A French Model on Europe’s Periphery: Imperial Russia’s Adoption of Penitentiary Agricultural Colonies for Juvenile Delinquents, 1840-1917

At three in the afternoon on July 28, 1839, thirteen-year-old Achille Arnoux arrived at the village of Mettray, after a long journey from his native Paris. Dressed in his brand-new uniform of a pale blue stiff canvas tunic and dark trousers, and clutching the copy of the Gospels he had received that morning from a lady benefactor, he heard speeches by various dignitaries praising the newly-founded penitentiary agricultural colony for incarcerated juvenile boys. Then, together with the gathered officials and local residents, as well as thirteen other identically-dressed Parisian boys aged from ten to fifteen, Achille trooped into the building that served as the colony’s chapel to hear a sermon by the vicar-general of Tours which moved some of his comrades to tears. The priest extolled the newly-arrived boys’ good fortune in being transplanted to Mettray, away from the “dangers of the great city” with its “bad examples” and “corrupting pleasures,” and exhorted them to obey their masters at all times. Over the years, Mettray’s inmates would often hear similar advice. But Achille and the others were not Mettray’s first young detainees; they were its supervisory staff.[1]

This scene captures, first, Mettray’s explicit break with existing correctional models, and second, the singular talent of Mettray’s founder Frédéric-Auguste Demetz in publicizing his penitentiary agricultural colony. Even today, the idea that young adolescents should be given responsibility for disciplining detainees of their own age is jarring. In the 1830s, the presence of these novices offered a vivid contrast to the prevailing image of young detainees as degraded, miserable, and dangerous, and of prison guards as venal, corrupt, and brutish. Demetz sent a clear message to those gathered at the inauguration, and later, via newspaper reports, to the whole country, that Mettray was something never before seen, meriting attention, support, and emulation. His message would soon traverse national frontiers, inspiring penitentiary agricultural colonies across Western Europe and North America which further enhanced Mettray’s fame. Setting up his colony as a “specimen” to be studied and reproduced, Demetz believed he was performing a generous service to the nation, but Mettray benefitted greatly from being emulated, as the sheer number of agricultural colonies – around sixty in France alone – and reports of their successes reflected glory back on the original model. The uneven nature of this emulation set in motion a complex dynamic, as Mettray found itself under pressure to compete for limited resources with the very colonies it claimed to lead and serve. Mettray’s “branding” had to present the colony as both easy to reproduce, and superior to all reproductions.

On the other side of Europe, unremarked by anyone at Mettray, Russian reformers founded in 1871 a penitentiary agricultural colony inspired by Mettray and its imitators. The St. Petersburg colony’s struggle to function while retaining Mettray’s principles sheds light on the original model, revealing gaps between reality and the triumphant public narrative. The history of the Mettray model’s Russian incarnation was shaped by local conditions and contingencies, but also by the particularities of Russia’s situation during a period of social and political change. By studying French and Russian colonies together, this article traces a marked shift in practice and philosophy occurring in both countries after an initial period of optimism. Penitentiary agricultural colonies turned away from rehabilitation and towards harsher discipline during a time of political repression in Russia, but in France this turn happened as the Third Republic was becoming more responsive to matters of social welfare. This points to the importance of internal, as well as external factors in motivating the change, calling into question the model’s real robustness.

This article investigates both the French and the Russian colonies, highlighting their shared ideological underpinnings.[2] It addresses the publicity efforts of Mettray’s supporters, and their effects on reformers in Imperial Russia, which lay on the periphery of Europe and relied primarily on published reports rather than personal networks. Finally, it investigates the gradual abandonment of more idealistic aspects of the model in both countries. Although Mettray’s importance as a model and standard for correctional education in France and internationally is well-established, this article fills a gap in existing scholarship by considering its influence in Russia, which even transnational histories of penitentiary agricultural colonies have not yet considered.[3] Examining Mettray and the St Petersburg colony together, and explaining their similarities and differences, can help scholars better understand the kinds of transnational flows and exchanges of expertise, information, and institutional models in which nineteenth-century reformers participated, and their impact on incarcerated boys.

The Mettray model: farming and fictive families

Former magistrate Demetz (1796-1873) founded the colony of Mettray, in the picturesque and fertile Loire Valley, in 1839 as a practical solution to the increasingly visible problem of youth crime in France’s growing cities. His friend, landowner and former military officer vicomte Louis-Hermann de Brétignières de Courteilles (1797-1852), provided land to establish the colony and remained co-director with Demetz until his death.[4] Although laymen, they relied heavily on religious devotion and doctrine to motivate and organize their work, and their emphasis on social reconciliation through religion echoed those of other social Catholics of that era.[5] The colony existed from 1839-1937 and took in children who had committed crimes (chiefly petty theft or vagrancy), but who had been acquitted because, due to their young age, they were deemed unable fully to comprehend the gravity of their actions, in accordance with Article 66 of the 1810 Penal Code.[6] For forty years the colony’s reputation seemed unassailable. Then, in the 1880s, under the Third Republic, administrations became increasingly anti-clerical and the state more paternalistic, and the old private colonies, by now viewed as bastions of religion, repression, and conservatism, lost much of their public funding. No private colonies were founded after 1881, and only a handful out of sixty in total survived until the Great War, although Mettray itself operated until 1937.[7]

In constructing an understanding of criminal youth to inform his solutions, Demetz relied on Enlightenment ideas of childhood as a time of essential innocence. The child’s surroundings and experiences determined the defining characteristics it would take into adulthood.[8] Delinquency, then, was a paradox in which an innocent child was guilty of crimes. On one hand, this made the criminal child worse than an adult, a monstrous betrayal of its own nature; on the other, it removed blame for its aberrant behavior from the child itself, offering the hope that with better guidance it could return to its natural state of innocence.[9] Mettray offered a healthy environment and a nurturing community to prepare its wards to be honest, industrious fathers of families.

Visitors to Mettray were struck by the colony’s lack of high walls or heavy gates: “nothing but green lawns, dense trees, beds full of flowers, and behind these gardens, space, liberty.”[10] Visually, the place resembled no existing carceral institution. High walls around extensive fields would, in any case, have been impractical, but their absence was symbolic, a compelling sign of mutual trust between the directors and their wards.

Mettray’s built and cultivated environment embodied two foundational principles of Demetz and Brétignières’ system: farming and fictive families. Its most distinctive innovation in the field of juvenile corrections was its use of agricultural work. Children were called not prisoners, but colonists (colons), a word that evoked productive, transformative labor.[11] Farming was not merely a way to keep young offenders occupied: fresh outdoor air and vigorous exercise, Demetz believed, were “the means necessary to modify their sickly constitutions.”[12] Physical labor would also moralize. By developing habits of hard work, boys would in future disdain idleness and dishonesty. Further, by working even in inclement weather and wearing rough clothing they would develop physical courage and mastery over their own bodies.[13] Although there were workshops for skills such as tailoring, shoemaking, blacksmithing, and carpentry, only trades that could be practiced in a rural setting were permitted. The colony encouraged boys to reject the “macabre excitations” of the big city.[14]

“Colonists” worked in Mettray’s fields, growing cereal and fodder crops, and in its vineyards. They tended livestock and maintained kitchen-gardens, learning the latest farming techniques. Ideally, colonists would settle in the countryside on their release, spreading their knowledge and promoting agricultural modernization. The colony’s agricultural equipment workshop produced ploughs, tillers and other tools based on “perfected” designs, doing a brisk trade with local farmers, and winning prizes at expositions.[15]

While colony founders claimed that a country setting encouraged virtues such as hard work, honesty, and thrift, they viewed the men and women who already inhabited rural spaces as backward, dirty, and disrespectful, commenting: “It will thus be given to the former colonists of Mettray to help to uproot those old routines to which our peasants cling so tightly solely because they defy the examples and advice given them by men who are placed above them.”[16] Only by imposing military discipline, wrote an advocate of a similar colony, could the countryside’s transformative potential be realized:

These negative views of the rural population betrayed a contradiction in reformers’ ideas about urban and rural France. They touted the transformative power of the rural environment, but created spaces and systems that resembled the discipline of factories rather than the traditional rhythms of country life.

Demetz and Brétignières presented themselves and their staff as substitute fathers to children whose birth kin had failed them. Viewing the family as the natural, divinely-ordained environment for childrearing, Demetz organized the colony by “family” units not exceeding twenty children each, headed by an employee whose official title was père de famille: father of a family.[18] Each “family” lived on one floor of a three-story house, in a common room that served as dormitory, dining room, or schoolroom. Building additional houses as needed allowed the colony to house a large population – 800 at its high point in the 1860s – and benefit from economies of scale, while still permitting each boy to be known personally. A “father” at Mettray spent almost every non-working moment with his charges: “he takes his meals at the same table, he sleeps in the same dormitory as his pupils; he never leaves them or loses sight of them.”[19] Like a real father, he shared the home lives of his children. The directors insisted this was more than “empty nomenclature:” the supervisory staff had genuine devotion to the cause and familial affection for their charges. As an administrative report noted, “Lately, one of our pères de famille was obliged to be away, on Colony business; you cannot imagine the sadness of his children when he left, or the joy that his return produced. All the colonists in his family ran to embrace him and surrounded him, forming a single group.”[20] The “fathers,” however, were still above all enforcers of a strict discipline. From their sleeping quarters adjoining the colonists’ dormitory, they observed the boys through a grille without being seen. The “father” prepared a daily report on his “family’s” behavior, and a weekly report to help determine rewards and punishments meted out publicly by the directors.[21] However genuine their fatherly affection, it accompanied bureaucratic monitoring far beyond normal paternal supervision. Most “fathers,” in Mettray’s early decades, were young men in their twenties who had trained as pupil-supervisors (élèves contre-maîtres) at the colony’s own Preparatory School.[22]

Speeches from Mettray’s inauguration ceremony in July 1839 reveal the founders’ vision for the Preparatory School pupils. Of the fourteen boys feted that day, only one was over thirteen years old.[23] They were youths of irreproachable conduct, entrusted to Demetz by their poor, but honorable, Parisian families. To become worthy masters, these children would first follow the same program they would eventually teach, gaining agricultural skills and developing moral character by following their director’s example. One speaker stressed the importance of their role as model colonists, who would influence the young detainees by their example:

The first cohort of pupil-supervisors would also be a model to the colony’s neighbors. By presenting “a group of inoffensive and well-disciplined children” at the outset, Demetz and Brétignières “conquered the trust of [their] fellow-citizens” who feared “the proximity and the competition of [their] colonists.”[25] In effect, then, the first pupil-supervisors played the role of model colonists, creating an image of order and success to establish the colony’s reputation – an advertisement acted out in real time, and one of the first strategies in Mettray’s wildly successful public relations campaign.

“The greatest possible publicity”

Mettray’s success depended on both the resonance of Demetz’ principles with the reform-minded public, and his deliberate and sustained labor in publicizing the work. The characteristics that defined the Mettray system – the agricultural setting and the family organization, underpinned by the principle of mutual trust – had a consistent internal logic that many supporters found convincing. To readers of publicity materials, and to the visitors who took guided tours of the colony, the system was explained as evidence-based, progressive, and logical, but this tended to obscure the importance of the leaders’ personal qualities, and of personal connections between them and their supporters, in eliciting trust and assistance from the public and from successive governments.[26] Based upon the conception of the child criminal as both dangerous and endangered, and presenting a clear contrast to the abject failure of previous, more punitive types of action, the model promised to erase all trace of degradation from the child’s character. If this action could be reproduced in colonies across France, it offered a tantalizing promise of social reform on a national scale, solving the twin nuisances of a shortage of rural labor, and a surplus of unsupervised urban adolescents.

To encourage this reproduction, Demetz eagerly responded to requests for information, sending out literature, and inviting potential colony founders to visit and study Mettray. Over three decades, he cultivated a network of influential supporters from a range of political persuasions in France and beyond, and wrote myriad brochures and reports.[27] By the 1860s, Mettray was a well-known tourist destination with a hotel just off-site, and visitors could take a tour lasting as long as six hours, guided by one of the colony’s staff, or, if the visitor promised to be influential, by Demetz himself.[28] He refused to place advertisements, “a mode of publicity from which I have always abstained, so as to conserve a certain cachet of honorability for the institutions that I have founded.” [29] However, the constant stream of articles that appeared in newspapers and magazines in France, even when written by people who had visited in person, often consisted in large part of Demetz’ own brochures paraphrased, or sometimes merely reproduced, by the ostensible author of the piece.[30] In a letter of 1865, Demetz thanked a newspaper editor for “the real service you have given to Mettray, by consenting to give the greatest possible publicity to this creation. Only, Mr. Hermant shows far too much humility in consenting to modify nothing in my composition, to which he has signed his own name.”[31] Articles by journalists and visitors carried an aura of objectivity, but conveyed a carefully curated narrative shaped by the colony’s founder.[32]

As reformers and philanthropists prepared to found similar penitentiary agricultural colonies throughout France, Demetz and Brétignières encouraged and welcomed them. However, Mettray’s governing body, the Paternal Society, was committed to overseeing only Mettray itself, not a network of daughter colonies.[33] Their help, then, was limited to advice and encouragement, yet the founders took pride in Mettray’s influence, telling its donors: “You have given the impetus, sirs; we may be permitted to say so, since almost all the directors of these establishments have come to draw from Mettray, and have adopted our Colony as the elder sister to theirs.”[34] When Abbé Charles Fissiaux, founder of a penitentiary colony at Marseille, visited Mettray in 1840, he remained several days at the colony, studying, observing, and being “initiated into all secrets,” and resolved from that moment to run his colony in the same way, proclaiming that “from today the houses of Marseille and Mettray have become sisters.”[35] Another colony, at Ostwald near Strasbourg, created even closer ties with Mettray when Prudent Guimas, a former pupil of the Preparatory School who had risen to be an administrator in the agricultural department and was a twelve-year veteran of the colony, was appointed Ostwald’s director in 1855. “From now on I regard Mettray and Ostwald as forming one and the same institution, only placed in different locations,” wrote Demetz. [36] One colony in the Somme was even named “Petit-Mettray.”[37] Colony founders, then, invoked Mettray in various ways, depending on how closely they wanted to ally themselves with the “elder sister,” although none copied Mettray’s system entirely faithfully. Fissiaux’s wards slept in individual cells rather than communal dormitories; Ostwald’s colonists were organized not into “families” but as “squadrons.” Petit-Mettray’s staff were soldiers temporarily seconded there.[38] France’s penitentiary agricultural colonies created a patchwork of practices adapted to local conditions, available resources, and their founders’ preferences. However, Mettray remained the best-known of all, and most observers concurred that it served as a gold standard. One judicial expert pronounced in a brochure of 1863 that “it is today recognized by impartial men that any establishment destined for poor, delinquent, or abandoned children must come as close as possible to the organization of Mettray.”[39] The literature produced by Mettray and lesser colonies, as well as visitor narratives published in newspapers, presented an overall picture of a loose network of institutions, with a few standing out as exemplary, and Mettray the most prominent of all.

From the Loire to the Neva

Demetz and Brétignières also found admirers beyond France’s borders, especially after 1850, when the effectiveness of the Mettray system appeared proven by a decade of healthy colonists, financial stability, and low recidivism.[40] Reformers in England and the Netherlands visited Mettray before founding their own colonies, and maintained a friendly correspondence with Demetz.[41] In the 1860s, Russian reformers began to call for the Mettray model to be reproduced on Russian soil. In 1871, the first Russian penitentiary agricultural colony opened its doors near St. Petersburg; at least seventeen others would follow in the next two decades.[42] Life in the St. Petersburg Colony was shaped both by the type of information accessible to Russian reformers, and by the local social and cultural context.

The Society for Agricultural Colonies and Industrial Asylums was founded in St. Petersburg at a unique moment, as Tsar Alexander II was implementing a series of fundamental state reforms aimed at strengthening the legitimacy and power of the autocratic state. [43]These Great Reforms provided a legislative infrastructure, beginning with the long-awaited emancipation of the serfs in 1861, that was intended to remove barriers to modernization and economic progress. Alexander simultaneously relaxed the draconian censorship of his predecessor, and encouraged the formation of voluntary associations, allowing for a new expansion of Russian civil society.[44] This provided a space in which educated Russians, although deprived of formal political representation beyond the local level, could participate in reforms in practical ways.[45]

The Imperial government used Western models to inform its reforming activities, as is clearly evident in its approach to juvenile delinquency. Following the judicial reform of 1864, which allowed for juveniles to be treated as a separate category of offender, a law of 1866 called for the creation of correctional institutions for criminal minors by private individuals, charitable societies, or religious groups. The government officials who prepared the decree had visited Western Europe, and the legislation was remarkably similar to the French law of August 5, 1850, providing for minors who had committed crimes, but had been acquitted due to their young age, to be sent to correctional agricultural colonies. The Russian law, however, called for not only agricultural, but industrial or artisanal (remeslennye) institutions.[46]

Western experiences with industrialization and urbanization, and Western attempts to remedy their attendant ills, served as both a roadmap and a cautionary tale for Russian reformers, whether private or state actors. Although Russian industry was still undeveloped and only a small fraction of its people lived in towns, the belief that sooner or later the Empire must follow the path trodden by Western Europe had driven educated Russians to analyze Western experiences, and compare conditions there to those in Russia.[47] They wanted their nation to benefit from economic and social modernization while limiting such problems as exploitation and urban poverty. Building on Western research, and adopting from the start only those models that had proven effective, promised Russia a quicker route towards a well-functioning modern society, and an end to perceived “backwardness” in comparison with the West.[48]

Like the tsar’s lawmakers, the writers and reformers whose efforts in the 1860s created the Society for Agricultural Colonies and Industrial Asylums used Western models as their starting point. From 1862, a handful of articles appeared in the periodical press that brought the French prison system, and specifically Mettray, to the attention of the educated public. Their authors, aware that the government was working on reforms, but without specific knowledge of their content until they were proclaimed, trod a careful path, offering information to their readers and calling, sometimes, for public participation in reform, without overtly attempting to influence government policy. The articles drew extensively from materials published in the West, including reports from individual colonies and government inquiries; only one, expatriate journalist Nikolai Shcherban’s account of his visit to Mettray in 1864, was based on personal experience. ^[49] Shcherban’ visited the colony as a tourist and did not meet with Demetz; he recounted the guided tour, interspersed with snippets of statistics and the colony’s history that had appeared in colony reports.[50] Other articles relied upon published statistics and reports for their information. The writers, educated and predominantly young men from a variety of backgrounds, included the future revolutionary Piotr Tkachev (the only one to downplay Mettray’s significance, seeing it as merely a derivation of an earlier German institution), as well as Vasilii Chaslavskii, a statistician and bureaucrat who was instrumental in founding the Society for Agricultural Colonies and became secretary of its first executive committee.[51]

The combination of philanthropic activity with state incentive and supervision, which characterized Russian civil society in the 1860s, provided fertile ground for adapting the Mettray model of private-public partnership. In his 1864 article Shcherban’ highlighted “the significance and strength of private initiative” even in a country known for its bureaucracy: “Mettray is the fruit of private activity springing up on the soil of centralization, a bold initiative appearing in the classic country of routine.” If this institution could thrive in France, then perhaps philanthropic reformers could succeed under autocracy, too. Shcherban’ presented Demetz as the state’s useful collaborator, “provid[ing] the law with the ability truly to correct juvenile criminals.”[52] By praising French agricultural colonies, in which private individuals worked in concert with the state to take on disciplinary functions as well as a charitable role, Shcherban’ strengthened the case for voluntary associations in Russia.

As was common with such associations, the Society for Agricultural Colonies and Industrial Asylums was formed in response to top-down initiative: the law of 1866, and the offer of two generous monetary grants, one for the first juvenile penitentiary colony to be founded, and another to send its director to study in Western Europe.[53] St. Petersburg’s elite flocked to become members of the charitable society, supporting the work with annual dues. An executive committee was formed from the most prestigious members, including men with substantial experience in judicial and pedagogical matters.[54] Although some worked in government administration, they participated in the committee as private citizens. This committee chose as director a young teacher, Aleksandr Gerd, who had experience educating the city’s working-class children. In 1871 the colony accepted its first boys.[55] When Gerd resigned in 1874, he was replaced by Pavel Rovinskii, a teacher and ethnologist who had been prominent in a radical populist secret society, Zemlia i volia (Land and Will), in the early 1860s.[56] Rovinskii imitated Demetz’ publicity efforts, welcoming the influential author Fyodor Dostoevsky to tour the colony and write about his impressions, and himself writing an extended account of the colony’s history in 1877, just before resigning his post.[57] . The variety of political views among the colony’s supporters reveals the narrow space in which Russian civil society was permitted to operate. Since outright criticism of the regime was still forbidden, those who wanted fundamental change and those content to participate in the autocracy’s own efforts to improve society found themselves limited to the same sphere of activity.

The articles of the 1860s in the Russian press, as well as reports and accounts by the committee and directors in the St. Petersburg colony’s first decade, express several reasons for the Mettray system’s appeal at this extraordinary time in Russia. The idea of sending children to the countryside to guarantee their moral and physical health might have seemed more logical for Western Europe, where a rural-urban exodus was already reaching huge proportions by mid-century, than for imperial Russia, still overwhelmingly agrarian in the 1860s. However, the population growth of St. Petersburg and Moscow had begun to accelerate noticeably in that decade.[58] Novels such as Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) and Vsevolod Krestovsky’s urban mystery, Slums of St. Petersburg (1864-6), had offered readers a fictional window into the dank slums and shady characters of the capital. Even before emancipation, some serfs had been able to work for part of the year in urban industries; after 1861, as peasant communes struggled to find the cash to make redemption payments for their land, the volume of this migration increased.[59] Living quarters, particularly in the two capitals, were in terribly short supply. The colony director Rovinskii gave the example of a young man who found a job in town after leaving the colony and was disgusted that all his co-workers slept on the dirty workshop floor.[60] Families were under particular pressure in Russian cities, where factory workers were often housed in single-sex barracks. Many families were divided, with the father working in the city and wife and children remaining in the village.[61] Colony reports describe several young detainees as boys who had come to St. Petersburg aged ten or twelve to join their fathers and begin work, but, lacking supervision, had fallen into bad company and criminal habits.[62] Such problems as yet affected only a tiny minority of the Tsar’s subjects, but Western experiences indicated they could presage worse to come.

Moreover, the idea of the countryside as a guarantor not only of health, but of moral virtue, had deep roots in Russia. When Peter the Great imposed aspects of Western culture on nobles and elites, he did so in the cities, particularly the new, Western-facing capital at St Petersburg. The countryside and its peasant inhabitants, relatively untouched both by Western progress and by Western vices, seemed to have preserved distinctly Russian moral values, such as simple, Orthodox faith; patience in suffering; and valuing community above self-interest.[63] These ideas prepared Russian reformers to accept French anxieties about rural-urban migration, and to embrace the agricultural colony model. As one noted, “Agricultural education, directing the pupils’ activity towards rural occupations, at the same time paralyzes the abnormal flow of the rural population towards the big cities – a flow that has been particularly strong in recent times [in France].”[64] Rovinskii believed that “the rural setting, life in direct contact with nature, and agricultural labor” comprised the key “educational stimulus” for young detainees.[65]

Yet these romantic tropes of peasants as the salt of the Russian earth were not based upon real knowledge of their life. Nobles who had owned serfs usually knew little about the souls they controlled, often living as absentee landlords.[66] Even Populists, who placed their trust in the Russian peasantry to bring about social and political liberalization, knew the peasants better as myth than as real people.[67] While many Russians from the noble and professional classes supported emancipation, they felt deep anxiety about what it would mean to Russian society. During the 1860s and 1870s, idealistic and romanticized views gradually gave way to more pessimistic stereotypes of peasants as either greedy, ruthless kulaks, or exploited, impoverished people known as “grey peasants.”[68] A well-ordered agricultural colony promised all the benefits of country life without the poverty, dirt, or disorder endemic to actual rural conditions. The Russian visitor to Mettray, Shcherban’, experienced that colony as the true image of what rural life could be: “[T]here was no trace of artificiality in it. Everything around was perfectly natural, as if it had not been put there but had taken shape all by itself; one did not think of a house of correction, but it seemed as if we were standing in the square of a small hamlet, whose inhabitants had gone off to work in the fields, leaving only the artisans and youngsters at home.”[69]

Anxiety about the peasants’ new status coexisted with hopes that freedom and control over their own land would allow them to improve their lives through better farming practices. Mettray employed modern and even experimental methods, training farm-workers who would disdain superstition and backwardness, making them, it was claimed, more employable. Chaslavskii contended that such training would likewise be of value in Russia: “A good agricultural worker can always find work and his fate is more secure than any other worker. Such a worker’s situation is even more secure in Russia, where at the present moment the lack of good agricultural workers is being felt and everywhere one hears complaints about it.”[70] However, it is questionable whether his understanding of the status of peasant laborers was grounded in reality.[71] A batrak (landless laborer) who hired himself out to a landlord or to a peasant commune was often subject to abuse and could seldom earn a living wage. Landlords may well have complained about the lack or the poor quality of available laborers without being willing to pay higher wages to secure them. Those young urban delinquents who still had roots and rights in a village commune were not necessarily guaranteed a rural livelihood if they returned: of those freed from the St Petersburg colony and returned to their rural relatives, a number were immediately sent back to the capital to earn wages.[72]

The idea that a rural physical environment had the power to embody and transmit desirable moral values perhaps explains why agricultural colonies appealed to people with such disparate views as the populist Rovinskii, the future revolutionary Tkachev, the idealistic Gerd, and the military and judicial high-ups who sat on the Society’s executive committee. This consensus indicates the multiple meanings that the concept of nature can bear, endowing it with the capacity both to enable and to obscure power relations.

Russian reformers took enthusiastically to Demetz’ and Brétignières’ principles. Keen interest in French ideas and practices was, of course, nothing new in Russia, where nobles had long conversed more comfortably in French than in Russian. But the published materials produced by Mettray’s founders and allies were not necessarily a reliable guide for Russian reformers as they founded their own colony. Since they had been written to attract support, they sometimes downplayed difficulties and emphasized the system’s success, humanity and optimism.

Demetz often argued that only “within the perimeter of Mettray” could the system be truly understood, and he issued countless invitations to influential people.[73] While Shcherban’s is the only existing record of a Russian’s visit to Mettray, some of his countrymen did travel to other agricultural colonies in Western Europe. Aleksandr Gerd, the first director, was sent abroad by the Society for six months in 1870, stopping in Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland, although the Franco-Prussian war prevented him from visiting France.[74] This was undoubtedly a useful and informative experience for Gerd and influenced his directorship. But Gerd, although well-respected, was only an employee of the Society; moreover, when he resigned in 1874 whatever personal networks he had managed to establish were lost to the Society. Colony reports do not indicate that members of the executive committee ever visited foreign colonies. It appears that published reports were their primary source of information on Western colonies.

Although the St Petersburg colony lacked direct contact with Mettray, its leaders continued to refer to the pre-eminent French colony as a model. The early advocates of penitentiary agricultural colonies in Russia had presented Mettray as living proof that the system worked. When Rovinskii wrote his article on the first six years of the colony in 1877, he had to account for a number of problems, while validating the colony’s foundational reformative system. To do this, he cited crucial differences between the St Petersburg colony and successful foreign ones, such as its harmful proximity to the city, and its acceptance of older, more hardened boys sent to it by the local courts. To explain the high recidivism rate (25% compared to Mettray’s average of 10%) he reminded readers that the St Petersburg colony, unlike Mettray, lacked its own, costly patronage system.[75] In his report for 1876, he added that many of Mettray’s former colonists went abroad or into the military, where any further offences were not reported; and that when Mettray boys returned to cities, as did the majority of the St Petersburg boys, their recidivism rate was much higher.[76]

While these explanations exculpated the basic principles of the system (agriculture, fictive families, and caring, educated staff) they revealed that Mettray’s success depended also on other, less-publicized factors, including its ability to select subjects based on previous good behavior. This belied Brétignières’ claim that the Mettray system could reform even the most difficult cases.[77] By justifying his colony’s past failures to make a case for future success, Rovinskii took some of the shine off the original model.

From “fathers” to “uncles”

Early advocates of agricultural colonies in Russia had praised the family system, adopted by Mettray and others as the cornerstone of colony organization. Their agents were “not at all like the soldier-sergeants of correctional homes. The officers of Mettray are young, well-educated men, experienced in and devoted to the work.”[78] If Mettray’s staff were, in Michel Foucault’s words, “technicians of behavior” whose outstanding quality was their training in a set of disciplinary techniques fundamental to the carceral system he described, it was the devotion, not the techniques, that first appealed to Russian reformers.[79] The visitor to Mettray, Shcherban’, had reserved one of his rare criticisms for “all the bugle blasts, honor rolls, didactic engravings, service records, rules, forbidden conversations and the system of going to bed.” He was troubled by those techniques that undermined the “system of trust,” insulting the children by assuming they would misbehave unless constrained “by cunning means.”[80] Director Gerd eschewed punishments such as solitary confinement or withholding food, relying almost exclusively on exclusion from games to deter disobedience.[81]

However, at the St Petersburg colony, finding the necessary devoted, intelligent employees was always a problem. Gerd deliberately kept the colony’s growth slow until he could find suitable staff, and both he and Rovinskii devoted considerable time to mentoring the educators (vospitateli) who served under them. Both men modeled personal devotion and commitment. Gerd retired because working sixteen-hour days in a stressful environment had brought him to nervous exhaustion. Only two months before, some colonists had murdered another boy, and several others had absconded.[82] Rovinskii, likewise, told friends the work had been too demanding.[83] The executive committee subsequently chose a former colonel to replace Rovinskii. But soon, all the educators resigned, leading to chaos and crisis. For two years, until a competent director was found, the colony barely functioned. The Inspection Commission of 1878 reported apathetic staff, unruly inmates, and filthy conditions.[84]

This report presented the crisis as the result of the system, adopted from abroad and developed in situ over the last six years. As it detailed filthy floors, walls crawling with bedbugs, thieving boys, and a terrified priest who barricaded himself in his quarters at night for fear of incursion, the report blamed two key factors. First, it complained, educators could be dismissed with no due process at any time, which discouraged devotion to the colony. Second, it questioned the family system itself, which depended on suitably educated, cultivated, and devoted young men being willing to live in Spartan conditions and share in the detainees’ manual labor. Their wages, while not a pittance, were far from sufficient for them to save for the future or support a family. The directors and executive committee had, the commission contended, attempted to implement a system that had never existed in reality:

The St Petersburg colony was in chaos, the commission argued, because in chasing an intangible ideal it failed to do any real good. And even if the model had been attainable, it could not be realized in Russia, where the necessary people simply did not exist. Instead, the commission turned to an accessible, functioning, Russian model: Moscow’s Rukavishnikov asylum. Founded in 1864 in a rented apartment before moving to larger premises, the asylum employed delinquent and indigent youth in bookbinding.[86] The Moscow asylum employed not educators, but “uncles” (diad’ki), who between them exercised constant supervision, day and night, and whom the commission described thus:

In response to the commission’s scathing report, the executive committee pointed out that the commission had visited under exceptional, crisis conditions, which explained the deficiencies. It conceded, however, that “uncles” could replace the assistant educators in future.[88]

This turn away from idealism and towards order certainly reflected Russia’s changing political climate at the end of Alexander II’s reign. The reforming tsar himself, in response to attempts on his life by domestic terrorists bent on liberating the nation from the injustices of autocracy, had in the late 1870s slowed the pace of reform. When one of these terrorists finally succeeded in assassinating him in 1881, his son Alexander III once again imposed repressive, autocratic rule.[89] If the hope of reform was replaced by the imperative of discipline at the St Petersburg colony in the early 1880s, this was one small eddy in a rising tide of repression.

However, the turn towards harsher discipline was not unique to the autocratic Russian Empire. In France, from the 1870s onwards, even as the new Third Republic relaxed censorship and strengthened electoral democracy, young detainees were increasingly guarded by military or law enforcement veterans, rather than younger men dedicated to education and rehabilitation. At Mettray, the school for future “fathers of families” ceased to exist after Demetz’ death in 1873, and older men, often “selected former non-commissioned officers, used to discipline and command,” were more often hired as supervisory staff.[90] Demetz’ successors, even those who had themselves studied at the Preparatory School, were evidently much less committed to his ideas about personnel.

Despite Demetz’ insistence on Mettray’s staffing system as the core of its program, other penitentiary agricultural colonies in France, even those that claimed Mettray as a model, had almost unanimously elected not to adopt it (making it all the more remarkable that the Russian colony embraced it so wholeheartedly at first).[91] This choice would render it difficult for Demetz’ successors, perpetually in quest of additional funding, to justify maintaining the staffing model. Other lay-run colonies had from the outset employed men from the military or law enforcement, not those trained as educators. Demetz was no doubt correct in attributing this choice to financial pressures. One contemporary comparative study found that the cost per inmate per day was higher at Mettray than at any other private colony in France, due in large part to the high ratio of staff to detainees: 1.86 francs compared to an average of 1.28 francs for private, and 1.01 for state-run colonies, in 1851.[92] Demetz believed that it was important “to moralize at the lowest possible cost, but at all cost, to moralize, that is, financial considerations must never take precedence over moral ones.”[93] He insisted that to skimp on staffing was a false economy that could jeopardize the whole mission. It was crucial to employ people intelligent enough to engage the children and win them over without resorting to brutality. To do this, heads of families needed to be responsible for relatively small groups of children. As Demetz remarked,

Although Mettray positioned itself as the “elder sister” and pointed to penitentiary agricultural colonies in France and abroad as vindication of its own success, other colonies’ ability to succeed without adopting Mettray’s costly staffing model eventually made it difficult for Demetz’ successors to insist upon its crucial role. In Mettray’s first two decades, the colony garnered generous support from both government and private donations, but as it became established, financial support dropped off.[95] Individual donors doubtless found maintaining an existing institution less interesting than participating in a novel enterprise; besides, they expected that once the initial costs of setting up the colony were covered, the establishment should become self-sustaining through the children’s abundant labor.[96] In the 1860s, numbers of young detainees in France declined, and the Penitentiary Administration, rather than relying on the old private colonies, founded and favored its own state-run institutions, making funding harder to obtain.[97]

Successive leaders responded differently to these changes. When, in 1881, senator Eugène Gouïn became president of the Paternal Society, he implemented drastic cuts in staff and more accountability for spending. Gouïn’s background as a banker and financier influenced his priorities; he had long headed the Paternal Society’s finance commission and knew the colony’s accounts well.[98] The budget cuts were perhaps inevitable given the paucity of government funding. But at least one disgruntled former employee believed Gouïn had betrayed Demetz’ vision. “The system changed completely,” wrote Prudent Guimas, whose post as head of agricultural operations had been eliminated. “A barracks replaced the family. Every time employees left, they were replaced with ex-military men, honorable men certainly, but who had never known what it was to moralize children.”[99]

If the St Petersburg colony’s disciplinary turn corresponded to a more repressive national political trend, Mettray’s set it apart from a state that had become republican and more secular. As the relatively authoritarian Second Empire was replaced in 1871 by the Third Republic, whose successive governments took a progressively anticlerical stance from the 1880s, Mettray found itself pigeonholed. At its inception, the work had blended paternalistic, conservative traditionalism with progressive, utopian ideals, appealing to individuals from a range of political affiliations. By the 1880s, in contrast to a state increasingly interested in social policies and in improving the lives of the disadvantaged, Mettray’s model appeared no longer progressive, but benighted and reactionary. The institution’s reliance on religion as the basis of moralization made it particularly suspect in this regard. Almost all colonies run by religious congregations were closed down in the 1880s, some in the wake of abuse scandals. Mettray came under concerted attack from the anticlerical left in 1887, but survived. Conservatives and traditionalists continued to support the work, and their growing representation in the Paternal Society arguably played a role in moving the colony’s discipline further towards strict order and hierarchy.[100]

Conclusion

Mettray’s founders expended considerable effort to create a positive image of their colony. They sincerely hoped to offer a working model so others could imitate it and thus multiply its benefits. However, the image was also carefully crafted to attract private and public funding and goodwill. Although a non-profit enterprise, Mettray, unlike a state institution, had to compete for scarce resources and so invested in making its name a hallmark for effective, humane rehabilitation of delinquents. This “branding” not only affected the way Mettray ran, but had unintended consequences. It overstated the beneficial effect of key principles like agriculture and the family system, and downplayed other, less reproducible factors, such as the ability to select incoming colonists, the national network of supporters, and the colony’s status as “elder sister,” which undoubtedly played an important role in its success.

Russian reformers used this carefully crafted image as a template and a guarantee of future success. However, since their knowledge of the model was based primarily on published materials, early leaders of the St Petersburg colony trusted perhaps too idealistically in the humane, optimistic principles espoused at Mettray.

Under the autocratic state, Russian civil society, while certainly vibrant and growing in the 1860s and 1870s, was less mature and robust than in France. Whereas Mettray had set the example upon which the French state eventually modeled its legislation, the St Petersburg colony formed in response to state initiative and was in no position to shop around for the most advantageous location or turn down any young detainees sent by the local courts. These factors precipitated the difficulties of the colony’s first decade.

Although the St Petersburg colony drew on Western models at its inception, it subsequently served as a model, together with the Rukavishnikov Asylum, for other colonies in the Empire. As the St Petersburg reformers had with Western models, philanthropists in the provinces adopted some of its principles, but tried to avoid its mistakes. A number of new societies rejected the agricultural model and founded purely industrial asylums; even at the St Petersburg colony, by 1876 a visitor noted that most boys were engaged in manufacturing trades.[101] Although the idea of rural life as morally virtuous still appealed to reformers, in practice, colonies had more success placing boys in factories and workshops upon their release, and so industrial training came to predominate.[102] Still, agricultural colonies, including the one at St Petersburg, existed until 1917, although the “family” system, with its cultured and self-abnegating “fathers,” gradually faded away, leaving a memory, after the revolution, of “uncles” who enforced discipline through beatings.[103]

Internal factors, including changes in leadership, and the difficulty in finding staff whose idealistic devotion could weather the daily stress of caring for a difficult and vulnerable population, as well as external ones such as states’ reluctance to spend large sums of money on youth seen as less deserving, influenced the turn to repressive discipline – and, as conditions worsened, to abuse and brutality – in both France and Russia. Although the 1880 Inspection Commission characterized the “family” system as particularly unsuited to national conditions, its gradual decline was not unique to Russia. By the 1920s, although Mettray had outlasted most of its imitators, harsh conditions and brutal guards had turned it into the kind of institution its founders had hoped to replace.[104]

Notes

1. Mettray employee register, Archives départementales d’Indre-et-Loire (hereafter AD37) 114J (Mettray colony archives), 540; hand-copied report about the inauguration of the School of Supervisors, 1839, 114J 271; No title, La Gazette agricole, August 10, 1839, copied by hand into a ledger-book, 114J 579.

2. Mettray’s place as a pioneer and model in correctional education has long been recognized, but only in 2001 were its archives collected and made available in the departmental archive of Indre-et-Loire. Henri Gaillac wrote a foundational work on juvenile detentions in France: Les Maisons de correction: 1830-1945 (Paris: Editions Cujas, 1991). Since then, scholars such as Eric Pierre, Jacques Bourquin, and Ivan Jablonka have considered Mettray in the context of nineteenth-century philanthropy and welfare measures; see their chapters in Luc Forlivesi, Georges-François Pottier, and Sophie Chassat, eds., Éduquer et punir: la colonie agricole et pénitentiaire de Mettray, 1839-1937 (Rennes: Presses univ. de Rennes, 2005). Stephen Toth’s forthcoming Mettray: A History of France’s Most Venerated Carceral Institution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, forthcoming) will be the first monograph devoted to Mettray. Russian penitentiary agricultural colonies have received sparse attention in English, although Jude C. Richter, “Rehabilitating Juvenile Criminals in Russia, 1864-1917” (Ph.D., Indiana University, 2008) covers juvenile corrections more broadly.

3. Although this article focuses on one linkage between two similar institutions, they were nodes in what Michel Foucault names a “carceral archipelago” of related institutions that relied upon similar disciplinary practices, and what Ann Laura Stoler describes as a “broad arc of imperial governance” surpassing the scope of social reform. See Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Random House LLC, 1995), 394; Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 82–83. Work on transnational connections and networks in correctional education has focused on Western Europe. For Britain, see Felix Driver, “Discipline Without Frontiers? Representations of the Mettray Reformatory Colony in Britain, 1840-1880,” Journal of Historical Sociology 3, no. 3 (September 1990): 272–93; for the Netherlands, see Jeroen J. H. Dekker, The Will to Change the Child: Re-Education Homes for Children at Risk in Nineteenth Century Western Europe (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2001). Marie-Sylvie Dupont-Bouchat and Éric Pierre, eds., Enfance et justice au XIXe siècle: essais d’histoire comparée de la protection de l’enfance, 1820-1914: France, Belgique, Pays-Bas, Canada (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2001) brings together scholars of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Britain, and Canada; Chris Leonards, “Visitors to the International Penitentiary Congress A Transnational Platform Dealing with Penitentiary Care,” Österreichische Zeitschrift Für Geschichtswissenschaften 26, no. 3 (September 2015): 80–101 reveals transnational connections by looking at participation in a series of International Penitentiary Congresses. Most of these Congresses took place after the death of Demetz and did not, therefore, serve as vehicles to promote the Mettray model.

4. Gaillac, Les Maisons de correction, 22–23.

5. Katherine A. Lynch, Family, Class, and Ideology in Early Industrial France: Social Policy and the Working-Class Family, 1825-1848 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 39–48; Jean Baptiste Duroselle, Les débuts du catholicisme social en France (1822-1870) (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1951), 601–4.

6. The Penal Code of France, Translated into English with a Preliminary Dissertation and Notes (London: H. Butterworth, 1819), 14–15; Frédéric-Auguste Demetz, Fondation d’une colonie agricole de jeunes détenus à Mettray (département d’Indre-et Loire). (Paris: Benjamin Duprat, 1839), 16–17.

7. Christian Carlier, La prison aux champs: les colonies d’enfants délinquants du nord de la France au XIXe siècle (Paris: Éditions de l’Atelier, 1994), 679–80.

8. Ivan Jablonka, “Un discours philanthropique dans la France du XIXe siècle: la rééducation des jeunes délinquants dans les colonies agricoles pénitentiaires,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne & Contemporaine 47, no. 1 (January 2000): 135.

9. Other historians have likewise noted the dual status of child criminals, beggars, or vagabonds as “both dangerous and in danger”: Miranda Sachs, “‘A Sad and . . . Odious Industry’: The Problem of Child Begging in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris,” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 10, no. 2 (May 9, 2017): 189; see also Dominique Kalifa, L’encre et le sang: récits de crimes et société à la Belle époque (Paris: Fayard, 1995), 158; Jablonka, “Un discours philanthropique,” 134.

10. Hand-copied extract from Les Nouvelles, November 7, 1865, AD37 114J 581.

11. For a discussion of how Mettray and other reform colonies related to European imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Barbara Arneil, Domestic Colonies: The Turn Inward to Colony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

12. Demetz to the Prefect of Indre-et-Loire, Mettray, January 8, 1853, AD37 1Y 141.

13. Assemblée générale des fondateurs, June 7, 1840, 22, AD37 1Y 103; Assemblée générale des fondateurs, March 12, 1843, 26-7, AD37 1Y 106.

14. Report by M. de Gasparin to the Assemblée générale des fondateurs, March 12, 1843, 5, AD37 1Y 106. In later years some members of Mettray’s governing body, the Paternal Society, pushed to expand the industrial workshops. They argued that to train a city boy in agriculture was to doom him to a life of crime, since he would inevitably return to his urban home without any useful trade. Administrative Council meeting, April 5, 1884, 85, AD37 114J 176.

15. Catalogue of the Fabrique d’instruments d’agriculture de la Colonie de Mettray, August, 1861, AD37 114J 434.

16. Assemblée générale des fondateurs, January 23, 1842, 17, AD37 1Y 105.

17. Pierre Jean Corneille Debreyne, Colonie agricole monastique, fondée à la Grande-Trappe, près Mortagne (Orne) pour les jeunes détenus (Paris: Vve Poussielgue-Rusand, 1856), 46.

18. Since “the great reproach which is aimed at us is that we have too much personnel,” Mettray’s families were larger than natural ones to allow fewer staff to care for more detainees. Demetz to Matthew Davenport Hill, October 15, 1849, AD37 114J 248.

19. Hand-copied article from La France, August 8, 1839, AD37 114J 579.

20. Assemblée générale des fondateurs, January 23, 1842, 12, 23, AD37 114J 187.

21. Almire Lepelletier de la Sarthe, Colonie de Mettray, solution pratique du problème des jeunes détenus. Extrait du Système pénitentiaire (Paris: Guillaumin et Cie, 1856), 34.

22. Employee register, AD37 114J 540.

23. Ibid.

24. Hand-copied article from La Gazette agricole, Saturday August 10, 1839, quoting a speech by Mr. Diard, a magistrate at Tours and early supporter of the colony, AD37 114J 579.

25. Assemblée générale des fondateurs, June 7, 1840, 12, AD37 1Y 103.

26. Demetz, Fondation d’une colonie. Later, annual reports offered statistical data to show evidence of success: AD37 1Y 99-114.

27. Éric Pierre, “La colonie de Mettray: Exemplaire, mais unique,” in Éduquer et punir: la colonie agricole et pénitentiaire de Mettray, 1839-1937, ed. Luc Forlivesi, Georges-François Pottier, and Sophie Chassat (Rennes: Presses univ. de Rennes, 2005), 44–45.

28. Nikolai Vasil’evich Shcherban’, “Metre - ispravitel’naia koloniia dlia maloletnykh prestupnikov. Iz dorozhnykh zametok. Okonchanie,” Otechestvennyia Zapiski 168 (October 1866): 518.

29. This editor had merely reproduced Demetz’ brochure, with no introduction, so that it resembled an advertisement rather than a journalist’s report. Demetz to the editor of the Journal de la Vienne et des Deux-Sèvres, October 23, 1864, AD37 114J 582.

30. The directors produced a brochure about the colony for distribution to any foreign visitors who intended to write articles. Assemblée générale des fondateurs, March 12, 1843, 28, AD37 1Y 106. Mettray’s directors paid close attention to any publicity about their colony, and transcribed all relevant articles into a series of ledgers: see AD37 114J 578-582. Many of these summarized annual reports; see for example, “Eloges adressés aux directeurs de Mettray publiés dans le Journal de la Vienne,” August 30, 1842, AD37 114J 580.

31. Demetz to an unidentified editor, December 18, 1865, AD37 114J 582.

32. As well as the two letters cited above, see Demetz’ correspondence with Edouard de Pompéry, August 7 and 22, 1863, in which he enclosed a document with the relevant arguments circled and advised his correspondent when to publish his article. In another undated letter to an unnamed correspondent, Demetz wrote “Permit me, if you are thinking of publishing something on Mettray, not to put out your article until I have had the honour of seeing you and giving you a few explanations that will enable you to understand the import of our work.” AD37 114J 582.

33. Assemblée générale des fondateurs, June 7, 1840, 8, AD37 1Y 103.

34. Assemblée générale des fondateurs, March 12, 1843, 3, AD37 1Y 106. Some prominent colonies, in particular the one founded by the eminent prison expert Charles Lucas at Val-d’Yèvre in the Cher, explicitly distinguished their systems from Mettray’s: see Charles Lucas, Un mot sur la fondation de la colonie agricole pénitentiaire du Val d’Yèvre considérée au point de vue du Programme Impérial du 5 janvier 1860 sur le défrichement des marais (Bourges: Imprimerie et lithographie de A. Jollet fils, 1861), 27.

35. Charles Fissiaux, Discours prononcé à l’occasion de l’inauguration du pénitencier agricole et industriel pour les jeunes détenus des départements du Midi (Marseille: Marius Olive, 1840), 21–23.

36. Demetz to prefect of the Bas-Rhin, Mettray, August 18, 1855, Archives départementales du Bas-Rhin (hereafter AD67), Y 123 (Colony of Ostwald).

37. Christian Carlier, “De la maison de correction à la colonie pénitentiaire. Les enfants délinquants à Amiens sous la Monarchie de Juillet,” Criminocorpus. Revue d’Histoire de la justice, des crimes et des peines, May 14, 2012, http://journals.openedition.org/criminocorpus/1773.

38. Carlier.

39. Paul Huot, Ostwald ancien et moderne, le Mettray d’Alsace (Colmar: C. Decker, 1863), 9. Although this article focuses on penitentiary colonies, agricultural colonies were also created to care for orphaned or abandoned children.

40. Frédéric Auguste Demetz, Notice sur la colonie agricole de Mettray (n. p., 1865), 1–2; Edouard Ducpétiaux, Colonies agricoles, écoles rurales et écoles de réforme pour les indigents, les mendiants et les vagabonds, et spécialement pour les enfants des deux sexes, en Suisse, en Allemagne, en France, en Angleterre, dans les Pays-Bas et en Belgique. (Brussels: Imprimerie de Th. Lesigne, 1851), 55–65.

41. Demetz had particularly friendly relationships with Willem Suringar in the Netherlands and with Matthew Davenport Hill and Lord Leigh in England. See Dekker, The Will to Change the Child; Driver, “Discipline Without Frontiers?” Mettray served as a highly influential model for institutions such as Suringar’s “Netherlands Mettray,” or Redhill in England.

42. Richter, “Rehabilitating Juvenile Criminals,” 107.

43. Otchet o deiatel’nosti obshchestva zemledel’cheskikh kolonii i remeslennykh priiutov (St Petersburg: Tipografiia Imperatorskoi Akademii Nauk, 1870); W. Bruce Lincoln, The Great Reforms: Autocracy, Bureaucracy, and the Politics of Change in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, Ill: Northern Illinois University Press, 1990).

44. Historians have debated the nature or even existence of a civil society in Russia under autocracy. See Adele Lindenmeyr, “‘Primordial and Gelatinous’?: Civil Society in Imperial Russia,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 12, no. 3 (August 13, 2011): 705–20. Joseph Bradley argues for the vitality of civil society in this period. See Bradley, “Subjects into Citizens: Societies, Civil Society, and Autocracy in Tsarist Russia,” American Historical Review 107, no. 4 (October 2002): 1094–1123.

45. Adele Lindenmeyr, Poverty Is Not a Vice: Charity, Society, and the State in Imperial Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 120–41.

46. Richter, “Rehabilitating Juvenile Criminals,” 52–53.

47. Gregory L. Freeze, Russia: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 192, 215–17.

48. N. Lamanskii, “Tiuremnoe zakliuchenie vo Frantsii,” Iuridicheskii Vestnik, 1862, 79.

49. For example, Lamanskii, “Tiuremnoe zakliuchenie vo Frantsii”; Petr Nikitich Tkachev, “Rabochevospitatel’nyia zavedeniia dlia nesovershennoletnykh prestupnikov,” Iuridicheskii Vestnik, 1864; Nikolai Vasil’evich Shcherban’, “Metre - ispravitel’naia koloniia dlia maloletnykh prestupnikov. Iz dorozhnykh zametok. Stat’ia pervaia,” Otechestvennyia Zapiski 168 (September 1866): 380–401; Vasilii Ivanovich Chaslavskii, “O zemledel’cheskikh koloniakh i remeslennykh priiutakh,” Sel’skoe Khoziaistvo i Lesovodstvo, 1868. Shcherban’ liberally cited Mettray’s annual reports; Chaslavskii cited Demetz, Notice. Lamanskii and Tkachev quoted extensively from Ducpétiaux, Colonies agricoles.

50. Shcherban’, “Metre,” September 1866; Shcherban’, “Metre,” October 1866.

51. Tkachev acknowledged only Mettray’s post-release patronage system as an original contribution. “Rabochevospitatel’nyia zavedeniia,” 55–56. Demetz had indeed borrowed the family system from the Rauhe-Haus, near Hamburg, and acknowledged his debt, but due to his skill in promoting the work, Mettray eclipsed the colony that had inspired it. Demetz, Fondation d’une colonie, 10–13; Otchet za 1870 g., 3.

52. Shcherban’, “Metre,” September 1866, 384, 386.

53. Otchet o deiatel’nosti S.-Peterburgskago obshchestva zemledel’cheskikh kolonii i remeslennykh priiutov dlia maloletnykh prestupnikov c osnovaniia obshchestva po 1 ianvaria 1873 g. (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia A. M. Kotomina, 1873), 9.

54. Otchet za 1870 g., 2–3.

55. Otchet za 1873 g., i.

56. L. F. Panteleev, Vospominaniia (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo khudozh. lit-ry, 1958), 557–59.

57. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “A Colony of Young Offenders. Dark Individuals. The Transformation of Blemished Souls into Immaculate Ones. Measures Acknowledged as Most Expedient Thereto. Little and Bold Friends of Mankind. (January 1876),” in A Writer’s Diary, trans. Kenneth Lantz, vol. 1 (1873-1876), 2 vols. (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 314–24; Pavel Apollonovich Rovinskii, “S.-Peterburgskaia zemledel’cheskaia koloniia, ispravitel’no-vospitatel’noe zavedenie dlia maloletnikh muzhskago pola (1871-77 g.),” Zhurnal grazhdanskago i ugolovnago prava 7, no. 5 (October 1877): 59–94.

58. Adele Lindenmeyr, “Raskolnikov’s City and the Napoleonic Plan,” in Dostoevsky: New Perspectives, ed. Robert Louis Jackson (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1984), 99.

59. Lincoln, The Great Reforms, 88–90.

60. Obshchestvo zemledel’cheskikh kolonii i remeslennykh priiutov: Otchet za 1876 g. (St Petersburg: Tipografiia M. Stasiulevicha, 1878), 30–31.

61. S. A. Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917-1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 16.

62. Obshchestvo zemledel’cheskikh kolonii i remeslennykh priiutov: Otchet za 1881 g. (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia E. Arngol’da, 1882), 14–21.

63. Cathy A. Frierson, Peasant Icons: Representations of Rural People in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 34–36.

64. Chaslavskii, “O zemledel’cheskikh koloniakh,” 16.

65. Rovinskii, “S.-Peterburgskaia koloniia,” 89.

66. Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), 58–59.

67. Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in 19th Century Russia (London: Phoenix Press, 2001), 469–506.

68. Frierson, Peasant Icons, 116–60.

69. Shcherban’, “Metre,” September 1866, 389.

70. Chaslavskii, “O zemledel’cheskikh koloniakh,” 23.

71. From the early 1870s until his death by suicide in 1878, Chaslavskii conducted research on Russian agriculture, but at this point had no claim to expertise. V. Chernov, “Chaslavskii, Vasilii Ivanovich,” in Russkii Biograficheskii Slovar’, ed. A. A. Polovtsov, vol. 22 (St. Petersburg: Imperatorskoe Russkoe istoricheskoe obshchestvo, 1905), 64–66.

72. Otchet za 1876 g., 30.

73. Demetz to Matthew Davenport Hill, Mettray, October 15, 1849, AD37 114J 248.

74. Gerd stayed several weeks at the Swiss colony of Bächtelen, described by Ducpétiaux, Colonies agricoles, 14–17; Otchet za 1873 g., 9–10.

75. Rovinskii, “S.-Peterburgskaia koloniia,” 93–94.

76. Otchet za 1876 g., 33–34.

77. Assemblée générale des fondateurs, March 12, 1843, 8, AD37 1Y 106.

78. Chaslavskii, “O zemledel’cheskikh koloniakh,” 14.

79. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 294–95.

80. Shcherban’, “Metre,” October 1866, 519, 399.

81. Otchet za 1873 g., 59.

82. Rovinskii, “S.-Peterburgskaia koloniia.”

83. Panteleev, Vospominaniia, 559.

84. Obshchestvo zemledel’cheskikh kolonii i remeslennykh priiutov: Otchet komiteta za 1878 g., doklad revizionnoi kommissii za 1877 i 1878 g. (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia M. Stasiulevicha, 1880), 22–79.

85. Otchet za 1878 g., 33.

86. For the Rukavishnikov, see Richter, “Rehabilitating Juvenile Criminals,” 54–56, 84–99.

87. Otchet za 1878 g., 37.

88. Otchet za 1878 g., 87–90.

89. Freeze, Russia, 228–31.

90. Mettray’s director Louis Blanchard to the editor of the St James’ Gazette of London, Mettray, February 26 1881 AD37 114J 582. It is unclear when exactly the Preparatory School closed; dwindling numbers of pupil-supervisors were taken on until 1909, but under Demetz’ successors they were too few to have merited a separate school.

91. Minutes of a meeting of the Financial Commission of the Paternal Society, February 28, 1870, 277, AD37 114J 175.

92. Ducpétiaux, Colonies agricoles, 50–51. The same source gives the daily cost at Marseille as 1.44, while at Ostwald it was only 0.85F.

93. This argument ran against a then-growing trend in English social care to ensure charity did not provide perverse incentives by making poverty more remunerative than paid labor and thrifty housekeeping; Demetz agreed to some extent, believing charitable institutions should not accustom their wards to a comfortable lifestyle, but warned that the principle should not outweigh the imperative of providing real help: Demetz to Matthew Davenport Hill, Mettray, October 15, 1849, AD37 114J 248.

94. Minutes of a meeting of the Financial Commission of the Paternal Society, February 28, 1870, 277, AD37 114J 175.

95. See Mettray’s official financial accounts 1840-1895, AD37 114J 253.

96. Assemblée générale des fondateurs, January 23, 1842, 14, AD37 114J 187.

97. Gaillac, Les Maisons de correction, 155–60.

98. Minutes of meetings of the administrative council of the Paternal Society, August 27, 1839, 12, and May 4, 1869, 275, AD37 114J 175; also May 14, 1884, 87-8, AD37 114J 176.

99. Prudent Guimas, Colonie agricole de Mettray: Souvenirs d’un fonctionnaire (Tours: Rouillé-Ladevèze, 1885), 9. From 1855-1872, Guimas directed the Ostwald colony near Strasbourg, but he returned to Mettray after Germany annexed Alsace. My analysis of Mettray’s employee register, AD37 114J 540, shows the average age of pères de famille increased steadily from 22.2 years soon after its foundation, in 1845, to 45 years by 1870, which corroborates Guimas’ evidence that former NCOs, rather than newly-trained young men, were being hired.

100. For the scandal, see “Le scandale de Mettray,” La Petite France, March 23, 1887, and the related clippings from that year in AD37 114J 582. For the political conservatism of Mettray’s supporters, see the debate reported in “L’affaire de Mettray,” Journal d’Indre-et-Loire, April 21, 1887, 1-2.

101. A. D. Ushinskii, Otchet po obozreniiu S.-Peterburgskoi zemledel’cheskoi kolonii i Moskovskago Rukavishnikovskago priiuta dlia maloletnikh prestupnikov (Kiev: Universitetskaia Tipografiia, 1876), 3–4.

102. A. Dmitriev, “Padshie angeli. V zemledel’cheskoi kolonii dlia maloletnikh prestupnikov,” Kolos’ia, no. 10 (1888): 77–86.

103. Anton Makarenko, The Road to Life: An Epic of Education. (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), 1: 29.

104. For conditions during Mettray’s later years, see Raoul Léger, Jacques Bourquin, and Éric Pierre, La colonie agricole et pénitentiaire de Mettray: souvenirs d’un colon, 1922-1927 (Paris: Harmattan, 1997); Toth, Mettray; For a transnational perspective on the end of colonies for young offenders in France, see Kari Evanson, “Vers le chemin de la vie : le discours communiste lors de la campagne médiatique contre les bagnes d’enfants, 1934-1938,” ed. Mathias Gardet and David Niget, Revue d’histoire de l’enfance « irrégulière ». Le Temps de l’histoire, no. 15 (October 30, 2013): 187–202.