A French “Death Row”?

The existing historiography on the death penalty in France has focused on aspects related to the execution itself and debates around abolition, leaving aside the question of the incarceration of death row inmates. This article examines the gradual, and to a large extent customary, formation of a specific penitentiary regime for prisoners sentenced to death, and the development of specialized prison structures for them in twentieth-century France. The emergence of this distinct regime reflects the increasingly controversial nature of the application of the death penalty. It is also the result of anomalies observed during periods of sharp increase in capital punishment, such as world and colonial conflicts and post-war periods. There was a dual tendency toward concentration of inmates and a relative improvement in their conditions of detention. Until abolition, however, the establishment of death row as a separate structure of detention remained incomplete, both for budgetary reasons and because of the general trend toward the disappearance of this punishment during the second half of the twentieth century.