Critically discuss why the food industry uses food safety management systems based upon HACCP principles.

Critically discuss why the food industry uses food safety management systems based upon HACCP principles. , By 1789 France's Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue wus h OIlI {, 10 Ih,\ largest, wealthiest, and most self-confident free popularioll of Al denn dl' scent in the Americas. Comprising close to half the colony's Cree puplI l.I tion, these gens de couleurwon civil equality. with whites frolll tl w FIt'nrl, Legislative Assembly in April 1792 and their political demands hcllWd P") ouce the Haitian Revolution. This article lays the found ali on for ;1 rr'lJ1 praisal of the actions bf Saint-Domingue's free men of color in rhe.' Pn'IH'h Revolution by drawing attention to the role of gender in n> lolli,,1 1.1\ i,,1 discourse before the fall of the Bastille. After '1763 legal and social prejudice against free mulattoes al\~1 utllill nonenslaved people of African descent in Saint-Domingue Will' h,I\lNI \til feminized stereotypes. Colonial writers began to describe frct' nWI1 ;IIld women of color as passionate, narcissistic, and parasitic. B CC,lUIiC II/ tl l~l,~.! dangerous vices, elite white society increasingly excluded free pl'()plt' III I~'. 11. mit I th~ IllUar f'!!l\lot('\ ·l~ndllll. IlhQut dlt' Hilfutt" uf whit,. p(1liricnl pow!!r ~ml S.thlt . UoIJlil1~ne produced thill III Ilion of i'ncilll nod gcuder l,!UfCgOriCS. Af~t!t the SCVI:I1 Yearll' Wnr new itnmi I-IratlPI1 (rom E UfO P C and the increasingly "civi li:r.cd " lOne of cli te colo nial society raised the question of ho w "FrcI1ch" Sain t-Domingue could become. C ould a slave plantation colony produce a civic-minded public of the sort said to be emerging in France at this time?1 Many colonial planters, magj li~ trates, and merchants wanted to believe it could. The appropriation of metropolitan political discourse in an intense feud between the colon y 's Conseils superieurs (high courts) and royal administrators led these elites to an explanation of how free Dominguan society differed from France. U sing "" gender to solidify and expand the social category gens .de couleur, placing it firmly outside French colonial society, white Saint-Domingue argued for its ' own freedom from ministerial despotism. Engendering the image of people of mixed blood answered troubling questions about white behavior in Saint-Domingue and seemed to guarantee that an orderly, rational colonial public could emerge. Feminized stereotypes reinforced the rejection of r people of color who in nearly every other way, wealth, education, distance from slavery, even physical appearance, were indistinguishable from whites. Aft<lelltl IlIICCliltI y. C~lltul'I\1 idellllt)' hi Before the dominance of sugar slavery in the 1700s, censuses of SaintDomingue counted free men, women, children, and servants, not "whites" and "mulattoes."2 In the colony'S rough-and-tumble seventeenth-century 1. For the. current historiographical debate on this issue see Joan G. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988) and the following critiques: Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York : Cambridge University Press, 1990); Baker, "Defining the Public Sphere in Eigltteenth-Century France: Variations on a Theme by Habermas,» in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991),181-211; Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991); Dena Goodman, "Public Sphere and Private Life: Toward a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to the Old Regime," History and Theory 31 (1992): 1-20; David A. Bell, "The 'Public Sphere,' the State, and the World of Law in Eighteenth-Century France," French Historical Studies 17 (Fall 1992): 912-34; Daniel Gordon, "Philosophy, Sociology, and Gender in the Enlightenment Conception of Public Opinion," French Historical Studies 17 (Fall 1992): 882-911; Sarah Maza, "Women, the Bourgeoisie, and the Public Sphere: Response to Daniel Gordon and David Bell," French Historical Studies 17 (Fall 1992): 935-50; and Dale K. Van Kley, "New Wine in Old Wineskins: Continuity and Rupture in the Pamphlet Debate of the French Prerevolution, 1787-1789," French Historical Studies 17, no. 2 (Fall 1992): 447-65. 2. For example, the 1720 census of lands in the southern peninsula that had been under the control of the Compagnie de Saint-Domingue (Archives Nationales Section Outre-Mer, henceforth ANSOM, G'509 No. 17) did not count free coloreds, but a 1713 general colonial Im~'l~lm,,('\' ."dtltfl fill " WU }ll.lt tilt' OhS~~tiNiilU it wuuld hucr bccornc:. Before th\! JIlasl/iv~ itnptlt'mtillu (If Africnn slaves f()J' sugar wod~1 children of rl'Jlxcd dcsccm were nppul( lItiy considered free from birth. Even in 1685. the met.. ropolitan ;\ulhors of the Code Noil' were more concerned about sin than ro.ce and racial mixtu re. The code ordered the confiscation of mixed-race ·hil.dren and slave concubines, but stated that if a master married his slave mistress, she would be automatically free, as would ~he children of their IInion. Under the original terms of the Code Noir, ex-slaves enjoyed all the rlghts accorded to whites. 3 As plantation slavery developed in the eighteenth century, colonial practice modified these laws to protect the hierarchy of "white" over "black" on which S(1gar profits depended. But concubinage between European men And African women was extensive and the sorts of master/slave marriages dcscribed in the Code Noir occurred as well. 4 Most European men left their wives and daughters behind in France and constituted new, ostensibly temporary, households with colonial women who shared their table, managed their domestic affairs, and often bore their children. By the 17205 many of these women were Caribbean-born, of mixed African and European ancestry. In this early period free men of color were often former slaves who were clearly "nonwhite. " However, the social position of many free women of color was blurred by their relationships with white men. In the general census of 1730, for example, officials across Saint-Domingue reported the number of mulatres lib res but left the category mulatresse libre blank for more than half the colony.s Evidence suggests that in the first half of the century, local authorities often included the wives, free mistresses, and racially mixed children of colonists in their enumerations of "white" society. Free women who owned property, could read and write French, and were faithful to the French church, were counted as white. census did (ANSOM G'509 No. 12). In the 1730 general census [ANSOM G'509 No. 20], officials from the West prolince did not record numbers for free women of color, only for men in this class, though the North province provided data on both sexes. Only from 1739 (ANSOM G1509 No. 21) do surviving general censuses systematically report the population of free men and women of color. 3. See Le Code Noir (Paris, 1767 [Basse-Terre, 1980)), 33-34, 55; and the interpretation in Alan Watson, Slave Law ill the Americas (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 83-90. 4. Pierre de Vaissiere, Saint-Domingue: La societe et la vie creoles sous l'ancien regime 1629-1789 (Paris : Librairie Academique Perrin, 1909), 65, cites the example from the 1730s of one of the richest planters in Saint-Domingue who began by marrying a free black woman who owned thirty slaves. 5. ANSOM G'509 No. 20; however throughout the slave-owning Americas, women and mixed-race ohildren were nrice as likely as men to be freed, especially when there were few European women in the colony, as was the case in Saint-Domingue. Herbert S. Klein, African dozen children, As adults thcse I11cn and WOIIH!It, lilH' their I1Wt!WI'S, owned property, abided by the l;tw, attcuded church. ,\1111 s/>"I< ,., reud, and wrotc French well. By all documentary indications, IH,.i l officials regarded Marie and Fran~oise Begassc as "white" up to the 1 7(,O~ 'fhey did not describe their skin color and did accord thcm the reslwcrf II I tides of "Demoiselle" and "Dame." According to Moreau de Saint-M ~I y in 1730 Bainet had only twelve free people of color and 317 whites. But ,1 visiting official touring the parish the following year said that there well' few whites there, since most had married into wealthy families of c%r. 11 Indeed Marie and Fran~oise Begasse had a whit~ father and a black moth cl', But only in the 1760s would the two women be consistently identified ill documents as muiatresses fibres. With the establishment of the plantation economy, social categories in Saint-Domingue became increasingly based on genealogy rather than cultural identity.7 In the 1730s men were morc likely than women to be labeled "colored"; by the 1760s many whites argued that the free population of color was dangerously feminized. The expansion of sugllr also changed colonial attitudes about militia service. The hunters and pirates of the seventeenth century lent their sabers and muskets to French imperial strategy, reaping rewards in Spanish treasure. But by the 1740s colonists had bent their swords into sugar mills. Planters fought the royal administration over militia obligations and from the middle of the eighteenth century this issue was at the core of the debate about whether Saint-Domingue could ~have a "public" in the new sense of the word and whether people of color would be a part of that public. Colonial governors, drawn from the royal army or navy, favored a strong militia as the basis of local government. Parish militia captains answered to Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 227; Arlette Gautier, Soeurs de Solitude (Paris: Editions Caribeennes 1985), 172-74. 6. AN Colonie Fl 91, pp. 96-97; Census cited in Mederic Louis Elie Moreau de SaintMery, Description topographique, physique, ovile, politique et historique de Ia partie franraise de I'isle Saint Domingue, ed. Blanche Maure! and Etienne Taillemite (1797); (Paris: Societe d'histoire d'Outre-Mer, 1984), 1155. 7. For more on the Begasse and a longer development of this argument, see John D. Garrigus, "Blue and Brown: Contraband Indigo and the Rise of a Free Colored Planter Class in French Saint-Domingue," The Americas 50 (October 1993): 233-63. dlr 14i'Vfllllli, 1I11Il'lI,',1 ifl l~R.,kll l'l tilt, pC.Ht ",HI tHI~ll ,HI kll li'P';'ll "H!"~ 111111'1 . nut Ih"il IHltl;)ltlttlf't " ~"nh'd tltt~ illtlhOl'\t y .tilt! S"hu 1)1I1J11Hiii~j, two rOl'Ht'I/J ,IU,wkl"d lhfl 'JUtl.i jlldid"l ml~ (If 1111:/1/' Cliftlilill rt. 'l'hl1 tu;;."/" 'L" ~ were hi[4h CCJurt~ t\1.\t Vm'$.,i lll.'li h.\(l originnlly IIlttflt'd with ell bW l-.Iu".,( iUld influential planters as a wny of IIlr(.'I1glhclling Ft'('!H:!l ru le. r lowrv,',', Ihes~ magistratcs came to ,~ce themselves :11-1 colonial /),Idi'ml'nttilll'I, !till I to royal policies, especially lhe milid.l. H Cr iticism of the militia system became a way fur ~'~1 10Ili ll l jlulg('1/ 10 dll\\ Ihey led opposition It'nge the power of royal governors and their local appoinl(·"·s. MUIIY 1I111t-\i N rrates and planters believed the conseils, not royal o/(id.,kltllll. Ijllllllid oversee local administration, so that the "rule of /(tw" ~ou Jd I'(' phllr< Ihl' ":1rbitrary" power wielded by parish captains, co)oninlj.\()Vl'1I101 ~ .llIll . \III i ma~dy, Versailles. Conflict over the militia system reached its zenith duritll-: til" S('VI~tI Vfllt ... • War. Colonists loudly insisted that the time and money 1'l1CY NIli'1I1 Ill! 11, fense duties were ruining their plantations. After GlIiuldollp,· W;\N ~IIIHin,.!l by the British, Versailles was worried abollt Oomingll.m loyall Y ,1I111 IiMftll·d 10 disband the colonial militia. When hostilities had {·ndC.'d, 1"11 jH/J (41'1,1111. would be replaced by a syndie chosen locally under c(I/l!Jcil Htlthm II y. \I Though much celebrated in the colony, this reform was shot,! hv.:d. Til duc de Choiseul's reorganization of French imperial del enM~" ,!ft~'1 17', \ reinstated the militia. In fact, the aftermath of the war trallsfofllH.·" I hllUili guan society ~_w2' leading to new attitudes about 111(" In''' population of color. First of arr:-the reestablishment of the unpl11,u l.1I IIll/hlll embittered the struggle between the eonseils and royal administr(tum. ~~.t ond, after the loss of Canada, Saint-Domingue more than CVCI' Iw('.1I1I(I til ~of French immigration, commerce, and slave traffic. Peill'C :1c(,I·II.'I'«1 NI the growth of the Dominguan economy but it also created .. new dlllili III angry white men-petits blanes-who were unable to fu/fiJl t11('i, dlt'.1U11I of sugar riches. _'I.!!ird~ peace brought more administrators and j.\()vernhH'uf functionaries to France's most valuable possession, changing L1w WIl(' ~Uld tempo of urban society. Printing presses, theaters, public p:1d~$. 1U1I1 M sopic lodges were established in the colony. In short, white Saint ~ J )olllin!{lH! 8. ,Charles Frostin, "Histoire de I'autonomisme colon de la partic fran,aisc dr St I )Plllfll.1I aux XVII< et XVIII' siecles: Contribution a I'etude du sentiment amcricnjn "'jlldl·IlMlt,lIh'''· (Thesis, Universite de Paris, 1972), 213; Pierre Pluchon, ed., Histoirc dcs II/II/I/fll lit ,If' I" Guyane (Toulouse: Privat, 1982),83. 9. Moreau de Saint-Mery, Loix et constitutions des colonies franraises dt: l'IIIII('r/l{11I1 ttl1Jf /, '!lent (Paris, 1784-90),4:538-39. hltl~.ii lli li\iUi1 hij·ow 1\ J~\lhlk _p111ft 'f'ltt\~~ ( hill1j&.. 11 hfl"UI \.111111111 ill1ltwdi Ito'iv \Vhll fhl'l 111'1 iVltln( II tt{'W ~~nVN'ItU! III 11t1'\. ~hill'h·\ (:tltm~ tl'HlIlttill!\\ cillll'l(tlti whh tt'itl.nol1il1g tht! llliJiti:l ill 1764, Wlh the fl(,~l of It new I'ifyJC of admi nilltrlltnr for Saint·t)ollJinguc. Earning l~!\ to fifteiln thm~tllhe snl;try of hi ll pl'cdcccssors; d'Escaing installed himself It! the. ct'lt.JIlY with Il large household staff, armorial dinner service, expen~ sivc wine aHd books, and an elaborate wardrobe. 10 He also Came equipped with his own ide,as about how to reinstate the militia. The new governor believed that a lack of patriotism was at the heart of France's military problems and he tried to muster a new civic spirit in the colony. He established prizes, medals and new ranks, and renamed the militia La Legion Nationale. D'Estaing hoped this cultural re-engineering would popularize the institution and spare him a confrontation with colonial magistrates. It He was disappointed. In 1764 and 1765 the Port·au-Prince eonseil branded his militia reforms illegal. Printed placards, petitions, and pamphlets criticizing the governor circulated widely in the colony. D'Estaing was labeled a tyrant and his personal wealth was presented as evidence of corruption and his insatiable desire for power. 12 The eonseil would not register his ordinance and Versailles called in another chief administrator in 1766. This new governor, the Prince de Rohan·Montbazon, adopted ~he same ostentatious style. Like d'Estaing he was rebuffed by the Port-au-Prince eonseil, which by now probably included twelve avoeats sent from the obstreperous Parlement of Paris. 13 After several years of fierce political con10. Michel Verge-Franceschi, "Fortune et plantations des administrateurs coloniaux aux Jles d'Amerique aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siecles," in Commerce et plantation dans Ia Carai'be XV/lIe et X/Xe siecles: Actes du colloque de Bordeaux, 15-16 Mars 1991, ed. Paul Butel (Bordeaux: Maison des pays iberiques, 1992), 124. .. . 11. AN OB17, d'Estaing's MS. "Objets principaux que j'ai eu dans .. . I'ordonnance des milices," dated 15 January 1765; AN OB17, d'Estaing's memoir entitled "Observations particulieres" dated 14 June 1765, N°20bis; AN C 9B 17bis, 18 August 1765, letter from d'Estaing to Choiseul, the colonial minister. 12. Verge-Franceschi. "Fortune et plantations des administrateurs coloniaux, .. 124; AN Col. P179, p. 56. "Arrete du Conseil du Port-au-Prince qui nomme quatre commissaires pour faire Ie releve des pouvoirs du General et de l'Intendant; du 24 Janvier, 1765." However, the most public statements of this perspective carne in the local assemblies convoked by d'Estaing's successor, the Prince du Rohan, in 1766. AN Col. FJ180, p. 322. 13. On Rohan-Montbazon, .see Verge-Franceschi, "Fortune et plantations des administrateurs coloniaux," 124-25; AN Col. C9b18 ·Copie de la lettre de Mgr Ie Duc de Choiseul a M. Etienne Batonnier de l'ordre des avocats. De Versailles Ie 3 mars 1766." This letter was apparently written in frustration at the difficulties that the Port-au-Prince Conseil raised for d'Estaing: "Le Roi etant. Monsieur. dans I'intention de rendre sedentaires les Conseils flke. wlihl i'liJllkn 1ml.,!" t'lhlt,t" Jih',,~ly ltnlH Ihl" kill" 'lIlhtll)' ttIThtii'i1t I1tilllilit i.-. f\If~t'. 4.llmtmwtl til bldTnI.' th(, rdt.llHl Uti Ittll"I11-_ I'tyt'Mt tt¥I." riley refused to IItll!lt~r .t.. ordcrt·d ItI1J were. dt,hlUtct\ by ruyal trtlU~1.li:th1 loynl militia units in ~~nrly J169, i~ Thesc CVClitS COllfil'nled i he brood aliKmncntof \loloniat <it1d llH, trli l'c1I1t"" I'olitic;ll discourse down to the Revolution. 15 M;\gistrntcl; ami thdr 1I1lppurr.. :1'S portrayed royal administrators as corrupt couni('rli ucvult'd Ii\llrly l\J personal advancement. They debated why" civic spidt th:tt t1li~ht h'm,'~" this despotism was slow to arise in Saint-Dotningl,lC. 1f• Royal adtllillil'lu'l\tufli nlso lamented the lack of public-spiritedness, which for thcllllrW.lnl willluK" ness to serve in the militia. With headstrong s!avcowncrs, unt' tl1ploYl'd fir/ill blanes, and few church or family influences, th e CO lllll Y was 1H1~OV('1 nubl •• they re~orted.17 Despite these political struggles, or perhaps beta us\.' of till''''. ,\fl rf' l1i,' observers generally agreed that white Saint-D\)min~\l t' W~~II bCC(HnlnR j'IllttH civilized,» more French. In fact, accelerating slav~' i011'Of'lN wt'('l' 1I1\\ldl'f; til colony even more African, demographically:'N cvt:tthck'$s Mnn1tHI tiflliulllf Mery dubbed this the colony'S "second age": IN "Finlll\y lh~' IIflllt III dVIIi. tion and politesse appeared after the peace of 1763, which bl'o\l~llllltlIlY regiments, officiers genereux, lavish intendants, the fnllhinmlblt' (II lry •• ry station ... the simple and steadfast ways of the coJOl1illtli tll"'W f hIli!' t\1 those of the home country. "19 Saint-Domingue's eonseils followed more closely than ever tilt' IItyhl lluLl pretensions of France's parlements. The populations of Cap Franr.,::lis. PortSuperieurs de St. Domingue et de les composer de Sujets instruits et eprou v6s, "Ill prop\t,CII S. M. de prendre douze avocats du Parlement de Paris pour remplir un pardi l'Iofl\hr~ tic 1'1~l'I'~ de Conseiller qui sont vacantes dans les deux Conseils superieurs. S. M. aynnt ~Ippn Ive vouloir bien m'indiquer les sujets qui voudront prendre ce parti ... " 14. AN Col. fl180, p. 340 "Lettre du Ministre a M. L~ Chevalier Prince de Rull'llI . 111' II' retablissment des Milices, 14 juin 1767"; AN Col. FJ 180, p. 363-64, "Lettre de M. Ie (111m !.' de Rohan au ministre sur les milices ... 10 Novembre 1767"; AN Col. P18l, pp. 141 , H . See the account in Charles Frostin, I,.es revoltes blanches (Toulouse: Editions de I·E~·(lll'. 11)7'). 15. On the ministerial versus magisterial tensions in prerevolutionary pamph kf lil enUUIl1. see Dale Van Kley, "New Wine in Old Wineskins," 454, 455. 16. AN Col. PJ 192, anonymous MS dated 1785, "Reflexions sur la positiqn !\clUdlr \It! St Domingue." 17. AN C!J1. FJ192, "Reflexions sur la position actuelle de St Domingue"; AN C\\I. Il' 1'10. Cte Dautichamp, "Observations sur ... St Domingue, " MS dated 1781. 18. Moreau de Saint-Mery, Description, 31. 19. AN Col FJ76, p. 151. See also Justin Girod-Chantrans, Voyage d'lt» SlItS,I t' ,1,uII I,., Colonies d'Amerique, ed. Pierre Pluchon (Paris : Tallandier, 1980), 118 n. 2. Jean 1<!)\ldulr!lt Les Plaisirs de Saint-Domingue: Notes sur sa vie sociaie, litteraire et artistique (PorteaU'·I'J'irH PI 1 144 John D. Garrigus au-Prince, and other port ClUes exploded in the 1770s and 1780s. New construction gave colonial cities a previously unknown air of permanence, even urbanity. Cap Frans;ais boasted parks, seventy-nine public buildings, public fountains, drainage, defenses, and hospitals. Theaters, Vauxhalls, booksellers, printers' offices, journals, social clubs, and Masonic lodges sprouted in the main ports and then in secondary towns. In the 1780s, Cap Frans;ais became home to a royally chartered scientific academy that could consider itself the peer of any in provincial France. 20 This transformation of white urban society was superficially similar to changes occurring in France. The new press, improved postal service, and urban sociability mobilized popular opinion against the governor and intendant. Colonial writers began to refer to a "public" and the weight of its 21 opinion. Nevertheless, Saint-Domingue was clearly not France. Could a "public" of the SOrt emerging in France be created in a slave society? For colonial administrators the militia controversies had proven how little "public-spiritedness" the white population possessed. The free population of color, however, assembled for monthly musters and hunted escaped slaves without complaint. Administrators had long recognized the military superiority of these amateur soldiers; in 1764 d'Estaing had proposed them as the core of his cont~oversial Legion N ationale. Drawing on the neoclassical rhetoric of many military reformers, he had described free men of color as frugal patriots, loyal sons, and self-sacrificing citizens. 22 D'Estaing "Sons of the Same Father" 145 had planned to honor virtuous members of this class and allow the lightestskinned families to be counted as white. 23 His opponents, on the other hand, believed the free population of color was the core of colonial corruption. The reestablishment of the militia in 1769 demonstrated the power of colonial governors and military rule. Colonial writers and judges were more than ever struck by how weak social bonds were in Saint-Domingue. These reversals prompted whites to fashion another image of the colony'S growing free population of color, drawing on the misogynistic rhetoric of some French opponents of royal despotism. By the late 1760s both sides of the colonial political spectrum agreed that politics, family, and society in Saint-Domingue were corrupted by the weakness of "legitimate" bonds and by the force of pride and individual will. 24 But a number of writers associated with the conseils and opposed to military rule blamed the frailty of colonial society on the sexual power free and enslaved women of color exerted over white men. According to the Swiss traveler Girod-Chantrans, These women, naturally more lascivious than European women, flattered by their control over white men, have collected and preserved all the sensual pleasures [voluptes] they are capable of. La jouissance has become for them an object of study, a specialized and necessary skill [used] with worn-out or depraved lovers, who simple nature can no longer delight. 25 Imprimerie de l'Etat, 1955),28-53, cites Wimpffen, Hilliard d'Auberteuil, and announcements in the colonial press. 20. AN Col. P76, p. 151; James E. McClellan III, Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 75, 78-81, 94-96, 106-8. He notes that "overall ... the book collections in Saint-Domingue did not differ in character from those in bourgeois-professional and robe circles in France in the same period" (102). See his evocative description of Cap FraJ;lcais, 83-94. Figures on Cap Fran<,;ais are from Moreau de Saint-Mery, Description, 479-80. See also David P. Geggus, "Urban Development in 18th Century Saint-Domingue," Bulletin du Centre d'histoire des espaces atfantiques 5 (1900): 197-219; and Geggus, "The Major Port Towns of Saint Domingue in the Later Eighteenth Century," in Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650-1850, ed. Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 87-116. 21. See for example the affair of the COUnt deGravier, a parish militia captain accused of abusing his power, who then published a pamphlet to expose the facts of the case to the public; AN Col. P191, pp. 198-265, especially p. 222. See also Moreau de Saint-Mery, Description, 415 and 1003. 9B 22. AN Col. C I7 MS. "Objets principaux' dated 15 January 1765; Moreau de SaintMery, LoVe et constitutions, 4: 820-24; Auguste Nemours, Haiti et fa guerre d'Independance americaine (Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 1952),29-31; on the importance of neoclassical imagery among military reformers in France, see Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the In the 1770s and 1780s this feminine sexuality, described as "un-natural" in women of mixed ancestry, came to symbolize the "foreign-ness" of SaintDomingue'S free population of color. For Moreau de Saint-Mery, The whole being of a muldtresse is given over to sensual pleasure and the flame of this goddess burns in her heart so as only to be French Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1989), 169-74; Jean Chagniot, Paris et l'armee au xviii siecle: Etude politique et sociale (Paris: Economica, 1985), 656-57; Andre Corvisier, Armies and Societies in Europe, 1494-1789, trans. Abigail T. Siddall (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 103. See also d'Estaing's own play, Les Thermopyles, tragtidie de circonstance (Paris, 1791). 23. AN Col. C 9B 17 MS. "Objets principaux· dated 15 January 1765; Moreau de SaintMery, LoVe et constitutions, 4: 820-24; Nemours, Hafti, 29-31. 24. AN Col. PI92, "Reflexions sur la position actuelle de St Domingue"; AN Col. F 3 190, Cte Dautichamp, "Observations sur ... St Domingue," MS dated t 781; AN Col. E 233, dossier "J ussan .• 25. Justin Girod-Chantrans, Voyage d'un Suisse, 152. 146 John D. Garrigus "Sons of the Same Father'" snuffed out with life itself.... Even the most inflamed imagination can conceive of nothing that she has not fathomed, concocted, experienced. Her sole vocation is to bewitch the senses, deliver them to the most delicious ecstasies, enrapture them with the most seductive temptations; nature, pleasure's accomplice, has given her charms, endowments, inclinations, and what is indeed more dangerous, the ability to enjoy such sensations even more keenly than her partners, including some unknown to Sappho.26 As this ambiguous passage suggests, feminine sexuality, for Moreau, was "both the danger and the delight" of men. 27 The work of other colonial wJ;iters reveals more clearly the political fears generated by what Hilliard d'Auberteuil described as an "empire based on libertinage" enjoyed by women of color over white men. 28 An army officer and amateur poet Gabriel Bruey d'Aigailliers used Roman and Renaissance figures, and images of corruption and disease, to portray women of color in these verses. Si je voulais en phrases ingenues Decrire aussi des sujets libertins Je vous p'eindrais des Messalines nues Entre les bras de nouveaux Aretins, Rivalisant de debauches honteuses, Vous les verriez ces couples gangrenes Plonger sans choix leurs ames crapuleuses. Amour, pudeur, sentiments les plus doux Fuyez, fuyez ces rives dangereuses! So us votre masque on s'y moque de VOUS.29 If, in innocent sentences I were to describe those libertines I would paint for you naked Messalinas 26. Moreau de Saint-Mery, Description, 104; for similar stereotypes in the British Caribbean see Hilary Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 147, and Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650-1838 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 14-17. 27. AN Col. P76, p. 151. 28. Hilliard d'Auberteuil, Considerations sur l'etat present de la colonie franraise de Saint Domingue, ouvrage politique et legislatif (Paris, 1776), 2: 27. 29. Cited in Jean Fouchard, Plaisirs de Saint-Domingue: Notes sur sa vie sociale, litteraire et artistique (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie de l'Etat, 1955), 89-91. 147 In the arms of new Arentino, Competing in shameful debauchery. You would see these gangrenous couples Aimlessly immerse their dissolute souls. Love, modesty, the sweetest feelings, Flee, flee these dangerous shores For, beneath your mask, you are mocked here. For the Baron de Wimpffen, these Priestesses of an American Venus ... have made sensual pleasure [Ia volupte] a kind of mechanical skill they have taken to the highest perfection. Next to them Aretino is a prudish school boy.... They combine the explosiveness of saltpeter with an exuberance of desire, that scorning all, drives them to pursue, acquire and devour pleasure, like a blazing fire consumes its nourishment. 30 The sexual power of free women of color over white men was especially disturbing because of the public nature of that power. White men lived openly with their black and brown mistresses and acknowledged their mixed-race children. Though born in Martinique, Moreau de Saint-Mery was shocked by Saint-Domingue's mulatresses. "One is not protected. by the public decency that preserves morality [even] in [Europe's] capitals. . . . Publicity, I repeat, is one of the sweetest pleasures [of SaintDomingue'S mulatresses]." These women took money that should have gone to legitimate families in France to satisfy their own "insatiable" desire for rich fabrics and jewels. 31 Contemporaries were troubled by what such behavior revealed about colonial society as a whole, particularly about the inability of individual colonists to sacrifice their immediate pleasures for a larger public good. Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, widely read in Saint-Domingue by 1765, disCUssed the physical and political effects of warm climates and warned of the dangerous consequences of female vice. 32 f~ pu61ic f~eedom of women was either a symptom of despotism that "feminized" men, or it produced 30. Cited in Pierre Pluchon, Negres et Juifs au XVIIle siide: Le Racisme au siide des Lumieres (Paris: Tallandier, 1984), 286. 31. Moreau de Saint-Mery, Description, 31-33, 105, 109. 32. AN Col. PI92, "Reflexions sur la posicion actuelle de Saint-Domingue. » Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Thomas Nugent (New York: Hafner, 1949), 102; see book 7 148 John D. Garrigus social chaos. Those who hoped that the power of the governor and intendant would be tempered by rational public debate, or that the isolation and social violence of Dominguan life would give way to some form of recognizable community, saw the colony's free women of color as a reminder, even a reason, that Saint-Domingue could never be France. 33 For Moreau de Saint-Mery and others the sensuality and narcissism of women of color was not only a property of their sex, but characterized the entire mixed-race population, female and male. In his encyclopedic Description of the colony Moreau devoted five pages to island-born white men and five to white creole women, but gave only one-and-a-half pages to "Ie Mulatre." "La Mulatresse," in contrast, received five-and-a-half pages. In his opinion "all the advantages given by nature to the Muidtre are lavished upon the Muidtresse." These defining characteristics were largely sexual; for the muidtre as for the muidtresse, "pleasure is his sole master, but it is a despotic master. "34 Such passages illustrate that prejudice against Saint-Domingue's free population of color was not simply an extension of the racism that held nearly half-a-mil.1ion colonial slaves in bondage. The new feminized definition of the free popul\ition of color incorporated French political cliches while providing hope that a rational public might yet emerge, if these corrupt beings could be effectively shut out. A.fter 1763 administrators and judges enacted a variety of measures to exclude this "vicious" class from Saint-Domingue's white world. Manumission was made more difficult and time-consuming, and female slaves were made twice as expensive to free as males. In 1773 free people of color were forbidden to use European names and were directed to take names of obvichap. 8, 'Of Public Continency,» and chap. 9, ·Of the Condition or State of Women in Different Governments.» The interpretation is that of Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere, 35-38. 33 . The views of colonial intellectuals were also influenced by the debate over American nature. Moreau de Saint-Mery believed that whites born in the colony had a physical and psychological constitution distinct from European-born men and women. In Philadelphia in 1798 Moreau wrote that the calculating and passionless teenage girls of that city engaged in masturbation and lesbian activities from an early age. Moreau de Saint-Mery, Voyage aux Etats-unis de l'Amerique, 1793-1798, ed. Stewart L. Mims (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1913), 302-3. See also Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750-1900, rev. and enl. ed., trans Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press , 1973). 34. Moreau de Saint-Mery, Description, 103, 104. "Sons of the Same Father" 149 ous African origin. 35 They were excluded form honorable professions and required to prove their freedom in all legal documents after 1778. They were forbidden to wear extravagant clothing, carry a sword, or sit with whites in churches, theaters, or music halls. 36 The feminization of free colored stereotypes was not only a product of white attitudes and French political imagery; through the 1760s free women of color wielded far more economic power within their social category than did their counterparts in the white population. In one local census .from rnidcentury, free colored women were four times more likely than white women to be heads of rural households. 37 Free women of color were at least four times more likely to participate in real estate transactions involving free people of color than white women were to be involved in similar transactions involving only whites. 38 In the 1760s women of color brought an average of 3S percent more property than their spouses to formally contracted marriages while white brides brought slightly less property than their grooms. Yet, by the 1780s, a new free colored elite had come to the fore. This third or even fourth generation of mixed ancestry was wealthier than its 35. Moreau de Saint-Mery, Loix et constitutions, 5 :448-49. This statute gave rise to a number of responses. Inversion of former names made Jean Decopin into Jean Pain Corde, or Denis Pilorge into Denis Golerep. Others adopted other names from their family networks, so that Michel Depas, the free descendent of a Jewish commercial family at Bordeaux, became Michel Medina, after another prominent trading family. Others resorted to hyphenations, so that Michel Depas became Depas-Medina. Still others adopted African names or invented African-style names; the mulatto daughter of a militia commander was no longer Jeanne Maignan, but Jeanne Foedina. ANSOM, 14 December 1784, Gaudin reg. 742, Nippes, procuration. 36. Yvan Debbasch, Couleur et liberte: Le feu du critere ethnique dans un ordre esclavagiste (Paris: Dalloz, 1967),94, 100-104; Moreau de Saint-Mery, Loix et constitutions, 4:225, 229, 342, 412, 466, 495; 5 :384-85, 823; AN Col. P243, p. 341; Col. P273, p. 119; AN Col. P91, p. 115; AN Col. P189, decree of 2 June 1780. 37. ANSOM G'509 No. 26. 38. In a sample of 4,882 notarial contracts from the 1760s, free women of color participated in 21 percent of rural land sales involving free coloreds, while only 16 percent of sales including whites involved a woman. In a 1780s sample of 2,679 notarial documents from the same districts free women of color were involved in 43 percent (68 of 160) of rural land sales involving their class, while white women accounted for only 11 percent (39 of 340). In the 1760s free women of color participated in 21 of the 28 sales of urban property that involved this class-75 percent. In the 1780s they were involved in 60 percent (53 of 88) of free colored urban sales, compared to white women who were in only 18 percent (29 of 165). In the 1760s and 1780s free women of color were involved in nearly 58 and 43 percent, respectively, of the leases of urban property in which free coloreds participated, compared to a female participation rate of only 21 and 4 percent among whites for the same periods. ANSOM, Saint-Domingue notarial archives. 150 John D. Garrigus "Sons of the Same Father» predecessors, well-educated, light-skinned, and locally respected. 39 Moreover, these elite families of color were increasingly led by men, not women. In the 1780s, free colored men brought far more property than free women of color to formal marriages, reversing the early trend. 40 The emergence of this new generation of wealthy men of color in the 1780s did not alter the racial and gender imagery established after 1763. In the 1780s these men began to fight their exclusion from public life, challenging the stereotypes of racial pollution and tropical vice. They allied with Versailles against colonial whites and advanced a three-part argument that stressed their virtue and virility at every opportunity. Their economic virtue was demonstrated by their plantations and slaves; their social virtue was illustrated by their filial piety and obligations as husbands and fathers; and their civic virtue was seen in faithful militia service .• '7 - ' White Saint-Domingue, which had been unable to prevent the reestablishment of the militia in 1769, responded by rejecting militia service as a sign of virtue. In March 1779, at the very moment Saint-Domingue's free men of color were volunteering for an expedition against the British in North America, the colonial , press defined white colonial patriotism as commer39. See Garrigus, "Blue and Brown, and Garrigus, "Color, Class and Identity on the Eve of the Haitian Revolution: Saint-Domingue's Free Colored Elite as Colons americains,» Slavery & Abolition 17 (April 1996): 20-43. 40. In the 1760s the average value of the property of nonwhite brides (slaves and free women of color) when listed, was 9,371 livres. For free colored grooms, the average was 6,881 li vres. Among white couples, grooms listed more property than brides while the largest value a free man of color brought to marriage in the 1760s was less than half that of the largest recorded value brought by a free woman of color. However, in the 1780s the average value of the property nonwhite brides brought to their marriages was 13,425 Iivres, while grooms from this racial category brought, on average, 23,497 livres. When Julian Raimond, a prominent indigo planter and man of color, married in 1782, he claimed to own nearly ten times what the wealthiest free man of color had claimed in the 1760s. Although the value of free colored bridal property also increased over this period, the wealthiest free colored bride of the 1780s brought only about 30 percent more in value than her counterpart of the 1760s. This data comes from the analysis of 4,882 notarial contracts for the period 1760-69 in the Nippes, St. Louis, and Cayes quartiers of Saint-Domingue and 2,679 contracts from these same districts in the years 1780-89. 41. See, for example, Raimond 's manuscript memoirs to the colonial ministry from 1786, AN Col. P91, pp. 171-83; these archival documents are copies of Raimond's text and none but the first are dated. The first bears the notation "I" memo ire de Raimond, en 7bre [SeptemberJ 1786. See also his early preparations to bid for free colored representation in the Estates Generale in Andre Maistre de Chambon, "Acte notarie rdatif aux doleances des 'gens de couleur' de Saint-Domingue, (29 juillet 1789),· Memoires de la Societe 'archeologique et histo rique de la Charente (June 1931): 7-8. U U 151 cial, not martial. 42 The Affiches americaines extolled the idea that SaintDomingue follow the example of Paris and several French provinces in presenting Louis XVI with a frigate of thirty-six to forty cannons. The newspaper contrasted this proposal with classical ideals of civic virtue and concluded that the ancients had been "harsh" and "severe": To the honor of humanity, undoubtedly one will never again see a barbarian and ferocious mother send her son to his death with a dry eye, see him again pale and bleeding without emotion and believe she owes this horrible sacrifice to the fatherland. . . . These awful traits, so long admired by our fathers, are not natural and make any respectable and sensitive soul tremble. H Moreau de Saint-Mery, writing in the 1780s, affirmed that free colored military discipline did not contradict the. image of the sensual and selfserving mulatto. It seems that then [in the ranks a mulatto] loses his laziness, but all the world knows that a soldier's life, in the leisure it provides, has attractions for indolent men .... A mulatto soldier will appear exactly to the calls of day, perhaps even to those of the evening, but it is in vain that one tries to restrict his liberty at night; [the night] belongs to pleasure and he will n,ot indenture it, no matter what commitments he has made elsewhere.« Such pronouncements helped white colonists reconcile their resentment of militia service with their fears of tropical corruption. But in France the ideal of the citizen-soldier was growing in popularity in the 1780s, with dramatic results in 178'1 and thereafter. Although the wealthiest of SaintDomingue'S free families of color joined the white campaign to donate a frigate to the king in 1782, these same families and other less prosperous free men of color made military service a centerpiece of their claims for citizenship in the French Revolution. By 1789 their spokesmen had adopted a Rousseauean stance, blaming whites for corrupting colonial society and 42. See Garrigus, "Catalyst or Catastrophe? Saint-Domingue's Free Men of Color and the Savannah Expedition, 1779-1782,· ReviewlRevista Interamericana 22 (Spring-Summer 1992): 109-25. 43. Affiches americaines (mardi 30 mars 1779): no. 13; BN 4, Ie 1220122. 44. Moreau de Saint-Mery, Description, 103-4. 152 "Sons of the Same Father" John D. Garrigus portraying themselves as natural men, colons americains, inherently virtuous and natively patriotic. As sons of French fathers, France was their patrie and Frenchmen were their brothers, literally as well as figuratively. ~5 The "feminization" of the free population of color had been designed to exclude them from the "civilized" colonial public. Yet by exaggerating the cultural gulf between whites and free people of color, such stereotypes ultimately worked in their victims' behalf. After 1789 the French Revolution's conflation of militia service, natural virtue, and universal brotherhood allowed Saint-Domingue's free men of color working in Paris and in the colony to expose prerevolutionary racial distinctions as artificial. Their victory over discrimination opened the way for the eventual inclusion of haIfa-million slaves in the liberte, if not the fraternite, of the French Revolution. This accoUnt of the construction and dismantling of racial categories corroborates two elements of the new scholarship on the origins of the French Revolution. First of all, conditions in Saint-Domingue clearly point to the emergence of a public sphere in the years 1763 to 1789. This development is perhaps even clearer in the colony than in France, since white inhabitants of this immensely profitable territory had so little in the way of ··community" before the end of the Seven Years' War. Saint-Domingue was a place where the 'lives of African men and women were cheap, compared to the price of sugar and the ambitions of their masters. Frenchmen talked only of returning home the moment they set foot in the colony, though many never did. Nevertheless after 1763 the extraordinary rush to establish printing presses, theaters, post offices, Masonic lodges, urban parks, and other sites for elite sociability reveals the colony's appetite for the kind of "public" emerging in France. Second, because the risks of this path were far deeper in Saint-Domingue than in the metropolis, the colonial story underlines the way contemporaries used gender to define this new public. Saint-Domingue's inhabitants were recognized to be black, white, and brown. Some prosperous people of mixed ancestry might even be recognized as white, early in the eighteenth century. But after 1763 those who hoped to create an effective colonial 45. On the citizen-soldier in prerevolutionary France, see Jean Chagniot, Paris et l'arrntie au xviii siecle: Etude politique et sociale (Pris: Economica, 1985), 611-13, 617. For free colored participation in the royal donation, see AN Col. F'91, p. 189. For free colored political claims in the early Revolution, J. M. C. americain, Precis sur les gemissements des sang-meles dans les Colonies Fram;oises (Paris, 1789); Abbe Cournand, Reponse aux Observations d'un habitant des colonies, sur Ie Memoire en faveur des gens de couleur ... (Paris, 1789); Abbe Gregoire, Lettre aux philancropes, sur les malheurs ... des gens de couleur de Saint-Domingue (Paris, 1790); and any of the works published in Paris from 1789 to 1792 by Julien Raimond. 153 public sphere worried that this racial continuum would ultimately bring some free people of color into that sphere. They might even win a place over less-talented whites, calling the whole racial hierarchy into question. Drawing on metropolitan images, colonial reformers used gender-in addi. tion to race-to explain the disturbing behavior of French male colonists who treated their mulatto and quadroon children like French sons or daughters. Mutually reinforcing gender and racial constructions barred people of color from elite status in a place where nearly half-a-million Africans and their descendents worked and died for the profit of roughly 40,000 French colonists. PLACE THIS ORDER OR A SIMILAR ORDER WITH US TODAY AND GET AN AMAZING DISCOUNT :)