Louis Arnaud, a French national who spent two years in Tehran's Evin prison, has described the facility as 'the den of evil' in a recent interview with Euronews. Arrested by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) on 28 September 2022, Arnaud was held in section 209, the block reserved for political and foreign detainees, where conditions are deliberately dehumanising.
Speaking about his ordeal, Arnaud recalled a place where captives are crammed into windowless cells with lights that never go out. 'The lights dissolve any notion of time passing; they constantly search your body. In your cell, there's nothing; it's devoid of everything. You eat, you live, you sleep on the floor,' he said. 'They took us out for a walk like animals once a week, blindfolded, to get 20 minutes of fresh air and that's it.'
Arnaud, who was 35 at the time of his arrest, was accused of participating in the mass protests that erupted after the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman who died in police custody for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly. He has consistently maintained his innocence. The psychological pressure, he explained, was relentless: 'All this dehumanisation and extreme pressure in prison never stopped, even when you were asleep. The goal was to force out fantasy espionage confessions.'
Shared Suffering and a Poetic Connection
Arnaud was not alone in his captivity. Cécile Kohler and Jacques Paris, the last French hostages officially held by the Iranian regime, were also imprisoned in Evin before being released on 8 April after several months of house arrest at the French embassy in Tehran. Although the three never met directly, Arnaud described one indirect encounter. 'On my last night in prison, I was thrown into a cell I'd never seen before, where I found a poem [by French poet Gérard Nerval] inscribed on the wall. I knew straight away that Cécile, who has a degree in literature, had written it,' he recounted. 'I told myself that she had to save herself through literature and poetry. It was a particularly powerful moment because as I caressed the poem, it was as if she had left it there for a gate to open.'
The death of Mahsa Amini in September 2022 sparked widespread protests across Iran, with calls for regime change echoing even inside the country's prisons. Arnaud noted a shift in sentiment among inmates: 'At first, the sentiment was "let's protest, although we know it won't achieve anything, we'll lose anyway." Then there was this change of perspective, where people were saying, "It is actually possible, we can achieve a revolution, and we must have one."' In January 2026, protests again shook Iran, fuelled by anger at the authoritarian government and a spiralling economic crisis. However, the regime responded with intense repression, killing thousands and arresting at least 50,000 people, according to human rights organisations. 'The revolution of 2022 failed and in January 2026, Iranians attempted to stage one again,' Arnaud said. 'In any case, Evin remains not just a prison, but also a bastion of resistance.'
Arnaud's book, La Résistance Intérieure, details how relationships with fellow detainees shaped his spirit of resistance. He recalled meeting a prisoner who had been part of the 1979 revolution and had been arrested, tortured, and imprisoned multiple times. 'He is a man who, even today, is regularly arrested and told he will be killed. Yet in prison, he was always smiling. It was as if everything slipped through his fingers, as if death threats had no hold on him,' Arnaud said. This encounter changed his behaviour: 'I realised I was obedient, lowered my eyes and begged to call my family. But then I understood even when you are in chains, even in the worst prison in the world, it's still possible to refuse servitude, to refuse to be the victim that they want to impose on us. You don't have to be a victim in life.'
Arnaud's experience is a stark reminder of the conditions faced by political prisoners in Iran, a country where the EU has repeatedly called for human rights reforms. The story also resonates with broader European concerns about the treatment of detainees abroad, as seen in the release of Polish-Belarusian journalist Andrzej Poczobut in a recent prisoner swap. Despite a tentative ceasefire between the US, Israel, and Iran, Arnaud has struggled to maintain contact with former inmates, underscoring the ongoing risks for those who speak out.
