Colonial Intimacies:
Legislating Sex in French Louisiana

Jennifer M. Spear

"We forbid our White subjects of either sex from contracting marriage with Blacks. . . . [and] also forbid our said white subjects . . . from living in concubinage with slaves."

Code Noir, 1724

ISSUED only a decade apart, these two statements—one the request of a colonial missionary, the other a decree of the state—illustrate two very different attitudes toward marriage between French colonists in Louisiana and its native inhabitants and between those colonists and their African laborers. La Vente's statement was part of a decade long debate between secular and religious officials on both sides of the Atlantic over the propriety of permitting marriages between Indian women and French men, an issue that was never definitively settled. The Code Noir, issued in 1724 by the French metropolitan government to regulate the institution of slavery in its Louisiana colony, explicitly and expressly prohibited marital and nonmarital sexual relations between Africans, whether slave or free, and Europeans. This proscription was received by colonists with neither complaint nor praise but rather with silence.	1
Why did the idea of relationships between Europeans and Indians and between Europeans and Africans engender different reactions and lead to the formation of different sexual policies in French Louisiana? Why was it at least possible to have an open debate about Indian-European relationships and their place in the colonial project while African-European ones received no public contemplation? The answers to these questions demonstrate how sexuality could be used to construct and maintain boundaries between colonizer and colonized or, conversely, as the ultimate instrument of assimilation. Sexual politics—a vital concern of policy makers—were never uncontested. The struggles over métissage illuminate conflicts between secular and religious authorities and between colonial and metropolitan interests as each sought to shape the colony's development. Métissage also reveals tensions between officials and the colonial population they sought to govern. Influenced by demographic, economic, cultural, and imperial circumstances, authorities sought to legislate sex in attempts to further their colonial goals and to control colonial populations. As a tool of colonial policy, sex was not solely a private matter, nor one of population statistics, and least of all one of European men's "natural" urges; rather it was intimately linked to the formation of the colonial state.1	2
Public debates and colonial ideologies about sex in early America are far easier to uncover than private practice. Did legal or administrative policies prohibiting relationships between particular partners mean those relationships did not take place, or were those policies prompted by the prevalence of such relationships? Does an absence of prosecutions demonstrate that laws were effective in eradicating prohibited relationships, or were local communities more tolerant than policy makers?2 It is the private nature of sexual relationships, particularly ones that were illegal or against social convention, that makes statistical evidence regarding them difficult to obtain. For colonial New Orleans and Louisiana more generally, the picture is also complicated by its reputation, well established by the early nineteenth century, as a site in which relationships between Euroamerican men and non-European women were widespread and generally accepted.	. . .