‘My Soul of Combined Saltpeter’. The Penal Colony Journal of Jean Claude Romand

Abstract

Having fought in the Lyon uprising of November 1831, tailor and republican activist Jean Claude Romand (1798–1874) was sentenced to the Toulon penal colony from 1833 to 1838. There, the man who would later claim credit for coining the Canut motto – ‘Live working or die fighting’ – kept an unpublished personal journal. This journal is both a day-to-day account of life in the penal colony and a narrative of Romand's life. A self-taught man, he asserted the value and worth of his existence and was determined to tell his story, to ‘give an account’ of it. This resolve to share his experience reflects his political and moral commitment to a republic he dreamed of as democratic and social. A “grassroots republicanism” – both unique to Romand's idiosyncrasy and representative of the radical artisan milieu in the period following the July Revolution – emerges throughout the seven notebooks of this journal.