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"The Blood of France": Race and Purity of Blood in the French Atlantic World
Guillaume Aubert
| ALTHOUGH much has been written about the construction of race in the British and Spanish American colonies, little attention has been paid to this crucial historical development in the contexts of the French Americas.1 Indeed, a number of American historians have contended that, prior to France's loss of its North American empire in 1763, conceptualizations of social order emphasizing ancestry and skin color were comparatively underdeveloped in the French Atlantic world.2 According to most of the current historiography of the French colonial Americas, policies and attitudes that distinguished between colonizing and colonized populations in racial terms began to appear only during the second half of the eighteenth century, after France had lost New France and Louisiana, its North American mainland colonies.3 With rare exceptions, the emergence of racialized discourses and policies that emphasized ancestry over all other criteria to determine social and political hierarchies is thus generally circumscribed to the French Caribbean or metropolitan France during the last decades of the eighteenth century and addressed only in relation to the slave and free populations of African descent.4 |
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From such a perspective, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North American French colonial discourses and attitudes toward both Indians and people of African descent focused on their cultural deficiencies but rarely posited unalterable and inherent differences between French, Indian, and African populations. Following the lead of the major nineteenth-century American historian of New France, Francis Parkman, a number of historians claim that the French, unlike the English, demonstrated little or no such prejudice in their treatment of Indian populations.5 Assessing French conceptualizations of Indians in New France, for instance, a leading authority on French-Indian relations in North America concludes that, by contrast to the late-eighteenth-century French Caribbean, "the [idea] that humanity is made up of inferior and superior stocks ... did not gain much ground in New France." Historians of French colonial Louisiana have made similar claims regarding French attitudes toward both Indians and the increasing number of African slaves who began to arrive in the colony during the 1720s. In her ground-breaking study of Africans in colonial Louisiana, for instance, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall argues that, despite the early institutionalization of black slavery in that colony, the French "openness to peoples of other races and cultures" led to the creation of a racially fluid society in French colonial Louisiana. Indeed, Hall finds "little indication of contempt towards blacks, nor evidence that white settlers and French officials considered the Africans and their descendants uncivilized people."6 |
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To illustrate their point, Hall and others often insist that the seventeenth-century French colonial policies that tolerated and sometimes encouraged sexual interactions between French male settlers and Indian or African women in New France and the Caribbean during the seventeenth century were transplanted and persisted unabated in eighteenth-century French Louisiana. Most significant, they argue that such peculiar attitudes stemmed from "early modern French social structure and social theory" that "strongly and consistently advocated societal liberty," attitudes that resulted in a socially fluid society, unencumbered with the segregationist and rigidly hierarchical ethos of English metropolitan and colonial societies.7 |
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