Based on the true story of Henri Charriere, also known as Papillon, which is French for butterfly (the character even sports a large tattoo of a butterfly). A petty criminal, Papillon is wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to life in a French penal colony in Guiane (French Guiana, South America). Papillon is determined to escape but attempt after attempt meets with difficulty, resulting in eventual recapture. He continues his attempts to escape despite incarcerations in solitary confinement as punishment.

Henri Charriere makes friends with fellow inmate Louis Dega while they are serving a sentence on Devils Island, a hellish, notorious island prison and he plots his escape. The petty criminal known as Papillon is unjustly convicted of murder (specifically, murdering a pimp) in the 1930s and sentenced to life imprisonment in a French penitentiary on Devils Island in French Guiana. He attempts several escapes, which result in many punishments, but after more than a decade (at least seven years of which were spent in solitary confinement as punishment for his escape attempts), he eventually succeeds in escaping to freedom.