Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire: State, Church, and Society, 1604-1830 9780773553767

Citation preview

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

McGill-Queen’s French AtlAntic Worlds series Series editors: Nicholas Dew and Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec The French Atlantic world has emerged as a rich and dynamic

Le monde atlantique français est devenu un domaine de re-

field of historical research. This series will showcase a new

cherche riche et dynamique au sein de la discipline historique.

generation of scholarship exploring the worlds of the French

La présente collection a pour vocation d’accueillir une nouvelle

Atlantic – including West Africa, the greater Caribbean region,

génération d’ouvrages explorant les espaces de l’Atlantique

and the continental Americas – from the sixteenth century

français – y compris l’Afrique de l’Ouest, la grande région

to the mid-nineteenth century. Books in the series will ex-

des Caraïbes et les Amériques continentales – du début du

plore how the societies of the French Atlantic were shaped

XVie siècle jusqu’au milieu du XiXe siècle. Les œuvres qui y

and connected by trans-oceanic networks of colonialism,

sont publiées explorent de quelles manières les sociétés de

how local and indigenous cultures and environments shaped

l’Atlantique français sont façonnées et reliées par les réseaux

colonial projects, and how the diverse peoples of the French

transocéaniques issus du colonialisme, de quelle manière

Atlantic understood and experienced their worlds. Especially

les cultures locales et leurs environnements influencent les

welcome are histories from the perspectives of the enslaved

projets coloniaux, et comment les divers peuples de l’Atlan-

and dispossessed. Comparative studies are encouraged and

tique français comprennent et expérimentent leurs mondes.

the series will accept manuscript submissions in English and

Les ouvrages donnant la parole aux esclaves ou aux acteurs

in French. Original works of scholarship are preferred, though

traditionnellement dominés sont particulièrement bienvenus,

translations of landmark books in the field will be considered.

tout comme les recherches comparées. La collection est ouverte aux manuscrits rédigés en anglais ou en français, de

1 Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire State, Church, and Society, 1604–1830 Gauvin Alexander Bailey

préférence des monographies originales, ainsi qu’aux traductions de livres ayant marqué le domaine.

Gauvin alexander Bailey

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire State, Church, and Society, 1604–1830

McGill-Queen’s University Press | Montreal & Kingston | London | Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2018

isBn 978-0-7735-5314-9 (cloth) isBn 978-0-7735-5376-7 (ePdF)

liBrAry And ArchiVes cAnAdA cAtAloGuinG in PuBlicAtion Bailey, Gauvin A., author Architecture and urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire :

Legal deposit second quarter 2018

state, Church, and society, 1604–1830 / Gauvin Alexander

Bibliothèque nationale du Québec

Bailey.

Printed in Canada on acid-free paper

(McGill-Queen’s French Atlantic worlds series ; 1) Includes bibliographical references and index.

This book has been published with the help of a grant from

Issued in print and electronic formats.

the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social

isBn 978-0-7735-5314-9 (hardcover). – isBn 978-0-7735-5376-7 (ePdF)

Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

1. Architecture, French colonial.

2. Architecture –

France – Colonies.

3. Architecture, French

Colonies – History.

5. City planning – France – Colonies.

4. France –

6. Architecture and society – France – Colonies. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son

nA1044.B35 2018

720.944

I. Title.

c2017-907605-1 c2017-907606-X

Unless otherwise noted, photographs are by the author.

soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et

Set in 10.5/14 Sina Nova with Kappa Text and Display

des Canadiens de tout le pays.

Book design & typesetting by Garet Markvoort, zijn digital

for

Peta

contents

Acknowledgments Maps

12 Secular Architecture before the Seven Years’ War 323

ix

xi

1 Introduction: The Architecture of Empire

3

13 Secular Architecture after the Seven Years’ War 355

2 Ideology and Reality in the French Atlantic Empire 34

14 Tradition and Innovation in Church Architecture 385

3 France and Amerindian Architecture, the Amerindian Reductions, and l’Affaire de Kourou 55

15 Italianate Church Facades, Eclecticism, and Neoclassicism from Quebec to Senegal, 1654–1830 412

4 African Slaves and the Architecture of the French Atlantic Empire 93

16 The Architecture of the Land: Vernacular Traditions 439

5 Free People of Colour and the Architecture of the French Atlantic Empire 105

17 Epilogue: Circa 1830: The End of an Empire

6 White Civilian Architects and Builders in the Colonies 119 7 Building pour la gloire du roi: The Royal Engineer Architects

8 Putting Their House in Order: Urban Idealism in France and the Seventeenth-Century Colonies 173 204

10 Urbanism in Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue and Public Monuments in the French Atlantic 241 11 Formal and Scientific Gardens and Ephemera 279

489

Timeline

495

Notes

148

9 The Planned City in the French Atlantic World, 1700–1789

Glossary

497

Bibliography Index

603

585

481

acknowledGments

As always, this book would not have been possible without my catalyst and collaborator Peta Gillyatt Bailey, whether in Kingston or Aix-en-Provence, or on the many research trips that made this book possible, from Brittany to Guadeloupe to Senegal. I also wish to thank the following people for their assistance, conversation, and generosity: Derek Abolo, Joe OseaAddo, Abraham Allotey, Marie-Annick Atticot (bdaf ), Bastien Augustin, Edem Baeta, LeGrace Benson, Josué Biabiani (adg ), Marie-Paule Blasini (anom ), Mozart Alberto Bonazzi da Costa, Alvin Bregman, Bright Botwe, Megan Butcher (nac ), David Carita (Musée départemental Franconie, Cayenne), Yann Celton (adql ), Père Serge Cyrille (Association diocésaine de Guadeloupe), Marie-Emmanuelle Desmoulins, Fatoumata Cisse Diarra, Daouda Diop, Mbaye Diouf, Marie-Christine Ducros, Pierre Du Prey, Philippe Ferrand (bma ), Amadou Mansour Faye, Pierre Fournié (Conservateur général du patrimoine anf ), Dominique Frelaut (anom ), Christophe Guilmoto, Janet Hart, Marie-Hélène Jacobs (Collège Eugène Nonnon, Cayenne), Jean-Marie Kabrane (Bibliothèque du Musée d’Aquitaine), Jeremi Kamsu, Fatou Bintou Kébé, Olivier Latil, Aurore Laurent (aeg ), Loïc and Marie-Laure Lemaire; Cornelia Logemann, Mme Pascale Louis (Association diocésaine de Guadeloupe), Amadou Tidiane Ly, Neil and Olga MacWilliam, Frederick Mangones, Nii Marmah Marquaye, Mgr. Max Leroy Mésidor (Archidiocèse de Cap-Haïtien), Abigail Mettle, Elizabeth Miller, Sandra Montabord (adg ), François Nawrocki (bnf ), Papa Ndiaye (director ifan , Senegal), Béatrice Olive (anom ), Sophie Olive (anf ), Gaëlle

Neuser (mbpa ), Suellen Pellat, Youri Pierre, Elie Dit Purina, Leeford Quarshie, Frédérique Radjouki (Direction des Affaires culturelles et patrimoniales, BasseTerre), Valérie de Raignac (Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Bordeaux), Anne Reddacliff (slnsw ), Christian-Julien Robin, Eric Rosso (anom ), Alessandra Russo, Bishop Ernest Sambou (Diocese of Saint-Louis, Senegal), Abbé Adrien Ngondeb Sarr, †Mary Sheriff, Stanley Sidoel (Directeur van Cultuur Suriname), Eric Simon (anom ), Lorelle Semley, Eric Sylvestre, Dominique Taffin (adm ), Alan Templeton, Marie Viard (anom ), JeanClaude Yoka (anom ), Allan Yvart, and Ines Županov. I also very much appreciate the assistance of my graduate students Kennis Forte, Brie Gascho, Molly-Claire Gillett, Jillian Lanthier, and Lauren Mathieson, and my inspiring conversations with the much-missed Mary Sheriff in Paris and Los Angeles; with Ines Županov in Paris; with Wazi Apoh in Accra; with Leslie Barnes in Canberra; and with Alessandra Russo, who at a conference in Heidelberg in 2012 was one of the first to encourage me to write this book. In Chile and Argentina I am especially grateful to Fernando Guzmán and Ricardo González for allowing me to present this work on the “other Latin America” to a Latin American audience, at Universidad Adolfo Ibañez in Santiago (2014), and the Instituto Payró in Buenos Aires (2017). This book would not have been finished in such a timely fashion without the vital contributions of two graduate students: Rosemary Legge, who prepared the splendid index – which is no small task – and Anna-Maria Moubayed for her magnificent maps, which combine accuracy with creative flair. I am also

indebted to my editors at McGill-Queen’s University Press, Jonathan Crago, Ryan Van Huijstee, and especially the book’s copyeditor James Leahy and designer and typesetter Garet Markvoort, for their invaluable support and guidance and to my two reviewers for their insightful and detailed reports. They have all helped make this a better book. Financial support for this project was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the National Endowment for the Humanities, for which I am extremely thankful. I am also particularly indebted to the continuing support of my Alfred and Isabel Bader research fund at Queen’s University. I am also especially grateful for all of the scholarly support I have received from my fellow correspondants and members at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres at the Institut de France, notably Marc Fumaroli, Michel Zink, and Hervé Danesi.

x

Acknowledgments

Much of this book was researched and written while working at the Archives Nationales d’OutreMer (anom , France) at Aix-en-Provence (2013–16). The final revisions were undertaken when I was the 2017 Panofsky Professor at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. I am indebted to both institutions for their support, and especially to Ulrich Pfisterer and the Verein der Freunde des Zentralinstituts for the invitation to take up this position at the Zi and for sharing their knowledge of the arts of early modern Europe. I am also grateful for the invaluable assistance of Matteo Burioni, Urte Krass, Iris Lauterbach, Tobias Teutenberg, and Franz Hefele and for enriching conversations with the two Panofsky Fellows Marlen Schneider and Caroline Fowler. This book is also dedicated to Liesl, Smallie, and to the loving memory of Rupert of Pitcee, a “fine old gentleman.”

Calais

France

lish

g En

C

Amiens Le Havre

Caen SaintMalo

Douarnenez

Rouen

Maintenon

Rennes

Lorient

Poisvilliers Chassant Luigny Le Mans

Paris

Nancy

Strasbourg

Neuf-Brisach

Orléans

Tours

Nantes

Metz

Bailleau-Armenonville Chartres Fontainebleu Meslay-le-Vidame

La Flèche Angers

Reims

Versailles

Jouy Dol-deBretagne

Brest

Lille

l

ne

n ha

Besançon

Dijon

Bourges

Beaune

Poitiers Mâcon

La Rochelle Île d’Oléron

Rochefort

Atlantic Ocean Bordeaux

Limoges Angoulême

Lyon Grenoble

Saint-Émilion Cadillac

Avignon

Bayonne

Toulouse

Nîmes Montpellier Béziers

Aix-en-Provence Marseille

Nice

Toulon

Mediterranean Sea

Corse

Guadeloupe

Anse-Bertrand

Port-Louis Le Gros Cap

Petit Canal Deshaies

Atlantic Ocean

Sainte-Rose

grande-terre Lamentin Baie-Mahault

Pointe-Noire

Les Abymes Pointe-à-Pitre

Vernou

Le Moule

Petit-Bourg

Douville

Le Gosier Sainte-Anne

SaintFrançois

Bouillante

basse-terre

Goyave Sainte-Marie

Vieux-Habitants Baillif

Saint-Claude

Basse-Terre

Capesterre-Belle-Eau

Gourbeyre

Vieux-Fort

Trois-Rivières Saint-Louis

îles des saintes Caribbean Sea Petite-Anse

Terre-de-Haut Grand-Bourg

île de marie galante Capesterre-de Marie-Galante

Pointe des Châteaux

The Guianas Longchamp (Georgetown)

Atlantic Ocean Paramaribo

british guiana

Mana Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni

Sinnamary Nouvelle-Angoulême Kourou Cayenne Matoury Bourg-Villebois

suriname (dutch guiana)

Oyapock

french guiana

brazil

Atlantic Ocean

Saint-Domingue

île de la tortue Port-de-Paix

Saint-Louis Le Borgne

Jean Rabel

Môle Saint-Nicolas

Bombardopolis

Cap-François

Port Margot

nord

Limbé

Limonade Milot Marmelade

Plaisance Gonaïves

Golfe de la Gonâve

San Rafael

santo domingo (spain)

Ri re

viè

Saint-Marc

de

Montrouis

ite

la

go

Mirebalais

nâv

e

Jérémie Petite Rivière Miragoâne Fond des Nègres Cavaillion Fort Saint-Louis

sud Tiburon

Les Cayes

Les Coteaux Port Salut

Torbec

Aquin

on

de

ib

Bourg CapDame-Marie

rt

l’A

île

Acul du PetitGoâve PetitGoâve

Croix-des-Bouquets Port-au-Prince Cul-de-Sac

Léogâne Grande-Goâve

Baynet

île-à-vache

Caribbean Sea

Fort Dauphin

Jacmel Cayes de Jacmel

ouest

Martinique Macouba

Basse-Pointe Grande Anse

Atlantic Ocean

Le Marigot Le Prêcheur

Sainte-Marie Le Morne-Rouge La Trinité

Saint-Pierre

Gros-Morne

Le Carbet

Le Robert Saint-Joseph

Case Pilot

Pontaléry

Le Lamentin

Le François

Case des Navires

Le Saint-Esprit

Fort-Royal

Trou au Chat

Caribbean Sea

Le Vauclin Grande-Anse-d’Arlet Les Anses-d’Arlet

Les Trois-Îlets

Rivière Salée

Le Diamant

Sainte-Luce

Rivière-Pilote Le Marin

Sainte-Anne

terre-neuve

North America

Fort Bourbon Nord (1741)

Plaisance (Placentia)

Tadoussac

Fort Dauphin (1741)

Louisbourg

SainteFamille

acadie

oni e (bri s tain )

Fort Frontenac (1673) Sainte-Marie-aux-Hurons

col

Fort Niagara (1678)

Fort Beauharnois (1727)

thir

teen

Détroit

Boston

Philadelphia

Wendake

Québec

Neuville

Washington

Trois-Rivières

louisiane

Montréal Lac des DeuxMontagnes

Rivière Pascagoula

Lac Pontchartrain

SaintLaurent

New York

Fort de Chartres (1720) Kaskaskia Fort Toulouse (1717)

Fort des Natchitoches (1714)

SaintPierre

Île Sainte-Croix

île

Fort Maurepas (1733)

nouvelle-france

s

Fort Bourbon Ouest (1697)

st-pierre et miquelon île-royale éan

île saintjean

do ’ rl

Mont Louis

Oka

Sainte-Foy

Odanak Pierreville Saint-Antoine-sur-Richelieu Saint-Charles-sur-Richelieu Saint-Marc-sur-Richelieu

Kahnawake

Atlantic Ocean Île de la Balise

Fort Condé de la Mobile La Mobile Concession Chaumont Vieux-Biloxy Nouvelle-Biloxy Concession Plantation de la Pointe Destrehan

Nouvelle-Orléans

Gulf of Mexico

saint-domingue

saint-christophe (st kitts)

Carribean Sea

guadeloupe martinique

Arguin Saint-Louis Cape Verde (Dakar) Île de Gorée

jolof

senegambia serer

Fort James

balante

mande kingdom

guinea

dahomey Gr

ain

Atlantic Ocean

Abomey

asante Co

Kumasi

as

t

Ivory Coast

fante Gold Coast

st Benin

a e Co v a l S

Elmina

Juda (Ouidah)

Osu (Accra)

Bight of Benin

Gulf of Guinea

West Africa

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

1

Introduction: The Architecture of Empire

FeW ArchitecturAl leGAcies MAy Be as poorly understood as that of France’s old Atlantic Empire (1604–1830). Stretching from the West African coast to the North American prairies, south through Louisiana and the Caribbean and down the rivers of Guiana, it was one of the largest political entities in the Western Hemisphere. It began when medieval traditions were still alive, peaked during the Enlightenment, and collapsed during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars (1789–1815), leaving a handful of relatively unimportant islands and swaths of wilderness that remain French to this day. In contrast to the architectures of the Spanish, Portuguese, and British empires in the Americas, which have long established themselves a place within the canon, the building program of the French Crown, Church, and settlers has all but vanished from our collective memory except in regions such as Quebec and Louisiana, where ethnic pride, tourism, and scholarship have helped keep that remembrance alive – albeit a frequently romanticized one. Our oblivion toward the built environment of the French Atlantic Empire is all the more remarkable given that empire’s magnitude on the world scene – as is reflected by a burgeoning scholarly literature about its political, military, and economic histories – and because it matured in the late seventeenth century at the very moment France superseded Italy as Europe’s pre-eminent centre for contemporary architecture, garden design, city planning, and the arts. This combination of military

dominance, commercial prosperity, and architectural reinvigoration was a potential juggernaut: the French Empire was big, strong, and influential. But it was also poorly organized, hopelessly unrealistic, plagued by mad utopian schemes, underfunded, and underpinned by a brutal and volatile institution of agricultural slave labour that proved to be one of the main sources of its undoing. The Atlantic was not merely a regional but a global stage. A crossroads of empire, it witnessed two of the most momentous episodes of early modern history. One was the epic battle with Britain from ca. 1689 to ca. 1815, often called the “Second Hundred Years’ War,” which included the world’s first true world war – the five-continent Seven Years’ War (1756–63), begun in America – and the largest naval battle in history at the time (the Battle of the Saintes, near Guadeloupe, in 1782).1 This struggle has been described as “one of the most intense, most troubled, and most significant of modern times,” and it involved a continual swapping of territories between the two powers.2 The other, unconscionable, event was France’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade (1625–1831), in which one and a quarter million Africans were forced onto ships and sent to hostile places to endure lives of grinding misery in the name above all of sugar, France’s raison d’être in the tropical zone from the late seventeenth century.3 In fact, thanks largely to sugar, France’s overseas empire was the richest in the world: Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) was the wealthiest single colony, producing by 1743 more sugar than all the English Caribbean possessions combined; by 1776 it brought more revenue than the entire Spanish Empire – outdoing even the fabled silver of Peru and Mexico – and in the 1780s the island enjoyed as much trade as the entire United States of America, which by 1790 numbered nearly 4 million citizens.4 Today we speak of “blood diamonds.” In the eighteenth century it was blood sugar that greased the wheels of empire and graced the elegant salons and coffee houses of polite French society. One of the explanations for our amnesia about the architecture of the French Atlantic Empire is

4

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

terminological: French “colonial architecture” or “imperial architecture” mean quite different things to different people. A French person would think of either Napoleon’s European “Empire Français” or France’s modern empire in Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific, from the conquest of Algeria in 1830 to the independence of French Africa in the 1960s. An American might think of Greek revival plantation houses overhung with Spanish moss (all later than the French regime), wrought-iron balconies on New Orleans’s Jackson Square (introduced in the 1850s), or brightly coloured West Indian “creole” houses, which date predominantly from the last century. A Quebecer would simply find the terms odd, since the province had two colonial periods, one of them subject to the French monarchy (1608–1759) and the other under British suzerainty after what is still called “La Conquête.” People do not talk about “colonial architecture” in Quebec in the way they do in Peru or Massachusetts: old-style French buildings are either categorized as dating from the “régime français” (and very little does) or more generically as being “canadien” or “québécois,” which can mean anything old-fashioned and French-looking. In Louisiana similar confusion reigns: French from 1699 to 1763, the colony was then divided between the British (east of the Mississippi) and the Spanish (New Orleans and the plantation country to the west), and in the scholarship “French Colonial” refers to the architecture of the French and Spanish regimes alike – and even to buildings built between the Louisiana Purchase and the Civil War (1803–61) when “French colonial” is sometimes subsumed into the concept of “Antebellum architecture.” In the Caribbean and Guianas this terminology would also provoke contradictory responses. A Haitian would see “French colonial architecture” as an unwelcome relic of Haiti’s hated former oppressors and would remind us that hardly any of it survives anyway. By contrast, a person from Guadeloupe, Martinique, and French Guiana – places that have been French territory longer than Nice, Corsica, or Alsace and fully fledged French départements since 1946 – might well think of

the work of architects such as Ali Tur (1889–1977) of Guadeloupe, who rebuilt many of the island’s administrative buildings and churches in a bold modernist style between 1929 and 1937 (and wrote a book about them, published in Paris, called Architecture coloniale Guadeloupe).5 These places remain French, but not “colonial,” as if that were really possible somewhere five time zones away from the metropole where businesses stay open hours after their main offices in Paris or Lyon have closed. In Senegal, where the colonial era lasted until 1960, people differentiate between “l’architecture strictement coloniale” (i.e., built by French administrators), by which they mean primarily that of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and “l’architecture indigène” or “métisse,” built by the Senegalese and reflecting a profound blend of cultures already under way long before the French arrived. The main reason that French colonial architecture does not exist as a concept in most people’s minds – and that it does not constitute a field in its own right – is that nobody can agree about what it is. This uncertainty is not helped by tourism. Cruise ship destinations like Quebec City and New Orleans have been so prettified and restored à l’ancienne that visitors do not realize that nearly everything in both cities postdates the French regime, most of it built in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To give the most prominent example, Quebec City’s towering Chateau Frontenac, built to evoke the grand chateaux of the Loire Valley, was begun in 1892. Quebec City’s tourism website makes its priorities very clear: “So Europe. So close. Old Québec … is walkable and safe. Stroll the only walled city north of Mexico and its cobblestone streets.”6 Even that wall was mostly rebuilt in the nineteenth century, with major additions as late as the 1930s and even 1980s. The New Orleans equivalent goes for a more cosmopolitan angle but communicates a similar message of old world refinement and charm – “French Quarter architecture blends Spanish, French, Creole and American styles together in an idyllic, enchanting setting. Walled courtyards, perfect for French Quarter parties, are a gift of the Spanish influence” – and refer

to the plantations (brushing slavery under the carpet) as “bastions of genteel culture.”7 But the problem is not just one of ersatz Gallic buildings because French style also has a potent political dimension, especially in Quebec, where the notion of “francophonie” and canadien self-identity has led to an exaggerated idea of what was really built by or under the French monarchy. The motivations in New Orleans are more mercantile: after all, unlike in Quebec, most people in this city that prides itself on its French culture do not actually speak French. Admittedly our blind spot toward the idea of French colonial architecture also has to do with how little of it remains. Although at one time cities such as CapFrançois (now Cap-Haïtien), Port-au-Prince, SaintPierre (Martinique), Nouvelle-Orléans (New Orleans), and Quebec City boasted a vast range of French-era structures – from grandiose squares and gardens, opulent government palaces, public theatres, massive barracks, and lavish private homes to flashy fountains and public sculpture – time has not been kind to them. Through a combination of natural disasters (hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, heavy rains, and fires) and human destruction (revolutions, military sieges, and, more recently, demolition and neglect) these monuments have been dramatically reduced in number. Only two towns – one in the Americas (BasseTerre in Guadeloupe) and the other in West Africa (Île de Gorée in Senegal) – preserve a significant amount of their ancien régime architecture intact, and they do so because they are poor and do not have the financial wherewithal to replace it. The three largest colonial cities were simply wiped off the map: Saint-Pierre, the largest in the empire in 1726 (with 8,000 inhabitants), was pulverized in minutes on the morning of 8 May 1902 by the eruption of Mount Pelée. Cap-François, the richest and most populous city by 1789 (with 18,850 residents, it was equal in size to Dijon or Boston), with five public squares, a large baroque church, and tree-lined promenades, was torched twice during the Haitian Revolution (1793, 1802) and toppled by an 1842 earthquake (fig. 10.10).

Introduction

5

Only a handful of fragmentary buildings and fountains are left standing from the French era: part of the church and barracks, a few houses and fountain plinths, a naval building, an ornate rococo street sign, and some bits of fortified wall along the coast.8 Port-au-Prince has suffered worse: a city built of wood instead of stone out of a belief that it was anti-seismic, it was nevertheless obliterated by earthquakes, hurricanes, and fires (the eighteenth-century cathedral was burned down in an act of vandalism as recently as 1991), especially in the devastating temblor of 2010, which left little in its wake.9 North America has suffered as well. Although it is popular to blame the British Conquest for what can only be described as a catastrophic loss of patrimony in the province of Quebec, in fact most French-regime churches were destroyed by fire or aggressive rebuilding campaigns in the last 150 years by communities who considered the latest fashions to be more important than their unique heritage. Saint-François in Île d’Orléans (1734–37), a priceless French-regime survivor, was destroyed as recently as 1988 when a sports car smashed through its front doors causing a violent firestorm.10 Many French colonial buildings in North America are replicas, some built with great precision, such as the city of Louisbourg (Nova Scotia), reconstructed in the 1960s and 1970s, and others recreated with a freer hand, such as Fort Condé in Mobile (Alabama), which was recreated for the 1976 American Bicentennial at a scale of four-fifths of its original size. These meagre numbers are astonishing when compared to the other empires in the Americas. New England, the mid-Atlantic states, and the former English colonies of the US South preserve hundreds of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century churches, meeting houses, private dwellings, and former government buildings – many of them built of wood – and the British and Dutch colonies in the Caribbean and Suriname have at least as many as their French counterparts: in fact Paramaribo preserves so much colonial architecture that it has been declared a unesco world heritage site; by contrast, there are only four indisputably pre-1830 buildings left in all of neighbouring French

6

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

Guiana, all but one of them from the 1820s. But it is in the comparison with Iberian America that the paucity of French pre-1830 architecture really stands out: there are more intact colonial buildings in metropolitan Lima alone than in the entire French Atlantic Empire put together. The Colbertian Revolution in Architecture Beginning in the 1660s under King Louis XIV (r. 1643– 1715) France became the self-proclaimed capital of avant-garde architecture, crafting a succession of elegant, more or less classically inspired, and homogeneous styles in building, decor, city planning, and garden design which were emulated throughout Europe – including by France’s political enemies – and as far afield as Istanbul and Beijing. France also produced one of the most consequential colonial architectural legacies in the Atlantic world, the product of a regime in which building and empire building went hand in hand, architecture serving as a tangible reminder of French occupation and as a tool for regulating the behaviour of indigenous peoples, slaves, and colonists. In France Louis XIV patronized architecture on an almost maniacal scale, and his finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert (in office 1661–83) and Premier Peintre du Roi Charles Le Brun (1619–90) oversaw the creation of an architectural and decorative style that was meant to represent visually what Louis referred to as la gloire du roi to an international audience.11 As the king wrote to his son in his Mémoires (1662): “where foreigners are concerned … what is consumed in spending that may seem superfluous creates a highly advantageous impression of splendour, power, wealth, and grandeur,” an impression projected most explicitly by Louis Le Vau’s and Jules Hardouin-Mansart’s garden facade at Versailles (1668–85), adorned with triumphant giant-order Ionic columns and festooned with martial trophies; Libéral Bruand’s monastic but monumental courtyard (1671–79) in Europe’s largest military hospital at Les Invalides (1671–79); and structures such as the triumphal arch of Saint-Denis (1671–76), constructed

to commemorate a ramparts which had been demolished to demonstrate the security of the state (see chapter 8 and figs. 1.1–4).12 Europe had never seen such a centralized machine for standardized cultural production and theoretical dogma. In 1661 Colbert became vice-protector and then (1672) protector of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture; in 1662 he founded the Gobelins

1.1 (above, left) Louis Le Vau and Jules Hardouin-Mansart, main garden facade, Château de Versailles, 1668–85. 1.2 (above, right) Jules Hardouin-Mansart, Grande Écurie, Château de Versailles, completed 1682. 1.3 (below, left) Libéral Bruand and Jules Hardouin-Mansart, main courtyard, Les Invalides, Paris, 1671–79. 1.4 (below, right) François Blondel, Porte Saint-Denis, Paris, 1671–76.

Introduction

7

Manufactory, which produced high-quality furnishings for royal chateaux and for export; in 1663 he established the Petite Académie, a foundation for Latinist scholars to produce inscriptions for royal monuments; and in 1666 and 1669 he created the Academy of Sciences and Academy of Music. However Colbert was above all preoccupied with architecture. In 1664 he acquired the position of Surintendant des Bâtiments du Roi (superintendent of the King’s Buildings), an umbrella post with authority over nearly every aspect of royal cultural production, which he held until his death in 1683; in 1666 he founded the French Academy in Rome, where architecture students went on three-year bursaries to study antiquity – a century later it gave birth to neoclassicism – and, most importantly, in 1671 he founded the first modern Academy of Architecture.13 In the decade after Colbert’s death in 1683 the Crown spent 15 million livres tournois on architectural projects alone: it remains the highest proportion of the national budget spent on architecture in French history.14 The baroque classicism that Louis and Colbert espoused and that was meant to reflect a specifically royal and national image was showcased in Paris, Versailles, and beyond by architects such as François Blondel (1618–1686), first director of the Academy of Architecture, and three succeeding Premiers Architectes du Roi: Louis Le Vau (1612–70), Jules Hardouin-Mansart (1646–1708), and Robert de Cotte (1656/7–1735), the latter two of whom succeeded Colbert as head of the Bâtiments. Their gargantuan ateliers, manned by an “architectural workforce beholden to the king alone,” facilitated the spread of baroque classicism throughout the nation and beyond.15 A fusion of classical rationalism with baroque material and ornamental splendour, it borrowed from Italian models but tamed them through a strict application of rectilinear geometry and a preference for balance and elegance over dynamism and whimsy. It promoted in particular a kind of uniform facade, based ultimately on Le Vau’s south facade of the Louvre (begun 1668) and Daniel Gittard’s Hôtel de Lully (1671), with plain or rusticated ground floors with arched windows or blind arcades, first and

8

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

second storeys united by giant-order pilasters, high rectangular windows, and a flat, sloping, or mansard roof with dormers (figs. 1.5, 12.12). French style was as much about projecting power, stability, and legitimacy within and outside France as it was about beauty.16 In today’s terminology Colbert was essentially exporting the French “brand,” using architecture (among the other arts) as an immediately recognizable symbol of Frenchness, of what people called le grand goût, and of gloire. Few politicians since have placed so much faith on the economic and political importance of culture. One of the underpinnings of the Colbertian architectural ideal was the concept of convenance, which can variously be translated as “suitability” or “appropriateness” and which referred to the association between a building and its function, especially a building’s fittingness to the social status of its patron.17 The idea goes back to the mid-sixteenth century, but it was Claude Perrault (1613–88) who placed it at the foundation of architectural theory in two books on the Greco-Roman orders (Les dix livres d’architecture de Vitruve, 1673; L’ordonnance des cinq espèces de colonnes selon la méthode des Anciens, 1683). In his 1673 treatise on the Roman architect Vitruvius, Perrault defined convenance as “the usage and the useful and necessary end to which an edifice is made, as in solidity, salubrity, and commodity.”18 A modern building’s decorum relates not only to its social and political functions but also to its “positive beauties,” which Perrault contrasted with the incidental “arbitrary beauties” of the Vitruvian system of classical orders and their proportions, derived from those of the human body (a notion which Perrault, a physician, disputed).19 In reforming and simplifying the classical orders for modern usage Perrault based them instead upon a unified system in which the proportions of each member of the column are calculated by a system of averages. Although Perrault’s criticisms of the Vitruvian system were rejected by many architects – notably Blondel, who opposed him in what was called the “Querelle des anciens et des modernes” – the idea of convenance was fundamental to French architecture until the last quarter of the eighteenth century, when

the social order began to unravel and design related less to status. Michel de Fremin (1702) best summarizes the classic Louis XIV–era definition of convenance as: “the science of avoiding anything that does not suit the dignity or the status of the master; when this precept is not followed, there occurs an inconvenance, which consists in forgetting one’s condition and rejecting the rules of modesty and prudence.”20 Although in France this concern for a building’s relationship to rank was partly a reaction to the rise of the bourgeoisie, it had particular importance in a colonial context in which architecture needed to reflect power and authority over rival empires, indigenous people, and the enslaved. Working in tandem and often collaboration with the royal architects and academicians were the legions of royal engineer architects of what was later called the Génie militaire (army corps of engineers) first led by France’s most celebrated engineer architect the maréchal Sébastian Le Prestre de Vauban (1633–1707), most famous for his complex plans for polygonal bastioned fortress towns and city walls – works of art in their own right in their dahlia-like, radiating complexity (fig. 8.8). Far from being monotonous, his 160 city plans demonstrated an adaptability and inventiveness

1.5 (left) Louis Le Vau and others, south facade, Louvre, Paris, begun 1668. 1.6 (right) Sébastian Le Prestre de Vauban, Citadel Chapel of Saint-Étienne, Besançon, 1683. Photo courtesy François Aulas.

that make him one of the great urban planners of the day.21 But Vauban and his team of architects did not just design nine imposing ex nihilo garrison towns such as Besançon or Neuf-Brisach, or radically restructure multiple existing settlements such as Lille along harmonious geometric lines; they also populated them with a panoply of military and civilian buildings in a remarkably consistent, lean court style, whether commanders’ palaces, barracks, churches, or hospitals, as well as spacious public squares and fountains (figs. 1.6, 7.5). Vauban recognized that a civilian population was an essential support for a garrison town, whether by meeting the material needs of the soldiers or by paying taxes. Although he was against imposing a strict model to be followed universally – he differed from Colbert on that point – Vauban valued convenance as well as beauty and uniformity, as expressed through the symmetry of his streets and the use of baroque forms such as the patte d’oie trident (a meeting of three streets at a point)

Introduction

9

to afford dramatic sightlines. As we will see in chapter 7, he paid particular attention to city gates, which were designed with greater opulence with the specific purpose of impressing foreign visitors. Vauban’s ring of fortified cities – known in its day as the ceinture de fer (belt of iron) – helped demarcate France’s new international boundaries and made physically manifest a concept of power that was especially characteristic of Louis XIV and Colbert: a preordained, centralized, and circumscribed French territorial state known as the pré carré (literally: “square meadow”) that imposed unity on diversity from the Pyrenees to the Alps, the shores of Brittany to the Rhine, and Flanders to Provence – it survives in French politics today in the idea of the “hexagon.”22 David Bittering has proposed that this ideology was inspired by late Renaissance advances in astronomy, geometry, and mathematics.23 Scientists and philosophers such as Copernicus, Galileo, Sir Isaac Newton, and especially René Descartes (1596–1650) subscribed to the idea of a unified, measurable cosmos and celebrated geometry’s rationalism: when applied to the earth through measuring, map-making, and the collection of statistics, their discoveries made a country like France seem to be precisely quantifiable and calculable – the ideal absolutist state. But this notion was as artificial as it was utopian: Janis Langins reminds us that “France is a constructed country … in the sense that it was expanded from a centre to a periphery, constructed because earlier than in most other countries a centralizing and rationalizing administration sought to impose a pattern – social, administrative, productive, and even visual – upon it, and constructed as a geometrical territory.”24 This “geometry of reason” was particularly suited to architecture, urban and garden design, since those art forms are intrinsically dependent upon measurement, space, and mathematics.25 Consequently it underlies most of the projects in this book. The engineer architects of the Génie and their colleagues in the Academy and Bâtiments were all motivated by this same desire for stylistic unity, Cartesian logic, and the marque française: indeed, as I will explore

10

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

in chapter 7, there was little differentiation between the career of architect and architect engineer. Prominent academicians and royal architects such as Blondel devoted as much time to engineering and such practical skills as the “draining of marshes, canalization of rivers, and the irrigation of fallow land” as they did to major public monuments (fig. 7.5), and engineers worked for the Bâtiments and royal architects for the Génie.26 Like the better-known figures responsible for the king’s palaces and buildings of state, the royal engineer architects were innovative and adaptable, producing schemes that reflected metropolitan styles but also often giving them a striking originality, the best of them worthy of being recognized as essential works of French baroque or neoclassicism. That these same architect engineers, Vauban included, also directed their efforts toward the colonies in North and South America, the Caribbean, Guiana, and West Africa – places where much of their work remains unknown to all but specialists – partly inspired me to write this book. A New Kind of Empire The French had been building their empire in the Atlantic since the first decade of the seventeenth century, but it was only in the 1660s that Louis XIV and Colbert enacted substantial measures to control and expand it, aiming to end the unruly and unsystematic organization that had marked the first sixty years of colonization and turning a “sickly dependency” into a loyal, economically viable, and defensible enlargement of French territory.27 In fact it was precisely this Colbertian fiction of the colonies as an extension of the French pré carré that determined the way the French saw their empire, and it lay at the heart of their colonial architectural enterprise.28 Instead of chartering colonial trade companies with minimal government interference as under his predecessors Cardinals Richelieu (1585–1642) and Mazarin (1602–61), Colbert promoted “direct, hands-on state supervision,” first through the Compagnie des Indes Occidentales (1664–74), a royal organ with a monopoly on trade with the Americas and

West Africa, and then by royal administration.29 Trade went from four ships annually to the Antilles in 1660 to 131 in 1674, and colonists were ordered to trade only with designated French ports, a rule known as the exclusif.30 The colonies even contributed to Colbert’s program of promoting French luxury products, since the chocolate, snuff, tobacco, and sugar confections made from colonial products were part of his French “brand” and resulted in new kinds of luxury utensils and furnishings.31 In 1663 Colbert nominated Alexandre de Prouville, seigneur de Tracy, as proconsul in charge of the Atlantic possessions with the lofty title of “Lieutenant General in all the Lands in our Obedience situated in North and South America and in the Islands of America,” and in 1664 sent him to Cayenne in charge of the largest French flotilla ever to visit the colonies before Tracy took over as administrator of Nouvelle-France between 1665 and 1667.32 The king and Colbert further reinforced their authority by imposing the governmental structure of a French province onto the different colonies, under the authority of the Controller-General of Finances and then the Ministry of the Marine. Ideologically this move meant that the government conceived of the “provinces” of the French empire as being equivalent to those of France, not just administratively but also culturally (as are the départements of Guadeloupe or Martinique today).33 They were viewed as extensions of the metropole. Colbert balanced the authority of the governor, who usually came from the old nobility (noblesse d’épée, or of the sword) and who represented the Crown and commanded the militia, with that of the intendant, a position drawn mostly from the lesser nobility (noblesse de robe, or of the robe), who was in charge of finances and civilian and commercial affairs (intendants had only recently been introduced into France itself).34 To these were added a sovereign council (conseil souverain; Saint-Domingue had two) that was appointed by the governor and represented the colonists. Colbert further streamlined the power structure by ending the feudal seigneurial land-ownership system then

in place in Nouvelle-France and the Antilles. In 1665 Colbert appointed his relatives Jean Talon (1626–94) and Michel de Bégon (1638–1710) as first intendants of Nouvelle-France and the Caribbean respectively, and in 1665 he sent the first regular troops to New France, the four company–strong Carignan-Salières regiment, who were encouraged to settle after they retired from active service.35 Never before had France tried so hard to amalgamate its Atlantic possessions into something so efficient and economically beneficial. This arrangement had an immediate impact on French colonial architecture: unlike in Spanish America where the Crown was represented by a single viceregal palace on the central plaza of the capital, here the governor’s mansion was always balanced by that of the intendant, sometimes on the same square (fig. 10.6), elsewhere on separate squares within a city (as in Portau-Prince), or sometimes in different towns altogether (as in Martinique). The two officers used architecture directly to compete for prominence, whether through opulent building styles or simply by the size or siting of their headquarters, often drawing upon their particular privileges to do so. These perks included, in the case of the intendant, the ability to siphon off funds meant for fortifications to embellish his lodging; whereas the governor, who had no control over royal revenue, was able to seize private property or apply funds from the sale of commercial rights or the produce of his personal plantation.36 In at least one case the governor’s and intendant’s palaces even played gendered roles: in Port-au-Prince during the 19 March 1771 nuptials of Governor-General Pierre Gédéon de Nolivos (1714– after 1790) to Dame Marie Marcombe the men were entertained in the governor’s palace while the women (including the bride-to-be) were hosted in the intendance, guests of both sexes mingling only after arriving in the church at one o’clock.37 With Colbert’s reforms official colonial architecture also changed dramatically – in fact the minister even sent Blondel to the Antilles between 1666 and 1668, although he did not build anything there.38 Specifically, it went from a scattering of basic palisaded forts, squat

Introduction

11

houses, and barn-like chapels built by amateurs or local civilian architects in the regional styles of Normandy, Brittany, or Burgundy to the more polished, standardized, and metropolitan products of the royal engineer architects. More closely related to the royal commissions of Paris and the Île-de-France, some of them were nostalgically evocative of the earlier court styles of Jean Androuet du Cerceau (1585–1649), Salomon de Brosse (1571–1626), and François Mansart (1598–1666; figs. 7.1, 12.20), but most of them played variations on the grand goût of the architects of Louis XIV. Thus metropolitan baroque classicism – and in the following 150 years a succession of newer classically inspired styles – was introduced to the far reaches of the French Atlantic empire. In the early to mid-eighteenth century colonial centres also reflected a new French enthusiasm for large-scale, gridiron, rational urban planning of a sort that was difficult to realize in the congested cities of France, manifesting itself especially in the grand urban schemes of Guiana and Saint-Domingue (figs. 9.15, 10.7).39 This diverse and wide-ranging architectural production survives primarily in the form of literally hundreds of plans, maps, elevations, sectional views, bird’s-eye views, and sketches in ink, graphite, and watercolours that are preserved in archives in Aix-en-Provence, Paris, Vincennes, and the former colonies. When they are noticed at all these drawings are looked on with some disdain, at least the designs not directly related to fortification. Typical is Frederick Thorpe’s faint praise: “[t]hey could reproduce the barrack blocks, garrison churches, and military hospitals common to fortress towns in France, and these were by no means ugly. They could even design colonial ‘chateaux’ and intendants’ ‘palaces,’ provided little originality was demanded.”40 There are several reasons for this neglect. First, unlike the designs of the better-known French architects of the Bâtiments or Academy these drawings were never published as engravings or in treatises, and as a result neither they nor their architects were ever known outside the Génie or the colonies – indeed, in some cases we do not even know their first names. Second, most

12

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

projects are finished presentation drawings, sometimes even executed by assistants, and not the autograph “back of the napkin” type of designs favoured by historians of architecture for the clues they might reveal about the project’s conception and development and about the mind of the architect. Finally, they originated in a large, anonymous bureaucratic organization with a reputation for uniformity and military discipline that would seem to discourage innovation. But the engineer architects are not to be dismissed so easily. As just noted, recent scholarship is revealing closer ties between the career of architect and architect engineer across the board. In fact, from its very beginning in sixteenth-century Italy, early modern fortification architecture was developed by some of the most prominent architects or painters of the Renaissance, as with Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), who was hired by the Sforza family of Milan primarily as a fortifications expert or members of the prominent Sangallo family, for whom fortification was their main métier.41 Even the stigma of subservience to a large corporation and the dearth of autograph drawings should not automatically make us view the royal engineer architects in an inferior light. Revisionist histories of the most important architects of the French baroque such as Hardouin-Mansart and de Cotte are acknowledging the substantial degree to which even they were subsumed within the Surintendance des Bâtiments du Roi, the relative indifference in French circles toward autograph drawings by architects compared to the Italian privileging of disegno, and how scholars have shied away from discussing the institutional affiliation of their subjects out of a concern that it would taint their reputation as independent architects.42 About This Book This book is about the cities, buildings, and gardens designed in Paris, Versailles, and the colonies in the name of the French state and church, as well as the larger projects of the wealthiest landowners who aped the fashions of the metropole. It draws largely on plans,

elevations, maps, and other archival sources produced for French government entities and preserved in archives in France and its former colonies. Many of these projects were built but many were not: as both are equally interesting in what they reveal about French imperialism, both appear in this study. This book also treats extant buildings where they survive, especially churches but also some of the grander houses and – although they are rare – government buildings. Because it covers three continents and more than two centuries, this book is necessarily selective, and has involved winnowing down hundreds of projects to a number sufficient for the reader to appreciate the full range of French colonial architecture. It has also necessitated setting clear boundaries: in particular, this book will only include colonies when they were under direct French control, which means no buildings in French Canada or Louisiana after 1763 or in Haiti after 1804, although it will include those of Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guiana, and Senegal until the book’s cut-off date of 1830. Finally, since this book is about aesthetics and civilian architecture I also will not consider fortifications or ramparts except as elements of city design or where aesthetics come into play as in portals, towers, and iconography. The science of French colonial bastioned fortification architecture has received the lion’s share of the attention and constitutes a highly technical field which I will leave to the specialists.43 But this book is also about the builders: the main preoccupation of chapters 3 to 7 is to bring to life the architects, contractors, masons, carpenters, joiners, and other specialists responsible for this patrimony, from the royal engineers trained in France and white civilians in the colonies to the aboriginal builders of the Americas and West Africa and the huge contribution made by African slaves and free people of colour (known as gens de couleur) to places such as Louisiana, the Antilles, and Guiana. Reconstructing the lives of the non-white architects and builders has been a particularly challenging task since in most regions they have been lost to history and research has involved long and concentrated work in notarial archives. But

the task is essential if we are to redress the European bias of the documents written by French government officials and the royal engineers who, along with white civilian architects, were the only ones to sign their projects and with whom we can associate known buildings. In fact this book provides the first overview of the lives and careers of builders of colour in the French Atlantic Empire, a rich and revealing subject without which our understanding of its architecture and society would be deficient. However, I hasten to add that while this book is a recognition and commemoration of architectural achievement, it is not meant as a celebration of colonial architecture as a phenomenon or of French civilization overseas. The French Atlantic Empire was one of the most ruthless and oppressive regimes in the Americas, largely as a direct result of the imposition of metropolitan political, commercial, religious, and cultural goals on places where the French had no right to be and upon peoples whom the French treated often with cruelty, neglect, and disrespect. This book is also a story of unspeakable nonchalance and violence toward people of African descent whose lives were rendered miserable because of the greed and racism of government, military, or church officials. Theodor Leutwein, colonial administrator of German Southwest Africa between 1894 and 1904 noted bluntly that “colonization is always inhumane,” and we need to bear this in mind as we consider the buildings and gardens in this book, the elegance and innovativeness of which belie the miseries of the human condition in so many of the places they adorned.44 This book is concerned with what buildings can tell us about French imperialism – and about the ways in which different strata and racial divisions in society interacted in the making, using, renting, buying, and selling of buildings – as much as with issues of style, influence, and craftsmanship. Of particular importance is what architecture reveals about French self-identity and its sense of manifest destiny and also the astonishing gap between what the French thought they were building in their colonies and what was actually happening on the ground.

Introduction

13

A major theme in this book is colonial France’s remarkable intransigence in the face of non-French influences, European and non-European alike, which contrasts so strikingly with the approach of their Spanish and Portuguese neighbours and their haphazard architectural programs, spectrum of regional styles, and receptiveness (in Spanish America) to indigenous forms, iconographies, and techniques. French architects created – or hoped to create – cities, parks, palaces, and fountains that perfectly replicated those of France, right down to the last mansard roof, promenade of imported elm trees, and vineyard of Sauvignon grapes, a uniquely obstinate vision of unity in the face of such geographical or demographic diversity.45 Except in West Africa, where hybrid architectural forms prevailed from the beginning (see chapter 16), foreign influences in the French Atlantic Empire were relegated primarily to domestic architecture – and even then they were only details such as a roof type in Guiana that may derive partly from Amerindian forms, and rural cottages in the Antilles and Louisiana which may reflect West African building techniques. In general indigenous forms, briefly useful in the pioneer days, were swept aside along with the aboriginal peoples who developed them. No other group – not the Massachusetts Puritans, Virginia farmers, or the Dutch plantation owners of Pernambuco or Suriname – was so obsessed with recreating a perfect simulacrum of the metropole, a visual manifestation of cultural and ideological unity with the motherland that insisted upon a sameness that never existed. Since the French upheld the idea of convenance, particularly its concern that buildings needed to reflect the social status of the patrons, overseas projects were consistently grander and more decorative than their function required. In positions of strength this grandeur was meant to pronounce the superiority of French civilization to rival powers and to inspire loyalty in the colonists, but in the many cases where the French hold on a colony was more tenuous – or non-existent in the case of places like Ouidah (Benin) – architectural opulence and gloire compensated for a lack of real authority.

14

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

Projects repeatedly ran over budget. They were usually only partially completed. Architects lied to the Ministry of the Marine about what they were doing. The Ministry of the Marine turned a blind eye to corruption and calamity on the worksite. And countless schemes were simply abandoned altogether. The grandest urban utopian plans – they rarely paid attention to climate or other geographic realities – were dependably disastrous and sometimes resulted in a catastrophic loss of life. The French privileging of gloire over practicality is especially revealed in French visitors’ reactions to the colonial towns of their rivals. When visiting the British convict colony at Port Jackson (Sydney) in 1819, French explorer Jacques Arago was impressed by how atypical it was of the other English settlements he had seen with their cost-effective but uninspired architecture. Atypically, Port Jackson had been turned into a city of considerable elegance by idealistic governor Lachlan Macquarie (in office 1810–21), his wife Elizabeth Henrietta, and their convict architect Francis Greenway who – to the great consternation of British authorities in Whitehall – constructed large public buildings (fig. 16.5), squares, parks, fountains, and a castellated stables derided by their enemies as a “palace for horses.” Although this kind of profligacy may have gone against the grain of the British imperial project, it nevertheless was seen as quite appropriate to the French: Arago wrote glowingly of Port Jackson’s “magnificent hotels, majestic mansions, houses of extraordinary taste and elegance, fountains ornamented with sculptures worthy of the chisel of our best artists, spacious and airy apartments, rich furniture … immense storehouses – you expect to find all these, four thousands leagues from Europe? I assure you, my friend, I fancied myself transported into one of our handsomest cities.”46 Like his seventeenth- and eighteenth-century predecessors in the Atlantic world, Arago placed design and elegance well ahead of thrift and necessity. One intriguing aspect of French colonial architecture is the keen awareness it demonstrates of the evolution of style and the way different styles fit into historical epochs – a historicism that was quite innovative for

its time and that was usually driven by specific goals. Architects worked in a panoply of styles, from that of Henri IV (fig. 7.1) to Napoleonic neoclassicism (fig. 15.28), and in one case neo-gothicism (fig. 15.23), often retroactively. The choice was usually ideological: in particular, an enthusiasm for the style of Louis XIV led to the construction of buildings in the grand goût in the mid- to late eighteenth century by a citizenry disillusioned with the current monarchy and who actively pined for the more muscular era of Colbert, a nostalgia that motivated intellectuals in France as well, as scholars are now revealing (figs. 10.16–17, 13.1).47 However, beginning in the later eighteenth century, architects inspired by Enlightenment ideals of practicality and convenance developed building designs that made greater concessions to tropical climates, as in the twenty schemes for plantation homes and other buildings published in 1776 by the Chevalier D’Albaret – the only known treatise on architecture in tropical climates by a French architect – which adapted Palladian villa architecture to the need for exterior balconies, loggias, and peristyles (fig. 6.7).48 Although D’Albaret’s treatise did not have a single offspring in the French colonies – unlike in Jamaica, the only island for which his designs had any real relevance – similarly minded engineers such as Jean-Samuel Guisan, Nicolas-Georges Courtois, or Burke O’Farrell began to approach architecture more scientifically, especially in the lead-up to the French Revolution and in the first two decades of the nineteenth century (figs. 13.19–21). Vernacular and Post-French “Creole” Architecture As noted, this book is primarily about the official state, church, and large-scale private architecture of the French regime and less about vernacular buildings, although the latter form the chief subject of four chapters (chapters 4–6 and 16). This book also does not treat post-French architecture. Neither of these decisions was made lightly. Vernacular architecture from the French era is a rich subject that handily deserves a book of its own: in fact Louis P. Nelson has written precisely

such a book about its counterpart in colonial Jamaica in which he intentionally omits official architecture: “many readers [will] expect public buildings, courthouses, and fortifications to leap from its pages. Yet these are all missing from the pages that follow; this is a book focused almost exclusively on domestic architecture.”49 Not only does vernacular architecture comprise the majority of surviving structures in places such as Basse-Terre, Fort-de-France, and Cap-Haïtien, but it is also the tradition in which styles diverged the most from their French models and which tells us the most about how people adapted to their surroundings – precisely the reality that the French penchant for fantasy has left out of its official architecture. But our understanding of this body of material is seriously uneven, and it would be unwise to try to write something comprehensive about it until more consistent fieldwork has been done in all of the regions under study. Vernacular architecture is difficult to document and challenging to date precisely: links between the archives and extant buildings are particularly hard to make, at least outside Quebec, and it is challenging to link names of builders with extant buildings in this period (unlike in New Orleans following the fires of 1788 and 1794). Others have acknowledged this challenge, including Marie-Emmanuelle Desmoulins in her study of private dwellings in Basse-Terre, and Jay Edwards, writing about Louisiana, who warns that such buildings are “much less abundantly documented.”50 To make matters worse, vernacular buildings have usually been altered and rebuilt by owners who did not keep records, whether plantations transformed into guest houses or townhouses made into commercial buildings, as was the fate of Basse-Terre’s oldest building, the Joseph Douze house (ca. 1759–80), the ground floor of which was gutted to accommodate a shoe shop. These buildings require intensive archaeological fieldwork and scientific analysis of materials and techniques.51 Nelson’s book, for example, is the result of ten years of meticulous archaeology and measuring with a team of graduate students – and it deals with a single island.52 It is not something I can do for

Introduction

15

the myriad colonies in this book. Nevertheless I will consider three of the most important vernacular forms to emerge in the French Atlantic World in chapter 16: the slave hut, the French open gallery, and the Goréen townhouse. French Atlantic architecture in the post-French period, sometimes known as “creole architecture,” is also a fascinating field of study – indeed it already boasts an extensive secondary literature – but it is a very

different subject from the one treated in this book.53 After the departure of French colonial authorities French forms blended more vigorously with non-French influences, resulting in completely new styles of building.54 Although the architecture of the former colonies remained predominantly French in style and technique long after they became British, Spanish, or independent, the severing of contact with France caused an immediate and permanent change.

1.7 Church of Saint-Antoine-sur-Richelieu, Quebec, 1779–80. Belfries added after 1913.

16

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

1.8 Church of Saint-Charles-sur-Richelieu, Quebec, 1818–20.

As non-French possessions, their architecture was no longer dominated by an administration aimed at glorifying the French state and church and they were also cut off from the latest metropolitan trends, resulting in buildings that were retardataire and which assimilated more rapidly with more local traditions. The new colonial powers also imposed their own official architectural styles, and vernacular architects and patrons responded to these trends as well as to other non-French sources, particularly from the United States, by then the dominant cultural force in the Americas.

These phenomena are particularly apparent in British New France (after 1791 called “Lower Canada”) and in Louisiana under the Spanish and Americans. In post-Conquest Quebec, houses and churches – Catholicism was no longer the state church so parish churches were now by definition vernacular – proudly retained their French identity. In fact this use of French styles as a nationalistic response to foreign conquest was unprecedented and is unique to Quebec. It usually manifested itself in plain, conservative stone buildings such as the church of Saint-Antoine-sur-Richelieu (1779–80). Constructed during the first building boom

Introduction

17

1.9 Maison Gaudette-Dupont. A maison canadienne, Saint-Antoine-sur-Richelieu, Quebec, ca. 1779.

after the Seven Years’ War, it recalls French-regime precedents such as the church of Sainte-Famille on the Île d’Orléans (figs. 1.7, 14.18) with its twin towers and statue niches but reduces decoration to the barest minimum (the outsized belfries were added after a fire in 1913).55 Habitants had neither the means nor the desire to imitate metropolitan models and builders were “inspired liberally” by a potpourri of local influences, resulting in buildings that were notably more eclectic than before.56 Another patriotic revival of colonial forms was the standardized church scheme devised by Abbé Pierre Conefroy (1752–1816). Employed for more than twenty churches in the Montreal region, it evoked plain French-era models with three-doored gabled

18

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

facades and single or paired belltowers, as well as classical elements such as ashlar pediments and pilasters around the doorways, as at Saint-Charles-sur-Richelieu (1818–20; fig. 1.8).57 Conefroy’s plan had a profound impact on the church designs of Quebec’s most famous architect of the nineteenth century, Thomas Baillairgé (1791–1859).58 Ironically, given their patriotic motivation, the “French classicism” in Conefroy’s and Baillairgé’s churches was also inspired by British Palladianism – especially the work of James Gibbs (1682–1754) but also by the British buildings of Lower Canada and the churches and meeting houses of neighbouring New England and New York. The United States also inspired

another French revival in Quebec. The vogue for Gallic neo-gothicism that swept the province’s churches in the mid-nineteenth century (e.g., Saint-Michel in Yamaska, 1842–43) was inspired not by Notre-Dame in Paris or the Rouen Cathedral but by the design for the new Basilica in Montreal (completed 1829) by Irish-American James O’Donnell, architect of New York’s Fulton Street Market (1821–22).59 Domestic architecture in Quebec also preserved certain features of traditional French-era homes such as the steeply pitched roof with dormers, thick stone walls, and plain windows and doors, but it was also transformed by new influences into what is called the “maison canadienne” or “tradition québécoise” (fig. 1.9). Particularly typical are deep bellcast eaves over a raised porch and wooden gallery, a feature which may have come from the Dutch architecture of the Hudson Valley or post-French

1.10 Robert Jones, Don Manuel Lanzos House, New Orleans, begun 1788.

architecture in Louisiana and Missouri (see chapter 16), and English Georgian window and door dressings (again probably from New England).60 Louisiana architects also preserved French colonial styles in the buildings they constructed after 1763, but they very soon embraced aspects of Spanish and British architecture. The earliest-surviving domestic structure is the Don Manuel Lanzos House (1789), a modest, French-style, half-timbered, rectangular wood and bousillage (clay and straw) building on a raised brick basement with a broken-pitched dormered roof, galleries front and back, and warehouses below (fig. 1.10).61 Spanish elements became more prominent following the laws of 1795, a response to two devastating fires in 1788 and 1794 that destroyed 800 structures between them.62 They decreed that houses inside the city walls had to be made of brick (or timber and brick) and

1.11 Samuel Lover, Street in New Orleans, graphite and watercolour on paper, before 1847. British Museum, London. The Cabildo is to the left and the Cathedral to its right.

covered in a one-inch-thick coat of lime, and they were required to have flat roofs of tile, brick, or similar fireproof material. In fact Spanish American–style flat roofs, usually with an exterior balustrade, constituted one of the most significant departures from French tradition, as with the once numerous single-storey “Spanish-colonial creole cottages” and the two-storey combination commercial and residential structure known as the Old Absinthe House (1798–1806).63 Early visitors such as John Prichard in 1801 noted that “roofs

20

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

in general are quite flat and paved with square tiles” with balustrades and urns around them.64 As in Quebec, Palladian forms from the United States also found their way into New Orleans houses: the Cornue-Pitot House (1795), a red-brick Georgian townhouse attributed to French architect and engineer Barthelemy Lathon, would not have looked out of place in Philadelphia’s Society Hill.65 The authorship of these buildings also reveals the increasing cosmopolitanism of post-French New Orleans: the French-style Lanzos House was built by an Anglo-American named Robert Jones for a Spaniard and the Anglo-American style Cornue-Pitot house was built by a Frenchman. The most Spanish intrusion of all was the large-scale building project around what is now Jackson Square

(1795–99) financed by Andalusian benefactor Don Andrés Almonester y Rojas (1724–98), including the Casa Curial (presbytery), Cabildo (town hall; both designed 1791), and the rebuilt parish church, or “Iglesia Parroquial” as it was called in the plans (consecrated as a cathedral independent of Havana in 1794), designed by engineer Gilberto Guillemard (1746–1808) (fig. 1.11).66 The Cabildo and Casa Curial were typical of the government buildings of Spanish America, with a high arcade on two storeys, the lower one open, and a flat roof with a balustrade decorated with urns (the mansard roofs that give them a French flavour today were only added in 1847). Similar government buildings in Spanish America include a 1781 project for the Casas Reales in Oaxaca and the Cabildo in Córdoba, Argentina (1780s).67 The Cabildo and Casa Curial are decidedly unlike the prototype used in official French architecture with their flat walls or blind arcades below

and two upper storeys of rectangular windows united by a giant order of pilasters (figs. 1.5, 8.7). Guillemard’s Cathedral, which is known through paintings and old photographs, was built in a severe Spanish neoclassical style with a low, wide facade, paired columns, and narrow towers like those of Montevideo Cathedral (1790–1804), although the towers’ octagonal shape was likely inspired by the eighteenth-century church of Cristo del Buen Viaje closer to home in Havana (the heavy square tower over the portico of the New Orleans church as shown in Samuel Lover’s painting was added by Anglo-American Benjamin Latrobe in 1820).68 The most celebrated French creole form in Louisiana is the plantation house, which began to appear in 1.12 Destrehan Plantation, Saint-Charles Parish, Louisiana, 1787–90, with 1830s Greek revival additions. Photo: Hemis/Alamy Stock Photo.

Introduction

21

1.13 (opposite) Saint-Thomas de Pierreville, Quebec, built 1855 and demolished 2016. From a photograph taken October 2014. 1.14 (right) Second Empire– style house on the Place d’Armes, Cap-Haïtien, Haiti, late nineteenth century.

the 1750s with its two-storey wraparound open gallery, double pitched roof, and raised brick basement. The most authentic surviving example is Parlange Plantation in Pointe Coupée (begun 1750 and considerably altered later) with dormered hip roof and double galleries supported by stuccoed brick columns below and wood colonnettes and a balustrade above.69 The most famous traditional Louisiana plantation house is Destrehan Plantation, built by the free mixed-race architect Charles Pacquet, who signed a contract for the house with Robert Antoine Robin de Logny in 1787 and completed the work in 1790 (fig. 1.12).70 It also had brick columns below and wooden colonnettes above, but this time a high double-pitched roof. However the original supports were replaced by what has become the most recognizable feature of this building: a giant-order colonnade of robust white-painted columns added in the 1830s that reflect the American Greek Revival style popular in southern states such as the Carolinas and

Georgia. Thus the white-columned plantation house conjured up in most people’s minds when thinking of Louisiana (e.g., Oak Alley Plantation, 1839) owes as much to Anglo-America as it does to France. As we have already seen with neo-gothicism in Quebec, some of the most French-looking architectural features in former French colonies – particularly during the nineteenth century – came from the United States, where they often formed an eclectic mix with other influences. Such is the remarkable amalgam of styles present in the church of Saint-Thomas de Pierreville (fig. 1.13) near the former reduction of Odanak (fig. 3.10). Built in 1855 and recklessly demolished by the municipality in 2016, this soaring monument combined neo-gothic tracery windows, combination Renaissance-gothic blind arcades, a New England Georgian red and white colour scheme, and a tower which could be in Boston’s North End but for the glittering ancien régime clocher at the top wrapped

Introduction

23

1.15 Baron de Faraud and others, Sans-Souci Palace, Milot, Haiti, 1806–13.

in traditional québécois tin cladding.71 The most common French-style import from the United States was the mansard roof, as with the 1840s Gallic update of the former Cabildo and Casa Curial in New Orleans. The form had a particularly enthusiastic following in Quebec and Haiti in the second half of the nineteenth century, as in the farmhouses lining the Rivière Richelieu – they are often sheeted in tin, a material so

24

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

expensive in the French regime that it was used only for churches – and in the finer townhouses of Cap-Haïtien, in particular a group of grand commercial structures built near the Place de la Cathédrale in the 1890s that are usually mistaken for colonial architecture (fig. 1.14).72 In Haiti’s case the appearance of this style is curious since there certainly existed no nostalgia for French rule. However the architecture of independent

Haiti has long had an ambiguous relationship with that of its former colonial proprietors. The most famous example was King Henry I Christophe’s grand Palace of Sans-Souci, built in ca. 1806–13 near the town of Milot, a former plantation, by ex-slaves and free people of colour. One of the first major architectural projects of independent Haiti – and built for a black king as a declaration of his nation’s parity with the great powers of Europe and the United States – this proud monument was nevertheless built in the style of Louis XV after an identifiable model by Germain Boffrand (fig. 1.15).73 But Roi Christophe’s monument is no mere copy: it incorporates Italian Renaissance and baroque features and even sophisticated masonry traditions from ancient Rome to create a structure as unusual and impressive as any buildings constructed by the French – and in many ways quite unlike them. More than any other building just cited, Sans-Souci shows us just how far removed the architecture of the post-French period can be from the motivations and ideologies of the metropole and the French state’s obsession with glorifying its monarchy. A Brief History of the French Atlantic Empire Although history is woven into the narrative throughout this book and the timeline provides a list of the main events, it is important at this juncture to sketch out the basic historical context of the French Atlantic Empire – particularly as this book presents its material thematically rather than colony by colony. I will focus here on political, military, and economic affairs since I will treat other kinds of historical issues at greater length in later chapters, including the colonial Church, utopianism, Amerindian cultures, slavery, the architect’s trade, and the royal corps of engineers. The three most significant eras in the history of the French Atlantic Empire are the 1660s, when Colbert restructured it along modern lines; the Seven Years’ War, when France lost the vast majority of its Atlantic possessions; and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, when a general emancipation of slavery in 1794 followed swiftly by its reinstitution in 1802 lost France its richest

colony of Saint-Domingue and almost did the same for Guadeloupe. The main point to make here is that more so than in Spanish or Portuguese America or the mainland British colonies, the French Empire in the Atlantic was shaped by war. The proximity of its colonies to British, Dutch, and Iberian territories and its uneasy alliances with equally powerful indigenous groups made it particularly susceptible to conquest. Every colony was seized at least once, sometimes permanently, but often only until the next peace was signed. Some of them, like Martinique or Acadia, passed back and forth multiple times between French and English administrations, Acadia becoming fiercely independent as a result, keeping French rule at arm’s length in a way the habitants of Nouvelle-France did not.74 It is therefore worth keeping the major battles at the back of the mind throughout this book. In addition to the two just cited they include the Franco-Dutch War (1672–78); the Nine Years’ War of the English Succession (1688–97); the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13); the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48); and the American War of Independence (1775–83), which pitted France against England. France was a relative latecomer to Atlantic conquest but Breton explorer Jacques Cartier (1491–1557) did found a short-lived colony named Charlesbourg-Royal near present-day Quebec City in 1541 and certain overly zealous naval mémoires would later claim that Canada had been French since 1492.75 Nevertheless, disappointing returns and civil war at home postponed further efforts to colonize the Americas aside from some abortive exploits such as the 1555–60 establishment of “Antarctic France” in Guanabara Bay (Rio de Janeiro) by Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon (1510–71), vice-admiral of Brittany, and two equally disastrous attempts to establish a base in Florida in 1562 and 1564–65. One of the incentives to found a new colony in Canada was to gain control over the cod fishing industry in the Grand Banks off Newfoundland (Terre-Neuve), which French fishermen had been exploiting since the early sixteenth century, hundreds of ships making the

Introduction

25

crossing annually.76 From about 1550 fishermen began drying their catch on the shores of Newfoundland and the Gaspé Peninsula, necessitating small temporary settlements (fig. 3.3) and placing them in contact with indigenous people from whom they obtained furs to bring back to France. By the last decade of the 1500s, shipowners increasingly turned their attention to the trade in northern beaver pelts – the fur was used primarily to make hats – which necessitated not only careful diplomatic relations with Amerindians but also exploration inland, up the St Lawrence River. In 1600 Pierre de Chauvin de Tonnetuit (d. 1603) established a commercial post at Tadoussac, a wintering ground for the Innu peoples, and he and his men traded items such as copper pots and axes for furs, but French people still had no interest in settling and merely came in the summer to trade.77 Permanent settlement in Canada began with Pierre Dugua, Sieur de Mons (ca. 1558–1628) and his associate Samuel de Champlain (1574–1635), who made their voyage in the first decade of the next century after France’s wars of religion ended with Henri IV’s 1598 Edict of Nantes and its official tolerance for Protestantism. These explorers were charged with colonizing North America between 44 and 46 degrees latitude, and Dugua was awarded a ten-year monopoly in the fur trade on the understanding that he would introduce settlers and grant seigneuries, or land grants.78 They reached Tadoussac in 1603, founded trading factories on Île Sainte-Croix in Acadia (1604; now Maine) and Port-Royal (1605; now Nova Scotia), and a fortified post at Quebec City in 1608 (fig. 12.1).79 They combined a quest for a northwest passage to Asia with mandates to create settlements, convert Amerindians, and promote trade. Next came the era of the chartered companies (1608–1663), commercial enterprises made up of merchants from all over France, at the time the only groups capable of supporting an undertaking of such a scale. The greatest of these was Richelieu’s Compagnie des Cent-Associés (founded 1627), which operated directly or with subsidiary companies, and in return for exclusive privileges to exploit the colony’s natural resources

26

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

(except for fishing) they were given a commission to settle and develop this new land.80 To help populate and exploit their territory the Compagnie granted subfiefs of riverfront land to seigneurs, members of the lesser nobility who brought farmers and other labourers at their own expense to clear land, plant crops, and encourage the fur trade.81 The first was granted in 1634 to percheron gentleman-surgeon Robert Giffard and about seventy seigneuries were established within thirty years. Religious institutions were also assigned seigneuries: in 1640 Montreal was conceded to the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement, a confraternity of clerics and laymen led by soldier Paul de Chomodey (they called themselves the Société de Notre-Dame de Montréal), which included Sulpician priests and a lay society of apostolic life founded in 1645.82 The Sulpicians eventually took over as the sole seigneurs and used it as a base for launching missions among the Amerindians (fig. 12.11). Unlike the former trading posts of Quebec and Trois-Rivières, Montreal was founded as a town (called Ville-Marie), with a church, school, and hospital. Nevertheless, part of the reason Colbert took over French North America in 1663 was because of the poor results of private enterprise: only about 2,500 people lived in the colony – the Compagnie had been charged with settling 4,000 – and a minuscule amount of land had been developed. Quebec was even captured by the English between 1629 and 1632, and French settlements and western expansion were endangered by the increasingly bellicose Iroquois Five Nations – an empire far exceeding any European colony in extent and strength – who resented French encroachment on their territory and trade.83 Particularly hard hit were the towns of Trois-Rivières and Montreal, where habitants were subjected to nearly constant guerrilla warfare, and the Jesuit missions among the Huron on the shores of the lake of that name which the Iroquois destroyed in 1648–49.84 Between 1633 and the 1701 “Great Peace” with the Iroquois, the habitants enjoyed fewer than fifteen years of freedom from war. By 1663 even relatively safe Quebec City was little more than a hardscrabble

trading post, a company town with few inhabitants that owed its very existence to a delicate network of alliances with indigenous groups. With the first governor (1663), intendant (1665), bishop (1674), and permanent military regiment (the Carignan-Salières, 1665) Nouvelle-France was transformed administratively into a French province, a hierarchy which would be repeated in the reorganization of the tropical colonies.85 A string of fortifications was built from the mouth of the St Lawrence far into the Great Lakes. Eager to turn what was considered an empty wilderness into a real colony, the Crown sent some 850 orphan girls and widows (the so-called filles du roi) between 1663 and 1673 to marry the settlers, who now also included 400 men from the regiment.86 For the first time the balance of the sexes was roughly equal and Nouvelle-France’s prodigious period of natural reproduction began. Intendant Talon promoted agriculture and fishing and tried unsuccessfully to found industries such as shipbuilding and flax and hemp manufacture.87 Motivated by the fur trade and by a desire to claim inland territory to block the English colonies – and aided by a brief peace with the Iroquois (until 1682) – a new generation of explorers penetrated farther into the Great Lakes, into Hudson Bay, and down the great inland rivers. The most famous were René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle (1643–87), who travelled the length of the Mississippi in 1682, and Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville (1661–1706) who – going the other way, around Florida – founded the first temporary settlement near the river’s mouth at Biloxi in 1699 (see chapter 9).88 By this time French Canada had reached the limit of its territorial expansion, but its settlements were far from uniform, either in population or culture. The farms and villages of the shores of the St Lawrence replicated something of the seigneurial system of France with its landed gentry with around two hundred seigneuries by the first quarter of the eighteenth century.89 Similarly, the towns of Quebec, Trois-Rivières, and Montreal reproduced to a certain degree the social mores and urban life of the metropole (fig. 12.20).90

Canadians were also loyal to the Crown in a way the criollos (American-born whites) of the Spanish Empire and residents of the Thirteen Colonies were not, notably in their dependence upon the government for coveted positions as officers in the regiment, an essential entree into the colonial aristocracy. Even the rural militias were kept firmly in royal hands and out of the grasp of the seigneurs, each one organized by parish and the whole led by a senior tenant-farmer called the captain of the militia.91 By contrast Acadia, with a population of 3,950 in 1726, was a self-supporting community of farmers and fisherman with little use for government or external influences and enjoying close cultural ties with New England.92 The fishing communities of Newfoundland such as Plaisance looked eastward into the open seas rather than to Nouvelle-France, and had the least permanent population of any of the regions (roughly 250 people scattered over about a dozen posts).93 The settlements in the Great Lakes were little more than trading posts, despite repeated government recommendations to send young people to settle on farms around them for defence.94 French Canada began its slow collapse in 1713 with the peace of Utrecht, when Britain acquired Newfoundland, the Acadian peninsula (but not Île-Royale, present-day Cape Breton), and Hudson Bay, and gained supremacy over the Iroquois territories in what is now New York State.95 The French now prioritized the fortification of Louisbourg, on Île-Royale, a place not merely of strategic importance given its position at the mouth of the St Lawrence, but also a lucrative trading centre, since unlike Quebec its port did not freeze in winter (fig. 10.14).96 The final blow came with the Seven Years’ War.97 Despite its impressive if hastily built colonial fortifications, France could not withstand superior British naval power, and on 13 September 1759 General James Wolfe captured Quebec City, and although he died in battle alongside his adversary the marquis de Montcalm, the British soon conquered all of Nouvelle-France (Montreal fell the following year). The conquest was permanent with the Treaty of Paris (1763) when France chose the sugar islands of

Introduction

27

Guadeloupe and Martinique over its North American territories, although not without criticism from business groups such as the Chambers of Commerce of La Rochelle and Bordeaux, who held that Canada was essential for supporting the island trade.98 Indeed the loss of Canadian forests as a source of wood for naval vessels would plague France for the next century. France also held onto two tiny, foggy island colonies off Newfoundland to maintain its share of the fishing trade. One 1784 naval report described Saint-Pierre and Miquelon – they are still French today – as “barren rock covered with moss bristling with spikes … containing … impenetrable gorges and potholes, full of swampy lakes and pools of water.”99 France was still dreaming about recapturing Canada as late as 1793, when patriotic citoyen Jean Basset sent a “Proposition de conquérir le Canada” to the minister of war.100 France was not so sorry to see the end of Louisiana in the same treaty: the impecunious colony was arguably the least successful of any of France’s long-term holdings in the Americas except for Guiana. Although Louisiana encompassed an impressively wide expanse of territory the reality amounted to little more than a few names on a map and most of it remained in aboriginal hands (see chapter 3).101 Other than a few deerskins and buffalo hides, Louisiana did not have a fur trade to speak of, nor did it have much agricultural potential, and its mineral wealth did not live up to rumours. Nor did Louisiana have a single decent harbour, and its tiny provisional settlements were strung out along the sandbars of the Gulf Coast and far up the wild rivers of what are now the southeast and midwestern United States, from the easternmost post of Fort Toulouse (1717) on the Tallapoosa River in present-day Alabama to the western factory at Natchitoches on the Red River (now Louisiana), and as far north as distant Fort Orleans (1723–26) on the Missouri River at the colony’s outer limit (Louisiana’s border with NouvelleFrance lay just under 200 miles southwest of today’s Chicago). Settlers endured insufferable heat, swarms of mosquitoes, snakes, and alligators. They also did not want to be there: nearly a fourth of the original male

28

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

population were so-called forçats: convicts, deserters, and other unfortunates whom the Crown compelled to settle one of its least popular colonies (the practice was finally discontinued in 1720).102 In fact France held onto Louisiana primarily for strategic reasons: by holding North America’s two greatest rivers, the St Lawrence and Mississippi, France could control the continent. It is therefore all the more remarkable that some strikingly grandiose buildings and urban schemes were designed for places like New Orleans (figs. 14.25, 16.22), Biloxi (fig. 9.7), and the swampy delta island of Balise (fig. 14.26). But Louisiana looked good on paper, at least at first. The first settlements were on the coast because large ships had trouble navigating the river, but in 1718 Nouvelle-Orléans (named after the duc d’Orléans) was founded on the Mississippi, 100 miles from the mouth between a crescent-shaped bend in the river and shallow Lake Pontchartrain to the north (it became the capital in 1722; fig. 9.9).103 Jesuit, Capuchin, and Ursuline religious administered the settlements and the missions alike, although with none of the millennialist zeal of their counterparts in Huronia in the 1640s: as W.J. Eccles bluntly put it, “there was no attempt to create a New Jerusalem on the Gulf Coast.”104 In 1712, when the colony amounted to fewer than two hundred settlers, a bankrupt Louis XIV handed Louisiana over to the merchant Antoine Crozat (1650–1738), who administered it in the king’s name and encouraged a trickle of emigration (twenty men or women a year) in return for a fifteen-year trade monopoly.105 This time no seigneuries were granted; instead, individual habitants were given concessions along the rivers where a unique palisaded form of plantation estate developed (fig. 3.6). The king even appointed a governor and commissaire ordinateur (who served as an intendant), and although both officially answered to the governor general and intendant in Quebec they were in fact administered by the Ministry of the Marine. But Crozat failed and Louisiana was subsequently handed over to John Law and his Mississippi Company in 1717. It would remain in company hands until 1731, eleven years after Law’s

spectacular fall from grace, when Louisiana came under direct Crown control. As I will treat Law’s Louisiana swindle and the vicious enmity between Louisianans and aboriginal peoples in the next two chapters, I shall now turn to the Caribbean. Although French pirates had been roaming the Antilles as early as the sixteenth century the first French settlement was founded on the Island of SaintChristophe (Saint Kitts) in 1625 by Richelieu’s Compagnie de Saint-Christophe, a motley bunch of merchants, brigands, and arms dealers led by the Norman ex-pirate Pierre Belain d’Esnambuc (1585– 1636), although two years later the island was divided into three and shared, sandwich-like, with the British.106 Saint-Christophe was soon famous the world over for the profligacy of its governor Philippe de Longvilliers de Poincy (1584–1660), who built the grandest chateau in French America (fig. 12.10).107 More significant, however, was the 1635 landing of Charles Liénard de l’Olive (d. 1643) and Jean du Plessis d’Ossonville (d. 1635) on Guadeloupe along with hundreds of Norman engagés (indentured workers), followed shortly by a settlement in Martinique founded by Jacques Dyel du Parquet (1606–1658). Du Plessis and L’Olive cared only about extracting the maximum wealth from Guadeloupe, and terrorized the engagés and Kalinago (Island Caribs) until famine, yellow fever, and Amerindian raids decimated the population and sent them into hiding in the southern redoubt of Vieux-Fort.108 The Martinique colony also faced repeated attacks from the Kalinago and habitants launched a ruthless counterattack so effective that no Amerindians were left on that island by the end of the century. Settlers immediately planted tobacco, then cacao and indigo.109 In 1649 the Compagnie des Îles d’Amérique – the new name of the Compagnie de Saint-Christophe – went bankrupt and the three islands were resold to private investors: Saint-Christophe to the Order of the Knights of Malta (of which Poincy was Commander), Martinique to Parquet, and Guadeloupe to Jacques de Boisseret (b. 1641) and his brother-in-law Governor Charles Houël (1617–1682). Dominican historian

Jean-Baptiste du Tertre (1610–1687) called this period the era of the “proprietary seigneurs.”110 The colonies experienced an unexpected bonanza with the arrival of several hundred Jewish refugees and their slaves from Brazil in 1654–56 after the Dutch were expelled from their short-lived colony there – thus introducing largescale sugar cane production into French territory for the first time – and Guadeloupe and Martinique transformed almost immediately into sugar islands, introducing so many slaves that by the eighteenth century African bondsmen outnumbered the whites several times over (see chapter 4).111 Colbert put an end to this era of private proprietorship with his Compagnie des Indes Occidentales (1664), forcing the seigneurs to sell the islands and even deporting some of them (including Houël) to France.112 The islands then fell under direct Crown rule after the Company’s failure in 1674, as happened in Nouvelle-France. Guadeloupe’s growing prosperity attracted English envy and England (it became Britain after the Acts of Union in 1707) tried to take the island in 1691, 1703, and 1759 – the last time successfully. I have already noted that Martinique suffered a similar fate. All of the islands were fiercely independent and each quarter had its own colonial militia led by a captain who was usually one of the major landowners – indeed at times they viewed Versailles and its laws as no less an enemy than Britain, and planter revolts like the 1717 Gaoulé uprising in Martinique were common.113 Colbert began reorganizing the administration of the Petites Antilles with a governor general located successively in Saint-Christophe (until 1671), in Saint-Pierre in Martinique (until 1691), and thenceforth at Fort-Royal on the same island. Saint-Domingue began inauspiciously in 1625 as a pirate lair on Tortuga Island (Tortue), from which people known as buccaneers (from boucan, a barbecue rack) raided the thinly settled west end of the Spanish island of Santo Domingo for wild cattle and pigs to sell for the smoked meat and skins.114 The French took control of Tortuga in 1659 and by 1665 enjoyed sovereignty over Grande-Terre, or “mainland” Saint-Domingue, although Spain only acknowledged France’s possession

Introduction

29

with the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697.115 The two colonies could not have been less alike: Santo Domingo was sparsely populated with more whites than slaves and Saint-Domingue became the most populous French colony with a slave community far outnumbering whites and free gens de couleur. Saint-Domingue was also heterogeneous from the very beginning, with buccaneers bumping up against a growing agricultural settler community.116 The colony’s divisive character would plague it throughout its history as it matured into an unbalanced and volatile combination of slaves, free people of colour, and whites – themselves divided between the “grands blancs” owning the plantations and the “petits blancs” who worked as artisans and tradesmen of the towns (see chapters 4–5). Saint-Domingue was also segmented politically. Its three semi-autonomous colonies – usually called “parties” at the time; they are variously termed “departments,” “provinces,” or “districts” in English – developed slowly. They comprised the Northern District of Cap-François and Tortuga, the Western District, known as Cul-de-Sac with Port-au-Prince and the Gulf of Gonâve, and the Southern District encompassing the south coast and Île-à-Vache – the latter practically empty until the eighteenth century. Saint-Domingue’s main population surge began in the first decades of the eighteenth century as it transformed into a plantation economy with nearly half a million slaves by the beginning of the Haitian Revolution in 1791.117 The colony’s capital shifted four times, from Petit-Goâve (1685–97) and Port-de-Paix (1697–1711) to the more populous Cap-François (1711–70), which would remain the cultural and financial capital, and finally to Port-au-Prince (1770–present).118 Le Cap grew into a major cosmopolitan city by the end of the French regime, with a theatre, newspaper (Affiches Américaines, an invaluable resource on colonial life), a learned society (Cercle des Philadelphes, founded in 1784), grand public promenades, and all the trappings of a rich satellite of France (figs. 10.10, 10.24).119 The free gens de couleur community was particularly influential, with mixed-race people becoming prosperous craftsmen and builders as well as

30

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

educated members of the bourgeoisie by the end of the French regime (see chapter 5).120 Saint-Domingue was also more directly tied to France than were the smaller islands (or, in their day, Nouvelle-France and Louisiana), since a large number of the plantation owners resided in France, unlike in Martinique or Guadeloupe where landowners tended to live on the islands (see chapter 6).121 The court of Louis XVI was full of nobles who married wealthy Saint-Domingue creoles to prop up their failing fortunes. The French Revolution had a catastrophic effect on the economy of the French West Indies, most obviously in Saint-Domingue, where the long, drawn-out Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) turned the “pearl of the Antilles” into a war zone and ended with independence, but also in Guadeloupe and Martinique.122 The French government freed all slaves in 1794, but SaintDomingue and Guadeloupe were the only islands actually to liberate them (Martinique had been seized by the slavery-friendly British) and the newly freed only enjoyed their status until 1802 when Napoleon – at the instigation of his Martinican consort Joséphine de Beauharnais – reinstated slavery.123 The institution took decades to stop. The trade in slaves was only prohibited with the fall of Napoleon in 1815, and even then it had little effect as French slave ships kept arriving in Caribbean ports until 1831, and enslaved people of African descent continued to toil in Martinique and Guadeloupe until the abolition of slavery itself in 1848.124 At the end of the Seven Years’ War everyone from the king on down were convinced that Guiana, their sole uncaptured territory, was the ideal place to make up for the loss of Quebec, even though it was an impenetrable rainforest with one of the most insalubrious climates in the Circum-Caribbean. Guiana was to be the site of vast new utopian settlements of immigrants from France, Ireland, and the German Palatinate, and authorities were so keen to increase the white population that they even admitted Protestants and Jews. In the next two chapters I will look in considerable detail at Kourou (founded 1764), the most disastrous of these fools’ errands resulting in thousands of deaths. However

France’s unhappy relationship with Guiana goes back much further: in fact Daniel de La Ravardière (1570– 1631) made the first attempt to found a colony there in 1604, the same year Champlain built the habitation at Île Sainte-Croix.125 La Ravardière was followed by many others. According to an official government mémoire: “In 1624 some merchants from Rouen established a little settlement of 26 men there in a place called Sinamary [Sinnamary], around 24 to 30 leagues to the northwest of the island of Cayenne. Two years later a more considerable colony went to establish itself on the River Conamama [Counamama] at six leagues from Sinamary.”126 In 1633 some remnants of these ventures managed to convince Cardinal Richelieu of the riches Guiana had to offer, and according to the same report “establishments were made at Cayenne itself in 1634 and 1636 where a fort was built near the western extremity of the island, at the mouth where the river formed the port, and above the fort, a town which has remained the capital [chef-lieu] of the colony” (fig. 8.18).127 Cayenne was enlarged in 1643 by Charles Poncet de Brétigny of the Compagnie de Rouen with four hundred men.128 A ruthless despot, Brétigny terrorized colonists and Amerindians alike until one of the latter named Pagaret split his head open with an axe in 1644. None of the surviving Frenchmen, including twenty-five in Fort Cépérou in Cayenne and a pair of Capuchins and a servant at a mission at Kourou made it out of Guiana alive. Unfazed, the Compagnie de la France Equinoxiale (or Compagnie des Douze Seigneurs, depending upon whom you asked) tried it all again in 1652 with twice as many colonists, but in short order they too were either killed by Amerindians or fled for Barbados.129 Of the 1,500 to 2,000 Frenchmen who tried to found colonies in Guiana not a single one remained in 1660.130 In 1664 Colbert ordered the reconquest of Cayenne (it had been taken by the Dutch in 1657), sending a formidable force of 1,200, and although the town fell twice again to foreign powers (to the English in 1666–67 and the Dutch again in 1676) it remained French until the Napoleonic wars. But it was not much of a victory: the sad little colony had a mere 100 plantations growing

indigo, cotton, and ginger and 16 large sugar mills, and by 1685 the total population, including slaves, remained at 1,682 compared to 30,000 in the West Indies.131 Its plantation owners were usually just petits colons (smallscale farmers) and Cayenne’s shallow harbour discouraged large-scale trade, so basic provisions, never mind luxury goods, were extremely scarce.132 Even missionaries had little to show for their efforts when compared to their counterparts in North America: although the Jesuits were in Guiana as early as 1653 and ended up building the largest house in Cayenne (figs. 16.6, 16.19– 20), only about a hundred Jesuits ever came to Guiana, and there were rarely more than ten there at a time, usually only five.133 As one ca. 1767 report put it: Guiana had “always remained in a state of languor,” with its tiny capital and a handful of villages along the littoral.134 The French colony of Senegal was even more of a fiction than Guiana. Until the mid-nineteenth century the French were isolated on two tiny islands off the coast. The more populous was Île de Gorée, a Dutch trading factory since 1588 (it was probably named after the Dutch island of Goeree in Zeeland) which the French captured in 1677. The smaller one was Saint-Louis, a tongue-shaped spit of land on the mouth of the Senegal River, which was their first outpost there and home of the director-general in 1659.135 Gold had been the principal lure since the Portuguese began exploring the region in the sixteenth century, but the French found little and turned quickly to slaves and gum arabic, the chief commodity of the Senegal River. Senegal never sold slaves on the massive scale of the European trading posts on the Guinea coast or Angola, although it was a vital refreshment stop for ships heading to those regions, and Louis XIV explicitly stated that Gorée’s primary role was “to protect the trade in Blacks.”136 By the end of the seventeenth century France’s largest colony in Africa was a relative disaster: as Naval Lieutenant Jean-Baptiste Du Casse pointed out in 1688, “The Island of Gorée … cannot even defend itself against a small sloop … its commerce is totally ruined … [Fort] St. Louis in Senegal is in the same pitiful state … I must observe that if your Lordship does not withdraw its

Introduction

31

concession from this Company, it will ruin itself.”137 Despite these unpromising beginnings, French financiers aggressively invested in Senegal through Louis XIV’s reign and afterward, which manifested itself in the architecture there and especially the Jardin du Roi on Île de Gorée (figs. 11.7–10). Unlike in the Americas, the French never settled on the mainland in Africa, which remained firmly in the hands of indigenous rulers to whom they paid annual fees and who became their trading partners. At best French companies maintained small temporary trading posts (comptoirs) in the north at Arguin (in presentday Mauritania and belonging to the Brakna and Trarza tribes) and at Galam, 400 miles up the Senegal River (1699) – as well as on the south coast at Albréda (part of the Kingdom of Bar), Rufisque (home of the king, or damel, of Cayor/Kajor), Portudal (part of the Kingdom of Baol or Bawol), and Joal (belonging to the Kingdom of Sin/Siin). Since almost every comptoir had its own king, France was obliged to practise the most delicate diplomacy simply to survive: as an eighteenth-century mémoire bluntly put it, “this is not at all a territorial concession; France can neither grant nor clear [land]” and the French are “only proprietors of commerce and not of the country.”138 Even Gorée officially belonged to the King of Cayor. Louis XIII and his two successors chartered a bewildering panoply of about ten often overlapping companies to West Africa, which makes studying the documentation of French Senegal in this period extremely challenging.139 Nevertheless by 1684 they had coalesced into two entities, with everything north of the Gambia River going to the Compagnie du Sénégal and everything south to the Compagnie de Guinée, although both corporations underwent further name, ownership, and territorial changes over the course of the next century.140 The companies with jurisdiction over Senegal failed to create wealth, and their problems were exacerbated by combining two irreconcilable economic models, a tax-leasing consortium (based on tax-farming ventures) and a proprietary company (like those in the Americas), as Kenneth J. Banks notes.141

32

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

The English captured all of the French posts in Senegal during the Seven Years’ War in 1758, and while Gorée was returned to the French in 1768 and became the seat of the governor, Saint-Louis remained in British hands until 1779 (the British took both islands again during the Napoleonic Wars in 1809–17).142 The population remained small: Saint-Louis had about a dozen permanent dwellings in 1785 and just over five thousand occupants by 1790, and Gorée was home to only two thousand people.143 Nevertheless a flourishing métis culture developed in both towns among the gens de couleur, particularly the so-called signares (after the Portuguese senhora), mixed-race women unofficially married to French traders in what was called mariage à la mode du pays.144 As an intermediary group between whites and mainland Africans – they were Catholic (grumets) and loyal to the French but had ties with indigenous groups well inland – they became significant property owners, merchants, community leaders, and, quite literally, founders of a new mixed-race population on both islands (fig. 16.33). Signares married French traders or officials, and lived with them in their grand houses on the northeast shore of Gorée or southern Saint-Louis until the man returned to France for good or died, at which point they had the freedom and wherewithal to remarry. The men benefited because it gave them social and commercial access to African culture.145 Their children took their father’s surname and became leaders in society in a way that was not possible for gens de couleur in the West Indies (see chapter 5). Hilary Jones goes so far as to say that “Saint Louis would not have existed as a viable port town if not for the role that African women played in facilitating commerce, providing domestic services for European men, and producing a class of individuals with the cultural dexterity required to serve as intermediaries and cultural brokers.”146 In addition to their factories in Senegal, the French had founded on Colbert’s recommendation a fort called Fort Saint-Louis in Juda (Ouidah) on the Bight of Benin (fig. 11.11) – well east of a string of important stone fortresses and castles built by the Portuguese, British,

and Dutch, on the Gold Coast, a prime location where the French never managed to obtain a permanent beachhead (fig. 12.8).147 Built in 1671 it was the first of three European forts in the settlement (the British and Portuguese followed suit), and it featured a grand formal garden that dwarfed the little mud-brick fort.148 Nothing could be further from a bastion to French glory. As with the comptoirs of Senegal, the post was entirely in the hands of indigenous rulers, particularly after 1741 when the powerful kings of Dahomey began to administer Ouidah: the kings did not allow the French to have military titles or to call their settlement a fort; the French were forced to keep peace with their British counterparts even during wartime; and they expelled French administrators at will, the last one in 1791 when the fort was finally abandoned. The main reason the French Atlantic Empire failed to coalesce in the manner of its Iberian or English counterparts was that it was an empire which existed

as much on paper and in people’s imaginations as it did in reality – a top-down empire burdened by fantastic schemes and produced by centuries of whitewashing over the inconvenient realities of geography, demographic disparities, and military capacity. But as we have seen, this geopolitical illusion reflected a fundamental aspect of early modern France itself. Back in Europe the very idea of the pré carré was itself a propaganda stunt – tellingly, Bittering calls it an act of “interior colonization” – a campaign to turn one of the continent’s most fractious nations into a unified, centralized state.149 If France itself was not yet a cohesive cultural reality, how could French officials hope to create one overseas where the conditions were so much more different and difficult to control? This book will show that despite gargantuan efforts applied over centuries and massive, costly, and opulent buildings, gardens, and urban schemes constructed by people of often prodigious talent, this illusion of a colonial pré carré would vanish like smoke.

Introduction

33

2

Ideology and Reality in the French Atlantic Empire

the French coloniAl enterPrise was plagued throughout its history by a striking disparity between ideology and reality, revealed particularly in its geography and demographics. In sharp contrast to the conception of the centrally organized, enclosed territorial realm of the pré carré in France – or to the efficient administration of Spain’s American viceroyalties, ruled from above but using local knowledge – France’s supposedly homogeneous empire, built in the motherland’s image, was fragmented, disorganized, and poorly interconnected across impossible distances, its societies formed haphazardly by rich seigneurs and plantation owners, petits blancs, buccaneers, slaves, gens de couleur, and the widest spectrum of indigenous peoples: “a loose chain of isolated establishments, separated from one another by wide expanses of water and wilderness … a huge, ungainly child … difficult to love.”1 Levels of state control and populations varied enormously, from large-scale white settlements protected by troops as in Quebec to mud brick or palisaded trading posts in the heart of powerful indigenous nations as at Ouidah. From the very beginning the French Atlantic Empire existed more on paper than in actuality. The Iberian empires were huge but contiguous, with cities, major towns, and villages leading from Santiago in Chile to Zacatecas in New Spain, linked by well-kept highways

like the famed Ruta de la Plata between the silver mines of Potosí (now Bolivia) and the port of Arica (now Chile), efficiently maintained by indigenous labour and supplied by mule trains.2 By contrast, if you were to draw an X between the four outermost French American possessions, one from Lake Superior to French Guiana and the other from Newfoundland to Saint-Domingue, each 3,700-mile-long leg would traverse territories belonging to the Spanish, British, Dutch, and others, not to mention vast expanses of sea and comparably immense parts of the North and South American continents that remained firmly in Amerindian hands. Geography also affected the different colonies’ contact with the metropole: it took twice as long to go from France to Quebec as it did to the Caribbean islands or Cape Breton – not to mention that Quebec was cut off from the world when the St Lawrence froze over during the long Canadian winter and condemned its scorbutic denizens to brutal isolation – and while it was relatively easy to sail from Martinique to Cayenne, 1,200 kilometres away, it could take a month or more to go the other way against the headwinds, making it impossible to use Guiana to provision the islands and ensuring that it remained the most neglected of the colonies.3 Although it looked like one of France’s largest land masses on maps, Louisiana in 1730 was still 90 per cent Amerindian in population, possessed a climate which regularly decimated the white habitants, and attracted few Europeans.4 John Darwin’s comments about the global British Empire could just as easily apply to the French Atlantic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: “Empire” is a grand word. But behind its façade … stood a mass of individuals, a network of lobbies, a mountain of hopes: for careers, fortunes, religious salvation or just physical safety. Empires were not made by faceless committees making grand calculations, nor by the “irresistible” pressures of economics or ideology. They had to be made by men (and women) whose actions were shaped by motives and morals no less confused and demanding

than those that govern us now … The result was an empire of hybrid components, conflicting traditions, and unsettled boundaries between races and peoples: a source of constant unease as well as extraordinary energy.5 The reality in French America was more like the Portuguese Empire in Asia: a series of outposts, entrepôts, and factories like Goa or Macau, almost exclusively situated on riverbanks, the seashore, or on islands, allowing easy access, departure, and defence. Very few settlements were linked by roads so that communication was dependent upon pirogues, canoes, and ships. Nothing could be further from the French dream of a geographical area which could be “conceived as a whole, managed, and improved” as prevailed in France under Louis XIV within its ceinture de fer.6 Part of the problem was that mapmakers were ahead of the game: this period witnessed great advances in the science of cartography and of measuring the earth, and the legions of arpenteurs (cartographers) working for the corps of engineers were able more efficiently and accurately to reconstruct the territories to which France laid claim than the French were able to claim them.7 Sitting in their offices in Versailles, the Ministry of the Marine could peruse beautifully rendered, detailed, and convincing evidence of a kind of suzerainty that simply did not exist. But France’s imperial facade was not merely the product of over-zealous cartographers: it was intentional government policy. Like mapmaking, the laying out of grand gardens as a symbol of territorial rule, or Colbert’s rush to create a unified French style in architecture and luxury goods, the chimera of the French Atlantic Empire gave the Crown a compelling fiction with which it could wow its rivals and, perhaps most importantly, satisfy its citizens: people who over the course of the eighteenth century became increasingly estranged from the monarchy. As Chandra Mukerji notes about the ideology of the ceinture de fer in France: “it projected a false vision of French unity and well-being that turned out to be all too effective. The exorbitance of the French court ironically helped

Ideology and Reality

35

frighten French enemies … Exquisite goods and their ostentatious display were clearly taken seriously as an expression of geopolitical power.”8 One illusion was demographic. In the French Atlantic Empire settler populations were paltry compared to their British and Iberian counterparts, and in North America and Guiana they were vastly outnumbered by Amerindians, who were left out of French censuses. According to one count, between 1500 and 1750 only 60,000–100,000 French colonists departed for the Americas, compared to 746,000 Britons, 678,000 Spaniards, and 523,000 Portuguese (the Dutch, by contrast, sent only 20,000), yet France was by far the largest country in Europe with a population of nearly 20 million.9 Furthermore, many of the people in French colonial towns were not French: Philip Boucher characterizes a typical Antillean town before the 1660s as including, “Catholic Irish, Dutch Calvinists from Europe or those fleeing Brazil, [and] Portuguese Jews from the same area.”10 Even some of the royal engineer architects, like Captain Burke O’Farrell, designer of a standardized structural system for government buildings in Saint-Louis (Senegal) in 1822, came from Ireland (fig. 13.21). Most infamously, in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Frenchmen were matched and then outstripped in number several times over by African slaves – settlers too, but unwilling ones. In fact more African immigrants reached French America as a whole – even if we include Nouvelle-France – than any other ethnic group.11 Furthermore, three out of four white people who settled in the colonies returned to France. The relatively prosperous French peasantry on the whole showed remarkably little interest in emigration as they owned nearly half the land and enjoyed secure property rights. On the other end of the social scale, the wealthy grands blancs of eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue spoke constantly of their return to France, treating their sojourn on the island as a kind of get-rich-quick scheme, although families held onto plantations for generations, often running them from France under the supervision of an overseer (géreur). Historian Médéric Louis Élie

36

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

Moreau de Saint-Méry commented in the years before the Revolution that “the general mania is to speak of returning or to travel to France. Everyone repeats that he will leave the following years, and no one thinks of himself as anything more than a traveller in a land where so often he finds his final home.”12 Although through the course of the eighteenth century these arm’s-length colonists were balanced by a growing American-born population who felt that the Antilles or Quebec were home and had no desire to go to France except perhaps to be educated, the overall number of returnees was strikingly large. By contrast the Spanish emigrated on such a massive scale – an average of about 2,500 a year left in the sixteenth century – that it threatened to empty entire regions such as Castile by the eighteenth century, causing serious concern within the government.13 English emigration to the Americas exceeded 400,000 in the seventeenth century alone – four times that of the French in the whole colonial period. Nouvelle-France in particular offered little incentive to migrate. The region had a fearsome reputation as a place of glacial winters and murderous indigenes, spread by sensationalist Jesuit letters and fanciful stories by the likes of Rabelais (1494–1553) and Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655): in the words of Intendant Jacques de Meulles (d. 1703) in the 1680s, “Canada has always been regarded as a country at the end of the world, and as an exile that might almost pass for a [sentence] of death.”14 The voyage, lasting anywhere from a few weeks to a few months, was as terrifying as the destination: as late as the middle of the eighteenth century it was considered fortunate if fewer than 10 per cent of the passengers on the passage to Canada survived and on journeys where fever had taken hold more arrived dead than alive.15 Small wonder that the French gladly traded this largest colony, which Voltaire famously dismissed in Candide (1759) as “a few acres of snow” (“quelques arpents de neige”) for the tiny but lucrative sugar islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique. Consequently the French Atlantic Empire lacked the urban density it appeared to have on maps. The Iberian

empires were empires of cities and large towns, an urban culture even if dependent upon the land. The French Empire had real towns – some of them quite large by colonial standards, particularly in the later eighteenth century in places like Cap-François – but true power rested with the seigneurs and plantation owners along the rivers and coasts and there was no equivalent to the village, the “most common form of collective domicile in France.”16 The traveller Francis Alexander Stanislaus, baron de Wimpffen, who travelled through Saint-Domingue in the late 1780s, was particularly surprised at the difference between preconceived notions and reality when he visited the town of Jacmel: “When I honour Jacquemel with the name of a town, you are not, Sir, to take the expression literally: for surely a few wooden barracks spread over a beach, or scattered up and down the acclivities of a rugged and stony eminence, were never yet supposed to constitute a town. With the exception, however, of Cape François, this is the definition of all you will find in St. Domingo.”17 Colonial “villages” (bourgs) were above all places that served the economic, religious, and social needs of the habitants in the countryside, meeting places more than places of residence, with merchants’ magasins, artisans’ workshops, and churches, but unlike the government capitals such as Basse-Terre or Saint-Pierre they were not true administrative centres like a French mairie; neither were they the “heart” nor even the most populous part of a region.18 Colonial bourgs almost always appeared spontaneously rather than having been planned in advance, and unlike the large towns with their gridiron streets, fountains, theatres, and public squares they were often little more than a few haphazard houses strung along the shoreline (fig. 10.3). The French belief that these bourgs were true villages in the European sense was yet another illusion created by arpenteurs and their elaborate, beautifully rendered town plans. Permanence was another issue. Except for a few episodes such as the Dutch occupation of Pernambuco (1630–1654) or Henry Morgan’s spectacular sack of Panamá Vieja (1671), most Iberian territories

remained in Spanish and Portuguese hands for over three hundred years. Proof of this was the fact that outside the Caribbean and some Pacific coastal ports, Hispanic American towns were almost never fortified. French possessions, by contrast, were nearly all fortified at least with a battery on the shoreline, and they frequently changed hands as British, Dutch, and Spanish navies captured islands and river fortresses, then handed them back (or not, in the case of Nouvelle-France after the Treaty of Paris in 1763), so that during some periods places like Martinique – British in 1762–63, 1792–1802, and 1809–14 – seemed to be the victim of an international game of musical chairs. Pointe-à-Pitre, soon to be the largest port in Guadeloupe, was actually first laid out by the British during their sojourn there (1759–63), although it was officially refounded by the French in 1768 in a kind of nationalist exorcism.19 Louis XIV was obsessed with dominating Europe, as was Napoleon, but neither of them showed a comparable commitment to their overseas possessions, the former seeing the colonies as “small change” (his own words) and the latter selling Louisiana to the United States in 1803 and letting SaintDomingue, the jewel in France’s colonial crown, slip away in 1804 – less than a year before his spectacular victory over Austria and Russia at Austerlitz.20 Distances and geography also wreaked havoc with any attempts at unity within France’s colonial enterprise. Colonists in the West Indies were closer to France than they were to New France, and even in a single island colony such as Saint-Domingue, difficulties of communication caused by high mountains, lack of highways until the 1780s, and limited arable land meant that the three districts developed independent characters: to put all of this in context, it took two or more weeks by sea to get from Cap-François in the Northern District to Port-au-Prince in the Western District.21 Indeed the three districts were as different from each other as they were from the colonies in the Lesser Antilles, nearly 750 miles away – a difference with a direct impact on architecture since each district had its own building style and used different materials.22

Ideology and Reality

37

Utopias and Financial Schemes The separation between idealism and reality ran deeper than unsubstantiated geographical claims or low white populations. The French Atlantic Empire seems to have been particularly prone to utopian fantasies and dubious financial schemes, manifested in the very names they gave to new territories, Acadia (from Arcadia), being the most famous example. This is not to say that Hispanic America was a stranger to utopianism (or mad quests for El Dorado for that matter, some of them successful), but there the social experiments were religious in nature and mostly took place much earlier, in an era when an essentially medieval spirit of apocalyptic expectation was still current, whereas the French experiments were decidedly secular, the most outlandish of them taking place when the Enlightenment was in full swing. These schemes are especially important for our purposes since whenever they advanced to the stage of formal planning they had a direct impact on urban design, generating geometrically ideal city plans based on a grid of streets (figs. 9.10–12) – itself an idea used in the earliest years of the Spanish conquest (figs. 9.1–2) but with origins in the Italian Renaissance and manifestations in France itself. They usually focused on a central public square, occasionally overlaid with avenues formed of radiating diagonals, and enclosed within idealized ramparts such as circles, squares, or ovals (see chapter 9).23 In Spanish America the earliest, and among the most radical, experiments in utopian living were pursued by Mendicant missionaries after the fall of the Aztec and Inca states in the 1520s and 1550s. Franciscans in particular sought to create ideal Amerindian Christian societies in preparation for the arrival of the Third Age when a New Jerusalem would be founded on earth prior to the Day of Judgment – a millennialist program inspired by the Apocalyptic prophesies of the twelfth-century abbot Joachim of Fiore. However these utopian towns were also quite literally motivated by Thomas More’s Utopia (1516): the first bishop of Mexico, the Franciscan Juan de Zumárraga

38

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

(1468–1548), possessed a copy of the book, and it inspired Don Vasco de Quiroga (ca. 1470–1565), bishop of Michoacán, to build community hospices in the string of mission centres he founded on Lake Pátzcuaro.24 Many of the first generation of Mendicants in New Spain and the Andes demonstrated a keen interest in indigenous culture, translated indigenous poetry and theatre, adapted Amerindian dance, music, and even sacred texts to Christian worship. These experiments also led the Franciscans (beginning in 1575) and later the Jesuits (from 1609) to found a string of what became gargantuan model mission towns among the Guaraní peoples far from white settlements in present-day Paraguay, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay – the famed “Paraguay Reductions,” an enterprise which inspired the Jesuit missions in Nouvelle-France (in 1632 Cardinal Richelieu had given the Jesuits exclusive rights to convert the Amerindians of Canada, which they enjoyed until the 1660s) and in Guiana (fig. 2.1).25 Like their sixteenth-century predecessors, the Paraguay missionaries accommodated to aspects of Guaraní culture, assuming the role of karai, or indigenous “great shaman,” adopting Guaraní forms of communal land ownership, and emulating Guaraní forms of rhetoric. French utopian schemes had less to do with Thomas More or religion than with commercial and political interests, as with sixteenth-century attempts to locate a mythical island of gold called Saguenay up the Ottawa River, or the quartz and pyrite “diamonds” and “gold” dug up at Charlesbourg-Royal, near the future site of Quebec City, which settlers brought home in 1541 to their subsequent embarrassment.26 In fact this

2.1 (opposite) Anonymous, Village of San Juan which is one of the ones on the Uruguay [River] which they intend to hand over to Portugal, 1756. This painting shows the Reduction of San Juan Bautista, founded in 1697 but mostly dating from the eighteenth century. The long apartment blocks lined up around the square with exterior stone colonnades are for Amerindian housing and the church faces the square at the top of the picture. The Jesuit residence and courtyards are at the top. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département Cartes et Plans.

disappointing return on investment, combined with civil war in France, was enough to discourage further attempts to colonize North America until the following century. Many French schemes combined attempts to find El Dorado with proposals to found ideal, rational societies. Such was Sieur d’Accarette’s 1669 plan to establish a giant French colony in what is now Argentina, between the River Plate and the straights of Magellan and extending westward to the “montagnes du Chili.”27 It was to have one of the greatest harbours in the world, abundant pasturage and farmland, exploitable Amerindians, easy access to slaves across the Atlantic in Angola or Kongo, and untold varieties of edible fauna, “above all Penguins, which are a large species of bird like a goose and very good to eat, of which one sees colonies so numerous that if you salted them you could keep yourself in provisions for several months.” D’Accarette’s scheme was only the latest in a succession of French efforts to colonize parts of southern South America, as with Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon’s “Antarctic France” (1555–60) and Daniel de La Ravardière’s first expedition to Guiana (1604), both mentioned in chapter 1.28 The interior of Guiana was particularly favoured by hopeful speculators – the mythical king El Dorado was quite literally thought to be living up one of its rivers in a town called Manoa – and they extolled its natural wonders and hidden wealth to a succession of gullible French monarchs and ministry officials.29 As late as 1777 Abbé Jacquemin, the curate of the little coastal town of Sinnamary (fig. 3.18), wrote a glowing report about Guiana’s unlocked wealth, praising at first its abundant fish, game, birds, and trees and the ease of growing crops, but concluding that it also “has the wherewithal to create a rich and flourishing kingdom, where we will soon find mines of gold, silver and other riches locked in the bowels of the earth, because this country probably contains as much as Chile, Paraguay and Brazil, which it borders.”30 Old fantasies, it would seem, die hard. The most notorious utopian scheme in Guiana was the ill-fated new colony of Kourou (figs. 3.19–21). It was founded on top of a Jesuit reduction in 1763 on the coast

40

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

between Sinnamary and Cayenne, complete with a Place Royale and monumental statue of Louis XV, and was to have sufficient housing for almost 17,000 immigrants, including Frenchmen, Germans, displaced Acadians, and Irishmen from Newfoundland.31 Conceived as a white colony on the model of Anglo-America to compensate for the loss of Nouvelle-France the same year, it had an ambitious Enlightenment agenda, including freedom of religion for Protestants and Jews, abolition of the death penalty except for lèse-majesté (crimes against the sovereign), premeditated murder and other major felonies, and a prohibition on the introduction of new slaves – ironic given that the colony was mostly built by them – although people who already owned slaves were allowed to keep them.32 This shining white city was to be a testament to the superiority of the Caucasian race: the king proclaimed that “the intention of His Majesty is to establish a colony of whites … because this population is more compatible with the views of Justice & of Humanity which animate His Majesty.”33 Although even its chief advocate, Foreign Minister Étienne-François, the duc de Choiseul (1719–1785), called the project a “fantasy” in a letter to Voltaire in 1763 (although he meant it positively), the philosophes saw it as the new best thing: Denis Diderot sent his own cousin there, and Voltaire enthusiastically recruited emigrants.34 Kourou turned out to be one of the most large-scale immigration schemes in the history of colonialism and one of its greatest disasters: as many people shipped out from the three main French Atlantic ports to Kourou as to all of Nouvelle-France before 1759, and within months nine thousand of them were slain by infectious disease, the rest of the colonists fleeing for France and safer colonies, where many more perished.35 The French Crown lost 20 million livres tournois for its efforts, and although intendant of Guiana Jean-Baptiste Thibault de Chanvalon (1723–1788) spent almost fifteen years in prison for his role in the disaster, the main perpetrators, including Étienne-François Turgot (1721–1789), governor general of Guiana and commander in chief of the expedition – not to mention Choiseul – got away scot-free.36 Undeterred, the French

kept at it, hiring the same overseer to re-establish Kourou on a more modest scale less than ten years later, and founding further utopian settlements in strategic locations on the Approuague (1789; fig. 9.16) and Mana (1820–24) Rivers, farther to the west. In the end France settled upon a dystopia: the notorious penal system (la bagne), which lasted from 1852 to 1938 and made Guiana world famous as a place of convicts, lost hopes, and inhuman torture (see chapter 17). The kind of starry-eyed thinking that led to the catastrophe at Kourou also made the French Atlantic Empire the scene of two of France’s greatest financial swindles, both almost destroying the French economy and one of them setting into motion the ruin of one of the world’s most successful religious orders. The first was the famed “Mississippi Bubble,” the 1719–20 financial crash resulting from the colonial and financial misadventures of Edinburgh-born financier John Law.37 Decades of Louis XIV’s profligate militarism had reduced France to bankruptcy and Louis XV’s regent, the duc d’Orléans (1715–22), welcomed Law enthusiastically even though the latter had fled Britain on a murder conviction. Law soon persuaded the regent that he would eliminate the national debt if he were allowed to open a bank for issuing paper money, the Banque Générale (it became the Banque Royale in 1719). In 1717 he acquired and issued shares for the Compagnie d’Occident (popularly known as the Mississippi Company), which had the monopoly on trade with the fledgling colony of Louisiana and on trade in beaver skins from Nouvelle-France, promising settlers and especially investors great returns on their investment through (among other things) tobacco plantations that would rival those of the Chesapeake and gold and silver mines that would put Peru to shame.38 Soon the company secured a monopoly on all France’s colonial trade, acquiring a slew of companies involved in Africa and Asia between 1717 and 1720, and in 1719 taking on the name of Compagnie des Indes. The speculative frenzy caused by the astronomical yet artificial rise in value in 1719 of the company’s shares, which could be purchased either with bank notes or

government bonds called billets d’état – today we would call them “junk bonds” – caused hyperinflation by encouraging the government to issue ever greater quantities of paper money unsupported by gold reserves. For a short time Paris was thronged with “millionaires” (the term was coined during this episode), made instantly rich by their investments in Law’s shares. However by 1719 investors started madly selling off their shares and the government refused to accept further payments in paper. Meanwhile, Law’s promise to turn Louisiana into France’s greatest tobacco producer had failed miserably.39 The Scottish banker’s fall from grace was spectacular and fast, and this former duc d’Arkansas was forced to flee his 500,000 creditors to Venice in late 1720, his ventures sparking what one historian has called “the first international financial crisis in world history.”40 The beleaguered Louisiana colony also witnessed a humanitarian crisis which anticipated that of Kourou four decades later: hundreds of colonists, including tradesmen and labourers from France and Germanic lands, who had travelled to the colony between 1717 and 1721, died of starvation and disease.41 The Compagnie des Indes limped along for another ten years but France had little interest in its Mississippi colony and happily handed it over to Spain in 1763. Even this ignominious end did not prevent a late eighteenth-century French huckster named Captain Bonnevie from remarking, as part of a recommendation for a re-establishment of the French colony of Louisiana, that “[i]t is easy to predict that New Orleans will one day be the greatest city in the world.”42 The second great financial disaster was the so-called Lavalette affair, the economic collapse of the Jesuits in Martinique brought about by the dubious business practices of Jesuit Superior Antoine Lavalette (or La Valette, 1708–67), a “marvellous charmer” who not only bankrupted his own order but gave France the excuse they needed to expel the Jesuits from all French territories in 1764, contributing significantly to the worldwide suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773.43 In an attempt to enrich the Jesuit headquarters at Saint-Pierre (fig. 11.13), Lavalette became involved in

Ideology and Reality

41

a portfolio of increasingly convoluted business deals that transgressed French and canon law alike. His litany of schemes included building ten houses along the Saint-Pierre River as rental properties; acquiring a Crown contract to sell wood to the navy; speculating on island currency by acting as an agent to colonists who wanted to transfer money to France; employing a network of unscrupulous (and non-Catholic) agents to sell the products of nearby islands such as Grenada, Saint Lucia, and Saint Vincent in defiance of the exclusif; purchasing hundreds more slaves than the one hundred allotted each religious order by the Crown; trading with the British during wartime; and buying extensive sugar, coffee, and other plantations in Dominica, an island where there were no laws of mortmain to prevent religious orders from developing commercial land.44 In 1755 two of his chartered ships, bursting with merchandise, were seized by the British Navy and his financial empire soon collapsed. By 1762 the Martinique Jesuits were a staggering 5,000,000 livres tournois in debt. Lavalette was removed from office in May 1762, but it was too late for the Society of Jesus in France, who were compelled to pay his creditors and await their fate. The Curious Case of the French Colonial Church The scattershot nature of the French Empire created other unexpected complications. One major issue was the impracticality of running a colonial church when the only bishop was in Quebec City. By contrast, most major and even many mid-sized cities in Spanish and Portuguese America were the seat of a bishopric – well over forty in total – so that local parishes and missions were closely monitored by church hierarchy and the state. In addition, each Iberian American town boasted foundations from the major religious orders, male and female, featuring churches often of cathedral dimensions. Religion played an immensely greater role in the built environment and daily life of the Iberian colonies than it did in those belonging to France. Spain and Portugal were authorized by a papal mandate in 1493 known as the Bulls of Donation to occupy

42

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

the Americas with the purpose of converting indigenous people, and the Spanish and Portuguese crowns directly managed the colonial Church, including missions, by right of an early sixteenth-century papal decree known as Patronato in Spain and Padroado in Portugal (“Patronate,” or guardianship).45 Spanish and Portuguese monarchs were empowered to appoint bishops, license churchmen and control their movements, intervene in matters of religious and spiritual jurisdiction, collect tithes, and supervise the construction of religious buildings. France had no such mandate – in fact France transgressed it in the very act of crossing the Atlantic – but the French kings compensated by declaring very loudly and from the very beginning that evangelization was their primary goal in conquering and colonizing the Americas. In his 1533 commission to Jacques Cartier to claim Nouvelle-France, King François I (1515–47) – a particularly vocal opponent of Hispanic claims on the Americas – declared that the explorer must work “to increase the holy and sacred name of God among the indigenous people whom he encounters from Newfoundland to Hochelaga [Montreal],” and one of Cartier’s first acts was to raise a 30-foot cross on the Gaspé Peninsula the following year before a crowd of bemused Iroquoians.46 François reiterated France’s sacred aims eight years later in his instructions to Jean de la Rocque, Seigneur de Roberval (1500–60), that he should “inhabit the aforesaid lands and countries and build there towns and fortresses, temples and churches, to constitute and to establish law and peace, by officers of justice so that they [the Native Americans] may live by reason and civility (police).”47 Faced with Spanish and papal protests that he was infringing upon their sphere of interest, his successor King Henri IV (1589–1610) restated that France’s main goal was proselytization and that every Catholic ruler had the right to conquer territory in the name of the True Faith – as he demonstrated by ordering forty Capuchin friars to the short-lived French colony of Maragnan in the Bay of Maranhão (Brazil) – they only arrived there after the king’s assassination, between 1612 and 1615.48 In 1615 Louis XIII

(r. 1610–43) followed suit by commanding Samuel de Champlain to send the first four missionary friars to Nouvelle-France, members of the branch of observant Franciscans known as the Recollects (Récollets).49 The tide turned in France’s favour with the foundation in 1622 of the Sacred Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith, a papal institute for missionary activities and later a missionary college, which gave the pope an official “organ of missionary centralization” that could override the Iberian Patronate system and support French missionary activities in the colonies.50 The Congregation authorized a branch in Paris called the Séminaire des Missions Étrangères (1663), which, although at first primarily concerned with French missions in Asia, further strengthened France’s hand in overriding the Patronate system in the Americas.51 Consequently, when Louis XIII established the first trading company in Canada, the Compagnie des Cent-Associés pour le Commerce du Canada (1627), he took the moral high road, telling them to go forth “for the purpose of attempting, with divine assistance, to bring the peoples who inhabit them to the knowledge of the true God, to civilize them (les faire policer), and to instruct them in the faith and Apostolic, Catholic, and Roman religion,” promising them all of the rights of a native Frenchman, including that of property inheritance.52 As Florence Artigas has noted, “The deed of establishment of the Compagnie des Cent-Associés testified that religion was the most solid basis for New France and the apostolate, the real purpose of colonisation.”53 It also meant that the king delegated the task of paying missionaries to the Company until the Crown assumed direct control in 1663. But there was as yet no concerted effort toward missionary activity except in Nouvelle-France, where the Recollects and Jesuits, supported by private funding and disliked by merchants, were already active in the 1610s: before 1635 only a handful of secular priests from Normandy accompanied the first settlers to the Antilles.54 France obtained more direct legal backing for its actions in 1635 when Richelieu won the king approval from Pope Urban VIII to send Capuchins,

Dominicans, Jesuits (already in Acadia in 1611 but in the Antilles from 1640), and later Carmelites (1646) to the Caribbean, Nouvelle-France, and Guiana, “thus tacitly revoking traditional papal support for Iberian claims to a monopoly in the Americas.”55 The Recollect Franciscans, although active in Canada between 1615 and 1632, were not included in this effort as they had already been forbidden to return to the colony.56 Establishing a bishopric in Quebec was only achieved slowly through byzantine loopholes in canon law. In 1658, Pope Alexander VII made Quebec an Apostolic Vicariate (a temporary jurisdiction for mission territories where a diocese had yet to be established).57 Meanwhile, François-Xavier de Montmorency-Laval (1623–1708), its first incumbent, was made bishop – but of somewhere else. His diocese was the essentially fictitious missionary post of Petrea, near Thessalonica in present-day Greece and then firmly in the hands of the Ottoman Turks (as his title put it, he was bishop in partibus infidelum, in the land of the unbelievers). Therefore, although technically a bishop he was only permitted the title of vicar apostolic in Quebec until that city was finally elevated to a bishopric in 1674, although that did not stop Laval from establishing a seminary there in 1663. The Crown tried the same thing in Louisiana in 1713, appointing Capuchin LouisFrançois Duplessis de Mornay (1663–1741) as bishop of Eumeneia (another Ottoman city, now Çivril in Antatolia), in partibus infidelum, as co-adjutor to the bishop of Quebec. However Mornay never left his abbey in Meudon, even after succeeding Jean-Baptiste SaintVallier as bishop of Quebec in 1727, and he resigned his post six years later rather than cross the Atlantic.58 Under Louis XIV and Louis XV (from at least 1666 to 1754) France continued to advertise its increasingly mercantile imperial enterprise as a holy crusade by sponsoring so-called prises de possessions, elaborate, choreographed events involving processions, chanting, and singing, Te Deum masses, the firing of muskets, bonfires, documents of dubious legality, and above all the raising of a cross and/or a pole bearing a plaque with the royal arms, echoing Cartier’s act of over a

Ideology and Reality

43

century earlier. As Manuel Servin has shown, the religious nature of these cross-plantings was amplified over the course of Louis’s reign.59 Dominique Deslandres remarks that they were aimed neither at the indigenous people who happened to attend nor at rival European powers but at the French themselves, and that they were less about actual land conquered than about France’s right to do so in the future, declaring as vassal states indigenous groups who were in fact fully in charge.60 These ceremonies’ relationship to the actual state of French settlement was often laughably tenuous, as with the 1671 ceremony at Sainte-Marie-du-Sault in which Daumont de Saint-Lusson laid claim to the vastness of the western Great Lakes (Pays de l’Ouest) for Louis XIV. In Louisiana, the French crosses raised along the banks of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers were so numerous that they also conveniently served as “the earliest aids to navigation.”61 In 1663 Louis XIV was still declaring that the “conversion of the natives (sauvages)” was one of his sacred duties, with trade still officially treated as something of secondary interest, and Colbert announced in 1667 that indigenous people should be integrated completely with French settlements, a policy which later clashed with that of the Jesuits, who preferred to keep aboriginal communities in isolation.62 Nevertheless France’s true motive is revealed in other sources. Such is a 1725 report on the state of the French possessions in the Great Lakes, which notes that Jesuit missionaries among the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) and other peoples will help “bind them to the interests of France.”63 Even trade could be dressed up as a spiritual activity: Jesuit historian François du Creux (1596–1666) proclaimed in a 1664 book on Canada that commerce was the best way to bring Christianity to Amerindians because the financial incentives of contact with the French would encourage them to discover the advantages of the faith.64 France’s moral prerogative gave official backing even to its colonization of regions where the indigenous populations had been nearly obliterated, as in the Antilles: Charles de Rochefort claimed

44

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

in 1665 in his Histoire naturelle et morale des îles Antilles de l’Amérique that “the edification and instruction of the poor barbarians” was France’s main reason for being there; similarly, a 1687 report from Versailles calling for the establishment of a bishopric in the Antilles, noted that there was a “great need” to evangelize the “native idolaters whom we have not yet been able to call to Christianity.”65 Louis XIV had similar aims for West Africa, which was more complicated ideologically since one of France’s aims in the region was to enslave Africans, but he saw it as a way of winning over local kings and potentates to his cause.66 Nevertheless the missionary enterprise there was noteworthy not for its numbers – missionaries were always in short supply and conversions were negligible – but for the volume of text it generated. Although a handful of French missionaries had travelled (and died) in Senegal and the Guinea coast (including Ouidah) from 1634, the Sun King placed greater emphasis on religious activities. In an edict of 28 May 1664 he compelled the Compagnie des Indes Occidentales to supply priests for the spiritual needs of the settlers and Africans, to build churches and chapels, and to pay the clerics about 600 livres a year.67 Such were the two Capuchins pères Paschal and Léon from the Free County of Burgundy who were sent to SaintLouis in 1714 on the orders of the Ministry of Marine by the superior Brother Louis de Rosey.68 Although their primary function was to serve the white community, they were also to serve as “missionaries for the Negroes who live in the aforementioned settlements.”69 However the Crown revealed the strategic and political importance it attached to clerics in Africa by objecting to the foreign origin of these fathers (the Free County was still part of the Holy Roman Empire), and it took a great effort on Rosey’s part to convince the king that the fathers “had a French heart [le coeur françois] even though they are foreigners.”70 True missionary work in West Africa was much rarer and noteworthy for its lack of success, even though in 1703 a religious order called the Congrégation du Saint-Esprit was created especially

to evangelize among Africans. It did not help the missionary cause that the priests arrived on slave ships on the first leg of their triangular voyage, so that Africans understandably saw them as spies for the slavers.71 Missionaries and Martyrs in North America If the French Crown paid lip service to proselytization the same cannot be said for the mostly Jesuit missionaries responsible for the extraordinarily fervent and disastrous campaign of evangelization among the Iroquoians (1626–56), which captured the attention of the whole Catholic world thanks to the Jesuits’ savvy publication of the annual letters from the Quebec Provincial in the bestselling Relations des Jésuites de la Nouvelle-France (1632–72).72 A decade after the Recollects began proselytizing in the region, Jesuit Jean de Brébeuf (1594–1649) first entered Huron (Wendat) territory in 1626 near present-day Georgian Bay, 870 miles from Quebec City.73 In 1634 he established a more permanent mission among the Attignawantan (Bear People), the largest tribe in the Wendat Confederacy who controlled 50 per cent of the fur trade, with the main Mission of the Immaculate Conception (1637) in the chief town of Ossossané. At first contact each of the major Huron settlements was about five times the size of Quebec City, but with the arrival of smallpox and influenza epidemics, the population plunged from 30,000 to 12,000 people and caring for the terminally ill soon overshadowed other missionary activities. Although some viewed Jesuits as members of a “ritual curing society,” others understandably saw them as the source of the pestilence.74 Nevertheless the mission grew under the leadership of Jérôme Lalement (1595–1673), who moved headquarters to the fortified village of Sainte-Marie (1639) on what is now the River Wye, which combined concentrated evangelization with fur-trading activities meant to bring the mission financial and political support.75 By 1648 Sainte-Marie had a population of twenty-three Jesuits, twenty-three French lay workers, domestics, and seasonal soldiers

to protect the fur trade, and it featured longhouses for Christian and non-Christian Huron, a large church and “Indian chapel,” masonry bastions, barracks, a hospital, and agricultural buildings.76 By the winter of 1648–49 Ossassané was predominantly Christian.77 But the Huron adventure was soon over: in 1642 the Iroquois from south of Lake Ontario and west of Lake Champlain began raids into Huronia, urged on by their Dutch and English fur-trading partners, and systematically destroyed the mission villages between 1648 and 1649, killing Brébeuf, Lalement, and Antoine Daniel in the slow, deliberate ritual of torture the Iroquoian peoples traditionally imposed upon captured enemies, satisfying a ghoulish fascination for martyrdom among the European devout which the Jesuits themselves had been encouraging since the 1580s in illustrated books and church decor.78 But except for a foolhardy attempt to Christianize the Iroquois in 1656, which resulted in more murder and ritual torture, the Jesuits were finished with this first phase of Great Lakes evangelization.79 One of the longest-lasting results of this episode among the Huron was the idea of the noble savage living in the forests in a state of antediluvian purity – a notion originating in 1520s Spain but which gained new purchase in the Enlightenment with writers such as Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.80 Religious orders changed tack in their approach to Amerindian groups in the later seventeenth and eighteenth century: as we will see in chapter 3 Jesuits, Recollects, Sulpicians, and other orders founded a string of reductions of Huron, Iroquois, Algonquin, and Abenaki Christians along the shores of the Saint Lawrence, most of them circling Montreal and Quebec City but deliberately kept separate from white communities, and similar towns were formed far into the Great Lakes at places like Sault-Sainte-Marie and Michilimackinac.81 The main settlements included the Algonquian/ Abenaki reduction at Sillery (founded in 1637, it was the oldest), the Huron centre at Wendake (1679), the Abenaki settlement at Odanak (1707–08; fig. 3.10), and the five successive Iroquois towns founded progres-

Ideology and Reality

45

2.2 Claude Chauchetière, The First Chapel Is Built (at the Mohawk mission of Saint-François-Xavier at Sault-Saint-Louis, the original Kahnawake, ca. 1676). From his manuscript, Narration annuelle de la Mission du Sault depuis la fondation jusqu’à l’an 1686. Archives Départementales de la Gironde. 2.3 Claude Chauchetière, Lightning Strikes at the Foot of the Chapel (at the Mohawk mission of Saint-François-Xavier at Sault-Saint-Louis, the original Kahnawake, ca. 1681, when it was destroyed). From his manuscript, Narration annuelle de la Mission du Sault depuis la fondation jusqu’à l’an 1686. Archives Départementales de la Gironde.

sively westward between Kentaké, the first Kahnawake (1676–90; figs. 2.2–3) and Caughnawaga, present-day Kahnawake (1716–present) in the Seigneurie du SaultSaint-Louis.82 The Sulpicians also kept moving aborig-

46

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

inal communities away from the city, as when they left the reduction on Montreal mountain and moved their congregation north to Sault-au-Récollet on the Rivière des Prairies in 1696, and then farther away in 1717 to Oka-Kanesataké, on the north shore of the Lac des Deux-Montagnes, where it was expanded in 1733 and remains today (figs. 3.13–15).83 By 1710 as many as 1,750 reduction Amerindians lived on the Saint Lawrence, capable of furnishing 600 warriors.84 As I will soon explore, one fascinating feature of these reductions is that they were constructed according to utopian urbanistic schemes, sometimes a grid plan of longhouses or huts arranged alongside rectilinear “streets,” often with different ethnicities divided into neighbourhoods, and including mission churches, mountain calvaries, residences, and even decorative fountains.

“Parishes” vs. Missions, Apostolic Prefects vs. Bishops The Jesuits in Huronia were something of an aberration. France’s – and even many Jesuits’ – real interests lay elsewhere, and attempts to create a Spanish-style network of episcopal sees in French America failed. In 1687 officials were touting Martinique as the ideal place for a diocese to serve the Antilles and Guiana, using the argument that even distant Cayenne would be closer to the episcopal seat than the distances within Canada: It would be much easier to maintain good order throughout his diocese, which he might easily tour every year; since except for the peninsula of Cayenne, which is 200 leagues distant from Martinique and the coast of Saint-Domingue which is 150, the other islands are only 20 to 25 leagues apart from each other, so that even the Intendant is obliged to travel to them every year. One did not have this advantage in the establishment of the Diocese of Quebec, since the colony of Canada was spread over five or six hundred leagues and was only composed of four or five thousand French inhabitants.85 Another report, by Martinique governor François-Louis de Salignac, marquis de Fénélon to Choiseul (ca. 1763– 64), recommended elevating the churches in Martinique and Saint-Domingue to cathedrals, lamenting quite specifically that “we have one Bishop in Canada; the Spanish have one in all their colonies,” and even suggesting that had there been a bishop in Martinique the Lavalette affair would never have happened.86 Yet Martinique had to wait until 1850 for its first bishopric (and Guadeloupe in 1877), Saint-Domingue never received one as a French colony, and Cayenne, long a suffragan diocese of the bishop of Martinique, was elevated to a bishopric as late as 1956. New Orleans was the only French town to be granted a cathedral before the nineteenth century, but as noted in the Introduction it had

to wait for the Spanish to do it (in 1793), when it was separated from the see of Havana (fig. 1.11). As a result there were no true parishes outside Canada, even if they usually bore that title. Instead, churches had the tentative, officially temporary status of missions and the curates were usually members of missionary orders who divided their responsibilities between settlers, Amerindians (where they survived), and Africans, such as the two Jesuit “missionaries” from Toulouse, Father Charles Collinet and Father Benoît Girard, who were sent from Bordeaux to SaintDomingue in 1730.87 In Saint-Pierre in 1743 the Jesuits employed two priests, “one of whom is the curate for the Whites, and the other the curate for the Negroes … the curate of the Negroes is extremely busy with the great number of slaves owned by the habitants.”88 The firstknown curé des nègres was Jesuit missionary Louis Charpentier (ca. 1669) on the island of Saint-Christophe.89 There is little evidence that the missionaries to the slaves were particularly enthusiastic about their charges, with some notable exceptions like Abbé Pierre-René Champroux, curate of Pontaléry in Martinique in the first decade of the nineteenth century, whom we will meet in chapter 16. This arrangement was the opposite of that of Spanish America after 1574, where, seeking more direct control over conquered lands, Philip II transformed the larger Amerindian missions into secular parishes overseen by bishops (and therefore the Patronate), leaving religious orders to move into the cities or to mission fields farther from densely settled regions.90 The French King did not try to turn his missions into secular parishes until 1773, and it is unclear to what degree his wishes were followed through.91 Stable parish life was also impeded by intense rivalry between religious orders, as in Saint-Pierre (Martinique), where the Jesuits and Dominicans serving the two parishes detested each other so ardently that the governor was compelled to allow them to mount separate Corpus Christi parades in 1686.92 These enmities had a direct impact on architecture and garden design, motivating religious orders to build ever bigger and

Ideology and Reality

47

more ostentatious foundations, as we shall see in chapters 11–13. There were also rivalries between Rome and Versailles. Since French colonial curates were officially missionaries, they took their orders from their generalate in Rome and were under the jurisdiction of the Holy See – even though their members had to be vetted by the Crown, paid by the state, and chosen from monasteries approved by the king (the Dominicans for instance usually came from the house at Toulouse).93 This arrangement was naturally a bone of contention with colonial officials: the French monarchy had an arm’slength relationship with Roman Catholicism through what was called Gallicanism, or the more or less complete freedom from papal authority as proclaimed in the Four Gallican Articles in 1682 by the Assembly of the French clergy.94 The governor and intendant of Guadeloupe succinctly characterized the delicate loyalties of the colonial Church in 1774 as being “under the authority of the Holy See and with the agreement of our Kings.”95 Some officials became exasperated. An 1808 letter by military authorities in Basse-Terre to the Ministry of the Marine on the occasion of the death of the French Antilles’ apostolic prefect (a missionary superior in lieu of bishop) asked: “For a long time there have not been any more missions; why therefore should there be an Apostolic Prefect? Why should the colonies be excluded from the Gallican Church and submitted to the immediate jurisdiction of the Holy See? What is the Apostolic Prefect but a great vicar of the Bishop of Rome? Is it not more natural that the churches of the French colonies be ruled by a great vicar of the Archbishop of Paris?”96 The same letter made an envious comparison with Spanish policy, explaining that the French unwillingness to appoint bishops in their tropical colonies was related to fears about the consequences in a society with such a great disparity in number between the slaves and gens de couleur and the white minority: The Spanish colonies have bishops; but those colonies are immense; those colonies are, like

48

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

their government, built on principles that are very different from ours. The free population and the slave population there are in inverse proportion to what one sees in our islands. The general spirit there is not carried to insubordination and independence of all authority … It would not be the same thing among us, where public spirit and especially that of the clergy is so separated from this apathetic indifference, where the free and the slaves are not yet well free of their lengthy agitations.97 There is a certain irony in this statement, since a mere two years later the independence movement would break out in Spanish America, expelling Spanish authorities from all but Cuba and Puerto Rico by the 1820s. Only those working among the Amerindian or African communities were called missionaries; those serving settler communities were simply known as curates (curés) working under each order’s apostolic prefect. A royal memorandum to the governor and intendant of Martinique in 1777 spells out quite specifically how the system worked: Spiritual Service is entrusted … to different religious orders whose establishment was authorized as missionaries. The Superior of each order is at the same time Apostolic Prefect and superior of the order. He is in charge of his mission by authority of his superior generals. As Apostolic Prefect, he directly reports to the Holy See, and exercises its powers under letters of attachment of His Majesty registered in the courts. These two titles contain the essential parts of the administration of the mission, both spiritual and temporal, namely superiority over missionary personnel, the arrangement of things in the mission, and powers for the exercise of the ministry of religion. Although the missions of the islands cannot be compared to our dioceses in the

hierarchical order, because of the absence of the part of the authority and jurisdiction which is reserved for the Episcopacy, they nevertheless have in some sense the authority, in that the regulars for whom they are responsible take the place of clergy, and parishes are regulated and governed in the same way and by the same laws as those of the Kingdom … In the colonies there are no parish priests, strictly speaking. The missionaries who serve the parishes are removable at will. The apostolic prefects provide and withdraw powers when they see fit, just like a bishop in France switches, changes or retires curates as he desires.98 Clearly the king’s order three years previously that apostolic prefects would now be called “Bishops in partibus” was not enacted.99 In the Antilles the prefectures of the Jesuits and Dominicans were in SaintPierre, the Capuchins at Fort-Royal, and the Carmelites at Basse-Terre, and they were the first port of call for new missionaries when they reached the islands.100 In 1731 the Jesuits had separate prefectures in CapFrançois – by which time they administered fourteen parishes on the island – and in the same year one in Cayenne: both eventually based in grand buildings which would later be taken over by the governors of those colonies (figs. 12.18, 16.6). The tentative status of French colonial churches really comes into focus when we consider a 1764 royal instruction to the governor and intendant of Guiana at the time of the founding of Kourou. The colonial capital of Cayenne itself barely had a proper church – it was served by a succession of wooden huts from the 1650s and then a small stone structure built in 1694–99 and interminably in need of repair (fig. 14.7) – but as we have seen, Kourou was designed to accommodate thousands of European immigrants who needed churches immediately.101 Here, the lack of episcopal authority was particularly acute, with all decisions about where to build churches resting in the hands of government officials: “the chaplains serving the churches will be …

chosen by the Governor and in his absence by the Intendant … As we do not yet know the limits of the parishes and consequently how to determine the location of churches to be built, it may be undertaken by Governor [Étienne-François] Turgot, who may through consultation with the Intendant, and the principal habitants chosen from each canton, [choose] the most convenient place to build a hall that will serve as a church.”102 In Saint-Domingue, a colony which shared an island with the Spanish Santo Domingo, desperate parishioners were occasionally compelled to import Spanish priests working under the authority of the archbishop of Santo Domingo, as happened in Port-dePaix in 1704 when “the divine service is performed in a pit (creux) and with inadequate altar furnishings and by a Spanish priest who does not speak any French,” although a 1716 letter by Father Gouye stridently asserts that “the spiritual life of the French Colony of Saint-Domingue is governed by French religious … without any dependence upon the Archbishop of Santo Domingo, who has not yet claimed any jurisdiction over lands belonging to France.”103 Colonial Churches Unsurprisingly, given their tenuous legal status, churches in French colonies were too modest to compete with ostentatious government buildings – categorized as Bâtiments appartenant au Roi and paid for and repaired at the king’s expense – or even with the grander private mansions like Jean Testas’s flamboyant hôtel particulier in Pointe-à Pitre (1777) (fig. 13.1). The earliest churches were little different from the wooden or half-timbered shacks of the colonists: in 1696 the curate of Saint-François (Guadeloupe) described his church as a “Negro hut” (une case à nègres) with a piece of painted cloth for an altarpiece and no other ornaments.104 In fact they seemed uncomfortably out of scale with the spacious squares they often overlooked. Perhaps Colbert set the trend for this inattention toward ecclesiastical structures – he was notoriously

Ideology and Reality

49

2.4 Diego de Adrián and others, facade (detail), La Compañía, Arequipa, Peru, 1698–99.

anticlerical and concentrated his architectural efforts on secular monuments – but it lasted well past the minister’s death in 1683 and should more properly be seen as a reflection of the French Empire’s priorities more generally, and of the size of the congregations. One result of this lack of royal interest in churches and of the influence of religious orders is that their architects frequently looked to Rome for inspiration. In Nouvelle-France the Italian style was characteristic of some of the larger church projects built or planned after the 1721–22 “delineation of the parishes” in which eighty-two independent parishes were carved out of the see of Quebec, resulting in the construction of over twenty-five churches by 1735 (fig. 15.19).105 In the Antilles it was widespread even among the smaller town churches such as the churches of Saint-Jacques at Le Carbet (1776) Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption-etSaint-Joseph at Case-Pilote (seventeenth/eighteenth century; fig. 15.6), and Saint Anne in Sainte-Anne (1824), all in Martinique. The most common models for facade designs came from late sixteenth-century monuments such as S. Luigi dei Francesi (1589;

50

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

fig. 15.3), S. Caterina dei Funari (1560–64; fig. 15.18), or the Jesuit church of the Gesù (1568–84) (fig. 14.1), all widely known through prints. I believe their missionary patrons chose these models for a mixture of political and spiritual reasons: they wanted to declare their loyalty to the papacy over the Gallican Church but they also hoped to evoke the era of the Council of Trent (1545–63), considered a Christian golden age for all Catholics but especially for the Society of Jesus, which was founded in 1540.106 In a similar vein, the French reductions on the Saint Lawrence and in Guiana turned to Spanish models instead of French ones for their urban design, notably the Paraguay Reductions, themselves seen as a symbol of Christian triumph (fig. 2.1). Spanish and Portuguese America could not have presented a greater contrast in their support of church architecture. From New Spain to Rio de Janeiro massive cathedrals, monastic and parish churches were paid for by generous tithes drawn from the income generated by the mining industry and by private donations – since sumptuary laws discouraged outward displays of wealth in clothing, carriages, or the exteriors of private homes

patrons expressed their status by financing lavish side chapels and altarpieces.107 In 1501 the pope granted the Spanish Crown all tithes from the Indies in perpetuity to support the colonial church, and by royal orders of 1539 and 1541 these tithes were distributed systematically, with half going to bishops, deans, and cathedral chapters and the other half divided into nine parts, four going to parish priests and their staff, three to the building and adornment of churches, and two to the Crown.108 Cathedrals were a special priority. In 1680 Philip II decreed that they were to be financed by three groups: “Our estates will contribute the first; the other the Indians of the Archbishopric or Bishopric; and the other the neighbouring encomenderos [landowners with Amerindian subjects] … and if Spaniards live 2.5 Claudio de Arciniega and others, Mexico City Cathedral, Mexico, sixteenth to nineteenth century.

in the Diocese who do not have encomiendas of Indians, they also have to provide a certain amount, according to the status (calidad) of their persons, since they too are obliged to build the Cathedral Church.”109 Built in highly regional styles which in Spanish America frequently blended Native American techniques and even styles into an overall Hispanic matrix (fig. 2.4), Iberian American churches enjoyed undisputed prominence in the city and countryside, whether dominating giant public plazas as in Lima or Mexico City (fig. 2.5) or looking down from the hilltops as at Vila Rica (now Ouro Preto, Brazil).110 Even mission churches could be bigger than the grandest churches in the French Empire: the Mexican Augustinian iglesias conventuales at Actopan and Ixmiquilpan (both 1550s) were both larger than either the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Quebec City (1744–48; fig. 14.15) or Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption in Cap-François (1771–74; figs. 15.12–14).111 In fact

Ideology and Reality

51

Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption could have been placed end to end three times inside Mexico City Cathedral, which was also nearly three times the length of the Quebec Cathedral.112 Lacking this government-administered apparatus for allocating resources to churches, the French had to draw heavily upon the habitants, who could not have been less enthusiastic about what they saw merely as a burden on their commercial interests. It did not help that before 1685 a substantial percentage of the population were Huguenot Calvinists; in the Antilles the percentage was larger than in France itself.113 French authorities were forever struggling to get settlers to pay for the construction or upkeep of their churches – in the Antilles they often paid with sugar or the loan of slaves – or to donate land. Churches (except for military chapels) were only partially supported by royal donations or by chartered companies, as in 1686 when Louis XIV donated 3,000 livres tournois toward the building of churches and vicarages in 16 parishes, and 8,000 for the salaries of thirty-six curates in Nouvelle-France.114 In the Antilles, the king paid for the passage of each religious and a trousseau of 150 to 200 livres, which was also to cover church furnishings and books, which he was only too happy to rescind if the missionaries earned too much from their agricultural activities, as with the Dominicans in 1706 – as for the Jesuits, the king was sufficiently suspicious of hidden wealth that members of the Society never received trousseaux from the Crown, only their passage.115 In Nouvelle-France, once the government drew the boundaries of a new parish the intendant called parishioners to a meeting presided over by the curate, militia captain, and seigneur to select syndics for the unpopular job of levying labour and material contributions from the communities.116 These bodies were known as fabriques (or three-man vestry boards). But their efforts were unimpressive as the Crown still covered 40 per cent of the costs of colonial churches in Nouvelle-France in the eighteenth century: in fact, by the advent of the Seven Years’ War just under half (forty-four) of the parishes were still supported by the

52

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

government, and many had to share curates, meaning they only heard Mass once a month (in 1730 only twenty out of one hundred parishes had full-time curates).117 Even the collection plate offered little incentive: in one example, in Le Diamant (Martinique) in 1789, it brought a miserable 20 sols over the course of an entire year.118 Antillean church officials made a litany of complaints about unfinished or dilapidated buildings and placed the blame squarely on the habitants: such was a 1743 testimony concerning the parish church of SainteMarie (Martinique) which notes that it was “poorly maintained, as is the vicarage, which would be spacious anywhere else, and this is because of the negligence of the churchwardens (marguilliers); the Superior of the missions has filed complaints about this to Monsieur the Intendant.”119 Upon visiting Cap-François in 1717 Governor General Charles Joubert de la Bastide, marquis de Châteaumorand (d. 1722), blamed “the habitants’ lack of zeal” on delays in church construction.120 In 1711 his frustrated predecessor Jean-Pierre de Casamajor de Charritte (1648–1723) protested that he was compelled himself to pay for the furnishings of the church of Saint-Louis, a neighbourhood outside Le Cap where he had a sugar plantation, including “an altarpiece (tableau) of Saint Louis costing 800 livres,” as well as “a pulpit (chaire de prédicateur) worth 1,200 livres including transport, and a very fine marble baptismal font with its pedestal of the same material, which are not yet installed because there is no church decent enough to put it in; I would like to say furthermore that, independently of all this, my wife has donated many furnishings.”121 At times the Crown had to resort to creative measures to make up the shortfall, as in Cayenne in 1694, when a treasure chest belonging to “Henry the Dutch Pirate” (Henri, flibustier hollandais), which had been left to a French accomplice before the pirate’s untimely death in a shipwreck off the coast of Portugal, was sequestered by the king by the droit d’aubaine (a law allowing the confiscation of foreign property for the use of the state) and used toward the construction of the two churches in that city.122

From Saint-Domingue to Nouvelle-France plantation owners or seigneurs defied Church authority by building private chapels on their land or in their houses and forced priests to celebrate Mass in them, even after a 1716 royal decree that forbade the practice without royal permission.123 Victor-Marie d’Estrées, maréchal of France (1660–1737), noted in 1717 in a letter to the bishop of Quebec that: “all the seigneurs of this country want to have private parishes on their lands, as small as some of them are, and they oblige the curates, by force and threats not to pay tithes, to go and say Mass in houses or private chapels.”124 Jesuit Père Gouye wrote in the previous year from the Antilles that “for some time rich habitants have been building private chapels where they have Mass celebrated, giving the excuse that it is to instruct their Negroes; the Jesuit fathers, the Dominicans, the Carmelites, and the Capuchins on the Windward Islands are all opposed to it.”125 In Nouvelle-France Bishop Laval had tried to impose the standard French tithe but his parishioners complained so much that after 1667 they had to pay only half that amount, one twenty-sixth of their produce in wheat. By 1720 only one-third of church revenue came from the congregation.126 On the islands parishioners did not pay tithes – a report from the 1680s warned that the enmity of the habitants would make levying tithes impossible – but they were expected to contribute to the upkeep of churches and clergy, even if they did so with notorious irregularity.127 Even churchwardens regularly shirked their duties, which ranged from keeping accounts and managing the collection plate to making sure that church buildings, furnishings, and cemeteries were kept in order and that the bell was sounded on Sundays. This negligence led to repeated royal proclamations aimed at bringing them into line, as in this Regulations Concerning Churches issued by the governor of Guiana at Cayenne in 1774: “We, from the special knowledge which we have acquired concerning the status of Parishes of this Colony, and of the manner in which their assets are managed, have recognized that up to the present time Churchwardens almost everywhere have performed their duties with great negligence.”128

Judging by the tenor of these decrees, it is clear that churchwardens helped themselves to the church silver, took bribes to give people preferential seating – about the only aspect of churchgoing that did interest the congregations – speculated upon church property, and let villagers use cemeteries to graze their animals. Small wonder, since as Abbé Rennard notes, “to be a churchwarden was not a very sought-after honour, it was a significantly ponderous duty imposed without any remuneration,” and they could even opt out altogether for a modest 500 livres.129 Even more unpopular was the added burden of having to contribute to the upkeep of priests, who in the early eighteenth century were to be paid 300 piastres (Spanish dollars, worth a quarter of a livre tournois) per annum. In a 1704 royal decree establishing the Society of Jesus in Saint-Domingue the king ordered that: According to custom three hundred dollars will be paid by the trustee of each parish to the superior of the mission or his deputy, and the same sum of 300 dollars annually for each of the two religious responsible for the instruction of Negroes of whom one will be in Cap [François] and the other in Port-de-Paix; we desire that the habitants of the Northern districts be obliged to provide the Fathers who serve the parishes with one Church in each neighbourhood, with comfortable accommodation and in a condition to house at least two religious and as many domestics, [and] to maintain and repair churches and presbyteries and to provide ornaments and lamps as well as the other ordinary expenses of churches.130 This obligation was especially unpopular where it applied to missionaries in distant Amerindian villages or to curés des nègres: indeed the latter’s activities were viewed with alarm as settlers were terrified by gatherings of large groups of slaves. In fact a royal law of 1753 prohibited the Jesuits from founding slave confraternities (they were common in the Hispanic world) because

Ideology and Reality

53

it was forbidden “to organize any assembly of slaves, under any pretext.”131 As a result of the tepid enthusiasm for paying them, the clergy often made do with very little indeed – even less than their official salary if a governor like Joseph d’Honon de Gallifet (d. 1706) chose to make them scrape by on 200 piastres a year, as he did in Portde-Paix in 1704.132 In 1688 the Capuchins in SaintDomingue were reduced to eating manioc cakes and drinking water in “a state akin to misery,” and their brethren in Grenada fared little better a decade earlier when they had to rely on whatever wild game they could shoot.133 As one jittery Jesuit in Saint-Domingue put it in 1708: “the way in which the habitants are imposed upon for the payment of pensions, and the way it is required, makes the Missionaries odious to them and prevents them from doing all the good they could do.”134 Nevertheless there were exceptions, as with several dandified priests living in Nouvelle-Orléans, about whom Marc-Antoine Caillot, an employee of the Company of the Indies who stayed in Louisiana between 1729 and 1731 remarks: “the other priests … secretly lead very excessive lives … Here in New Orleans they each wear shirts with lacy cuffs, silk stockings, and slippers and carry money, a snuffbox, a watch, and a parasol.”135 In fact as far as the habitants were concerned, priority seating and the hierarchical location of family tombs – i.e., concerns about status and not faith – were their sole preoccupations when it came to the Church. One of the most common complaints emanating from the parishes had to do with squabbles over who got to sit where. Royal engineers were called in to redraw ground plans in places like Trinité in Martinique to accommodate rival families and officials, and the needs of pew holders came before those of the liturgy, with family pews blocking aisles or even transepts (fig. 14.28).136 It was important to regulate pews as they were granted for life and the grantees owned the entire pew, not just an individual place on it.137 People also fought over burial rights in the churches, and officials had to take action not merely because of lack of space but because of the

54

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

ill effects of putrefaction in such a hot climate, trying to discourage the practice through ever higher fees.138 Churchwardens, because they were liable to bribes, were expressly forbidden from granting the rights for burial within churches. An instruction of 1726 in Martinique read: “The said Churchwardens may not concede pews nor give permission to put tombs in churches without having … obtained the advice of the religious serving the parishes; and in the case of the pews, they will comply with the tariff and Ordinance of Messieurs the General [i.e., Governor] and the Intendant concerning curates and parishes.”139 The exasperated former captain of the port of FortRoyal, Georges-René Pléville Le Pelley (1726–1805), provided an appropriate epilogue to this chapter about the ways the French imperial enterprise differed from the image promoted by the French monarchy and from the American empires of its Spanish and Portuguese rivals. Writing in 1777 about the irreverent atmosphere in the Caribbean he remarked: “there is certainly no country where there is less religion than in our Islands … this aim, to live a life of leisure, forms and sustains civil societies: self-love, or rather pride, turns the Creole into a man so wildly profligate that he quickly consumes a fortune left by his ancestors … everyone who is white is without religion.”140 Small wonder that church buildings in the Antilles and elsewhere in the tropical colonies in particular lacked the grandeur of the governors’ and intendants’ palaces and other large-scale government and military buildings commissioned by a government whose priority – despite repeated claims to the contrary – was the glorification of the monarchy and of French trade. In the French Atlantic Empire a colonial church run for the most part by missionaries whom the French government believed to be of dubious loyalty – and who were openly disdained by their parishioners – could never compete with its state-sanctioned counterparts in Iberian America, where they served as the very bedrock of empire.

3

France and Amerindian Architecture, the Amerindian Reductions, and L’Affaire de Kourou

in stArk contrAst to iBeriAn AMericA, where Amerindian influence on colonial architecture was widespread – from New Spain to Chilean Patagonia and from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries – aboriginal styles and building traditions had a negligible impact on the French American colonies, except for a handful of Native American structural techniques borrowed at an early period for practical reasons. Nowhere in America under the French regime do we find the kind of adoption of indigenous or other non-European forms or technologies that made the built environment of parts of Spanish territories markedly different from that of Spain – the forms, known variously as “tequitqui,” “mestizo-barroco,” or “Andean Hybrid Baroque,” which have been a source of scholarly interest and debate for almost one hundred years (fig. 2.4).1 Even the most primitive huts or chapels of the early phase of settlement were overwhelmingly French in design, derived from vernacular methods of stone, rubble, brick, and especially wood frame construction (sometimes in combination), notably half-timbered structures with various kinds of infilling known generically as “colombage” (fig. 3.1) or all-wood buildings formed of tightly fitted horizontal planks (rounded or squared off) joined to the vertical studs using mortise and tenon and other techniques and known loosely as “pièce de bois sur pièce de bois” or “pièces-sur-pièces” (fig. 3.2).2 No other feature of French architecture in the Atlantic world so clearly demonstrates the stubborn cultural

3.1 (left) Colombage (half-timbering) construction in a barn in Luigny (Perche, France). 3.2 (right) Pièces-sur-pièces construction in an outbuilding of the Abbey of Notre-Dame-du-Lac, Oka, Quebec, nineteenth century.

intransigence that distinguished the French presence there from that of its Catholic rivals. Although French colonists encountered the widest spectrum of American indigenous groups – from the Mi’kmaq, Huron (Wendat, or Wyandot), Iroquois (Haudenosaunee), Abenaki, Innu (Montagnais), Natchez, Choctaw, and Cherokee of North America to the Arawak, Kalinago, Galibi, Palicour, Camopi, Yao, and Oyampi of the Circum-Caribbean – and while the Amerindian-to-settler ratio was much higher than in Iberoamerica, the scattered colonies had much less exposure to these cultures than did their Iberian counterparts, except for traders such as coureurs de bois and missionaries. In Spanish America settlers appropriated Amerindian cities (e.g., Cuzco and Quito, the two Inca capitals), adopted their institutions (such as

56

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

the Andean rotational labour practice of the mita), and integrated the indigenous community hierarchy into an overall network of state and religious institutions. In Nouvelle-France and the Pays d’en Haut (“Upper Country,” or the vast lands stretching from Montreal to the prairies) the French tried to build their settlements outside Amerindian territory so as not to antagonize groups who were essential not only as partners in the lucrative fur trade but also as allies against their British and Dutch neighbours. Montreal, considered by the Iroquois to be an encroachment on their territory, was the exception, and settlers paid for their mistake with protracted guerrilla warfare (see chapter 2). This arm’slength approach, often called a “partnership” with free aboriginal populations, was less exploitative than the forced labour extracted from Amerindians in Spanish territories or the English settlers’ gradual extermination of Native American groups – a different kind of arm’s-length policy – however, it was practised only out of expediency and not because of any humanitarian concern for indigenous peoples.3 In chapter 1 I mentioned France’s Machiavellian policy of using missions

to ensure Amerindian loyalty and trade: government reports are full of remarks like that of Governor Philippe de Rigaud de Vaudreuil (1717), who recommended placing the Jesuits in charge of the Great Lakes Amerindians “to keep the natives in our interests” and to “make them more docile” because “the Jesuit Fathers … have a particular talent for controlling (gouverner) the natives.”4 But the final nail in the coffin for the myth of an enlightened French approach to aboriginals was the widespread practice of enslaving them. The French forced almost 2,700 people into slavery before 1759, mostly from the Pawnee tribe of the Missouri Valley, so many in fact that panis (feminine panise) became a generic term for slave in French Canada.5 Slavery of

Native Americans in Nouvelle-France had been legalized as early as 1709.6 Different colonies had different experiences with Amerindians and their architecture. In the Newfoundland and Gaspé fishing communities contact was negligible as their focus was on the distant Atlantic fishing banks – and with simply staying alive in their 3.3 Wood-frame cabins and fish-drying racks at the planned community of Mont-Louis, Gaspé Peninsula. Detail of Malet de Noziel, Bird’s-Eye View of Mont-Louis, New Colony in Canada, 1699. The structures at the top (labelled “c” and “d”) are fish-drying racks. Buildings for storage and fish preparation are on the left side of the river and the houses (marked “m”) are on the right side. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département Cartes et Plans.

France and Amerindian Architecture

57

tiny cabins along the barren coast (fig. 3.3).7 One late seventeenth-century commentator noted about Plaisance: “The cold is violent … and winter usually lasts there eight months, everything is awful during this time: barely is the fishing over when suddenly it comes; it is impossible to keep warm without going all over the place to look for wood with diligence and caution, it is very difficult to find enough for it; there must be a continual fire because the houses are extraordinarily cold.”8 These cabins used local materials, but otherwise were the kind of half-timbered building seen throughout the early empire (and in New England and New Netherland) and not an adaptation of indigenous forms as is popularly believed – though eighteenth-century voyageurs referred to them as “in the Indian style.”9 The variety common in the Gaspésie or Newfoundland was called a piquet hut and was made of posts planted directly in the ground (pieux-en-terre or poteaux en terre) with small spaces in between the studs to limit the amount of filling.10 The commentator quoted above notes that “they are built of fir poles, joined together, between which they insert moss to seal the space. The roof is make of planks on which they place large pieces of moss … the best houses have this peculiarity that the poles are levelled out on the exterior.”11 In Acadia by contrast missionaries worked actively if sporadically among the Mi’kmaq – but not always enthusiastically; indeed contempt ran both ways – beginning with the Jesuits (1611– 13; 1632–63), and then the Recollects (1619–29; 1670s– 1690) and Capuchins (1632–54).12 The Mi’kmaq people suffered the earliest from epidemic disease brought by the Europeans since they were on the front line of encounter, but paradoxically they helped ensure a healthy population expansion among settlers in Acadia through miscegenation – so much so that in 1753 Abbé Pierre Maillard doubted that people would be able to distinguish between Frenchmen and Mi’kmaq at all in fifty years’ time.13 Nevertheless as in Newfoundland there is no evidence of a parallel cultural mixture in Acadian architecture except perhaps in the materials used. Aboriginal architecture had neglible impact on towns such as Quebec City, Trois-Rivières, or Montreal, or

58

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

even on the smaller settlements along the St Lawrence or Richelieu rivers. It is only on the Catholic missions – whether those deep in Amerindian territory or the reductions to the south and west of Montreal and the north of Quebec City – that we encounter indigenous forms, but usually only in the earliest foundations and in buildings constructed by aboriginals.14 In 1623 Recollect missionaries at the Wendat village of Quieunonascaran on Georgian Bay had the villagers build them a twenty-foot-long cabin roofed with bark, divided into a chapel, small vestry, and living space, and fronted by a small fenced-in herb garden.15 On the St Lawrence reductions at Caughnawaga (Kahnawake), Oka, Wendake, and Odanak, and in indigenous settlements near fortresses such as Fort Frontenac (Kingston, Ontario), Amerindian groups built their own houses along traditional lines, as proven by descriptions, extant drawings, and archaeology (fig. 3.4). Although there were some variations between different Iroquoian groups, longhouses tended to be 27–30 metres long by 8–9 metres wide and built on a tunnel-like frame of poles sunk in the ground on either side, tied at the top in an upside-down “u ,” and covered with planks of (usually) cedar joined by saplings.16 The Jesuit residences in the Wendat villages of Ihonatiria (Saint-Joseph) and Ossossané (La Conception) were miniature longhouses divided into three sections like those of the Recollects, a combination chapel and storage area, a living quarters, and a catechesis room. The headquarters at Sainte-Marie (founded 1639) combined French half-timbered building techniques such as colombage bousillé (vertical timber posts with plaster and straw infilling) with Wendat double palisades of logs woven together by saplings and longhouses for converted and unconverted Amerindians. The complex included a church by French timber framer Charles Boivin (ca. 1600–after 1674) and constructed by donnés (French workers who by civil contract and solemn vow gave their labour as a gift to God for life).17 The medieval institution of the donné was reintroduced after missionaries were dismayed by the lax morals of their indentured servants (engagés) and sought chaste young

men who would not consort with Amerindian women but who could provide protection as they were exempt from the Jesuits’ prohibition against firearms.18 It would be hard to exaggerate how alien this tradition of employing European engagés or donnés would seem to Spanish or Portuguese missionaries: in Hispanic America indigenous groups built even the largest and most Spanish-style structures in their mission villages with their own hands. Drawings by Jesuit missionary Claude Chauchetière (1645–1709) of the first chapel at the Mohawk mission of Sault Saint-Louis south of Montreal (the original Kahnawake, built ca. 1676) reveal that the first generation of permanent mission churches were French

3.4 Aboriginal longhouse outside Fort Frontenac (Kingston, Ontario). Detail from Plan of Fort Frontenac or Cataracouy, eighteenth century. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aixen-Provence), 03 DFC 525B .

wooden-frame structures with spaces between the studs for colombage and faced with horizontal boards (compare figs. 2.2–3 and 3.1), either poteaux en terre or with the posts resting on a sill beam (poteaux sur sol).19 But the studs were also bound together with pliable branches in the manner of longhouses and they were occasionally constructed using traditional forms of communal Amerindian labour, as recounted in 1651–52 by Jesuit Paul Ragueneau about the Wendat chapel on

France and Amerindian Architecture

59

3.5 Huron wampum belt or “collar” (colier) with depiction of chapel on far left and six human figures joining hands around a cross, shell beads, hide, fibre, ca. 1634–49. McCord Museum, Montreal.

the Saguenay River: “The young men went to cut beams and rafters … the women brought boards, – that is to say, bark to cover this Palace; the girls went in quest of tapestry to adorn our Alcove. This is made of very beautiful fir-branches, with which they deck the lower part of their cabins.”20 Mission chapels were also decorated like longhouses: on the inside they were adorned with wampum (purple and white shell beads woven into belts or “collars” to record treaties), porcupine quills, and painting on deerskin as at the first church at Saint-François-Xavier Caughnawaga (present-day Kahnawake) in 1716, which was decorated with “their robes … their collars … their porcelain bracelets … shields which the women wear to adorn their hair, and … belts, which are the savages’ pearls.”21 One Wendat collar has what might be the earliest Amerindian depiction of a church – a rectangular, pitched-roof structure with windows and a steeple – although its traditional 1634–49 date cannot be confirmed (fig. 3.5). Later reduction chapels like the new church at Caughnawaga (1720; fig. 3.11) and the churches at Wendake (1730) and Oka (ca. 1730s) were indistinguishable from Quebec parish churches, although they continued to incorporate Amerindian adornments into their interiors, as can

60

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

be seen today also at those sites. Even Native Americans were building their homes in the French manner by 1752 – and hiring French builders to do it – as noted by Louis Franquet about Wendake: “The houses are built in the same way and in the style of those of our habitants, pièces-sur-pièces, covered with planks and furnished with fireplaces, doors and windows.”22 Commercial relations with Amerindian groups were also encouraged in Illinois country and the Mississippi valley, but they were less successful. As noted, whites (and Africans) were overwhelmingly outnumbered by Amerindians in these vast regions, mostly unsettled by immigrants. White attitudes toward the indigenous people were similar to those in Nouvelle-France; they approached them for trade and French authorities founded missions and forts in Amerindian territories to “control (conserver) the natives” or “maintain the natives’ respect” as a way of keeping out the English and Spanish, who loomed over both flanks of the colony.23 Louisiana was the site of one of the greatest uprisings by an Amerindian group in the empire. The so-called Natchez Revolt took place in November 1729 near the city of that name in present-day Mississippi – a settlement planted with tobacco in hopes of becoming a “French Chesapeake” and thus vital to the colony’s economy – after almost a decade of mounting tension and violence in reaction to aggressive French appropriation of tribal lands adjacent to Fort Rosalie.24 The Natchez killed most of the colonists in raids on the

habitations and on Fort Rosalie (145 white men, 90 white women and children, and 300 black slaves), and arranged some of their severed heads in rows in front of a burned plantation. Reciprocal attacks by French and their Choctaw allies upon the Natchez and other tribes had the result that, as George Edward Milne puts it, “[f]rom that day, the tenor of Native American relations with France’s subjects in the Lower Mississippi Valley changed forever.”25 Royal architect Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz (ca. 1695–1775), who lived in Louisiana between 1718 and

1734, described the Natchez “cabins” as being “perfect squares” measuring 15 square feet and 5 or 6 feet high formed of walnut poles planted in the ground and tied 3.6 Dumont de Montigny, Plantation of Sr. De La Pointe at Pascagoula, ink on paper, 1726. The building marked 1 is the house; 2 is the warehouse; 3 is the dovecote; 4 is the house for slaves; 5 is the forge; 6 is the projected chapel; 7 is another projected warehouse; L . are the sawmills; M . is the garden and dairy; P . is the kitchen; Q . is the court; R . is the view of the sea; T . is the dock; and V . is the river. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département Cartes et Plans.

France and Amerindian Architecture

61

together to form a vault with “thick cane wicker” in the manner of a “garden bower such as we have in France” with mud and moss used as mortar, the whole covered with “mats of cane tied one to the other.”26 As in Nouvelle-France some indigenous forms appeared on the missions and also, temporarily, on plantations. Jesuit missionary Paul du Ru (1666–1741) had introduced wood-framed houses with a mortar made of mud and Spanish moss (Tillandsia usneoides) that had been used by indigenous Bayagoula and Mougoulacha builders in 1700, and more recently scholars have suggested that the practice of sheathing wood frame houses in palmetto leaves is an indigenous tradition, although the earliest examples they cite are from the 1890s.27 Dumont de Montigny’s 1726 drawing of the Chaumont and De La Pointe concessions on the Pascagoula River (possibly built ca. 1716) shows only European type structures, the De La Pointe house “of two storeys and a balcony all round” (fig. 3.6).28 As in the northern colonies, wood-framed structures of European derivation were the norm in the early period, with adaptations to climate occurring later on.29 No trace of indigenous forms existed in the official architecture of the towns, although interestingly one of the major architects of Nouvelle-Orléans, Alexandre de Batz (1685–1759), made a detailed drawing of a “temple des sauvages” and “cabane du chef” of the Collapissa people on Lake Pontchartrain in 1732, large round versions of the kind of hut described by Le Page du Pratz, which showed at the very least that he was curious about Amerindian building traditions (fig. 3.7).30 The French had much less exposure to indigenous groups in the West Indies after the initial contact period. There the Arawak and Kalinago had been reduced by disease and slaughter to near extinction within fifty years of their first encounter with the Spaniards, and, after a brief period of coexistence and trade the first French habitants in Saint-Christophe, Guadeloupe, and Martinique systematically eliminated the remaining Kalinago, although not without incurring resistance.31 Particularly notorious was the genocide instigated in Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe, in

62

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

3.7 Alexandre de Batz, Native Temple (above) and Chief’s Cabin (below), ink on paper, 1732. Gift of the Estate of Belle J. Bushnell. Courtesy the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, PM # 41-72-10/16.

1635–41 by Charles Liénard de l’Olive. By the 1660s most remaining Kalinago had fled to St Lucia, St Vincent, Guiana, and especially Dominica (Waitukubuli) – declared “neutral” by European powers in 1686 – and their populations declined to such a degree that, in the words of one scholar, “[b]y 1700, the Caribbean had ceased to be an Amerindian region.”32 In the early period, just as they learned pidgin Kalinago and intermarried with Kalinago people, some settlers borrowed

aspects of indigenous architecture: they adapted the Kalinago habit of orienting their buildings toward the sea, the indigenous distinction between public and private spaces, and the exterior hearth – practical in hot weather – and they used local materials, such as palm logs and thatching.33 The Kalinago and Arawak built several kinds of huts, invariably called cases in French: round, oval, or rectilinear structures made of palm logs planted in the ground and with conical or pitched roofs thatched with grass and palm fronds.34 Some were like tents, with the roof planted straight into the ground, and others, of a kind introduced from South America, were built on stilts. A larger communal house for a community leader most familiar to the French is the carbet – in fact its name remains the generic term for an indigenous house in the West Indies and Guiana alike – and others found throughout the islands were called ajoupas, caneyes, barbacoas, kabays (or mouinas), and bohíos.35 The earliest settlers combined some of these forms with the kind of basic hut built by French settlers throughout the Americas, with a timber frame filled with stone and mortar (colombage pierroté) or stone and mud/ clay (colombage bousillé), and probably thatched roofs, often divided into three rooms.36 As Du Tertre commented in 1667: The huts of the simple inhabitants … only have “salles basses,” or a ground floor, separated inside into two or three sections, of which one acts as a sitting room, the other as a dining room, and the third a space for food storage. The poorest dwellings are covered with cane, reed, Latan palm or palm leaves … [s]ince there is no winter in the islands, there is not a single fireplace in any of the houses, except the governor’s, where they make them more for decoration than out of necessity. The kitchen is always separated from the hut. It is a little lean-to five or six steps downwind.37 The one feature of the Caribbean Amerindian house to have a lasting effect on French colonial architecture was

not architectural: the hammock, a Kalinago invention which the French used in their hospitals and barracks from Guiana to Louisiana. The situation of indigenous peoples in Guiana was more complicated, although there, too, they were devastated by epidemic disease: the population of the interior declined from around 13,000 in 1670 to between 600 and 700 by 1787, and the peoples of the littoral shared a similar fate.38 As a universal place of refuge, this vast swath of sparsely populated rainforest was home not only to Amerindians from the Caribbean (e.g., Arawak) or related to them (Mainland Kalinago, known as Galibi) but others from various parts of Amazonian South America (Palicour, Camopi, Yao, Oyampi), and also Maroons, communities of Afro-Amerindians descended from escaped slaves who developed a distinctive culture which continues to flourish today. The indigenous people of Guiana were more marginal to colonial life than those of North America after the initial contact period as they lived primarily in the hinterlands along the shores of the region’s massive rivers and had less presence on the terre firme of the coast, where the French had begun driving the coastal tribes inland from the 1630s with the first establishment of a settlement at Cayenne and further worsening the demographic imbalance by shipping in African slaves in the 1660s.39 Nevertheless the Amerindians who survived enjoyed a certain degree of freedom simply because they lived so far away from the colonists, even when they agreed to settle into missions, and the French were anxious to remain on good terms with them because so few whites lived in the interior and their lands were of strategic importance as buffer zones between French territories and Dutch Suriname and Portuguese Brazil. As in Nouvelle-France they were described in practical terms as being “useful to the colony” (1739), and the highest priority was placed on “win[ning] the hearts of the Indians for the French nation” (1764).40 Although Amerindians were occasionally called up as corvée labour for land clearance and building projects, such work seems to have been voluntary, and they were paid. They were

France and Amerindian Architecture

63

3.8 Esprit Bodin, Plantation house from View of the Building Site of Acarouany taken from the port of New Angoulême, Mana River (Guiana), ink on paper, 1823. Archives Nationales d’OutreMer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 1 PL 2187.

even compensated for building mission churches, as in 1786, when missionaries paid Galibi communities to build the chapels at Macari and Oyapock – the account books for Oyapock show that Father Xavier Padilla paid male and female “Indians” in cloth, mirrors, combs, knives, and crosses.41 These mission bases, often founded adjacent to forts, were an essential part of France’s strategy of securing their territorial limits. Although we know little about the appearance of indigenous housing in that period, nineteenth- and twentieth-century aboriginal dwellings recall Caribbean forms: rectangular structures sometimes on stilts, ranging from 6 to 8 metres wide by 10 long, with a heavy thatched roof of palm leaves extending over the sides and fastened onto wooden posts with vines.42 The walls are made of evenly spaced posts connected by woven palm leaves or twigs. The grander communal houses – they were built as late as the 1960s in Suriname – were round structures on posts lashed together with vines, with huge conical roofs of palm thatching and walls

64

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

of clay or palm mats.43 The first habitants adapted the indigenous house to their own use but quickly switched to French forms such as the poteaux en terre cabin with a pitched wood-framed roof. Only the heavy palm-leaf thatching survived this transition, as seen in early drawings such as Louis Pierre Desmon’s depiction of the Place Royale at Kourou from 1764 (fig. 3.19), which shows rectangular cabins with poles placed close together, probably mortared with mud and grass, with European-style rectilinear windows and doors. Others had a veranda on the front, as in Esprit Bodin’s sketch of a plantation house at Nouvelle-Angoulême on the Mana River (1823; fig. 3.8).44 Thatched roofs persisted even after the government abolished them as a fire hazard in 1710–11.45 Guiana is unique in that a major design feature of colonial buildings in the territory – it later spread to other parts of the West Indies and to Louisiana – may have been partly inspired by Amerindian forms (fig. 3.16). Identified by scholars of Louisiana

architecture as a “Class ii French Creole Roof,” it is a rectangular covering with a high pitched inner roof and less steeply pitched surrounding eaves that cover either enclosed or open galleries on all four sides (they are more generically known as broken-pitch or doublepitch hip roofs).46 The form may have derived from the high-pitched thatched roofs of Amerindian houses, which however lacked the eaves.47 A version of that roof type is illustrated in a 1763 book by Jean de Bruletout, chevalier de Préfontaine (d. 1787), as a model plantation building (it is described as a “caze ordinaire de

Cayenne”; fig. 3.9), divided into three rooms like its Caribbean equivalents. According to Préfontaine, they only have a ground floor … [and] there are three rooms on the same floor … The galleries, 3.9 Nicholas Chalmandrier, Plan, [and] Sectional Views of an Ordinary Cayenne House without Nails or Mortise &c. Engraving from Jean Antoine Bruletout de Préfontaine, Maison rustique à l’usage des habitans (1763). Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

France and Amerindian Architecture

65

the exterior edge of which will be supported by eight-foot poles, allow fresh air in during the hot season, allow one to walk under cover in the rainy season, and they protect the walls and house from humidity … [For] the roof … most often leaves of certain plants are used … If you do not have leaves you can use cane straw … wheatgrass, or the “queue de biche savanne,” known as yappé.48 He continues: “When the house is raised & roofed, one is ready to build the walls, that is to say, to fill the spaces between the studs. Normally there are no windows; one compensates by choosing on each side of the house the space at the middle of each room to make two doors. One can be closed while the other is open.”49 Nevertheless it is possible that the Guianese brokenpitched roof owes as much to Dutch influence as to Amerindian precedents. Broken pitched roofs with eaves were being built on plantations in Brazil and Suriname as early as the mid-seventeenth century, as with a church in Pernambuco (before 1644) depicted by Dutch painter Frans Post or the cookhouse of the Waterlant Plantation on the Suriname River sketched by Dirk Valkenburg in 1708, which however only has eaves on two sides of the house (figs. 16.11, 16.13).50 The Guianese roof particularly flourished in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries both in Cayenne and smaller towns like Mana, where they are surfaced with tin and often employ imported iron frames.51 The lack of impact of Amerindian technology and design on architecture was precisely the feature that made the buildings of the French Atlantic Empire differ so profoundly from those of its Iberian – particularly Spanish – rivals. In early colonial Mexico, the Nahua descendants of Aztec craftsmen painted murals and carved motifs in churches and public buildings that contained Aztec glyphs and even symbols of imperial rule such as the eagle astride a cactus.52 Late seventeenth-century southern Peru witnessed a vigorous revival of Andean iconography based on

66

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

representations of culturally significant flora and fauna and symbols related to the regalia of Inca kingship, and in Lima traditional roofing methods using cane and mud were employed in church vaulting after the European techniques proved vulnerable to earthquakes (fig. 2.4).53 In eighteenth-century Brazilian Amazonia carved decoration in the altarpieces of the Jesuit church at Belem included depictions of plants that reflected the local environment of the Amerindian sculptors who made them.54 By contrast French settlers quickly discarded aboriginal forms, with the single possible exception of the Guianese broken-pitched roof, and there is no evidence that any French colonial buildings were adorned with Amerindian patterns or symbols. Eighteenth-Century Amerindian Reductions on the St Lawrence Although planned reductions, or standardized settlements of Christian Amerindians, were less common in French America than in Iberoamerica, religious orders were inspired by Spanish and Portuguese models to design utopian schemes for the handful of reductions they did found on the St Lawrence and in Guiana. French missionaries were particularly motivated by the Jesuit mission towns in Paraguay and among the Chiquitos and Moxos peoples in the lowlands of present-day Bolivia to create idealized Christian villages in which convert Amerindians would learn a trade, study the rudiments of religion, practise self-sustaining agriculture, and become “civilized” according to French standards (and therefore sympathetic with French interests). As in Spanish America, French missionaries were convinced that the logical geometry of these settlements would help impose a Europeanized regimen upon indigenous communities, the very layout of the streets, pathways, and houses encouraging them to abandon their nomadic ways and assimilate to French lifestyle, living within hearing distance of the church bell. They were also designed to impose segregation: between whites and non-whites, Amerindians and African slaves, and even between

different indigenous groups – as we will see, this brand of apartheid avant la lettre extended even to graveyards. These regularized towns contrast strikingly with the early Great Lakes missions of the Recollects and Jesuits, which usually amounted to little more than a longhouse in an extant Amerindian village or a crowded, irregular fortified village. Although few plans survive of these French reductions – as most of them were not designed by royal architect engineers few have been recorded for posterity – they demonstrate the belief that a symmetrical, rational town plan could directly mould the behaviour of new converts. They are also another example of the way church patrons looked to non-French sources for their inspiration more frequently than did their secular counterparts. Founded between 1609 and 1630 and moved and rebuilt several times over – the most elaborate were reconstructed in stone from the 1720s to the 1750s – the thirty Jesuit reductions in Paraguay were the most famous Catholic missions in the Americas and inspired imitations around the world, from Chiloé in Chilean Patagonia to the Philippines.55 The main innovation of these reductions was the implementation of grid-pattern urbanism, with long, rectangular, multi-family indigenous housing arranged in parallel rows and separated by straight intersecting passageways, as at the Reduction of San Juan Bautista (founded 1697), now in Brazil but formerly in Spanish territory (fig. 2.1).56 These blocks of tenements surrounded three sides of a large rectangular plaza the fourth side of which was enclosed by a giant church, residence, and courtyard for crafts productions, thus representing visually the balance between sacred and profane life and emphasizing the Church’s role in people’s lives.57 The plaza was the arena for the elaborate church ceremonies and processions that punctuated the liturgical year. Perspectival sightlines were crucially important to reduction design: the church and Jesuit compound in particular were arranged so as to make the most dramatic impression upon viewers, notably by having a wide access road directly across the square from them to enhance the view from afar. The church and residence

also served as a fortress during attacks by Brazilian slave raiders: after their defeat of the Portuguese in the Battle of Mbororé in 1641, the Guaraní were among the very few Amerindians to be issued guns by the Spanish government to protect their borderlands.58 As many of the French reductions along the St Lawrence and the major rivers of Guiana were also strategically situated on the fringes of colonial settlement, they too served both as fortress and mission, which is why some of their plans were sent to the Ministry of the Marine and survive today. This duality also frequently put them at loggerheads with a Crown whose priority was defence and not proselytization. Six missions for which plans survive include the Jesuit reduction at Saint-François-du-Lac (Odanak, 1700) among the Abenaki on the Saint-François River between Montreal and Trois-Rivières; the Jesuit missions to the Iroquois at Caughnawaga (Kahnawake, 1716) on the south shore of the St Lawrence across from Montreal island; the Sulpician mission to the Nipissing, Algonquians, Iroquois, and Huron at Lac des Deux-Montagnes (Oka, 1719) west of Montreal and, in Guiana, the Jesuit Missions to the Galibi and other peoples at Fort SaintLouis de l’Oyapock (1725), Saint-Joseph de Sinnamary (1738), and Notre-Dame de l’Assomption de Kourou (1713-24), the latter two transformed by French authorities into the principal towns of the ill-fated colony of Kourou, the only secular colony in the French Empire to use Spanish reduction-style urbanism, as I will explore at the end of this chapter. The mission at Odanak (fig. 3.10) was founded as a bastion against British and Iroquois incursions into Nouvelle-France at a strategically important spot 10 kilometres from where the Rivière Saint-François meets Lac Saint-Pierre, a wide stretch of the St Lawrence. The Abenaki (and related Sokoki, or Missiquoi, peoples) were moved here from an earlier Jesuit reduction of the same name on the Chaudière River 200 kilometres away in the lead-up to the 1701 “Grande Paix de Montréal,” the precarious peace accord with forty aboriginal groups from Acadia to Lake Superior.59 In 1700 Governor General Louis-Hector de Callière

France and Amerindian Architecture

67

(1648–1703) and Intendant Jean Bochart de Champigny (1645–1720) carved the 30-square-kilometre mission out of the seigneuries of Saint-François and Pierreville (fig. 1.13), compensating the owners by letting them maintain their rights to wood and pasturage and the privilege of trading with the mission, and the reduction was enlarged in 1705 and 1706.60 The Abenaki served their patrons well: within a few years of its foundation Odanak had become a base for regular raids into western Massachusetts to kidnap New England settlers, most notably the 1704 raid on Deerfield made famous by the publication, by former captive John Williams, of The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion (Boston, 1707).61 Williams himself – his wife and several children had been killed and captured in the raid – spent some unhappy days at Odanak, mostly arguing about religion and politics with the Jesuits. The project for the fortified mission was presented to the French government in 1704 by engineer Jacques Levasseur de Néré (1688–1724), at which time only the walls, chapel, and Jesuit residence had been completed, as well as the house of the seigneur of SaintFrançois, Joseph Hertel (1738–1781), located on the riverbank just west of the fort.62 The stockade formed a lopsided rectangle on the northern riverbank at a height of about 7 metres with a bastion at each corner and a long covered passageway leading to a redoubt on a clifftop with a view of the river.63 Like a Paraguay reduction in miniature it was built around a central square with the chapel, residence, and garden at one end and twenty mostly rectangular, multi-family, bark-covered Abenaki dwellings lined up in rows on 3.10 Jacques Levasseur de Néré, Plan of the Native village of St. Francois des Abenakis drawn on the spot in the year 1704, ink and colours on paper, 1704. A depiction of the Odanak mission of the Abenaki, showing a bastion at each corner (“1”) and a long covered passageway leading to a redoubt on a clifftop with a view of the river (“4”). It was built around a central square with the chapel and residence (“2”), and garden at upper left and twenty mostly rectangular, multi-family, bark-covered Abenaki longhouses (“3”) lined up in rows on the other three sides. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 03 DFC 491B.

the other three sides. The public space served for religious processions, particularly those dedicated to the Virgin of Chartres, to whom the mission had a particular devotion (the church contained a relic of her shirt and a small silver statue which formed the centrepiece of these processions).64 Recent archaeological work has confirmed the existence of a wooden palisade, a Jesuit residence of logs squared off in the European fashion; a poteaux sur sol chapel with a stone masonry foundation; and longhouses built on a framework of wooden poles.65 Odanak may have occupied little territory compared to its South American precursors, but it had a population of around one thousand at the time of its foundation.66 Typically for the missions of North America and Guiana it was meant to keep aboriginals segregated from habitants in nearby villages, reflecting the Spanish-American division into the república española, or settlements inhabited by white colonists (e.g., Lima, Puebla), and the república indiana, or reductions and pueblos de indios.67 The other two reductions were grander affairs. The most important was the Mohawk mission of SaintFrançois-Xavier at Caughnawaga (now Kahnawake), founded in 1716 (figs. 3.11 and 3.12) in the Seigneurie du Sault-Saint-Louis, a critical player in the geopolitical and economic interchange between France, Britain, and Britain’s Mohawk allies and a counterbalance to the fortified Anglican Mohawk mission, or “praying town,” of Fort Hunter (New York) founded five years earlier by Queen Anne of Britain 350 kilometres due south.68 A bustling, rapidly growing community of Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Huron, and other Great Lakes peoples, Caughnawaga was the largest and most important Christian Amerindian community in the northeast.69 The mission was first founded in 1667 at La Prairie, about 20 kilometres to the east (figs. 2.2–3), but it moved five times upriver before setting at Sault Saint-Louis, not only to escape cheap brandy and other European temptations but also, following indigenous practice, to leave exhausted farmland for more fertile fields. Caughnawaga was also the headquarters of captivity diplomacy, the indigenous capture and adoption

France and Amerindian Architecture

69

3.11 View of the Mission of Sault St Louis, ink and watercolours on paper, mid-eighteenth century. The church (A ) and mission (B ) are to the right in the palisade and the Amerindian longhouses (C ) are to the left, outside the palisade. The village is known today as Kahnawake. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département Cartes et Plans.

of New Englanders, mostly children, to replace fallen warriors and to use as a leverage tool in Anglo-French negotiations.70 The mission was vital in maintaining

70

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

peace with the non-Catholic Iroquois in the ancestral homeland along the Mohawk River since Catholic and non-Catholic Iroquois were reluctant to attack each other.71 Its illegal trade in beaver pelts with the Dutch merchants of Albany was also an important source of revenue for France during troubled times.72 Unlike Odanak the fort at Caughnawaga enclosed only the Jesuit compound and later the garrison, whereas the indigenous longhouses were located outside, in two rows along the riverbank to the east

(figs. 3.11–12). The original stockade fort was designed in 1720 by royal engineer architect Gaspard-Joseph Chaussegros de Léry (1682–1756), who was inspired by the rapidly built and economical stockade villages of the Mohawks: “a palisaded fort is not very expensive when it is built as the Natives usually build it in the forest; in peacetime no palisaded forts are built in the colony because they deteriorate and are useless; when war is declared one builds a comparable fort in less than five or six days.”73 The duc d’Orléans approved the original land grant in the name of Louis XV with a construction budget of 2,000 livres on the condition that the Amerindians were to provide free labour: Sieur Bégon has informed [us] that there was the need to change the Native Village of the Mission of Sault St. Louis and to move it further upriver

because the lands where the Natives live now are used up, His Majesty approves this change and has ordered a fund of 2,000 livres on account of the expense necessary to separate two square arpents of land and to build a stockade for it with a new fort and a church and He charges the said Sieur de Vaudreuil with ensuring that this amount is sufficient to execute all the work, by engaging the Indians to contribute with their labour to the construction of this fort.74

3.12 Louis Franquet, Plan of the Fort of Sault de St Louis and of the Village of the Iroquois Natives, ink and colours on paper, 1752. Newberry Library, Chicago. The buildings painted red were completed but the walls of the fort facing the village and the river had not yet been begun. The house marked “C ” at the top belonged to merchants with the surname Desauniers.

France and Amerindian Architecture

71

The Jesuits spent the king’s money – but on their residence and church (1716–1721). They were reluctant to permit the construction of a garrison (corps de garde) as originally intended because the main point of moving to Sault Saint-Louis was to get away from Europeans.75 The Amerindians seem to have shared their unwillingness: in 1727 the governor general reported that “the Natives do not want [a garrison] at all and that they have said that they will return to their first village if one is built.”76 Chaussegros complained that the Jesuits had made a “very considerable expense” in building their stone church and residence, “even though these funds had been given to them to begin the walls of the palisaded fort” and that they now needed a further 1,000 livres “for the walls of this fort, the house for the officer and the garrison.”77 His September 1721 budget totalled 4,181 livres, of which 1,500 was set aside for the palisade fort (fort de pieux).78 However, maintaining that “this garrison is very prejudicial to the interests of God and the King,” the Jesuits succeeded in postponing the construction of the fort, officers’ quarters, and garrison for another twenty-five years.79 In 1723 Vaudreuil shelved Chaussegros’s project, two years later reallocating the 4,181 livres to the fortification of Montreal.80 An undated drawing probably from the late 1730s or early 1740s shows only a partial palisade around the Jesuit compound (fig. 3.11).81 It was only in 1746 with the construction of British stone forts at Herkimer (1740) and Oswego (1741) that two forts were finally begun at Caughnawaga, “one of stone for the French and the other of palisades for the Iroquois Natives,” the former including the new stone garrison building and officers’ quarters, all at a cost of 10,889.40 livres, more than twice Chaussegros’s estimate.82 A 1752 plan by Louis Franquet shows Caughnawaga as it looked just before the war (fig. 3.12). The ramparts with their seven bastions were less regular than at Odanak, perhaps because they had been built hastily and the reduction had expanded so drastically since the 1720s: the plan shows over eighty indigenous buildings compared to Odanak’s twenty, and by 1741 as many as

72

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

1,160 Amerindians lived on the mission.83 The layout of the longhouses seems to confirm this hypothesis since although the two rows flanking the main road are lined up reduction-style (see fig. 3.11) – the ones at the back are more loosely arranged. The houses are also now built in the French manner of wood and stone with pitched roofs. Inside the fort was the church, Jesuit residence, merchants’ quarters, warehouse, corps de garde, stables, and various courtyards and vegetable gardens, and a place for the mustering of troops. Today some of the wall remains as does the Jesuit residence (the church was replaced in 1845).84 In the end the realities of politics and war prevented Caughnawaga from acquiring the idealized form originally envisioned by the king’s planners. The Sulpicians were the idealists among the missionaries of Nouvelle-France. Sent by the Order’s Parisian founder Jean-Jacques Olier (1608–1657) in 1657, they acquired in 1663–64 the seigneuries of Montreal and Saint-Sulpice from the defunct Société de Notre-Dame de Montréal (see chapter 1). The socalled “Gentlemen (messieurs) of Saint-Sulpice” were a wealthy order and generated projects on a grand scale, whether ambitious reductions or the palatial threestorey headquarters planned by superior François Dollier de Casson (1636–1701) for Montreal in 1684 (fig. 12.11).85 The Order preferred to send missionaries with personal fortunes which they could use to augment royal grants, even if they often lacked the practical skills to keep their operations solvent.86 But their pastoral successes among the colonists of Montreal were not matched by comparable accomplishments in the mission field.87 As with Caughnawaga the first Sulpician reductions moved progressively away from white settlers toward fertile land. The first missions (1660s) on and around the island of Montreal, such as the Mountain Mission of Our Lady of the Snows (1675), administered to a few unenthusiastic Huron, Algonquin, Nipissing, and Iroquois families. From 1683 the Mountain Mission was run by François Vachon de Belmont (1645–1732), who despite lavishing his personal wealth on a fort, housing,

and chapel only converted eight men, 18 women, and 13 children out of 220 Amerindian inhabitants.88 The populations of Sulpician missions also fluctuated dramatically: Amerindians spent the winters in their ancestral hunting grounds, returning to the reductions only in the summer for the trade fairs, and numbers oscillated as warriors were killed and captives and refugees taken in. In 1704 the Mountain Mission relocated to the north shore of the island to get away from settlers and the Sault Saint-Louis Mohawks, who were enticing their own Mohawks to leave.89 In 1717 Vaudreuil and Intendant Michel Bégon granted them a seigneury on the northeast shore of Lac des Deux-Montagnes (now Oka), a strategic spot on the westernmost extremity of Nouvelle-France and at the mouth of the Ottawa River, the heavily-trafficked gateway to the fur trade (figs. 3.13–15). Maintaining its earlier dedication to the Virgin of Loreto, the mission moved to its new location between 1721 and 1722. The 1717 grant makes it clear that the king was particularly interested in the site’s military potential. While the missionaries and their Amerindian communities were given excellent fishing and hunting rights the grant required that they undertake at their expense “all the costs necessary for the move of the said mission from Sault-au-Récollet” as well as the construction of a Church and a stone fort “to protect the natives,” and that they must build the settlement within seven years following plans provided by the governor general and intendant.90 The mission was granted a 6,000-livre annual Crown subsidy; in 1727 it was joined by Nipissing and Algonquin from the nearby Île-aux-Tortes mission; and its territory was increased twice in 1733 and 1735. The Sulpicians embarked on their new mission in a spirit of Arcadian idealism: “[i]n this magnificent setting, they could fish in a lake teeming with fish, hunt in the neighbouring forests, and even cultivate the soil to assure a more reliable food supply.”91 The reality, as with their other enterprises, was far from idyllic and conversions were scanty: John Dickenson remarks that the years 1721 to 1812 were “marked by a terrible fight against entertainment and jugglery, nighttime dances

and drunkenness,” and the number of missionaries declined from eight in 1755 to a single man by 1784.92 Despite these disastrous returns the three surviving projects for the Oka mission are grand and utopian. The earliest (ca. 1718–19), prepared by Belmont on the king’s instructions, is an ideal manifestation of the balance between the sacred and profane life – particularly when compared to the more unruly plan of Caughnawaga (compare figs. 3.12 and 3.13). On the right (east) the fortress forms a perfect square divided into three zones lengthwise with a round bastion at each corner, a large rectangular assembly space down the middle, a sacred zone on the left measuring 72 by 24 feet (formed of sacristy, church, and aboriginal council chamber or “salle de conseil pour les sauvages”), and on the right the “house to lodge the missionaries” with five cells and a larger room, possibly a refectory. On the other end is a “school for catechism and to teach the little native boys to sing the offices of the Church in their language,” reflecting a Sulpician emphasis on music.93 Balancing this fortress on the west, Belmont envisioned an Amerindian quarter formed of a larger square bisected by two streets with seventy-two longhouses, all with their gable ends facing the lake and arranged in precise rows of six each, eighteen to a block. The effect is similar to that of the Paraguay Reductions (fig. 2.1), and the organization into four quadrants also recalls traditional depictions of the Hortus conclusus (Enclosed Garden), a symbol of Mary’s virginity and also associated with the Litany of Loreto (Letania Lauretana), the popular devotion to the mission’s dedicatee, the Virgin of Loreto.94 The west half of this village was for the Iroquois, and the east half, or at least the northeast block, was for the Algonquin. Each “cabane sauvage,” made of bark, was to be 18 feet wide (about the length Belmont remarks only that “leur longueur est differente”), with a doorway in the facade facing the water. They are traditional longhouses built by indigenous labour, and it is their arrangement, rather than their architecture, that reflects European ideals. The Crown’s response to Belmont’s city of God was an unequivocally military project by Chaussegros de Léry

France and Amerindian Architecture

73

(1719), inspired by Vauban and similar to Chaussegros’s projects for frontier posts (e.g., Fort Chambly, 1734).95 Chaussegros’s main criticism of Belmont’s design had been that the fort was “too small, and that it is only useful for the missionaries, not being able to serve as a refuge for the Natives in case of war.”96 Although the new project does a better job of integrating the two zones of the mission it makes no pretense to being a village of peace, and it includes a garrison. It also separates Europeans from Amerindians: the Amerindian village is now hidden behind the fort, while the white habitants enjoy prime lakeside property. The smaller white zone is also better protected with stone ramparts 12 feet tall and 2 feet thick while the larger aboriginal zone at the rear, with its neat rows of longhouses in four quadrants – the only surviving feature of Belmont’s design – is merely palisaded as at Caughnawaga.97 Chaussegros equipped the fort with massive lozengeshaped bastions on each corner, with an open place d’armes inside, and he reduced the size of the chapel. Nevertheless, like the Jesuits at Caughnawaga the Sulpicians successfully blocked Chaussegros’s plans and built a small stockade fort and a stone church and lodging in 1731–32.98 By 1734 the Algonquin, Nipissing, Iroquois, and Huron had built their longhouses to the west of the fort as in Belmont’s original conception, although not in the neat rows imagined by the Sulpician. The Peaceable Kingdom returns in the final project for the reduction, one which is oblivious both to the needs of the Crown and to the dangers of geopolitics (fig. 3.14). It features five sectors distributed over the extent of the seigneury and divided by ethnicity, four completed (including a tiny fort still lacking ramparts and with a single bastion) and the fifth, a gridiron

3.13 François Vachon de Belmont, Fort of Lac des Deux-Montagnes situated around two leagues from the Island of Montreal, ink on paper, 1719. The fort with its church, sacristy, and aboriginal council chamber residence and catechism room was to be on the right while the Amerindian longhouses were lined up in four quadrants on the left. The village is now known as Oka. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), F 3 290 73.

France and Amerindian Architecture

75

village in the northeast on the bay, mostly unfinished. It is attributable to François Picquet (1708–1781), an Oka missionary from 1739 to 1749 who oversaw “all the large works for housing the missionaries and the arrangement of the native villages,” and it was documented by Governor Charles de Beauharnois (1671–1749) in a 1743 plan sent to the Ministry of the Marine.99 Moving clockwise from the European complex at the bottom with its “French Fort,” church, missionaries’ residence, and stables, it includes a little convent for the Soeurs de la Congrégation (an order of teaching nuns; it is marked “d ”), an Iroquois and Huron village (T ) arranged in neat rows (three longhouses and twenty-four European-style pièces sur pièces houses with pitched roofs and square chimneystacks), and an unbuilt trading building called the “Cabane du Roy” (e ). North of the spacious lacrosse pitch (s ) is a more scattershot group of longhouses for Iroquois, Huron, and the poor, probably refugees. In the far north central sector is a garden-like cemetery, divided into four quadrants by ethnicity, with Algonquin and Nipissing at the top and Iroquois and French at the bottom. The gridiron town, with three longitudinal and five latitudinal streets, is composed of monumental apartment blocks with pitched roofs and chimneys, and features a decorative fountain with a reflecting pool and jet d’eau at the centre. The west half is for the Nipissing (“l ”) and the east side for the Algonquin (“m ”), with housing for the village and war chiefs and with trade and war council chambers on the ends of the north–south axis.100 Missionary De Pontbriand claimed to have been “much edified” by the design in a 1742 letter to the minister.101

3.14 Charles de Beauharnois, Plan of the Mission of Lac des DeuxMontagnes, ink and colours on paper, 1743. Moving clockwise from the lower right is the “French Fort,” church, residence, stables (“A ,” “B ,” “C ”); a convent (“D ”); an Iroquois and Huron village (T ); an unbuilt trading building (E ); north of the lacrosse pitch (S ) is a village of Iroquois, Huron, and refugees (T , R ). At the top is the cemetery, divided by ethnicity. The town at upper right is divided between Nipissing (“L ”) and Algonquin (“M ”). Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 03 DFC 490B .

France and Amerindian Architecture

77

3.15 Hamon Guen, Calvary Chapels on the Chemin de Croix, Lac des Deux-Montagnes (Oka), Quebec, 1740–42. These chapels are on a clearing high above the mission and river.

One can only imagine what Versailles must have thought of this vulnerable representation of Christian harmony on one of the most strategic outposts in the empire, but officials were still complaining in 1747 that “the works on the Lake of the Two Mountains for the fort of this village of natives” had “not at all been finished.”102

78

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

Not included on the map is a Calvary on the mountaintop northeast of the mission commissioned by the superior Hamon Guen (in office 1740–42) with four oratories and three chapels of stone, all of which once contained paintings of Christ’s Passion specially copied in Paris from originals by Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), Jean Jouvenet (1644–1717), and others (they were replaced by wooden relief panels in 1775–76; fig. 3.15).103 Hidden deep in the forest except for the three chapels on the summit, it is the only North

American example of a sacro monte (Italian for “holy hill”), a hilltop complex of chapels containing statues or paintings of the Passion meant to mimic a pilgrimage to the Holy Lands and to prompt emotional and spiritual responses in visitors. Developed at first by the Franciscans, the first was built at Varallo (1491) and then at twelve other sites in Piedmont and Lombardy, and outside Italy at Mont Valérien near Paris (1633, destroyed), Bom Jesus do Monte, Portugal (begun 1723), and Bom Jesus do Matosinhos in Congonhas do Campo, Brazil (begun 1794).104 Guen may have been equally inspired by the elaborate stone churchyard calvaries unique to his native Brittany, as at Guimiliau (1581–88) or Plougastel-Daoulas (1602–04). The placement of the Oka Calvary chapels in the woods was intended to recreate the kind of forested setting where Amerindians spent so much of their lives, and their culmination in the open clearing provides a dramatic and baroque sensation of emerging from darkness into light. The view from the top affords a vast panorama of the lake and mission, an Arcadian vision of peace and prosperity that existed largely in the imaginations of the Sulpicians. Eighteenth-Century Amerindian Reductions in Guiana and L’Affaire de Kourou Rationally planned reduction villages were also common in Guiana, where the Jesuits founded a string of missions across two-thirds of the length of the territory. Situated either at the mouths of the great rivers punctuating the coast or hundreds of kilometres upstream, they were modelled after those of their co-religionists in the southern part of the continent. As in Nouvelle-France the reductions combined military and spiritual functions, particularly since many of their outposts were in disputed territory, as along the Oyapock River on the border with Brazil. Nevertheless governors and intendants distrusted the missionaries and maintained that their territory could be more profitably worked by colonists.105 Unlike in Nouvelle-France, Guianese reduction design was also used for the first white

settlements outside the capital region of Cayenne – in fact projects such as Sinnamary and Kourou (1763–64) were built quite literally on top of existing reductions since the Jesuits had been expelled from French territories in 1763.106 Rather than ship the Jesuits back to France as happened elsewhere, the government kept them under house arrest and ordered them to oversee new construction work by their African and Amerindian labourers. The result was unlike anything else in the empire: a bizarre combination of Louis XV-style urbanism with what looked for all the world like a Paraguayan mission (fig. 3.19). It is perhaps not surprising, as we have just seen, that Guiana was the source of the only architectural form in the French Atlantic Empire that may derive from Amerindian source. Unlike in Canada the Jesuits had a virtual monopoly on missionary activity in Guiana, particularly in the backcountry among the semi-nomadic Galibi and other groups. Although they had made tentative and unsuccessful efforts to proselytize as early as the 1650s – in Spanish territory on the Orinoco and in the 1670s far up the River Mahury in French territory – the mostly Martinican Jesuits made little progress and eventually abandoned these “flying missions” in favour of permanent reductions.107 Under the initiative of Pierre-Aimé Lombard (1678–1748) the Jesuits founded a network of reductions on the major rivers: first on the Karouabo River (1709) – it moved to two locations on the Kourou River in 1713 and 1725 – then five on the Oyapock River (from ca. 1727 to the 1740s), and in 1738 on the Sinnamary River.108 The Jesuits were as concerned with self-sufficiency and making money as they were with conversions: their land, a concession like any plantation, was used for crops and livestock to feed their communities and to turn a profit. The Jesuits even founded highly remunerative slave plantations for sugar and cacao production outside Cayenne at places like Rémire (the earliest, founded 1668), Saint-Régis (1688), and Montlouis (1722): by 1764 they owned 803 slaves, almost a quarter of the Africans in the colony.109 Unlike those in Nouvelle-France the Guiana Jesuits also kept slaves on some of their reductions, creating

France and Amerindian Architecture

79

3.16 Former Maison des Gardes de l’Intendance (before that it was part of the Jesuit compound), Cayenne, ca. 1749–52.

a potentially volatile conflict of interest between free Amerindians who tended their own gardens and were sometimes paid to build mission structures and the enslaved Africans working the cash crops who built reduction buildings without pay, including indigenous housing.110 Among the Africans were trained carpenters, turners, bricklayers, forgers, and masons as in any secular plantation in the Circum-Caribbean (see chapter 4).111 In spite of these profound social inequalities the duc d’Orléans had great faith in the reductions, as he wrote in the child king’s name in 1716: “His

80

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

Majesty is informed that the Jesuits, who have sent missionaries among the Nations of the Galibi Natives, have made great progress there, and that the greatest part have sincerely and in good faith renounced their errors and their vices, have embraced Christianity and fulfil their duties with all the zeal and fervour of which they are capable, these examples and the attentions of the missionaries daily bring more Natives to the Faith.”112 The earliest-surviving plan (1728) for a Jesuit foundation in Guiana is not a reduction but a fort: Fort Saint-Louis at the mouth of the Oyapock River, a key French military base and the headquarters of the Jesuits’ missionary activities along the river, which would amount to six separate reductions, many of them

founded multiple times and in different places, the closest of which was the Saint-Pierre reduction with its Arawak-speaking Palicour (Paikwehne) peoples (fig. 3.17).113 Although the fort belonged to the king it was planned by the Jesuit Father Fauque and incorporates elements that would characterize their later reductions: a taste for geometry, a balance between the temporal and spiritual worlds – like Belmont’s first project for Oka (fig. 3.13) – and an emphasis on the Jesuits’ self-appointed role as guardians of French territory.114 As the Jesuit superior boasted in 1739:

“we have on the Oyapock River four missions of a distance of two days from one to the other; there is a fifth inland, among the Palicours, who are located south of the fort of Oyapock.”115 Founded on the orders of Governor d’Orvilliers and lasting from 1725 until the English destroyed it in 1744, Fort Saint-Louis was a perfect square with four diagonal 3.17 Father Fauque, Plan of Fort Saint-Louis on the River Oyapock (Guiana), ink on paper, 1728. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département Cartes et Plans.

France and Amerindian Architecture

81

bastions at the corners, two named after saints (“bastion Saint-Louis” and “bastion Sainte-Claire”) and two in honour of the government (“bastion royal” and “bastion Maurepas,” named after the secretary of state for the marine), underscoring the balance between Church and state. Inside, arranged around a square Place d’Armes – it is accessed by four side streets and a central avenue leading to the fort’s main entrance – is an ecclesiastical range at the far end with the church, Jesuit residence, and hospital, two flanking ranges housing the government headquarters and officers’ lodgings, and the range closest to the entrance incorporating the barracks and “magasin du Roy” or storehouse. What is fascinating about this arrangement is that despite the fort’s primary function as a military emplacement, the Jesuits have placed the church facade in its most prominent spot, on a direct axis with the entrance portal so that it dominates the square like a Paraguay Reduction (fig. 2.1). Nevertheless, as with so many projects in this book, this plan papered over a less ideal reality. The Jesuits were constantly fighting with the military – in fact their various Oyapock reductions were founded to protect Amerindians against the abuses of soldiers and French traders – and in 1733 they even moved their residence and church 120 metres outside the fort.116 Unlike Fort Saint-Louis the Jesuit Galibi reduction at Saint-Joseph de Sinnamary, located on a bend in the river about 15 kilometres from the sea, had neither fort nor garrison. Founded in 1738 as an annex of the Kourou mission by Father Caranave, it accommodated 350 Galibi by 1742, 200 of them unbaptized.117 In 1754

3.18 Jean Baptiste Tugny, Plan of the Mission at Sinnamary (Guiana), 1763. This plan shows the original Jesuit reduction (at the bottom) and the new buildings planned by Tugny at the top. The buildings marked “A ” are the new immigrant housing with vegetable gardens and outdoor kitchens called carbets. The Jesuit buildings include “B ” (hospital), “C ” (warehouse), “D ” (church), “E ” (priests’ lodging), “F ” (kitchen), “G ” (chicken coop), “H ” (dairy), “I ” (dovecote); and “L ” (priests’ garden). The rest of the houses to the right of the square belonged to the Amerindians. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 14 DFC 110B .

82

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

the mission was taken over by Father O’Reilly, also from Kourou, who constructed its church of Saint-Joseph that year, which measured 15 metres long by 8 metres wide. Sinnamary never had the population influx of Kourou and the number of Amerindians fell steadily: by 1760 there were only 110 Galibi left.118 Despite its falling fortunes the reduction’s appearance was recorded for posterity by royal engineer Jean-Baptiste Tugny, who drew up a plan when the Jesuits were expelled and Sinnamary was being transformed into a satellite town for the Kourou colony, and in an engraving showing a bird’seye view published in 1767 when it was a refugee camp for displaced Canadians (fig. 3.18).119 The reduction’s total lack of defence is remarkable since not only was it the westernmost French settlement but it was also located in a strategically vital position about halfway between Cayenne and the Dutch border on the Maroni River, as Father Prieure observed in 1739: “we have recently made a new establishment in a place called Cennamarie [sic], between Surinam and Cayenne.”120 The Jesuit compound was a grid of five rectilinear blocks, three on the river and two behind, delineated by a network of paths. The central block was a large public square which doubled as a ceremonial space and embarkation point for pirogues coming and going from the settlement.121 As in Paraguay or Chiquitos, Sinnamary was designed to impress visitors and residents through dramatic sightlines: the church and Jesuit residence dominated the square, the residence in the middle and the church set farther back and on an angle to allow a direct view of its facade both from the river and from the road that enters the square from the north (on the left in the plan). Even the botanist Jean-Baptiste Fusée-Aublet, who in 1762 found the church and residence in a state of semi-dilapidation, was impressed by their commanding situation, which made them “the masters of the river.”122 Indeed the town still makes an imposing first impression when viewed from the n1 highway to the west, which would have been the visitor’s first glimpse after passing the final bend in the river. The Amerindians’ houses occupied the southern (right) block and also faced directly onto the square:

84

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

they included small individual carbets, two communal buildings called tapouy, according to the engraving “a kind of assembly hall for the Indians,” and a building raised on stilts called a tocay. The square also included the Jesuits’ vegetable garden with a pond and dovecote. The main road, at the back of the square, went to the hospital and dairy on the north and to the storehouse and the carbets on the south. Behind the settlement was a grassy field called the savane, where the Jesuits had only built a chicken coop, but in 1763 Commandant Préfontaine chose it as the location for a row of six monumental apartment blocks for the new immigrants arranged gable-end toward the river like piano keys (the engraving calls them “cultivators’ houses”). Constructed under Tugny’s supervision, each was to have ten corresponding kitchen sheds and kitchen gardens: “the little sheds placed to the right of the large [ones] are not yet finished, they take the place of the kitchens which can be built in due course, where at the same time little kitchen gardens are shown which can be placed between the houses.”123 Each tenement was 120 feet long, and they were all finished by mid-September with a capacity for forty families.124 At the centre of the rectangle was an elongated square grandly named “Place de Choiseul” after the mastermind of the Kourou colony, which was approached by a wide avenue leading straight from the river. The apartment blocks were built reduction-style with pitched tile (or slate) roofs and side galleries supported by posts, which is not surprising since Tugny relied upon the Jesuits’ Amerindian work crews, engaging one hundred Galibi builders to construct them.125 The Galibi were valued for their speed and likely also their economy: in a 1764 letter to the king Préfontaine commented, “I found the six large houses raised and in the final stages of construction; they were ahead of those of Kourou, the advantage of being made by Indian hands.”126 Tugny then converted the original mission buildings to serve the functions of a secular town: the residence became the house of Commander Guy de Marcenay, the dovecote a powder magazine (with the pigeons still in it!), the mission storehouse a magasin

général and another building the corps de garde. To prepare for the arrival of immigrants Préfontaine ordered Tugny to build another large warehouse on the mouth of the river, and he attempted to cut a road through the rainforest between Sinnamary and Kourou but was defeated by the incessant rains.127 In the end Sinnamary never did amount to much, reaching a capacity of only sixty families in 1767 after the arrival of refugees fleeing the Kourou disaster, and even today it has just over three thousand inhabitants. Tellingly, eighteenthcentury maps referred to Sinnamary as a “camp” and not a “bourg.”128 Founded in 1713 by Father Lombard and built from 1722 to 1724, the Kourou reduction of Notre-Dame de l’Assomption was the Jesuits’ first in Guiana, and it was the immediate model for Sinnamary (fig. 3.20). Its wooden church with a thatched roof (completed 1728) was designed by an architect from Cayenne and built by the Amerindians – who also had to pay his 1,500-livre bill with canoes and hammocks – and unlike Sinnamary the reduction was fortified, as Lombard noted in 1733: “our natives have fortified it sufficiently; it is fraisée [surrounded by horizontal or oblique sharpened poles], palisaded, and defended with a kind of small bastion” and featured what Lombard called a “grande place.”129 A 1763 map by royal cartographer Simon Mentelle (1731–1799) depicts a church, Jesuit residence, and what looks like a storehouse or atelier in a row facing the river with indigenous housing (carbets indiens) arranged irregularly along winding pathways on either side to the north and south.130 Like Sinnamary it was based on a grid pattern, or at least on rectilinear streets laid out with a plumb line – “all the streets are measured au cordeau and they culminate in a large square in the middle of which the Church is built” – and there were also allegedly hospitals for men and women, although later visitors could not find them.131 The reduction was divided into zones for the missionaries, Amerindians, and the plantation: it had extensive agricultural fields where around eighty slaves cultivated cacao, coffee, and roucou (achiote, grown for its red pigment). The community was mostly Galibi but there were also Aroua,

Maraone, and Coussari refugees from Brazil, totalling about 430 Amerindians in 1723, and like the mission at Oka the Jesuits kept these indigenous communities apart, separating them by ethnicity, each with a “captain” and a communal carbet.132 All of this looked good on paper, but in fact the mission was plagued by internecine strife, slave rebellion, and persistent shamanism: like the Oka mission the reality was far removed from the stories of spiritual conquest and harmony which the fathers described in their letters to France and Rome.133 In 1734 the king reassured the mission of an annual maintenance of 1,000 livres and that he would prevent whites and non-mission blacks from crossing mission territory without written permission from the governor except to go fishing or to catch turtles: “to assure at the same time the peace of the Indians settled in this mission against the persecution of merchants, and the work and the missionaries against the seduction of libertines.”134 Father Prieur, writing from Martinique in 1739, extolled the mission’s “zeal” and the quiet devotion of the “pauvres sauvages” in their church: “we all have reason to believe, that … the Faith of the True God is established in the vast country of Guiana.”135 However the honeymoon was short: by 1762 a certain M. Aublet was already warning that “the Jesuits who have absolute control over the spirit of the Indians are opposed to all of our enterprises and undermine them with their trickery.”136 In fact the Cayenne government had long coveted their land, and after the Jesuit expulsion they wasted no time in claiming the territory for the new utopian colony.137 As at Sinnamary, Préfontaine simply helped himself to mission labour, in July 1763 enlisting eighty of their slaves and about twenty mission Amerindians to transform the former reduction into his metropolis in the jungle.138 Reduction buildings were converted into offices for the administration, notably the twostorey Jesuit residence with its surrounding galleries, and concessions were granted on Jesuit land along the river.139 As at Sinnamary but on a much larger scale, Préfontaine built a reduction-style quarter on the

France and Amerindian Architecture

85

savane to the rear of the old mission, with ten parallel apartment blocks and a huge hospital on either side of the Place Royale as well as a barracks on the north side, and between thirty and forty-three colonists’ concessions were lined up along the river outside the town.140 The maps and a 1763 sketch by Préfontaine also show partial palisaded ramparts around the original reduction quarter, including a bastion on the northwest corner that served as a pen for livestock.141 It is ironic that the urban design of Kourou, a colony Voltaire enthusiastically promoted, was modelled on the very Paraguay Reductions he lampooned in Candide as a wastefully rich and corrupt theocracy: “The Fathers have everything, the people nothing; it’s a masterpiece of reason and justice.”142 Adding twenty of his own slaves to the workforce, as well as those sequestered from his political enemies and a crew of 128 French and Irish colonists, Préfontaine cleared 40 hectares of land around the mission church and built eight large poteaux en terre communal houses (40 × 4 metres each), five smaller ones (30 × 4 metres each), five pavilions (5 × 4 metres each), a hospital (120 metres long), and a barracks (170 metres long), all of wood and thatched.143 Work was a muddy, insect-ridden, back-breaking torture: it is a sign of how bad things were that Préfontaine was satisfied that only 5 per cent of the workforce died over the course of the summer. As he breezily put it at the beginning of his 1764 letter to the king: “The first steps we took in the enterprise were marked by losses, but what is the new establishment that will not be [marked] by similar events?”144 He had no idea how right he was. The government sent shiploads of supplies, including (alongside mountains of food, medicine, and gifts for Amerindians): 2,000 bricks and 4,000 tiles for the ovens; 12 tents, 1,200 axes, 1,200 billhooks, 1,200 hoes for land clearance; 2,000 planks, 200 beams, 300 hammers, 150 pincers, 3,000 nails, and 100 chisels for the carpenters and turners; 6,000 pieces of slate and 6,000 tiles for roofing; “a reasonable quantity of oil paint in four colours to cover the storehouses and other wooden buildings”; and two geographic surveyors.145

86

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

Work proceeded at such a pace that Kourou was ready to receive the first eight hundred colonists newly arrived from Rochefort that year and would soon accommodate the thousands coming in Choiseul’s remaining thirtyseven convoys and seventy ships.146 But in reality the tiny colony was woefully unprepared for such an onslaught: the buildings of Kourou and Sinnamary were little more than shacks and the colony was desperately short of skilled builders (fig. 3.19). As it happens, at that very moment one hundred French tradesmen “such as rope-makers, stone cutters, locksmiths, tool-makers, carpenters, masons,” were being loaded onto ships in La Rochelle for the trip to Guiana – but too late to build the city of Choiseul’s dreams.147 Préfontaine had a taste for ceremony and gained the loyalty of his work crews with titles, presents, and blandishments: I divided my crew into four companies, [and] proceeded to the recognition of the officers and all the assembled Indians of the mission … I gave Sieur Nattereau, a creole from Cayenne and born of Indian parents, the title of Captain-General of the Indians of Guiana and, to gain for him the friendship of those who were present at the reception, I had him distribute the presents which I made in the name of the King to three captains of this nation. The number of my workers grew to 128, both officers and simple colonists; I placed the hatchet in their hands and proceeded to have them clear the land; I gave them 286 toises of length by 152 of width to [clear]. Twelve days after our arrival the Jesuits sent us 80 Negroes who added to the food consumption but on the other hand advanced our work … I got the help of twenty of my Negroes, whom I had sent from my plantation, in order to build my houses.148 The icing on the cake was the Place Royale, a muddy patch of land amid the shacks and surrounded by jungle.149 Préfontaine’s description of its inauguration overflowed with royalist gratitude: “on All Saints’ Day

I ordered the Statue of the King erected in the middle of the Place d’Armes of the Camp, I owed this honour to the goodwill of a Prince to whom the Colony owed its existence; the image of whom the Colonists’ gratitude has engraved in their hearts with indelible strokes.”150 His prose echoed similar ceremonies in France, as at the raising of an obelisk four years earlier in the Place des Prêcheurs in Aix-en-Provence when it was declared that “[the city] has for its aim the glory of the King … but even more the inviolable faith and its zeal for the service of the King.”151 Kourou’s Place Royale was the only square in colonial France to boast a full pedestrian statue of Louis XV, attired as a Roman and brandishing a baton of command on a tall baroque pedestal surrounded by a low stone balustrade. A sculpture of this sort would have cost around 150,000 livres tournois if made of bronze,

3.19 Louis Pierre Desmon, detail from an untitled view of the Place Royale with the statue of Louis XV, Kourou (Guiana), watercolours and gouache on paper, 1764. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 14 DFC 135B .

a monumental extravagance in a colony which would spiral into catastrophic debt a mere three months later.152 Even in France the statue was one of the most expensive and most prestigious parts of the commission of a place royale, as I will explore in chapter 8.153 The sculptor was chosen by the chief architect, the provincial governor, or a combination of the two, and cast bronze sculptures served as a manifestation of France’s technological prowess. We have no idea who made the Kourou sculpture, but given Choiseul’s personal investment in the colony, it may well have been made in France of bronze. The Kourou statue shows Louis as

France and Amerindian Architecture

87

3.20 Simon Mentelle, Plan of the Camp of the New Colony … at Kourou, ink and colours on paper, 1764. The Jesuit reduction is in the lower part of the town and the new and planned structures above. Archives Nationales d’OutreMer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 14 DFC 142B .

“Le Bien Aimé” (a name he acquired after miraculously surviving an illness in 1744), an enlightened ruler and not the conqueror-king persona preferred by Louis XIV. The Kourou statue recalls a number of French examples, notably the design by Antoine-François Vassé for Louis XV’s statue in the Invalides (1724) and the sculpture from the Place Louis XV at Nancy by Barthélemy Guibal and Paul-Louis Cyfflé (dedicated 1755) and published in Pierre Patte’s Monumens érigés en France à la gloire de Louis XV (Paris, 1765).154 Nevertheless it is possible that the sculpture was made locally, perhaps of the ferruginous laterite stone found on colonial archaeological sites.155 Tugny might have even designed it himself: in 1774 he would be hired to design the king’s catafalque during Cayenne’s royal obsequies.156 Although Préfontaine does not call the Kourou square a “Place Royale,” it is unequivocally labelled as such in two maps drawn up by Mentelle on 15–16 March 1764 (fig. 3.20).157 Facing onto the Place Royale at the far end was to be a monumental new Greek-cross church, the only such church ever planned in the Atlantic Empire, although it was never built. Perhaps it had been inspired by Germain Soufflot’s second project for Sainte-Geneviève (now the Paris Panthéon), a plan of which had been published by Charpentier in 1757 and of which Louis XV had personally laid the first stone in 1764, the same year as the Mentelle maps.158 Like Soufflot’s plan, the church has arms of equal length and a spacious porch, which presumably was meant to accommodate a portico. The hubris of this city in the jungle beggars belief: the streets between the houses are grandly named after the people who commissioned, built, and mapped it – they included “Rue de Préfontaine,” “Rue de Chanvalon” (after Intendant Jean-Baptiste Thibault de Chanvalon), “Rue de Turgot” (after Governor Étienne-François Turgot), “Rue de Tugny,” even “Rue Mentelle,” and, at the end of the Place facing the church, a much wider “Rue de Choiseul” – seventeen muddy “streets” in all, not including the sodden “Quai du Gouvernement” and “Quai de l’Intendance.” A government report written shortly after l’affaire de Kourou had ended provided a blunt assessment of the legacy of this ruined colony:

France and Amerindian Architecture

89

In the end it was impossible to provide suitable and sufficient lodging or storehouses for all the men and supplies of every kind. Scurvy and a horrible epidemic appeared among this multitude and, of the ten thousand men, around seven thousand perished on the spot; some relocated to other colonies where they perished all the same, the rest, a small number, returned to France. The largest quantity of belongings and supplies fell into complete disuse through dissipation or waste. All the expenses were proportionate to the vastness of the project which cost, between 1763 and 1765, immense sums not only without success, but even with the loss of several of the old colonists whom the epidemic carried away. At the end of 1765 they tried to remedy this project by legal means. They fixed everything that was useless. They rescued as much as they could of the debris that was left there and they restored things to the state in which they had been before.159 As for the statue of the king, it completely vanished from history. Perhaps it was returned to Cayenne or even France along with the rest of the “debris,” or perhaps some enterprising Galibi spirited it away over the Maroni River into Dutch territory, where many of them fled after the disaster. It may still be rusting away in the jungle in a Maroon (Bushinengue) colony somewhere in southeastern Suriname. Unbelievably, Préfontaine was unfazed by l’affaire de Kourou. With the backing of the minister of the marine and governor, he had Mentelle draw up plans in April 1773 for an even larger settlement on the site of the old camp (fig. 3.21). The map notes that “nothing remains any longer of the New Colony” and that “the beautiful

3.21 Simon Mentelle, Plan of the Camp of the New Colony of French Guiana at Kourou, ink and colours on paper, 1773. This is the second scheme for Kourou with an expanded grid-plan city at the top. There is nothing left of the carbets for the immigrants, the statue, or the proposed new church. Archives Nationales d’OutreMer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 14 DFC 206B .

90

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

houses of the King [are] almost destroyed, overturned by animals.” However there is one significant innovation: the old, reduction-style urbanism is replaced with a giant French-style grid-plan city of twenty-six rectangular blocks, fifteen of which were exactly the same size, a new Place du Marché to the left of the former Jesuit compound, and a much smaller hospital and barracks, preserving the original church. The project is also less pretentious: the streets in the new quarter, mostly to the north of the former reduction, have generic names like “Rue des Casernes” (Barracks Street), “Rue de Sinamarie” (Sinnamary Street), “Rue des Préries” (Prairie Street), and “Rue des Ances” (Cove Street). If the map can be believed Préfontaine even succeeded in recruiting a modest number of settlers to the new village.160 Even the Place Royale – although without its statue – seems to have survived the disaster: it was still styled “Place de Louis Quinze” in a 1766 map by François-Étienne Haumont and once again as “Place Royale” in a map by Simon Mentelle from 1776.161 Préfontaine’s abandonment of the Jesuit-inspired reduction model hints that authorities blamed the disaster partly on bad urban design – perhaps even on its

92

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

associations with the hated Jesuits and even Spanish America – and it is telling that he replaced it with the gridiron quadrillage, a form which by that time had become the quintessential French urbanistic model for the colonies and a symbol of rationalism and cultural supremacy, as we will see in chapters 8 to 10.162 The fall of Kourou in 1764 thus marks the end of the only time in the history of the French Atlantic Empire that a nonFrench source was used for planned urban design. All that survives of this new grid is the Vieux Bourg quarter of the present town, between rue Jules Seraphin and the rue Du Port, where the church of Sainte-Catherine allegedly stands on the site of the original Jesuit chapel. Some scholars claim that this church is in fact Père Lombard’s original 1726–28 building and therefore “the oldest standing church in Guiana,” but I could find no trace of anything that looked more than about seventy years old in that church of crumbling concrete and rusty tin.163 However Kourou has long moved on, its smart, new residential enclaves to the north of the old quarter reflecting its new role (since 1964) as the spaceport for the European Space Agency (Centre Spatial Guyanais) – another improbable, if less deleterious, utopian project in this small town with a big history.

4

African Slaves and the Architecture of the French Atlantic Empire

history is Written By the Victors, and as most chapters in this book are based on documents that primarily record the activities of the ruling classes and bourgeoisie – the kings, ministers, governors, intendants, priests, and white architects of the French Atlantic Empire – these people perforce occupy centre stage. But it is important to acknowledge that while the royal architect engineers and their civic counterparts in the colonies designed the buildings discussed here, they did not provide most of the labour. Except for late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Nouvelle-France and the Canadian Maritimes, nearly every edifice, town square, and garden was constructed and planted by coerced or semi-coerced workers who have almost entirely vanished into anonymity. Some of them were white, including soldiers, convicts, and especially indentured servants known as engagés, who were ubiquitous before 1664 but diminished rapidly after 1700, before most of the monuments in this book were constructed. Originating from all over France and from cities and rural areas alike, engagés were usually hired on three-year terms, were paid poorly and treated worse, and most of those who did not die returned to France. Nevertheless they made up a substantial percentage of the Caucasian population – more than a quarter in Nouvelle-France and even more in Louisiana and the Caribbean – and some were skilled in building trades such as carpentry, masonry, metalworking, and joinery.1 Amerindians also contributed to the built

environment, as we have seen in chapter 3, often employing traditional methods of communal labour, both under pressure and voluntarily – sometimes even for pay – but their involvement was limited to the missions and to their own dwellings and a few small chapels and priests’ houses. However it was above all the African slaves who made possible the monuments and public spaces of the Caribbean, Louisiana, Guiana, and West Africa, whether through massive projects such as clearing land in the rainforest and erecting ramparts outside imperial ports, or in the smallest decorative details of homes or government buildings, such as balcony railings, shutters, or carved wall panels. Often treated as a monolithic “other” and in a frustratingly generic manner even in some contemporary scholarship, slaves belonged to a panoply of ethnic groups as culturally or linguistically distinct as the French are from the Finns. As with Amerindian groups, chroniclers and primary documents do not record the contributions or identities of slave masons, carpenters, joiners, and other builders except in inventories and, very occasionally, contracts. In fact only one building mentioned in this book, the old prison at Pointe-à-Pitre (ca. 1777), soon to be replaced by L’Abbé Lazare Talsy’s Palace of Justice and new jail (1780–84) (fig. 13.12), can be linked beyond a doubt to an identified slave labourer, a twenty-fiveyear-old black mason named Joseph, and there are a handful of named slave builders who may have worked on Jean Testas’s 1775 house in the same town (figs. 13.1, 10.19). However this impediment does not mean that we can overlook the importance and sheer scale of slaves’ impact on colonial architecture. Indeed, one of the main disparities between architecture in France and that of the colonies was that so much of the latter was built by African slave labour, another challenge to France’s promotion of its overseas possessions as a pure reflection and seamless extension of the metropole. In the southern colonies slavery’s influence lay at the very core of the colonial enterprise. By the late seventeenth century, and increasingly over the following 150 years, slave-based agriculture was the institution

94

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

that justified the existence of their towns, palaces, and fortresses, and it was the source of the colonial wealth which paid for them. Many buildings were built precisely to handle slaves or to accommodate them: the gargantuan barracks that dominated the towns of Saint-Domingue or Guiana were not just built to repel English or Dutch attacks but to control rebellious Africans, the so-called marrons (maroons); hospitals and prisons were planned in plain, brutal styles exclusively for slaves; and a mammoth number of slave houses were built – tiny, cramped rectangular wooden cases that occupied the margins of the chateaux and grand plantation houses and became the main site for slave self-identity and resistance (fig. 16.3). Of comparable importance were the communities of former slaves or descendants of former slaves: the free black and mixed-race gens de couleur who, particularly in Saint-Domingue but also in the Lesser Antilles, formed workshops of masons, carpenters, joiners, and other building vocations and achieved a wealth and prosperity that challenged white supremacy in the profession. Although they worked primarily for other people of colour they did not do so exclusively, and their activities – another critical and underappreciated branch of architectural practice in French America – will form the subject of chapter 5. Although this book is mainly a study of architecture designed by and for Frenchmen, it is critical that it not whitewash over the realities of a system so much of which was based on intimidation and brutality. Indeed it is ironic that an architectural program meant to represent France’s ideal of a civilized society was built by people who had every reason to hate France. And it is equally ironic that while African styles or traditions had negligible impact on the architecture of the colonies outside West Africa, the French financiers and merchants of Nantes and Bordeaux had no scruples about adorning their mansions with mascarons depicting grinning African slaves, whimsical decorative details masking a mass cruelty that lay at the very foundation of their wealth. This chapter is the first study of slave builders in the French Atlantic Empire. It is my goal not merely

to come to terms with these people in the aggregate but to learn whatever I can about them as individuals, information, however, that is almost exclusively limited to their names (rarely their African ones), ethnicities (often imprecise), and age (always given as approximate). In his recent study of the slave ship, Marcus Rediker remarks on the abstracting and dehumanizing effect which “legers, almanacs, balance sheets, graphs, and tables” have had on the study of the slave trade, obscuring the everyday experiences of the people involved and of the “pervasive torture and terror” of slavery.2 He responds by telling the personal stories of the various people involved in what W.E.B. Dubois called the “most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history,” using memoirs, letters, printed tracts, and other primary documentation. I am attempting the same thing for slave builders in the French Americas, by scrutinizing ledgers, inventories, passport applications, police records, newspaper advertisements, and a panoply of notarized documents. The latter are particularly important, although they only shed light on a short period of time since notarial documents in the Antilles date overwhelmingly from the late 1770s thanks to a 1776 law requiring notaries to send duplicates (“double minutes”) to the royal archives.3 Architecture and Slavery We will see the fingerprints of African slaves throughout this book: slaves were employed as early as the 1620s, they existed in every colony, and in the tropical settlements they had already outnumbered whites and Amerindians by the turn of the eighteenth century, the imbalance reaching epic proportions by the time of the French Revolution. Although France did not have the largest colonial slave populations – Britain, Holland, and Portugal enjoyed that dubious honour – it did have a significantly higher population of African bondsmen than did Spanish America (except in nineteenth-century Cuba).4 Even though scholars still debate the degree to which African architectural styles or technologies had an impact on French America (see

chapter 16), as a workforce African slaves made a larger contribution to the French colonial built environment than any other group, at least in Louisiana, the Antilles, Guiana, and West Africa. The numbers speak for themselves. In 1655 the French West Indies employed 10,000 African slaves out of a total population of 23,000; by 1670 there were almost 16,000 slaves in the French West Indies and Guiana, already slightly more Africans than whites; and the number more than doubled (to 33,343) in 1700 – all of this during a time which scholars call the “pre-plantation era” of “slave-holding societies.”5 A slave-holding society employed slaves as only one of several workforces as opposed to a mature “slave society” with its “plantation complex.” A slave society was based on large-scale, labour-intensive farming by slaves of cash crops such as (especially) sugar, coffee, or cotton instead of the mixture of small- and mediumscale cultivation of subsistence and export crops that characterized a slave-holding society. Slave societies are also defined by the extreme imbalance between the populations of slaves to free people, as Franklin Knight puts it: “The populations moved from predominantly European (or a mixture of European, mestizos and indigenous) to overwhelmingly African. The predominantly free population became a largely slave population rigidly organized for the narrow purpose of productive efficiency.”6 After 1700 with the advent of mature slave societies on Martinique and later the rest of the larger Caribbean islands, and with the dominance of sugar production, slave populations grew precipitously. In 1700 there were 29,900 African bondsmen overall: 14,200 in Martinique, 9,000 in Saint-Domingue, and 6,700 in Guadeloupe (compared to a total white population of 14,000); by 1714–15 the number of slaves exceeded 50,000, with 26,900 in Martinique and 24,000 in Saint-Domingue.7 Between 1746 and 1752 as many as 85,000 slaves were brought to the French colonies by business interests in Bordeaux alone.8 A relative late starter, Saint-Domingue more than compensated by instigating the most appalling acceleration of slave populations in the Caribbean, moving from 2,000 in

African Slaves and Architecture

95

1681 to 117,411 in 1720 to 709,642 (plus 56,666 gens de couleur) by the time the Haitian Revolution broke out in 1791, with as many as 40,000 African captifs arriving in the ports of Saint-Domingue every year.9 By the second half of the eighteenth century Saint-Domingue outproduced any colony in the Americas, including British Jamaica, its closest rival. A recent estimate places the total number of African slaves brought to the French Circum-Caribbean alone at a staggering 1,118,000 souls, almost 800,000 of them to Saint-Domingue, over 267,000 to Martinique and Guadeloupe, and 26,000 to Guiana – more than ten times the 60,000–100,000 French colonists who came to all the colonies put together, including Nouvelle-France (see chapter 2).10 Although their slave populations were much smaller, the North American colonies of Louisiana and Nouvelle-France were also slave-holding societies. Between 1719 and 1731, in Louisiana’s heyday, over 6,000 African slaves were brought to the Mississippi region, and although the government paid little attention to the colony after the fall of the Compagnie des Indes there were still as many as 4,730 Africans living in Louisiana when it was handed over to Spain in 1763, handily outnumbering the 3,000 whites.11 Canada is often mistakenly seen as a more enlightened society than Louisiana and the tropical colonies, built by the labour of hard-working settlers and traders. But recent scholarship has shown that as many as 1,132 African slaves were brought to Canada under the French regime.12 Although these men and women were mostly domestic servants rather than agricultural or mine labourers, ambitious plans were hatched to introduce large-scale agricultural slavery into Canada as early as 1688 to make up for declining numbers of indentured servants and the inconvenience of not being able to enslave sufficient numbers of aboriginals (see chapter 3).13 Intendant Michel Bégon de La Picardière (1667–1747) enthusiastically endorsed such a plan in 1716 and Governor General Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil (1698–1778) objected only because he feared that Africans might not be able to survive a Canadian winter.14 In 1725 an anonymous recommendation that

96

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

Africans be brought into Canada proposed a devious scheme whereby they could buy their freedom and property only by handing over six of their children to slavery: “We might even send Negroes and Negresses to Canada, there are quite temperate climates where they can live; to give them an incentive we should give freedom and land to the Negroes and Negresses who are faithful and attached to the French, and who have six living children born in lawful wedlock as good Catholics – but on the condition that their children remain slaves until they themselves also have six children; by this means we will make them faithful and attached to France, make them wise and take care of their children and rear them well. This will be very advantageous to the Colony.”15 In the African colonies, the slave trade, as opposed to the employment of slaves, justified their existence. The comptoir at Île de Gorée and especially that of Ouidah purchased enslaved people from indigenous rulers to ship them to the Americas. Although Louis XIII gave his approval to African slavery as early as 1638 and in the 1660s Louis XIV declared that the wealth of the colonies was based on “the laborious work of Negroes,” the French were relative latecomers in the slave trade compared to the English and Dutch – in fact there was only an average of one French slaver ship a year between 1643 and 1700 when most slaves on French colonies were purchased from Dutch or English slavers, pirates, and even the Kalinago Amerindians, who made money by capturing and selling maroons.16 The first slaves brought to Saint-Christophe by 1625 (the number grew to 500–600 ten years later) were probably obtained by raiding Spanish and Portuguese ships and towns.17 The French got serious about the slave trade with the foundation of several slaving companies for direct trade with West Africa, including the Compagnie du Cap Vert et du Sénégal (1633), the Compagnie du Sénégal (1672), and the Compagnie de Guinée (1685); however the French trade developed very slowly before 1700–01 and sometimes private individuals obtained slaves on their own initiative, as did l’Olive, the leader of the 1635 expedition to Guadeloupe (see chapter 1).18

Only about a quarter of the slaves who were shipped to the Americas in the seventeenth century came from Senegambia; the vast majority were taken from the Gulf of Guinea, particularly the Bight of Benin.19 Between 1662 and 1713 French slavers were responsible for bringing 7,000–15,000 slaves to the Antilles with Le Havre and La Rochelle establishing themselves as the main French ports for the slave trade, later superseded by Nantes. The trade expanded exponentially through the course of the eighteenth century, particularly after 1713 when the chartered companies gave way to individual merchants who operated with much greater freedom (Senegal alone remained in the hands of a succession of monopoly companies almost to the end of the eighteenth century, partly because the colony also benefited from the gum trade).20 From 1737 the French sent out an average of fifty-three slaving expeditions a year, particularly to Saint-Domingue: 80 per cent of slave ships called at Cap-François and the colony’s other ports between 1737 and 1743.21 Although the trade stagnated between 1743 and 1784 when France spent so much time at war with Britain (meanwhile planters obtained slaves on the sly, including from the British), it more than made up for it in its heyday (1783–1792), when over 1,100 French ships delivered 370,000 slaves to the colonies, at a rate of about 37,000 a year – double that of the pre-war era.22 Most slaves were transported via the notorious triangular trade between France, West Africa, and the Caribbean. Using a method pioneered by other European powers, merchants in places like Nantes sent ships with diverse cargoes to African ports, where the goods would be given to local potentates in exchange for slaves; these men and women would then be shipped in unspeakably overcrowded ships to the Caribbean, where they would be exchanged for Antilles products such as sugar and coffee, which would then be sold at great profit after the return trip to Europe.23 During the dreaded “middle passage” between Africa and the Antilles losses of 10 to 15 per cent of the shipboard population were considered normal, and often as many as half the slaves and crew died en route: as a result,

ships travelled as quickly as they could to preserve crew and human cargo alike. The nationalities of the dealers with whom the French traded in this early period had an impact on the demographics of the slaves. The predominantly Dutch suppliers between the 1640s and 1660s shipped their human cargo mostly from Angola (65 per cent of the total), which they had seized from Portugal to supply their plantations in newly conquered Pernambuco.24 The best records on the ethnic makeup of African groups were kept for eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue: in the first decades they came mostly from the Bight of Benin, predominantly a Yoruba people called “Arada” (Ardra) by the colonists, who made a critical early contribution to creole culture (their religion laid the foundations of Haitian Vodou); later on more people were brought from Portuguese Congo (they made up 40 per cent of the slaves shipped to Saint-Domingue during the century); and many other groups were represented, including the Ibo, Fulbe, and Wolof (the latter from Senegal).25 However slaves from Senegal remained in the minority: in 1777 the minister of the marine wrote that of the over 18,000 slaves brought to Saint-Domingue the previous year “not a single one of them originates in Gorée.”26 Statistics can numb us to the horrors of individual slave experiences, but travellers’ descriptions, court proceedings, and other evidence give us ample proof of the brutality that characterized the plantation complex at its very foundation – a misery endured by the majority of the human population in tropical locations with ironically idyllic names like Limonade, Marmelade, Petit-Paradis, and Montagne de la Tranquillité (all in Saint-Domingue), appellations more suggestive of a painting by Antoine Watteau than industrial-scale forced labour. While French slaves received baptism and were cared for by missionaries (unlike those of the British or Dutch), this supposed act of humanity was meant to keep them submissive and to appease guilty consciences at home – it certainly did not make slaves’ lives much better, even if they did get Sundays and feast days off and were allowed to cultivate their own little

African Slaves and Architecture

97

gardens for subsistence and to grow food and livestock for trade.27 These gardens were a crucial means of autonomy that even the colonists came to rely on for their own nourishment. Louis XIV also tried to guarantee better treatment for slaves and contain the worst excesses of planter brutality through the infamous Code noir of 1685, a set of slave laws that enforced Christianization, mandated work-free holidays and Sundays, established norms for food rations and clothing, prohibited “excessive” and “arbitrary” behaviour toward slaves, and forbade planters from sexually abusing African women (if found guilty planters were compelled to marry the victim and free her and her offspring or risk having them confiscated).28 The Code also spelled out the route to manumission and declared that free slaves were to be accepted as equal subjects, paving the way for the development of a flourishing community of free gens de couleur (in Saint-Domingue, where they were a much higher proportion of the population than in the Lesser Antilles there were as many free people of colour as whites by 1787).29 As with the signares in Senegal (see chapter 1), alliances with women of colour could provide even white newcomers with social advantages. However the Code’s supposed leniency was all done in the name of maintaining public order and guaranteeing the prosperity of the plantation complex, and it legalized horrific punishments for rebellious slaves, including whipping, mutilation, and branding with the royal fleur-de-lys. There was nothing kind about the Code noir. Furthermore, much of the Code was “brazenly ignored” by planters, who were constantly afraid that their slaves would escape and join the ever-increasing maroon populations in the hills or simply rise up and kill all of the whites on the plantation, whether through acts of violence or the subtle and popular art of poisoning.30 Through the course of the eighteenth century the Code’s provisions regarding manumission were “whittled away” through a series of decrees that banned free people of colour from professional careers such as law and medicine, tried to prevent interracial

98

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

marriage, and policed dress and furnishings through sumptuary laws.31 Planter brutality was commonplace, with punishments including mutilation, gruesome forms of torture, and murder, not to mention the constant scourge of rape. One particularly extreme anecdote from Saint-Domingue in the 1780s was recorded by the baron de Wimpffen: “[a] lady, whom I have seen, a young lady, and one of the handsomest in the island, gave a grand dinner. Furious at seeing a dish of pastry brought to the table overdone, she ordered her negro cook to be seized, and thrown into the oven, yet glowing with heat … this infernal fiend whom public execration ought to drive with every mark of abhorrence from society … is followed, and admired – for she is rich and beautiful!”32 While most people were not treated to the most macabre of these tortures – indeed many colonists fought to contain such crimes because they feared it would destabilize the plantation system – the agricultural tasks slaves faced every day were torture enough, particularly at harvest time, a time that was sufficiently “hellish” that slaves were issued with extra rations of cheap rum even at the risk of making them unruly.33 The mortality rate in Saint-Domingue was such that by some estimates half of the newly arrived Africans died within a year, and far more people died than were born on plantations. In fact the slave population could be maintained only through a steady supply of new captives: planters realized the brutal truth that it was cheaper to replace them than to improve their lives.34 It is the institution of slavery, more than any other aspect of French colonialism, which reveals the depth of the chasm between the ideology of French gloire as viewed from France and the pitiless reality of the colonial experience on the ground. Slave Builders, Carpenters, and Masons Slaves contributed to the colonial built environment on many levels. The most punitive jobs such as clearing land, cutting down trees, quarrying rocks, carrying loads, and performing heavy unskilled construction

labour were given to teams commandeered either by plantation owners and religious orders (these workers were called nègres de corvée, nègres de louage, or nègres de journée), or by slave workshops belonging to the king and housed on royal plantations (where they were referred to as nègres du roi). All such slaves were overwhelmingly field labourers. Sometimes settlers agreed “voluntarily” to lend their slaves – notably for church projects, where it was expected that they would do so out of charity – and sometimes the government paid masters for their slaves’ service or drew upon a fund called the caisse des libertés made up of the fees charged for manumissions.35 During the rebuilding of the church at Basse-Pointe, Martinique, in 1687, parishioners donated 19,700 pounds of sugar and 1,000 journées (work days) of slaves.36 This situation often resulted in bitter complaints about the “injustice of forcing the habitants to lend out their Negroes for projects other than those of [regular] service,” as in a 1709 letter about a public works project in Léogâne by François-Joseph, Comte de Choiseul-Beaupré (1655–1711), governor of Saint-Domingue.37 One recommendation (from about 1764) that troops of slaves be established on Martinique expressly for public works commented that: it is easy to prove that the Negroes whom the inhabitants are obliged to provide for chores cause much inconvenience for their masters; such is a colonist, who resides in Anses-d’Arlet in TroisIslets, and is obliged to send 12 Negroes for eight days for the work on Fort-Royal; that means that for eight days he loses those 12 negroes for ten, since they are compelled to leave the day before they must start their work and they lose another [day] to return home to the aforementioned masters; furthermore, it is often time to harvest the coffee or cotton or to make sugar. Consequently it results in a delay or even a loss for the habitant.38 The historian has a hard time feeling sympathy for this landowner from Anses-d’Arlet but the comment does demonstrate habitants’ reluctance to lend or even hire

the labour of their slaves. In fact masters often preferred, when possible, to pay a substantial tax instead.39 Significantly, slaves did not just provide brute force. Many of them learned a trade, particularly carpentry, masonry, roofing, and joinery, most frequently in ateliers run by whites or gens de couleur, often itinerant ones. Guianese master carpenter Pierre Le Clou had “three Negro carpenters” in his workshop who, in a contract from 1718 to build a house in Cayenne, were to work alongside the “King’s carpenters” (race unspecified) “in the forest cutting and squaring off the logs necessary, as also to provide labour continually from the beginning to the completion of the construction of the aforementioned building.”40 Another contract, from 1723 for a new governor’s mansion (fig. 16.17), demonstrates that two of Clou’s black carpenters were skilled in the finer points of carpentry such as “fine joinery (ouvrages de menuiseries) consisting in planks, doors, windows and partitions,” and that the Crown would supply two “royal Negroes” (nègres du Roi) and two others “capable of the aforementioned carpentry.”41 A memorandum from 1736 regarding the construction of a new fort, city, and port at Cayenne noted that slaves were given specialized training by white artisans: “His Majesty already has four [black men] capable of working with the carpenters … we need a stone-dresser, a hewer, eight masons … two brick makers, a thatcher, an excavator, two carpenters, and an edge-tool maker. All these workers will take in hand the Negroes of the King who will each learn his métier easily, first in serving the [present] undertaking.”42 The Company of the Indies in Louisiana also owned a workshop of slaves trained in architectural skills. An inventory from 1731, when it was purchased by the Crown, demonstrated that nearly all of the 148 men were involved in skilled trades, many of them working on the fortifications, and it was decreed that in future slave boys would be trained in useful skills including carpentry, masonry, and other building arts, since there were so few whites who could do this kind of work: “furthermore,” wrote one observer in 1739, “we know from experience that we do not obtain from a white half the service which we

African Slaves and Architecture

99

obtain from a black, aside from the fact that the whites are sick half the time and we would have to bring them from France.”43 On the whole, documents such as inventories and notarized sales give us very little information about who these builder slaves were – particularly regarding their ethnicities – and even their ages are always given as approximate (e.g., “environ vingt ans”). The general term used in colonial documents to denote ethnic origin in Africa (as opposed to creoles) is nation, but references to ethnicity are frequently misleading as they were often used loosely to refer to peoples of generally similar origins, and sometimes they referred to the port of origin, which tells us even less.44 Mostly they originated in the coastal areas and inland forests from Senegal to Angola (slave traders referred to the west coast in general as “Guinea” and the coast of central Africa as “Angola”). The vast majority of inventories give only first names, as in a 1777 register of a carpentry workshop in Port-auPrince that lists carpenter slaves named Narcisse, Milvre, Thelemaque, Sans Façon, Alexandre, Sans Soucy, Joly Coeur, and Onze Heures.45 Classical and whimsical names such as these (Sans-Souci means “without care” and Joli-Coeur means “sweet heart”), given to the slaves by their owners or dealers, were a means not merely of belittling them – the names are more appropriate for a hunting dog or prized bull – but also of cutting them off from their past. Religious orders practised the same strategy, although they generally gave their slaves Christian names instead, usually those of saints such as Sebastian or Epiphanius and sometimes those specific to the order as in the popular name Kostka, after the Polish Jesuit Saint Aloysius Kostka – although even these names were often nicknames.46 The plantation inventories, from which we get the longest lists of slaves, tended not to provide surnames or backgrounds at all, revealing the usual litany of classical (Adonis) and Christian names (Toussaint, the name of revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture, 1743–1803), often as diminutives (Charlot, or Charlie).47 Very occasionally African names were given

100

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

without ethnicities, as with the workers in the thirtystrong Royal Slave Corps in Guiana in 1785, which included men named Héocouny, Ouabavela, Haximba, and Chitinté, who had probably just got off the ship.48 Other inventories give us precious clues about where these people came from, and their wide spectrum of origins and occasional non-French first names show that many had been purchased from the Dutch and English and came from the Gold Coast, Angola, and Kongo (the ones from Senegal or the Bight of Benin were the most likely to have arrived on French ships). In 1756 the staff of the André Fabry plantation near Port-auPrince included a thirty-five-year-old mason named Jean Farine of the Bossa nation from present-day Liberia; another mason named Alexandre from Kongo (also about thirty-five); and four carpenters including Sans-Quartier from Kongo (about forty), a twenty-fiveyear-old man named Marlborough after the British military leader, who was of the Aquia nation (probably Kumasi in Ghana), and two twenty- to twenty-threeyear-old apprentices of the Guiamba nation (Angola), who likely also had passed through British hands as they were named Gilbert and George.49 By 1764 the same plantation also had a twenty-year-old Igbo carpenter called Cupidon from present-day southern Nigeria and a thirty-nine-year-old mason called La Fleur of the Nago nation (present-day Benin). In 1771 a plantation workshop near Limonade in Saint-Domingue included Ferrier, a Senegalese carpenter (aged about sixty); in 1775 the Maré plantation near Port-au-Prince included Michel, a builder from the Tiamba nation (Bight of Benin); in 1783 a Baye-Mahaut plantation (Guadeloupe) included two sawyers from Guinea named Jeannot and Gregoire (fifty-one and thirty-two years old); the Mocquard atelier in Cap (1788) had a carpenter named Charles (aged thirty-seven) from the Dutch fort of Elmina (now Ghana, fig. 12.8); in 1789 the Ménoire de Beaujau Plantation at Maribaroux (Saint-Domingue) had on staff three builders from Kongo including the masons L’Espérance (from Adia, aged forty-two) and Pitre (thirty-six) and the carpenter Petro (aged forty);

and the Malmaison plantation in Guadeloupe in 1790 employed a twenty-eight-year-old mason from Guinea called Bazile.50 Workshop Practice Although the most sophisticated ateliers were located in the towns (or were itinerant), most plantations maintained some skilled builder slaves on staff who were trained in workshops on the property or in town: as an “ouvrier” or “nègre à talent” they acquired special status in the slave hierarchy, including separate lodgings, better clothing, and other material advantages, and sometimes they were hired by neighbouring plantations for large building projects.51 Slave builders even held the rank of master – loosely applied though it was – with the largest number in Martinique or Guadeloupe (many emigrated to Saint-Domingue to train teams of labourers there).52 For example the Carmelite plantation at Dos-Dane outside Basse-Terre (Guadeloupe) included maîtres charpentiers Coquille (forty-four) and Celestin (thirty-three), and maître maçon Ambroise (forty-two).53 The Fleuriau Plantation in SaintDomingue employed a fifty-year-old maître mason slave in charge of new construction and maintenance alike and it kept three carpenters on staff, including a maître charpentier from the Lesser Antilles.54 Although some plantation ateliers were overseen by a white builder – as in the Royer Plantation in Belle-Rivière du Haut-Moustique in Saint-Domingue (1783), where carpenter Vincent Suret from Saintonge worked with his own slave, a twenty-year-old carpenter called l’Eveillé from the Gold Coast – many of them were staffed entirely by Africans, as at the Bois de L’Âme plantation, also in Saint-Domingue, which in 1756 had five masons, six carpenters, one joiner, and three bricklayers.55 The slave masonry workshop of Jean Testas (d. 1782), scion of an old bordelais family with the grandest house in Point-à-Pitre (figs. 10.19, 13.1), included three master masons and two apprentice masons, and his carpentry atelier comprised five carpenters, and a sawyer for

making planks (sçieur de long).56 Although skilled slaves were common on plantations the ratio of skilled to non-skilled labourers was rarely as high as in Testas’s workshop. Of the 134 slaves at La Ramée plantation (Sainte-Rose, Guadeloupe) at the end of the eighteenth century, only 14 per cent were skilled workers out of a total of 189 slaves; the Delaunay Mahé sugar plantation in Larcahaye (Saint-Domingue) had a single carpenter out of 48 male slaves (and 133 overall) in 1785; the Martinique plantation of the Comte d’Héricourt (1774) lists only two carpenters out of 75 male slaves; and on the eve of the Revolution the 175 slaves on the Guadeloupe plantation of Jean-Baptiste Poyen de Saint-Marie included only four masons and three carpenters and sawyers for making planks.57 Some plantation slave builders acquired astonishing competency in their metiers given the restrictions they worked under. The most significant demonstration of their skill took place after the French were finally expelled from Haiti in 1804. The Citadelle Laferrière (1804–20) and Palace of Sans-Souci (ca. 1806–13), buildings of extraordinary sophistication constructed for King Henry I Christophe and today unesco world heritage monuments, were designed and built primarily by former slaves, mostly from plantations (fig. 1.15).58 As a sign of their esteem slave builders were sometimes given a gratuity, as with the carpenters and masons of the Fleuriau plantation, who were paid 24 livres 15 sols for their work on a roof in 1780.59 But esteem came with a price – quite literally, as carpenters were worth four to five times as much as a working child or elderly person (between 4,000–5,000 livres each on the indigo plantation of Paul Belin Desmarais in SaintDomingue), and masons were worth only slightly less.60 In 1783, Jean Régis and his wife Marguerite Frenaud, both of Île-à-Corne, near Saint-Pierre (SaintDomingue), sold a Kongo slave mason named Feliciano, only twenty-five years old and a mere apprentice, for 3,000 livres.61 Some nègres de talent, while having a primary skill, worked in other metiers as needed, as in the massive Dominican plantation of Fond Saint-Jacques

African Slaves and Architecture

101

in Martinique, which had five hundred slaves in 1773: “The coopers, carpenters, distillers, roofers, masons, and joiners have not been indicated at all [in the inventory] because many collaborate in a variety of trades, and … among these workers none of them are fully-trained [parfaits] like those in the towns.”62 This was especially true on smaller plantations such as La Coutename in Perches (Saint-Domingue), which employed only a single carpenter slave called “Grand Joseph,” who would have been expected to contribute to any general labour.63 Like itinerant workshops, plantation owners often rented their slaves out to other habitants – for skilled and unskilled jobs alike – as when Georges Grégoire from Grande-Rivière (SaintDomingue) let out a Kongo mason named Hector (forty years old) for six months to Pierre Bardinet, resident of Cap-François.64 In cities and towns throughout the Antilles slave builders were apprenticed in-house: young apprentice slaves were trained at the workshop’s expense to expand its workforce or to sell or rent to other clients, and master craftsmen also trained slaves belonging to others for a fee or for the free use of their labour. These skilled workers were essential to white or gens de couleur carpenters setting up businesses in the town, but by providing a trade to slaves they gave the latter a means to earn their own living should they gain their freedom.65 In 1787 Jean Lafitte, a joiner living on rue Royale in Cap-François, sold his neighbour Pierre Severin Deguirin two slaves, the first of whom, twentyfive-year-old Lue from Kongo, had studied with Lafitte and could be sold as an “apprentice joiner,” and in 1804 Pointe-à-Pitre resident Gratien Fabien de Iturbide sent his fourteen-year-old black slave Figaro to apprentice for three years with the master joiner Christian Mierk.66 Extremely rare, Figaro’s contract is a simplified version of the apprenticeship agreements drawn up among whites or gens de couleur (see chapters 5 and 6) stating: 1. The Negro Figaro will stay for three consecutive years in apprenticeship at the home of S. Mierk,

102

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

who obliges and engages himself to teach him his profession to the best of his abilities; 2. That he will be fed by the said S. Mierk, but that he will be properly clothed according to his profession and his station by his master, who furthermore will care for him when sick and provide him with the medicine which is necessary for him; 3. That at the end of the three years, S. Diturbide will return to S. Mierk the amount of any absence which the Negro Figaro would have occasioned at the latter’s house, no matter the reason for this absence; 4. That the present agreement is without pecuniary remuneration on behalf of either, except that S Mierck will benefit from the labour of the said Figaro, during the space of the said three years.67 Sometimes these trainees did not live to see the end of their apprenticeships, as with a mason named Charles working for the atelier of Jean-Baptiste and PierreSimon Béguin in Pointe-à-Pitre who died in 1804.68 Renting, exchanging, or selling slaves was an important way for workshops to cement business partnerships. In Cap-François in 1779 an entrepreneur des bâtiments named François Angonin sold a twenty-yearold Kongo mason named Lamphitrion to his fellow entrepreneur Louis-Joseph Dubin for 2,400 livres.69 In 1781 in the same city two carpenters named Maillart and Robare hired two slave roofers from a local businessman named Julian Thomas, including Domingue from Kongo (forty-five years old) and a creole named Joseph (twenty-three years old) for three years on the understanding that they would acquire them permanently at the end of the term.70 In the same year a free black widow named Marie Rose Robert purchased a thirty-two-year-old Kongo carpenter named Pierre from the workshop of white carpenter Jacques Vilna.71 Port-au-Prince carpenter Louis Raguenau rented out a particularly large number of slaves (“négres”) from his atelier for eighteen months in 1785, including six carpenters, two joiners, and three roofers, along with five whose function was either unstated or simply given as “manoeuvre.”72 He then rented these slaves, together

with four slave women and their children, to a family member, an entrepreneur named Vincent Raguenau who was using them to complete a warehouse on Rue des Capitaines. Often ateliers sold or rented slaves to plantation owners, as in 1779 in Basse-Terre when the master mason Pierre Praux sold a “young Negro named Bastien, aged 22 years, masonry his métier,” whom he had trained in his workshop, to habitant Jean Laloge from Baillif, possibly to staff his own atelier.73 The Saint-Domingue newspaper Affiches Américaines is another important source of information about slave builders, particularly in the cities, although they are never named (unlike in the notices of escaped slaves, where they are nearly always named to help slave hunters find them). Almost every month the Affiches ran advertisements offering skilled black carpenters or masons for sale from plantations or carpenters’ ateliers, some of them seasoned craftsmen and others mere apprentices. They provide many details about the different skills and circumstances of these men. Since these references are legion I will give only a random sample. “Three Negro furniture makers, of whom two are joiners” were on offer in Port-de-Paix in 1766; “five negro carpenters all in the prime of life, work well, and speak French,” were sold in the same year; “eight Negroes for sale, born in the country, among whom there are … a joiner and carpenter” were advertised in January 1777; “seven fine & good Negro carpenters, among whom are three who make slate roofs, and one of whom is capable of overseeing a work site,” were for sale in Petit-Goâve in 1783; “seven Negro masons, of whom two are capable of running an atelier & of overseeing whatever work that may be; the five others just good masons, & good subjects, having all recently had measles and smallpox” were advertised in Port-au-Prince; and among the “11 Negro carpenters, sawyer overseers (doleurs), crosscut sawyers,” offered in 1784 by a Mirabalais carpenter was one described as “an excellent builder capable of running an atelier.”74 Note that four of them were trained as overseers or heads of ateliers, and that issues such as health and ability to communicate in French were of prime importance to buyers.

Although some became renowned for their aptitude in their trade we should not exaggerate the quality of work most plantation builders were called on to do. Slaves tended to be placed in charge of the more basic structures such as their own dwellings, while more specialist work such as windmills, sugar buildings, or the maison de maître were often assigned to white carpenters and their better-trained slaves from the town. Slave carpenters were responsible for a wide range of tasks, from cutting down trees and making planks and beams to constructing frames for wooden buildings and roofs, and in the case of joiners, fine carpentry and furniture making. Slave masons also generally did the heavy work under a master such as landfill and laying down foundations or floors. Indeed back-breaking misery was the lot of most builders, particularly in the country. Witness Bruletout de Préfontaine’s description of the black labourers lent to him by the soon-to-beexpelled Jesuits in the building of Kourou (fig. 3.19): “the camp was like an ant-hill, whites, Negroes, all were occupied in transporting, in digging the holes and placing the poles in them, meanwhile one group of the fathers’ Negroes cut the rafters, the cross beams, and the tie-beams in the coves near Kourou.”75 We should certainly not harbour any misconceptions that skilled slave builders lived comfortable lives.76 Many of them simply ran away, as did Jean-François and La Fortune (twenty-seven years old), two carpenters of the Nago (Yoruba) and Kongo nations who fled Cap-François in 1767 “with all the tools of carpentry,” and the fifty-fiveyear-old mason Spadille, formerly from the plantation of Monsieur Peyrac in Cul-de-Sac (Saint-Domingue), who joined the maroons in the mountains in 1783.77 A perusal of the marronnage sections of the newspaper demonstrates that literally hundreds of builders lived among the escaped slaves in Saint-Domingue, enough to build their own city. African slaves were sometimes sent to France to learn a trade “useful to the colonies” by becoming nègres à talent; however builders were always a small minority given the expense involved in sending an apprentice to Europe when he could be educated in the colonies.78

African Slaves and Architecture

103

At least four thousand African and mixed-race people are known to have stayed in Bordeaux during the eighteenth century, including slaves and free men and women, and almost all from Saint-Domingue, Martinique, and Guadeloupe. Most of them went there for the reasons expressed by slave owner Sieur Jean Dominique from Saint-Pierre (Martinique), who brought “a small Negro named Jean” with him to France in 1723 “to serve him as a domestic and to have him learn a trade if it seems good to him,” or Sieur Brisson, who wanted to send a boy and girl there in 1773 “to have them educated and learn their religion.”79 Slaves also accompanied their masters to Rochefort, La Rochelle, and on to Paris and even Amsterdam, where five slaves accompanied Sieur D’Almeide from Bordeaux in 1756.80 Although in theory slaves were freed upon setting foot on French soil, a wary government announced in 1776 that it would register all people of African descent in France “to make known the number of negro slaves who have followed their masters to France,” a process which was implemented on 9 August of 1777 with the Déclaration du Roi pour la police des noirs, which also included free people of colour. French authorities were concerned that black people would stay in France and deplete the slave supply in the Antilles, and some slaves were even kept in a detention centre called a Dépôt des Noirs, which held them until they could be returned to the colonies.81 The first such registry from Bordeaux, dating from 1777–78, listed slaves of both sexes from children to the elderly who were trained primarily as domestics, cooks, wigmakers, tailors, coopers, and locksmiths, but also including apprentice carpenters and joiners.82 Érick Noël has found references to 12 black apprentice joiners, 11 carpenters, and possibly as many as 16 stonecutters (tailleurs de pierre) throughout France

104

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

out of a total of 297 apprentices registered in 1777, including a “nègre” mason named Noradin (probably a Muslim) and the free “mulâtre” Pierre Morel, who was a miniature painter and also made “des dessins d’architecture,” both resident in Paris.83 It is impossible to say how many of these young men returned to the colonies, although most of the slaves presumably did: many passports were obtained from the Admiralty by slaveholders to bring their “property” back to the colonies.84 These black artisans included Pierre Bosset, from Ouidah via Martinique, who was in Île-Gloriette (Nantes) in 1736 studying carpentry and who returned to Cap-François in 1741; or Jean-Baptiste Trictrac, fifteen years old, from Léogâne, who was studying to be a joiner in Paris in 1740 before returning to Cap-François in 1750–52.85 On the other hand, those lucky enough to gain liberty while in France could pursue careers in art and architecture, occasionally winning great recognition as in the extraordinary case of Guillaume Lethière (1760–1832), the Guadeloupe-born son of a slave woman who was sent by his white father to study sculpture and painting at the Académie Royale in Paris and, obtaining his freedom, went on to become the director of the French Academy in Rome (1807–16) and member of the Legion of Honour in 1818.86 Although such a career was possible only in the metropole, where free gens de couleur were not restricted to the same degree as they were in the colonies, the communities of free black and mixed-race builders in the Antilles became increasingly organized and prosperous from around the 1770s, resulting in a society of entrepreneurs, carpenters, masons, and joiners that was large and competitive enough to challenge their white counterparts. These remarkable builders and their families are the subject of the following chapter.

5

Free People of Colour and the Architecture of the French Atlantic Empire

slAVes Were not the only skilled black or mixed-race builders in the French tropical colonies. By the last third of the eighteenth century legions of free gens de couleur in the Caribbean were setting themselves up as entrepreneurs, architects, masons, carpenters, and joiners, especially in Cap-François and Port-au-Prince but also in the Lesser Antilles. Free people of colour included emancipated slaves of African or black creole origin (the former known as bossales) and mixed-race people, usually the children or descendants of white male slave owners and African female slaves. These latter were classified obsessively by degrees of miscegenation as mulâtres (“mulattos,” or half-white, half-black), méstis (half-white, half-mulatto), carterons (“quadroons,” or a quarter black), and câpres or griffes (half-mulatto, half-black), in a taxonomy of race also prevalent in Hispanic America, where it even inspired a tradition of genre of figure painting known as pinturas de castas (caste paintings).1 Although they occupied a position in society well below that of the grands blancs (plantation owners, government officials, big businessmen), as urban artisans, shopkeepers, and small landowners free gens de couleur were close in status to the petits blancs: indeed, in places like the Southern District by the 1770s free people of colour were doing materially better than their white neighbours.2

Whites in general and petits blancs in particular felt threatened by this prosperous community – although it did not stop the two groups from regularly engaging in business transactions – and racism was deeply embedded in society at many levels. In documents of the period male whites are generally styled “Sieur” or “Monsieur,” while male gens de couleur were never given a title (after 1782 it was actually forbidden to do so) and their surnames were often treated as nicknames, preceded by dit (“called”).3 People of colour were not allowed to hold public office or follow higher professions, their dress was subjected to sumptuary laws, they could not carry weapons (unless they were in the militia), and they were not allowed to sit with whites either in public places like churches or at the theatre or even privately at meals. Whites also dominated the wholesale business and the large retail trade.4 Despite these prejudices and a discriminatory legal apparatus that increasingly restricted their freedom, many people of colour were prosperous and educated, owning land, holding military posts (by the 1780s they dominated the rural police force and the colonial militia), running shops and small businesses, and commonly owning slaves themselves. Dominque Rogers has identified forty-four different professions among free people of colour in Cap-François and thirty-three in Portau-Prince, from surgeon to militia officer and among both men and women – the latter for instance enjoyed prosperity as estate agents.5 In 1789 there were already 24,848 gens de couleur living in Saint-Domingue compared to 30,831 French colonists, and by another count 30,000 gens de couleur lived in the colony on the eve of the Haitian Revolution, roughly equal to the white population.6 In Saint-Domingue in particular a new emphasis on racial purity developed among jittery Caucasians, contributing ultimately to political activism and eventual rebellion among the richest free black and mixed-race families, especially in the Southern District: “In Saint Domingue, anyone with a black ancestor, no matter how remote, was subject to the humiliating legal discrimination typical of all slave colonies in the

106

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

eighteenth century.”7 They were even more restricted socially than their counterparts in other places with large populations of people of colour such as Brazil or even Jamaica.8 Nevertheless officials were often lax in applying discriminatory laws in the belief that people of colour would eventually integrate into society.9 In the Lesser Antilles gens de couleur prospered as well but in smaller numbers (only in Martinique did gens de couleur consist of as much as a quarter of the overall inhabitants of the island) and builders seem to have been more itinerant.10 The building trades were among the most common and remunerative professions listed in notarial documents for gens de couleur; in Cap-François and Port-au-Prince they were among the top ten, and in the latter carpenters and masons were in the top four.11 This chapter is the first study of the profession of architecture among people of colour in the Antilles.12 I have taken a similar approach as in chapter 3, concentrating on notarial documents, but here the paper trail permits an infinitely richer understanding of these communities. People of colour frequently used notaries as their legal status was more tenuous than that of whites and some notaries particularly welcomed them (others seem to have avoided them altogether). Notarial sources have been plumbed by scholars looking at other aspects of black or mixed-race society in Saint-Domingue, for instance their role in the plantation economy or politics, or issues of gender, and they encountered many references to builders, but none of them focus specifically on the building trades.13 By examining about one hundred notarial ledgers from the 1770s to 1800s I have been able to reconstruct much more about the personalities, training, social and family life, ethnic and cultural backgrounds – and even passions and goals – than is possible for the slave communities discussed in chapter 3, not to mention the minutest details of their business transactions, including contracts and apprenticeship agreements, which are published here for the first time. Although none of these architects and builders can be linked to specific monuments in this book or even with plans

or elevations – this is the greatest distinction between them and the two categories of white architects treated in the next two chapters – these documents demonstrate that a significant share of the urban fabric of the towns and cities, particularly private homes, was built by these often very successful and highly trained and organized craftsmen. They were almost certainly responsible for many of the surviving eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century dwellings in places like Basse-Terre or Fort-Royal.14 Free People of Colour in the Building Trades in Saint-Domingue In the Antilles free gens de couleur in the building trades worked mostly in the towns since both plantations and government overseers preferred the more economical option of slave labour and had their own on-site ateliers, as we have seen. As the biggest city in the colony with the largest number of free black and mixed-race people, Cap-François naturally had the largest number of gens de couleur builders. In her statistical study of free people of colour in Le Cap and Port-au-Prince Dominique Rogers has identified thirty-six masons, eight carpenters, nine roofers, twelve joiners, and three entrepreneurs de bâtiments in the city between 1776 and 1789, compared to only thirteen masons, sixteen carpenters, one roofer, and three joiners in Port-au-Prince in the same period.15 Masons were more prevalent in Le Cap because it was a stone city; correspondingly, wooden Port-au-Prince had more carpenters. Free builders of colour were prosperous enough to buy, sell, and let property, they worked communally in ateliers (often family ones), owned their own slaves – including slave builders – and entered into formal construction and apprenticeship contracts. In other words, their personal and professional lives were very similar to those of their white counterparts despite their restricted rights and the burden of social prejudice. The notarial records are an extraordinarily rich source because they provide information not only about

the business of architecture but also about the society in which gens de couleur builders lived. In fact they not infrequently enjoyed the finer things in life: the free black mason Jean-François Édouard dit Léveillé owned a distinguished collection of mahogany furniture, twelve paintings in gold frames, a gilt-wood framed mirror, a Chinese cabinet for coffee cups and other coffee paraphernalia, among many other luxury goods, which he sold in 1783 for 1,500 livres to the free black woman Hélène Léveillé; and another free black mason, Jean-Baptiste Cayo, purchased in 1788 a stately fourwheeled, two-horse English phaeton carriage painted bright yellow and outfitted in leather for the princely sum of 2,400 livres.16 Some builders benefited from high connections and married strategically. Mathieu dit Cockburn, a “mulâtre libre” joiner, did both: in 1785 he wed the “mulâtresse libre” and widow Margueritte ditte Fauquet, a woman of considerable means whose property included a fifth of a coffee plantation with forty agricultural slaves and six mules, two Congolese masons named Paul and Mars (worth 6,000 livres in total), two female domestic slaves worth 4,400 together, a pair of fine horses (2,000 livres), and jewels and furniture worth 4,000 livres. Mathieu was sponsored by his presumed father Guillaume Thimothée Cockburn, chevalier of the Order of Saint-Louis, who gave him 30 carreaux of land on two different properties in Marmelade and near Fort-Dauphin, for which Mathieu “very humbly thanked the said Monsieur patron.”17 The “mulâtre libre” joiner Jean-Pierre Petigny was a particularly active and respected member of his community in Le Cap and his name turns up in a myriad of contexts, social and commercial: in 1780 he witnessed the will of the free woman of the Nago nation Cécile Tardivy; in 1779 he bought a house from the free black woman Marie Elizabeth “Babette” Petinier in the socalled “Petit-Guinée” neighbourhood on the condition that she could live there until her death; in 1779 he acquired a 300-livre enamelled Parisian watch from Jean Francois Édouard dit Léveillé, a free black sergeant in a company of chasseurs volontaires (French regiment of coloured troops); in 1782 he again witnessed a will of

Free People of Colour and Architecture

107

another free black woman, Madelaine ditte Francisque; and in 1785 he let an apartment to a white widow, Mme Marianne Joffroy.18 The life of the most prominent builder of colour in Le Cap, free black mason Jean Jasmin, was a true ragsto-riches story. Born Aloon Kinton on the Gold Coast in present-day Ghana in 1714, he was sold to a mason named Thomasseau (or Thoumazeau), who taught him his métier, was baptized as Jean Jasmin in 1736, and was sold upon Thomasseu’s death in 1738 to entrepreneur des bâtiments Sieur Louis.19 His new owner gave him considerable responsibility as overseer of a number of building projects and was so impressed with his talents that he applied to have him freed in 1741 (the manumission was granted only in 1746). Jasmin’s business made him very rich – a 1789 mémoire noted that “his fortune … is quite considerable” – and he put his money toward building a stone house that would serve as the city’s first hospital exclusively for people of colour, contributing to its upkeep with a 50-arpent plantation just outside of town that also produced food for the patients.20 Jasmin made such an impression on the white elites that Médéric Moreau de Saint-Méry, one of Le Cap’s most prominent lawyers, petitioned to officials in Paris to have the hospital granted the same status, through lettres patentes, as a white hospital. The hospital was given the name Maison de Providence des Gens de Couleur Libres and a special gold medal was struck in Jasmin’s honour by the Royal Society of Agriculture – surely the first time such an honour had been granted to a black man. The medal bore on one side the figure of the king and the year, and on the other side “Jean Jasmin, founder of the Providence of the Free People of Colour at Le Cap in 1756.”21 Many entrepreneurs (contractors responsible for supervising large building projects) and builders supplemented their income by speculating in the real estate market, often doing business with whites. Often rental transactions were for short periods – a quick turnover could be quite remunerative – and they involved individual rooms or entire houses (the better houses in Saint-Domingue had upwards of four large rooms).22 In

108

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

1787 the “mulâtre libre” Chaviteau let a large apartment on rues Vaudreuil and de la Cimetière in Le Cap – it included a warehouse, bedroom and gallery, two offices, kitchen, and vegetable garden – to the white merchants Messieurs Levent and Cardinal for their headquarters for one year at 5,800 livres; and the next year he let an apartment to the Dutch sea captain Pierre Nicolas Christian from Curaçao for seven months at 2,000 livres per annum.23 The “carteron libre” joiner Joseph Pironneau (b. 1748), an eminent member of society who ran a workshop founded by his father, was also heavily involved in real estate.24 In 1784 he rented for seven years at 6,400 livres per annum a stone house with courtyard on the corner of rue Royale and rue des Religieuses, a fashionable part of town two blocks west of the Church of the Assumption (fig. 15.12) and outside the segregated “Petit-Guinée” neighbourhood to the south where most of the gens de couleur lived.25 By subletting this house – it belonged to a white owner named Jean Berange – Pironneau was able to turn a profit: in July of the same year he sublet two of the rooms, one to a white merchant named Jean La Serre for seven years at 2,000 livres a year on the rue Royale side, and the other to the mixed-race woman Marie Louise ditte Traitté, for three years at 115 livres 10 sols per month (slightly less than La Serre’s monthly rate of 166 livres 12 sols, 4 deniers).26 In May 1787 Pironneau rented part of a house on rue Royale from the white merchant Genevieve Dupré for a year for 3,700 livres.27 Free black carpenter Charles Blaise, another rich builder who did a lot of business with whites, let out a house on rue de Vaudreuil in 1785 for seven years at 3,600 livres a year to a white merchant called Jean-Pons-Marc Roux except for two rooms reserved for Blaise’s mother, and in May 1787 he let an office (cabinet) in a building on rue de Vaudreuil to Messieurs Allegret and Company, white merchants, for 300 livres per annum until January 1795.28 Builders did not have to be particularly well off to participate in the market: in 1785 the “carteron libre” carpenter Charles Saliot purchased a property on the Grand Chemin in Le Cap from the white merchant Jacques Pontier for 3,000 livres, and two years later the

mason Charles dit Bideau, a “mulâtre libre,” bought a piece of land in the city from the Portuguese Jewish businessman Abraham dit Alexandre Faxardo.29 One important mid-level entrepreneur who played the real estate market was Pierre-Guillaume Provoyeur dit Mirebalezia (born 1731), a “mulâtre libre” from Mirebalais living in Le Cap.30 In May 1781 he purchased a piece of property on the Grand Chemin (it ran from Haut du Cap to Le Cap) from the “free quadroon” sisters Magdelaine ditte Charrier and Genevieve Labarde, one-half in May of 1781 for 1,350 livres and the rest in December for 1,800 livres, and in June 1782 he sold a piece of property and house on the same road – he had similarly acquired it in two parcels in 1781–82 from a white colonist named Daguindeau – to the “griffe” woman Marie-Anne for 5,000 livres.31 Provoyeur did not confine himself to urban property: in January 1787 he bought a fruit and vegetable plantation (habitation établie en vivres) in Morne Rouge on 19½ carreaux of land for 1,900 livres from the free “carteronne” sisters Jeanne Germain and Elisabeth Aunay.32 These transactions show the extent to which women were active in the market. Provoyeur became rich through his various dealings and was very generous to his mistresses and other female friends. In his August 1782 will (he wrote three), drawn up when he was fifty-one and in good health, he gave 1,800 livres to Cécile, the wife of Toussaint dit Bréda – the future revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture – with whom Provoyeur had had an affair beginning in 1778; he left 10,000 livres to the same Marie Anne to whom he had earlier sold the parcel of land; and he donated 8,000 livres and the land purchased from Charrier and Labarde to a free black woman named Elizabeth Mambo.33 He even left 600 livres for “poor whites” (albeit together with destitute mixed-race and black people). Provoyeur’s status can also be gauged by his witnesses, who included Petigny and the white merchant Sauveur Honoré Imbert. Indeed Provoyeur was worth a small fortune: property aside, and not including his slaves, his wealth stood at around 22,600 livres, and by the time of his next will, in December 1782, his assets rose to 30,400 livres, not

including land; at the time of his death he was allegedly worth as much as 70,000 livres.34 Business partnership agreements, as among white builders, were a way of consolidating income, expertise, and property, whether expensive tools or skilled slaves.35 Claude Imbert and Jean-Baptiste Sommereu, both “mulâtres libres” and entrepreneurs de bâtiments, had formed a verbal partnership but went bankrupt in January of 1785.36 Imbert’s and Sommereu’s workshop included four African slaves: Lindor (thirty years old) from Kongo, a Mandinka named Abraham (fifty years old), a Mesurado (from present-day Liberia) called Sourd (“deaf,” thirty-four years old), and another Mandinka named Mercure (twenty-two years old). The slaves were divided among their original owners, the first three to Sommereau and Mercure to Imbert. Tools could be more expensive than slaves: in 1788 Pironneau purchased 9,000 livres worth of tools and furniture for his workshop from the white joiner Léonard Gourdon.37 Some documents show that entrepreneurs or senior craftsmen subcontracted out to others of their profession and reveal the sometimes creative ways in which they were paid. The free black roofer Etienne Ciacou dit Léveillé, who hired free black roofer Alexis Jupiter to do a job between January and March 1787 for just over 1,811 livres, found himself 708 livres short when it came time to pay him, so he made up the difference by giving Jupiter a discount on an eighteen-year-old Congolese slave named Mangre, selling him for 1,391 livres rather than the 2,100 livres he was worth.38 The source does not indicate whether Mangre had a métier, but given his age he might have been an apprentice roofer. Notarial documents demonstrate the pervasiveness of slave owning among free gens de couleur. People of colour bought and sold slaves inside and outside their community as an increasingly “narrowly capitalistic” activity, especially after the 1780s: in Saint-Domingue 30 per cent of slaves were owned by gens de couleur in the last quarter of the century.39 Many of them were no less guilty than whites of “heartless and abusive” behaviour toward their slaves, buying them cheaply because they were very young or sick, “pawn[ing] them

Free People of Colour and Architecture

109

out” to temporary employers for short periods while seeking buyers, and, since they represented only a small investment and a decent profit (an average of 10 per cent a year), a high mortality rate did not present a major loss.40 Sometimes the slaves had a skill, but the majority were domestics, often young women, whose presence in their households allowed people of colour to emulate the lifestyles of the wealthier white bourgeoisie and landowning classes. Less surprisingly, since many of them had only recently been freed themselves, gens de couleur also manumitted slaves with great frequency. Thus the function of slaves in free black or mixed-race households was necessarily complicated: “as commodity in the market, as kin (pseudo or real), as appurtenance of social respectability, and only sometimes as labor unit in a productive enterprise.”41 The latter function played a larger role in the households of people in the building trades where significant manpower was required. But builders, like everyone else, had slaves for different reasons. Joseph Rebandy, a “free mulatto” mason resident in the city, purchased two women and children from their freed mixed-race owner Marie Marthe Forest for 5,000 livres in December 1776 to serve as domestics.42 The “mulâtre libre” mason Pierre dit Toulouse sold a fifty-year-old Nago woman to the free black merchant Elisabeth Joly-Coeur ditte Bonne Femme for the same purpose for 1,800 livres.43 Provoyeur sold another Nago woman and her two children as domestics for 4,200 livres in 1779 to the free “griffe” woman Marie-Anne; in April 1786 he sold a thirty-nine-yearold Congolese woman and her three sons to the free black tailor Jean Francois dit Mouroux for 1,540 livres; and the following month he bought a thirteen-year-old Congolese boy named Jean-Louis from Jean-Baptiste dit Lestoque, a free black man, for 1,500 livres, as a servant or apprentice.44 In 1783 the free black mason Mathieu André sold a twenty-five-year-old Congolese servant – branded with André’s name as with any white slave owner – to the black vegetable merchant Marie Jeanne for 2,000 livres, who then turned around and sold him to a free black mattress maker Jean Pierre L’Allemand

110

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

at a 450-livre profit.45 Sometimes they were meant to be freed upon the deaths of their owners, as with the free black mason Pierre Balthazar from Le Cap, who in his 1781 will donated the proceedings of his estate to the manumission of five household slaves (though the same man sold a thirty-year-old slave woman and her young daughter to a free black barber in 1785).46 This was particularly true when the slaves were the children of the testators: Laurent Durocher, a “mulâtre libre” joiner, instructed his powers of attorney in his 1779 will to sell his possessions to purchase the freedom of his children Eulalie and Laurent Amadée, which was witnessed by two other gens de couleur, including Petigny.47 Slave trading among builders of colour was often undertaken directly with white merchants or plantation owners, again usually involving domestics. In 1781 Petigny bought a heavily branded twenty-six-year-old woman of the Fon nation (Dahomey) for 1,800 livres from a white woman from Port Margot named Françoise Guerin, and in 1784 he bought a twenty-five-year-old creole woman from the slave traders Messrs G. Papillon and Company for 3,000 livres.48 Similarly, free black mason Noel Laurent purchased a thirty-eight-year-old creole woman in 1782 by from the Cap-François merchant Michel Alvarez for 1,782 livres.49 Sometimes their roles were spelled out more explicitly, as in 1784 when the free black mason Pierre Antoine bought a sixteenyear-old creole woman for his own family (“pour lui et les siens”) for 2,555 livres from a white woman named Simone Brocard, and then in 1786 he bought his family a twenty-two-year-old Congolese barber from the free black woman Julie ditte Le Roy for 3,000 livres.50 Builders of colour also sold domestic slaves to whites, something which seems particularly unpalatable today but which reveals again the complexities of race in the eighteenth-century Antilles. Such was the case with Dominique Aplon dit Legoux, a “mulâtre libre” mason, who sold a twenty-year-old Congolese woman as a domestic to Antoine Vincent Lecelier Duverger, “bourgeois de cette ville” for 1,800 livres.51 Charles Blaise sold two black women domestics to whites in the late 1780s, including a fifty-year-old laundress in March

of 1785 to Louis-Auguste Vallet, an official in one of the Bureaux du Roi, and in the same month he sold another female slave to a jeweller named Pierre Le Monnier; however she was returned to him and he resold her in May to a free black woman named Fauchette.52 The high-end joiner Pironneau was particularly active in the domestic slave trade. In September 1782 he sold a seventeen-year-old creole woman to Jean Soreau, a “mulâtre libre” butcher for 2,400 livres; in December he bought a Congolese woman and her daughter from the white liquor dealer Claude Michel for 4,000 livres; in 1787 he bought a twenty-nine-year-old creole woman from saddler Charles Imbert (a “mulâtre libre”) for 1,520 livres; and in 1788 he exchanged a forty-yearold Congolese woman for a thirty-year-old Grogro man named Cézar with the free black woman Marie Louis dite Traitté.53 Pironneau, the man of many mistresses, may well have had sexual relations with some of his slaves. In his 1785 will, when he was “sick in body but nevertheless healthy in spirit,” Pironneau left a legacy to three mixed-race boys named Alexis, Casimir, and Veran (possibly his sons, but all with different mothers), each of whom was provided with two black slaves and enough money “to have them [i.e., the slaves] learn a métier.”54 Of his personal fortune of 54,855 livres, revealed in a 1785 marriage contract, 30,400 livres was the calculated value of his twelve slaves.55 Domestics, however, were only part of the story. Ateliers run by gens de couleur trained and employed specialist slaves, sometimes making an extra profit by apprenticing those belonging to other owners. Stewart King cites the case of the free black woman Augustine, wife of Pierre Pasquier, who sent her slave Pierre on a standard five-year apprenticeship to master carpenter Antoine Profit, another free black, in 1785: “in 1790, she would have become the proud owner of a journeyman carpenter, whose income would be sufficient to support himself and his mistress.”56 Workshops also rented specialist slaves to other ateliers in need of extra hands: in 1782 the mixed-race carpenter Julien dit Joseph successively let out three slave carpenters for 51 livres, 54 livres, and 60 livres per month – at a rate

much above the average.57 As with domestics, builders of colour frequently sold such slaves to whites, as in the case of the mason Pierre dit Fontenau, a “mulâtre libre,” who in 1785 sold a twenty-five-year-old Congolese man named Gonsac to the building contractor Pierre Charriere.58 Pironneau sold four joiner slaves from his workshop in February 1782, including a twenty-two-year-old “carteron” named Jean-Pierre from Martinique and a twenty-two-year-old Congolese man named François, along with some tools, to François Joseph Xavier Vorber and Jean Louis Vorber, petit blanc joiners with their own family atelier on the corner of rue Bourbon and rue de Vaudreuil for 17,000 livres.59 Contracts, Apprenticeship, and Family Workshops Contracts and bills for work by people of colour are scarce, suggesting that most agreements were made by word of mouth, and they were rarely as detailed as contracts with white builders (see chapter 6). However they do reveal builders’ fees and the ways in which they were paid. Frequently builders were remunerated fully or partly in kind, as in the case of Joseph Pironneau, a “mulâtre libre” joiner and father of Joseph Pironneau, who in 1777 was paid 1,750 livres by a free black man named Louis Roussanes to build a mahogany staircase, mostly in the form of a discount on the purchase of a twenty-three-year-old Congolese slave named Gabriel – the same arrangement made with Alexis Jupiter (see above).60 Others, like “mulâtre libre” carpenter François Breviton, were paid a yearly wage (in his case 1,800 livres), or a daily rate (journée) varying from three to five livres depending upon the worker’s qualifications.61 Sometimes workers were paid for each item they made, or the fee depended upon the amount of material used or the dimensions of the project. In Portau-Prince in October 1789 Jean Magès, director of the public baths, paid the free black roofer Jean-Baptiste dit Jeannot six livres a toise for fifteen days’ work to put a tiled roof on his house on rue Sainte-Claire and the following month he paid the “grif libre” joiner Jean-Paul one gourde per toise to lay down a wooden floor and

Free People of Colour and Architecture

111

33 livres a pair (or 9 portugaises) to “make 18 doors and 18 windows with movable shutters, English-style.”62 The white baker Dominique Broquart hired free black mason Balthazare in 1780 to do masonry work on a wall he shared with his neighbour for 1,251 livres, 17 sols, and 5 deniers calculated at a cost of 65 livres per toise.63 However Broquart’s contract for the carpentry work on the same house, signed with Laurent Desprès, “mulâtre libre,” was unusually detailed for a nonwhite builder, possibly because it replaced a contract Broquart had already made with a white man (master carpenter François Maurice, who absconded) and was simply adapted from it. It also reveals another way of paying for work more common with white builders, a lump sum delivered in multiple payments (see chapter 6). Broquart’s contract with Desprès called for: First a square building in three sections in which the two north and south wings are each 60 feet long by eight feet wide, and six feet high on a foundation, with a gallery below and above, three feet deep by seven feet high on the lower one and six feet high on the upper one. The third section in the west will measure between 36 and 38 feet long by 15 to 16 wide and will be divided into three rooms with its gallery of six feet on the inside; plus the gallery above and below joining those of the two wings below.64 Desprès was to be paid 1,200 livres, one-third when half the job was done and the rest upon completion, and Broquart provided all the wood. Lump sums were sometimes used for smaller jobs as well, as when Marie-Louise and Thérèse Traitté paid the mason Fontenau to build her a well in 1788 for 1,800 livres.65 I have found two particularly detailed contracts from 1784 and 1788 which show that even if a full contract existed the means of payment and negotiation were more multi-layered and less formal than in contracts between white builders. The first is between Provoyeur and Jeanne, a free black widow of the black man Ignace Pompée. At first glance it looks like a contract for work

112

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

to be done in the future but in fact it was drawn up four days after Provoyeur had finished the job (the original contract had been a verbal agreement). The document’s purpose was twofold: to reiterate the terms of the verbal contract and to dictate the future use of the house and means of payment, which was not made in cash but by renting the house to Provoyeur for the next five years free of charge. An excerpt reads: [Both parties] have said that they had made a verbal contract [marché verbal] between themselves according to which the said Provoyeur would be engaged and obliged to construct on a property belonging to the said widow [of] Ignace Pompée, situated in this city making up one of the corners of rue Royale and rue des Boucheries … a building on stone foundations, 28 feet long by 40 wide, divided into two rooms with a gallery at the back of the said building and along the entire length of the same, of four feet in width, with a small room [cabinet] at each end of the same, the whole roofed and covered in shingles, provided with doors and windows with all their ironwork, finally to make and finish the said building, key in hand, and to furnish all of the materials, generally whatever [is needed] for the said construction, for the payment of all of which the said widow [of] Ignace Pompée would be on her side obliged to hand over to the said Provoyeur the use of the said building for five years, with which he will be satisfied as his full payment.66 Typically, Provoyeur did not use his free rent as a personal dwelling but as a source of income: the house was located in the fashionable new neighbourhood on the edge of the showpiece Place Royale then under construction (figs. 10.9, 10.11) and was a prime rental property. On the very same day he sublet it for a year to Claire dit Clairone, a “mulâtresse libre,” for 2,400 livres, a rate that, should it continue for the full five years of his possession, would earn him the handsome sum of 12,000 livres for his work.67

The 1788 contract was between Anne-Elizabeth (“griffonne libre”) and two black builders, the roofer and entrepreneur de bâtiments Etienne Ciacou dit Léveillé and Jean-Baptiste Hypolite, to finish the first storey of her house in Petit-Guinée in Le Cap, a combination commercial and residential structure with living quarters and balcony upstairs typical of the city (figs. 16.27–8). As with any standard contract it spelled out the builders’ duties in detail: [Leveillé and Hypolite] promise and commit themselves to make and construct in the house belonging to the said Anne Elizabeth, situated in this city, in Petite Guinée, rue du Canard, and in the court of the same: 1. A stone staircase and floors of Bidache stone to access the upstairs bedrooms and cabinet of the said house; 2. To construct the upper gallery in front of the said bedrooms and cabinets with a balustrade in pitch pine or cypress wood … to receive and support the said gallery; 3. To cover the said gallery in tiles and to make the necessary carpentry to support the said roof … 9. To make a gallery in front of the upstairs kitchen joining that which will be in front of the said bedrooms and cabinet, of the same size and construction … 12. To pave the court of the said house in Bidache stone … 15. To make all necessary repairs to the bedrooms and cabinet already built.68 Ciacou and Hypolite were also to build the kitchen, replace the water pipes, and furnish all construction materials, all within five months. As with the 1784 Provoyeur contract, the builders were not paid in cash but were given the right to let the house, minus a small apartment (“une chambre et un cabinet”) that Anne Elizabeth would keep for herself until they earned the amount of the payment in rent, set at 6,700 livres. Contracts that were not paid in kind or through rental agreements had the disadvantage that the patron might come up short at the time of payment. Later in the same year (May 1788) Ciacou had to sue the widow of his patron, a free black man named Benjamin, for unpaid

fees amounting to 3,623 livres and 9 sols for repairs he had made on his house in the same neighbourhood.69 Formal apprenticeship contracts among gens de couleur are also scarce: notarized documents cost money and most people were satisfied with verbal agreements, as we have seen with building contracts. Rogers found only eleven of them, two involving instructors with the rank of master (François Sombré, black master mason in Le Cap, and César, black master carpenter in Port-au-Prince).70 They also differed from those of their white counterparts in one significant way: the parents or guardians of the boy paid either nothing or a nominal fee for the service, the craftsmen being satisfied with an extra pair of hands in the workshop. By contrast in France apprentices paid their masters hefty fees, as did Antillean white architects, while, conversely, those of Nouvelle-France were paid a wage by their masters (see chapter 6). Such is the agreement between Pironneau and Marguerite Cabains, a free black woman from Petit-Anse in Le Cap on 16 October 1781. Mme Cabains sent her thirteenyear-old son Benoît to apprentice with Pironneau for four years: The said Joseph Pironneau promises and is obliged to show and teach his profession of joinery without withholding any part from the named Benoit, free mulatto, son of the said Marguerite Cabains, 13 years old; whom [Cabains] has placed in apprenticeship in his house … and to treat him during the time of the said apprenticeship as a good master … that her said son maintains the respect and deference which apprentices must have for their master, and for [Pironneau] to provide all the clothing of which he will have need during his apprenticeship, to feed him and to house him with a place to sleep only, and in the case of sickness to house him and care for him.71 Not only did Mme Cabains not pay for Benoit’s apprenticeship, but Pironneau even agreed to supply the boy’s clothing, room, board, and health care.

Free People of Colour and Architecture

113

In August 1783 Petigny, now living on the rue des Religieuses, signed a contract with Mathieu Moreau, a sailor and “mulâtre libre,” to place the latter’s son Jean Germain into apprenticeship with him over a five-year period ending in 1788, agreeing to retain “the said Jean Germain as his apprentice and to whom during the time fixed above he promises to show and teach his profession of joiner and all which concerns it … to feed [him], give [him] lodgings [and] a bed and to treat him humanely and as a good master, by which the said Jean Germain promises to learn to the best of his abilities everything which he is shown by the said Petigny and to obey him in everything legal and honest which he asks him to do.”72 This time the father was to provide clothing for his son and to catch him if he escapes and return him to Petigny’s workshop until the end of his apprenticeship, and he was also responsible for health care. The apprenticeship fee was insignificant: a mere 600 livres, payable in two equal instalments. Similar terms applied even when a white workshop was involved. In Port-au-Prince in 1787, Louis-Henri Poirier, who had a large workshop of slave carpenters, took in the seventeen-year-old son of the free black woman Marie Olive Savon as an apprentice for three years. The teenaged Nicolas was to “be present at the construction sites of the said S. Poirier, wherever they should be” – the fact that he was to be put to work immediately and his age suggest that he had already been trained – and Marie Olive Simon was to pay only 125 livres for her son’s food.73 Where larger sums were quoted they were not fees but fines to be levied if the apprentice did not fulfill his contract: in the same city in 1786 Sieur Cado, a white carpenter and entrepreneur de bâtiments, took on a “free quadroon” named François dit Bonhomme from his white father, Sieur Godineau, “to lodge him and feed him during the time of his apprenticeship, at the expense of the said Sieur Godineau, who is obliged to send the said François dit Bonhomme to live with Sieur Cado for four years, and to pay the said S. Cado a sum of 1,000 livres in the event that the said apprentice quits before the expiration of the four years, and finally to clothe him.”74

114

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

Family workshops were fundamental to the building trades in the French West Indies for people of colour and whites alike, as we will also see in the next chapter. I have already noted the team of Joseph Pironneau père and fils and their prosperous joinery workshop in Cap-François in the 1770s and 1780s. These family networks were often quite complex, the professional kinship ties crossing racial lines and extending through marriage. In one case in Le Cap a single network encompassed people of colour, white civilian architects, royal engineers, and different colonies. The “mulâtres libres” Jean and Jean-Baptiste dit Viau, a tailor and mason respectively, purchased a house on rue du Lion just north of Government House from the heirs of a white entrepreneur des bâtiments named Gilbert Viau – clearly their father and also the person who most likely taught Jean-Baptiste his trade – one of whom (the heirs) was the widow of Gilbert’s nephew Jean, another builder (constructeur) who had worked for the Service du Roy in Cayenne in 1778.75 Thus we can conclude that Gilbert Viau ran a family workshop in Le Cap in which he trained both his white and mixed-race relatives and that his white nephew went on to have a career in the Génie, a rarity for colonials (see chapter 6). Evidence for a workshop of masons can be teased out of a lease document from 1778 in which the free black mason Mathieu Blaise rented a twenty-two-year-old Congolese slave named Mars from a free black man named Blaise dit Bréda (a friend of the future Toussaint Louverture from the same plantation) for three years at 200 livres a year, possibly as an apprentice (the document states that he must look after him and treat him as a member of his family, standard language in apprenticeship agreements).76 This transaction was witnessed by two other free black masons who were probably associates in his atelier, Ignace Pompée Guesquin and Pierre Chiquet. Another family member was the carpenter Charles Blaise, mentioned above for his slave and real estate deals. As among white craftsmen in Europe and the colonies alike, specialist gens de couleur married into families in the same trade, as in Cap-François in 1780 when the free black mason

Jean-Louis La Ronderie married Marie, the ward of fellow free black mason Jean-Baptiste François Roger.77 In Cap-François one of the most successful family workshops was that of Joseph Rouanet, a “mulâtre libre” whose atelier included two sons Pierre-Prosper and Joseph and who worked on about a dozen jobs between 1777 and 1788, his fees climbing as high as 70,000 or even 100,000 livres, although he was sometimes paid partly in land.78 Free People of Colour in the Building Trades in Rural Areas and the Lesser Antilles Although there were not as many gens de couleur in the smaller towns and rural parishes of Saint-Domingue and they tended to be small plantation owners (especially in coffee and cotton), freed black or mixedrace builders made a living there, probably building and repairing agricultural buildings.79 Their names turn up in notarial documents regarding real estate transactions, marriages, and especially manumissions rather than contracts, apprenticeships, or workshop agreements, suggesting that these individuals probably had trained on plantation workshops as slaves and were then freed (the recent dates of some of their manumissions would seem to confirm this hypothesis). Pierre dit Fa, for example, a free black carpenter working in Mirebalais, had only been manumitted ten years earlier when in 1781 he bought part of a plantation from his former master for 720 livres, and Thomas dit Pompé, a “mulâtre libre” builder from Sainte-Marthe de la Marmelade, also had probably just earned his freedom since he purchased that of his wife and four children in 1787 from a plantation owner who was likely his former master for a sizable 8,500 livres.80 Others were involved with the manumission of relatives or guardians such as the “mulâtre libre” JeanLouis Jauvin, a joiner with a practice in Léogâne who witnessed the manumission and marriage of a creole slave in 1781 and the “mulâtre libre” Jean-François dit Lamothe, another Léogâne joiner, guardian of a young woman who was freed in 1780 and married in 1787.81

Real estate transactions demonstrate, like Pompé’s payment above, that people of colour in rural areas enjoyed prosperity. Pierre dit Lottin, a “free mulatto joiner” from Mirebalais, sold land to the children of his eldest daughter in 1777 worth 1,000 livres and the “mulâtre libre” carpenter Jean-Jacques Rosselot from Acul donated property on behalf of his affluent late wife to various heirs in 1788.82 Other references are simply to marriages, as with the black carpenter Jean-Baptiste from Petit-Anse, who in 1786 married a free black woman from the same parish.83 Guadeloupe and Martinique were smaller islands with fewer opportunities for builders than SaintDomingue, but builders of colour benefited from the construction booms of the last quarter of the eighteenth century (see chapter 13). As noted in the last chapter the Lesser Antilles also appear to have had a higher concentration of builders who styled themselves as “master,” and several of them went to Saint-Domingue to train slaves. Anne Péroutin-Dumon has published the names of twenty-two freed black or mixed-race builders working in Basse-Terre and Point-à-Pitre between 1750 and 1800, including carpenters, joiners, masons, carpenters, and entrepreneurs, two of them masters.84 In 1797 alone there were five mixed-race and five black carpenters, one mixed-race and three black masons, and a single black joiner in Basse-Terre; while in Pointe-à-Pitre there were six mixed-race and four black carpenters, one mixed-race and seven black masons, and one mixed-race and three black joiners. I have found names of further master builders, including three in what may have been a single workshop consisting of Maure, a “méstis libre” master carpenter resident in Capesterre in 1784 and his colleagues Hypolite and Auguste, both mixed-race master carpenters.85 The “mulâtre” master carpenter Pierre Blondau was active in Baie-Mahault (Guadeloupe) in 1786, and in Martinique “mulâtre libre” master carpenter Pierre-Raymond Bocage was working in SaintPierre in the late 1780s.86 A marriage contract of 1804 mentions a Pointe-à-Pitre master carpenter named Joseph Taurin, a “mulâtre” fortunate enough to have

Free People of Colour and Architecture

115

been freed in 1803, one year after Napoleon had reintroduced slavery to the islands.87 Builders of colour were usually commissioned for smaller jobs in the Lesser Antilles than in Le Cap or Port-au-Prince, as in the case of the free black master mason and entrepreneur de bâtiments Léonard, who was hired by the white lawyer Philippe Martin Legrand to execute new masonry work on the floors and well in his house in Pointe-à-Pitre for 330 livres in three payments in 1781.88 As part of his commission he also had to pave halfway across the adjacent streets – the responsibility of all homeowners – under the guidance of royal engineer and Voyer Général Claude-François Nassau (see chapter 7). Léonard supervised a crew of four masons and confirmed that the job would take five months. The daily pay of a journeyman of colour was low: in a repair job on the great house (“grand case”) of a sugar plantation in Goyave (Guadeloupe) a “mulâtre libre” carpenter named Louis was paid 16 livres 10 sols a day for the ten days he worked on the project in 1787 (although it was admittedly much higher than the 2 livres, 10 sols paid per slave for slave labour on the same job).89 As in Saint-Domingue, people of colour in Guadeloupe and Martinique also played the real estate market, buying and leasing properties to other gens de couleur and whites alike. These transactions operated at the highest and lowest levels: master mason Louis Bouillon (“méstis libre”) and his wife sold a small stone house which he had built on the rue de Bouillé in Pointeà-Pitre to white businessman Clement Dubergier the elder in 1782 for a substantial 8,000 livres; by contrast Pierre Mituel, another “méstis libre,” sold a dilapidated wooden house in Petit Bourg (also Guadeloupe) to Jacques, a “mulâtre libre” rope maker for a mere 462 livres.90 In general, prices were high. In 1784 Victoire, the widow of the “mulâtre libre” carpenter Thomas Reache, purchased part of a plantation in Abymes (Guadeloupe) from the white habitant Louis-Hourticq Duchardon for 2,400 livres, and in 1788 the “mulâtre libre” charpentier de maison Alexandre Cognet, also

116

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

of Abymes, sold a piece of land there to white colonist Jacques Ignace de Blaine for 4,500 livres.91 In 1787 the mother of “métis libre” mason François Gabriel left him and her other children the proceeds of a house and plantation in Petit Cul-de-Sac (Guadeloupe) which she had purchased from a white owner named Dolabarets and sold for 7,000 livres.92 In 1806 a mixedrace charpentier entrepreneur named Joseph Daguin purchased half a lot in a part of Pointe-à-Pitre called Nouvelle-Ville from Marie-Joseph, a “métisse libre,” for 9,000 livres, and later that same year he sold a house on Rue Abymes for 1,403 livres to the white colonist Jean Portalier.93 However the biggest transaction of all was that of Lambert Charles, a free black mason, who sold property in Fort-Royal to a white colonist in 1788 on behalf of two other free black men living abroad in Saint-Lucie and Brazil for 18,000 livres, a small fortune.94 Sometimes however payment was made in creative ways, as we have seen in Saint-Domingue. In 1777 the “mulâtre libre” Charles Vincent, a carpenter in Fort-Royal, bought an apartment from a white woman named Victoire Dorothée Dumont in her house on rue Blenac for 2,000 livres, which he paid not in cash but in work which he agreed to undertake for Mme Dumont.95 As in Le Cap or Port-au-Prince people of colour in the building trades owned and traded slaves. Most of them were domestics, as in the case of François Gabriel, a “méstis libre” mason from Petit Cul-de-Sac (Guadeloupe), who listed three female domestic slaves as part of his 1783 marriage contract, and Jean-Baptiste Songui, a “mulâtre libre” carpenter from Diamant (Martinique), who in 1788 gave his daughter and sonin-law an unspecified number of “nègres” as a wedding present.96 The “mulâtre libre” carpenter Rémi Pajote of Fort-Royal received three slaves as part of his wife’s dowry in 1785 and later that year sold one of them to the méstis libre Pierre dit Bech.97 Conversely Christophle, a “mulâtre affranchi” master carpenter from Capesterre (Guadeloupe), brought two domestic slaves to his 1785 marriage.98 These transactions leave no doubt about the financial nature of even domestic slavery: in 1788

Fabien, the “mulâtre libre” carpenter from Fort-Royal, left a female slave and her child in a trust for his orphaned grandchildren, who were minors at the time.99 Builders of colour sometimes manumitted and married slaves, as with Modeste Dupigny, a “mulâtre libre” mason from Fort-Royal, who in 1789 freed and married the “mulâtresse” Claire, although that did not keep them from maintaining two slaves of their own.100 Some of these women had once been the builders’ property, as with the Pointe-à-Pitre mason Pierre Mituel, who in 1782 married “cabresse” Thérèse, who was “his slave aged about 30 years,” in which act he was “assisted and authorized by Louis Boudignie, rope maker, her old master.”101 Similarly, the Pointeà-Pitre “mulâtre libre” carpenter Pierre Lamy manumitted and married his fifty-year-old slave consort Rosalie in 1783 – she had been donated to him by her former master, the widow of a regimental captain for that purpose – although his benefactors obliged him to purchase their own fourteen-year-old “cabresse” daughter for 1,800 livres.102 Sometimes the slaves were manumitted as a gift to the groom from their former owners. In the case of Jean-Baptiste, a twenty-sixyear-old “mulâtre” sawyer and journeyman carpenter from Saint-Vincent (Guadeloupe), the bride’s former master manumitted her and gave her to her new husband along with two slaves to serve the new couple as domestics.103 Occasionally it was the groom who was manumitted. In Trois-Rivières (Guadeloupe) a “métis” slave carpenter named Mathieu was freed in 1779 by his “mulâtresse” future mother-in-law so that he could marry her daughter Thérèse and set up a practice in the town, for which Thérèse’s former employer (or master) Robert Moiell donated 3,000 livres as a dowry.104 These exchanges, like those in Saint-Domingue, demonstrate the complexity of family relations in this region. I have not found any apprenticeship contracts from the Lesser Antilles; however, given the number of “masters” on the islands, apprenticeship must have been common, probably arranged by word of mouth. The grandly named Claude dit Jean-Pierre Coutesse dit

Grenadin from Pointe-à-Pitre, who was liberated in 1787 by his “mulâtresse libre” owner so that they could get married, received as part of his marriage contract three young slaves from different parts of Africa, at least one of whom was an apprentice carpenter, a sixteenyear-old named Jean, of the Moro nation (possibly Mauretania).105 In 1788 Louis dit Louison Castor, a “mulâtre libre” mason from Fort-Royal owned together with his wife five male slaves (Joseph, Mathurin, Marcel, Barrington, and Stanislas), who were likely his apprentices, since the couple lived in the city and it was unusual to have such a large all-male domestic staff.106 Given his English name – he was named after the British secretary of war – Barrington likely came from Jamaica or one of the closer British islands. In the same year Charles Vincent freed his apprentice “mulâtre” slave Charles Michel dit Eugene (aged twenty-two years) and left him 3,000 livres for subsistence, half his clothing, and his carpentry tools.107 Similarly, although I have found no formal contracts for partnerships between builders, they must have existed since builders often did business with one another. In 1788 the “méstis” libre mason François Latour of Fort-Royal lent 3,000 livres to the “mulâtre libre” Régis Duras, a joiner; a “mulâtre libre” master mason named Théodore sold some land in Fort-Royal the same year worth 300 livres to the free black master mason Louis Auguste Théagène, who saved 100 livres by exchanging a small piece of his own land; and also that year Théagène left in his will nearly his entire estate to a “mulâtre libre” named Lambert la Fonde, whose profession is not listed but who is referred to as his “confrère.”108 Family workshops also existed, as with Louis La Parade, a “mulâtre libre” carpenter from Fort-Royal, who in 1788 married the younger daughter of Hiacinthe, another “mulâtre libre” carpenter, but there is less evidence for such ateliers as there is in Saint-Domingue.109 Sometimes, as with white masters, the wealthier people of colour sent their children to France to learn their trade, usually paid for by their white fathers, although again the purpose was generally to gain a

Free People of Colour and Architecture

117

liberal arts education and higher social standing rather than occupational training. There are exceptions, though, as with Martial, the three-year-old son of the free “carteronne” woman Scolastique, who at the time of her 1785 marriage to Christophle (not the child’s father), was “presently in France with Sieur Jean du Tour who has voluntarily agreed to feed him, take care of him, and have him learn a trade when he gets to the right age,” on the understanding that should Martial return to Guadeloupe before his training ends, the spouses should pay for his apprenticeship and then pay him 2,000 livres when he was ready to work.110 Since Christophle was a master carpenter it is likely that carpentry was to be Martial’s métier as well, especially since Capesterre was a small town and Christophle could have used extra help in his workshop. One feature that emerges from all of these transactions, whether in Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe, or Martinique, is their flexibility and certain features that seem unique to the business practices of people of colour. Such are the widespread reliance on verbal agreements; inconsistencies between different written contracts and their relative lack of specificity about the nature

118

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

of the job; often very creative means of payment in kind over payment in cash such as discounts on slave purchases or free rent; and the more charitable rates in general charged for leases, slaves, work, or apprenticeship by gens de couleur to members of their own community. The actual project often seems to be in the background, its details already agreed upon, the contract concerned instead with the intricacies of the business deal. By contrast, the contracts of civilian white builders, treated in the following chapter, while still less formal than those drawn up in France, still adhered to the basic outlines of standard European procedure, were usually much more complex and exacting as to the terms of employment and especially the details of the project, and they generally concerned payments made primarily in specie. The most significant distinction however is that none of the transactions I have found involving builders of colour have involved drawings of plans or elevations, whereas contracts for work by white builders were frequently accompanied by illustrations of the work to be done, particularly from the end of the seventeenth century onward, even if many of them were basic and few survive.

6

White Civilian Architects and Builders in the Colonies

in the lAst tWo chAPters we looked at the contributions of black and mixed-race builders, entrepreneurs de bâtiments, and architects to the buildings of the French Atlantic Empire. Although people of African descent provided most of the labour and a significant part of the design and fine craftsmanship – at least in Louisiana, the Circum-Caribbean, and West Africa – and while their names and details about their lives can be retrieved from notarial documents, their involvement was not acknowledged in government documents, principally because French officials and the white settler class did not consider their names worth mentioning. The most direct result of this neglect is our inability to associate any of the buildings in this book with any known non-white individuals, except indirectly. The situation was different for white architects, the subject of this and the next chapter. As the dominant race in the colonies and (usually) fully fledged subjects of the king or citizens of the Republic, they were acknowledged by name in state documents and the most important private contracts, and their signatures are found on many of the plans and elevations. By contrast, not a single signed plan survives by a builder of colour even though many of them were literate and regularly signed legal documents, often in an elegant copperplate. Although admittedly white architects working in the colonies did not enjoy the status of those who stayed in France – for example, not a single architect in the Americas published an engraving of his work, much

less an architectural treatise – the position guaranteed to them by racial discrimination and by the relatively loose social hierarchy allowed them unchallenged professional supremacy. Two classes of white architect and builder contributed to the buildings in this book. The first was civilian: frequently indentured in the early decades of settlement they later on operated as professionals as did their free gens de couleur colleagues. Sometimes self-taught, they were usually trained through private apprenticeship or by family members in the trade, either in France or in the colonies.1 Family workshops were a long-established institution in Europe, and although their structure was more flexible in French America they provided not only collective instruction but also protected trade secrets. Although civilian architects were born in France and the colonies alike – and they sometimes returned to France at the end of their careers – their defining feature was that they worked on site, usually did not travel between colonies, and were not attached to a metropolitan architectural bureau in France. There were remarkably few exceptions. The second class of white architect was the academically trained royal engineer. Although frequently also hailing from families of architects and engineers, they were above all servants of the French state and the military and they regularly moved back and forth between different towns and colonies. Indeed, aside from their education, hierarchical organization, scale, and the relative stylistic uniformity of their projects, one of the main distinguishing features of the engineer architects was precisely this mobility within the empire. Nevertheless we should not make too great a distinction between civilian and engineer architects as even the grandest and most strategically important projects designed by the royal engineers were frequently contracted out to local builders, and engineers were hired to build private houses and churches. Governors’ mansions, public squares, streets, and even fortifications were joint efforts, overseen by the governor and intendant and supervised by the engineer-in-chief, sub-engineers, and government-appointed foremen.

120

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

In this chapter I will look at the training, methods, careers, and lives of white civilian architects in the French colonies and consider the business of constructing the buildings that were not the purview of engineer architects: mostly private homes and plantation buildings but also grander public commissions, particularly the colonies’ churches. In chapter 7 I will turn to the Army Corps of Engineers (after 1743 they were called the Génie Militaire), examining them as an institution, their relationship with the Bâtiments du Roi, their educational system, and the manner in which official government commissions were made. Workshops, Corporate Organizations, and Architectural Competitions Civilian architects and decorators in the French colonies included professionals with everything from the most basic to advanced training in architecture and the building trades, many of them holding the rank of master, although their loose use of this title was a far cry from its strict application in the French guild system. Such were Claude Baillif dit Regnault (ca. 1635–1698) or Pierre-Noël Levasseur (1690–1770), two of the chief architects of colonial Quebec City, or masons or carpenters like Pierre Le Clou (fl. 1710s–20s) in Cayenne – his name means “the Nail,” surely a nom de métier – who rose to the challenge of building something grander than their training had prepared them for and in some cases sought the trappings of high society, whether through fancy houses in good neighbourhoods or elite pews in the municipal church (figs. 14.17, 16.17). Sometimes their background can be deduced from the appearance of their buildings: Fort de La Roche on the pirate island of Tortuga (begun 1640) and the Governor’s Palace in Petit-Goâve (Saint-Domingue, 1688) were built by carpenters accustomed to constructing half-timbered farmhouses and agricultural buildings (figs. 10.3, 12.2).2 Civilian architects also included complete amateurs, whether missionary priests designing modest chapels in the forest or jungle (figs. 2.2–3) or colonists producing plans and elevations for private

homes and outbuildings on the riverine farms of Quebec or the plantations of Martinique. Before Colbert standardized engineering training many of the architects working for the French government were civilians so that a building as important as Château Saint-Louis (1648; fig. 12.3) was little more than the kind of lowslung stone hall found all over northern France. However, civilian projects were not necessarily humble: Monsieur de Poincy’s Château de la Montagne on his plantation in Saint-Christophe (begun ca. 1640), built by specialists brought in from France, was the spitting image of a grand provençal country seat (fig. 12.10) and Father Jean-Baptiste Labat’s design for the Dominican monastery in Saint-Pierre, Martinique (completed 1704), was inspired by nothing less than the Palace of Versailles (figs. 12.13–14). One challenge we face when considering the work of white civilian architects, like that of the free gens de couleur, is that because their buildings were often more modest structures such as private homes and plantation outbuildings, we have much less evidence about what they looked like than we do for the projects of the royal engineer architects.3 Even surviving buildings have usually been radically altered. The result is a skewed understanding of the urban and rural built environment since these less-exalted structures were much more common than the government buildings commissioned from Paris and therefore would have given us a better idea of the prevailing architectural traditions of the French Atlantic Empire. Documents help us to a certain degree, especially contracts, but it is important to bear this important lacuna in mind, particularly since private buildings adapted the most to their cultural and geographical settings and thus diverged the most from metropolitan models. I will return to this quandary in chapter 16. The careers of architects or architectural sculptors in the French Atlantic world could not have been less like those of their counterparts in Hispanic America. In the Iberian Empire (as in Spain or France) no architect worked in a vacuum. Architectural training was undertaken in ateliers operated by master masons,

carpenters, bricklayers, and retablo makers, and they were regulated by a highly organized guild system under municipal authority that maintained quality, protected architects’ social status, and gave them a means of support and advocacy. Most importantly, guilds assured standardized training from apprentice to journeyman to master. As early as 1536 Juan de Escalante founded a carpenters’ organization in Lima that became formalized as a guild in 1549; in 1568 a carpenters’ guild was founded in New Spain; and artisans’ corporations and monastic workshops flourished in the Brazilian regions of Olinda, Pernambuco, and Bahia already in the first two decades of the seventeenth century.4 Some guilds, such as those of the “geometricians” who designed roofs and coffered ceilings, were staffed by men competent in calculus, design, and building techniques; however on the whole architects were treated as artisans until the rise of the formal art and architecture academy in the eighteenth century allowed them greater status. These institutions began with the Real Academia de San Carlos in Mexico City (1781), founded by Charles III on the model of Real Academia de San Fernando in Madrid (1757), which itself was based on Colbert’s Academy of Architecture in Paris.5 Architects and other craftsmen also enjoyed the social and financial support of membership in lay religious brotherhoods, or confraternities.6 Dedicated to the patron saint of that profession – for carpenters he was usually St Joseph, the carpenter of Nazareth, as with the 1560 Lima carpenters’ and bricklayers’ confraternity of San José – crafts confraternities possessed their own chapels for communal worship, cared for poor and unemployed members of their profession, and paid for their burials. By the late seventeenth century there were guilds exclusively for Amerindian and black artists and architects, organizations that became particularly prosperous and politicized in places such as Cuzco, frequently by charging less for their work than their white competitors and working predominantly for their own communities. By contrast the French Atlantic Empire had no guilds, a single woodworker’s confraternity, and – paradoxically, given that the Spanish and Portuguese

White Civilian Architects and Builders in the Colonies

121

foundations were founded on Colbert’s model – no academies of architecture.7 In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries builders and decorators, often engagés or temporary immigrants, were also critically thin on the ground: this is why authorities quickly abolished official distinctions between journeymen and masters and trained African slaves in specialist trades. Demand for skilled professionals acutely outweighed supply. By contrast the Iberian governments were content to let the colonies regulate crafts guilds on the municipal level, as was also the case in France, where town trade corporations controlled apprenticeship, rank, and trade standards. Furthermore, in the French colonies, all governmental architectural activity after Colbert was controlled from Paris by the Ministry of the Marine and was executed under the direction of engineer architects, with independent colonial architects fending for themselves, working under the engineers in demeaning circumstances in which they had to abandon their titles, but principally working for the Church and private patrons. Nothing better epitomizes the chasm that existed between the architectural activities of the three great Catholic empires in the Atlantic. The career of a French colonial architect also differed markedly from that of his counterparts in France. French cities had strictly regulated the architect’s métier since the time of Henri IV, with networks of trade organizations called frairies, compagnies, or communautés des maîtres, each under a patron saint and with their own chapel, such as the eminent Communauté des Maîtres Maçons et Architectes de la ville de Bordeaux (founded 1594), the architects’ corporation with the closest links with France’s colonies in the eighteenth-century Circum-Caribbean.8 The twenty statutes of the Communauté spelled out stringent rules for apprenticeship, ranking, contracts, rights and obligations of masters, and fees and penalties, administered by four syndics or bailiffs who met every year in their chapel in the Carmelite monastery.9 In order to achieve master status an architect had to undergo a long program of training, contracting with a master for his

122

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

three-year education, then serving in a master’s shop as an apprentice for three more years and for two years as a journeyman (compagnon). In Bordeaux as elsewhere in France, a journeymen could become a master only after taking a test, swearing an oath of fealty to the statutes, and proving himself to be of “bonne vie et honnête conversation.” The test was very specific, involving a chef d’œuvre or pièce (or essai) de trait, which in the case of the Community of Master Masons and Architects meant a work of masonry demonstrating skill in stonecutting (stéréotomie) and a pièce de main, or a draughtsmanship test like those used at the Paris Royal Academy of Architecture. The pièce de main entailed the execution of plans and elevations of a complete building or an architectural detail such as an aedicule or fountain in a particular classical order.10 These works were then submitted to a jury, and once approved the master could style himself as an architecte juré. These essais de main could be excruciatingly specific: journeyman mason Nicolas Papon was asked on 17 December 1770 to draw “a sepulchral chapel on an octagonal plan of ten to 12 toises in diameter with a portico in the Doric order with its exterior facades adorned in the same order, and the interior of the said chapel will be decorated in an Ionic order and that tombs will also be placed on four of the facades of the said façade [sic], the whole with plan, elevation, sectional and profile drawings with rafters and roof in the form of a rotunda, and that the scale of proportion of the said plan will not be reduced less than two pouces per toise.”11 Even then candidates had to wait two years before having their new status acknowledged by the municipality. Most journeymen did not acquire this status and they were resentful and at times often openly hostile to the masters: in Bordeaux in 1766–67 they even tried to set up a separate corporation.12 Traditionally architects were sons of architects and married into architect families to create dynasties, as happened between the Dardan and Laclotte families in Bordeaux and the Giral and Laurens families in Montpellier – this was also true of many of the architects of the Bâtiments du

Roi and even the Corps of Engineers as we shall see in chapter 7, and of course among free gens de couleur as we have already seen.13 One of the advantages of moving to the colonies, as for Bordeaux architect and Communauté member Joseph-Antoine Dardan (1740–after 1803) when he moved to Saint-Domingue in 1771, was precisely this lack of regulation and the unprecedented freedom it gave individuals. As early as 1627 the Crown abolished distinctions between masters and journeymen to encourage craftsmen to emigrate.14 The king even went so far as to allow artisans who had spent six years in the colonies automatically to receive the title of master (maître de chef-d’oeuvre) upon returning to France, first for Nouvelle-France in 1627 and then for Guiana and the Antilles in 1663, noting that once they had fulfilled their duties to the Compagnie des Indes Orientales, “the artisans and tradesmen (gens de métier) who will make the passage, whether to the said Isle of Cayenne, or to other islands of America, will be reputed as Masters in whatever towns in France they should wish to live.”15 He probably did not expect any of them to actually take up his offer, and indeed only one appears to have done so.16 Nevertheless most colonial architects were not interested in their reputations in France: with enough ambition and creativity people from the humblest backgrounds could carve out distinguished careers in the colonies and rise above their social rank. Nowhere in France could a ship’s carpenter go on to build a smart country house or a parish church, or a shoemaker’s son become one of the colony’s most prominent architects, as happened with Jean-Baptiste Maillou dit Desmoulins (1668–1753) in Quebec City (figs. 14.9, 14.12).17 An architect or sculptor down on his luck in Bordeaux or Marseille could reinvent himself in Fort-Royal or Cap-François as a distinguished master from the metropole. To promote further productivity the Crown even handed out grand but empty titles such as “Architecte du Roi” to colonial builders – including Maillou in 1719 and his compatriot Dominque Janson Lapalme (1701–1762) in 1751.18 By contrast, in

France by this time the title was reserved only for those in the Academy of Architecture.19 In fact the very title of “architect” in the colonies was mostly social and did not correspond to specific expertise: in Quebec it was generally understood that an architect worked in stone and could prepare a plan, but in the West Indies carpenters and even roofers styled themselves as “architects.”20 Thus the mason François de Lajoüe (1656–1719), designer of the second Château Saint-Louis in Quebec City (fig. 12.20) was titled “architecte” in a 1700 land concession.21 The lack of guild regulations and standardized training meant that builders went straight from apprentice to “master” – a self-appointed rank without legal privilege – and moved between workshops at will, and for much higher wages (in Nouvelle-France they were double those of France).22 One gets a sense of this entrepreneurial spirit when leafing through Saint-Domingue’s weekly newspaper, the Affiches Américaines. In the eighteenth century the island’s architects and craftsmen were often temporary immigrants from France, sojourning on the island for a quick profit. Such were the five architectural sculptors who arrived in Cap-François in 1766 to finish the facade of Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption (fig. 15.12) and who used the opportunity to “employ their talents, for those who are curious, for any kind of decoration, whether on buildings or gardens, in Painting [or] Sculpture, either external or internal”; or the sieurs Marsault (1766), Marteau (1777), Lacroix (1777) Raimon (1777), and Rousseau (1784), all carpenters in Le Cap or Fort-Dauphin claiming to be departing “immediately” for Paris (a ubiquitous claim that seems to have been a ruse to drum up more business or to get people to settle their accounts) but who still offered to undertake, in Rousseau’s case, “all kinds of work for wooden frames, houses, and mills.”23 One of the most distinguished architects to move to Saint-Domingue did so out of utter desperation and did not live out the year. The academician Jérôme Beausire le jeune (1709–1761), designer of several buildings in Paris as well as the decorations of the choir at Beauvais Cathedral – and

White Civilian Architects and Builders in the Colonies

123

the man chosen by Royal Academy of Architecture to write its first history – left suddenly for Cap-François in 1760 probably to escape his debtors, leaving most of his notes, including an unpublished history of French architecture, behind him.24 Some builders formed small companies with colleagues in an informal version of those of France. Such was carpenter Sieur Labbée in 1783 based in Le Cap, who, “shortly leaving for France with his son” where he was “only going to restore his health,” reassured his customers that “[t]he said Sieur Labbée is still a Carpenter [and] his shop is run by Sieur Nicolas Perrie, with whom he has formed a company [société] since the first of January. The latter will do everything possible to satisfy those who will honour him with employment.”25 These agreements were occasionally formalized by a notary public: in the same month the sculptor and joiner Antoine Simonin founded a partnership with fellow joiner Louis Jolly for five years “because of the profession of joinery which they know how to exercise in this city,” and in 1785 the Port-de-Paix joiners Jean Sost and Jean Bertellet formed a five-year partnership to run an atelier in a dwelling which Bertellet would rent in Le Cap under the condition that any slaves which Bertellet purchased during that time would belong to the company.26 The latter agreement was not a partnership of equals. Bertellet was the boss and he contributed tools and finances (not to mention the rent on the property), and the agreement notes that the partnership “is only contracted for the works and undertakings which the said Sieur Bertellet will make only so that the said Sieur Sost cannot be hired for any work or enterprise whatsoever under the said partnership.”27 Family workshops were an important form of collective work. Such was that of the carpenters Pierre and Jean Guichard, “père & fils” from Le Cap, who however announced that they were returning to France in 1783; or Jean Dejan, another Le Cap carpenter who had been working for thirty years in the city with his two first cousins and even adopted their name.28 In France architects commonly took on the names of more celebrated family members: even Jules Hardouin-Mansart

124

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

(1646–1708) added the Mansart to his name in honour of his famous great uncle François Mansart (1598– 1666). Nevertheless, Dejan later changed his mind, placing an advertisement in 1783 announcing that he would revert back to his original name of Jean Jean, although hastening to add that he would still entertain contracts under either surname. Family workshops and builder dynasties appeared throughout the colonies as with the brother carpenters Jean, Dominique, and Jean-Baptiste Payssé, who ran an atelier in Port-auPrince in the 1780s, and the Breton joiner François Denis, who married the daughter of an entrepreneur des bâtiments and was likely in a partnership with another joiner named Pelissier, since he dictated his will (dying at the age of thirty-five) from Pelissier’s house.29 One particularly prosperous family workshop operated out of Guadeloupe: run by master carpenter Étienne Doyon, it included his sons Jean-François and Louis Dieudonné, both master carpenters, and PierreAndré, a master mason, as well as two sons-in-law in the trade, Claude Sejan, master carpenter, and Claude Jalai-vivant, carpenter. Although headquarters was in Trois-Rivières, in southern Basse-Terre, Louis-Dieudonné worked in nearby Capesterre and Jean-François in Morne-à-L’Eau in Grande-Terre. Their geographical range demonstrates the flexibility of colonial family workshops, so that while the father certainly trained the son, the son was free to set up his own practice somewhere else, and the number of builders with the title “master” also suggests a less formal means of advancement than that practised in the metropole or even in Saint-Domingue.30 I have already noted in the previous chapter the proliferation of self-styled “masters” among the community of free gens de couleur and even slaves in Guadeloupe and Martinique. Frequently builders came from or married into families of builders who remained in France, as with Dardan cited above. Other cases included the master joiner François Rogues from Fort-Royal (Martinique), who was married to the daughter of Parisian master carpenter Mathieu Mandrou – the marriage likely took place in Paris and Mandrou could have been his former

master; the constructeur Jean Poitevin, also from FortRoyal, whose father Jacques was also a constructeur from the parish of Saint-Michel in Bordeaux and the brother of master ship carpenter Martial Poitevin; or the carpenter François Roux from Plaisance (SaintDomingue), who noted in his 1783 will that he had learned his craft from his carpenter father Jacques Roux in Burgundy.31 Sometimes artists, sculptors, and architects boasted of credentials they had received in France, some legitimate, others more dubious. Among the latter were Le Sieur Emmanuel Challes, supposed “Painter of the King,” who wrote from Le Cap in 1772 that, “anxious to see France again, to settle in Paris, warns the Public that it will miss his talents.”32 Port-au-Prince painter Jean Pirault also called himself “ancien peintre du Roy,” in 1786.33 That same year in the same city the master joiner Nicolas Bédé styled himself as a “menuisier du Roi.”34 In 1768 a certain sieur Forgues, “entrepreneur des bâtimens” in Le Cap, hinted at an academic background, noting that he was no mere builder, even though he undertook “all sorts of work related to Architecture,” since “he understands perfectly the distributions and decorations, both on the interior and exterior of buildings.”35 At no period were there more white entrepreneurs, masons, and carpenters in the colonies than in late eighteenth-century Antilles, although, as with their black and mixed-race counterparts, few can be linked to any extant buildings (or at least buildings for which we have plans or elevations). In Le Cap they include (in addition to ones mentioned elsewhere in this chapter and in chapter 5) sixteen entrepreneurs de bâtiments, four joiners, and thirteen carpenters (most of the entrepreneurs were also masons and some of them carpenters).36 Port-au-Prince came second: aside from a single “architect,” Jacques-Philippe Du Paintriel (1786), these men included fifteen entrepreneurs de bâtiments, six carpenters, and seven joiners.37 The Lesser Antilles also boasted a significant number of architects and builders. Pointe-à-Pitre was home to five architects encountered in this study, one of whom,

Joseph Chaumet from Avignon (d. 1781), called himself an “architect,” as well as one mason, five master carpenters, two journeyman carpenters, two master joiners, a painter, and a furniture maker (ébéniste).38 Pérotin-Dumon has found the names of further builders in Pointe-à-Pitre between 1760 and 1810, including twenty-seven architects and entrepreneurs, seven masons, seven carpenters, and six joiners, and in Basse-Terre (1750–1800) she names another fourteen architect/entrepreneurs, one mason, two carpenters, and one joiner.39 Nevertheless there appear to have been more carpenters of colour than white carpenters in Guadeloupe. In Martinique, other than the ones mentioned elsewhere in this chapter, I have found reference to only two joiners Pierre Raymond (1777) and Jean Marcelin Pavie (1787) from Rouen; however future scholarship will no doubt reveal a number of builders on that island comparable to that of Guadeloupe as the Martinican documentation has not yet received the attention it deserves.40 Builders in cosmopolitan late eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue had it easy. By contrast their predecessors lived a very hardscrabble life indeed – men like the apprentice carpenter (garçon charpentier) Philibert Pié and apprentice joiner Jean Taurande, who were absolved of unspecified sins in 1717 by local priests in Bordeaux but only if they agreed to be shipped off to Saint-Domingue at a time when it had barely been wrested from the hands of buccaneers and cattle rustlers.41 Some officials even mooted schemes whereby engagés could work for the new colony as virtual prisoners. In 1706, Le Sieur de la Grange, engineer and officer in the naval garrison, recommended to the minister of the marine, Jérôme Phélypeaux, comte de Pontchartrain (1674–1747), that he be allowed to establish a company of “workers of all sorts of professions,” at his own expense and formed of artisans conscripted into the artillery company of the Marine.42 De la Grange press-ganged sixty-eight engagés into his service in Paris, but twenty of them fled during a sojourn on the Island of Oléron and the rest died or deserted after arriving in Saint-Domingue, not only killing his utopian

White Civilian Architects and Builders in the Colonies

125

plan but also causing him considerable financial harm. Unfazed, de la Grange proposed an even grander project in 1710 in which “a company of 120 labourers like those who are in the Royal Artillery Regiment in France” would be conscripted for service in Petit-Goâve (the southern capital) and constantly resupplied through new recruits. The company would be composed of (among other workers) “carpenters, lumberjacks, masons, stone-cutters, quarrymen, lime kiln workers, blacksmiths, locksmiths, armourers, nail-makers, joiners, cartwrights, [and] sawyers” and would live and work in an arsenal outside the town, guarded by soldiers. Although their main function was to build the city’s new fortifications, the builders were to work on myriad projects from clearing land to building houses and making fine furnishings for government buildings. De la Grange concluded that “[t]he workers thus distributed and employed each according to his specialty seems sufficient to prevent any delay in the work as long as we take precautions and sufficient advance time to obtain the materials and the necessary supply of wood.” There is no evidence that this scheme ever came to fruition, but, as we will soon see, engagés contributed greatly to the built environment of many pioneer colonies such as seventeenth-century Nouvelle-France. Architectural Competitions in the French Colonies Although competition was rife among architects and builders in the colonies, true architectural competitions were extremely rare. In France a concours involved an open invitation to architects to submit original plans and elevations that would then be adjudicated by a panel of experts – the 1732 competition for the facade of Saint-Sulpice in Paris is a good example.43 By contrast, colonial competitions usually took the form of a tender that invited contractors to follow only pre-approved designs and budgets. In 1770 the habitants of the town of Limbé invited “Messieurs Architects, Masons & Carpenters, who wish to undertake the construction of the Church of Limbé” to contact Monsieur Latour du Roc, habitant of the quarter, to obtain the plan

126

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

and budget for the project.44 Similarly, Monsieur de Labrosse, habitant of the town of Jean-Rabel, advised the public in 1774 of a contest to choose the prospective contractor for the new parish church. He would be paid in three equal instalments, one in advance, the other when the framework was ready to erect, and the rest when the work was finished. The advertisement even indicated what the church was to look like: “a building of 110 feet, with a curving gallery, all in wood.”45 In a third example, for the parish church of Plaisance (Saint-Domingue) the contractor was able to provide his own plan (un plan figuratif) but he had little artistic licence since the church’s dimensions and even neoclassical style had already been determined: “the length will be 80 feet by 24 in width and 14 in height, including the sacristy under the same roof, with a bell tower in the form of a peristyle or otherwise, which is to be built in front of the principal portal of the said Church, all constructed in stone.”46 Sometimes the winning entrepreneur and parish differed in their interpretations of the plan and the matter had to be taken to a board of adjudicators formed of other entrepreneurs. In 1789 the Apostolic Prefect Father Duguet of the Church of the Assumption in Port-au-Prince accused entrepreneur de bâtiments Louis Ragnos of mis-measuring the main staircase of the presbytery: “the grand staircase does not at all conform to that which is indicated on the plan, the change had been made according to the whim of the said Sieur Ragnos entrepreneur, without his taking into account the increase which I find in the length of the banisters,” and accused him of not meeting the obligations of his 1787 contract.47 Ragnos, who was also responsible for “other buildings necessary for the parish of this town of Port au Prince” (and possibly the church), petitioned the authorities to conduct an inspection, for which a committee of four other entrepreneurs – Jean-Pierre Glaze, Louis Trevant, François Raimbault, and Jacques Lagrange (the latter two were also masons) – visited the work site and examined the plan. Although Father Duguet was clearly not pleased, the architects determined that Ragnos had indeed met his obligations:

“that the works are made according to the wishes and conforming to the said contract and following the rules of art.”48 He was merely obliged to complete the iron balustrade for the small staircase, the portico (petit fronton) in the middle of the facade, and a lavatory, “as soon as possible.” The only true architectural competition I have encountered is the drawn out 1806–07 concours for the new church of Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul in Point-àPitre, which was only completed in 1817 (fig. 6.1). The new church was a replacement for Claude-François Nassau’s 1772–74 structure on Place Sartine, damaged by the British in 1794 and demolished in 1795 (figs. 10.19, 15.15), and in 1806 “several plans” were presented to the parish at the invitation of the curate and Vice-Préfet Apostolique Pierre-Joseph Foulquier (b. 1761).49 The churchwardens rejected architect Jean Rousseau’s plan, elevation, and sections for a Latincross church on 30 January 1806 because it was too large and expensive (at 500,000 livres), at which point the architect was invited to reduce the dimensions to 180 × 40 feet with transepts and to provide “a new plan and sections, both along the width and length, according to the designated size, with a very detailed budget (droit estimatif), both for the price of materials and for the labour.”50 On 9 May of that year the parish committee met to decide between two projects, possibly by Rousseau although he is not named (the dimensions had in the meantime been reduced to 160 × 40 feet), one of them in stone and the other in wood. The committee chose the more expensive stone one because it would require fewer repairs in the end and – significantly – because it would project “the majesty [majesté] which should characterize such a building.”51 Their decision was remarkably far-sighted for a cash-strapped colonial parish: by contrast in Le Cap in 1713 the interim governor Paul-François de La Grange rejected plans for a stone church that would have cost 37,000 livres over a wooden one, which only cost 20,000.52 A tender (adjudication au rabais) was announced in May for contractors to build this structure, but for unexplained reasons on 18 December the Colonial Prefect

François-Marie Perichou de Kerversau (1757–1825) forwarded further designs, of which two made the final cut: one for a round church (en rotonde) and the other for a rectangular one (quarré long).53 Even though it was designed to fit on top of the circular battery where the church was initially to be built, the round plan was rejected because it was too expensive and no masons were skilled enough to execute it – the same fate would befall the only other round church proposed in the French Atlantic Empire, at Saint-Louis in Senegal in 1820 (fig. 15.24): 1st: That the price of building the church on the circular plan was too high for the present circumstances in which the inhabitants of this parish find themselves. 2nd: that no workmen could be found capable of carrying out such a project. 3rd: Finally, that one side of the land on which a part of the construction of a round church must sit was not sufficiently consolidated to support a mass of masonry so considerable.54 The impatient churchwardens ordered the rectangular church’s “immediate execution” (exécution immédiate). An entrepreneur named Faudoas was given the job of building it, along with a budget of 297,000 livres, on 6 April.55 To cut costs, the church was reduced to 136 × 60 feet in size, and Faudoas was to build a structure with a basilical plan in which the facade and the walls of the side aisles (murs des bas-côtés) were to be of stone but the roof of carpentry, the nave and choir roof supported by thick wooden pilaster beams 24 feet tall.56 But just as Faudoas was to begin work, the town decided to move the church to its present location behind Morne de la Victoire, and the parish altered the plan so that it would be slightly wider and cost 305,000 to 307,000 livres.57 Then Faudoas was thrown into prison owing to some “private” troubles, and the work on the new site was supervised directly by a shady businessman named Vaultier de Moyencourt, a relative of a former governor of the colony, who appointed his brother-in-law Regné as entrepreneur.58 On 22 September 1807 in a pompous

White Civilian Architects and Builders in the Colonies

127

6.1 Anonymous, The Church of Saint-Pierreet-Saint-Paul at Pointeà-Pitre in 1808, undated. Archives de l’Evêché, Basse-Terre.

Napoleonic ceremony, the leading governmental, civic, and ecclesiastical figures processed to the church’s new site and planted a wooden cross where the altar would go and medals extolling the emperor’s reign were placed in an incorruptible box with some coins to be buried nearby, as “a thousand times” people shouted “Glory, Praise, Honour to the all-Powerful, long and happy Reign of the Cyrus of France!,” and much more besides.59 But even the emperor’s patronage could not guarantee a swift conclusion to the project: thanks to an American trade embargo of 1808 and the 1810–14 British occupation of Guadeloupe all work on the church stopped, with the walls only 12 feet high plus the foundations, the wooden pillar-pilasters and the roof lumber lying in piles nearby, and a facade which “had not been begun at all: even the foundations of the facade had not yet been prepared.”60 In 1811 Moyencourt absconded, taking with him all the woodwork, as well as a tidy sum of 111,000 livres.61 Although in 1812 the parish was still calling for a “continuation immédiate des ouvrages,” little more happened aside from work on a gallery and sacristy, until 29 May 1814, when royal engineer Claude-Nicolas Nassau (Claude-François’s son) was called in to finish the project, with a “nouveau plan” and a budget of 318,500 livres.62 Like his more famous father, the former arpenteur et voyer général of Guadeloupe, Claude-Nicolas also likely trained in France (there were no institutions of higher learning in the French Antilles) and he took over his father’s profession as arpenteur until at least 1814.63 The decision to move from a private architect-entrepreneur to a royal engineer is unusual in a commission of this kind and demonstrates the importance the town placed on its new church. In just a few months after Guadeloupe’s brief return to French rule, between December 1814 and August 1815, Nassau fils transformed the unfinished church into a more emphatically classical structure: he built a facade with four Doric engaged columns and a semicircular pediment; he constructed a gallery around the inside of the nave; and instead of wooden pillar-pilasters he erected a stone arcade to hold up the roof,

decorated with pilasters with bases and capitals and crowned with a formal entablature.64 Some of the carpentry was executed by a certain Arsenne and Antoine Pavillon, and although Philibert was still employed (see n.60) Bastien Basyle served as chief mason (maçon entrepreneur) and much of the labour was provided by “various Negroes on hire” (divers nègres de loyer).65 The facade is illustrated in an undated drawing (mistakenly entitled Eglise de la Pointe à Pitre en 1808) and in an 1843 print executed before the church was destroyed in the earthquake that year (fig. 6.1).66 The church was finally completed after the British finally withdrew in 1817 (1 December), at a final cost of 445,959 livres, more than 130,000 over budget, and leaving the town 72,639 livres in debt: as one government administrator complained in November 1818: “the Church of Pointà-Pitre has cost an enormous sum.”67 Thus the church founded with Bonapartist pomp was opened in honour of the new King Louis XVIII. These competitions in Saint-Domingue and Guadeloupe demonstrate the substantial degree to which patrons could restrict architectural freedom in the colonies, a phenomenon scholars have also noted in Nouvelle-France, where clients often designed the buildings themselves or intervened throughout the building process, making the end product a true collaboration.68 Unsurprisingly, patrons and architects tended to differ in their priorities, as Marc Grignon notes about Quebec, “the client’s point of view was usually characterized by a great attention paid to the manifestation of social prestige in buildings” (as we have just seen in Pointe-à-Pitre with the church council’s insistence on “majesty”) “while builders were mostly concerned about practical problems of structure and solidity”69 Prefabricated Architecture and Healthy Living In some cases patrons removed all potential for individual creativity by importing prefabricated architecture, a practice that became increasingly common in the late eighteenth and especially nineteenth centuries, as

White Civilian Architects and Builders in the Colonies

129

with the parish churches of Point-à-Pitre (begun 1843; fig. 17.2) and Fort-de-France (1894). An early example was the parish church in Jacmel (Saint-Domingue) in the 1780s, a ready-made structure imported from France. The baron de Wimpffen remarked that “the inhabitants … have procured a church from France; that is to say, the materials necessary to construct one; this they mean to erect in the centre of a large opening, formed by the meeting of the four principal streets: all that remains to be done on the spot, is the foundation, and the carpenter’s work.”70 After the American War of Independence, prefabricated ceiling frames were also commonly imported from New England, as Wimpffen again notes: “Since we have opened a commerce with the United States of America, we have imported from thence frames of houses, which are formed with more care, and furnished much cheaper than those made on the spot: but as the wood employed on them is very far from being as good as that we use here, I should imagine this consideration would insure a preference to the French workman, as soon as the competition shall have compelled him to lower his price, to finish his materials with greater care, and to exhibit more taste, and intelligence in putting them together.”71 Moreau de Saint-Méry reported that by the 1790s the town of Môle Saint-Nicolas was made up primarily of prefabricated single-storey wooden houses with galleries brought from the United States, and lamented the loss of Nouvelle-France and Louisiana as a source for materials for the French to make their own.72 Prefabricated homes were tentatively introduced into Guiana as early as 1766, when the company Fiedmond & Maillard Dumesle imported some shingled pine flat-pack homes from New England; however the experiment was not a success.73 Similarly, during the construction of the remote utopian town of Mana (1823–35) and the Royal Plantation at Tilsit (1821), both also in Guiana, the government sent ready-made houses from Cayenne, which probably also originated in France or New England given that the government surveyor Gaudens Pansiotti complained about their unsuitability for the climate. In a report to the governor

130

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

he maintained that the ones in Mana could be made serviceable only by adding a gallery: “[t]he House which you have sent from Cayenne and which has been assembled, is properly made, the wood is of good quality and the system of the framework is very competent and solid; it is of the same length as the previous one but it is narrower; we should make a gallery for it, on the front, a necessity in this country, whether for the conservation of the house or for the health protection which it provides,” but he condemned those which had been ordered for Tilsit and which were still sitting in a warehouse in the post at Maillard outside Cayenne: “I have not had the opportunity to examine them. Nevertheless, according to the description that Mr. Jeny has provided me they cannot be used for European settlers … they are too low and too narrow, they do not have galleries, and the attic cannot be inhabited.”74 I will return to the gallery as an architectural form in chapter 16. These prefabricated houses were primarily an attempt to make up for the extreme scarcity of builders in the colony: as then-governor Victor Hugues remarked in 1820 about the 1790s, “there was at the time at Cayenne no man capable of making a plan, even if he was a quite decent officer of the Corps.”75 However they and the recommendations Pansiotti made for improvements also reflected a new interest in creating a kind of standardized architecture for the tropics that would be both economical and salubrious. I will return to this topic in chapters 13 and 15 with the designs of Jean-Samuel Guisan in the 1780s (also using flat-pack architecture) and especially those of Nicolas-Georges Courtois and Burke O’Farrell in 1820s Senegal. This new scientific approach was prompted by a serious concern about the deleterious impact of tropical disease upon colonial populations, slave and settler alike. They were designed in particular to guarantee circulation of healthy morning sea breezes and to prevent pestilential “miasma” or bad air. Long before people identified mosquitoes as the culprit they believed that infectious disease came from moisture, swampy land, and unhealthy night draughts. In this development the French were behind their British counterparts, who

in the first half of the eighteenth century were already implementing improvements to allow for greater ventilation in the struggle against pestilence in places like Jamaica, particularly in the increasing use of “piazzas” (covered walks fronting houses) and jalousies in planters’ houses.76 Architectural Practice in Nouvelle-France In spite of the prevalence of tenders over competitions and the increasing use of prefabricated architecture, many white architects and builders enjoyed considerable freedom and prosperity, especially in the settler colony of Nouvelle-France, where they had no competition from free gens de couleur or slaves. In this predominantly white society Nouvelle-France’s societal norms and institutions also more closely resembled those of France. As Grignon comments: “although the European cultural conventions may have been partly disregarded in some remote areas of North America, they were nevertheless followed with great conviction in [Quebec City].”77 Although architects still frequently came from the metropole the northern colony also had a robust birth rate and by the early eighteenth century Canadian-born builders and their family dynasties started to dominate the trade in a way their West Indian counterparts, most of whom immigrated much later or returned to France, did not. Canadian builders constituted such a large workforce that they even made a major contribution to the early architecture of Louisiana, as we will see in chapters 9 and 14. Architects and builders in Nouvelle-France were ardently independent and preferred to be self-employed. In France (and Iberian America) journeymen were loyal to a single master for life unless they themselves earned the title of master and founded their own workshops. But in Nouvelle-France workshops were lean and fluid, kept small for reasons of economy, and marked by frequent changes in personnel since an apprentice could become a “master” simply by striking out on his own. As Peter Moogk remarks, “[t]hey sought personal, not collective advancement.”78 Colonial builders were

also unwilling to tolerate old-country deference: the engagé mason Jean Guion (1592–1663) and his associate the carpenter Zacharie Cloutier (1590–1677), both from Perche, broke their contract with fellow percheron Seigneur Robert Giffard because he demanded such ancient and demeaning practices as kneeling in fealty toward him while repeating his name three times.79 Craft confraternities in Nouvelle-France were an extreme rarity: there were only three of them and their activities were limited to celebrating mass on their patron saint’s day and holding a (frequently rowdy) banquet afterward.80 The only one related to the building arts was the sculptors’ and joiners’ Confraternity of Saint Anne, which was granted a chapel in the Quebec parish church (later Cathedral) in 1657, but by the 1670s it had opened its doors to everyone and no longer maintained its craft specificity.81 Nevertheless builders found ways to celebrate their community, especially in processions such as the parade of craftsmen at the Corpus Christi (Fête-Dieu) Festival in Quebec City: the same Guion and Cloutier represented their profession in 1647 by carrying a garlanded torch bearing the insignia of their trade, a hammer, compass, and rule.82 Tradesmen in France had the same custom, as with the Community of Master Masons and Architects of Bordeaux, who on Corpus Christi would parade through town behind their corporate banners bearing the image of the Virgin of Candlemas after the bishop blessed them in the cathedral.83 Also, as in France, colonial builders tended to live in the same neighbourhoods, as in lower rue Saint-Louis in Quebec City (in Bordeaux the masons lived in the Saint-Seurin district).84 In the first three quarters of the seventeenth century indentured servants (engagés) and soldiers provided the bulk of the white builders in Nouvelle-France, where a quarter of the total indentured recruits before 1666 were in the construction trades, and some carpenters were contracted for Canada specifically “to build houses.”85 Nevertheless, during their three-year stints in the colony engagé builders such as Guion and Cloutier were overwhelmingly occupied with the endless task of land clearance (défrichage) as colonists

White Civilian Architects and Builders in the Colonies

131

carved territory out of the vast primeval forests that blanketed northeastern North America, and masons and carpenters spent less time on building despite the dire need for it.86 But the era of the indentured craftsman was soon to end: by the late seventeenth century engagé builders, by now mostly in the towns, were quickly vanishing, partly a result of their high cost and because of the rapidly increasing number of locally born free apprentices who filled their shoes. Apprenticeship and Social Status As noted above, nothing could be further from a topdown, Crown-controlled institution than crafts training in the French colonies – despite early attempts by intendants Jean Talon (1670–72) and Jacques de Meulles (1682–86) to establish Colbertian royal workshops in Nouvelle-France.87 Even church institutions did not provide arts training in any consistent way: in fact the Seminary of Quebec preferred to work with engagés and even hired sculptors from France.88 Private apprenticeship was the main road to employment for young specialists: it offered flexibility, as apprentices could leave one workshop or even trade for another, and in Nouvelle-France at least they were paid a wage by their masters. This practice contrasted with that of the Antilles: among gens de couleur (see chapter 5) apprentices recompensed their master through labour and sometimes a small fee and the patrons of their white Antillean counterparts paid larger fees. It was the opposite of the situation in France, where apprentices paid their masters so much that they ended up owing them money by the end of their apprenticeship.89 Family workshops were much more inclusive than in Europe, frequently taking in non-relatives. Apprenticeship contracts for white builders use similar language as those for builders of colour seen in chapter 5. In March 1780 Pierre-Étienne Déjambes, son of Sieur Pierre Déjambes of Le Cap, was contracted to apprentice for two and a half years with the master carpenter Alexander Guiton, who lived in the quarter of Terrier Rouge. Guiton promised Déjambes père “to

132

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

demonstrate and teach his said profession of carpenter and to not hide from him any of the techniques and anything relating to the said profession of carpenter, in a word to exert every effort to make him a good worker to the end of the said time, fixed below, to treat the said Sieur Étienne Déjambes during the duration of the said apprenticeship as a good paterfamilias, to lodge him, feed, care for him and look after his wellbeing, both in health and in ordinary and natural sickness, and to have the laundry washed.”90 In return the boy’s father was to hand over his son to the complete authority of Guiton during the period of apprenticeship and pay him 1,400 livres, beginning with a down payment of 700 livres and to compensate him with extra time should his son fall ill for a long period, and if his son should quit his apprenticeship the father would pay Guiton a fine of 1,500 livres. The careers of Quebec architects Baillif and his pupil Maillou demonstrate the extraordinary flexibility enjoyed by colonial builders and the loose application there, as in the Antilles, of the title of “architect.” Born possibly in Normandy into a petit-bourgeois family of masons who soon moved to Paris, Baillif was likely a journeyman before being indentured by the Quebec Seminary as a stonecutter (tailleur de pierre) and moving to Canada in 1675 – despite his self-identification as “architect of Paris.”91 Less than five years after his release from engagé status – by which time he was again calling himself an “architect” – Baillif became the leading builder in the city at the head of a large atelier with private, ecclesiastical, and government clients, and he was responsible for around forty structures, including townhouses, the Saint-Famille wing of the Seminary (1678), the church of Notre-Dame-des-Victoires (begun 1688; fig. 8.17) – a collaboration with his rival Hilaire Bernard de la Rivière (ca. 1640–1729) – and most importantly the designs for enlarging the cathedral (1683; figs. 14.15–16) and the Bishop’s palace (1693–98; fig. 14.17), considered by some to be his masterpiece.92 The contract for the cathedral commission even won him and his wife a coveted private pew. Yet although Baillif hired more than half the masons in

Quebec City, he still had to defer to the royal engineer architects when he worked on government projects, during which time he could not even use the title of “architect.”93 The childless Baillif chose to return to France, perhaps to enjoy there the status he had earned in the colonies, but he died on the open seas.94 Quebec-born Maillou was the epitome of the architectural social climber. The son of a maker of wooden shoes, he switched to the building trade and, along with his brother Joseph (ca. 1663–1702), he apprenticed under Baillif as a stonecutter and mason.95 By the age of twenty-seven he had struck out on his own and was already calling himself a “maître masson,” and when he took over Baillif’s business in 1698 he became the chief architect in the city and also worked

on parish churches in the countryside, including the 1708 facade of Saint-Laurent in Île d’Orléans and an unidentified church from 1715 (figs. 14.9, 14.12). Maillou’s rising status was reflected in his three marriages, the first two to working-class women and the third to the eldest daughter of a ship’s captain. By 1720 he was given the empty title of “Architecte du Roi” and styled himself as “Sieur Jean Maillou Architecte”; in 1723 he rented a pew in the cathedral, and he soon moved from a neighbourhood of manual labourers to a fine stone house in the Upper Town near the governor’s palace 6.2 Jean-Baptiste Maillou dit Desmoulins, Maison Maillou, Upper Town, Quebec City, ca. 1737. The upper storey was added in 1766 and a two-bay extension on the left in 1805.

White Civilian Architects and Builders in the Colonies

133

(fig. 6.2).96 As with Baillif, however, his status fell below that of royal engineer architects so that when he won the tender for the new intendant’s palace (from 1726) he worked as a mere subcontracted mason under Gaspard-Joseph Chaussegros de Léry (1682–1756).97 As with many family workshops in Nouvelle-France, the Maillou brothers passed their trade not only to their blood descendants such as Jean-Baptiste’s son Vital (fl. 1735–1764), but also to their apprentices, Guillaume Deguise (1694–1752) and Nicolas Dassilva (1698–1761).98 After the early eighteenth century civilian architects rarely held positions normally given to royal engineers without going through the rigorous training of the Génie in France, and the few exceptions sometimes suffered for it. Such was the case of master mason Dardan.99 Scion of one of Bordeaux’s leading families of masons – it included Étienne Dardan, Entrepreneur des Ouvrages du Roi, who advised on the construction of the Place Louis XV (fig. 8.10) – Joseph-Antoine travelled to Saint-Domingue in 1771 and “resolved to make his residence there and to exercise the functions of his art, which he had practiced for several years at Bordeaux,” according to a 1783 mémoire.100 In 1774 Dardan opened for business in the rue Espagnole in Le Cap, placing an advertisement in Affiches Américaines announcing: “Furnished with a prodigious quantity of different materials & tools required for construction, [he] offers to undertake all contract work and site management with which one may wish to entrust him in Le Cap & the plain. He will provide people who will honour him with a visit Plans, Elevations, Quotes & Estimates of all the work they can offer him. He boasts of the excellent manner of working & the accuracy that he will achieve, to merit the confidence of the public.”101 The governor general and intendant of Saint-Domingue, Victor-Thérèse Charpentier d’Ennery (1732–1776) and Jean-Baptiste Guillemin de Vaivre (1736–1818), were impressed enough with his talents that they made him the Grand-Voyer (chief of the roads administration) of Cap-François in 1777, and he was sworn in at the Conseil Supérieur the same year. His position put him

134

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

in charge not only of the streets and public squares but also of waterways and fountains, a remit of the highest importance. But Dardan was summarily fired in 1781 and thrown in prison for seven days by interim governor general Jean-François comte de Reynaud de Villeverd (1731–1812) so that Reynaud could give his job to his protégé, an arpenteur-voyer from Limbé.102 Dardan sued for his old post back, claiming that he was uniquely qualified, having worked in Bordeaux “to measure the roads of the dependency, the alignments and levelling of the said City, in the place of his father, commissioned by the Bureau of Streets for these sorts of projects, which his age kept him from continuing.”103 Despite maintaining that the demotion had left him destitute and begging for justice “as an unfortunate father of a family,” he was compelled to appeal directly to the minister of the marine in 1786, with unknown results.104 Dardan remained in Le Cap to the end of the Haitian Revolution after most whites and even affluent gens de couleur had fled the colony. In 1793, a document from his family solicitor noted he had not returned to France and that “his parents wrote many letters to him and they never acknowledged that they had received a response.”105 Dardan turns up for the last time in a real estate advertisement in the Gazette Officielle de Saint-Domingue in July 1803 – just four months before revolutionary leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines seized the city – in which he still styled himself “ex-voyer de la commune du Cap” and listed an address in the Petit Guinée neighbourhood near Place de Clugny, a neighbourhood of free gens de couleur (fig. 10.10).106 There is no evidence that Dardan ever returned to France. I suspect that he remained because he had a family with a free woman of colour (as indicated by his address in the segregated neighbourhood), which, together with having been snubbed by the military, may have made him sympathetic to the revolutionary cause. In fact, as I have written elsewhere, I suspect that he contributed to the design of one of independent Haiti’s most important monuments, King Henry I Christophe’s Palace of Sans-Souci (ca. 1806–13), based in part on a model

by Germain Boffrand and exhibiting profound knowledge of stereotomy, precisely his specialty (fig. 1.15).107 Civilian Contracts and Drawings Compared to the meticulously rendered ink and watercolour plans, elevations, and cross-sections of the royal engineer architects, those prepared by civilian architects could be quite primitive indeed. Few survive, most of them from Nouvelle-France. The earliest buildings were half-timbered “colombage” structures based on

6.3 (left) Anonymous, frame drawing (elevation and plan) of a house to be built for Sieur Noël Pinguet in Basse-Ville, Quebec City, ink on paper, 27 December 1683. This is taken from a photograph; unfortunately the original has gone missing. Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales du Québec, S 114, D 172 (Fonds Cour Supérieure. District Judiciaire de Québec; Greffes de notaires – François Genaple). 6.4 (right) Design for a clocher mounted on an ogival arch, from Mathurin Jousse, Le théâtre du l’art de charpentier (Paris, 1627). Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (63071).

White Civilian Architects and Builders in the Colonies

135

frames of studs assembled according to the time-worn French art of framing carpentry, or charpenterie. Since charpenterie was dependably standardized, builders did not present their clients with drawings (“frame drawings” in English, simply “dessins” in French documents) until as late as the 1680s, relying instead upon written contracts stating the dimensions of the building.108 In Quebec frame drawings were sometimes used in the delicate proceedings of founding a church on seigneurial land, and seigneurs had the right to veto designs approved by the community, as happened in Cap-Saint-Ignace, 70 kilometres east of Quebec City in 1683, when Sieur L’Espinay and his wife rejected a dessin.109 The earliest frame drawings were meant to give a basic idea of the structure, but it was expected that changes would be made during negotiations with clients, often verbally on the work site. Frame contracts represented 42.3 per cent of all contracts in Quebec City between 1663 and 1690.110 Such are the projects for the Noël Pinguet house in Quebec City (1683) – known only from a photograph – which shows a basic side and gable-end wall formed of studs six inches apart to be filled in by the mason (fig. 6.3).111 The diagram shows only these two walls because they have peculiarities such as a chimney and doorway; the carpenter could simply deduce the design of the other two. This kind of image would have been adapted from the hugely popular book Le théâtre de l’art du charpentier by Mathurin Jousse (1627; fig. 6.4), which was used even by relatively distinguished architects such as Claude Baillif and was one of the origins of the Quebec clocher (belltower) (fig. 14.9) and the framed ceilings of the eighteenth-century West Indies (fig. 14.24). Unlike academic plans and elevations, which were coordinated according to scale and sometimes rendered in perspective and shading to show the building in depth, these diagrams made no attempt at visual realism and depicted individual walls or roof structures head-on, repeating parts of the frame with each drawing and not bothering to synchronize the scale.112 The habit of dividing architectural drawings into individual walls without perspective was so ingrained

136

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

that when Baillif presented his project for the enlarged cathedral in Quebec City in 1683 he prepared three sheets depicting the facade, a split facade view showing roof trussing, and a side view, but did not coordinate the scale between them (fig. 14.16).113 Thus the most important church in the French Atlantic Empire was based on the plainest geometric ink drawings, executed like a notarial contract using drafting instruments and corrected in pencil. By the eighteenth century more detailed drawings were presented with contracts for private buildings. Such is a surviving plan and elevation for the house of François-Marie Soumande Delorme in Montreal (1735), with a plan of the house, courtyard, and stables, and an elevation of the street facade and staircase (fig. 6.5). The drawing still looks naive compared to the finished products of the Génie, not merely in the looser draftsmanship and minimal shading and colour but also in the awkward insertion of side views of the vaulting systems between the plans of each storey.114 The house includes elements typical of Montreal construction including massive external support walls pierced with regularly spaced mullioned windows, as well as fireproofing techniques (the house had already burned down twice) such as the masonry firewalls and cut stone around the openings. Parts of the house were also designed for commercial purposes, including a shop on the ground floor, a vaulted cellar for storage, and another supposedly fireproof vaulted storage area (this time in brick) on the first floor.

6.5 Untitled plan of the house of François-Marie Soumande Delorme, Montreal, ink and colours on paper, 1735. Plan of the house, courtyard, and stables, and an elevation of the street facade and staircase. It has side views of the vaulting systems between the plans of each storey. Elements typical of Montreal construction include massive external support walls pierced with regularly spaced mullioned windows, as well as masonry firewalls. The house includes a shop on the ground floor, a vaulted cellar for storage, and another fireproof vaulted storage area (in brick) on the first floor. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-enProvence), 03 DFC 452B .

Contracts between patrons and builders were prepared along the same basic principles as those in Europe or Latin America, and were more formal than those arranged with gens de couleur, even though both were usually witnessed by a notary public. The patron stated the dimensions and any other peculiarities of the building, spelling out the time frame for construction and payment, articulating which materials and workers were to be provided to the contractor and which were to be obtained at his expense, and – in the southern colonies – specifying whose slaves would be employed. Some took the form of a fixed-price contract (marché en bloc) or a marché les clefs à la main (literally “keys in hand”), which was for a complete house ready to be occupied.115 Payment usually took the form of instalments, and sometimes in kind rather than cash, although masons might also be paid by the toise (six feet), and journeymen and lesser labourers were often paid salaries.116 In Montreal before the Peace of 1701 and especially in the 1650s and 1660s contractors were given armed protection against Iroquois raids.117 The earliest known colonial contract, made between the Norman engineer Jean Bourdon and the Quebec mason Martin Grouvel for a house and barn near Quebec City in 1640, simply stated that the house should be “habitable,” spelling out the measurements, requiring the presence of a fireplace, chimney, and cellar, and stating the spacing of the studs.118 From the last quarter of the seventeenth century contracts usually depended on the submission of some kind of a plan and budget (devis), in at least one case in Quebec in 1679 on the same sheet of paper.119 Baillif’s 1683 contract for Quebec Cathedral, accompanied by the drawings already noted (fig. 14.16), stipulated that he was to be paid 9,000 livres for the facade and granted the family pew – although he had to fight to be paid on time and at one point interrupted construction in protest.120 This amount covered all supplies, which Baillif had to provide, as well as all workers (they included six masons in addition to other labourers). However the contract did not include the upper part of one tower that was still under discussion: Baillif

138

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

was required to finish it should it be determined to do so at some future time at a rate proportionate to what it cost him to build the first tower. The architect subcontracted out for the carpentry work, first to Jean Lemire in 1684, which included preparing a new roof frame and repair work to the nave of the older church, and, upon Lemire’s sudden death in 1685, to Charles Pouliot and Robert Chorest.121 Curiously, when the parish drew up a second contract, in 1686, Baillif was paid a salary (7 livres a day), the arrangement usually made for a journeyman mason rather than an architect or contractor, although it was generous and reflected his role as head of the project.122 By the late eighteenth century contracts became increasingly detailed and presentation drawings more sophisticated, and paid more attention to style. This development can be seen by examining five building contracts from Guiana and the Antilles spanning almost a century from 1691 to 1788. Surviving contracts from the southern colonies are much rarer than those in Quebec, which have received considerable attention from Canadian scholars Peter Moogk, Marc Grignon, and Rémi Chénier, so it is worthwhile examining them in detail.123 The first three, from Cayenne, demonstrate that in this early period the colony had to rely upon civilian architects even to build key government structures. In fact Cayenne is the only colonial capital where the chief seat of the government was never built or substantially altered by royal engineer architects. In 1691 Governor marquis de Férolles, signed a contract with Antoine Macaye dit la Montagne, a local architect, before the Royal Notary and Clerk of the Court and the Royal Scribe Charles Petit that stated that Mr Macaye and his assistant Mr Gallez were “obliged to build two of the King’s Barracks and one for the workers, and one also for the King on the lee; be it known that the said two houses [will be] of 120 feet in length and the other sixty, and that of the said workers forty-five, and the said [house] on the lee eighteen … and this in return for the price and sum of seventy-five louis which the gentlemen here present, Petit and Monseigneur the Governor, have promised and promise to pay.”124 There

is no mention of a plan or budget and they were likely traditional half-timbered structures. This is a contract at its most basic. The next is the 1718 contract for the governor’s mansion in Cayenne (figs. 16.17–18) with the master carpenter Pierre Le Clou – mentioned in chapter 4 because it specified the employment of “three Negro carpenters” to clear land, square the logs, and provide labour. By contrast this contract includes a plan (now lost) and budget and describes the structure in considerable detail. Governor Claude Guillouet d’Orvilliers (1668–1728) and the intendant’s delegate Royal Commissioner Paul Lefebvre agreed that Le Clou was obliged to build and construct in carpentry a house destined to serve henceforth as the R[esidence] of Messieurs the Governors, however not including four large stone walls from the foundations to the first storey for which the said Le Cloud [sic] is not responsible; firstly, that the said house will be 75 feet in length by 36 in width, including that of the two exterior galleries [galléries extérieurs] which will be in front and at the back of the same, built of wooden carpentry … that the second storey of the said house will be to a height of 11 feet all constructed in framed carpentry conforming to the proposed budget [devis] and plan [plan], and an attic of truss work bearing the galleries on its two wall plates [sablières] which will form a roof [pavillon] composed of five complete roof trusses [fermes], two half roof trusses, and four arrestiers [the descending corner ridge of a hip roof] the whole furnished with rafters … and any pieces necessary for construction.125 Second, Le Clou was to construct a wooden staircase next to the house, and third he was “to finish and install all of the [interior] joinery (menuiserie), which will consist of two floors, namely that of the first storey and that of the attic, both floors dressed and matched, furthermore and similarly the partitions of the upper offices, furthermore all the doors and shutters for the

windows assembled in planks and with crosspieces [a barres], except the two doors for the upper bedrooms which will be joined and panelled.”126 The patrons then stipulate that they will supply Le Clou with “all the necessary wood, squared-off and in rough planks, for the said construction and the nails, boards, and shingles, pierced and ridged [and] ready to install,” as well as the slaves mentioned earlier and, “furthermore to provide the said Le [Clou] with as many people as he needs to move, raise, and install the carpentry of the said building.”127 His payment was to be 1,350 livres in silver in three instalments, 400 livres upon commencing work, 400 livres after the carpentry is completed on the site, and 550 livres upon completion of the building. The carpenter slaves were to come from Le Clou’s personal atelier. In 1723 Guillouet and Lefebvre hired Le Clou again to construct the “King’s House” (Maison du Roy), a smaller government building (40 by 36 feet) adjacent the governor’s mansion. It closely resembled the earlier structure, with a stone ground floor, galleries at the front and rear, a first storey 11 feet high, and the same wood frame used on the main facade of the governor’s mansion facing the Place d’Armes. Le Clou was to make morticed cedar planks, a door four feet in width and eight in height, ten windows three feet wide and five feet high; on the rear facade which faces the garden a door three feet wide and seven high, two windows of three feet by five in height; also, in the support wall a doorway three feet wide and seven feet high; that the second storey will be constructed entirely of carpentry and that on each of the two facades three doors will be made, of which two [are] of three feet and one of four with a height of eight; also a support wall of carpentry with a door four feet wide and eight high; also at the end of the rear gallery a two-storey, two-quarters turning staircase will be made by the said Le Clou; also he is obliged to make a roof of trusses attached to a horizontal top beam with their complete framework; also two large dormer windows on the front

White Civilian Architects and Builders in the Colonies

139

side which faces the said Place d’Armes; and since it is considered appropriate to join the two buildings at the same height the said entrepreneur is obliged to raise the roof of the government house to connect it to the end of the new building.128 He was to execute this work with an unnamed companion and two slaves at his own cost, but this time he was not responsible for any of the interior woodwork. The patrons provided Le Clou with materials, two of the king’s slaves, two additional carpenter slaves, and all other personnel necessary to bring the project to fruition. This time he was paid only 600 livres in silver in two instalments, 300 at the halfway point and 300 at the completion of the job. The fourth contract, between Pierre Charrière, entrepreneur de bâtiments in Cap-François and merchant Jean-Joseph Granon in 1783, was for only the floors on a (presumably stone) house in the city, but nevertheless described the work to be done in exacting detail. It demanded that the patron provide ground plans for the first and second storey: The said Sieur Charrière promises and is obliged … to make the floors of boards only, for the house belonging to the said Sieur Granon situated in this City, Rue Espagnole, consisting of two rooms downstairs and two small rooms upstairs, galleries upstairs and downstairs, and a small room upstairs and downstairs and diverse other small rooms and [a] kitchen … the first [floor] in boards which the said Sieur Granon will supply and which cannot be thicker than an inch and a half, which will be bleached in other words, planed on one side and joined with tongue-andgroove by the said Sieur Charrière, and the last floor which forms the attic, in boards of pitch pine one inch thick also bleached on one side and tongue-and-groove, the boards for the said last floor, as well as all the nails for installing all the said last floor, that the first will be provided by the said Sieur Charrière, who must deliver the said

140

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

floors, made and completed, in five weeks from next Monday … or be responsible for all expenses and damages. And for his part the said Sieur Granon promises and is obliged to furnish all the plans [plans] which will be necessary for the first floor, or put another way the first storey, of the two said rooms, galleries, and cabinets … The present contract … is thus set for … the price and sum of two thousand livres, which the said Sieur Granon promises and is obliged to pay to the said Sieur Charrière … namely 100 pistoles [piasters] from when the floor of the first storey of the said places shall be made and finished, and 100 pistoles at the completion and conclusion of the said floors, made and finished.129 For a project involving nothing but floors this contract is extremely comprehensive, demonstrating the level of attention and use of plans in even the most basic of jobs in this later period. The fifth and final contract is for the plantation mansion of François Augustin Ricard in the parish of SainteMarthe de la Marmelade in Saint-Domingue (1788), for which local master carpenter Laurent Maistre received ten times Le Clou’s 1723 payment, a sign of inflation but also of the great wealth of his private client compared to that of the impoverished early governor of Cayenne. This time the contract provides us with clear instructions about style, requesting an English Palladian house probably inspired by planters’ mansions in Jamaica and Barbados. Maistre is required to build a house 40 feet in length and 15 wide with two galleries [Galeries] on each side of the said house, of eight [feet] in width down its entire length, divided into three bedrooms and four cabinets, at each end of the gallery with openings coordinating with the said apartments, in whatever manner the said Sieur François Augustin decides, and in the instructions [indication] which he provided for it; the said house [is] to be built on a masonry foundation in good wood, squared or sawn, having

pillars of four to five square pouces and nine feet tall including the thickness of the foundations which will be the same four to five pouces square, and timber roof beams will be placed all the way across the said house and the divisions between the apartments [will be made] with boards; and to make a floor across the same capable of carrying weight; also to make a hip roof [comble à croupe] of fine framed carpentry over the totality of the main part of the building and the galleries, all under the same roof, and in the English style [à l’Angloise], namely that the pillars of the galleries should have the same height as the body of the building; to lathe it, make rafters for it and cover it in shingles; to prepare all the wood, planks, and shingles and provide to this end all that will be necessary for the wood of the said construction; that he feed himself at his own cost and expense; and finally to complete the said house within three years from this day.130 The patron for his part promises to pay for the stone foundations and to supply all the nails and ironwork, to provide his own slaves to help those of Maistre, and to feed Maistre’s slaves out of the produce of his plantation, although Maistre is responsible for raising half of the produce and for managing the slaves and bringing them to the work site each day. For his work Maistre was to be paid in kind, in pine and redwood from Ricard’s plantation to the value of 6,600 livres, which however he was obliged to cut himself. The decision to follow British design is quite rare in the French colonies – aside from references to English-style shutters as seen in chapter 5 – and it may reflect Maistre’s experience trading in British-owned islands where he might have seen the Jamaican veranda known as a “piazza.”131 Use of Engravings and Architectural Manuals I have written elsewhere about the frequency with which architects in colonial Latin America used engravings and illustrated architectural manuals when

designing the elevations, plans, and decorations of their buildings, particularly in more remote regions such as the sixteenth-century Peruvian Altiplano or the Cono Sur (Argentina, Chile, Paraguay) in the eighteenth century.132 When trying to recreate a church reminiscent of Renaissance Italy in rural Peru or New Spain architects turned to volumes by Sebastiano Serlio (1475–1554), Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola (1507–1573), Hans Vredeman de Vries (1527–1607), and the Frenchman Philibert de l’Orme (1510–1570).133 By the eighteenth century architects and decorators had moved on to rococo models by French and German printmakers such as Étienne Charpentier (fl. 1730s) and Franz Xaver Habermann (1721–1786) for facades and altarpieces, whether in Minas Gerais (Brazil) or Buenos Aires. However artists rarely copied these models wholesale, preferring instead to adapt them to circumstances, materials, and in the case of architectural sculpture, to the decorative and iconographic needs of their commissions. Architects in the French Atlantic Empire also relied on engraved models – including some of the same ones as their Latin American counterparts – although paradoxically, since rococo never really gained purchase in French colonies, there is little evidence for the use of eighteenth-century French decorative prints except for cartouches and other minor motifs on maps.134 The first French colonial architects had limited exposure to architectural books because their working methods did not require them. Jousse’s L’art de charpentier changed all that, and while it was a convenient means of ensuring a reliable product both for builder and client, this book was technical with little to say about style (fig. 6.4). Claude Baillif’s library, inventoried at his death, shows how few architectural books were used even by an architect of relatively high status in the late seventeenth century: the sole architectural treatises out of his ten books were Antoine de Ville’s Les fortifications (Lyon, 1628), Louis Savot’s L’architecture françoise des bastiments particuliers (Paris, 1624), a French translation of Vignola’s Regola delli cinque ordini d’architettura, probably by Pierre Lemuet (Paris,

White Civilian Architects and Builders in the Colonies

141

1631), and another unspecified book by Vignola – all of them practical and none of them heavily illustrated.135 The Maillou brothers had the same edition of Vignola and Savot’s L’architecture françoise, as well as Philibert de l’Orme’s Le premier tome de l’architecture (1567), two books on fortifications and seventeen architectural engravings.136 Montreal church architect Dominique Janson dit La Palme owned Augustin-Charles Davilier’s 1720 edition of Vignola and the same author’s Explication des termes d’architecture (1720). To put this all in context the library of the French architect François Blondel (1618–1686) numbered 439 books, with all the major architectural treatises and books on philosophy, religion, history, mathematics, and various sciences.137 Although the range of books available to civilian architects in the colonies did expand over the course of the eighteenth century, particularly in the West Indies, they never had the access to the wide range of often lavishly illustrated architectural manuals upon which even colonial royal engineer architects were able to draw. Architectural books were widely available in the French Atlantic Empire, especially in late eighteenthcentury Saint-Domingue; however they were primarily practical in nature and not the richly illustrated or theoretical tomes architects had in their libraries in Paris.138 Typical were Bernard Forest de Bélidor’s Architecture hydraulique (Paris, 1737–53) for sale in Cap-François in 1772; various unidentified “Treatises of Architecture and Fortification” on offer in Môle Saint-Nicolas in 1773; and, in a sale in 1775 at the Royal Printers in Le Cap, Charles Étienne Briseux’s Architecture moderne, ou l’Art de bien bâtir pour toutes sortes de personnes (first edition, Paris, 1728), Augustin-Charles d’Aviler’s gloss on Vignola entitled Cours d’architecture (Paris, 1691), another Cours d’architecture in quarto, perhaps the same work, and Charles-François-Roland le Virloys’s Dictionnaire d’Architecture civile, militaire & navale, antique, ancienne & moderne (Paris, 1780).139 In 1777 the same Royal Printers offered Nicolas Fourneau’s L’art du trait de charpenterie and Essais pratiques de géométrie, & suite de l’art du trait (Paris, 1767); Pierre Bullet’s L’architecture pratique (Paris, 1691); Louis Liger’s

142

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

La nouvelle maison rustique, ou economie générale de tous les biens de campagne (Paris, 1702); Bernard Forest de Bélidor’s La science des ingénieurs (Paris, 1729); Amédée François Frézier’s La théorie de la pratique de la coupe des pierres et des bois … ou Traité de stéréotomie (Strasbourg and Paris, 1737), used to train apprentice masons; and the Traité de perspective à l’usage des artistes (Paris, 1750) by the royal engineer Edmé-Sebastien Jeaurat, heavily illustrated with architectural models in perspective and architectural landscapes enclosed in fanciful rococo cartouches.140 Of all of these books, only the Briseux contains a significant number of pictures of contemporary buildings in France. The people of Saint-Domingue were particularly keen on keeping up with French fashions, so there was also a market for books on the latest court buildings and decor, such as (in 1777) the “Royal Almanac of Versailles of the present year, containing a description of the City & Château; the King’s House, and the Queen’s; those of the Royal Family; the Offices of the Ministers, &c.”141 It is unclear whether this was illustrated, but it fed the enthusiasm denizens of this particular colony had for the lives of the rich and famous. Nevertheless such books were not restricted to the wealthy and populous colonies: two copies of Liger’s Maison rustique turned up in Île de Gorée, in the libraries of Doctor Jean Baptiste Delille (1817), and in an anonymous library of 1822.142 By far the most widely used books on building in France and its colonies alike were those specifically directed toward private homes or plantations, which included practicalities about form and appearance, arrangements of rooms, materials, and location; extensive and detailed sections devoted to gardens and agriculture; and even advice about how to deal with dishonest builders, bad neighbours, and creditors. Liger’s La nouvelle maison rustique – it was an updated version of Charles Estienne’s book of the same name and was republished repeatedly throughout the eighteenth century – was the most popular in the colonies.143 Volume one covers the basics of designing and building a house, looking at materials, masonry, carpentry, fine woodwork (menuiserie), measurements, ways to avoid

unscrupulous workers, and other such necessities, before continuing on about poultry and livestock, beekeeping and (in the second half of the volume) field crops, vineyards, natural springs, forests, pastures, swamps, pools, and other aspects of rural life, as well as how to make a profit off the land. The only illustrations are of farm implements, and Liger’s building instructions are pretty basic – for example, in his discussion of an ideal Main Building (Maître-Logis) he calls for “a hall to eat in, a bedroom to sleep in, an office to study in, and to find rest from one’s affairs; and other additional rooms insofar as our resources permit. This House, in a word, is as magnificent as one has the money to put into it.”144 Liger then proceeds methodically to describe the rooms needed in the principal lodging, emphasizing comfort and utility but not style – it is telling that the section on chicken coops is longer than his introduction to the ideal country house. By contrast his garden designs, in volume two, are opulent, demonstrating the particularly French penchant for overly grand gardens in humble settings. There are sections on vegetable, fruit, and flower gardens, as well as instructions on gardens of simples and botanic gardens, but there is also much about formal parterres, broderies, bosquets, water jets, and ornamental ponds – features that would be well beyond the reach of most habitants’ budgets. Savot’s Architecture françoise was another favourite with colonial architects and was more concerned with elegance of design than Liger’s book – although his eminently sensible recommendation to use a highpitched roof in “cold regions” found an enthusiastic following in early colonial Quebec, where roofs tended to be pitched at a slope of 55 to 60 degrees from the horizontal (fig. 6.2).145 In his annotated 1673 re-edition of Savot’s book, François Blondel chided him for his pastiche-like mannerist ornamentation, encouraging enlightened patrons of his own era to build in a more classical style: “the taste of the times in which this author was writing was to crowd the facades of buildings, not only with columns and with pilasters, but also with cartouches, with masks and with a thousand other ornaments composed in strange combinations,

and they had not yet their eyes accustomed to the natural and simple beauty of fine architecture.”146 Blondel published two reprints of the treatise (the second in 1685), each time with more information he hoped would help edify but also protect private builders – like Liger, he was concerned with dishonest builders.147 Nevertheless, neither Savot’s retrograde opulence nor Blondel’s classicism can have had much of an impact on the people actually using the book except for a basic appreciation for symmetry and simplicity: the earliest editions are unillustrated, and Blondel’s reprints included only a handful of diagrams, including a cross-section of a dome and a rusticated portal. Like Liger, Savot stressed the importance of location, materials, measurements, and form, as well as interior disposition. His houses ape those of the aristocracy, manifesting “dignity” and “majesty” with a single or double corps de logis, both with two storeys, fronted by a cour d’honneur formed of a three-sided courtyard and formal entrance, and with a garden consisting of “parterres, gardens, orchards, and groves (bosquets)” at the back: The single corps de logis are more common in France than anywhere else. This kind is made ordinarily by building on the four sides of a courtyard, on one of which one places the body of the principal lodging, opposite to the entrance, being almost always larger and more spacious than any other, principally in the towns: on the two other sides joining the preceding one places two other buildings called arms, wings (aisles), or dependencies (potences), in one of which one always constructs a gallery, the other is employed in various lodgings … the fourth side is that of the entrance, which must be directly opposite the facade of the principal corps de logis. In the countryside normally one builds it on flat ground (en terrasse), with one storey [i.e., two storeys] to allow the most joyful (gaye) and free views of the whole building, and [to make] whole building more cheerful (riant).148

White Civilian Architects and Builders in the Colonies

143

In addition, the house was to be furnished with a chapel, reception rooms (antisalles), halls, bedrooms with their own antechambers, wardrobes, rear wardrobes, offices, galleries, armouries, libraries, baths, and stables, and the gardens were to be furnished with fountains and grottoes. The staircase was to be placed in the middle for the most agreeable effect. Savot’s terminology is classical, as when he comments about facades that “the storeys are distinguished ordinarily on the outside by plinths, bands, or architraves, friezes, and cornices,” and he expresses a preference for flat roofs with balustrades in the Versailles style over roofs with dormers (figs. 1.1,

6.6 Nicholas Chalmandrier, View of the Plantation of Sr. de Préfontaine situated in Guiana. Engraving from Jean Antoine Bruletout de Préfontaine, Maison rustique à l’usage des habitans (1763). The property includes a two-storey house with a pair of colonnaded galleries, a cour d’honneur, and a formal garden with parterres, a basse cour with a Greek temple–like folly, fountains, orchards, palm trees, and a water basin with a jet d’eau. It is difficult to say how much of the landscaping actually existed since it seems to have been more of an ideal than a reality. On the right is an ideal plantation, at the bottom of which are two rows of slave huts surrounded by a citrus hedge. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

144

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

12.13).149 He also notes that the courtyard facade “should be more ornate than those opposite it on the exterior, and always more decorated on the upper part than the lower part: since this arrangement gives much more grace to the ornamentation.”150 Regarding chapels Savot comments that they should reflect the status of the owners (the usual concern for convenance; see chapter 1) and that to be “beautiful” they should always be longer than they are wide, and, when necessary, divided into two or three aisles.151 Although readers will find nothing about the Greco-Roman orders in this book, the author does mention Vitruvius and draws upon the latter’s idea that a correct building should have

symmetrical proportions based on those of the human body. This view is in line with the position espoused by Blondel in his famous debate with Claude Perrault (see chapter 1).152 Two other treatises on country houses and plantations were specifically directed toward a West Indian and Guianese clientele. They also promoted a more grandiose lifestyle and were therefore less universally influential than Savot or Liger. The first, Bruletout de Préfontaine’s hyperbolic Maison rustique, à l’usage des habitans de la partie de la France équinoxiale, connue sous le nom de Cayenne (Paris, 1763) is primarily a guide on how to run a slave plantation in Guiana and other

tropical climates, with sections on land clearing, crops, and slave management, so its architectural references are generic except for instructions on siting.153 The book, which not coincidentally coincided with the Kourou enterprise, was actively promoted by members of the colonial government as a guide for new colonists but perhaps more as a propaganda stunt, making the wretched colony look like paradise. In March 1763 the Sieur de la Bombarde personally advanced funds for publication and engravings, and urged the Ministry of the Marine to purchase 500 or 600 copies as quickly as possible to distribute to new colonists before their imminent departure.154

White Civilian Architects and Builders in the Colonies

145

Préfontaine’s concern for security emerges in his description of the ideal placement for the Maison de Maître, which combines Savot’s emphasis on majesty with a concern for surveillance: The house must be well-aired, not directly opposite the prevailing wind, nor excessive rain in some seasons. A slightly elevated piece of land is advantageous for the agreeableness of its view … A small plateau reached by a gentle slope & which will dominate all the dependencies of the house is preferred … All other buildings that concern the domestic business, and the Negro huts, and those relating to manufacture in which one is engaged, should be under the eyes of the Master. That which relates to the household, such as the food shop, kitchen, &c. must be seen by the Mistress from the place where she works.155 Préfontaine was a “bourgeois adventurer” and as chief apologist for the Kourou scheme one of the most tireless promoters of Guianese immigration.156 Resident in the colony since the late 1730s he was hardly an aristocrat – among many undertakings in his early years were sailoring, soldiering and a stint as a bounty hunter tracking down maroons in the bush – but he gained instant gentleman status upon his second marriage (1752) when he inherited the sprawling Habitation La Félicité (“Bliss”) in Macouria, together with 62 slaves and 120 head of cattle (fig. 6.6). Bliss formed the centrepiece of his treatise, and he used its imaginary grandeur to lure immigrants to try their hand at plantation life in the colony: ironically Préfontaine was kept at Bliss against his will as the treatise was written when he was under house arrest for undisclosed crimes.157 Préfontaine’s La Félicité is an ideal example of a colonial monument that seemed to be much more than it actually was. One of the book’s seven engravings depicted its “Caze Maître” as a grand formal estate: an imposing two-storey house with a pair of colonnaded galleries, classical entablatures, three-quarters of a cour d’honneur, a semicircular staircase in front of

146

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

the main portal, and an impossibly grandiose garden replete with parterres, fountains, orchards, palm trees, and even a water basin and jet d’eau. A particularly interesting detail is what appears to be a Greek temple-like folly in the basse-cour, a feature of the increasingly popular English garden with its echoes of the Grand Tour that was appearing in Jamaica in the same decade as this engraving.158 Anyone reading this book in France would be reminded of a country house of the minor nobility. However a closer look at the text (and the engraving) reveals that the galleries of the house and wings around the courtyard are made of wooden posts driven into the ground and tied with vines instead of mortise-and-tenon joints. The spaces between the timbers in the walls are filled with pieces of dry wood and clay mixed with straw, and the roof is made of planks, canes, or reeds. Only the kitchen was of stone. The impossibly elaborate landscaping also invites skepticism. In fact the house he recommends to planters was a much simpler, single-storey structure containing three rooms on one floor, with verandas mounted on simple post and lintel frames.159 As it happens, archaeological work has demonstrated that this kind of house, a square building with two bedrooms on either side, built using these techniques, was common in colonial Guiana.160 The other book was the chevalier D’Albaret’s Différents projets relatifs au climat et la manière la plus convenable de bâtir dans les pays chauds (Paris, 1776), a folio of twenty luxury engravings by C.R.G. Poulleau with short technical explanations (fig. 6.7).161 D’Albaret’s work is even less practical than Préfontaine’s, and its impact on French America was negligible. Meant more as a conversation piece for wealthy landowners than a practical building guide, it was commissioned by Jamaican planter John Blagrove (1752–1824), whose Cardiff Hall was a “‘Great House’ of rare distinction in the annals of sugar estates on the island.”162 Inheriting his grandfather’s fortune at age three, Blagrove was educated at Eton and Cambridge, and went on the Grand Tour in 1773–74, where he sat for the Roman society painter Pompeo Batoni

(1708–1777) in 1774.163 He returned to Jamaica in 1777 and enjoyed a long political career there before going back to England for good in 1805 to occupy the family seat in Buckinghamshire. Blagrove was introduced to D’Albaret during the Parisian phase of his tour, and the project was Blagrove’s idea. D’Albaret was a little-known architect associated with the Hôtel des Monnaies (Royal Mint) whom Louis XVI gave the not particularly prestigious job of maintaining the churches and vicarages of the Compiègne region, so he was understandably thrilled at this attention from a rich, young milord.164 Blagrove’s patronage explains the distinctly Palladian style of the buildings illustrated, more in line with Georgian taste than with that of France – as well as the guide for conversion from French to English feet included at the end. There is more Chiswick than Marly in these idealized designs. Although D’Albaret explains that the book answered a need for buildings that “take into account the nature of the climate” and for “a manner of building, bringing together the advantages specific to this country,” these designs for bulky, primarily stone Palladian villas could not have been less practical to a climate plagued, by his own admission, by “earthquakes, hurricanes, heavy rains & great heat.”165

6.7 C.R.G. Poulleau, eighth project for a “very simple” house in warm climates. Engraving from M. D’Albaret, Différens projets relatifs au climat et à la manière la plus convenable de bâtir dans les pays chauds, et plus particulièrement dans les indes occidentales (Paris, 1776), plate XVII . Collection of the author.

The decoration is ponderous; the buildings are particularly overladen with columns, porticoes, and bulky window frames; and the only concessions to climate are their open courtyards and breezy colonnades. Indeed, if any of these had been built either in Jamaica or the French West Indies they would have been insanely expensive and would have dwarfed the buildings of state – admittedly more a concern in French colonies than in British ones. Thus the most elaborate French treatise on architecture in the colonies, written in French for an Englishman for application in Jamaica, remains a mere curiosity piece.

White Civilian Architects and Builders in the Colonies

147

7

Building pour la gloire du roi: The Royal Engineer Architects

FrAnce’s royAl enGineer Architects belonged to the Army Corps of Engineers, known by many names: first as the “ingénieurs du Roi,” then the “Génie militaire” (after 1743), the “corps du Génie” (in the 1750s), and after 1776 the “corps royal du Génie.”1 A division of the War Office, this massive and productive organization has been sidelined in the history of French architecture even though many of its architects enjoyed a higher social status than did their civilian counterparts, as the corps was always made up of a substantial number of nobles – from half to three-quarters of the membership by the time of the Revolution. There are several explanations for this scholarly neglect. The first is that since engineer architects worked primarily on garrison towns and fortresses they have been disdained for not being “proper” architects such as the members of the Academy of Architecture and those employed in the Surintendance des Bâtiments du Roi, a government agency in charge of the king’s properties and a panoply of other cultural and industrial foundations. Second, since they worked for a large, anonymous organization which for reasons of national security did not allow them to publish their own designs or writings, their works did not get the exposure enjoyed by their colleagues in the Academy and Bâtiments. Finally, they have a poor reputation specifically because they worked for such an institution, the assumption being that in its rigorous promotion of uniformity it stifled creativity. There is even a double standard in the scholarship

on the royal engineer architects: while works on the maréchal de Vauban and the engineers who stayed in France have received considerable attention in specialist literature – notably Anne Blanchard’s magisterial study from 1979 and Janis Langins’s comprehensive monograph of 2004 – there is no comparable study of the engineer architects in the colonies, whether the Americas, Africa, or Asia.2 We must re-evaluate the prejudice against the corps du Génie in light of recent scholarship on mainstream French architecture. It turns out that scholars have long underplayed the degree to which even the most famous architects such as Jules Hardouin-Mansart or Robert de Cotte (1656/7–1735) were subsumed within the Bâtiments, a bureaucratic institution every bit as unwieldy as its military counterpart. It is telling that the Surintendance des Bâtiments du Roi are not even listed in indexes of many of the major surveys or monographs on French architecture, particularly in English.3 By excising or underplaying this critical part of these architects’ career history, architectural historians have been able to present their subjects as independent operators in the tradition of the historiography of Italian architects like Gianlorenzo Bernini or Francesco Borromini and the Renaissance privileging of individual genius. It is also becoming clear that the boundaries between “great” architect and engineer architect are not so cut and dried. Indeed the Bâtiments du Roi and the Corps of Engineers intersected and overlapped in myriad ways, borrowing personnel and ideas from each other and collaborating on civic and military projects alike. New work by historians of science is even revealing the degree to which academic and engineer architects were trained in what might have seemed to be each other’s field – architects as engineers, engineers as architects – and the pre-eminent importance both gave to mathematics and geometry, often at a highly theoretical level. I will not claim in this book that the engineer architects as a body were equal to the best architects of the Academy and the King’s Household. However if we recognize that many of our preconceptions about individual genius in French architecture are nurtured by a long

habit of overlooking the collective nature of royal architectural production in what was undoubtedly the most bureaucratic state in early modern Europe we can step back from the notion that the corporate culture of the Corps of Engineers necessarily stymied individual expression or talent. To be sure, many of the architects in this book are merely competent, designing utilitarian if elegantly proportioned and at times innovative buildings in the colonies. Others however rise to a higher level, individuals such as Jean-André Du Coudreau and his project for the Palais de Justice in Cap-François (1746; fig. 12.27) or Jean-Samuel Guisan, author of the utopian urban scheme for Bourg-Villebois on the Approuague River in Guiana (1789; fig. 9.16), creating monuments that – although long destroyed or indeed never built – stand up to those of many of the architects working for the Bâtiments du Roi. As received notions of “genius” become less important in a history of architecture that is becoming more interested in a larger range of cultural production observed less subjectively, the time has come to bring these architects to light. The Army Corps of Engineers and the Surintendance des Bâtiments du Roi Most considerations of the Corps of Engineers begin with Sébastien Le Prestre, maréchal de Vauban (1633– 1707), France’s most celebrated engineer architect and siege-warfare expert, who personally directed the construction or overhaul of over 160 military establishments, the best preserved of which is Neuf-Brisach in Alsace (begun 1698; fig. 8.8).4 He was celebrated not just for his ingenious designs for fortifications, striking geometrical constructions formed of nesting, rotating polygons, but also for consolidating the idea of the circumscribed French territorial state known as the pré carré – and for protecting it from the enemy with a ring of fortresses around the country known then as the ceinture de fer.5 Langins remarks that Vauban “literally covered France with his handiwork and gave it much of its present shape,” making the nation, in David Bittering’s words, a kind of “fortified garden.”6 Louis XIV

The Royal Engineer Architects

149

spent long hours going over the minutest details of Vauban’s plans with him on site, a degree of personal collaboration few of his architects enjoyed, save André Le Nôtre.7 A man so esteemed in the ancien régime that ideological enemies nearly a century later were loath to criticise him directly – he was even praised by the acerbic Duc de Saint-Simon (1675–1755) – Vauban is nevertheless undeservedly neglected in survey books on French baroque architecture and urbanism, even though some of his civic buildings, notably the citadel chapel at Besançon (1683; fig. 1.6) anticipated later trends in French architecture in its spare, elegant classicism.8 While most of Vauban’s surviving plans are for fortresses and ramparts, a number of plans, elevations, and interior drawings in ink and watercolour of civilian structures survive primarily for the nine fortified cities he built from scratch such as Montdauphin (1700) and especially Neuf-Brisach, Vauban’s last work, an ideal city based on a grid pattern of streets centring on a spacious public square and enclosed in octagonal walls.9 Vauban was given a staff of draftsmen equivalent to that of the premier architecte du Roi, and worked primarily with local masons and architects, a practice which led to regional stylistic variations among the various projects. Nevertheless, while Vauban may have been the prototype for the royal engineer architect the tradition goes back much further. The first use of the term “ingénieur” dates from the Middle Ages and referred not to architects but to experts in “engines” such as catapults or scaffolding to climb over ditches.10 Towns were responsible for their own fortifications, hiring officials known as “masters of works” to organize their design. But by the late fifteenth century the Crown began a systematic organization of defence for France’s borders. Louis XI directly oversaw fortification work in Burgundy, and his successors fortified other regions, the first links in the ceinture de fer. In 1520 a valet de chambre du Roi named Jean de Cologne, responsible for inspecting the fortifications of Bayonne, was appointed the “General Master of the Fortifications and Repairs of the Region and Duchy of Guyenne.” As did Vauban, the ingénieurs du Roi often rose from the military ranks, notably Jean

150

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

Errard de Bar-le-Duc (1554–1610), the leading engineer of Henri IV (1589–1610) who fought alongside his king in his protracted struggle for the throne.11 In 1600 the king created the office of surintendant des fortifications in the person of Maximilien de Béthune, duc de Sully, and in 1604 a law was passed establishing a new Service of Fortifications. Each border province had an ingénieur du Roi who always had a draftsman or conducteur des dessins as his adjutant. These officials would inspect their province annually and send reports back to Paris. Although the number of engineers increased steadily under Louis XIII (1610–1643) – about fifty can be documented – there was as yet no standardized training program or systematized corps of engineers.12 Engineer architects were hardly of secondary importance: among Louis XIII’s ingénieurs were Salomon de Brosse (1571–1626), the most important architect of his reign, who designed the Palais de Luxembourg for Marie de Médicis (1615). Under Louis XIV the academician Libéral Bruand (1631–1697), architect of the Hôtel des Invalides (1671–76; fig. 1.3) and chapel of the Salpêtrière Hospital (ca. 1670), was also a royal engineer. Indeed Bruand’s austere style – long wings devoid of classical orders, high hip or mansard roofs with decorative dormers, and simple Greek temple fronts – was a model for many of the engineer architects working on overseas commissions.13 Under Louis XIV the institution of the royal engineer architect was centralized under Vauban when he assumed control of the Corps of Engineers in 1669 and implemented a new system of recruitment, training, and placement. Under this bellicose king the number of engineers grew to about 350 and the corps grew so substantially over the next century that more than 1,752 engineers ended up being appointed between 1661 and the Revolution.14 The engineers were also increasingly assimilated into the military: at Louis’s death 45 per cent of them held a military rank, by 1726 the number had increased to 55 per cent, and by 1743 a full twothirds of the corps were in the services.15 Beginning in 1732 they were also issued special uniforms. After 1691, the corps was administered by the new Bureau

of Fortifications, with offices on rue Barbette in Paris. Its first director-general was Michel Le Peletier, who supervised a commissar-general and various other officers as well as clerks, accountants, and draftsmen.16 This bureau worked in liaison with the Galerie des Plans-reliefs in the Louvre, installed there by the provençal engineer Charles de Pène.17 Rue Barbette remained the central office under Le Peletier’s successor, the marquis d’Asfeld (in office 1715–43), even though he ran the Department of Fortifications from his private home on the rue Neuve-des-Champs and kept most of its papers there.18 The engineers were in an unusual position since draftsmanship was the métier of a commoner, yet they were officers of the military, the traditional domain of the nobility. The corps included roughly the same number of commoners and nobles at the end of the seventeenth century but the percentage of nobles increased overall, rising to 75 per cent between 1778 and 1791, which explains the preponderance of florid names among the engineers working in the colonies – men such as Jacques-François-Marie-Eléonore-Thimoléon de Béhague d’Hartincourt (fig. 9.12).19 Engineers came from all over France but those working for the secretary of war came predominantly from small towns and villages, whereas those working for the secretary of the marine – the office in charge of the colonies – were mostly urban, from Paris and major naval towns such as Toulon, Marseille, La Rochelle, and Rochefort, which may partly explain the insistently metropolitan style of so many colonial commissions.20 Many engineers were born into families of engineers, not unlike their civilian counterparts in the Bâtiments: in the first half of the eighteenth century nearly half of them had fathers in the trade, although numbers dwindled after the Corps took measures in 1743 to curtail favouritism.21 Family ties occasionally spanned the Atlantic, as with Claude Girardin, an equerry and captain of militia in FortRoyal (Martinique), whose nieces in Paris and Rouen were both married to royal engineers.22 The architect engineers were one of three categories of so-called ingénieurs de places (place means a garrison

town or the military quarter of a larger city) the other two of which were hydraulics experts and cartographers; all of them played a role in architectural and urban projects.23 An ideal engineer architect would combine military and artistic talents: he should have a solid knowledge of the rules of war, an up-to-date understanding of technical advances and innovations in artillery, and an appreciation of the defensive value of a site – but he should also be proficient in civilian urban planning and architecture, hydraulics, and mathematics, and have “a taste for the monumental, concern for solidity and for ‘bel ouvrage.’”24 In the seventeenth century, before the creation of professional schools, the Corps primarily recruited master-masons and architects straight from royal work sites in Paris and Versailles, with the result that they transferred to the Corps the court style and that of Paris – the architecture of Colbert, the Bâtiments du Roi, and the Academies.25 Although academies were not founded within the Corps of Engineers until the mid-eighteenth century each member was trained as a soldier as well as theoretician and practitioner, undergoing a rigorous apprenticeship, usually in late adolescence. Vauban introduced an entrance examination that tested everything from arithmetic and geography to drawing. It was then obligatory to work as an apprentice on-site at an urban or fortification building project – this stage was called the novitiate, as in a religious order, and fittingly the youths were “to discover which will be the gateway to their spirit.”26 After a second round of tests they were appointed ingénieurs du Roi, after which time they were paid 200–800 livres on top of their military salary. Vauban endeavoured to sit personally on the adjudication committee, and when he could not make it the job was entrusted to the mathematician Joseph Saveur of the Academy of Sciences.27 Trainees could also enhance their education by taking courses at non-military schools: mathematics at the Oratory at Pézenas; physics at Jesuit colleges at Montpellier and several other cities; science with the Benedictines at Sorèze; and after 1683 mathematics and hydrography at the University of Montpellier.28 It may have been no coincidence that

The Royal Engineer Architects

151

Montpellier was the source of one of the most important urban projects in the colonies, Antoine-François Sorrel’s Place Intendance and gardens in Port-au-Prince (1787; figs. 11.21–3). However due to the irregularities of warfare or the differing needs of different regions, novices were often accelerated through the system. This happened frequently for those sent to the colonies – men such as Benjamin de Combes (1649–1710), who undertook his apprenticeship at age ten while serving on a naval ship, or the Saint-Domingue engineer JeanJacques Du Portal (1701–1773), who had served with the Corps de Génie from the tender age of seven.29 In its contributions to architecture and engineering the Corps of Engineers overlapped with the Bâtiments du Roi. A division of the Département de la Maison du Roi, the Bâtiments was established by Henri IV as the bureau in charge of all architectural projects in the royal residences and domains, originally headed by two superintendents.30 In 1602 the duc de Sully, who as we have seen was also the surintendant des fortifications, became the first sole surintendant, and Colbert became the seventh sole surintendant in 1664. After 1691 the position was awarded by commission, the second of which was to the first architect to hold the post, Premier Architecte Hardouin-Mansart.31 One of the most important directors-general of the eighteenth century (by this time the title surintendant was no longer used) was Madame de Pompadour’s uncle Charles-François-Paul Le Normant de Tournehem (in office 1745–51), who revived an aggressive, Colbertian approach to public building by tripling the budget of the Bâtiments.32 The Bâtiments was about much more than the king’s buildings, as it also oversaw the royal academies, the manufactories, fountains, canals, parks, royal equestrian statues, royal gardens – including scientific ones of importance to the colonies, such as the royal nursery and the Jardin Royal des Plantes – and even the swans on the Seine. By the end of the reign of Louis XV the Bâtiments looked after forty-two properties, each with a resident contrôleur. The offices of the Bâtiments were divided between their headquarters in Versailles –after 1702 it was in a

152

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

purpose-built structure by Hardouin-Mansart across from the southeast corner of the Versailles gardens (designed 1688–92)– and branches in Paris and Marly.33 The Versailles office housed the services bureau, archives, cabinet of drawings and plans, and storage for overflow paintings in the royal collection. The architectural division was headed by the premier architecte (beginning with Louis Le Vau), who supervised a small army of architects, inspectors, and labourers, and by the 1680s the premier architecte was also the chief artistic assistant of the surintendant.34 His secondin-command was the architecte ordinaire, who was in charge of lesser projects but who still had creative input. The lower echelons were staffed by the assistants (commis), controllers, draftsmen (dessinateurs), building inspectors, contractors (entrepreneurs), artisans, and artists, and below them the legions of journeymen, labourers, and servants.35 Most draftsmen were simply copyists: in the late 1670s de Cotte was the only person in Hardouin-Mansart’s office allowed to execute his own inventions. The builders who worked on the king’s construction projects suffered the same physical hardships as their counterparts in the Corps of Engineers even though they were not on the field of battle: “the speed required of the workers, the undertaking of work in all seasons, in any kind of weather and during public holidays, made their construction campaigns true military campaigns, where the dead and the wounded were counted in the dozens.”36 When Louis XIV died in 1715 the Bâtiments employed a staff of about three hundred people, only slightly fewer than those working for the Corps of Engineers.37 The ranking system within the Bâtiments was bewildering, made worse by a fluid hierarchy with overlap between positions, imprecise divisions of duties, and an inconsistency between titles and actual responsibilities – not to mention that several of the uppermost positions (intendant, contrôleur général, trésorier général) were little more than sinecures.38 Individual duties could be remarkably diverse: when he took over the Paris department as architecte ordinaire in 1699, de Cotte juggled seven separate remits within

the bureau – from drawing up plans and estimates to supervising archives and art collections – and he was also director of the Academy of Architecture.39 As Claude Mignot notes about Hardouin-Mansart, who came to rely on a vast cadre of draftsmen: “throughout his career … Hardouin-Mansart remains caught in a complex decision-making machine, to the point that his freedom of invention seems stronger early in his career than at the end, when the administration of the King’s Buildings, which he ends up leading, reached its full deployment.”40 The complex and contradictory monolith that was the Bâtiments could not help but stifle even the greatest architects’ originality. The Corps of Engineers’ (and military’s) interaction with the Bâtiments went well beyond recruiting members from royal construction sites. Colbert’s successor in 1683 as surintendant, François-Michel le Tellier, marquis de Louvois (1641–91), had been minister and secretary of state for war before heading the Bâtiments. He simplified the latter’s command structure along military lines with a directly managed design office with permanent staff, and regularly hired soldiers, contractors, and engineer architects to assist with the bureau’s largest projects, including Vauban.41 Inversely, the Bâtiments served the Corps. Although fortress and citadel gates were under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of War, Bâtiments architects such as Hardouin-Mansart were called in to design or critique projects, as with the city gates at Neuf Brisach (which were later altered by another engineer architect named Jacques Tarade, 1646– 1720) or those of the fort at Menin. In 1686 Jean Orry, entrepreneur of the Bâtiment’s Maintenon aqueduct project, an ultimately fruitless scheme to bring water to the Versailles gardens (fig. 11.5), constructed the port of Brouage the following year for the Ministry of War, and, inversely, Vauban was called upon to inspect the Maintenon project as well as the Machine de Marly, the massive hydraulic pump also built to provide water for Versailles’s thirsty fountains.42 The Invalides (fig. 1.3) is a splendid example of the criss-crossing remits of the two bureaus: although France’s grandest military structure, it fell under the authority of the Bâtiments (in

fact Vauban hated its design) and its architect Bruand was at once an employee of the Bâtiments, a member of the Academy of Architecture, and head of the Génie’s Bureau of Bridges and Roads (ponts et chaussées). Like the Bâtiments, with its bureau of drawings, the Corps of Engineers placed great importance on the art of draftsmanship, even though Vauban’s own preferred method of presenting projects to Louis XIV was via plans-reliefs, or sophisticated three-dimensional wooden models (none survive for colonial projects) (fig. 8.8).43 In his Le Directeur-Général des fortifications (1683) Vauban codified the use of colours and inks in the maps which engineers would prepare on their annual territorial inspections, establishing a system that would remain standard practice in France and the colonies, as with Pierre-Antoine Jérôme Frémont de La Marveillère’s map of the city of Les Cayes in SaintDomingue of 1789 (fig. 9.5). First the map had to be large enough to distinguish all of the city blocks (pièces) and clear enough to distinguish between them and show their peculiarities; one should: “paint red all of those which are completed and extant; and if the blocks which are represented are surrounded by walls, [with] Chinese ink, or [with] grey wash if it is simply earth or turf, distinguishing the parapet from plain earth with a stronger touch on the places where work has already begun … the more the work is advanced and close to being completed the more it is necessary to darken the said pigment and approach in colour that of finished work … The blocks which are merely in the planning stage and those which are not yet begun should be painted in yellow to distinguish them from the others, and the parts on the old map, or old works which are replaced by the new design, should simply be represented by dotted lines”44 (see fig. 9.12). In his treatise cartographer Alain Manesson-Mallet (1630–1706) also gives precise instructions on the use of light and shadow to give buildings a precise sense of volume. Training in meticulous shading techniques was introduced by Nicolas-François-Antoine de Chastillon (1699–1765), founder in 1748 of the École Royale du Génie de Mézières in the Ardennes, a formal liberal

The Royal Engineer Architects

153

7.1 Jean-Baptiste de Caylus, Profile and Elevation of the Arsenal of Fort-Royal of Martinique, colours on paper, 1694. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-enProvence), 13 DFC 831B .

arts academy for engineer architects which became the military equivalent to the academies under the jurisdiction of the Bâtiments.45 The same system of red versus yellow was applied to plans, cross-sections (profils de coupe), and elevations of forts and buildings, which also often employed overlays (flaps on his drawings which could be opened like the little doors in an Advent calendar), either to show different floors in the plan of a building, the alterations between old and new construction, or alternative designs, usually with a simpler and more opulent alternative depending upon cost (e.g., fig. 15.21). However, the most remarkable thing about the hundreds of extant drawings of landscapes, cityscapes, and buildings is the extraordinary skill and delicacy with which they were executed: although rarely considered as such, they are works of art in their own right. In the colonies during the seventeenth century maps and plans were still less regularized than those envisioned by Vauban: drawn primarily in ink and often unpainted, they took the form of elevations, plans, or (more rarely) bird’s-eye views, with a scale and

154

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

sometimes key letters. Nevertheless they could be quite sophisticated, as with Jean-Baptiste de Caylus’s side elevation for the Arsenal at Fort-Royal in Martinique (1694), an elegant three-storey pavilion with attic and a mansard roof built of brick with ashlar quoining like the architecture of the Henri IV and Louis XIII eras (fig. 7.1). However, beginning in the 1720s, Vaubanstyle maps, plans, and elevations prevailed, as with the sophisticated proposal by Vincent Houel for the hospital and chapel at Fort-Royal, Martinique (1725; fig. 7.2). It features a meticulously measured plan and cross-sections in ink and watercolour with red and yellow to distinguish built from unbuilt; black ink and grey wash highlighting to emphasize components such as roof trussing; bar scales; and key letters. By the end of the century the drawings became even more polished, with carefully rendered ornamental details in the latest styles, subtle depictions of brickwork, tiles, quoining, and carved inscriptions, delicate garden parterres with flowers and hedge borders, and interior decor: a 1776 proposal for the Governor’s Palace in

Basse-Terre (Guadeloupe) even includes panelling in a restrained Louis XIV-style neoclassicism like Antoine Rousseau’s boiseries in the Petit Trianon (1769–77), to which the building bears more than a passing resemblance (fig. 13.5).46 A major change in the training of the royal engineers came with the Academy at Mézières.47 All engineers except for those in the Bureau of Bridges and Roads henceforth had to matriculate from this two-year college, which became something of an elite institution since by this point most engineers were nobles.48 Like the Academy of Architecture, on which it was modelled, this establishment augmented its teaching staff by hiring civilian professors of mathematics, physics, and drawing and also architects and craftsmen who could teach the finer points of carpentry, stonecutting, perspective, and draftsmanship.49 Students therefore benefited from sound theoretical and practical training, but their creativity was stifled by an emphasis on

uniformity in design and a suffocating degree of rote memorization: according to one estimate students had to learn about three thousand pages from scientific and mechanical manuals by heart.50 When the École shut down in 1793 it boasted almost six hundred alumni.51 Royal engineers’ careers were strictly regimented according to a standard hierarchy. At the lowest end was the ingénieur ordinaire (one who is employed permanently) and ingénieur volontaire (employed temporarily). These men directly served an ingénieur-en-chef (before 1691 called ingénieur-en-premier), responsible for either a single large garrison town (place) or several small places-forts.52 After 1776 the chief engineers were known by their military rank. Above the 7.2 Vincent Houel, Plan of the Hospital of Fort Royal of Martinique, 1725. The sections coloured red were already built whereas the sections coloured yellow were proposed. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 13 DFC 139A .

The Royal Engineer Architects

155

ingénieurs-en-chef were the directeurs des fortifications, in charge of the whole region, who numbered between twenty and twenty-four overall before 1776. Engineers’ ranks were not those of the regular military but honorary or “reserve” ranks, beginning with the ingénieurs ordinaires, who rarely rose beyond lieutenant or captain.53 Each region had its own office with a library and furnishings such as writing tables, strongboxes, cabinets for maps and plans, and large design tables as well as mathematical and geometrical instruments, brushes of different sizes, paint pots for the watercolours and gouache, carmine, Chinese ink, gambage (gomme-gutte) for fixing colours, pocket knives, scrapers, scissors, and other tools necessary for drawing and painting. While working on site, engineers used alidades (an instrument that measures angles to view distant objects), recipiangles (for measuring angles of fortifications), and various other surveying tools.54 These instruments were no different from those used by civilian architects. Provincial offices also included small archives containing portfolios of all the maps (prints and drawings), letters, reports, budgets, accounts, and any other documents related to the construction projects directed from that office. Books – both theoretical and practical – formed an essential part of the regional office of an engineer architect in France and the colonies, some of them architectural (primarily on fortification), and others related to mathematics, geometry, and hydraulics.55 Among the non-fortification architectural works the most common were the classical and Renaissance texts of Vitruvius, Serlio, Vignola, and Palladio; Louis XIV–era treatises by François Blondel, Daviler, Perrault, and Bullet; and eighteenth-century volumes on stereotomy such as Dom Durand’s L’architecture des voûtes (1666–1746) and above all Frézier’s Théorie et pratique de la coupe des pierres et des bois (1736), a popular preparation book for guild masters’ examinations (see chapter 6). Science books were in the majority, among them the works of Gérard Désargues, La Hire, Edme Mariotte, Pierre Varignon, Jacques Ozanam,

156

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

Louis-Bertrand Castel, Jean-Pierre de Crousaz, and Bernard Forest de Bélidor’s work on hydraulics. When the Saint-Domingue arpenteur royal De La Lande offered his books for sale in 1729 they included many works on mathematics and geometry, including Ozanam’s Les lieux géométriques, Dictionnaire mathématique, and Le cours & les recréations mathématiques, L’application de l’algèbre à la géométrie de Guinée; Les grands logarithmes de Brigs avec les grands sinus de Vlacq; Les éléments de géométrie de Mr De Bourgogne by Malezieur; Le mouvement des eaux by Mariotte; and many other works on mathematics, physics, herbalism, and astronomy.56 The two most influential publications in the Atlantic colonies were Jean Mariette’s three-volume Architecture françoise (1727–38) with hundreds of engravings of the palaces, townhouses, churches, parks, and public monuments (volumes 1 and 2 were of exteriors and published in 1727; and volume 3 was of interiors and published in 1738) – it first made its mark in the 1730s in Louisiana (figs. 12.15–16)– and Jacques-François Blondel’s updated four-volume edition of the same work (Paris, 1752–56). The latter included a history of architecture and of Paris, and discussions of agriculture, sculpture, architectural theory, together with 498 engravings of plans, elevations, and cross-sections – including buildings constructed since the publication of Mariette’s volumes (figs. 13.2, 13.11).57 Nevertheless, as defence was their main preoccupation, engineer architects relied primarily upon treatises on fortification architecture. Yet even these books often included instructions on executing plans, elevations, and perspective drawings, as in Manesson-Mallet’s Les travaux de Mars, which has a chapter entitled “De la manière de lever les plans pour les représenter sur le papier”; or illustrated guides to the Greco-Roman orders complete with designs for pediments and decorative relief sculpture, as in Bardet de Villeneuve’s Traité de l’architecture civile à l’usage des ingénieurs (The Hague, 1740).58 The fortification treatises with the greatest impact on the French Atlantic included Barle-Duc’s La géométrie et la praticque générale d’icelle

(Paris, 1594) and La fortification démonstrée et réduicte en art (Paris, 1620); Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban’s Le directeur-général des fortifications (The Hague, 1683–85); le Chevalier de Cambray’s Manière de fortifier de M. de Vauban (Amsterdam, 1689); Jean-François Bernard’s Nouvelle manière de fortifier les places (Paris, 1689); Jacques Ozanam’s Traité de la fortification (Paris, 1694); and Vauban’s posthumous De l’attaque et la défense des places (Paris, 1732–47). Engineer architects spent most of their time in the office, particularly the directeur and ingénieur-enchef, who was required to visit all the work sites only twice a year.59 Together with his staff of ingénieurs ordinaires he coordinated all aspects related to his place: keeping extant fortresses, fortifications, and barracks in good order; building new ones as required; and coordinating roads and earthworks. They were also encouraged not to hire professional draftsmen wherever possible. Engineer architects were responsible for precise and often voluminous estimates and budgets, which were with the maps, plans, elevations, and legends in the office archives: “[d]rafts skilfully designed and lovingly scrutinised, estimates calculated to be economical, will then be translated into a complete project incorporating plans of execution and a ledger of costs destined to be sent for approval by the entrepreneurs working under the chairmanship of the Intendant.”60 The bureaucracy did not end with the final approval of the project: engineers were obliged to report regularly on the progress of the projects with updated budgets and sketches, all of which went into the project portfolio. Except for those on royal commissions, civilian architectural contracts simply could not compare with those of the Corps in the amount of paperwork generated, especially in the colonies, where the grandest plantation houses or religious institutions generated a few sheets of paper and perhaps a plan while a single military project like the new barracks at Cayenne (1819) or a new hospital in Basse-Terre in Guadeloupe (begun 1817) included a suite of handcoloured plans, elevations, profile views – often with

overlays to show alternate versions – and thick bound volumes of hundreds of pages submitted every year in tiny, neat handwriting, giving the price of every nail and roof tile.61 As already noted regarding members of the Génie who worked for the Bâtiments du Roi, royal engineer architects frequently hired out their services, sometimes working for private clients, whether something small like a rococo fireplace for the Bishop’s Palace in Montpellier (by Jean François de la Blottère, 1732) or the facade and tower of the church of Phalsbourg (by Charles Adam Le Beuf, 1736). 62 Because such commissions did not adhere to the restrictive bureaucracy of their military projects, they allowed architects to exercise their creativity and produce designs of considerable delicacy such as the porte-cochère of the episcopal palace in Lodève (today the town hall). Like Vauban, who designed his own country seat at Bazoches, the wealthier engineer architects also frequently built their own townhouses or chateaux. Enterprising engineers in the colonies similarly enjoyed the often very remunerative patronage of private clients, as we shall soon see, for example, in Guiana. The work of the engineers in France and on the colonies was closely integrated. Aside from his work on the Cayenne citadel (8.18), Vauban showed a keen interest in the potential of France’s colonies, as indicated in one of his so-called “Oisivetés” (Idlenesses), an imitation-print manuscript entitled Moyen de retablir nos colonnies de l’Amérique & de les accroitre en peu de temps (1699).63 Written shortly after the Treaty of Ryswick and concerned with Nouvelle-France, Louisiana, and Saint-Domingue, the treatise exhorts his monarch to reinforce his colonial possessions as an extension of his European conquests and as a projection of royal gloire, and to implement more direct state rule. Vauban blamed the colonies’ sorry state on the private compagnies and the excessive influence of priests. He advocated for a greater presence of troops, promoted a more aggressive policy of emigration and incentives to population increase (including obligatory marriage for men

The Royal Engineer Architects

157

between the ages of eighteen and twenty), and called for the importation of builders, specialist tradesmen, and royal engineers to locate new towns and survey natural resources.64 Vauban envisioned systematic urban design with “regulated” streets, ramparts, moats, bridges, gates, garrisons, houses and churches, but also with a formidable police force backed up by the death penalty.65 In short, it reads like a project written by an engineer, every aspect of the colony part of a well-oiled machine, including the people. Although Louis XIV paid it scant attention, as he had more pressing problems on the home front with the War of the Spanish Succession, the top-down approach to colonization echoed later settlement projects such as that of Kourou (fig. 3.19) or Approuague in Guiana (fig. 9.16). The different conditions in the colonies meant that royal engineers could not follow the same procedures as in France and frequently had to cut corners. Particularly problematic was the substantial time lag between proposal and approval caused by the distance from the metropole. Engineer architects frequently had to begin work without the official sanction of the king, officially a requirement for fortifications.66 Instead of being sent directly to the minister of the marine as in France, colonial projects were vetted by the intendant and governor before being sent to Paris and reviewed by an advisory committee for royal approval, correction, or rejection (under Louis XIV Vauban participated personally in these examinations). They also worked much more frequently with contractors (as we have already seen in chapter 6) and with merchants than did their counterparts in France, although contractors were regulated by the state to prevent overspending or corruption.67 In fact, in eighteenth-century Nouvelle-France contractors oversaw entire fortification projects without any direct intervention from the Crown. The intendant accepted tenders directly from competing bidders, and as budgets were invariably short the lowest bidder usually got the job.68 Colonial architects frequently dispensed with some of the documents which in France would have been an essential responsibility of the chief architect: especially

158

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

wooden models in the case of forts, but even things as essential as elevations or cross-sections were often missing, and the annual budgets for materials and wages (toisé or dévis) could be quite irregular, at least before the last third of the eighteenth century.69 In Quebec the first official engineer Robert de Villeneuve (ca. 1645–1692) only provided plans and some memoranda (fig. 12.4); his successor, Josué Boisberthelot de Beaucours (ca. 1662–1750), submitted only a handful of specifications and a general estimate of expenses; even Gaspard-Joseph Chaussegros de Léry, who was quite prolific in drawing up plans and specifications (fig. 12.20), generally kept the latter brief and his toisés rudimentary. Another major difference from French practice was labour. As well as working more with contractors, projects were built using a combination of military, engagé, corvée (rotational), and civilian builders in the seventeenth century – as with Claude Baillif, who worked under the supervision of engineer architects on military projects. And in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as we have seen in chapter 4, contractors in the southern colonies relied increasingly upon African slaves.70 Bernard Forest de Bélidor (1698–1761), Vauban, and the Colonial Architect One manual popular with engineer architects paid an unusual amount of attention to aesthetics and architectural theory: Bernard Forest de Bélidor’s La science des ingénieurs (1729) was quoted liberally in the designs of city gates, decorative features of forts, public monuments, and also government buildings throughout the empire.71 Bélidor was not himself a member of the Corps; indeed, like an academic architect he primarily saw himself as a mathematician. As well as teaching mathematics at the new regimental artillery college at La Fère he published several works on the subject and on engineering and hydraulics (between 1725 and 1753), and he enjoyed a distinguished international reputation, including membership in the Royal Society of London, the Royal Prussian Academy, and, as

a corresponding member, in the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris.72 Although Bélidor included his own designs in the book, it was most important as the first publication of the inventions of Vauban and his assistants and served as a manifesto of Vaubanian taste (Vauban himself never published a treatise on building fortifications, only on how to attack or defend them).73 Vauban had a very particular style, even though many of the structures under his supervision were built or even designed by others, such as Tarade. His civic structures are simple and economical, although they share a keen sense of proportion with academic architects – he often stressed the importance of “beauty” in his work – as well as a simplicity of line and reduction of ornament. They also follow the contemporary architectural notion of convenance (see chapter 1), often tied to the use of particular classical orders. In the words of one recent study, “the house of a governor is not the hôtel of a duke and peer, a barracks is not a palace; a garrison church is neither a cathedral nor a Parisian parish church, but it must respond to certain demands of dignity.”74 Vauban generally avoided the orders on civic buildings (except for churches), but they were an essential feature of city gates, reflecting the special value Vauban placed on what was after all the first point of entry and the ideal place for foreigners to encounter a manifestation of royal grandeur. In his words, they would have a chance to “judge the magnificence of the King and of the excellence (bonté) of the fortification through the beauty of its gates.”75 Gates at places like Lille or Longwy – built or even designed by other architects such as Simon Vollant (1622–94) but under Vauban’s close supervision – adopted a variety of forms taken from civic and garden architecture and even a church facade. Vauban also emphasized the importance of uniformity in civic architecture: “All those who build must make the facades of their buildings conform to those that have already been constructed on the main square both for the decoration of these facades and the height of the cornices and for the size of the shops, doors, and windows, which must all be the same, as well as the height of the roofs.”76

In Bélidor’s treatise barracks, civilian houses, and ceremonial portals combine more restrained currents in metropolitan architecture, such as the more functional works of Hardouin-Mansart and especially Robert de Cotte – himself the grandson of a royal engineer – with more ostentatious motifs reflecting the grand goût of Louis XIV.77 Like many of their designs the civic buildings published by Bélidor avoided columns and pilasters, favouring long, low, and plain facades with hip, sometimes mansard, roofs, the bays divided by vertical bands of quoining, and often rusticated on the ground floor. Like de Hardouin-Mansart’s Grande Écurie at Versailles (finished 1682; fig. 1.2) or de Cotte’s Abbey of Saint-Denis (1700–25) and Verdun Bishop’s Palace (1724–51) – none of which use classical orders – Bélidor’s and Vauban’s grander schemes feature a central triumphal-arch ressaut (wall projection), sometimes resting on a triple arcade, crowned with a triangular pediment carved with trophées and other martial imagery (fig. 7.3).78 The rusticated triple arcade in a design for a commandant’s mansion also recalls some Parisian townhouses such as that of Jean Courtonne’s Hôtel de Noirmoutier (or de Sens) of 1723.79 The trophées, whether in bas relief in the manner of François Girardon’s and Michel Anguier’s reliefs on Blondel’s Porte Saint-Denis in Paris (1671–76; fig. 1.4) or adorning the dormer windows as in Libéral Bruand’s Hôtel des Invalides (begun 1671), were the most Colbertian features of his buildings (fig. 1.3).80 A motif particularly characteristic of Bélidor/Vauban was the fleur-de-lys roof finial, a patriotic symbol which had already been gracing colonial commissions for decades, from Fort Saint-Louis in Senegal (1659; fig. 12.6) to the Governor’s Mansion at Fort-Royal (Martinique, 1686; fig. 12.5). The monumental gates featured giant-order Doric or Tuscan columns or pilasters – the orders reflected Vitruvian associations of those orders with masculinity and military power – against a rusticated wall with a plain entablature and pediment, sometimes with rich relief panels as at the roughly contemporary Porte Monumentale at the Toulon Arsenal (1738; fig. 7.4).

The Royal Engineer Architects

159

7.3 Bernard Forest de Bélidor after Vauban, prototype for a commandant’s mansion. Engraving from La science des ingénieurs (Paris, 1729). W.D. Jordan Library Special Collections, Queen’s University.

Bélidor’s plate 17, featuring paired Tuscan columns, heraldic sculpture over the door and in the pediment, and a pair of massive trophées on top, has recently been traced to a project by Hardouin-Mansart that was adopted for one of the gates at Neuf-Brisach in 1699.81 Most of these triumphal arch designs are in the style of Louis XV, as those built under the king’s predecessor

160

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

(such as the Porte Saint Denis or Pierre Bullet’s Port Saint Martin, 1674–77) tended not to use the classical orders. Paradoxically it is Vauban’s and Bélidor’s least decorative and least classical buildings that adhere most closely to the Louis XIV style, as with Vauban’s design for a barracks and officers pavilion which has the unadorned walls, modestly decorated dormers, and long string courses one sees in buildings such as François Blondel’s 374-metre-long Corderie Royale at Rochefort (1666–69; fig. 7.5), Vauban’s own 400-metre-long Corderie at Toulon (begun 1686), or HardouinMansart’s new Conciergerie wing at Fontainebleau (1665–88; 1701).82

One of Bélidor’s own designs was a buttressed Latin-cross model church plan with a narthex, single narrow nave of five bays with groin vaults, transepts, an oval vault at the crossing, and a hexagonal apse with a fan of rib vaulting (figs. 14.27).83 Although he does not provide an elevation for his tripartite facade we know that it used the classical orders because the plan shows two pairs of pilasters on single plinths flanking the portal and two single pilasters on the extremities of the flanking bays, each enclosing a niche.84 However despite its veneer of classicism the plan is essentially Gothic: not just in its elongated nave but in its groin vaults and heavy buttresses. Perhaps it is a manifestation of French pride in Gothic as a national style, a preoccupation of architectural theorists from Claude Perrault to Julien-David LeRoy (1724–1803) as an alternative or adjunct to the Academy’s classicism.85 However Bélidor was a lone voice in the wilderness: in the entire French Atlantic Empire only a single

7.4 (left) Jean-Lange Maucord, Porte Monumentale at the Arsenal, Toulon, 1738. 7.5 (below) François Blondel, Corderie Royale at Rochefort, 1666–69.

The Royal Engineer Architects

161

neo-Gothic structure was ever built before 1830, the ca. 1789 bell-tower of the Église du Nord in Saint-Louis, Senegal (fig. 15.23), which may owe more to the English Gothic revival movement and the personal tastes of its learned patron than to anything from the metropole. Bélidor devoted Book Five of his treatise to the architecture and decor of “the best Architects,” providing detailed diagrams of the classical orders and their proportions like any book of civilian architecture.86 It was meant to compensate for the emphasis on fortification elsewhere in the treatise so that architects could learn the good taste required of a “galant homme.” Bélidor’s comments demonstrate specifically how style was to project an image of gloire. An engineer, he wrote, should be just as capable of building a palace as a demi-lune or contre-garde (two types of triangular projecting wall): It is only through knowledge of the Orders of Architecture that one might acquire good taste & this elegance which serves so well even in the most rustic of Works … whether to adorn the Gates of Cities, Masonry Sentry Boxes, & Military Buildings in general … furthermore, how satisfying would it be for those who are worried about being less knowledgeable than others to be able to judge the merit of the superb monuments which demonstrate the magnificence of our Kings in all fortified settlements (places); & what would someone think if he were in the middle of the Château of Versailles and awed by the beauties there just like the common People, without a more enlightened awareness?87 Appealing to the architects’ snobbism and patriotism alike, Bélidor celebrates elegance and magnificence, proving “that beautiful decoration is not incompatible with Fortifications.”88 Echoing Vauban, he further instructs: “you might perhaps consider [such ornament] too lavish to be employed in the Cities of War; but I could say that the expense never concerned our Kings.”

162

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

Lives and Careers of Colonial Royal Engineer Architects As we have seen, the careers of colonial royal engineer architects were much more regimented than those of their civilian counterparts. However they suffered from a similar anonymity. Cogs in the wheels of a giant institution, much like the artists of a medieval monastic scriptorium, few are known today outside specialist circles, and none ever published his work. Their places of origin, training, life dates, and even first names are often difficult to discover, and they suffered from a sense of inferiority caused by a military establishment that disdained their supposed deskbound lives and honorary ranks, even if many engineers had served as regular soldiers (few engineer architects achieved a rank higher than captain). Critically, engineer architects did not own their work – it belonged to the king – and once a project was completed all plans, elevations, and other relevant documents sat in portfolios in the archives of the regional office until the architect’s death, when they were stashed away in the Bureau of Fortifications on rue Barbette.89 Engineer architects could not even bring their own portfolios with them when they changed posts – if they did they had to return them at their own expense. Engineers also had to adhere to the strictest rules of scale in the paper they used and the way they drew up budgets: for example, the plan directeur, the chief map of any fortress which had to stay in the engineer’s office, used a scale of 4 pouces to 100 toises, whereas plans of individual structures such as civic buildings needed to be done at 1 pouce per toise.90 It is easy to see how the personal touch of the architect could get lost in this staggeringly complex bureaucracy. Therefore it is illuminating to rescue some of the colonial engineer architects from oblivion, men who in contrast to their reputation for ordinariness often lived extraordinary lives. I will begin with Chaussegros de Léry, the only colonial engineer architect whose name is known outside specialist circles – although only in Canada – and the only one to write an architectural

treatise, his Vaubanian manuscript entitled Traité de fortification divisé en huit livres (1714–27), which he never succeeded in publishing despite repeated pleas to ministry officials.91 Except for his arch-rival and fellow provençal Étienne Verrier (1683–1747), an aixois responsible for the fortified city of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island (Île-Royale, begun 1717; fig. 10.14), no figure played as decisive a role in shaping the architectural landscape of French North America. Chaussegros was responsible not only for fortifications at places like Quebec City, Montreal, Fort Niagara, and Fort SaintFrédéric (Lake Champlain), but also for grandiose projects – many of them unexecuted – for Quebec City, including renovations to the Château Saint-Louis (fig. 12.20), the Intendant’s Palace, the Cathedral (fig. 15.21), as well as a plethora of architectural and urban schemes from the Great Lakes to the lower Saint Lawrence River. Chaussegros returned to the style of Louis XIV in his search for gloire and his buildings are characterized by even older forms such as steep pitched roofs, ogee cupolas, clochers, and quoining. But he did not use the classical orders very often – the pilasters on his facade project for Quebec Cathedral (1745) are an exception – favouring flat walls and a quiet but imposing austerity recalling the projects of Bélidor or Vauban.92 This reticence was partly a response to the financial capacities of the colony: in fact Chaussegros usually provided more opulent alternatives on overlays (as with his Cathedral facade), but much to his chagrin the plain ones invariably met the approval of his superiors. Born in Toulon, Chaussegros came from a family of engineers and for ten years was a career soldier, going as far afield as Turin and the Firth of Forth.93 Chaussegros hoped to join the engineer corps in France but was unsuccessful despite having such exalted patrons as the comte de Toulouse, the duc d’Orléans, and the duc de Penthièvre. In 1716 he was sent by the Ministry of the Marine to Nouvelle-France to evaluate the existing fortifications in Quebec City (by Bernard Renau d’Éliçagaray, 1652–1719), and after a brief visit back to France (1717–19) he returned for good to assume the

post of ingénieur-en-chef du roi.94 One year after his arrival in Quebec he married Marie-Renée Legardeur de Beauvais (1697–1743), who came from a colonial family of high social standing, and their large family included the engineers Joseph-Gaspard (1721–1797) and Joseph-François, the latter of whom served as an equerry in the Royal Corps of Engineers in Guadeloupe in the 1780s.95 Although scholars are re-evaluating the quality of his designs and the soundness of his defensive works, Chaussegros continues to suffer from a reputation as an architect of middling quality, falling short in theory and practice alike.96 Governor General Ange Duquesne de Menneville (1700–1778) complained that his designs had either “too little or too much solidity” and officials belittled him because he could find work only in the colonies and because as a provençal he was “hot-headed.”97 It did not help the architect that he constantly faced severe funding restrictions – the Crown prioritized Verrier’s strategic Île-Royale (fig. 10.14) over any of his projects – and that he was constantly asked to renovate structures that were poorly built in the first place. He also angered colonial officials by attempting to send his designs directly to the minister of the marine.98 His ambitious nature, reflected in the ostentatious portrait in full regalia he commissioned during his return trip to France – in 1741 he even painted in the cross of the Order of Saint-Louis in his own hand – likely antagonized people as well.99 Chaussegros’s high opinion of his own abilities was exemplified by the precise framing and lettering of his drawings and treatise and the incorporation of prominent signatures and dates in fine copperplate.100 Although personal rivalries contributed to the Traité’s rejection for publication, his detractors were correct that the manuscript did not differ significantly from the many treatises already in print. Duquesne and others also criticized its inability to adapt to regional practicalities, as Thorpe notes: “various manuals published before and after the completion of his manuscript emphasized the adaptation of fortifications to the peculiarities of the surrounding terrain – and appear to have

The Royal Engineer Architects

163

done so more effectively.”101 It would have been ironic if its inadaptability was the reason for its rejection since the author specifically noted that his engineer’s training gave him unique insight into accommodating fortresses to the vagaries of geography: “[m]any engineers have written about fortification but they have not demonstrated how to adapt it to the setting of a place; most only provide the rules of fortification, which can only serve locations that are regular and situated in flat countryside; but fortifications are rarely in such settings … one must give them a form that deviates from the standard … it is these sorts of situations that the experience of an engineer will comprehend.”102 The first book of the Traité considers the techniques of Chaussegros’s predecessors, including French engineers Vauban, Monsieur du Bombelle, Pagan, Antoine de Ville (1596–1658), and Errard, as well as the Dutchman Samuel Marolois (1572–before 1627) and the Italian Pietro Sardi (1560–after 1630). Chaussegros also discusses the work of François Blondel, who wrote a Nouvelle manière de fortifier les places (Paris, 1683) and who had first-hand experience of the Americas, having visited the Antilles on Colbert’s orders between 1666 and 1668. Blondel’s fantastically popular Cours d’architecture (Paris, 1675), a compendium of classical architecture and a manifesto of the new Colbertian style, would have a critical impact not just on the work of Chaussegros but on the other ingénieurs working in the Americas.103 Certain of Blondel’s non-military designs appear in Chaussegros’s work such as the main doorway to the Intendant’s Palace (1718), based on Blondel’s rustic portal after Vignola, and a rusticated interior arcade illustrated in Chaussegros’s treatise on plate 90 may derive from Blondel’s illustration after Serlio.104 In fact Chaussegros openly attributes his designs for portals in the Traité to the “capable architects of Italy” (habiles architectes d’Italie).105 Such summaries of the works of predecessors were standard in treatises on fortification (Manesson-Mallet recounted the methods of Errard, Marolois, Sardi, de Ville, and Pagan, among others). Given this treatise’s close reliance on those earlier models, notably their varied polygonal fortification

164

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

models and manner of presenting plans and elevations, it is likely that Chaussegros had them at hand.106 Not surprisingly, since most of the Traité is devoted to the practicalities of fortification architecture, it follows predictable lines.107 The first two books provide vocabulary and maxims on fortification and then walk the reader through the features of a fortress, from flanking walls and embrasures to esplanades and bastions. Book Three describes various kinds of regular and irregular fortresses. Book Four concentrates on how to adapt regular fortifications to irregular sites, as in the treatise by Manesson-Mallet. Books Five and Six look at specialist fortress types as well as ways to fortify valleys, bridge heads, and camps – among other things – and describes polygonal forms for exterior walls. Book Eight is devoted to siege warfare and how to make various kinds of batteries. The most interesting book from a stylistic point of view is Book Seven, which is also the most heavily illustrated. Here we see depictions of various kinds of portals and sentry boxes (guérites), a plan and perspective for a double and single corps of barracks, and a powder magazine. The Traité is unusual in the number of its illustrations, such as his rusticated portals, which sometimes feature a pair of Tuscan or Doric engaged columns and a pediment adorned with Bruand-style trophées and royal suns (plates 89–99), all in accordance with what he calls “the rules of civic architecture [l’architecture civile].”108 This type of portal not only recalls Chaussegros’s own work but that of Verrier in Louisbourg (figs. 7.6, 10.14). Although he does not write much about aesthetics, Chaussegros is concerned with stylistic convenance, noting that certain architectural modes are more appropriate for particular situations, as when he writes about a city gate that “the elevation of the front of the portal is of the Tuscan order, the simplest of all the orders; it suits perfectly in this setting.”109 This understanding of a building’s appropriateness to the status of its owner emerges in his building projects, notably the stately Hôtel de Vaudreuil in Montreal (1723; fig. 7.7), built as the private residence of Governor General Philippe de Rigaud de Vaudreuil (1643–1725)

7.6 A model city gate from Gaspard-Joseph Chaussegros de Léry, Traité de fortification divisé en huit livres, 1714–27. Library and Archives Canada.

and handily the most metropolitan building in the city during the French regime.110 Built in a very up-to-date style emulating a modest country seat (it is a near twin of the Manoir de Belle Noë, Dol-de Bretagne, 1710; fig. 7.8), it was a stylish two-storey mansion with a high hipped roof with scrolling dormers, a pair of pavilions at the ends and a curving double staircase leading to

an elegant rusticated Doric doorway. The style is more country than city – it faced onto spacious gardens and was celebrated for its views – and it ably communicated Vaudreuil’s status as a member of the landed gentry. Following Vaudreuil’s death the house was rented to the Crown in 1727 and henceforth became the official residence of the governor general, beginning with Charles

The Royal Engineer Architects

165

de la Boische, marquis de Beauharnois (1671–1749), but it was destroyed in a fire eighty years later.111 Contemporary visitors were struck precisely with the building’s convenance: one 1727 source commented that “the house is gracious, and very well distributed, more or less. Built with convenance for its location and [has] a beautiful view.”112 In his treatise Chaussegros, like Vauban before him, pays close attention to beauty, as when he suggests that by placing more windows in one of his barracks designs he does so partly “for the beauty of the rooms.”113 Some of his structures are based on extant buildings in France, such as Fort Saint-Louis in Toulon, the source for a sentry-box design in plate ci .114 Such views are absent in Manesson-Mallet, Vauban, Ozanam, Pagan, Bernard, or De Ville, who focus principally on plans and perspective lines. Chaussegros exhibits a keen sense of embellishment, as in his fancifully executed sentry boxes festooned with heraldic shields and crowned by fleurs-de-lys, about which he notes: “sentry boxes serve as a beautiful ornament to the fortification if they are well built.”115 Some of the illustrations resemble Chaussegros’s architectural projects, notably his towers (e.g., plates 66, 68) with quoining, rustication around the windows, and the use of mâchicoulis (an opening between the projecting corbels under a rampart) as well as a kind of conical cap which appears in his later elevations for the redoubt at Point-à-la-Cheveleur (1728– 37).116 His two barracks schemes (plates 106, 108) also closely resemble the New Barracks he designed for Quebec City in 1749–52.117 Chaussegros was not unique among the engineer architects in his academic credentials or pretensions. Several of the architects sent to the West Indies and Guiana were already respected authorities in France, particularly in mathematics. Joseph-Louis de La Lance, chief royal engineer in Saint-Domingue, where he designed the elegant Magazin Royale at Cap-François (1738; figs. 12.24–5), was both a scholar and a decorated soldier. He started out as a mathematics professor at the Académie Royale de Lorraine and at the noble cadet company (Compagnie de Gentils-hommes) in Metz

166

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

with a salary of 800 livres before entering the army in 1705.118 He fought in nine campaigns during the War of the Spanish Succession in Alsace, Flanders, Dauphiné, and Catalonia, was taken as a prisoner of war in 1708, and then served between 1712 and 1714 as an officer in the Regiment of Pontlieu, distinguishing himself at the Siege of Barcelona (1714). His career as an engineer was characteristically mobile: his first post, as ingénieur-ensecond, was in Senegal during the retaking of Arguin and Portandick in 1723, and he was employed at La Rochelle, Antibes, Le Quesnay, and Cambrai before being sent to Saint-Domingue in 1726. As well as his work at Le Cap he designed the new fort at Bayaha (now Fort Liberté, begun 1730), of which he was so proud that he asked the king patriotically for permission to give it a nobler name, suggesting “Fort Royal” or “Fort Dauphin de Bayaha” (it ended up being named Fort Dauphin). One of the most distinguished engineer architects in the colonies was the rochelais René Gabriel Rabié (ca. 1721–1785), ingénieur-en-chef in the Northern District of Saint-Domingue, and more responsible than any other figure for the regal appearance Cap-François acquired in the decades before the Haitian Revolution. His many surviving drawings include gardens in the style of André Le Nôtre such as that of the Hospital of the Religious of Charity with its parterres and fountains (1771; fig. 11.14) and two schemes for Versailles-style bosquets (forest groves) for the grounds of Government House for public promenades (1774; figs. 11.17–18). He also built some of the city’s most important civic and military monuments such as the massive Barracks (1752) inspired by Bruand’s Invalides in Paris (fig. 1.3); the buildings for the Naval Arsenal (1766, 1784); and the François Mansart–inspired facade of the church 7.7 (opposite, above) Attributed to Gaspard-Joseph Chaussegros de Léry, Hôtel de Vaudreuil, Montreal (private residence of Governor General Philippe de Rigaud de Vaudreuil), begun 1723, rented to the Crown as the private residence of the governors general of Nouvelle-France, 1727. Archives Nationales de France. 7.8 (opposite, below) Manoir de Belle Noë, Dol-de Bretagne, 1710. This is a typical modest country estate of the period.

of Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption (1748–74; fig. 15.12). However his most distinctive legacy is his portfolio of designs for the city’s unusually large number of public monuments – not all of them built – including fountains (fig. 10.23) and two Roman-style triumphal arches (1781; figs. 10.16–17). Rabié trained for two or three years in draftsmanship and mathematics before serving as an ordinary engineer (ingénieur ordinaire) at Rochefort under ingénieur-en-chef Lefebvre.119 In 1742 he left for Cap-François, where he worked under Jean-André du Coudreau, the Northern District’s ingénieur-en-chef; in 1743 the governor and intendant appointed him inspector of fortifications; and in 1747 he was named sous-ingénieur with a royal commission (Brevet de la Cour). Rabié rose quickly through the ranks: in 1753 as reserve lieutenant (Lieutenant Reformé, an officer without regular military duties) for being a “good and capable subject,” then as captain (1758), chevalier of the Order of Saint-Louis (1771), colonel of infantry (1772) – at which point he was named ingénieur-en-chef of the Northern District – and finally brigadier (1784). According to his own reckoning he built or renovated around twenty-four fortresses, batteries, and defence walls; eleven public buildings; nine fountains, waterworks, and aqueducts; five major earthworks projects; and two stone bridges; and also drafted a map of the coastline. Few engineers better demonstrated the wide range of skills needed in a rapidly growing colony. Rabié died while on sick leave in Paris, his widowed daughter Mme de la Boissière and a “mulâtresse” named Marie at his side, at which point he was making 8,000 livres a year – only slightly less than the director of the entire Corps of Engineers.120 The Ministry of Marine praised him for his forty-five years of service and for being a “galant homme” and “bon officier,” two of his sons became lieutenants in the colonial regiment, and one of his daughters married another artist, a “dessinateur” in Le Cap named Longuet.121 By contrast, some engineer architects went to the colonies because of trouble in France. Such was the case for Rabié’s former employer Coudreau, royal

168

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

engineer at Saint-Domingue from 1740 until his death in 1747 and designer of a distinguished series of projects in Petit-Goâve (a Vauban-style city ramparts from 1740 and a project for the Fort at l’Acul from 1743) and in Cap-François: a prison (1746), the regal Palais de Justice on the Place d’Armes (1746; fig. 12.27), and a baroque fountain to be built on one of the docks of the quay to furnish the ships (1747; fig. 10.18). Clearly a man of considerable talent he had nevertheless been stripped of his title as a royal engineer at Rochefort due to “some troubles in his youth” (quelques dérangements de jeunesse) – the records provide no more details about his misdemeanour – but the head of the Corps of Engineers, maréchal D’Asfeld, recognized that he could “render good services” (rendre des bons services) as a sous-ingénieur at a salary of 2,000 livres in SaintDomingue, where “there are considerable works to be done.”122 As we have just seen, he went on to serve as the Northern District’s ingénieur-en-chef. Although they were mocked by the regular military for being deskbound, engineer architects rarely led comfortable lives. Aside from the often terrifying cross-Atlantic voyages and equally miserable trips between colonies, they suffered from tropical diseases, crippling wounds or death suffered on the worksite, rivalries which could land them in jail, and – especially during the reign of Louis XIV – death on the battlefield. In fact much of what we learn about the royal engineers comes from letters of protest in which they ask the ministry for justice, higher salaries, payment of pensions, relief from debts, or for royal honours, whether promotions in rank or the coveted Cross of the Order of Saint-Louis (Ordre Royal et Militaire de Saint-Louis, created in 1693), the most prestigious decoration the military offered (Vauban himself received one of the first eight minted).123 They also regularly asked for medical or mental health leaves (congés) – sometimes because they fell ill or broke a limb but also simply because they wanted to escape the colonies. Several of these motives were at issue with JulienMarie Solain-Baron (d. 1790), lieutenant-colonel d’infanterie and ingénieur-en-chef in Cayenne.

Solain-Baron, who designed the Cayenne Barracks in 1752, showed early promise. He started as a cadet in Rochefort in 1738; as reserve ensign he was nominated ingénieur-en-second in Saint-Domingue the following year; in 1743 he made the rank of reserve lieutenant and five years later was put in charge of fortifications; and in 1753 he was promoted to Reserve Captain. However he was unsatisfied: in August 1762 a request was made on his behalf for an even greater honour, declaring that “his assiduity and zeal [son assiduité et son zèle] made him hope that the Court would surely award him the Croix de Saint-Louis, owing to the length of his service.”124 Unsuccessful, Solain-Baron tried again two years later, this time cheekily asking the king to help finance his home renovations: “I hope that your Majesty might wish to decorate me with the Croix de SaintLouis and accord me with a pension which could help me with the expansion of a house which I am currently planning to enlarge, having determined to settle in this Colony.”125 His life in the colony turned out not to be so bucolic, as he broke his right arm above the elbow in 1770 falling off of a rampart in Cayenne while measuring it – given the state of health care in those days no minor complaint. Having returned to France to convalesce, he asked in 1771 for his medical leave to be extended for a year, “to give him time to make the remedies necessary for its recovery,” and for the Court to pay his medical fees, amounting to 3,000 livres, and – couched as an afterthought – requested that he be promoted to colonel.126 Although he finally got his precious Croix (in 1770) his arm never healed properly and he died a mere reserve lieutenant-colonel in 1790. Another royal engineer managed to secure himself one of the finest properties in Port-au-Prince only to have part of it sequestered by the king for a new botanic gardens. A waterworks expert with the title of ingénieur-géographe, Charles-François Hesse (1748– 1801) probably knew more about water than anyone in the West Indies. Best known for providing the town with its first fountain and canal and waterworks systems, he worked on several other major projects in the city including the plans of the Officers’ Quarters (1773–74;

fig. 13.15); the fountain at the Barracks (1774); the fountain in the Place d’Armes (1773–74; fig. 10.25); the town reservoir (1774; fig. 10.20); and the grandiose tomb for Victor Thérèse, marquis d’Ennery at the parish cemetery (1776–78); and he also contributed to the Barracks at Cap-François (1781). Hesse was awarded the rank of reserve infantry captain for his services. He wrote during a convalescence in Paris in 1783: “I have spent in these various operations four years of continuous hard work, exposed from morning to night to the heat of the sun. I have sacrificed my health which 18 months of a very expensive stay in France could not restore.”127 His property occupied about 100 square toises (about 195 square metres) of land right next to Government House on the fashionable rue de Conti (now rue Monseigneur Guillou), and the main house was laid out entre cour et jardin (between forecourt and garden) with galleries front and back, the small formal garden planted with fruit trees and divided into quarters with a jasmine hedge and a bassin d’eau fed by his own canal (fig. 11.24).128 But in 1784 the Crown decided to carve out the new “Botanic Gardens” or “Royal Garden” (Jardin de Roi) from the far end of Hesse’s property, a plot of land measuring 50 by 60 toises, and despite the best intentions on the part of the administration he was never paid for the property (see chapter 11).129 Louis-Pierre Desmon, a natural history painter employed in Guiana who was responsible for a rosy bird’s-eye view of the Place Royale in the soon-to-be plague-ridden town of Kourou (fig. 3.19) presented an even greater litany of woes to the government. A native of Paris, Desmon came with the highest credentials, having studied with painter Jean-Baptiste Marie Pierre (1713–89) at the Académie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture, and held a 1758 diploma signed by its secretary, the celebrated art critic Charles-Nicolas Cochin (1715– 90).130 Governor Étienne François Turgot of Guiana invited Desmon to the colony in 1763 with a royal commission as peintre et dessinateur, one of several engineers working on the new settlement under Préfontaine, and notwithstanding what happened to Kourou, the new Governor Jean-Pierre-Antoine Béhague de

The Royal Engineer Architects

169

Septfontaines (1727–1813) and Procurer General Claude de Macaye (1708–1781) remarked in 1765 that Desmon “acquitted himself of the duties of his position, in the quality of a Painter and Designer of the said Colonies, and that he has worked with zeal and industry [avec zèle et application] to our satisfaction.”131 His woes did not end with the Kourou disaster. When Desmon and his wife returned to France in 1787 their ship was lost at high sea, and although they were rescued and taken to Île Oléron they lost all of their worldly possessions and could afford passage only to Paris after the navy paid him 400 livres in compensation. His reports bring alive the horrors of ship travel in those days: “he had had the misfortune of sinking and of losing all of the fruit of his labours; he has been transported to the Ile d’Oléron with his wife, where both of them subsisted on the charity of the inhabitants who took care of them after their shipwreck; The Sieur Desmon requests certain assistance from the generosity of Monseigneur [maréchal de Castries, Ministry of the Marine] to return to Paris, where he hopes that his talent will procure him a livelihood.”132 Castries himself left a more colourful description: “Having finished his work in this colony, and wanting to return to France, he collected and gathered together all that he had earned and was put to sea with his spouse; they had hardly gone 200 leagues [approximately 780 miles] when a ferocious storm smashed the ship which carried them, and they were thus in an instant deprived of their entire fortune; they themselves would have perished without the assistance of another ship which of the 68 passengers saved seven or eight, of which number they are, and left them on the Isle d’Oléron, Province of Saintonge, where for six weeks since their landing they have survived only from the generous care of the inhabitants.”133 There is no record of how Desmon and his wife fared upon their return to Paris. Adrien de Pauger (ca. 1685–1726), from Dieppe and brother of a painter in the Paris Academy, was one of the first three engineers to arrive in the new colony of Louisiana in 1720, becoming ingénieur-en-chef in 1723. He described his own harrowing voyage, this time

170

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

from France to Saint-Domingue, the first stop on his journey to the Bay of Biloxi in 1720. Pauger was a key contributor to the architecture of Louisiana and designed the French post at l’Île de la Balise and its chapel on the mouth of the Mississippi (1723; fig. 14.26), Fort Condé in Mobile (1724), and the first Church in New Orleans (1724; fig. 14.25).134 His ship, named the Camel (Chameau), also carried the then chief engineer Louis-Pierre Le Blond de La Tour (1673–1723) and another assistant engineer named Boispinel. In a letter from Saint-Domingue written two months earlier (11 October), Pauger related the tribulations of their fiftysix-day sea voyage from the Île de Groix in Brittany. During the journey one of his engagés and three children died, as did the man sent to be the vicar-general of the colony, the Discalced Carmelite Father Jacques de Saint-Martin, who died of food poisoning. Pauger wrote to the Louisiana Company in exasperation: I venture to affirm that the Church and the Company suffered a very considerable loss in this august Religious who engaged himself voluntarily to travel to Louisiana with the sole aim of cultivating there the Health of Souls. It could have been the same with the other two clerics, officers, and most of the workers that I have engaged. Had the Company the goodness to treat them more favourably it would prevent me from having the honour of informing them that fifteen days after embarking they suffered a thirst so extreme that many drank their urine, and the way they were treated by the ship’s officers they might as well have been condemned to torture, and instead of encouraging them it gave them such a bad idea of Louisiana that they believed they had been sent to the galleys.135 Some royal engineer architects were so unhappy in the colonies that they positively begged the king to allow them to return to France. Such was the case with Pierre-Antoine-Jérôme Frémond de la Merveillère, lieutenant-general of the Corps of Engineers. A

splendid cartographer (figs. 9.5, 11.20), he was also responsible, together with Hesse, for the innovative new suite of wooden government buildings (1772–74) erected in Port-au-Prince following the 1770 earthquake (figs. 16.23–4). But De la Merveillère also had the misfortune to be working in Saint-Domingue as director-general of fortifications during the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution in 1791. The insurrection began with a sight that terrified everyone in Cap-François, the plantations on the surrounding hills all on fire, most vividly described by C.L.R. James: “From Le Cap the whole horizon was a wall of fire. From this wall continually rose thick black volumes of smoke, through which came tongues of flame leaping to the very sky. For nearly three weeks the people of Le Cap could barely distinguish day from night, while a rain of burning cane straw, driven before the wind like flakes of snow, flew over the city and the shipping in the harbour, threatening both with destruction.”136 Frémond’s desperation is palpable in an official request for repatriation he wrote from that city in January 1792, just months after the outbreak. Writing in the third person he declared that since he was employed in Saint-Domingue, he fulfilled the duties of his position with all the zeal of which he is capable, but that the continual troubles, which have begun to agitate the colony almost from the time he got there, and the various disastrous events which have followed it since, having rendered his service increasingly painful and tiring; the three years he has spent in this country, already destructive because of the intemperance of the climate, have been more harmful to his health than a stay of six years in an ordinary climate, and put him in [a state of] need, given the state of languor and deterioration he feels, which does not allow him to make himself useful any more to the Colony; and that to try to recover he desired to go breathe his native air.137 His wish was granted and he was returned to Nantes by August of that year.138

By contrast, some engineers so took to colonial life that they found a vocation which had evaded them in France. Kourou veteran Simon Mentelle (1741–1799), a royal surveyor (ingénieur-géographe du roi) and former professor of history and geography at the Royal Military Academy, prepared several important plans of the doomed settlement and its replacement (figs. 3.20–1) and had every reason to hate Guiana after the disaster that had destroyed the utopian city. But the twentythree-year-old stayed on, was made reserve lieutenant in 1764, and enjoyed a long career drawing survey maps of the colony (including voyages deep into the interior), designing fortresses and earthworks, and also surveying multitudes of Crown, church, and private properties, volumes of which are still in the Cayenne archives. In chapter 6 we have seen a civilian architect, JosephAntoine Dardan, hired by the Corps of Engineers and even given a title. Mentelle’s career shows that, conversely, engineers could work as civilian architects, as in May 1772 when he was paid 360 livres in cash (as well as all of his meals) for twenty-four days’ work measuring a new property acquired by the Cormonbo Plantation, not including the 72 livres to draw up the plan and 96 more to pay for two copies to be sent to France, as well as 60 more livres to make a “plan, cross-section, profiles, and elevation” of the maison à maître.139 To put Mentelle’s fees in context, the carpenter who actually built the house, a certain La Borde, worked at a rate of only 400 livres a year.140 In 1771 Mentelle was retired from his government commission but six years later was promoted to reserve captain and placed in charge of the colony’s archives with the remit to trace a comprehensive map of all French Guiana, and to join an official visit to Dutch Suriname.141 He described his first impressions of Guiana in a 1780 letter to the governor: “I came here in 1763, as a Royal Surveyor, the Spirit all full of grand projects which the Court had for this country; quite persuaded that I would experience all the calamities which accompany new establishments; and that I would be exposed to the fatigues and labours which are inseparable from voyages, for which I was destined. But the

The Royal Engineer Architects

171

country seemed to me much more interesting than two scientists have already observed about it; that there still remained much to do; and that there was nothing concerning its interior but the most imperfect notions.”142 Mentelle was awarded the Croix de Saint-Louis in 1792, a royal honour a year before the king lost his head: “It is with sentiments of the most intense gratitude that I have received your letter of 16 October last year, and the military decoration enclosed in it, with which the King had indeed desired to honour me. I declare that in all occasions, I have endeavoured to demonstrate that I was worthy of that Grace, by the most devout zeal to the Service of His Majesty, to the duties of my position and to those of all good Frenchmen.”143 Architect engineers in the field were often as entrepreneurial as their civilian counterparts. Some of them, like Mentelle, even used the time to undertake their own scientific experiments, voyaging deep into the hinterland to make maps and collect specimens of flora and fauna, and some came up with remarkably ambitious schemes with which they hoped – usually in vain – to interest their monarch or government officials. The waterworks and bridge expert Joseph-Henri Dausse, inspecteur des ponts et chaussées at Saint-Domingue, who assisted his colleague Pierre-Bernard Varaigne in planning a massive irrigation and aqueduct project in the Plaine de l’Artibonite (1777; fig. 13.16), became fascinated with the possibility of digging a canal through the Isthmus of Panama, exactly a century before Ferdinand de Lesseps began the ultimately unsuccessful

172

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

French canal and 122 years before the United States began working on the canal that exists there today. In 1782 Dausse wrote from Grenoble that he was prevented from exploring his idea further only by illness: I was also strongly desirous of instructing myself about the possibility of the communication between the two seas by the Isthmus of Panama; I would have been too gratified to send the details of this important project to the Ministry, but I was prevented from it by a dangerous convalescence from a cruel sickness which did not permit me to follow this idea and solicit funds before my departure from Saint-Domingue. This project is intended to honour the Realm and the Ministry under which it would have been undertaken; it interests all nations because of the facility which it would procure for the navigation of the southern sea [i.e., the Pacific], and we are perhaps at a favourable moment to discuss it with the Power which must provide the location.144 Dausse may have been animated by scientific inquiry but he probably also had less altruistic reasons for proposing this project: for his Plaine de l’Artibonite project he had been paid so handsomely by the government that colonial officials nearly revolted and it caused a major scandal (see chapter 12). Clearly a patron like that was worth holding onto.

8

Putting Their House in Order: Urban Idealism in France and the Seventeenth-Century Colonies

nothinG Better reVeAls A nAtion’s ideoloGy than the way it designs its cities and public spaces, and – particularly in the case of early modern France – its gardens. Beginning in the era of Colbert but especially in the eighteenth century, urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire became much more than the haphazard, nostalgic replication of the homeland it had been in its pioneering days. Royal architect engineers transformed the French colonial town and city into a deliberate projection of the pré carré onto the colonies, a kind of French manifest destiny of centrally ruled space, resolute in the face of France’s foes, oblivious to indigenous land claims, and frequently built with the sweat of slave labour on a gargantuan scale – a workforce that French people at home, spooning their sugar and drinking their coffee and cocoa, preferred to overlook. But since the geographical, demographic, and economic realities of empire flatly refused to submit to this ambitious program of territorial transformation, many of these schemes for urban and landscape renewal never made it past the drawing board, and even the ones that did were frequently executed on a much reduced scale, their streets refusing to be teased into straight lines, their elegant allées of imported elms putrefied by swamps, and their shrunken budgets forcing inhabitants to make do with thickly planted rows of citrus trees instead of the stone retaining walls shown on the maps. Indeed French cartographers were masters of deceit – we might politely call it optimism – and while on paper their

plans looked very impressive indeed, in the drawing rooms and ministerial chambers of France they were often little more than the stuff of dreams – precisely the kind of “fantasy,” as the duc de Choiseul enthused to Voltaire about Kourou, which could result in the loss of thousands of lives (see chapter 3). Although the French became the premier urban designers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they did not invent the idealized cityscape. Architects had experimented with rational city schemes since antiquity, most notably the Roman rectangular grid plan city with two main bisecting streets called the cardo (north/south) and decumanus maximus (east/west) with a forum located at their crossing, a form which developed out of the castrum, or military camp and allowed for a free flow of people and supplies.1 This tradition was preserved in a group of treatises called the Corpus agrimensorum (ca. first century ad ), popular during the Middle Ages. The Corpus shows that this idealized layout was linked to cosmology and divination, and over the centuries the city was seen increasingly as a microcosm of the heavenly realm. Roman architect Vitruvius’s De architectura libri decem (Ten Books on Architecture, ca. 22–14 bc ) was a compendium of Greco-Roman (mostly Hellenistic) architectural and urbanistic knowledge, and discussed healthy siting, ramparts, the direction of streets and effects of wind, and the placement of civic and religious structures, as well as the idea that architecture should relate to the proportions and symmetry of the human body (book iii , chapter i ).2 Between the late eleventh and mid-fourteenth centuries urban planners developed a kind of regularized fortified town in southern France called the bastide (literally “planted town” in Occitan) that descended from Roman prototypes and that also presaged the idealized cities of the Renaissance.3 Such were the ex-novo towns of Montauban (1144), Aigues-Mortes (1241), and Carcassonne (1247), paid for by the wealth of the wine industry. Bastides were divided into more-orless uniform square or rectangular blocks (îlots) inside the town – grid plans became increasingly common

174

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

in the thirteenth century – with standardized garden lots outside the wall and vineyards in the surrounding countryside, all to be worked by the inhabitants. The inner structure of the town was determined by the shape of the walls, and its streets by the placement of its gates; towns frequently featured central market halls, and covered walkways and streets provided shelter from the elements. Instead of having a church or palace as their focus, they were built around a public town square, emphasizing that “the town is no longer built only by the abbot, or by the seigneur, but for the population itself, to whom the dominant economic role belongs.”4 This democratization of the town is the feature that contrasts the most with the colonial towns, with their emphasis on government, the monarchy, and – even if not to the degree found in Europe or Spanish America – the Church. Churches in medieval bastides were frequently not even near the main square; the same went for civic structures, except for markets.5 Nevertheless in the military nature of their planning – they were designed and executed by the military and placed in strategic locations between the territories of the French king and the counts of Toulouse – they were the direct forebears of the colonial garrison towns of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.6 The next source of ideal cities was Renaissance Italy, which turned Vitruvius into the canonical text for fifteenth-century urban theory. Vitruvius’s early progeny included Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), whose De re aedificatoria (On Architecture, completed 1452, published 1486), although not about urbanism per se, has much to say about the city, particularly that it should promote peace, health, safety, and access to public services and that it should be located on a flat site when possible and near good agricultural land (“cities owe their origin and their existence to their enabling their inhabitants to enjoy a peaceful life, as free from inconvenience or harm as possible”). He also writes about the functions of different kinds of buildings and about public space.7 Although Alberti calls for military roads that are wide and straight for the sake of

“dignity and majesty,” he differs from Roman practice by recommending that the road not meet up exactly with the gates for safety’s sake and that within a city “it is better if the roads are not straight, but meandering gently like a river … for apart from the fact that the longer the roads seem, the greater the apparent size of the town, no doubt it will be of great benefit in terms of appearance.”8 Alberti wrote of two kinds of cities, one for a republic and the other for rule by a “tyrant.” A tyrant’s city should have two concentric circular walls, the outer circle delineating the neighbourhood of the rich (it keeps them from petitioning the ruler), and the centre is the neighbourhood of the poor, with the slaughterhouses, ateliers, and markets. A republican city demands more open access to public buildings, so structures such as the senate house, law courts, and the main religious building should be placed in the middle. Some Renaissance architects and writers went in for more fantastical urban schemes, but none of them were built – indeed they were not meant to be built. The best-known example is by Filarete (Antonio di Pietro Averlino, ca. 1400–ca. 1469), a perfectly round city named Sforzinda (1451–56) that incorporated Vitruvius’s anthropomorphism (in which a healthy city should reflect the physiognomy of its inhabitants), and located the palace of the ruler and the civic and religious buildings in the centre to give him the advantage of surveillance and control.9 Sforzinda’s moat was to circumscribe an eight-pointed star-shaped ramparts, with eight principal streets and canals, a large square in the middle with the cathedral on the east and the ducal palace on the west, a merchants’ piazza to the north and a market piazza to the south, as well as a hospital, community palaces, schools, custom houses, and other public buildings. Filarete was more concerned with social theory than with bricks and mortar, and his Sforzinda was at best an “abstract model … detached from any real link with any territory.”10 Francesco di Giorgio Martini (1439–1502), whose unpublished Trattato di architettura, ingegneria e arte militare (completed 1490s) also described a city with the chief

political and religious structures at the centre, and like Vitruvius he advocated a theory of corporeal proportions, as with a fortress that followed the outline of a standing man in the shape of its ramparts, with the fort at his head.11 Two more practically minded Italian designers whose plans anticipated Vauban were a model citadel town published by Pietro Cataneo (I quattro primi libri di architettura, 1554) and Vincenzo Scamozzi’s starshaped town of Palmanova near Udine (begun 1593), the only one ever built.12 Even German artist Albrecht Dürer designed a rectilinear ideal city in 1527.13 Of course the most quintessentially utopian city of all was the one promoted by Thomas More in Utopia (1516), which was literally applied to Spanish American town planning by the bishop of Michoacán, Vasco de Quiroga, as we have seen in chapter 2.14 A fictitious island in the Atlantic with fifty-four identical cities, Utopia was a perfect society that corrected the faults he found in Henry VIII’s England. More’s work was therefore more concerned with social issues than with town planning per se – there was to be no private property, justice and equality were guaranteed to all, cities were to be comfortable – but a basic idea of town planning could be extracted from the text.15 One of these cities, Amaurot, was divided into four equal quarters with a market in the centre of each; its houses were uniform and each possessed a large garden; the city had ramparts for protection; and it could accommodate over six thousand families. Unlike Sforzinda, however, Amaurot rejected pomp and ceremony, with neither palace nor cathedral, and public buildings were to be simple and useful. In this respect More’s cities could not have been less like those of Louis XIV and his successors. More also had early Protestant followers, many of whom believed that an “orderly” city should have “repeated house types and a regular street plan; in shape it was usually a square,” as in the sanctuaries planned for the refugees from the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of which Heinrich Schickhardt’s proposed “Freudenstadt” (Happy Town; founded 1599) in the Black Forest was one of the most rectilinear.16

Urban Idealism in France and the Seventeenth-Century Colonies 175

Urban Idealism in France and the Place Royale Although Vitruvius and Alberti were translated into French in 1547 and 1553 respectively (by humanist Jean Martin), the treatises were more influential for architecture than for city planning.17 France was to develop its own kind of idealized city, a form allied with and partially derived from garden design (see chapter 11), and which would be imitated throughout Europe. French idealized visions for cityscapes and countryside began, not surprisingly, with Paris, where designers had only just begun to impose rational spaces such as public squares, orthogonal grid plans of streets (quadrillages), and elegant bridges onto a pre-existing fabric 8.1 Attributed to Baptiste du Cerceau, Place Royale (now Place des Vosges), Paris, 1605–12.

176

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

of congested, erratic medieval lanes and insalubrious neighbourhoods. The process began in earnest under the first Bourbon king Henri IV, who, after achieving a peaceful solution to the religious wars that had torn his country in half for almost forty years (with the Edict of Nantes in 1598), took it upon himself to make his new capital a reflection of his enlightened rule and the greatest city of Europe. Inspired by the contemporary urban renewal of Rome under the reformist popes, he began by carving out the city’s first public square from an uninhabited marsh (the Marais), first called the Place Royale and now known as the Place des Vosges (1605–12; figs. 8.1–2). Next, with the Pont Neuf, he completed the city’s widest bridge (1578–1606), innovative in several ways.18 The Pont Neuf could accommodate larger horse-drawn vehicles; it boasted Paris’s first

raised pavements for pedestrians; it was flanked by its own pair of royal squares including the triangular Place Dauphine (1607–16); and since it was not piled up with houses it afforded panoramic views of the sort which became fundamental to baroque urban and garden design. Finally, Louis XIII commissioned a giant, ship-like island in the middle of the Seine, created from a pair of grassy islets (Île Saint-Louis, 1620s–40s, fig. 8.2), which featured Paris’s first grid plan of streets and uniform residential architecture on an unprecedented scale and unparalleled anywhere else in Europe.19 The place royale, a square centred upon a (usually) equestrian statue of the ruler – by the end of Louis XIV’s reign Paris boasted rectangular, triangular, and circular variants – was an entirely new form, and it was copied throughout France and from London to Turin (figs. 8.4–7).20 Henri IV’s original Place Royale – it

8.2 Place Royale (lower left) and Île Saint-Louis (1620s–40s; lower right), Paris. Detail from Michel-Étienne Turgot, Plan de Paris, engraving, 1734. Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich.

only acquired the statue, of Louis XIII, in 1639 – was an ingenious combination of industrial scheme, investment housing, and site for public spectacles. Taking the form of a perfect square, it was funded by private financiers, as were several royal projects in the city. The Place Royale was also strategically located, just off the rue Saint-Antoine, the widest street in Paris, and near the city’s main entrance at the Porte Saint-Antoine and the Bastille. In an attempt to boost the French economy Henri incorporated a silk manufactory into the complex (on the north range), as well as what we would call today “affordable housing” for artisans and members of the bourgeoisie alongside grand hôtels particuliers for the nobility and two taller

Urban Idealism in France and the Seventeenth-Century Colonies 177

pavilions with pyramidal roofs on the north-south axis metaphorically called the Pavillon du Roi and Pavillon de la Reine.21 Although the silk project – it was inspired by a similar scheme by Sixtus V (r. 1585–90) in Rome for the Colosseum – was abandoned in 1607, as was eventually the affordable housing, the square was an ideal place for public events such as the politically charged 1612 wedding celebration of Henri’s two children (with an estimated 70,000 participants). Its gradual takeover by the wealthy made it the most prestigious address in Paris.22 The Place Royale was enclosed by four rows of nine townhouses (called “pavillons”), which were mostly of uniform height and built to the same basic design in red brick with vertical limestone quoining and steep slate roofs, and with a vaulted walkway on the ground floor like the square in a medieval bastide. Although the style was somewhat retardataire – called rustique français, it recalled the Renaissance chateaux of the Val du Loire and Flemish row-house design – the Place des Vosges has a harmonious, ordered appearance in which individual parts submit to an overall design – a unity which was much better appreciated before, contrary to its original strategy, it was planted with trees.23 This symbolic embodiment of royal order and rationalism – Richard Cleary characterized it as “a representation of the royal presence that commanded the deference accorded the monarch himself” – became the norm for the place royale in France and the colonies, and its function as a space for public recreation and urban renewal lay at the ideological foundation of every place royale built after it, particularly under Louis XIV.24 Around 1608 Henri planned an even more elaborate square (never built), called the Place de France, a vast lunette-shaped square between Porte Saint-Antoine and Porte du Temple, accessed by a grand gate to be called the Porte de France. Its circumference was to be lined with markets and other public buildings and with an outer semicircular avenue behind it and eight more extending outward radially into the city, each one bearing the name of a French province.25 Between 1683 and 1688 alone, twenty projects for places royales were submitted

178

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

throughout France, and as we will see in this and the next two chapters, nine places royales were projected or built overseas. It would be hard to exaggerate the stylistic and ideological significance of this form, particularly in an imperial setting. The Île Saint-Louis (at first called the Île NôtreDame) was another significant model for idealized urban development (fig. 8.2).26 The first rationally planned neighbourhood in Paris, it is based on a grid plan like a Roman castrum with two intersecting broad avenues (formerly rue Marie and Grand Rue), two additional, evenly spaced streets on the north-south axis, and three more on the south half of the island which only reach the central east-west avenue. It also links the right and left banks of the Seine by means of two of Paris’s widest bridges, the Pont-Marie (named after Christophe Marie, the contractor responsible for the island’s design) and Pont de la Tournelle. In 1608–10 Marie created a new, parallelogram-shaped platform out of the uninhabited Île aux Vaches (Cow Island) and Île Nôtre-Dame and developed an ordered residential area by filling in the canal between the two islands, levelling the surface, and surrounding it with quays. Despite protracted legal and financial troubles that kept work at a slow pace until the 1640s (the grid was laid out in 1642), by the beginning of Louis XIV’s reign it transformed into Paris’s grandest and most modern neighbourhood.27 The project also included a new church of Saint-Louis-en-l’Île (begun 1664 on designs by François de Vau), placed in the first block to the southeast of the rue Marie (now rue des Deux-Ponts).28 Originally the island was also to have recreational spaces such as a public fountain, bath house, and a court for jeu de paume (an ancestor to tennis), as well as shops to attract merchants. But in the end it never had a public square and its only gardens were private. One of the innovations of the new island was the importance the Île Saint-Louis gave to views – whether views of the new houses from the banks of the Seine or vice versa – and its new aesthetic of wide, uniform houses built of white limestone in a city where houses tended to be half or a third of the width and stone

was still a relative rarity in domestic architecture.29 However, without the public square the island feels congested with its tall houses and narrow streets, and is best appreciated from across the river. Although the houses were not based on a standardized design and were of varying sizes, they were uniform enough that they had what Bernard de Montgolfier calls an “air de famille.”30 Many of the houses were built after designs of Le Vau, the future architect of Vaux-le-Vicomte and Versailles. The grandest was the now demolished Hôtel Bretonvilliers (completed 1640).31 The grid plan of Île Saint-Louis was a direct reference to classical Rome, as attested by the famous quotation by dramatist Pierre Corneille (1606–1684): “Paris seems to my eyes a Roman nation: I thought this morning that I saw here an enchanted island. I left it deserted and found it inhabited.”32 Appearing soon after the “enchanted island” was the Quartier Mazarin in Aix-en-Provence, designed by Jehan Lombard in 1646 and built on over 20 hectares of former farmland south of the city on property primarily owned by religious orders and the archbishopric (fig. 8.3).33 Michel Mazarin, Cardinal Mazarin’s nephew and the archbishop of Aix from 1645, wanted to bring a Parisian grandeur to the provincial capital and also a source of lucrative rental properties for the archbishopric and the Order of Malta, another property owner. Although many of the plots were not filled until well into the eighteenth century the result today is similar to a colonial town like Cap-François in Saint-Domingue: a grid plan with more or less rectangular blocks and two major streets meeting at right angles. Unlike the Île-Saint-Louis, an elegant public square called the Place des Quatre-Dauphins marks the crossing of these streets with a fountain in the centre (1666–67). Although not a place royale, the fountain’s iconography – four royal dolphins and originally a fleur-de-lys at the top – allowed the place to “rise in a certain sense to the level of a royal square.”34 The Quartier Mazarin was originally to be surrounded by ramparts and had regulated street widths, and the walls of the individual houses also had to adhere to specific dimensions: “the walls

8.3 Place des Quatre-Dauphins, Quartier Mazarin, Aix-en-Provence, 1666–67.

fixed at three cannes above the foundation of one canne, of a depth of seven pans in thickness.”35 Its promoters stressed the hygienic importance of its wide, regular streets and spacious residences, and even today it contrasts markedly with the congested old city to the north. Grandeur was critical: in a 1647 report Lombard recommended aligning streets so that houses had enough space for “une plus Grande decoration.”36 Several important royal engineers came from Provence, such as Aix native Étienne Verrier, planner of the fortified town of Louisbourg in Acadia (fig. 10.14), his rival Chaussegros de Léry, responsible for some of the most extensive

Urban Idealism in France and the Seventeenth-Century Colonies 179

fortification and urban projects in Nouvelle-France (fig. 15.21), and possibly Philippe Cauvet, designer of the grid plan at Léogâne (1710; fig. 10.1). Aix is also very close to Marseilles and not far from Toulon, both of them ports of great significance for the French colonies and the Génie. It is therefore quite possible that the Quartier Mazarin was a source of inspiration for colonial projects. Beginning in 1662 Louis XIV went further than either of his predecessors in his renewal of Paris, widening and paving streets, introducing fountains and Europe’s first streetlights, and even the first public bus service (the carrosse à cinq sols). Employing an age-old metaphor used by rulers such as his great-great grandfather Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici of Florence or Pope Sixtus V, Louis presented himself as the provider of health and fertility to the city.37 He also constructed two new places royales, again with the backing of rich supporters, 8.4 (left) Place des Victoires, Paris. Detail from Michel-Étienne Turgot, Plan de Paris, engraving, 1734. Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich. 8.5 (right) Jules Hardouin-Mansart and others, Place des Victoires, Paris, 1685–90.

180

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

which were designed by Jules Hardouin-Mansart and built by the Bâtiments du Roi: the circular Place des Victoires (Victories Square, 1685–90, figs. 8.4–5) near the Palais-Royale and the octagonal Place des Conquêtes (Conquests Square) to the west, soon renamed Place Louis-le-Grand and also known as the Place Vendôme (1685; rebuilt 1699–1708, figs. 8.6–7).38 Planned at the same time as the Place des Victoires, in 1685, it nevertheless took more than a decade before the Place Louis-le-Grand was begun, and it ended up taking three different forms before city planners finally settled on an irregular octagon.39 While the Place des Victoires was in theory a private commission, the Place Louis-le-Grand began as a royal project, and even though both were real-estate investment schemes the latter had a more public function: it was to serve as a western pendant to Henri IV’s Place Royale, as a place for formal entries of foreign eminences, and also the site of a massive new royal library and triumphal arch.40 This time the design of the two places royales was coordinated with that of the sculptures to create a harmony of scale that was lacking in Henri’s Place Royale and to echo public architecture in Rome, particularly Michelangelo’s Piazza del Campidoglio (begun 1538).41

Unlike their predecessors, these squares showcased contemporary architectural style: gone was the antiquated brick and instead the rows of townhouses feature modular, classically inspired facades derived from the new south facade of the Louvre (by Le Vau, Charles Le Brun, and Claude Perrault, begun 1668) and, nearby, Daniel Gittard’s Hôtel de Lully (1671; figs. 1.5, 12.12).42 They rest on a rusticated blind arcade with mascarons (grotesque face masks) on the keystones, and feature two principal upper storeys united by a giant order of pilasters and a heavy entablature at the top with high rectangular windows and a hip or mansard roof with alternatingly shaped dormers (at the Place des Victoires they are either arched or segmented whereas at the Place Louis-le-Grand they are arched or oval). The giant-order pilasters are a nod to the Palazzo dei Conservatori at the Campidoglio; however that palace lacked the ground floor arcade of the Parisian squares, which lift the pilasters high above the street to harmonize with the height ratio of the equestrian sculpture to its plinth.43 Place Louis-le-Grand also features four corner porticoes with engaged columns and a greater

8.6 (left) Place Louis-le-Grand, Paris. Detail from MichelÉtienne Turgot, Plan de Paris, engraving, 1734. Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich. 8.7 (right) Jules Hardouin-Mansart and others, Place Louis-leGrand, now Place Vendôme (1699–1708), Paris.

concentration of royal iconography, from trophies, fleurs-de-lys, and the letter “l ” to masks of Apollo and the Gallic cock. In fact unity of design was so important that the facades were built first (in 1689), although they were reconstructed ten years later by Hardouin-Mansart after the bankrupt king gave the project to the city and, except for a barracks, its plots were sold to financiers (as had happened at the Place des Victoires).44 In fact it was Louisiana adventurer John Law (see chapter 2) who encouraged the investments that brought the square to completion: as the speculative frenzy connected with his Compagnie des Indes reached its height in 1720 trading was even moved to the square, traders and bankers hawking shares out of temporary wooden booths.45 Nevertheless the Place Louis-leGrand maintained its original ideological function as a

Urban Idealism in France and the Seventeenth-Century Colonies 181

place royale, centring upon François Girardon’s monumental equestrian sculpture of the Sun King, even if it never became an important centre for royal spectacle. Louis had already made his most audacious move in 1669 when he demolished the defensive walls and moat around the city’s northern periphery to demonstrate that his military victories and that Vauban’s expanding ceinture de fer were turning Paris into a safe haven (Vauban himself thought it was a bad idea).46 In place of the ramparts – barely two decades old – he laid down a promenade (known as the Cours) featuring a wide, tree-lined avenue for his subjects to enjoy a healthy, pleasurable walk in a city known for choked, disease-ridden neighbourhoods. It stretched from the Porte Saint-Antoine to the present-day Place de la Concorde and was to continue around the left bank, but the extension was delayed. To celebrate the novelty of this act of hubris Louis erected permanent triumphal arches where the gates of the city once stood – the Port Saint-Bernard (1670), Port Saint-Antoine (1671; it replaced a 1585 original), Port Saint-Denis (1671–76), and Port Saint-Martin (1674–77) – recreating Romanstyle defensive architecture in a city which no longer needed to be defended (fig. 1.4).47 In a single gesture the king demonstrated his invincibility and his dedication to modernity and to the welfare and recreation of his people. Louis’s innovations were part of a larger imperialist ideology promoted by geometricians who – combining the rationalism of René Descartes (1596–1650) with the utopianism of Filarete, Alberti, and More – envisioned even more radical transformations for Paris. They argued that the capital should be nothing less than a physical reflection of good government and the geography of France. In Discours de la méthode (1637) Descartes unfavourably compared the disorder of traditional towns with their crooked streets and mismatched houses with the new cities of the engineer architect, proposing that a city built by one man is superior to one built by multiple architects: “Thus, these old cities, which, being at first only small towns, have become large cities with the passing of time, are usually

182

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

so badly drawn out (compassées), compared to the regular towns which an engineer traces out as he wishes on level ground, that … one would rather say that it is chance and not the will of men guided by reason which has so arranged them.”48 In the mid-seventeenthcentury manuscript Idées politiques de l’empire françois, dedicated to Cardinal Richelieu, the anonymous author recommends Paris’s complete reconstruction on a pattern of concentric circles and radiating streets to segregate and control the citizens, an instrument of surveillance one scholar compares to prison architecture.49 This circular Paris was to be a microcosm of two larger outer circles, the inner one delineating France’s current territorial borders and the outer one the yet-tobe-conquered French “Empire” (“Empire françois” or “Galliarum Imperium”).50 Thus the pré carré becomes a pré rond. This text is particularly relevant to the subject of this book: by using the language of empire the author shows that French philosophers were testing out ideas about imperialism at home before they applied them in any systematic way to France’s overseas possessions. In fact it is particularly significant that Richelieu was the dedicatee, not only given his tireless efforts to promote France’s actual empire (see chapters 1 and 2), but because he hired Jacques Lemercier (1585–1654) to design his own small idealized town of Richelieu in Poitou – a rectangle with a grid of streets and a main square with a church on it – to accompany a chateau that was never built (ca. 1635–40).51 Richelieu’s rational town reflected the first minister’s views that “whoever cannot or will not put his house in order cannot bring great order to a State.”52 The author of Idées politiques maintains that as a physical reflection of the nation and its ruler Paris should be bound to the rest of France with “straight and very long lines [lignes droites fort estendues]” radiating outward from the centre.53 He chose a circular Paris because the circle is “the most noble, the largest, and the most perfect of all the shapes,” and he divided it into four quarters aligned with the cardinal directions.54 This “Platonic City, Empress of the cities of Europe,” would have fifty gates bearing the name and arms of

the emperor but – anticipating Louis XIV’s demolition of the ramparts – no walls.55 The Seine would be spanned by two wide stone bridges – perhaps he was inspired by the Pont Neuf – at the eastern and western extremities of a “beautiful and large circular street” called “rue Impériale.”56 As with Louis XIV’s Cours, the author envisioned open walkways for the citizens, and recommended that “all the embankments and riversides of the Seine be free, and that no building should impede the liberty of pedestrians, and of horsemen, nor the carriages nor boats, and that the well-paved and clean streets maintain their symmetry without allowing any building to get in the way.”57 The rest of his innovations were political and social: Paris should be divided into one hundred equal parishes and the world’s biggest palace should sit at the centre.58 Each quarter should contain a “beautiful square surrounded by beautiful houses capable of housing a Court in the form of a Presidium” under the authority of a central parliament, and, echoing More, each parish should have an infirmary.59 Another Cartesian named Gérard de Cordemoy published Divers traitez de métaphysique, d’histoire et de politique (Paris, 1691) at a time when Louis’s building activities were already beginning to slow down. His book, which concentrates on provincial capitals, has less to tell us about geometry or style but much about social control and education. In his recommendations for urban design Cordemoy proposes that each city have a palace in the centre capable of lodging the captain and the officers of the captaincy; also each city should have an apartment for the governor of the province for when he visits.60 There should also be a “Palais de la Ville” for the magistrate and all the officers of the magistracy with lodgings also for the president for when he visits the city.61 Finally, each city should have a treasury with an apartment for the intendant and another for the assembly of notables, as well as five academies (for religion, law, rhetoric, sciences, and fine arts), separate quarters for workers and retail merchants that should not overlap with those of the other citizens, and one or more hospices for travellers in each quarter.62 Since the

overseas settlements were officially provinces of France these recommendations had relevance for the colonies. The rage for idealized renovations of Paris continued unabated in the eighteenth century, and although many of them were quite radical – Richard Wittman aptly characterizes them as “a rash of megalomaniacal proposals” – they never involved a complete reconstruction of the city as did their seventeenth-century predecessors.63 Such were Robert Pitrou’s Recueil de différents projects d’architecture (Paris, 1756), with illustrations by Jacques-François Blondel, which presented a vast scheme for interconnecting squares, bridges, quays, and public architecture for the Île de la Cité, or the even larger three-volume Projets des embellissements de la ville et fauxbourgs de Paris published in the same year by a lawyer named Guillaume Poncet de la Grave – allegedly an inspiration for the Baron Haussmann – which was overflowing with projects for new squares, avenues, and public buildings including a Place Louis XV featuring a cluster of fountains and sculptures, four ranges of facades based on the Louvre colonnade, and a panorama of the Siege of Berg-op-Zoom.64 A particularly direct model for utopian cities in the colonies was the Vaubanian garrison town (see chapter 7), particularly the nine he built ex nihilo (fig. 8.8). They typically combined complex radiating ramparts with orthogonal urban plans and a central, usually rectangular, place d’armes. The central square usually housed the administrative buildings and often a church, and sometimes a second square served the town hall, shops, and a market like a bastide. The town also had a hospital, fountains, a barracks and officers’ pavilion (usually along the curtain wall), and opulent city gates approached by drawbridges; the arsenal and powder magazines were kept far from residences and were often incorporated into the ramparts.65 Residential zones, or “maisons de bourgeois” were arranged into “cantons” delineated by the quadrillage. The place d’armes was a combination civilian space and military parade ground. Similarly, the wide principal streets leading to the square were not just for promenading but were designed to accommodate three chariots de

Urban Idealism in France and the Seventeenth-Century Colonies 183

8.8 Jean François de Montaigu, plan relief of the Town of NeufBrisach designed by Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban on a scale of 1/600, wood, paper, silk, metal, and paint, 1703–06 (restored 1782, 1936). Hotel des Invalides, Paris.

front, large military vehicles. These innovations are best reflected in the projects for Mont-Louis and especially Neuf-Brisach, his largest ex nihilo town.66 By contrast Lille centred on a hexagonal place d’armes with a radial arrangement of avenues that Robert Berger suggests are meant to represent the rays of the sun and therefore the Sun King.67 The idealized geometric forms of Vauban’s city ramparts would have pleased Cartesian

184

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

theorists: they included a square (Fort-Louis-du-Rhin), a pentagon (Huningue and Mont-Royale), a hexagon (Longwy, Sarrelouis, Phalsbourg), and an octagon (Neuf-Brisach).68 Perhaps to compensate for the monarchy’s faltering prestige, the places royales constructed under Louis XV were even more grandiose than those of his predecessor, expanding beyond schemes for individual squares to engage with their wider urban context, incorporating markets, canals, fountains, and major civic and military structures. One notable difference was a lack of royal enthusiasm for these projects, which were promoted instead by municipal bodies. Critics such as La Font

de Saint-Yenne and Denis Diderot openly criticized this royal neglect, helping to stimulate a widespread nostalgia for the era of Colbert.69 The Place Louis XV in Paris attracted unprecedented interest: a staggering 150 projects were made in all shapes and sizes (see, for example, fig. 10.8) with locations on either side of the Seine, on the islands, across from the east facade of the Louvre, and even on a bridge before a rectangular square was finally built facing the Tuileries by Ange-Jacques Gabriel in 1754–63 (now Place de la Concorde; fig. 8.9). Its equestrian statue by Edme Bouchardon cost an incredible 480,000 livres.70 The location disappointed many intellectuals because it was insufficiently urban: it was far from the city centre and surrounded by forested groves and gardens instead of ranges of buildings. In fact the grandest places royales of the era were built in provincial cities such

as Bordeaux and Montpellier – in the latter case a belated Place Louis XIV – two urban spaces that would have a direct impact on projects in Cap-François and Port-au-Prince. The Bordeaux Place Royale (1730–55; fig. 8.10), known today as the Place de la Bourse, was conceived a mere four years after the end of the Regency.71 Although inspired by the Place Louis-le-Grand in Paris it had more to do with urban renewal and Bordeaux’s transformation from a walled city into a major seaport than it did with fondness for the monarch, and its long, strikingly horizontal series of facades faces away from the historic centre toward the River Garonne (the city’s 8.9 Nicolas Pérignon, view of Place Louis XV, Paris, before the construction of the bridge, watercolour and pastels, before 1782. Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Urban Idealism in France and the Seventeenth-Century Colonies 185

access to the Atlantic). Like tram cars the ranges line the quayside to the north and south and enclose the u-shaped square at the centre.72 In the square the westernmost range is broken into three segments to admit two streets (the central segment forms a pavilion), and at the juncture of the two flanking ranges the corners are canted on a 45-degree angle as at the Place Louis le Grand (fig. 8.7). Like its Parisian predecessors, the Bordeaux Place Royale incorporated multiple entities, including speculative residential properties, a stock exchange, and customs and merchants’ offices.73 The 8.10 Jacques V. Gabriel and Ange-Jacques Gabriel, Place de la Bourse, formerly Place Louis XV, Bordeaux, 1730–55.

186

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

Place Royale had an immaculate royal pedigree: designed by Premier Architect du Roi Jacques V Gabriel (1667–1742), author of several of the mansions on the Place Louis-le-Grand, it was based on a project by Robert de Cotte (1728) of the Bâtiments and was finished by Jacques’s son Ange-Jacques, designer of the Paris Place Louis XV. The scheme engages more profoundly with its surroundings than did any of the Paris places royales, generating over a century of urban renewal. It penetrated deep into the city via two diagonal radiating streets – the straightened rue Saint-Rémy and the new rue Royale (now rue Fernand-Philippart), the latter ending at another new square called the Place du Marché-Royale (now Place du Parlement). Gabriel’s

8.11 Jean-Antoine Giral, Place Louis XIV, now Place (or Promenade) du Peyrou, Montpellier, begun 1767.

scheme also introduced two of the city’s grandest public spaces to the northwest: the Allée de Tourny and Place de la Comédie.74 The buildings of the Bordeaux Place Louis XV also echo those of the Place Louis-le-Grand with blind rusticated arcades on the ground floor, a continuous row of giant-order pilasters straddling the upper two storeys and porticoes of engaged columns in strategic places. However the Bordeaux square has heavier sculptural decoration, especially the trophées, which recall those of the Hôtel des Invalides (fig. 1.3), and the lively mascarons over the ground-floor arches, some depicting Africans in reference to the slave trade which was one of the city’s main sources of income. A Versailles-style balustrade surmounts the entablature, adding to its palatial appearance. One of the chief masons who worked on this project from 1730 was Étienne Dardan, entrepreneur des ouvrages du roi (royal contractor), who was the father of Joseph-Antoine Dardan, architect of CapFrançois (see chapter 6).75

The place royale (Place du Peyrou) in Montpellier, begun in 1767 by Jean-Antoine Giral, was one of the last in France – it was not even completed at the outbreak of the Revolution – yet it was named after Louis XIV (fig. 8.11).76 The dedication was driven by local religious politics: Languedoc historically was a stronghold of Protestantism and the first project for a place royale was proposed in the immediate aftermath of Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 in which he abolished freedom of religion for Huguenots. Like the Place Louis XV in Paris it was more of an open promenade and was similarly located on the western fringe of the city, offering panoramic views of the surrounding countryside. Both squares are rectangles with canted corners divided into panels and adorned with trophées and other sculpted decoration. Unlike its Parisian counterpart, it was linked on its western extremity to an aqueduct, for which Giral built an imposing hexagonal reservoir in the form of a Roman temple which also served as a belvedere. Surrounded only by a

Urban Idealism in France and the Seventeenth-Century Colonies 187

double row of espaliered trees and a low balustrade, the square was essentially a rural promenade, symbolic of the city’s ties to its territory, an effect enhanced by the tree-lined lower terraces on three sides accessed by five grand double staircases. Colonial Urbanism in the Seventeenth Century: Cayenne, Fort-Royal, and Quebec If French cities were submitted to such radical restructuring and heavy-handed ideology in the name of royal authority and trade it is small wonder that rational town planning schemes proliferated in the French Atlantic Empire. In fact, since these towns were built from scratch a far greater number of idealized urban schemes were constructed or planned there than in the metropole, frequently based on an orthogonal grid of streets and surrounded by polygonal ramparts with a place d’armes or, in nine cases, a place royale. In addition to the short-lived one in the Lower Town in Quebec City (1688–99; fig. 8.16), places royales were proposed or built at Mobile (1711–25; fig. 9.6), Kourou (1764–after 1776; figs. 3.19–20), Point-à-Pitre (1767–after 1792), Cap-François (1780–89; fig. 10.9), Longchamp (1782; fig. 9.15), Port-au-Prince (1788–90), and Les Cayes (1789; fig. 9.5), not to mention the centrepiece of a utopian “Place de Guerre” in Saint-Domingue (ca. 1791–93; fig. 10.7), named after a king who would soon be deprived of his head.77 Some simply bore the name while others aped the grandeur of French models, with features such as unified facades and royal statues. Yet the rationally planned town was a relative latecomer in the colonies: there is no evidence that any were built before Colbert’s tenure, and the form remained rare until the foundation of a new wave of southern settlements in Saint-Domingue, Louisiana, and Guiana between ca. 1710s and the 1730s. Colbert was enthusiastic about regularized towns, but those that survive were mostly built under the patronage of Philippe II, duc d’Orléans (regent of France 1715–23) and Louis XV’s ministers (particularly the duc de Choiseul, in office 1758–70). By 1789 grid-plan cities

188

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

of varying shapes and sizes graced all of the surviving French Atlantic colonies, from Port-au-Prince to Cayenne. But Descartes would not have been impressed with the earliest settlements: disorganized, crowded, and unhealthy, they gave little thought to open spaces or promenades, regularized public squares, or even straight streets for the mustering of troops. In most of them buildings were simply aligned with a road running along the coast or riverbank with a small gathering place on the water, sometimes with some trees for shade and a gibbet (fig. 10.3). Such was the Place des Carmes at Basse-Terre in Guadeloupe (ca. 1651), the oldest surviving square in the French Caribbean (fig. 8.12). Although missing its western half, this space, once bordered by the old Carmelite church on the west and the road leading to the Jesuit church (the present Carmelite church; fig. 15.4) on the east, still demonstrates the haphazard urban planning of the time, in spite of the attempt by a nineteenth-century bronze fountain to lend it civic dignity.78 French colonial towns were hastily built on rivers, islands, and natural promontories by people who had little or no building experience and they expanded and contracted according to the ebb and flow of immigration, disease, and war. Few were adequately fortified, although they had forts in them. Contemporary descriptions of seventeenth-century Cayenne or Île-Gorée make them sound more like a ship or even a child’s make-believe fortress than a town: minuscule streetless outposts with disordered wooden shacks bearing outsize names like “Palais du Gouvernement,” their populations living cheek by jowl and constantly on guard against human or natural dangers. Cayenne was a particularly illusory place: French Guiana’s colonial “capital” (chef-lieu) began life in 1634 as a tiny wooden palisaded company fort founded with Richelieu’s blessing. Abandoned and rebuilt two years later, it was swiftly deserted again, and rebuilt a third time upon the arrival of four hundred colonists in 1643, when the fort was named after the Galibi leader Cépérou, upon whose land it sat. Abandoned the next year when most of the population was slaughtered, the town was rebuilt by another French company (1652),

abandoned again, taken by the Dutch (1657–64), recaptured by Colbert’s flotilla under the seigneur de Tracy in 1664, sacked by the English (1666–67), captured one last time by the Dutch (1676), and finally retaken for France in 1677 by comte Jean II d’Estrées (1624– 1707).79 Only then, at a glacial pace and with little planning, did the scruffy post at the mouth of the Cayenne River start to resemble a village, as the colony, in the words of Emmanuel Lézy, made its “painful entry into the adult world.”80 A 1677 map of what was then called “Bourg Louis,” shows a jagged kidney bean–shaped palisade still flying the Dutch flag enclosing thirtyfour wooden structures on uneven terrain, mostly

8.12 Place des Carmes, Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe, ca. 1651. View northeast from the former seashore toward the street leading to the former Jesuit church (now rue Rémy Nainsouta).

scattered around a well, a little orangerie, and a chapel (fig. 8.13). All of this was guarded by a watchtower, a few meagre batteries, and a miniature star-shaped fort – “peu spacieux” according to a 1677 report, with walls so thin they were falling to pieces – on the squat promontory formed by Morne Cépérou.81 Governor Pierre de Sainte-Marthe de Lalande (ca. 1648–1692), who had grand plans for the town, remarked in 1685 that the residential quarter within the outer palisade

Urban Idealism in France and the Seventeenth-Century Colonies 189

was still “too large for the small number of inhabitants,” although once filled to capacity it would be “worthy of the name of the King.”82 The unpromising little capital was surrounded by rocky coastline, mosquito-infested mangrove swamps, trees with roots the size of a man’s torso, caimans, and five-metre-long green anacondas, and sat at the edge of a largely impenetrable Amazonian rainforest eight times the size of France. Few French colonies would be the subject of as many extravagant redevelopment schemes: indeed, in its rush to be “worthy of the name of the King” Cayenne became an object lesson precisely in how not to plan a colonial capital. The earliest orthogonal grid-plan towns in the French colonies were tentative and unimpressive: FortRoyal in Martinique (figs. 8.14–15), planned in 1669–71 but only realized over the course of over a century; and Lower Town (Basse-Ville) in Quebec City, reorganized in 1686 into a uneven quadrillage focused on an irregular square after a 1682 fire (figs. 8.16–17). Fort-Royal boasted the finest natural harbour in Martinique, the Cul-de-Sac Royal, and Lieutenant-General Jacques Dyel du Parquet (1606–58) erected a provisional palisaded wooden fortress in 1638 on the striking volcanic peninsula that overlooks the harbour on the east and a mangrove swamp called the Savane on the west. Even though rival Saint-Pierre became headquarters of the island colony in 1640, Fort-Royal was still the principal fortress; Governor-General Jean-Charles de Baas-Castelmore (d. 1677) enlarged it in 1672.83 But Fort-Royal compensated for its splendid strategic location by being a miserable place to live. The only flat surface, between the Rivière de Cornet and the Savane, was flood-prone, disease-ridden, and lacking in drinking water: between 1676 and 1694 the few hardy souls who had built shacks on the land endured dysentery, yellow fever, smallpox, the plague, three hurricanes, 8.13 Untitled plan of the town and fort of Cayenne (“Bourg Louis”), 1677. The town was built in 1652–53. The original church of SaintNicolas (1652–53) is on the lower right, marked “Esglise.” Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 14 DFC 5C .

190

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

and an earthquake.84 Even the refugee Brazilian Jews and Protestants who had been invited there in 1654 to jump-start the sugar industry fled for more salubrious regions. Ever oblivious to geographical realities, Colbert ordered the construction of a regularized “bourg” laid out in an elongated quadrillage of four longitudinal streets and three transverse ones (1669–77) as part of a campaign to build what he called a “town of great commerce.”85 Unlike planned towns in Spanish America (see chapter 9) the main square, called the Esplanade or Place d’Armes (now La Savane), was not at the centre but at one end of the grid, between the town and the fortress, and the plan made no provision for further public space – even the church of Saint-Louis (1678– ca. 1687) was hidden away among the houses. Progress was slow. Two maps of the grid from 1681 reveal only a scattering of houses along the beach road and a kitchen garden, grandly titled the “jardin du Roi,” still occupying part of the Savane (Colbert wanted it razed in 1678 for reasons of security).86 By the end of the next year dwellings appeared on all four longitudinal streets, but by 1686 the town still had only twenty-four houses.87 In 1686 Baas-Castelmore’s successor, the comte de Blénac (1622–96), had his engineer Jean-Baptiste de Caylus draw up a scheme to extend the town toward the north and west, and in 1692, with the transfer of the colonial capital to Fort-Royal, engineers oversaw the construction of a stone aqueduct, a reservoir for drinking water, and a canal along the northern extremity of the town (now Boulevard Général-de-Gaulle), and they finally drained the Savane, turning the mangrove swamp into an (unpaved) place for mustering troops. This work was carried out by one hundred “nègres de louage” on loan from a habitant named Duval at a cost of 12 sous per slave a day, as well as by engagé masons, carpenters, and joiners who were paid 40 sous a day. 8.14 Marc Payen, Geometrical Plan of Fort-Royal on the Island of Martinique, ink and colours on paper, 1682. The “Savane” is the section marked “Esplanade.” Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 13 DFC 30A .

192

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

8.15 The Savane and Fort, Fort-de-France (Fort-Royal), Martinique.

Unsurprisingly, the engagés were not enthusiastic. Caylus reported in 1692 that the salaries are generous however they are not happy with them, and they never return to their ateliers happily; they consider Fort-Royal to be like a prison, and the work like torture, because food is sold to them dearly and their lodgings cost them a great deal; instead of at the plantation, where they are well lodged and nourished at the master’s table, [where] they earn 130 to 150 livres of sugar. The plantation owner on the other hand

194

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

complains that we have taken away his workers, and at the end of the day we end up with three unsatisfied parties at once. The worker who does not believe he is paid enough and who thinks he is enslaved; the plantation owner who grumbles against the supposed injustice made to him; and the engineer who powerlessly curses the spitefulness and aggravation of a worker who only serves with vexation and under constraint.88 Despite these infelicitous conditions Caylus was able by 1698 to present the Ministry of the Marine with a

map showing the full extent of the grid between the river, two canals, and Savane – although the canal, many of the streets, and the hospital still only existed on paper.89 The total area, including the Savane, was about 1 kilometre long by 550 metres wide. Fort-Royal continued to grow at a snail’s pace, especially after a levee was built in 1726 and the canal and drainage were completed in 1763–64. In 1764 Governor General François Louis de Salignac, marquis de Fénélon (1722–64) and Intendant Jean-Baptiste Guignard (1717– 87) laid the blame for the town’s slow growth on the laziness of the colonists who had been granted lots in the grid in 1722: The repeated orders of His Majesty … to populate Fort-Royal to a considerable degree, have not borne fruit as they should have, because of the negligence of most concessionaires, who have not developed their lots at all; some of them began establishments which they soon abandoned, so that the Town of Fort Royal, instead of growing has found itself reduced over 30 years to a small number of streets, while the rest was only a heap of ruins, or a swamp, of which the fumes, in making the air unwholesome, disgusted those who had been able to establish themselves there … Several individuals were quick to ask for concessions for some of the newly drained plots, the Government granted them the title; but when these concessionaires have set out to build on their land, they met opposition from the alleged previous concessionaires.90 Acting upon a law that voided titles to lots after they had been abandoned for thirty years, the government seized the old concessionaires’ property in the name of the king and sold them to new proprietors. But there were still plenty of vacant lots in the grid by the time of the Revolution, and it was only in the 1820s, with a massive public building drive in the northeast sector of the town and a campaign to construct quays along the Baie des Flamands, now the cruise ship terminal, that Colbert’s

grid plan realized its full potential – nearly 150 years after his death.91 The planned neighbourhood in Quebec City’s commercial and residential Lower Town was even less impressive than its Caribbean precursor, although a combination of overenthusiastic scholarship and Québécois patriotism have made it out to be a key moment in North American urbanism (figs. 8.16–17). Although several projects were mooted to double or triple the size of this meagre plot of land – one of them with a grand square at the fulcrum between the original grid and a much more spacious and regularized one to the north – the irregular, wedge-shaped Basse-Ville never measured more than about 550 by 170 metres (six times smaller than the grid at Fort-Royal) and by the 1759 English Conquest it boasted only two longitudinal and two latitudinal streets.92 Claims have also been made that as early as the 1660s the Upper Town – it contained all of the government and major ecclesiastical foundations and was situated on one of the most dramatic and defensible promontories in North America – was based on a rational, radial plan, with streets extending outward diagonally from the Place d’Armes. However, while it is true that the city did possess some straight streets (e.g., rue Saint-Louis and rue Mont-Carmel), they were far from being regularly distributed, and when one scholar imposed a radial diagram onto a 1664 map, only two streets out of six lined up with his orthogonals.93 In reality the Upper Town’s monuments were aligned according to its hilly and haphazard topography and the relative size of its competing institutions. In the 1660s, the giant Jesuit residence sat on a rise opposite the tiny parish church, and was abutted on a 45-degree angle by the equally impressive Ursuline property, while the more modest Hospitaller and Recollect buildings were wedged into the northwest sector, and a temporary palisaded Huron reduction between Fort Saint-Louis and the parish church further prevented the realization of a rational town plan (fig. 14.3).94 Quebec City was not even permanently fortified until the 1691 arrival of Robert de Villeneuve, the first ingénieur du Roi in Nouvelle-France, appointed

Urban Idealism in France and the Seventeenth-Century Colonies 195

directly by Vauban. Villeneuve found the extant defensive walls, paid for by a tax levied the year before William Phipp’s siege of the city in 1690, as being “very weak” (fort foible).95 Indeed the Upper Town was never regularized: a 1752 map by Chaussegros de Léry proposes an ambitious grid of streets in the southwest focused on a spacious square, but like the expansion projects for the Lower Town it was never built.96 Before the fire and renovations of 1682–86 BasseVille was vulnerable, crowded, and – given its location on the fast-flowing and dangerous St Lawrence River between Cap-aux-Diamants on the south and the Saint Charles River on the north – it was prone to floods and attack. Samuel de Champlain had built his first two factories, or “habitations,” there in 1608 (fig. 12.1) and 1624–26, but wisely soon constructed his principal fort (Fort Saint-Louis) in the upper town in 1620, which although still of timber was only reachable by a precipitous, winding path.97 Champlain also grandly proposed building an ex nihilo town called Ludovica in the name of the king on the Saint Charles River that would be “almost as big as Saint-Denis” and have a church dedicated to the Redeemer, but it was never begun; meanwhile the Upper Town was laid out in 1636, the year after his death.98 Lower Town grew considerably between 1655 and 1658, but because most of the houses were built of wood, two-thirds were destroyed in the 1682 conflagration. Before the fire, as attested by maps from 1660–64, the “Ville Basse” was a jumble of unevenly grouped buildings with two main streets, and an irregular Place d’Armes (its original name) on the south end (fig. 14.3).99 Reconstruction work was spearheaded by the merchant Charles Aubert de la Chesnaye (1632–1702), Intendant Jacques de Meulles (d. 1703), and hydrographer Jean-Baptiste-Louis Franquelin (ca. 1651–after 1712), who took the opportunity to straighten the quarter into an elongated quadrillage with a Place du Marché on the south surrounded by about twenty mostly stone houses. As in Fort-Royal the square was off to the side instead of in the middle of the grid; however the Crown rejected plans for enlarging and fortifying the town, giving

196

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

priority instead to the construction of powder magazines.100 Villeneuve’s 1685 plan, recognized as the most accurate and detailed to date, shows a square called “le marché” (the former gardens of Champlain’s factory) located on the southern end adjacent the “vieux magazin du Roy,” which was the proposed site of the chapel to be built “next year” (the future church of NotreDame-des-Victoires).101 Under orders from de Meulles and Governor Joseph-Antoine le Fèbvre de La Barre (1622–1688), Villeneuve proposed a new configuration for the market square, to be called “Place de Québec,” in 1685, an elongated half-trapezoid with houses enclosing its north, west, and east ranges (the east one split by a street) and the south end open to the old royal warehouse, which abutted it on an awkward diagonal.102 As at Fort-Royal, manpower was a constant preoccupation, especially since local workers were expensive, for which Villeneuve offered a solution: “as the workers are very costly in this country, since they each earn three livres a day, it would be worthwhile assembling a Company of Limousins whom one would engage for three years and pay fifteen sous a day; they would work during the summer on construction projects, and during the winter carve stone for the works of the following year; moreover these people could serve as soldiers if needed.”103 We do not know if his suggestion was carried out but a troop of stonecutters from Limoges did work on the church at Vieux-Habitants in Guadeloupe at the beginning of the next century (fig. 15.8). The west range of the Place de Québec was to be occupied entirely by the house of architect Claude Baillif (see chapter 6) raised on a vaulted arcade; however the merchants 8.16 (opposite) Josué Dubois Berthelot de Beaucours: detail from Plan of the Town of Quebec, Capital of Nouvelle-France, 1693. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 03 DFC 356B . At the bottom is the regularized plan of Basse-Ville with “The Square in the Centre of which is a Pedestal Carrying the Bust of the King” (marked “D ”). The church of Notre-Dame-des-Victoires is labelled “C ” but is unrealistically straightened out whereas in reality it was on a sharp angle. In the Upper Town the cathedral is labelled “L ” and the Jesuit church and compound are directly above it, to the left.

8.17 A view of Basse-Ville, Quebec, detail from JeanBaptiste Decouagne, Map of the Government of Quebec drawn in the Year 1709, ink and colours on paper, 1709. Notre-Dame-des-Victoires is to the left and the former Place Royale is just to the right of the church. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département Cartes et Plans.

refused to allow a single individual to own so much of the square and blocked its construction even though it had been approved by the king.104 The scholarship becomes both muddled and fanciful when it comes to the origin and nature of the Place Royale, the transformed Place du Marché. James Kornwolf claims that it was already called “Place Royale” in 1660, which as we have seen is not possible.105 Cleary and Harold Kalman (along with most other scholars) trace the new designation to 1686, the date of the arrival of Intendant Jean Bochart de Champigny (after 1645–1720), who allegedly placed a “bronze bust” of Louis XIV in the square in that year.106 Although that year is a plausible departure point, the first firm evidence of the Place du Marché’s elevation to a Place Royale is a 1688 drawing of the city by Franquelin which depicts the pedestal and the statue (“Effigie du roy”) and identifies the square as the “Place Royalle,” a title repeated in a 1699 copy also attributed to Franquelin.107 A 1692 map by Villeneuve simply calls it “La Place”

198

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

but illustrates a little gated enclosure at the centre with a circle, which suggests that the pedestal was still there.108 This map also shows that the king’s warehouse had been demolished and replaced with Notre-Damedes-Victoires, still under construction, and that it faced the square’s south side on the same awkward diagonal. A 1693 map by Josué Dubois Berthelot de Beaucours (inaccurately) represents the space as a near perfect square – Notre-Dame-des-Victoires is straightened out to adjoin the square on a right angle as it never did – and calls it “The Square in the centre of which is a pedestal supporting the bust (le buste) of the King” – the only specific reference to a bust (fig. 8.16).109 The 1699 map is the last time that the Place Royale bore that name, and by around 1700 it was again called Place du Marché, at which point, according to Gaumond and Cleary who cite no sources, the bust went to the Intendant’s Palace where they assume it was destroyed in the fire of 1713.110 The little town as it appears in a 1709 map by Jean-Baptiste Decouagne (1687–1740) was still

a cluster of unevenly sized buildings around an equally irregular square with the new church of Notre-Damedes-Victoires dominating its left side (fig. 8.17). To summarize: we know that the main square in Basse-Ville was a Place Royale from at least 1688 to 1699, and that a gated enclosure with a pedestal bearing a bust of Louis XIV stood in its centre.111 There is no evidence that it was made of bronze as Cleary first maintains, or, as René Chartrand and William Eccles state and Marc Grignon hints, that it was a copy of Gianlorenzo Bernini’s marble bust of the king (1665), Eccles even giving the wrong medium for Bernini’s original: “It was likely during these first days in the colony that Champigny had the copy of the bronze head of Louis XIV by Bernini placed on a pedestal in the market place in Lower Town. This extraordinarily fine work he had brought with him so that the Canadians could know what their monarch looked like.”112 I think that it is also misleading to hint, as Grignon seems to do, that Baillif’s proposed house with its vaulted arcades was meant to recall the Place Royale in Paris (fig. 8.1), which would imply that the then Place de Québec was already being conceived of as a stylistically unified space in emulation of its Parisian prototype.113 In contrast to the grander urban schemes of the next century there is no evidence that the town planners of Quebec pursued any such stylistic agenda. The romantic image many have of the Basse-Ville Place Royale has been exacerbated by twentieth-century Quebec nationalism and what Marc Saint-Hilaire has called the “symbolic value” of “the affirmation of the French character of Quebec society.”114 Only in 1943 was the square, known since 1890 as the Carré Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, renamed “Place Royale,” and in 1960–67 a heavy-handed reconstruction – complete with a bronze bust after Bernini – gave the space a deceivingly old-world character that has encouraged people, including curators and scholars, to assume that it has always been called “Place Royale.”115 Typical is a plaque on one of the walls which implies that Champlain himself gave it that name: “Place Royale, cradle of New France. Here on this land Samuel Champlain founded Quebec in 1608.” The

uneasy mixture of fact and patriotism shows that we need to be careful when studying elements of the province’s French-era patrimony that still have nationalist resonances today. Back in the land of El Dorado, Cayenne was the focus of a litany of frequently outsized regeneration schemes, some using the extant footprint of the town as a point of departure and others calling for an expansion onto the flat land to the east called the Savane (today the Place des Palmistes and the grid of streets from rue Léon Gontron Damas to boulevard Jubelin) – although as it happens the Savane was not developed until the mid-eighteenth century. But the first priority following the expulsion of the Dutch in 1677 was to build defensive walls and extend the town to the northeast to form a regular hexagon with bastions at the corners. These projects typically ignored extant civilian structures: like the anonymous project for rebuilding Paris they reveal the urban designer’s preference for pure geometry and for operating from a clean slate. Although a primitive project was already in the works in 1677 it made no pretense toward regularity and proposed constructing a ditch, parapet, and banquette (platform along the inside of the parapet) with a double palisade of poles and citrus-tree hedges around the extant retrenchment.116 Citrus-tree hedges became a cheap and effective way of fortifying towns throughout the French tropics: as M. Renau wrote in a 1700 report on Cayenne: “a lemon hedge is incomparably better than any palisade, because besides the fact that the lemon trees are lined with thorns longer than a finger, you will always require cannon to shoot it down, the sword cannot do anything; moreover this requires no more care than that of clipping them like a garden hedge and they will last a hundred years; by contrast you would have to renew the palisades annually if you put them there, the great heat and rains would rot the poles that are driven into the ground.”117 Many of the impressive Vauban-style ramparts on fortified city plans produced on the rue Barbette or on-site in the colonies were in fact nothing more than rows of lemon trees – we will see more of them in later chapters.

Urban Idealism in France and the Seventeenth-Century Colonies 199

The first of the hexagonal plans for Cayenne, by Vauban himself, dates from around 1689 (fig. 8.18), although it was modified in 1690 by a local ingénieur des travaux du Roi named Paquine because Vauban’s geometrical perfection did not fit the irregular contour of the riverside and Morne Cépérou – it was criticized for being “pas juste” and “mal placé.”118 Governor Lefebvre de la Barre, newly demoted from his position in Quebec, ordered all extant houses to be demolished and the earthworks, woodcutting, quarrying, and masonry to be built by one thousand slaves provided in rotating groups by the colonists (the slaves wore baskets on their heads to carry the earth); these man were assisted by soldiers and at times led by professional stonecutters and carpenters.119 Nevertheless, during construction in 1689–92 Paquine complained about slaves who failed to turn up – even the governor sequestered his slave carpenters to work on his plantation without warning – and his work crews were frequently more than one hundred or two hundred short. Slogging daily through violent rain, hail, heat, and periodic attacks by Amerindians in canoes in the pay of the Dutch, Paquine and his slaves and engagés completed the basic ramparts, which he still referred to as Vauban’s project, by 1692. Construction killed more than one hundred people over the three years it took to build the basic ramparts.120 The finished compromise hexagon was illustrated in two anonymous presentation plans of 1696 sent to the Ministry of the Marine by Governor PierreÉléonore de La Ville de Férolles.121 These plans blithely ignored whatever buildings existed in the town, including the Church of Saint-Nicolas, and gave no indication about the future layout of streets. The first project to populate the ramparts was Bernard Renau d’Eliçagaray’s scheme of 15 January 1700, which distributed houses loosely around three main blocks on an arc and introduced a “Place d’Armes” adjacent the northernmost block (present-day Place Léopold-Héder) and directly facing the church (fig. 8.19).122 The church (lower left) was left where it was – so far from the fortress that its apse extended into the curtain walls, a security hazard that provoked

200

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

8.18 Paquine, Plan of Cayenne, 1696. Design by Sébastian Le Prestre de Vauban, altered by Paquine, Ingénieur des Travaux du Roi, to fit the site. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 14 DFC 21B .

repeated demolition orders, although the authorities got around to it only in 1799–1802 (see chapter 9). D’Eliçagaray’s project again indicates that all extant housing was to be demolished – la Barre’s demolition order evidently had not been carried out – and replaced by dwellings organized into these embryonic îlots: “[s]ince the houses which are currently in place are in poor condition and of little importance, the streets will be formed as they are on the plan, and it will no longer be permitted to build except on the alignments which the Engineer will provide in conformity with the plan.”123 The engineer boasted about his garrison town that “[t]his town would be very respectable in Europe, and is certainly unassailable in this country.”124 Judging by the future layout of the government buildings of the colony and the current grid of streets in the area west of the Place des Palmistes it appears that d’Eliçagaray’s plan was not deemed so respectable after all and designers continued to bombard the king with ambitious schemes for cities with star-shaped ramparts and regularized grids well into the eighteenth century – in one case it would have necessitated the complete destruction of the town, the fortress included. Let us now turn to these and other grandiose plans as, in chapter 9, we move further into the eighteenth century and particularly into the eras of the Dukes of Orléans and Choiseul.

8.19 Bernard Renau d’Eliçagaray, Plan of the Town of Cayenne and Proposed Works to be Executed, ink and colours on paper, 1700. The church is breaching the walls at the lower of the two landward ramparts (facing northeast) fronted by the Place d’Armes, and the Jesuit residence is on the lower (northern) side of the square to the right of the church. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aixen-Provence), 14 DFC 30A .

202

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

9

The Planned City in the French Atlantic World, 1700–1789

seVenteenth-century PlAnned toWns in the French Atlantic Empire were little more than embryotic neighbourhoods wedged into an existing urban fabric created by decades of haphazard growth along the shoreline and riverbanks. Early attempts at orthogonal gridiron plans, such as Quebec City’s Lower Town or late seventeenth-century Cayenne (figs. 8.16–19), were tentative, small in scale, and irregular. Only Fort-Royal (figs. 8.14–15) anticipated the more regularized schemes of the following century, although it developed slowly. Some of the most important towns, notably Saint-Pierre in Martinique or Basse-Terre in Guadeloupe, were so restricted by their mountainous settings that planners never even tried to redesign them. In the eighteenth century three alternative town models appeared in the French Atlantic. The first, which we have seen in chapter 3, was a short-lived Spanish-inspired reduction plan used in the first half of the century for the missions in North America and Guiana and the secular towns built on top of them, as at Kourou and Sinnamary (figs. 3.18–21). The second was a new kind of garden town exclusively found in Guiana in the 1780s, an Enlightenment-inspired form meant to serve as the urban residence for agriculturalists whose plantations were arrayed along the adjacent river shore. These settlements fused town and country in innovative ways through spacious allotments, an emphasis on public green space, advanced land reclamation systems, and a preponderance of waterworks. Some emulated garden design quite directly, as with

Bourg-Villebois on the Approuague River (fig. 9.16), which adapted its street layout from the Royal Fruit and Vegetable Garden at Versailles. The third, most common, and longest-lasting model was the large-scale quadrillage formed of rectangular îlots and usually focused around a main square. This was the form which civic planners – significantly, the very same planners – chose when they redesigned Kourou in the 1770s after abandoning the reduction layout. Their decision reveals a conviction that the Frenchstyle quadrillage was superior to foreign models: in fact a patriotic celebration of French design was a major motivation behind the form’s proliferation throughout Louisiana and the tropical colonies. In Guiana, where several ambitious quadrillage projects were mooted for Cayenne (figs. 9.11–13), envious French engineers were specifically aiming to outdo the Dutch town of Paramaribo, which despite being much more prosperous was aesthetically chaotic – a jumble of mismatching streets, uneven residential blocks, and wandering canals.1 Colbert was the main proponent of the colonial quadrillage town such as it was in the seventeenth century, but in the eighteenth century the duc d’Orléans and Louis XV’s minister Choiseul were the form’s main masterminds.2 The English and especially Spanish colonies also used regularized gridiron city plans but neither of these powers demonstrated the same degree of interest in idealized geometry promoted by France. By the eighteenth century France was the unchallenged leader in European urban and garden design, its forms imitated from St Petersburg to London, and French planners were proud to declare the ascendancy of French style in their overseas colonies. Seldom had colonial planning been so stylish – and seldom had it been so oblivious to its setting or the people who lived there. Planned Cities in Spanish America, British America, and the United States Spanish America pioneered the grid-plan town almost a century before Samuel de Champlain built his shortlived palisaded post in Saint-Croix, now Maine, in

1604.3 A whole string of towns spread throughout Spanish America beginning with Panamá La Vieja (1519), Mexico City (1521; fig. 9.1), Oaxaca (1527), and Santiago de Guatemala (1527), and foundational plans (trazas) show that they were already as far south as San Juan de la Frontera in present-day Argentina in the 1560s. In fact Santo Domingo, the main Spanish town on the island where France later founded SaintDomingue, may have had a grid plan as early as in 1502.4 In the Spanish Empire orthogonal grid-plan cities were the law: as early as 1516 King Ferdinand called for what he called “ordered” towns and Philip II enshrined the gridiron plan organized around a central plaza in his Ordenanzas de Descubrimiento, Población y Pacificación de las Indias, inspired by Vitruvius and Alberti, which was promulgated in July of 1573.5 Unlike their French counterparts Spanish American towns and cities made no pretence toward beauty in urban design: eminently practical, the gridiron eased traffic congestion and allowed for infinite expansion at minimal cost. Some settlements – Mexico City, Cholula (Mexico), and to a lesser degree Cuzco – partly followed pre-existing pre-Hispanic layouts; however the impact of Amerindian city planning was much more limited than some scholars have maintained (fig. 9.2).6 Town planners tended not to be professional architects but soldiers who learned a little surveying on the side: such was Alonso García Bravo, the man who designed the grids for the first four mainland cities, including Mexico City (1521). A soldier of fortune in Hernán Cortés’s army, he was self-taught as an alarife (builder). As Hugh Thomas remarks: “García Bravo was no more a professional architect than Martín López [a captain] had been a shipwright. His efforts at construction had hitherto been confined to helping with the fortress at Villa Rica, and building a palisade (Palenque) to act as a hospital for sick soldiers. That was how Cortés decided that he was a good ‘geometrician.’”7 Stylishness and originality were not the remit of Spanish colonial town planners. In fact the trazas are understated on purpose so that the giant churches and, to a lesser degree, civic structures could stand out, and they were meant to be

The Planned City in the French Atlantic World, 1700–1789

205

9.1 Manuel Ignacio de Jesús del Águila, Ichnographic Plan of the City of Mexico, 1794. Library of Congress, Washington, DC .

familiar rather than impressive, so that a traveller from Huancavelica in Peru arriving in, say, Jujuy in northern Argentina, would know how to get to the church and town hall, where to go shopping, and generally how to get around. There was no equivalent to the French idea of gloire in city planning in the Spanish Empire.

206

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

King Philip II’s Ordenanzas set the tone for Spanish American town planning well into the eighteenth century – although in practice their more idealized features were often left out in favour of pre-existing customs, alternative models from a planner’s home town, other sources such as Vitruvius, or because of adjustments to geographical realities.8 Philip ordered town planners to divide the site into “squares, streets, and building lots beginning with the main square from which streets are to run to the gates and principal roads and leaving

sufficient open space so that even if the town grows, it can always spread in the same manner.”9 The central plaza was either in the centre of the grid or, in seacoast towns, on the water, and although Philip believed that rectangular plazas were better suited for ceremonies the standard Spanish American plaza was the plain square of the earliest trazas. Philip ordered that plazas and principal streets were to be arcaded along their perimeters for the convenience of merchants and private houses were not allowed on the plaza. Four main streets were supposed to exit the plaza in the middle of each side, and two from each corner (this was to avoid exposing the plaza to the four principal winds), but in practice the middle streets were usually dispensed with. The king particularly emphasized the grid plan’s ease of

expansion: “[t]he streets shall run from the main plaza in such manner that even if the town increases considerably in size, it shall not result in some inconvenience that will make ugly what needed to be rebuilt, or endanger its defence or comfort.”10 The central plaza was above all a showcase for the church and government buildings, which in practice are usually located diagonally across from each other. Unlike in French towns the church was the centrepiece, ideally occupying its own block, sometimes raised on a platform, and set back from the plaza.11 Spanish American plazas also rarely contained statues of the monarch, “contrasting with the visible hierarchy of power embodied by the temples or the rulers’ palaces dominating the utopian European treatises.”12 In Philip’s ordinance

9.2 Plaza de Armas, Cuzco, Peru, sixteenth to seventeenth century.

The Planned City in the French Atlantic World, 1700–1789

207

subsidiary churches, such as parish churches and those belonging to religious orders, were also to have their own separate blocks “here and there in the town,” fronted by smaller plazas, but not in any regular way. Finally, the king called for a “commons” somewhere in the town “large enough that although the population may experience a rapid expansion, there will always be sufficient space where the people may go to for recreation and take their cattle to pasture without them making any damage.” Although in the eighteenth century these commons developed into elegant parks called alamedas, with diagonal pathways and fountains – inspired in fact by French garden design – these early green spaces were probably very basic indeed, more like a common in a New England village, as demonstrated by their dual role as a place for recreation and livestock.13 Eighteenth-century Anglo-American city planners were also primarily interested in practicality and economy, which is why there are almost no idealized towns in Puritan New England, which centred instead on an uneven piece of common pasturage.14 Like the Spanish trazas, the first gridiron layouts were concerned more with delineating private property than with design, reflecting a concern for landownership that was particularly characteristic of English settlements in the Americas.15 English colonial towns were also designed by amateurs, whether local government officials or aristocrats: in the case of Alexandria (Virginia), the designer was a then-loyal British officer George Washington. The few utopian schemes that English designers did propose were generally modest and little interested in geometrical complexity, but when they employed diagonal sightlines, circular squares, and other avant-garde forms they did so in emulation of French models such as the Place Royal (fig. 8.1) and the gardens of André Le Nôtre at Versailles and the Tuileries (figs. 11.3–4), whether directly or as refracted through

9.3 Michael Hay, Plan of Kingston, ca. 1745. Ink on paper. Library of Congress, Washington, DC . Note the inset pictures of facades of townhouses with “piazzas.”

208

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

Christopher Wren and John Evelyn’s unexecuted projects for rebuilding London after the 1666 great fire.16 Most British gridiron urban projects were basic checkerboards indicating private and church land, generally lacking town squares or other public spaces.17 Francis Nicholson (1655–1728), British governor or lieutenant-governor to six colonies, devised the two most ingenious idealized town plans, although the most avant-garde design elements were discarded in the making. His schemes for Annapolis, Maryland (1694), and Williamsburg, Virginia (1699), included wider diagonal boulevards imposed on a grid, unusually shaped public plazas (at Williamsburg a canted square and in Annapolis French-style rond-points, or roundabouts), and in the case of Williamsburg cyphers for the initials “w ” and “m ” (for the monarchs William and Mary) inscribed into the streetscape. Scholars have traced this introduction of the baroque city scheme to Nicholson’s stint as a courier to the British ambassador in Paris (1682–83), where he would have been exposed to Versailles at the very moment when Louis XIV made it his centre of government.18 Nicholson also owned a copy of a translated gardening treatise by the French king’s fruit and vegetable gardener, Jean-Baptiste de La Quintinie (1626–1688) and he may have consulted with Wren on his French-inspired plans for London.19 Engineer Colonel Christian Lilly’s more utilitarian gridiron plan for Kingston, Jamaica (1705), geographically close but stylistically distant from France’s Antillean towns, featured elongated rectangular blocks and had a parade ground slightly off-centre with streets exiting from the four sides and two to a corner, a well in the middle, and a church near the southeast corner (fig. 9.3).20 The most eccentric British American city scheme was for the exotic-sounding and unrealized Margravate of Azilia in Georgia – a “margravate” was a military camp in the Holy Roman Empire – a project dreamed up by Sir Robert Montgomery (1680–1731), a Scottish aristocrat in 1717, the same year that fellow Scotsman John Law founded the Mississippi Company. The Margravate is known only through an engraving in the pamphlet Montgomery published to encourage support for

210

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

emigration, in which he calls it “The Most delightful Colony in the Universe.”21 The engraving, of one of the colony’s “county divisions,” shows a ramparted square divided into quarters with a palace at the centre, open pasturage or “great parks” in the middle of each quarter, agricultural land between the ramparts and the city, and 116 square plots of land divided by rectilinear streets, each with a house in the middle surrounded by gardens. The farmland around the settlement’s perimeter was for farmers who would double as the district’s defenders in time of war, the houses were for the gentry, and the palace was for the Margrave. Although nothing came of Azilia, the town did inspire the more practical plan of Savannah, Georgia (1734).22 George Washington and Thomas Jefferson hired a French artist and engineer to design their new capital at Washington.23 A painter trained in the Académie Royale who fought in the War of Independence and became a major in the US corps of engineers in 1783, Pierre-Charles L’Enfant (1754–1825) designed the grandest city project in North America in six months in 1791 (fig. 9.4). L’Enfant was intimately familiar with official court art in France as he was born at the Gobelins workshops to an academician painter on the payroll of Louis XV.24 His scheme superimposed a network of radial avenues meeting at ronds-points over a quadrillage of intersecting streets, the former lined with a double row of elm trees on each side and the latter divided into larger thoroughfares and narrower streets in the grid. The most important streets were the two avenues emanating from the President’s House and the Capitol, which he called the “Grand Avenue” (now the Mall), which intersected at what is now the Washington Memorial. The city was also to include a multitude of squares – fifteen for each state, plus two dozen others shaped like squares, triangles, circles, and other shapes – as well as a spacious network of parks and promenades, markets, canals, jets d’eau, obelisks, statues, and other public monuments, culminating in a giant cascade.25 L’Enfant worked directly from engraved maps from Jefferson’s library, including those of Paris, Bordeaux, Marseilles, Lyons, Strasbourg, and

Montpellier.26 Although L’Enfant’s plan was truncated – in fact he was fired shortly after presenting it to government – the Washington of today is still essentially L’Enfant’s creation, a city in his words “of a magnitude so worthy of the concern of a grand empire.”27 French colonial towns differed from those of their rivals through the advanced professional training of their architects and their privileging of beauty and elegance over pragmatism. Much to the dismay of financially strapped public works departments, overwhelmed

9.4 Pierre L’Enfant, Plan for Washington DC , engraving, Philadelphia, 1792. Library of Congress, Washington, DC . The plan is criss-crossed by diagonal avenues meeting at ronds-points with the “Capitol” just right of the centre and the “President’s House” at upper left.

builders, and frustrated habitants, gloire frequently trumped practicality. Planners gave their cities geometrically complex ramparts; stylish rond-points leading to Elysian promenades; dramatic sightlines (“grandes

The Planned City in the French Atlantic World, 1700–1789

211

9.5 Pierre-Antoine-Jérôme Frémont de La Merveillère, Master Plan of the City of Cayes (Saint-Domingue), 1789. The promenade, or “Cours” runs around the inner perimeter of the city. The red blocks were properties already allotted, the yellow ones had not yet

been sold, and the blue lots belonged to Le Comte de Reynaud, former governor, whose plantation was just to the west of the city. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 15 DFC 790A.

derived from garden architecture: the patte d’oie was a garden motif and even medium-sized towns had promenades (“promenades” or “cours”), not surprising in a regime that promoted the garden as a metaphor for territorial rule and French identity (see chapter 11). Trees were ubiquitous: double and quadruple rows of imported elms or native palms lined the squares and boulevards while single or double allées gave greater pomp to the approaches to major public buildings and parks. The Cours at the Saint-Domingue city of Les Cayes even followed Paris’s example by taking the form of a spacious promenade around the outer boundaries of the town (the northern range had four rows of trees) (fig. 9.5).28 Larger cities like Cap-François and Portau-Prince had multiple squares for government, church buildings, or markets, or even to afford splendid views as at the Place Vallière at Port-au-Prince or the Place Royale at Cap (fig. 10.9). Sightlines were a key component of the main square, where, unlike most Spanish American towns, streets departed from the centre of each side. French colonial city and town designs could be absurdly unmindful of their surroundings. Like the author of Idées politiques de l’empire françois (see chapter 8), colonial urban designers demonstrated an extraordinary capacity for ignoring geographical realities – small wonder so many of them never advanced beyond the planning stage. Louisiana: Nouveau-Biloxy and Nouvelle-Orléans

perspectives”); trident-shaped street intersections (a “patte d’oie,” or goose-foot), ever-increasing numbers of places royales; and large and prominent formal gardens. In fact many elements in colonial towns were

Some of the earliest full-scale quadrillage town projects were made in 1721 for the Mississippi Company’s scattered colonists at Nouveau-Biloxy (Biloxi) and Nouvelle-Orléans (New Orleans). They were the brainchild of engineer-in-chief Louis-Pierre Le Blond de La Tour, scion of a distinguished Bordeaux family of artists and architects, and his dieppois chief assistant ingénieur ordinaire Adrien de Pauger respectively.29 The towns that preceded them were very primitive indeed. Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville’s 1699 Fort Maurepas on the Bay of Biloxi in present-day Mississippi (“Vieux-Biloxy,” now Ocean Springs, Mississippi) was a mere stockade,

The Planned City in the French Atlantic World, 1700–1789

213

and Fort Louis de La Louisiane, founded in 1702 by his brother, Montreal-born Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville (1701–1743) up the Mobile River at La Mobile (Old Mobile, now Le Moyne, Alabama), was little better, its ramparts made of pièces-sur-pièces beams.30 At La Mobile draftsman Charles Levasseur dit Ruessavel, whose joiner father had helped found the Quebec Confraternity of Saint Anne (see chapter 6), laid out a lopsided grid of wooden shacks of red pine with high-pitched Quebec-style shingled roofs, the first colonial capital and an unimpressive “first attempt at a French town in Louisiana.”31 Its fort was surrounded by a grassy field still dotted with tree stumps called the “Place d’Armes” with nineteen îlots mostly to the north, only fourteen bearing the names of their motley crew of inhabitants, including soldiers, Jesuits, eight Canadian fur traders, five ship’s carpenters, and two men simply called “the Parisian” and “the Breton.”32 A 1704–05 project upgraded the Place d’Armes to a “Place Royalle” with three access “streets” named rue de Bois Brillant, rue Châteauguay, and rue Ruessavel (Levasseur’s witty sobriquet, his surname spelled backwards) and a market square, but no purpose-built church (fig. 9.6).33 French colonial planners had a mania for street names – in fact it was one of the first things they did when tracing out a quadrillage, even though they frequently existed only on maps, as we have already seen at Kourou (figs. 3.19–20). This christening of non-existing streets seems to have served as a talisman to reassure nervous speculators that whatever unpromising piece of land they had chosen would one day become a great city. Old Mobile having been inundated by spring rains and attacked by pirates, officials decided in 1711 to burn it to the ground and move 20 miles downriver to the city’s present location, a year before the colony was handed over to Antoine Crozat.34 Vieux-Biloxy was already in an advanced state of decay upon d’Iberville’s death in 1706, its location described as a “mauvais choix” and “très mal imaginé.”35 In 1717 Law’s Compagnie de l’Occident moved its headquarters (comptoir générale) across Biloxi Bay to Nouveau-Biloxy on the Gulf Coast (present-day Biloxi),

214

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

a hardly more promising spot known for swamps, floods, and shifting sandbars.36 In January 1721 Le Blond de La Tour drafted four alternative plans for the new town, of which the government chose the second cheapest. Work on land clearance had already begun the previous year with a crew of “nearly 200 people,” including French soldiers, Swiss guards, and Apallachee

Amerindians, who have been made “to clear [land], build huts and houses, to protect them from the hazards of weather, and also for merchandise; in May [1721] around 50 huts [baraques] both large and small had been finished there.”37 Conditions were terrible: food was scarce, disease was rampant (nine hundred settlers died in May 1721), it was so hot that builders could work

9.6 Anonymous, Plan of the town and Fort Louis Established by the French on the Mobile, ink on paper, 1704. The fort and “Place Royale” are along the river at the bottom centre while the market square is at upper left. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 04 DFC 120B .

The Planned City in the French Atlantic World, 1700–1789

215

only in the morning and late afternoon, and during “the nights [it was] impossible to rest because of the gnats and mosquitoes.”38 Yet after all of this back-breaking effort the project was finally called off in 1722, infuriating Le Blond de La Tour, who never stopped believing that this site was the ideal capital for the colony.39 The grandeur of Le Blond de La Tour’s four projects for Nouveau-Biloxy is all the more astonishing given the discouraging state of the settlement’s geography (fig. 9.7).40 The most ambitious replicates half of Vauban’s Neuf-Brisach (fig. 8.8), slicing it down the middle so that the Place d’Armes is on the waterfront and arranging the ramparts and moat around the town at the back. Nouveau-Biloxy comprised thirty-six îlots compared to Neuf-Brisach’s forty-eight, which means that had it followed Vauban’s full plan it would be have been one and a half times larger than its French prototype. Its ramparts are particularly impressive: comprising three rotating layers it had six large bastions at the upper level, five projecting demi-lunes below, and a layer of smaller triangular projecting sections of wall at ground level. Le Blond de La Tour’s project even improves Vauban’s sight lines. In Vauban’s Place d’Armes the church is off to one side whereas at Nouveau-Biloxy it occupies a dramatic position at the centre of the far end of the square, standing like an island in a separate little square so that visitors can admire it from all sides and presenting an impressive spectacle to approaching ships. Nouveau-Biloxy’s Place d’Armes, lined by facades alone, was also more uniform than Vauban’s, which gave onto gardens as well as buildings. The function of the îlots was similarly regimented: those around the square were given over to ecclesiastical, government, and private buildings; the six to the west were allotted to engineers and other officers; and to the east was the “Direction” or government house, more Company offices, four blocks of storehouses, and lodging for Company staff. All of the blocks at the back were given to colonists and labourers. Ten long barracks (Neuf-Brisach had only four) lined the perimeter of the town facing the ramparts, and the powder magazine was far

216

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

from the town in a rampart (an improvement over its unwise location in Old Mobile on the Place-Royale). Le Blond de La Tour’s Nouveau-Biloxy project enjoyed a long afterlife as it was adapted by Pauger, minus the ramparts, for the Company’s new headquarters of Nouvelle-Orléans, an unpromising tract of partially cleared land on a bend in the Mississippi River, “prone to flooding and infested with snakes and mosquitoes,” which would become, according to Lawrence Powell, “one of the most deliberately planned towns in all of colonial North America” (figs. 9.8–9).41 The layout of streets in the Vieux-Carré or “French Quarter” of present-day New Orleans preserves Le Blond de La Tour’s “ville régulière” with its Place d’Armes (now Jackson Square) on the water and with the church treated in the same way.42 Named after the Regent, the new town had been founded by the now Commandant-Général Bienville in 1718 on the site of an Amerindian portage between the headwaters of the Bayou Saint-Jean and the Mississippi, a place where as early as 1708 itinerant colonists from Mobile and squatters from Illinois Country had made their temporary home. Bienville also awarded himself substantial land holdings on the site in 1719, including what would become the Vieux-Carré, which he ran as a de facto seigneury. In April 1718 the Crown decreed that the capital would be located far upriver near present-day Baton Rouge in a place called Bayou Manchac, which offered a back door, via Lake Pontchartrain, to the upper Mississippi, the Natchez tobacco plantations, and Illinois country; however in 1721 they acquiesced to the choice of Nouvelle-Orléans as the Crown lost interest in its colony.43 Unlike Nouveau-Biloxy, New Orleans was never meant to be fortified – it was little more than a trading post for concessionaires – and early planners envisioned a quadrillage spreading out over the flat territory to form a perfect rectangle like a Roman castrum. But work progressed very slowly: when Le Page du Pratz arrived there in January 1719 with fifteen concessionaires and fifty engagés he was appalled to

find “on the spot where the capital should have been founded just a place no longer marked by anything but a shack covered in palm fronds which M. de Bienville had had built for his lodgings and where his successor M. Pailloux remained”; three months later the settlement could boast only four buildings, and that same spring a massive flood placed the city under two feet of water.44

9.7 Pierre Le Blond de Latour, Plan of the Works Projected for the New Establishment of Nouveau-Biloxy, ink and colours on paper, 1721. The yellow colouring indicates that nothing had yet been built, and in fact this project was rejected for a less elaborate one. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 04 DFC 135C .

The Planned City in the French Atlantic World, 1700–1789

217

A 1720 report remarked about Nouvelle-Orléans that “the region is under water, impracticable, unhealthy.”45 Yet Company propagandists such as the chevalier de Bonrepos waxed eloquently in Paris about a metropolis on the Mississippi: in a 1720 pamphlet he proclaimed that “already the town which is named New Orleans, and which is the capital of Louisiana, has nearly eight hundred houses, very habitable and comfortable … large warehouses have been built there to keep all the merchandise which is brought there from Europe and to store those of the country which are taken to France.”46 It was because of reports such as these that the Jesuit Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix was so derogatory about the new settlement when he visited it in 1722: If the eight hundred fine houses and the five parishes, which our Mercury bestowed upon it two years ago, are at present reduced to a hundred barracks, placed in no very good order to a large ware-house built of timber; to two or three houses which would be no ornament to a villages in France; to one half of a sorry ware-house, formerly set apart for divine service, and was scarce appropriated for that purpose, when it was removed to a tent: what pleasure, on the other hand, must it give to see this … become the capital of a large and rich colony.47 With the benefit of retrospect the planners of Kourou forty-three years later would have done well to recognize the object lesson provided by this disparity between fantasy and reality. In March 1721 Pauger and Franquet de Chaville, ingénieur en second, drew up the alignment of the streets – the general gridiron scheme had already been implemented by Bienville in 1718 – many of them named, grandly, after the royal and aristocratic families of France.48 As Gilles-Antoine Langlois nicely puts it: “It is understood that the plans of New Orleans were able to make an impression in France, and it is certain that the engineer Pauger would flatter the sponsor of the city who gave it its name: the Regent. Had the

218

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

latter not abandoned Versailles? Here he was offered, with the miraculous ‘system’ of Law, a town on the ‘Mississipy,’ modern and rigorous, utopian and exotic, so distant that he would not have to get there. For this man occupied with vain pleasures, what better dream than an unreachable city?”49 Pauger’s map reached Paris in the autumn of 1721, within weeks or even days of the Company’s decision to make Nouvelle-Orléans the capital in December 1721.50 Over the years the engineers regularly sent plans to Paris giving updates on the growth of the town. The earliest, by Pauger (1721), shows a proposed grid of twenty-eight blocks (fig. 9.8) with a canal on the southwest side (now Canal Street) marking the border with Bienville’s plantation.51 Unlike any of the Nouveau-Biloxy plans, the Place d’Armes has large single îlots on either side to give it greater unity and grandeur. In fact the Place d’Armes was not much smaller than Henri IV’s Place-Royale in Paris (124 × 124 metres versus 144 × 144 metres) (fig. 6.1).52 But the map also shows that much was still fantasy: out of the whole grid only parts of two blocks had been assigned to habitants – most still lived pell-mell along the riverside – and the church was not yet begun. A map of ca. 1722 shows that each îlot was subdivided into an H -shape as Vauban had done at Neuf-Brisach, with five properties facing the streets parallel to the river and two properties wedged in the middle lengthwise so that they faced the lateral streets.53 The next plan, a detail by Le Blond de La Tour of the southwest quadrant from 12 January 1723, was drafted after two hurricanes had devastated the settlement (1719, 1722) and during a year when the plague was killing eight or nine colonists a day – including, in October, Le Blond de La Tour. It shows how little of the cypress forest had been cleared, indicating two successive clearances, the “old clearance made by some private people,” and the “new clearance made by the workers of the Company and some private people [after 1721],” but enough land was carved out for only sixteen îlots.54 It shows a mere eight buildings, seven of them in the block between rue de Bienville and rue de Conti and the other a small chapel jutting out into the middle of the projected

rue Sainte-Anne just north of the Place d’Armes. The entire grid including the Place d’Armes, represented by a dotted line, is still a figment of the surveyor’s imagination. However by 1726, when Jean-Pierre Lassus painted his view of New Orleans, the town was already booming – despite Louisiana’s fall from grace and the Crown’s relatively modest interest in the colony – with some two hundred buildings, mostly small wooden houses

9.8 Adrien de Pauger, Plan of the Town of Nouvelle Orléans Projected in March 1721, 1721. The position of the church directly facing the square at the centre derives from the Nouveau-Biloxy project. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 04 DFC 66C .

The Planned City in the French Atlantic World, 1700–1789

219

9.9 Jean-Pierre Lassus, View and Perspective of New Orleans (detail), watercolour and gouache on paper, 1726. Note that the forest still had not been cut back to allow for a full grid-plan city. The Ursuline convent is to the right of the square. The scene of land-clearance (défrichage) at the front is a rare depiction of one of the most critical uses of labour in colonial France. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 04 DFC 71A .

but two of them grander structures with Mansard roofs and dormers, the Ursuline convent (fig. 12.15), a prominent windmill, and the completed new Church of Saint-Louis (1724–27) in the Place d’Armes (fig. 14.25) balanced by two identical buildings on either side (the manse and corps de garde/courthouse), with a palisade fence along the river bank with openings for the streets

220

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

but otherwise no indication that the streets had been laid out (fig. 9.9).55 In 1728 Saucier prepared a plan which showed the city as it was envisioned at full size at 88 hectares (the French city of Rochefort, by comparison occupied 60 hectares), which made it as wide as the river in front of it.56 It was to be a giant rectangle six blocks by eleven, all surrounded by a wooded promenade in the shape of a ramparts – it was never more than a levy – which was meant to recall Louis XIV’s Cours in Paris.57 As it happens, this map is very close to the layout of the French Quarter today, which measures six blocks by thirteen. The city was also segregated socially, with the rich and governmental and ecclesiastical structures closest to the river, on higher ground, and the petits gens inland.58

Officials decided to fortify New Orleans only after the 1729 Natchez uprising (see chapter 3), an event which paradoxically enhanced the city’s importance as the colony essentially gave up on its dreams of being a plantation economy and colonists fell back upon New Orleans. In 1730 engineer Brison proposed surrounding the quadrillage with a moat and then building an oval-shaped stockade around it with seven bastions.59 This unexecuted scheme also included a canal leading westward, probably to Bayou Saint-Jean and Lake Pontchartrain. Finally a ditch was dug around part of the grid by Pierre Baron, a naturalist sent to Louisiana by the Royal Academy of Sciences in 1727. Only a foot in depth and soon silted over, it appears in an unfinished state in a map by Gonichon from 1731 – the year when the Company relinquished its charter – enclosing a truncated grid of four by eleven blocks, ten of which were entirely or largely unoccupied, with a variety of buildings in wood and brick, and several formal gardens, the latter non-existent but painted in to please Parisian audiences.60 A palisade around the town was only partially built by Bernard Deverges after the fall of Quebec in 1760 – it was lozenge-shaped rather than rectangular, with nine bastions – as shown on a ca. 1765 map by Lieutenant Philip Pittman, when the grid had reached the anticipated extent of six blocks by eleven.61 What is remarkable is that Paris had been fooled into believing that New Orleans was a walled city: when the truth was revealed in 1760 it caused a great scandal, known as the “Louisiana Affair,” in which the governor was accused of overspending on an unnecessary project to enrich his friends and the commissaire-ordonnateur denounced for inflating prices for his personal profit. In the end many former colonial officials were arrested.62 The rest of the history of New Orleans – including its expansion, against all odds, into a large and important city – took place under its Spanish and American administrations, and although the population and architectural style were still predominantly French at first, town planners were increasingly beholden to their new governments (see chapter 1).

The Guianas: Oyapock, Cayenne, Longchamp, and Bourg-Villebois In the eighteenth century Guiana was the target of several avant-garde urban design schemes that were distinct from the pseudo-reductions at Kourou and Sinnamary in using a regular orthogonal quadrillage on a large scale. Some of them combined the quadrillage with idealized geometrical ramparts on the Vauban model with pointed bastions, glacis, and ravelins, but with the innovation of having the fortress fitted into the city walls and surrounded by moats, a form we will also see in Saint-Domingue (chapter 10). However two of them were a unique new kind of garden city designed to integrate green space and canalization into residential quarters, reflecting advances in French garden design and Enlightenment ideals about healthy living, love of nature, and social engineering, which in France resulted in an ever greater number of public promenades and parks.63 They are unique to the Guianas and appear nowhere else in the empire. While the former were aimed primarily at the perpetually reinvented capital of Cayenne, the garden cities were planned for distant but strategic outposts on the great rivers. The earliest of the fortified towns (fig. 9.10), drafted in 1734 by ingénieur du roi François Fresneau de La Gataudière (1703–1770) as a replacement for the dilapidated Fort Saint-Louis on the Oyapock (fig. 3.17), was an ostentatious baroque city in the spirit of Le Blond de La Tour’s 1721 first scheme for Nouveau-Biloxy (fig. 9.7) and derived in part from Vauban’s 1689 project for Cayenne (fig. 8.18).64 Fresneau later made a name for himself as the discoverer of the rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis) in 1747, one of a growing number of amateur naturalists seeking useful plants to grow in France’s network of acclimatization gardens (see chapter 11).65 Renamed Fort Saint-Pierre, Fresneau’s creation was to incorporate a rebuilt Fort Saint-Louis nested into one of its flanks (the original fort and its sundry Jesuit buildings outside the walls, shacks “roofed in straw,” are shown in a cartouche on the

The Planned City in the French Atlantic World, 1700–1789

221

upper left of the map). Located at a widening of the river with a view of the Islets de Taparabo and of several concessions, it was in an ideal situation to command the river’s upper reaches. As we have seen in chapter 3 the original Fort Saint-Louis was precarious in both its primitive materials and its politics, since it combined a headquarters for a constantly expanding Jesuit network of missions along the river and a garrison headquarters. The missionary and military needs of the colony inevitably collided – in 1737 soldiers knocked a missionary to the ground and the fort commandant threatened to kill him – and the Jesuits were expelled from the fort.66 Designed three years earlier, Fresneau’s project aimed not only to replace an earlier, inadequate fort but to integrate the Jesuits (they were, after all, the fort’s chaplains) into the community. The fort lacks the high, rotating ramparts of Nouveau-Biloxy (it was probably just a palisade), but it shares the latter’s taste for geometry, taking the form of a near-perfect hexagon with five monumental bastions as at Cayenne. Most striking is the difference in size: the town was to be ten times larger than the original Fort Saint-Louis, the citadel now separated from the town by a deep moat. It features a centralized quadrillage of twenty-three îlots, mostly rectangular, focusing on a commodious Place d’Armes. Significantly, the church is no longer on the square – in fact a pair of îlots have been placed directly in front of it – but a street between them still affords a direct view of its facade from the centre of the square. The church also has its own little square in front. The church’s prominence communicates the Jesuits’ standing in the settlement: it is flanked by the presbytery and school (“college”) on one side and two cemeteries (one for whites, one for blacks) on the other, and a substantial block was set aside as “terrein pour une communauté 9.10 François Fresneau de La Gataudière, Project of the Plan of Oyapock (Guiana), 1734. This plan shows an elaborate project for a fortified town and a new fort to be called Fort Saint-Pierre; the old fort “as it is today” is shown in an inset at upper left. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 14 DFC 53B .

The Planned City in the French Atlantic World, 1700–1789

223

de Religieux,” presumably the Jesuits. Particularly interesting is a park for hospital patients with a cruciform pair of tree-lined boulevards set in one of its bastions, which demonstrates a new interest in hospital gardens and promenades as a way to promote healing. Nothing came of Fresneau’s scheme, nor that of a much reduced one by ingénieur du roi Julien-Marie Solain-Baron from 1750, and a map of the river from 1762 merely shows a “Fort D’Oyapocko,” some Jesuit buildings, and a church but no town anywhere in sight.67 By that time government officials had turned their attention to the River Approuague, nearer to Cayenne and therefore more important as a place to protect the colony. The next major building project was Cayenne’s expansion in the lead-up to the Seven Years’ War, when Julien-Marie Solain-Baron and the ostentatiously named Jacques-François-Marie-Éléonore-Timoléon, chevalier de Béhague d’Hartincourt (1742–1787) offered three colossal proposals to build a city worthy of France’s only South American colony. Cayenne had two problems: the old town was constricted by Vauban’s snug fortifications (1689–93), uneven terrain, and crooked streets, and the only place for expansion – the extensive flat territory to the east called the Savane – was being filled up by colonists’ market gardens and poultry yards. As early as the 1730s engineers had proposed developing the Savane, but it was too expensive to protect. Engineer Fresneau criticized one pre-1733 scheme: Since in this plan the fort is very little we would have been forced to fortify the town as well, which we would have been obliged to enlarge as a consequence; because it would have made it necessary to destroy all the houses which have been built on the mountain … as well as those which are on the foot of this mountain … also indeed a good number of other houses which stand too close to the city ramparts, it would have been necessary to resettle the owners; we would have thus been forced to enlarge the city considerably.68

224

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

A 1733 plan was even more costly because it called for enclosing the Savane in a ramparts: “since the town and the fort are fortified, the scale of the works is too considerable and it would take too much time and expense to build and maintain them and finally too many troops to guard them.”69 Fresneau favoured a 1736 project which called for a fort that was not much bigger than Vauban’s, used citrus hedges instead of walls, and, most importantly, obliged the population of the Savane – for which Fresneau had already traced out six îlots for thirty families – to hide inside Cayenne’s ramparts during a siege.70 But Minister of the Marine JeanFrédéric Phélypeaux de Maurepas (1701–1781) firmly rejected all of the plans, remarking to the governor and intendant that “the expansion of the city does not appear necessary for the present, and it would be better to work on the fortifications which it might need in its current state,” and warning the eager planners that “in general, you should not undertake any work without the approval of the King.”71 Meanwhile, private concessions expanded on the Savane, by the 1750s occupying more land and accommodating more people than Cayenne itself. A Dutch map from the 1750s shows that the concessions were organized into a tidy quadrillage of twelve elongated rectangular îlots about 50 metres west of Cayenne – the grid survives today – and, typically, the streets had already been given names such as rue Royale, rue d’Artois, rue de Provence, rue du Marais, rue de Berry and rue de Praslin.72 The Savane had no public square but it did have a chapel – the map calls it a “Capelle” to differentiate it from the town church, called “De Kerk,” even though it is the bigger of the two – which was placed in the middle of a grassy îlot. Another block was occupied by a formal recreational garden called the “King’s Garden” (Koningstuyn). The Savane was surrounded by a row of trees, and a gracious tree-lined allée led westward from rue de Provence to the King’s Plantation (Konings Plantage). Compared to this commodious neighbourhood of gardens, Cayenne looked like an anthill.

It was precisely that impression of Cayenne that Solain-Baron and d’Hartincourt sought to ameliorate with three grand new urban projects. Solain-Baron’s was the first (1750), designed to withstand a potential British attack (as it happens the weather did the job for them, turning the British fleet away). It is a very stylish

9.11 Julien-Marie Solain-Baron, ingénieur du roi, Plan of a new fort and a new town to build at Cayenne, designed by the Sieur Baron, ingénieur du Roy, ink and colours on paper, 1750. The original Fort Cépérou is shown at lower right inside Vauban’s ramparts. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 14 DFC 74B .

The Planned City in the French Atlantic World, 1700–1789

225

plan, a rhythmic intersection of polygonal forms that balances the sweeping curves of its curtain walls with bold, arrow-shaped bastions, triangular ravelins, and paired, slightly canted quadrillages (fig. 9.11). SolainBaron has solved the problem of Vauban’s ramparts by demolishing the two westernmost walls of his hexagon and merging it with another hexagon like Siamese twins. This new hexagon would swallow up the Savane and protect the newly united city from all sides. Unlike a more modest project to fortify the Savane from about the same period that simply extended its extant grid, Solain-Baron showed little respect for what was already there.73 His project eliminates not only all of the buildings and streets of old Cayenne – including the massive Jesuit residence (fig. 16.6), Government House (fig. 16.17), and the church of Saint-Nicolas (fig. 14.7) – but also the concessionaries’ plots on the Savane. Because the twin hexagons are slightly askew at their juncture, the eastern (top) section of the grid plan is aligned differently from the western section, but Solain-Baron managed to fit in twenty-five mostly rectangular îlots as well as a straightened-out Place d’Armes on the site of the current one and a giant hospital in the northeast corner. If Solain-Baron’s plan acknowledged the shape of Cayenne’s awkward promontory, the same cannot be said for d’Hartincourt’s first project of 1764 (fig. 9.12). The younger brother of Jean-Pierre-Antoine de Béhague, the governor of Cayenne (1763–68), d’Hartincourt came from a noble family from Calais and served as a royal musketeer and in the Périgord Infantry Regiment before moving to Guiana to become commandant of a Compagnie de Canonniers, de Mineurs, et d’Ouvriers in 1764; he continued to serve as a major in the colonial army and was made chevalier of Saint Louis in 1772 with a promotion to lieutenant colonel.74 In this giddy era of mass colonization schemes officials had high hopes for Guiana and its capital: in 1764 Béhague praised the natural wonders and strategic importance of the colony – “its position on the windward side of Suriname and the Antilles, its proximity to the Amazon River through which it could open commerce with Brazil, Peru, perhaps even with the South Sea [Pacific 226

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

Ocean]” – and stressed that “the city of Cayenne needs therefore to be enlarged, and enclosed with a standard of fortification proportionate to the resistance that a garrison of this kind should be able to offer.”75 In July 1765 Béhague and Intendant Claude de Macaye declared that they would seize the Savane concessions in the name of the king and raze the gardens and farmyards to make room for the new city: The King having ordered that a new town should be built in the space that was intended to serve as a Savane near the old city of Cayenne; and this piece of land in the Savane having been granted previously to different individuals to grow gardens and build farmyards, until it pleased His Majesty to move it somewhere else … the intention of the governors and officer who granted the said concessions [being] that whenever they are required for the good of the state all the constructions, hedges, or trees erected by the concessionaries may be razed … on the advice of Monsieur de Piedmont, Vice-Commandant, and Baron, State Engineer, we have declared and declare that all the lands conceded in the Savane and those acquired there by virtue of the said concessions should be reunited with the Domain of the King without the concessionaries or tenants having any right of indemnity on the part of His Majesty.76 Meanwhile his brother had drafted two radically different projects for the expanded city, both enclosed within ramparts. One was oblivious to most geographical realities while the other acknowledged them. The first project – I call it the first but neither is dated – is for an octagon inspired by Vauban’s NeufBrisach and probably copied from the engraving in Bélidor’s La science des ingénieurs (Paris, 1729), which 9.12 (opposite) Jacques-François-Marie-Éléonore-Thimoléon de Béhague d’Hartincourt, untitled project for the extension of Cayenne, 1764. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-enProvence), 14 DFC 126B .

has only the uppermost ring of ramparts and not the complex lower layers Le Blond de La Tour employed for Nouveau-Biloxy (figs. 8.8, 9.7). D’Hartincourt has razed the town and Savane alike and except for a small bite taken out of the hexagon by the shoreline the plan makes no concessions to the area’s topography. It has fifty-six square or rectangular îlots, some with trimmed corners, as well as triangular plots, and the Place d’Armes is in the middle just outside the old city walls and on the site of today’s Place des Palmistes. As at Nouveau-Biloxy the new church occupies the middle of the northern range of the square, directly across from the governor’s mansion. The west range houses the headquarters of the lieutenant du roi and the town hall, the east range accommodates the intendance and office of the major, and the church is flanked by the presbytery and chaplaincy. Directly behind the church in the same îlot, d’Hartincourt places a boys’ and girls’ school. Sharing the blocks on the west side would be the offices of the aide-major and the prisons, and on the east side the commissary and treasurer. Never before was such a concentration of church and government buildings planned on a single square: even Neuf-Brisach had a considerable number of “Maisons des Bourgeois” on its Place d’Armes. As at Neuf-Brisach and Nouveau-Biloxy, a row of narrow barracks and a corderie (rope-making facility, see fig. 7.5) stand between the town and ramparts, including housing for the troops and marines (soldats matelots), and artillery. The largest buildings are a hospital and arsenal, and there are two covered markets, one (a halle) two blocks east of the Place d’Armes for meat, fruit, and vegetables (it looks like the one at Neuf-Brisach as depicted in Bélidor) and the other, tucked in between the port and fort, a fish market (other food-related buildings such as a boulangerie were also clustered around the fort). Thus, unlike in Spanish cities, d’Hartincourt kept mercantile activity out of the main square. As at Neuf-Brisach D’Hartincourt cuts an extra street through the middle of the town from the port to the principal city gate, bisecting the square on the west and east flanks and opening up an

228

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

9.13 Jacques-François-MarieEléonore Thimoléon de Béhague d’Hartincourt, Plan of the town of Cayenne, where the new distribution is seen, in accordance with the orders of the Chevalier Turgot, Governor-General of Guiana, ink and colours on paper, ca. 1764. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-enProvence), 14 DFC 128B .

unbroken sightline across the entire settlement. However Vauban’s scheme does not allow for the centralized position of the church and government house that was so critical to d’Hartincourt’s conception. D’Hartincourt even straightens out Fort Cépérou by rotating it by 45 degrees and transforming it into a near perfect

9.14 Pierre Toufaire, Hôpital de la Marine, Rochefort, 1783–88.

230

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

rectangle (in reality this would have involved massive earthworks as the morne is high, rocky, and uneven). D’Hartincourt’s next project (1764), commissioned personally by Governor General Étienne-François Turgot, was a more economical realization of SolainBaron’s model, preserving Vauban’s original ramparts,

discarding Solain-Baron’s outer hexagon, making do with the Place d’Armes as the only public space, and redesigning the Savane as an unprotected quadrillage about four times larger than it was at the time (fig. 9.13). The only awkwardness was where the grid encountered the lopsided ramparts, and dotted lines show that d’Hartincourt left open the possibility of demolishing that section of wall and redesigning the western end of the old town – as it happens Vauban’s ramparts were demolished only in 1787.77 D’Hartincourt reconceived the Savane’s rectangular îlots as squares encompassing six or nine plots of land each (the narrow rectangular plots nearer the coast could hold twelve), twenty-nine blocks in total. Similarly to the Oyapock project, he laid out a spacious hospital on a peninsula between present-day Anse de l’Hôpital and Anse Nadau, a separate campus with a formal recreational garden complete with decorative broderies and a fountain, and a separate potager. As I will explore in chapter 11, these hospital gardens, increasingly spacious with not only promenades for patients but simples gardens to grow medicinal plants, were an ever greater concern of the Ministry of the Marine and still exist in some historic hospitals in France, such as that of the Hôpital de la Marine in Rochefort (1783–88; fig. 9.14). In the end utopianism never took hold in Cayenne, which developed slowly, organically, and economically into the modest city it remains today, parts of the old town still following the seventeenth-century orientation and the ca. 1700 urban layout of Bernard Renau d’Eliçagaray (fig. 8.19). The first of the garden cities was the town that became present-day Georgetown in Guyana, a spacious, rational Enlightenment project called Longchamp (founded 1782) on the Demerara River (fig. 9.15). In 1748 the Dutch established a small factory and military post at the mouth of the river, about as far to the west of Paramaribo as Cayenne was to the east. Over time colonists established plantations there and it became an important agricultural zone. The Dutch had already planned to set aside a strip of riverside land between two plantations to make a regional capital; however nothing had happened by the time the Demerara

colonies were seized by British forces in 1779 under Lieutenant General Robert Kingston. On 31 January of the following year, during the American War of Independence, the French captured Demerara, as well as the Essequibo and Berbice rivers in what was called the colony of the “Trois-Rivières,” or simply “Demerary” (or Demerari), until it was handed back to the Dutch in March 1784 (at which point Longchamp became Stabroek, was taken again by the British in 1796, and renamed Georgetown in 1812).78 The French governor, the Breton nobleman Armand-Guy-Simon de Coetnempren, comte de Kersaint (1742–1793), conceived of Longchamp not merely as a way to compensate for French losses in the Seven Years’ War or as one-half of a pincer to pressure the Dutch in Suriname from both sides. It was to be a shining example of French scientific design, combining social engineering with grandeur: “a Capital which will become the business centre where Religion will have a temple, Justice a palace, War its arsenals, Commerce its counting-houses, Industry its factories, and where the inhabitants may enjoy the advantages of social intercourse.”79 He went on to say: This represents without a doubt the unique case of a European colony, among the thousands across the globe, which achieved a degree of magnificence without the establishment of a town or village … there is no reason why the colonists of Demerary should refuse to cooperate to the best of their ability in undertaking which we now propose, to establish on the site previously known as Brandwagt, which now becomes a place of great importance for them, if they quickly enter into commercial relations with France and the French colonies.80 The extraordinary thing about Kersaint’s new capital was that it was not built on an island or defensible peninsula but boldly occupied a long slice of land on the continent like a plantation. Kersaint entrusted Longchamp’s design to royal engineer Despret de l’Échelle, who promised in 1782

The Planned City in the French Atlantic World, 1700–1789

231

9.15 Despret de l’Échelle, Project for the town and fort of Longchamp on the right bank and near the mouth of the Demerara River, 1782. The river is located to the left of the plan on the other side of Fort de Castries. The hexagonal Place Louis XVI is located just to the right on rue Royale, surrounded by most of the public buildings, while private houses and rectangular gardens occupied the rest of the city blocks. The city is now known as Georgetown, Guyana. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aixen-Provence), 06 DFC 172A .

to erect “a new city (ville) where we can build all the necessary buildings for the garrison and administration,” and noted that Dutch colonists were already requesting concessions for townhouses.81 As François Souty has noted, “the plans manifest the desire to conceive an airy city, the style of which contrasts very clearly with existing public buildings in the colony, all on islands.”82

232

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

Despret, captain of the Royal Corps of Engineers and from 1782 engineer-in-chief of Demerary, came from Douai and served at Rochefort before being chosen as the chief engineer for Cayenne in 1779, where he was tasked with improving the city’s fortifications until 1781.83 However working conditions in Demerary were far from airy: his troops suffered from “diseases caused by excessive heat and the extraordinary work which the soldiers are obliged to do, [which] creates much havoc in the garrison.”84 In fact Despret himself fell desperately ill, and after Demerary was returned to the Dutch he was sent to recuperate in Martinique and then to France in 1784.85 Longchamp must have been an impressive sight indeed according to Despret’s map of 10 March 1782: a long rectangular carpet of land divided evenly into

twelve ample îlots, eight of which held five homes each, all separated by four tree-lined north-south streets (the first two called rue de Bloz and rue d’Henery) and a canal, and a major boulevard called rue Royale with double rows of trees on each side bisecting the town from west to east.86 A star-shaped fort, named Fort de Castries after the minister of the marine, anchored the town on the riverbank, and the system of îlots expanding eastward into the forest was designed so that it could be extended as the city grew. In fact the map clearly stated that while the town measured 100 toises along the riverbank it had a “profondeur illimitée,” and already forty-three out of forty-six concessions had been granted (to French, Dutch, and English owners judging by the names). Each îlot measured 50 toises on the street side by 26 toises in depth, the individual

concessions within them measuring 10 by 26 toises. The four blocks to the east of the fort surrounded a hexagonal square called Place Louis XVI, the second place royale in the Guianas and the only square in the world dedicated specifically to that ill-fated monarch, its pedestal in the middle ready for the royal statue. The main administrative, military, and ecclesiastical buildings faced the square, the governor’s and intendant’s palaces across from each other on the southwest and northwest flanks, the church and manse occupying the southeast flank, and the Council across from it on the northeast flank. Additional government buildings, on the rue Royale closer to the fort and adjacent the church, included the officers’ pavilion and barracks, the general warehouse for foodstuffs and tools, and the hospital. Within each block all of the houses face

The Planned City in the French Atlantic World, 1700–1789

233

directly onto the street, with a courtyard and domestic buildings at the rear. Despret paid particular attention to unity by having facades line all of the streets, the boulevard, and the square – in fact along the rue Royale and the four sides of the Place Louis XVI all are united by a single covered arcade, the only colonial example of this form introduced at the Place des Vosges (fig. 8.1) and dating back to the medieval bastides, although the hexagonal plan may have been inspired by Vauban’s Place d’Armes at Lille.87 This symmetry is a far cry from Mobile or Biloxy (or, indeed, Neuf-Brisach). Unfortunately no elevations have come to light to confirm a program of stylistic unity. Longchamp was as spacious as Kersaint had envisioned: twenty years later it still impressed visitors with its commodiousness and graceful design. Sir Henry Bolingbroke, visiting in 1803–04 declared: It stands on the flat strand; and canals enclose the main street; while wooden houses, with colonnaded porticoes, and balconies shaded by a projecting roof, are orderly arranged between spacious intervals in three parallel lines. They are seldom above two story high: they stand on low brick foundations, and are roofed with a red wood, which I took for mahogany … Even the public buildings are of wood … The principal streets are quite straight, with carriage roads. The middle street, leading from the king’s stelling [wharf] is paved with bricks, and has lamps on each side … A navigable canal on each side of the town, which fills and empties with the tide, affords the same convenience to those houses, which are not situated near the water side … The public buildings in the town are the governor’s house, and a range of offices for conducting public business. The secretary’s office is so large as to comprise the courts of police and justice, and a place of worship … Next comes the receiver-general’s office for the king’s colonial duties; the commissary’s or king’s stores; the town guard-house: and the exploiteur, or marshal’s

234

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

office; after which the public gaol … The houses are built of wood, two and three stories high, raised on brick foundations, which include excellent cellars.88 I suspect that some of the buildings were likely built by local Dutch carpenters and bricklayers since the Dutch in Paramaribo favoured wooden structures on brick foundations, although double-galleried buildings were also a trademark of Cayenne architectural style (see chapter 16). Nothing is left of this city, which extended from present-day Fogarty’s Department Store with North Road the likeliest location of rue Royale and Saint George’s Cathedral on the site of the hexagon. Kersaint’s dream of an Enlightenment city did not last long. A British visitor in 1882 remarked about Georgetown that “it appears a hopeless land of slime and fever, quite unfitting for man,” and as Ramesh Gampat opines: “More than 230 years later, that dream is still unrealized and Georgetown is as filthy as ever … a city that more resembles a haphazardly overgrown, unkempt and unruly village than a country’s capital.”89 The second garden city and the last major ancien régime urban project in French Guiana (begun in 1789) was Bourg-Villebois on the Approuague River, now an uninhabited tract of lowland jungle named Guisanbourg (fig. 9.16). It combined a love of geometry, baroque perspective, and garden design with a scientific approach to agriculture tested out in Dutch Suriname and perfected by the Swiss agricultural engineer Jean-Samuel Guisan (1740–1801). Unlike the rest of the engineers working in Guiana, Guisan did not train in the French Génie militaire but was self-taught, going first to Suriname in 1771 to help manage his uncle’s plantations.90 He was a remarkable polymath, capable not only of a wide range of relevant skills (including 9.16 (opposite) Jean-Samuel Guisan, Plan of the Proposed Town to be Built in the New Quarter of Approuague (Guiana), ink and colours on paper, 1789. The church is located on the circular Place Publique and the river is to the right. Archives Nationales d’OutreMer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 14 DFC 486A .

cartography, masonry, carpentry, architecture, hydraulics, mechanics, economics, and agronomy) but also of more intellectual pursuits. Aside from his published Traité sur les terres noyées de la Guiane (Cayenne, 1788) and three other publications, he left innumerable unpublished treatises, reports, memoranda, and a memoirs; he was a frequent correspondent with members of the Académie des Sciences in Paris and the Académie des sciences et Belles-lettres in Lyon; and he was instrumental in founding the royal spice garden at La Gabrielle (1779–91), the colony’s first experimental garden devoted to spices smuggled out of Dutch colonies in Asia (see chapter 11).91 In 1777 when an official French delegation visited Paramaribo, Guisan was persuaded to apply his gift for land reclamation to the French cause, helping develop riverbanks in eastern French Guiana, where settlers had avoided the swampy lowlands for the so-called “terres hautes.” For the next fourteen years, except for a short stint as a sanitation engineer at Rochefort (1780–81), he supervised massive land reclamation and canal projects in Cayenne and along major riverbanks at the head of a crew of hundreds of royal slaves (l’Atelier royal). The French had long been jealous of the success of the Suriname plantations and particularly the Dutch skill at reclaiming wetlands (terres noyées), as in this anonymous letter of 1769: Suriname, that rich and superb colony … The plantations there are superb and inhabited by people who have forgotten Europe, and who would be most unhappy to return. They mainly harvest coffee, they make there 14 or 15 million livres. What a difference between Cayenne and Suriname! They are nevertheless the same lands and the same continent, but the Dutch have more credit, more means, and more industry besides; they do not have other colonies in the Americas competing with their attention.92 No doubt with swampy, cramped Cayenne at the back of his mind, future governor of Saint-Domingue,

236

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

Victor-Thérèse Charpentier d’Ennery, praised Paramaribo as an “assez jolie ville” with a fine port, an agreeable situation, and “beautiful houses, even though they are only made of wood, with brick foundations shipped from Holland,” while he raved that “I have never seen in the French or English colonies anything approaching the beauty, and propriety of these plantations, nor the magnificence of the buildings on them; all these lands along the rivers were flooded, and covered with four to five feet of water with each tide; with locks and many ditches the Dutch were able to dry them, and this is this is how they manage their biggest rivers today.”93 The only thing that gave the French pause was the powerful Maroon community in Suriname, increased annually by legions of escaped slaves, who launched violent attacks on plantations and their owners – attacks, it must be said, that were provoked by the particularly brutal treatment slaves endured at the hands of Dutch colonists.94 The greatest of all these campaigns were the Boni-Maroon Wars (1768–77), which almost cost the Dutch their colony and put the fear of God in their French neighbours.95 Envy for Suriname was the main incentive for founding the Approuague colony, which lay between the Oyapock River and Cayenne, 18 kilometres upstream and across from Mantouni and Aipoto Islands. For some time officials had recommended establishing a base there as an additional buffer between Portuguese territory and the capital and to aid communication with the fort at Oyapock (fig. 9.10). Louis XV made the first proposal for a commercial centre at Approuague in 1737: “the execution of this project would not be difficult and would be very advantageous; the lands which border the River Approuague are said to be very ideal for plantations, and principally for those of cacao, and this port would have the advantage over that of Oyapock that it is closer to Cayenne.”96 At the time of the development of Kourou in 1764 the King recommended that Governor-General Turgot develop the Approuague to accommodate overflow population, “since the establishment formed at Courou [sic] is not yet adequate for the number of men who have already arrived in the

new colony … the Sieur Governor could … transport some of them to some other river, especially to that of the Approuague, which since it is windward of Cayenne and is navigable by the largest ships seems to present particular advantages.”97 Between 1765 and 1772 many survivors of the Kourou catastrophe were indeed moved to the right bank of the Approuague, although they made little progress in developing their land.98 In 1776 the government sought help from private investment, founding yet another company, the Compagnie de Paris (later Compagnie de la Guyane), which held jurisdiction over the lower Oyapock and the left bank of the Approuague and was tasked with developing tobacco and sugar plantations but above all with facilitating the slave trade with Senegal.99 Officials offered colonists incentives including the free lease of royal slaves and tools, payment for reclamation surveys, and even the honorific title of “Premier colon” in 1780 to motivate their zeal.100 By 1787 seventeen strips of land had already been claimed on both sides of the river (all but six on the right bank), including one belonging to architect Jean-Baptiste Tugny.101 Several had idealistic names such as L’Espérance, La Concorde du Sud, L’Harmonie, and La Confiance. A 1788 letter described these concessions as “the best lands in the Colony.”102 In a treatise from the same year Guisan describes a Rousseau-like society in the wilderness in which people periodically get together for healthy recreation and discourse, although the atmosphere seems less Rousseauian when one discovers their favourite pastime: “[t]hey gather together frequently in moments of leisure, at one another’s houses in turn, with the double intention of obtaining necessary relaxation, and of instructing each other … This kind of instruction … can above all produce a degree of considerable perfection in the control of the slaves: & this object which is the most common subject of their interesting conversations is also the most important of all for a cultivator.”103 But Guisan’s dream was incomplete without a town. Without “at least a Town at Aprouague [sic],” he wrote, success will be slow and progress late, and plantations

will only be capable of “feeble & mediocre” activity because of their isolation from civilization.104 By 1780 the plantations had expanded from across from the mouth of the Courouaye River north to what is now the entrance to the Kaw Canal.105 In the middle, the widest plot belonged to the College of Cayenne, where that year they began building “a storehouse, indeed the buildings necessary for the said plantation, so that the engineers, surgeons, chaplains, watchmen, etc. can find comfortable lodgings there.”106 Guisan provided strict guidelines for the riverine plantations. In his treatise he wrote “the concessions are distributed there according to the wisest system; they are contiguous and parallel with each other, they are only given 300 toises of riverfront [de face], along the entire depth which the concessionaries can clear & cultivate.”107 Guisan began Bourg de Villebois, named after the new governor general, in 1787, on a private plantation (fig. 8.16).108 Guisan sought to provide his cultivators with a physical environment as balanced and harmonious as the idealized society he believed that they had created. In a regulation concerning the îlots the governor and intendant declared: The houses must be built along the alignment of the streets, with their main façade forward, not the gable end; We prohibit adding any gallery commonly called “flying” [an open gallery], or any piece extending in any way over the ground floor of the said houses, or dependent service quarters; [a house] may not be elevated less than a foot above the level of the streets; thatched roofs will not be tolerated for the town houses two years after the first of January 1790 … Overly high fences, by preventing the circulation of air, often cause a humidity which is very harmful to the health; to avoid this inconvenience we order that the fences used for closing low courtyards, gardens or any private land should be at most five and a half feet above the street level and have at least two inches of distance or space between them; we also order that the lemon hedges and other shrubs

The Planned City in the French Atlantic World, 1700–1789

237

placed on the site chosen for the said town, whatever their use may be, must be at most four feet in height above the aforesaid level.109 The prohibition of flying galleries was meant to keep the facades behind the pavements. Each property owner was to have a place for a house as well as “a spacious courtyard and a vegetable garden.”110 Its concerns with health and the free flow of air to prevent miasma and deleterious humidity participated in a general Enlightenment interest in salubrious living which we have already seen in chapter 3. But this was an Arcadia for white people only, built from the sweat of slave labour from the Royal Slave Corps.111 Although the king provided the labour and materials for the church and presbytery and a canal between the Approuague and Kaw rivers, colonists were responsible for the rest. First Guisan excavated drainage ditches so that after a fortnight, according to a May 1789 report, “this site was not only dry but entirely immune to flooding.”112 The report went on to say: “the church and presbytery … are the first two buildings which must be built there … one part of the materials has already been brought there, some labourers are working there too, so that there is reason to believe that by the end of the year the main works will be well advanced if not finished,” and it projected a storehouse, hospital, lodging for the commandant, and a barracks for a detachment of the Guiana Battalion within a year.113 The church and houses were prefabricated, standardized wood-frame structures which were likely packed flat for transportation and were easy to build (see fig. 15.22).114 Guisan wrote in 1797 that “I had a church built [and] a house and dependencies for the curate, a common house, warehouses, barracks, a quarter and all the lodging necessary for a military post, [and] for a civilian administration; in short, I had founded all that could form the advantageous nucleus of a new colony in which progress is followed and success assured.”115 Bourg-Villebois was to be composed of twenty-one îlots, thirteen of which were rectangles of the same size and the rest truncated by the diagonal slant of the

238

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

riverfront. Unlike other projects we have seen, these îlots were also surrounded by polders, a Dutch kind of dyke for land reclamation. All but three of them were assigned to colonists, totalling 113 concessions.116 Except for the half-rectangle marked “q ,” each îlot was to be divided in half lengthwise by a 20-foot-wide pathway with a palisade fence down the middle, each half further divided into ten lots, resulting in twenty lots per îlot. Only three blocks were dedicated to public buildings: the one farthest to the northwest, marked “a ,” was for the garrison and Place d’Armes; the adjacent one to the south (marked “b ”) was for a mixture of concessions, warehouses, and “other buildings,” and the îlot marked “d ,” on the northwest corner of the rond-point, was for the church, presbytery, and seven concessions for merchants and artisans. A canal in the centre of town was to feed a network of rivulets which ran around the town’s perimeter, down both sides of its three main boulevards, and even along both perimeters of the pathways dividing the îlots. The town also provided plenty of shade and places to walk: single rows of trees were to line the two north-south boulevards and the embankment while double rows would line the eastwest boulevard and its canal and the rond-point. There was also to be a small shaded park (he calls it a “place”) at the southwest corner of the settlement. Guisan hoped that the rond-point, which he simply called a “Place du Bourg,” would one day be lined by buildings in a unified style: “as the Church occupies the corner of the block ‘d ’ one should perhaps reserve the corner of the block ‘l ’ & that of ‘m ’ for the placement of two regular buildings there, if so desired at a later time, and that the parish should then build on the same plan (“sur le même plan”) at the corner of block ‘e ’ a house to serve the parish assemblies and all those which the government will consider useful to allow or to establish.”117 These buildings would have been half-timbered, 9.17 (opposite) The Royal Fruit and Vegetable Garden at Versailles. Engraving from Jean-Baptiste de La Quintinie, Le parfait jardinier, ou, Instruction pour les jardins fruitiers et potagers (Paris, 1695). Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich.

wood-framed structures with broken-pitched roofs and overhanging eaves, as evidenced by plans and elevations Guisan prepared for the church and presbytery in April 1789.118 I will return to the church in chapter 15 specifically because it seems to have been inspired by a garden pavilion. A garden was certainly what Guisan had in mind when he designed his town. Many French colonial urban schemes incorporated features from garden design, and as we will see in chapter 11, gardens were essential features of French colonial settlements. But Bourg-Villebois was the only town plan based on an actual garden, the Potager du Roi at Versailles, as published in Le parfait jardinier (Paris, 1695), by La Quintinie (fig. 9.17). It is not surprising that the Swiss agricultural engineer had a copy of this popular book with him since it is eminently practical, with chapters on growing fruit and vegetables, detailed engravings demonstrating how to espalier trees, dissertations on land quality and types, exhaustive lists of fruits and flowers and their particular needs, and reflections on agriculture. Bourg-Villebois closely resembles its model. It featured a rond-point, here in the centre with a fountain in the middle, and the rest of the property consisted of mostly rectangular plant beds, the ones in the central section similarly divided into half lengthwise with ten divisions to a side. Although Quintinie’s beds are separated by walls with little entryways, on the plan they look just like Guisan’s rivulets with their little bridges – in fact the larger bridges over the canal look just like the staircases descending into Quintinie’s beds. The single rows of bushes which surround each bed, the rond-point, and the “grand entrée du Roy” all have their counterparts in Bourg-Villebois, and the corner plot carved out for the church in Guisan’s

240

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

plan has the same shape as the four plots surrounding the rond-point in the Quintinie plan. It is fitting that his agricultural town was based not on the Versailles gardens of Le Nôtre but on that of his more down-toearth colleague. As it happens Guisan’s utopia at Bourg-Villebois was not to be. The Bastille was stormed three months after his master plan was submitted – although news reached Guiana only in November – and all major architectural activities came to a halt.119 Since most of the habitants were nobles the new regime abruptly removed their privileges and appropriated most of their slaves for public works projects.120 Then on 4 December 1790 the embryonic town – only blocks a –d had been drained – and the concessions on the Approuague were the scene of a violent slave uprising in which several colonists were massacred in their homes or kidnapped.121 Although the rebellion was crushed and the plantations continued to eke out a living, Guiana was in too much turmoil to proceed with Bourg-Villebois and Guisan returned to Switzerland for good in 1791.122 In an 1826 map by maréchal de camp Baudrand the town has vanished altogether.123 It was not until 1830–33 that France once again turned its attention to this small piece of riverfront, founding a post with a military base and church on the spot Guisan had cleared forty years earlier.124 Even this town, called Guisanbourg in his honour and briefly famous during a gold rush in the 1850s, was also abandoned, the last evidence of its rotting structures and fallen dikes depicted in late nineteenth-century postcards.125 Today all that remains of Guisanbourg aside from some rusting ruins are thick mangrove swamps and liana-strangled trees against a backdrop of royal palms, Nature having reclaimed all vestiges of this garden city that never was.

10

Urbanism in Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue and Public Monuments in the French Atlantic

sAint-doMinGue could not hAVe Presented a greater contrast to sparsely settled Louisiana or Guiana. In the decades leading up to the Revolution the island became the most populous, most urban, and richest French colony in the world, with a greater number of towns or cities than any other.1 Although the island was overwhelmingly rural (nine-tenths of the people lived on plantations), eleven towns had populations of greater than a thousand, three of them – Cap-François, Port-au-Prince, and Les Cayes – standing “in the first rank as veritable cities,” with respective populations of 18,500, 9,400, and 5,650 inhabitants.2 Saint-Domingue also boasted about fifty villages with over three hundred inhabitants, thirty-two of them with parish churches. The towns and cities of Saint-Domingue ranged from modest settlements spread along the shoreline with perhaps a town square and battery, to complex, geometrical fortified towns and grand gridiron cities. The largest were resplendent with multiple squares, esplanades, ronds-points, and a panoply of public monuments.3 Saint-Domingue’s urban populations were also whiter than those of the countryside: although slaves were still the majority at 66 per cent (plus 8 per cent free gens de couleur), there was no comparison with the imbalance on the plantations, where the slave population grew to 91 per cent of the total.4 Since these chapters on urbanism are most concerned with what urban design tells us about the French ideology of empire, this chapter will be restricted to the most

original schemes developed by engineer architects, three of them never built. It will not include an overall discussion of the two largest cities since their sprawling quadrillages were a product of aggregation over time rather than a single conceptual scheme. However they will not be neglected, as I will treat individual projects within Le Cap and Port-au-Prince. These include the 1780 Place Royale in the former and an unrealized ca. 1743 project for the latter that is one of the most fascinating ever proposed for the island. This chapter will conclude with an examination of public monuments throughout the empire, although most of them were in Saint-Domingue, primarily in Le Cap and Port-au-Prince. Far from being satisfied with beautifying their towns and cities through ground plans, colonial city planners enriched – or tried to enrich – their creations with entry portals, triumphal arches, obelisks, columns, fountains, and funerary monuments, creations that emulated models in the metropole but which also have much in common with the kind of ephemeral structures built for baroque festivals in Europe, as if the cities were in a state of a perpetual celebration.5 Indeed, as we will see in chapter 11, the French did not stint on public festivities, whether for the arrivals of new governors and intendants, the death of a monarch or dauphin, or a victorious sea battle. Although Spanish and Portuguese colonial cities also favoured extravagant ephemeral celebrations – not just for religious holidays but also for confraternity parades and above all the arrival, or entrada, of a new Spanish viceroy – no other colonial power built or proposed as many permanent public monuments of this sort, celebrating triumph, community, and urban renewal.6 Urban planning was a largely eighteenth-century phenomenon in Saint-Domingue. At the end of the previous century the colony could count only a handful of shantytowns built by boucaniers and pirates, many hailing from Île de la Tortue. The exception was Le Cap (founded 1670), the largest settlement because of its natural harbour and strategic location. The first

242

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

systematic layout was executed in 1697 with the Treaty of Ryswick, and although no dated plans have survived from this era, an unpublished plan datable to ca. 1701 shows a basic cluster of îlots around a long, roughly rectangular square with a church on the south.7 Portde-Paix, built in 1664 across from Île de la Tortue on the site of Christopher Columbus’s Valparaiso and capital between 1697 and 1711, was a disorderly scattering of houses: in 1704 Governor Charles Auger (1644–1705) found it “in very poor order, the number of inhabitants is only 200, most of them hunters who only live here half the year and the others are almost unarmed.”8 As his reference to arms indicates one of the reasons officials promoted the construction of towns was because they wanted to create communities of petits-blancs to form defence militias, since fortifications were extremely costly and plantations could not provide enough armed men to defend the coast – the Africans could have done the job admirably, however for obvious reasons it was unwise to arm them.9 Except for Bombardopolis, a utopian community near Môle Saint-Nicolas hastily built to accommodate German refugees from Kourou around 1764, they were all coastal towns – directly on the water or near it – and therefore vulnerable to attack.10 Pierre Pinon has divided Saint-Domingue’s gridiron towns into three “generations,” the first comprising Port-de-Paix (ca. 1720–25), Saint-Louis (1721), PetitGoâve, Saint-Marc, Les Cayes, and Torbec (all from 1726), and Bayaha or Fort-Dauphin (1727–28). The second, mid-century generation includes Port-auPrince (1749–51), Bombardopolis (1760), Gonaïves (1760–61), a large-scale extension of Cayes in 1764 (fig. 9.5), Le Môle Saint-Nicolas (1766), and an unbuilt project for Artibonite (1766). The third generation reflects the population explosion of the last decades of colonialism – Le Cap’s population tripled between 1771 and 1778 – and consists of extensions of extant towns, none of them finished. These enlargement schemes included those of Port-de-Paix (ca. 1780), Saint-Marc (1781–86), Le Môle Saint-Nicolas (1782),

Petit-Goâve (1786), Gonaïves (1799), and Fort-Dauphin (1799).11 Most of these projects laid out their gridirons as if nothing had existed there before, and the largest simply extended the grid of the nucleus even if it meant changing the dimensions of some of the îlots, as it did in the “new town” at Port-au-Prince.12 In fact the dimensions of the individual îlots varied widely from town to town, the square ones ranging from 50 metres per side as in Le Cap to 110 metres at Port-au-Prince, with rectangular blocks sometimes reaching 200 metres on their long sides.13 They were divided into properties ranging from 10 to 37.5 metres wide and from 22.5 to 40 metres deep. At Le Cap where the îlots were divided into quarters with lots 22.5 metres square, properties were heavily built up, whereas at Les Cayes they were more spacious at 45 by 45 metres, allowing room for gardens.14 Some towns, such as Gonaïves, Le Môle, and the “new town” at Port-au-Prince used the H -shaped division of lots pioneered at Neuf-Brisach – it was also used in the reconstruction of Rennes from 1720 – and which we have seen at Nouveau-Biloxy and New Orleans (figs. 9.7–8). The engineers most responsible for SaintDomingue’s parade of quadrillages were the successive directors of fortifications: Amédée-François Frézier (1719–25), Joseph-Louis de La Lance (1725–39), JeanAndré Coudreau (or du Coudreau; 1740–50), Guillaume du Verger De Verville (ca. 1751–61), Jean-François-Hyacinthe Polchet (1764–68), and Jean-Jacques Du Portal (1764–69).15 Léogâne, Petit-Goâve, Port-au-Prince, Place du Guerre, the Place Royale at Cap-François Dating from around 1663 but rebuilt on a quadrillage in 1710, Léogâne is a town in the Western District 3 kilometres inland from the southern shore of Culde-Sac and some 45 kilometres from the future site of Port-au-Prince. It is also, together with nearby Petit-Goâve, the earliest known grid-plan town in Saint-Domingue (fig. 10.1). Already in 1707 interim Governor de Charritte ordered Chief Engineer Philippe

Cauvet to find a site that is “sufficiently advantageous to make there a redoubt,” and, after securing royal approval, “to build the City that it is imperative to have in this area,” a region rich in plantations but vulnerable to attack.16 In 1709–10 Governor François-Joseph, comte de Choiseul-Beaupré (in office 1710–11) and Intendant Jean-Jacques Mithon de Senneville (1669–1737) agreed that it should be built on two contiguous sugar plantations in the adjacent parishes of Petite-Rivière and Ester. One of the plantations, that of commandant Ducasse de Plassac, had “an abundant source of very good water half a lieue from the sea, and [is] absolutely free of swampland, which leaves no doubt that the air is very healthy,” compensating for the inconvenience of its distance from the shore and harbour. The new town was to be built “following the plan which is being drawn up directly by the said Sieur Cauvet, ingénieur.”17 The historic centre of Léogâne is thus unusually far from the sea. The governor and intendant further ordered the immediate construction of a parish church to replace the churches of Petite-Rivière and Ester, which “are to be demolished as soon as possible after the construction of the said Church on the point.”18 From the beginning planners wanted the parish church to be something out of the ordinary. In a letter of 3 July 1711 Lieutenant du Roi Jean-Joseph de Paty (1666–1723) and Intendant Mithon wrote that “it was resolved to build a grand Church on the terrain of the new town” and that “we have ordered that Mr. Cauvet make a plan of this Church of the simplest design and we have received tenders over the course of three Mondays for the furnishing of all the materials,” and that they required the services of “8 to 10 masons, two of them stonecutters, and two or 6 carpenters.”19 In the interim they moved the old church of Petite-Rivière to Léogâne to serve as a temporary chapel – this once-common Caribbean practice of moving wooden buildings still survives in places like Guadeloupe, where creole houses are transported on flatbed trucks.20 When completed, the church (it is now dedicated to Saint Rose of Lima) was “the most

Urbanism in Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue and Public Monuments

243

10.1 Philippe Cauvet, Plan of the Town of Léogane, ink and colours on paper, 1713. The sections coloured red have been allotted and those coloured yellow have yet to be sold. The green sections represent fallow land or public parks. The rond-point with its

patte d’oie is on the lower left, the widest allée leading to the sea. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), F3 296 D23.

beautiful in the Colony” and was praised in 1717 for its facade, which was “large, well built, with a fine portal, all that it lacks is the paving stones.”21 According to Moreau de Saint-Méry, Cauvet “gave [Léogâne] the form of an octagon with 6 more or less equal sides and two larger sides, with ramparts comprising ten bastions, and four city gates.22 The town grew quickly: in a 1713 report Governor Louis de Courbon, comte de Blénac (in office 1713–17) and Intendant Mithon note that “every day new houses are built in the town of Léogâne, Monsieur le comte de Blénac has been surprised at the progress of this establishment which was only begun two years ago … we will stop at nothing to encourage the colonists to build new houses there.”23 In 1717 the now Governor General de Châteaumorand specifically praised its innovative grid pattern: “the town of Léogâne [is] well built, the streets laid out with a surveyor’s cord (tirées au cordeau), and the square quite pretty.”24 The earliest extant maps date from 1713 and 1715 (fig. 10.1).25 They show an elongated octagon oriented southeast to northwest with a central “Place” lined with a double row of elm trees, a church facing the square on the southeast side (at the top), and an irregular grid making up the rest of the town, of which eight îlots had been mostly finished. Moreau wrote that the square was surrounded with “beautiful houses” that served as warehouses and that the elms had been planted according to a 1716 ordonnance to provide shade for the market held there – although he was dismayed that “these elms and those of the streets are poorly cared for & suffer from the mania for cutting them & pruning them incessantly.”26 The first plans show that the quadrillage was still only partially developed with fallow land behind the church – the grid was not finished until at least 1742 – and that the town was unevenly bisected lengthwise by a stream (“source de La Pointe”), now a canal.27 The îlots varied greatly in size: those around the “Place” and the rue Royale (now Grande Rue) ranged from 75 by 120 feet to 105 by 120 (although most of them measured 80 by 120) and those on other streets were even less uniform.28 The embryonic town was also furnished with the usual run of royal

and colonial street names: in addition to rue Royal they included rue d’Orléans, and rue de Pontchartrain. Cauvet’s plan also incorporated striking sightlines: diagonal avenues superimposed onto the grid afforded direct views through the settlement, as with rue d’Anjou (now rue La Source), which led straight from the main city gate, the “Porte de la Mer” on the northern corner, to the square. The gate opened onto the most remarkable feature of the town, a tree-lined rond-point and patte-d’oie with three radiating avenues, the southernmost of which (to the right on the map) led to the port and battery. Now named route de Ça-ira, it once boasted a double allée of trees. It is reminiscent of a much later project for a rotunda in Aix-en-Provence (1781) coincidentally designed by another member of the Cauvet family, Paul-Gilles (1731–1788; fig. 10.2), and it is inspired by garden design.29 The Cauvets were a historic aixois noble family going back at least to the time of Henri IV. Paul-Gilles was the official architect to the Comte de Provence (future Louis XVIII), as well as being a painter and ornemaniste, and he designed several projects in a neoclassical style for Aix.30 The Cauvets also went on to be an important family in the military in Saint-Domingue, including Antoine-Charles, councillor at the Conseil Supérieur in Port-au-Prince in the early 1770s; Philippe-Nicolas Cauvet, commander of the militia in Croix-des-Bouquets, also in the early 1770s; and another Cauvet who was a cadet in Rochefort in the 1730s and commandant in Mirebalais in the early 1750s.31 Léogâne’s grandeur faded quickly. By 1742 the patted’oie was reduced to a pair of diagonal roads, the main one labelled “grand chemin garni d’arbres.” 32 Another map from the 1740s shows that many of the îlots around the town’s periphery were merely market gardens with most of the buildings in the town centre.33 By 1785 the rond-point had also vanished and there were no more trees on the now-single avenue leading to the port.34 The buildings were not much to speak of: the town’s 280 houses were made of wood with straw roofs and galleries, and few of them had gables facing the street.35 Léogâne never did get its ramparts, and the unpaved,

Urbanism in Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue and Public Monuments

245

10.2 Paul-Gilles Cauvet, Project for the Entries to the City of Aix by the Roads from Paris, Marseille and Martigue, ink and colours

on paper, 1781. Académie d’Aix/Musée-Bibliothèque Paul Arbaud/ Numéro provisoire d’inventaire Dess I .1.

sandy streets were full of stagnant water and open sewers even in Moreau’s time. But this small matter did not dampen his enthusiasm for French town planning, as he wrote about the allées in the square: “[They] make the situation of the city of Léogâne even gayer & provide its inhabitants with a charming promenade.”36 The epicentre of the 2010 earthquake, old Léogâne has been effectively wiped off the map. Founded at roughly the same time as its rival to the northeast, the Southern District town of Petit-Goâve did not have a promising start: torched in 1671 by Governor Bertrand d’Ogeron de La Bouëre (1613–1676) because of its rebelliousness, it was then savaged by Dutch buccaneers (1676), attacked by the navies of Spain (1687) and England (1697), and further depopulated when it became a pirate lair in the 1690s.37 Still, Petit-Goâve was the largest town in the colony when, in 1685 it was chosen as its capital and the location of its Conseil Supérieur. The earliest map, from the year after the Spanish attack, shows a modest string of houses arranged in parallel lines along the beach, four-deep at its widest spot, around and to the west of the Place d’Armes and fort (fig. 10.3).38 Three plantations, each with formal gardens, were linked to the shore by treelined allées and there was a tiny “paroisse” at the east of the town (founded 1670), and a larger chapel for the Jesuits at the opposite end, which was known as the “pirate chapel” (chapelle des flibustiers) and became the parish church of Nôtre-Dame de l’Assomption in 1710. The largest plantation was the governor’s house, its pre-eminence indicated by a double allée. In other words, it was precisely the kind of haphazard town plan characteristic of most early French settlements in the Caribbean (see chapter 8). After the Sack of 1697 reduced the town to rubble – the governor’s house alone was spared – Cauvet was hired to draw up Petit-Goâve’s first regularized town scheme in 1710 (fig. 10.4), along with plans for a fort on the island of Carénage on the opposite (western) end of the bay at l’Acul du Petit-Goâve. Governor Choiseul-Beaupré had high hopes for the impoverished shantytown, with its 84-foot-long governor’s house

“pierced with battlements and flanked by two little towers of four feet in diameter on the corners,” confident that the inhabitants’ “truly poor” dwellings would be replaced with “finer ones in due course.”39 The governor’s house was built with slave labour provided by the state because the habitants (typically) refused to lend their plantation slaves.40 It cannot have been much of a building: sixteen years later a report noted that “the façade … has been turned to powder by the wind.”41 Surrounded by a hexagonal grid with five bastions, Cauvet’s plan incorporated a grid of nineteen irregular îlots surrounding an “esplanade” in front of the fort, which was to have a fountain to serve the town and ships. Cauvet placed the governor’s house inside the walls but, significantly, not the church – another reflection of the Antillean lack of interest in ecclesiastical buildings (see chapter 2).42 Pinon calls this kind of off-centre square facing a battery or fort a “place excentrée” and notes that the same solution was used at Les Cayes (fig. 9.5) and Port-au-Prince.43 The “Place d’Armes,” as Choiseul-Beaupré’s report called it in 1709, was to be flanked by warehouses, “all of which will be very regular and very comfortable for the country [i.e., climate],” and the streets could accommodate two rows of trees planted at equal distance for “public comfort,” as he put it in a report of the following year.44 To fortify the town Choiseul-Beaupré proposed the economical option we have seen in Cayenne of a double row of citrus trees for the interior ramparts.45 A cheaper scheme by La Lance (1728) was eventually chosen, which turned the battery into a miniature octagonal fort (designed by Frézier) that was surrounded on two sides by four îlots of houses separated by tree-lined streets.46 La Lance also placed the “palace” (courthouse) on the square along with the Intendance and a garrison of Swiss guards. La Lance’s project formed the nucleus of the town as it was actually built over the course of the century: by 1742 the number of îlots had expanded to fourteen and surrounded the parish church, although the “palais” and prisons were no longer on the square.47 Although a low-budget solution, it did accommodate a baroque sensibility, with the allée of the governor’s

Urbanism in Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue and Public Monuments

247

plantation lined up perpendicularly with the fort and maintaining that of the church as a public esplanade. The most extraordinary proposal for reinventing the city involved relocating it a few kilometres to the northwest to a place called l’Acul du Petit-Goâve on the other side of the bay (fig. 10.4).48 In the late 1730s the government had chosen this spit of land because it formed a natural bay on the south side. For this project royal engineer Meynier (first name unknown) produced Saint-Domingue’s first truly utopian town plan, a complex polygonal walled quadrillage on reclaimed swampland and delineated by saltwater and sweet water canals so that the town’s three main quarters seem to float in the water like Venetian sestieri. Canals serve as a moat between the inner and outer ramparts and link the various neighbourhoods and the two fortresses with the harbour, some of which were to be used for transportation by chaloupe (small boats). The harbour is enclosed like that of La Rochelle, with jetties and chains to block it from intruders. The town boasts sixty-seven îlots of varying shapes and sizes, mostly squares or rectangles. The principal neighbourhood, on the west, is similar to Nouveau-Biloxy (fig. 9.7): it is lunette-shaped (here a hexagon), with ramparts tracing its perimeters and it focuses on a “Grand Place” facing the harbour and containing government and ecclesiastical buildings. But in this case the square is partially hidden from the harbour by two more rows of îlots and two canals. The fortress (citadel) nests in the ramparts, separated by a moat fed by the canal, in much the same manner as François Fresneau de La Gataudière’s 1734 project for Fort Saint-Pierre d’Oyapock in Guiana (fig. 9.10), and there is a second fortress in the northwest corner, a small pentagon, to guard the heights and the road to Nippes and Saint-Louis. A separate fortress with heavy

10.3 P. Cornuau, Plan of Petit-Goâve and Acul, ink and colours on paper, 1688. The fort and governor’s house are depicted in the insets on upper left (plan) and right (elevation). The main town is located just below the plan of the fort, mostly scattered along the shore. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 15 DFC 696B .

Urbanism in Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue and Public Monuments

249

10.4 (opposite) Philippe Cauvet, Map of the Surroundings of the Town of Petit-Goâve, 1710. The new bastioned ramparts would enclose the town and square but not the church, which is on the right at the end of an allée. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 15 DFC 706B .

10.5 (above) Jean-André Du Coudreau, General Project for a Citadel, City and Enclosed Port in the Acul du Petit Goâve drawn by the late M. Meynier with the Changes Made by M. Coudreau as they are Partly Begun Today, 1743. This city was to be built mostly on reclaimed land with an intricate canalization system. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 15 DFC 719B .

artillery was located on the island of Carénage, south of the harbour. Meynier made dramatic use of sightlines, piercing the îlots blocking the square from the harbour with an extra street and two bridges so that ships entering the harbour would have a direct view of the church in the centre of the far range of the square. Another gracious feature is the generous and shady Cours, or promenade, on the south end of town at the entry to the main gate, which is shaded by a double allée of trees and a bosquet, or forested grove. The town was to have a separate neighbourhood to the northwest (upper left on the plan) for “mulattos and for free blacks,” demonstrating the growing importance of those communities in an urban setting, but also the settlers’ desire to keep them at arm’s length. Moreau remarked that the plan was “so ingenious that the King agreed that this site should be named Fort-Royal de l’Acul du Petit-Goâve,” but that “unfortunately for M. Meynier, he had not consulted the climate, and became its victim,” dying of tropical disease.49 Meynier’s city shared the fate of its creator. Although Coudreau briefly took over the project and part of it was in fact begun, it was never finished. Petit-Goâve fared only slightly better. Officials had long ago moved the capital to Port-de-Paix (in 1697), and Petit-Goâve, now out of the limelight, remained a backwater.50 When Moreau visited the town of 450 people in the 1780s he found twelve unpaved streets (although they were still lined with elms) and about 125 wooden houses with galleries, some on verge of collapse, a partially obscured market square, and the parish church of Nôtre-Dame, recently rebuilt and “pretty enough without being remarkable in any way; it lacks ornament, church fabrics, sacred vessels, etc.”51 The splendid neo-Mughal church that was reduced to rubble in 2010 was a modern building. Port-au-Prince developed in much the same way as did Le Cap – as a massive quadrillage without walls enlarged during successive building campaigns – and it offered little unity of design except within individual neighbourhoods. The only idealized project is an anonymous scheme by royal engineer Louis-Denis

252

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

Lagneau de Laris (fl. 1742–1771), never realized and never mentioned by Moreau, that bears many similarities to Meynier’s l’Acul du Petit-Goâve (fig. 10.6) and was likely inspired by it.52 Officials debated making Port-au-Prince the capital as early as 1724, and in 1733 La Lance designed two proposals for towns on the Plaine du Cul de Sac, one roughly where the town was eventually constructed in 1749 and the other to the southeast at a place called Port-Royal.53 Meynier replaced La Lance upon his death in July 1739, and in 1742 he designed a battery on an islet facing the harbour. The government began acquiring land on the mainland, officially founding Port-au-Prince in October of 1743 with the amalgamation of the parishes of Cul-du-Sac and Grand-Rivière. Engineers Du Colombier and Duport (first names unknown) determined the town limits and Meynier’s successor De Coudreau drew up the quadrillage in 1743, its properties sold to concessioners on the understanding that they would build houses of equal height with tile roofs for which they were to pay three livres per foot of facade. Port-au-Prince actually developed as two contiguous towns, one called the “old town” and the other “new town,” the first dating from 1749 (De Coudreau) when it became the regional capital, and the second by 1751 (De Verville).54 Quebec-born noble Lagneau de Laris passed his examinations in 1742 in France as ingénieur du roy and served as an ingénieur volontaire before working as a fortifications expert at Le Cap, Petit-Goâve, Léogâne, and elsewhere from 1743 to 1750, when he accompanied the governor and intendant to Port-au-Prince to determine the location of the buildings necessary for the King’s Service.55 There he built a governor’s house, a powder magazine, repaired the French and Swiss barracks, and constructed two batteries. Nothing is known about the origin of his earlier plan for an ex nihilo city (fig. 10.6), but it is odd that someone as junior as Lagneau would have been commissioned to design the future capital – he was not even a sousingénieur until 1747 and De Coudreau and Duport were already on the scene. It is also unclear when it was

made. An inscription on the plan in what looks like late eighteenth-century script says that “the plan must have been made around 1745,” which would place it a year after he moved to the Western District; however he moved to Port-au-Prince permanently only in 1750. A date of before 1743 is the likeliest given the plan’s affinities with Meynier’s 1740 scheme and that project’s 1743 corrections by De Coudreau, whom Lagneau would surely have met. It is unlikely to date from 1750 since De

10.6 Louis-Denis Lagneau de Laris, Map of Port-au-Prince with the Plan of a Project for the Town to Build there and of the Fortified Ramparts to Build in Turn with a Citadel for its Defence, ink and colours on paper, before 1743. This project had twin palaces and gardens for the governor and intendant directly across from the main church on the central square. The enclosed port had separate sections for warships and merchant ships. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), F 3 296 E 57.

Urbanism in Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue and Public Monuments

253

Coudreau had already laid out the quadrillage for Portau-Prince the year before and construction was well underway. Perhaps this drawing was little more than an exercise to demonstrate his skill to his superiors, a kind of pièce de trait, like those required of journeymen hoping to make the rank of master in the French guild system (see chapter 6). Lagneau’s project aligns its streets, squares, and buildings for maximum effect. Like Meynier’s it features a grid plan facing an enclosed harbour and encircled by large polygonal ramparts, a smaller fortress incorporated into the walls (on the northeast, guarding the high ground), and a church at the centre of the main square opposite the harbour with an extra street affording a direct view from approaching ships. The rectangular harbour has separate zones for war ships and merchant ships and is accessed by a small opening in the jetties which could be enclosed by chains and which was further guarded by a tiny fort and battery. Although there are no canals (the town was not on reclaimed land as was l’Acul), Lagneau’s scheme does allow for plenty of open space within the ramparts and along the waterfront for manoeuvres and recreation (the cours along the harbour front is lined with rows of trees and the architect left room for it to continue around the whole town). Lagneau provides two squares, a square place d’armes roughly in the centre of the grid, and a rectangular one facing the waterfront and linked to the promenade, both lined with trees. The main square, also lined with freestanding pavilions that might have been shops, is masterfully balanced: on the west range a large church sits in the centre flanked by dependencies and gardens, and on the east stand the palaces of the

10.7 Anonymous, Project of a Fortified War Town Near the Centre of the French Part of the Island of Saint-Domingue in Accordance with the Orders of the Court, ink and colours on paper, ca. 1791–93. Commissioned by Jean-Jacques Du Portal, Director-General of Fortifications for Saint-Domingue and the Windward Islands. This was the only large-scale inland fortress ever projected for the colony. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 15 DFC 564B .

Urbanism in Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue and Public Monuments

255

governor and intendant, identical in size and appearance and adjacent to each other on individual îlots, with larger gardens behind them. This placement of the buildings of Church and State directly across from each other – and the perfect balance between the seats of military and economic authority – is a quintessentially Gallic answer to the Spanish plaza and reveals the workings of a particularly creative mind. Although town planners opted for an ungainly sprawl instead of an idealized scheme, Lagneau did receive the Cross of Saint-Louis in 1771.56 No project in the French Atlantic Empire approaches the geometrical complexity, flamboyance, and design flair of the spectacularly crustacean Place de Guerre (literally “City of War,” fig. 10.7). It was drawn up by an unknown engineer architect named Deherine following a scheme first proposed by Antoine-Jean-Jacques Duportal, maréchal de camp and director-general of fortifications for Saint-Domingue and the Windward Islands, and “conforming to the orders of the Court” according to the extant two plans. It is difficult to date this project. Duportal was in Saint-Domingue from before 1766 until he fell ill in 1771, dying in 1773 after returning to France.57 But the project was seriously proposed for the first time only in the 1790s, when the colony was rapidly being torn apart by its rebellious ex-slaves. Capitaine du Génie Charles-Marie Vincent (in office 1786–1800), the desperate engineer on the ground at the time, was keenly aware of the need to build a fortress northeast of Port-au-Prince to control the mountainous backcountry where the rebels had taken hold. He wrote a report in 1795 specifically calling for a “Place de Guerre Centrale” in which he mentions Du Portal’s “octagon” but criticizes it because “it would be an object of frightening expense (dépense effrayante) and more impossible than ever at this moment.”58 Given that the project had an urgency in the 1790s which it did not have in the 1760s, I believe that Deherine drew up these plans sometime between the outbreak of the rebellion in 1791 and Louis XVI’s death in 1793, since the plan is fervently royalist. The idea may have been Du Portal’s but the project’s megalomania and its clear function as

256

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

a last-ditch safe haven for the colony’s white citizens places it after 1791.59 The Place de Guerre was meant to be built on a strategic inland location in the Western District straddling the Artibonite River, a major waterway shared by the French and Spanish (fig. 10.7).60 However it could just as well have been executed in Paris for all its obliviousness to the geography of the region – even the river has been straightened out – and the description on the map shows that planners had still not decided on which of three possible sites it would occupy and whether it should be built in totality (en totalité) or in a reduced version (pour reduction). The main novelty about this plan aside from its extraordinary design is that it was meant to be an inland city. Previously, all fortifications were aimed at defending towns from attack by sea, and as we have seen the interior ramparts illustrated in projects were rarely executed or constructed with rows of citrus trees. Astonishingly, it had not previously occurred to colonial planners (except perhaps for Du Portal in the 1760s) that the main enemy of French interests in the island were the very slaves they had brought there in such overwhelming numbers, men who now controlled the mountainous hinterlands and in 1804 would decisively expel the French from the island. This obliviousness is especially striking when compared to nearby Jamaica, where even the plantation houses were frequently built as defensible stone fortresses modelled on the tower castles of northeast Scotland and Northern Ireland.61 The French colonies in the Circum-Caribbean showed little interest in fortifying their plantations with defensive walls, and except for Cayenne they were also apathetic about interior ramparts – unlike the towns and more remote farms of North America which were often palisaded against Amerindian invasion. Reconquest demanded a highland redoubt. As Vincent commented, “all the military officials who have written about the defence of Saint-Domingue and on the way of assuring its permanent ownership by France have thought that it is impossible to gain this advantage except by establishing a strong central citadel” that

could repel “the revolt and cruel war which has taken place in the high mountains in the Northern District.”62 It is also remarkable that French engineers were wasting time executing such a stylish and idealistic project – a sentiment Vincent clearly shared – when the nation was torn by revolution at home and Saint-Domingue was slipping through their hands. No city plan is as emphatically royalist and metropolitan, expressed not merely through its Place Royale but in the names of the bastions and the decision to name the parish church after the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris. The Place de Guerre is a fully functioning city on a grand scale with civic and religious structures, eight

10.8 Claude Guillot-Aubri’s 1748 project for a Place Louis XV (marked “L ”) across the river from the Tuileries and linked to it by a bridge called the “Pont-Royal.” From Pierre Patte, Monumens érigés en France à la gloire de Louis XV (Paris, 1765), xxxix. Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich.

public squares (even Le Cap had only five), promenades, formal gardens, and charitable institutions such as a hospital for the poor. Its 77 residential îlots were meant to be divided into 15 lots each, which with maximum capacity would accommodate 1,155 residences. It was a colony in miniature, a retreat for the entire French population of Saint-Domingue protected by

Urbanism in Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue and Public Monuments

257

unprecedentedly complex ramparts, and bristling with arrow-shaped bastions, ravelins, and other pointy protrusions. The basic unit of the town is like that of Nouvelle-Biloxy (fig. 9.7), with a roughly semicircular enclosed quadrillage surrounding a square facing the water, only here it is twinned with a neighbourhood of equal size on the southern bank of the river, the two linked by the Pont Royal between the Place Notre-Dame on the north and the Place Royale on the south. The city is bursting with public spaces: small ronds-points with fountains punctuate eight intersections to provide water and ease transportation; four market squares (“places publiques pour les marchés”) adorn the four corners of the grid where produce could be brought from the

258

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

countryside; and four formal squares provide the city with multiple sites for ceremonies (in addition to the Place Notre-Dame and Place Royale there are two to the northeast and southwest called Place Saint-Marc and Place Saint-Louis). The latter two, positioned directly behind the city gates (Porte Saint-Marc and Porte SaintLouis) and only reachable by crossing three bridges over moats and ditches, would give visitors an immediate sensation of openness and grandeur as they entered the city, each square flanked by barracks and allowing a direct view of the river. Government, military, and ecclesiastical buildings are also positioned for maximum visual impact. Pride of place is held by the governor’s palace, inside

a bastion at the northernmost extremity with a corps de logis and outbuildings surrounded by lawns and a formal parterre garden behind it. It is balanced by an arsenal with an identical arrangement of buildings and a lawn but no garden on the south side of town. The two are linked by a straight avenue that pierces the two central squares, uniting the city with its executive and military powers. The rest of the government buildings and the main church structures are on Place SaintLouis, including the intendance, the palace of justice and archives, and the residences of the lieutenant de roi, the church, and the presbytery. The sheer scale of these buildings is astonishing: the two barracks could each accommodate 1,200 men plus officers (and the

10.9 Jean-Pierre Calon de Felcourt with Jean Artaud, Plan of Place Royale [in Cap-François] and of the Facades of the Blocks forming the said Square at the Entrance to the City following the Orders of MM de Reynaud, Commandant General, and Le Brasseur … Intendant, ink and colours on paper, 1780. The red blocks had already been constructed at the time this plan was drawn up, although the facades were still in the planning stage. The facades illustrated were to face the entrance to the city and the Cours Villeverd. They were to match the facades inside the square on the yellow blocks marked “A ,” “B ,” “C ,” and “D .” Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), F 3 296 E 11.

Urbanism in Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue and Public Monuments

259

smaller barracks could hold 300); the military hospital could accommodate two thousand patients (and there was also La Providence, the hospital for the poor, which was only slightly smaller); and there was a large military prison. The hospitals had their own recreation gardens and chapels. Overall the Place de Guerre could accommodate over five thousand people. The way the two squares face each other with a bridge between them recalls some of the projects for the Place Louis XV in Paris as published in Pierre Patte’s Monumens érigés en France à la gloire de Louis XV (Paris, 1765), in particular Claude Guillot-Aubri’s 1748 project for a square across the river from the Tuileries and linked to it by a bridge called a “Pont Royal” (fig. 10.8). Indeed, the most striking thing overall about the Place de Guerre is how much it looks like Paris, as if nothing short of a simulacrum of the metropole – with its pre–Louis XIV ramparts restored – would be able to protect French civilization from destruction by the very institution it created to assure its prosperity. My consideration of French colonial urbanism will end not with another project for an entire city but with the most ambitious public space ever conceived within one: the 1780 scheme for a Place-Royale at Le Cap, conceived in more confident times by Jean-Pierre Calon de Felcourt, colonial infantry captain and ingénieur ordinaire at Saint-Domingue, in collaboration with a private entrepreneur Moreau calls “M. Artau,” whom he credits with the design of the facades (fig. 10.9).63 We know something about Calon: fifty years old at the time of the commission, he had served the Génie as an 10.10 Phelipeau, Plan of the City of Cap-François and Environs on the Island of Saint-Domingue, hand-coloured engraving, 1786. This view shows the new blocks enclosing the Place Royale coloured yellow and the extensive Promenade Publique at the entrance to the city to the left (south). The Place de Clugny and Petit-Guinée neighbourhood is just to the right and the Place d’Armes with the Church of the Assumption is farther right and closer to the sea. The former Jesuit compound, now Government House, with its extensive gardens, is near the top of the plan (west), and just below it is the little Place Montarcher with the Comédie. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

260

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

ingénieur géographe and with the military in France and the Rhineland since 1752.64 In 1763 he was sent to Saint-Domingue to produce a detailed new map of the colony, and in 1780 he was made aide-maréchal des logis, a grade of officer. All we know about Artau (variously spelled as “Artaud,” “Arnaud,” or “Arteau”) is that his first name was Jean, that he was born in Semuren-Auxois in Burgundy, that in 1777 he ran a shop with “seven carpenter Negroes” (see chapters 4–5), and that he died in Port-au-Prince in 1789.65 As was traditional when an engineer architect hired a civilian architect (see chapter 6), only Calon’s signature appears on the plans. By this time Le Cap was the largest and most advanced city in Saint-Domingue, the “Paris of our Islands” as one colonial official called it: a town mostly of stone, unlike Port-au-Prince, with 260 îlots divided by 56 streets, 1,400 houses, 79 public buildings, 5 public squares, fountains, promenades, an ostentatious theatre and dance hall (Salle de Spectacles, or Comédie; see fig. 10.24), all of which are vividly brought to life in Moreau’s meticulous three-hundred-page virtual walking tour (fig. 10.10).66 The giant grid, which survives intact today, was first developed around the docks area with the church and Place d’Armes above it to the west (it was the most desirable quarter, finished in 1743), with another neighbourhood known as “Petite Guinée” to the southwest around the Place de Clugny (a market square and place of executions; now the Marché de Fer) and inhabited mostly by free gens de couleur.67 Farther northwest was the military and government quarter, the governor housed in the former Jesuit residence, as well as the fashionable Place Montarcher with its park and fountain and fronted by the Comédie. The city is aligned northeast to southwest, surrounded by precipitous hills and with the sea to the east, and it was arranged along three major thoroughfares (rue Espagnol, rue d’Anjou, and rue du Gouvernement), the first of which was paved in 1776. An extension on a strip of coastal plain to the northeast of the docks (now le Carénage) included the Parc d’Artillerie, the Cours Le Brasseur promenade (ca. 1760), and the small Place de

262

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

la Luzerne. The Place Royale (now Place Toussaint Louverture) was built six blocks directly southwest of Place de Clugny in a southern extension of the city that was to serve as its main entry point from the countryside and the road to Port-au-Prince, and it was still under construction when the first slave rebellions brought things to a halt. The Place Royale was built on reclaimed swampland like Petite-Guinée to the northeast and began as a demiplace, or u -shaped square open on one end, designed by Coudreau in 1746. It was protected by a ramparts on the southwest rank, as it appears in a 1779 map (the first to call it “Place Royale”), with a corps de garde near the centre.68 In November 1780, Governor-General JeanFrançois, comte de Reynaud de Villeverd (1731–1812) and Intendant Joseph-Alexandre Le Brasseur (1745– 1794) ordered the demolition of the ramparts and fixed the final dimensions of the place at 52 square toises, the same as Place de Clugny, with which it was aligned. The Place Royale was now to be an enclosed square, about the size of four îlots, its southwestern rank formed of two new self-standing blocks.69 To the southwest, the Place Royale was to be approached by a long double allée of deciduous trees called the Cours de Villeverd, while an extension of rue Espagnole called the Grand Chemin ran parallel to it with a single allée of palms (fig. 10.10).70 The land immediately in front of the Place Royale was to be planted with shady groves of deciduous trees for promenading, and all three entrances were to be adorned with triumphal arches by René-Gabriel Rabié, which will be discussed later in this chapter (figs. 10.16–17). Unique for the colonies, this Place Royale was to have matching facades like its metropolitan counterparts – Calon’s exact words were “in the same Order” and Moreau called them “maisons régulières” – not only on the inside of the square but also on the six blocks facing the Cours Villeverd on the southwest, so that it presented a unified aspect to people approaching the town as well as those inside it.71 Although strictly speaking the plan states that within the square the uniform facades were to be placed only on the new sections

(marked yellow), it seems inconceivable that the Place Royale would have been planned without uniform facades all around the interior, so presumably facades had already been completed for the other buildings. Artau designed facade prototypes for two sizes of building, here described by Moreau: All facades were to be two storeys & run around all four sides of the îles [îlots]. A central ressaut (avant-corps) with pilasters would have taken up a third [of the facade], and their wings would also have had pilasters. Eleven openings adorned each floor of the îlets on the side facing the field. Two other symmetrical corps de logis faced onto the Rue du Pont, the one between the Rue Dauphine & Rue d’Anjou, & the other along Rue Espagnole in the West; they were 230 feet long [each], with 19 openings on each floor. Both buildings and the two between rue Vaudreuil & rue St. Louis also had triangular pediments above the projecting central section.72 Pinon has compared the placement of the two southern îlots to Jean-Gabriel Legendre’s project for the Place Royale in Reims (1755), which also has two self-standing blocks with matching facades – on the interior only – although the styles of the facades in

the two projects are quite different.73 Artau’s facades as illustrated on the plan have two storeys of high rectangular windows and are divided into three by superimposed pilasters – single at each end and layered pilasters flanking the central ressaut, which is also surmounted by a triangular pediment (fig. 10.11). Although much simplified, the long, low profile of the buildings and their prominent pediments, use of pilasters, and high roof hearken back to the facades of the Place Louis-le-Grand or Place Louis XV in Bordeaux (figs. 8.6, 8.10). However they also reflect trends in more contemporary architecture such as the late eighteenth-century Hôpital Saint-Eloi in Montpellier (1750–1805), which is comparably plain and has the same kind of window surrounds (fig. 10.12). Like so many of the projects in this chapter the Place Royale was never completed, although the square continued to bear that name until 1789 and at least one of the new îlots was occupied by 1798 (the second had only two buildings on it).74 Moreau explains that the former owners of the îlots opposed Artau’s scheme and the architect was able to build only foundations around the proposed new îlots pending a final ruling that never materialized.75 Moreau laments the failure 10.11 Jean Artaud, facade design for the Place Royale, CapFrançois, 1780. (detail of fig. 10.9).

Urbanism in Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue and Public Monuments

263

torched – and how far they had moved beyond utopian schemes. Arriving from Marseille in 1792, a plantation owner’s son named Monsieur Payerne fils wrote to his father: “We arrived here on the 24th of [March] where we discovered more disorder than in France … every night in the town there is fighting and there is some cannon fire … all the inhabitants have been obliged to find refuge in the city and abandon their plantations; every day troops arrive [and] the city is threatened with fires daily.”78 A 1796–97 map shows the extent of the devastation, about two-thirds of the city pockmarked by burned and demolished îlots, including two on what was now patriotically called the Place Nationale.79 Today the square is a chaotic dry goods market, completely hidden from view by the jumble of wooden roofs and canopies over the stalls (fig. 10.22). Public Monuments in French Colonial Cities

10.12 Jean Antoine Giral and others, Hôpital Saint-Eloi, Montpellier, 1750–1805.

of a project that would have brought gloire to his city: “I must admit that if this plan had been realised, the first sight of the city would have been magnificent, & that the traveller who, after being impressed from outside, would have entered through the arch of the rue Royale, & who would have found this square with same architecture … could not suppress a surge of admiration.”76 The project’s final death knell came with the Haitian struggle for independence when the city was burned twice by the rebels in 1793 and 1802.77 An eyewitness gives a sense of the terror that gripped the city’s denizens even before the city itself had been

264

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

In the French Atlantic Empire – and Saint-Domingue in particular – towns and gardens were adorned with a wide range of public monuments meant to advertise the loyalty of the colony, the wealth and influence of its citizens, and the power and technological accomplishments of the French state. Vauban had already demonstrated the importance of public spaces and monuments in his citadel towns and many of his urban projects made room for sculptures of the king.80 Claude Perrault also stressed the importance of such structures in celebrating “the pomp and brilliance” (“la pompe et l’éclat”) of the monarchy, particularly “triumphal arches, obelisks, pyramids, and mausoleums.”81 Aside from grand mausolea, which were very rare and usually temporary (like Jean-Baptiste Tugny’s 1777 catafalque for Louis XV in Cayenne), large-scale public monuments in the colonies came in three main categories: city gates, triumphal arches, and monuments related to water (including reservoir-fountains and ornamental fountains bearing obelisks, urns, or columns). Except for city gates, which graced all French fortifications or walled towns from the seventeenth century to the Bourbon Restoration, all of these monuments date from

10.13 Moreau de Chambonneau, main entry gate to Fort Saint-Louis, Senegal, ink on paper, ca. 1685. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aixen-Provence) (detail of fig. 12.6).

the eighteenth century, most from the 1770s to 1790s, and the majority were designed for Le Cap and Port-auPrince. By contrast statues were quite rare: although as we have seen nine places royales were built or planned in the French Americas, except for the brief appearance of a bust of Louis XIV at Quebec and the equally ephemeral pedestrian statue of Louis XV at Kourou (fig. 3.19), none of these squares contained a statue of the monarch, a considerable distinction from their counterparts in France, where the statue was the defining feature of a place royale. We have already seen that Vauban and his followers (notably Bélidor) considered ostentatious city gates to be an ideal tool for demonstrating the gloire of the king and France to foreign powers. This principle was enthusiastically applied in the colonies, even in towns and garrisons of tiny proportions. One of the earliest for which a drawing survives was the gate at Fort SaintLouis on the island of N’dar, 24 kilometres from the mouth of the Senegal River, a settlement that later grew

into the town of Saint-Louis (fig. 10.13).82 The first fort was built by the Compagnie du Cap-Vert in 1659, and it was rebuilt and/or enlarged in 1661, 1673, 1677, and ca. 1685, the last time by Governor Louis Moreau de Chambonneau (ca. 1650s–ca. 1693), designer of the gate.83 I will return to this fort in more detail in chapter 12; however the gate merits separate attention as it was designed with a grandeur utterly disproportionate with the size and solidity of what was essentially a patchwork of mud-brick turrets, walls, huts, and watchtowers. As depicted in the 1694 drawing it features an arched doorway of rusticated stone masonry surmounted by two inscription plaques, the legible one reading “Louis Moreau, Lord of Chambonneau etc., had this arch constructed.”84 Carved or painted onto the wall on either side of the door are two coats of arms, the royal arms on the left bearing the Cross of Saint-Louis and that of the Compagnie des Indes Occidentales on the right with a pair of Amerindian figures flanking a crowned shield of fleurs-de-lys.

Urbanism in Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue and Public Monuments

265

However, the most prominent image is the statue of the crowned Virgin and Child on the battlement flanked by the inscription “Et Rege Eos.” This text is from the Te Deum mass (“Et rege eos, et extolle illos usque in aeternum,” or “Govern them, and lift them up forever”), which is significant because not only was the Te Deum regularly performed in celebration of colonial power (see chapter 11) but it was also specifically tied to the legitimacy of the French monarchy.85 Ironically, the 10.14 (left) Étienne Verrier, Porte Dauphine of the Town of Louisbourg on Ile-Royale, ink and colours on paper, 1729. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 03 DFC 163B. 10.15 (right) Entry gate, Fort Saint-Charles (now Fort LouisDelgrès), Basse-Terre (Guadeloupe), ca. 1780.

266

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

image of the Virgin and Child at Fort Saint-Louis was not French at all but the Madonna Regina di Genova, a figure who appeared on Genoese silver scudo coins that also carry the inscription “Et rege eos.”86 The artist probably turned to the coin out of a lack of other visual models. Although the gate is unique in the French colonies for placing so much importance on religious symbolism, Chambonneau may have had personal reasons for emphasizing France’s Christian identity. Best known as the author of a report on jihadism in Senegal, he was keenly aware of the growing power of Islam in West Africa. His actions and comments demonstrate an insecurity about Christianity’s influence in the region, as when he threw pork lard into the stew he served to his Muslim servants out of spite and when, writing

about Ramadan, he commented that “in reality they make us see that to our great shame we are practically without fear of God when compared to them.”87 Like the gardens we will see in Gorée and Ouidah in the next chapter, the triumphant spirit underlying the gate at Fort Saint-Louis belied the precariousness of actual French power. Saint-Louis is an essentially medieval outlier: most fortress and city gates are based closely on Vaubanian models, often directly on the model gates illustrated in Bélidor’s La science des ingénieurs. Étienne Verrier’s design for Porte Dauphine at Louisbourg (1729), with its rustication and free-standing paired pier-pilasters, is a sophisticated pastiche of several of Bélidor’s designs from book iV , plate 19 (fig. 10.14).88 Similarly, the main gate at Fort Saint-Charles (now Fort Louis-Delgrès) in Basse-Terre is a close adaptation of Bélidor’s model for a gate and drawbridge from plate 18 from Book iV , only substituting a flat top instead of a rounded pediment (fig. 10.15).89 The arch would have borne the royal arms as in the engraving, but then the Revolution intervened. These monuments are plain but their use of classical proportions and rustication were meant to evoke associations with the Roman Empire. The connection with imperial antiquity was even more pronounced in triumphal arches (arcs de triomphe). Although they are permanent structures, they project the same ideology as the ephemeral ones built of wood and plaster throughout the Renaissance and baroque world to line processional routes during carefully choreographed royal entries (entrées) into cities, particularly near actual city gates, on bridges, or in public squares. In European cities temporary Romanstyle triumphal arches modelled after the Arches of Constantine (ad 315), Titus (first century ad ), and Septimus Severus (ad 203) equated the power of a monarch or local potentate with that of the Roman emperors – such were those produced in France under Henri IV and Louis XIV, the latter of whom also left us with two of the most monumental permanent triumphal arches in Paris, the Porte Saint-Denis and Porte SaintMichel (fig. 1.4).90 As Louis Hautecœur remarks, “the

entrées … became a pretext for building temporary buildings.” These short-lived structures were designed by such leading architects as Charles Le Brun and Jean Le Pautre (1618–82).91 In France permanent triumphal arches – another example that would have been familiar to engineer architects was Augustin-Charles d’Aviler’s arch in Montpellier (1691) at the entrance to the Place Louis XIV – served both to ensure immortality for their ruler and to inspire future monarchs toward the greatness of their predecessors. In the colonies they served as a physical reminder of royal power in a distant region, and their emphasis upon martial imagery asserts the importance of the king’s navy in maintaining that power. Given their expense, only three triumphal arches were ever proposed for the Atlantic colonies (figs. 10.16–17). Designed by René-Gabriel Rabié as part of Calon and Artaud’s Place Royale project for Le Cap (fig. 10.9), they were to span rues Vaudreuil, Royale, and Saint-Louis at the three southwestern entrances to the square, marking the transition between the urban zone and the beginning of the Cours de Villeverd (fig. 10.10).92 For people arriving from Port-au-Prince they would provide the first impression of the grandeur of the rival city. Rabié provided two designs, both three bays wide with engaged columns in the Doric order. The first, for the two identical arches for rue Vaudreuil and rue Saint-Louis, was conceived on the model of the Arch of Constantine and crowned with a high entablature with four trophées, one on top of each column. The second was for the central entrance at Rue Royale: it has a full Doric entablature with triglyphs and metopes (the latter carved with shields and helmets), a triangular pediment bearing the royal arms, a pair of trophées mounted on plinths on the extremities, and oval oeil-de-boeuf motifs with garlands over the two side openings. Both arch types were variations on models from Bélidor’s treatise, the fancier one on a prototype illustrated on plate 16 of Book iV that lacks the side openings and entablature reliefs but is profusely carved and has the trophées and royal arms.93 Although none of these arches were completed,

Urbanism in Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue and Public Monuments

267

much of the stonework had already been carved before the project was called off, as Moreau records: “orders had already been given that the King’s Negroes at Môle

10.16 René-Gabriel Rabié, Plan, Profile, and Elevation of a Gate to be built at the Entry to the City of Le Cap, facing Rue Royale, ink and colours on paper, 1781. This was the most opulent of the three gates that was to be the main entry to the city on rue Royale. Although it was never built, the stone was carved and ready. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), F3 296 E13.

268

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

prepare there the fine masonry necessary for the construction of these gates.”94 Nearly all public monuments were related to water. Since Roman times, and more recently during the restorations of that city of Pope Sixtus V, Louis XIV’s work at Versailles, and Parisian projects by various Bourbon kings, the ability to bring water to the city and gardens was a potent symbol of divinely appointed power and of the beneficence of the monarch to his people (fig. 11.5).95 In the eighteenth century as concern for public hygiene became more widespread, running

water became an essential ingredient in a healthy city. In the tropical colonies it was also a desperately needed source of respite from the heat, as fountains and waterworks gave water to thirsty people and animals and provided a cooling sensation through pools and jets of water in parks and urban squares. The sugar islands were the only place rich enough to undertake the largescale interconnecting systems of canals, reservoirs, and fountains that were constructed in the last quarter

10.17 René-Gabriel Rabié, Plan, Profile, and Elevation of one of the Gates to be built at the Entry to the City of Le Cap at the foot of Rues Vaudreuil and St. Louis, ink and colours on paper 1781. Two of these were to be built flanking the main arch in fig. 10.16, one on rue Vaudreuil and one on rue Saint-Louis. Although they were never built, the stone was carved and ready. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), F 3 296 E 12.

Urbanism in Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue and Public Monuments

269

of the eighteenth century. These waterworks projects were the work primarily of three men: Claude-François Nassau in Guadeloupe, Charles-François Hesse in Portau-Prince, and Rabié in Le Cap. Of all of these figures, Hesse was perhaps the most prolific hydraulics engineer. In a letter he wrote to the minister of the marine in 1783, Hesse boasted of the work he had done for the salubrity of Port-au-Prince:

10.18 Jean-André Du Coudreau, Plan, Profile and Elevation of a Fountain to be built on the Seaside [of Cap-François] in one of the wharves of the quay, to provision the ships, ink and colours on paper, 1747. The main fountain with the dolphin faced the quay. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 15 DFC 353C .

270

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

I built the first fountain in Port-au-Prince, which had never had anything but muddy water, which even animals refused to drink. After the great earthquake of 1770 all of the water sources for this city disappeared, the King’s troops, and the inhabitants were languishing for lack of this first necessity of life. It was costing the King 100,000 livres a year to cart and furnish water to the garrison, hospital, houses of the Governor, the Intendant, the Administrative Officers &c … I had to overcome all sorts of opposition to have my project for canalization adopted … the care that I have taken in diverting torrents of rainwater with dikes and drainage ditches, to shelter people from the sun by planting trees, have so increased that

instead of one source of water it has brought and continues to bring today 84 sources of good water to the public on the Place d’Armes, one in the barracks, another in Government House, and a fourth at the military hospital … Fire could destroy thousands of wooden houses in an instant without water to extinguish it.96 Fighting fire was serious business, and the major towns in Saint-Domingue had state-of-the-art firefighting equipment paid for by the Crown.97 Although Hesse’s report addresses only the more practical aspects of canalization, his system of waterworks made possible the flourishing of imposing public fountains in that city, from the harbour to the Place d’Armes. In France and the colonies alike civic reservoirs, or “châteaux d’eau,” were enclosed spaces with a spigot or other outlet for water, which usually took the form of a freestanding socle, often rusticated in imitation of garden grottoes as with the Château d’Eau de la Croix du Trahoir in Paris by Jacques-Germain Soufflot (1774).98 Paris lacked water, and both Louis XIII and XIV ordered new reservoir-fountains built along the Rive Droite in Paris to bring Seine water up to street level as part of their program of improving the health of the city, but it could be used only for cleaning. The building of reservoir-fountains increased rapidly so that by the end of the century Paris had fifty-one public fountains, nineteen of which were built by a single architect, Jean Beausire (1651–1743), maître des oeuvres de maçonnerie, between 1685 and 1733. Occasionally fountains were conceived on a truly monumental scale such as Edme Bouchardon’s Fontaine des Quatre Saisons on rue de Grenelle (1739), which occupies the entire facade of a building.99 One of the earliest colonial reservoir-fountains was Jean-André Du Coudreau’s 1747 harbour fountain at Le Cap located on a projecting pier so that the spigots on three sides could be reached by ships’ boats while the main facade could be reached on foot (fig. 10.18).100 A restrained, plinth-like classical structure, its facades featured central bays flanked by paired Doric pilasters

against a rusticated background, tall, plain entablatures, and flat cornices. The principal facade also had a grotto and basin in the centre with a bronze dolphin fountain on a plinth. The structure resembles Parisian examples such as Beausire’s Fontaine de Charonne (1671) but it is an almost exact copy of a city gate from Bélidor’s manual (Book iV , plate 17), the only difference being that the Bélidor portal has trophées at the top and a recessed pair of pilasters in the central bay – thus it is a clever refit of a prototype fashioned for another purpose.101 The grotto with its dolphin comes complete with false stalactites in the manner of French garden grottoes such as the Bassin de Neptune at Versailles (1679–81) and also a model grotto from EdmeSebastien Jeaurat’s popular treatise on perspective, the Traité de perspective à l’usage des artistes (Paris, 1750), which however has a lion’s head rather than a dolphin.102 As we have seen with the fountain in the Place-des-Quatre-Dauphins in Aix-en-Provence (fig. 8.3), the dolphin was a common symbol of the French monarchy. Nassau chose a more contemporary model for his reservoir-fountain behind the hospital at Pointe-àPitre, a sober exercise in neoclassicism. Of the two projects he illustrated the simpler one (1782) was a plain square structure with a triangular pediment, with water cascading from a chute into a basin in the middle and then into a pool. It featured three rectangular plaques above the chute, the central one with a royal inscription “Ludovico XVI regnante 1784 [sic].”103 The second project (1784) is more refined, the main body of the structure faced with long horizontal rustication unbroken except where it adjusts to form voussoirs around the fountain’s semicircular chute, from which water gushes down into a basin and then a pool (fig. 10.19). There is no royal inscription but the Bourbon arms adorn the pediment above. This structure is striking in its Spartan simplicity and recalls the exactly contemporary designs for Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s customs posts or barrières (1784–89) that once ringed Paris, particularly the Barrière des Bonshommes, a box-like structure with a pediment, horizontal unbroken rustication, and

Urbanism in Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue and Public Monuments

271

10.19 Claude François Nassau, “Projected Reservoir (Chateau d’eau)” (left) along with the House of Monsieur Testas (centre) and the Church (right) in Pointe-à-Pitre, detail from Plan of the Town of Pointe-a-Pitre on the Island of Grande-Terre, Guadeloupe, ink and colours on paper, 1783–84. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 08 DFC 395A .

a semicircular opening with voussoirs, and the Rotonde de la Villette (fig. 15.25), a tour de force of unbroken rustication.104 Unbroken rustication was very fashionable at the time, as at Ledoux’s Pavillon Guimard

272

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

(1770–72), Alexandre-Théodore Brogniart’s Couvent des Capucins (1780–82) – both in Paris – and JacquesJean Thévenin’s Laiterie in the gardens of Rambouillet (1785–88).105 Nassau’s reservoir-fountain is an unusually progressive monument for an Atlantic colony. Hesse’s 1774 design for a château d’eau on the spot where the main canal at Port-au-Prince empties into the general reservoir (bassin général) – it was commissioned by Mathias Henri Demoulceau (d. 1780), director-general of fortifications – is a compromise between Ledoux’s sobriety and rococo ostentation

(fig. 10.20).106 The box-like structure with its pyramidal roof is quite plain with heavy rusticated quoining on the corners, but it sports an outsized shell plaque reminiscent of the bulky coquillages (shellwork carvings) on the pediments of Parisian portes-cochères, notably the Hôtel Gouffier de Thoix (1719–27) on the rue de Varenne.107 The reservoir-fountain bears a Latin inscription from Virgil that could serve as a justification for Hesse’s lifetime of effort bringing water to the city: “Labor omnia vincit improbus & duris urgens in rebus egestas” (“Persevering labour overcomes all difficulties, and want that urges us on in the pressure of things”).108 The only royal symbol is the fleur-delys atop the pyramidal roof. The basic structure of the

building recalls the château d’eau on the Quai aux Vivres in Rochefort (1754) – very likely by an engineer architect – which has the same plain walls and rusticated quoining (fig. 10.21). One of the last reservoir-fountains to be built was the plinth-shaped fountain for the Place Royal in Le Cap in 1789 (fig. 10.22). It still exists against all odds and with its Bourbon arms intact, poking up above the square’s 10.20 Mathias-Henri Demoulceau and Charles-François Hesse, Fortifications, Port-au-Prince, 1774: Plan and Profile to Serve for … the Construction of the General Reservoir, ink and colours on paper, 1774. The reservoir’s elaborate facade is to the left. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 15 DFC 640B .

Urbanism in Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue and Public Monuments

273

10.21 Château d’eau on the Quai aux Vivres, Rochefort, 1754. 10.22 Fountain in the former Place Royal (now Place Toussaint Louverture), Cap-Haïtien, 1789.

chaotic cluster of market stalls and surmounted by broken electric lampposts. A much-simplified version of Coudreau’s 1747 monument, it has flat walls with raised panels and engaged Ionic columns at the corners supported by a square socle, coats of arms in the centre of the northwest face, and an entablature, stepped pyramidal roof, and garlanded urn.109 The water emerged from a circular opening carved to resemble a sailor’s knot in the middle of each side of the socle. As

274

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

in many monuments in Saint-Domingue it bore four coats of arms to represent municipality, colony, and monarch: in this case the arms of Le Cap, Governor Marie-Charles, marquis du Chilleau (1734–1794), and Intendant François Barbé-Marbois (1745–1837), with the royal crest on the main face. Since only the latter survives I suspect that the other three were painted onto their flat panels rather than being carved. Thus, in place of a statue of the king Cap-François’s Place Royale made do with mere symbolic references to the monarch and colony. Other fountains were meant as adornments for public squares and served as supports for columns,

obelisks, and urns. They were meant to draw people’s attention and to serve as visual focuses for neighbourhoods. Such was Rabié’s 20-foot-high fountain in the Place d’Armes in Le Cap (1769; fig. 10.23, right). It consisted of a socle set in a pool with carved mermaids and tritons in recessed panels in the lower section of each side along with bronze mascaron spouts, the usual run of coats of arms in recessed panels in the main section, and an elaborate urn adorned with eels and dolphins at the top with paired dolphin finial.110 Replacing an earlier wooden fountain from 1735, it bore multiple inscriptions lauding the beneficence of the king in bringing water to the people.111 Moreau proudly commented that “this monument would not be out of place in most of the cities of France, & it honours the taste of the city where it was constructed.”112 In fact this type of

plinth fountain crowned with an urn is quite common in France, as in the Fontaine des Tanneurs in Aix-enProvence (1761).113 A similar iconography adorned a fountain designed by Rabié for the Place d’Armes at Fort-Dauphin in 1787, a socle and pedestal with mascaron spigots on each face and the four coats of arms on the pedestal above, surmounted by a quartet of dolphins (fig. 10.23, left). The dolphins are especially reminiscent of the Quatre-Dauphins fountain in Aix (fig. 8.3) and once again symbolized monarchical authority as well as the name of the town.114 10.23 René-Gabriel Rabié, fountain, Fort-Dauphin, Saint-Domingue, 1787; fountain on the Place d’Armes, Le Cap, Saint-Domingue, 1769. From Moreau de Saint-Mery, Recueil, 1791, pl. 6. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

Urbanism in Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue and Public Monuments

275

Rabié’s fountain on Place Montarcher was an unusual invention, comprising a tall and narrow plinth with an engaged Ionic or Corinthian column on each corner, 10.24 Chevalier de Largues, Perspective View of the Place Montarcher in the City of Le Cap taken from the Corner of Rue St. Francois-Xavier, watercolour on paper (10½ × 16¾ inches) mounted on card captioned in manuscript, 1790. Signed “Le Cher Largues pinxit 1790.” In the middle of the square is René-Gabriel Rabié’s Fountain built in 1769. The municipal theatre, or Salle des Spectacles (also known as the Comédie), is the large building on rue Espagnole on the right. Government House and its gardens are in the distance. This is an extremely rare and hitherto unpublished view of France’s most important colonial city. Courtesy William Reese Company, New Haven.

276

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

mounted on a socle with diagonally projecting pedestal bases under each column, a chain of the usual coats of arms wrapped around the middle about a third of the way up the columns, and a high entablature on the top bearing a tongue-and-dart frieze and a heavy cornice, topped off with a pair of dolphins with intertwined tails (fig. 10.24).115 Between each of the pedestals were bearded mascarons with spigots in their mouths like those of the Place d’Armes and Fort Dauphin. Moreau was not impressed with this fountain, remarking that it “had little grace & a sort of pretentiousness which the smallness of the square makes very noticeable.”116 All that remains today is the base with the mascarons, resurfaced with cheap tiles. Although fountains with

10.25 Charles-François Hesse, Profile … of the Fountain Planned on the Place d’Armes (Place du Gouvernement), Port-au-Prince, 1773 (built 1774). Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-enProvence), 15 DFC 621C .

single columns on plinths are common enough in the period – as with the Corinthian Fontaine de l’Hôtel de Ville in Aix (1755) – this bundling of four columns is unique.117 The use of a column may hearken back to the Column of Trajan, which was reproduced by French monarchs since the time of Henri IV in ephemeral processions as a symbol of their ties to antiquity, or even the twinned Pillars of Hercules – like the Montarcher columns they are bound by chains – a Habsburg symbol of world conquest that Louis XIV appropriated for France after acquiring Navarre in 1665.118 The latter would have had a particular resonance in a French colony surrounded by Spanish territory in America. More traditional was Hesse’s counterpart in the Place du Gouvernement (also known as the Place d’Armes) in Port-au-Prince (1773–74), a tall obelisk on a socle and plinth with a crowned orb bearing the royal arms at the top and mascaron spigots in the socle emptying into a deep octagonal pool within an iron gate (fig. 10.25).119

It follows a common type in France going back to Claude Perrault’s unexecuted design for the Obelisk of the Sun King (1666) or the seventeenth-century Fontaine seigneuriale Notre-Dame in Saint-Cannat (Bouchesdu-Rhône).120 The earliest public fountain in the city (1774), it was 16 feet 8 inches high, and featured a black marble plaque with a gold-leaf inscription on the obelisk honouring Louis XV’s reign and naming the governor and intendant and, on the other side, another reference to the regime bringing water to its people.121 The Affiches Américaines wrote an approving review of this symbol of royal magnanimity on 30 March: The inhabitants of Port-au-Prince have seen with as much joy as gratitude … the water flow for the first time in the basins of the newly established Fountain on the Place d’Armes of this city. This precious monument of a beloved administration occasioned more than ever the feelings of love & respect which the sight of the Heads of this colony

Urbanism in Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue and Public Monuments

277

have inspired every good citizen … The public Fountain which today holds our admiration is in the most cheerful and most convenient position. Its shape represents an obelisk of stone whose point is surmounted by a globe crowned with the King’s arms; it is surrounded by an iron gate. Four sluices cut into the pedestal cast water into a large tank which empties itself into four pools.122 However local officials did not feel the same way: annoyed that a large fountain in the middle of the Place d’Armes now obstructed the proper review of troops, they called for its demolition as early as the 1780s.123 Engineer architect and director general of fortifications Pierre-Antoine-Jérôme Frémond de la Merveillère (1737–after 1792) criticized this move: “I do not see the same necessity in demolishing the fountain which is in the middle of the Place du Gouvernement in order to build two attached to the wall of the courtyard. The square is big enough that this edifice which serves as its ornament is not out of place in its setting and the inconvenience of blocking the view of Government House does not seem to me to warrant the new expense which it would require if one were to demolish it.”124 However his concerns were not merely practical ones. Merveillère was wary of destroying such a potent monument to royal authority. Like the triumphal arch and Trajan’s Column, the obelisk – whether permanent or ephemeral – had been used since Henri II’s time to represent the supremacy of the monarchy, again often crowned with the royal crown and other devises. Ever since the raising of obelisks had become a leitmotif of Sixtus V’s renovation of Rome they became an international symbol of urban regeneration.125 Louis XIV was particularly fond of obelisk imagery since ancient writers associated it with the rays of the sun, which fit neatly into his heliocentric iconography, and since the sun’s rays shone around the globe it was also used as a metaphor for Louis’s dominion over the “four parts of

278

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

the world,” a reference of particular importance for a colonial monument. The outsized cities and monuments in this chapter project an image of wealth and prosperity, but many of them also share a kind of desperation: an urgency to display authority and loyalty to the king in the face of global developments that placed the monarchy and empire on an ever-weaker footing. Most of these monuments date from after 1763, when Minister Choiseul and colonial authorities were still smarting from the loss of so much territory to the British, and their desire to make up for these losses propelled many of the most elaborate schemes of the last decades of the eighteenth century, from utopian colonies in the rainforest to vast formal gardens in the court style of Louis XIV (see chapter 11). The proliferation of monuments also reflects a crisis at home: beginning in the 1750s and 1760s intensifying architectural criticism in France sought a solution to what was perceived as a decline in French architecture occasioned by the comparative dearth of major architectural projects in the early reign of Louis XV and his apparent lack of interest in finishing the Louvre.126 The very definition of a national style was at stake. Critics fell into different camps, some seeking a return to Colbert’s era, not only his robust patronage but the Grand Siècle style, a nostalgia which also underscores many of the projects in the colonies. By the 1760s with the return to large-scale architectural projects such as Jacques-Germain Soufflot’s church of Sainte-Geneviève, designers turned to a more academic classicism that by the end of the century and the maturity of the neoclassical movement was transformed by Ledoux and Jean-Jacques Lequeu (1757–1826) into a more radical, inventive kind of architecture. I will explore how these new styles were reflected in the colonies in chapters 12 to 16 as we move from looking at the empire’s cities and towns from the air to walking through their streets.

11

Formal and Scientific Gardens and Ephemera

this chAPter Will look At one of the most explicit expressions of French imperial power, which at times was integrated into urban schemes and does not fit neatly into the category of architecture. The French formal garden was one of France’s most important and recognizable contributions to baroque culture and was the nation’s preferred way to imprint a specifically French identity onto its overseas possessions. There is a performative quality to gardens that sets them apart from all but the most important formal public squares in French colonial towns since they served as stages and backdrops not only to people’s daily lives but also for ephemeral events, whether an outdoor banquet celebrating the arrival of a new governor, a fireworks display to celebrate a naval victory, or a funerary procession for a dead king. As in Catholic Europe and Latin America these celebrations were quite routine, were duly reported in newspapers and broadsides, and gave colonial administrators a way to encourage settlers, free gens de couleur, slaves, and Amerindians to publicly act out their allegiance to France and (rather less than in Hispanic America) to the Catholic Church. The French were also convinced that gardens and public monuments were an effective way to impress foreigners since they were seen as quintessential French inventions, they were large and out of doors, and they were accessible to all. Gardens also had a particular capacity for directing people’s gazes and indicating where they should

11.1 (left) “A Magnificent Garden all upon a Level.” Engraving from AntoineJoseph Dézallier d’Argenville, La théorie et la pratique du jardinage (Paris, 1709). Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich. 11.2 (opposite) Design for a parterre from Claude Mollet, Théâtre des plans et jardinages (Stockholm, 1651). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1926.

walk. They were also uniquely capable of engaging the senses, using stimuli such as fountains, forest groves (bosquets), flowery parterres (decorative raised beds), or fruit trees to delight the eye, nose, ear, mouth, and – through cool breezes and water – the sense of touch. But they were used not just against rival European powers. Gardens were on the front line in battles between rival groups within the colony, as religious orders vied with government foundations and with each other and towns struggled to outdo each other to curry favour with the Ministry of the Marine and the king. Given their close ties to the imperial enterprise – and the degree to which the ideology of the French formal garden has been studied in its European context – it is remarkable that they have not merited more than the briefest mention in the scholarship. In my opinion they constitute one of the most fascinating branches of architecture in this book.

In their effort to export the French brand, nothing could have better reflected Frenchness than the formal garden as developed by Louis XIV’s chief gardener André le Nôtre (1613–1700) and transmitted across the country and the world by manuals such as Antoine-Joseph Dézallier d’Argenville’s influential La théorie et la pratique du jardinage (Paris, 1709) (fig. 11.1). The French formal garden did not arise from a vacuum: as with French Baroque architecture it borrowed heavily from Italian prototypes, in this case late Renaissance gardens in Florence and Rome, but the latter were smaller and not as grandiose in their ideological pretensions. The origins of French garden design can be traced to the publication of manuals such as Olivier de Serres’s Le théâtre de l’agriculture et ménage des champs (1600), Claude Mollet’s Théâtre des plans et jardinages (1638), and André Mollet’s Le jardin de plaisir (1651)

Formal and Scientific Gardens and Ephemera

281

11.3 (left) The east-west axis from the Fountain of Latona at the Gardens of the Château of Versailles, begun 1661. 11.4 (opposite) General Plan of the City and Château of Versailles. Engraving, from Blondel, Architecture françoise (Paris, 1752–56). Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (87-B 434).

(fig. 11.2).1 These treatises, influential in the colonies, emphasized the link between palace and garden, the supremacy of ornamental plantings over the merely utilitarian, and the progression along axes encompassing parterres, lawns, canals, and forest groves. They also provided convenient models for broderies – literally “embroideries,” referring to the intricate arabesque designs inside raised garden beds or parterres – and labyrinths. By teaching gardeners how to draw a garden first on paper before plotting it on the ground, they placed the act of drawing at the centre of landscape practice.2 The largest axis in the realm was Le Nôtre’s three-kilometre east-west perspective at Versailles: from the steps of the palace the king could gaze down a terrace, past the horseshoe-shaped Parterre de Latone (named after Apollo’s mother Latona), along an extended, narrow lawn called the Tapis Vert (“Green Carpet”), over the Bassin d’Apollon (Apollo was Louis’s alter ego), down the entire length of the Grand Canal, and across another wider lawn into the forests beyond. The Grand

282

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

Canal (1667–80) – over 1,500 metres long – was so large that it berthed a permanent fleet of miniature French naval vessels and Venetian gondolas (fig. 11.3). Serving as contrôleur général of the Bâtiments du Roi between 1657 and 1700 and famously enjoying the ear of the king, Le Nôtre came from a family of royal gardeners, and trained at the Tuileries until qualifying as master gardener in 1637.3 It was an exciting time to be at the Tuileries: together with the Louvre it was the largest construction project in France, and the young designer came into contact with the greatest artistic minds of the day.4 No mere planter, Le Nôtre studied painting and perspective (especially popular from the 1620s) under Simon Vouet (1590–1649) and Charles Le Brun, became an accomplished architect in his own right, was arguably the world’s leading hydraulics expert, and amassed one of Paris’s finest painting and sculpture collections, including important works by Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), Claude Lorrain (1600–1682), and many Italian masters.5

Scholars have long noted that these gardens were much more than just a place to grow plants or take a refreshing walk.6 Beginning at Vaux-le-Vicomte (1656– 61) and culminating in the gargantuan gardens of Versailles (first phase 1661–77), formal gardens became one of France’s most impressive manifestations of absolute power, military might, and territorial expansion. In fact they inspired some of the fundamental characteristics of French urban design which we have already seen: notably the long, wide avenues and centrifugal axes as seen at the garden of the Tuileries (1664–67), from which avenues radiated outward to the west, most famously with the Champs-Élysées, and with the patte d’oie trident. Scholars have shown that garden designers were inspired directly by the very cartographers who were mapping out France’s territory and new conquests.7 By imposing hierarchically organized zones, grand perspectives, meticulously organized plantings, literal representations of maps (“cartes géographiques), fortification-like earthworks, waterworks, and an unusually high number of allegorical statues onto a landscape, garden designers advertised the king’s authority over the territory of France, and by extension (through the inclusion of exotic plants and animals in his menagerie at Versailles) his world empire (fig. 11.4).8 Gardens and the aqueducts that fed them also celebrated military power more directly: built by soldiers, they were as big as a garrison town and were dependent upon the techniques of military engineering and surveying. The most ambitious feats of garden engineering were the industrial-scale Machine de Marly, composed of 14 waterwheels and 221 pumps, which drew water 162 metres from the River Seine, and Vauban’s ill-fated Maintenon Aqueduct (1683–95; fig. 11.5), intended to carry water from the River Eure but ultimately abandoned. In fact scholars have interpreted royal gardens as a conscious representation in miniature of the pré carré of French territory, a concept itself understood as a metaphorical garden (as noted in chapter 1 pré means “meadow”).9 The bastion-type retaining walls and other earthworks that restructured their landscapes not only projected a military aspect but also gave the king

284

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

and nobility a literal view from on high to scrutinize the countryside, “seeing the landscape with a surveyor’s eye,” part of a culture of surveillance that used perspective sightlines that had become popular with the nobility.10 These views from above were inspired by depictions of battles.11 Sometimes these martial associations were spelled out unambiguously, as in the Étoile (“star”) bosquet at Versailles, which is shaped like a pentagonal citadel. In France and the colonies alike one of the most important functions of gardens was as settings for elaborate public entertainments – the most renowned were Louis XIV’s Les plaisirs de l’île enchantée (1664), the Grand divertissement royal (1668), and the Divertissements de Versailles (1674), days-long combinations of processions, music, theatre, and spectacular fireworks.12 Theatrical events took place in the “salles” in the bosquets, or forested groves – in fact there was no permanent theatre at Versailles until after the death of Louis XV (fig. 11.6). Formal gardens also played into Colbert’s economic schemes: the broderies were either derived from or influenced textiles being made in the Gobelins manufactories and incorporated into French haute-couture, an unequivocal reference to French products and to the king’s program of nationalizing industry.13 French formal gardens were also open to the public, so that their messages of power and legitimacy could be communicated directly to the king’s subjects – at least until 1685, when Louis XIV became fed up with “the host of people come from everywhere” and restricted access to the gardens at Versailles.14 Like the Cours in Paris they gave people a place for salutary promenades where they could reflect on the benefices of a king who created a place not only of beauty and order but also of health and recreation. Particularly indicative of this ideology, and a prototypically absolutist symbol of royal authority, were the seemingly endless views cut through the terrain. Taking the form of extended and orderly successions of walkways, terraces, basins, lawns, canals, and allées (avenues) that stretched to the horizon, they were referred to as “grandes perspectives”

(as with the patte d’oie), and allowed the king to look toward infinity, metaphorically observing and controlling his vast domains (figs. 11.3–4).15 Whereas the strict geometry of the rectangular parterres near the palace, with their hedges, coloured rocks, and flowers, represented order, the forest groves – equally artificial but looking like ancient woods – stood for wilderness. But it was a tamed wilderness subject to the rationality of the overall design. As with any successful expression of power, French formal gardens were avidly copied by France’s friends and foes across Europe, becoming the prototypical representation of royal prerogative before they were overtaken by the English “natural garden” in the eighteenth century. Although overshadowed in the literature, the more practical potagers, or fruit and vegetable gardens, were also widespread, beginning with Olivier de Serres’s influential Théâtre d’agriculture (Paris, 1600).16 The largest and most famous one was Louis XIV’s Potager du Roi at Versailles, its plants lined up in regimented rows and surrounded by high walls, which further evoke fortification architecture, as if symbolizing the Crown’s efforts to protect the nation’s foodstuffs (fig. 9.17). We

11.5 (left) Sébastian Le Prestre de Vauban, Maintenon Aqueduct, Beauce, 1683–95. 11.6 (right) Jules Hardouin-Mansart, Enceladus Grove, Versailles, rebuilt 1706.

have already seen in chapter 9 that an entire city in Guiana was based on a print of this garden (fig. 9.16). The king’s fruit and vegetable gardener Jean-Baptiste de La Quintinie (1626–1688), the first directeur des jardins fruitiers et potagers de toutes les maisons royales, was in his way just as influential as Le Nôtre (like Le Nôtre he had first worked at Vaux), not just through practical techniques such as espaliering fruit trees or using cold frames but because his Versailles garden became the prototype for potagers throughout France and its colonies.17 Quintinie also considered the potager to be a metaphor for royal authority since it represented “physical control, land stewardship, and control of the effects of the sun on fruit” – the latter of particular resonance to Louis XIV’s heliocentric iconography.18 The potager du roi was not merely a place to grow food for the royal table; it also served for experimental plantings, mostly of fruit and vegetables from the Midi

Formal and Scientific Gardens and Ephemera

285

(southern France) which gardeners lovingly nurtured in greenhouses, hotbeds of soil and manure, and glass cloches (bell jars for melons and cucumbers) to help them survive the northern climate. As Ian Thompson puts it, “[t]he Potager was no modest kitchen-garden; it was something between an outdoor laboratory and an early example of agribusiness.”19 They also served as evidence of royal charity as excess fruit and vegetables were handed out to the urban poor of Versailles. Some of these crops made an extraordinary impression on the court: Louis XIV became so obsessed with peas – they were introduced from Italy around 1660 – that he would binge on them at one sitting and made himself sick. As a place to acclimatize plants from warmer regions the potager was akin to another kind of garden with a much more direct relationship with the colonies: the acclimatization garden, usually called a “jardin botanique” and often part of a larger jardin de la marine located at naval hospitals across France (the term “acclimater” was not introduced until the end of the eighteenth century).20 The earliest acclimatization garden was founded in Nantes in 1726 when Louis XV – himself something of an amateur botanist – ordered that sea captains there deposit all seeds and plant specimens from “the Indies” for eventual shipment to the Jardin du Roi in Paris (1635) – also known as the Jardin Royale des Plantes and now the Jardin des Plantes – as well as to the king’s collection of rare specimens at the Tuileries. Similar institutions were soon founded in the French naval bases of Rochefort (fig. 9.14), Toulon, and Brest, as well as civilian botanic gardens in cities with strong links with the Atlantic trade, such as Bordeaux and Montpellier.21 These gardens were essential as acclimatization could take years: most specimens arriving from overseas were frankly struggling for their lives. With the introduction of acclimatization gardens and the expansion of global trade in the eighteenth century, the jardins de la marine, which originally focused on medicinal plants, grew exponentially, accommodating fruit trees and vegetables, medicinal simples, and decorative plants, and they became major construction projects in their own right.22

286

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

Acclimatization gardens combined two critical functions as spelled out in a 1739 plan for the new botanic garden in Rochefort: “to instruct surgeon students and to serve as an entrepot for plants which come from America for the Jardin du Roi.”23 The Rochefort garden soon became one of the largest depositories of exotic plants in France, and was the place where breadfruit from the South Pacific was acclimatized before being sent to Cayenne and the site of the first coffee plants grown in France, which were then sent to the Antilles and Brazil. Traffic could be quite busy, as in 1736 when banana plants from Saint-Domingue, tulip trees from Louisiana, and a collection of exotic plants from Guiana arrived all at the same time. Louis XVI put even greater energies into plant-hunting voyages of discovery, most notably with the ultimately disastrous voyage (1785–88) of Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse (one of the consultants was Antoine Laurent, head of the Jardin Botanique at Brest), which ended with La Pérouse’s mysterious death in the Solomon Islands (fig. 17.4).24 One of the key contributions made by these naval gardens was the development of receptacles for transporting delicate plants over long sea voyages, a technology without which much of the interchange of tropical flora would not have been possible.25 Scientists pored over books providing advice on transporting fragile plants: Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau’s Avis pour le transport par mer des arbres, des Plantes vivaces, des semences et autres curiosités d’Histoire naturelle (Paris, 1752) was a classic of its genre. A critical part of the monarchy’s race to acquire exotic and potentially profitable plants was the creation of a vast network of botanic gardens in the colonies themselves, which scholars call applied botanic gardens but which at the time were called “jardins du roi” or “jardins botaniques.” The first was founded in 1716 in Guadeloupe and they later spread to Cayenne (1762), Port-au-Prince (1777), and Saint-Pierre in Martinique (1803), as well as to the Indian Ocean colonies of Île de France, where there were three (1735, 1748, 1775), and Île Bourbon, which had two (before 1767).26 Unlike the Jardin du Roi in Paris or the French naval

botanic gardens, in which teaching, medicine, and sustenance for hospital patients were still the principal concerns, applied botanic gardens in the colonies served science and industrial espionage in equal measure. Their primary function was to grow plants stolen from British, Dutch, and Spanish territories (such as mulberries from the Philippines or breadfruit as noted above) that officials hoped could be grown at profit in French colonies with similar climates. The English and Dutch had similar networks of gardens, from Cape Town (1694) to Jamaica (1775) to Sydney (1788) – in fact bringing breadfruit from Tahiti to Jamaica was the goal of the ill-fated voyage of the British ship Hms Bounty in 1789 – although the French chain of colonial jardins botaniques was more extensive and aggressive than those of their competitors.27 By the second half of the eighteenth century plants – and gardens – were on the front line of the geopolitical struggle for dominance. The Formal French Gardens of West Africa, 1681–1776 Extraordinarily, France planned two of the earliest and most ambitious colonial formal gardens in Africa – I say extraordinarily because both were laid out in tiny enclaves that were little more than factories (comptoirs) in regions where the French were overwhelmingly outnumbered by Africans, whether sovereign states within view of the compounds, free people of colour living within the factory walls, or slaves, who outnumbered whites and free people of colour alike. It is almost as if the size and glory of the garden projects were planned in inverse proportion to France’s actual influence in the region, which gives these idealistic designs a palpable edge of desperation. Africa presented a very different reality to the French than did in their American colonies. The African mainland remained in the hands of powerful, highly organized independent states such as the kingdoms of Dahomey or Cayor, with trade and political connections reaching far into the continent, and the French were utterly dependent upon them for their existence.28

Indeed indigenous rulers sometimes held French officials captive or deported them, such as the Wolof monarch Latsukaabe, who in 1701 arrested the French governor of Île de Gorée, André Brüe (1654–1738). The kings of Dahomey, who administered the town of Ouidah (Benin) from 1741 maintained that the French fort was their property – as noted in chapter 1 the French were forbidden to call it a “fort” since it suggested military occupation – and deported several French administrators, the last one in 1791, after which the French factory was abandoned for a half-century.29 In 1687, La Courbe, director of the Company of Senegal, wrote that “if the Negroes had wished, nothing would have been easier than to expel the whites, [who are] dispersed and without armies.”30 French ships, the source of their power in the American colonies, were of little avail in coastal settlements such as Ouidah, because sandbars, lagoons, and a powerful surf kept them anchored far out at sea and traders and officials were obliged to use the services of local ferrymen to get to their forts and factories. The European populations in Gorée or Saint-Louis were also dramatically smaller than those of the American colonies, consisting of little more than a garrison and a handful of merchants and artisans (Gorée had a white population of 70–80 out of a total of 1,840 in 1785). As John Darwin bluntly remarked about these African powers: “there was no question of their tamely submitting to European mastery.”31 The French settlements in Senegal did not have the option of expanding onto the mainland until the 1850s, when they had the advantage of improved firepower and steam technology (see chapter 17).32 No garden in the French Atlantic Empire was remodelled as frequently and obsessively as the royal garden on the island of Gorée, which first appears on a map in 1681 – and was therefore likely one of the first projects the French undertook following the island’s seizure from the Dutch in 1677 – and which survives to this day on its original spot, a scruffy walled enclosure of red sandy earth with a clutch of baobab trees and a paved basketball court, renamed Parc Adanson in 2011 after the naturalist and explorer whom we shall

Formal and Scientific Gardens and Ephemera

287

meet shortly.33 Known variously as “le jardin” (1681– 1750), “Jardin de la Compagnie” (ca. 1750–63), “the Garden” (under British occupation, 1758–63), “Jardin appartenant au Roi” (1763–64), “Ancien Jardin du Gouverneur” (1764), “Jardin du Roi” (1766), and “Jardin du Gouvernement” (1776–1960), the garden appeared in myriad incarnations on over forty-five maps by 1821 alone, some of the most elaborate schemes including canals, reflecting pools, parterres, vestibules, staircases, ronds-points and allées, all on a patch of barren land measuring just over one and a half acres with no source of fresh water (figs. 11.7–10). The Gorée garden was in an isolated spot in the northeast part of the island, close to one of its two African villages and across the bay from Fort Saint-François. For a project that received so much attention there is astonishingly little about the Gorée garden in the archives, and it has also been ignored in recent scholarship. In fact the earliest mentions are not of the garden but of the gardeners: we know that in 1725 the Compagnie des Indes employed one gardener at Gorée (the only one in their Senegalese possessions); in 1736 the gardener at Gorée is named as Jacques Cotineau; and in 1766 an unnamed gardener was paid an annual salary of 450 livres.34 Documentary references to the garden itself are cryptic: a manuscript by Michel Adanson entitled Pièces instructives concernant l’ile Goré voisine du Cap-Verd en Afrike (1763) mentions two gardens, one the “jardin de la compagnie” measuring 30 toises square (just less than an acre) and another one measuring 12 toises square on the northern end of the island. A 1784 report on the state of the governor’s mansion mentioned that it was positioned “entre cour et jardin” as if it were an accoutrement of a Parisian townhouse.35 The governor’s mansion, located along the southern perimeter of the garden, is the building known today as Maison Saint-Jean (1753–77), just behind the cathedral. Thirty toises square was small but it was not as small as the garden at Saint-Louis, which in 1664 measured only 400 square feet.36 Adanson also noted elsewhere that in 1749 Governor Blaise Estoupan de Saint-Jean had launched a building campaign on Gorée, including

288

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

“several fresh springs” and that “the gardens have been planted with excellent fruit-trees; legumes have been made to grow in great plenty; in short, by these different advantages, from a small barren island, he has made a safe and delightful residence.”37 English pastor John Lindsay, who visited the island in 1759, was less enthusiastic, noting that “their gardens, of which they have two, are miserable!”38 The Gorée garden was walled and accessed via a staircase as noted by royal engineer Alexandre-David Armény de Paradis (fl. 1763– 1780), who reported in 1764 that one entered “the old government garden … by a ruined staircase, built over the ramparts by the consent of the Governor.”39 The Jardin du Gouvernement was reborn under art collector and poet Governor Stanislas de Boufflers (1786–87), who undertook a second rebuilding campaign following the 1779–83 British occupation. During his first visit to Gorée in May 1786 he noted that “the gardens are well enclosed and well cultivated,” and in August 1787 he wrote that his residence was surrounded by trees and plants, especially banana trees, which Guy Thilmans believes were located in the Jardin du Gouvernement.40 Boufflers had brought four gardeners with him from France but three promptly died, and by September the fourth had fallen sick: “my flowers, my vegetables, my trees, my gardeners are dead, my garden is in the moment the saddest of the deserts of Africa … a relic of abandoned crop, of entangled weeds and some unhappy European plants … all my melons and all my other vegetables have been taken over by worms, caterpillars and spiders,” although he remained optimistic that he had found “a way of making at least the appearance more cheerful for the future by planting cotton and indigo in all the borders … which prepares for prosperity to come from the colony.”41 The next month he simply describes the garden as “fallow” (en friche). The contrast between the elaborateness of the designs and the less-than-enthusiastic responses the garden elicited from some of its visitors suggests that some of the projects were not executed. Nevertheless we can identify the ones that were because they appear consistently on maps over a long period. The

disappointment one reads in the letters and reports has more to do with the unfortunate state of the mostly European plants that were expected to grow in the island’s unforgiving climate and sandy soil (and with its dilapidation following neglect under the English) than with design. The garden began as a basic potager. The 1681 map attributed to slave trader Jean Barbot shows a simple rectangle bisected lengthwise by a wide path and parcelled out into sixteen rectangular lots for growing fruit and vegetables. It was reprinted in a much later engraving in London in 1746, this time depicting it as a walled rectangular enclosure bisected into nine beds by two paths at right angles with a few trees.42 The first of the more elaborate designs appears on two maps of ca. 1687 (fig. 11.7), one from 1699, a print of 1713, and a mid-century map datable to just before the first British conquest of 1758, which demonstrates that this garden was actually built and lasted for seventy years (fig. 11.8).43 In its earliest two iterations it is not really a garden at all but more of a cours composed of a pair of adjacent rectangular walled enclosures of

11.7 (left) The Garden at Gorée from an anonymous map entitled Plan of the Forts and Island of Gorée, ink and colours on paper, 1687. In this version the garden is taken up mostly with pools of water. The upper of the two walled enclosures was situated at a lower level. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-enProvence), 17 DFC 10A . 11.8 (right) The Garden at Gorée from an anonymous untitled map, ink and colours on paper, before 1758. Evidently by this time the pools, if they had existed at all, were replaced with lawns. The promenades in the main garden were, however, the same. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 17 DFC 31B .

different widths divided into quarters by walkways and with five entrances. The two southeastern gates have oval vestibules, and a pair of park benches are at the crossing of the main garden. In the first design the paths surround reflecting pools – an admirable attempt at a refuge from the pounding heat but not very practical in a place with so little fresh water and almost nowhere else to grow food. The only plants are the trees lining the promenades and the perimeter and a fruit tree in a small enclosure in the northwest wall. Not surprisingly

Formal and Scientific Gardens and Ephemera

289

11.9 Project for the Garden at Gorée, from an anonymous map entitled Plan of the Forts and of the Island of Gorée, ink and colours on paper, 1699. This version has a combination of ornamental parterres with broderies and fruit and vegetable gardens. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 17 DFC 15A .

the engineers who laid out the garden discarded the reflecting pools in favour of beds, as can be seen in the 1699 drawing that shows them as patches of green. Otherwise the garden is identical, right down to the park benches and tiny enclosure with the fruit tree. The same garden appears in the ca. 1730 engraving. The mid-century map depicts the garden in more detail and repeats the 1687 scheme but with lawns (fig. 11.8). In this map we also see the beginning of an urban grid plan with numbered properties adjoining the garden on the south and west – a neighbourhood that eventually would entirely surround it. At the same time some alternate designs were proposed, most of them variations on the twin or single rectangle divided into parterres. The most fanciful appears on another map from 1699 (fig. 11.9), in which the rectangular garden is divided into eight beds, the outer four subdivided into four vegetable patches and the four in the centre (half the garden) taking the form of decorative broderies around a circular rond-point as if the property were at Vaux-le-Vicomte and not off the coast of Africa.44 The pattern for the broderies and their arrangement around a circular space is adapted from Mollet’s Théâtre des plans et jardinages (fig. 11.2). In a

290

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

1705 map, which indicates the location of the garden only with a dotted line, Royal Engineer Froger proposed moving the entire thing into the fort at the top of the mountain on the south end of the island, a rocky and unforgiving place with neither proper soil nor sufficient water.45 For the design he returned to something more practical: a basic rectangle divided into twelve beds, without shaded walkways, pools, or other ornaments. In a 1716 engraving of a 1714 project by Sieur Compagnon the garden is shown as a single rectangle, divided into six beds, its walkways possibly lined with trees, and its single southern vestibule closed off so that it resembles an apse.46 Now the only apparent way to enter the garden is through the “logement du jardin,” a tiny building with a pyramidal roof on the garden’s northwest corner. Two 1723 manuscript maps, by de La Lance and Desvallons, present a similar arrangement but with six beds, as does a post-1758 British print, which would have no reason to exaggerate the garden’s appearance.47 In the latter map the six beds are further subdivided into quarters, the middle two diagonally. The garden’s most complex design, attributed to Armény de Paradis, dates from the rebuilding campaign following the British occupation of 1758–63, when it

was first called a “royal garden” (fig. 11.10). This was a period in which, reeling from their losses to the British (which in Africa included Saint-Louis and other comptoirs along the coast), colonial officials wanted to make an example of Gorée, a French citadel off the barren shore of a “dark continent.” In fact the fate of Gorée was linked to that of Guiana, the other great hope of the post–Seven Years’ War era. In 1763 Adanson suggested founding a botanic garden there, which he called a nursery (pépinière), to acclimatize plants from the African interior for shipment to Guiana: The analogy which rather extensive knowledge in Botany and Natural History have made me discover long ago between the produce of the fertile country of Cayenne and that of Senegal, suggested to me the idea that one could put Gorée to use, this feeble remnant of a vast possession, to the advantage of this new colony [i.e., Guiana], in transporting there through farming not only a number of plants which would be useful for food and health, but even the most precious commerce which takes place in Senegal and which even surpasses those of the blacks, I wish to speak of gum arabic, for which this analogy [of climate] promises us success, which would make us little regret the loss of the river Niger or Senegal and Port Addik, the only places on the coast where this advantageous trade takes place.48 The eminent naturalist’s dream of a royal botanic garden in Gorée as part of the global network of applied botanic gardens from Île Bourbon to Guadeloupe (about which more below) came to nought, but his dream of acclimatizing plants in Guiana came true as we shall see shortly. The 1763 scheme for the now Royal Garden at Gorée may partly have been inspired by Adanson’s project, but more importantly it reflects the same colonial pride bred of defeat that launched Kourou on the other side of the Atlantic.49 It is now more clearly shown to be an annex to the governor’s residence (42 on the map), a

11.10 Attributed to Alexandre-David Armény de Paradis, project for the “Royal Garden” at Gorée. Detail from Plan of the Island of Gorée, 1763. This is the most complex version of all, with promenades, bosquets, and pools. Note the stairs leading down from the main enclosure to the lower garden. The Governor’s House is marked “42,” and the house numbered “48” is for two officers. The number “49” indicates an African village of 1,000 to 1,100 inhabitants living in straw houses. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 17 DFC 54A .

stone building with tiled roof “à l’italienne” and that of two officers, stone but thatched (48). Although the garden is laid out on the same piece of land divided into wider and narrower rectangles, it now incorporates eleven main plots subdivided into fifty-one parterres, potagers, and bosquets of various shapes – rectangles, triangles, circles, and a four-pointed star – with straight and radiating diagonal paths, a tree-lined promenade along the west wall, and trees punctuating various axes throughout the garden. Even the reflecting pools reappear, although now on a more modest scale in

Formal and Scientific Gardens and Ephemera

291

11.11 Père Charles-Pierre-Joseph Bullet, detail of the tapis vert and garden at Fort Saint-Louis, Juda (Ouidah, Benin) from Plan of the Woods, Gardens, and Fort of St. Louis of Juda, alias Grégoy, ink on paper, 1776. The fort was completed in 1671. The fort, not depicted here, is off to the right, although its elevation is depicted at upper left. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 1 PL 2209.

the eastern half of the larger rectangle. That rectangle, now clearly shown to be higher than the narrower one, is accessed by a pair of staircases. The design combines the fashion for healthy promenades along shaded paths and the refreshing proximity of water with the needs

292

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

of a functioning market garden. The multitude of plots (divisions into tiny sections recall medicinal or scientific gardens, including the Jardin Royale des Plantes and the various Jardins de la Marine) suggest that it was partly intended as an applied botanic garden.50 But gloire came first. At least two of the patterns in this scheme derive from the plan of “A Magnificent Garden all upon a Level” from d’Argenville’s La théorie et la pratique du jardinage (plate 1a ; fig. 11.1), and the plots with eight and four radiating pathways are also echoed in the gardens at Versailles, which were the ultimate inspiration for d’Argenville’s design. Although it was inventoried much later (in 1822), a private

library on Gorée included what appears to be a copy of d’Argenville’s book.51 These echoes of Le Nôtre are decidedly anachronistic since by that time the naturalistic English or “Chinese” garden (also called “composition paysagère”) was all the vogue in France.52 This garden’s emulation of the era of Colbert is therefore a nostalgic return to the French Atlantic Empire’s golden age, an yearning in line with sentiments expressed by French critics such as La Font de Saint-Yenne and his 1749 L’ombre du Grand Colbert, an allegorical dialogue between the Louvre, the City of Paris, and the ghost of Colbert, the latter of whom “offers a résumé of the glorious achievements of his tenure and of the reign of

Louis XIV, covering everything from science and the arts to foreign policy.”53 The Jardin du Roi at Gorée was to be the mouse that roared: a diminutive garden in France’s smallest overseas colony that aped the most sumptuous royal and aristocratic formal gardens of the motherland. But in the end officials asked for more modest proposals. One reduced the number of beds to twenty-six and discarded the promenade, reflecting pools, and staircases: the only decorative element is a rond-point and fountain in the middle of the larger rectangle.54 A second project by Paradis keeps the treelined cours along the west wall and the two reflecting

Formal and Scientific Gardens and Ephemera

293

pools but has only fourteen rectangular beds.55 In three other plans, one from 1766 and also attributed to Paradis, the garden was further abridged to form a square with seven rectangular beds and a small orchard.56 The garden eventually laid out in ca. 1769 was a simple square with two diagonal paths forming a saltire cross and framed by shaded walkways but with no further trace of the division into wider and narrower rectangles nor any other feature of the ca. 1687 garden.57 This scheme with its saltire cross, which emphasized recreation over food production, was still the basis of the garden’s design as late as the 1950s.58 The other major French formal garden in West Africa was laid out in a place where France had an even more tenuous position than in Gorée (figs. 11.11–12). The town of Ouidah – it was called “Juda” or “Grégoy” in documents, the latter a rendering of the indigenous name Glehue – was one of the principal trading centres on the Bight of Benin, or “Slave Coast,” an area of even more intense rivalry between European powers and where the slave trade operated on a significantly greater scale than in Senegambia.59 Ouidah was unlike Gorée in two significant respects: it was on the mainland – in fact it was quite difficult to get from the town, 4 kilometres inland, across the sandbars, mangrove swamps, coastal lagoons, and dangerous surf to the ships anchored 3 kilometres out to sea – and it was foreign territory.60 After 1741 the kings of Dahomey with their capital at Abomey 100 kilometres to the north ruled not only over Ouidah but over an ancient and extensive slave trading network, and they enjoyed total control over the handful of whites who sojourned at Ouidah, not only because they far outnumbered them but because any European nations who fell out of favour would be cut off from this profitable trade. In 1703 the king even forbade Europeans from menacing one another when they were at war.61 With its palace of the Yovogan, or Captain of the White Men (“yovo” means “white”; “gan” means “chief”), and its bustling Zobé market, Ouidah was therefore an entirely indigenous town and its three European forts – French (1671), English (ca. 1682),

294

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

and Portuguese (1712) – were in small satellite “camps” near enough to the Yovogan that he could keep an eye on them (Fort Saint-Louis, in the west of town, was practically adjacent to the Yovogan’s residence and was also close to a Dahomey military encampment). All of the forts were modest, made of mud brick and thatching by local builders (the Portuguese fort of today, the only one surviving, is an 1865 reconstruction), and their conformity to the architecture of the region reflected their subservience to the Dahomey people.62 Simon Berbain notes that Fort Saint-Louis “was a very African fortress, with its ditches, its large wall of dried mud with four corner bastions capped with thatching and its interior buildings also made of brown earth” (fig. 11.11).63 They may have been called “forts” in the European sources – one source even distinguishes Ouidah as a fort in contrast to the “concession” of Senegal – but they were in fact combination warehouses and domestic slave quarters (Dahomian law forbade the export of slaves living in the forts) and were known by the local people simply as singbo (or singbome), “great houses.”64 The best the French could boast, as in this 1776 report, is that their establishment was favoured by the Dahomian king: “the French fort is the first and the nation enjoys the distinction of being preferred over the two others.”65 This subservience did not sit well with the French, who were eager to impress their trading partners and rivals alike with their perceived cultural superiority. The largest of the three European factories, their “fort” was regularly visited by local authorities and offered plenty of opportunity for patriotic display. Therefore the French factors at Ouidah laid out a carpet-like formal garden, lawn, and pair of double allées about 240 to 292 metres long, which led from the fort’s main gate via a wooden drawbridge westward into the open countryside.66 The garden may have been executed when the Ministry of the Marine took over Fort SaintLouis from the Compagnie des Indes in 1767 – at the time it had a mason, stonecutter, and joiner/carpenter on permanent staff – but it may have been there as early as 1704, when the French built the first fort on this site with the help of four hundred labourers working for

the king of Savi (the pre-Dahomian ruler of Ouidah).67 It does not appear on a map of 1705, which is however not too trustworthy as it is very imprecise, indicating only the three outlines of the forts.68 The only plan of the garden was drawn in 1776 by fort chaplain CharlesPierre-Joseph Bullet.69 Like the one in Gorée, the Ouidah garden is barely mentioned in the sources. It was a true tapis vert, a long rectangular “green carpet” forming a grande perspective up a main axis toward the fort, which was built on a slight rise. The parallel double allées of fruit trees on either side formed “promenades,” with the wide central walkway running the length of the property and the two flanking ones leading to ten rectangular tree-lined parterres at

11.12 Père Charles-Pierre-Joseph Bullet, Village of Grégoy, Juda (Ouidah, Benin), from an untitled map of the seashore and villages of Ouidah, 1776. The French complex, formed of Fort Saint-Louis (E ) and the garden (F ), is much more prominent than those of the British (“O ”) and Portuguese (“S ”). Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 1 PL 2210.

the east end near the fort and two small bosquets at the west end. Except for the parterres it was quite close in its general layout to the 1780 Cours Villeverd planned for Cap-François (fig. 10.10). In French formal gardens the bosquet tended to be located at the margins of the parterres and lawns, either on the sides or at the far end, and they symbolized wildness – a wildness whose

Formal and Scientific Gardens and Ephemera

295

purpose was precisely to highlight the “civilized,” or cultivated and manicured part of the garden. Perhaps the bosquets at Fort Saint-Louis were in fact meant to symbolize the transition from the perceived wildness of Africa to the rationality of France. In Bullet’s map of the town of Ouidah, drawn in the same year, the garden’s straight sightlines contrast markedly with the random, curvilinear arrangement of streets in Grégoy (fig. 11.12). Neither the Portuguese nor the English forts possessed anything like it. The only description of the garden comes from Abbé Bullet’s commentary on his map, which provides insight on both appearance and function, although the chaplain’s tirade about the natural indolence of Africans makes him an unsympathetic witness. Maintained by the fort’s slaves, the garden included a variety of trees and crops and combined a concern with design with the more practical needs of feeding the staff: Garden, woods, and promenade of the fort in which all the trees are fruit trees, whether oranges, lemon trees, guava trees, cashew trees, tamarind, and cherry trees … [it has] excellent workable land, which produces wheat from Turkey and all sorts of vegetables in abundance, however they are poorly cultivated; everything is cleared for a league all around; only a small part of it is planted. The negroes of the French fort have all they want and desire from it, but laziness prevents them from benefiting from it; they are content with the King’s allowance and work neither for themselves nor for their masters: they do not even have the intelligence to cultivate a small corner for the employees of the fort who are obliged to buy everything for the price of gold; their indolence goes so far that they do not even maintain the hedgerows of the garden, which is open to the whole world, and to all the animals; to the degree that one gets no profit from it; their only work, among the two hundred that they are, and which costs the King 15,000 francs every year, is to take care of the roofing of the fort, to go get wood

296

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

and to fetch from the sea the provisions which the King sends … everyone would say that with such a number of slaves it is pitiable that they do not do more work, and to give them a penny (solde), while they have the land at will and opportunity to cultivate; with this number of slaves the fort should be covered in tile and built entirely in brick.70 It is not difficult to understand why the fort’s slaves were unenthusiastic about working the lands of the people who held them in captivity, particularly since Dahomian law also protected them from the kind of arbitrary and cruel punishment which Antillean masters used to encourage unwilling slaves to work and therefore they had no incentive to do so.71 This description by a man of God of questionable morals reminds us that out of all the colonies of the French Atlantic Empire Ouidah really was in the belly of the beast: altogether 1.4 million slaves were exported from the Bight of Benin in the eighteenth century, almost a fifth of the total Atlantic slave trade and second only to Luanda; by comparison Senegambia provided only 400,000 slaves, only half of them on French ships.72 As it happens the garden’s role as a producer of food was not as important as Bullet’s commentary makes it seem – certainly not when compared to Gorée. According to a 1725 description by Dominican priest Jean-Baptiste Labat (1663–1738), Fort Saint-Louis had a “jardin potager” within its walls with large orange trees as well as another garden in the basse-cour (the 1776 map illustrates five gardens in the fort). Anyway, employees preferred to pay for fresh food from the Zobé market, from which they enjoyed very well-provisioned feasts, as Berbain notes: “[t]he meal brought all of the personnel to the director’s table and until 1767 he had a food allowance for this purpose while an old butler looked after the meals; the fort had its gardens, its basse-cour and even a herd of cattle and sheep, and all of the resources of an indigenous market which every day offered chicken, small but delicious, guinea fowl, ducks, water game, partridges, potatoes, peas, lemons, oranges, bananas, guavas, papayas, pineapples. From

France came flour which served to make bread, charcuterie, tea, coffee, wine – Bordeaux and Frontignan [Muscat] – and spirits.”73 Life was not bad for the slave traders and their chaplain as they sipped their claret and perhaps sought oblivion from the business that brought them there. The primary purpose of the garden at Fort SaintLouis was not agricultural but ceremonial. The business of trading commodities from France for slaves involved delicate diplomacy and adherence to set official rituals in which the Yovogan could play his role as host and representative of the Dahomey king and the French governor could communicate French power with his own ceremonial entry into the town. Paraphrasing Bullet, Berbain describes the ritual surrounding the arrival of a new governor and shows that a procession up to the fort, which would have passed along the whole length of the garden, was the culmination of the festivities: The new director who arrives in Judah after two months of sailing crosses the three sand bars in the bottom of a canoe; on the beach awaits a simple sedan chair, made of a hammock of reeds threaded on a bamboo pole; he lies in it and thus reaches Fort Saint-Louis, swung to the rhythm of the march of the two carriers. But that first trip to Juda territory is always accompanied by a very strict ritual that blacks faithfully observe: the head of the coastal station, warned as soon as the ship arrives by vigilant watchmen, has himself transported to the meeting with the white to offer as a welcome a gourd filled with fresh water; he receives brandy in exchange and, satisfied, leads our director under the Tree of the Captain, where Yovogan is soon to join them: the black governor appears in all his pomp, dressed in bright silks, sheltered under a wide umbrella, and preceded by a noisy and frolicking procession he circumnavigates the tree three times; he presents in turn a glass of water to the director, a glass of wine, and a glass of spirits, amiably asks him news of

the King and Queen of France, and all march back to the fort; there, further ceremonies, because Yovogan has the job of solemnly presenting the royal sceptre that symbolizes the power of the king of Dahomey and of inviting the newcomer to visit his master; when, after strong swigs of brandy, the black and his retinue have withdrawn, plied again with a glass and a bottle of the precious liquor, the director can now look over the accounts of the interim management and make an inventory of the fort.74 Yet despite all the pomp and circumstance the French commander of the fort was really just a shopkeeper, as Bullet acknowledged in 1776: “one knows that the fort only has the title of factory, and he who commands it only the title of Director of Commerce.”75 And given the modest budget allowed for maintenance and the fort’s slaves’ lack of enthusiasm, there was little the director or anyone else could do to preserve the outsized grandeur and utility of his garden. In 1777, before his return to France, Bullet appealed to the ministry to send more builders and two gardeners to help repair and improve the property, but the establishment never did get the assistance it needed and it went into a long decline before being abandoned in 1791 with the expulsion of the last director.76 Religious Rivalry in the Antilles The French monarchy and French chartered trading companies used formal gardens to send a message of cultural superiority to their European rivals and indigenous groups alike. However gardens also played a role in rivalries within French colonies, as with competing religious orders. The most notorious example was the Jesuit garden at their headquarters and sugar plantation in Saint-Pierre in Martinique (founded ca. 1646; fig. 11.13), the same property from which Superior Antoine Lavalette set up his disastrous speculative schemes between the 1740s and 1760s (see chapter 2). Although several religious orders boasted

Formal and Scientific Gardens and Ephemera

297

11.13 Jesuit Habitation, Saint-Pierre, Martinique, ca. 1646 – before 1762. Detail of an oil-on-canvas painting of Saint-Pierre by Francis Swaine executed during the British occupation in 1763. Musée Régional d’Histoire et d’Ethnographie, Martinique. The Jesuit house and allée can be seen at upper left along with the rows of slave huts. The Jesuit Église du Fort is on the far right (see fig. 15.5).

extensive gardens, the biggest were usually associated with hospitals, such as that of the Hospital of the Fathers of Charity in Cap-François (fig. 11.4; after 1719), or educational foundations, as at the Capuchin College of Saint-Victor in Fort-Royal (begun 1725). But the Jesuit gardens at Saint-Pierre, one of the largest private gardens in the Antilles and dramatically sited

298

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

on high land in the fort district, simply belonged to a residence. The Jesuits’ main competitors in SaintPierre were the Dominicans, who operated the opulent residence and parish church of Notre-Dame-du-BonPort (founded 1654) in the Mouillage (harbour) neighbourhood, and who also owned the giant Habitation Fond Saint-Jacques in Sainte-Marie (founded 1659), which was rebuilt in stone in 1689 by Labat, that tireless promoter of Dominican hegemony (figs. 12.13, 15.1). However the Jesuits, with their Church of the Visitation (Église du Fort, founded 1678; fig. 15.5) in Saint-Pierre’s fort district, had an advantage over the Dominicans in that their property was on higher ground, allowing their house and gardens to be seen

from a great distance, particularly when approached by sea. The Dominican monastery and church were also wedged in awkwardly between the base of the mountain and Saint-Pierre’s bustling but narrow commercial area (fig. 11.13). I have already noted how the Jesuits used sightlines to enhance the appearance from the river of their reductions in Guiana (see chapter 3), and archaeologist Stephan Lenik has noted the same preference for “prominent, visible locations, often on the coasts” among several Jesuit properties in the CircumCaribbean, including Saint-Pierre.77 The overly spacious Jesuit residence at Saint-Pierre, a two-storey masonry structure with a high roof, dormers, and two wings at the front framing a forecourt, was the source of considerable resentment among the inhabitants of Saint-Pierre, particularly after the Lavalette Affair and the expulsion of the Society of Jesus from French territory. An official of the colonial government reflected this general bitterness in 1773 when describing their property (it was so large it housed the town garrison): “The house … consists of a large pavilion and two wings and an immense main structure which could house the Jesuits living in community – or serve their luxury – because receiving a lot of people, they maintained so many domestics that even a rich private person would have been hard-pressed to afford them.”78 In a layout that dates to the 1680s the house sat near the northwestern corner of their property, between the sugar processing buildings to the north, the formal garden to the east, the forecourt and slave housing on the west, and a grand tree-lined cours on the south, which led in a straight line down to the fort district and their church.79 The rest of the property, to the west of the cours and most of the land to the south and east of the complex, was planted in sugarcane. The 190-metre-long cours of mature orange trees was the most recognizable part of the landscaping, easily visible from the anchorage, as illustrated in Francis Swaine’s oil painting made during the British occupation in 1763 that shows an allée of trees four times as long as the house running arrow-straight toward the fort, with trees as high as the house’s roof.80 Approaching from

the town the visitor would arrive at a stately stone gate in the Ionic order that marked the entry into the Jesuit forecourt. Although the Jesuits would have used this avenue for processions to and from their church, they also conceived of it as a public space, an “avenue” to be used as a “public promenade,” and they abstained from planting cane in the adjacent lands so that they could serve as parks for the townspeople.81 It continued to serve this civic function after the Expulsion: the promenade was popularly known as the “Allée des Pères” right up to the 1902 eruption that wiped it off the map.82 Like the tapis vert at Ouidah, this grand avenue was meant to impress, and given the attention paid to it by the Englishman Swain it seems to have done its job. The other feature built to astonish visitors was their potager, set in a walled rectangular enclosure east of the house and divided into fifteen beds with six walkways not including those around the perimeter. Excavations have also revealed segments of a canal and a small kiosk-like pergola in the garden.83 The 1773 source described it as “immense, walled in on all sides, without communication with the land and factory buildings.”84 Their potager was no mere kitchen garden: the French fort and the Jesuits’ parish church could have fit neatly within its walls at the same time, and – more importantly – it was more than twice as big as the Dominicans’ garden in the Mouillage. Lenik reasonably suggests that the garden answered a variety of needs, aesthetic and practical, and that it also may have been a scientific garden.85 As Steven J. Harris reminds us, the Jesuits frequently experimented with medicinal plants on their overseas foundations, regularly sending botanic specimens to scientists in Europe, which makes me inclined to think that the potager at Saint-Pierre was an acclimatization garden.86 One eighteenth-century Jesuit wrote proudly of the establishment that “[o]ur house … is situated in the most beautiful place on the island; there is air and freshness at all times; it is large, separated from the city and the parish by a long and beautiful avenue of mature orange trees that always casts a shadow. Our garden is the most beautiful of the island” but then notes almost as an afterthought that

Formal and Scientific Gardens and Ephemera

299

“[w]e are usually six priests in the house,” precisely demonstrating how unnecessary such a grandiose building really was.87 Lenik believes that the Jesuits sited their property and arranged its dramatic sightlines precisely to “attract gaze by presenting visual markers of their identity as Catholic missionaries, rather than to display wealth or use such locations for surveillance,” and that “the scale and architecture of Jesuit plantations needed to uphold a high level of prestige, and, furthermore, visible reminders of the Society’s work helped silence critics because the Jesuits’ popularity in France fluctuated.”88 I agree with only part of his hypothesis. There is no doubt that the property was meant to attract people’s attention from land and sea, and generically the foundation could be interpreted as a celebration of Jesuit endeavour although not necessarily their work as missionaries. I would also argue that the “high level of prestige” for which they aimed had precisely the opposite effect on the Jesuits’ critics. I am not convinced that the Jesuits did not practise what Levik calls the “panopticon” approach used in plantation design elsewhere and recommended in manuals such as Brûletout de Préfontaine’s Maison rustique of 1763 (see fig. 6.6), whereby the main house was situated so that its masters could keep an eye on the running of the plantation and particularly the slaves, since the Jesuit house is much higher than anything else and affords a clear view of slave housing and manufactory buildings. Where I believe Lenik is on the mark is his belief that the Jesuits placed grandeur before practicality, at SaintPierre specifically by placing the tree-lined avenue inconveniently between two plots of arable land so that it is difficult to get from one field to another, and by placing the house and garden between the cane fields and the mill and factory buildings, which would have made it awkward to get the crops to the place where they were processed.89 The formal garden also wasted space that could have been used for much greater profit in growing sugarcane. In its impractical combination of gloire and productivity, the landscape of the Jesuit house

300

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

in Saint-Pierre had much in common with the garden projects of Gorée and Ouidah. The Fathers of Charity, a hospital order, built another of the grandest formal gardens in the Antilles on their property on the Morne de l’Hôpital (now Sainte-Philomène) to the southwest of Cap-François, home of Saint-Domingue’s largest infirmary (built 1717–82; fig. 10.14). Here too it had a rival in the Jesuit compound in the northwestern part of the town, but although the Jesuit property had a dramatic siting and approach it was hemmed in by the town. In addition to the twelve medical wards of the hospital itself, straddling a wide tree-lined avenue and situated dramatically on the side of a hill, the Fathers had a sugar plantation on the property as well as the only vineyard in Saint-Domingue, one of the most important private acclimatization gardens in the colony, and a fish pond full of Chinese carp which they sold in the market in town.90 The property was blessed by a particularly splendid location, as Moreau de Saint-Méry noted: “There are few pleasanter locations in Saint-Domingue than the hospital at Le Cap which, because of the elevation of its ground, overlooks a vast expanse of plain which one sees to the East & South.”91 The approach to the hospital via a wide, almost 400-metre-long (200 toises) double allée with four rows of oaks accessed by a classical stone portal was designed not merely to accommodate a large amount of traffic but also for maximum visual impact: because of the geography of the coast a person exiting Le Cap on the south would pass through the Place Royale, down the Cours de Villeverd, around a narrow, curving bottleneck where the coastal plain was constricted by a cliff and the Rivière du Haut de Cap (now Rivière Mapou), and then turning westward along a winding road before heading abruptly westward upon entering the avenue. Since the avenue could not be seen until the visitor passed through the bottleneck and traversed the curving road, the vision of the straight allée with the hospital rising up the hill at the top would have been sudden and spectacular, making the most of sightlines and perspective to create

a quintessentially baroque theatrical effect. The entire route was ready-made for elaborate processions and other grand public ephemeral events. Moreau was so effusive about the wonders of the Charité’s formal parterre garden behind the main hospital, extending westward up the hill, that he gives us one of the most detailed descriptions of any colonial garden: It is to the west of the house & starts at the end of a terrace below the gallery located in front of the façade. A pretty pond with a fountain aligns with the inner door of the room & forms the centre of a beautiful garden. Above, the land which descends down a hill, is divided into successive terraces. Small brick canals, pools of water, covered reservoirs for the groves, all this makes this place delightful; alimentary or medicinal plants serve it as ornament as well as shrubs & curious & foreign plants. The air is sweet, the sound of water speaks to the soul & disposes it to calm & repose; in short, without going into it too much, art has embellished nature … On the right of the garden, which is 55 toises long from the beginning of the parterre, & 160 feet wide, is a long basin located near the hedge to the north, where we see a multitude of goldfish from China, known in Saint-Domingue as the Poisson Rouge … Above this pool & under a small open roof built there are several hives where bees deposit their useful & beneficial gifts … furthermore in this garden we see naturalized many plants from East India or other places whose success would be a real boon for Saint-Domingue. We distinguish, among others, the precious breadfruit tree, the palm of the Cape of Good Hope, the date tree of Senegal, the mango & it even has paper mulberry from China.92 To place these Arcadian pleasures in context it is worth noting that the slave huts at the Hospital of Charity were located next to the pig sty.93

There would have been at least a medicinal garden at the hospital when it opened in 1717, since such gardens had been standard adjuncts to monasteries and hospitals in France since the Carolingian era with some of the largest ones in military hospitals. The one at the naval hospital at Rochefort (fig. 9.14) grew both pharmaceutical simples and food for the patients, and in Paris the Hôtel-Dieu and Hôpital Saint-Louis had extensive pharmacological gardens for tisanes, purgatives, and other remedies as well as food for patients.94 A report of 1719 boasts that the apothecary at the Hospital of Charity was “well supplied,” and a later map shows that the garden had already reached its full extent by 1764.95 The most detailed plan, by René-Gabriel Rabié (1774), shows that the garden was divided into two rectangular terraces, the lower one adjacent the west facade of the hospital and flanked on the south by one of its service wings, and the other one higher up the slope and accessible by a staircase (fig. 11.14).96 Both are rectilinear, with twelve parterres in the lower level and six larger plots in the upper level, suggesting that medicinal plants and exotica were planted closer to the hospital and that the farther garden was a potager with more room for vegetables and fruit. The upper garden was well irrigated with a series of canals and pools running around its perimeter and down the middle of the westernmost of the two lateral walkways. The lower garden is more decorative, with fruit trees at each corner flanking the entries to the lateral walkways and a round pool with a fountain in the middle – presumably the carp pond – between the four parterres closest to the hospital. The garden is close enough to the ideal garden plan in Louis Liger’s La nouvelle maison rustique (Paris, 1721, 2:15) from his chapter on the “Distribution du jardin” that it would appear to be the model. Both have a shallower lower terrace with parterres surrounding a circular fountain and an upper terrace with vegetable and fruit plots and irrigated by a canal. There is likewise a main passageway between the gardens in the middle of a wall, the location of the staircase in the garden of the

Formal and Scientific Gardens and Ephemera

301

11.14 René-Gabriel Rabié, Plan of the Charity Hospital [at Cap-François], ink and colours on paper, 1774. The Charity Hospital was begun after 1719. The elevation of the main building is given at upper left and the plan at the foot of the garden at centre right. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 15 DFC 384B .

Charité. Ornamental trees and bushes punctuate the pathways and crossings of both. The only difference is that the parterres in the lower garden are triangular in Liger’s scheme and decorated with broderies. The Fathers of Charity therefore chose a model that combined the necessities of a hospital garden that could serve a huge number of patients (it was filled beyond capacity by sailors who had contracted tropical diseases) with a healthy place for walking and contemplation and an elegance enhanced by the grandeur of its natural setting. Like so many owners of spacious gardens, the Fathers of Charity used their properties as settings for opulent spectacles, whether to mark religious festivals or to cement their ties with the colonial government. Both functions were at play in the garden of their hospital in Léogâne when, at the commemoration of their patron saint’s feast day in March 1770, the superior played host to the comte de Nolivos during the governor general’s first official visit to the town. It was such a lavish event – complete with an artificial grotto, fountain, giant pergola, and artistic pyrotechnics that it was reported at length in the Affiches Américaines: For lunch and dinner [the Fathers] built a rustic salon (sallon champêtre), artistically made, ornamented with greenery and flowers & very well illuminated, in which they set up a table with one hundred place settings. We saw a shell grotto in a hollow, in the middle of which was a fountain seven to eight feet tall. We read on the entrance portico of this salon & around the grotto several allegorical inscriptions; we have noted down the following: underneath his coat of arms they put patriae vota replevit [the wishes of the fatherland are fulfilled]; & and on the two pilasters, on one side flent quos reliquit [those whom he abandons weep], and on the other gaudent quos gubernat [those whom he governs celebrate]. At nightfall they set off a fireworks display at the edge of a pond that is across from the house which turned out very well and a few minutes later this same pond was surrounded by an illumination

executed so well that it left nothing to be desired. The meal was very well arranged & nothing equalled its sumptuousness and delicacy except the happiness and joy of the guests, but the celebrations were not confined to the place where the main party took place; the whole city was illuminated, and citizens willingly celebrated the arrival of our new Chief.97 The temporary outdoor dining room recalls the “salles” in the forest groves at Versailles (fig. 11.6), and the use of fireworks, “illuminations,” and allegorical inscriptions were typical of ephemeral events throughout the French Atlantic Empire and early modern Europe and its colonies in general.98 In fact fireworks displays began astonishingly early in the French Atlantic and they were not confined to the Antilles. The first pyrotechnics were brought to France from Italy in the sixteenth century, where they were typically used to celebrate the birth of a prince or crowning of a sovereign, and artists of the calibre of Le Brun were called upon to design them. The earliest – and only – illustration of such an event in the colonies is a primitive woodcut of a display that took place in front of the parish church in Quebec City on 18 March 1637 during the Feast of Saint Joseph, published in the annual letter from that year by the Jesuit Paul Le Jeune (1591–1664; fig. 11.15). Le Jeune describes this event at some length, comparing it to the finest pyrotechnics in France and demonstrating how such spectacles were meant to impress indigenes as well as settlers: [There was] a pole, upon which the illuminated name of St. Joseph appeared; above this sacred name shone many Roman candles [chandelles à feu], from which emerged eighteen or twenty small serpents [i.e., jets of flame], which caused wonderment: behind this first invention were fourteen large rockets, which were fired off one after the other, to the astonishment of the French, and much more of the Natives, who had never seen anything of the kind. They admired

Formal and Scientific Gardens and Ephemera

303

the rain of gold or fire, and the stars which fell from very high up. The fire of the rockets at times shot up straight, at times as an arcade, and always high up in the air. A little castle, very well proportioned, and enriched with various colours, was flanked by four turrets, filled with Roman candles, which brightened this entire little fortress with their light. There were sixteen large flaming lances, surrounded by sausages [another pyrotechnical effect]. At the four corners of it were wheels spinning around, with a larger one above the castle, which revolved around a cross of fire, lit by a number of sparkling Roman candles, which made it appear as if it were covered with diamonds. In addition, four large trumpets (trompes) were placed about this fortress, from which were seen thirteen dozen serpents, firing six at a time at a regular distance, and four dozen rockets which were shot off twelve at a time.99

11.15 Anonymous, fireworks and “illuminations” during the Feast of Saint Joseph at Quebec City, 18 March 1637, woodcut from Paul Le Jeune, Relation de ce qui s’est passé en la Nouvelle-France en l’année 1637 (Paris, 1638). Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. This is the earliest depiction of a fireworks celebration in the French Atlantic Empire, a kind of ephemeral event that became increasingly popular through the eighteenth century and marked most major events from Quebec to Saint-Domingue. This woodcut shows two displays celebrating the feast of St Joseph, the patron of Nouvelle-France. One is shaped like a castle with spinning fleurs-de-lys with sparklers while the other is a pole bearing the name of the saint with fireworks behind it.

304

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

This print shows two of these fireworks displays operating at once: one is shaped like a castle with spinning fleurs-de-lys with sparklers while the other is a pole bearing the name of the saint with fireworks behind it. Commissioned by the Governor of New France, the chevalier de Montmagny (1601–1657) and designed by pyrotechnicians Bourdon and Beaulieu, this spectacle amused crowds in Quebec one year before Louis XIV, a king who made a name for himself for his fondness for fireworks, was even born. Returning to eighteenth-century Cap-François, the Jesuits were not content to be left in the wings by their rivals at the Charité and laid out their own vast allée, lawns, rose parterre, and potager at their palatial residence in the west-central part of the city – in fact the house was sufficiently large that it and its lands became Government House (the home of the Council and the Commissaire ordonnateur) upon the Jesuits’ expulsion (figs. 11.16, 12.18). Their property also benefited from a prominent location on a slope, as Moreau notes: “It is very nice to spend time there, because it is in a very high point of the city and the breezes freshen it. The

view is beautiful, and in calm weather you can clearly see Cap La Grange, which is 14 miles away. The eye wanders over the sea & the plain, from the parish of Petite-Anse as far as Limonade.”100 The original arrangement, as laid out in 1739 and illustrated in a map from 1744 and a plan from 1774, emphasized the approach rather than the potager, which was much smaller than that of the Fathers of Charity, with only a single terrace and eight rectangular beds.101 The front lawn was divided in half lengthwise by an allée of pear trees leading from rue Espagnole to a spot 60 feet in front of the eastern facade of the house, leaving room for a spacious terrace as wide as the house. The terrace contained six parterres, two of them ovals, delineated by a double ring of rose bushes and gravel paths and enclosing lawns.102 Thus, after visitors walked the length of the allée they would proceed along a tapis vert between the rose gardens to the main staircase of the house, “where superb rosebushes gave off their scent.”103 The short potager could not expand any farther west since it abutted public lands, the “Savane de la Boucherie,” which after 1752 was the site of the gargantuan town barracks. Raised on a terrace and fronted by a wooden balustrade, the garden had eight main plots punctuated by trees and divided into three or four beds, a quatrefoil pond at the centre fed by a canal and a row of six shallow plots on a higher terrace running along the back wall. There was also an orchard of orange trees just east of the potager inside the wings of the house, with two more quatrefoil ponds. Although their land was on a gentle incline and therefore provided a view from the entrance to the allée, it was surrounded on three sides by the town, with rue Espagnole at its foot and rue Saint-Avoie at the top – they simply did not have the capacity for expansion enjoyed by the Fathers of Charity. The general layout

11.16 Former Jesuit gardens at Cap-François, from AlexandreFrançois Duparquier, Plan of the House of the King Occupied by the Council and Monsieur the Commissaire Ordinaire, ink and colours on paper, 1774. The Jesuits’ famed rose garden is in the rectangular parterre in the centre. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 15 DFC 385A .

of both of these properties survive today, including the main allées, but nothing of the original plantings or buildings endures to attest to their original appearance. Competing Gardens in Cap-François and Port-au-Prince The future of the gardens at the former Jesuit house at Le Cap was in the hands of the government, which launched one of the most extensive landscaping schemes in the Antilles beginning in 1781, probably partly out of rivalry with Port-au-Prince, which had succeeded Le Cap as the capital of the colony eleven years earlier and had just laid out lavish gardens at its own Government House and intendant’s palace following a 1770 earthquake. As with competing religious orders, rivalry between towns and cities also found an ideal instrument in the formal garden. It was because of this need to present the most impressive view that the government chose to develop the more expansive eastern approach to the house at Le Cap instead of the restricted potager when they acquired the property in 1762.104 The project was spearheaded by Governor General Reynaud de Villeverd, the patron of the Cours de Villeverd. The Jesuit property had already fallen into disrepair, particularly the trees of the allée, which Moreau remarked had been “destroyed for lack of care,” and the grand lawn or “savane” in the front was “furrowed with rainwater” and full of holes.105 Consequently in April 1780 Reynaud uprooted everything between the house and the Rue Espagnole, including the allée, and extended the terrace by another 56 feet – overlaying the entire width and almost the entire length of the rose garden. He also replaced the wooden balustrades with ones of ashlar masonry, extended and paved the ramps, and planted a lawn on one-third of the area formerly occupied by the allée. The governor added three “superb” new monumental iron grille gates giving onto this lawn: two on the sides at rue du Chat and rue Saint-Jacques giving access to the terrace, and one at the east entrance and beginning of the so-called Jardin du Gouvernement, which served as a public park. The

306

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

Jesuits had already built a concave stone porte-cochère at the far entrance on rue Espagnole, which served as the main entry into this new public space.106 The Jardin du Gouvernement had already been designed six years earlier (1774) by Rabié, who submitted two projects (figs 11.17–18) for the front property, which is the only colonial project to have used Le Nôtre’s invention of the bosquet enclosing a salle (literally a “hall,” but really a secluded opening for festivities).107 Like the tapis vert at Ouidah or the most elaborate of the schemes for Gorée, these projects referred unequivocally to the era of Louis XIV and Colbert. Le Nôtre had introduced salles inside forested groves during the second campaign at Versailles (1670–78), spaces that were used for court gatherings and ephemeral events and bearing names reflecting their use or decoration such as the “Salle de Balle,” the “Salle des Antiques,” or the “Salle du Souper.” In fact they were the most important locations for the king and the site for some of his most lavish entertainments, as well as fountains, sculptures, labyrinths, and garden theatres, as with the “Salle des Festins” (now Bosquet de l’Obélisque, 1671, 1704) by Le Nôtre and Jules Hardouin-Mansart or the adjacent Enceladus Grove (fig. 11.6). Bosquets were a particular status symbol in seventeenth-century France given the expense of planting trees: as d’Argenville wrote in his manual, they represented “all that is most noble and agreeable in a garden.”108 Rabié’s schemes take us back to Versailles in another way as well: he names the four salles in his two proposals after classical deities, recalling more generally Louis XIV’s iconographic program at Versailles with fountains, pools, and other features dedicated to gods such as Apollo, Latona, and Neptune. Rabié’s salles are named “Salle de Jupiter,” “Salle de Saturne,” “Salle de Venus,” and “Salle de Mercure.” Engravings of garden salles 11.17 (opposite) René-Gabriel Rabié, Plan of the garden of the King [in Cap-François], proposed for the Enclosure of Government House, to serve for public promenades, ink and colours on paper, 1774. This second version was rejected because it had insufficient public space for promenading. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 15 DFC 381B .

11.18 (opposite) René-Gabriel Rabié, Plan of the Proposed King’s Garden in the Enclosure of the Governor’s House to Serve for Public Walks, ink and colours on paper, 1774. This first version was executed. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 15 DFC 380B . 11.19 (right) Designs for cabinets and salons for a garden, from Antoine-Joseph Dézallier d’Argenville, La théorie et la pratique du jardinage (Paris, 1709). Zentralinstitut Für Kunstgeschichte, Munich.

were readily available, as in d’Argenville’s treatise, which presented no fewer than forty-three prototypes for bosquets (fig. 11.19) and Rabié might also have been inspired directly by prints of the Versailles salles, which were published in François Blondel’s Architecture françoise (Paris, 1752–56; fig. 11.4). Nevertheless, Rabié’s two projects are his own invention. Both schemes divide the park into four rectangular groves surrounded by shaded walkways, with a wider path up the centre and a circular pool in the middle. In the second project (fig. 11.17) each bosquet forms what is called a quincunx, or a rectangle divided into five sections by intersecting paths, in this case four forested groves and a grassy opening, or salle. These lawns take three forms: the Salle de Jupiter (upper left) is a circle, the Salle de Mercure (lower right) is an oval, and the other two are rectangles with bites taken out of each corner. His first, more practical, design (fig. 11.18) is more prosaic. Instead of thickly planted bosquets he populates the four quarters with evenly spaced rows of

trees (six across, eight lengthwise) and uniform lawns again shaped like rectangles with bites taken out of the corners. This version was more practical as a public park since it allowed for more open space for crowds to circulate and is the kind of design used in the renovations of the Champs-Elysées in Paris in the same decade in which trees were planted far enough apart that they would ease circulation and afford views.109 In the end it looks as if the governor chose a compromise: maps from the late 1780s show four large uniform rectangular lawns (measuring 50 by 44 toises, Moreau calls them “grands carrés ou tapis verts de gason”) delineated by tree-lined paths and bisected in the middle by a wider path, thus maintaining the spirit of the salles but allowing for the free circulation of pedestrians.110 Moreau notes that the gardens retained a sense of privacy because they featured “stone benches here and there, taking care that there are not two looking directly across from one another, with the aim of making every gathering more private and also to punish curiosity a

Formal and Scientific Gardens and Ephemera

309

little.”111 Reynaud made another addition which recalled the function of salles in court gardens by installing a pavilion inside each corner of the eastern wall of the Jardin du Gouvernement enclosed by jalousies, one a “salon” for private conversation and the other a concert hall, connected by a trellis portico that was to be covered with flowering plants but was never executed. For a general view of the entry to the gardens in 1790 see figure 10.24. The new gardens had an early inauguration on the occasion of the celebrations of the Peace of Paris (1783) and the end of the American War of Independence (and of hostilities between France and Britain). The entire city took part in a feast of the senses, from the Te Deum Mass sung at the Church of the Assumption (figs. 15.12– 14) at five o’clock in the afternoon to the accompaniment of shots fired from the artillery and the ships in the harbour, and a free double-feature at the Comédie Théâtre (fig. 10.24). The performances were CharlesSimon Favart’s conciliatory romantic comedy The Englishman in Bordeaux (L’Anglois à Bordeaux), written on the occasion of the earlier Peace of 1763, followed by Alessandro Frizeri’s comic opera The Bronze Shoes, or the German Shoemaker (Les souliers mordorés ou la cordonnière allemande); the play ended with a fireworks show choreographed by a local actor punctuated with numerous flying rockets. The crowds then descended upon Government House, where, according to a reporter from Affiches Américaines, “[t]he façade & garden … were illuminated with great taste & intelligence … The garden, forecourts & courtyards of Government House were filled with an immense crowd.” 112 The celebrations culminated in a ball that lasted until two in the morning. This practice of “illuminations,” which meant outlining the features of a structure or landscape with candles, torches, and other stationary fireworks, was a ubiquitous feature in such ephemeral celebrations and helped draw attention to the buildings’ and gardens’ sophistication of design. Unlike the repurposed government gardens at CapFrançois, the governor’s and intendant’s gardens at Port-au-Prince had always been the king’s property.

310

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

They were also the most extensive construction projects in the new capital: unlike the monumental stone architecture of Le Cap (or Saint-Pierre), which could equal any landscape in grandeur, the governor’s (fig. 16.23) and intendant’s palaces in Port-au-Prince were modest wooden structures, in the case of the Intendance little more than a series of temporary-looking garden pavilions. The original grounds of Government House on this site – designed in 1752 after the previous year’s earthquake had flattened an earlier structure – took the form of a large, enclosed avant-cour bisected by a double allée extending from a raised terrace in front of the house to the main entry portal and a balustrade wall running along the length of the property on rue de Conty and the Place du Gouvernement – in fact it was the site of the future Haitian Palais National, itself toppled by an earthquake in 2010.113 Once again destroyed in the temblor of 3 June 1770, the property was reconceived along grander lines in 1772 as illustrated in a 1791 plan by Pierre Antoine Jérôme Frémont de La Merveillère (fig. 11.20).114 As described by Moreau, the front of the property consisted of two rectangular lawns bordered by treelined paths with the inner two corners of the rectangles cut off to form a semicircle in front of the building to allow carriages to turn around.115 A central allée ran from the front gate to the staircase of Government House. However the main attention was now at the back of the building, which, unlike the one in Le Cap, could expand limitlessly into what was basically open countryside. Set into a rectangular gravel terrace with bites out of the two eastern corners and measuring 190 square metres in total, the back garden was a purely decorative quartet of parterres with circular flower beds

11.20 (opposite) Pierre-Antoine-Jérôme Frémont de La Merveillère, the Royal Garden at Government House, Port-au-Prince (begun 1772) from Plan, profile and elevation of the Government Hotel and the buildings that depend on it. Port au Prince, ink and colours on paper, 1791. The gardens were much more impressive than the low wooden buildings (see fig. 16.23). Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 15 DFC 661A .

in the centre, borders formed of broderies of flowers, and the rest planted in grass. A small fruit tree was planted at the centre of each of the circles and also in four smaller circles situated in the centres of the borders on each side. Low hedges bordered the terrace and a row of tall trees ran along the two sides. At the far end the terrace opened onto an allée of trees which led the eye for almost half a kilometre into the distance and toward the mountains behind; the map shows them as palm trees but Moreau claims that it was “a delightful allée of bamboo.”116 Nowhere was there any sign of a potager: in fact, in stark contrast with any of the other gardens surveyed so far, that of Government House had no practical use whatever, privileging dramatic views over sustenance. As Moreau remarked, sitting on the front terrace, “the view is very cheerful when one is on the terrace of the government, because you can see the city, the harbour, & since [the island of] Gonâve presents a curtain-like backdrop in a very picturesque manner.”117 The pages of Affiches Américaines again show us how the property was used. On 9 February 1770, just months before the earthquake, the lawns of Government House formed the backdrop to the installation of the new governor general, the comte de Nolivos: The drum-beat to arms was made and the whole Garrison assembled in the Place du Gouvernement. Monsieur le Comte de Nolivos went at eight o’clock to the square, where the troops stood in battle formation. Monsieur le Chevalier Prince de Rohan acknowledged him as Governor-General, representing the person of His Majesty in the Leeward Islands. The priest, with his clergy and the canopy, conducted the new Governor to the Parish Church; the troops forming a line from the square to the Church … After the Te Deum, the troops again formed a line from the Church to the Palace, Monsieur le Comte de Nolivos went before the Council, where its officers, sitting in special assembly, proceeded immediately to the installation of the new Governor-General.118

312

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

The processional route would have been directly down rue de Conty, which led not only to the church (in almost a straight line) but also past the Intendance, the other seat of government. The staircase and facade of Government House were decked out in an illumination with an allegorical theme during a ball in March of the same year: “Monsieur the General [i.e., the governor general] gave a Ball on the 29th of last month … A brilliant illumination adorned the staircase and façade of Government House, & finished with a heart-shaped gloria (transparent) in which one read this devise: ‘Quos sert in corde, Cives recreat’ [‘citizens take pleasure with what is worn in the heart’]. The Hall was adorned with mirrors & elegantly decorated with flowers artistically interlaced into a bower (feuillage).”119 The transparent, which I translate as a “gloria,” is a usually circular opening surrounded by false sunrays which in the Catholic tradition originated as a frame for the displayed Eucharist but which Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) turned into an international indicator of divine glory – whether for sacred or secular purposes.120 The king’s birthday inspired another pre-Rabié ephemeral event recorded in the Affiches with “a ball, fireworks display & grand dinner at Government House; More than 300 people formed a populous crowd & took part in the festivities, where His Excellency Count Solano, Governor General & President of the

11.21 (opposite) Antoine-François Sorrel, Plan of a Public Promenade on the Place de l’Intendance or Market Square [in Port-au-Prince] to which are added the two fountains ordered by MM le Cte de la Luzerne, et de Marbois, General and Intendant in 1787, ink and colours on paper, 1787. The Promenade Publique (at the bottom) was located on an awkward piece of land hemmed in between the Place de l’Intendance on the east (above) with the raised platform where the pre-1770 Intendance once stood, the Church of the Assumption on the north (left), and the Hôtel de la Marine on the south (right). The new Intendance and its gardens are shown at the top. The promenade was accessed from the street below and then, by another set of stairs above, one entered the Place de l’Intendance. The promenade is now the square in front of the (destroyed) New Cathedral. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), F 3 296 350.

11.22 Antoine-François Sorrel, Plan and Elevation of the Facade of a Public Promenade on the Place de L’Intendance of Port-au-Prince, ink and colours on paper, 1788. This is the (still-extant) street facade with its three fountains and double staircase. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), F 3 296 E 51.

Spanish Sector [i.e., Santo Domingo] was present, and all the officers who had accompanied him. All of the courtyards of the Government were illuminated, and from the porch of the great courtyard to the peristyle, there was an illumination formed of garlands, of which the effect seemed to please all Spectators.”121 These excerpts show how the borders, broderies, and other decorations of these gardens were not only meant

314

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

to delight during the day but also to be traced out in lights and enjoyed at night. The gardens and particularly the promenade of the nearby Intendance, designed by royal engineer Antoine-François Sorrel in 1787–88, were similarly imposing but better integrated into the public spaces of the city (figs. 11.21–3).122 They likewise reflected advances in metropolitan city planning which emphasized the free circulation of pedestrians and healthy refreshment through exercise and the enjoyment of the senses. Sorrel conceived of a raised public “promenade” facing onto the Place de L’Intendance that is uncannily close to Jean-Antoine Giral’s Place Louis-XIV in Montpellier, begun three years earlier (fig. 8.11), and also recalls the

recently completed Place Louis XV in Paris (fig. 8.9). The Montpellier structure is not an unsurprising prototype because Languedoc was one of the most important training centres for royal engineer architects, and the Paris square was one of the most celebrated (and controversial) of its day.123 Although there is no evidence that the Intendance promenade was meant to be a Place Royale like its French prototypes (after 1785 a Place Royale was built, but in the southern part of Port-au-Prince), it certainly would have felt like one.124 Sorrel’s Promenade Publique was especially impressive against the backdrop of the decidedly unimpressive Intendancy, hastily built after the 1770 earthquake on property that was still technically a private sugar plantation until 1786. Moreau extolled the sensual pleasures of the Intendancy lawns and gardens: “the situation of the place, set at once in the city & the countryside, is charming. The seduction of a garden, the cheerfulness

of compartments planted in Guinea grass & which borders an allée of trees, a lawn between the two buildings, an allée of orange trees to the east of the salon de compagnie, a gentle breeze, a refreshing shade provided by trees of various species, pure water running everywhere & which provided the delightful enjoyment of a bathhouse, a covered gallery enclosed only with a trellis and which connects from one building to another; the view of a pleasant walk; that of the city & a further one of the harbour, everything makes the Intendance a pleasant & healthy place.”125 As at Government House the tapis vert extended up into the countryside at the back and was compartmentalized by gravel paths and low hedges. 11.23 Antoine-François Sorrel, Elevation of one of the Two Fountains attached to the Wall of the Promenade Publique on the Place de l’Intendance of the City of Port-au-Prince. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), F 3 296 E 52.

Formal and Scientific Gardens and Ephemera

315

The Promenade Publique (figs. 11.21–3) was a separate public space across the Place de L’Intendance from the entrance to the Intendancy garden, hemmed in between the raised platform of the pre-1770 Intendance on the east, the Church of the Assumption on the north, and the Hôtel de la Marine on the south. The original Intendancy landscaping, by Charles Durand de Saint-Romès (1770), was little more than a double allée going from the Place de L’Intendance to the back lawns.126 Sorrel replaced this cul-de-sac with an elevated terrace measuring 40 by 35 toises (about 80 by 68 metres) and raised 3 toises (almost 6 metres) above the level of the square and which partially survives today as the platform in front of the now destroyed New Cathedral.127 It is supported by a stone wall with rusticated corners and surmounted by stone balustrades, accessed by a double staircase and viewing platform at the front and two single staircases on the sides (fig. 11.23). The main facade also featured two rusticated wall fountains (fig. 11.24) with six mascaron spigots each and a tablet for an inscription, both of them with an elevated viewing platform (4 toises or just under 8 metres high) and combination stone and iron balustrade on top. Moreau describes it in some detail: One arrives there from the city side by a staircase formed of two ramps, under which has been placed a corps-de-garde for the archers of the police who monitor the market of the Place de L’Intendance. On the north and south sides of this terrace is a double allée of orange trees interrupted in the middle by a space accessed by a staircase on each end … In the middle of the four sections planted with trees are four lawns with ornamental borders [that are] notched at their corners & planted with flowers. In the middle of the terrace, facing the grand staircase & the platform of the Intendancy is a beautiful fountain which adds to the pleasure of this location … Two identical fountains were added to this terrace corresponding to the middle of each double row of orange trees. The architecture is very simple … they were executed

316

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

by the Negroes of the King’s atelier and they have platforms for viewing the port. Four masks expel water in the front & on each of their side walls. The plaques, which are of vermiculated grey coral stone, await the inscriptions which I hope to see written in French, the expression of the sentiments of my fellow citizens, for those who have tried to make their city healthier.128 The Place Louis XIV in Montpellier (fig. 8.11) has a similar raised terrace with four rectangular lawns in the centre divided by wide paths and flanked by double allées, although at Montpellier the outer allées are on the lower level. Both promenades are accessed by rusticated double staircases crowned with balustrades, although the Montpellier square had five of them. One particularly contemporary detail is the row of oval œil-de-bœuf windows surrounded by laurel wreaths along the Promenade Publique’s front wall. This kind of window is one of the principal motifs of the Montpellier monument, and blind versions adorn the sides of the statue plinths around the Place Louis XV in Paris. Adjacent to the southwest corner of the terrace was “a large reservoir where men and animals can bathe” with sufficient water to be directed onto paved gutters alongside the houses to put out fires including “a small fountain, which receives water from the fountain basin & pours into another basin for the animals to drink,” all lined by a row of orange trees at the back.129 Sorrel’s monument shows again that colonial architects could be strikingly avant-garde in their creations, reflecting the very latest tastes, philosophies, and technologies of the metropole. The French Acclimatization Garden As noted earlier, the French colonies were home to a substantial number of applied botanic gardens or acclimatization gardens, part of a global chain of scientific nurseries meant to receive, grow, and dispatch exotic plants from and to other colonies, to France’s own network of naval botanic gardens, and – ultimately – to the Jardin Royale des Plantes in Paris. Although few

of their plans survive and descriptions are scarce, it is possible to get a general idea of what they looked like and how they were organized. The earliest was the 1716 Jardin du Roi in Guadeloupe, founded with the personal encouragement of the duc d’Orléans and President Abbé Jean-Paul Bignon (1662–1743) of the Academy of Sciences as a place to acclimatize plants from the East and West Indies, or, as the minutes of the Academy simply put it, to: “cultivate useful plants there which cannot come here.”130 It was originally to have been in Martinique, and Bignon appointed Michel Isambert, a physician at the medical school at the University of Montpellier, as the first jardinier du roi – he sailed with

11.24 The Jardin Botanique and Hesse’s garden from Pierre Antoine Jérôme Frémont de La Merveillère, Plan of the City of Port Républicain [Port-au-Prince] and its environs, ink and colours on paper, after 1793. Hesse’s property is the formal garden marked “Terrein du M. Hesse” and the botanic garden is just above it. Government House is marked “A .” Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 15 DFC 666A .

trunk-loads of seeds, plants, and insects, including coffee, mulberry trees, pistachio, walnuts, olive trees, bees, and silkworms. Unfortunately Isambert died of yellow fever within weeks of his arrival in Saint-Pierre in 1716, followed quickly by his specimens, but habitant

Formal and Scientific Gardens and Ephemera

317

Jean-Baptiste Lignon took it upon himself to establish his own instead, a “garden named the Jardin du Roy” on his own property in Guadeloupe, styling himself as “Jardinier Botaniste du Roy” with the grand title of “Botaniste ordinaire for the southernmost plants” and obtaining an annual pension of 1,000 livres and a médaille d’or.131 I have been unable to discover the location of Lignon’s plantation, but the garden seems to have moved each time a new director was appointed, as happened with Jean-André Peyssonnel (1727–1756), Médecin Botaniste du Roy, who was ordered: “to go to the property of the late Sieur Lignon where he had a garden named Jardin du Roy to make an inventory there of the trees, plants and seeds to be shipped to the Royal Garden with the aim of finding out which ones could be transplanted to his home and be cared for and used for the same purpose; it seems from the report that he sent that what was found in this garden is of little consequence.”132 Peyssonnel was a doctor as well as a botanist – he served in Marseille during the 1720 plague – and was associated with the hospital of the Fathers of Charity in Basse-Terre.133 Thus, although the Guadeloupe Jardin du Roy was eventually a success – it underwent what James McClellan calls an “upgrade” with the 1775 appointment of Jacques-Alexandre Barbotteu as superintending botanist for the Windward Islands – it differed significantly from the next generation of botanic gardens founded by the Ministry of the Marine in SaintDomingue, Guiana, and Martinique between 1777 and 1803, which were located in designated locations either near a major town or on a government-owned plantation.134 Such was the “Jardin National Planté en Herbes de Guinées” for plants from West Africa located in the southwest outskirts of Môle Saint-Nicolas and illustrated in a 1799 map.135 There were also privately owned acclimatization gardens such as the one we have seen above, owned by the Fathers of Charity in Le Cap. It was 11.25 Esprit Bodin, Topographical Plan of the Jardin des Plantes of Saint-Pierre Martinique, ink and colours on paper, 1823. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 13 DFC 572A .

318

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

not until 1818 that the government proposed setting up a permanent “Jardin du Roi” in Guadeloupe on the land owned by the Carmelites in Basse-Terre, close to the Hôpital Militaire (founded 1764).136 We know much more about the Jardin Botanique, or Jardin du Roi, in Port-au-Prince, founded in 1771 by Louis XVI, the first in Saint-Domingue (fig. 11.24). Its final location was to the south of Government house and east of the Military Hospital on the property of Charles-François Hesse, designer of the city’s waterworks – the government appropriated a parcel of land behind Hesse’s back lawn for the purpose as a “terrein du Roi.”137 In exchange the government permitted Hesse to open up a sluice from the canal serving the hospital: “Sieur Hesse, Infantry Captain, demands letters patent, to confirm an order by the administrators of Saint-Domingue [20 May 1786] allowing him to open an outlet of one pouce of water in the hospital canal. The Directors have authorized Sieur Hesse to undertake this project in order to compensate for a portion of land that was taken from him to form the Royal Botanic Gardens.”138 The garden first appears on two maps from 1788 and 1790.139 In 1793, when the city was rechristened Port-Républicain, the garden itself was renamed “Jardin Botanique.”140 It measured 97.5 by 117 metres and was divided into 14½ beds with a shed near the middle.141 Baron von Wimpffen describes the “Jardin du Roi, or Royal Garden at Port-au-Prince,” as “well furnished as could reasonably be expected from its infant state: its declension or prosperity must depend in future on the degree of importance his successors may attach to this monument of his taste for the natural history of plants,” although he thought it was not “sufficiently spacious, and varied, to admit of every species of cultivation,” and maintained that a large plantation, a “King’s Farm, or Estate,” was better suited to the needs of plant science.142 On the other hand Moreau thought it was poorly situated: Its topsoil is mixed with tuff which covers it to a depth of about two feet. This land furthermore

320

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

has veins of pebbles, most of which are located at ground level. The surrounding mountains reflect a burning heat, and violent winds from the East & Northeast cause diseases in plants. This too-thin ground, battered by the sun, becomes an oven, and the rain water evaporated by this heat withers the leaves by its thick exhalations, while salt air attacks the upper parts of the plants. Artifice can do nothing with it.143 Despite its relatively meagre proportions, the garden and the government’s efforts to acclimatize exotic plants from Asia was considered a great boon for the colony, as reported in Affiches Américaines in 1784: “[The Governor] … wanted to enrich [the colony] with the trees and plants of Asia; he asked his friends in India and Île de France [Mauritius] for any plants which they thought could be easily naturalized in our climate … there is every reason to believe that the trees and plants will succeed perfectly here,” noting that when a coffee bush was introduced to Martinique in 1726 “it is from that single coffee plant that all the coffee bushes of our islands derive … a treasure more useful to France than the mines of Peru are to Spain.”144 The last of the Antillean botanic gardens, called the Jardin des Plantes, was founded in the intended destination for the first one: Saint-Pierre in Martinique (fig. 11.25). Created by a decree of 1803 on the lands of the former Ursuline convent, it was first run by the bordelais Castelnau d’Auros, according to the diaries of Governor Pierre-Clément de Laussat (1756–1835), the man best known for supervising the handover of Louisiana to the United States. It was meant to replace the acclimatization garden of Port-au-Prince, which was no longer in French territory. Laussat’s description of the garden the year after it was founded shows that the government was working quickly to develop its crops of Asian plants: “This morning at dawn, I mounted my horse and went to the old house of the Brothers of Charity (very fine), today national property, and maintained by Henri de Moulins … and at 8:00 I went down

again through the LeBlanc habitation and the path that leads to the Jardin des Plantes. This is a nascent garden, which will one day add to the wealth of this colony. It is entrusted to Castelnau d’Auros, an émigré from Bordeaux. He has 100 exotic plants, most of them Indian. A beautiful waterfall could be sensed, which we heard, but which could barely be seen.”145 As Laussat’s description shows, the garden was in a much different kind of location than the one in Port-au-Prince: high above the town among the plantations in the lush hills overlooking the fort district on the Rivière du Fort. Unlike its predecessors, it was designed for promenading and recreation as much as for science.146 Perhaps partly reflecting the influence of English “natural garden” design, popularized particularly by the duc de Chartres’s Jardin de Monceau in Paris (1773–78), it is asymmetrical, arranged on multiple levels with winding paths, lawns, and a pond with little islands in it, although it is accessed via a particularly dramatic, long, rectangular, tree-lined tapis vert, and the main area is divided into parterre gardens and circular fountains in the French manner.147 Here there was plenty of room to grow plants, with different elevations to accommodate plants tolerant to varying climates, and it was also close to the town, which was not the case for most of the acclimatization gardens the French built in Guiana. In contrast to the island colonies Guiana had an entire network of “habitations royales,” ranging from model farms and agricultural training centres to nurseries, menageries (as in the Ménagerie du Roi at Sinnamary) and acclimatization gardens, including the Jardin du Roi in Cayenne’s Savane, the Habitation du Roi about a kilometre east of that, and the Épicerie de La Gabrielle founded by Jean-Samuel Guisan in 1778 on a plantation of that name in the rainforest about 45 kilometres south of Cayenne near the modern town of Roura.148 The oldest of them, the Habitation du Roi, looked like an aristocratic country seat – at least that is how the Dutch depicted it on a mid-century map – with six buildings approached by a tree-lined patte d’oie and containing parterres with broderies in its forecourt

and an ample back lawn, but I suspect that the baroque grandeur was skin deep, as was usually the case in this colony.149 Indeed, while they did introduce new spices from Asia and other tropical regions (such as clove trees at La Gabrielle), and they also developed new agricultural techniques, the royal plantations and gardens performed poorly and were expensive. Even the gardener’s house at the Jardin du Roi was never in good condition: a 1782 report described it as being “built using bad carpentry” and a mémoire from the same year described it as “a rotting building” and suggested constructing there “a house for the director of the Jardin des Plantes, if one is ever established in Cayenne in what we call the Jardin du Roi.”150 The most detailed description of the Jardin du Roi (1787) has more to say about its potential than its success: This garden is managed as much as the situation permits; it has not yet received the plants from India which have been promised and for which the request will be renewed if necessary to Monseigneur; but it was enlarged with a few plants and trees from the interior of this continent; Vanilla, Sarsaparilla, Chinese Roses, Mango trees, clove bushes, cinnamon trees, Sago palms, Pandanus kaida, Quassia Amara, Guiaguiomadu, Carapichea ipecacuanha, and other plants and seeds of the country were sent to M. le comte de la Luzerne, Governor at Saint-Domingue, following authorization by the Minister, by the corvette La Sincère, which the government employed for this purpose, last May. Since the soil in this garden is stingy and sterile, most of the plants profit little of it: it occupies valuable space in the new town [e.g., the Savane]; it would perhaps be better to transport the plants that are there to the Habitation du Roi and to the one that is La Gabrielle, in the case where they maintain a nursery there: the difference of the earth and the climate which exists between the two locations will demonstrate through

Formal and Scientific Gardens and Ephemera

321

experience the place where each of the crops will better prosper; some will thrive in sandy areas, or those passes and swamps in the vicinity of the sea; others succeed better in the cooler climate of the mountain, in this or that exposure; it is not possible to provide variety in the narrow and barren plot of the King’s Garden.151 La Gabrielle was even worse off. Among its disastrous schemes was one initiated by the Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834) of American revolutionary fame, who briefly turned it into a different kind of experimental farm in 1786: one involving people. Lafayette encouraged George Washington to liberate the slaves of the United States by keeping them on as contented paid labourers. Although Washington was unenthusiastic, Lafayette went ahead and tested his idea out by purchasing two plantations in Guiana in 1785 called SaintRégis and Le Maripa, to which he added La Gabrielle in 1786 in a profit-sharing agreement with the Cayenne government.152 He also purchased the slaves, who were to be emancipated slowly after being disciplined and indoctrinated with religion, on the theory that they would willingly stay and work the land after gaining their freedom. He never did emancipate them. When the plantation was seized in 1792 during the French Revolution the slaves escaped but were hunted down and re-enslaved, and the farm had become nearly unserviceable. By this point La Gabrielle had nothing more on it than a run-down, four-room wooden shack, although it limped along for a few years. In 1796 the gardener, a certain citoyen Martin, managed to plant

322

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

some Chinese litchi and wampi trees there which he had purchased in Philadelphia and the garden allegedly enjoyed a decent nutmeg harvest.153 Despite the general failure of Guiana’s much-vaunted network of scientific gardens, colonial officials were undaunted – as happened all too often when projects went bust in Guiana – and new royal plantations were soon up and running in places like Mana and Tilsit in the 1820s (see chapter 7), the former part of a utopian planned community near the Suriname border that included a school run by nuns and a grid of streets and one of the few towns in Guiana that still preserves its colonial character.154 However a few decades later with the introduction of the penal system in 1857, officials placed hope in a different kind of experimental garden in which agricultural land was to be worked by prison work gangs as a way of feeding themselves and eventually earning their liberty, turning Guiana into a prisoner’s paradise, or, as they put it, the “cradle of a society regenerated by work.”155 The scheme lasted about ten years: white workers died at such an alarming rate that in 1867 the government decided to import only prisoners of colour – displaced Asians and Africans, many of them political prisoners – and send whites instead to the gentler climes of New Caledonia. By the time they resumed sending white prisoners to Guiana in 1887 – officials acknowledged that New Caledonia was an insufficient deterrent to crime – Guiana’s last utopian agricultural experiment had long been abandoned in favour of more permanent kinds of incarceration and a more “rigorous expiation of the crime.”

12

Secular Architecture before the Seven Years’ War

We have met the people Who built them and visited the cities and gardens where they were constructed, but we have so far had only a few glimpses of colonial buildings, the subject of the next five chapters. Here we face an even greater numeric challenge than in the chapters on urbanism and gardens, since there are literally hundreds of examples to choose from, whether extant structures or drawings of executed or unexecuted buildings. These chapters are therefore restricted to the monuments that provide the best overview of structural and stylistic changes over time, while also allowing for a few outstanding outliers that are fascinating simply because they are bizarre or innovative. These chapters separate colonial architecture into two broad categories. Chapters 12 and 13 will look at secular architecture, by which I mean factories, governors’ palaces, castles, monastic buildings (excepting churches), plantation houses, warehouses, and courthouses. Chapters 14 and 15 deal exclusively with churches, from tiny chapels to the Atlantic Empire’s one cathedral and its largest parish churches. Unlike several of the urban projects we have seen in this study, most of the buildings in these four chapters were actually constructed – even if their final appearance at times differed dramatically from the original design. Chapter 13, which begins with a cluster of unexecuted designs for administrative buildings in Guadeloupe, is the exception. By contrast,

all but one of the buildings in chapter 12 and most of the ones in chapters 13 and 14 did exist and some of them still do. The two chapters on secular architecture are chronological, divided by the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), the single most important event in the history of the French Atlantic Empire: chapter 12 treats buildings before that conflict and chapter 13 considers those built after it. This division is not simply one of convenience since the losses suffered by the French made them significantly change their approach to colonial architecture, with new styles reflecting new ideological motivations. By contrast the buildings in chapters 14 and 15 are treated thematically, although arranged chronologically within each chapter. Chapter 14 will look at the buildings that derive primarily from French provincial models, mostly rural parish churches from the north of France. Chapter 15 will consider those more closely aligned with urban church design in Rome and Paris. Chapter 16 will move in an entirely different direction. All of the buildings in the previous four chapters are strikingly European in style; even after they were constructed in their new context they closely resembled precedents in France and Rome. Chapter 16 is devoted to buildings that diverge the most from European models, the vernacular forms which – as noted in the Introduction – have the closest relationship to the “creole” architecture of the colonies after they stopped being French and which were the prototypes for much of the historic architecture surviving in those regions today. Medieval Halls and Castles from Quebec to Senegal, 1604–1694 It is difficult to obtain an accurate picture of the first buildings in French America and Africa because so few drawings, elevations, or decent descriptions survive, and many of them are suspect. However it looks as if a predominantly rural, medieval style prevailed to the end of the seventeenth century, as it did in the English colonies, where houses in places like Ipswich, Massachusetts, or Jamestown, Virginia, closely followed the

324

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

traditions used in Lincolnshire or Essex before the arrival of Georgian style around 1700. What it was not was Gothic. Unlike the early Spanish settlements such as Santo Domingo on the same island as Saint-Domingue where Gothic vaulting was quite common from around 1510, French colonial architecture avoided Gothic altogether except for a single Gothic Revival church tower in Saint-Louis, Senegal, from 1789 (fig. 15.23). The main reason was probably not ideological but simply the result of a lack of the sort of highly skilled masons who could execute Gothic stone vaulting. The traditions builders brought were primarily those related to the making of large farm buildings such as barns or multi-family long houses typical of Normandy, with the grander buildings resembling modest manor houses at best, and even then usually the service wings (communs) and not the main house.1 I have already mentioned some of the techniques used in this early period in chapters 2 and 3: wood frame buildings built of posts planted in the ground (pieux or poteaux en terre) or post-on-sill (poteaux sur sol), often half-timbered (colombage) and filled with some kind of mixture of mud, straw, plaster, pebbles, or brick, or covered with clapboards. In the first half of this chapter I will look at how traditional forms manifested themselves in a selection of seventeenth-century government buildings, mostly factories (comptoirs) and governors’ mansions. Our earliest sources for such buildings come from engravings from travelogues, beginning with Samuel de Champlain’s Voyages (Paris, 1613), which illustrates the French settlements of Île-Sainte-Croix in 1604; Port-Royal in 1605; and, most famously, the habitation at Quebec in 1608 (fig. 12.1). These engravings show wood-frame buildings with small, leaded-glass windows and basic rectangular doors, steeply pitched gable roofs, tall chimneys, and wooden palisades. They closely resemble village architecture in northern France, especially Normandy. However these engravings must be treated with caution as they were made in France and it is very unlikely that they were based on drawings executed on site. Champlain’s description of the Quebec habitation in Basse-Ville, little more than

a comptoir like those of West Africa, does not provide many clues about style: “our lodging … was three buildings of two stories. Each was three toises [thoises] long & two & a half wide. The warehouse [was] six [long] & three wide, with a fine cellar [cave] six feet high. All around our lodgings I had a deck [galerie] made outside on the second storey, which was very commodious, with trenches 15 feet wide & six deep: & beyond the trenches, I constructed several spurs, which enclosed part of the lodging, wherever we placed our cannon … around the lodging there are quite fine gardens, & a square on the north side which is a hundred or 120 pas [paces] long, 50 or 60 paces wide.”2 Scholars have noted the liberties the engravers have taken with Champlain’s description, remarking that the storehouse is not illustrated and that they added a square dovecote – the part which makes it look the most like a castle – which Champlain never even mentioned.3 An extant plan by Jean Bourdon of the 1624 habitation shows that it looked more like a fort, with a turreted storehouse in the middle, a platform, and a redoubt.

12.1 (left) Habitation of Quebec. Engraving from Samuel de Champlain, Voyages du sieur de Champlain, 1613. The building was constructed in 1608. Special Collections, McGill University Library, Lande Canadiana Collection. 12.2 (right) Fort de La Roche (begun 1640), Tortuga. Engraving in Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François (Paris, 1667), vol. 2. W.D. Jordan Library Special Collections, Queen’s University.

The next engraving, of the 1640 Fort de La Roche on the pirate island of Tortue off the coast of SaintDomingue, is slightly more reliable since it was based on a “plan” by a Sieur Hotman, brother of the island’s second governor, the corsair Timoléon Hotman, seigneur “chevalier” de Fontenay (d. 1658; fig. 12.2).4 Published in volume 1 of Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre’s Histoire générale des Antilles (Paris, 1667), it depicts a long rectangular half-timbered structure apparently made of vertical posts, a hip roof with finials and dormers at the ends, and five unevenly spaced little rectangular windows. It was perched like a tree house atop an

Secular Architecture before the Seven Years’ War

325

outcropping of rock with an undercarriage of exposed wooden trussing; together with two service buildings and a Norman-style round dovecote, it was surrounded by earthwork ramparts.5 The main building could have been plucked out of the northern French countryside – indeed there is little to distinguish it from a farmhouse in Normandy or a colombage bousillé barn in Perche (fig. 3.1).6 The fort was built by the island’s Huguenot first governor François Le Vasseur (d. 1652), who conquered the island in the name of France with the help of resident French pirates. Jean-Baptiste du Tertre had the highest opinion of his building skills: As he was a very good engineer, he chose the most advantageous place on the island to put his fort, at five or six paces from the Sea; it was a rock forming a platform around which he made regular terraces, capable of lodging three or four hundred men easily; in the middle of this platform stood a large high rock about thirty feet, steep on all sides. There he made a few steps in the same rock, which only went halfway up … He built on this rock a considerable accommodation for himself & the gunpowder magazine. He also brought up the cannon, and put several other battery parts on the platform, that defended the harbour entrance.7 However the fortress was not sufficiently impregnable to prevent the dictatorial first governor from being assassinated by his own men.8 Three more elongated hip-roofed hall-forts, two in stone and one in wood, were designed in the late seventeenth century in Quebec’s Upper Town (1648–85), Fort-Royal in Martinique (1686), and Petit-Goâve in Saint-Domingue (1688), although only the first and last were actually built. These buildings were slightly larger and therefore more closely resembled outbuildings of small country manor houses in France such as the seventeenth-century service wing at the Château de Quilly in Bretteville-sur-Laize (Normandy).9 Château Saint-Louis in Quebec City had a particularly complicated building history, best characterized as a slow

326

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

evolution rather than a single campaign. Constructed on the site of a small fort started by Champlain in 1620, it was first rebuilt in 1626 and again in 1633–35 in a mixture of medieval and what are called “classic,” or bastioned, fortifications.10 The residential part owed its appearance in particular to two governors general, first Charles Huault de Montmagny (1636–48) and then Louis de Buade de Frontenac (1672–82, 1689–98), who demonstrated an increasing concern for convenance, or more specifically a lodging that reflected the status of their office. As governors tended to belong to the nobility of the sword (unlike intendants, who were generally nobility of the robe; see chapter 1), it was particularly incumbent upon them to project their rank through architecture. Such concerns are revealed in the style and size of their commissions – and in their litany of complaints to Versailles about the Crown’s unwillingness to bring them to fruition. The Quebec residence was reconstructed in stone in 1648, heavily repaired in 1663, and further augmented between 1683 and 1685 (figs. 12.3–4).11 It is unclear who designed it, but it is unlikely to have been hydrographer Jean-BaptisteLouis Franquelin as is sometimes asserted (he drew its first elevation in 1689) since he was not an architect. In any case the additive nature of the building makes the issue of authorship a moot point. Alexandre de Prouville de Tracy, lieutenant general of French territories in the Americas, found the building so unworthy of his status that he chose to stay in the Sénéchausée (district court building) when he visited Quebec in 1665 following his reconquest of Cayenne. Frontenac’s attempt to have Colbert provide the funds for a substantial reconstruction in 1683 that would better reflect the dignity of his office was fruitless.12 Jeannine Laurent and Jacques Saint-Pierre characterize the Château Saint-Louis as “a château in name alone.” In fact, it was more like a chateau in miniature, and although its closest equivalents in France were modest buildings, it had characteristics in common with the larger houses: even its asymmetry was typical in country seats such as the Château de Cadillac in Aquitaine (1598–1616), which had off-centre windows

above the main portal of the court facade.13 Franquelin’s drawing of the river (east) facade shows a long, low rectangular structure with a rez-de-chaussée and attic, a door, and ten windows and dormers – a strikingly similar arrangement to the service wings of certain French chateaux, for example the upper two storeys of the service wing of the Château de Quilly or that of the Château de Sully in Burgundy (1570–1610).14 The hip roof has five chimneys and two flag finials on the extremities, there is a storage hut (garde-ménager) at the southern end, and the building opens onto a fortified stone terrace with a small viewing platform and balustrade at the centre. Two plans and elevations by Robert de Villeneuve (1685) show that although the building was basic it

12.3 Château Saint-Louis, Quebec City (1648, repaired 1663, 1683– 85), from Jean-Baptiste Louis Franquelin, Carte du Fort St. Louis de Quebec, ink on paper, 1689. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 03 DFC 347B .

followed the standard layout of a French manor of the time with rooms arranged into enfilades (with the doors of each room aligned with those of the next), the central rooms more public and the more private ones at the ends. The suite of seven main rooms was centred upon a hall (salle) as wide as the viewing platform, which would have been the first space encountered by the visitor, and it was flanked by an antechamber on the north and a staircase with offices on the south. The private rooms were in the northern wing, including the governor’s

Secular Architecture before the Seven Years’ War

327

12.4 Robert de Villeneuve, Plan of the Chateau of Quebec, ink and colours on paper, ca. 1685. The sections coloured grey are original, those coloured red were recently constructed, and those coloured yellow were yet to be completed. The terrace at the top of the plan faces the river. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aixen-Provence), 3 DFC 448C .

bedroom, with a large kitchen with thick walls at the opposite end.15 The number and arrangement of rooms are similar to one of the model manor houses published in Jacques Androuet de Cerceau’s Livre d’architecture, particularly the first storey of model XX, which has six rooms aligned in an enfilade with an off-centre staircase to the right of the vestibule and the bedrooms on the far ends. A similar arrangement also appears in contemporary houses in France such as Brécourt manor at Douains (Eure).16 The west facade was also asymmetrical, with unevenly spaced doors and windows. The château gave onto a pair of linked bastioned courtyards with a double

328

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

gatehouse for the day and night garrisons. Only the east facade was faced in clapboard: a 1683 expense report notes that seven thousand new boards were used to cover the facade with a total surface area of 38 toises or about 74 metres.17 During that renovation the threefoot-thick west facade wall was rebuilt, the work of two “Company masons,” but it was little more than a stopgap measure, as Villeneuve reported sometime after 1691 that the chateau was “tout ruiné” and not worth the effort of repairing so that “Monsieur the Governor is not even safe inside during a strong nor’easter.”18 The next building would be grander and more classical, and I will return to it in the next section. The unexecuted anonymous project for the residence of Governor General Charles de la Roche-Courbon, comte de Blénac (1622–1696) at Fort-Royal in Martinique is remarkably close to that of Quebec, showing how consistently carpenters and masons adhered to established French provincial traditions (fig. 12.5).19 The Martinique building was more symmetrical, with

a single doorway flanked by three windows per side and three dormers, one above the door and two above each middle window. The masonry is also more sophisticated, with rustication around the windows and string courses delineating a dado along the lower part of the wall and an entablature-like strip at the top. The Martinique project also included two wings on the ends to form a forecourt. But otherwise – except for the lack of chimneys, unnecessary in a tropical climate – the two are essentially the same building. In its main wing the Fort-Royal residence had six rooms to Quebec’s seven, and five of them formed an enfilade. The main difference was that the staircases were located in the side wings. According to a 1686 budget the governor’s house in Martinique was to have consumed 382½ square toises of stone masonry, 6,604 pieces of lumber for the

interior carpentry, 208 square toises of shingle roofing, 7,050 square feet of flooring, and 53 windows and doors at a total cost (including levelling the foundations) of 23,185 livres 14 sols.20 It was to have measured 35 by 20 feet, with walls two feet thick, using 4,220 square feet of ashlar for the window and door frames and 382½ square toises of regular masonry, including stone vaulting in the kitchen lined with clay tiles.21 However, given that there was already a perfectly good fort at SaintPierre, the building was considered an unnecessary

12.5 Plan of the Lodgings to Build in Fort Royal for the LieutenantGeneral of the Isles, signed by Governor General Charles de la Roche-Courbon, comte de Blénac, ink and colours on paper, 1686. Although the plan is coloured red, this building was never built. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 13 DFC 47C .

Secular Architecture before the Seven Years’ War

329

expense and the garrison had to make do with the rudimentary building already on site. In 1694 Jean Baptiste de Giou de Caylus (d. 1722), engineer of fortifications, complained that he was embarrassed to take foreign visitors there because it was nothing more than “an old wooden structure” which “has more of the look of a Negro hut than that of a residence for a Governor and Lieutenant-General.”22 The governor’s house in Petit-Goâve (ca. 1688) in Saint-Domingue was a hybrid fort and chateau sufficiently well built that it survived that town’s lengthy series of attacks (fig. 10.3).23 Constructed the year after the 1687 Spanish siege, it was likely designed by engineer architect P. Cornuau, about whom nothing is known but his surname, which suggests that he was a Huguenot.24 According to a report dated 1710 it was built by the habitants and was 84 feet long with stone walls on the ground floor pierced with embrasures and was flanked by two small turrets, four feet in diameter, which gave it the look of a castle.25 This kind of combination of dwelling and fort was common in Renaissance France, as with the modest manoir d’Houlbec in Normandy (1494–1520s) in which round corner towers like those at Petit-Goâve gave directly onto a lady’s bedroom and a kitchen. They also appear in two models published by Jacques Androuet du Cerceau (1510–1584).26 In fact a building similarly flanked by two turrets, called the “Magasin du Roi,” formed part of Champlain’s second habitation in Quebec (1624) and was sketched while in a ruinous state in 1680.27 By contrast, the first storey of Cornuau’s structure recalls Fort de la Roche in Tortue of forty-eight years earlier, a half-timbered rectangular structure with a hip roof and finials at the extremities (fig. 12.2). No plan survives of the first storey but the three main rooms of the rez-de-chaussée and spaces inside the turrets for marksmen were reached not by an enfilade but directly from a narrow cour d’honneur. The only stylistic feature to speak of is a Doric stone portal which was probably copied from a book. The most ostentatiously medieval-style design to come out of these early years is a remarkable pair of drawings from 1694 depicting the east and west facades 330

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

of Fort Saint-Louis in Senegal – they show no mere factory like Champlain’s counterpart in Quebec but a true crusader castle with lofty turrets bearing massive fleurs-de-lys linked by a pair of keeps and a chapel, thick bastioned ramparts bristling with cannons, and a grand gate already considered in chapter 10 (figs. 10.13, 12.6–7). However this pair of unsigned presentation drawings has more to do with wishful thinking and propaganda than with accuracy. The building’s resemblance to the castles of northern France – for example, Château de Josselin in Brittany (begun in the late fourteenth century) – may on one level reflect the pride or homesickness of the mostly northern French traders who served there. More pertinently, the structure resembles the larger of the castles of France’s competitors on the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) such as the Portuguese São Jorge da Mina at Elmina (1482; fig. 12.8), by the Dutch, which originally also had four towers, or nearby Cape Coast Castle, founded by the Swedes in 1653 as Carolusborg.28 France was unable to gain a lasting foothold on this lucrative gold- and slave-trading coast (Ouidah was farther east on the Bight of Benin) and the designers of Fort Saint-Louis may have felt the need to keep pace with these much larger structures. The fort’s design may also reflect nostalgia for the Crusader era, given Governor Louis Moreau de Chambonneau’s attitude toward Senegal’s Muslims (see chapter 10) and the prominence of Christian imagery on its main gate. By contrast, none of the castles and forts of Ghana have Christian figures or symbols over their gates, just coats of arms. Although these drawings faithfully depict all of the parts of the castle, they exaggerate its size, strength, symmetry, and dramatic effect, glossing over the fact that it had been expanded haphazardly over several decades. It was first built in 1659 by the Compagnie du Cap-Vert, and then added to in 1661, 1673, 1677, and ca. 1685 by that company’s successors.29 A 1664 audit made by the Compagnie des Indes upon acquiring the property reveals that inflated claims were already being made about this property long before the 1694 drawings. The audit takes the form of two contradictory descriptions of the building, the more positive one in

12.6 (above) View of Fort Royale du Senegal from the Coast of … Guinea [sic], ink and colours on paper, 1694. The earliest known view of the fortress at Saint-Louis, Senegal, founded 1659. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 19 DFC 10C . 12.7 (below) View of Fort Royale du Senegal from the Langue de Barbarie, founded 1659 (from a drawing of 1694). This view shows the other side of the castle, facing the ocean. Archives Nationales d’OutreMer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 19 DFC 11C .

12.8 Fort St George, Elmina (Ghana), founded 1482. The tower is all that remains of what was once a Portuguese four-tower square “Crusader Castle.”

the left column by the Compagnie du Cap-Vert and the more critical one in right column (which I have rendered in italics) by the Compagnie des Indes. It makes for an effective reality check: [The fort is] a large building of 100 feet long and 20 wide where there is a cellar as long as the building on which are [built] four rooms with their attic above to accommodate merchandise,

332

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

and at the end its fort … the said building is certainly 100 feet long and 20 feet wide but what they call a cellar is nothing but a hole which one enters through the floor on which you walk, which is nothing but some simple boards which you lift some of to descend into what they call the cellar and they do that with a ladder as one does in a ship when one raises the hatches, the walls are of brick made locally to a height of about six feet, a roof above covered with tiles imported from France, the whole building has three rooms and a kitchen on the same storey, above are a warehouse or garret, at the end there is nothing but a fort six feet high made of brick of 20 feet square which

commands one of the coasts of the river. 2. Next to the building and joining it there is a chapel with the lodging of Messieurs the chaplains, 60 feet long by 20 wide, above are two attics … The buildings are not worthy of the name they are given, they are all very mediocre not having anything but brick walls, the rest is of poor wood taken from the countryside which is also very wormy … 4. Behind the buildings on the south side, is another building of 100 or 120 feet in length and 12 or 15 feet wide which are for four small rooms for surgeons and Company men. This long building is of no or little value … the walls are only of earth and water which is called daub, the top covered with staves of old casks or nasty ends of boards which the company men made while passing the time and to give them shelter from the sun. 8. In front of the great house on the north side are two other towers of brick … These are not towers but shacks made of brick six feet tall and covered with straw.30 The description continues for several pages along the same lines, mentioning also a bridge, dock, four brick towers, a big warehouse, a gardener’s house, a small garden, and a walled cemetery. The same source notes that the sole remaining part of the 1659 habitation

that had not been “ruined by the Sea” was a tower with a magazine and cannon. The Compagnie des Indes Occidentales repaired the fort in November 1673, including the “restoration of the old buildings and adding to them, enclosing the said habitation,” but two decades later the fort still “only has for defence simple brick walls with some little turrets, all of it very asymmetrical (irregulier).”31 In 1696, two years after the drawings, a government report said about Fort Saint-Louis that it was “in such bad state regarding the buildings and so badly supplied with munitions and food that the clerks of the Company sent by these two vessels can barely find shelter and the few clerks who were on the scene were starving and sold the locks and hinges off the doors to buy millet.”32 This was no crusader castle. The reality of Fort Saint-Louis is revealed in an elevation and plan by engineer François Froger from 1705 (fig. 12.9).33 Instead of a proud row of tall turrets we see four squat towers without fleurs-de-lys, all but the central pair uneven in shape and materials, and distributed haphazardly within the asymmetrical ramparts. 12.9 François Froger, Elevation of Fort St. Louis from the Entry Side, from a plan of 1705. This drawing is a more realistic depiction than those illustrated in 12.6–7. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département Cartes et Plans.

Secular Architecture before the Seven Years’ War

333

The middle towers – the map says they are the oldest part of the complex – have conical roofs but are barely high enough for the top row of their windows to peek over the wall. The left tower (the governor’s house) has a kind of double-pitch hip roof and no windows whatsoever, whereas the right tower is simply thatched. The chapel cannot even be recognized as such. The ramparts are low and mean: nowhere to be seen are the rustication, masonry doorway, coats of arms, Latin inscriptions, and Genoese Virgin and Child of the 1694 drawings (fig. 10.13). Fort Saint-Louis was made almost entirely of local materials such as mud bricks for the walls, thatching for the roof, and lime made of seashells, and the right tower resembles the round houses with thatched roofs common in African villages on the coast (fig. 16.29).34 Fort Saint-Louis never did amount to much, despite Froger’s recommendation that the whole thing be demolished and replaced by a giant polygonal fort farther south straddling the entire island and “sufficient for all the commerce which the Company will ever conduct along the whole Senegal River.”35 A 1723 report still complained that “the fortifications are of very little consequence,” although new buildings were gradually arranged around a central courtyard to the west on the Langue de Barbarie.36 By the turn of the nineteenth century the original comptoir had become a wing in a larger whole – its foundations survive today underneath the 1830 Préfecture on rue Milles LaCroix – but as Alain Sinou notes there were “no frills and pageantry as in the Caribbean colonies where French architects designed buildings of prestige, in the Neoclassical style, for the governors and planters.” As it happens cannons were more important to residents than fanciful turrets and ceremonial gates.37 Large-Scale Projects in the Metropolitan Style, 1639–1746 These largely rural, medieval-style buildings were soon joined by more substantial structures aping the metropolitan and court styles of Paris and Versailles,

334

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

notably the grand goût of Louis XIV and Colbert and the early Regency, but also earlier court styles. The main difference, aside from their use of the classical language of architecture, was that they drew much more upon printed models, whether loose engravings or illustrated books, than upon inherited traditions from rural France. These structures and unbuilt projects were commissioned not only by the government but also by private individuals and religious orders. In fact – paradoxically given their lack of financial support from the Crown – religious orders commissioned some of the most extravagant projects, as was also the case with two of the gardens we considered in chapter 11. By the turn of the eighteenth century metropolitan styles would prevail in large-scale architectural projects, some of them up to date with trends in France and others accidentally or deliberately retardataire. For the earliest grand goût structure in the colonies we return to Du Tertre’s Histoire générale des Antilles – in fact the same plate illustrating Fort de La Roche – and an earlier engraving published in Histoire naturelle et morale des iles Antilles by César de Rochefort (Rotterdam, 1658). They show two views of the extraordinary Château de la Montagne on the La Fontaine plantation on Saint-Christophe (Saint Kitts), begun 1639–40 by carpenters, locksmiths, lime makers, brickmakers and stonecutters brought from France (fig 12.10). The patron was Captain General Philippe de Longvilliers de Poincy (1584–1660), the younger son of a French noble family who was appointed lieutenant general of the Islands of America and commander and then bailiff of the Order of Malta.38 Poincy began with a modest income from two commanderies (small landed estates) of the Order, but as one of the first non-Spanish sugar plantation owners in the Antilles he amassed an immense fortune with unprecedented alacrity which one source has estimated at over 1,000,000 livres. Michel Camus claims that “there are no examples in all the Antilles, French or English, at this period, of such a rapid and important accumulation of capital.”39 The Château de la Montagne therefore served two purposes. On one hand it was an official residence of

12.10 Chateau of Mr de Poincy. Detail of an engraving from Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François (Paris, 1667), vol. 2. Planche XIII. Otherwise known as the Château de la Montagne (begun 1639–40), it was on the La Fontaine plantation in Saint-Christophe (Saint Kitts). W.D. Jordan Library Special Collections, Queen’s University.

the highest French colonial official in the Antilles and had to satisfy a certain standard of grandeur. Poincy was particularly concerned with impressing the English, with whom France shared the island, but Philip Boucher, who calls it “the most elaborate house in the non-Spanish Caribbean,” suggests it was equally important to intimidate his unruly subjects in the town of Basse-Terre, conveniently within cannon shot of the house.40 On the other hand it was the country seat of a gentleman scholar from an old family, a grand seigneur, and had to project an image of personal prestige and learning. We know that it was an opulently appointed, three-storey country house with a double staircase front and back, a spacious, walled cour d’honneur, and an extensive walled formal garden behind it complete with broderies and a fountain with jet d’eau. The engravings in Du Tertre’s and Rochefort’s books resemble each other sufficiently that we can assume that they have a common source, but that source is likely to be Rochefort’s engraving and not a sketch of the house as it actually looked. Surviving descriptions disagree about whether it was a square-plan building or the narrow rectangular one depicted, with five bays on its facades

but only two on the sides, a shape peculiar to the country houses of Provence such as the Pavillon de Vendôme in Aix-en-Provence (1665–67).41 As the Château de la Montagne predates the Pavillon by almost three decades and Rochefort’s engraving was made seven years before it was begun, I suspect that he simply based it on a similar building in France. Fortunately the published descriptions are detailed, and we also have an inventory of Poincy’s house drawn up at his death in 16 April 1660. Rochefort describes the “Palais” as a building of unusual luxury in the latest French style, built with classical symmetry: Its shape is almost square, with three wellproportioned floors, following the rules of exquisite architecture, which here has used stone, and brick, with a beautiful symmetry. The facade which appears first, and looks toward the East, has in front of its entrance a wide staircase, with a double rank of steps, with a beautiful parapet above; and that which looks to the west is also embellished with very similar stairs to the first … The halls and the rooms are well constructed; the floors are made

Secular Architecture before the Seven Years’ War

335

in the French manner, of red wood, solid, polished, of a pleasant scent, and grown on the island. The roof forms a platform, from where one has the most beautiful, and the most accomplished view in the world. The fenestration is arranged in good order: the views from the front extend along the avenue.42 The property also had a “beautiful and large chapel, extremely well fitted out,” and Du Tertre, who confirmed the stone ashlar and brick construction, claimed that “nothing distinguishes [the house] from buildings in France.”43 In a 1640 letter Poincy claims that the house measured 66 feet long by 24 feet wide, and 35 feet high.44 It had a table which could seat 40, taffeta chairs and sofas, bed furnishings of taffeta, silk and damask, secular and religious oil paintings, mirrors, globes, marine charts, and a personal library of 150 volumes.45 The books included works on everything from fortifications and mythology to mathematics and travel (including the voyages of Champlain from which figure 12.1 is taken), as well as a book with views of sea harbours and their buildings, a book of portraiture, a “book for learning how to draw,” and two volumes called La maison rustique by different authors, one of them likely that of Charles Estienne (Paris, 1583).46 Many of these books would have come in handy in designing and furnishing a country seat: Estienne’s volume for instance included illustrations of a variety of parterre designs, which Poincy could have used in his garden, and instructions on measuring land. The Château was destroyed in an earthquake at the end of the century, although Jean-Baptiste Labat in 1700 was able to appreciate its extent from the ruins of its grottoes, fountains, and other structures “which showed still the magnificence and good taste of their ancient master.”47 For such a wealthy man Poincy was stingy with his workers: the Château was built by engagé labourers, who were paid a pittance of 100 livres of tobacco a year, and it was made with local materials.48 If the building had been constructed just a few decades later he would have employed slaves.

336

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

Poincy exploited its setting for dramatic effect using ephemeral events of the sort that we have already seen in chapter 11. Rochefort describes a particularly elaborate victory celebration: It is the most diverting thing possible when on days of public rejoicing they light a bonfire on the island with the news of some happy success of victorious arms of his most Christian Majesty. Because then the Clarions and Hautboys make their bright sound heard from the height of the platform of this Palace, in such a manner, that the neighbouring mountains, the hills & the woods which cover them, resound with this penetrating noise, & form a happy echo, which is heard by the whole island, and long afterward at sea. Then we also see hanging from the top of the terrace, and from the windows of the top floor, assorted escutcheons bearing fleurs-de-lys, and the flags & banners which Monsieur the General has won from the enemies.49 He was aiming not just at ships but also at English colonists elsewhere on the island: English Nevis, a mere sixteen kilometres away, would also have had a clear view of the festivities.50 The next colonial palace was never built – or at least the version constructed was a pale shadow of it. In 1684 the Sulpician superior François Dollier de Casson (1636–1701) commissioned (or designed himself) a plan and elevation for the order’s Montreal headquarters to replace their cramped lodgings and live up to the nascent colony’s utopian ideals – a Catholic version of the Massachusetts puritans’ 1630 “City upon a Hill” (fig. 12.11).51 An explorer, missionary, and historian in addition to being an amateur architect and city planner, Dollier regularized Montreal’s layout and founded its first parish church in 1672.52 The Sulpician residence, located adjacent the church and north of their vast gardens, was designed shortly after Dollier’s return from convalescence in France in 1678 and

reflects his exposure to new architectural commissions in the metropole. In fact the building is precociously up-to-date. The garden facade elevation shows a long three-storey stone corps de logis (because the property was on a slope the street facade was only two storeys tall) with sixteen high rectangular windows on the first two floors; a main doorway framed by pilasters and an entablature and reached by a staircase; rusticated quoining; a massive stone chimney on the right end; the first mansard roof in French colonial architecture; and eighteen oeil-de-boeuf dormer windows, five oval and the rest circular. The mansard (comble à la Mansart), a broken-pitch roof with two slopes on all sides in which the lower one is steeper than the upper one, was named after François Mansart (1598–1666) but occurred already in the sixteenth century; nevertheless by the 1640s, particularly with the publication of Pierre Le Muet’s Manière de bien bastir pour toutes sortes de personnes (1645), it became the preferred modern form

(it is sometimes simply called a toiture brisée moderne, or “modern broken roof”), and was later used on the buildings lining the Place des Victoires in Paris (1685– 90; fig. 8.5).53 The lower mansard has the advantage over steeply pitched roofs such as the toiture à fort pente (see below) of permitting a roomier, habitable attic and allowing for a wider building underneath. As we have seen in chapter 8 the kind of oval dormers seen on Dollier’s design became widespread after their introduction at the Place Louis-le-Grand in Paris, but that was not until 1699, fifteen years after Dollier’s project (fig. 8.7). However there are some earlier examples, as in Daniel Gittard’s Hôtel de Lully in Paris (1671), itself 12.11 Attributed to François Dollier de Casson, Plan of the New House of the Seminary, ink and colours on paper, 1684. Archives Nationales de France. This is the first project for the New Seminary of Saint-Sulpice in Montreal seen from the cour d’honneur. It was rejected for a more austere structure.

Secular Architecture before the Seven Years’ War

337

12.12 Daniel Gittard, Hôtel de Lully, Paris, 1671.

an influence for Jules Hardouin-Mansart and built just three years before Dollier went to France (fig. 12.12).54 Dollier’s creation projects an unmistakable aura of pageantry with its cheerful assembly of windows at roof level. The plan notes that the building was to be 127 feet long – almost twice the length of the Château de la Montagne – and 27 feet high. The palatial exterior belies a modest interior of wooden walls and rooms with humble functions. Once entering the ground floor on the garden side (the only one for which a plan remains, although the rooms for the étage and second floor are listed), visitors would find themselves in a long corridor (couloir) with a staircase at each end and a suite of rooms behind it.55 This is a more modern arrangement than the enfilade and would prevail in France and the colonies alike, especially in the eighteenth century. On the lower level were refectories, kitchens, servant’s quarters, and a dispensary; on the first floor (or ground floor on the court side) were the recreation room, a study, two visitors’ bedrooms, additional bedrooms,

338

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

an infirmary, and a granary and other storage area; the second storey contained an interior gallery and the rest of the bedrooms, about fifteen in total. Dollier’s palace was never built. Instead the Sulpicians chose his simpler alternative (built 1684–87): devoid of ornament, it was however taller with three storeys on the street side and four plus an attic on the garden side, and it had plain rectangular dormers. More significantly it looked more monastic, which was perhaps the point.56 The Dominican residence in the mouillage district of Saint-Pierre (completed in November 1704) was arguably the most literally “palatial” of all colonial structures as it is a reduced simulacrum of the garden facade of the Château of Versailles (figs. 12.13–14). As we have seen in the previous chapter the Dominicans felt outdone by the Jesuits in the Martinican port since the Jesuits occupied the high ground and dominated the town with their vast house and especially garden (fig. 11.13). Dominican superior Jean-Baptiste Labat designed this project personally in July 1704, and it survives in a watercolour elevation and two plans attributed to Louis

Boudan as well as an engraving included in volume 2 of Labat’s Nouveau voyage aux isles d’Amérique (The Hague, 1724).57 Labat was as outsized a personality as Poincy, and he was a man who liked to make an impression. His bestselling “Rabelaisian” travelogue, leavened with an ample dose of fiction, aimed to entertain French audiences with his life and adventures – they combined that of a priest, soldier, slave owner, plantation farmer, and amateur botanist – and “to pique the French reader’s interest in this faraway island of delights.”58 Doris Garraway remarks upon “his enormous ego and unstoppable ambition,” which earned him enemies but also enabled him to bring great wealth to the order by developing large-scale sugar plantations.59 Born in Paris and formerly a professor of philosophy and mathematics, he lived in the Order’s elegant headquarters

on rue Saint-Honoré and travelled in the highest circles. He was not the sort of person to be satisfied with a modest headquarters for his Order in Martinique. The main building was 128 feet long, almost exactly the same as the Sulpician monastery in Montreal (figs. 12.11, 12.13), and 40 feet deep. The street facade is similarly long and low with high rectangular windows, ten 12.13 (left) Attributed to Louis Boudan, View of the Monastery of the Dominicans in Bourg Saint-Pierre of Martinique from the Entry Side facing the Sea in 1704, ink on paper, 1704. Designed by Jean-Baptiste Labat, the monastery was in the Mouillage district of Saint-Pierre and was built in direct competition with the Jesuit complex in the Fort District. Bibliothèque Nationale de France. 12.14 (right) Attributed to Louis Boudan, Plan of the Ground Floor of the House of the Dominicans of Bourg St. Pierre in America, 1704, ink on paper, 1704. Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Secular Architecture before the Seven Years’ War

339

on the ground floor flanking the door and eleven on the étage, and the main entrance is a classical portico. However that is where the affinities end. The Dominican monastery’s roof is flat, in the Italian style used at Versailles, crowned with a long stone balustrade with urn finials over each window and in the corners. Such roofs were rare in the French colonies, and in this chapter Poincy’s house is the only other one to have one, in that case (as here) doubling as a viewing platform. Labat’s facade is very regular, balancing the vertical thrust of the windows and plinths with the horizontality of the five string courses. The doorway is flanked by a pair of Doric pilasters crowned by an entablature with triglyphs and metopes and above it an early rococo scrollwork cartouche. Aside from the balustrade the facade’s main link with Versailles is in its general length-to-height ratio and vertical/horizontal balance although even Labat did not try to replicate details such as Versailles’s rusticated arcade, window dressings, or upper-storey pilasters and columns. Even he did not possess that kind of money and neither did he have the builders skilled enough to do it (fig. 1.1). As with Dollier’s palace the opulent facade contrasts with a modest interior (fig. 12.14). The main wing of the ground floor combines a corridor with enfilade, the former at the back accessible from the garden and the latter uniting the front suite of rooms, which included a central entrance hall flanked by two pairs of visitors’ bedrooms. Two short wings on the garden side house a pair of staircases, a refectory, and the infirmary. Upstairs the seven bedrooms for the priests were accessed solely by the corridor and did not use an enfilade, as befits a more private zone, while the library and chapel occupy the side wings. Labat describes his creation as consisting of “a large Main building, whose facade faced the sea … with two wings on the mountain [garden] side.”60 The window above the main entry with the rococo balcony was conceived as a kind of benediction loggia: “[It] should be open all the way down to give entry to a balcony supported by the cornice of the Doric pilasters adorning the front door. All the windows were framed, and [each] plinth was supported by mouldings.

340

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

A large cornice was to run around the building to hold up a stone balustrade with vases & globes on the pedestals to serve as an amortizement. There should not be any [pitched] roof but a well-cemented & tiled terrace, where one could go for a walk at night, and take the air.”61 Labat justifies the grand appearance of his building by claiming that it was meant to lodge high-ranking naval officers, and interestingly he sees the building as serving dual functions as a secular and sacred institution, even having secular and ecclesiastical zones: “I had arranged this building in a way as to let the whole floor of the ground floor to a few officers of quality such as a Vice-Admiral of France, or Lieutenant General, who would like to have a place to stay while on the land in Martinique, without this inconveniencing us in the least. Thus one could consider the ground floor with its enfilade and formal suite of rooms as a secular home, and the top, with its dormitory as a Monastery.”62 Thus this building, like Poincy’s Château de La Montagne, played two distinct roles and expressed them through architectural style and the distribution of rooms. The first Ursuline Convent in Nouvelle-Orléans (1732; fig. 12.15) by architect Alexandre De Batz and chief engineer Ignace-François Broutin is an unusual combination of the kind of traditional architectural methods treated in the first half of this chapter – in this case half-timbering with brick known as briqueté entre poteaux (brick-between-post) – with a metropolitan model adapted from a print, Alexandre Le Blond’s Parisian Hôtel de Clermont (1708) as published in Mariette’s Architecture françoise (Paris 1727; fig. 12.16).63 The first Ursulines to reach Louisiana in 1727 came from Rouen, where half-timbered buildings are among the chief characteristics of the old town, and although its use here was strictly practical – other materials were in short supply – it also might have appealed to their nostalgia for their homeland.64 The more austere convent of today – it was the second on the site and was also by Broutin (1745–50) – is the only French-era structure in the city to survive.65 The first convent, built in 1727–34, was contracted out to the entrepreneur and master carpenter Mikael Seringue, who had just

12.15 Alexandre De Batz and Ignace-François Broutin, Facade and Elevation of the Building of the Convent of the Lady Religious Ursulines [in Nouvelle-Orléans], ink and colours on paper, 1732. The plan of the ground floor is at the bottom with those of the first and second floors above it. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aixen-Provence), F 3 290 6.

12.16 Alexandre Le Blond, Hôtel de Clermont (1708). Engraving from Mariette, Architecture françoise, 1727. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (87-B 434).

completed the parish church on what is now Jackson Square. Many worked on the building, including Pierre Baron, who made alterations when he took over as chief royal engineer. But on the evidence of certain motifs typical of De Batz such as the little rectangular windows in the upper storey, Samuel Wilson attributes the project primarily to the latter.66 This was not the only time De Batz combined colombage with Parisian townhouse design. His so-called “Observatory,” the private residence and studio of Pierre Baron on rue du Maine (1730) (Baron was a true scholar and spent as much time watching the stars as designing buildings), unites a half-timbered corps de logis with a metropolitan cour

342

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

d’honneur with a classically framed porte-cochère of dressed stone, and the interior features a grand escalier in the latest style.67 De Batz (1685–1759) was something of a scholar himself, having travelled all over the region from about 1730 to 1735 documenting local flora and the clothing, customs, and dwellings of Native American peoples along the lower Mississippi, as we have already seen in chapter 3 (fig. 3.7).68 Unfortunately we know very little else about this fascinating polymath. The convent was likely the largest building in the colony. Measuring about 166 feet (26 toises), it was also considerably longer than either the Montreal or Saint-Pierre monasteries (figs. 12.11, 12.13). Its size is due to its function as a dormitory for the women’s boarding school, which was the Order’s main vocation (in fact they made themselves unpopular by teaching free women of colour and insisting on integrated

classrooms) and the building also served as a dormitory for the hospital.69 The convent was a three-storey structure with wood-framed arched windows, six to a side, and shorter attic windows.70 Most of the building is unadorned, revealing the structure of the half-timbering and enlivened only by the polychromy of the brown wood and red bricks and roof tiles, which were manufactured across the street.71 The most interesting part is the central bay and portal, for which two versions survive, both dated 1733 (15 January and 19 March).72 In the first project (shown here) the portal uses giantorder Ionic pilasters that rise almost to the top of the second storey, topped by a heavy entablature and an aedicule with a small window in the centre, a triangular pediment on top, and raised panelling on the sides. The colour of the portico suggests that it is made of stone, a rare material in colonial Louisiana, while the aedicule appears to be of wood. The aedicule was taken directly

from the Hôtel de Clermont, including the way it pushes forward to form a ressaut, the only major difference being the orders, since the latter uses Doric paired pilasters. De Batz has substituted Le Blond’s Italianate balustrade for a steeply pitched roof and chimneys, the latter an odd choice given Louisiana’s climate. The interior arrangement of rooms in the Ursuline Convent is also very up-to-date (fig. 12.15). Instead of enfilades, the ground and first floors feature a central corridor flanked by appartements as pioneered by Jules Hardouin-Mansart in the Chateau Neuf in Meudon (1706–07) and published in Mariette’s Architecture françoise (fig. 12.17).73 In both buildings visitors enter onto a vestibule giving onto a central corridor – very 12.17 Jules Hardouin-Mansart, Château Neuf, Meudon, 1706– 09. Engraving from Mariette, Architecture françoise, 1727. Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Bibliothek Zürich.

Secular Architecture before the Seven Years’ War

343

12.18 Former Jesuit Residence (now Government House) CapFrançois, Saint-Domingue, 1774 (detail of fig. 11.16).

different from the corridors of Montreal and SaintPierre, which run parallel to one of the facades – and the rest of the rooms are arranged into four private clusters. They include a refectory/larder/kitchen cluster; one containing a refectory, workroom, and parlours for boarders; another one with bedrooms and parlours; and a smaller one with two bedrooms and a cabinet. As in Montreal and Saint-Pierre the upper two storeys are quite basic by comparison and given over mostly to dormitories. The étage preserves the vestibule and corridor but the corridor simply gives onto a row of individual cells on each side, and the top floor is a single large space under the rafters supported by a double row of wood posts.74 The curving wooden staircase from the rez-de-chaussée is the only part of the original building to survive today.75 One of the largest residences for a religious order in the Antilles – at 216 by 36 feet – belonged to the Jesuits in Cap-François (fig. 12.18), which, like its counterpart

344

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

in Saint-Pierre, was seized by the government after 1763, in this case transformed into Government House. We have already looked at their extensive allée and rose garden in chapter 11 (fig. 11.16). Unlike the Saint-Pierre residence, which styled itself after the country manors of France, the Jesuit building in Cap looked like an ecclesiastical institution, and one with a specifically Jesuit flavour. Built in 1738–48 and one of the Society’s last architectural projects before its expulsion from French territory in 1664, this stalwart stone structure with a slate roof was approached from Place Montarcher (fig. 10.24) via a long allée of pear trees and towered over the city from its slight elevation similarly to the SaintPierre residence.76 Moreau showed that the ecclesiastical appearance of the building extended into the interior: “originally the arrangement was monastic & featured large galleries or dormitories across the width of the western side, and bedrooms (chambres) overlooking the city. Two parallel wings, 60 feet long by 15 wide … at the back, served the common areas. The one at the South end, which also has a first floor, had on the ground floor a refectory, offices, &c; the other, which only has a ground floor, was intended for the chapel.”77

It is interesting that the chapel was given such short shrift as Jesuit colleges in France tended to foreground them, often placing them directly in the middle of the main facade: this was the case particularly in the work of Jesuit architect Étienne Martellange (1569–1641).78 This reticence about their evangelizing function is shared with their residence in Cayenne (1729; fig. 16.6), and I suspect that it might be the result of an attempt to underplay their unpopular missionary role. The Jesuits were not shy when it came to advertising themselves as a political player in the colonies, which is why they were not conservative about the size and prominence of their building. Even Moreau wrote that “the building though simple, has an appearance & size that is remarkable for Le Cap.” The long facade is austere compared to that of the Dominicans in Saint-Pierre with its pretentions of courtly grandeur. It is divided into five sections by plain, generically Doric giant-order pilasters, the four outer sections each containing five arched windows on two storeys and a dormer, and the narrower central one containing an ornate two-storey portal in the Doric and Ionic orders crowned by a decorative circular dormer and flanked by single windows on two storeys. The upper part of the portal is the most ornate part of the building and draws viewers’ attention. It contains a benediction-style window (another symbol of ecclesiastical authority) with an iron grille and framed by delicately carved garlands. The only surviving ground plans, executed after the government renovations, show a combination of enfilades in the larger formal rooms with apartments reached by corridors for the more private areas – similarly to the arrangement at SaintPierre but also in most Parisian townhouses of the first decades of the eighteenth century.79 One noteworthy feature is the clocher (bell tower) in the centre of the roof above the decorative dormer, a type which was particularly widespread in NouvelleFrance in church architecture (see chapter 14). Usually possessing two or more narrow storeys, colonial clochers probably derive most directly from Mathurin Jousse’s popular carpentry manual Le théâtre de l’art de

charpentier (Paris, 1627; fig. 6.4), which has a number of model framed cross-sections to choose from, and they are common in France in institutional buildings such as colleges, residence, and hospital buildings. They also have a particularly Jesuit resonance, dating back to the seventeenth century with Martellange’s projects for the colleges at La Flèche (1612; fig. 12.19) and Bourges (1621).80 In fact the overall design of the Cap residence, with its high-pitched roof, clocher, regular fenestration, classical portico, and fanciful central dormer might be modelled partly after the College Henri-IV at La Flèche – it was eventually built by Louis Métezeau (1560–1615) and Jacques le Féron de Longuemézière – and it may reflect a kind of esprit de corps for the Society. It is quite conceivable that drawings of Le Flèche or similar monuments could have been brought to the Antilles by Jesuit missionaries. One of the largest and truly regal buildings in the French Atlantic Empire was the second Château SaintLouis in Quebec City, built for Frontenac in 1692–98 primarily by François de Lajoüe (1656–1719) working with Hilaire Bernard de la Rivière and the stonecutters Guillaume Termen dit Desloriers and Jacques Danguelle dit La Marche (1658–after 1714), and enlarged for Governor Philippe de Rigaud, marquis de Vaudreuil.81 It was further enlarged and regularized between 1719 and 1723 by Gaspard-Joseph Chaussegros de Léry, who has left us with the best drawings of it (fig. 12.20). Unlike the last five buildings discussed, which all emulate to varying degrees the ecclesiastical and royal architecture of the Louis XIV era, this structure reaches back to the plain but stately style sevère of the turn of the seventeenth century, evoking an era of courtly elegance in keeping with the governor’s growing emphasis on visual display. Frontenac may partly have been inspired by his rivalry with Bishop Jean-Baptiste de la Croix de Chevrière de Saint-Vallier (1653–1727), who was at the time building the comparably massive episcopal palace (fig. 14.17) – demonstrating that architectural competitiveness existed not merely between governors and intendants but also between state and ecclesiastical powers. Nevertheless the new building was also

Secular Architecture before the Seven Years’ War

345

12.19 Louis Boudan, View of the College of the Jesuits at La Flèche (detail), ink and colours on paper, 1695. Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

desperately needed, particularly after the Battle of Quebec between Nouvelle-France and the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1690. To meet the skyrocketing costs of funding this testament to gloire – it cost 25,000 livres during its first phase and 50,000 livres in total – Frontenac sold congés de traite (permissions for fur trappers to leave the colony to trade), one of the benefits of his office.82 Lajoüe led a particularly peripatetic life, even for a king’s engineer: born in Paris he served in Quebec from around 1689 and spent the last two years of his life in Safavid Persia, either in the service of the French king or that of Sultan Husain I (r. 1694–1722).83 The Château Saint-Louis was immense. A long twostorey building with a tall attic – at 50 toises, or almost 320 feet, it was over 100 feet longer than the Jesuit house in Cap-François and almost twice that of the Ursuline convent in Nouvelle-Orléans. After Chaussegros’s enlargement the Château stretched across sixteen bays on both facades and was composed of a central

346

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

main wing and two ressauts at the ends, barely perceptible on the terrace facade but about six feet deep on the court side. Both facades were plain except for quoining at the corners of the ressauts and a single-string course separating the storeys, although Chaussegros’s drawing shows that he had planned to add on the courtyard side a Doric portico (half of the overlay has been torn away) with smooth pilasters on a rusticated background and a triangular pediment similar to a Bélidor city gate model (book iv , plate 15). This portico would have supported a viewing balcony with a stone balustrade which could be entered by means of a short stairway tower with ogee cupolas on either side and from the doorway of the chambre des gardes behind. We have already seen similar viewing galleries in the Jesuit house in Cap or the Dominican house in Saint-Pierre, although there they emulate ecclesiastical models. The ogee cupolas conformed to a roof type known as the comble à l’impériale (“imperial roof”).84

12.20 Gaspard-Joseph Chaussegros de Léry, Plans and Elevations of the Chateau St. Louis in the Town of Quebec, ink and colours on paper, 1723. Designed by François de Lajoüe and others, this is the second building on the site, begun in 1692. The plan shows Chaussegros de Léry’s proposed additions of 1723. The parts on the

plan coloured red were newly built whereas those coloured yellow were projected. The plan shows the first storey, or étage. The right half of Chaussegros’s portal design has been ripped off the overlay (flap) in the lower elevation. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 03 DFC 409B .

Originally neither the terrace (river) nor courtyard facade were symmetrical, although drawings from before Chaussegros’s renovations and his own plans differ in the details. A 1709 elevation by Jean-Baptiste Decouagne (1687–1740) shows an off-centre terrace facade of fourteen bays, the left ressaut a mere sliver with a single bay compared to the three-bay one on the right, and it had six windows on the left side of the facade and seven on the right.85 Chaussegros’s plan shows that he extended the terrace facade by four bays (one of them on a narrow extension set about 10 feet back from the facade) but since the final number was still only sixteen the 1709 drawing must be wrong. The door of the terrace facade remained off-centre, since the left ressaut is two bays longer than the terrace and plunges dramatically down to the bedrock (allowing for a pair of basement windows absent on the other side), but Chaussegros compensates with a visual trick in which the terrace extends only across the six bays on either side of the door – as if the rest did not count. On the courtyard facade he added the last five bays on the right end including the entire ressaut. There would have been seven windows or doors on either side of the new portal, of which however only the right-hand staircase tower was completed.86 The most remarkable thing about this building is the vertiginous single-sloped roof, which emulates the so-called toiture à fort pente of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, notably the ressauts, which also have the typical finials of the period. Such roofs are legion in French country houses as far back as the Pavillon de la Porte Dorée (1528) at Fontainebleau (fig. 12.21), and the toiture à fort pente also appears in several of the prints in Androuet Du Cerceau’s Livre d’architecture. A more likely prototype emerges when we consider the roof in its totality: a long single roofline uniting a corps de logis with two end ressauts. This exact scheme, minus the dormers and chimneys, was used at Salomon de Brosse’s Palais de Justice in Rennes (1618), the house of the Parlement (fig. 12.22). Given the legal and political importance of the Rennes Parlement (founded 1554) as one of the oldest

348

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

12.21 Pavillon de la Porte Dorée, Château de Fontainebleau, 1528.

semi-autonomous courts of justice in France, this building is an appropriate model for a structure meant to represent the rule of law.87 Chaussegros’s short towers with ogee cupolas are also a Louis XIII–era motif in keeping with the rest of the building: they resemble watchtowers in the ramparts of great houses, as at the Château de Cadillac near Bordeaux (fig. 12.23). The rez-de-chaussée of the Château Saint-Louis was the same as on the 1685 plan by Villeneuve except that the staircase and offices on the right side of the Salle were transformed into a dining room and additional bedroom (this is why Chaussegros moved the staircase outside for his new entrance portal). New additions were confined to the extremities, where two cramped wings incorporated more modern-style appartements for the governor and his wife with bedrooms, cabinets, and even indoor lavatories, or “lieues.” The new étage (fig. 12.20) used an arrangement we have seen in Montreal and Saint-Pierre: a corridor running the

length of the building at the point of entry gives onto smaller clusters of bedrooms, cabinets, and wardrobes, presumably where staff and visitors would have their quarters. The more constricted basement had three large cellars with massively thick walls, a larder, kitchen, and an office. These new bedroom suites were the initiative of the governor’s wife, Louise-Élisabeth Joybert de Vaudreuil (1673–1740), who, accustomed to life at the court of Versailles during her sojourn there between 1709 and 1721, complained that they had nowhere outside the governor’s antechamber in which to “recevoir le monde,” and she also wanted the building to be more symmetrical in keeping with metropolitan style.88 Acadian-born Madame de Vaudreuil enjoyed a remarkably high position at court while her husband was fighting the War of the Spanish Succession in Quebec, becoming a confident of the comte de Pontchartrain, and serving as a governess to the children of Charles, duc de Berry (1686–1714), the third son of the

12.22 (left) Salomon de Brosse, Palais de Justice, Rennes, 1618. 12.23 (right) Pierre Biard and others, watchtower, Château de Cadillac, Aquitaine, 1598–1616.

Grand Dauphin.89 Agueda Iturbe-Kennedy has recently suggested that this change during the patronage of the Vaudreuils to a courtlier and less military style was also characteristic of a transition in château architecture within France at the time.90 Indeed such ponderous monumentality was on its way out as designers looked toward Regency models – particularly Parisian townhouses – preferring their light, airy qualities and their more modest proportions. This change in taste would particularly prevail after the Seven Years’ War, as we will see in chapter 13. Two projects in Cap-François from the 1730s and 1740s make excellent case studies for this new direction in official colonial architecture. The first is Joseph-Louis

Secular Architecture before the Seven Years’ War

349

12.24 Joseph-Louis de La Lance, Plans, Profile, and Elevation of the Magazin Royale of Cap [François], ink and colours on paper, 1737. This is de La Lance’s second project. The two-storey open gallery is in the courtyard at the bottom of the plan, labelled “grande gallerie du commun.” The plan is the first storey. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 5 DFC 335A .

350

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

de La Lance’s Magasin du Roi, built facing onto the Quay Saint-Louis near the Corps-de-Garde to replace one destroyed in the 1734 fire that inspired urban officials to decree that all buildings henceforth be made of stone. Three projects survive for this monument, from 1736, 1737, and 1738 (figs. 12.24–25).91 The 1736

design is very rudimentary and makes no pretensions toward metropolitan style: it consists of a nine-bay, single-storey corps de logis with a hip roof joined by rusticated portes-cochères to a pair of two-storey pavilions at each end, each with high, pyramidal roofs and quoining. His 1737–38 versions are more accomplished: by adding an étage to the main corps de logis, Delalance unites all three blocks with a single facade, particularly in the 1738 redaction where the roofline of the central building extends over the gates to meet those of the wings, making the gates look like doors. This trick of hiding passageways between buildings within a continuous facade is very baroque: Pietro da Cortona did the same thing with passages to a cloister and a street at S. Maria della Pace in Rome (1656–58) and Louis Le Vau incorporated a hidden passageway to the rue de Seine on the far side of the right arm of his seemingly symmetrical Collège des Quatre-Nations in Paris (1668–88). A triangular pediment bearing a royal coat of arms and trophées surmounts the three middle bays, and the 1737 project repeats the pediment on each of the wings. The two outer wings are crowned with anachronistic toitures à fort pente, which contrast markedly with the low hip roof of the corps de logis. De La Lance has placed a viewing platform over the main doorway, in the 1738 version using a 27-foot-long wrought-iron railing that connects the three central bays, and each window on the street facade has its own railing bearing

12.25 Joseph-Louis de La Lance, Plan, Profiles, and Elevation of the Magasin Royal of Cap of St. Domingue in America, made by Herbert, ink and colours on paper, signed “Made at Léogâne on 12 May 1738 Delalance.” This is de La Lance’s final project, which was built. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-enProvence), 15 DFC 335A .

the monogram of Louis XV. Although the Magasin du Roi is sufficiently generic that it was unlikely to have been based on any particular model, it does recall contemporary country manors. The nearly contemporary Château Soutard in Saint-Emilion in Aquitaine (1741–62; fig. 12.26) is also formed of three wings with separate rooflines, doorways at their juncture, a tripartite ressaut and triangular pediment, and a wroughtiron balcony above the main doorway; it also has similar fenestration. The court facade of the Magasin du Roi consisted of a two-storey gallery formed of a colonnade with stone Doric columns below and wooden posts and a balustrade above. On the first floor it is called the “grande gallerie du commun” and is accessed in the 1738 version by a pair of gracefully curving staircases, one at each end (figs. 12.24, 16.21). The gallery is an outdoor version of the kind of corridor we have seen in the Montreal and Saint-Pierre buildings, and I will return to this form at length in chapter 16. The étage contains a salle d’armes, two bedroom suites, a large formal bedroom and antechamber, an audience chamber, and

Secular Architecture before the Seven Years’ War

351

12.26 Château Soutard, SaintEmilion, Bordeaux, 1741–62.

another bedroom suite at the north end. On the rez-dechaussée the wings and main building are completely separate. Most of the ground floor is devoted to storage. The 1738 facade did not merely hide the divisions between the buildings, it also concealed an uneven plot of land in which the flanking streets converge along a diagonal and the back wall of the courtyard bends inward to accommodate the neighbour’s plot. In this, too, it had much in common with the Collège des Quatre-Nations, the unified facade of which conceals an unbalanced and awkwardly sited string of buildings and courtyards. I end this chapter with one of the most remarkable – and baroque – buildings in this book: Jean-André Du Coudreau’s unexecuted project for a Palais de Justice on the Place d’Armes in Le Cap (1746; fig. 12.27, see also fig. 10.10). Stylistically more consistent than the Magasin du Roi or most other buildings in this chapter, it is even more creative as a piece of stagecraft, using scenographic sleight of hand to hide an awkward site behind it.92 Again formed of three corps de logis, this time with only a single storey (although the wings have attics with dormers), it is impressively long for its height (it extends to 269 feet), with seven bays in each wing and twelve bays plus a monumental portal in the main building. But it avoids monotony by eliminating most of the wall: the windows and doors are so

352

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

large that they nearly fill each of the bays, leaving only a raised pilaster-like section between them and giving the building a sensation of permeability like that of the Grand Trianon (1687) at Versailles or a garden orangerie such as Hardouin-Mansart’s one at Sceaux (1686), with which it shares the low, single-storey profile, mansard roofs, and giant windows.93 Its extraordinary lightness is particularly conspicuous when compared to the Magasin du Roi with its solid wall planes, even though both are tripartite structures divided into three pavilions. The main portico of the Palais de Justice is unusually ornate with paired Corinthian pilasters (a rare order in the colonies), raised rectangular and circular panels in between, and a semicircular pediment bearing the royal arms and crowned by a finial. The portals in the wings also use Corinthian pilasters – not paired but layered – but they lack pediments. In fact the building is quintessentially decorative: the roof line of the main building is crowned by fifteen urns on plinths, the seven dormers on each side pavilion are framed by baroque volutes as at Hardouin-Mansart’s Place Louisle-Grand, only here with the addition of globes on top (fig. 8.7), and all three roofs are accented by fleursde-lys. The mansard roofs on the pavilions also appeal to more contemporary taste than do the archaic ones on the Magasin du Roi (compare with fig. 12.26). One

possible model for De Coudreau’s Palais de Justice is the river facade of the Palais de Bourbon in Paris (1722–28) by Lorenzo Giardini, Pierre Lassurance, and others, which was published in Mariette’s Architecture françoise and therefore would have been available to the architect (fig. 12.28). Itself inspired by the Grand Trianon, the Palais de Bourbon consists of an unbroken arcade, also of twelve bays excluding the portal, with twinned Corinthian pilasters or columns between the arches and a similar high entablature mounted with urn finials. Both buildings use the entablature to unite three wings with

different roof lines, although the Palais de Bourbon does not use mansard roofs. However the Palais de Justice is more evocative of festival architecture or even a theatre set with its

12.27 Jean-André Du Coudreau, Plan of a Proposed Palace to be built at Cap, on the Place d’Armes, ink and colours on paper, 1746. This project was to straddle a street to form the northern flank of the Place d’Armes, across from the Church of Notre-Dame-del’Assomption (fig. 15.12). Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 15 DFC 350B .

Secular Architecture before the Seven Years’ War

353

12.28 Lorenzo Giardini, Pierre Lassurance, and others, Palais de Bourbon, Paris, 1722–28. From Mariette, Architecture françoise (Paris, 1727). Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (87-B 434).

receding stage and side wings, an appropriate allusion for a building meant in part to serve as the backdrop for the mustering of troops and the public illuminations that took place in the Place d’Armes: the Church of the Annunciation (fig. 15.12), scene of so many Te Deums and society weddings, would have been right across from it. It also enjoyed a southern exposure, which would have only enhanced the chiaroscuro of the facade’s decor, which Du Coudreau emphasizes using shading in his painting. This stage-like facade also conceals a very uneven reality behind it. The only part of the facade for which plots had been set aside were the pavilions, which were located on opposite corners of rue du Palais. Thus most of the main building, housing the audience hall, council chamber, and law offices, would have been in the middle of the street, a major thoroughfare in the city’s congested centre.94 The building becomes even more deceptive when we learn that only three-quarters of it was actually public: the right “wing” was in fact the house of a certain Sieur Bouvier, and its counterpart on the left – simply called a “building” or “the King’s property” – and future site of the corps de garde – was only designed as a symmetrical twin to Bouvier’s house, or as it said on the plan: “pour simetriser avec celuy du Sr. Bouvier.” Behind the facade things were even more illusory. Bouvier’s property was

354

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

not as deep as the pavilion on the other side, as it was blocked by another property belonging to Sieur Deslorier, which furthermore would have obstructed the right wing of the courtyard if the architect chose to close it with a northern range. In its use of a seemingly unified facade to fool the eye, Du Coudreau’s grand facade on the Place d’Armes rises to the same kind of challenge that inspired the first architects of baroque Rome a century earlier, most famously when Francesco Borromini incorporated parts of neighbouring palaces into the two ends of his church facade of S. Agnese in Agone (1652–66) to make it look longer than it actually was. Architects like Du Coudreau remind us again that fame is not solely the product of talent: had he employed his skills in France under less stringent circumstances than those allowed him as a member of the Corps of Engineers – and especially if he had published engravings of his creations or even an architectural treatise – he may today be as familiar as Ange-Jacques Gabriel or Germain Soufflot.

13

Secular Architecture after the Seven Years’ War

the Seven YearS’ War WaS as much a watershed for French colonial architecture as it was for the French Atlantic Empire. Before 1759 French buildings projected confidence in the motherland, whether through the medieval halls and “crusader castles” of the seventeenth century, which hearkened back to older building traditions or ideologies, or through the grand goût palaces of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and their manifestation of court and metropolitan styles. Colbert’s patriotic vision was secure almost a century on, and the superiority of French culture seemed to be unchallenged in an expanding and prospering empire. However this optimism was severely tested after France lost North America and the island of Saint-Louis, leaving only a remnant of the empire intact, most of it in unexplored and unhealthy Guiana. Reeling after their defeat, the French went on the defensive, scrambling to compensate for their losses. In architecture, they did so by changing tack. In the decades after the war a few projects for large-scale buildings were designed, such as Jean Baptiste Tugny’s unexecuted Military Hospital at Cayenne (1777), a barely scaled-down version of Robert de Cotte’s Abbey of Saint-Denis (1700–24), and Pierre Antoine Jérôme Frémont de La Merveillère’s new barracks at Port-au-Prince (ca. 1772), which was however made of wood and cheaply and quickly built.1 We have also seen in chapters 9–11 that costliness and grandiosity were still the rule of the day in urban and garden projects, although many of the former were never realized. However nearly all

buildings designed or constructed between 1763 and the Bourbon Restoration were smaller than before. This does not mean that they were not opulent or self-consciously stylish; on the contrary, they privileged contemporary style over nostalgia in an unprecedented way. More than ever before, architects were concerned with being modern. In one essential way, however, the French approach to colonial architecture did not change. Motivated in particular by their nation’s rivalry with Britain, French architects continued to promote a uniquely French identity. Projects for private mansions and government buildings alike were for exceptionally close simulacra of metropolitan models, most notably in Guadeloupe, which can serve an instructive case study for the spirit of these times. But it was a different identity they were showcasing. As Britain gained the advantage in world conquest and brute power on the seas, France turned away from bombast to styles that celebrated something in which France was still the undisputed world leader: politesse (manners), fashion, and Enlightenment discourse. These cultures developed not in Versailles but in the salons of the Parisian hôtel particulier, where regular gatherings brought together aristocrats, scholars, architects, and other figures for exchanges of ideas. The late eighteenth century was the era, to borrow the title of Marc Fumaroli’s classic study, “when Europe spoke French,” and French society became the model for the whole continent and beyond, including Spanish and Portuguese America.2 The critic and diplomat Louis-Antoine Caraccioli (1719–1803) coined the phrase “French Europe” to denote the supremacy of the French language and manners at European courts from Warsaw to Lisbon.3 Diplomats from around the world (including colonials such as Benjamin Franklin, 1706– 1790) flocked to the Paris salons, turning them into Europe’s leading centres for diplomacy and back-room deals. Surely it is more than a coincidence that colonial buildings stopped looking to Versailles for their model and more directly emulated Paris and the hôtel particulier. For the first time the French sought to outdo their enemy in sophistication rather than size.

356

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

But things changed dramatically with the Bourbon Restoration of Louis XVIII (1814/15–24) and especially Charles X (1824–30). The Revolution and Napoleonic Wars had created a long hiatus in official architecture in the Antilles, Guiana, and West Africa, and between 1815 and 1830 architects were encouraged to bring back the bombast on a new scale, as with François Louis Joseph Garin’s 130-metre long project for Hôpital Saint-Pierre at Fort-Royal (1826) or Jacques Teissier’s mammoth 220-metre-long scheme for a barracks for 672 troops in Cayenne from the same year – neither of which, however, was built.4 Although the architects of the Bourbon Restoration still occasionally returned to the styles of the early eighteenth century – principally to that of Robert de Cotte – this period is most significant for introducing the principles of neoclassicism to the Atlantic world for the first time consistently and on a grand scale. Neoclassicism, a more rigorous, rational reclamation of antiquity, began in Rome and Paris in the 1750s and 1760s, was first championed by the Marquis de Marigny (1727–1781), directeur général des Bâtiments du Roi, architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot (1713–80), and engraver and critic Charles-Nicolas Cochin, and it moved into a more austere, utopian phase in the 1770s with the work of Ledoux and Étienne-Louis Boullée (1738–1799).5 As Robert Rosenblum famously noted, while some of its proponents sought a sublime, romantic vision of antiquity others, especially Ledoux and his ilk, believed that “the destroyed classical past could also be used for constructive, regenerative purposes; at times, the retrospective attitudes of private, languorous melancholy could be replaced by prospective dreams of vast, public Utopias.”6 These “vast public Utopias” enjoyed an enthusiastic reception in the colonies; however, smaller-scale and more refined and utilitarian models also found fertile ground there, before and especially after the Restoration. Although the styles of the Grand Siècle and later both used what Sir John Summerson called the “Classical language of architecture,” neoclassical architects were dissatisfied with the ways in which that language’s

grammar had been distorted.7 To an unprecedented degree architects aimed at an academically correct style based on advances in archaeology and the study of extant ancient buildings. Neoclassicism was also marked by an enthusiasm for sobriety, with less ornament on walls and a preference for the simpler style of ancient Greece or Republican Rome over that of the Roman Empire. The new style spread widely on the more popular level thanks to richly illustrated building manuals such as Jean-François de Neufforge’s Recueil élémentaire d’architecture (Paris, 1757–68), which partly inspired a church facade in Senegal (fig. 15.26). In France neoclassicism was associated in particular with the reign of Louis XVI (and was therefore ideal for a Bourbon revival), but its more radical forms had been forged during the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. Unlike earlier colonial French styles, neoclassicism was not exclusively French: in the colonial world Britain and Holland in particular championed their own versions of the classical revival – in Britain it is known as Palladianism after the Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio (1508–1580), or simply the Georgian style. Neoclassicism is at its most monumental in Garin’s or Teissier’s work in Martinique and Guiana. Their use of antique models is plain and functional – there is little concern here for stylishness or ornament – but it demonstrates a progressive interest in modular design, in which elements such as ground plans, windows, and porches could be arranged in different ways to suit the building’s purpose and climate. They achieved an elegant balance in their plans and elevations through their placement of courtyards, hallways, and porticoes, and their overall juxtaposition of masses and voids. They also combined ancient forms with those of the Italian Renaissance, including Palladianism – most notably through the use of the so-called Palladian window or “Serliana” (after Sebastiano Serlio, 1475–ca. 1554), a central arched opening flanked by two lower openings crowned with cornices, which was also a favoured motif of Ledoux. While the scale of these designs could give them the impersonality of a grand hotel, some

architects aimed for more discreet structures that combined practicality and classical elegance in novel ways and responded more directly to the needs and financial capacities of the colonies. Of these, the most important is royal engineer Nicolas-Georges Courtois, one of great talents in this book, who introduced a refined new style into Senegal that was derived in part from archaic Greek models. The Parisian Hôtel Particulier in Guadeloupe Few areas in the French Atlantic Empire sought such a sophisticated, metropolitan style as did Guadeloupe in the 1770s and 1780s, where a cluster of six private and public commissions aimed to bring the elegance of the Parisian hôtel particulier of the Regency and early Louis XV era to the island. Independent of Martinique since 1775, Guadeloupe was aware of its increasing importance as the Lesser Antilles’ main entrepot. Not surprisingly, Guadeloupe was slated to be the premier manifestation of French style in the Caribbean. AntiBritish sentiment had a local resonance in the island: Pointe-à-Pitre was founded by the British during their occupation, and after the Treaty of Paris handed Guadeloupe back to France and the town began developing in earnest, planners may have promoted French style there to compensate for the nationality of its founders. At the very least the documents of the period show that patriotic feelings ran very high in 1770s Pointe-à-Pitre. Its inhabitants lobbied the government to change its name to Louis-Ville in honour of the king and to name the principal square after him as well: “the inhabitants of Pointe-à-Pitre greatly desire that His Majesty would give his permission to give their town the name of a Sovereign whom they cherish, and if the king should deign to approve it, it will from that moment be called Louis-Ville.”8 The main square of Pointe-à-Pitre (later Place de Boynes and then Place Sartine) was already named “Place Royale” on a map of 1767, but in 1780 the Place Royal was moved to the small triangular square to the west of the harbour now called the Marché des Épices.9

Secular Architecture after the Seven Years’ War

357

13.1 Claude-François Nassau, “Façade of the House of Mr Testas,” from his map entitled Plan de [Point-à-Pitre] situated on the Island of Grande-Terre, Guadeloupe, ink and colours on paper, 1775. The design of the house is attributed to ClaudeFrançois Nassau. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 36 DFC , f. 17.

The embellishment of Point-à-Pitre began with the ostentatious townhouse of local merchant Jean Testas (ca. 1772–75), the largest private dwelling on the island and one of only two of this cluster of projects actually to be built (figs. 10.19, 13.1). We know little of this man except that he came from Bordeaux, owned plantations in nearby Abymes and elsewhere, and had family in Saint-Domingue.10 Testas purchased his first concession in Pointe-à-Pitre in 1772 and seems to have been a large-scale textile and perhaps dry goods merchant: his 1781 payment for a single shipment of cloth, fibre, candles, nails, tools, foodstuffs, and other items from France came to over 126,904 livres (for which he put up his house as a guarantee for payment).11 Although Testas died before April 1783 of a slow death – as indicated by an exorbitant medical bill as early as August 1781 – the négociant kept up his social and business obligations, serving as a witness at a society wedding in Pointe-à-Pitre in August of that year.12 As he approached the end, Testas manumitted two of his 445 slaves in November 1781 (likely his mistress and son)

358

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

and sold a sugar plantation in Baie-Mahaut and its 136 slaves (including Louis, a sixteen-year-old carpenter) for 680,000 livres; and in July 1782 he paid a bill for 40,000 livres to an associate named François Mausacré.13 Testas was seriously in debt: in November 1782 he took out a two-year, 66,000-livre loan from businessman André Courtois, and when Testas died his executors were overwhelmed with the “immense work” required by paying off his over 760,000 livres in debts and the “general despoliation” (dépouillement général) of all the deceased’s papers.14 Among his creditors was a mason named Besson, whom he owed 1,158 livres and who therefore may have worked on the house. Testas’s creditors were still meeting in November 1784 to sort out his finances.15 Testas’s house was closely inspired by Pierre Lassurance’s Hôtel de Rothelin in Paris (1700), illustrated in both Mariette’s and Blondel’s editions of Architecture françoise (1727; 1752–56) and it featured a classical central portico with arcades on two storeys and crowned with a triangular pediment, with Ionic engaged columns

below and Corinthian pilasters above (fig. 13.2). Testas’s architect added a fourth bay to Lassurance’s arcade, marking the centre not with a doorway but with pairs of columns and pilasters, and providing two main entries instead of one. Lassurance’s version also has only windows upstairs in contrast to Testas’s full loggia – more appropriate in a tropical climate – which was enclosed in an intricate rococo iron railing. Testas’s house is the only one of this guadeloupéen cluster of buildings to use columns, even though they are engaged ones. The ends of both facades are framed with vertical rustication and Testas’s house again increases the width by adding an extra bay to allow for a door and two windows on each side. The hip roofs without dormers are identical in both houses. Testas’s house first appears on a 1775 map by ClaudeFrançois Nassau, the likely architect of the 1772–74 church on Place-Sartine (figs. 15.15), which is also illustrated on the map (Testas’s house and the church again appear in a 1784 map by the same draughtsman, where the house is called the “maison principalle,” fig. 10.19).16 The house was therefore built sometime between 1772, when Testas was awarded his first concession in the town, and 1775. The exact location of the house has confused scholars, since Nassau’s 1775 plan suggests that it was in town, yet the 1784 map locates another “maison principale” not in the town but on

a sugar plantation to the west immediately across the bay. But Nassau does not clarify whether the plantation house is the same maison principalle for which he provides the elevation, and which is keyed to the letter “x,” which appears nowhere on the map. The 1782 inventory provides the answer, saying that Testas’s house was located on the rue des Juifs, the popular name of rue Tascher (now rue Gambetta), likely the courtyard house which Nassau has drawn on the îlot immediately west of the square.17 Bruno Kissoun reasonably suggests that the architect was Nassau himself, given the prominent placement of its elevation on his two maps alongside other works attributable to the architect and in a similar style, including the church and the reservoir and fountain, designed around 1782 but as yet unbuilt.18 The house would have been built by Testas’s slave masonry workshop, which as we have seen in chapter 4 included several masons, of whom Philippe, François, the Mouringa brothers, and Alidor were old enough to have participated. Likewise, the roof and interior woodwork would have been executed by Testas’s carpenter slaves under Louis, of whom only Sophrony, Gilles, Thomas, and the sçieur de 13.2 Pierre Lassurance, Hôtel de Rothelin (detail), 1700. Engraving from Blondel, L’architecture françoise (Paris, 1752–56). Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (87-B 434).

Secular Architecture after the Seven Years’ War

359

long Sans Chagrin could have worked on the project.19 The house is as much a testament to the skill of these men as it is to its designer. The most extensive description of the house is in a 1783 inventory of Testas’s properties, published here for the first time: A house of stone masonry situated in this town on the rue des Juifs, the property [is] 72 feet wide on the street and 150 in depth … divided below into four shops with a vaulted gallery under which there are two offices serving as countinghouses, two staircases at the two ends under which are two vaulted stone chambers, the upper storey divided into four rooms with an attic the length of the house, a trap door at each end with a ladder; itself [the roof] covered with shingles nailed onto panelling with two dormers on the facade … the facade adorned with a portico (frontispiece) in the Ionic and Corinthian order, with an iron balcony 38 feet long and two deep, six iron balustrades on the windows on the two ends, two storage rooms on each side in stone divided in the middle, each one 88 feet long and 17 wide, not including the open gallery, and covered with slate … a pavilion at each end facing the sea, 20 feet square, with an upper chamber and attic covered with shingles, the western pavilion and its adjacent storehouse … with paving stones from Barsac [near Bordeaux],20 just like the bottom of the main house, also in the middle of the courtyard.21 Testas’s immense house could not stand up to the southern climate and was so dilapidated by 1783 – the inventory said it needed “immenses réparations” – that it was evaluated at only 110,000 livres. There is no indication of how long the house lasted after Nassau’s 1784 map, but given its condition and the fact that the government never purchased it, I expect it was either torn down or fell victim to one of the island’s many natural disasters.

360

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

Scholars such as Kissoun and Anne de PérotinDumon have mistakenly – but understandably – assumed that this building was not a private home but a project for the governor’s mansion.22 In 1775 Pointe-à-Pitre was Guadeloupe’s fastest-growing town with a superior port, more foreign commerce, and a more strategically important location than the capital of Basse-Terre – by 1806 people were already calling it a “cité” – and Governor Alexandre-Bache-Elzéar d’Arbaud de Jouques (in office 1776–82) considered moving the capital there.23 Even before his arrival the administration began moving government offices to the new town, starting with the Council and Chamber of Agriculture. A post-1775 report praised the booming settlement: “One can say with honesty that in this interval the town of Pointe-à-Pitre has grown to more than twice what it was in 1770. Large streets have been cut through its hills, quays are formed of their rubble, a Church, Warehouses, numerous Hotels (auberges), a Theatre (salle de spectacle) have been built there, swampland has been reclaimed within its perimeters, and several private citizens have built beautiful houses there so that it is fair to say that whatever was lacking in 1770 to receive the Council and Chamber of Agriculture, has now been accomplished.”24 In fact, Kissoun and Pérotin-Dumon were on the right track since the report goes on to praise Testas’s house specifically and suggests that the Crown purchase it for the Council and Chamber of Agriculture (although not for the governor’s house): “The beautiful house of Mr. Testas and that of Mr. Dupuis could be adapted right now and quite easily to the needs of these two assemblies, moreover the Administrators could examine for themselves if other buildings in Pointe-à-Pitre could better fulfil the needs of this transition.”25 Kissoun maintains that Testas’s house was built in 1784, the date of Nassau’s second map, where it is called the “maison principalle” and not the one from 1775, where it is called the “maison de Mr Testas” (in fact Kissoun does not mention Testas anywhere in his book), therefore making it later than Abbé Lazare Talsy’s 1777 design for the house of the Commandant of

Grande-Terre (figs. 13.8–10), a building which Kissoun implies is the first project for the governor’s house and which I will address shortly. “Maison principalle” sounds like a logical name for a governor’s mansion, except that as noted the 1784 map also labels a plantation house as “maison principale” (with one “l”), and indeed “maison principale” and “maison de maître” are terms commonly used for plantation houses. Pérotin-Dumon, illustrating the 1784 map, refers to Testas’s house outright as the “hôtel du gouvernement,” although in her discussion of the 1775 map she calls it the “hôtel du commandant en second.”26 Kissoun therefore believes that Testas’s house was the second project for the governor’s mansion, after Talsy’s 1777

project, and that it was rejected because it was “too onerous,” but that as late as 1785 Governor Marc Antoine Nicolas Gabriel de Clugny (in office 1784–92), the principal advocate of moving the capital to Pointe-àPitre, had still hoped to see it built.27 13.3 (above) Attributed to Abbé Lazare Talsy, Elevation of the Facade on the Entry Side, ink on paper, 1776. This elevation shows the principal facade of the proposed Governor’s Palace at BasseTerre, Guadeloupe. Although not illustrated, this structure was to have a hip roof like Testas’s house. Archives Nationales d’OutreMer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 08 DFC 321C . 13.4 (below) Attributed to Abbé Lazare Talsy, Elevation of the Facade on the Garden Side, ink on paper, 1776. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 08 DFC 322C .

Secular Architecture after the Seven Years’ War

361

13.5 Attributed to Abbé Lazare Talsy, Elevation and cross-section taken on the line A –B , ink and colours on paper, 1776. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 08 DFC 323C . This is the only elevation of the Governor’s House to show the roof.

The very next year (1776) plans and elevations appeared for the governor’s mansion in Basse-Terre, which was also closely modelled on a Parisian hôtel particulier from the early eighteenth century and which was likely inspired by Testas’s example even if the two houses used different prototypes (figs. 13.3–6).28 Since documents show that Abbé Talsy designed the intendancy that was to serve as a pendant to the governor’s mansion (for which no drawings survive), it is likely that he was also responsible for the latter.29 Royal engineer Lazare Talsy (b. 1695) was a rare instance of a cleric in the colonial Génie – he graduated from the École de Mézières in 1749 and had been Guadeloupe’s ingénieur en chef des fortifications since 1767,

362

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

acquiring a string of honours, including (by 1780) “Colonel d’Infanterie, Commandant le Corps du Génie a la Basse-Terre et Chevalier de L’Ordre Royal et militaire de St. Louis.”30 Talsy was also remarkably old – he was eighty-one when he designed this building – which suggests that he had some sort of ecclesiastical appointment before switching careers and entering the military. We also know that he was married, at least by 1782 when he retired to France. Rarely was a colonial project as self-consciously elegant and metropolitan as this scheme for a stone palace, originally intended to go next to its twin, both approached by tree-lined allées and possessing extensive formal gardens. As with Testas’s house, the Basse-Terre Gouvernement takes its cue from Mariette or Blondel, this time the elevation of the court facades of either Jean Courtonne’s 1723 Hôtel de Noirmoutier (or de Sens) or Jean Aubert’s Hôtel Peyrenc de Moras (now Hôtel de Biron, the Rodin Museum) in Paris (1727–32; fig. 13.7).31 The interiors were more generically inspired by some of the

sectional views in those books, such as Jacques Gabriel’s design for the house of Monsieur Blouin, governor of Versailles (ca. 1718), and again the Hôtel Peyrenc de Moras.32 The Basse-Terre Gouvernance and Monsieur Testas’s house have basic features in common: strips of rustication at each end, a basically tripartite division of the facade with a portico at the centre, a triangular pediment, and a hip roof (not illustrated in Talsy’s elevations). The Basse-Terre palace’s lack of arcades and balcony makes it closer to its metropolitan model, since, like the Parisian hôtels, it has projecting ressauts on the ends of the side wings which are framed by rusticated strips (strictly speaking dividing the facades into five sections). In addition, they both have the high plinth and steps, the iron railings at the base of the first-storey windows, and – in the case of the Hôtel de

Noirmoutier – the Italianate balustrade at the top at the roofline. Talsy keeps things simple by avoiding pilasters and sticking with uniformly rectangular windows and plain walls, although the raised panels between the windows and doors provide some surface ornament. Curiously, in Talsy’s version the two windows flanking the door on the rez-de-chaussée on each side are blind, which would have left the vestibule and staircase behind them in the dark. The garden facade repeats the arrangement of the street facade except for an open, 13.6 Attributed to Abbé Lazare Talsy, Plan of the Ground Floor of a House to be built to lodge the Governor, ink and colours on paper, 1776. Like a Parisian townhouse the Basse-Terre project focused on a grand Salon (“B ”) and had a “Grande Gallerie” marked “C ” affording views over the gardens. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 08 DFC 319C .

Secular Architecture after the Seven Years’ War

363

13.7 Jean Aubert, Hôtel Peyrenc de Moras (now the Hôtel Biron), Paris, 1727–32.

arched loggia on the ground floor, a pair of rectangular doors instead of windows on the ressauts, and no blind windows so that the “Grande Gallerie” would have been bathed with light. Overall the effect at the Basse-Terre Gouvernement is more delicate than Testas’s house and subtler than its Parisian models, emphasizing restraint over bombast. Talsy’s sectional drawing reveals one of the most developed schemes for decorative wood panelling (boiseries) in any French colonial building (fig. 13.5), and interestingly the style is more up-to-date than the exterior and even more than the sectional views of the Parisian townhouses. Although the basic divisions of some of the walls are the same – notably the rectangular doors with overdoor panels flanking a central mantelpiece and mirror – the rococo detailing on the overdoors, mirror frames, and panels of the Parisian homes have been eliminated, replaced with more reserved rounded and polygonal frames and garlands in the Greek revival style or goût à la grecque of the late

364

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

Louis XV and Louis XVI periods. They are in fact reminiscent of some of Honoré-Jean-Guibert’s boiseries at the Petit Trianon (1769–77) and demonstrate that while these patrons were satisfied with a slightly retrograde style on the exteriors, the interiors needed to reflect the latest French fashions.33 The other rooms are much plainer, with sunken rectangular panels to match the windows, but the curving staircase spills down onto the ground floor in the Parisian manner. One notable change from the French models is an adaptation to the tropical climate: the fireplaces have been removed from the mantelpieces. The ground plan of the rez-de-chaussée is arranged along enfilades like the public areas of a Parisian townhouse, so that upon entering the front door there is a clear view from the vestibule through the salon and the grande gallerie out into the garden (fig. 13.6). Similarly, the doorways are arranged along a single axis in the left wing so that someone standing in the office marked “f ” would be able to see straight through the dining room to

the gallery. Because it includes a bedroom the enfilade in the right wing is blocked by wooden walls; however as the plan notes, “the walls are made so as to be removable easily if the gallery is not big enough.” In the Parisian manner the salon is in the centre of the house and is the most elaborately decorated room. The grande gallerie is particularly spacious and bright, running the whole width of the building and lit by fifteen windows and doorways, including the central loggia. By contrast the first storey follows the eighteenth-century practice of enclosed appartements of bedrooms and cabinets around the outer perimeters (six in total) accessed via narrow corridors. There is still a “salon” in the middle, but it is little more than a hallway – although with an impressive direct view of the garden and the thickly forested mountains beyond. The Basse-Terre Gouvernement answered an urgent need: to end the colonial administration’s dependency upon the exorbitant rental properties it had occupied since 1740. Their current quarters did not present an impressive spectacle to visitors. In the 1760s the governor lived at the Carmelite monastery and government offices were housed in a scattering of houses, the governor in a building with “neither doors nor windows,” for which the Crown was obliged to pay 6,000 livres a year.34 Governor D’Arbaud was keen to regroup all government offices into a central complex with Government House and the Intendance at the centre. The land set aside for this project, extended through purchases from two private individuals named Nadau and De L’Isle, amounted to four hectares. In November 1776 the governor and intendant reported to Versailles that we have received the letter … in which you have fully approved the acquisition which we have made … of land and of a house serving as a Gouvernement at Basse-Terre. You authorize at the same time … to draw up bills of exchange to replace the first payment of 10,000 livres which has been made to Monsieur Nadau; and regarding the new construction which we have proposed to you, you advise us that the payment cannot be made in less

than three years: you notify us that a sum of 77,000 livres will be taken from the 1777 budget for the first payment.35 That same year Talsy prepared a budget for the Intendance – to be made of fine ashlar masonry, with 62 swinging doors (plus 37 regular doors for the apartments), and 40 windows, and built on the land purchased from Nadau costing a total of just over 245,713 livres.36 Combined with Government House, which must have cost at least as much (not to mention all of the outbuildings), this project for a government quarter at Basse-Terre must have amounted to well over half a million livres, a staggering amount for such a small colony. However as with so many such projects, the administrative centre of Basse-Terre was never built, as France’s entry into the American War of Independence in 1778 put a stop to all building activity even though the king had released funds to begin the project. After the end of the war in 1783 the government was still lodged in rental properties, the Intendance in a building owned by the Brothers of Charity and the Gouvernance in its supposedly temporary wooden structure.37 A 1784 report urged the administration to revive the government complex.38 Another one from the same year noted about the current government compound that the main building was of wood with a first floor and two lower galleries; there are six rooms or offices upstairs which are quite narrow and very low. The gallery giving onto the garden is difficult to maintain since its roof is extremely thin, the doors, and the shutters require considerable repair (Length 94 feet, Width 48). Another [is] of brick with a first floor and gallery above, and part of the lower floor, of wood. The upstairs serves as the lodging for the General [i.e., governor] and contains 9 rooms on one floor, with cabinet and wardrobe. At the end is his office with a little gallery separated from the large one by a single partition. At the

Secular Architecture after the Seven Years’ War

365

13.8 (above) Abbé Lazare Talsy, Elevation on the Entry Side, ink on paper, 1777. This is a project for the Mansion of the Commandant of GrandeTerre at Pointe-à-Pitre. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), F 3 288 56. 13.9 (below) Abbé Lazare Talsy, Elevation on the Garden Side, ink on paper, 1777. This is the other side of the building illustrated in fig. 13.8. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), F 3 288 57.

13.10 Abbé Lazare Talsy, Plan of [the Ground Floor of] a House to Lodge the Commandant of Grande-Terre, ink and colours on paper, 1777. Although much pared down, this version still centres on a “Sallon,” which is the largest room in the house. The dining room is next to it and the two are flanked by apartments. Archives Nationales d’OutreMer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), F3 288 54.

bottom below the gallery there are several rooms capable of serving for storage. At the front is the Secretary’s lodging with the Government Office. This part needs repair, they are currently working on it; the construction of the gallery is defective, and always needs much care (Length 72, Width 36).39 This miserable excuse for an administrative headquarters for one of France’s most prosperous remaining Antillean colonies was destroyed in a hurricane in 1825.40 Now let us return to Pointe-à-Pitre and Abbé Talsy’s 1777 plan for what he unequivocally calls the “Maison pour loger le Commandant de la Grande Terre” (figs. 13.8–10).41 Kissoun gives the correct title of this project in the illustration caption, but in the text he implies that it is the first project for the governor’s house, which is something very different indeed.42 In fact the

building is never called the “palais du gouvernance” or “maison du gouverneur” but only the house of the Grande-Terre commandant or (in Talsy’s letters to the governors and the accompanying estimate) the “Logement du Commandant en Second,” or sub-commandant. The commandant of Grande-Terre was the commander of the military base on Grande-Terre island only and ranked below the commandant of BasseTerre based at Fort Saint-Charles. The first reference to the building is from 4 June 1776, when Talsy was still trying to sort out economical rental arrangements for the commandant: In notifying you in my letter of 22 March … I had the honour of informing you that I would occupy myself at Pointe-à-Pitre with the lodgings destined for the Sub-Commandant. I have in fact made the necessary arrangements about the locations. I planned to purchase a house which

Secular Architecture after the Seven Years’ War

367

someone had proposed for this end, but we could not conclude the deal. I have been obliged to decide to rent another at the rate of 6,000 livres a year, island currency; this rent is undoubtedly very expensive, but it cannot be less in a place like Point-à-Pitre, where houses are very rare and the rents extremely costly … we are now making a few necessary repairs so that Monsieur [Bonay] de la Saulaye can take up residence upon his arrival. We hope he will be happy, especially when he sees for himself the impossibility of doing better.43 However the authorities were far from happy about paying rent to a private party and quickly ordered the engineer to design a permanent structure for the officer. Talsy’s commission dates from around 15 May 1777, when the governor and intendant forwarded the extant plans to the minister of the marine, who had just approved the project on 22 February. They wrote: “We will start work on it without delay under the command of the officers of the Génie and we will continue with vigour, so that as soon as possible we can stop paying rent on the house which is currently occupied by that commandant. Monsieur [Louis Antoine de Thomassin] de Peinier will immediately release, as you have authorized, instruments of payment for three months for half of the 40,000 livres, French currency, at which the cost of this establishment has been fixed. He will have the honour of updating you in due course.”44 On 24 May Talsy wrote: I have the honour of advising you that I have sent to Messieurs [Alexandre-Bache-Elzéar] le comte D’Arbaud and de Peinier the plans of the projected house to lodge the Sub-Commandant of the Colony, at Point-à-Pitre: I fear that the estimate which was made several years ago is not sufficient for the construction, given the rarity of the wood which was very common then, and that one cannot send different kinds of material from France anymore which one had requested at the time and which we are obliged to purchase

368

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

today, such as bricks, iron, paint, nails, &a … which will necessarily augment the expense of this building.”45 Since much of the wood in the French West Indies came from New England (see chapter 6) presumably the American War of Independence had put a stop to shipments. From this description it would seem that the house was to be built of brick and wood and not stone. Talsy’s 1777 project was clearly inspired by Testa’s house, as it preserves the tripartite facade with its central ressaut (fig. 13.1). It is also remarkable how much simpler it is than his Basse-Terre Gouvernement of the previous year (fig. 13.3). There are no arcades, rusticated strips, or classical orders, but the central section hints at a portico if the pointed section of roof above it is read as a pediment. Instead of the arched openings of Testas’s house Talsy gives us a single rectangular doorway flanked by rectangular windows, all echoed by a trio of windows above. There is no front balcony, but on the garden facade, which is the reverse of the street facade with flanking ressauts and a recessed centre, there is a terrace between the wings. Although pared down, Talsy’s scheme maintains something of the grandeur of a Parisian hôtel particulier, such as Germain Boffrand’s Hôtel d’Argenson (Chancellerie d’Orléans, 1704–05), with which it shares its lack of pediment and a similar roof segment above the entrance as well as its general fenestration.46 Both buildings also have an entablature above the roof line and are raised on a plinth with a wide staircase. The distribution of rooms on both storeys of Talsy’s project is identical, with a wider central enfilade with three doorways separating the rooms and two narrower wings with two main rooms subdivided into apartments with wooden walls, the one on the right side of the garden facade occupied by a curving staircase (fig. 13.10). On the ground floor the central enfilade begins at the street entrance with the salon, the largest room, followed by the dining room, and the wings accommodate two bedrooms, a wardrobe, cabinet, “office,” and “bureau.” The house is surrounded by

a spacious “terrasse” on the street side and a “grand pallier” or landing on the garden side. The central enfilade of the first storey is composed of a balcony on the garden side, a hall, and then what is called a “salon or parade bedroom” (the wings incorporate three additional bedrooms with a pair of wardrobes and cabinets). The most surprising feature is the parade bedroom (chambre de parade), a formal bedroom for receiving visitors, which was one of the most characteristic innovations of the era of Louis XIV, reserved for the royal family and the upper nobility, but which fell out of fashion over the course of the eighteenth century. Augustin-Charles d’Aviler defined a chambre de parade as “the room on the first floor where the richest furniture is. It is occupied in preference to all the others; and ceremonial visits are received there … There is at the back of this Chamber a beautifully decorated bed; it is either in a rich alcove, or separated by a balustrade.” He then notes: “We are doubtless talking here for les Grands; because we assume that one must be such to have a proper Parade Bedroom.”47 It is a sign of Talsy’s zeal that he has placed such a noble chamber in an infantry sub-commandant’s quarters in a small Caribbean island – even Madame Vaudreuil’s apartments in the Château Saint-Louis in Quebec could not boast of such finery, and she at least had lived at court (see chapter 12). The general distribution of the rooms in Talsy’s house is also not without pretension, despite their modest dimensions. In fact it is again likely modelled after some of the hôtels illustrated in Mariette’s and Blondel’s book. To give one example, the ground floor of Pierre Bullet’s Château d’Issy (1681), a summer retreat belonging to the Prince de Conti just outside Paris (fig. 13.11), also has its salon and vestibule in the central enfilade and bedroom apartments on the sides, together with a curving staircase accommodated in one of the corner sections in much the same way as in Talsy’s project. But even the Prince de Conti did not have a chambre de parade, only a rather large “chambre” on the first floor. But poor Abbé Talsy had to watch as his project was whittled down to nothing: in a 1777 report the governor

sought to reduce costs even more: “[Talsy] will confirm the execution of plans of the proposed construction, for the lodging of the Sub-Commandant, with the recommended reduction in the second storey [sic]: he hopes, as we do, that by means of this reduction, the first sum requested will suffice for its costs … He is constantly occupied with work related to this construction; he does not neglect a thing in bringing it to its conclusion as soon as possible.”48 The project was never completed. A 1784 inventory of the king’s buildings shows that the sub-commandant’s house, also called the “old Government house” was nothing more than a simple wooden ground floor in the most terrible state, consisting of five rooms or offices [chambres ou cabinets] occupied by the Sub-Commandant – this building is basically abandoned – length 50 [feet], width 25 [feet], an outbuilding to the side of this building with a ground floor only, partly covered in shingles and in slate, divided into four parts, a kitchen, a dormitory for the Negroes, a chamber for the water, and a stables, all in the most awful state. Length 50, width 18. Note: to the side of the Government lies the site for the new house which has only been built a few feet above its foundations.49 These foundations for the “new house” would appear to be the only part of Talsy’s project ever to see the light of day. Talsy’s one-storey Palace of Justice and jail in the same town (1780) was more elegant, featuring a classical portico with a triangular pediment, rusticated pilasters, and garlands (fig. 13.12).50 This main corps de logis had two wings and outbuildings for the cells and prison warden’s house with mansard roofs and dormers and a distinguished entry gate resembling a Parisian porte-cochère complete with Doric pilasters, a central arch, a prominent entablature, and sloping volutes. As the original wooden structure had been destroyed in a 1780 fire, Governor D’Arbaud envisioned “a durable structure in which the solidity left nothing to be

Secular Architecture after the Seven Years’ War

369

desired … an ornament for the town,” and the new building was constructed on a new site on the east of Place Sartine.51 The 1784 inventory describes it as a “stone building, consisting of a large courtyard surrounded on three sides by a wall, in the enclosure of which are three vaulted cells, a one-storey house for the archers, and a large lean-to divided into three rooms for the prisons … the compound is enclosed on the north by a house of stone with a wooden mansard roof (mansarde) covered in shingles … It leaks almost everywhere. Length 70 [feet], width 20.”52 Along with Testa’s house this was the only one of these Parisian-style buildings in Guadeloupe to be completed, and its poor

13.11 (opposite) Pierre Bullet, Chateau d’Issy, near Paris, rezde-chaussée, 1681–1709. Mariette, Architecture françoise, 1727. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (87-B 434). Like Talsy’s Commandant’s house the floor plan is tripartite with a main enfilade leading from court to garden with the main salon and vestibule, with the more private rooms on the sides: the bedrooms, dining room, wardrobe, and cabinet. The staircase is almost identical to that of Talsy’s project although on the opposite end of the house. 13.12 (above) Abbé Lazare Talsy, 1780 Project for the Palace of Justice and Jail, Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, completed before 1784. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 1 PL 2282. This is the only one of Talsy’s projects to have been completed.

Secular Architecture after the Seven Years’ War

371

13.13 Paul Edme Crublier de Saint-Cyran, Plan of Government House and the Intendancy projected for the Town Pointe-à-Pitre on the Island of Guadeloupe, ink on paper, 1786. This is the sole project in the French Atlantic Empire to attempt to house the governor’s and intendant’s offices in the same building. The drawing is misleading because the central ressaut in fact projected forward only a few inches. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-enProvence), C 7B 6 No 37.

condition a mere four years after it was built demonstrates that Talsy may have been an architectural visionary but less confident when it came to practical matters. The prison’s predecessor (ca. 1777) is the sole building in this book which can be linked beyond a doubt to a named slave builder, a twenty-five-year-old black mason named Joseph. In 1777 Joseph was working on the prisons with another slave called Prudent (profession unknown) under the leadership of architect Mathieu Mallabath, an entrepreneur de bâtiment named Pierre Momay, and a Sieur Demanin-Baïsly, probably also a builder. However the concierge of the prison, surname Martin, had ordered the young boy to do personal jobs on the side, including paving a shed behind his house, under threat of incarceration: “the said Sieur Martin had mistreated the said Negro Joseph for not having at all wanted to continue the work which he had him do daily for his service, and the same placed him in irons … and on the part of the said Sieur Momay it was reported that he saw various times the said Negro Joseph in the town and suburb of the city Pointe-à-Pitre

372

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

doing jobs for the said Sieur Martin and asked the said Negro what he was doing; that the said Negro replied that he was working for the said Sieur Martin.”53 Since Joseph was taken out of Martin’s clutches that year it is likely that he continued to work for Mallabath’s team. It is also quite possible that the same team built Talsy’s new project three years later. Thus Joseph may have worked on the 1780 Palais de Justice illustrated in figure 13.12. The final scheme for a Parisian-style government building was for a joint palace for the governor and intendant from 1786 when the administration finally – although fleetingly as it turned out – decided to move the capital from Basse-Terre (fig. 13.13).54 A pareddown echo of the grand schemes of the 1770s designed by royal engineer Paul Edme Crublier de Saint-Cyran, who succeeded Talsy in 1784, it preserved the tripartite facade with central ressaut, and it shares with Talsy’s Sub-Commandant’s House the use of a roof projection over the central part of the facade in lieu of a pediment.55 However Saint-Cyran has fused all of the roofs

to form a unique pyramid-like peak. The drawing is misleading because the ressaut in fact only projected forward a few inches: the ground plan is purely rectangular, with a vestibule, office, “salle de compagnie,” dining room, and secretariat on the ground floor and six bedroom apartments and a lavatory upstairs. Instead of Talsy’s stone walls and enfilades the first storey uses thin wooden walls; the uneven apartments are accessed via a narrow corridor off the main staircase vestibule. This simplified project is a far cry from the parade bedrooms and grand salons of its predecessors. It is also unique in the French colonies in general for including the governor’s and intendant’s offices in the same building: as we have seen they were universally kept separate, sometimes even in different towns. Saint-Cyran’s project was not without its little luxuries, and was quite expensive at 258,095 livres, 10 sols. An estimate from May 1786 notes that the outer walls were stone with fine ashlar for the jambs, lintel of the entry portal, and windows, as well as the corner pilasters, string-courses, dado, and interior doorways.56 The floors of the public rooms downstairs were all to be made of black and white marble, while the first floor and most of the staircase were of American fir, the upstairs walls formed of tongue-and-groove panels. The building was to have a slate roof. The window shutters were described as “à l’anglaise,” which probably meant that they opened sideways rather than from the top. The governor’s lodging was a separate building with a floor of Normandy stone and a roof framed of “charpente à l’anglaise,” a simple, light, and cost-effective structure of a -frames that became popular also in Quebec at the turn of the nineteenth century.57 Governor Clugny and Intendant Jean-François Foulquier (d. 1789) found the estimate too high and recommended eliminating the fine masonry on the interior as well as “certain embellishments, useless in this country, such as the iron railings, balustrades, and panelling.”58 In April 1786 the administration decided to “suspend all work” on these “too vast” plans pending further investigation, and the project’s final death knell was sounded when it was decided to keep the capital at Basse-Terre.59 Such was

the ignoble end of one of the most extravagant building projects in the history of the French Antilles. Neoclassicism in the Tropics, 1777–1821 Neoclassicism did not dominate colonial architectural production until the Bourbon Restoration. In fact exactly two neoclassical projects were proposed for public buildings in ancien régime Saint-Domingue, neither of them built, and they drew upon an unexpected source: the “petite maison,” a semi-rural refuge situated in outer peripheries of Paris and dedicated to libertine pleasures. Since the early eighteenth century the concept of a love nest for the aristocracy became a major theme in romantic literature – there was even a book called La petite maison, by Jean-François de Bastide (1724–1798) with contributions by JacquesFrançois Blondel, about a woman who was quite literally seduced by a beautiful house (Paris, 1763).60 Beginning in the 1750s and the construction of the pavilion of Le Bouëxière (1751), a new architectural type gradually emerged and the capital was surrounded by these small, block-shaped, classically inspired houses, situated in a landscaped environment.61 The retreat houses of the court partook of the same culture, most famously AngeJacques Gabriel’s Petit Trianon at Versailles (1762–68), one of the premier monuments of the first phase of neoclassicism in France. One of the best surviving petites maisons is Pierre-Louis Moreau-Desproux’s Pavillon Carré de Baudouin in Paris (1770; fig. 13.14). The extraordinary thing about the two buildings in Saint-Domingue is that they used this diminutive, private model as the centrepiece of two of the largest building projects in the history of the colony. Charles-François Hesse’s scheme for the Hall of the War Council was to be the centrepiece of the officers’ pavilion, part of a massive new barracks built in Port-au-Prince in 1774 on the plans of the marquis de Gripière de Laval after the 1770 earthquake had destroyed most of the buildings in the city (fig. 13.15).62 Located on the main government thoroughfare of Rue de Conty between the Gouvernement and Intendance,

Secular Architecture after the Seven Years’ War

373

13.14 Pierre-Louis MoreauDesproux, Pavillon Carré de Baudouin, Paris, 1770.

the main barracks for sixteen infantry companies took the form of a giant courtyard enclosing fourteen rectangular structures, lawns bordered by orange trees, a main entrance from the street, and a single row of rooms lining the courtyard on all sides to accommodate storage, various dining rooms and kitchens according to rank, musicians’ lodgings, prisons, a school, a guardhouse, and quartermasters’ lodges. These buildings and the soldiers’ barracks were cheap, primitive, half-timbered poteaux-sur-sol structures with stone filling that differed little from the service buildings of plantations like the Habitation Saint-Joseph (formerly La Grivelière) at Vieux-Habitants, Guadeloupe (last quarter eighteenth century).63 Hesse’s Hall of the War Council was intended to bring a little stylishness to this low and humble massing of buildings, a complex soundly criticized by government officials for the poor impression it gave to visitors. The nicest thing Moreau could say about the barracks was that “they did not have any magnificence like those

374

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

of Cap, but in their simplicity they have the merit of salubrity and commodity,” while Frémond de la Merveillière wrote in 1789 that the barracks already needed re-roofing and were badly damaged because they had been “made too hastily in the wake of the earthquake in 1770.”64 The officers’ pavilion, also by Hesse, took the form of an adjacent courtyard to the east accessed by a classical double ramp and fountain, and the Hall of the Council of War was to occupy its most dramatic spot, at the end of a long perspective line leading from the barracks’ main entrance on the rue de Conty. The courtyard incorporated sixteen apartments for captains and thirty for lieutenants and sub-lieutenants all united by a single “gallerie” with overhanging eaves supported by plain wooden posts. Except for the gallery the officers’ dwellings differed little from those of the enlisted men. The Hall of the War Council stands out dramatically from the primitive verandas that surround it on all sides. Although small at 36 feet across and made of wood, it has a monumental presence, taking the form of

a cube with a pyramidal roof and flag post, a full Greek portico with four Ionic columns and a high pediment decorated with the royal arms, and a trio of flaming urn finials (pots à feu). A window crowned with a plain triangular pediment and resting on corbels flanks the portico on each side, and two more are found on either side of the main doorway in the vestibule behind the columns. The use of full columns in the round is rare in the colonies before the Bourbon Restoration and reflects the neoclassical enthusiasm for Greek temple fronts. The walls are very plain, and the only ornament is a plain plinth and entablature. The interior comprised a hall with a small archives on the left and an office on the right. The Hall of the War Council is

a “petite maison” plucked from the outer banlieues of Paris: it has the typical square plan, simple classical portico, and recessed entry wall of metropolitan examples and projects an almost joyful mood with all its finials and flags. It is strikingly similar to the Pavillon Carré, finished just four years earlier in Ménilmontant (fig. 13.14).

13.15 Charles-François Hesse, Elevation of the Hall of the War Council [in Port-au-Prince] with a Part of the Facade of the Officer’s Quarters (detail), ink and colours on paper, 1774. This structure was at the end of a vast courtyard. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 15 DFC 629B .

Secular Architecture after the Seven Years’ War

375

13.16 Joseph-Henri Dausse and Pierre-Bernard Varaigne, LockKeeper’s Cottage, detail from Sectional View of the Aqueduct on the side of Mount Tranquillity [Saint-Domingue], 1777. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 15 DFC 541A .

The other “petite maison” in Saint-Domingue was in an equally unlikely setting: it was to be a lock-keeper’s lodge (Logement de l’Éclusier) nestled at the foot of the Morne de la Tranquillité next to the source of the canal feeding the mammoth Mount Tranquillity Aqueduct project, the single largest (and most disastrous) waterworks scheme in Saint-Domingue’s history (fig. 13.16).65 Irrigation was essential to SaintDomingue’s plantation economy, and “the elaborate

376

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

network of rivers and streams, flowing down from the mountains and further channelled where necessary by the most advanced irrigation system in the Western hemisphere, ensured that the plantations of SaintDomingue would rarely lack for the extensive water resources they required to out-produce the British and Spanish Caribbean colonies.”66 The jewel in the crown was the fertile and lucrative Plaine de l’Artibonite between Gonaïves and Saint-Marc, the focus of extravagant irrigation schemes commissioned by the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris and the Royal Division of the Ponts-et-Chaussées. The project involved an ever-changing roster of French engineers including Guillaume de Verville in 1751, who had collaborated

extensively with Bélidor on waterworks but died shortly upon arrival in the valley, and finally the engineering team of Joseph-Henri Dausse and Pierre-Bernard Varainge, chosen by the king and the Academy to do a feasibility study in 1776.67 However two massive floods in 1780 and 1784 together with the prohibitive costs of the venture doomed it to failure. The architecture of the little lock-keeper’s lodge contrasts particularly strikingly with that of the bridge that leads to it, located across the first lock where the canal exits the Artibonite River, a grim and imposing structure of giant buttresses and rusticated arches bearing the royal coat of arms that recalls in its elemental geometry the more austere projects of Ledoux or Boullée. The lodge was to be a single rectangular block with a staircase facing the bridge and a smaller one giving onto the countryside behind it, and featured a tripartite facade, a portico of four Doric columns with a recessed vestibule behind, and two high rectangular windows on the sides with semicircular pediments carved with shell motifs. Inside it was to have a main hall flanked by two smaller rooms, with a pair of alcoves on either side of the vestibule. The Parisian “petite maison” that most closely resembles this cottage is the street facade of Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart’s Hôtel Dervieux (begun 1774): both have four-column porticoes on five steps crowned by a high entablature (rather than a pediment as at the Hall of the War Council), and rectangular doorways on either side.68 The contrast of the whitewashed walls with the rich greenery of the hills and palm trees of the Artibonite lodge only add to the sense of refuge so beloved by the Parisian aristocracy. Public architectural commissions came to an abrupt stop with the 1789 Revolution and (in SaintDomingue) the War of Independence; the same went for the Napoleonic years, as the first consul and then emperor was more interested in conquering Europe and restructuring Paris than in maintaining France’s Atlantic colonies.69 The struggles between loyalists and revolutionaries on the islands, erupting most famously with Victor Hugue’s guillotine in Guadeloupe and the temporary abolition of slavery there in 1794, meant that

people had more pressing concerns than public architecture; some colonies like Martinique were not even in French hands during this interregnum. It was only with the second restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1815 that France turned again to its Atlantic colonies, financing ambitious restoration and construction projects in Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guiana, and Senegal by the likes of Garin in Martinique, Emmanuel Philibert in Guadeloupe, Teissier in Cayenne, and Courtois in Saint-Louis. Except for Courtois none of these architects possessed the originality of their forebears and their projects have a sterile, industrial quality, favouring basic, readily replicated structural elements to facilitate expansion and changes in function, and minimizing surface decoration. The practicality and adaptability of these projects anticipated the truly industrial, prefabricated architecture of metal and brick used in the French colonies worldwide in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries as I will explore in chapter 17. Garin, who worked in Martinique from 1815 to at least 1829, was a particularly active advocate for French renewal. Enamoured with new ideas about progress and efficiency, he was appalled at the state of Fort-Royal and what he saw as the backward and superstitious architectural practices of colonists, such as the use of wood buildings in the belief that they were better protection against earthquakes. With little patience for Caribbean culture, Garin sought to impose a rational, impersonal French style onto the colonies, as he wrote: We can say without fear of contradiction that there is not a single public building at Fort-Royal that adequately fulfils the object of its purpose; yet considerable amounts have been allocated for centuries to the enlargement and maintenance of royal buildings: other amounts could also be thrown for a long time into this bottomless pit without filling it unless we finally adopt a rational system of buildings and roads. In the general distribution of its masses the modern city of Fort-Royal exhibits the essential flaws of old cities. Randomly placed monuments bear the

Secular Architecture after the Seven Years’ War

377

stamp of ineptitude, art appears nowhere: everything seems to be the work of the Caribbean.70 Garin’s plan was to transform the city into a rational, French, nineteenth-century capital. The cathedral, theatre, fountains, reservoir, canal, and road and paving work would be charged to the townspeople while the palaces of the governor and intendant, the pavilions, barracks, Palace of Justice, and prison would be paid for by the colony.71 Garin’s brand of neoclassicism was ideal for such a grand reconstruction scheme. The suite of stone government structures he designed echoed Ledoux, particularly in the use of Italianate forms such as the Serliana. Ledoux’s style was now readily accessible with the publication of his influential L’architecture considérée (1804). However Garin was more directly inspired by the more practical designs of Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand (1760–1834), a pupil of Boullée and the pioneer of modular architecture. Durand’s lavishly illustrated Précis des leçons d’architecture données à l’École Polytechnique (1802–05), with its large engraved plates full of utilitarian models for building components, revolutionized the way designers approached buildings.72 Meant as a practical textbook for engineers in training, Durand’s book was unprecedented in the sheer variety of forms it illustrated in its giant engravings and also for the flexibility with which they could be assembled according to an architect’s needs. The systematic, taxonomic approach to architecture in Durand’s book – he was concerned with salubrity, economy, and a new understanding of convenance as “caractère” which had less to do with status and more to do with building type and even human emotions – responds to a growing interest in technological and scientific rationalism, a spirit that was transported immediately to the colonies.73 In fact Teissier’s barracks of 1826, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, is partly modelled after a model barracks published in part iii of Durand’s manual (plate 20). Typical are Garin’s two projects for the Palais de Justice in Fort-Royal (1815). They are generic enough

378

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

to serve any major civic function, with a two-storey portico with Doric columns and unadorned pediment, a main two-storey corps de logis with three windows per side on the upper floor and two plus a door on the lower level, and two single-bay wings protruding from the ends (fig. 13.17).74 The palace was to be a large rectangular block (almost a square) with four facades, two on the side streets with two-storey colonnades flanked by wings and grander ones facing onto the garden and the new Place du Palais de Justice. This more-or-less square, centralized plan with surrounding enfilades and central, basilical halls with apses was likely adapted from part ii of Durand, his section on “Composition in General.”75 Durand particularly advocated placing rooms on “common axes,” four of them forming a square and additional ones subdividing the plan. Garin’s first project forms a shallow rectangle with projecting wings on the garden and court facades, two main corridors, a concourse behind the portico leading to a square council chamber with a barrel-vaulted coffered ceiling, and other offices located in the wings. Project two was larger, almost square in shape, and did not have the projecting wings. They have the antiseptic interchangeability of many US state capitols, and despite their size they demonstrate a post-revolutionary trend toward the replacement “of the notion of the monument with that of the facility, l’équipement,” so that their functionality was at least as important as their role as a symbolic reflection of royal power.76 This uneasy dichotomy between utility and monumentality is one of the main reasons these buildings lack the sensation of gloire or “magnificence” sought in ancien régime buildings. Garin’s project for the Palais du Gouverneur in the same city (1815; fig. 13.18) is similarly block-like, unadorned, and blandly functional, this time using a triple arch motif instead of a classical portico: on 13.17 (opposite) François-Louis-Joseph Garin, City of Fort Royal, 1815. Sectional View of the Palace of Justice (project number 1). Principal Elevation of the Palace of Justice, ink and colours on paper, 1815. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-enProvence), 13 DFC 509B .

13.18 François-Louis-Joseph Garin, Site of Fort-Royal: Plan, Sectional View, and Elevation of a Palace of the Governor Planned on the location of the “Small Government,” ink and colours on paper, 1815. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-enProvence), 13 DFC 511B .

the ground floor of the main facade it appears in the centre and on the two side wings.77 The only difference is in the arcade above the central portal, which takes the form of a triple Serliana, as seen for example at Ledoux’s Salt-Manufacturing Building at the Saline Royale at Arc-et-Senans (1775–79). The building’s general severity, roofline, and use of arches also recall the eighth project (plate Xvii ) from M. D’Albaret’s

380

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

Différens projets, but not closely enough for it to be the model (fig. 6.7). But the facade most closely resembles a number of porch models by Durand (plate 9 of part ii), many of which have Serlianas and triple arched doorways and one of which has the same profile, only with the lateral arcades on the first storey rather than the rez-de-chaussée.78 The plans of both storeys show the same symmetrical arrangements of rooms arranged along enfilades but also accessed by means of corridors on the sides and the gallery at the back (the garden facade features a double arcade). The only architectural treatise Garin mentioned by name, although not for this project, was Nouvelles inventions pour bien bastir et à petits fraiz (Paris, 1561) by Philibert de l’Orme, which

regained popularity in the late Enlightenment because of the book’s emphasis on technical innovativeness.79 Saint-Louis in Senegal was another town handed back by the British (in 1817) that the French were determined to transform into a showcase for French efficiency, beginning with the fort itself, an uneven, dilapidated structure – parts of it still survived from the seventeenth century – which Sinou describes as “a building still remarkable for its cracked walls and rickety floors” (figs. 12.6–7).80 Government workers refused to live in the humid and poorly ventilated structure, but its symbolic value saved the fort because it demonstrated the antiquity of France’s claim to this part of the world. In 1820 officials held a concours to design the new “Hôtel du Gouverneur,” which was in fact just the étage to be built on top of an existing rectangular wing across the courtyard from the original corps de logis and facing onto a new garden.81 The winner was Capitaine du Génie Courtois, whose previous assignment had been in the Caribbean, where he worked on some cartographic projects in the Guadeloupe Archipelago between 1810 and 1818. The architectural style he introduced into Saint-Louis was similar in spirit to experimental new designs being developed in the Circum-Caribbean that emphasized air circulation, especially in new settlements in Guiana such as Mana (see chapter 6).82 Courtois created a light, elegant new facade in 1820 that combined the aesthetics of classicism with the need for ventilation (fig. 13.19). A plain tripartite structure, it focuses on a Doric portico of six piers accessed by a double staircase. The whole corps de logis is united by an entablature at the roof line and pilasters mark the facade’s outer extremities. Courtois places jalousies between the columns to allow air to flow in yet keep out the sun, and the five tall rectangular windows on either side were also to have shutters. Although his facade underwent several changes before the building was actually constructed in the 1830s, the 1820 project survives as the central portion of today’s west facade, now all but obscured by a large tree. Courtois’s 1821 project for a hospital for 180 patients provides the same airy

classicism of his Hôtel du Gouvernement but on a much grander scale (fig. 13.20).83 It represented an ideal combination of stylishness and salubrity, of the sort which was lacking in many of the rejected hospital designs of the time. Such was Emmanuel Philibert’s project for Basse-Terre in Guadeloupe (1817), specifically criticized in this report by Governor Antoine-Philippe de Lardenoy: We know that refreshing the air is one of the main causes contributing to the reduction of the insalubrity of places inhabited by a large number of individuals. It is essential, especially in climates where the contagiousness of a great number of diseases is so rapid and so forceful, that the buildings intended for the accommodation of troops, and especially hospitals, are so disposed as to promote air currents as much as possible. In the large hospital project of M. Philibert, the different buildings are not sufficiently isolated. The air would circulate badly in the courtyards which they form between them … the different bodies of buildings which compose it may be given a more advantageous arrangement by completely isolating them from each other and placing them in such a manner as to enhance the action of the prevailing winds … One would walk from one building to another via covered galleries, where the convalescents could promenade during the heat and the bad weather.84 Note Lardenoy’s specific mention of galleries, which are a dominant feature of Courtois’s project and absent in that of Philibert. Courtois’s hospital design consists of eight main buildings well separated by treed promenades and encircled by galleries for easier access and circulation. The uniformity of colour, pier and arch shapes, and the constant roofline created by the crowning entablature also ensure a satisfying, open appearance that contrasts sharply with the block-like structures of Garin. Unlike the Hôtel du Gouverneur the piers have a pronounced entasis like those of the

Secular Architecture after the Seven Years’ War

381

13.19 (above) Nicolas-Georges Courtois, Elevation of the Hôtel du Gouvernement, ink on paper, 1820. This project for the first-storey residential wing of Government House in Saint-Louis, Senegal, still stands today on the west side of the complex. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 19 DFC 177B .

13.20 (below) Nicolas-Georges Courtois, Project for a Hospital for 180 Patients, ink and colours on paper, 1821. This hospital at SaintLouis in Senegal was planned according to the latest theories of healthy living and air circulation. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 19 DFC 220B .

13.21 Captain Burke O’Farrell (Burck-o-farel), Sectional View of the Roofs with Terrace in use in Senegal, ink and colours on paper, 1822. This project is for a standardized terrace to be used in SaintLouis. The galleries are separate structures attached to the main wall and do not connect with the inner joists. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 19 DFC 150C .

Greek temples at Paestum (600–450 bc), an important model for neoclassical architects in Europe, particularly Ledoux, that we will see again in Courtois’s project for a church at Saint-Louis (fig. 15.24) and its offspring on that island and in Gorée (figs. 14.26, 14.28).85 In this period, in which Saint-Louis was also developed along an Antillean-style grid plan as the capital of a growing colony, functionality, practicality, and especially the growing concern with ventilation were at least as important as ideology, as can be gleaned from the texts of various proposals for government buildings from the 1820s and 1830s, particularly a minutely detailed 1822 report on standardized terrace roofs for two-storey open galleries by engineer Burke O’Farrell (Burck-o-Farel, fig. 13.21). O’Farrell does not make a single reference to aesthetics, only to lengths of rafters, manners of joining and sealing, the proper use of tar and quicklime, and comments like: “this so simple method was the only one employed in the civil and military structures in Senegal, where large and long droughts followed by heavy rains have tested them, and experience shows that the first construction of these terraces, and their subsequent maintenance is very cheap.”86 In a similar spirit engineer Vené proposed a standardized facade for the hospital in 1830.87 However the love for progress did not prevent architects from being criticized for aesthetic misjudgments in such things as the dimensions and use of the classical orders. An 1829 report on a design by engineer Stucker for the new barracks at Saint-Louis chides the architect for his lack of refinement: “the facade that results from the plan … to us seems to lack taste. The pillars of the gallery are too low relative to the width of the arches, and the thin string course that crowns the facade does not seem to us to produce a very good effect.”88 One of the main innovations of these structures is their long post-and-lintel galleries with overhanging eaves, often enclosed by jalousies, and their long corridors – both created in the name of air circulation. These forms, tested out first in the Circum-Caribbean and Île Bourbon, are another manifestation of a new interest in healthy living (see chapter 6) even though,

384

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

as authorities noted, the climate in Senegal was more salubrious than that of the Antilles.89 Director Cuissier of the Depot of Colonial Fortifications in Paris, for instance, proposed using designs proven in Guadeloupe for Saint-Louis as presented by Stucker: When the Engineering Committee examined the barracks to be constructed in Guadeloupe, it recognized the need to surround the barracks with galleries. In hot climates, the galleries were mainly intended to prevent the direct impact of the sun on the outer walls of buildings … we have drawn on this sheet a wooden gallery similar to that which was adopted for the barracks being built in the neighbourhood of Angoulême in Guadeloupe. The hurricanes and earthquakes which are frequently endured in the Caribbean made us favour this kind of gallery over stone galleries. Since similar sources of destruction do not exist in Senegal, it seems that one should, as proposed by Mr Stucker, build the galleries of the proposed barracks in brick. They will present more strength and durability than galleries of wood.90 Indeed one of the biggest changes at the end of the Bourbon Restoration was that architecture was now increasingly designed from afar to address generic pan-tropical climatic needs and in multiple colonies rather than being planned for specific sites. This all-important gallery, often doubled on two storeys, lost its French identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as it became the distinguishing feature of the tropical colonial architecture of most European colonies, as I will explore in Chapter 16. For example Sydney’s General Hospital, designed by John O’Hearne and others (1811) and renovated by convict architect Francis Greenway (1820), uses almost exactly the same kind of gallery as O’Farrell, except that wooden Doric colonnettes are used in place of posts (fig. 16.5).91 But first it is time to turn to the one branch of public architecture that right from the very beginning diverged the most from French models: the colonial church.

14

Tradition and Innovation in Church Architecture

throughout thiS book I have explored the ways in which the buildings, towns, and gardens of the French Atlantic Empire were manifestly different from those of their Spanish, Portuguese, British, and Dutch competitors through their tenacious adherence to French models. In the past six chapters we have witnessed architects seeking to replicate in America and West Africa the built environment of a changing metropole: beginning with medieval, vernacular traditions from Normandy or Aquitaine; then employing the Colbertian grandeur and courtly style of Versailles and Paris; next in a post-1763 emphasis on refinement and private Parisian prototypes such as the hôtel particulier or petite maison; and finally through neoclassical models, at first modest and delicate but under the Bourbon Restoration often grandiose and depersonalized, particularly with the move to generic, pan-colonial modularity. In all of these periods French identity and the promotion of the French brand were primary motivators in colonial architectural and urban design. Nevertheless there was one branch of public architecture in which unique, autochthonous forms developed almost immediately, some of them using combinations of French forms in ways that were unique to the colonies, others introducing structural changes prompted by climactic concerns, and still others drawing upon foreign prototypes. I refer to the architecture of colonial churches, the subject of the next two chapters.

Unlike in the Spanish and Portuguese empires where churches were the largest and most important buildings by a long stretch (fig. 2.5) – indeed the study of Viceregal architecture in Iberian America is principally a study of churches – those in the French empire rarely equalled civic and even domestic buildings in scale, costliness, or pretension. Paradoxically, even religious orders put their greatest energies into their sometimes palatial residences and plantations, often based on secular models and frequently dedicated to comparably secular ends (figs. 12.11, 12.13). Even on the missions churches were humble stone buildings or wooden shacks, perhaps larger and at times more dramatically sited than an indigenous carbet or longhouse but frequently with little else to distinguish them 14.1 Church of the Gesù, Rome (1568–75). Engraving from Giovanni Battista Falda, Il terzo libro del’novo teatro delle chiese di Roma (Rome, ca. 1667). Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome.

386

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

(figs. 2.3, 3.11). Since churches were primarily the responsibility of the community, their design was not supervised by the Génie or the Ministry of the Marine, and they were rarely the work of royal engineer architects. Left on their own, usually strapped for cash, neglected by corrupt churchwardens, resented by habitants who had to pay for them, and often involved in property disputes and squabbles about burial and seating arrangements, churches were the bastard children of French imperial architecture. Churches had another reason to distance themselves from official court style thanks to the rivalry between Gallicanism and papal authority. As we have seen in chapter 2, religious orders – the de facto clergy in most of colonial France – retained emotional ties to Rome, which was the seat of their generalates (headquarters), even though the French kings kept them under close supervision and chose specific French houses as their headquarters within the French church, such as

the Dominican monastery at Toulouse. As a result the facades of many of the churches in the Caribbean and North America emulated the Roman late Renaissance and early baroque, favouring models associated with the Catholic Reform era following the Council of Trent (1545–63) – seen by many as a Christian golden age – and in the case of the Jesuits specifically with their mother church, Il Gesù (1568–75; fig. 14.1). Even here, however, a certain French pride prevailed, especially in the eighteenth century, when these Italianate styles were often refracted through a French lens. As early as the 1620s the Roman baroque had also exerted a powerful influence over church architecture in France, especially in the design of facades, many of which were later published in Jean Mariette’s or Jacques-François Blondel’s treatises, the same models used for government buildings.1 Thus churches or projects for churches such as Basse-Terre (fig. 15.10), Cap-François (fig. 15.12), Quebec City (fig. 15.21), and Point-à-Pitre (fig. 15.15) copied Italianate facades not by Giacomo della Porta (1532–1602) or Carlo Maderno (1556–1629) but by François Mansard and Jean-Sylvain Cartaud (1675–1758). However most churches simply tried out something new, and they are the subject of this chapter. In his pioneering study of the French-era churches of Quebec, Alan Gowans noted that it was nearly impossible to find anything resembling a Quebec parish church in France. In fact he located only one, Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul in Bailleau-Armenonville near Chartres (1658–76; fig. 14.2), and even it had buttresses around the apse, which do not appear in Nouvelle-France, and the wrong kind of tower.2 In my own travels, scouring northern, western, and southern France in particular, I have not done any better, although I have determined that the largest cluster of churches significantly similar to those of Quebec and the Circum-Caribbean is not in Normandy or Brittany as many have assumed but precisely in this area around Chartres, in regions such as Beauce and Perche. Unsurprisingly some of the first immigrant church builders came from there, as did Quebec’s greatest early church patron, Bishop François-Xavier de

14.2 Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul, Bailleau-Armenonville, Beauce, 1658, clocher 1676.

Montmorency-Laval. Mason Jean Guion and carpenter Zacharie Cloutier, mentioned in chapter 6, came from Perche, as did Quebec master bricklayer Robert Drouin (1606/13–1685). The master timber framer Nicholas Pelletier (b. ca. 1590 – after 1657), who contributed to the Jesuits’ second church in Quebec City (see below), came from Gallardon, a town less than four kilometres from Bailleau-Armenonville and also close to Jouy and Poisviliers, where there are other churches with features recalling those of colonial examples, as I will soon explore.3 These forms include the clocher belltower (also known as a flèche), steeply pitched roofs, and oculus windows and small niches in the facades, although they are rarely combined in a single building as they are in the colonies. Gowans is correct that

Tradition and Innovation in Church Architecture

387

colonial churches are unique because their mixture of late medieval, Renaissance, and baroque forms in churches built from scratch would rarely have occurred in France, where such a combination would instead have been the result of aggregation over time. In Europe it was primarily the Protestants who found themselves in a similar position because of the need to build new churches to suit new kinds of worship, as with the seventeenth-century churches of Scotland – small, stone buildings with pitched or ogee roofs, sometimes tiny “bellcotes” (birdcage belfries) over the door, and subtle classical details mixed with remnants of Gothic. In fact they bear more than a passing resemblance to their Quebec counterparts.4 Church Architecture in Nouvelle-France, the Lesser Antilles, and Guiana, 1615–1769 In the French Atlantic Empire autochthonous styles were generated first in the towns and comptoirs and then in the countryside, where they spread from village to village at the hands of itinerant builders. Even the Cathedral of Quebec and larger churches of the religious orders had already adapted a patchwork of European styles to local climactic and budgetary circumstances. Although the earliest (partially) surviving French colonial churches, from the 1640s and 1650s, are in the Caribbean, church building began earlier in Nouvelle-France, where it presents scholars with a huge challenge. Out of literally hundreds of churches and chapels built between 1615 and 1759 only four survive largely intact, all from the eighteenth-century: Cap-dela-Madeleine (begun 1714); Saint-Pierre (1717–20; fig. 14.11) and Sainte-Famille (begun 1743; fig. 14.18) on Île d’Orléans; and Cap-Santé (1754–67). To this we can add two in which the rear portion of the church is original (Repentigny, 1723–25; and Saint-Jean, Île d’Orléans, 1734–37), and a few little chapels (Neuville wayside chapel, ca. 1735; Tadoussac mission chapel, 1747; and the Calvary chapels at Oka, 1740–42; fig. 3.15). The earliest Quebec churches for which we have even a basic elevation already postdate Bishop Laval’s

388

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

mandate to build new churches in his diocese in 1663 (although called “paroisses” in documents there were no true parish churches until 1721). He declared that “it is necessary to build many churches to hold the Divine Service and for the comfort of the faithful,” and that parishioners should contribute to their construction.5 Nevertheless it is possible to gain a general impression of the plan, size, and appearance of the first generation of churches from maps, letters, travel journals, and contracts. Among the twenty-eight churches and chapels built between Montreal and Tadoussac before 1665 – they ranged from birch bark shacks to small stone churches – the most prominent were the Recollect chapel of the Immaculate Conception (1615) and church of Notre-Dame-des-Anges (1621) in Quebec City, and the Jesuits’ church (1625–26) in the same town also dedicated to Notre-Dame-des-Anges. But these were minor affairs: the first took only a month to build, the second was described as a “little chapel,” and the third was just a room in the rez-de-chaussée of the Jesuits’ residence.6 All were destroyed by the English in 1629. We also know nothing about the largest church built after the English were expelled in 1632, Notre-Damede-la-Recouvrance (1633), built under Samuel de Champlain’s direct patronage and the town’s principal church until it burned down seven years later. Scholars have long trusted a plan taken from a map allegedly by Jean Bourdon and dated to 1640, but this map’s authenticity has justly been questioned.7 In 1647 the Jesuits built a second church rechristened Notre-Dame-de-la-Paix in commemoration of a peace treaty with the Iroquois in 1645: it was built using a plan (“dessin”) by the masons Denis Bochard, Jacob Desbordes, and Jean Garnier, and the carpenter Nicholas Pelletier under the supervision of the Jesuit superior Barthélemi Vimont (1594–1667).8 Two maps from 1660 and 1664, in which it is called the “grand église,” show that it was built on a Latin-cross plan with a semicircular apse as wide as the nave and two small, square transepts (fig. 14.3, labelled “6”).9 Like its predecessor, it served as the town’s main place of worship, but it was also built to impress, at 80 feet long and 38 feet wide,

14.3 Detail of Jean Bourdon, True Plan of Quebec as it is in the Year 1664 and the Fortifications which one can make there, ink and colours on paper, 1664. The church of Notre-Dame-de-la-Paix (1646) is labelled “6,” the château Saint-Louis is “2,” and the Huron reduction is “13.” Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 3 DFC 342B .

with a roughly 2:1 length-to-width ratio which became typical of Nouvelle-France. From the 1646 contract we know that Notre-Dame-de-la-Paix was built of stone with a wooden roof and that it was sided in clapboard like the first Château Saint-Louis (fig. 12.3), a means of insulating it from the bitter cold (as was the wooden floor and probable wood-panelled vault and walls inside). The church also included the first known instance of a flèche-style clocher at the crossing, perhaps the single most characteristic element of the Quebec village church.10 Bishop Laval wrote glowingly that “there is a basilica here … it is large and magnificent.”11 Although Luc Noppen has created a hypothetical elevation for Notre-Dame-de-la-Paix, it is based retroactively on the design of churches from the 1690s.12 Otherwise the only clue about its appearance is a source that has not yet been considered, a 1663 map by Bourdon – made a year before it was officially made

Nouvelle-France’s first parish church according to canon law – which has an extremely basic rendering of the “paroisse” showing a plain facade with a door and two windows or niches, a gambrel roof, and a prominent clocher.13 Scholars believe that Notre-Dame-de-laPaix became the prototype for the rural churches of the 1650s to 1670s.14 While this is a reasonable assumption, the lack of visual evidence until the 1690s makes it difficult to confirm, although we do know that many shared the characteristic 2:1 length-to-width ratio and that the first parish church of Sainte-Famille on the Île d’Orléans (1669) had almost exactly the same dimensions at 80 feet long by 36 wide. Laval consecrated Notre-Dame-de-la-Paix as a cathedral in 1674, and between 1684 and 1687 it was rebuilt on grander lines. I will return to this church’s reconstruction shortly. The first churches in the Antilles about which we have any visual evidence were quite different from

Tradition and Innovation in Church Architecture

389

those of Nouvelle-France. Although they also used vernacular French traditions, they demonstrated a preference for separate bell-towers, or campaniles, instead of clochers, and they appear to have been longer and narrower. Most importantly, we know that they were already employing classical facades as early as the 1650s. The earliest remnant of a church is a stalwart stone campanile at Le Prêcheur, a community north of Saint-Pierre in Martinique (1640–44; fig. 14.4).15 The tower was built a few dozen metres from the church 14.4 (left) Bell-tower, Le Prêcheur, Martinique, 1640–44. 14.5 (right) Bell-tower, church of Saint-Lubin, Chassant, Perche, twelfth to sixteenth centuries.

(now destroyed) on the Morne-Danty so that it could be seen from the sea, and its bells were used to send signals out to ships. The tower is built on a square plan and has two storeys plus an attic inside a pyramidal tiled wooden roof containing the bells. The building is made of volcanic stone rubble (andesite) covered with plaster but uses hewn stone masonry for the quoining on the corners, the arched doorway on the west face, windows, and three horizontal string courses. The bell-tower at Le Prêcheur is remarkably similar to towers in Perche, the only difference being that the latter are always attached to the nave, usually at the front (fig. 14.5). Such is the bell-tower at the church of Saint-Lubin in Chassant (twelfth to sixteenth centuries), with a square plan,

14.6 Church of Saint-Cyr-etSainte-Julitte, Jouy, Beauce, twelfth to sixteenth centuries.

plain rubble and plaster walls with masonry quoining and string courses dividing the storeys, masonry around the door and windows, and a pyramidal roof (the large wooden clocher at Chassant was added later). The walls of the Le Prêcheur tower are extremely thick, which is why it survived not only the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée that destroyed Saint-Pierre (Le Precheur is even closer to Pelée’s crater than SaintPierre) but also another devastating eruption in 1928. The earliest reference I have found to the parish dates from a 1687 inspection authorized by the governor and witnessed by curate Pierre Bernard as well as the churchwardens and officers of the quarter and the town’s most prominent parishioners. No mention was made of the tower, but then these inspections tended to mention only what was wrong: the church, presbytery, and cemetery all “need substantial repairs” to the tune of 13,750 livres paid by the parishioners in sugar, and a stone wall was required around the cemetery.16 The Antillean tradition of campaniles probably emerged after traditional bell-towers collapsed onto the church

during earthquakes or hurricanes: at least that was the theory of Pierre-Clément de Laussat, who wrote in his 1804–07 memoirs: “I noticed that many of the parish bell-towers are separated. It seems that this is often the result of the climate. Bell-towers are usually separated from the body of the church and short because of hurricanes and earthquakes.”17 As in Quebec the first place of worship in Cayenne, the wooden church of Saint-Nicolas (1652–53), closely resembled its counterparts in French villages (fig. 8.13). It was illustrated in a 1677 map made after the Dutch occupation after the church had been torched by the English and repaired in 1667, and it is the only illustration to survive before it was rebuilt in 1694–99.18 A 1688 inventory of the “bâtiments du Roi” in Cayenne described it as “a church building … buttressed on all sides, covered with tiles in which there are two bells in the tower.”19 The 1677 map shows a single nave ending in either a semicircular apse or a separate round chapel (each has its own quite different roof), the latter crowned with a high clocher at the crossing (or over the

Tradition and Innovation in Church Architecture

391

chapel), and the entire structure was supported by buttresses as confirmed in the 1688 document. The church would have stood out from the other colonial buildings, which were basic mud huts or half-timbered dwellings covered with thatch. The essentially medieval construction makes the first Cayenne church look like any number of country churches in northwest France, as in the Church of Saint-Cyr et Sainte-Julitte at Jouy (twelfth 14.7 Second Church of Saint-Nicolas, Cayenne, 1694–99 (demolished 1799–1802). Detail from Anonymous, The Marquis de Turgot, Governor of Cayenne, Receives Presents from the Indians, oil on canvas, ca. 1764. Musée d’Aquitaine, Bordeaux. Note the side galleries with jalousies.

392

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

to sixteenth century), near Chartres (fig. 14.6), which has a rectangular nave with a steeply pitched gable roof attached to a large chapel at the end (on the right side) with a sixteenth-century pyramidal roof and clocher, both sections supported by buttresses with single windows between them, and with two distinct roof lines. The second church of Saint-Nicolas in Cayenne (1694–99) was similar in plan to the first generation of Quebec churches (fig. 14.7) but enjoyed a kind of patronage that was unique to the tropical colonies. The first and only stone church in Guiana, Saint-Nicolas was financed largely by two pirates, both of them Calvinists: an involuntary legacy from the deceased “Henry the Dutch Pirate” (see chapter 2) and a voluntary

donation by another Dutch corsair named Frans Rool, who sought to retain a favourable relationship with the colony. Work began on 30 June 1694 when a mason was hired to rebuild the whole church from the foundations up, including the portal, walls, and piers; by 11 December he laid the first stone of the piers.20 In 1695 Governor de Férolles received lime for the church and hospital, by 3 July 1695 the stone piers were completed, and by the end of the year the nave was too. In 1697 Férolles contracted out to build the transepts and the choir, all in dressed masonry, and the church was finally finished on 30 January 1699. Other than some repair work on the carpentry in 1718 and the loss of the bell-tower after it collapsed in 1753 and killed a man – motivating parishioners to build a self-standing campanile – the 1694–99 church was intact when it was immortalized in a 1764 painting showing the arrival of the Marquis de Turgot, governor general of Cayenne (fig. 14.7). Two maps from 1733 and 1749 show that the church of Saint-Nicolas had a similar ground plan to that of Quebec’s original Notre-Dame-de-la-Paix, with a wide nave ending in a semicircular apse of equal width, and a pair of small transepts.21 The church also has the characteristic québécois 2:1 length-to-width ratio. Where it differs is that it is a basilical church with a central nave flanked by side aisles, and the transepts also end in rounded apses. The 1749 map clearly shows the two rows of stone piers mentioned in the sources. Both also illustrate the bell-tower, which is located to the right of the apse, accessible by a low passageway. The 1763 painting demonstrates that the roof was very steep like the churches of Quebec, but designed to withstand torrential rainfalls instead of heavy snow. Because the transepts are round, the transept roofs take on a conical, turret-like form at the ends. One important detail is the classical portal with Doric engaged columns, an entablature, and semicircular pediment. This same combination of a French medieval body with a classical doorway appears in the Chapelle Saint-Michel in Douarnenez (Brittany), completed in 1664, which has the round-ended transepts and apse, a similar roof

14.8 Chapelle Saint-Michel, Douarnenez, Brittany, 1664.

solution (although without the side aisles), and a Doric portico (fig. 14.8). Coincidentally the Breton church was a pilgrimage church built in honour of missionary Michel le Nobletz, who invented a kind of pictorial language to communicate with non-literate peasants that was quickly adapted by French Jesuits and used in their Western Hemisphere missions.22 The church of SaintNicolas in Cayenne survived until the end of the eighteenth century, when it was probably demolished by Victor Hughes (administrator from 1799–1802) when he tore town the defensive wall between the town and Savane, to which the church was notoriously close.23 The church still appears on a map from 1791 but has disappeared by 1820.24

Tradition and Innovation in Church Architecture

393

The most innovative feature of the Church of Saint Nicolas is the treatment of the side aisles, which are covered not with separate eaves to form a doublepitched roof but with an extension of the sloping rafters of the main roof to form an exterior gallery fitted with jalousies to increase air circulation. This replacement of the traditional enclosed aisle with windows is the earliest example in colonial church architecture of adaptation to a tropical climate. A similar solution appeared almost a century later in Port-au-Prince with the Church of the Assumption (1770–71; destroyed 1991), minus the jalousies.25 This church had open galleries (bas-côtés) flanking the nave, which were closed in when a second pair was added in 1789. The galleries were built specifically to protect parishioners from the sun.26 A pair of churches in Louisiana during and after the Seven Years’ War also used open galleries on the sides: St François in Point Coupée Parish (ca. 1760) and Saint Gabriel (1772–87), neither of which, like the church in Port-au-Prince, survive.27 The use of jalousied side aisles in churches became standard in Guiana, beginning with Bourg-Villebois (1789; fig. 15.22) and in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century churches such as the ca. 1850 church at Sinnamary (destroyed sometime after 1883) and those at Iracoubo (1886), Mana (1935–38), and Kourou (ca. 1950s?).28 In Nouvelle-France the paroisses constructed between Laval’s investiture and the early eighteenth century – they included about fifteen new stone churches between 1665 and 1700 – were primarily located on the Île d’Orléans and on Laval’s seigneuries on the Côte de Beaupré, just east of Quebec City.29 Stone was a priority given the frequency of fires caused by heaters, and in 1699 the king reiterated a decree that all churches built on private seigneuries be made of stone: “His Majesty … has ordered and orders that the Sieur Bishop builds churches of stone in all the parishes and fiefs of Nouvelle-France where none have yet been built, in the places which are considered the most convenient.”30 Among the most important early masonry churches were Sainte-Famille, Beauport (1672), Saint-Joseph de la Pointe de Lévy (1675), L’Ange-Gardien (1675),

394

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

14.9 Church of Saint-Laurent, Île d’Orléans, Quebec, begun 1695, facade by Jean Maillou 1708, destroyed 1864. Photograph from the Ramsay Traquair Photo Archive, McCord Museum, McGill University.

and Château-Richer (ca. 1680). The earliest parish churches that survived long enough to be photographed date from after Laval’s departure, including Saint-Laurent on the Île d’Orléans (begun 1695; facade by Jean Maillou, 1708), destroyed in 1864 except for the 1709 clocher; the third church at Sainte-Anne de Beaupré (1689–95, by Hilaire Bernard de la Rivière and Claude

Baillif), demolished in 1878; and the first church at Sainte-Foy (1698), destroyed 1878 (figs. 14.9–10).31 We can only guess how these churches relate to those of earlier decades, but they emerge as a fully fledged regional style unlike anything in France or elsewhere in the French colonies. Because Baillif had a hand in one of them and he was the favoured mason of Bishop Laval, Gowans gives him credit for this new style’s “master plan,” but Maillou also contributed and I am inclined to think that it emerged by consensus, over several decades, and through increasingly standardized workshop

practice as various builders saw what their neighbours were doing.32 Quebec churches come in two basic varieties: the first follows an aisle-less Latin cross plan with a wide nave ending in a semicircular apse usually originally with a more-or-less 2:1 length-to-width ratio (those 14.10. Joseph Légaré, Church of Sainte-Foy, Quebec, in a rural landscape, oil on canvas, ca. 1830s. The church of Sainte-Foy was built in 1698, restored in 1759, and demolished in 1878. Musée de la Civilisation, Archives du Séminaire de Québec.

Tradition and Innovation in Church Architecture

395

of Beauport, L’Ange-Gardien, and Château-Richer all were about 60 feet long by 30 wide), rectangular, often shallow transepts, rough stone walls covered with whitewash or plaster, a steep toiture à pignon, and correspondingly steep transept roofs of which the rooflines either meet the top of the nave roof or come to a point several feet below it (figs. 14.9, 14.11).33 The transept roofs sometimes curve upward gracefully before 14.11 Saint-Pierre, Île d’Orléans, Quebec, 1717–20. Tower and side door 1830–34.

396

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

reaching the nave roof. In 1683 eight churches listed in a visitation report had either exactly or roughly a 2:1 length-to-width ratio, although later additions sometimes lengthened the nave at the front.34 The facades of these churches are unremittingly plain, with a single arched doorway framed in masonry, a single oculus window, and sometimes rough quoining on the corners. The naves usually have two high-arched windows per side and two more on the ends of the transepts (sometimes with a dormer above), and they have the characteristic hexagonal double clocher mounted on a square base atop the facade (the earliest-surviving one, from 1696, is now at the commemorative chapel at SaintAnne-de-Beaupré). Some believe that the clochers were originally located at the crossing like a true flèche (as at the first church in Cayenne; fig. 8.13) and were only moved over the door in the early eighteenth century, but since clochers over the door are so common in France I will reserve judgment (figs. 14.2, 14.13).35 The second variety differs from the first primarily in its lack of transepts, and has either an apse the same width as the nave or – in a sub-variety popularly known as the “Recollect Plan” – a narrower, elongated apse forming a separate choir. They often employ a faceted roof over the apse called an anse de panier, or “basket vault,” an echo of the medieval groin vault. Such are the first churches at L’Ange-Gardien, Pointeaux-Trembles, and the first church at Sainte-Foy (fig. 14.10.36 One of the best surviving anse de panier apse roofs is at the Church of the Purification (second church) in Repentigny (1723–25). The variety with the apse of equal width with the nave is often called the plan Maillou, after an elevation and plan (1715) for an unidentified parish church signed by Jean-Baptiste Maillou, whom we have met in chapter 6, which until recently was believed to be a standardized or ideal plan rather than one for a particular church (fig. 14.12).37 The church is 30 feet wide with a 2:1 length-to-width ratio, three windows per side and one at the end of the apse, with a single rusticated doorway, a niche and oculus window above, and a two-storey clocher over the peak.38

14.12 Jean-Baptiste Maillou, dit Desmoulins, plan and elevation for a parish church in Quebec, ink and colours on paper, 1715. Musée de la Civilisation, Archives du Séminaire du Québec.

It is like Maillou’s own 1708 facade at Saint-Laurent on the Île d’Orléans (fig. 14.9), Saint-Pierre on the same island (fig. 14.11), and the third church at Sainte-Anne de Beaupré. Noppen and Marc Grignon have shown that the clocher and roofline derive from plate cXi from Jousse’s Le théâtre de l’art de charpentier (fig. 6.4) and also cite the clocher of the Jesuit Collège

de la Flèche as a potential model (fig. 12.19).39 All of these québécois parish church types persisted up to the time of the British Conquest. In fact nowhere else in North America witnessed the astonishing multiplication of churches seen in Quebec. By one count 129 chapels and parish churches were built or rebuilt in the colony between 1700 and 1763 alone, by far the

Tradition and Innovation in Church Architecture

397

14.13 (left) Church of Saint-Étienne, Poisvilliers, Beauce, fifteenth century. 14.14 (right) Clocher, Church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, Paris, completed 1622.

highest concentration in the French colonies at the time, and which James Kornwolf maintains is higher even than in British America.40 Different elements of these churches can be found in France but never in the same building. Plain gableend facades with oculus windows and basic doorways are fairly common, as in Bailleau-Armenonville (fig. 14.2) and the church of Saint-Étienne in nearby

398

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

Poisvilliers (fifteenth century; fig. 14.13), and also in Brittany, as with the church of Notre-Dame du Moustoir in Malguénac (completed 1646). While these and many other churches have bell-towers over the doors they are never the same shape as the Quebec clocher – even at Bailleau-Armenonville, which lacks the characteristic hexagonal base and open arcades. In fact the closest clochers I have found to the Quebec tradition are on larger urban churches, such as SaintÉtienne-du-Mont (completed 1622) and SainteÉlisabeth-de-Hongrie (completed 1646), both in Paris, or Notre-Dame-de-Gloriette in Caen (1684–89), often as a flèche placed over the crossing or perched atop a

separate bell-tower (fig. 14.14). Country belfries are usually enclosed with shingles or slate and are frequently square with a single belfry. Also, while toitures à pignon are common enough in northwest France they are never as dramatically high as the snow-proof or rain-proof ones in Quebec and Guiana. Churches with Quebec-style transepts with sloping roofs such as the seventeenth-century Chapelle du Faget in Oloron-SteMarie (Aquitaine), are rare in France. Finally – and this is perhaps the most significant difference – French churches do not have the characteristic québécois length-to-width ratio, usually having longer, narrower naves like Caribbean churches. The most monumental version of the severe, gableend facade with a single door and window was likely

the facade for the enlarged Cathedral in Quebec City (1684–97; fig. 14.15), built after officials rejected Baillif’s more decorative proposal (fig. 14.16), which I will examine in chapter 15 because of its Italian influence.41 There has been little agreement about the appearance

14.15 (left) Claude Baillif and others, Cathedral of Notre-Dame, Quebec City, 1684–97, after a drawing by Chaussegros de Léry entitled Plan, Profile and Elevations of a New Cathedral and Parish Proposed to be built in the Town of Quebec Nouvelle France, ink and colours on paper, 1745. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 03 DFC 424A . 14.16 (right) Claude Baillif, first project for the facade of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, Quebec City, ink and graphite on paper, 1683. Musée de la Civilisation, Archives du Séminaire du Québec.

Tradition and Innovation in Church Architecture

399

of this facade. Noppen maintains that Baillif’s second proposal – a squat, single-storey structure the height of the existing nave – was executed as illustrated.42 Gowans and Grignon believe instead that the architects who succeeded Baillif built a high basilical facade, completed in 1697.43 I agree with Gowans that this 1697 facade is the one illustrated as part of Gaspard-Joseph Chaussegros de Léry’s 1745 project for updating the cathedral (fig. 14.15).44 Called an élévation du portail simple, it is painted underneath the overlay upon which Chaussegros de Léry illustrated his more elaborate classical design (fig. 15.21). The reason that the portail simple is the likeliest candidate for the 1697 facade – and that it is not simply a cheaper alternative of Chaussegros’s own invention – is that when Chaussegros did eventually build a more economical substitute it looked nothing like it. As depicted by Richard Short in 1759 Chaussegros’s facade rose to three or even four storeys and had a completely different window arrangement. Furthermore Chaussegros only acknowledged that the design on the overlay (feuille volante) was his own work.45 The 1697 facade is spartan with its three doorways and windows, the bays separated by modest quoining. The roofline is like that of a French country church, with a high, peaked gable end at the top and two sloping roofs en appentis over the side aisles. Small wonder that the Jesuit traveller Pierre-François-Xavier Charlevoix remarked in 1720 that “the cathedral would not be worthy of a good parish in one of the smallest towns of France … Its architecture, its choir, its high altar, its chapels – all are exactly like the architecture of a country church. The most tolerable feature is a rather high tower, solidly built, which is fairly presentable from a distance.”46 Charlevoix was prescient as it was precisely this right tower, the only one completed, that is the sole part of Baillif’s cathedral to survive today. Beginning with Baillif, some Quebec churches incorporated modest classical details in their facades, as in the Doric portal at the original Notre-Dame-desVictoires (begun 1688; destroyed 1759) in Quebec City’s Lower Town, a collaboration with Hilaire Bernard de la Rivière or the rusticated doorway on the Maillou

400

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

plan (fig. 14.12).47 Notre-Dame-des-Victoires also introduces statue niches, which as we have seen are characteristic of French churches such as BailleauArmenonville (fig. 14.2). Baillif returned to this scheme in the chapel of the Episcopal Palace (1693–98; destroyed 1759; fig. 14.17), this time with five niches instead of three and with Doric pilasters and an entablature along the length of the ground level. It was also copied by priest and amateur architect Juconde Drué at the Recollect Church, using a broken pediment over the door (1693; destroyed 1759).48 However the most elaborate offspring is the facade of the second Church of Sainte-Famille in the Île d’Orléans (1743–46; fig. 14.18), which has an ashlar frame around the door crowned with a small entablature, an arched window above, and five niches, two flanking the door, two flanking the window, and one at the top flanked by a pair of miniature oculus windows – in fact oculus windows become the church’s main motif, also appearing in two sizes on the towers.49 It is handily the most splendid facade in Quebec, and its multiplication of decorative details lend it a palpable air of pageantry. The paired towers, unusual in québécois country churches (CapSanté has them as well), derive from the 1666 Jesuit church in Quebec City (fig. 15.20) – although the right tower of the Jesuit church was later destroyed – and like its model they once had ogee cupolas. In one way Baillif’s facade at the Episcopal Palace is anti-classical, which brings me back to my earlier comment about the commonalities between French colonial churches and those of certain Protestant groups in northern Europe. The top of the facade takes the form of a medieval ogee arch, which is unique in colonial France. I have traced this arch to plate lXXXvii of Jousse’s Le théâtre de l’art de charpentier (fig. 6.4), where the outline of the arch is traced by the uppermost beams in the carpentry supporting the clocher; Baillif must have liked the profile so much that he incorporated it into his facade. I have searched in vain for a similar way of crowning a facade in France; however it turns up complete with a matching oculus in James Smith’s Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh, finished five years earlier in 1688.50

Although church furnishings are beyond the scope of this book a few comments should be made here about interior decoration. Baillif’s chapel at the Episcopal Palace housed a sophisticated wooden baldachin (1695) by bordelais sculptor Jacques Leblond de La Tour (fl. 1690–1715) now preserved in the church in Neuville (fig. 14.19). In 1700 chronicler Claude-Charles La Potherie (1663–1736) wrote about it: “its interior is magnificent, by reason of its altar retable, the ornaments of which are a raccourci of that in the Val-de-Grâce.”51

14.17 (left) Claude Baillif, Chapel of the Episcopal Palace, Quebec City, 1693–98, from a drawing by Chaussegros de Léry entitled Elevation and Profile along the Line AB of the Episcopal Palace, ink on paper, 1743. The building was destroyed in 1759. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), F 3 290 96. 14.18 (right) Second Church of Sainte-Famille, Île d’Orléans, Quebec, 1743–46, flanking clochers rebuilt 1806; central clocher added 1843.

Tradition and Innovation in Church Architecture

401

As he indicated, it is a copy of Gabriel Le Duc’s baldachin at Val-de-Grâce in Paris (1664; fig. 14.20), itself a variation of Bernini’s Baldacchino at St Peter’s (1624–33). It became a characteristic québécois form, particularly after the end of the French regime and as recently as the baldachin at the church of Saint-JeanBaptiste in Quebec City (1881–83) by François-Pierre Gauvin (1866–1934), descendent of an engagé who immigrated from La Rochelle in 1662.52 Although no original eighteenth-century interiors survive in Quebec churches, Richard Short recorded for posterity the insides of the bombed-out Jesuit and Recollect churches in Quebec City. The Jesuit church had a flat, coffered wooden roof and a large, tripartite wooden retable in 14.19 Attributed to Jacques Leblond de La Tour (fl. 1690–1715), baldachin formerly in the Episcopal Palace, Quebec City (1695), and now in the church of Saint-François-de-Sales, Neuville. 14.20 Gabriel Le Duc, baldachin, Val-de-Grâce, Paris, 1664.

402

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

the Corinthian order of a type common in Brittany, with its two wings turned inward to accommodate the shape of the apse (fig. 14.21).53 The side altars, as was characteristic in Louisiana and the Antilles as well, faced east and the corners of the walls were adorned with fluted Ionic pilasters. The Recollect church lacked transepts and had a wooden barrel vault in the nave and the choir, again like churches in rural Brittany (e.g., the church of Saint-Demet in Plozévet, Finistère, fifteenth to sixteenth centuries). The only extant French-era retables are the pair by Pierre-Noël Levasseur (1680–1740) at the Ursuline Convent in Quebec City (1727–36), which were spoiled during the chapel’s enlargement in 1902 when they were torn apart and reattached to the walls with more space between their components to satisfy the aesthetic preferences of the day.54 Also surviving from various locations are twenty-nine monumental wooden tabernacles of a kind particularly typical of Quebec, although they are also close to Breton models.55

Scholars have divided them into six groups according to formal characteristics, but the most unique feature is the large, often dome-like central section that sits atop the monstrance niche and is sometimes inspired by actual domes of baroque churches – perhaps to make up for their fiscal inability to commission actual domes, as no colonial church in the French Atlantic Empire had a dome. The Caribbean had its own version of the plain style in the eighteenth century – it is called the style sobre, and while it is just as severe as in Quebec it is different in nearly every other respect.56

14.21 Anthony Walker, A View of the Inside of the Jesuits [sic] Church drawn on the spot by Richard Short, engraving, 1759. This is the only view of the inside of the Jesuit church in Quebec City, built 1666, restored 1765, and demolished 1807. McCord Museum, McGill University, Montreal.

Notre-Dame-de-la-Bonne-Délivrance in Les TroisÎlets, Martinique (1724; fig. 14.22) is characteristic of the facades, which usually consist of a single arched doorway, quoining, whitewashed rubble walls, and either a gable end or, as here, a plain triangular pediment.57 Since only the facade survives from the original

Tradition and Innovation in Church Architecture

403

14.22 Church of Notre-Damede-la-Bonne-Déliverance, Les Trois-Îlets, Martinique, 1724. Side aisles added 1945–55.

church we need to look at the Dominican church of Sainte-Anne at Macouba (begun 1743; figs. 14.23–4) (the town that produced Louis XIV’s favourite tobacco) for a sense of what the rest of the building looked like. Macouba has an even plainer facade, just a gable end, and no pediment, with a doorway, stone dado, heavy quoining, and a tiny oculus at the top (the porch is modern).58 The church forms an elongated Latin cross with thick stone whitewashed walls and quoining on the corners, ashlar door and window frames, and an apse as wide as the nave. There are three windows per

404

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

side in the nave – with jalousies instead of glass – and two openings in each transept. The church has characteristically thick buttresses on the nave walls, three to a side and with dark volcanic stone quoining on the edges – indeed the quoining becomes the church’s sole decorative motif, on the exterior and interior alike (fig. 14.24). Unlike the wooden altars of Quebec, Macouba’s altars, as was common in the Antilles, are marble and imported from France. The apse is dark and claustrophobic as its two little windows are tucked away in the corners, but the roof of the nave and crossing

(1823–27) is refreshingly open, formed of open charpenterie, a form typical of the islands. The earliest-surviving truss work of this kind in the Caribbean can be found in two ceilings at the Habitation Fond SaintJacques at Saint-Marie (Martinique) dating from ca. 1696–1705 and 1769.59 Antilles open charpenterie ceilings derive ultimately from Mathurin Jousse’s manual, but they were soon adapted by local ateliers – many of the carpenters were shipwrights – which made them in advance to be shipped flat to the worksite. These structures demonstrate the influence of climate: in Quebec, ceilings were low and enclosed to preserve the heat, whereas in the Antilles they were open to encourage air circulation. As if to emphasize this point many of them today (as at Macouba) have electric fans hanging from the central beam. Vauban in Louisiana, 1723–1731 I end this chapter with a unique variant of church architecture that developed in Louisiana – a place where there was little church architecture at all. Instead of reflecting rural French traditions as we have just seen or

14.23 (left) Church of Sainte-Anne, Macouba, Martinique, begun 1743. 14.24 (right) Church of Sainte-Anne, Macouba, Martinique, begun 1743, carpentry roof 1827.

the influence of Italian or French prints as we will see in chapter 15, it followed quite precisely the prototypes developed for garrison churches by Vauban and Bélidor, as visible in Adrien de Pauger’s facades for the church of Saint-Louis in Nouvelle-Orléans (1724; fig. 14.25) and the chapel at the pilot station at Isle de la Balise on the mouth of the Mississippi (1723–after 1731; fig. 14.26), the two largest houses of worship in the colony. The decision to build Saint-Louis as the town’s first permanent church (it replaced a series of temporary chapels in homes run by Capuchins) was first mentioned in a letter written by Louis-Pierre Leblond de La Tour in 1723.60 It is interesting to read the text as it explains why the project came to be directed by royal engineers and not local builders as in Quebec: We have hoped since Easter to have the church built by contract. No one presented himself except

Tradition and Innovation in Church Architecture

405

14.25 (above) Adrien de Pauger, Plan, Profiles and Elevation of the Proposed Church to be Built in Nouvelle-Orléans, ink and colour on paper, 1724. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-enProvence), 04 DFC 70B . 14.26 (opposite) Adrien de Pauger and Bernard Deverges, Plan and Elevation of a Chapel and of Two Lodgings Planned to be Erected on the Island of La Balise, ink and colours on paper, 1723. The chapel was flanked by the commander’s house and the chaplain’s and engineer’s residence. The structure was built between 1723 and after 1731. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 04 DFC 107C .

Trudeau, a Canadian, who says he could not do the thing all alone and that it would be necessary that he speak to his comrades. He has never reappeared … I know very well, Gentlemen, that the quickest way would be to make agreements by contract, but here there are only Canadians who do not know how to build with wood … They are not even capable of undertaking the construction of a shanty with its dimensions and proportions.61 Unlike in Quebec or Saint-Domingue there simply were not enough capable builders around, and the ones who did inhabit this company backwater were less than

406

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

trustworthy, particularly the Canadians, who tended to trade furs on the side and had a particular skill for vanishing into the woods. By coincidence, LouisPierre’s brother was a civilian sculptor in Canada, although not a native-born Canadian: the very Jacques who designed the baldachin at the Episcopal Palace in Quebec (fig. 14.19). Leblond de La Tour promptly died, and in 1723 he was replaced by Adrien de Pauger, whom we have met in chapter 7. Pauger worked with local entrepreneur Mikael Seringue, who had also worked with De Batz and Broutin on the Ursuline Convent (fig. 12.15). Already in January of that year work was proceeding on the new church, made of cypress on a heavy timber foundation with dimensions of 108 by 32 feet, and in May of that year Pauger sent detailed plans and elevations to Paris (fig. 14.25).62 The church was laid out on a Latin cross plan but narrow and long in the Caribbean manner, three times as long as wide (not including the sacristy, which formed an apse behind the high altar). The transepts were rectangular and narrow and the choir was raised above the nave with a semicircular altar rail. The side walls were half-timbered on a brick foundation with diagonal beams forming partial saltire crosses and brick filling. Above the door was a single clocher with an arcade belfry and a gambreled, bell-shaped cap. The church had a higher roof over the nave and lower ones over the transepts, with a coved ceiling and plaster on all the interior walls and vault; according the Wilson it was the first plastered interior in Nouvelle-Orléans.63 The exterior was finished with painted boards. The church was completed only in 1727, a year after Pauger’s death and after several delays that enraged the curate Father Raphaël, who grumbled about the expense of hiring a royal engineer who was not as competent with hands-on building as were the local carpenters. As late as 1731 the glass had not yet arrived from France, and the congregation made do with windows of stretched cloth. The facade has two storeys of equal width, pronounced quoining on the corners, a string course dividing the storeys, an arched doorway in the centre of the

408

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

ground floor, and an oculus window, the whole crowned by a triangular pediment carved with a Trinity motif in a gloria. Wilson correctly traced the design of the facade to Vauban’s Citadel Chapel of Saint-Étienne in Besançon, 1683 (fig. 1.6).64 The only major difference is that the Besançon church lacks the division between the storeys and its roof springs from the pediment in an unusual way to form a half-pyramid (Pauger’s solution is more academically correct). The triangular Trinity within a gloria motif is common in French churches of the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries such as the Church of the Pénitents Noirs in Aubagne (Provence, 1784), so it is unusual to find it at such an early date. Wilson has suggested that the cruciform plan and narrow nave also derive from Bélidor’s prototype (fig. 14.27); however in this case I do not feel that the two are close enough.65 I think it more likely that it shows the influence of an Antillean tradition: it is, for example, very close to the plan of the ca. 1720 church of Port de la Trinité in Martinique as drawn by Jean-Baptiste Romain in 1740 (fig. 14.28).66 Both the Nouvelle-Orléans and Trinité church have roughly a 3:1 length-to-width ratio in the nave, a broad curving altar rail with steps, and four windows on each side in the nave and two in the apse. The Bélidor model by contrast has a 5:1 ratio, five windows on the sides, a comparably narrow apse, groin vaulting in the ceiling, and buttresses surrounding it on all sides – Pauger’s church uses wooden shoring timbers for protection against hurricanes but they looked more like scaffolding than buttressing. Some changes were made when the church was finished, as illustrated in a 1732 plan by Alexandre de Batz.67 Marc-Antoine Caillot bemoaned the poor materials of the church but praised the work of the engineers in general: “the parish church, built of wood and bricked inside, 144 feet long and 60 feet wide, of a terrible wood that is found in this aforementioned place. One can sing the praises of the engineers who drew up the plan for this town, for it is a very fine creation for the country.”68 Pauger designed a variation of this facade for the tiny settlement at Île de la Balise, an unexpectedly elaborate

project for what was little more than a post for river pilots, a transfer point for cargo, and a prison – and moreover a place extraordinarily ill-suited to construction, with its constantly shifting sands, mud, and inundations (fig. 14.26).69 Caillot put it best: “The Balize is a place swamped by the sea, so swamped that, when the sea is heavy, you are forced to walk on planks. There are not eight arpents that are not inundated every day … Hunting for fowl is very easy in this place in the months of November, December, January, February, March, and April, but the rest of the year you die of hunger.”70

14.27 Bernard Forest de Bélidor, prototype for a parish church from La science des ingénieurs (Paris, 1729). W.D. Jordan Library Special Collections, Queen’s University.

The chapel rose a full storey higher than the Commander’s House and Chaplain and Engineer’s residence, which formed its left and right ranges, looking for all the world like a monastery. But monastic it was not. The chapel was big because it was to serve primarily as a warehouse for goods (they had to be brought by pirogue from ships anchored 150–200 metres from the

Tradition and Innovation in Church Architecture

409

entrance to the river), whether for “the Spanish trade and relief of ships” as noted on a plan from 1723, or for grain to feed the colony’s slaves, as reported in a letter of April 1732 – it even doubled as a lighthouse.71 Pauger had been working at Balise as early as June 1723, but when he was ordered to Nouvelle-Orléans, the project was put on hold and it was completed only shortly after 1731 by his replacement Bernard Deverges, although even then the walls were provisional (wooden planks instead of bricks) and the glass had yet to arrive. In April of that year there was so much food for slaves in the chapel that the exasperated anonymous cleric had only “a small space in the back which I had made with a provisional retable to celebrate the Holy Mass and Offices there.”72 The building is quite basic despite its size, just a single aisle with a shallow apse, pitched roof, and four high windows on each side of the nave, and like the rest of the buildings in this area it is raised high above the ground on stilts against the floods. The little base had a lodging for the contractor (Sieur Verges, ingénieur), chaplain, commandant, and garrison, a powder magazine, and a food warehouse, much of it in poor condition, and there were plans to build a captiverie for slaves coming from the Guinea coast. The chapel was described in 1731 as being “built like the warehouse below [i.e., elevated and covered] all the interior still needs to be finished, except for a little provisional altarpiece to celebrate the Divine Office.”73 Pauger’s facade anticipates the one for the church of Saint-Louis, right down to the arcaded clocher, the Trinity motif, the string course, and large oculus (presumably the destination of the glass mentioned in the sources), although its treatment of the roof above the

14.28 (opposite) Jean-Baptiste Romain, Plan of the Interior of the Church of The Trinity, ink and colours on paper, 1740. Shows the seating arrangements of the church at Port de la Trinité, Martinique, built ca. 1720. Among the priority seating illustrated here is that of the Lieutenant du Roi and his entourage, who sit on the benches marked “A ,” while the judges sit on the benches marked “B .” Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-enProvence), F /3/288/39.

pediment is more like that at Besançon and the doorway has a segmental head. One minor difference is the treatment of the corners, which are now giant-order pilasters ending in scrolling corbels, a facade treatment used in the rococo portails of Paris townhouses, as in the courtyard facade of the Hôtel Gouffier de Thoix (1719– 27), an interesting switch from an ecclesiastical to secular model, perhaps reflecting the building’s dual duty. Ship captains often remarked upon the unexpected opulence of the chapel in such a bleak setting. Even the oculus window was a gratuitous extravagance: “the glass for the rose windows of six feet and four inches of diameter” cost 100 livres.74 But in the end, sand, mud, and floodwaters reclaimed this little outpost: when it was handed over to Spain in 1766 authorities could not even find a chapel and noted that the rest of the buildings still standing at La Balise were “beyond usefulness through their age, defection and rottenness.”75 Louisiana did not produce many churches under the French regime, but these two buildings are unlike any of the others in the book in the degree to which engineers from the Génie designed them directly, making them more like company churches than buildings reflecting the needs or tastes of a mixed community of habitants. Nevertheless, as Father Raphaël of Nouvelle-Orléans demonstrated, the parish still had to pay for the job even if a royal engineer was commissioned to do it. Thus these churches attest once again to the disparity between the goals of government planners, civic entities, and church communities, the very disparity which guaranteed that churches in the French colonies consistently fell short of their Spanish counterparts – in this case a few hundred miles away in what is now Texas, where outside San Antonio the Franciscans were building a string of spacious mission churches in stone carved with opulent rococo facades.

Tradition and Innovation in Church Architecture

411

15

Italianate Church Facades, Eclecticism, and Neoclassicism from Quebec to Senegal, 1654–1830

aS We have Seen, unique variations of church design developed early in Nouvelle-France, the Antilles, and Guiana and grew into fully fledged vernacular traditions by the late seventeenth century. Some, like the post-Laval parish churches of Quebec (fig. 14.9), the campanile at Le Prêcheur (fig. 14.4), and the church of SaintNicolas in Cayenne (fig. 14.7), borrowed features of French country churches but assembled them in new ways. Others, such as Sainte-Famille on Île d’Orléans (fig. 14.18) or Notre-Dame-de-la-Bonne-Délivrance in Les Trois-Îlets (fig. 14.22), added a modest and generic classical element to churches otherwise marked by a spartan severity. But a significant number of churches from Quebec to Saint-Domingue adopted classicism more comprehensively in their stone facades. Motivated by a desire to evoke the late sixteenth-century era of Catholic reform and to remind people of their ties to Rome, the missionary orders who served the parishes commissioned architects and stone carvers to recreate the facades of late Renaissance and early baroque Italy, particularly that of the Jesuit mother church of the Gesù (fig. 14.1), engravings of which were widely available either in loose sheets or in illustrated vitae of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. This phenomenon was primarily limited to facades: interiors tended to be much plainer, and if they have classical piers or entablatures today they usually come from a later nineteenth- or twentieth-century building campaign meant to harmonize with them (as was the case

with Saint-François in Basse-Terre, about which more below). Facades in general had little to do with the style or even dimensions of interiors – as Danièle Begot notes about the Antilles, they “seem in effect to be pasted onto the rest of the construction in perfect ignorance of their form, volumetrics, or constructive technique.”1 Italianate Church Facades in the Antilles, 1654–1830 We can already see this Italianizing trend in the two partial seventeenth-century facades to survive from the Antilles, that of the Dominican church of Notre-Damedu-Bon-Port in the Mouillage district of Saint-Pierre and the former Jesuit (now Carmelite) church of NotreDame du Mont-Carmel in Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe. The Saint-Pierre church was begun in 1654, partially blown up in 1667, largely rebuilt in 1679 with the help of the king’s troops, radically renovated in the 1850s upon its elevation to a cathedral, and then almost entirely levelled by the 1902 earthquake (figs. 15.1–2).2 Despite these vicissitudes the central part of the ground floor of the facade dates either from 1654 or 1679. Built

entirely of fine ashlar masonry, the tripartite portal (the side wings are modern) features an arched doorway framed by Doric pilasters and a pair of statue niches balanced by raised decorative panels, and it is crowned by an entablature carved with dentils. The facade has precise quoining on the ends, and the doorway is reached by a wide hexagonal staircase. A small drawing on a map of Saint-Pierre from 1819 shows that the first storey had the same width but was slightly shorter than the rez-de-chaussée and that the facade was surmounted by a massive triangular pediment bearing the rosary escutcheon of the Dominican order (fig. 15.2).3 The upper storey used rectangular blind panels instead of niches and had an arched window or niche over the

15.1 (left) Dominican church of Notre-Dame-du-Bon-Port, SaintPierre, Martinique, begun 1654, rebuilt 1679, renovated 1850s, all but ground floor destroyed 1902. 15.2 (right) Dominican church of Notre-Dame-du-Bon-Port, SaintPierre, Martinique. Detail of a map by Laroque Dufau entitled Topographic Plan of the Town and Environs of Saint-Pierre Martinique, ink on paper, 1819. This is the only known drawing of the church before its radical 1850s renovations. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 13 DFC 550A .

Italianate Church Facades, Eclecticism, and Neoclassicism 413

door, and while it had pilasters between the bays it lacked quoining. The church’s ground plan is preserved in a set of plans and elevations from 1853 that show an elongated Latin cross ending in a shallow curved apse, rectangular transepts as wide as the nave, a narthex and staircase, a pitched roof, and five windows on each side of the nave.4 Notre-Dame-du-Bon-Port evokes the first generation of large post-Tridentine churches in Rome. The closest matches are S. Luigi dei Francesi (Giacomo della Porta, 1589) and S. Carlo ai Catinari (Giovanni Battista Soria, 1636), both of which feature two storeys of equal width capped by a monumental triangular pediment and with prominent pilasters separating the bays and at the corners, but with five instead of three 15.3 Giacomo della Porta, Church of S. Luigi dei Francesi (1589), Rome, from a print by Giovanni Battista Falda (Rome, ca. 1667). Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome.

414

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

bays (fig. 15.3). The arrangement of panels, niches, windows, and door at Saint-Pierre also corresponds in a general way to those of the Roman facades, although, as in all Antillean churches of this type, the central portal is arched whereas the Italian (and Italo-French models) are usually rectangular. S. Luigi dei Francesi is the closest to the Saint-Pierre church as it uses a simple Tuscan or Doric order on the ground floor, its pediment encloses the escutcheon in a similar way, and there are raised panels above and below the niches, even if they differ in the details. S. Luigi was known through an engraving by Giovanni Batista Falda (ca. 1667) and another engraving appeared in Girolamo Francini’s heavily illustrated treatise Le cose meravigliose dell’alma citta di Roma (Rome, 1588), a visual celebration of the works of the reformist pope Sixtus V, whose urban improvements would have appealed to French colonial patrons (see chapter 8).5 Another motivation for choosing S. Luigi dei Francesi as a model is that it was the official

church of the French community in Rome and is therefore Roman yet French, foreign yet familiar. It is hard to determine the model for the central bay of the ground floor of the former Jesuit church in Basse-Terre (begun ca. 1655; fig. 15.4), the only part to survive from the original structure, although it has enough affinities with the Saint-Pierre church – a central doorway flanked by niches and raised rectangular panels – that it is likely also based on Roman printed models.6 Certain parts of the carving (in particular, the plinths and capitals of the pilasters and the crisp edges of the carving) are so close that it is possible that the same work teams worked on both structures, travelling between the islands. The main difference

15.4 Former Jesuit church, then Carmelite church of Notre-Dame du Mont-Carmel, Basse-Terre (Guadeloupe), begun ca. 1655.

is the treatment of the pilasters as a giant order using a thick string course at the level of the springing of the doorway arch. The quality of the church construction inspired comments early on. In 1696 Governor Charles Auger described the church as “so well maintained and served that it draws considerable attraction to itself,” and in 1722 Jean-Baptiste Labat praised the church as being “très-propre” and noted about the facade: “the portal … is of hewn stone with the arms of Messieurs de Houël on the door, either because these gentlemen contributed to its construction, or because the Jesuits

Italianate Church Facades, Eclecticism, and Neoclassicism 415

15.5 Jesuit Église du Fort, Saint-Pierre, Martinique, 1678, rebuilt 1899 (except for campanile), destroyed 1902. Detail of a map by Laroque Dufau entitled Topographic Plan of the Town and Environs of Saint-Pierre Martinique, ink on paper, 1819. This is the only known drawing of the 1678 facade before its 1899 reconstruction.

wanted, by this distinction, to get them to finish it at their expense.”7 The Houël arms are still located over the door today. Unsurprisingly, one of the first churches in the Antilles to use the Roman Gesù as its model was the Jesuit Église du Fort in Saint-Pierre (1678), rebuilt in 1899 except for the campanile, destroyed in 1902, but recorded in an elevation and plan from two maps from 1819 and ca. 1681–82 (fig. 15.5).8 The 1819 elevation shows that the facade is a pared-down version of its model (fig. 14.1), with its paired columns or pilasters under a triangular pediment, flanking niches, volutes in the upper storey, and a pair of niches and central window above. It is typical of Jesuit churches around the globe only to quote certain details from the

416

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

Gesù – especially the volutes in the upper storey – as a way of proclaiming Jesuit identity, rather than to attempt an exact replica of the Roman church, even if they frequently considered their churches to be simulacra of the Gesù.9 Although it is impossible to tell on the basis of this drawing, it is possible that the same crew worked on this one as on its Dominican counterpart (figs. 15.1–2): the ends of the ground floor are similarly rusticated, and it balances its niches with raised panels. The very strange high arched pediment at the top seems out of place, and I suspect it was a later addition (or reflected the limitations of the draughtsman). The ground plan is the elongated Latin cross of the Antilles with a semicircular apse the same width as the nave. The campanile, located a few feet to the east of the church, was a sturdy, thick-walled stone structure like that of Le Prêcheur with a massive gambreled clocher at the top similar to those found on larger bell-towers in France such as the church of Saint-Bénigne de Pontarlier (1651–66) in Besançon.10 Another generically Gesù-like facade graces the former Jesuit church of Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomptionet-Saint-Joseph at Case-Pilote, Martinique (late seventeenth–early eighteenth century), executed in varicoloured porous volcanic stone (fig. 15.6).11 Again the architect uses visual shorthand to evoke his model (fig. 14.1), with a miniature upper storey with plain pilasters and sloping volutes, a triangular cap, and on the ground floor a pair of niches, large central doorway, and four prominent Doric pilasters. The main difference is the oculus window, which is absent in the Gesù but present in other sixteenth-century Roman churches such as S. Caterina dei Funari (1560–64; fig. 15.18), and the order of the pilasters. I suspect that rather than working directly from printed models the work team by this point was drawing upon a collective memory of certain Roman forms. The only other decoration is a pair of raised square panel frames underneath each niche. Like the Jesuit church at Saint-Pierre (fig. 15.5), which is likely its immediate model, decorative finials at the ends of its upper and lower cornices lend it an air of pageantry. Another descendant of the Saint-Pierre

15.6 (above) Former Jesuit church of Notre-Dame-del’Assomption-et-Saint-Joseph, Case-Pilote, Martinique, late seventeenth to early eighteenth century. 15.7 (below) Saint-Étienne, Le Marin, Martinique, begun 1766.

Jesuit facade is that of Saint-Étienne in Le Marin (1766; fig. 15.7), built by Capuchin Jean-Marie de Coutances with his own funds.12 Both have paired engaged columns flanking a large central door, sloping volutes, and quoining on the extremities of the ground floor. The Le Marin facade substitutes large, lobed, raised panels 15.8 (left) Former Capuchin church at Vieux-Habitants, Guadeloupe, founded in 1636, burned and rebuilt in stone between 1703 and 1721, the date of the facade. 15.9 (right) Portal design from Sebastiano Serlio, Architettura di Sebastian Serlio Bolognese in sei libri divisa (Venice 1663). Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich.

418

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

for the niches on the ground floor, and introduces another set of paired engaged columns above, with a statue niche instead of a window. It is in fact slightly closer to the Gesù than either the Saint-Pierre or Case-Pilot churches with its scroll volutes and its sophisticated broken lower cornice in the pediment. The church has a bulky campanile on the right side – similar to the one at Le Prêcheur (fig. 14.4) – adjoining it on a slight angle. A different kind of sixteenth-century Italian model inspired the facade of the former Capuchin church at Vieux-Habitants, Guadeloupe, founded in 1636, burnt and rebuilt in stone between 1703 and 1721, and heavily reconstructed in the twentieth century (fig. 15.8).13 The

facade – the only surviving part of the 1703 church – was built by masons from Limoges who were brought over in 1701 by curate Père Vincent, and the limousin emblem of the ermine spot is discreetly carved above each of the pilasters. Limoges was particularly respected for its masonry and carpentry families, such as the Gabriel, Mazière, Bergeron, and Mallet dynasties, who worked regularly for the Bâtiments du Roi.14 The mortar for the masonry was made from molasses, a technique called ciment batterie, which made up for the lack of lime and was ideal for a sugar island. The Vieux-Habitants facade is remarkable in being the only one in this book that looks like a Spanish American building: it is the spitting image of the facades of the region south of Cuzco and to the west of Lake Titicaca, with their plain, whitewashed facades and simple, delicately carved stone portals with pilasters, a small entablature, and usually an oculus window above.15 But this is not a case of inter-colony influence. The reason they look alike is because they use the same prototypes, model portals published in book iv of Sebastiano Serlio’s Sette libri dell’architettura (Venice, 1537), one of the most popular sources for facade design in the first century of conquest in Spanish South America (fig. 15.9). One is for a door in the Corinthian order, which the limousin craftsmen have transformed into Ionic and altered by reducing the number of pilasters from two to one per side while preserving the characteristic shape of Serlio’s volutes. The other model, for a rusticated portal (illustrated here), provides the rounded arch, oval oculus window and scrollwork frame, and finials. Like their Spanish American counterparts the masons of Vieux-Habitants made free pastiches of these models rather than reproducing them slavishly. Something new happened in the facade (ca. 1730) of the former Capuchin church of Saint-François (now Cathedral of Notre-Dame-de-Guadeloupe) in BasseTerre that soon became the norm elsewhere in the Caribbean, especially in the larger towns, and also in Nouvelle-France (fig. 15.10). Although the desire to reflect the post-Tridentine style of Rome persisted, it was now safely – we might say patriotically – refracted

through French models published in treatises such as those of Mariette or Blondel. Saint-François was founded in 1673, enlarged in 1696, burnt in 1703, and rebuilt from 1713 to ca. 1730, the date traditionally given to the facade, the only surviving part of the eighteenth-century church.16 The building underwent many subsequent trials and reconstructions, including a British bombardment in 1759 and its transformation into a private house in 1795–1802; however neither event seems to have significantly damaged the facade. A 1773 inventory notes that the church was “in good condition,” and around 1820 traveller Félix Longin wrote that “the facade is quite beautiful.”17 In 1844–50 the city council added side aisles in anticipation of the church’s elevation to a cathedral (consecrated 1877), and in 1874 Bishop François-Benjamin-Joseph Blanger (1821–1888) extended the choir and the aisles to form an ambulatory.18 The roof has since been destroyed in a cyclone and only recently rebuilt to historic standards. The dating of the facade is confusing because even though it is very close in style and technique to the former Jesuit church in the same town (fig. 15.4) – and looks much as it did in an engraving of 1780 – the inscriptions just above the statue of the Virgin in the upper section (mdccclXXvi ) and in the middle of the frieze above the main doorway (b .v .m . guadalupensis ) both date from 1876, suggesting at first glance that the facade must also date from when the church was transformed into a cathedral.19 However upon close examination, the stone is a different colour from the rest of the facade and the blocks bearing the letters sometimes cut into the earlier stonework, a sign that the inscription is later. Marie-Emmanuelle Desmoulins agrees that part of the 1730 facade survives and some of it may have been reassembled in the early nineteenth century.20 There is also no evidence for a new facade in the meticulous account books of Bishop Blanger’s restoration of the church between 1874 and 1877.21 In fact in 1874 he wrote explicitly: “The Cathedral church of Basse-Terre is absolutely the same as the old parish church of Saint Francis. Also my intention was not to touch a single stone of the Cathedral before obtaining

Italianate Church Facades, Eclecticism, and Neoclassicism 419

15.10 Former Capuchin church of Saint-François (now NotreDame-de-Guadeloupe), BasseTerre, founded 1673, facade ca. 1730.

the authorization from the local Government or town authority.”22 Therefore I am satisfied that the central part of the facade was left intact and that Blanger simply had the inscription carved into the existing fabric. It is a two-storey structure with a tripartite lower section divided by paired Doric columns, a large, arched doorway in the middle, and two statue niches on the sides. A tall entablature separates the storeys and a triangular pediment crowns the portal. The upper level, which sits on a parapet, features a spacious open niche flanked by paired Doric columns and sloping volutes, an entablature, and a semicircular pediment. One unique feature

420

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

is the inclusion of twelve masons’ marks in a plaque over the main door; they are on the same stone as the inscriptions so probably date from the expansion; to my knowledge they have not been studied. The facade follows its model – François Mansart’s Church of the Minimes in Paris (1659–77) – very precisely, except that it only reproduces the central part of the wide facade as the Basse-Terre church had no side aisles at the time. Mansart’s now-destroyed church, published in Mariette’s Architecture françoise (1727), was itself inspired by Roman models, including the work of Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola and the Theatre of

15.11 François Mansart, Church of the Minimes, Paris. Engraving from Blondel, Architecture françoise (1752– 56). Bibliothèque numérique de l’Institute Nationale d’Histoire de l’Art, Paris.

Marcellus (fig. 15.11).23 The Basse-Terre architect has simplified his model somewhat: he uses the Doric order on both storeys (Mansart’s upper story is Composite), transforms columns into pilasters, and reduces their number. On the upper level the number of pilasters is consistent with the model; he has reproduced the parapet between the storeys and has preserved the exact profile of the semicircular pediment. The upper niche at the Basse-Terre church is unusually large because in the model it is a window. The architect has even tried to emulate the shifting planes of Mansart’s walls, so that the door frame and upper level form a ressaut, the side bays recede, and the double pilasters at the ends advance to meet the level of the portico. The only additions are the sloping volutes, which as we have seen have become a trademark of church facades in the Lesser Antilles, and like all Antillean churches it has an arched doorway.

Mansart’s Church of the Minimes makes its grandest appearance in the facade of the second-largest church in the Atlantic Empire, René Gabriel Rabié’s rebuilt stone church of Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption on the Place d’Armes in Cap-François (1772–74), which is illustrated in Moreau de Saint-Méry’s volume Recueil de vues des lieux principaux de la colonie françoise de SaintDomingue (Paris, 1791) (figs. 15.12–14), and of which only the ground floor survives.24 Interim Governor le comte de La Ferronays (in office 1772) and Intendant Jean-François Vincent de Montarcher (1730–1783) hired Rabié to replace a 1748–71 church that collapsed partly due to an earthquake – it was the one with the facade carved by the five sculptors who arrived from Paris in 1766 (see chapter 6).25 In January 1772 the syndics and churchwardens of the parish signed a contract with an entrepreneur named Sieur Renard “allow[ing] the Parish Church of Cap to be made & built

Italianate Church Facades, Eclecticism, and Neoclassicism 421

on the accepted plan” under Rabié’s direction at a total estimated cost of 504,000 livres to be raised from parishioners, although Moreau claims the costs ran to 1.8 million.26 The church was completed in time to hold the obsequies of Louis XV on 26 July 1774, the first service celebrated in the building, and it was officially dedicated in a lavish Mass featuring music by M. Gervaise, the music master at the Comédie Theatre.27 It would go on to be the backdrop for most major ephemeral festivals in the city. 15.12 René-Gabriel Rabié, Facade, New Parish church of NotreDame-de-l’Assomption, Cap-François, 1772–74. Engraving from Moreau de Saint-Mery, Recueil, 1791, pl. 6. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

422

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

Built on a Latin cross plan with a nave and side aisles and semicircular apse and transept ends, the church is 63 metres long by 25 metres wide (Quebec Cathedral is 65 by 31 metres), so wide that it had to block a street and took up nearly two îlots.28 This church is one of the rare instances in which the architect maintained a uniform style on the interior, although it ended up having open charpenterie instead of the planned vault. The pier arcade, which survives in partly reconstructed form today, matches the height of the facade’s lower level, and its Ionic pilasters harmonize with those of its upper storey. The church also had an iron grille with gilt details in the choir, a giant plaster group sculpture of the Assumption behind the high altar, white marble altarpieces in the chapels, a sculpted mahogany pulpit,

and a floor paved with black and white marble tiles. A five-storey masonry campanile was aligned with the right of the facade, “tak[ing] away some of its grace,” in Moreau’s opinion.29 Moreau, a great admirer of the facade – he omitted the tower in his engraving – describes it in some detail, noting that it was made of stone imported from Nantes:

15.13 (left) René-Gabriel Rabié, left transept, Notre-Dame-del’Assomption, Cap-François (now Cap-Haïtien), 1772–74; rebuilt after 1842. The walls are mostly original up to the height of the cornice.

The facade, or portal of this church … is composed of two orders, the first Doric, & the second Ionic. The main door is decorated with four paired columns, two on each side, recessed into the wall, up to a quarter of their diameter, crowned by a triangular pediment, in which are carved the arms of France. The two small doors of this facade are decorated with four pilasters, built into the wall for three-quarters of their thickness. Above these doors are two niches, in which are placed two

stone statues representing the first two Apostles, slightly more than life-size. The higher order is composed of four columns & two pilasters, which correspond to those of the lower order, and to which the projections are proportionate. The whole is completed & crowned by a semicircular pediment, in which is carved a gloria; this pediment is surmounted by a stone cross, which itself was remade later on a smaller scale, because it had been struck by lightning.30

15.14 (right) René-Gabriel Rabié, interior, Notre-Dame-del’Assomption, Cap-François (now Cap-Haïtien), 1772–74. The vault and dome are twentieth-century replacements.

Italianate Church Facades, Eclecticism, and Neoclassicism 423

15.15 (left) Claude-François Nassau, Facade of the Parish Church Begun in 1774, detail of a map entitled Plan de [Pointe-à-Pitre] situated on the Island of Grande-Terre, ink and colours, 1775. See also fig. 10.19, right. 15.16 (right) Jean-Sylvain Cartaud, façade, Notre-Dame-desVictoires, Paris, 1739.

This time Mansart’s Minimes church is replicated almost exactly (fig. 15.11). Particularly striking is the use of paired engaged columns on both storeys, although the progression is Doric to Ionic instead of Doric to composite. Rabié has transformed the pair of columns flanking the porch into pilasters but otherwise the differences are minimal: an arched main portal rather than a segmented one, and statue niches in place of windows, and he has finished off the sides with very subtle sloping volutes absent in the model. The architect had to come up with his own solutions for the sides of the church since the original was attached to a cour

424

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

d’honneur. In this case the engraving could have come from either Mariette’s or Blondel’s treatise as both of them illustrated the church. Claude-François Nassau’s facade for the Capuchin parish church of Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul in Pointeà-Pitre (begun 1774; figs. 10.19, 15.15) is based on another Parisian model, Jean-Sylvain Cartaud’s facade for the Augustinian church of Notre-Dame-des-Victoires in Paris (1739), just off the Place des Victoires and published in Mariette’s treatise (fig. 15.16).31 Nassau’s church, simply called the “Église Paroissiale,” was the predecessor of the church for which the protracted concours was held between 1805 and 1817 (see chapter 6).32 The 1774 facade appears on two maps by Nassau dated 1775 and 1783–84 and also in a sepia drawing by Jean-Baptiste Viry of the capitulation of British troops during the reconquest of the island on 7 May 1794.33 Nassau simplifies his model but preserves all of its main components including the triangular pediment with

the arms of France (visible only in the 1775 drawing), the paired pilasters delineating the central bay on both storeys, the single outer pilasters, the sloping volutes, and the arched central doorway. Since Nassau’s church did not have side aisles he has replaced the lateral doors with raised panels, and although his two drawings also replace the upper window with a raised panel, the sepia drawing shows that the church as built did end up having an arched window. Discrepancies with the model are minor: both orders are Doric, the central portal does not form a ressaut, and plant pots are used as finials rather than miniature obelisks (although in Viry’s drawing they are just round balls). That same drawing also reveals a square-based masonry tower awkwardly located directly behind the facade.

Italianate Church Facades in Nouvelle-France, 1663–1745 An illustration of a québécois church facade demonstrates an early affinity with the Eternal City in Nouvelle-France – even if it is pure fantasy. It is a drawing by Jean Bourdon (1663) of the Jesuits’ second church in Quebec City that reproduces the unmistakable wide, flat, tripartite facade of the Roman Gesù, with its 15.17 Future Jesuit church, Quebec City. Detail from Jean Bourdon, A True Plan of Quebec Made in 1663, ink and colours on paper, 1663. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département Cartes et Plans. This illustration of a church yet to be built is pure fantasy; however it is based on engravings of the church of Il Gesù in Rome.

Italianate Church Facades, Eclecticism, and Neoclassicism 425

15.18 Church of Santa Caterina dei Funari, Rome (1560–64). Detail from an engraving by Giovanni Battista Falda (Rome, ca. 1667). Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome.

massive triangular pediment, narrower upper storey, and giant dome (figs. 15.27, 14.1).34 Bourdon could have drawn on several models, including the engraving by Falda and a depiction in Pedro Ribadeneira’s life of Ignatius of Loyola (Antwerp, ca. 1610), reissued many times after Ignatius’s 1622 canonization.35 We know that Bourdon’s illustration is imaginary not only because the Jesuit church in Quebec City never had a dome – in fact no church in the French empire ever had a dome – but also because the church was only begun three years later, in 1666.36 However it is interesting because it probably represents the building the Jesuits hoped to build; indeed, the Jesuits may even have lent Bourdon the model, since Ribadeneira’s life is precisely the sort of book they would have had in their library.

426

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

S. Caterina dei Funari may have inspired Baillif’s 1683 first project for the facade of the reconstructed cathedral in Quebec City, although in a very pareddown version that combines Roman style with French tradition (figs. 14.16, 15.18).37 The twin towers recall the great Gothic cathedrals of France, an explicit symbol of this church’s new function, although the upper sections of the tower – a square transitioning to an octagonal shaft bearing a cupola – is a seventeenth-century form, also French.38 Baillif has freely adapted his Roman model to fit the high, narrow nave and towers of his church. He has preserved the number of niches flanking the central doorway in his narrow facade by placing the outer pair on the tower bases; he accommodates the extra height by repeating the distribution of the ground floor on the first storey (with a window in place of the door); and has moved the oculus and the sloping volutes to the attic, treating the pediment as a gable. It is a simple but creative solution that preserves the

arrangement of the model on a church front with a completely different profile. Italianate models more explicitly inspired four of the most ambitious facade projects in eighteenth-century Quebec, two of them by Chaussegros de Léry. The earliest was his facade for the paroisse of Notre-Dame in Montreal (1722; fig. 15.19), a church that had been built in stone in 1672 by Dollier de Casson, architect of the Sulpician residence next door (fig. 12.11).39 Already in 1708 Superior Vachon de Belmont commissioned the remodelling of the west end with what was to be two massive flanking towers, and Chaussegros provided the Gesù-type facade, which survives in an autograph elevation of 1722 as well as a photograph taken after it had been transferred to the Recollect Church but before its demolition in 1867.40 Work was contracted out in 1723 to Montreal sculptor Paul Jourdain dit Labrosse (1697–1769), an organ-maker born into a family of cabinetmakers who also made tabernacles and figural sculpture.41 In its simplification of the basic Gesù form it has much in common with the church at Case-Pilote (figs. 15.6, 15.19): it reduces the number of pilasters and avoids columns; it uses the Doric order on both levels; and it has a truncated upper storey flanked by volutes (here with their scrolls intact). But it also preserves the Gesù’s high arched window in the upper storey – so large here that it looks almost out of scale. It also reproduces the tall plinth and horizontal string course that runs behind the pilasters on the Gesù’s ground floor: in the Montreal facade the effect is achieved by connecting the imposts of the door and windows behind the pilasters. Chaussegros is very clever about making the little church seem big: on the lower storey he uses layered instead of paired pilasters at the ends to preserve the Gesù’s sense of monumentality yet maintain the narrowness he needed for his facade, and since his nave did not need side 15.19 Gaspard-Joseph Chaussegros de Léry and Paul Jourdain dit Labrosse, facade of the Church of Notre-Dame, Montreal, 1722–23. In fact the left tower was the one completed. Archives des Prêtres de Saint-Sulpice de Montréal.

Italianate Church Facades, Eclecticism, and Neoclassicism 427

entrances he substitutes the Gesù’s flanking doorways with spacious niches. Around 1730 the Jesuits in Quebec City also commissioned a Roman-style facade for their church, which had been finished in 1676 on a Latin-cross plan and was the largest in the colony – a 1713 report called it a “trez belle Eglise.”42 Scholars regularly attribute this facade to Chaussegros de Léry, although I have found neither an elevation nor any documentary evidence to confirm this claim, and the style is unlike his other projects.43 All that we know about it comes from a 15.20 Anthony Walker, A View of Jesuits [sic] College and Church drawn on the spot by Richard Short, engraving, 1759. This is the only view of the exterior of the Jesuit church in Quebec City, built 1666, restored 1765, and demolished 1807. McCord Museum, McGill University, Montreal.

428

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

detail in a Richard Short engraving of 1759 (fig. 15.20). It is a peculiar insertion of one style into another. The church was already flanked by a pair of medium-height Henri iv –style tapering towers attached to the facade at the corners and crowned with ogee cupolas (à l’impériale) like the ones Chaussegros had hoped to build on the portal at Château Saint-Louis (figs. 12.20, 12.23). In between these towers (the right one was demolished to make way for an expansion of the adjacent residence) the architect introduced a facade again resembling that of S. Caterina dei Funari (fig. 15.18), but only the central section, a solution already explored by Jesuit architect Étienne Martellange in an unexecuted project for Collège de Vienne in France (1623), although it was never published.44 Rectangular and divided into three bays by Doric pilasters on two storeys, it has a central doorway flanked by a single pair of niches on the ground floor

reference appears in the plans he submitted for a redesigned interior, including an extension of the choir and the addition of a clerestory. His solution, an arcade on ten Ionic piers with a shallow tribune and balustrade above, resembles a type commonly found in Jesuit churches in France, most famously at their main church in Paris, Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis (formerly SaintLouis-le-Grand), again by Martellange (1627).45 Thus the last Italianate church facade in Nouvelle-France hearkens back in its interior to a model developed more than a century earlier in France. Perhaps Chaussegros’s hints toward Jesuit prototypes reflected the influence that Order held in colonial Quebec and their retardataire nature was meant to evoke a period when the Jesuits still enjoyed a high position at the French court and in the intellectual life of Paris, one which they would lose in less than two decades with the 1763 expulsion.46 Eclecticism and Neoclassicism in Guiana and Senegal, 1789–1830 15.21 Chaussegros de Léry, project for the facade of Quebec Cathedral, 1745. Detail of fig. 14.15. This project was never built.

and an oculus window flanked by raised panels on the upper storey. The architect has omitted the pediment present in both S. Caterina and the Vienne project so that the hip roof springs directly from the upper entablature, a peculiar solution possibly occasioned by budgetary restraints. Chaussegros’s unexecuted 1745 facade project for Quebec City Cathedral (fig. 15.21) is the first Italianate structure in Nouvelle-France to use a French prototype, in this case again Cartaud’s Notre-Dame-des-Victoires (fig. 15.16), which it resembles closely. Both are twostorey, tripartite structures crowned by a triangular pediment using the Ionic order below and Corinthian above, with paired pilasters flanking the main portal and a large arched window above; both also have side doorways flanked by single pilasters, and both use sloping volutes, except that Chaussegros has transformed them into Gesù-style scroll volutes. Another Jesuit

The scientific spirit that inspired royal engineers like Gaudens Pansiotti, Nicolas-Georges Courtois, and Burke O’Farrell to develop a pan-tropical architecture (see chapters 6 and 13) also motivated church design beginning in the late 1780s. The first church to demonstrate similar concerns for air circulation, local conditions, healthy living, and prefabrication was Jean-Samuel Guisan’s chapel (1789; fig. 15.22) for Bourg Villebois, the showpiece of his utopian agricultural city on the Approuague River in Guiana (fig. 9.16).47 Located at the northeast corner of the great rond-point at the crossing of the two main roads, it was built between May and October 1789 by the “Negroes of the King” under the leadership of a “white master carpenter,” at a cost of 8,527 livres from the Crown and 4,637.5 livres from the habitants.48 On 26 October construction was well advanced, with one report noting that “when construction of the chapel is finished and it is in a state where one can decently celebrate the Divine Service there, it will be blessed according to the ceremonies of the Church by the Prefect of the Mission after which the

Italianate Church Facades, Eclecticism, and Neoclassicism 429

15.22 Jean-Samuel Guisan, Project for the Chapel for the New Quarter [of BourgVillebois] at Approuague, ink and colours on paper, 1789. This drawing of the chapel for the utopian town in Guiana shows the plan and the elevations of all the sides as well as the sectional view of the carpentry. Bricks are coloured in red. These sections were made in advance, probably in Cayenne, and shipped flat to the new colony. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 14 DFC 485B .

priest chosen to serve it will be required to celebrate Mass on feast days and Sundays.”49 Like the other buildings planned for Bourg Villebois the chapel was a standardized wood-frame structure for which the framing could be built in advance, packed flat, and then assembled on site. The plan is in fact very similar to one designed by royal engineer François Joseph Charles Dessingy for the new chapel at Cayenne’s Savanne (1782), a basic rectangular hall with three aisles divided by wooden posts and a wooden altar rail, except that Guisan’s church lacks windows and had a post-and-lintel terrace on each end.50 The facade looks like a tent or garden pavilion, with decorative lappets and a delicate balustrade formed of intersecting circles at the entrance to the sanctuary, appropriate in a town designed on the plan of a garden. In fact it specifically recalls orientalist garden pavilions such as the Vakttältet (Turkish tent) at Drottningholm Palace in Sweden (1781), the so-called “tentes turques” (1773–78) built at Parc Monceau for the Duc de Chartres by Louis Carrogis dit Louis Carmontelle, and an unexecuted late eighteenth-century design for a “Pavillon du jardin, dont l’extérieur représente une Tente” by Jean-Jacques Lequeu.51 These “folies” or “fabriques” became popular throughout Europe with the introduction of the English-style or “anglo-chinois” garden. In Guisan’s case perhaps his choice of an exotic design was meant to harmonize with the chapel’s tropical setting. If so it is a rare early example of a kind of nostalgic revival of Islamic styles favoured by late nineteenth- and twentieth-century French colonial architects in places like Algeria or Senegal, notably in the railway stations at Saint-Louis (1884) and Dakar (1904).52 Guisan’s chapel certainly provides the sensation of a garden pavilion. The nave is simply a hall with a typical Guianese wooden double-pitch hip roof with the usual eave extensions over the side aisles; the walls are formed of wide-studded timber posts filled with brick (briqueté entre poteaux); and instead of windows it is open to the outside on all four sides, with jalousies formed of vertical wooden slats and open lattice work in the transoms. As we have seen in chapter 14 this use

of exterior jalousies was pioneered in Guiana at the end of the seventeenth century at the Second Church of Saint-Nicolas in Cayenne (fig. 14.7) and reappeared in Port-au-Prince and Louisiana a century later. Combined with the Guianese roof profile, this feature exhibits a profound knowledge of Guianese architecture and reflects Guisan’s years of working in the region and his sensitivity to local climatic conditions. Only the walls surrounding the sanctuary are completely bricked in, out of a need to respect the sanctity of the space and give some privacy to the priests, although two small jalousies shed light onto the altar. The dimensions of this prefabricated building are standardized throughout so that the chapel could be expanded simply by adding more bays of equal length. Senegal was another centre for experimental church design, but nostalgia trumped science in the earliestsurviving church there, the Église du Nord in SaintLouis (1789; fig. 15.23). Although it was built in the same year as Guisan’s pavilion-chapel, the Église du Nord was less concerned with air circulation than with Catholic victory. Religious sentiment ran high on the island after twenty-one years without a priest during the British occupation (1758–79) and especially after Saint-Louis became the seat of Senegal’s Préfecture Apostolique after the British briefly took Gorée in 1779. Indeed Saint-Louis’s fervour contrasted markedly with that of Gorée, where the inhabitants cheerfully exercised their revolutionary right to destroy their church on Christmas day 1799.53 But Saint-Louis’s new church was long in coming. The first new priests celebrated mass inside a rented house, and the governors would approve construction of a church (as stated in 1786) only if the habitants would supply half the brick and lime and all the beams.54 The church was personally designed by Governor Stanislas de Boufflers, a courtier, man of belles-lettres, and patron of the arts, who wrote in two letters of 1787 that he was “drawing with my hand the plan of the church,” which he also called “my church.”55 At the time the community was worshipping in an upper room of a house north of the fort. The new church was likely executed under the governorship

Italianate Church Facades, Eclecticism, and Neoclassicism 431

15.23 Stanislas de Boufflers, bell-tower, Église du Nord, Saint-Louis (Senegal), designed 1787, built ca. 1789–90.

of François Blanchot de Verly (in office 1789–90) sometime before July 1789 and March 1792 when the revolutionary government, itemizing the properties of the ex-Company, mentioned “the construction of the new church.”56 The last priest departed in 1794 and the building was duly transformed into the Temple of Supreme Being, putting an end to the short-lived, likely unconsecrated church, after a mere five years.57 After the French retook the island following another British occupation (1809–17) nobody even remembered the building’s original function. The Église du Nord has the distinction of being the only neo-Gothic building in the French Atlantic

432

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

Empire in the period covered in this book. Three storeys high in a town where most buildings had only two, the tower still dominates the neighbourhood. It is built of local brick covered with plaster, with wooden lintels and interior carpentry. String courses separate the storeys, with a square doorway on the ground floor, an early Gothic-style twin-lancet-plus-oculus window on the first floor, a pair of lancet windows on the top floor, and a crenelated roof. Although it looks like a square tower when seen from the south on rue Blanchot or from the west on avenue Blaise Diagne, there are no northern or eastern facades, possibly because the parish could not afford to finish them. Boufflers may have chosen Gothic because he agreed with certain Parisian architectural critics that it was a quintessentially French style (see chapter 7). The style had already gained purchase in the 1780s and ’90s with artists such as Lequeu, who drew extant Gothic portals or made designs for garden follies, although Napoleon soon put a stop to that with his new style Empire.58 Or, ironically, he might have been sympathetic to the English Gothic revival movement as epitomized by Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill in Twickenham (1749–77) or James Gibb’s folly, the Gothic Temple, at Stowe (1741). In either case it is one of the earliest colonial reflections of the style anywhere, even if the British beat them to it with the church of Saint James on the Island of St Helena (1774), a building, as it happens, that Napoleon would have plenty of time to get to know.59 The tower of the Église du Nord does indeed look English: the crenelated top on a square tower with precisely that kind of plate tracery (often called “Early English”) is not something found in France, where steeples, cupolas, or clochers tended to crown church towers. The campaign to build a church in Saint-Louis gathered steam after the French reacquisition of the island in 1817. On 6 April 1817 a Te Deum mass was celebrated on the occasion of the unveiling of the bust of the king – no mention here of a “Place Royale” – but it had to be held in Government House as the new Préfet Apostolique Abbé Giudicelli complained that the only place they had to worship was “a messy very indecent room

that can barely hold twenty people.”60 That same year Governor Julien-Désiré Schmaltz (1771–1826) wrote: Neither Saint-Louis nor Gorée have a church at the moment; and it would be suitable to build one, at least in the capital. The house that once served [as a church], after being abandoned during the occupation of the English, fell into ruins and the land on which it was built has been sold … The limited funds allocated to Senegal will not allow me to think about solving this problem … Catholic inhabitants of Saint-Louis, who are generally pious, willingly contribute to the construction of a church, and supply part of the masonry; but the Government should provide wood and ironwork and bear part of the costs of the work force.61 On 19 March 1819 a group of nuns with the Congregation of Saint-Joseph de Cluny, recently founded by Anne-Marie Javouhey (1779–1851), arrived in Saint-Louis. This order was one of the chief colonial educational and missionary orders of the Bourbon Restoration with early bases in Île Bourbon (1816), Guiana (Cayenne and Mana, 1822), and Martinique (1824).62 The six nuns, led by Rosalie Javouhey, the founder’s sister, discovered the extant chapel being used as a storehouse and attended the first Mass under Abbé Terrasse on 25 March 1819 in a hospital ward, later clearing out part of their school for the purpose.63 An 1820 report lamented that “it is very unfortunate that this colony has gone so long without spiritual help … there is no chapel in Saint-Louis; to this day services are held in a private room: it is not suitable in any respect. It should be possible to link the construction of a hospital to that of a chapel.”64 Abbé Baradère, the new préfet apostolique, opened a public subscription on 20 June 1821 to build a church but disagreements about the cost of paying the joiners, carpenters, and masons prevented anything being done until 18 February 1826. On that date Governor Jacques-François Roger (1787–1849) gave the new Préfet Abbé Girardon 50,000 francs toward the church and decided upon its present

site, just south of the fort and its gardens.65 Royal engineer Marie-Philippe Deroisin (1797–1828) presented the definitive project for the brick church on 18 August, evaluated at 100,007 francs. The groundbreaking ceremony took place on 11 February 1827 to acclamations of “Vive le Roi!” and on 28 August 1828 it hosted the consecration mass (fig. 15.26).66 However Nicolas-Georges Courtois had submitted an earlier project for the new church the same year as his 1820 project for the new étage for Government House (figs. 13.19, 15.24). Given its stylistic affinities with the governor’s residence it may have been conceived as a pendant, uniting church and state in a single, architecturally unified compound similar to the government quarter planned for 1770s Pointe-à-Pitre, which however had no church (see chapter 13). In fact it is possible that this was the project for which Baradère had originally been raising money. A dodecagonal church, it is only the second centralized church to be proposed in any colony, together with the equally unsuccessful bid for a church en rotonde in Pointe-à-Pitre in 1806 (see chapter 6).67 The project has four entrances, the principal one with a four-pier Doric portico with a triangular pediment and the back one with stairs to the roof and belfry, all accessible by small staircases. The piers all exhibit strong entasis like those of Courtois’s Hospital project of 1821 (fig. 13.20), and a wide entablature runs around the roofline of the ground floor, crowned with a low balustrade. The interior has a wide outer aisle separated from an inner ring by twelve Doric piers and a square inner sanctuary raised on three steps enclosed by four more piers. The church would have been very dark as there are no windows on the ground floor: the only light comes from twelve jalousies in arched openings in the clerestory over the inner aisle and sanctuary. Courtois was realistic enough to know that work teams in Saint-Louis would not be capable of vaults – let alone a dome – so the ceiling of the central part of the church is flat. Inside the clerestory is a latticed balustrade, and Courtois has placed the bell-tower at the top of the cupola, an octagonal belfry with jalousies and a bellshaped cap.

Italianate Church Facades, Eclecticism, and Neoclassicism 433

15.24 Nicolas-Georges Courtois, Project for a Chapel, ink and colours on paper, 1820. This project for a church at Saint-Louis (Senegal) is one of only two designs for a centralized church in the French Atlantic Empire, the other for Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 19 DFC 180B .

Courtois seems to have been inspired by a series of centralized structures from the decade of the Revolution and afterward that combined Greek and late Renaissance Italian prototypes, in particular the work of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, the likely source of Courtois’s Paestum-inspired piers. Ledoux’s Paris Barrières, based on circular temples from antiquity and Palladian villas, may have been a model for the Saint-Louis project.68 The Rotonde de la Villette (1785–89) is closest to Courtois’s church even though it consists of a circular space within a square instead of two nesting dodecagons (fig. 15.25). Courtois’s and Ledoux’s structures each have four entrances that form two axes meeting at the centre (in Ledoux’s version three of them are Doric

434

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

porticoes with triangular pediments resting on baseless piers with a pronounced entasis), and both have a high entablature on top of the ground floor. Both buildings also use arched openings on the upper storey (an arcade formed of serliana motifs in the case of the Rotonde de la Villette). Most importantly, neither building has a dome. The closest ecclesiastical precedent to Courtois’s design is the oval church of Saint-Pierre Saint-Paul at Courbevoie (1790–93) in Paris’s western suburbs, a rare Revolution-era church by Ledoux’s pupil Louis Le Masson (1743–1826), but it is not similar enough to have served as a model for the engineer architect.69 Courtois may also have intended to recall the round churches of early medieval Europe, built in imitation of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem by pilgrims and crusaders returning from the Levant in the fourth to twelfth centuries, two prominent examples of which are the church of Saint-Bonnet of Saint-Bonnetla-Rivière (Aquitaine) from the eleventh century and Saint-Étienne in Neuvy-Saint-Sépulchre (Centre-Val de Loire), from the twelfth. Both churches are formed

15.25 Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Rotunde de la Villette, Paris, 1785–89.

of a lower outer ring and an inner sanctuary – both circular – with a sloping roof on the outer ring and a conical one over the central one.70 The most important feature is the location of the altar directly under the cupola so that the congregation can circumnavigate it, just as Courtois has done in his project. Given SaintLouis’s history of antagonism with an increasingly powerful Islamic community on the mainland – as with the militant Christian iconography of Louis Moreau de Chambonneau’s 1694 drawing of Fort Saint-Louis – I do not think it is too much of a stretch to say that Courtois returned to a crusader-era model intentionally (fig. 10.13). What makes it interesting, however, is that he clothes it in the architectural language of modernism and improvement, using shade to keep the interior cool and jalousies for air circulation – the same techniques he used for Government House and the new hospital. Deroisin’s 1826 project, constructed in 1827–28, opts for a more practical, rectangular-nave structure based on one of two possible sources (fig. 15.26). The first is a model church facade from Jean-François de Neufforge’s

1757 neoclassical manifesto Recueil élémentaire d’architecture, entitled “Plan and Elevation of the arrangement of a Church Portal composed of a Corinthian giant order containing three sorts of intercolumniation.”71 Although Deroisin’s facade is simpler – mostly in the reduction of ornament, the switch to Doric, the removal of the pyramidal crowning devices, and the transformation of columns into piers – the tall facade with its paired rectangular towers, narrow portico, giant order, and heavy entablature does look a lot like Neufforge’s model. Another potential model was the Cathédrale Saint-Vincent (1808–18), founded by Napoleon I at Mâcon, Burgundy (fig. 15.27), which has a strikingly similar arrangement of Doric pilasters on the tower bases, and belfries with nearly identical profiles and similar arched openings with imposts.72 The portico of the Saint-Louis church differs from both of these prototypes: instead of four Corinthian or Ionic columns it features a narrow projecting porch, reduced to two piers, with pronounced entasis in the manner of Courtois, and it has a small, broken pediment above. The Saint-Louis church is a three-aisled structure

Italianate Church Facades, Eclecticism, and Neoclassicism 435

15.26 (left) Marie-Philippe Deroisin, Church of Saint-Louis, SaintLouis (Senegal), designed 1826, built 1827–28. 15.27 (right) Cathédrale Saint-Vincent de Mâcon, Burgundy, 1808– 18. Photo courtesy of MOSSOT .

divided by two arcades of piers and with a semicircular apse. It has a flat, corrugated roof, and a metal clerestory level fitted into the arcade at the springing of the arches. The Church of Saint-Charles Borromée in Île de Gorée (1828–30), the last of a long line of chapels on the island going back to the first Portuguese church in 1481, is a more Spartan structure but it also employs Courtois’s trademark Doric pier (fig. 15.28). The earliest French settlement on Gorée had a free-standing square chapel just to the south of Fort Saint-François

436

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

(first depicted on a 1688 map), and in 1745 the chapel was located at the northern end of a row of buildings including the hospital and a school.73 The first elevations of the chapel date from the building’s re-consecration under the Recollects in 1765 as the Church of SaintLouis just after Gorée became colonial Senegal’s capital and the seat of the Apostolic Prefecture, giving more legitimacy to what had essentially been a company factory chapel.74 However the building did not amount to much: a rectangular stone structure with a thatched roof on wooden beams, it had three windows on each side of the nave, a classical facade with pilasters on the sides and a triangular pediment, and it was surrounded by a narrow terrace three steps up from the ground.75 We get an idea of both its structure and wretched condition from a report by Armény de Paradis in 1767: “As for the

Church, it is cracked in both gables where foundations are missing … The rest of the masonry is good shape … The niches in the masonry for supporting the 19 beams that hold up the floor are absolutely rotted through by the rain which for over thirteen years has passed through the straw roof that covers it.”76 Although, as we have seen, the church was burned in 1799, it is still labelled “église” in a map of 1802; nevertheless by 1819 Abbé Tabaudo was saying Mass in a rented room.77 In 1827 the administration approved the construction of a new church in Gorée at the end of an allée planted next to the garden and in front of the old governor’s mansion. The first stone was laid in November 1828, a public subscription was raised in 1829, and that same year the governor sent a letter to the minister of the

marine asking for three altars and attached four designs by an engineer named Dervise, who was probably the church’s architect.78 Finished in 1830 and dedicated to Saint-Charles-Borromée in honour of King Charles X, the church was built mostly from stone from the nearby Île de la Madeleine and Bargny. A rectangular, flatroofed structure, it has three aisles separated by Doric piers supporting an entablature rather than an arcade and clerestory as at Saint-Louis, and also lacks the former’s apse. The church has seven arched windows on each side and is preceded by a long Doric portico on six piers supporting an entablature and parapet, with a 15.28 Dervise, Church of Saint-Charles-Borromée, Île de Gorée (Senegal), 1828–30.

Italianate Church Facades, Eclecticism, and Neoclassicism 437

15.29 Nicolas-Jacques-Antoine Vestier, Church of Saint-Étienne, Meslay-le-Vidame, Beauce, 1810–16. The narrow tower, at the far end, cannot be seen in this view.

single rectangular door, a short arched window above it, and two small lunette windows on the sides. Directly above the centre of the porch is a plain, tall, rectangular clock tower. A second, shorter tower is located at the back just over the sacristy door. This shorter tower resembles those of the Saint-Louis church, with arched belfry openings, prominent imposts connected to a string course, and a cornice on top. The church sits on a high socle, and at the corners the walls are reinforced by a massive engaged pier on a correspondingly high plinth. Saint-Charles-Borromée brings to mind another rare Napoleonic-era church in a small village outside Chartres called Meslay-le-Vidame (fig. 15.29), where a follower of Ledoux named Nicolas-Jacques-Antoine Vestier (1765–1816) built the rectangular, Greektemple-style church of Saint-Étienne (1810–16) which

438

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

Chantal Bouchon characterizes as a “veritable replica of Paestum, surprising in a village in Beauce!”79 Like the Gorée church it sits on a socle, has a portico of Doric piers at the front with pronounced entasis, flat, unadorned side walls with windows, and a sole central rectangular doorway. At Meslay-le-Vidame the high, plain, rectangular tower is at the back of the church over a similarly plain sacristy door rather than the front as at Gorée; it also has a pediment with a lunette window and a pitched roof, but otherwise the two are like twins. I doubt that Dervise even knew about this church; however Saint-Charles Borromée clearly demonstrates the wide popularity of Ledoux’s style as a way of projecting French identity and empire in a new century. These projects by Courtois, Deroisin, and Dervise are really the last of an era in which aesthetics, balance, and classical harmony were still considered of paramount importance. The increasingly industrial world of post1830 colonialism, with its emphasis on affordability, pre-manufactured buildings, and practical living, had little room for such artistic niceties.

16

The Architecture of the Land: Vernacular Traditions

much of thiS book haS been about the large-scale public and semi-public architectural projects of French empire builders in the Americas and West Africa. It has looked at cities in the swamp, gardens in the jungle, and palaces and churches in the outback envisioned in France or in the colonies, often inspired by engraved models, designed by the king’s engineers or civilian architects, and built mostly by slaves, soldiers, and engagés. Many of these projects never saw the light of day and few survive of the ones that did. Most were commissioned by the state while others were contracted by ambitious religious orders and moneyed private clients. The various protagonists of this imperial project were driven by a stubborn and ultimately unsuccessful desire to spread the gloire du roi, the pré carré, and the Catholic Church in places where France had no right to be: places where French modes of building and culture could not exist without immediate and lasting changes wrought by climates and populations that refused to fit into that picture of a transplanted France. Far from representing what the average French person at home would have recognized as French culture and values, it was an enterprise founded upon forced labour, rapaciousness, and an inhumanity toward fellow human beings that would have appalled most people in the metropole.1 Furthermore, the astonishing naiveté and negligence of these empire builders regularly

courted failure and disaster, of which l’Affaire de Kourou was merely the most catastrophic. This has been a book about the biggest projects and most overt manifestations of French ideology about which we have the most documents. However there was another kind of architecture built by the people discussed in chapters 4 to 6 that adapted more thoroughly to local conditions, whether climatic or cultural, in the latter case even incorporating nonFrench forms and developing new ones unique to the region. This vernacular tradition is much harder to study because unlike the larger-scale projects its buildings are rarely relatable to archival documents, plans, and elevations – or to architects’ names. Therefore, rather than attempting a lopsided overview of vernacular architecture based on scholarship that remains uneven (see chapter 1), this chapter will highlight the three autochthonous forms that relate most closely to the projects in the rest of this book – and to the kinds of sources used to reconstruct them. These structures are the slave hut, the open gallery, and the late eighteenthcentury Goréen house. As it happens, the French open gallery seems to have emerged first in church and government commissions, only afterward appearing in domestic architecture, and even the Goréen house, the most profoundly acculturative architectural tradition in the French Atlantic Empire, descended partly from state-sponsored projects in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The theme of African influence in particular dominates this chapter. The “Black Hand” in French American Architecture and the Slave Hut The question of the contribution of African culture to the built environment of the French Americas is one of the most vexing in the field.2 We have seen how much of the architecture of the French Empire was built by African slaves and their descendants. Does it not follow that they would incorporate traditions they knew in West and Central Africa into the architecture they built for their new masters? This issue has long occupied

440

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

scholars of Brazilian baroque, some of whom maintain that what they term the “black hand” made a visible impact on sculpture made by slaves and free people of colour in the churches of the northeast, even speaking of a “Black baroque.” African identity is palpably revealed in dark-skinned Madonnas, cherubs, and black saints such as São Elesbão in the churches of Afro-Brazilian confraternities in Bahia and Pernambuco– not to mention the oratórios, or small household shrines containing carvings of saints dedicated to African deities (orixas) from the Candomblé faith (a relative of Haitian Vodou).3 But some scholars have claimed, more controversially, to see African physiognomic features in the work of free sculptors of colour, especially the mixedrace Minas Gerais artist Antônio Francisco Lisboa (Aleijadinho, 1730–1814). These views are now being challenged as we understand more about the environment of Lisboa’s apprenticeship, which was exclusively with white relatives and associates.4 In Spanish territories, notably New Spain and Peru, African and mixedrace sculptors, retablo makers, and painters were responsible for some of the most important decorative interiors in the realm, most notably the sacristy murals at the cathedral of Mexico City by the mixed-race painter Juan Correa (1689), but again they are executed in a mainstream colonial style and have not been successfully tied to African forms.5 Scholars of vernacular architecture in the former French colonies have debated the same question, some maintaining that enslaved Africans could never have been able to introduce African architectural traditions into the built environment and others claiming to be able to trace certain forms and principles of African architecture in slave dwellings, including ways of making walls and roofs, ground plans, and less-definable African characteristics or value systems deduced from the ways people lived in them. This latter theory builds on Melville Herskovits’s consideration of African influences in the Americas as occurring along a “scale of intensity” which he divides into categories of “retentions,” which are “completely African, or almost so” (primarily in maroon communities) and

“reinterpretations,” whereby African forms are substituted for European equivalents while preserving their core values.6 All of these approaches are skeptical about the survival of “pure” African forms in the Americas – indeed, the idea of “pure style” in African art itself is a problematic term as I will explore later on in this chapter. I will briefly consider these two points of view before looking at how they apply to the slave hut. The first theory is based on the belief that as coerced workers under constant supervision Africans could not have diverged from the architectural models and methods that were imposed upon them. Although scholars have long acknowledged that slaves introduced their languages, religions, music, dance, philosophy, designs for agricultural tools, gardening methods, and other traits to the Americas, this hypothesis holds that slaves were not at liberty to make structural or aesthetic decisions when building in the Americas, at least outside maroon communities.7 Another factor inhibiting the transferral of African styles to the Americas is that slaves often represented a mixture of ethnicities that hampered cultural translations of the sort which Europeans could achieve thanks to tightly knit communities based on shared places of origin (e.g., Normandy, Limoges). John Thornton writes: Lacking the ethnic and cultural specificity necessary to maintain or recreate their African culture in the Americas, the slaves necessarily had to form a new culture. To be sure, this new culture had African roots, from a sort of least common denominator of the many and varied African cultures that served as its building blocks, but it was built in a context in which elements of the European culture served as linking materials. Moreover, not only was European culture pervasive in the slave society, but it was much more homogeneous than the various African cultures, giving it a coherence that the Africans lacked. The resulting mixture was distinctly European and Euro-American oriented, with the African elements giving it flavor rather than substance.8

The “distinctly European and Euro-American” culture further dominated the architectural production of African slaves because of the way they were trained: not in Africa but in the Americas, in workshops in the towns and plantations run by whites and gens de couleur, as we have seen in chapters 4 to 6. Herskovits was also dubious about any surviving aspects of what he called “African art” or aesthetics in a colonial or plantation context, which he maintained was “understandable when the life of the slave, which permitted little leisure and offered slight stimulus for the production of art in the aboriginal African style, or, indeed in any other style is recalled.”9 More recently, writing about the houses of the free people of colour in Jamaica, Louis Nelson has criticized the very idea that we should evaluate African American structures according to their degree of Africanness. He rejects the “persistent assertion that the value of early African American material expressions resides in their capacity to manifest African cultural survivals,” warning against the acceptance of an “immutable cultural determinism that assumes buildings will naturally emulate deeply embedded cultural structures.”10 Instead he asserts that we should recognize them as “extraordinary examples of appropriation by a disenfranchised margin of the resources of the majority,” a creative adaptation to climate and resources. Others have sought traces of African architectural forms and techniques that are analogous to those used in Europe and therefore imperceptible to those unfamiliar with West African vernacular traditions (i.e., to European colonists). John Vlach, in a study of mid-nineteenth-century “shotgun houses” of New Orleans, traced the form back to the Yoruba “bush house” from the Bight of Benin via a rural Haitian type called the “ti kay” (“little house” in Kreyol), which developed in maroon communities independent of French control. Both forms are two-roomed rectangular buildings with a gable front formed of a parlour leading to a bedroom, the Yoruba form serving as a “basic module for the development of other building types.”11 In some parts of coastal West Africa such structures are

Vernacular Traditions

441

preceded by porches on posts protected by an extension of the thatching called in Mandinka jimbwaw (pavilion or gallery), as with the kombet, or family dwelling unit in compounds in Senegal and the Guinea Coast described in the 1720s by Jean-Baptiste Labat: “[b]efore the entry they generally make a porch or vestibule, open on all sides, where they receive their visits, dine, and transact their business.”12 The Haitian variety probably developed among maroon communities, combining African forms with certain Arawak practices. Although no ti kay houses survive from the French regime, Jay Edwards maintains that the form is first seen in a painting of Les Cayes by a French sailor from ca. 1729 that shows a scattering of rectangular buildings along the coast, some gable-ended and others with a hip roof; nevertheless the difference in roof types and the impossibility of determining their ground plans 16.1 (left) West African style basketry walls in a contemporary rural house, Milot, Haiti. The technique uses a wattle-and-daub filling on a framework of sticks anchored by regular posts. 16.2 (right) A case créole or kaz antiyé in Grand-Bourg, MarieGalante (Guadeloupe), nineteenth or early twentieth century.

442

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

makes me more skeptical.13 Edwards agrees in essence with Vlach’s thesis but stresses that the ti kay was “not precisely like the houses of the Yoruba and other West Africans,” only that it shared a “spatial grammar” which allowed for an African “social dynamic” to persevere: thus the question is more about how people used their houses than what they looked like.14 But he concedes elsewhere that African carpenters “not formally trained in French carpentry” used West African techniques in French and post-French Upper Louisiana, substituting the European tradition with an analogous West African one, such as wattling, in which a basketry-like woven lattice of sticks or bamboo was anchored between wall posts, plastered on either side with mud and other substances, and coated with lime plaster.15 Walls constructed with wattled panels are still made in rural Haiti today (fig. 16.1). Finally, Edwards suggests that the tradition of detached kitchens in the French West Indies and French and post-French Louisiana also derive from a West African custom of keeping the kitchen separate from the living quarters.16 This debate is particularly acute concerning plantation dwellings, known as slave huts or cases à nègres.

This is not an unreasonable assumption since these homes are acknowledged as the primary locus for cultural survivals of other kinds, “inasmuch as slaves lived in family units in small huts and were encouraged to produce much of their own sustenance on provisionground farms.”17 But we face a major challenge as virtually no slave houses survive from this period: in fact the only vestiges are some eighteenth-century stone foundations at the Habitation Dion in Haiti, three buildings of seven cells each measuring 4.5 × 4.5 metres with doorways opening onto a courtyard.18 Nevertheless scholars persist in recognizing the French-regime slave huts as the ancestors of today’s “creole hut” (case créole in French, kaz antiyé in Kreyol), modest late nineteenth- and twentieth-century rectangular houses that in reality derive from a completely different political and racial environment (fig. 16.2). Jacques de Cauna for instance believes that these modern structures “give a good idea” of what the eighteenth-century predecessors looked like.19 But Nelson has rightly rejected this approach, noting that “such substitutions wrongly presume a stability of cultural practice that anthropology has resoundingly demonstrated to be untenable.”20 Eighteenth-century descriptions of colonial slave huts show that they were mostly rectangular and very simple indeed. Labat described them in the 1720s as being wattle-and-daub structures on a framework of reeds thatched with “cane tops, reeds or palm leaves,” measuring about 30 feet long by 20 feet wide and divided in half if occupied by more than one family.21 They were entered via a single door on the gable end (in the case of a two-family dwelling a door on each end) and had only a single window, also located on the gable end. Labat notes that slaves “take great care that their huts are well sealed” and that “the rafters and covering often come down to the ground, and create little sheds next to the huts where their pigs and fowl can take shelter.” Some have a separate hut for the kitchen but most have the kitchen inside the hut, “where they can thus keep the fire all night. This is what always makes their huts so smoky.”

Perhaps the most noteworthy feature of the slave hut then is this concern for keeping the interior dark and “sealed.” Du Tertre already noted this feature in 1667, remarking that the inhabitants “enclose [their houses] with huge stakes that hold each other up, without using reeds the way the French, who like to have a little air, do; so that their huts are closed up like boxes.”22 A study of the Habitation Fleuriau in Saint-Domingue (constructed 1753) corroborates these descriptions by Labat and Du Tertre. It concluded that of the sixty huts on the property those of the agricultural workers were made of poles planted in the ground with mud and plaster filling and a thatched roof of cane and commissioned by the plantation carpenters at the lowest cost, whereas the skilled workers such as builders were housed in wooden huts with three separate rooms inside.23 There is no doubt that slave huts were worth a pittance: a 1785 inventory of a plantation near Marmelade (SaintDomingue) evaluated the property’s “cazes a negres” at 150–600 livres each, and a register of a plantation in Pointe des Nègres (Martinique) evaluated six “cases à negres” at a total of 360 livres (by comparison a good mule went for 800–900 livres).24 Slave huts were usually grouped closely together and downhill from the master’s house for greater control and surveillance, either haphazardly, as in the habitation of Sieur Banchereau at Le Carbet, Martinique (1726), where they were arranged in a jumble across the river from the main plantation (fig. 16.3); around a courtyard in a separate sector within view of the master’s house, as at Chouachas Concession on the Mississippi (also 1726); or laid down in neat rows like a military barracks as at the Habitation Fleuriau with thirty-five cases arranged in three rows, their entrances facing the Great House.25 These quarters, like the segregated neighbourhoods in cities (e.g., Cap-François), were sometimes called “Petite Guinée.”26 Some plantations, like that of Jean Testas in Guadeloupe, inventoried in 1783, had a larger dormitory hut for “new negroes,” made of wood with six bedrooms all on one level surrounded by galleries, in addition to thirty-four individual huts.27 The slaves used the spaces between

Vernacular Traditions

443

the cases à nègres for domestic animals and a kitchen garden, and they were given one day a week to work them – usually, but not exclusively, on Sundays – as at the Plantation of Petit-Anse (Saint-Domingue), which noted in its account books for Friday, 13 March 1789, that the overseer “gave the workday to the Negroes to work at their homes.”28 Scholarly efforts to link the colonial slave hut to African forms have focused on features common to traditional West African houses and those of the Boni maroon communities from Suriname (now resident in French Guiana), notably the gable-end entrance, the use of solid shutters instead of jalousies, and the general desire to keep the interior dark and unventilated.29 Nevertheless, Jack Berthelot and Martine Gaumé concede that there is nothing “exclusively African” about any of these features.”30 Jean-Pierre Sainton goes further, asking how there can be an “act of architectural creation” or a “cultural syncretism” in a situation of total control of the master over the slave: The negro had no initiative in the building of this hut: he did not choose the location, the dimensions, the materials, or the design. Everything was ordered and directed by the commander who “installed” the slaves according to precise rules. The relationship between the slave and his “home” deserves fuller description. He did not have his “own” place, the master or commander could come in at any time to wake him up, or check on the state of the hut; he didn’t live there, but only slept there … we can see the slave dwelling as inextricably bound up in the coercive system of slavery. In the context of such a relationship, it is doubtful that the slave hut would have retained much of the influence of African dwelling.31

16.3 (opposite) Plan of the plantation of Sieur Banchereau at Le Carbet, Martinique, 1726. The slave huts, or cases à negres, are to the left of the river. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), F 3 288 37.

Sainton’s hypothesis is further supported by the common practice in the West Indies of using modular slave houses: they were made somewhere else and constructed on site, sometimes with methods derived from ship carpentry (such as the use of pegs and mortise and tenon joints).32 Furthermore, Thornton considers it unlikely that skilled African builders capable of transmitting techniques from West Africa to the Americas would have been allowed out of Africa in the first place as they were “often valued by their patrons and might avoid Atlantic enslavement even if captured, for their patrons might redeem them.”33 Others believe that Thornton’s theory is not sustainable, that slave raiders took whole villages at a time and were more interested in capturing lucrative able-bodied men than in differentiating between skilled and unskilled labourers.34 Every village would have had builders capable of erecting the vernacular dwellings of their part of West Africa (figs. 16.29, 16.32), and such people were almost certainly shipped to the Americas, where they could conceivably have applied those skills to maroon houses. But they would not have had the same freedom in building plantation huts – not to mention larger projects – since they would have been supervised by carpenters trained in the colonial workshops. Thus at most the Frenchregime slave hut may have maintained aspects of the fenestration, building techniques, and materials used by West African builders, and it certainly provided a space for the continuation of traditional ways of life that were sometimes reflected in the architecture (such as the separate kitchen and the desire to keep dwellings dark), but it was built in a way that assimilated to colonial forms (Herskovits’s “reinterpretations”). This rule even holds true for one of the most remarkable buildings in the annals of Antillean slavery and the only surviving pre-1830 structure built by slaves voluntarily and for themselves. The tiny chapel in Pontaléry (Martinique), dedicated to the Vierge Libératrice (Virgin Liberator), now the Chapelle Saint-Joseph, was constructed in 1802 with proceeds from the slaves’ market gardens (fig. 16.4).35 It is difficult to determine how much of the original fabric survives, since it was

Vernacular Traditions

445

16.4 Abbé Pierre-René Champroux and others, Chapelle de la Vierge Libératrice (now Saint-Joseph), Pontaléry, Le Robert (Martinique), 1802, restored 1894.

renovated in 1894; however there is no reason to suppose that the basic U-shape, with a pair of arched windows on each wall and a simple arched doorway, does not reflect the plan of the original chapel, which was described as looking like a country hearth. The shrine was built by slaves from the Pointe Royale plantation at their own request and with the support of Abbé PierreRené Champroux, the proudly revolutionary first curate of the parish, and it was he who chose the subversive

446

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

dedication.36 The plantation owners and another priest lodged an official complaint against Champroux two months after the dedication, and Champroux responded in a letter to First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte from exile in Paris in 1803 in which he described the chapel as “a chapel of six square feet in the shape of a small country oven … in imitation of several oratories similarly established in the Colony” and that “this small chapel, built eight months before the return of Martinique, engaged the devotion of the Negroes to the Holy Virgin without alarming the Government which considered it rather as a happy token of tranquillity that the Negroes turned their thoughts to religion! The

inscription (Supporter of slaves, pray for us) that was affixed to the small oratory, was not suspected of impropriety, so perfect was the safety of inhabitants of the colony.”37 Although it might be tempting to trace this building’s form to an African precedent, Champroux makes clear elsewhere in his letter that he was both the author of the inscription and the architect of the church.38 Nevertheless it is intriguing that the priest refers to “several oratories” of this nature in the colony. Perhaps forms of syncretic Catholicism manifesting itself in small shrines like Brazilian oratórios prospered in small chapels in the countryside in the years in which the Revolution gave hope of eventual emancipation. Because none of them exist today we will never know for certain.

The French Open Galerie It is in the search for the origins of the French exterior open gallery – usually called a “galerie” in documents – that scholars have proposed the most significant influences from Africa. However Africa is only part of the story in the quest for the derivation of a form that has caused a more protracted and impassioned debate than any other in the field. The reason that the galerie has been the source of such conjecture is that it was by far the most influential structural innovation of the French Atlantic Empire and one that enjoyed a long afterlife 16.5 John O’Hearne and others, General Hospital, Sydney, Australia, 1811. Repaired by Francis Greenway, 1820.

Vernacular Traditions

447

in public and civilian buildings in French and rival European colonies around the world. Even British and other Protestant colonies embraced this form whether in the West Indies (e.g,. Jacaranda House, Nassau, 1840s), Australia (General Hospital, Sydney, 1811), Asia (Flagstaff House, Hong Kong, 1846), and above all West Africa (Basel Missionary School, Accra, 1843). Indeed, the open gallery remains a favoured solution to the challenges of hot climates around the globe in our post-colonial age (figs. 16.5, 17.3).39 As with all hotly contested subjects it is best to be as specific as possible about our terms, particularly since trabeated (post-and-lintel) galleries appeared spontaneously in cultures around the world and throughout history, from ancient Crete and Mali to Japan and Teotihuacan. Commenting on the plethora of possible sources in West Africa alone Peter Mark remarked that “the attempt to establish specific historical origins for 16.6 Brother Gaspard du Molard, Jesuit Residence, Cayenne, garden facade, 1729. The contre-fiches can be best seen on the lower storey.

448

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

the veranda may … be pointless.”40 Colonial French open galleries – either truly open (volante) or enclosed with jalousies (entière or close en jalousie) – follow quite specific guidelines. First, although they can use posts, columns, or piers, they are never arcades: that is, they do not support arches but are surmounted by a horizontal lintel. Some form a single range at the front and/ or the back of the building, others turn around one or more corners to form an “L” or “U,” while others wrap around the entire building to form a peristyle. They can also appear inside a forecourt or courtyard, again on a single range or on all four to form a cloister. They can occupy one or two storeys, often contain exterior staircases, and frequently have enclosed corner rooms (cabinets) at one or both ends. French open galleries are associated with a variety of roof types that Edwards and Nicolas Kariouk have divided into three main “classes.”41 In “Class i ,” the most common, a single gallery sports a flat or sloping roof connected to the main building at the height of the wall plates or slightly lower (fig. 3.8). It differs from the ti kay type because the latter places the porch under an

16.7 House of Diego Colón, or Alcázar, in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, after 1510.

extension of the gable end of the roof. “Class ii ” buildings have a broken-pitch roof (hip or gable) formed originally by adding galleries with a lower-pitched roof onto an extant building, although this type was soon built de novo. The posts of the galleries support either extensions of the building’s main joists or the rafters directly (figs. 3.16, 16.6). The hip-roof category of Class ii is the roof discussed in chapter 3 as potentially deriving from Amerindian forms in Guiana. “Class iii ” has a single-pitch roofline (also either hip or gable) so that the rafters reach down from the ridge of the roof all the way to the gallery, which in turn supports either an extension of the building’s main joists or separate joists attached below the wall plates (fig. 17.3). In the French tropics open galleries serve both as an exterior corridor, giving direct access to most of the rooms of the house, and as living areas in their own right. There are also two varieties of supports in the French open gallery: wooden posts and columns or piers made of brick or stone. The squared wooden posts (poteaux) are by far the most common, used in the upper storey even when the rez-de-chaussée uses columns. Particularly

characteristic are the paired contre-fiches or aisseliers at the top of each post fixed by a mortice and tenon joint to form an inverse chevron (as in the ground floor of fig. 16.6).42 Where columns or piers are used they are primarily in the Doric order – because of their plainness scholars often refer to them as “Tuscan,” but I see no reason to apply too much Vitruvian fastidiousness since they generally lack other order-specific identifying features. There are various theories about the origins of the French colonial open galerie, with scholars tracing the form variously to Spanish America, West Africa, Brazil, and France. Leaving French prototypes until the end of my discussion I will treat these different hypotheses in chronological order according to the date of the proposed prototypes. Especially pervasive is the notion that the form derives from early Conquest-era Spanish models, specifically from the House of Diego Colón (Alcázar) in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic (after 1510; fig. 16.7) and similar buildings on the island such as the “Palacio” at the sugar plantation at Engombe (ca. 1530), both of which feature a two-storey

Vernacular Traditions

449

16.8 Peter Vogl and others, patio in the Jesuit residence, Calera de Tango, Chile, 1741–48. Zapatas are used on top of the posts to give the gallery the appearance of an arcade.

loggia sandwiched between enclosed sections called gabinetes (cabinets).43 This model soon spread to the mainland, notably with the Palacio Cortés in Cuernavaca, Mexico (1523–28) and the Casa del Fundador in Tunja, Colombia (begun 1540).44 This theory seems convincing since Spain was the dominant European culture in the Americas at the time and Santo Domingo later shared the Island of Hispaniola with French SaintDomingue. In fact Christophe Charlerly demonstrates that their ground plans were a prototype for a kind of three-roomed plantation house, the “maison de maître à trois pièces en enfilade,” which appeared throughout the French Circum-Caribbean and in Cuba; furthermore Edwards shows that the cabinets that often flank open galleries in French American structures were derived from the Spanish gabinete.45 However this influence does not extend to the galleries themselves: the Santo Domingo loggias are stone arcades in the manner of Renaissance villas such as Jacopo Sansovino’s Villa Garzoni in Pontecasale

450

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

(1526) – very different from a trabeated open gallery, even one composed of columns.46 In general Iberoamerica favoured arcades over galleries, often stocky and primarily of stone or brick, especially in the first 150 years of conquest. They appeared on the joined facades of houses in town squares, usually on the ground floor, as at the Plaza de Santo Domingo, Mexico City (sixteenth century) or the Plaza de Armas in Cuzco (sixteenth–seventeenth century; fig. 9.2).47 Even when they took the form of colonnades their capitals usually supported elongated, triangular wooden structures called zapatas (an Islamic or mudéjar tradition imported from Andalusia) that made them look like arcades (fig. 16.8).48 Single-storey wooden galleries, usually featuring zapatas, were particularly typical of the Cono Sur (southern Brazil, Paraguay, and present-day Argentina) as we will soon see.49 Spanish stone arcades did have an immediate impact on Jamaica, which was seized from the Spanish in 1655 and had commercial ties with Havana. In Jamaica these forms, known as “piazzas”

and common in city streets and houses by the mideighteenth century, generally took the form of stone arcades or colonnade porches (sometimes they were wooden but made to resemble classical columns), sometimes with an enclosed upper storey, and they have also been traced to an English structure called a “walk,” a classical stone colonnade positioned like a porch in front of country houses (see the piazzas fronting the houses in fig. 9.3).50 However the double wraparound galleries typical of late eighteenth-century Jamaica probably reflected French influence in their general layout – despite their Palladian pretensions. The second theory, proposed by Edwards and Mark, is that the French open gallery derives from West African architecture via the seventeenth-century Portuguese sugar plantation houses in Pernambuco (Brazil), the appearance of which was recorded by painters Frans Post (1612–1680) and Albert Eckhout (ca. 1607–1665/6) during the time when the Captaincy was briefly a Dutch colony (1630–54).51 Mark identified a West African dwelling type in Upper Guinea known as a “Portuguese-style house” (maison à la portugaise), which was rectangular, built of sun-dried clay or earth, whitewashed with clay or lime, and featured a vestibule or open gallery in front. Developed by mixed-race Luso-Portuguese traders, the Portuguese-style house was in fact the product of a complex blending of cultures, incorporating pre-European African forms and techniques, notably the open galleries that he associates with Muslim Manding traders of Western Sudanese origin living in the Gambia.52 First described in a 1625 publication by a Portuguese who had visited the Manding town of Casão four decades earlier, the houses were fronted by what he called a poial (stoop), which Mark interprets as a covered open gallery, citing the hot climate as evidence. Sieur Jajolet de la Courbe left one of the earliest descriptions of a Portuguese-style house south of the Gambia in 1685 that clearly notes “a small vestibule (petit vestibule) in front of the entry where we were seated upon mats, in the fresh air.”53 Thomas Astley, summarizing accounts of visits by Labat and Francis Moore from the 1720s and ’30s, confirmed

that Portuguese-style houses always had “a porch open on every side, where they receive visits, eat … and do all their business.”54 Nevertheless, as Marks acknowledges, our knowledge of what these buildings actually looked like must remain circumstantial since none survive before 1850, and what we know is based on imprecise European descriptions and equally ambiguous details in engravings.55 Mark believes that the West African Portuguese-style house model made a profound impression upon the plantation buildings of Portuguese and Dutch Pernambuco, as recorded by Post and Eckhout during their seven-year residency there from 1637 to 1644.56 Although most of the Post paintings were executed in Holland decades after his return, the architectural details seem accurate enough to be trustworthy. The link between West Africa and Brazil was close under both the Portuguese and Dutch, since both powers maintained castles and forts on the West African coast to supply slaves for the sugar plantations in Brazil, notably the Portuguese castle of Elmina (1482) in presentday Ghana, seized by the Dutch in 1637 (fig. 12.8).57 This steady trade between the continents allowed for a transferral of people with knowledge of West African architectural traditions – slaves, Luso-African traders, or what we might call Portuguese “old Africa hands” – who either reconstructed what they knew in Guinea or created new forms independently once they got to Brazil.58 Mark contends that the influence of the “Portuguese-style” dwelling can be found on large plantation houses (casas grandes), smaller dwellings, and slave huts, the latter two “clearly built by Africans.”59 According to Edwards these forms were then broadcast throughout the French West Indies when Portugal reconquered Pernambuco in 1654 and hundreds of expelled Sephardic Jewish sugar plantation experts were welcomed into Guadeloupe and Martinique for their knowledge of the sugar industry.60 Edwards maintains that the open gallery was inextricably associated with the sugar industry. Let us first examine the visual evidence for these claims and then the chronology. The galleried buildings

Vernacular Traditions

451

depicted in the Dutch paintings and an engraving after Post take a variety of forms. The earliest, by Eckhout (1641), shows a casa grande with galleries (known in Brazil as alpendres) on both floors, the lower one enclosed in jalousies formed of narrowly spaced slats and the upper one open with squared wooden posts directly supporting that side of the hip roof under narrow eaves.61 There is an Iberian-style gabinete on at least one end. The 1645–47 engraving shows another two-storey building with a narrower open balcony on the upper storey flanked by gabinetes.62 In this case the ground floor is a hypostyle structure (supported on parallel rows of piers), open on three sides like a traditional medieval market building, and the second 16.9 Frans Post, Landscape on the Rio Senhor de Engenho, Brazil (detail), 1670–80, oil on panel. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

452

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

storey extends past the lower one, resting on a series of corbel-like beams (vigas). It is like a house in a ca. 1670–80 painting by Post with a narrow balcony of squared wooden posts on the upper storey bookended by a gabinete and a wall that has the same roof and hypostyle open hall below (fig. 16.9). In this case the posts in the lower storey rest on zapatas (the top of the upper-storey posts, as in the other depictions, are hidden by the eaves). An earlier (1652) painting by Post shows an l -shaped house with an alpendre of squared posts on zapatas on a section of the ground floor and a narrower upper gallery on squared posts meeting the hip roof, flanked by a gabinete on the right and the enclosed left wing (fig. 16.10). Finally there is the slave dwelling painted by Post in 1656 that somewhat resembles a ti kay in that the gable end of the thatched roof faces forward, but the small porch is more like

16.10 Frans Post, Landscape in Brazil (detail), signed and dated “F. Post 1652,” oil on canvas. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

a lean-to with a horizontally sloping thatched roof.63 Other houses have upper-storey galleries raised on widely spaced poles with a combination of posts and a balustrade upstairs (sometimes without the posts). One substantial galleried building not mentioned by Mark or Edwards is a church in a 1675–80 painting by Post that has a double-pitch hip roof, side galleries on posts with wooden balustrades, and a pair of “giant order” poles in front of the two-storey facade that reach up to the main roofline (fig. 16.11). Except perhaps for the slave house, all of these buildings are characteristic of early Iberian architecture in South America, using forms that can be traced back to

the beginning of the century and probably earlier. The church in figure 16.11 is a standard early mission prototype developed by the Jesuits in Paraguay in 1610–41 – and probably by their Franciscan predecessors as early as 1575 – that is known from contemporary descriptions and a photograph of the now-destroyed 1694 Jesuit church at San Ignacio Guazú.64 Essentially giant umbrellas on massive wooden poles, they were ideal for accommodating formidable numbers of new converts, and in fact the roof and posts were often the first part to be built. Although much later (1755), the church of San Buenaventura in Yaguarón in Paraguay is the best surviving example of this type.65 The dwellings depicted in the Dutch paintings and engraving also relate to local traditions probably going back to the 1620s, in particular the so-called casas bandeiristas, country houses

Vernacular Traditions

453

16.11 Frans Post, Brazilian Village (detail), 1675–80, oil on panel. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

built by slave raiders in the São Paulo outback who made a living by capturing Guaraní slaves from Paraguay.66 These buildings – low-lying, rectangular, and with hip roofs – featured an alpendre gallery flanked by gabinetes.67 Aracy Amaral shows that the form originated in medieval Spain, from where it spread to the precise regions of the Cono Sur encountered by the bandits on their raids. The oldest surviving casa bandeirista is the Sítio Santo Antônio (ca. 1640) in São Roque (Sao Paulo State), a typical tripartite facade with an alpendre on five squared wooden posts (fig. 16.12).68 Therefore, although Mark’s and Edward’s theory seems quite plausible on the surface it is likelier that

454

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

the housing types depicted in the Dutch paintings and engraving are autochthonous forms derived from Spanish precedents originating in the south. Spanish features include the zapatas and the tripartite division of facade and ground plan (as at Sítio Santo Antônio, which has three rooms), particularly the balcony flanked by alpendres, which recalls the grander configuration at the Santo Domingo Alcázar (fig. 16.7). It would be hard to support an argument that African traditions had an impact on the São Paulo backcountry or Paraguay – 3,000–3,500 kilometres southwest of Pernambuco – where Amerindian rather than African culture dominated. I am equally unconvinced that Pernambuco plantation buildings were the source of the French open gallery. Most notably, none of them uses contre-fiches, and in French examples the posts

are always evenly spaced. French galleried buildings never use projecting second storeys or hypostyle halls and their roofs are also quite different: Pernambuco examples are relatively low-pitched in the Mediterranean style and covered in tiles or thatching whereas French structures use high-pitched hip, gable, and mansard roofs with shingles or slate. Most of the Pernambuco galleries are narrow – more like balconies or loggias – and none of them use the classical orders. Another problem is the chronology: as we will soon see, the first open gallery in French territory appeared in Guiana at the end of the seventeenth century and the form was in full swing by the second decade of the eighteenth – nearly half a century after the Sephardic Dutch immigrants brought sugar technology to the French Circum-Caribbean. No concrete evidence has yet emerged that Sephardic sugar specialists brought this form to French America.

In the past scholars sought origins in North America, although this theory is now discredited. Simple post-and-lintel porches were characteristic of Dutch farmhouses in what is now New York and New Jersey during and after the time they formed part of New Netherland (1614–67). Examples include the Shenks-Crook house in Flatlands, New York (1656), or the Terhuen House in Hackensack New Jersey (ca. 1670): they tend to be short, single-storey structures with a pitched or hip roof with a front porch sometimes but not always supported by posts.69 But given the great distance from the Circum-Caribbean and the humble nature of these buildings they are unlikely to have influenced buildings in Guiana or Saint-Domingue. Some scholars have sought the origins of the open galerie within the French Atlantic Empire in Nouvelle-France and the Great Lakes region, a source which seems as far-fetched as the New Netherlands farmhouse and not merely because of

16.12 Casa do Sítio de Santo Antônio, São Roque, Brazil, ca. 1640.

Vernacular Traditions

455

geography.70 The main problem here is that post-andlintel verandas in those regions are all much later – mostly from the end of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as Ramsay Traquair already noted in 1947 (e.g., fig. 1.9).71 It is more likely, as C.E. Peterson first contended in 1941, that the northern colonies adopted styles developed in the tropical colonies rather than the other way around.72 If New Netherland was an unlikely source for the French open gallery, another Dutch colony, Suriname, has more potential. We have already seen in chapter 3 how the early plantations on the Paramaribo River depicted by Dirk Valkenburg in 1709 may have been one of the sources of the typical Guiana “Class ii ” brokenpitched roof, and in chapter 9 I have noted how close an

16.13 Dirk Valkenburg, View of mill and cooking house on the Waterlant plantation of Jonas Witzen on the Paramaribo River (Suriname), ink on paper, 1709. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

456

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

eye the French kept on their Dutch neighbours. Charlery traces the French open gallery to the cookhouse at Jonas Witzen’s Waterlant plantation with its galleries under sloping eaves (fig. 16.13) and also to the galleries attached to the great house at Palmeniribo.73 However, I am skeptical since these galleries are mostly walled in, a form the French call a galerie dans oeuvre. Open galleries appeared in Suriname in the second half of the eighteenth century on the ground floors of plantation great houses (e.g., Fredericksdorp) and in more distinguished urban dwellings such as the Huis Duplessis in Paramaribo (ca. 1750; fig. 16.14). They were a unique kind of arcade formed of alternating wide and narrow arches of thin horizontal wood cladding resting on imitation piers also made of thin cladding – essentially a false facade nailed onto squared-off posts.74 Although central Paramaribo today is full of houses with single or double French-style open galleries they all date from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the influence was running in the other direction.

16.14 Huis Duplessis, Paramaribo, Suriname, ca. 1750.

The only place left to look is in France, which I consider to be the likeliest source of forms that were designed by Frenchmen. I am not the first person to do so: in reaction to what he calls the “climactic determinism theory,” whereby the open galleries originated in the West Indies and Gulf of Mexico as a response to the climate, Jonathan Fricker proposes that “unlike most of the others [i.e., colonial traditions] the Creole style remained true to its folk medieval roots.”75 Fricker found “a small but distinct minority [of French farmhouses] that show Creole architectural features – raised houses, galleries, cabinets, and exterior staircases,” which was enough to convince him that the climatic determinists were wrong: “These features were part of the folk building tradition of medieval France. None was invented on this side of the Atlantic; hence, none originated as a response to the climate either of the West Indies or of the Deep South.”76 I have explored Fricker’s theory by looking farther afield within France and have found that the forms he

describes are much more widespread than he supposed. Post-and-lintel galleries on wooden posts, frequently with contre-fiches, appeared in early modern French farmhouses and outbuildings in Normandy, Brittany, Limousin, the Auvergne, the Vallée du Lot, and Burgundy.77 Especially common are remises, or roofed sheds opening onto the barnyard via a row of posts, or firstfloor wooden galleries, sometimes without supports underneath. The highest concentration of open galleries is in the Mâcon area of Burgundy between Lyon and Dijon, where upper-storey and two-storey galleries accessed by exterior stairways proliferated since the fifteenth century, all supported by wooden posts with contre-fiches.78 One example noted by Françoise Thinlot is a three-storey farmhouse in Verzé with wooden galleries on the upper two storeys supported by a single giant-order “colonnade of wood” of squaredoff logs rising from the ground to the roof.79 Although most galleries in Mâcon follow this model (i.e., two galleries supported by a single “giant-order”

Vernacular Traditions

457

16.15 Hospices de Beaune or Hôtel-Dieu de Beaune, 1443.

colonnade and not stacked single-storey galleries) there is one building in Burgundy that is strikingly close to the French colonial examples I will examine next: the vast two-storey gallery on two courtyard wings of the Hospices or Hôtel-Dieu at Beaune, a former almshouse now famous for its wine auctions (fig. 16.15). Built in 1447-48 and partly restored after a fire in 1499, it is composed of a plain grey stone colonnade on the ground

458

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

floor supporting a wooden gallery of squared posts with contre-fiches and an enclosed balustrade with a pattern of chevrons.80 If there were any single model for the French colonial gallery, especially in its double form, this is it, and it soundly predates any Hispanic, Dutch, or English colonial examples. Burgundy was closely associated with the French colonies as it was the home of an important regiment. Many administrators,

soldiers, and royal engineers came from there, such as Jean Champé, a soldier from Chalon who died in Nouvelle-Orléans in 1735, as well as colonial builders such as the carpenter François Roux working in SaintDomingue in the 1780s (see chapter 6), Jean Artaud, designer of the facades at the Place Royale in Cap (fig. 10.11), and Louis Carré, a mason from Motte SaintJean who worked in Île-de-France and Île-Bourbon, where he died in 1769.81 I have also noted that the Napoleonic church at Mâcon is a potential model for the church of Saint-Louis in Senegal (fig. 15.27). But even if the French open gallery came from France I do not agree with Fricker that the metropolitan origin of the parts rules out the colonial uniqueness of the whole – not to mention the impact of climate. We have already seen a similar situation in the churches of Nouvelle-France, where the different components come from the metropole but no church in France contains all of them at once. Edwards, who is critical of what he calls Fricker’s “European diffusion theory,” remarks that when European craftsmen emigrated to the colonies they could not bring all aspects of their architectural history with them and that the ways in which they employed them depended upon each colony’s specific climatic, historical, and social character: “each represented a kind of random sampling of the broad architectural character of the homeland … Some elements were simply forgotten or deliberately discarded while others, perhaps originally unimportant, became increasingly dominant in the new environment.”82 Charlery agrees, noting that like all European settlers in the Antilles the French began by building houses in the style of their homeland, but their efforts were immediately impacted by geographical realities: “then comes the time to adapt to locally available materials, and especially to the tropical climate. In these warm countries, often wet and sometimes with heavy rainfall, seeking shade and more ventilation become a priority.”83 Charlery’s comment is particularly important in the context of the French open gallery since few galleries in France were as spacious as their offspring in the tropical Americas. In his search for vernacular models

Fricker is also wrong in insisting that classicism was absent in the French open gallery. He writes: “whereas English and Spanish colonial architecture eventually came under the influence of the classical Renaissance, French colonial architecture for the most part never did.” 84 As I will now explore, the classical variant of the French open galerie is in fact one of the most important and widespread – not just in the French colonies but beyond. A New Hypothesis for the Origins of the Open Galerie The colonial French open gallery does not seem to have existed long before the turn of the eighteenth century: as Charlery notes, Labat does not mention a single one in his 1694–1706 travels to the Antilles, although he did not visit Guiana.85 The earliest examples I have found are the side aisles of the second church of Saint-Nicolas in Cayenne (1694–99), which as we have seen in chapter 14 were formed of four squared wooden posts, the outer two with contre-fiches, directly supporting an extension of the church’s dramatically sloping rafters and fitted with jalousies formed of turned wood poles resembling table legs, the central bay with a balustrade at the base (fig. 14.7). The first mention I have found in the archives concerns the combination entry portal and governor’s lodgings at Fort Saint-Louis (Saint-Louisdu-Sud) in Saint-Domingue (begun 1700), which is depicted in a 1704 elevation (fig. 16.16). The two-storey brick gallery in the Doric order is described in two 1720 reports as the “galerie de la maison du gouverneur.”86 The elevation shows that the rez-de-chaussée was a standard classical arcade with superimposed pilasters but that the upper gallery was formed of piers directly supporting a horizontal cornice. Therefore the two main variants of the French open gallery were developed at almost exactly the same time, the classical one in Saint-Domingue and the more traditional one in Cayenne. There is also evidence that upper-storey galleries or balconies appeared in Louisiana in the first two decades

Vernacular Traditions

459

16.16 Elevation of the Entrance Portal of the Fort St. Louis [SaintDomingue] on the Courtyard Side, 1704. The fort was built in 1700– 06. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 15 DFC 827C .

of the eighteenth century. The earliest – built sometime between the date of the town’s foundation in 1702 and the 1704 map that depicts it (fig. 9.6), adorned the river facade of the fort at Old Mobile and appears to be a gallery of posts supporting the rafters and fronted by a balustrade, although the sketch is frustratingly imprecise.87 An even less exact drawing is that of the De La Pointe concession on the Pascagoula River (possibly built ca. 1716), the building “of two storeys and a balcony all round” which we have already seen in chapter 3 (fig. 3.6). In this case a close inspection of the drawing, which shows a freestanding balcony without posts – plus the caption’s use of the term “balcon” rather than “galerie” – in my opinion rules out the possibility that this maison de maître had any galleries. Humbler lower-storey porches also existed in the colony, as demonstrated by a 1719 sketch by Jonathan Darby showing New Orleans before the streets were laid out

460

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

and depicting a few one-storey buildings with hip roofs covered with shingles and front porches on posts.88 The first solid evidence for a two-storey open wooden gallery appears in Cayenne around the same time. Pierre Le Clou’s 1718 contract to build Government House (see figs. 16.17–19) calls for “two exterior galleries which will be in front and at the back of the same, built of wooden carpentry,” and in his 1723 contract for the adjacent “King’s House” he was also to build front and rear galleries and an exterior twostorey staircase at the end of the rear gallery.89 Although it is admittedly hard to tell whether the text refers to a single or double (two-storey) gallery – the 1718 contract says “deux galeries extérieures lesquelles serait au-devant et au derrière d’icelle” and the 1723 one mentions “deux galeries de devant et de derrière” – the exterior staircase at the end of the back gallery in the second contract suggests that there were indeed upper galleries. Furthermore, the same wording – “deux galeries” – is used in a 1782 document describing the same building long after we have irrefutable proof that it had double galleries.90 That proof is a depiction of Government House in an anonymous oil painting of the

Place d’Armes from ca. 1764 (fig. 16.17).91 It shows that high, evenly spaced wooden posts supported each storey using contre-fiches like those of the Beaune almshouse with a balustrade of urn-shaped colonnettes on the upper floor. The lower gallery was open across the entire length of the building while the upper one was enclosed at each end, the left end by a tower and the right by a two-bay cabinet. Given that Le Clou was not told how to build these galleries it is safe to assume that this form had already been in use for some time. The painting illustrates a veritable hothouse of galleried buildings of every conceivable kind except for the classical variant: two substantial structures on the Grande Rue with wraparound galleries on both storeys; a two-storey building with a “giant-order” gallery of

wooden posts reaching from pavement to ceiling on the street facade; four single-storey buildings with front or side galleries; and a building behind the church on the left with an open gallery on the upper floor only. There is also a comparable variety of roof types – gable, hip, and mansard – all steeply pitched against the rain. Thus some kind of architectural renaissance took place in turn-of-the-century Guiana that matured sometime in the late teens and was ubiquitous well before 1764, which was also the year Préfontaine published the first engraving of a double gallery in Guiana (fig. 6.6). 16.17 Pierre Le Clou, Government House (begun 1718; centre), Place d’Armes and galleried houses on Grande Rue (right) viewed from Jesuit Residence, Cayenne, ca. 1764. Detail.

Vernacular Traditions

461

I suspect that it was initiated by builders from eastern France, where such galleries formed part of a living architectural tradition in town and country alike.

16.18 Government House, Cayenne, 1718, ground floor, from François-Joseph-Charles-Dessigny, Cayenne 1782: Civil Building: Government House, Intendancy, with their Dependencies, Territory, and other Buildings of the King, ink and colours on paper, 1782. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 14 DFC 357A .

462

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

In 1782 François-Joseph-Charles-Dessigny drew up a plan of Le Clou’s government building, showing that it was a narrow, rectangular structure measuring 114 feet by 38 feet, built in “bois de charpente du pais” with brick infill, in which the rooms on the ground and first floor both entered directly onto the gallery (fig. 16.18).92 There was a grand staircase just to the left of the main entry vestibule on the interior but also one at the left end of the rear gallery outside, as indicated on Le Clou’s contract. The main gallery

16.19 Br Gaspard du Molard, Jesuit Residence, now Government House, Cayenne, 1729 (left). From Anonymous, View of the Port and of the City of Cayenne, taken from the End of the Property of Leblond, late eighteenth century. Musée d’Aquitaine, Bordeaux.

faced the square and the rear gallery faced the “Jardin du Gouvernement” with its fountain. Other plans Dessigny prepared at the same time show that there were more galleried buildings than those depicted in the 1764 painting, including the Intendance on the rue de Remire, which had a front and rear gallery and the “Domaine” on the same street, which had only a front gallery.93 The 1764 canvas leaves out the largest two-storey galleried building, the former Jesuit residence (figs. 16.6, 16.19), probably because the artist painted it from its upper gallery. The largest monument in Cayenne and the only surviving eighteenth-century structure in Guiana, it was built in 1729 under the direction of Brother Gaspard du Molard, an architect who had joined the Society as a temporal coadjutor.94 The residence was enlarged in 1749–52 when its U-shaped “Grand-cour” or “Terrasse” was enclosed by an uneven second courtyard (long destroyed), and sometime in the nineteenth century the double gallery on the facade facing the Place d’Armes was demolished and replaced

in 1925 with a neo-Palladian colonnade. Like its Jesuit and Dominican counterparts in Saint-Pierre (figs. 12.18, 12.13) the house was built to publicize the order’s influence in the colony – it was big enough at 128 feet long by 38 feet wide to be a college but in fact only ever housed the superior, a temporal coadjutor, and sometimes a Jesuit on retreat – and it served double duty as a lodging for distinguished guests. An English traveller in the 1750s called it “large, beautiful, commodious, and well built” and indeed Governor Alexandre Ferdinand de Bessner (in office 1781–85) was only too happy to take up residence there in 1782 after the Jesuits were expelled.95 On the basis of a nineteenth-century engraving scholars have maintained that the original facade was plain, but I have found three confirmations that it had a double gallery: Dessigny wrote in 1782 that the “face qui regarde la Place d’Armes” had “deux galeries”; his accompanying ground plan shows a gallery the entire length of the facade on both storeys with another two-storey gallery in the original Grand-cour; and a late eighteenth-century watercolour shows that

Vernacular Traditions

463

16.20 (above) François-Joseph-Charles-Dessigny, Plan of the House of the Reverend Fathers of the Society of Jesus now Occupied by M. the Governor with the Changes which he has made there, ink and colours on paper, 1782. Archives Nationales d’OutreMer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 14 DFC 358A . This view does not show the 1749–52 courtyard (hidden by overlay). 16.21 (opposite, above) Louis-Joseph Delalance, detail of the construction of the two-storey courtyard gallery at the Magasin Royal, Cap, Saint-Domingue, 1738 (detail of fig. 12.25). The lower level is supported by stone columns in the Doric order while the upper level is all of wood, with squared posts and a balustrade.

16.22 (opposite, below) Ignace-François Broutin, Sectional View and Profile of the Building of the Intendance [of NouvelleOrléans], ink and colours on paper, 1749. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 04 DFC 101C . This building had a stair hall with a grand escalier (marked “C ”), a dining hall (D ), a salon (salle de compagnies; H ), and a double gallery, the lower one supported on brick columns and the upper one on wooden columns.

it had a full double gallery on the facade (figs. 16.19, 16.20).96 The only surviving galleries are in what is left of the Grand-cour, both of them supported by squared posts with contre-fiches: the upper storey is enclosed in jalousies (hiding the contre-fiches, which can be seen from the inside) whereas the lower one is open (fig. 16.6). As shown on the 1782 plan the present building has two interior and two exterior staircases, the latter at the ends of the rear galleries, as at the 1718 Governor’s Mansion. The earliest-known classical double galleries – in this case classical below and plain above – were Louis-Joseph Delalance’s courtyard facades for the Magasins du Roi in Cap (1737, 1738), which we have seen in chapter 12 with their “grande gallerie du commun,” stone Doric columns on the ground floor, wooden posts and balustrade above, and exterior staircases (figs. 12.24–5, 16.21).97 A more fully classical form appears in 1749 in Louisiana in Ignace-François Broutin’s project for the Intendance in Nouvelle-Orléans (fig. 16.22).98 This unbuilt two-storey brick building was to have a steep pitched roof with two-storey open galleries on both facades, the lower one with stuccoed brick Doric columns and the upper one with Doric wooden colonnettes and a wooden balustrade. The galleries meet the walls at the height of the plates but use separate joists, and their lower-pitched roofs create the “Class ii ” broken-pitch profile. Wilson shows that Broutin’s design was likely the source of the Louisiana plantation house such as the Parlange Plantation in Pointe Coupée (begun 1750) with its double wraparound galleries supported by stuccoed brick columns below and wood colonnettes and a balustrade above (see chapter 1).99 Given the examples cited above it would seem that the classical variant of the French open gallery was invented by royal engineers while the more traditional wooden variety with contre-fiches seen especially in Cayenne was the product of civilian architects. But royal engineers soon embraced both forms, as can be seen in the massive reconstruction project in Port-au-Prince (1772–74) led by Charles-François Hesse and Pierre

466

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

Antoine Jérôme Frémont de La Merveillère following the 1770 earthquake. Buildings with galleries of both the Cayenne and classical varieties included Government House (fig. 16.23), the Intendancy, the Military Hospital, the Bureau des Classes (fig. 16.24), the Magasins du Roi, and Hesse’s Officers’ Barracks (fig. 13.15).100 Although mostly built using the classical orders with Doric columns and entablatures (the Intendancy used squared-off posts with contre-fiches), they were made entirely of wood as an earthquake-resistant measure, as noted in a 1789 report: “the form that was adopted for construction of houses and buildings, almost entirely of wood and which are only placed on the ground (posés sur le sol) seem to make them immune to earthquakes thereafter.”101 The most striking thing about these buildings is their delicacy, especially when compared to the buildings of Le Cap. The Bureau de Classes, with its broken-pitch roof and narrow colonnettes wears its classicism lightly and has more in common with Le Clou’s 1718 Government House than with anything comparable in Le Cap or Saint-Pierre. Diminutive Government House (1772–73) was the chef d’oeuvre of this urban regeneration project (fig. 16.23).102 Measuring 30 by 15 toises it was raised on a stone platform with a double staircase and delicate iron grille and features a triumphal arch portico with three doorways, rusticated piers and quoining, roundels, and the arms of France in the pediment. A pair of raised gambrel roofs over the corps de logis (a lower one over the portico and a higher one over the salon and dining room) create a tent-like effect, similar in spirit to Guisan’s church at Bourg-Villebois (fig. 15.22). The elongated U-shaped building was enclosed in a wraparound gallery supported on wooden Doric piliers with 16.23 (opposite, above) Pierre-Antoine-Jérôme Frémont de La Merveillère, elevation of Government House, Port-au-Prince, 1772– 73, painted in 1791 (detail from the same plan as fig. 11.20). Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 15 DFC 661. 16.24 (opposite, below) Pierre-Antoine-Jérôme Frémont de La Merveillère, Bureau des Classes, Port-au-Prince (detail), ca. 1772, painted in 1791 (detail from the same plan as fig. 11.20).

16.25 Maison Bally, Habitation Lajus, Le Carbet, Martinique, 1774.

a balustrade along the top in imitation of French palace architecture (figs. 1.1, 12.13) and paved with marble tiles.103 The triple portal, added sometime later, seems to be a direct homage to Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s arch at the Salt Manufacturing Building at the Saline Royale at Arc-et-Senans, built between 1775 and 1779.104 Before the 1770s single- and double-galleried buildings appear to have been limited to Guiana, SaintDomingue, and Louisiana. In Saint-Domingue they began to proliferate in domestic architecture from at least the 1760s, as with the wooden house across the street from the church in Dondon for sale in 1766 “consisting of three rooms downstairs, a gallery with a cabinet at each end, and a loft above the said rooms,” or one in northeastern Le Cap advertised in 1769 as “a House named Bellevue, near the Grisgris, on the way to Picolet, consisting of two pavilions, upper and lower galleries (galeries haute & basse), two bedrooms, kitchen, oven, dovecote, hutch, chicken coop & backyard surrounded by a very beautiful trellis.”105 Open

468

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

galleries only appear in the Lesser Antilles in the 1770s, although Martinique and Guadeloupe had no equivalent of the Affiches Américaines that might tell us more about the previous decade.106 In a detailed engraving from ca. 1750–60 of the buildings of Fort-Royal open galleries are conspicuously absent, as they are in a painting of Saint-Pierre dated 1765.107 Survivors from this period are extremely rare, but the Maison Bally on the Habitation Lajus in Le Carbet, Martinique (1774), built for the baron de Lajus, has a double gallery of wood posts with wooden balustrades on each floor bookended by two enclosed wings (fig. 16.25). The house sits on a raised masonry or rubble foundation and features an elegant stone staircase in front.108 The first mention of galleries in Basse-Terre and Saint-Pierre appears in a pair of 1784 reports on the conditions of the royal buildings, which in Basse-Terre were rental properties (see chapter 13). A “red pavilion” (pavillon rouge) in Basse-Terre had a “wooden upper and lower gallery,” and the various buildings comprising

Government House included a two-storey structure with ground-floor galleries on the street and garden sides, and another stone structure with a gallery upstairs and partial gallery below, both of wood.109 Since some of these galleries were already in need of repair, we can safely assume that they were built at least a few years before the report, probably before France entered the American War of Independence in 1778. By contrast, the building mentioned in the report for SaintPierre, one of two belonging to Government House, was new. A two-storey stone structure, it had on its ground floor “a gallery on posts facing the courtyard and another lower gallery sur solage [mounted on a wooden

sill on masonry foundations], roofed in shingles, newly made along the whole length of the building on the garden side … The two buildings are joined on the right by an open gallery above and below which contains several small warehouses and offices below, the above serving as a corridor between the apartments of the General and Secretariat.”110 By the time of the French Revolution galleries had become common in the Lesser Antilles. In a unique watercolour of Pointe-à-Pitre from 16.26 A Street in Point-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, 1789, watercolour on paper by B … bon fils. Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Bordeaux. This is the only known eighteenth-century view of the buildings of the city.

Vernacular Traditions

469

16.27 (above) House on the Quai de Bellecombe, CapHaïtien, eighteenth century. 16.28 (below) Commercial building on the Place de la Cathédrale, Cap-Haïtien, after 1842.

1789, an unnamed street is lined with buildings with one- and two-storey galleries, some of them supported by wooden posts and others with classical colonnettes (probably also of wood), the upper storeys all enclosed in jalousies (fig. 16.26).111 One form characteristic of Cap-François in the late eighteenth-century is an upper-storey balcony on classicizing wooden posts, sometimes wrapping around one or more corners. Although it is extremely hard to date surviving structures, there is a property on the Quai de Bellecombe – steps away from the Bellevue house advertised in 1769 – which is believed to date from the French regime (fig. 16.27).112 It is a whitewashed rubble structure with classical-style pilasters on the corners, high arched doorways and windows on the rez-de-chaussée, and a spacious open gallery surrounding the upper storey with narrow colonnettes and a balustrade (the gingerbread work on the roofline makes me suspect that the balcony was updated or replaced in the mid-nineteenth century). Typical is the way the gallery curves around the corners, as can also be seen in a commercial building on the Place d’Armes, which however probably postdates the 1842 earthquake (fig. 16.28). In many examples, again from the later nineteenth-century, the balconies were made of iron, with richly worked grilles, lamentably now replaced by concrete.113 In fact iron balconies are among the earliest to appear in Le Cap, sometimes on the corners and sometimes shaded, as with De La Lance’s Magasin du Roi of 1738 (fig. 12.25) and in the Salle des Spectacles on the right of Place Montarcher as shown in the 1790 watercolour by Chevalier de Largues (fig. 10.24). Many, like figure 16.28, were combined residential and commercial structures, with a lower living quarters upstairs and a higher storey for shops below. Spanish New Orleans preserves related structures from the 1780s to the 1830s called entresol (mezzanine) buildings as they included a storage area in the entresol level concealed behind transoms in the upper parts of the arched openings.114 By the mid-nineteenth century versions of such buildings also appeared in Saint-Louis, Senegal,

demonstrating the impressively wide distribution of this model developed in the Circum-Caribbean. Cultural Convergence in Senegal Senegal is the only region in this book to witness the kind of profound convergence of European and indigenous forms that characterized so much of the architecture of Spanish America, although only during a brief but brilliant episode culminating in the last quarter of the eighteenth century on Gorée. Although some of this unique architecture spread to Saint-Louis it was soon phased out under the Bourbon Restoration with the introduction of a more consistent, classicizing, French Antillean style, which we have already seen in chapter 13 (figs. 13.19–21). The architecture of early modern French Senegal, so little understood until quite recently, is now the subject of a groundswell of scholarship that focuses not only on the cultural components that went into making a building but also on the way people used, lived in, and adorned it. Scholars such as Peter Mark and Mark Hinchman have shown that the mostly mixed-race (métis) property owners drew upon architectural traditions from Senegambia and elsewhere in the interior of Africa but that far from being “purely” African these structures were already a “reciprocal” rather than unidirectional combination of African and European traditions originating more than a century before the French arrived in Saint-Louis in 1659.115 The most important of these forms in the colonial context is the rectangular “Portuguese-style house” discussed above, which may have begun as early as the sixteenth century in Portuguese territories in present-day Senegal such as Casamance, south of the Gambia River.116 Drawings and descriptions from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries depict the housing of indigenous peoples such as the Wolof, Lebu, Tukalor, and Serer as being circular or rectilinear structures of mud brick or straw and reeds crowned with conical roofs of bamboo and grass thatching (fig. 16.29). Clusters of buildings

Vernacular Traditions

471

16.29 Indigenous coastal huts, Arguin (now Mauritania), from A View of Fort d’Arguin, ink on paper, 1688. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 16 DFC 10C .

were often surrounded by reed palisades known as tapades, which generally delineated a familial group – as among the Wolof – and could also communicate the status of the people who lived in them.117 Contemporaries described tapades variously as being “constructed of bamboo canes split and formed into a sort of wickerwork” and as an “enclosure of reeds or earth.”118 In their contempt for African building methods the French quickly came to differentiate between structures of stone or brick which they called en dur (literally, “of hard materials”) – these appealed more to European architectural taste – and impermanent African structures which they called en paille (literally “of straw”).119 This terminology is ubiquitous in the archival reports sent to the Ministry of the Marine. However – oblivious to the scorn of the colonists – coastal African peoples traditionally preferred less durable materials because of the ease with which they could be improved or enlarged, and they were less inclined to move into more solid structures.120

472

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

Indigenous forms even impacted the buildings of the Bâtiments du Roi, as government officials frequently rented rooms from civilians and relied upon African and mixed-race builders and materials. Senegal was an extraordinary case: government buildings in Louisiana or Guiana might resemble each other quite closely but nothing in the Antilles looked like the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century architecture of Gorée before Courtois and his colleagues introduced pan-tropical classicism. The main reason why African culture had more of an impact on the French settlements in West Africa than Amerindian cultures did in the Antilles or Guiana is that the power balance was fully in favour of the Africans – even the métis community enjoyed a kind of prestige and power from their familial and commercial connections with mainland Africans which their free gens de couleur counterparts in Saint-Domingue lacked completely. Royal engineers give us details about the materials used and how and where they were made. Armény de

Paradis noted in 1767 that a frame of palm branches “can be built quickly, as can straw roofing,” but that they are not cost-effective given their impermanence.121 Paradis also reported that lime was made on the mainland by a crew of African labourers about 5 kilometres inland in what is now Dakar, where they could make 10,000 pounds a week and that schooners were sent to the Gambia River to harvest wood from mangrove trees “that last an eternity” for carpentry.122 To save the expense of shipping them from France, planks were sawn on-site in Gorée. As in the Antilles, slaves provided specialized as well as brute labour – from building stone foundations to executing skilled carpentry work – and Gorée and Saint-Louis had a prosperous class of free African and mixed-race masons, carpenters, and joiners. A 1725 list of government employees working in Senegal includes an engineer in Gorée, three house carpenters (charpentier de maison) in Saint-Louis, two in Galam, two in Gorée, and four in Arguin; and seven masons and stonecutters (masons et tailleurs de pierres) in Saint-Louis, two in Galam, six in Gorée, and four in Arguin.123 All but the engineer were likely free people of colour as white builders were thin on the ground. Scholars have retrieved some of their names, including Jean-Pierre Kiaka, a prosperous free black master mason and landowner cited in a document from 1784 and possibly 1777; Gorée carpenter Pierre Turpin, who in 1827 had “an entire construction team at his disposal” including slave carpenters, masons, and joiners; and carpenter Samba Diale, who ran a workshop in Saint-Louis with two slaves in 1821.124 The earliest surviving projects by royal engineers for Gorée, published here for the first time, demonstrate how quickly imported French architectural forms adapted to local conditions, techniques, and materials. The first is a plan and elevation from 1699 of the “Direction,” or company director’s (later governor’s) headquarters, inside the northern fort of Saint-François, designed just twenty-two years after the island had been taken from the Dutch (fig. 16.30).125 At first glance it looks like a scaled-down Paris townhouse, with a high hip roof, tripartite facade, and double staircase

bookended by ressauts. Its lower floor was accessed through a doorway between the staircases and two others in the ressauts; upstairs it had three main rooms arranged in an enfilade and vestibules in the wings. The house was still in good shape after the French reacquired the island from the British in 1763: “the walls of Government House which is in the fort do not seem to be damaged at all, but there are no roofs or floors, nor doors nor windows. It appears that the English

16.30 Project for the Director’s House, Fort Saint-François, Île de Gorée (Senegal). From Plan of the Forts and Island of Gorée, ink and colours on paper, 1699. This building was constructed shortly afterward. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-enProvence), 17 DFC 16A .

Vernacular Traditions

473

have burned all the carpentry in the buildings.”126 This project is not merely interesting as yet another example of an attempt to export French style: it is critically important in its Goréen context because it is the first example on the island of the house with a double staircase with a door between the flights: the ancestor of the Maison Pépin (1780–84) and other grand houses of the last quarter of the eighteenth century (fig. 16.33). The next building is Paradis’s project for repairing the hospital (fig. 16.31).127 Built ca. 1745 at the south end of a long row of buildings which included the chapel, it was a rectangular structure of stone and mortar with plastered walls. Like the chapel (see chapter 15), it featured Doric pilasters on high plinths,

16.31 (opposite) Armény de Paradis, Plan, Profiles, and Elevation of the Hospital of the Island of Gorée, ink and colours on paper, 1763. The hospital was built ca. 1745 as part of the same complex containing the original chapel. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM , Aix-en-Provence), 17 DFC 46B . 16.32 (above) Outdoor banquet hall on the Atlantic coast, Central Region, Ghana (photograph 2017).

one at each corner of the building. The most interesting part of the structure is the thatched roof with finial-like points (pignons), a form that can still be encountered across West Africa and that contrasts strikingly with the en dur building it protects (fig. 16.32).128 The ground floor was used for storage and a kitchen, while the

Vernacular Traditions

475

upper storey, accessed by an internal staircase, was for the wards and employees. The building also emerged mostly unscathed from the British occupation, as Paradis notes in 1763: “There are only minor repairs to windows where it is missing a few stones … One can easily repair these defects. The roof is of straw, the carpentry is consequently too weak to support a plaster roof because of the slate tiles.”129 The plastering on both of these buildings would have used the traditional Goréen method of mixing lime with sand and sometimes seashells and ground brick.130 With the Maison Pépin, commissioned by métis patrons like all the great private homes on the island, we come to the most distinguished building in Gorée. It has been shrouded in mystery and exoticism for decades thanks to its association with the much-romanticized signares (see chapter 1) and its somewhat arbitrary selection as the museum to slavery named the “Maison des Esclaves.” It was always a private house and never a regular captiverie for the export of slaves like Fort Saint-Louis at Ouidah or Cape Coast Castle in Ghana (begun 1653), although small numbers of slaves may sometimes have been held there (figs. 16.33–4).131 It is one of a group of houses that adopted features of French architecture primarily in the late 1770s and 1780s, including a walled forecourt, a distribution of rooms along an enfilade, and in certain cases an opulent, paired, curving staircase which served as much as a status symbol as it did a practical means of getting upstairs given its massive size relative to that of the forecourt.132 Although some of these houses were commissioned by signares, they should not be seen as a form specific to female patronage as is popularly believed but rather as a product of the mixed-race habitant class in general. The widespread development of private stone architecture in Gorée primarily postdated the peace of 1783. During the first eighty years or so of French occupation there were two forts (Saint-Michel, Saint-François), the garden, and three African communities of circular huts made of “soft” materials and surrounded by tapades belonging to the bambaras (domestic slaves,

476

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

mostly Muslims), grumets (free, mostly Christians), and, near the fort, habitants (people of mixed race and Africans).133 As late as 1763 the “village” on Gorée contained only “seven poor houses made of stone, the rest is built of straw only.”134 The oldest surviving house is the Maison Saint-Jean, begun by French governor Blaise Estoupan de Saint-Jean in 1753 next to the royal garden.135 The number of stone buildings grew from fifteen in 1770 to twenty-three in 1779, eightyone in 1784, and eighty-five in 1786; after 1786 most home owners replaced thatching with tile roofs.136 The French were at first reluctant to allow people of colour to build stone houses, fearing that they would make it easier for the enemy to hide during a siege: “We must not allow the inhabitants to build stone houses in the space between the glacis and the northern point. They can accommodate themselves in their own manner in reed huts which can be burned after dismissing these Negroes to the mainland in case of siege to avoid giving the enemy any means to take cover from fire from the fort.”137 Paradoxically it was the enemy’s nonchalance about security that made it possible for the urban expansion of which the Maison Pépin would play a role. In 1779 the English sold crown land on the eastern, northern, and western coasts of the island that had previously formed part of its fortifications to private individuals, leading to an extensive building campaign (the French reacquired the island in 1784).138 The rental of stone houses from African owners to French officials also increased so that whites and Africans lived next to each other more than ever before.139 Three kinds of stone house evolved over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: the first, on an l - or v -shaped plan, appeared between 1761 and 1776; the second, primarily using the courtyard plan as with the Maison Pépin, between 1779 and 1800; and the third, usually without a courtyard, in the early nineteenth century.140 Since many of them backed onto the sea the houses were oriented to the street and the lower floors on the sea side were thick, fortified walls pierced with arrow-loops. The most important surviving houses on the sea wall on rue Saint-Germain are the

Maison Crespin (after 1782), Maison Pépin, and Maison Jouga (ca. 1782; now the Presbytery). Of the three the Maison Pépin had the grandest pretensions. It was built by Nicolas Pépin, the métis son of signare Catherine Baudet and her second common-law husband, a surgeon with the Compagnie des Indes named Jean Pépin, on an 18.2 by 27.4 metre plot inherited from his parents.141 Nicolas actually built the house to compete with his sister Anne Pépin (ca. 1758–1837), one of the most celebrated signares of her generation, who commissioned a house after 1779 when her common-law husband Bernard Dupuy departed for France (it no longer survives). Maison Pépin was inherited by Nicolas’s daughter Anna-Nicolas (or Annacolas), a sufficiently important figure that apostolic prefect Abbé Giudicelli celebrated a Te Deum mass in her house in 1817.142 Xavier Ricou claims that it was the first house on the island to have a plastered exterior, but, as we have seen, stone buildings were covered with a layer of chaux from at least the 1760s and almost certainly earlier; stone buildings would not survive the climate otherwise.143 The Maison Pépin is a rectangular house with the corps de logis at the rear with its back to the sea, an enclosed cour d’honneur at the front with two narrow side ranges and a wider range on the rue Saint-Germain to accommodate shops (fig. 16.33). The corps de logis and the two outer corners of the courtyard have an upper storey, while the rest of the courtyard has only a ground floor with a flat terrace on top of the side ranges. The street facade (fig. 16.34) is plain, with a central arched doorway flanked by rectangular shop doors and four small windows with two larger ones on the first floor. It has a typical profile for a house of this period in Gorée and Saint-Louis: the two-storey pavilions at the ends have inward-sloping tile roofs while the one-storey central part of the facade is crowned by a triangular peak surmounted by a chimney-shaped finial. The facade emphasizes symmetry: as Ricou notes about Gorée houses in general, “the facades are also fairly simple, but they undeniably also betray a concern for seeking the aesthetic.”144 The inside of the house cannot be seen from the street and is only revealed

to visitors as they walk through the passageway. The rectangular courtyard serves as a showcase for a grand horseshoe-shaped double staircase which is so long it reaches nearly two-thirds of the way across it. The staircase is slightly off-centre but aligned with the entrance portal so that the visitor can see straight through the doorway between the flights to the sea by means of an internal passageway and the famous and misnamed “Door of No Return,” the highlight of the building’s new role as a memorial to the slave trade. Aside from the baroque sightlines, the visitor is struck by the immensity of the staircases, which are in fact big enough to include ample storage rooms. Most staircases in Gorée were a single flight perpendicular or parallel to the gallery, as can be seen in a detailed map of the city from 1835, and even the few double staircases were mostly rectilinear – in fact the map shows only one other double curving staircase, further down rue Saint-Germain.145 The rez-de-chaussée of the Maison Pépin comprises a warren of square and rectangular rooms with thick walls that were used for domestic and storage purposes and may also have served as holding cells for slaves at certain times in the building’s history. The rooms in the corps de logis are accessed by five arched doorways including the one in the middle of the staircase. Rising dramatically above the double staircase – the first floors on Gorée are typically much higher than the rez-de-chaussée – is a tall open gallery on five stone piers with plain capitals supporting a long stone lintel and low pitched gable roof resting on a framework of wooden beams. Symmetry dominates the interior as well: four of the piers are centred on the staircase and aligned with the entry, a pair of them framing each flight; the fifth pier, off centre on the left to accommodate the extra width of the house, is invisible at first. Ricou remarks: “omnipresent, the search for symmetry is nevertheless always straining against the limitations of the site.”146 Although, as we have seen, the open gallery has a long history in Senegambia it also recalls the galeries of the Circum-Caribbean, most strikingly that of the 1704 Governor’s House at Fort Saint-Louis

Vernacular Traditions

477

16.33 (left) Maison Pépin, Île de Gorée, Senegal, 1780–84. Interior of courtyard showing double staircase. 16.34 (right) Maison Pépin, Île de Gorée, Senegal, 1780–84. Facade on Rue Saint-Germain.

in Saint-Domingue, and could conceivably have been inspired by the work of a royal engineer (fig. 16.16).147 It serves as a vestibule to the main living quarters on the first floor, which include a larger salon flanked by two smaller rooms in the centre and a corridor with open

478

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

gallery (on plain piers this time) at the back, as well as smaller service rooms on the sides. This tripartite main division recalls that of the main floor of the director’s house, which similarly has five rooms. Hinchman has shown that the plan of the Maison Pépin derives from those of a Parisian entre-cour-etjardin townhouse in which the main corps de logis is sandwiched between the cour d’honneur on the street side and the garden at the back – in the case of Gorée the sea replaces the garden – and he compares it to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century examples

by Pierre Le Muet and Augustin-Charles Daviler.148 However the courtyard might also derive from indigenous practices, notably the tapade, which traditionally surrounded family compounds and which on old maps of Gorée are shown to be rectangular with a single opening at front.149 As it happens some of the signares lived in tapades before moving into their en dur houses, including Anne Pépin and Victoria Albis, both of whom lived in tapades on their plots on rue Saint-Germain before beginning construction of their stone houses.150

The habitants’ decision to transform these more practical dwellings into stone structures was motivated by their desire to associate themselves with the Europeans from whom they received their influence and legitimacy.151 In the case of the Maison Pépin the family went the extra mile to impress French authorities and their fellow Africans. The unique, outsized double staircase does not derive from Hinchman’s Parisian hôtels particuliers or even the great French country seats, some of which have double staircases, but rectilinear ones. Double curving staircases of such immensity were limited to the most regal buildings, most famously Jean Androuet du Cerceau’s horseshoe-shaped double staircase in the Cour du Cheval Blanc at the Palace of Fontainebleau (1528-40; fig. 16.35). In fact the staircase at the Maison Pépin seems to be a direct, if simplified, copy of the Fontainebleau prototype, particularly since both not only curve but undulate. Plans and elevations of Du Cerceau’s staircase were widely distributed as engravings and could easily have served as models. The double staircase also had a Goréen dimension, since its early appearance on the director’s house (fig. 16.30) meant that people would have associated the form with colonial power. By emulating one of the most imposing staircases in France the Pépin family was simultaneously proclaiming their position at the top of Goréen society and their loyalty to the French Crown. The clearest evidence that the staircase’s ceremonial and symbolic role was out of proportion with its function is precisely that it took up so much room in a space that scholars have indicated was the most important in the house.152 In the métis houses of Gorée the courtyard was the principal semi-public area for the family, the focus of domestic and business activities, a place for storage and where livestock roamed freely, and – as evidenced by nineteenth-century engravings – a place where servants erected traditional straw huts for their own living quarters. Although it would seem counterproductive to waste so much space in such an important part of the house, the staircase enhanced the prestige of the owner – not only through its cultural references but

Vernacular Traditions

479

16.35 Androuet du Cerceau, double staircase, Cour du Cheval Blanc, Château de Fontainebleau, 1528–40.

through its dramatic sightlines, designed to direct the spectator’s gaze upward between the flights toward the living quarters and even to the chatelaine herself when she stood between the piers. The Maison Pépin is impressive not merely as an artifact of cultural convergence but because it is one of the most strikingly inventive buildings in the French Empire. It is remarkable in its bold, plain walls, juxtaposed geometric forms, carefully calibrated sightlines, subtly contrasting sinuous curves and straight lines, alternations of open and closed spaces, and the natural chiaroscuro of cast shadow over the walls’ rough plaster and the steps’ shiny stones. Scholars have spent much effort trying to distinguish which parts of these

480

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

houses came from Portuguese, French, or West African traditions, and these are important considerations. But if we spend too much time dividing these buildings into components we lose sight of the forest for the trees.153 The Maison Pépin deserves to be recognized as a masterpiece of international baroque, and as a work of hybrid architecture it takes its place alongside the eighteenth-century churches of southern Peru or the Philippines. Unfortunately, its current use as a stand-in for a slave castle has forever tainted the building in the eyes of the world: as Jean Martin reminds us, “this bourgeois house never served as an esclaverie, but as an entrepot for gum arabic, bundles of cotton cloth, and various foodstuffs, and that the famous door giving onto the sea, poetically called: the gate of the voyage of no return, never had a slave pass through it, ships never anchored of the coast of the island, exposed to the sea breeze.”154

17

Epilogue: Circa 1830, the End of an Empire

thiS book encompaSSeS the full chronological sweep of the architecture of France’s Old Empire in the Atlantic from 1604, the date of Samuel de Champlain’s fortified habitation at Île Sainte-Croix – the first French structure on American soil about which we know anything at all – to 1830, the consecration year of the new church of Saint-CharlesBorromée on Île de Gorée and the end of the Bourbon Restoration (fig. 15.28). This African church and its counterpart at Saint-Louis finished two years earlier (fig. 15.26) marked the beginning of a new kind of empire, demonstrated in Senegal by a commitment to modernization. Most significant was the November 1830 implementation of the French civil code granting Senegalese adult men equal citizenship status to Frenchmen in the colony, which also put an end to common-law marriages and the age of the signares.1 With the help of new technologies Saint-Louis also became the launch pad for the conquest and development of the African mainland, beginning with Governor General Louis Faidherbe’s advance up the Senegal River in the 1850s in which he drove off the forces of the charismatic Muslim leader El Hadj Umar Tall (1797–1864), France’s only serious rival in the region. These technologies, shared by all the major European powers, included the discovery in the 1820s of quinine as a cure for malaria, the introduction of steamships in the 1830s and shallow-draught steamboats for river travel in the 1850s, advanced weaponry such as breach-loading rifles, improvements in paper

manufacturing, and eventually railways and telegraph cables.2 Thanks to a long-awaited peace after the protracted Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, this period also witnessed a sharp increase in scientific voyages of exploration in Africa, Asia, and Oceania – often thinly veiled surveillance expeditions with future colonization in mind – beginning with the foundation of the Société de Géographie in 1821, the 1828 expedition of René Caillié (1799–1838) to Timbuktu, and Louis de Freycinet’s and Hyacinthe de Bougainville’s explorations of the Pacific islands in the 1810s and ’20s.3 In the 1830s steam decisively overtook traditional means of manufacturing in northern Europe, resulting in a torrent of cheap goods requiring a ready market, found most conveniently in the non-European world.4 This need further altered Europe’s relationship with the rest of the globe: while free trade with African or Asian powers seemed a sufficient way to offload these products at first, by the 1870s Europeans used the necessity for markets as an excuse for founding new colonies, especially in Africa. In his defence of the period term “Victorian Britain” Martin Hewitt remarks about the social, technological, and geopolitical changes in this era: “it is … difficult to dispute that the 1830s brought a realignment of state structures, a redefinition of the political community, a reordering of the structures of public life, and a readjustment of terms of engagement between centre and periphery that, however partially, effected changes in state, politics and society significant enough to mark these years as a recognizable boundary.”5 The year 1830 is particularly momentous for the history of French imperialism as it was the first year of the French conquest of Algeria and the slow acquisition of a vast mainland empire that would eventually encompass most of West Africa.6 Nine years later the French signed a treaty with King Denis of the Mpongwé giving France rights of residency along the left bank of the Gabon River, its first mainland colony in sub-Saharan Africa and one that was conveniently close to the Congo River, the focus of so much European natural resource and human exploitation from the 1870s onward.7 The treaty specifically mentioned architecture, granting

482

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

the French permission to build “all buildings and fortresses” considered necessary to protect their trading interests.8 Consequently, scholars see 1830 as the “end of the First Empire” and the dawn of what is called the “New Imperialism,” which developed slowly at first but by the 1870s ballooned into a campaign of unprecedented global expansion and conquest by European nations and the increasingly powerful United States.9 During this period France and its rivals also changed the way they exploited indigenous people or former slaves in Africa and the Antilles. Although slavery was abolished in French territories in 1848 France and other European powers continued to practise forced labour with degrees of intimidation and torture that at times differed little from the institution it replaced. These practices ranged from the low-pay indentured servitude of Indian and Chinese workers brought to Guadeloupe and Martinique beginning in the 1840s to replace the slaves to the appalling mistreatment of the indigenous peoples of the so-called Congo Free State of King Leopold II of Belgium (r. 1865–1909), with its institutionalized maiming, kidnapping, and forced death marches in the name of ivory and rubber extraction (similar atrocities occurred in French territory and those of Britain and Germany).10 The late nineteenth century was also the era of what we would today call “ethnic cleansing,” most notoriously in German Southwest Africa, where officials issued Germany’s first Vernichtungsbefehl (extermination order) against the Herero cattle herders of present-day Namibia in 1904, anticipating the actions of the Third Reich.11 This new brand of conquest was characterized by the notion of “effective occupation,” as defined at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 under the patronage of German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck (in office 1871–90), when European nations launched the so-called “Scramble for Africa,” a frantic race to divide Africa into colonies, which, by 1914, left only three independent states on the continent.12 Effective occupation meant that powers claiming territories had to “demonstrate an ‘effective’ presence on the ground,” and it encouraged more aggressive intervention than had been attempted before.13

17.1 Former Governor General’s Palace (1902 with later modifications; now Palais de la République), Dakar.

Paradoxically, this era also witnessed more intensive proselytization and education campaigns by missionary groups who sought to “civilize” and pacify indigenous peoples – precisely the kind of missionary zeal that was mostly absent in the ancien régime French empire. Most significantly for this book, France’s New Imperialism shifted attention away from the Americas to Africa, Asia, and the Pacific: to places such as Tahiti, a French protectorate in 1842, and Indochina, a French colony in 1887.14 French America was largely a thing of the past, and France considered its few remaining possessions there to be more trouble than they were worth. French colonial architecture also changed dramatically in the years after 1830. The Bourbon Restoration was the last French government before the turn of the twentieth century to promote manifestly French styles in colonial architecture, whether the neo-baroque or Durandian neoclassicism of the Lesser Antilles and Guiana or Nicolas-Georges Courtois’s more subtle Greek revival in Senegal. With the July Monarchy

(1830–48) and Second Empire (1848–71) colonial architecture became blandly utilitarian, a generically classical, modular style of brick, stucco, cast iron, tin, and concrete – the uninspired end product of the experiments in pan-tropical architecture we have seen in the 1820s. Not only were buildings no longer designed for a specific place but they were not even related to function, a governor’s house serving just as easily for an officers’ barracks or courthouse. Nevertheless, like the châteaux and castles of earlier centuries, these rather dreary buildings were still built to impress and continued to cling to the idea of convenance. The designers of the metal and brick Hôtel du Gouvernement in Conakry (now Guinea) made that clear in 1889 when they declared that “the natives will feel authority and comply more when seeing a more grandiose construction and [one which is] more in harmony with the high-ranking official who dwells there.”15 Only with the development of Dakar following its elevation to capital of Afrique Occidentale Française in 1902 did French

Epilogue

483

administrators return to an architecture celebrating the French classical tradition – Alain Sinou calls it the “style du vainqueur” – as with the Hôtel de Ville (1918) with its high mansard roof and Ionic columns or the Governor General’s palace (1902; now Palais de la République), once reminiscent of the south wing of the Louvre (fig. 1.5) and now reduced to a sleek, art deco– inflected classicism (fig. 17.1).16 As French colonial architecture became less specifically French its styles were adopted by other European powers and amalgamated with English, Dutch, 17.2 Church of Saint-Pierre-Saint-Paul, Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, begun 1843. View of interior of nave.

484

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

or German characteristics. Between ca. 1830 and ca. 1900 a kind of pan-colonial architecture spread across the globe, particularly in Africa, combining Guianese double-pitched roofs and French open galeries with Palladian elements inspired by the architecture of the British colonies and an all-purpose Gothic revival that satisfied German Protestants and French Catholics alike.17 Prefabricated parts meant that buildings were not even built in the colonies, only assembled there, as with the metal-frame Gothic parish churches of Pointe-à-Pitre (1843; fig. 17.2) and Fort-de-France (1894) or an unexecuted 1870s project for an all-metal extension to Government House in Saint-Louis.18 NeoGothic was used to differentiate Christianity from Islam

17.3 Basel Missionary School, Salem Avenue, Osu (Accra, Ghana), 1843.

or “paganism,” as in the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception (1896–1919) at Ouidah, built on the very spot where white visitors were received by the Yovogan and facing down the animist Vodun Temple of Pythons across the street – two places tainted in the French imagination with the shame of submissiveness (see chapter 11).19 Bruce Chatwin characterized the basilica well: “a stuccoed monument to the more severe side of French Catholicism that glared across an expanse of red dirt at the walls, the mud huts and trees of the Python Fetish.”20 Colonial architecture became simply “white,” a symbol of perceived Caucasian cultural and racial superiority that was broadcast as much in churches and schools as in government buildings. An excellent example of the pervasiveness of generic colonial French style is the Basel Missionary School on Salem Avenue in Danish Osu (now Accra, Ghana), built in 1843 by the Evangelical Missionary Society of Basel, a Swiss-based Protestant group founded to train missionaries and present on the Gold Coast since 1827 (fig. 17.3).21 A near twin of Gaspard du Molard’s Jesuit Residence at Cayenne, built almost exactly a century earlier (fig. 16.6), this base for the Baslers’ missionary

activities in West Africa is a two-storey rectangular building with a double wraparound open gallery supported on squared posts, the upper ones with contrefiches and featuring a balustrade formed of wooden slats; the only difference is the gable roof and the lack of dormers. This modest building played a key role in the introduction of this style into the British colonies since after the United Kingdom took over Danish Osu in 1850 it became the prototype for what scholars simply call the “colonial type building.” Anthony Hyland describes it thus: In terms of the plan, the innovation was to surround the house with a gallery or a porch. As for the structure, its core is always of stone or brick, generally the width of a room and with a length that varies from one to four rooms or more. The galleries are usually made of wood, supported by columns of bricks, stucco, or stone, sometimes also by wooden poles or cast iron columns … This architecture suited very well the Basel mission, which could install its classrooms and store rooms on the ground floor and keep the upstairs

Epilogue

485

for accommodations. It was also suitable for the climate, so it became a prototype repeated many times by the masons and the carpenters trained by the missionaries.22 The model developed in Africa was so effective in fact that the Baslers took it to the East Indies at the end of the century and it was adaptable to various functions such as schools, hospitals, official residences, and private homes – it even came in a one-storey version for more limited budgets. The most notorious appearance of this new architecture was in the “prison capital” of Saint-Laurentdu-Maroni (founded 1857), the showcase of France’s penal system in Guiana on the Maroni River.23 The last great utopian experiment in the colony, the penal system was meant to increase Guiana’s value through free labour and, at least in the beginning, to offer those convicts who were “susceptible to moral recovery” a new chance to enter society – although in Guiana (see chapter 11). After 1887, when European convicts were once again transported to the colony, the settlement was redesigned as the ideal penal town. A felons’ Kourou, Saint-Laurent was built according to the latest scientific standards to keep prisoners alive in the tropics so that they could serve out their sentences. This building incorporated innovative ideas about orientation, the use of stilts to prevent flooding, the introduction of steel broken-pitched roofs with spreading eaves for shade, and different kinds of wraparound galleries. The 1880–1900 era was the heyday of prefabricated components at Saint-Laurent. Prison labour supplied the sand, pebbles, wood, and bricks, but everything else came from France: steel frames for supporting walls, hydraulic lime, cement, hardware, metal trusses, corrugated metal, and paint – in fact several French companies made a fortune providing metallic modules and tools, such as the Society of Forges of Franche-Comté, the Schneider Company, the French Metal Company, the Bogny-Braux Nuts and Bolts Company, and the Vieux-Montagne Society of Mines and Zinc Foundries.24 The steel frames produced for Saint-Laurent and its

486

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

satellite colonies made possible the perfect generic, homogeneous architecture – it was no more French than the Australian prison architecture in Norfolk Island or Port Arthur was visibly British. As it happens, Australia is where I will end this book with a peculiar and little-known French colonial monument from 1825–28 that has much to say about the new imperial climate circa 1830 (fig. 17.4).25 Perched on a windswept, isolated field across Botany Bay from Sydney Airport and the Kurnell Oil Refinery is a solitary stuccoed brick 23-foot-high Tuscan column crowned with an iron astrolabe and resting on a plinth carved with urns and covered with plaques bearing two inscriptions, one in French, the other English:

this place visited by monsieur de la perouse in the year mdclXXXviii is the last whence any account of him have [sic] been received erected in the name of france by mm de bougainville and ducampier commanding the frigate la thetis and the corvette lesperance lying in port jackson in mdcccXXv. I have already mentioned in chapter 11 the comte de La Pérouse’s scientific-political mission of discovery (1785–88), which was financed personally by Louis XVI and advised by a team of consultants including the head of the Jardin Botanique at Brest. La Pérouse arrived in Botany Bay in 26 January 1778, a mere eight days too late to claim Australia for France, although his disappointment did not stop him from accepting the hospitality of Captain Arthur Philip (1738–1814) before sailing off to his death six weeks later in the Solomon Islands.26 Botany Bay was the last place any white people except for his doomed crew saw La Pérouse alive. Decades later, Hyacinthe de Bougainville (1781–1846), son of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville (1729–1811), France’s other world-famous explorer of the ancien régime and veteran of the Conquest of Quebec, made what he called

17.4 George Cookney, La Pérouse Monument, Botany Bay, Australia, 1825–28, commissioned by Hyacinthe de Bougainville.

a “pilgrimage” to the site during his own circumnavigation of the world.27 Bougainville fils commissioned a monument to the memory of La Pérouse on a site known as the “French Garden” because it was the site of La Pérouse’s acclimatization garden, “where this

navigator left plants and seeds with which he wanted to enrich this region,” according to a 1825 British report.28 Bougainville also enjoyed the hospitality and friendship of the British, so much so that Governor Thomas Brisbane – a francophile and corresponding member of

Epilogue

487

the Académie des Sciences – granted him a 176-squareyard plot of land for the monument and offered the services of the government architect George Cookney to build the column. On 4 September 1825 Cookney presented Governor Brisbane with two alternate projects for the monument, one in the Tuscan and the other in the Doric order, and over lunch the next day Bougainville chose the Tuscan style as being more appropriate for the “monument in honour of La Perouse,” presumably because of its Vitruvian associations with manliness, simplicity, and vigour.29 Bougainville wrote the text of the inscriptions. On 6 September, after masons had cleared the land, he laid the first stone in the presence of the governor’s representatives and “drank a toast to the dearly departed, in keeping with an old English tradition.”30 A copper plaque with gold and silver coins inside was embedded into the foundations with another inscription, this time thanking the Royal benefactor: “This monument was erected in 1825 during the reign of Charles X in memory of Mr de La Perouse by Baron de Bougainville, who was in command of a French naval division consisting of the corvette La Thétis and the corvette L’Esperance under the command of Captain Ducamper.”31 The monument was enclosed in a wall, 12 feet square and 2 feet high, with an iron grille. Unsure that the royal benefactor would live up to his role, Bougainville paid the £178 bill himself. In addition to demonstrating perfectly colonial architecture’s new lack of national stylistic specificity – commissioned by a Frenchman it was built by an Englishman using a generalized classicism that evoked neither nation – the La Pérouse Memorial is the harbinger of a new era on a number of levels. First, it reflects the eastward expansion of France’s empire away from the Americas. Second, it was a product of the less overtly militaristic scientific voyages of the early nineteenth century, expeditions with clear strategic objectives to be sure but in which serious plant, animal, and geographic science was carried out and shared with scholars and collectors of all European nations. Third, Bougainville fils’ warm reception also marked a new

488

Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire

phase in Anglo-French relations: after Napoleon’s final removal to St Helena in 1815 France and Britain would never again go to war against each other, bringing to an end the enmity that more than any other determined the extent and nature of the French Atlantic Empire of the ancien régime. This was the reason it was possible in 1820s Australia for a British governor to freely grant a French naval captain a plot of land on British territory for a monument to French heroism, an act that inspired nostalgic pride in Bougainville as a small consolation for France’s failure to capture Australia: “France, whose meticulously prepared explorations were aimed at founding a settlement in Australia … would not literally have owned an inch of land without a concession made in 1825 by Governor Brisbane for the monument erected by us in memory of our illustrious and ill-fated compatriot!”32 This plot of land is still the focus of annual Bastille Day celebrations and bears multiple plaques from visiting French military vessels, including those from the French Pacific colonies who departed from Sydney during the First and Second World Wars. Circa 1830 was an era of peace and partnership between old foes, a seismic shift in geopolitics that could not have been conceived of in the previous century and a half. Nevertheless we should not allow the gentlemanly context in which the La Pérouse Monument was achieved blind us to one essential thing that had not changed about European colonialism: no less than in Guadeloupe in the 1620s or Louisiana in the 1720s this monument was built on land forcibly taken from its original inhabitants, in this case the aboriginal peoples of Australia, who like their predecessors in the Atlantic world were left out of the equation and largely ignored in government reports. Even the refined and gregarious Bougainville, the darling of Sydney society during his sojourn there, who wrote that “he has not forgotten and will never forget the excellent reception and touching hospitality which he has received” from his British hosts, bluntly stated when he encountered a group of Aboriginal people while at Port Jackson that “one cannot imagine anything more hideous and repulsive than these creatures.”33

Glossary

acclimatization garden: usually called a jardin botanique and often

associated with naval hospitals, the acclimatization garden was often a place for industrial espionage – to acclimatize plant specimens stolen from rival colonies in hopes of growing them as cash crops in a French territory. adjudication au rabais: a tender put out to contractors to undertake a building project for which a plan has already been submitted. allée: a tree-lined path or road, often leading to a plantation. alpendre: in Portuguese American architecture a loggia-like open gallery in a country house formed of wooden posts. apostolic prefect: head ecclesiastical official in a colony that has no bishopric (see “apostolic vicariate”). apostolic vicariate: a temporary ecclesiastical jurisdiction for mission territories where a diocese has yet to be established. architecte juré: formal title of a master architect in the French guild system who passed his test. Not used in the colonies. See maître. arpent: a French unit of measurement roughly equivalent to an acre. arpenteur: a cartographer working for the Royal Corps of Engineers. arêtier (or arrestier): the descending corner ridge of a hip roof. Bambaras: Senegalese term for domestic slaves, mostly Muslims,

living in Île de Gorée or Saint-Louis. banquette: a platform along the inside of a parapet. bastide: literally “planted town” in Occitan, a regularized forti-

all architectural projects in the royal residences and domains as well as royal academies, manufactories, fountains, canals, parks, royal equestrian statues, and royal gardens. boiseries: decorative woodwork, such as carved panelling, in an interior. bosquet: a forested grove in a French formal garden. Bossale: emancipated former slave of African origin (as opposed to one born in the West Indies). bourg: a colonial “village” that, unlike French counterparts, was an economic, religious, and social centre rather than (principally) a place of residence, with merchants’ warehouses, artisans’ workshops, and churches. It was not a true administrative centre equivalent to a French mairie. bousillage: an infill used in half-timbered (colombage) buildings made of clay combined with a vegetal binder (e.g., straw) and sometimes lime. It filled in the spaces between posts and was supported on a wooden clissage (lattice). brevet de la cour: a royal commission. briqueté entre poteaux: literally, brick-between-post, the term refers to the use of bricks as infill between posts in a half-timbered building. broderie: literally “embroidery,” a pattern for a parterre in a French formal garden. broken-pitch roof: a roof type in which the inner portion of the roof is more steeply pitched than the lower part, usually as the result of adding open galleries to the exterior. Edwards and Kariouk have named this form a “Class ii ” roof. Bushinengue: Dutch name for a maroon used in Suriname.

fied town in medieval southern France. Bâtiments du Roi: a division of the Département de la Maison du

Roi, it was established by Henri IV as the bureau in charge of

caisse des libertés: a fund made up of the fees charged for

manumissions. campanile: a free-standing bell-tower, employed in the West

* The architectural definitions in this section are based primarily on Hoffsummer, Les charpentes; Bourdier and Minh-ha, Vernacular Architecture; Berthelot and Gaumé, Kaz Antiyé; Edwards and Kariouk, A Creole Lexicon; Piot, La Provence; Thinlot, Maisons paysannes; Moogk, Building a House; Gauthier, Les maisons paysannes. Sources for the other terms can be found in the main text of this book.

Indies to avoid damage to the church should it be toppled in an earthquake. câpre or griffe: a term used to designate a mixed-race person who is half-black, half-mulâtre (see mulâtre). captiverie: a prison for newly captured slaves ready to be shipped to the Americas.

carbet: a larger communal house for a Caribbean Amerindian

leader; the term is now a generic term for a larger indigenous house in the French West Indies and Guiana. carreau: a square measurement unit (about 1.137 hectares or 3.3 acres). carteron (or quarteron): a term used to designate a mixed-race person who is three-quarters white and a quarter black (English: “quadroon”). case: a generic name for a small house used in the Circum-Caribbean. case à nègres: a slave hut. ceinture de fer: literally “belt of iron,” it refers to Marshall Vauban’s ring of fortified cities protecting the international borders of France. charpenterie (or charpente): carpentry of timber-framed buildings or roofs using such joints as mortise-and-tenon. charpentier: a carpenter. château d’eau: a reservoir. chef d’oeuvre (or pièce or essai de trait): the practical part of the master’s examination in the French guild system. chevron: a rafter (the timber used to support the covering of a roof). ciment batterie: a West Indian variety of masonry mortar composed of molasses to make up for a scarcity of lime. clocher: a bell-tower, typical of Quebec in particular, which derived from the flèche-type towers positioned over the crossings of Gothic churches. In Quebec they tend to be at the front of the church, over the facade. They are usually hexagonal and can have two storeys. Code Noir: slave laws enacted by Louis XIV in 1685 to regulate treatment of slaves. They enforced Christianization, mandated work-free days, standardized rations, prohibited “excessive” and “arbitrary” behaviour toward slaves, spelled out the route to manumission, and forbade sexual abuse of female slaves, but also legalized certain punishments for rebellious slaves. colombage bousillé: vertical timber post in the walls of halftimbered buildings filled with bousillage (see bousillage). colombage pierroté: a wall in a half-timbered building infilled with stone rubble and plaster made of lime or bousillage (see bousillage). colon: generic term for colonist; in some areas petits colons referred to small-scale farmers. comble à l’impériale: literally “imperial roof,” it takes the form of an ogival cap. compagnon: in the French guild system a journeyman, or one who has passed his apprenticeship but is not yet a master. comptoir: a factory (in the early modern sense of a trading post) usually taking the form of a fort and small settlement on an island or other defensible place near a large non-European

490

Glossary

power with whom the factors engage in trade. In North America often called a habitation. congé: medical leave. contre-fiche: a wooden diagonal brace morticed to either side of the top of a post as a support forming an inverse chevron. Also called an “aisselier.” Commonly used in French open galleries (see galerie). convenance: variously translated as “suitability” or “appropriateness”; refers to the association between a building and its function, especially a building’s fitness to the social status of its patron. cordeau: a surveyor’s cord, used to lay out streets in a new settlement (tirer au cordeau). corderie: an extremely long building at a French naval base where ropes are made for ships. corps de garde: a garrison. corps de logis: the main residential structure in a French townhouse or château. cour d’honneur: the principal courtyard in a French townhouse or château, immediately preceding the corps de logis. coureur de bois: freelance fur trader in Nouvelle-France. cours: a public promenade, usually lined with trees and located around the inside of the ramparts of a city (or in the case of the original cours in Paris, commissioned by Louis XIV, in place of the ramparts). creole architecture: sometimes also called “creolized architecture,” the term is applied to buildings in a style that developed in the tropical Americas from a mixture of European influences and autochthonous forms. It is used especially for Louisiana (where it refers to specific ground plans) and the Caribbean. creole hut: (case créole in French, kaz antiyé in Kreyol), the term refers to modest late nineteenth- and twentieth-century rectangular houses, sometimes with verandas and often adorned with delicate carved decoration, found throughout the West Indies. curé: a parish priest or equivalent in regions without parishes. curé des nègres: a missionary priest whose main remit was to administer to slaves. demi-lune: a type of triangular projecting wall in bastioned forti-

fication architecture (another is the contre-garde). devis: an often complex budget accompanying a contract or an

annual budget for a longer-term building project (the latter was standard practice for royal engineer architects). dit: literally “called,” this adjective was placed in front of a free person of colour’s surname in legal documents to suggest that they are not worthy of having proper surnames and therefore to denigrate them (e.g., Jean-François Édouard dit Léveille).

donné: French lay worker who by civil contract and solemn vow

gens de couleur: free mixed-race people of African and Cau-

gives their labour as a gift to God for life. droit d’aubaine: a law allowing the confiscation of a foreigner’s property for the use of the state. droit estimatif: a budget for work to be undertaken.

casian descent, primarily in the Circum-Caribbean. French authorities applied a variety of more specific names to these people depending on their degree of African ancestry (see mulâtre, quarteron). géreur: a plantation overseer working for absentee owners who usually remained in France. giant order: a Greco-Roman column or pier (or pilaster or engaged column) that rises to the height of two storeys. grands blancs: literally “big whites,” the landowning class, particularly in the Caribbean. Gouvernement: Government House, or the residence and offices of the governor. governor: usually from the nobility of the sword, he was the superior official in any colony responsible for military affairs and was the chief representative of the Crown. In larger jurisdictions the title was “governor general.” The governor ruled jointly with the intendant. grand goût: literally “grand style,” it refers to the arts and architecture of Louis XIV’s era. Grumets: the mixed-race Catholic community in Senegal. guérite: a sentry box.

en dur: literally, “of hard materials,” the term refers to Senegalese

structures of stone or brick. engagé: indentured French worker on three-year stint working

in the colony. Engagés included builders and other skilled workers. They were phased out at the end of the seventeenth century, especially in the southern colonies with the increased reliance on slavery. en paille: literally “of straw,” the term refers to impermanent Senegalese structures. entre cour et jardin: a type of French townhouse with the main living quarters located between a forecourt and a garden (see corps de logis and cour d’honneur) entrepreneur (or entrepreneur des bâtiments): a contractor responsible for supervising large building projects, usually an architect (mason or carpenter) by training. étage: the main living quarters of a house or grandest floor of a building, located on top of the rez-de-chaussée. exclusif: a rule whereby French colonists were allowed to trade only with designated French ports. fabrique: originally the term for a three-man vestry board,

in Quebec it came to be used as a generic term for a parish church. ferme: a roof truss (a triangular wooden framework supporting the roof ridge, purlins, and rafters). feuille volante: an overlay (flap) on a plan or elevation that depicts a proposed renovation but when lifted up shows the building as it now stands (or, alternatively, a simpler version of the design). forçats: convicts, deserters, and other people on the wrong side of the law who were compelled by the Crown to settle in the colonies. fort de pieux: a fortress surrounded by a wooden palisade rather than earthworks or stone ramparts. frame drawing: a basic ink drawing of the framework of a wooden building sometimes included in contracts. fronton: a portico. galerie: the colonial French open gallery, either truly open

(volante) or enclosed with jalousies (entière or close en jalousie). For a full description see chapter 16. Génie militaire: official name after 1743 of the French Army Corps of Engineers.

habitant: general term for settler, ranging from wealthy plan-

tation owners in the Antilles to poor farmers in Quebec. In Senegal it refers to Africans and people of mixed race living in Île de Gorée and Saint-Louis. See also colons. habitation: see comptoir. hip roof: a roof having four sloping surfaces each oriented at 90 degrees from the adjacent surface. hôtel particulier: a townhouse, especially in Paris in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. îlot (or îlet): a city block, also sometimes called a “pièce.” ingénieurs du Roi: royal engineers, including architect engineers,

hydraulics experts, and cartographers. They were known after 1743 as the Génie militaire, in the 1750s as the corps du Génie, and after 1776 as the corps royal du Génie. intendance: intendancy, or residence and offices of the intendant. intendant: usually from the nobility of the robe, he was in charge of finances and civilian and commercial affairs. The intendant ruled jointly with the governor. jet d’eau: a water jet in a French formal garden, often located

inside a pool (bassin). journée: a day’s work as measured in contracts. Often used for

slaves hired out for works projects (see nègres de corvée).

Glossary

491

kombet: a family dwelling unit in compounds found in Senegal

and the Guinea Coast. livre (sol, denier): Currency in this book is given either in the

livre tournois (French livre) or colonial livre, which was worth two-thirds of the French livre. Money sent from France or used for transactions in France was French currency, whereas transactions in the colonies were mostly in colonial, or “island” currency. If it is not clear from the context which currency is being used I make the distinction in the text. Both kinds of livre were dividable into 20 sols, and each sol was worth 12 deniers. mâchicoulis: an opening between the projecting corbels under a

rampart. maçon: a stonemason. maison à la portugaise: literally “Portuguese-style house,” a West

African dwelling type from Upper Guinea. It is rectangular, built of sun-dried clay or earth, whitewashed with clay or lime, and features a vestibule or open gallery in front. maison de maître: main plantation residence (“Great House” in the British West Indies). maître: literally, “master,” the term refers to an independent craftsman (such as a builder) who has passed the guild test and can head a workshop and undertake contracts. It was applied very loosely in the colonies. mansard roof: named after the architect François Mansart. A double-pitch roof with a very steeply pitched lower section capable of enclosing an attic and a less steeply pitched upper section. marché: a contract between a patron and builder. It could take the form of a fixed-price contract (marché en bloc) or a marché les clefs à la main (literally “keys in hand”), which was for a complete house ready to be occupied. marché verbal: a verbal contract. marguillier: a churchwarden. marron: French name for a maroon, or escaped slave. Marronnage is the act of escaping. mascaron: a decorative boss, usually on a keystone or around the spigot of a fountain, featuring a face. menuisier: A joiner, capable of fine woodwork such as interior panelling or furniture. métis (or méstis): a person of mixed race. In Nouvelle-France the term referred to someone of Amerindian/European descent; in the Circum-Caribbean (especially Lesser Antilles) it meant someone who was half-Caucasian, half-mulâtre (see mulâtre); in Senegal it denoted a person of African/European descent. mudéjar: Spanish architecture and design of Islamic derivation, especially woodwork.

492

Glossary

mulâtre: a term used to designate a mixed-race person who is

half-black, half-white. nègres de corvée (also nègres de louage or nègres de journée):

enslaved labour teams commandeered from plantation owners and religious orders. nègres du roi: slave workshops belonging to the king and housed on royal plantations who could be hired out to undertake large building projects. noblesse d’épée: literally, “nobility of the sword,” the title designates the most ancient class of nobility with origins in the knightly orders of the Middle Ages. The nobles of the sword were considered to be of higher status to the nobles of the robe. noblesse de robe: literally, “nobility of the robe,” the title designates nobility who derive rank through holding offices of state such as high judicial positions. This branch of the nobility expanded under Louis XIV. Ordre Royal et Militaire de Saint-Louis: Cross of the Order of

Saint-Louis (created in 1693), the most prestigious decoration the military offered and awarded to the most eminent engineer architects. Panis (feminine Panise): member of the Pawnee tribe of the

Missouri Valley, which became a generic term for “slave” in French Canada. patte d’oie: a trident-shaped meeting of three paths or streets at a point derived from garden design and adapted to urbanism to afford extensive views in three directions. pays d’en haut: literally “Upper Country,” or the vast territories claimed by France stretching from Montreal to the prairies and Hudson Bay. Petit-Guinée: name given to a neighbourhood of free people of colour in cities such as Cap-François; also name given to the part of a plantation containing the slave huts. petite maison: a semi-rural refuge situated in the outer peripheries of Paris and dedicated to libertine pleasures, popular in the late eighteenth century. petits blancs (or petits gens): literally “little whites” or “little people,” the white underclass especially in the Caribbean, primarily in the towns and in the trades (e.g., artisans and merchants). pièce de bois sur pièce de bois (alternatively, “pièces-surpièces”): a wall built of hewn horizontal beams. pieu(x) en terre or poteau(x) en terre: in French half-timbered buildings a wall formed of posts planted directly in the ground (earthfast) with small spaces in between the studs to limit the amount of filling.

place: most commonly a town square; however in military plan-

ning it means a garrison town or the military quarter of a larger city. Smaller forts were called places-forts. plan directeur: the chief map of any fortress. plan-relief: an elaborate three-dimensional wooden formal presentation model of a garrison town or fortification, common under Louis XIV. porte-cochère: formal entrance gate to the main courtyard (see cour d’honneur) in a French townhouse. potager: a fruit and vegetable garden. poteau(x) sur sol (also sole, or solle): in French half-timbered buildings a wall frame mortised onto a heavy sill that could be on the ground or raised on piliers (pillars). poteau(x) en terre: see pieu(x) en terre. pouce: an inch. pré carré: literally “square meadow,” it refers to the idea of a preordained, centralized, and circumscribed French territorial state as envisioned during the reign of Louis XIV. profil de coupe: a cross-section diagram prepared by an architect to accompany elevations and plans of a building. purlin (in French, panne): a horizontal beam placed along a roof’s length to strengthen the middles of rafters. quadrillage: orthogonal grid plan of streets in a town or city. reduction: from the Spanish reducción, it refers to a mission town

created to settle Amerindians within easy reach of the church and mission. rond-point: a circular space at the meeting of streets (today the term means a “roundabout”). roof truss: see ferme. sablière: a wall plate or horizontal beam connecting the tops of

America were not always from the nobility. Seigneuries could also be granted to military officers and religious orders. signares: (after the Portuguese senhora), mixed-race women in Senegal married unofficially to French traders in what was called mariage à la mode du pays. They were property owners and influential members of society because of their unique position as intermediators between the French administrators and the African powers on the coast. sovereign council (conseil souverain): a judicial court appointed by the governor and representing the colonists. This court was the settlers’ main court of appeal. tailleur de pierre: a stonecutter (a less common term than

maçon). tapade: reed palisade in Senegambia surrounding a cluster of

dwellings and generally delineating a familial group. tapis vert: a long rectangular “green carpet” forming a grande

perspective up a main axis in a French formal garden. ti kay: Haitian Kreyol for “little house” (petite caille). A small

rectangular two-roomed rural house in Haiti with a gable front and a porch possibly derived from West African prototypes. toise: a unit of measurement roughly equal to an English fathom (1.95 metres). toiture à fort pente: a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French roof type with highly pitched flanks used in grand estates and palaces. trophée: a symbol of military might comprising weapons, helmets, and other military objects bound together in the manner of ancient Roman relief carving, commonly taking the form of a stone sculpture on the entablature of a roof or surmounting dormers. trousseau: money paid to a priest by the king for his upkeep when embarking for the colonies.

the wall posts (or resting on top of a masonry wall). salle: name for an open space in a French formal garden sur-

rounded by a forested grove (see bosquet). They were the location for theatrical events, balls, and other festivities and frequently featured a fountain. savane: in the French West Indies and Guiana a generic term for an open public green in a larger town (e.g., Fort Royal and Cayenne) scieur de long: a sawyer specializing in cutting planks lengthwise from tree trunks. seigneur: (see seigneurie) seigneurie: in Nouvelle-France a piece of feudal land granted by the Crown to a seigneur (manorial lord) who then let out most of it to habitants (agricultural settlers) who cleared and farmed the land. Unlike in France, seigneurs in North

Vodou: an Afro-Caribbean religion derived from West African

Vodun (“spirit” in Ewe) that combines African spirituality with certain Catholic precepts and other European influences. wall plate: see sablière. wattling: a basket-like woven lattice inserted between wall posts

as an armature. The panel would usually then be plastered with mud, clay, sand, straw, and other materials (in a combination known as “wattle-and-daub”). zapata: a wooden capital shaped like an elongated triangle of

mudéjar derivation used in Spanish and Spanish-American architecture on the tops of posts in a gallery.

Glossary

493

Timeline

1534 1550s 1555–60 1562 and 1564–65 1588 1589–1610 1598 1600 1604 1605 1608 1610–43 1624 1625

1627 1634 1635 1642 1643 1643–1715 1648–49 1653 1654 1654–56 1659 1663 1665 1671 1672–78 1674 1677

Jacques Cartier’s first voyage to North America, followed by others in 1535–36, 1541–42 Fishermen begin drying their catch on the shores of Newfoundland and the Gaspé Peninsula Colony of “Antarctic France” in Guanabara Bay (Rio de Janeiro) Short-lived French colonies in Florida Dutch establish trading factory on Île de Gorée Reign of King Henry IV of France Henri IV’s Edict of Nantes grants French Protestants a large degree of religious liberty; in the early years Protestants (Huguenots) were active in the colonies Pierre de Chauvin de Tonnetuit establishes first trading post at Tadoussac Daniel de La Ravardière founds first colony in Guiana Samuel de Champlain founds factory at Île Sainte-Croix in Acadia Champlain founds trading factory at Port-Royal Foundation of Quebec City Reign of King Louis XIII of France Merchants from Rouen establish first settlement near Cayenne French pirates and those of other nations found settlement on Tortuga Island (Tortue, Haiti) First French Antillean settlement founded on Saint-Christophe (Saint Kitts) First African slaves in French Atlantic Empire at Saint-Christophe Cardinal Richelieu founds the Compagnie des Cent-Associés Granting of first seigneurie in Nouvelle-France to Robert Giffard Martinique claimed by Jacques Dyel du Parquet Guadeloupe claimed by Charles Liénard de l’Olive and Jean Du Plessis d’Ossonville Foundation of Montreal (Ville Marie) in the name of the Virgin Mary Sugar cane introduced into the French colonies Cayenne enlarged by Charles Poncet de Brétigny, who was killed the next year Reign of King Louis XIV of France Iroquois destroy the network of Jesuit missions in Huronia First Jesuits in Guiana The Dutch seize Cayenne Jewish refugees and their slaves from Brazil bring expertise in the sugar cane industry to Guadeloupe and Martinique First French factory in Senegal founded at Saint-Louis France clears the pirates out of Tortuga Minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert personally oversees Atlantic empire Colbert ends private proprietorship in the colonies with establishment of the Compagnie des Indes Occidentales On Colbert’s recommendation, French found Fort Saint-Louis in Juda (Ouidah) on the Guinea coast Franco-Dutch War French Antilles come directly under Crown rule French capture Île de Gorée from the Dutch

1682 1685 1688–97 1697 1699 1701 1702–13 1712 1713 1713–1744 1715–74 1715–23 1717 1718 1720 1731 1740–48 1741 1756–63 1759 1763 1764 1768 1773 1774–91 1775–83 1779 1789–99 1791 1791–1804 1793 1793–1815 1794 1794–1802 1799 1802 1804 1814–24 1815 1824–30 1830 1831 1848

496

Timeline

René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle’s voyage from Quebec to the mouth of the Mississippi Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV denies freedom of religion to French Protestants Nine Years’ War of the English Succession Spain acknowledges France’s possession of Saint-Domingue in the Treaty of Ryswick Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville founds the first settlement in Louisiana at Biloxi The “Great Peace” between France and the Iroquois War of the Spanish Succession Louisiana granted to merchant Antoine Crozat in the king’s name Peace of Utrecht grants Britain Newfoundland, the Acadian peninsula (but not Île-Royale, present-day Cape Breton), and Hudson Bay Population of Nouvelle-France experiences unprecedented growth Reign of King Louis XV of France Regency of the duc d’Orléans Louisiana handed over to John Law and his Mississippi Company Major Planter’s Revolt in Martinique known as the Gaoulé Nouvelle-Orléans (named after the Duc d’Orléans) founded, becoming capital of Louisiana in 1722 John Law’s fall from grace and exile Louisiana taken over directly by the Crown War of the Austrian Succession Kings of Dahomey begin to administer Ouidah Seven Years’ War, known in Anglo-America as the “French and Indian War” Conquest of Quebec; General James Wolfe captures Quebec City Treaty of Paris; France reacquires Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Gorée Jesuit expulsion from French territories Foundation of Guianese colony of Kourou Gorée returned to the French and becomes the seat of the governor Worldwide suppression of the Jesuits Reign of King Louis XVI of France American War of Independence Saint-Louis, Senegal, reacquired by France French Revolution Last French administrator in Ouidah is expelled and the fort abandoned Haitian Revolution Execution of Louis XVI Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars French government frees all slaves, but in practice only in Saint-Domingue and Guadeloupe Martinique in British hands Napoleon Bonaparte is First Consul Reinstitution of slavery in French territories Napoleon crowns himself Emperor of France Reign (with brief interruption) of King Louis XVIII of France Napoleon exiled to St Helena Slave trade throughout the French empire is prohibited Reign of King Charles X of France Beginning of French conquest of Algeria Slave ships to French ports finally halted Slavery abolished in all French territories

noTes

M u s e uMs and arc hi v e s c o ns ulte d with a b br e v i at i o ns us e d i n t he no t e s

adgi

Archives Départementales de la Gironde, Bordeaux adgu Archives Départementales de Guadeloupe, Basse-Terre aeg Archives de l’Evêché de Guadeloupe, Basse-Terre adql Archives du Diocèse de Quimper et Léon adg Archives Départementales de Guyane, Cayenne adm Archives Départementales de la Martinique, Fort-de-France adsl Archives du Diocèse de Saint-Louis (Senegal) amb Archives Municipales de Bordeaux anom Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence anf Archives Nationales de France, Paris apssm Archives des Prêtres de Saint-Sulpice de Montréal aucss Archives, Univers Culturel de Saint-Sulpice, Montréal bdaf Bibliothèque Départementale AlexandreFranconie, Cayenne bma Bibliothèque Municipale d’Aix-en-Provence (Méjanes) bnf Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris lac Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa mbpa Musée-Bibliothèque Paul Arbaud, Aix-en-Provence mcfsq Musée de la Civilisation, Québec, Fonds Séminaire du Québec shd Service Historique de la Défense, Vincennes slnsw State Library of New South Wales, Sydney c h a p t e r o ne 1 Hardman, The Life of Louis XVI, 6. 2 Tombs and Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, xxiii.

3 Rediker, The Slave Ship, 12–13; Geggus, “The French Slave Trade,” 119. In fact French registered ships continued to participate in the slave trade until 1864, decades after the institution was prohibited by French law. 4 McClellan, Colonialism and Science, 2; Tombs and Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, 110–11. For the 1790 census, which numbered 3,929,214, see Carroll D. Wright and William C. Hunt, The History and Growth of the United States Census, 17. 5 Ali Tur, Architecture coloniale. 6 http://www.quebecregion.com/en/. 7 http://www.neworleansonline.com/tools/ neighborhoodguide/frenchquarter.html. 8 Edwards, “Creole Architecture,” 254–6; Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 112; McClellan, Colonialism and Science, 3. Boucher calls it “among the brashest of nouveau riche American cities.” Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 17. 9 See Corvington, Port-au-Prince au cours des ans. 10 The litany of ancien-régime churches destroyed in the last century and a half through fire and deliberate destruction is breathtaking. A partial list includes: Notre-Dame-deBonsecours, Montreal (begun 1675, demolished 1885–86); Ange-Gardien (begun 1675, destroyed 1930); SainteFoy (begun 1698, destroyed 1878); Saint-Laurent, Îled’Orléans (begun 1695, destroyed 1864); Sainte-Anne de Beaupré (begun 1676, demolished 1878); Trois-Rivières (begun 1710, destroyed 1908); Lachine (begun 1702, destroyed 1869); Pointe-aux-Trembles (begun 1705, destroyed 1937); Recollect Church in Montreal (begun 1706, destroyed 1867); Lachenaie (begun 1724, demolished 1883); Saint-François-de-Sales, Île d’Orléans (begun 1734, destroyed 1988); Ursuline Chapel, Quebec (begun 1723, demolished 1902). See Noppen, Les églises; Gowans, Church Architecture. 11 The term gloire, one to which Louis openly aspired as the true sign of divinely appointed kingship, was used specifically by Colbert to denote architecture’s role in representing royal authority in 1663. Sabatier, “La gloire du

12 13

14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27

28 29

30 31

32 33

498

roi,” 527–60; Berger, A Royal Passion, 5. On Colbert and the construction of French culture, see also Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions, 98–106, 115–24. On Le Brun, who worked directly under Colbert, see Burchard, The Sovereign Artist. Quoted in Chaline, “A King and His Gardens,” 30. Berger, A Royal Passion, 20–3; Blunt, Art and Architecture in France, 215–18; Lefaivre and Tzonis, The Emergence of Modern Architecture, 18–21. Sarmant, Les demeures du soleil, 17. The figures are for the years 1683, the year of Colbert’s death, to 1691. Gerbino, François Blondel, 46. Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions, 101. Fricheau, “Les étymologies de Claude Perrault,” 167–82; Picon, “From ‘Poetry of Art,’” 32; Grignon and Maxim, “Convenance,” 29; Picon, Architectes et ingénieurs, 86–9. Quoted in Picon, “From ‘Poetry of Art,’” 32. Gerbino, François Blondel, 2. Quoted in Grignon and Maxim, “Convenance,” 29. Mignot, “Vauban, ordres et décor,” 226–33; Sanger, “Vauban, urbaniste,” 214–25. De Cotte was the grandson of a royal engineer. On de Cotte, see Kalnein, Architecture in France, 8–23; Gallet, Les architectes parisiens du xviii e siècle, 146–58; Neuman, “French Domestic Architecture,” 128–44. On the pré carré see Bittering, L’invention du pré carrée, 15–29, and Mukerji, Territorial Ambition, 55–6. On Colbert and the ceinture de fer see Blanchard, Les ingénieurs du “roy,” 61–8. Bittering, L’invention du pré carré, 33–4, 235. Langins, Conserving the Enlightenment, 65. The term is Bittering’s. L’invention du pré carré, 235. Gerbino, François Blondel, 46. The quotation is from Moogk, who was referring specifically to Nouvelle-France, but his comment can be applied to the whole Atlantic empire. Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 13. See also Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 279. Bittering, L’invention du pré carré, 140–1. Quotation is from Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 67; see also page 88. See also Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 234–5; Chénier, Québec, 43; Eccles, The French in North America, 66–8. Boucher remarks that Colbert “initiated the beginning of the end of frontier independence in the French Caribbean” (111). Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 283. Ibid., 301. On luxury items made for the enjoyment of products from tropical colonies see Herda-Mousseaux, Thé, café ou chocolat? Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 109, 168–9; Chénier, Québec, 45, 227. Bittering, L’invention du pré carré, 80–1.

Notes to pages 7–14

34 Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 286, 292; Chénier, Québec, 43. 35 In fact Talon was the second intendant of New France, the first appointed in 1663, but his predecessor never made the trip to Quebec. See Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 242–3; Chénier, Québec, 46. On the office of intendant, see McClellan, Colonialism and Science, 40. On the CarignanSalières Regiment and the policy of encouraging settlement, see Moogk, “The Craftsmen of New France,” 142. 36 Marc Grignon has written in particular about the intense rivalry between these figures. See Grignon, “Transformation et adaptation,” 551–64. See also Iturbide-Kennedy, “Les sièges du pouvoir,” 31–40. 37 “Les hommes de tous les ordres de la Colonie, invités à cette cérémonie, se sont rendus au Gouvernement dans le cours de la matinée, & les Dames à l’Intendance, ou étoit logée Mde. Le Roux. A midi, M. le Général est parti en carrosse du Gouvernement, accompagné du cortège le plus nombreux pour se rendre à l’Intendance. A une heure, toute l’Assemblée s’est rendue à l’Eglise.” Affiches Américaines, 27 March 1771, 106. 38 On François Blondel’s voyage to the West Indies, see Le Blanc, “François Blondel et les Îles d’Amérique (1666– 1668),” 156–61. 39 Kalnein, Architecture in France, 85. 40 Thorpe, “Gaspard Chaussegros de Léry,” 126. 41 On the Italian Renaissance origin of early modern fortification architecture, see Langins, Conserving the Enlightenment, 20–32. See also chapter 7 in this volume. 42 See the comment on the scholarship on Robert de Cotte in Fossier, Les dessins du fonds Robert de Cotte, 37. See also Mignot, “Vauban,” 255–6. Scholars attach the same stigma to Charles Le Brun, whose control over a vast network of artistic production has been called dictatorial; more recent work is “encouraging art historians to turn away from a concentration on Le Brun’s ‘dictatorship’ and his organizational skills in order to appreciate the inventiveness of his compositions.” Burchard, The Sovereign Artist, 21. 43 Barros, Vauban: L’intelligence du territoire, 88–95; Buisseret, “French Cartography,” 1504; Langins, Conserving the Enlightenment, 14–37; Buisseret, Ingénieurs et fortifications; Charbonneau, Quebec, the Fortified City, 86–92; Association Vauban, Vauban et ses successeurs en Briançonnais, 1995. 44 Quoted in Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa 1876– 1912, 608. 45 For example, Moreau de Saint-Méry describes a public square in Saint-Marc (Saint-Domingue) lined with two rows of elm trees and Sauvignon grapes from Bordeaux growing on the shores of Cul-de-Sac in the same colony.

46

47 48

49 50 51

52 53

54 55 56 57

58 59

60

About the grapes he remarks: “Ce raisin demande à être défendu de la grande chaleur du soleil.” Moreau de SaintMéry, Description, 2:195, 302. Arago, Narrative of a Voyage round the World, 163. See also McGregor, A Forger’s Progress. The definitive work on Greenway’s architecture is Broadbent and Hughes, Francis Greenway: Architect. Wittman, Architecture, Print Culture, 85–8. D’Albaret, Différens projets. On this see Nelson, Architecture and Empire in Jamaica, 42–4, 147–51; D’Orgeix and Frémaux, “La petite maison,” 2–13. Nelson, Architecture and Empire, 4. Desmoulins, Basse-Terre, 163. This kind of work has primarily been done in North America and the literature varies considerably in date. Most of the work on Quebec and Louisiana is decades old, whereas that on the Antilles, Guiana, and Senegal includes quite recent material. For a good bibliography of the state of the research see Hinchman, Portrait of an Island; Kelly and Hardy, French Colonial Archaeology; Le Roux et al., Les jésuites et l’esclavage; Kissoun, Pointe-à-Pitre; Desmoulins, Basse-Terre; Edwards, “Creole Architecture,” 241–71; Charlery, “Maisons de maître,” 2–49; Mark, Portuguese Style and Luso-African Identity; Berthelot and Gaumé, Kaz Antiyé; Grignon, Loing du soleil; Goguet and Mangones, L’architecture de la ville historique du Cap Haïtien; Noppen and Grignon, L’art de l’architecture. Nelson, Architecture and Empire. Of particular note is the work of Jay D. Edwards, who has contributed extensively to the history of creole architecture in Louisiana and Haiti, as well as Jamaica. For an excellent discussion of the term “creole” and its application to the architecture of Louisiana and other regions see Edwards, “Creole Architecture,” 241–71; Edwards, “The Origins of Creole Architecture,” 155–89. Ibid., 180. Noppen, Les églises du Québec, 200–1. Morisset, L’architecture en Nouvelle-France, 51–2. Kalman, A History of Canadian Architecture, 1:193–5; Bédard, Maisons et églises du Québec, 39; Morisset, L’architecture en Nouvelle-France, 56–7. Kalman, Canadian Architecture, 1:195–6; Gowans, Looking at Architecture in Canada, 92–7. Gowans, Building in Canada; Gowans, Looking at Architecture in Canada; Bédard, Maisons et églises du Québec; Toker, The Church of Notre-Dame in Montreal. Kalman, A History of Canadian Architecture, 1:51–3; Traquair, The Old Architecture of Quebec, 60–1; 67–8.

61 Arrigo and McElroy, Plantations and Historic Homes of New Orleans, 28–30; Kornwolf, Architecture and Town Planning, 1:223–34; Lane, Architecture of the Old South, 31; Wilson, The Architecture of Colonial Louisiana, 336–8. 62 Toledano, New Orleans, 9–14; Mills, Architecture of the Old South, 31. 63 Toledano, New Orleans, 31. 64 Mills, Architecture of the Old South, 31. 65 I am grateful to one of my reviewers for this reference. 66 Wilson, Architecture of Colonial Louisiana, 291–313; Wilson, The Cabildo on Jackson Square, 27–39. The present cathedral was built in 1849–52. 67 Trecco, Arquitectura de Córdoba, 38; Gutierrez, Arquitectura y urbanismo, 278–9; Toledano, New Orleans, 24. The Córdoba building lacks the portico. 68 The form was also common in the Spanish Philippines, as at the church at Malate (1716–18). See Gutierrez, Arquitectura y urbanismo, 132–3; Alarcon, Philippine Architecture, 177–8. 69 On the Parlange Plantation house see Kornwolf, Architecture and Town Planning, 1:346; Daspit, Louisiana Architecture, 26–7, 31; Lane, Architecture of the Old South, 60; Morrison, Early American Architecture, 263. 70 Arrigo and McElroy, Plantations and Historic Homes of New Orleans, 94–5; Daspit, Louisiana Architecture, 53–5. 71 Peter Gnass, an artist living in Pierreville, commented upon the destruction: “Pour moi, c’est un crime, on est au Québec, on a très peu de choses anciennes ici, il faut essayer de les protéger.” http://ici.radio-canada.ca/ nouvelle/784605/eglise-saint-thomas-pierrevillepatrimoine-religieux-demolition. 72 Kalman, A History of Canadian Architecture, 1:52; Goguet and Mangones, L’architecture de la ville historique du CapHaitien, 52. 73 See Bailey, The Palace of Sans-Souci, 113–39. 74 Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 73–5. 75 Ibid., 1–16; Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 31–43; Eccles, The French in North America, 1–31. “La Nouvelle France, situé dans l’Amérique septentrionale, nommée la Canada est une partie de la Terre plus grande que l’Europe. Elle appartient à la France depuis la decouverte qu’en fit Christophe Colomb en l’année 1492.” shd gr 1 m 1105 6, “Mémoire servant à faire connoitre les grands avantages que le Roy retireroit du Canada pour le Commerce, la Marine, la Guerre” (1755). 76 Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 139–42. 77 Eccles, The French in North America, 13, 30–85. 78 Ibid., 14–15.

Notes to pages 14–26

499

79 Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 53–86; Eccles, The French in North America, 66–99. 80 Chénier, Québec, 41–3. 81 Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 93; Eccles, The French in North America, 30–1, 37. 82 Stelter, “Military Considerations,” 222; Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 94–5; Eccles, The French in North America, 52–4. 83 On the balance of power in favour of the Iroquois and other Great Lakes Amerindians over European colonial powers, see especially McDonnell, Masters of Empire, 91–124. 84 Eccles, The French in North America, 38–9. 85 Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 98–100; Eccles, The French in North America, 72, 86, 181. 86 Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 106, 119, 137; Eccles, The French in North America, 91–2. 87 Shipbuilding at Quebec and an iron forge at Trois-Rivières had greater success after 1730 under Intendant Gilles Hocquart. Eccles, The French in North America, 136–7. 88 Ibid., 183–4; Naissance de la Louisiane, 21. 89 Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 78–83. 90 Ibid., 37; Eccles, The French in North America, 56–60, 94–5. 91 Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 71; Eccles, The French in North America, 124. 92 Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 143–76; Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 34. 93 Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 75, 144–5, 347–9; Eccles, The French in North America, 96. 94 “Voilà les grands et utiles avantages que certainement l’on retiroit par l’etablissement de l’envoy de bien de jeunes gens dans le Canada pour le bien peupler une bonne fois pour toujours, affin d’y trouver dans tous les tems des forces suffisantes pour arrêter les progrès des nombreux etablissemens que l’Angleterre y fait depuis longtems, et pour la vaincre en tems de guerre.” shd gr 1 m 1105 6, 14a. 95 Eccles, The French in North America, 162–3. 96 Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 3–5, 12–13, 83–4; Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 115, 150, 193; Eccles, The French in North America, 121–2, 134–45. 97 Tombs and Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, 116–41; Naissance de la Louisiane, 44–56; Eccles, The French in North America, 198–232. 98 The complaint by the La Rochelle Chamber of Commerce asking their Bordeaux counterparts to protest with them dates from 12 November 1761. adg i c 4256, “Registres de deliberations,” 12 November 1761. On the Paris Treaty see also Eccles, The French in North America, 238–42. 99 “Un rocher aride, couvert de mousse, hérissé de pointes … contenant dans son intérieur des gorges et des fondrières

500

Notes to pages 26–30

100 101 102 103 104 105 106

107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114

115 116 117 118 119 120 121

122

impénétrables, remplies de lacs de marais et de flaques d’eau.” shd gr 1 m 1105 32, “Reconnoissance des Isles St Pierre et Miquelon,” 17 July 1784. See also Tombs and Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, 140–1. shd gr 1 m 1324, “Proposition de conquérir le Canada,” signed Jean Basset, 27 January 1793. Eccles, The French in North America, 176–97. Powell, The Accidental City, 69; Dawdy, Building the Devil’s Empire, 150–3. Naissance de la Louisiane, 32–3, 44–6. Eccles, The French in North America, 176. Choquette, “Proprietorships in French North America,” 126–9; Powell, The Accidental City, 24–5. Sainton, Histoire et civilisation de la Caraibe, 21–35; Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 69–87; Butel, Histoire des Antilles françaises xvii –xx siècles, 23–50; Pluchon, Histoire des Antilles et de la Guyane, 53–78; Rennard, Histoire religieuse, 11–12. Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 83–5; Butel, Histoire des Antilles, 42–7. Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 70–2; Butel, Histoire des Antilles, 29–31. Butel, Histoire des Antilles, 94–108. Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 88–111; Butel, Histoire des Antilles, 43–8. On the Jewish refugees from Dutch Brazil, see Klooster, The Dutch Moment, 164–74. Butel, Histoire des Antilles, 50–69; Pluchon, Histoire, 79–108. Butel, Histoire des Antilles, 128–30. Sainton, Histoire et civilisation, 35–6; Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 79–82; Butel, Histoire des Antilles, 83–90. Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 60. Sainton, Histoire et civilisation, 35–6. Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 60–2; Pluchon, Histoire, 109–40. Hall, Historical Dictionary, 52, 211–12, Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 16–17. McClellan, Colonialism and Science, 95, 98–100, 149–52, 200–1; Pluchon, Histoire, 163–71. Butel, Histoire des Antilles, 158–64; Pluchon, Histoire, 172–9. Such was Le Sieur Sureal, a carpenter from Mirebalais, who, “étant sur son départ pour France, prie ceux à qui il peut devoir de se présenter pour recevoir leur payement & ceux qui lui doivent de le solder incessamment.” Supplément aux Affiches Américaines, 3 January 1784, 3. Butel, Histoire des Antilles, 209–39; Pluchon, Histoire, 265– 320; The classic work on the Haitian Revolution is James,

123 124 125

126

127

128

129 130 131 132 133 134 135

136 137 138 139

The Black Jacobins. On the gens de couleur, see esp. 133–41. On the term “pearl of the Antilles” see Parizet, Bordeaux au xviii e siècle, 223. On Hugues, see Butel, Histoire des Antilles, 240–4. Butel, Histoire des Antilles, 246–76; Pluchon, Histoire, 379–93. Artigalas, Les jésuites au Nouveau Monde, 32–7; Le Roux, Les jésuites et l’esclavage, 22; Montabo, L’histoire de la Guyane, 40–60; Bain et al., “Archaeological Research at Habitation Loyola,” 209; Mam Lam Fouck, Histoire générale, 22–3; Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 93–102. “En 1624 des marchands de Rouen y etablirent une petite peuplade de 26 hommes dans un lieu appelé Sinamary, environ 24 a 30 lieues au N.O. de l’isle de Cayenne. Deux ans après une colonie plus considérable alla s’etablir sur la riviere de Conanama a 6 lieues de Sinamary.” anom 14 dfc 158, “Mémoire sur la Guianne Françoise dont Cayenne est le chef-lieu” (after 1765), 2b. “On fit des etablissemens a Cayenne même en 1634 et en 1636 ou batit un fort vers la pointe de l’ouest de cette isle, a l’embouchure ou la riviere forme le Port, et au dessus du fort, un bourg qui est resté le chef lieu de la colonie.” anom 14 dfc 158, 2b. See Verwimp, Les jésuites, 27. Le Roux, Les jésuites et l’esclavage, 21–6; Montabo and Stephenson, La Guyane, 14–27; Verwimp, Les jésuites, 28; Bain, “Archaeological Research,” 209; Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 94. Montabo, L’histoire de la Guyane, 51–60; Verwimp, Les jésuites, 30; Mam Lam Fouck, Histoire générale, 23. Klooster, The Dutch Moment, 95–6; Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 93. Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 44; Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 230. Bain, “Archaeological Research,” 206. Le Roux, Les jésuites et l’esclavage, 44; Rennard, Histoire religieuse, 187–8. “Elle etoit toujours restée dans un etat de langueur.” anom 14 dfc 158, 2b. Klooster, The Dutch Moment, 111; Martin, “Les Français en Afrique subsaharienne,” 314; Diakité, Louis XIV et l’Afrique noire, 71–5; Sinou, Comptoirs, 27–35. Diakité, Louis XIV et l’Afrique noire, 71. Banks, “Financiers, Factors,” 79. Diakité, Louis XIV et l’Afrique noire, 72; Banks, “Financiers, Factors,” 84–5. They began with four founded by Richelieu: the Compagnie de Rouen (also known as the Compagnie Normande, 1626), another Rouen Company (1633), the Compagnie de SaintMalo (1634), and a stillborn company of Parisian businessmen founded in 1635. The 1633 Rouen Company was

140

141 142 143 144

145

146

147 148 149

dissolved to form the Compagnie du Cap-Vert et du Sénégal in 1659, which in turn was purchased in 1664 by Colbert’s Compagnie des Indes Occidentales (the Atlantic equivalent of his Compagnie des Indes Orientales), but this was split in half in 1673, with the West African portion going to the Compagnie du Sénégal, which, bankrupted eleven years later, was reorganized as the Compagnie du Sénégal et la Côte de Guinée in 1681. This latter company lasted all of three years before it was split in two in 1684. In 1769 the Senegal Company was renewed once more, according to a 1775 report by Aumont de Rochemeont, but by this point the king had also placed a governor in Gorée to ensure direct rule. anom, 17 dfc 88, “L’Isle de Goré: sur ce qu’elle a été, ce qu’elle est, et sur ce qu’on peut en faire a l’avantage de l’etat et du commerce, par Mr. Aumont de Rochemeont” (1775), 1a. Banks, “Financiers, Factors,” 80. Benoist, Histoire de l’église catholique au Sénégal, 76–9; Martin, “Les Français en Afrique subsaharienne,” 323–7. Sinou, Comptoirs, 17. Hinchman, “African Rococo,” xvii, 81–2. On the signares see Jones, The Métis of Senegal; Jones, “Mariage à La Mode,” 27–48; Knight-Baylac, “La vie à Gorée,” 377–420. On the degree to which the signares were involved in commerce see Knight-Baylac, “La vie à Gorée de 1677 à 1789,” 46–7. Jones, The Métis of Senegal, 21. See also Jones, “Mariage à La Mode,” 27–48; Hinchman, “Anne Pepin (1758–1837),” 133–49. Lawrence, Trade Castles and Forts, 51–3. Soulillou, Rives coloniales, 207–14; Berbain, Études sur la traite des noirs. Bittering, L’invention du pré carré, 83, 16; see also 140–1. c h a pte r two

1 Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 12–13. Moogk was speaking specifically of Nouvelle-France, but his remarks are even more appropriate for the remainder of the far-flung empire. See also Pritchard, In Search of Empire, xx. 2 There has been much recent work on the churches that lined the Ruta de la Plata: see Corti et al., La pintura mural de Parinacota; Moreno and Pereira, Arica y Parinacota. 3 Eccles, The French in North America, 134; Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 15, 177. 4 Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 8. In the entire colonial period only seven thousand settlers and six thousand slaves reached Louisiana. Dubois, “Slavery in the French Caribbean, 1635–1804,” 433. 5 Darwin, Unfinished Empire, xi–xii. Notes to pages 30–5

501

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19

20

21 22 23

24

25

502

Langins, Conserving the Enlightenment, 69. Bittering, L’invention du pré carré, 29. Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions, 100. Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 10; Dubois, “Slavery in the French Caribbean,” 431. Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 132. Dubois, “Slavery in the French Caribbean,” 442. Charlery, “Maisons de maître,” 3. Eliot, Empires of the Atlantic World, 52, 260–1; Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 16. As Pritchard notes, “it is highly unlikely that even 100,000 emigrants ever left the shores of “la douce France” for the harsh conditions of the New World, or that one-quarter of that number settled there.” Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 16–17. Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 14. Eccles, The Canadian Frontier, 38, 69. Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 133. Wimpffen, A Voyage to Saint Domingo, 67. Sainton, Histoire et civilisation, 275–81. The memorandum founding the city in 1768 begrudgingly acknowledges that the British traced out the city. anom 08 dfc 259, “Mémoire-historique sur l’établissement de la ville de la Pointe-à-Pitre” (1768). The classic account of Napoleon’s bungling approach to recapturing Saint-Domingue from the independence fighters is that of James, The Black Jacobins, 235–303. The quotation from Louis XIV is from Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 299. Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 17. Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 75, xviii. On a seventeenth-century project to rebuild Paris as a geometrically perfect representation of absolutist rule, see Bittering, L’invention du pré carré, 110–11. The literature on eschatological programs of the Mendicant missions in the Americas is large and growing. For a sample with particular relevance to art and architecture see: Lara, Flying Francis; Lara, “Francis Alive and Aloft,”139–63; Lara, Christian Texts for Aztecs; Melvin, Building Colonial Cities of God, 13–17; Lara, City, Temple, Stage; Edgerton, Theaters of Conversion, 13–33; Gruzinski, The Conquest of Mexico, 51–69; Warren, The Conquest of Michoacán; Phelan, The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans, 46; Zavala, Sir Thomas More in New Spain; Kubler, Mexican Architecture, 3, 10–15. See also Lejeune, “Dreams of Order,” 38–9; MacCormack, Religion in the Andes, 247; Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 184–6. On Quiroga in particular see Verástique, Michoacán and Eden. Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions,144–82; Sustersic, Imágenes Guaraní-jesuítias; Sustersic, Patrimonio jesuítico; Sustersic,

Notes to pages 35–40

26 27

28 29

30

31

Templos Jesuítico-Guaraníes. On Richelieu and the Jesuits in Canada see Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 21. Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 22–3. “et sur tout en Pinguins qui sont d’une espece d’oiseaux gros comme les oyes et tres bons a manger, dont il se voit des troupes si nombreuses qu’on en peut faire des provisions estant salées pour plusieurs mois.” anom 14 dfc 2, “Memoire et Proposition pour l’Establissment d’une Colonie entre la Riviere de la Platte et le Detroit de Magellan” (1669), 3a. First quotation is from fol. 1a. Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 45–55; Vidal, “Fort-Coligny et la France antarctique (1555–1560),” 70–3. “Ayant que débute vraiment l’entreprise de colonisation, sous Louis XV, la Guyane faisait partie de ces terres mythiques inspirant voyageurs et aventuriers en quête de l’Eldorado. Ainsi, sous la plume d’esprits romanesques, la Guïane fut longtemps évoquée comme un territoire à mi-chemin entre mythe et réalité, le pays de l’Eldorado ou encore le royaume des Amazones.” Artigalas, Les jésuites au Nouveau Monde, 28–9. See also Rothschild, “A Horrible Tragedy,” 71; Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 15; Verwimp, Les jésuites en Guyane française, 24. À Sinamari le 26 9bre 1777. Monseigneur, comme vous n’avez que le bien public en vue et que vous cherchez a le procurer par toutes sortes de moïens; je me crois obligé de faire savoir à votre grandeur ce que je pense de la Guianne François. C’est un pais où tout y vient en abondance, et dont on tireroit un très bon partie s’il etoit plus habile; un païs dont les productions l’emportent en qualités sur les productions des autres colonies. Le poisson, le gibier y sont très communs. Il abonde en choses rares et curieuses. Il y a des oiseaux qui charment la vue par la beauté et la varieté de leur plumage. Dans ce païs tout y vient presque naturellement et sans culture, le manioque, le tabac, le coton, le cacao, la vanille, le café, le sucre, le roucon et l’indigo viennent d’aux mêmes dans plusieurs endroits. Il y a des bois de toutes les espèces imaginables propres pour la structure et la teinture. Il y a enfin de quoi former un roiaume riche et florissant, où on trouvera dans la suite des mines d’or, d’argent, et autres richesses enfermées dans les entrailles de la terre car ce païs en contient probablement aussi bien que le Chili, le Perraguai et le Bresil auxquels il confine.” anom col f 5a 21, “Lettre de l’abbé Jacquemin, curé de Sinnamary comportant une brève description de la Guyane,” 26 November 1777, 1a. Verwimp, Les jésuites en Guyane française, 70–1; Larin, Canadiens en Guyane, 70–5; Mam Lam Fouck, Histoire générale, 52–4; Rothschild, “A Horrible Tragedy,” 77. There is a growing literature on the tragedy; see in particular:

32

33

34 35 36 37

38

39 40 41 42

43

44

Godfroy, Kourou, 1763; Michel, La Guyane sous l’Ancien Régime; Thibaudault, Échec de la démesure en Guyane. “Autorisation aux anciens colons de Cayenne de garder leurs esclaves noirs, mais défenses expresses d’établir une nouvelle habitation en nègres … La peine de mort restreinte aux seuls crimes de lèse-majesté divine et humaine, d’assassinat prémédité, de viol, de rapt, de violences de femmes et filles tant Européennes qu’Indiennes & d’intelligence avec les énnemis de l’état … Tollérance des réligions des étrangers.” anom 14 dfc 143, “Instructions du Roi à M. le chevalier Turgot gouverneur et lieutenant-général de la Guyane,” 31 August 1764, 1b–2a. “Il ne doit pas perdre de vue que l’intention de S.M. est d’établir la colonie en blancs … parce que cette population est plus compatible avec les vues de justice & de humanité qui animent S.M.” anom 14 dfc 143, 1b. Godfroy, Kourou, 17. Ibid.; Rothschild, “A Horrible Tragedy,” 72. Le Roux et al., Les jésuites et l’esclavage, 80. For a recent study on the Mississippi Bubble, see Neal, “I am Not a Master of Events.” On some positive aspects of Law’s adventures on the French economy, which included allowing towns, corporations, and private citizens throughout France to get out of debt and increasing the amount of currency in circulation, see Bittering, L’invention du pre carré, 77. See also Powell, The Accidental City, 25–32. Choquette, “Proprietorship in French North America,” 127–30; Powell, The Accidental City, 26–7; Garber, Famous First Bubbles, 92–5. Powell, The Accidental City, 30. The quotation is from Powell, The Accidental City, 52. See also Markham, A Financial History of the United States,100. Powell, The Accidental City, 53. “Il est aisé de prévoir que la Nouvelle Orléans sera un jour la plus grande ville du monde.” anom 04 dfc 9, 23, f. 3, Mémoire sur la Louisianne et les Illinois, d’après un Voyage fait dans l’intérieur du Continent de l’Amérique, undated. The quotation is from Rochemonte, Le Père Antoine Lavalette, 53. On Lavalette see also Rennard, Histoire religieuse, 193–242. Rennard also calls him “un charmeur, un enjôleur” (204). Thompson, “The Lavalette Affair,” 208–9, 212–17; Rochemonte, Le Père Antoine Lavalette, 69–78, 72, 128–9, 152–6. The one-hundred-slave limit was restated regularly by the authorities. For example, the Royal Lettres Patentes authorizing the establishment of the Jesuits in Saint-Domingue (1651) state that the Jesuits were allowed to “acquerir des maisons et des terres pourvue qu’elles n’excedent point celles qui qui sont necessaires

45

46 47 48 49 50 51 52

53 54 55

56 57 58 59 60

pour l’employ de cent negres, construire des moulins et autres engins et machines a l’usage du païs.” anom fm f5a 22, “Lettres patentes de juillet 1651 autorisant les Jésuites à s’établir à Saint-Domingue” (July 1651; copy from 1704, 4). Similarly, in a royal memorandum of 1717 addressed to the governor of Saint-Domingue, the king wrote: “Pour empecher que les communautés religieuses ne fassent de trop grands etablissements dans les colonies il a été ci devant deffendu de souffrir que ces communautés eussent des habitations de plus de cent negres travaillants.” anom 15 dfc 2, “Mémoire du Roy pour servir d’Instruction au S. Marquis de Chateaumorant chef d’escadre, Gouverneur et Lieutenant General des Iles de St. Domingue” (1717), 2b. Similarly, in a 1721 “LettresPatentes sur les exemptions des Religieux” for Martinique the King reiterated a 1703 rule: “à ce que chaque Ordre Religieux ne put étendre ses habitations au-delà de ce qu’il faut de terre pour employer cent negres.” Durand-Molard, Code de la Martinique, 168. On the 1493 bulls of donation of Pope Alexander VI, see Elliot, Empires of the Atlantic World, 249–51. See also Parry, The Spanish Seaborne Empire, 154ff; Lippy et al., Christianity Comes to the Americas, 8–10, 67; Alden, The Making of an Enterprise, xx. Quoted in Artigalas, Les jésuites, 42. See also Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 41. Quoted in Pagden, Lords of All the World, 33. Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 59–60, 141. Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 28–9. Deslandres, Croire et faire croire, 22; Rennard, Histoire religieuse, 28. Rignac, “La presence française en Indochine,” 678–9. Deslandres, Croire et faire croire, 278–80; Pagden, Lords of All the World, 34; Artigalas, Les jésuites, 24–5; Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 20–1. Artigalas, Les jésuites, 42; Chénier, Québec, 41. Lippy, Christianity Comes to the Americas, 148–53; Rennard, Histoire religieuse, 12, 261–71. Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 68. See also Boucher, “French Proprietary Colonies,” 171; Lippy, Christianity Comes to the Americas, 145; Artigalas, Les jésuites, 43; Rennard, Histoire religieuse, 13–14, 59, 185. Lippy, Christianity Comes to the Americas, 148. Deslandres, Croire et faire croire, 77, 288; Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 109. Eccles, The French in North America, 189. Deslandres, “Et loing de France,” 108. Ibid., 94–5, 104–5; Leavelle, “Geographies of Encounter, 913–14.

Notes to pages 40–4

503

61 Wilson, The Architecture of Colonial Louisiana, 24. See also Powell, The Accidental City, 8–9. 62 “la conversion des Sauvages.” anom fm a 21, “Le Roy estably et approuve le Seminaire de Quebec” (1663), 91a–b. The second text is quoted in Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 21. In this book I translate sauvage, the usual French term for Amerindians, as “native,” since in English the term “savage” is associated with cruelty and ferocity whereas “sauvage” was a more neutral term, literally denoting a forest dweller but not specifically referring to the person’s character. In Spanish America the usual term was “indio” (Indian). 63 “Il est très important pour le bien de la Colonie de confier ces missions Iroquoises aux Jesuites d’en mettre aussi chés les Oniatanons et autre nations du sud du nord et de l’ouest pour les instruire des vérités chretiennes et les engager dans les interets de la France.” anom 03 dfc 292, “Mémoire concernant le Canada” (1725), 419a. 64 On du Creux, see Pagden, Lords of All the World, 34. 65 “sauvage idolastres qu’on n’a pû appeler jusques a present au Cristianisme.” anom col c 8b 1, no. 63, “Mémoire sur l’establissement d’un evesché aux Isles de l’Amerique” (1687). On Rochefort, see Pagden, Lords of All the World, 35. 66 Diakité, Louis XIV et l’Afrique noire, 175; Benoist, Histoire de l’Église catholique au Sénégal, 61–7. 67 Diakité, Louis XIV et l’Afrique noire, 176–7; Benoist, Histoire de l’Église catholique au Sénégal, 42–7, 53–6, 63. 68 anom fm c 6 4, “Sénégal, lettre de frère Louis de Rosey, Superior of the Capuchin Order” (Meudon, 27 May 1714). 69 “missionnaires pour les negres qui y sont renfermées dans les d. habitations.” anom fm c 6 4, letter by frère Louis de Rosey, Superior of the Capuchin Order (Meudon, 6 June 1714). 70 “Les Religieux nommez pour le Senegal out le cœur francois quoy’quils soient etrangers.” anom fm c 6 4, letter by frère Louis de Rosey, Superior of the Capuchin Order (Meudon, 8 July 1714). 71 Diakité, Louis XIV et l’Afrique noire, 187. 72 Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic, 403; Blackburn, Harvest of Souls, 21; Lippy et al., Christianity Comes to the Americas, 148–91; Deslandres, “Exemplo aeque ut verbo,” 259; Deslandres, Croire et faire croire, 31–2; Chaline, De Normandie au Nouveau Monde. 73 Deslandres, Croire et faire croire, 241–61, 277–305; Lippy, Christianity Comes to the Americas, 151; Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic, 376. 74 Trigger, “The Original Iroquoians,” 52. 75 Ibid., 54. 76 Gagnon, La conversion par l’image, 29–30. 77 Trigger, “The Original Iroquoians,” 55. 504

Notes to pages 44–7

78 See Bailey, Between Renaissance and Baroque. 79 Lippy, Christianity Comes to the Americas, 165–7. 80 See Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 46–7. For the origins of this vision of Amerindians as “nature’s children” in the 1520s among the theologians of Salamanca, see Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, 57–108. 81 Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 36–43; Lippy, Christianity Comes to the Americas, 165–7; Eccles, The French in North America, 161–2. 82 Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 40; Gill, “La nation abénaquise,” 71–4; Vecsey, The Paths of Kateri’s Kin, 87–93; Devine, Historic Caughnawaga, 1–183. 83 Dickinson, “Seigneurs and Landowners,” 190. 84 Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 42. 85 “Un Evesque establi dans ce lieu au quel le Roy donneroit moyen de subsister et d’y faire passer un bon nombre d’Ecclesiastiques pour former le chap[it]re de sa cathedralle remedieroit a tous ces inconveniens, et il lui seroit d’autant plus facille de mettre un bon ordre dans toute l’estendue de son Diocese, qu’il pourroit facilement en faire le tour tous les ans, puisque hors l’Isle de Cayenne qui est esloignée de 200 lieues de la Martinique, et la coste de St. Domingue de 150 les autres Isles ne sont esloignées que de 20 a 25 lieues les uns des autres, en sorte mesme que l’Intendant est obligé d’en faire le tour tous les ans. Cet avantage ne se trouvoit pas lors de l’establissement de l’Evesché de Quebec, puisque la Colonie de Canada estoit respanüe en cinq ou six cent lieues de païs, et n’estoit composée que de quatre ou cinq mil habitans François.” anom col c 8b 1, no. 63, “Mémoire sur l’establissement d’un evesché aux Isles de l’Amerique” (1687), 3–4. 86 “Nous avions un Evêque au Canada les Espagnols en ont dans toutes leurs colonies … M. de Fénelon est persuadé que l’esclandre du Père de la Valette ne seroit jamais arrivé s’il y avoit eu un Evêque a la Martinique.” shd gr 1 m 1105 5, “Memoire pour Monsieur le Duc de Choiseul sur l’administration du spirituel” (undated), 5, 8. 87 adg i 6 b 60, letter by Lestage, Superior of the Jesuit Professed House in Bordeaux, 14 July 1730. 88 “La parroisse de St. Pierre est desservie par deux missionnaires, dont l’un est curé de Blancs, et l’autre curé de Negres … Le curé des Negres est extrêmement occupé du grand nombre d’esclaves qu’ont les habitans, et il n’a pas moins besoin d’un second, que le curé des blancs.” anom col f5a 7/3, “État des biens et revenus des Jésuites” (1743), 3a. 89 Boucher, France and the American Tropics to 1700, 283. 90 Melvin, Building Colonial Cities of God, 2–3; Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions, 35–6; Elliot, Empires of the Atlantic World, 129.

91 In March 1773 Louis XV decreed that all regular clergy be removed from the colonies and that the parishes be taken over by secular clergy (anom 209miom 30, anonymous report, Guadeloupe, 13 September 1774, f. 41a). At the end of that year there were still thirty-three regular clergy in Guadeloupe (nine Dominicans, nine Carmelites, and fifteen Capuchins) and no seculars (209miom 30, “Etat des dépenses a faire à la Guadeloupe et dépendances pour le service du Roy pendant l’année 1774,” 84b). A letter from Basseterre of 18 March 1776 by Governor D’Arbaud and Intendant De Peinier reports on the activities of the Capuchins operating in Guadeloupe and makes no reference to this decree (209miom 31, f. 14b). 92 Rennard, Histoire religieuse, 98–9. 93 Rennard goes so far as to characterize the king as a kind of évêque laïque (Rennard, Histoire religieuse, 69). He writes: “Rome donne les pouvoirs spirituels aux supérieurs des missions, il donne quelques dispenses et c’est tout; il ne semble pas qu’il fasse autre chose; le roi se charge de tout le reste.” On the Toulouse headquarters of the Dominican mission to the Antilles, see also page 177. 94 Cross and Livingstone, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 653–64. 95 “Sous l’autorité du Saint-Siège et avec l’agrément de nos Rois,” anom 209miom 30, letter of Nozière and de Tascher to the Minister of the Marine (1774), 35. 96 “Depuis longtemps il n’y a plus de missions; pourquoi donc faut-il qu’y ait un Préfet-Apostolique? Pourquoi faut-il que les colonies soient exclues de l’Eglise Gallicane et soumis à la juridiction immédiate du Sainte Siege? Qu’est le Préfet Apostolique sinon un grand Vicaire de l’Evêque de Rome? N’est-il pas bien plus naturel que les Eglises des colonies françaises soient régies par un grand Vicaire de l’Archevêque de Paris?” anom 209miom 56, letter from Basseterre, from Auguste Ernouf, F.M. PerichouKerversau, and A.R. Constance Bertolio to the Minister of the Marine, 20 December 1807, 54b. 97 “Les colonies espagnoles ont des évêques; mais ces colonies sont immenses; ces colonies sont, comme leur Gouvernement, constituées sur des principes tous différents des nôtres. La population libre et la population esclave y sont en raison inverse de ce qu’on les voit dans nos iles. L’esprit général n’y est pas porté à l’insubordination et à l’indépendance de toute autorité … Il n’en seroit pas de même parmi nous, ou l’esprit public et surtout celui du clergé est si éloigné de cette apathique indifférence, ou les libres et les esclaves ne sont pas encore bien remis de leurs longues agitations.” anom 209miom 56, 55a. 98 “Le Service Spirituel est confié … au differents ordres religieux dont on y a autorisé l’établissement sous le titre

99

100 101 102

de missionnaires. Le Superieur de chaque ordre est, en même temps prefet apostolique comme superieur regulier. Il tient sa mission de ses superieurs majeurs. Comme prefet apsotolique, il releve immediatement du St. Siège, et exerce ses pouvoirs en vertu de lettres d’attache de Sa Majesté enregistrées aux tribunaux. Ces deux titres renferment les parties essentielles de l’administration, tant spirituelle que temporelle de la mission, sçavoir la superiorité sur la personne des missionnaires, la disposition des choses de la mission, et les pouvoirs pour l’exercice du ministere de la religion. Quoique les missions des isles ne puissent etre comparées à nos dioceses dans l’ordre hierarchique, par le defaut de la partie d’autorité et de juridiction reservée au caractere Episcopal, elles en ont cependant en quelque sorte l’ordonnance, en ce que les reguliers qui en sont chargés, tiennent lieu de clergé, et que les paroisses sont régies et gouvernées de la même manière et par les mêmes lois que celles du Royaume … Il n’y a point, aux colonies, de curé proprement dit. Les missionnaires qui desservent les paroisses sont amovibles à volonté. Les prefets apostolique donnent et retirent les pouvoirs quand ils le jugent à propos, de même qu’un eveque en France, commut les vicaires, les change, ou les laisse dans l’inaction à son gré.” anom 13 dfc 345, “Mémoire du Roy pour servir d’instruction au Sr marquis de Bouillé maréchal de Camp Gouverneur de la Martinique et au Sr Tascher Intendant de la même colonie” (ca. 1777), 2b–3b. “On nomma deux vicaires apostoliques avec le titre d’Evêques in partibus pour les Iles du Vent et Sous le Vent.” anom 209miom 30, 13 September 1774, 41. Rennard, Histoire religieuse, 116. Verwimp, Les jésuites en Guyane française, 70–1; Rothschild, “A Horrible Tragedy,” 77. “Quant à la nouvelle colonie, les aumoniers au desservants des Eglises seront, quant à présent et jusqu’à nouvel ordre, choisis par le gouverneur et en son absence par l’Intendant. Comme on ne saurait encore fixer les limites des paroisses et conséquemment déterminer l’emplacement des églises à construire, il y sera pourra par le chevalier Turgot, le quel pourra en se concertant avec l’intendant, et avec les principaux habitants, choisis dans chaque canton le lieu le plus commode pour y construire une salle qui servira d’église: il déterminera ainsi par provision l’etendue du terrain qui ressortira de chacune, afin que les régistres publics y soient remis et tenus de la manière convenable” (Versailles, 31 August 1764). anom 14 dfc 143, “Instructions données par Sa Majesté, au Sr Chevalier Turgot Gouverneur et Lieutenant Général de la Guyane” (1764). Notes to pages 47–9

505

103 The first quotation is excerpted from: “on est sans curé, le service divin se fait dans un creux et avec des ornements peu decents et par un prestre Espagnol qui ne parle point François. Les habitans avoient abandonné le dessein qu’ils avoient eu de construire une belle esglise” (anom fm c 9a 7, “Saint-Domingue [1704–06], Iles de l’Amerique, par M de Saugière, 4 mai 1704,” 134b). The second quotation is excerpted from “Le spirituel de la Colonie Francoise de St dominque est gouverne par des Relligieux Francois qui y font les fonctions curialles sans l’autorite de leurs superieurs avec les pouvoirs que leur donne le Pape ainsi qu’il fut regle avec la Cour de Rome par le Cardinal de Richelieu lorsque les Français commencerent leurs etablissments en Amerique. Les Peres Dominicains desservent les quartiers du l’ouest les Peres Jesuites les quartiers du Nord sans aucune deppendence de archevesque du St. Domingue qui n’a cherché jausques a present aucune jurisdiction sur les terres qui appartennent a la France.” anom fm c 9a 12, “Mémoire sur les Chapelles Particuliers de St Domingue,” 366a. 104 Rennard, Histoire religieuse, 105. 105 Gowans, Building Canada, 28. “1722 was the year New France’s growing spirit of independence was written into law. In that year the authoritarian power Laval had established for the Bishop of Quebec finally broke down; his one-time private mission field was split into eighty-two independent parishes, which soon became – and remained into the twentieth century – the basic units of Québécois social life.” See also Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 210–11. 106 For a similar phenomenon in eighteenth-century Argentina see Bailey, “Classicism in a Rococo World,” 99–111. 107 Elliot, Empires of the Atlantic World, 129; see also 68. On the pragmáticas laws that had been decreed since the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, see Aste, Behind Closed Doors, 71. 108 Elliot, Empires of the Atlantic World, 129. 109 Palacio, Las catedrales del Nuevo mundo, 10–11. 110 On the impact of Amerindian styles and techniques on colonial churches see Bailey, Art of Colonial Latin America, 69–108; and Bailey, The Andean Hybrid Baroque, esp. 303–38. 111 The church at Le Cap measured 206 feet (63 m) by 84 feet (25 m) (Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:338). In his plan of Quebec City cathedral from 1744 to 1748 Chaussegros de Léry gives the church’s measurements as 33 toises by 16 toises (65 m by 31 m). anom 3 dfc 424a ; see also Noppen, Notre-Dame de Québec, 96–7; Gowan, Church Architecture in New France, 149–50. The church of San Miguel Ixmiquilpan measures 66.9 m by 14.40 m and the church of San Nicolás de Tolentino in Actopan (both begun in the

506

Notes to pages 49–52

112 113 114

115 116

117 118 119

120

121

122

1550s) measures 65.4 m by 14.57 m (Kubler, Mexican Architecture, 2:242). Mexico City Cathedral is 190 m long and 54 m wide (Toussaint, La Catedral de México, 77). Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 132. anom col f5a 4/1, “État des donations royales” (1686/1701), 1–3. In 1660, for example, the habitants of Martinique paid 6,000 livres in sugar to pay for the passage of a new curate from France (Rennard, Histoire religieuse, 65). Rennard, Histoire religieuse, 70–1. Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 73; Moogk, Building a House in New France, xviii; Eccles, The French in North America, 146, 150. Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 210. Rennard, Histoire religieuse, 118. “mal entretenüe, aussi bien que le Presbytére qui seroit d’ailleurs ainsi logeable et cela par la negligence des marguilliers, contre lesquels le Superieur des missions a porté ses plaintes à M. L’Intendant.” anom col f 5a 7/ 3, “État des biens et revenus des Dominicains” (1743), 13. “On travaille à la construction d’une Eglise au Cap de maçonnerie qui sera tres solide, je l’ai trouvée un peu etroite, a qu’ona fait pour Epargner la dépense, mas cet ouvrage va lentement, l’argent manque par le peu de zèle des habitants, il est à remarquer que ce sont les plus considérables du quartier qu’on trouve plus rétifs que les autres quand il s’agit de contributions, dont j’ai été informé depuis je suis ici.” anom fm c 9a 13, “M de Chateaumorand, Léoganne,” 18 March 1717. “j’ai aussi adjouté a ces present une chaire de prédicateur qui ecuient a douze cents livres avec le fret et un tres beau benistier de marbre avec son pied d’estal de mesme, qui ne sont pas encore mis en place faute d’une église qui soit assés descente pour les y mettre; je pouray encore dire qu’independemment de tout cela, ma femme y a donné plusieurs ornements.” anom fm c 9a 9, “Charritte au Cap,” 23 October 1711, 156a–b. “Aujourd’hui premier jour de Decembre 1694 le Roy estant a Versailles a esté informé que le nommé Henry flibustier hollandois de nation, a peri avec sa famille sur la navire Genois qui a fait nauffragé en [illegible] de Portugal au havre de Grace et que le d[it] Henry revenant de la mer du Sud, a laissé entre les mains du nommé Du Bois habitant de l’Isle de Cayenne … de quatre et une cent livres qui appartient par droit d’aubain a Sa M[ajes]té, la quelle voulant que ces fonds soit employé au establissment des deux Esglises paroissialles de la d[ite] Isle de Cayenne, Elle a ordonné et ordonne que la d[ite] somme de quarante et un

123

124

125

126

127 128

mil cent livres sera incessament remise aux marguilliers des d[ites] paroisses par le d[it] Du Bois pour estre employé suivant este destination, et les ordres particuliers du Sr. de Ferolle gouverneur de la d[ite] Isle moyennant quoy le d[it] Du Bois ay demeurera valablement deschargée en … breves que Sa Ma[jes]te a pour temoignage de sa volonté.” adg c 353, “Application du droit d’aubain sur les biens de Henry, flibustier hollandais, au profit des deux églises paroissiales de l’Ile-de-Cayenne,” 1 December 1694. “Dans un mémoire du Roy a Mrs de Chateaumorand et Mithon du 26 aoust 1716 il leur fit ordonné de faire cesser l’exercise dans touttes les chapelles domestiques qui sont dans l’ile St Domingue et d’empecher qu’a l’avenir il en fait etabli aucune sans des ordres particuliers de Sa Majesté. Ces Mrs en firent une ordonnance du 25 mars 1717. De Paris le 30 jan. 1717.” anom fm f 6 3, untitled sheet, 12. “Tous les seigneurs de ce Pays veulent avoir des paroisses particuliers dans leurs terres quelques petites qu’elles soient, et obligent par force et menaces de retranchement des dismes les curés de leur aller dire la messe dans des maisons ou chapelles particuliers.” anom col f 5a 4/ 1, “Deux articles du Conseil de Marine sur la construction des églises” (1717/1718), 5a. “Des habitants riches ont fait depuis quelque temps des chapelles domestiques sur leurs habitations ou ils font dits la messe, et apportent le pretexte de l’instruction de leurs negres … Les P Jesuites des jacobins les Carmes et les Capucins des Iles du Vent y sont tous opposés.” anom fm c 9a 12, “Mémoire sur les Chapelles Particuliers de St Domingue” (1716), 366a–b. Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 210–11; Eccles, The French in North America, 79; Eccles, The Canadian Frontier, 97–8; Gowans, Church Architecture in New France, 38. Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 140–1; Rennard, Histoire religieuse, 84–5. “Nous, d’après la connoissance particulière que nous avons pris de l’etat des Paroisses de cette Colonie, et de la manière dont leurs biens sont administrés, avons reconnu que jusqu’à present les Marguilliers ont presque partout rempli leurs fonctions avec beaucoup de negligence.” adg c452, “Règlement concernant les églises, rôle des marguilliers,” 7 March 1774, 1a–b. The same source spells out the duties of a churchwarden: “il aura soin de fournir exactement les ornements, luminaires et autres choses necessaires au Service Divine … Sera le Marguillier également tenu d’entretenir en bon etat les portes, clairesvoies, fenêtres, couvertures de l’Eglise et les clotures du Cimetiere, de manière que les bêtes n’y puissent entrer.”

Ibid., 3a–5a. Such ordonnances were quite common. Almost the exact wording was used in one from 1726 for Martinique (“Ordonnance de MM les Général et Intendant, sur les Cures et paroisses. Du 11 mai 1726,” in DurandMolard, Code de la Martinique, 1:266–72). On the role of churchwardens see Rennard, Histoire religieuse, 106–10. 129 Rennard, Histoire religieuse, 107. 130 “Il soit payé trois cent piastres par le sindic de chaque parroisse suivant l’usage au superieur de la mission ou a son procureur et pareille somme de 300 piastres annuellement pour chacun des deux religieux chargés de l’instruction des Negres dont un sera au Cap et l’autre au Port de Paix, voulons que les habitans des quartiers du Nord soient tenus de fournir aux Peres qui y desservent les Cures une Eglise a chaque quartier avec un logement commode, et en estat d’y pouvoir contenir au moins deux religieux et autant de domestique d’entretenir et reparer les Eglises et presbitaires et fournir des ornements et luminaires avec les autres depenses ordinaires des Eglises.” anom fm f 5a 22, “Lettres patentes de juillet 1651 autorisant les Jésuites à s’établir à Saint-Domingue” (July 1651; copy from October 1704), 3. 131 “A Paris le 29 de novembre 1753. Le P. de Sacy. Monseigneur: En conséquence de la lettre, que votre Grandeur me fit l’honneur de m’écrire le 29e décembre de l’année dernière, au sujet d’une confrérie de nègres, qu’on vouloit établir a la Guadeloupe, j’avois écrit aux supérieurs de nos missions des Isles du Vent, qu’un pareil établissement etoit tout à fait contraire aux intentions de sa Majesté, et qu’ils eussent grand soin de défendre aux missionnaires, qui etoient sous leur conduite, de faire aucune assemblée d’esclaves, sous quelque prétexte que ce pût être, et leur en avois fait sentir les funestes inconvéniens, qui pouvoient en résulter. Leurs réponses a mes lettres me fit connoitre leur parfaite soumission, et je ne suis point surpris de celle, qu’ils ont écrit, pour les ordres de Monsieur Bompart. Ainsi il ne me reste plus, pour les y confirmer, que de leur envoyer une copie de la lettre, que je viens de recevoir, sur cela, en date de 27 de ce présent mois. C’est ce que je ferai ces jours-ci. Ils seront d’autant plus portez, Monseigneur, a obéir, en toute occasion, aux ordres du Roi, qu’ils verront, par la fin de votre lettre, combien Sa Majesté a à cœur de leur faire sentir sa royale protection dans tout ce qui aura rapport à la Religion, et a l’exercice de leur ministère. Comme nous vous devons, Monseigneur, cette protection, et que c’est vous, qui nous la procurez, par celles, que vous voulez bien nous donner vous-même, permettez-moi de vous en faire, au nom de tous nos missionnaires nos très humbles remercimens, et de vous renouvelles, en même temps, avec les sentimens

Notes to pages 53–4

507

132

133 134

135 136

137 138

139

140

d’une parfaite reconnoissance, les témoignages de profond respect, avec lequel j’ai l’honneur d’être, Monseigneur, De Votre Grandeur. Le très humble et très obéissant serviteur P. De Sacy de la Comp. De ihs .” anom fm f 5a 7 7, “Lettre du père de Sacy, procureur des Jésuites, au sujet de l’interdiction de l’établissement d’une confrérie de nègres à la Guadeloupe,” 29 November 1753, 1a. “Les appointements du curé estoient autrefois de 300 [piastres], M. de Galiffet les a reduit a 200 avec lesquels ils ne peuvent subsister.” anom fm c 9a 7, letter of M de Saugiere, 4 May 1704, 134a–b. Rennard, Histoire religieuse, 66, 83. “La manière dont on impose les habitans pour le payement des pensions, et la manière dont on l’exige rend les Missionnaires odieux, et empesche qu’ils ne fassent tout le bien qu’ils pouroient faire.” anom fm c 9a 8, “Mémoire pour les Peres Jesuites Missionnaires dans les Quartiers du Nord de Saint Domingue” (1708), 302a. Caillot, A Company Man, 81. anom col f3 27, “Lettre de Messieurs de Champigny et de la Croix au Ministre sur les bancs de l’Eglise de la Trinité,” 29 July 1740, 238a. Rennard, Histoire religieuse, 106. However, the grantees paid rent for their pews and did not own them outright. For a list of taxes paid for various church services and particularly where people may be buried inside the church see anom fm c 9a 9 (1710–12), 364a ff. “Ordonnance de MM les Général et Intendant, sur les Cures et paroisses. Du 11 mai 1726,” in Durand-Molard, Code de la Martinique, 1:266–72. Il n’y a certainement point de pays où il y ait moins de Religion que dans nos Iles … cet objet, celui d’exister à son aise, forme et entretient les sociétés civiles: l’amour propre, ou plutôt dire l’orgueil, fait du Créole un homme généreux assez follement pour consommer rapidement une fortune laissée par ses Ancêtres … tout ce qui est homme blanc est sans religion. anom 13 dfc 359, “Réflexions sur les Iles Françaises du Vent surtout la Martinique” (1777), 1a–b. c h a p t e r t hr e e

1 See Bailey, The Andean Hybrid Baroque, 15–43. 2 Moogk, Building a House in New France, 14–15, 20–1; Chénier, Québec, 152. 3 Deslandres, “Et loing de France,” 98–102; Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 151; Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 9. 4 “Pour maintenir les Sauvages dans nos interets … et les rendent plus dociles … Comme les Peres Jesuites … ont

508

Notes to pages 54–8

5

6 7 8

9

10 11

12

13 14

un talent particulier pour gouverner les Sauvages.” anom 03 dfc 291, letter signed by Vaudreuil, Quebec City, 26 November 1717. On Pawnee slaves, see Trudel, L’esclavage, 89–91; Trudel, Deux siècles d’esclavage, 73–8; Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 9; Nelson, Slavery, 11, 75. Dubois, “Slavery in the French Caribbean,” 432. On the fishing industry see Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 31, 139–50; Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 1–3. “Les froids sont violents a Plaisance, et l’hiver y dure ordinairement huit mois. Tout est affreux pendant ce temps: a peine la pesche est finie que tout a coup il vient; l’on ne peut se chaufer qu’a force d’envoyer du monde chercher du bois quelque diligence, et quelque precaution qu’il puisse avoir et lui est très difficile d’y pourvoir. Il faut un feu continuel parce que les maisons sont extraordinairement froides.” anom 03 dfc 80, 6, “Mémoire sur l’Ile de Terre Neuve, Description de Plaisance” (after 1696), 11b–12a. Edwards, “Creole Architecture,” 265; Morrison, Early American Architecture, 9. Morrison writes about the first dwellings in New England “based on the crude huts and cabins of shepherds, charcoal burners, and peat diggers on the moors and meadows of England.” Seventy years ago historians of the architecture of New England mistakenly believed that the first settlers built log cabins and that these cabins related to Amerindian structures, the socalled “Log Cabin Myth.” Moogk, Building a House in New France, 21–2. “Elles sont basties de perches de sapins, jointes les unes contre les autres entre les quelles ils mettent de la mousse pour en boucher le vide. Le toit est de planches sur les quelles ils mettent de grandes pieces de mousses, on croist l’herbe qui la pluspart sert de pasture aux moutons, car c’est le seul endroit ou ils puissent paistre. Les maisons les plus belles ont cela de particulier que les perches sont applanis en dehors.” anom 03 dfc 80, 6, 12a. Poliandri, First Nations, 303; Nash and Strobel, Daily Life, 4; Deslandres, Croire et faire croire, 201–2, 231–4; Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 20; Lippy, Christianity Comes to the Americas, 145–6. Quoted in Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 36. “Reduction” refers to a mission created through resettlement, usually of nomadic or semi-nomadic peoples. The term is commonly used in the Spanish world, notably to refer to the Jesuit Reductions of Paraguay, which in fact were a direct inspiration for the reductions of Nouvelle-France and the Great Lakes. See Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions, 150–5; Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic, 577.

15 Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic, 385–6; Clair, “L’aménagement,” 44. 16 This description is of a Wendat house. See Trigger, The Children of Aataenstsic, 43; see also Tremblay, Les iroquoiens du Saint-Laurent, 23–8. 17 Trigger, “The Original Iroquoians,” 54; Clair, “L’aménagement,” 44; Moogk, Building a House in New France, 15; Richardson, Quebec City, 112–13. 18 Moogk, “The Craftsmen of New France,” 215; Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 28–9. 19 See Lacroix, Les arts en Nouvelle-France, 75–8; Gagnon and Cloutier, Premiers peintres de la Nouvelle-France, figs. 9, 12; Gowans, Church Architecture in New France, 16–17; Kornwolf, Architecture and Town Planning in Colonial North America, 1:270–1. 20 Thwaites, The Jesuit Relations, 37:223. The same letter describes the building materials: “our house … is nothing more than a few logs of wood joined together, covered at the gaps with a little earth, and covered with grass.” 21 Chauchetière is quoted in Demos, The Unredeemed Captive, 127. 22 Franquet, Voyages et mémoires, 107 (see also p. 38); Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 42–3. 23 “Les Natchitches: En 1717 M. de Bienville etablit ce poste qui est situé sur la Riviere Rouge pour nous conserver les Sauvages qui habitent le long de cette Riviere, et commencer a nous aprocher des Espagnols … Les Yasou: sont situés sur la Riviere de ce nom a environ 15 lieues du Mississipi et a 30 au dessus des Natchez. Ce poste a été jugé necessaire pour tenir les Sauvages en respect et contenir les coureurs Anglois qui étoient déjà venus de ce costé là.” anom 04 dfc 21, “Colonie de la Louisianne” (1719), 6a. 24 Milne, Natchez Country, 1–10. The quotation is from Powell, The Accidental City, 45. On the numbers killed in the Natchez revolt see Powell, The Accidental City, 85. 25 Milne, Natchez Country, 2. 26 Wilson, Architecture of Colonial Louisiana, 75. 27 Blokker and Knight, “Louisiana Bousillage,” 27–48; Wilson, The Architecture of Colonial Louisiana, 101; Higginbotham, Old Mobile, 97–9. On the palmetto-leaf house see Poesch and Bacot, Louisiana Buildings, 12. I am grateful for one of my reviewers for the reference to the Blokker and Knight article. 28 The Law plantation is illustrated in Wilson, Architecture of Colonial Louisiana, 4–5, 74, 83–4; the Dumont de Montigny drawing is bnf , Cartes et plans, ge dd -2987 (8818). 29 Edwards, “Creole Architecture, 243–4. 30 Weekley, Painters and Paintings, 156; Wilson, Architecture of Colonial Louisiana, 75; Daspit, Louisiana Architecture, 1.

31 Sainton, Histoire et civilisation de la Caraibe, 31–2; Butel, Histoire des Antilles françaises, 29–35; Pluchon, Histoire des Antilles, 41–8; Marley, Wars of the Americas, 139–40; Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 4–5; Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 23–39, 69. 32 Crain, Historic Architecture, 10. See also Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 71. On the Kalinago retreat to Dominica see Sainton, Histoire et civilisation, 33–4. 33 Berthelot and Gaumé, Kaz Antiyé, 49, 54; Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 124–5. 34 Buisseret, Historic Architecture, 1. 35 Crain, Historic Architecture, 11; Gravette, Architectural Heritage, 5–8. 36 Buisseret, Historic Architecture, 2; Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 135. 37 Quoted in Berthelot and Gaumé, Kaz Antiyé, 50. 38 Montabo, L’histoire de la Guyane, 1:33. A census dated 1787 records 628 Amerindians of all ages in the three main interior missions and notes that there are others dispersed throughout the colony: “Les missions chez les indiens ont fait des progrès sensibles; celle du Macary compte 308 personnes, de tout-âge et de tout-sexe. Celle de Conany 173: celle de St Paul, à Oyapock, 147 sans compter un nombre d’Indiens dispersés dans les divers endroits de la Colonie, lesquels semblent se disposer à adopter les projets de civilisation qu’on leur présente. anom 14 dfc 436, “Mémoire sur la situation actuelle de la colonie,” signed l’Escalier (1787). 39 Montabo, L’histoire, 42–3; Artigala, Les jésuites, 33–5. 40 The first quotation is from a letter by the Jesuit superior of Martinique during a visit to Guiana concerning plans to build a new reduction on the Maroni River: “Ce dernier sera utile à la Colonie de Cayenne.” anom col f 5a 7/ 2, “Lettre du père Prieur concernant sa visite générale des missions,” 3 March 1739, 2–3. The second quotation is from Louis XV’s mandate to Governor Turgot from 1764: “il lui est expressément ordonné par le Roi de ne rien négliger pour gagner à la nation Française les coeurs des indiens.” anom 14 dfc 143, “Instructions du Roi à M. le chevalier Turgot gouverneur et lieutenant-général de la Guyane,” 31 August 1764, 1b. See also Pluchon, Histoire, 43–5. 41 Since such records are extremely rare I quote it in full: “Note des Indiens qui ont travaillé pour gileter, bousiller, et blanchir l’église et leurs payements. Lemert pour faire la chasse, et pèche 2 mois – 3 aune [a cloth measurement of 120 centimetres] de toile blanche, et 3 de ginga; [illegible] pour aider – 3 aune de toile blanche; Joseph Pascamou, dix jours – 1 aune de petit bleu, et 1 peigne; Taye 24 jours – 2 aune et 2/4 de ginga; Joseph Emerillon 2 mois – 4

Notes to pages 58–64

509

42 43 44 45 46 47

48

49 510

aune de petit bleu, et 2 aune de bleu blanc; Tapaye 23 jours – 2 aune et demi quart de bleu blanc; Avir 25 jours – 2 aune et ½ de petit bleu; Gramon 28 jours – 1 aune et ¾ de toile blanche, et un aune de petit bleu; Sophie 27 jours – 2 aune et ¾ de ginga; Trayemor 22 jours – 1 aune et ¾ de ginga; Louise 20 jours – 1 aune et ½ de ginga, et 1 miroir; Celyte 12 jours – 1 aune, et 2/4 de ginga et 1 miroir; Michel 1 mois, et 18 jours, Jean Baptiste 23 jours – les deux Indiens demandent petit bleu, qui ne soit de coton. Equipage pour le menuisier et leur payement: Jacinte – 2 aune et ½ de petit bleu; Patrice – 1 aune et ½ de ginga; Maiquet – 1 aune et ½ de ginga, Reste à la mission 1 aune et ½ de petit bleu noire. Equipage pour m’amener pour Oyapok et leur payement: Jacinte – un miroir et un peigne; Joseph – un miroir et un peigne; Avir – un pair de ciseau et un peigne; Louis – un couteau, et une croix; Louis le petit – un couteau, et un peigne; Patrice – un couteau, et un peigne; Simon – deux paires de ciseau; Tapaye – un couteau, et un pair de ciseau; Alexandre – un couteau; Maparanan – un couteau. Dette: A M. Bertrand 4 l[ivres] de clous de mi caravelle pour finir l’église. A moi pour assister avec dix paquets de cassave à 4 l[ivres] chaque paquet– 24 livres en argent. Cayenne 19 janvier 1786. Jean Xavier Padilla Prêtre missionnaire.” adg 1j 52 ( 1), “Relevé nominal des paiements attribués par le prêtre missionnaire Jean Xavier Padilla aux Amérindiens ayant participé à la construction d’une église à Oyapock,” 29 January 1786, 1–2. On Macari, Father Lanoë writes of voluntary paid labour: “On lui envoie les effets qu’il fasse rebatir l’Eglise & reparer son logement en tenant compte des journées des Indiens qui y travailleront de bonne volonté.” adg 1j 52 ( 4) , “Lettre de Lanoë, missionnaire a Macari, sollicitant la reconstruction de l’église et évoquant la situation de la mission et celle des Amérindiens qui y vivent,” 27 November 1786, 1a. Bruné, Demeures traditionelles, 14, 74. Boven, “Inheems wonen in Suriname,” 26–7. anom 1pl 2187. Montabo, L’histoire, 83. Edwards, “Unheralded Contributions,” 24; Edwards and Verton, A Creole Lexicon, 59–60. adg Ref. 728-88, Chantal Elisabeth and Régine Paradis, “La maison traditionnelle en Guyane,” undated typed manuscript, 2–3. The queue de biche savane (literally, “tail of prairie doe”) was a kind of herb, known by the indigenous name yappé. In the Grand dictionnaire Français-Anglais, Anglais-Français (Paris, 1854, 1102) it is identified as being specifically used for roofing of houses. Préfontaine, Maison rustique, 8–11. Notes to pages 64–9

50 Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, rp -t -1905-103 ( 2) . 51 Bruné, Demeures traditionnelles, 47–73. 52 The literature on the survival of Aztec glyphs and imagery in early colonial Mexico is enormous. Two particularly readable accounts in English are Edgerton’s Theaters of Conversion and Lara’s City, Temple, Stage. 53 On the culturally convergent architectural sculpture of southern Peru see my The Andean Hybrid Baroque, and on the use of quincha, mud and rushes, for vaults in Lima see my Art of Colonial Latin America, 101. 54 See Tirapeli, Igrejas barrocas, 120; Costa, “A arquitectura jesuitica no Brasil,” 66–7, fig. 34. 55 See Bollini, Misiones jesuíticas; Sustersic, Templos jesuítico-guaraníes; Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions, 144–82; Las misiones jesuíticas; Gutiérrez, Evolucion urbanística y arquitectónica, 109–64. 56 See Baldotto and Paolillo, El barroco, 254–5; Las misiones jesuíticas, 64. 57 Las misiones jesuíticas, 64, 123, 133, 144. 58 Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions, 157, 196. 59 Jacques Bigot was the first superior of the new reduction and his companion Joseph Aubery wrote a celebrated dictionary of the Abenaki language there in 1715. See Savoie, “La linguistique liturgique,” 7–8; Bourque, Twelve Thousand Years, 17; Day, In Search of New England’s Native Past, 50, 263; Day, “Western Abenaki,” 148–51; Eccles, The Canadian Frontier, 88; Maurault, Histoire des Abénakis, 272–81. On the Great Peace, see Havard, The Great Peace; Havard, Montréal 1701. 60 Gill, “La nation abénaquaise,” 72–3. 61 See Haefeli and Sweeney, Captive Histories; Demos, The Unredeemed Captive. 62 anom 03 dfc 491b , “Plan du village des sauvages de St. françois des abenakis levé sur les lieux en l’année 1704, par Jacques Levasseur de Néré.” The map is published in Haefeli, Captive Histories, 110. 63 Maurault, Histoire des Abénakis, 281. 64 Ibid., 282. For the history of the Abenaki devotion to the Virgin of Chartres and the gifts of wampum and other items they made to the cathedral treasury, see Trésors de la cathédrale de Chartres, 90–3. 65 Geneviève Treyvaud, and Michel Plourde, “Prospection archéologique, Odanak, 2010,” “Odanak, fouilles archéologiques 2011–2012,” and “Odanak, fouilles archéologiques 2013,” archaeological report deposited in the Quebec Ministry of Culture and Communications. 66 Maurault, Histoire des Abénakis, 283. 67 Gonzalbo and García, 367–72. 68 Irwin, Coming Down from Above, 151; Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 40; Washburn, Handbook, 4:83; Aquila, The Iroquois

69 70 71

72 73

74

75

76

Restoration, 75, 122, 155; Eccles, The Canadian Frontier, 88; Hodge, Handbook, 1:220. The Anglican mission was run by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts by the Anglican Communion (founded 1701), and although only the manse survives of the original stone chapel a second, wooden, chapel, built in 1769, still stands in Herkimer County between Fort Plain and Mohawk. See Rose, The Colonial Houses of Worship, 318–19. Labelle, Dispersed but Not Destroyed, 133–6; Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 6. Haefeli and Sweeney, Captive Histories, 115. Havard, Great Peace of Montreal, 125. On the complex relations between Christian and non-Christian Mohawks see Greer, “Conversion and Identity,” 181. Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 159. “Un fort de pieux n’est pas d’une grande dépense quand il est fait comme doit être celui de ces sauvages au milieu d’un bois, en temps de paix on ne construit aucun fort de pieux dans la colonie a cause qu’ils dépérissent a ne servent à rien, quand la guerre se déclare ou fait un semblable fort dans moins de cinq ou six jours.” anom c 11a 42, 262b– 63a. Devine, who quotes part of this letter (without giving its source), maintains that Chaussegros was opposed to a palisaded fort and wanted a stone fort from the beginning, but the sources demonstrate the contrary. Devine, Historic Caughnawaga, 186–7. “Le S. Begon a informé de la necessité qu’il y avoit de changer le Village des Sauvages de la Mission du Sault S. Louis et de le transporter plus haut parce que les terres ou sont presentement ces Sauvages sont usées, Sa Majesté approuve ce changement et a ordonné un fonds de 2000 ll a compte de la depense qu’il conviendra de faire pour de serter deux arpents de terre en quarré a y faire une enceinte de pieux avec un nouveau fort et une Eglise et elle charge le dit S. de Vaudreuil de faire en sorte que cette somme suffise pour mettre en etat tous ces ouvrages, en engageant les Sauvages de contribuer par leurs travaux a la construction de ce fort.” anom 03 dfc 280, 26, “Mémoire du Roy aux Srs de Vaudreuil Gouverneur et Lieutenant General et Bégon Intendant de la Nouvelle France,” 15 June 1716. Devine, Historic Caughnawaga, 186–91; Kornwolf, Architecture and Town Planning, 1:270; Noppen, Les églises du Québec, 92; Gowans, Church Architecture in New France, 137. In a report of 22 October 1720 Chaussegros remarked that the Jesuits had already spent the initial 2,000 livres and requested another 1,000 the following year. anom c 11a 42, letter of Chaussegros, Quebec City, 22 October 1720, 262a. “Son idée sur le fort du Sault St Louis je crois que n’y faut pas penses parce que les sauvages ne veulent point et qu’ils

77

78

79

80

ont dit qu’ils s’en retournent a leur premier village si on en faisoit un.” anom c 11a 49, “Lettre de Beauharnois au minister,” 18 October 1727, 154b. “Les jesuites ont fait une depense tres considerable à la batisse d’une Eglise et d’une maison de pierre pour leur logement à la mission du Sault S. Louis, qui leur a couté au moins 15 m. l[ivres], et ils y ont employé le fonds de deux mil livres accordé en 1718; quoique cette fonds leur esté remise pour commencer l’enceinte du fort de pieux à faire à cette mission. Il leur paroitroit convenable que le Roy voulut bien accorder encore 1000 à compte de la depense à faire pour l’enceinte de ce fort, la maison pour l’officier et le corps de garde. Le Conseil croit que ce qu’ils proposent est necessaire pour le Service. Accordé.” anom c 11a 43, “Extrait d’une lettre de Vaudreuil et Bégon,” 28 October 1720, 8a–9a. The rest of the funds were to be divided as follows: 1,620 for the masonry, 400 for three chimney stacks, 80 for seven doors, 80 for eight windows, 225 for 300 wooden beams, and 156 for roofing. anom c 11a 44, “Estimations pour une maison, un corps de garde et un fort de pieux, à faire au Sault S. Louis,” 30 September 1721, 255. See also c11a 124, “Délibération du Conseil de Marine sur une lettre de Vaudreuil,” 8 June 1722, 553b; c 11a 44, “Projet de la depense a faire pour continuer les fortiffications des places de la nouvelle France … pendant l’année 1722,” 109. “Les missionnaires marquent qu’il est aisé de juger par une démarche des Sauvages que cette Garnison est très prejudiciable aux interests de Dieu et du Roy” anom c 11a 106, “Conseil les missionnaires du Sault St. Louis 1722,” 12 May 1722, 185a. This decision was made on the condition that the 4,181 livres be returned to the mission whenever the Jesuits changed their minds: “Sur les avis que nous avons reçu de Monsieur de Ramesay que les sauvages du Sault St Louis lui ont representé qu’ils souhaitoient que je ne fisse point du tout faire le fort de pieux le corps de garde et la maison pour y loger un officier nous sous le bon plaisir du Roy, voulons bien abandonner l’execution de ces ouvrages crainte de les aigrir que nous sommes obligés de menager et les conserver dans la bonne volonté ou ils sont de secourir leurs freres les Abenakis ainsi le Sr Chaussegros ingenieur ne fera point faire ces ouvrages.” anom c 11a 46, “Ordre de Vaudreuil à Chaussegros de Léry,” 27 January 1724, 343a. Chaussegros responded on 31 October 1723: “Le conseil avoit accordé un fond de 4181 l[ivres] pour construire à la mission des Sauvages du Sault S. Louis une maison pour y loger un officier un corps de garde pour une garnison et un fort de pieux, ces battimens et fort auroient été faits cette année, Monsieur le Marquis de Vaudreuil Notes to pages 69–72

511

81

82

83 84

85

86 87 88 89 90

512

me deffendit dans le mois de Janvier dernier, de faire ces ouvrages ayant donné sa parole aux peres Jesuites que ces battimens et fort ne se feroient point, dans le mois d’avril Monsieur L’Intendant faisant publier les adjudications pour les travaux du Roy à faire au gouvernement de Montreal Monsieur le Marquis de Vaudreuil lui dit avoir changé de sentiment et qu’il jugeoit par cette année de ne point faire faire ouvrages du Sault St. Louis.” anom c11a 45, “Lettre de Chaussegros de Léry au ministre,” 30 October 1723, 372a–b. See also anom c 11a 46, “Lettre de l’ingénieur Chaussegros de Léry au minister,” 23 May 1724, 320a–1b. See also Devine, Historic Caughnawaga, 190–1. bnf, Estampes et photographie, est vd-20 (b, 1), “Vue de la Mission du Sault St Louis.” See Haefeli and Sweeney, Captive Histories, 234, fig. 19. “État des ouvrages qui ont été faits au Sault-Saint-Louis pendant l’été dernier de la présente année pour la construction de deux forts audit lieu, l’un de pierre pour les Français et l’autre de pieux pour les Sauvages Iroquois. Sçavoir en maconnerie: fait deux costé d’un fort de pierre au Sault St. Louis pour le fort des francois ainsi qu’il s’est marqué dans le plan envoyé a Monsieur L’Intendant. Fait un corps de garde de pierre de 50 pieds de long et 60 pieds de large … pour loger les soldats et la milice le la garnison du dit fort … (signed Rocbert de La Morandière).” anom c11a 117, “État des ouvrages qui ont été faits au SaultSaint-Louis” (1747), 158a. The price is given here: “Pour la construction des deux forts du Sault St. Louis les dépenses faites a l’occasion de la Garnison du dit lieu, 10,889.40.” anom c11a 117, “État des paiements qui ont été ordonnés à Montréal pour les diverses dépenses faites à l’occasion de la guerre,” 1 September 1747, 150b. Devine claims that the wall around the Amerindian community was stone, and that it was begun in 1747 and completed only in 1754. I have found nothing in the sources to support this claim. See Devine, Historic Caughnawaga, 193, 225, 243. anom c11a 75, “Mémoire (du jésuite Pierre de Lauzon)” (1741). Kornwolf, Architecture and Town Planning, 1:270; Buisseret, Mapping the French Empire, 40–1; Devine, Historic Caughnawaga, 224; Franquet, Voyages et mémoires, 38. Dickenson, “Seigneurs and Landowners,” 190; Dickenson, “Spreading the Gospel,” 368; Porter and Trudel, The Calvary at Oka, 5. Dickinson, “Seigneurs,” 194. Dickinson, “Spreading the Gospel,” 368. Ibid., 376–7; Porter and Trudel, The Calvary at Oka, 5. Robert, “The Sulpicians and Montreal Space,” 186, 190. “à condition qu’ils feront a leurs depense toute la depense necessaire pour la changement de la d[ite] Mission du Notes to pages 72–5

91 92 93 94

95 96

97

Sault au Recolet et d’y faire batir aussi a leurs depens une Eglise et un fort de pierre, pour la seureté des Sauvages et suivant les plans qui en seront par eux remis aux Gouverneur et Intendant de la nouvelle France, pour estre avec leurs avis envoyez au Conseil de Marine, pour en rendre compte a Sa Majesté et y être statué, les quelles ouvrages ils seront tenus de faire faire en sept ans.” anom col f 5a 3/ 3, “Concession d’une terre pour le transfert de la mission du Sault-au-Récollet,” 27 April 1718, 1a–b. The concession is also quoted partially in Dickinson (“Spreading the Gospel,” 378–81) and Porter and Trudel (The Calvary at Oka, 5); however, they appear to be referring to another version, which differs in two significant ways. First the fort is “for defence against the savages” according to Porter and Trudel, which is not how I read “pour la seureté des sauvages,” and their version says that the work has to be completed in two years not seven. Porter and Trudel, The Calvary at Oka, 6. Dickenson, “Spreading the Gospel,” 382. Gallat-Morin, “Sulpician Cultural Strategies: Music,” 539. A walled garden divided into four parterres by two paths meeting at right angles appeared on many devotional prints not just of the Virgin Mary herself but of the child Jesus, from the sixteenth century onward; for example, Marie Mauquoy-Hendrickx, Les estampes des Wierix i (Brussels, 1978), cat. 476, an undated late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century print by Hieronymus Wierix of the infant Jesus on a lily sprouting from an enclosed garden, or cat. 631, from a series of the life of the Virgin Mary by the same printmaker where the garden has a little fountain at the centre. On the immense popularity of the Litany in early modern Europe, see Smith, Sensuous Worship, 145–51. It is illustrated in Porter and Trudel, The Calvary at Oka, 9. “Nous envoyons aussi le plan que Monsieur de Belmont Superieur du Seminaire de Saint Sulpice a Montreal nous a dressé sur le fort de pierres qu’il propose de faire faire pres le Lac des deux Montagnes dans la Concession qui a esté accordée pour y transporter la mission des Sauvages du Sault au Recolet, le Sieur Chaussegros a qui nous l’avons remis pour l’examiner, a jugé qu’il etoit trop petit et qu’il n’est util que pour les missionnaires ne pouvant pas servir de retraitte aux Sauvages en cas de guerre ni pour y recevoir une Garnison.” anom c 11a 126, “Extrait d’une lettre de Vaudreuil et Bégon au Conseil de Marine,” 14 November 1721, 57–8. Chaussegros’s plans were relayed to the king by the governor general and intendant in 1721, who reported that the fort “est enfermé dans une enceinte de maconnerie d’une muraille de deux pieds et deux d’épaisseur sur douze pieds de hault percé de carnots laquelle enceinte est destinée

98 99

100

101

102

103

104

105 106 107

pour y mettre les cabanes des Sauvages nous croyons comme lui qu’il est absolument necessaire que ce village ait une enceinte et que ce fort soit fait en conformité de son plan.” Ibid., 57. Porter and Trudel, The Calvary at Oka, 9. The quote, from a 1782 manuscript, is published in Porter and Trudel, The Calvary at Oka, 23. In 1742 Beauharnois notes that Piquet was building cabins to receive refugee Hurons from Detroit: “M. Piquet … fait faire des cabanes pour les recevoir.” anom c 11a 75, “Lettre de Beauharnois au ministre,” 15 September 1742, 124. Porter and Trudel make the attribution to Picquet without giving a source (The Calvary at Oka, 9). On this plan see also Dickenson, “Spreading the Gospel,” 380. On the houses see Franquet, Voyages et mémoires, 45. War councils operated at the village level as a place to deliberate about military, mercantile, and diplomatic policies and were the main means of interacting with French authorities. See Labelle, Dispersed but Not Destroyed, 2; Heidenreich, The Huron, 31–4. “J’ay été tres edifié de la mission sauvage du lac des deux montagnes; et si le secour que vous avez bien voulu accorder continuait quelques annees, on y fixera beaucoup des ouvrages.” anom c 11a 78, “Lettre de Mgr de Pontbriand au ministre,” 28 September 1742, 427b–8a. “Les ouvrages du Lac des deux Montagnes pour le fort de ce village des Sauvages n’étant point achevés.” anom c 11a 117, “État des certificats et états certifiés que j’ai donnés pour les travaux des forts du Sault-Saint-Louis pendant l’été dernier de la présente année 1747,” signed Rocbert de La Morandière, 30 September 1747, 162a. See also Franquet, Voyages et mémoires, 42–3. Des Rochers, “Sulpician Cultural Strategies: The Fine Arts,” 555–6; Porter and Trudel, The Calvary at Oka, 11–12, 21–4. There is a substantial literature on sacri monti. See Göttler, “The Temptation of the Senses”; Novarina and Bayard, Sacri Monti; Ribeiro de Olivera, O Aleijadino; Hood, “The Sacro Monte of Varallo”; Pirovano, Il Sacro Monte sopra Varese; Porter and Trudel, The Calvary at Oka, 35–7; Porter and Désy, Calvaires et croix de Chemins, 37–53; Langé, Sacri Monti piemontesi e Lombardi. Verwimp, Les jésuites, 195, 199–204. Le Roux, Loyola, 81–2. Artigalas, Les jésuites, 55–6, 105–16; Godfroy, Kourou, 102–4; Le Roux, Les jésuites et l’esclavage, 26, 44; Verwimp, Les jésuites, 34–5; Duclos, “Guayana francesa,” 1831. Despite the unimpressive number of spiritual conquests, officials such as M. de Sainte-Marthe were sanguine about the Jesuits’ riverine efforts: “Les Jesuites

108

109 110 111 112

113 114 115

116 117 118 119

120

par leurs Missions qu’ils ont poussées avant dans les terres, ont fait quantité de Chretiens.” anom 14 dfc 7, “Mémoire à Monseigneur le Marquis de Seignelay, pour le retablissement et l’augmentation de l’Isle de Cayenne,” signed by M. de Sainte-Marthe, 31 January 1685, 4b. Artigalas, Les jésuites, 116–18, 123–6, 136; Le Roux, Loyola, 62–3; Verwimp, Les jésuites, 278–84; Collomb, “Missionnaires ou chamanes?” 438; Montabo, L’histoire de la Guyane, 1:143–50; Froidevaux, “Les ‘Lettres édifiantes,’” 180. Le Roux, Loyola, 48; Godfroy, Kourou, 104; Verwimp, Les jésuites, 209–18. Verwimp, Les jésuites, 179–86. Larère, “La suppression,” 212. “Sa Majesté est informée que les Jesuites qui ont envoyé des missionnaires parmi les Nations des Sauvages Galibis, y ont fait de grands progrés, et que la plus grande partie ont sincerement et de bonne foy renoncé à leurs erreurs et a leurs debauches, ont embrassé le Christianisme et enremplissent les devoirs avec tout le zele et la ferveur dont ils peuvent être capables, ces examples et les soins des missionnaires attirent de jour en jour d’autres Sauvages a la Religion.” anom 14 dfc 46, “Mémoire du Roy pour servir d’Instruction au Sr. Dorvilliers Gouveneur de Cayenne,” signed by Louis XV and the duc d’Orléans (Paris, 4 May 1716), 1b–2a. bnp, Cartes et plans, ge dd -2987 (9577). See Verwimp, Les jésuites, 274–5. On the history of the fort see Larère, “La suppression,” 212; Rivière, La Guyane française en 1865, 311. “Nous avons sur la Rivière d’Oyapok quatre missions a deux journées de distance l’une de l’autre; il y en a une Cinquième dans les terres, parmi les palicours, qui sont placés au sud du fort d’Oyapok”: A St Pierre de la Martinique ce 3 mars 1739, prieur Jésuite. anom col f 5a 7/ 2, “Lettre du père Prieur concernant sa visite générale des missions” (Saint-Pierre, 3 March 1739), 2–3. Verwimp, Les jésuites, 277. Again, they hired a Cayenne carpenter to supervise construction of the building. Verwimp, Les jésuites, 266–9. Ibid., 268. On the history of the Sinnamary reduction see Verwimp, Les jésuites, 265–71; Coëta, Sinnamary, 23–5. The engraving is in the Archives Départementales de Guyanne, Fonds iconographique, 4f i 2/ 9, although I was permitted to view only a facsimile. It is also published in Larin, Canadiens en Guyane, 128. “Nous avons recemment fait, un nouvel establissement, dans un Lieu appelé Cennamarie, entre Surinam et Cayenne, ou se sont réunis un grand nombre d’Indiens.” anom Notes to pages 75–84

513

col f 5a 7/ 2, “Lettre du père Prieur concernant sa visite 121 122 123

124

125 126

127

128

129

130

514

générale des missions,” 3 March 1739, 2. On the importance of music for the Guiana Jesuits, see Collomb, “Missionnaires ou chamanes?” 444. Quoted in Verwimp, Les jésuites, 268. “Nota. Les petits cazes placés à la droite des grandes ne sont point executé elles tiennent la place des cuisines qu’on pourra construire par la suite, ou à de meme representé les petits potagers qui pouroient etre placés entre les cazes.” anom 14 dfc 110b , “Plan de la mission de Sinnamary distante de 2/3 de lieue de l’embouchure de la rivière de ce nom avec les 8 carbets construits par ordre de M. le commandant sous la conduite de Tugny, ingénieur,” 18 October 1763. In a letter to Louis XV Préfontaine reported: “Le Chevalier de Villers ancien officier des troupes et la marine et Le S. de Tugny ingénieur géographe faisaient construire a Senna[mari] six grandes cases de cent vingt pieds de long, un magasin et un hopital a[vec] l’effet de recevoir une cinquantaine des familles.” anom 235miom 15, “Lettre de Bruletout de Préfontaine au Roi,” 1 January 1764, 94b. See also Verwimp, Les jésuites, 271–2. Michel, La Guyane, 44–5. “Je trouvai les six grandes cases elevées et très avancées, elles avaient mis sur celles de Kourrou; l’avantage d’être faites de mains Indiennes.” anom 235miom 15, 96b. “J’avois aussi chargé ces deux personnes, sur le zèle et la connaissance desquels je faisais fonds, de tracer un chemin par terre de Kourrou a Sennamary, je voulais ouvrir une communication par l’intérieur des terres en distribuant des terreins le long de ce chemin aux habitans, mais ses obstacles que les savannes me noyées par les pluyes et l’hiver leur firent rencontrer, me determinerent au remettre ce chemin a un autre tems … J’ordonnerais au S. de Tugny de tracer un grand magasin vis-à-vis de l’embouchure de la riviere pour servir a la décharge des bâtiments destinés a l’approvisionnement.” anom 235miom 15, 95a, 96b. For example Jean-Antoine Bruletout de Préfontaine’s 1773 “Carte des rivières de Kourou et de Sinnamary,” anom 14 dfc 232 bis b. See Coeta, Sinnamary, 33–4. Artigalas, Les jésuites, 137–8; Godfroy, Kourou, 104–7; Verwimp, Les jésuites, 243–52; Duclos, Guyana francesa, 2:1831; Froidevaux, “Les ‘Lettres édifiantes,’” 178, 180. bnf, Cartes et plans, ge sh 18 pf 164 div 3 p 3 d , “Plan de la Mission de Kourou et de ses Environs dans lequel on voit l’Etat dans lequel étoit le pays lors de l’arrivée de Monsieur de Préfontaine le 17 juillet 1763 levé et dressé par Simon Mentelle Ingénieur géographe du Roy.”

Notes to pages 84–5

131 Verwimp, Les jésuites, 248–9; Froidevaux, “Les ‘Lettres édifiantes,’” 180–5. 132 Voyages et travaux, 314. From a letter of Aimé Lombard. 133 Collomb, “Missionnaires ou chamanes?” 439–40. 134 “Missions de Kourou, 16 9bre 1734. Fontainebleau, 16 9bre 1734. Messieurs. Lorsque le Roi a approuvé l’établissement de la Mission de Kourou et que Sa Majesté a bien voulu accorder une portion de 1000 ll. pour l’entretien du Missionnaire chargé de la déserte de cette cure, il a été question d’en régler les bornes, de décider s’il devait être permis aux blancs et aux nègres d’y aller, et de savoir de quelle exemption devait jouir cette mission. Sa Majesté a décidé par le second point que pour assurer en même temps et le repos des indiens rassemblés dans cette mission, contre la persécution des traiteurs et le travail et le missionnaires contre la séduction des libertins, il pourrait eu par y avoir d’accommodation à faire dettente aux blanches et aux noires d’aller sur les terres de la mission, sans avec permission par écrit du Gouverneur, en observant reconnaissance que le passage soit libre aux habitants de la Colonie pour la pèche de la tortue et du poisson appelé Machoiran.” adg c 573, “Lettre du Roi (Fontainebleau): projet de création de la mission de Kourou par les Jésuites, permission de pécher le Machoiran, prétention de l’indien Louis Jacques sur les terrains de la Montagne dite de Kourou,” 16 November 1734, 1a–b. 135 “La mission de Kourou, n’est pas celle, qui se distingue le moins, par son zele, pour tout, ce qui regarder votre grandeur: les pauvres sauvages, qui reconnoissent vous devoir, après dieu, la religion qu’ils professent, ont des tems et des jours marquis, pour faire dans leur église des prières; pour que dieu daigne répandre ses bénédictions sur leur Libérateur. La modestie et la pieté qui accompagnent [2] ces prières, nous font espérer qu’elles seront efficaces. Nous avons tous lieu de Croire, que vous aurés, Monseigneur, le plaisir, de voir que pendant votre ministere, et par votre protection; le Culte du vrai dieu, est etabli dans le vaste païs de La Guiane.” anom col f 5a 7/ 2, “Lettre du père Prieur concernant sa visite générale des missions,” 3 March 1739, 2a–b. 136 “Détails sur la mission de Kourou: Les Jésuites qui gouvernant absolument l’esprit des indiens s’opposent a toutes nos entreprises et les font échouer par leurs manœuvres.” anom 14 dfc n. f., “Relation du voyage à Sennamary sur la Riviere de Marony par Mr. Aublet en 8bre 1762” (October 1762), 1a. 137 Le Roux, Loyola, 63. Duclos, “Guyana francesa,” 1831. 138 Godfroy, Kourou, 159; Le Roux, Loyola, 80–1; Michel, La Guyane, 44.

139 Artigalas, Les jésuites, 138. 140 Godfroy, Kourou, 169. 141 The Préfontaine sketch, sent to M. Bombarde in 1765, is published in Montabo, L’histoire, 164. 142 Voltaire, Candide, 49. 143 Michel, La Guyane, 44. 144 “Les premiers pas que nous avons fait dans la carrière ont été marqués par des pertes, mais quel est le nouvel établissement que ne le soit pas par des évènements semblables?” anom 235miom 15, “Lettre de Bruletout de Préfontaine au Roi” (Kourou, 1 January 1764), 88a. 145 “Pour le depart de M. de Préfontaine … 2000 briques et 4000 tuilles pour preparer les fours … 2,000 planches. 200 madriers. 300 marteaux. 150 tenailles de toute espece. 3 milliers de clous. 100 ciseaux de chaque espece pour charpentiers menuisiers &c … 2 arpenteurs geographes … 6 milliers d’ardoise. 6 id. de tuilles pour couvrir les maisons … Une quantité raisonnable de peintures de quatre couleurs preparées al’huille pour enduire des magazines et autres batimens en bois. De l’huille pour peinture a proportion. 6 pierres à filtrer. 6 jarres à l’eau.” anom col e 341, “Bruletout de Préfontaine, Jean Antoine, colonel d’infanterie, commandant particulier à Kourou en Guyane” (1763), 14a–16a. 146 Godfroy, Kourou, 16–17; Michel, La Guyane, 46. 147 Michel, La Guyane, 50. 148 “Divisai mon monde en quatre compagnies, procedai a la reconnaissance des officiers et tous les Indiens de la mission rassemblés … Je donnai au S. Nattereau, créole de Cayenne et issue de parents originairement Indiens, le titre de Capitaine general des Indiens de la guyanne, et, pour lui attirer l’amitié de ceux qui étoient présents à la réception, je fis distribuer par ses mains les présents que je fis au nom du Roi au trois capitaines de cette nation. Le nombre de mes travailleurs montait en tout tant officiers que simples colons au nombre de cent vingt-huit, je leur mis la hache à la main et procedai à leur faire fai[re] l’abbattis, je lui donnai deux cent quatre-vingt-six toises de longueur sur cent cinquante-deux de largeur. Douze jours après notre arrivée les Jésuites nous envoyèrent quatre-vingt négres qui augmentèrent la consommation des vivres, mais avancèrent d’une autre part notre ouvrage … Je secourus de vingt de mes negres que je fis venir de mon habitation, en état d’élever mes cases.” anom 235miom 15, 91b–2b. 149 Michel, La Guyane, 46. 150 “Je fis elever le jour de la Toussaint la Statue du Roi au milieu de la Place d’Armes du Camp, je devais cet hon[neur] au bontés d’un Prince auquel la Colonie doit son existence; la reconnaissances des Colons en avait gravé

151

152 153 154

155

156

157

158 159

l’image dans les cœurs avec des traits ineffaçables.” anom 235miom 15, 98b. mbpa 9 b 1, letter by the consul and assessor of Aix to Monsieur (the Count of Provence), Aix-en-Provence (20 August 1759). Cleary, The Place Royale, 63; Godfroy, Kourou, 171–2. Desmas, Edme Bouchardon, 52–84. bnf, Estampes et photographie, fol-hc-14 (2). The Guibal and Cyfflé statue is illustrated in Cleary, The Place Royale, 76, fig. 44. There are some ionic capitals from eighteenth-century Jesuit plantations at Rémire made of this material in the Musée Départemental Alexandre-Franconie in Cayenne. “Comme nous avons, Monsieur, reçu une Lettre du Roy Louis XVI par laquelle il nous ordonne de faire les funérailles du feu Roy et que je connois votre gout et vos talens, je vous prie de vous rendre à Cayenne pour y faire construire un Catafalque ainsi qu’il convient pour la Cérémonie funèbre qui, je compte, aura lieu le 8 du mois prochain. Il n’y a pas de temps à perdre pour travailler au dessein et projet de cette décoration funéraire. Vous serez aidé dans l’execution. J’ai l’honneur d’être avec attachement Monsieur votre très humble et très obéissant serviteur, Signé Delacroix.” anom col e 381 bis, Tugny, Jean Baptiste, lieutenant d’infanterie, arpenteur à Cayenne (1763/1789), “M Delacroix ordonnateur charge le Sr Tugny de faire construire le catafalque ordonné par le Ministre” (Cayenne, 20 October 1774). anom 14 dfc 142b, “Plan du camp de la nouvelle colonie … à Kourou,” signed Simon Mentelle, 15 March 1764; anom 14 dfc 141b, “Plan du camp de la nouvelle colonie de la Guyanne françoise à Kourou,” signed Simon Mentelle, 16 March 1764. In a letter two weeks later, on 30 March, Intendant Chanvanlon wrote that they were starting to send people out to the Îles du Salut to get them away from the volatile atmosphere of Kourou: “Je m’etois embarqué me rendre aux isles du salut, le bateau a échoué sur la vase; je profite de ce court délai, pour vous exposer par quelques autres traits encore combien notre situation est critique dans ce moment, et combien il est a craindre que tout n’échoue, si vous ne daignes pas soutenir avec force et vigueur le plan d’opération que vous avez adopté, et je vous n’avez la bonté de le faire exécuter par les ordres les plus précis.” anom 14 dfc 140, letter of Chanvalon, 30 March 1764, 1a–b. For more on Chanvalon’s correspondence at this time, see Godfroy, Kourou, 173–6. Petzet, Soufflots Sainte-Geneviève, 37–42, plate 1. “En fin on n’avoit pû pouvoir ni aux logemens, ni aux magasins convenables et suffisants a tout d’hommes et de munitions de toute espece. Le scorbut et une epidemie Notes to pages 85–90

515

160

161

162

163

affreuse se mirent parmi cette multitude et, sur les dix mille hommes, sept mille environs perirent sur le lieu, quelques uns se retirerent dans nos autres colonies ou ils perirent de même, le reste en petit nombre, repassa en France. La plus grande quantité des effets et munitions tomba en pur perte par dissipation ou dépérissement. Toutes les depenses furent proportionnées à l’etendue du projet qui a couté de 1763 à 1765 des sommes immenses non seulement sans succès, mais même avec perte de plusieurs anciens habitans que l’epidemie enleva. A la fin de 1765 on chercha à remedier aux suites juristes de ce projet. On reforma toutes les inutilités. On tira le meilleur parti qu’on put des debris qui etoient restés, et l’on rétablit les choses dans l’Etat ou elles etirent auparavant.” anom 14 dfc 158, “Mémoire sur la Guianne Françoise dont Cayenne est le chef-lieu” (after 1765), 2b. “Son exemple y ayant attiré les habitans nommés cy contre et son comandement ici ayant été rendu par Mgr. De boines Ministre de la Marine il traça … avec l’agrément du Gouverneur Le Bourg de Kourou sur le même emplacement ou il avait élevé le Camp de la Nouvelle Colonnie le 17 juillet 1763. L’époque du Retablissement est sous le Ministre de Mgr. De boines .” anom 14 dfc 206b , “Embouchure de la rivière de Kourou,” 1 April 1773. bnf, Cartes et plans, ge sh 18 pf 164 div 3 p 4, “Plan de l’embouchure de la rivière et du camp de Kourou levé sur les lieux par François Étienne Haumont,” (1766); shd gr 6 m 7 f 134, “Embouchure de la Rivière de Kourou,” signed Simon Mentelle (1776). The latter is published in Montabo, L’histoire, 158, and Bruné, Histoire, 73. Ironically, revolutionaries such as Pierre-Léon Levavasseur, the commissar for French Guiana in 1792, would seize upon the Jesuit reduction as the ideal form to settle aboriginals less than two decades later. See Spieler, Empire and Underworld, 47. Bruné, Histoire, 479. It looks nothing like the one illustrated in the Illustrated London News in 1852, which may be the eighteenth-century church but in fact looks more like a church from the middle of the nineteenth century (Archives Départementales de Guyane). c h a p t e r f o ur

1 Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 286, 297, 302; Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 268–71; Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 23, 94; Moogk, “The Craftsmen of New France,” 76–80. 2 Rediker, The Slave Ship, 12–13.

516

Notes to pages 92–6

3 King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig, xix, 3; Rogers, “Libres de couleur,” 81. They were sent to France by the Dépôt des Papiers Publics des Colonies (dppc ), created in June 1776. 4 Klein and Vinson, African Slavery, 75–82; Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 483–500. 5 Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 158–9, 274–5; Dubois, “Slavery in the French Caribbean,” 436–7; Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 282; Knight, “Introduction,” 4–5; Stein, The French Slave Trade, 9. 6 Knight, “Introduction,” 5. 7 Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 282, 294–5; Dubois, “Slavery in the French Caribbean,” 437. 8 adg i c 4314, letter of M. Castaing from 2 May 1752: “la quantité des nègres qui ont été débarqués dans nos colonies pendent le dernier bail de six années, qui monte environ à 85,000 testes.” 9 Noël, Être noir en France, 95; Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 284; Dubois, “Slavery in the French Caribbean,” 431, 435, 442, 448. The total numbers for Saint-Domingue at the time of the Revolution are based on the most recent figures (Cauna, “D’Aquitaine en Haïti et inversement,” 28). 10 Dubois, “Slavery in the French Caribbean,” 442. 11 Ibid., 433–4. 12 Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 8–9; Nelson, Slavery, 4–8. 13 Moogk, “The Craftsmen of New France,” 122. Most of the African slaves who entered Quebec and Acadia were seized from English vessels. Agricultural slavery was never successfully implemented in Canada (Pitchard, In Search of Empire, 41). 14 “On pourroit aussi procurer l’augmentation de cette Colonie et de son commerce en y faisant venir des negres” (anom 03 dfc 280, 27, letter from Quebec City, 14 October 1716). Governor Vaudreuil’s remark about the cold is in a marginal note. For more on Bégon’s attempts see Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 7–8. 15 “On pourroit meme envoyer des negres et negresses en Canada, il y a des climats assés temperés pour qu’ils y puissent vivre, pour les encourager il faut donner la liberté et des terres au negres et negresses qui seront fideles et attachés aux François, et qui auront six enfans vivans nés en legitime mariage et bons catholiques, cependant a condition que leurs enfans demeureront esclaves jusqu’à ce qu’eux-mêmes aient aussi six enfans, par ce moyen on les engagera a etre fideles et attachés aux François, a etre sages et avoir soin de leurs enfans et a les bien elever, ce qui sera très avantageux a la Colonie.” anom 03 dfc 292, “Mémoire concernant le Canada” (1725), 413b–14a.

16 Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 10, 70, 77, 273, 275; Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 279, 281, 285; Stein, The French Slave Trade, 11–12. 17 Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 154. 18 Ibid., 155; Stein, The French Slave Trade, 11. 19 Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 273; Stein, The French Slave Trade, 16. 20 Stein, The French Slave Trade, 13–14. 21 Ibid., 22–3. 22 Ibid., 26, 38. 23 Sainton, Histoire et civilisation, 99–101; Stein, The French Slave Trade, 51–4; Saugera, Bordeaux, 238–57. 24 Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 155. 25 Dubois, “Slavery in the French Caribbean,” 442–3; Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 276. 26 “Sur plus de 18,000 noirs introduite l’année dernière à Saint-Domingue, il n’en est pas provenu un seul de Gorée.” adgi c4338, “Du ministre de la Marine, sur le monopole accordé à la compagnie de la Guyane en vue de traiter sur la côte de Gorée pour le défrichement de la Guyane.” 27 Belrose, Le jardin créole, 30–6; Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 164, 282; Ghachem, The Old Regime, 132–3, 141–2, 167–8; Cauna, Au temps des isles à sucre, 117; Dubois, “Slavery in the French Caribbean,” 440; Beckles, “Social and Political Control,” 208. 28 Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 286–7; Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 290–2; Ghachem, The Old Regime, 10–12; Dubois, “Slavery in the French Caribbean,” 439. A revised edition was printed in 1723 for Louisiana. 29 Dubois, “Slavery in the French Caribbean,” 440; Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 291; Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 287–91. In the older colonies the numbers of free gens de couleur were smaller. In Martinique there were only half as many as the number of whites and in Guadeloupe a quarter of the number of whites, whereas in Saint-Domingue there were 56,666 gens de couleur, 46,000 whites, and 709,642 blacks by a recent estimate (Cauna, “D’Aquitaine en Haïti et inversement,” 28). 30 Dubois, “Slavery in the French Caribbean,” 440. 31 Ibid. See also Ghachem, The Old Regime, 77–120. 32 Wimpffen, A Voyage to Saint Domingo, 216–27. 33 Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 279. On planters’ fears of the results of excessive brutality see Ghachem, The Old Regime. 34 Dubois, “Slavery in the French Caribbean,” 445. 35 Pérotin-Dumon, La ville aux îles, 351.

36 “Bassepointe, ou en presence du Reverend pere Dominique Seré curé de la paroisse du dit quartier, des marguillers des officiers du quartier et des principaux paroissiens, nous avons visité l’estat de l’eglise, du presbitaire et du cimetiere, et nous avons trouvé le tout avoir besoin d’estre refait a neuf en consideration de quoy les dites paroissiens ont promis volontairement dixneuf mille sept cent livres de sucre, et mille journées de negres.” anom col f 3 26, “État de l’église au Martinique” (1687), 214a. 37 “Rien n’est si injuste que de forcer les habitans a donner des Negres pour d’autres ouvrages que pour ceux du service, et qui n’ont d’autre objet que celui de leur deffense.” fm c 9a 8, letter by M de Choiseul Beaupré, Petit-Goâve, 14 July 1709, 357a. 38 “Il est aisé de prouver que les negres que les habitants sont obligés de fournir pour les corvées causent beaucoup de derangement a leurs maitres. Tel colon qui demeure aux Anses d’Arlets, au Trois Islets et obligé d’envoyer aux travaux du fort Royal 12 negres pour huit jours. Cela lui fait dix journées de 12 negres de perdre pour huit, puisqu’il faut qu’ils partent la veille du jour qu’ils doivent commencer leurs travaux et qu’ils en perdent un autre pour se rendre chez les dits maitres. D’ailleurs c’est souvent le tems d’une recolte ou de caffé ou de cotons ou celuy de faire du sucre. Consequemment il en resulte un retard ou meme une perte pour l’habitant.” anom 13 dfc 236, “Mémoire pour l’etablissement de negres a la Martinique pour les travaux publics” (ca. 1764). 39 Pérotin-Dumon, La ville aux îles, 351. 40 “S’oblige encore le dit Le Clout de fournir rendre ses trois nègres charpentiers pour aller avec les charpentiers du Roy dans le bois couppez et equarris les pieces necessaires, comme aussi de les fournir continuellement [de] travail depuis le commencement jusqu’à perfection de l’entreprise du dit batiment.” adg c 776, “Contrat pour la construction de la maison du gouverneur passé avec Le Clou, charpentier,” 17 June 1718, 1b–2a. 41 “s’oblige le d[it] entrepreneur et un compagnon et deux nègres a ses frais jusqu’à l’entiere perfection de la charpente de la d[ite] maison, a l’égard des ouvrages de menuiseries consistant en planches, portes, fenetres et cloisons le d[it] entrepreneur n’en sera tenu en aucun façon … plus de fournir au d[it] entrepreneur les deux nègres du Roy et deux autres capable de travailler a la d[ite] charpente et ce jusqu’au perfection de l’ouvrage.” adg c376, “Construction d’une maison joignant celle du gouvernement sur la place d’armes: convention entre

Notes to pages 96–9

517

42

43 44 45

46

47

518

le gouverneur et Le Clou (Pierre), maître charpentier,” 6 September 1723. “Que le Roy aye cinquante jeunes bons negres males, Sa Majesté en a desja quatre en estat de travailler avec des Charpentiers. 2e Il faut un apareilleur, un piqueur, huit maçons … deux brictiers, un chaumier, un mineur, deux charpentiers et un taillandier. Tous ces ouvriers auront sous leur main les Negres du Roy qui apprendront insensiblement chacun leur metier en servant d’abord de manœuvre.” anom 14 dfc 57, “Mémoire instructif sur le projet d’un Nouveau fort d’une nouvelle ville et d’un port au Bassin a Cayenne,” 17 May 1736, 3a–b. Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 134–6. Vlach, “Sources of the Shotgun House,” 126. anom dppc not sdom//1382 (Port-au-Prince, Notary Michel, 1777), “Bail a ferme de 8 negres par le Sieur Jenot a S. Poirier.” The carpenters were evaluated at 3,600 livres each, while the unskilled workers were evaluated at only 2,000 livres. The rent for these slaves for this period totalled 2,000 livres. An inventory of the 408 slaves at the Dominican plantation in Baillif, Guadeloupe (1773) lists the carpenters Bastien (a short form for Sebastian, aged fifty-three), Julien (fortyfour), Georgiac (a nickname for George, forty-one), JeanPierre (thirty-one), Quentin (twenty-two), and Charles (twenty), and the stonemasons Jean-Albert (forty-four), Epiphane (forty-one), Alexia (thirty-three), and Hilaire (twenty). This workshop had two slaves without saints’ names: Rouilliac (the name of a town in Charente, fortyone), and Manille (unknown origin, thirty-seven). anom 209miom 29, “Inventaire des biens de la mission des Dominicains, Paroisse du Baillif,” 115b–23a. A registry of slaves on a plantation belonging to Monsieur Blondain in a place called Trou in the Parish of Saint-JeanBaptiste (Saint-Domingue, 1770) lists three carpenters simply as Jean-Louis, Charlot, and Adonis (adg i 61 j 5, “Traite des noires et ésclavage: Fonds Chatillon: Mise en possession une sucrerie,” 4 April 1777). A quarter plantation in Lamentin (Guadeloupe), sold in 1782, included a “mulâtre” carpenter named Pierre (thirty-seven years old) out of thirty-two slaves of both sexes; and in 1806 a plantation in Petit-Canal (also Guadeloupe) included a carpenter called Toussaint (highly valued at 4,500 livres) out of fifty-two slaves of both sexes (anom dppc not gua//331, Pointe-à-Pitre, Notary Boyer, 1781, “Vente d’un quart d’habitation esclaves bestiaux et dependences par le Sieur Charles Hipolyte Gardin au Sieur Jacques Nicolas Lemoyne et a la Dame son epouse, et societé entr’eux,” 1 February 1782; dppc not gua// 765, Pointe-à-Pitre,

Notes to pages 99–101

Notary Descures, “Dissolution de Société et partage, entre le S Thébault & les epoux Courdemanche Laclémendière,” 10 January 1806, 8). A hospital registry of 1789 from the plantation of Dagouls in Sainte-Louise in Saint-Domingue lists a black creole charpentier named Alexandre suffering from “malingre” (adg i 61 j 5 2, “Traite des noires et ésclavage: Fonds Chatillon: Habitation Dagouls au camp di Louise feuille d’hopital au mois d’avril 1789”). 48 In the chantier de la Comté were carpenters named Paul Strélé (twenty-nine years old), Chrétien (forty-nine), Raimond (twenty-nine), Narcisse (thirty-three), Abraham (forty-eight), Héocouny (thirty-five), Ouabavela (thirtyone), Christophe (?), Haximba (twenty-five), Joseph dit Samba (twenty-nine), Iphigénie Marot (twenty-six); at the Cayenne Armoury, a joiner named Eustache (nineteen), three masons named Cazimire (twenty), Farbert (twenty), and Chitinté (nineteen) – they were apprenticing with German masters – and carpenters Balthazard (forty-four), Baptiste Laterreur (forty-six), Calixte Soliman (fortyfive), Claude le Jeaure (forty-two), Nicolas créole (thirtynine); and, at Approuague, the carpenters Koska (thirty), Triton (thirty-four), Alexandre (twenty-three), Moutaoua (nineteen), Vincinty (twenty-seven), Simon (twentyfour), Médéric Petit (sixteen), and joiners Louis Médéric (thirty-eight), Auguste Petit (thirty-five), Baptiste Le Grand (thirty-nine), and Baptiste (thirty), who came from Martinique. From a Tableau ou liste générale des esclaves appartenants au roi (1785) published as Annexe iv in Yannick Le Roux et al., eds., Le Vaudois des terres noyées: ingénieur à la Guyane française, 1777–1791, 314–17. 49 anom fm f 6 3 123, “Recollement Inventaires après le decès de feu M. Fabry du 29 avril [1756], et jours suivants, 1757,” Port-au-Prince, 18 April 1757, 7a–24b. See also fm f 6 3 117, “Extrait des minutes du Greffe du Siege Royal du Port au Prince,” 15 November 1756, 134–44; fm f 6 4, “Proces verbal de la remire fait de notre habitation par M. Danié a M. de Morimiere le 1ere mars 1764,” 4a–7a. 50 The Limonade plantation also included creole labourers including Bonhomme, a mixed-race creole mason (fortyfive), Telemaque, a creole sucrier and carpenter (about forty-five), and a joiner and carpenter called Quieba, also a creole (fifty-six) (anom fm f 6 4, “Inventaire des biens de Limonade dependans des successions et communautés Lecoiteux, Ducatel, et Grave,” 62a–6a). Michael from the Maré Plantation was about seventy years old. The workshop also included Jacques “Gros Tête” dit Achille, a creole carpenter and cooper (thirty-three), Bouc (no origin given, but apparently an African name), and an unnamed carpenter aged around twenty-nine (anom fm f 6 4,

“Inventaire de l’habitation Maré,” 16 May 1775, 2b–5b). The Baye-Mahaut plantation also included a twenty-fouryear-old “mulâtre” carpenter named Martin, out of a total of fifty slaves of both sexes (anom dppc not gua// 333, “Vente d’une habitation sucrerie esclaves et dependences par les Sieur et Dame Bidlet aux Sieur et Dame Marraud,” 24 July 1783). The Moquard atelier also included four from Kongo including Tambour dit Neron, aged forty-three, L’Eveillé, about thirty-seven, and Pitre, thirty-three years old (amb 1 s 13-Fonds Mocquart, “Etat des Negres appartenents à Mocquard du Cap Français … 1788,” 1a). The staff of builders from the Ménoire Plantation worked under a Maître de bâtiments named Pierre à Zabeth (“créolle”), aged forty-one, and included (in addition to the workers from Kongo listed in the text) two creole masons named Joseph, aged forty-five, and Gabriel Gabo, aged sixty-eight (adg i 210 s 112, “État générale des negres, negresses, negrittes et animaux existant sur l’habitation de Monsieur Menoire de Beaujau a Maribaroux,” 1789–91, 1a–b). The Malmaison workshop also employed two creole carpenters named Benoit (aged forty) and Laurent (forty-two). Sainton, Histoire et civilisation, 335. 51 This practice existed in Jamaica as well, where “enslaved artisans and tradesmen often had the wherewithal to improve the quality of their housing.” Nelson, Architecture and Empire, 221. 52 The pages of the Affiches Américains attest to the presence in Saint-Domingue of builders from Martinique and Guadeloupe, many of whom escaped. They included (from Martinique) Médor, a black carpenter (forty years old), Marc, a creole mason (thirty), another unnamed creole mason, a “mulâtre” named Joseph, and a black creole mason named Jacques (twenty-seven). They also included four joiners: a “mulâtre” named Barthelemi (thirty), another “mulâtre” called Théophile (thirty), a third “mulâtre” named Pierre (twenty-eight), and a fourth named Marc (thirty to thirtyfive). From Guadeloupe they included a “griffe” mason and a “quarteron” mason and joiner named Antoine, who knew “some principles of design.” Affiches Américaines, 1 July 1772; 22 February 1772; 30 September 1772; 10 January 1776; 21 April 1783; 7 September 1768; 18 August 1773; 9 February 1774; 25 July 1778; 3 June 1790; 10 June 1790; 13 November 1790; 7 August 1767; 14 December 1785. 53 The workshop also included apprentice carpenters JeanPierre (called a second charpentier, age forty-five) and Laurent (fifty), and an apprentice mason named Yves (forty-two). anom 209miom 29, “Inventaire des biens et effets dont les religieux Carmes établis dans la ville de la Basse-Terre Guadeloupe se sont trouvés en possession au vingt-cinq mai 1773,” 138a–40a.

54 Cauna, Au temps des isles à sucre, 113. 55 Supplément aux Affiches Américaines, 16 July 1783, 401; anom f 6 3, letter from Bois de L’Ame, 20 April 1756, to an unknown recipient signed Lebrun de la Fortière, fol. 5. 56 The atelier included three master masons, Philippe, François, and Dimba, aged thirty-five, forty, and twentysix; two apprentice masons named Mouringa, aged fortythree, and Alidor, aged thirty-five; and his carpentry atelier, led by chief carpenter Louis (aged fifty) comprising four carpenters – Gregoire, Sophrony, Gilles, and Thomas aged twenty-eight, thirty-eight, thirty-four, and fortysix – and a sawyer named Sans Chagrin, aged forty-eight. amb 65 s 103, “Inventaire de la plantation de Jean Testas à Pointe-à-Pitre” (April 1783). For more on the Testas family, originally from Puymirol, see Coyne, Dictionnaire des familles, 7:73–8. The family had Protestant and Catholic branches. 57 The La Ramée plantation crew included three sawyers for making planks (scieurs de long), a carpenter, a joiner (menuisier), and three masons; the Assier plantation (Lorrain, Martinique) at the same time had two masons and a carpenter (Bégot, “Esclaves d’habitation,” 124; Sainton, Histoire et civilisation, 173; see also King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig, 91). The carpenters at the d’Hericourt plantation were named Jacques and André (anom fm f 6 2 41, “Etat des nègres et bestiaux existants sur l’habitation de Monsieur le comte d’Hericourt au Premier Janvier 1774”). The Delaunay Mahé plantation was inventoried in 1785, and the carpenter’s name was Appollon, age not given, from Kongo (anom dppc not sdom// 1308, “Vente d’une habitation sucrerie par Madame Delaunay Mahé a M. Garesché Du Rocher,” 14 September 1785). 58 See Bailey, The Palace of Sans-Souci. 59 Cauna, Au temps des isles à sucre, 112. 60 Martinetti, “Une habitation,” 149. On the comparative price of skilled and non-skilled slaves see King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig, 103. For the period covered in his study King found the mean value for “technical specialists” to be 3,162 livres (slightly less than for leaders, or commandeurs, at 3,520 livres) and more than 2,618 livres for domestics and the overall average of 1,751 livres. 61 anom dppc not sdom// 53 (Notary Pierre-Martial Baratte, Cap-François, 1777–86), “Vente Francois Regis et Famille a Jean Regis,” 1 May 1783. 62 “Les tonneliers, charpentiers, raffineurs, couvreurs, maçons & menuisiers n’ont point été distingués parce que plusieurs se mêlent de divers métiers, & que parmi ces ouvriers il n’en est point de parfaits comme ceux des villes, excepte trois raffineurs, un forgeron & trois charrons.” anom 209miom 29, “Inventaire générale des biens & Notes to pages 101–2

519

63

64

65 66

67

68 69

70

71 72

520

effets dont les religieux Dominicains se sont trouvés être en possession au mois de mai mil sept cent soixante-treize dans leurs établissements de la Martinique,” 53. He was sixty years old at the time and likely too old to have been working any longer. anom dppc not sdom// 196, “Bail de habitation et negres de S de Clairfont au S De Roquefort,” 23 December 1786. anom dppc not sdom//371, “Vente sous la faculté de réméré de six mois plusieurs esclaves marechal de Balande à M Bardinet,” 26 August 1786. King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig, xiii. anom dppc not sdom//197, “Vente de negres et negresse de S Lafitte et S severin de Querin,” 21 March 1787; dppc not gua//764 (Pointe-à-Pitre, Notary Descures, 1804–05), “Brevet d’apprentissage du negre Figaro appartenant au Sr Diturbide chez le Sr Mierck menuisier” (15 Nivôse An. 13). “1. Que le nègre figaro restera trois années consécutives d’apprentissage chez le S. Mierk qui s’oblige & s’engage de lui enseigner son état aussi bien qu’on peut le faire. 2. Qu’il sera nourri par le dit S. Mierk, mais qu’il sera habillé proprement conformément à son état et à sa qualité par son maitre qui en outre le traitera en maladie & lui fournira les remèdes qu’il pourra lui être nécessaire. 3. Qu’au bout des trois années, le S. Diturbide rendra au S. Mierk le tems d’absence que le nègre Figaro aurait pu faire de chez ce dernier sous qu’elle cause qu’ait pu être occasionné cette absence. 4. Que les présents accords sont sans rétribution pécuniaire de part et d’autre, si ce n’est que le S. Mierk jouira du travail du dit Figaro, pendant l’espace des dites trois années.” anom dppc not gua// 764. adgu 1 e 35 95, “État civil, collections des tribuneaux, esclaves, Pointe-à-Pitre” (1804), 22a. anom dppc not sdom//175 (Cap-François, Notary Bordier, 1778–79), “Vente de negre le S. Angonin au S. Dubier,” 21 April 1779. anom dppc not sdom//178 (Cap-François, Notary Bordier, 1781), “Bail de negres le S Thomas aux S Maillart et Robare,” 1 May 1781. The rent for three years was 1,500 livres and the sale price 6,600 livres. anom dppc not sdom//178, “Vente de negre le S Vilna a la Ve Francois Douat N.L.,” 17 May 1781. They included the six carpenters Colombry (aged thirtysix), Lagarone (twenty-four), Beachoux (twenty-six), Augustin (thirty), René (thirty-two), François (forty-two); two joiners Pyrane (thirty-eight) and Mathieu (thirtyeight); and three roofers named Maturin (thirty-one), La Douceur (thirty-seven), and Rossignol (thirty). anom dppc not sdom//1307 (Port-au-Prince, Notary Loreilhe, 1784–85), “Bail a loyer de negres par Louis Raguenau a Notes to pages 102–4

73

74

75

76 77 78 79

80

81

Vincent Raguenau,” 20 April 1785. The fee was 7,000 livres although Louis had to give Vincent all the wood needed for the project. anom dppc not gua//697 (Basse-Terre, Notary Debort, 1778–79), “Vente par le Sr Praux au Sieur Jean Laloge d’un negre nommé Bastien pour la somme de 1848 lv,” 28 February 1779. Affiches Américaines, 25 June 1766, 232; 19 February 1766, 76. Supplément aux Affiches Américaines, 11 January 1777, 24; 26 July 1783, 420; 2 August 1783, 437; 3 January 1784, 3; 10 January 1784, 4. “Le camp ressembloit a une fourmilliere, blancs, négres, tout étoit occupé a charroyer, à faire des trous et à planter des fourches, une partie des négres des pères coupoit pendant ce tems les chévrons, les sablieres, et les tirants dans les anses voisines de Kourrou.” anom 235miom 15 (Guiana, 1 January 1764), 87a. Sainton, Histoire et civilisation, 172–3. Supplément aux Affiches Américaines, 9 August 1783; Affiches Américaines, 16 February 1767, 54. Caudron, “S’insérer dans une société de Blancs,” 89–90. The 1723 passport reads “Jean Dominique habitant au Quartier Du mouillage de ce bourg Saint-Pierre, lequel estant sur son Depart pour France a dit et declare qu’il ammene avec lui en France un petit negre nommé Jean de terre arrada agée d’environ quatorze ou quinze ans pour le servir comme domestique et le faire apprendre un Mestier si bon lui semble pendant le temps qu’il restera en France” (adg i 6 b 59 [1723]). In a letter written in Jérémie on 28 May 1773, Brisson regrets to his uncle in Bordeaux that a lack of funds prevents him from “faire passer en France un p[etit] garcon et une p[etit]e fille pour les faire edûquér & apprendre leur Religion” (amb 32 s 1, “Correspondance passive de l’armateur Dejeanne, lettres a à o ” [1737–1787]). See also: Cauna, “D’Aquitaine en Haïti et inversement,” 32; Juppé, Bordeaux au xviii e siècle, 50–1; Saugera, Bordeaux: Port négrier, 287–91. Erick Noël has estimated that in 1777 there were 527 slaves in Paris, 370 in Bordeaux, 104 in Nantes, and 66 in La Rochelle, compared with 12 in Rochefort. See Martin, Rochefort, 123; Noël, Être noir en France, 270–1. The letter of passage for D’Almeide, clearly of Portuguese descent, is dated 8 July 1756 and approved by Monsieur de Greuve, greffier of the Admiralty at Bordeaux: “Monsieur. Je vous prie de donner un passeport au nommé D.S. Dalmeide agé d’environs 50 ans et a ces cinq esclaves pour aller a Amsterdam dans le navire la Demoiselle Johana, Capitaine Abraham Vandoen” (adg i 6 b 61 [1751–1763]). “A faire connoitre le nombre des negres esclaves qui ont suivi leurs maîtres en France.” Letter of 15 November 1776

82

83

84

85 86

from M. de Sartine to the Intendant of Bordeaux, M Dupré de Saint-Maur (adg i c 201, “Analyses des lettres de la cour” [1776–1777]). One such incarceration was that of a slave named Philippe, who belonged to Sieur Dupin and who was ordered by the king to be taken to the “Depôt des Noirs établi à Bordeaux” at Dupin’s expense until he could be deported back to the colonies (adg i c 223, Letter signed “Louis,” Versailles, 6 May 1780). The 1777 registry program was also enforced in Rochefort (Martin, Rochefort, 123). For more on the 1777 decree, see Saugera, Bordeaux: Port négrier, 291; Caudron, “Noirs, mulâtres,” 169–74. Such are the apprentice menuisiers Claude Morien (a slave, nègre, fifteen years old) and the freeman Claude Maureil (mulâtre), both living in Bordeaux, the first with Sieur Carrié, businessman (since 1769), and the second with Sieur Botte (since 1768) (adg i c 4457, “Généralité de Bordeaux, Etat des noirs esclaves de l’un et de l’autre sexe” [1777]; “Etat des Noirs libres qui resident actuellement dans l’Etendue de la Généralité de Bordeaux” [1777]). Other registers from 1777 are in the dossier with the call number c 3669. On the whole series of registries see Noël, “Gens de couleur,” 76–8. Noël, Être noir en France, 116. The number of 16 is for tailleurs and tailleuses both. Tailleur can mean stonecutter and also tailor; in the case of the females they would have been tailors. Noël does not say how many of that number were female. Such was the passport granted on 13 February 1731 by Monsieur Rigolet “de passer mon negre Jean en revenu pour la Martinique et de lui donner un passeport” (adg i 6 b 60, 13 February 1731). Similarly, in 1732 Joseph Depaz requested a passport for a black slave named Cato, who was twenty-seven, to return with him to Saint-Domingue (adg i 6 b 60, 21 May 1732). Noël, Dictionnaire, 1:18, 2:100. Ibid., 1:139. chapter five

1 The tradition was particularly prevalent in New Spain. See Katzew, New World Orders, and Carrera, Imagining Identity. Throughout this book I put terms such as “mulâtre” in quotation marks as the terms are derogatory (for instance “mulâtre” comes from the Spanish mulatto, derived from the word for mule). When I use such terms I render them as they appear in the primary sources. 2 Garrigus, Before Haiti, 2–3; King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig, ix–xii; Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, 172; Asante and Mazama, Encyclopedia, 260; McClellan, Colonialism and Science, 59–61.

3 On the 1782 law, see Garrigus, Before Haiti, 186. 4 King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig, xviii. 5 Rogers, “Les libres de couleur,” 169, 174. For a more extensive study of the role of women of colour in the Antillean port towns, see Rogers and King, “Housekeepers, Merchants.” 6 Garrigus, Before Haiti, 2–3; Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, 5. The numbers vary among scholars. Stewart King writes that there were at least 21,813 free people of colour in Saint-Domingue in 1788 compared to 27,723 whites. King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig, xvi. 7 Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, 6. 8 Garrigus, Before Haiti, 7. 9 Rogers, “Les gens de couleur,” 185. 10 Garrigus, Before Haiti, 5. 11 Rogers, “Les gens de couleur,” 174–5. 12 Tara Dudley has done something similar for the builders of colour in nineteenth-century New Orleans. See Dudley, “Ownership, Engagement.” I am indebted to my second reviewer for this reference. 13 David Geggus has published hundreds of lists of slaves on plantations (e.g., Geggus, “Unexploited Sources,” 95–103); Dominque Rogers has compared records for Cap-François and Port-au-Prince in her thesis “Les libres de couleur,” anom th1134; and John Garrigus has studied the status and political awareness of gens de couleur in the Southern Province (Garrigus Before Haiti). 14 Charlery, “Maisons de maître,” 8. 15 Rogers, “Les libres de couleur,” 616–17. 16 anom dppc not sdom// 184, “Vente de meubles François dit Léveillé et Helenne,” 11 August 1783; dppc not sdom//201, “Vente de phaeton Jean Baptiste Cayo NL au S Mellain,” 1 June 1788. 17 anom dppc not sdom// 190, “Contrat de Mariage de Mathieu dit Cockburn et de la Ve. Poiret M.L.,” 21 May 1785. 18 anom dppc not sdom// 176 (Cap-François, Notary Bordier, 1779–80), “Testament de Cecile N.L.,” 4 February 1780; “Vente de emplacement Babet Petinier femme Langley N. L. Petigny M.,” 13 April 1779; dppc not sdom//176, “Vente de montre Edouard dit Leveillé N.L. a Petigny M. L.,” 12 August 1779; dppc not sdom//180 (Cap-François, Notary Bordier, 1782), “Testament de la Ve. Seurié,” 23 April 1782; dppc not sdom//190, “Bail d’appartement Mme Ve. Barbier a Petigny,” 10 May 1785. 19 “Le Sr Louis chargea Jasmin de diriger plusieurs travaux, et en fut si content, qu’il sollicita son affranchissement dès 1741,” adg i 61 j 5, 1a. On Jasmin see also: Garrigus, Before Haiti, 222; Rogers, “Libres de couleur,” 615; Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:416–17. Notes to pages 104–8

521

20 anom col e 229, “Jasmin, nègre libre de Saint-Domingue, fondateur au Cap-François d’un hospice pour les gens de couleur” (1788/1789); and adg i 61 j 5, “Extrait des Registres de la Société Royale d’Agriculture du 26 mars 1789.” 21 “Elle pourroit porter d’un côté l’effigie de Sa Majesté et le millésime et de l’autre Jean Jasmin fondateur de la Providence des Gens de Couleur Libres au Cap en 1756.” anom col e 229. 22 See King, Blue Coats or Powdered Wig, 137; Rogers, “Libres de couleur,” 126. 23 anom dppc not sdom// 198, “Bail d’appartement Etienne Chaviteau ML aux S. Levent Jeune et Cardinal,” 8 May 1787; dppc not sdom//203 (Cap-François, Notary Bordier, 1788), “Bail d’appartement par le Ee Chaviteau ML a Pierre Nicolas Christian,” 15 December 1788. 24 On Pironneau, see Rogers, “Libres de couleur,” 188–9. 25 anom dppc not sdom// 187 (Cap-François, Notary Bordier, 1784), “Bail de maison S Beranger a Pironneau,” 3 June 1784. 26 anom dppc not sdom// 187, “Bail de chambre Pironneau au Sr. La Serre,” 1 July 1784; “Bail d’appartement Pironneau à Marie Louise à Traitté,” 8 July 1784. 27 anom dppc not sdom// 198, “Bail de partie de maison Genevieve Dupré a Joseph dit Pironneau C.L.,” 4 May 1787. 28 anom dppc not sdom// 193 (Cap-François, Notary Bordier, 1785), “Bail de maison Charles Blaise NL au S Roux,” 19 January 1786; dppc not sdom// 198 (CapFrançois, Notary Bordier, 1787), “Bail de cabinet Charles Blaise NL au S Allegret et Cie,” 2 May 1787. 29 anom dppc not sdom// 199 (Cap-François, Notary Bordier, 1787), “Quittance, Charles dit Bidault, au Sieur Faxardo,” 22 September 1787; dppc not sdom// 190 (Cap-François, Notary Bordier, 1785), “Vente de terrain S Pontier a Saliot,” 3 April 1785. 30 On Provoyeur, see also Girard, Toussaint Louverture, 187–8. 31 anom dppc not sdom// 178 (Cap-François, Notary Bordier, 1781), “Vente d’emplacement Madelaine dite charrier et Genevieve Labarde C.L. a Guillaume Provoyeur,” 28 May 1781; dppc not sdom// 179 (Cap-François, Notary Bordier, 1781–82), “Vente de terrain Madelaine Charier et Genevieve Lubard a Provoyeur,” 22 December 1781; dppc not sdom// 180, “Vente de terrain Provoyeur a Marie-Anne,” 4 June 1782. 32 anom dppc not sdom// 197 (Cap-François, Notary Bordier, 1787), “Vente de portion d’habitation de Jeanne Germaine et Elisabeth Aunay a Provoyeur de Mirbalizia,” 2 January 1787. 33 anom dppc not sdom// 181 (Cap-François, Notary Bordier, 1782), “Testament de Provoyeur,” 15 August

522

Notes to pages 108–10

34 35 36

37 38

39 40 41 42

43

44

45

46

47

48

1782. Provoyeur had already written Cécile into his will in 1778, the likely year of the affair, when Toussaint was away managing a coffee plantation in Petit Cormier (Girard, Toussaint Louverture, 76). Girard, Toussaint Louverture, 75; Rogers, “Libres de couleur,” 188. Garrigus, Before Haiti, 185. anom dppc not sdom//189 (Cap-François, Notary Bordier, 1785), “Resiliation de Société en cession de droit entre Claude Imbert et Sommereu,” 10 January 1785. anom dppc not sdom//200, “Vente de effets S Gourdon a Joseph de Pironneau CL,” 9 April 1788. anom dppc not sdom//197, “Quittance Alexis NL a Etienne Ciacou NL et vente de negre le dernier,” 26 March 1787. Garrigus, Before Haiti, 176; King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig, 84; Rogers, “Libres de couleur,” 115–17. King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig, 82; Rogers, “Libres de couleur,” 119. King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig, 83. anom dppc not sdom//173 (Cap-François, Notary Bordier, 1776–1777), “Vente de negresses, Marie Marthe Forest mulatresse libre à Joseph Rebandy mulatre libre,” 23 December 1776. anom dppc not sdom//187, “Vente de negresse Pierre dit Toulouse M.L. à Elisabeth Joly-Coeur, dite Bonne Femme,” 16 August 1784. anom dppc not sdom//175, “Vente de negresses et negritte, Provoyeur Mirbalizia a Marie Anne Griffe,” 22 March 1779; dppc not sdom// 194, “Vente de negresse et negrillons Provoyeur Mirbalizia ML a jean dit Mouroux NL,” 6 April 1786; “Vente de negrillon Jean Baptiste dit Lestoque NL a Provoyeur Mirbalizia ML,” 6 May 1786. anom dppc not sdom//182, “Vente de negre Mathieu André a Marie Jeanne,” 3 March 1783; “Vente de negre Marie Jeanne NL. Jean Pierre L’allemand N.L.,” 3 March 1783. anom dppc not sdom//178, “Testament du Pierre Balthazar N.L.,” 6 July 1781; dppc not sdom// 189 (CapFrançois, Notary Bordier, 1785), “Vente de Negresse Balthazar N.L. a Beley N.L.,” 21 January 1785. anom dppc not sdom//175 (Cap-François, Notary Bordier, 1778–79), “Testament de Laurent Durocher mulatre libre,” 18 March 1779. anom dppc not sdom//178, untitled document dated 13 September 1781. The woman was stamped on her right breast “L. SUSON,” had another brand “B.S.C.” on her shoulder and yet another stamp “I.S.” on her left breast; dppc not sdom//186 (Cap-François, Notary Bordier,

49

50

51

52

53

54

55 56 57 58 59 60

61

62

1784), “Vente de negresse Mrs. Papillon et Cie. au nommé Petigny,” 21 May 1782. anom dppc not sdom//181 (Cap-François, Notary Bordier, 1782), “Vente d’une negresse S. Alvarez a Noel Laurent,” 25 November 1782. anom dppc not sdom//187 (Cap-François, Notary Bordier, 1784), “Vente de negresse Simone Brocard à Pierre Antoine,” 29 June 1784. anom dppc not sdom//193, “Vente de negre Julie ditte le Roy N.L. a Pierre Antoine N.L.,” 10 January 1786; dppc not sdom//187, “Vente de Negresse Dominique Aplon dit Le Goux a Sr Lecelier Duverger,” 9 August 1784. anom dppc not sdom//189, “Vente de negresse Charles Blaise au S Vallet,” 2 March 1785. The price of the woman was only 396 livres, probably owing to her age (dppc not sdom//189, “Vente de Negresse Charles Blaise au Sr le Monnier,” 17 March 1785). The twenty-year-old woman, who was lame and in constant pain, sold for a mere 800 livres (dppc not sdom// 190, “Vente de negresse Charles Blaise a Fauchette N.L.,” 6 May 1785). anom dppc not sdom//181 (Notary Bordier, 1782), “Vente de negresse Joseph Pironneau a Soreau,” 3 September 1782; dppc not sdom// 181, “Vente de negresse et negritte S. Michel Joseph Pironneau,” 5 December 1782; dppc not sdom//198, “Vente de negresse Charles Imbert ML a Josephy dit Pironneau CL,” 6 July 1787; dppc not sdom//200, “Echange de negre Marie Louise ditte Traitté NL et Joseph dit Pironneau CL,” 8 April 1788. “Malade de corps mais neanmoins sain d’esprit … donner à chacun des ci après nommés deux négres, et de leur faire apprendre un métier.” anom dppc not sdom// 191 (CapFrançois, Notary Bordier, 1785), “Testament de Joseph connu sous le nom de Pironneau C.L.,” 8 August 1785. Rogers, “Libres de couleur,” 189. King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig, 91, 115. Rogers, “Libres de couleur,” 120. anom dppc not sdom//191, “Vente de negre Fontenon ML au S. Charierre,” 29 September 1785. anom dppc not sdom//179, “Vente de negres &a Joseph Pironneau aux S. Vorbes,” 17 February 1782. anom dppc not sdom//168 (Cap-François, Notary Bordier, 1776–1777), “Vente de négre Louis Roussanes a Joseph Pironneau,” 14 April 1777. Rogers, “Libres de couleur,” 184. Rogers lists forty-nine contracts among gens de couleur in Cap and Port-auPrince between 1776 and 1789. anom dppc not sdom//962, “Marché pour constructions du sr. Magès,” 26 October 1789; “S’oblige en outre le dit Paul [sic] de faire dix-huit portes & dix-huit fenêtres en

63

64

65

66

67

68

jalousies mouvantes – à l’Anglaise.” dppc not sdom// 962, “Marché pour contructions Sr Mages,” 23 November 1789. anom dppc not sdom//176, “Quittance Balthazare N.L. au S. Broquart,” 18 March 1780. The part of the wall he was to build measured 17 toises, 33 feet, and 2 inches. “Premierement un batiment formant l’équerre en trois corps de logis, dont les deux ailes nord et sud auront chacun soixante pieds de long sur huit pieds de large, et six pieds de haut sur seulage, avec une gallerie en bas et en haut de trois pieds de large sur sept pieds de haut quant à celle d’en bas et sur six pieds de haut quant à celle d’en haut. Le troisieme corps de logis dans la partie de l’ouest aura de trente-six à trente-huit pieds de long sur quinze à seize de large et sera divisé en trois chambres avec sa gallerie de six pieds de dedans en dedans; plus la galerie tant en haut qu’en bas joignant celles des deux ailes ci-dessous.” anom dppc not sdom// 961, 2957, 21 October 1789. anom dppc not sdom//202, “Marché entre Therese et Marie Louise ditte Traitté NL et Fonteneau ML,” 28 July 1788. “Lesquelles Parties ont dit qu’elles auroient fait entre elles un marché verbal par lequel le dit Provoyeur se seroit engagé et obligé de construire sur un emplacement appartenant à la dite Veuve Ignace Pompée, sittué en cette ville faisant un des angles des rues Royalle et des Boucheries … un Bâtiment sur seulage de maçonnerie, de vingt-huit pieds de long sur quatorze de large divisé en deux chambres avec une gallérie sur le derrière dudit Bâtiment, et sur toute la longueur d’icelui, de quatre pieds de large, avec un cabinet à chaque bout d’icelle, le tout carrelé et couvert en essentes garni de portes et fenêtres bien ferrées enfin de faire et finir ledit Bâtiment la clef à la main, et de fournir tous les matériaux généralement quelconques pour ladite construction, pour le payement de tout quoi la dite veuve Ignace Pompée se seroit de son côté obligé d’abandonner au dit Provoyeur la jouissance du dit bâtiment pendant cinq ans, de quoi il se seroit contenté pour tout payement.” anom dppc not sdom// 187, “Transport et abandon de jouissance de bâtimens, Ve Ignace Pompée à Provoyeur,” 19 July 1784. anom dppc not sdom//187, “Bail de Maison le nomme Guillaume Provoyeur à la nommee Claire dite Clairone,” 19 July 1794. The rent was to be paid in four equal instalments of 600 livres. “Promettent et obligent faire et construire dans la maison appartenant à la dite Anne Elizabeth, scitué en cette ville, dans la petite Guinée, rue du Canard, et dans la cour d’icelle 1e un escalier en maçonnerie et carreaux de

Notes to pages 110–13

523

69

70 71

72

73

74

524

Bidache, pour monter aux chambres, et cabinet haut, de la dit maison. 2e de construire la gallerie haute au-devant des dits chambres et cabinets en balustrade en bois de pitchpin ou cypre … pour recevoir et supporter la dite gallerie; 3e de couvrir la dite gallerie en thuilles, et de faire la charpente nécessaire pour supporter la dite couverture … 9e de faire une gallerie au-devant de la cuisine haute joignant celle qui sera au-devant des dits chambres et cabinet, de même grandeur et construction … 12e de carreler la cour de la dit maison en carreaux de Bidache … 15e de faire toutes les réparations nécessaires aux chambres et cabinets actuellement construits.” anom dppc not sdom// 200, “Marché entre les N[egr]es Leveillé Ciacou et Hypolite, NL, et la Née Elizabeth GL,” 14 April 1788. anom dppc not sdom//201 (Cap-François, Notary Bordier, 1788), “obligation la ve. Benjamin NL Etienne leveillé Ciacou NL,” 8 May 1788. Rogers, “Libres de couleur,” 183–4. “Le dit Joseph Pironneau promet et s’oblige de montrer et enseigner son métier de menuisier sans en déguiser aucune partie au nommé Benoit mulatre libre fils de la dite Marguerite Cabains agé de treize ans, que cette dernière a mis en apprentissage chez lui … et de le traitter pendant le tems du dit apprentissage en bon maitre … de maintenir son dit fils dans le respect et la soumission que les apprenties doivent à leur maitre, et de lui fournir tous les vestements dont il aura besoin pendant le dit apprentissage, de le faire nourrir de le faire loger pour le coucher seulement, et en cas de maladie de le faire loger et faire traitter.” anom dppc not sdom//179 (Cap-François, Notary Bordier, 1781–82), “Brevet d’apprentissage de Benoit M.L.,” 16 October 1781. “Qui a pris et retenu le dit Jean Germain pour son apprentis, et auquel pendant le temps ci-dessus fixé il promet montrer e enseigner son etat de menuisier et tout ce dont il se mêle … de le nourrir, loger, coucher et traiter humainement et en bon maitre, lequel dit Jean Germain promet d’apprendre de son mieux tout ce qui lui sera montré par le dit Petigny et de lui obéir en tout ce qu’il lui commandera de licite et honnête.” anom dppc not sdom// 184 (CapFrançois, Notary Bordier, 1783), “Brevet d’apprentissage de Jean Germain,” 10 August 1783. “Le d. Nicolas suivra les chantiers du d. S. Poirier, par tout ou il les aura.” anom dppc not sdom// 803, “Apprentissage Poirier et Marie Olive,” 9 August 1786. “De le coucher et nourrir pendant le tems de son apprentissage, a la charge par le d. S. Godineau, lequel s’y oblige de faire rester le dit François dit Bonhomme, chez le d. S. Cado pendant quatre années, et de payer au d. S. Cado

Notes to pages 113–15

75

76

77

78 79

80

81

82

83

84 85

86

une somme de mille livres, dans le cas où le d. apprentis quitteroit avant l’expiration des d. quatre années, et enfin de le vêtir.” anom dppc not sdom// 802 (Port-au-Prince, Notary Glandas, 1786), “Marché Cado & Godineau,” 4 February 1786. anom dppc not sdom//174 (Cap-François, Notary Bordier, 1777–1778), “Vente de Maison les héritiers Vian aux Mulatres Jean, et Jean-Baptiste Vian,” 7 May 1778. anom dppc not sdom//174, “Bail de negre Blaise dit Breda Mathieu Blaise,” 6 July 1778. The text referring to the treatment of Mars reads “Le présent bail est fait a la charge par le dit preneur qui si oblige de tenir du dit nègre en bon père de famille, de le loger, nourrir, vêtir, traitter, et médicamenter tant en santé que maladie.” On Blaise dit Bréda see Girard, Toussaint Louverture, 62. anom dppc not sdom//177 (Cap-François, Notary Bordier, 1780–81), “Contract de marriage entre Jean Louis Laronderie N.L. et Marie N.L.,” 8 July 1780. Rogers, “Libres de couleur,” 186. Garrigus, Before Haiti, 174–6. Significantly, saddle making, not building, produced the Southern Province’s two most prominent artisans (ibid., 193). anom dppc not sdom//1177 (Mirebalais, Notary Lamauve, 1781), “Vente de terre,” 25 August 1781; dppc not sdom//1543, “Vente d’une mulatresse et de enfants par Madame de Silly au nommé Thomas mulatre libre,” 22 November 1787. anom dppc not sdom//56 (Léogâne, Notary Baron, 1779–1786), “Contrat de Mariage entre Michel et Saumat,” 4 June, 1781; dppc not sdom// 57 (Léogâne, Notary Baron, 1787–89), “Contrat de Mariage de Louis Piot et D’Agnes Celestine dite Moransille,” 24 April 1787. anom dppc not sdom//82 (Mirebalais, Notary Beaudoux, 1777–79), “Vente par le nommé Lottin mulatre aux enfants naturels de la nommée Marie Elizabeth Pepin,” 28 November 1777; dppc not sdom// 202 (Cap-François, Notary Bordier, 1788), “Donation entrevisse le nommé Rousselot ML a la nommée Nanette GL,” 2 July 1788. anom dppc not sdom//196 (Cap-François, Notary Bordier, 1786), “Contract de marriage de Jean Baptiste NL et de Marie Margueritte NL,” 21 October 1786. Pérotin-Dumon, La ville aux îles, 510, 797–800. The latter two witnessed Maure’s marriage, which suggests that they were associates. anom dppc not gua// 334 (Pointe-à-Pitre, Notary Bordier, 1784), “Mariage de Maure mestis libre avec Marie Angelique mestisse libre,” 15 January 1784. anom dppc not gua//338 (Pointe-à-Pitre, Notary Boyer, 1786–87), “Partage et emargement entre Jacques Philippe

87

88

89

90

91

92

93

94

95

96

mulattre libre et les gendres,” 6 February 1786; dppc not mar//438 (Saint-Pierre, Notary Cairoche, 1788), “Donnation par Pierre Raymond Bocage ML la Dlle. Gal d’une petite negresse nommé Angele,” 7 August 1788. anom dppc not gua//764, “Contract de mariage de Branviliers et Marie-Joseph, patentés,” 20 Pluviôse An 13. The bride’s father was also a builder, the late Laurent, a mason. His race is not specified but his lack of title or surname indicates a person of colour. anom dppc not gua//329 (Pointe-à-Pitre, Notary Boyer, 1781), “Depost d’un sousseing privé par Me Legrand No.re et Leonard negre libre,” 15 February 1781. anom dppc not gua//338, “Reglement de compte entre les Sieurs Beauregard freres et M. Berthelot Ribot,” 23 January 1787. anom dppc not gua//331, “Vente d’une maison et emplacement par Louis Bouillon et sa femme au Sieur Clement Dubergier ainé,” 13 March 1782. The house had a facade 17 feet wide and was 16 feet deep with a “salle” and small office downstairs and a bedroom and small cabinet upstairs; dppc not gua// 333, “Vente d’une maison au Petit Bourg par Mituel mestis libre et sa femme a Jacques mulatre libre,” 27 June 1783. anom dppc not gua//335 (Pointe-à-Pitre, Notary Boyer, 1784), “Vente d’un morceau de terre par le Sieur Louis Hourticq Duchardon a la veuve Reache,” 15 June 1784; dppc not gua//938, “Emargement donné par Alexandre Cognet au Sieur de Blaine,” 19 October 1788. anom dppc not gua//339 (Pointe-à-Pitre, Notary Boyer, 1786–87), “Vente d’une maison au Petit Bourg et d’une portion de terre au Petit Cul-de-Sac par Marguerite mulatresse libre a ses huit enfants,” 21 July 1787. anom dppc not gua//765 (Pointe-à-Pitre, Notary Descures), “Vente & Marché entre la nommée Marie Joseph et le nommé Joseph Daguin, entrepreneur,” 2 January 1806; dppc not gua//766, “Vente par le Ne. Daguin, faveur du S Pourtalier,” 14 November 1806. anom dppc not mar//603 (Fort-Royal, Notary Clavery, 1786–88), “Vente par le Né Lambert Négre libre fondé a procuration de Francois-Xavier negre libre et Jean Charles Negre libre au Sieur Francois Cotton,” 11 February 1788. anom dppc not mar//599 (Fort-Royal, Notary Clavery, 1777), “Vente d’un appartement par la Dlle Victoire Dorothée Dumont a nommé Charles Vincent mulatre libre,” 15 January 1777. anom dppc not gua//333 (Pointe-à-Pitre, Notary Boyer, 1783), “Mariage de François Gabriel mestis libre avec Carlotte mestis libre,” 8 June 1783; dppc not mar// 605

97

98

99

100

101

102

103

104 105

106

107

108

(Fort-Royal, Notary Clavery, 1788), “Transaction passé entre le mulâtre libre nommé Jn Bte Songui et le mestis libre nommé Fois. Callaigre, mari de Francoise Songui,” 23 July 1788. anom dppc not mar//601, “Mariage du nommé Rémi Pajote Mulatre libre avec la nommée Marie Rose Mulatresse libre,” 30 April 1785; dppc not mar// 601, “Vente d’une negresse, par le mulatre libre nommé Rhemy pajotte, au nommé Pierre dit Bech, mestis libre,” 18 September 1785. anom dppc not gua//337, “Contrat de mariage de Christophle le mulatre affranchi avec Scolastique carteronne affranchie,” 9 November 1785. anom dppc not mar//606 (Fort-Royal, Notary Clavery, 1788), “Liquidation de droits des mineurs Marchand dans la succession de feue Modestine Fabien epouse du Sieur Pierre Marchand,” 14 June 1788. anom dppc not mar//607, “Mariage du nommé Modest Dupigny mulastre libre, avec la nommée Claire, mulatresse son esclave,” 10 February 1789. anom dppc not gua//332, “Contrat de Mariage de Pierre Mituel mestis libre avec Therese Cabresse son esclave,” 2 September 1782. anom dppc not gua//332, “Donnation par Dame de St Maclou d’une negresse a Pierre Lamy; vente par la meme au dit de l’enfant de la ditte negresse. Mariage entre le dit Lamy et la negresse Rosalie, et legitimation de l’enfant acheté,” 30 June 1783. anom dppc not gua//334 (Pointe-à-Pitre, Notary Boyer, 1784), “Donation entrevit par Madame Deligny de la mestisse nommé Luce a Jean Baptiste mulatre libre, et mariage entre les dits Jean-Baptiste et Luce,” 16 January 1784. anom dppc not gua//697, untitled, 3 August 1779. anom dppc not gua//339, “Affranchissement par la mulatresse libre Jeanny son esclave nommé Claude dit Grenadin, et mariage entre le dit Claude et la ditte Jeanny,” 8 November 1787. anom dppc not mar//604 (Fort-Royal, Notary Clavery, 1787–88), “Mariage du nommé Louis dit Louison Castor mulatre libre & de Marguerite Scolastique mulatresse libre,” 27 January 1788. anom dppc not mar//605 (Fort-Royal, Notary Clavery, 1788), “Testament du nommé Charles Vincent mulâtre libre charpentier,” 22 April 1788. anom dppc not mar//605, “Obligation consenté par le mestis libre nommé François Latour en faveur du mulatre libre nommé Regis Duras,” 19 March 1788; dppc not mar//602, “Vente de terre par le nommé Theodore mulatre

Notes to pages 116–17

525

libre au nommé theagine negre libre,” 8 May 1788; dppc not mar//607, “Testament du Negre libre nommé Auguste Théagene maçon,” 24 October 1788. 109 anom dppc not mar// 607 (Fort-de-France, Notary Clavery, 1788), “Mariage du nommé Louis La Parade mullatre libre avec la mulatresse libre nommé Marie Joseph Hyacinthe,” 2 September 1788. La Parade also turns up in a 1789 document in which he rents a property to a free black widow with the surname Pierre. dppc not mar//608 (Fort-de-France, Notary Clavery, 1789), “Vente de deux chambres, faite par le nommé Louis La Parade mulâtre libre a la negresse libre nommé Vve Pierre Abo,” 13 March 1797. 110 The text stipulated that they should pay Martial only the 2,000 livres if he was not yet twenty-five and was still working in his chosen profession: “La future epouse declare qu’elle à un enfant nommé Martial agé de trois ans qui est actuellement en France avec le Sieur Jean du Tour qui s’en est volontairement chargé pour le nourrir entretenir et lui faire apprendre un métier lorsqu’il sera en age ; dans le cas que cet enfant reviendroit en cette Isle avant d’avoir appris un métier et qu’il fut encore en bas age les futurs epoux s’obligent l’un et l’autre solidairement de le nourrir loger et entretenir aux dépens de la future communauté et de lui faire apprendre egallement un métier, et lorsqu’il sera assez instruit pour pouvoir travailler lui seul du métier qu’il aura appris les futurs epoux s’obligent sous la même solidarité et sous les renonciations au benefice de discution de lui payer et compter la somme de deux mille livres en espèces pour li servir et le mettre à même de travailler quand même il n’auroit pas atteint l’age de vingt-cinq ans et pourvu qu’il sache son métier.” anom dppc not gua//337 (Pointe-à-Pitre, Notary Boyer, 1785), “Contrat de mariage de Christophe le mulatre affranchi avec Scolastique carteronne affranchie,” 9 November 1785.

3 4 5 6 7

8

9

10

11

chapter six 1 As this chapter will demonstrate Christophe Charlery’s claim that “dans les colonies françaises, il n’y a pas d’architectes civils” is simply incorrect, even if we limit ourselves to the tropical colonies which are the focus of his study. Charlery, “Maisons de maître,” 8. 2 Moogk notes that “there was no analogy between the timber houses with board or shingle roofs built in Canada and homes in France, except for farm outbuildings, mountain huts and the odd plankwall dwelling in wooded regions. The depletion of the French forests had led to

526

Notes to pages 117–22

12

a replacement of wood by stone as a walling material.” Moogk, Building a House in New France, 13. Edwards, “Creole Architecture,” 243. Gutiérrez, “Los gremios,” 26–8. Ibid., 45–50. Ibid., 28–31. Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 97–8; Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 196–7; Moogk, “The Craftsmen of New France,” 1–2, 303. See Maffre, Construire Bordeaux, 55–71. The deliberations book of the Corporation of Masons and Architects from 1769–90 is preserved in the Archives Départementales de Gironde and is an invaluable source for architecture historians. adg i c 1757 “Déliberations, Comunauté des Maîtres Architectes de Bordeaux,” 1769–90. adgi c 4466, “Corporations, charpentiers, maçons, et architectes, orfevres,” 1673–1780; “Éclaircissemens demandés par M. le Contrôleur Général, sur la situation actuelle de la Communauté des Maîtres Maçons et Architectes de la Ville de Bordeaux,” 1764; “Statuts des Maîtres Maçons & Architectes de la Ville & Fauxbourgs de Bordeaux,” 1787. Maffre, Construire Bordeaux, 59; adg i c 4466, “Status des Maîtres,” 3. The art of stereotomy was essential to the training of a mason in eighteenth-century France. Among the important manuals which served as models for journeymen preparing for their chef-d’oeuvre was Frézier, La théorie de la pratique. “Une chapelle sepulchralle sur un plan octogonne de dix a douze toizes de diametre avec un porche de l’ordre dorique ayant ses façades exterieures decorées du meme ordre et l’interieur de la dite chapelle sera decoré d’un ordre ionique et qu’il sera egalement placé dans quatre des façades de la dite façade des mosolées. Le tout avec plan, ellevation couppes et profils couronné avec charpente et couverture en rottonde. Et que l’echelle de proportion du dit plan ne pourra etre reduitte moins de deux pouces par toize.” The essai de main was to be executed at the house of Jean Laclotte. For his chef d’oeuvre he was asked to construct a decorative squinch. adg i c 1757 “Déliberations,” 15. “Les maçons non maitres, demandents d’être separez pour leurs impositions d’avec les maitres qu’en consequence il leur soit expedié des mendemens pour leur capitation et industrie, ainsi que cela a été ordonné par M. Boutin par son ordonnance du 27. 9bre 1762 dont l’execution a été depuis interrompue, ils pretendent que sans cela ils seront toujours exposés a être surchargés par les maitres qui varieront leurs taxes a leur gré, comme il est arrivé l’année

13 14 15

16 17 18

19 20 21

22 23

24 25 26

27

28

derniere.” adg i c 4466, “Capitation les non maitres maçons contre les maitres” (after 1769), 20. See also Maffre, Construire Bordeaux, 63–4. Maffre, Construire Bordeaux, 58; Blanchard, Les Giral, 151. Moogk, “The Craftsmen of New France,” i, 2–3. “Les Artisans & Gens de Mestier qui passeront, soit en ladite Isle de Cayenne, ou aux autres Isles de l’Amerique, seront reputez Maistres en telles Villes de France où ils voudront s’habituer, apres y avoir exercé leurs Arts & Mestiers le temps porté par la concession, verifiée au Parlement, & sera fourny des outils à ceux qui n’en auront point.” adg i c 3784, “Recueil d’Arrêts, 1616–1687, De par le roy. Messieurs de la compagnie des Indes Occidentalles” (8 August 1664). Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 197. Moogk, “The Craftsmen of New France,” 277–8; Richardson et al., Quebec City, 386–8. Richardson et al., Quebec City, 324–5; Noppen and Grignon, L’art de l’architecture, 126; Moogk, “The Craftsmen of New France,” 10. Gerbino, François Blondel, 47. On Quebec, see Moogk, Building a House in New France, 88–9. anom col f5a 3/9, “Cession d’un terrain à l’architecte François de La Joüe à condition qu’il y construise une maison,” 29 March 1700. Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 196–7; Moogk, “The Craftsmen of New France,” i. Affiches Américaines, 3 September 1766, 312; 24 December 1766, 439–40; 2 April 1777, 163; 21 June 1777, 299; Supplément aux Affiches Américaines, 22 February 1777, 8; 7 January 1784, 1. Wittman, Architecture, 132; Gallet, Les architectes parisiens, 49–50. Affiches Américaines, 16 April 1783, 197. “Pour raison de l’etat de menuiserie qu’elles entendant exercer au cette ville.” anom dppc not sdom// 182 (CapFrançois, Notary Bordier, 1783), “Société entre les S. Simonin et Joly,” 30 January 1783; dppc not sdom// 192 (Cap-François, Notary Bordier, 1785), “Société entre les S. Sost et Bertellet,” 22 November 1785. “qui n’est contractée que pour les ouvrages et entreprises que fera le dit Sieur Bertellet seulement et sans que le dit Sieur Sost soit tenu à aucun travaux ni entreprise quelconques en raison de la ditte société … La ditte Société sera régie et gouvernée par le dit Sieur Bertellet seul.” anom dppc not sdom//192. Supplément aux Affiches Américaines, 5 March 1783, 115; 8 March 1783, 118.

29 anom dppc not sdom// 803 (Port-au-Prince, Notary Glandas, 1786), “Dépôt de Procuration Payssé freres a Ferrau la Janquiere,” 5 June 1786; dppc not sdom// 803, “Testament Denis menuisier,” 20 June 1786. 30 anom dppc gua// 334 (Pointe-à-Pitre, Notary Boyer, 1784), “Vente d’un habitation de la Capesterre par les heritiers Doyon a M. Duquesnil,” 24 March 1784. 31 anom dppc not mar// 599, “Procuration des S. et D. Rogues,” 14 March 1777 (Rogues inherited Mathieu Mandrou’s estate in 1777); dppc not mar// 601 (Fort-Royal, Notary Clavery, 1778–84), “Attestation pour le Sieur Jean Poitevin,” 6 October 1778; anom dppc not mar// 437, “Vente de maison par mr Pierre Joseph Hugonnenc au Sieur Ml. Poitevin,” 16 November 1787; dppc not sdom//183 (Cap-François, Notary Bordier, 1783), “Testament du S Roux,” 11 April, 1783. He left his worldly goods, which he had brought with him from France, to his associé Pierre Bertranet of the same quarter. 32 Supplément aux Affiches Américaines, 14 November 1772, 552. 33 anom dppc not sdom// 802 (Port-au-Prince, Notary Glandas, 1786), “S. Giraut peintre faveur de Therese dit Minerve,” 19 January 1786. 34 anom dppc not sdom// 803 (Port-au-Prince, Notary Glandas, 1787), “Testament Godot,” 12 November 1786. 35 Affiches Américaines, 2 March 1768, 75. 36 The entrepreneurs de bâtiment include Gilbert Viau (1778), François Angouin (1779), Louis-Joseph Dubier from Besançon (1779, 1782), François-Guillaume Robard (1782, 1784), Pierre Charrière (1783, 1785), Vincent Augeard (1783), Joseph d’Arbois (1784), Laurent Bossin (1785), Jean Artaud (or Arteau, 1786), Jean-Simon Caustau Delisle (1786), Jean Regnault (1787), Jean-Pierre Portal (1787), Jean-Baptiste Troyon fils (1787), Pierre Lavite (1787), Pierre Sauzenaut (also a carpenter, 1788), and Henry Tiffon (1788); joiners include François Xavier Vorber (1783), Nicolas Perrier (1786), René Bonnot (1788), and Léonard Gourdon (1788); and carpenters include Sieur Laborie (1780); Charles Vitou (1782), François Roux (1783), Joseph Boyer (1784, 1785), Étienne Verger (1784), Charles Gaudin from Limbé (1785), François Dauphin (1785), François Maillart (1785), Armand Pierre (1786), François Portau (1786), Pierre Petit (1787), Pierre Gaillard from Artibonite (1787), and Jacques Pepain (1787, 1788). anom dppc not sdom// 174 (Cap-François, Notary Bordier, 1777–1778), “Vente de Maison les héritiers Vian aux Mulatres Jean, et Jean-Baptiste Vian,” 7 May 1778; dppc not sdom//175, “Vente de Negre le S Angouin au S Dubier,” 21 April 1779; dppc not sdom// 180, “Testament

Notes to pages 123–5

527

du Dubier,” 29 April 1782; dppc not sdom// 181, “Vente de Negre S. Moussole au S. Vitou,” 20 November 1782; “Bail d’emplacement et bâtiments Srs Maitre et le Cardinal au S. Robard,” 8 December 1782; dppc not sdom// 187, “Marché Le Sr.a Barganger et le Sr. Robard,” 2 June 1784; dppc not sdom//184, “Marché le S Granon et le S Chariere,” 9 July 1783; dppc not sdom// 191, “Vente de negre Fontenon ML au S. Charierre,” 29 September 1785; dppc not sdom// 184, “Bail d’apartement S. Augeard au S Moizard,” 19 August 1783; dppc not sdom// 186, “Marché de construction Srs Lapole et Darbois,” 5 July 1784; dppc not sdom// 189, “vente negresse S Bossin au S Boyer,” 10 January 1785; dppc not sdom//371, “Accord entre M Artaud et C Angard,” 8 September 1786; dppc not sdom// 194, “Vente de canot S. Costeau delisle a Jacque Guimby,” 2 March 1786; dppc not sdom//197, “Sous bail apartement S Boissieux au S Renault,” 7 April 1787; dppc not sdom// 198, “Vente de negresse negrillon et negritte S Portal a la Demoiselle Boisdaré,” 7 May 1787; dppc not sdom// 198, “Marché pour la construction de deux chambres entre la Melle. de Menul Livry et le Sr. Troyon,” 12 July 1787; dppc not sdom//198, “Vente de terrain S Lavitte, à Jacques Anibal dit Champigny ML,” 25 July 1787; dppc not sdom// 202, “Marché entre le S Bellet et Sauzeneau,” 9 July 1788; dppc not sdom//202, “Cession de jouissance de terrain la Delle Deligny au S Sauzeneau,” 11 August 1788; dppc not sdom//184, “Procuration du S. Blanc par la S. Vorber,” 13 July 1783; dppc not sdom// 203, “Transport de créance S Tiffon au S. Sallenave,” 23 September 1788; dppc not sdom//196, “Cession et transport S. Joseph Perrier au S. Nicolas Perrier,” 27 October 1786; dppc not sdom// 200, “vente de negre S Mareschal de Baland au Sr René Bonnot,” 22 January 1788; dppc not sdom// 200, “Vente de effets S Gourdon a Joseph de Pironneau CL,” 9 April, 1788; dppc not sdom//177, “Declaration par S. Bascoulergue,” 4 June 1780; dppc not sdom// 183, “testament du S. Roux,” 11 April, 1783; dppc not sdom// 188, “Vente de negresse Sr. Boyer au Sr. Bargeot,” 19 November 1784; dppc not sdom//189, “vente negresse S Bossin au S Boyer,” 10 January 1785; dppc not sdom// 185, “Vente de negresse S Le Grand au S Verger,” 9 February 1784; dppc not sdom//189, “Vente de terrain Anne dit Godoffe C[arter]onne L. au Sr. Gaudin,” 4 March 1785; dppc not sdom//190, “Vente de canot S Dauphin a Jacques Olivet NL,” 9 May 1785; dppc not sdom// 191, “Marché entre les Srs Bezangé et Maillart,” 9 August 1781; dppc not sdom//371, “Echange d’esclaves entre M. Milly et P. Carpentier,” 8 September 1786; dppc not sdom// 371 (CapFrançois, Notary Cassanet, 1786), “Vente d’une negresse

528

Notes to page 125

Congo par le Sr Portau, a la nommé Marie Françoise ditte Désiré NL,” 1 July 1786; dppc not sdom// 197, “Vente de mulatresse, S. Poudré au S. Petit,” 27 January 1787; dppc not sdom//198, “Bail de negresse S Gaillard au S Amphoux,” 22 May 1787; dppc not sdom// 198, “Cession de bail et vente d’objets S Pepain en nomme au Sr Friney,” 24 August 1787; dppc not sdom// 201, “Vente de negres Sr Roncio et Bainville au Sr Pepain,” 16 June 1788. 37 The entrepreneurs de bâtiment included Jean-Baptiste Le Méth (1784), Jacques Flon (1784), François Helliot (1784), Louis Ragnos (1785), Louis-Henri Poirier (1786, also a carpenter), Sieur Merceron ainé (1786, also a carpenter), Jean Jean (1786), Pierre Marchand (1786, also a master mason), François Brochard (1786), Hyacinth Lesser (1786), Bernard Meunier (1787), Jean Baptiste Lemit (1789), Henry Baquet (1789), Pierre Casanave (1789), and Joseph Gelin (1789); carpenters included Pierre Gervais (1785), Sieur Cado (1786), Pierre de la Mothe (1786), Claude Rutel (or Rhutel, 1786), Jean-Nicolas Linsent (1786), and Jean Bonvallet (1786); and joiners included Pierre-Robert Michel (1784), Pierre Vaconet (1785), Pierre Robert (1785), Jean-François Bazergue (1785), Hypolitte Godot (1786), Sieur Badin (1786), and Louis Bernard (1786, also a carpenter, joiner, and entrepreneur). anom dppc not sdom//800 (Port-au-Prince, Notary Glandas, 1784); dppc not sdom//801 (Port-au-Prince, Notary Glandas, 1785); dppc not sdom// 802 (Port-au-Prince, Notary Glandas, 1786); dppc not sdom// 803 (Port-au-Prince, Notary Glandas, 1786); dppc not sdom// 804 (Port-auPrince, Notary Glandas, 1786); dppc not sdom// 803 (Port-au-Prince, Notary Glandas, 1786–87); dppc not sdom//1308 (Port-au-Prince, Notary Loreilhe, 1785); dppc not sdom//962 (Port-au-Prince, Notary Guieu, 1789); dppc not sdom//961 (Port-au-Prince, Notary Guieu, 1789); dppc not sdom// 1319 (Port-au-Prince, Notary Loreilhe, 1787). 38 The entrepreneurs included Charles Mazurino (or Maggiorino) from Lugano (1748–after 1804), Joseph Chaumet from Avignon (called an “architecte,” d. 1781), Joseph Daguin (1806), and Jacques Creuzet (1806); masons included Jean Drouart (or Drouet) dit Le Roy (1785, 1804); master carpenters included Jean Nain (1777), Pierre Perrot (1781), François Duperé (1783), Joseph Taurin (1805), and Charles Renouard from La Rochelle (1804); carpenters included Sieur Benon (1777) and Jean Guisenau (1784); master joiners included Claude Lebel (1786) and Christian Mierk (1805); painter and merchant Jean-Baptiste Viry (1805); and there was a furniture maker (ébéniste) named Offin “already known for his work” who built the pulpit

39 40

41 42

at the church in Pointe-à-Pitre in 1822. anom dppc not gua//328, “Vente d’un terrain a la pointe a Pitre par le Sieur Boyer de l’Etang au nommé Maggiorino et marché entr’eux,” 19 October 1780; adg u 1 e 35/ 95, “État civil, collections des tribuneaux, esclaves, Pointe-à-Pitre,” 17a (1804) (on Maggiorino see also Pérotin-Dumon, La ville aux îles, 446–8); adg u 1 e 20/ 1, “État civil: collection des greffes des tribunaux, Pointe-à-Pitre,” 31 December 1781, 18b; anom dccp not gua// 765, “Vente & marché entre la nommée Marie Joseph & le nommé Joseph Daguin, entrepreneur,” 2 January 1806; dccp not gua// 765, “Vente par le S. Creuzet à M. Sabarot,” 7 October 1806; dppc not gua//336, “Transport par le Sr. Jean Drouart dit le Roy au Sieur Anglas,” 12 April 1785; adg u 1 e 35/ 95, 4b (1804); anom dppc not gua// 335, “Attestation pour le mariage pour le Sieur Jean Nain,” 19 November 1777; adgu 1 e 20/1, 19a (1781); anom dppc not gua//332, “Vente d’une maison faubourg du Marigot par Elizabeth Petit mulatresse libre a François Deperé Me Charpentier,” 19 January 1783; dppc not gua// 332, “Vente d’une maison faubourg du Marigot par Elizabeth Petit mulatresse libre a François Duperé Me Charpentier,” 19 January 1783; adg u 1 e 35/ 95, 17a (1804); anom dccp not gua// 764, “Contrat de mariage de Brainvilliers & Marie-Joseph Patenté,” 20 Pluviose An 13; dccp not gua// 553, “Testament de Louis negresse libre,” 7 October 1777; dccp not gua// 334, “Contrat de mariage entre Jean Guisenau et Anne Allette Ephestion,” 30 April 1784; dccp not gua// 338, “Vente d’un maison au bourg de Ste Rose par le Sr Claude Lebel,” 4 March 1786; dccp not gua// 764, “Testament du Ct. J. Bte. Viry peintre,” 3 Brumaire, An 13; adg u, E. Dépôt 13.5, 1804–41, f. 129b. Pérotin-Dumon, La ville aux îles, 765–6, 795–800. anom dppc not mar//600, “Attestation pour le Sieur Pierre Raymond menuisier,” 4 October 1777; dppc not mar//437 (Saint-Pierre, Notary Cairoche, 1786–87), “Testament du Sr Jean Marcelin Pavie Mtre menuisier,” 26 October 1787. adgi c b 59 (1713–24). “un nombre d’ouvriers de toutes sortes … [in 1710 he proposes to send] une compagnie de cent vingt ouvriers à l’instar de celles qui sont dans le régiment royal d’artillerie en France … Charpentiers, Bûcherons, Maçons, Tailleurs de pierre, Carriers, Chaux fourniers, Forgerons grossiers, Serruriers, Armuriers, Cloutiers, Menuisiers, Charrons, Scieurs de long … Les ouvriers ainsi distribuez et employez chacun suivant son mestier, il paroist assez que le travail ne peut souffrir aucun retardement s’autant que pour peu qu’on prenne des précautions, et le temps suffisant

43

44 45 46 47

48 49

50

51 52

d’avance pour faire l’amas des materiaux, et les provisions necessaires des bois.” anom fm c 9a 8, “Mémoire concernant l’établissement d’une Compagnie de cent vingt ouvriers de toutes sortes de professions dans l’Isle de St. Domingue sous le nom de Compagnie d’Artillerie de la Marine,” 14 January 1710, 321a–4b. Hamon, “Les églises parisiennes,” 10; Kalnein, Architecture of France, 48, 110; Fuhring, Meissonnier, 1:43, 2:170–72. See also Nyberg, “Introduction,” 40; Fuhring, “Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier,” 26; Bédard, Decorative Games, 19. Affiches Américaines, 3 October 1770, 394. Supplément aux Affiches Américaines, 8 October 1774, 477. Affiches Américaines, Avis Divers, week 6, 13 February 1773, 1. “Que le grand escalier de perron n’étant point conformé à celui qui était porté sur le plan, le changement a été fait de gré à gré avec le dit S. Ragnos entrepreneur; sans à lui tenir compte de l’augmentation qui je trouve sur la longueur de la rampe.” anom dppc not sdom// 962, n. 3024, 10 September 1789. “Declarons … que les ouvrages sont fait au desir & conformement au dit marché et suivant les regles de l’art.” The building history of the church from the time of its demolition is recorded in a history by surveyor Hilaire Gallois to Lieutenant-General le comte De Lardenoy, written at Point-à-Pitre on 12 June 1819, from which the reference to “plusieurs plans” is taken. anom fm sg Guadeloupe 258 1549, no. 300, f. 1. See also Kissoun, Pointe-à-Pitre, 112; Kissoun, “Les prémices,” 1–2; Pérotin-Dumon, La ville aux îles, 407–8, 413–15, 766; Fabre, De clochers en clochers, 6–8; Ballivet “Nos paroisses,” 96–100, 125–7. “Invitation a été faite à Monsieur Rousseau architecte, ici présent, ayant présenté le projet, de faire un nouveau plan, avec les coupes, tant sur la largeur, que sur la longueur, d’après les dimensions désignés, avec un droit estimatif très détaillé, tant du prix des matériaux que de celui de la main-d’œuvre.” adg u, E. Dépôt 13.5, 1804–41, “Délibération sur le plan de l’Eglise (Pointe-à-Pitre),” 4b. “la majesté que doit caractériser un tel édifice.” adg u, E. Dépôt 13.5, 1804–41, f. 20a. “Les habitants du bourg du Cap étoient convenus par une deliberation faite en presence de Messieurs de Charité et Mithon de construire une eglise de maçonnerie dont le devis se montoit a 37 m. ll et le comte d’Arquiyan a changé ce premier projet pour une eglise de charpente qui ne coutera que 20 m ll. Elle sera beaucoup moins solide et la premiere auroit été plus decent et plus convenable a ce lieu qui est considerablement etabli, et le principal du quartier, mais on a commencé a metre les bois en œuvre, et ce seroit trop de depense perdue de revenir au premier projet, elle

Notes to pages 125–7

529

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

530

poura être fini dans les premiers mois de l’année prochaine.” anom fm c 9a 10, report by Blenac & Mithon, 10 August 1713, 11a–b. adgu, E. Dépôt 13.5, 1804–41, f. 15. See also Kissoun, Pointe-à-Pitre, 113; Kissoun, “Les prémices,” 2; Fabre, De clochers en clochers 7; Ballivet “Nos paroisses,” 97. “1e Que le prix de la construction de l’église sur le plan en rotonde était beaucoup élevé pour les circonstances actuelles ou se trouvent les habitans de cette paroisse. 2e. Que l’on ne trouverait pas d’ouvriers capables d’exécuter un pareil projet. 3e. Enfin qu’un côte du terrein sur lequel doit reposer une partie de la construction en rotonde, n’était pas assez consolidé pour soutenir une masse de maçonnerie aussi considérable.” adg u, E. Dépôt 13.5, 1804–41, f. 15. “un projet fut accepté; il s’en suivit un devis et un marché; et le 7 mars 1807, l’on en proposa l’adjucation au rabais, qui eut lieu à l’extinction de la bougie, les 23 et 30 mars et 6 avril de la ditte année. Le sieur Faudoas s’en rendit adjudicataire à la dernière séance pour la somme de deux cent quatre-vingt-dix-sept mille livres. Il fournit pour caution le sieur Vottier Moyencourt.” anom fm sg Guadeloupe 258 1549, no. 300, f. 1a. anom fm sg Guadeloupe 258 1549, no. 300, f. 1. This description of the church is transliterated in Kissoun, “Les prémices,” 2. “Mais au moment de mettre la main à l’œuvre, l’on se décida alors à placer l’église derrière le morne de la Victoire, sur l’emplacement où elle est actuellement au lieu de l’endroit qui lui étoit destiné sur la place de Sartine. L’on se décida aussi à quelques changemens dans sa construction, et on lui donna plus de largeur qu’au devis.” anom fm sg Guadeloupe 258 1549, no. 300, f. 1b. “Le Sieur Faudoas avoit fait commencer les travaux; mais quelque tems après, il fut arrêté et détenu pour des motifs à lui particulier. Le Sieur Moyencourt, sa caution en écrivit à Monsieur Le Préfet en lui demanda qu’attendu la détention de Mr. Faudoas le marché de l’entreprise de l’église fut résolu, et à être déchargé de son cautionnement. Mais par délibération du conseil de préfecture à la datte du 17 juillet 1817 [sic] le sieur Moyencourt fut débouté de sa demande en résiliation, et fut autorisé à se mettre au lieu et place du Sieur Faudoas entrepreneur. Dès ce moment le Sieur Moyencourt prit l’entreprise sur son compte, et envoya pour conduire les travaux le Sieur Regné, son beau-frère.” anom fm sg Guadeloupe 258 1549, no. 300, f. 1b. “ici ce sont mille fois répéter les cris de: Gloire, Louange, Honneur a tout Puissant long et heureux Règne au Cyrus de la France!” adg u, E. Dépôt 13.5, 1804–41, f. 21b.

Notes to pages 127–9

60 “A cette époque, la majeure partie des murs de 12 pieds de haut, formant le pourtour des bas-côtés, ainsi que ceux des chapelles, étoient construits en maçonnerie brut. Les murs de la sacristie étoient construits à cette hauteur seulement; le tout non compris les fondations: il n’en restoit qu’une petite partie à faire; mais la façade n’avoit point encore été commencé: les fondations même de la façade n’avoient point été préparés. Quant à la charpente, l’on avoit préparé les poutres qui devoient former les pilastres de la nef et du chœur et supporter le grand corps de charpente, et l’on avoit aussi commencé la taille de la ditte charpente,” anom fm sg Guadeloupe 258 1549, no. 300, f. 2a. During this time some names of builders appear in the accounts doing odd jobs, including the carpenters Champi and Colas, and Philibert the mason, as well as several others whose métiers are not given. adg u, E. Dépôt 13.5, 1804–41, f. 33, 43. 61 “Le 19 décembre 1811 Monsieur Quin convoqua les principaux propriétaires de la ville. L’assemblée eut lieu chez Monseigneur L’abbé Foulquier. Là Mr. Moyencourt obtint la résiliation de l’entreprise de l’église, sans estimation ni réception d’ouvrage. On lui donna la faculté de reprendre tous les matériaux qui n’étoient point employés, même ceux déjà préparés, et on lui abandonna la somme de cent onze mille cinq cent trente-quatre livres qu’il avoit touchée.” anom fm sg Guadeloupe 258 1549, no. 300, f. 2a–b. 62 adg u, E. Dépôt 13.5, 1804–41, f. 38, 47b; anom fm sg Guadeloupe 258 1549, no. 300, f. 3b. See also Ballivet “Nos paroisses,” 126–7; Pérotin-Dumon, La ville aux îles, 350–1. 63 Pérotin-Dumon, La ville aux îles, 766. 64 “Le Sieur Nassau ne trouva alors que les murs faits par le Sieur Moyencourt, dont la majeure partie étoit élevée à hauteur du rez-de-chaussée; il s’engagea à les terminer et à faire un exhaussement pour former un étage supérieur devant servir de tribune ou galerie; à faire le portail qui n’étoit pas commencée; et au lieu de pilastres en bois qui devoient former la nef et le chœur, à construire des arcades en pierres de taille décorées de pilastres ayant bases et chapiteaux, le tout couronné par un entablement. Enfin à faire l’église telle qu’elle en aujourd’hui [1819].” anom fm sg Guadeloupe 258 1549, no. 300, f. 3b. 65 adg u, E. Dépôt 13.5, 1804–41, f. 56b (1813–14). 66 aeg , no shelf number, “Eglise de la Pointe à Pitre en 1808,” undated; bnf v d22 (1)–fol. p 184795, “Vue générale de la Pointe à Pitre avant le tremblement de terre du 8 fèvrier 1843,” published by d’Anbert & Co. 67 anom fm sg Guadeloupe 258 1549, no. 325, “Note au sujet de la construction de l’eglise de la Pointe-à-Pitre” f. 2b.

68 69 70 71 72 73 74

75

76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

Grignon, “La pratique architecturale,” 15. Grignon, Loing du soleil, 4. Wimpffen, A Voyage to Saint Domingo, 1797, 91–2. Ibid., 177. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 2:37. D’Orgeix and Frémaux, “La petite maison dans les abattis,” 7. “La Maison que vous avez envoyé de Cayenne et que l’on a montée, est proprement faite, les bois sont de bonnes qualités et le système de la charpente est bien entendu et solide; elle se trouve de la même longueur que la précédente mais elle est plus étroite; l’on aurait dû y faire une gallérie, sur le devant, objet dans ce pays nécessaire, soit pour la conservation de la maison, que pour la santé ménagements qu’elle donne. Les cases de Tilsit étant restées au poste Maillard. Je n’ai pas eu l’occasion de les examiner. Cependant par la description que Mr Jeny m’en a faite ne peuvent pas servir pour des colons Européens. 1e Elles sont trop basses, et trop étroites, elles n’ont pas de galléries et le grenier ne peut pas être habité.” anom 14 dfc 663, “Rapport à Monsieur Le baron Villiers commandant et administrateur de la Guyane Française pour le Roi, par Monsieur Pansiotti, arpenteur juré du Gouvernement, sur les établissements de la Mana, Cayenne” (19 November 1823–12 March 1825), 11a. “La Gabrielle [a plantation] depuis lors, après un accroissement considérable, malheureusement la maison principale et la sècherie furent mal conçus et mal construites, parce qu’il n’y avait alors à Cayenne aucun homme capable de faire un plan quoiqu’il eut un fort décent officier du génie.” adg i 61 j 27, “Guyane française: Fonds Chatillon: Sur introduction de la culture des espèces par Victor Hugues,” 18 March 1820. Nelson, Architecture and Empire, 206–7. Grignon, Loing du soleil, 1. Moogk, “The Craftsmen of New France,” ii. Richardson et al., Quebec City, 300. Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 200–1; Moogk, “The Craftsmen of New France,” 303–4. Moogk, “The Craftsmen of New France,” 305–8; Richardson et al., Quebec City, 43. Richardson et al., Quebec City, 300. “L’an mil sept cent soixante onze et le trente du mois de may a neuf heures du matin fête du corpus christi les drapaux de la confrairie des maitres maçons et architectes jurés de Bourdeaux, etabli en l’eglise de R.R.P.P. grand-carmes de la dite ville, sous l’invocation de la purification de notre Sainte vierge ont été bénis en l’eglise

84 85 86 87 88

89 90

91

92

93 94

95 96

métropolitaine de Saint André devant la chapelle de notre dame de la nef, par Son altesse sérénissime Monseigneur Ferdinand Maximilian Mériadec prince de Rohan guéméné grand prevôt de l’Eglise de Strasbourg abbé de Mouzon archevêque de Bourdeaux primat d’aquitaine, assité de M.M. les vicaires généraux doyen et chapitre de la dite eglise.” adg i c 1757, “Déliberations, Comunauté des Maîtres Architectes de Bordeaux, 1769–90,” 30 May 1770, 19. Maffre, Construire Bordeaux, 58. Moogk, “The Craftsmen of New France,” 80–1, 88, 104. Ibid., 80–1, 88. Moogk, “The Craftsmen of New France,” 161. The seminary trained boys in certain trades on a casual basis, including a mason in 1680, but there is no evidence that they operated a building and sculpture workshop on their farm at Saint-Joachim as scholars have traditionally suggested. Moogk, “The Craftsmen of New France,” 164, 218; Villeneuve, Baroque to Neoclassical, 35. Moogk, “The Craftsmen of New France,” 161, 180–3; Villeneuve, Baroque to Neoclassical, 35. “de montrer et enseigner son dit etat de Charpentier et de ne lui rien déguiser des ouvrages et de ce qui concerne ledit etat de Charpentier en un mot d’apporter tous ses soins a le rendre bon ouvrier a la fin du dit tems cy après fixé, de traiter ledit Sieur Étienne Déjambes pendant la durée du dit apprentissage en bon père de famille, de le loger, nourrir, traitter et medicamenter tant en santé que maladie naturelle et ordinaire, et de faire blanchir les linges.” dppc not sdom//176 (Notary Bordier, 1779–80), “Brevet d’aprentissage de S. Etienne Dejambe,” 4 March 1780. Grignon, Loing du soleil, 6; Grignon, “La pratique architecturale,” 6–13; Chénier, Québec, 206–8; Richardson et al., Quebec City, 89–93; Moogk, “The Craftsmen of New France,” 181, 240. For large projects he worked as what was called an “architect-entrepreneur,” subcontracting out to masons and joiners. Grignon, “La pratique architecturale,” 15–16. See also Grignon, Loing du soleil, 6–7. Noppen and Grignon, L’art de l’architecture, 27. Marc Grignon believes that he may have been attempting to purchase an office or title such as master craftsman so that he could establish an atelier in France. Grignon, “La pratique architecturale,” 22; Grignon, Loing du soleil, 152–3. Grignon, Loing du soleil, 154–5. This notarized sale of a plot on the rue Sault-au-Matelot by the Séminaire de Québec to Jean Maillou refers to him as “Jean Maillou Architecte demeurant en cette d[itt]e ville.”

Notes to pages 129–34

531

mcfsq, Seigneuries 9, no. 1, “Vente d’un emplacement rue

97 98

99

100

101 102

103

532

Sault-au-Matelot par le Séminaire de Québec à Jean Maillou,” 19 November 1717, f. 1a. Grignon, Loing du soleil, 159. Moogk, “The Craftsmen of New France,” 282; see also 233, 277, and 299. See also Noppen and Grignon, L’art de l’architecture, 126; Richardson et al., Quebec City, 187–97, 199–201, 386–8. He first paid his dues to the city’s Compagnie des Maîtres Architectes on 14 April 1765 and was elected bailiff in 1768. The document gives only his surname; however the signature is identical to that of Joseph Dardan in a letter of 26 May 1781. adg i c 4466, “Corporations, charpentiers, maçons et architectes, orfèvres, 1673–1780, doc 13,” 14 April 1765; anom col e 108, letter of 26 May 1781. Dardan also signed his name on 30 April 1765 in the company’s book of deliberations, was elected bailiff on 11 June 1768, and attended his last meeting on 17 December 1770. His signature is missing at the next meeting of 15 April. adgi c 1757, “Déliberations, Comunauté des Maîtres Architectes de Bordeaux” (1769–90), 1, 2, 15, 16. No reason is given for his decision, although he may have had a falling out with his parents – he remained estranged – but he was still noted as a full member of the company five months after his departure: “Ses affaires l’ayant appellé au Cap, il résolut d’y fixer sa résidence et de s’y livrer aux fonctions de son art, qu’il avoit exercé pendant plusieurs années à Bordeaux,” anom col e 108, no. 13; “Dardan, Joseph Antoine, maître-maçon et architecte juré en la ville de Bordeaux, ancien grand voyer de la ville et banlieue du Cap, à Saint-Domingue,” letter of 1 February 1783, f. 1. On Étienne Dardan and the Dardan dynasty see Maffre, Construire Bordeaux, 27–9, 33–6. In the minutes of the 17 November and 6 September 1770 meetings he was simply listed as “absent,” adg i c 1757, “Déliberations, Comunauté des Maîtres Architectes de Bordeaux” (1769– 90), 22, 23. Supplément aux Affiches Américaines, Avis Divers, week 9, 5 March 1774, 2. anom col e 108, no. 13, letter of 1 February 1783; letter of 13 November 1785. Dardan’s departure date from Bordeaux (1771) is mentioned in a legal proceeding from 1793 (adg i 2 e 785, Titre de famille Dardan, 1 August 1793, document 2, f. 1a). “Les talents du supliant ne se sont point bornés dans la Ville de Bordeaux à la simple architecture. Il a encore été choisi pour mesurer les chemins de la dépendance, allignements et nivellements de la ditte Ville, au lieu et place de son Père, commis par le Bureau de la Voyerie pour ces

Notes to pages 134–8

104

105

106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113

114 115 116 117 118 119

120

sortes d’opérations que sa vieillesse l’a empêché de continuer.” anom col e 108, no. 13, letter of 1 February 1783, f. 3a. “Comme père de famille malheureux je reclame à bras ouvert votre Justice” (anom col e 108, letter of 26 May 1781). The notice from the lawyer for the Conseil du Roy in the name of the maréchal de Castries, the minister of the marine, is dated 9 September 1786 (anom col e 108, letter of 9 September 1786). adgi 2 e 785, Titre de famille Dardan, 1 August 1793, 2a, 3b, 4b. It notes “la portion e Joseph Dardan rester dans les mains de l’acquéreur pour y produire l’intérêt si mieux il n’aime la déposer dans les mains du Receveur des consignations ou dans celle de tout autre officier public solvable” [5b]. Concerning his parents’ letters: “1e. Avoir parfaitement connu le dit Joseph Dardan ainé architecte frère des susnommés, et savoir qu’il partit de ce lieu au mois de Septembre mil sept cent soixante-onze, pour les colonies, que depuis il n’a plus reparu en cette ville; qu’ils savent de plus que ses parents lui ont écrit plusieurs lettres et qu’ils n’ont jamais oui dire qu’ils eussent reçu de réponse.” adg i 2 e 785, letter from Bordeaux, 29 July 1793. Gazette Officielle de Saint-Domingue, 4 July 1803, 216; 6 July 1803, 220. Bailey, “Palace of Sans-Souci in Milot,” 107–11. Noppen and Grignon, L’art de l’architecture, 29; Grignon, Loing du soleil, 139; Chénier, Québec 152–3. anom col f5a 4/1, “Autorisation de construire une chapelle au Cap-Saint-Ignace,” signed Laval, 2 March 1683, 2a. Chénier, Québec, 151. Noppen and Grignon, L’art de l’architecture, 32. Ibid., 120–1. Only a handful of Baillif’s drawings survive, even though he appears to have generally worked with them: two sketches for mantelpieces in the house of Charles Aubert de la Chenaye (1679); the Quebec City Cathedral project (1683); and two basic schemes for the house of the sacristan of Notre Dame des Victoires (1696). Noppen and Grignon, L’art de l’architecture, 37, 114–19; Grignon, Loing du soleil, 5–8. Lauzon and Forget, L’histoire du Vieux-Montréal, 85. Edwards and Kariouk, A Creole Lexicon, 135; Moogk, Building a House in New France, 56. Grignon, Loing du soleil, 137–9. Moogk, Building a House in New France, 27–8. Ibid., 17. Noppen and Grignon, L’art de l’architecture, 114–15. On contracts in Nouvelle-France see also Villeneuve, Baroque to Neoclassical, 37. Grignon, Loing du soleil, 20–3.

121 Ibid., 11. 122 Ibid., 24–5. 123 Moogk, Building a House in New France; Grignon, Loing du soleil; Chénier, Québec, 141–61. 124 “Par devant le Notaire Royale et Greffier de cette ville de Cayenne soussigné furent presents en personnes Le Sieur Charles Petit Ecrivain du Roy faisant les fonctions de commission de cette Isle de Cayenne, Gerard Leyalden Laforesst et Antoine Macaye dit la Montagne, habitant demeurant en cette Isle … se sont scavoir le s[ieu]rs Macaye et Le Gallez obligé de fester deux des Casernes du Roy et une pour les ouvriers, et une a bas vent aussy pour le Roy, scavoir logis des dites deux cases de six vingt pieds de long et l’autre de soixante, et celle des dites ouvriers de quarante cinq, et la dite a bas vent de dix-huit … et ce moyennant le prix et somme de soixante et quinze louis qui les sieurs Petit cy present et Monseigneur Le Gouverneur a promis et promet de payer.” adg c 351, “Construction de deux cases. Cayenne, acte notarié: engagement entre Antoine Macaye et le Marquis de Férolle, Gouverneur” (1691), 1a. 125 “le dit Le Clout promet et s’oblige de batir et construire en charpente une maison destinée pour servir désormais de R[esidence] de Messieurs les Gouverneurs, a la reserve touttes f[ois] des quatre gros Murs allants en pierre depuis les fondements jusqu’au premier etage dont n’entend le dit Le Cloud se charger, Premierement, que ladite maison aura de longueur soixante quinze pieds sur trente sept de largeur, compris celle des deux galleries extérieures lesquelles sero[it] au devant et au derriere d’icelle, construits de bois du charpente … Que le second etage de ladite Maison sera a la hauteur de onze pieds totallement construit en bois & charpente conformant au devis et plan proposé et g[renier] de comble portant sur les deux sablières les galleries qui formera un pavillon composé de cinq fermes complettes, deux demi fermes de crouppe, et quatre a[r]estiers, le tout garni de chevrons … et touttes pieces quelconques necessaires assemblés.” adg c 776, “Contrat pour la construction de la maison du gouverneur passé avec Le Clou, charpentier,” 17 June 1718, 1a. This document is heavily worm-eaten and difficult to read. 126 “travailler et placer toutte la menuiserie qui consistera en deux planchers, scavoir celui du premier etage et celui d’un grenier, l’un et l’autre de planches blanchis ci jointes en bouffetages plus et pareillement les cloisons des cabinets d’en haut, plus touttes les portes et contrevents des fenestres en planches assemblées et a barres exceptés les deux portes pour chambres d’en haut qui seront de menuiserie et panneaux.” adg c 776, 1a–2a. 127 “tous les bois equarris et planches brutes nécessaires audit bâtisse et les clous lattes, et les bardeaux percez et chenillez

prest a mettre en place … plus de fournir au dit Le [Clout] autant de monde qu’il en aura besoin pour remuer, monter et placer la charpente du dit batiment.” adg c 776, 2a. 128 “faire en cedres les madriers en mortoises sçavoir une porte de quatre pieds de large sur huit de hauteur dix fenêtres de trois pieds de large sur cinq de hauteur sur la face de derrière qui regarde le jardin une porte de trois pieds de large sur sept de haut, deux fenetres de trois pieds sur cinq de hauteur, plus dans le mur de refend une porte de trois pieds de large sur sept pieds de hauteur, que le second etage sera construit entierement en charpente et qu’il sera fait sur chacune des deux faces trois portes dont deux de trois pieds et une de quatre sur huit de hauteur, plus un mur de refend en charpente avec une porte de quatre pieds de large et huit de hauteur, plus sera fait par le d[it] Le Clou dans le bout de la galerie de derriere un escalier de deux quartiers tournant, montant a deux etages, plus s’oblige de faire le comble a fermes retroussées en lierne avec leur assemblage complet, plus deux grandes lucarnes sur le devant qui regarde la d[ite] place d’armes, et attendu qu’il est jugé a propos de joindre les deux maisons au même egalité s’oblige le d[it] entrepreneur de lever la croupe de la Maison du gouvernement pour la transporter au bout du nouveau batiment.” adg c 376, “Construction d’une maison joignant celle du gouvernement sur la place d’armes: convention entre le gouverneur et Le Clou (Pierre), maître charpentier,” 6 September 1723, 1a–2a. This contract is also badly worm-eaten and difficult to read. 129 “le dit Sieur Charriere promet et s’oblige … de faire les planchers en planches seulement, de la maison appartenant au dit Sieur Granon sittuée en cette Ville, Rue Espagnole consistante en deux chambres basses et deux cambres hautes, galléries haute et basse et un cabinet haut et bas et de divers autres cabinets et cuisine dont n’est fait description … le premier, en planches telles que le dit Sieur Granon les fournira et qui ne pourront être plus fortes que d’un pouce et demi, lesquelles seront blanchis autrement dit, rifflées d’un côté et embouvetées les uns dans les autres par ledit Sieur Charriere, et le dernier plancher qui formera le galetas, en planches de Pispin d’un pouce d’épaisseur pareillement blanchis d’un côté et embouvetées, lesquelles planches, pour le dit dernier Plancher, ainsi que tous les clous pour attacher tant le dit dernier plancher, que le premiers seront fournis par le dit Sieur Charriere lequel s’oblige de faire remise des dites planchers faits et parfaits dans cinq semaines, à compter de lundi prochain … a peine de tous dépens dommages et intérêts. Et de sa part le dit Sieur Granon promet et s’oblige fournir toutes les plans qui seront nécessaires pour le Notes to pages 138–40

533

130

131

132

133

534

premier plancher ou autrement dit le premier étage des dites deux chambres, galléries et cabinets … Le présent marché … est ainsi fait pour … le prix et somme de Deux Mille livres, que le dit Sieur Granon promet et s’oblige payer au dit Sr. Charriere … sçavoir cent Pistoles, dès que le plancher du premier étage des dits lieux sera fait et parfait, et cent Pistoles lors de la fin et remise de la totalité des dits planchers faits et parfaits.” anom dppc not sdom//184 (Cap-François, Notary Bordier, 1783), “Marché le Sr. Granon et le S. Charriere,” 9 July 1783. “une maison de quarante pieds de long sur quinze de large avec deux Galeries de chaque coté de la ditte maison, de huit de large dans toute la longueur divisée en trois chambres et quatre cabinets, au chaque bout de Galerie avec les ouvertures convenables aux dits appartements de la manière que les juger a le dit Sieur François Augustin Ricard et sur l’indication qu’il en donnera, La ditte maison batie sur seuillage de maçonnerie en bon bois equarris ou de sciage ayant les poteaux de six (quatre à cinq) pouces quarrés et pour hauteur neuf pieds en y comprenant l’epaisseur du seuillage qui aura de même six (quatre à cinq) pouces décarissage et la sabliere on seront posés les travers, de palissades la ditte maison en son entier et les divisions des appartements en planches et faire un plancher sur les traverses d’icelle susceptibles de pouvoir être chargé, de même de faire le comble à croupe en bonne charpente d’assemblage sur la totalité du corps du batiment et des Galeries le tout sous le même comble et a l’Angloise c’est-à-dire que les poteaux des Galeries auront la même elevation que ceux du corps du batiment, de la latter, chevronner et couvrit en essentes, de faire tous les bois, planches et essentes et fournir à cet égard tout ce qui sera necessaire pour la ditte ediffication en ce qui concerner le bois, de se nourrir à ses frais et dépens et enfin de livrer la ditte maison dans trois ans à compte de ce jour faitte et parfaite clause & couverte.” anom dppc not sdom// 1544, “Marché du Charpentier le Sr. Laurent Maistre et François Augustin Ricard,” 19 May 1788. I know of only one other such reference, a project by engineer architect Jacques Teissier for a barracks modelled on English architecture in Barbados from 1826. anom 14 dfc 708b. On the “piazza” form, see Nelson, Architecture and Empire, 80–8. See Bailey, “Fantastical Rococo,” 769–75; Bailey, “Classicism in a Rococo World,” 99–111; Bailey, “French Rococo Prints,” 780–5; Bailey, “‘Just Like the Gesù,’” 233–64. There is an extensive literature on copying prints in colonial Latin America, although it has focused more on imagery than architecture. A selective bibliography of recent

Notes to pages 141–5

134

135

136 137 138

139

140 141 142 143 144 145

146 147 148 149 150 151 152

publications follows: Fajardo de Rueda: “Del grabado europeo,” 191–214; Bargellini, “Difusión de modelos,” 964–1007; Vives Mejía: “El arte colonial,” 58–60; García Sáiz, “La interpretación,” 293–303; Castelli, “La importancia,” 313–22; Gutiérrez, “Los circuitos.” On the circulation of the prints of Sebastiano Serlio in South America see Bailey “Classicism in a Rococo World,” 99–111. Royal engineer architects such as Lieutenant-Colonel Doumet (1769) incorporated cartouches by Jacques Lajoüe, Jean-Charles Delafosse, and Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier into maps drawn on-site at Île-Gorée. anom 17 dfc 76c (1769, after Delafosse); 17 dfc 82c (1769, after Lajoüe); and 17 dfc 108c (1779, after Meissonnier). The first two are by Doumet and the third is anonymous. Grignon, “La pratique architecturale,” 7–9; Richardson et al., Quebec City, 90; Moogk, Building a House in New France, 88. Moogk, Building a House in New France, 88. Gerbino, François Blondel, 206–36. On the Blondel treatise, see Gerbino, François Blondel, 119–20. On architectural treatises in Saint-Domingue see Charlery, “Maisons de maître,” 8. Supplément aux Affiches Américaines, Avis Divers, week 14, 4 April 1772, 2; Supplément aux Affiches Américaines, 30 January 1773, 48, and 9 December 1775, 588. Supplément aux Affiches Américaines, 30 August 1777, 420. Ibid., 5 April 1777, 168. Hinchman, Portrait of an Island, 345–6. Moogk, Building a House, 120. Liger, La nouvelle maison rustique, 3. Ennals and Holdsworth, Homeplace, 27; Grignon and Maxim, “Convenance,” 30; Pérouse de Montclos, Histoire, 151–3, 216; Moogk, Building a House, 12–13. Quoted in Thomson, Renaissance Paris, 181. Gerbino, François Blondel, 45. Savot, Architecture françoise, 42–4. For his recommendation for gardens, see 29. On dignity and majesty, see 49. Ibid., 51, 53. Ibid., 56. Ibid., 61. Savot lays his cards on the table in his introduction: “This Philosopher, and great master of Architects, Vitruvius, wrote that the symmetries [and] proportions of a building have been and must be based on those of the human body: because as I see it, since art depends on the imitation of nature, [and] since the building is the most perfect way to see the greatest achievements of most artists of mankind, it must be built in keeping with the most accomplished of nature, and a summary of her marvels.” After a discourse

153 154

155 156 157 158 159 160 161

on the symmetry of the human body he continues, “by the same token it is necessary that all parts & members (appartenances) of a building, and the division of the same, adhere to a similar proportion, & correspondence, principally to the members & parts which are outside, and in open air, in cases in which they can be seen from a single glance, and place … There is nothing easier than to obtain the commodities of a building: but to dispose them commodiously with this symmetry, that is where you discover the industry, spirit & honour of the Master who designs the building … the more symmetries there are in a building the more agreeable it is to the man.” Ibid., 203–7. See also Gerbino, François Blondel, 2. Regourd, “Kourou 1763,” 241; d’Orgeix and Frémaux, “La petite maison,” 3. “Il y a un article Monsieur sur lequel j’aurois desiré une reponse de vous, c’est au sujet de l’impression du Livre de Mr. de Préfontaine. Vous n’en avez point probablement a me donner: l’argent est rare, il y a des choses plus pressées; Il faut vous aider. J’avancerai les frais de l’impression et des Gravures qui seront necessaires. J’ai eu le Privilege au nom de Mr. de Prefontaine, Il sera chargé de l’edition, et il suffira que le Ministre en achete 5 a 600 exemplaires suivant que les chefs de la Colonie en auront besoin pour instruire et eclairer leurs nouveaux Colons. Mandez moi simplement ce que vous en penser, et ecrivez en consequence a M. de Chanvallon, sur ce qu’il peut faire à cet egard qu’il retienne 500 exemplaires, il n’y aura point d’embarras, et tout ira. Il est meme question de presser, car le temps du depart arrivera [bientôt]. Je suis Monsieur avec tous les sentimens.” anom col e 341, “Bruletout de Préfontaine,” letter from Bombarde, March 1763, 16a; “Mr. Bombarde s’étant chargé de l’impression du livre de M. de Préfontaine demande que, Monseigneur veuille bien en faire prendre 500 exemplaires par le Roy pour les faire distribuer aux nouveaux colons de Cayenne, auxquels il sera tres utile,” anom col e 341, letter from Bombarde [?], 19 March 1763, 17a. Préfontaine, Maison rustique, 7–8. D’Orgeix and Frémaux, “La petite maison dans les abbatis,” 3. Ibid., 3–4. See Nelson, Architecture and Empire, 136–42. Préfontaine, Maison rustique, 8–9. D’Orgeix and Frémaux, “La petite maison dans les abbatis,” 7–8. Surprisingly little has been written about this remarkable book. See: Nelson, Architecture and Empire, 147–51;

162

163 164 165

D’Orgeix and Frémaux, “La petite maison,” 1; Charlery, “Maisons de maître,” 8 (who mistakenly calls him “Daviler”); Tzonis, Tropical Architecture, 146n3; Segre, Arquitectura antillana, 57n36. On D’Albaret, see Gallet, Les architectes parisiens, 23; Gallet, Paris Domestic Architecture, 139. McCrea, “The Fluid Nature,” 172. For the most extensive discussion of D’Albaret’s book in its Jamaican context see Nelson, Architecture and Empire, 90–1, 147–9. Bowron, Pompeo Batoni, 476, cat. 381; McCrea, “The Fluid Nature,” 182. Gallet, Les architectes parisiens, 23. D’Albaret, Différents projets, 5. c h a pte r se ve n

1 Blanchard, Les ingénieurs, 215–25. 2 Ibid.; Langins, Conserving the Enlightenment. 3 To give just five examples in English, the two surveys of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French art and architecture by Anthony Blunt and Wend von Kalnein (the latter just on architecture), Robert Berger’s survey of the architecture of Louis XIV, and Chandra Mukerji and Ian Thompson’s work on the gardens of André Le Nôtre. See Blunt, Art and Architecture; Kalnein, Architecture in France; Berger, A Royal Passion; Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions; Thompson, The Sun King’s Garden. The same goes for many French surveys – to give just one recent example, Pérouse de Montclos’s L’art de France. On the other hand Louis Hautecoeur’s classic but underappreciated Histoire de l’architecture classique (vol. 2) provides an entire chapter on Colbert and the administration of the Bâtiments (pp. 413–25). 4 The literature on Vauban is massive, as he has enjoyed cult status to the present day. For some recent studies see Barros, Vauban; Langins, Conserving the Enlightenment, 47–76; Association Vauban, Vauban. 5 See Bittering, L’invention du pré carré, 15–16. 6 Langins, Conserving the Enlightenment, 49; Bittering, L’invention du pré carré, 140. 7 Berger, A Royal Passion, 164–8. 8 To return to the two principal English-language surveys, Anthony Blunt mentions him only in an aside because Hyacinthe Rigaud painted a portrait of him and he barely merits a sentence in Kalnein’s book. Pérouse de Montclos does not even have an index reference to Vauban. Only Berger gives him a whole chapter and in Hautecoeur he merits two subsections, including one just on his gates.

Notes to pages 145–50

535

9 10

11

12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19

20 21

22

23 24 25 26

27

536

See Blunt, Art and Architecture, 270; Kalnein, Architecture in France, 85; Berger, A Royal Passion, 163–78; Hautecoeur, Histoire de l’architecture classique, 2:497–510. Barros et al., Vauban, 88–95; Sanger, “La ville ex nihilo,” 37–41; Berger, A Royal Passion, 169. Buisseret, “French Cartography,” 1504; Buisseret, Ingénieurs et fortifications, 12–15; Blanchard, Les ingénieurs, 35–51; Hautecoeur, Histoire de l’architecture classique, 2:491–6. Buisseret, “French Cartography,” 1505–6; Buisseret, Ingénieurs, 48–9; Langins, Conserving the Enlightenment, 3–33; Blanchard, Les ingénieurs, 51–7. Buisseret, Ingénieurs, 87–8. Ibid., 83–4; Blunt, Art and Architecture, 111–15, 230–1; Buisseret, “French Cartography,” 1514. d’Orgeix, “De l’éducation,” 49; Langins, Conserving the Enlightenment, 80–1; Blanchard, Les ingénieurs, 60–8; Hautecoeur, Histoire de l’architecture classique, 2:497–505. Langins, Conserving the Enlightenment, 86–7. Blanchard, Les ingénieurs, 72. Ibid., 80. Ibid., 159. More nobles worked for the branch under the auspices of the secretary of war (at a ratio of about two-thirds to one-third) and more commoners worked for the secretary of the marine (at roughly the reverse ratio). In 1691, sixty-seven of those working for the secretary of war were of aristocratic background while only thirty-eight were commoners. The numbers for the secretary of the marine for 1691 were the opposite, with two-thirds commoners and only one-third nobles. Blanchard, Les ingénieurs, 84, 95; for statistics for the years 1692–1715, see 122–5, 173, 206, 209. Ibid., 95. Langins, Conserving the Enlightenment, 87–93. Blanchard, Les ingénieurs, writes of a “veritable esprit de famille in the corps” (229). anom dppc not mar//602, “Vente d’une maison … fondé du procuration de Srs et Dme Girardin au S. Grandmaison et a la Dme par au son épouse,” 14 April 1786. The third heir was a nephew, Jean-Francois de Girardin, a military officer in Evreux. Blanchard, Les ingénieurs, 108. Ibid., 109. Ibid., 112. Orgeix, “De l’éducation,” 50–1; Vauban, Le DirecteurGénéral, 73–4; Langins, Conserving the Enlightenment, 81; Blanchard, Les ingénieurs, 117–20. Blanchard, Les ingénieurs, 118.

Notes to pages 150–4

28 Ibid., 127. 29 Orgeix, “De l’éducation,” 50. 30 Except for Fontainebleau, which had its own superintendent until 1661. See Sarmant, Les demeures du soleil, 90; Fossier, Les dessins du fonds Robert de Cotte, 37; Hautecoeur, Histoire de l’architecture classique, 2:413–25. 31 Confusingly, he was styled superintendent again from 1715 to 1726. See Mignot, “Mansart,” 49; Ringot and Sarmant, “La Surintendance,” 59–61; Fossier, Les dessins du fonds Robert de Cotte, 37–41; Neuman, Robert de Cotte, 102. 32 Wittman, Architecture, 66–7. 33 Mignot, “Mansart,” 48; Ringot and Sarmant, “La surintendance,” 65; Fossier, Les dessins, 40; Neuman, Robert de Cotte, 16. On the Hôtel de la Surintendance des Bâtiments du roi (1688–92) see Gady, Hardouin-Mansart, 258–9. 34 Sarmant, Les demeures du soleil, 93–5, 102; Neuman, Robert de Cotte, 18–19. 35 Sarmant, Les demeures du soleil, 112, 129; Mignot, “Mansart,” 48. 36 Sarmant, Les demeures du soleil, 132. 37 Neuman, Robert de Cotte, 19. 38 Sarmant, Les demeures du soleil, 89–90. 39 De Cotte supervised the office that produced all the plans for the king’s service, many of them schemes by Hardouin-Mansart; he was to maintain an archive of the complete drawings of the Bâtiments past and present; he supervised the transformation of presentation drawings into engravings; he kept an inventory of marble, glass, iron, lead, copper, and fine woodwork; he monitored materials used in the manufactories of the Gobelins and Savonnerie; he disbursed funds for the academies of painting and sculpture; and he drew up detailed estimates for Hardouin-Mansart’s commissions. See Sarmant, Les demeures du soleil, 67–8, 116, 119; Mignot, “Mansart,” 49; Fossier, Les dessins, 41; Neuman, Robert de Cotte, 12–13. 40 Mignot, “Mansart,” 53; see also page 56. See also Fossier, Les dessins, 38. 41 Mignot, “Mansart,” 48. Sarmant, Les demeures du soleil, 136–8. 42 Mignot, “Mansart,” 54; Gerbino, François Blondel, 47; Sarmant, Les demeures du soleil, 129, 138–9; Berger, A Royal Passion, 177–8. 43 Berger, A Royal Passion, 165–8. 44 Vauban, Le Directeur-Général, 71–2. 45 Manesson-Mallet, Les travaux de Mars (Amsterdam, 1696), 1:168–71: “Methode de donner le jour & les ombres.” On Chastillon, see Langins, Conserving the Enlightenment, 239–46, especially fig. 9.2, the training sheet on how to

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69 70 71

72 73

depict shadows cast by the sun according to his procedures. Blanchard, Les ingénieurs, 181–213. See Von Kalnein, Architecture in France, 208–9. Blanchard, Les ingénieurs, 181–213. Ibid., 188. Langins, Conserving the Enlightenment, 95–8. Blanchard, Les ingénieurs, 202. Ibid., 195. Ibid., 290–1. Ibid., 298. Ibid., 312–14. Ibid., 316. anom fm f 6 3, letter from M. De La Lande from Léogâne to M. Souffle fils, 23 October 1729, 21–2. Scott, The Rococo Interior, 242–6; Gallet, Les architects parisiens, 65–7. Mallet, Les travaux de Mars, 1:10–46, 200–23; Villeneuve, Traité, plate 27. Blanchard, Les ingénieurs, 321–3. Ibid., 322. The voluminous devis estimatif for the Guadeloupe hospital and chapel, by Emmanuel Philibert, are typical of such budget reports. anom 08 dfc 571 (1818); 08 dfc 591 (1820). Ibid., 421–32; Sanger, “Vauban,” 259–65. Parent and Verroust, Vauban, 232–6. Vauban, “Oisivetés,” 4:9–10. Ibid., 4:19. Charbonneau et al., Quebec, the Fortified City, 237–9. Foremen were responsible for materials, the attendance of workers, and the acceleration of work if required. Charbonneau et al., Quebec, the Fortified City, 239. Moogk, Building a House, xviii. Charbonneau et al., Quebec, the Fortified City, 238. Ibid., 155–262. For a survey of the main French treatises on fortification see Charbonneau, Quebec, the Fortified City, 101–10. See also Vidal and’Orgeix, Les villes françaises, 52–3. On Bélidor, see Langins, Conserving the Enlightenment, 224–34. Gerbino, François Blondel, 118–24; Langins, Conserving the Enlightenment, 225. Langins, Conserving the Enlightenment, 51–9. Other important followers of Vauban were engineer architect François Ferry (1649–1701), who made ink and watercolour drawings of Vauban’s major projects, and Joseph Saveur (1653– 1716), author of a treatise on fortifications and Vauban’s successor as examiner of engineer candidates. A veritable deluge of printed treatises claiming to teach Vauban’s “method” appeared in the seventeenth century, including

74 75

76

77

78

79 80 81 82

83 84 85 86

87 88 89 90 91

92 93

such works as the chevalier de Cambray’s Manière de fortifier de Mr. de Vauban (Paris, 1689). Barros et al., Vauban, 92. See also Mignot, “Vauban,” 254–8. Quoted in Gady, Jules Hardouin-Mansart, 546; and Mignot, “Vauban,” 257. For illustrations of the portals see Berger, A Royal Passion, 170–3; Hautecoeur, Histoire de l’architecture classique, 2:505–10. The quotation is from the building regulations for civilian houses at Neuf-Brisach. Langins, Conserving the Enlightenment, 65. On de Cotte see Fossier, Les dessins du fonds Robert de Cotte, 47–53; Neuman, Robert de Cotte, 3–5; Kalnein, Architecture in France, 8–23; Gallet, Les architects parisiens, 146–58; Neuman, “French Domestic Architecture,” 128–44. On the Grande and Petite Écuries, designed by Hardouin-Mansart and de Cotte respectively, see Gady, Jules Hardouin-Mansart, 246–53. On the episcopal palace at Verdun see Fossier, Les dessins, 565–70. Pillement, Les hôtels, 64–6, pl. 58. See Kimball, The Creation of the Rococo, figs. 14–15; Blunt, Art and Architecture, 228–31. Barros, Vauban, 89. On the Rochefort Corderie, see Gerbino, François Blondel, 31. Gerbino comments about the Corderie that “it is, in fact, hardly classical at all.” On Hardouin-Mansart’s project, see Gady, Hardouin-Mansart, 298–301. Bélidor, La science des ingénieurs, 4:96, plate 36. Brosse, Dictionnaire des églises, ii -d -46; Fouilloy-Jullien, “Mont-Dauphin,” 145. See Wittman, Architecture, 24–6, 153. Belidor, La science des ingénieurs, 5:1. Langins notes that this book is “what today would belong to the domain of the architect.” See Langins, Conserving the Enlightenment, 227. Belidor, La science des ingénieurs, 5:2 Ibid., 4:37. Langins, Conserving the Enlightenment, 100–1; Blanchard, Les ingénieurs, 319. Langins, Conserving the Enlightenment, 149. lac mg18-k 2, “Traité de fortification divisé en huit livres” (1714–27). On this document see Richardson et al., Quebec City, 176; Thorpe, “Gaspard Chaussegros,” 126; Charbonneau et al., Quebec, the Fortified City, 142; Grignon, “Chaussegros de Léry,” 63. The elevation of Quebec City Cathedral is in anom 03 dfc 424a . Kalman, History of Canadian Architecture, 32; Richardson et al., Quebec City, 175–8; Charbonneau, Quebec, the Fortified City, 131–4; Thorpe, “Gaspard Chaussegros de Léry,”

Notes to pages 155–63

537

94 95

96 97 98 99 100 101 102

103

104 105 106 107

108 109

538

124–8; Charbonneau, “Gaspard-Joseph Chaussegros de Léry,” 142–6; Grignon, “Gaspard-Joseph Chaussegros de Léry,” 61–73; Charrois, “Gaspard Chaussegros de Léry.” Grignon, “Gaspard-Joseph Chaussegros de Léry,” 62; Charbonneau, Quebec, the Fortified City, 143. Lacroix, Les arts en Nouvelle-France, 165. Joseph-François Chaussegros de Lery, “Ecuyer officier au Corps Royal du genie,” was a resident of Basseterre. anom dppc not gua//335, “Enlargement donné par la demoiselle Suzanne Bernard a M. Duquesnel,” 2 November 1784. Charbonneau, Quebec, the Fortified City, 143. Richardson, Quebec City, 176. Charbonneau, Quebec, the Fortified City, 243. Grignon, “Chaussegros de Léry,” 61; Lacroix, Les arts en Nouvelle-France, 167, fig. 124. Noppen and Grignon, L’art de l’architecte, 49; Grignon, “Chaussegros de Léry,” 63. Thorpe, “Gaspard Chaussegros,” 128; see also D’Orgeix, “De l’éducation des ingénieurs militaires,” 52–3. “Plusieurs Ingenieurs ont ecrit de la fortification mais ils n’ont pas montré, comme il faut la disposer par raport aux environs d’une place, la plupart n’ont donné que des regles de fortifier, qui ne peuvent servir que pour des places reguliers scituées dans un plat pays, mais il arrive rarement qu’on fortifie dans de semblables lieux, ou il seroit bon que la fortification fut reguliere, s’il etoit possible mais par rapport aux environs qui souvent commandent une partie de la fortification, pour lors, il faut lui donner, une forme differente de la reguliere, en la disposant de manière qu’elle ne soit uniquement que commandée sans être enfilée c’est dans ses sortes de scituations que l’experiance d’un Ingenieur se connoitra.” lac mg 18-k 2, i. On De Ville, see Langins, Conserving the Enlightenment, 45–7. On Blondel, see Gerbino, François Blondel, 65–70; Blunt, Art and Architecture in France, 231; on his Antilles trip see Le Blanc, “François Blondel,” 156–61. Blondel, Cours d’architecture, 379, 451; anom dfc 404a . lac mg18-k 2, 302. Manesson-Mallet, Les travaux de Mars (Paris, 1684), 2:75– 115, 235–94. For example, in addition to similarities with treatises listed in the previous paragraph, the subjects and maxims of the first chapters are very close to those of Jean Du Breuil, Art universel des fortifications (Paris, 1665) or the chevalier de Cambray, Manière de fortifier de Mr. de Vauban (1689). See Langins, Conserving the Enlightenment, 40–42; 58–60. lac mg18-k 2, 315. “L’elevation du devant de la porte est d’un ordre Toscan le plus simple de tous les ordres, il convient parfaitement

Notes to pages 163–9

110 111 112

113 114 115 116 117 118 119

120

121 122 123 124

125 126 127

dans cet endroit, la figure que je donne fait voir la manière comme on pourra faire une pareille porte y ayant observé toutes les regles de l’art, qui m’ont été aprises par d’habiles architectes d’Italie.” lac mg 18-k 2, 301–2. Lauson and Forget, Vieux Montréal, 75. Beauharnois moved in on 1 October 1727. anf mar/c/7/340 (dossier Vaudreuil), 26a. “La maison est Gracieuse, et tres bien distribuée, a quelque chose prez. Batie avec convenance pour sa destination en belle veûe.” anf mar/c/ 7/ 340 (dossier Vaudreuil), “Sur la Maison de M. de Vaudreuil” (20 October, 1727), 34b. See also anf mar/c/ 7/ 340 (dossier Vaudreuil), “Sur la Maison de Madame la Marquise de Vaudreuil a Montréal” (1737), 43a. lac mg18-k 2, 332. Ibid., 324. Ibid., 323. anom 03 dfc 511b; 03 dfc 512a ; 03 dfc 519c. This was first noted in Charbonneau, Quebec, the Fortified City, 379. anom col e 115, “Delalance, ingénieur du Roi à SaintDomingue” (1726/1730), 1a. anom col e 344, “Rabié, René Gabriel, ingénieur en chef de la partie du Nord, de l’île de Saint-Domingue (1742/1785),” letter of 1753, 1a–2a; letter of 8 May 1770, 1a–5b; letter of 22 July 1780, 1a–4a; letter of 4 April 1783, 5b. anom col e 344, letter of 24 September 1783; letter of 3 September 1783. The salaries of the thirteen directors in 1777 are listed in Blanchard, Les ingénieurs, 338. The dates of Rabié’s promotions vary somewhat in the sources and I have gone with those listed in a letter of 22 April 1785 from the Ministry of the Marine. anom col e 344, letter of 22 April 1785; letter of 11 August 1786. The quotation is from the second letter. anom col e 94, “Coudreau, ingénieur du Roi à SaintDomingue, mort en 1747 (1740/1763).” Langins, Conserving the Enlightenment, 76–7. anom col e 17, “Baron, Julien Marie, lieutenant-colonel d’infanterie, ingénieur en chef de Cayenne (1762/1790),” letter dated August 1762. An elevation of the barracks building, in brick, exists in the Aix archives. anom f 3 289 28. anom col e 17, letter of 4 February 1764. anom col e 17, letter of 27 November 1771. “J’ai employé dans ces différentes opérations quatre années d’un travail continu et pénible, exposé du Matin au Soir à l’ardeur du soleil. J’y ai sacrifié ma santé que 18 mois d’un séjour très couteux en France n’ont pu encore

128

129

130

131

132

133

rétablir.” anom col e 221, “Hesse, Charles François, ingénieur-géographe, chef du dépôt des cartes et plans des Colonies (1748/1801)” (letter from Paris, dated 6 September 1783), 1a–b. anom dppc not sdom//1309, “Bail a loyer d’une Maison près le Gouvernement par M. Hesse a M. Alexandre Jacques de Bongars mont. 5000 ll par an,” 21 April 1786. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 2:365; Wimpffen, A Voyage to Saint Domingo, 171; McClellan, Colonialism and Science, 152. “Copie d’un Certificat du Secretaire de L’Academie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture donné au Sr. Desmon, par ordre de Mrs. Les Proffesseurs et academiciens, pour son agregation a l’Academie. Nous secretaire perpetuel de l’academie Royale de peinture et Sculpture, certifions que le nommé Louis Pierre Desmons [sic], est élève de Monsieur Pierre, Peintre et Professeur en la ditte academie et qu’en cette qualité il doit jouir partout où il se trouvera de tous les privileges et de l’exemption de la milice accordées par le Roy a la ditte Academie, en foi de quoi nous avons expedié le present Certificat pour servir et valoir ce que de Raison, et auquel nous avons apposé le sçeau de la Compagnie a Paris au Louvre ce vint six septembre mil sept cent cinquante-huit. Signé Cochin avec paraphe.” anom col e 126, “Desmon, Louis Pierre, peintre d’histoire naturelle, employé à Cayenne (1765/1787),” document 5 (26 September 1758). anom col e 126, “Desmon, Louis Pierre, peintre d’histoire naturelle, employé à Cayenne (1765/1787),” document 2 (5 March 1765); document 3 (17 September 1765, signed Macaye); document 4 (16 September 1765, signed Béhague). The quotation is Macaye’s; Béhague’s wording is slightly different: “Sr. Louis Pierre Desmons [sic] … a exercé son talent et rempli tous les devoirs de son etat evec tout le zèle possible.” anom col e 126, document 1 (1787), 1a; document 7 (15 June 1787). The quotation is from an unsigned report addressed to the minister of the marine: “il a eû le malheur de périr et de perdre tout le fruit de ses travaux. Il a été transporté dans l’Isle d’Oleron avec sa femme, où ils ne subsistent l’un et l’autre que de la charité des habitans qui les ont accueilli après leur naufrage. Le Sr. Desmon reclame quelques secours de la bienfaisance de Monseigneur, pour se rendre à Paris, où il espère que son talent pourra lui procurer de quoi vivre.” Document 8 (14 June 1787). “Ayant terminé ses travaux dans cette colonie, et voulant repasser en France, il a ramassé et réalisé tout ce qu’il avoit gagné et s’est mis en mer avec son epouse, a peine avoient

134 135

136 137

138 139

ils fait 200 lieues qu’une affreuse tempête a brisé la vaisseau qui les portoit, et leur a ainsi enlevé en un instant leur fortune entiere. Ils auroient eux même péri sans le secours d’un autre vaisseau qui parmi 68 passagers en a sauvé 7 à 8 desquels du nombre dont ils se trouvent et les a jétés dans L’Isle d’Oléron province de Saintonge ou ils ne subsistent, depuis six semaines qu’ils sont débarqué que par les soins généreux des habitants.” anom col e 126, document 9 (6 June 1787). On Pauger see Langlois, “Les ‘mousquetaires’ du Mississippi,” 147–51; Wilson, Architecture, 4–8, 24, 50, 111–12. “J’ose assurer que l’Eglise et la Compagnie fait une perte tres considerable dans ce digne Religieux qui volontairement s’estoit engagé pour passer a la Louisianne dans la seule veue d’y cultiver le Salut des ames ; il en sera peut être de même des deux autres Religieux ; des officiers et de la plus grande partie des ouvriers que j’ay engagé. Si la Compagnie n’a la bonté de les faire traitter plus favorablement ne pouvant me dispenser d’avoir l’honneur de l’informer que quinze jours apres avoir esté embarquez ils ont souffert une soif si extrême que plusieurs ont bû de leur urine et ont esté traittez par les officiers du vaisseau comme si, ils avoient estez contamnez au suplice et qui au lieu de les encourager, leurs ont donné une si mauvaise idée de la Louisianne qu’ils croyent aller au galleres.” anom col e 331, “Pauger, Adrien de, ingénieur en chef à la Louisiane, 1720–26,” letter of 11 October 1720, 1a–2a. James, Black Jacobins, 71. “Le dit Sr. Représente que depuis qu’il est employé à St Domingue, il a rempli avec tout le zèle dont il est capable les devoirs de son état ; mais que les troubles continuels, qui ont commencé à agiter la Colonie presque dès l’époque où il y est arrivé, et les divers évènements désastreux, qui s’y sont succédés depuis, ayant rendu son service de plus en plus pénible et fatiguant, les trois années qu’il a passées dans ce pays, déjà destructeur par l’intempérie du climat, ont été plus pernicieuses à sa santé, qu’un séjour de six années dans des tems ordinaires, et le mettent dans la nécessité, vu l’état de langueur et de dépérissement qu’il éprouve, lequel ne lui permet plus de se rendre aussi utile à la Colonie qu’il le désireroit, d’aller respirer son air natal, afin de tâcher de se rétablir.” anom col e 194, “Frémond de La Merveillère, Pierre Antoine Jérôme, lieutenant-colonel au corps du Génie, employé à Saint-Domingue en qualité de directeur général des fortifications (1788/1792),” letter from Cap-François, 24 January 1792. anom col e 194, letter of 16 August 1792. adg 1j18, “Compte General de l’achapte, et depenses de l’habitation de Cormonbo, 1771–1774” (18 May 1772). For

Notes to pages 169–71

539

140

141 142

143

144

540

more on engineers working on private commissions for extra money, see G. Debien, “Les Grand’cases des plantations à Saint-Domingue aux Xvii e et Xviii e siècles,” Annales des Antilles 15 (1970): 16. adg 1j18, “Compte General” (1 July 1771–1 June 1774). La Borde was paid an additional 1,000 livres for materials and a “cadet mason” was paid 90 livres to build a stone terrace for the house. anom col e 309, “Mentelle, Simon, ingénieur-géographe à la Guyane (1767/1786),” letter of 19 August 1789. “Monsieur … permettez-moi, je vous prie, de vous faire l’historique de mon séjour dans cette Colonie … Je suis venu, ici, en 1763, en qualité d’Ingenieur géographe du Roi, l’Esprit tout plein des grands projets que la cour avoit sur ce pays; bien persuadé que j’éprouverois toutes les calamités, qui accompagnent les nouveaux établissements; et que j’y serois exposé aux fatigues, et aux dangers, inséparables des voyages, auxquels je me destinois. Mais le pays me paroissoit d’autant plus interessant, que deux savants y avoient déjà fait plusieurs observations; qu’il en restoit encore beaucoup à faire ; et qu’on n’avoit sur son intérieur que des notions fort imparfaites.” [Signé] Mentelle, anom col e 309, letter of 15 June 1780, 23a. Other biographical information can be found in a letter of July 1770 in the same dossier. “Cayenne le 15 mars 1792. C’est avec les sentiments de la plus vive reconnaissance que j’ai reçu votre lettre du 16 Octobre dernier, et la Décoration militaire y contenu dont le Roi a bien voulu m’honorer. Je proteste que dans toutes les occasions, je tâcherai de me montrer digne de cette Grace, par le zèle le plus dévote au Service de Sa Majesté, aux devoirs de ma place, et à ceux de tout bon François.” anom col e 309, Letter of 15 March 1792. “J’aurois fortement desiré aussi m’instruire sur la possibilité de la communication des deux mers, par l’isme de Panama j’aurois été trop flatte de remettre au ministere des details sur cet objet important, mais j’en fus empeché par une convalescence dangereuse a la suite d’une maladie cruelle qui ne me permit pas de suivre cette idée et d’en solliciter les moyens avant mon depart de St Domingue. Ce projet est fait pour honorer le Regne et le Ministere sous lequel il aura ete formé il interresse toutes les nations par la facilité qu’il procureroit a la navigation de la mer du sud, et nous touchons peut etre au moment favorable de le concerter avec la puissance qui doit en fournir l’emplacement.” anom col e 383, “Varaigne, Pierre Bernard, ingénieur des ponts et chaussées, capitaine ingénieur des colonies à Saint-Domingue et aux États-Unis, député à l’Assemblée

Notes to pages 171–8

nationale, et Dausse, inspecteur des Ponts et Chaussées à Saint-Domingue (1776/1792),” letter of 9 July 1782, signed by D’Ausse, 2a. c h a pte r e igh t 1 Stambaugh, The Ancient Roman City, 283; Lilley, City and Cosmos, 119–20; Rykwert, The Idea of a Town, 62–5. 2 Vitruvius, Ten Books, 73. See also McEwen, Vitruvius, 1–2; Evers, Architectural Theory, 6; Kruft, Architectural Theory, 31–5; Rykwert, “Introduction,” ix–xxi; Mallgrave, Architectural Theory, 4. 3 Coste and Roux, Bastides, 10–35; Stelter, “Military Considerations,” 211; Laurent, Bastides, 37–43; Lavedan, Les villes françaises, 71–88; Brinckmann, Spätmittelalterliche Stadtanlagen. 4 Coste and Roux, Bastides, 17. 5 Lauret, Bastides, 60–84. 6 Stelter, “Military Considerations,” 214; Lauret, Bastides, 13–17. 7 Alberti, De re aedificatoria, 95–7. See Morrison, Unbuilt Utopian Cities, 11; Loupiac, La ville, 27–8. 8 Alberti, De re aedificatoria, 106. 9 Lewis, City of Refuge, 34–5; Pepper, “Ville idéale,” 227–8; Morrison, Unbuilt Utopian Cities, 14; Loupiac, La ville, 28–31. 10 Morrison, Unbuilt Utopian Cities, 27. 11 Ibid., 28. 12 Pepper, “Ville idéale,” 226–7. 13 Kruft, Städte in Utopia, 70–1, plates 58–9. 14 Loupiac, La ville, 32–6; Kruft, Städte in Utopia, 68–70. 15 Morrison, Unbuilt Utopian Cities, 1–2. 16 Lewis, City of Refuge, 10–11 (fig. 1), 58–64; Kruft, Städte in Utopia, 68–81. 17 Montclos, L’art de France, 157. 18 Hautecoeur, Histoire de l’architecture classique, 1:572–5. 19 For an engaging discussion of these three building projects, enlivened with literary references, see DeJean, How Paris Became Paris, 21–76. See also Lavedan, Les villes françaises, 114–25. On the Place Royale, see Montclos, L’art de France, 165–6; Cleary, The Place Royale, 4–7; Norberg-Schulz, Baroque Architecture, 64–80; Hautecoeur, Histoire de l’architecture classique, 1:572–3. 20 See Cleary, The Place Royale, 157–63; Blunt, Art and Architecture in France, 104–6; Lavedan, Les villes françaises, 130. 21 DeJean, How Paris Became Paris, 46–8. 22 Cleary, The Place Royale, 5. 23 Montclos, L’art de France, 165.

24 Cleary, The Place Royale, 12. 25 Blunt, Art and Architecture of France, 106; Hautecoeur, Histoire de l’architecture classique, 1:576. 26 Cojannot, Louis Le Vau, 35–42; Montgolfier, Île Saint-Louis, 7–11; Lavedan, Les villes françaises, 120–3; Hautecoeur, Histoire de l’architecture classique, 1:581–3. 27 Blunt, Art and Architecture of France, 107; Dumoulin, Paris d’église en église, 77; Montgolfier, Île Saint-Louis. 28 Hautecoeur, Histoire de l’architecture classique, 1:94–6. 29 DeJean, How Paris Became Paris, 64. 30 Montgolfier, Île Saint-Louis, 10. 31 Dejean, How Paris Became Paris, 71–2; Courtin, Paris Grand Siècle, 72–3; Blunt, Art and Architecture in France, 144–5; Hautecoeur, Histoire de l’architecture classique, 1:738–9. 32 Quoted in Montgolfier, Île Saint-Louis, 8. The quotation is from act 2 of his play Le menteur (1644). 33 Castaldo, Le quartier Mazarin, 13–56. 34 Ibid., 63. 35 “les murailles faites a 3 cannes par-dessus le fondement d’une canne de profond de 7 pans espesseur.” bma , Ms 863 (R.A.11), “Registre de Jean Lombard, controleur pour le roi des bâtiments … en 1646,” “Cannage des murailles” (June 1647). 36 bma , Ms 863 (R.A.11), “Alignemant reforme au la grandissemant de la Ville” (28 August 1647). 37 On Sixtus V, see Varriano, Italian Baroque, 27–9; NorbergSchulz, Baroque Architecture, 12–16, 27–43. On Louis’s extensions and embellishments of Paris, see Hautecoeur, Histoire de l’architecture classique, 2:436–41. 38 Lavedan, Les villes françaises, 130–4. It was also known as Place de Nos Conquêtes (Square of Our Victories), but Gady prefers “Place des Conquêtes” because it was first styled as such in 1690. See Gady, Hardouin-Mansart, 495. 39 Montclos, L’art de France, 224–5; Cleary, The Place Royale, 14, 198–208; Berger, A Royal Passion, 74–83. 40 On the library see Gady, Hardouin-Mansart, 500–1. 41 Gady, Hardouin-Mansart, 489–501; Cleary, The Place Royale, 198–209; Ziskin, The Place Vendôme, 5–29. 42 Gady, Hardouin-Mansart, 88–9, 422–5 (on the influence of the Hôtel de Lully, see 491). 43 Cleary, The Place Royale, 86. 44 Gady, Hardouin-Mansart, 523–8; Berger, A Royal Passion, 159. 45 Cleary, The Place Royale, 207. 46 DeJean, How Paris Became Paris, 96–121; Sanger, “Vauban, urbaniste,” 216; Ziskin, The Place Vendôme, 5–33; Berger, A Royal Passion, 73–83, 154–62; Norberg-Schulz, Baroque Architecture, 75–80; Lavedan, Les villes françaises, 115–16.

47 Hautecoeur, Histoire de l’architecture classique, 2:511–18. 48 Quoted in Hautecoeur, Histoire de l’architecture classique, 1:579. 49 Bittering, L’invention du pré-carée, 110–11. 50 “Idee 1: Du Centre et de la Circonference de l’Empire françois. Nostre premiere Idée geometrique considere un point donné par la prudence politique (dite Reine des vertus et gouvernante des hommes) pour estre le centre de la circonference de l’empire françois, dit (Galliarum Imperium).” bnf , Français 5874, 1. 51 Kruft, Städte in Utopia, 82–98; Lavedan, Les villes françaises, 102–3; Hautecoeur, Histoire de l’architecture classique, 2:579–80. 52 The original French text is quoted in Kruft, Städte in Utopia, 164n41. 53 “De ce centre partent toutes lignes droites fort estendues, acquises et conservées par l’ordre, par les armes, et par les loix de son Eminence. De centre premier point d’estat et de l’empire est Paris.” bnf , Français 5874, 1. 54 “Le corps suit le cœur, quel sera le centre telle sera la circonference. Formons Paris, et donnons a son corps et plan, la plus noble, la plus ample et la plus parfaite de toutes les figures, scavoir, la figure ronde ou circulaire, et non ovale comme l’antique. Tirons ses deux lignes diametrales croisées; la premiere du Sud au Nord, dela de la fauxbourg St. Jacques au dela de la fauxbourg de St. Martin; la seconde de l’Est a l’ouest, depuis le dehors de St. Anthoine iusques au dehors de la porte de la conference. Supposons ces deux lignes diametrales estre chacune d’une longueur de quatre mille toises, et la circonference de douze mille; sa grandeur surpassera toutes celles des villes de l’Europe, et ne sera toutefois si grande que la trentiesme partie de la ville de Nanquin.” bnf , Français 5874, 2. 55 “Idée 3. De la Beauté, Symmetrie, et Clausture de Paris. Cherchons et batissons la ville Platonique Imperatrice des villes de l’Europe. Pulchritudo digna est Imperio. Aussi est elle nommé Calliste … Considerons le plan de Calliste qui doit avoir une muraille circulaire parfaitement ronde de douze mille toises, avec cinquante portes esgallement distantes l’une de l’autre de 240 toises … En vain est de parler icy de bastions, de Lunes, de demylunes, toutes lesquelles choses sont icy inutiles. Toutefois si les Architectes ingenieux les proposent et portent le conseil a leurs volontez vous aurez a bastir cent bastions reguliers royaux. En cent endroits du tour ou cordon des murailles que les noms et les armes de Sa Majesté et de son Eminence soient posez avec cette inscription ou autre plus signalée Imperante Ludovico Justo, et Duce Armando Eminentissimo.” bnf , Français 5874, 2–3.

Notes to pages 178–83

541

56 “Dedans la ville trente toises pres les portes voisines de la riviere, que lon bastisse deux ponts de pierre, larges, et que par ces deux ponts opposites passe une ligne circulaire esgalement distante de la circonference ou des murailles de la ville pour faire une belle et grande rue ronde qui sera nommée generalement la rue Imperiale, et divisée en cinquante parties esgalles a raison des cinquante portes desquelles elle sera esgalement distante; et les cinquante portes diviseront cette rue imperiale en cinquante sections de rues, chacune desquelles portera le nom de quelque estat reduit a l’Empire francois, et se nommera la rue de Lorreine, la rue de Castille, rue de Portugal, rue de Savoye ou autrement.” bnf , Français 5874, 3–4. 57 “Que tous les bords et rives de la riviere de Seine soient libres, et qu’aucun bastiment n’empesche la liberté des gens de pied, et de cheval, ni des carettes et batteaux, et que les rues bien pavées et nettes gardent leur symmetrie, sans souffrir aucun bastiment pour les offusquer.” bnf , Français 5874, 4. 58 “Idee 4. De l’ordre Ecclesiastique de Paris et de l’Empire. L’estat ecclesiastique doit estre le premier mis en son lustre et perfection. Pour ce faire divisons tout Paris du moins en cent parroisses esgales, et que chacune dicelles ait sa circonference bornée et limitée en telle sorte que les parroissiens soient facilement assistez et instruits … Que l’on ne bastisse plus tant de convents a Paris desquels se trouve le nombre excedant soixante ia bastis sans ceux qui sont commencez a bastir … Dans Calliste batissez un tres ample palais, composé d’un temple vaste et admirable excedant en beauté structure et symmetrie tous les autres du monde.” bnf , Français 5874, 4–5. 59 “Idée 5. De la Justice de Paris. Considerons Paris estre divisé par ses deux lignes diametrales croisées en quatre parties esgalles. En chacune dicelles (qui contient un quartier) scavoir au milieu ie pose une belle place entourée de belles maisons capables pour estre le lieu d’une Justice en forme de Presidial, et pour loger tous les officiers de Justice … Au milieu de ces quatre iustices ou presidiaux de l’orient, de l’occident, du midi, et du septentrion sera située la Cour de Parlement. De telle sorte que chacun presidial aura en sa iurisdiction du moins vingtcinq parroisses dedans le cercle de la ville.” bnf , Français 5874, 6. 60 Cordemoy, Divers traitez, 152. 61 Ibid., 152–3. 62 Ibid., 154, 155, 156. 63 Wittman, Architecture, 108–9. 64 Ibid., 110. 65 Sanger, “Vauban, urbaniste,” 214–25. 66 Pepper, “Ville idéale, 226–7.

542

Notes to pages 183–9

67 Barros, Vauban, 85–90, portfolio X , Xiii ; Berger, A Royal Passion, 168–9. 68 Barros, Vauban, 90. 69 Wittman, Architecture, 67, 71, 88–9, 110. 70 Desmas, Edme Bouchardon, 371. 71 Cleary, The Place Royale, 6–9, 21–2. 72 Sargos, Bordeaux, 155–8; Cleary, The Place Royale, 157–64; Kalnein, Architecture in France, 76–81. 73 Sargos, Bordeaux, 155. 74 Kalnein, Architecture in France, 80. 75 “Nous soussignez Gerard Jaugeon, Estienne Buissiere, Estienne Dardan, et François Bonfin tous quatre entrepreneurs de Bâtiment à Bordeaux sommes convenus ensemble de ce qui suit sçavoir que nous engageons solidairement les uns pour les autres à faire en société chacun pour un quart les ouvrages à faire sur le Port de Bordeaux conçernant un quay le long de la Rivière et les façades de la Place où doit ester erigée la statue equestre de Sa Majésté conformement au Devis de Monsieur Gabriel Directeur général desdites ouvrages dont l’adjudication en à esté faite le treize Septembre de la presente année, et les ouvrages qui pourroient survenir à un de nous quatre en ce qui concerne la Ville sur ledit Port de Bordeaux et non d’ailleurs dont Monsieur Gabriel disposera comme de toute autre chose.” adg i c 4497, “Embellissements de Bordeaux: construction de l’hôtel des Fermes et de la Place Royale. Adjudications et entrepreneurs (1730–1746),” letter of 21 December 1730. 76 Lochard, “La place royale du Peyrou,” 181–91; Cleary, The Place Royale, 183–90; Blanchard, Les Giral, 111–20; Projets et dessins, 47–72; Kalnein, Architecture in France, 164; Baumel, Le Peyrou de Montpellier. 77 Only the Quebec place royale is noted in Cleary’s exhaustive catalogue of French places royales. See Cleary, The Place Royale, 245–6. 78 The square is shown on a map of 1686, when it had a row of trees on the south and east side, a cross in the middle, a gibbet, and a small battery facing the sea on the south. anom 08 dfc 17a, “Plan géométrique du bourg de la BasseTerre de la Guadeloupe” (1686). On the Place des Carmes see Jean-Luc Flohic, ed., Le patrimoine des communes de la Guadeloupe, 60. On French urbanism in the early period in general see Pinon and Vidal, “L’urbanisme français,” 57–9. 79 Montabo, L’histoire de la Guyane, 51–60; Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 44; Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 230; Lézy, “L’implantation française,” 90–2; Le Roux, “Cayenne” 96–8. 80 Lézy, L’implantation, 92. 81 “L’ancien chasteau qui est à present sur pied outre les imperfections d’estre mal flancqué à encore celles d’estre peu

82

83

84 85 86

87

88

spacieux, de plus ses murs tombant en ruine pour n’avoir pas assez d’epaisseur ces raisons font clairement voir qu’il ne doit pas estre compté pour une bonne deffense.” anom 14 dfc 3, “Avis sur la scituation du Bourg Louis de L’Isle de Cayenne scitué à la pointe du nord de ladite Isle par les 4 degrez 55 minuttes latitude nord, par de Combes” (1677), 1a–b. “Ce fort est entouré d’un retranchement qui est trop grand pour le petit nombre d’habitants, mais qui pourroit servir pour une plus grande Colonie. Son fossé a seulement 12 pieds de large sur six à sept pieds de haut, et son parapet palissadé. Ce retranchement fut fait en 1672 par le Sr Ch. De Lezy ci-devant Gouverneur dans la guerre contre les Hollandois … Enfin il se peut voir que toutes choses concourent à établir à Cayenne une puissant Colonie digne du nom du Roy.” anom 14 dfc 7, “Mémoire à Monseigneur le Marquis de Seignelay, pour le retablissement et l’augmentation de l’Isle de Cayenne, 31 janvier 1685, par M. de Sainte-Marthe,” 2a–b, 5b. Flohic, Le patrimoine des communes de la Martinique, 118–19; Léti and Élizabeth, Fort Saint-Louis, 2–10; De Roux, “La création urbaine,” 102–5; Magnan, Regards, 2–5; Danger, “Fort-de-France,” 325–38. See Léti and Élizabeth, Fort Saint-Louis, 15. Ibid.; Magnan, Regards, 5. One map does not show the extant houses but does show the Jardin du Roi. anom 13 dfc 27a , “Project de la ville à construire au cul-de-sac de la Martinique avec la contrescarpe du Fort-Royal,” signed by de Combes, 15 December 1681. The other shows the houses: anom 13 dfc 26b , “Plan géométrique du Fort Royal de l’Isle Martinique,” Marc Payen, ingénieur du Roi, 30 November 1681. This urban growth is depicted on three plans by ingénieur du Roi Marc Payen: anom 13 dfc 30a , “Plan géométrique du fort Royal de l’Isle Martinique,” 31 December 1682; 13 dfc 34b , “Plan géométrique du Fort Royal de l’Isle Martinique,” 13 February 1683; 13 dfc 42 bis, “Plan géométrique du fort Royal de l’Isle Martinique,” 2 April 1686. The comte de Blénac reported in 1686 that “Le Bourg du fort Royal, est presentement composé de quatre vingt maisons, et une église bâtie de pierres, couverte de charpente et d’essentes.” 13 dfc 42, letter from Fort Royal, 2 April 1686, 1a. “Tous les travaux se font à la Martinique, par 100 negres de louage, par des ouvriers habitans de l’Isle payez a la journée, et par 3 barques entretenues pour le transport des materiaux … Les ouvriers (maçons, menuisiers charpentiers charrons &c) sont commandez par tour de role, et payez à raison de 40 s. par jour. Ces journées sont grandes, cependant ils n’en sont pas contents, et ne se rendroient

89 90 91 92

93

94 95

96

jamais à l’atelier de bonne volonté; ils regardent le fort Royal comme une prison, et le travail comme un supplice: parce que les vivres leur sont vendus cherement, et qu’il leur couste beaucoup à se loger; au lieu que chez l’habitant, outre qu’ils sont bien logez, et nourris à la table du maistre, ils gagnent 130 jusqu’à 150 ll de sucre. L’habitant d’un autre costé se plaint, qu’on luy enleve ses ouvriers, et pour tout dire, il se trouve qu’il y a trois mecontens tout à la fois; l’ouvrier qui ne croit pas gagner suffisamment, et qui se trouve en esclavage; l’habitant qui murmure contre l’injustice pretendue qu’on lui fait; et l’ingenieur qui peste inutillement contre la molleste et la mechanceté d’un ouvrier, qui ne sert qu’avec depit et par contrainte. Les 100 Negres sont fournis et entretenus par le Sr Du Val à que Mons. L’Intendant en a passé le bail à raison de 12 s chaque journée de negre.” anom 13 dfc 58, “Discours sur les inconvenients des travaux du Roy à la Martinique avec les remèdes qu’on y peut apporter,” letter signed by Caylus, Fort Royal, 1 September 1692, 1a–b. anom 13 dfc 86b, “Plan de la nouvelle ville sous le Fort Royal de la Martinique,” 10 July 1698. Durand-Molard, Code de la Martinique (22 October 1764), 2:334–8. Flohic, Le patrimoine, 118; Magnan, Regards, 5. For the more ambitious scheme to enlarge the Basse-Ville, see anom 03 dfc 399b , “Plan de la Ville de Québec, Capitale du Canada” (1716); anom f 3 290 92, “Plan relatif à la lettre qui concerne les religieuses de l’hotel dieu de Quebec 1727” (1727). A map of 1752 by Chaussegros de Léry shows that the town had not expanded beyond its original boundaries. anom 03 dfc 429a , “Plan de la Ville de Québec,” 20 October 1752. Rémi Chénier (Quebec City, 21) argues that the upper town is built on a planned radial pattern, but given the lack of cohesion among the blocks I find it improbable. bnp Cartes et plans 127, 7, 3, “Le veritable plan de Quebec fait en 1663.” Villeneuve commented: “L’enceinte de Quebec, telle qu’elle est, a esté construite des deniers provenus d’une taxe qui fut imposée sur les habitans l’année de devant l’arrivée des Anglois, sans cette enceinte, quoyque fort foible, la Ville et tout le reste du pays couroient risque d’estre perdus, et si les ennemis a leur arrivée avoient attaqué la place, ils l’auroient emporté d’autant plus facilement, qu’il y avoit pour lors peu de monde dedans et aux environs, mais ayant apperceu quelques especes de fortifications, ils crurent la Ville de plus grande deffense qu’elle n’est effectivement.” anom 03 dfc 355, ‘Mémoire du Sr de Villeneuve sur les fortifications de Québec” (after 1691), 1b. anom 03 dfc 429a. Notes to pages 190–6

543

97 Chartrand, French Fortresses in North America; Noppen and Grignon, L’art de l’architecte, 27; Chenier, Quebec City, 20–1; Gaumond, Place Royale, 7. 98 Stelter, “Military Considerations,” 219–20; Kalman, Canadian Architecture, 30–1; Chenier, Quebec, 127; Kornwolf, Architecture and Town Planning i , 206–13; Charbonneau, Quebec, 361–7; Roy, La Ville de Québec, 441–4. 99 bnp Cartes et plans 127, 7, 3; anom 03 dfc 341c , “Vray plan du haut et bas de Quebec comme il est en l’an 1660”; 03 dfc 342b , Jean Bourdon, “Véritable plan de Québec comme il est en l’an 1664 et les fortifications que lon y puis faire.” 100 Charbonneau, Quebec, 30. 101 anom , 03 dfc 349b , Robert de Villeneuve, “Plan de la ville et chasteau de Québec, fait en 1685, mezurée exactement.” 102 The map is published in Grignon, “Robert de Villeneuve,” 197. The church was completed as shown, facing the square on a diagonal, as indicated in a 1740 map by Chaussgros de Léry: anom 03 dfc 416a , “Plan de la ville de Québec capitale de la Nouvelle France,” 20 September 1740. 103 anom 03 dfc 355, 3b. 104 The new intendant Jean Bochart de Champigny (in office 1686–1702) abandoned the royal grant to Baillif under pressure from the merchants. See Grignon, “Robert de Villeneuve,” 197. 105 Kornwolf, Architecture and Town Planning, 1:201. 106 Kalman, Canadian Architecture, 30; Cleary, The Place Royale, 245–6. 107 The first drawing is illustrated in Grignon, “Robert de Villeneuve,” 188, and Chénier, Quebec, 173. The 1699 map is reproduced in Grignon, “Robert de Villeneuve,” 188. 108 anom 03 dfc 439a , Robert de la Villeneuve, “Plan de la ville de Québec en la Nouvelle France où sont marquées les ouvrages faits et a faire pour la fortification” (1692). The map is also reproduced in Grignon, “Robert de Villeneuve,” 203. 109 “La place au centre de laquelle est un piedestail portant le buste du Roy.” anom 03 dfc 356b , “Plan de la ville de Québec, capitale de la Nouvelle-France” (September 1693). The plan is also reproduced in Grignon, “Robert de Villeneuve,” 191. 110 Cleary, The Place Royale, 245–6; Gaumond, La Place Royale, 15. Cleary bases his entry entirely on that of Gaumond. 111 Gaumond is apparently the first to mention a bust: “Lorsqu’en 1686 l’intendant Champigny y installa le buste de Louis XIV, on lui donna le nom de Place Royale, nom qu’elle conserva jusqu’en 1700.” Gaumond, La Place Royale, 7. In the 1688 Franquelin drawing it looks like a fleur-delys more than anything else.

544

Notes to pages 196–200

112 Chartrand, French Fortresses, 15; Grignon, “Robert de Villeneuve,” 199; Eccles, “Bochart de Champigny,” 71–80. 113 Grignon, “Robert de Villeneuve,” 197. 114 Saint-Hilaire, “Entre hier et demain,” 331. 115 The Musée de la Place Royale de Québec calls it “Place Royale, the birthplace of French America from 1608 to today,” in a permanent exhibition on the history of the Place Royale, and Yves Paré in his study of marketplaces in ancien régime Quebec claims that “Place Royale” was the square’s “nom d’origine.” Paré, “La montée,” 214; Gaumond, La Place Royale, 7. 116 anom 14 dfc 4b , “Plan du fort et des travaux avancés de Cayenne, plan des attaques qu’on y a faites,” 21 January 1677. 117 “Il est a remarquer qu’une haye de citronniers est incomparablement meilleure qu’aucune palissade, car outre que les citronniers sont garnis de piquants plus long que le doit, il faudra tousjours du canon pour les abatre, le sabre n’y pouvant rien faire, d’ailleurs cela n’est sujet a d’autre entretien que de celuy de les tondre comme une palissade de jardin et elles dureront cent ans, au lieu qu’il faudroit renouveller tous les ans les palissades si l’on y en mettoit, la grande chaleur et les pluyes pourissant les bois qui sont enfoncés en terre.” anom 14 dfc 28, “Description de la Guyane par Renau,” 15 January 1700, 44b–45a. 118 anom 14 dfc 13c , “Plan de Mr. de Vauban par Paquine,” 25 July 1690. This quick sketch altered the hexagon to fit the contour of the River Cayenne. Paquine also prepared another adjustment to Vauban’s hexagon in a second sketch: anom 14 dfc 12b , “Plan de Cayenne par Paquine,” 25 July 1690. The full report on his alterations of Vauban’s plans is anom 14 dfc 11, “Journal de ce qui est passé a Cayenne par rapport aux fortifications” (July 1689). 119 “Il me dit de ne point epargner les maisons.” anom 14 dfc 11, 1. Concerning slaves he wrote in frustration, after calculating that the habitants, including religious orders, owed him 769 slaves: “L’on m’a assuré qu’il devoit y avoir plus de 1000 negres travaillantes, mais tout m’est caché ici” (3). For example, on 14 November 1689 he had 402 slaves working for him for a 15-day stint, and on 25 February 1690 only 164 were sent to the work site (5, 11). On 24 and 25 March and 4 April 1690 he complained that 220, 90, and 120 slaves, respectively, failed to turn up, and similar numbers of workers were absent regularly throughout the project. On the fourth of April the governor had simply taken his slave carpenters with him to his own habitation (13). On 25 April the Dutch sent forty canoes of Amerindians to attack the fort and Paquine was compelled to have his masons close up the Remire gate (26). The first phase

120 121

122

123

124

of construction of the ramparts ended in 1691. anom 14 dfc 17, “Extrait de l’estimation generalle de l’enceinte de Cayenne suivant le premier project de la Cour,” 1 February 1691. Le Roux, “Cayenne,” 98. anom 14 dfc 21b, “Plan de Cayenne envoyé par M. de Férolles,” 29 January 1696; 14 dfc 123b , “Plan de Cayenne” (ca. 1696). anom 14 dfc 30a , Bernard Renau d’Eliçagaray, “Plan de la ville de Cayenne et des ouvrages proposés à y faire,” 15 January 1700. “Comme les maisons qui sont actuellement sur pied sont en assez mauvais etat et de peu d’importance, on formera les rues comme elles sont sur le plan, et l’on ne permettra plus de batir que sur les allignemens que l’Ingenieur donnera conformement au plan.” anom 14 dfc 30a. “Cette place seroit tres respectable en Europe, et assurement innataquable dans ce pays.” anom 14 dfc 28, “Description de la Guyane par Renau,” 15 January 1700, 65a. c h a p t e r ni ne

1 See Fatah-Black, White Lies, the cover illustration of which is a 1750 map of Paramaribo by Mattheus Sager. On the history of Paramaribo’s urbanism, and how the regularized grid plan appeared only in the later nineteenth century, see Klooster and Bakker, Architectuur, 75–84. 2 See Pinon, “Saint-Domingue,” 108. 3 I consider Gilbert Stelter’s characterization of Champlain’s primitive palisaded post as “the first planned settlement in Canada” a bit optimistic, as is his contention that it “vaguely resembled a Spanish town.” Stelter, “Military Considerations,” 217. 4 See Bailey, Art of Colonial Latin America, 126–7; Lejeune, “Dreams,” 33–5; Kagan, Urban Images, 121–3. 5 Lejeune, “Dreams,” 39–40; Morales Folguera, La construcción de la Utopía, 31–41; Kagan, Urban Images, 28, 122. 6 Gasparini, “The Pre-Hispanic Grid System,” 78–109. 7 Lejeune, “Dreams,” 33–5; Thomas, Conquest, 561. The quotation is from Thomas. 8 See Stanislawski, “Early Spanish Town Planning,” 95. I am grateful to one of my reviewers for this reference. 9 The full text is translated in Lejeune, Cruelty, 21–32. This quotation is from 21. 10 Ibid., 22. 11 Ibid. 12 Lejeune, “Dreams,” 40. 13 Lejeune, Cruelty, 23, 42. On the first Alameda, in Mexico City, see Kagan, Urban Images, 156–63.

14 The main exception, New Haven (1638–40), was founded as a “Biblical Commonwealth,” and therefore had utopian overtones. See Elliot, Empires of the Atlantic World, 42–4; Kornwolf, Architecture and Town Planning, 2:378, 542, 545, 562, 574–5, 726–7, 1170–1; Lara, “God’s Good Taste,” 517 (for map of New Haven from 1641). 15 Elliot, Empires of the Atlantic World, 134–7. 16 Kornwolf, Architecture and Town Planning, 2:519, 795; Reps, The Making of Urban America, 105. On Wren’s and Evelyn’s plans and their French inspiration see Whinney, Wren, 37–40; Soo, “Christopher Wren,” 135–7. 17 Such were the plans for Fredericksburg (1721), Richmond (1737), Alexandria (1749), and Portsmouth (1752) in Virginia and Georgetown in South Carolina (1730–34). Other South Carolina settlements such as Beaufort (before 1733) and Charleston (ca. 1739) contained a central square entered on the four axes. See Kornwolf, Architecture and Town Planning, 2:605–11, 852–7, 894–6. 18 Kornwolf, Architecture and Town Planning, 2:574–5, 725; Martin, Pleasure Gardens, 28–53; Reps, The Making of Urban America, 105–14. 19 Unfortunately neither town was built as Nicholson had intended, and “the interesting combination of the English residential square and the French rond-point was never achieved.” Reps, The Making of Urban America, 108. On the Kingston plan, see Nelson, Architecture and Empire in Jamaica, 78; Webb, Marlborough’s America, 116; Buisseret, Historic Architecture, 20. 20 Webb, Marlborough’s America, 116; Buisseret, Historic Architecture, 20. 21 Montgomery, A Discourse. 22 Kornwolf, Architecture and Town Planning, 2:925–30; Reps, The Making of Urban America, 183–92. 23 Reps, Washington on View, 1–33. On Pierre-Charles L’Enfant, see Bert, Grand Avenues; Caemmerer, The Life of Pierre Charles L’Enfant; Jusserand, “Introduction,” 1–30. 24 Berg, Grand Avenues, 19–23. 25 Reps, Washington on View, 7–8. 26 Ibid., 18. 27 Ibid., 20. 28 anom 15 dfc 790a . 29 Kornwolf, Architecture and Town Planning, 2:317; Daspit, Louisiana Architecture, 2; Langlois, “L’aventure urbaine,” 47. 30 See Waselkov, Old Mobile Archaeology; Oszuscik, “French Colonial Architecture at Old Mobile,” 171–82. I am grateful to one of my reviewers for these two references. See also Higginbotham, Old Mobile, 47–52. 31 Langlois, “L’aventure,” 121. See also Wilson, The Architecture of Colonial Louisiana, 47; Higginbotham, Old Mobile, 40–1.

Notes to pages 200–14

545

32 anom 04 dfc 119a , “Fort et ville de la Maubille” (1702). 33 anom 04 dfc 120b , “Plan de la ville et du port Louis etabli par les Francais sur la Mobile en 1711.” 34 Powell, The Accidental City, 39; Higginbotham, Old Mobile, 453. 35 The quotations are from shd gr 1 m 1105 20, “Memoire sur l’état present de la province de la Louisianne, dans l’année 1720,” 19a–b. See also Langlois, “L’aventure,” 123–4; Naissance de la Louisiane, 53; Reps, The Making of Urban America, 78. 36 “Sitôt après l’arrivée des Ingenieurs, et qu’ils eussent reconnu, tiré le plan du terrain du vieux et nouveaux Biloxy, il fut deliberé par Conseil tenu et envoyé à la Compagnie par les vaisseaux partis en Janvier, qu’on feroit l’etablissement du Comptoir general au nouveau Biloxy, et qu’on travailleroit incessamment.” anom 04 dfc 8, “Mémoire de Charles Le Gac ci devant Directeur pour la Compagnie des Indes a la Louisianne, Etat dans lequel a été trouvée la Colonie de la Louisianne,” 24 August 1718, 47a. On the foundation of New Biloxi see also Powell, The Accidental City, 3, 46–7. 37 The quotation is from a Company director named Charles Le Gac: “On avoit travaillé à l’établissement du Biloxy dès le commencement de Janvier 1720 par l’envoy qu’on y avoit fait de près de 200 personnes pour deffricher, batir des Baraques, et maisons, pour se mettre a couvert de l’injure du tems, et aussi pour les marchandises; on y trouva en May autour de 50 Baraques tant grandes que petites de parfaites … il fut deliberé par Conseil … que l’on y feroit passer tous les ouvriers, les Suisses, gens de force, et autres au Service de la Compagnie pour l’execution; ce qui avoit été commencé dès les premiers jours de Février pour y travailler suivant le plan, qui a été envoyé à la Compagnie on avoit défriché tout le terrain au Nouveau Biloxy pour l’enclos de établissement, et on avoit commencé au vieux Biloxy à y faire de la brique, ou le terrain y est propre.” anom 04 dfc 8, 34a, 47a. On the Apallachee, see Langlois, “L’aventure,” 124. 38 The quotation is by Le Blond de La Tour. See Kornwolf, Architecture and Town Planning, 1:317; Wilson, The Architecture of Colonial Louisiana, 50; Chartrand, French Fortresses, 52; Langlois, “L’aventure,” 125. 39 Langlois, “L’aventure,” 125; Naissance de la Louisiane, 52. 40 Naissance de la Louisiane, 49; Wilson, The Architecture of Colonial Louisiana, 50. 41 First quotation from Powell, The Accidental City, 2; second quotation ibid, 61. See also Daspit, Louisiana Architecture, 7–8; Kornwolf, Architecture and Town Planning, 1:322–7; Langlois, “L’aventure,” 125–7; Wilson, The Architecture of

546

Notes to pages 214–21

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54

55

56 57

58 59 60

61

62

Colonial Louisiana, 3–4; Naissance de la Louisiane, 50–6; Reps, The Making of Urban America, 81–5. The term is Pauger’s and is quoted in Langlois, “L’aventure,” 125. For the measurements of the streets see 128. Powell, The Accidental City, 4, 44–5. Naissance de la Louisiane, 51; Powell, The Accidental City, 49. “le pais est noyé, impracticable, mal sain.” shd gr 1 m 1105 20, 21a. Naissance de la Louisiane, 52; Powell, The Accidental City, 51. Quoted in Kornwolf, Architecture and Town Planning, 1:326. Daspit, Louisiana Architecture, 7; Langlois, “L’aventure,” 125; Wilson, The Architecture of Colonial Louisiana, 50–2. Langlois, “L’aventure,” 127. See also Dawdy, Building the Devil’s Empire, 12–16. Powell, The Accidental City, 57. anom 04 dfc 66c, “Plan de la ville de la Nouvelle Orléans projetté en mars 1721.” Langlois, “L’aventure,” 128. The map is reproduced in Wilson, The Architecture of Colonial Louisiana, 53, figure 10. See also Langlois, “L’aventure,” 126–7. The lots measured 100 metres per side. See also Poesch and Bacot, Louisiana Buildings, 14–15. anom 04 dfc 68b, “Partie du plan de la Nouvelle Orléans,” signed by De La Tour, 12 January 1723. See Daspit, Louisiana Architecture, 7; Kornwolf, Architecture and Town Planning, 1:327; Naissance de la Louisiane, 54–5; Wilson, The Architecture of Colonial Louisiana, 6. Daspit, Louisiana Architecture, 7; Poesch and Bacot, Louisiana Buildings, 16; Wilson, The Architecture of Colonial Louisiana, 7–9. Langlois, “L’aventure,” 126–8. anom 04 dfc 76c, “Plan de la Nouvelle Orléans dédié à la Compagnie des Indes par leur très humble serviteur Saucié à la Nouvelle Orléans le 12 may 1728 en Amérique.” Dawdy, Building the Devil’s Empire, 86–97, 158–62. anom 04 dfc 85b, “Projet de fortification de la Nouvelle Orléans,” by Brison, 10 April 1730. anom 04 dfc 89b, “Plan de la Nouvelle Orléans telle qu’elle estoit au mois de décembre 1731 levé par Gonichon.” See Wilson, The Architecture of Colonial Louisiana, 9–10. On the relinquishment of the charter, see Powell, The Accidental City, 67. I am grateful to one of my reviewers for indicating that the gardens, drawn up with elaborate broderies, never existed. William L Clements Library, Ann Arbor, Thomas Gage Papers, Map Division, Maps 8-l -13, Lt Philip Pittman, “A Plan of New Orleans” (ca. 1765). See Wilson, The Architecture of Colonial Louisiana, 10. Dawdy, Building the Devil’s Empire, 95–6.

63 On the transformation in eighteenth-century French urbanism see Rabreau, “Introduction,” 13–14. 64 anom 14 dfc 53b , “Projet du plan du fort d’Oyapock dressé le plus avantageusement qu’il a été possible par rapport à sa situation par le s[ieu]r Fresneau de La Gataudière ingénieur ordinaire du Roy à Cayenne le 10 juillet 1734,” 10 July 1734. 65 Turenne, Voyageurs naturalistes, 53–4. 66 Verwimp, Les jésuites, 277. 67 anom 14 dfc 75b , “Plan du fort d’Oyapock projetté par le s[ieu]r Baron ingénieur du Roy à Cayenne en 1750”; 14 dfc 86a, “Cours de la rivière d’Oyapocko depuis le sault d’Ynery jusqu’à son embouchure, levée par Mr. Dessingy, capitaine d’infanterie au service des Colonies et ingénieur des Camps et Armées du Roy” (1762). 68 “parce que dans ce plan le fort estant très peu de chose on auroit esté contraint de fortifier aussi la ville, qu’on auroit même esté obligé d’agrandir, parce qu’il auroit faire necessairement pour assurer le fort detruire toutes les maisons qu’on a baties sur la montagne ou ce fort est situé et même celles qui sont au pied de cette montagne et qui forment un des côtes de la grande Rue, aussi bien qu’on bon nombre d’autres maisons qui se trouvent trop près des remparts de la ville; il auroit faire donner d’autres emplacements aux proprietaires, on auroit été contraint par-là d’agrandir considerablement la ville ce qu’on auroit peut faire sans multiplier les ouvrages et augmenter considerablement la depense.” anom 14 dfc 57, “Mémoire instructif sur le projet d’un Nouveau fort d’une nouvelle ville et d’un port au Bassin a Cayenne,” 17 May 1736, 1a. 69 “Ni le plan qui fut donné en 1733 parce que dans ce plan la ville et le fort estant fortifiés l’estendue des ouvrages est trop considerable et demendroit trop de temps et de depense pour les eslever et pour les entretenir et enfin trop de troupes pour les garder.” anom 14 dfc 57, 1a–b. 70 anom 14 dfc 57, 1b. For this project Fresneau asked the Ministry for slaves, specialized workers, and stone from France: “1. Que le Roy aye cinquante jeunes bons negres males, Sa Majesté en a desja quatre en estat de travailler avec des Charpentiers. 2. Il faut un appareilleur, un piqueur, huit maçons quatre chassavents, deux briquetiers, un chaumier, un mineur, deux charpentiers et un taillandier. Tous ces ouvriers auront sous leur main les Negres du Roy qui apprendront insensiblement chacun leur metier en servant d’abord de manœuvre. 3. Il faut que le Roy fasse transporter de France de la pierre propre à faire de la chaux et de la pierre de taille pour mettre aux angles saillants et rentrans des Bastions, pour faire les cordons et plaint, les culs de lampes des guerites et les guerites mêmes, les

71

72

73

74

75

portes et les escaliers et enfin pour faire les encoignures et croisées des Batiments interieurs de la place.” anom 14 dfc 57, 3a–b. “Je vous observais que l’agrandissement de la ville, ni paroissait pas nécessaire pour le présent, et qu’il convenait mieux de travailler aux fortifications dont elle pourroit avoir besoin dans l’état où elle etoit actuellement. Je vous marquai qu’il etoit question seulement d’examiner quels ouvrages il etoit nécessaire d’y faire, et je vous demandai de bien envoyer un plan, avec le devis estimatif de la dépense … En général, vous ne devez entreprendre aucun ouvrage, sans l’approbation & l’ordre du Roi.” adg c 632. “Lettre du ministre Maurepas à Messieurs de La Mirande et d’Albon, au sujet d’un projet de fortification” (Versailles, 21 November 1739), 1a–b. anom 14 dfc 130b, “Plan van de Stadt & Vesting Cayenne” (ca. 1750–60). This grid survives today in the rectangle enclosed by rue Madame Payée and avenue Générale de Gaulle on the north and south and rues Léon Gontran Damas and Quatorze Juillet on the west and east. For more on the early history of the Savane, see Yannick Leroux, “Cayenne,” in Vidal and d’Orgeix, Les villes françaises, 98. anom 14 dfc 129a , “Plan de la nouvelle ville de Cayenne” (undated, before 1760). It is a very simple uncoloured drawing in ink on paper. It proposes enclosing the Savane in a four-sided rampart (the northern coast makes up the fifth) with four bastions. It had twenty îlots, including the ones already made by the concessionaires, kept their street names, and added more. The longitudinal streets (from north to south) are: rue de la Côté, rue Royale, rue du College (there was a college two blocks north of the church, where it stands today), rue Dartois, rue de Provence, rue de Choiseul, rue de Praslin, and rue du Marais. The latitudinal ones, from west to east are: an unnamed street, rue de Berry, and rue des Premieres Limites. The text reads: “Chaque Isle de Concession 2389 Pieds sur la Rue et 174 de profondeur pour l’Echelle de la Ville de Cayenne.” anom col e 24, “Béhague d’Hartincourt, Jacques François Marie Eléonore Thimoléon de, major à Cayenne (1764/1787),” fol. 23, n.d.; letter to Monseigneur de Boyne minister and Secretary of State, signed De Béhague d’Hartincourt (Cayenne, 15 February 1772), no folio number. See also Borel D’Hauterive, Annuaire de la noblesse de France et des maison souverains de l’Europe 15 (Paris, 1858): 160–1. “Sa position au vent de Surinam, et des Antilles, sa proximité du fleuve des amazones par lequel elle pourroit s’ouvrir un commerce dans le bresil, dans le perou, peut être même dans la mer du Sud, tout enfin concourt à faire de la guianne une colonie d’autant plus puissante que son

Notes to pages 221–6

547

76

77 78 79 80 81 82 83

548

principal commerce doit être fondé sur l’exploitation des terres … La ville de Caienne demande conséquemment à être agrandie, et renfermée dans un ordre de fortification proportionnée à la résistance qu’une place de cette nature doit être en état de faire.” anom 235miom 15, “Prospectus du projet d’établir la Guianne presenté par le Sieur de Béhague” (1764), 5a–b, 8b. “Le Roi ayant ordonné qu’il seroit bâtie une nouvelle ville dans l’espace qui a été destiné pour servir de savane près l’ancienne ville de Cayenne; et cet espace de terre en savane ayant été concédé ci devant a différents particuliers pour y cultiver des jardins et former des basse cours, jusqu’à ce qu’il plut à Sa Majesté d’en faire une autre destination … l’intention des gouverneurs et ordonnateur qui ont octroyés les dites concessions que toutes fois et quantes que le requerrait le bien du service, toutes les constructions élevées par les concessionnaires haies ou arbres plantés pourraient être rasés et incessamment … sur ce l’avis de Monsieur de Piedmont commandant en second et Baron ingénieur en état nous avons déclaré et déclarons tous les terrains concédés dans la Savanne et eux y acquis en vertu des susdites concessions, réunit au domaine du Roi sans que les concessionnaires ou acquéreurs puissent prétendre de la part de Sa Majesté aucune indemnité … Fait et jugé en notre hôtel sous le sceau de nos armes et le contreseing de nos secrétaires. À Cayenne le seize juillet mil sept cent soixante cinq. Signé Béhague. Signé De Macaye par Messieurs. Signé Loeffler.” adg c 633, “Projet de création d’une nouvelle ville à Cayenne, destruction des édifications faites sur la savane,” 16 July 1765, 1a–2a. anom 14 dfc 437, “Extrait d’une Lettre du Ministre du 19 janvier 1787, adressée à MM de Fitzmaurice et L’Escalier.” Belrose, “Daniel Lescalier et les Guyanes,” 532–4; Souty, “Le comte de Kersaint,” 132–3. Gampat, Guyana, 145; quoted also in Souty, “Le comte de Kersaint,” 132. Quoted in Souty, “Le comte de Kersaint,” 132. Ibid., 132. Ibid. anom col e 128, “Despret de Leschelle, Capitaine au corps royal du Génie, ingenieur-en-chef a Demerari,” letter from Versailles, 28 February 1779, signed by Sartine; letter from Demerary, 11 December 1782, signed by Despret. See also Souty, “Le comte de Kersaint,” 133. In a letter of 1782 Despret writes: “J’ai l’honneur de vous rappeler que je suis parti de France le 10 de may 1779, que depuis cette époque j’ai été employé aux colonies de Cayenne et Demerari,” letter from Demerary, 12 September 1782, signed by Despret.

Notes to pages 226–36

84 “les maladies causées par les chaleurs excessives et les travaux extraordinaires que les soldats ont été obligés de faire, font beaucoup de ravage dans la garnison.” anom col e 128, letter from Demerary, 17 January 1783, signed by Despret. In this letter he demands a second engineer to help him with construction. 85 anom col e 128, letter from Le Havre, 22 May 1784, signed by Despret. 86 anom 06 dfc 172a , “Plan de la ville projettée conformement aux ordres de Monsieur le Comte de Kersaint … sur un terrein de la Rive droite de la Rivière de Demerary que la Compagnie de Zélande s’etoit reservé, et qui a 100 toises du Rhin de largeur, sur une Profondeur illimitée” (1782). 87 On Lille see Barros, Vauban, 85–90, portfolio X , Xiii ; Berger, A Royal Passion, 168–9. 88 Bolingbroke, A Voyage to the Demerary, 19, 28–9. 89 Gampat, Guyana, 145; Gimlette, Wild Coast, 4. 90 Le Roux, Le Vaudois, 9–13; 14–16. 91 Ibid., 57–63. 92 “Surinam cette riche et superbe colonie … Les habitations y sont superbes et habités par des gens qui ont oublié l’Europe, et qui seroient fort fachés d’y retourner. On y recueille principalement du Caffé, on y en fait quatorze ou quinze million de livres. Quelle difference entre Cayenne et Surinam, ce sont cependant les memes terres et le meme continent, mais les hollandois ont plus de credit plus de moyens, et plus d’industrie d’ailleurs, ils n’avoient pas en Amerique d’autres Colonies qui partageassent leur attention.” anom 14 dfc 179, “Extrait d’une lettre sur Surinam,” 16 February 1769. 93 “Paramaribo … est le chef-lieu de la Colonie … c’est une assez jolie ville située à la rive gauche de la riviere de Surinam, son port est très beau, c’est là ou mouillent tous les batimens d’Europe qui viennent charger les denrées de la Colonie … la Ville est assez peuplée, et sa situation est agréable, il y a de belles maisons cependant elles ne sont baties qu’en bois, les fondemens en briques qu’on apporte d’Hollande” (anom 14 dfc 180, 2b); “Je n’ai vu dans les Colonies Francoises, et Angloises qui approche de la beauté, et Propriété de ces Plantages, non plus que de la magnificence des bâtimens qui sont dessus; toutes ces terres le long des rivières étaient inondés, et couvertes de quatre à cinq pieds d’eau à chaque marée; avec des écluses, et beaucoup de fossés, les Hollandois sont parvenus à les sécher, et c’est à présent ou ils font leurs plus gros rivières” (anom 14 dfc 180, 3b). 94 “Ils ont beaucoup de negres marons qui les desolent, et avec lesquels ils viennent cependant de faire la paix à de certaines conditions auxquelles ils se sont soucis. Ces

95 96

97

98 99 100

negres marons forment dès à present un peuple, qui … leur causera de l’embarras et du dommage, et je trouve à cet égard leur position très précaire” (anom 14 dfc 179); “Les Hollandois ne poussent pas leur etablissement plus haut à cause des nègres marrons qui les inquietent … Cette colonie auroit eu des progrès bien plus rapide, et deviendroit prodigieuse sans les negres marrons qui sont devenus un peuple avec lequel les habitants sont perpetuellement en guerre” (anom 14 dfc 180, “Notes du Comte D’Ennery sur la Colonie Hollandoise de Surinam,” 23 February 1769, 3a–b). Fatah-Black, White Lies, 93–107; Cobin, “Suriname,” 622; Hoogbergen, The Boni Maroon Wars, 52–104. “l’exécution de ce projet, ne seroit pas difficile, et pourroit être très avantageux. Les terres qui avoisinent la Rivière d’Approüague, passant pour être très propre pour les plantations du pays, et principalement pour celles du cacao, et ce port, auroit cet avantage, sur celui l’Oyapok, qu’il est plus proche de Cayenne, et que la communication avec cette île, peut y être continuelle, au lieu que la communication de Cayenne avec Oyapok.” adg c 400, “Projet de construction d’un établissement a Approuague pour mettre Oyapock en sûreté, 1737,” 1a–b. “L’Etablissement formé à Courou pourtant n’être pas suffisant pour le nombre d’hommes qui ont déjà passé dans la nouvelle colonie … le Sr Gouverneur pourra, s’il le juge à propos, en transporter une partie sur quel qu’autre rivière, spécialement sur celle d’Approuague qui étant au vent de Cayenne et étant navigable pour les plus gros batimens, parait présenter des avantages particuliers. S.M. lui recommande cependant d’avoir attention de ne déplacer que de leur consentement ceux des colons, qui au moyen des concessions déjà faites auraient déjà commencé leurs défrichements et plantations.” anom 14 dfc 143, “Instructions données par Sa Majesté, au Sr Chevalier Turgot Gouverneur et Lieutenant Général de la Guyane” (1764). Le Roux, Le Vaudois, 37–8. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 40. One government report gave very explicit instructions on how to found a plantation: “Ceux qui voudraient donc confier des fonds à des personnes sures et actives pour former des établissements dans ce nouveau quartier devront avoir la prudence de ne faire commencer qu’avec un petit atelier de vingt à trente nègres acclimatés et une dizaine de nouveaux afin d’être assurés de trouver des vivres à acheter si non dans ce quartier au moins dans les autres. Après avoir demandé au Gouvernement la concession peu étendue d’une terre haute le plus à portée qu’il se pourra des terres basses qu’on voudra établir,

101

102 103 104 105

106

on y mettra ce petit attelier pour faire des plantations de vivres et l’employer uniquement à cela la première année en l’établissant avec des cazes en paille faites avec le plus d’Economie. On irait outre cela dans les terres basses faire un bon Carbet pour se loger. La seconde année cet attelier ferait dans ces terres le plus grand abatis possible, mais il n’en dessécherait qu’autant s’espace que le plan de tout l’établissement exigerait, dans lequel on commencerait à établir le plus promptement possible les cazes nègres, les batimens nécessaires aux logemens et à la manufacture, et est ceci la seconde année serait très bien occupée, mais dans les 6 derniers mois et au commencement de la troisième il faudrait alors augmenter l’attelier et le monter au point qu’on s’était proposé selon les moyens arrêtés pour cela. La troisieme année on augmenterait l’abatis de la précédente à proportion de l’augmentation de l’attelier, on dessecherait et on planterait selon la culture convenue, ainsi que des Bananiers &a en grande quantité voilà la marche qu’on devrait suivre d’une année à l’autre selon la quantité des bras qu’on aurait à employer.” anom 14 dfc 249, “Mémoire abrégé pour les Européens qui voudraient former des établissements de Culture à Cayenne et dans les Terres Basses du nouveau quartier d’Approuague” (ca. 1775), 2a–b. anom 14 dfc 439, “Croquis des nouveaux établissements dans les terres basses d’Approuague,” signed Jean-Samuel Guisan, 18 April 1787. See also Le Roux, Le Vaudois, 40, 44–5, 220. anom fm f 6 2, 584, Letter from La Luzerne to de Soucy, Versailles, dated 18 December 1788. Guisan, Traité, 266. Ibid., 334–5. The plots are shown precisely in this map: anom 14 dfc 393b , “Croquis de la rivière d’Approuague et des nouvelles concessions en terre basse,” 25 October 1784, signed by Guisan. “on y bâtiroit une maison des magazins, enfin les bâtiments qui devroient être necessaires à la dite habitation, afin que les ingenieurs, chirurgiens, aumoniers, garde magazins &a puissent y trouver des logements commodes.” anom 14 dfc 343, “Mémoire et observations sur les travaux des terres basses et les operations que j’ai executées à Cayenne, avec des projets pour l’amelioration de cette colonie,” signed Guisan (Cayenne, 24 April 1780), 5a. Located in the Savane, the Cayenne College (“Grand Collège,” or “Le Collège”) was formerly the Jesuit “Petit Collège” (founded 1690), and was rebuilt on its new site in 1748 by Governor d’Orvilliers from an endowment from a former slave named Mme Paillé, to educate children, and

Notes to pages 236–7

549

107 108 109

110 111

112

550

it originally owned a plantation in Macouria. adg , “Sites et Monuments Historiques en Guyane,” 18. See Le Roux, Le Vaudois, 41–4. Guisan, Traité, 333. Le Roux, Le Vaudois, 39. “Les maisons ne pourront être bâties qu’à l’alignement des rues, y faisant face par un grand côté, non par un pignon. Défendons d’ajouter aux façades aucune gallerie appelée communément volante, ni aucun corps saillant quelconque le sol des rés de chaussée des dites maisons, et des servitudes en dépendant, ne pourra être élevé moins d’un pied au-dessus du niveau des rues. Les couvertures en paille ne seront tolérées pour les maisons du bourg que pendant deux années à compter du premier janvier 1790 … Les clôtures trop élevées, en s’opposent à la circulation de l’air, occasionnent souvent une humidité très nuisible à la santé. Pour obvier à cet inconvénient, nous ordonnons que les palissades servant à clore basses cours, jardins ou terrains quelconques des particuliers, soient au plus de cinq pieds et demi au-dessus du niveau des rues, et ayant au moins deux pouces de distance ou vides entr’elles. Ordonnons également que les haies de citronniers ou autres arbustes placés sur l’emplacement destiné au dit bourg, à quelques usages qu’elles puissent être, soient au plus de quatre pieds de hauteur au-dessus du susdit niveau.” anom 14 dfc 496, “Extrait des Registres du Tribunal Terrier, Règlement sur les Concessions du Bourg de Villebois (ci-devant Approuague),” signed Jacques-Martin de Bourgon & Pierre d’Huinet Desvarennes, 15 October 1789, 1b–2a. Jean-Samuel Guisan, “Mémoires contenans la vie ou l’histoire de J. S. Guisan (1797),” in Le Roux, Le Vaudois, 260. The building records of Bourg Villebois provide a rare glimpse of the names of the slaves who constructed it, including the carpenters Abraham (thirty-six years old), Jean (thirty-two), and Pierre (thirty-three); and the masons Domingue (thirty), Léveillé dit Martinique (forty-nine), and Bazile (nineteen) Further royal slave builders detailed to Approuague included the carpenters Koska (aged thirty), Triton (thirty-four), Alexandre (twenty-three), Moutaoua (nineteen), Vincinty (twenty-seven), Simon (twentyfour), Médéric Petit (sixteen); the joiners Louis Méderic, August Petit (thirty-five), Baptiste le Grand (thirty-nine), and Baptiste Martiniquais (thirty), who, judging from his name, came from Martinique, as did Léveillé. Le Roux, Le Vaudois, 303, 319. “M Guisan, que nous y avions autorisé, avait déjà fait donner les premiers coups de pelle pour le dessèchement de l’emplacement du Bourg, de sorte que quinze jours

Notes to pages 237–8

113

114

115 116

à peine écoulés; cet emplacement était non seulement desséché, mais entièrement à l’abri des submergements.” anom 14dfc 490, “Sur le Bourg d’Aprouague” (Cayenne, 6 May 1789), signed by Pierre d’Huinet Des Varennes. “l’église et du presbitere … sont les deux premieres edifices qui doivent y être construits … Une partie des matériaux y est déjà portée; quelques ouvriers y travaillent aussi, de sort qu’il y a lieu de croire qu’à la fin de l’été, les ouvrages principaux seront bien avancés, s’ils ne sont pas finis.” anom 14dfc 490. In October estimates were prepared for the church, presbytery, barracks, warehouses, officers’ and administrators’ quarters, bakery, baker’s house, hospital and hospital kitchen, surgeon’s house, jail, concierge’s house, a canal lock, eight little bridges to cross the drainage ditches, and twelve houses for the king’s workers, all at a cost of 599,702 livres: “La chapelle matériaux & main d’œuvre, 8527 l; Maison ou Logement du Curé matériaux & main d’œuvre, 5722; Cazernes, magasins, logements d’officiers militaires et d’administration, 15328; Boulangerie, logement du boulanger, cuisine pour les employés & l’Hopital, 4263; Hopital, Logement du Chirurgien, 5003; Geole ou Prison, Logement d’un Concierge, 2170; Ecluse en maçonne pour le dessechement du terrein du Bourg, 3802; Huit petits ponts nécessaires pour le passage des fossés de dessechement du Bourg, 779; Douze petites maisons à donner par le Roy pour fixer des ouvriers utiles au Bourg a 1198 l. l’une, 14376. [Total] 599702.” anom 14 dfc 494, “Etat des prix que couteront les differents etablissements du Bourg d’Aprouague d’apres les plans & devis du S. Guisan, ingénieur,” 15 October 1789; see also anom 14dfc 483, “Devis des materiaux necessaires pour batir la Chapelle du quartier d’Approuage,” 14 March 1789. Guisan, “Mémoires” in Le Roux, Le Vaudois, 260. The key on the map reads: “a . Ilet destiné partie à l’Etablissement militaire et le reste à une place d’arme &c. b . Ilet destiné à placer les magasins et autres Batiments; et le surplus à y distribuer huit concessions à des particuliers. c. Ilet destiné pour y distribuer treize concessions aux particuliers. d . Ilet destiné en partie à former une place pour y placer une église, ainsi que la maison du curé à l’endroit marqué n ; et le reste à placer sept concessions pour les Marchands et artisans, qui les premiers voudront s’y établir. Tous les autres îlets e .f .g .h .i .k .l .m .n .o .p .q .r .s .t .v .X sont destiné à placer des concessions au nombre de trois cent treize en totalité selon la distribution du plan, qui, est disposé de manière à pouvoir être entrepris successivement par partie, plus ou moins considérable selon que

117 118

119 120 121 122 123 124

125

la population l’exigera. a .b .c .d . Les quatre lettres c’està-dire la figure qui les renferme comprend la partie du Bourg qui sera entreprise desechée et arangée cette année 1789. y . Canal pour ammener les eaux dans le bourg, dont il sera entretenu toujours plein; objet d’une utilité qu’on ne sauroit pour ainsi dire assez apprecier. ttt. Ponts sur les fossés. rr. Espèce de chemins qui doit separer les concessions en partageant les îlets en deux parties egales, et borner par consquence les proprietés dans leur longueur. A cette occasion il seroit très important de mettre dans les titres de concession cette clause: que la palissade qui les separera dans leurs profondeurs sera mise au milieu du chemin dont on fait ici mention, lequel aura vingt pieds de largueur totale; et que le long du quel chemin à dix pieds de la ditte palissade les proprietaires seront de concert obligés d’entretenir un petit fossé d’un bout de l’ilet à l’autre comme c’est marqué au plan. Nota: Comme l’Eglise occupe l’angle de l’ilet d il conviendroit peut être de réserver l’angle de l’ile l & celui de l’ilet m pour y placer deux bâtiments réguliers; se l’on le desiroit dans un autre tems, et que la paroisse fit bâtir dans la suitte sur le même plan à l’angle de l’ilet e une maison pour servir au assemblées de paroisse et à toutes celles que le gouvernement croira utiles de permettre ou de faire instituer.” Approved by chevalier D’Alain Desvarennes, signed Guisan. anom 14 dfc 486a , “Plan du bourg qu’on se propose d’exécuter au nouveau quartier d’Approuague.” anom 14 dfc 486a , 1a. anom 14 dfc 484b, “Plan d’une petite maison qui servira de cure au nouveau quartier d’Approuague pour loger le curé et son vicaire”; 14 dfc 485b , “Plan d’une chapelle pour le nouveau quartier d’Approuague” (both April 1789). Montabo, L’histoire de la Guyane, 175. Le Roux, Le Vaudois, 44–5. Montabo, L’histoire de la Guyane, 181. Le Roux, Le Vaudois, 15, 45. shd gr 1 m 1324, “Guyane Française, No. 2,” 22 November 1826. Some plans survive from 1831–33 for buildings to be constructed in the new colony. See anom 14 dfc 941c , “Guiane, 1830, Plan du poste d’Approuague” (by Joseph Emmanuel Laboria); 14 dfc 832b , “Guiane, 1833, “Plan, coupe et élévation d’une caserne pour 60 lits à construire à Approuague,” by Jacques Teissier; 14 dfc 814c , “Plan, coupe et élévation d’un pavillon devant servir provisoirement de logement pour un détachement au quartier d’Approuague et par la suite d’infirmerie pour la caserne,” by Joseph Emmanuel Laboria. Lamaison, “Guizanbourg,” 78–9.

c h a pte r te n 1 Pinon, “Saint-Domingue,” 108. 2 McClellan, Colonialism and Science, 75–6. 3 Elm trees were fairly common in Saint-Domingue in plantings as allées or to line public squares. For example, Moreau describes two rows of elm trees lining the public square in Saint-Marc, as well as a promenade called the Cours Bellecombe in the same town planted with four rows of elms. The town of Mirebalais also had a place d’armes planted with elms. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 2:195, 199, 232. On the introduction of imported elm trees into tropical Saint-Domingue see also McClellan, Colonialism and Science, 82. 4 McClellan, Colonialism and Science, 76. 5 For a selection of the literature on the role of ephemeral structures in baroque festivals, see Mulryne and Goldring, Court Festivals; Fagiolo, La festa a Roma; Dell’Arco, La festa barocca. 6 There is a substantial literature on ephemera in colonial Latin America. See Campos, La fiesta; Curcio-Nagy, The Great Festivals. 7 The square and church sound like the ones mentioned in a 1701 description by Père Labat (anf , Cartes et Plans, Service hydrographique de la Marine, 149, 4, 8d , “Plan du Cap”). For the Labat reference to the “assez belle place d’environ trois cents pas au carré” see Goguet and Mangones, Architecture, 21. An unpublished ink sketch of 1688 taken from a ship shows a very basic jumble of buildings with what looks like a small square with trees but very little land had yet been cleared from the surrounding forest (anf , Cartes et plans, Service hydrographique de la Marine, 149, 4, 5d , “Ainsy se fait voir le Cap au Sudouest et nordest … 1688”). For the early history of Cap in general see Pinon, “Saint-Domingue,” 109, 111–12; McClellan, Colonialism and Science, 81; Goguet and Mangones, Architecture, 5, 20–4. 8 “Il l’a trouvé en tres mauvais ordre, le nombre des habitans n’est que de 200 la pluspart chasseurs qui n’y resident que la moitié de l’année et les autres presque sans armes.” anom fm c 9a 7, “Iles de l’Amerique,” by Auger, 22 March 1704. 9 Pinon, “Saint-Domingue,” 110–12. 10 On Bombardopolis, built upcountry from Môle SaintNicolas and named after the Sieur de Bombarde, Préfontaine’s patron, see Hodson, The Acadian Diaspora, 114–15; Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 2:48–9. 11 McClellan, Colonialism and Science, 81. 12 Pinon, “Saint-Domingue,” 116. 13 Ibid., 115.

Notes to pages 238–43

551

14 Goguet and Mangones, Architecture, 83–5. 15 Pinon, “Saint-Domingue,” 109. 16 “assez avantageux à y faire un redoute … pour construire La Ville qu’il conviendroit d’avoir dans ce quartier.” anom fm c 9a 8, letter by Governor Jean-Pierre de Casamajor de Charritte, from Le Cap, 24 January 1707, 63b–4a. 17 “Une source abondante d’une très bonne eau éloigné environs d’une demie lieue du bord de la mer, et absolument hors du marecage, ce qui ne permet pas de doutes que l’air n’y soit très sain … suivant le plan que en sera dressé incessamment par le dit Sieur Cauvet Ingenieur … Nous ordonnons que l’Eglise parroissialle y sera incessament construite pour servir à tous les habitans du dit quartier en réunissant en cette paroisse celles de la petitte riviere et de l’Ester, qui seront demolies aussitôt après la construction de la dite Eglise de la pointe” (anom fm c 9a 9, SaintDomingue [1710–12], “Ordonnance qui fixe la ville de Leogane au quartier de la pointe,” signed by Choiseul and Mithon, 25 May 1710, 31b–2a. On the foundation see also Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 2:454–5. 18 See note 17. 19 “On y resolut la construction d’une grande Eglise sur le terrain de la nouvelle ville … Nous avons fait faire un plan de cette Eglise par Mr. Cauvet dans le dessin le plus simple, et nous avons reçu les offres au rabais pendant trois lundis pour la fourniture de tous les matériaux … nous aurions besoin de 8 ou 10 maçons, dont deux appareilleurs, et deux ou 6 charpentiers.” anom fm c 9a 9, letter of Paty and Mithon, 3 July 1711, 222a–4a. 20 Crane, Historic Architecture, 71. 21 The first quotation is from Saint-Méry, Description, 2:457. The second is: “grande bien bâtie, avec un beau portail, il n’y a que le pavé qui y manque.” anom fm c 9a 13, signed Chateaumorand, Léogâne, 18 March 1717, n.f. 22 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 2:454–5. 23 “On construit tous les jours de nouvelles maisons a la Ville de Leogane, M. le comte de Blenac a été surpris du progres de cet etablissement qui n’est commencé que depuis deux ans … nous ne negligerons rien pour exciter les habitants d’y batir de nouvelles maisons” (anom fm c 9a 10, report by Blenac and Mithon, 10 August 1713, 23a–b). Blénac and Mithon had this to say about the bricks, which were necessary for military buildings: “Du premier argent que nous aurons en caisse nous ferons couvrir d’essentes les casernes des Soldats tant ici qu’au Petit Goâve … on a essayé vainement de faire de la brique, et de la thuille en ce quartier, le Sr Lemaire avoit entrepris une briquerie qui lui a beaucoup couté sans aucun fruit, la terre ne s’est

552

Notes to pages 243–7

24

25 26 27

28

29

30 31

32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39

pas trouvée propre, la brique qu’on en tire est sans liaison, et la pluie la degrade par petits morceaux, M. de Champ y a mieux reussi au Cap, mais il la vent une fois plus chère que celle de France, ce manquement de briques a empeché qu’on n’ait entrepris la construction d’une poudrier en ce quartier, ce sera un des premiers ouvrages que nous ferons faire” (anom fm c 9a 10, signed Blénac and Mithon, 1 August 1714, 299b). “J’ai trouvé la Ville de Leogane bien bâtie, les rues tirées au cordeau, la place assez belle.” anom fm c 9a 13, letter by Châteaumorand, 18 March 1717. anom f 3296 d 23, “Plan de la Ville de Léogane,” 1713; anom 15 dfc 684b, “Plan de la Ville de Léogane,” 1715. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 2:456–7. anom 15 dfc 13c, “Plan de la ville de Leogane et fort de la Pointe, lieutenance de Roi du gouvernement de l’Ouest,” signed by Charles Brunier Larnage, 11 March 1742. anom , fm c 9a 11, “Etat des emplacements pris et occupez dans la Nouvelle Ville de Leoganne,” signed by Blénac and Mithon, 14 March 1715, 284–90. mbpa, Cartes et Plans, “Projet pour les Entrées de la Ville d’Aix par les Routes de Paris, Marseille et du Martigue,” 1 September 1781. See Boyer, Architecture et Urbanisme, 26–8; Boyer, “Deux projets inédits,” 222–40. Provence, Le Cours Mirabeau, 30; Masson, Les Bouches-duRhone, 12:319–21, 807. anom col e 66, “Cauvet, Antoine Charles, conseiller au Conseil supérieur de Port-au-Prince à Saint-Domingue (1773/1774)”; “Cauvet, Philippe Nicolas, commandant des milices de la paroisse de la Croix-des-Bouquets, à Saint-Domingue (1771)”; col e 64, “Cauvet, cadet à Rochefort (1737), commandant à Mirebalais à Saint-Domingue (1753).” anom 15 dfc 13c. anom 15 dfc 692a , “Plan de la ville et rade de Léogane relatif à l’article 10 du projet général de défense,” by Du Coudreau, undated (ca. 1740–50). anom 15 dfc 689c, “Plan de la ville et des environs de Léogane,” 1785, by Phelipeaux. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 2:456. Ibid., 2:464. Ibid., 2:537–40. anom 15 dfc 696b, “Petit-Goâve en 1688,” by Cornuau. “une maison de 84 pieds de long percée de créneaux et flanquée de deux petittes tours de quatre pieds de diametre aux encoignures, avec des retours de maçonnerie jusqu’au bord de la mer, ou l’on avoit fait un retranchement de terre avec des pieux … peu à peu ce bourg ne se soit un peu

40

41

42 43 44

45

46 47

rétabli par le nombre des maisons, mauvaises a la verité, mais capables de donner aux proprietaires de quoi en bastir de plus belles dans la suitte des temps.” anom , fm c 9a 9, “Projet du Petit Goâve,” signed Choiseul, 1 June 1710, 34a–b. The call number of the plan is anom 15 dfc 707a , “Plan de la baye du Petit Goâve,” signed by Cauvet, Mithon, Choiseul, Beaupré, 9 June 1710. See also Moreau de SaintMéry, Description, 2: 541. “Rien n’est si injuste que de forcer les habitans a donner des Negres pour d’autres ouvrages que pour ceux du service, et qui n’ont d’autre objet que celui de leur deffense.” anom fm c 9a 8, by Choiseul-Beaupré, 14 July 1709, 357a. “La façade de la maison du Gouverneur … a esté faite d’une pierre si tendre qu’elle s’est mise en poussière que le vent a emporté.” anom fm c 9a 26, 5 January 1726. anom 15 dfc 706b, “Plan des environs du bourg du Petit Goâve,” signed Philippe Cauvet, 1 June 1710. Pinon, “Saint-Domingue,” 113. “J’ai approuvé, Monseigneur, conjointement avec Monsieur Mithon le plan de ce bourg du Petit Gouave les particuliers y font a present bastir des magasins, ceux qui font les façades de la Place d’Armes seront achevés dans moins de trois mois, le reste suivra incessament, le tout sera tres regullier et tres commode pour le pays, les maisons feront a couvert des grandes ardeurs du soleil par des arbres qui seront plantés dans les milieux des rues a distances esgales.” anom fm c 9a 8, report signed by Choiseul and Beaupré, 27 November 1709, 391a. “L’enceinte du coste des terres sera tracée ainsi quelle est figuré au plan, cette enceinte ne sera autre chose qu’une double raye de citronniers plantée l’une de l’autre (ce travail se fera par les negres des habitans) … On a laissé un grand espace au-devant du fort en forme d’esplanade pour esloigner le feu de la mousqueterie; les rues sont assez larges pour que l’on y puisse planter deux ranges d’arbres pour la commodité publique. L’avantage d’avoir une fontaine au milieu de la place sera considerable non seulement pour le public mais encore pour les vaisseaux qui seront en rade … on a establi les cazernes a la teste de l’enceinte au nordest” (anom fm c 9a 9, 45a, 49a). But even this option would have cost 95,820 livres (anom fm c 9a 9, 54b). anom 15 dfc 711b, “Plan de la ville et du fort du Petit Goâve avec les environs,” signed by La Lance, 24 February 1728. anom 15 dfc 12c, “Plan de la ville et fort du Petit Goâve, capitale du Gouvernement de l’Ouest,” signed by Governor-General Charles Brunier, marquis de Larnage, 11 March 1742. The town had not progressed much by 1752, in the plan by Mathias Henri Dumoulceau (anom 15 dfc 734a ) or in maps from 1782 (anom 15 dfc 755a ) and 1789 (anom 15

48

49 50 51 52

53 54 55

56 57

58

59

60

dfc 758a). Defended by a pair of batteries and the nearby fort at l’Acul, the town was never walled. anom 15 dfc 719b, “Plan général pour un port fermé avec une ville de guerre défendue par une enceinte, une forteresse et deux batteries avancées proposée pour la baie de l’Acul du Petit Goâve”; 15 dfc 728a , “Plan du projet général d’une ville citadelle et port fermé à faire à l’Acul du Petit Goâve dressé par feu M. Meynier avec les changements faits par M. Coudreau tels qu’ils sont commencés en partie aujourd’hui,” 10 July 1743; 15 dfc 729a , “Plan général d’une ville et citadelle,” 10 July 1743. Moreau, Description, 2:314. Beauvoir-Dominique, L’ancienne cathédrale, 20–1. Moreau, Description, 2:544, 548–9. anom f3 296 e57, “Carte du Port au Prince, avec le plan du projêt de la ville a y établir et de l’enceinte de fortification a y construire dans la suite avec une citadelle pour sa deffense,” signed Lagneau de Laris, undated. Pinon, “Saint-Domingue,” 110; Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 2:311–14. Pinon, “Saint-Domingue,” 113–17. anom col e 247, “Lagneau de Laris (Louis-Denis), gentilhomme canadien, Ingénieur à Saint-Domingue, Lt. Colonel d’Infanterie, 1766–1780,” letter entitled “Etat des services du S. Lagneau de Laris Ingenieur,” Port-au-Prince, 10 December 1758, 1a. anom col e 247, “Etat des services” (undated; after 1772), 1a. anom col e 161, “Duportal, Antoine Jean Jacques, lieutenant-général des armées du Roi, directeur général des fortifications à Saint-Domingue et sa veuve Marie Jeanne Louise de Rault de Ramsault” (1766/1779). “toujours occupé du soin de fixer un point central de défense et de ralliement, le G.al Du Portal homme du premier mérite porta définitivement ses vues sur un point des hauts de l’Artibonite qui se trouve sur l’habitation Mirault ou il proposa de fortifier un octogone qui seroit un objet de dépense effrayante et plus impossible que jamais en ce moment.” anom 15 dfc 233, “Réflexions sur le Projet d’Etablissement d’une Place de Guerre Centrale dans la Colonie,” 4 December 1795, 1b. The staff at the Archives Nationales d’Outre-mer are also of the opinion that these plans date from the 1790s, although they date them to 1796, which I feel to be too late given the royalist references. anom 15 dfc 564b, “Projet d’une place de guerre à peu près centrale pour la partie française de l’Isle de SaintDomingue, conformément aux ordres de la Cour,” signed Deherine, 1796; 15 dfc 565b , “Projet d’une place de guerre

Notes to pages 247–56

553

61 62

63

64

65 66 67 68

69

70

71 72 73 74

554

à peu près centrale pour la partie française de l’Isle de Saint-Domingue, conformément aux ordres de la Cour,” signed Deherine, 1796. The two plans are identical. See Nelson, Architecture and Empire, 36–64. “Tous les militaires qui ont écrit sur la défense de St. Domingue et sur les moyens d’en assurer la propriété permanente à la France ont pensé que l’on ne pouvoit trouver cet avantage que dans l’établissement d’une place forte centrale”; “la révolte et la guerre cruelle qui a eu lieu dans les montagnes élevées de la partie du Nord.” anom 15 dfc 233, 1a. anom f3 296 e 11, “Plan de la Place Royale et des façades des islets formant la dite Place à l’Entrée de la Ville en consequence des ordres de MM. de Reynaud Commandant general et le Brasseur, commissaire ordonnateur faisant fonction d’intendant,” signed Calon de Felcourt, 8 November 1780. anom col e 180, “Corps du Genie de St. Domingue demandé pour la Croix de St. Louis,” 18 March 1783. See also Moreau, Description, 1:446. anom col e 8, death certificate of Arnaud, Jean (1789). McClellan, Colonialism and Science, 83. Ibid., 86; Pinon, “Saint-Domingue,” 113–18. anom Ar. F. 56, “Plan de la Ville du cap Français Isle St. Domingue avril mdcclXXiX .” On the history of the Place Royale see Moreau, Description, 1:445–7. anom f3 296 e 11, “Plan de la Place Royale et des façades des islets formant la dite Place à l’Entrée de la Ville,” signed by Calon, 8 November 1780. anom f3 296 e 14, “le Cap 1780. Plan du Projet de redressement du Chemin en direction de la Rue Espagnole des Augmentations à faire à la Promenade Publique, ainsi que des autres travaux à faire,” 30 July and 26 October 1780, signed by Calon de Felcourt, Reynaud, and Le Brasseur, 8 November 1780. Another project for a ceremonial approach to the city was a patte d’oie with a trident of treelined allées – a difficult feat given the narrowness of the coastal plain at this point. anom 15 dfc 396a , “Plan de la ville du Cap français chef lieu de l’île de Saint-Domingue, levé en 1780 par M. Eynard.” The Calon quotation is on the plan (anom f 3 296 e 11). The quotation from Moreau is from his Description, 1:447. Moreau, Description, 1:446–7. Pinot, “Saint-Domingue,” 119. For example, a notarial document dated 17 January 1784 refers to it as “Place-Royalle” (anom dppc not sdom// 185, Cap, Notary Bordier, 1784, “Testament du Sieur le Fevre,” 17 January 1784). The latest reference to the name is on a printed map of the city from 1789 (anom f 3 296 d 11,

Notes to pages 256–67

75 76 77 78

79

80 81 82 83

84 85

86 87

“Plan de la Ville du Cap et de ses Environs dans l’Isle St. Domingue,” Paris, 1789). The final state of the square can be seen in anom 15 dfc 406a , “Plan de la ville du Cap servant à indiquer son état actuel et les progrès de ses reconstructions,” signed by Charles-Humbert-Marie Vincent (1798). Moreau, Description, 1:147. Ibid. Goguet and Mangones, Architecture, 36. “Nous sommes arrivé ici le 24 du présent ou nous avons trouvé plus du désordre, qu’en France … la ville tous les soirs il y a des combats on leur tire des coups de canon … tous les habitants ont été obligés de se réfugier dans la ville et d’abandonner leurs habitations il arrive tous les jours des troupes la ville est menacée d’être incendie tous les jours.” anom fm f 6 4, letter by M. Payerne fils sent to his father in Grenoble (Cap, 29 March 1792), 239a. bnf, Service hydrographique de la Marine, 149, 4, 23, “Plan de la Ville du Cap dans son état actuel a 2 époque du 20 Prairial An. 5 de la République.” A 1798 map, which has renamed the royal square “Place Nationale” and shows that at least a fountain was built in the centre, shows that while the îlots had been traced out many of them were almost empty. anom 15 dfc 406a , “Plan de la ville du Cap servant à indiquer son état actuel et les progrès de ses reconstructions,” signed by Charles-Humbert-Marie Vincent (1798). Sanger, “Vauban, urbaniste,” 221. Petzet, Claude Perrault, 335. anom 19 dfc 10c, “Veüe du fort Royale du Senegal du Coste de Guinée” (1694). Sinou, Comptoirs, 17, 29; Hinchman, “African Rococo,” 18. On Chambonneau, see Ritchie, “Deux textes sur le Sénégal,” 289–353. “Hanc arcem facere curavit Lud[ovic]us Moreau dominus de Chambonneau &a.” In early modern France the hymn was performed during coronation ceremonies, initially as a sign of the subjects’ approval of their monarch but by this time as an affirmation of absolute rule: “by the coronation of Charles VIII in 1484, the Te Deum celebrated royal power unconditionally; the king sat, consecrated and enthroned, bearing all the devices of his royal majesty, while the cries of ‘Vivat rex in aeternam’ gave way to ‘Vive le Roy’ and the supreme acclamation of the Te Deum laudamus.” See Orden, Music, Discipline, and Arms, 141. Oresko, “The House of Savoy,” 296, 301; Garnett and Rosser, Spectacular Miracles, 71, 281. Searing, West African Slavery, 89.

88 anom 03 dfc 163b , “La Porte Dauphine de la Ville de Louisbourg à L’isle Royalle,” signed by Étienne Verrier (1729). 89 On the history of this gate see Flohic, Guadeloupe, 64. 90 McGowan, “The Renaissance Triumph,” 26–30. 91 Hautecoeur, L’architecture classique, 2:240–5. 92 anom f 3 296 e 12, “Plan, profil, et elevation d’une des Portes à faire à l’Entrée de la Ville du Cap au bout des Rues de Vaudreuil et St. Louis,” signed Rabié, 20 January 1781; f3 296 e13. “Plan, profil, et elevation d’une Porte à faire à l’entrée de la ville du Cap, vis à vis la Rue Royale,” signed Rabié, 20 January 1781. 93 Moreau notes about Rabié’s creations that “[e]ach would have been 50 feet across and of a similar height. Four columns of the Doric order supporting the building and projecting 26 inches, an arch 13 feet wide and 27 high gave passage between them in the middle with transom, archivolt and keystone, and two lateral doors … were six feet wide and 13 high.” Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:446. 94 Ibid. 95 Norberg-Schulz, Baroque Architecture, 9–15, 64–80. 96 “J’ai Etabli la 1ere fontaine au Port-au-Prince, qui n’avait jamais eu qu’une eau bourbeuse, que les animaux mêmes refusaient de boire. Après le grand tremblement de terre de 1770 toutes les sources avaient disparues pour cette ville, les troupes du Roi, et les habitans languissaient faute de ce premier besoin de la vie. Il en coutait au Roi cent mille livres par an, pour les charrois et fournitures d’eau de la garnison, de l’hôpital, des maisons du Gouverneur, de l’Intendant, des officiers d’Administration &a. Faut compter la dépense des journées d’hôpitaux, par ce que le manque d’eau produisait des maladies, et la mortalité parmi les troupes. J’ai eu à surmonter toutes sortes de contradictions pour faire adopter mon projet de conduite d’eau … les soins que j’ai pris d’en détourner les torrens d’eaux pluviales par des digues et fosses découlements, de la mettre à l’abri du soleil par des plantations d’arbres, l’ont tellement augmentée, qu’au lieu de la pouce d’eau elle en a rendu et rend encore ajourd’huy 84 pouces d’eau effectif a publique sur la place d’armes, une dans les cazernes, une autre au gouvernement, et une 4e a l’hôpital militaire … Le feu pouvait dans un instant détruire pour des milliers de bâtimens en bois, faute d’eau pour l’eteindre.” anom col e 221, “Hesse, Charles François, ingénieur-géographe, chef du dépôt des cartes et plans des Colonies (1748/1801),” letter from Paris, dated 6 November 1783. 97 McClellan, Colonialism and Science, 28.

98 Courtin, Paris au xviii e siècle, 26–7, 32–3; Courtin, Paris Grand Siècle, 76; Hautecoeur, L’architecture classique, 2:433–6. 99 Desmas, Edme Bouchardon, 230–60. 100 anom 15 dfc 353c , “Plan, profil et élévation d’une fontaine à faire sur le bord de la mer du Cap dans une des cales du quai pour l’aiguade des vaisseaux” (1747). 101 On the Fontaine de Charonne, see Hautecoeur, L’architecture classique, 2:434. 102 For an illustration of the Versailles grotto, see Le Rouge, Détail, 6:11, 12. 103 Both of these elevations are mere details in maps of the city: anom 08 dfc 379a , “Plan du projet pour conduire l’eau douce à la Pointe à Pitre dressé par le sieur Nassau en 1782,” signed by Nassau (1782); 08 dfc 395a , “Plan de la ville Pointe à Pitre en l’Isle Grande-Terre Guadeloupe levé et dessiné par le S[ieu]r Nassau Arpenteur breveté du Roi et Adjoint au Grand Voyer de l’isle en 1783 et 1784,” signed by Nassau (1784). 104 Courtin, Paris au xviii e siècle, 21. 105 Kalnein, Architecture in France, 196, 206, 222. 106 anom 15 dfc 640b , “Plan et profil pour servir au revetement de 30 toises du canal au-dessus et joignant le point DD et à la construction du bassin général” (1774). 107 Gady, Les hôtels particuliers, 96. 108 The translation is from Stone, Dictionary of Latin Quotations, 271. 109 A rough sketch of this monument survives in the Outremer archives (anom f 3 296 e 69, “Fontaine nouvellement construit Place Royale 1789”). For a description see Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:447. 110 In this case the governor was the Prince of Rohan and Intendant Alexandre-Jacques de Bongars. An engraving is published in Moreau de Saint-Méry, Recueil, pl. 6. 111 Including under the royal arms: “Regnante Ludovico XV, amatissimo Impensis Regis Fons exurgit Civibus” (“During the reign of the most beloved Louis XV a fountain rises at the King’s expense for the citizens”). See also McClelland, Colonialism and Science, 85. 112 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:330. 113 The fountain was heavily restored in 1861 but the urn is original. Plantier, Fontaines de Provence, 136. 114 Nevertheless Moreau disliked this fountain because, at a cost of over 1,133,333 livres, he thought it was a ridiculous extravagance for what he considered to be a mediocre town; furthermore it took forever to build and only worked for a year (Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:120). An engraving is published in Moreau de Saint-Méry, Recueil, pl. 6.

Notes to pages 267–75

555

115 The sources are inconsistent about the order of the columns: Moreau de Saint-Méry claims that the columns are Ionic (Description, 1:357), yet the engraving accompanying his Recueil (pl. 25) depicts them as Doric. Largues’s watercolour on the other hand shows them as Corinthian. 116 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:359. 117 Liégeois, Aix-en-Provence, 71. 118 McGowan, “The Renaissance Triumph,” 36–7; Petzet, Claude Perrault, 350–1. 119 anom 15 dfc 621c , “Profil pris sur la ligne a , b , du Plan de la fontaine projetée sur la place d’armes,” signed Hesse, 24 March 1773. 120 Petzet, Claude Perrault, 337–43. 121 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 2:357. 122 Affiches Américaines, 30 March 1774, 150. 123 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 2:348. 124 “Je ne vois pas la même nécessité à supprimer la fontaine qui est au milieu de la Place du Gouvernement, pour en construire deux adossées au mur de la cour. La Place est assez vaste pour que cet édifice qui y sert d’ornement ne soit pas déplacé dans son milieu et l’inconvenance de couper la vue du Gouvernement ne me paroit pas de nature a engager dans la nouvelle dépense qu’il faudroit faire si on le détruisoit.” anom 15 dfc 221, “Reconnoissance et Vues Genérales sur quelques parties de la Colonie Française de St. Dominuge,” signed Frémond de la Merveillère (1789), 12a. 125 McGowan, “The Renaissance Triumph,” 36–7; Petzet, Claude Perrault, 340–1. 126 See Wittman, Architecture, 80–94, 97–113.

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24

25

26 27 28 29 30 31

c h a p t e r e le v e n 1 Wick, “Le plan de paysage,” 174. 2 Montclos, “La représentation graphique,” 34–5. 3 Bouchenot-Déchin, “Beyond the Myth,” 35–9. See also Cojannot-Le Blanc, “Drawing in Paris,” 61–8. 4 Gady, “The Spade and the Compass,” 166–7. 5 Rosenberg, “Poussin and Le Nôtre,” 88–91; Lavergnée, “Le Nôtre’s Collection,” 91–9. 6 The classic text is Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions. 7 Besse, Face au monde, 97–125. 8 Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions, 176–81. 9 Bittering, L’invention du pré carée, 222–3; Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions, 39–97. 10 Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions, 45, 61. The quotation is from page 85. 11 Mosser, “Sous l’objectif.” 12 Chaline, A King and His Gardens, 26.

556

Notes to pages 276–88

32 33

34

35

Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions, 46–135. Chaline, “A King and His Gardens,” 26. Farhat, “Great Vistas,” 171–87; Weiss, Mirrors of Infinity, 67. Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions, 158–61. Thompson, The Sun King’s Garden, 180–1; Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions, 167–71. Mukerji, “The Power of the Sun King,” 55. Thompson, The Sun King’s Garden, 180. Regourd, “Maîtriser,” 49. Jeanson, Jardins, 200; Roussel and Gallozzi, Jardins botaniques, 18, 39–41, 58–9, 64, 72; Azema, Les jardiniers de Montpellier, 20–7; Regourd, “Maîtriser,” 47. Roussel and Gallozzi, Jardins botaniques, 17–18. Ibid., 38–40. Williams, Naturalists at Sea, 150–78; Ferloni, La Pérouse, 22–3. On Laurent’s involvement see Roussel and Gallozzi, Jardins botaniques, 129. Williams, Naturalists at Sea, plates 17–19; Ferloni, La Pérouse, 28–9; Roussel and Gallozzi, Jardins botaniques, 19–21. McClellan, Colonialism and Science, 152; Regourd, “Maîtriser,” 48. McClellan, Colonialism and Science, 148. Diakité, Louis XIV et l’Afrique noire, 72; Banks, “Financiers, Factors,” 102–8. Hinchman, Portrait of an Island, 30–1; Gnacadja, “Le Bénin,” 207–14; Berbain, Le comptoir français de Juda, 52. Diakité, Louis XIV et l’Afrique noire, 72. Darwin, Unfinished Empire, 42. On the pioneering French factories (comptoirs) in West Africa see Sinou, Comptoirs, 19–35. On the population of Gorée see Hinchman, Portrait of an Island, 220–1. Sinou, Comptoirs et villes coloniales, 108–15, 225–8. In his 1951 guide to Gorée, R. Mauny remarks simply that “Le Jardin actuel semble avoir été tracé dès le début de l’occupation par les Français.” Mauny, Guide de Gorée, 13. anom fm c 6 9, “Sénégal Galam, Bissaux, Estat des employéz existants dans les Departements de la Concession du Senegal au 15 mai 1725”; fm c 6 11, “Rolle general des Blancs et Negres au Service de la Compagnie des Indes a la concession du Senegal le 1er May 1736,” 3a; fm c 6 15, “Etat des appointements paies et gages de la colonie de Gorée pour l’année mil sept cent soixante six,” 1b. “Il y a cependant 2 jardins dont un de 30 toises en quarré, appelé jardin de la compagnie, près de la corne méridionale du port, et l’autre de 12 toises quarrées au N du gouvernement et du fort St François, tous 2 à l’usage de l’Etat-major” (anom fm c 6 15, “Senegal, Guyane [1758– 68], Michel Adanson, Pièces instructives concernant

36

37 38 39

40 41 42

43

44 45 46

l’ile Goré voisine du Cap-Verd en Afrike,” 1763, 4a); “Le Gouvernement est une vaste maison composée de plusieurs corps de logis, à un res de chaussée celui du milieu entre cour et jardin est distribué en quatre pieces, c’est ce qui forme le logement du commandant” (anom 17 dfc 122, “Cote d’Afrique Isle de Goré, Etat des forts, batteries, et maisons appartenantes au Roy lors de la prise de possession par Mr. Le Marquis de la Faille, le vingt cinq mars 1784,” 8a). On Adanson see Martin, “Les Français en Afrique subsaharienne,” 320–2. “Derriere les bastiments il y a une autre de 15 pieds en carré fait de brique pour loger le jardinier et servant de poste pour le jardin qui peut avoir 400 pieds en carré. (C’est un petit logis de jardinier aussy de brique couvert de paille qui a seulement six pieds de hault).” anom fm c 6 1, “Etat de l’habitation du Sénégal” (1664), 1b. Adanson, A Voyage to Senegal, 104. Lindsay, A Voyage to the Coast of Africa, 49. “Ancien jardin du gouverneur, dans lequel on entre par un escalier ruiné, pratiqué sur le rempart pour l’agrément du gouverneur.” anom 17 dfc 60a. Thilmans, Histoire militaire de Gorée, 207. All of the excerpts from Bouffler’s letters are quoted in Thilmans, Histoire militaire, 207. The autograph map is reproduced in Hinchman, Portrait of an Island, 66, and Thilmans, Histoire militaire, 62–3. The print is in Barbot, A Description, 5:plate iii . The earliest are two nearly identical maps which the anom catalogue dates as 1687 but which are undated (anom 17 dfc 10a , “Plan des forts et l’isle de Gorée”; 17 dfc 12b, “Plan du Fort de Gorée”). The 1699 map is 17 dfc 16a , “Plan des forts et isle de Gorée”; the print is entitled “Plan de l’Isle de Gorée” and Thilmans dates it to ca. 1730 (anom 1pl 2179; bnf shm 111 4 11d ). See Thilmans, Histoire militaire, 96–7. The mid-century map has the call number anom 17 dfc 31b and is entitled “Nouveau plan de Gorée.” It is datable to mid-century by a rococo cartouche in the style of Pierre-Edmé Babel (1720–1775) that appears on the map. anom 17 dfc 15a, “Plan des forts et de l’isle de Gorée.” anom 17 dfc 18b, “Plan de l’isle de Gorée prés le Cap Verd,” 1 June 1705, by Froger. anom 1pl 2180, “Plan de l’Isle de Gorée.” The print was published in Labat, Nouvelle relation. The engraving is based on a manuscript map in the Newberry Library in Chicago by René Vernise called “plan du fort de lisle de Gorée et ses projets levé par le Sr. Compagnon en avril 1714, desiné par René Vernise en Janvier 1716 (Newberry Library, vault drawer, Ayer ms , map 30, sheet 4).

47

48

49 50

51

52 53 54 55

56

57

Hinchman attributes the print to F. Baillieul l’Ainé, whereas Thilmans only mentions Compagnon. Neither source refers to the Newberry Library map Hinchman, Portrait of an Island, fig. 14; Thilmans, Histoire militaire, 86–7. anom 17 dfc 22b, “Carte de l’Isle de Gorée” (1723) by Desvallons. The de La Lance map is reproduced in Thilmans, Histoire militaire, fig. 13. The British print, entitled “A Plan of the Island of Goree,” has the call number anom 17 dfc  30b . C. Becker and V. Martin, “Mémoires d’Adanson sur le Sénégal et l’île de Gorée,” Bulletin de l’ifan b , 42, 4 (1980): 744. anom 17 dfc 54a, “Plan de l’Isle de Gorée,” 9 November 1763. See Edme Verniquet’s 1783 plan of the Jardin des Plantes in Deligeorges, Le jardin des plantes, 7; Roussel and Gallozzi, Jardins botaniques, 71; Pompignoli, “Apothicaires,” 240. The library belonged to one Jean-Baptiste Lecoup, and the titles are simply listed as “Pratique du jardinier” and “Le jardinière solitaire.” Hinchman, Portrait of an Island, 346–7. The second book was Claude Rigaud’s Le jardinier solitaire: ou, Dialogues entre un curieux et un jardinier; pratique du jardinier solitaire (Brussels, 1725). Wick, “Le plan de paysage,” 175–6. Wittman, Architecture, 86–7. He referred to it as the “Jardin de la Compagnie.” bnf Cartes et plans 111 4 9d , “Ile de Gorée” (undated, ca. 1763). He called it the “Jardin appartenant au Roi.” anom 17 dfc 60a , “Plan de l’Isle de Gorée,” signed Armény de Paradis (ca. 1763). anom 17 dfc 51a, “Ile de Gorée” (1766); 17 dfc 113a , untitled, undated; 17 dfc 17a , “Plan de l’Isle de Gorée” (ca. 1777); 17 dfc 17a , “Plan de l’Isle de Gorée,” unsigned, undated. anom 17 dfc 53a, “Plan de l’Isle de Gorée,” signed Armeny de Paradis (1 May 1766). This scheme appears on two more maps of ca, 1766: 17 dfc 111b , “Plan de l’Isle de Gorée presenté a Monseigneur de Sartine, Ministre et Secretaire d’Etat ayant le department de la marine,” signed Everard Du Parel (1776); anom 1pl 2108 (no title, ca. 1766). It next appears on five 1784 maps made for the Marquis de Lajaille, captain of the corvette La Bayonnaise who retook possession of the island: anom 17 dfc 128b , “Plan de l’Ile de Gorée,” signed by the captain of the corvette La Bayonnaise, 25 March 1784; “Plan de l’Ile de Gorée,” signed Lajaille and Durand (1784) at the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, Northwestern University; anom 2294-6.4, “Plan de L’isle de Gorée levé lors de la prise de Possession le 25 mars 1784 par Monsieur le Marquise

Notes to pages 288–94

557

58

59 60

61 62 63 64

65

66

558

de lajaille ,” 25 March 1784; anom 17 dfc 126c , “Plan de l’Ile de Gorée,” by the captain of La Bayonnaise (1784); and another copy with the shelf number 17 dfc 127b . The garden design appears four years later in a map by Everard du Parel (bnf cp ge d -16372, “Plan de l’Isle de Gorée,” signed by Everard Du Parel [1788]) and in 1821 (anom 17 dfc 160a , “Plan de l’île de Gorée,” signed M. Davy). Another copy is in the shd archives in Vincennes and published in Hinchman, Portrait of an Island, fig. 17. The reason I believe that this garden was not executed immediately after 1766 is that two 1769 maps still show an alternative design, a simple rectangle divided into nine plots and tree-lined walkways (anom 17 dfc 77c , “Ile de Gorée,” signed by Doumet, 2 June 1769; 17 dfc 81c , “Plan de l’Isle de Gorée [ca. 1769]. After 1769 the garden with the saltire cross appears fairly consistently in later maps. The design can be seen in a map entitled “Ile de Gorée” in Pierre-André Cariou, “Promenade à Gorée (Sénégal),” typed manuscript (1951–52), anom bib som d4506, and in an aerial view in a postcard from the 1950s by “la carte africaine, b.p. 57, Paris 14e,” in the collection of the author. On the history of the slave trade at Ouidah see David, “Ouidah,” 361–6. Martin, “Les Français en Afrique subsaharienne,” 343–5; Rediker, The Slave Ship, 90–1; Law, Ouidah, 1–6, 18, 50; Berbain, Le comptoir français de Juda, 24–5. Law, Ouidah, 48. Ibid., 37; Sinou, Le comptoir, 90–8; Berbain, Le comptoir, 55–6. Berbain, Le comptoir, 56. The first quotation is from shd gr 1 m 1105 63, “Memoire concernant la coste de Guinée et l’Utilité d’une forteresse a Anamabou” (undated; eighteenth century), 1a. The second is from Law, Ouidah, 78. “Le fort français est le premier, et la nation jouit de la distinction d’être préférée aux deux autres.” anom 16 dfc 75, “Réfléxions sur Juda par les Srs De Chenevert et Abbé Bullet” (1776), 32a. I am calculating the length of the garden at between 125 and 150 toises, as represented in Bullet’s two maps, one of the whole town of Grégoy (150 toises) and the other of the fort and gardens (125 toises) (anom 1pl 2210, “Rade de Juda,” by Pierre-Joseph Bullet [1776]; 1pl 2209, “Plan du bois des jardins et du fort de St Louis de Juda,” by Pierre-Joseph Bullet [1776]). In his plan of the fort the garden does not seem to be drawn at the same scale as it is boxed in a separate part of the sheet surrounded by text.

Notes to pages 294–7

67 Law, Ouidah, 31; Berbain, Le comptoir, 57. 68 bnf cp shm 113 4 38d , “Plan de la rade et des forts de Juda … par le Sr. de Marchand en 1705.” 69 anom 1pl 2209, 1pl 2210. On the foundation of the fort at Ouidah see Berbain, Le comptoir, 49–54. The fort was about 52 toises long (just over 101 metres) by 42 wide: “Le fort est exposé S.E. et N.O. il y a environ 52 toises de long sur 42 de large ; il est clos d’un mur en terre flanqué de 4 bastons, entouré d’un fossé d’environ 24 pieds de large sur 18 à 20 de profondeur.” anom 16 dfc 75, “Mémoire sur le Fort de Juda, côte d’Afrique” (ca. 1776), 1b. 70 “Jardin, bois, et promenade du fort dont tous les arbres sont fruitiers soit oranges soit citronniers soit goyaviers soit pommiers d’acajou soit tamarin et cerisier … Terres labourables excellentes, qui produisent en abondance du bled de Turquie et toutes sortes de légumes, malgré qu’elles soient mal cultivées; tout est défriché a une lieue aux environs; il n’y en n’a qu’une très petite partie d’ensemencée. Les négres du Fort François en ont tant qu’ils veulent, et à choisir, mais la fainéantise les empêche d’en tirer parti; ils content sur la solde du roi, et ne travaillent ni pour eux ni pour leurs maitre: on n’a même pas l’intelligence de leurs en faire cultiver un coin pour les employés du fort qui sont obligés d’acheter tout au poids de l’or; leurs indolence est poussée au point qu’ils n’entretiennent même pas les haies du jardin, qui est ouvert à tout le monde, et a tous les animaux; de sorte que l’on n’entier aucun profit; leurs seul ouvrage, entre deux cent qu’ils sont, et qui coutent par an quinze mil francs au Roi, est d’entretenir les couvertures du fort, d’aller chercher du bois et d’apporter du bord de la mer au fort les provisions que le roi envoie … tous diront, qu’avec tel nombre d’esclaves il est pitoyable de ne pas faire plus d’ouvrage, et de leurs donner un solde, pendant qu’ils ont du terrain à souhait et a choix à cultiver; avec ce nombre d’esclaves le fort devrait être couvert de tuile et bâtit tout en brique.” anom 1pl 2209. 71 Law, Ouidah, 78; Sinou, Le comptoir de Ouidah, 99. 72 Rediker, The Slave Ship, 81, 90–1; Law, Ouidah, 2. 73 Berbain, Le comptoir, 62–3. Jean-Baptiste Labat, in his Voyage du chevalier de Marchais en Guinée en 1725, described the gardens inside the castle walls: “Parmi ces comptoirs le français était le plus grand et le mieux bâti, disposant d’une cour rectangulaire fermée par des corps de bâtiments uniformes; al milieu de la cour, un jardin potager avec quelques gros pieds d’orangers. Il y a un corps de logis au-dessus de la grande porte, et un corps de garde avec le pavillon de la nation. Il y a encore un jardin dans la bassecour; derrière le corps de logis du fond, une forge, des

74 75

76

77 78

79

cuisines, des offices et les autres pièces nécessaires à une grande maison.” Quoted in Soulillou, Rives coloniales, 211. On the Zobé market see Law, Ouidah, 82. Berbain, Le comptoir, 61–2. “On sait que le fort n’a plus que le titre de comptoir, et celui qui y commande que de titre de Directeur du Commerce.” anom 16 dfc 75, “Réfléxions sur Juda par les Srs De Chenevert et Abbé Bullet” (1776), 22a. “Le poste de Juda n’étant point militaire, n’étant même pas susceptible de l’être, peut être réduit, a la plus simple et a la plus modique dépense … comme c’est un pais dénué de tous les secours des arts et métiers, on est obligé de se procurer par soi-même tout ce qui on provient d’utile et de nécessaire tant au fort qu’aux navires marchands qui y abordent, il faut en conséquence des ouvriers blancs que l’on peut réduire a six avec deux canonniers, sçavoir, deux briquiers, maçons, deux serruriers, deux charpentiers menuisiers … deux jardiniers.” anom col e 56, “Colonies 1777. Essai économique et ammélioratif sur le fort de St Louis de Juda,” 1a. On the fate of the fort see Soulillou, Rives coloniales, 212. Lenik, “Mission plantations,” 54. “La maison … consiste en un gros pavillon et deux aisles et un corps de bâtiment immense qui pouvoit être utile aux jesuittes en vivant en communauté, ou servir leur luxe, parce que voyant beaucoup de monde, ils entretenoient en nombreux domestiques mais elle seroit fort à charge même à un très riche particulier quiconque en deviendra propriétaire.” adm j 222, part 1, “Correspondance de M. Le Président (Guadeloupe and Martinique), Biens des Jesuites” (18 February 1773), 26–7. The basic layout of the Jesuit property appears on the earliest maps of the quarter (1693, 1685) by royal engineers Jean-Baptiste de Caylus and Marc Payen, and Lenik has found a reference to the potager already in 1646, so the main features of the property were clearly part of the original design of the complex (anom 13 dfc 65b , “Plan du fort Saint-Pierre de la Martinique et des ouvrages proposez à y ajouter pour le mettre hors d’insulte,” signed by Jean-Baptiste de Caylus, ingénieur, 15 March 1693; 13 dfc 41a , “Plan géométrique du bourg et fort Saint-Pierre de l’isle Martinique,” signed by Marc Payen, ingénieur du Roi [1695]). In fact the only difference from later maps is that the early ones show fewer buildings related to sugar cane production, including slave huts. In maps from 1763, 1807, and an undated one from the first half of the nineteenth century the property remains intact, although the 1763 map – drawn for the British naval officer George Brydges

80

81

82 83 84

85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94

95

Rodney – shows that the Jesuits’ house had by that time expanded to several times its original size, with a long wing and paired courtyards to the north of the potager (anom 13 dfc 191b, “The Bay, Town, Fortifications and Environs of Saint-Pierre in the Island of Martinique surveyd by Order of Sir G.B. Rodney in 1763”; 13 dfc 487c , “Plan de la ville de Saint-Pierre” [ca. 1800–1850]; 13 dfc 488b , “Plan du bourg Saint-Pierre de la Martinique et de ses environs” [ca. 1807]). A 1770 map published by Lenik is similar to the others except it shows how many slave huts existed to the west of the house in the “camp des negres” (the number may have been augmented in the post-Jesuit period). Lenik, “Mission Plantations,” 60. Francis Swaine, View of Saint-Pierre, Martinique (1763). Musée Regional d’Histoire et d’Ethnographie, Martinique, 1997.52.1. The avenue was about 100 toises (about 190 metres) according to various of the maps cited above. “Le terrein … attenant à l’avenue … les jesuittes euxmêmes et ceux qui sont venus après ont laissé cet espace en friche pour le public, le sol n’etant susceptible d’aucune sorte de culture. L’avenue restera intacte pour la promenade publique.” adm j 222, part 1, 27. See the unnumbered illustration in Lambolez, SaintPierre-Martinique. Lenik, “Mission Plantations,” 60. Le Jardin Potager est immense, dans de murs de tous côtés, sans communication avec les terres et les bâtiments de la manufacture.” adm j 222, part 1, 27. Lenik, “Mission Plantations,” 60. Harris, “Mapping Jesuit Science,” 212–40. Rennard, Histoire religieuse, 191. Lenik, “Mission Plantations,” 55, 58. Ibid., 60. McClellan, Colonialism and Science, 94, 159. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:577. Ibid., 1:589–91. McClellan, Colonialism and Science, 92. Pompignoli and Anckaert, “Apothicaires,” 207–12; Roussel and Gallozzi, Jardins botaniques, 16–17, 39–40. The hospital was already operational in 1717: “Il y a deux hopitaux de Religieux de la Charité etablis au St. Domingue, l’un au Cap et autre a Leogane.” anom 15 dfc 2, “Mémoire du Roy pour servir d’Instruction au S. Marquis de Chateaumorant chef d’escadre, Gouverneur et Lieutenant General des Iles de St. Domingue” (1717), 3a. “Nous avons été visité l’hopital … l’apotiquairerie est bien garnie, et tout nous a paru en bon ordre dans cette maison.” anom fm c 9a 16, letter from Chateaumorant and

Notes to pages 297–301

559

96 97 98 99 100 101

102

103 104 105 106 107

108 109 110

111 112 113

114

115

560

Mithon, 4 January 1719, 123b; f 3 296 b 9, “Plan d’une partie de la Ville du Cap,” by M. de Mensuy, ingénieur ordinaire du Roy (1764). anom 15 dfc 384b, “Plan de l’Hopital de la Charité,” signed René Gabriel Rabié, 1774. Affiches Américaines, 21 March 1770, 137–8. For the European context see Salatino, Incendiary Art; Hautecoeur, L’architecture classique, 2:239–40. Le Jeune, Relation, 17–19. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:390. anom 15 dfc 340b, “Isle St Domingue. Plan de la ville du Cap, signed Jean André Du Coudreau, ingénieur en chef (1744). Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:390. The original Jesuit gardens appear in a plan by royal engineer Alexandre François Duparquier fils from 1774. anom 15 dfc 385a , “Plan de la maison du Roy, occupée par le conseil et le commissaire ordonnateur. Au Cap,” signed Duparquier fils (1774). Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:291. McClellan, Colonialism and Science, 86; Moreau de SaintMéry, Description, 1:374. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:390–1. Ibid., 1:391. anom 15 dfc 380b, “Plan du jardin du Roy, proposé dans l’enclos de la Maison du Gouvernement, pour servir de promenades publiques,” signed by Rabié, 20 March 1774; 15 dfc 381b , Plan du jardin du Roi proposé dans l’enclos de la maison du Gouverneur pour servir de promenades publiques,” signed by Rabié, 20 March 1774. On the bosquet, see Laird, The Formal Garden, 78–9. Buridant, “From Shaded Lanes,” 249–50; Thompson, The Sun King’s Garden, 133–49. Turcot, “Former une promenade,” 51–72. bnf, Cartes et Plans, 149, 4, 22d, “Plan de la Ville du Cap Francois et ses Environs” (engraving by Phelipeau, 1789). The quotation is from Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:392. Ibid. Affiches Américaines, 18 February 1784, 2–3. anom f3 296 e 40, “Plan du Gouvernement general,” signed by ingénieur ordinaire du Roi Lagruau de Larey, 2 November 1752. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 2:354. anom 15 dfc 661a , “Plan, profil et élévation de l’hôtel du Gouvernement et des bâtiments qui en dependent, Portau-Prince,” signed Pierre Antoine Jérôme Frémont de La Merveillère. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 2:354.

Notes to pages 301–16

116 117 118 119 120 121 122

123 124

125 126

Ibid., 2:356. Ibid., 2:355. Affiches Américaines, 14 February 1770, 78. Ibid., 4 April 1770, 163. See Warwick, Bernini, 44–7, 50–4. Affiches Américaines, 1 September 1773, 413–14. anom f3 296 e 50, “Plan d’une Promenade Publique sur la Place de L’Intendance, ou du Marché à laquelle sont adossées les deux Fontaines ordonnées par MM le Cte de la Luzerne, et de Marbois, Général et Intendant en 1787,” signed Sorrel (1787); f 3 296 e 51, “Plan et Elévation de la Façade d’une Promenade Publique sur la Place de L’Intendance du Port-au-Prince,” signed Sorrel, 20 May 1788; f3 296 e 52, Elévation d’une des deux Fontaines adossées au mur de la Promenade Publique sur la Place de l’Intendance de la Ville de Port-au-Prince,” 1787. An engraving of the latter is published in Moreau de Saint-Méry, Recueil de vues des lieux principaux de la colonie françoise de SaintDomingue (Paris, 1791), nr. 6 bis. The Intendance gardens also appear in some detail in a map of the city: anom 15 dfc 646a , “Plan de la ville et du port de Port-au-Prince,” signed Frémont de La Merveillère (1790). Blanchard, Les ingénieurs, 429. The Place Royale first appears on maps in 1788 (e.g., bnf , Cartes et plans, 149, 7, 15, “Plan de la Ville du Port-auPrince arrêté le 12 8bre 1788” [1789]). It is absent in maps from 1785 and 1790 (anom 15 dfc 645c , “Plan de la rade, ville et environs du Port-au-Prince,” by Phelipeaux [engraving, 1785]; 15 dfc 646a , “Plan de la ville et du port de Port-au-Prince,” signed by Frémont de La Merveillère [1790]). A report from 1789 discusses a plan to place a fountain in the Place Royale: “On ne sauroit amener trop d’eau dans cette ville pour en maintenir la propreté a la salubrité, ni trop en multiplier les distributions dans les différents quartiers contre les incendies. Ainsi lorsque les circonstances le permettront je regarderai comme nécessaire d’achever le projet qui doit procurer une fontaine sur la Place Royale” (anom 15 dfc 221, “Reconnoissance et Vues Genérales sur quelques parties de la Colonie Française de St. Domingue” [1789], 11b). Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 2:333. His project also includes a trellised floral bower behind the south block of the new Intendancy and a large vegetable garden to the south of the whole complex. See Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 2:338; anom f 3 296 e 42, “Plan et détails des bâtiments de L’intendance du Port-au-Prince, pour constater ceux qui ont été faits depuis les tremblements de terre du 3e juin 1770,” signed Charles Durand de Saint-Romès, 1 July 1772. The original allée also appears

127

128 129 130

131

132

133

134 135

136

in a map of 1774 (anom 15 dfc 643a , “Plan de la ville et de la rade du Port-au-Prince avec une partie de ses environs relatif à l’article 9 du projet général de défense,” signed Hesse, 16 August 1774). The walls, double staircase, and balustrades of the Promenade Publique survive today as the square in front of the ruined New Cathedral (rue du Dr Aubry), and there are plans to replant some of the lawns as part of a reconstruction of that church. See Cauna, “Vestiges,” 22. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 2:338–39. Ibid., 2:340. Quoted in Alfred Lacroix, Notice historique sur les membres et correspondants de l’académie des sciences, 18. See also Turenne, “Voyageurs naturalistes,” 51–4; McClellan, Colonialism and Science, 149; Regourd, “Maîtriser,” 50. “Mr Mesnier donne avis de la mort du Sr Lignon jardinier Botaniste du Roy arrivé le 20 Janvier dernier. Il s’est trouvé dans ses papiers un Brevet de don d’aubaine du dernier décembre 1707 ou il est qualifié de Botaniste ordinaire pour les plantes des plus méridionales, et une lettre de M le Duc d’Orleans du 22 Xbre 1716 par laquelle sur le compte rendu par Mr. L’abbé Bignon du soin qu’il prenoit des plantes, il lui y marqua qu’il lui estoit accordé 1000 livres de recompense tous les ans et lui envoya 1000 ll avec une medaille d’or et la chaisne pour marque de satisfaction de ses services.” anom col e 286, “Lignon, jardinier-botaniste du Roi à la Guadeloupe,” letter of 1 February 1729, 1a. “Il marque que cet emploi se trouve remplacé par le Sr. Peyssonnel qui a passé dans cette isle en l’année 1727 avec un Brevet de medecin Botaniste du Roy aux appointements de 1000 livres par an auquel il a donné un ordre de se transporter en la demeure du dit feu Sr. Lignon ou il avoit un jardin nommé Jardin du Roy pour y faire un inventaire des arbres, plantes et graines pour en faire des envois au jardin Royal affin de connoistre ceux qui pourroient se transplanter chez lui et en prendre soin pour en faire le mesme usage, il parroist par le mémoire qu’il lui a remis et qu’il envoie, que ce qui s’est trouvé dans ce jardin est de peu de consequence.” anom col e 286, 1a–b. anom col e 335 bis, “Peyssonnel, Jean André, médecinbotaniste à la Guadeloupe (1726/1756), letter of 17 February 1756. McClellan, Colonialism and Science, 150. anom 15 dfc 494a , “Plan de la Ville de des Environs du Môle St. Nicolas,” signed by Charles Humbert Marie Vincent (1799). anom 08 dfc 524a , “Plan du fort Saint-Charles et des environs. Exercice 1818,” signed Emmanuel Philibert,

137 138

139

140 141 142 143 144 145

146

15 September 1819. The Letter “o ” on this map is keyed to the text: “Jardin du Roi projété sur le terrein des Carmes.” McClellan, Colonialism and Science, 152; Regourd, “Maîtriser,” 51. “Le S. Hesse, Capitaine d’Infanterie demande des lettres patentes, confirmatives d’une ordonnance des administrateurs de St. Domingue (20 mai 1786) qui lui permet d’établir une prise d’un pouce d’eau sur le canal de l’hôpital. Les administrateurs ont autorisé le Sr. Hesse à faire cet établissement dans la vue de l’indemniser d’une portion de terrein qui lui a été prise pour former le Jardin Botanique du Roi.” anom col e 221, “Hesse, Charles François, ingénieur-géographe, chef du dépôt des cartes et plans des Colonies (1748/1801),” memorandum of 30 September 1786, 1a–b. anom f3 296 d 37, “Plan de la ville du Port au Prince” (1783); anom 15 dfc 645c , “Plan de la rade, ville et environs du Port-au-Prince,” signed Phelipeaux (engraving, 1785); bnf , Cartes et plans, 149, 7, 15, “Plan de la Ville de Port-au-Prince arrêté le 1788” (1789); anom 15 dfc 646a , “Plan de la ville et du port de Port-au-Prince,” signed by Merveillère (1790). anom 15 dfc 666a , “Plan de la ville du Port Républicain et de ses environs,” signed Merveillère (after 1793). Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 2:365. Wimpffen, A Voyage to Saint Domingo, 210–11, 171. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 2:369. Affiches Américaines, 21 January, 1784, 3–4. “Ce matin à la pointe du jour, je suis monté à cheval et je suis allé à l’ancienne habitation des frères de la charité (très vaillante) aujourd’hui national et tenu en forme par Henry de Moulins … à 8 heures je suis redescendu par l’habitation LeBlanc et le chemin qui aboutit au jardin des plantes. C’est un jardin naissant, qui pourra un jour ajouter aux richesses de cette colonie. Il est confié à Castelnau d’Auros, émigré de Bordeaux. Il possède une 100aine de plantes exotiques la plupart indiennes. Il y a fait ressentir une belle cascade, qu’on entendait, mais qu’à peine on apercevait.” adm 24j 1, “Mémoires de Pierre Clément Laussat,” 1, fol. 36 (Saint-Pierre, 27 June 1804). anom 13 dfc 572a, “Plan topographique du jardin des plantes de Saint-Pierre Martinique,” signed by Esprit Bodin (1823). Several maps from the period also show the gardens in detail and are very consistent: 13 dfc 550a , “Plan topographique de la ville et environs de Saint-Pierre Martinique,” signed Laroque Dufau (1819); 13 dfc 557a , “Plan topographique de la ville et environs de SaintPierre Martinique,” signed by François-Louis-Joseph

Notes to pages 316–21

561

147 148 149

150

151

562

Garin, commandant du Génie (1820); 13 dfc 558a , “Plan topographique de la ville et des environs de Saint-Pierre Martinique,” signed by Garin (1820). On the duc de Chartres’s garden see Courtin, Paris au xviii e siècle, 68; Dauchez, “Normes,” 166–75. D’Orgeix and Frémaux, “La petite maison,” 8; Regourd, Maîtriser,” 51; Le Roux, “L’habitation guyanaise,” 539. anom 14 dfc 130b, “Plan van de Stadt and Vesting Cayenne” (ca. 1750–60). The plantation, located 300 Dutch roeden east of the Savane (just over a kilometre) is called the “s’Koningsplantage.” “Un Batiment de 66 pieds de long, sur 27 pieds de largeur y compris une galerie, construit en mauvaise charpente … ce batiment, ne doit être compté que pour mémoire.” anom 14 dfc 356, “Etat des plans des batimens du Roy tant dans l’Interieur de la Ville qu’à la Savanne, Cayenne,” signed by Designy, 30 December 1782, 9a; “C’est un batiment pourri. Il ne doit effectivement être compté que pour mémoire: son emplacement est beau: on pourroit construire dessus une maison pour le Directeur du Jardin des Plantes si jamais on en fait un a Cayenne de celui qu’on appelle Jardin du Roy.” 14 dfc 375, “Observations sur l’état des batiments du roi envoié par MM les administrateurs au mois de Xbre 1782,” signed M Desrivières Gerss (December 1782), 8b. “4. Jardin du Roi, à Cayenne. Ce jardin est entretenu autant que sa situation le permet; il n’a pas encore reçu les Plantes d’Inde qui ont été annoncés et dont on renouvelle, au besoin, la demande à Monseigneur; mais on l’a augmenté de quelques plants et arbres de l’intérieur de ce continent; on a fait passer à M. le Comte de la Luzerne, Gouverneur à St. Domingue, d’après l’autorisation du Ministre, par la corvette, La Sincere, que ce Gouvernement a envoyée à cet effet, au mois de Mars dernier, des plants de Vanille, de Salsepareille, de Roses de la Chine, de Manguiers, de Gérofliers, de Canéliers, de Sagou, de Kaida, de Quassia Amara, de Guiaguiomadou, d’Ipécacuanha, et autres plants et graines du pais. Le terrain de ce jardin, étant resserré et stérile, la plupart des plantes y profitent peu: il occupe un espace précieux, dans la nouvelle ville; il sera peut-être trouvé préférable, de transporter les plants que y sont, dans le local de l’Habitation du Roi, et dans celui où est la Gabrielle, dans le cas où on y entretiendra une pépinière: la différence du sol et du climat qu’existe entre ces deux endroits, montrera par l’expérience, quel est le local où chacune de des productions prospéra le mieux; telle se plaira dans les parties sablonneuses, ou dans celles passes et marécages du voisinage de la Mer; telle autre réussira mieux dans le climat plus frais de la montagne, dans telle ou telle exposition; ce qu’il n’est pas possible de varier dans

Notes to pages 321–5

152

153

154

155

le local resserré et ingrat du Jardin du Roi.” anom 14 dfc 436, “Mémoire sur la Situation Actuelle de la Colonie,” signed l’Escalier (Cayenne, 25 July 1787). Auricchio, The Marquis: Lafayette Reconsidered, 120–1; Ghachem, The Old Regime, 229; Willens, “Lafayette’s Emancipation Experiment,” 354–62; Gillard, “Lafayette, Friend of the Negro,” 357–64. Orgeix and Frémaux, “La petite maison,” 8; Le Roux, Le Vaudois des terres noyées, 57–63; Le Roux, “L’habitation,” 539. The quotation concerning citoyen Martin is as follows: “Paris le 11 Germinal, au 5e de la république française une et indivisible. Citoyen président: Je crois qu’il est de mon devoir de vous faire part d’une lettre que je viens de recevoir de Cayenne, par laquelle j’apprends que le muscadier a donné cet année, une grande quantité de fruits, et qu’à l’époque du 25 Ventôse dernier, il promettait une récolte des plus abondantes. En outre, que deux arbres intéressants, que j’ai introduits dans cette colonie, réussissaient parfaitement: l’un est le litchi et l’autre le Cookia ou le Wampi. J’achetai ces deux individus à Philadelphie, dans un voyage que j’eus occasion d’y faire au mois de messidor dernier, et dont le Citoyen Adet, ministre plénipotentiaire de la république française près les états unis d’Amérique, a connaissance. Si vous juges, Citoyen président, que cette lettre puisse être de quelqu’intérêt a l’institut national, je vous prie de vouloir bien lui en donner connaissance. Salut et respect, Martin (Jardinier directeur du jardin des épices à Cayenne). anom fm f 6 2, 598, letter dated 11 Germinal, An. V., 2 April 1796. For a list of the slaves at La Gabrielle in 1785 see Guisan, Le Vaudois des terres noyées, 310–14. “L’expérience faite au poste principal sur le terrain du Jardin situé à l’ouest de la Maison du Gouvernement qui avait été en mil huit cent vingt-deux cultivé par le Sieur Martin Maitre Charpentier. Et qui lui avait donné d’assez belles productions. Ce même terrain cette année cultivé par le Sieur Trévau Jardinier du Roi à la Mana avec beaucoup de soins n’a presque rien produit comparativement à celui également par lui défriché et planté derrière la dite Maison.” anom 14 dfc 663, “Rapport à Monsieur Le baron Villiers commandant et administrateur de la Guyane Française pour le Roi, par Monsieur Pansiotti, arpenteur juré du Gouvernement, sur les établissements de la Mana” (Cayenne, 19 November 1823 – 12 March 1825), 1a–b. Mallé, Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, 37. c h a pte r twe lve

1 Letenoux, Architecture et vie traditionelle, 149–50. 2 Champlain, Voyages, 136–7.

3 Kornwolf, Architecture and Town Planning, 1:206–7; Noppen and Grignon, L’art de l’architecture, 27. See also Chénier, Québec, 20; Charbonneau, Québec, the Fortified City, 20–3; Traquair, The Old Architecture, 5–8. 4 Du Tertre, Histoire, 2:31. 5 Dovecotes in Normandy were typically of this type (or octagonal) rather than square as in the Champlain habitation. See Boithias and Mondin, La maison rurale, 32. 6 For a variety of half-timbered farmhouses from Normandy see for example Boithias and Mondin, La maison rurale, 36–41, 64–5. 7 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1:171. 8 Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 79. 9 Beck, “Les châteaux,” 1:156, fig. 5. 10 Charbonneau, Québec, 21–6; Laurent and Saint-Pierre, Les forts, 75–6. See also Iturbide-Kennedy, “Les sièges,” 32–3. 11 anom 03 dfc 347b , “Carte du Fort St. Louis,” signed by Franquelin (1683). 12 Iburbe-Kennedy, “Les sièges,” 32; Noppen and Villeneuve, Le trésor, 133–43. 13 Laurent and Saint-Pierre, Les forts, 75. On the Château de Cadillac see Perrin, Le château de Cadillac; Hautecoeur, L’architecture classique, 1:537–41. 14 Beck, Les châteaux, 156, fig. 5. The long, low profile with dormers was common in service wings: there is another one, this time with two storeys and an attic, at the Manoir de l’Angenardière in Normandy, also from the late sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries. Beck, Les châteaux, 272, fig. 3. 15 anom 03 dfc 448c , “Plan du chasteau de Quebek”; 03 dfc 352c , “Couppe sur la ligne a , b, c , marqué sur le plan de Quebec” (1685); 03 dfc 353c , “Coupe sur la ligne d b e marqué sur le Plan de Québec” (1685); 03 dfc 349b , “Plan de la ville et chasteau de Québec, fait en 1685, mezurée exactement, par le Sr de Villeneuve” (1685). See Kornwolf, Architecture and Town Planning, 213; Noppen and Grignon, L’art de l’architecture, 42–3, who reproduce two of these drawings. 16 Pagazani, La demeure noble, 118–19. 17 “Sept milliers de bardeau a 7 ll le millier, 49 ll; vingt huit milliers de clous a 50 s le millier, 56 ll; Trente huit toises de couverture neuve a 40 la toise, 76; 30 toises de murailles de trois pieds d’epoisseur a chaux et sable a raison de 15 ll la toise pour la face du fort à l’ouest, 450 ll; pour l’engagement de deux massons de la Compagnie, 345.10s” (certifié par M. de la Barre). anom 03 dfc 348, “Mémoire de la despense faite au Fort de Saint Louis de Quebec pour l’avoir fait couvrir a neuf de Bardeau du costé de l’Est,” 25 October 1683, 1a.

18 “il est tres necessaire, comme Vostre Grandeur le verra par le plan que fait le d. Sr. de Villeneuve, de faire construire ce nouveau chasteau, car le vieux n’est d’aucune deffense, il est tout ruiné, et ne vaut pas la peine d’y faire de nouvelles reparations; les fondements manquent par tout dans les caves, et tous les planchers en sont pourries, Mr. le Gouverneur n’est pas méme en seureté dedans lorsqu’il fait grand Nord-Est.” anom 03 dfc 355, “Mémoire du Sr de Villeneuve sur les fortifications de Québec” (after 1691), 2a. 19 anom 13 dfc 47c , “Plan du logement à faire dans le fort Royal pour le lieutenant général des Isles,” by Blénac, 7 September 1686. 20 “Pour 382 toises ½ quarrées de maconnerie estimées a 13834 ll. Pour 179 toises cubes de terre a enlever pour les fondemens, 1182; Pour 6604 pieds de bois pour la charpente, 2302.13; Pour 208 toises quarrées de couverture sont compris a 10 ll, 2080; Pour 7050 pieds quarrez de planches pour les planchers, 2196.14; Et pour 53 portes et fenestres y compris leurs ferrures, 1590. Total 23185.7.” anom 13 dfc 46, “Extrait du devis des ouvrages a faire pour la construction du logement du Roy dans le fort Royal de la Martinique dont l’estimation monte a 23 185 ll. 70,” 10 September 1686, 1a. 21 “Premierement: Le dit logement aura cent trente cinq pieds de long sur vingt de large, conformement au plan et profil qui en sera donné; les murs de face auront deux pieds d’épaisseur dans lesquels on observera couverture des portes et fenestres, qui seront revestuées de pierre de taille qui ce monte a 4220 pieds quarrée et 382 toises ½ quarrée de massonnerie avec les voutes de la cuisine pave de carreau de terre fours et cheminées le tout estimé a la somme de 13834 ll. Les terres qu’il faudra tirer pour faire les fondements des dits murs et vidange de la cave et cuisine ce monte a 179 toises cubes estimée a 1182. Tous les bois de charpente qu’il faut pour les planchers, et comble du dit batiment ce monte a la quantité de 6604 pieds vault, 2302 ll. Deux cents huict thoises quarrée de couverture d’essente, compris la late, cloux et peine de couvrier, a 10 ll la thoise est 2080 ll. Toutes les planches qui sont necessaires aux planchers ce monte a la quantité de 7050 pieds quarrée estimé a 2196, 14. Cinquante trois portes et fenestres garnies de touttes leurs serrures estimées a la somme de 1590 ll. Somme Total, 23185, 7,” signed Blénac, Domain, Noyen. anom 13 dfc 45, “Devis par estimation des ouvrages de massonnerie pierre de taille charpenterie et couvertures, a faire pour la construction du logement du Roy dans le fort Royal de la Martinique,” 7 September 1686, 1a–b.

Notes to pages 325–9

563

22 “Mr de Blenac loge au fort Royal dans une vielle Maison de bois; il est vray qu’il a un logement au fort St. Pierre qui couste dix mille ecus au Roy: mais le sejour du fort St. Pierre ne lui plaist pas, et si j’avois voulu demolir ce bastiment sur un ordre verbal, et sous pretexte de se servir des bois pour la construction de la charpente des Magazins, il y a tantost deux ans qu’il ne seroit plus en nature. J’ai eu plusieurs fois la confusion secrette de voir introduire les estrangers dans une maison qui a plus l’air d’une Caze à Negre que du logis d’un gouverneur et lieutenant general, et cela m’a donné la pensée de destiner la salle E pour lui faire un appartement convenable à sa dignité. Cela ne change en rien le premier dessin, et loin d’augmenter la depense, c’est dans le fonds une espargne considerable pour un logement qu’il faudroit tost ou tard faire, pour remplacer au moins la caze de bois qui ne peut durer que fort peu de temps.” anom 13 dfc 78, “M de Blenac estant allé visiter les ouvrages du Fort Royal,” signed Caylus, 14 April 1694. 23 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 2:537–40. 24 anom 15 dfc 697c , “Plan et élévation du fort du Petit Goave. Cornuau” (ca. 1688); 15 dfc 698c , “Plan et élévation du fort du Petit Goave,” Cornuau (ca. 1688); 15 dfc 696b , “Plan du Petit Goave et de l’Acul, avec le figuré du fort du Petit Goave tel qu’il a été reformé, avec deux autres plans de ce même fort,” Cornuau (ca. 1688). 25 “et par le nombre des flibustiers qui y venaient il y a environ 25 a 30 ans que les habitans y battirent pour le Gouverneur une maison de 84 pieds de long percée de créneaux et flanquée de deux petittes tours de quatre pieds de diametre aux encoignures.” anom fm c 9a 9, “Projet du Petit Goâve” (1710), 34a. 26 Pagazani, La demeure noble, 82–3; Androuet du Cerceau, Livre d’architecture, plates 11 and 13. 27 Kornwolf, Architecture and Town Planning, 206, fig. 2.26. 28 See Lawrence, Trade Castles, 103–15; 183–98. See also Doortmont and Smit, Sources, 322–7; Dantzig, Forts and Castles. 29 Hinchman, “The Grid of Saint-Louis du Sénégal,” 295–6; Sinou, Comptoirs, 17, 29; Hinchman, “African Rococo,” 18. 30 “1. Un grand corps de logis de cent pieds de longueur et de 20 de largeur en dedans ou il y a une Cave de la longueur du Bastiment sur laquele sont quatre chambres avec leur grenier au dessus pour mestre des marchandises, et au bout son fort. Que le dit bastiment est bien de 100 pieds de long et 20 pieds de large mais que ce qu’ils appellent cave n’est qu’un trou dans lequel on entre par le planché, sur lequel on marche qui n’est que de simples planches desquelles on enleve

564

Notes to pages 330–3

quelques-unes pour descendre dans ce qu’ils appellent cave et ce avec une eschelle comme l’on fait dans un navire quand on leve les escoutilles, les murailles sont de brique faite au pais environ de la hauteur de 6 pieds, un comble par-dessus couvert de thuille portée de France, tout le bastiment compose 3 chambres & une cuisine de plain pied au dessus des grenier ou galletas, au bout il n’y qu’un fort elevé de 6 pieds fait de brique de 20 pieds en carré qui commande l’un des costes de la Riviere. 2. A costé du bastiment et y joignant il y a une chapelle avec la Chambre de Mrs les aumosniers contenant 60 pieds de longueur et 20 de largeur, au dessus deux greniers pour mettre des marchandises … Que ces bastimens ne respondent pas au nom qu’on les donne tout y estant tres mediocre n’y ayant que les murailles qui sont de brique, le reste n’estant que de meschant bois pris au pays qui est aussy fort vermoulu … 4. Derriere les bastimens du costé du sud, est un autre bastimen de cent ou 120 pieds de longueur et de 12 ou 15 de largeur qui sont pour 4 petites chambres pour les chirurgiens et compagnons. Que ce long bastimen est de nul où peu de valeur … les murailles ne sont que de terre et d’eau que l’on appelle torchys, le dessus couvert de douelles de vieilles fustailles ou meschantes bouts de planches que les compagnons ont fait en passant les temps et pour se mettre à l’abry du soleil 8. Devant la grande Maison du costé du Nord sont deux autres tours de brique … Que ce ne sont pas tours, mais cases faites de brique de six pieds de hault couvertes de paille.” anom fm c 6 1, Sénégal, “Etat de l’habitation du Sénégal” (1664), 1a–2a. 31 “le 8 novembre 1673 retablissement desquelles anciens bastimens, et augmentation a iceux, closture de la dite habitation” (anom fm c 6 1, “Sénégal, Estat general des biens, effets, et débits actives de la Compagnie du Senegal,” June 1681); “L’habitation … n’a pour deffences que de simples murailles de bricque, avec quelque tourelles, le tout fort irregulier” (fm c 6 2, “Estat du Commerce du Senegal, et Cap Vert, les Holandois estant maitres du fort d’Arguin, et les Anglois de celuy de Gambie,” signed De la Courbe [1693], 5a). 32 “en si mauvais estat pour les bastimens et si mal pourveus de munitions et de vivres qu’a peine les commis que la compagnie envoya par ces deux vaisseaux, peurent trouver a se metre a couvert, et que le peu de commis qui estoient sur les lieux y mouroient de faim, et avoient vendu pour du mil jusques aux verrous et aux gonds des portes.” anom fm c 6 3, “Mémoire concernant le Senegal” (1696), 3a. 33 bnf , Cartes et plans, ge dd -2987 ( 8127 b) , “Plan du Fort St. Louis” (1705). On the state of Saint-Louis and its relative unimportance at the time see also Martin, “Les Français en Afrique,” 312–13.

34 Sinou, “Le Sénégal,” 35–6. 35 “J’ai tracé en lignes ponctuées dans mon projet le Fort St Louis, qui est à démolir, afin qu’en comparant l’un avec l’autre, on juge plus aisément du terrein qu’occuperoit le nouveau Fort que je propose … je n’ai donné que 70 toises de poligone, et je pourrois assurer que le reduisent à 60, les magazins et logemens construits, tels que je les proposé, seroient sufisans pour tout le commerce, que fera jamais la Compagnie dans toute la Riviere du Senegal.” anom 19 dfc 14, “Explication des lettres et chiffres, qui se trouvent au Plan et Profil du Fort proposé à faire sur L’isle du Sénégal,” signed by Froger, 25 November 1704, 1a. His project is 13 dfc c 82, “Dessin du Fort” (1705). 36 “Fort Louis de Senegal: Le Fort Louis de Senegal est dans une isle a l’embouchure du fleuve Niger; autrement du rivierre du Senegal; les vaisseaux sont obligés de mouiller au large, y aiant une barre qui les empeche d’aprocher de terre, cette difficulté fait la plus grande seureté de ce comptoir dont les fortiffications sont tres peu de chose. Le directeur general de la Compagnie y fait sa residence. Il y a 30 canons en batterie 60 blancs et 50 bambaras.” anom 19 dfc 18, “Mémoire sur le Commerce du Senegal” (1723), 4a. 37 Sinou, Comptoirs, 40. 38 On Poincy, whom the author describes as “without doubt the first sugar capitalist of the Antilles, see Camus, “Le général de Poincy,” 119–25. 39 Camus, “Le général,” 119. 40 Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 134, 79. 41 On the bastides of Provence, see Fustier-Dautier, Bastides et jardins. 42 Rochefort, Histoire naturelle, 51–2. On Poincy’s rapid accumulation of wealth see Camus, “Le général,” 119–20. 43 Rochefort, Histoire, 52. Du Tertre is quoted in Berthelot and Gaumé, Kaz Antiyé, 52. 44 Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 134. Boucher estimates that the house had 4,500 to 5,000 square feet of space. 45 anom col c 8b 1, no. 6, “Inventaire des biens et effets … feu M. le Commandant de Poigny,” 12 April 1660. This inventory is also mentioned in Camus, “Le général,” 124. 46 anom col c 8b 1, no. 6, 5b–6a. 47 Labat, Nouveau voyage, 37. 48 Camus, “Le général,” 124. 49 Rochefort, Histoire, 52. 50 Maurile de Saint Michel, Voyage, 42. 51 The plan, without a title, is in the Archives Nationales special collections in the Hôtel de Soubise (anf, ae ii 2699). It is published in colour in Deslandres, The Sulpicians of

52 53 54 55

56 57

58

59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

68

Montreal, plate 4. On Governor John Winthrop’s famous sermon, see Hunt, Ten Cities, 25–6. Dickenson, “Seigneurs and Landowners,”190; Lauzon and Forget, L’histoire du vieux-Montréal, 58–9. Hautecoeur, L’architecture classique, 1:44, 727–8, 781; Cojannot, Le Vau, 115–16. Courtin, Paris grand siècle, 151–2; Cleary, The Place Royale, 86–9. On the uniqueness of this corridor, and its first appearance in monastic buildings including this one, see Charlery, “Maisons de maître,” In Situ 5 (2004): 28. Lauzon and Forget, L’histoire, 58–62. bnf, Cartes et plans, p184892 [Vd-22 (2)-Fol.], “Veue du Couvent des Jacobins au Bourg St. Pierre de la Martinique du costé de l’entrée qui regarde la mer en 1704”; p 184893 [Vd-22 (2)-Fol.], “Plan du rez de chaussée de la maison des Jacobins du Bourg St. Pierre de l’Amérique, 1704”; p184894 [Vd-22 (2)-Fol.], “Plan de l’etage d’en-haut de la maison des Jacobins du Bourg St. Pierre de l’Amérique, 1704.” On the building history see Labat, Nouveau voyage, 2:69–71. The first quotation is from Garraway, The Libertine Colony, 130, the latter from Toczyski, “Navigating the Sea of Alterity,” 1. Garraway, The Libertine Colony, 131. Labat, Nouveau voyage, 69. Ibid., 70. Ibid., 71. On traditional colombage buildings using brick see Gauthier, Les maisons paysannes, 167–78. Clark, Masterless Mistresses, 7. Daspit, Louisiana Architecture, 13; Poesch and Bacot, Louisiana Buildings, 21; Wilson, “Religious Architecture,” 133–4. Wilson, “Religious Architecture,” 134. anom f3 290 19, “Façade et elevation de la porte d’entrée du Bâtiment neuf Rue du Maine construit en l’année 1730. Fait et dessiné a la N.lle Orleans le 14 Decembre 1731,” signed Alexandre De Batz; f 3 290 9, “Façade et elevation du bâtiment neuf Rue du Maine construit en l’année 1730. Fait et dessiné à N.lle Orleans le 14 Decembre 1731,” signed Alexandre De Batz; f 3 290 23, “Plan du Bâtiment neuf Rüe du Maine Construit en l’année 1730,” signed Alexandre De Batz. For illustrations and short commentary see Daspit, Louisiana Architecture, 9–10; Wilson, “Architecture in Eighteenth-Century West Florida,” 86, fig. 21; Langlois, “L’aventure urbaine,” 128–9. On Baron, see Dawdy, Building the Devil’s Empire, 35. Renn, American Paintings, 167–9.

Notes to pages 334–42

565

69 Clark, Masterless Mistresses, 2–5. 70 The windows were glazed, still a rarity in the colony. See Wilson, “Royal Hospital and Ursuline Convent,” 170. 71 On the brickworks see Samuel Wilson, “Royal Hospital and Ursuline Convent,” 167. 72 The plan and elevation of the first project are: anom f 3 290 6, “Façade et élévation du Batiment et Monastère des D. Religieuses Ursulines,” 14 January 1732. The second project is published in Wilson, Architecture of Colonial Louisiana, 11, fig. 14, and 134, fig. 15. 73 On the Château Neuf at Meudon, see Kalnein, Architecture in France, 4–5. 74 The second versions are published in Wilson, “Royal Hospital and Ursuline Convent,” 168. 75 Wilson, “Religious Architecture,” 134; Wilson, “Royal Hospital and Ursuline Convent,” 181. 76 anom 15 dfc 385a , “Plan de la Maison du Roy occupée par le Conseil et M. les Commissaire Ordonnateur 1774,” signed Duparquier fils. See also Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:374. 77 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:375. 78 Moisy, Les églises des jésuites, plates Xiv –Xv . See also his project for the college in Montpellier in Vallery-Rodot, Le recueil des plans, plate XiX . 79 anom 1pl 2304, “Plan de la distribution a faire, dans la maison des Jesuites, pour y placer le conseil, la Jurisdiction, le Commissaire ordonnateur, et les Bureaux de l’Administration,” signed by De Boisforêt, 1 August 1772; anom 15 dfc 385a, “Plan de la maison du Roy, occupée par le conseil et le commissaire ordonnateur. Au Cap,” signed Duparquier fils (1774). 80 For La Flèche see Vallery-Radot, Le recueil, plate Xvii . 81 anom 03 dfc 409b . “Plans et elevations du chateau St Louis dans la ville de Quebec” (1722). See also IturbeKennedy, “Les sièges,” 32–3; Castonguay and Lacasse, Québec, 65, cat. 9; Richardson, Quebec City, 204–5. 82 Iturbe-Kennedy, “Les sièges,” 32. 83 Richardson, Quebec City, 205. 84 Thus was it identified by D’Aviler in his Cours d’architecture. See Gilles, “L’évolution,” 30. 85 anf , Cartes et Plans, 127, 2, 2, “Carte du gouvernement de Quebec levee en l’année 1709 … par Jean Btc Decouagne.” 86 An elevation done in 1808–34 shows only the right tower, which by then had a pyramidal roof. Kornwolf, Architecture and Town Planning 12, fig. 9.4a. 87 On the Palais de Justice in Rennes, see Szambien, Le Parlement de Bretagne. See also Hurt, Louis XIV and the Parlements, 56–7; Hautecoeur, L’architecture classique 1:600–1.

566

Notes to pages 343–57

88 89 90 91

92

93 94

See also Pérouse de Montclos, L’art de France, figs. 56, 217; Perrin, Le château de Cadillac. Castonguay and Lacasse, Québec, 65. Zolwany, “Joybert de Soulanges,” 301–2. Iturbe-Kennedy, “Le siège,” 33. anom f3 296 e 8, “Plan, profils et façade du batiment des Magazins du Roy à faire au Cap, l’incendie de 1734 ayant bruslé l’ancien, fait au Cap le 30 mars 1736,” signed De La Lance; f 3 296 e 9, “Plans, profil et elevation du Magasin Royal du Cap, le Cap le 30 aoust 1737,” signed De La Lance; anom 15 dfc 335a, “Plan profils et elevation du Magasin Roial du Cap de St. Domingue en Amerique,” signed “Herbert fecit, 1738” (but this must refer just to the drawing itself or even the decorative cartouche); also “fait a Leogane le 12 may 1738 Delalance.” anom 15 dfc 350b, “Plan d’un Palais proposé à faire au Cap sur la place d’armes. Elévation d’un batiment pour simétriser [sic] avec celuy du Sieur Bouvier. Elévation du palais et élévation de la Maison du Sieur Bouvier,” signed Du Coudreau. However even Sceaux lacks orders: see Gady, HardouinMansart, 334–7. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:332. c h a pte r th irte e n

1 anom 14 dfc 301c , project for the hospital at Cayenne, signed Tugny (1777); 15 dfc 660a , “Plan, profiles et Elévations des casernes du Port-au-Prince,” signed La Merveillère (ca. 1772). 2 Fumaroli, Quand l’Europe parlait français. On the role of the salon in the development of eighteenth-century sociability see Bailey, The Spiritual Rococo, 23–94. 3 Caraccioli, L’Europe française, 1:61–2. Among his many books was a parody of Parisian society entitled Le livre des quatre couleurs (Paris, 1760). 4 anom 13 dfc 674b , “Hôpital de Saint-Pierre,” signed Garin, 1 May 1826; 14 dfc 709a , “Projet de caserne avec galeries pour 672 hommes,” signed Teissier (1826). 5 For a basic introduction to the period, see Kalnein, Architecture, 131–4, 215–20. On Ledoux see Vidler, Claude Nicolas Ledoux, esp. 235–62. 6 Rosenblum, Transformations, 119. 7 Etlin, Symbolic Space, 90–6; Summerson, Classical Language. 8 “Les habitans de la Pointe-à-Pitre désireroient beaucoup que Sa Majesté voulût bien leur permettre de donner à leur ville le nom d’un Souverain qu’ils chérissent, et si le Roy

9 10

11

12

13

14

daignoit l’approuver, elle seroit dès ce moment appellée Louis-Ville. Nous vous sommes chargés de vous prier de faire agréer au Roy ce très respectueux hommage; et nous vous demanderons pour notre compte de vouloir bien permettre que la place principale porte votre nom: Ce sera un monument durable de la protection spéciale que vous aurés bien voulu avez des à cet établissement.” anom 209miom 28, 27a, letter from the governors to the Minister of the Marine from Basse-Terre, 6 November 1772. Pérotin-Dumon, La ville aux îles, figs. 8.4, 8.7–8.13. In 1783 an inventory of his properties was drawn up: amb, 65 s 103, “Inventaire de la plantation de Jean Testas à Pointe-à-Pitre” (April 1783). Francois Testas owned a plantation in L’Anse du Clerc, Parish of Saint-Louis, SaintDomingue. amb , 91 s 51, “Donation de Francois Testas en faveur des enfants de Jacques de La Chassaigne, lieutenant de cavalerie des milices,” 23 April 1785. For more on Testas, see Pérotin-Dumon, La ville aux îles, 169–73, 189, 824. anom dppc not gua//330 (Pointe-à-Pitre, Notary Boyer, 1781), “obligation par le Sieur Jean Testas en faveur de Sieur Jacques Louis Loisel,” 18 September 1781. The marriage, between Jean-Baptiste Lassabe and Dame Marie Anne Laborde, was in August 1781 (anom dppc not gua//330, “Contrat de marriage du Sieur Lassabe avec la Dame veuve du Sieur François Gabriel Budan,” 13 August 1781); Testas’s bill from François de Faur, maître en chirurgie in August 1781, was for 14,336 livres, 10 sols, almost four times as much as the amount paid by the patient with the second-highest bill and ten or more times the average bill (“Transport par le Sieur du Faur au Sieur Jary,” 22 August 1781). In November 1781 he freed the thirty-six-year-old mulatresse Julienne and her six-year-old son Charles for 2,640 livres. anom dppc not gua// 330, “Affranchissement par le Sieur Jean Testas de sa mulatresse Julienne et de Charles son fils,” 28 November 1781; dppc not gua//330, “Vente d’un habitation … par Mr Jean Testas a Mr Philibert Dupuy de la Quintinie et Madame Marie Therese Lallement son epouse,” 29 November 1781; dppc not gua//332, Pointe-à-Pitre, Notary Boyer, 1782–83, “Obligation par le Sieur Jean Testas en faveur du Sieur François Mausacré,” 19 July 1782. anom dppc not gua//332, “Obligation par le Sieur Jean Testas en faveur du Sieur André Courtois,” 30 November 1782; “Les écritures, papiers et affaires du feu Sieur Testas, les a nécessité de faire de travail immense d’un dépouillement général de tous les papiers du déffunt, de les faire mettre enliasse, sans en excepter un seul non seulement par ordres de dattes, par lettres alphabétiques, mais encore

15 16

17

18 19 20

21

de faire des liasses pour chaque particulier qui on en plusieurs affaires avec lui que d’après cet arrangement ils ont fait employer au rang des dettes actives généralement … parce que le Sr Testas a toujours singulièrement négligé ses écritures.” amb , 65 s 103, 131a. anom dppc not gua//335, “Assemblée des creanciers de la succession du Sieur Jean Testas,” 10 November, 1784. anom dfc Guadeloupe, supp., f. 17, “Plan de … [sic] Située en l’Isle Grande – Terre Guadeloupe,” signed by Nassau, 1775; anom 08 dfc 395a , “Plan de la ville Pointe à Pitre en l’Isle Grande-Terre Guadeloupe levé et dessiné par le S[ieu]r Nassau Arpenteur breveté du Roi et Adjoint au Grand Voyer de l’Isle en 1783 et 1784.” On the rue des Juifs, see Pérotin-Dumon, La ville aux îles, plate 8.14. The “maison en maçonne a chambres hautes scitué a la ditte ville pointe à pitre a la rue en allant à l’église” is also mentioned in Testa’s 1781 bill for goods purchased from Jacques-Louis Loisel. anom dppc not gua//330, “obligation par le Sieur Jean Testas en faveur de Sieur Jacques Louis Loisel,” 18 September 1781. Kissoun, Pointe-à-Pitre, 139; Pérotin-Dumon, La ville aux îles, 403. amb, 65 s 103. Barsac stone was brought as ballast to Guadeloupe and commonly used for ground floors. See Pérotin-Dumon, La ville au îles, 453. “Une maison en pierre de taille située en cette ville dans la rue des juifs le terrein de soixante douze pieds de face sur cent cinquante de profondeur … les murs mitoyens avec les sieurs de Sougeres et Admirat divisée par le bas en quatre boutiques avec une Galerie voutée sous laquelle sont deux cabinets servant de comptoirs deux escaliers aux deux bouts sous lesquels sont deux caveaux voutés en Pierre, le haut divisé en quatre chambres avec un Galetas de la longueur de la maison une trape a chaque extremitté avec une echelle de main, icelle couverte d’essentes a cloux sur lambris avec deux lucarnes sur la facade … la facade ornée d’un frontispiece de l’ordre ionien et Corinthien, du Balcon de trente huit pieds de long sur deux de large en fer, six balcons de fer aux croisées des deux extremités. Deux magasins de chaque cotté en maçonne divisés par le millieu, ayant chacun quatre vingt huit pieds de long sur dix sept de large, sans y comprendre la Galerie ouverte et couverte d’ardoise … un Pavillon à l’extremité de chaque, faisant face au bord de mer de vingt pieds quarrés avec chambre hautte et Galetas couverts d’essentes le Pavillon de la Partie de l’ouest et son magasin y joignant Garny de pavé de Barsac, ainsi que les bas de la maison principalle, de plus dans le millieu de la Cour.” amb , 65 s 103,

Notes to pages 357–60

567

22 23

24

25

26 27 28

29

30

568

“Inventaire de la plantation de Jean Testas à Pointe-àPitre” (April 1783), 8a–10a. Kissoun, Pointe-à-Pitre, 139; Pérotin-Dumon, La ville aux îles, caption to plate 8.11. Kissoun, Pointe-à-Pitre, 139; Pérotin-Dumon, La ville aux îles, 194–200, 391. Pointe-à-Pitre is called “Cité de la Pointe-à-Pitre” in a property sale from 24 January 1806. anom dppc not gua//765, Pointe-à-Pitre, Notary Descures, “Vente & Marché entre la nommée Marie Joseph et le nommé Joseph Daguin, intrepreneur,” 2 January 1806. “On peut dire avec vérité que dans cet intervalle la ville Pointe à Pitre s’est agrandie de plus du double de ce qu’elle été à l’époque de 1770. On y a percé de grandes Rues à travers les mornes, des quais se sont formés de leurs débris, une Eglise, des Magasins, des Auberges nombreuses, un Sale de Spectacle y ont été bâties, des marécages compris dans son enceinte ont été combles, plusieurs particuliers y ont fait bâtir de belles maisons en sorte que est vrai de dire que ce qui pouvoit lui manquer en 1770 pour recevoir le Conseil et la Chambre d’Agriculture, lui est maintenant acquis.” anom 209miom 30, “Mémoire sur la translation proposée du Conseil et de la Chambre d’Agriculture de la Guadeloupe de la Basse-Terre à la Pointe-à-Pitre” (after 1775), 283b–4a. “La belle maison du Sr. Testas et celle du Sr. Dupuis peuvent être dès à présent et fort aisément adaptées aux convenances de ces deux assemblées, au reste les Administrateurs Examineront par eux-mêmes si d’autres édifices de la Pointe à Pitre pourraient mieux remplir l’objet de cette translation.” anom 209miom 30, 288a. Pérotin-Dumon, La ville aux îles, plate 8.11 and page 403. Kissoun, Pointe-à-Pitre, 139. Elevations for the court facade, garden facade, sectional view, and plans for the ground and first storeys, which are unsigned and dated 1776, survive: anom 08 dfc 319c ; 08 dfc 320c; 08 dfc 321c; 08 dfc 322c; 08 dfc 323c. These elevations were first published in Pérotin-Dumon, La ville aux îles, plate 7.13; Desmoulins, Basse-Terre, 146–7. A financial report for the year 1777 remarked: “Quant aux nouvelles constructions à faire sur ce terrein, nous n’en ferons commencer aucune sans y être autorisés par le Ministre. Nous lui avons proposé, dans notre correspondance, du troisième quartier celle de l’hôtel de l’Intendance, et nous lui avons adressé en même tems les plans et projet relatifs à ce bâtiment qui ont été dressés par l’Ingénieur en chef; nous attendons ses ordres à ce sujet.” anom 209miom 32, 202, “Finances: Imposition de 1777.” anom col e 236, “Mémoire pour demander un Brevet de Colonel dans le Corps Royal du Génie,” 5 August 1778,

Notes to pages 360–7

31 32 33 34 35

36

37 38

39

30a. See also: Pérotin-Dumon, La ville aux îles, 725, 825; Desmoulins, Basse-Terre, 54–6. The marriage contract was between Governor d’Arbaud’s aide-de-camp Gaspard Hilarion de Bonnet de Costefrede, chevalier de la Baume and Charlotte Pauline Lemercier de Maisoncelle de Richemont. anom dppc not gua//328, “Contrat de Mariage de M. le Chevalier de la Beaume avec Demoiselle Lemercier de Maisoncelle de Richemont,” 23 October 1780. Blondel, Architecture françoise, 1:Xi , plate 3; 1:ii , plate 5. Kalnein, Architecture, 56, 76. Ibid., 154–5. Pérotin-Dumon, La ville aux îles, 361; Desmoulins, BasseTerre, 54. “Nous avons reçu la lettre … par laquelle vous voulez bien approuver l’acquisition que nous avons faite … du terrein & de la maison servant d’hôtel du Gouvernement a la Basse-Terre. Vous autorisez en même tems … à tirer des lettres de change pour le remplacement du premier payement de 10 mille livres qui a été fait à M. Nadau; et quant à la construction nouvelle que nous vous avions proposé, vous nous marquez que la dépense ne pourra en être payée qu’en trois ans : vous nous annoncés qu’il sera employé sur l’état de fonds de 1777 une somme de 77 mille livres pour le premier à compte.” anom 209miom 31, 86a–b, “Relative à l’acquisition du terrein et de la maison servant d’hôtel du gouvernement,” Basse-Terre, 20 November 1776, signed by D’Arbaud and De Peinier. anom 209miom 32, 39, “Etat estimative de la dépense à faire pour construire une maison pour loger L’Intendant, dans l’emplacement que le Roi à acheté de M. Nadau,” 1 June 1777, signed by Talsy. The total was given as 256,713.8.5. Pérotin-Dumon, La ville aux îles, 321. “Le projet des ouvrages pour 1784 et 1785 que l’on adresse avec ce Mémoire indique les parties les plus instantes à entreprendre dans ces premiers commencements. Il est absolument indispensable de travailler à la réedification du Palais ainsi qu’aux reparations de l’hopital et de quelques partes de Casernes.” shd gr 1 m 1105 31, “Mémoire general sur les Isles françoises du vent,” 1 March 1784, 26. “Le terrein et emplacement du Gouvernement les bâtiments consistent en plusieurs corps de logis. Savoir: un en face de l’entré en bois avec étage et deux galléries basses, il y a six chambres ou cabinets dans le haut assez étroite et fort bas. La Gallerie donnant sur le jardin est de difficile entretiens quant à la couverture qui est extremement platte les portes, et jalousies ont bessoin de beaucoup de réparations. (Longueur 94 pieds; Largeur 48). Un autre, en maçonnerie de terre avec étage et gallérie hautte, et

40

41

42 43

44

partie de celle d’en bas en bois. Le haut sert de logement au Général, et contient 9 chambres de plein pied, avec cabinet et garderobe. Dans le bout est son cabinet avec une petite gallérie séparé de la grande par une simple cloison. Dans le bas au-dessous de la gallérie il y a plusieurs chambres propres à servir de magazin; sur le devant est le logement du secrétaire, avec le bureau du Gouvernement. Cette partie à besoin de réparation, on y travaille actuellement; la construction de la gallérie est défectueuse, et demandera toujours beaucoup d’entretiens. (Longueur 72; Largeur 36).” anom 08 dfc 388, “Mémoire et état actuel ou se trouvent les Bâtimens civils et militaires appartenant au Roy,” 5 June 1784, 8. anom 08 dfc 696, “Aperçu des degats occasionnés par le coup de vent du 26 juillet, aux Batiments et Constructions Civiles de la Basse-Terre et arrondissement,” 10 August 1825. The four sheets for the front and back facades and the ground plan of both storeys have three separate call numbers: anom f 3 288 56, “Elévation du côté de l’entrée”; f 3 288 57, “Elévation du côté du Jardin”; f 3 288 54, “Plan d’une Maison pour loger le Commandant de la Grande Terre”; f 3 288 54, “Plan du premier étage.” Kissoun, Pointe-à-Pitre, 139. “En vous annonçant par ma lettre du 22 mars No. 17 la tournée que j’allais faire dans la colonie avec M. Le C.te D’Arbaud, j’ai eu l’honneur de vous prévenir que je m’occuperais à la Pointe à Pitre du logement destiné pour le commandant en second. Je me suis, en effet, donné les mouvements nécessaires sur les lieux. Je comptais faire l’acquisition d’une maison que l’on m’avoit proposée pour cet objet, mais le marché n’a pu se conclure. J’ai été obligé de prendre le parti d’en louer une autre a raison de 6000 livres par an, argent des iles; ce loyer est sans doute fort cher, mais il ne peut être moindre dans un endroit tel que la Point a Pitre où les maisons sont très rares et les loyers extrêmement chers … on y fait actuellement les petites réparations indispensables, pour que M. de la Saulaye puisse l’occuper a son arrivée; nous espérons qu’il en sera content, surtout lorsque reconnaitra par lui-même l’impossibilité de faire mieux.” anom 209miom 31, “Pointeà-Pitre Construction d’une maison pour le logement du Commandant en Second,” Basse-Terre, 4 June 1776, 154a–b. “Nous allons y faire travailler sans délai sous la conduite des officiers du Génie et nous la ferons continuer avec activité, pour faire cesser le plutôt possible le loyer de la maison qui est actuellement occupée par ce commandant. M. de Peinier fera tirer incessamment, ainsi que vous

45

46 47 48

49

l’y autorisez, des lettres de change a trois mois de vue pour moitié de 40 mille livres argent de France, a quoi la dépense de cet établissement a été fixée. Il aura l’honneur de vous en donner avis dans le temps.” Signed D’Artaud and Peinier. anom 209miom 32, “Pointe-à-Pitre. Construction d’une maison pour le logement du Commandant en Second,” Basse-Terre, 15 May 1777, 35b. “J’ai l’honneur de vous prévenir que j’ai remis à M. le Cte D’Arbaud et de Peinier les plans de la maison projettée pour loger le Commandant-en-second de la Colonie, à la Pointe-à-Pitre: je crains que l’estimation qui a été faite depuis plusieurs années, ne puisse suffire à sa construction, vu la rareté des bois qui étoient fort communs alors, et qu’on n’a pas envoyé non plus de France différentes sortes de matériaux qu’on avoit demandée dans le temps et que nous serons obligés d’acheter aujourd’hui, comme des briques, ferrures, peinture, clous, & lesquels tous, par leur défaut, doivent augmenter nécessairement la dépense de cette bâtisse.” anom 209miom 32, 152, letter by Talsy to the governor and intendant, from Basse-Terre, dated 24 May 1777. Blondel, Architecture françoise, 3:iX , plate 13. D’Aviler, Dictionnaire d’architecture civile, 87–8. On the use of chambres de parade, see Scott, The Rococo Interior, 105. “Nous avons reçu la dépêche du Ministre du 11 juillet dernier, dont nous avons donné connoissance à M. Labbé de Talsy. Il se confirmera, d’une l’exécution des plans de construction proposés, pour le logement du Commandanten-second, à la réduction prescrite dans la second étage: il espère, comme nous, qu’au moyen de cette réduction, la première somme demandée pourra suffire à la dépense … L’on s’occupe toujours des travaux relatifs à cette construction; on ne négligera rien pour les mettre à leur perfection le plutôt possible.” anom 209miom 32, 204, “Finances. Imposition de 1777: Logement du Commandant-en-Second,” signed D’Arbaud and De Peinier. “Pointe à Pitre: Les bâtiments appartenant au Roy à la pointe à pitre sont l’ancienne maison du Gouvernement, simple rèz de chaussée en bois, dans le plus mauvais état, consistant en cinq chambres ou cabinets occupés par le Commandant en 2e (ce bâtiment est comme abandonné) Longueur 50, Largeur 25; une dépendance, à côté de ce bâtiment avec un rèz de chaussé seulement; couvert partie en aissantes, et en ardoises, divisé en quatre parties, une cuisine, une chambre pour les nègres, un cabinet pour l’eau, et une écurie, le tout dans le plus mauvais état. Longueur 50, Largeur 18. Nota. Il y a à côté du Gouvernement l’emplacement de la nouvelle maison qui n’est élevé qu’a quelques pieds au-dessus des fondations.” anom 08 dfc

Notes to pages 367–9

569

50 51 52

53

54 55

56

57

570

388, “Mémoire et etat actuel ou se trouvent les Bâtimens civils et militaires appartenant au Roy,” 5 June 1784, 11. anom 1pl 2282. Letter of 6 July 1780 cited in Kissoun, Pointe-à-Pitre, 138. “La Geôle, en maçonnerie, consistant en une grande cour entouré des trois côtés par une muraille, dans l’enceinte de laquelle sont trois cachots voutés une maison à un étage pour les archers et un grand appentis divisé en trois chambres pour les prisons, au milieu de la cour est un puit. L’enceinte est fermée dans le nord par une maison en maçonnerie et une mansarde en bois couverte en aissantes. Dans le rèz de chaussé sont la chambre du Greffe une petite allé pour l’entrée de la Geôle et trois chambres et une cuisine pour le Geôlier, au-dessus de la chambre du Greffe est la chambre d’audience, et celle du Greffier, et ensuitte deux autres chambres pour le Geôlier a besoin des réparations. Il y a pleut presque partout. (Longueur 70; Largeur 20).” anom 08 dfc 388, 12. “lesdits deux esclaves ont toujours été au service du Sieur Martin Concierge des Prisons de la ville Pointe-à-Pitre, et que le nommé Joseph … a quarrelé pour le dit Martin un appentis derrière sa maison et que d’ailleurs le dit Sieur Martin lui faisoit faire diverses commissions en ville … que sur la fin du mois d’avril de dit Sieur Martin a maltraité le dit Negre Joseph pour n’avoir point voulu continuer les ouvrages qu’il lui faisait faire journellement pour son service et le même fait mettre aux fers … Et de la part du dit Sieur Momay a été déclaré qu’il a vu diverses fois le dit Negre Joseph a la ville et faubourg de la ville Pointe-à-Pitre faisant les commissions du dit Sieur Martin et a même demandé au dit Negre ce qu’il faisoit, ce à quoi le dit Negre lui auroit répondu qu’il étoit eu commission pour le dit Sieur Martin.” anom dppc not gua// 698 (Basse-Terre, Notary Debort 1777–78), “Declaration par le S. Demanin Baïsly, Mathieu Mallabath et Pierre Momay,” 26 August 1777. Kissoun, Pointe-à-Pitre, 138; Pérotin-Dumon, La ville aux îles, 198–9. anom fm c7 b6, no. 37, “Plan du Gouvernement, et de l’Intendance projettés a la Ville Pointe-à-Pitre dans l’isle de la Guadeloupe,” signed by Saint-Cyran (1786). anom fm c 7 b6, no. 36, “Devis estimatif des ouvrages de maçonnerie, charpente, couverture d’ardoise, menuiserie, serrurerie, gros fer, peinture d’impression, et déblai des terres pour les fondations, à faire pour la construction de la Maison du Gouverneur, dans l’emplacement de l’ancien Gouvernement de la Ville Pointe-à-Pitre suivant les plans coupe et elevation ci-joints,” signed by Saint-Cyran (Basse-Terre, 15 May 1786). Martin, “Les facteurs,” 205.

Notes to pages 369–73

58 “Nous l’avons trouvée [l’estimation] très forte, et réductible sur plusieurs objets; entr’autres sur la pierre de taille qu’on peut se dispenser d’employer dans l’intérieur des batimens … et sur certains embelissemens inutiles dans ce pais ci, tels que les rampes de fer, les balustrades, et les lambris.” anom 209miom 35 (Basse-Terre, 15 March 1785), 25b–6a. This letter accompanied plans and an earlier copy of the estimate which, although lost, appears to have been much the same as the May 1786 version cited above. 59 “La ville de la Pointe-à-Pitre mérite, sans doute, toute la protection du Gouvernement mais il n’est peut-être pas encore temps d’y former les établissements qu’on y projette, et puisque cette ville s’élève d’elle-même, et sans la presence des administrateurs, on peut attendre qu’elle soit entièrement formée, avant de s’occuper d’etablissement qui augmenteraient infiniment la depense de la Colonie. (Monseigneur a marqué aux Administrateurs, par ses dépêches des 28 avril et 30 juin dernière, de suspendre tous travaux à la Pointe-à-Pitre pour la translation du cheflieu dans cette ville, jusqu’à ce qu’il leur ait fait connaitre ses intentions d’après l’avis qui leur a été demandé sur un mémoire joint à la premiere de les dépêches, relativement aux inconvénients de cette translation.)” anom fm c 7 b6, 43, “Extrait d’une lettre du Mr Foullon D’Ecotiers du 22 avril 1786” (Pointe-à-Pitre, 27 July 1786); “D’après la proposition qui avoit été faite de transférer le chef-lieu de la Guadeloupe, de la Basse-Terre à la Pointe-à-Pitre, les Administrateurs avoient envoie les plans et devis des Bâtiments qu’il convenait d’élever pour effectuer cette translation. Ces plans ayant paru trop vastes, et la dépense trop considérable, Monseigneur les a chargé, par sa dépêche du 9 Novembre 1785, de lui en adresser de nouveaux. M le Comte d’Arbaud ayant fait ensuite des représentations sur les inconvénients qui résulteraient de cette translation, Monseigneur leur a marqué, par une autre dépêche du 28 avril dernier de suspendre tous travaux dans le cas où on en auroit entrepris quelqu’un, et de lui faire connoitre dans le plus grand détail, les avantages ou les inconvénients que produiroit la translation du Chef-lieu. Mrs de Micoud et de Viévignes répondent, par leur lettre du 16 juillet dernier No 8, qu’il n’y avoit encore aucuns travaux de commencés à la Pointe-à-Pitre.” anom fm c 7 b 6, 49, “Consulter M. D’Arbaud sur la Translation de L’entrepôt” (Pointe-à-Pitre, 8 October 1786). See also the letter to the Bordeaux chamber of commerce regarding the move to Basse-Terre “de transferer l’entrepot etabli a la Guadeloupe de la Pointe a Pitre a la Basse-Terre, lieu de la residence des administrateurs de cette Colonie.” adg i c 4856, signed “De la Croix,” 15 March 1787.

60 See Vidler “Preface,” 9. See also Young, Seducing, 56–7; Ollagnier, Petites maisons, 46–51. On the petites maisons more generally see Fouquier, Paris au xviii e siècle. 61 Ollagnier, Petites maisons, 17–55. 62 anom 15 dfc 629b , “Plan, profil et élévation pour servir au détail de la charpente des pavillons des officiers projetés au Port-au-Prince ainsi qu’à la salle de conseil de guerres,” signed Hesse and Mathias-Henri Dumoulceau, directeur général des fortifications, 1 January 1774; 15 dfc 628a , “Plan d’un pavillon d’officiers au Port-au-Prince relative au 1er article du projet général et plan d’un corps de caserne,” signed Hesse (1773). 63 anom 1pl 2309, “Elévation, vüe, et construction d’un Pavillon des cazernes de la legion au Port-au-Prince,” signed Saint-Romes, 23 October 1772. 64 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 2:352; “Je n’ai rien dit encore des bâtiments du Roi qui existent et qui sont pour la plus part caducs, tels que les Casernes qui sont à recouvrir, l’Hopital, le Magasin du Roi, l’Intendance qui sont mauvais écrasés et qu’il faudra dans peu reconstruire à neuf, en général tous ces bâtiments ont été faits avec trop de précipitation à la suite du tremblement de terre de 1770.” anom 15 dfc 221, “Reconnoissance et Vues Générales sur quelques parties de la Colonie Française de St. Domingue,” signed Frémond de la Merveillère (1789), 12b. 65 anom 15 dfc 535a , “Elévation de la prise d’eau au pied de la Tranquillité,” signed Dausse and Varaigne (1777); 15 dfc 536a , “Coupe de la prise d’eau au pied de la Tranquillité,” signed Dausse and Varaigne (1777); 15 dfc 537a , “Plan général des environs de la Tranquillité et des différents projets proposés pour conduire les eaux de la rivière de l’Artibonite au sommet de la plaine de ce nom,” signed Dausse and Varaigne (1777); 15 dfc 538a , “Plan général de la prise d’eau au pied du morne de la Tranquillité,” signed Dausse and Varaigne (1777); 15 dfc 539a , “Plan des travaux de la prise d’eau au pied de la montagne de la Tranquillité, signed Dausse and Varaigne (1777); 15 dfc 540a , “Plan des travaux de la prise d’eau au pied de la montagne de la Tranquillité,” signed Dausse and Varaigne (1777); 15 dfc 541a , “Coupe du pont de prise d’eau du côté de la montagne de la Tranquillité,” signed Dausse and Varaigne (1777); 15 dfc 542b , “Elévation de la prise d’eau au pied de la montagne de la Tranquillité,” signed Dausse and Varaigne (1777). 66 Ghachem, The Old Regime, 39. 67 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 2:127–36. 68 Ollagnier, Petites maisons, 293; Fouquier, Paris au xviii e siècle, 80–4. 69 See Sarmant, Napoléon et Paris, 15–20. 70 “On peut affirmer sans crainte d’être démenti qu’il n’existe pas au Fort-Royal un seul Edifice public qui remplisse bien

71 72 73

74

75 76 77

78 79

80 81

82

l’objet de sa destination; des sommes considérables ont cependant été affectées depuis des siècles à l’accroissement et à l’entretiens des bâtiments royaux: d’autres sommes pourraient encore être versées pendant longtemps dans ce tonneau des Danaïdes sans pouvoir le remplir si l’on si adopte enfin un système raisonné de constructions et de voirie. La ville moderne du Fort-Royal présente dans la distribution générale de ses masses les défauts essentiels des villes anciennes. Les Monuments placées au hasard portent le cachet de l’ineptie, l’art ne se montre nulle part: tout parait l’oeuvre des Caraïbes.” anom 13 dfc 506, “Rapport adressé à MM le Gouverneur & l’Intendant de la Martinique par le Commandant du Génie sur l’Assiette des Etablissmens Civils & Militaires de la Ville du Fort Royal,” signed Garin, 27 April 1815, 1a. anom 13 dfc 506, 7a. Durand, Précis; Villari, J.-N.-L. Durand. Picon, “From ‘Poetry of Art’ to Method,” 2–3; Grignon and Maxim, “Convenance,” 35–6; Vidler, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, 21–5; Picon, Architectes et ingénieurs, 86–9, 285–90. anom 13 dfc 508b, “Plan d’un palais de justice projeté sur l’ancien emplacement du couvent de la Providence,” signed Garin, 27 April 1815; 13 dfc 509b , “Ville de Fort-Royal. 1815. Coupe du palais de justice (projet no 1). Elévation principale du palais de justice,” signed Garin, 27 April 1815; 13 dfc 510b , “Ville de Fort-Royal. 1815. Palais de justice. Coupe … projet no 1. Elévation latérale,” signed Garin, 27 April 1815; 13 dfc 513b , “Elévation du palais de justice. Projet no 2,” signed Garin, 27 April 1815. Durand, Précis, plates 21–2. Picon, “From ‘Poetry of Art,’” 16. anom 13 dfc 511b, “Place du Fort-Royal. Plan, coupe et élévation d’un palais de gouverneur projeté sur l’emplacement du petit gouvernement. An 1815,” signed Garin, 27 April 1815. Durand, Précis, part ii , plate 10. See also Szambein, JeanNicolas-Louis Durand, 272, fig. 129. Referring to his proposed new Pavillon du Génie, Garin comments: “en substituant à la charpente actuelle, une charpente à la Philibert Delorme, construite en planches du pays.” anom 13 dfc 506, 4b. On the revival of de l’Orme’s treatise, see Picon, “From ‘Poetry of Art,’” 18. Sinou, Comptoirs, 117. anom 19 dfc 177b, “Elevation de l’hôtel du Gouvernement à St. Louis (Sénégal),” signed by Courtois (1820); 19 dfc 177b , “Elévation de l’hôtel du Gouvernement,” signed Courtois (1820). See also Sinou, Comptoirs, 119; Sinou, “Le Sénégal,” 41–2. The earliest and last plans by Courtois in the anom archives are: anom 08 dfc 467b , “Plan du quartier de la Baie Notes to pages 373–81

571

83

84

85 86

87 88

89

572

Mahaut,” signed Courtois (1810); 09 dfc 35b , “Iles des Saintes. Plan indiquant les hauteurs relatives de quelques mornes des Saintes,” signed Courtois (1818). anom 19 dfc 220b, “Projet d’Hôpital pour 180 malades,” signed Courtois, 10 February 1821. The project was ordered in 1820: “Il paraitrait donc urgent que le Ministre ordonnât à Mr. Le Chef de Bataillon Courtois, de lui soumettre un plan raisonné d’hôpital, dont l’emplacement devrait être fixé dans un conseil présidé par le Gouvernement et où les médecins seraient appelés.” 19 dfc 150, “Sénégal, notes n. 1, 2, 3, 4 et 5,” signed M. Mackau (1821), 5a. “Plan de l’Hôpital: On sait que le renouvellement de l’air est une des causes qui contribuent le plus à diminuer l’insalubrité des lieux habités par un grand nombre d’individus. Il est essentiel, surtout dans les climats où la contagion d’un grand nombre de maladies est si rapide et si redoutable, que les bâtiments destinés au logement des troupes et principalement les hôpitaux, soient disposés de manière à favoriser le plus possible l’action des courants d’air. Dans le grand projet d’hôpital de M. Philibert, les différents corps de bâtiments ne sont pas assez isolés. L’air circulerait mal dans les cours qu’ils forment entre eux” (anom 08 dfc 471b) . anom 08 dfc 508, “Observations sur les Projets envoyés par Mr Philibert, commandant le Génie à la Guadeloupe, voir une décision du 26 aout 1818.” The devis estimatif for the new hospital and chapel are extraordinarily detailed. 08 dfc 571 (1818); 08 dfc 591 (1820). Pérouse de Montclos, L’art de France, 411, 448. “Cette méthode si simple étoit la seule qu’on employait dans les constructions civiles et militaires au Sénégal, ou des grandes et longues sècheresses suivis de très fortes pluies se font éprouver, et l’expérience prouve, que la première construction de ces terrasses, et leur entretien subséquent est très peu dispendieux,” signed by Burck-oFarel (after 1821). His accompanying cross-section is now in a separate place: anom 19 dfc 150c , “Coupe des toitures en terrasse en usage au Sénégal, plan joint à une note de Mr. le Cap.ne Burck-o-Farel,” 12 May 1822. anom 19 dfc 150c. “Elévation de la Façade principale,” signed Vené (1830). “La facade qui résulte du plan … nous parait manquer de goût. Les piliers de la Galerie sont trop faibles, relativement à la largeur des arcades, et le maigre filet que couronne.” anom 19 dfc 292, “Rapport sur un projet de défense de l’Ile St. Louis adressé par Mr. le Chef de Bataillon du Génie Stucker,” by Cuissier (?), Directeur du Dépôt des Fortifications des Colonies, 10 January 1829, 11b. anom 19 dfc 292, 12b. See Sinou, “Le Sénégal,” 41; Sinou, Comptoirs, 122–3.

Notes to pages 381–8

90 “Lorsque le Comité du Génie a examiné les projets des casernes à construire à la Guadeloupe, il a reconnu la nécessité d’entourer les casernes par des galeries. Dans les climats chauds, les galeries ont principalement pour objet d’empêcher l’action immédiate du soleil contre les murs extérieurs des édifices. Elles sont surtout utiles dans les casernes, en ce qu’elles permettent aux troupes qui, sous les tropiques ne devraient jamais sortir de 10 heures du matin à 3 heures du soir, de rester dans les galeries que les rayons du soleil ne frappent pas, et où la brise qui règne ordinairement pendant le jour, rend la chaleur moins accablante. Des motifs seuls d’économie pourraient déterminer à ne faire de galeries que sur un seul côté des casernes … Nous avons dessiné sur cette feuille une galerie en charpente semblable à celle qui a été adoptée pour les casernes que l’on construit au quartier d’Angoulême à la Guadeloupe. Les ouragans violents et les tremblements de terre que l’on éprouve fréquemment aux Antilles ont fait préférer ce genre de galeries aux galeries en pierre. De semblables causes de destruction n’existant pas au Sénégal, il nous semble que l’on doit, ainsi que le propose Mr Stucker, construire en briques les galeries des casernes projetées. Elles présenteront plus de solidité et de durée que des galeries en charpente.” anom 19 dfc 292, 12b–13a, 14b. 91 An elevation survives in the Public Records Office in London. See Broadbent and Hughes, Francis Greenway Architect, 33. c h a pte r f ou rte e n 1 On the impact of Italian façade design on French architecture, see Hautecoeur, L’architecture classique, 1:649–60. 2 Gowans, Church Architecture, 93–7. 3 On Drouin and Pelletier see Richardson, Quebec City, 220, 455. 4 Spicer, Calvinist Churches, 69–78; Howard, Architectural History, 188–207. 5 “il est necessaire de battir plusieurs Eglises pour faire le service divin, et pour la commodité des fidelles.” anom fm a 21, “Etablissement du Seminaire de Quebec,” signed by Laval, 26 March 1663, 90a. See also Gowans, Church Architecture, 36; Kalman, Canadian Architecture, 61. 6 Gowans, Church Architecture, 100–8. 7 Serge Courville, Robert Gagnon, and Luc Noppen have long considered this map to be from 1640 (Courville and Gagnon, Québec, 52; Noppen, Les églises, 5). Nevertheless it looks like a later copy to me, and the church is located not where Notre-Dame-de-la-Recouvrance was built but

8 9

10

11 12 13

14 15 16

17

18 19 20

on the Grand Place on the site of Notre-Dame-de-la-Paix, with which it shares a suspiciously exact ground plan. On the disputed authenticity of this map see Gauthier, “Une carte de Jean Bourdon de 1640,” 99–101. Kalman, Canadian Architecture, 67; Gowans, Church Architecture, 25–6. anom 03 dfc 341c, “Vray plan du haut et bas de Quebec comme il est en lan 1660”; 03 dfc 342b , “Véritable plan de Québec comme il est en l’an 1664 et les fortifications que lon y puis faire,” signed Bourdon (1664); See also Noppen, Notre-Dame de Québec, 24. The reference to the clocher comes from a letter written by Laval to the king in 1680: “The clocher [of Notre-Damede-la-Paix], being only of wood, has been totally ruined by the snows and severe climate of this country.” Quoted in Gowans, Church Architecture, 26. Ibid., 25. Noppen, Les églises, 5; Noppen, Notre-Dame-de-Québec, 32–3; Noppen, “L’évolution, 69–78. bnp cp 127, 7, 3, “Le veritable plan de Quebec fait en 1663,” attributed to Jean Bourdon. On the church’s status as a parish church see Gowans, Church Architecture, 29. Kalman, Canadian Architecture, 68; Noppen, Les églises, 12; Gowans, Church Architecture, 39–41. Fondation Clément, La patrimoine, 269. “Nous avons visité l’estat de L’Esglize du dit quartier Le presbitaire & Le Cimitiere & nous avons trouvé Le tout avoir besoing de grosses Reparations, en consideration dequoy les paroissiens ont volontairement donné la quantité de 13750 ll. de sucre pour les susdittes Reparations, et espesialement pour la cloture du Cimitiere qu’ils desirent estre faitte de Massonerie. Laquelle somme avec ce que les Paroissiens que ne ce sont pas trouvées a l’assemblée pourront donner, sera la plus grande partie des dittes Reparations necessaires & Laquelle quantité de 13750 ll. de sucre nous avons remis au Sieur Roy Conseiller du Roy au Conseil Souverain de cette Isle, & Marguillier de la ditte paroisse,” signed P. Bernard, Degue, J. Roy, Renaudiz, Duvinier, and Pierre Girard Roy. anom col f 3 26, 21 November 1687, 212a–13a. “J’ai remarqué que beaucoup des clochers de paroisse sont déliés. Il parait que c’est souvent l’effet du climat. Les clochers sont en général séparés du corps de l’église et bas, à cause des ouragans et des tremblements de terre.” adm 24j2i, “Mémoires de Pierre Clément Laussat,” vol. 2 (1804–07): 1233 (10 April 1805). anom 14 dfc 5c, anonymous map of Cayenne (1677). Verwimp, Les jésuites en guyane francais, 70. Ibid., 70–1, 220.

21 anom 14 dfc 52b , “Plan de la ville et du fort Saint-Michel de Cayenne dans l’état où je l’ay trouvé au mois de janvier 1733,” signed François Fresneau de La Gataudière (February 1733); 14 dfc 72a , “Plan de la ville de Cayenne levé par le sieur Baron, ingénieur du Roy en 1749,” signed Julien-Marie Solain-Baron (1749). 22 Morvannou and Castel, Michel le Nobletz, 112–17. On the influence of Le Nobletz in North America see Gagnon, La conversion, 66–71, 87–9. 23 “Les fortifications avaient été détruites sous le gouvernement de Mr. V. Hugues.” anom 14 dfc 564, “Mémoire sur la Guiane Françoise … [par] Son Excellence le Duc de Luxembourg, Ambassadeur extraordinaire de S.M. à la cour de Brésil” (1817). About the church the report simply says: “Deux besoins urgents se font principalement sentir à Cayenne. L’un est celui d’une Eglise décente. Il n’existe qu’une espèce de chapelle, dont l’enceinte ne contient pas le tiers des assistants; d’ailleurs bâtie comme un hangard d’habitation, et très-mal entretenue.” 24 anom 14 dfc 518b , “Plan de la nouvelle ville de Cayenne sur laquelle on voit aussi la partie des fortifications de l’ancienne ville qui la sépare de la nouvelle,” signed François Simon Mentelle (January 1791); 14 dfc 601a , untitled map of Cayenne (1820). 25 Corvington, Port-au-Prince, 1:98–1000; Rigaud, “L’histoire d’Haïti,” 3–12; Beauvoir-Dominique, L’ancienne cathédrale, 19–23. I am grateful to my second reader for suggesting that I include this church in this section and for pointing me to these secondary sources. 26 “Elle est propre, mais sans majesté, comme tous les édifices en bois, ou nul plafond ne cache l’intérieur du toit. Des piliers y forment une nef avec deux bas-côtés.” Moreau de Saint-Mery, Description, 2:337. 27 Kornwolf, Architecture, 1:342–4. 28 Kukawka and Leclercq, Mana, 41–9; Savé, Histoire, 543–5. The 1840 Mana church did not have open or jalousied side aisles. The 1883 photograph of the Sinnamary church is in the bnf , Société de Géographie, sge sg Xgf -59. 29 Bédard, Maisons et églises, 32; Noppen, Les églises, 12; Gowans, Church Architecture, 40–1. 30 “Sa Ma[jes]té … a ordonné et ordonne que le Sieur Evesque pourra faire bastir des Eglises de pierres dans touttes les parroisses et fiefs de la nouvelle France ou il n’en a pas esté fait jusqu’à present dans les lieux qui seront estimez les plus convenables, pour la commodité des habitans.” anom fm a 21, “Arrest du Con[se]il d’estat qui accordé à Mons[eigneu]r L’Evesque le patronage des Eglises les ayant pour batir de pierres,” 27 May 1699, 82a. Not surprisingly (see chapter 1) the reason for this reiteration of the decree

Notes to pages 388–94

573

31 32 33 34

35 36

37

38

39 40 41 42

43

574

was that many seigneurs were ignoring the decree because they did not want to spend the money. The report listing the number of churches in stone and wood is: anom col f5a 4/1, “Nouvelle-France, État des cures et des missions” (1686). Bédard, Maisons et églises, 31–9; Noppen, Les églises, 12–14; Gowans, Church Architecture, 36–47. Gowans, Church Architecture, 47. Noppen, Les églises, 12. The two largest churches had a width-to-length ratio of roughly 1:3: Montreal (36 × 120 feet), and Sainte-Annede-Beaupré (28 × 80). Small chapels tended to have a ratio of between 1:1.4 and 1:5: Lachine (26 × 36 feet), Pointeaux-Trembles (24 × 36), Prairie de la Madelaine (20 × 25), Saurel (12 × 30), and Neuville (22 × 30). The final eight of the ones whose dimensions are given in this document are exactly or roughly 1:2: Boucherville (25 × 50 feet); Repentigny (20 × 40); Trois-Rivières, (27 × 60), Cap-de-laMadelaine (16 × 30), Champlain (25 × 55), Batiscan (22 × 45), Beauport (24 × 60), and Côte de Lauzon (20 × 45). anom col f5a 4/ 1, “État des cures et des missions” (1683). Noppen, Les églises, 13. Bédard, Maisons et églises, 33. Luc Noppen has created a complex family tree of church plans into five categories which I have simplified above in a desire to focus on the most essential differences. See Kalman, Canadian Architecture, 76. Noppen and Grignon, L’art de l’architecture, 126–7. Kalman, Gowans, and Gérard Morriset believe that this was meant to be a prototype, but Noppen and Grignon point out that we simply do not have enough evidence to prove that it was not meant for a particular church (indeed it has corrections written on the back that indicate that it was for a specific project). See Kalman, Canadian Architecture, 71–2. The obverse of the plan reads: “Plan d’Eglise par Mr Jean Maillou le plan n’est point asses large il n’a que 30 pieds. Il en faut 36 le mur doit avoir au moins 2 pieds ½ au dessus du rez de chaussée et reduite 2 pieds au haut, quatre rangees de bancs de 5 pieds sont 20 pieds l’allée du milieu au moins 4 pi. Reste 7 pieds pour les allée des cotés.” mcfsq, sme15-La collection de cartes et plans / z-160. Noppen and Grignon, L’art de l’architecture, 126–7. Kornwolf, Architecture and Town Planning, 1:276. Grignon, Loing du soleil, 5–6. Noppen, Notre-Dame-de-Québec, fig. 10, is a reconstruction, based on Baillif’s second facade design, representing the church as Noppen believed it appeared in 1720. Gowans, Church Architecture, 48–9; Grignon, Loing du soleil, 8.

Notes to pages 395–406

44 anom 03 dfc 424a , “Plan, Profil et Elévations d’une nouvelle Cathédrale et Paroisse proposés à faire dans la Ville de Québec,” signed Chaussegros de Léry, 4 January 1745. The facade is depicted under a flap showing Chaussegros’s proposed design of 1745. This facade is also depicted in Castonguay and Lacasse, Québec, 67, fig. 30, where it is assumed to be a project of Chaussegros’s devising. 45 “Jay mis a feuille volante un dessein dun Portail, dans un autre une elevation sur la longeur de la nef avec un ordre d’architecture quon pourra fare en platre.” anom 03 dfc 424a . 46 Quoted in Gowans, Church Architecture, 48. 47 On Baillif’s “collaboration” with de la Rivière at NotreDame-des-Victoires, see Grignon, “La pratique architecturale,” 17. On these monuments see also Kalman, Canadian Architecture, 64; Grignon, Loing du soleil, 83–4; Noppen, Les églises, 178–9; Gowans, Church Architecture, 50–3, 122, 124–6. 48 anom f 3 290 97, “Plan du Bel Etage au Rez de Chaussée de la cour du Palais Episcopal,” signed Chaussegros de Léry, 15 October 1743; f 3 290 98, “Plan de l’Etage au Rez-deChaussée de la basse Cour du Palais Episcopal ou sont les offices,” signed Chaussegros de Léry, 15 October 1743; f 3 290 100, “Elevation et Profil par la ligne A.B. du Palais Episcopal,” signed Chassegros de Léry, 15 October 1743. 49 Kornwolf, Architecture and Town Planning, 281–3; Gowans, Church Architecture, 149. 50 Glendinning and MacKechnie, Scottish Architecture, 69–70. 51 Quoted in Gowans, Church Architecture, 126. 52 Tadgell, “France,” 124–5; Sécheval, “Entre hommage et trahison,” 378. For a photograph of the baldachin see Landry and Derome, L’art sacré, 50. On François Gauvin see Les Gauvin d’Amérique, 26. 53 On the vigorous Breton tradition of wooden retables of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, see Tapié, Retables baroques. 54 See Trudel, The Ursuline Chapel; Trudel, Un chef d’œuvre. On retables in general in Quebec see Landry and Derome, L’art sacré en Amérique française, 32–5. 55 Villeneuve, The Tabernacle, 35–63; Gauthier, Les tabernacles, 15–39. See also Landry and Derome, L’art sacré, 70–1. 56 Begot, Architecture, 60. 57 Fondation Clément, Martinique, 428; Cazassus-Bérard, 101 monuments, 94. 58 Fondation Clément, Martinique, 230. 59 Ibid., 386; Cazassus-Bérard, 101 monuments, 86. 60 Wilson, “Religious Architecture,” 119. On this church see also Kornwolf, Architecture and Town Planning, 1:330–1. 61 Wilson, “Religious Architecture,” 119.

62 anom 04 dfc 70b , “Plan, profils et élévation de l’Eglise projetée à faire à la Nouvelle Orléans,” signed De Pauger, 29 May 1724. See Poesch and Bacot, Louisiana Buildings, 16–17. 63 Wilson, “Religious Architecture,” 120. 64 Ibid., 85. 65 Ibid., 119. 66 anom f 3 288 39, “Plan de l’interieur de L’Eglise de la Trinité, signed by Jean-Baptiste Romain, 1 August 1740. 67 The reredos screen has been removed so the apse would have been visible from the nave, the sacristy was added to the right side of the choir, the vestibule is missing, and side entrance doors replaced windows in the transepts. I have not been able to locate the original of Alexandre de Batz’s plan; however it is published in Wilson, “Religious Architecture,” 125–6. 68 Caillot, A Company Man, 78. 69 anom 04 dfc 107c , “Plan et elevation d’une chapelle et de deux logements projetez d’estres elevez a l’isle de la Balise,” signed De Pauger, 23 September 1723; 04 dfc 112b, “Profils relatifs au plan du fort de la Balise,” anonymous (July 1731). On Balise, see Powell, The Accidental City, 48–9; Daspit, Louisiana Architecture, 21–3; Wilson, “Religious Architecture,” 138–9. 70 Caillot, A Company Man, 84. 71 The quotation is from anom 04 dfc 107c . See next note for the letter of April 1732. 72 “à l’exception d’un petit espace que j’ai fait pratiquer dans le fonds de ce batiment, avec un Retable provisoire pour y celebrer la Ste Messe et les offices.” anom 04 dfc 118, “Mémoire traittant de la situation de L’Isle, et des ouvrages faites au fort de la Balise,” anonymous (April 1731), 4a. See Wilson, “Religious Architecture,” 139, for more references to its function as a warehouse and lighthouse. 73 anom 04 dfc 117, “La Louisianne Fort de la Balize” (ca. 1731), 2. 74 “Plus deux chassis a verre pour les Roses ou Oeïls de Bœufs de 6 pieds 4 pouces de diamettre a 50 la pièce ci, 100.0.0.” anom 04 dfc 118, 25b. 75 Wilson, “Religious Architecture,” 140. c h ap t e r f i f t e e n 1 Begot, Architecture, 63. 2 Fondation Clément, Patrimoine, 322–3; Flohic, Martinique, 270. 3 anom 13 dfc 550a , “Plan topographique de la ville et environs de St. Pierre Martinique,” signed by Laroque Dufau (1819).

4 anom 13 dfc 5096a , “Projet d’agrandissement de l’église de la paroisse du Mouillage à Saint-Pierre,” signed Berthet (1853); 13 dfc 5097a , Plan de l’église du Mouillage et du terrain qui en dépend à Saint-Pierre, signed Berthet (1853); 13 dfc 5095a , “Ponts-et-Chaussées. 1853. Projet d’agrandissement de l’église du Mouillage pour la transformer en cathédrale. Saint-Pierre,” signed Lemonnier de La Croix. 5 It appears on page 39. 6 In 1696 Auger described the church as “so well maintained and served that it draws considerable attraction to itself,” and in 1722 Jean-Baptiste Labat noted about the facade: “the portal … is of hewn stone with the arms of Messieurs de Houël on the door, either because these gentlemen contributed to its construction, or because the Jesuits wanted to, by this distinction, get them to finish it at their expense” (Desmoulins, Basse-Terre, 98). Since the Carmelite church had been burned during the siege of 1759 the Carmelites were sold the ex-Jesuit church by the Crown for 45,000 livres (anom 209miom 209, “Inventaire & etat des biens meubles & immeubles de la mission des Carmes de l’isle Guadeloupe,” 1 January 1773, 280b). On this church see Desmoulins, Basse-Terre, 95–101; Flohic, Guadeloupe, 58; Begot, Architecture, 42–3. 7 Desmoulins, Basse-Terre, 98. 8 anom 13 dfc 550a ; 13 dfc 40b , “Plan du fort Saint-Pierre et d’une partie de la ville nommée communément le cartier du fort,” signed Marc Payen (ca. 1681–82). For a brief history of the church see Fondation Clément, Patrimoine, 324. 9 See Bailey, “Just Like the Gesù,” 233–64. For French examples such as seventeenth-century projects for the Jesuit churches at Tournon, Blois, Besançon, or Montpellier, see Moisy, Eglises des Jésuites, plates Xvi c , XXv d , XXXvii c , and lviii d . 10 The tower’s appearance is preserved in a pre-1902 photograph, a drawing by Dufau, and a painting by Bassot. The photograph shelf number is adm ad 972 2f i 00043_001 nb n . The Dufau drawing of 1819 is from anom 13 dfc 550a ; Bassot’s painting Vue de la Rivière du Fort Saint-Pierre de la Martinique (1765) is in the Musée Regional d’Histoire et d’Ethnographie, Martinique, 89-64-1. See Beuze, Belles acquisitions, 24–7. 11 Fondation Clément, Patrimoine, 83; Jeanne CazassusBérard, 101 monuments, 26. 12 Fondation Clément, Patrimoine, 243; Cazassus-Bérard, 101 monuments, 70. 13 Desmoulins, La Côte-sous-le-vent, 36; Flohic, Guadeloupe, 372; Begot, Architecture, 43. 14 Sarmant, Les demeures du soleil, 129.

Notes to pages 408–19

575

15 I have written elsewhere about the impact of Serlio on the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Andes. See Bailey “Classicism in a Rococo World,” 99–111; Bailey, The Andean Hybrid Baroque, 49, 76, 83; Bailey, “Just Like the Gesù.” For a classic study on the impact of Serlian Renaissance classicism on the Andes see Fraser, The Architecture of Conquest. 16 Desmoulins, Basse-Terre, 101–7; Begot, Architecture, 45; Fabre, De clochers en clochers, 8. 17 Desmoulins, Basse-Terre, 106; Fabre, De clochers en clochers, 11–12. 18 Fabre, De clochers en clochers: 19–26, 29–33. 19 For the engraving, by Ozanne, see Desmoulins, BasseTerre, 38. 20 Desmoulins, Basse-Terre, 105. 21 aeg , Lettres officielles et administratives 1874–1882. 22 “Restauration de la Cathédrale … l’église Cathédrale de la Basse Terre est absolument la même que l’ancienne église paroissiale de St. François. Aussi mon intention n-a-telle jamais été de toucher à une pierre de la Cathédrale, avant d’avoir obtenu du Gouvernement local ou métropolitain l’autorisation voulue pour être en droit d’obtenir également une subvention et de la colonie et de l’état.” aeg , Lettres officielles et administratives 1874–1882, 19 October 1874, 33. 23 Pérouse, Art de France, 210–13; Biver and Biver, Abbayes, 426–9. 24 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Recueil, plate 6. 25 On the church’s building history see Saint-Méry, Description, 1:334–5. 26 Supplément aux Affiches Américaines, Avis Divers, 29 February 1772, 9, 1. For the final cost of the church see McClelland, Colonialism and Science, 85. 27 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:335. 28 Ibid., 1:337. For the dimensions of Quebec Cathedral see Noppen, Notre-Dame de Quebec, 16. 29 It appears in an engraving of the ruins of the church in La Selve, Le pays des négres, 23. On the tower see also Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:342. 30 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:226–37. 31 On this church see Dumoulin, Paris d’église en église, 48–51; Hautecoeur, L’architecture classique, 1:549. 32 A 1775 map (see next note) confirms the construction date, as does an inventory of Capuchin properties from 9 May 1773 which shows that the “maison presbitéralle,” had not yet been begun (anom 209miom 29, “Inventaire,” 175–6). On the church’s history see R.P. Ballivet, “Nos paroisses de 1635 à nos jours … La Pointe-à-Pitre 2e Partie: Les églises,” L’écho de la Reine de Guadeloupe 77 (1927): 96. 33 anom dfc Guadeloupe, supp., f. 17, “Plan de [blank] située en l’isle Grnde-Terre [sic] Guadeloupe, levé & dessiné en 576

Notes to pages 419–31

34 35 36 37

38

39 40

41 42

43 44 45

46 47 48

49

1775 par C. F. Nassau”; anom 08 dfc 395a , “Plan de la ville Pointe à Pitre en l’Isle Grande-Terre Guadeloupe levé et dessiné par le S[ieu]r Nassau Arpenteur breveté du Roi et Adjoint au Grand Voyer de l’isle en 1783 et 1784,” signed Nassau (1784). The Viry drawing, from the last quarter of the eighteenth century, is in the Musée de Versailles, mv 6033; inv. Dessins 313. bnf cp 127, 7, 3. Lucas, Saint, Site, 133. Gowans, Church Architecture, 108–9. Grignon, “La pratique architecturale,”15–16; Grignon, Loing du Soleil, 6–7; Noppen, Notre-Dame de Québec, 45–55; Gowans, Church Architecture, 120. Noppen has found a similar tower in the town of Argentan (Normandy) (Noppen, Notre-Dame-de-Québec, fig. 15). There is also a close example in Saint-Martin, Sai, Orne (lower Normandy) from ca. 1683, and at the church of Saint-Julien in Arles (Provence), rebuilt in 1648. See La Sicotière, Le département de l’Orne, 208. Gowans, Church Architecture, 76–7; Moisy, Les églises, 320, plate lXXi b , lXXX b . Archives des Prêtres de Saint-Sulpice de Montréal, voûte 1, tiroir 5, no. 1521; McCord Museum, McGill University, mp-0000.10.44. Villeneuve, The Tabernacle of Paul Jourdain, 18; Gowans, Church Architecture, 141. anom col f5a 4/1, “Mémoire sur le Canada et son clergé par de La Marche” (1713). See also: Kalman, Canadian Architecture, 61–2; Gowans, Church Architecture, 108–9; Moisy, Les églises, 499–500. E.g., Gowans, Church Architecture, 54. bnf, Estampes et photographie, fol-hd-4 (8). Pérouse, L’art de France, 197; Dumoulin, Paris, 86–91; Moisy, Églises des Jésuites, 246–51. On Martellange and his tribunes see Moisy, Églises des Jésuites, 107–27, plate Xlii a , Xlvii. See Fumaroli, L’âge de l’éloquence, 223–391. anom 14 dfc 485b, “Plan d’une chapelle pour le nouveau quartier d’Approuague,” signed Guisan (April 1789). anom 14 dfc 483, “Devis des materiaux necessaires pour batir la Chapelle du quartier d’Approuage,” signed Guisan, 14 March 1789. In another devis about what would be owed by the king he wrote: “La chapelle matériaux & main d’œuvre, 8527 l[ivres].” 14 dfc 494, “Etat des prix que couteront les differents etablissements du Bourg d’Aprouague d’apres les plans & devis du S. Guisan, ingénieur,” 15 October 1789. “Lorsque la chapelle sera finie de bâtir et mise en état de pouvoir décemment y célébrer le Service Divin, elle sera bénite suivant les cérémonies de l’église par le Préfet de la

50

51

52 53 54 55

56 57

58

59 60 61

Mission après quoi le prêtre destinée à la desservir, sera tenu d’y célébrer la messe les fêtes et dimanches.” anom 14 dfc 499, “Extrait des Registres du Tribunal Terrier, Ordonnance pour l’Etablissement du Bourg de Villebois dans la Guiane Française,” signed Jacques Martin de Bourgon and Pierre d’Huinet Desvarennes, 26 October 1789. anom 14 dfc 372c, “Cayenne. 1782. Bâtiments civils. Chapelle de la Savanne servant de magazin pour le roy,” signed Dessigny (1782). See Courtin, Paris au xviii e siècle, 68–9. The Lequeu drawing for a garden pavilion also has the characteristic lappets. bnf, Estampes et photographie, est va -282 (b, 1). See Duboy, Jean Jacques Lequeu, 337. See Cantone, “The Point of Pointed Architecture,” 85–106; Goerg, “Conakry,” 61–9. Benoist, Histoire, 84; Thilmans, “L’église oubliée,” 193–8. Benoist, Histoire, 81. Thilmans et al., “L’église oubliée,” 207. On Boufflers, see also Jones, The Métis of Senegal, 26; Martin, “Les Français en Afrique subsaharienne,” 331–2. Thilmans, “L’église oubliée,” 229, 234. The church’s generic name “Église du Nord” would suggest that it had never been consecrated. See Thilmans, “L’église oubliée,” 219. See Wittman, Architecture, 24–6, 153. Jean-Jacques Lequeu designed several neo-Gothic follies during this period, none of them executed. See Duboy, Jean Jacques Lequeu, 154, 197. The latter, a “Nouveau Portail d’Eglise appliqué au Temple supérieur d’Isis par les Galois,” has a similar tracery window. Cannan, Churches of the South Atlantic Islands, 50–6. Thilmans, “L’église oubliée,” 225. “Ni St. Louis, ni Gorée n’ont d’église dans le moment actuel; et il serait convenable d’en construire une, au moins, dans le chef-lieu. La maison qui en servait autrefois, après avoir été abandonnée pendant l’occupation des Anglais, est tombée en ruines et le terrain sur lequel elle était bâtie a été vendu … La modicité des fonds allouer au Sénégal ne m’a pas permis de penser à remédier à cet inconvénient … Les habitans catholiques de St. Louis, qui sont généralement pieux, concourront volontiers à l’édification d’une Eglise, et se chargeront de la partie de la maçonnerie; mais il faudrait que le Gouvernement se déterminât à fournir les bois et les ferrements et à supporter une partie des frais de mains-d’œuvre.” anom 19 dfc 123, “Détails d’exécution du plan de colonisation du Sénégal adressé le 8 juillet 1817 a son Excellence le Ministre de la Marine et des Colonies, et adopté en principe par le Conseil des Ministres dans sa séance du 18 mai 1818,” signed Commandant Schmaltz, 18 May 1818, 44.

62 Benoist, Histoire de l’église, 92–5; Kukawka and Leclercq, Mana, 18–19. 63 Thilmans, “L’église oubliée,” 225. 64 “Il est bien fâcheux que cette Colonie soit resté privée si longtems de secours spirituels … Il n’y a point de chapelle à St. Louis; jusqu’à ce jour c’est dans une chambre particulière que le culte a été desservi: ce n’est convenable sous aucun rapport. Il faudrait pouvoir lier à la construction d’un hôpital, celle d’une chapelle.” anom 19 dfc 147, “Rapport de Mr de Mackau sur les Etablissemens de Sénégal,” 16 March 1820. 65 adsl , “Histoire de l’église de Saint-Louis du Sénégal,” undated typewritten document; Benoist, Histoire de l’église, 104–5; Thilmans et al., “L’église oubliée,” 227. On Deroisin, who was born in Orléans in 1797 and died in Saint-Louis in 1828, see Bajot, Annales, 730. 66 adsl , “Histoire de l’église de Saint-Louis du Sénégal.” 67 anom 19 dfc 180b , “Projet de Chapelle [Saint-Louis],” signed Courtois (1820). 68 Courtin, Paris au xviii e siècle, 21; Lyonnet, Les propylées de Paris, 74–5, 92–93; Vidler, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, 209–34; Kalnein, Architecture in France, 237–9. 69 Szambein, “Bernin et l’architecture néoclassique française,” 154; Rosenblum, Transformations, 123. 70 Hourihane, The Grove Encyclopedia, 404. 71 Neufforge, Recueil, i , book two, plate three. 72 Pinon, “Les églises néoclassiques,” 265. 73 Thilmans, Histoire militaire, 128–9; 132–3. Knight-Baylac, “La vie à Gorée,” 382. 74 The 1687 map depicting the chapel is anom 17 dfc 12b (see chapter 11). The two maps with elevations are 17 dfc 50a (from 1765) and 17 dfc 83c (1769); the plan is shown on 17 dfc 60a (1768). For full details on these maps see chapter 11. For the early history of Christianity in Gorée see Benoist, Histoire de l’église, 7, 63, 73. 75 “La Chapelle attenante à ces cazernes sert actuellement de Magasin, elle est couverte de paille.” anom 17 dfc 43, “Mémoire sur l’etat présent de l’ile de Goree, lors de la reprise de possession le 14 7bre 1763” (1763), 2. 76 “Quant à l’Eglise, elle est lézardée au deux pignons ou elle manque par les fondements … Le reste de la maçonnerie est en état … Les parties assises dans la maçonnerie des 19 poutres qui soutiennent ce plancher, sont absolument pourries par la pluie qui traverse depuis plus de treize ans le toit de paille qui le couvre.” anom 17 dfc 57, “Mémoire des Réparations à faire aux Bâtiments du Roy existants a l’Isle de Gorée par M. de Paradis,” Gorée, 5 November 1767, 5–6. 77 Thilmans, Histoire militaire, 200–1. 78 Benoist, Histoire de l’église, 106. Notes to pages 431–7

577

79 Bouchon, Ces églises, 19, 234; Szambien, “Les architectes parisiens,” 38–40, 50. chapter sixteen 1 Nevertheless, the French public was not completely unaware of what was going on and even tried to brush the more distasteful aspects of colonialism under the carpet. Recent studies have suggested that French society deliberately turned a blind eye toward slavery while enjoying the benefits of its production. For example, Madeleine Dobie notes that although the French furniture industry depended on tropical woods obtained by slave labour, the objects they produced made no reference to the colonies, replacing the distasteful realities of slavery in the Atlantic and Indian oceans with images associated with the exotic Orient. Dobie, “Orientalism,” 13–36. 2 Edwards, “Creole Architecture,” 245. 3 Da Cunha, “Esboço histórico,” 989–90; Sullivan, “The Black Hand,” 43–55; Ávila, “The Baroque Culture of Brazil,” 124; Sweet, Recreating Africa, 199–206; Curto and Lovejoy, Enslaving Connections; Matory, Black Atlantic Religion. 4 It is beyond the scope of this book to deal with the Aleijadinho “problem.” For recent works with varying attributions and presentations of Aleijadinho and his myth see: Teixeira, Aleijadinho, 14–17; Jardim, O Aleijadinho; Ribeiro de Oliveira, “Antônio Francisco Lisboa,” 12–17; Ribeiro de Oliveira, Aleijadinho; Ribeiro de Oliveira, Os passos; and especially Grammont, Aleijadinho e o aeroplano. 5 On Juan Correa and the cathedral murals see Alcalá and Brown, Painting in Latin America, 138–47. 6 Herskovits, “Problem, Method and Theory, 343–4, 348; Herskovits, “The Present Status,” 137–8, 145. Herskovits’s theory is discussed most cogently in Edwards, “Unheralded Contributions,” 166. 7 Belrose, Le jardin créole, 27–31; Thornton, Africa and Africans, 129, 208–9; Herskovits, “Problem, Method and Theory,” 348. 8 Thornton, Africa and Africans, 184. 9 Herskovits, “Problem, Method and Theory,” 348. 10 Nelson, Architecture and Empire, 234. 11 Vlach, “The Shotgun House,” 47–56; Vlach, “Sources of the Shotgun House,” 137. 12 Edwards, “Shotgun,” 65–6; Edwards, “Unheralded Contributions,” 168, 181–2. Labat is quoted in Astley, A New General Collection, 2:285. I am grateful to my second reviewer for this last reference. See also Bourdier and Minh-ha, Vernacular Architecture, 19–21, 166–7. 13 Edwards, “Shotgun,” 67.

578

Notes to pages 438–45

14 Edwards, “Unheralded Contributions,” 168. 15 Edwards, “Creole Architecture,” 265; Vlach, “Sources of the Shotgun House,” 156. On the survival of wattling as an African technique in the West Indies, see also Nelson, Architecture and Empire, 221; and Higman, Montpelier, 183–4. 16 Edwards, “Unheralded Contributions,” 187–9. 17 King, Blue Coats or Powdered Wigs, 99. 18 From a sign produced by L’Institut de Sauvegarde du Patrimoine National (ispan ) on-site at the Habitation Dion National Historic Monument. On Haitian slave houses, “almost none” of which have been preserved, see also Cauna, “Vestiges,” 32. 19 Cauna, Au temps des isles à sucre, 117. 20 Nelson, Architecture and Empire, 221. 21 Sainton, “The Historical Background,” 55. 22 Barthelot and Gaumé, “Introduction,” 26. 23 Cauna, Au temps des isles à sucre, 117. 24 anom dppc not sdom// 1543, Notary Jean-Baptiste Riberou, 1783–87, “Estimation des établissements, bâtiments et plantations,” 6 May 1785. The next year, on 20 September 1786, the same notary evaluated six mules on another plantation near Marmelade at 900 livres (dppc not sdom//1543, “Société entre les Sieur Pierre Michaud et le Sr. Jean Claude Michaud contenant vente de la parte de la premier en faveur du dernier”). For the plantation at Pointe de Nègre, see dppc not mar// 601, “vente d’habitation par le Sieur Gabriel Gounaud au Sieur Antoine Laborde,” 22 February 1785. 25 On the location of slaves’ houses see: Sainton, “The Historical Background”; Sainton, Histoire et civilisation, 150–3; The map of the Banchereau plantation in Le Carbet is anom f3 288 37. The map of the Chouachas Concession is in the Edward E. Ayer Collection at the Newberry Library; the Habitation Damian map is anom 1pl 1975. The Fleuriau plantation map, in ink on parchment, is in the Musée du Nouveau Monde in La Rochelle, gift of Louis-Aimé de Fleuriau, 2013. 26 Belrose, Le jardin créole, 32. 27 amb , 65 s 103, “Inventaire de la plantation de Jean Testas à Pointe-à-Pitre” (April 1783), 26a. 28 “Donné la journée aux negres pour travailler à leur place.” anom fm f 6 4, “Travaux journaliers pour le mois de mars 1789,” 179a. 29 Barthelot and Gaumé, “Introduction,” 25. 30 Ibid., 26. 31 Sainton, “The Historical Background,” 56. 32 As Sainton notes: “Even though the slave built his own house, he repeated a prototype that was imposed on him

33 34 35 36

37

and that did violence to his needs and tastes” (Sainton, “The Historical Background,” 56). On the modular construction of slave huts see Berthelot and Gaumé, “Introduction,” 23–7. Thornton, Africa and Africans, 224. Personal communication, Professor Wazi Apoh, Department of Archaeology, University of Ghana, 18 April 2017. See Debien, “Religion des esclaves,” 233–43. Champroux was in fact the first ecclesiastic to swear an oath to the Republic, but he was expelled from the colony in 1802 after only eight years for insubordination. In a letter of 14 November 1802 (23 brumaire), Louis-Thomas Villaret de Joyeuse, captain-general of Martinique and Sainte-Lucie notes that Champroux had been expelled along with abbé Dumonteil, curate of Marigot, for refusing to preach the sermon (anom 211miom 70, Correspondence, Villaret de Joyeuse, 14 November 1802). Champroux’s own declaration of obedience from the same year was evidently ineffectual (211miom 70, “Procès-verbaux de prestation de serment d’obéissance et fidélité au gouvernement de la République” [1802], fol. 52a). Details about the plantation and Dubuc family also appear in some notarial documents of the same year – e.g., anom dppc not mar// 1951 (La Trinité, Notary Mollenthiel, 1802), “Obligation des Srs de Dubuc de Rivery au propris des Srs Nesbitt Stewart Nesbitt,” 30 January 1802. “La construction d’un oratoire de six pieds carrés, en forme d’un petit four de campagne, ou jamais on a dit la messe, est l’édifice sur lequel M. Dubuc de Riveray a élevé son atroce dénonciation; j’en joins ici la copie certifiée … cet oratoire accordé, (par le Commandant de la paroisse du Robert qui y exerce toute la Police) a la dévotion des Nègres Esclaves, a l’imitation de plusieurs oratoires semblablement établis dans la Colonie et contre le voeu de l’exposant qui redoutait de distraire cette classe, des exercices plus importants du Culte dans l’Eglise; ce petit oratoire, construit huit mois avant la remise de la Martinique, occupait la dévotion des nègres à la Sainte Vierge, sans alarme le Gouvernement qui considérait au contraire comme un gage heureux de tranquillité que les nègres tournassent leurs pensées vers la Religion! L’inscription (appui des esclaves, priez pour nous) qui fut apposée à ce petit oratoire, ne fut pas soupçonné d’inconvenance, tant étoit parfaite la sécurité des habitans de la Colonie.” anom 211miom 71, “Requête adressée au Premier Consul par Ponce René Champroux, curé du Robert, protestant contre les persécutions qu’il prétend avoir subies du fait de M. Dubuc de Rivery et du père Trepsac qui l’ont fait expulser de la Martinique (April 1803),” 1a–b. See also Fondation Clément, Le

38

39

40 41 42 43

44

45 46

47 48 49

50 51

52 53 54 55 56 57 58

patrimoine, 300, which mentions this text but does not give the source. Writing about Trepsac he remarks: “Le Curé que n’etoit pas plus l’auteur de l’inscription que l’architecte de l’Oratoire, n’a reconnu l’abus possible de l’inscription, que par la Malignité déversée dans la dénonciation” (anom 211miom 71, 1b). By accusing Trepsac of misunderstanding the church because he was not the author of the inscription or the architect of the building, I believe he is implying that he, Champroux, is. On Jacaranda see Crain, Historic Architecture, 110–11; on the General Hospital, see Broadbent and Hughes, Francis Greenway, 33; Davidson, ed., Historic Public Buildings, 2–5; on the Conakri Hôtel des Douanes, see Soulillou, Rives coloniales, 92. Mark, Portuguese Style, 48. Edwards and Kariouk, A Creole Lexicon, 60; Edwards, “Origins of Creole Architecture,” 167–9. Thinlot, Maisons paysannes, 184. Edwards, “Creole Architecture,” 256; Charlery, “Maisons de maître” 23–6; Kingsley, Buildings of Louisiana, 23; Edwards, “Origins of Creole,” 167, 172. On the Palacio at Engombe see Pérez, “Republica Dominicana,” 27. On the Palacio Cortés, see Marco Dorta, Arte en América, 54–6; on the Casa del Fundador see Daza, Herencia colonial, figs. 5–10. Charlery, “Maisons de maître,” 5; Edwards, “Origins of Creole,” 168–9. Charlery, “Maisons de maître,” 25. On the Alcázar’s relationship to the Villa Garzoni, see Bailey, Art of Colonial Latin America, 130–1. On the Plaza de Santo Domingo and the Plaza de Bolívar see Gutiérrez, Arquitectura y urbanismo, 49, 92. Toussaint, Arte mudéjar, 7–13, xxix. On the Chiquitos and Paraguay missions see Querejazú, Las misiones jesuíticas; Gutiérrez, Evolución urbanística, 293–325. Nelson, Architecture and Empire in Jamaica, 69–70; 79–88. Mark, “The Evolution,” 173–8; Mark, Portuguese Style, 10; Edwards “Complex Origins,” 3–58. On Post and Eckhout, see also Klooster, The Dutch Moment, 65–6. Mark, Portuguese Style, 52–8. Quoted in Mark, “The Evolution,” 178. Quoted in Mark, Portuguese Style, 59. Mark, Portuguese Style, 10–11. Ibid., 67. Klooster, The Dutch Moment, 49–53; 63–73; Lawrence, Trade Castles, 131–69. Mark, Portuguese Style, 59–60.

Notes to pages 445–51

579

59 Ibid., 66–70, 74. 60 Edwards, “Complex origins,” 28–31. On the Jews in Guadeloupe and Martinique, see Klooster, The Dutch Moment, 164–74. 61 Tupi Woman Holding a Child, with a Basket on Her Head (oil on canvas, 1641). National Museum of Denmark, n .38.a4. 62 Mark, Portuguese Style, fig. 11. 63 Ibid., fig. 13. 64 Sustersic, Templos Jesuitico-Guaraníes, 29–33; Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions, 151; Gutiérrez, Evolución artística, 139, 149–51. 65 Bailey, The Spiritual Rococo, 273–7. 66 Bayón and Marx, South American Colonial, 293–5; Bruno, O equipamento, 69 67 Amaral, A hispanidade, 12–18, 24–8, 52, 84–7. 68 Bayón and Marx, South American Colonial, 293–5. 69 Embury, “New Netherlands Farmhouses,” 10–15; Gosner, Caribbean Georgian, 24. 70 Edwards, “Creole Architecture,” 258; Toledano, The National Trust Guide, 12; Fricker, “The Origins,” 137–53; Gowans, Images of American Living, 44–5; Traquair, The Old Architecture of Quebec, 60. 71 A 1711 reference to a gallery in Detroit cited by Alan Gowans has been shown to be a mistranslation. 72 Edwards, “Creole Architecture,” 260–1; Peterson, “Early Ste. Genevieve and Its Architecture,” 261; Gosner, Caribbean Georgian, 22–4. 73 Charléry, “Maisons de maître,” 24. 74 Klooster and Bakker, Architectuur en bouwcultuur, 49, 96–7. 75 Fricker, “The Origins,” 153. 76 Ibid., 148, 152. 77 Toscer, Architecture rurale, 75, 130–1; Gauthier, Les maisons paysannes, 32, 53, 56, 222–3. 78 Thinlot, Maisons paysannes, 184. 79 Ibid., 171–6. On the farmhouse at Verzé, see 183–5. 80 Hugonnet-Berger, L’Hôtel-Dieu de Beaune, 14–25; Bavard, L’Hôtel-Dieu de Beaune, 15–22. 81 anom col e 70, Champré, Jean, death certificate (1735); col e 64, Carré, Louis death certificate (1769). On the prevalence of royal engineers from Burgundy, see Blanchard, Les ingénieurs, 95. 82 Edwards, “Creole Architecture,” 247–8. For his views of Fricker, see 258. 83 Charlery, “Maisons de maître,” 22. 84 Fricker, “The Origins,” 153. 85 Charlery, “Maisons de maître,” 25; Desmoulins, BasseTerre, 180. 86 anom 15 dfc 830a , “Profil de la porte d’entrée du Fort Saint-Louis” (1704); anom fm c 9a 17, letter from Sorel

580

Notes to pages 451–66

87

88 89

90

91 92

93

94

95 96

97

& Mithon, 10 February 1720, 52a; fm c 9a 17, “Devis des reparations necessaires au Fort St Louis,” 20 January 1720, 68a. anom 04 dfc 120b, “Plan de la ville et du port Louis etabli par les Francais sur la Mobile en 1711.” I am grateful to my second reader for pointing out this image. Widman, “New Orleans,” 206. I am grateful to my second reader for this reference. adg c776, “Contrat pour la construction de la maison du gouverneur passé avec Le Clou, charpentier,” 17 June 1718, 1a–2a; adg c 376, “Construction d’une maison joignant celle du gouvernement sur la place d’armes: convention entre le gouverneur et Le Clou (Pierre), maître charpentier,” 6 September 1723, 1a–2a. anom 14 dfc 356, “Etat des plans des batimens du Roy tant dans l’Interieur de la Ville qu’à la Savanne,” signed Dessigny, Cayenne, 30 December 1782, 2a. Musée d’Aquitaine, Bordeaux, 2003.4.19 (Collection Chatillon l 14). anom 14 dfc 357a, “Cayenne, Bâtiments civils. Gouvernement, intendance, avec leurs dépendances, domaine et autres bâtiments au roi. N° 1,” signed Dessingy (1782); 14 dfc 356, 2a. anom 14 dfc 363b, “Bâtiments civils. Maisons du roy sur la rue de Remire servant de logement à l’aide-major de place.” The building replaced a 1688 structure on the same site. See adg , Sites et Monuments Historiques en Guyane, typewritten document entitled “L’hotel prefectoral des Palmistes,” 1–5; Verwimp, Les jésuites, 73, 218–19. On the Jesuit use of brother architects see: Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions, 46–7; and Bailey, The Spiritual Rococo, 242–50. T. Jeffereys, quoted in Verwimp, Les jésuites, 219. anom 14 dfc 356, 3b; 14 dfc 358a , “Cayenne. 1782. Bâtiments civils. Plan du pavillon sur la place [d’armes] et ses dépendances acquit en 1766 des créanciers des soitdisants Jésuites,” signed Dessigny (1782). The anonymous watercolour seems to have altered the setting so that the shoreline is right on the Place d’Armes (or it has turned the Jesuit house around so that the main facade is visible from the water). However there are too many similarities with the current facade and Dessigny’s plan for me to have any doubt that this is the facade being depicted. anom f3 296 e 8, “Plan, profils et facade du batiment des Magazins du Roy à faire au Cap, l’incendie de 1734 ayant bruslé l’ancien, fait au Cap le 30 mars 1736,” signed Delalance; f 3 296 e 9, “Plans, profil et elevation du Magasin Royal du Cap, le Cap le 30 aoust 1737,” signed Delalance; anom 15 dfc 335a , “Plan profils et elevation

98

99

100

101

102 103 104

105 106

du Magasin Roial du Cap de St. Domingue en Amerique,” signed “Herbert fecit, 1738” (but this must refer just to the drawing itself or even the decorative cartouche), also “fait a Leogane le 12 may 1738 Delalance.” anom 04 dfc 99c, “Facade et elevation du Bâtiment de l’Intendance, du côté de l’entrée,” signed Broutin, 23 August 1749; 04 dfc 101c , “Coupe et profil du bâtiment de l’Intendance, pris sur la ligne ponctuée,” signed Broutin, 23 August 1749. Quotation is from Wilson, “Ignace-François Broutin,” 249; see also Wilson, “Bienville’s New Orleans,” 19–23; Daspit, Louisiana Architecture, 18; and Edwards, “Creole Architecture,” 257. On the Parlange Plantation house see: Kornwolf, Architecture and Town Planning, 1:346; Daspit, Louisiana Architecture, 26–7, 31; Morrison, Early American Architecture, 263. anom 15 dfc 654a , “Plans et profils des Magasins du Roi et de l’artillerie. Port-au-Prince,” signed La Merveillère (1790); 15 dfc 655a , “Plan et profil de l’intendance et des bâtiments qui en dependent,” signed La Merveillère (1790); 15 dfc 659a , “Plan et profil de l’hôpital militaire de Port-au-Prince,” signed La Merveillère (1790); 15 dfc 661a , “Plan, profil et élévation de l’hôtel du Gouvernement et des bâtiments qui en dependent. Port-au-Prince,” signed La Merveillère (1791); 15 dfc 651c , “Plan profil et élévation du bureau des classes. Port-au-Prince, signed La Merveillère (1790); 15 dfc 653c , “Plan et profils du Corps de Garde de la place Vallière. Port-au-Prince,” signed La Merveillère (1790); 15 dfc 653c , “Plan et profils du Corps de Garde de la place Vallière. Port-au-Prince,” signed La Merveillère (1790). “La forme qu’on a adoptée pour les constructions des maisons et des édifices, presque totalement en bois et qui ne sont que posés sur le sol semblent la mettre par la suite à l’abri des tremblements de terre.” anom 15 dfc 221, “Reconnoissance et Vues Genérales sur quelques parties de la Colonie Française de St. Dominuge,” signed La Merveillère (1789), 9a–b. Affiches Américaines, 16 June 1773, 283. Saint-Mery, Description, 2:354–5. La Merveillère’s portal is absent in the only drawing made at the time of the construction in 1772. anom cp 1pl 2302, “Plan et élévation du Gouvernement G[enera]l,” approved by Vallière and Montarcher (1772). Affiches Américaines, 12 March 1766, 99; Avis du Cap, 1 May 1769, 28. Desmoulins notes that “les galeries ouvertes, élément emblématique de l’architecture antillaise et du mode de vie

107

108 109

110

111

112 113 114 115

116

créole, sont peu présentes a Basse-Terre … Dans les habitations rurales, elles sont régulièrement décrites a partir des années 1780, mais c’est sans doute la perte des archives plus anciennes qui nos empêche de les documenter plus tôt.” Desmoulins, Basse-Terre, 180. bnf, Estampes, Vd. 22 (2) p184860, “IIe Vue du Fort Royal de la Martinique”; “Vue de la Rivière du Fort SaintPierre de la Martinique,” by Bassot, 26 October 1765, Musée Régional d’Histoire et d’Ethnographie, Martinique, Inv. 89-64-1. Fondation Clément, Patrimoine, 74. “Pavillon Rouge en maçonnerie avec Gallerie hautte et basse en bois il y a 16 chambres et 17 petits cabinets, magasin, grenier, cuisine, ecurie, et un petit jardin sur le derriere. Une partie de la couverture et les potaux de la gallerie a refaire. (Longueur 135; Largeur 26).” anom 08 dfc 388, “Mémoire et état actuel ou se trouvent les Bâtimens civils et militaires appartenant au Roy,” 5 June 1784, 8. See chapter 13 for a description of Government House. “Le second Bâtiment au fond de la Cour en maçonnerie avec étage couvert en tuiles occupée par le general. Le Bas consiste en une salle avec Gallerie sur poteaux, sur la cour, et une autre gallerie basse sur solage couverte en essentes, faite à neuf sur toute la longueur du Batiment donnant sur le jardin. (Long. 73.0.0; larg. 45.0.0) Le haut consiste en une gallerie ouverte sur la cour, et une autre fermée divisée en quatre petits appartemens donnant sur le jardin. Le corps du Batiment entre ces deux galleries contient trois chambres, garde-robes, cabinets occupés par le General. En bon état. Les deux Batimens sont joints sur la droite par une gallerie ouverte haute et basse qui contient en bas plusieurs petits magasins et offices, le haut sert de communication des appartemens du General au secreteriat. En bon etat (Long. 44.0.0; larg. 14.0.0)” anom 13 dfc 404, “Mémoire et Etat actuel ou se trouvent les Bâtiments civiles et militaires appartenant au Roi a la Martinique,” signed Beton, 1 September 1784, 4a. A Street in Point-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, 1789, watercolour by B … bon fils. Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Bordeaux, 66.1.1055. Legs Jeanvrot. Edwards, “Creole Architecture,” fig. 13; Goguet and Mangones, Architecture, 59. Goguet and Mangones, Architecture, 42–5. Toledano, New Orleans, 14–18. Mark, Portuguese Style, 43, 46, 50; Mark, “African Rococo,” 53; Hinchman, Portrait of an Island, 81–116; Hinchman, “House and Household,” 76, 169–71, 174. Mark, Portuguese Style, 10, 46–7.

Notes to pages 466–71

581

117 Hinchman, “House and Household,” 171; Bourdier and Minh-ha, Vernacular Architecture, 18–19, 146; KnightBaylac, “Gorée au Xviii e siècle du sol,” 37 118 The first quotation is by Mungo Park, who travelled to Senegal in 1797 and 1805, and the second is by L’Abbé Boilat in 1853. See Hinchman, “House and Household,” 171; Boilat, Esquisses Sénégalaises, 295. 119 Hinchman, Portrait of an Island, 85; Hinchman, “House and Household,” 171; Hinchman, “African Rococo,” 71–2; Wood, “An Archaeological Appraisal,” 39–64. 120 Bourdier and Minh-ha, Vernacular Architecture, 25. 121 “Les charpentes de palmistes sont d’une prompte execution ainsi que les couvertures de paille, mais les etats de depense de Gorée ont foi du peu d’oeconomie qu’il y a a les mettre en œuvre la durée de la paille ne passe pas l’année, et la charpente sert au plus trois ans.” anom 17 dfc 57, “Mémoire des Réparations à faire aux Bâtiments du Roy existents a l’Isle de Gorée par M. de Paradis,” Gorée, 5 November 1767, 2. 122 “On fait la chaux a la terre ferme a une lieue et demi de Gorée, et dix negres y établis en fourniront environ 10000 livres par semaine … Une des goélettes de Gorée, coupera en Gambie le bois nécessaire à la charpente. On y trouve en abondance des mangliers qui sont éternels pour la durée, il est même bon de ne pas perdre le privilège, trop négligé, jusqu’à ce jour, dont jouissent les français de remonter cette rivière au-dessus du Fort St. Jacques pour cet objet seulement. Quant aux lattes, on les fera à Gorée des planches de sape qu’on ne peut se dû penser d’y envoyer de France.” anom 17 dfc 57, “Mémoire des Réparations à faire aux Bâtiments du Roy existants a l’Isle de Gorée,” signed Armény de Paradis, Gorée, 5 November 1767, 1–3. 123 anom fm c 6 9 “Sénégal Galam, Bissaux (1725), Estat des employéz existants dans les Departements de la Concession du Senegal au 15 mai 1725.” 124 Knight-Baylac, “Gorée,” 46–7; Hinchman, Portrait of an Island, 224–8. Nevertheless, these men were paid less than their white counterparts: in 1768 a French mason earned 3 livres 6 sous 8 deniers per day whereas a black mason earned only 8 sous; similarly a white carpenter earned 1,200 livres per year compared to the 144 earned by a black carpenter. Knight-Baylac, “La vie,” 399. 125 anom 17 dfc 16a , “Plan des forts et isles de Gorée” (1699). 126 “Les murs du Gouvernement qui est dans le fort ne paroissent point du tout endommagés, mais il n’y a ni toits ni planchers, n’y portes n’y fenetres. Il y a apparence que les Anglais on fait du feu avec toute la charpente des Batiments.” anom 17 dfc 43, “Mémoire sur l’etat présent de

582

Notes to pages 472–7

127

128 129

130

131 132

133 134

135 136 137

138 139 140 141 142

l’ile de Goree, lors de la reprise de possession,” 14 September 1763, 3a. anom 17 dfc 46b, “Plan, Profils, et Elevation de l’hopital de l’isle de Gorée,” signed Armény de Paradis, 19 November 1763. For roofs of traditional architecture on the Senegal River see Hinchman, Portrait of an Island, 52–3. “Ce bâtiment doit être recrépis à chaux et à sable en dedans et en dehors. Il n’y a que des réparations légères à faire aux fenêtres ou il manque quelques pierres. Le cheminée n’est point liée avec le pignon, la fenêtre, F, est lézardée on peut facillement réparer ces défauts. La couverture est de Paille, la Charpente trop foible par conséquent pour soutenir un toit de chaux, faute d’ardoises.” anom 17 dfc 46b . Hinchman, Portrait of an Island, 229–31; Ricou, “Gorée,” 93. In his report, Paradis mentions the need to finish the floors: “L’hôpital sert actuellement de magasin, il est couvert de paille, les planchers sont à faire, il n’y a exactement que les murs qui puissent servir si l’on veut le rétablir.” anom 17 dfc 43, “Mémoire sur l’etat présent de l’ile de Goree, lors de la reprise de possession le 14 7bre 1763.” Martin, “Les Français en Afrique subsaharienne,” 333. Hinchman, Portrait of an Island, 102. See also: Hinchman, “African Rococo,” 77; Hinchman, “House and Household,” 168. Hinchman, Portrait of an Island, 70–1. “Le Village est composé de sept mauvaises maisons construites en pierre, le reste est bâti avec de la paille seulement.” anom 17 dfc 43, 2a. See Knight-Baylac, “Goree,” 35. Hinchman, Portrait of an Island, 96. Knight-Baylac, “La vie,” 386. “On ne doit point souffrir que les habitans construisent des maisons de pierre dans l’espace compris entre le glacis et la pointe du nord. Ils pourront s’y loger à leur façon dans des cabanes de jonc que l’on incendiera après avoir renvoyé ces Negres a la grande terre dans un cas de siège pour ôter a l’ennemi tout moyens de se mettre à couvert du feu de la place.” anom 17 dfc 40 bis, “Mémoire sur un projet de fortification de l’Isle de Gorée,” Armény de Paradis, Paris, 24 May 1763, 5a. Hinchman, Portrait of an Island, 87; Knight-Baylac, “Gorée,” 51. Knight-Baylac, “Gorée,” 34–5; Knight-Baylac, “La vie,” 381. Ricou, “Gorée,” 96–110. See also Hinchman, Portrait of an Island, 83–7. Benoist and Camara, “Les signares,” 108. Benoist, Histoire de l’église, 92–5.

143 Benoist and Camara, “Les signares,”108. 144 Ricou, “Gorée,” 92. 145 anom 17 dfc 174a , “Plan adressé par Mr. Vène chef de bureau du Génie” (1835). In fact the Maison Pépin’s staircase stands out clearly in this map. 146 Benoist and Camara, “Les signares,”108. 147 Mark, Portuguese Style, 47–9. 148 Hinchman, Portrait of an Island, 93; Hinchman, “African Rococo,” 368–9. 149 For example, the undated seventeenth-century map of Gorée with the shelf number anom 17 dfc 11a . 150 Benoist and Camara, “Les signares,” 100–5. 151 Sinou, Comptoirs, 164. 152 Hinchman, Portrait of an Island, 91; Hinchman, “House and Household,” 175–6. Hinchman in particular has focused on how these spaces were used and experienced. 153 Scholars of Latin American culture have long warned against lingering too long over the minutiae of specific sources. Inga Clendinnen famously warned that such an approach to early colonial Mexican religion was akin to “vivisection,” and Verónica Cereceda, writing about Chilean textiles, cautioned scholars not to lose a sense of the “specific language of the fabrics” and their “syntax” in favour of parsing out individual motifs and symbols. Clendinnen, “Ways to the Sacred,” 109; Cereceda, “The Semiology,” 149. 154 Martin, “Les Français en Afrique subsaharienne,” 333. c h a p t e r s e v e nt e e n 1 Martin, “Les Français,” 509; Jones, The Métis of Senegal, 85. 2 Burgess, Engines of Empire; Campo, Engines of Empire, 38; Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, 90; Thackeray and Findling, Events, 176–7; Duignan and Gann, Colonialism, 680. 3 Gény, “Introduction,” 385–6; Martin, “Les français,” 506–7; Williams, Naturalists at Sea, 232–3; Rivière, The Governor’s Noble Guest. 4 See Malm, Fossil Capital, 148–59; Hewitt, “Victorian Britain,” 395–438. I am grateful to Elizabeth Miller for directing me to these two sources. 5 Hewitt, “Victorian Britain,” 398. 6 Rahmani and Sarazin, Made in Algeria; Frémaux, “La France en Algérie,” 391–402. 7 Martin, “Les Français en Afrique subsaharienne,” 532–4. 8 Rachel, Conjugal Rights, 36. 9 See Gény, “Introduction,” 385–8. See also Vandervort, Wars of Imperial Conquest. Vandervort begins his book, and

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

therefore the beginning of the new imperial age, with the conquest of Algeria. Hodge, Encyclopedia, 1:83; Butel, Histoire des Antilles, 309–10. Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, 282. Gény, “Introduction,” 387; Hodge, Encyclopedia, 1:12– 15, 83–4. Chamberlain, Scramble for Africa, 54. Rignac, “La présence française en Indochine,” 675–87; Huetz de Lemps, “La présence de la France,” 734. Goerg, “La Guinée Conakry,” 90–1. Sinou, Comptoirs, 178, 326–7. Compare for instance the chapters on Ghana and Togo with those of Guinea-Conakry and Côte d’Ivoire in Soulillou, Rives coloniales. Fondation Clément, Le patrimoine, 140; Sinou, Comptoirs, 220; Flohic, Guadeloupe, 213–14. Gnacadja, “Le Bénin,” 222–3. See also Martin, “Les Français en Afrique subsaharienne,” 343. Ironically in Senegal neo-Gothic was embraced by Muslims, who began a tradition of building Gothic mosques in the 1840s, with pointed windows and often cathedral-like paired towers, a style that remains popular in village mosques today. See Cantone, “The Point of Pointed Architecture,” 85–106. Chatwin, The Viceroy of Ouidah, 13. Hyland, “Le Ghana,” 161. Ibid. Mallé, “Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni,” 113–23. Ibid., 37, 40–2. Rivière, “In Honour of a Fellow-Explorer,” 9–20. McAleer, Captain Cook, 172–8; Williams, Naturalists at Sea, 150–78; Ferloni, La Pérouse, 22–3. Rivière, Noble Guest, 110. Ibid., 247. While I have not found any specific references to this garden in the manuscript collection of the State Library of New South Wales, there are references to scientific work being carried on by La Pérouse’s men, including astronomer Joseph Lepaute Dagelet (1751–ca.1788), who shares hints about how to build an observatory with British naval astronomer William Dawes (1762–1836) in a letter of 3 March 1788: “Je trouve que votre Q.C. [carte de cercle] est parfaitement bien posé et ne laisse rien à désirer sous aucun rapport. Le couvrirez-vous par un petit dôme conique et tournant sur lui même” (slnsw, safe 1/ 250, coll. 15). Another reference, from the journal of Philip Gidley King (1758–1808), who was sent to welcome the La Pérouse crew upon their arrival at Botany Bay in 1788, mentions botany and natural history science conducted by

Notes to pages 477–87

583

the crew: “The Astrolabe & Boussole were fitted out with the greatest liberality, Monsieur de la Perouse told me, that the King told him to get whatever he wanted & he added that if he was now at Brest & had to equip his Ships for the remainder of his voyage, that he could not think of any article that he stood in need of. Besides the Astronomer Monsieur Dagelet, he is provided with a very capital Botanist from the Jardin du roi called de la Martinniere, also a draughtsman, in every line, I saw his collect[ion] of Natural History which is very compleat. An Abbé who is also on the expedition as a collector of Natural Curiosities [illegible] … appears a Man of Letters & Geniality. This Abbé has under his care a great number of Philosophic instruments & the Astronomer has also every instrument necessary. slnsw, manuscript ml safe 1/16, “Remarks & Journal kept on the Expedition to form a Colony in His Majesty’s

584

Notes to page 488

29

30 31 32 33

Territory of New South Wales,” vol. 1 (12 January–1 February 1788, signed by Philip Gidley King), 93a–b. Ibid., 121. On Cookney, see also McGregor, A Forger’s Progress, 314–15. On the anthropomorphic symbolism of the orders, see Summerson, Classical Language, 14–15. Rivière, Noble Guest, 122. Ibid., 122; Rivière, “In Honour of a Fellow-Explorer,” 13, 16. Rivière, Noble Guest, 154. The first quotation comes from a letter from Bougainville from Paris, dated 6 December 1829: “il n’a point oublié et n’oubliera jamais l’excellent accueil et la touchante hospitalité qu’il a reçu d’eux.” slnsw, a 2922, James Macarthur letters, vol. 26, 34–5. The second quotation is from Rivière, Noble Guest, 71.

BiBlioGraphy

p u b l i sh e d p r i Mary s o urc e s Adanson, Michel. A Voyage to Senegal, the Isle of Goree, and the River Gambia. London, 1759. Androuet du Cerceau, Jacques. Livre d’architecture. Paris, 1611. Arago, Jacques. Narrative of a Voyage Round the World, in the Uranie and Physicienne. London, 1823. Astley, Thomas. A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels. Reprint, London, 1968. Barbot, John. A Description of the Coasts of North and South Guinea. London, 1746. Bélidor, Bernard Forest de. La science des ingénieurs. Paris, 1729. Blondel, Jacques-François. Cours d’architecture, ou Traité de la décoration, distribution et construction des bâtiments: contenant les leçons données en 1750 et les années suivantes. 3 vols. Paris, 1771–77. Boilat, Abbé P.D. Esquisses sénégalaises. Paris, 1853. Bolingbroke, Henry. A Voyage to the Demerary. Philadelphia, 1813. Caillot, Marc-Antoine. A Company Man: The Remarkable French-Atlantic Voyage of a Clerk of the Company of the Indies. Trans. and ed. Erin M. Greenwald and Teri F. Chalmers. New Orleans, 2013. Cambray, chevalier de. Manière de fortifier de Mr. de Vauban. Paris, 1689. Caraccioli, Louis-Antoine. L’Europe française, vol. 1. Turin and Paris, 1776. – Le livre des quatre couleurs. Paris, 1760. Champlain, Samuel de. Les voyages du sieur de Champlain, xaintongeois, capitaine ordinaire pour le roy. Paris, 1613. Cordemoy, Gérard de. Divers traitez de métaphysique, d’histoire et de politique. Paris, 1691. D’Albaret, chevalier. Différens projets relatifs au climat et a la manière la plus convenable de bâtir dans les pays chauds, et particulièrement dans les Indes Occidentales. Paris, 1776. D’Aviler, Augustin-Charles. Dictionnaire d’architecture civile et hydraulique. Paris, 1755. Du Breuil, Jean. Art universel des fortifications. Paris, 1665. Durand, Jean-Nicolas-Louis. Précis of the Lectures on Architecture. Ed. Antoine Picon, trans. David Britt. Los Angeles, 2000.

Du Tertre, Jean-Baptiste. Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François. Paris, 1667. Franquet, Louis. Voyages et mémoires sur le Canada. Quebec City, 1889. Frézier, Amédée François. La théorie de la pratique de la coupe des pierres et des bois … ou Traité de Stereotomie. Strasbourg and Paris, 1737. Guisan, Jean Samuel. Traîté sur les terres noyées de la Guiane, appelées communément Terres-Basses. Cayenne, 1788. Harrevelt, E. van, and D.J. Changuion. Histoire générale des voyages, vol. 22. Amsterdam, 1777. Jeaurat, Edme-Sebastien. Traité de perspective à l’usage des artistes. Paris, 1750. Labat, Jean-Baptiste. Nouvelle relation de l’Afrique occidentale. Paris, 1728. La Selve, Edgar. Le pays des négres: voyage á Haïti, ancienne partie française de Saint-Domingue. Paris, 1881. Le Jeune, Paul. Relation de ce qui s’est passé en la Nouvelle France en l’année 1637. Rouen, 1638. Le Rouge, Georges-Louis. Détail des nouveaux jardins à la mode. Ed. Iris Lauterbach. Nördlingen, 2009. Liger, Louis. La nouvelle maison rustique, ou economie générale de tous les biens de campagne, vol. 1. Amsterdam, 1701. Lindsay, John. A Voyage to the Coast of Africa, in 1758. London, 1759. Mallet, Alain Manesson. Les travaux de Mars, vol. 1. Amsterdam, 1684. Maurile de Saint Michel. Voyage des isles Camercanes en L’Amerique. Le Mans, 1652. Montgomery, Sir Robert. A Discourse Concerning the design’d Establishment of a New Colony to the South of Carolina, in the Most delightful Country of the Universe. London, 1717. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Médéric Louis Élie. Recueil de vues des lieux principaux de la colonie françoise de Saint-Domingue. Paris, 1791. – Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue. 2 vols. Paris, 1797. Patte, Pierre, Monumens érigés en France à la gloire de Louis XV. Paris, 1765.

Préfontaine, Chevalier de. Maison rustique à l’usage des habitans de la partie de la France équinoxiale. Paris, 1763. Rivière, Léon. La Guyane française en 1865: Aperçu géographique, historique, législative, agricole, industriel et commercial. Cayenne, 1866. Rochefort, César de. Histoire naturelle et morale des iles Antilles de l’Amérique. Rotterdam, 1658. Savot, Louis. Architecture françoise des bastimens particuliers. Paris, 1624. Thwaites, Reuben Gold. The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents. 73 vols. Cleveland, 1897–1901. Vauban, Sébastien Le Prestre de. Le Directeur-Général des fortifications. Paris, 1683. – Oisivetés du Maréchal de Vauban ou ramas de mémoires de sa façon sur différents sujets. Paris, 1843. Villeneuve, Bardet de. Traité de l’architecture civile à l’usage des ingénieurs. The Hague, 1740. Vitruvius. The Ten Books on Architecture. Trans. Morris Hickey Morgan. New York, 1960. Voltaire. Candide. Trans. Lowell Bair. New York, 2003. Voyages et travaux des missionnaires de la Compagnie de Jésus publiés par les pères de la même compagnie, vol. 1: Mission de Cayenne et de la Guyane française. Paris, 1857. Wimpffen, Baron von. A Voyage to Saint Domingo in the Years 1788, 1789, and 1790. London, 1817. s ec o n da ry s o urc e s Alarcon, Norma. Philippine Architecture during the Pre-Spanish and Spanish Periods. Manila, 1991. Alcalá, Luisa Elena, and Jonathan Brown, eds. Painting in Latin America 1550–1820. New Haven and London, 2014. Alden, Dauril. The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire, and Beyond, 1540–1750. Stanford, 1996. Amaral, Aracy A. A hispanidade em São Paulo: Da casa rural à Capela de Santo Antônio. São Paulo, 1981. Aquila, Richard. The Iroquois Restoration: Iroquois Diplomacy on the Colonial Frontier, 1701–54. Lincoln and London, 1983. Artigalas, Florence. Les jésuites au Nouveau Monde: Les débuts de l’évangélisation de la Nouvelle-France et de la France équinoxiale, xvii e–xviii e siècle. Cayenne, 2013. Asante, Molefi Kete, and Ama Mazama. Encyclopedia of Black Studies. Thousand Oaks, 2005. Association Vauban. Vauban et ses successeurs en Briançonnais. Paris, 1995. Aste, Richard. Behind Closed Doors: Art in the Spanish American Home 1492–1898. Brooklyn, 2013. Augeron, Mickaël, and Olivier Caudron, eds. La Rochelle, L’Aunis et la Saintonge face à l’ésclavage. Paris, 2012.

586

Bibliography

Auricchio, Laura. The Marquis: Lafayette Reconsidered. New York, 2014. Ávila, Affonso. “The Baroque Culture of Brazil.” In Edward Sullivan, ed., Brazil: Body and Soul, 114–27. New York, 2001. Azema, Xavier. Les jardiniers de Montpellier. Montpellier, 2004. Bailey, Gauvin Alexander. The Andean Hybrid Baroque: Convergent Cultures in the Churches of Colonial Peru. Notre Dame, 2010. – “Art in Colonial Latin America: The State of the Question.” Renaissance Quarterly 62, 1 (Spring 2009): 2–27. – Art of Colonial Latin America. London, 2005. – Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America. Toronto, 1999. – “Classicism in a Rococo World: Steadfastness and Compromise in Late Colonial South America.” In Matthew Reeve, ed., Architecture and the Classical Tradition from Pliny to Posterity, 99–111. Turnhout, 2015. – “The Fantastical Rococo Altarpieces of Santiago de Surco, Peru.” Burlington Magazine, November 2015, 769–75. – “French Rococo Prints and Eighteenth-Century Altarpieces in Buenos Aires.” Burlington Magazine, November 2012, 780–5. – “‘Just Like the Gesù’: Sebastiano Serlio, Giacomo Vignola, and Jesuit Architecture in South America.” Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 70, 140 (July–December 2001): 233–64. – The Palace of Sans-Souci in Milot, Haiti (ca. 1806–13): The Untold Story of the Potsdam of the Rainforest. Berlin and Munich, Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte and Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2017. – The Spiritual Rococo: Décor and Divinity from the Salons of Paris to the Missions of Patagonia. Farnham, 2014. Bain, Allison, Réginald Auger, and Yannick Le Roux. “Archaeological Research at Habitation Loyola, French Guiana.” In Kenneth G. Kelly and Meredith D. Hardy, eds., French Colonial Archaeology in the Southeast and Caribbean, 206–24. Gainesville, 2011. Baldotto, Gianni, and Antonio Paolillo. El barroco en las Reducciónes de Guaraníes. Treviso, 2004. Ballivet R.P. “Nos paroisses de 1635 à nos jours … La Pointe-àPitre 2e Partie: Les églises,” L’écho de la Reine de Guadeloupe 77 (1927): 26–32, 92–100. Banks, Kenneth J. “Financiers, Factors, and French Proprietary Companies in West Africa, 1664–1713.” In L.H. Roper and B. Van Ruymbeke, eds., Constructing Early Modern Empires: Proprietary Ventures in the Atlantic World, 1500–1750, 79–116. Leiden, 2007. Bargellini, Clara. “Difusión de modelos: grabados y pinturas flamencos e italianos en territorios americanos.” In J. Gutiérrez Haces, ed., Pintura de los Reinos: Identidades Compartidas. Territorios del Mundo Hispánico, siglos xvi –xviii , 964–1007. Madrid, 2010.

Baridon, Michel. A History of the Gardens of Versailles. Philadelphia, 2008. Barros, Martin, et al. Vauban: L’intelligence du territoire. Paris, 2007. Bavard, Abbé E. L’Hôtel-Dieu de Beaune, 1443–1880. Marseille, 1979. Baumel, Jean. Le Peyrou de Montpellier. Avignon, 1979. Bayón, Damián, and Murillo Marx. History of South American Colonial Art and Architecture. New York, 1992. Beauvoir-Domingue, Rachel. L’ancienne cathédrale de Port-auPrince: Perspectives d’un vestige de carrefours. Port-au-Prince, 1991. Beck, Bernard. “Les châteaux et manoirs de la campagne de Caen.” In Bernard Beck et al., eds., L’Architecture de la Renaissance en Normandie, 139–58. Caen, 2003. Becker, C., and V. Martin. “Mémoires d’Adanson sur le Sénégal et l’île de Gorée.” Bulletin de l’ifan series b , 42, 4 (1980): 722–79. Beckles, Hilary McD. “Social and Political Control in the Slave Society.” In Knight, ed., General History of the Caribbean, 194–221. Bédard, Hélène. Maisons et églises du Québec xvii e, xviii e, xix e siècles. Quebec City, 1982. Bédard, Jean-François. Decorative Games: Ornament, Rhetoric, and Noble Culture in the Work of Gilles-Marie Oppenord, 1672–1742. Lanham, md , 2011. Bégot, Danielle. La grande encyclopédie de la Caraïbe, vol 8: Architecture. Sanoli, 1990. – “Esclaves d’habitation: le cas de la Guadeloupe et de la Martinique du milieu du Xviii e au milieu du XiX e siècle.” In Augeron and Caudron, La Rochelle, 110–30. Belrose, Vincent Huygues. “Daniel Lescalier et les Guyanes 1782–99.” In Chantal Radimilahy and Narivelo Rajaonarimanana, eds., Civilisations des mondes insulaires (Madagascar, îles du canal de Mozambique), 520–40. Paris, 2011. – Le jardin créole à la Martinique. Fort-de-France, 2010. Benoist, Joseph Roger de. Histoire de l’Église catholique au Sénégal: du milieu du xv e siècle à l’aube du troisième millénaire. Paris and Dakar, 2008. Berbain, Simone. Études sur la traite des noirs au golfe de Guinée: Le Comptoir français de Juda (Ouidah) au xviii e siècle. Paris, 1942. Berger, Robert W. A Royal Passion: Louis XIV as Patron of Architecture. Cambridge, 1997. Bert, Scott W. Grand Avenues: The Story of Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the French Visionary Who Designed Washington, D.C. New York, 2007. Berthelot, Jack, and Martine Gaumé. “Introduction.” In Berthelot and Gaumé, Kaz Antiyé, 13–44. – Kaz Antiyé jan moun ka rété: L’habitat populaire aux Antilles. Goyave, 2002.

Besse, Jean-Marc. Face au monde: Atlas, jardins, géoramas. Paris, 2003. Beuze, Lyne-Rose. Belles acquisitions du Bureau du Patrimoine du Conseil Régional de la Martinique. Fort-Royal, 1990. Bittering, David. L’invention du pré carré: Construction de l’espace français sous l’Ancien Régime. Paris, 2009. Biver, Paul, and Marie-Louise Biver. Abbayes, monastères et couvents de Paris. Paris, 1970. Blackburn, Carole. Harvest of Souls: The Jesuit Missions and Colonialism in North America 1632–1650. Montreal and Kingston, 2000. Blackburn, Robin. The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern 1492–1800. London and New York, 1997. Blanchard, Anne. Les Giral: Architectes montpelliérains. Montpellier, 1988. – Les ingénieurs du “Roy” de Louis XIV à Louis XVI. Montpellier, 1979. Blokker, Laura Ewen, and Heather A. Knight. “Louisiana Bousillage: The Migration and Evolution of a French Building Technique in North America.” Construction History 28, 1 (2013): 27–48. Blunt, Anthony. Art and Architecture in France 1500–1700. New Haven and London, 1953. Boithias, Jean Louis, and Corinne Mondin. La maison rurale en Normandie. Nonette, 1982. Bollini, Horacio. Misiones jesuíticas: visión artística y patrimonial. Buenos Aires, 2009. Bonnichon, Philippe et al. Présences françaises outre-mer (xvi e– xix e siècles). 2 vols. Paris, 2012. Bouchenot-Déchin, Patricia. “Beyond the Myth: Le Nôtre’s Origins and Family Connections, Status, Standing, and Patrons.” In Bouchenot-Déchin and Farhat, eds., André Le Nôtre in Perspective, 35–9. Bouchenot-Déchin, Patricia, and Georges Farhat, eds., André Le Nôtre in Perspective. New Haven and London, 2013. Boucher, Philip. France and the American Tropics to 1700: Tropics of Discontent? Baltimore, 2008. – “French Proprietary Colonies in the Greater Caribbean, 1620s–1670s.” In Louis H. Roper and B. Van Ruymbeke, eds., Constructing the Early Modern Empires: Proprietary Ventures in the Atlantic, 163–88. Leiden, 2007. Bouchon, Chantal. Ces églises du dix-neuvième siècle. Paris, 1993. Bourdier, Jean-Paul, and Trinh Minh-ha. Vernacular Architecture of West Africa: A World in Dwelling. Abingdon and New York, 2011. Bourque, Bruce. Twelve Thousand Years: American Indians in Maine. Lincoln and London, 2001. Boven, Karin M. “Inheems wonen in Suriname.” In Olga van der Klooster and Michel Bakker, Architectuur en bouwcultuur in Suriname, 23–9. Amsterdam, 2009. Bibliography

587

Bowron, Edgar Peters Bowron. Pompeo Batoni, a Complete Catalogue of His Paintings. New Haven and London, 2016. Boyer, Jean. Architecture et Urbanisme à Aix-en-Provence aux xvii e et xviii e siècles. Aix-en-Provence, 2004. – “Deux projets inédits de l’architecture Paul-Gilles Cauvet pour Aix-en-Provence.” Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de l’Art Français (1976): 222–40. Brejon de Lavergnée, Arnauld. “Le Nôtre’s Collection of Paintings, Mirror of the Collection of Louis XIV.” In Bouchenot-Déchin and Farhat, André Le Nôtre in Perspective, 91–9. Brinckmann, A.E. Spätmittelalterliche Stadtanlagen in Südfrankreich. Berlin, 1910. Broadbent, James, and Joy Hughes. Francis Greenway: Architect. Sydney, 1997. Brosse, Jacques, et al. Dictionnaire des églises de France, vol. 2: Centre et sud-est. Paris, 1966. Bruné, Elsa, et al. Histoire de l’Église Catholique en Guyane 1664– 2006. Cayenne, 2006. Bruné, Paulin. Demeures traditionnelles de Guyane. Cayenne, 1987. Bruno, Ernani Silva. O equipamento da Casa Bandeirista segundo os antigos inventários e testamentos. São Paulo, 1977. Buisseret, David. “French Cartography: The Ingénieurs du Roi, 1500–1560.” In David Woodward, ed., The History of Cartography, vol. 3, 1504–20. Chicago, 2007. – Historic Architecture of the Caribbean. London, 1980. – Ingénieurs et fortifications avant Vauban. Paris, 2000. – Mapping the French Empire in North America. Chicago, 1991. Burchard, Wolf. The Sovereign Artist: Charles Le Brun and the Images of Louis XIV. London, 2016. Burgess, Douglas R. Engines of Empire: Steamships and the Victorian Imagination. Stanford, 2016. Buridant, Jérôme. “From Shaded Lanes to Stands of Timber: Trees and Groves in Seventeenth-Century Gardens.” In Bouchenot-Déchin and Farhat, André Le Nôtre, 249–61. Butel, Paul. Histoire des Antilles françaises xvii –xx siècle. Paris, 2002. Caemmerer, H. Paul. The Life of Pierre Charles L’Enfant. Washington, 1950. Camara, Abdoulaye, and Joseph Roger de Benoist. “Les signares: de la representation à la realité.” In Abdoulaye Camara and Joseph Roger de Benoist, eds., Histoire de Gorée, 59–83. Paris, 2003. Campo, J.N.F.M. à. Engines of Empire: Steamshipping and State Formation in Colonial Indonesia. Verloren, 2002. Camus, Michel Christian. “Le général de Poincy, premier capitaliste sucrier des Antilles.” Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer 84, 317 (1997): 119–25.

588

Bibliography

Cannan, Edward. Churches of the South Atlantic Islands, 1502–1991. Shropshire, 1992. Cantone, Cleo. “The Point of Pointed Architecture: Its Revival in Europe and Its Appearance in ‘Colonial’ Mosques,” In Fassil Demissie, ed., Colonial Architecture and Urbanism in Africa, 85–106. Farnham, 2012. Carrera, Magali. Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings. Austin, 2003. Carson, Cary, and Carl R. Lounsbury. The Chesapeake House: Architectural Investigation by Colonial Williamsburg. Williamsburg, 2013. Castaldo, Inès. Le Quartier Mazarin: Habiter noblement à Aix-enProvence. Aix, 2011. Castelli, A. “La importancia de la imprenta Plantin para la América Colonial.” Histórica 20, 2 (1996): 313–22. Castonguay, Denis, and Yves Lacasse. Québec, une ville et ses artistes. Quebec, 2008. Caudron, Olivier. “Noirs, mulâtres ou autres gens de couleur dans l’Aunis du Xviii e siècle.” In Augeron and Caudron, La Rochelle, 169–74. – “S’insérer dans une société de Blancs: destins de ‘gens de couleur.’” In Dubesset and Cauna, Dynamiques caribéennes, 83–96. Cauna, Jacques de. Au temps des isles à sucre: Histoire d’une plantation de Saint-Domingue au xviii e siècle. Paris, 2003. – “D’Aquitaine en Haïti et inversement.” In Dubesset and Cauna, Dynamiques caribéennes, 27–54. – “Vestiges of the Built Landscape of Pre-Revolutionary SaintDomingue.” In David Patrick Geggus and Norman Fiering, eds., The World of the Haitian Revolution, 21–48. Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2009. Cazassus-Bérard, Jeanne. 101 monuments historiques Martinique. Paris, 2014. Cereceda, Verónica. “The Semiology of Andean Textiles: The Talegas of Isluga.” In John V. Murra, Nathan Wachtel, and Jacques Revel, eds., Anthropological History of Andean Polities, 162–70. Cambridge, 1986. Chaline, Jean-Pierre. De Normandie au Nouveau Monde: Missionaires et religieuses en Amérique Française. Rouen, 2004. Chaline, Olivier. “A King and His Gardens.” In BouchenotDéchin and Farhat, André Le Nôtre in Perspective, 25–31. Chamberlain, M.E. The Scramble for Africa. 3rd ed. London, 2013. Charbonneau, André. “Gaspard-Joseph Chaussegros de Léry.” In Laurent Vidal et al., Les villes françaises du nouveau monde, 142–6. Paris, 1999. Charbonneau, André, et al. Québec, the Fortified City. Ottawa, 1982.

Charlery, Christophe. “Maisons de maître et habitations coloniales dans les anciens territoires français de l’Amérique tropicale.” In Situ 5 (2004): 2–49. Charrois, Geneviève. “Gaspard Chaussegros de Lery 1682–1756: L’homme, l’ingénieur militaire, son travail pour la ville de Québec.” Master’s thesis, University of Dijon, 1990. Chartrand, René. French Fortresses in North America 1535–1763. Oxford, 2005. Chatwin, Bruce. The Viceroy of Ouidah. London, 1980. Chénier, Rémi. Québec: A French Colonial Town in America, 1660 to 1690. Ottawa, 1991. Choquette, Leslie. “Proprietorships in French North America.” In L.H. Roper and B. Van Ruymbeke, eds., Constructing Early Modern Empires: Proprietary Ventures in the Atlantic World, 1500– 1750, 117–32. Leiden, 2007. Clair, Muriel. “L’aménagement des premières chapelles jésuites en Huronie.” In Lacroix, Les arts en Nouvelle-France, 44. Clark, Emily. Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727–1834. Williamsburg and Chapel Hill, 2007. Cleary, Richard. The Place Royale and Urban Design in the Ancien Régime. Cambridge, 1999. Clendinnen, Inga. “Ways to the Sacred: Reconstructing ‘Religion’ in Sixteenth-Century Mexico.” History and Anthropology 5 (1990): 105–41. Cobin, David M. “Suriname.” In Junius P. Rodriguez, ed., The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery, vol. 7, 620–2. Santa Barbara, 1997. Coëta, René-Claude. Sinnamary 1624–1848: Une cité et des hommes. Paris, 1992. Cojannot, Alexandre. Louis Le Vau et les nouvelles ambitions de l’architecture française 1612–1654. Paris, 2012. Cojannot-Le Blanc, Marianne. “Drawing in Paris during André Le Nôtre’s Formative Years (ca. 1627–1635).” In BouchenotDéchin and Farhat, André Le Nôtre in Perspective, 61–8. Collomb, Gérard. “Missionnaires ou chamanes? Malentendus et traduction culturelle dans les missions jésuites en Guyane.” In La Guyane au temps de l’esclavage, discours, pratiques et representations, 435–55. Paris, 2009. Corti, Paola, et al. La pintura mural de Parinacota en el último bofedal de la Ruta de la Plata. Arica, 2013. Corvington, Georges. Port-au-Prince au cours des ans: La ville coloniale. Port-au-Prince, 1975. Costa, Lucio. “A arquitectura jesuitica no Brasil.” Revista do serviço do patrimonio histórico e artístico nacional 5 (1941): 9–104 Coste, Michel, and Antoine de Roux. Bastides, villes neuves médiévales. Villefranche-de-Rouergue, 2007. Courtin, Nicolas. Paris au xviii e siècle. Paris, 2013. – Paris Grand Siècle. Paris, 2008.

Courville, Serge, and Robert Gagnon. Québec, ville et capital. Sainte-Foy, 2001. Crain, Edward E. Historic Architecture in the Caribbean Islands. Gainesville, 1994. Cross, F.L., and E.A. Livingstone. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. Oxford, 1997. Cunha, Mariano Carneiro da. “Esboço histórico: o elemento negro nas artes plásticas.” In Walter Zanini, ed., História Geral da Arte no Brasil, vol. 2, 989–90. São Paulo, 1982. Curcio-Nagy, Linda A. The Great Festivals of Colonial Mexico City: Performing Power and Identity. Albuquerque, 2004. Curto, José C., and Paul E. Lovejoy, eds. Enslaving Connections: Changing Cultures of Africa and Brazil during the Era of Slavery. Trenton, 2005. Danger, R. “Fort-de-France.” In L’urbanisme aux colonies, 325– 38. Paris, 1932. Dantzig, Albert van. Forts and Castles of Ghana. Accra, 1999. Darwin, John. Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain. London, 2012. Daspit, Fred. Louisiana Architecture, 1714–1820. Lafayette, 2004. Dauchez, Chantal. “Normes du jardin classique et jardin de ville.” In Jean-Pierre Babelon and Bertrand-Pierre Galey, eds. Jardiner à Paris au temps des rois, 149–77. Paris, 2004. David, M. “Ouidah et le commerce des esclaves.” In Bonnichon, Présences françaises, vol. 1, 361–6. Davidson, Rodney, ed. Historic Public Buildings of Australia. Melbourne, 1971. Dawdy, Shannon Lee. Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans. Chicago, 2008. Day, Gordon M., et al. In Search of New England’s Native Past: Selected Essays. Amherst, 1998. – “Western Abenaki.” In Bruce Trigger, ed., Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 15: Northeast, 148–51. Washington, 1978. Daza, Gloria Ines. Herencia colonial IV: Tunja. Bogota, 1974. Debien, G. “Les Grand’cases des plantations à Saint-Domingue aux Xvii e et Xviii e siècles.” Annales des Antilles 15 (1970): 1–39. – “Religion des esclaves et réactions des colons de la Martinique en 1802, le curé du Robert, Ponce Champroux, prêtre manceau.” Province Maine 72 (April–June 1970): 233–43. DeJean, Joan. How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City. New York, 2014. Dell’Arco, Maurizio Fagiolo. La festa barocca. Rome, 1997. Demos, John. The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America. New York, 1995. De Roux, Antoine. “La création urbaine en Martinique et en Guadeloupe aux Xvii e et Xviii e siècles.” In Vidal and d’Orgeix, Les villes françaises, 102–5.

Bibliography

589

Deslandres, Dominique. Croire et faire croire: Les missions françaises au xvii e siècle. Paris, 2003. – “Et loing de France, en l’une & l’autre mer, Les Fleurs de Liz, tu as fait renommer: Quelques hypothèses touchant la religion, le genre et l’expansion de la souveraineté française en Amérique aux Xvi e–Xviii e siècles.” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 64, 3–4 (winter/spring 2011): 93–117. – “Exemplo aeque ut verbo: The French Jesuits’ Missionary World.” In John O’Malley et al., eds., The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 258–73. Toronto, 1999. Deslandres Dominique, et al. The Sulpicians of Montreal: A History of Power and Discretion 1657–2007. Montreal, 2013. Desmas, Anne-Lise et al., Edme Bouchardon 1698–1792: Une idée du beau. Paris, 2016. Desmoulins, Marie-Emmanuelle. La Côte-sous-le-vent, Guadeloupe. Paris, 2002. Desmoulins, Marie-Emmanuelle et al. Basse-Terre, patrimoine d’une ville antillaise. Pointe-à-Pitre, 2006. Des Rochers, Jacques. “Sulpician Cultural Strategies: The Fine Arts.” In Deslandres, The Sulpicians of Montreal, 549–80. Devine, E.J. Historic Caughnawaga. Montreal, 1922. D’Hauterive, Borel. Annuaire de la noblesse de France et des maison souverains de l’Europe, vol. 15. Paris, 1858. Diakité, Tidiane, Louis XIV et l’Afrique noire. Paris, 2013. Dickenson, John A. “Seigneurs and Landowners: An Ecclesiastical Economic Vision.” In Deslandres et al., The Sulpicians of Montreal, 189–225. – “Spreading the Gospel and Training Priests: The Sulpician Missions.” In Deslandres, The Sulpicians of Montreal, 367–412. Dobie, Madeleine. “Orientalism, Colonialism, and Furniture in Eighteenth-Century France.” In Dena Goodman and Kathryn Norberg, eds., Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What Furniture Can Tell Us about the European and American Past, 13–36. New York and Oxford, 2007. Doortmont, Michel R., and Jinna Smit, Sources for the Mutual History of Ghana and the Netherlands. Leiden, 2007. D’Orgeix, Émilie. “De l’éducation des ingénieurs militaires (1650–1750).” In Vidal and D’Orgeix, Les villes françaises, 49–55. D’Orgeix, Émilie, et Céline Frémaux. “La petite maison dans les abattis ou l’art de rédiger aux bois par Jean Antoine de Brûletout, chevalier de Préfontaine dans son habitation de la France équinoxiale (1754–1763).” In Situ 21 (2013): 2–13. Dubesset, Éric, and Jacques de Cauna. Dynamiques caribéennes: pour une histoire des circulations dans l’espace atlantique (xviii e– xix e siècles). Bordeaux, 2014. Dubois, Laurent. “Slavery in the French Caribbean, 1635–1804.” In David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., The Cambridge World History of Slavery, 431–49. Cambridge, 2011. Duboy, Philippe. Jean Jacques Lequeu: Une énigme. Paris, 1987. 590

Bibliography

Duclos, P. “Guayana francesa.” In Charles E. O’Neill and Joaquín M. Domínguez, eds., Diccionario histórico de la Compañía de Jesús: Biográfico-Temático, vol. 2, 1831. Rome and Madrid, 2001. Dudley, Tara. “Ownership, Engagement, and Entrepreneurship: The gens de couleur libres and the Architecture of Antebellum New Orleans, 1820–1850.” PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2012. Duignan, Peter, and L.H. Gann, eds. Colonialism in Africa 1870–1960, vol. 4: The Economics of Colonialism. Cambridge, 1975. Dumoulin Aline, et al. Paris d’église en église. Paris, 2007. Eccles, William J. “Bochart de Champigny, Jean, Sieur de Noroy et de Verneuil.” In Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 2, 71–80. Toronto and Quebec City, 1969. – The Canadian Frontier 1534–1760. New York, 1969. – The French in North America 1500–1783. Markham, 1998. Edgerton, Samuel. Theaters of Conversion: Religious Architecture and Indian Artisans in Colonial Mexico. Albuquerque, 2001. Edwards, Jay D. “Creole Architecture: A Comparative Analysis of Upper and Lower Louisiana and Saint Domingue.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 10, 3 (September 2003): 241–71. – “The Origins of Creole Architecture,” Winterthur Portfolio 29, 2/3 (summer–autumn 1994): 155–89. – “Unheralded Contributions across the Atlantic World.” In William Beolhower, ed., New Orleans in the Atlantic World: Between Land and Sea, 10–50. Abingdon, 2010. Edwards, Jay D., and Nicolas Kariouk Pecquet du Bellay de Verton. A Creole Lexicon. Baton Rouge, 2004. Elliot, J.H. Empires of the Atlantic World. New Haven and London, 2006. Embury, Aymar. “New Netherlands Farmhouses.” In Robert E. Miner, ed., Early Homes of New York and the Mid-Atlantic States, 10–15. New York, 1977. Ennals, Peter, and Deryck Holdsworth, Homeplace: The Making of the Canadian Dwelling over Three Centuries. Toronto, 1998. Etlin, Richard. Symbolic Space: French Enlightenment Architecture and Its Legacy. Chicago and London, 1994. Evers, Bernd et al. Architectural Theory: From the Renaissance to the Present. Cologne, 2003. Fabre, Camille. De clochers en clochers: Cathédrale. Aubenas, 1977. Fagiolo, Marcello. La festa a Roma: Dal Rinascimento al 1870. Torino, 1997. Farhat, Georges. “Great Vistas in the Work of Le Nôtre.” In Bouchenot-Déchin and Farhat, André Le Nôtre in Perspective, 171–87. Fatah-Black, Karwan. White Lies and Black Markets: Evading Metropolitan Authority in Colonial Suriname, 1650–1800. Leiden, 2015.

Ferloni, Julia. La Pérouse: Voyage autour du monde. Paris 2005. Flohic, Jean-Luc ed. Le patrimoine des communes de la Guadeloupe. Paris, 1998. – Le patrimoine des communes de la Martinique. Paris, 1998. Fondation Clément. Le patrimoine des communes de la Martinique. Fort-de-France, 2014. Fonvielle, Chris E. Historic Wilmington and Lower Cape Fear. San Antonio, 2007. Fossier, François. Les dessins du fonds Robert de Cotte de la Bibliothèque nationale de France. Paris and Rome, 1997. Fouilloy-Jullien, Isabelle. “Mont-Dauphin.” In Association Vauban, Vauban et ses successeurs en Briançonnais, 145. Paris, 1995. Fouquier, Marcel, Paris au xviii e siècle: Ses folies. Paris, 1912. Fraser, Valerie. The Architecture of Conquest: Building in the Viceroyalty of Peru, 1535–1635. Cambridge, 1990. Frémaux, J. “La France en Algérie (1830–1962).” In Bonnichon, Présences françaises, vol. 1, 391–402. Fricker, Jonathan. “The Origins of the Creole Raised Plantation House.” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 25, 2 (spring 1984): 137–53. Froidevaux, Henri. “Les ‘Lettres édifiantes’ et la description de la mission de Kourou.” Journal de la Société des Américanistes 3, 2 (1901): 177–85. Fuhring, Peter. “Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier and His Patrons.” In Sarah D. Coffin et al., eds., Rococo: The Continuing Curve, 22–39. New York, 2008. – Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier: Un genio del rococò. 2 vols. Torino and London, 1999. Fumaroli, Marc. L’âge de l’éloquence: rhétorique et “res literaria” de la Renaissance au seuil de l’époque classique. Geneva, 2009. – Quand l’Europe parlait français. Paris, 2001. Fustier-Dautier, Nerte. Bastides et jardins de Provence. Marseille, 2013. Gady, Alexandre. Jules Hardouin-Mansart, 1646–1708. Paris, 2010. – Les hôtels particuliers de Paris. Paris, 2008. – “The Spade and the Compass? Reflections on Le Nôtre and Architects.” In Bouchenot-Déchin and Farhat, André Le Nôtre in Perspective, 165–9. Gagnon, François-Marc. La conversion par l’image: Un aspect de la mission des Jésuites auprès des Indiens du Canada au xvii e siècle. Montreal, 1975. Gagnon, François-Marc, and Nicole Cloutier. Premiers peintres de la Nouvelle-France. Quebec City, 1976. Gallat-Morin, Élisabeth. “Sulpician Cultural Strategies: Music.” In Deslandres, The Sulpicians of Montreal, 515–48. Gallet, Michel. Les architectes parisiens du xviii e siècle: Dictionnaire biographique et critique. Paris, 1995. – Paris Domestic Architecture of the 18th Century. London, 1972.

Gampat, Ramesh. Guyana: From Slavery to the Present. Georgetown, 2015. Garber, Peter M. Famous First Bubbles: The Fundamentals of Early Manias. Cambridge, ma , 2001. García Sáiz, M.C. “La interpretación de los modelos europeos en las artes de tradición indígena.” In A. Bustamante García et al., eds., Felipe II y el Arte de su Tiempo, 293–303. Madrid, 1999. Garnett, Jane, and Gervase Rosser. Spectacular Miracles: Transforming Images in Italy from the Renaissance to the Present. London, 2013. Garraway, Doris L. The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean. Durham and London, 2005. Garrigus, John. Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French SaintDomingue. New York, 2006. Gasparini, Graziano. “The Pre-Hispanic Grid System: The Urban Shape of Conquest and Territorial Organization.” In Ralph Bennett, ed., Settlements in the Americas: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, 78–109. Newark, 1993. Gaumond, Michel. La Place Royale. Quebec City, 1972. Gauthier, Joseph-Stany. Les maisons paysannes des vieilles provinces de France. Paris, 1951. Gauthier, Raymonde. “Une carte de Jean Bourdon de 1640.” Journal of Canadian Art History 3 (fall 1976): 99–101. – Les tabernacles anciens du Québec. Quebec City, 1974. Les Gauvin d’Amérique. Quebec City, 1965. Geggus, David, “The French Slave Trade: An Overview.” William and Mary Quarterly 58, 1 (January 2001): 119–38. – Haitian Revolutionary Studies. Bloomington, 2002. – “Unexploited Sources for the History of the Haitian Revolution.” In Latin American Research Review 18, 1 (1983): 95–103. Gény, P. “Introduction à la deuxième partie historique.” In Bonnichon, Présences françaises, vol. 1, 385–8. Gerbino, Anthony. Francois Blondel: Architecture, Erudition, and the Scientific Revolution. New York and London, 2010. Ghachem, Malick W. The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge, 2012. Gibson, Carrie. Empire’s Crossroads: A History of the Caribbean from Columbus to the Present Day. London, 2014. Gill, Lucie. “La nation abénaquaise et la question territorial.” Recherches amérindiennes au Québec 33, 2 (2003): 71–4. Gillard, John T. “Lafayette, Friend of the Negro.” Journal of Negro History 19, 4 (October 1934): 355–71. Gilles, Isabelle. “L’évolution du comble à la lecture des traités Français d’architecture du Xvi e au Xviii e siècle.” In Hoffsummer, Les charpentes, 29–39. Gimlette, John. Wild Coast: Travels on South America’s Untamed Edge. London, 2011. Girard, Philippe. Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life. New York, 2016. Bibliography

591

Glendinning, Miles, and Aonghus MacKechnie. Scottish Architecture. London, 2004. Gnacadja, Luc. “Le Bénin.” In Soulillou, Rives Coloniales, 207–42. Godfroy, Marion F. Kourou, 1763: Le dernier rêve de l’Amérique française. Paris, 2011. Goerg, Odile. “Conakry: de l’ère des conducteurs de travaux à celle des architectes urbanistes.” In Marie-Paul Arnaud et al., Architecture coloniale et patrimoine: L’expérience française, 61–9. Paris, 2005. – “La Guinée Conakry.” In Soulillou, Rives coloniales, 79–104. Goguet, C., and F. Mangones. L’architecture de la ville historique du Cap Haïtien. Cap Haïtien, 1989. Gonzalbo, Pablo Escalante, and Antonio Rubial García. “Los pueblos, los conventos y la liturgia.” In Historia de la vida cotidiana en México, vol. 1, 367–72. Mexico City, 2009. Gosner, Pamela. Caribbean Georgian, the Great and Small Houses of the West Indies. Washington, 1982. Göttler, Christine. “The Temptation of the Senses at the Sacro Monte di Varallo.” In Christine Göttler, ed., Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe, 395–451. Leiden, 2013. Gowans, Alan. Building in Canada: An Architectural History of Canadian Life. Toronto, 1966. – Church Architecture in New France. Toronto, 1955. – Images of American Living: Four Centuries of Architecture and Furniture as Cultural Expression. Philadelphia, 1964. – Looking at Architecture in Canada. Toronto, 1958. Grammont, Giomar de. Aleijadinho e o aeroplano – O paraíso Barroco e a construção do herói colonial. Rio de Janeiro, 2008. Gravette, Andrew. Architectural Heritage of the Caribbean. Kingston, 2000. Greer, Allan. “Conversion and Identity: Iroquois Christianity in Seventeenth-Century New France.” In Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton, eds., Conversion: Old Worlds and New, 175– 98. Rochester, 2003. Grignon, Marc. “Gaspard-Joseph Chaussegros de Léry: La ville comme totalité aux Xviii e siècle.” In Québec, une ville et ses artistes, 61–73. Quebec City, 2008. – “La pratique architecturale de Claude Baillif.” Annales d’histoire de l’art canadien 15, 1 (1994): 6–30. – “Robert de Villeneuve and the Representation of Quebec City at the End of the Seventeenth Century.” In Henry A. Millon, ed., Circa 1700: Architecture in Europe and the Americas, 187– 206. Washington, 2005. – “Transformation et adaptation des formes architecturales européennes en Nouvelle-France au Xvii e et Xviii e siècles.” Perspective 3 (2008): 551–64. Grignon, Marc, and Juliana Maxim. “Convenance, Caractère and the Public Sphere.” Journal of Architectural Education (1995): 29–37.

592

Bibliography

Gruzinski, Serge. The Conquest of Mexico. Cambridge, 1996. Gutiérrez, Ramón. Arquitectura y urbanismo en América. Madrid, 2002. – “Los circuitos de la obra de arte. Artistas, mecenas, comitentes, usuarios, y comerciantes.” In Ramón Gutiérrez, ed., Pintura, escultura y artes útiles en iberoamérica, 1500–1825, 51–82. Madrid, 1995. – Evolución urbanística y arquitectónica del Paraguay, 1537–1911. Resistencia, 1974. – “Los gremios y academias en la producción del arte colonial.” In Ramón Gutiérrez, ed., Pintura, escultura y artes útiles en iberoamerica, 1500–1825, 25–50. Madrid, 1995. Haefeli, Evan, and Kevin Sweeney, eds. Captive Histories: English, French, and Native Narratives of the 1704 Deerfield Raid. Amherst and Boston, 2006. Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo. Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Baton Rouge, 1992. Hall, Michael. Historical Dictionary of Haiti. Lanham, 2012. Hardman, John. The Life of Louis XVI. New Haven and London, 2016. Harris, Steven J. “Mapping Jesuit Science: The Role of Travel in the Geography of Knowledge.” In John W. O’Malley et al., eds., The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences and the Arts, 1540–1773, 212–40. Toronto, 1999. Hautecoeur, Louis. Histoire de l’architecture classique en France. 9 vols. Paris, 1943–57. Havard, Gilles. Montréal 1701: Planter l’arbre de paix. Montreal, 2001. Havard, Gilles, et al. The Great Peace of Montreal of 1701: FrenchNative Diplomacy in the Seventeenth Century. Montreal, 2001. Heidenreich, Conrad. The Huron: A Brief Ethnography. Toronto, 1972. Herda-Mousseaux, Rose-Marie et al. Thé, café ou chocolat? Les boissons exotiques à Paris au xviii e siècle. Paris, 2015. Herskovits, Melville. “The Present Status and Needs of Afroamerican Research.” Journal of Negro History 36, 2 (April 1951): 123–47. – “Problem, Method and Theory in Afroamerican Studies.” Phylon 7, 4 (1946): 337–54. Hewitt, Martin. “Why the Notion of Victorian Britain Does Make Sense.” Victorian Studies 48, 3 (spring 2006): 395–438. Higginbotham, Jay. Old Mobile: Fort Louis de la Louisiane, 1702– 1711. Tuscaloosa, 1977. Higgins, Kathleen J. “Licentious Liberty” in a Brazilian Gold-Mining Region: Slavery, Gender, and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Sabará, Minas Gerais. University Park, 1999. Higman, Barry. Montpelier, Jamaica: A Plantation Community in Slavery and Freedom, 1739–1912. Kingston, 1998.

Hinchman, Mark. “African Rococo: House and Portrait in Eighteenth-Century Senegal.” PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2000. – “Anne Pepin (1758–1837): Entrepreneur, Landlady, and Mixed-Race Signare in Senegal.” In Karen Racine and Beatriz G. Mamigonian, eds., The Human Tradition in the Atlantic World, 1500–1850, 133–49. Lanham, 2010. – “The Grid of Saint-Louis du Sénégal.” In Fassil Demissie, Colonial Architecture and Urbanism in Africa: Intertwined and Contested Histories, 295–324. Farnham, 2012. – “House and Household on Gorée, Senegal, 1758–1837.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 65, 2 (June 2006): 166–87. – Portrait of an Island: The Architecture and Material Culture of Gorée, Sénégal, 1758–1837. Lincoln and London, 2015. Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. New York, 1999. Hodge, Carl Cavanagh. Encyclopedia of the Age of Imperialism, 1800–1914. Westport and London, 2008. Hodge, Frederick Webb. Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, vol. 1. Washington, 1912. Hodson, Christopher. The Acadian Diaspora: An EighteenthCentury History. Oxford, 2012. Hoffsummer, Patrick, ed. Les charpentes du xi e au xix e siècle: Grand Ouest de France. Leiden, 2011. – Roof Frames from the 11th to the 19th Century: Typology and Development in Northern France and in Belgium. Leiden, 2009. Hood, William. “The Sacro Monte of Varallo: Renaissance Art and Popular Religion.” In Timothy G. Verdon and John Dally, eds., Monasticism and the Arts, 291–313. Syracuse, 1984. Hoogbergen, Wim S.M. The Boni Maroon Wars in Suriname. Leiden, 1990. Hourihane, Colum, ed. The Grove Encyclopedia of Medieval Art and Architecture, vol. 2. Oxford, 2012. Howard, Deborah. The Architectural History of Scotland. Edinburgh, 1995. Hudgins, Carter L. The Vernacular Architecture of Charleston and the Lowcountry, 1670–1990. Charleston, 1994. Huetz de Lemps, Ch. “La présence de la France et des Français dans les îles du Pacifique au temps des colonies (1840–1960).” In Bonnichon et al., Présences françaises outre-mer, vol. 1, 731–53. Hugonnet-Berger, Claudine, et al. L’Hôtel-Dieu de Beaune. Paris, 2005. Hunt, Tristram. Ten Cities That Made an Empire. London, 2015. Hurt, John J. Louis XIV and the Parlements: The Assertion of Royal Authority. Manchester, 2002. Irmscher, Günther. “Style rocaille.” Barockberichte 51/52 (2009): 339–414.

Irwin, Lee. Coming Down from Above: Prophecy, Resistance, and Renewal in Native American Religions. Norman, 2008. Iturbide-Kennedy, Agueda. “Les sièges du pouvoir en Amérique septentrionale sous l’ancien régime.” Architecture in Canada 41, 1 (2016): 31–40. James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins. London, 1938. Jardim, Márcio et al. O Aleijadinho: Catálogo geral da obra, inventário das coleções públicas e particulares. São Paulo, 2011. Jean-Baptiste, Rachel. Conjugal Rights: Marriage, Sexuality, and Urban Life in Colonial Libreville, Gabon. Athens, oh , 2014. Jeanson, Marc, et al., eds. Jardins. Paris, 2017. Jones, Hilary. “From Mariage à La Mode to Weddings at Town Hall: Marriage, Colonialism, and Mixed-Race Society in Nineteenth-Century Senegal.” International Journal of African Historical Studies 38, 1 (2005): 27–48. – The Métis of Senegal. Bloomington, 2013. Jusserand, Jean-Jules. “Introduction.” In Elizabeth S. Kite, L’Enfant and Washington, 1791–1792, 1–30. Baltimore, 1929. Kagan, Richard. Urban Images of the Hispanic World, 1493–1793. New Haven and London, 2000. Kalman, Harold. A History of Canadian Architecture, vol. 1. Toronto, 1995. Kalnein, Wend von. Architecture in France in the Eighteenth Century. New Haven and London, 1995. Katzew, Ilona. New World Orders: Casta Painting and Colonial Latin America. New York, 1996. Kelly, Kenneth G., and Meredith D. Hardy, eds. French Colonial Archaeology in the Southeast and Caribbean. Gainesville, 2011. Kimball, Fiske. The Creation of the Rococo. New York, 1964. – Domestic Architecture of the American Colonies and of the Early Republic. New York, 1922. King, Stewart R. Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue. Athens and London, 2001. Kingsley, Karen. Buildings of Louisiana. Baton Rouge, 2003. Kissoun, Bruno. “Les prémices de l’architecture métallique en Guadeloupe: la construction de l’église Saint-Pierre et Saint-Paul de Pointe-à-Pitre au XiX e siècle. In Situ 6 (2005): 2–20. – Pointe-à-Pitre: Urbanisme et architecture religieuse, publique et militaire xviii e–xix e siècles. Clamecy, 2008. Klein, Herbert S., and Ben Vinson. African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean. Oxford, 2007. Klooster, Olga van der, and Michel Bakker. Architectuur en bouwcultuur in Suriname. Amsterdam, 2009. Klooster, Wim. The Dutch Moment: War, Trade and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World. Ithaca, ny , 2012. Knight, Franklin W. “Introduction.” In Franklin W. Knight, ed., General History of the Caribbean iii : The Slave Societies of the Caribbean, 1–8. London and Basingstoke, 1997.

Bibliography

593

Knight-Baylac, Marie-Hélène. “Gorée au Xviii e siècle du sol.” Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer 64, 234 (1977): 33–54. – “La vie à Gorée de 1677 à 1789.” Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer 57, 209 (1970): 377–420. Kornwolf, James D. Architecture and Town Planning in Colonial North America. 3 vols. Baltimore and London, 2002. Kruft, Hanno-Walter. A History of Architectural Theory: From Vitruvius to the Present. R. Taylor, trans. New York, 1994. – Städte in Utopia: Die Idealstadt vom 15. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert zwischen Staatsutopie und Wirklichkeit. Munich, 1989. Kubler, George. Mexican Architecture of the Sixteenth Century. 2 vols. New Haven, 1948. Kukawka, Katia, and Jean-Paul Leclercq. Mana, Guyane. Cayenne, 2009. Labelle, Kathryn Magee. Dispersed but Not Destroyed: A History of the Seventeenth-Century Wendat People. Vancouver, 2013. Lacroix, Alfred. Notice historique sur les membres et correspondants de l’académie des sciences. Paris, 1932. Lacroix, Laurier, ed. Les arts en Nouvelle-France. Quebec City, 2012. Laird, Mark. The Formal Garden: Traditions of Art and Nature. London, 1992. Lamaison, Dennis. “Guizanbourg: un village au confluent des temps,” Une saison en Guyane 14 (February 2015): 78–9. Landry, Madeleine, and Robert Derome. L’art sacré en Amérique française:Le trésor de la Côte-de-Beaupré. Quebec City, 2005. Lane, Mills. Architecture of the Old South: Louisiana. Savannah, 1997. Langé, S. Sacri Monti piemontesi e Lombardi. Milan, 1967. Langins, Janis. Conserving the Enlightenment: French Military Engineering from Vauban to the Revolution. Cambridge, ma , 2004. Langlois, Gilles-Antoine. “L’aventure urbaine de la Louisiane.” In Vidal and D’Orgeix, Les villes françaises du Nouveau Monde, 120–9. – “Les ‘mousquetaires’ du Mississippi.” In Vidal and D’Orgeix, Les villes françaises du Nouvelle Monde, 147–51. Lara, Jaime. Christian Texts for Aztecs. Notre Dame, 2008. – City, Temple, Stage: Eschatological Architecture and Liturgical Theatrics in New Spain. Notre Dame, 2004. – Flying Francis: Art and Apocalypticism in the Colonial Andes. Tucson, 2016. – “Francis Alive and Aloft: Franciscan Apocalypticism in the Colonial Andes.” The Americas 70, 2 (October 2013): 139–63. – “God’s Good Taste: The Jesuit Aesthetics of Juan Bautista Villalpando in the Sixth and Tenth Centuries b .c .e .” In John W. O’Malley et al., eds., The Jesuits: Cultures Sciences and the Arts, 1540–1773, 505–21. Toronto, 1999.

594

Bibliography

Larère, Charles. “La suppression de la mission de la Guyane française (1763-66).” Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 9 (1 January 1940): 208–26. Larin, Robert. Canadiens en Guyane, 1754–1805. Paris, 2006. Las Misiones jesuíticas del Guayrá. Buenos Aires, 1995. La Sicotière, Léon de. Le département de l’Orne archéologique et pittoresque. Beuzelin, 1845. Laurent, Alain, et al. Bastides: Villes nouvelles du moyen-âge. Toulouse, 1980. Laurent, Jeannine, and Jacques Saint-Pierre. Les forts et châteaux Saint-Louis, 1620–1760. Quebec City, 1982. Lauzon, Gilles, and Madeleine Forget. L’histoire du vieux-Montréal à travers son patrimoine. Sainte-Foy, 2004. Lavedan, Pierre. Les villes françaises. Paris, 1960. Law, Robin. Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving “Port,” 1727–1892. Athens, oh , and Oxford, 2004. Lawrence, A.W. Trade Castles and Forts of West Africa. Stanford, 1964. Leavelle, Tracy Neal. “Geographies of Encounter: Religion and Contested Spaces in Colonial North America.” American Quarterly 56, 4 (December 2004): 913–43. Le Blanc, François-Yves. “François Blondel et les Îles d’Amérique (1666–1668).” In Vidal and D’Orgeix, Les villes françaises du Nouveau Monde, 156–61. Lefaivre, Liane, and Alexander Tzonis, eds. The Emergence of Modern Architecture: A Documentary History from 1000 to 1810. New York, 2004. Lejeune, Jean-François. “Dreams of Order: Utopia, Cruelty, and Modernity.” In Jean-François Lejeune, Cruelty and Utopia: Cities and Landscapes of Latin America, 30–49. New York, 2005. Lenik, Stephan. “Mission Plantations, Space, and Social Control: Jesuits as Planters in French Caribbean Colonies and Frontiers.” Journal of Social Archaeology 12, 1 (2011): 51–71. Le Pas de Sécheval, Anne. “Entre hommage et trahison: La réception et l’adaptation du baldaquin de Saint-Pierre.” In C. Grell and M. Stanic, eds., Le Bernin et l’Europe, actes du colloque de 1998, 377–90. Paris, 2002. Le Roux, Yannick. “L’habitation guyanaise sous l’Ancien Régime.” PhD dissertation, University of Paris-ehess , 1994. Le Roux, Yannick, et al. Les jésuites et l’esclavage: Loyola, l’habitation des jésuites de Rémire en Guyane française. Quebec City, 2009. Le Roux, Yannick, et al., eds. Le Vaudois des terres noyées: Ingénieur à la Guyane française, 1777–1791. Matoury, 2012. Letenoux, Guy. Architecture et vie traditionnelle en Normandie. Paris, 1980. Léti, Geneviève, and Léo Élizabeth. Fort Saint-Louis. Paris, 2013.

Lewis, Michael J. City of Refuge: Separatists and Utopian Town Planning. Princeton, 2016. Lézy, Emmanuel. “L’implantation française en Guyane, Xvii e– Xviiie siècles.” In Vidal and D’Orgeix, Les villes françaises du Nouveau Monde, 90–5. Liégeois. Guy, Aix-en-Provence 2014: Les hôtels particuliers, les fontaines et les oratoires. Aix-en-Provence, 2014. Lilley, Keith D. City and Cosmos: The Medieval World in Urban Form. London, 2009. Lippy, Charles H, et al. Christianity Comes to the Americas 14921776. New York, 1992. Lochard, Thierry. “La place royale du Peyrou à Montpellier: La statue équestre, le paysage et le territoire.” In Laurence Baudoux-Rousseau et al., eds., La place publique urbaine du moyen âge à nos jours, 181–91. Arras, 2007. Loupiac, Claude. La ville: Entre représentations et réalités. Paris, 2005. Lucas, Thomas ed. Saint, Site, and Sacred Strategy: Ignatius, Rome, and Jesuit Urbanism. Vatican City, 1990. Lyonnet, Jean-Pierre. Les propylées de Paris, 1785–1788. Claude Nicolas Ledoux: Une promenade savant au clair de lune. Paris, 2014. MacCormack, Sabine. Religion in the Andes. Princeton, 1991. Macrae, Marion, and Anthony Adamson. The Ancestral Roof: Domestic Architecture of Upper Canada. Toronto and Vancouver, 1963. Maffre, Philippe. Construire Bordeaux au xviii e siècle: Les frères Laclotte, architectes en société. Bordeaux, 2013. Magnan, Aude. Regards sur le Centre-Ville de Fort de France. Fort de France, 1992. Mallé, Marie-Pascale. “Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni. La construction de la ‘capitale du bagne’ d’après les archives du service des Travaux publiques du ministère des Colonies conserves au Centre des archives d’outre-mer.” In Marie-Paul Arnaud et al., Architecture coloniale et patrimoine: L’expérience française, 37–45. Paris, 2005. Mallgrave, Harry Francis. Architectural Theory, vol. 1: An Anthology from Vitruvius to 1870. Malden, 2006. Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. London and New York, 2016. Mam Lam Fouck, Serge. Histoire générale de la Guyane française. Cahors, 2002. Marco Dorta, Enrique. Arte en América y Filipinas. Madrid, 1973. Mark, Peter. “The Evolution of Portuguese Identity: LusoAfricans on the Upper Guinea Coast from the 16th to the early 19th Century.” Journal of African History 40, 2 (June 1999): 173–91. – Portuguese Style and Luso-African Identity. Bloomington, 2002.

Markham, Jerry W. A Financial History of the United States from Christopher Columbus to the Robber Barons (1492–1900), vol. 1. New York, 2002. Marley, David. Wars of the Americas: A Chronology of Armed Conflict in the New World, 1492 to the Present. Santa Barbara, 1998. Martin, J. “Les Français en Afrique subsaharienne de 1816 à 1960.” In Bonnichon, Présences françaises outre-mer, vol. 1, 309–60. Martin, Paul-Louis. “Les facteurs d’évolution de la maison rurale au centre du Québec, de 1760 à 1870.” In Annie Antoine, La maison rurale en pays d’habitat dispersé: De l’Antiquité au xx e siècle, 185–94. Rennes, 2005. Martin, Peter. The Pleasure Gardens of Virginia from Jamestown to Jefferson. Princeton, 1991. Vallery-Rodot, Le recueil des plans d’édifices de la compagnie de Jesús conservé a la Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris. Rome, 1960. Martinetti, Brice. “Une habitation à Saint-Domingue au Xviii e siècle: l’indigoterie Belin Desmarais ou les rouages d’une microsociété.” In Augeron and Caudron, La Rochelle, 142–50. Masson, Paul, ed. Les Bouches-du-Rhône encyclopédie départementale. Marseille, 1937. Matory, James Lorand. Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé. Princeton, 2005. Mauny, R. Guide de Gorée. Dakar, 1951. Mauquoy-Hendrickx, Marie. Les estampes des Wierix. 4 vols. Brussels, 1978. Maurault, Joseph A. Histoire des Abénakis depuis 1605 jusqu’à nos jours. Sorel, 1866. McAleer, John, and Nigel Rigby. Captain Cook and the Pacific: Art, Exploration, and Empire. New Haven and London, 2017. McClellan, James E. Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime. Chicago and London, 2010. McCrea, Rosalie Smith. “The Fluid Nature of Eighteenth-Century British and Italian Reputations at the Margins and at the Centre: The Case of Blagrove and Batoni.” In Frank O’Gorman and Lia Guerra, eds., The Centre and the Margins in EighteenthCentury British and Italian Cultures, 172–87. Newcastle, 2013. McDonnell, Michael. Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America. New York, 2015. McEwen, Indra Kagis. Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture. Cambridge, ma , 2003. McGowan, Margaret M. “The Classical Triumph and Its Classical Heritage.” In Mulryne and Goldring, Court Festivals, 26–47. McGregor, Alasdair. A Forger’s Progress: The Life of Francis Greenway. Sydney, 2014. Melvin, Karen. Building Colonial Cities of God: Mendicant Orders and Urban Culture in New Spain. Stanford, 2012.

Bibliography

595

Michel, Jacques. La Guyane sous l’ancien régime: Le désastre de Kourou et ses scandaleuses suites judiciaires. Paris, 1989. Mignot, Claude. “Mansart et l’agence des Bâtiments du Roi.” In Gady, Jules Hardouin-Mansart, 45–58. Mignot, Claude. “Vauban, ordres et décor.” In Warmoes and Sanger, Vauban, 254–8. Milne, George Edward. Natchez Country: Indians, Colonists, and the Landscapes of Race in French Louisiana. Athens, ga , 2015. Moisy, Pierre. Les églises des jésuites de l’ancienne assistance de France. Rome, 1958. Montabo, Bernard. L’histoire de la Guyane, vol. 1: Des origins à 1848. Paris, 2004. Montabo, Barnard, and Élie Stephenson. La Guyane: Un nom, une histoire. Cayenne, 2010. Montclos, Brigitte de. “La représentation graphique des jardins.” In Martine Constans, ed., Jardinier à Paris au temps des rois. Paris, 2003. Montgolfier, Bernard de, ed. Île Saint-Louis. Paris, 1981. Moogk, Peter. Building a House in New France: An Account of the Perplexities of Client and Craftsmen in Early Canada. Markham, 2002. – “The Craftsmen of New France.” PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 1973. – La Nouvelle France: The Making of French Canada – A Cultural History. East Lansing, 2000. Morales Folguera, José Miguel. La construcción de la Utopía: El proyecto de Felipe II (1556–1598) para Hispanoamérica. Madrid, 2001. Moreno, Rodrigo, and Magdalena Pereira. Arica y Parinacota: La Iglesia en La Ruta de la Plata. Viña del Mar, 2011. Morisset, Gérard. L’architecture en Nouvelle-France. Quebec City, 1949. Morrison, Hugh. Early American Architecture. Oxford, 1952. Morrison, Tessa. Unbuilt Utopian Cities 1460 to 1900: Reconstructing Their Architecture and Political Philosophy. Farnham, 2015. Morvannou, Fanch, and Yves-Pascal Castel. Michel le Nobletz. Gouere, 2002. Mosser, Monique. “Sous l’objectif, les jardins des Duchêne entre histoire et création.” In Claire Frange, ed., Le Style Duchêne: Henri & Achille Duchêne, architectes paysagistes, 1841–1947. Neuilly, 1998. Mukerji, Chandra. “The Power of the Sun-King at the Potager du Roi.” In Hubertus Fischer et al., eds., Gardens, Knowledge and the Sciences in the Early Modern Period, 55–76. Zurich, 2016. – Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles. Cambridge, 1997. Mulryne, J.R. and Elizabeth Goldring. Court Festivals of the European Renaissance: Art, Politics, and Performance. Burlington, 2002.

596

Bibliography

Naissance de la Louisiane. Paris, 1982. Nash, Alice, and Christoph Strobel. Daily Life of Native Americans from Post-Columbian through Nineteenth-Century America. Westport, ct , 2006. Navascués Palacio, Pedro. Las catedrales del Nuevo mundo. Madrid, 2000. Neal, Larry. “I am Not a Master of Events”: The Speculations of John Law and Lord Londonderry in the Mississippi and South Sea Bubbles. New Haven, 2012. Nelson, Charmaine A. Slavery, Geography and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. Nelson, Louis. Architecture and Empire in Jamaica. New Haven and London, 2016. Neuman, Robert. “French Domestic Architecture in the Early 18th Century: The Town Houses of Robert de Cotte.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 39, 2 (May 1980): 128–44. – Robert de Cotte and the Perfection of Architecture in EighteenthCentury France. Chicago and London, 1994. Nicols, Frederick Doveton. The Architecture of Georgia. Bronx, 1976. Noël, Érick. Dictionnaire des gens de couleur dans la France moderne, vol. 1. Geneva, 2011. – Dictionnaire des gens de couleur dans la France moderne, vol. 2. Geneva, 2012. – Être noir en France au xviii e siècle. Paris, 2006. – “Gens de couleur à Nantes et à Bordeaux au Xviii e siècle.” In Éric Dubesset and Jacques de Cauna, eds., Dynamiques caribéennes: Pour une histoire des circulations dans l’espace atlantique xviii e–xix e siècles, 75–82. Bordeaux, 2014. Noppen, Luc. “L’évolution de l’architecture religieuse en Nouvelle-France.” Sessions d’étude, Société canadienne d’histoire de l’Église catholique 43 (1976): 69–78. – Les églises du Québec (1600–1850). Quebec City, 1977. – Notre-Dame de Québec. Quebec City, 1974. Noppen, Luc, and Marc Grignon. L’art de l’architecture: Three Centuries of Architectural Drawing in Quebec City. Quebec City, 1983. Noppen, Luc, and René Villeneuve, Le trésor du Grand Siècle. Quebec City, 1984. Norberg-Schulz, Christian. Baroque Architecture. New York, 1971. Novarina, Valère, and Marc Bayard. Sacri Monti: Incandescence baroque en Italie du Nord. Paris, 2012. Nyberg, Dorothea. “Introduction.” In Dorothea Nyberg, Meissonnier: An Eighteenth-Century Maverick, 16–43. Bronx, 1969. Ollagnier, Claire. Petites maisons: Du refuge libertin au pavillon d’habitation. Brussels, 2016. Orden, Kate van. Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France. Chicago and London, 2005.

Oresko, Robert. “The House of Savoy in Search for a Royal Crown.” In Robert Orseko et al., eds., Royal and Republican Sovereignty in Early Modern Europe, 272–350. Cambridge, 1997. Oszuscik, Philippe. “French Colonial Architecture at Old Mobile.” In Gregory A. Waselkov, ed., Archaeology at the French Colonial Site of Old Mobile, Phase i . 1989–1991, 171–82. Mobile, 1991. Packenham, Thomas. The Scramble for Africa 1876–1912. London, 1991. Pagazani, Xavier. La demeure noble en Haute-Normandie. Rennes, 2014. Pagden, Anthony. The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology. Cambridge, 1982. – Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c.1500–c.1800. New Haven and London, 1995. Paré, Yves. “La montée du commerce de détail.” In Courville and Garon, Québec, 210–13. Parent, Michel, and Jacques Verroust. Vauban. Paris, 1971. Pariset, François-Georges. Bordeaux au xviii e siècle. Bordeaux, 1968. Pepper, Simon. “Ville idéale – ville ex nihilo – ville militaire.” In Warmoes and Sanger, Vauban, 226–33. Pérez Montas, Eugenio. “República Dominicana: la Hispaniola colombina.” In Ernesto Armitano et al., Arquitectura colonial iberoamericana, 17–60. Caracas, 1997. Pernod, Jean-François. “L’école française de fortification.” In Warmoes and Sanger, Vauban, 55–61. Pérotin-Dumon, Anne. La ville aux îles, la ville dans l’île: BasseTerre et Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, 1650–1820. Paris, 2000. Pérouse de Montclos, Jean Marie. Histoire de l’architecture française de la Renaissance à la Révolution. Paris, 1989. Perrin, Joel, et al. Le château de Cadillac. Paris, 2008. Peterson, C.E. “Early Ste. Genevieve and Its Architecture.” Missouri Historical Review (January 1941): 207–32. Petzet, Michael. Claude Perrault und die Architektur des Sonnenkönigs. Munich, 2000. – Soufflots Sainte-Geneviève und der französische Kirchenbau des 18. Jahrhunderts. Berlin, 1961. Phelan, John Leddy. The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World. Berkeley, 1970. Picon, Antoine. Architectes et ingénieurs au siècle des Lumières. Marseilles, 1988. – “From ‘Poetry of Art’ to Method: The Theory of Jean-NicolasLouis Durand.” In Durand, Précis, 1–68. Pillement, Georges. Les hôtels du Faubourg Saint-Germain. Paris, 1950. Pinon, Pierre. “Les églises néoclassiques à plan basilical.” In Bruno Foucart and Françoise Harmon, eds., L’architecture religieuse au xix e siècle, 255–68. Paris, 2006.

– “Saint-Domingue: L’île à villes.” In Vidal and D’Orgeix, Les villes françaises du Nouveau Monde, 108–19. Piot, Alberte. La Provence: Pour restaurer et construire dans le style provençal traditionnel. Paris, 1971. Pirovano, Carlo. Il Sacro Monte sopra Varese. Milan, 1981. Plantier, Louis. Fontaines de Provence et de Côte d’Azur. Aix-enProvence, 2007. Pluchon, Pierre, ed. Histoire des Antilles et de la Guyane. Paris, 1982. Poesch, Jessie, and Barbara SoRelle Bacot. Louisiana Buildings 1720–1940. Baton Rouge and London, 1997. Poliandri, Simone Poliandri. First Nations, Identity, and Reserve Life: The Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia. Lincoln, ne , 2011. Pompignoli, Marie-Ange, and Jean Anckaert. “Apothicaires et plantes médicinales.” In Jean-Pierre Babelon and BertrandPierre Galey, eds., Jardiner à Paris au temps des rois, 203–19. Paris, 2004. Porter, John R., and Léopold Désy. Calvaires et croix de Chemins du Québec. Quebec City, 1973. Porter, John R., and Jean Trudel. The Calvary at Oka. Ottawa, 1974. Portes ouvertes des maisons & jardins de Saint-Louis. Saint-Louis, 2012. Powell, Lawrence N. The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans. Cambridge, ma , 2012. Pritchard, James. In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas, 1670–1730. Cambridge, 2004. Projets et dessins pour la place royale du Peyrou à Montpellier. Montpellier, 1980. Provence, Marcel. Le Cours Mirabeau: Trois siècles d’histoire 1651– 1951. Aix-en-Provence, 1951. Querejazú, Pedro, ed. Las misiones jesuíticas de Chiquitos. La Paz, 1995. Rabreau, Daniel. “Introduction.” In Daniel Rabreau and Sandra Pascalis, La nature citadine au siècle des lumières, 13–18. Paris, 2005. Rahmani, Zahia, and Jean-Yves Sarazin. Made in Algeria: Généalogie d’un territoire. Marseille, 2015. Rediker, Marcus. The Slave Ship: A Human History. New York, 2007. Regourd, François. “Kourou 1763. Succès d’une enquête, échec d’un projet colonial.” In Charlotte de Castelnau-L’Estoile et al., Connaissances et pouvoirs: Les espaces impériaux (xvi e–xviii e siècles), 233–52. Pessac, 2005. – “Maîtriser la nature: un enjeu colonial. Botanique et agronomie en Guyane et aux Antilles (Xvii e–Xviii e siècles).” Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer 86, 322 (1999): 39–63. Renn, Melissa. American Paintings at Harvard, vol. 1: Paintings, Watercolors, and Pastels. New Haven and London, 2014. Rennard, J. Histoire religieuse des Antilles Françaises dès origines à 1914. Paris, 1954.

Bibliography

597

Reps, John William. The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States. Princeton, 1965. – Washington on View: The Nation’s Capital since 1790. Chapel Hill and London, 1991. Ribeiro de Oliveira, Myriam Andrade. Aleijadinho e sua oficina: O catálogo das esculturas devocionais. Rio de Janeiro, 2008. – “Antônio Francisco Lisboa: De herói romantic a mito da nacionalidade.” In José de Monterroso Teixeira, Aleijadinho, o teatro da fé, 12–17. São Paulo, 2007. – O Aleijadino e o Santuário de Congonhas. Brasilia, 2006. – Os passos de Congonhas e suas restaurações. Brasilia, 2011. Richardson, A.J.H., et al., Quebec City: Architects, Artisans, and Builders. Ottawa, 1984. Ricou, Xavier Ricou. “Gorée, ville métisse.” In Abdoulaye Camara and Joseph Roger de Benoist, eds., Histoire de Gorée, 96–110. Paris, 2003. Rigaud, Candelon. “L’histoire d’Haïti et l’histoire de Port-auPrince, concentrées dans la vieille cathédrale et le carré qui entouré cette église.” Revue de la Société Haïtienne d’Histoire et de Géographie 46 (1964): 3–12. Rignac, R. “La présence française en Indochine.” In Bonnichon, Présences françaises outre-mer, vol. 1, 675–87. Ringot, Benjamin, and Thierry Sarmant. “La surintendance des Bâtiments du Roi sous Jules Hardouin-Mansart.” In Gady, Jules Hardouin-Mansart, 59–61. Ritchie, Carlson I.A. “Deux textes sur le Sénégal (1673–77).” Bulletin de l’Institut Fondamental de l’Afrique Noire series b , 30 (1968): 289–353. Rivière, Marc Serge. The Governor’s Noble Guest: Hyacinthe de Bougainville’s Account of Port Jackson. Melbourne, 1999. – “In Honour of a Fellow-Explorer: Flinders’ and Bougainville’s Monuments to Lapérouse in Mauritius and at Botany Bay.” Humanities Research 10, 2 (2003): 9–20. Robert, Jean-Claude. “The Sulpicians and Montreal Space.” In Deslandres, The Sulpicians of Montreal, 163–88. Roberts, Bruce, and Elizabeth Kedash. Plantation Homes of the James River. Chapel Hill, 1990. Rochemonte, Camille. Le Père Antoine Lavalette à la Martinique, d’après beaucoup de documents inédits. Paris, 1907. Rogers, Dominque. “Les libres de couleur dans les capitales de Saint-Domingue: Fortune, mentalités et intégration à la fin de l’Ancien Régime 1776–1789.” PhD dissertation, University of Bordeaux, 1999. Rogers, Dominique, and Stewart King. “Housekeepers, Merchants, Rentières: Free Women of Colour in the Port Cities of Colonial Saint-Domingue.” In Douglas Catterall and Jodi Campbell, eds., Women in Port: Gendering Communities, Economies, and Social Networks in Atlantic Port Cities, 1500–1800, 357–99. Leiden, 2012.

598

Bibliography

Roncayolo, Marcel, and Thierry Paquot, eds. Villes et civilisation urbaine xiii e–xx e siècle. Paris, 1992. Rose, Harold Wickliffe. The Colonial Houses of Worship in America. New York, 1963. Rosenberg, Pierre. “Poussin and Le Nôtre.” In BouchenotDéchin and Farhat, André Le Nôtre in Perspective, 88–91. Rosenblum, Robert. Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art. Princeton, 1967. Rothschild, Emma. “A Horrible Tragedy in the French Atlantic.” Past and Present 192 (August 2006): 67–108. Roussel, Claude-Youenn, and Arièle Gallozzi. Jardins botaniques de la marine en France. Paris, 2004. Rueda, M. Fajardo de. “Del grabado europeo a la pintura americana.” Historelo 3, 5 (2011): 191–214. Rykwert, Joseph. The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome, Italy, and the Ancient World. Princeton, 1988. – “Introduction.” In De Re Aedificatoria: On the Art of Building in Ten Books, by Leon Battista Alberti, ix–xxi. Cambridge, ma , 1988. Sabatier, Gérard. “La gloire du roi: Iconographie de Louis XIV de 1661 a 1672.” Histoire, économie et société 19, 4 (2000): 527–60. Saint-Hilaire, Marc. “Entre hier et demain.” In Serge Courville and Robert Garon, eds., Québec, ville et capitale, 330–3. SainteFoy, 2001. Sainton, Jean-Pierre. Histoire et civilisation de la Caraibe. Paris, 2012. – “The Historical Background: A Sketch.” In Barthelot and Gaumé, Kaz Antiyé, 45–62. Salatino, Kevin. Incendiary Art: The Representation of Fireworks in Early Modern Europe. Santa Monica, 1997. Sanger, Victoria. “La ville ex nihilo: Un modèle Vauban?” In Vidal and d’Orgeix, Les villes françaises du Nouveau Monde, 37–41. – “Vauban, architecture civile et religieuse.” In Warmoes and Sanger, Vauban, 259–65. – “Vauban, urbaniste.” In Warmoes and Sanger, Vauban, 214–25. Sargos, Jacques. Bordeaux: Chef-d’œuvre classique. Bordeaux, 2009. Sarmant, Thierry. Les demeures du soleil: Louis XIV, Louvois et la surintentendance des bâtiments du roi. Seyssel, 2003. – “Vauban, Louis XIV et ses ministres.” In Warmoes and Sanger, Vauban, 64–71. Sarmant, Thierry, et al. Napoléon et Paris, rêves d’une capitale. Paris, 2015. Saugera, Éric. Bordeaux: Port négrier xvii e–xix e siècles. Paris, 1995. Savoie, Sylvie. “La linguistique liturgique du père Aubery.” Recherches amérindiennes au Québec 33, 2 (2003): 7–8. Scott, Katie. The Rococo Interior. New Haven and London, 1995. Searing, James F. West African Slavery and Atlantic Commerce: The Senegal River Valley, 1700–1860. Cambridge, 1993.

Segre, Roberto. Arquitectura antillana del siglo xx . Mexico City, 1993. Sinou, Alain. Comptoirs et villes coloniales du Sénégal. Paris, 1993. – “Le Sénégal.” In Soulillou, Rives coloniales, 31–62. Smith, Jeffrey Chipps. Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation in Germany. Princeton, 2002. Soo, Lydia M. “Christopher Wren, Plan of London.” In Ray Hutchison, ed., Encyclopedia of Urban Studies, 135–7. Thousand Oaks, ca , 2010. Soulillou, Jacques, ed. Rives coloniales: Architectures, de SaintLouis à Douala. Paris, 1993. Souty, François. “Le comte de Kersaint et la fondation de Longchamp en Guyane néerlandaise (1750–1810).” In Vidal and D’Orgeix, Les villes françaises du Nouveau Monde, 132–3. Spady, James O’Neil. “Bubbles and Beggars and the Bodies of Laborers: The Georgia Trusteeship’s Colonialism Reconsidered.” In Louis H. Roper and Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, eds., Constructing Early Modern Empires: Proprietary Ventures in the Atlantic World, 1500–1750, 213–68. Leiden and Boston, 2007. Spicer, Andrew. Calvinist Churches in Early Modern Europe. Manchester, 2007. Spieler, Miranda Frances. Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana. Cambridge, ma , 2012. Stambaugh, John E. The Ancient Roman City. Baltimore, 1988. Stanislawski, Dan. “Early Spanish Town Planning in the New World.” Geographical Review 27, 1 (1947): 95 Stein, Robert Louis. The French Slave Trade. Madison, 1979. Stelter, Gilbert. “Military Considerations and Colonial Town Planning: France and New France in the Seventeenth Century.” In Ralph Bennett, ed., Settlements in the Americas: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, 210–37. Newark, 1993. Stone, Jon R. The Routledge Dictionary of Latin Quotations. New York, 2005. Sullivan, Edward. “The Black Hand: Notes on the African Presence in the Visual Arts of Brazil.” In Joseph J. Rishel, ed., The Arts in Latin America, 43–55. New York, 2006. Summerson, Sir John. The Classical Language of Architecture. London, 1965. Sustersic, Bozidar D. Imágenes Guaraní-jesuítias. Asunción, 2010. – Patrimonio jesuítico la Compañía de Jesús en América: La construcción de un espacio. Buenos Aires, 2007. – Templos Jesuítico-Guaraníes. Buenos Aires, 1999. Sweet, James H. Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770. Chapel Hill, 2003. Szambien, Werner. “Les architectes parisiens à l’époque révolutionnaire.” Revue de l’Art, 83 (1989): 36–50. – “Bernin et l’architecture néoclassique française (1750–1830).” In Chantal Grell and Milovan Stani, eds., Le Bernin et l’Europe: du baroque triomphant à l’âge romantique, 147–58. Paris, 2002.

– Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand 1760–1834. Paris, 1984. Szambien, Werner, et al. Le Parlement de Bretagne: Naissance et renaissances d’un palais. Marseille, 2000. Tadgell, Christopher. “France.” In Anthony Blunt and Wim Swann, eds., Baroque and Rococo Architecture and Decoration, 106–42. New York, 1978. Tapié, Victor L. Retables baroques de Bretagne. Paris, 1972. Tejeira Davis, Eduardo. “Panamá: la arquitectura colonial en Panamá.” In Armitano, Arquitectura colonial, 179–92. Thackeray, Frank W., and John E. Findling. Events That Changed the World in the Nineteenth Century. Westport, 1996. Thibaudault, Pierre. Échec de la démesure en Guyane: autour de l’expédition de Kourou: Une tentative européenne de réforme des conceptions coloniales sous Choiseul. Saint-Maixent-l’Ecole, 1995. Thilmans, Guy. Histoire militaire de Gorée de l’arrivée des Portugais (1444) au départ définitif des Anglais (1817). Gorée, 2006. Thilmans, Guy, with Françoise and Cyr Descamps. “L’église oubliée de Saint-Louis du Sénégal.” Outre-mers 93, 350–1 (1er semestre 2006): 193–8. Thinlot, Françoise. Maisons paysannes de Bourgogne. Paris, 1983. Thomas, Hugh. Conquest: Cortes, Montezuma, and the Fall of Old Mexico. New York, 1993. Thompson, D.G. “The Lavalette Affair and the Jesuit Superiors.” French History 10, 2 (1996): 206–39. Thompson, Ian. The Sun King’s Garden. New York, 2006. Thomson, David. Renaissance Paris: Architecture and Growth, 1475–1600. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984. Thornton, John. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World. Cambridge, 1998. Thorpe, F.J. “Gaspard Chaussegros de Léry.” In Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 3, 124–8. Toronto and Montreal, 1974. Tirapeli, Percival. Igrejas barrocas do Brasil. São Paulo, 2008. Toczyski, Suzanne C. “Navigating the Sea of Alterity: JeanBaptiste Labat’s Nouveau voyage aux îles.” Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature 34, 67 (2007): 1–25. Toker, Franklin. The Church of Notre-Dame in Montreal: An Architectural History. Montreal and London, 1970. Toledano, Roulhac. The National Trust Guide to New Orleans. New York, 1996. Tombs, Robert, and Isabelle Tombs. That Sweet Enemy: Britain and France, the History of a Love-Hate Relationship. New York, 2006. Toscer, Catherine, et al., eds. Architecture rurale en Bretagne: 50 ans d’Inventaire du patrimoine. Lyon, 2014. Toussaint, Manuel. La Catedral de México. Mexico City, 1948. – Arte mudéjar en América. Mexico City, 1946. Traquair, Ramsay. The Old Architecture of Quebec. Toronto, 1947.

Bibliography

599

Trebutien, G.S. Caen: Son histoire, ses monuments, son commerce et ses environs. Caen, 1860. Trecco, Adriana. Arquitectura de Córdoba. Córdoba, 2008. Tremblay, Roland. Les iroquoiens du Saint-Laurent: Peuple du maïs. Montreal, 2006. Trésors de la Cathédrale de Chartres. Chartres, 2002. Treyvaud, Geneviève, and Michel Plourde. “Prospection archéologique, Odanak, 2010”; “Odanak, fouilles archéologiques 2011–2012”; and “Odanak, fouilles archéologiques 2013.” Archaeological reports deposited in the Quebec Ministry of Culture and Communications. Trigger, Bruce G. The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660. Montreal and Kingston, 1976. – “The Original Iroquoians: Huron, Petun, and Neutral.” In Edward S Rogers and Donald B. Smith, eds., Aboriginal Ontario: Historical Perspectives on the First Nations, 41–63. Toronto, 1994. Trudel, Jean. Un chef d’œuvre de l’art ancien du Québec: La chapelle des Ursulines. Quebec City, 1972. – The Ursuline Chapel in Quebec City. Quebec City, 2005. Trudel, Marcel. Deux siècles d’esclavage au Québec. Montreal and Paris, 2004. – L’esclavage au Canada français. Quebec City, 1960. Tur, Ali. Architecture coloniale: Guadeloupe: Bâtiments gouvernementaux et communaux. Paris, undated (1930s). Turcot, Laurent. “Former une promenade publique: Les ChampsElysées au Xviii e siècle.” In Daniel Rabreau and Sandra Pascalis, eds., La nature citadine au siècle des lumières: Promenades urbaines et villégiature, 51–72. Paris, 2005. Turenne, J.-F. “Voyageurs naturalistes et agronomes tropicaux: De la vision exotique à la prise en compte des agricultures paysannes.” In Bonnichon, Présences françaises, vol. 2, 361–6. Tzonis, Alexander et al. Tropical Architecture: Critical Regionalism in the Age of Globalization. Ann Arbor, 2001. Vandervort, Bruce. Wars of Imperial Conquest in Africa, 1830–1914. London, 1998. Varriano, John. Italian Baroque and Rococo Architecture. Oxford, 1986. Vecsey, Christopher. The Paths of Kateri’s Kin. Notre Dame, 1997. Verástique, Bernardino. Michoacán and Eden: Vasco de Quiroga and the Evangelization of Western Mexico. Austin, 2000. Vero, Norma Campos. La fiesta: Memoria del IV encuentro internacional sobre barroco. La Paz, 2007. Verwimp, Régis. Les jésuites en Guyane française sous l’Ancien Régime (1498–1768). Matoury, 2011. Vidal, Laurent. “Fort-Coligny et la France antarctique (1555– 1560).” In Vidal and D’Orgeix, Les villes françaises du Nouveau Monde, 70–3.

600

Bibliography

Vidal, Laurent, and Émilie D’Orgeix, eds. Les villes françaises du Nouveau Monde. Paris, 1999. Vidler, Anthony. Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: Architecture and Social Reform at the End of the Ancien Régime. Cambridge, ma , 1990. – “Preface.” In Jean-François Bastide, The Little House: An Architectural Seduction, trans. and ed. Rudolphe el-Khouri, 9–19. New York, 1996. Villari, Sergio. J.-N.-L. Durand (1760–1834): Arte e scienza dell’architettura. Rome, 1987. Villeneuve, René. Baroque to Neoclassical Sculpture in Quebec. Ottawa 1997. Villeneuve, René. The Tabernacle of Paul Jourdain. Ottawa, 1990. Vives Mejía, G. A. “El arte colonial y los grabados.” Desde la Sala 16 (2010): 58–60. Vlach, John. “The Shotgun House: An African Architectural Legacy,” Pioneer America 8, 1 (January 1976): 47–56. – “Sources of the Shotgun House: African and Caribbean Antecedents.” PhD dissertation, Indiana University, 1975. Warmoes, Isabelle, and Victoria Sanger. Vauban, bâtisseur du RoiSoleil. Paris, 2007. Warren, J. Benedict. The Conquest of Michoacán. Norman, 1985. Warwick, Genevieve, Bernini: Art as Theatre. New Haven, 2012. Waselkov, Gregory A. Old Mobile Archaeology. Mobile, 1999. Washburn, Wilcomb E. Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 4: History of Indian-White Relations. Washington, 1988. Webb, Stephen Saunders. Marlborough’s America. New Haven, 2013. Weekley, Carolyn J. Painters and Paintings in the Early American South. New Haven and London, 2013. Weiss, Allen S. Mirrors of Infinity: The French Formal Garden and 17th-Century Metaphysics. New York, 1995. Whinney, Margaret. Wren. London, 1971. Wick, Gabriel. “Le plan de paysage: Entre architecture et cartographie.” In Marc Jeanson et al., eds., Jardins, 172–7. Paris, 2017. Willens, Liliane. “Lafayette’s Emancipation Experiment in French Guiana, 1786–1792.” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 242 (1986): 354–62. Williams, Glyn. Naturalists at Sea: Scientific Travellers from Dampier to Darwin. New Haven and London, 2015. Wilson, Samuel. The Architecture of Colonial Louisiana. Lafayette, 1987. – “Architecture in Eighteenth-Century West Florida.” In Wilson, The Architecture of Colonial Louisiana, 69–100. – “An Architectural History of the Royal Hospital and the Ursuline Convent of New Orleans.” In Wilson, The Architecture of Colonial Louisiana, 161–220.

– “Bienville’s New Orleans: A French Colonial Capital, 1718– 1768.” In Wilson, The Architecture of Colonial Louisiana, 1–23. – The Cabildo on Jackson Square. Gretna, 1998. – “Ignace-François Broutin.” In Wilson, The Architecture of Colonial Louisiana, 221–60. – “Religious Architecture in French Colonial Louisiana.” In Wilson, The Architecture of Colonial Louisiana, 108–47. Winks, Robin W. The Blacks in Canada: A History. Montreal and Kingston, 1997. Wittman, Richard. Architecture, Print Culture, and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France. New York and London, 2007. Wood, Raymond. “An Archaeological Appraisal of Early European Settlements in the Senegambia.” Journal of African History 8 (1967): 39–64.

Young, Paul J. Seducing the Eighteenth-Century French Reader: Reading, Writing, and the Question of Pleasure. Farnham, 2008. Zavala, Silvio. Sir Thomas More in New Spain: A Utopian Adventure of the Renaissance. London, 1955. Ziskin, Rochelle. The Place Vendôme: Architecture and Social Mobility in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Cambridge, 1999. Zolwany, Yves F. “Joybert de Soulanges et de Marson, LouiseÉlisabeth de.” In Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 2, 301–2. Toronto and Quebec City, 1967.

Bibliography

601

index

Page numbers displayed in boldface indicate illustrations. Abenaki, 45, 56, 67–9 absolutism, 10, 284–5 academicism, in France, 7–8 Académie des Sciences et Belles-Lettres (Lyon), 236 Académie Royale d’Architecture, 8, 121–4, 148, 153, 155 Académie Royale de Lorraine, 166 Académie Royale de Musique, 8 Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, 7, 10–12, 104, 169, 210 Académie Royale des Sciences, 8, 151, 159, 221, 236, 317, 376, 488 Acadia, 25–7, 38, 40, 43, 58, 67, 179, 349; deportation of Acadians, 40 Adanson, Michel, 287–8, 291 administration. See colonial administration Affiches Américaines, 30, 103, 123, 134, 277, 303, 310–12, 320, 468 agriculture, 316–22; and cities, 174, 210, 231–4, 240; manuals, 142–3; and missions, 66, 85; and people of colour, 115. See also gardens; plantations; seigneurial system; slavery; sugar Aigues-Mortes, 174 Aix-en-Provence, 245; Pavillon de Vendôme, 335; Place des Prêcheurs, 87; Place des Quatre-Dauphins, 179; La Rotonde, 245–246; Quartier Mazarin, 179–80 Alberti, Leon Battista, 174–6, 182, 205 Alexandria (Virginia), 208 Algeria, 4, 431, 482 Algonquin peoples, 72–7 Almonester y Rojas, Don Andrés, 21 American War of Independence, 25, 130, 210, 310, 365, 368, 469 Amerindians. See Indigenous peoples Androuet du Cerceau, Jacques, 328, 330, 348, 479, 480 Androuet du Cerceau, Jean, 12 Angola, 31, 40, 97, 100 Anguier, Michel, 159 Annapolis (Maryland), 210 Antilles. See Guadeloupe; Martinique; Saint-Domingue apprenticeship. See training; workshop practice

Approuague River, 41. See also Bourg-Villebois Arago, Jacques, 14 Arawak peoples, 56, 62–3, 81, 442 architects. See architecture architecture: civilian architects, 119–47, 171, 439; and climate, 14–15, 62, 130, 147, 357–60, 364, 384, 391, 394, 405, 439, 441, 448, 451, 457–9, 477, 485–6; “colonial,” 4–5; “creole,” 4, 15–25, 442–3, 457; decoration, 6, 14, 18, 23, 60, 63, 66, 77, 94, 120–3, 125, 129, 141–2, 144, 147, 150, 154–5, 159–62, 179, 187–8, 231, 281, 286, 290, 293, 301–3, 306, 310, 312, 314, 345, 352, 354, 364–5, 369, 375–7, 399–401, 404, 413–38; destruction of, 5–6, 19, 26, 81, 90–2, 120, 149, 166, 171, 196, 198, 384, 336, 350, 367, 388, 390–1, 394–5, 400, 416, 419, 420, 431,453, 463; distribution of rooms, 125, 166, 340, 368–9, 426, 476; domestic, 14–15, 19, 179, 357–73 468; and engineering (see engineering); and health, 129–31, 182, 238, 271, 314– 16, 384; manuals, 141–7, 158–62, 271, 281–2, 300, 357, 378, 405; prefabricated, 129–31, 238, 377, 429, 484, 486; religious (see churches); and slavery, 93–104 (see also slavery); and symmetry, 9, 143–45, 183, 234, 263, 330, 335, 348, 349, 380, 477 (see also gridiron city plans); theory, 8, 15, 141–7, 156–66, 174, 176, 282; and uniformity, 9, 12, 120, 148, 155, 159, 381 (see also gridiron city plans); vernacular, 16–25, 439–80. See also fortification; hybridization; urban planning Arequipa (Peru), La Compañía, 50 Arguin (Mauretania), 472 Armény de Paradis, Alexandre-David, 288, 290–4, 436, 472–5 Army Corps of Engineers. See Génie militaire Artaud, Jean, 259, 262–3, 267, 275, 459 Aubagne (Provence), Church of the Pénitents Noirs, 408 Aubert, Jean, 364 Auger, Charles, 242, 415 Aztecs, 38, 66 Baas-Castelmore, Jean-Charles de, 190, 192 Baillairgé, Thomas, 18 Bailleau-Armenonville (Beauce), Church of Saint-Pierre-etSaint-Paul, 387, 424

Baillif dit Regnault, Claude, 120, 132–41, 158, 196, 199, 394–5, 399–401, 426 Balise, Île de la, 28, 170, 405–6, 408–11; Chapel, 407–9 Banque Générale (Banque Royale), 41 Baradère, Abbé, 433 Barbé-Marbois, François, 274 Barbot, Jean, 289 Barbotteau, Jacques-Alexandre, 318 Bardet de Villeneuve, 156 Baron, Pierre, 221 baroque, 5, 8–12, 25, 79, 150, 168, 177, 210, 221, 242, 247, 267, 279–81, 301, 321, 351, 352, 354, 387–8, 403, 412, 477, 480; “Black Baroque” (see also hybridity), 440–7; and classicism, 8,12; Italian, 351, 354, 387–8, 412 Basset, Jean, 28 Basse-Terre (Guadeloupe), 5, 15, 37, 48–9, 62, 101, 103, 107, 115, 124–5, 128, 154–5, 157, 188–9, 204, 266–7, 318, 320, 335, 360–8, 372–3, 381, 387, 413, 415, 419–21, 468–9; Church of Notre-Dame du Mont-Carmel, 413, 415; Church of SaintFrançois (Cathedral of Notre-Dame-de-Guadeloupe), 49, 413, 419–20; Fort Saint-Charles, 266–7; Government House project, 362, 361–3; Jesuit Church, 415–16; Joseph Douze house, 15; Place des Carmes, 188–189 Basse-Terre (Saint-Christophe), 335 Bâtiments du Roi (Surintendance), 8, 10, 180, 186, 282; and Army Corps of Engineers, 149–3, 157; and creativity, 12; and neoclassicism, 356 Batoni, Pompeo, 146–7 Battle of Mbororé, 67 Battle of Quebec, 4, 346 Baudet, Catherine, 477 Bayou Manchac, 216 Beaucours, Josué Boisberthelot de, 158, 196, 198 Beauharnais, Joséphine de, 30 Beauharnois, Charles de, 77, 166 Beaune, Hôtel-Dieu, 458, 461 Beausire, Jean, 271 Beausire le Jeune, Jérôme, 123 Bégon de La Picardière, Michel de, 11, 71, 73, 96 Béhague, Jean-Pierre-Antoine, 226 Belain d’Esnambuc, Pierre, 29 Bélidor, Bernard Forest de, 142, 156, 158, 265; La science des ingénieurs, 142, 158–63, 160, 226–8, 267, 271, 346, 377, 405, 408–9, 409 Belmont, François Vachon de, 72–5, 81, 427 Berbain, Simon, 294, 296 Bernard, Jean-François, 157 Bernard de la Rivière, Hilaire, 132, 345, 394, 400 Bernini, Gianlorenzo, 149, 199, 312, 402

604

Index

Bertellet, Jean, 124 Berthelot de Beaucours, Josué Dubois, 196–8 Besançon, 9, 150, 408, 411, 416; Citadel Chapel of Saint-Étienne, 9, 150, 408 Bessner, Alexandre Ferdinand de, 463 Béthune, Maximilen de (duc de Sully), 150 Bienville, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de, 214–18 Bight of Benin, 32, 97, 100, 294, 296, 330, 441. See also Ouidah Bignon, Abbé Jean-Paul, 317 Biloxi: Fort Maurepas, 213; Nouveaux-Biloxy (New Biloxy), 28, 170, 213–14, 217, 218–21, 223, 228, 243, 249; Old Biloxi, 27 bishops, 42, 47–9, 51; vs. apostolic prefects 47–9 Blagrove, John, 146–7 Blanger, François-Benjamin-Joseph, 419–20 Blénac, Charles de la Roche-Courbon, comte de, 192, 245, 328–9 Blondel, François, 7, 8, 10–11, 142, 143, 145, 156, 159, 160, 161, 164, 282, 309 Blondel, Jacques-François, 183, 358, 362, 369, 373, 387, 419, 424 Bochard, Denis 388 Bochart de Champigny, Jean, 69, 198 Bodin, Esprit, 64, 318–19 Boffrand, Germain, 25, 135, 368 Boisseret, Jacques de, 29 Boivin, Charles, 58 Bombarde, Sieur de la, 145 Bombardopolis, 242 Boni Maroons, 236, 445 Bonrepos, Chevalier de, 218 Bordeaux, 28, 47, 94–5, 104, 131, 134, 210, 213; Chamber of Commerce, 28; Communauté des Maîtres-Maçons et Architectes, 122–3; Place Louis XV (Place de la Bourse), 185, 186, 187, 263, 286, 310, 321, 348, 352, 358, 360 Borromini, Francesco, 149 Bosset, Pierre, 104 Botany Bay (Australia), Pérouse Monument, 486, 487–8 Boudan, Louis, 338–9, 346 Boufflers, Stanislas de, 288, 431–2 Bougainville, Hyacinthe de, 482, 486–8 Bougainville, Louis-Antoine de, 486 Boullé, Étienne-Louis, 356, 378 Bourbon Restoration, 356, 384–5, 471 Bourdon, Jean, 138, 304, 325, 388–9, 425–6 bourgeoisie, 9, 30, 177, 183 Bourg-Louis. See Cayenne bourgs, 37 Bourg-Villebois (Guiana), 149, 205, 221, 234–40, 394, 466; Chapel 238, 394, 429–430, 466 Brébeuf, Jean de, 45 Brétigny, Charles Poncet de, 31

Bretteville-sur-Laize (Calvados), Château de Quilly, 326–7 bridges, 153, 155, 158, 178, 183–5, 240, 252, 257, 258, 260, 267, 333, 377. See also engineering Brisbane, Major General Sir Thomas, 487 Brison, engineer, 221 British Empire, 1–2, 6, 20, 38, 59–65, 79, 129, 398–9, 484–5; and architecture, 25, 485–6 Brittany, 25, 170, 330, 393, 398, 402, 457 Brogniart, Alexandre-Théodore, 272 Broquart, Dominique, 112 Brosse, Salomon de, 12, 150, 348–9 Brouage, 153 Broutin, Ignace-François, 340–1, 408, 464, 466 Bruand, Libéral, 6–7, 150, 153, 166 Brüe, André, 287 Bruletout, Jean Antoine de (chevalier de Préfontaine), 65, 84–6, 90–2, 103, 169, 300, 461; Maison rustique à l’usage des habitans, 65, 144–146 Bullet, Abbé Charles-Pierre-Joseph, 292, 295–7 Bullet, Pierre, 142, 156, 160, 369, 370–1 Burgundy, 12, 125, 150, 262, 327, 435, 457–8; Free County, 44 Cadillac, Château, 326, 348, 349 Caen, Church of Notre-Dame-de-Gloriette, 393 Caillié, René, 482 Caillot, Marc-Antoine, 54, 408–9 Calera de Tango (Chile), Jesuit hacienda, 450 Callière, Louis-Hector de, 67–8 Calon de Felcourt, Jean-Pierre, 259–62, 267 Cape Coast Castle (Ghana), 330, 476 Cap-François, 5, 30, 37, 51–3, 97, 102–7, 110, 113–16, 123–7, 134–6, 141–2, 149, 166–71, 179, 185–8, 213, 214, 243, 241–260, 261–78, 295–310, 344–6, 349–50, 387, 421–4, 443, 466, 471; Church of Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption, 51–2, 108, 120, 123, 168, 310, 353–4, 387, 421, 422–423; Comédie Théâtre, 262, 276, 310, 422; Cours Villeverd, 259, 260, 262, 295; Fountain on the Place d’Armes, 275; Fountain on Place Royale, 273–274; Fountain on the Quay, 270; Gardens in Government House, 306, 307–308, 310; Hospital of the Fathers of Charity, 298, 300–302, 303; House on the Quai de Bellecombe, 470; Jesuit gardens, 304–305; Jesuit residence, 49, 304, 344; Magasin du Roi, 166, 330, 350–351, 352, 465, 466, 471; Morne de l’Hôpital, 300; Palais de Justice, 149, 168, 352, 353; Place d’Armes, 23; Place de Clugny, 134, 260, 262; Place Montarcher, 260, 262, 276, 277, 344, 471; Place Royale, 213, 243, 258–259, 260–2, 263, 264; Triumphal Arches, 267, 268–269. See also Cap-Haïtien Cap-Haïtien, 5, 15, 23, 24, 274, 423, 470; Place de la Cathédrale, 23, 470

Cap-Santé (Quebec), 388, 400 Capuchins, 28, 31, 42–5, 49, 53–4, 58, 298, 405, 418–20, 424–5; and administration, 28; and Africans, 44; and Amerindians, 58; and architecture, 416–24; and gardens, 298 Caraccioli, Louis-Antoine, 356 Caranave, Father, 82 Carcassonne, 174 Caribs. See Kalinago Carignan-Salières regiment, 11, 27 Carmelites, 43, 49, 53, 101, 122, 170, 188, 320, 413–15; and architecture, 413–15; and gardens, 320, 365 Carmontelle, Louis Carrogis dit, 431 carpenters, 13, 80, 86, 94; civilian 120–1, 123, 124–6, 130–6, 200, 214, 234, 243, 294, 328, 334, 340, 387–8, 405, 408, 429, 459, 483; and contracts, 135–6, 139–40, 171, 433; engagés, 192; free carpenters of colour, 105–18, 473; slave carpenters, 98–104, 139–40, 262, 358–9, 442–3, 445. See also architecture Carré, Louis, 459 Cartaud, Jean-Sylvain, 387, 424, 429 Cartesianism. See Descartes, René Cartier, Jacques, 25, 42–4 cartography, 35, 85, 89–92, 153–7, 171–4, 210–11, 218, 262, 284 Case créole. See Kaz antiyé Case-Pilot, Church of Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption-et-SaintJoseph, 50, 416, 417 Castel, Louis-Bertrand, 156 Castelnau d’Auros, 320–1 Castries, Charles Eugène Gabriel de La Croix, marquis de, 170 Cataneo, Pietro, 175 Caughnawaga (Kahnawake): Mission Church, 46, 60–61; reduction at, 46, 58, 60, 67, 69–75 Cauvet, Antoine-Charles, 245 Cauvet, Paul-Gilles, 245, 251 Cauvet, Philippe, 180, 243–7 Cauvet, Philppe-Nicolas, 245 Cavelier, René-Robert, Sieur de La Salle, 27 Cayenne, 31, 47–53, 63–6, 79–90, 99, 130, 138–40, 145, 157, 168–9, 188–202, 204–5, 221–37, 286, 291, 321–2, 326, 345, 355–6, 391–3, 412, 430–3, 448, 459–63, 466, 485; Church of Saint-Nicolas, 49, 226, 390, 392–3, 412, 459, 46; Fort Cépérou, 31, 157, 190–1, 200–203, 225, 226, 227, 230; Government House, 99, 120, 139–41, 226, 460, 461–2, 463, 485; Jesuit Residence, 31, 49, 84–85, 202, 226, 345, 448–9, 463–464, 466; Savanne, 199, 224–6 Caylus, Jean-Baptiste de, 154, 192–5, 330 Cayo, Jean-Baptiste, 107 ceinture de fer, 10, 35, 150, 182 Cercle des Philadelphes, 30 Chambonneau, Louis Moreau de, 265–6, 330, 435

Index

605

Champé, Jean, 459 Champlain, Samuel de, 26, 31, 43, 45, 196, 199, 205, 324–5, 330, 336, 388, 481 Champroux, Abbé Pierre-René, 47, 446–7 Chanvalon, Jean-Baptiste Thibault de, 40, 89 Charlesbourg-Royal (Quebec), 25, 38 Charpentier, Louis, 89 Charrite, Jean-Pierre de Casamajor de, 52 Chartres, 69, 387, 392, 438 Chartres, Louis-Philippe d’Orléans, duc de, 321, 431 Chassant (Perche), Church of Saint-Lubin, 390–1 Chastillon, Nicolas-François-Antoine de, 153 Château d’Issy (Issy-les-Moulineaux), 370 Château de la Montagne (Saint-Christophe), 121, 334–5, 340 Château de Sully (Burgundy), 327 Châteaumorand, Charles Joubert de la Bastide, marquis de, 52, 245 Chauchetière, Claude, 46, 59; The First Chapel Is Built, 46; Lightning Strikes at the Foot of the Chapel, 46 Chaussegros de Léry, Gaspard-Joseph, 71–5, 134, 158, 162–6, 196, 345, 347–8, 399–401, 427–9; Traité de fortification, 165 Chauvin de Tonnetuit, Pierre de, 26 Chaviteau, 108 Chesnaye, Charles Aubery de la, 196 Chilleau, Marie-Charles marquis du, 274 Choiseul, Étienne-François, duc de, 40, 47, 86, 87, 174, 188, 202, 205, 247 Choiseul-Beaupré, François-Joseph, comte de, 99, 243, 247 Cholula (Mexico), 205 Chomodey, Paul de, 26 Chouachas Concession (Louisiana), 443 Christian, Pierre Nicolas, 108 churches, 49–54, 385–411, 412–40; in the Antilles, 49–54, 388–94, 413–29; cathedrals, 47, 50–1, 426, 440; cost and maintenance of, 52–4; in Guiana, 388–405, 429–38; in Louisiana, 405–11; in Nouvelle-France, 49–54, 394–405; in Senegal, 429–38; in Spanish and Portuguese America, 49–54, 174, 205–13, 386; and style, 385–411, 412–38 classical orders, 6–8, 21, 122, 144, 156, 159–64, 181, 267, 271, 345, 368, 384, 412, 455, 459, 461, 466 Clugny, Marc-Antoine-Nicolas-Gabriel de, 361, 373 Cochin, Charles-Nicolas, 169, 356 Code noir. See slavery Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 44, 121–2, 132, 151–3, 173, 195, 278, 326, 334, 355, 385; and architecture, 6–8; and chartered companies, 29; and the Church, 49; and empire, 10–12, 25–6, 31–5, 164, 188–9, 192; and gardens, 284, 306; nostalgia for, 185, 278, 293

606

Index

Collapissa peoples, architecture, 62 Collinet, Father Charles, 47 colonial administration, 11, 27–8, 47–54, 79, 93, 158, 326; governors, 11, 47–9, 54, 158, 326; in Guadeloupe, 48; intendants, 11, 27, 28, 47–9, 52, 54, 158, 326; in Louisiana, 28; and missionaries, 47–54, 79; and nobility, 326; in Nouvelle-France, 27; in Saint-Domingue, 11, 47; sovereign council, 11 Combes, Benjamin de, 152 Compagnie de Canonniers, de Mineurs, et d’Ouvriers, 226 Compagnie de Guinée, 32, 96 Compagnie de la France Equinoxiale (Compagnie des Douze Seigneurs), 31 Compagnie d’Occident. See Mississippi Company Compagnie de Paris (Compagnie de la Guyane), 237 Compagnie de Rouen, 31 Compagnie de Saint-Christophe. See Compagnie des Îles d’Amérique Compagnie des Cent-Associés, 26, 43 Compagnie des Gentils-hommes, 166 Compagnie des Îles d’Amérique (Compagnie de SaintChristophe), 29 Compagnie des Indes, 41, 96, 181, 288, 330, 332, 477 Compagnie des Indes Occidentales, 10, 29, 44, 123, 265, 333 Compagnie du Cap-Vert, 265, 330, 332 Compagnie du Sénégal, 32, 96 comptoirs, 32, 324–5, 388 Conefroy, Abbé Pierre, 18 confraternities, 26, 44, 53, 121, 131, 242, 440; Confraternity of Saint Anne, Quebec City, 131, 214 Congrégation du Saint-Esprit, 44 contractors (entrepreneurs des bâtiments), 13, 104, 107–8, 126–7, 138, 152–3, 158, 187–8, 405–6 contracts: and free people of colour, 23, 106–9, 112–18; and white builders, 120–4, 126–7, 131–2, 135–40, 460. See also finances contre-fiches, 448–9, 454, 457–59, 461, 466 convenance, 8–9, 14–15, 144, 159, 164, 166, 378, 283, 483 Copernicus, 10 Cordemoy, Gérard de, 183 Córdoba (Argentina), Cabildo, 21 Corneille, Pierre, 179 Corpus Christi, 47, 131 Correa, Juan, 440 Cortés, Hernán, 205 Cortona, Pietro da, 351 Cotineau, Jacques, 288 Coudreau, Jean-André du, 149, 168, 243, 251–5, 262, 270–1, 274, 352–4 Council of Trent, 50, 387

Courtois, André, 358 Courtois, Nicolas-Georges, 15, 130, 357, 377, 381–2, 384, 429, 433–6, 438, 472, 484 Coutances, Jean-Marie de, 418 creole. See architecture, “creole” “creole roof,” 65–6 Creux, François du, 44 Crousaz, Jean-Pierre de, 156 Crozat, Antoine, 28, 214 Cuernavaca (Mexico), Palacio Cortés, 450 Cuzco, 56, 121, 205, 207, 419, 450; Plaza de Armas, 207 Cyfflé, Paul-Louis, 89 Cyrano de Bergerac, 36 D’Accarette, Sieur, 40 Dakar, Palais de la République, 483 D’Albaret, Chevalier, 15, 146–7, 380; Différens projets relatifs au climat, 147 D’Arbaud de Jouques, Alexandre-Bache-Elzéar le comte, 360, 365, 368–9 Dardan, Étienne, 187 Dardan, Joseph-Antoine, 122–4, 134, 171 D’Argenville, Antoine Dézallier, 280–1, 292–3, 306–9; La théorie et la pratique du jardinage, 280, 309 D’Asfeld, Marquis, 151, 168 Dausse, Joseph-Henri, 172, 376–7 D’Aviler, Augustin-Charles, 142, 156, 267, 369, 479 De Batz, Alexandre, 62, 340–3, 408 De Charlevoix, Pierre-François-Xavier, 218, 400 De Cologne, Jean, 150 De Cotte, Robert, 8, 12, 149, 152, 159, 186, 355–6 Decouagne, Jean-Baptiste, 198, 348 De La Lance, Joseph-Louis, 166, 243, 290, 350–1, 354, 464, 466, 471, 480, 485 De La Lande, royal arpenteur, 156 De la Merveillère, Pierre-Antoine-Jérôme Frémond (or Frémont), 170–1, 212, 278, 310, 317, 355, 466 Della Porta, Giacomo, 387, 414 De La Salle. See Cavelier, René-Robert, Sieur De l’Orme, Philibert, 141–2, 381 Demerara River (Guyana), 231–4 Demoulceau, Mathias Henri, 272–3 D’Ennery, Victor-Thérèse Charpentier, comte de, 134, 169, 236 De Pène, Charles, 151 Deroisin, Marie-Philippe, 433, 435–6, 438 Dervise, engineer, 437–8 Désargues, Gérard, 156 Desbordes, Jacob 388 Descartes, René, 10, 182–4, 188

Desloriers, Guillaume Termen dit, 345 Desmarais, Paul Belin, 101 Desmon, Louis-Pierre, 64, 87, 169–70 Desprès, Laurent, 112 Despret de l’Échelle, 231–4 Dessingy, François Joseph Charles, 431 D’Estrées, Jean II, 189 D’Estrées, Victor-Marie, 53 Destrehan Plantation (Louisiana), 21, 22 Deverges, Bernard, 221, 406, 411 De Verville, Guillaume du Verger, 243, 252, 376–7 D’Hartincourt, Jacques-François-Marie-Eléonore-Thimoléon de Béhague, 151, 224–31 D’Iberville, Pierre Le Moyne, 27, 213–14 Diderot, Denis, 40, 185 Dol de Bretagne (Brittany), Manoir de Belle Noë, 165–167 Dollier de Casson, François, 72, 336–8, 340, 427 Dominicans, 43, 47–9, 52–3, 101–2, 298–9, 338–9; and architecture, 121, 338–9, 346, 404–5, 413, 416; competitiveness with other orders, 47–9, 298–9; and gardens, 296, 298–9 donnés, 58–9 D’Orvilliers, Claude Guillouet, 81, 137, 139 Douarnenez (Brittany), Chapelle Saint-Michel, 393 Drottningholm Palace (Sweden), Turkish Tent, 431 Du Casse, Jean-Baptiste, 31 Ducasse de Plassac, commandant, 243 Du Colombier, 252 Dugua, Pierre (Sieur de Mons), 26 Duplessis de Mornay, Louis-François, 43 Du Plessis d’Ossonville, Jean, 29 Duport, engineer, 252 Du Portal, Jean-Jacques, 152, 243, 255–6 Duquesne de Menneville, Ange, 163 Durand, Dom 156 Durand, Jean-Nicolas-Louis, 378, 380, 483 Durand de Villegaignon, Nicolas, 25, 40 Dürer, Albrecht, 175 Du Ru, Paul, 62 Dutch Empire, 6, 25, 29, 31, 33, 35–7, 56, 63, 66, 84, 90, 96–7, 100, 189, 205, 224, 231–8, 385, 451–8, 473, 484; and architecture, 66, 205, 224, 231–8, 451–8, 484; rivalry with French, 63, 84, 94, 189, 385, 473; and transatlantic slave trade, 96–7, 100 Du Tertre, Jean-Baptiste, 29, 63, 325–6, 334–6, 443 Eckhout, Albert, 451–2 Edict of Nantes, 26, 176, 187 El Dorado, 38–40, 199 Elmina (Ghana), Fort St George, 100, 330, 332, 451 elm trees, 14, 173, 210, 213, 245, 252

Index

607

emigration, 28, 36, 157–8, 210 engagés, 29, 58–9, 93, 126, 131–4, 158, 170, 192–4, 200, 216–17, 336, 402, 439 engineering, 9, 12, 20–1, 36, 120–1, 129, 133–5, 138, 148–72, 234, 315, 386. See also Génie militaire Engombe (Dominican Republic), “Palacio,” 449–50 Enlightenment, 15, 40, 45, 204–5, 221, 231, 356 entrepreneurs des bâtiments. See contractors ephemera, 43, 242, 267, 277–9, 284, 297, 300–6, 310, 312, 336, 422; and fireworks, 279, 284, 303–304, 310, 312; and gardens, 284, 300–4, 306, 310, 312; religious processions, 43, 67, 69, 131, 299; and the state, 43, 267, 284; Te Deum Mass, 43, 266, 310, 432, 477; and urbanism, 267, 312, 336, 422 Errard de Bar-le-Duc, Jean, 150, 164 Escalante, Juan de, 121 Estoupan de Saint Jean, Blaise, 288, 476 exotic plants. See acclimatization gardens; gardens facades. See architecture; decoration Faidherbe, Governor-General Louis, 481 Falda, Giovanni Batista, 386, 414, 426 Fathers of Charity, 298, 300, 303, 305, 318 Fauque, Father, 81 Favart, Charles-Simon, 310 Fénélon, François Louis de Salignac, marquis de, 47, 195 Ferdinand V, King of Spain, 205 Férolles, Pierre-Éléonore de La Ville, marquis de, 138, 200, 393 Fête-Dieu. See Corpus Christi Filarete (Antonio di Pietro Averlino), 175, 182 “filles du roi,” 27 finances, 41–2, 94, 130–3, 177, 181, 438; billets d’état, 41; and the colonies, 41–2; financiers, 41, 94, 177, 181; “Lavalette Affair” (see Jesuits); “Louisiana Affair,” 438; “Mississippi Bubble,” 41; royal grants, 130, 132–3 fleur-de-lys, 98, 159, 179 Fontainebleau, Château, 348, 479–480 Fontenay, chevalier de, 325 Fort Dauphin (Saint-Domingue), 107, 123, 242–3, 275–6; Fountain, 275 Fort-de-France (Martinique), 15 Fort de la Roche (Tortue), 120, 325, 330, 334 Fort Frontenac (Ontario), 58–59 fortification, 12–13, 27, 141–2, 149–52, 156–66, 255–6, 272–3, 284–5, 334; bastides, 174; ramparts, 13, 38, 72, 75, 86, 94, 150, 158, 174, 175, 182–4, 199–202, 210–16, 221–31, 245–9, 251, 253, 255–6, 258, 260, 262, 326, 330, 333–4, 348; ramparts vs. citrus trees, 199–200, 213, 245–7, 256; and style, 284–5, 326, 348; Vaubanian garrison towns, 9, 151, 158–9, 183 Fort Niagara (New York), 163

608

Index

Fort Orléans (Missouri), 28 Fort-Royal (Martinique), 29, 49, 99, 117, 124, 154, 159, 188–192, 194–203, 326, 328–9, 356, 377–80; Arsenal, 154; Capuchin College of Saint Victor, 298; Governor’s Mansion, 159, 328– 329; Governor’s Palace, 378, 380–1; Hospital, 154–155; Palais de Justice, 378–379; Savane, 190–194, 195 Fort Saint-Frédéric (Lake Champlain), 163 Fort Saint-Louis (Saint-Domingue), 459–460, 477 Foulquier, Jean-François, 373 Foulquier, Pierre-Joseph, 127 foundational crosses, 42–4, 128–19 fountains. See hydraulics, fountains Francini, Girolamo, 414 Franciscans, 38, 43, 79, 411, 453. See also Recollects Franco-Dutch War, 30 Franquelin, Jean-Baptiste-Louis, 196, 198, 326, 327 Franquet, Louis, 71–2 Franquet de Chaville, 218 free people of colour. See gens de couleur Fremin, Michel de, 9 French Academy in Rome, 8, 104 French identity, 13, 213, 279, 356, 385, 438; and gardens, 279; in Quebec, 5, 17 French open gallery, 440, 447–71, 477–8, 485 French Revolution, 3, 15, 30, 36, 95, 187, 322, 356, 469 Freudenstadt (utopian city), 175 Frézier, Amédée François, 142, 156, 243, 247 Frizeri, Alessandro, 310 Froger, François, 290, 333–4 Frontenac, Louis de Buade de, 326, 345–6 Gabriel, Ange-Jacques, 185, 186, 354, 373 Gabriel, Jacques V, 186 Galam (Senegal), 32, 473 Galibi, 56, 63–4, 67, 79–85, 90, 188 Galilei, Galileo, 10 Gallican Church, 48, 50, 386. See also papacy Gallifet, Joseph d’Honon de, 54 García Bravo, Alonso, 205 gardens, 33–5, 47, 72, 80, 82, 84, 98, 123, 142–4, 152–3, 165–6, 169, 173, 178, 185, 196, 210, 213, 216, 221, 224, 226, 231–2, 240, 243, 245, 247, 253–7, 260, 264, 272, 276–8, 279–325, 334, 336, 362, 445; acclimatization, 286, 299–300, 316–22, 487; and agriculture (see agriculture); bosquets, 143, 166, 252, 282, 284, 291, 295–6, 306, 309; broderies, 143, 231, 282, 284, 290, 303, 312, 314, 321, 335; and ephemeral events (see ephemera); English, 285, 293; and French identity, 279; and medicine, 98, 287; and mission towns, 72, 82, 84, 98; and science, 143,169, 286–7, 291–2, 299, 316–20; and urbanism,

173, 178, 185, 196, 210, 213, 216, 221, 224, 226, 231, 232, 240, 243, 245, 247, 253–7, 260, 264, 272, 276–8, 323, 325, 334, 336, 362, 445 garden cities, 221, 231–40 Garin, François Louis Joseph, 356, 357, 377–80 Garnier, Jean, 388 gates, 10, 153, 158–62, 174–5, 182–3, 258, 264–9, 289, 306, 330, 351 Gauvin, François-Pierre, 402 Génie militaire (Royal Engineer Architects), 9, 12, 36, 120, 121, 129, 133–5, 138, 148–72, 234, 315, 386 genius, idea of, 149 gens de couleur, 13, 30, 32, 48, 93–124, 132, 134, 138, 241, 441; and building trades, 107–11; legal status, 106; populations, 106. See also race geometry, 10, 66, 81, 149, 156, 183, 205, 223, 234, 285, 377 Georgetown (Guyana), 231, 234 Ghana, 475. See also Cape Coast Castle; Elmina; Osu Giardini, Lorenzo, 354 Gibbs, James, 18 Giffard, Robert, 26, 131 Giral, Jean Antoine, 187, 264, 314 Girard, Father Benoît, 47 Girardin, Claude, 151 Girardon, Abbé, 433 Girardon, François, 159, 182 Gittard, Daniel, 8, 181, 337–8 Giudicelli, Abbé, 432, 477 gloire. See Louis XIV, gloire Gold Coast, 33, 100–1, 108, 330, 485. See also Ghana Gonaïves (Saint-Domingue), 242–3 Gonichon, engineer, 221 Gorée. See Île de Gorée Goréen townhouse, 16, 440, 471–80 Gothic style, 15, 19, 23, 161–2, 324, 388, 426, 432, 484 Gouye, Père, 49, 53 “Grand Goût.” See metropolitan style Greenway, Francis, 14, 384, 447 Grégoy. See Ouidah gridiron city plans, 12, 37, 75–7, 92, 204–5, 208–10, 218, 240–1 Guadeloupe, 47, 270, 377, 451, 482; and acclimatization gardens, 286, 291, 317–20; and Amerindians, 62–3; and Chinese and Indian workers, 482; and “colonial architecture,” 4–5; foundation of colony, 29; and free people of colour, 115–18; and Italian architecture, 413, 415, 418–20; and loss of New France, 27–8, 36; and mobile architecture, 243; and the hôtel particulier, 356–73; and open galleries, 468–9, 471; and slavery, 95–6, 100–1, 104, 443, 445; and tropical architecture, 381, 384; and white builders, 124–5

Guanabara Bay (Rio de Janeiro), 25 Guaraní peoples, 38, 67, 454 Guen, Hamon, 78–9 Guiana, 6, 28, 35–6, 43, 62, 123, 149, 157–8, 399; and acclimatization gardens, 236, 291, 318, 321–2; and Amerindian architecture, 14, 63–6, 449; and the Bourbon Restoration, 355–7, 377, 483; and the Church, 47, 49–50, 53, 433; and “colonial architecture,” 4–5; and engineer architects, 168–9, 171; and foundation of colony, 30-31; and missions, 66–7, 69, 79–85; and open galleries, 394, 455–6, 459–63; penal system, 322, 486; and prefabricated architecture, 130, 381, 429–31; and slavery, 100, 138–40, 429; and Suriname, 205; and treatises, 144–6; and urbanism, 221–41, 285; and white builders, 138–40; and utopianism, 30–1, 38, 40–1, 86–96 Guibal, Barthélemy, 89 Guichard, Jean, 124 Guignard, Jean-Baptiste, 195 Guillemard, Gilberto, 21 Guillemin de Vaivre, Jean-Baptiste, 134 Guillot-Aubri, Claude, 257 Guinea, 31, 44, 97, 100–1, 411, 442, 451, 483. See also Bight of Benin; Gold Coast; Slave Coast Guisan, Jean-Samuel, 15, 130, 149, 236–40, 321, 429–31, 466 habitants, 26–30; and the Church, 47, 49, 52–4, 126–7, 386, 411; and indigenous peoples, 26–7, 29, 62–4, 69; populations, 5, 26, 31, 36, 40, 95–6; in Senegal, 476, 479; and slaves, 99, 102; and the State, 25; and towns, 37, 240. See also seigneurial system Habitation Fleuriau (Saint-Domingue), 443 Haiti, 4–6, 13, 23–5, 101, 252, 264, 310, 440–3. See also Saint-Domingue Haitian Revolution, 5–6, 96, 101, 106, 134, 166, 171, 241, 377 Harduoin-Mansart, Jules, 6–8, 12, 124, 149, 152–3, 159–60, 180–1, 285, 306, 338, 343, 352 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène, 183 Havana, Church of Cristo del Buen Viaje, 21 Henri IV, King of France, 15, 26, 42, 122, 150, 152, 176–7, 180, 218, 245, 267, 277 Hertel, Joseph, 69 Hesse, Charles-François, 169, 171, 270–3, 277, 317, 320, 373–5, 466 hexagonal plans, 10, 184, 187, 199–200, 223, 226–8, 231–2, 234, 247 Hong Kong, Flagstaff House, 448 Hotman, Sieur, 325 Houël, Charles, 29, 415–16 Houel, Vincent, 154–5 Hughes, Victor, 393

Index

609

Huguenots, 26, 30, 40, 52, 187, 192, 326, 330. See also Edict of Nantes Huron (Wendat) peoples, 26, 45–6, 56, 60, 67, 69, 72, 75, 77, 195, 389 hybridization in architecture, 14, 35, 55, 330, 440–7, 475–80; with African traditions 440–7, 475–80; with Amerindian traditions, 58–60 hydraulics, 151, 153, 156, 158, 169, 172, 204, 270–1, 282, 284; aqueducts, 153, 168, 172, 187, 192, 284–5, 376; canals, 10, 152, 169, 172, 175, 178, 184, 192, 195, 205, 210, 218, 221, 233–40, 249, 269–72, 282, 288, 301, 305, 320, 376–8; and firefighting, 271; fountains, 5, 6, 14, 134, 144, 152, 153, 166, 168, 180, 183, 184, 208, 242, 258, 262, 264, 269–78, 281, 306, 312, 314–16, 321, 336, 378; grottos, 144, 271, 303, 336; and hygiene, 179, 271, 268; and power, 271, 273; reservoirs, 169, 192, 264, 269, 271–3, 359, 378. See also engineering Hypolite, Jean-Baptiste, 113 Iberian empires. See Portuguese Empire; Spanish Empire idealism, 34–42, 173–88. See also utopianism Ihonatiria (Saint-Joseph in Huronia), 58 Île de Gorée, 5, 31–2, 96, 142, 287, 436–7, 473, 478, 481; Church of Saint-Charles Borromée, 436, 437, 438, 481; Director’s House, 473, 479; Hospital, 474–6; Maison Crespin, 477; Maison Jouga, 477; Maison Pépin, 475–478, 479–80; Royal Garden, 32, 288, 289–291, 293, 306 Île de la Tortue (Tortuga Island, Haiti), 29–30, 120, 242, 325, 330 Île d’Oléron (Saintonge), 170 Île d’Orléans (Quebec), 6, 18, 133, 388–9, 394–7, 400–1, 412 Île-Royale (Cape Breton), 27, 163 Île Sainte-Croix (Maine), 26, 31, 205, 324 Imbert, Charles, 109 Imbert, Claude, 111 Inca, 38, 56, 66 indigenous peoples, 6, 9, 25–7, 32–5, 38, 42, 44, 56, 58–72, 80, 85, 96, 173, 287, 294, 296–7, 386, 471–2, 479, 482–3; architecture of, 58–72; and disease, 58, 62–3; enslavement of, 56–7; and fur trade (see trade); and labour, 35, 56–9, 63, 71, 73; and mission towns (see reductions); populations, 45, 63. See also Abenaki; Algonquin; Arawak; Guaraní; Huron; Iroquois; Kalinago; Mi’kmaq; Wolof Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) peoples, 26–7, 45–6, 56, 67, 70–3, 77, 138, 388; “Great Peace” of 1701, 26 Isambert, Michel, 317 Italian style, 8, 25, 50, 340, 378, 387, 399, 413–29 Jacmel (Saint-Domingue), 37, 130 Jacquemin, Abbé, 40

610

Index

Jacques de Saint-Martin, Father, 170 Jajolet de la Courbe, Sieur, 451 Jamaica, 15, 96, 106, 131, 140–1, 146–7, 210, 256, 287, 441, 450–1 Jardin du Roi (Guadeloupe), 317, 319–20 Jardin du Roi (Guiana), 321 Jasmin, Jean (Aloon Kinton), 108 Javouhey, Annie-Marie, 433 Javouhey, Rosalie, 433 Jeaurat, Edme-Sebastien, 142, 271 Jefferson, Thomas, 210 Jesuits, 26, 28, 31, 36, 38–54, 57–9, 66–75, 79–86, 89, 92, 100, 103, 151, 189, 195–6, 202, 214, 218, 221–6, 247, 260, 262, 297–306, 338–9, 344–6, 387–8, 393, 397, 400, 402–3, 412–19, 425–6, 428–9, 448, 450, 453, 461, 463, 485; and Amerindians, 26, 38, 44–7, 53, 58–62, 66–75, 79–82, 84–6, 89; competitiveness with other orders, 297–306; expulsion of, 85, 299, 304, 344, 429; and gardens, 72, 80, 84, 224, 260, 297–306; Jesuit colleges, 151, 345–6, 397, 428, 463; and “Lavalette Affair,” 41–2, 47, 297, 299 Jews, 29–30, 36, 40, 109, 192, 451 joiners, 13; civilian, 124–6, 131, 214, 294, 433; engagés, 192; free joiners of colour, 105–18, 473; slave joiners, 93, 99–104. See also architecture; carpenters Jones, Robert, 19–20 Josselin (Brittany), Château de, 330 Jousse, Mathurin, Le théâtre de l’art de Charpentier, 135–6, 141, 345, 397, 400, 405 Jouvenet, Jean, 78 Jouy (Beauce), Church of Saint-Cyr et Sainte-Julitte, 391–2 Jupiter, Alexis, 109 Kahnawake (Kentaké), 46, 58–60, 67, 69–70 Kalinago peoples, 29, 56, 62–3, 96 kaz antiyé, 442 Kersaint, Armand-Guy-Simon de Coetnempren, comte de, 231–4 Kingston (Jamaica), 208–9 Kingston, Robert, 231 Kongo, 40, 100–3, 109 Kourou, 3, 19–20 30–1, 40–1, 49, 55, 64, 67, 79–86, 87–91, 92, 103, 145, 169–70, 174, 204–5, 214, 218, 221, 236–7, 242, 265, 486; Jesuit reduction of Notre-Dame de l’Assomption, 67, 85; Place Royale, 64, 86–87, 92, 169 La Barre, Joseph-Antoine le Fèbvre de, 196 Labat, Jean-Baptiste, 121, 296, 298, 336, 338–40, 415, 442–3, 451, 459 Labbée, Sieur, 124

La Bouëre, Bertrand d’Ogeron de, 247 labour, 4, 26, 35, 41, 52, 56–9, 63–4, 71–3, 79, 85, 93–103, 107, 116, 119, 126–33, 138–9, 152, 158, 170–3, 192–4, 216, 220, 238, 247, 294–6, 322, 336, 439, 445, 473, 482, 486. See also contracts; engagés; slavery Labrosse, Paul Jourdain dit, 427 Lac des Deux-Montagnes (Quebec). See Oka La Courbe, director of the Company of Senegal, 287 Lac Saint-Pierre (Quebec), 67 L’Acul du Petit-Goâve, 249–251, 252. See also Petit-Goâve La Fayette, marquis de, 322 La Félicité Plantation (Guiana), 144–145, 146 La Ferronays, le comte de, 421 La Flèche, Jesuit College, 345–346, 397 La Font de Saint-Yenne, Étienne, 185, 293 La Gabrielle, Épicerie de (Guiana), 321 La Gataudière, François Fresneau de, 221–3 Lagneau de Laris, Louis-Denis, 252–6 La Grange, Paul-François de, 127 La Grange, Sieur de, 125–6 La Hire, Philippe de, 156 Lajoüe, François de, 123, 345–7 Lalement, Jérôme, 45 La Luzerne, César-Henri comte de, 321 La Marche, Jacques Danguelle dit, 345 Languedoc, 187, 315 Lapalme, Dominque Janson, 123 La Pérouse, comte de la (Jean-Francois de Galaup), 286, 486–8 La Quintinie, Jean Baptiste de, 285; Le parfait jardinier, 210, 238, 239–40, 285 La Ravardière, Daniel de, 31, 40 La Rochelle, 86, 97, 104, 151, 166, 249, 402; Chamber of Commerce, 28 Lardenoy, Antoine-Philippe de, 381 Lassurance, Pierre, 353–4, 359 Lassus, Jean-Pierre, 219–20 Lathon, Barthelemy, 20 Latsukaabe, Wolof king, 287 Laurent, Antoine, 286 Laurent, Jeannine, 326 Laussat, Pierre Clément, 320–321, 391 Laval, Bishop François-Xavier de Montmorency, 43, 53, 387–9, 394–5, 412 Law, John, 28, 41, 181 Le Blond, Alexandre, 340, 342, 343 Le Blond de La Tour, Louis-Pierre, 170, 213–18, 221, 228 Le Brasseur, Joseph-Alexandre, 259, 262 Le Brun, Charles, 6, 181, 267, 282

Le Carbet (Martinique), 50; Church of Saint-Jacques, 50; Habitation of Sieur Banchereau, 443, 444, 445; Maison Bally (Martinique), 468 Le Clou, Pierre, 99, 120, 139–40, 460–2, 466 Le Diamant (Martinique), 52 Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas, 271–2, 278, 356–7, 377–8, 380, 384, 434, 435, 438, 468 Légaré, Joseph, 395 Le Marin (Martinique), Saint-Étienne, 417 Le Môle Saint-Nicolas (Saint-Domingue), 130, 142, 242–3, 268, 318 Le Moyne de Bienville, Jean-Baptiste, 214 Le Muet, Pierre, 337, 479 L’Enfant, Pierre-Charles, 210–11 Le Normant de Tournehem, Charles-François-Paul, 152 Le Nôtre, André, 150, 166, 178, 208, 240, 281–2, 285, 293, 306 Léogâne (Saint-Domingue), 99, 104, 115, 180, 243–244, 245–7, 252, 303, 351 Le Page du Pratz, Antoine-Simon, 61–2, 216 Le Peletier, Michel, 151 Le Prêcheur (Martinique), 390–1, 412, 416 Lequeu, Jean-Jacques, 278, 431–2 LeRoy, Julien-David, 161 Les Cayes (Saint-Domingue), 153, 188, 212–213, 241–3, 247, 442; Cours, 212–213; Place Royale 188 Le Tellier, François-Michel, 153 Lethière, Guillaume, 104 Leutwein, Theodor, 13 Levasseur, Charles, 214 Le Vasseur, François, 326 Levasseur, Pierre-Noël, 120, 402 Levasseur de Néré, Jacques, 69 Le Vau, Louis, 6–9, 152, 179, 181, 351 Léveillé, Etienne Ciacou dit, 107, 109, 113 Léveillé, Hélène, 107 Léveillé, Jean-François Éduoard dit, 107 Liger, Louis, 142–5, 301–3 Lignon, Jean-Baptiste, 318 Lille, 9, 159, 184, 234 Lilly, Christian, 210 Limoges, 196, 419, 441 Lindsay, John, 288 Logny, Robert Antoine Robin de, 23 l’Olive, Liénard de, 29, 62 Lombard, Jehan, 179 Lombard, Pierre-Aimé, 79, 85 Longchamp (now Georgetown, Guyana), 188, 221, 231, 232–233, 234; Fort de Castries 232; Place Royale, 188

Index

611

longhouses, 45–6, 58–59, 60, 67–7, 70, 74, 76, 386 Longin, Félix, 419 Longuemézière, Jacques le Féron de, 345 Longwy, 159, 184 Lorrain, Claude, 282 Louis XI, King of France, 150 Louis XIII, King of France, 32, 42–3, 96, 150, 154, 176–7, 271, 348 Louis XIV, King of France, 6, 10–15, 28, 31–2, 35, 41–4, 52, 89, 96, 158, 180, 278, 281, 284–6, 306; and Africa, 31–2, 44, 96–8; and architecture, 6, 10–15, 149–50, 278; bankruptcy of, 28; and churches, 52; and gardens, 281, 284–6, 306; and gloire, 6, 8, 14, 98, 162–3, 265; imperial policy of, 35, 37, 41–4, 89, 96–8 Louis XV, King of France, 43, 184, 188, 205, 236, 278, 286; style of, 25, 79, 160 (see also rococo) Louis XVI, King of France, 30, 147, 256, 286, 320, 486 Louisbourg (Cape Breton), 6, 27, 163–4, 179, 266–7; Porte Dauphine, 266 Louisiana, 28–30, 35, 130, 170, 286, 402; Amerindian architecture, 14, 61–2, 64; and Canadian builders, 131, 214, 406–8; “creole” (see architecture); and the Church, 43–4, 54, 340; and colonial nostalgia, 3–4, 23; Louisiana Purchase, 37, 320; and open galleries, 394, 459–60, 466–8; scarcity of stone in, 343; and slavery, 13, 93–6, 99; and urbanism, 188, 205, 213–21; Vauban and, 157, 405. See also “Mississippi Bubble”; Natchez Revolt Lover, Samuel, 20–1 Ludovica (utopian town in Quebec), 196 Luigny (Perche), 56 Macari (Guiana), 64 Macaye, Claude de, 170, 226 Macaye dit la Montagne, Antoine, 138 Machine de Marly, 153, 284 Mâcon (Burgundy), 457, 459; Cathédrale Saint-Vincent, 435–436 Macouba (Martinique), Dominican Church of Sainte-Anne, 404–405 Macquarie, Elizabeth Henrietta, 14 Macquarie, Lachlan, 14 Maillou, Jean-Baptiste dit Desmoulins, 123, 132–4, 142, 394–7, 400; project for a parish church, 397 Maintenon, Aqueduct, 153, 284–285 maison canadienne, 18–19 maison de maître. See plantation houses Mana (Guiana), 66, 130, 322, 381, 394, 433 Manesson-Mallet, Alain, 153, 156, 164, 166 Manoa, mythical place, 40

612

Index

mansard roof, 8, 14, 24, 150, 159, 181, 220, 337, 344, 371, 384 Mansart, François, 166, 337, 420–1, 424 Maragnan colony (Brazil), 42 Marcombe, Dame Marie, 11 Margravate of Azilia (Georgia), 210 Mariette, Jean, 156, 340–3, 354, 358, 362, 369–70, 387, 419, 420, 424 Marigny, Marquis de, 356 Mariotte, Edme, 156 Marmelade Plantation (Saint-Domingue), 97, 107, 443 Martellange, Étienne, 345, 428–9 Martin, Jean, 176 Martinique, 11, 25, 35, 121; and Amerindian architecture, 62; and the Bourbon Restoration, 377; and the Church, 47–8, 50, 52, 54, 85, 433; and Chinese and Indian workers, 482; and “colonial architecture,” 4–5; foundation of colony, 29; and gardens, 297–8, 317–20; and gens de couleur, 106, 111, 115–16, 111, 115–16, 124–5; Lavalette Affair (see Jesuits); and loss of New France, 27–8, 36; and neoclassicism, 357, 357; and open galleries, 451, 468; and slavery, 30, 95–6, 99–104, 445–7; and urbanism, 190, 192, 194, 204 masons, 13; civilian 120–6, 131–8, 150–1, 187, 294, 324, 328, 358, 387–88, 393, 419–20, 459; contracts, 126–9, 140, 243, 433; engagés, 86, 192; free masons of colour, 105–18, 473, 486, 488; slave masons, 80, 94, 98–104, 200, 359, 372; treatises, 142. See also architecture mathematics, 10, 151, 155–56, 166, 168. See also geometry Mazarin, Cardinal, 10, 179 Mazarin, Michel, 179 Mendicants, 38. See also Dominicans; Franciscans Ménilmontant, Pavillon Carré de Baudouin, 374 Mentelle, Simon, 85, 89–92, 171–2 Meslay-le-Vidame (Beauce), Church of Saint-Étienne, 438 Métezeau, Louis, 345 métis, 32, 471, 472, 476, 477, 479; in Gorée, 471, 472, 476, 477, 479; in Saint-Louis, 32 metropolitan style, 10, 17–18, 151, 334–54, 357; and the grand goût, 8, 12, 15, 159, 334, 355 Meudon, Château Neuf, 343 Meulles, Jacques de, 36, 132, 196 Meynier, royal engineer, 249–55 Mexico City, 121, 205, 206, 450; Cathedral, 51, 52, 440; Plaza de Santo Domingo, 450 Mézières, École Royale du Génie, 153–5, 362 Michelangelo, 180 Michilimackinac (Michigan), 45 Mi’kmaq peoples, 56–8 Milot, 25; Citadelle Laferrière, 101; Palace of Sans-Souci, 24–25, 100–1, 134

Ministry of the Marine, 11, 14, 28, 35, 48, 67, 122, 145, 163, 170, 194, 200, 231, 281, 294, 318, 386, 472 missionaries, 38, 43–92, 97, 300, 345, 485–6; and parish priests, 47–54. See also Capuchins; Carmelites; Dominicans; Franciscans; Jesuits; Mendicants; Recollects; reductions; Sulpicians; Ursulines Mississippi Company, 28, 41, 210, 213–14 Mississippi River, 4, 27, 28, 44, 60, 170, 216, 218, 405, 443 Missouri River, 28, 44, 57 Mithon de Senneville, Jean-Jacques, 243–5 Mobile (including Old Mobile), 188, 214–215, 216, 234, 460; Fort Condé, 6, 170; Fort Louis de La Louisiane, 213–214; Place d’Armes, 214; Place Royale, 188, 214 Mohawk peoples. See Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) peoples Molard, Brother Gaspard du, 448, 463, 485 Mollet, André, 281–2 Mollet, Claud: Théâtre des plans et jardinages, 280–1, 290 Montarcher, Jean-François Vincent de, 260–2, 421 Montauban, 174 Montcalm, Marquis de, 27 Montdauphin, 150 Montevideo, Cathedral 21 Montgomery, Sir Robert, 210 Montigny, Dumont du, 61–2 Mont-Louis (Quebec), 57 Montmagny, Charles Huault de, 304, 326 Montpellier, 122, 151–2, 157, 185, 211, 263, 267, 286, 317; Hôpital Saint-Eloi, 264; Place Louis XIV (Place du Peyrou), 187–8, 314–16 Montreal, 18–19, 42, 45, 56, 58–60, 67, 72, 136, 138, 163, 164, 336–7, 339, 342–4, 348, 351, 388, 427; foundation of, 26–7; Maison François-Marie Soumande, 136–137; Mountain Mission of Our Lady of the Snows, 72; New Basilica de NotreDame, 19; Notre-Dame Parish Church, 50, 427; Sulpician Monastery, 336–337, 338 monuments, 264–78. See also gates; ephemera; fountains; obelisks; triumphal arches More, Thomas, 38, 175. See also utopianism Moreau, Mathieu, 114 Moreau de Chambonneau, Louis, 265, 330, 344–5, 435 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Médéric Louis Élie, 36, 108, 130, 245–7, 252, 260–5, 268, 275–6, 300–1, 304, 306, 309–12, 315–16, 320, 421–3 Moreau-Desproux, Pierre-Louis, 373–4 Morel, Pierre, 104 Morne de la Tranquillité (Saint-Domingue), 376–7; LockKeeper’s Cottage, 376 Moyencourt, Vaultier de, 127, 129

Napoleon I, Emperor of France, 30, 116, 432, 446 Napoleonic Wars, 3, 31, 32, 356, 482, 496 Nassau, Claude-François, 116, 127, 129, 270–2, 358–60, 424–5 Nassau, Claude-Nicolas, 129 Nassau, Jacaranda House, 448 Natchez, 56, 60–1, 221; Natchez Revolt, 60–1, 221 neoclassicism, 10, 15, 126, 155, 245, 271, 278, 334, 356–7, 373– 84, 412–38, 483 Neuf-Brisach, 9, 149, 150, 160, 184, 216, 218, 228, 234, 243; Vauban’s model for, 184 Neufforge, Jean-François de, 357, 435 Neuvy-Saint-Sépulchre (Centre-Val de Loire), Saint-Étienne, 434 Nevis, 336 New England, 6, 18, 19, 23, 58, 69, 130, 208, 368 Newfoundland (Terre-Neuve), 25–6, 35, 42, 57–8 New France. See Nouvelle-France New Orleans (Nouvelle-Orléans), 4–5, 15, 19–21, 24, 28, 41, 47, 54, 62, 170, 213, 216, 218, 219–220, 221, 243, 441, 460; Cabildo, 20–1, 24; Casa Curial (Presbytère), 21, 24; Church of Saint-Louis, 20–1, 28, 161, 170, 192, 220, 405, 406, 408, 411; Cornue-Pitot House, 20; Don Manuel Lanzos House, 19–20; Intendance project, 465; Ursuline Convent, 220, 340, 341–6, 408 Newton, Sir Isaac, 10 New York, Fulton Street Market, 19 Nicholson, Francis, 210 Nine Years’ War of the English Succession, 25 nobility, 11, 26, 151, 284, 369; noblesse d’épée vs. noblesse de robe, 11, 326 Nobletz, Michel le, 393 Nolivos, Pierre Gédéon comte de, 11, 303, 312 Normandy, 12, 43, 324, 326, 373, 385, 441, 457 Northwest Passage, 26 Nouveau-Biloxy. See Biloxi. Nouvelle-Angoulême, plantation house, 64 Nouvelle-France (New France), 37–41, 180, 195–6; and Amerindians, 45–6, 56–7; and the Church, 42–3, 52–3; church architecture, 387–90, 394, 412, 419; and civilian builders, 113, 123, 126, 129–35; and the clocher, 345; foundation of colony, 11, 25–30; and Italian architecture, 50, 425, 429; and Kourou, 40–1; and open galleries, 455–6; poor reputation of, 36; and reductions, 67–79; and slavery, 57, 93, 96; and utopianism, 45–6; Vauban and, 157–8 Nouvelle-Orléans. See New Orleans Oaxaca, Casas Reales, 21 obelisks, 87, 210, 242, 264, 275–8, 425

Index

613

Odanak, reduction of, 23, 45, 58, 67–68, 69–72 O’Donnell, James, 19 O’Farrell, Burke, 15, 36, 130, 383–4, 429; project for government building in Saint-Louis (Senegal), 383 Oka, 46, 56, 58, 60, 67, 73–81, 85, 388; Abbey of Notre-Damedu-Lac, 56; Calvary chapels, 78–79, 388; Mission, 46, 67, 73, 74–77, 78 Oka-Kanesataké. See Oka Order of the Knights of Malta, 29, 179 Order of Saint-Louis, 107, 163, 168 Orry, Jean, 153 Ossossané (La Conception), 45, 58 Osu (Accra, Ghana), Basel Missionary School, 448, 485 Ouidah (Benin), 14, 32–4, 44, 96, 104, 267, 287, 292, 294–295, 296, 299–300, 306, 330, 476, 485; Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, 485; Fort Saint-Louis and garden, 32, 159, 265–7, 292–3, 294–7, 330, 333–4, 435, 476 Oyapock, 64, 67, 79–82, 221–4, 231, 236–7, 249; Fort SaintLouis, 80–81, 221, 222–223 Ozanam, Jacques, 156–7, 166 Pacquet, Charles, 23 Padilla, Xavier, 64 Palicour peoples, 81 Palladianism, 18, 357; British, 18; villa architecture, 21, 357 Palladio, Andrea, 156–7 Palmanova, 175 Panama Canal, 172 Panamá La Vieja, 37, 205 Pansiotti, Gaudens, 130, 429 papacy, 43, 48–51, 176, 180, 268, 414; Bulls of Donation, 42; Council of Trent, 50; Four Gallican Articles, 48; Pope Alexander VII, 43; Pope Sixtus V, 180, 268; Pope Urban VIII, 43 Papon, Nicolas, 122 Paraguay reductions, 38, 50, 66–7, 69, 73, 79, 82, 84, 86, 453–4 Paramaribo (Suriname), 6, 205, 231, 234, 236, 456; Huis Duplessis 456–457 Paris, 78, 123, 132, 147, 210, 218, 293, 368–9; architectural style, 8, 12, 267–8, 288, 334, 342, 356, 362–5, 373–5, 377, 385, 411; black people in, 104; Cathedral of Notre-Dame, 257; ChampsÉlysées, 284, 309; Church of the Minimes, 420–421, 424; Church of Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, 424, 429; Church of Sainte-Élisabeth-de-Hongrie, 398; Church of Saint-Étiennedu-Mont, 398; Church of Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis, 429; Church of Val-de-Grâce, 402; Collège des Quatre-Nations, 351–2; Couvent des Capucins, 272; engineers convalescing in, 168–70; Fontaine des Quatre-Saisons, 271; hospital gardens,

614

Index

301; Hôtel de Biron, 362, 364; Hôtel Bretonvillers, 179; Hôtel de Clermont, 340, 341–3; Hôtel Gouffier de Thoix, 273, 411; Hôtel des Invalides, 6–7, 89, 150, 153, 159, 166, 187; Hôtel de Lully, 8, 181, 337–338; Hôtel de Noirmoutier (or de Sens), 159, 362–364; Hôtel de Rothelin, 358–359; Île Saint-Louis, 177– 78; Île aux Vaches, 178; Jardin de Monceau, 321; Jardin du Roi (Jardin des Plantes), 286, 213; Palais de Bourbon, 354; Palais du Louvre, 8–9, 151, 181, 183, 185, 278, 282, 293, 484; Palais de Luxembourg, 150; Pavillon Guimard, 272; Parc Monceau, turkish tents, 431; Place Louis XV (Place de la Concorde), 185–7, 257, 260; Place Louis XV (unexecuted), 257; Place Louis-leGrand (Place Vendôme), 180–181, 263; Place Royale (Place des Vosges), 176–8; Place des Victoires, 180–1, 337, 424; Port Saint-Antoine (Paris), 182; Port Saint-Bernard (Paris), 182; Port Saint-Denis (Paris), 7, 159, 182, 267; Port Saint-Martin (Paris), 182; Rotonde de la Villette, 272, 434–435; Salpêtrière Hospital, 150; as simulacrum for colonial town, 257, 60; Tuileries, 185, 208, 257, 260, 282–4, 286; urban regeneration in, 176–9, 180–2, 213, 220; utopian schemes for, 183; waterworks, 271–2 Parlange Plantation (Louisiana), 23, 466 Parquet, Jacques Dyel du, 29, 190 Pascagoula (Mississippi), Chaumont and De La Pointe concessions, 62 Pasquier, Augustine, 111 Pasquier, Pierre, 111 Paty, Jean-Joseph de, 243 Pátzcuaro, Lake (Mexico), 38 Pauger, Adrien de, 170, 213, 216, 218–19, 405–11 Pays d’en Haut, 56 Peace of Paris, 310 Peace of Utrecht, 27 Pelletier, Nicolas, 387–8 Pépin, Anna-Nicolas, 477 Pépin, Anne, 477, 479 Pépin, Jean, 477 Pépin, Nicolas, 477 Pernambuco (Brazil), 14, 66, 121, 440, 451, 454–5 Perrault, Claude, 8–9, 145, 156, 161, 181, 264, 277 perspectival sightlines: in British urbanism, 208; in gardens, 284, 296, 299, 300–1; and reduction design, 67, 84; in SaintDomingue, 245, 252; in Senegal, 477, 480; and Vauban, 9–10; in Washington, dc , 211–13 Petigny, Jean-Pierre, 107, 109–10, 114 Petit-Anse (Saint-Domingue), plantation, 445 Petit-Goâve, 30, 243, 247, 248–250, 252, 326, 330; Church of Notre-Dame, 252; Governor’s Palace, 120, 247, 248–249, 330. See also L’Acul du Petit-Goâve

Petite Académie, 8 petite maison, 373–7 Petrea, 43 Peyssonnel, Jean-André, 318 Phélypeaux de Maurepas, Jean-Frédéric, 125, 224 Philibert, Emmanuel, 377, 381 Philip II, King of Spain, 47, 51, 205, 206 Phillipe II, duc d’Orléans, 28, 41, 71, 80, 163, 188, 205, 317 Picquet, François, 77 Pierre, Jean-Baptiste Marie, 169 Pierreville (Quebec), Church of Saint-Thomas, 22, 23–4 pirates, 29, 52, 96, 120, 214, 242, 247, 325–6, 392 Pironneau, Joseph, 108–9, 111, 113–14 Pitrou, Robert, 183 Pittman, Philip, 221 Place de Guerre (Saint-Domingue), 188, 254–255, 256–7, 260 place royale (type of royal square), 176–88; in the colonies, 188, 198–9, 213–15, 243–67, 274, 300, 315, 357, 432, 459; in France, 176–88; and sculpture, 87, 177, 185, 188, 197, 198, 207, 233, 274, 316 Plaine de l’Artibonite (Saint-Domingue), 376–7 Plaisance (Newfoundland), 27, 58 Plaisance (Saint-Domingue), 125–6 plantations; absentee landlords, 30, 36; and acclimatization gardens, 321–3; and Amerindian architecture, 62–4; and chapels, 53; governors’, 11, 224, 247, 247; and “grands blancs,” 30–1, 36; and the Jesuits, 79–80, 85, 300; ownership among people of colour, 115–16; “plantation complex,” 95, 97–8, 376; plantation houses, 4, 15, 21–3, 28, 64, 94, 130, 140–42, 157, 334, 359, 339, 361, 450, 451, 466; in Saint-Domingue, 241–3; and slave builders, 99–103; and slave huts, 94, 441–5; in Suriname, 66, 236–7; treatises, 15, 144–6; and villages, 37. See also agriculture; slavery Pléville Le Pelley, Georges-René, 54 Poincy, Philippe de Longvilliers de, 29, 121, 334–6, 340 Pointe-à-Pitre, 37, 94, 102, 115–17, 125, 128–9, 272, 357–61, 366–7, 371–2, 424, 433–4, 469–71, 484; Chateau d’Eau, 271– 272; Church of Saint-Pierre-Saint-Paul, 127, 128, 129, 218, 272, 424, 484; Maison Jean Testas, 49, 94, 101, 272, 358–64, 368, 443; Morne de la Victoire, 127; Palais de Justice and Prison, 370, 371, 372; Place Royale, 557; Reservoir, 272; Street Scene, 469; Sub-Commandant’s Mansion project, 366–367, 368–9 Poisvilliers (Beauce), Church of Saint-Étienne, 398 Poitou, 182 Polchet, Jean-François-Hyacinthe, 243 Pompée, Ignace, 112, 114 Pompée, Jeanne, 112

Pontaléry (Martinique), Chapelle de la Vierge Libératice, 47, 445–446 Pontchartrain, Jérôme Phèlypeaux, comte de, 125, 349 Pontchartrain, Lake, 28, 62, 216, 221 Pontecasale (Italy), Villa Garzoni, 450 Port-au-Prince 5–6, 11, 30, 37, 100–16, 124–6, 152, 169, 171, 185, 188, 213, 241–5, 252–6, 262, 265–7, 272–3, 277, 286, 306, 310–21, 355, 373–5, 394, 431, 466; Bureau des Classes, 466–467; Fountain in the Place d’Armes, 277–8; Government House, 171, 310, 466–467; Hall of the War Council, 169, 373–375, 466; Jardin Botanique, 317, 320; Maison des Gardes de l’Intendance, 80; Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption, 126; Officers’ Pavilions, 169; Place d’Armes, 358; Place Royale, 188; Promenade Publique, 260, 312, 313–315, 316; Reservoir, 272–273; Royal Gardens, 310–311, 312 Port de la Trinité (Martinique), Church of the Trinity, 408, 410 Port-de-Paix (Saint-Domingue), 30, 53, 103, 124, 242, 252 Port Jackson (Sydney), 14, 486–8; General Hospital, 447 Portuguese Empire, 3, 14, 25, 31–3, 36–7, 42, 50, 54, 59, 63, 66–7, 96–7, 236, 242, 294–6, 332, 356, 385–6, 436, 451, 480; and architecture, 294–6, 436, 471, patronate system, 43, 47 Post, Frans, 66, 451–4; Brazilian Village, 454; Landscape in Brazil, 453; Landscape on the Rio Senhor de Engenho, Brazil, 452 Poussin, Nicolas, 282 Poyen de Saint-Marie, Jean-Baptiste, 101 pré carré, 10, 33, 34, 149, 173, 182, 284, 439 prisons, 14, 28, 41, 486 Propaganda Fide. See Sacred Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith Provoyeur dit Mirebalezia, Pierre-Guillaume, 109–10, 112–13 quadrillages. See gridiron city plans Quebec, 1, 22, 24–8, 30, 32–4, 342; and “colonial architecture,” 4; and colonial nostalgia, 5; and nationalism, 5, 195, 199 Quebec City, 5, 25–7, 38, 42, 45, 51, 58, 120, 123, 131, 133, 135–6, 163, 166, 188, 190, 195, 303–4, 326–7, 345, 387–8, 399–403, 425–9; Basse-Ville (Lower Town), 135, 188, 190, 195–196, 197–198, 199, 204, 324, 389, 400; Cathedral of NotreDame, 51, 132, 154, 180, 387, 399–400, 429; Chapel of the Episcopal Palace, 400, 401–402; Chapel of the Immaculate Conception, 388; Château Frontenac, 5; Château Saint-Louis (first version), 121, 195–6, 326, 327–328, 346–8, 369, 389, 428; Château Saint-Louis (second version), 123, 163, 326–7, 347, 428; Church of Notre-Dame-des-Anges, 388; Church of Notre-Dame-de-la-Recouvrance, 388; Church of NotreDame-de-la-Paix, 388–9, 393; Church of Notre-Dame-desVictoires, 132, 196–198, 199, 400; Habitation of Champlain 325; Haute-Ville (Upper Town), 133, 195–6, 197, 326, 389;

Index

615

Jesuit Church, 400, 402, 403, 425, 428; Maison Jean-Baptiste Maillou, 133; Maison Noël Pinguet, 135; Sénéchausée, 326; Ursuline Convent, 402. See also Nouvelle-France Querelle des anciens et des modernes, 8–9 Quieunonascaran (Huron village), 58 Quiroga, Don Vasco de, 38, 175 Rabelais, François, 36, 339 Rabié, René Gabriel, 166–8, 262, 267–70, 275–6, 301–2, 306, 309, 312, 421–4 race, 13, 98, 106, 114, 119–20, 443, 485; and discrimination, 98, 105–6, 119–20, 488; and racial purity 106. See also gens de couleur; métis; slavery Ragueneau, Paul, 59 Rambouillet, dairy (laiterie), 272 Real Academia de San Carlos, 121 Real Academia de San Fernando, 121 Recollects, 43, 45, 58, 67, 436; and Amerindians, 45, 58, 67; and architecture 436. See also Franciscans reductions, 34–54, 55–92; cost of, 72–3; in Guiana, 79–92; in Nouvelle-France, 45–79; in Spanish America (see also Paraguay Reductions), 38, 50, 66–7, 69, 73, 86; and utopianism (see utopianism) Renaissance, 10, 12, 25, 38, 141, 149, 156, 174–5, 267, 357, 387–8, 412, 434, 450, 459 Renau d’Éliçagaray (or Élissagaray), Bernard, 163, 199–202, 231 Rennes, Palais de Justice, 348, 349 Ribadeneira, Pedro, 426 Richelieu, Cardinal, 10, 26, 29, 31, 38, 43, 182, 188 Richelieu (Poitou), 182 Ricou, Xavier, 477 Rio de Janeiro, 25, 50. See also Guanabara Bay Rochefort, 86, 104, 151, 168, 169, 220, 232, 236, 245, 286, 301; Château d’Eau at the Quai aux Vivres, 273, 274; Corderie Royale 160, 161; Garden, 286; Hôpital de la Marine, 230, 231 Rochefort, César de, 334–5 Rochefort, Charles de, 44 rococo, 141–2, 272–3, 340, 364, 411 Rocque, Jean de la (Seigneur de Roberval), 42 Roger, Jacques-François, 115 Rohan, Chevalier Prince de, 312 Romain, Jean-Baptiste, 408, 411 Rome, 8, 48, 50, 85, 104, 176, 178–9, 181, 278, 281, 324, 351, 354, 356–7, 386, 412–15, 419; Arch of Constantine, 267; Church of Il Gesù, 50, 386–7, 412, 416, 418, 425, 427–9; Palazzo dei Conservatori, 181; Piazza del Campidoglio, 180; S. Carlo ai Catinari, 414; S. Caterina dei Funari, 50, 416, 426, 428; S. Luigi dei Francesi, 50, 414; S. Maria della Pace, 351; Theatre of Marcellus, 420–1

616

Index

Rool, Frans, 393 Rosey, Brother Louis de, 44 Roussanes, Louis, 111 Rousseau, Antoine, 155 Rousseau, Jean, 123, 127 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 45, 237 Roux, François, 125, 459 Royal Prussian Academy, 158 Royal Society of Agriculture, 108 Rubens, Peter Paul, 78 Rufisque, 32 rustication, 166, 267, 271–2, 329, 334, 359, 363 Sacred Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith (Propaganda Fide), 43 Saint-Antoine-sur-Richelieu (Quebec), Maison GaudetteDupont, 17–18; parish church, 16–17 Saint-Bénigne de Pontarlier (Besançon), parish church, 416 Saint-Bonnet-la-Rivière (Aquitaine), 434 Saint-Charles-sur-Richelieu (Quebec), parish church, 17–18 Saint-Christophe (island), 29, 47, 62, 96, 121, 334–5 Saint-Croix (Maine), 205 Saint-Cyran, Paul Edme Crublier de, 372–3 Saint-Domingue: and building contracts, 140–2; and the Church, 47, 49, 53–4; and engineer architects, 166, 168–72; foundation of colony, 29–30; and gardens, 300, 320–1, 324–6; and gens de couleur, 115–20; and neoclassicism, 373–7; and open galleries, 455, 459, 468; and slavery, 25, 94–109; and slave huts, 443, 445; sovereign councils, 11; and sugar, 4; ties with France, 36–7; and urbanism, 188, 212–13, 241–64; and Vauban, 157; and white builders, 123–6 Saint-Emilion, Château Soutard, 351–352 Sainte-Famille (Île d’Orléans), parish church, 18, 388–9, 394, 400–401, 412 Sainte-Foy, parish church, 395–96 Sainte-Marie-aux-Hurons (Ontario), 45, 58, 298 Sainte-Marie-du-Sault (Ontario), 44 Sainte-Marie (Martinique), Habitation Fond Saint-Jacques, 101–2, 298, 405 Sainte-Marthe de Lalande, Pierre de, 189 Saint-François (Île d’Orléans), parish church, 6 Saint-François-du-Lac. See Odanak Saint Ignatius of Loyola, 412 Saint-Jean, Blaise Estoupan, 288, 476 Saint-Jean (Île d’Orléans), parish church, 388 Saint-Laurent (Île d’Orléans), parish church, 394 Saint Lawrence River, 26, 28, 35, 45, 58, 67, 164, 196 Saint-Louis (Senegal), 31–2, 36, 44, 52, 127, 159, 162–3, 265, 287, 383, 431, 471, 473, 476–7, 481, 484; Church of Saint-Louis,

357, 384, 432–436, 437–8, 459; Église du Nord, 162, 324, 431, 432; Fort Saint-Louis, 265–7, 288, 330, 331, 332–333, 334–5, 382; Hospital Project by Nicolas-Georges Courtois, 381–382, 433; project for a dodecagonal church, 434 Saint-Lusson, Daumont de, 44 Saint-Marc (Saint-Domingue), 242, 258, 376 Saint-Pierre, Jacques 596 Saint-Pierre (Île d’Orléans), parish church, 396 Saint-Pierre (Martinique), 29, 37, 41–42, 47, 104, 190, 204, 286, 297–300, 317–18, 320, 339, 342, 344–5, 390, 413–16, 463, 468; Church of Notre-Dame-du-Bon-Port, 413, 414–16; Église du Fort, 298, 416; Dominican Monastery, 121, 144, 298–9, 338, 339, 342, 386, 468; Jardin des Plantes, 318–319, 320–1; Jesuit residence and gardens, 297–298, 299–300 Saint-Pierre (Saint-Domingue), 101 Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, 28 Saint-Romès, Charles Durand, 316 Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy duc de, 150 Saint-Vallier, Jean-Baptiste de la Croix de Chevrière de, 43, 345 San Ignacio Guazú (Paraguay), Jesuit reduction, 453 San Juan Bautista (Paraguay), Jesuit reduction, 38–39, 67 Sansovino, Jacopo 450 Santiago de Guatemala, 205 Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic), 29–30, 49, 205, 314, 324, 449–50, 454; House of Diego Colón (Alcázar), 449 Sault-Saint-Louis (Quebec), Seigneurie du, 46, 69. See also Caughnawaga Saveur, Joseph, 151 Scamozzi, Vincenzo, 175 Schmaltz, Julien-Désiré, 433 Second Hundred Years’ War, 4 seigneurial system, 11, 26–7, 29, 34, 136, 52–3, 72–3; in the Antilles, 11, 29, 52–3; in Nouvelle-France, 11, 26–7, 52–3, 72–3 Séminaire des Missions Étangères, 43 Senegal, 166, 301, 431, 471; and the Bourbon Restoration, 377; and the Church, 436–7; and “colonial architecture,” 5; and cultural convergence, 471–80; foundation of colony, 31–3; and gardens, 287–94; indigenous architecture, 442; and Islam, 266–7, 330; and neoclassicism, 357, 381–4; post-1830, 481, 483; prefabricated architecture in, 36, 130; relations with indigenous groups, 33; and slavery, 97–100, 237 Septfontaines, Jean-Pierre-Antoine Béhague de, 169–70, 226 Seringue, Mikael, 340, 408 Serlio, Sebastiano: Architettura … in sei libri divisa, 141, 156, 164, 357, 418–19 Serres, Olivier de, 281, 285 settlers. See habitants Seven Years’ War, 4, 18, 25, 30, 32, 52, 224, 231, 291, 324, 349, 355, 394

Sforzinda (utopian city), 175 Short, Richard, 400, 402–3, 428 Sillery (Quebec), Jesuit reduction at, 54 Simonin, Antoine, 124 Sinnamary (Guiana), 31, 40, 67, 79, 82–83, 86, 92, 204, 221, 394 Sítio Santo Antônio (Brazil), 454–455 Slave Coast. See Bight of Benin slavery, 5, 25, 29–31, 40, 42, 47–8, 52–4, 57, 61, 63, 66, 79, 85–6, 93–104, 105–11, 116–18, 122–4, 131, 138–41, 158, 200, 236–7, 240, 241, 247, 256, 279, 287, 294, 296–7, 322, 336, 377, 411, 439, 440–5, 446, 451, 454, 473, 476, 477, 482; abolition, 30, 40, 377; and architecture (see architecture; slavery); Code noir, 98; emancipation, 29, 40, 211; and gardens, 296–7; Maroons, 63, 90, 94, 96, 98, 103, 146, 236, 440–5; plantations, 440–5 (see also plantations; slave huts); populations, 31, 95–7, 296; slave castles, 330, 451, 476, 480; transatlantic slave trade, 4, 95–7, 11, 187, 237, 294, 296 Société de Notre-Dame de Montréal, 26, 72 Solain-Baron, Julien-Marie, 168–9, 224–6, 231 Sommereu, Jean-Baptiste, 109 Sost, Jean, 124 Soufflot, Jacques-Germain, 89, 271, 354, 356 Spanish Empire, 3–5, 11, 14, 16–21, 25, 27, 29, 35–8, 42, 43, 47–54, 56, 59, 60, 66, 79, 121–2, 204–8, 213, 221, 242, 247, 324, 330, 334–5, 385–6, 419, 450, 454, 459, 471; and architecture, 19–21, 419, 450, 454, 459, 471; patronate system, 43, 47; rivalry with French, 60, 66, 79, 247, 287, 385–6; and utopianism (see utopianism) Stanislaus, Francis Alexander, 37 style, historicism in, 14–15 sugar, 4, 11, 29, 36, 42, 52, 79, 95, 97–9, 192–4, 237, 243, 269, 297–300, 315, 334, 339, 358–9, 391, 419, 449, 451, 455. See also plantations Sulpicians, 26, 45, 67, 72–5, 79, 336–9, 427; among the Amerindians, 26, 45; and architecture, 336–9 sumptuary laws, 50, 98, 106 Suriname, 6, 14, 63–6, 90, 171, 226, 231, 234–6, 322, 445, 456–7. See also Paramaribo Swaine, Francis, 298–9 Tabaudo, Abbé, 437 Tadoussac (Quebec), 26, 388 Tall, Al Haj Umar, 481 Talon, Jean, 11, 27, 132 Talsy, Abbé Lazare, 94, 360–73 Tarade, Jacques, 153, 159 Te Deum mass. See ephemera Teissier, Jacques, 356–7, 377–8 Terrasse, Abbé, 433

Index

617

Testas, Jean, 49, 94, 101, 272, 358–64, 368, 443 Thévenin, Jacques-Jean, 272 ti kay house, 441–2 tithes, 42, 50, 51, 53 Toufaire, Pierre, 230 Toulon, 151, 159–60, 163, 166, 180, 286; Corderie 160; Porte Monumentale 159, 161 Toulouse, Dominican Monastery, 387 tourism, 3–5 Tracy, Alexandre de Prouville, seigneur de, 11, 189, 326 trade, 4, 10–11, 25–31, 41, 44–5, 54, 56–7, 60, 62, 70, 73, 77, 95–7, 111, 187, 188, 237, 286–7, 291, 294, 296, 346, 408, 411, 451, 477, 482; exclusif, 42; fishing, 25, 28; fur trade, 26–7, 45, 56, 70, 73, 408; gold, 31, 38; 41; gum arabic, 31, 291, 480; luxury goods, 11, 31, 107 (see also sugar); transatlantic slave trade (see slavery) training, 99, 102–14, 119–23, 132–4, 150–6, 162, 164, 315, 378; in France, 7–12, 122; among gens de couleur, 102–14; guilds, 120–3, 156, 255; in Hispanic America, 121; for royal engineers, 150–6, 162, 164, 315, 378; among slaves, 102, 110–11; among whites, 119–23, 132–4. See also workshop practices Treaty of Paris (1763), 27, 37, 357 Treaty of Ryswick (1697), 30, 242 Trictrac, Jean-Baptiste, 104 triumphal arches, 159–60, 168, 180, 182, 242, 262–4, 267, 268– 269; 278, 466 Trois-Îlets (Martinique), Notre-Dame-de-la-BonneDéliverance, 404 Trois-Rivières (Quebec), 26–7, 58, 67 Trois-Rivières (Guadeloupe), 117, 124 Tugny, Jean-Baptiste, 82, 84–5, 89, 237, 264, 355 Tunja (Colombia), Casa del Fundador, 450 Tur, Ali, 5 Turgot, Étienne-François, 40, 49, 169, 229–30, 392–3 Turgot, Michel-Étienne, 177, 180–1

unesco, 6, 101 urban planning, 173–264; in Aix-en-Provence, 179–80; in Anglo-America, 208; in Bordeaux, 185–87; democratization, 174; in Fort-Royal, 192–5; in the Guianas, 190–1, 199–202, 221; in Louisiana, 213–21; in Montpellier, 187–88; in Paris, 176–80; in Quebec City, 196–99; in Saint-Domingue, 241–64; in Spanish America, 205–8. See also city planning; gridiron city plans; utopianism Ursulines, 28, 195, 220, 320, 340–6, 402, 408 utopianism, 4, 10, 25, 30, 125–6, 149, 188, 218, 231, 264, 322, 336, 356, 429–30, 486; and city planning, 14, 38–41, 46, 130, 171, 175, 182–3, 208, 242, 249; and imperial schemes, 38–41;

618

Index

and reductions, 40, 46, 66, 73, 85, 92 (see also Kourou); in Spanish America, 38, 66, 175, 207–8 Vachon de Belmont, François, 72, 75 Valkenburg, Dirk, 66, 456 Varaigne, Pierre-Bernard, 172, 376–7 Varignon, Pierre, 156 Vassé, Antoine-François, 89 Vau, François de, 178 Vauban, maréchal Sébastian le Prestre de, 9, 75, 168, 175, 195, 218; and Army Corps of Engineers, 149–54; and ceinture de fer, 10, 182; Oisivétés, 157–60, and treatises, 158–64, 166, 405–8; and urbanism, 183–4, 199–201, 216, 221, 224–6, 230–1, 234, 264–5, 267, Vaudreuil, Louise-Élisabeth Joybert de, 349, 369 Vaudreuil, Philippe de Rigaud de, 57, 71–3, 96, 164–5, 263, 345 Vaux-le-Vicomte, Château, 179, 284, 290 Verly, François Blanchot de, 432 vernacular architecture. See architecture, vernacular Versailles, 12, 29, 35, 44, 48, 77, 142, 159, 166, 208, 218, 238, 268, 271, 292, 303, 306, 326, 334, 338–40, 349, 352, 356, 363–5, 385; Bâtiments du Roi Headquarters, 152; Château, 6, 7, 8, 121, 144, 162, 179, 187, 340; Château Gardens, 6–7, 152–3, 205, 240, 282–283, 284, 285; Grande Écurie, 7, 159; Grand Trianon, 352–3; Petit Trianon, 155, 364, 373; Royal Fruit and Vegetable Garden, 238–239, 240, 285–6 Verrier, Étienne, 163–4, 179, 266–7 Vestier, Nicolas-Jacques-Antoine, 438 Vieux-Habitants (Guadeloupe), Capuchin church, 196, 374, 418–19 Vignola, Giacomo Barozzi da, 141–2, 156, 164, 420 Vila Rica (Ouro Preto, Brazil), 51 Villeneuve, Pierre Bardet de, 156 Villeneuve, Robert de, 158, 195–96, 198, 327–28, 348 Villeverd, Jean-François, compte de Reynaud de, 134, 259, 262, 306 Vimont, Barthélemi, 388–9 Vincent, Père, 419 Viry, Jean-Baptiste, 424–25 Vitruvius, 8, 144, 156, 174–176, 205–6. See also classical orders Vollant, Simon, 344 Voltaire, 36, 40, 45, 86, 174 Vodou, 97, 440 Vouet, Simon, 282 wampum, 60 war, 4, 25–26, 30, 32, 40, 71–72, 97, 188, 210, 231, 255–7, 488. See also American War of Independence; Franco-Dutch War; French Revolution; Napoleonic Wars; Nine Years’ War of the

English Succession; Second Hundred Years’ War; Seven Years’ War; War of the Spanish Succession War of the Spanish Succession, 25, 158, 166, 349 Washington, George, 210, 322 Washington, dc , 210–211 Waterlant Plantation (Suriname), 66, 456 Wendake (Quebec), 45, 58, 60 West Africa, 5, 10–14, 32, 44, 94–7, 119, 266, 287–97, 318, 325, 356, 385, 439–41, 445, 448–51, 472–5, 485 Whitehall, 14 Williams, John, 69 Williamsburg (Virginia), 210 Wimpffen, Alexander Stanislaus, baron de, 37, 98, 130, 320 Wolfe, General James, 27

Wolof, 97, 287, 471–2 workshop practices, 101–18, 121, 124–5, 131–4, 194, 205, 395, 445; apprenticeships, 101–18, 120–5, 131–4, 142, 151–2, 440; ateliers, 101, 103, 107, 111, 117, 121, 194, 205; family workshops, 124–5; partnerships, 109, 117, 124. See also training Wren, Christopher, 210 Yaguarón (Paraguay), Church of San Buenaventura, 453 Yamaska (Quebec), Church of Saint-Michel, 19 Yovogan (Dahomey official), 294, 297 zapatas, 450, 452, 454 Zumárraga, Juan de, 38

Index

619