INTRODUCTION
BLACK WOMEN IN THE FRENCH IMAGINARY
If skin is the only difference then the Negro might be considered a black European. The Negro is, however, so noticeably different from the European that one must look beyond skin color.
—SAMUEL THOMAS VON SOEMMERRING as quoted in Londa Schiebinger, “Skeletons in the Closet”
From the seventeenth century into the nineteenth, all the major European powers (Portugal, Spain, England, France, Scotland, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands) participated enthusiastically in the slave trade. However, even though the colonies supported lavish lifestyles in Europe, Europeans went to considerable lengths to disguise the extent to which buying and selling human beings was a lucrative enterprise. As late as 1830, fifteen years after France formally abolished the slave trade, it engaged more of the country’s ships than did legitimate commerce.1 Despite efforts to conceal the French involvement, the country remained directly and actively involved in—and benefited from—the buying and selling of people of African descent. While European cities such as Paris, London, and Madrid were hailed as bastions of cosmopolitanism (they were, in a technical sense) and achieved that cosmopolitan status partly via riches reaped from their slave colonies, they were, in fact, also imperial cities. This distinction is important, since notions of cosmopolitanism can conceal a multitude of sins that cannot be hidden behind the imperial or colonial label. In short, presenting oneself as merely cosmopolitan had long-standing cultural repercussions; as a consequence of the ongoing attempts to prevent the practice of slavery from touching (and thereby tarnishing) France proper, the French could minimize their active participation in the slave trade.
FIGURE 1.
Eugène Delaplanche (1836—91), L’Afrique, 1878.
L’Afrique is one of six allegorical statues representing the six continents created for the Exposition Universelle (World’s Fair) in 1878 that now line the esplanade in the courtyard of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. All six of the statues had been improperly cared for in Nantes for almost fifty years before being purchased and returned to Paris in 2013.
In the eighteenth century, metropolitan France had a tiny nonwhite population—about three thousand people out of a population of more than twenty-five million as of 1777.2 However, the French colonies— particularly Martinique, Saint-Domingue, and other Caribbean possessions that had extensive sugar and coffee plantations—had substantial numbers of people of color. Despite this geographical distance from the metropole, images of and discussions about people of color, especially women, frequently appeared in a variety of French cultural sectors and social milieus. Paradoxically, although mainland France had minimal numbers of black women, their bodies attracted a disproportionate amount of attention. However, they were more than mere curiosities or aesthetic fodder, and as this book demonstrates, the literary and visual depictions of black women gave rise to cultural discourses about Frenchness that shaped the country’s postrevolutionary national identity. Black women helped France’s white men and women fantasize about their black colonies and often served as substitutes for making sense of white bodies “behaving badly.”
Highly negative discourses regarding black slaves appeared in some of the earliest seventeenth-century French missionary accounts.3 In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a second wave of anxiety emerged around racial mixing in the colonies. In metropolitan France, a flurry of legislation attempted to calm fears of racial inundation and contamination.4 Existing representations of black women in the colonies were subsequently appropriated, deployed, recycled, and repurposed, circulating more widely in the metropole. As Sue Peabody has shown, blacks were often depicted as symbols for political and social positioning for white Frenchmen.5 Though the rhetoric stressed that France had no slaves, the country’s livelihood largely depended on slavery in the colonies as well as at home. This contradiction complicated the functionality of these opposing rhetorical strategies yet made these interactions more meaningful. This awareness creates a new space for understanding how different locations in Europe constructed and reconstructed themselves and their colonial Others and relocates our understanding of geopolitical thinking to a much earlier period in French history. This book examines how science and popular culture simultaneously informed and regulated social behavior. It also considers the extent to which existing boundaries of that time period separated scientific discourse from popular entertainment, thereby demonstrating the fallacy of such constraints. Portrayals of the black female body allowed white Frenchwomen to discuss issues of race and gender, while white Frenchmen could use the black female body to discuss white women, black women, and black men, thus layering many social and political tensions onto one body.
HAITI AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
Depictions of black people in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French discourse were not static but changed in response to events, particularly the French and Haitian Revolutions. The French Revolution of 1789 created tremendous upheaval for notions of citizenship and nationhood in France, raising questions about such topics as who was now eligible to vote and the roles that Jews, Arabs, and others would play in the new nation.6 In addition, the revolution had less-well-known consequences for French understandings of race and gender that were epitomized in the Haitian Revolution of 1791— 1804. Saint-Domingue had been the crown jewel of France’s first colonial empire; the uprising there took the lives of thirty thousand white Frenchmen and other Europeans, and permanently drove the French completely from the island of Hispaniola. No modern European power had ever suffered a defeat of such magnitude at the hands of blacks, and Haiti remains the only nation in the world founded on the basis of a slave rebellion.
For more than two centuries, the French tended to downplay the significance of the revolution in Saint-Domingue, with many eighteenth-century white Frenchmen and -women dismissively referring to it as the “troubles.”7 In fact, Jeremy Popkin notes that the French government went to great lengths to suppress news of the uprising in Saint-Domingue, censoring publications to prevent them from “evoking the memory of the humiliating French defeat in Saint-Domingue.”8 Similarly, the continued French use of the term Saint-Domingue long after the independent nation adopted the name Haiti, as Alyssa Sepinwall argues, indicates an official reluctance to acknowledge that the colony no longer belonged to France.9 As William Cohen concludes, the French government clung to the belief that either by concession or by force, Saint-Domingue could be recaptured and the institution of slavery reimposed.10 For Sepinwall, the surprising lack of historical attention paid to Haiti even in modern-day France can be ascribed in part to the fact that “race is anathema in contemporary French discourse.”11
Yet any sustained analysis of the Haitian Revolution reveals that this event was cataclysmic, sending shock waves throughout the Atlantic world. Even before the 1789 revolution, France had been struggling with a series of imperial losses that began in Canada and India in the 1760s. And as the nation was struggling with the thorny issues of citizenship and national identity brought on by the revolution, it had to grapple not only with the loss of its most important colony but also with the 1803 sale of Louisiana to the United States. Even standard terms used to describe French constitutional history since 1799 such as the Empire and the Second Empire elide the true imperial history and legacy of defeat. The loss of Haiti and the collapse of Napoleon’s empire threatened France’s self-perception as an imperial power (with its connotations of racial superiority) and its image of its masculine prowess.
As Krishan Kumar writes, “Nations are formed of national memories, of the stories of great men and great deeds. . . . But it is not just triumphs and glory but also, and perhaps more so, defeats and trials that make the nation.”12 Haiti was a thrashing and a trial that would not be easily overcome. The geopolitical and social consequences were immediate: between six thousand and ten thousand white Creoles fled to metropolitan France following the collapse of French rule in Saint-Domingue.13 Most of the refugees landed in Paris, where they were, for all practical purposes, foreign. They formed part of an enormous migration both into and out of France over the revolutionary and Napoleonic years. After 1789, France experienced nearly two decades of constant population movements, including returning soldiers from the Napoleonic Wars, diehard ultraroyalist émigrés, and military and colonial refugees from Haiti, all of whom brought new customs, values, and cultural identities with them. In many cases, assimilating or reassimilating in the midst of continuous political upheavals was neither a simple nor a happy experience.
The vast majority of the migrants from Saint-Domingue were white settlers, with only about eight hundred blacks fleeing the colony.14 Yet when Saint-Domingue violently and permanently unyoked itself from France, the cultural reverberations both fueled and haunted the ongoing discursive construction of race and gender. In particular, the representations of black women (who probably represented a small minority among the influx) illuminate these tensions. As art historian James Smalls maintains, defining and empowering the colonial (and postcolonial) self was of paramount importance to white Frenchmen and -women.15 This volume explores the psychological ramifications of this defeat for the nation, revealing the extent to which France was dealing with threats to white racial homogeneity much earlier than has previously been realized.16 Writers, artists, politicians, and French laypeople situated and attempted to mitigate these traumas through the black female body, seeking ways to redefine Frenchness and bury the anxieties raised by the defeat in Haiti. The book investigates the eroticization of the black female body and the simultaneous need to disavow that body. The trauma of losing Saint-Domingue was displaced onto a body and in a manner that appeared to simplify a far more complex range of experiences and identities.
CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS AND NATIONAL IDENTITY
Hanging in the Musée du Louvre is Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s painting Portrait d’une négresse (fig. 2).17 Painted in 1800, the unnamed black woman faces her audience with her breast exposed in an explicitly sexualized way.18 Her arm hugs her dress in a gesture that seems intended to keep her other breast from also being revealed. She is surrounded by the accoutrements of luxury—the sumptuous shawl and the beautiful chair—but the plainness of the woman’s white dress, her lack of identification (her name was in fact Madeleine), and most important her skin color show that she is merely an ornament of her mistress or master’s wealth. Her direct and somewhat intimate stare at the viewer is enigmatic, and her blue shawl, red sash, and white dress evoke the colors of revolution, a trope that hardly applies in her case, however.19 Finally, her head covering constitutes a colonial marker of her blackness and confirms her subjugated status. Her passivity (or resignation) invites a sustained and sexualized gaze. She is eroticized and touchable, as much a product for consumption as the accessories surrounding her. Observers have suggested that this image is reminiscent of Jacques-Louis David’s portrait of Mme. Récamier both in pose and artistic style and that given the date when Portrait d’une négresse was painted, the image could be interpreted as a celebration of French abolitionism.20 David’s portrayal of her as fully clothed, as well as his use of her given name, shows a greater respect for his subject. And while the woman in Portrait d’une négresse gazes at the viewer, she lacks the look of agency. Did Benoist know her name? If the woman was truly a subject of worth, why not acknowledge that more fully by naming her? British art historians Hugh Honour and John Fleming suggest that Benoist may have used the painting to advocate for women’s emancipation. If so, it seems clear that this emancipation did not extend to black women.21
FIGURE 2.
Marie-Guillemine Benoist (1768—1826), Portrait d’une femme noire (also known as Portrait d’une négresse), 1800. Benoist was one of the few female students of the painter Jacques-Louis David. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Nineteenth-century French cultural representations of black women reflect earlier historical events going back to the establishment of France’s Caribbean colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The social and economic conditions of slavery in Martinique and elsewhere generated pervasive tropes about black women that made their way to metropolitan France, where they provided a surprisingly attractive canvas that the citizens of a fragmented, traumatized, and dislocated country used to digest the ramifications of their losses. Gustave d’Eichthal, the secretary of the Société ethnologique, wrote in his 1839 Lettres sur la race noire et la race blanche that blacks were a “female race.” “Just like the woman,” he pontificated, “the black is deprived of political and scientific intelligence. . . . Like the woman he also passionately likes jewelry, dance, and singing.’22 Eichthal’s assignment of a discursive gender to an entire race of people helps to illustrate how the failure in Haiti, taken as a defeat at the hands of black men, facilitated a reordering of French national identity via the black female body, which was represented as savage, hypersexual, and above all an existential threat to the purity of the French nation. Blacks could not and should not be a part of the French body politic. Eichthal reinforces the assumption that blacks were not included in the definition of Frenchness.
Representations of black bodies both in France and in the colonies show that race encouraged the development of different notions of French citizenship and subjectivity. Every regime—the Republic, the Empire, the Restoration—attempted to redefine for itself what it meant to be French, with constant debates over the meaning of liberty and equality.23 With slavery temporarily reinstated in 1802, the distinction between free whites and enslaved blacks and the relationship between male and female bodies afforded a safer way to talk about larger issues of freedom. Paul Gilroy proposes the term crypto-nationalism to characterize how nationalist writers “are often disinclined to consider the cross catalytic or transverse dynamics of racial politics as a significant element in the formation and reproduction of . . . national identities.”24 This oversight is particularly curious given the collective handwringing and self-examination that normally follow a loss of such magnitude (Haiti), especially since the political, cultural, and military loss came at the hands of what were considered racial inferiors.25
For many historians, the revolutionary era forms an almost impenetrable barrier, with scholarship falling squarely on either side of the 1789 divide or narrowly within the immediate years of the revolution. Yet paying attention to colonial slavery and plantation society reveals a number of interesting continuities in the cultural production of race and gendered discourse that stretched throughout the entire Bourbon, revolutionary, and imperial eras.
As the evolving conversation about national identity suggests, ideas of Frenchness shifted from monarchy to republic to empire. Under the Bourbons, the royal family was emblematic of the nation in both image and allegory. In this “family romance,” as historian Lynn Hunt calls it, “the ideology of absolutism explicitly tied royal government to the patriarchal family, and the use of the term fraternity during the French Revolution implied a break with this prior model.”26 Killing the king redefined Frenchness away from royal bodies and instead rooted it in brotherhood. In conjunction with concurrent social and political changes, elites used discourses on national identity to better establish and maintain social control. Under the tension and uncertainty of the revolution and the Napoleonic Code, “active” citizenship was recognized only for adult men. Women of all colors and all colonial men, regardless of race (with the exception of a brief liberal moment in 184852), were subordinated to male heads of household as passive citizens. According to historian Carla Hesse, women were involved in the revolution and subsequently sent back home, highlighting the importance of gender-related tensions within white French society as well.27
Black women, seen as Other by the new republican definition of citoyenneté, are a particularly rich focal point to study in exploring how France grappled with both race and gender. Yet no one has yet tackled the historical presence of and discursive focus on black women in the metropole. This book closely explores the stories of three women who achieved contemporary fame, meaning that a relative wealth of information is available about them. Each has been amply studied individually. However, this volume breaks new ground by studying them in conversation with one another, enabling scholars of France not only to reckon with the long-standing importance of black women as historical subjects but also to see how the use and production of their bodies reinforced strategies of whiteness, blackness, and Frenchness. Bringing together these women’s stories provides additional information regarding the conflicts between French identity and national belonging within particular roles.28
The discursive presence of black women in nineteenth-century France—how they were seen, perceived, produced, and represented —suggests that French elites were deeply unsettled by the Haitian Revolution and that this disturbance contributed to an unclaimed and ignored racialized national identity. The legacy of this blind spot continues to trouble French national identity in the postcolonial present and therefore remains relevant and vital to understanding France today.
Although some scholars have studied black female representations in France, particularly in literature and art, less attention has been paid to analyzing these representations within a larger historical framework. This project brings together the social history of black women in France and cultural studies—including art history, political theory, women’s and gender studies, and critical race theory.29 Historical studies of the presence of blacks in the colonies and in France have lacked a sustained focus on black women.30 Some scholars of literature, critical theory, gender, and art history have studied images of blacks in France and the meaning of such depictions.31 But tensions exist between these types of scholarship: history seeks to recover an accurate and changing past, while theories of representation look for the ways that enduring power relations, especially those built on binaries, operate as abstractions. Scholarship that seeks to incorporate both types of analytical models can be challenging: one tries to access a stable “truth” through documents, while the other insists that all documents, texts, images, or representations are distorted by powerful discourses of the dominant culture.32
This book incorporates several distinct theoretical discussions in the fields of modern French history, ethnic studies, and race and gender studies, contributing to our understanding of the historical production of French nationalism and of gender and racial identities from the ancien régime through the first half of the nineteenth century. In addition, the volume transcends conventional periodization to look at continuities and disjunctions between prerevolutionary France and the modern era.
Marisa Fuentes writes about the often heartbreaking “constructions of enslaved women in the archival records”: “enslaved women appear as historical subjects through the form and content of archival documents in the manner in which they lived: spectacularly violated, objectified, disposable, hypersexualized, and silenced. The violence is transferred from the enslaved bodies to the documents that count, condemn, assess, and evoke them, and we receive them in this condition.”33 The prevailing narrative of these representations, which transcends the vastly different political and cultural structures of multiple French regimes, established and reinforced the inability of these women to be French, regardless of their individual stories or backgrounds. Yet the representations of these women also reveal fissures in the definition of what it meant to be French, challenging existing gender and racial boundaries within white society. Too often, blackness in the French imagination (as elsewhere, though perhaps less uniformly) is often unthinkingly equated with enslavement. Scholars must remain conscious of the distinction.
How were representations of difference among black female bodies used to make sense of the loss of French colonies and to prove the importance of future imperial domination? Like blackness, Frenchness was not statically defined. That the meaning of both terms changed over time allows us to ask important questions about these constructions: How were the anxieties over shifting definitions and productions of Frenchness projected onto black bodies and specifically black female bodies? French social, cultural, and political upheavals in this transitional era hindered the crystallization of a single, concrete national identity. This book explores how—in the midst of national shock brought on by the French and Haitian Revolutions—black women came to occupy particular discursive visibility despite the fact that their actual numbers in France were very small.
Edward Said’s classic study, Orientalism, calls attention to the importance of cultural production, reminding us that “a very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, ‘mind,’ destiny, and so on.”34 Though focused mainly on the “Middle East,” Said’s insights highlight the idea that the white French writers, painters, lawyers, and so on who produced the dominant texts also played the primary role in crafting messages about black women and about Frenchness. These discussions were always in dialogue with the audiences and critics who consumed these works. In a similar vein, Robert Darnton’s essay about cultural production in the information era argues that popular culture did not emanate from elites down to the lower classes or pass along single channels but rather circulated simultaneously up and down, back and forth.35
In keeping with this idea, this book juxtaposes a vast array of sources to contextualize the social and political environments in which images of black women circulated. These sources include artworks (paintings, prints, and sculptures), legal cases, rulings, legislation, parliamentary debates, literary works (plays, poems, memoirs, and letters), fashion (not just items of clothing but also the historical meaning they conveyed to both black and white Frenchmen and -women), and pamphlets, advertisements, and newspapers. In addition to weaving together these various genres, I incorporate scholarship from a host of disciplines, particularly feminist studies as well as cultural and social history, thereby providing a broad perspective on colonialism, race, and gender and thus a more comprehensive investigation of the historical moments in which these women lived.36
THE BLACK WOMEN OF ART AND FICTION
Chapter 1 introduces the three women at the heart of this study, Ourika, Sarah Baartmann, and Jeanne Duval.37 These basic biographical sketches show not only the contours of their lives but also the challenges of reconstructing them from the scant surviving archival evidence. The next three chapters focus in turn on the literary and visual depictions of each of these women. Although the historical Ourika (ca. 1771–99) lived well before Baartmann arrived in France in 1814, “Ourika Mania” did not begin until 1823–24, when Claire de Duras published her novel Ourika. Consequently, chapter 2 addresses the multiple invocations of Baartmann during her lifetime, while my examination of Duras’s work is reserved for chapter 3. Finally, chapter 4 centers on the life of Jeanne Duval, a working woman who was depicted using a wide range of racialized tropes, largely through the work of her common-law husband, the poet Charles Baudelaire.
Between 1786 and 1870, these three women of color altered the French social landscape in a way that could not have happened in the colonies. Because these women were real people as well as archetypes, early colonial tropes of savagery and otherworldliness worked differently when the women moved to France. Their physical existence on French soil belied the considerable cultural work of white Frenchmen and -women that strove to make them appear ahistorical. Their presence in the metropole led to cultural clashes that demanded redefinitions of Frenchness.
As chapter 2 shows, Baartmann, popularly known as the Hottentot Venus, represented the distorted memories of Haiti in the French imagination. Her display, treatment, and representation embodied the residual anger and anxieties the French harbored after losing their most important colony. Questioning the French preoccupation with the cultural need to understand the black female body demonstrates why this interest aided in understanding the white female body. Thus, the racialized as well as sexualized construction of Baartmann, despite being hidden in scientific and cultural packaging, is critical to understanding her importance at this specific historical juncture.
Chapter 3 looks at how white Frenchmen and -women appropriated black female identity through the representations of Ourika, a young Senegalese girl purchased as a house pet for the Maréchal Prince de Beauvau in 1788. More than twenty years after her death in 1799, she became the subject of numerous plays, poems, and discussions, inspiring clothing, jewelry, fashion, colors, and hairstyles. These fads allowed middle- and upper-class white Frenchwomen to wear blackness without fully transgressing French racial and gender norms. At the same time, the white Frenchmen who were writing about Ourika exposed and perpetuated stereotypes of the hypersexual black woman and emphasized the impossibility and unsuitability of her marrying a white man of her own class, thereby reinforcing her inability to sustain the breeding she had acquired in aristocratic French society. These phenomena highlight the interconnectedness of gender and race issues, especially as white women attempted to exercise some agency over their own changed circumstances and white men attempted to control both black and white women and the definition of Frenchness.
Chapter 4 looks at how these themes played out during the July Monarchy (1830—48) and into the Second Empire (1852—70) using an examination of Duval, Baudelaire’s longtime lover. Baudelaire’s contemporaries and subsequent biographers have demonized Duval, in part to elevate Baudelaire. The level of vitriol toward Duval, however, reveals something deeper. The chapter analyzes Duval’s life as a part-time actress, prostitute, and wife within the historical context of the end of the French slave empire. The erasure of Duval’s humanity becomes a metaphor for the historic need to rid France yet again of actual black bodies even as images and discourses about these bodies proliferated.
The French defined themselves in opposition to the representations of these specific historical black women. This ongoing compulsion has continued well into the current century, with black women (from anywhere) such as Josephine Baker both acting as an exotic Other and highlighting the foreignness of any black body within the French body politic.
These real historical women existed independently of their representations. They lived in France, they walked along the cobblestones, they may have had favorite pâtisseries, they spoke to people, and people spoke back to them. But the people who had power saw these women merely as objects, and that is how they survive today. There are no extant documents that allow them to speak, to tell their own stories. They continue to exist only as foils for all kinds of French imaginations, as symbols or tools, in representations of them produced for the most part by white men and women within a limited set of tropes or stereotypes. Ourika was long dead by the time images and stories of her began to circulate widely. Only one word spoken by Baartmann has been recorded: she said “No” when naturalist Georges Cuvier sought to look under her apron. Only Duval had the opportunity to push back against the stereotypes, most likely because she outlived the man who was supposed to control her representation. Although her defiance was minimal, it provoked a vicious response from Baudelaire’s contemporaries, who tried to eradicate her. Nevertheless, she finally defeated the racial and gendered ventriloquism that began with Baartmann and was perfected with Ourika.
Even today, many French leaders seem eager to separate their country’s history from slavery and the slave trade, imperial endeavors that contributed greatly to its economic survival and prestige. But such legacies can be fully understood only in relation to one another. This work also touches on the emergence of celebrity and consumer culture, which are generally seen as late nineteenth-century phenomena. In addition, this book fills a gap in women’s histories in France, particularly by illuminating how even a small number of black women could so affect and restructure French society. Finally, this project contributes to the growing scholarship of the African diaspora in France in the nineteenth century.
This is not simply a tale of looking at black women: it is a cultural history of white Frenchmen and -women looking at black women. Black women mattered in France, as is evidenced by the tremendous amount of time and effort white Frenchmen and -women devoted to trying to convince themselves and others that black women lacked importance. This is not the story most people envision when thinking about the century following the French Revolution. These women were not supposed be there. Yet they were.