France’s Forgotten Concentration Camp: The Martyred Priests of Île-Madame

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France’s Forgotten Concentration Camp: The Martyred Priests of Île-Madame

The Remnant | February 7, 2026

Long before the Nazi camps, revolutionary France created a system designed to make priests die “without noise.” This is the suppressed history of the prison-ship martyrs of Île-Madame—and the faith that endured the Terror. Why were hundreds of priests made to die in silence during the French Revolution—and why was their story erased? This account of the prison-ship martyrs reveals a lineage of fidelity that echoes into the Church’s modern struggles.

Scrolling through search engine results for a “death camp” or “extermination camp,” one might be tempted to imagine that malicious, death-inducing internment was confined to Nazi camps or to the Soviet gulag. Although it would be naive to assume that the twentieth century had a monopoly on evil, it is nonetheless startling to realise the world’s very first concentration camp was located, not at Dachau, nor even in 19th-century Cuba, but in 18th-century France. There, near La Rochelle on the western coast, near a small island called Île-Madame, 829 priests were starved and tortured aboard prison ships designed for the slave trade,[1] and transformed by the Reign of Terror into efficient murder weapons. Over five hundred of them perished.

It was not by accident that this story escaped the world’s attention and our history books.  The history of these priests was so carefully and entirely suppressed that it even disappeared for decades from the collective memory.[2]  In the words of their torturer, the brutal and callous Capitaine Laly, “These men were torn from the book of the Republic.  I was told to make them die without noise. ”[3]

Why should they have died without noise, these 829 priests herded with indignity through the towns and streets of France, beaten and stripped before being consigned to two prison ships bound for French Guiana – a place deliberately chosen for its murderous climate[4]? As a reminder of the historic allegiance of France to the Holy See, they were an embarrassment to the Republic; because they functioned as a stimulus to the faith of many, they were undesirables to be eliminated.  Most of them had refused from the outset the route the Republic considered patriotic: the oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which removed the priest from his fidelity to the Pope and rendered him a schismatic civil servant of the government.  Others among them, confronted with the fidelity of their brethren, would later retract that same oath.

It is to the credit of the French hierarchy that all but four of the bishops of France, along with over half of the clergy, refused the oath.  Even the Terror regime was afraid to execute them all outright.  Instead, it would bury all of them in opprobrium, chase many of them into exile, and murder the remaining unfortunates by inches on the prison ships which, due to their condition and the British blockade of the oceans, would never make it to French Guiana.

The deportation of the prisoners reads like an episode from a surrealist nightmare.  Humiliating strip searches, insults and booing from the mob, inclement weather, accommodation with malefactors or in profaned churches were not the only sufferings endured on the long Calvary.  On the march through Limoges, goats and donkeys arrayed in priestly garments were added to the procession of clergy, and a deacon was ritually guillotined[5]. At Cognac, they were taunted by an official, “If you were animals, we might have pity on you, but being monsters, you don’t deserve any compassion.[6]”  Once arrived at their destination, the already demoralised and exhausted priests were welcomed on board the ships by being denuded of their last possessions.  Not even a breviary was allowed.

On board they would learn an entirely different code of justice, the code of false accusations and rapid executions. Everything was punishable: to whisper in Latin was the sign of a conspirator[7]. Those subjected to a quick execution by gunfire were the fortunate ones; those left to rot on the ships had the crueller fate. From eight at night to eight in the morning, they were crammed into a space smaller than a coffin[8] for each one, without light, without air. As there were insufficient buckets for natural necessities and given the brutal necessity of climbing over bodies to reach those buckets, the air was soon filled with a terrible stench. To this suffering was added the freezing cold on deck during the day, and below deck, the horror of fumigations which were produced by plunging a red-hot cannonball into tar[9]. These fumigations made some of the priests spit blood; they produced a racking cough. The food, unsatisfying as it was, was infested with worms, infected with mould, or even more putrid matter. Forced to labour, deprived of the least intellectual enjoyment or companionship, the priests were put to a test of fidelity which is astonishing to contemplate.

All these outward tortures- to which the predictable dysentery and typhoid would soon be added- pale, however, in comparison to the spiritual sufferings, for if the physical sufferings were a purgatory, the behaviour of the crew was reminiscent of the demons in hell. One Abbe Maugras recorded of the crew’s behaviour “I doubt if the demons in hell could utter as many blasphemies against God and His Saints.”[10]  Every prayer they uttered was greeted with a blasphemy so terrible that many resolved to keep silent. Nonetheless, by unanimous consent the entire body of priests resolved, in the face of death, to continue the Benedicite and to make the sign of the Cross before meals. Before their resolve, the crew was silenced. It was one of the priests’ rare victories.[11]

Providence, meanwhile, was not asleep. Somehow, the Blessed Sacrament and the holy oils remained undiscovered on one of the ships, the Deux-Associes, so that all of of the priests were able to receive Extreme Unction (and nearly all Holy Viaticum) before death, a death endured with sentiments of confidence and resignation so great that it comforted their voluntary nurses.  “I have seen some of them after death whose faces were so beautiful that we could not stop looking at them,” recorded one of these helpers later.[12]  And what hours of tender adoration were made by these priest-victims beside the Divine Host, which transformed the hell of the prison ships into a paradise of virtue, peace, and love of God!  “We suffer not only with peace, but with sweetness, and we die with delight,” wrote one of them.[13]

The gentle hand of Our Lady was also to be seen in some of the reliefs given to the victims on her feast days. For instance, it was on the feast of her Assumption[14] that the priests received the welcome news of their disembarkation onto the island of Île -Madame, where they might nurse the sick and bury their dead. They hastened to consecrate their makeshift hospital and the island to Our Lady under the title of her Assumption, changing the name to Ile-Notre-Dame.

It was possibly there that one of the priest-nurses, whilst tending to his brethren, sculpted the relic and icon of their trial, the famous Prison Ship Cross which doubtless received the last pleading glance of the dying priests. The Corpus, worn with the devotion of over two centuries, is without arms, without hands. The armless Christ is seen as a symbol of the priesthood deprived of the liberty to offer Mass yet exercising their priesthood through suffering and interior prayer.[15]

Perhaps the most beautiful jewel to emerge from the bitter trial was the mutual support of the clergy. A group banded together and made nine serious resolutions for their spiritual lives: to avoid repining on account of the loss of their possessions; to live modestly and soberly if ever they were released; to avoid ever making public the story of what they had endured; to avoid useless longings for release from their fate; to spend the time of their imprisonment reflecting on their past and making serious resolutions for the future.  Most touching is the promise to cover for posterity and to screen from a curious public any faults or weaknesses which their brethren, under tyranny, might happen to commit[16].

This magnanimity which grew under persecution was no weak flame, sputtering and dying after its first burst of radiance. Years later, a visitor called at Captain Laly’s house, where the man lived, now impoverished and far from the consolations of religion, as he only too well deserved. A visitor entered; Laly regarded him with horror, recognising in him one of the priests he had tortured. The priest left a bag of money on the table. “That is how a priest forgives,” he remarked.[17]

The terrible Laly later died repentant and converted - a conversion surely won by the magnanimity of his victims.

But if, as Commandant Laly desired, the ocean guarded her secrets, the soil of Île -Madame did not. The local peasantry transmitted the story of the holy priests and their cruel murder. Decades later, in 1863, a clergyman asked a praying peasant why he doffed his hat to pray in a field without church or shrine. Astonished, the peasant asked, “But Sir, is it possible that you do not know that the saints are buried here?”[18] Devotion grew and, in the nineteenth century, God was pleased to honour the sacrifice of His servants by a miracle:  the path which connects the island to the mainland, and which had become dangerous, was renewed miraculously overnight[19].  It endures beneath the tread of countless annual pilgrims. There on Île -Madame lie buried (and honoured by a cross of simple galets or flat stones brought by generations of pilgrims) the bodies of some 254 priests, buried by their exhausted fellow-sufferers, who were forced to dig the burial places of their comrades but prevented from offering the briefest of funeral obsequies.  They were buried in silence- but the stones still cry out.

For an intimate tie exists binding Catholics to those priests who died in witness to the spiritual independence of Christ’s kingdom on earth. If we can attend the Mass of Ages, it is due in no small part to the valiant efforts and rapid organisation of some French clergy and laity after the Second Vatican Council. It is likewise indisputable that the heroes of the ecclesiastical Revolution, slandered and reduced to penury, saying Mass in forests and in basements, are the spiritual heirs of the martyrs of the French Revolution. Across the centuries we hear the clarion call: “If we are the most unfortunate of men, we are also the happiest of Christians.”[20]  It is our motto too.


[1]  Poivert, L. (Chanoine): Les Martyrs des Pontons, pg 34

[2] La croix des pontons de Rochefort et Le Pelerinage a L’Ile-Madame, Documentary, Culture-Bible et Studio 4, 2023

[3] Un peu plus d’Histoire - PRÊTRES DÉPORTÉS sur les PONTONS :  Diocèse de La Rochelle & Saintes:  This quotation is also found generally, in the public domain, such as Les martyrs des Pontons de Rochefort (1794-1795) - Christ Roi and Les mouroirs flottants de Rochefort

[4]  Poivert, L. (Chanoine): Les Martyrs des Pontons, pg 20

[5] Ibid, pg. 28

[6] Ibid, pg 27

[7] Les mouroirs flottants de Rochefort, https://fr.aleteia.org/

[8] La croix des pontons de Rochefort et Le Pelerinage a L’Ile-Madame, Documentary, Culture-Bible et Studio 4, 2023

[9] Chevreau, Guy, Les Pontons de Rochefort, 1974 :  Kindle edition

[10] Chevreau,  ibid.

[11]ibid.

[12]ibid.

[13] Poivert, L. (Chanoine): Les Martyrs des Pontons, pg 58

[14]  Poivert, L. (Chanoine): Les Martyrs des Pontons, pg 66

[15] La croix des pontons de Rochefort et Le Pelerinage a L’Ile-Madame, Documentary, Culture-Bible et Studio 4, 2023

[16] An entire list of the nine resolutions is given at the website of the Diocese of Saintes at 9 Résolutions - PRÊTRES DÉPORTÉS sur les PONTONS.    The resolutions are in the public domain and included in, for example, the present liturgical books of the Carmelite Order.

[17] Reportage du pèlerinage 2022 à l'Ile Madame • La Porte Latine

[18] La croix des pontons de Rochefort et Le Pelerinage a L’Ile-Madame, Documentary, Culture-Bible et Studio 4, 2023

[19] This is an oral tradition for which historical data are difficult to find, but the fact is maintained by local clergy and religious in France. See an example at Reportage du pèlerinage 2022 à l'Ile Madame • LPL

[20]  La croix des pontons de Rochefort et Le Pelerinage a L’Ile-Madame, Documentary, Culture-Bible et Studio 4, 2023