The Enraged | Sorj Chalandon

"In 1977, while I was working at Libération, I read that the Belle-Île-en-Mer Supervised Education Centre was going to be closed. This word actually referred to a penal colony for minors. From 1880 onwards, within its high walls, where Communards had first been detained, petty thugs from the cities, brigands from the countryside but also turbulent dunces, abandoned children and orphans were "re-educated". The youngest were 12 years old.

On the evening of August 27, 1934, fifty-six kids revolted and built the wall. While the fugitives were surrounded by the sea, the gendarmes offered a twenty-franc piece for each child captured. So the good people went on the hunt and hunted down the fugitives in the villages, on the beaches, in the caves. All were captured. All? No: at the first light of dawn, an escapee was missing.

I slipped into his shoes and it's his story that I'm telling. The story of a battered child who looks like me. The metamorphosis of a wild beast born without love, of a madman, forced to clench his fists to grasp outstretched hands. S.C.