Mettray revisited in Jean Genet’s Le Langage de la muraille

This article returns to the model reformatory of carceral entrepreneur Frédéric-Auguste Demetz at Mettray by rereading its archive and existing historical scholarship in view of a little-known major work by its most famous inmate, gay novelist and playwright, thief and leftist agitator Jean Genet (1910–86): Le Langage de la muraille. Genet was responding, with his own characteristically light-fingered form of autodidactic historical scholarship, to Michel Foucault’s appropriation of Mettray in Surveiller et punir (1975). In my return to the archives of this model institution, I argue that Mettray was an exemplary exercise in liberal statecraft’s mixture of coaxing and coercion; and that Demetz was an unrivalled master of ‘the language of the wall’. This was a distinctly modern practice of administrative governance by partitioning, an art of containment continuous with harder forms of policing in tending towards the suppression of democratic politics.