Mettray: A History of France’s Most Venerated Carceral Institution. By Stephen A. Toth

Mettray is a familiar name to those acquainted with Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Foucault places the “birth” of the modern carceral system at the opening of Mettray in 1840. Despite the juvenile detention center’s important place in the history of incarceration, Stephen Toth’s Mettray: A History of France’s Most Venerated Carceral Institution is the first work to extensively study the prison. But, Toth’s Mettray is far from just an institutional history. Instead, Toth provides an analysis of both the incarcerators and the imprisoned, shedding light on the understudied policies and practices inside this famous facility.

As Toth states in his conclusion, a key goal of his book is to “confer agency on Mettray’s young colons” in order to provide “a counterweight to Foucault who was never particularly interested in how historical actors impede and complicate presumptions of institutional power” (195). Through extensive archival research, Toth supplies the people, the events, and individual perspectives that Foucault’s studies lack. Mettray provides unique insight into the experiences, lives, and decisions of juvenile delinquents over the course of the nineteenth century. Divided into six thematic and chronological chapters, Toth explores the types of labor convicts performed, the changing and varied understandings of masculinity that existed within the institution, and the nineteenth-century’s attention to rehabilitation, especially of youths and adolescents.

In regards to the history of childhood and youth, Mettray serves as an example of how to keenly read institutional sources against the grain for evidence of children’s experiences. Toth explains that the “archival record is driven by the agenda and perspectives of prison keepers,” (8) yet that did not stop him from locating children’s voices and perspectives. In examining Mettray administrators’ official notes and records, Toth uncovered interviews with prisoners, policies informed by prisoners’ behaviors, and anecdotes from prison keepers. Deploying this rich evidence in each of his chapters, Toth allows the reader to discover what life was like for prisoners. Toth also routinely questions the agency that prisoners had over their experiences and even thoughts while in the prison.

Chapter 3: “Resistance”, in particular, engages with the question of how prisoners actively complied with or rebelled against official prison policy. At the heart of this chapter is the argument that through sexual acts inmates were actively engaged in disobedience. Building on the work of Virginia Thompson, Jeffrey Merrick, and Bryant T Ragan, Toth posits that “homosexuality was an act of deliberate disobedience” (84). It was one way that inmates could “subvert, thwart, and evade authority and disciplinary power” (104). Similarly, acts of repeated masturbation could also be understood this way. Expanding his discussion to the tattoo art that prisoners received during their incarceration, Toth convincingly argues that the body became a site of resistance for prisoners. With limited autonomy over their individual bodies, prisoners could mark themselves how they saw fit or engage in behavior that was strictly forbidden. All were not only ways to achieve a level of personal satisfaction, but also as a way to resist authority. Although Toth hints at the emotions prisoners felt during these acts, a deeper engagement with the history of emotions might have served the argument well here. Regardless, for those interested in nineteenth-century institutionalized behaviors, sexuality, and masculinity in the nineteenth-century, this chapter is a must-read.

Mettray is a powerful piece that adds much to our understandings of prisoners’ lives as well as the construction of modern adolescence and social reform. But, as is sometimes common with the history of childhood and youth, Toth’s argument occasionally views power in terms of a binary: acts of resistance or of oppression. Though he explains in his introduction that power is multifaceted, with prisoners coerced into submission as well as resistance, his examples speak more clearly to acts of resistance. Providing more examples of the complex dynamic between the historical actors would help better explain the extent to which prisoners held and expressed agency. Despite this, Mettray is a model for those interested in studying youth incarceration, gender, and sexuality. I anticipate that many graduate classes on modern history, especially the history of gender and sexuality, will adopt this work for discussion in graduate seminars.