Mixed Race Studies

Assimilation and Racialism in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century French Colonial Policy

The American Historical Review
2005
Volume 110, Number 2

Saliha Belmessous, Research Fellow of History
University of Syndey

Although the idea of race is increasingly being historicized, its emergence in the context of French colonization remains shadowy. This is despite the fact that colonization was central to the emergence of race in French culture. The French are either credited with a generous vision and treatment of Amerindians or they are kept in limbo. The publication of Richard White’s Middle Ground in 1991 shook up these conventional ideas by showing that French conciliation toward indigenous peoples had to be explained by particular political and economic factors rather than by national character. Yet the issue of race has remained almost untouched, and French America has still not taken its place in the current debate about race, color, and civility.

The present essay is an empirical contribution to the discussion on the origins of European racialism as applied to colonial situations. It argues that racial prejudice in colonial Canada emerged only after an assimilationist approach had been tried for almost a century and had failed. In the seventeenth century, French policy toward the indigenous peoples of New France relied on the assimilation of the natives to French religion and culture. The aim was to mix colonial and native peoples in order to strengthen the nascent New France. This policy of francisation (sometimes translated as “Frenchification”) was based on a paternalistic vision of cultural difference: the French officials viewed the Amerindians as “savages,” socially, economically, and culturally inferior to the Europeans. As such, they had to be educated and brought to civility. This policy remained the official “native policy” employed throughout the period of the French regime in Canada despite the internal tensions and contradictions displayed by French officials. Historians have traditionally emphasized the implementation of this policy by missionaries and, consequently, have neglected or, at best, diminished the significance of francisation for civil authorities. The conversion of Amerindians to Christianity was undoubtedly an important part of the policy of francisation, but that importance has been overstated: francisation was more a political program than a religious one. An understanding of the central role played by the state in the promotion of the policy of assimilation has profound consequences for our comprehension of the relations between the French and Amerindians…

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The Chevalier de Saint-Georges: Virtuoso of the Sword and the Bow

Pendragon Press
March 2006
566 pages
ISBN: 9781576471098

Gabriel Banat

The Chevalier de Saint-Georges, born Joseph Bologne, was the son of an African slave and a French plantation owner on the island of Guadeloupe. The story of his improbable rise in French society, his life as a famous fencer, celebrated violinist-composer and conductor, and later commander of a colored regiment in the French Revolution, should, on the facts alone, gladden the heart of the most passionate romance novelist. Yet, the information disseminated about this illustre inconnu is found in an extravagant nineteenth-century novel, which contains more fiction than fact. Unfortunately, many of the author’s flights of fancy have found their way into serious works about Saint-Georges. Gabriel Banat has set about systematically dispelling the confusion, for the real story is easily as fascinating as any flight of fancy. Gabriel Banat has been a professional violinist all his life; recitalist and member of the New York Philharmonic, he has systematically scoured the violin repertory for interesting and even unknown music. He came across the works of St. Georges and was fascinated by the freshness and charm of these 18th-century compositions. Eventually, he edited a critical edition of all the violin music and, inevitably, began a systematic investigation into the life of this intriguing and multifaceted individual, utilizing archives of the French Land Army, official clippings and untapped personal diaries of St. Georges’ contemporaries. Banat is the author of an authoritative monograph on St. Georges in the Black Music Research Journal.

Gabriel Banat has been a professional violinist all his life: recitalist and member of the New York Philharmonic, he has systematically scoured the violin repertory for interesting and even unknown music. He is the author of an authoritative monograph on St. Georges in the Black Music Research Journal.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xii
Preface xiv
Necrology xviii
Chapter 1 The Island 1
Chapter 2 Joseph 5
Chapter 3 The Trial 12
Chapter 4 A Fugitive Family 22
Chapter 5 The Bologne Plantation 27
Chapter 6 People ¿of Color¿ 37
Chapter 7 Return to France 40
Chapter 8 Paris 46
Chapter 9 The Prodigy 54
Chapter 10 Too Many Blacks 67
Chapter 11 The Chevalier de Saint-Georges 76
Chapter 12 A Young Man About Town 90
Chapter 13 Virtuoso 97
Chapter 14 Gossec 113
Chapter 15 The New Bow 119
Chapter 16 Composions- Quartets and Concertos 125
Chapter 17 Gluck and Marie Antoinette 140
Chapter 18 Concertos andSymphonie Concertantes 159
Chapter 19 TheOpéra Affair 177
Chapter 20 Ernestine 193
Chapter 21 Mme. de Montesson
Chapter 22 Mme. de Montalembert
Chapter 23 L¿Amant Anonyme
Chapter 24 Le Concert des Amateurs
Chapter 25 The Grand Orient of France
Chapter 26 Le Concert Olympique
Chapter 27 Le Palais-Royal
Chapter 28 London
Chapter 29 The Gathering Storm
Chapter 30 The Bastille
Chapter 31 Revolution
Chapter 32 An Orléans Conspiracy?
Chapter 33 Return to London
Chapter 34 Lille
Chapter 35 The National Guard
Chapter 36 La Légion Saint-Georges
Chapter 37 Regicide
Chapter 38 The Great Terror
Chapter 39 Too Many Colonels
Chapter 40 Paris 1795
Chapter 41 Saint Domingue
Chapter 42 Coda-Finale
Epilogue
Epitaphs for those who survived Saint-Georges 456
Appendix: Dramatis Personae
Works List
Discography
List of Documents
Bibliography
Index

List of Illustrations

Fig. 1.1 Map of Guadeloupe xix
Fig. 2.1 View of Basse-Terre, ca. 1750 7
Fig. 2.2 ¿Squares¿ of sugar cane, Bailiff 9
Fig. 5.1 Plantation with view on La Suffrière 30
Fig. 7.1 Custom Records of Passengers arriving in Bordeaux, Aug. 2, 1753 41
Fig. 7.2 Port of Bordeaux, 1753 42
Fig. 8.1 Mme. de Pompadour 49
Fig. 8.2 49 rue St. André des Arts today 52
Fig. 10.1 The Saint-Georges Guard 70
Fig. 11.1 Equestrian statue of Louis XV 79
Fig. 11.2 Chamber music at a musical salon 88
Fig. 12.1 ¿Winter¿ from Les quatre saisons 94
Fig. 12.2 The Italian style of fencing 95
Fig. 13.1 One of Les vingt-quatre violons du Roi 99
Fig. 13.2 Leopold Mozart and his two children 107
Fig. 13.3 English Tea in the Salon of the Four Mirrors 108
Fig. 13.4 Portrait of Saint-Georges at 22 111
Fig. 14.1 François Joseph Gossec 114
Fig. 14.2 L¿Hôtel de Soubise 115
Fig. 15.1 Leopold Mozart, 1756 121
Fig. 15.2 The evolution of the bow 122
Fig. 16.1 Title page of Saint-Georges¿ second set of quartets 130
Fig. 17.1 Maria Antoinette at her spinet in Vienna 145
Fig. 17.2 Christoph Willibald Gluck 147
Fig. 17.3 Marie Antoinette in 1777, Versailles 151
Fig. 18.1 George Polgreen Bridgetower 168
Fig. 19.1 La petit loge at the Opéra in the Palais-Royal 179
Fig. 19.2 Mlle.La Guimard in Le Navigateur 185
Fig. 19.3 Papillon de la Ferté 189
Fig. 20.1 Choderlos de Laclos 195
Fig. 20.2 Théatre Italien in 1777 198
Fig. 21.1 Mme. de Genlis 206
Fig. 21.2 Mme. de Montesson 208
Fig. 21.3 The Duke of Orléans and his son 210
Fig. 23.1 Title page of L¿Amant Anonyme 238
Fig. 24.1 Title page of the D¿Ogny catalogue 246
Fig. 24.2 Saint-Georges¿ quartets listed in the D¿Ogny catalogue 247
Fig. 25.1 Philippe, Duke of Chartres with his family 253
Fig. 26.1 Masonic initiation ceremony 260
Fig. 26.2 The Palais-Royal before its reconstruction 262
Fig. 27.1 ¿Prinny,¿ George, Prince of Wales 277
Fig. 27.2 Philippe, Duke of Orléans 278
Fig. 28.1 Henry Angelo 284
Fig. 28.2 Le Chevalier D¿Éon in his uniform 288
Fig. 28.3 Mlle. La Chevalière D¿Éon in 1783 288
Fig. 28.4 Cartoon of St. George and D¿Éon 293
Fig. 28.5 Fencing match at Carlton House 297
Fig. 29.1 Burning of the Opera House, 1781 307
Fig. 29.2 Palais-Royal after reconstruction 308
Fig. 30.1 Mme. de Genlis as ¿Governor¿ of Philippe¿s children 315
Fig. 30.2 Giovanni Baptista Viotti 317
Fig. 30.3 Louis XVI inaugerating the opening session of the Estates-General 320
Fig. 30.4 Desmoulins haranguing the people 324
Fig. 30.5 Fall of the Bastille
Fig. 31.1 Mrs. Grace Dalrymple Elliott 327
Fig. 32.1 March of the Paris Poissardes, 1789 334
Fig. 32.2 Cartoon of Lafayette kicking Philippe 340
Fig. 33.1 Mr. Angelo¿s Fencing Academy 342
Fig. 34.1 Session at the Jacobin Club, Paris, 1792 363
Fig. 35.1 General Dillon¿s body being burned in Lille 368
Fig. 36.1 Hussar of the Légion St. Georges 374
Fig. 36.2 The battle of Jemappes, 1792 378
Fig. 36.3 Trooper of the 13th regiment of the Chasseurs à cheval, 1793 383
Fig. 37.1 Execution of Louis XVI, 1793 386
Fig. 37.2 Bust of General Dumouriez 388
Fig. 37.3 Arrest of the Commissioners and the Minister of War by Dumourez 397
Fig. 38.1 General Thomas Alexandre Dumas 403
Fig. 38.2 Danton on his way to the guillotine 409
Fig. 38.3 The Feast of the Supreme Being 410
Fig. 38.4 ¿The Last Tumbrel¿ 411
Fig. 40.1 Invasion of the Assembly by the Sans-Culottes 428
Fig. 40.2 Post-Thermadorian manners, 1795 432
Fig. 40.3 Theresa Tallien ¿Our Lady of Thermador¿
Fig. 41.1 Toussaint Louverture, c.1800 444
Fig. 41.2 Map of Saint-Domingue 445

The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean

Duke University Press
May 2005
408 pages
19 b&w photographs
Cloth ISBN: 0-8223-3453-4, ISBN13 978-0-8223-3453-8
Paperback ISBN: 0-8223-3465-8, ISBN13 978-0-8223-3465-1

Doris Garraway, Associate Professor of French
Northwestern University

Presenting incisive original readings of French writing about the Caribbean from the inception of colonization in the 1640s until the onset of the Haitian Revolution in the 1790s, Doris Garraway sheds new light on a significant chapter in French colonial history. At the same time, she makes a pathbreaking contribution to the study of the cultural contact, creolization, and social transformation that resulted in one of the most profitable yet brutal slave societies in history. Garraway’s readings highlight how French colonial writers characterized the Caribbean as a space of spiritual, social, and moral depravity. While tracing this critique in colonial accounts of Island Carib cultures, piracy, spirit beliefs, slavery, miscegenation, and incest, Garraway develops a theory of “the libertine colony.” She argues that desire and sexuality were fundamental to practices of domination, laws of exclusion, and constructions of race in the slave societies of the colonial French Caribbean.

Among the texts Garraway analyzes are missionary histories by Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, Raymond Breton, and Jean-Baptiste Labat; narratives of adventure and transgression written by pirates and others outside the official civil and religious power structures; travel accounts; treatises on slavery and colonial administration in Saint-Domingue; the first colonial novel written in French; and the earliest linguistic description of the native Carib language. Garraway also analyzes legislation—including the Code noir—that codified slavery and other racialized power relations. The Libertine Colony is both a rich cultural history of creolization as revealed in Francophone colonial literature and an important contribution to theoretical arguments about how literary critics and historians should approach colonial discourse and cultural representations of slave societies.

Table of Contents

• Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction: Creolizaton in the Old Regime Chapter One: Border of Violence, Border fo Desire: The French and the Island Caribs
• Chapter Two: Domestication and the White Noble Savage
• Chapter Three: Creolization and the Spirit World: Demons, Violence, and the Body
• Chapter Four: The Libertine Colony: Desire, Miscegenation, and the Law
• Chapter Five: Race, Reproduction, and Family Romance in Saint-Domingue
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index

Between Totem And Taboo: Black Man, White Woman in Francographic Literature

University of Exeter Press
2001
292 pages
Hardback ISBN: 9780859896498
BIC Code: 1HFD, 2ADF, 3JF, 3JH, 3JJ

Roger Little

Between Totem and Taboo picks its way judiciously through a minefield of prejudice, myth and stereotypes.  It is the first book to explore the literary representation by authors black and white, male and female, of interracial relations between France and her former territories in West Africa through the special nexus of the white woman and the black man.

Presented as a text-based chronological exploration of the relationship from 1740 to the present day, it reveals how racism distorted such relations for a quarter of a millennium.  It will fascinate anyone seriously interested in Black studies, Women’s studies and Postcolonial studies, who will find in it not only many unknown or unconsidered texts but a new angle of approach to their research.  All quotations are in French and English.

Roger Little was Professor of French (1776) at Trinity College Dublin until his retirement in 1998. He has an outstanding record of scholarship in French and francophone writing, with particular interests in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean. His academic work has mainly concentrated on modern French poetry and the representation of Blacks in Francographic literature. He has edited several volumes of Textes littéraires for University of Exeter Press. The French government has conferred upon him the rank of Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Mérite and he has been awarded the Prix de l’Académie française: médaille de vermeil du rayonnement de la langue française.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Some Key Dates
• Introduction: Between Totem and Taboo
• 1. Eighteenth-century Enwhitenment
• 2. From Taboo to Totem
• 3. Traditions and Transitions
• 4. Opposite genders, Opposite Agendas
• 5. The French Empire Writes Back
• 6. Struggles for Independence
• 7. The Freedom to Choose
• 8. Liberty and Licence
• 9. Full Circle
• Conclusion: Beyond Difference and Indifference
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index

Labeling People: French Scholars on Society, Race, and Empire, 1815-1848

McGill-Queen’s University Press
2003-08-20
264 pages
6 x 9
15 drawings
Cloth ISBN: (0773525807) 9780773525801

Martin S. Staum, Professor of History
University of Calgary

An examination of techniques used by scholarly societies to classify people that constructed the image of an inferior “Other” to promote social stability at home and a relationship of domination or paternalism with non-Europeans abroad.

Nineteenth-century French scholars, during a turbulent era of revolution and industrialization, ranked intelligence and character according to facial profile, skin colour, and head shape. They believed that such indicators could determine whether individuals were educable and peoples perfectible. In Labeling People Martin Staum examines the Paris societies of phrenology (reading intelligence and character by head shapes), geography, and ethnology and their techniques for classifying people. He shows how the work of these social scientists gave credence to the arrangement of “races” in a hierarchy, the domination of non-European peoples, and the limitation of opportunities for ill-favored individuals within France.

While previous studies have contrasted the relative optimism of middle-class social scientists before 1848 with a later period of concern for national decline and racial degeneration, Staum demonstrates that the earlier learned societies were also fearful of turmoil at home and interested in adventure abroad. Both geographers and ethnologists created concepts of fundamental “racial” inequality that prefigured the imperialist “associationist” discourse of the Third Republic, believing that European tutelage would guide “civilizable” peoples, and providing an open invitation to dominate and exploit the “uncivilizable.”

Raising Eurasia: Race, Class, and Age in French and British Colonies

Comparative Studies in Society and History
Volume 51, Issue 2 (April 2009)
pages 314-343
DOI: 10.1017/S0010417509000140

David M. Pomfret, Associate Professor
The University of Hong Kong

Sexual relationships between European men and indigenous women produced racially mixed offspring in all of Europe’s empires. Recent interdisciplinary scholarship has shown how these persons of mixed race, seen as transgressing the interior frontiers of supposedly fixed categories of racial and juridical difference upon which colonizers’ prestige and authority rested, posed a challenge to the elaborate but fragile sets of subjective criteria by which “whiteness” was defined.  Scholars critiquing the traditional historiography of empire for its tendency to present colonial elites as homogeneous communities pursuing common interests have emphasized the repertoire of exclusionary tactics, constructed along lines of race, class, and gender, devised within European colonial communities in response to the presence of “mixed bloods.” This article aims to show that the presence of people of biracial heritage inspired collaborative as well as exclusionary responses in outposts of European empire during the late imperial era. It also illustrates how, with white prestige and authority at stake, age, age-related subcategories, and in particular childhood and adolescence, powerfully underpinned responses to the threat this group posed to the cultural reproduction of racialized identity.

Footnotes
Acknowledgments: Research for this article was generously supported by the Hong Kong Government Research Grants Council Competitive Earmarked Research Grant (HKU7455/05H).

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…

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Sweet Liberty: The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique

University of Pennsylvania Press
July 2009
312 pages
6 x 9; 7 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8122-4172-3
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8122-2227-2
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-8122-0356-1

Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss, Associate Professor of History
Texas A & M University

From its founding, Martinique played an integral role in France’s Atlantic empire. Established in the mid-seventeenth century as a colonial outpost against Spanish and English dominance in the Caribbean, the island was transformed by the increase in European demand for sugar, coffee, and indigo. Like other colonial subjects, Martinicans met the labor needs of cash-crop cultivation by establishing plantations worked by enslaved Africans and by adopting the rigidly hierarchical social structure that accompanied chattel slavery.  After Haiti gained its independence in 1804, Martinique’s economic importance to the French empire increased.  At the same time, there arose questions, both in France and on the island, about the long-term viability of the plantation system, including debates about the ways colonists—especially enslaved Africans and free mixed-race individuals—fit into the French nation.

Sweet Liberty chronicles the history of Martinique from France’s reacquisition of the island from the British in 1802 to the abolition of slavery in 1848. Focusing on the relationship between the island’s widely diverse society and the various waves of French and British colonial administrations, Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss provides a compelling account of Martinique’s social, political, and cultural dynamics during the final years of slavery in the French empire. Schloss explores how various groups—Creole and metropolitan elites, petits blancs, gens de couleur, and enslaved Africans—interacted with one another in a constantly shifting political environment and traces how these interactions influenced the colony’s debates around identity, citizenship, and the boundaries of the French nation.

Based on extensive archival research in Europe and the Americas, Sweet Liberty is a groundbreaking study of a neglected region that traces how race, slavery, class, and gender shaped what it meant to be French on both sides of the Atlantic.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Sweet Liberty: The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique
• 1. “That Your Hearts Will Blossom and Again Become French”: The Early Napoleonic Period
• 2. “Happy to Consider Itself an Ancient British Possession”: The British Occupation of Martinique
• 3. “Your French and Loyal Hearts”: The First Decade of the Restoration
• 4. “In the Colonies, It Is Impossible That a White Would Align Himself With Slaves”: Shifts in Colonial Policy
• 5. “To Ensure Equality Before Those Laws to Free Men, Whatever Their Color”: Changing Ideas of French Citizenship
• 6. “Amelioration of the White Race” and “The Sacred Rights of Property”: The End of Slavery in the French Atlantic
• Conclusion
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments