crook; convict, prisoner of a penal colony
“Ce ne fut pas sans fierté que M. Tach s'était su atteint du redoutable syndrome d'Elzenveiverplatz, appelé plus vulgairement « cancer des cartilages », que le savant éponyme avait dépisté au XIXᵉ siècle à Cayenne chez une dizaine de bagnards incarcérés pour violences sexuelles suivies d'homicides, et qui n'avait plus jamais été repéré depuis.” — It was not without a certain sense of pride that Monsieur Tach learned he was afflicted with the dread Elzenveiverplatz Syndrome, more commonly referred to as “cartilage cancer,” which the eponymous learned physician had individuated in Cayenne in the nineteenth century among a dozen or so convicts imprisoned for sexual crimes followed by homicide, and which had never been diagnosed since that time.
From bagne (“penal colony”) + -ard.