Forbidden History - Papillon: History's Greatest Hoaxes

Episode Date: October 17, 2024

Forbidden History presents History's Greatest Hoaxes Papillon is one of the most popular books and films of the 1970s. It tells the dramatic story of the prison life of Henri Charrière, a convicted murderer with a large butterfly tattoo on his chest. But how much of his story was actually true? Was he ever imprisoned on Devil's Island? Or was it all fiction...? Cast List: Guy Walters: A British author, historian, and journalist who has written several books on WWII. As a journalist for The Times, he writes on historical topics for the national press. Alex Boese: Author, The World's Greatest Hoaxes Marcus Brigstocke: Author & Comedian Vladimir Lozinski: News Producer Ronnie: Local Guide Marcus Brigstocke: Author & Comedian Jim Haynes: Publisher Erwin James: Ex-Convict & Journalist Michel Muszlak: Philosopher Eric Meyers: Narrator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. Papillon was one of the most popular books and films of the 1970s. By 1973, it had sold 5 million copies and had been translated into 16 languages. It tells the dramatic true story of the prison life of Henri Chariere, a convicted murderer who had a large butterfly tattoo on his chest.

But how much of his best-selling memoir was true? Was the man they supposedly called Papillon ever really imprisoned on Devil's Island? Or was it all a work of fiction? Devil's Island was the ultimate place where you didn't want to go as a prison. Because once you went over that horizon, you didn't know where you were. It was brutal. It was isolated. And you pretty much knew you didn't have a chance of ever coming back.

There were beatings, there were abuses, there were sodomy. These were not fun places to hang out. 20 years in prison almost killed me. They exhausted me. It drained me. I wasn't in French Guiana. I was a prisoner, but back of a... He couldn't have written that without having been through some hell.

This book is not just a success, it's a runaway success, selling millions. Everybody knows a story of Pabillon. It's a story about survival. It's a story about the triumph of the spirit. The reason it became an instant bestseller in France and it sold 5 million copies was because there was this incredible curiosity about the penal colonies in French Guiana and what went on there. People want good stories and if fibbing are stretching the truth a bit makes the story. makes the story a better story.

It's hard to resist. Papillon, a memoir written by convicted felon and fugitive Henri Chariere, was first published in France in 1969. The story covers a 14-year period of his life from 1931 to 1945, when he was convicted of a murder in France and sentenced to a life of hard labor on the Devil's Island penal colony in French Guiana.

French Guiana. It became an instant bestseller and was adapted for a Hollywood film in 1973, starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. Chariere always stood by the story that all events in the book were truthful and accurate. But this has been questioned by those who have studied it, and many now believe that it really depicts the adventures of several of Chaire's inmates. Basically, Chariere is sent to the penal colony. and French Guiana, because he's a very bad prisoner, he's a murderer after all, he's tried to escape, he's committed lots of misdemeanors. So he ends up in what's become, thanks to his book, these are infamous French penal colonies off the coast of French Guyana.

These are horrible, terrible places. Indeed, that's the part of the book that really do ring true, because he was there. There was this incredible curiosity in France about the penal colonies in French Guiana. It was this mysterious part of French history, and there was a hunger to know what exactly was going on there. We know for sure that Henri Chariot wrote Papillon was in prison. He did do time, but that it's very unlikely that most of the book and then the film was about his life.

What seems to have been the case is he went to prison. He heard some fascinating stories about people who have done time in various. places and decided to say that it was all him. I think quite encouraged by his publisher, because it's a really good story. Much more interesting to take loads of people's stories and make it about one person and say, yeah, that was me. Vladimir Lozinski is a news producer who specializes in covering conflicts as well as crime and punishment.

He believes it's entirely possible that Chariere concocted the whole story. Devil's Island was the ultimate place where you didn't want to go as a prisoner. Because once you went over that horizon, you didn't know where you were. It was brutal. It was isolated. And you pretty much knew you didn't have a chance of ever coming back. People talk about it, but they talk about it from the outside. Now this is a book where writing came from the persons in the prison. Through literature.

And then through film, you know, you got Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman, Justin Hoffman shining a light on the brutality of a prison system, people sit up and go, oh my God, you know, does this sort of thing really happen? And the answer from the official said, well, actually it does. The idea of any reform for prisoners is a very late 20th century idea. The idea then was just to punish and dump. It was even better if they didn't come back, because if they did come back, you have a totally hardened criminal back in your society.

For them, it was a win-win situation. You get rid of the petty criminal. It's cheaper because they're building the colonial base for the empire, and they pretty much don't come back. Which is actually why the stories and the information of how brutal it was was kept secret for so long because very few people actually made it back to tell the story. French Guiana, on the northeast coast of South America, housed a notorious penal colony, which had several locations both offshore and on the mainland.

It was home for Chariere for 14 years and plays an important part in the book. The facility was closed in 1953, but many of the remains of the site lay abandoned today. The prison of Saint Laurent de Moroni was the main penal institution. Devil's Island was probably the toughest you'd get. you would get. It was the middle of nowhere. It was the end of the world at the time. There was absolutely no escape.

One of the governors of the island said once, you got two choices to get out of here. The sharks don't get you, the ants, and everything else will. On top of that, the jailers made it absolutely difficult. They made your life miserable. It was actually better to die than to actually keep living. Life in the penal colonies was very difficult. People died.

People weren't neglected. Punishment was very, very extreme. There was a lot of abuse of prisoners going on. It was almost like the law of the jungle. There were beatings. There were abuses. There was sodomy. These were not fun places to hang out.

If you hit solitary confinement, and they put you in, I think it was about a three by three cell, where you pretty much had to stand up against the wall. You had no light. You had no contact with anyone, and you couldn't speak. Psychologically, that will break any man. These days, that would be considered cruel and unusual punishment.

In those days, it would consider a really good way to reform a prisoner. As a result of several attempted escapes from the prison, Henri Chariere spent a good proportion of his time in solitary confinement. Local guide Ronnie agreed to explain the layout of the prison. I'm here inside, and the cells of Papillon

is about four square meter. The bed frame, Papillon write his name here. Carving his name into the stone floor would have only added to the time spent in solitary. Records show that Chariere did indeed do hard time. Human beings are social beings. We're not made to live in solitary, confinement and Henri was in solitary confinement for a big part of his time there.

One of your coping mechanisms, defense mechanisms, would be to escape in a world within. To not think thoughts that made you go mad because you were just going around in circles and you lost touch with reality would be to tell yourself stories that built you up, that gave you a resilience. isolation without checks and balances anyone will embellish in our world. But in their situation of just that grinding, grinding brutality, there's only one thing to focus on, and that's your pain, you know, both psychological and physical. So there is a tendency to make things grow. And I don't think it's a lie. It's just a distortion. If you are living

under those conditions, you will distort. Everything is a distortion. It's not normal. There is a long vein of prisoners making up stories about their experiences in jail and making up stories of violence and also trying to escape. There's a lot of shame in being a prisoner

because you've been caught, you've been found out, you've done something wrong, you may be feeling guilty. And because they're feeling ashamed, or perhaps guilty, they're going to try and earn themselves a bit of self-respect by saying, you know what, I try to break out of this prison 20 times, or you know what, I save someone from being stabbed in the showers. What they're doing is taking other people's stories, putting them onto themselves, and then telling it in later years.

It is a very common thing, and Papillon is probably the most successful manifestation of this. In a surprising twist in 2005, another prisoner from Devil's Island, Charles Brunier, came forward to claim that the book Papillon was actually based on himself and his time in the prison, and that Chariere had stolen his story. In 2005, another inmate comes out to completely discredit Henry Charié's story. His name is Charles Brunier. And he says, hold on a second. This story is not on reason.

This story is my story. Yes, he was a prisoner. but you know what he's a bit of a wuss. He had it fine. I'm the one that had it so hard. I'm the one that had the tattoo. I'm the one who went through all this. You had to have been pretty much isolated not to have come across that story, especially if you'd been on Devil's Island it was your story. I find it intriguing that he lived, what, 50 years from being incarcerated to when he mentioned it. Now his story gels, and it also gels with the accounts of the French administration. of saying that the dates and the places don't match.

The one question remains is why he didn't come out with it for 50 years. In my mind, this is how it goes. He sits there and he goes, I have to say something. After all this time, finally, I have to say something. So story of Papillon, and he starts unbuttoning his shirt. It is not who you think it is. Whips his shirt open and there's a huge butterfly on his chest. He goes, it's me.

I am Papillon. This old boy has a butterfly tattoo. He then says, yes, those incidents in the book, most of which happened to me. But I never made me money from them. I never wrote about them. And yet, so maybe Runier is Papillon, and maybe Chariere never was Papillon.

People investigate, and it seems that yes, you know, this man, this 104 geyser in this nurse, home, his life story actually does seem to fit better than Henri Chariere. And in fact, the more people look at Chariere's life, investigation discovered, who was actually a model prisoner, and he spent most of his time cleaning latrines. So far from being this like super exciting, you know, guy who had escaped nine times and on a raft of coconuts,

of coconuts. He was just, you know, your average prisoner. Brunier lived out the last years of his life in a retirement home in Valdeuze in France. To his dying day, he claimed that Papillon was his story, and that Charrier had stolen it. However, penal colony records from the prison on Devil's Island confirm that Henri Charrier was an inmate on the island, and like the character in poverty, like the character in Papillon,

did escape from the prison on more than one occasion. With all this attention that Sharia receives, comes people who are looking at it and going, hang on a minute, they're scratching their heads and they're thinking, does this really stack up? I mean, his experiences are almost too fantastical, too picaresque to be absolutely true. There is a report commissioned by the French penal system

to look as to whether Chariere's account in Papillon of its own experiences are true. It turns out in this 20-page report that they, by and large, aren't true. How much of it is fiction? How much of it is fact? And do we really want to hear about the banality? Would anyone read about the story of a bunch of guys

living together, eating three meals a day and working eight hours? No one would read them. We want to hear that someone was wrongly incarcerated, or had to struggle with horrible guards or prisoners. We don't want the banality, we want the excitement, and any good writer knows that, any good storyteller knows that, and that's what Sherrye did. I'd be inclined to believe that he not so much embellished, but collected other people's stories.

Psychologists these days even study that now with people's memory. When people have been incarcerated or been in a situation, there's a tendency for them to actually take other people's stories and actually convince themselves that it actually happened to them. And that's actually been proven, you know, by psychologists now. So did Henri Charrier make up a lot of papillon as he's accused? Jim Haynes is a Paris-based author who's worked with convicts before. He believes that it's entirely normal for an inmate to fantasize while incarcerated and aggrandize his own prison life story.

A prisoner has time. That's one thing he's got. Usually, if you can find a pencil or a pen, he can start writing down what he thinks. Whereas normal life, we've got a million distractions. So a president has an opportunity to write his memoirs or her memoirs, and the world is always interested in what goes on behind the door. There's lying and there's elaborating on other people's stories. A lot of fiction writers do that today.

I mean, they use other people's stories and incorporate them in their book. They don't call it autobiography, but they use it. biography, but they use the stories. I think the genre of literary memoirs is notorious for being fast and loose with the truth. Because people want a good story, and unfortunately the reality is that truth often isn't as dramatic a story as people want. So there is a built-in tendency for authors to tweak it or just invent. it out of whole cloth.

You know, how much of what you see on TV is really happens or has it been tweaked by editors to make it more dramatic. When you live in a situation of a penal colony like that, and you've got people around you and the collective history, you tend to think that it happened to you as well. And yeah, he would have embellished a little bit, but every writer does, I think. In 2003, in a chilling echo of Papillon, American author James Frey released a best-selling memoir called A Million Little Pieces, which supposedly told the story of his recovery from drugs and alcohol abuse.

However, it turned out that he'd just made up large parts of the story. Oprah Winfrey had heavily promoted the title in her book club, taking sales to over 2 million copies. And she learned of phrase lies and embellishments, she went public, castigating the author, telling him live on the air that she felt duped and betrayed. Publishing is a rough milieu. I mean, once you're in it, you have to be prepared to do some amazing marketing things to get your book notice and get it out in the world.

A writer is tempted at all times to make a a good story. And when the facts are not necessarily accurate, 100% accurate, but by slipping a little bit, you enhance the story considerably, the temptation is to do so. It's there all the time in front of every writer. One of the reasons why Papillon, the book, remains so popular and people still remain willing to believe it, is because the film with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman, It was this very shocking film, it felt very plausible, and the horrors that McQueen goes through just felt so ghastly and so grim. How would anybody lie about this, about themselves?

It must be true. And so what it helps to do is elevate the book. You've got these enormous names attached to it, and it puts the book on a pedestal that makes it almost insurmountable. You can't knock this off the pedestal because it's been a movie with Steve McQueen. A former member of the French Foreign Legion, and convicted murderer Erwin James was sentenced to 20 years behind bars. Unusually, he became a columnist for the British newspaper The Guardian while incarcerated. And in 2013, he visited Devil's Island.

I was in a deep, deep hole. There was very little room for imagination. You know, in prison, you live in dreams and fantasies and nightmares. And I was banged up in a cell in Wandsworth Prison, just for the... bucket, a table, a chair, a bed, three sets of bars on the window. And I was locked on that cell for 23 hours a day for the first year of my life sentence. I was allowed six books a week from the prison library. One of the first books I read from the prison library was Papillon. Papillon gave me a vision of a world that was enigmatic, it was mysterious, it was exciting.

And when you're locked in a cell, you know, I really, I mean, it sounds ridiculous, but I thought, I wish I could have had my life sentence in Devil's Island, you know, because at least I could have had some means of engaging with my environment. I just locked in a concrete box. Papillon gave me a fantastic means of just escaping for a little while. I strolled up to that prison. The door was hanging off. Just the most amazing experience.

I stood and held the bars that he used to hold. It was just amazing to be on that place, which had been a penal settlement. for like 300 years. It's set under a canopy of a beautiful blue sky and tropical sun. And that, I would guess, would make it even more difficult because you could see people enjoying life.

I mean, when I was in prison and a visitor came in and the governor would show them around the prison. And you could see that the people thought, oh, this doesn't look too bad. You have we got pink walls and, you know, some new bit of paint work here and there, and it's been tidied and cleaned and smells a bit of disinfectant. It doesn't seem too bad,

but when you're in there, you've got to be in it to understand. You've got to be in it to understand it. You've got to be amongst it. In a prisoner hierarchy, there are no rules. And when you're in that hierarchy, and you've got to try and figure out how do I exist in this atavistic, primitive psychology? How do I survive this?

How do I get up tomorrow, manage tomorrow, and then the next day, then the next day, and then the next week, and the next month, and the next year? There's no doubt in my mind that what Charié and his fellow prisoners went through was a pretty excellent. a pretty extreme human experience. In real life, Aung Wai Charlier did escape from Devil's Island and eventually settled in Venezuela. The penal colony in French Guiana closed in 1953.

He does manage to escape and makes his way to Venezuela, where he arrives in 44. He then meets his wife to be called Rita, and they set up bars and nightclubs, and they end up to running a business and making a new life for himself. But, you know, clearly he's not satisfied, and at one stage he loses quite a lot of money, and he realizes that one thing he can do is sort of kind of write his way out of financial trouble. But this takes off more than he can possibly anticipate. Now, his experiences in themselves are, frankly, enough to put in a book. But like a lot of former prisoners, you know, who are sometimes quite ashamed of being incarcerated. He embellishes the story with anecdotes and escape attempts and rescue attempts of

various people. So therefore, what he ends up with is this is a kind of glorious kind of synthesis of his autobiography and other people's biographies that have come together to fuse into this almost superhuman prisoner that he calls Papillon after a butterfly tattoo he supposedly has on his In Cherrier's case, it's interesting because he was an ex-con who'd murdered somebody and he managed to get a meeting with a publisher and he said, I've written a book, it's a story, it's a novel about a guy who's in the penal connoisse. Publisher looks at it and goes, yeah, this would be better if it's an autobiography. Just say it's all about you. And he puts it all together and sure enough, it's a better story. Comedians do this all the time. Funny thing happened

to me on the way to the gig. Didn't happen to me. Didn't happen at all. Happened to somebody, somewhere, along the way. You know, it's a better story. It's always a better story if you say it was me. Often prisoners do big themselves up. You're there because you've failed in some way,

lost your way, and sometimes the criminal identity can give you a sense of being more than what you are. It's a very negative, sad situation. But I think with Charié, he definitely, definitely was a prisoner in the French Guiana Penal Settlement. No question about that. I've seen the documentation of his escape from the hospital in San Laurent, so he definitely did that. I think in those days it was easier to walk in and say it was your story.

Because of our modern communications and the way that we can check facts these days, we can verify pretty easily in our modern time if a story is true or not. In those days, information wasn't that integrated. If someone came in and told you this is the truth, until someone comes along and knocks it down, you're going to go with that, because there's no one around you to say, excuse me, I have another version.

If you look at the history of memoirs, autobiographies, this is an ancient genre. This goes back to the beginning of writing itself almost. almost, and there's always been, for some reason, this tendency to put that phrase, this is a true story at the start of memoirs. No matter if the rest of it is complete fiction, somehow putting that one phrase at the start of a memoir completely changes how the reader will interact with that work. And it makes it much harder for a reader to distance themselves from what happened.

If it's fiction, you can think, oh, you know, this is a nice story. If you think it's a true story, the emotional effects is far more pronounced. Papillon is a great story because it's a story about survival. It's a story about the triumph of the spirit. It's something that I think people can relate to about, you know, this idea of being wronged and overcoming adversity. And because of that, I think people were very quickly to want to believe it. But if Chariere did make up a lot of what was in Papillon, why did he do it? Michel Muslach is an author and philosopher in Paris, who has studied prison life for many years.

I don't think Papillon was a fake. He was a semi-fake, a quarter-fake, assertive a fake. He certainly told a lot of stories that were not his own stories. But you feel when you read the book that he really did go through a lot. He was a young man at the beginning of the story, and the fact that he had a strong psychology, had a pretty good education, not high, but pretty good education. I think this allowed him to imagine a way out, even if it was completely unbelievable. So he did a lot of thinking, and that's better than looking at the blank wall.

He talked about this fact that the prisoner has to have to have. the prisoner has to imagine, imagine, imagine, to keep on living. If he doesn't, he dies. So of course, they all tell themselves stories, how it could be, what could be, what would happen when they get out, all kinds of adventures,

and they start believing their own stories up to a point. What exactly is Cherrier guilty of? Is he guilty of lying to people? Should we condemn him as a liar? Or is he just a guy guilty of telling a good story? I think what happens when people feel that somebody is appropriating suffering or the misery of others in a way that is not justified. I think there's more of an emotional reaction.

It's one thing to tell a fanciful story. It's another thing to tell it in a way that takes advantage of real life suffering. And I think with Cherrier, maybe that's what he was leaning towards doing, because this really was a terrible chapter in French history. Being incarcerated has to be, from a psychological perspective, one of the hardest things to contend with. Human beings aren't made to live in a four-by-four cell, not associate with nature, other people, the outside world.

As a consequence, their inner world, their understanding of their experience becomes very important because they justify their feelings. They come important because they give them strength. And so it's not surprising that we see so many stories, embellished stories, coming from prisons. There's a lot of, I guess, mythology within them in order for these people to cope with their experiences. I think people write about time in prison because there's an audience for it, just like great sitcom, it's a small contained environment.

It's quite easy to write about. You can explain process that your world has limits on it, and that's the totality of your experience. And the people keeping you there are the bad guys, and you're the good guy. Makes for good stories, it always has, especially if there's a sense for the reader that the person in prison shouldn't really be there,

that they're a bit different, or they're a spirit somehow that shouldn't tied down. We all like either the rags to riches or the richest rag stories. In other words, something happens because I don't want to say this too loudly, but many of our lives are humdrum. What happens this year and what happened next year and the next and the next is a bit the same. So these are people that are talking about things that happen because they really have a fight

to lead and they win it or they lose it. That's not so important. Having a book of fiction is part of freedom. But as long as you're not doing harm in the writing itself, you're free to write whatever you want, whatever you poetically want. Should we throw out Alice in Wonderland? Catch 22? The Sri Musketeers?

No, of course not. First of all, it's entertainment. It was one of the most popular books and films of the 1970s. It depicted a story based on an island penal colony, a world which no longer exists today. Charier probably never set out to make millions from a book. However, the story that he wrote captured the imaginations of millions of readers around the world, even if he did embellish the plot. There are two things that Charier is guilty of, depending on your viewpoint. He's almost certainly guilty of being a murderer, and I think we've just got to let that go.

He probably was. But was he also guilty of being a deliberate and willful hoaxer? He served his time. He got away. I suspect he did set out to write a book largely about himself, but probably embellished it in the way that old lags often do. He probably didn't expect it to sell many more than 10,000 copies. Instead, it sold millions, it made him millions, and of course he had to stick by what he wrote.

So I think in many ways my suspicion is that he was a victim of commercialism rather than any dark intent to deceive people. He may have made it up or embellished or condensed other people's stories. It doesn't make it less real. It still is valid. For me, even if it wasn't him, the story that he told actually brought to light the horror of the French penal system. So, in that sense, I'll go with him because he actually did something. It wasn't just a book and a film. My heart goes out to authors because I think they're telling a story.

And as a storyteller, you want to spice it up as much as you can. There's such an onus on making it interesting that there probably comes a point where you feel that even if it's based on fact, it's a problem of proportion, right? So clearly if I had the problem with drugs or I was in prison, isn't that enough? Do I need to kind of go into that much detail? And I think that's what tends to come across and we see, you know, literary hoaxes happening quite often actually. Human beings like stories much better than we like the truth. Stories are great.

Stories are really interesting. And we buy hoaxes all the time. We're willing to play along and be hoodwinked up to a point, maybe completely. And then we like the bit where it's exposed where you go, well, I knew it was a hoax all along. We like both sides. A good hoax is a good story. That's the point. Not just the hoax itself,

but then the story of how the hoax is put together when it's busted. It's a good story. People are very willing to forgive a lie if it's an entertaining lie, if they think it's clever and amusing. And this same phenomenon seemed to kick in with the Papillon novel.

I've seen some of some of the Papillon novel. I've seen some of the papillon. American reviewers who are saying, well, you know, it may be a hoax, but it's a good read anyway. So you have this odd tension between entertainment and truth. All of these prisons, all over the world, these historic prisons, still have their ghosts. And those ghosts are still alive and they live in our memories. They're still in the walls. Even though you can have a jungle completely overgrow a place, you can have forgotten by the

authorities and forgotten by most people. But because of books like Papillon, they live in our memory. They bring it back. Quite frankly how brutal human beings can be and how we can just waste human beings. We still waste human lives and we don't consider them valuable. If you tell a story about John, Joe, this happened to him, that happened to her, it's interesting. If you say it happened to you, you can identify. much, much closer. And if the story is well told, if it's well written, if on top of it you spice it up a bit,

it becomes better. I don't know exactly who's guilty of what, but I think that he went through a lot, but he heard a lot of stories, and he definitely loved to tell stories. So who knows what's true, and really up to a point. Who cares?

The effects and the impact and the sense of incarceration is a universal thing, So you can be in a selling Wandsworth prison, you would still recognise the experience of someone on Devil's Island. And I think I did, if I'm honest. I could empathise. But I... Once I experienced firsthand,

when I saw a close-up what they experienced, I'm not sure I would have survived it.