For almost four decades the world believed, without the slightest shadow of a doubt, that the story told by Henri Charrière in Papillon It was that of his life and that of the escape attempts – both the frustrated and the successful ones – that he carried out from the French prisons of Guiana and Devil’s Island. The enormous success of his book, published in 1969 and presented as an autobiographical novel, earned him a pardon the following year by French President Georges Pompidou, a merely symbolic act because the crime for which he was convicted had expired in 1967, when it had already expired. He had been free for 18 years.
The book, which was also a denunciation of the terrible conditions in which prisoners lived in French prisons overseas, was made into a film in 1973 and the film, starring Steve McQueen -in the role of Papillon- and Dustin Hoffman, It multiplied his fame and enhanced the reach of history.
Charrière barely managed to enjoy this last success, because he died in Madrid of throat cancer that same year, at 66. His story, however, survived him, not only because of the mastery with which he had narrated it but because of the impact caused by the narrations of apparently impossible events but carried out by people of flesh and blood. Because Papillon, the nickname that Charrière owed to the butterfly he had tattooed In his chest, he was that: a real man who had lived adventures worthy of a novel and who, furthermore, had known how to tell them.
It took more than thirty years after Charrière’s death for anyone to question the veracity of his stories. In 2005, a French ex-convict named Charles Brunier came to the fore and claimed that he and not Charrière He was the real Papillon. The man was 104 years old and showed a tattoo of a butterfly on his left arm. The statements of the elder Brunier forced us to review the story told by Charrière and it was concluded that some passages in the book, although true, He had not starred in them.
The scandal grew when the French prison authorities published the prisoner records of the Devil’s Island penal colony and Henri Charrière did not appear in them. But Not everything was false either.because the author of “Papillon” was an ex-convict who had been sentenced to life imprisonment and confined on the other side of the Atlantic. That was also documented.
Today, when Henri Charrière would be 118 years old and 51 years have passed since his death, there are many questions that remain unanswered: Who was the real Papillon? How much is true and how much is false in Charrière’s book? Is it an autobiographical novel or a work of fiction? What events had him as the protagonist and which ones did he invent or take from the stories of other prisoners? Why was Brunier silent for so long? Papillon has become an enigma.
It is documented – because a birth certificate exists – that Henri Charrière came into this world on November 16, 1906 in Saint-Étienne-de-Luggdarès, in Ardèche, France. His parents were Joseph and Marie-Louise, two high school teachers, who also had two daughters. A death certificate also states that Henri was orphaned by his mother in 1917, shortly after his 11th birthday.
In 1923, when he was 16 years old, he enlisted in the Navy, where he served two years before asking for discharge. Their trail can then be followed to the underworld of Pariswhere he becomes another character in that environment where criminals, prostitutes and pimps mix.
He moved in that world until 1931 when the police arrested him, accused of killing a cafisho named Roland le Petit. Charrière, who by then already had the butterfly tattooed on his chest and was known as Papillon, always denied having committed that crime, but it did not help him: in October of that year He was sentenced to life-long hard labor in French Guiana.
It is there that begins the extraordinary story that made him one of the most famous French prisoners, along with Captain Alfred Dreyfus, unjustly convicted years before of treason and sent to Devil’s Island, the same one from which Charrière claimed to have escaped. early ’40s.
The fugues that Charrière in “Papillon” are from a novel, or a film, and here we can only list them. His first destination as a prisoner was the Saint Laurent du Maroni Penitentiary Center in French Guiana, from where he was transferred to one of the small Salvation Islands. Feigning an illness, he managed to be taken to the hospital, from where he escaped with the help of a nurse along with two prisoners, Clousiot and André Maturette. They had a small boat ready with which they sailed along the coast of Trinidad and Tobago to Riochacha, in Colombia. On the journey they received help from a community of lepers.
Bad weather prevented them from continuing their trip and the three were captured by the Colombian police. Papillon was able to escape a few days later and after days of walking he arrived in the Guajira region, where he was welcomed by a group of native pearl fisherswith whom he remained for several months. If something was missing from his adventure it was love and he found it in a young woman from the town. Love and peace did not last long, because he was recaptured and imprisoned in Santa Marta and later in Barranquilla, from where he was extradited and sent again to French Guiana in 1934.
For having escaped, Charrière was sentenced to two years of isolation on the island of Saint-Joseph, known as “the man-eater”. After spending those two years in isolation, he was transferred to the island of Royale, from where he had another failed escape attempt in which he killed a prison informant, for which he was sentenced to eight years of isolation. He only served 19 months, because his sentence was commuted after a heroic act: He saved the daughter of a prison boss who was drowning in the sea.
Despite all these setbacks, Charrière did not give up in his attempts to regain freedom. His new strategy was to feign dementia so that he would be transferred to an asylum, where surveillance was much less rigid. They recaptured him before he could get away from the island.
He then asked to be transferred to Devil’s Island, used as a French penal colony since the time of Napoleon III, from where no one had managed to escape. The prisoners could wander throughout the island, because its cliffs prevented any attempt to escape by sea. But Charrière discovered a way to do it: after months of watching the arrival of waves hitting the cliffs, he discovered that the seventh in a sequence was moving away from the coast with more force than the previous ones. He built a raft with coconuts and threw it into the water.
He reached land in Guyana and from there fled by boat to Venezuela, where he was captured again, although with an advantage: by not having sought extradition, he avoided being returned to the prisons of the French colonies. He was released on October 18, 1945 and decided to stay in the country. He could not return to Europe because the French authorities continued to demand him.
He married a Venezuelan woman – more to avoid being expelled than for anything else – and obtained funds to found the restaurant in Caracas. Great Coffeewhich soon became a meeting place for local bohemia. There, at the tables of that bar, Charrière began to write Papillon.
He had to wait until 1967 for all the cases he had with the French justice system to prescribe and return to Europe. Two years later he published the book that made him famous and finished writing another, Bancowhere he told his life in Venezuela.
The publication of Papillon – which immediately became a bestseller and was translated into several languages - not only made Henri Charrière a famous writer. It soon also became the spearhead of complaints. against the cruelty of the French prison systemwhich he criticized both inside and outside the borders of his country.
At the same time, he began touring the world to present his book. During one of those literary and denunciation tours, in 1972, he stopped in Buenos Aires, and summarized the two sides that, in his opinion, his country had. “France, not in vain, is the cradle of human rights. France put at my disposal all the means of oral, written and visual dissemination so that I could come face to face with the French legal-police system. That was extraordinary. I am now a citizen of the world, but the one who made me a citizen of the world was the same French people who brutally sentenced me and He treated me like a filth of society. The barbaric and medieval treatment of its police weighed on some consciences,” he explained in an interview with the literary critic Ubaldo Nicchi published in the newspaper Clarion.
Charrière was already ill and died a few months later, on July 29, 1973, and for more than thirty years the story he had told in Papillon was taken at face value, until in 2005 the elderly Charles Brunier, with his butterfly tattooed on his left arm, came forward to assert that the real Papillon was him.
Added to the old ex-convict’s statements was the publication of the records of the Devil’s Island penal colony, where Charrière’s name did not appear. According to French authorities, he had never been imprisoned there. All this aroused the interest of journalist Gerard de Villiers, who thoroughly investigated the story and came to the conclusion that he published in his book Butterfly Pinned (Butterfly nailed): that only ten percent of what Chárriere tells in his autobiographical novel is true and that the rest of the episodes he relates They were carried out by other prisoners or arose from the author’s imagination.
On the 118th anniversary of his birth, the enigma surrounding Henri Chárriere remains valid. There is no doubt that, whether autobiographical novel or work of fiction, “Papillon” is one of the adventure stories most exciting that have ever been written during the 20th century. It begins like this, with violence: “The slap was so strong that it took me thirteen years to overcome it. It was no ordinary slap, and they went to great lengths to give it to me.”
