When Mont-Saint-Michel housed the Bastille of the seas

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Its geographical position, in the middle of a dangerous bay, like the height of its fortifications explain the prison vocation of the Mont from the Middle Ages.

By Baudouin Eschapasse

Iplace is closed to the public. To get there, you have to take a labyrinthine network of stairs and pass through several locked doors. The steep terraces, which form like hanging balconies along the eastern facade of the Mont-Saint-Michel abbey, offer a magnificent view of the bay.

It is difficult to imagine that it is on this gallery-ambulatory, suspended about thirty meters above the ground, that dozens of jails have been installed for nearly 450 years. “The cells, exposed to the winds, were particularly feared by the prisoners. The death rate there was appalling.”says Étienne Dupont, author of a book on this astonishing story, The Prisons of Mont-Saint-Michelpublished by Perrin.