Cabrera: From island paradise to hell island

After the surrender of General Dupont in Baylen on the 24th of July 1808, about 9000 French soldiers were declared prisoners of war and sent to the island of Cabrera in May 1809. Only 3700 returned to France in May 1814. Some survivors have left a testimony of these long years of misery. Their war memories published in the first half of the XIXth century rocked numerous pre-romanticist and romanticist symbols: the myth of the island refuge and the island paradise. Cabrera became an island prison and the island of hell. All the natural sites of the island acquired a new sinister dimension: the abundant nature of the island of Rousseau was converted to a barren desert of rocks and death, the protective blue sea to the main obstacle to freedom and life, the fountain, source of life to a source of death, the caves to an antechamber to the kingdom of Darkness ...