Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss. Sweet Liberty: The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. vi + 300 pp. ISBN 978-0-8122-4172-3.
Reviewed by Bernard Moitt (Virginia Commonwealth University)
Published on H-Caribbean (August, 2010)
Commissioned by Audra A. Diptee
The Meaning of Liberty in Martinique: The Final Days of Slavery
At the outset of Sweet Liberty: The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique Rebecca Schloss states definitively that her book, “ a history of Martinique from French reacquisition of the island in 1802 to the abolition of slavery in 1848, chronicles the complicated social relationships on the island during those years and argues the ways race, slavery, class, and gender intersected in Martinique shaped what it meant to be French in the early nineteenth century, not just in Martinique and the Caribbean but in continental France as well” (p. 3). This is an ambitious and wide sweep of major regions of the French Atlantic world, even if it does not include French West Africa, which would have been worthy of mention, if only peripherally. Nonetheless, Schloss sets herself a task that represents nothing short of a major undertaking because she sets out to examine social relations in a slave society without using race as a primary unit of analysis to chart change--a course of action usually associated with French scholars who seek to avoid confronting disturbing issues of race head-on, which, by all appearances, is not Schloss’s intention. What should not be lost sight of is that although slavery is the major element that underpins the work, race is but one factor in analyzing change. What the author shows is that whiteness was not tantamount to being French; every group in society (not just whites, however powerful they may have been), had a hand in carving and creating the end product--French. As she explains, “What it meant to be French between 1802 and 1848 resulted in part from the persistence of race-based slavery in places like Martinique and also the presence of Creoles as well as enslaved and free people of African descent in metropolitan France” (p. 4). In essence, Schloss contends that race was not static or necessarily a limiting factor in the period under study. During this period, individuals and groups were able to transcend racial boundaries, especially in the latter stages of slavery when racial markers waned and did not have the same significance as in earlier times. These changes did not come about overnight; they resulted from prolonged interactions, even clashes, between various ethno-cultural groups in the French Atlantic. Indeed, Schloss indicates that her book deals with how people in this region “defined, challenged, and policed the legal, social, political, and cultural meanings of labels like “Creole,” “French,” or “gens de couleur.” It was, she argues, the confrontations over the meaning of these labels, both in metropolitan France and the French Antillean colonies in particular, that resulted in shifting configurations of what it meant to “black, white or mixed-race, rich or poor, male or female, French or not” (p. 3). And Martinique--a French colony since 1635 which was subjugated to British occupation from 1809 to 1815, when the French regained hegemony, provided Schloss with “a good opportunity to examine the complex interplay between rhetoric and lived experience during the last fifty years of slavery in the French Empire” (p. 3).
Following a succinct introduction, the author begins with the early Napoleonic period going from 1802 to 1815--a means that enables her to present a view of Martinican society before British occupation. Here she highlights Martinique’s racially stratified and fluid population of about 110,000 people, the vast majority of them enslaved Africans, whom Schloss refers to as “enslaved workers.” The divisions among the island’s white population--composed mainly of French colonial administrators and locally-born whites or Creoles, many of them planters--and the interplay and tensions between the array of local and metropolitan whites ever mindful of the example set by the enslaved in Saint-Domingue who showed that slavery could successfully overthrown, were palpable. Add to this the fear of racial mixing both in France and the colonies where the presence of enslaved and free Africans of different hues was felt, and where laws and restrictions were enacted to combat this fear on both sides of the Atlantic, and the complexity of the social relations Schloss aims to illuminate is driven home. In 1802, for example, French authorities instituted a law that prohibited people of African descent, including the gens de couleur (free coloreds) from entering France, but Schloss shows that it was not effective. On a whole, Schloss is effective in presenting the social dynamics that governed Martinican society, but her concentration on white elites, mostly Creoles, here and throughout the book, is problematic in that change is viewed largely through the lens of a white slave-owning minority.
The power and influence that white elite Creoles wielded in Martinique during the period of British occupation--an era that has unfortunately been ignored by scholars--is amply and effectively demonstrated in Schloss’s book. Indeed, she shows how they used their status advantageously to buttress the occupiers who needed their support in governing the colony. Both groups had much to gain, for, in return, the British helped the elites to maintain what Schloss refers to as “the myth of appropriate white behavior Creoles had so carefully crafted” (p. 48). There are racial undertones that the author could have explored here because in a society of predominantly white slaveowners and black enslaved people “white behavior” could only have been constructed in racial terms. The emphasis Schloss puts on the struggle that white Creoles waged to maintain and defend “white dominance” and the established “racial hierarchy” in Martinique would appear to warrant such exploration. And one needs to question whether “racial supremacy” is not a more appropriate term than “racial dominance” for what Schloss describes. In any case, Schloss uses this section of the work to highlight the life and careers of rich white elites such as Pierre Dieudonne Dessalles, whose family plantation business in Martinique began in the mid-eighteenth century. Others, like Jean Baptiste Marie de Fonrose, who came to Martinique in 1801, became entangled in an 1811 plot hatched by enslaved and free mixed-race individuals aimed at setting fires and eliminating whites, starting in the town of Saint-Pierre. Interestingly, Fonrose was one of five Creoles allegedly involved in the plot. Bringing to light the lives of elite whites who had an impact on the colony in this manner, and slave plots that have received little attention by scholars, are among the gems that Schloss’s book offers. Likewise, illuminating the condition of the petits blancs (poor whites) for whom the British instituted charity bureaus in order to maintain social cohesion while offering concessions to the gens de couleur by way of civil rights, adds to the substance of the work.
In subsequent chapters, Schloss focuses on the reintegration of Martinique into the French Empire as the colony sought to regain stability, and the Creoles, their economic prowess; shifts in colonial policy and implementation of laws that had an impact on the social structure of society; the struggle for human rights and liberty by the gens de couleur and enslaved Africans; and the alliances and shifts in relations between racial groups in the last decades of slavery. Using the first decade of the Restoration (1815-31) and the July Monarchy (1830-48) as major chronological markers, Schloss amplifies the ways in which slavery, race, class, and gender intersected in Martinique, often in surprising and unexpected ways.
The cases she highlights in this regard constitute some of the most interesting parts of the book. The case of Tholosan, a free mixed-race Martinican who was deported from his homeland during the early years of the French Revolution of 1789, and his white wife, both of whom returned to the island in 1815 at a time when mixed-race people outnumbered whites, is an example. A staunch supporter of racial segregation, Governor Pierre-René -Marie Vaugiraud viewed the union as a degradation of a white woman, a danger to society and ‘“subversive to the colonial system’” (p. 73). “For Vaugiraud,” as Schloss concludes, “Tholosan’s wife fell well short of the model of white womanhood and her behavior threatened to banish her from the ranks of whites into that of the gens de couleur”--a demotion (p. 74).
Actual banishment of white women from the colonies for transgressions of elite norms of behavior (primarily interracial sex) occurred, as Schloss discovered through official court records which indicate that white women from the best families ‘“threw themselves entirely into the middle of the slave quarters and could only be made to leave by force’” (p. 102). Women were not the only transgressors, even thought they were dealt with more harshly than men. In April, 1828, the Tribunal of First Instance in the town of Fort-Royal sentenced the Creole male, Saint Maur Desfontaines, to lifelong deportation for abusing and threatening to kill his widowed mother--a plantation owner--because she refused to facilitate his interracial relationship with the mixed-race woman, Virginie.
Attempts to maintain el ite white norms and the prevailing racial hierarchy resulted in Creoles reigning in their own for other transgressions besides sexual contravention, while continuing their oppression of the enslaved. The court cases Schloss provides as proof are well chosen. In one such case, a white Martinican and his two sons appeared before the Fort Royal Tribunal accused of beating a white man with a whip--the most common instrument of discipline and torture used on blacks during slavery. Not surprisingly, the “tribunal’s Creole members sent a message about how whites should behave, banishing the oldest son, accused of the murder, for ten years and sentencing the youngest son and father each to three months in prison for their actions” (p. 117).
As in former times, the courts were more lenient with whites accused of abusing, even murdering blacks, which they did with impunity throughout slavery. In 1828 when Dame Dubuc de Rivery came before the Fort Royal Tribunal accused of excessively punishing several of her 150 slaves and contributing to the death of her enslaved male domestic, Rémy, she was found not guilty, despite strong evidence to the contrary. However, the court ordered that the enslaved people she owned be sold, imposed court fines on her, and banished her from both continental and colonial French territory for twenty years. Schloss does not give Dubuc de Rivery’s age, but if she were young enough, she could certainly return to the colonies to resume slave ownership, although in this case timing would not have been on her side. What needs to be investigated as well is the extent to which judgments were carried out, and this aspect of slave society in the French Antilles remains fertile ground for future research.
It goes without saying that enslaved people were not nearly as fortunate when accused of similar crimes, for when Théresine, an enslaved domestic of the Creole woman Dame St. Yves came before the Royal Court in 1828 accused of theft and premeditated murder of her owner, she was convicted on both counts and subjected to a gruesome punishment, all too familiar to the enslaved--“amputation of her right hand for the theft, and then strangulation and hanging for the murder of Dame St. Yves” (p. 118).
Throughout Sweet Liberty, Schloss provides evidence of resistance of gens de couleur and the enslaved against white oppression. In addition to the slave uprising of 1811 mentioned above, she cites cases of free gens de couleur who defied French authorities, engaged in armed resistance, fought for political rights, and challenged deportation imposed on them by Creoles, in some cases for assisting blacks. Also, the slave revolt of October,1822 in which enslaved blacks sought to massacre gens de couleur and whites on plantations in Saint-Pierre and surrounding regions, and the Grand Anse Affair in which significant numbers of gens de couleur and enslaved people staged an armed rebellion in Martinique, are used to illuminate the struggle for equality that free coloreds waged, and the battle in which enslaved people engaged “to mitigate the brutality of the plantation system,” according to Schloss (p. 153). However, details of the brutal murder of a white plantation manager, Lapeyronnie, by Lucien, an enslaved Martinican, in 1844 hint at the pent-up rage of African bondmen and -women, to which Schloss pays little attention.
In the last chapter of Sweet Liberty, which focuses on the end of slavery in the French Atlantic, Schloss shows how economic downturn in the colonial sugar economy, the enactment of antislavery legislation by French authorities, and antislavery forces in France finally brought down slavery, and with it, the Creoles, who nevertheless remained a force to be reckoned with. Much of the chapter centers on the planter Pierre Dessalles, whose journal reveals that he engaged in interracial sex and fathered at least one mixed-race son--Saturnin--whom he never acknowledged. Once at the pinnacle of Creoledom, Dessalles was reduced to virtual poverty, isolation, and despair as slavery ended.
Drawing upon an array of solid sources, many previously untapped, Schloss’s well-researched and clearly written book is a work of intellectual merit and an important contribution to the historiography of French Atlantic studies. Even so, the complicated relations revolving around slavery, race, class, and gender she set out to untangle remain complicated to the end. Indeed, what each group actually contributed to what it meant to be French could have been better articulated. Also, the power dynamics that governed these relationships throughout the period of study ought to have been explored. For a black person, enslaved or free, what did it mean to be French? Who determined what input they had in relations with others? How did they see themselves as racial beings? These are some of the questions that Schloss or others might one day address.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.
Citation: Bernard Moitt. Review of Schloss, Rebecca Hartkopf, Sweet Liberty: The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique. H-Caribbean, H-Net Reviews. August, 2010.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=25625
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