{"id":771,"date":"2009-09-19T20:47:52","date_gmt":"2009-09-19T20:47:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=771"},"modified":"2012-02-12T03:42:21","modified_gmt":"2012-02-12T03:42:21","slug":"the-one-drop-rule-in-reverse-interracial-marriages-in-napoleonic-and-restoration-france","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=771","title":{"rendered":"The One-Drop Rule in Reverse? Interracial Marriages in Napoleonic and Restoration France"},"content":{"rendered":"

The One-Drop Rule in Reverse? Interracial Marriages in Napoleonic and Restoration France<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Law and History Review<\/em>
\nVolume 27, Number 3
\nFall 2009
\nUniversity of Illinois<\/p>\n

Jennifer Heuer<\/a><\/strong>, Associate Professor
\nDepartment of History
\nUniversity of Massachusetts at Amherst<\/em><\/p>\n

In the early nineteenth century, an obscure rural policeman petitioned the French government with an unusual story.\u00a0 Charles Fanaye had served with Napoleon<\/a>\u2019s armies in Egypt. \u00a0Chased by Mameluks<\/a>, he was rescued in the nick of time by a black Ethiopian woman and hidden in her home. \u00a0Threatened in turn by the Mameluks, Marie-H\u00e9l\u00e8ne (as the woman came to be called) threw in her lot with the French army and followed Fanaye to France. \u00a0The couple then sought to wed.\u00a0 They easily overcame religious barriers when Marie-H\u00e9l\u00e8ne was baptized in the Cathedral of Avignon. \u00a0But another obstacle was harder to overcome: an 1803 ministerial decree banned marriage between blacks and whites. \u00a0Though Fanaye and Marie-H\u00e9l\u00e9ne begged for an exception, the decree would plague them for the next sixteen years of their romance.<\/strong><\/p>\n

As we will see, Fanaye\u2019s history was atypical in several regards.\u00a0 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<\/a>.\u00a0 It was officially applied to metropolitan France, rather than the colonies, and was circulated throughout the continental Napoleonic Empire. \u00a0It would remain in effect even after Napoleon fell from power, quietly disappearing only in late 1818 and early 1819.<\/p>\n

This quiet disappearance has persisted in the historical record: both the ban and its application have been almost completely forgotten. \u00a0The reasons for this oversight are both conceptual and practical.\u00a0 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. \u00a0When scholars of European history think of miscegenation<\/a> 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<\/strong>; metropolitan France in the early nineteenth century seems an unlikely site for contestations over racial and family law.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

There are also pragmatic reasons why the decree has been forgotten.\u00a0 The black and mulatto<\/a> population in metropolitan France was small in the period, at most 5000 people, and there are few records that address them as a group. <\/strong>\u00a0Many of the relevant documents are buried in a series at the French National Archives<\/a> on dispensations for marriage. \u00a0While a few are grouped together thematically, many are organized alphabetically, within at least 160 cartons of records.\u00a0 Others are in a series of administrative correspondence catalogued geographically. \u00a0A few are scattered in municipal and departmental archives, often under the rubric of local administration.\u00a0 These are not categories that promise obvious connections to racial or colonial history…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 Charles […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,28,459,1467,6,6940],"tags":[69,96,263,264,259,82],"class_list":["post-771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-europe","category-history","category-law","category-new-media","category-slavery","tag-anti-miscegenation-laws","tag-france","tag-jennifer-heuer","tag-law-and-history-review","tag-marriage","tag-one-drop-rule"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=771"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/771\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}