Mixed Race Studies

The One-Drop Rule in Reverse? Interracial Marriages in Napoleonic and Restoration France

Law and History Review
Volume 27, Number 3
Fall 2009
University of Illinois

Jennifer Heuer, Associate Professor
Department of History
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

In the early nineteenth century, an obscure rural policeman petitioned the French government with an unusual story.  Charles Fanaye had served with Napoleon’s armies in Egypt.  Chased by Mameluks, he was rescued in the nick of time by a black Ethiopian woman and hidden in her home.  Threatened in turn by the Mameluks, Marie-Hélène (as the woman came to be called) threw in her lot with the French army and followed Fanaye to France.  The couple then sought to wed.  They easily overcame religious barriers when Marie-Hélène was baptized in the Cathedral of Avignon.  But another obstacle was harder to overcome: an 1803 ministerial decree banned marriage between blacks and whites.  Though Fanaye and Marie-Héléne begged for an exception, the decree would plague them for the next sixteen years of their romance.

As we will see, Fanaye’s history was atypical in several regards.  But he was far from the only person to confront the ban on interracial marriage. The decree, which seemed to reinstate a 1778 edict, went hand in hand with the reestablishment of slavery after the French Revolution.  It was officially applied to metropolitan France, rather than the colonies, and was circulated throughout the continental Napoleonic Empire.  It would remain in effect even after Napoleon fell from power, quietly disappearing only in late 1818 and early 1819.

This quiet disappearance has persisted in the historical record: both the ban and its application have been almost completely forgotten.  The reasons for this oversight are both conceptual and practical.  While there is burgeoning interest in the history of slavery in the French empire, historians tend to focus on the drama of emancipation during the Revolution, rather than on the more painful return of slavery after 1802.  When scholars of European history think of miscegenation laws, we often turn immediately to colonial arenas, or look to the later nineteenth and twentieth century when social commentators were particularly obsessed with interracial sex; metropolitan France in the early nineteenth century seems an unlikely site for contestations over racial and family law.  More generally, the supposedly race-blind French model of citizenship, that of republican universalism, has often made it difficult to think about racial categories when discussing French history and politics.

There are also pragmatic reasons why the decree has been forgotten.  The black and mulatto population in metropolitan France was small in the period, at most 5000 people, and there are few records that address them as a group.  Many of the relevant documents are buried in a series at the French National Archives on dispensations for marriage.  While a few are grouped together thematically, many are organized alphabetically, within at least 160 cartons of records.  Others are in a series of administrative correspondence catalogued geographically.  A few are scattered in municipal and departmental archives, often under the rubric of local administration.  These are not categories that promise obvious connections to racial or colonial history…

Read the entire article here.