At the Château de Cadillac, in Gironde, the confinement of “bad girls” – 05/09/2024 at 1:25 p.m.

Their names were Félicie, Irma, Jeanne, were born in 1922, 1926, 1930 and were detained at the preservation school for young girls in Cadillac, in Gironde, for theft, vagrancy, contempt of public order.

The Château de Cadillac, built in the 16th century south of Bordeaux by the Duke of Epernon, was the first prison for women in France from 1818 to 1891, before being converted into a preservation school for young girls, the equivalent of reformatories for boys, until 1951.

Vagabonds, orphans, abortionists, thieves, fighters were locked up there until the age of 21, the age of majority. Most were from working classes.

“The inmates of preservation schools are young girls who move away from gender norms,” explains Véronique Blanchard, historian and co-author of the book “Bad Girls”.

“What worries us is the bodies and sexuality of young girls,” she adds. “The administration is haunted by the fear of prostitution,” notes Cyril Olivier, coordinator of research and exhibitions at the Gironde departmental archives.

At the end of the 19th century, three preservation schools for young girls were created, public establishments managed by the prison administration.

– Keep an eye on and punish –

In Cadillac, the central staircase of the ducal castle, its sculpted fireplaces and its luxurious apartments contrast with the cells under the attic – real “chicken cages” -, the graffiti on the walls and the heavy wooden doors from the time of the prison , where the duchess’s quarters have been converted into dormitories.

“This building has gone through extremely contradictory things: on one side, a sumptuous and flashy palace, and on the other a prison past of which traces have been preserved,” describes Olivier du Peyrat, administrator of the castle.

“Cadillac embodies a disciplinary place à la Michel Foucault, where a discipline of the body and time is imposed on the inmates, subject to permanent control,” comments Véronique Blanchard.

Departmental archives preserve traces of inmate revolts.

In 1941, six of them tried to escape. Caught, they are punished by 30 days in solitary confinement and a diet of dry bread and water.

The young girls, according to the police reports, are “violent in nature”, have “deplorable morals” and “light conduct”. They rebel against their supervisors, attack them, throw buckets of urine in their faces.

The troublemakers are sent to solitary confinement, shaved, sometimes put in a straitjacket, according to Véronique Blanchard.

The punishments are also financial. Some inmates work as laundresses, seamstresses and domestic servants outside.

In the event of bad behavior, their pay is taken by the administration.

“It’s a system of debt: we bring girls into a prison world and we put them in debt in such a way that they can hardly get out,” comments Cyril Olivier.

– Attempt at reform –

At the end of the Second World War, we tried to “turn the page on children’s prisons and promote their education”, explains Olivier du Peyrat.

The preservation school becomes a “public institute of supervised education” and Dominique Riehl, psychologist, is responsible for reforming the establishment.

She sets up sports classes, theater workshops, supervises the education of girls, whose level in Cadillac is very low. The inmates become “wards” divided into small groups around an educator, in order to reproduce a semblance of a family unit.

But the experiment, launched in October 1944, failed. The castle’s prison past is too heavy, the building unsuitable.

Cadillac was the last public reformatory to close its doors in 1951, after the suicides of two students.

The castle was returned to the Secretariat of Fine Arts in 1956. Work was carried out, but the exterior and chimneys remained in poor condition. A global renovation took place in the 2000s.

In 2019, Olivier du Peyrat opens the attic to visitors. “We tried to show what the castle housed in a particularly striking and dark way. The public comes away struck by the prison past of the place, a past that is much stronger, closer and more sensitive than the splendor of the palace,” says he.