Men in Prison

Victor Serge served five years in French penitentiaries (1912-1917) for the crime of 'criminal association' - in fact for his courageous refusal to testify against his old comrades, the infamous 'Tragic Bandits' of French anarchism. 'While I was still in prison,' Serge later recalled, 'fighting off tuberculosis, insanity, depression, the spiritual poverty of the men, the brutality of the regulations, I already saw one kind of justification of that infernal voyage in the possibility of describing it.'