"The blood of France": Race and purity of blood in the French Atlantic world

William and Mary Quarterly

Volumn 61, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 439-478

  Aubert, Guillaume ^a  

^a WILLIAMS COLLEGE   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61149444139     PISSN: 00435597     EISSN: 1933-769     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3491805     Document Type: Review

References (129)

1. A special issue of the William and Mary Quarterly titled "Constructing Race" (3d Ser., LIV [January 1997]) did not contain an article on the French colonies. For a synthesis of the debates on the origins of African slavery in Virginia and its impact on racial prejudice, see Alden T. Vaughan, "The Origins Debate: Slavery and Racism in Seventeenth-Century Virginia," in Vaughan, Roots of American Racism: Essays on the Colonial Experience (New York, 1995), 136-174
2. On the current scholarship about race in early Anglo-America, see Kathleen M. Brown, "Beyond the Great Debates: Gender and Race in Early America," Reviews in American History, XXVI (1998), 96-123
3. In her synthesis on the idea of race in North America, Audrey Smedley argues that, by contrast to what occurred in English North America, the French "evolved a very different perspective on human differences that did not result in the construction of rigidly exclusive racial groups"; see Smedley, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (Boulder, Colo., 1993), 40
4. For a similar perspective, see Charles Edwards O'Neill, Church and State in French Colonial Louisiana: Policy and Politics to 1732 (New Haven, Conn., 1966), 250
5. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies: A Comparison of St. Domingue and Cuba (Baltimore, 1971), 146
6. Gary B. Nash, Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America, 2d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1982), 105-106
7. Cornelius J. Jaenen, The French Relationship with the Native Peoples of New France and Acadia (Ottawa, 1984), 72
8. James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York, 1985), 278
9. Mathé Allain, "Not Worth a Straw": French Colonial Policy and the Early Years of Louisiana (Lafayette, La., 1988), 81-82
10. Jerah Johnson, "Colonial New Orleans: A Fragment of the Eighteenth-Century French Ethos," in Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon, eds., Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization (Baton Rouge, La., 1992), 13, 15, 34-35
11. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, La., 1992), 15, 155
12. Vaughan Burdin Baker, "Interracial Societies: The French Colonies: Louisiana," in Jacob Ernest Cook, ed., Encyclopedia of the North American Colonies (New York, 1993), II, 175
13. Pierre H. Boulle, "In Defense of Slavery: Eighteenth-Century Opposition to Abolition and the Origins of a Racist Ideology in France," in Frederick Krantz, ed., History from Below: Studies in Popular Protest and Popular Ideology (New York, 1988), 219-246
14. John D. Garrigus, "'Sons of the Same Father': Gender, Race, and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue, 1760-1792," in Christine Adams, Jack R. Censer, and Lisa Jane Graham, eds., Visions and Revisions of Eighteenth-Century France (University Park, Pa., 1997), 137-153
15. Only Yvan Debbasch, Couleur et liberté: Le jeu du critère ethnique dans un ordre juridique esclavagiste, I, L'affranchi dans les possessions françaises de la Caraïbe (1635-1833) (Paris, 1967)
16. and William B. Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans: White Response to Blacks, 1530-1880 (Bloomington, Ind., 1980), identify the emergence of colonial hierarchies based on skin color and ancestry during the seventeenth century. Some of the more recent and most welcome literature on the construction of race in early modern France does acknowledge the discourses emphasizing fixed physical and moral attributes to distinguish between French and Africans or people of African ancestry during the late seventeenth century. Yet all argue that "the rigidification of racial ideology" in France and its colonies appeared only during the second half of the eighteenth century
17. See Sue Peabody, "There Are No Slaves in France": The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (New York, 1996), 68 (quotation); Pierre H. Boulle, "La construction du concept de race dans la France d'ancien régime," Outre-mers: Revue d'histoire, LXXXIX (2002), 155-175
18. Boulle, "François Bernier and the Origins of the Modern Concept of Race," in Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall, eds., The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France (Durham, N.C., 2003), 11-27
19. Nash, Red, White, and Black, 105-106; Axtell, The Invasion Within, 278
20. According to Parkman, "Spanish civilization crushed the Indian; English civilization scorned and neglected him; French civilization embraced and cherished him" (Parkman, The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century [Boston, 1899], I, 131)
21. For a critique of the continuation of Parkman's perspective, see John A. Dickinson, "French and British Attitudes to Native People in Colonial North America," Storia Nordamericana, IV (1987), 41-56
22. Jaenen, The French Relationship, 72; Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 14, 155
23. Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 155
24. Johnson, "Colonial New Orleans," in Hirsch and Logsdon, eds., Creole New Orleans, 13, 15, 17, 34-35
25. Robert Mandrou, La France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1967), 148. To be sure, the idea that the superior status of the nobility stemmed from the purity of its blood was nothing new in the early modern period. The notion of a divinely ordained social order in which noble status was transmitted through blood from one generation to the next had already emerged throughout medieval Europe. On blood and race during the Middle Ages, see Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950-1350 (Princeton, N.J., 1993), 221-242
26. On the importance of genealogy among medieval aristocrats, see Georges Duby, Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages (Chicago, 1994), 114-115, 177-183
27. Arlette Jouanna, Ordre social: Mythes et hiérarchies dans la France du XVIe siècle (Paris, 1977), 204-210
28. More recently, Jonathan Dewald has argued that "seventeenth-century nobles produced elaborate defenses of their order's superiority to the rest of society and emphasized the value of noble birth." Especially after 1570, Dewald writes, "noble blood acquired greater importance ..., increasingly obscuring other plausible justifications of privilege." "The monarchy contributed to this enhanced evaluation, by inspecting genealogies more carefully and penalizing those who lacked proper ancestry. Concepts of lineage (race in the language of the seventeenth century) performed comforting ideological functions" (Dewald, Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture: France, 1570-1715 [Berkeley, Calif., 1993], 8, 15)
29. See also Jouanna, "Race," in Lucien Bély, ed., Dictionnaire de l'ancien régime: Royaume de France, XVIe-XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1996), 1045-1047
30. Jouanna, L'idée de race en France au XVIème siècle et au début du XVIIème siècle (1498-1614), 3 vols. (Lille, 1976), III, 1315-1326
31. Pierre Goubert, L'ancien régime, I, La société (Paris, 1969), 152
32. Jouanna, "Race," in Bély, ed., Dictionnaire de l'ancien régime, 1045-1047
33. Jouanna, L'idée de race, III, 1315-1326
34. Roland E. Mousnier, The Institutions of France under the Absolute Monarchy, 1598-1789, 2 vols., trans. Arthur Goldhammer and Brian Pearce (Chicago, 1979), II, 27-59
35. Pierre de Roncherolle, Harangue prononcée en la sale du petit Bourbon, le 27 octobre 1614 ... (Paris, 1615), 12
36. Discours sur le congé impétré par Monsieur le Cardinal de Lorraine ... (1565), 5; Pierre de La Primaudaye, Academie françoise (Paris, 1581), fol. 53
37. See also Jouanna, L'idée de race, 31-38
38. Patrick Dandrey, "Un tardif blason du corps animal: Résurgences de la physiognomonie comparée au XVIIe siècle," XVIIe Siècle, CLIII (1986), 351-370
39. See several such examples in André Devyver, Le sang épuré: Les préjugés de race chez les gentilshommes français de l'ancien régime, 1560-1720 (Brussels, 1973), 164-169
40. Josse Clichtove, Le livre et traicté de toute vraye noblesse, nouvellement translaté de latin en françoys (Lyon, 1533), fol. Aiiii; Etienne de La Boétie, Discours de la servitude volontaire (1550), in Paul Bonnefon, ed., Oeuvres complètes d'Estienne de la Boétie (Paris, 1892), 15-16
41. Boulle, "La construction du concept de race," Outre-mers: Revue d'histoire, LXXXIX (2002), 155-175
42. Dewald, Aristocratic Experience, 1-2, 7-8, 11
43. Laurent Bourquin, La noblesse francaise à l'époque moderne, XVIe-XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 2002), 63-74, 110-113
44. Louis Le Caron [Charondas, pseud.], Pandectes ou digestes du droict françois, livre II (Paris, 1607)
45. Arlette Jouanna, "Le mythe du sang bleu," L'histoire, LXXXIX (1996), 6 (quotation)
46. Charles Du Fresne Du Cange, Histoire de S[aint] Louis IX du nom, roy de France ... (Paris, 1668), 198
47. La Roque, Traité de la noblesse, 326
48. François de Belleforest, Les grandes annales et histoire générale de France ... (Paris, 1579), fol. 1620
49. Jonathan Dewald has argued that, if the official culture of the royal court promoted the sexual freedom of aristocratic women, their affairs with servants were a source of great anxiety as well as scandal. Expressing "a widespread sense that women threatened the purity of the lineage," seventeenth-century poet François Malherbe observed that "it was a folly to boast that one came from the old nobility ... [since] it needed only one lascivious woman to pervert the blood of Charlemagne and Saint Louis." See Dewald, Aristocratic Experience, 127-128
50. Since "marriages are the seminary of the realm," read the preamble to the November 1639 royal ordinance on marriage, "the source and origin of civil society, and the foundation of the families which compose commonwealths, which bind them together, and in which the natural reverence of children for their parents is the basis for the legitimate allegiance of subjects to their sovereign, the kings preceding us have deemed it worthy of their attention to legislate the public order, external decency, integrity, and dignity of marriage." See François André Isambert, ed., Receuil général des anciennes lois françaises, depuis l' an 420 jusqu'à la Révolution de 1789, 29 vols. (Paris, 1821-1833), XVI, 520
51. (translated in Julius R. Ruff, Crime, Justice, and Public Order in Old Régime France: The Sénéchaussées of Libourne and Bazas, 1696-1789 [London, 1984], 168-169)
52. Following the principles of canon law, confirmed by Tridentine rules, ecclesiastical authorities considered marriage a holy sacrament that necessitated the consent of only the couple. By requiring parental consent for minors, proof of age, publication of banns, and witnesses for all and by expanding the definition of clandestine marriage, the royal edicts and ordinances of this period gave secular authorities and civil courts powers that undermined the traditional prerogatives of the church. Sarah Hanley points out that these new regulations "generated a long church-state quarrel in France." As we shall see, conflicts between ecclesiastical and secular authorities over these issues also occurred in Louisiana. See Hanley, "The Jurisprudence of the Arrêts: Marital Union, Civil Society, and State Formation in France, 1550-1650," Law and History Review, XXI (2003), 17
53. See also André Bruguière, "L'état monarchique et la famille (XVIe-XVIIIe siècle)," Annales: Histoire, sciences sociales, LVI (2001), 314-316
54. See also Mousnier, The Institutions of France under the Absolute Monarchy, I, 62
55. See also Sarah Hanley, "Family and State in Early Modern France: The Marriage Pact," in Marilyn J. Boxer and Jean H. Quataert, eds., Connecting Spheres: Women in the Western World, 1500 to the Present (New York, 1987), 63
56. Hanley, "The Jurisprudence of the Arrêts," Law and History Review, XXI (2003), 3, 12. Mathieu Molé, president of the Parlement of Paris in 1634, thus insisted that "marriages are not made for the persons who contract [them] but for the honor and advantage of families" (26, 27, 29). Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the French parlements, or sovereign courts, nullified an increasing number of marriages for similar reasons. The actions of the parlementaires against mésalliances were symptomatic of the pervasive nature of the "idea of race" among the French elite. The roturier origin of the nobles of the robe who officiated in the parlement had originally induced the old nobility to argue for the defense of its judicial prerogatives by emphasizing the racial inferiority of these new nobles. The heredity of judicial functions granted by the state at the beginning of the seventeenth century, however, led the nobility of the robe to develop a racial consciousness of its own and to display no more toleration for mésalliances than the old nobility
57. On the increasing number of marriages nullified by French courts, see J. Ghestin, "L'action des Parlements contre les 'mésalliances' aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles," Revue historique de droit français et étranger, XXXIV (1956), 74-110, 196-224
58. See Edmond Huguet, Dictionnaire de la langue française du seizième siècle (Paris, 1925). By the end of the seventeenth century, the famous Dictionaire universel by Antoine Furetière specified that the term was used for men who had "a father and a mother of different quality, country [pays], color, or Religion." Furetière also gave examples of how the term was used in the Spanish colonies: "a child born to an Indian and a Spanish woman ... in Peru, those who were born to a Spaniard and a Savage woman [une Sauvage]." See Furetière, Dictionaire universel, contenant généralement tous les mots françois ... (The Hague, 1690), s.v. "mestif, ive."
59. Myriam Yardeni, "Religion, Race, and Moral Code: The Jews in Travelers' Accounts of the Seventeenth Century," in Yardeni, Anti-Jewish Mentalities in Early Modern Europe (Lanham, Md., 1990), 144
60. Jean Dumont, Nouveau voyage du Levant ... (The Hague, 1694), 349; [Nicolas] Audeber, Le voyage et observations de plusieurs choses diverses qui se peuvent remarquer en Italie (Paris, 1656), 127
61. Albert Jouvin de Rochefort, Le voyageur d'Europe ... (Paris, 1672), I, 449
62. Isaac de La Peyrère, Du Rappel des Juifs (Paris, 1643), 81
63. Gabriel Sagard, Le grand voyage du pays des Hurons ... (1632) (Montreal, 1998), 113
64. Marc Lescarbot, The History of New France (1618), 3 vols., ed. and trans. W. L. Grant (Toronto, 1907), I, 10-11
65. Lescarbot, History of New France, ed. and trans. Grant, I, 159, 183
66. Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610-1791, 73 vols. (Cleveland, Ohio, 1896-1901) (hereafter cited as JR), V, 211, X, 27
67. Jean-Baptise Colbert to Jean Talon, Apr. 5, 1667, in Pierre-Georges Roy, ed., Rapport de l'archiviste de la Province de Québec pour 1930-1931, II (Quebec, 1931), 72; Cornelius J. Jaenen, Friend and Foe: Aspects of French-Amerindian Cultural Contact in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York, 1976), 161-185. This policy also matched the reluctance of Versailles to encourage massive immigration to New France. See Jacques Mathieu, La Nouvelle France: Les Français en Amérique du Nord, XVIe-XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1991), 68
68. Estimates for the number of French brides transported to New France at the king's expense vary between 774 and 1,200. See Silvio Dumas, Les filles du roi en Nouvelle-France (Quebec, 1972), 41
69. Gustave Lanctôt, Filles de joie ou filles du roi: Etude sur l'émigration féminine en Nouvelle-France (Montreal, 1952), 104-105, 113
70. For a survey of female emigration to New France, see Leslie P. Choquette, "L'émigration féminine de la France vers le Canada aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles," in Claire Quintal, ed., La femme Franco-Américaine/The Franco-American Woman (Worcester, Mass., 1994), 4-18
71. king's daughters' program represented a racial reorientation as much as a demographic developmentalist agenda"; see Greer, The People of New France (Toronto, 1997), 17
72. See Mathieu, La Nouvelle-France, 84; Philipe Jacquin, Les Indiens blancs/Français et Indiens en Amérique du Nord (XVIe-XVIIIe siècle) (Paris, 1987), 156, 161-162, 174, 177
73. For one such French moralist, see [François Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon], "De l'éducation des filles" (1687), in Jacques Le Brun, ed., Oeuvres (Paris, 1983), 1201-1202
74. See also Philip F. Riley, "Michel Foucault, Lust, Women, and Sin in Louis XIV's Paris," Church History, LIX (1990), 38
75. Jacques Bégnigne Bossuet, Cathéchisme du Diocèse de Meaux (Paris, 1687)
76. The expression "life of profligacy" is from Father Allouez, Jesuit missionary in New France. See JR, VI, 253, L, 291
77. "Relation du Sieur Lamothe de Cadillac" (n.d.), in Pierre Margry, ed., Découvertes et établissements des Français dans l'ouest et dans le sud de l'Amérique septentrionale (1614-1754): Mémoires et documents originaux, 6 vols. (Paris, 1876-1886), V, 120
78. French officials and missionaries were naturally prone to misunderstand and criticize Indian sexuality. For an analysis of the significance of these relationship for Indian women, see Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge, 1991), 60-68
79. To the best of our knowledge, only sixty-five church-sanctioned marriages between French men and Indian women were celebrated during the French regime, representing an insignificant proportion of the total number of marriages during that same period. More than twenty-seven thousand marriages appear in the records of the French colonial period, which would put the proportion of French-Indian marriages around 0.2 percent of the total number of marriages between 1608 and 1765. For the same period, only 512 individuals (1 percent) appearing in marriage records counted at least one Indian ancestor. For the list of marriages between French men and Indian women during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries based on an exhaustive survey of the surviving records, see Cyprien Tanguay, Dictionnaire généalogique des familles canadiennes depuis la fondation de la colonie jusqu'à nos jours, 7 vols. (Montreal, 1871), VII, 687-688
80. Calculations are based on Tanguay and Bertrand Desjardins, "Homogénéité ethnique de la population québécoise sous le Régime français," Cahiers québécois de démographie, XIX (1990), 69, 72
81. See also Hubert Charbonnueau, "... Et pourtant français à 95 pour cent," Mémoires de la Société Généalogique Canadienne-Française, XL (1989), 11-17
82. For a higher count, see Peter Moogk, La Nouvelle France: The Making of French Canada - A Cultural History (East Lansing Mich., 2000), 46
83. "Lettre du Gouverneur de Vaudreuil au Roi, 14 Novembre 1709," CAOM, C11 A 30, fol. 9
84. Louise Dechêne, Habitants and Merchants in Seventeenth-Century Montreal, trans. Liana Vardi (Montreal, 1992), 67-76
85. Yves F. Zoltvany, Philippe de Rigaud de Vaudreuil, Governor of New France, 1703-1725 (Toronto, 1974), 37-42
86. White, The Middle Ground, 108-111 (for an analysis of French-Indian alliances in the Great Lakes region from 1700 to 1712, see 142-159); "Lettre de Lamothe Cadillac, 1700," CAOM C11 E, fols. 40-41v
87. The de facto enslavement of these captives had a long tradition in New France and was an integral part of French-Indian diplomacy. See Brett Rushforth, "A Little Flesh We Offer You': The Origins of Indian Slavery in New France," WMQ, 3d Ser., LX (2003) 777-808
88. See also "Ordonnance Rendue au sujet des Nègres et des Sauvages appelés Panis," Apr. 13, 1709, in Ordonnances des intendants et arrêts portant règlement du Conseil Supérieur de Québec (Quebec, 1806), 67
89. The principle of partus sequitur ventrem, according to which slave mothers transmitted their status to their children, was applied in the French Antilles starting in the 1640s and became part of French colonial law with the promulgation of the 1685 Code noir. See Aubert, "Constructing Race," 117, 131
90. Rushforth, "'Le sauvage quoyque Esclave ... ne ressemble pas au Nègre: La 'race' et l'esclavage en Nouvelle-France" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Institut d'histoire de l'Amérique française [October 2003]), 5. According to Rushforth, "about 13 or 14 percent of Montreal's households claimed an Indian slave by 1709" (Rushforth, "'A Little Flesh,'" WMQ, 3d Ser., LX [2003], 802)
91. See also the duc de Saint-Simon, quoted in Louis Trenard, "Les fondements de l'idée de race au XVIIIe siècles," L'information historique, XLIII (1981), 166
92. Jean-Baptiste Labat, Nouveau voyage aux îles de l'Amérique ..., 4 vols (The Hague, 1724), II, 38
93. Jacques Bouton, Relation de l'établissement des françois depuis l'an 1635 en l'îsle de la Martinique, l'une des Antilles de l'Amérique ... (Paris 1640), 102
94. Pierre Pelleprat Relation des Missions des PP. de la Compagnie de Iesvs dans les Isles, et dans la terre ferme de l'Amerique Meridionale; divisée en deux parties; avec une introduction à la langue des Galibis Sauuages de la terre ferme de l'Amerique (Paris 1655), 55-56
95. [Jean-Baptiste] Du Tertre, Histoire generale des Antilles habitées par les françois ..., 4 vols. (Paris, 1667-1671), II, 483-484, 494, 501
96. Du Tertre Histoire generale, II, 511. The negative connotations associated with a dark complexion had a long tradition. In French medieval texts, semipagan peasants were often said to be "dark" or "tawny." Medieval religious paintings or sculptures also often depicted agents of the Devil with dark skin. By the twelfth century, the physiognomy of these demonic figures became more specifically African. White skin, by contrast, was symbolic of Christian superiority. See Paul Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford, Calif., 1999), 139
97. Jean Devisse, L'image du noir dans l'art occidental (Fribourg, 1979), II, pt. 1, 62-79, 81-148, pt. 2, 59-67
98. Jacques Houdaille, "Le métissage dans les anciennes colonies françaises," Population, XXVI (1981), 271, 276, 277
99. Du Tertre, Histoire generale, II, 460; Clarence J. Munford, The Black Ordeal of Slavery and Slave Trading in the French West Indies, 1625-1715 (Lewiston, N.Y., 1991), III, 708
100. For similar perspectives on black women, see Guillaume Coppier, Histoire et voyage des Indes Occidentales ... (Lyon, 1645), 19-20
101. and Pelleprat, Relation des missions, 55-57
102. In 1724, Jean-Baptiste Labat explained that black women "are well-formed ... especially once one is accustomed to their color." "For those who are not accustomed to it, they must look at them from behind, otherwise they will appear to them like flies in milk"; see Labat, Nouveau voyage, IV, 489
103. Du Tertre, Histoire generale, I, 117. In Martinique, mulatto men were declared free at age twenty, and mulatto women, at age fifteen. See "Extrait des avis de Mrs de Blénac et Patoulet sur divers objets d'administration que le roi avoir fourni à leur discussion par sa lettre du 30 avril 1681, 3 Décembre 1681," CAOM, F3 248, fol. 686; "Mémoire de M. de Ruau Palu, agent general de la Compagnie des Indes, 30 Novembre 1673," CAOM, F3 91, fols. 84-85 (quotation on 84v). Palu himself objected to freeing mulatto children. The practice, in his view, encouraged the "prostitution" of slave women. "In order to prevent the disorders of the Negresses," he insisted, "there is more reason to declare Mulattoes slaves for ever than to set them free."
104. The figures given in Moitt are based on Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, Wis., 1969), 78
105. They are consistent with the surviving censuses. See "Recensements des Antilles," CAOM, G1, boxes 468-472
106. See also Arlette Gautier, Les soeurs de solitude: La condition féminine dans l'esclave aux Antilles du XVIIe an XIXe siècle (Paris, 1985), 31-33
107. See Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996), 116-120
108. Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650-1838 (Bloomington, Ind., 1990), 13
109. For similar cases, see Lucien Peytraud, L'esclavage aux Antilles françaises avant 1789; d'après des documents inédits des Archives coloniales (Paris, 1897), 202-204
110. see Moitt, Women and Slavery, 153-157
111. Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne de Bienville to Pontchartrain, abstract of letters for the year 1706, "Lettre de Bienville au minister, 12 Aout 1709," both in MPAFD, II, 26, III, 135. During the first half of the eighteenth century, Louisiana missionaries repeatedly ignored the prescription of secular authorities on the issue of intermarriage. In upholding the Tridentine conceptualization of marriage as a holy sacrament that only required the consent of the couple, these missionaries were consistent with the recurring opposition of French ecclesiastical authorities to the royal edicts and ordinances undermining the prerogatives of the church in celebrating marriages. See Hanley, "The Jurisprudence of the Arrêts," Law and History Review, XXI (2003), 17
112. Bruguière, "L'etat monarchique et la famille," Annales: Histoire, sciences sociales, LVI (2001), 314-316
113. Allain, Not Worth a Straw, 78-79; O'Neill, Church and State, 248
114. Johnson, "Colonial New Orleans," in Hirsch and Logsdon, eds., Creole New Orleans, 34-35
115. Baker, "Interracial Societies," in Cook, ed., Encyclopedia, 175; Jennifer M. Spear, "Colonial Intimacies: Legislating Sex in French Louisiana," WMQ 3d Ser., LX (2003), 85-86
116. Archives du Séminaire de Québec, Lettres R., no. 83, July 4, 1708; "Mariages des François avec les sauvagesses, 1er Septembre 1716," CAOM, C13 A 4, fols. 155-157. This concern for "whiteness" in the context of French-Indian marriages may seem surprising, since opposition to French-Indian marriages in New France never distinguished between French and Indians in terms of skin color. As early as 1708, colonial officials attempted to develop slave-trading connections with the Caribbean. By 1712, the colony had obtained a few African slaves, most likely in exchange for enslaved Indians. The possible presence of a few African slaves in the colony by 1708 might have led Louisiana officials to emphasize skin color as a distinctive feature of Indians as well as Africans. On the introduction of African slaves in Louisiana, see "Bienville au minister, 12 octobre 1708," CAOM, C13 A 2, fol. 165; "La Mothe-Cadillac au ministre, 26 octobre 1713," CAOM, C13 A 3, fol. 64; "D'artaguiette au ministre, 10 janvier 1711," CAOM, C13 A 2, fol. 640
117. Daniel H. Usner, Jr., "From African Captivity to American Slavery: The Introduction of Black Laborers to Colonial Louisiana," Louisiana History, XX (1979), 26
118. Allain, "Not Worth a Straw, " 78
119. The representations of Le Boullenger are in the mistakenly entitled "Arrest du Conseil de la Chambre au Canada qui exclut les sauvages des successions des franço," CAOM F3 11, fols. 144-147 (see also F3 242, fols. 178-179). In her work on French colonial Louisiana, Jennifer M. Spear cited only part of the decision's ruling regarding the succession of French-Indian couples; she did not cite ts stance on French-Indian marriages, perhaps because she used an edited translation. See Spear "'They Need Wives': Métissage and the Regulation of Sexuality in French Louisiana, 1699-1730," in Martha Hodes, ed., Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History (New York, 1999), 44; Spear, "Colonial Intimacies," WMQ, 3d Ser., LX (2003), 89
120. Thomas N. Ingersoll, Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South, 1718-1819 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1999), 132-144, 399-404
121. Jennifer M. Spear insists that one such marriage was celebrated in 1725. Despite a marginal note in the sacramental records stating that both spouses were free blacks, Spear argues that, since the mother of the bride, present at the ceremony, was identified as a native of Flanders, the bride must have been "European." It is possible, however, that the bride's mother was a black woman born in Flanders, as Thomas Ingersoll has argued, or that the bride had a black father. See Spear "Colonial Intimacies," WMQ, 3d Ser., LX (2003), 92-93
122. Ingersoll, Mammon and Manon, 139 and n. 97, 402. See also marginal notes regarding the enforcement of the Louisiana Code noir specifying that no marriages between whites and blacks had been celebrated in the colony in "Le Code noir ou Edit du Roy du mois de mars 1724 concernant les Esclaves de la Louisiane," CAOM, A 23, fol. 51
123. "Requête du Procureur du Roi au Conseil Superieur de la Louisiane à l'encontre du sieur Batard, 27 may 1751," CAOM, F3 243, fol. 93; "Lettre du Commissaire Ordonateur Michel au Ministre, 15 Juillet 1751," CAOM, C13 A 35, fol. 287v
124. "Recensement de la Ville de la Nelle Orleans, Janvier 1732," CAOM, G1 464; Ingersoll, Mammon and Manon, 140
125. Census of the colony of Louisiana taken in September 1763, in Jacqueline K. Voorhies, ed. and trans., Some Late Eighteenth-Century Louisianians: Census Records, 1758-1796 (Lafayette, La., 1973), 1-107
126. Ingersoll, Mammon and Manon, 79, 385
127. Somewhat paradoxically, Du Pratz explained that black slaves had to be submitted to a different regimen from whites, "not because they ate black, nor because they are Slaves, but because they think differently from Whites." See Du Pratz, Histoire de la Louisiane, I, 333, 343 (quotation)
128. See Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 15
129. Du Pratz, Histoire de la Louisiane, I, 343