This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing Henri Charriere - or, as he was nicknamed, Papillon - a condemned prisoner that was sent to one of the most infamous prisons in History in French Guiana known as Devil’s Island. After eight escape attempts, Charriere finally successfully escaped the notoriously impossible-to-escape prison, living the latter part of his life as a free man when he was pardoned by the French Justice System for his alleged crime.
In 1968, when Charriere was sixty-two years old, he published an autobiography titled Papillon in which he detailed the wild stories of his incarceration and escape from Devil’s Island. This book was an immediate success and is nowadays considered a modern classic. By the time Charriere passed away in 1973, more than five million copies of the book had been sold. To this day, there are more than 200 editions of the book and it has been sold in 21 different languages. This book was adapted into a film in 1973 starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman and another movie adaptation was made in 2017 starring Charlie Hunnam and Rami Malek.
The validity of the Papillon book continues to be called into question, however, as it is believed that this book can’t possibly be a true autobiography of Charriere’s experiences. In fact, it is more often than not believed that many of the experiences he wrote about in Papillon were either total works of fiction or were indeed real…but had actually occurred to other inmates and not to him.
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