THE CARIBBEAN

From roughly 1500 to 1800, France was far more important as a Caribbean imperial power than is commonly recognized today. Its economic and military might were effectively lost in 1804, when the most important French Caribbean colony, Saint Domingue, became the independent nation of Haiti. Today France retains a handful of territories from its early modern New World empire, and the largest of these islands became full-fledged French departments after 1948.

PROCESS OF COLONIZATION

Like England, France established no Caribbean colonies until the early seventeenth century. But its importance as a naval power in the region began in 1523, when pirates from Normandy captured Spanish treasure ships. Such attacks were the greatest threat to the Spanish Caribbean in the first half of the sixteenth century, culminating in the sacking of Havana in 1555. Yet Spain's imperial vigilance held off the French for nearly a century, ensuring that the kingdom's first Antillean colony would only be founded in 1625. In that year the Norman nobleman Belain d'Esnambuc formally established a French colony on Saint Kitts. This tiny island served as a seedbed for further settlements until coming under full British control in 1713.

In 1635 French expeditions successfully claimed the larger islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe in the Lesser Antilles, after a delay caused partly by the hostility of resident Carib Indians. Early colonialists produced tobacco, relying on indentured servants for labor. By the middle of the 1640s about half of the five to seven thousand French colonists in these islands were serving out labor contracts. Yet by this time the price of Caribbean-grown tobacco had plummeted. From 1638 colonists were being urged to plant cotton or indigo instead of tobacco. In the early 1640s royal officials sponsored the establishment of the first sugar plantations and mills in Martinique and Guadeloupe. In the 1670s, as sugar became the primary export of these islands, planters increasingly purchased enslaved African workers, and European servants fled.

A number of these Europeans imigrated west to the Greater Antilles territory that would become France's most profitable Caribbean colony, Saint Domingue. In the early 1600s the uninhabited western coast of Spanish Santo Domingo was teeming with wild cattle. The livestock attracted a population of rootless men who sold leather and smoked meat, or boucan, to passing ships. In the 1640s French officials from Saint Kitts managed to establish their authority over these boucaniers, though it was not until 1697 that Spain formally recognized the land as a French colony. With a land area ten times larger than Martinique and Guadeloupe combined, Saint Domingue would become the Caribbean's largest slave plantation colony by the middle of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, the colony retained a distinct identity as the most violent, as well as the most valuable, of France's New World possessions.

Other early modern French Caribbean colonies, which never attained much economic or demographic weight, include the Lesser Antilles islands of Grenada, Dominica, and Saint Lucia, all three lost permanently to Britain by the early nineteenth century. France did retain other smaller Caribbean islands, including Saint Martin, shared with the Dutch after 1648, and Saint-Barthélemy, traded to Sweden in the late 1700s and repurchased a century later. The territory known as Cayenne (today, French Guiana) on the South American mainland, was important strategically, but never developed the profitable sugar fields or fearsome slave conditions of neighboring Dutch Surinam. In 1788 Cayenne had fewer than two thousand free inhabitants and about ten thousand slaves.

ECONOMIC IMPACT

By the end of the eighteenth century, France's Caribbean colonies were its most precious overseas asset, yielding roughly half of Europe's sugar and coffee, as well as large quantities of indigo and cotton. Acre for acre, by the 1750s these territories outproduced Britain's island possessions. By itself Saint Domingue generated some 75 percent of French tropical commodities. The value of these goods was multiplied by the additional commerce they generated. France re-exported half of its sugar and coffee to other European markets, allowing the kingdom to maintain a favorable balance of trade in the eighteenth century. Moreover, Saint Domingue's insatiable demand for labor helped make France the second largest slave-trading nation in the eighteenth century, after Britain. Trade with Africa and the islands fostered a variety of auxiliary industries in France, including the manufacture of cotton textiles.

FORMS OF DOMINATION

France's seventeenth-century island colonies were administered by a series of unsuccessful royal companies. By the eighteenth century the secretary of the navy ruled these territories, selecting nearly all colonial officials from the royal navy and army. The crown did name prominent colonists to the socalled superior councils, which functioned as courts of appeal and legislative bodies on the model of France's regional parlements. Nevertheless, elite planters had little of the control over local taxation that characterized the British islands, with their colonial assemblies.

Established and aspiring planters deeply resented the military priorities of colonial governors, especially mandatory militia service and the trade monopoly that Versailles imposed on Caribbean trade from the 1660s. Colonists argued that militia work distracted them from their plantations. Over time they transferred the most onerous of these duties, such as the search for escaped slaves, to freeborn men of color and ex-slaves. Colonists also maintained that free international trade would greatly increase the islands' economic value to the kingdom. Unable to curb colonial contraband, by the end of the eighteenth century Versailles was beginning to loosen its mercantilist restrictions.

Although the Code Noir of 1685 established the basic legal principles of French Caribbean slave society, the colonial government left control of the slave population to individual masters. Officials ignored royal laws protecting slaves from malnutrition and torture. The Code Noir also proclaimed that ex-slaves were legally equal to other free colonists, but by the early eighteenth century racial prejudice had already become an important means of social control. From the beginning of French Caribbean slavery, colonists commonly freed their slave mistresses and mixed-race children. Such manumissions amounted to no more than 1 percent of all slaves every year. Nevertheless, over time this population of free blacks and mixed-race people grew increasingly large, wealthy, and familiar with French culture. To maintain their own French identity, in the second half of the eighteenth century, colonial judges and planters installed an increasingly rigid set of discriminatory laws, separating "white" from "nonwhite" persons.

The Catholic Church was relatively unimportant as a form of social control over white society in the French Caribbean. Many of the most important religious orders, such as the Jesuits, maintained large and profitable slave plantations in the colonies. The Church's influence over colonists was strongest in the Lesser Antilles, where missionaries played an important role in early colonization. Saint Domingue was notoriously irreligious, however, and its priests were described as the most decadent in the kingdom. Many masters refused to Christianize their newly purchased slaves, citing the expense and threat to plantation discipline. As thousands of new African workers arrived each year, slaves developed new forms of spirituality, the fore-runners of modern Haitian vodou.

NUMBER OF FRENCH COLONISTS

Despite their commercial importance to the kingdom, France's Caribbean territories were never significant population centers for French colonists. In fact, from 1650, as colonial sugar planters imported more and more enslaved Africans, many poorer colonists fled. This was less true in Saint Domingue, where poor whites could still find hillside land for farming and ranching up to the 1760s. Even here, however, cheap land became scarce with the expansion of coffee plantations into the hills after mid-century.

Whether whites had land or not, they were a distinct minority in all of France's Antillean territories. In 1788 the French Caribbean had approximately 56,000 white residents and over 693,000 slaves. A third group, the so-called free population of color, numbered roughly 32,000. By this date, many of these individuals had been born free and owned some property, including slaves. Throughout much of French Caribbean history, the wealthiest and lightest-skinned members of this group were acknowledged to be "French." However, after 1763, new racial laws categorized these individuals as nonwhites, defining them as ex-slaves, despite their birth and wealth.

PLANTATION SYSTEMS

In the eighteenth century, France's Antillean plantations were the most productive institutions of their kind in the Atlantic world. Because sugarcane requires over twelve months of carefully tended growth to reach maturity, but must be crushed within forty-eight hours of harvest, planters using early modern grinding and refining technology needed their own mills and boiling houses. Such investments were more profitable for larger estates, with more sugarcane to process. Saint Domingue's sugar plantations were the largest in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, employing, on average, between 150 and 200 slaves, with the largest plantations far exceeding this number. Leading Dominguan sugar growers also invested in elaborate irrigation systems, built sugar mills driven by wind and water, and developed complex crop rotations. British planters in Jamaica claimed that the French earned returns of close to 10 percent on their plantation investments. Modern calculations based on plantation records vary from 4 percent to 18 percent annual profit.

In part because of these capital improvements, many of Saint Domingue's great planters were heavily indebted to European merchants. Moreover, despite the high price of buying new Africans, many estates systematically overworked or undernourished their slaves to maximize short-term profits, causing annual mortality rates of 5 percent and higher. The brutality of French Caribbean plantation society and the wealth it generated were among the reasons that the biggest planters often left their properties in the hands of managers and returned to France. Approximately 30 to 40 percent of French colonial plantations were managed in this absentee style.

Sugar plantations were the largest and most influential institutions in Caribbean agriculture. However, the early modern French Caribbean colonies produced a number of other commodities with their own distinct plantation technologies. Coffee was the most important of these, with European demand increasing markedly around the middle of the eighteenth century. In the 1780s Saint Domingue's coffee shipments to France were as valuable as its refined sugar exports. Because this crop required far less processing and labor, it cost about one-sixth as much to establish a coffee estate as to build a sugar plantation in Saint Domingue. Other crops were accessible to planters who did not have the capital to found a sugar estate. Indigo dye was an important product in many parts of Saint Domingue and, by the end of the eighteenth century, so was cotton, though these commodities were frequently smuggled into British or Dutch markets.

LOSS

The French Revolution (1789–1799) forever altered France's presence in the Caribbean. The issue that first destabilized Saint Domingue in 1789 was citizenship, not slavery. From 1789 to 1791, colonial men of color living in Paris convinced the revolution's National Assembly to recognize them as French citizens. In 1791, when colonial whites refused to accept the racial reforms legislated by Paris, civil war broke out in Saint Domingue, pitting whites against free blacks and mulattoes. Taking advantage of this conflict, in August 1791 slaves planned and executed a revolt that spread throughout the colony. Racial tensions prevented whites and free men of color from forging an effective island-wide army to defeat the uprising. In 1793 exslaves were still in rebellion. By this time, France was at war with Spain and England. As these enemies attacked the French Antilles, conservative colonists joined them to fight the revolution.

By the middle of 1793 the twin threats of counterrevolution and foreign invasion forced French officials to offer Saint Domingue's rebel slaves freedom in exchange for military assistance. On 31 October of that year, the French commissioner to Saint Domingue, Léger-Félicité Sonthonax, declared slave emancipation throughout the colony. On 4 February 1794 legislators in Paris, responding to this fait accompli, declared slavery illegal in all French territories. The British had already captured Martinique, but emancipation transformed Guadeloupe, where ex-slaves served as sailors and soldiers alongside whites and former free men of color, attacking foreign shipping and raiding nearby British colonies from 1794 to 1798. In Saint Domingue free colored and ex-slave officers, most notably Pierre Dominique Toussaint L'Ouverture, emerged as the leading figures in the French army.

With Napoléon Bonaparte's ascension to power in 1799, and temporary peace with Britain in 1802, France attempted to restore its Caribbean plantations to profitability. In Guadeloupe a French expeditionary force killed approximately 10 percent of the population in the process of reestablishing slavery. Many of the dead were black and mulatto soldiers who had fought loyally for the republic. In Saint Domingue in 1803, however, approximately forty thousand European troops were unable to defeat the colony's former slaves. Fighting first as guerrillas, and then under the leadership of black and mixed-race generals, the ex-slaves also benefited from an outbreak of yellow fever that severely weakened the expeditionary force. On 1 January 1804, rejecting France while proclaiming their allegiance to the ideals of the French Revolution, the leaders of Saint Domingue's ex-slave armies declared their independence as the new American nation of Haiti.

See also Colonialism ; Slavery and the Slave Trade ; Sugar .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Dessalles, Pierre. Sugar and Slavery, Family and Race: The Letters and Diary of Pierre Dessalles, Planter in Martinique, 1808–1856. Edited and translated by Elborg Forster and Robert Forster. Baltimore, 1996.

Labat, Jean-Baptiste. The Memoirs of Père Labat, 1693–1705. Edited and translated by John Eaden. London, 1970. Abridged translation of Nouveau voyage aux isles de l'Amérique (1742).

Moreau de Saint-Méry, Médéric-Louis-Elie. A Civilization That Perished: The Last Years of White Colonial Rule in Haiti. Edited and translated by Ivor D. Spencer. Lanham, Md., 1985. Abridged translation of Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l'isle Saint-Domingue (1797).

Secondary Sources

Boucher, Phillip P. Cannibal Encounters: Europeans and Island Caribs, 1492–1763. Baltimore, 1992.

Dubois, Laurent. A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804. Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003.

Fick, Carolyn E. The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below. Knoxville, Tenn., 1990.

Geggus, David P. Haitian Revolutionary Studies. Bloomington, Ind., 2002. An important collection of articles by the foremost scholar of prerevolutionary Saint Domingue.

James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. 2nd ed. New York, 1963. The classic account of the Haitian Revolution and its preconditions.

King, Stewart R. Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue. Athens, Ga., 2001.

Moitt, Bernard. Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635–1848. Bloomington, Ind., 2001.

Parry, J. H., P. M. Sherlock, and A. P. Maingot. A Short History of the West Indies. 4th ed. New York, 1987.

Peabody, Sue. "There Are No Slaves in France:" The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime. Oxford and New York, 1996.

Rogozi'nski, Jan. A Brief History of the Caribbean: From the Arawak and Carib to the Present. New York, 1992.

Stein, Robert Louis. The French Sugar Business in the Eighteenth Century. Baton Rouge, La., 1988.

John D. Garrigus