Abstract
This chapter explores the preoccupation of the late eighteenth-century French colonial world with the racial “purity” of families identifying as “white,” particularly within the contentious context of shifting categories of citizenship and belonging during the era of the French and Haitian Revolutions. Focusing on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion, this study uncovers how families of mixed European and African, Malagasy, and/or Indian heritage (who formed the majority of those categorized as “white” in the colony) used state paperwork to shore up their claims to whiteness throughout much of the eighteenth century. These actions had not only been tolerated but actively facilitated by officials in the colony, from the parish militia commanders responsible for collecting census declarations to the intendants tasked with aggregating population data for the Ministry of the Marine; all were eager to generate the impression of a robust, populous, and neatly ordered colonial society. These dynamics produced a gendered local convention whereby free women of color acquired legal white status through marriage to European men, who, in turn, benefited from access to their in-laws’ property and networks. However, as the French and Haitian Revolutions unfolded, a backlash emerged against this convention and its most recent beneficiaries. Newly empowered, European and Creole citizens joined forces to consolidate privileges for those already considered white by social consensus and erect barriers both to rights-seeking free men of color and women of color attempting to use traditional channels for upward mobility through cross-racial marriage. Bourbon Island’s traditionally capacious definition of whiteness gave way to a more restrictive one gaining ascendance throughout the French colonial world going into the nineteenth century.
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Notes
- 1.
Today the most populous of France’s overseas départements, Réunion Island has borne several names. At first known as Mascarin, after the Portuguese mariner Pedro Mascarenhas (and the namesake of “Mascarene Islands,” the modern name for the whole archipelago), the uninhabited island was renamed “Bourbon” when claimed for France in 1649. In 1793, the National Convention changed its name to Réunion. In 1806, it was renamed Bonaparte for the Emperor of France. When the British occupied the colony in 1810, they reinstated “Bourbon,” which endured after its retrocession to France in 1815. It has been called Réunion since the Revolution of 1848. Here, I use “Bourbon” for the period prior to the local Colonial Assembly’s adoption of the new name on February 10, 1794. I usually use “Isle de France” when referring to Mauritius, as the island was known until the British conquest of 1810.
- 2.
“Extrait des délibérations de la Municipalité de Saint-Denis.” 2 February 1792. Archives départementales de La Réunion (hereafter, ADR), L335. The documents refer to the “Salle de spectacle des fantoccinis français,” a marionette show popular in France and its colonies, which usually featured physical comedy. Beginning in the 1770s, seating was segregated in Saint-Domingue’s theaters, while it had not been before on Bourbon Island. See David Geggus, “The Slaves and Free People of Color of Cap François,” in The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade, ed. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 101–21. Theaters could often become sites of conflict over honor, race, and social position in France’s colonies. See Lauren Clay, Stagestruck: The Business of Theater in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Colonies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 195–224; Claude Wanquet, “Aspects culturels de la société réunionnaise au XVIIIe siècle,” in Le Mouvement des idées dans l’océan Indien occidental: actes de la table ronde de Saint-Denis, 23–28 juin 1982 (Saint-Denis: Association historique internationale de l’océan Indien, 1985), 399–433.
- 3.
This document survives as “Copie de la Requête Présentée à la Municipalité de St. Denis Par les Nommés Méchard, Luc Marsique, Malbeste, Pierre Badet et Jacques le Comte, le 6 février 1792.” ADR L335. Municipal officers filed this document as using the term “nommés,” rather than the more respectful honorifics “messieurs” or “citoyens.”
- 4.
“Copie de la Requête Présentée à la Municipalité de St. Denis.” ADR L335.
- 5.
For an in-depth discussion of these gendered dynamics, see Jennifer Heuer, “The One-Drop Rule in Reverse? Interracial Marriages in Napoleonic and Restoration France,” Law and History Review 27, no. 3 (2009): 515–48.
- 6.
Article V, “Lettres patentes en forme d’édit concernant les esclaves nègres des Isles de France et de Bourbon,” December 1723, registered by the Conseil Supérieur of Bourbon on 18 September 1724. Article LI declared “affranchis (freedpersons) and nègres libres (free blacks) incapable of receiving bequests from whites.” Code des îles de France et de Bourbon, Deuxième Édition (Port-Louis: Tristan Mallac, 1826), I: 247–52. The fifth article, banning intermarriage, echoed an earlier prohibition from 1674: “Art. 20: Deffenses aux francais d’Epouser des Négresses, cela dégouteroit les noirs du Service, et Deffenses aux Noirs d’épouser des Blanches, c’est une confusion à éviter.” 1 December 1674. Archives Nationales d'Outre-Mer (hereafter, ANOM), 6DPPC 2707.
- 7.
Letter of the Vicar-Apostolic, Contenot, to the Minister of the Marine, Isle de France, 25 September 1771. ANOM F5 A 32/5. The “ordonnance concernant la police des noirs,” issued on 29 September 1767, ordered the republication and execution of the original Lettres Patentes of December 1723. Jean-Baptiste Etienne Delaleu, ed., Code des Iles de France et de Bourbon [1777], Deuxième Édition, vol. I (Port-Louis: Tristan Mallac & Cie., 1826), 212.
- 8.
Mélanie Lamotte, “Economic Developments and the Growth of Colour Prejudice in the French Empire, c. 1635–1767” (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 2015).
- 9.
For the genealogies of each, in the order in which they appear here, see Lucien Jacques Camille Ricquebourg, Dictionnaire généalogique des familles de l’île Bourbon (La Réunion) 1665–1810, 3 vols. (Mayenne: Imprimerie de la Manutention, 1983), 2766, 1650, 1904, 1838 (the identity of the wife of one petitioner, Badet, does not feature in this collection). Each of these women (or their mothers) appear with only a given name in the record; Marie Josèphe is explicitly recorded as “affranchie” (freedwoman).
- 10.
According to the general census of 1787, Bourbon Island counted 1,029 people as “Libres” (along with 8,182 “blancs” and 42,588 enslaved people, universally glossed as “noirs.” The Libre population was divided into 281 households, headed for the most-part by men or women described as Creoles (69%); 21% were of South Asian provenance (recorded, variously, as “Lascard,” “Malabar,” “Bengale,” “Indien,” or as hailing from São Thomé, Goa, or Pondichéry); two were Southeast Asians, described as “Malais”; freeborn men and women from Madagascar (5%) and the African continent (2%) constituted smaller minorities; 2% were native to Isle de France and were not associated with an ethnic identifier; 1% had unidentified origins. “Recensement général de l’Isle Bourbon.” ANOM, G1/480.
- 11.
“Copie de la Requête Présentée à la Municipalité de St. Denis…” ADR L335.
- 12.
Myriam Paris, “La page blanche. Genre, esclavage et métissage dans la construction de la trame coloniale (La Réunion, XVIIIe–XIXe siècle),” Les cahiers du CEDREF, no. 14 (January 1, 2006): 31–51.
- 13.
Miranda Frances Spieler, “The Legal Structure of Colonial Rule During the French Revolution,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 66, no. 2 (April 1, 2009): 365.
- 14.
Deliberations of the Colonial Assembly, 18 December 1790, ADR L319/3.
- 15.
Historians have shown that Isle de France’s Colonial Assembly had been much more amenable to Libres’ demands (as well as their apparent commitment to helping to maintain the subordination of the enslaved). Raymond D’Unienville, Histoire politique de l’Isle de France, 1791–1794, vol. II (Port-Louis: Mauritius Archives Publications, 1982), 57–58; M. D. North-Coombes, Studies in the Political Economy of Mauritius (Moka, Mauritius: Mahatma Gandhi Institute, 2000).
- 16.
Guillaume Aubert, “‘Nègres ou mulâtres nous sommes tous Français’: Race, genre et nation à Gorée et à Saint-Louis du Sénégal, fin XVIIe-fin XVIIIe siècle,” in Français ?: La nation en débat entre colonies et métropole (XVIe–XIXe siècle), ed. Cécile Vidal (Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2014), 125–47; Adrian Carton, Mixed-Race and Modernity in Colonial India (Hoboken: Taylor & Francis, 2012), 80–116; Yvan Debbasch, Couleur et liberté. Le jeu de critère ethnique dans un ordre juridique esclavagiste (Paris: Dalloz, 1967); Léo Élisabeth, “Gens de couleur et révolution dans les îles du Vent (1789-janvier 1793),” in La Révolution française et les colonies, ed. Jean Tarrade (Paris: Société d’histoire d’Outre-mer; L’Harmattan, 1989), 107–24; John D. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Florence Gauthier, L’aristocratie de l’épiderme: le combat de la Société des citoyens de couleur, 1789–1791 (Paris: CNRS éditions, 2007).
- 17.
A notable recent exception is Sabine Noël, Amours et familles interdites: Blancs et Noirs à l’île Bourbon (La Réunion) au temps de l’esclavage (1665–1848) (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2022). Frédéric Régent, “Le métissage des premières générations de colons en Guadeloupe et à l’Île Bourbon (Réunion),” in Mariage et métissage dans les sociétés coloniales: Amériques, Afrique et Iles de l’Océan Indien (XVIe–XXe siècles) (Bern: Peter Lang, 2015), 111–32.
- 18.
Nivoelisoa Galibert, À l’angle de la Grande Maison: les lazaristes de Madagascar, correspondance avec Vincent de Paul: 1648–1661 (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2007), 19–21; Solofo Randrianja and Stephen Ellis, Madagascar: A Short History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 67–69.
- 19.
Letter from Caulier to the Superior of the Congrégation de la Mission, Bourbon, 1764, ACM, Registre 1504, f. 55.
- 20.
This was the estimate given by Cossigny de Charpentier (commandant of Bourbon) to d’Entrecasteaux (governor-general), Saint-Denis, 8 July 1788, ADR L93. Analysis of an early census reveals that 72% of adult whites born on the island had at least one Malagasy or Indian grandparent; the rest had exclusively European heritage. “Recensement de 1711,” ANOM, G1/477.
- 21.
Trevor G. Burnard and John D. Garrigus, The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 18, 68, 137.
- 22.
For example, in 1770, the financial commissioner (ordonnateur), Honoré de Crémont, sent a dispatch to the Minister of the Marine warning of the potential perils of appointing Jean Vally to the post of conseiller for the simple reason that his wife’s family “numbers among those known locally as families of mixed blood (vulgairement connues sous le titre de familles de sang melé).” Crémont to Praslin, Saint Denis, 15 March 1770. ANOM C313, pièce 85.
- 23.
Ricquebourg, Dictionnaire généalogique, 2812–13; Sue Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
- 24.
“Recensement de lille de Bourbon en 1713,” ANOM G1/477.
- 25.
Anonymous, “Mémoire sur l'Isle de Bourbon [c. 1787],” f. 10v. ANOM C3/20, Pièce 66.
- 26.
Lorelle Semley, To Be Free and French: Citizenship in France’s Atlantic Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 7.
- 27.
André Scherer, Histoire de La Réunion (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1965), 19.
- 28.
In 1787 women and girls made up 48% of the total white population on Bourbon; 47% in 1788. “Récapitulation…,” ADR L139. Frédéric Régent has examined “the fabrication of whites” in France’s colonies, finding that the category developed and grew “through repeated unions of people of color with whites permitting individuals who seemed white to obtain that status.” Early colonial officials even encouraged this process, in order to establish a solid settler society, until sex ratios evened out within the white population. Frédéric Régent, “La fabrication des Blancs dans les colonies françaises,” in De quelle couleur sont les blancs? Des «petits Blancs» des colonies au «racisme anti-Blancs», ed. Sylvie Laurent and Thierry Leclère (Paris: La Découverte, 2013), 67–75.
- 29.
Bourbon differed from Isle de France in this respect. There, women of color almost never married white men; instead, they formed informal partnerships with them, often acting as ménagères, or plantation household managers. See Pier M. Larson, “Fragments of an Indian Ocean Life: Aristide Corroller Between Islands and Empires,” Journal of Social History 45, no. 2 (December 1, 2011): 366–89; Richard B. Allen, “Marie Rozette and Her World: Class, Ethnicity, Gender, and Race in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Mauritius,” Journal of Social History 45, no. 2 (December 15, 2011): 345–65; Megan Vaughan, Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 152–77.
- 30.
Courcy and de Souillac to Davelu, Saint Denis, 24 July 1778. ADR 20C, f37–39 (emphasis mine).
- 31.
The white section of the census declaration of one Creole planter of partial Malagasy and Indian ancestry includes only himself. A woman and her son are recorded as “citizens of color living with him,” and are likely his partner and child. “Recensement du Citoyen Joseph Guillaume Delalande, habitant de la paroisse St Denis pour l’année 1794 Vieux stile.” ADR L140.
- 32.
Letters of Duverger (ordonnateur of Bourbon) to Dupuy (intendant of the Isles de France and Bourbon), 9 May and 3 November 1790, ADR L94. Duverger’s full name was Pierre Rathier-Duverger; he had previously held posts in Louisiana and on Isle de France. Two of his daughters married into the prominent Routier family (of exclusively European heritage) on Bourbon during the Revolution, with one obtaining a divorce in 1795. See Sue Peabody, Madeleine’s Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets, and Lies in France’s Indian Ocean Colonies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 74.
- 33.
Anne Perotin-Dumon, La Ville Aux Iles, La Ville Dans l’ile: Basse-Terre et Pointe-a-Pitre, Guadeloupe, 1650–1820 (Paris: Karthala, 2000), 689.
- 34.
For more on these numbers, see “Appendix.”
- 35.
Louise Françoise had been married previously, to a Libre man known only as Paulin, and was recorded as a widow when she married Malbeste in the parish church of Saint-Denis on 26 September 1791. They had one son together. See Lucien Jacques Camille Ricquebourg, Dictionnaire généalogique des familles de l’île Bourbon (La Réunion) 1665–1810 (Mayenne: Imprimerie de la Manutention, 1983), 1820, 2765, 2766. Little is known of Louise Françoise's grandfather, François Ticot, except that he was born around 1719, exercised the trade of blacksmith, and married Gracieuse a free “Malabare” (South Asian) woman. Their son, François fils, had apparently been born on Isle de France before moving to Saint-Denis and marrying Geneviève Charlotte, the manumitted daughter of an enslaved servant named Louison. He and his father declared ownership over six slaves on the 1787 general census of Bourbon Island. Perhaps because of their service to the church, the local curé described members of their family with the respectful honorifics sieur, dame, and demoiselle. Malbeste’s father-in-law was among the most prominent signers of a 1792 petition of Libres to the Colonial Assembly, requesting the right to choose officers from among their own ranks. His family connections on Isle de France inspired him to follow the (successful) example of that island’s Libre community in seeking civil rights. He was, along with Ramalinga and Azy, among the few to sign with a surname, implying freeborn heritage. “Copie d’une Adresse envoyé a l’Assemblée Coloniale Signée de plusieurs Noirs Libres en datte du 13 Juin 1792.” ADR L319/3. The text of the February 6 Petition gestured to the importance of Malbeste’s connections to his in-laws in referring to the authors as “White European citizens married (alliés) to people of color,” using the masculine plural, or neutral, form of the noun. “Copie de la Requête,” ADR L335.
- 36.
Ricquebourg, 2766–67. Marie Olimpe Ticot’s death notice, signed by several of her French in-laws, can be found in the “actes de décès des personnes de la population blanche.” ANOM IREL, St-Denis, 12 April 1812, f. 25v.
- 37.
ANOM IREL Etat-Civil, Réunion, St-André, 1789, f. 9.
- 38.
“Récensement du Sr. Jacques Le Comte habitant du quartier St denis pour l’année 1791,” 1 February 1792, No. 217. ADR L140 (Declarations individuelles de la région du vent: 1791–1795, St-Denis).
- 39.
The notary who recorded the 1795 census declaration of another European immigrant, Auguste Maniquet, listed him and his wife, “Louise Créole,” (daughter of a formerly enslaved woman named Marine) as “Blancs,” followed by their four children and two slaves. “Petit Recensement de Maniquet,” ADR L140. Their marriage record is in ANOM IREL, Saint Denis, 1786, f. 6r. Generally in the colonies, so-called “petits recensement” declarations were usually filled out by the householder before being collected by the local commandant and gathered into the “general census” tabulations submitted annually by each colony’s financial commissioner (intendant or ordonnateur). See Fanny Malègue, “L’empire en tableaux,” Histoire & mesure XXXIII, no. 2 (December 31, 2018): 93–114.
- 40.
Celestin Payet, “Ettat des habitant Portant armes de La Paroisse St. Joseph,” [undated, c. 1790–1], ADR L413. Jean Louis Kerbidie, a Breton immigrant; his wife Marcelline; and their children had all been counted on the white sections of vital records since the couple married in 1748, eight years after Marceline’s emancipation. ANOM IREL Etat-Civil, Saint-Paul, 1748.
- 41.
ANOM C3/21, Pièce 96. Letter of Duverger to the Minister of the Marine, Saint-Denis, 31 May 1791.
- 42.
Quoted in Claude Wanquet, Histoire d’une Révolution. La Réunion, 1789–1803, vol. I (Marseille: Éditions Jeanne Laffitte, 1980), 319–20. Wanquet places the date of this document between late 1790 and August 1791. I have not been able to locate the document in ADR L9, where it is supposed to be deposited.
- 43.
Claude Wanquet, Histoire d’une Révolution. La Réunion, 1789–1803, vol. III (Marseille: Éditions Jeanne Laffitte, 1980), 316, 598.
- 44.
Report by Dioré, c. 1791. Quoted in Wanquet, Histoire d’une Révolution. La Réunion, 1789–1803, 1980, I:745.
- 45.
As a percentage of white householders, Bourbon Creoles made up 30% in Saint Denis and 71% in Saint Paul. “Recensement général de l’Isle Bourbon.” ANOM G1/480.
- 46.
Article V, in “Pétitions de la Colonie de Bourbon à l’Assemblée Nationale.” 21 April 1791. ADR L307.
- 47.
On the debates in Paris over civil rights for free people of color, see Florence Gauthier, L’aristocratie de l’épiderme: le combat de la Société des citoyens de couleur, 1789–1791 (Paris: CNRS éditions, 2007). In the context of these debates, Abbé Grégoire presented the Mascarenes as evidence of a French colonial region with no “color prejudice,” to which Moreau de Saint-Méry, writing under a pseudonym, responded that, “after two centuries, the colonists of Bourbon have still not managed to prove that the women taken in Madagascar by the first settlers of the Island were freeborn and not slaves.” P. U. C. P. D. D. L. M., Observations d’un habitant des colonies sur le Mémoire en faveur des gens de couleur, ou sang-mêlés, de Saint-Domingue & des autres isles françoises de l’Amérique, adressé à l’Assemblée nationale, par M. Grégoire, curé d’Emberménil, député de Lorraine (Paris, 1789), 43. In May 1790, white men married to women of color (called mésalliés by their critics) were barred from active citizenship in Saint-Marc by ordinance of that municipality. Jean-Philippe Garran de Coulon, Rapport Sur Les Troubles de Saint-Domingue (Paris: Convention Nationale, 1796), II, 30.
- 48.
Duverger reported to the Ministry of the Marine that the “Pétitions à l’Assemblée Nationale” had not been made public. ANOM C3/21, Pièce 96.
- 49.
Guillou, “Instructions Simples, Par demandes et Par reponses.” ADR L319/3, Pièce 20.
- 50.
Guillou’s statement to the Officers of Justice of the Municipality of Saint-Denis and to the Conseil Supérieur of Bourbon was given on 21 July 1792, ADR L319/3. He claimed at one point to have a stake in a great fortune in the French Antilles, which he had somehow lost, preventing him from leaving the island. He worked as a manager on a plantation in the Bourbon countryside for a time, but returned to the capital.
- 51.
Guillou, “Addresse aux habitans de Bourbon,” undated. ADR L319/3, Pièce 10.
- 52.
After repeatedly being rejected by the Assemblée Coloniale, fifty men from the Libre community in Saint-Denis hired Guillou to write a new petition on their behalf. “[Pétition] au nom de 1200-1500 Libres…à l’assemblée de Saint-Denis” 13 September 1790, ADR L5.
- 53.
Letter of Guillou to the Municipality of Saint-Denis, 11 February 1792. ADR L319/3, Pièce 11.
- 54.
Ricquebourg, Dictionnaire généalogique, 1234.
- 55.
Deliberations of the Municipality of Saint-Denis. 9 February 1792. ADR L335.
- 56.
Guillou to the Municipality of Saint-Denis (Draft letter, undated). ADR L319/3, Pièce 8.
- 57.
“Rapport succinct de l'affaire concernant les Sieurs Chevalier, Guillou Dubertin et Ozanne avec les motifs de l'arret contr'eux rendu le 32 juillet dernier Remis à monsieur le commissaire civil [Tirol] sur sa demande, par le procureur général du roi [Azéma] au conseil supérieur de l'isle de Bourbon.” St-Denis, 25 October 1792, ANOM C3/21, p. 9v.
- 58.
Claude Wanquet, Les premiers députés de la Réunion à l’Assemblée nationale: quatre insulaires en Révolution, 1790–1798 (Paris: Karthala, 1992).
- 59.
Tirol to the Minister of the Marine, Saint-Denis, 10 April 1793. ANOM C 3/ 22, Pièce 13.
- 60.
Ricquebourg, Dictionnaire généalogique, 1820.
- 61.
Antoine Parny (president du Comité administrative) à l’accusateur publique, St Denis, 14 Nivose an X [4 January 1802]. ADR L75/6, p. 10.
- 62.
“The Assembly declares, in the name of the Colony, that it will never consent to the application of the Decree of 16 Pluviose, Year II, no matter the forms and modifications that may be proposed.” Notice by the “Comité Exécutif” of Réunion (26 February 1801) ANOM C4/153.
- 63.
On July 21, 1803, the Commission Intermédiaire suspended “tout mariage de blancs avec des gens de couleur jusqu’à l’arrivée des nouveaux administrateurs de la République.” ADR L46. Quoted in Wanquet, Histoire d’une Révolution, 1980, III:484.
- 64.
An arrêté of General Decaen, Île de France, 3 Pluviôse an XII [24 January 1804], banned the transfer of property from whites to people of color. See Recueil des lois publiées à Maurice depuis la dissolution de l’assemblée coloniale en 1803, sous le gouvernement du général Decaen, jusques à la fin de l’administration de Son Exc. sir R.T. Farquhar, en 1823 (Mauritius: Mallac Frères, 1824), 54. Articles LXVII–LXVIII of the “supplement au Code Civil” (23 October 1805) reiterated this ban.
- 65.
Bellier to Crespin (commissaire de justice), [date unspecified, after April 1806], “Observations sur differentes parties de l’administration judiciaire à l’île de la Réunion,” ANOM C325, Pièce 222A-B, p. 3.
- 66.
Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
- 67.
18 nivôse an VII (7 January 1799), ANOM IREL, St Denis, 1799, fol. 10; 5 germinal an XI (26 March 1803), ANOM IREL, St Denis, 1803, fol. 14.
- 68.
In the case of the 1806 marriage of Louis Julien Chartois and Marie Elizebette Libre, the groom, classified as blanc, was the legitimate son of a French military man and “Marie Marianne indienne”; the bride, Marie Elisabeth Chariapa was the goddaughter of an Indian man (the origin of her surname) and the daughter of two parents described as Libres. “Acte de mariage du Sieur Louis Julien Chartois...natif de Pondichery fils majeur et légitime, de feu Sieur Nicolas Chartois, invalide de la grande maison au quartier Saint Paul, en cette Isle, et de Marie Marianne indienne ses père et mère, suivant acte de notoritété...et de Marie Elizabette Libre...native de cette Isle...fille majeur et légitime des feu Jullien, et de Marie Elizabette Libres.” This marriage is recorded among the “mariages et divorces des blancs,” ANOM IREL St-Denis, 1806, f. 13v.
- 69.
Governor Pierre Bernard Milius to the Minister of the Marine (Pierre-Barthélémy, baron Portal), St Gilles (Réunion), 22 September 1819. ADR 1M 304. I am grateful to Pier Larson for bringing this source to my attention.
- 70.
Louis-Laurent Simonin, Voyage à l’île de la Réunion (île Bourbon) (Paris: Le Tour du Monde, 1862), 154. The fact that Célimène reportedly used the term “mulâtresse,” once rare on Bourbon, suggests a broader change in racial vocabulary on Bourbon. For Gaudieux's life and legacy, see Luc Legeard, Célimène: mythe et réalité muse créole de l’île Bourbon, 1808–1864 (Sainte-Marie (Réunion) Saint-Denis de la Réunion: Azalées éd. ARAL, Académie réunionnaise Arts et lettres, 2013).
- 71.
Jean-Luc Bonniol and Jean Benoist, “Hérédités plurielles: Représentations populaires et conceptions savantes du métissage,” Ethnologie française 24, no. 1 (1994): 62; Frédéric Régent, La France et ses esclaves: de la colonisation aux abolitions, 1620–1848 (Paris: Pluriel, 2012), 202.
- 72.
Pierre H. Boulle and Sue Peabody, Le droit des noirs en France au temps de l’esclavage: textes choisis et commentés (Paris: Éditions l’Harmattan, 2014); Robin Mitchell, Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2020); Tyler Stovall, White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021).
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Appendix: Documented Marriages Between Blancs and Libres
I have identified 58 marriages involving grooms understood to be white and brides with identifiers denoting free nonwhite status, including the terms affranchie (ex-slave), négresse (libre), Indienne (libre), Malbare (libre), créole libre, or simply libre. In rare cases, women in these unions bore a first name but no racial marker, suggesting former slave status. For the period covered here, there are no cases involving enslaved women and white men marrying formally, although cases exist of enslaved women marrying free nonwhite men and becoming free through these unions, as was explicitly permitted by the 1723 Lettres Patentes du Roy. These figures are aggregated from two sources of data: a list kept by the lawyer Guillou DuBertin and seized as evidence during his trial in 1792 (ADR L319/3, Pièce 7), which appears to be a list of white men married to libre women, as well as a genealogical guide to early births, marriages, and deaths on Bourbon Island: Lucien Jacques Camille Ricquebourg, Dictionnaire généalogique des familles de l’île Bourbon (La Réunion) 1665–1810, 3 vols. (Mayenne: Imprimerie de la Manutention, 1983). Where possible, I have corroborated (or supplemented) Ricquebourg’s data using the extant copies of sacramental registers for Réunion in ANOM IREL Etat-Civil, Réunion.
Appendix: Documented Marriages Between Blancs and Libres
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Marvin, N. (2023). “Free and Naturalized Frenchwomen”: Gender and the Politics of Race on Revolution-Era Bourbon Island. In: Andersen, M.C., Byrnes, M.K. (eds) Fertility, Family, and Social Welfare between France and Empire. New Directions in Welfare History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26024-7_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26024-7_4
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