Deaths at the heart of the state: incarcerating working-class youth at Ferme Neuve of Les Douaires, France.

In the 19th century, French youth detention was a necropolitical enterprise aimed at controlling precarious social classes. Built in the 1840s in Normandy, Ferme Neuve is a rare example of the first generation of public youth penal colonies in France. First an annex to the prison of Gaillon, from 1862 to 1868, it then formed the core of the youth penal colony of Les Douaires. This paper reconstructs the history so-far disregarded of Ferme Neuve, demolished in the 1960s, and produces a 3D digital reconstruction of what its built environment might have looked like. It then goes on to discuss the high mortality at Ferme Neuve, emphasizing the responsibility of the French state in this surplus of deaths and arguing that this system prefigured contemporary processes of othering poor and racialized youth in France. The paper ends by discussing the need to politicize archaeologies of incarceration in the recent past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]