Henri Charrière

Who was Henri Charrière?

Henri Charrière was convicted as a murderer by the French courts, and was chiefly known as the author of Papillon, a hugely successful memoir of his incarceration in and escape from a penal colony in French Guiana. While Charrière claimed that Papillon was largely true, modern researchers believe that much of the book’s material came from other inmates, rather than Charrière himself. To his final days Charrière strenuously denied his murder conviction, however he freely admitted to having committed various other petty crimes prior to his incarceration.