"A dangerous zeal": Catholic missions to slaves in the French Antilles, 1635-1800

French Historical Studies

Volumn 25, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 53-90

  Peabody, Sue ^a  

^a WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 34447280858     PISSN: 00161071     EISSN: 15275493     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00161071-25-1-53     Document Type: Review

References (215)

1. [Guillaume Moreau (?)], "Mémoires concernant la mission des pères de la compagnie de Jésus dans les isles françoises de l'Amérique," reprinted in Annales de la société d'histoire de la Martinique 27 (1988-91): 74-75. Historical situation of this text is not without difficulty. The Annales article attributes the authorship to Guillaume Moreau, former superior general of the Jesuit mission to the French West Indies and gives the date as 1709
2. Bernard David says that Moreau probably wrote this report in 1710, upon his return to France (see Bernard David, "L'histoire religieuse de la Martinique au XVIIe siècle," Annales des Antilles [Bulletin de la société d'histoire de la Martinique] 27 [1988-91]: 39 n. 18)
3. though some historians date it much earlier: (1703) Marcel Chatillon, "L'évangelisation des esclaves au XVIIe siècle," Bulletin de la société d'histoire de la Guadeloupe 60-62 (1984): 35
4. and (1705) Charles Frostin, "Méthodologie missionnaire et sentiment religieux en Amérique française aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: Le cas de Saint-Domingue," Cahiers d'histoire 24 (1979): 26
5. Camille de Rochemonteix, author of Le père Antoine Lavalette à la Martinique d'après beaucoup de documents inédits (Paris, 1907), mistakenly identifies the author as Pierre Combaud, superior general of the Jesuits in the French Antilles and dates the document September 1707
6. In 1690, Combaud was superior of the Jesuit mission in Martinique while Père Moreau was a member of the Jesuit mission in Saint-Christophe from 1686 to 1690 (see Bernard David, Le clergé: Dictionnaire biographique de la Martinique, 1635-1848, 3 vols. [Fort-de-France, Martinique, 1984], 1:61, 178-79). Thus the facts are most consistent with David's attribution of the text to Moreau's authorship around 1710, exactly twenty years after the English conquest of Saint-Christophe. All translations from the French are my own, unless otherwise indicated
7. Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South (New York, 1978)
8. Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries: The Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society, 1787-1834 (Urbana, Ill., 1982)
9. Richard Price, Alabi's World (Baltimore, Md., 1985)
10. Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998)
11. and Jon Sensbach, A Separate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Moravian World in North Carolina, 1763-1840 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998)
12. On the French colonization of the Antilles, see Pierre Pluchon, Histoire des Antilles et de la Guyane (Toulouse, 1982)
13. and Lucien-René Abenon, "La colonisation française en Amérique intertropicale," in Les Français en Amérique: Histoire d'une colonisation, ed. Lucien-René Abenon and John A. Dickinson (Lyon, 1993), 107-93
14. American readers will lament the lack of a comprehensive Anglophone overview of French colonization of the Caribbean. Until the forthcoming publication of Philip Boucher's synthesis of recent scholarship and printed primary sources, one may consult Boucher's Les Nouvelles Frances: France in America, 1500-1815, an Imperial Perspective (Providence, R.I., 1989)
15. See also Herbert Ingraham Priestley, France Overseas through the Old Regime (New York, 1939)
16. W. Adolphe Roberts, The French in the West Indies (Indianapolis, Ind., 1942)
17. Nellis M. Crouse, French Pioneers in the West Indies, 1624-1664 (New York, 1940)
18. and idem, The French Struggle for the West Indies, 1665-1713 (New York, 1966)
19. On Haitian Vaudou during the French colonial period, see especially David Geggus, "Haitian Vaudou in the Eighteenth Century," Jahrbuch für Geschichte von Staat, Wirtschaft, und Gesellschaft Lateinamerikas 28 (1991): 21-51
20. and idem, "Marronage, Vaudou, and the Saint Domingue Slave Revolt of 1791," in Proceedings of the Fifteenth Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society, ed. Patricia Galloway and Philip P. Boucher (Lanham, Md., 1992), 22-35
21. See also Leslie G. Desmangles, The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992), 17-59
22. Pierre Pluchon, Vaudou, sorciers, empoisonneurs de Saint-Domingue à Haiti (Paris, 1987)
23. Léon-François Hoffmann, "Le Vodou sous la colonie et pendant les guerres de l'indépendance," Conjonctions: Revue franco-haitienne 173 (1987): 109-35
24. Howard Sosis, "The Colonial Environment and Religion in Haiti: An Introduction to the Black Slave Cults in Eighteenth-Century Saint Domingue" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1971)
25. and Alfred Métraux, Vaudou in Haiti, trans. Hugo Charteris (1959; rpt., New York, 1972), 25-57
26. John Thornton's "On the Trail of Voodoo: African Christianity in Africa and the Americas," The Americas 44 (1988): 261-78, is an interesting exception to this general trend. Thornton asserts that many of the "'syncretic' or 'mixed' cults of the New World can be traced to African Christianity" (262), that is, Christianity as adopted by Africans prior to their being transported to America as slaves. Thornton's research is based primarily on slaves in seventeenth-century Portuguese and Spanish America and may not have as much bearing on the French Antilles of the late eighteenth century
27. On religion among French slaves, see Gabriel Debien, Les esclaves aux Antilles françaises, XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles (Fort-de-France, Martinique, 1974), 249-95
28. and Lucien Peytraud, L'esclavage aux Antilles françaises avant 1789 (1897; rpt., Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, 1973), 165-92, though these tend to blur the chronological trends by presenting a more thematic account
29. David, "L'histoire religieuse," 21-44
30. idem, Le clergé
31. James Latimer, Foundations of the Christian Missions in the British, French, and Spanish West Indies, vol. 1 (New York, 1984)
32. Frostin, "Méthodologie missionnaire," 19-43
33. George Breathett, "Religious Protectionism and the Slave in Haiti," Catholic Historical Review 55 (1969-70): 26-39
34. idem, "The Jesuits in Colonial Haiti," Historian 24 (1962): 153-71
35. Joseph Rennard, Histoire religieuse des Antilles françaises des origines à 1914 d'après des documents inédits (Paris, 1954)
36. J. M. Jan, Les congrégations religieuses à Saint-Domingue, 1681-1793 (Port-au-Prince, 1951)
37. Joseph Janin, La religion aux colonies françaises sous l'Ancien Régime (Paris, 1942)
38. Guillaume de Vaumas, L'éveil missionnaire de la France au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1976)
39. Henri de Noussanne, La France missionnaire aux Antilles: Guadeloupe, Martinique, Trinidad (Paris, 1936)
40. and Marie-Thérèse Porte, "Les Dominicains à la Guadeloupe, 1635-1955," Documents pour servir à l'histoire de l'ordre de Saint-Domingue en France 10 (1975): D1-D35
41. I have deliberately chosen to exclude from this article the results of my research on the religious history of blacks in French West Africa, Louisiana, and French Guiana, though these are important to the wider picture. In an assessment of the impact of French Catholicism on Africans in the diaspora, the Antilles are the logical place to begin. The sugar-producing islands of the Caribbean were France's most economically important overseas possessions and held the greatest concentration of Africans and their descendants in the French colonial empire. The field of African American religious history in Louisiana has recently been stimulated by the work by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall (Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century [Baton Rouge, 1992])
42. Also in Louisiana, we will soon see a fascinating analysis of the feminine face of black worship resulting from the efforts of the Ursulines by Emily Clark (Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and Colonial Society, 1727-1803 [Chapel Hill, N.C., forthcoming]). The story of black worship in French Guiana is made more intriguing by the dominant presence of the maroon community and has yet to be satisfactorily analyzed
43. Despite the great variation in local deities, certain features of West and Central African cosmology and worship are widespread, if not universal, giving a commonality to the region's religious outlook. These features include belief in a supreme deity who, compared with the lesser deities and ancestor-spirits, could be quite removed from the daily activities of the living. Thus, people turned to these lesser gods and spirits of the dead, through rites and intermediaries (such as priests and devotees), to intervene in the natural and social worlds. Practices such as divination, spirit possession, and sacrifice allow people to interact with the deities; burial rites are important for proper relationships with the dead. The power of spirits was believed to extend to human health, and African healers provided preventative amulets and charms to ward off illness, as well as offering cures through herbal and magical means (Raboteau, Slave Religion, 5-16)
44. Alexis de Saint-Lô, Relation du voyage du Cap-Verde (Paris, 1637), 28-31, 62
45. There is an extensive historiography of the African reception of Catholicism in Kongo. For a point of entry, see the many works by John Thornton, including, most recently, The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684-1706 (Cambridge, 1998)
46. and Wyatt MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa: The BaKongo of Lower Zaire (Chicago, 1986), esp. 191-216
47. Vaumas, L'éveil missionnaire, 223-25
48. Henri Labouret and Paul Rivet, Le royaume d'Arda et son évangélisation au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1929), 17
49. See, for example, F. J. B. Gaby, Relation de la Nigritie. Contenant une exacte description de ses Royaumes et de leurs Gouvernemens, la Religion, les Mœurs, Coustumes et raretez de ce Païs . . . (Paris, 1689), 30
50. and Abbé Demanet, Nouvelle histoire de l'Afrique Française, enrichie de cartes et d'observations astronomiques et géographiques, de remarques sur les usages locaux, les mœurs, la Religion et la nature du commerce de cette partie du monde, 2 vols. (Paris, 1767), 1:121-23, both of whom comment upon the sustained enclaves of Luso-African Christians but also upon the infrequent visits of clergy to these regions
51. In this article I have not addressed the multiple efforts by female religious orders to establish a presence in the French Caribbean. For example, the general census for 1687 lists thirteen religieuses along with some eighty-seven religieux (Adrien Dessalles, Histoire générale des Antilles, 5 vols. [Paris, 1847-48], 2:453). There is considerable work remaining to be done on this topic
52. The most lucid account of the Carib inhabitants' resistance to European domination is Philip Boucher, Cannibal Encounters: Europeans and Island Caribs, 1492-1763 (Baltimore, Md., 1992)
53. The Jesuits first reached Martinique in 1640 when Jacques Bouton was sent to explore the possibilities of a mission on the island (Jacques Bouton, Relation de l'establissement des françois depuis l'an 1635 en l'isle de Martinique, l'une des Antilles de l'Amerique [Paris, 1640], 95-141). A typographical error in Rennard's Histoire religieuse mistakenly implies that Bouton first arrived in 1637 (p. 41)
54. The Huguenot population of Guadeloupe was 7.03 percent in 1671; see Gérard LaFleur, Les Protestants aux Antilles français du Vent sous l'Ancien Régime (Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe, 1988), 84
55. Robert Louis Stein, The French Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century: An Old Regime Business (Madison, Wis., 1979), 11-47
56. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (New York, 1966), 84-111, 197-222
57. Jacques Petit-Jean Roget includes some interesting examples of the missionaries' rationales for slavery in Martinique in his "La société d'habitation à la Martinique: Un demi-siècle de formation, 1635-1685," 2 vols. (Ph.D. diss., Université de Paris VII, 1978; reproduced by Université de Lille III, 1980), 2:1120-21
58. For a detailed discussion of Catholic and especially Jesuit attitudes toward slavery in Brazil, see also Dauril Alden, The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire, and Beyond, 1540-1750 (Palo Alto, Calif., 1996), 502-27
59. Pierre Pelleprat, "Relations des missions des pères de la compagnie de Jésus dans les îles et dans la terre ferme de l'Amérique Méridionale" (Paris, 1655), reprinted in Missions de Cayenne et de la Guyane française avec une carte géographique, ed. M.-F. De Montézon (Paris, 1857-61), 50
60. See also André Chevillard, Les desseins de son Eminence le cardinal de Richelieu pour l'Amérique ce qui s'est passé de plus remarquable depuis l'établissement des colonies (Rennes, 1659), 137-46
61. and Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les Français, 4 vols. (Fort-de-France, Martinique, 1978), 2:398-412
62. Pelleprat, "Relations des missions," 46-47
63. Chevillard, Desseins de son Eminence, 142, 146
64. Du Tertre says that while parents generally retained their original African languages, most children born into slavery knew only French and "bargouin, which is used in the islands when speaking with the savages; it is a jargon of French, Spanish, English, and Dutch words" (Histoire générale, 2:511)
65. The Dominican Jean-Baptiste Labat says that he learned rudimentary Arada to speak with the slaves on his own plantation (Jean-Baptiste Labat, Nouveau voyage aux isles de l'Amérique, 4 vols. [Fort-de-France, Martinique, 1972; based on 1742 edition], 2:394-95)
66. Guy Hazaël-Massieux, "Inculturation et langue de l'évangelisation aux Antilles," in Cultures et société s Andes et Méso-Amérique: Mélanges en hommage à Pierre Duviols, ed. Raquel Thiercelin, 2 vols. (Aix-en-Provence, 1991), 2:455-75
67. Sometime between the late seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries, missionaries created a creole version of the Passion according to Saint John, reflecting an attempt to use music to reach the slaves. For an analysis of the creole Passion, see Lambert Félix Prudent, "Pratiques langagières martiniquaises: Genèse et fonctionnement d'un système créole," 3 vols. (Ph.D. diss., Université de Rouen, 1993), 274-81
68. see also Ellen M. Schnepel, "The Language Question in Guadeloupe: From the Early Chroniclers to the Post-War Generation," Plantation Society in the Americas 5 (1998): 66
69. For the Dominicans, see Du Tertre, Histoire générale, 2:504
70. Chevillard, Desseins de son Eminence
71. and Antoine Touron, "Guillaume Martel, missionnaire apostolique dans l'Amérique," in Histoire des hommes illustres de l'ordre de St-Dominique, 6 vols. (Paris, 1743-49), 6:587-639
72. The earliest reference I have found to a curé des nègres in French territory is an obituary for the Jesuit Father Louis Charpentier, curé des nègres of Saint-Christophe, who died 4 June 1669. During his tenure, he had baptized between one thousand and twelve hundred blacks of the three thousand to four thousand in his district, which suggests that he had not been there for more than a few years (Père Gerard Brion, letter of 20 June 1669, Archivium Romanum Societatis Jesu [ARSI], Rome, Franc., 45 II fols. 332-33; the staff at the Jesuit archives in Rome was kind enough to copy this document for me). As late as 1694, the Dominican missionary Labat was commenting on the novelty of the Jesuit "Père des nègres" in Fort Saint-Pierre, Martinique. He does not mention corresponding titles for the Dominican, Capuchin, or Frères de la Charité missionaries of the island (Nouveau voyage, 1:53-55, 109). By 1729, however, the Dominicans and Capuchins had appointed curés des nègres for their respective parishes in Fort Royal and Saint-Pierre, Martinique ("Etat de la distribution qui doit être faite . . . ," in Documents inédits publiés à l'occasion du Tricentenaire des Antilles Guadeloupe 1635-1935, ed. Joseph Rennard [Basse-Terre, 1935], 187-91)
73. Jean Mongin, "Copie de la lettre du P. Jean Mongin, missionnaire de l'Amérique à une personne de condition du Languedoc écrite de l'île de Saint-Christophe au mois de mai 1682," as reprinted by Marcel Chatillon in Bulletin de la société d'histoire de la Guadeloupe 60-62 (1984): 86. My English translation of the Bibliothèque Municipale de Carcassonne manuscript version of Mongin's letter will soon be published electronically at www.amherst.edu/∼aardoc
74. Mongin, "Copie de la lettre," 82
75. African slaves' enthusiasm for Christianity is echoed by the Dominican Du Tertre, Histoire générale, 1:468-70 and 2:503-5
76. Thornton, "On the Trail of Voodoo."
77. Yet it is difficult to be certain. The first slave importation to the French Antilles recorded in David Eltis et al., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge, U.K., 2000), on which table 1 is based, is a 1670 shipment to Martinique. Given that the slave population for the Antilles was nearly twenty-four thousand in 1687 (see table 3), and our knowledge that many of the first Africans to reach the French Antilles in the 1640s and 1650s were confiscated from Portuguese and Spanish ships, the figures in table 1 are clearly incomplete
78. Pelleprat states that slaves from Angola were the most highly prized in the 1650s ("Relations des missions," 48)
79. Yet in 1682 Mongin writes that almost all the slaves who come from Africa are ignorant of Christianity, "excepting several who come from Kongo, perhaps because these live near a mission that the Jesuits run in Loanda" ("Copie de la lettre," 86)
80. It might further be objected that African Christians would not have been among those seeking baptism in the French slave colonies since, according to Catholic doctrine, the rite is supposed to be enjoyed only once in a lifetime. Yet there is evidence that some slaves sought multiple baptisms, perhaps understanding the rite as a purification, protective, or healing ritual, rather than an induction into an exclusive faith. Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix, Histoire de l'isle espagnole ou de S. Domingue: Ecrite particulièrement sur des mémoires manuscrits du P. Jean-Baptiste Le Pers, jésuite, missionnaire à Saint Domingue, 2 vols. (Paris, 1730-31), 2:502
81. John Thornton, "The Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1491-1750" Journal of African History 25 (1984): 151-59
82. idem, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800, 2d ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 255
83. Wyatt MacGaffey, "Europeans on the Atlantic Coast of Africa," in Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, ed. Stuart B. Schwartz (Cambridge, 1994), 254-61
84. Mechal Sobel, Trabelin On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Westport, Conn., 1979), 58
85. Melville J. Herskovits, "African Gods and Catholic Saints in New World Negro Belief," American Anthropologist 39 (1937): 635-43
86. Jean Clodoré, Region de ce qui s'est passé dans les isles & terre-ferme de l'Amérique (Paris, 1671), 48-49
87. have translated nègres as "Negroes" throughout, though their meanings are not identical. Nègre frequently connotes slave status as well as racial difference. For a more thorough discussion of race and slave status in eighteenth-century French discourse, see Sue Peabody, "There Are No Slaves inFrance": The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (NewYork, 1996), esp. chap. 4
88. See also the Jesuit Moreau, who writes, "Their slavery contributes to heightening this desire [for baptism] when they see that, being Christians, they are consoled and comforted by their fathers, loved by their masters, and almost equal to them before God" ("Mémoires concernant la mission," 73)
89. Moreau, "Mémoires concernant la mission," 72
90. The Dominican Labat also describes how the Christian plantation slaves used peer pressure and "one who is well instructed" to entice the newly arrived slaves to embrace Christianity. This teacher often stood as godfather or godmother during and after the slaves' baptism (Nouveau voyage, 2:398)
91. Labat, Nouveau voyage, 2:398
92. Clodoré, Relation, 38-40
93. The seventeenth century has been identified as the "golden age of Christianization" in France (Jean Delumeau, Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire: A New View of the Counter-Reformation [London, 1977], 190
94. see also Emanuel Chill, "Religion and Mendicity in Seventeenth-Century France," International Review of Social History 7 [1962]: 400-425)
95. On the piety of colonists in the Lesser Antilles, see Debien, Esclaves aux Antilles françaises, 251-52
96. Rennard, Histoire religieuse, 64-66
97. and Roget, "Société d'habitation," 1:612
98. Mongin, "Copie de la lettre," 89-92
99. Arlette Gautier, Les soeurs de Solitude: La condition féminine dans l'esclave aux Antilles du XVIIe au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1985), 69
100. Mongin, "Copie de la lettre," 113, 122-23
101. Maurile de Saint Michel, Voyage des Isles Camercanes en l'Amérique qui font partie des indes occidentales (Mans, 1653), 80-81
102. However, Du Tertre's explanation for the Capuchins' expulsion makes no mention of slavery. Du Tertre faults a priest he identifies as Père Jerome, who publicly defended a colonist sentenced to death for intriguing against the governor (Histoire générale, 1:132, 297-98)
103. "Lettre de M. de Bouloc, gouverneur de la Grenade," published in Annales des Antilles 27 (1988-91): 66-67
104. One should not infer from these accounts that all Capuchins were champions of slaves' rights. In 1726 the slave André, a woodworker who came to be owned by Père Amboise, the curé of Cul-de-Sac, Guadeloupe, sued for his freedom on the grounds that he had already been manumitted by his previous owners. The Capuchins contested this lawsuit and, because the notarized act of manumission had not been authorized by the governor, André was confiscated and resold au profit du roi. A.N. Col., F 3 225, p. 291, cited in Lucien-René Abenon, La Guadeloupe de 1671 à 1759: Etude politique, économique et sociale, 2 vols. (Paris, 1987), 2:12
105. It should be noted that colonial officials were appointed by the crown and did not reflect colonists' attitudes. Indeed, George Breathett has found evidence of substantial opposition to all the religious orders by planters beginning in the middle of the seventeenth century ("Religious Protectionism," 28-31, 35-37)
106. For example, Governor Galifet of Saint-Domingue describes the Capuchins as "more greedy for silver than anyone in the world" (letter of 27 Dec. 1699, reprinted in Jan, Congrégations religieuses, 36-37)
107. A few years later, Lieutenant Governor Phélypeaux, residing in Martinique, wrote: "These Capuchins are more than very greedy for money; almost all have some [money] and practice every means to get it" (M. de Phélypeaux to the Minister, 10 Sept. 1713 [A.N. Col. C8 A19], quoted in Rennard, Histoire religieuse, 135-36)
108. "Code Noir, touchant la police des iles de l'Amérique" in M. L. E. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions des colonies françoises dous le vent, 6 vols. (Paris, 1784-[1790]), 1:414-24
109. For extensive commentary on the Code Noir, see Louis Sala-Molins, Le Code Noir ou le calvaire de Canaan (Paris, 1987)
110. Edward Long advocated the adoption of similar legislation for the English slave colonies and offered one of the few published English translations of the edict in his History of Jamaica, 3 vols. (1774; rpt., London, 1970), 3:921-34
111. Vernon V. Palmer, "The Origins and Authors of the Code Noir," in An Uncommon Experience: Law and Judicial Institutions in Louisiana, 1803-2003, ed. Judith K. Schafer and Warren M. Billings (Lafayette, La., 1997), 331-59. Although the personnel filling these offices changed continually, Palmer's contention that the law emanated from colonial practices and concerns is well supported
112. The Jesuits' influence on the final piece of legislation is evident in the first article, which makes no mention of slaves, but which bans all Jews from the islands. Palmer speculates that this article, which was not in the draft emanating from the colonial officials, was added in Paris in response to the Jesuits' 1682 report protesting the Jews' alleged interference in Catholic missionary work ("Origins and Authors," 344-45)
113. An excerpt of that report reads: "[The Jews] have in their houses a great number of slaves that they instruct in Judaism, or at least that they divert from Christianity, preventing them from coming to instruction and destroying [them?] by a rite of religion contrary to ours and by what they say to them, especially all the sentiments that the missionaries could inspire in the faith; even more, of the [total] number of slaves, there are several who come from certain countries, who, because of their proximity to the Mohammedans, have all received circumcision, which, being the door to Judaism, makes it very easy for the Jews to persuade their slaves [to embrace] the other dogmas of the law" (A.N. Col. F 142, quoted in Peytraud, Esclavage aux Antilles françaises, 172)
114. Labat claimed to know only two white men who had married black women in all of the French islands (Nouveau voyage, 1:306)
115. Léo Elisabeth, "The French Antilles," in Neither Slave nor Free: The Freedmen of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World, ed. David W. Cohen and Jack P. Greene (Baltimore, Md., 1972), 134-71, notes that by the 1720s, colonial officials were seeking to curb the growth of the free mulatto population through a variety of means (141-43). Published census records do not indicate what proportion of the enslaved population was mulatto
116. The Martinique mission was the Jesuits' first. The missions to blacks of Basse Terre, Guadeloupe, dated from 1684. In 1704 Louis XIV transferred the northern Saint-Domingue parishes from the Capuchins to the Jesuits because of the Capuchins' inability to staff the mission there (Jan, Congrégations religieuses, 44-45)
117. The Dominican Du Tertre mounted a spirited defense of his order in the face of perceived slights by another author, Sieur Chaulmer, who, in his Suite de nouveau monde chrétien, "speaks of this new world, as though the Reverend Father Jesuits had been the only apostles and the only missionaries to it" (Du Tertre, Histoire générale, 4:360)
118. On the perpetual sparring between Jesuits and Dominicans, see Rennard, Histoire religieuse, 100-103,182
119. and Roget, "Société d'habitation," 2:1033-34
120. See, for example, Moreau, "Mémoires concernant la mission," 69-75
121. Jean Vidaud to the Minister, 22 June 1713, reprinted in Rennard, Documents inédits, 167-71
122. Adrien Dessalles, Histoire générale des Antilles, 5 vols. (Paris, 1847-48), 2:454-55
123. Saint-Domingue followed a pattern similar to that of the Lesser Antilles, though delayed by several decades. Tobacco farms proliferated in the 1660s and 1670s until the new tobacco monopoly forced down production in 1674 (Jacob Price, France and the Chesapeake: A History of the French Tobacco Monopoly, 1674-1791, and of Its Relationship to the British and American Tobacco Trades [Ann Arbor, Mich., 1973], 1:17-22, 83-115)
124. The larger-scale sugar and indigo plantations took off during the first decade of the eighteenth century (Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint-Domingue Revolution from Below [Knoxville, Tenn., 1990], 22)
125. Charles Frostin, Les révoltes blanches à Saint-Domingue aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Haiti avant 1789) (Paris, 1975), 28-29
126. Delumeau, Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire, 203-35
127. Joseph Rennard, "Etat religieux des colonies aux Antilles en 1743," Revue d'histoire des missions 8 (1931): 433-50 and 554-85
128. and Père Margat, letter of 20 July 1743, in Lettres édifiantes et curieuses: Ecrites des missions étrangères, new ed. (Lyon, 1819), 4:397-98
129. Le Pers, as quoted in Charlevoix, Histoire de l'isle espagnole, 2:502-4
130. These are the satchels known to French explorers to West Africa as gri-gri or gris-gris. In Senegambia and along the Guinea coast they contained scraps of paper with holy texts in Arabic and were common among West African Muslims. Europeans claimed that Africans ascribed magical powers to the gris-gris, such as the ability to ward off snakes. In contemporary Kongo-Manianga culture, a similar bag is called a futu and is believed to be the material manifestation of the nkisi, or spirit. See, for example, Saint-Lô, Relation du voyage, 198-99
131. Claude Jannequin, Sieur de Rochefort, Voyage de Lybie au royaume de Sénéga (Paris, 1643), 119-20
132. and François Froger, Relation d'un voyage fait en 1695, 1696, et 1697 aux côtes d'Afrique, . . . Brezil, Cayenne et Isles Antilles (Paris, 1698), 18
133. MacGaffey, Religion and Society, 135-68
134. idem, Art and Healing of the Bakongo Commented by Themselves: Minkisi from the Laman Collection (Stockholm, 1991), 9
135. Simon Bockie, Death and the Invisible Powers: The World of Kongo Belief (Bloomington, Ind., 1993), 67-71
136. Burgas could be avariation on the Fon terms bocie and bo, from southern Benin, which refer to empowerment objects known variously as gris-gris or fetishes (Suzanne Preston Blier, African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power [Chicago, 1995], 2-16)
137. Labat, Nouveau voyage, 1:91-96, 245-49
138. Skepticism among elites had eliminated executions for witchcraft in France by the end of the seventeenth century (Robert Mandrou, Magistrats et sorciers en France au XVIIe siècle: Une analyse de psychologie historique [Paris, 1980], 323-486)
139. Elisabeth, "French Antilles," 140-46
140. Yvan Debbasch, Couleur et liberté: Le jeu du critère ethnique dans un ordre juridique esclavagiste (Paris, 1967), 34-105
141. John Garrigus, "A Struggle for Respect: The Free Coloreds of Pre-Revolutionary Saint-Domingue, 1760-1769" (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1988), esp. 245-61
142. Gabriel Debien, "Marronage in the French Caribbean," in Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, ed. Richard Price (Baltimore, Md., 1973), 107-34
143. translated with considerable editing from "Le marronage aux Antilles françaises au XVIIIe siècle" Caribbean Studies 6.3 (1966): 3-44
144. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions: 1 Aug. 1704 (2:12-13)
145. The term kalenda or calenda first appears in the law of 1772. For a detailed description of the kalenda, which seems to have been perceived by colonial officials as a social gathering, or "ball," rather than a religious event, see M. L. E. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de lu partie française de l'isle Saint-Domingue, ed. Blanche Maurel and Etienne Taillemite, new ed., 3 vols. (Paris, 1984), 1:63-64
146. After the French Revolution, slaves from the islands of Grenada, Saint-Vincent, and Dominica brought the tradition of kalenda to Trinidad, where the term came to be associated with ritualized stick-fighting (Richard D. E. Burton, Afro Creole: Power, Opposition, and Play in the Caribbean [Ithaca, N.Y., 1997], 173-74)
147. Throughout this article I have chosen the terms people of color and, in some instances, free colored to describe free people of partial or full African ancestry in French slaveholding colonies. I choose this over the more familiar U.S. terms black or African American to reflect the more nuanced sense of racial identity prevalent in French slaveholding colonies. Common seventeenth-and especially eighteenth-century terms, such as mulâtre, quarteron, sang-mêlé, and gens de couleur reflected colonists' acute awareness of degrees of whiteness and the demographic importance of miscegenation in French colonial society, where - at the outbreak of the Revolution - almost half of the free populations of Martinique and Saint-Domingue were of mixed ancestry, some with significant wealth (see John Garrigus, "Colour, Class, and Identity on the Eve of the Haitian Revolution: Saint-Domingue's Free Coloured Elite as Colons américains" Slavery and Abolition 17 [1996]: 20-43)
148. These trials took place in 1721, 1723, and 1725 (Pluchon, Vaudou, sorciers, empoisonneurs, 241-42)
149. 3 224, fols. 791-96
150. "Extrait de la lettre du ministre aux administrateurs, sur l'inhumation solomnelle d'une négresse pendue du 22 Octobre 1737," in Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions, 3:485
151. Pluchon, Vaudou, sorciers, empoisonneurs, 167-72, 238-41
152. See also Geggus, "Marronage, Vaudou, and the Saint Domingue Slave Revolt," 28-29
153. A. C. de C. M. Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1441-1555 (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 152-55
154. A. J. R. Russell-Wood, The Black Man in Slavery and Freedom in Colonial Brazil (New York, 1982), 153-60
155. Patricia A. Mulvey, "Slave Confraternities in Brazil," The Americas 39 (1982): 39-68
156. Frederick P. Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524-1650 (Palo Alto, Calif., 1974), 247-50
157. On the Spanish confraternities for blacks, see David Wills and Albert Raboteau, eds., African-American Religion: A Historical Interpretation with Representative Documents (Chicago, forthcoming)
158. The Jesuits apparently attempted to establish a Confraternity of the Rosary in Martinique in the 1650s and 1660s and again in the late 1680s. It is not clear whether this effort was aimed primarily at blacks or whites. Nonetheless, the Dominicans successfully challenged the Jesuits' right to establish such confraternities in Martinique before the pope in 1667. The acting governor-general of the French islands was called upon to settle the affair once again when it erupted in 1688. Rennard writes that "the chevalier de Saint Laurent terminated the affair and reconciled the religious of the two orders 'as well as he could'" (Histoire religieuse, 100-103)
159. See Roland E. Mousnier, Society and the State, trans. Brian Pearce, vol. 1 of The Institutions of France under the Absolute Monarchy, 1598-1789 (Chicago, 1979), 339-40
160. Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Palo Alto, Calif., 1965), 98, 172-73
161. and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Carnival in Romans, trans. Mary Feeney (New York, 1979), 176
162. Letter from Machault, minister of the marine, to Bompar, governor of the Windward Isles, 27 Nov. 1753 (A.N. Col. B 97, p. 66), cited in Abenon, Guadeloupe, 2:59
163. Letter from Bompar to the minister, 20 July 1753, A.N. Col. F 144, cited in Peytraud, Esclavage aux Antilles, 180-81
164. The Jesuit order was already on the defensive. Expelled from Portugal and Paraguay in 1759, the Society of Jesus had been hounded by its enemies in the Parlement of Paris for years. The order would subsequently be suppressed in Spain in 1767 and dissolved by Pope Clement XIV in 1773 (Owen Chadwick, "The Fall of the Jesuits," in The Popes and European Revolution [Oxford, 1981], 345-90)
165. Dale Van Kley's The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits from France, 1757-1765 (New Haven, Conn., 1975)
166. is the most comprehensive recent account of the Jesuit expulsion from France but see also D. G. Thompson, "The Lavalette Affair and the Jesuit Superiors," French History 10 (1996): 206-39
167. All of these sources revise the first significant scholarly interpretation of the Jesuits' demise in France: Rochemonteix, Le père Antoine Lavalette
168. David, Clergé, 2:41-42. One may wonder about his capacity to perform the more rigorous aspects of his duties, such as the catechism of newly arrived Africans, in his weakened condition
169. Conseil Supérieur de la Guadeloupe, "Extrait des registres concernant la suppression des Jésuites à la Guadeloupe," 6 July 1764, in Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions, 4:775
170. A Martinique administrator criticized the missionaries' refusal of certain godparents to slaves in a 1752 report, "Au sujet des registres des paroisses et baptêmes des mulâtres et métis," published in Rennard, Documents inédits, 199-203
171. Pluchon, Histoire des Antilles, 171
172. From 1757 to 1761, only two slave ships left France (Stein, French Slave Trade, 31)
173. Of course, slaves could be acquired illicitly through smuggling during times of war, but a prohibition against selling flour or bread to gens de couleur during this period suggests that Cap Français was deprived of many external supplies as the war lingered on (Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions, 4:451)
174. Jan, Congrégations religieuses, 45, 133
175. Because clergy were hard to recruit for the colonies, in some instances individual Jesuits, such as Father Bruny, were permitted to remain in their posts as regular clergy (Janin, Religion aux colonies, 53)
176. V. P. Malouet, Collection de mémoires et correspondances officielles sur l'administration des colonies, 5 vols. (Paris, 1802), 4:338
177. and Justin Girod-Chantrans, Voyages d'un Suisse dans différentes colonies d'Amérique pendant la dernière guerre (Neuchatel, 1785), 164
178. idem, Collecta, 2 vols. (Port-au-Prince, 1955), 2:24
179. and Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, xiv-xv
180. On mesmerism, see Gabriel Debien, "Assemblées nocturnes d'esclaves à Saint-Domingue (La Marmelade, 1786)," Annules historiques de la Révolution française 44 (1972): 277-83
181. see Frostin, "Méthodologie missionnaire," 20-22
182. and Gabriel Debien, "Un officier du regiment de Forez à Saint-Domingue en 1764," Conjonction: Revue franco-haïtienne 124 (1974): 120-21
183. 3 90, fols. 110-21
184. "Le règlement de discipline," 113-113v
185. "Le réglement de discipline," 112r-114v
186. Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
187. The new CD-ROM puts a vast amount of information in the hands of researchers and increases the ease by which it may be organized. Unfortunately, one of the weaknesses of the interface is that chronological queries may be made only in round intervals, such as ten, twenty-five, or one hundred years. Thus one cannot easily use the program to select periods corresponding to specific historical intervals, such as the period of the Seven Years' War. Robert Stein notes that while Saint-Domingue planters suffered a virtual blockade on slave imports during the war, Martinique and Guadeloupe planters, under English occupation during the war, benefited by direct access to the burgeoning English slave trade (French Slave Trade, 31-32)
188. Dessales, Histoire générale des Antilles, 2:454-55. The date of the census is 1687, five years after Mongin wrote his letter, but the figures would, if anything, have been lower in 1682
189. "Le règlement de discipline," 112
190. Pierre-François-Régis Dessalles, Annules du consell souverain de la Martinique, ed. Bernard Vonglis, 4 vols. (1786; rpt., Paris, 1995), 1:254
191. Nicolas Germain Léonard, "Lettres sur un voyage aux Antilles," in Oeuvres de M. Léonard, 2 vols. (Paris, 1787), 2:207-9
192. 9 B29), quoted in Pluchon, Vaudou, sorciers, empoisonneurs, 39
193. David Geggus, "The French Slave Trade: An Overview," William and Mary Quarterly 58 (2001): 119-38
194. Frostin, Les révoltes blanches, 28
195. generally supports David Geggus's and Philip Curtin's conclusions regarding the prominence of slaves exported from the regions of Benin and Congo and Angola (see David Geggus, "Sex Ratio, Age, and Ethnicity in the Atlantic Slave Trade: Data from French Shipping and Plantation Records," Journal of African History 30 [1989]: 28
196. and Philip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census [Madison, Wis., 1969], 164-67, 170, 200)
197. Geggus, "Haitian Voodoo in the Eighteenth Century," 33-35
198. Debien, "Assemblées nocturnes d'esclaves," 278-80
199. The evidence of African-based ritual is widespread. For a survey of examples, see Pluchon, Vaudou, sorciers, empoisonneurs, 71-116, though one should be skeptical about the author's tendency to label everything African as "Vaudou."
200. David Geggus, "The Bois-Caiman Ceremony," Journal of Caribbean History 25 (1991): 41-57
201. idem, "Haitian Vaudou in the Eighteenth Century," 42-46
202. Fick, Making of Haiti, 92-94, 104-5, 241-44, 264-66
203. Two histories that celebrate the role of Vaudou in the overthrow of the French slave regime are Jean Fouchard, The Haitian Maroons: Liberty or Death, trans. A. Faulkner Watts (New York, 1981)
204. and Hénock Trouillot, Introduction à une histoire du Vaudou (Port-au-Prince, 1970)
205. Thornton, "On the Trail of Vaudou," 262-67
206. It is not clear which sources this author is using; one of them is certainly Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:411-15, 425, 533
207. Jasmin also found white advocates who could present his petitions to authorities in Saint-Domingue and France after the Jesuits were suppressed (Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:412-16)
208. John Thornton, "'I Am the Subject of the King of Kongo': African Political Ideology and the Haitian Revolution," Journal of World History 4 (1993): 186-88
209. See also David P. Geggus, "From His Most Catholic Majesty to the Godless Republic: The 'Volte-Face' of Toussaint Louverture and the Ending of Slavery in Saint Domingue," Revue française d'histoire d'Outre-Mer 65 (1978): 486 n. 36
210. See also Louverture's 1794 letter to the parish priest of Gonaives, Saint-Domingue, which suggests his continuing Christian faith and respect for
211. Pierre-François-Régis Dessalles, Historique des troubles survenues à la Martinique pendant la Révolution, ed. Henri de Frémont (Fort-de-France, Martinique, 1982), 20-21
212. The relationship of rumor to slave rebellion is explored in Julius Scott, "The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution" (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1986)
213. and in Laurent Dubois, "A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1789-1802" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1998), esp. 83-97 and 101-7
214. For example, the slaves' letter states: "We are not ignorant, Great General, of all the claims that have been made to you to our disadvantage . . . ; but God who sooner or later confounds the haughty designs of men, this God so just knows our heart[;] he knows if we have ever had another purpose than that of supporting with patience the oppression of our persecutors, this eternal God not being able to suffer any longer so many persecutions has doubtless committed Louis XVI, the great Monarch; [sic] the charge of delivering all these unhappy Christians oppressed by their similar injustices," quoted in Léo Elisabeth, "Saint Pierre, août 1789," in Compterendu des travaux du colloque de Saint-Pierre: 14, 15, 16 décembre, 1973 (Fort-de-France, Martinique, 1975), 39
215. Gabriel Debien, "Religion des esclaves et réaction des colons à la Martinique en 1802: Le curé du Robert, Ponce Champroux, prêtre manceau," La Province du Maine (Apr.-June 1970): 233-42