3-065-582 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Island and Fort of St. Marguerite, the prison of ex-Marshal Bazaine, 1874. 'The [French] Government appears to have feared a manifestation, and, instead of the prisoner being openly conducted through Paris to the Lyons Railway station, he was conveyed in a closed carriage, escorted by a detachment of gendarmerie, to Villeneuve St. Georges...The night express to Marseilles was here intercepted, and the Marshal, arriving at Antibes late on Friday, was immediately conducted across to the Ile Ste. Marguerite, his appointed place of detention. [The Fort Royal is] celebrated as the place of confinement for many years of the "Man with the Iron Mask"...Madame Bazaine and her family have arrived at Cannes, where a villa had been previously engaged for them. They will have every facility for visiting the prisoner, who, according to the Bonapartist journals, is occupied in drawing up a grand scheme for the reorganisation of the French army'. François Achille Bazaine was incarcerated in the Fort Royal on Île Sainte-Marguerite about half a mile offshore from the French Riviera city of Cannes. During the night of 9-10 August 1874, at the instigation of his wife Pepita, Bazaine escaped after two hundred and twenty-one days of imprisonment. From "Illustrated London News", 1874.