Mazas Prison

You are standing near the former site of the Mazas Prison, an institution that redefined isolation in the mid-nineteenth century. Opened in 1850, this facility was designed specifically to implement a radical form of punishment known as the cellular system. Architects Émile Gilbert and Jean-François-Joseph Lecointe structured the building with twelve hundred individual cells, ensuring that prisoners were kept in total solitude at all times. Even during religious services, inmates remained separated in individual stalls, able to hear the chapel proceedings but forbidden from seeing their fellow prisoners.