Cul de Sac: Patrimony, Capitalism, and Slavery in French Saint-Domingue 9780226411774

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Cul de Sac

Cul de Sac

Patrimony, Capitalism, and Slavery in French Saint-Domingue

Paul Cheney

the university of chicago press chicago and london

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2017 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2017 Printed in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17

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ISBN-13: 978- 0-226- 07935-6 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978- 0-226-41177-4 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226411774.001.0001 Portions of chapter 4 appeared as “A Colonial Cul de Sac: Plantation Life in Wartime Saint-Domingue, 1775–1782” in Radical History Review (Winter 2013) and are reprinted by permission of Duke University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cheney, Paul Burton, author. Title: Cul de Sac : patrimony, capitalism, and slavery in French Saint-Domingue / Paul Cheney. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016022705 | ISBN 9780226079356 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226411774 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Sugar plantations—Haiti—Cul-de-Sac Plain—History— 18th century. | Capitalism—Haiti—History—18th century. | Haiti— Economic conditions—18th century. | Haiti—History—To 1791. | Haiti— History—Revolution, 1791–1804. | Plantation owners—Haiti. | Plantation overseers—Haiti. Classification: LCC HD9114.H2 C47 2017 | DDC 338.1/736109729452—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016022705 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To Nick and Louis

Contents

Introduction: The Colonial Cul de Sac

1

1.

Province and Colony

15

2.

Production and Investment

42

3.

Humanity and Interest

71

4.

War and Profit

105

5.

Husband and Wife

130

6.

Revolution and Cultivation

161

7.

Evacuation and Indemnity

191

Epilogue

223

Acknowledgments

227

Sources and Abbreviations

229

Bibliography

233

Index

249

vii

Introduction

The Colonial Cul de Sac

Le Cul de sac est le plus cul de sac qu’il y ait du monde. The Cul de Sac [plain] is the deadest dead end in the entire world. —Jean- Baptiste Corbier to Étienne-Louis Ferron de la Ferronnays, 8 December 1779

C

ul de Sac is a place, a highly fertile plain near Port-au-Prince, in what was the French colony of Saint-Domingue. This was the location of a sugar plantation owned by the Ferron de la Ferronnays family, nobles from the province of Brittany whose pedigree included long service to the French monarchy. Saint-Domingue, the western part of the island of Hispaniola that came under official French domination in 1697, was the most profitable of all of Europe’s eighteenth-century colonies; it was a powerful machine that pumped immense quantities of sugar and coffee onto avid world markets. On the eve of the French Revolution, the colony produced nearly as much sugar as the whole of the British West Indies, and it produced 60 percent of the coffee consumed by Europeans.1 This prodigy of wealth could not have existed without precise, rational organization within the confi nes of the plantation; highly capitalized markets capable Translations from the French are my own unless a translator is otherwise indicated. Throughout, I have translated the terms nègre, nègres, négresse, and négresses as “slave,” “slaves,” “female slave,” and “female slaves,” respectively. On occasion, eighteenth- century writers used the terms esclave or esclaves to underline the condition of bondage; where this emphasis seems important to maintain, I have placed the original in square brackets. See Sources and Abbreviations (p. 229) for a guide to the documentation below. 1. The whole of the British West Indies produced 36 percent of the sugar consumed in European and American markets against Saint-Domingue’s 30. For sugar, Butel, Histoire des Antilles françaises, 94; and for coffee, Trouillot, “Motion in the System,” 337 (share for 1789). Trouillot’s figure lies between other extremes, 50 and 75 percent, which are often cited.

1

2

Introduction

of feats of spatial and temporal coordination; steady flows of forced and voluntary migration; and an active state to protect and administer the colony. When these forces converged from great distances on places like the Cul de Sac plain, they also produced the violence, economic volatility, and social fragility for which Saint-Domingue was notorious. Even if slaves were of great value to the planters of Saint-Domingue, life was cheap there; recurring wars, mortality crises, wild boom-bust cycles, natural disasters, and an atmosphere of lawlessness were all greeted with fatalism long beyond the frontier stage of this colony’s development. This book, a close account of the way that the international division of labor shaped daily life on the Ferron de la Ferronnays plantation, exposes the relation between Saint-Domingue’s phenomenal wealth and its besetting weaknesses. Imperial politics, geography, and demography determined the uneven development, starting in the mid-seventeenth century, of many Caribbean islands (map 1) into immense open-air workhouses. By this point, the scramble for the islands of the Lesser Antilles had ended, with the British, the French, and, to a lesser degree, the Dutch taking hold of former Spanish possessions in the eastern Caribbean. With the exception of Jamaica and the western half of Hispaniola (the present-day Haiti)— the former seized by Britain in 1655 and the latter colonized unofficially by the French shortly thereafter—Spain remained master of the Greater Antilles: Cuba, the eastern part of Hispaniola (the present-day Dominican Republic), and Puerto Rico together comprised 88 percent of the total landmass of the Caribbean islands, about 220,000 square kilometers. On the island of Hispaniola, European diseases and deadly labor regimes imposed by Spanish settlers beginning in the late fi fteenth century virtually wiped out the native population of Caribs and Arawak Indians. In other parts of the Caribbean, where the effects of epidemics and forced clearances were less devastating, white settlers had to come to some sort of understanding with the remaining natives to secure possession of the most desirable land. Native populations were hardly the only source of insecurity that slowed white settlement. Until the 1690s, treaties between European nations were not observed “beyond the line” of the Tropic of Cancer; an atmosphere of buccaneering anarchy outlasted the period when Spain was stripped of its Lesser Antillean possessions, which could only frustrate British and French attempts to consolidate their new conquests. Superior naval power; the decisive punch delivered in the 1650s by Oliver Cromwell’s Western Design against Spanish possessions in the Americas; and more established circuits of transoceanic migration to fi ll and secure

The Colonial Cul de Sac

3

Map 1. The Caribbean in the eighteenth century. Courtesy of Dick Gilbreath, Gyula Pauer Center for Cartography and GIS, University of Kentucky.

these conquests all put Britain at an advantage in this process. Free or indentured white settlement in places like Barbados, Antigua, and Jamaica vastly exceeded populations on the French islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique.2 The British island of Barbados was the fi rst to undergo the transformation from a settler colony, where residents combined subsistence agriculture with the cultivation of market crops such as tobacco and cotton, to a place where most of the productive forces were integrated into a capital-intensive export sector. The fi rst step in this process was the

2. Watts, West Indies, 4 (surface area), 236 (table 6.1, on population). For a thorough discussion of the reason for lagging white settlement, Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 74–122 and 302.

4

Introduction

transfer from Brazil by Dutch merchants of sugarcane rolling mills and refi neries. To achieve necessary economies of scale, smaller landholdings were consolidated, which inevitably squeezed out planters who had no access to sufficient credit to buy refi ning equipment or the African captives who manned the slave gangs on the island. The rise of the gang system of sugar production was responsible for a twofold displacement: fi rst, the immigration of white indentured servants wound down in favor of slave labor; second, smaller planters—some of them former indentured servants or their descendants—were pushed off onto marginal lands, some of them located on other islands where the sugar economy had not yet fi rmly taken root. Intensive sugar cultivation brought soil exhaustion and dependency on external markets for subsistence goods, both of which cut into profits and encouraged merchant capitalists and aspiring planters to strike out for new frontiers. It was by this process that the British islands of Antigua and Jamaica came under occupation by new generations of sugar barons. As new conquests came under intensive cultivation, developments of the Atlantic economy as a whole accelerated their progress to maturity: European consumers craved more sugar and coffee; slave traders furnished more human cargo; and deeper pools of merchant capital were available to flood new territory as soon as it opened up. This same process of leapfrogging was at work in the French Empire: Martinique and Guadeloupe had been under French occupation since 1635, and the Dutch had also brought refi ning technology to these islands, but still in 1700 sugar production in the French Antilles lagged well behind the British. With French claims recognized in 1697 and three decades of relative peace starting in 1713, Saint-Domingue (see map 2) rapidly swamped all its competition: in 1710, the colony produced less sugar—about 5,000 tons annually—than Martinique (5,700) and Jamaica (6,000); by 1742, it produced 42,000 tons against the 16,000 produced in Martinique and Jamaica combined. 3 The three principal sugar-growing areas of Saint-Domingue were themselves separate islands, cut off from one another by mountain chains and poor or nonexistent roads; in a process analogous to the islands of the Caribbean, intensive development occurred sequentially from plain to plain. The Western Province included four growing plains, the geographically contiguous areas of Arcahaye, Cul de Sac, and Léogane; and, apart from these, the Artibonite plain. Sugar cultivation made a desultory arrival in Saint-Domingue on the Léogane plain in the 1680s, but it was on 3. For sugar production, Watts, West Indies, 286– 87 (tables 7.2 and 7.3); figures are rounded, and year ranges simplified to single years.

The Colonial Cul de Sac

5

Map 2. Saint-Domingue in the eighteenth century. Courtesy of Dick Gilbreath, Gyula Pauer Center for Cartography and GIS, University of Kentucky.

the North plain during the fi rst third of the eighteenth century that the sugar plantation became the island’s defi ning economic and social institution. Once crowding and environmental pressures began to be felt on the North plain, investment capital was diverted to the Western Province. The Léogane plain was put at a disadvantage by looming soil exhaustion and its comparatively small size; already by the 1730s, it was clear that the Cul de Sac plain would dominate the next phase of the colony’s growth. The plantations that rapidly filled this area were linked by an expensive, highly efficient irrigation system and were more productive and more capital intensive than their predecessors to the north. The bloom of youth was destined to fade here too, and by the late 1780s soil exhaustion began to take hold. A familiar cycle of declining soil fertility in established plains and the migration to new ones made Les Cayes in the Southern Province a hotspot in the 1780s; but for the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, and resulting civil war in Saint-Domingue of the 1790s, it might have become as intensively cultivated as the plains of the north and west. As it happened, the island of Cuba—with its great expanses of comparatively virgin soil—became the new Eldorado of the Caribbean littoral

6

Introduction

in the early nineteenth century. In the French colony of Saint-Domingue, the Antillean plantation complex reached the summit of its development on the Cul de Sac plain, in plantations like the one owned by ÉtienneLouis Ferron de la Ferronnays.4 The Cul de Sac of the title also refers to the dead end of a peculiar manifestation of early modern capitalist accumulation. The Antillean plantation complex—the production by forced labor of tropical commodities on the islands maintained by competitive imperial states—was a central component of the commercial revolution experienced in northern European countries over the long eighteenth century. The idea that the reallocation of profits from a declining Antillean plantation complex built the factories of the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution was long ago disproved. Nevertheless, there is a case to be made that the institutions, technologies, managerial techniques, and consumption patterns stimulated by the rise of the plantation economy during the eighteenth century helped lay the basis for the Industrial Revolution. But this is not a providential history in which the dynamic forces of capitalism—whether they are imagined as arising from the internal contradictions described by Marx or through the heroic process of “creative destruction” lauded by Joseph Schumpeter— cleared the decks for more efficient technologies or organizational forms. Seen from the perspective of this book—that of one family and its plantation property—French Saint-Domingue looks less like proof of capitalism’s power of creative destruction than the long persistence of a crisisprone social and economic system, not only through periods of turbulence but well beyond the climacteric that should have ended its existence.5 The growth of Saint-Domingue’s plantation economy in the fi nal decades of the Old Regime obscured some weaknesses of this complex as it exacerbated others. This colony produced a constant share of the sugar produced in the Antilles and destined for Europe and its American posses4. On the serial development of islands and growing plains in the Caribbean, Schwartz, introduction to Tropical Babylons, 13. For comparisons between the growing plains of SaintDomingue, Geggus, “Slave Society in the Sugar Plantation Zones,” 33–36. For Léogane and Cul de Sac, Debien, “Aux origines des quelques plantations de . . . Léogane et du Cul- de-Sac.” 5. For declining profitability of the plantation complex and the rise of British industry, Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, chaps. 5–10. For the refutation of this thesis, Drescher, Econocide, chaps. 3–5. Robin Blackburn offers the most sophisticated and complete account of the relation between the plantation complex and the rise of industrial capitalism, while also taking into account these debates. See Making of New World Slavery, chap. 12. Blackburn adopts a revised Marxist perspective, naming this process “extended primitive accumulation” (p. 515).

The Colonial Cul de Sac

7

sions, about 30 percent, from 1770 to 1787, even as its gross output grew by 40 percent—reaching 86,000 tons annually—by the end of this period. The sheer size of the expanding market for tropical produce, and the opportunities for profits it presented, often hid the considerable uncertainties faced by individual planters. In a competitive environment, sugar planters were compelled to borrow heavily to acquire larger units of capital, and then to work them hard: indebtedness and unpredictable market gyrations greatly reduced planters’ margin for error. Endemic wars cut island colonies off from world markets, while environmental disasters—droughts, hurricanes, earthquakes, fi res, and epidemics—introduced strains at unpredictable intervals that could lead to bankruptcy. It was merchants and not producers who dominated the economy of the early modern world; they channeled surplus produced in the Antilles by granting planters credit and piling on the transactions costs—shipping, insurance, commissions —involved in overseas trade. The merchants of Bordeaux and Nantes often held planters in thrall, but they presided over colonial commodity markets that were poorly integrated with the whole of the French economy outside the largest, most developed cities and their hinterlands. Their dependence on markets external to France’s commercial empire made for halting growth and frequent reversals when international political or economic conjuncture shifted against French mercantile interests. If the wealth produced in these colonial outposts was impressive enough to stimulate flows of investment and migration—all protected by diverse and considerable state expenses—the benefits they secured were unevenly distributed and easily reversed.6 The planters of Saint-Domingue were often intelligent men who understood that turning a profit meant fi nding a way to cope with the effects of slave mortality, wars, economic disruptions, uprisings, and resource scarcity that the plantation complex regularly produced. Beginning in the 1760s, some planters, encouraged by personnel in the French colonial administration, began to implement a series of reforms to align the “humanity” dictated by Enlightenment philosophy with their economic interests.

6. Saint-Domingue’s relative share of production was 28.8% in 1770 and 29.8% in 1787. Drescher, Econocide, 48 (table 11). For other production figures, Watts, West Indies, 286 (table 7.2); and Butel, Histoire des Antilles françaises, 94. On transactions costs, Stein, French Sugar Business, 36–39 and 85. On the fragility of French overseas markets, Meignen, “Commerce extérieur de la France”; and of its plantation complex, Pétré- Grenouilleau, “Monde de la plantation”; and Butel, “L’essor antillais.” For the poor integration of the French economy and the dominance of merchants, Grenier, Economie d’ancien régime. These are, in general, perspectives emphasized by French rather than Anglo-American scholars.

8

Introduction

Reducing gratuitous cruelty toward slaves while improving their health and nutrition would, they hoped, minimize the expenditures necessary to cover premature deaths, increase productive efficiency on the plantation, and decrease the threat of slave revolt and escape. They also sought to change patterns of investment in an effort to minimize their exposure to the volatile credit networks on which they were dangerously dependent.  But these and other efforts were, by their nature, never more than weakly palliative. By the late eighteenth century, Saint-Domingue was the most modern and radical experiment in the international division of labor hitherto produced by mercantile capitalism. But the peopling and development of Saint-Domingue were an extension of the social collaborations and political structures characteristic of Old Regime France. Over the course of the long eighteenth century, the absolute monarchy placed increasingly heavy bets on the growth of its colonial empire. Exploration, conquest, defense, and administration were costly propositions, but these were considered reasonable given the need to open up new territories and markets for merchant capital hemmed in by limited growth opportunities at home. As the historian Fernand Braudel comments, early modern capitalism “always wore seven-league boots.” Indeed, many economists and statesmen saw colonial commerce as a means of jolting the French provinces out of their isolation and creating an integrated national economy. To solidify its power by spreading prosperity into its colonies and underdeveloped provinces, the absolute monarchy was forced to consult the needs of productive classes—merchants, manufacturers, and agriculturalists—outside the charmed circle of traditional elites; as prospective employers of the idle poor, as taxpayers, and as the king’s fi nanciers, they were accorded a voice within a reforming state more systematically than ever before. The growth of France’s colonies and foreign trade during the eighteenth century testifies to the wide field of compatibility between the absolutist state—with its traditional elites and outlook—and the aggressive expansion of mercantile capitalism, but the resulting fractures were endemic to Old Regime French society. Opening up new markets or organizing new zones of production generally did not entail loosening restrictions in favor of free markets, but rather involved reshuffling economic privileges and government powers—and hence the winners and losers—within a given industry or region. No shift in economic policy was politically anodyne. Of equal importance, if the absolutist state sometimes weakened venerable institutions of local aristocratic rule as it centralized, it extended its reach with the help of these elites and for their ultimate benefit. The

The Colonial Cul de Sac

9

French nobility was a relatively porous elite with internal confl icts, but ritual carping about machinations at the royal court accurately reflected the domination of French society by an aristocracy working hand in glove with a centralized monarchy.7 The career of Étienne-Louis Ferron de la Ferronnays, the owner of the Cul de Sac plantation examined in this book, evinces this collaboration and its attendant conflicts. As an aristocrat and as a member of the French colonial administration, he filled a familiar role as an enforcer of royal will; eventually, he also became one of the plantation-owning Lords of Saint-Domingue whose investments on the great sugar-growing plains, and the process of consolidation they set in motion, crowded out incumbents of modest social origins, some of whom had lived in the colonies for generations. After the Seven Years’ War (1756– 63), moves by the royal administration to make France’s colonies more governable—and therefore reliably profitable to metropolitan interests—began to seem like yet another conspiracy of noble social domination. Local elites renewed their vituperation against “ministerial despotism” from the imperial center. This confl ict was blunted, at least for a couple of decades, by the fulgent growth of the coffee economy beginning in the 1760s, which provided some outlet for the ambitions of the impecunious whites (petits blancs) and free people of color (gens de couleur) squeezed out by the sugar barons like Ferronnays. With lower barriers to entry, the number of coffee plantations multiplied, reaching three times the number of sugar plantations, 3,000 versus 910, in 1786. It was in this atmosphere and during these decades that a Creole identity, which defi ned itself against royal government and the exploitation of metropolitan merchant capital, matured. The differences between small planters and the Lords of Saint-Domingue were more of degree than of kind: the coffee economy rose on the strength of the markets and infrastructure that served the sugar economy. Abundant access to slaves, credit, and a flourishing urban world of merchants, artisans, and administrators who served the plantation economy were all network effects, residual advantages, of Saint-Domingue’s world-dominating sugar economy. And all members of the landholding elite of planters—white or colored, petty or aristocratic, Creole or metropolitan born—enjoyed the privilege of masters over the enslaved. Once the French Revolution arrived in Saint-Domingue beginning in 1789, elites on the island resumed fight-

7. Braudel, Wheels of Commerce, 554. On the “wide field of compatibility,” Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, 41 and more generally chap. 4. On privilege as a tool of economic modernization, Horn, Economic Development in Early Modern France, chaps. 1–3.

10

Introduction

ing over their relative degrees of privilege and were unable to unite to defend their common interest: the maintenance of chattel slavery.8 This cul-de-sac mapped in the pages that follow was made not exclusively of economic structures but also of ideology. Administrators, merchants, planters, and their managers could only perform well based on a realistic, well-informed view of their environment. In addition to displaying a technocratic mastery of details, we find Ferronnays’ manager, JeanBaptiste Corbier, venturing some searching analyses of the cruelty he saw in his midst, the inefficiencies to which it led, and the moral danger to whites such as he of presiding over such a system. Many of these were often couched in the sentimental language so pervasive among educated elites in eighteenth-century Europe. If we carefully stitch these isolated criticisms together, they end up looking something like the wholesale denunciation of slavery formulated by a restricted number of people toward the end of the eighteenth century. But this is merely an optical illusion: people like Corbier or his employer Ferronnays saw certain aspects of the society they helped to create in Saint-Domingue with great clarity. Those who took the next step to look beyond slave society were accused of naiveté, nihilism, or—worse—negrophilia. This fact is less surprising than the persistence with which production of tropical export commodities by coerced labor remained the dominant social vision for Saint-Domingue. After the abolition of slavery in 1793 and 1794, planters sought to reconstruct a slave society without slaves, and received plenty of cooperation from a French revolutionary state intent on keeping newly freed “citizen cultivators” hard at work on their old plantations. When the military cadres of an independent Haitian state took over in 1804, they tried, with a lack of success equal to their predecessors’, to implement a variation of the same system. High profits, combined with the social dominance enjoyed by the Lords of Saint-Domingue under the Old Regime, made for deep ruts that ran through successive regimes. The economic and ideological dead ends explored in this book are not those of capitalism tout court or even of the contradictions of capitalist accumulation jump-started by the use of slave labor—a subject that has given rise to such a rich historical literature. To these must be added the

8. On this crowding out on the Léogane plain and in Cul de Sac, Debien, Une plantation de Saint- Domingue, 26–34. On ministerial despotism, Bénot, Révolution française et la fi n des colonies, chap. 2. On coffee versus sugar plantations, CAOM, G 509, “État de la colonie de Saint-Domingue année 1786.” On coffee and Creole identity, Trouillot, “Motion in the System.”

The Colonial Cul de Sac

11

role of the patrimonial state in the expansion of the early modern world economy. In order to increase and transmit their fortune and status, the Ferronnays family participated in the “gentlemanly capitalism” that knit together fi nance, trade, and production at their highest levels, pushing the frontiers of the early modern world economy. When the Bourbon dynasty sought to reestablish itself after the French Revolution, they did so in part by rehabilitating the fortunes of the noble planter families with whom they had collaborated so brilliantly in the fi nal decades of the Old Regime. Although the account offered in this book goes all the way to 1838, years beyond Haitian independence in 1804 and even official French recognition of this fact in 1825, Haiti does not figure into the title; in the planter’s mind the place remained, eternally, Saint-Domingue. Years after the evacuation of the remaining white planters, the persistence of the legal Old Regime kept the slaves of former Saint-Domingue, some living in faraway places like New Orleans, from attaining freedom from their French masters; Haitian peasants continued to pay a crippling indemnity, designed to support the former planters of Saint-Domingue, into the late nineteenth century. The tenacity of patrimony, which includes the tendency of elites to transpose their alliances into new contexts to assure their survival, helps to account for the inertia of this system and, therefore, for the persistence of the violence for which Saint-Domingue was notorious.9 Over the course of thirty years starting in the 1940s, a Frenchman named Gabriel Debien accomplished what amounts to a whole generation’s worth of scholarly work on the plantation society of Saint-Domingue and on the early phases of the French Revolution in that colony. The fruits of his heroic labors can be found in several plantation-level monographs and hundreds of articles. Perhaps appropriately for the time, he wrote at the extreme margins of French academic life, from posts in Cairo and Dakar. Scholars like Jacques Cauna, Charles Frostin, David Geggus, and Pierre Pluchon followed in his wake, but for many years writing on the history of Saint-Domingue and the Haitian Revolution fell into a lull. A recent explosion of literature about the Haitian Revolution now draws attention to the role of colonization and slavery in the French Revolution. But despite this recrudescence of interest, the final decades of Old Regime Saint-Domingue remain largely unexplored, particularly among the Anglo-American scholars for whom the Haitian Revolution holds such 9. Cain and Hopkins, “Gentlemanly Capitalism.” Although the authors discuss Britain, many of their insights could be applied to the French case.

12

Introduction

fascination. These historians tend to focus on the urban world of SaintDomingue, leaving largely to the side the basic social and economic unit of the sugar colonies: the plantation.10 Historians have not given the world that Gabriel Debien studied a wide berth simply to avoid the real risk of being thrown in the shade or crushed by this colossus of scholarly energy. Preoccupations have changed since his foundational work, with recent scholarship on the French and Haitian Revolutions settling on the problem of race and citizenship. Analyzing the terms of inclusion and exclusion from citizenship of women, Jews, and people of color sheds an occasionally unflattering light on the nature, and limits, of the revolutionary project itself. The urban world of the French Antilles, with its socially and racially heterogeneous population, was a crucible of the violent confrontations over citizenship that took take place during the 1790s, and therefore an obvious point of focus.11 A book about the nature of capitalism in the slave colony of SaintDomingue must necessarily return to the plantation. While recalling earlier work by Debien and Cauna, Cul de Sac constantly moves between the microcosm of the Ferronnays plantation and the wider worlds to which it was connected. The French colonial empire and the world markets that reached Saint-Domingue are two obvious contexts, but others include Paris, the ports and hinterlands of western France, the Caribbean littoral, and the European countries where reactionary nobles like the Ferronnays family fled during the French Revolution. The wide geographic scope of this book and the alternation between microscopic and macroscopic frames of reference make Cul de Sac an example of the new “global microhistory,” although the work of Robert Forster is a more persistent, if less obvious, influence here. The power of the books he wrote about two families and their fortunes in Old Regime France lies in their breadth; to explain the social destinies of the Saulx-Tavanes and Depont families, he wrote simultaneously as a social, economic, political, and cultural historian. The charm of Forster’s books reposes in the sensitivity of the individ-

10. Two examples of this focus on the urban world of Saint-Domingue are Rogers, “Libres de couleur dans les capitales de Saint-Domingue”; King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig. Recent work on the eighteenth century or outside the urban context includes Garrigus, Before Haiti, which focuses largely on problems of race and citizenship but not the plantation economy per se; and Ghachem, Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution, which examines changing legal regimes. 11. Of all the recent work on the Haitian Revolution, Carolyn Fick’s Making of Haiti is the most anchored in the world of the plantation slaves of Saint-Domingue and their aspirations. For an example of this focus on the urban world, Dubois, A Colony of Citizens.

The Colonial Cul de Sac

13

ual portraits he drew. Cul de Sac too is a book about people—most vividly of all, Marie-Elisabeth Thimothée née Binau, the wife of Étienne-Louis Ferron de la Ferronnays. This couple’s scandalous marriage, recounted at length in chapter 5, reflects the confl icts that divided the white elites of Saint-Domingue. The cul-de-sac that Jean-Baptiste Corbier complained about was not simply a set of economic structures. The intimate relationships that tied together the families, plantations, and provinces of the French Atlantic world also served as lines of transmission for some of its characteristic pathologies. This is why a book about the kind of capitalism that developed on the plains of Saint-Domingue begins deep in the French provinces of Brittany and Anjou, threading its way to Paris before embarking, fi nally, for the colonies.12 The sources for this book came together due to two strokes of good fortune. The fi rst is the preservation of the Ferronnays family papers, which were seized by the government when several members chose to emigrate shortly after the outbreak of the French Revolution. Among the contracts, receipts, and account books are 220 letters written by Jean-Baptiste Corbier, manager to the absentee owner of the Cul de Sac plantation and confi rmed graphomaniac. These letters are highly varied and introspective, whereas the correspondence used by Debien and Cauna in their plantation-level studies is either of short duration or, when extensive, drily factual. The closest example we have to this source is the journal written by the execrable Jamaican planter Thomas Thistlewood; but as his chronicler acknowledges, even this source is limited by its emphasis on external events, and lacks the self-reflection of Corbier’s letters. The seized family papers in the French National Archives are complemented by research into contracts, tax rolls, wills, administrative correspondence, and parish records in national and local archives.13 The account offered in this book might have ended in 1789, the date when the publicly available Ferronnays papers end, but for a second stroke of good fortune. The Ferron de la Ferronnays line became extinct in 1946, with the death of the marquis Henri; at this point the estate, including the archive, passed to a lateral inheritor. Madame Aliette de Cossé-

12. Trivellato, “Is There a Future for Italian Microhistory?” Two recent family histories unfolding in a similar geographical or chronological context include Rothschild, Inner Life of Empires; Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers. See Forster, House of Saulx-Tavanes; and Merchants, Landlords, Magistrates. 13. On Thistlewood’s diaries, Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire, 26–27.

14

Introduction

Brissac was not herself aware of the presence in the family archive of 160 letters and  other documents relating to the Ferronnayses’ property in Saint-Domingue during the revolutionary period. This correspondence circulated between Saint-Domingue, continental France, Germany, Switzerland, Britain, Cuba, and Louisiana. Following an uncertain lead, I approached Madame de Cossé-Brissac from nowhere, and she gamely allowed herself to be convinced that these letters might be found somewhere among the family possessions. After much searching this turned out to be the case, which has permitted me to reconstruct one of the three most extensive plantation archives for a colony, Saint-Domingue, whose historians are poorly served, in this respect, in comparison to those of the British West Indies. In the pages that follow, I tried to preserve some of the extraordinary literary value of these sources—their capacity to communicate individuals’ experience to the attentive reader—while evoking patterns of significance that reach far beyond the Cul de Sac plain.14 14. The others are the Gallifet papers, used for instance by Laurent Dubois in Avengers of the New World; and the Galbaud du Fort papers, exploited in Debien, Un plantation de Saint- Domingue.

Ch apter one

Province and Colony

T

he French economy remained predominantly agricultural until well into the nineteenth century, so it is little wonder that members of the landed elite like the Ferron de la Ferronnays family, with their conservative investments and their essentially patrimonial ways of thinking and acting, retained the upper hand in eighteenth-century France. These same elites were nevertheless acutely aware of a commercial revolution that was thought to be transforming Europe beyond recognition. As international commerce linked hitherto remote parts of the world, states vied with one another to gain an increasing share of this trade; to integrate poor and isolated populations into this new economy; and to encourage and co-opt the merchants who dominated this activity. The rise of mercantile fortunes at the expense of landed wealth was part of a broader uncloistering of provincial worlds that linked previously isolated industries, social groups, or regions and reoriented them toward an expanding world of commerce. Saint-Domingue, with its massive exports of sugar, coffee, and indigo, lay at the cynosure of all these processes. The African captives who worked on its plantations were purchased in part with textiles procured by French traders in India; the wood that merchant ships were made of came from the Baltic; and the porcelain fi nery in which tropical luxuries such as coffee, sugar, and cocoa were served came from Limoges, deep in the heart of provincial France. The effects of the commercial revolution were not exclusively economic: altered patterns of consumption, the movement of peoples, the creation of new spaces of sociability, and the circulation of ideas were fundamental contexts for the development of the Enlightenment in France and elsewhere. Awareness of possibility piqued the appe-

15

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tite, which increased the rhythm of change. Not moving forward imparted a sense of falling behind.1 If the effects of France’s commercial revolution were widespread, they were not consistently felt, and the very unevenness of this progress had consequences of its own. France’s non-European foreign trade increased 1,310 percent from 1716 to 1789, but people mainly experienced its effects in Paris and in the largest French port cities—Marseille, Bordeaux, Nantes, and La Rochelle. Rural dwellers could benefit if they had the good fortune to live in the hinterlands of ports like Bordeaux and Nantes; other rural areas were cut out of opportunities to produce export crops or manufactured goods—notably, textiles—and their residents focused more on subsistence than on new possibilities offered by the market. Lack of road or river transportation kept rural areas or smaller towns isolated from foreign markets; the division of France into a mosaic of competing customs zones did not facilitate the flow of goods either. Instead of selling tropical goods to poor peasants and artisans within their own country, French merchants in Bordeaux and Nantes largely re-exported them to consumers elsewhere in Europe. The penalty to French economic development was double: fi rst, weak consumer demand inhibited industrial growth; and second, French producers and merchants remained excessively dependent on foreign markets, which were sensitive to competition and political disruptions. French merchants grew fabulously wealthy off this trade, and many French consumers did fi nd their daily rituals and even outlook altered when they were put into contact with a new world of goods, but they did so in places like Paris, Saint-Domingue, Nantes, and Bordeaux. Between these islands of economic dynamism lay vast zones of economic traditionalism; although those left behind were not always poor, they glimpsed these broader transformations from a distance and were drawn only haltingly into the vortex of the modern economy. Linking new worlds through commerce meant also, fundamentally, creating new, more striking patterns of differentiation between the poor and the rich, the rural and the urban, the benighted and the educated, the traditional and the modern.2

1. On the awareness of globalized commerce, Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce, introduction. On the linkage between these processes of uncloistering during the Enlightenment, Roche, France in the Enlightenment. 2. The ur-text for the interpretation advanced here is Meignen, “Commerce extérieur de la France.” For modernization and differentiation more generally, Tilly, “Did the Cake of Custom Break?” For growth figures, Léon, “L’élan industriel et commercial,” 503; for further statistics, using the same basic sources as Léon, Daudin, Commerce et prospérité, chap. 4. On customs zones, Horn, Economic Development in Early Modern France, 128–29. On polariza-

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These conditions of increasing wealth, but also of social and geographic polarization, meant that family fortunes based on inheritance and the sleepy routines of French agriculture could no longer be assumed to last—let alone continue to serve as the basis for social and political dominance. The rapid growth of Atlantic commerce during the eighteenth century provided several possibilities for the nobility, faced with the relative decline of landed wealth, to participate in these transformations and to reinvigorate their family fortunes. Agricultural land could be planted with specialty crops for export; investments could be made in those local industries that supported or directly participated in foreign trade; convenient alliances could be forged with rich bourgeois families seeking social advancement within a status-obsessed society; and fi nally, nobles could make direct investments in overseas production and trade. Nobles’ openness to new economic possibilities was determined by a number of things: proximity to markets; availability of investment capital; relative status within the local, regional, and national nobility; degrees of prejudice toward commerce and nonprivileged social groups; and family demographics. Whether pulled by opportunity or pushed by circumstances, the Ferronnays family moved beyond its provincial enclave in Brittany in two directions: eastward to the capital city of Paris, and westward to the overseas province of Saint-Domingue. As planters in Saint-Domingue, landed elites in the hinterland of the Atlantic port city of Nantes, and fi xtures of the beau monde in Paris, members of this family were eyewitnesses to the modernization of eighteenth-century France’s economy and society; but they took part in this process for reasons, and following a logic, that were eminently traditional.

BRITTANY, ANJOU, SAINT-DOMINGUE The Ferronnayses occupied a doubly charmed circle within a French nobility riven by inequalities of wealth and status. This family had roots extending to 1160—a distinction that only the top fi fth of the Breton nobility to which they belonged, among the oldest in France, could pretend to at the end of the seventeenth century. The military nobility (noblesse d’épée), of which the Ferronnayses were a part, generally enjoyed higher status than the administrative nobility (noblesse de robe), a group that had assimilated into the aristocracy by purchasing offices and performing tion in the context of the urban consumer revolution, Roche, France in the Enlightenment, chap. 7.

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administrative and juridical functions in an expanding absolutist state. Some wealthy bourgeois purchased offices that did not entail any real service to the state, but nevertheless entitled them or their heirs to nobility. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the ranks of the French nobility as a whole grew by at least one-quarter, so that the Ferronnayses found their relative seniority, and therefore status, further enhanced by this process of dilution.3 If the Breton nobility was among the oldest in France, it was also among the poorest. Cadets (younger sons) were in particular plagued by the Breton custom of préciput, which allowed two-thirds of family property to go to the eldest son, while the siblings, languishing in poverty, were left to cherish impressive-sounding titles: “Most powerful and mighty Lord of a dovecote, a toad’s burrow [crapaudière] and a rabbit warren,” joked the son of just one such impoverished Breton clan, François-Réné Chateaubriand, an ally of the Ferronnays family under the Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. Étienne-Louis issued from the upper crust of the Breton nobility, judging by tax payments made in the family seat at Saint Mars la Jaille by the father for the capitation—a direct wealth tax levied on the nobility and townspeople. (Saint Mars la Jaille lies in Ancenis at the southeastern extremity of Brittany, next to the province of Anjou, which is centered on the city of Angers [see map 3]).4 There is no exact rule for extrapolating from capitation payments to annual income, but in 1748 the Ferronnayses enjoyed about 19,000l.t. in income and 17,000 in 1752 (graph 1). (A skilled artisan in the eighteenthcentury Parisian building trades earned about 500l.t. per year; at midcentury, 19,000l.t. were worth about 800 English pounds sterling of the same epoch.) Although the family was situated on the border between rich and merely prosperous during the early decades of the eighteenth century, by the 1740s they had vaulted into the top 5 percent of taxpaying noble households in the bishopric of Nantes, there to remain until the end of the Old Regime.5

3. On the Ferronnays line, Costa de Beauregard, En émigration; for figures on Brittany, Meyer, Noblesse bretonne, 1:57; and for eighteenth-century trends, Chaussinand-Nogaret, French Nobility, chap. 2 (statistics on p. 30). 4. On noble inheritance laws in Brittany, which are more complicated than the above summary, Meyer, Noblesse bretonne, 103–34. Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre-tombe, 1:14. 5. For contemporary wage rates, Allen, “Great Divergence in European Wages and Prices,” calculations on table 1, p. 416 (I have taken the mean of both eighteenth-century figures, and calculated l.t. based on a value of 4.5 grams of silver per l.t.).

Map 3. Western provinces of France in the eighteenth century. Courtesy of Dick Gilbreath, Gyula Pauer Center for Cartography and GIS, University of Kentucky.

Graph 1. Capitation payments, bishopric of Nantes. Source: calculations on ADLA, B 3484, 3486, 3487, 3491, 3494, and 3496.

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Within France as a whole, the Ferronnays family was situated comfortably among the rich provincial nobility, a group of 3,500 families whose wealth placed them in the upper 13 percent of the aristocracy.6 (The French nobility was about 300,000 strong, or 1 percent of France’s total population of 25 million.) These were defi nitely not the poor nobles facing professional and social exclusion and the cause of official concern—even charity—starting in the middle of the eighteenth century. With their kind of wealth, the Ferronnays family built one of the many rococo jewels that still ornament the Loire River valley. Their chateau at Saint Mars la Jaille was flanked by a pleasure garden laid out in a delicate counterpoint of fishponds, manicured hedges, and sculptures; from the center, a stairway descended to a reflecting pool that imparted a sense of space, of symmetry, and of command to the ensemble. The eighteenth-century chateau and gardens reprised the aesthetics of the royal chateau at Versailles on an appropriately reduced scale—a tacit allusion to the Ferronnayses’ source of prestige as officers in the military of the modern Bourbon kings; tucked  away behind this recent installation stood a sixteenth-century dovecote, a visual reminder of the Ferronnayses’ more ancient, independent origins.7 Land was the source of this imposing wealth, and the Ferronnays family held one of the largest portfolios in the area around Nantes. These were not innovating agriculturalists who made investments to improve farm buildings, roads, or soil productivity on their estates; the structure of their landholdings and the way they exploited them remained essentially unchanged throughout the eighteenth century, which resembled nothing so much as the two previous centuries. Like many of their fellow nobles, around the mid-eighteenth century the Ferronnayses began to get serious about increasing their revenue. To this end, they hired specialists in feudal law to draw up terriers, voluminous documents that summarized the assets and income within a given seigneurie. (By virtue of owing a collection of lands called a seigneurie, the lord [seigneur] exercised a set of profitable economic rights over landholding peasants; dispensing certain

6. The number of families in 1710 was 440, and rose steadily to 551 in 1778. Source: calculations on ADLA, B 3484, 3486, 3487, 3491, 3494, and 3496. On the capitation and income categories among the nobility, Chaussinand-Nogaret, French Nobility, 50–53 and table on p. 63; and Collins, State in Early Modern France, 134–35. On the relation of the capitation to income, Snyder and Morrisson, “Inégalités de revenus en France,” 128–29. On the Breton nobility in the beginning of the eighteenth century, Meyer, Noblesse bretonne, 1:16–27. 7. Bien, “Army in the French Enlightenment”; and Shovlin, Political Economy of Virtue, 38–44, on a declining “middling nobility.”

Province and Colony

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kinds of justice within the seigneurie was also a source of profit and prestige.) Using these terriers as a basis, noble landowners worked with their estate stewards to determine the highest plausible rents for their tenants and to uncover as well as to increase, wherever possible, the other obligations owed to them by landowning peasants on their estates. What has been dubbed the “feudal reaction” on the part of noble seigneurs was unquestionably a form of rational management; but if it was capitalism it was of the most conservative kind, maximizing revenues available within existing technical and contractual arrangements rather than reinvesting profits in an economically transformative fashion.8 In 1744, the family patriarch, Pierre-Jacques Louis Auguste Ferron de la Ferronnays, had a terrier drawn up for the seigneurie of Saint Mars la Jaille. This document lists no less than 1,485 separate seigniorial obligations relating to properties sprinkled over nineteen bailiwicks. The feudal rents specified in this terrier—those owed by peasants who technically owned their land—were often quite trivial, but among other benefits accruing to the landlord, the Breton institution of domaine congéable imposed heavy fees, payable to the feudal landholder, upon the renewal of a lease or transfer of land. Peasants owed their lords payments in kind, labor, and free services of every description that went under the general heading corvée seigneuriale. The seigneurie also included several large holdings that the Ferronnays family leased out directly in a form of sharecropping called métayage, which usually entitled the landlord to half the harvest. By both arrangements, produce flowed in from cereal fields, chicken coops, fishponds, dovecotes, and apple orchards, while local monopolies on windmills and water mills squeezed revenue from peasants needing to grind their grain. Complant, a sharecropping arrangement for vineyards unique to the county of Nantes, assured one-quarter to one-third of the produce to the landholder, while leaving the risks and burdens to the cultivator. With this lucrative system, viticulture accounted for about one-third of all landed revenue in the Ferronnayses’ county of Nantes. The Ferronnays family possessed a number of such seigneuries, which, taken together, could easily account for a large portion of its income of 17,000l.t. per year. The agricultural practices in Brittany and the county of Nantes were profitable for landholders such as the Ferronnayses, but within set limits: local inheritance and property-leasing practices (domaine congéable and

8. For a classic case study of this type of maximization, Forster, House of Saulx-Tavanes, 88–106. For a discussion of the feudal reaction that credits its existence, Jones, Peasantry in the French Revolution, 51–57.

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complant) made this region particularly resistant to the sort of wholesale reorganization that may have transformed agricultural productivity—and hence landed fortunes.9 Although based in the countryside, Pierre-Jacques Louis Auguste also owned a pied-à-terre in Nantes, on the Îsle Gloriette, situated among rich slave-trading merchants residing in the chic commercial neighborhood of La Fosse. Members of the military nobility doubtless brought social luster to this milieu, but their wealth paled in comparison with nearby merchants who, earning as much as 82,000l.t. per year, vied with the richest 250 noble families of France.10 This commercial aristocracy remained a distinct social group up until the French Revolution, but in many outward senses they began to meld with the nobility. Merchants bought venal— purchased and therefore heritable—offices, which gave them a juridical foothold in the nobility and set their families on the path to social recognition. All of Ferronnays’ richest neighbors had purchased what contemporaries sneeringly termed “soap for scum,” preferring the office of Secretary to the King because, while they enjoyed noble tax exemptions, a small but steady return on their investment, and the possibility of selling their office later on at a profit, secretaries did not perform any substantial duties that could distract a busy merchant from trade. And after twenty years in office, the holder attained complete and heritable nobility. The overwhelming majority of successful Nantes merchants purchased landed property in the environs of Nantes not to renounce trade but as a hedge against the fluctuations of international trade; these estates were also more easily passed along to heirs than the shares merchants owned

9. The basic stability of the Ferronnays family’s agricultural exploitation can be deduced by comparing rent rolls. Compare ADIV, 2E F36, Landonnais en Minniac, 1622 to 1739; 2E F38, 1744 terrier; and 2E F35, obligations and rents, 1770s to late 1780s. Meyer, Noblesse bretonne, 769n2 (for the family’s relative position); 651– 98 (nonrental sources of landed income); 755– 65 (on complant). Breton nobles benefited from the effects of domaine congéable, a regime of landholding that sometimes helped to account for as much as 90 percent of their landed revenues (see 730–38). 10. The family owned the Nantes house from at least 1725, probably quite a bit earlier. AMN, DD 200. On the 250 families in the “plutocratic” kernel of the French nobility, Chaussinand-Nogaret, French Nobility, 52. For the Ferronnays neighbors’ wealth and offices, ADLA, B 510, Capitation Rôles 1741, Nantes. In the immediate vicinity of the Ferronnays house, 11 households paid above 200l.t.; 3 from 4 to 600l.t.; and 1 paid 920l.t. This distribution is consistent with that of the “grand négociants nantais” discussed by Jean Meyer in L’armement nantais, 180– 92, table on 187. Income is inferred by using a multiplier of 90 on third-estate capitations, rather than the 100 applied to nobles, on the assumption that the former generally paid at rates closer to their actual income. On diversification among nantais merchants, Hirsch, “Les milieux du commerce . . . à la veille de la Révolution,” 1354–56.

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in complicated business partnerships. Rural estates were intended as profitable investments, but also helped merchants—who hunted, made improvements, and observed the landed aristocracy’s seasonal transhumance between city and country—to project the air of living nobly. At well-appointed tables in the city, landed bourgeois served delicacies culled from their fields, woods, or pastures. As with any dominant social group, members of this set usually intermarried to reinforce and extend existing advantages; by this tactic, merchants pooled available investment capital and strengthened their credit networks. A small minority took the path of exogamy into the nobility by concluding marriages with old aristocratic families. When a successful merchant looked in the mirror, he hoped to see a noble visage staring back at him.11 If merchants paid the nobility the homage of aping some of their customs and investment patterns, eighteenth-century France witnessed a complementary gravitation of nobles toward industry and trade. Since the seventeenth century, the crown had been encouraging overseas trade by removing the penalty of derogation—loss of noble status—hitherto infl icted on nobles who entered into trade. Nobles could engage in “grand commerce” by making investments in royally sponsored trading companies; gradually, restrictions were lifted to allow entry in the triangular trade connecting France to Africa and the Americas through participation in merchants’ syndicates, which spread risk as they expanded available reservoirs of capital. When they turned to industry, nobles tended to cleave to large state-sponsored ventures, investing in glassworks, canal building, and metallurgy, which attracted royal protection because they were deemed of some strategic value. Metallurgy was particularly popular, because nobles often did not operate metal forges themselves, preferring to lease out mineral rights to a nonnoble entrepreneur; this arrangement bore legal and fi nancial resemblance to seigneurial property holding, and did not encumber the noble mind with managerial details.12 Investments of this scale were beyond the reach of the modestly propertied nobility, but conditions in Brittany were propitious for a broader range of noble investment and entrepreneurial activity. While the rest of the French aristocracy risked losing their noble status by engaging in low sorts of trade, especially retail, the Breton nobility had the option of going

11. On the choice of noble office, Pineau-Defois, “Une élite d’ancien régime,” 102–5; on the limited assimilation of the merchant elite into the nobility, with several telling parallels to the Bordeaux merchant elite, Pétré- Grenouilleau, Argent de la traite, 126–48. 12. On metallurgy, Richard, Noblesse d’affaires, chap. 7.

24

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“dormant,” temporarily renouncing their status, sometimes for generations, so that it was not soiled while impoverished nobles restored family fortunes. The very existence of dormancy implies a negative attitude toward commerce, but placing a juridical cordon sanitaire around it helped to encourage a markedly entrepreneurial streak among the Breton nobility. And this was not simply the push effect of poverty: newer segments of the nobility—officeholders, immigrant nobles, and others—were pulled to colonial investments because of the superior profits they commanded. Despite this legal dispensation and royal encouragements, however, the overwhelming majority of the old landed nobility, including Étienne-Louis Ferron de la Ferronnays’ father, abstained massively from these opportunities. Of some sixty noble families involved in the slave trade in Nantes around 1750, only six had not been recently ennobled, mainly by the purchase of office. Although plantation owning entailed no risk of derogation and more closely resembled landed investments at home, members of the old nobility were similarly resistant to making these investments. This is a pattern that persisted up until the French Revolution.13 If cultural biases seem to explain the absence of the ancient military nobility from Atlantic commerce, what explains the eventual entry of Pierre-Jacques Louis Auguste’s sons into the colonial economy? As the century wore on, anticommercial animus began to wear down; in Bordeaux and Nantes, the spectacle of colonial wealth in ultrarich enclaves such as La Fosse helped to erode prejudices—where it did not arouse resentment. While the great port cities of western France are an obvious place to look for the cultural influences, social networks, and investment opportunities that drew nobles into colonial commerce, these same forces were at work in the far hinterlands of these port cities, connecting the colonial periphery with the French heartland. The Ferronnays family had deep connections in Angers, where they owned residences, baptized several of their children, and conducted business. Although it was known principally as an administrative and ecclesiastical center and not as a hub of commerce, from the late seventeenth until at least the mid-eighteenth century Angers was a major source of immigration to the Western Province of Saint-Domingue, behind Nantes, La Rochelle, and Paris, but—perhaps surprisingly—well

13. On noble entrepreneurialism, Chaussinand-Nogaret, French Nobility, chap. 5. Much of Chaussinand-Nogaret’s data comes from Guy Richard’s Noblesse d’affaires, but a careful look at this book reveals a much less risk-taking, entreprenurial nobility than ChaussinandNogaret projects. Meyer, Noblesse bretonne, 134– 67 (on dormant nobility); 831 (on profits to colonial trade); and 839 (on the sociology of noble colonial investment).

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ahead of Bordeaux. Given its size (only 4,175 taxpaying households in 1784), immigration to the Western Province Saint-Domingue by Angevins (residents of Angers and the surrounding area) was proportionately much higher than from any other French diocese. This exodus, usually by city dwellers of modest social status, was accompanied after midcentury by substantial plantation investments in Léogane and Cul de Sac by wellto-do Angevins of both noble and common origin. In Nantes and Angers, friends, acquaintances, servants, tradesmen, well-known and half-known neighbors of the Ferronnays brothers, were all immigrating to, returning from, investing in, and getting rich off of Saint Domingue.14 Economic conditions in Anjou, particularly after the Seven Years’ War (1756– 63), may have helped to favor this eighteenth-century migration to Saint-Domingue. Anjou was part of the agricultural and industrial hinterland of Nantes—France’s second great Atlantic port, next to Bordeaux. This port served as an outlet for the grains and wines produced in the region, which arrived in boats from the Maine and Loire Rivers. The textile industry in and around the city of Angers, which included wool, linen, and hemp, the latter used mainly for the production of sailcloth, fed exports from the region. Slate roofs, taken from quarries around Angers, crowned buildings made from prestigious materials such as hewn stone. Refi neries in Saumur and Angers turned raw sugar into more expensive loaves of white, or “clayed,” sugar that were re-exported to northern Europe or consumed in Paris. Yet despite the natural advantages of its soil and situation, by all accounts the economy of Anjou stagnated after midcentury. In the wake of the Seven Years’ War, demand for sailcloth plummeted; the woolen industry declined during the same period. Despite official encouragement, the agricultural sector remained stubbornly traditional; surpluses of grain were not reliable enough, and wines not of sufficient quality, to fi nd deep markets beyond Anjou. In this context, the region experienced a wave of bankruptcies that, taken together, testify to a chronic undercapitalization of Angevin agriculture, industry, and commerce. The withering of hinterland regions like Anjou may also help to explain why, over the course of the eighteenth century, Nantes fell into a relative decline vis-à-vis its principal competitor, Bordeaux; here, every indicator, 14. Based on a parish survey in Léogane, 1666–1735. Denisse, “Angevins à SaintDomingue,” 21–31 (the origin of French natives living in the parish of Sainte-Rose in Léogane was, in percentage terms: Nantes, 10.7; La Rochelle, 11.3; Paris, 8.9; Angers, 5.5; and Paris, 8.9). On eighteenth-century investments, 40–48 and 58–59. See also Frostin, “Angevins de modest condition établies à Saint-Domingue,” 448. For the Ferronnayses’ presence in Angers, see AM, Angers CC 157-166 (tax roles); and AM, Angers, II 13, census of 1769.

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from ship traffic and import duties to population growth, points to superior integration between regional and transoceanic markets. The development stimulated by France’s colonial expansion was uneven, and while circuits of migration furnish evidence of a globalizing economy, their patterns also indicate which regions were, comparatively speaking, left behind: it is likely that an anemic regional economy pushed the Ferronnays family and others to seek opportunities outside Anjou.15 Whatever local conditions and the example of fabulously rich Nantais merchants could not accomplish, simple Malthusian pressure did. Family patriarch Pierre-Jacques Louis Auguste sired eight children with his wife, Françoise-Renée Le Clerc des Emeraux, between 1724 and 1743, seven of them males. To make matters worse, the Ferronnays family followed the Breton custom of préciput. When it came time to split up the estate after the father’s death, the total value of the family’s property was valued at 2,374,795l.t. Shares for the surviving six children were put at 148,000 apiece—with the exception of the sole daughter, who was to receive 48,000. Faced with this fragmentation of their fortunes, the Ferronnays clan applied an age-old solution: the red and the black. One son, Jules Bazile, became a cleric—ultimately a bishop—while five of the younger boys followed military careers, attaining such titles as Maréchal de Camp (third in command of the army behind the General) and Lieutenant General (second in command). Étienne-Louis also went into the military, but followed a route only newly fashionable among younger sons of the provincial nobility seeking rapid promotion and profit opportunities: a career in the colonial army and administration. The chevalier de la Marronnière, the son of Étienne-Louis’ widowed sister, Françoise, followed a similar path to Saint-Domingue to recoup the family fortunes after the death of his father.16 Too little attention is paid, on the whole, to the role of the military nobility in assuring the basic conditions of profitability for the planta15. Maillard, L’ancien régime et la révolution en Anjou, 221 and 231 (on textiles), 247 (on refi neries and post– Seven Years’ War conjuncture); Lebrun, Histoire d’Angers, 99–100. On bankruptcies, Chassagne, “Faillis en Anjou au XVIIIe siècle”; on agricultural stagnation, Lebrun, Histoire des pays de la Loire, 248–51. For statistics on Bordeaux’s dominance in the latter half of the eighteenth century, Butel, Négociants bordelais, 34. For population, Bairoch and Chèvre, Population des villes européennes, 23–36 and 297. On the importance of hinterlands to port city development, Price, “Economic Function and the Growth of the American Port Towns.” 16. For the Ferronnayses’ adherence to préciput, AN, T 210/2, Convention, Saint Mars La Jaille, 1 August 1775. On younger sons, Pritchard, Louis XV’s Navy, 64. On the prevalence of cadets in Saint-Dominguan military forces, Vaissière, Saint- Domingue, iii.

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tion complex. Bourgeois merchants collaborated with the Old Regime state, transmitting and dividing the surplus produced on the plantations; but the nobles who presided over the defense and, internally, the policing and administration of France’s colonial possessions provided an indispensable structure for the colonial enterprise. In the early years of the French presence in Saint-Domingue, noble intendants and military governors like Bertrand d’Ogeron—also from Anjou—were called on, as outsiders, to bring an unruly population of buccaneers to heel. The French monarchy’s administrative norms were imposed by these cadres, and thanks to them, Saint-Domingue was increasingly ruled like any other province of the French monarchy—albeit a far-removed one where special conditions obtained. The hostility between local and metropolitan authority never abated, but once the sugar industry took off in the beginning of the eighteenth century, nobles began to assimilate into Saint-Dominguan society through plantation ownership. A class of super-rich sugar barons, the grands blancs of the North plain and in Cul de Sac, where the mean plantation values toward the end of the eighteenth century were, respectively, 973,000 and 1,256,000l.t., created a set of social hierarchies in Saint-Domingue that were at least superficially analogous to those in France; on the islands, people referred to “‘our Lords of Saint-Domingue, our Monsieurs of Martinique and our Bourgeois of Guadeloupe.’”17 Once the frontier stage of colonization was over, connections in the Ministry of the Navy, combined with deep pools of capital made available by the merchants of Nantes and Bordeaux, facilitated the recolonization of SaintDomingue by traditional elites and the mutation of the plantation into an aristocratic form of property.18 Étienne-Louis Ferron de la Ferronnays was fully a part of this process, arriving on the western part of the island of Hispaniola, the colony of

17. David Geggus, for instance, emphasizes the importance of garrison strength in containing slave rebellions during the Age of Revolutions: “Slavery, War, and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean, 1789–1815,” 7. On “Lords,” Baguet, Régime des terres, 67, is quoting a popular saying of the eighteenth century; Vaissière, Saint- Domingue, 128–29 (on nobles’ roles), 99–104 (on the purchase of plantations). For plantation values, Geggus, “Slave Society in the Sugar Plantation Zones,” 35, table 1. 18. Oliver Gliech does not put his analysis in these terms but provides convincing statistical evidence of the prominence of traditional elites among plantation owners on the North plain and in Cul de Sac: Saint- Domingue und die Französische Revolution, 146–48. Vaissière refers to “an admirable century-long colonization effort that ended in a plutocracy that saw in Saint-Domingue nothing but an inexhaustible mine”: Saint- Domingue, 355–56. See also Trouillot, “Motion in the System,” 371. On the increasingly aristocratic character of plantation property, Baguet, Régime des terres, 64.

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Saint-Domingue, in 1764; two years later, he was appointed Vice Commander (Commandant en Second) and, briefly in 1771, interim military commander for the entire colony. Early in his stay there, he bought two coffee plantations. His timing was bad: during the first half of the 1770s, sugar prices fell at semiannual rates of 7 to 15 percent. The fi rst coffee plantation, in the parish of Pilate in the Northern Province, was a small property never capable of generating more than 10,000l.c. per year in gross revenues; the other, which bore the Breton name of its original owner, Kersaliou, was a sad operation in a constant state of disintegration. Neither repaid the trouble and expense they caused; he was rid of them shortly after 1773, the year he bought a sugar plantation on Cul de Sac plain and therefore sealed his entry into the upper stratum of the island’s elite.19 For the titled, marriage was a less troublesome means into the plantocracy than either service to the crown or direct investment. This route had become so canonical among the nobility that in 1788 the planters of SaintDomingue residing in Paris wrote to the king, “Sire, the whole of your court has become creole by marriage.” In the sense employed here, creole probably entailed nothing more than corresponding with plantation managers in the colony and bankers in Bordeaux or Nantes. As the eighteenth century wore on, husbands were less inclined to stay in Saint-Domingue with their Creole brides, so that these marriages served less as a means for their assimilation into Creole society than as a conduit for repatriating colonial fortunes to continental France. Nevertheless, this pattern of marriage between noble “pride” and Creole “gold” unquestionably assured a heavy political influence for the planter lobby—a weight that would continue to make itself felt, through several regime changes over the decades of the French Revolution, well into the 1820s.20 An alliance with Creole gold could take different forms. Three of the youngest brothers married into Saint-Dominguan fortunes, and two of these—Paul and Emmanuel Henri-Eugène—never had to cross the ocean to take possession of their new Creole wife and her property. In 1777, Em-

19. For coffee prices, Trouillot, “Motion in the System,” 350. Trouillot is making calculations on Tarrade, Commerce colonial, 771–72 (table 12). Ferronnays purchased the property for 130,000l.c. (86,666l.t.), but its evaluation in 1790, around 1,500,000, put it slightly above the average value for other plantations on the Cul de Sac plain. 20. For “Creole” court, AN, BIII, 135, p. 155, 31 August 1788. Cited in Vaissière, SaintDomingue, 355. For “marriages of gold and pride,” Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description . . . de l’isle Saint- Domingue, 1:9. For alliances on the Cul de Sac plain in particular, ibid., 2:306. On shifting patterns of Creole marriage, Bonnet, “Seigneurs et planteurs,” 573.

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manuel Henri married the twenty-one-year-old Marie-Adélaïde de Fournier de Bellevue, who brought as dowry a large sugar plantation in Limonade, Northern Province, worth upwards of 1.6 million l.t. Paul Ferron de la Ferronnays actually married two Creole women. A fi rst marriage was concluded in Angers with Marie Louise Harp, daughter of a planter in Fort Dauphin (Northern Province). Harp died shortly after their nuptials in 1769, and the dowry, 200,000l.c., went unpaid. Until dowries were handed over in full to a new husband, they were considered a debt on which interest was due; by the time of Marie Louise’s death, the parents had already paid 15,000 in interest on the unpaid dowry to Paul Ferron de la Ferronnays. When Marie Louise’s father asked him to return this sum, the latter stood on his rights and refused. The couple’s union, however brief, had been precious to Ferronnays, and the 15,000l.c. probably served as a fitting keepsake of his attachment to Marie Louise. By 1780, Paul had awakened to the fact that Paris might be a better jumping-off point for SaintDomingue than the provincial backwater of Angers. It was there that he concluded his marriage to the twice-widowed Barbe Perine de Chabanon. A 1781 estimate put Chabanon’s plantation in Trou (Northern Province) at 846,348l.c., and that of Limonade (Northern Province) at 1,662,029. After debts, this 2,508,377 came out to 855,830 in net value. In 1772, while serving the crown in Saint-Domingue as Vice Commander, Étienne-Louis married a Creole woman, Marie-Elisabeth Thimothée Binau. The ocean separating Saint-Domingue from France was the source of confl icts that did not trouble the younger brothers’ placid alliances. In patrilineal societies such as France, couples tend to live in or near the paternal household, in an affirmation of male dominance; nowhere is this logic stronger than among noble families, where the title passes through the male line. In contrast to this pattern, Étienne-Louis and Marie-Elisabeth began their marriage living nearer the bride’s parents in Saint-Domingue and hence the wealth and power she brought to the alliance. The marquis’ new bride was unwilling to cede her advantages, and her resistance destabilized and ultimately destroyed the marriage of Binau gold and Ferronnays pride.21

21. On the Ferronnayses’ marriages, Malouet, Mémoires, 1:67, note 1. For Paul’s original marriage contract, ADML, 5 E 7 165, 14 November 1769, Notaire Bougery; and for fi nancial details of this union, AN, T 210/2, Notarial Act, 30 December 1771. For the terms of Paul’s second marriage, AN, T 210/2, contract of 13 April 1780. For the Fournier plantation valuation, France, Ministère des Finances, État détaillé des liquidations, 3:49. For noble elites, colonization, and the state, Ruggiu, “Kingdom of France,” 301–2. On confl ict over colonial plantation property in matrilocal marriages, Gerber, “Marital Confl ict and Creole Identity.”

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THE CREOLE COURT Paul’s marriage illustrates the dual movement of the Ferronnays family, westward to Saint-Domingue but also eastward to Paris, to maintain their status and wealth. Promotion to lucrative ecclesiastical and military offices was difficult without connections in Versailles and the beau monde of Paris; their parents had not entirely neglected this world, but like other members of the high Breton nobility, the younger Ferronnays brothers’ center of gravity shifted decisively toward the Île-de-France (Paris region) in the later part of the century. Were the Ferronnays family seated in the hinterlands of Bordeaux, somewhere in Aquitaine, it is much less probable that they would have followed their rather risky strategy of geographic triangulation. Bordeaux, with its diverse occupational structure and noble domination of local institutions—including the Parlement, a sovereign court composed of venal officeholders—was a territorial capital that much more closely resembled Paris than it did Nantes, Saint Malo, La Rochelle, or any of the other port cities opening onto the Atlantic. Situated near a place like this, the Ferronnayses might well have followed a much more conservative, geographically compact strategy, colonizing local institutions and intermarrying with mercantile elites nearer to hand, as was more commonly the practice in Bordeaux than in Nantes. Although a key node in the triangular trade connecting France to Africa and the Americas, Nantes was too small, too provincial for the ambitions thrust upon the Ferronnays brothers. The natural gravitational attraction between large masses of capital and political power meant that in France’s emerging social geography, Saint-Domingue lay closer, in certain respects, to Paris than to Nantes. As the provinces of France opened up to the wider world, the hierarchy between them also shifted.22 Sumptuous living in the capital city and its environs was not only an aristocratic pleasure but a social necessity. Étienne-Louis and his elder brother Pierre-Jacques both commissioned identical townhouses from the sought-after architect Jacques Cellerier in a newly fashionable neighborhood, the Chaussée d’Antin. Confections such as this—Étienne-Louis’ (fig. 1) had four stories decorated with luxurious materials, a billiard room, 22. On the recentering of the Breton nobility, Meyer, Noblesse bretonne, 864, 873, and 1125 (for Ferronnays in Paris). Lepetit, Pre- Industrial Urban System, chap. 4 (urban typology in general); 154 (administrative and trading principles); 156 (hierarchy of cities). On the diversity of professions in Bordeaux, Poussou, “Structures démographiques et sociales,” 325–72. For the prevalence of noble and bourgeois intermariage, in contrast to the patterns observed by Jean Meyer for Nantes, Butel, Négociants bordelais, 324–32.

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Fig. 1. First-floor plan of Étienne-Louis Ferron de la Ferronnays’ townhouse on rue de Neuve Mathurins, Paris. From a contract dated 1777 with the architect Jacques Cellerier. Source: AN, MC ET XIV, 457. Author’s photograph.

the latest in bathroom fittings, and indoor accommodations for two carriages and ten horses—were part of a real estate bubble in chic Parisian neighborhoods fueled by money coming from the Antilles. Critics saw the Chaussée d’Antin as the home of a new class of “‘usurers,’ ‘extortionists’ and ‘speculators’” degrading the physical and social landscape of Paris.23 23. For the brothers’ townhouses, AN, MC ET XIV Arnoult, 457 (1777) and 461 (1778): 457 for illustrations; AN, MC ET XIV, Coupery 12 April 1782. ELF purchased his rue de Neuve

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Some of the Ferronnays brothers made fabulous investments in landed estates near Paris, the better to exercise the aristocratic art of rural living in closer view of their newly chosen peers; Étienne-Louis bought a property in Livry sur Seine, while Paul and his wife, the newly minted baronne de la Ferronnays, lived in Chevreuse. A veritable army of carpenters, decorators, food purveyors, and chefs worked in and around these magnificent properties so that their owners could receive in grand style. Étienne-Louis only improved the chic of his Parisian interiors by returning from SaintDomingue with François, a slave of the Ibo nation, to wait on him.24 In these surroundings, Étienne-Louis cultivated connections with officials like Antoine de Sartine, Secretary of State and the Navy. Sartine formed a crucial link between the Ferronnays family and the king, and was responsible for the promise made to Étienne-Louis that he would be promoted to Commander General of the Island of Saint-Domingue. When, for reasons to be discussed, a career-threatening scandal erupted in his marriage, Sartine and the king himself intervened to save the reputation of a family of loyal servants. Pierre-Victor Malouet, whom Étienne-Louis probably fi rst met while the former was fulfi lling various royal commissions in Saint-Domingue, was another friend of the Ferronnays family in Paris. Malouet was himself a plantation owner by marriage, and played diverse roles in formulating colonial strategy within the Ministry of the Navy. This included issuing warnings about the excessive cruelty of plantation slavery in the Antilles and floating propositions for reform. In the early phases of the French Revolution, Malouet helped to defend slavery; once in exile in London starting in 1792, he conspired with the British on behalf of planters like the Ferronnays clan, many of whom had also fled the revolution. Malouet was back in the Ministry of the Navy serving planters’ needs under both Napoleon and, starting in 1814, the restored Bourbon monarchy. Even where they did not serve the royal government, well-connected absentee owners gathered in Paris kept one another informed, thereby providing a crucial check to the prevarications of their

Mathurins property earlier, before 1778. On colonial wealth in the Paris real estate market, Potofsky, “Paris- on-the-Atlantic.” On the Chaussée d’Antin, Dubin, Futures and Ruins, 90– 95 (quote from Louis Sébastien Mercier, eighteenth-century chronicler of Parisian life, on 94). 24. For Paul’s property, including some stupendous bills from local purveyors, ADY, E 923. For that of ELF, ADSM, 1 Q 779– 81. For a handsome, hand-painted atlas of the seigneurie at Livry sur Seine, numbering over 200 elephant folio pages, ADSM, E 479. For ELF’s servant Noël, Dictionnaire des gens de couleur, 186.

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plantation managers. Paris had become a listening post for the colonial world.25 The “Creole” court described to Louis XVI in 1788 was more than the conceit of absentee planters seeking to assert their influence in the months before the meeting of the Estates General in May 1789—the event that began the French Revolution. An interlocking set of interests united crown, nobility, and the Lords of Saint-Domingue. The profundity of these links was proved by the mutual aid and comfort they consistently lent one another during the revolutionary decades. If Louis XVI’s court was not literally Creole, the sugar plains of Saint-Domingue nevertheless provided a remarkably fertile terrain for the symbiosis between the Old Regime state and its traditional elites. But other, far less gilded social types had a hand in building colonial fortunes like that of the Ferronnays family; in so doing, they too quit the cloister of their provincial lives.

A PROVINCIAL PARVENU IN SAINT-DOMINGUE When Étienne-Louis moved to Saint-Domingue, he did so as a single man, but the effects were soon felt within the Ferronnays household, which—as in any wealthy family—included many servants. At the lower end of the social scale they cooked, cleaned, and tended to children, animals, gardens, buildings, and forests. Higher up, they served as secretaries, lawyers, and property managers (stewards or attorneys [procureurs]) who kept track of the minutiae of the family business and also used their legal training in negotiating contracts within the juridical tangle that was Old Regime France. The destiny of one such family servant, as well as that of his own immediate family, was considerably altered when in 1773 Étienne-Louis sent him to manage his plantations in Saint-Domingue. Jean-Baptiste Corbier’s story of social ascent provides a telling example of the porousness of the social system in eighteenth-century France. The rise from obscurity by tens of thousands of similar social types may have had democratizing effects in the aggregate, but parvenus like Corbier had little to gain by openly questioning social hierarchies. Attention to pat25. On Malouet’s property, Cauna, Toussaint Louverture et l’indépendance d’Haïti, 71, note. The plantation was worth about 1 million l.t. and belonged to his wife Marie Louise Béhotte. Sartine’s name recurs in JBC’s letters to ELF (AN, T 210/2) as well as ELF’s personnel fi le with the Ministry of the Navy, AN, COL E 245, fol. 54. For Paris acquaintances, Malouet, Mémoires, 1:59. On the English interlude, chapter 7. For Malouet on slavery, Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire, 155–58.

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terns of deference within and toward the nobility; sensitivity to the gradations within the bourgeoisie; and uncritical acceptance of his membership in Saint-Domingue’s racial aristocracy all contributed to the success of this dexterous social climber. His letters are a principal source for this book, and interspersed in this managerial correspondence are many sustained reflections on family, social status, exploitation, and freedom; in examining the plantation system of eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue through his eyes, we also peer into the conscience of eighteenth-century France’s provincial bourgeoisie. Jean-Baptiste Corbier was born in La Flèche in 1734, the same year that David Hume settled there to write his Treatise on Human Nature. (The Scottish philosopher was following in the tracks of René Descartes, who had attended the famous Jesuit Collège Royale at La Flèche, and Hume reports having spent a pleasant three years in this small town in Anjou.) Little is known of the circumstances of Corbier’s early life except that his father was an innkeeper. When the few traces left by Corbier during this period are connected, they form an inexorably rising curve of wealth and ambition. By the time of his marriage in 1759, he bore the titles Licentiate in Law and Seneschal of La Bigeottière, near Nantes. Françoise-Renée Le Clerc des Emeraux, Étienne-Louis’ mother, held the title of Countess of La Bigeottière, so it is likely that Corbier initially came into the family’s service through an appointment to the seigneurial court at La Bigeottière. Corbier probably began his studies rigorously at the College of the Oratory and received his diploma from the Faculty of Law at the University of Angers; but whether in Angers or elsewhere, his was a classic path for sons of moderately prosperous merchants or master artisans whose parents could afford the sums required for a law degree (219l.t. for university fees alone), and who sought for their sons a more secure foothold in the bourgeoisie.26 Given his education and early success, Corbier’s marriage to the daughter of another innkeeper seems socially unambitious, but his wife’s family also had pretentions; in 1735, the formerly humble innkeeper Claude Roger began to style himself Claude Deroger de la Motte. The name stuck, for whatever reasons, and it is clear that his daughter Renée

26. JBC’s birth, ADS, RP, La Flèche, parish of Saint Thomas, BMS 1717–38. Sons of marchands constituted a large and growing proportion of law students in Angers in the eighteenth century, 11 percent at the beginning and 18 percent in 1759–73. Cocard, “Professeurs et étudiants,” 42; on costs of education and the path to legal studies, Guerder, “Avocats d’Angers,” 8. The broader picture in France is much the same; see Kagan, “Law Students and Legal Careers,” 56, for statistics on origins. For the marriage record, ADML, RP, Bécon les Granits, parish of Saint Pierre, BMS 1753– 65, 28 May 1759.

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Françoise brought capital into the marriage. Substantial annuities were purchased in Corbier’s wife’s name directly after the couple married, and her dowry helped pay for other investments. Some of this money derived from Claude Roger’s investments in Saint-Domingue, which involved a partnership with Étienne-Louis’ brother Pierre, vicomte de la Ferronnays. Jean-Baptiste Corbier’s relationship with the Ferronnays family was only a part of a larger cluster of partnerships linking these distant provinces, reinforcing fortunes in Anjou by creating them in Saint-Domingue.27 By 1774, when he arrived in Saint-Domingue to manage Étienne-Louis’ plantations, Corbier had already been working for the Ferronnays family for twenty-two years, since the age of eighteen; living in Saint Mars la Jaille, he became deeply enmeshed in the household. Corbier confi rmed this liaison by naming his fi rstborn for Pierre-Jacques Louis Auguste Ferron de la Ferronnays, and the family patriarch stood, in turn, as the boy’s godfather. Corbier’s daughters, Julie-Monique and Apoline-Victoire, also had Ferronnays males as godfathers. The complexity of his duties in Brittany and Anjou required a certain authority and range of acquaintance, and Corbier sometimes entered into business partnerships with the Ferronnayses. At some point before his departure for Saint-Domingue, for instance, he coinvested with them in a metal foundry in l’Aune. Managing their many properties called him to points everywhere in the region, but the provincial lawyer’s horizons were also broadened by trips to Paris, where he had contacts with members of the court aristocracy such as the comte de Provence, brother of Louis XVI and the future king Louis XVIII. An apprenticeship in these circles was valuable to the Ferronnays family; in Saint-Domingue, Corbier was a regular guest at the houses of royal officials, and he kept his ear to the ground about local political machinations affecting the marquis’ career. More fundamentally, Corbier’s long experience as a lawyer was indispensable in the litigious business environment there.28 The conditions of Corbier’s sojourn in Saint-Domingue were not en27. Compare ADML, RP, Bécon les Granits, parish of Saint Pierre, BMS 1718–35, 29 December 1734 (birth of Claude) to BMS 1736–48, same parish, 20 November 1735 (birth of Renée Françoise). JBC’s wife’s capital made possible the investment in a forge in l’Aune, discussed in the next paragraph. See AN, T 210/2, JBC to ELF, 26 August 1775. On Saint-Domingue investments and partnership, AN, T 210/2, JBC to ELF, 24 July 1766. 28. Length of employment, JBC to ELF, 19 February 1781 and 15 October 1787. Birth acts, ADLA, RP, Saint Mars la Jaille, parish of Saint Médard, 12 November 1761 and 19 February 1763. The details of the foundry investment are quite sketchy: JBC to ELF, 12 August 1775 and 12 September 1775. Contact with Provence, AN, T 210/2, JBC (Paris) to Georget (Angers), 7 September 1773.

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tirely typical. Although immigration to the colonies was a family affair, not all members of a household went abroad. In this case, Jean-Baptiste left his wife and three children behind. Even if some migrants did stay, few went to Saint-Domingue with permanent settlement in mind. Families of slender means scraped together the funds necessary to send the husbands, sons, or cousins, whose goal it was to begin as an overseer (économe) in order to gain technical skills and savoir vivre in an alien environment. The next step was to insinuate oneself into the well-paid position of plantation manager (gérant) or attorney (procureur) and then, ultimately, to buy a coffee or sugar plantation. With any luck, these family emissaries would return to France much wealthier, not too much older, and with their health intact. After the Seven Years’ War, immigration of this sort to Saint-Domingue increased dramatically; lacking both skills and capital—and squeezed by their own numbers—relatively few fulfi lled their ambitions. Fortune seekers began to pool in the cities of Cap Français and Port-au-Prince, where they became a recognizable class of socially frustrated petits blancs. Corbier, by contrast, departed from Nantes in November 1773 under the title of secretary to the marquis de la Ferronnays and with the highly sought-after position of procureur waiting for him. Attorneys acted as planters’ legal representatives and sat at the top of the managerial hierarchy; for their services, they generally received between 5 and 10 percent of the revenue of the plantations they managed, and an annual salary of around 8,000l.c. Corbier himself received 10 percent of the revenue of Ferronnays’ plantations—amounting to around 10,000l.c. per year—but no fi xed salary. He also received living expenses, no small item in a place where residents believed they suffered the highest cost of living in the world. Attorneys could increase their income by working for multiple plantation owners; Corbier did not do so, but he, like other attorneys, used his insider’s knowledge to snap up local investment opportunities. If Corbier was not one of the Lords of Saint-Domingue, he arrived under the protection of one, frequented their milieus, and shared many of their attitudes.29 Despite the immense social distance between a nobleman of ancient

29. On Saint-Domingue career paths, for instance, Frostin, “Angevins de modest conditions établies à Saint-Domingue”; and for the much less typical case of emigration from the Basque country, Force, “Stratégies matrimoniales.” For JBC’s voyage, ADLA, Passagers embarqués de France, en Nantes (1764– 91), fols. 76–78. There is some ambiguity in the term gérant (manager): procureur (attorney) stands above gérant in the hierarchy of plantation employees—it was the procureur who acted as legal proxy for the absentee owners—but in reality many attorneys like JBC exercised both functions and were commonly called gérants.

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extraction and an upstart bourgeois, a surprising personal intimacy—the effect of an early propinquity—colors Ferronnays and Corbier’s correspondence. Étienne-Louis was only three years older than Jean-Baptiste, and they passed significant periods of their youth together in Saint Mars la Jaille. Corbier’s letters reveal a deep familiarity with the details of the marquis’ marriage and sexual adventures, which may seem natural enough for a family retainer whose job it was to attend to the complications arising from these liaisons—including, it would seem, provisions for an illegitimate child in France. This familiarity was not a one-way street, and we fi nd Corbier relating details of his own private life to Étienne-Louis. The former dwelled on his loneliness in Saint-Domingue at great length, a situation no doubt exacerbated by his disinclination to seek solace in paid sexual encounters: “I am a hard and even possibly greedy man,” he confessed. Corbier’s wife, Renée, despaired at their long separation, and, not halfway through his seven-year stay in Saint-Domingue, the attorney began to ask Étienne-Louis, instead of his own wife, to send him linens from France: “My sojourn seems to weigh upon her so heavily that the things I request seem to her intended to prolong my stay.” In addition to seeing to Corbier’s personal toilet, Étienne-Louis helped arrange for the repair of his manager’s house in Angers. Although Corbier often used the words friend and friendship in describing the men’s relationship, some caution is in order given the gulf of status between them as well as eighteenth-century epistolary conventions, which can impart a warm glow to the most coldly utilitarian exchanges. Corbier constantly affirmed his selfless attachment to Étienne-Louis, but given the well-founded mistrust directed toward them, attorneys regularly caressed their employers to keep them biddable. For his part, Étienne-Louis had every reason to cultivate the person who guarded so much of his property and so many personal secrets.30 But their relationship went beyond the conventional signs of fidelity that fi ll so many managers’ letters, and even allowed space for criticism toward a social superior. Months after the event, Jean-Baptiste exposed to the marquis his “suffering . . . that the person to whom I have been most attached during my life was the only one not to demonstrate any interest in the marriage of my daughter.” He was stung by the realization that their personal relationship was of more value to him than to  Étienne-Louis.

30. ELF’s birth, ADML, RP, Angers, parish of Saint Maurille, 26 August 1731. For maintenance payments to an Abbé Royer, who had been charged with the care of the infant Latour, JBC to ELF, 25 November 1776, 20 February 1777, and 30 April 1779. JBC to ELF, 20 March 1779 (greed); 12 February 1778 (sojourn); and 14 November 1778 (repairs).

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Other reproaches arose, not from wounded feelings but from a confrontation of values. Like so many bourgeois, Corbier coveted the privileges that flowed from typically noble forms of property: land and venal office. 31 But ends and means were altogether different things. Corbier preached the gospel of cautious investment and unostentatious living befitting a good patriarch (bon père de famille), and quipped to Étienne-Louis that “you and economy were not made for each other.” If Corbier could criticize with amused tolerance the conspicuous consumption that destroyed so many noble fortunes, he reserved a much sterner tone in announcing the peril that the “chaos” in Étienne-Louis’ personal life posed to the “honor and interests” of the entire family. At risk here was the clan’s symbolic capital, and Corbier was emboldened to point out when an intimate risked squandering a priceless element of the family patrimony. Luxury and moral disorder within aristocratic households were viewed as cognate problems in eighteenth-century France, furnishing the material for novels, plays, and a whole genre of published judicial memoirs that exposed in lurid detail the excesses of the ruling class. Corbier jealously guarded the Ferronnayses’ patrimony and did not ever call into question their social privileges; but it is clear that this meticulous, often morally priggish aspirant to noble status and wealth also found aristocratic insouciance rather vertigo-inducing. The planter class, which set the dominant tone for Saint-Dominguan society in the same way that the aristocracy did in France, aroused in Corbier a similar discomfort even though—or perhaps because—he eventually joined its ranks; the sensuality, violence, and corruption he saw among Saint-Domingue’s plantocracy were perfect inversions of the bourgeois virtues of thrift, continence, and order.32 Emigration, investment, and marriage solidified the Corbiers’ place among the provincial elites of Anjou and Saint-Domingue. Two years after his own arrival in 1774, Jean-Baptiste sent for his fi fteen-year-old son, Pierre-Jacques Auguste, to begin his training as a plantation manager. When the father returned to France in 1783, the son took over the Ferronnays sugar plantation on the Cul de Sac plain, as well as two nearby cof-

31. For “suffering,” JBC (Angers) to ELF, 2 June 1784. On converging perspectives and patterns of wealth, Taylor, “Noncapitalist Wealth.” 32. Sarah Maza warns against reading these criticisms of the aristocracy in a reductive way, but concedes that concern over domestic morality was a distinctly bourgeois discourse: “It was a matter of culture as translated into style . . . that marked the ruling elites off from the rest of the nation.” Private Lives, 21–23 and 283– 86 (quote on 285). JBC to ELF, 22 November 1777 (“bonne père”); 24 March 1775 (“economy”); 29 July 1779 (“chaos”); and 22 November 1777 (“honor”). See also 25 November 1777.

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fee plantations owned by Corbier. At the age of twenty-one, Pierre-Jacques Corbier was in charge of about three hundred slaves and on the road to becoming rich in his own right. Corbier fi ls sped things along by marrying a Creole widow, Jean-Françoise Merillon, possessed of a “pretty fortune” from a coffee plantation in Grands Bois, near Port-au-Prince. Immediately upon his return to his native province of Anjou, Corbier père set himself up as a local notable. First, he bought the office of First Judge of the Treasury (Monnaie) of Angers, an office that would confer transmissible nobility after the second generation of Corbiers held it. Although it could not compete in prestige or price with the charge of Secretary to the King favored by Nantais merchants, this judgeship conferred numerous tax exemptions; Corbier, always somewhat vain regarding the small honorific titles he accumulated in Saint-Domingue, was probably not insensitive to the merely symbolic aspects of this locally respected office. A couple of months later, he paid 70,000l.t. in cash for a chateau situated in Chaumineau, outside La Flèche. This unassuming property was nevertheless embellished with horse stables, vineyards, woods, gardens, and 28 journaux (about 23 acres or 9.3 hectares) of arable land, whose thirteen feudal tenants would now render services, cash rents, and grain—along with the odd chicken or bushel of apples—directly to Corbier. After the acquisition of land and office, he married both of his daughters into the cream of the Angers bourgeoisie. When he died in 1788—with his landed estate in France, his ennobling office, and underlying it all, his colonial investments—this son of the petty provincial bourgeoisie was, socially speaking, a miniaturized variation of the slave traders, Secretaries to the King, and estate owners who lived in La Fosse. Having enriched themselves through colonial commerce, the plutocrats of Nantes, in their turn, sought outward resemblance to ancient families like the Ferronnayses.33 The partnership between the Ferron de la Ferronnayses and the Corbiers was active for over fi fty years, until the evacuation of the remaining white planters from Saint-Domingue in 1803. Their collaboration in the colo-

33. PJC to ELF, 6 August 1788 (“fortune”). For a description of JBC’s office, Conseiller du roi, premier juge au siège royale de la monnoie d’Angers, Affiches d’Angers, 13 February 1784. On conditions of heritability, Doyle, Venality, 80. For a comparison between Juge de Monnaie and Secrétaire du Roi, Bluche, Magistrats de la cour, 26–27 and 89. Without the actual deed of sale, it is difficult to ascertain just what Corbier paid for this office. Following Doyle’s discussion, I estimate between 30,000 and 50,000l.t.; see Venality, 200–212. For details of JBC’s land purchase, ADS, 4 E 183/93 and ADS, 28 J 160. On marriages, ADS, 2 C/1676 (JBC death act) and CAOM, 6 SUPSDOM 5, Indemnités de Monique Julie Livoys (née Corbier).

40

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nies was an extension of the arrangements by which landowners and their agents—the provincial bourgeois who served as managers, lenders, lawyers, receivers, and low-level judges—had so long drained the surplus produced in the countryside into elite, urban reservoirs. As this partnership passed from Corbier père to fi ls in 1783 and from Étienne-Louis to his nephew in 1798, little overt confl ict of interest arose between the families—with one telling exception. In 1787–88, Étienne-Louis started to believe that the son, who had lived in Saint-Domingue from a tender age, was behaving more like the Creole attorneys who so often defrauded absentee owners or ran their plantations into the ground in search of short-term profits. Many of these managers would align against the grands blancs during the French Revolution, in the name of freedom from metropolitan exploitation and in the hopes of taking their place as Lords of Saint-Domingue. The incident involving Corbier fi ls almost terminated the families’ relationship before Étienne-Louis, likely appreciating the uncertainties involved in hiring an actual Creole manager, recovered his senses. 34 Despite the pervasive mistrust between metropolitan and Creole elites, their collaboration was essential in maintaining the Saint-Dominguan plantation complex for a century before its demise. Together they oversaw the transport, discipline, and integration of new laboring populations; the clearance of conquered territories and the construction of highly specialized agricultural-industrial infrastructure; the organization of transatlantic markets; and fi nally the defense of this system against imperial predation. Whether private or public, these efforts depended on—and created—familial, administrative, and economic linkages between colony and metropole. The density of these linkages made Saint-Domingue into one among many interlinked French provinces. But integration was far from total. Saint-Domingue was distant from France, and aspects of its daily life—from rhythms of work and play to clothing, food, and shelter—were adapted to a tropical climate. Social differences with mainland France were only amplified by the hypertrophy of the plantation system. The sum of these and other contrasts, taken together with the self-evident economic value of these colonies to their mother countries, helped to shape a more self-assertive Creole identity over the eighteenth century.

34. For an enumeration of offices, Goubert, Cent mille provinciaux, 217–20. On absentee/ Creole confl ict, Frostin, “Histoire de l’autonomisme colon,” 729. For the Le Doux controversy on the Ferronnays plantation, PJC to ELF, 25 October 1787, 4 November 1787, 27 December 1787, 20 January 1788 (among others); and Le Doux (Port-au-Prince [henceforth: PaP]) to JBC (Angers), 26 November 1788.

Province and Colony

41

This process of creolization, as it was called, only intensified with the takeoff of coffee production after the Seven Years’ War. These planters, both white and colored, had far fewer connections to the motherland than the sugar barons who occupied high military and administrative positions and circulated back and forth to France. In Saint-Domingue, as in many parts of the French, Spanish, and British Atlantic empires, native elites defended themselves against what they regarded, rightly or wrongly, as metropolitan economic exploitation and political oppression. Racial mixture and polarization at the top of the social pyramid, as well as the particularly intrusive character of the French state after the Seven Years’ War, exacerbated the divisive effects of creolization in Saint-Domingue. The troubled marriage between metropolitan and Creole elites proved to be one of the deep structural weaknesses of Old Regime Saint-Domingue.35 35. On coffee production and creolization, Trouillot, “Motion in the System,” 370–71.

Ch apter two

Production and Investment

A

s highly specialized agricultural-industrial enterprises producing commodities consumed in far-removed places, the plantations of Cul de Sac owed their origin, profitability, and continued existence to the European world economy. Saint-Domingue and other European colonies in the West Indies replicated a similar pattern whereby slaves, along with subsistence and capital goods, came from abroad; colonists used these for producing indigo, cotton, coffee, and, above all else, sugar on their plantations. Many of these societies did not even reproduce themselves, but imported boatloads of slaves from Africa to fill the demographic hole left by premature deaths and low birthrates. Manufactured items and chronically undersupplied subsistence goods came from the outside. Although places like Saint-Domingue and Jamaica furnish particularly radical examples of the phenomenon, agricultural specialization and hence dependence on external markets were not unique to plantation economies on the colonial periphery. Within Europe, those countries and regions able to pursue the path of market specialization over peasant subsistence enjoyed increased productivity, which generated higher profits and freed up labor in the countryside for manufacturing activities. While specialization and technical innovation contributed to almost every other type of economic progress during the agricultural revolution in early modern Europe, the producers who adopted new practices did not thereby overcome a fundamental set of constraints. Arable land was limited, and even the most fertile soil could be exhausted by misuse. Natural variations of temperature and moisture affected crop yields, as did periodic disasters like storms, disease, frosts, or hail. Investments in irrigation works or soil improvement mitigated some of these constraints and hazards; the labor involved in crop rotation, fertilizing, or weeding hedged against oth42

Production and Investment

43

ers. The choice of agricultural technique, and hence capital/labor ratios, was dictated by any number of conditions; naturally the prices of labor and capital goods were determinative, as were the demands of particular crop mixes and the availability of common resources like woodlands and pasture. Particularly in continental Europe, contractual arrangements between farmers and landowners often determined whether fi xed investments were viewed as worthwhile. The level and long-term stability of prices also influenced what was planted, and how. In France and elsewhere, zones of highly specialized, market-oriented agriculture existed alongside more traditional structures, where the pursuit of risk-averse subsistence agriculture helped peasant communities eke out a living on the margins of the market economy, in a semblance of autarky.1 The plantation societies of the West Indies were radical incarnations of the eighteenth-century international division of labor, existing for and through markets in a way that was unprecedented on the European mainland. At the same time, their fundamental productive and social unit, the plantation, was an extended household organized to promote certain forms of enclosure and self-sufficiency. In this respect, the plantations of the West Indies resembled the estates of ancient Rome (variously called villas or latifundia), another form of large, export-oriented agricultural enterprise staffed mainly by servile labor; in both cases, a household organization with an extensive internal division of labor minimized labor costs beyond the initial investment in slaves. By producing subsistence crops within the villa, owners took advantage of varied soil types, hedged against climatic or market disruptions, and maximized profit by minimizing purchases outside the household. Intensified production of export goods naturally entailed trade-offs against self-sufficiency within the villa, but the autarkic ideal remained durable among Roman agronomists for whom the household, and not the market, remained a principal source of social and economic stability.2 Perhaps most important, the household, governed by patriarchal ideol-

1. For classic statements on specialization in the European context, De Vries, Economy of Europe, chap. 2; and Hoffman, Growth in a Traditional Society, 190–92. 2. For the plantation as a form of household, Fox- Genovese, Within the Plantation Household, introduction, esp. 56. For the persistence of the household as the principal site of production in slave societies, Genovese, Political Economy of Slavery, 289–320. On the “autarkic utilization of labor” in the context of the household or oikos, M. Weber, Economy and Society, 1:382. For Roman models, Morley, Metropolis and Hinterland, 110–27. For the hybrid of autarky and market production in the estates of Roman Egypt, Rathbone, Economic Rationalism and Rural Society in Third- Century A.D. Egypt, 213–19.

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ogy, furnished the “pocket of authoritarian command” necessary to the management of servile labor. Since 1685, slavery in the French colonies had been regulated by the Code Noir, which, among other things, prohibited torture, dictated Sunday as a day of rest, provided for the possibility of manumission, and stipulated certain minima of subsistence. However, Louis XIV’s royal edict hardly abolished the patriarchal authority of the master over his slaves: at most, it balanced royal and paternal sovereignty against each other so as better to stabilize and preserve the master’s absolute authority within the plantation. In practice, royal intrusions into plantation life were very rare, even in the case of the torture and murder of slaves. Not only in fact but also in theory, the plantation remained a domain walled off from civil law. Colonial judges reflexively deferred to planters’ arguments that order depended on their unquestioned “domestic sovereignty” even in instances of the grossest abuses against the Code Noir. In any case, by article 31 of the code, abused slaves lacked any legal standing to bring criminal or civil complaints against their masters.3 In their pursuit of profits and stability, planters like Étienne-Louis Ferron de la Ferronnays were pulled in what seem like opposed directions: outward toward the market, and inward to the closed world of the plantation. This dual orientation was not unique to the plantation economies of the West Indies, but in their case long distances, the prominence of crops that had no real subsistence value, and unstable environmental conditions made the contrast between these strategies all the more striking. In what follows, we examine the rhythms of plantation life, from cultivating, harvesting, and refi ning sugar to the considerations involved in selling colonial produce, investing in land, building infrastructure, and making technical improvements. (Although none of these things can be considered apart from the pervasive fact of slave labor, this element of plantation economy and society receives more thorough discussion in chapter 3.) The dual character of the plantation—an isolated place that was nonetheless completely, one might say mercilessly, integrated into the world economy—affected nearly every aspect of its economic organization and contributed to its “insolent but fragile wealth.”4 Although they were written to inform his employer of basic business 3. On “pocket of authoritarian command,” Genovese, Political Economy of Slavery, 291. For “domestic sovereignty,” Debbasch, “Au coeur des ‘Gouvernement des esclaves,’” 36. Ghachem estimates the theoretical and practical effects of royal sovereignty more highly than Debbasch, but see Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution, 43– 63 (on balancing act) and 182n50 (on lack of legal standing). 4. Butel, “L’essor antillais,” 132 (“insolent”).

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conditions, Jean-Baptiste Corbier’s letters are fi lled with reflections— apologetic, triumphant, or monitory, depending on the people and circumstances in question—about how to make money growing cane and selling sugar. Able posturing was so much part of the job that Corbier fretted repeatedly about his son’s literary talents: “He hasn’t the least notion of literature . . . and writes poorly.” In his own letters, Corbier at times plays a latter-day Polonius, dispensing uncontroversial bromides like “water is the basis of profit” to reassure Ferronnays that his affairs were in reliable hands. At others, he contradicts himself, making confident predictions, accompanied by self-serving barbs aimed at less capable managers, only to cast himself in a subsequent letter as a passive victim of circumstances. While such pronouncements may provide insight into the relationship between an absentee owner and his attorney, it is fitting to ask what lies behind such stylized performances. But by abstracting from his occasionally self-serving hyperbole, and by taking the letters as a whole, it is in fact possible to put together a coherent picture of the economic forces at work on the plantation, and of Corbier’s response to them.5 Over their twenty-nine years as Ferronnays’ managers, Corbier and his son, Pierre-Jacques, persisted in a contradictory set of aspirations: on the one hand toward the growth of fi xed-capital investments, and on the other toward economizing on these same investments. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, “the era of making a fortune with small capital has ceased to exist,” Corbier père concluded. Sugar prices were flat; affordable land was increasingly located far from port access, so that transportation costs ate up profits; and absentee ownership was impossible on small estates, because management costs absorbed all surplus. In this context, sugar planters had to renounce short-term profit-taking in order to invest heavy sums for the long term. This logic even dictated the Corbiers’ choices on the less capital-intensive coffee operations they owned. They bought already developed operations, and neither father nor son stinted on the acquisition of slaves: by 1787, they owned a combined total of two hundred. On behalf of their employer, Corbier père and fils presided over a systematic process of consolidation, selling Ferronnays’ small, unprofitable coffee plantations. They used the proceeds to buy land adjacent to his Cul de Sac plantation, adding slaves to work this increased area of cultivation. In the fi rst two years of his tenure as attorney, Corbier expanded cane land by about one-quarter. By 1787, the slave population increased to 232, 5. AN, T 210/2, JBC to ELF, 4 November 1776 (“literature”); 1 December 1776 (Corbier fi ls); and 15 January 1775 (“water”).

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from around 200 in 1776, rising to 242 in 1789. Growth on the Ferronnays plantation reflected trends in all three provinces of Saint-Domingue. And this consolidation was not simply a question of extent but entailed intensification and specialization. Early on, in 1774, Corbier recommended relying on the open market for slaves’ food to the maximum possible degree; the “least diversion” of precious cane land or slave labor into food production would occasion an “immense loss,” whereas sugar could be sold in exchange for all manner of necessities. Competitive pressures dictated increasingly large investments in land and slaves, and owners and managers alike adopted an ideal of commodity crop specialization within the plantation, a tendency that dictated reliance on the market for virtually everything else.6 Against the imperative to growth, the realities of debt and market fluctuations forced planters into a more defensive posture than these optimistic prescriptions suggest: capital savings and self-sufficiency, not necessarily conducive to long-term growth, became the order of the day. Debt was the original sin in this milieu, weighing upon planters’ minds far more heavily, for instance, than the moral implications of slavery; planters owed their existence to debt, worked constantly to redeem themselves from it, inveighed against its inevitable harms with theological fervor, and just as inevitably slid into recidivism. With this in mind, Corbier espoused a different investment strategy: “I have always undertaken things that promised to come to fruition quickly in order to make good on my engagements.” Such an attitude meant weighing the long-term benefits of infrastructure improvements against the short-term disruption to production and cash flow they entailed. Beyond these immediate evils, debts contracted in making improvements threatened the future reinvestment of revenue. All of this added up to the imperative to “proceed little by little,” including buying slaves at a slower pace and making sure that the plantation was growing food stores of its own. Corbier denounced “the ridiculous prejudice,” which he seemed elsewhere to hold, “that one gets rich by laying out lots of labor and expense. . . . For myself, I say that one must draw the most from one’s property and invest the least possible. It is more

6. JBC to ELF, 1 May 1775 (fortune and slaves). JBC to ELF, 22 April 1778 (transportation); 1 May 1775 (management costs); 4 January 1776 (small capital); 4 January 1776 (competition); 20 February 1774 (long-term investment); and 28 August 1774 (“least diversion” and “immense loss”). For expansion figures: 5 April 1776. See PJC to ELF, 15 October 1787 for both slave censuses. On consolidation: JBC to ELF, 5 June 1776 and 20 July 1776; and PJC to ELF, 6 July 1784. In 1784, ELF contemplated increasing the slave population to three hundred. For comparative statistics, Geggus, “Slave Society in the Sugar Plantation Zones,” 35 (table 2).

Production and Investment

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profitable to conserve one’s property and manage it well than to multiply its expenses by expanding it.”7 A detailed discussion of the process of growing cane on the Ferronnays plantation and the refi ning and selling of its sugar reveals that Corbier’s views did not so much contradict themselves as they expressed two realities that constantly intruded into the plantation and influenced its development. The eighteenth-century sugar business was a highly organized industrial enterprise with competitive pressures dictating constant adaptation and reinvestment; but international markets and the unpredictable growing environment of Saint-Domingue frequently upended the process of steady accumulation.

GROWING AND ROLLING The Ferronnays plantation on the Cul de Sac plain used the same technology and organization that was brought to bear in the West Indies during the seventeenth century and came to be known as the “Barbados” or “gang” system. The basic elements of this system remained in place partly because they corresponded to requirements of sugar production that were of a purely technical order; others were artifacts of the reliance on slave labor, but the social character of these constraints made them no less compulsory. At the center of the sugar plantation stood the rolling mill (fig. 2), a type of capital investment that is termed “lumpy” because of its high cost and indivisibility. The model in use in Saint-Domingue was initially brought to the British West Indies from Brazil by Dutch merchants, and featured three upright cylinders. These cylinders, powered by a single source, made it possible to crush the cane stalks twice; after the stalks’ fi rst trip through the rolling mill, which partly crushed them, an operator—usually female—folded them in half and sent them through again in the opposite direction. A later invention automatically turned the cane stalks around for their return trip through the mill. This dangerous and labor-intensive process crushed the hard plant fibers of the cane, forcing out the sucrose-rich juice or vin they contained. Cane juice was then sent to the boiling house for refi ning into one of many possible grades of sugar. Both the rolling and the refining processes

7. JBC to ELF, 15 January 1775 (debt); 22 April 1778 (“fruition”); and 21 December 1775 (“conserve one’s property”). Corbier fi ls adopted a similar attitude on investment: PJC to ELF, 15 October 1787.

Fig. 2. Top: A three-cylinder rolling mill, powered by mules. Bottom: A water-powered model, such as was used on the Ferronnays plantation. Source: Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie (1762). Photograph: The ARTFL Project, University of Chicago.

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involved the application of great amounts of energy—fi rst mechanical, then thermal—at precisely timed intervals. Putting off the harvest beyond the point of ripeness meant a decrease in the sucrose content of the cane; after the harvest, cane had to be rolled within three days to prevent the stalks from becoming unworkably rigid, and also to stave off fermentation, which converts valuable crystallizable sugar into uncrystallizable sugar (molasses). Once rolled, the initial stages of purification involved several cycles of heating, skimming, cooling, and reheating. At fi rst, the rolling mills were powered by animal traction; in some places, especially Barbados, planters used wind power; but the biggest cost-saving innovation, one that became a special advantage for the Saint-Dominguan sugar industry, was the introduction of water-powered mills. Despite this advance, the rolling mill generally remained the bottleneck of sugar production. In 1774, Ferronnays’ mill would take over a week to roll the harvest from just one of the eighteen sugar-producing plots on the plantation, whereas in the high season as many as four plots might be ready for harvest at one time. Such constraints would seem an argument for a second rolling mill, but this equipment was expensive—around 100,000l.c., Corbier estimated—and required constant expenses for upkeep. Moreover, even if such objections were answerable, each mill required sufficient waterpower, and Corbier estimated the cost of building an aqueduct at another 100,000l.c; another planter, Gallifet, paid 287,000l.c. to install a new mill and aqueduct. And then there was the cost of slaves to staff the mill. If adding a second mill was so far outside the norm for all sugar producers that Corbier never seriously considered it, he did discuss replacing the existing mill, whose efficiency he frequently deplored—but a fi ne set of calculations convinced him that it was better to muddle through making repairs as the necessity arose rather than to replace the entire mill, which would augment capacity by only one-sixth. As they did on most every other plantation, planting, harvesting, and marketing would continue to revolve around a single mill.8 The coupling of the rolling mill and slave labor within the confi nes of a sugar plantation began to suggest canonical proportions between land, labor, and capital, but that things might have been organized differently gives a sense of the peculiarities of this system. In sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Brazil, for example, mill owners (senhores de

8. JBC to ELF, 15 January 1775 (costs) and 26 August 1775 (capacity). On the effects of “lumpiness” on agricultural investment and innovation, Heady, “Farm Planning.” On Gallifet, Stein, French Sugar Business, 64n11.

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engenho) bought cane from independent producers (lavradores de cana) in a variant of sharecropping. Some of these growers employed free labor, but the more significant difference between the Brazilian factory system and the West Indian “gang” system lay in the separation of growing from rolling and refi ning; this separation allowed for comparatively lower fi xedcapital costs within the sugar industry as a whole—in effect, the same mill serviced a greater amount of cane-growing land—but the physical proceeds were split between growers and the mill owner. Whereas Caribbean mills turned for an average of 120–180 days a year, the mills in the relatively undercapitalized Brazilian industry operated 270–300 days per year. The factory system resurfaced in nineteenth-century Haiti, after abolition of slavery and the introduction of steam-powered rolling mills. The combination of cane cultivation and processing within a single fi rm on a West Indian plantation entitled a single owner to the gross proceeds, but at the price of investing in a rolling mill that typically stood idle half the year: what looks like capital-saving from Ferronnays’ point of view—living hand to mouth on strictly necessary repairs—merely made up for the waste inherent in the fi rm structure of the West Indian sugar business as a whole. At times, neighboring planters cooperated by leasing out idle mill time to one another, but the possibility of being cheated made them wary of such arrangements.9 The ideal plantation described in French manuals from the early eighteenth century onward sought efficiency within this basic context of inefficiency. Writing in 1724, Jean-Baptiste Labat suggested dividing around 47 carreaux (61 hectares) evenly into 1-hectare plots; such a plantation would need about 120 slaves, or 2.5 slaves per carreau, to work it. In general, it was thought that roughly one-third of a plantation’s total area should be allotted to cane cultivation; the remaining land would be allocated to subsistence crop production, perhaps some woodland to provide for fuel, and a reserve of virgin land as a hedge against soil exhaustion. As soil exhaustion and land speculation took hold on developed sugar-growing plains—or on entire islands, like Barbados—reserve land disappeared. A later (1787–88) model envisioned a larger plantation, 56 carreaux divided into 16 plots; but with 200 slaves this amounted to higher labor intensity, at 3.5 slaves per carreau. In 1776, Ferronnays’ plantation

9. On the factory system in Brazil, and for figures, Schwartz, “A Commonwealth within Itself,” 177– 83. Some cane was produced by the senhores de engenho, but the majority was provided by sharecropping lavradores de cana. On nineteenth- century Haiti, Deerr, History of Sugar, 2:235. JBC to ELF, 11 August 1776 (cooperation).

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lay somewhere between both these models, working more land, 80 carreaux divided into 18 cane plots, but at a lower intensity, with 200 hands or 2.5 slaves per carreau.10 The division of cane land into plots (fig. 3) served several purposes simultaneously. A field newly planted with cane shoots took about eighteen months to mature, and when cane was harvested, the plants were not uprooted; instead, the stalks were cut, leaving the roots (rejetons, or ratoons) intact. The ratoons matured, ready for harvest again in about twelve months. Although subsequent crops based on old planting were generally smaller, ratooning saved the labor involved in replanting and shortened the growing time. Division into plots staggered the harvesting and rolling of cane, thereby better allocating rolling capacity and labor resources; during the growing season, it also helped to rationalize the irrigation process. From the standpoint of revenue, lower-yielding plots were counterbalanced by the higher productivity of plots on their fi rst or second ratoon. Even within the same growing regions, fertility could vary widely: in exceptional cases, planters on the Cul de Sac plain continued ratooning the same plot for twelve or even twenty years, while the Ferronnays plantation was closer to the norm, with plots falling into senescence after five or six harvests. Once a plot of four carreaux produced less than twenty-five barrels (barriques) of raw or “muscovado” sugar (about 3,300 pounds of raw sugar per acre), Corbier suggested replanting. Cane plots were separated by wide alleys, which accommodated irrigation ditches and the passage of carts. Once reasonably mature, a cane field is extremely dense with vegetation, a fact that explains how one runaway slave on the Ferronnays plantation hid in a cane plot for six months undetected. Planters on the Cul de Sac plain reported twenty fi res set, intentionally or not, by slaves hiding away in their cane fields. So, the physical separation of fields also enhanced scrutiny of field laborers. Finally, if cane plots were of the same size, as manuals suggested, they facilitated the overall surveillance of the plantation’s business operations, allowing direct comparison of labor productivity, soil fertility, and mill output on interchangeable units. The rectilinear layout into equal-size plots both symbolized and facilitated planters’ aspiration to the rational organization of production.11 10. On ideal plantation size, Watts, West Indies, 386– 90; and Stein, French Sugar Business, 42–45. On 1 December 1776, JBC listed one hundred field slaves, which usually was about half the total slave population on the Ferronnays plantation. 11. On ratooning, Cauna, Temps des isles à sucre, 159– 60; and Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 2:282 (for twenty years on Caradeaux plantation); Debien, Esclaves aux Antilles, 140 (for times to maturity). JBC to ELF, 15 January 1775 (replanting thresholds);

Fig. 3. Layout of a model sugar plantation (1799), consisting of sixteen cane plots, marked in Roman numerals. The three sections on the bottom show, from left to right: subsistence crops; plantation buildings, including two columns of ten slaves’ barracks; and more subsistence crops. Source: Avalle, Tableau comparatif des productions des colonies françaises aux Antilles. Photograph: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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Cane-growing on the Ferronnays plantation followed the basic techniques and patterns employed in Saint-Domingue and elsewhere, but Corbier père styled himself an enlightened agronomist who followed the principles of experimentation and observation set forth by Francis Bacon in his Novum Organum (1620). “One must avoid both stubbornness and general principles, one must study nature and follow her,” he declared. Corbier distinguished his own methods from a host of prejudices and thoughtless routines prevalent on the Cul de Sac plain and in the Northern Province, where the marquis de la Ferronnays himself had learned sugar cultivation. Although an absentee owner, the marquis took an informed interest in the day-to-day operations of his plantation. In Paris, he compared notes with fellow absentee owners, confronting the Corbiers when yields seemed low on his own land; he asked associates to drop in at Cul de Sac to relay their impressions; and Corbier’s letters are replete with details that echo Ferronnays’ persistent inquiries about agricultural technique.12 Agricultural improvement meant fi rst of all revisiting planting and fertilizing techniques. Although all planters sought to stagger their harvests in the manner described above, they nevertheless tended to time their plantings so that harvest fell within the primeur, the dry season between January and July; for his part, Corbier broke with this practice, observing that there were “no bad seasons” on the Cul de Sac plain. That plantations there could continue into several ratoons was a sign of residual force that had long since disappeared in places like Barbados. Nevertheless, planters in Saint-Domingue widely adopted preventative measures like cane holing (rigolage), in which field laborers constructed an alternating series of trenches and ridges; cane stalks were planted in the trenches, which could be fi lled in by manuring, while the ridges helped prevent soil runoff and provided some degree of protection to young shoots against drying winds. Cane holing, which entailed cutting ever-deeper trenches, was widely regarded as the most difficult form of plantation work, and some despairing slaves subverted their masters’ plans by uprooting canes. Corbier himself experimented with the newly introduced practice of digging the trenches perpendicular to the flow of irrigation water—a further anti-erosion measure—but after concluding that this technique was a harmful bit of agronomic vogue, reverted to the previous method of cane

and 1 December 1776 (slaves in fields). For a general discussion of the division into plots, Watts, West Indies, 384– 86. 12. JBC to ELF, 22 November 1774 (“study nature”). For comparisons, JBC to ELF, 21 December 1775 and 12 February 1778; and PJC to ELF, 15 October 1787.

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holing. Similarly, the introduction of the plow was controversial wherever it was contemplated for sugarcane cultivation, because it entailed a radical departure from fi xed routines involving the hoe. Some believed quite plausibly that it provided only a temporary boost while destroying the soil and making it more susceptible to erosion. Later in the 1780s, once he began to observe declining fertility on Cul de Sac, Corbier fi ls conducted his own experiments and found the technique worthwhile; the degree to which he actually adopted it is unknown, but it appears that no great changes were made.13 Thus, the planters of Saint-Domingue did not rely exclusively on the natural fertility of their great sugar-growing plains, and drew lessons from the declining productivity on longer-cultivated islands like Barbados and Antigua. All over Saint-Domingue, the labor intensity of sugar cultivation had begun to increase markedly by the 1770s, a sure sign of weakening fertility. Closer to home, Corbier struggled routinely with disappointing yields on Grande Rivière, the plantation situated near Léogane that was brought to Ferronnays by his marriage with Marie-Elisabeth Thimothée Binau. Against the looming threat of soil exhaustion, bone meal was an effective and long-acting replacement for depleted phosphates, but after a trial on Cul de Sac it was judged too expensive for use on Ferronnays’ land. Animal dung from beasts of burden (mainly mules) was a ready solution, but in short supply; carting and distribution further imposed on field hands’ time. Seeds in mule droppings spread noxious plants such as dogweed, and burning dung to kill the seeds took work and fuel and in any case was only partly effective. Later, because of his dissatisfaction with the effects of manuring, Corbier fils began to lay terreau, a compost of putrefied animal (and possibly human) excrement mixed with soil, into cane holes. While neighbors on less fertile lands might have needed a fillip to soil productivity, some lacked the manpower to put such measures into place and so suffered declining yields. Ferronnays generally fertilized only marginal lands in order to bring them into profitable cultivation—a testament to the superior fertility of the Cul de Sac plain (figs. 4, 5), but also to the high costs that easily rendered fertilization techniques uneconomic.14

13. JBC to ELF, 22 November 1774 (primeur). A survey of JBC’s letters shows that he was, indeed, likely to harvest and roll outside the January– July season. On cane holing, Watts, West Indies, 399–406. JBC to ELF, 15 July 1775 (uprooting); and 12 September 1775 (depth and direction of trenches). On the plowing controversy, Marquis de Casaux, Essai sur l’art de cultiver la canne, 348–70; and Debien, Esclaves aux Antilles, 165– 66. 14. Planters were aware of soil exhaustion in other places. See Affiches américaines, 8 January 1766. For trends in labor-intensiveness and the susceptibility of this type of soil to

Fig. 4. Cadastral map of the Cul de Sac plain in 1780 by Charles François Hesse showing plantations labeled with owners’ names. Photograph: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Fig. 5. Charles François Hesse’s map of the Cul de Sac plain in 1780 (detail of fig. 4). The Ferron de la Ferronnays property, near the town of Croix des Bouquets, is shown, surrounded by fellow aristocrats: the comtes de Noailles and d’Argout, and the marquis de Caradeux, Fleuriau, Rocheblanche, and Vaudreuil. Photograph: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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The alluvial plain of Cul de Sac had deep, fertile, and light soil that was perfect for sugar cultivation, but as in other parts of Saint-Domingue, water—either too much or too little of it—was a problem. Heavy rains could wash away new plantings in a flash, and prolonged droughts, beyond the six months of predicted dryness in Saint-Domingue, worked their predictable evils. Without a steady supply, water-powered sugar mills ceased to turn. In the face of these challenges, the French colonial administration, working closely with private entrepreneurs, helped to transform the Cul de Sac plain into a deeply ramified network of reservoirs, sluice gates, and irrigation ditches, traces of which remain to this day. They did so by imposing collective action on planters. The Governor General, the colonial Intendant, and the President of the Port-au-Prince High Council (Conseil Supérieur)—a local governing body—all sat on water commissions that exercised the power of taxation in order to fi nance this infrastructure, and planters also had to contribute slave labor to the attendant projects. In the space of thirty-six months from 1774 to 1777, Ferronnays paid 25,000l.c. in such assessments, the cost of about fi fteen slaves at current prices. The power of taxation that these syndicates enjoyed was fully backed by the law: in 1779, Corbier was called on by four armed, mounted police officers (marechausée) and two bailiffs, who ordered him to pay 30,000l.c. or face the seizure of slaves and mules. This sum was Ferronnays’ share of a 1.7-million-l.c. project, for which a syndicate with fi fty-six other planters had been formed. In exchange for this heavy burden of taxation—well above, for instance, the trivial amounts paid in municipal taxes—planters benefited from an irrigation system said by one observer to be the “school for the rest of the colony.” The works completed on the Cul de Sac plain in the 1770s and 1780s cost approximately 3 million livres. The system attached to Grande Rivière, the river that served the Ferronnays plantation on Cul de Sac (not to be confused with the Léogane plantation of the same name), could irrigate 7,988 carreaux of land spread over fi fty-eight sugar plantations. In total, by the estimation of Moreau de Saint-Méry—a Martiniquan jurist and the eighteenth century’s great chronicler of the French Antilles—irrigation works installed on the Cul de Sac plain irrigated 13,000 carreaux of arable land. Planters on the island waited with bated breath for the announcement of the next “distribution,” which would dictate the extent and timing of their water allotment.15 exhaustion, Watts, West Indies, 320–24 and 397. On fertilization, PJC to ELF, 20 December 1784 (fertilization); and on exhaustion JBC to ELF, 12 September 1775, and PJC to ELF 25 July 1787. 15. PJC to ELF, 22 November 1788 (bailiffs). On costs, Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description,

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Viewers of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, set in 1920s Los Angeles, will fi nd a useful primer on the mix of official corruption and violent confl ict governing the provision of water on the Cul de Sac plain. Ensuring that projects reached one’s plantation and that water distributions were adequate meant the difference between fabulously profitable and worthless land investments. On the one hand, these were matters of intensely local politics, where powerful resident planters, themselves often current or former royal officials, outmaneuvered mere attorneys, who felt “too humiliated to assert their rights” in front of the local water commission or in the general assembly of planters. In 1780, Corbier became the syndic of the water commission for Grand-Rivière so that he could exercise more influence on his employer’s behalf—another instance of the value to Ferronnays of Corbier’s extended apprenticeship in France.16 Faced with all these confl icts, harassed local officials were in a nearly constant state of reforming the water commissions appointed by local assemblies in order to placate furious syndicate members. On the other hand, the planter class as a whole believed itself in thrall to the entrepreneurs, often from Paris, who led these projects. Moreau de Saint-Méry described a long succession of entrepreneurs who took money from water syndicates without meeting promised goals. Vague accusations of fraud were natural given the princely sums involved—Corbier spoke of a conspiracy between the commissioners and the entrepreneurs—but planters were also to blame for delays that dogged these projects. Whether out of protest, chicanery, or simple inability to pay, planters often withheld the assessments of money or slave labor they owed. For the upright Corbier, this ongoing “state of war” perfectly reflected the “misplaced self-interest that guides everything” in Saint-Domingue.17 The “state of war” over water was equally widespread outside official channels. The water that turned an individual planter’s mill after it traveled the length of an expensively and elaborately constructed aqueduct often belonged to a neighboring planter. Neighbors had every incentive to cooperate, since plantations located far from the reservoir had to fi nd a route for their water to reach its fi nal destination; allowing it to run along a neighbor’s aqueduct and over a mill was therefore a mutually beneficial compromise. At the same time, neighbors took turns ruthlessly 2:276–77 (costs), 281– 83 (surface irrigated), 283 (“school” quote by hydrographer Verret). 16. On the politics of water distribution, ibid., 2:284. See also JBC to ELF, 2 February 1775; 10 April 1778; and 20 September 1788 (“humiliated”). For JBC as syndic, 28 April 1780. 17. JBC to ELF, 22 November 1779 (assessments); 17 August 1776 (“state of war”); and 6 July 1780 (“self-interest”).

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pressing their advantages against one another in these negotiations, creating a pervasive air of mistrust. The backdrop to corrupt local politics and sharp negotiations between neighbors was the pervasive fact of water stealing. Planters or managers sent out slaves at night to open up sluice gates, thereby diverting water to thirsty crops. Some planters defended themselves with the claim that their slaves were working on their own behalf, to which Corbier dryly responded, “They wouldn’t still be nègres nor even slaves [esclaves] if by their own initiative they worked for the good of their masters.” But as more land fell into cane cultivation and irrigation needs increased, water was diverted from the slaves’ garden plots, and so it became “impossible to prevent” slaves from appropriating water for their own use, mainly in nightly forays; this situation gave color to the planters’ fabrications.18 An atmosphere of lawlessness and vigilantism developed, with planters sending out gangs of slaves to smash other planters’ water basins and dikes so as to prevent the hoarding of water. Governor Vallière reported groups of fi fteen to twenty vandals, as well as nightly “detachments” at the river, the location of irrigation sluice gates, where fights erupted among the white employees sent to mind their employers’ interests. Corbier regularly sent his employees to steal water, and relied on one particularly violent commander, paying him bonuses for the use of his fists to protect the water that kept Ferronnays’ cane watered and mill turning. When there was no water available, animal traction powered the mill; the extra food and time off for recovery that mules required showed up as yet another expense on Corbier’s books.19 Beyond the spectacle of hypocrisy in the cold heart of a provincial lawyer, Corbier’s reaction to the water war reflects the colliding ethical worlds of Saint-Domingue. The “misplaced self-interest” to which Corbier alluded tacitly evokes its opposite, the properly understood self-interest that was the subject of so much eighteenth-century economic and ethical thought. Business could be viewed as something better than a Machiavellian zero-sum game if short-term gains were renounced in favor of honest trading and productive investments beneficial to all players. Cooperative

18. For the use of “war” to describe struggles over water: JBC to ELF, 4 May 1775 and 17 August 1776. For negotiations, JBC to ELF, 8 September 1774, 4 April 1776, and 12 February 1778; and PJC to ELF, 20 December 1787 and 1 November 1788. For an especially egregious example of bad-faith negotiations, JBC to ELF, 12 September 1775. JBC to ELF, 20 February 1774 (“initiative”); and 20 November 1779 (“impossible”). 19. JBC to ELF, 19 August 1777 and 10 April 1778 (water-stealing missions); 8 September 1774 (destruction); and 4 May 1775 and 4 May 1777 (overwork of mules).

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ventures like the water syndicates on the Cul de Sac plain exemplified this social ethic in action, and Corbier’s criticism of free-riding planters shows that the norms of legality and cooperation prevalent in continental Europe were spreading into former buccaneer strongholds such as SaintDomingue. For thinkers like Adam Smith, “order and good government” were prerequisites for widespread prosperity, but Corbier’s apologia for water theft gave a glimpse of Thomas Hobbes’ state of nature beneath the surface of progress: “If my property is not respected I don’t have to respect that of others, this maxim is the foundation of laws  .  .  . it is the right of war.” The reaction on the Cul de Sac plain to the dearth of water (or merely the uncertainty surrounding its supply) exposed the underpinnings of a society that regularly resorted to overt violence to regulate its labor force.20 The French colonial administration’s attempts to regulate corruption in Saint-Domingue had wider political implications. A dim view of Creole business practice lay at the root of a royal decree, published in December of 1784, that imposed strict new requirements on attorneys. Henceforth, they were required to keep a daily journal of all plantation work; minute records of the slave population, including births, deaths, and illnesses; and a log of all planting, harvesting, and refi ning, as well as a ledger of all sales and employment contracts. Copies of many of these records were to be kept at a neighboring plantation specializing in the same crop—presumably so their guardian could more easily detect fraud. Moreover, attorneys were allowed to work for more than two different planters only by the consent of all their absentee employers. The decree also mandated several measures, to be discussed in the next chapter, for the improved treatment of slaves. The attorney addressed by the 1784 decree was sloppy, distracted by the pursuit of gain, prone to encourage and then exploit his employer’s ignorance, and sometimes cruel. “I know people you respect,” Corbier wrote to the marquis de la Ferronnays, “who would have been quite honest in France but who come here and make the most overt display of bad faith.”21 Although not all attorneys were Creoles, the crown was targeting for

20. For a useful history of institution building in Saint-Domingue, McClellan, Colonialism and Science, pt. 3. JBC to ELF, 17 August 1777 (“right of war,” emphasis added). On reconfigured notions of self-interest, Hirschman, Passions and the Interests. On order, Smith, Wealth of Nations, bk. 3, chap. 3, p. 426 in cited volume. 21. JBC to ELF, 19 August 1776 (“bad faith”). Ferronnays’ political attitudes are discussed briefly in chapter 3. For text of 1784 decree: Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions, 6:655– 67.

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strict surveillance a business culture infected by loose island morals and a pattern of opposition between metropolitan and Creole interests. The decree reasserted metropolitan control in two senses. First, it set the interests of owners residing in France over that of attorneys who could come to think of the plantations they managed as their own; absentee owners sometimes never saw their property, enjoying the rarefied pleasures of Paris while their attorneys risked their health, working long hours year after year in the insalubrious climate of Saint-Domingue. Second, the decree asserted the right of the crown to dictate business practice on the island. The High Council of Cap Français took the radical step of refusing to register as law in Saint-Domingue a decree it saw as the manifestation of creeping metropolitan despotism. Eventually, it was implemented, but compliance was weak. The whole episode exposes how elite confl ict even politicized —and compromised—efforts to impose rational accounting methods on the plantation enterprise. Progress was not a matter of course in such an atmosphere.22

REFINING Historians have long appreciated that sugar production in the colonies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a precocious example of the sort of labor regimentation, heavy fi xed-capital investment, and technical innovation that would come to characterize Europe’s factory system only much later, well into the nineteenth century. In its general outlines, this description is true, and helps us to locate the signal contribution that the sugar business made to European capitalism during the early modern phase of its development. At the very same time, investments and technical change inside the plantation were far from automatic responses to opportunities and market pressures coming from the outside. In the last half of the eighteenth century, the world market for sugar was expanding rapidly; meeting this demand in the context of flat or decreasing sugar prices,

22. Examining the case of Jamaica, B. W. Higman has concluded that the inefficiencies and fraud inherent in the attorney-planter relationship are overstated. Even if managers cheated, they probably rendered more profits than most resident proprietors would have been capable of making on their account. Plantation Jamaica, 222 and 281. The weakness of compliance can be judged from the near-total absence in surviving French plantation archives of the sort of documentation called for in the 1784 decree. This situation should be contrasted to the numerous highly detailed accounts coming from West Indian plantations examined, for instance, by Roberts, Slavery and the Enlightenment, 56– 68. On opposition, Bonnet, “Seigneurs et planteurs,” 141.

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combined with the inexorably increasing cost of slaves, should have led planters to seek productivity gains by investing in improvements in cane processing. But progress on this front was oddly halting, and in the West Indies as a whole, productivity growth on sugar plantations was both weak and erratic after the fi rst decades of the eighteenth century. Before explor ing why this was the case, we turn to the process of sugar refi ning itself (fig. 6).23 Once the sugar juice, or vin, was crushed from the cane, it ran along a pipe from the rolling mill to the boiling house, where it underwent several cycles of heating, cooling, and separation that were the starting point for producing all types of sugar. Ferronnays, like the majority of planters on the Cul de Sac plain, produced muscovado sugar as opposed to the sucre terré (“clayed,” or white, sugar) that had become increasingly pervasive in the Northern Province, outstripping muscovado in value terms in Saint-Domingue by the 1760s.24 Some refi ning operations in the boiling house—fi ltration, heating, and the addition of alkalis such as lime, chalk, alum, and ox blood—were designed to rid cane juice of impurities including starch and, to a lesser extent, dirt. Once added into the cauldron, and with the assistance of heat, alkalis bonded to starches, forming a scum that was skimmed off, a process called defecation. Heating and the addition of alkalis also helped to arrest the process of fermentation, which bought time for subsequent phases of refi ning. Other aspects of the initial refi ning process—heating, cooling, and evaporation of the water in which the sugar was dissolved—were designed to separate crystallizable from uncrystallizable sugar (sirop, or molasses). Although molasses could be used to make rum, its very presence in cane juice inhibited the recovery of more desirable crystallizable sugar. Cane juice ran through several cauldrons, each with different capacities, temperatures, and cooking durations. But the variability of the number of cauldrons—between four and seven—provides one clue that the refi ning process was more art than science. Although cauldrons were arranged in a series known as the Jamaica Train, the distinct processes of sugar boiling—defecation, evaporation, and separation—took  place  in  parallel,

23. On the industrial character of sugar production, Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 46–49. On sugar prices, Tarrade, Commerce colonial, 771–72 (table). On lack of technical progress, Schwartz, introduction to Tropical Babylons, 3–4. On productivity growth, Eltis, Lewis, and Richardson, “Slave Prices, the African Slave Trade, and Productivity,” 682– 83. 24. For production figures in tons, Deerr, History of Sugar, 1:240. Stein, French Sugar Business, chap. 3 (for production processes), and p. 67 (preference for muscovado on the Cul de Sac plain).

Fig. 6. Interior of a sugar refi nery. Top: a boiling house battery for purifying cane juice. Bottom: cane juice being conveyed by a pipe from the rolling mill (building A) to the boiling house. Source: Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie (1762). Photograph: The ARTFL Project, University of Chicago.

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meaning that in a given cauldron one or more of these processes were taking place simultaneously, only with less volume and greater purity as the cane juice moved down the line. As a consequence, at each stage of the process, the continued presence of starch, molasses, or excessive amounts of water called for adjustments in temperature, cooking duration, or the addition of alkalis.25 Typically, the person in charge of the boiling process was a whiteskinned refi ner, but once a boiling house was set up and its basic routines established, the operations could be confided to an experienced overseer (économe) who had other managerial functions on the plantation. This was the case on Cul de Sac, where the head overseer, Charon, was in charge, although Corbier frequently stayed up all night to supervise when boiling operations were in full swing. Whoever was at the helm, the sugarrefi ning process consisted in a set of rules of thumb—or fi nger, the instrument used in the absence of widely available thermometers. Complaints followed when refi ners separated the sugar at the wrong temperature, or lacked fi nesse when it came to adjusting cooking recipes on the fly. Corbier contemned Charon and other white overseers’ ability as refi ners, and eventually took extraordinary steps to give Bacchus and other experienced black hands sole control—fi rst by “humiliating Charon in front of the slaves,” and then “preventing the whites to mix themselves up in any way whatsoever” with the refi ning process. Although Corbier himself did not seem particularly exercised by the issue, the reversal of habitual power relations that we see in the Ferronnayses’ boiling house was sufficiently widespread in Saint-Domingue that, later in the 1780s, technical innovations were promoted on the grounds that they would “elevate the grower and refi ner above the slave, to whom a long practice and habit have conferred the advantage.”26 Although Corbier did not permanently employ a specialized refi ner, low yields or inferior sugar could persuade him to seek outside help. In these cases, like neighboring planters he hired one of the many consultants who advertised their services by circulating memoirs on plant chem-

25. A good description of this process, from which the above was partly drawn, can be found in Stein, French Sugar Business, chap. 3. Stein cites several contemporary sources, all consulted for this discussion: Dutrône de la Couture, Précis sur le canne; Duhamel du Monceau, Art de rafi ner le sucre, and Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, 15:618–19, “Sucrerie.” See also Ducoeurjoly, Manuel des habitans de Saint- Domingue, 113–28. 26. JBC to ELF, 5 June 1776 (pouring temperature) and 26 June 1776 (disciplinary measures). Dutrône de la Couture, Précis sur le canne, 114–16 (temperature taking) and 150 (“elevate”).

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istry and refi ning techniques. When their writing was backed up by word of mouth, these refi ners or chemists were brought in temporarily to install new equipment, assess work routines, and instruct permanent personnel. But scientific expertise did not automatically trump the experience accumulated by black boiling house operatives. A certain Labarte was hired on Cul de Sac in 1777, boasting scientific credentials and successes on three neighboring plantations; nevertheless, Corbier was surprised to fi nd that his recommendations for separating sugar “worked shamefully on cane from which the blacks made perfectly fi ne sugar.” After a short interval, Labarte, who aroused the suspicion of fraud in Corbier, was let go, and the boiling house reverted to previous techniques. Between 1777 and the end of the American War of Independence in 1783, little thought and still less investment was devoted to improving refi ning operations on the Ferronnays plantation. In explaining this lapse to Monsieur Le Doux, an outside observer sent by Ferronnays, Corbier fi ls, apparently uninhibited by fi lial piety, referred to his father as a backward “old fool.”27 Once Pierre-Jacques Corbier took the helm of Cul de Sac plantation in 1783, he began to pay sustained attention to its boiling house. Equipment predating the arrival of Corbier père was beginning to wear down, while cramped quarters precluded any meaningful expansion of capacity. A leaky roof let in rain during heavy downpours, spoiling batches of sugar; inadequate ventilation led to the contamination of sugar by blowing ash, and occasionally even made it difficult for workers to see what they were doing though the smoke; and once again, Ferronnays was contemplating shifting production from muscovado to clayed sugar. In France, official attention was focused on improving sugar production techniques: Paul Belin de Villeneuve was issued letters of nobility in 1777 for his contributions to boiling-house technology, and he continued to work in Saint-Domingue; chemist Jacques-François Dutrône de la Couture received support in the 1780s from Secretary of the Navy de Castries and the French Royal Academy of Sciences. All of this encouraged a certain fashion for technical improvement among Ferronnays’ neighbors on the Cul de Sac plain, who invited these celebrated chemists—or their imitators—to their plantations to install new systems. Although Dutrône sold his methods as a way of de-skilling black operatives and setting them back in their place beneath

27. Would-be master refi ners also advertised locally. See, e.g., Affiches américaines, 10 July 1781. JBC to ELF, 8 November 1777 (“shamefully”). Le Doux (PaP) to ELF (Paris), 5 October 1787 (“fool”).

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white refi ners, Corbier fi ls gave no hint of such motivations; to the contrary, he believed, for instance, that adopting Antoine Baumé’s hydrometer, a device which made it possible to determine accurately the amount of alkali needed for defecation, would help him do without paid white expertise in the boiling house. Within the plantation, the quest for labor selfsufficiency eclipsed the racial politics of the royal administration.28 Despite an efflorescence of new boiling techniques and equipment in the 1780s, Ferronnays remained indecisive. From a certain standpoint, the decision should have been an easy one: simplifying boiling operations to the greatest possible extent helped planters avoid more onerous expenditures: “It is certain that the more slaves there are on a habitation the more land and supplies you need to feed them,” Corbier fi ls wrote, “and as a consequence less cane and above all else less water for irrigation.” The message was clear: labor savings freed up other resources, but arriving at this point of view proved difficult for Ferronnays, who constantly blanched at the costs of the work stoppage—three months at a minimum—that building a new boiling house would require. Apart from his reluctance to halt normal routines and sink money into new operations, the choice of technique he should adopt was far from obvious. Ferronnays’ earlier experience with Labarte had been an unhappy one, and quackery of one sort or another was rife in the get-rich-quick atmosphere of Saint-Domingue. Miracle elixirs and amazing technical discoveries were advertised weekly in the local newspaper, the Affiches américaines; absurd proposals were routinely sent to the Governor’s attention, including a fanciful description of a mill, powered by a single human, which promised to deliver the same crushing capacity as one driven by several mules or a waterwheel.29 Ferronnays hesitated between rival systems developed by Dutrône and Belin, which both men were busy installing on other plantations on the Cul de Sac plain and elsewhere in Saint-Domingue. Dutrône’s system was by far the more radical, reducing the number of boiling cauldrons and letting the cane juice sit for several hours to cool in a basin after the fi rst phase of boiling was complete. The principle behind Dutrône’s system was to more clearly distinguish the three processes that went into sugar 28. PJC to ELF, 22 September 1787. PJC refers to the hydrometer as a vesoumetre. 29. PJC to ELF, 15 October 1787 (“water for irrigation”). This opinion followed a lengthy discussion between PJC and Paul Belin de Villeneuve. On governors’ attention, AN, COL C9A 143, 1772, Mémoire by Peynot, Creole inhabitant of Léogane. For official concern about charlatanism in the Affiches and a proposal by August François de Neufchâteau in favor of censorship, AN, COL C9A 156 (19 August 1785).

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boiling in order to administer each of them more precisely and economically. Dutrône claimed his system required eight to ten fewer hands in the boiling house; in addition, his method saved heating fuel as well as managerial effort—no more all-night stints in the boiling house for the refi ner—all the while producing muscovado sugar that was closer in purity to clayed sugar. The attraction of Dutrône’s system was that producers could count on a product that was more valuable and marketable than ordinary muscovado sugar, but that did not require the added processing costs of clayed sugar. The downside was that it was quite expensive to install and did not tolerate the sort of imprecision for which the old system, with its built-in redundancy of processes, was built. Like Dutrône, Belin recommended copper cauldrons, which conducted heat better and were less prone to cracking under thermal stress than the ones in use, which were made of iron; he also insisted on a more precise application of alkalis and temperature measurement at all stages of the boiling process. In contrast to Dutrône, Belin emphasized the size and shape of the boiling cauldrons; a more commodious construction and layout of the house; and shorter cooking times at the end of the boiling process. Belin’s system was more easily adopted, because it did not rely on a wholesale reorganization of the sugar-refi ning process.30 A number of prominent neighbors, among them Vaudreuil and Caradeux, hired Dutrône to set up his new system. Planters like Ferronnays and Digneron preferred to bide their time, observing results from afar. Corbier reported delays, mistakes, and “enormous losses” amounting to a full years’ revenue: “We’re lucky that there are others who are sufficiently ambitious to sacrifice a part of their profits to conduct these experiments.” Given these setbacks, Vaudreuil reverted to the old method, but Caradeux persisted. The uncertainty over why Dutrône’s work fared better in some places than others is in itself telling; absent any clear superiority, any number of local factors could tip the scales in favor of alternatives, including the alternative of doing nothing. This was especially the case when skilled refi ners achieved good results using existing techniques. We know from comments by Corbier fi ls that the quality of workmanship and materials mattered, as did the scale of production necessary to make newer techniques profitable. Variations in soil could result in vastly different cane juice, and it seems likely that Caradeux’s land—widely celebrated for 30. Dutrône de la Couture, Précis sur le canne, xiv–xv, 109, 153–58, and plate 6. Belin de Villeneuve, Mémoire sur un nouvel équipage.

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its high quality—initially gave a relatively pure juice that was more susceptible to Dutrône’s method. 31 Caradeux’s sobriquet—the Cruel—also throws light on his choice of refi ning method. Brute coercion might suffice in the garden, but where conscientious artistry was required, planters encouraged their skilled workers with privileged treatment. His black sugar refi ners might well have received extra food or better lodging, but Caradeux could not restrain himself from extending the reign of terror, for which he was notorious on the Cul de Sac plain, to his skilled employees. It is reported, for instance, that he executed a black refi ner whom he accused of making “rascally sugar.” The latter was forced to dig his own grave, and as he stood waiting for the coup de grâce, some female houseguests witnessing the scene begged Caradeux to grant his victim clemency. To Caradeux’s offer, the slave replied defiantly, “You will not be Caradeux if you pardon me.” Caradeux crushed his head with a rock. Even where Caradeux did not deplete the ranks of his skilled slaves during attacks of psychotic rage, it is not difficult to imagine a short supply of trust and goodwill in such an environment; Dutrône’s goal of doing without blacks’ refi ning skills would have been both attractive and necessary for a planter like Caradeux. 32 In 1787, the pressing need for renewal fi nally eclipsed Ferronnays’ tightfistedness and uncertainty, and he opted for Belin’s plan, which offered expanded refi ning capacity, flexibility to produce either muscovado or clayed sugar, and a far less expensive and technologically risky system than that proposed by Dutrône. The option of making white sugar made it possible for Ferronnays to respond to fluctuating market conditions, including the frequent blockades that made it difficult to export muscovado sugar, but marginally easier to fi nd space for shipments of less voluminous clayed sugar. In this case, adaptability may have trumped technical efficiency. While Dutrône promised a refi ning process that required eight fewer slaves, Corbier fi ls estimated that when the extra step of sugar claying was put into place, Belin’s plan would require eight more slaves. Sixteen slaves at current prices cost between 32,000 and 48,000l.c., and when Corbier fi ls added the cost of the terra-cotta molds required for the fi nal 31. Dutrône mentions ten plantations outfitted over the course of two and a half years in Saint-Domingue: Précis sur le canne, 153. PJC to ELF, 15 January 1786 (neighbors’ installations and “we’re lucky”); and 24 May 1786 and 23 June 1786 (reversions). On Caradeux, Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, 27–28. 32. These details are recounted in Weiss, “Horrors of St. Domingo,” 770. For more on Caradeux’s reputation, Geggus, “Caradeux and Colonial Memory.”

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stage of claying the sugar, he concluded that the plantation was capable of only an incremental move toward white, or “clayed,” sugar production. Corbier’s renovations resulted in a more sanitary and efficient set of buildings that he esteemed “the most beautiful on Cul de Sac.” But Ferronnays’ choices left the basic routines of sugar refi ning intact and did not reduce the proportion of slave labor to land or capital, even with the rising price of slaves and the considerable expense their maintenance required. When clear choices were available, such as metal gears for his rolling mill, Ferronnays readily adopted them, but his basic attitude was a skeptical conservatism toward technological innovations. 33 But there were other reasons that Ferronnays stinted on capital improvements; as Corbier fi ls explained, “everything wastes away very quickly in this country, the more buildings and property you have here the more it costs each year in upkeep. If I undertook immense expenses setting up your plantation, how long would it take before you profited from them?; instead, with the plan I’ve adopted you’ll profit while the others waste their lives conducting experiments.” This pronouncement does more than echo an employer’s desire for a steady stream of short-term profits. As Corbier fi ls saw it, the productive basis of the plantation was basically ephemeral: soil became exhausted, slaves died of overwork, and buildings disintegrated. Landowners in France, by contrast, treated possessions as a form of patrimony; Étienne-Louis Ferron de la Ferronnays, for instance, memorialized the land and buildings of his estate in Livry sur Seine by commissioning a beautiful hand-painted atlas that ran to several hundred elephant folio pages, while among thousands of pages of bills, letters, and contracts, the sole surviving visual record of Cul de Sac is a single scrap of paper containing the plan for leveling a field. In this hard tropical environment that quickly ground up men, machines, and buildings, all investments had to turn a profit quickly. Slaves were expensive, and the average plantation replaced its labor force at the rate of 5 to 10 percent a year— for Ferronnays, this meant between ten and twenty slaves. Nevertheless, slaves’ exertions were an obvious source of profit, and once slaves were purchased, they could be employed in a number of ways to make good the deficiencies of land and capital assets; moreover, unlike buildings or equipment, excess slaves could be sold, and there was an active leasing market involving slaves of various skill levels. The sale of small parcels of 33. PJC to ELF, 29 June 1787 (eight more slaves); 15 August 1787 (move to clayed sugar); 20 December 1787 (new buildings); and 6 July 1784 and 20 April 1785 (metal gears).

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land depended on the presence of immediately adjacent buyers who were seeking to round out their holdings, and therefore remained a highly limited source of flexibility.34 Although the letters to Ferronnays are full of warnings not to overinvest in slaves and to maintain the labor force in balance with other factors, the plantation was not a place where labor savings per se were pursued consciously and systematically, or where productivity gains were the automatic byproduct of competition and investment in technology. As we have seen, fi rm structure and external market pressures helped to determine the division of labor and patterns of investment within the plantation, but at a certain point the need for flexibility edged out the calculation of efficiency. Making different types of sugar as the market demanded; diverting labor to repair, renew, or expand infrastructure; replanting or fertilizing fields to maintain yields; not to mention responding to any number of environmental emergencies like hurricanes, earthquakes, or drought that arose with regularity, all required a cushion of highly adaptable labor that could be mobilized without spending precious cash to hire on the open market. What from one point of view looks like technological inflexibility and a perverse emphasis on capital savings corresponded to the need for another, perhaps more essential form of flexibility. The household structure of the plantation, with the ideal of labor self-sufficiency that permeated decision-making within its walls, helped ensure weekly, seasonal, and even year-to-year adaptations on the plantation, even if it did not guarantee progress or economic rationality within the sugar industry as a whole. The sugar plantations of Old Regime Saint-Domingue did not in fact fully resemble the factory of the modern Industrial Revolution, but they were a central institution in what economic historians have termed the industrious revolution of premodern Europe—the massive outpouring of human effort that, in the absence of striking productivity gains, was the basis of economic growth in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 35 No examination of the industrious revolution that took place in SaintDomingue is complete, however, without an extended discussion of the central fact of plantation life there: slavery. In the last quarter of the eigh34. Upkeep: PJC to ELF, 15 July 1787 (“experiments”). On the weakness of net or “fi xed” capital accumulation in early modern Europe, Braudel, Wheels of Commerce, 2:243–47. For this atlas, ADSM, E 479. 35. On the lack of market adjustment in Old Regime economies and the adaptation to uncertainty, Grenier, Economie d’ancien régime, 421. For the industrious revolution—without a single mention of slavery—De Vries, Industrious Revolution, chap. 3.

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teenth century, the planters of Saint-Domingue and the slaves they owned were caught between two ideological worlds. The old patriarchal ideology assured some degree of social stability amid the violence and exploitation of plantation life, but as new planters and colonial administrators like Ferronnays and Corbier arrived, they brought with them the utilitarian ideals of the Enlightenment, which promised to reconcile the interest of planters with the humane treatment of slaves.

Chapter three

Humanity and Interest

O

n the Ferronnays plantation as elsewhere, slaves were treated as units of capital to be purchased, set to work, maintained, and occasionally sold, all according to rational managerial principles. At the same time, the family and not the fi rm served as the underlying social model for the plantation. The patriarchal authority exercised by slave owners and their managers implied a set of reciprocal duties that legitimized their unquestioned authority: slaves were obliged to work and to obey; masters were supposed to observe standards of moderation and care that assured the prosperity of the household. Indeed, contracts for the leasing out of slaves stipulated that their temporary masters must treat them “as a good father.” On the plantation, the logic of the market and the logic of the patriarchal household complemented each other, but not in entirely predictable ways. For every instance in which Jean-Baptiste Corbier evoked fatherly concern as a necessary counterweight to the incessant demands for profitability that threatened slaves’ lives and well-being, we encounter another where he asserted that cool considerations of interest could temper the violence inherent in the despotic relation of master to slave.1 In reality, planters did not aspire to intellectual coherence in the governance of their slaves; to achieve profits and a limited kind of stability within the confi nes of the plantation, they combined state-of-the-art managerial techniques that would come to characterize the industrial capitalism of the late nineteenth century with patriarchal ideology of a sort

1. See, e.g., agreement for the lease of the Léogane plantation from ELF to Valdec, which held the latter to act “as the real owner and a good father” (en vrai propriétaire et en bon père de famille), 25 July 1777, AN, T 210/2. The expression bon père de famille remains a term of art in French commercial jurisprudence to the present day.

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barely distinguishable from expressions found in Renaissance and even ancient writings on household management. In the previous chapter, we saw how the need for certain kinds of self-sufficiency and adaptability characteristic of ancient estates (latifundia) hindered regular technical progress and prevented exclusive focus on the production of marketable goods. At times the capitalist fi rm had to be managed like an extended household to assure its mere survival. Chapter 4, which treats the response on the Ferronnays plantation to the disruptions of war, explores these adaptations in more detail. In one essential way, the patriarchal vision of the plantation as a household was a grotesque falsification. The sugar plantation existed for the sake of production, and the lives of its inhabitants were systematically subordinated to that goal: each year, the typical Saint-Dominguan estate had to replace between 5 and 10 percent of its slave population because of vanishingly low birthrates and short life expectancy. Filling this demographic hole damaged profitability, while constantly integrating newly arrived captives into plantation society added another unwelcome element of instability and hence the threat of potential revolt. Moreover, although rates of absentee ownership were not as high on the Saint-Dominguan plantation as on their British counterparts in Jamaica or Barbados, in the post– Seven Years’ War era the largest properties on the great sugar plantations were increasingly ruled, as it were, by absentee fathers. Already by midcentury, an estimated three-quarters of the plantation owners on the Cul de Sac plain did not reside on their property. Attorneys had to be paid to manage these plantations, which cut into profits, and as mere delegates of their owners, they enjoyed diminished legitimacy in slaves’ eyes, further contributing to the master class’s sense of vulnerability. Neither the natural, despotic authority of the father nor the demands for efficiency imposed by world markets were entirely adequate in the peculiar conditions of the sugar islands.2 Trends that were the product of the European Enlightenment migrated across the ocean and provided the means for colonial administrators and planters to address the most glaring, destabilizing abuses. Jean-Baptiste Corbier styled himself an enlightened manager of slaves and, encouraged by Étienne-Louis Ferron de la Ferronnays, implemented reforms that, ac-

2. On accounting, which was more advanced in the British and American contexts than in the French, Roberts, Slavery and the Enlightenment, 57– 68. For absenteeism in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue, Watts, West Indies, 352–54. For Cul de Sac, Vaissière, Saint- Domingue, 300.

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cording to the formulaic expression that emerged in the 1760s, were capable of “reconciling humanity and interest.” The transformations Corbier envisioned in master-slave relations drew on what, according to widely held tenets of Enlightenment social philosophy, were two distinct but complementary desiderata of human progress: the reasoned, scientific understanding of nature and society; and the cultivation of virtuous sentiment. Reason and sentiment were thought to provide the means and the motivation for improvements in the human condition. By softening discipline and improving food and hygiene, enlightened reformers hoped to relieve demographic and economic pressures menacing the profitability and even the existence of the plantation complex. Such reforms were the logical extension of a vogue for improvement that seized progressive elites in Britain, France, and elsewhere: from industry to agriculture, government reformers, entrepreneurs, and progressive landlords sought to bring scientific understanding to bear on industrial and agricultural routines. On the Continent, improvement was discussed in learned societies, salons, and ministerial circles. In Saint-Domingue, newspapers like the Affiches américaines and the Chambers of Commerce and Agriculture, established during the Seven Years’ War, flirted with uncontroversial problems of technology and plant cultivation. These were questions not only of profit but of cultural pride. Elites in Saint-Domingue resented their reputation as rustic sadists sweating profits out of unfortunate slaves on culturally desolate outposts. They sought to participate in a transatlantic conversation with the mother country that was, inevitably, carried out in the language of Enlightenment. The discussion of the value of new techniques in the field and in the boiling house in Corbier and Ferronnays’ correspondence was one private example of this conversation, even if market and ecological conditions did not always favor their adoption. The quest for productive efficiency that animated the literature on improvement also extended to slave populations, whose characteristics could be studied with an eye toward improving work routines and minimizing suffering.3

3. For the continuity between the search for productive efficiency and reform of slaves’ conditions, Roberts, Slavery and the Enlightenment, 44–56. On “agromania,” and in particular the relation to Baconian prinicples of scientific observation and their presence in administrative circles, Bourde, Agronomie et agronomes en France. For a recent discussion of the Enlightenment and technical progress, Mokyr, Enlightened Economy. On French colonial reform efforts, Debbasch, “Marronnage,” 131; Debien, Esclaves aux Antilles, chap. 20; and Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire, 145– 60. On chambers of commerce, Tarrade, “Administration coloniale en France.” On the press, Garrigus, Before Haiti, 124–25. On cultural striving,

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A second movement, toward the sentimentalization of master-slave relations, did not amount to a reformist program so much as it signified a shift in the master class’s self-understanding. A similar transformation took place in the British West Indies, but this trend was nowhere more pronounced than in the American South, where planters began to emphasize the duties of paternal kindness toward their slaves over the prerogatives of despotic patriarchal authority. Paternalism, a form of enlightened patriarchalism, spread among Anglo-American planters with the rise of abolitionism. But when Corbier used the language of virtuous sentiment as a way of humanizing the condition of bondage for the slaves of Cul de Sac, he did so far in advance of any widespread moral criticism of slavery in France and, needless to say, in its colonies. Pillars of the slave system were capable on their own of recognizing that an irrational pursuit of short-term profits at the expense of slaves’ lives could undermine the plantation as a business enterprise; if the plantation was considered an extended household, violent despotism within its walls eroded the familial affections that were supposed to hold it together. Neither sentiment nor reason offered much concrete improvement in slaves’ lives after planters and colonial administrators began to take widespread cognizance of these problems in the 1770s and 1780s. The uptake of reform measures on the plantations of Saint-Domingue as a whole was spotty, and even where implemented, these improvements were only quiet grace notes easily drowned out by the sinister basso continuo of overwork and malnutrition. But the motifs of Enlightenment thought that guided the spirit of improvement at least provided colonial administrators, and in rare cases managers like Corbier, a framework for making the moral foundations—and deficiencies—of colonial slavery clearer to themselves.4

THE SLAVES OF CUL DE SAC The slaves who lived and worked on the Ferronnays plantation represented only the tiniest fraction of the forced immigration that brought millions

McClellan, Colonialism and Science; and Shelford, “Cultivating Knowledge.” Moreau de Saint-Méry found that chambers of agriculture “showed [themselves] not always entirely lacking in courage.” For this faint praise, Description . . . de l’isle Saint- Domingue, 1:160. 4. On paternalism as “enlightened patriarchalism,” Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 284– 96; and for the link to abolitionist pressure, Roberts, Slavery and the Enlightenment, 53–54. On the failure of reform efforts, Debien, Esclaves aux Antilles, 493– 94. David Watts is slightly more positive about outcomes: West Indies, 367. Demographic improvements seem to have been the greatest in Barbados: Roberts, Slavery and the Enlightenment, introduction.

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of Africans to the Americas. From 1701 to 1790, 613,000 captives were sold in the markets of Saint-Domingue, which represented three-quarters of the 822,000 Africans who arrived in the French Caribbean—an area that also included Martinique, Guadeloupe, some smaller islands, and the South American colony of Guiana. The Caribbean basin was not an exclusively French preserve, and over the same period 2,533,000 captives were sold into the hands of English, Dutch, and Spanish masters. Taken as a whole, 4,524,000 slaves were purchased by Europeans from African coastal traders in these decades; 13 percent of them were destined to perish by violence, illness, and suicide during their Atlantic crossing, so that 3,918,000 Africans arrived in American ports over these ninety years. During the eighteenth century, nearly as many Africans died on their way to the Americas as arrived to work on the plantations of French Saint-Domingue. If they survived the crossing, between one-third and one-half of new arrivals died in their fi rst three years on the plantation.5 The size and structure of the population on the Ferronnays plantation typified not only surrounding estates on the Cul de Sac plain but the sugar plantations in the whole of Saint-Domingue. Norms on this, the western side of the island of Hispaniola, resembled those of the great sugar-producing islands all over the Antilles, where planter elites were consolidating their hold over steadily growing units of production. With 242 slaves in 1789—the only year for which a detailed occupational census exists—the Ferronnays estate lay between the averages attained in the 1790s for plantations in the Northern and Western Provinces, 215 and 251, respectively, and close to norms for those in early nineteenth-century Jamaica. The proportion of Creole to newly imported Africans—termed bossales—(52 percent) was a bit higher than the average for the Western Province (44 percent) in the 1780s, while the proportion of males to females, expressed as the number of males per 100 females, 130, was nearly identical to the average of 124. The distribution of tasks was virtually the same on all Antillean sugar plantations, and the division of the 187 members of the active population (out of 242 total) on the Ferronnays estate furnishes an entirely typical example of how men, women, island-born Creoles, and African-born bossales were sorted into occupational groups (tables 1, 2).6

5. Source: the Trans-Atlantic Slave Database, slavevoyages.org (figures rounded to thousands); last accessed 11 April 2016. Not taken into account is the smuggling of slaves into French colonies, alluded to by Geggus, “French Slave Trade,” 126. For mortality of the newly arrived, Debien, Esclaves aux Antilles, 343–45. 6. For these comparative figures, Geggus, “Slave Society in the Sugar Plantation Zones,”

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Table 1. Skill level and gender, 1789 Skill level

Males

Unqualified field slave

Females

1

61

Low skill

85

5

Trusted varied skill

10

10

Trusted high skill

15

0

111

76

Totals Source: AN, T 210/2.

Table 2. Skill level and ethnicity, 1789

Number in ethnic group M

% of group in unqualified or low skill task

F

M

% of group in trusted and varied skill task

F

M

% of group in trusted and high skill task

F

M

F

Creole

35

39

49

90

23

10

29

0

Arada

14

10

93

90

0

10

7

0

Congo

27

12

89

83

4

17

7

0

Nago

11

7

91

100

0

0

9

0

Source: AN, T 210/2.

Women who did not work in the hospital or in the master’s house (refered to as the Grand Caze—literally the “big house,” in the local patois) were given the general designation of field slave. Males of low skill who were classified as fi re tenders, carters’ assistants, or boiling house assistants also worked in the field, just as female field slaves also worked in the boiling house and especially the rolling mill; but their particular functions were not dignified with the term talent. Together, they did the planting, hoeing, weeding, digging, cutting, and carrying that occupied most slaves’ days from dawn to dusk, with a one- or two-hour break at midday. During the intense periods of rolling, night work in the mill and boiling house was common. In extremis, and in contravention of the Code Noir of 1685, slaves might be asked to work on Sundays, but were compensated with money. At the middle skill level, females were slightly more preva35 (table 2); Geggus, “Esclaves de la plaine du Nord,” 43–44 (tables 1 and 1b); and Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 13 (table 1).

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lent than males in relation to their overall numbers. These were slaves of varied though not exceptionally high skill levels in whom Corbier confided the care of persons and things.7 Since domestic tasks were considered a deadweight loss to the sugarmaking enterprise, only seven slaves worked in the Grand Caze. (In comparison to attorneys, Creole and resident French planters kept more slaves around them as markers of their status.) In the hospital, almost exclusively female attendants medicated and fed sick slaves according to a surgeon’s orders. In the fields, senior cart drivers tried to avoid accidents and breakdowns that cost money and time. At the top of the hierarchy sat the commanders—usually two—who supervised field slaves’ work and meted out punishments; the refi ners, such as Bacchus, whose attention and skill were so essential to the overall quality and quantity of sugar sent back to France; and the masons, carpenters, and coopers—often also doubling as blacksmiths—who maintained the physical infrastructure so essential to efficiency and security. The superior shelter, clothing, and food that trusted slaves enjoyed helped to preserve planters’ investments in their skills, and also distinguished them from the common run of field slaves. Planters preferred to rely on the skills of a few trusted servants than to pay for expensive white labor on the open market; their indispensability to the smooth functioning of the plantation was reflected in their comparatively higher valuation on inventories.8 Privileges and responsibilities were linked to slaves’ origins. Male Creoles occupied the summit of the skill hierarchy, although their female counterparts did not have any advantage over bossales in securing one of the thirty-six positions of trust on the plantation. What is perhaps more surprising is the role of slaves of Congo origin. Corbier constantly complained about their fragility, reporting that between two-thirds and three-quarters died in their fi rst years: “The Congos abandon themselves to despair and allow themselves to perish.” Nevertheless, the ethnic composition of bossales on the Ferronnays plantation mirrored almost exactly slave imports to Saint-Domingue as a whole between 1781 and 1790: Congolese (33 percent of imports to Saint-Domingue) came from Central Africa, while Nago (15 percent) and Arada (20 percent) were both taken 7. On night work, Bonnet, “Investissement colonial au XVIIIe siècle,” 264. 8. For similar labor hierarchies in Saint-Domingue, Gautier, Soeurs de solitude, 173– 88; Bonnet, “Organisation du travail servile”; Roberts, Slavery and the Enlightenment, 211–19, the latter with an emphasis on the similarity of work performed by women and men of low and varied skill. JBC to ELF, 1 December 1776 (Sunday pay); and PJC to ELF, 24 February 1784 (cart drivers).

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from the Bight of Benin. Given their prevalence in the population and the tendency of slaves of similar origin to stick together, one can speculate that by imparting skills or passing along positive reports to commanders, Congo females helped to pave the way for the promotion of their countrywomen to positions of trust. The possibility that compatriots who were more likely to share a language helped one another is supported by the experience of the six “Thiamba” or Chamba slaves from the Bight of Benin. Fully half the members of this small minority held positions of responsibility on the Ferronnays estate, whereas smaller minorities, splintered into nine separate ethnic groups, worked exclusively as field slaves. Parenthood, marriage, and fictive ties of kinship probably influenced how special tasks and therefore privileges were distributed. Although planters manifested very limited curiosity about the subject, the means by which slaves strengthened a social fabric strained by premature death and a steady stream of newcomers unquestionably contributed to the internal hierarchy of plantation society. For planters, the criteria by which this hierarchy was established were probably less important than the simple fact of its existence, since in addition to fi xing the division of labor, this structure also distributed and reinforced the masters’ authority. It was this authority that Corbier, a newcomer to Saint-Domingue in 1774, sought to assert but also to modify through enlightened management.9

AUTHORITY AND DISCIPLINE If Étienne-Louis Ferron de la Ferronnays’ chosen delegate, Jean-Baptiste Corbier, felt any sense of cultural or moral disorientation upon his arrival in Saint-Domingue, it must have dissipated by the time he began to write to Ferronnays a month or two later, in February of 1774. In these fi rst letters, Corbier discusses the problem of authority—his own and that of his

9. On Congos, JBC to ELF, 21 June 1774; 22 November 1774; 12 August 1775; 4 January 1776; 22 November 1779; and 8 December 1779 (“perish”). On origins: comparison of ELF figures with Curtin, Atlantic Slave Trade, 191– 95, tables 5–7. Much of Curtin’s data on SaintDomingue is culled from plantation surveys conducted by Debien. The statistics available on the Atlantic Slave Trade Database are not granular enough for the purposes of this discussion, as they provide only general regional origins of embarkation. Geggus demonstrates that sugar planters commanded preferential treatment in Saint-Domingue slave markets, but this does not seem to have been ELF’s experience: “French Slave Trade,” 128–29. The correlation coefficient for the adult population between age and skill level is positive but weak: .149. On the cohesion in America of slaves of similar African origin and kinship, Sweet, “Defying Social Death,” 258–59. For family, skills, and the problem of documenting the intimate life of slaves, Roberts, Slavery and the Enlightenment, 251– 62.

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employer—over two slave populations, one on the newly purchased Cul de Sac plantation and the other on Grande Rivière. Since Corbier was generally so voluble in his letters to Ferronnays, the lack of any reflection on the strangeness of a society organized around forced labor is in itself significant. It is possible that Corbier was inured in advance by widespread knowledge in France of conditions in the West Indies. Perhaps twenty-two years as the Ferron de la Ferronnayses’ agent, negotiating with the miners, foundry workers, and, above all else, peasants who produced wealth for the family, made social hierarchy and economic exploitation appear all the more natural. Defenders of slavery would later argue that but for the question of juridical status, slaves on the Antillean sugar plantations were not really worse off—perhaps even better off—than peasants in France, who “line the roads and highways trying in vain to excite our commiseration.” The argument may seem tendentious and self-serving, but the pervasive reality on the French countryside was one of grinding poverty, punctuated by deadly subsistence crises that only began to relent in the mid-eighteenth century. Well into the nineteenth century, French urbanites continued to regard the peasantry—ill-fed, short, non-Frenchspeaking, often disfigured by disease, and practicing bizarre, probably immoral customs—as something of an alien race in their midst. The slaves of Saint-Domingue could be viewed as just another miserable agricultural proletariat whose existence was in the nature of things, even in a wealthy, advanced society.10 Corbier’s arrival unsettled established lines of authority on the plantation as he imposed a new regime on his employer’s behalf. The slaves on Grande Rivière, which Ferronnays controlled by dint of his marriage in 1772 to Marie-Elisabeth Thimothée Binau, “worked with a laziness that would make you shudder,” observed Corbier. “They say that they have to obey only her because they belong to her, not to you, and it is she who should appoint the attorney.” Meanwhile, on Cul de Sac, the slaves had been “spoiled” by Ferronnays’ predecessors. Corbier’s appointment of new overseers, Trominqui and Charon, produced a rude shock in both places.

10. Corbier left Nantes in November of 1773, which would put him in Saint-Domingue in December or January. ADLA, Passagers embarqués de France, en Nantes (1764– 91), fols. 76–78. On slaves and peasants, Malouet, Mémoire sur l’esclavage des nègres, 25–31, quote on 26. For a discussion, including the citation to Malouet, Oudin-Bastide and Steiner, Calcul et morale, 85– 87. Olwen Hufton estimates that 20 percent of the rural population in France was indigent, while for the country as a whole as many as 39 percent were poor or vulnerable: Poor in Eighteenth- Century France, 11–24. For views on the peasantry, including literary sources, Zeldin, Histoire des passions françaises, 1:161– 64.

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Charon, “a big, strapping peasant with no education and some intelligence,” drove slaves to despair by moving too quickly to redress the idleness that supposedly reigned on the Cul de Sac plantation. At fi rst, demoralized slaves showed their displeasure in classic subaltern fashion by “raising their hoes no higher than six inches off the ground.” But soon, passive resistance turned active. “One day the whole gang, forty in all, led by the commanders, ran away right under Charon’s nose.” The term used here, marronnage, signified any number of types of absenteeism: rare were the all-out, long-term escapes (grand marronnage); much more common were the short-term evasions (petit marronnage) by individual slaves protesting some personal slight or simply taking a needed break from the pitiless rhythms of plantation work. Although usually punished, these short-lived fugues were expected and even tolerated to some degree. As Corbier’s son, Pierre-Jacques Auguste, later reported, “Those who escape are severely punished, [but] at other times I don’t do anything to them: they have to get out.” The manager of another plantation in Archaye, Western Province, dryly noted in his journal the absence of eighty-eight slaves for two weeks, until the figure suddenly dropped back to its normal level of two or three fugitives. The walkout from the Ferronnays plantation counted as an uncommon form of petit marronnage and was much more serious because of its collective, staged, and therefore symbolic character. To bring this walkout to an end, Ceselés, an employee of the former owner, was summoned to coax slaves and their commanders back to the Ferronnays plantation. The same commanders who had led the walkout were ordered to give the slaves 150 lashes.11 This incident was hardly the end of collective protest on the Ferronnays plantation. Two years later, another incident was triggered by the death of a field slave named Polidor, who had thrown ashes in the eyes of a female slave and then stolen bread from her. Second commander JeanBaptiste took it on his own authority to give Polidor a few lashes, and four days later this “hardened thief” was dead. A group of slaves came directly to Corbier père to complain about the excess of Polidor’s punishment. It came to light that Polidor had actually died of a brain abscess caused by a blow to the head he’d received earlier at the hands of a white man in Léogane. The commander Jean-Baptiste’s innocence in Polidor’s death was

11. JBC to ELF, 20 February 1774 (“shudder” and subsequent quotations); and PJC to ELF, 20 April 1784 (“severely punished”). The number 150 is so eye-popping that one wonders if this was the collective total of lashes infl icted on the group; 50 lashes could be fatal. For Archaye, Halgouet, “Inventaire d’un habitation à Saint-Domingue,” 242.

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a mitigating fact, but the additional two years’ familiarity between Corbier and the slaves of Cul de Sac was also instrumental in “dissipating this little cloud very easily.” Corbier’s apprenticeship as attorney had begun rather shakily two years before, with the dramatic walkout provoked by Charon’s brutality; although the slaves were made to feel the lash in the wake of this collective act of resistance, their show of force made Corbier much more sensitive to the balance of power on the Cul de Sac plantation.12 Coercion and violence were not in themselves a problem for Corbier; he really sought to eliminate the arbitrary, despotic exercise of authority: The most dangerous of all, for driving slaves, where prudence should walk hand in hand with justice, is to demand any sort of virtue from them. It is a gross error: the slave [esclave] can only have virtues relative to his master, who he cannot love; he must have the respect that fear inspires, and to obtain this sentiment one must be just and above all appear to be so. The only way to succeed is to stifle anger, even impatience; one is diminished by these faults in the eyes of a slave, who always sees the punishments doled out to him, justly or not, as the consequence of the passions of his despot.13

On the Jamaican sugar plantation he managed (fittingly named Egypt), latter-day Caligula Thomas Thistlewood personally beat his slaves and forced them to defecate into one another’s mouths and then wire the victim’s mouth shut. Nearer by, on the Cul de Sac plain, Caradeux the Cruel and his assembled guests watched, sipping drinks while sheltered from the midday sun on the porch of the Grand Caze, as slaves who had been buried up to their necks had their exposed heads eaten by fl ies. Thistlewood and Caradeux were extreme cases, but these and a thousand other examples of sadism on West Indian plantations furnished proof of what Charles Secondat de Montesquieu (1689–1755) and Jean Bodin (1530–1596), two precocious and isolated opponents of slavery, argued: the exercise of despotic authority was morally harmful for masters, because it provided an outlet for, and hence amplified, natural but otherwise repressed impulses to cruelty. The master “contracts all sorts of bad habits from his slaves, because he imperceptibly grows accustomed to failing in all the moral virtues, because he grows proud, curt, harsh, angry and cruel.” Montesquieu also argued that 12. On Polidor, including quotations: JBC to ELF, 26 December 1776. 13. JBC to ELF, 17 August 1774.

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the sort of despotism exercised by masters was an inferior way to govern, because the slave, animated only by fear, “can do nothing from virtue.” This is probably why Corbier fi ls remarked that although he was an efficient manager of slaves, “none of them work as hard as they would if they were free.”14 Corbier père did not deny the fundamentally despotic relationship between master and slave, but sought to mitigate its unprofitable side effects by convincing one of his white drivers, Charon, to become “master of his passions.” Although Corbier admired Charon’s greed and enormous appetite for work, the latter could not reasonably insist that slaves share these passions. Prudence meant adjusting demands to physical capacities and, of equal importance, to slaves’ habits and expectations: “Slaves who have been around longer have to be led gently while the new ones require more severity even though they too require circumspection.” On the whole, Corbier judged that the slaves of Grande Rivière and Cul de Sac were “not very accustomed to the yoke,” but changing work rhythms too quickly in order to increase output “would seem to them tyrannical.”15 Commanders, overseers, and attorneys should seem like rational managers infl icting carefully calibrated punishments rather than being seen by their slaves as sadistic tyrants venting their anger: “We need to cut back on the truncheon blows, even those with the fist, and little by little the swearing. . . . Humanity must always be harmonized with interests.” Commanders were still left with a wide repertoire of punishments to administer calmly to disobedient slaves, including branding; placing an iron collar with a heavy chain attached to it around the neck; applying the nabot, an iron weight fastened to the ankle; or putting a slave in prison on the day reserved for cultivating a subsistence garden or relaxation. Privileged slaves were kept in line with the threat, “feared more than death,” of being returned to work in the fields. Narcissus was taken from the kitchen and put in the fields for a couple of days “without a single stroke of the whip.” After only two days, under the strain of the work and deprived of meat, he was sent to the hospital, where he died shortly thereafter. For slaves like Narcissus, these punishments did not lack either real physical or intense psychological violence, but their disciplinary character was 14. For planter sadism, Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire, 31; and Vaissière, SaintDomingue, 193. On Caradeux, Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, 27–28. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, bk. 15, chap. 1, p. 246. For Bodin’s views, Six livres de la république, bk. 1, chap. 5, pp. 85–110 in cited edition. PJC to ELF, 20 April 1785 (“if free”). 15. JBC to ELF, 17 August 1774 (“passions”); 22 November 1774 (“circumspection”); and 28 August 1774 (“tyrannical”).

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thought to be more systematic and impersonal. Even the use of the whip was to be regulated, limited in normal cases to fewer than ten lashes— well below the limit of fi fty imposed by governmental decree in 1784— with exceptions requiring not only Corbier’s approval but also his solemn presence as they were administered.16 Commanders were to be denied the luxury of sadistic outbursts when disfigurement and demoralization—which could provoke suicide—ate into profits. Punishment was to be considered yet another input into the production process whose costs and benefits must be analyzed critically. These ideas were perfectly in line with those of Enlightenment reformers such as Cesare Beccaria, whose Of Crimes and of Punishments (1764) urged a more rational, utilitarian approach that would minimize needless cruelty while maximizing obedience, social order, and prosperity. Before the revolution in penal ideas initiated by Beccaria, punishment was largely conceived of as a public ritual for the restoration of order. On the plantation as on the public square, the master took personal revenge for crimes against his majesty. Suffering was part of the restitution paid by the criminal; during public executions and torture sessions, the sovereign’s assembled subjects shared vicariously in the pleasure of infl icting pain. The new regime proposed by Corbier was designed specifically to draw attention away from the despotic character of slave governance on the plantation and instill the norms of self-control, regularity, and efficiency characteristic of the factory.17 The stories of tranquility, health, and ease on the plantation recounted to absentee employers should be approached with a great deal of circumspection. Managers had every incentive to make false claims, while all the evidence historians now have points to the conclusion that even where they did not vie with Thomas Thistlewood, cruelty and malnutrition were particularly rife in these situations. Read skeptically, Corbier seems to protest too much: “It is very true, Monsieur, that your plantation is run in the right way; the work goes swimmingly and the horrible sound of the whip never insults the ear.” At the same time, there are reasons to think that Corbier’s reflections on discipline were not mere rhetorical exercises.

16. JBC to ELF, 17 August 1774 (“harmonized with interests” and branding); 28 August 1774 (collar); 12 February 1776 (nabot); 26 April 1776 (“death”); 8 December 1779 (Narcissus, including quotations); and 15 January 1775 (JBC’s presence). On the threat of return to the fields, Roberts, Slavery and the Enlightenment, 233–35. 17. Beccaria, Dei delitti e delle pene, introduction, bks. 6 and 12. On the theatrical element of punishment, Foucault, Surveiller et punir, 13–17. On pleasure and debt, Nietzsche, Contribution à la généalogie de la morale, essay 1, pts. 5 and 6, pp. 172–74 in cited edition.

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In Paris, Ferronnays exchanged information about conditions on the Cul de Sac plain with his fellow absentee planters—he sometimes even sent third parties to the plantation to check up—and routinely confronted Corbier when discrepancies arose. Based on this information, Corbier had several occasions to defend his bookkeeping, cultivation methods, or negotiation acumen, but for all the emphasis placed on this issue in the letters, never the treatment of slaves. In this respect and others, Ferronnays could count Corbier as a partner in enlightened plantation management.18

THE POLICING OF SLAVES Corbier’s repeated invocations of “humanity and interest” over several years precisely echo language used within the French colonial administration in its attempt, in the wake of the Seven Years’ War, to improve conditions for slaves. This was also a movement that took hold in some of the British West Indian islands, in particular Barbados. In France, this reformist impulse culminated in a royal decree of 3 December 1784—opposed and then ignored by many if not most planters—that established new standards for the feeding, clothing, and punishment of slaves as it mandated the stricter accountability over managers discussed previously. Ferronnays, himself an advocate of enlightened despotism as “the happiest for the people,” was more absorbed by border disputes with Spain than with slave governance during his short tenure as Interim Governor. He wrote little about the subject in his official capacity. Nevertheless, Ferronnays’ tenure in the colony of Saint-Domingue coincided with the beginning of official discussions about the need to reconcile humanity and interest on the sugar plantations of the Antilles; an ambitious man eager for promotion to Governor would not have remained unaware of these currents. The colonial officials in Port-au-Prince and Cap Français, with whom Corbier regularly conversed in order to keep an eye out for his employer’s career prospects, would have been equally aware of them.19 18. On attorneys, Watts, West Indies, 352–56. JBC to ELF, 4 November 1774 (“horrible sound”). 19. For JBC’s mentions of “humanity and interest,” JBC to ELF, 17 August 1774, 12 August 1775, 25 November 1776, 12 February 1778, and 20 March 1779. For decree: Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions, 6:655– 67. On ELF and enlightened despotism, AN, T 210/3, “Observations sur l’établissement des chambres coloniales à Saint-Domingue,” n.d. On the British West Indies, Cateau, “Conservatism and Change”; and Roberts, Slavery and the Enlightenment. On the French colonial administration, Charles and Cheney, “Colonial Machine Dismantled.” There is direct evidence, in a letter to ELF from subgérant Dubreilh, that the former promulgated these views to his employees: “On the good testimony of Mr Corbier,

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Reconciling humanity and interest meant fi rst and foremost closing the demographic hole on the tropical commodity-producing colonies. Administrators concerned with contraband trade and planters stung by the rising cost of slave imports both sought a demand-side solution, one that would not preclude growth, to the insatiable appetite for new slaves. The sudden multiplication of coffee plantations in the Southern Province and in the hills surrounding the great sugar-producing plains ran up the demand, and hence prices, for new slaves in Saint-Domingue.20 Faced with these pressures, demography was therefore a persistent concern among sugar planters. Corbier sent back regular slave censuses to France, and his letters are a catalogue of deaths by misadventure, disease, the occasional suicide by earth eating, miscarriages, and childbirth. Pregnancies and births were reported carefully as blessed arrivals full of promise for future profits. Nursing mothers were given new calico-print skirts, for sanitary reasons or possibly as a prize for carrying a child to term. The edict of 1784 (title 3, art. 7) stipulated reduced work for pregnant women and nursing mothers. But half the newborn infants did not survive to working age, many of them the victims of tetanus or tropical fevers. If this were the full extent of infant or child mortality, Ferronnays could have counted himself lucky, since only about half the newborns in Old Regime France, and Europe more generally, survived to age ten. Of equal or probably greater importance were low birthrates. To encourage childbearing, the edict of December 1784 (title 3, art. 7) granted complete exemption from plantation work (liberté de savanne) for mothers of six children surviving to the age of ten. In 1789, only three of the seventy women over the age of fi fteen on the Ferronnays plantation enjoyed this prize, although we do not know what the precise standards were on the estate. In keeping with their generally superior fecundity, these three women were Creoles, as were five of the seven mothers who had given birth on the plantation the year before.21 Planters usually explained low birthrates with vague allusions to I will mainly consider how to reconcile your interests with the principles of humanity that you recommend to me.” SMJ, Dubreilh (Cul de Sac), to ELF, 9 April 1790. 20. On coffee, Garrigus, Before Haiti, 173–74 and 192; and Trouillot, “Motion in the System.” 21. On Europe, Flinn, European Demographic System, 17. Conditions on the Ferronnays plantation are in line with observations elsewhere. In a survey conducted of the slaves in the area of Nippes (Southern Province), 47 percent of women over the age of fi fteen had no children at all, and only 2 percent had more than five surviving children. Gautier, Soeurs de solitude, 76– 81. JBC to ELF, 28 August 1774 (calico dresses); and 8 December 1779 (survival rates).

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“libertinism,” but without showing much explicit awareness of the decisive effect of health and nutrition on reproduction. And although married slaves were known to be more fecund, over the course of the eighteenth century marriage rates declined, particularly among field slaves. In the early eighteenth century, managers stopped organizing slave censuses by family groups and simply divided the population by gender: males on the left and women to the right, with livestock usually listed at the bottom in the same document. Here, religious scruples acted in a counterintuitive manner. Planters became increasingly lax about the duty to Christianize slaves as stipulated by the Code Noir (art. 2), and discouraged marriage also, because this sacrament interfered with their ability to sell off one member of a couple. Corbier, for his part, tried to explain low birthrates from the point of view of gender relations and sexual mores: Congo women are not very faithful, and the men are even less so. But among this type [espèce] the men rule absolutely. A woman only pleases a man to the extent that she will suffer him to have as many other women as he wants. They do not permit the least jealousy, and if she complains of it she is repaid with blows and her clothes are ripped; those who mend their ways are allowed to stay, the others are forced to leave the Caze. The Creoles and the women of other Guinea nations get what they can out of this situation but the Congos abandon themselves to despair.22

Corbier was aware of victimization among the slaves of Cul de Sac, and at times even seems to have taken steps to minimize it. The constant influx of newcomers from diverse cultures, thrown into the grind of overwork and deprivation, disrupted family structures that favored conscientious child rearing. Only tacitly at best did he recognize the corrosive effects of plantation society on family life, even though he sought answers to the problem of low natality. However meticulously observed much of Corbier’s writing was, he remained a member of the planter class; it would have been difficult for him to understand the egotism and violence he depicted within the slave household as a faithful reflection of the system he was paid to administer.23 Between birth and death lay, with equal inevitability, illness. Malign 22. JBC to ELF, 8 December 1779. 23. JBC to ELF, 21 December 1775 (steps to minimize victimization).

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fevers, abscesses, chest infections, venereal disease, and inflammations and other unspecified leg problems were the most common reasons that slaves missed work. Other incidents testified to the physical and psychological extremities of plantation life. Oulisou, a “poor devil” known for some time to have “suffered horribly from hallucinations,” hanged himself when the terrors of a hurricane provoked his already fevered imagination beyond recall. Famished field laborers bought cows’ blood and drank it raw, while others ate rotten food, precipitating stomach ailments, sometimes death. Some, particularly the newly arrived, took to the deadly practice of geophagia (earth eating), whose causes remain as obscure today as at the time. In Brazil, flummoxed planters put iron masks on eartheating slaves, although there is no evidence that Corbier père made use of this expedient to save Ferronnays’ investments. At times, Corbier fi ls was “touched by witnessing their deaths,” while at others he noted their passing without any emotional inflection; whatever his private feelings, his obituaries never failed to mention the nature of the loss involved: the death of an old, decrepit, or chronically ill-behaved slave was not really seen as an unmitigated evil, while that of a “good subject” was related as a setback for the plantation.24 At any given time, between 10 and 15 percent of the field slaves could be counted on to be immobilized in the hospital. Here is where humanity served planters’ interest most visibly by preventing premature death and minimizing costly absenteeism. At best, high rates of absenteeism forced planters to maintain a cushion of extra slaves; at worst, Corbier père could recount stories of planters forced to rent out their plantations or sell them entirely when the scythe of death cut down numerous slaves in one stroke. But the seemingly straightforward proposition of spending on medical care to save workdays or lives was complicated by self-interest among the healers of Saint-Domingue. As in France, credentialed doctors of medicine sought in vain to prevent less respected but more practically minded surgeons from plying their trade on plantations. These surgeons, who were paid a monthly rate to treat all the slaves on a plantation and usually sold their services to several estates simultaneously, sought to maximize their clientele while avoiding the inevitable—and probably entirely justified— accusations of chicanery and neglect. Surgeons who were paid a flat rate

24. PJC to ELF, 20 September 1788 (“hallucinations”). JBC to ELF, 22 November 1775 (blood); 12 February 1778 (rotten food); and 15 January 1775 and 12 August 1775 (geophagia). Woywodt and Kiss, “Geophagia.” PJC to ELF, 12 February 1788 (“touched,” “good subject”).

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for their services stinted on necessary drugs. After Corbier fi ls replaced one long-serving surgeon with another, who was required to live on the plantation, it was reported that in comparison with his predecessor, ten fewer slaves were routinely laid up in the hospital. If this was true, then the same output could be maintained on the plantation at a savings of 25,000l.c. in capital costs—the price of ten slaves at going rates. Finally, druggists in France vied with one another to sell, in quantity and at “insane prices,” the latest remedies for the tropical fevers, infections, and distempers that ran riot on plantations. Both Corbier père and fi ls were wary of quackery, but nonetheless repeatedly pled for remedies, which Ferronnays had personally sent from Paris. Particularly beginning in the 1770s, there was a great demand for medical care on sugar plantations, and in 1776 the French colonial administration began actually requiring hospitals on the larger sugar estates.25 Doctors, apothecaries, and surgeons all thronged to cash in on the surging demand for health care in Saint-Domingue, but there is in fact only one uncontroversial example of Enlightenment medical science providing a life-saving remedy for plantation slaves. Inoculation against smallpox consisted in placing a pustule cut from a symptomatic patient under the skin of an as-yet uninfected one. The fi rst trial vaccinations for smallpox took place in Saint-Domingue in 1745, but the practice did not become widespread until 1780. An outbreak on the Cul de Sac plain in 1778 served as a wake-up call. While inoculated slaves on the nearby Digneron and d’Argout estates remained safe, slaves on the Ferronnays plantations began to get infected and die because Corbier had not gotten around to inoculating them. After the loss of at least five slaves during this episode, the practice was regularized on the Ferronnays estate.26 Such healing as actually went on in the hospital was less a matter of state-of-the-art science than of common sense. Systematically overworked slaves were allowed the chance to rest and enjoyed an enhanced diet, even if we cannot verify Corbier’s rosiest affirmations: “We do not stint on meat, bread, biscuit, or rice in the hospital.” Nonessential but nonetheless recuperative hospital stays were regarded in much the same way as

25. On doctors, Bourdier, “Vie quotidienne et conditions sanitaires,” 401–7. On competition, McClellan, Colonialism and Science, 133. Absenteeism, JBC to ELF, 1 December 1776; PJC to ELF, 1 June 1788; and PJC to ELF, 11 August 1776 (economic consequences). JBC to ELF, 12 February 1778 (compensation); PJC to ELF, 30 April 1788 (reduction of absentees); JBC to ELF, 22 February 1775 (“prices”). 26. McClellan, Colonialism and Science, 144–45. For outbreak, JBC to ELF, 20 September 1778.

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Fig. 7. The bar (1834). The discipline of health care in a plantation hospital. Source: Jean-Baptiste Debret, Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil. Photograph: Bibliothèque mationale de France.

petit marronnage: small but perhaps necessary lapses in discipline that were tolerated up to a certain point. The nurses who dispensed food and remedies also served as the eyes and ears for managers on the lookout for malingering. Naturally, it was easier if slaves could internalize the master’s own sense of what constituted strictly necessary repose. To this end, all hospital inmates were restrained in leg stocks (referred to as “the bar” [fig. 7]) as they lay on the floor.27 The discomfort of the bar prevented all but the most needed sleep for bodies wracked by illness and fatigue; bodily constraint reminded inmates that their recovery itself was simply another form of work performed for their masters’ benefit. Shackled at the bar, slaves were better able to understand the true relationship between humanity and interest. If the movement to reconcile humanity and interest actually improved material conditions for slaves in places like the Cul de Sac plain, we need not conclude that it enhanced their quality of life. The elimination of the most ferocious and injurious punishments, better food provision, and the lengthening of life spans through medical treatment were all intended to produce bodies capable of more forced labor. Suffering was

27. JBC to ELF, 4 November 1776 (“stint”). For tolerance and punishment, JBC to ELF, 21 December 1775; and PJC to ELF, 20 September 1788. On nurses’ roles, Bourdier, “Vie quotidienne et conditions sanitaires,” 395– 96. For the bar on Cul de Sac, JBC (Angers) to ELF (Paris), 2 June 1784.

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not to be eliminated, only its gratuitous, unproductive forms. Was this Enlightenment?28 The movement to realign humanity with interest on colonial plantations resembled enlightened reform movements in continental Europe in their emphasis on efficiency. For administrators, economists, and moralists, social improvement required a reasoned appreciation of the internal workings of people and of things. Scientific knowledge made it possible to manage populations and institutions more predictably and efficiently. Reducing costly, often socially destructive impositions of force was the key to social progress, because it enabled the redirection of human effort to productive ends. Uzbek, the main character of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, whose own despotic slave society is soon to descend into chaos, experiences the following epiphany after observing at close range the workings of an enlightened and free society: “I have come to think that the most perfect government is the one which attains its purpose at least expense, so that the one which controls men in the manner best adapted to their inclinations and desires is the most perfect.”29 Ferronnays and Corbier also sought to govern their slaves at the least cost, and in this sense can be understood as having implemented enlightened reforms on the Cul de Sac plain. Anybody looking to verify the existence of an insidious Enlightenment project will certainly fi nd plenty of grist for their mill in the workings of the French or the British imperial state, including the sorts of private enterprises, like the West Indian plantations, that both governments actively encouraged throughout the eighteenth century. Here, subject populations were observed, experimented on, and controlled in view of potential—though often purely imaginary— enhancements to imperial political, military, and economic power. But it is not even necessary to quit the European continent to see how easily enlightened science and techniques of government could be perverted to purely instrumental ends. The self-styled “Enlightened despots” of Europe sought to improve agriculture by implementing the latest agronomic science; to encourage economic growth by freeing up internal markets; to favor the development of the sciences by encouraging education and the circulation of ideas; and to attract economically productive subjects to their realms by decreeing religious toleration. But if enlightened despo-

28. This insight can be found in Bourdier, “Vie quotidienne et conditions sanitaires,” 412–13. See also Roberts, Slavery and the Enlightenment, 55–56. 29. Montesquieu, Persian Letters, letter 80, p. 158 in cited edition (translation slightly modified).

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tism was supposed to be the “happiest for the people,” the record of failed eighteenth-century reform efforts showed that enlightened monarchs often encouraged prosperity only to expand available resources for taxation and conscription. This was a natural outcome of the persistence of reason of state (raison d’état) thinking, which took the state’s power and prestige as an end in itself. Real material gains for subject populations were fragile and easily reversed when—as was so often the case—sovereigns exhausted their subjects with the demands of waging war. The monarchies of continental Europe were not plantations, but the benefits of efficient governance did not automatically flow to subject populations either—even if a more scientific attitude, which included the admission that prosperity and a certain degree of happiness were essential to good government, made enlightened reforms possible. Étienne-Louis Ferron de la Ferronnays seems to have been aware of the limits of the doctrine of “humanity and interest” on the plantation. The brilliant economic recovery that followed the close of the American War of Independence in 1783 presented a set of opportunities that could not be ignored by Saint-Dominguan planters, who pushed their gangs to increase output. Corbier fi ls, now in charge following his father’s departure for the quiet of the French countryside, was relieved to fi nd that Ferronnays did not blame him for the resulting spike in mortality on the Cul de Sac plantation. No amount of rational administration could undo the underlying condition of biological fragility or the strict relationship, in a preindustrial economy, between brute physical effort and output: “I have always paid the greatest attention to the conservation of your property. The gang has never lacked for food and I have always taken the greatest care about the hospital, but the work was much harder this year.  .  .  . The revenue that this produced has considerably weakened them.”30 In fact, the doctrine of “humanity and interest” on the plantation was only superficially enlightened. It drew on rhetoric and motifs fashionable among Enlightenment philosophes but was grounded more fundamentally in the ideas and practices brought to bear on the policing of Old Regime societies. Policing, to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ear, connoted something much broader than simple repression of criminal activity. A  well-policed society ensured order and prosperity through a more thorough, rational understanding of a population and its needs; implementing this knowledge entailed constant, often punitive, interventions into daily life. It is not incidental in this connection that the subtitle of 30. PJC to ELF, 12 November 1785 (“considerably weakened”).

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the Code Noir specified “the police, the discipline and the commerce of slaves.” But like the plantation owner, the sovereign and his police apparatus reserved for themselves the defi nition of ends entirely apart from the consent and, certainly, interference of his subjects. In this sense, police represented the extension of reason-of-state thinking to domains of everyday administration—the economy, sanitation, food, population—more commonly associated with the household. On the plantation, police represented a rationalization, but certainly not the dissolution, of patriarchal, despotic authority. Even when techniques and tropes associated with this movement found their way into this world, an essential element of Enlightenment social thought was missing in the government of slaves in the late eighteenth century. At no time did planters or colonial administrators contemplate slave society as something coherent or potentially autonomous. Slaves’ happiness could only be considered a subordinate means to the end of planters’ profits; even where it was taken into account, slaves would never be invited to speak about their values or their understanding of what constituted their own well-being. Despotism and reason of state end when the needs of society are placed over those of the state; Enlightenment begins when some measure of self-direction comes to be seen as essential to social stability and to individual happiness. 31 Through the 1780s, the government of slaves remained essentially similar to what it had been in the late seventeenth century. The introduction of “humanity and interest” from the 1760s added a level of managerial refi nement in some places like the Ferronnays plantation, but did not alter the basic situation: planters’ constant short-term needs for increasing revenue easily obliterated the weaker, long-term incentives to humane treatment. Corbier père himself saw that reason was no panacea for shortsighted greed or cruelty, and called on sentiment, another aspect of Enlightenment culture, to resolve the contradictions of plantation life.

THE MELTING FEELING OF VIRTUE In 1714, Bernard Mandeville proposed that self-interest, hitherto disparaged by moralists as a vice, was sufficient to guarantee order and prosperity. But pleasure and profit-taking should not be immediate: consideration for others’ needs—principally their vanity—required the reasoned

31. On police versus Enlightenment, Raeff, Well- Ordered Police State, chap. 1, pp. 50–54 and 23 (on colonial origins of policing). On Enlightenment as autonomy, Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 356–58.

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direction of one’s own passions toward enjoyment. The sardonic realism of Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees: Private Vices, Publick Benefits, which argued that virtue was nothing other than self-interested but socially useful hypocrisy, fascinated and scandalized Enlightenment-era intellectuals. The Enlightenment has conventionally been defi ned as the age of reason, but there was no shortage of anxious discussion of reason’s insufficiency and antisocial effects; when it was not guided by the proper passions, reason could easily lead to self-absorption, greed, and cruelty. Writers as disparate in their views as Adam Smith, David Hume, Montesquieu, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau all affirmed the importance of reason, but wrestled with the problem of fi nding reliable counterweights, such as sympathy, honor, or pity, to naked self-interest. 32 Of these thinkers, it was probably Rousseau whose work offered the culturally most significant alternative to self-interested reason during the eighteenth century: sentiment (or sensibilité). In Rousseau’s treatises, but more especially in his best-selling novel La nouvelle Héloïse, sentiment was offered up as an answer to the corrosive egotism that seemed to be engulfi ng a modern world dominated by cool considerations of interest. Through the tender, melting experience of sentiment, individuals were drawn together and called to fulfi ll mankind’s noblest duties in acts of self-sacrifice. For Rousseau, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Samuel Richardson, and other sentimental novelists of the eighteenth century, those rare individuals blessed with sensibility constituted a new sort of aristocracy. But because uncorrupted lovers of virtue could be found in all walks of life, sensibility was also viewed as profoundly democratizing. The authentic self was often uncovered during the process of reading and writing, and so letter writing came to occupy a central place in the cult of sensibility; indeed, sentimental novels were almost inevitably epistolary in form, while the language and literary conventions found in them crept into personal exchanges between members of the reading public. 33 The cult of sensibility was widespread in Europe, but it was in France 32. On the search for alternatives sparked by Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, Hundert, Enlightenment’s “Fable,” chap. 2, esp. pp. 58–59. 33. Sentiment and sensibilité are often distinguished in the scholarly literature on this subject, the former relating to the narrative strategies of sentimental literature, and the latter to a more pervasive notion of the psychological or physiological state of susceptibility. I treat them as part of the same cultural phenomenon here, because many of the psychological states attributed to sentiment in the sentimental novel, for instance, are described in JBC’s correspondence as sensibilité. In short, critics may be making distinctions that, while valid on their own terms, many eighteenth-century proponents of sensibilité did not make. On the Rousseauist cult of sentiment, Darnton, “Readers Respond to Rousseau.”

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where the rhetoric of virtue so closely associated with it took on a particular resonance. Here, the absolutist state, with its ambitious ideology and its intrusive administration, was seen as encroaching on society—and on the liberty and consciences of the individuals who composed it—in an especially insidious fashion. As against the amoral reason of state practiced by the absolutist state, the cult of virtue celebrated the morally autonomous individual who resisted the corruption of cold, utilitarian logic: “Enlightened society thought of the government as immoral, but of itself as just. Rousseau went one step further: not only was the ruling State immoral, but it also compelled society, man, to be immoral.” Modest individuals trapped between the impersonal forces of the market and the state found in the cult of sentiment and virtue a convenient language not only of social criticism but also of self-justification.34 The history of the Enlightenment and of the age of revolution has recently been retold in light of the centrality of sentiment to eighteenthcentury culture. In these accounts, sensibility is an essential guide not only for moral behavior but for understanding how the world functions. Sensibilité now takes its place, alongside reason, in accounts of Enlightenment natural science. The social sciences, including the political economy of Jean-Antoine Nicolas de Condorcet and Adam Smith, are now understood as assigning a central role to the altruistic impulses arising out of sentiment. Democratic sensibilities of the sort that made the American Revolution possible have been linked to the rise, among middle classes, of the cult of sentiment, linking together networks of individuals who cultivated democratic virtue through their correspondence. Most ambitiously, one historian has seen in the cult of sentiment, and in novel reading in particular, the origins of a moral revolution leading to modern notions of human rights—including the prohibition of torture, the promotion of religious toleration, and the abolition of slavery. In this argument, novel reading and cultural practices related to it engendered empathy for strangers, a respect for their autonomy that made cruelty and gratuitous social exclusion increasingly unthinkable for a wide segment of European society of all levels of cultural attainment.35 34. Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, 169 (“Enlightened society”). For similar themes and, in particular, on self-justification, Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue, 81– 92. 35. On natural science, social science, and revolution, see (respectively) Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility, chap. 1; Rothschild, Economic Sentiments; Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution, introduction. For the culture of sentiment and the origin of human rights, Hunt, Inventing Human Rights, chaps. 1 and 2. Hunt does discuss the abolition of

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The language of sentiment was unquestionably widespread, penetrating into the writings of royal functionaries, into the tender souls of Parisian fi nanciers, and across the ocean and into the depths of the Cul de Sac plain. But the easy adaptability of this idiom into a managerial jargon for slave drivers makes it impossible to credit the transformative powers so widely attributed to eighteenth-century sensibility. The fi ner feelings called forth by sentimental writers were easily compartmentalized by men of affairs; when sentimental bonds did not actually help to justify the hierarchies of plantation life, the sacrifices of profit they might have dictated were easily overwhelmed by considerations of self-interest. The culture of sentiment is said to have elevated feeling above cruelty and calculation, but on closer examination it seems to have been powerless precisely in those contexts it is supposed to have radically transformed. 36 With the exception of some references to the Bible, Cato, René Descartes, Saint Augustine, and Sir Isaac Newton, we do not really know much about Corbier’s intellectual culture. If he was not a reader of the sentimental novel or any of the other literature responsible for the spread of the cult of sensibility and virtue, then he seems to have absorbed the language by osmosis: “I shudder every day when I contemplate the immense interval that separates us, not because I have self-pity over my fate . . . but because I fear not being able to fulfi ll your wishes.” This bourgeois servant envisioned his connection with the nobleman Étienne-Louis in terms that transcended a simple business partnership: “The love of justice, which can only exist in conjunction with good order, must be our guide, and happiness our goal. We must force the public to think like us and not follow the desires they want to instill in us. Without this, we will fall into the ordinary class.” Jean-Baptiste and Étienne-Louis belonged to an aristocracy of virtue, no longer separated by the gulf between noble and commoner: “Everybody aspires to happiness but few actually know it: virtue alone confers the right to enjoy it.” Corbier constantly emphasized the importance of the epistolary art for the well-trained plantation manager—even more, for instance, than accounting or commercial acumen. While the son never achieved the same heights of style as the father, he learned nonethe-

slavery during the French Revolution (161– 67), but what she has to say there does not relate to the following observations on sentimental language among slave managers like Corbier. 36. Tocqueville criticizes even the original writings by authors like Rousseau and Denis Diderot as “false sensibilité.” On this subject and diffusion, Ancien régime et la révolution, bk. 1, chap. 4, p. 135 in cited edition.

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less to leaven his prose with Rousseauist tropes to enhance his credibility: “I never hide my manner of thinking: since I only have respectable ideas I expose them with the utmost frankness.”37 There is no way to know how deeply the Corbiers, père and fi ls, or their correspondent, Étienne-Louis Ferron de la Ferronnays, internalized this language. There is an inevitably performative element even in the most intimate expressions, but that father and son chose to articulate these sentiments and ideas and not others testifies, at a minimum, to their currency in situations requiring trust and sense of mutual obligation. During the French Revolution, the majority of the Ferron de la Ferronnays fortune was held in sequester by the revolutionary government of France, and the besieged plantation on the Cul de Sac plain was the last hope for a steady income for Étienne-Louis’ nephew, Pierre-Jacques François Joseph Auguste. Here once again, the language of sentiment called forth altruism and a sense of obligation between two families bound by business but separated by thousands of kilometers and the gulf of social status. Beyond and above its role in uniting families and business partners across the Atlantic, Corbier père counted on the sensibility of virtuous souls to redeem the fundamental inhumanity of plantation life. His first concern was for his son, Pierre-Jacques, who arrived in Saint-Domingue at the age of fi fteen to learn the business of plantation management. By the age of twenty-one, Corbier fils would be in charge of around three hundred slaves. Before his son’s arrival, Corbier père confided the following fears, which were perhaps a reflection of his own experience: I do not wish that my son become inhuman. If he must command slaves he must love them even knowing their faults. The happiness of these beings should not be a matter of indifference because they depend upon us absolutely. A contented gang works well, just punishments do not revolt the conscience, and the man who has enough fortitude to punish when it is called for does not recoil from doing so, and his sensibility [sensibilité] is not affected.38

Corbier saw moral hazards for his son in a place where “virtue is exiled and everything is injustice and cruelty,” and sought to protect him by “in-

37. JBC to ELF, 28 August 1774 (“I shudder”); and 15 March 1778 (“ordinary class,” emphasis in original). PJC to ELF, 30 April 1788 (“frankness”). 38. JBC to ELF, 21 December 1775. On the role of the family sentiment in the Atlantic world, with some useful strictures about its ideological role, Pearsall, Atlantic Families, chap. 1.

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delibly etching the sacred love of humanity upon his heart.” The sentimental novelist also envisioned a Manichaean division between corruption and virtue, except that the contest between them usually took place in Paris, in London, or at court, not in a slave colony. Saint-Domingue was hardly the pastoral world of Bernadin de Saint Pierre’s famous novel Paul and Virginia (1788), where masters and servants live and work together in harmony because they share a rough but dignified poverty. Instead, in the Antillean slave colonies the greed and inequalities rampant in Europe’s thriving commercial metropolises took on a particularly naked quality. In the midst of this degradation, the man of sensibility expressed pity for the downtrodden and exposed the social institutions responsible for the suffering of the poor.39 Whether it issues from the Grand Caze or the sentimental novel, the language of sensibility shows a remarkable power to reinforce the authority it appears to criticize. Julie, the heroine of Rousseau’s La nouvelle Héloïse, ultimately gives up the commoner Saint-Preux in order to marry and raise children with the aristocrat Wolmar, whom her father deems more suitable. The sacrifice to humanity demanded by the emotional logic of sensibility leads Julie to renounce her merely individual love for SaintPreux. What looks from the outside like a marriage of interest testifies in fact to the depths of Julie’s self-sacrifice, which she ultimately takes to the point of death. Given his humane love and pity for the slaves he commands, Corbier fi ls must nevertheless summon the fortitude to punish them according to the requirements of profit and order. Sensitive souls serve the common good in paradoxical ways.40 The cult of sensibility exalted the altruistic love between parents, children, and domestic servants within the bourgeois family. This closed universe was held to be a training ground, a little republic where universal love of humanity is nurtured. This vision stood in critical contrast to the lack of intimacy—marriages of interest, children raised exclusively by servants, libertinism—said to pervade the court-like atmosphere of the noble household. Jean-Baptiste frequently looked askance at precisely this aspect of Étienne-Louis’ personal life, linking the disorder within the Ferronnays household, explored in more detail in chapter 5, to the permissive, mercenary ethics of the aristocracy. The West Indian plantation, with its lack of

39. JBC to ELF, 27 December 1779 (“virtue is exiled”). De Saint Pierre, Paul et Virginie, 209–13. 40. For a discussion of La nouvelle Héloïse, including ambiguities not explored here— most notably Julie’s tragic death—see Denby, Sentimental Narrative, 107.

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marriageable women for white men and the sexual exploitation of chattel slaves within the household, made for a rather cold incubating chamber of domestic virtue; but without sensibility, Corbier feared that his son would grow into another of those “human monsters” that plantation life unfailingly produced.41 A long letter of 20 March 1779, easily the most fascinating of the nearly four hundred collected for this book, meditates at length on this problem. In this letter, Corbier asks Étienne-Louis to manumit one slave, Nicolle, the housekeeper in the Grand Caze of the Cul de Sac plantation, and to give another, Agathe, to his son, Pierre-Jacques. Corbier’s impromptu treatise on sentiment and sexuality is in some sense yet another manifestation of the need, explored throughout this book, for planters to protect the world they created in the Antilles against its inherent excesses. But this letter explores another, perhaps profounder question: What is the relationship between modern notions of human dignity, freedom, and happiness in a context where servitude is conceived of as both natural and inevitable? The request to donate Agathe comes in the context of Pierre-Jacques’ sexual coming of age and his training as a plantation manager. The father had always complained of the son’s lack of intellectualism, but life on the plantation seemed to only make things worse: “Reading and my conversation seemed to bore him and going to check on the cane fields served as pretext to talk about girls [parler fi lle] with the overseers.” Although Corbier understood the sexual needs of young men, he refused to hand out the money necessary to attract mulatto prostitutes onto the plantation. But his prudery and thrift went only so far: “I sought out means to satisfy this ardent natural need without expense or scandal.” To this end, Corbier brought an attractive young slave, the washerwoman Agathe, into the household to nurse an infant girl growing up in the Grand Caze. On occasion, he brought the child onto his porch “to observe the natural development of the black mind”; the son himself took an interest in the girl, picking her up and caressing her from time to time. Eventually, as Corbier had planned, Pierre-Jacques’ affection for the child migrated to the mother. After offering his son some money to pass along to Agathe, and thus revealing his role in the affair, Corbier slyly remarked, “I know that you have given your linen to her and I hope that it will always be perfectly white.”42

41. On bourgeois criticism of the aristocratic household, Habermas, Structural Transformation, 44. JBC to ELF, 20 March 1779 (“human monsters”). 42. This sexual innuendo here is difficult to translate because of the relation to Agathe’s profession: it is akin to the slang expression “having one’s ashes hauled.”

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This ersatz family contrived by fatherly pimping provided the son with a sexual outlet, some measure of intimacy, and protection from a more serious moral evil: the mulatto prostitutes of Saint-Domingue, whose beauty and libertinism so aroused the masculine imagination. At the conclusion of this touching scene, “everything changed”: father and son embraced and became friends once again; the son renounced his antiintellectualism; and together they turned to the study of nature, including Cartesian geometry, chemistry, and Newtonian physics: “We are nearly philosophes . . . we only want to be good and useful to others.” Once the sexual desires were domesticated, the tension between father and son dissipated and the latter’s passions, now calmed, could be redirected toward the improvement of humanity. Lust, like cruelty, interfered with the proper direction of plantation life.43 But there was more at work here than the washerwoman Agathe helping, or being used, to establish a healthy affective equilibrium within the Grand Caze. In asking for Ferronnays to donate Agathe, Corbier considered that his son, given his unpaid work on the plantation, had probably already earned her price. But framing this exchange as a gift rather than an outright sale would create a personal bond between the marquis and the future manager of the Cul de Sac plantation. Pierre-Jacques, it will be recalled, was the godson of the marquis’ father, so the donation of Agathe represented yet another of the artificial kin relationships, concluded by gift exchanges in societies of all kinds, that linked the Ferronnays and Corbier clans. In setting his blessing over Agathe’s concubinage with Pierre-Jacques, Étienne-Louis would assume his fatherly role as the giver of brides within the Grand Caze. As the anthropolgist Claude Lévi-Strauss argues, the central relationship established by marriage is not between the man and the woman but between two groups of men who create a social bond through the exchange of marriage partners. Corbier did not explore the probability that his son’s liaison with Agathe would produce a child, or the social consequences in Saint-Domingue of a growing class of mixed-race Creoles. Those issues aside, although Corbier’s envisioned scenario does not break in any way from the patriarchal system so essential to maintaining order on the Ferronnays property, he conceived of it as a step in his son’s education as a man—and as a planter—of sensibility. To this end, he suggested that the marquis carefully explain to the son the ostensible motivation behind the gift: “Make him feel that you are only giving her to him because you are persuaded that she will be happy; 43. Garraway, Libertine Colony, chaps. 3 and 4.

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it is impossible to inspire too much love of humanity in him: this virtue is foremost for sound administration, and if one does not have it, one becomes a monster.”44 Like the bourgeois family, with its tender and spontaneous rituals  of reciprocity, the master’s household was to become a school of feeling. From here, love of humanity would radiate outward to the fields and boiling house, ensuring profits and tranquility of conscience. But given the moral Manichaeism that pervaded sentimentalist thought, education—the art of producing islands of virtue in a sea of corruption—was bound to pose formidable theoretical and practical difficulties. In this sense, the plantation was only a particularly radical example of a more general problem. In Emile: On Education, Rousseau scripted the educational environment for his eponymous hero down the last detail; paradoxically, only at this extreme pitch of artificiality could Emile avoid the taint of the wider world and learn to feel and act according to his naturally humane impulses. Corbier seemed to believe that by similar orchestrations he could educate his son to listen to the voice of nature and avoid the moral deformity of mastership. Was it naiveté or virtuosic cynicism that made the father think that coldly calculated exchanges disguised as gifts, or arranged sexual liaisons with domestic slaves, were sufficient to simulate a familial atmosphere of altruism?45 The sentimental literature of the eighteenth century and the cult of sensibility that it nurtured placed great stock in individual acts of charity as the solution to widespread social evils. Pity for the oppressed reaffirmed the existence of a universal human solidarity, even as acts of altruism always subtly, and often explicitly, reinforced the social divisions and institutions necessitating them. In the vast eighteenth-century literature devoted to the colonial world, subjects of charity inevitably remained objects of pity, with a line of social condescension demarcating givers from receivers. This was even, perhaps especially, the case in the literature that denounced the horrors of New World slavery and urged its abolition. Corbier’s letters were neither published nor, suffice it to say, intended to aid the cause of abolition. In 1779, emancipationist projects had just begun in Great Britain, while the French Society of the Friends of the Blacks (Société des Amis des Noirs) was not established until 1788. Abolitionist arguments enjoyed no wide currency at this time, and were confi ned to the

44. Lévi-Strauss, Structures élémentaires de la parenté, 135 and 550. 45. On fi nding nature through artificial means, Rousseau, “Emile,” bk. 1, pp. 250–55 in cited edition.

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networks of evangelical Christians in England and North America, and the still smaller groups in France, who spearheaded these efforts.46 Nevertheless, his plea to Étienne-Louis to manumit his housekeeper Nicolle—the second order of business in Corbier’s long letter—resembles the humanitarian literature of abolition in several essential respects. Here and in the sentimental literature credited with inaugurating a revolution in human-rights thinking in eighteenth-century Europe, readers were drawn to the general idea of universal brotherhood by the portrayal of singular, dramatic encounters between individuals of exceptional feeling. In requesting Nicolle’s manumission, Corbier professes curiosity “to see what the change of status will operate in her: it is senseless to live if one does not increase one’s understanding; the human heart, black or white, is worthy of our inquiry.” But it seems to have been the particular experience of gratitude toward Nicolle, who nursed Corbier back to health and buoyed his spirits through a period of isolation, that brought him to her point of view: “I know that human monsters, whose horrible vanity persuades that everything is made for them, do not know the sweet sentiments of gratitude; this only belongs to privileged souls, happy are those who know how to enjoy it.” And as in abolitionist texts, Corbier makes his plea for the humanity of the slave by granting her a voice. In the thousands of pages of correspondence sent by Corbier père and fi ls to the Ferron de la Ferronnays family, this request for manumission is the sole instance in which a slave is made to speak, albeit in ungrammatical French, much in contrast to the high style of Thomas Day’s The Dying Negro (1773) or William Cowper’s Negro’s Complaint (1788). Why did Nicolle take such trouble over Corbier’s health? Her response: “‘First you good [d’abord vous bon],’ she said, to be loved for not being the executioner of those whose labor makes us rich seemed a happy thing to me, and the sensation that I got from it was perhaps a useful remedy for the state I was in.” After assuring Nicolle that she would be happy working under him because she would no longer be subjected to his predecessors’ sexual advances or beatings, he reports her reaction: “‘How,’ she replied with a profound sigh, ‘you want me happy and me poor slave [esclave]?’ The energy with which she pronounced these words made an impression upon me that will never fade away.”47 46. For a general discussion of ideological recuperation through sentiment, Denby, Sentimental Narrative, 48 and 96; on colonization and abolition, Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire, 5– 8 and chap. 4. 47. On the speech of slaves in abolitionist texts, Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire, 160– 61. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, sentimentalism played a significant role in the ideology of improvement among British planters, who themselves were

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The lesson that Corbier drew from this encounter barely needs explanation: since freedom and the dignity that goes with it are indispensable conditions for happiness, manumission is the only fitting reward for a slave who has demonstrated her selfless humanity. But despite the literary trappings depicting a sudden moral awakening to the problem of slavery, Corbier’s request fit into a recognizable pattern. Manumission long played a regulatory role in slave societies, providing incentive for slaves to behave well and to acquire skills; for their part, masters often demanded money from their slaves in the form of self-purchase. Far from diminishing the power of the master, this humane disposition confi rmed his or her prerogatives, leaving fully intact the essential distinction between servile and free. While in ancient Rome perhaps one-third of adult males were manumitted slaves, it was much less common in the plantation societies of the West Indies, with perhaps one in five hundred or one thousand slaves achieving manumission per year. After the Seven Years’ War, colonial administrators increasingly resisted acts of manumission as socially destabilizing, which diminished already low rates of manumission in Saint-Domingue; the phenomenon was increasingly restricted to female slaves who had developed some intimacy, usually sexual, with the master in the Grand Caze. Manumission requests by managers like Corbier or Thomas Thistlewood, who sought freedom for his mistress Phibba, gave plantation owners a valuable point of leverage over their employees. As the gift of freedom circulated from owner to manager to favored slave, ties of patronage and social recognition were affirmed all around; and as in the donation of Agathe, the principal relation affirmed in the granting of Corbier’s request was the bond between Corbier and Ferronnays. Moreover, freed slaves often remained on or near the plantation, rendering service in keeping with the age-old injunction, enshrined in the Code Noir, to show respect to their former masters: “Free she will do no less than she does now,” Corbier enthused.48 Corbier embraced the cult of sentiment as an antidote to the endemic

affected by abolitionist discourse. The results were as disappointing in the British West Indies as in Saint-Domingue, with the possible exception of Barbados. Lambert, White Creole Culture, Politics and Identity, chap. 2. 48. On Roman manumission, Mouritsen, Freedman in the Roman World. Mouritsen emphasizes the continuity between free and servile, with “freedman” lying somewhere in between. For a general overview of patterns and rates of manumission in the West Indies, Blackburn, introduction to Paths to Freedom; and Peabody, “Négresse, Mulâtresse, Citoyenne.” On the social significance of manumission on the plantation, Patterson, “Three Notes of Freedom.”

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violence of plantation life, but like the movement to reconcile humanity and interest through more rational management techniques, the appeal to sensibility had inherent limitations. Corbier’s sentimental encounters were restricted to the Grand Caze, a place whose inefficiency he deplored; he sought to minimize the size of the household so that the rest of the plantation would more closely resemble a factory. Even where sensibility had free rein, it was not in any way incompatible with older practices or visions of authority, and may have even legitimized them by adding a veneer of humanity to an otherwise rough surface. And fi nally, Corbier père remained who and what he was. Had the voice of humanity spoken to him more loudly than the reassuring jingle of coins, he would have simply offered to buy Nicolle outright—and most likely with little risk of actual fi nancial loss. Several years later, when Corbier fi ls asked to purchase a slave to whom he was “very attached,” Ferronnays gave him the slave outright. Although Corbier père and Ferronnays had exchanged money often enough for the slaves that circulated between their plantations, Nicolle was another matter entirely: “I do not in any way propose to you, Monsieur, that you sell Nicolle to me, because she has no value for you.” In fact, her potential labor had considerable cash value to the marquis; it was Nicolle’s freedom that, for Corbier père, counted as small change.49 Sensibilité was not a socially transformative way of perceiving the moral universe or of linking individuals together. Culturally, it was more like a mood, a bit of gauze that could easily be pushed aside when more serious affairs had to be assessed with a cold eye. Long, emotive letters were written after dark by candlelight; sugar was harvested in the harsh light of day and refi ned in the infernal heat of the boiling house. This ethical dissonance was in no way delegitimizing: for adepts of the cult of sentiment like Corbier, the virtue conferred by sensibility remained within the closed circle of private conscience. It was a manner of feeling rather than of acting in a world that progressive men of enlightenment were called on to improve and transform. The rational doctrine of “humanity and interest” had more inherent bias toward action and the measurement of results, since it called on men of enlightenment to apply their hard-won knowledge to the improvement of output and, secondarily, to slaves’ well-being. Reliably coaxing revenue out of a well-nourished and passably content

49. About 1,500l.c. at current values. See the slave valuations included in the inventory and lease agreement of 25 July 1777, AN, T 210/2. PJC to ELF, 20 December 1787 (“very attached”); and 6 August 1788 (ELF donation).

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household rather than wringing profits out of an exhausted and terrified gang was a matter of shifting one’s perspective from the short to the long term. But varying degrees of enlightenment did not uniquely determine the quality of slaves’ lives; the colonial context restricted the extent and continuity of reform. Heavily indebted planters were often in no position to act as far-seeing, rational stewards of their estates. Even when planters were not straitened by the importunities of their creditors in Nantes and Bordeaux, frequent commercial wars, whose effects are the subject of the next chapter, disorganized production, investment, and the daily life of slaves in places like Cul de Sac.

Ch a pter FOUR

War and Profit

A

small minority of eighteenth-century economists, many of them now highly regarded, questioned the value of commercial empire to those European powers that made the massive investments necessary to conquer, develop, and defend overseas colonies. Adam Smith, for instance, demonstrated how monopolies, by raising market prices above their natural level for long periods, attracted excessive amounts of capital into sectors where merchants enjoyed the privilege of limiting supply and setting prices to consumers. Smith argued that the hitherto universally accepted benefits of overseas trading companies should be judged, not from the vantage point of the merchants and states that bought, sold, or exploited commercial monopolies, but from that of the consumers whose budgets were eroded by expensive foreign goods, or of the industries that remained underdeveloped as the supposedly smart money flocked to foreign trade instead of making productive domestic investments. The French physiocrats—a school of free-trade thought that began in the 1750s—also criticized Europe’s colonial-mercantile system by contrasting the “merely apparent gains of monopoly to the real advantages of competition,” but writers like Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours went beyond analyzing the allocation of capital to consider the inherent violence of Europe’s early modern commercial empires. Foreign trade, he observed, “should pay the costs of war that it entails . . . the expenses and the accidents of war should be regarded among those kind of regular and unavoidable curses that arise out of the direct trade with the Indies.” Merchants gladly shifted the costs of naval protection onto states that fi nanced the highly profitable business

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of warfare by levying crippling levels of taxation; in the aggregate, these economists argued, empire was a losing business.1 Although de Nemours was writing in 1769 about the East India Company, as the conflict between Britain and the nascent United States heated up, other physiocrats such as the abbé Pierre-Joseph André Roubaud increasingly trained their sights on the disputes between Britain, Spain, and France over the spoils of colonial commerce in the Americas. By the time these doubts about the value of empire were being voiced, several expensive wars had already played out in the American theater: the Nine Years’ War (1688– 97); the War of Spanish Succession (1701–13); the War of Austrian Succession (1740–48); and the Seven Years’ War (1756– 63). The physiocrats argued that among its many disadvantages in comparison with the British, the French commercial empire was bled white by an elite that preferred the sinecures of office, and the monopolistic profits exacted by state-sponsored ventures such as the Compagnie des Indes (India Company), to the exertions of genuinely productive activity. Under these classic conditions of rent-seeking behavior, it was little surprise that economic development was stunted and, along with it, the (white) demographic development the physiocrats so admired in the settler colonies of British North America. Underpopulated and often unpatriotic French colonies made for soft targets—a pattern of weakness that itself perpetuated warfare. According to eighteenth-century critics, the costs of these wars pushed the balance sheet of colonial empire further into the red; indeed, some modern historians have even questioned whether, taking military expenditures into account, the plantation complex was profitable for the European powers. As naval action figured more heavily into the costs of war, the cost of Anglo-French conflict rose precipitously: while France was involved in the Seven Years’ War and the American War of Independence, crown expenditures approximately doubled in relation to their peacetime levels. At home, war debts caused political instability as elites wrangled over who should pay them; in the colonies, the unequally shared burdens of these wars exacerbated social and racial divisions in what were already unstable, violent places.2

1. For this criticism, Smith, Wealth of Nations, bk. 5, chap. 8. Dupont de Nemours, “Du Commerce & de La Compagnie Des Indes,” 8:170 (competition), 10:217 (war). De Nemours’ perspective has been confi rmed subsequently by historians: warfare was “a branch of business, not only for the colonists who claimed the protection of the navy but for the strategists who planned the operations.” Pares, War and Trade, iv. 2. Roubaud, Histoire générale, 15:53– 69 and, on Saint-Domingue, 126–31. For a presentday analysis, Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 190– 93 and 227–29. On military expenditures and profitability, Blackburn, Making of New World Slavery, 312: “If heavy military expendi-

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Factors that favored the rise of the plantation complex made the West Indian islands particularly susceptible to the disruptions of war. A climate propitious for cultivating tropical commodities was necessarily distant from northwestern Europe, rendering metropolitan surveillance and protection costly and subject to delay. The island setting of the eighteenthcentury sugar plantations made controlling slave populations easier by limiting possibilities for escape, but islands were also more easily invaded and cut off from markets. The marked weakness of the French navy in comparison to the British accentuated this problem in Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe, and Martinique for the whole of the eighteenth century up until the American War of Independence. Internally, the wild demographic imbalance between servile and free populations—reaching 8.8:1 in SaintDomingue in 1791—encouraged whites’ sense of encirclement, though not to the extent of making them willing to, or capable of, undertaking selfdefense through locally organized militias. The distance between metropole and colony was not only geographic: in these societies “beyond the line” of the Tropic of Cancer, where forced labor contrasted so blatantly with European norms, naked acquisitiveness was acceptable to a degree unthinkable on the European mainland, lending everyday life the tincture of violence and opportunism. A decree of 1784 denounced the “barbarous custom” of sailors’ baptism aboard ships bound for the Antilles, in which drunken sailors dressed themselves as the water god Poseidon, outraging passengers with ridicule, sexual innuendo, and demands for money. The persistence of this picaresque, “profane,” or “scandalous” ritual well into the eighteenth century testifies to the deep-rootedness of West Indian buccaneer culture.3 Despite the visible extension of royal power and the imposition of rigorous norms of French administration onto island colonies like SaintDomingue, Creole elites remembered the seventeenth-century Antillean world of multinational settlements, rampant piracy, and loose imperial tures are included, then it might well be that none of the colonial powers had yet secured a real surplus.” For profitability and alternative uses of capital, Thomas, “Sugar Colonies of the Old Empire.” On war expenses, Morineau, “Budgets de l’état et gestion des fi nances royales en France,” 325 (France’s intense involvement in the American War of Independence lasted only three years, 1778– 81). On the post– Seven Years’ War debate, Beik, Judgment of the Old Regime. 3. For figures on servile to white population, Watts, West Indies, 320 (French islands), 311–13 (British islands), and 316 (ceded islands). On white resistance to militia duty, Garrigus, Before Haiti, 31 and 123. Charles Frostin speaks of Creole “antimilitarism”: “Histoire de l’autonomisme colon,” 644–46. For a vain attempt by the French colonial administration to stop sailors’ baptism, AN, COL C9A 155 (24 January 1784), Arrêt du Conseil Souverain du Cap.

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control. This world still existed to some degree in the Lesser Antilles, where smaller islands changed hands frequently and populations emigrated to seize opportunities in the grey zones of imperial rule. At a remove of several thousand kilometers, and imbued with a culture of independence, national sentiment was often rather weak during wartime; during peacetime, trade restrictions like the French Exclusive—a series of trade prohbitions enacted beginning in 1717—or the British Navigation Acts, designed to make captive markets of their respective colonies, were widely considered illegitimate instruments of imperial exploitation. Navies not only protected inhabitants from foreign invasion but interdicted the rampant contraband trade between islands. The maturation of these tempestuous island workhouses into wealthy, self-confident Creole societies hardly diminished the costs of commercial empire. The end of the Century of Enlightenment was darkened by near-constant confl ict, with the American War of Independence (1775–83) and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815) closing what has been termed the Second Hundred Years’ War between France and England.4 Widening the frame of reference to empire and its costs helps relativize the value to European nations of their American colonies. But there is still another manner in which endemic warfare must enter into our understanding of the eighteenth-century plantation complex. The effects of intermittent warfare and fluctuating trade regimes in the region had a profound, ongoing impact on the internal organization of plantation life. Although eighteenth-century political economists did not explicitly discuss the effects of war on the plantation, planters and colonial administrators felt them keenly: it was the subject of repeated legislation; contracts frequently included provisions that foresaw its possibility; and managers worried the issue incessantly in their correspondence. Plantations came through repeated confl icts through the expedients described below, but the debts they accrued during these periods increased their subordination to metropolitan merchants. For the French Antilles as a whole, recurrent warfare had the effect of blocking continuous growth in trade; boom-bust cycles robbed planters and merchants alike of their margins for maneuver and accentuated systemic weaknesses. The previous two chapters explored how the household organization of the plantation was designed in

4. For norms of imperial control, Murphy, “Creole Archipelago.” Jean Tarrade estimates that the contraband trade from Martinique was 38.8 percent of raw produce in 1768 and was 48 percent in Guadeloupe in 1773. He offers no estimates for Saint-Domingue but argues that the percentage of gross produce was lower: Commerce colonial, 1:110–11.

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part to mitigate the effects of excessive exposure to international markets. This also meant coping with the regular disruptions to trade that war brought. A micro-level examination of these adaptive strategies reveals something that aggregate trade statistics cannot: the internal organization of the plantation was determined, sometimes in self-limiting ways, by international forces. The rapid decomposition of the estates on the Cul de Sac plain during wartime provides a case study in economic and social fragility in the face of what were, after all, perfectly normal and predictable shocks. In the long term, the plantation economy was only as strong as the markets and the empires that were its raison d’être.5 Much had changed in the French colonial empire between the Treaty of Paris that ended the Seven Years’ War in 1763 and France’s entry into the American War of Independence in 1778. The strains of war almost infallibly expose underlying social conflicts, consigning to defeat divided nations with resource constraints. The inevitable disruptions of the Seven Years’ War demonstrated that the metropole was not keeping up its side of an implicit bargain that held the French imperial system together: the mother country would protect the colonies, but in exchange it had the right to exploit them economically and hold them in political tutelage. Planters may have welcomed naval protection, but they had long bristled against the Exclusive, the trading regime that left most island imports and exports in the hands of merchants from a limited number of French ports. This policy, whose explicit aim was to funnel colonial profits into metropolitan hands—another aspect of the rent-seeking criticized by Smith and the physiocrats—decreased the price of colonial exports while restricting the availability, and raising the prices, of slaves and subsistence goods to planters. Alienated colonists in Martinique and Guadeloupe were anything but fervent defenders of their islands: the British took Guadeloupe early on, in 1759, and Martinique fell to them in 1762. Saint-Domingue remained in French hands, although some restive colonists would have warmly greeted a British invasion. Over the entire confl ict, French trade in the Antilles was profoundly disrupted, falling between 81 and 90 percent; under British occupation and with the influxes of slaves it brought, 5. Robin Blackburn has observed, “The American plantation might withdraw for a time within a shell of ‘natural economy’ if the market for its products was temporarily disrupted, but this could not be done indefi nitely without devaluing and decomposing the plantation.” Making of New World Slavery, introduction; quote on 376. On war, growth, and systemic weakness, Meignen, “Commerce extérieur de la France,” 612–14; Pétré- Grenouilleau, “Monde de la plantation,” 126–27.

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Guadeloupe and Martinique experienced unprecedented spikes in economic growth.6 The Seven Years’ War served as a wake-up call in government circles, after which enlightened self-interest led to a softening of the Exclusive to the advantage of colonial planters; as a consequence, French colonists defended their islands more assiduously during the American War of Independence and even contributed some troops to the wider war effort. If the colonies were more patriotic and hence better defended internally, by this time the French also had no territory to protect in North America and had a better-equipped navy. Britain, by contrast, seemed to manifest the same vulnerabilities that beset France during the Seven Years’ War: a widely distributed colonial empire, part of which was in revolt against the trading regime imposed from the metropole. In this context, the French scored a series of naval victories against British possessions in the Antilles. Naval blockades and an embargo against the former thirteen colonies fell quite hard upon islands like Barbados and Jamaica. Nevertheless, the limits of these political reforms and strategic advances found expression in local attitudes. Planters took for granted a tenuous situation, anticipating that the coming confl ict would affect virtually every aspect of plantation life in Saint-Domingue, from food consumption and sugar production to capital investment, labor allocation, and credit arrangements. In places like the Cul de Sac plain, planters knew the limits of metropolitan naval protection and sensed the cold calculus to which their interests were subject in government circles.7

SUFFERING IN BLACK, WHITE, AND BRUT Even before France’s entry into the war, the prospect of a lengthy confl ict began to color Corbier’s business decisions. Already during the summer of 1776, he began to worry about the possible effects of an embargo on British commerce: these included depriving Saint-Domingue of adequate wood supply, as well as pushing up the costs of slaves’ provisions and of slaves themselves. As Vice Commander of Saint-Domingue (and later as interim

6. For fi rsthand accounts of the difficulties in Saint-Domingue caused by the Seven Years’ War, Frostin, “Entre l’Anjou et Saint-Domingue,” 8– 9. On dubious allegiances, Frostin, “Histoire de l’autonomisme colon,” 638–41. On disruption, Pares, War and Trade, 187– 95; and Riley, Seven Years’ War and the Old Regime, 110–11. 7. On the War of Independence, Ghachem, “‘Between France and the Antilles.’” On preparations, Dull, French Navy, epilogue. On the blockade, Tarrade, Commerce colonial, chap. 13.

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Commander), the marquis de la Ferronnays was familiar with these issues, and his preoccupations reflected the French colonial administration more generally. In this respect, Ferronnays resembled many of his fellow plantation owners on the Cul de Sac plain, among them Noailles, d’Argout, and Nolivos, who combined the roles of military commander, colonial administrator, and planter. Ferronnays’ ministerial writings, along with queries and complaints that echo audibly in Corbier’s letters, show his awareness of a strategic environment in the Antilles that pushed external markets from one sort of disequilibrium to another.8 Regarding the prospect of renewed war, Corbier worried about Ferronnays’ enormous debt load, around 800,000l.t. During wartime, frightened creditors might well begin to demand repayment en masse, and at the same time land prices would drop and sugar sales would halt. Renting out his plantations could not fully hedge against this risk: a 1775 lease agreement for the plantation at Grande Rivière specified a rent reduction of one-third in the fi rst two years of war and two-thirds in subsequent years, should the war persist. His renter, Julien Claude Valdec, was unable to pay even these greatly reduced amounts, and the affair wound up in court. Corbier recommended that Ferronnays increase his liquidity by selling some land immediately, and that he put off buying any more slaves to avoid running up debt.9 Although Corbier trimmed his sails in anticipation of shifting political winds, he and others continued to indulge in wishful thinking. Such thoughts were encouraged by false rumors in 1776 of a victory by the American insurgents in New York when in reality they were routed by the British, and then positive news of Washington’s exploits in New Jersey: “Nobody believes the war will come, and nobody in situ makes any preparations whatsoever on their plantations.” Even the relatively pessimistic Corbier nursed the hope that he could continue quietly to make sugar. Local planters and merchants might well have maintained this illusion; despite an embargo on English goods and the distant thunder of confl ict 8. AN, T 210/2, JBC to ELF, 26 June 1776 (English commerce); and 11 November 1776 (slave purchases). Commanders Paul-Antoine Nolivos Saint- Cyr and Alexandre-Jacques and Chevalier de Bongars seemed to be preparing for renewed confl ict as far back as 1771. See AN, COL C9A (1771) 140. See AN, T 210/3, dossiers 41 and 44 for ELF’s well-informed discussions on defense and food supply. Later, ELF would attempt to influence the ministry to open up wartime trade with the islands. AN, COL C9A (1778), 146. 9. JBC to ELF, 26 August 1775 (ELF’s debts); 20 September 1775 (proposed land sale); and 27 December 1779 (slaves and debt). For lease, CAOM, G2 47, fols. 528–30 and 682. Other agreements made timing and amount of payment conditional on war: JBC to ELF, 18 July 1779 and 18 July 1783.

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Graph 2. Sugar prices, 1774– 83. Sources: Affiches américaines and AN, T 210/2 for Ferronnays’ sales prices (limited observations for 1778 and 1779).

on the North American continent, sugar prices held up through 1777 (see graph 2), ensuring a “pretty income” for Ferronnays of around 586,000l.c. gross revenue that year.10 Once France signed the Treaty of Amity and Commerce, cementing an alliance with the insurgent American colonists in February 1778, sugar prices dropped precipitously as British warships outside Saint-Dominguan ports began to seize French vessels. Indeed, the initial intensity of the British offensive against French shipping led some to believe that this confl ict would be worse for the colonies than the Seven Years’ War, despite improvements in the French navy and a more consolidated strategic situation. In 1778, Ferronnays lost eighty thousand pounds of sugar to a British seizure, despite Corbier’s newly adopted practice of dividing sugar sales

10. JBC to ELF, 9 November 1776 (insurgent victories); 26 June 1776 (English commerce); 11 August 1776 (land prices and restricted credit); 8 November 1777 (“preparations”); and 2 February 1778 (“pretty income”).

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into multiple shipments. At this point, the reality of the war began to sink in.11 Although the prices of all sorts of provisions had begun to rise already in 1777, after the outbreak of war a real scarcity set in, affecting that most daily of routines: mealtime. “From this point forward,” Corbier wrote in April of 1779, “we have no fear of deepening misery, we lack everything; in the last war, everybody assures me, the colony didn’t experience anything remotely similar. If the Minister [of the Navy] sought to have us recognize the multiplicity of our needs, he has succeeded; I would like to see him at my dinner table, without wine and quite often without fresh meat, no powder for our wigs; he could fi nd this article, however, for it is sold at a horrendous price, fashioned from rotten wheat taken from the King’s storehouse.” Corbier’s cri de coeur in the face of missing wig powder may seem fanciful—even grotesque—but for the crown, wartime shortages posed a serious geopolitical and economic threat. Writing in March of 1779, Commanders de Vaivre and d’Argout reported “starvation and misery” in the colony, prudently omitting wig powder from their tales of deprivation. Louis XVI and his ministers responded by sending provisions, including wheat flour, to the colonies. Subsistence crises brought on by bad harvests were still sufficiently frequent in Old Regime France that the king’s very legitimacy rested on his response in times of dearth. For an insecure populace grown mistrustful of the monarchy, the export of grain outside France—even to its colonies—could be construed as evidence of a “famine pact” between greedy merchants, venal ministers, and the king against a helpless population. Mindful of the political risks at home, Louis XVI had provisions sent to Saint-Domingue through the intermediary of large merchant houses. This emergency provisioning, however, did little to palliate the “misery” of planters such as Ferronnays who were unable to prise these newly arrived goods from the hands of established merchants, to whom they were already massively indebted. In these straitened circumstances, Corbier found himself doing business with a certain Seguineau, “a Jew, but I’m forced into it for the time being”—and so summed up his vexations. At unpredictable intervals, ship convoys delivered provisions and packets of letters, which brought variety to planters’ tables and temporarily beat back Corbier’s creeping sense of isolation from the marquis as well as his own family. But just as quickly, it seemed, the

11. JBC to ELF, 14 November 1778 (on seizures); and 12 December 1779 (on warships). Ferronnays’ factor in Nantes believed that “we were less mistreated in the last [i.e. Seven Years’] war”: Bosdieu? (Nantes) to ELF (Paris), 14 November 1778.

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sea closed up again and wartime deprivations resumed, their intensity increased by dashed hopes for renewed peace and prosperity.12 Amid this tableau of suffering at the Grande Caze at Cul de Sac, Corbier repeatedly assured the marquis that he insulated the slaves from hardship: “In this situation you’d sleep with the chickens to protect them. Nevertheless, I help the slaves out as much as I can.” Was Corbier exaggerating the misery in the Grand Caze and soft-pedaling the suffering of field slaves for effect? Undoubtedly so, at the margins; but the details in his letters, in conjunction with the accounts he sent back to France, give the impression of a concerted plan to assure slave subsistence through war and drought. These efforts reflected Ferronnays’ own concerns, as Vice Commander, about food supplies in Saint-Domingue. Widespread “hunger and despair” drove slaves to theft; still worse, planters’ continued nonchalance about their most fundamental—indeed perhaps only—obligation toward slaves would reach its logical conclusion one day, when famished slaves were “provoked to employ all means necessary to shake off their yoke.” Wartime, with its cash shortages and hiccoughing supply lines, aggravated an inherently tense situation.13 In normal times, slaves in the French Antilles survived on four sources of food. First, on the plantation itself, planters grew crops like cassava, manioc, sweet potatoes, millet, plantains, and peas of all sorts. These staple crops, which provided the main source of calories, were grown in the gullies and interstitial areas of the cane fields themselves or in outlying areas, and were distributed to slaves daily, weekly, or even semiweekly. Second, in the small garden plots provided to them—sometimes in between the slaves’ barracks but at other times in remoter areas—slaves cultivated green vegetable crops such as spinach, congo beans, pumpkins, and peppers. Although not generally calorie rich, these foods added vitamins and maintained variety in an otherwise monotonous, starchy diet. Third, planters relied on the market to bring in scarce animal proteins, mainly salt cod and dried salted beef. Some planters also bought stores of essential grains like rice and wheat flour, which came from overseas, or extra peas and millet from neighboring planters or farmers. (Indeed, as Vice

12. Robert, comte d’Argout and Jean-Baptiste Guillemin de Vaivre, “Situation de La Colonie,” AN, COL C9A 147, 12 March 1779. JBC to ELF, 24 April 1779 (“wig powder,” emphasis added); 11 November 1779, 8 December 1779, and 28 April 1780 (debt and provisions); and 22 April 1778 (Seguineau). 13. JBC to ELF, 24 April 1779 (hardship); 28 April 1780 (“chickens”); and AN, T 210/3, dossier 44 (“yoke”). On the relationship between food shortages and marronnage, Debbasch, “Marronnage,” 17 and 136–38.

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Commander, Ferronnays’ proposed solution to the subsistence problem in Saint-Domingue was to prohibit all freedmen [affranchis] and small landowners from growing export crops like sugar and requiring them to grow island subsistence crops instead. This strategy had the triple attraction of blunting the competition that the freedmen posed to the white planter class when they became planters themselves; softening overall demand for slaves; and reducing planters’ dependence on overseas food markets.) Fourth and fi nally, slaves foraged for the rats, fish, crabs, and a dwindling population of turtles that helped them to round out a protein-poor diet. The Code Noir of 1685 explicitly prohibited the practice, widespread on Dutch plantations in seventeenth-century Brazil, of simply giving slaves a plot of land and according them one afternoon or day a week, the “slaves’ Saturday” (samedi nègre), to see to their own subsistence. The vagaries of weather; the tendency of planters to set aside an insufficient allotment of their worst land for slave gardens; and the wide variations in individual slaves’ initiative or capacity as subsistence gardeners all made the Dutch system too risky in the toilsome, fragile environment of the island plantation.14 In his meticulous attention to the Ferronnays slaves’ nutrition, Corbier combined the roles of benevolent paterfamilias and rational manager; at the same time, his close observation of their eating habits points—perhaps more than any single subject treated in the Ferronnays correspondence— to a separate society among slaves, with its own norms, its own practices, its own tastes. For his part, Corbier oversaw the distribution of food from his own porch to minimize the theft that was endemic when the task was confided to commanders. But once this solemn office was concluded, slaves did as they pleased, sometimes to the detriment of their own health. Stomachaches from eating too many plantains were common, and slaves even preferred, he claimed, to starve rather than eat dishes they didn’t like: “Everybody has to fiddle around with their own plate.” Everywhere, and particularly among Creoles, there were signs of initiative: “There is always a bit of salted meat in the boiling vat.” Corbier felt certain that the food purchased by slaves added up to at least 30,000l.c. per year, but he couldn’t pinpoint the origins of an “essentially mysterious but nonetheless real commerce” by which slaves squeaked by. It seemed impossible that they were selling stolen sugar in sufficient quantity to account for

14. On the correlation between malnutrition and increased risk of death over the individual’s entire life span, Fogel, Escape from Hunger, 23–33. Debien, Esclaves aux Antilles, 173– 93 (177–79 for prohibition of Dutch system).

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all the extra food he saw on the plantation. Wages for side work; chickens and vegetables raised in garden plots and sold at the market in the town of Croix des Bouquets on Sundays; small items stolen from one another or from the master’s house and circulated between plantations: this was a world of improvisation that was largely invisible to Corbier but that would become indispensable as the deprivations of wartime set in.15 In the beginning of the confl ict, Corbier fed slaves the stores (rice, salted beef, fish, and peas) he had stockpiled against the eventuality of war. He was convinced that while garden plots were essential, “it is an abuse to believe that the slaves can live on vegetables alone.” To meet this widening gap, Corbier withdrew land from sugar cultivation, a dualpurpose strategy characterizing many of his wartime measures. His efforts were in line with a much-ignored ordinance, issued by Commanders de Vaivre and d’Ennery in August 1776, directing planters to sow a certain quantity of plantains, manioc, and sweet potatoes per slave. The regular inspections intended to enforce these measures probably never happened. The Commanders on the island, Ferronnays’ successors, stipulated that it was not sufficient to “leave to slaves a certain amount of land for their own personal cultivation.” The traditional slave’s garden (jardin de nègre) had to be supplemented, at the expense of the productive capacity of cane fields, “for the safety of the colonies . . . in case of war.” Sweet potatoes and millet were common food crops in the French Antilles that were rotated periodically into cane land as a way of refreshing the soil, a system that worked in much the same way as turnips or clover in the Norfolk system of crop rotation: they restored fertility to the soil while at the same time, and unlike mere fallowing, they yielded a useful crop. In substituting sweet potatoes and millet for sugar in proportions well above the one-eighth of cane land usually rotated into subsistence crop production, Corbier reconditioned the soil in Ferronnays’ cane fields with little loss to revenue, since in the depths of war sugar sales were unprofitable; sugar had even lost most of its value as a means of payment in the colony. By some estimates, sugar bartered for provisions netted only a quarter or even just an eighth of the food it commanded in peacetime. In the cash market, wine in 1779 cost 2.5 times its average price in 1777, salted beef 1.6 times, and wheat flour 3.0 times. It is in this context that we should view the food expenditures made on the Ferronnays plantation (graph 3).16

15. JBC to ELF, 25 November 1776 (distribution); and 26 June 1776 (“plate,” “mysterious commerce”). 16. JBC to ELF, 16 February 1779 (stores); 26 June 1776 (“vegetables”); and 18 July 1779

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Graph 3. Food purchases, 1774– 83. Source: AN, T 210/2.

These statistics pose some difficulty of interpretation. For instance, there are many portmanteau entries for payments made to ships’ captains not included in this accounting, so that many food expenses of an indeterminate nature may be hidden from our view. This said, there is little reason to believe that this vagueness varied greatly from year to year, so we can probably trust the general expenditure trends in graph 3. In addition, meat and bread purchases are retrospective: payments made in 1777 may stand for consumption that occurred in late 1776. These are reasonably reliable figures, because the butcher and the baker sold their goods locally and Corbier had accounts with them, so there is little question of these basic items being hidden elsewhere. Purchases of food for slaves were much more likely to be made in advance, so that we can interpret the purchases

(food crops). D’Ennery and de Vaivre, Correspondance Générale (PaP, 10 August 1776), AN, COL C9A 144. On crop rotation, Debien, “Comptes, profits, esclaves et travaux,” 12. Price multiples based on calculations from data printed in the Affiches américaines: yearly average costs of high-quality wine, beef, and flour in PaP. On barter costs, Pares, War and Trade, 328.

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of 1776 and 1777—with the aid of Corbier’s comments—as provision for deprivations to come. (1774 is only a partial accounting.) What can be concluded with reasonable certainty from these figures? Wine consumption decreased during the war, while the amount of money spent on meat and bread, when they were available, increased. Fresh meat was produced largely on the Spanish side of Hispaniola, and when available, it became more expensive. In the leanest year, 1782, meat did not even appear in Corbier’s accounts. It is impossible to judge the extent of his exaggeration, but Corbier recounted to Ferronnays that most of his meat purchases were destined for consumption by slaves laid up in the hospital. Bread, by contrast, increased as a proportion of household food consumption as it went up in price—precisely the behavior expected of an inferior or Giffen good. Given the increase in prices, expenditure would have had to jump by a factor of two or three to maintain a fi xed level of consumption—which it obviously did not. At the table of the Grande Caze, then, whites ate bread and shrinking quantities of meat—often unaccompanied by wine or imported delicacies—whereas in the slaves’ quarters there were increasing supplies of sweet potatoes and millet. Slaves made do without the habitual supplements to their diet that came from overseas, although they tried to recoup their protein deficit by increasingly brazen livestock theft. Finally, Corbier took to feeding temporarily worthless syrups to his mules for lack of proper feed. At Cul de Sac, land and labor were reallocated toward subsistence agriculture, and what little cash or credit remained was channeled largely into the purchase of inferior goods.17 As sugar production became unprofitable, Corbier also began to reallocate slave labor to capital improvements, including building a new irrigation canal and an aqueduct to bring water to the rolling mill: “One shouldn’t work in the same way during wartime as during peace,” he concluded. Drought conditions in 1777 and 1778 made these investments an even higher priority than usual, but the hill country behind the Cul de Sac plain, where some of Ferronnays’ land lay, had always posed hydrological challenges for sugar-growing colonists. Local officials must have been aware that slack labor supplies on plantations presented an opportunity for them as well, because during this period forced contributions by planters of their slaves’ labor to road- and dam-building projects, similar to the

17. JBC to ELF, 16 June 1780 (expense of meat; hospitals); 28 April 1780 (livestock stealing); and 20 March 1779 (mule subsistence).

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royal corvée in France, increased while provoking much less ritual grumbling among the planters.18 While the marquis de la Ferronnays directed slack labor to infrastructural improvements, the war context decisively shaped and limited his investment possibilities. He had long sought to set up sugar-refi ning operations on his plantation to export the more costly clayed rather than muscovado sugar, but the collapsed market for sugar of all sorts, in addition to the exorbitant price of refi ning equipment, made this project impossible for at least several years. Other efforts, such as reconditioning the plantation’s barrel supply or wood- and stone-intensive building projects, went begging because of the high cost or complete absence of building supplies. High prices were to blame for the marquis’ inability to make any but labor-intensive improvements, of course, but the disastrous state of credit markets—and the low standing of the heavily indebted Ferronnays in them—also dictated this strategy.19 On commodity markets, planters of the Cul de Sac plain, who like Ferronnays specialized in the production of muscovado sugar, were doubly or even trebly penalized by the interruptions of war. Fewer merchant ships meant more competition between planters for space on outgoing vessels. Ships’ captains found relatively compact goods like clayed sugar or indigo more desirable than muscovado sugar; as the latter accumulated in warehouses, whatever quantities did not spoil after months in the tropical heat waiting for an outbound berth served to depress prices further. In the worst year of the American War of Independence, 1779, muscovado sugar plummeted to 32 percent, whereas clayed sugar kept 47 percent of its 1777 value. Shipping costs ad valorem rose disproportionately for muscovado sugar due to contrary movements of commodity prices and shipping costs: deducting shipping costs, muscovado sugar sunk to 23 percent of its average 1777 price, whereas clayed sugar held 42 percent of its value for planters.20 18. JBC to ELF, 28 June 1779 (“during peace”); 24 April and 28 June 1779 (canal and aqueduct); and 16 June 1780 (working habits). On the hydrography of this region, Debien, “Comptes, profits, esclaves et travaux,” 12. On the corvée, compare JBC to ELF, 15 January 1775, 22 November 1775, 12 February 1776, and 5 June 1776 to 5 January 1776 and 16 February 1776. 19. On difficulties of conversion, JBC to ELF, 8 November 1777, 10 December 1778 (with particular emphasis on the absence of materials), and 16 February 1779. On wood costs, 16 June 1780. 20. Source: Affiches américaines, 1774– 82. Prices quoted in this paragraph are yearly averages.

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Graph 4. Surplus from the Ferron de la Ferronnays plantation, 1774– 88. Source: AN, T 210/2.

We can appreciate the consequences of this situation initially by examining the flow of surplus from the Ferronnays plantation (graph 4). (In this context, surplus simply means those proceeds of Ferronnays’ plantation that were not plowed directly back into expenditures, be they fi xed or circulating capital.) In an ordinary year (1775 or 1776), the marquis— through the offices of Corbier—would divide the surplus from his plantation among honoring such bills of exchange bearing the marquis’ or his wife’s name as were presented to Corbier for payment in Saint-Domingue; retiring debts owed to merchants and others residing in the colony; and, fi nally, sending off consignments of sugar to France, along with bills of exchange for the proceeds directly payable to the marquis.21 As the war continued and the plantation’s revenues tumbled, the marquis ceased paying off his creditors in Saint-Domingue, and Corbier could no longer honor bills of exchange presented to him. In the ordinary course of affairs, Ferronnays could continue doing business with merchants to whom he was indebted. Merchant houses usually distinguished between long-term and short-term credit; as long as planters’ long-term debts were being serviced periodically, they could continue to rack up short-term debts to keep their plantations operating. But Ferronnays’ inability to pay anything made it impossible to secure credit, which was in any case ex-

21. It is quite likely that ELF paid some of his other debts and plantation production costs out of these proceeds. For example, until 1782, JBC’s fees were not listed in the account books, so some payments must have been made to him in France by ELF.

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pensive, with interest rates hovering around 10 or 12 percent; fi nancing costs pushed up the effective purchase price of subsistence and capital goods. Merchant houses forced heavily indebted planters into exclusive arrangements to carry their produce back to France, which seems to have been Ferronnays’ situation: “In these circumstances,” Corbier explained, “I can’t send any [sugar] to you, because your bills of exchange aren’t paid; without this you risk having your sugar seized.”22 Ferronnays’ debts going into the war period had increasingly negative effects once the confl ict heated up. Although Corbier did manage to sell a small amount of sugar during this interval and to have the proceeds realized in France, Ferronnays’ indebtedness meant that Corbier could send back sugar only when it pleased his creditors. Naval convoys protected planters from British warships but not, alas, from angry creditors. A comparison of the price Corbier fetched for Ferronnays’ sugar with the average prices in Port-au-Prince quoted in the Affiches américaines (see graph 2) illustrates another aspect of the problem. Corbier always sold above the average prices paid to planters, but after the crisis hit in early 1778, he found himself on the wrong side of these transactions, systematically losing between 25 and 58 percent of potential gross proceeds on sales, even after sugar markets began to rebound in 1781.23 Corbier, who also owned land and slaves, and suffered from the economic conjuncture of wartime, reflected on the war’s long-term effects: I wanted to make my fortune, but my intention was never to do so at another’s expense. I had large loans that I would have easily paid had it not been for the war, which forced me to slow down my payments. I am devastated by this even though it is not my fault; I still owe money for slaves that I would otherwise have paid for two times over if my produce had retained the slightest value.24

Gradually, the situation eased: as the convoy system improved and prices increased in 1781 and 1782, Corbier retired more of Ferronnays’ bills of exchange, thereby facilitating the shipment of sugar to France. As he re-

22. JBC to ELF, 10 December 1778 (seizures and credit). The dating of this observation clearly makes it safe to assume that the situation of 1780 existed in 1778–79, when there is a lacuna in the data. See a similar letter of 5 January 1779. For one missed opportunity to send sugar, 15 February 1779; and on interest rates, 4 October 1780. On exclusive arrangements, Thésée, Négociants bordelais, chap. 2. 23. On sugar prices, Affiches américaines, 1774– 84. 24. JBC to ELF, 6 July 1780.

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tired more of his long-term debt obligations, the marquis began to shift his business to other merchant houses to improve his terms of sale. The lesson was nevertheless crystal clear: in wartime, overhanging debt imperiled the credit relations—however straitened and erratic—serving as a lifeline for planters in Saint-Domingue. It also made the expansion of the plantation’s basic operations more difficult and compromised the marquis’ ability to invest in more profitable white sugar production facilities.

WARFARE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT Saint-Domingue was hardly the sole European colony to feel the economic effects of the American War of Independence. The British West Indies were particularly hard hit by Parliament’s 1775 decision to ban commercial relations with its rebellious subjects; the US Continental Congress reaffirmed this decision from its side during the same year, effectively depriving colonies such as Jamaica and Barbados of needed subsistence goods. Jamaica and the eastern Antilles were densely populated and, in comparison with the French Antilles, particularly reliant on imports for slave subsistence. Although contraband trade helped soften the effects in Jamaica and Barbados of this outright ban, American privateers and the French navy put great pressure on this conduit of relief. Given this tense situation, it is unsurprising that 1776 saw another of the slave rebellions to which Jamaica was unusually prone. Although the effects of these embargoes are difficult to disaggregate from an abnormal concentration of hurricanes during the same period, five thousand slaves died in Barbados and fi fteen thousand died in Jamaica between 1775 and 1782, most from malnutrition and disease caused by short food supplies. By the time the confl ict ended in 1783, trade patterns had shifted permanently, to the prejudice of British West Indian planters, who paid more for slave subsistence goods that no longer came directly from American merchants. The stage was set for the eclipse of the British West Indian sugar colonies by the French.25 While the relative isolation and vulnerability of island colonies complicate any comparison with the mainland, the economic effects of the American War of Independence on the colonies of the Lower South nev-

25. For these sovereign acts and the general economic situation, Carrington, “American Revolution and the British West Indies’ Economy”; and for mortality figures, Sheridan, “Crisis of Slave Subsistence,” 632. On divergent French and English tendencies of plantation food production, Watts, West Indies, 239. On the 1776 rebellion, Sheridan, “Jamaican Slave Insurrection Scare of 1776.”

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ertheless provide an instructive series of contrasts. The War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739–43) was the fi rst in a series of confl icts interrupting the market for South Carolina’s principal export crop, rice, throwing the region into recession. From that point, planters began consciously to diversify their output into such crops as indigo and cotton. When the American War of Independence cut off British textile imports, planters could easily draw on the skills and tools developed in the previous decades to provide their slaves’ “homespun” clothes during these lean years. Of longer-term significance, the agricultural and processing skills honed in the ensuing decades were mobilized once again in the early part of the nineteenth century, when the Lower South became the heart of the cotton-producing South. In the meantime, conditions specific to the American War of Independence contributed to the stability of this region during that war, as well as to postwar prosperity. Unrest among slaves led to the extension of the task system, whereby slaves were left to their own work—be it subsistence agriculture, textile manufacture, or other petty forms of production for the market—after they had completed a defi ned set of tasks for their masters. This compromise between masters and slaves diverted slack labor to the essential tasks of subsistence production, and also helped defuse social tension by allowing slaves a limited degree of autonomy in their work rhythms. Once the war ended, the planter elite in the low country turned their attention to a wholesale, capital-intensive renovation of their rice-field irrigation works, which had been partly abandoned during the war for lack of willing labor and export markets. Adjustment to these turbulent market conditions over the eighteenth century in South Carolina led to two distinct but complementary types of economic development there: diversification and the deepening of skills in the servile labor force. Much in contrast to the case of Saint-Domingue or Jamaica, its wartime adaptations prepared the way for transformational economic growth while contributing to social stability.26 Nearer to home, Corbier and his correspondents bore witness to a growing social disorder connected to the war. Destitute slaves were steal-

26. For the broad interpretive scheme relating to the Lower South, Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit, chaps. 6 and 8. On South Carolina, Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina. In “Tradition and Innovation in the American Sugar Industry,” J. H. Galloway assesses the causes of traditionalism and technological progress in the West Indian islands. Although Galloway is quite optimistic about the adaptability of the West Indian plantation system, he also concedes that places like Saint-Domingue and Jamaica did not experience the same resource scarcity that pushed innovation in Barbados. See also Cateau, “Conservatism and Change.”

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ing lead from the roofs of old houses to sell as rifle shot, while chickens and other livestock disappeared. Perhaps more frightening for the planter class, marronnage was on the increase, as was arson and, at least reportedly, poisoning. As Ferronnays had warned in his official writings, hunger was the beginning of a broader social unraveling. While Corbier did his best to adapt to the challenges of colonial life in wartime, these improvisations quickly ran up against their inherent limitations. By December 1779, planters all over the Cul de Sac plain began to lose slaves to malnutrition in “prodigious” numbers. Although Corbier congratulated himself on the success of his preparations, slaves also began to die at Cul de Sac from chest diseases, fatally weakened by “lack of salted meats: it is absurd to think that these people can survive alone on what we grow here.”27 Not only was Ferronnays unable to update his refi ning facilities to make white sugar, but his rolling mill—the centerpiece of any sugar operation—was falling increasingly into disrepair because of the impossibility of fi nding replacement parts. As sugar production and prices fell, the plantation itself slid further into debt, unable to pay even its massively scaled-back costs: “The saddest profession these days is making sugar,” Corbier complained. “If things continue as they are, one would be better off as a shoe-maker.” The Ferronnays plantations did bounce back, as did the rest of the Saint-Dominguan sugar economy, in part aided by the blow delivered to the British West Indies during that war, but the fundamental economic and social structures remained untouched. In this basically monocultural, export-led economy, Corbier could pursue his inward turn to strategic autarky and labor-intensive improvements only so far. This conclusion is perhaps not so surprising as the speed with which SaintDomingue fell into misery once deprived of European markets, foodstuffs, and capital goods. The colony was, after all, France’s richest, with almost three hundred thousand inhabitants in 1780; and yet after barely two years of merely intermittent blockade, the essential character of the place showed through the thin veneer of order: “The colony is the chaos of human societies.” Saint-Dominguan society behaved less like a healthy organism with its capacity for adaptation and recovery than it did a great and complex machine operating on dangerously narrow tolerances. This perspective on the instability of the plantation complex is possibly what informed Corbier’s views about the revolution unfolding in his midst.28

27. JBC to ELF, 6 May 1780 (rifle shot); and 8 December 1779 (salted meats; slave deaths). 28. JBC to ELF, 27 December 1779 (“shoemaker”); 6 May 1780 (“chaos”).

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COLONIAL LIBERATION Viewed from the narrow confi nes of Corbier’s cul-de-sac, one would hardly suspect that the American War of Independence was the hemisphere’s first successful war of colonial liberation. And yet reactions to this confl ict adumbrate divisions that would reappear ten years later with the coming of the French Revolution. The situation of Saint-Dominguan planters was at least analogous to that of the American colonists, who after the Seven Years’ War assessed the costs and benefits of their alliance with the mother country in an atmosphere of tightened metropolitan control. If the royal government of France was prepared to cede to planters’ complaints on a limited range of issues pertaining to trade during the American War of Independence, they compensated by hemming in local autonomy on taxation, lawmaking, and defense; during this period, murmuring about “ministerial despotism” became increasingly audible. But Corbier greeted this revolutionary confl ict between the Americans and their British imperial masters with all the fervor of an insurance actuary; in this respect, his cautious stance toward the rebellion of the thirteen colonies resembled the initial reaction of the Affiches américaines, the officially sponsored local newspaper that Corbier read. In 1775 and 1776, the Affiches reported American colonists’ grievances against the British Crown and Parliament with some sympathy, but since the editors’ main concern was with the disruptions to good order (and trade) that would result from warfare, they tended to emphasize the path to conciliation. As the confl ict progressed, however, they clearly began to side with the American colonists against a usurping imperial center, often drawing a contrast between the Americans’ lot and the happy unity of the French monarchy. Albion began to seem more perfidious as the war progressed, and colonial observers began to sense the world-historical dimensions of the confl ict. As the Affiches américaines remarked in 1779, “the independence of the English colonies doubtlessly forms one of the remarkable eras of the universal constitution, which will forever illuminate the present century, and add to the various revolutions that have occurred over the course of it.” It was perhaps in this light that the editors of the Affiches began to discuss favorably reform movements taking place in the metropole, such as the representation of all three of France’s estates—the clergy, the nobility, and the third estate (to which the bourgeoisie belonged)—in the provincial administration of Dauphiné in eastern France.29 29. For a broad comparative perspective on post– Seven Years’ War transformations, El-

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While the Affiches reflected evolving official views about the American War of Independence, most planters had no difficulty resisting the implicit call to join the progressive forces of history. A contingent of French soldiers was raised in Saint-Domingue to participate in the failed 1779 siege of Savannah, Georgia, but the overwhelming majority of them, 546, were free men of color, while only 146 white troops embarked for North America. White planters, who often objected to militia service as a form of “slavery,” preferred to remain on their plantations, raising a subscription to build a warship for the French navy. While whites cultivated their own gardens in Saint-Domingue, free men of color (gens de couleur) gained military experience, and the expectation of free political participation in their home country, as they fought for the Americans’ cause. When the French Revolution spread to Saint-Domingue, gens de couleur immediately entered the fray to demand political rights; when refused, many used their military training to rally slaves to their cause in the Western Province of Saint-Domingue. The leader of the Savannah expedition, the marquis Lenoir de Rouvray, would later trace the origins of the Reign of Terror of 1793– 94 in France to the American colonies: “The Jacobin sect was born there and they will always be the home of popular revolt and the doctrine of regicide.”30 Corbier was certainly no revolutionary fellow traveler. Although he saw American liberation as a sign of human progress, agreeing that “certainly it is more advantageous to France and to Europe that America be free than under the domination of the English,” he was nevertheless overcome by the atmosphere of nervous discontent, and offered up the following counsel of despair: “It would perhaps be more prudent that the belligerent powers get together and carve up the sovereignty of North America . . . peace is what we should desire.” Once the French Revolution arrived in Saint-Domingue in 1789, a broad segment of elite opinion opted for peaceful subjection to metropolitan authority, accompanied by minor reforms. Still another segment believed that consummating a revolution that had

liott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 295. For the situation in the French colonies, Tarrade, “Administration coloniale en France”; and Bénot, Révolution française et la fi n des colonies, chap. 2 (on ministerial despotism). For parallels with the American case, Frostin, “Histoire de l’autonomisme colon,” 651–52. On early reactions to the war, Affiches américaines, 11 January 1775; 3 January 1776; 24 January 1776; and 7 February 1776. See 16 February 1779 (“universal constitution”), 18 June (contrast with French monarchy); 8 June (general views on the American Revolution); and 7 September 1779 (estates of Dauphiné). 30. Garrigus, Before Haiti, 208 (for figures), 123 (on militia service). Weber and McIntosh, “Une correspondance familiale,” 207 (marquis de Rouvray to the comtesse de Lostanges).

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begun in the imperial metropole meant overturning ministerial despotism in favor of colonial autonomy. Whether loyalist or autonomist, all sides believed that theirs was the solution to containing the social chaos that political revolution and war threatened. 31 The war ended and the plantation of Étienne-Louis Ferron de la Ferronnays recovered by 1783, the year that Pierre-Jacques Auguste Corbier took over management of the estate, but the coming economic surge in SaintDomingue brought other difficulties and exposed a different set of social tensions. These developments seemed to vindicate the prediction of the elder Corbier that, were the thirteen colonies to win their independence, only an artfully conceived set of policies could succeed in keeping SaintDomingue within the French orbit. One consequence of French victory was that slaving voyages increased by 100 percent in the decade after the war; arrivals to Saint-Domingue averaged twenty-six thousand African captives per year between 1783 and 1791, and for the fi rst time planters made the overwhelming majority of their slave purchases from French merchants. Although imports were increasing, the efflorescence of the coffee economy in Saint-Domingue bid up demand and hence prices for slaves: Ferronnays paid between 1,500 and 1,800l.c. for a field slave from 1774 to 1777; between 1784 and 1788, prices were between 2,300 and 3,000. Slave purchases fattened debt portfolios in metropolitan merchant houses, and on the eve of the French Revolution planters’ debts held by Nantes merchants ballooned to an estimated 80 millionl.t. Merchant houses foreclosed on plantations or imposed onerous terms of receivership, stretching for several years, until planters discharged their debts. The late 1780s saw a rash of such arrangements, although the marquis narrowly escaped the ignominy of living on a pension while merchants managed his estate by submitting to a quieter humiliation: in 1783, he sold the Cul de Sac plantation for 500,000l.t. to his eldest brother, Pierre-Jacques François Louis Auguste. Étienne-Louis kept the plantation in usufruct until his death, a disposition reflected in the greatly reduced price—probably about half its actual value. He received 100,000 in cash; 120,000 was paid to his creditors, including the merchants Arnous and Sons of Nantes; and the rest was

31. JBC to ELF, 22 November 1779 (two quotations). For criticism of the war effort, 2 February 1779, 16 February 1779, 4 April 1779, 8 December 1779, and 6 May 1780. Corbier’s criticism is validated in Tarrade, Le commerce colonial, 466. Oddly, although Corbier seemed to uphold the principles of the Americans’ struggle, he also believed them to be the “refuse of the human race”: 22 November 1779.

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constituted into an annuity that paid 28,000 per year. Not even this infusion of cash was entirely sufficient to break the cycle of debt, and by 1790 the marquis sought to borrow another 60,000 to pay off debts to Arnous and Sons. Regular bankruptcies among neighbors served as reminders of the parlous state of planter fi nances, which translated into increasing resentment toward the merchant-bankers of Bordeaux and Nantes. 32 A set of letters written by Pierre-Jacques Corbier in 1785 reminds us how the postwar economic boom was felt on the plantation. As fewer slaves were purchased to replenish the ranks on Cul de Sac, Corbier explained, “the laziest” slaves ran off, while those who remained were subjected to an increasingly “rude” work rhythm. Despite adequate provisions, overworked slaves were dying in prodigious numbers or lying sick or exhausted in the hospital. Although sugar production was increasing, Corbier fi ls predicted another crash: “It is impossible, with slaves at 2,500l.c. and other goods similarly expensive, that the planters make anything.” In their impatience to capitalize on stagnation in the British West Indies, Saint-Dominguan planters continued to bridle against the Exclusive, which, even in attenuated form, raised their costs. Colonial planters and metropolitan merchants renewed their mutual recriminations, with an increasingly delegitimized crown caught in between. 33 Corbier père often remarked that the Cul de Sac plain—and SaintDomingue more generally—had long passed its frontier stage where small sugar planters could come to the colony and quickly make a fortune. Toward the end of century, the Cul de Sac plain, with its fertile land and close port access, began to feel like a crowded place. Irrigation schemes became increasingly contentious and expensive, and the land market was heating up to speculative levels. Corbier reported one buyer paying an astounding 4,000l.c. per carreau in 1784; the normal price was about 250. Rising costs and market volatility favored an oligarchy of planters like

32. On arrivals, slavevoyages.org (accessed 11 April 2016). See Stein, French Sugar Business, 22 (French preponderance) and 38 (debts in Nantes). For debts in Bordeaux, comanagement, and foreclosure, Thésée, Négociants bordelais, 51–78 and 120. For import figures and the coffee economy, Garrigus, Before Haiti, 119–20. PJC to ELF, 11 November 1776 (political prospects); and 17 November 1783 and 6 July 1784 (bankruptcies). For details of the sale of the Cul de Sac plantation, AN, MC XIV/482, 23 April 1783. The timing of this sale also suggests that it was made to meet fi nancial needs arising from Ferronnays’ separation from his wife, discussed in the next chapter. On 60,000l.t. for Arnous and Sons, JC to ELF, 6 July 1790. 33. PJC to ELF, 15 January 1786 (“it is impossible”); and 12 November 1785 and 20 April 1785 (mortality and work rhythm). This episode is also discussed in chapter 3. On the politics of trade, Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce, chap. 6; and on tensions with (and within) the colonial administration, Bénot, Révolution française et la fi n des colonies, chap. 2.

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Ferronnays, who could spread fi xed costs over larger productive units and who could weather market gyrations better than his smaller competitors by calling on large merchant houses or family members. Ferronnays was undoubtedly part of this consolidation among the planter elite, expanding his productive capacity on Cul de Sac over the 1780s by acquiring land and slaves; but his experience reminds us that such expansion always took place on the razor’s edge of overcapitalization and hence potential bankruptcy. The postwar boom represented not so much the return to health as the onset of a different kind of fever.34 This consolidation among planters had destabilizing social consequences as well: as the plantation economy matured, confl ict sharpened between landless whites (petits blancs), plantation-owning free blacks (gens de couleur ), and the white owners of large plantations (grands blancs). Among the latter class, there was no love lost between newly arrived or absentee French owners—who, like Ferronnays and Corbier, exploited their connections with the royal administration—and members of the comparatively less powerful white Creole planter group, like ÉtienneLouis’ father-in-law, Pierre César Binau of Léogane. 35 These groups pitched in to maintain slavery once the threat of abolition—real or imagined—began to loom in 1789; but their relations quickly degenerated to prerevolutionary norms, which helps to explain why the lid was never entirely put on the slave uprisings that began in August of 1791, in the run-up to what eventually became the Haitian Revolution. From this point forward, international political events once again reached deeply into the countryside. What one planter concluded in 1780 remained true in the 1790s: “I know from personal experience that this country is always subject to revolutions, and all the more so in times of war than in peace.”36 34. PJC to ELF, 5 August 1784 (land prices); and 11 November 1788 (water politics). Paul Butel, citing Moreau de Saint Méry, confi rms this land speculation. Butel, Histoire des Antilles françaises, 97 and 103. 35. On this process of consolidation and polarization in Saint-Domingue, particularly in contrast to Guadeloupe and Martinique, Watts, West Indies, chap. 8. Mainland French versus white Creole relations are a leitmotif of the entire correspondence between ELF and Corbier père and fi ls, but these tensions sharpen toward the end of the period. For earlier developments, Debien, “Aux origines des quelques plantations . . . de Léogane et du Cul- de-Sac,” esp. 54– 64, on the evolution of class structure. On these issues, PJC to ELF, 20 December 1787; 30 April 1788; and 12 June 1788. 36. AN, T 210/2, Valdec (Grande Rivière) to JBC (Cul de Sac), 16 July 1779.

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F

amily provided indispensable structures for the growth of the early modern world economy and for colonies such as Saint-Domingue. The European states that sponsored monopolistic trading companies and invested in colonies were heavily patrimonial in character. That is to say, to attract the capital and talent needed to accomplish these enterprises’ ostensibly public ends, impecunious states with limited bureaucracies became captive to the logic of private inheritance dominant among elites. Wherever European states established trading companies and colonies, the grants of land, privileges, and offices that were the lifeblood of traditional elites flowed in profusion. Imperial confl ict was often motivated by dynastic considerations, while military and administrative oligarchies often consisted of familial networks. We examined previously how patriarchy served diverse purposes on the West Indian plantation: it reinforced the authority of the owner and his—usually his—delegates; but the household organization of the plantation also acted as a buffer against the capriciousness of the world market, to which the Antillean islands were cruelly exposed.1 Families provided essential connective tissue for long-distance trade networks. In this respect, the economy of the Atlantic world resembled the systems of the Mediterranean Sea and the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Keeping trade within small groups of families that were often bound by membership in a religious minority helped to mitigate the besetting problems of trust and information. Merchant families intermarried, sent nephews and sons to serve apprenticeships as factors in foreign ports, and concluded 1. The literature on this subject is vast. For two influential discussions, Adams, Familial State; and Cain and Hopkins, “Gentlemanly Capitalism.”

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commercial alliances by extending or seeking credit. Slowly, prudently, they expanded the sources of merchandise, information, and capital essential to mastering the uncertainties of long-distance trade. Even where robust legal institutions facilitated cross-cultural trade by making it possible to enforce contracts and assert property rights, family-centered fi rms remained central to oceanic commerce. An outward-looking, cosmopolitan commerce always carried with it the protective shell of endogamy into which it could retreat, in the manner of the hermit crab, in times of peril.2 Finally, families were central to the process of colonization itself. Although it was typically individuals and not entire family groups who immigrated to colonies like Saint-Domingue, these decisions usually involved family members and fortunes, like that of the Ferron de la Ferronnayses, that remained rooted in the metropole. Historians have recently shown us how intermarriage between elites, circular migration, cultural exchanges, and patterns of investment make it more useful to speak of Saint-Domingue as a far-removed province of France that shared a relatively unified elite, rather than as a colonial periphery with an increasingly independent Creole population struggling against a distant metropole. Politically, socially, and geographically, families bridged the immensity between the ports of western France and the fertile plains of Saint-Domingue. This is part of what the planters of Saint-Domingue meant when they told Louis XVI in 1788 that his court had become Creole by marriage.3 From all these points of view, families were central in establishing the structures of France’s colonial empire. They functioned in much the same way that, as Karl Polanyi memorably described in The Great Transformation, traditional society propped up a weak and crisis-ridden market society during the period of its emergence in the eighteenth and nine2. Francesca Trivellato argues against fetishizing diasporic religious communities as the framework for oceanic trading networks, but her work nevertheless makes clear that family alliances were key for fi rms involved in cross-cultural trade in the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. See Familiarity of Strangers, 16–27. Family imparted “cumulative resistance” to risky, sometimes fragile trading networks. See Mathias, “Risk, Credit and Kinship in Early Modern Enterprise”; quote on 33. On intermarriage and overseas trade, Cain and Hopkins, “Gentlemanly Capitalism,” 509. For the context of the French Atlantic world, including plantations and the slave trade, Pétré- Grenouilleau, Argent de la traite, 58– 62; and Stein, French Sugar Business, 24 and 33. 3. Meadows, “Planters of Saint-Domingue”; and Palmer, “Atlantic Crossings.” On metropolitan/Creole confl ict, Bénot, Révolution française et la fi n des colonies, chap. 2; Frostin, “Histoire de l’autonomisme colon.” For the role of the family in the construction of the Atlantic world more broadly, Hardwick, Pearsall, and Wulf, “Introduction: Centering Families in Atlantic Histories.”

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teenth centuries. But it would be a mistake to draw an overly sentimental portrait of the families that helped to make France’s Atlantic world, or to exaggerate the stabilizing functions they were able to perform. The domestic space of the family was never independent from production and exchange, as much as the sentimental ideology of the family so pervasive in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries portrayed the household as a necessary counterpoint to the competitive, egoistic world of the market. If love and altruism sometimes protected weak and dependent members from the rigors of the market, other aspects of patriarchy only intensified economic exploitation within the household by setting it on a more stable ideological footing. Family could hardly be expected to provide a shelter against the violence, individualism, and uncertainty that was so pervasive in Saint-Domingue and the world markets it served. The geographic and social distances between colony and metropole exploded or negated the settled domesticity of family and marriage: on the plantation and within marriages, absences undermined social control, property, and profit. Harmonious households could call forth the gentler, more altruistic bases of family feeling, but bad marriages exposed the crude armature of social and economic ambition that held most alliances together. One such marriage, between Étienne-Louis Ferron de la Ferronnays and Marie-Elisabeth Thimothée Binau, began, as most do, in the expectation of mutual comprehension and prosperity; the loathing that developed immediately between them, the misery of their union, helps us to complete the picture of a violent and competitive society whose elites were perpetually at odds with one another.4

A MARRIAGE OF NEED AND GREED Like many servants of the crown stationed in Saint-Domingue, the marquis de la Ferronnays saw his appointment there as an occasion to improve his personal fortune. In addition to their salaries and other official emoluments such as taking a cut of the droit de nègre, a tax on the im-

4. Polanyi, Great Transformation. On the family, Habermas, Structural Transformation, 46–47: “The bourgeois family’s self image of its intimate sphere collided even within the consciousness of the bourgeoisie itself with the real functions of the bourgeois family” (47). For the prevalence of sentimental discourse, specifically in the context of the Atlantic world, Pearsall, Atlantic Families, 7–11: “In short, sentimentalizing families was one way of coping with the dislocations of the eighteenth century” (7); “Families did not get happier in the eighteenth century; they just emphasized the claims of domestic harmony more, in order to serve various ends” (11).

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port of slaves, royal officials feathered their nests by taking part in the provisioning and fi nancing of military operations or by accepting bribes from merchants plying the contraband trade. The marquis’ post of Vice Commander carried with it a salary of 24,000l.t., a large sum quickly demolished by the strict necessity of high living. For a nobleman, his agent Jean-Baptiste Corbier warned, the need for ostentation was more pressing in Saint-Domingue: “In a country like this, where everybody pretends to equality it is difficult to get any respect. Without considerable expenses your social advantages [i.e. nobility] are meaningless here.” It was cheaper to live nobly, and easier to enjoy the pleasure of social deference, in the more forgiving social milieu of mainland France.5 In the face of these disagreeable facts, the marquis invested massively and married strategically. By 1775, he was 800,000l.t. in debt, most of it contracted to purchase and improve his Cul de Sac plantation. As to marriage, Ferronnays wrote well in advance to the king for permission to marry an as-yet-unspecified woman. Shortly after receiving his hunting license, he entered into negotiations for the hand of Mademoiselle de la Chevalerie, a young Creole whose “graces of spirit enriched those of her body.” “She must make a charming wife for a very rich man whom she will have no other care than to please. But a woman like that with a mediocre fortune”—a mere 200,000l.c.—“will be a weak resource.” Ferronnays let these negotiations drop, and in May of 1772 married Marie-Elisabeth Thimothée Binau, who brought with her a considerable dowry, including 72,000 in cash and Grande Rivière, the sugar plantation in Léogane that came with about ninety slaves. Gossip in Port-au-Prince had it that the marquis gained 900,000l.c. by his marriage settlement, although the shabby state of Grande Rivière made the reality somewhat less brilliant.6 Marie-Elisabeth Binau of Léogane was the daughter of Pierre César Binau, a second-generation inhabitant of Léogane and a Major in the army. Binau was half-brother to the highly decorated Maréchal de Camp comte de Nolivos, who probably helped make the connection with another mili5. AN, COL E 245, personnel fi le, Étienne-Louis, vicomte de la Ferronnays, fol. 16 r/v, 7 January 1775 (on salary); and fol. 17 r/v, 6 July 1770 (on expenses). AN, T 210/2, JBC to ELF, 24 March 1775 (“equality”). The title of this section is adapted from Eugen Weber’s quip: “So it was need and greed that bound the family.” Peasants into Frenchmen, 176. 6. AN, COL E 245, fols. 151–52, letter of 18 August 1772, makes reference to this earlier request for blanket permission. On Mlle de la Chevalerie, incuding quotation: M Pays-Duvau (Léogane) to a M Deslandes, 16 August 1769, ADG, 73 J 19, Fonds Gabriel Debien. On Grande Rivière, AN, T 210/2, 5 July 1775, lease agreement between ELF and Valdec. ELF purchased the Cul de Sac plantation in 1773 for 130,000l.c. SMJ, PJF, Notes pour Veuve Corbier, undated, citing a notarial act passed by ELF in PaP, 21 August 1773.

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tary man, Ferronnays. One of Binau’s three plantations on the Léogane plain was a joint venture with Nolivos, who also owned a plantation in Cul de Sac. The father’s connections and military rank may seem to have given him a veneer of status, but early in his career Binau had inadvertently divulged some military secrets, leading him to flee an arrest warrant by the king; upon his return from Curaçao in the southern Caribbean, he spent over a year in prison, and—his career blighted—was relieved of his command although not his military title. We do not have full details on Binau’s political allegiances, but his uncertain fidelity to the crown in the midst of military confl ict with the British fit in with a broader pattern of Anglophilia among disgruntled Creole planters, who believed that British colonists enjoyed better terms of trade and more autonomy than their French counterparts. The Binau family may have been rich, but the disgraced father had two sons seeking military careers, so he was in need of social rehabilitation. Upon his choice of Binau’s daughter, the marquis sought for his nearly seventy-year-old future father-in-law the honorary title of chevalier of the Croix of Saint-Louis, adding, “It is an honor he won’t enjoy for long, and at this point it is much more for my sake than his.” Both sons eventually found low-level commissions as officers in the colonial army.7 The marquis was in an excellent position to request such favors, given his title and his impeccable record of faithful service. The crown had particular cause to be pleased with Ferronnays’ actions beginning in December of 1768, when a group of free men of color, allied with some petits blancs, rose in armed insurrection around the town of Croix des Bouquets. They sought to forcibly remove the Intendant and Governor in Port-auPrince, and to replace them with personnel of their own election. At issue were the attempts, since the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, to build a militia in Saint-Domingue capable of repelling future English invasions; colonial administrators also hoped that militia service would make patriotic citizens out of a free population recalcitrant to royal authority. Rich white planters (grands blancs) were more inclined to cultivate coffee and sugar than the virtues of self-sacrifice and obedience, while the petits blancs crowding the cities of Saint-Domingue saw enlistment in the militia as a form of indentured servitude that could only accentuate their resemblance to enslaved blacks. These tensions were only exacerbated in the 1760s and 1770s, with the increasing domination of Saint-Dominguan 7. AN, COL E 32, on Binau’s career, and AN, COL E 245, 18 April 1772, for Ferronnays’ request.

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society by great sugar planters. Free people of color were more drawn to military service, but their systematic exclusion from positions of command within the militia, which was part of a broader program to deprive free people of color of political rights, created deep resentments among a class of property owners increasingly aware of their contribution to prosperity and social order in the colony. Social divisions and recriminations against ministerial despotism were commonplace in Saint-Domingue, but an atmosphere of heightened public discussion in journals, in places of public entertainment, and among local officials there ratcheted up these confl icts and their potential for a violent dénouement. Ferronnays, an advocate of enlightened despotism who had explicitly denigrated colonists’ pretentions to self-rule, judged that “ill-intentioned people made use of the incredulity” of free people of color in order to press white Creole demands. This uprising was ultimately put down thanks to the timely arrival of troops from the Northern Province and some exemplary executions; locals credited Ferronnays with rallying the inhabitants around the authority of the crown: “Tranquility and good order are due to the love and esteem in which Mr de la Ferronnays is held.” Nevertheless, the incident provided an ominous foretaste of the kinds of unpredictable alliances that would ultimately subvert royal authority when civil war, which eventually led to Haitian independence, returned to Saint-Domingue in 1791.8 On paper, the Binau-Ferronnays alliance was a classic example of the successful pairing of Creole “gold” and noble “pride” described by Moreau de Saint-Méry. The marriage was a social event of some note, with both the Intendant and the Governor in attendance at its celebration in Portau-Prince. In exchange for her considerable dowry, Marie-Elisabeth Binau assumed the title Madame la marquise de la Ferronnays. But in other respects, the alliance can be seen as a collision of two hostile—or at least mutually uncomprehending—worlds. The mésalliance between these two families cannot be interpreted exclusively in terms of the political struggle between Creole and metropolitan elites. At work as well were the tensions between absentee and resident planters; provincial versus Parisian culture; and the submission expected of a socially inferior woman to a member of the ancient military nobility twice her age. Social differences, 8. AN, COL C9A 135, ELF (Cap Français) to duc de Praslin (Versailles), 10 February 1769 (“ill-intentioned”). M Pays-Duvau (Léogane) to a M Deslandes, 16 August 1769 (“esteem”). On this episode, Frostin, “Histoire de l’autonomisme colon,” 651–54; for a particular emphasis on public opinion and a discussion of its expressions, Garrigus, Before Haiti, 127–39. On the social domination by great sugar planters, Trouillot, “Motion in the System,” 369; and Gliech, Saint- Domingue und die Französische Revolution, 147–48.

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and the emotional distance they reinforced, poisoned this marriage from the start.9 Beyond the title of marquise, Marie-Elisabeth received little that corresponded to her expectations. Only one month after their wedding, the marquis de la Ferronnays was called back on orders to Cap Français in the Northern Province, but bringing his new wife with him did not figure into his plans. He delayed his departure from Port-au-Prince for one month “to prepare a young woman for a separation that seems very hard for her,” but insisted that she stay behind on the pretext that in her uninoculated state she would be susceptible to a smallpox epidemic in Cap Français. The absence of any published accounts in Port-au-Prince of this outbreak, coupled with silence in official circles, may have aroused in Marie-Elisabeth the conviction that her husband sought to abandon her on false pretenses: “Remember all the tears she shed in order to follow you to Cap Français,” Corbier reminded his employer. When months later Marie-Elisabeth was fi nally called to Cap Français, her husband greeted her with sexual indifference and social contempt, thus acquainting her with the reality of the mercenary alliances pervasive among the upper nobility.10 The details of this failed marriage are fi ltered through a number of sources. Jean-Baptiste Corbier devoted obsessive attention to this scandal in his letters, carefully reporting his contacts with the marquise, colonial administrators, and members of the beau monde of Port-au-Prince and Cap Français. Also in his letters, Corbier reports in great detail the contents of one lost source. The marquise commissioned the writing of a libelle (libel)—a scurrilous song, poem, or, in this case, narrative circulated in order to damage another’s reputation—from a lawyer in Port-au-Prince and had it circulated widely in Saint-Domingue. Eventually, the document was sent to the Secretary of the Navy in France, which helped a private quarrel metastasize into the affair of state it eventually became. The sulfurous gossip that wafted in the air of this confi ned world was not mere apolitical 9. If demographic patterns in Saint-Domingue are any guide, Marie-Elisabeth was young, only twenty- one years old, while Étienne-Louis was about twice her age. Creole women married on average four years earlier than their French counterparts. For these trends, Houdaille, “Trois paroisses de Saint-Domingue,” 99. For wedding, Affiches américaines, 1772, 235. For ELF birthdate, ADML, RP, Angers, parish of Saint Maurille, 31 August 1731. 10. No news of the epidemic appeared in the Affiches américaines in May, June, or July of that year, nor was there a spike in death notices printed during this period, making it likely that the mortality was experienced solely among the servile population. For the official correspondence, or lack thereof, AN, COL C9A 141 1772. For the outbreak, Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description . . . de l’isle Saint- Domingue, 1:536. On Mme de la Ferronnays, AN, COL E 245, 12 June 1772 (“separation”); and JBC to ELF, 28 August 1774 (“tears”).

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amusement but another facet of the growing importance of public opinion in the political affairs of Old Regime France and its elites. And as with any bedroom scandal, the most intimate details of the Ferronnays-Binau marriage that are related in Corbier’s letters cannot be verified, but the broad details can be corroborated by correspondence within the Ministry of the Navy, contracts, baptismal acts, and letters written by Marie-Elisabeth and her intimates.11 The accusations related in Madame de la Ferronnays’ libelle—an “irritating fiction . . . repeated a hundred thousand times” in the salons of Portau-Prince, according to Corbier—indicate the extent of her outrage. “You inspired disgusting principles in her,” Corbier recounted, “you led men into her dressing room [cabinet de toilette] to watch her dress, and you made her promise to receive them; your conduct was notorious, and you lived more or less publicly with two women in Cap Français and one girl at home.” The girl in question was Mademoiselle Juvigny, a woman of uncertain origins who served as Étienne-Louis’ housekeeper in Cap Français. Money continued to flow to her long after the marquis’ departure from Saint-Domingue in 1774, pointing to the existence of yet another illegitimate child in addition to one in France. Marie-Elisabeth described “several years of disdain” as Étienne-Louis continued his life in Cap Français much as he had during his bachelor days, so she began to nurture plans for vengeance against a man who exploited her passions for his material gain. Corbier carefully reported her line of thinking to the marquis: “You had had other inclinations, and it was understood that you wanted to marry somebody else. You were obliged to return; but it was only calculation that brought you back. I was sold.”12 Although he himself was slandered in Madame de la Ferronnays’ libelle and unhesitatingly sided with his employer, Corbier’s remark that Ferronnays “traded” on his future bride’s passion suggests sympathy with the marquise’s point of view. Here we sense bourgeois criticism directed against noble immorality in an age when sentimental views of the family, including the ideal of companionate marriage, were becoming increasingly prevalent. The marquis’ dangerous liaisons were completely at odds with the treacly portrait that Corbier offered of his own marriage. As a ser11. On the “People-ization” [i.e. People magazine] of politics in Old Regime France, Lilti, Figures publiques, 23. 12. JBC to ELF, 29 June 1775 (quote and the previous paragraph). On ELF’s alliance with Mlle Juvigny, 15 May 1775; 30 July 1775; and 12 August 1775. A payment of 450l.t. to Juvigny, “following her letter,” is recorded in February 1781, long after any housekeeping duties on her part had ceased.

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vant of the de la Ferronnays family, he had plenty of contact with MarieElisabeth—perhaps he even felt some pangs of sexual and social jealousy at the marquis’ conquest—which may explain his sympathetic insight into her situation: “This passion, which I imagine was at fi rst innocent, but still fundamentally novelistic, turned into rage by resistance and a long fermentation.” Madame de la Ferronnays clearly did not understand the transactional nature of her marriage and, stung by disappointment, fell prey to a precocious sort of Bovaryism.13 Tales of the marquise’s loose living began to reach Corbier shortly after his arrival in Saint-Domingue in 1774. She went window-shopping unaccompanied in Léogane, where young men felt free to make her lewd proposals—“the fate reserved for a woman whose reputation is completely lost.” Gambling was a common, sometimes ruinous vice among the French aristocracy, and the taste for this amusement was even more widespread as a palliative against the suffocating boredom of the Grande Caze, or in the easy-come, easy-go atmosphere that reigned in the principal cities of Saint-Domingue. Common report had the marquise deep in the action, and she stood accused of stealing from fellow punters to recoup heavy losses; one chevalier Mantagnac alleged the very serious sum of 30 louis d’or (about 960l.c.). Blotchy skin was just one sign that staying up all night gambling and sleeping all day were beginning to tell on her health. A milk diet and increasing dependence on mysterious “medications” were others. “Ordinarily I arrive at her place at around eleven o’clock in the morning; Madame is still sleeping; her domestics pull her by the legs, by the arms and fi nally she wakes up and allows me to enter her chamber; we talk about business, and the refrain is always ‘fi nd me money.’”14 Inevitably, there were lovers. One of them, Souchet, met Madame de la Ferronnays at the house of a mutual friend for their trysts, flaunting their liaison by presenting bills of exchange made out by Marie-Elisabeth for reimbursement and by riding about town on his lover’s horses. This jean foutre (blackguard, jackass)—strong language for Corbier—compounded the injury by retailing Marie-Elisabeth’s side of the story wherever he

13. JBC to ELF, 29 June 1775 (both quotes). Corbier refers to “a time when she demonstrated the greatest confidence in me”: 18 July 1779. On marriage and noble morality, Habermas, Structural Transformation, 43–44. Bovaryism, named for the main character of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary: Moeurs de province (1856), is the syndrome of ennui diagnosed in novel-reading women of the late nineteenth century. 14. JBC to ELF, 10 August 1774 (“reputation”); 17 August 1774 (losses and theft); 18 July 1779 (medication); and 27 December 1779 (“‘fi nd me money’”).

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went, blaming his mistress’ shameful conduct on an inattentive husband. “It is clear that she is seeking and will always seek to deceive us,” Corbier concluded. “I will sooner believe in the resurrection of the dead than in her reformation.”15 Several circumstances combined to keep this confl ict, which continued for over ten years before it was completely resolved, at a steady boil. Corbier’s letters to Ferronnays alternate between the piquant and the picayune, juxtaposing without transition salacious details of an errant wife to the minutiae of plantation management. But this bathos is more apparent than real; a common thread holds these contrasting literary elements together: both were managerial updates about the disposition of property. Indeed, the two situations were intertwined. On Corbier’s fi rst visit, he observed the “deplorable state” of Grande Rivière, which he largely blamed on the “indiscipline” of the slaves. They claimed that they owed obedience only to Madame de la Ferronnays, because they didn’t belong to her new husband. The transfer of control over Grande Rivière to the marquis excited common anxieties about the rigors of life under absentee owners and their ruthlessly profit-maximizing attorneys. Hoping that the proximity of a Creole mistress to her slaves offered greater guarantees of solicitude, and perhaps counting on the indulgence attributed to her sex, the slaves of Grande Rivière maintained that only the marquise had the right to name a manager. Whenever their more benevolent mistress arrives at Grande Rivière, Corbier observed, “the gang grinds to a halt and they spend whole hours talking to her.” Discipline was undermined further as the slaves began to murmur, recounting the Ferronnayses’ marital scandal in exquisite detail. Five years later, after Grande Rivière had been rented out, its tenant, Julien Claude Valdec, lodged the alarming accusation that the marquise was agitating the slaves of Grande Rivière against him. Her goal, he speculated, was to get him to abandon his lease out of fear for his safety, and then to assume management of her dotal property.16 The message was clear, even if Corbier exaggerated for effect: profits hinged on patriarchal authority being asserted both on the plantation and against a defiant wife. Étienne-Louis’ brothers may have had to cope with the problems of absenteeism, but their authority on the plantation was not further eroded by the presence of a Creole wife who remained on the

15. JBC to ELF, 28 August 1774 (“resurrection”). 16. JBC to ELF, 28 August 1774 (visits to Grande Rivière, with quotations); 29 July 1779 (on conspiracy).

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island. Marie-Elisabeth’s constant returns to Grande Rivière remind us that much in contrast to regnant clichés, white Creole women of SaintDomingue, particularly those of petit blanc origins, often took a great deal of interest in business affairs. The wives of the grands blancs were progressively marginalized from the late seventeenth century onward, although the rarity of marriageable white women on the large Antillean sugar islands should, in principle, have led to more bargaining power with their husbands and, if they so desired, to a more active role in the management of shared property. The marquise evidently did not feature herself in the role of passive domestic ornament. When her husband left Saint-Domingue for Paris in the summer of 1774, she fi lled the resulting vacuum of authority; the balance of power shifted in her favor, and the marquis lost control of a situation he had never entirely mastered in the fi rst place.17 Early on, Corbier believed that Marie-Elisabeth’s immoral behavior was not a simple case of depravity but part of a “diabolical” plan, supported by her parents, to secure a marital separation. Outright divorce was impossible in Catholic France, and so the alternatives for those married under the legal Custom of Paris (which extended to the French colonies) were to receive a “separation of household [corps] and property” or a simple “separation of property.” The possibility of separation, added to community property between spouses and women’s preserved capacity to conclude contracts independently of their husbands, gave French wives more independence than those women whose property and legal identity were subsumed into that of their husbands—as for instance under the English common law. The comparatively broad rights enjoyed by wives under of the Custom of Paris, it has been argued, tempered the rigors of patriarchal marriage and laid the basis for more equal and hence more companionate unions. If the Ferron de la Ferronnays marriage was not harmonious, at the very least French law left an escape route for both spouses, one that

17. JBC to ELF, 20 February 1774. The marquis arrived in Le Havre on 18 August 1774. AN, COL E 245. Very little has been written on the subject of white Creole women in SaintDomingue, but for a preliminary attempt, Linzau, “Femmes libres, ‘blanches’ et ‘de couleur.’” On the diminishing role of white women and demographic trends, Burnard, “Inheritance and Independence,” 109. In 1713, adult women constituted 23 percent of the white population; in 1775, this figure had declined to 14 percent, rising back to 21 percent in 1780, probably as a result of new migration rather than births. Source: CAOM, G1 509 (with thanks to John Garrigus). For similar trends in Saint-Domingue and birth statistics, Houdaille, “Trois paroisses de Saint-Domingue,” 96. The percentage of the female Creole population probably remained in the low teens, following Houdaille’s parish survey. Given the paucity of work on this subject for Saint-Domingue, much of the role of white women there, and perceptions of them, must be inferred from the larger corpus of work on the British West Indies.

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opened up the possibility that the Grande Rivière plantation and other dotal property might return to the Binau family.18 Under the Old Regime, it was the wife who had to petition for a separation, and to receive a separation of property she had to prove severe fi nancial mismanagement on the part of her husband. To receive a separation of household that would officially split their domicile and give her more autonomy in her day-to-day life, it was incumbent on her to prove cruelty or abandonment; male adultery was considered immaterial long into the nineteenth century. As proof, Marie-Elisabeth retained the marquis de la Ferronnays’ compromising letters, which exposed him as her corruptor—“you inspired in her the taste for expense and pleasures”—and which supposedly contained damaging revelations about his expensive social competition with the vicomte de Choiseul among the upper crust of Cap Français. However, Madame’s bill of particulars probably wouldn’t have gone far in an Old Regime court, had the marquis sought to resist a separation; neither a rich man’s profl igate spending nor the noble practice of “manuring the fields” by contracting a loveless marriage with a rich commoner fell wildly outside eighteenth-century social norms.19 At the same time, Marie-Elisabeth had Paris on her side. Her husband lived there, far away from Saint-Domingue and largely unable to control her; and Paris, the social and cultural capital of France, demonstrated as nowhere else the destructive effects that a well-placed libelle could have on its subject.20 Libelle is an old, even ancient practice, but in eighteenthcentury France it was carried to a fi ne art. A raft of such productions— pamphlets, books, songs, and handwritten screeds—exposed the private vices of public figures like Marie Antoinette, Louis XV, the duchesse du Barry—and in so doing eroded the moral authority of the monarchy and its ruling elites. The reason that these libelles were so effective in monarchical France was that the patrimonial royal government not only lacked a strict separation between the public and the private but relied on the conflation of the two. Allegiances, factions, and appointments were often

18. On “liberal” and “companionate” patriarchy and the Custom of Paris, Bradbury, Wife to Widow, chap. 2. For contrasts to English common law—and strictures against exaggerating French wives’ power, Christie and Garvreau, “Marital Confl ict, Ethnicity and the Regime of Legal Hybridity.” The authors discuss Bradbury. 19. For details on separations, Lepointe, Famille dans l’ancien droit, 328–31; Hardwick, “Seeking Separations”; and Pigeau, Procédure civile du Châtelet de Paris, 177– 88. JBC to ELF, 29 June 1775 (“pleasures”). 20. Many libelles were produced in London, but Paris was the political cynosure of this genre; see Darnton, Devil in the Holy Water, introduction and chap 3.

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determined by family connections; venal offices and the public powers associated with them were transmitted as family property; and the government itself was structured like a household, where dissention among its powerful inhabitants was, ideally, hidden behind the veil of domestic secrecy. Revelations of turpitude in the private, privileged world of the court damaged not only the individuals and groups singled out for libelle but also the whole structure of power that had hitherto protected them. The marquis, a servant of the king and a nobleman, had much to lose by his wife’s flagrant indecency, and taking the sordid details of their marriage public in a professionally written libelle was a daring and dangerous provocation on her part. Marie-Elisabeth cunningly turned the social codes of the aristocracy against itself, exploiting both the absence of her husband and the protection of her family to assert her will in a situation where men generally had the upper hand. At fi rst, this tactic succeeded brilliantly. By returning to Saint-Domingue, Ferronnays could have put a lid on the scandal, but his ambitions and his status froze him in place in Paris. His very presence would have served as a rebuttal to charges of abandonment and put him in a position to overawe a restive wife, in-laws, and slaves. But he had returned to Paris to secure a permanent appointment as Governor—fi rst military commander—of Saint-Domingue; returning there with a lesser appointment, or none at all, would have been unacceptably humiliating. So instead, the marquis ordered his wife to join him in Paris. Marie-Elisabeth, abetted by her family and other connections in Saint-Domingue, put him off with every sort of ruse and pretext. Then Ferronnays obtained a lettre de cachet through the Ministry of the Navy, but he hesitated to put it into execution, since any successful resistance on her part “would assure [him] public humiliation.” A lettre de cachet was a private arrest warrant issued by the king, often used to settle family disputes discreetly; it conferred the right to put a woman into a convent for two years, but by such an overt show of force, Ferronnays risked “occasioning further public clamor and awakening rumors that have started to die away.” Marie-Elisabeth had maneuvered him into a situation where the tools normally used to quash public scandal only aroused it.21 Ferronnays owed his defeat in this fi rst phase of hostilities to MarieElizabeth’s profound sense of injury and her wily manipulation of public opinion in the colony: “All of these machinations,” Corbier observed, “have their source in your own household.” Given his wife’s penchant for 21. AN, COL E 245, ELF (Paris) to Anne Nicolas François Leroux, commis à Versailles (Versailles), 24 November 1775 (both quotations).

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public drama, the marquis had no other recourse but prevarication, for the time being allowing Marie-Elisabeth to follow her inclinations by remaining with her mother in Léogane: “In the public eye,” he reasoned amiably, “a young woman is as respectable in her mother’s house as in a convent.” Although the Binau family did not retake Grande Rivière by their plotting, Ferronnays allocated his wife two-thirds of its rental price, 18,000l.c., as a living allowance. In addition to occasioning this pension, the scandal cost the marquis his colonial career. He had enjoyed an unblemished record up to this point, and for over five years had been effectively promised the governorship when it came vacant. But a series of pleading letters on the subject of his promotion, written to Secretary of State Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux Maurepas and Secretary of the Navy Sartine, attest to his increasing desperation over his career and fortune. None of these arguments found any purchase; probably believing the marquis too tainted by scandal to command effectively in Saint-Domingue, Sartine retired him at half pay at forty-four years of age.22

THE PROMISCUOUS ISLAND Expensive as it was, whatever peace the marquis hoped to purchase through discreet conciliation with his wife was not durable. Corbier had opposed the settlement between the pair as insufficiently punitive, believing that starving Marie-Elisabeth of money and threatening to imprison her in a convent would improve the marquise’s dangerous frame of mind. A sacred question of male duty was at stake: “Giving free reign to those we are charged with disciplining violates every rule of respectability,” he thundered. Having cornered the marquis into granting her both an allowance and de facto independence, Marie-Elisabeth continued to sign for gambling losses all over Léogane and Port-au-Prince; Étienne-Louis was forced to cover her debts. Her penchant for scenes while at the theater raised eyebrows. And as to her sexual appetite, it could only be compassed theologically: “You know that she would cheat on God the Father himself if he were not three people rolled into one.”23 In February 1779, Corbier wrote to the marquis with news of the mar-

22. JBC to ELF, 26 August 1775 (“machinations”). AN, COL E 245, ELF to Anne Nicolas François Leroux, commis à Versailles (Versailles), 24 November 1775 (ELF’s pleas and “convent”). 23. JBC to ELF, 20–25 November 1777 (punitive measures); 29 July 1779 (“respectability”); and 6 July 1780 (“three people,” i.e., the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit).

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quise’s latest, culminating outrage. Since no correspondence could be presumed safe from officially prying eyes, Corbier had adopted the habit of relating the most scurrilous details of Madame de la Ferronnays’ behavior as the story of “Julie.” This displacement not only furnished the recipient of these burning letters with a certain plausible deniability, but gave Corbier—who did not lack authorial pride—scope for literary experimentation. In this narrative, for instance, Julie’s deceived husband was transformed into a literary double, a mutual friend of Ferronnays and Corbier. “You must be even closer to him than I,” Corbier noted, “and without any fear you can give him the advice necessary to his tranquility and the honor of his name.”24 Perhaps reading about himself as the duped husband of an extravagant wife would jolt the marquis, by the process of cathartic self-recognition, from his curious torpor. The details of the marquise’s recent behavior had the power to shock even a seasoned roué like ÉtienneLouis Ferronnays: Last year Julie gave birth to a boy in April or May; everybody knew about the pregnancy; I learned toward the end but still did not want to believe it.  .  .  . Even though some measures were taken the birth was quite public and became even more so because of a pitiful ruse designed so that the child could be raised in her father’s household. The child was set out in a basket at the front gate of the Point [one of Pierre Césare Binau’s plantations], but two of Julie’s female slaves were left there, one to the right and one to the left  .  .  . for fear that something might happen to the child, who was wrapped up in the fi nest cloth decorated with lace, and along with him in the basket was a roll of 25 portuguaises [approximately 1,660l.c.] and a letter recommending the child to the proprietor of the Point as well as to Julie. She took the child, whom she raises with the greatest care; everybody recognizes Julie in the child without the least difficulty. I knew at the time that the Seigneur of the Point had a document drawn up that testified to the abandonment of the child and that it was baptized. The baptismal act states the mother and father are unknown. . . . It is suspected that Julie intends to recognize the child one day; the public signs of tenderness she shows all advertise it. . . . I think you have no other option than to have the child taken away from her, an order from the King shouldn’t be difficult, a bastard deserves no other treatment than to be raised and educated so as to earn his livelihood; after the principle that we have 24. JBC to ELF, 20 February 1774 (“tranquility”).

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in France pater est quem nuptiæ demonstrant, there is every reason to fear that this child will be declared to belong to he who is not his father.  .  .  . What is certain is that the child exists, that it enjoys his mother’s tenderness and that an end should be put to this.25

The boy was baptized Siriac Thimothée, with Marie-Elisabeth Thimothée Ferron de la Ferronnays named as the child’s godmother. Poitou, an army officer in Port-au-Prince and the suspected father, served as godfather. Rather than being taken away from the marquise as Corbier suggested, Siriac came to live on her father’s plantation. This child was not the fi rst fruit of the marquise’s adultery: already on 8 May 1774, she had given birth to a girl. Marie-Pierre Gabriel Lamoreux was baptized the legitimate daughter of Pierre and Jean-Gabrielle Lamoreux, two merchants from Cap Français. The baptismal record declared the infant born in Cap Français, but curiously, she was administered the sacrament of extreme unction by a priest—indicating grave danger of death—in Léogane just one month after her birth. In May of the following year she was baptized, again in Léogane, “at the request of the parents, here represented by the dame vicomtesse de la Ferronnays by act . . . of the notaries of Cap Français.” As with Siriac, Marie-Elisabeth served as godmother; her father, Pierre César Binau, was named as the godfather, and the little girl was handed over to a governess nearby in Léogane, who was paid by the “godmother.” It was through these fraudulent pretexts, involving a conspiracy by local government and church functionaries against the standards of official morality and Ferronnays’ authority, that the marquise created a natural—if not precisely legitimate—family in Saint-Domingue.26 Several months after Siriac’s birth, Corbier met the infant while dining in the Grand Caze of the nearby Coustard plantation. Ever in search of money, the marquise caught up with Corbier there toward the end of dinner, making her entrance along with her “foundling.” He recounted that a slave woman brought the foundling into the room and placed him in his mother’s arms. The woman [the marquise] immediately brought it

25. JBC to ELF, 16 February 1779. Pater est quem nuptiæ demonstrant: “The husband is presumed the father.” Note Corbier’s use of the term Seigneur (Lord) to denote a sugar plantation owner. 26. For Marie-Pierre Gabriel’s baptism, CAOM, États Civils, Saint-Domingue, Léogane, 24 May 1775. In her will, the marquise de la Ferronnays pays a total of 4,000l.t. to Marie Anne Beton, the governess of her “goddaughter.” CAOM, DPPC NOT SDOM, 234, Notariat Bacon de Rochefort, Léogane, 8 October 1791, Testament and Codicil of MEB.

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to Monsieur Coustard and had him kiss it. She then came to me. I was immobilized by the spectacle. She presented the child to me, saying to him “my son, kiss Monsieur, he is a good white [un bon blanc]” . . . I cannot fathom the reason for such an act, which has made an impression that goes beyond anything I have seen in twenty-eight years of working for your family. I could never have imagined that the living proof of your misfortune could enjoy my caresses.27

Corbier presented himself as stunned by Marie-Elisabeth’s shamelessness, but did not explicitly discuss what is perhaps for modern readers the strangest facet of this episode: the expression un bon blanc. On the surface, this utterance is gratuitous, perhaps meaningless; but Corbier’s vivid reaction provides a link between the marital drama documented so compulsively in his letters and the aspects of eighteenth-century SaintDominguan culture that aroused widespread apprehension. In presenting Corbier as un bon blanc, the marquise drew a line separating mother and son from her husband’s attorney. A straightforwardly racial interpretation of this expression is impossible, since all four protagonists in the scene—mother, child, attorney, planter—stood on the same side of the color line. For his part, the slaves called Siriac, who was just cutting his teeth when this incident occurred, “little master”; not only were they all blanc but they were the grands blancs who set the tone for the rest of Saint-Dominguan society. The broader issue for a grand blanc of metropolitan origin like Corbier was the promiscuity—indiscriminate and immoral mixing—of plantation life. Corbier and others constantly lodged this criticism against SaintDominguan society. Here, master and slaves lived in close quarters, infecting one another with their respective attitudes and vices. Marie-Elisabeth was a blanc from every point of view, but calling Corbier a bon blanc set her, a Creole, apart from metropolitan newcomers. In all likelihood, she was simply teasing him, scandalizing his stone-faced prudery by assuming for a moment the voice of one of the black women who constantly surrounded, and performed the most intimate offices for, their white masters. Or perhaps she acted inadvertently, demonstrating with all the more force how little sense of derogation was to be felt in playfully adopting a

27. CAOM, États Civils, Saint-Domingue, Léogane, 5 December 1778. This written record simultaneously confi rms the truth of Corbier’s account as well as the identity of “Julie.” For the scene chez Coustard, JBC to ELF, 22 November 1779 (italics denote text that is underlined in the letter).

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slave’s diction, a habit for which the white Creole women of Jamaica, for instance, were constantly reproached. In either case, one appreciates how naturally white Creoles accepted their constant proximity to slaves: Madame de la Ferronnays referred to them as “her children,” and the large mixed-race population of Saint-Dominguan society provided incontrovertible proof of this intimacy. In contrast to Marie-Elisabeth’s perfect ease, Corbier fearfully resisted the promiscuity of Creole life. He and other critics saw their manners as part of a larger pattern of white assimilation into a degenerate culture. In this account, living among slaves and the massive fortunes built on their toil, whites became lascivious, tyrannical, corrupt, and work shy.28 Corbier’s descriptions of Madame de la Ferronnays fit all the contemporary stereotypes used to describe the white Creole women of SaintDomingue. In a hot climate with little to do, and surrounded from an early age by slaves who doted on them, these creatures were said to become indolent, capricious, and sexually precocious. The poor state of education did not help either. To strengthen ties with the mother country, the crown had prohibited the establishment of any educational institutions in Saint-Domingue. Those children whose parents did not send them to France to have their education supervised by relatives would remain on the island and receive the “detestable education” that had poisoned Marie-Elisabeth’s mind. The poor example set by the mother, as well as an “abominable vice” running in her own blood, accounted for MarieElisabeth’s turpitude. Corbier ruefully admitted that she was “very seductive,” and reported with faint relief when he found that extravagant living had spoiled her figure. The beauty of white women in Saint-Domingue was said to wither quickly in the tropical heat, a disadvantage in the sexual competition with their mulatto counterparts, who were said to age more gracefully.29 Contemporaries like Moreau de Saint Méry were fi xated on the mulatto women (mulâtresses) of Saint-Domingue, who dominated the 28. On speech habits, Zacek, “Searching for the Invisible Woman,” 332–33. The proportion of free people of color in the free population as a whole does not account for all mixedrace people in Saint-Domingue, and not all free people of color were of mixed race; but the proportion of free people of color in the free population as a whole is indicative: 1771 (26%); 1780 (34%); and 1788 (44%). Source: CAOM, G1 509. 29. For more on lack of education and sexuality, Vaissière, Saint- Domingue, 296–305. Vaissière is frankly biased against Creole culture and adopts the point of view of its sternest contemporary critics, but his account is reliable in the sense that he draws on contemporary sources and documents them accurately. Some believed that an education in France made Creoles even more haughty, superficial, and refractory to metropolitan authority. On MEB’s mother, JBC to ELF, 19 June 1775 and 15 March 1778. On seduction and her figure, 6 July 1780.

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image of this colony to a much greater degree than the smaller, considerably less exotic population of white Creoles. When a white Creole took on a mulâtresse as a companion, the two often shared a bedroom; the white Creole might take on the mannerisms of her “cocotte” (a familiar term for “prostitute”), and it was widely believed that she became her apprentice in the arts of seduction. Whatever bargaining power white women may have gained within the household by their relative scarcity in Saint-Domingue was overwhelmed by the wide availability of paid (or forced) sexual encounters with African slaves or their free descendants. Unlike in Jamaica, where the role of respectable—if asexual—motherhood was assigned to the women of the planter class in the eighteenth century, seduction seems to have remained the only game in town in Saint-Domingue, and women like Marie-Elisabeth Binau were slandered for playing it. 30 The portrayal of women of both races was highly sexualized, although the mulâtresse came to represent Creole culture as a whole, which was said to suffer from any number of feminine vices undermining the masculine virtues of continence, honesty, and hard work: “Only a physical obstacle can stop a Creole’s desires, especially among the opposite sex.” As in mainland France, the taste for luxury was seen as feminine, because it was “soft” and came to symbolize a civilization undermined by its own wealth.31 A principal item of luxury in Saint-Domingue was the domestic slave, whose omnipresence constantly reaffirmed the master’s social status. From an early age, according to Moreau Saint-Méry, a Creole woman basked in these slaves’ servile flattery, protecting her favorites just like any tyrant who elevates personal whims above principles. The doctrine of racial supremacy led to a certain egalitarianism among the white population of Saint-Domingue: any white, no matter how poor, could consider him- or herself the social superior of even a rich and free black. This disposition helps to explain the pervasive anti-authoritarianism among the white population of Saint-Domingue. As in so many island slave societies,

30. For Moreau de Saint Méry’s description, Description . . . de l’isle Saint- Domingue, 1:18–23. On mulâtresses’ sexuality and the image of the colony, Garraway, Libertine Colony, 29, 230–31, and 288– 89. On the “cocotte,” Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative, 281. MEB had a “cocotte” in her retinue who went to the theater at her expense (JBC to ELF, 6 July 1780). On Jamaica, Zacek, “Searching for the Invisible Woman,” 332; and Barash, “Character of Difference,” which usefully explores the regulating role of sexuality in Jamaica. 31. JBC to ELF, 29 July 1779 (“desires”). See also 18 July 1779: “The mind of a woman, and especially that of a Creole woman, who is fortunately in a class all her own, is a singular thing.”

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white Saint-Dominguans resisted metropolitan authority, and refused to pay social deference to those fellow whites who, in Europe, might have been considered their natural social superiors. A taste for independence that was merely irritating in lower-class men became intolerable in a woman of any social status. The coterie of black servants constantly surrounding her served as a sign of Madame de la Ferronnays’ incorrigible freedom: according to Corbier, one reason for her refusal to go France was that she simply “could not exist” without slaves: “Only they can bend to her manner of living, which neither you nor anybody else can reform.”32 A corollary to the taste for independence was the search for distinction in an acquisitive society where money blurred social hierarchies. Valets often dressed in elaborate livery that advertised their masters’ importance, an expense that was part of a larger pattern of consumption geared to competitive display. In this respect, the Creoles of Saint-Domingue resembled nothing so much as the French aristocracy. Madame de la Ferronnays herself brought a coach and six horses into her marriage, owned diamonds and pearls, and traveled with a “troupe of servants and valets” around her that were “much too well dressed.” With all these expenses, like many of her fellow Creoles, Marie-Elisabeth received infrequently in her own shabby abode: “No question of maintaining a table in her house, and she will not ruin herself with what she spends on table cloths.” What some Enlightenment observers called the “new luxury” developing among the moneyed bourgeoisie of France—consumption oriented toward comfort and refi nement rather than aristocratic ostentation—had not reached the Lords of Saint-Domingue. One day Corbier found Marie-Elisabeth at home “eating a sweet potato, a plantain and some salted meats on her bed.” For the disgusted Corbier, this sordid tableau of a noblewoman reduced by her own extravagance to eating like one of her slaves was a fitting reductio ad absurdum of Creole luxury. 33 The unease that the marquise’s intimacy with her “children” produced in Corbier was not simply a matter of sluttish eating habits but one of social order. Two of her valets were caught after a break-in at a butcher shop

32. On race, egalitarianism, and authority in Jamaica, Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire, 90– 91; and in Saint-Domingue, Ruggiu, “Kingdom of France,” 301. On white Creoles, Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description . . . de l’isle Saint- Domingue, 1:13–17. JBC to ELF, 20 July 1775 (“reform”). 33. On MEB’s jewels, SMJ, MEB (in Confl ans) to her brother at Bordeaux, 25 September 1784, and JBC to ELF, 6 May 1780. For the coach, MC, ET/LXXI/59, 17 February 1785, “Transaction entre Monsieur et Madame de la Ferronnays.” JBC to ELF, 6 July 1780 (“servants,” “cloths,” and “potatoes”); and 6 July 1780 (“dressed”). On the new luxury, Kwass, “Big Hair.”

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in Port-au-Prince involving over 4,000l.c. in losses. The marquise sent a slave woman to take care of them in jail, and she personally made several trips to Port-au-Prince, where she took “the most indecent steps” with the authorities on their behalf. As usual, a bored public avidly gobbled up these new scraps of gossip. Given her influence and tenacity, one of the accused, Cyprion, stood a credible chance of slipping the noose. Were they to be found guilty and executed for the crime, the marquis de la Ferronnays would have received 1,200l.c. apiece. Planters often balked at executing their own slaves or allowing them to be executed by the authorities because of their stiff replacement cost. A crown fund paid out money to the owners of executed slaves to discourage planters from letting serious crimes go unpunished. Whether she pled “with the greatest possible warmth” out of sympathy with her slaves or hatred for her husband, who would have pocketed the money resulting from their execution, Madame de la Ferronnays meddled with the operation of justice. As on the Grande Rivière plantation, the marquise’s familiarity with her slaves interfered with the exercise of other, more official forms of authority. 34 Even if she was hardly the only target of his incessant complaints, Marie-Elisabeth Binau epitomized for Jean-Baptiste Corbier the decadence of Saint-Domingue. He had come to the colony to strike it rich in the plantation economy, but deplored all the cultural effects so easily traced to its existence: a feverish, casino-like atmosphere that perverted business ethics; wasteful displays of wealth; and above all, the promiscuous confusion of classes and races that seemed to constantly undermine decent order. We saw earlier how Corbier feared that his son would become one of the island’s licentious tyrants, habituated from an early age to easy profits, the love of domination, and sexually available women of color. And as degenerate as he found Creole culture in Saint-Domingue, Corbier was little comforted by the manners of the metropolitan elites sent to impose form on this social chaos. Frustrated with the marquis’ “destructive indifference to virtue” in allowing his wife to run riot, he suggested none too subtly that the aristocracy had renounced its moral authority: “In this century, the fashionable people regard adultery as a sort of kindness, and even those who pretend to a sort of respectability believe that it is a fault that should be pardoned, but it . . . is destructive of all morality and good order.” Given their worldly predilections, elites were forced into an “in-

34. For this story and all quotations, JBC to ELF, 25 November 1778. As in so many of these incidents that took place during wartime, we do not know the outcome, because British ships seized outgoing correspondence from captured vessels.

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famous tolerance” of the sort of behavior they were duty-bound to contain. Corbier’s reflections on Saint-Dominguan society resembled his scattered criticisms of the French aristocracy: noble pride and Creole gold were equally forms of disorderly, sensual egotism. 35 It is therefore unsurprising that Corbier’s reflections on Creole society bore a genetic similarity to debates in mainland France over the spread of luxury. In the cities of France—particularly Paris—men of letters witnessed a spectacle of increased wealth, an expanding consumer economy, and the resultant social confusion when improved status could, as some feared, be had for the price of a smart suit of clothes. The ensuing discussions over the role of luxury in commercial societies turned, sometimes bitterly, on many issues. These included the role of the nobility, the corruption of politics by money, and the possibility of virtue in a wealthy, individualistic society. The luxury debate in eighteenth-century France amounted to a collective process of self-reflection on the interaction between new forms of capitalist accumulation and the traditional social order. But not even the most pessimistic of cultural critics ever proposed that Europeans renounce their newfound prosperity. Critics of Creole society reprised many of the central motifs of this debate: confusing social mixture; elites corrupted by the pursuit of wealth; societies rendered cruel and unstable by greed; and women’s nefarious role, or at least the role of values and behaviors attributed to their sex, in these processes. In metropolitan France, new sources of wealth were highly diffuse: overseas trade, manufacture, consumer goods, agriculture, and finance all provided fodder for observers of the modern economy, including critics of its social effects. In Creole society, the origins of disorder—or dynamism—could be located with much greater precision: the plantation. As biting as these assessments of Creole culture sometimes were, nobody for a moment considered addressing the root of the problem. The dysfunction of Saint-Dominguan society was not a mirror in which organizers of the plantation system, like Corbier, chose to see themselves, so the problem was always deflected onto a competing group: metropolitans, Creoles, lascivious women, propertied free people of color, or petits blancs.36

35. JBC to ELF, 29 July 1779 (“destructive indifference”); and 15 March 1778 (“good order”; “infamous tolerance”). 36. For Vincent Brown, “invidious comparisons” absolved metropolitan observers of their moral responsibility for colonial society: “It was a vision calculated to obscure the actual depth of mutual engagement between colony and home country.” Reaper’s Garden, 8.

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THE MARITAL EXCHANGE After years of scandal, it was only the threat of the “usurpation” of the Ferron de la Ferronnays name by an illegitimate male that moved ÉtienneLouis to action. 37 The absence of any but the most passing mention of the little girl over the course of this scandal strengthens the impression that patrimony weighed more heavily in this affair than mere private vice. On 16 October 1779, a lettre de cachet was issued by Louis XVI ordering the arrest of Madame de la Ferronnays, who was to be transported back to France and imprisoned in a convent. This was only the beginning of a long series of letters emanating from the king and his highest ministers. Owing to the seriousness of the allegations, a spy was sent from Paris to SaintDomingue to verify the accusations against Ferronnays’ wife before her arrest. All this occurred during the profound disruptions, including naval blockades and ship seizures, of the American War of Independence. The family’s stature made a private scandal into an urgent affair of state brooking no delay. 38 Ferronnays called on an intimate of the family, Antoine de Sartine, to help settle a sordid affair quietly. Prior to becoming Minister of the Navy, Sartine had served as Lieutenant General of the Paris Police. He drew on the world of ethically flexible police operatives familiar to him when he chose Jean-Baptiste Troussey for a wartime mission to Saint-Domingue. An Inspector of Police during Sartine’s tenure, Troussey had racked up an impressive 150,000l.t. in gambling losses over five years, leaving him at 37. Corbier observed that MEB’s affections “seem equal for the little girl and the little boy,” and that she advertised her intention to give as much as possible to both of them in her will at the expense of her brothers. For this quotation and for “usurpation,” 27 December 1779. These intentions are borne out in her will. See MEB, CAOM, DPPC NOT SDOM, 234, Notariat Bacon de Rochefort, Léogane, 8 October 1791, Testament and Codicil of MEB. For further evidence of ELF’s concern about his estate in relation to Siriac Thimothée: 25 July 1787. ELF’s concern may have been far-fetched, given that he had been in Paris since 1774, so the presumption of paternity would be weak indeed. Corbier was right that the law presumed the husband to be the father, but not when the couple was physically separated. LefebvreTeillard, “‘Pater est quem nuptiae demonstrant,’” 185– 97. Laws on bastardy were liberalized in the eighteenth century, but not to the point where the product of an adulterous union by the mother could be imposed on the father. Gerber, Bastards, 33; chap. 6 on liberalization; 203n22 for reference to Lefebvre-Teillard, above. 38. For the lettre de cachet, AN, COL E 245, 6 October 1779, Louis XVI (Marly) to d’Argout, Intendant of Saint-Domingue (Pa P). On Troussey’s mission, AN, COL E 245, 16 October 1779, “Instruction pour Troussey.” He is enjoined to seek “clarifications” as to the “truth of the facts” alleged behind the lettre de cachet, and to confi rm orders “which might not have been appropriately given.” For the verifications necessary in these cases, Farge and Foucault, Désordre des familles, 28–29.

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least 70,000 in debt and, consequently, “unable to live in Paris except by fraud.” He was duly thrown in the Bastille in 1773, only to be rehabilitated six years later by his former chief Sartine for a clandestine mission in the Antilles. Troussey’s instructions were to dissimulate his true business during the ocean crossing; once on the island, he posed as a doctor and lodged—of all places—on the Ferronnays plantation. Here, he handdelivered highly sensitive letters from the marquis to Jean-Baptiste Corbier. Troussey’s task in Saint-Domingue was to resolve a genuine uncertainty within the Ministry of the Navy about the truth of the charges against the marquise and hence to either execute or annul the repressive measures ordered by the king at Ferronnays’ behest. If the king sought to impose justice in his name, there is more than a whiff of conspiracy in the cozy arrangements between a thoroughly compromised former subordinate and two fellow travelers, Sartine and Ferronnays, in the beau monde of Paris. Allusions to secret instructions and repeated requests to burn written evidence all contributed to an atmosphere of hushed peril and connivance.39 The marquise de la Ferronnays was taken into custody and put aboard a ship bound for France in July of 1781. By April of 1782, she was shut in a convent outside Paris. The captain of the ship that carried her to France and the prioresses of the convent where she lodged were ordered to watch her like the prisoner she was, but also to maintain the respect owed to a marquise. Marie-Elisabeth insisted on bringing her chambermaid with her, and brought so many trunks that the captain was forced to leave several paying passengers behind. Once in France, at the Convent of Valdosne near Charenton, the marquise was lodged “respectably and fittingly”: she enjoyed two large rooms, a small private study, and the services of two chambermaids. Her pension came to the respectable sum of 4,000l.t. a year. For health reasons, she requested shortly thereafter to be moved; her husband approved, and the archbishop of Paris himself saw to her relocation. The only surviving letter from Marie-Elisabeth, written at the Con-

39. For the Paris police, Chassaigne, Lieutenance générale de police de Paris, chap. 5. For the quiet settlement of another colonial affair, Pearsall, “‘The Late Flagrant Instance of Depravity in My Family.’” Discretion was desired by not only members of the French aristocracy. On Troussey’s arrest, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Archives de la Bastille, MS 12516, correspondence; 1246 dossier Troussey. For Troussey’s acquaintance with Sartine, report of 31 July 1773 in the same dossier. For sensitive letters, 21 February 1781. For burn requests, JBC to ELF, 17 August 1774, and AN, COL E 245, ELF to Leroux, 24 November 1775. For an account, PJC to ELF, 28 August 1783. For secret instructions, AN, COL E 245, 6 October 1779, “Instructions à M Troussey.”

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vent of the Demoiselles of Conflans, shows her advancing the Binau family’s business interests through the intercession of aristocratic figures in Paris. She also developed sincere friendships with the doctors, priests, and nuns she encountered during her stay in France. Instead of a prisoner overawed by the machinery set to work against her, we fi nd a titled woman confidently affirming her status on her husband’s home territory.40 Marie-Elisabeth also used the force of her personality to keep useful men on a string. Her brother’s navy friend in Saint-Domingue, the chevalier Coriolis, served as a go-between for the marquise during her stay at Conflans. Before his departure from the colony, he collected letters, jewels, and sugar to deliver to her; during his stay in Paris, he lent her money, hunted down information, and seconded her efforts to reverse the sinking fortunes of her profl igate, senile father. The latter ultimately frustrated Coriolis’ efforts to bring Siriac Thimothée from Saint-Domingue to the marquise in Paris: “The grandfather seemed to push [Siriac] to refuse to go,” he reported, “but the child responded every time (in patois): ‘I want to see mother. I want to go where she is.’” In all matters, Coriolis “spared no pain or care” for a woman whom he had understood to be, upon his departure from Saint-Domingue, his lover. While he was acting as her factotum in Paris, he found her “sweet, confidential and sensitive,” but once she no longer needed him, she wounded him with “coolness and indifference.” Still a follower in the mid-1780s of the waning scientific fad of mesmerism, the lovesick Coriolis clearly had a gullible streak that MarieElisabeth did not hesitate to exploit.41 The marquise showed the same awareness of her advantages, and willingness to press them to the last degree, during the process of separation from her husband. She had been forcibly brought to France and imprisoned in a convent by a lettre de cachet, but she still held quite a few cards. If 40. On the crossing and the convent, AN, COL E 245, Jean- Charles-Pierre Lenoir, Lieutenant General de Police (Paris), to the marquis de Castries (Versailles), 10 April 1782; and Louis XVI (Marly), 16 October 1779. For Parisian connections, SMJ, MEB (Confl ans) to her brother, M Binau (Saint-Domingue), 8 February 1783. MEB’S friendships with Parisian figures are also inferred from her Testament and Codicil Bequests are inferred from the Testament and Codicil of MEB. 41. On Siriac’s projected transfer to Paris, SMJ, Coriolis (PaP) to MEB (Conflans), 3 July 1784: “Moi velé voir maman moi. Moi velé aller outil li.” The text is underlined in the letter. SMJ, Coriolis (Paris) to MEB’s brother Pierre César Jean Baptiste Constance Binau (SaintDomingue), 17 October 1784 (“confidential and sensitive”). SMJ, Coriolis (Paris) to MEB (Conflans), 15 October 1784 (“indifferent” and “pain or care”), and in the same letter, on magnetism (i.e. mesmerism): “[It] is in the greatest discredit here (in Paris), I am treated like a visionary when I recount everything that I have seen Mr de Puységur do and, by chance, we have been able to reproduce in our experiments.”

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Old Regime France was a patriarchal society, it was also status-bound and almost unimaginably legalistic in its attachment to procedure and to property. Women who understood the rights attaching even to modest forms of property or status could bring formidable legal machinery to their aid. In this contest, Marie-Elisabeth’s resources were anything but humble: the property and status exchanged in the marital alliance between the Binau and Ferron de la Ferronnays families both passed through MarieElisabeth, making her a marquise with an enviable dowry, and she was careful to preserve the authority they conferred. Moreau de Saint-Méry described the marriages between rich Saint-Dominguan Creoles and metropolitan nobles as the mixture of two unlike substances, of “gold” and of “pride”; but the slave-owning Creoles of Saint-Domingue understood how readily money could be converted into social dominance. They coveted the power and status of metropolitan elites, but did not fear them. The alliance between these groups is a classic instance of a “hot” marriage, in which the spouses are too equal, and too powerful, to assure a harmony of interests between them. By the time of the Ferronnayses’ separation, the marquise had managed to retain the majority of the income coming from her dotal property—the plantation at Grande Rivière—on her side of the Atlantic and in her pocket; she had also given herself the children that her legal husband could not or would provide for her. Their separation consecrated in metropolitan courts the advantages she had won in league with her allies in Saint-Domingue.42 The separation was intended to put the miseries of a mésalliance behind the Ferron de la Ferronnays clan, and for once since their marriage in 1772, both parties appeared to be in agreement. As a woman, it was the marquise who had to initiate the separation proceedings, which she did in December of 1783.43 In keeping with the practice of publicity-averse noble

42. Moreau de Saint Méry, Description . . . de l’isle Saint- Domingue, 1:9. Pierre Force, using the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Nasset, describes the “hot option” in which the “marriage between inheritors necessarily provokes a confl ict between husband and wife over household government.” I borrow the terminology, but employ it here in a less technical sense. “Stratégies matrimoniales,” 88. 43. On noble separations, Landelle, “‘Plaintes en séparation sont éternelles,’” 67–71 (procedure) and 102–4 (contestations and discretion). An exhaustive search—mysteriously—did not turn up documentation about the separation in the archives of the Châtelet in the French National Archives. Landelle cautions against expecting much beyond agreed legal formulas in cases of separation by common consent, which was officially prohibited but nonetheless widespread. The following notarized accord between ELF and MEB provides much useful information: AN, MC ET/LXXI/59, “Transaction entre Monsieur et Madame de la Ferronnays,” 17 February 1785. Thanks to Miranda Spieler for passing along this fi nd to me.

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families, Étienne-Louis readily admitted the “just causes” alleged by his wife. We unfortunately cannot know the degree to which Marie-Elisabeth rehearsed the horrors of the libelle discussed above, although the speed and discretion of the proceedings indicate that she trod lightly. But the entire process left the most delicious irony intact: a wife who had only recently been dragged across the ocean and thrown into a convent on a lettre de cachet now found herself receiving a voluntary confession of immorality, abuse, or improvidence from her erstwhile jailer. In March 1784, the Parlement (sovereign court) of Paris pronounced an initial decree of separation of household and property. Marie-Elisabeth was to receive her dotal property back, including the sugar plantation at Grande Rivière consisting of one hundred carreaux of land and ninety-two slaves. In its present run-down condition, the property was worth between 250,000 and 300,000l.c. In addition, the marquis had to return the cash dowry he had received from the marquise’s father, 72,000l.c., as well as 10,000l.c. in consideration of other effects brought into the marriage. The separation required Marie-Elisabeth to renounce the community of property stipulated in the marriage contract, but since the couple were still officially married, she remained the marquise de la Ferronnays. Using the most conservative estimates, by this act she became worth 332,000l.c. For a woman in Old Regime France, she had carved out an enviable position: rich, titled, and, exceptionally for her sex, “free and the mistress of her own actions.”44 The marquise was impatient to fully enjoy the fruits of this remarkably favorable settlement. Legal writ once in hand, she did not scruple to break the decorous silence in which Étienne-Louis and his allies at court sought to shroud whole affair. Had her detractors called her shameless, they would have been correct in one crucial respect: she was not effectively relegated to shamed silenced by the treatment—arrest, transportation overseas, and confi nement in a convent—reserved for her as an adulteress. Four short months after the separation proceedings had been completely settled, she hired lawyers to impose a lien against the marquis’ other property. In due course, bailiffs arrived at Ferronnays’ chateau in Livry sur Seine, south of Paris, to warn him of an eminent seizure of his estate for debts. At issue was his slowness to comply with the Par44. With necessary capital improvements amounting to 171,500l.c., including the augmentation of its workforce to 150 from its present 92 slaves, the plantation’s worth could climb to 750,000l.c. Source: calculations on “Transaction . . . Ferronnays,” using the same basis as the calculations for the indemnity of 1825—i.e., capital value is equal to ten times the annual revenue, with sugar at 25l.c. per hundredweight (see chapter 7 for a fuller discussion). SMJ, Coriolis (Paris) to MEB (Conflans), 15 October 1784 (“free . . . mistress”).

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lement’s decree and also Marie-Elisabeth’s suspicion that he was planning to deduct from the dowry the large sums he spent for maintenance on the Grande Rivière plantation. The marquise’s effrontery brought the situation to a head on the morning of 17 February 1785, when husband and wife met in person, at the office of the marquise’s Parisian lawyer, for a tense renegotiation. The couple’s verbal exchanges during what was in all likelihood their fi nal encounter were recorded, and the document witnessed and notarized. Ferronnays complained of the “humiliating constraints exercised against him” and enumerated the many expenses he had made to revive a dilapidated plantation. Marie-Elisabeth scoffed at this accounting, replying that “her husband vainly imagined” fi nding a way around the terms of a separation decreed by the Parlement. She let it be understood that she had precious little “repugnance for the extremities, however disagreeable they might be,” that had so profoundly embarrassed her husband: he was wealthy enough to pay her in full, and should do so without delay. Étienne-Louis and his lawyers understood the threat of “endless” and “inconclusive” lawsuits implicit in these words; after “mature reflection,” all consented to the marquise’s initial terms. In addition, Étienne-Louis agreed to pay Marie-Elisabeth’s legal fees and other retroactive maintenance payments.45 Marie-Elisabeth Thimothée enjoyed the wealth and freedom she wrested from her husband for only a few years. For unexplained reasons, half this time was spent in Paris—probably in her convent in Conflans—and the other half on her plantation near Léogane, where she returned in 1787. On 8 October 1791, just as the civil war was heating up in the Western Province of Saint-Domingue, she called local notaries to her deathbed.46 The will she dictated provides some fi nal, if limited, insight into the inner life of somebody whose character and actions emerge mainly through official documents and, above all, her enemies’ vilifications. Traces of her personal struggles can be read in her complete rejection of the dynastic considerations that guided the aristocracy; her sincere embrace of religion; and especially her abundant, even hectic generosity. In her testament we fi nd the portrait of a woman spreading precious things—property, freedom,

45. All this detail is recounted in “Transaction . . . Ferronnays.” 46. For MEB’s evident intentions to stay in Confl ans, SMJ, Coriolis (Paris) to MEB’s brother Pierre- César-Jean-Baptiste- Constance Binau (Saint-Domingue), 17 October 1784. For MEB’s September 1787 return to Saint-Domingue: ADLA, Passagers embarqués de France, en Nantes (1764– 91), fols. 79– 81.

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personal luxuries—in great profusion. Although her surviving brother is mentioned, all her wealth is settled on her natural offspring, slaves, and friends. In keeping with the practice of at least some Saint-Dominguan Creoles, the fi rst provisions of the marquise’s will bequeathed generous sums to the church, particularly for the saying of masses in her name. Elsewhere in her testament she communicated a total of 5,000l.c. to two of her spiritual advisors in Paris. The next item in her will provided for the manumission of twenty domestic slaves—fourteen Creole adults and their children, and one sixty-year-old Congolese woman named Petite Agnès, “all for good services.” Two were accorded pittances of 320l.c. on which to live. Some white Creoles of Saint-Domingue requested the manumission of a couple of loyal domestic slaves upon their death, but the magnanimity with which Madame de la Ferronnays freed virtually all the domestics she had affectionately referred to as “her children” was truly exceptional. In all things she was vehement.47 The most valuable provisions touched on Siriac Thimothée and MariePierre Gabriel Lamoureux, Marie-Elisabeth’s biological children, designated as “godchildren” in her will. At the time of her death, the two were in Paris to receive their education, presumably at Marie-Elisabeth’s expense. They were accorded equal shares of a plantation that the marquise held in common with her brother after their father’s death. The potential value of the marquise’s estate was eroded by the manumission of so many domestic slaves, but more seriously still by debt. Nine days before her death, she was forced to sell Grande Rivière; after its sale paid off her many creditors, mere fi nancial scraps remained for her children. MarieElisabeth had lived by a sometimes self-defeating aristocratic magnanimity, not bourgeois calculation. At the threshold of death—as in life—Marie-Elisabeth honored  her affections without narrow-minded concern for appearances. While her brother received nothing from her will, two outsiders were named her executors and principal inheritors in case her “godchildren” (then aged seventeen and thirteen) had predeceased her: one-third was to go to Monsieur Baron, the manager and the eventual purchaser of Grande Rivière; and two-

47. The comparisons to other Creoles are based on Butel, Mentalités créoles. This study is limited, by the author’s own admission, by the small sample size, so the same reservations apply to the conclusions drawn from it. On the motives for manumissions, Halgouet, “Inventaire d’un habitation à Saint-Domingue,” 243, and the previous discussion in chapter 3. The estate would have had to pay a manumission tax for each slave and seek the permission of the Governor and the Intendant; each of these requirements would have imposed an insuperable obstacle to MEB’s mass manumission.

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thirds to Claude-François Valentin de Cullion, a Saint-Dominguan native, lawyer, and plantation owner who eventually sided with independenceseeking white colonists when the French Revolution provided them an opening. At the time of the marquise de la Ferronnays’ death in 1791, Valentin de Cullion was in France pressing colonists’ claims before the National Assembly, and later he was the author of a violently racist proslavery polemic. We know nothing about Marie-Elisabeth’s political views, but the wholesale liberation of so many slaves hardly implied any second thoughts about slavery that might put her at odds with Valentin de Cullion. The gift she made to him of her Senegalese hairdresser (perruquier) Tiberius speaks to a continued taste for the pleasures of domination, and suggests private moments between her and Cullion in which a common appreciation for Tiberius’ work could come to light.48 Four days before her death, Marie-Elisabeth called notaries from Léogane to add a fi nal, brief but telling codicil to her will. She added Valentin de Cullion as an executor of her estate and exhorted him, “in the name of friendship,” to see to Siriac’s education in France. Some household effects were left to both of her executors, and in one fi nal gesture—thinking of the fi ne things remaining in her possession—she left Valentin de Cullion another intimate gift, her “English palfrey horse, bridled and saddled.” Whatever the precise nature of her relationship with Valentin de Cullion, Marie-Elisabeth’s testament pushes her past as a Binau or a Ferron de la Ferronnays as far into the background as possible, all the better to underline her own autonomy and to preserve the world she had created for herself in Saint-Domingue. In all its titillating and scabrous detail, the mésalliance between the marquis and marquise de la Ferronnays lies somewhere between a metaphor and a roman à clef. The loss of Saint-Domingue by France was caused in no small measure by the inability, in the late 1780s and early 1790s, of the colony’s metropolitan and Creole elites to agree on much beyond the need to preserve slavery. The white elites were fatally split between independence movements and loyalism; within the latter option they could choose between royalism and adherence to the French Revolution (socalled patriotism). Royalists made alliances with France’s enemies in the region, while patriots split with the metropole on the question of rights for free men of color. These groups might have been unified by a mutual desire for social order and a profitable plantation complex, but the diver48. Valentin de Cullion, Examen de l’esclavage en général.

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gence between metropolitan and local elites that had greatly accelerated at midcentury in Saint-Domingue created deep reserves of distrust and incomprehension. Similarly, although it began within the confi nes of their marriage, the struggle between the marquis de la Ferronnays and his wife implicated many others beside themselves; taken together, the cultural, legal, economic, and political dimensions of their relationship reflect on the Creole-metropolitan relationship as a whole. Need and greed are the basis for so many beautiful marriages, but they were not sufficient to make this particular one work. Respecting the limitations of this case study means that the Ferron de la Ferronnays marriage cannot be made to stand for every confl ict within Saint-Dominguan society. Divisions between grands and petits blancs, which found no echo whatsoever in this family drama, only served, once the French Revolution broke out, to exacerbate tensions with free men of color (gens de couleur). The gens de couleur, another group that played no role in the Ferronnayses’ mésalliance, was a distinctive feature of SaintDominguan society: in no other part of the French colonial empire did they achieve the numbers and extent of landed wealth found there by the end of the eighteenth century. Their increasingly visible prosperity and demands for social recognition may or may not have set them ineluctably on a collision course with the white planter class, but their existence unquestionably complicated any peaceful settling of accounts within the white population or between colony and metropole. Although these struggles never made their way into the Ferronnayses’ bedroom, they did not fail to make their way to the gate of the Cul de Sac plantation shortly after the revolution broke out in 1789.

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Revolution and Cultivation

T

he French Revolution in Saint-Domingue began as a confl ict among elites, not a movement of slave self-emancipation. The gift of hindsight, however, makes it seem inevitable that once the slaves who labored in Saint-Domingue’s plantation complex rose in revolt beginning in August of 1791, the ensuing series of foreign interventions, emancipations, and secessionist civil wars would ultimately culminate in the proclamation of Haitian independence in 1804. An overview of the stages of the French Revolution in Saint-Domingue, in which the role played by people of African descent becomes increasingly evident and decisive, reinforces this impression. From the outbreak of the Revolution in France in 1788–89 until August of 1791, the manner in which elites would be represented in the process of reform initiated by King Louis XVI, and the form that metropolitan power would assume in a reorganized French Empire, dominated discussions. The second stage began in August 1791, when slave uprisings shook the North plain and lasted until 4 February 1794, when the abolition of slavery became the letter of the law—if not an accomplished fact—in the whole of the French Empire. The decree of February 1794 was provoked by a series of more local abolition decrees pronounced in Saint-Domingue starting in 1793; but these developments were less the direct consequence of slaves’ demands than the unanticipated by-product of the violent confl ict that raged during these years over the role of free people of color (gens de couleur) in an ostensibly egalitarian political order. Once Toussaint Louverture learned of the abolition of slavery in mid-1794, he switched from attacking the French as an ally of the Spanish to putting his considerable military skill and personal charisma at the service of a besieged French Republic; thus began the third phase, which lasted until Louverture proclaimed a separate constitution 161

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for the colony of Saint-Domingue in July 1801; over this period, members of a new elite, composed of ex-slaves or their descendants, vied for dominance in a colony that had become all but independent of its mother country. In the fourth and fi nal phase, which lasted from 1801 until the official proclamation of Haitian independence in January of 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte’s attempts to reassert control over Saint-Domingue and to reimpose slavery in the French colonies more generally precipitated the expulsion of what remained of Saint-Domingue’s white elite. By the time of the outbreak of the war of Haitian independence in October of 1802, resistance to French rule was consolidated, as it had never been before, into a single cause: slave emancipation.1 Despite this seemingly clear arc of developments, several circumstances made the situation in Saint-Domingue fluid and unpredictable right until the end. Perhaps foremost, racial and class divisions among the colony’s African-descended population made any durable political alliance elusive. Even if the white population had presented a common front— which they emphatically did not—very little natural solidarity united, say, a light-skinned, plantation-owning free person of color with an African who had recently been sold into slavery to work in the fields of SaintDomingue. Goals evolved quickly as revolution in the colony degenerated into civil war; in any case, hesitant policy-making by a politically divided metropole would have deprived a fi xed point of anchorage to even the most ideologically consistent insurgent. Finally, meddling by France’s imperial rivals, Britain and Spain, divided the provinces of Saint-Domingue and initiated a cycle of invasion, occupation, and emigration that helped to polarize the situation. Early on, Spanish connivance with black leaders helped to sustain and intensify the slave insurgency, while the occupation of the Western Province by the British between 1794 and 1798 emboldened royalist planters like Étienne-Louis Ferron de la Ferronnays who hoped for a restoration of the Old Regime at home and in Saint-Domingue. Haiti emerged from the revolution deeply socially divided, and its leadership took an authoritarian direction from the outset. The handful of military officials dominating the country sought to consolidate their rule by revivifying its sugar plantation complex in the face of massive popular resistance. The stage was set for the political polarization and economic underdevelopment that has continued in Haiti until this day. Indeed, some historians have hesitated to classify the civil war in Saint-Domingue and 1. For the centrality of the confl ict over free people of color, Popkin, You Are All Free, chaps. 3–5.

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the Haitian national independence that followed among the democratic or liberal revolutions that convulsed the Euro-American world between 1776 and 1830. The difficulty in establishing a clear pattern of social or political progress can be traced to the beginnings of the French Revolution in Saint-Domingue in 1789. Here as in the metropole, elites wrangled over the right to participate in the representative institutions of the newly reformed French government; everywhere, these debates inevitably touched on the socioeconomic basis of political rights. On both sides of the Atlantic, the elites who initiated the revolution were hesitant to put popular social demands on the agenda for reform; losing control of the revolutionary process could also mean losing property and power in the postrevolutionary settlement.2 In Saint-Domingue as in France, the revolution’s political horizons were largely determined by the participants’ ability to reimagine the social world in which the revolution was taking place. The violence that roiled Saint-Domingue beginning in 1791 testifies eloquently to the elite’s complete lack of imagination; despite the abolition of slavery in 1794, most of them could not think beyond the colony’s plantation economy. Even those revolutionary officials who did not stand to gain personally saw plantation cash crops (and, crucially, the servile labor necessary to produce them) as the only plausible response to the imperious fi nancial requirements of warfare. Black leaders promised a return to a system of forced plantation labor, despite the decrees abolishing slavery, and distributed abandoned plantations as spoils to their generals. National survival, profit, and the prestige enjoyed by masters over their servants all accorded in suggesting this solution. The collective illusions of the post-abolition elites in Saint-Domingue resembled planters’ longings, in the teeth of all available evidence, for a return to the Old Regime, but with one twist. If planters could not return to the status quo ante bellum, they sought to perpetuate a slave society without slaves. Asking nominally free “cultivators” to do the same work under conditions startlingly similar to what they knew under the Old Regime assured permanent resistance from those slated to work within this rebaptized plantation complex. Although sugar exports had declined by 1826 to two-hundredths of 1 percent of their 1791 level, the Haitian state continued to legislate as if the plantation complex still existed, issuing a Rural Code fi lled with unenforceable provisions to maintain the sugar industry. Yet nobody at the top saw Saint-Domingue

2. On liberal revolutions, Geggus, “Caribbean in the Age of Revolution,” 97– 99.

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turn into this particular cul-de-sac, because their eyes were permanently fi xed on a mirage of normalcy.3

EMIGRATION, SEQUESTER, AND INSURGENCY Before widespread violence reached the Cul de Sac plain in the fall of 1791, Étienne-Louis Ferron de la Ferronnays’ political commitments, and not colonial anarchy, posed the greatest obstacle to the flow of plantation profit into his hands. The fi rst commentaries written by Pierre-Jacques Auguste Corbier, son of Jean-Baptiste, on the Revolution in France and its possible repercussions in Saint-Domingue, were written in October 1789; these reached the marquis de la Ferronnays in Solothurn, Switzerland, where he was among the avant-garde of antirevolutionary noble émigrés. Three of the marquis’ brothers—Paul, Emmanuel Henri Eugène, and Jules Bazile, bishop of Saint-Brieuc—left France shortly thereafter. None of the Ferronnays clan waited until the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793, after which approximately half the total noble emigration (3,500 of 7,500 departures) occurred, and international perceptions of the revolution soured almost universally. These four brothers were joined by two sons and nephews, Pierre-Louis Auguste, future Minster of Foreign Affairs under the Restoration, and Pierre-Jacques François Joseph Auguste, the inheritor of the Cul de Sac plantation. Two of the brothers died in self-imposed exile: Jules Bazile in London in 1802 and Étienne-Louis in Emmerich, Prussia, in 1798. The rest waited until the fi rst Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814 to return defi nitively to France, well beyond the mass return of nobles following Napoleon’s proclamation of amnesty for émigré nobles in 1800. The family paid a high price for its opposition to the French Revolution: multiple regime changes in Saint-Domingue put colonial revenues in and out of reach even as they had become essential to the fortunes of a family in self-imposed exile.4 Financially speaking, Étienne-Louis’ fl ight from Paris came at a delicate time. Fear of warfare in the Caribbean and in Europe meant a reduc-

3. For legislation, Code Rural d’Haïti; for statistics, Cabon, Histoire d’Haïti, 95. 4. SMJ, PJC (Grand Fond) to ELF (Paris), 6 October 1789. On emigration, AN, BB/1/63, Liste générale . . . des émigrés de tout la République. Declarations of emigration were made against all three Ferronnays brothers in 1792, but ELF’s correspondence and other evidence makes clear that this part of the family had emigrated by early 1790. AN, BB/1/63, Liste des émigrés, 1793, E-F, pp. 28–29; and Révérend and Tulard, Titres, anoblissements et pairies, 3:50–53. For emigration figures, Greer, Incidence of Emigration, 115. For ELF’s death, AN, MC XIV 690, 4 April 1826 (inventory).

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tion in ship traffic and increased insurance costs. Since French merchants were excessively reliant on re-export markets to sell sugar and coffee, any interruptions within Europe could only mean difficulty fi nding an outlet for colonial goods. Like the French monarchy, which had recently defaulted on its debt, nobles lived largely on advances and not on revenues; to fi nance his peregrinations in Switzerland and Germany, the marquis had to fi nd new sources of credit abroad in order to draw on future sugar revenues. To this end, his banker in Bordeaux, Jean Camescasse, sought out new contacts for him in London, Amsterdam, and further east in Lyon and Frankfurt. Finding new bankers and commissioning agents was a process of trial and error, and even the wariest player was bound to be cheated from time to time. Camescasse averred to the marquis that he was “unquestionably the victim of people who pretend to serve you disinterestedly,” and encouraged him to return from exile to France. As time wore on, sugar shipments became intermittent, and solvent buyers for such goods as did arrive from the islands became rare: of 500,000l.t. in goods he’d recently received, Camescasse was only able to squeeze out 62,000 in cash sales. It was difficult to realize such profits that the marquis could repatriate in France in anything but assignats (the new paper currency circulating in revolutionary France). Bankers were suspicious of French government fi nances and had little confidence in the quickly depreciating assignat; when exchanged for pounds, guilders, or florins, the marquis’ colonial profits evaporated on foreign currency markets, sometimes by as much as 40 percent. For all these reasons, Camescasse’s foreign correspondents cast a cold eye on the Bordelais’ requests to extend Ferronnays’ credit, stiffening the terms or radically reducing the sums involved—when they did not refuse them outright. Although the marquis had been conducting his business between Saint-Domingue and Paris at a distance of 7,500 kilometers, the additional 500 kilometers separating Paris from Solothurn or Mainz diminished his ability to touch the profits of his Cul de Sac estate.5 Camescasse insisted that the marquis’ fi nancial problems were fundamentally political, and would persist until his client reconciled himself to the revolution. Camescasse, a rich Protestant with an extensive portfolio of colonial interests, including the slave trade, ultimately ended up 5. On new commercial contacts, SMJ, JC (Bordeaux [henceforth: Bx]) to ELF (Solothurn), 4 September 1790; JC (Bx) to ELF (Mainz), 12 November 1791, 2 July 1791, and 12 May 1792. JC (Bx) to ELF (Solothurn), 14 August 1790 (“disinterestedly”). JC (Bx) to ELF (Mainz), 1 November 1791, 12 December 1791, and 27 December 1791 (bankers’ suspicions); 27 May 1792 (terms and sums). JC (Bx) to ELF (Solothurn), 6 July 1790 and 27 December 1791 (pleas to return); and 27 December 1791 (diversification).

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serving successive revolutionary regimes as an elector and as a member of the municipal council of Bordeaux. And like many prorevolutionary bourgeois, he was persecuted under the Terror of 1793– 94, although he did escape with his life. The banker spoke much more bluntly to his client about the political situation in France than did the family servant Corbier fi ls. This frankness reflected Camescasse’s political commitments, but also the balance of power between the two men: Étienne-Louis sought favors from his banker, in one case requesting of him an advance of 60,000l.t. to help extinguish debts to the merchant house of Arnous and Sons in Nantes. Camescasse’s letters, written between 1789 and 1792, dwelled mainly on topics of safe consensus, but provocation occasionally broke through their polite surface. He openly praised the new institutions being established all over France: “I am starting to believe that we will enjoy more tranquility than we’ve had in some time and I hope, Monsieur, that you will not delay returning here to share in it.” Emigré nobles such as the marquis and his brothers, fighting in concert with foreign powers, would rather “reduce the most beautiful part of the world to ashes” than allow a majority of citizens favorable to the revolution to “enjoy the advantages they anticipate from the new constitution.” As to those who conspired against the revolution, Camescasse warned, “not even the craziest could still believe counterrevolution possible, and all of the attempts they might hazard will only serve to hasten their own destruction.”6 When in September of 1791 Louis XVI fi nally accepted the constitution crafted by the Constituent Assembly—France’s legislative body at the time—Camescasse painted this act as a reconciliation between the leading member of the French aristocracy and the revolution itself: “I ardently desire that the King’s acceptance of the Constitution [of 1791] will contribute to the reestablishment of peace throughout the empire, and that all good Frenchmen will hasten to return to their country in order to peaceably enjoy the advantages to which all good citizens should aspire.” There is ample reason to question the king’s sincerity in accepting the constitution; nevertheless, in his correspondence with the marquis, Camescasse expressed what was to become, beginning in November 1791, the official view toward émigrés: France had a constitution and a king vowing to abide by it, and those living abroad must prove their loyalty by repatriating themselves or else face political proscription and the sequestration of their properties. Laws passed in February and April of 1792 required passports 6. SMJ, JC (Bx) to ELF (Solothurn), 4 September 1790 (“share”); and 4 September 1790 (“craziest”). JC (Bx) to ELF (Mainz), 27 December 1791 (“to ashes” and “constitution”).

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for those wishing to leave the country, and those who could not prove residency in France had their assets seized and in some cases sold along with the church properties that had been appropriated in November of 1789 to pay down the French national debt. (Collectively, these were known as the biens nationaux, or national properties.) It was in light of these and other laws that the de la Ferronnays family properties in Anjou, Brittany, and the Île-de-France were sequestered and their family papers seized; profits from Saint-Domingue could only be repatriated to residents of France in good standing.7 Like many émigrés, Ferronnays could count on trusted business associates like Corbier fi ls to help him skirt the law in order to keep income flowing to him in his places of exile. Corbier père did not live to help coordinate these transfers, having died in La Flèche, France, in August of 1788. But revolutionary politics threw the basis of other clientèle networks into question. Camescasse began by receiving funds from SaintDomingue on Ferronnays’ behalf through straw men, but the pair’s relationship soured when Ferronnays asked his banker to break the law on his behalf. At one point, he asked Camescasse to use the funds of one of his straw men to directly pay his own debts; more seriously, Ferronnays asked his banker retrospectively to alter his official books in order to hide the illegal transfer of funds. Camescasse tartly refused these requests, in one case alluding to heavy penalties for forging fi nancial records, and in another simply reminding his client that “the most solid means of ending your worries is to come back to your own country, [where] your honesty and your loyalty will assure you of the most perfect tranquility wherever you choose to live.” At this point or shortly thereafter, the two men’s business relationship ended, further compromising the marquis’ link to Cul de Sac just as the sequester of the family’s French estates made colonial profits more urgently necessary.8 If dramatic, occasionally sanguinary events in France had serious repercussions for Ferronnays, at the outset the greatest threat in the remote province of Saint-Domingue appeared to be the possibility of ideological

7. SMJ, JC (Bx) to ELF (Solothurn), 8 October 1791 (“good Frenchmen,” my emphasis). SMJ, Montingny (Paris) to ELF (Solothurn), 8 August 1790 and 2 November 1791 (pensions and bonds). On seizures of Ferronnays’ property in the Île- de-France: ADSM, 1 Q 779– 81 and ADY, 4 Q 109; in Anjou: ADML, 1 Q 2214; and in Brittany, ADLA, Q 432. 8. SMJ, JC (Bx) to ELF (Mainz), 5 June 1792 (refusal); and 27 March 1792 (“tranquility”). For another refusal of illicit favors, SMJ, Montingny (Paris) to ELF (Solothurn), 2 November 1791.

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contagion from abroad. Slaves were enthusiastic about donning the cocarde, the red, white, and blue badge of revolutionary enthusiasm—or at least conformity—worn everywhere in metropolitan France. Fortunately for slave owners, scattered rumors of revolution on the streets of Port-auPrince appeared to be just that: several blacks were thrown in prison as a preventative measure, which put an end to the threat of uprising, and “there was no revolution among the gangs of the [Cul de Sac] plain.” Why? A few months later, Pierre-Jacques Corbier explained the reasons a slave uprising in Martinique in August 1789, involving a group of slaves claiming the king himself had abolished slavery, had no chance of spreading to Saint-Domingue: I’ve not spoken to you much about what we might fear from the slaves because I’ve never had the least worry. I know these people too well for them to inspire any fear in me; fi rst of all they are too indecisive to take hold of a project and follow it through; they are too cowardly to dare to struggle against the whites, which is very fortunate for us because we’ve done everything possible to give them ideas that they didn’t entertain previously.

Even after uprisings on the Cul de Sac plain proved Corbier wrong, he continued to claim that the contagion of revolution had not infected the minds of otherwise docile slaves. Ordinarily, managers spoke of their “good” and “bad” subjects as one might speak of fruit or domestic animals: a certain number of specimens were expected to be defective by dint of birth or by accident, and the regular incidence of violent, disobedient, or shiftless subjects was not thought to reflect on the conditions of plantation life as a whole. In this new, revolutionary situation, cracks appeared in the ideological edifice of the slave regime; all slaves were susceptible to the revolutionary effervescence among the free population of the island. Political ferment and anti-authoritarian talk among the free would “end by opening up the slaves’ eyes,” and all would be lost.9 The Saint-Dominguan slave population seemed the least immediately threatening problem in the early months of 1791, since confl ict up to that point was largely restricted to racial and economic elites in the colony.

9. SMJ, PJC to ELF (Solothurn), 18 October 1789 (“no revolution”); 4 April 1790 (“too indecisive,” in block quotation); 6 April 1791 (“slaves’ eyes”). On Martinique, Geggus, “Slavery, War and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean, 1789–1815,” 8; and Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 79– 80.

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Planters, urban professionals, administrators, and artisans took different sides in the eternal contest between local and centrally imposed government institutions. To complicate matters further, in none of the three provinces of French Saint-Domingue was the balance of demographic, ideological, and governmental forces—not to speak of the military situation—the same. Revolutionary or antirevolutionary sympathies were difficult to predict in advance: political factionalization was extreme, and political alliances both counterintuitive and fleeting. From the beginning, elites were divided over whether the colonies should seek representation at all in the Estates General—the body convoked by Louis XVI to meet in May 1789. Representation in the Estates General or its successor body the National Assembly meant subjection to laws created in the metropole that might be unfavorable to colonial interests. In the eyes of some, participation in the National Assembly would lead to further co-optation by the forces of “ministerial despotism,” whereas independence, or at least increased autonomy, promised the resolution of long-simmering confl icts between colonists and the central government. At issue here were the rules governing trade between Saint-Domingue and metropolitan France, the general principle of colonial self-governance, and, since the establishment of the Society of the Friends of the Blacks (Société des amis des noirs) in 1788, the specter of abolition. Metropolitan whites like Corbier fi ls and members of the Ferronnays clan disapproved of the independence movement on the island, which had taken matters into its own hands by establishing colonial assemblies without the express approval of either the Minister of the Navy or the National Assembly: “The colony should certainly use every means at its disposal to throw off the yoke of the Secretary of State of the Navy, but it would have sufficed to send its complaints to the Estates General and await a new set of constitutions.”10 Another axis of the confl ict was racial. Efforts by gens de couleur to gain political rights presented a twofold threat to white planters. First, these planters portrayed expanded rights for gens de couleur as a slippery slope leading directly to the abolition of slavery. Second, some white planters increasingly chafed against the demographic and economic power of the gens de couleur, whose population of 28,000 nearly matched the 32,000 whites in the colony in 1789– 90, and owned about one-third of the

10. Bénot, Révolution française et la fi n des colonies, chap. 2 (on ministerial despotism). SMJ, PJC to ELF (Paris), 4 April 1790 (“complaints”). At this point, PJC was still writing to ELF in Paris, although presumably his mail was forwarded to him abroad.

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land and one-fourth of the slaves there. If the rise of the gens de couleur eroded the relative wealth and privilege of the grands blancs, it also threatened the dreams of the white immigrants (petits blancs) who arrived in droves in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, seeking quick colonial fortunes. Although the petits blancs were not all as destitute and propertyless as has often been supposed, the social chasm separating them from the grands blancs—between their aspirations and the reality they lived, often years after a hopeful arrival in Port-au-Prince or Cap Français—was nevertheless immense. After the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, the French colonial administration had passed a series of edicts restricting interracial marriage and the rights enjoyed by free men of color in an effort to shore up white privilege.11 As a politically withdrawn businessman who prided himself on sticking to his own affairs, Corbier fi ls adopted a stance of skeptical neutrality toward all this political agitation. While the plantations of the Cul de Sac plain remained perfectly calm up until the spring of 1791—he claimed to sleep with his doors unlocked—Corbier worried that revolutionary agitation among the white population would spread to blacks. Petits blancs were the most fearsome vector of disorder, whose brigandage and violence furnished proof that the government had lost all authority. Like many of his fellow bourgeois, Corbier was a man of order for whom “tranquility” was the measure of all things as he judged the disputes between the National Assembly in France, the self-proclaimed Colonial Assembly at St. Marc, the municipal government of Port-au-Prince, and royal administrators. Ostensibly, all members of the dominant classes had the same interests, but they seemed to lose sight of this fact in a revolutionary atmosphere of endemic controversy. Whatever its faults, the Old Regime generally ensured that the sugar mills kept turning and merchant ships continued their profitable transatlantic shuttle.12 In 1791, the slave population in Saint-Domingue numbered around 480,000, while the combined free population, white or black, was about 54,000; given these numbers, it does not seem surprising in retrospect that the slaves of that colony could profit by the new spirit of schism to throw off their white masters. But throughout the eighteenth century, SaintDomingue had been much less susceptible to the slave rebellions that had, 11. Population estimates in McClellan, Colonialism and Science, 49 (table 1). In contrast to the generally accepted view of social relations on the island, Michel-Rolph Trouillot sees the self-confidence of the petits blancs rising, albeit modestly, through small-scale coffee production. Haiti, State against Nation, 42–43. On restrictions, Garrigus, Before Haiti, chaps. 4–5. 12. SMJ, PJC to ELF, 4 April 1790, all quotations in this paragraph.

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for instance, regularly shaken the British island of Jamaica. And even if the revolution had exposed and intensified divisions among the elites of the island, Ferronnays’ banker Camescasse expressed the widespread belief that “the common interest of the opposed parties requires that they unite in order to maintain subordination among the slaves.” Corbier, Camescasse, and Dubreilh—the manager hired to live on the Ferronnays plantation in 1790 and 1791 and to oversee its daily operations—all believed in the imperious necessity of white unity against the servile population. The slave uprising in the Northern Province that began in August 1791 furnished vivid proof: by the end of September, around 200 sugar plantations on the North plain were destroyed, while nearly 1,200 coffee plantations in the surrounding hills were attacked; these assaults involved between 20,000 and 80,000 slaves. Perhaps ironically, the absence of such an apocalypse in the Western Province gave the elites in and around Port-au-Prince, including the Cul de Sac plain, the opportunity to sow divisions rather than to “unite themselves” against insurrectionary slaves.13 Once the revolution broke out, tensions arose between gens de couleur seeking political rights as a class and petits blancs who sought to have their own racial and hence social advantages enshrined in a new constitution. Attempts by figures such as Julien Raimond and Vincent Ogé to gain representation in the National Assembly for their fellow gens de couleur aroused fears among planters and petits blancs that political revolution in France might lead to the wrong kind of social revolution in SaintDomingue. Although opponents professed to believe that granting full rights of citizenship to them was nothing less than a fi rst, irreversible step down the path to abolition, at the outset wealthy gens de couleur such as Ogé sought to solidify their standing within the elite of a slaveholding society with little regard for the fate of slaves. Indeed, they often argued quite plausibly that were gens de couleur to be admitted to full political citizenship, they could help whites to maintain slavery in the face of slave resistance. Particularly as confrontation over this issue heated up, arguments about political rights for gens de couleur became mixed with racial invective and, eventually, violence toward gens de couleur themselves. In Port-au-Prince and elsewhere, tensions extended to the mixed-race population as a whole, free or not. In this connection, early on, in April 1790,

13. On population, Watts, West Indies, 320. The figures are not wholly uncontested. On the 1791 insurgency, Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 113. On conditions in the Western Province, Geggus, Slavery, War and Revoluton, 40–42. SMJ, JC (Bx) to ELF (Solothurn), 29 January 1791 (“subordination”); and PJC (PaP) to ELF (London), 12 December 1794 (“unite”).

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Corbier recounted one incident involving a mulatto slave, Louis-Jacques. He had entered a jewelry shop to buy a ring and was falsely accused of both insulting the white proprietress and stealing from her; a fistfight ensued, and he was led to prison at the behest of his master, Dufort de la Jarte, who sought to protect him from a gathering crowd. Eventually, the slave was taken from prison by a mob of white citizens and hanged. Local officials were powerless to bring members of this vigilante mob to justice because of their own deep political involvement in the struggle against gens de couleur. There was little love lost between the grand blanc Pierre-Jacques Corbier and the petits blancs who occasionally exploded in retributive violence against the mixed-race inhabitants of Saint-Domingue: he reacted with genuine horror to this incident and others, accusing these “scoundrels” of leading the violence, disorder, and pillage that was destabilizing the whole colony.14 Amid all this violence in the urban centers of Saint-Domingue, the plantation complex hummed along efficiently. Overall, sugar and coffee exports were above their 1789 levels, and the Ferronnays plantation did its part; from November 1790 to November 1791, plantation manager Dubreilh shipped 250,000l.t. worth of sugar—about 420,000 pounds—to Jean Camescasse in Bordeaux. If there were any major disruptions, Dubreilh studiously kept them hidden from his employer: “no runaways, few illnesses,” he reported, along with a monthly account of sugar shipments, births, and deaths in conformity with the decree of 1784 regulating attorneys’ account keeping. The worst that could be reported was the suicide of Jupiter, a twenty-five-year-old boiling house assistant, hitherto a “good subject,” who had stolen two chickens from the hospital on 14 June 1790. He hanged himself the next day for fear of being caught. This vignette of crime and punishment, although recounted as an exception, portrays an inward-looking world as yet untouched by revolution, with its regulating economy of terror still solidly intact. Dubreilh’s reports confi rm the view that, but for the ferment in the cities of Saint-Domingue—where the most disruptive forces of immigration, racial mixture, and social striving were at work—the plantation complex might have continued to churn along through the events of the French Revolution.15 14. SMJ, PJC to ELF, 4 April 1790. The names, which are not mentioned in PJC’s letter, are taken from passing references in Garran de Coulon, Rapport sur les troubles de SaintDomingue, 1:106–14. 15. A comparison of 1791 exports with those of 1789, by weight, shows that raw sugar came in at 97 percent of 1789 exports, and coffee at 88 percent of 1789 levels, but clayed sugar leaped to 147 percent. Source: calculations on Cabon, Histoire d’Haïti, 95, citing statistics

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Although the Cul de Sac plain remained quiet until the fall of 1791, Corbier’s account of the fi rst rebellion to touch the Ferronnays plantation conveys a sense of the complex of forces—including race, class, and geography—that determined the course of what had by then become a civil war in Saint-Domingue. On the twenty-second or twenty-third of October, a band of slaves arrived at the Ferronnays property, announcing their presence with the symbolic act of cutting the commanders’ whips and ordering a halt to all work. Having pillaged and set fi re to a number of coffee plantations in the hills to the south of the Cul de Sac plain, the band was well armed, and some among them were mounted on horseback. In all, twenty of Ferronnays’ slaves joined the uprising—some voluntarily, others by force—and headed with the band to the town of Croix des Bouquets. Although this number represented nearly 10 percent of the slaves on the Ferronnays plantation and as much as one-fi fth of the field slaves, Corbier fi ls assured the marquis that the rest of the slaves had remained “unshakable,” and that the commanders had been able to keep order. Of these twenty disappearing slaves, one was killed by a patrol, several returned, and nine were arrested and deported from the colony under circumstances to be discussed shortly. Owners were compensated for these deportees by a local fund at the rate of 1,600l.c. per slave. Five of the nine had been good subjects up to the point of the uprising on the Cul de Sac plain, so their disappearance represented a “real loss”; but the other four had been “utter scoundrels,” and Ferronnays had gained doubly by ridding himself of a moral cancer and pocketing 1,600 apiece in government funds into the bargain. Others had it much worse, including Corbier himself, who lost fifteen slaves (among them two commanders) on his coffee plantation, where work consequently ground to a halt for two months. Ferronnays was not pillaged and hadn’t lost any mules. We don’t know what the marquis made of Corbier’s reassurances, but events of October 1791 probably chilled the blood of those who believed in their immunity from the violence of the North plain.16 What was to blame for the events at the Ferronnays plantation and, more widely, in the countryside of the Western Province? Race—the ambi-

compiled by the British. Dubreilh’s view on the subversive role of cities is implicitly at work in Popkin, You Are All Free. See SMJ, PJC to ELF, 6 April 1790; and PJC (PaP) to PJF (London), 28 February 1797, when PJC refuses to rent slaves out in the city for fear of ideological infection. PJC maintained this view of the city well into the civil war; see PJC (PaP) to PJF (London), 15 December 1800. 16. All details and quotations in this and the next two paragraphs, SMJ, PJC (Cul de Sac) to ELF (Mainz), 8 November 1791.

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tions of slaves and of free people of color—mattered, of course, but property and class were also central. On 15 May 1791, after much debate and many confl icting policies, the French National Assembly issued a decree granting political rights to people of color with a free mother and father. This decree would be retracted very quickly, on 24 September of the same year, a circumstance that only aroused the hopes and fears on all sides of the question of political rights for gens de couleur. Corbier and others believed that the slaves of the Northern Province had taken the “unfortunate” decree of 15 May as their signal to rise in insurrection in August of 1791, but he also believed that “if the slaves were alone they would have been quickly reduced, but they have whites and gens de couleur with them”—facts that could not be doubted, because members of both groups had been killed fighting alongside insurrectionary slaves. “Seeing the Northern Province in flames,” Corbier recounted, “the gens de couleur got together . . . to tell the slaves that they were free like themselves, that France agreed, and that the only thing they had to do was to join with them in killing all of the whites, or at least all of those who would oppose them.” He only repeated widely held opinion when he wrote that the 15 May decree was responsible for slave insurrection all over the island; but in making it clear that white attitudes and actions helped to provoke the gens de couleur, his judgments went beyond simple racialist dogma: “I groaned many times seeing the injustices committed toward the gens de couleur.” In reaction to these reversals in policy and to increased hostility from whites, the gens de couleur turned to violent collaboration, inciting the slaves on coffee plantations in the mountainous regions surrounding the Cul de Sac plain; the better-guarded sugar plantations remained relatively calm until events in Port-au-Prince began to boil over in mid-October. News of the National Assembly’s retraction of the 15 May decree did not change the situation on the ground much; the gens de couleur had shown their power to the planters, and it was at this point that the latter began signing a series of concordats with the gens de couleur. These agreements assured political rights for free people of color despite the National Assembly’s tergiversations. Royalist white planters brokered the concordats in Croix des Bouquets, and fourteen parishes of the Southern and Western Provinces ratified them in turn. Both the National Assembly’s 15 May decree granting rights to the gens de couleur and the local concordats guaranteeing them in the breach were widely opposed in Port-au-Prince, a city that housed “more people who possess nothing than those who have something, and it is these unfortunates who give the law to respectable people.”

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Other planters saw things from Corbier’s perspective, criticizing the poor whites for resisting an alliance with the gens de couleur against the menace of slave revolt: “crushed with debts, without property or status,” these petits blancs were placing their bets on a “general upheaval” in the colony instead of respecting the reign of property and order dear to the Lords of Saint-Domingue. The petit blanc “monsters” of Port-au-Prince sought to redeem their political humiliation by breaking the concordat signed with the gens de couleur and expelling the latter from the city. On 23 October 1791, the gens de couleur roused the maroon slaves in the mountains surrounding Port-au-Prince, and it was at this point that the violence spread to the plantations, arriving at Étienne-Louis Ferron de la Ferronnays’ doorstep.17 A group of planters from Mirebalais—a city that was signatory to the concordat—correctly observed that “the cause of the gens de couleur has become the cause of all white citizens  .  .  . after the fi res that have devoured all of the wealth of the Northern Province, white and colored citizens cannot but have the same outlook and interests.” These shared interests did not preclude some friendly differences of opinion among white and colored slave owners. Free people of color demonstrated their superior influence among slaves by inciting the latter to rise in revolt, and it was this show of force that allowed them to win concessions on the question of political rights; once these demonstrations wound down, leaders of the insurgency used this same influence to coax slaves back to their masters’ plantations. After the third concordat between planters and gens de couleur on 23 October, white planters began to take a harder line, seeking the execution of the slaves, such as the nine or so who had collaborated with the gens de couleur by willingly departing the Ferronnays plantation. The gens de couleur preferred that those arrested be constituted into a fighting corps whose members, after a probationary period spent defending the colony, would be set at liberty. Corbier thought “it would have been far more advantageous to shoot them all, but it wasn’t possible to get the gens de couleur to concede this, even though this would have presented the most salutary example for those who remained.” In the end, Ferronnays’ slaves met the same fate as the “Suisses,” the black troops who had thrown in with the insurgent gens de couleur much earlier, and who had

17. For other planters, AN, D XXV/1, “Mémoire explicative de différents faits, remis par MM Malescot et Robert de Ruette,” 24 October 1791. Even observers who were completely hostile to the gens de couleur recognized the need for a truce with them. See Dalmas, Histoire de la révolution de Saint- Domingue, 1:185 and 211.

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descended from the mountains with them to attack plantations of the Cul de Sac plain. Instead of being returned to their plantations, they were packed aboard a ship intended for the Mosquito Coast (present-day Nicaragua), “a land still inhabited by wild cannibals.” In any case, this ship never reached its destination; instead, it anchored off the coast of Mole St. Nicholas in the Western Province, where about sixty of the Suisses were executed and thrown into the bay; the rest, about 240 in total, were left to die of starvation and illness.18 In the wake of this episode, slaves on the plantations around Léogane rose against the gens de couleur who had led them astray and then collaborated with the whites brutally to restore order. Like most whites, Corbier had too little regard for slaves to believe that they could be the original authors of the revolts that had become a permanent feature of the revolutionary landscape in Saint-Domingue. Nevertheless, the fall of 1791 represented a turning point: “How much time will have to pass to make the slaves forget that they set their masters trembling?” Corbier wondered. Quite a lot, as it happened.19

RIVAL FUTURES From the fall of 1791 until the evacuation of Saint-Domingue by white planters in 1803, the plantations on the Cul de Sac plain settled into a holding pattern. Troops never arrived in numbers adequate to defi nitively put down the slave insurrection that began in 1791. Dubreilh, PierreJacques Corbier’s deputy manager, began to fear for his life and resigned in October 1791; by the winter of 1792, Corbier had almost completely ceased to roll sugar, for lack of labor on the plain and for lack of wood coming from the mountains, where insurgents camped. In the summer of 1792, the Ferronnays plantation became the encampment of about thirty gens de couleur, a situation that saved buildings from physical destruction but did nothing at all for production. In 1793, the estate was still among the most intact sugar operations on the Cul de Sac plain, but it produced only 16,000l.t. worth of sugar in that year—a mere 8 percent, in value terms, of what had been sent to Ferronnays’ factors in Bordeaux in 1791. When the

18. On Mirebalais, Malescot, and Ruette, AN, D XXV/1, “Mémoire explicative”; and Dalmas, Histoire de la révolution de Saint- Domingue, 205. For the Suisses and the uprising in the Croix des Bouquets in general, Fick, Making of Haiti, 119–29. For PJC’s account and quotations, SMJ, PJC (Cul de Sac) to ELF (Mainz), 8 November 1791. 19. SMJ, PJC (Cul de Sac) to ELF (Mainz), 8 November 1791 (“trembling”).

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British occupied the Western Province starting in 1794, the gens de couleur quit the Ferronnays plantation, which again became a target for insurgent activity in an atmosphere of loose British control on the Cul de Sac plain. In October of 1794, insurgents came to the habitation, setting the storehouse ablaze; a fi re at the Grande Caze was extinguished by two female slaves. Two others escaped kidnapping by the insurgents, while other attempts were reported. Unsure of what to make of these claims, Corbier had the remaining able-bodied males held in the town of Croix des Bouquets, leaving only females on the plantation for the time being. Once the insurgents heard that the British intended to billet troops there, they returned to the Ferronnays plantation and burned the Grand Caze to the ground. The sugar-making infrastructure remained untouched until 1802.20 The violence against plantation owners, their employees, and their property gave rise to unstable, recombinant coalitions involving French civilian and military forces, the gens de couleur of Saint-Domingue, and foreign military powers; perhaps more surprisingly, slaves and ex-slaves were often involved in these attempts to reestablish the Saint-Domingue sugar industry. Writing in 1794, Corbier seemed to grasp the reasons why none of these attempts would succeed for long: I think that it is more prudent to wait until they have killed or disarmed the slaves and until there is sufficient force to inspire a great terror. The sort of spell that held the slaves of this country in submission has now completely dissipated; now only fear will contain them. I believe that we can reduce the slaves, but we will never get rid of this spirit of revolt.

From 1791 to the evacuation of the French from Saint-Domingue in 1803, planters and state officials were able to bring some force to bear on the slaves of the Cul de Sac plain and to compel a fraction of them back to work. But beyond a few strategic cannon emplacements that protected the d’Argout and Bourgogne plantations, supported by small numbers of

20. On control of ELF’s plantation, AN, D XXV/30, interrogation of Jumécourt, 15 February 1793. For sugar production, calculations on AN, D XXV/26, “Subvention de la Croix des Bouquets,” 17 February 1794. Ferronnays was in the top 97th percentile rank of all plantation properties in the parish. On the security situation, Geggus, Slavery, War and Revolution, 222–24 and 233–34. PJC’s comments on the occupation leave some confusion, since letters from 1796 also make clear the presence of British troops on the plantation: SMJ, PJC (Grands Bois) to ELF (London), 4 November 1796. SMJ, PJC (PaP) to ELF (London), 28 October 1794 (slaves to Croix des Bouquets) and 6 October 1797 (destruction of buildings).

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metropolitan troops who were subject to tropical diseases and in any case ill-trained for the sort of guerilla tactics used by black and mixed-race insurgents, it was locally recruited forces that ensured order. Militias were manned by the few whites willing to serve in them—Corbier did so to the great detriment of his health—as well as gens de couleur and sometimes even those slaves deemed reliable. The need to muster both slaves and gens de couleur helps to account for the instability of ruling factions in all three provinces of Saint-Domingue. Constituting local militias and keeping them in the field was difficult enough: as the events of the late 1760s had demonstrated, planters or their employees preferred profit making to warfare, while gens de couleur and slaves participated in these patrols for their own reasons. These improvisations hardly corresponded to Corbier’s dream of a long-term, intensive campaign of terror. Lacking the material resources and the will, planters had to settle for a series of very ephemeral compromises punctuated, inevitably, by outbursts of violence, the destruction of property, and the stoppage of whatever small amount of plantation work had been set into motion on the plain.21 On 4 February 1794, France’s legislative body, the National Convention, unanimously voted for the abolition of slavery in the whole of the French Empire, but abolition decrees were less determinative of events on the Cul de Sac plain than might be imagined. The 1794 edict retroactively approved the actions of French Civil Commissioners Léger Félicité Sonthonax and Étienne Polverel, who had pronounced a series of abolition decrees in Saint-Domingue starting in June 1793; in the fall of 1793, Polverel extended these decrees into the Western Province. Beginning in 1791, the French government had begun dispatching Civil Commissioners to its colonies to implement revolutionary policies. Locals often received these praetors with hostility, seeing in them the vectors of revolutionary enthusiasm and a renewed version of Old Regime ministerial despotism. Fearing abolition on the island, royalist planters, backed by French émigrés in London, invited the British to invade as early as February of 1793. The British occupation of the Western Province of Saint-Domingue, which started in June 1794, rendered the French abolition decrees moot, but this was not the only reason for their minimal impact. Since the British themselves offered freedom to slaves willing to join defensive militias, the differences between the French and the British regimes were not terribly clear-cut. Af21. SMJ, PJC (PaP) to ELF (London), 15 December 1794 (emplacements) and block quotation (“spirit of revolt”).

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ter Toussaint Louverture negotiated the British withdrawal from the Western Province in 1798 and abolition once again became the law of the land, popular agitation over working conditions seemed to matter more than abstract questions of legal status.22 Although free people of color often helped to broker the terms by which insurgents laid down pikes, machetes, and what few guns they possessed to return to work, slaves began to play an increasingly direct role in negotiations. An interrogation by French officials of royalist planter Hanus de Jumécourt shows that the slaves of Cul de Sac lost confidence in their allies after the embarkation of the “Suisses,” and drew the conclusion that they must make demands on their own behalf. Corbier’s own testimony reveals that some of Ferronnays’ slaves were consigned to death among the “Suisses,” but we do not know how many of them were present, as insurgents, at the conferences recounted by Jumécourt to his jailers. In July of 1792, after a second full-blown slave insurrection on the Cul de Sac plain, a conference was held between slaves and Civil Commissioner Philippe Roume. To begin, insurgent slaves demanded food and money as a prerequisite for laying down their arms. The fi nal step of returning to work required assurances that the midday pause (normally an hour) would be substantially increased. Roume approved this concession in order to “cut short” the “dangerous illusions” slaves harbored about a “happy future and the suppression of several days of work”; some of these idle dreamers bandied about the figure of three days off per week to rest and to cultivate their personal gardens.23 Plantation owners probably did not fear such an extravagant outcome, but the slaves’ line of negotiation had a certain bite, because it was based on the Code Noir of 1685; this edict prohibited work on Sundays and also set minimum nutritional requirements. The calls for an extension of samedi nègre (slaves’ Saturday)—time off given to slaves to cultivate their own subsistence gardens—from one to three days was part of a broader strategy, on the Cul de Sac plain and elsewhere, to strengthen provisions within the Code Noir that touched on slaves’ well-being. The Old Regime provided a revolutionary script for slaves as well as for masters. If the

22. Abolition decrees were never implemented on the French islands of Bourbon (presentday Réunion) and Île-de-France (Mauritius), and were in any case abrogated by Napoleon in 1802. For the situation under the British occupation, Geggus, Slavery, War and Revolution, 314–17. 23. AN, D XXV/30, interrogation of Jumécourt, 5 February 1793.

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appeal to the Code Noir had the effect of implicitly undermining masters’ unquestioned despotic control within the plantation, other elements of these negotiations accentuated their patriarchal authority by calling on “soft” elements within the traditional repertory: clemency and manumission. The left hand of forgiveness had to balance out the right hand of force. Masters promised—really, they were forced—to forgive and forget the occasionally murderous transgressions committed by those slaves who were willing to return to work. Gone were the days when a nonviolent walkout, such as had occurred on the Ferronnays plantation in 1774, could be punished with 150 lashes. Moreover, masters were encouraged to liberate any of their slaves who had been particularly fi rm in the defense of white interests during these uprisings. Corbier seems to have responded to this particular call to paternal beneficence in manumitting one Marie Claudine (“Joqui”) on 1 January 1793.24 Patriarchial and governmental authority were well known—if uneasily cohabitating—forces within the plantation; the negotiations in Croix des Bouquets in 1792 made audible another, essential voice within the plantation system: the slaves themselves. Among other things, they exercised veto power over the overseers who managed their daily work routines. In the wake of the slave insurgencies of 1791 and 1792, many whites preferred to depart for the United States or Jamaica, bringing faithful slaves with them when feasible, rather than to allow themselves to be “killed like chickens” by insurgents. Corbier complained bitterly about “cowardly” fellow planters who preferred to remain in New England at a safe distance from events instead of returning to Saint-Domingue to “conquer their property” while he spent month after dangerous and miserable month in the local militia, sleeping in the mud while in the grip of a succession of tropical fevers. The abandoned plantations on the Cul de Sac plain had largely ceased to produce sugar: in 1793, all ninety-one sugar plantations combined managed to produce only about 500,000l.c. worth of sugar—less than the Ferronnays plantation in a good year; worse, from the point of view of authorities, these plantations became the source of shelter, food,

24. On precedents set by the Code Noir, Ghachem, Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution; and Debbasch, “Marronnage,” 32. In fact, the Code Noir prohibited owners from giving slaves time off to cultivate their gardens instead of food (see discussion in chapter 4). On legal norms on the plantation, Debbasch, “Au coeur des ‘gouvernement des esclaves.’” For manumission, Testament of Widow Corbier, JFM, New Orleans, 27 November 1837 (register of wills, New Orleans Parish, 6:19–20).

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livestock, and ammunition for insurgents who sometimes sold food and even captured slaves in exchange for munitions.25 French and British leaders were agreed that to bring the situation under control, plantations must come under some sort of management; but insurgent slaves had the power to enforce their views by refusing to return to work or by chasing off a detested overseer who showed his face. Slaves had long believed that their absentee masters were more benign than the attorneys or managers working for them, but during the revolution this conviction took on a more explicitly political overtone. The slaves’ tendency to assign blame to the masters’ subordinates was analogous to the widespread belief, in France and in Saint-Domingue, in the abuse by venal ministers of a beneficent king’s power: where the king sought abolition or reform of ancient abuses—slavery, noble privileges, perverted justice, endemic poverty—nobles or his ministers resisted the will of a wellintentioned monarch. On the plantation, class differences helped to reinforce this illusion: the absentee planter did not personally torture slaves, but left this work to brutalized subordinates while he periodically intervened to pardon and manumit them. Slaves believed in the moderating influence of the masters’ presence on the plantations, and begged French officials to compel them to return to Saint-Domingue, or at a minimum to send their inheritors. Had slaves also come to believe in the coincidence of “humanity and interest,” the doctrine their owners and managers preached in the 1770s and 1780s? Failing a return of absentee planters, Civil Commissioners such as Roume asked for the names of humane overseers to take over duties on the plantations, with the slaves themselves recommending candidates. Opportunists adapted to this tense but fluid atmosphere quickly, bribing influential gens de couleur or insurgent slaves to stain a rival’s reputation and hence to clear the path for their appointment to the lucrative post of overseer.26 The fact that slave insurrections had initially been led by propertyowning gens de couleur explains in part why fewer plantations were put to flame in the West than in the North. French officials counted on the

25. SMJ, PJC (Cul de Sac) to ELF (Mainz), 8 March 1792 (“chickens,” “cowardly,” and “conquer”); PJC (PaP) to ELF (London), 28 May 1795 (“property”); and 22 April 1796 (fevers). On sugar production, AN, D XXV/26, “Subvention de la Croix des Bouquets,” 17 February 1794. This is a comparison in value terms: in reality the physical quantity was probably much less, given the high price of sugar in 1793. For prices, Cauna, Temps des isles à sucre, 260 (annex 7). 26. For Roume’s request, AN, D XXV/30, interrogation of Jumécourt, 13 February 1793.

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Western and Southern Provinces, with their relatively intact (if idle) plantations, to fund the war effort against the British, the Spanish, and the internal enemies with whom they had truck. A general law of 25 August of 1792 provided for the seizure and sale of émigré plantations, and beginning on 23 November 1792, owners in the Western Province who could not prove their residence in France could expect to have their plantations managed by the French Republic until their names were cleared. The Ferronnays plantation escaped this fi rst round of sequestration, but eventually fell under state control in May of 1793. On the Cul de Sac plain, slaves’ expectations were informed by the policies that Civil Commissioner Polverel adopted in the Western Province to reestablish sugar production. Slaves on sequestered plantations in the west were freed by edicts of May and July 1793, although Polverel had no illusions about their desire to continue producing sugar on their former plantations, even if they were supposedly working on behalf of the republic that had recently emancipated them. Polverel’s colleague in the north, Commissioner Léger Félicité Sonthonax, laid the foundations of what would later be called “militarized agriculture,” which was essentially a system of forced labor for freed slaves, who were henceforth known as “cultivators”—sometimes even citizen cultivators. They would become stakeholders (portionnaires) in their plantations, entitled to onequarter of the produce, but they were not considered owners or comanagers; moreover, they would be forced into work by strict vagabondage laws and corporal punishment, all of which recalled nothing so much as slavery itself. Polverel opted for a system that called for a division of land after the war, explaining to Sonthonax, “What sort of prosperity can we expect without work and what sort of work can we expect to get out of newly freed Africans if one doesn’t make them feel the necessity of work by giving them property?” Polverel’s proposition was not cut whole from revolutionary cloth: plantation owners had long understood that granting garden patches, the “little Guineas” where slaves eked out a living in their precious spare time, discouraged escape. Beyond the concrete question of subsistence, in lavishing careful attention on a plot of land, the slave cultivated her own emotional attachment to the plantation. In addition to the promise of future property ownership, Polverel envisioned a system of self-management in which workers would elect their own overseers; in the early stages of emancipation, gangs in the Western and Southern Provinces actually determined their workweek by vote, but workplace democracy was tightly constrained by the needs of capital. Only gangs voting to work six days a week—the norm under the Old Regime—would be given

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their full share of plantation revenue, one quarter; the share of those voting for two days off a week would be reduced to 20 percent, while any gang so improvident as to vote for three or more would receive no share whatsoever. In the north, Sonthonax was even more deferential to plantation owners, and did not entertain plans to redistribute property to cultivators after the revolution. It was this authoritarian system favorable to the interests of large landowners that won out, at least in the collective imagination of Haiti’s emerging elite.27

LAND AND FREEDOM By the summer of 1794, the British were in control of the Western Province, and slavery had once again become the law of the land. Although there had been insufficient time for Polverel’s system to completely take hold on the Cul de Sac plain, the gains of 1791– 93 had the effect of encouraging slaves’ independence and their aspirations to land ownership. This was certainly the case on the strategically located Ferronnays plantation, which, thanks to the occupation by the gens de couleur, had survived with its buildings largely intact and was chosen by the British to billet 180 hussars and their horses. Here, even protected by British military power, fundamental questions about the location and availability of slave labor remained essentially mysterious for Pierre-Jacques Corbier. No managerial ritual was more central to setting the sugar plantation to work than the slave census, since counting available hands fi xed the basic possibilities, and limits, of production. Before the civil war, managers such as Corbier drew up tables, resembling modern-day accounting ledgers or spreadsheets, that clearly displayed the quantity and value of available labor power. By the mid-1790s, the order and precision of these Old Regime slave censuses were a distant dream for planters. Revolutionary bureaucrats continued to draw up official-looking fantasies about the productive potential of places like the Cul de Sac plain if, by some miracle, the whole 27. On ELF’s sequester, AN, D XXV/30, État des habitations séquestrées . . . Croix des Bouquets, 30 April 1794. On the revolutionary labor regime, Blancpain, Étienne de Polverel, 106– 63. On the system’s ideological underpinnings in Guadeloupe, Dubois, “Price of Liberty,” 375– 87. Polverel is quoted in Blancpain, Étienne de Polverel, 145. On the importance of land, Debbasch, “Marronnage,” 17 and 136. For elections, 25 January 1794 “Proclamation relative à la liberté générale dans l’Ouest et dans le Sud, au partage du revenu des habitation et à la discipline des ateliers” and 7 February 1794 “Règlement sur les proportions du travail et de la recompense,” especially arts. 20 and 21. Both are reprinted in “Proclamations de Polverel et de Sonthonax, 1793–1794,” Revue d’histoire des colonies 36, no. 125 (1949): 24–55. For the results of these elections, AN, D XXV/28/286– 88.

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of the pre– civil war slave population were to return to work on their old plantations. The reality was otherwise: from 242 slaves in 1789, Corbier counted 20 “working” slaves in November of 1796; four years later, after extensive researches, he was able to relay the mildly more optimistic number 30, but also observed that 50 or 60 of Ferronnays’ former slaves should be written off as dead. Many male slaves had joined the insurgents and taken their wives with them; others were simply vagabonding in the mountains south of the Cul de Sac plain. Two years after abolition took effect again in the Western Province, Corbier claimed that Ferronnays still possessed over 40 slaves, but confessed that it was difficult to give an exact number because he could not round them up to count them. People in that situation had to learn to tolerate ambiguity.28 From the masters’ perspective, slaves lived on the plantation to produce sugar, but in the midst of civil war, and without any coercive force to hold them there, other motivations drew runaway slaves back to their former plantations. Corbier reflected that had the French army not given up Léogane to the gens de couleur in the spring of 1796, the black insurgents’ retreat would have been checked, and the slaves would have been forced to return to their masters for “lack of food, lack of munitions and no hope of receiving any.” One young mulatto woman from Ferronnays’ plantation, supposedly an escapee from an insurgent band in the hills, found her way to Corbier starving and covered in sores. A number, perhaps the majority, of her equally sick and destitute fellow slaves expressed a desire to return to the habitation, but for the “city dwellers and bad subjects” who supposedly held them against their will. This alibi was likely proffered and accepted on all sides as a face-saving measure, but the delicacy of this negotiation indicates just how tentative and ill-defi ned these returns to the plantation were. Of the twenty slaves Corbier found on the Ferronnays plantation in the autumn of 1796, over half were pressed into the service of the British hussars billeted there; as to the others, “If one forces assiduous labor upon them, they will all up and leave . . . to join the other insurgents.” The Ferronnays slave cultivators returned to enjoy the relative safety and abundance of the plantation, doing the bare minimum of work for Corbier or the British to establish their right of domicile and

28. For the Cul de Sac plain censuses, e.g., AN, D XXV/30, “État général de la situation actuel . . . Cul de Sac,” 8 February 1794. The existing censuses for the rest of Saint-Domingue can be found in AN, CAOM, 5 SUPSDOM, 1–5. For Corbier’s censuses, SMJ, PJC (Grands Bois) to ELF (London), 11 November 1796, and PJC (Cul de Sac) to ELF (London), 12 August 1800.

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to cultivate their garden plots. Several years after these incidents, Corbier continued to stand idly by as insurgents returned temporarily from the mountains for the sole purpose of cultivating their garden plots, although some ex-slaves did pause in order to enter into desultory discussions, offering to return to the Ferronnays planation in exchange for protection.29 The habitation of Étienne-Louis Ferron de la Ferronnays, the Cul de Sac plain, and indeed the whole Saint-Domingue plantation complex stood poised among several possibilities. Even as it produced virtually nothing of marketable value, the plantation system was literally occupied by those staking claims on the future: Corbier, the British, and many of the gens de couleur who had led the slaves in revolt desired some version of the Old Regime plantation system; ex-slaves hoped for free access to—or even possession of—the land they had been cultivating before civil war and foreign occupation. The hills surrounding the Cul de Sac plain were not necessarily hospitable places for those unused to scraping out a living in them; remaining there as “brigands” was just as untenable an option for many insurgents during war and revolution as it had been for those runaway slaves during the Old Regime who fled there, only to return to their former plantations days or weeks later in search of food and familiar faces. The difference in this new situation was that slaves and ex-slaves envisioned themselves as peasant proprietors of some of the most fertile land in Saint-Domingue, but no longer subjected to the murderous routines of sugar cultivation. Leaders like General Louverture had other ideas. French abolition decrees took force again after the British evacuated the Western Province in 1798, so Louverture sought to revive the sugar industry by reimposing a strict regime of labor discipline resembling the system Sonthonax had fashioned for the Northern Province several years earlier. Louverture’s “Regulations on Agriculture” (October 1800) defi ned plantation labor as the patriotic contribution not to planter profits but to national survival. Since it was the sovereign state and no longer the master who exercised authority over the free cultivator, familiar practices like corporal discipline and imprisonment were now justified in the same terms as the punishments meted out to military conscripts who evaded their patriotic duty. This discipline had to be imposed, because newly freed slaves misunder29. SMJ, PJC (PaP) to ELF (London), 22 April 1796 (“lack”); 15 December 1794 (“city dwellers”); 4 November 1796 (“assiduous labor”); and 1 February 1803 (negotiations).

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stood the nature of the liberty guaranteed by the French Revolution and its decrees of abolition: Since the revolution some cultivators who, because they were young at the time, still have not yet worked in agriculture, do not want to give themselves over to it because, they say they are free and they pass their days exclusively in running and vagabonding about, give only a bad example to the other cultivators.30

Louverture’s regulations casually asserted, in the same manner as Corbier fi ls, that former slaves still belonged to a specific plantation. Cultivators were thus obliged to return to “their” plantations, whether managed by their old masters or by new delegates of the state. Cultivators who came to live on a different plantation after abolition were referred to as “foreigners” in censuses; the Old Regime plantation provided not only the basic social model for the new regime but also the identities of its new citizen cultivators. As under the Old Regime, Louverture considered the unrestricted movement of agricultural workers a threat to order: circulation between plantations or into the cities, even on rest days, was prohibited. And like planters under the Old Regime, Louverture was concerned with the problem of domestic labor: “Domesticity is not considered a useful profession, and in consequence all male and female cultivators who leave agriculture to sell their services are obliged to return to their plantations under the personal responsibility of those they serve.”31 Corbier’s employer as of 1798, Pierre-Jacques François Joseph Auguste Ferron de la Ferronnays, took a more religious, one might say mystical, view of events in Saint-Domingue and of Toussaint Louverture’s prospects for restoring order. Ferronnays, who like so many émigré nobles turned to religion during his self-imposed exile from a godless, “philosophical” revolution, was impressed by the accounts of General Louverture, who promised a healthy dose of patriarchy and institutionalized religion. The Constitution of Saint-Domingue (1801), written and promulgated by Louverture, made Roman Catholicism the official public faith of Saint-Domingue, and provisions were included for the support of parish churches. Divorce,

30. Toussaint Louverture, “Reglement rélatif à la culture,” 12 October 1800, AN, Col CC 9B 18. Emphasis in original. 31. Louverture, “Reglement,” arts. 6, 7, and 10 (circulation), and 3 (“domesticity”). For more on domesticity, Louverture, “Proclamation dictoriale,” 422. For “foreigners,” AN, D XXV/30, “État général de la situation actuel . . . Cul de Sac,” 8 February 1794.

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an innovation of the French Republic, was abolished, and more generally Louverture sought to “extend and maintain social virtues, to encourage and to cement the bonds of family.” These moral and religious prescriptions were part of a program to stiffen the work ethic of refractory “citizen cultivators” who did not respond adequately to patriotism, self-interest, or, when it came to it, to brute force. To this end, Louverture’s “Regulations on Agriculture” enjoined parents to imbue their children with “good morals, in the Christian religion and in the fear of God.”32 In many ways, Louverture’s emphasis on family, religion, and work resembled Napoleon’s own conservative interpretation of revolutionary doctrine. Although Ferronnays refused to return to France out of loyalty to the Bourbon dynasty and a hatred of Napoleon’s religious hypocrisy, he drew parallels between the two strongmen: “The reign of Terror no longer exists in our unfortunate country because Buonaparte [Ferronnays used the insulting Italianate spelling of the name] wants to make himself popular or to reign more securely.” Ferronnays detested Napoleon but acknowledged that he had restored property and status to the French elites who had come under attack during the French Revolution. These included the many nobles who returned from exile after the amnesty Napoleon granted in 1800. In Saint-Domingue, the paradox of a black general effecting a restoration of order to make the world safe for the white planter class could be attributed only to divine providence: “The Grace of God is infi nite, and it is not our share to know the means by which providence has elected to make use of Toussaint; but it is possible that a black be destined to give the fi rst example of a renewed submission to order.”33 Despite Louverture’s multipronged appeal to patriotism, patriarchy, and religion, many of the ex-slaves refused to return to the Ferronnays plantation. Corbier made extensive researches, hired the mounted patrol, and doled out bribes: “All the blacks thumb their noses at the General’s proclamations.” Eventually, slaves fi ltered back, proffering hollow promises in lieu of solid effort. Although they did little or nothing, on Corbier’s account the blacks respected him “as if it were ten years ago,” before the abolition of slavery. The strategy? “Keep them together because if I can have them at hand when order does return, I can certainly make them 32. Toussaint Louverture’s letters and pronouncements were widely printed in France and abroad in a deliberate public relations strategy. For a discussion, Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative, chap. 1. Constitution of 1801 reprinted in Janvier, Constitutions d’Haïti, 7–21 (art. 5 for quote); for more on religion, Louverture, “Proclamation dictoriale,” 423. 33. SMJ, PJF (London) to PJC, 26 April 1801 (“Terror”; see also 4 February 1801); and 26 April 1801 (“Grace”).

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work . . . given my ascendancy over them.” For returned ex-slaves, the Ferronnays plantation provided an asylum from Louverture’s tough vagrancy laws, safety during the civil war between the black leaders of an emergent Haiti; of equal or greater importance, maintaining a presence on their former masters’ plantations laid the basis for landownership after the cessation of white rule. From this point of view, empty gestures of respect were a small price to pay to occupy Ferronnays’ land, and Corbier accepted them—whether he took them at face value is another question—in anticipation of a return to the Old Regime.34 After ten years of upheaval in Saint-Domingue, the easy intersection of “interest and humanity” that Corbier and his father propounded in the 1770s and 1780s ceded to a virulent racism, coupled with a sense of civilizational struggle. In this respect, Corbier echoed intellectual developments in France, where scientific theories of racism began to take root. Whereas Enlightenment thinkers such as George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon had stressed the perfectibility of the various races of men found around the globe, a newer generation of naturalists placed Africans at the bottom of a fi xed racial hierarchy. The spate of works that came out in 1800 and 1801, including Julien-Joseph Virey’s Natural History of the Human Race and Bernard Germain de Lacépède’s On the History of Races, helped set the tone in the metropole for Napoleon’s reimposition of slavery in the French Empire in 1802. 35 The more that Corbier fi ls had to compromise with recalcitrant blacks —whether cultivators or slaves—the more racist and vehement his rhetoric became. Blacks preferred to vagabond in the mountains, cultivating their own plots “as though they are in Guinea.” What Corbier meant as a slur may have been an essentially correct description of black aspirations. The sharp economc growth in Saint-Domingue of the 1780s was fueled by a particularly large influx of slaves, who probably practiced subsistence agriculture in their native Africa before being brought to work on the French agro-industrial complex. Tellingly, before the French Revolution, slaves’ personal gardens on the plantations were referred to by administrators and planters as “little Guineas,” which recalls once again how much prerevolutionary practices informed aspirations after 1789. The refusal of slaves

34. SMJ, PJC to PJF (London), 15 December 1800 (“proclamations”); 18 February 1801 (“ascendancy”). For the notion of a “proto-peasantry” in places like Haiti, Mintz, Caribbean Transformations, chap. 5. Slaves’ aspiration to landownership is the overarching theme in Fick, Making of Haiti. 35. Bénot, Démence coloniale, 212–18.

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to work on the sugar plantations, no matter what their changing status, can be seen as a conflict between African natives, or bossales, and the Creoles, white or black, who wanted them to remain there. Against such passive and active resistance, Corbier saw the need for “a new code of laws for the blacks much more severe than that which existed before the Revolution [i.e., the Code Noir]; before they were beasts, now they are ferocious animals that must be restrained by iron rods.” “Begging them to work” no longer had the least effect, and they would only do so when “inspired with terror.” While critics of the Revolution in France blamed the Enlightenment philosophy for the excesses of the Terror, Corbier saw squeamish philanthropists recoiling from necessary acts of terror. He hoped that events “would open up the eyes of our philosophes and that this species of monkey, the sum of all vices, will be submitted to a regime that will make it feel the superiority of the whites and impress upon them the respect they owe.”36 The blacks of Saint-Domingue never returned to paying their former masters the respect owed to them, and in the fi nal analysis the Louverturian regime could not long survive its many contradictions. Toussaint Louverture’s Constitution of July 1801, which proclaimed a completely independent country within the French Empire, was one provocation too many for the Bonapartist regime. Already, in the previous years, during Saint-Domingue’s period of de facto independence from France, Louverture had been conducting foreign policy independently with Britain and the United States. Although Saint-Domingue remained officially part of the French Empire, Louverture named himself chief executive (governor) of the colony for life, and the constitution provided for no metropolitan oversight of Dominguan legislation, not even on matters of taxation or foreign trade. Between the black Napoleon and the white Napoleon, Bonaparte sought clarity. The conclusion in October of 1801 of the preliminaries for the 1802 Treaty of Amiens, which established a short-lived peace between France and Britain, gave Napoleon, who had been hemmed in by the British navy, his opportunity. Two months later, General Charles Victoire Emmanuel Leclerc sailed for Saint-Domingue to reconquer it for his brother-in-law, the white Napoleon. The latter had been encouraged in this project all along by the planter lobby, many of whom had recently

36. On “little Guineas, ” Debien, “Nourriture des esclaves,” 10. On the political significance of the bossale/Creole distinction, Nesbitt, “Turning the Tide.” SMJ, PJC to PJF (London), 15 December 1800 (“Guineas” and “iron rods”). PJC (PaP) to PJF (London), 9 April 1802 (“terror”); and 9 April 1802 (“begging” and “respect”).

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returned from self-imposed exile in London. Despite Louverture’s militarized agriculture and his forgiving attitude toward white planters, none could envision a real return to profitability without slavery.37 Above all, Louverture’s reimposition of coerced labor contradicted the aspirations of legions of newly freed blacks. His regime introduced some measure of stability on the island, and the plantation economy emerged from its nadir of 1794. But militarized agriculture taught the ex-slaves of Saint-Domingue to appreciate the white planters’ perspective, if only in one respect: plantation agriculture was incompatible with the personal liberty announced by the abolition decree of 1794 and in article 3 of the Constitution of 1801. This impasse between aspiring peasants and elites over the meaning of the revolution in Saint-Domingue did not end with the evacuation of the French and the proclamation of the independent nation of Haiti. The great sugar estates, whose splendor was lost but certainly not forgotten, exercised the imagination of Haitian elites long after they ceased to figure significantly in the island’s economy. The lost world of the Lords of Saint-Domingue aroused the same nostaligia in France; there, well into the nineteenth century, the restoration of colonial fortunes, and with it families like the Ferron de la Ferronnayses, was identified with the restoration of the Old Regime itself.38 37. For the classic comparison between Bonaparte and Louverture, James, Black Jacobins, chap. 11. 38. It was not simply fi nancial considerations that dictated the choice of Haitian elites, but the persistence of eighteenth-century attitudes. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot remarked, “Sugar is noble, coffee is routurier.” “Motion in the System,” 372.

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letter dated 30 October 1803 and sent from Santiago de Cuba by Pierre-Jacques Auguste Corbier effectively put the closing parenthesis on the Ferron de la Ferronnays family’s career as planters in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. The hasty fl ight to Cuba of most of the remaining white planters from that colony, “delivering what used to be the most beautiful, richest country in the universe into the hands of blacks in revolt,” marked a turning point in the process by which this family became again what it had been for centuries: a powerful and wealthy but essentially provincial member of France’s landed aristocracy. In this respect, the Ferronnayses’ fortunes were linked, as they had been since the mideighteenth century, to those of the French colonial empire. The year 1803 also marks the point after which France returned to what it had been for centuries, before its turn to global commerce during the long eighteenth century: an essentially continental economy, after losing its richest colony and selling its North American territorial claims to the United States.1 From the Treaty of Ryswick of 1697, by which the western part of the island of Hispaniola was ceded to the French, to the proclamation of the independent nation of Haiti on that island in 1804, France had been involved in five maritime conflicts; with the inclusion of the thirteen-year civil war in its colony of Saint-Domingue that began in 1791, this meant roughly forty-six years of warfare in France’s Atlantic empire, much of it animated by competition for sugar-producing islands and the markets they served. Once the crippling expense of this futile series of commer-

1. SMJ, PJC (Santiago de Cuba [henceforth: SdC]) to PJF (London), 30 October 1803. On the continental turn of France’s post-revolutionary economy, Crouzet, “Les conséquences des guerres de la Révolution.”

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cial wars became evident in the mid-eighteenth century, some isolated voices urged the French to quit the sordid business of empire in favor of more peaceful domestic occupations. But these arguments were not taken seriously except as calls to introduce administrative, commercial, and humanitarian reforms that might enhance the profitability of France’s overseas possessions; in the circles that determined policy, a retreat from commercial empire was out of the question. Only military defeat could dictate what altruistic speculation merely suggested: the complete renunciation of Saint-Domingue, a major element of France’s plantation complex. But plantation owners did not shrug off their losses: clawing back their possessions with the aid of metropolitan politicians always seemed the most plausible route forward, even if we know in retrospect that this strategy did not open up any new economic horizons for the planters of Saint-Domingue or for French capitalism tout court. But an account of the planters’ end game, of their struggle to keep their fortunes together, and then to reassemble the debris in metropolitan France once that effort failed, is valuable in the same way that an autopsy provides insights into the workings—and pathologies—of the living organism.2 The heart of this organism was, of course, the plantation, with its labor force and its impressive physical infrastructure. But, as we have seen, the Saint-Dominguan plantation complex was built on a system of social and political collaboration that tied the colony to the metropole; as contentious as these ties were during the Old Regime, the consequences of their dissolution during the civil war in Saint-Domingue confi rm their transcendent importance. Maintaining a narrow focus on the profitability of the plantations that kept churning out sugar in great quantities all the way until 1791 would obscure this essential point. Accordingly, when planters sought to revive their fortunes from their places of exile, they did so by reconstituting and redeploying the alliances that had served them during the Old Regime; these assured both the military backing and the state subsidies essential to the system they had known. Thus, in the midst of the most devastating crisis in the whole of the West Indian plantation complex, planters tried to grope their way back to the Old Regime by the most familiar of paths. When this strategy no longer proved to be entirely feasible after Haitian independence was declared in 1804, noble planters sought to restore the traditional wealth and status that had initially motivated their turn to colonial commerce during the eighteenth century. 2. On sugar as a prime mover of eighteenth-century colonial warfare, Meyer, Histoire du sucre, 148–56; and its effect on state budgets, Butel, Histoire des Antilles françaises, 124.

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Unsurprisingly, they employed that most hallowed of means to this end: France’s monarchical state.3

EVACUATIONS Although it proved to be the end of the line for white rule in SaintDomingue, many evacuees like Pierre-Jacques Corbier saw the fl ight to Cuba in 1803 as just the latest in a series of tactical withdrawals. Planters, military men, and government officials retreated temporarily to safe havens like Jamaica, New York, Philadelphia, or New Orleans, waiting for the violence to abate, or for a shift in the political winds that had initially blown them off Saint-Domingue. The Treaty of Basel (1795) brought peace between Spain and France and a recognition of the latter’s now-tottering sovereignty on the western half of the island of Hispaniola; renewed Franco-Spanish understanding made it possible for evacuees from SaintDomingue to embark en masse for Cuba. The obstinate or merely foolish whites who had remained up until that point in that colony, many of them coffee planters like Corbier, saw the town of Santiago, eighty kilometers from Saint-Domingue on the eastern tip of Cuba, as a convenient observation post and jumping-off point for a projected return to their properties.4 All this seems fanciful in retrospect—dreams of reconquering SaintDomingue persisted well into the nineteenth century—but from the initial slave uprising in 1791, the planter class did register some provisional victories, which gave hope to those willing to focus on the details without looking at the broader picture. The uprising of 1791 on the North plain had been put down; Toussaint Louverture had managed a surprising revival of Saint-Domingue’s plantation economy from 1800 to 1802; and fi nally, in 1802, Napoleon sent the expeditionary force long demanded by planters to reassert French authority and, ultimately, reimpose slavery. These glimmers of good fortune all proved temporary if not completely illusory, but desperate planters saw in them signs that order and lasting prosperity would soon be restored to the island. Some had the foresight to cut their losses earlier, exporting a significant number of slaves to Jamaica or

3. Seymour Drescher insists on the viability of the Antillean plantation complex based on gross production figures on the French and British islands, while only mentioning in passing—as if it were an accidental or external event—the social and political crisis in SaintDomingue: Econocide, 38. 4. For the most in-depth discussion of this population to date, Meadows, “Planters of Saint-Domingue.” On the fl ight to Cuba, Yacou, “Saintiago de Cuba.” See also Debien, “Colons de Saint-Domingue réfugiés à Cuba,” 1953, 573.

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departing to Philadelphia with enough wealth, usually in the form of coffee or sugar, to reestablish themselves comfortably in exile. Corbier might have escaped to Jamaica with thirty slaves had he acted earlier, but “as it was impossible to predict everything that has happened, I haven’t reproached myself for not having done it.” Not once?5 The evacuation from Port-au-Prince in October of 1803 was improvised and chaotic. In their haste, military officers abandoned arms and munitions—Corbier cited 20,000 rifles, 150 cannons, and 150,000 pounds of cannon powder—that were then seized by black leaders to fend off future French attempts at reconquest. Often, refugees could not be entirely certain of their final destination, since the English were on hand to capture and divert ships as they left harbor. Although Corbier was accompanied by 7 of Pierre-Jacques François Joseph Auguste Ferronnays’ slaves (3 men, 2 women, and 2 children), 6 children belonging to these refugees were left behind, because they could not be found in Port-au-Prince while transport ships were being hastily loaded. The willingness of departing parents to abandon their children as they sought haven alongside their former masters is probably less a testament to the “fidelity” and “sacrifice” Corbier attributed to them than to the famine and danger of life in a war zone. A census conducted by Haitian leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines in 1804 reveals that the black population declined by one-third, to 400,000, from the highs reached in 1791. Against this backdrop, the decision of a free woman of color named Marie Claudine (nicknamed “Joqui”) is more easily comprehensible: Corbier had manumitted her in 1793, but she chose to leave Saint-Domingue with her erstwhile owner at the risk of ending up in a place where her claims to freedom might not be recognized. By the time of the evacuation to Cuba, the blacks of Saint-Domingue were universally feared as potential vectors of slave revolt, so governments sought to prevent their entry along with French refugees. Despite his approval of these measures, Corbier nonetheless bribed Spanish officials to let the servants accompanying him enter Santiago. Not long after his arrival, one of Ferronnays’ slaves—either realizing the unlikeliness of a prompt return with Corbier to Saint-Domingue or remorseful over having abandoned his children—slipped out of Santiago on a ship destined for Saint-Domingue:

5. On planters’ reconversion, Covo, “Commerce, empire et révolutions,” 624–32. For the timely fl ight of Ferronnays’ neighbor Caradeux, Geggus, “Caradeux and Colonial Memory,” 231–34. For French dreams of reconquest, Brière, Haïti et la France, chaps. 1–3. SMJ, PJC (SdC) to PJF (London), 30 October 1803 (“reproached” and abandoned armaments).

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“I forgive him because of his motivations; he is a good subject but he’d never been separated from his family before.”6 The experience of French refugees in Cuba serves as a reminder of the diversity of the closely neighboring Caribbean islands, and of the shock that Saint-Dominguan customs could produce even in another slave society. In comparison to Saint-Domingue, Cuba was poor and economically isolated. Its plantations were run largely on the hacienda model, privileging self-sufficiency over export crops. The quickly paced, brutal “gang” system of labor practiced in Saint-Domingue was basically unknown there, and even Saint-Dominguan slaves were said to hold their more easygoing Cuban brethren in contempt. When the British occupied Havana from 1762 to 1763, they opened the ports to free trade; upon the return of Cuba to Spain at the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, this policy stayed more or less in place, which helped push the development of the Cuban sugar industry. But the real turning point in that island’s economic development was the arrival of thousands of French immigrants in Santiago de Cuba, a town of 26,400 people, in 1803; the mayor counted 7,700 new arrivals during this year, and over the whole revolutionary period around 18,000 refugees—white, free people of color, and slaves—arrived in Cuba. With few slaves and minimal capital but technical expertise and pitiless entrepreneurial drive, these immigrants quickly transformed the countryside around Santiago de Cuba beyond recognition. In 1803, Cuba as a whole had 100,000 coffee trees; in 1807, it had 191 coffee plantations and around 4.3 million coffee trees, many of them located around Santiago. This influx of people and the culture clash it produced were the origins of the nineteenth-century takeoff of the island’s sugar economy.7 The bitterness of Corbier’s letters during this period testifies to his inability to replicate the successes of Saint-Domingue in his place of exile. He purchased “a little establishment” on credit from a departing Frenchman; there he tried his hand at tobacco, a classic pioneer crop for straitened newcomers in the New World. The cash-strapped Corbier may have chosen this crop because coffee trees take between three and five years to reach

6. PJC (SdC) to PJF (London), 30 October 1803, all quotations in this paragraph. 7. For Haitian population figures, with a discussion, Bénot, Démence coloniale, 333n4. On PJC’s fl ight to Cuba, PJC (SdC) to PJF (London), 30 October 1803. For refugee numbers, Debien, “Colons de Saint-Domingue réfugiés à Cuba,” 1953, 590; and Yacou, “Saintiago de Cuba,” 197– 99. On coffee, Yacou, “Saintiago de Cuba,” 204; and Jiminez, “L’Influence de la révolution française . . . Cuba,” 300. On culture clash, Debien, “Colons de Saint-Domingue réfugiés à Cuba,” 1954, 31.

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maturity, whereas tobacco can take as little as three months. Others in his position entered into sharecropping arrangements with better-established locals to overcome their lack of ready funds. But two years into his refuge in Cuba, Corbier was still dissatisfied with his lot, and was far from recouping what were later estimated to be 776,000l.t. in losses suffered by his family in Saint-Domingue. Ferronnays proposed to help him get a land concession from the Cuban government through the intermediary of a mysterious “great lady” from the old times who formed part of his circle of exiles in Germany. It was probably this hope that kept Corbier in Cuba, while other marginal would-be planters moved on to places like Philadelphia to retool themselves as merchants or even artisans. In the meantime, he complained of the laziness and bad faith of Cubans, a lack of protection for French property, and laws “contrary to industry.” He may have meant the right of slaves in the Spanish colonies to bring complaints about their masters’ maltreatment before the law.8 Corbier’s litany of complaints provides a sense of the strain that the sudden influx of French immigrants produced in that “infernal country.” In Santiago, increased population meant a precipitous rise in real estate and food prices, with all the attendant social frictions; as French immigrants fanned out into the countryside to establish new plantations, officials were unable to keep pace with rising levels of crime, and Corbier complained that police reacted only to assaults against Spanish subjects. His wife, Jean-Françoise, stayed in town for her safety, while he slept with a rifle and pistol at his side—grim measures recalling the years of civil war in Saint-Domingue, when Corbier remained in hot spots like Cul de Sac and his wife retreated to calmer areas of the island. Cuban elites hoped that their island would succeed Saint-Domingue as the new center of world sugar production, but feared the bloodshed that could be unleashed by French slaves, driven over the edge by their avid masters and poisoned by revolutionary ideology. As Cuba’s slave imports grew along with its plantation complex, island officials would begin to pay much more attention to rural policing. In the meantime, French immigrants found a slower-paced, more paternalistic, and less acquisitive society than the one they had built in Saint-Domingue; the hostility they encountered in and

8. On farming in Cuba, SMJ, PJC (SdC) to PJF (Arolsen, Westphalia), 5 June 1805; and JFM (New Orleans) to Mme la marquise de la Ferronnays (SMJ), 23 November 1823. For an estimate of the Corbier property, France, Ministère des Finances, État Détaillé Des Liquidations, 1:278. SMJ, PJF (Arolsen) to PJC (SdC), 30 December 1805 (“great lady”); and PJC (SdC) to PJF (Arolsen), 5 June 1805 (“industry”).

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around Santiago de Cuba reflected the violence of their own way of doing business, including the harshness of their plantation slavery. But their grasping behavior succeeded, and came to be symbolized in the sumptuous haciendas that parvenu planters built around the countryside of Santiago de Cuba. These displayed a French art de vivre foreign to the rustic frontier style of eighteenth-century Cuba. Such newfound panache contrasted no less with the shoddy, utilitarian barracks where French planters once camped on their Saint-Dominguan plantations. Contact with Cuban society had changed these planters’ habits and outlook as well.9 Geopolitics and social resentment conspired to bring the émigrés’ Cuban interlude rapidly to a close. When Napoleon invaded Spain and installed his brother Joseph as its king in 1808, the colonists in the New World sided with the deposed king of Spain, Ferdinand IV. Anti-French riots broke out in Cuba, and those French émigrés who had not become naturalized subjects of the Spanish crown were forced to leave in April of 1809. Corbier, despairing of his chances on that island and hoping to sell his parents’ estate for needed cash, had already left for France in 1806. His wife had stayed behind with the few remaining slaves and was forced to evacuate, this time to New Orleans. Having little, she lost little, but most expelled French planters were despoiled of their coffee estates once they left Cuba—a fact which explains this surge of nativist enthusiasm better, perhaps, than Cubans’ love for the ineffectual and reactionary Ferdinand IV of Spain. Jean-Françoise was among the nine thousand French émigrés from Cuba who arrived in New Orleans between May 1809 and January 1810. These were not the fi rst refugees from Saint-Domingue, but their effect was massive compared with previous waves in 1798 and 1803 in that they doubled the population of New Orleans at a stroke. Territorial governor William Claiborne allowed them to enter with their slaves in contravention of the Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves of 1807. The refugees claimed to be simple farmers in search of land, although only five hundred actually were planters, and most settlers became artisans of one sort or another. A tightfisted charity prevailed over the fear of insurrectionary violence: “To have deprived the owners of the present use of their negroes would have been to have thrown them as paupers upon this community.”

9. For the hopes and fears aroused by the Haitian Revolution among Cuban elites, Ferrer and Brasier-d’Iribarne, “Société esclavagiste cubaine”; and Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror, esp. 38– 43. There was more attention paid to protecting French colonists than Corbier believed; see ibid., 236. SMJ, PJC (SdC) to PJF (Arolsen), 5 June 1805 (“infernal”).

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Congress soon followed up by passing legislation legalizing this exception. For her part, Madame Corbier brought in a few of Ferronnays’ slaves, at least two mulatto slaves belonging to her, as well as Marie Claudine (Joqui) and her daughter. The population influx was both more and less disruptive in New Orleans than it had been in Cuba.10 The mix of free whites, free people of color, and enslaved blacks who came to New Orleans was quite familiar in the Caribbean islands, but threatened the quick Americanization that politicians hoped to achieve in Louisiana, acquired by the United States from France only in 1803. For President Thomas Jefferson and others, this meant the eclipse of French as the dominant language in the territory and the development of a simpler, more stable demography characteristic of other slave states in the United States. In these places, it was believed that the virtual absence of intermediary social and racial categories such as free people of color or manumitted blacks, so numerous in Saint-Domingue, reinforced the racial hierarchy necessary for the maintenance of slavery. As the later history of Louisiana would prove, the arrival of Saint-Dominguan free blacks did in fact complicate the straightforward imposition of racist segregation laws. The public rights discourse that ultimately resulted in the Plessy versus Ferguson case of 1896, a challenge to segregation of public transportation, descended directly from free people of color of Haitian origin who had grown accustomed to asserting their civil rights through Old Regime courts.11 The move to Louisiana was perhaps one too many for the majority of the refugees, who arrived from Cuba too fi nancially depleted to fully take part in the sugar boom that had begun there in the 1790s after the decline of Saint-Domingue. Although Madame Corbier had the particular bad luck to be a woman arriving in a new land with thin family connections (one sister, a widow, also found her way to Louisiana from Saint-Domingue), her experience was in some sense typical in that she moved from proprietorship to the trades. By her own account, she was “reduced” to taking up the lowly profession of teaching.12

10. Claiborne’s words reproduced in Perez, “French Refugees to New Orleans in 1809 (with Documents),” 303. Perez is cited by Paul Lachance, whose article is the source for information and references for this paragraph: “1809 Immigration of Saint-Domingue Refugees,” 118 for Claiborne quotation. See also Debien and Le Gardeur, “Colons de Saint-Domingue réfugiés à la Louisiane.” 11. On public rights, Scott, “Atlantic World.” For the prehistory of these rights claims in Saint-Domingue, Rogers, “Les Libres de couleur dans les capitales de Saint-Domingue.” 12. On the sugar boom, Rothman, Slave Country, 75– 80. See also Lachance, “Repercus-

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Their shared business interests in America having shriveled away, the partnership between the Corbier and Ferron de la Ferronnays families that had begun fi fty years earlier in 1759 came essentially to an end. One significant bit of unfi nished business would reconnect them briefly in the 1820s and 1830s, but before turning to this fi nal episode, we will look more closely at the symbiosis between the families through the revolutionary decades in France, Europe, and Saint-Domingue. In this period of revolution and war, French conquests and alliances made in Europe kept the Ferronnayses spread out over the Continent; civil war in Saint-Domingue continually interrupted Corbier’s attempts to reconstitute the Ferronnays fortune; and Napoleon’s overreaching compromised the last—and possibly only—opportunity to reconstruct the Saint-Dominguan sugar industry.

IMPROVISATIONS For both his racism and his lack of tactical foresight, Napoleon Bonaparte has been widely execrated for ordering the reinvasion of Saint-Domingue in 1802. This failed expedition led by his brother-in-law General Leclerc, which cost the lives of 50,000–55,000 of the troops dispatched there and at least 20,000 Saint-Dominguans of African descent, was part of a broader strategy to reassert metropolitan power and to roll back emancipation in the surprisingly few places it had been implemented in the French Empire. For fear of scandalizing planters in the East Indies and turning them against the French Revolution, successive revolutionary governments had never attempted to apply the abolition decree of 1794 on the islands of Réunion and Île-de-France, located in the Indian Ocean. The British invasion and seizure of Martinique that same year rendered abolition moot on that island. Among the French colonies with major slave populations, Saint-Domingue and Guadeloupe were the only places where abolition actually had been implemented. The Senate’s decree of 20 May 1802, which reestablished slavery and the slave trade, only codified the status quo in the French Empire; it did not explicitly call for the reimposition of slavery in those colonies where it had been abolished. Despite the ambiguities surrounding the First Consul’s intentions toward Saint-Domingue and Guadeloupe, he and the reactionary wing of the colonial lobby, many of whom worked in Bonaparte’s colonial administration, were agreed in welcoming the arrival of circumstances favorable to the restoration of the sions of the Haitian Revolution.” Among these immigrants, Lachance found fi fteen women who entered the teaching profession: “Immigration of Saint-Domingue Refugees,” 132.

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Old Regime in the colonies. Governor Antoine Richepance, at the head of 3,600 troops dispatched by Napoleon, started this process of restoration in May 1802 by massacring 10,000 Guadaloupean mulattoes and blacks; the de facto return to slavery on the island was immediately followed by an official decree in September, although full implementation had to wait several months. Justly fearing a similar chain of events, the blacks of Saint-Domingue once again rose in revolt against French forces, starting in October of 1802: this was the start of the war of Haitian independence.13 The underlying logic of these attempts to reimpose slavery on Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue is encapsulated in the planters’ rallying cry: “No slavery, no colonies.” This itself is a variation on a saying devised a half century earlier by the philosophe Montesquieu to describe the social foundations of France’s political system: “No monarch, no nobility; no nobility, no monarch.” According to Montesquieu, Old Regime monarchies were founded on the unearned privileges of nobles, who sat at the apex of a steep social pyramid; they protected the authority of a monarch who, in turn, reinforced their social power. During the Old Regime, colonial planters entered into a similar symbiosis with the imperial states protecting their enterprises. During the French Revolution, and in particular beginning in the mid-1790s, this partnership took the form of a convergence between the pro-slavery colonial lobby and antirevolutionary monarchism. The Ferron de la Ferronnays clan was a precocious representative of this convergence between noble reaction and pro-slavery interests, as witnessed by the membership of Paul, comte Ferron de la Ferronnays in the Club Massiac, a pro-slavery lobby established in Paris in 1789. ÉtienneLouis was also linked to some publicists for the club. Later, from their places of exile, the Lords of Saint-Domingue, many of them nobles with the Ferron de la Ferronnayses’ profi le, came to the aid of their deposed Bourbon kings. In Saint-Domingue, the futility of reconstituting the prerevolutionary economic system without slaves furnished a perverse sort of justification for Napoleon’s reimposition of the colonial Old Regime.14 As we have seen, at the heart of this failure lay the question of labor.

13. Napoleon’s motivations are highly contested in the literature. For an account that emphasizes his racism and favorability to a restoration of the Old Regime, Bénot, Démence coloniale, esp. pp. 49–54 and chap. 3. For another convincing circumstantial case for Napoleon’s intention to reimpose the Old Regime, Pronier, “Implicite et l’explicite.” For a contrary view, Girard, “Napoléon Bonaparte and the Emancipation Issue.” For Richepance’s massacre, Bénot, Démence coloniale, 69–74; and Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, 411–22. 14. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, bk. 1, chap. 4 (p. 18 in this edition). On the Club Massiac, Debien, Colons de Saint- Domingue et la Révolution, 133 (ELF) and 391 (Paul).

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But studying Pierre-Jacques Corbier’s improvisations in the face of collapse reveals other aspects of the Old Regime plantation complex: the social collaboration it was founded on; the indispensability of military force; and not least the role of the state as guarantor for well-connected planters. In turning to Corbier’s attempts to reconstitute production on the Cul de Sac plain, we also regain sight of the Ferron de la Ferronnays family, whose self-imposed exile from the new regime in France heightened the importance of their colonial possessions. If they could not have a restoration in France, they desperately needed one in Saint-Domingue to recoup their fortunes. As it was, the family had to wait until 1814 for the fi rst Bourbon Restoration of Louis XVIII, but the delay was not for lack of effort. Of the six Ferronnays males to emigrate—the brothers Étienne-Louis, Paul, Emmanuel Henri-Eugène, and Jules Bazile (bishop of Saint-Brieuc); Pierre-LouisAuguste (nephew of Étienne-Louis and future Minister of Foreign Affairs); and fi nally, Pierre-Jacques François Joseph Auguste (nephew of ÉtienneLouis and inheritor of the Cul de Sac plantation)—all but the cleric Jules Bazile had fought in the Army of the Prince of Condé against the French Revolution. As French military forces pushed into Europe over the revolutionary decades, making enemies, neutrals, and allies of the states where the Ferronnays clan sought refuge, the brothers circulated between Germanic lands. Business and antirevolutionary politics also had them shuttling back and forth to London.15 During these peregrinations, the sequestration of their estates in France cut the émigrés off from most of their wealth. The derisory pay to which high-ranking noble officers in the Army of Condé were entitled during times of mobilization did little to offset these losses. Émigrés retrenched their expenses radically, lived off the generosity of their sometimes put-upon hosts, and—inevitably—began to accumulate debts as a period of emigration initially projected to last weeks or months stretched into years and, for the hard core of legitimists such as the Ferron de la Ferronnayses, decades. Étienne-Louis received 31,500l.t. from Simond Hankey & Co. of London before his death in 1798 in order to meet his living expenses in exile, while the Prince of Waldek gave Étienne-Louis’ nephew Pierre-Jacques François Joseph Auguste 56,500l.t. between 1795 and 1812. Between prerevolutionary debts and those he contracted during his exile, he owed at least 328,000l.t., and probably much more. To fill this fi nancial 15. For the family relationships, Révérend and Tulard, Titres, anoblissements et pairies, 51.

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void, women in noble émigré circles engaged in lacework, putting their sole marketable skill to use. Pierre-Jacques François Joseph Auguste Ferronnays attributed the slack demand for his wife and daughter’s handiwork to a jittery war economy in Germany, but the “market” for these goods probably amounted to no more than isolated acts of charity. The marquis doubtless exaggerated when he wrote that he often feared starvation, but the family unquestionably struggled fi nancially over these decades, worrying about trivial domestic expenses like laundry and postage.16 Beyond these arguably self-imposed debts and hardships, the owner of the Cul de Sac plantation was the victim of inherited privilege. In 1783, Étienne-Louis had sold the plantation to his elder brother Pierre-Jacques François Louis Auguste, but the terms of this act stipulated that the marquis would retain usufruct of Cul de Sac until his death; at this point, full possession would revert to the brother or his legatee. In buying the plantation from his younger brother in 1783, Pierre-Jacques François Louis Auguste was himself abiding by the customary obligations toward younger siblings under the Breton custom of préciput. Although this custom allowed the eldest son to inherit two-thirds of the estate, the beneficiary was expected to stand good for siblings’ debts and help them make investments from time to time. Eldest sons under préciput were not allowed to cut off younger siblings in the style of English primogeniture, a practice whose consequences fi ll the pages of so many nineteenth-century English novels. In any event, this act of brotherly love must have been considered a shrewd business maneuver, because the elder brother was willing to liquidate two substantial seigneuries in Brittany to pay the agreed price of 500,000. The marquis’ elder brother died in 1786, leaving his son PierreJacques François Joseph Auguste the bulk of his property, including the Saint-Mars la Jaille estate, two large seigneuries in Anjou, and the Cul de Sac plantation. When Pierre-Jacques-François-Joseph-Auguste inherited his father’s estate in 1786, the habitation at Croix des Bouquets was the jewel in the family crown, and sibling solidarity under préciput obliged him in turn to endow annuities to his sister and his uncles totaling 270,000l.t. once it fi nally passed to him. This sum was probably precisely

16. For army pay, SMJ, “Tarif des Appointments de l’Armée . . . de Condé, 1795, No. 2.” Marshalls of different ranks were allocated 55 kreuzers and 1 florin, 54 kreuzers—about 2.5 and 5 livres per day, respectively. For loans, SMJ, Simon Hankey (London) to PJF (London), 4 October 1804. PJF comments that “only death put an end to the Prince of Waldek’s generosity.” Perhaps the prince bled to death? The reported sum of 328,581l.t included 268,434 that the couple spent out of his wife’s dowry. SMJ, PJF (London) to PJC, 8 November 1799 and 7 March 1800 (economies).

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one-third of the property’s value in 1786, when his father died and these arrangements were made. By these transactions, the Cul de Sac property was placed at the center of the Ferron de la Ferronnays patrimony. Of inheritance practices similar to the Ferronnayses’, which place so many constraints on their beneficiaries to keep the family patrimony intact and profitable for succeeding generations, Marx wrote, “The beneficiary of the entail, the eldest son, belongs to the land. The land inherits him.” In 1798, when his uncle Étienne-Louis died in Emmerich, Prussia, and the plantation passed to his nephew, the situation had changed considerably: penniless and in exile, Pierre-Jacques François Joseph Auguste Ferron de la Ferronnays also belonged to the family property and was inherited by it; but it consisted by then only of a mass of colonial debts, burned-out buildings, and two hundred runaway slaves.17 Penury, ignorance of business affairs, and balky mails reduced PierreJacques François Joseph Auguste’s ability to recoup this situation from afar. He counted himself lucky to be placing the revival of his fortunes into the hands of a second-generation family servant, Pierre-Jacques Corbier, rather than a mercenary near stranger. Whether by conscious design or innate conservatism, his uncle Étienne-Louis’ decision in 1774 to call to Saint-Domingue Corbier’s father, Jean-Baptiste—who had already worked for the family in France for twenty-five years—mitigated the problem of trust inherent in absentee planter-manager relations. The flock of opportunists that descended on Saint-Domingue to feed on the chaos and a succession of regime changes probably made the managers who operated in the get-rich-quick atmosphere of the 1770s and 1780s seem like models of probity by comparison. Pierre-Jacques François Joseph Auguste repeatedly plucked the chord of family solidarity in his letters to Corbier fi ls, recalling times that both men, as children, played side by side at his mother’s feet in Saint-Mars la Jaille and offering details of his own marriage, such as his wife’s miscarriage: “If you trust me enough to speak to me of what concerns you and your family personally, I will always take the liveliest interest in everything that touches you.” Amid these epistolary conventions and encouragements to intimacy, the marquis never failed to drive his point home: “I could not be wrong in judging, from what I have seen, 17. Corbier’s dispatches to the family were treated as open letters that were read by his aunt in London before being sent along to Germany, because “the whole family rightly regards it as their property.” SMJ, PJF (Arolsen) to PJC (SdC), 30 December 1805. On inheritance, Marx, Critique of Political Economy. Cited in Bourdieu, “Stratégies matrimoniales”; emphasis added. For this reference and other reflections on colonial investments and family strategy, Force, “Stratégies matrimoniales,” 83.

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that your heart is the most honest and the most given to rendering service.” Noble absentees counted on their managers, in these exceptional circumstances paying them in sentimental outpourings and the promise of future profits rather than the usual 10 percent plus expenses.18 This quasi-familial partnership helped Ferronnays and Corbier to exploit, and in some cases defend themselves against, other collaborators in the Old Regime plantation complex. This was particularly the case with the formidable alliance between London merchants and the British imperial state, which sought to lay hands on the riches of the Cul de Sac plain through military invasion and planter indebtedness. Already before the nephew inherited the Cul de Sac property, the uncle was drawing a pension from Simond, Hankey & Co., a considerable merchant house that had spread its largesse to other noble émigrés, as well as influential émigré politicians like Victor Malouet, apologist for slavery, friend of the Ferronnays family, and author of the 1793 capitulation inviting the British to occupy Saint-Domingue. Firms like Simond, Hankey & Co. and Turnbull, Forbes & Co. successfully used these payments to nobles as arguments for a British invasion of Saint-Domingue in 1794. These “losses” had to be recovered by opening up access to investments in that colony. The rather ill-advised and tenuous British occupation was maintained, over the course of four years and at a total estimated cost of £4 million (about 92 million l.t.), thanks to merchants’ pressure. The costs of invasion and such limited security as was assured by British forces enabled investments in the Western and Southern Provinces of Saint-Domingue. Turnbull, Forbes & Co. reported over £100,000, while other houses such as Leriche, Baumann & Co. and Thellusson Brothers & Co. were committing similarly massive sums, buying up plantation leases, purchasing urban properties, and—significantly—making loans to cash-strapped planters. Étienne-Louis tried to take what he could from these merchants without getting burned. In addition to his pension from Simond & Hankey, another important London merchant, George Thellusson, stood as the counterparty in a simulated sale of the Ferronnays plantation in 1796, and advanced its real owner around 10,000l.t. The goal of this somewhat obscure transaction was to prevent the Ferronnays property from falling under the British administra-

18. On prerevolutionary absenteeism, Chevalier et al., “Recherches collectives,” vol. 6, issue 4, pp. 100–103. On absenteeism in the revolutionary context, Geggus, Slavery, War and Revolution, 334–35. SMJ, PJF (London) to PJC (PaP), 3 December 1800 (“trust”); and 3 March 1800 (“service”).

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tion of absentee and émigré estates. Richard Dalton, who had been making loans to Étienne-Louis’ brother Paul, the owner through marriage of properties in the Northern Province, attempted to seduce Corbier with offers of credit. Bankers’ magnanimity disguised onerous terms designed to bilk indebted planters out of their properties; Corbier counseled his employer to turn Dalton down, advice he seems to have followed. Exchanging Nantes or Bordeaux for London did not seem to have altered relations between merchants and planters greatly, although the prospect that SaintDomingue would return again to French hands only sharpened the imperative for quick returns on investment.19 When production failed utterly to revive on the Cul de Sac plain, planters—principled enemies of metropolitan taxation and ministerial despotism in all its forms—turned to the state. First they sought military contracts. So as to minimize stress to planters caused by the outright requisition of services during their occupation, the British government organized a concession for hauling military supplies. Fifty shares were to be sold to planters for 6,000l.c. each for a total of 300,000l.c. in capital; in reality these shares were nothing more than a loan to planters, secured against future profits. The piece rate on the hauling itself was not enormous, but it would bring in some money; valuable mules—worth 750l.c. apiece—purchased for this scheme were to remain the property of shareholders, and could be used for plantation work after the conflict settled down. Corbier tried to purchase a share on his employer’s behalf, but was excluded in favor of necessitous planters in situ. After the evacuation of British forces in 1798, planters sought indemnification for losses they suffered as a result of an occupation undertaken at their invitation. After a regiment of 180 men billeted on his property infl icted heavy damages, Pierre-Jacques François Joseph Auguste Ferron de la Ferronnays lodged claims for £12,000, the equivalent of two years’ revenue (i.e., 138,000l.t. per year). Although he could name several fellow émigré planters who succeeded in their entreaties to the British St. Domingo

19. Lokke, “London Merchant Interest in the St. Domingue Plantations.” On costs, Lokke, “New Light on London Merchant Investments,” 671. Geggus puts these costs to the Crown even higher, at perhaps even four times Lokke’s estimate. See “Cost of Pitt’s Caribbean Campaigns, 1793–1798,” 705. On Dalton and the pattern of these investments in general, Geggus, Slavery, War and Revolution, 255–56. For the false sale, SMJ, PJC (PaP) to ELF (London), 15 January 1796, 5 May 1796, 10 June 1796; PJC (Grands Bois) to ELF (London), 4 October 1796; and PJC (Angers) to PJF (Arolsen), 6 February 1807. For Thellusson’s advances, PJF (London) to PJC, 3 December 1800. For PJC’s advice, PJC (PaP) to ELF (London), 16 August 1794 and 15 December 1794.

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office, his own suit repeatedly failed on technical grounds. Eventually, he received a pension of only £4 per month, which he collected until 1805, but two decades later he was still petitioning the English government for full reimbursement. If nothing else, this episode provided a good lesson for émigré nobles, when it came to the 1825 indemnity accorded by the French government to planters in compensation for “confiscated” estates in SaintDomingue, in the indispensability of adequate documentation and a galloping sense of entitlement.20 Amid chronic labor shortages, market interruptions, and the destruction of infrastructure, Corbier constantly thought he glimpsed a return to steady production around the next turn of events. But even if the barriers to producing sugar on the Cul de Sac plain could be overcome, bringing the produce to market, selling it profitably, and then legally transmitting the proceeds to Ferronnays were entirely separate questions. A return to legality would have to wait until a resolution of the political situation in Saint-Domingue and, ultimately, for Ferronnays to regularize his situation with the French Republic. Fraudulent measures that Étienne-Louis took to square himself with one regime compromised him with its successor. Once Toussaint Louverture signed his accord with the British for the evacuation of the Western Province in 1798, for example, the false sale to Englishman George Thellusson meant that the Ferronnays plantation once again fell under sequestration by the French Republic. The situation was ironic because, in his need for the capital and expertise required to reestablish the Saint-Dominguan sugar economy, Louverture generally ignored the French Republic’s anti-émigré statutes. Louverture’s Constitution of 1801, which maintained the fiction that Saint-Domingue remained part of the French Empire despite providing for a wholly autonomous government, contained several provisions that protected the property of absentee and émigré planters. Ferronnays might well have been in the clear.21 Corbier overcame the legal hurdle of sequestration by becoming Ferronnays’ straw man and assuming a state-administered lease on the latter’s absentee property in 1799. An unnamed coinvestor injected 30,000l.c.

20. SMJ, PJC (PaP) to ELF (London), 20 November 1795 (mules). See also Geggus, Slavery, War and Revolution, 248–49. PJF (London) to PJC, 3 December 1800 (share purchase). For the basis of ELF’s indemnity claims, SMJ, “Note et mémoire pour le gouvernement Anglois, juin 1825.” For the rejection, SMJ, letter of M Marten, Secretary of St. Domingo Office (London), to PJF (London), 6 November 1800. 21. Saint-Domingue, Constitution of 1801, arts. 59, 60, and 74. Reprinted in Janvier, Constitutions d’Haïti, 7–21. On Louverture and émigrés, Maginer, “Régime de Toussaint Louverture,” 115.

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of needed capital for the reconstruction of sugar operations. By that point, rebels had burned down all the living quarters and the warehouse; the refi ning cauldrons, sold for ready money in 1797, had to be replaced. To Ferronnays’ land and his partner’s capital, Corbier added extensive local connections and labor, proposing to bring sixty or seventy cultivators from his burned-out, idle coffee plantation nearby to work on the Cul de Sac plain. He was able to rehabilitate this stitched-up enterprise to nine maturing cane fields by December 1802, up from a low point in 1798 of four intact cane fields. In prerevolutionary years, Corbier had maintained twenty. This limping progress back to normality on the Cul de Sac plain mirrored wider developments in the Saint-Dominguan economy. In 1794, combined sugar and coffee production in Saint-Domingue stood at a mere one twenty-fourth of 1789 levels; by 1800–1801, it had climbed to one-third of prerevolutionary peaks. An improved security situation after the end of Louverture’s war with André Rigaud in June of 1800 and the implementation of the militarized agriculture discussed previously both had their effects. Sometimes the revolutionary state made loans to planters, in cash or in kind, to repair ruined infrastructure. Nevertheless, formidable obstacles to profitability remained, particularly in the sugar industry. Louverture’s “Regulations on Agriculture” of 1800 were meant to respond to the shortage—and insolence—of plantation labor, unquestionably the principal reason for lagging productivity. But the distribution of revenues between the state, cultivators, managers, and owners weighed heavily on profits as well; the difficulties posed by the new order of things give a sense of the artificiality of the Old Regime system, which produced so much profit for planters and merchants in the first place. Leases on émigré and absentee property stipulated that half the proceeds go to the government. In paying his stategranted lease on the Ferronnays plantation, Corbier owed the government 13,000 pounds of sugar per year, but between 1799 and 1801, he managed to produce only 12,000 pounds, about 3,000l.t. worth.22 Louverture’s Rural Code also continued the practice, adopted by French Civil Commissioners Léger Félicité Sonthonax and Étienne Polverel, of granting one-quarter of a plantation’s revenue to citizen cultivators, although items of upkeep such as food, clothing, housing, and medicine 22. On production, Bénot, Démence coloniale, 29, citing contemporary figures. On the system of leases, Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, 2:410. The price of some leases was determined in advance through auction. The Ferronnays lease, signed on 16 December 1800, valued the property at twice the average (7,663l.c.) among sugar plantations in Croix des Bouquets, in the top 12th percentile. Source: calculation on AN, CAOM, 5 SUPSDOM 3, Ouest état général, fol. 4; and for PJC production figures, SMJ, PJC to PJF (London), 18 February 1801.

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could be deducted from the total. (In present-day developed economies, wage costs generally account for around two-thirds of gross product.) Slaveholders of course also had labor costs, including the purchase of slaves to cover a net mortality of 7 percent. Extrapolating from this average, maintaining the Ferronnays plantation at strength, 242 slaves in 1789, would have cost 42,000l.c. a year at going prices, although in 1788, the last year for which we have figures, only half that amount, 21,000l.c., went to slave purchases. Had one-fourth of the gross revenue for 1788 been paid to cultivators as wages, it would have cost Ferronnays 57,000l.c., minus perhaps a few thousand for upkeep—a difference in profits of well over 30,000l.c. in any event. The 632,000 pounds of sugar produced that year could only be fantasized about in 1801; greatly diminished output nonetheless had to cover an expensive set of relatively fi xed costs, notably rolling and refi ning infrastructure. Louverture’s militarized agriculture notwithstanding, without the size and discipline of the Old Regime workforce, the postabolition plantation was crushed under the weight of its own capital.23 After 1793, the curse of taxation descended upon a hitherto blessed planter class. On the whole, the plantations of Saint-Domingue appear to have paid only about 3 percent ad valorem on the export of their goods. Since a royal edict of 1727, raw sugar such as Ferronnays produced paid 2 livres 10 sols (2.5 livres) per hundredweight in export tax, two-thirds of which was paid by planters. In 1788, Corbier recorded 7,250l.t. in taxes paid, including municipal taxes and special levies for road building, or 2.7 percent of 262,000l.t. in gross revenue. If payments made to the irrigation syndicate on the Cul de Sac plain are included—really an item of capital expenditure—the sum rises to 14,540l.t., or 5.5 percent of gross revenue. Beginning with Sonthonax, and continuing all the way into the early years of Haitian national independence, successive regimes on the island sought to levy a 25 percent tax on agricultural produce. Although the militarization of Saint-Dominguan society was at a pitch—a budget of 1800 shows 84 percent of state expenses consecrated to military and policing—the French Antilles had always required a great deal of internal policing to keep slave populations in check and to defend against imperial predation. What is exceptional about this period is that France had largely ceased its subsidies, particularly after 1798, when the colony enjoyed de facto independence from the metropole; now planters were being asked to pay their own freight. Writing in 1802, Corbier easily conceded that production required military protection in the face of endemic threats, but 23. Net mortality average in 1787/88 from Tarrade, Commerce colonial, 2:53.

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lamented the costs: “I hope that order will be established for a long time in this unfortunate country, and that we can keep what we make. Our efforts produce so little profit because enormous taxes must be levied to maintain an army. . . . But at least we will be certain to have something.”24 Events proved Corbier’s optimism to be entirely misplaced, of course: by 1803, all realistic possibility of direct surpluses from Saint-Domingue had disappeared. The absurdity of maintaining a slave society by counting on the cooperation of ex-slaves had become quite evident, all of which reaffirmed colonists’ commitment to a return to the prerevolutionary status quo. Slavery was the principal but not the only element of this regime that evoked nostalgia. Under the Old Regime, planters often felt exploited by merchants and put upon by a state that enforced an asymmetrical trading regime. But taken as a whole, the state sought to protect both merchants and planters from risks and to absorb many costs—from protection to public infrastructure and administration—that cut into profits. This symbiosis generated tax receipts in the metropole and investment opportunities for governing elites on both sides of the Atlantic. Once a cash-strapped French state distracted by endless continental warfare ceased to perform these central functions over the course of the revolutionary decade, conditions for profitability rapidly degraded. Returning the plantation complex to full health would have meant mending the French Empire. As imperfectly as it had functioned during the Old Regime, the empire maintained essential conduits for commodities, capital, and information that linked colonies to the world beyond; internally, it provided military, juridical, and administrative structures to protect planters’ authority and property. Planters like Pierre-Jacques Corbier or Ferronnays’ tenant Julien Claude Valdec, who had originally leased land from his uncle Étienne-Louis, were being neither particularly excitable nor prescient when they described Saint-Domingue during the American War of Independence as a colony on

24. On the “quart de subvention,” see Blancpain, Étienne de Polverel, 113–15; Stein, Léger Félicité Sonthonax, 149; and Trouillot, Haiti, State against Nation, 59. Attempts during the British occupation to recoup protection costs by taxing functioning plantations also compromised profitability. See Geggus, “Cost of Pitt’s Caribbean Campaigns, 1793–1798.” Military expenditures were 29.5 out of 35 million francs. Source: calculations on Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture, 280, from Ordonnateur Général Vollée. Leases drawn up for plantations on the Cul de Sac plain in 1796 and 1797, under the British occupation, did not fail to list the heavy taxes and labor contributions that lessors would be expected to pay. See CAOM, 4 SUPSDOM, Domaines: Administration anglaise. These figures improved later in the century, but Haiti remained a heavily militarized society, allocating around 50 percent of public expenditures to the military up to 1860 and 25 percent thereafter. Bulmer-Thomas, Economic History of the Caribbean, 169. SMJ, PJC (PaP) to PJF (London), 9 April 1802 (“order”).

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the edge of an abyss: they merely showed their appreciation for a system whose profitability hinged, in the best of times, on the convergence of several powerful but easily derailed forces. “No slavery, no colonies” accurately described the underlying logic of the plantation system, but it was not the fi nal word for planters themselves. From the fi rst defeat of Napoleon in 1814 and the Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in the person of Louis XVIII, it was Montesquieu’s dictum “no monarch, no nobility; no nobility, no monarch” that set the stage for the fi nal act of the Old Regime in Saint-Domingue. Charles X, who acceded to the throne after the death of Louis XVIII in 1824, proved even more backward-looking than his predecessor, and sought to rehabilitate the fortunes of his nobility in order to solidify the social basis of his reign; this effort included the massive indemnity decreed for former plantation owners in Saint-Domingue. The Ferron de la Ferronnays family received their share of the indemnity, a sum that facilitated their restoration to a circumscribed and economically unambitious local power that paled next to the family’s eighteenth-century éclat. But the Ferronnayses’ return to provincial hebetude was costly for others, and accompanied by hidden acts of violence that evince the meaning of the Bourbon Restoration.

INDEMNITIES In 1825, Haiti gained recognition of its independence from France by agreeing to pay an indemnity of 150 million francs (equivalent to roughly the same amount in l.t.). The indemnity was then to be distributed to the colonists of Saint-Domingue who had been “despoiled” of their property, fi rst by the abolition decrees of 1793 and 1794, and then by the eviction of all whites from the island as decreed by the Haitian Constitution of 1805. Some “honorary blacks”—whites who had aided the cause of abolition and independence—were allowed to remain in Haiti, but these were certainly not the former plantation owners who had now become wards of the French state. The French negotiating position was strengthened by Haiti’s desperate need to secure a place among the community of nations (the United States did not recognize Haiti until 1862, half a century before the US Marines invaded it in 1915) and the presence of a battleship in the harbor outside Port-au-Prince, which underlined the ongoing threat of a French reinvasion. The Haitian government made the fi rst payment of 30 million francs immediately, with the help of a massive loan raised by Paris banking houses. In 1838, however, unable to pay the second of five projected installments, it renegotiated the amount owed to 60 mil-

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lion francs—still a staggering sum for a nation whose average annual state revenue between 1818 and 1824 was 2.5 million francs. The diplomatic and military blackmail accompanying this agreement, along with the debilitating effects of a debt that weighed on the Haitian economy late into the nineteenth century, lend the indemnity the odor of a great historical crime. But if this crime infl icted lasting harm upon the Haitian people, it was committed with the cooperation of the Haitian elite.25 The indemnity Haiti paid to the former plantation owners of SaintDomingue can be seen, from a certain perspective, as a gentlemen’s agreement between successive landholding elites. The president of the Haitian Republic, Alexandre Pétion, initially approached the French in 1814 about the possibility of paying an indemnity in exchange for diplomatic recognition and resumption of favorable trade relations with France. Although he emphatically believed that his countrymen had justly reclaimed their own freedom, Pétion was willing to negotiate with his erstwhile imperial masters to “sell us Saint-Domingue, as they sold Louisiana to the United States.” His successor, Jean-Pierre Boyer, was not thrilled about the ultimate outcome, but in 1821 he reinitiated the discussions with the French that led to the fi nal deal of 1825.26 Throughout Haiti’s war of independence and well beyond, the country’s leaders solidified their power by granting control or outright ownership of abandoned or seized sugar plantations to the generals charged with prosecuting the war effort. Former slaves were allowed to occupy coffee plantations in the mountains or marginal land on the large sugar plains, but the new oligarchy had every incentive to impose a post-independence land settlement that kept large tracts of land and their accompanying infrastructure intact. Punitive rural codes promulgated by Toussaint Louverture in 1800 and President Boyer in 1826 were designed to balance the other side of the equation, labor. The Ferron de la Ferronnays plantation figured into the interests of the Haitian elite at the highest levels. Upon the general division of the Cul de Sac plain in 1812, the plantation was granted to none other than president Alexandre Pétion himself; after his death in 1818, the property passed to President Boyer. Pierre-Jacques François Joseph Auguste

25. For statistics, calculations on tableau 1, Beauvois, “L’indemnité de Saint-Domingue,” 117. In reality, Haiti owed much more because of interest on a loan taken out for the fi rst payment. 26. On negotiations, Joachim, “Indemnité coloniale de Saint-Domingue,” 363; and Beauvois, “L’indemnité de Saint-Domingue,” 112–14. For Pétion’s words, “Extrait du journal de Dauxion,” in Mission Dauxion-Lavaysse (1814–15), AN, COL Correspondance Coloniale, CC9 A 48, 216. Cited in Beauvois, “L’indemnité de Saint-Domingue,” 112.

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Ferron de la Ferronnays even seriously proposed to President Boyer that the latter legitimize his enjoyment of the Cul de Sac property by purchasing it directly from him; Boyer did not dignify Ferronnays’ letter with a response. The importance of properties like these to the new Haitian elite was analogous to the heavy representation, among the indemnified former planters, of what were collectively known as the “Marquis” of the Cul de Sac plain: Fleuriau, Ferron de la Ferronnays, Vaudreuil, Rocheblanche, and Caradeux. These and similarly well-placed noble families came to serve in the Chamber of Deputies, the Chamber of Peers, and exalted diplomatic and administrative posts under the Restoration. Pierre-Louis Auguste Ferronnays, son of Emmanuel Henri-Eugène, was one such figure, serving as ambassador to Saint Petersburg and Denmark, and fi nally as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1828 to 1829.27 The manner in which Haiti paid for the 1825 indemnity reinforces the impression that its leaders sought a postrevolutionary settlement of land, labor, and an international exchange system that privileged the production and export of sugar. This tendency ran completely against the expressed preferences of a new peasantry that had rejected en masse the grueling regime of the sugar plantation in favor of subsistence agriculture; when they did turn to export commodity production, former slaves preferred the coffee bush and the dyewood tree of the mountains to the sugarcane of the plains. Labor on the coffee plantations was both less rigorous and more independent of the control of the new, largely light-skinned, planter class of Haiti. As under the Old Regime, sugar export taxes remained low, and eventually the 25 percent government tax on production was lifted; by contrast, coffee producers were crucified by heavy export duties—generally about twice the rate of sugar exports—extracted to pay for the indemnity. This differential treatment had the explicit goal of favoring the industrial agriculture of the sugar plantation over small-scale coffee and subsistence agriculture. Such subsistence and capital goods as Haitians could not produce for themselves were subjected to heavy import duties, while luxury imports consumed by rich merchants and state officials went largely untaxed. In 1842, customs duties made up 98.2 percent of state rev-

27. On land settlement, Aubin, En Haïti, 26; and Gonzalez, “Fruits of Destruction,” 119–32. Undated letter (certainly 1825), PJF (SMJ) to President Boyer of Haiti (PaP): “Quelques nouvelles qui me sont parvenues jusque dans la retraite ou la perte de tout mon bien en France et a Saint-Dominugue . . . qu’elle a roulé pour le général Pettion comme elle continue à rouler pour l’avantage de V[otre] Ex[cellence].” See also PJF (SMJ) to JFM (New Orleans), 16 December 1827. On the social profi le of the indemnified, Joachim, Décolonisation ou néocolonialisme?, 243.

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enues; surplus that was no longer being captured directly on the plantation was taken by state officials at the customs house. Haitians would naturally have preferred not to split these proceeds with the French, but this was not the state of play in the immediate post-independence world. Pétion and Boyer concluded agreements convenient not for the needs of a republic of peasant small-holders but for the aspirations of a militarized planter aristocracy (and the merchant class that served them) seeking to reproduce the social conditions of the Old Regime without slavery. The indemnity paid by the peasantry of Haiti was designed to serve the politics of restoration on both sides of the Atlantic.28 Pierre-Jacques François Joseph Auguste Ferron de la Ferronnays was the archetype of the kind of noble whose fortune Charles X hoped to resuscitate with the Saint-Domingue indemnity. In 1825, Ferronnays was living with his family in the stables of their Saint Mars la Jaille estate; the chateau had been burned down during the French Revolution, and he had been forced to repurchase the stables upon his return since they had been sold as national properties (biens nationaux). His share in the Saint-Domingue indemnity was 151,040 francs, one-tenth the assessed value of the Cul de Sac plantation, and equivalent to one very generously estimated year’s revenue. This allocation placed the Ferronnayses in the top 1 percent of indemnity recipients. The family was also the beneficiary of the “émigré’s billion,” a law passed in the same year that compensated émigrés for the confiscation and sale of biens nationaux. Compensation was assessed and paid on the basis of France’s eighty-six departments, the revolutionary territorial division that superseded Old Regime généralités. In the Department of the Côtes du Nord, the Ferronnays family was granted an indemnity of 61,173 francs, or 1.7 times the average indemnity paid in that department; in the Department of Maine et Loire, they received 201,406 francs, or 3.2  times the average allocation. In the Loire Atlantique, the Ferronnayses saw at least 348,079 francs of property sold, although in this case we do not know the indemnity they received. Bourgeois neighbors residing on the Île de Gloriette in Nantes, the former site of the family’s

28. Trouillot, Haiti, State against Nation, chaps. 1 and 2, pp. 60– 61 for figures. “The fi rst Haitian leaders, regardless of color and origin, fundamentally agreed on two principles, even though they fought about almost everything else. First, slavery as an institution was to be forever abolished from Haiti and from anywhere else the Haitian state could reach. None of Haiti’s fi rst statesmen wavered on the issue after 1802. Second, all agreed on the need to maintain large-scale export- oriented plantations and a labor system that would produce results similar to those of the slave regime.” Ibid., 48–49. For further discussion, Cheney, “Haiti’s Commercial Relations.”

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eighteenth-century pied-à-terre and a node of overseas mercantile wealth, had made a feast of properties seized from the Ferronnayses by the revolutionary government. The bourgeoisie benefited, overwhelmingly, from the massive redistribution of property that took place during the revolution; from his much-diminished estate in Saint-Mars la Jaille, Étienne-Louis’ nephew complained bitterly of feeling hemmed in by the upstart bourgeois who occupied former family lands. Whatever his social sympathies, the Prefect of the Department of the Côtes du Nord was aware of these realities, and citing Ferron de la Ferronnays’ “lack of industrial property,” accorded Pierre-Jacques François Joseph Auguste the entire indemnity to which he was entitled. The indemnities of 1825 were designed to fi nance a massive operation of noble land repurchase, and largely succeeded; in the former provinces of Brittany and Anjou, the nobility accounted for between one-third and one-half of the most heavily taxed citizens in 1840.29 But the business of reconstitution was hardly straightforward. Writing to the duc de Lévis, a substantial Saint-Dominguan property owner and himself a member of the government commission charged with setting the amount of the indemnity, Ferronnays complained that debts left by his father and the reconstruction of the chateau would eat up his indemnity: Without the mischances of the revolution I would have had 256,000 in income [rente], 220,000 from Saint-Domingue and 36,000 from France. Here I have been forced to take out a loan . . . but I have few regrets, I have learned only too well during all the years of my immigration to put up with privations, but my wife and child suffer from them.30

More than his selfless fortitude, what stands out in this passage is Ferronnays’ understanding of property. The term rente is most easily under29. On the politics of the indemnity, Joachim, “Indemnité coloniale de Saint-Domingue”; Gain, Restauration et les biens des émigrés, pt. 3, pp. 5– 6 and 418. Ferronnays’ position is established by a comparison of the rates of indemnity paid to the inheritors of the Cul de Sac plantation (found in SMJ, Camaret [Paris] to comtesse de Gosset [SMJ], 10 June 1845) with the figures cited in Beauvois, “Monnayer l’incalculable?,” 633. For domestic indemnities, ADML, 1 Q 2214; and Cotes du Nord, Liquidation de l’indemnité accordée par la loi du 27 Avril 1825 61 173, Registre 38, no. 221. ADLA, Q 432: État des biens vendus par l’administration centrale du département de la Loire Inférieure, confisqué par l’émigration de Pierre-Jacques François Joseph Aususte Ferron Ferronnais, an IV– an XII. Documentation on the indemnity paid to the Ferronnays family in Loire Atlantique is lacking. Not discussed here are properties around Paris. See ADSM, 1 Q 779– 80 and ADY, 4 Q 109. For averages, Gain, Restauration et les biens des émigrés, pt. 3, pp. 183 and 202. For 1840s taxation, Tudesq, “Élargissement de la noblesse en France,” 126. 30. SMJ, PJF (SMJ) to duc de Lévis (Paris), 14 March 1826.

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stood in relation to the term rentier: a person who lives off the interest on safe capital assets (usually state bonds) and not from risky fi nancial or industrial investments, let alone entrepreneurial activity. Because of the steadiness of returns on agricultural property, and because—to get around usury restrictions—bonds in Old Regime France were fictionally attributed to a piece of real property, usually land, whose returns were said to be the source of the interest, common parlance tended to conflate returns to landownership, or any low but predictably yielding asset, into the term rente. In using this term to describe potential profits from the Cul de Sac property, Ferronnays involuntary testifies to how little he had learned in the previous twenty-eight years about France’s colonial empire and the role his uncle’s plantation—a risky industrial enterprise par excellence— played in it. The nephew’s astonishing naiveté, a condition probably deepened by decades in which he begged and borrowed money but never meaningfully invested in or managed productive resources, probably explains why Ferronnays never sought to back out of his obligations as inheritor of the family estate under préciput, the inheritance regime for nobles in Brittany under the Old Regime. Much in contrast to his uncle, the nephew considered the plantation a part of his patrimony; the political, environmental, and social risks that governed profitability there did not enter into his thinking, and so he did not differentiate it from any of his other landed assets. The Ferronnays family emerged from the French Revolution with a more thoroughly rentier outlook than it had during the autumn of the Old Regime. This mentality, as much as the legal constraints of préciput, created a perverse situation in which the nephew disposed of patrimony, but without the underlying property. This was merely one in a series of reversals that characterized the period of the French Restoration. The Ferronnays family relied on the Restoration monarchy, with which it was so closely associated, to recoup its patrimony. But the Bourbon regime did not give nobles land: the sale of noble and church properties during the revolution was, politically speaking, irreversible. Instead, it arranged indemnity payments involving bank loans, bonds, and cash settlements funded by French and Haitian taxpayers. Rehabilitating a nobility based on traditional, landed wealth depended on the operation of international fi nance capital at its highest levels. Although nobles were delighted to receive easily negotiable state bonds as their due, the complete fi nancialization of their claims formalized the rentier’s remoteness from real economic activity. As symbolically fitting as this inversion was for people like Étienne-Louis’ nephew, it had real consequences as well, since receiving liquid assets left

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indemnified planters exposed to a spate of lawsuits by their prerevolutionary creditors. The settlement of the indemnity of 1825 revived the question of the legitimacy of certain forms of prerevolutionary property, and in so doing reignited an old economic struggle between planters and merchants. Under the Old Regime, planters were protected from the seizure of their property by a law designed to preserve the integrity of the productive unit; only sugar and slaves could be seized, and these with great difficulty, by metropolitan merchants seeking to recoup their debts. Now that the plantations of Saint-Domingue were reduced to purely fi nancial assets, planters like Ferronnays were no longer protected, and their creditors came rushing in to make good on old debts. Most planters carried debts well in excess of the 10 percent of the capital value of their plantations paid in the 1825 indemnity; recognizing prerevolutionary obligations—that is, creditors’ property—carried with it the risk of annihilating the potential benefits to the overwhelming majority of the intended recipients. But if he failed to recognize the legitimacy of creditors’ property claims, Charles X risked siding with those who, during the revolution, argued that certain forms of prerevolutionary property—for instance, church lands, lucrative seigneurial privileges, venal offices, or slaves—should be abolished without indemnity in the name of social progress and the rights of man. Only wild-eyed revolutionaries cancel debts, and Charles X was trying to engineer a restoration of crown, altar, and nobility.31 The Ferronnayses’ creditors understood how inherently political the questions of the indemnity and of planters’ debts were, and crowded in to press claims, legitimate and otherwise. One chevalier Mordret began to write in 1829, requesting 55,000l.c. for five and a half years as deputy manager of the Cul de Sac plantation between 1791 and 1796, substantiating his stories with swashbuckling tales of his “miraculous survival” during uprisings on the Cul de Sac plain: a horse shot from underneath him; a scar under his right eye; a maimed left hand. Mordret appealed to Ferronnays’ “religion,” “conscience,” and the solidarity between “military men and servants of the King,” and suggested a “friendly” settlement outside the courts. After four letters, and unable to produce the affidavit of his ser-

31. On the legal background to (non-) seizure of plantations, more complex than this summary suggests, Baguet, Régime des terres, 54–55. On planters versus colonists, Joachim, Décolonisation ou néoclonialisme?, 246–47. See also Beauvois, “Monnayer l’incalculable?,” 627–31.

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vice signed by several neighbors on the Cul de Sac plain that he claimed to possess, Mordret let drop his claim.32 Other creditors had less picaresque stories to tell, but they posed more serious threats to Ferronnays’ indemnity, because of both the large sums involved and the weight of documentation needed to fight off their claims. During successive evacuations of Saint-Domingue, notarial and administrative archives were hastily piled into departing ships, along with women, children, slaves, and precious movables. But decades of civil war, with the fi res, shipwrecks, and unpredictable circuits of migration they occasioned, defeated efforts to preserve the documents providing visible links in a chain of ownership. These were essential to putting together a claim of indemnity in the fi rst place, and of defending it against creditors. An extended period of emigration in London and all over Germany further complicated the Ferronnays family’s efforts. Among other impediments, the false sale to George Thellusson in 1796 still cast a shadow on Ferronnays’ title to the Cul de Sac property, although this was eventually overcome. More seriously, the inheritors of Jacques Babain, who had sold Étienne-Louis Ferronnays the plantation in 1773, claimed not to have been paid any of the original purchase price of 130,000l.c (86,666l.t.). Their claim was false, and easily disproved by documents seized from Étienne-Louis during the French Revolution, but these were unavailable to his nephew and inheritor, Pierre-Jacques François Joseph Auguste; more generally, the dispersal of documents over the revolutionary period made it difficult for him to prove his side of the case. It was in this context that he resuscitated relations with the Corbier family by writing Jean-Françoise Merillon, the widow of Pierre-Jacques Corbier. 33 Merillon reached the nadir of her fortunes in New Orleans after her husband’s death in 1823. After falling into a paralysis from which he never recovered during a trip to Paris in 1815, Corbier was robbed under mysterious circumstances of 38,000 francs, his share of the parental inheritance. Merillon herself had no claim to the indemnity due on her husband’s coffee plantation because of a marriage contract that stipulated no community of property. Moreover, the fi rst indemnity payment coming from her

32. On the prevalence of false claims, Joachim, Décolonisation ou néocolonialisme?, 248. SMJ, chevalier Mordret (Paris) to PJF (SMJ), 13 February; and 1, 17, and 21 April 1829. Mordret claimed to have served in the black fighting corps (13 February). There is not a single mention of Mordret’s name in Corbier fi ls’ correspondence, which renders Mordret’s claims utterly implausible. 33. One difficulty was that as of 20 January 1788, the Babains still possessed the title to the Ferronnays property.

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father’s side had been eaten up by family debts. Over the course of her husband’s illness, Merillon had allowed the fathers of three children born successively to one mulatto woman belonging to the Ferronnays family, Eugenie or Jenny, to purchase their offsprings’ freedom. In her straitened condition, Jean-Françoise pocketed the manumission fees, amounting to 500 dollars or about 2,500 francs, for the three New Orleans–born Ferronnays slaves. 34 In response to Merillon’s extended account of the displacement, sickness, and impoverishment that had befallen her family since 1803, PierreJacques-François-Joseph-Auguste Ferronnays offered his sympathies but politely apologized for his inability to “do what he would like for [her] happiness and that of her family.” He cited his own fi nancial troubles and his humiliating encirclement by impertinent bourgeois on the estate at Saint-Mars la Jaille. Hadn’t Ferronnays already extended a sort of charity to the Corbiers by allowing them to make use of the seven slaves that departed Saint-Domingue for Cuba with them in 1803—without asking for compensation? Ferronnays had found out about the sale of the three New Orleans–born slaves not from Merillon but from the French Consul in New Orleans, which put the widow in a compromised position vis-à-vis her husband’s employer. Ferronnays conceded that she might sell one or two of the seven slaves who were still alive, sending him the proceeds; moreover, instead of pressing for immediate payment, he was willing to content himself with a written recognition of the five-hundred-dollar debt until Merillon found herself in less pinched circumstances. 35 However, after Ferronnays was slapped with an 86,666-franc judgment by the inheritors of the Babain estate in 1826, he turned to the widow Corbier to search for titles and receipts that would prove his uncle ÉtienneLouis had paid the Babains long ago. In the meantime, a series of appeals made their way through the courts. Yet another regime change in Paris, this time the July Revolution of 1830 that brought Louis Philippe, duc d’Orléans, to the throne and sent Charles X into permanent exile, meant that legitimist émigré nobles—those who, like the Ferronnays family, sided with the claims of the Bourbon kings—fell into bad odor. “I regret to inform you,” Ferronnays’ lawyer Dubois wrote in 1832, “that Louis Philippe’s judges have not seen the matter in the same way as those of Charles X.” The widow Merillon had sent such scraps of paper as she had

34. SMJ, JFM (New Orleans) to Madame la marquise de la Ferronnays (SMJ), 20 November 1823 (PJC’s story); and 16 May 1829 (testament and indemnity). 35. SMJ, PJF (SMJ) to JFM (New Orleans), undated (“happiness”).

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rescued from the evacuation, but Ferronnays required fuller documentation in light of his political and legal imbroglio: “I can’t furnish you with any proof,” Merillon wrote, “but I’m certain that one of the Babains were paid.” Ferronnays pushed her to write to President Boyer of Haiti and to seek information among the neighbors and employees of the Cul de Sac plain, now scattered in their places of refuge—all aging, many already dead.36 As she made these inquiries, the seventy-eight-year-old widow probably began to sense her own mortality, and so turned to settling matters in her own household. This included the established ritual, in many slaveholding societies, of manumitting old and trusted servants. Merillon was in this case seeking freedom for Eugenie or Jenny Ferronnays as well as for the last of Jenny’s children, the four-and-a-half-year-old Julien. Technically, they did not belong to the widow, but Jenny had served the Corbiers since the evacuation to Cuba in 1803. In addition, as the widow explained, the two probably weren’t worth selling upon her death, because a recent influx of slaves into Louisiana from Virginia had lowered prices. Merillon also feared for the harsh life awaiting Jenny and her son as field slaves should they be sold to the owners of the sugar plantations flourishing in Louisiana at the time. Jenny was ill herself, and was considered old at forty-six. Although Jenny considered the 100 dollars in savings she had deposited with Merillon an “immense sum,” it fell far short of the 500-dollar estimate of her and Julien’s value required for manumission. Merillon asked Ferronnays to forgive the other 400 dollars (2,000 francs) and send her a legal proxy so that the two could be freed in New Orleans.37 As illustrated by the case of Agathe in chapter 3, manumission requests between the Corbier and the Ferron de la Ferronnays families were among the personal exchanges—epistolary rituals, godparenting, naming—that extended familial relationships beyond purely mercantile ties. Moreover, asking and granting this particular kind of favor reaffirmed the humanity of all parties involved. Accordingly, Ferronnays agreed in principle to Merillon’s request, but expressed uncertainty about the possibility of bureaucratic action at a distance between France and New Orleans. Over two years later, the proxy required to free Jenny and her son had not been sent to New Orleans, and meanwhile it became clear to Merillon that nothing would be forthcoming until her increasingly foundering efforts to fi nd some sort of proof for Ferronnays’ lawsuit bore fruit: “I will

36. Dubois (Paris) to PJF (SMJ), 23 April 1832 (Orléanist politics); and JFM (New Orleans) to PJF (SMJ), 27 February 1832 (“proof”). 37. JFM (New Orleans) to PJF (SMJ), 27 February 1832 (“immense sum”).

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write about this poor unfortunate [Jenny] once I have accomplished what you desire.”38 After the dislocations of revolution, the conclusion of decades-long dramas came down to pieces of paper that were slow to materialize. The French Restoration’s most perceptive chronicler, Honoré de Balzac, tells the story in Colonel Chabert of the apparent death of his eponymous hero in the battle between the French and Russian armies at Eylau in 1807. Chabert crawls out from beneath a pile of corpses in eastern Prussia only to confront the impossibility, in Restoration France, of recovering his former identity, wealth, and family. Despite assembling the proof of his implausible history, the magnanimous, heroic Chabert is “rejected by the whole social creation,” where property, status, and procedure were better respected than simple justice. During his absence, the entire legal and political system had coalesced around the goal of reestablishing the Old Regime nobility deposed by the French Revolution. Chabert fi nally renounces his suit, voluntarily sinking back into the obscurity from which he fi rst emerged before joining the French army during the revolution as a simple soldier. Some had better claims over the postrevolutionary social creation than others.39 Four years after Merillon’s initial requests, Jenny Ferron de la Ferronnays wrote two letters—or more likely dictated them, given the neatness of the script and the likelihood that she was illiterate. The one transcribed below gives a sense not only of Jenny’s desperation but of Ferronnays’ hardened position: as the threat to his indemnity persisted, he retreated from his original assurances in order to increase his leverage against Merillon, who ardently wished the manumission of this longtime servant and—one senses—companion. The additional 400 dollars (2,000 francs) required for Jenny’s and Julien’s manumission balanced against the 86,666-franc lien on Ferronnays’ indemnity. 17 June 1836 Monsieur and Master, Please allow the voice of your slave to reach you and deign to weigh her supplication; your slaves Jenny, over fi fty years old and her son of

38. PJF (SMJ) to JFM (New Orleans), 8 October 1829 (bureaucratic action); and JFM (New Orleans) to PJF (SMJ), 27 February 1832 (“desire”). 39. PJF (SMJ) to JFM (New Orleans), 8 October 1829 (bureaucratic action); and 27 February 1832 (“desire”). Balzac, Le Colonel Chabert, 50 (“creation”).

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around five years, live in New Orleans with Madame the Widow Corbier, where she has learned that you are disposed to sell her and her son—the one who is too old and the other who is too young to withstand what masters, especially on the countryside, require of them. She appeals to your humanity, she implores you to take compassion on her and her child and consent to set a price on them so that they may buy their own liberty; some charitable people may advance them the price necessary, which they will pay back little by little by their work. But in order for this to happen the price must be in proportion to their capacity; at her age she cannot do much, and infi rmity often disrupts her work. She kisses your feet in imploring you on the behalf of her unfortunate son. Deign to receive her favorably and to accord her the means to assure, before she dies, the deliverance of her son from the chains of slavery. She will unceasingly address prayers to heaven for your happiness. Jenny de la Ferronnais.40

Pierre-Jacques François Joseph Auguste Ferron de la Ferronnays never replied directly to this letter, except to write rather curtly to the widow Corbier in March of 1838: “This letter still does not have as its aim to certify the receipt of the money for the black woman and her son because I still haven’t seen . . . the money.” These lines were followed by further details to guide Merillon’s inquiry.41 Jean-Françoise Merillon was unable to carry out Ferronnays’ instructions, because she died four months before they were written. In her will, she took care to reaffirm the manumission in 1793 of Marie Claudine (Joqui), who had fled with the Corbiers to Cuba, and with it the freedom of her daughter, Virginie Charlotte Claudine. The latter received one-third of Merillon’s property, including one-third of the remaining indemnities on her father’s coffee plantation in Saint-Domingue, 5,000 francs. Put another way, the daughter inherited indemnities paid on a coffee plantation near the one her mother had worked on as a slave. The other two-thirds of Merillon’s bequest, 10,000, went to her sister and nephew. The widow requested her executor to sell one mulatto slave, twenty-nine-year-old Mimose, and

40. SMJ, Jenny de la Ferronnays (New Orleans) to PJF (SMJ), 17 June 1836. This is the only document relating to the Saint-Domingue property in the family archive at Saint Mars la Jaille to have been consulted previously. See Fouchard, Marrons du syllabaire, 123–26. 41. PJF (SMJ) to JFM (New Orleans), 19 March 1838 (“money”).

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forward the proceeds to Ferronnays in payment of her 500-dollar debt. There is no proof that Ferronnays ever freed Jenny or Julien; no act of manumission was passed in New Orleans Parish, and neither died there—presumptive evidence that Merillon’s fears over Jenny’s sale to a plantation in an outlying parish came to pass. Ferronnays died only a few months after the widow Merillon, leaving his daughter to inherit the estate and with it the balance of the Saint-Domingue indemnities.42 The evacuation of 1803 would appear to have split forever the destinies of the ex-slaves from the Ferronnays plantation, but a strong though hidden link persisted between those who remained on the plantation and those who departed into exile with the Corbiers. Judging by their actions during the civil wars, in all likelihood the slaves who stayed behind became part of the overwhelming majority of Haitians who aspired to economic and personal independence as part of a free peasantry. These peasants wished to be free of the exactions of both the state and its new planter class. Slaves like Jenny de la Ferronnays, who went to Cuba and then New Orleans, sought to purchase legal freedom and economic independence for themselves and their offspring by their own labors. Thirty-five years later, debts contracted by their social superiors still stood in the way, and the obstacles to these ambitions would not be lifted until elites in Haiti and France found themselves comfortably ensconced on their respective sides of the Atlantic. 42. New Orleans Parish will book, 1838, 6:19–20. See also notarial act, office of Marc Lafitte, New Orleans, 8 August 1819, in which the freedom of Claudine is reaffirmed. On indemnity payments, ADLA, Registre d’états civils, 9 July 1838; and SMJ, Camaret (Paris) to comtesse de Gosset (SMJ), 10 June 1845.

Epilogue

H

aiti bears many traces of its colonial past, only some of them physical. Thanks to two doctoral students at the University of Chicago, Johnhenry Gonzalez and Sabine Cadeau, I was able to travel to that country to look at the vestiges of Saint-Domingue’s agro-industrial complex. Sabine’s family lives on a Lakou—an extended household situated, usually, on agricultural land—in the town of Croix des Bouquets, and a cousin of hers, nicknamed “Souris” (Mouse), lives in a small village on the Cul de Sac plain, where many of these relics, including those of the Ferron de la Ferronnays plantation, lie surprisingly intact. Our walks on the Cul de Sac plain and our conversations with locals provided a palpable, irreplaceable sense of the vast scale of the investments that planters like the Ferronnays family made, the climate in which slaves labored, and the uses that present-day Haitians make of this still-fertile land. Most of the Haitians I met on this trip, amid the cholera epidemic of 2010, were curious and supportive of a foreigner’s efforts to learn something of their past, but other encounters indicated how raw this history remains.1 Near Lafewone, a village likely peopled by descendants of the Ferronnayses’ ex-slaves, a gentleman who noticed us examining one of the irrigation ditches still crisscrossing the plain asked what we could possibly be doing. To my response that I was writing a book about the Cul de Sac plain, he joked, “So you are going to get rich off of us again?”2 The realities of academic publishing aside, this sally bit as deeply as intended. Later,

1. Jacques Cauna provides an account of these ruins in “Vestiges Sucrières.” 2. Interviews with residents on the Cul de Sac plain were conducted in conformity with the University of Chicago Institutional Review Board Protocol H10236, issued 21 September 2010.

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as we were searching for the Ferronnayses’ old boiling house, a number of residents emerged, agitated, from Lafewone. Despite our explanations, the exchange remained surprisingly tense; the emissaries sent to speak with us continued to believe that we were archeologists seeking to make off with valuable treasure—or at least artifacts—left over from the colonial period. These three gentlemen fi nished by denying that we were standing on the soil of the former Ferronnays plantation, and as a crowd gathered around us, we left Lafewone to resume our explorations another day. Haitians, with their searing postcolonial history, remain justifiably suspicious about the intentions of outsiders. Poverty and deep social divisions inherited from the colonial period mean that trust among Haitians is also very low: what in other places might seem like perfectly innocuous information is closely guarded in a country where secretiveness remains the rule.3 Things are otherwise in present-day Saint-Mars la Jaille, France. The family estate, refurbished after the French Revolution, is the site of a charming pleasure garden open to the public on Sundays, and the ensemble radiates an air of mild dilapidation, an infallible sign of the peace that old money has made with itself and the rest of the world. The village is surrounded by wheat fields and orchards that quietly fructify in the mild climate of Ancenis. The Ferron de la Ferronnays estate still includes many parcels of agricultural land in this region that the family reacquired after the revolution. Madame de Cossé-Brissac allowed a complete stranger to recount to her the Ferronnayses’ history as slave owners, spiced with lurid details about their worldly manners in the eighteenth century. After this, she kindly agreed to help me unearth more unflattering evidence about a family whose estate she had inherited by marriage, but whose past she had assimilated as her own. That the aristocracy of Brittany had been intermarrying for centuries makes this a perfectly natural feeling. Madame de Cossé-Brissac’s openness can be explained by a couple of exchanges we had. In the archive that my presence gave her an opportunity to explore further, we found some gems: pieces of silk given by the queen of France in the sixteenth century, an eighteenth-century pistol, and a permit, delicately painted on vellum, conferring on its bearer the right to carry a sword in the city of Venice. These lay mixed with masses of trivia: postcards, schoolboys’ notebooks, and laundry bills. The explanation? “These men saved everything, because the aristocracy is always convinced of its own importance.” A book about this family’s plantation 3. On this subject, Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier.

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225

on the Cul de Sac plain can only augment this importance. Earlier, she had expressed some discomfort over the possibility, which my project recalled to her, that France might one day pay reparations for its involvement in the slave trade: “Like everybody, I am against slavery, but in this case who is going to pay?” Assigning responsibility in the present for a massive enterprise that took place so long ago raises profound moral and legal issues that few people are qualified to answer. I simply replied that her ancestors had touched part of the indemnity paid to France by Haiti starting in 1825, so returning this sum with interest might be a good place for the French government to begin. She took this answer equably, as she might have, since this gracious and tolerant woman bears no personal responsibility whatsoever for the Ferronnays family’s past. Indeed, the Ferronnays family itself operated in an environment of perfect legality and no widespread moral disapproval. In Haiti, the past treated in this book seems at times immediate and even threatening in ways that might be difficult to articulate: these are feelings with their own legitimacy. For France, this history has no such power. It is a nation that collectively inherits from generation to generation a patrimony of great wealth, prestige, and power; its rapid renewal after repeated historical disasters—war, occupation, depression—furnish proof of these underlying strengths. France has the luxury of remembering or forgetting as it chooses. It can also decide, as Haiti ultimately could not, whether to give reparations. Doing so would then redound to its glory as a respecter of human rights. Most recently, president François Hollande affirmed that any reparations would be “moral” and not fi nancial in nature, underlining the degree to which France retains all the initiative toward Haiti on the issue.4 In these respects, both countries still live out of an inheritance amassed two and a half centuries ago on the plains of Saint-Domingue. 4. Le Monde, “Esclavage.”

Ack now ledgments

I

nmates of the academy enjoy the great privilege of signing their names, as individuals, to books that could never have been written without considerable institutional support. A grant from the American Council of Learned Societies got this project started, and the University of Chicago provided me, generously as always, with research funds and precious time for writing. I received invitations to present parts of this work from several colleagues: Catherine Desbarats and Allan Greer at McGill University; Rebecca Spang at the University of Indiana at Bloomington; and Koen Stapelbroek at the University of Helsinki. All of them furnished a useful opportunity to reflect on a work in progress and, I hope, to make improvements. Several readers or auditors made insightful comments or, in a couple of cases, gave bracing criticism: Loïc Charles, Amy Chazkel, Pierre Cornu, Caroline Fick, Lisa Jane Graham, Sarah Knott, Allan Potofsky, and Robert Schneider. Christopher Moore, Agatha Kim, and Paige Pendarvis were trusted research assistants. The readers for the University of Chicago Press, including Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus, will judge whether or not I made good use of their expert advice. My editor, Alan Thomas, was a discreet, steadying presence throughout. Sandra Hazel’s copyediting improved the manuscript in its final stages, and I thank her for her care. Colleagues at the University of Chicago gave useful criticism or other kinds of support, and I gratefully acknowledge the friendship of Fredrik AlbrittonJonsson, Daniel Desormeaux, Jan Goldstein, Gary Herrigel, Robert Morrissey, Emily Osborn, and Bill Sewell. I would particularly like to thank another colleague, Ralph Austen, who saw me through the fi nal stages of revision with his abundant intellectual curiosity, his encouragement, and his wisdom. 227

228

Acknowledgments

Madame Aliette de Cossé-Brissac opened up the Ferron de la Ferronnays family archives to me, and in so doing immeasurably enriched this book. At a much earlier stage, Sabine Cadeau and Hank Gonzalez arranged for a visit to Haiti to see the Cul de Sac plain and the ruins of the Ferron de la Ferronnays plantation; their enthusiasm helped me to see more vividly, and perhaps to seize more urgently, the possibilities of a history whose outlines I was just beginning to glimpse. This book is dedicated to my sons, whose qualities become both more evident and more indispensable to me as they grow up: Nick, good-natured and forgiving; and Louis, who speaks truth to power.

Sou rces a nd A bbr ev iations

A rchiva l Sources Cited a nd Their A bbr ev iations ADG, Archives Départementales, Gironde 73 J, Archives Privées, Fonds Gabriel Debien ADIV, Archives Départementales, Ile et Vilaine E, Titres Féodaux ADLA, Archives Départementales, Loire Atlantique B, Capitation Rôles E, Titres Féodaux Passagers embarqués en France, de Nantes, 1764–1791, in-folio Q, Domaine RP, Registres Paroissiaux ADML, Archives Départementales, Maine et Loire E, Titres Féodaux Q, Domaine RP, Registres Paroissiaux ADS, Archives Départementales de la Sarthe C, Contrôle des Actes E, Titres Féodaux J, Fiefs RP, Registres Paroissiaux ADSM, Archives Départementales, Seine et Marne E, Titres Féodaux Q, Domaine ADY, Archives Départementales, Yvelines E, Titres Féodaux Q, Domaine AMA, Archives Municipales, Angers CC, Capitation Rôles II 13, Recencement nominatif des habitants

229

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Sources and Abbreviations

AMN, Archives Municipales, Nantes DD, Propriétés Communales AN, Archives Nationales de France BIII (Affaires Etrangères), Consulats BB/1, Personnel COL C9A, Colonies, Correspondance COL CC, Colonies, Correspondance D XXV, Comité des Colonies MC, Notariat T, Papiers Privés Tombés dans le Domaine Publique, T 210/1–3, Ferron de la Ferronnays CAOM, France: Centre d’Archives d’Outre Mer DPPC NOT, SDOM, Depot des papiers publiques des Colonies, Notaires, Saint-Domingue E, Personnel Etats Civils G, Greffe SUPSDOM, Supplément Saint-Domingue 4 SUPSDOM, Domaines: administration anglaise 5 SUPSDOM, Domaines: administration sous la révolution 6 SUPSDOM, Domaines: Saint-Domingue réfugiés, indemnités SMJ, Ferron de la Ferronnays Family Papers, Saint Mars la Jaille—Privately Held Correspondence, Binau Family to various, 1733–89 Correspondence, Étienne-Louis Ferron de Ferronnays and Pierre-Jacques Corbier, 1789–1807 Correspondence, Étienne-Louis Ferron de la Ferronnays and Jean Camescasse, 1789– 92 Correspondence, Étienne-Louis Ferron de la Ferronnays and Dubreilh, 1790–1791 Correspondence, Pierre-Jacques François Joseph Auguste Ferron de la Ferronnays and Jean-Françoise Corbier, née Mérillon, 1823–26 Correspondence, Pierre-Jacques François Joseph Auguste Ferron de la Ferronnays and Mordet, 1829 Various administrative documents and correspondence related to indemnities (domestic and colonial), plantation titles, family testamentary matters, and plantation management, ca. 1770–1845 Bibliothèque Nationale de France Archives de la Bastille Other Register of wills, New Orleans Parish New Orleans Parish, Office of the Civil Clerk, Notarial Archive

Na mes A bbr ev iated in Notes ELF, Étienne-Louis Ferron de la Ferronnays JBC, Jean-Baptiste Corbier

Sources and Abbreviations

231

JC, Jean Camescasse JFM, Jean-Françoise Corbier, née Mérillon MEB, Marie-Elisabeth Thimothée Ferron de la Ferronnays, née Binau PJC, Pierre-Jacques Corbier PJF, Pierre-Jacques-François-Joseph-Auguste Ferron de la Ferronnays

Locations A bbr ev iated in Notes PaP, Port-au-Prince, Haiti SMJ, Saint Mars la Jaille, France SdC, Santiago, Cuba (referred to as Saint Yago de Cuba in eighteenth-century France) Unless noted, all correspondence passing between the Corbiers and the Ferronnayses originates in Cul de Sac and is destined for Paris.

Cur r encies l.t., livre tournois. Currency of account, equal to approximately 1/24 of the British pound sterling l.c., livre colonial. Currency of account, worth 2/3 of the livre tournois

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Index

abolition of slavery: coerced labor following, 163, 178–79, 190, 208; culture of sensibility and, 94, 101; decrees of 1793 and 1794, 10, 161, 199; effects on sugar production, 184– 87; expectation of, during French Revolution, 129, 169, 171, 181; and indemnity of 1825, 210 absentee owners: confl ict between resident planters and, 59, 135; effects on plantation, 139, 181; Étienne-Louis Ferronnays as, 13, 53; during French Revolution, 205–7 (see also nobility: as émigrés during French Revolution); presence in Paris, 32–33; rates of, on Cul de Sac plain, 72; relationship of attorneys to, 36n29, 40, 60, 83– 84, 203–4 accounting, 60n22, 84, 95, 114, 183 administration: as career choice for nobles, 26; costs of colonial, 92, 209; French colonial, 8– 9, 27, 59, 88, 111, 170; Napoleonic, 199; provincial, 125; royal and absolutist of French state, 65, 94, 129; of slaves, 91– 92, 100, 107 (see also slaves: discipline of) adultery, 138, 141, 145, 150 Africa, 23, 30, 42, 188 African slaves: and development of plantation complex, 4, 15; ethnic origins on Ferronnays plantation, 78 (see also Arada; bossales; Congo; Creoles: slaves; Nago); importation fi gures, 74–75, 127; role in Haitian Revolution, 161– 62, 182, 188– 89, 199; sexual relations with whites, 148 Agathe (domestic slave), 98– 99, 102, 219

agriculture: in Brittany, 21–25; as dominant sector of French economy, 15; Ferronnays family and, 20, 224; militarized, in post-abolition Saint-Domingue (see militarized agriculture); in presentday Haiti, 223; proletariat, 79 (see also slaves); rice, 123; Saint-Dominguan Chambers of Commerce and, 74; subsistence, on sugar islands, 118, 212; of sugar (see sugarcane cultivation) agronomy, 43, 53, 90 altruism: and criticism of empire, 192; and family, 100, 132; and sentiment, 94, 96– 97. See also sentiment Angers, 18; Jean-Baptiste Corbier in, 34, 39; Ferronnays family in, 29; immigration to Saint-Domingue from, 24 Anjou: agriculture and industry of, 25–26; Corbier family in, 35, 38–39, 202; Ferronnays family in, 18, 167, 214; relation to France, including colonies, 13, 27. See also Angers Antigua, 3–4, 54. See also British West Indies Antilles: culture of, 107– 8; development of, by European powers, 6–7; French (see French Antilles); Lesser, 2, 108; plantation size in, 75. See also Caribbean aqueduct, 49, 57, 118. See also irrigation; water: need for in sugar production Aquitaine, 30. See also hinterlands (of port cities) Arada, 76–77 aristocracy: collaboration with monarchy, 9, 33; commercial, of port cities, 22– 24; court, 35; dynastic considerations

249

250

Index

aristocracy (continued) among, 157; and French Revolution, 166; landed, 191; manners and social codes, 97, 137–38, 149–51; planter, of Haiti, 213; racial, of Saint-Domingue, 34; of sentiment and virtue, 93, 95. See also nobility; privilege assignats, 165 attorneys: confl icts of interest with planters, 40, 45; Jean Baptiste and Pierre-Jacques Corbier, for Étienne-Louis Ferronnays, 81, 146; Creole versus metropolitan, 77; functions of, 33; and local politics, 57; in plantation hierarchy, 36–37; royal regulation of, 59– 60; and slave discipline, 72, 79, 82, 139, 181 autarky. See self-sufficiency authority: of Marie-Elisabeth Binau, by dint of her property, 155; of Jean-Baptiste Corbier, 35, 78– 80; despotic, over slaves, 72, 74, 81, 92 (see also despotism; patriarchy: failures of, on plantation; patriarchy: functions of, on plantation); of Étienne-Louis Ferronnays, over his wife, 145; of masters over slaves, 103, 130, 209; metropolitan, over Saint-Domingue, 126, 134–35, 149–50, 170, 193; moral, of French monarchy, 141; political, of French monarchy, 200 Babain, Jacques, 217–19 Bacon, Francis, 53, 73n3 bankruptcy, 7, 25–26, 127 Barbados: absentee planters of, 72; British settlement of, 3–4; effects of War of American Independence on, 110, 122; “gang” system of, 47; plantation production on, 49–50, 53–54; reforms on, 84, 102, 123n26. See also British West Indies Beccaria, Cesare, 83 beef, 114, 116, 117. See also protein; salted beef Belin de Villeneuve, Paul, 64– 67 biens nationaux, 167, 213, 215. See also seizure: of property during French Revolution; sequestration of property bills of exchange, 120–21, 138 Binau, Marie-Elisabeth Thimothée, 54; arrest and transportation to Paris, 152–54; children (see Lamoreux, Marie-Pierre Gabriel; Thimothée, Siriac); dowry, 29, 135, 155–57, 202n16; marriage to

Étienne-Louis Ferronnays, 13, 29, 132, 135–37; as member of Creole elite, 133– 34, 147–48, 150–51; personal habits, 149; relations with slaves, 79– 80, 139–40, 146, 150; separation of household and goods from Ferronnays, 140–41, 154–57; testament of, 157–59; use of libelle by, 136–38 Binau, Pierre César, 129, 133–34, 144–45 birthrates, 42, 72, 85. See also demography blockade. See naval blockade Bodin, Jean, 81 boiling house: division of labor within, 63– 64; as domain of realism, 103; improvements in, 65– 66, 73; ruins, on former site of Ferronnays plantation, 224; skilled labor within, 76; sugar refi ning in, 61– 62; suicide of Jupiter, assistant in, 172. See also refi ning Bonaparte, Napoleon: amnesty for émigrés, 164; attempted reconquest of SaintDomingue, 193, 199–200; confl ict with Louverture, 187– 89; deposition of, 210; and planters of Saint-Domingue, 32; reimposition of slavery, 179n22, 188; wars of, 108 Bordeaux: Camescasse, merchant of, 165– 66; and commercial revolution, 24–28; Étienne-Louis Ferronnays, dealings with, 172, 176; hinterlands of, 16, 30; merchants of, 7, 23n11, 104, 128, 205 bossales, 75, 77, 189. See also African slaves; peasants: ex-slaves of Saint-Domingue as Bourbon monarchy: in exile during French Revolution, 187, 200–201; nobles under restoration of, 11, 210, 215; during Old Regime, 20; restoration of, 18, 32, 164, 218. See also legitimism bourgeoisie, 27, 125; attitudes, 34, 95, 97, 100, 170; consumption and investment patterns, 149, 158; and culture of sensibility, 132n4, 137; during French Revolution, 213–14, 218; intermarriage among, 30; social ascent by, 17–18, 23, 36–40 Boyer, Jean-Pierre, 211–13, 219 Braudel, Fernand, 8 Brazil, 4, 47, 49–50, 87, 115 bread, 80, 88, 117–18. See also wheat; wheat flour Britain: colonies, resistance to metropole among, 41, 125; empire, 106–12, 162, 189;

Index Ferronnays family exile in, 14; French planters’ admiration of, 134; French planters’ negotiations with, 32; imperial state of, 90, 204; navy of, 121, 189; occupation of Cuba by, 199; occupation of Martinique by, 199; occupation of Western Province by, 162, 176– 84; West Indies (see British West Indies) British West Indies: conquests and settlement of, 1–4; documentation about, 14; effects of War of American Independence on, 122, 124, 128; “gang” system on, 47; reform movements on, 73–74, 84n19, 100; slave resistance in, 72, 170–71 Brittany: agriculture and industry of, 21, 23–24; economic and cultural integration, 13; Ferronnays family presence in, 1, 17–23, 167, 202, 214–25; inheritance practices in, 17–18 (see also préciput) Buffon, George-Louis Leclerc de, 188 cane processing. See boiling house; refi ning Cap Français, 145; Étienne-Louis Ferronnays in, 136–37, 141; French colonial administration in, 36, 84; petits blancs of, 36, 170 capital, 25; capital/labor ratios, 68– 69, 208; fi xed, 49–50, 60, 120 (see also fi rm structure); goods, 42, 121, 124, 212; improvements, 118, 123 (see also improvement: to plantation infrastructure); investment, by nobles, 24 (see also credit; debt); investment, on plantation, 42–43, 45–47, 49–50, 110; merchant, 3– 9, 23, 25, 27, 105, 130–31, 209; needs of, effect on cultivator self-management, 182; rentier, 215–16; requirements, to reestablish ruined plantation infrastructure, 205–7; slaves as units of, 71; symbolic and cultural, 38, 141. See also capitalism; commercial revolution; plantation complex capitalism: agricultural, 21; growth of, in Old Regime France, 72; mercantile, 8; patrimonial, 11, 72; plantation complex and, 4– 6, 10–13, 60, 192. See also capital; commercial revolution; plantation complex capitation, 18–20. See also taxes Caradeux, Jean-Baptiste de, 55, 66– 67, 81, 212 Caribbean: as destination for African slaves, 75; diversity of colonies in, 195; European

251

settlement of, 2– 6; racial mixture in, 198; warfare in, 164. See also Antilles; British West Indies; French Antilles Catholicism, 140. See also religion Cauna, Jacques de, 11 charity, 20, 100, 197, 202. See also pity Charles X, king of France, 210, 213, 216, 218 civil war of Saint-Domingue: aspirations during, of ex-slaves of Saint-Domingue, 222; and democratic revolutions of eighteenth century, 162– 63; disruptive impact of, on plantations, 192, 199; and French Revolution, 5; and Haitian independence, 161; and imperial wars of eighteenth century, 191; plantation conditions preceding, 183– 85; violence of, 188, 196, 217; in Western Province, 157, 173. See also French Revolution; Haiti: Revolution Claudine, Marie (“Joqui”), 180, 194, 198, 221 clayed sugar, 25, 61, 64, 66– 68, 119. See also sugar, white climate, 43; of Ancenis, 24; of SaintDomingue, 40, 60, 147, 223; of tropics, 107. See also ecological conditions Code Noir: and Christianization of slaves, 86, 102; as form of Old Regime policing, 91– 92; and masters’ authority, 44; restrictions on work mandated by, 76, 179– 80; and slave subsistence, 115; supposed laxity of, 189 coffee: in contrast to sugar cultivation, 45; and Creole identity, 170n11, 190n38; cultivation after 1789, 211–12; among exports from Saint-Domingue, 1, 4, 42, 85, 165, 172; growth in production of, from 1760s, 9, 15, 41, 127; plantation owned by Merillon family, 39, 221; plantations, destroyed during French Revolution, 171, 173; plantations established by French in Cuba, 195– 97; plantations owned by Corbier family, 28, 45, 207; plantations owned by Étienne-Louis Ferronnays, 28 Colonial Assembly of St. Marc, SaintDomingue, 170 Colonies of British North America, 110, 125, 127. See also War of American Independence commanders. See military commanders, of Saint-Domingue; slave commanders commerce: of Anjou, 25; Atlantic, 17; British,

252

Index

commerce (continued) 110; chambers of, in Saint-Domingue, 73; colonial, 8, 39, 106, 192; global and international, 15, 131, 191; among slaves, 115; of slaves, 92 (see also African slaves); Treaty of Amity and, between France and United States, 112; types permitted to nobles, 23–24. See also capitalism; trade commercial empire, 7, 106– 8, 192 commercial revolution, 6, 15–16 Commissioners. See French Civil Commissioners Compagnie des Indes. See India Company companionate marriage, 137, 140. See also women: Creole, marriage and domestic power among competition: between European empires, 16, 191; in overseas trade, 16, 105; sexual, 147; among social groups of SaintDomingue, 115, 141; in sugar industry, 69, 119 complant, 21–22. See also agriculture: in Brittany; privilege concubinage, 99. See also marriage Congo, 77–78, 86 Conseil Supérieur. See High Council conspiracy: to arrest Marie-Elisabeth Binau, 153; by Marie-Elisabeth Binau, 64; class, of nobles against small planters, 9. See also corruption; fraud Constituent Assembly. See France, Constituent Assembly constitution of 1791 (France), 166 constitution of 1801 (Saint-Domingue), 161– 62, 186, 189– 90, 206. See also Louverture, Toussaint constitution of 1805 (Haiti), 210 contraband, 85, 133 Corbier, Jean-Baptiste, 39, 46, 49, 51, 54, 56, 63– 68, 70, 77–78, 80, 84– 87, 90– 91, 127– 29, 136, 142; bourgeois sensibility of, 38, 100, 139–40, 143; early life and career, 33–36; as letter-writer, 13, 95– 96; plantation management by, 40, 45, 53, 110–24; political views, 125–26; relation to Marie-Elizabeth Binau, 137–38; relation to Étienne-Louis Ferronnays, 37, 95, 144, 203; views on Saint-Dominguan society, 57–59, 133, 146–47, 149–51; views on slavery, 10, 71, 79, 81– 83, 96– 99, 100–103 Corbier, Pierre-Jacques, 80, 87– 88, 101,

166, 208– 9; during civil war in SaintDomingue, 164, 167–207; plantation management by, 39–40, 64– 68, 71–74, 91, 127–29; relation to Étienne-Louis Ferronnays, 35, 40, 99–100; sexual initiation of, 98–100; views on slavery, 82 corruption, 57, 59, 94, 100. See also conspiracy; fraud costs: affecting profitability on sugar plantations, 45, 54; of capital, 47, 49–50; and choice of technique, 61; of cruelty to slaves, in lost work, 83, 90; effects of war on, 110, 116–21, 124, 165; fi xed, 129 (see also capital: fi xed); of illness among slaves, in lost work, 87– 88; of improvements, 67– 68; of irrigation works, 56; of labor, 26, 208; of living, in Saint-Domingue, 36; opportunity, of work stoppage, 65, 77; of production, of sugar, 66; of slaves (see prices: of slaves); transaction, charged by merchants, 7; of war and empire, 105– 9, 125, 208– 9. See also prices cotton, 42, 123 credit: Pierre-Jacques Corbier, use of, 95; merchant exploitation of planters through, 205; merchant networks, 23; planter access to, 4, 7– 9, 110; during wartime, 118–21. See also capital; creditors; debt creditors, 104, 111, 120–21, 158, 216–17 Creoles: confl ict with metropole, 9, 40–41, 107– 8, 129, 131, 134–35, 155, 159– 60; influence in metropole, 28, 33; metropolitan criticism of, 59– 60, 146–51; mixed-race, 99; as slave owners, 189; slaves, 75–77, 85– 86, 115, 158; women, marriage of to metropolitan French, 29–30, 39, 133, 136; women, role of in Antillean society, 139–40 Croix des Bouquets, 5, 116, 134, 173–74, 180– 81 crop rotation, 42, 116. See also fertilization cruelty: of attorneys, 59; awareness of, among planter class, 10, 92; of Caradeux, 67, 81; as grounds for separation in marriage, 141; reduction of gratuitous forms of, 82– 83, 99; of Saint-Dominguan society, 151; sentiment as an antidote to, 93– 96 (see also sentiment); of Thistlewood, 81. See also torture; violence Cuba, 2–5, 14, 191– 98, 218–19, 221–23

Index cultivation, sugarcane. See sugarcane cultivation cultivators, 10, 163, 182– 84, 186– 88, 207. See also militarized agriculture; peasants: ex-slaves of Saint-Domingue as d’Argout, Robert, 55, 88, 111, 113, 117 death: of Marie-Elisabeth Binau, 157–59; of Chabert, character in Colonel Chabert, 220; of Jean-Bapitste Corbier, 39; of Pierre-Jacques Corbier, 217; feared, of Lamoreux, 145; fear of, 82; of ÉtienneLouis Ferronnays, 127, 201–2; of Henri Ferronnays, 13; of Jules Bazile Ferronnays, 164; of Pierre-Jacques Louis Auguste Ferronnays, 26; of Harpe, 29; of Julie, character in La nouvelle Héloïse, 97; of Louis XVIII, king of France, 210; of Merillon, 219; of Pétion, 211; of Polidor, Cul de Sac slave, 80; premature, among slaves, 8, 42, 78, 85– 87; records of, for slaves, 59, 172; among slaves in revolt, 179. See also demography; violence Debien, Gabriel, 11 debt: of Marie-Elisabeth Binau, 143, 158; dowry as, 29; economic competition and, 7; of Étienne-Louis Ferronnays, 111, 119, 128, 133, 156, 165– 66; of PierreJacques François Joseph Auguste Ferronnays, 201–3, 214–18; of French state, 106, 167; of Haiti to France, 211; and merchant-planter relations, 127, 204–5; of Merillon, 222; of petits blancs, 175; planter consciousness of, 46; and shortterm thinking, 104; of Troussey, 153; in wartime, 108, 119–22, 124. See also credit; creditors decree of 3 December 1784, 59– 60, 83– 84, 107, 172. See also Creoles: confl ict with metropole; slavery: reform of democracy and democratization, 33, 93– 94, 163, 182 demography: of colonial societies, 2, 106–7, 136n9, 140, 169, 198; of colonial women, 136, 140n17; of Ferronnays family, 17; of plantation slaves, 42, 73–74, 85– 86 Descartes, René, 34, 95, 99 despotism, 74, 82, 84, 92 despotism, ministerial. See ministerial despotism Dessalines, Jean-Jacques, 194, 224 Digneron, Jean-Baptiste Nicolas, 66, 88

253

disease: of crops, 42; European, in Americas, 2; among French peasantry, 79; among French soldiers in Saint-Domingue, 178; among slaves, 59, 75, 79, 86, 89, 124. See also death: premature, among slaves; illness; mortality division of labor, 2, 8, 43, 69, 78 divorce. See separation of property and household domaine congéable, 21, 22n9. See also nobility; peasants; privilege dowry: of Marie-Elisabeth Binau, 29, 133, 135, 155–57, 202n16; of Roger de la Motte, 25 drought, 7, 56, 69, 114, 118. See also ecological conditions; environmental fragility Dupont du Nemours, Pierre Samuel, 105– 6 Dutch. See Netherlands Dutrône de la Couture, Jacques François, 64– 67 earth-eating. See geophagia East India Company, 106. See also trading companies East Indies, 199 ecological conditions, 73. See also environmental fragility économes. See overseers economic development, 16, 106, 123. See also capitalism; market: and French economic development efficiency: Enlightenment and, 90; imposed by markets, 72; need for flexibility over, on plantation, 69; reduction of cruelty to improve, 8, 73 (see also slavery: reform of); role of infrastructure in, 77; of sugar industry, role of fi rm structure in undermining, 49–50 egalitarianism, 133, 148, 161. See also democracy and democratization egotism, 86, 93, 151. See also corruption; individualism; luxury; self-interest; vanity elites: confl ict among, 60, 161, 169, 171; Creole, 41, 107, 151; Creole and metropolitan, 40, 131, 135, 159– 60, 163, 209; Cuban, 196; French, and colonization, 8– 15, 130; of independent Saint-Domingue and Haiti, 162, 183, 190, 211; landed, 17; merchant, 23, 30; of Old Regime France, 141, 150, 155, 187; planter, 75, 123, 129; progressive or enlightened, 73; provincial, 38; public opinion among,

254

Index

elites (continued) 137; rent-seeking among, 106 (see also privilege); of Saint-Domingue, 28, 126, 132, 162, 168; traditional, 27, 33 emancipation, 100, 161, 189, 199. See also abolition of slavery; manumission Emeraux, Françoise-Renée Le Clerc des, 26, 34 empire: Atlantic, 41; commercial, criticism of, 105– 6, 108– 9, 192; European, in Caribbean, 4, 7– 8; French (see French Empire) Enlightenment: and attitudes to punishment, 83; and luxury, 149; and medical advances, 88; racial theories in, 188; and reform of slavery (see slavery: reform of); role of sentiment in the, 92– 94 entrepreneurs: enlightened, 73; noble, 23–24, 215; in Saint-Dominguan irrigation works, 56–57 environmental fragility, 5, 44, 47, 69, 115. See also ecological conditions epistolary conventions, 37, 93, 203, 219. See also letter writing equality. See egalitarianism Estates General. See France, Estates General evacuation: of Saint-Domingue, 39, 176–77, 194, 217, 219; of Western Province by British, 205– 6 Exclusive, 109–10. See also trading regimes factory, 60, 69, 83, 103. See also Industrial Revolution factory system (in sugar industry). See fi rm structure family: bourgeois attitudes toward, 34, 96– 100; and commercial empires, 130–31; fortunes, maintenance and restoration of, 18, 34; immigration patterns, to Saint-Domingue, 36; inheritance (see inheritance); Louverture, attitudes toward, 187; among slaves, 86; as social model for plantation, 71. See also household fecundity. See demography: of plantation slaves; female slaves: health of female slaves, 144: actions of, to save Ferronnays plantation, 177; of Congo origin, 78; health of, 85– 86; labor of, 47, 75–78, 146; manumission of, 102; population, 75. See also gender Ferdinand IV, king of Spain, 197

Ferronnays, Emmanuel Henri-Eugène Ferron de la, 28, 164, 201, 212 Ferronnays, Étienne-Louis Ferron de la, 6, 10–13, 24, 36, 44–51, 53, 55–56, 59, 61, 63, 71, 74–75, 80, 85, 87, 99, 101–3, 113, 115– 16, 118, 124, 129, 179– 80, 185; career, 9, 26–28, 35, 110–11, 114, 132–35, 142–43; debts of, 111, 119–21, 128, 133, 156, 165– 66; as émigré during French Revolution, 157, 162, 164– 67, 171–73, 175–77, 201–4, 206; as “enlightened” plantation owner, 64– 69, 72–73, 88, 90– 92; investments in Saint-Domingue, 28, 127, 217; marriage to Marie-Elisabeth Binau, 13, 29, 53, 79, 97, 132, 135–37, 140–41, 154–57, 160; origins and social status, 18–21; in Paris, 30–32, 84; relation to Jean-Baptiste Corbier, 35, 37, 95, 144, 203; relation to Pierre-Jacques Corbier, 40, 96, 99–100 Ferronnays, Jenny (Eugenie) Ferron de la, 218–22 Ferronnays, Jules Bazile Ferron de la, 26, 164, 201 Ferronnays, Marie-Elisabeth Thimothée Ferron de la (née Binau). See Binau, MarieElisabeth Thimothée Ferronnays, Paul Ferron de la, 28–30, 32, 164, 200–201, 205 Ferronnays, Pierre-Jacques François Joseph Auguste Ferron de la: and Jenny Ferronnays, 221–22; and French Revolution, 164, 186, 201–5; and indemnity of 1825, 217–18; as inheritor of Cul de Sac plantation, 40, 96, 194; return to France, 214–15 Ferronnays, Pierre-Jacques François Louis Auguste Ferron de la, 21, 127 Ferronnays, Pierre-Jacques Louis Auguste Ferron de la, 21–26, 35 Ferronnays, Pierre-Louis Auguste Ferron de la, 164, 201, 212 Ferronnays, Pierre-René Joseph François Louis Auguste Ferron de la, 35 fertility: of Cul de Sac plain, 1, 128, 185; of Saint-Domingue, 131, 223; of soil, 116; of soil, declining, 5, 42 (see also soil exhaustion); of soil, variations, 51. See also agriculture; fertilization fertilization, 53–54, 69. See also crop rotation; sugarcane cultivation: improvements in

Index field slaves: hunger among, 87, 114; marriage rates among, 86; prices of, 127; scrutiny of, 51; skill levels, 76–78, 80, 127 fi rm structure (of sugar industry), 50, 69 food: habits, on Saint-Domingue, 40; illness from, 87; for mules, 58; in plantation hospitals, 89; price of, deducted from cultivator wages, 207; prices (see prices: of food); purchased on market versus grown on plantation, 46; purveyors, on Ferronnays estate, 32; and relations of slaves to plantation owners during civil war, 179– 81, 184–85; scarcity, during wartime, 110, 117–18, 122, 124; for slaves, highlyskilled, 67, 77; for slaves, improvements in, 73, 91– 92 (see also slavery: reform of); for slaves, principal sources of, 114–16. See also nutrition; subsistence Forster, Robert, 12 France, Constituent Assembly, 166 France, Estates General, 33, 169 France, Ministry of the Navy, 27, 32, 137, 142, 153. See also Malouet, Pierre-Victor; Sartine, Antoine de France, National Assembly, 169–71, 174 France, National Convention, 178 fraud: of attorneys toward absentee owners, 40, 57, 59– 60; by sugar refi ning consultants, 64, 145; by Troussey, 153. See also conspiracy; corruption freedmen, 115. See also free people of color freedom: for Marie-Elisabeth Binau, 149, 157, 159; colonial, 40, 125, 127, 134; Haitian, 211; for slaves, 11, 34, 98, 102–3, 123, 178, 194, 218–19, 221–22 (see also abolition of slavery; Haiti: Revolution; manumission). See also independence free men of color. See free people of color free people of color: in civil war of SaintDomingue, 160– 62, 169– 85; fl ight to Cuba, 195; in historiography of French Revolution, 12; increased wealth of, during eighteenth century, 9, 129; militia service by, 126, 135; population, 147n29; property owned by, 129, 151; and SaintDominguan coffee economy, 9 French Antilles: influence of, in Paris, 31–32; Moreau de Saint-Méry as chronicler of, 56; slave subsistence in, 114, 116, 122; urban world of, 12; wartime disruptions in, 109–11

255

French Civil Commissioners, 178–79, 181– 82, 207. See also Polverel, Étienne; Roume, Philippe; Sonthonax, Léger Félicité French Empire: abolition of slavery in, 178, 188, 199 (see also abolition of slavery); centrality of, to plantation complex, 209, 215; and French Revolution, 160– 61, 166; geographical contexts for history of, 12; role of family in, 131; SaintDominguan independence within, 189, 191, 206 (see also constitution of 1801 [Saint-Domingue]). See also empire French Revolution, 11, 22, 188; colonial independence movement during, 159; elite confl ict during, 9–10, 40, 125–27, 160– 61, 163; Ferronnays family during, 213, 215, 217, 225; ideology of, influence on slaves, 186; influence of planters during, 28, 32– 33, 199–200; noble emigration following, 12–13, 187, 201; sequestration of property during, 96, 166– 67, 182– 83, 201, 206; sugar production of Saint-Domingue on eve of, 1; wars of, 108. See also civil war of Saint Domingue; Haiti: Revolution gambling, 138, 143, 152 “gang” system, 47, 50, 195 garden plots (for slaves): and French Revolution, 179– 80, 182; and slave subsistence, 114–16, 188; time for cultivation of, 82; water for, 58. See also food; subsistence Geggus, David, 11 gender, 76, 86. See also female slaves; women gens de couleur. See free people of color geophagia, 87 gérant. See attorneys Germany, 14, 165, 196, 202–3, 217 government: British, in Saint-Domingue, 205– 6; Cuban, 196; economic, 8, 59; Haitian, 210, 212; household, 255n42; officials, fl ight from Saint-Domingue by, 193; present-day, of France, 225; reform of, 73, 90– 91, 110, 163; revolutionary, of France, 13, 96, 165, 199, 214; revolutionary, in Saint-Domingue, 169–70, 207; royal, of France, 9, 32, 94, 110, 125, 141; of slaves, 83, 92 (see also police; reason of state; slavery: reform of) grain, 21, 25, 39, 113–14. See also rice; wheat Grande Rivière (plantation): control of, by Marie-Elisabeth Binau, 133, 139–43, 150,

256

Index

Grande Rivière (plantation) (continued) 155–58; leasing of, 111; productivity of, 54; slaves of, 79, 82 Grande Rivière (river), 56– 67 grands blancs: confl ict with, 170; during French Revolution, 40, 129; manners and views, 134, 140; social domination by, 27, 146. See also Lords of SaintDomingue; planter class Guadeloupe: abolition on, 199 (see also reimposition of slavery); relations with metropole, 107–10; settlement of, 3–4; slaves sold to, 75; social classes of, compared to Saint-Domingue, 27 hacienda, 195, 197. See also household: plantation as; latifundia Haiti, 2; Boyer, president of, 219; indemnity of 1825, paid by, 211–16; independence of, 11, 135, 191– 92; influence of rights claims originating from, 198; military elites, 183, 188; peasantry of, 222; plantation economy of, 10, 50, 190, 208–13; population of, 194– 95; present-day, 223– 25; Revolution, 129, 161– 62; Revolution, scholarship on, 12; War of Independence, 162, 200, 211 Haitian War of Independence, 162, 200, 211 Hankey, Simond & Co., merchants, 201, 202, 204 hierarchy: between French provinces, 30; labor, on plantation, 78; managerial, on plantation, 36, 77; racial, 188, 198; social, 79 High Council (Conseil Supérieur), 56, 60 hinterlands (of port cities), 7, 12, 16–17, 24– 26, 30 Hispaniola: French sovereignty over, 2, 191, 193; plantation complex on, 75 Hobbes, Thomas, 59 hospital. See plantation hospital household: altruism versus exploitation in, 97– 98, 103, 132; aristocratic, criticism of, 38; bargaining power of Creole women within, 148; of Pierre César Binau, 144; of Marie-Elisabeth Binau, 219; bourgeois norms relating to, 100; of Étienne-Louis Ferronnays, 33, 35; immigration patterns of, to colonies, 36; Lakou as form of, 23; management of, 92; paternal, role of in patrilineal societies, 29; plantation as,

43, 72, 104, 108, 130; separation of property and, between husband and wife, 140–41, 156; of slaves, 86; structure, of Old Regime state, 142. See also family; patriarchy; patrimony humanity and interest, 73, 84– 85, 89– 92, 103, 181. See also government: of slaves; human rights; slavery: reform of human rights, 94, 101, 225. See also humanity and interest; sensibilité; sentiment ideology: abolitionist, contagion of slaves by, 167; absolutist, 94; and family, 96n38, 132; inconsistency of, during civil war of Saint-Domingue, 162, 169; patriarchal, 43, 70–71; underpinning plantation complex, 10 Île-de-France, isle of, 167, 179n22, 199 illness: of Pierre-Jacques Corbier, 218; among slaves (see disease: among slaves). See also disease immigration: from Angers to SaintDomingue, 24–25; of Jean-Baptiste Corbier, 214; effects on SaintDominguan cities, 172; of families to Saint-Domingue, 36; forced, 36 (see also African slaves); of indentured servants to Antilles, 3–4 improvement: to metropolitan agricultural land, 23, 42; to plantation infrastructure, 44, 46, 61, 64, 103, 118–19, 124 (see also investment: in plantations); to slaves’ well-being, 73 (see also slavery: reform of); and social reform, 90, 99, 101n47; of soil quality on plantation, 53 indemnity of 1825, 11, 156, 206, 210–22, 225 indentured servitude, 3–4, 134 independence: American War of (see War of American Independence); Creole (see Creoles: confl ict with metropole); female, 140–43, 149; Haitian (see Haiti: independence of) India Company, 106. See also trading companies Indian Ocean, 130, 199. See also Île-deFrance, isle of; Réunion, isle of indigo, 15, 42, 123 individualism, 132, 151. See also egotism Industrial Revolution, 6, 69 industrious revolution, 69 infrastructure: colonial, 9, 56, 208 (see

Index also administration: French colonial); plantation, 40, 77, 192, 208; plantation, destruction of, 177, 206–7; plantation, investment in, 44, 46, 69 inheritance: in Brittany (see préciput); of Corbier estate, 217; of Ferronnays estate, 215; and social reproduction, 17, 130, 203. See also patrimony innovation, 42, 60, 68. See also capital: fi xed; technique; improvement: to plantation infrastructure insurgents: of British colonies of North America, 111–12; of Saint-Domingue, 162, 175– 85 interest. See self-interest investment, 131; by Jean-Baptiste Corbier, 35, 38–39; effects of warfare on, 104, 110, 118–19; by Étienne-Louis Ferronnays, 9, 64; fi xed capital, 45–47, 60 (see also capital: fi xed); geographical allocation of, 5; by governments, in colonies, 7, 105, 204; in plantations, 25, 28, 36, 57, 223; possibilities for nobles, 17, 22–24, 202, 209 irrigation: on Cul de Sac plain, 5, 56–57, 128; to mitigate environmental risk, 42; role in sugarcane cultivation, 51, 53; in South Carolina, 123. See also water irrigation syndicate, 23, 57, 59, 208 Îsle Gloriette, Nantes, 22, 213 Jamaica: British conquest and settlement of, 2, 4; Creole women of, 147; fl ight of Saint-Dominguans to, 180, 193– 94; planter absenteeism in, 72; similarity to Saint-Domingue, 42, 123; slave rebellions in, 171; Thistlewood, plantation manager in, 13, 81; in wartime, 110, 122. See also British West Indies jardin de nègre. See garden plots kinship, 78, 99, 131. See also family; household labor: allocation of, on plantation, 51, 110, 118–19; avoidance of, by slaves during civil war in Saint-Domingue, 184; costs (see costs: of labor); discipline, under Louverture (see militarized agriculture); division of (see division of labor); forced, 79, 89, 107, 182 (see also slaves; slavery);

257

free, 50; “gang” system of, 47, 50, 195; in Haiti (see Haiti: planation economy of); labor-intensity, 54, 124; labor-savings, pursuit of on plantation, 69; proportion of, to capital, 68– 69, 208; regimentation, 60 (see also slaves: discipline of); released by productivity gains, 42; self-sufficiency, on plantation, 65, 69; servile, 43–44, 123, 163; shortages, during French Revolution, 200, 206–7; of slaves, as source of planter wealth, 101, 103, 192; violence in regulation of, 59; white, 77 Lafewone, village of (Haiti), 223–24 La Fosse, Nantes, 22, 24, 39 Lamoreux, Marie-Pierre Gabriel, 145, 158 land: allocation and cultivation of, on plantation, 46, 49– 60, 65– 66, 118; and growth of plantation size, 129; inheritance of, Marx on, 203; market, in Saint-Domingue, 44–45, 69, 111, 128–29, 209; occupied by ex-slaves, 211; owned by Ferronnays family, 20–22, 207, 224; ownership by free people of color of Saint-Domingue, 169–70; postabolition distribution of, 182– 88, 211; in present-day Haiti, 223; purchased by Jean-Baptiste Corbier, 38–39, 196, 212; settlement, in post-revolutionary France and Haiti, 211–16 landed wealth: as basis of nobility, 191, 215; bourgeois taste for, 23, 39; of Ferronnays family, 21–22, 32; relative decline of, in eighteenth century, 17; among SaintDominguan free people of color, 160 La Rochelle, 16, 24, 30 latifundia, 43, 72. See also hacienda; household: plantation as Leclerc, Charles Victoire Emmanuel, 197, 207 legitimism, 71, 218. See also Bourbon monarchy; royalism Léogane: Binau family presence in, 129, 133– 34; Marie-Elisabeth Thimothée Binau in, 143, 145, 157; declining fertility on plain of, 54; during civil war in SaintDomingue, 176, 184; emigration to, from Angers, 25; settlement of, 4– 6 letter of exchange. See bills of exchange letter writing, 103, 139, 143–44. See also epistolary conventions

258

Index

lettre de cachet, 142, 152, 154, 156 liberté de savanne, 85 Livry-sur-Seine, 32, 68, 156 London, 141; as corrupt metropolis, 32; émigrés in, 32, 165, 178, 190, 217; merchants of, 204 Lords of Saint-Domingue: collaboration with French monarchy, 9, 33, 209; as émigrés during French Revolution, 190, 200; emulation of, 36, 40; manners and social views, 36, 149, 175; social domination by, 10, 27, 36. See also grands blancs; planter class Louisiana, 14, 198, 211, 219 Louis Philippe, king of France, 218 Louis XVI, King of France: and comte de Provence, 35; and Étienne-Louis Ferronnays, 152; and French Revolution, 161, 164, 166, 169; and Saint-Dominguan planters, 33, 35, 113, 131 Louis XVIII, King of France, 35, 210 Louverture, Toussaint: diplomatic negotiations of, 179; and militarized agriculture, 151, 182, 185– 87, 190, 207– 8 (see also militarized agriculture); relations with France, 189; revival of plantation economy by, 193; and Spain, 161– 62 Lower South, 122–23 luxury: Creole penchant for, 148–49, 158; discourse on, as social criticism, 38, 151 (see also women: Creole, attitudes and manners); imports to Haiti, 212; “new,” among eighteenth-century bourgeoisie, 149; noble, 30, 133, 149; sadism as a form of, 83 Malouet, Pierre-Victor, 32, 204 management: by attorneys, 127, 139, 181 (see also attorneys); authoritarian, 44; costs of, 44; enlightened and rational, 21, 78, 84, 96, 103; household, 72; selfmanagement, by ex-slaves, 182 (see also cultivators); by women, 140 managers of plantations. See attorneys Mandeville, Bernard, 93 manumission: in ancient Rome, 102n48; by Marie-Elisabeth Binau, 158; of Claudine, by Pierre-Jacques Corbier, 180, 194; and maintenance of hierarchy, 198; by masters, 44, 181; by Merillon, 218–21; of Nicolle, domestic slave, 98 marechausée. See police: mounted

market: dependence of plantations on, 4, 42–44, 71–73, 132; fragility of, 47, 130; for free labor, 77 (see also costs: of labor); and French economic development, 7– 8, 16–17, 25–26, 90; for land, in SaintDomingue, 128; monopoly pricing in, 105; sentiment and, 94, 132; for slaves, 67, 75, 78n9; for slaves’ food, 46, 116; and technological progress on plantation, 60, 67, 69; during wartime, disruptions to, 107–15, 119–24, 129, 165, 191, 206; world, for tropical produce, 1, 3, 40. See also world economy marriage: between bourgeoisie and nobility, 23; companionate, 137, 140; JeanBaptiste Corbierand Roger de la Motte, 34–35, 38; Pierre-Jacques Corbierand Merillon, 39, 217; as exchange, 99; Étienne-Louis Ferronnays and MarieElisabeth Binau, 13, 37, 54, 79, 97– 99, 133–42, 149, 155–56; Pierre-Jacques François Joseph Auguste Ferronnays, 203; instrumental, 141; interracial, laws restricting, 170; between nobles and Creole planters of Saint-Domingue, 28– 32, 41, 131–32, 160, 205; among slaves, 78, 86. See also family; household; kinship marronnage, 80, 89, 124 Martinique: British invasion of, 199; relations to metropole, 107–10; settlement of, 3–4; slaves sold to, 75; slave uprising in, of 1789, 168; social classes of, compared to Saint-Domingue, 27 Marx, Karl, 6, 203 medicine, 87, 207. See also plantation hospital merchants, 196; collaboration with state, 8, 26–27, 105, 113, 133, 204, 207, 209, 212; relations with planters, 7, 120, 127–28, 205, 209, 216 (see also credit; debt); of Saint-Domingue, 9, 145; social assent and ennoblement, 22–23, 26, 34, 39; and structures of French commercial empire, 15–16, 108– 9, 122, 165; transfer of sugar refi ning technology by, 4, 47; during wartime, 111–12 Merillon, Jean-Françoise, 39, 180, 196– 98, 217–22 militarized agriculture, 151, 182, 185– 87, 190, 207– 8. See also cultivators; Louverture, Toussaint

Index military commanders, of Saint-Domingue: d’Argout, 13; Ennery, 116; Étienne-Louis Ferronnays, 28–29, 32, 110–11, 115–16, 133, 142; Vaivre, 113 militias, 126, 134–35, 178, 180 millet, 114, 116, 118 ministerial despotism, 9–10, 60, 125, 135, 178. See also authority: metropolitan, over Saint-Domingue; Creoles: confl ict with metropole Ministry of the Navy. See France, Ministry of the Navy molasses, 49, 61, 63. See also rum Montesquieu, Charles Secondat de, 81, 90, 93, 200, 210 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Méderic Louis Elie, 56–57, 135, 148, 155 mortality, 219; child, among slaves, 85; crises, 2, 91; among slaves, 7, 208. See also death: premature, among slaves; demography mules: destruction of, during civil war in Saint-Domingue, 173; feeding of, 118; rolling mill powered by, 48, 58, 65; seizure of, for nonpayment of debts, 56; used in carting, 54, 205 muscovado sugar, 51, 61, 64, 66– 67, 119. See also sugar, raw Nago, 76–77 Nantes: agricultural hinterland of, 18–22; Arnous and Sons, merchants of, 166; and commercial revolution, 16–17, 24–25; merchants of, 7, 27–28, 39, 104, 127–28, 205, 213; relative decline of, against Bordeaux, 30 Napoleon. See Bonaparte, Napoleon National Assembly. See France, National Assembly National Convention. See France, National Convention naval blockade, 67, 110, 124, 152 Navigation Acts, 108. See also trading regimes Netherlands, 2, 4, 47, 75, 115 New Orleans, 193, 197– 98, 218–22 Newton, Isaac, 95, 99 New York, 111, 193 Nicolle (domestic slave), 98, 101, 103 Noailles, Jean-Baptiste Louis Guy de, 55, 111 nobility: agricultural investments and practices, 21; bourgeois assimilation into,

259

23–24, 34, 39; and colonial administration and defense, 26–27; dominance in provincial cities, 30; as émigrés during French Revolution, 12, 164– 66, 186– 87, 201– 6; immigration to Saint-Domingue, 25; and indemnity of 1825, 213–15; industrial and commercial investments, 23–24; manners and views, 136, 151; marriage with Saint-Domingue Creoles, 28–29, 135, 141, 155; military versus administrative, 17; as plantation owners in Saint-Domingue, 11; privileges of, 38, 133, 181, 200; provincial, 1, 20; relations with bourgeoisie, 125; and restoration of Bourbon monarchy, 192, 200, 210, 218, 220; royal patents granting, 64; wealth and social divisions among, 9, 18–22. See also aristocracy; privilege Nolivos, Pierre Gédéon de, 111, 113–34 Northern Province of Saint-Domingue: abolition of slavery in, 185; agricultural technique in, 53; Étienne-Louis Ferronnays in, 28–29, 135–36; post-abolition labor regime imposed in, 185 (see also militarized agriculture); prevalence of clayed sugar production in, 61; property of Paul Ferronnays in, 205; slave uprising of August 1791 in, 135, 171, 174–75 North Plain of Saint-Domingue, 5, 27, 161, 171, 193 nutrition, 74, 86, 115, 179. See also food; subsistence ostentation. See luxury overseers: approach to discipline of, 82; in boiling house, 63– 64; democratic control over, during French Revolution, 180– 82; on Ferronnays plantation, 79, 98; in plantation management hierarchy, 36. See also attorneys; military commanders, of Saint-Domingue; slave commanders overwork, 68, 74, 86, 88, 128 owners, absentee. See absentee owners Paris: banking houses of, 210; MarieElisabeth Binau in, 154–58; Corbier family presence in, 35, 217; corruption and luxury in, 31, 97, 141, 151; and economic development in France, 16; Ferronnays family presence in, 30–35, 53, 84, 88, 140, 142; migration to Saint-Domingue

260

Index

Paris (continued) from, 24; as node of French colonial world, 12–13, 17, 57; police of, 152–53; Saint-Domingue planters in, 28–29, 60, 200; Treaty of, 109 passions: of Marie-Elisabeth Binau, 137–38; excesses of, without virtue, 93; mastery of, for efficient slave management, 81– 82, 99. See also Enlightenment; sentiment patriarchy: eighteenth- century, transformation, to paternalism, 74; and exploitation within family, 132; failures of, on plantation, 71–72; functions of, on plantation, 43–44, 99, 130, 180; and legal regimes, 141n18; Louverture and, 186– 87; and marriage, 139–40; Old Regime France as a, 155; and Old Regime policing, 92 patrimony: Cul de Sac plantation as, 68, 203, 215; in early-modern statecraft, 11, 130, 140; France’s, 225; and inheritance, 152; and reproduction of elites, 11, 15; risk to Ferronnays’, 38 patriotism: among colonists, 106, 110, 134, 185; among ex-slaves, 185, 187; as a political faction during French Revolution, 159. See also sentiment: national peasants: and agricultural productivity, 42– 43; ex-slaves of Saint-Domingue as, 11, 185, 188, 190, 212–13, 222; of France, 16, 20–21, 79 Pétion, Alexandre, 211, 213 petits blancs: ambitions of, 9, 36; during civil war in Saint-Domingue, 134, 170–72, 175; confl ict with, 129, 160 Philadelphia, 193– 94 physiocrats, 105– 6, 109 pity, 93, 95, 97, 100. See also sentiment; virtue plantains, 114–16 plantation complex: after abolition of slavery, 161– 63, 185, 210 (see also militarized agriculture); collaboration in maintaining, 40, 159, 192, 204; in Cuba, 196; during French Revolution, 172, 185, 201, 209; profitability of, 106, 193n3; reform for maintenance of, 73; rise of, 6–7, 40, 107; and Saint-Dominguan social dysfunction, 151; slaves and ex-slaves in, 161; warfare as central fact of, 108, 124. See also capitalism

plantation hospital: death of exhausted slaves in, 128; death of Narcissus in, 82; female labor in, 76–77; and reform of slavery, 87– 89, 91; special diet in, 118 plantation managers. See attorneys plantation system. See plantation complex planter class: confl ict with, 57, 124; during French Revolution, 115, 187, 193, 208; of Haiti, 212, 220; manners and views, 86; social domination by, 38; women of, 148, 160. See also grands blancs; Lords of Saint-Domingue planters, absentee. See absentee owners plots. See garden plots; sugarcane plots Pluchon, Pierre, 11 Polanyi, Karl, 131 police: in French Antilles, 208; mounted, 56; Old Regime idea of, 91– 92 (see also Enlightenment; government: of slaves; reason of state); of Paris, 152; of Santiago de Cuba, 196 Polverel, Étienne, 178, 182– 83, 207 population. See demography Port-au-Prince: Marie-Elisabeth Binau in, 133, 137, 143, 145, 150; coffee plantations near, 39; colonial officials in, 84; evacuation of whites from, 194; French Revolution in, 168, 170–75; geographical location, 1; High Council of, 56; petits blancs in, 39; social life, 133; uprising of 1768, 134–35 port cities, 16–17, 24–26, 30 potatoes. See sweet potatoes poverty: in France, 8, 16, 79n10, 97; among nobles, 18, 20, 24; as object of pity, 97; among populations of Europe, 15; in present-day Haiti, 224; and white status in Saint-Domingue, 148, 175 (see also petits blancs) préciput, 18, 26, 202, 215 prices: and choice of technique, 43; of coffee, 28; in Cuba after influx of French refugees, 196; of food, 118; of imports in general to colonies, 109, 113, 119; of land, 111; of medicine for slaves, 88; monopoly, 105; and planter indebtedness, 124; of slaves, 56, 67, 85, 150, 208, 219; of sugar, 28, 45, 60– 61, 112, 121, 127, 181n25. See also costs primogeniture, 202. See also inheritance; préciput privilege: economic, 8, 105; granted by

Index imperial powers, 130; of master class in Saint-Domingue, 8–10, 170; noble, 38, 142, 181, 200, 202, 216; of skilled plantation slaves, 67, 77–78. See also nobility procureur. See attorneys productivity: agricultural, in Europe, 20, 22, 42 (see also fertility: of soil); of canegrowing land, 51, 54; of labor, 69, 207 profit, 178; of colonies to imperial states, 105; maximization, 43, 139; on noble seigneuries, 21; of plantations, after abolition, 164; to planters, 7, 45, 132; sentiment and, 92, 95, 97; short-term versus long-term, 68, 73. See also profitability; revenue; surplus profitability: of plantation complex, 6n5, 192; of plantations, conditions of, 26, 42, 190, 207, 209–10, 215; and slaves’ well-being, 71–73. See also profit prostitutes, 98– 99, 148. See also sexuality: attributed to Saint-Dominguan women protection costs. See costs: of war and empire protein, 114–15, 118. See also nutrition public opinion, 137 racism, 159, 174, 188, 198– 99 Raimond, Julien, 171 raison d’état. See reason of state reason: and social improvement, 74, 90, 93– 94 (see also government: of slaves; humanity and interest; slavery: reform of); of state (see reason of state) reason of state, 91– 92, 94 redistribution of property, 183, 214 refi ning: equipment, 4; and fi rm structure in sugar industry, 50, 58 (see also fi rm structure); improvements to, 127, 132; process, 55, 69–75. See also boiling house reimposition of slavery, 183, 188, 190, 199, 200. See also Bonaparte, Napoleon religion: of Marie-Elisabeth Binau, 157; among émigré nobles, 186– 87; minorities and trade, 130; obligation to Christianize slaves, 86; toleration, 90, 94 rente and rentier, 214–15 rent-seeking, 106, 109. See also privilege repair (to plantation infrastructure), 49–50, 69, 27 Réunion, isle of, 179n22, 199 revenue: on coffee plantations owned by

261

Étienne-Louis Ferronnays, 28; effect of technique on, 51, 61, 116; of Haitian state, 211; on metropolitan estates, 20–21; plantation, accorded to ex-slaves, 183, 207– 8; reinvestment of, 46–47; share earned by plantation attorneys, 36; slaves’ well-being and, 91– 92, 103; on sugar plantations owned by ÉtienneLouis Ferronnays, 112, 120, 156n44, 164, 213. See also profit; surplus revolt: colonial, 110; popular, 126; slave, 8, 72, 194; slave, during civil war in SaintDomingue, 161, 175–77, 185, 191, 200 rice, 88, 114, 116, 123 Richepance, Antoine, 200. See also reimposition of slavery Rigaud, André, 207 rolling mill: female slaves’ role in operation of, 76; and fi rm structure in sugar industry, 50; improvements to, 68, 124; role in sugar refi ning, 47–59, 61– 62; water to power (see water: need for in sugar production) Roume, Philippe, 179, 181 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: and cult of sentiment, 93– 94 (see also sentiment); influence on epistolary practice, 96; works of, 97, 100 royalism, 159, 162, 174, 178–79. See also legitimism rum, 61. See also molasses Rural Code, 163, 207. See also militarized agriculture. Saint Mars la Jaille: Jean-Baptiste Corbier, residence in, 35, 37; Ferronnays family in, 18, 20–21, 202–3, 213–14, 218, 221; present-day, 224 Saint Pierre, Jacques-Bernadin-Henri de, 97 salted beef, 114, 116. See also protein; salted meats salted meats, 115, 124, 149. See also protein; salted beef samedi nègre. See slaves’ Saturday Santiago de Cuba, 3, 191, 193– 97 Sartine, Antoine de, 32, 143, 152 Schumpeter, Joseph, 6 science: and Enlightenment, 94; fads, 154; knowledge and plantation management, 61, 64, 88, 90– 91; and racism, 188 seigneurie, 20–21, 32, 202. See also landed wealth; nobility; privilege

262

Index

seizure: of armaments by black insurgents, 194; of property during French Revolution, 194, 211, 214 (see also biens nationaux; sequestration of property); of property for debt, 56, 121, 156, 216 (see also debt); of ships, 112, 150, 152 self-interest, 57–58, 92, 95, 110, 187. See also egotism; vanity self-sufficiency: of labor, within plantation, 65, 69; in peasant agriculture, 43; of plantation, as social unit, 43, 46, 72, 124; of subsistence, on plantation, 69, 72, 195 (see also latifundia). See also household: plantation as sensibilité. See sentiment sentiment: in abolitionist texts, 101n47; and authority, 102; and Enlightenment culture, 92– 93; and family, 132, 137; national, 108 (see also patriotism); and reform of slavery, 73–74, 94–102; of respect, 81; among slave owners, 10; and trust, 204. See also virtue separation of property and household, 140– 41, 154–57 sequestration of property, 96, 166– 67, 182– 83, 201, 206. See also biens nationaux servile labor: population, in SaintDomingue, 107, 171; and social status, 102. See also labor: servile; slavery; slaves Seven Years’ War: changes in SaintDomingue following, 41, 72, 134– 35; Cuba, growth of following, 195; economic changes in Anjou following, 25; French Antilles during, 109–12; immigration to Saint-Domingue following, 36; and imperial confl ict of eighteenth century, 106; reform to French colonial administration following, 9, 73, 125; reform to plantation slavery and racial laws following, 102, 170 sexuality: attributed to Saint-Dominguan women, 147–48, 150; of Marie-Elisabeth Binau, 143; of Étienne-Louis Ferronnays, 37, 136; initiation into, of Pierre-Jacques Corbier, 99–100; among slaves, 86; of whites with slaves, 98, 101 sharecropping 21, 50, 196 sirop. See molasses slave commanders, 58, 77–78, 80– 82, 83, 173 slave garden. See garden plots slavery: abolition (see abolition of slavery);

apologists for, 79, 204; and capitalism, 6 (see also capitalism; plantation complex); in Cuba versus Saint-Domingue, character of, 195; as fi xture of Old Regime society, 11, 181, 200–210, 213; in historiography of French Revolution, 11; influence on Creole society, 139, 149; maintenance of, 10, 159, 171, 198; manumission from (see manumission); and post-abolition Saint-Domingue and Haiti (see militarized agriculture); reform of, 7– 8, 70, 72–74, 89– 97, 103–4; reimposition of (see reimposition of slavery); reparations for, 225. See also labor: forced; labor: servile; slaves slaves: differences of skills among, 76–78 (see also division of labor); discipline of, 80– 85 (see also slavery: reform of); disease among (see disease: among slaves); employment of, in sugarcane cultivation, 50–53 (see also sugarcane cultivation); field (see field slaves); ideas of freedom held by, 100, 168; importation of, to Americas, 42, 110 (see also African slaves: importation figures); as investment, 2, 43, 65, 68–71, 111, 128– 29; marriage among, 78, 86; prices (see prices: of slaves); regulation of, by Code Noir (see Code Noir); sexual exploitation of, 98, 100, 148; subsistence (see food; garden plots); translation of French terminology for, 1n; uprisings of, 135, 168, 171, 174–78 (see also revolt: slave, during civil war in Saint-Domingue); versus paid labor, considerations dictating use of, 53, 67; water stealing by, 58. See also female slaves slaves, female. See female slaves slaves, women. See female slaves slaves’ Saturday, 115 smallpox, 88, 136. See also vaccination Smith, Adam, 59, 93– 94, 105 Société des Amis des Noirs. See Society of the Friends of the Blacks Society of the Friends of the Blacks, 100, 169 soil exhaustion, 4–5, 50, 54. See also fertility Solothurn, Switzerland, 164– 65 Sonthonax, Léger Félicité, 182– 83, 185, 207– 8 South Carolina, 123 Southern Province of Saint-Domingue, 5, 85, 174, 182, 204 southern United States. See Lower South

Index Spain: empire of, 41, 106; Louverture and, 161– 62; possessions in Caribbean of, 1–2; relations to France, 162, 193– 97; sale of slaves to, 75; Santo-Domingo, colony of, 84, 118 Strauss, Claude Lévi, 99 subsistence: agriculture, among ex-slaves, 188, 212 (see also peasants); agriculture, in Europe, 16, 43 (see also peasants); crises, 79, 113; gardens, cultivated by slaves, 82, 179, 182 (see also garden plots); goods (see subsistence goods); minima, stipulated by Code Noir, 44; of slaves, during wartime, 114–16, 118, 122–23. See also food subsistence goods: imported from overseas, 4, 42; prices of, 109, 121; produced on plantation, 3, 52; production, diversion of cane land to, 50 sugar: colonies (see Antilles; British West Indies; French Antilles); cultivation (see sugarcane cultivation); industry (see sugar industry); plantation (see infrastructure: plantation; infrastructure: plantation, destruction of; sugar plantations); prices (see prices: of sugar); processing (see boiling house; refi ning; rolling mill; technical expertise: in sugar refi ning; technique: in sugar refi ning); production and export trends, 4, 6–7, 111–12, 163, 172, 176, 180, 207– 8; production and producers as dominant force in Saint-Domingue, 134–35; sales, 46, 11, 120–21, 165, 206; taxation on, 212; as tropical export crop, 4, 15, 42, 115; types (see clayed sugar; muscovado sugar; sugar, raw; sugar, white) sugar, raw, 25, 51, 51, 172, 208. See also muscovado sugar sugar, white, 67, 122, 124. See also clayed sugar sugar boiling. See boiling house; refi ning sugarcane cultivation: allocation of land to, 58, 116; on Cul de Sac plain, 56; improvements in, 53–54; organization of plantation for, 50; resistance of ex-slaves to, 185; and soil exhaustion, 4 (see also fertility; soil exhaustion) sugarcane plots, 49–53 sugarcane processing. See boiling house; refi ning sugar industry, 50, 60; Cuban, 195– 96;

263

French, 9, 27, 47, 49, 124; of Louisiana, 198, 219; revival of, during civil war of Saint-Domingue, 162– 63, 184– 86, 199, 201. See also plantation complex sugar plantations: centrality of rolling mill to, 47; consolidation of, 4, 9, 45–46, 129 (see also land: and growth of plantation size; Lords of Saint-Domingue); Ferronnays family, on the Cul de Sac plain, 1– 2, 28, 38, 47, 72, 96, 109; Ferronnays family, on the North plain, 29, 38; model, 50–52; number of, in Saint-Domingue, 9; size, in Antilles, 75; values of, in Saint Domingue, 27 sugar refi ning. See refi ning suicide, 75, 83, 85, 87, 172 Suisses (Saint-Domingue insurgents), 175–76 surplus: absorption of, by management, 45; capture of, on plantation, 209, 213; diversion of, 7, 27, 40; reality of, for plantation complex, 106n2. See also profit; revenue sweet potatoes, 114, 116, 118 Switzerland, 14, 164– 65 sympathy. See pity syndicate. See irrigation syndicate taxes: enlightened despotism and, 91, 106; export, levied by Haiti, 212; and irrigation works, 56–57; on manumission of slaves, 158; noble exemption from, 22, 39 (see also privilege); paid by Ferronnays family in France, 18–19; paid by nobility, in nineteenth-century France, 214; paid by planters, 125, 205, 208– 9; Saint-Domingue constitution of 1801 and, 189; on slave imports, 132 technical expertise, 195; and organization of agriculture, 21; in sugar refi ning, 42, 44, 63– 65, 67, 72. See also technique technique: agricultural, 43, 53–54, 73; of government, enlightened, 90; managerial, 6, 71, 92, 103; in sugar refi ning, 43, 53–54, 64– 69, 73, 123n26. See also technical expertise terror: campaign of, desired to put down slave rebellion, 177–78, 189; over plantation slaves, 67, 172; Reign of, during French Revolution, 126, 166, 187 theft, 59, 114–15, 118 Thellusson Brothers & Co., merchants, 204– 6, 217

264

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Thimothée, Siriac, 145–46, 152n37, 154, 158–59 Thirteen Colonies. See Colonies of British North America Thistlewood, Thomas, 13, 81, 83, 102 torture, 44, 83, 94, 181 trade: contraband, 85, 133; family networks and, 130–31; foreign and overseas, 7– 8, 15–18, 105, 151; between Haiti and France, 1; in medical services, 87; noble participation in, 22–24; restrictions among early modern empires, 108, 134, 169; slave, 4, 39, 75, 78n9, 165, 199, 225; and the state, 11; triangular, 30; during wartime, 122, 125, 189. See also commerce trading companies, 23, 105, 130. See also East India Company; India Company trading networks, 131 trading regimes, 109–10, 209. See also Exclusive; Navigation Acts Troussey, Jean-Baptiste, 152–53 United States, Southern. See Lower South United States of America: as destination of fleeing Saint-Dominguan planters, 180; diplomatic relations with Haiti, 189, 210; and French criticism of empire, 106; Louisiana purchase, 191, 198, 211. See also Colonies of British North America utility, 79, 83, 94. See also Enlightenment; police vaccination, 88. See also smallpox vagabondage, 182, 184, 186, 188. See also marronnage Vaivre, Jean-Bapitiste Guillemin de, 113, 116 Valdec, Julien Claude, 111, 139, 209 Valentin de Cullion, Claude-François, 159 vanity, 92, 101. See also egotism; self-interest Vaudreuil, Joseph-Hyacinthe de Rigaud marquis de, 55, 66 venal office, 22, 30, 38, 142, 216. See also privilege Versailles, 20, 30 violence: of empire, 105; during French Revolution, 12, 161, 163– 64, 170–78, 193; hidden, of Bourbon restoration, 210; in management of slaves, 59, 74; on plantation, reduction of unproductive forms of, 71, 81– 82, 103; of Saint-Dominguan

planter class, 38, 86, 197; of SaintDominguan society, 2, 11, 106–7, 132, 135, 197; over water distribution, 57–58. See also cruelty Virey, Julien-Joseph, 188 virtue: according to Louverture, 187; according to Mandeville, 93; bourgeois, 38, 150; in master-slave relationship, 81– 82, 93–103; in Saint-Dominguan society, or lack thereof, 134, 148, 150–51. See also sentiment War of American Independence, 64, 91, 106–10, 119–26, 152. See also Colonies of British North America; United States of America water, 108; as byproduct of sugar refi ning, 61, 63; distribution among planters, 56–57; need for in sugar production, 45, 56, 65 (see also irrigation); stealing among planters and their slaves, 58; water-powered cane rolling mill (see rolling mill); water-powered grain mill, monopolies on, 21 (see also privilege). See also irrigation water commission, 56–57. See also irrigation; irrigation syndicate; water water syndicate. See irrigation syndicate Western Province of Saint-Domingue, 4–5, 24, 80, 162, 171– 85, 206 West Indies, 42–44, 47, 61, 102 wheat, 224. See also grain wheat flour, 113–14, 116. See also bread wine, 25, 113, 116–18 women: Bovaryism among, 138; of color, sexuality, 150–51; Creole, attitudes and manners, 147–48; Creole, marriage and domestic power among, 29, 98, 136, 140; among émigré nobles, 202; in historiography of French Revolution, 12; with property, rights accruing to, 155; slaves (see female slaves). See also gender women slaves. See female slaves world economy, 11, 42, 44, 130. See also market yield: agricultural, 42, 51, 54, 63, 69, 116 (see also productivity: agricultural, in Europe); on investments, 53, 215 (see also profit; revenue)