These converts are a distinctive – and growing – feature of French prisons.
Natixis, a bank, put together the €300m ($417m) loan to the trio of French prisons, but nearly €100m will go straight onto the balance-sheet of Ageas, a Belgian insurer.
Although the religious complexion of French prisons has been changing for several decades, the Republic's policy of not identifying the faith of its citizens meant that few noticed.
All of this, according to the public relations wing of the French prison service, has made La Santé a lieu de mémoire ("a site of memory"), a term used by French historians to denote buildings and monuments that are charged with historical meaning.
Their story is remarkably similar to that of another serial prison breaker, Redoine Faid one of France's most infamous criminals who helicoptered out of a French prison last week and is still on the run.
Their story is remarkably similar to that of another serial prison breaker, Redoine Faid – one of France's most infamous criminals – who helicoptered out of a French prison last week and is still on the run.
What ensues is both thrilling and – in its cold indictment of the French prison system – terrifying.
In "Night Soldiers," Khristo Stoianev, on the run from local fascists, is recruited by a Soviet agent and finds himself trapped in the paranoid and murderous N.K.V.D. at the time of the purges — he is pushed, like tumbleweed in a storm, from Moscow to the Spanish Civil War, then to the shady émigré community of Paris, French prison, the French resistance and eventually New York.
The hero of "A Prophet," Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim), is nineteen at the outset, a blank slate of a boy, just starting a French prison sentence of six years.
PARIS — Nearly 70 years after the pioneering automaker Louis Renault died in a French prison, accused of collaborating with the Nazis, his grandchildren are seeking to restore his reputation — and gain compensation for what they say was the illegal confiscation of his car company by the state.
