3-077-828 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Centenary of John Howard, Prison Reformer: deliverance of prisoner shut up for life in cage in the Fortress of Mont Saint-Michel, [18th century,] (1890). 'According to a story, difficult to verify now, Dubourg, a Dutch journalist, offended the King, and was shut up for life in a cage in the fortress of Mont Saint-Michel. There are accounts of the shocking cruelties inflicted in French prisons, both in the capital and in the provinces. Even after the Revolution, the provincial jails were still, according to an official authority, "pestiferous places, veritable sewers, foul dens, into which scarcely a breath of fresh air or a ray of light could penetrate; where men, women, and children were thrown together on a heap of rotten straw, and died of hunger and despair; and where the innocent and the guilty were so mingled that the unhappy victims came out with the germs of incurable disease, and with a tendency to crime".' From "Illustrated London News", 1890.