Prison, Then Novelist, Then Engineers

Mont Saint-Michel spent seventy years as a prison before it spent any time as a tourist destination, and a novelist is largely credited with ending that.

From abbey to jail

After the French Revolution, the abbey buildings were converted into a prison, holding political and later criminal prisoners from 1793 until 1863. Cramped cells were fitted into halls built for monastic life, and the wear from that use is still visible in parts of the complex today, layered awkwardly under the medieval architecture around it.

Hugo's campaign

The writer Victor Hugo and other cultural figures campaigned publicly against the prison's continued use, arguing that it degraded a major national monument, and the prison was finally closed in 1863; restoration and a return of a small monastic community followed over subsequent decades.

Losing, then regaining, the tide

A causeway built in 1879 let vehicles reach the island but also caused silt to build up around it, and by the early twenty-first century the bay was at risk of turning the mount into a permanently landlocked hill. A large hydraulic engineering project, including a new bridge completed in 2014 that lets water flow freely beneath it and a dam on the nearby River Couesnon to flush silt, was built specifically to restore the twice-daily tidal isolation that had defined the site for most of its history.