Bicêtre

History

Bicêtre , whose construction launched by Louis XIII in 1633 on the ruins of a Forteresse was a hospital, a lunatic asylum and a Prison Paris ienne. The name of Bicêtre comes owing to the fact that the fortress was built on grounds belonging to the bishop of Winchester (francized Vincestre, then Bicestre…).

It was initially an old people's home for estropiés soldiers. old men and null and void , increased in 1647, thanks to Saint-Vincent de Paul, of “the new work of Child-Found the”. Under Louis XIV, starting from 1656, the establishment belongs to the General hospital and is affected with enfermement beggars and of all the “undesirable ones”.
L' place accommodated the dregs of the company then, indifferently mixing the poor ones, the patients and the criminals: lunatics (connected until the arrival of Philippe Pinel in 1794), swindlers, syphilitic, assassins, vagrants and delinquents of any kind. One placed there in particular the homosexual poor taken in red-handed, since one had given up burning them in public place. One fustigated the prisoners there to make them expier their faults.

Under the French revolution, following a report/ratio of Mirabeau, one gives in freedom the prisoners held without judgment. In September 1792, of the Sans-culotte S in fury assassinate with the club nearly two hundred prisoners. In the number of the victims appeared much of children collected in the streets for small flights, begging or vagrancy.

One places there then the suspects of traffic of forgery Assignat S, whether their crime concerned the common right or political activism counter-revolutionary. They for the majority were included in the alleged conspiracy of the prisons in June 1794 and were sent to the scaffold, on the denunciation of that of them which most ardently wished to save its skin.

It is in Bicêtre that the tapestry maker Guilleret invented the Strait jacket in 1770. It is as there as was carried out, on April 17th, 1792, the first test of the Guillotine, on alive sheep, then on the corpses of three vagrants. The prison is also used as zone of transit for the bagne, of 1793 with 1836 (date on which the prison ceases its activity).

Bicêtre remains famous for its puit with the gigantic proportions dug in 1733 under the crook of the architect Boffrand (5m of diameter for 60m of depth). The rise in water was then ensured by prisoners and lunatics before being replaced by a steam engine in 1855.

Bicêtre - the worst prison of men. It contains condemned to longsufferings, which could not obtain to remain with Holy-Pelagie, and of condemned to the forced labors while waiting for that they are sent to the Bagne. All and sundry all are almost in a state of large dénûment. Holy Lazare. It is the bicêtre women.

The average annual mortality of 1815 with 1818 is of a prisoner on 18,75.

Bicêtre found its hospital vocation under the name of hospital of Bicêtre or, considering the presence of a medical college, of CHU the Kremlin-Bicêtre.

Bicêtre in the literature

Bicêtre is the decoration of the famous novel of Victor Hugo, the Last Day of one condemned . True plea against the capital punishment, one finds there many descriptions of Bicêtre and detention conditions then in force at the 19th century. In this text we can indicate the suffering of the main character during all the history.
" In the night of Bicêtre" , novel of Marie Didier, imagines it with what the life of Jean-Baptiste Poussin (or Jean-Baptiste Pussin could resemble) like looking after Bicêtre.

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