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

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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

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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

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Brest

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Besançon

Dijon

Bourges

Beaune

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Rochefort

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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

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grande-terre Lamentin Baie-Mahault

Pointe-Noire

Les Abymes Pointe-à-Pitre

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basse-terre

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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)

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french guiana

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île de la tortue Port-de-Paix

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Le Robert Saint-Joseph

Case Pilot

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terre-neuve

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

Fort des Natchitoches (1714)

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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

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balante

mande kingdom

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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