The only edition of this significant study by the historian and pioneering statistician Louis-François Benoiston de Chateauneuf (1776-1856) of convict transportation and the prospects for the system's adoption by the French government. Most of the study discusses the success of the penal colony of New Holland, the practicalities involved and the various locations for transportation and for secondary punishment, including some discussion of Tasmania. The author stresses the redemptive possibilities of distant transportation, citing specific examples of post-punishment successes in New South Wales. The Australian experiment is compared with Russian deportations to Siberia and the sequestering of Spanish criminals in Africa. The author proposes the Caribbean islands of Vièque, La Désirade and Saint-Martin as possible destinations for French criminals.

The only edition of this significant study by the historian and pioneering statistician Louis-François Benoiston de Chateauneuf (1776-1856) of convict transportation and the prospects for the system's adoption by the French government. Most of the study discusses the success of the penal colony of New Holland, the practicalities involved and the various locations for transportation and for secondary punishment, including some discussion of Tasmania. The author stresses the redemptive possibilities of distant transportation, citing specific examples of post-punishment successes in New South Wales. The Australian experiment is compared with Russian deportations to Siberia and the sequestering of Spanish criminals in Africa. The author proposes the Caribbean islands of Vièque, La Désirade and Saint-Martin as possible destinations for French criminals.

The book is decidedly rare: it is not recorded by Ferguson while OCLC lists no copies in the United States or in the U.K.

The publication was singled out by Louis de Freycinet as a major source for his notes on the convict system in New South Wales in his narrative of the voyage of the Uranie. The State Library of New South Wales holds a leaf of Freycinet's original manuscript for his study of New South Wales in which he has transcribed a long quotation from Benoiston's book (it appears on pp. 1152-3 of Part 3 of Volume 2 (1839) of the Partie Historique, in Chapter 39, section VI, the subject of which is "The colony of Port Jackson: Considerations on forced-labour camps". A translation appears on pp. 564-5 of Cullity's rendering of Freycinet's Reflections on New South Wales (Sydney, 2001).