At five-thirty in the morning on 3 May 1902, the young schoolteacher Roger Portel awoke to an eerie scene outside his window in Saint-Pierre, Martinique. Everything was closed: shops, governmental buildings, and schools. The sky blackened under what looked like a gray snow, as roads, homes, and even people were covered in a thin layer of a substance like ground cement. Remarking to a friend that it was now “winter without the cold,” Portel shuffled outside to take stock of what was happening. Mount Pelée had lurched awake, and Saint-Pierre teemed like a kicked anthill. Joining a crowd of Saint-Pierre’s disoriented denizens, Portel quickly realized he could not see more than thirty feet in front of him, and he choked as his nose burned. While he pinched it to ward off the smell of sulfur, he wondered, “Are we all going to die of asphyxiation? . . . What’s coming tomorrow? A column of lava? A shower of stones? A wind of suffocating gas? Mass drownings? No one knows.” Portel had awakened to a living nightmare, a hellish postapocalyptic scene plucked straight from the pages of the Bible. And he suspected that his death was imminent. “Should I die,” he wrote to his brother, “don’t be too sad.” Unfortunately, Portel’s worst fears came true. Five days later, he and everyone else in the crowd in Saint-Pierre was dead—suffocated by sulfur, petrified by ash, frozen in a winter without cold. Ascension Day had come. Mount Pelée had erupted.1
Forty kilometers away, in the city of Fort-de-France, the island’s acting bishop, Gabriel Parel, said a mass commemorating Jesus’s entrance into heaven. Later, when he stepped onto his balcony shortly after eight o’clock in the morning, night descended as ash blocked the morning sun and a hail of stones assaulted Martinique’s capital. While helping his congregation seek refuge, Bishop Parel wondered what was happening at Saint-Pierre. When he learned that Pelée’s fury had obliterated the so-called Paris of the Antilles, turning it into what witnesses would describe as “one vast brazier” and claiming thirty thousand lives in a quarter of an hour, a cry of horror went up “like the funeral knell of Martinique” that “would take the pen of Dante and the accents of Jeremiah” to accurately describe.2 Thousands of miles away, a Parisian journalist, who described himself as an “old republican . . . [with] an absolute faith in the progress of the human race,” asked, “Our race, is it as grand as we had imagined it? Hasn’t this disaster belied all [our] grand ideas?”3 Pelée’s eruption had shaken the convictions of the French Republic, and all eyes turned toward relief and recovery lest French civilization in the Caribbean come to an end.
The Caribbean environment had sparked French fears about the obliteration of their colonial project since France’s occupation of Martinique and Guadeloupe in 1635. Two centuries of the forced migration of Africans shackled into slavery had thrown fuel onto those sparks, and by the end of the nineteenth century, nature’s wrath collided with social conflicts within France and its old empire. In the span of thirty years, the French islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe endured catastrophes from all the elements—earth, wind, fire, and water—as well as a collapsing sugar industry, civil unrest, and political intrigue. In 1890 Martinique experienced a fire that burned down its capital city, and a year later a cyclone destroyed the island’s primary source of income: sugar. Since 1884 the islands’ economies had been in a tailspin, and by 1899 labor unrest ignited an urban fire that destroyed the largest city in Guadeloupe and launched a general strike in Martinique the following February. And in 1902, the eruption of Mount Pelée became the deadliest volcanic eruption in modern memory, solidifying the association of the Caribbean environment with death and destruction.
Nationalist fervor was at its height in this period, as the French empire grew to its greatest extent and politicians of France’s Third Republic vied to build a democratic consensus and distance themselves from France’s recent autocratic past. With the humiliating defeat during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 came the first democratic government in France in a generation—the Third Republic. Republicans projected a fantasy of assimilation onto the Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, two of France’s oldest colonies, where the Constitution of 1875 had bestowed full citizenship and governmental representation on the predominantly nonwhite population. Contemporaries described the Caribbean as “one of France’s oldest and most dear colonies,” where former slaves and indentured servants had been successfully integrated politically and culturally into the French nation-state, and republicans cast the Antilles as evidence of the “civilizing mission made good.” As the nineteenth century ended, however, environmental disasters threatened this republican fantasy by bringing to the fore existing racial and social tensions that held France’s ideological convictions of assimilation and citizenship to the fire. Disasters catalyzed the already rapid decline of the Antillean sugar economy, and injections of capital into the islands in the form of disaster relief rapidly made the former valuable financial assets a drain on the French economy. As Antilleans put forth an alternative image of Frenchness defined by its tropical surroundings and demanded state aid, disastrous moments precipitated a discussion of economic welfare and colonial assimilation and challenged republican cohesion.
When disaster struck in the French West Indies—whether the whirlwinds of a hurricane or the stirrings of an open rebellion—France faced a tempest at home as politicians, journalists, economists, and ordinary citizens debated the role of the French state not only in the Antilles but in their own lives as well. During the age of new empire, therefore, the “old colonies” of Martinique and Guadeloupe redefined what it meant to be a French citizen by prompting a discussion over economic rights and social welfare, and by laying claim to a definition of tropical Frenchness that preserved French civilization against a hostile environment. Disasters exacerbated existing societal tensions and marked a rupture in the status quo, however, and while centuries of cultural association demanded public assistance and political incorporation after these disasters, economic considerations led the French state to reexamine the long-term viability of its Caribbean colonies.
Disasters are never natural but are induced by either nature or humanity. Irrespective of what causes it, a disaster is always predicated on an event’s interaction with human civilization.4 Only the trappings of human society can make natural events into disasters—for example, construction in flood plains or on tectonic plate boundaries, lax or nonexistent building codes, high population densities, insufficient or crumbling public facilities and infrastructure. That is, it is our own built environment—roads, housing, sewers, aqueducts—that comes into conflict with what are natural cycles, and the natural ebb and flow of droughts, tempests, and seismic movements seem entirely unnatural when framed by the contours of human society: our notions of time, space, and location.5 As with nature-induced disasters, human-induced disasters—such as the 1899 fire in Guadeloupe and the 1900 strike in Martinique—disrupt what we see as normal time, space, and location by destroying the built environment, unseating or challenging cultural mores and political givens, and disturbing the pace of everyday life. Moments of environmental catastrophe and civil disturbance are, in their effects, two sides of the same coin, as all such emergency situations ultimately bring forth and make public systemic political prejudices and social tensions, ultimately leading to a crisis that precipitates a change in or reaffirmation of the status quo. This revaluation is particularly salient during events that strike contemporaries as significant ruptures (hurricanes, fires, strikes) rather than those that develop slowly over time (climate change, drought, economic hardship). Such large, singular events present the state with an immediacy to confront, even as officials attempt to contextualize such apparently extraordinary occurrences within a longer time frame. Therefore, the present work focuses on those disasters that the state understood as quick to unfold, even as it contextualizes them against longer historical and environmental trajectories.
At stake in the disasters and civil discord that struck the French Caribbean at the close of the nineteenth century were the population’s citizenship rights and the French state’s relationship to those citizens. The Third Republic’s invocation of the Jacobin ideals of the French Revolution—liberty, equality, and fraternity—to grant citizenship rights to the French Caribbean (and all the inhabitants of its “old colonies,” including French Guiana and Réunion) coincided with its beginning to make subjects of countless West Africans and Indochinese. Citizens are those who enjoy full legal rights and obligations within a state; possess membership in a political community in which they have the right to participate; and are entitled to the protection of the sovereign state to which they owe allegiance.6 Noncitizens, or subjects, lack some or all of these characteristics: they enjoy limited legal rights, cannot participate in the political community, or are not entitled to the protection of the sovereign state. Whereas in West Africa and Indochina officials applied a harsh indigenous legal code with expectations and penalties out of step with those applied in the French Caribbean, the people of the French Antilles were citizens and not subjects, in spite of France’s sordid history marred by slavery and forced migration, and they demanded a quality of life equal to their metropolitan counterparts via their political participation in the French legislature.
That Antilleans were indeed citizens and not subjects, however, did not ensure equal treatment under the law. While citizenship confers a certain degree of protection by the state, the exact rights that citizenship bestows are always in debate. At various points, France permitted Antilleans of color to voice their demands upon the state as citizens, and at other times it levied accusations of criminality or colonial disorder to muffle their voices and back an economically privileged white elite threatened by the political participation of Antilleans of color. Developments within the metropole, or the parent nation of the colonies, influenced and mirrored this slippage, as the poor, destitute, and disenfranchised there demanded equality in the face of industrial hazards and unfair labor practices. The end of the nineteenth century was the height of French demands for a social republic that properly attended to the needs and demands of its citizenry, and Antilleans were at the forefront of the conversation over what citizenship rights entailed.
Insufficient responses from the metropolitan government often fostered tension between creole elites in Martinique, local governmental bureaucrats in Guadeloupe, and mainland officials. As the following chapters describe, many prominent colonial administrators thought first and foremost of the sugar economy after both environmental catastrophes and moments of civil disorder. Though they might cast the French Caribbean as colonies of settlement on the path to assimilation, where French values and mores had taken root in a tropical soil, they tacitly treated the islands as colonies of extraction where economic profit was paramount and civil rights were curtailed. Regardless of the size of the disruption, ministerial reports following hurricanes or the eruption of Mount Pelée focused primarily on the disaster’s immediate effect on the sugar economy, secondarily on its impact on the alternative economies (fruit, cocoa, coffee, tafia—a rum made from cane juice), and only thirdly on its consequences for the citizens living there. Even the ardent assimilationist official Eugene Étienne claimed in 1897 that “the sole criterion to apply to every colonial enterprise is its degree of utility, the sum of the advantages and profits flowing from it to the métropole.”7 Colonial governments saw catastrophic events as an opportunity for restructuring society. And for many, this restructuring focused on a revitalization of, or in some cases a repudiation of, the colonial economy. At the same time, however, a language of civic inclusion that heralded the Frenchness of the people of the French Antilles challenged this focus on the economy. As a result of this tension between an economic calculus of disaster and a republican language of citizenship, moments of catastrophe serve as a lens through which to observe the contemporary values of French society and polity alike. And in the case of the French West Indies, which had been integrated in many ways into the metropolitan structures of government, the demands and expectations for disaster relief had substantial repercussions in the mainland.
Despite their legacy of plantation slavery and forced migration, the colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe had become “assimilated colonies” par excellence in the eyes of French contemporaries. That is, while the republican myth of assimilation purported that all colonies could one day become part of a Greater France and that all colonial subjects, after receiving French education and culture, would become active French citizens, this myth was in many ways made real in the French Caribbean. From 1848 onward, nonwhite inhabitants of the old colonies—including Martinique, Guadeloupe, Reunion, and Guyane—possessed full French citizenship, in theory if not in practice, thereafter rallying to the cause of the republican values of liberty, equality, and fraternity. After a period of “curtailed” citizenship during the Second Empire, wherein vagabondage laws limited islanders’ movement and only 2.6 percent of Guadeloupe, for example, was enfranchised in 1868, the French Antilles achieved universal manhood suffrage and became fully integrated into the French legislature under the Third Republic, receiving two deputies and a senator to represent their interests in Paris.8 The islands’ general councils, much like their departmental counterparts in the metropole, served as the local legislative bodies. The Law of 8 January 1877 replaced the colonial penal code with metropolitan law in the Antilles and Réunion, and later that year was fully extended to French Guiana and partly applied to French Indochina. No longer were the old colonies under the jurisdiction of a separate penal code; rather, the same juridical framework that governed their metropolitan compatriots governed these “colonial citizens.”9 In many ways, the descendants of the forcibly migrated Africans who populated the island were construed as tropical French citizens who had settled the colony in the name of France. In fact, since the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in 1789, free people of color in the French Caribbean had appealed to Enlightenment ideals in order to undermine the authority of local white planters and overturn a regime that precluded their political participation based on their skin color since the 1760s.10 While free men of color typically advocated a hierarchical society based on wealth rather than race, their unfree counterparts fought for emancipation and self-sufficiency in the eighteenth century, and later for class consciousness and societal equity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.11
Despite their appeals, the state met tropical Frenchmen with prejudice and inequity. As historian Jacques Dumont illustrates concerning its Antillean citizenry, the meritocratic Third Republic compromised between equality in principle and inequality in practice, which repeatedly culminated in strike activity persisting up to the present day.12 Though the Third Republic proclaimed equality for all in the French colonies, the ideal of equality always fell short of the reality. For instance, the Law of 8 January 1877 had some important exceptions to its extension of the metropolitan penal code to the old colonies. Most notably, the restrictions and laws that forbade public vagabondage and set up mandatory “work sentences” in public workshops, enforceable by the local police, remained in place.13 The Antilles also remained under the thumb of a colonial administration—an appointed governor, and the Ministry of the Marine until 1894 and the Ministry of the Colonies thereafter.
Nonetheless the French Antilles were politically represented in the same fashion as departments in France despite their colonial status, helping to shape the very policies that the French executive branch carried out. Since the Law of 28 July 1881, Martinique and Guadeloupe each had two representatives in the French legislature, up from the initial single deputy after the ratification of the constitution in 1875.14 Unlike other colonies such as Indochina and Senegal, which limited suffrage and had minimal representation in the legislature, the Caribbean colonies received representation in the Chamber of Deputies on par with that of departments within metropolitan France.15
Historically the French West Indies participated vociferously in the French Republic. Taking up arms during the French Revolution of 1789 and rejoicing during that of 1848—and even proclaiming a republic in southern Martinique in 1870—the predominantly nonwhite population of France’s old empire defined itself as inherently French and undeniably republican.16 In fact, the legality of the Third Republic hinged on the political participation of the French Antilles. The Guadeloupean deputy, Germain Casse, permitted the ratification of the Constitution of 1875 on 30 January 1875. The Wallon amendment to the constitution, which established the president of the republic as the chief executive and thereby finalized the political order of the Third Republic, passed by only a single vote: that of Germain Casse. As Le Figaro put it after Casse’s death in 1900, “At the time of the Third Republic’s founding, . . . the establishment of the government in France depended on the support of a colonial deputy.”17 Those who represented Martinique’s interests in Paris were by and large members of the island’s mixed-race middle class, or in the case of Guadeloupe, dedicated members of a mounting black socialism during the 1890s. Coupled with the flagging Caribbean sugar economy, which sapped the political power of the islands’ grands blancs and pushed people of color into administrative, legislative, educational, and bureaucratic posts, the onset of the Third Republic thrust the French Antilles’ population of color into social and political prominence, though the islands’ endogamous white elite continued to dominate its economic sphere.18
Therefore, the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe were almost-but-not-quite departments of France. While they had been folded into the metropolitan legal code, were free from the harsh indigenous code applied elsewhere in the French empire, and had representation on par with other departments—if at the lower end of the spectrum—they still faced very real hurdles to integration, most notably the economic realities of sugar cultivation and the political realities of their still colonial status. Given their legislative representation as well as their economic subjugation, the French West Indies were indeed colonies of citizens.
Scholars of the French West Indies have extensively examined the importance of assimilation in Antillean politics and culture, elucidating the significance of the short-lived emancipation of 1794; the transient citizenship gained in 1848 and suspended in 1851; and finally the full citizenship restored in 1871 and codified in the Third Republic’s Constitution of 1875. From Richard Burton’s La famille coloniale: La Martinique et la mère patrie (1994) and his edited volume French and West Indian (1995), to Mickaella Perina’s Citoyenneté et sujétion aux Antilles francophones (1997), to Jean-Pierre Sainton’s Les nègres en politique (2000), and, more recently, to Serge Mam Lam Fouck’s L’histoire de l’assimilation (2006), scholars have probed the entry of Antilleans into the political sphere during the Third Republic and explored their demands for civic and economic rights.19 This work seeks not to retrace their steps but to explore for the Third Republic, as Laurent Dubois does for the First Republic in A Colony of Citizens and Avengers of the New World, how disruptive events in the French West Indies—in this case, disasters both natural and manmade—shaped and interacted with broader developments in the metropole itself.
Disasters constitute a crucial aspect of a state’s relationship to its citizenry. Recent works such as Matthew Mulcahy’s Hurricanes and Society and Sherry Johnson’s Climate and Catastrophe evidenced how disastrous events propelled individuals toward the poles of revolution and reconciliation, reshaping how historians understand the effect of ecology on national and transnational political developments in the Atlantic world. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Jackson’s Paris under Water has underscored how disasters and the state’s technocratic response heightened nationalist sentiments among Frenchmen. In unpacking these nationalist sentiments, however, scholars must be attentive to race as well as class. As evidenced by the work of Jennifer Anne Boittin, Gary Wilder, Tyler Stovall, and others, narratives of France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries must incorporate the notion of a “black France” distinct from, and yet part of, a national French history—one with a trans-Atlantic dimension that pushed the limits of French reasoning about its nonwhite subjects and citizens.20 Republican dogma and nation building stretched their muscles in France’s old colonies during the second half of the nineteenth century, but as Myriam Cottias has pointed out, despite their vital role in France’s national story, the old colonies have occupied a blind spot in national French history and consequently in our understanding of French identity.21
By combining the literature’s recent focuses on ecology and race, as well as its redefinition of French national history as colonial history, the present work demonstrates that the cultural reaction of France to natural disasters in Martinique and Guadeloupe proved vital in defining French civilization at the close of the nineteenth century, torn as it was between an economic calculus that heightened Antilleans’ second-class status and a language of inclusion aimed at their assimilation. French officials understood Antilleans’ relevance to the French nation first and foremost as a function of their economic utility. As Elizabeth Heath has shown, Guadeloupeans struggled amidst a flagging sugar industry and ultimately failed to secure agricultural subsidies and governmental support akin to that provided to their metropolitan compatriots who toiled phylloxera-ridden vineyards in southern France.22 Heath’s excellent work has demonstrated how an uneven economic playing field between Guadeloupean and metropolitan Frenchmen interacted with administrative racism to preclude a truly inclusive social republic in France, and she has accurately shown that deep-seated racial prejudices and colonial disparities undercut the Republic’s claims to truly universal values and eased the rejection of Antillean rights to governmental assistance, increasingly in the decade leading up to Guadeloupe’s great strike of 1910. In the Third Republic’s Caribbean, this mistreatment was as undoubtedly true for downtrodden workers at it was for victims of catastrophe. And yet disasters and their cultural responses complicated France’s economic and civic exclusionism. Tropical Frenchmen of color fought for civil rights and national inclusion during moments of climatic and civil catastrophe that put the strength of liberal values and national integration to the test, to be sure, and at times this popular activism produced an administrative distancing that underscored the islands’ legacy of economic exploitation. At other times, however, disasters resulted in a public outpouring of support that seemed to wash away racial difference, particularly since the French prided themselves on having incorporated their West Indian populations as citizens. As the following pages will show, natural disasters—large, singular events like hurricanes, fires, and volcanic eruptions that captured the French imagination—and resulting civil unrest simultaneously prompted an exclusionary “calculus of disaster” that justified civic disparity through racially coded economic language, as was the case for Guadeloupe’s sugar workers, and an inclusive “language of citizenship” that underscored compatriotism and national community.
In some ways, this process mirrored what took place across the Caribbean at the close of the nineteenth century. As Bonham Richardson has rightly shown for the British West Indies, conflict arose when a collapsing sugar industry combined with what seemed to racist colonial officials to be a veritable onslaught of environmental hazards marking Antilleans as fundamentally different from Europeans.23 To them, such difference justified discrimination. While this phenomenon rings true in the French West Indies to some extent, in many ways the French case differed. Though French Antilleans were similarly plagued by an economic downturn and marked as distinct by their tropical environment, and even as contemporaries understood them through the lens of racist tropes, French West Indians’ status as citizens discouraged the French government from discriminating against them on the basis of their skin tone alone, leading republican officials to justify their exclusionism in financial as well as geographic terms. In turn, this exclusionary rhetoric ran up against the countervailing force of French national integration that was in part predicated on the republican faith that the civilizing mission could actually work.
As Eugen Weber reminded us, the process of making Frenchmen out of a rural, disconnected peasantry at the close of the nineteenth century was uneven and fraught with tension.24 He deemed it a form of internal colonization in which urban values permeated the countryside through school systems, transportation and communication networks, and military service. Similarly, historian Benedict Anderson has demonstrated that nations are not natural or foundational givens but “imagined communities” in the modern world produced through print capitalism, the political action of provincial elites, and the ever-increasing bureaucratic apparatuses of the state. The French Caribbean was part of this dual process of “internal colonization” and “national imagination” in that its population participated as citizens in the national integration of France. Rather than forming an independence movement struggling to imagine a separatist community, most Antilleans sought to gain recognition as a French one. The republican middle class and the socialist laboring class, not the white creole elites, led the charge because of the complex position of white elites in relation to the legacy of slavery and the particularities of French republicanism. Where the demand by colonial elites in the United States had represented a form of nascent nationalism a century before, Antillean planters’ centuries-long demands for increased autonomy represented a form of secessionism that ran counter to the political ambitions of the islands’ predominantly nonwhite middle and working classes. That is, colonial nationalism meant not independence but integration into the French nation.
Internal colonization forms a crucial backdrop for the political tensions brought to light by disasters and civil unrest in the Caribbean as well as in the metropole, because cataclysmic events cast societal problems and dynamics in their starkest relief, and the debate over who belongs in the national community takes center stage. The major crises this book addresses ignited public debates over Antillean belongingness in the national community and a political dialogue between the Antilles and metropolitan France as French society questioned who belonged and who did not. In the process, commonplace French understandings of citizenship, colonialism, and community were unearthed and challenged. By tracing the peculiarities of the Caribbean environment—as well as the increasing role of the French nation-state in distant localities—in relation to the rise of French nationalism and demands for political inclusion and social welfare, this book provides a fuller picture of the development of late-nineteenth-century nationalism and its ramifications for the colonial world.
How and to what extent the French Caribbean is part of metropolitan France remains a prominent issue to this day. Antillean society reveals a tension between a sense of commonality with an African heritage—most clearly elucidated through the writers and artists of the Negritude school—and a drive by the Creolité movement for difference from, or rather a synthesis of, the cultural or geographic antecedents to Caribbean peoples. The Caribbean during the late nineteenth century was not only a space of fragmentation and insularity but also one of a shared connection to the physical tropical environment and a shared bank of local knowledge. Undoubtedly distinct from their metropolitan counterparts, Antilleans nevertheless saw themselves as both French and Caribbean as they participated in the politics and social developments of the French Third Republic. While it is important not to reduce Antilleans to a singular cultural antecedent—either that of France or Africa—Antilleans have long engaged with their French nationality. In times of both natural disaster and civil unrest, French conceptualizations of nationality and citizenship simultaneously included and excluded them.
As a “colony of citizens,” the French Caribbean was simultaneously a colonial territory and an integral part of France. Under French control longer than Nice, Savoy, or Alsace-Lorraine, the colonies of “la France lointaine,” as it was called, were inextricably entangled in metropolitan concerns and arguments about the meaning and significance of “liberty, equality, and fraternity” as demands rose for a social republic in France. Rather than treating the colonies as a space to which national ideologies were either applied or one in which local circumstances pushed back on national discourses, this book looks beyond the dichotomy between metropole and colony in order to explore not only how republicanism was refracted in the colonies but also how the colonies shaped the Third Republic by challenging and redefining French ideology and serving as the battleground where a language of civic inclusion challenged, and was challenged by, economic imperatives.
Demands from the metropolitan government as well as conditions within the colonies shaped the French state’s imperial policy. The French had a strong desire to view the French Caribbean as the embodiment of the civilizing mission “made good”—that is, contemporaries explained, as a place where French values and culture had taken root in the tropics. The old colonies themselves had a voice in the legislature and thereby a say in government’s colonial policies. The political realities in Martinique and Guadeloupe were such that the islands’ mixed-race middle class and black laboring class championed assimilation, demanding disaster relief from the central government as if the Antilles were departments, and requesting economic parity with metropolitan citizens. Oftentimes these claims fell on deaf ears. However, the increasing prominence of socialists from the islands upheld the ideal of a “Social Republic” during times of natural catastrophe and civil discord. The French Caribbean’s relationship to the metropole during times of unrest and disaster under the Third Republic thus reveals the inextricability of colonialism, catastrophes, and democratic nation building in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The late nineteenth-century French understood disasters as an assault on the nation, though people in its oldest colonies always saw compatriotism through the lens of colonialism. Nevertheless, French Antilleans were by law citizens of the French nation, and while disasters were alienating events, they opened the opportunity for black Frenchmen to fight for their rights of inclusion. This book explores how the metropolitan French projected their prejudices and misconceptions, as well as their political hopes and aspirations, onto a tropical environment far removed from France; and how that faraway space—with its hurricanes, fires, and earthquakes—in turn influenced the conceptualization of the French nation itself by bringing forward existing racial and social tensions that put under scrutiny France’s ideological convictions of assimilation and equal citizenship.
Chapter 1 establishes that the “old colonies” are distinct from the “new colonies,” exploring the relationship of race to space to show that the colonial population of the French Antilles—particularly the middle class of Martinique—figured into the French imaginary as “tropical Frenchmen” who served as a bastion of French identity in a hostile environment that perpetually threatened to destroy all civilization there. Despite the fact they had been extractive sugar colonies in reality, France treated the French Antilles as colonies of settlement and thus as an extension of France in the tropics. The colonial citizenry had, according to contemporary journalist Auguste Terrier, “attained a certain degree of civilization” in this “faraway France,” and an intense struggle over French identity and nationality waged there between liberal French republicans and a reactionary right composed of monarchists and Bonapartists. Race, politics, and socioeconomics were intertwined in the Caribbean. Faced with an intransigent population of white planters who maintained the old aristocratic mores of prerevolutionary France but who were increasingly becoming obsolete at the hands of international market forces, liberal officials turned to Martinique’s burgeoning mixed-race middle class as the bearers of the French Republic.
Chapter 2 explains how Frenchmen socially identified with and supported distant “compatriots” in the Caribbean who suffered during the 1890 fires that burned down the administrative capital of the island of Martinique and an agricultural town in Guadeloupe. The fires of 1890, and the French government’s relief campaign, illustrated the French state’s need to safeguard its Antillean citizenry in times of natural disaster. Though the climate of the Caribbean was diametrically opposed to that of France, the French state and national press depicted people living there as inherently French—“more French than the French,” as many in France describe Antilleans today. The dire situation following the Great Fires of Fort-de-France and Port-Louis met an outpouring of public support from across France and throughout the empire, as Frenchmen heeded the call for the Caribbean’s compatriots to open their wallets to their brothers in peril.
Chapter 3 examines the role economics played in distinguishing “colonial” populations from “metropolitan” ones, looking at how the French business elite, whose financial operations in the islands had been repeatedly hampered by natural disasters and undercut by a worldwide sugar crisis, attempted to distance itself from the French Caribbean in the aftermath of the 1891 hurricane. As disaster fatigue set in, officials began to reevaluate the economic importance and vitality of the French Caribbean, downplaying the importance of its shared culture and instead emphasizing its economic history as the site of extractive colonies. To the chagrin of assimilationist politicians fighting for West Indian political rights, the Caribbean’s Frenchness seemed to hinge on its economic utility.
Chapter 4 explores the consequences of the downturn in the Antillean sugar economy caused by international competition and local environmental catastrophes. It examines the mounting agitation and incendiarism in Guadeloupe that eventually burned down the island’s largest city, Pointe-à-Pitre. On the heels of this fire, a general strike erupted on Martinique that foregrounded labor unrest in metropolitan France, as French socialists rallied to the cause of their compatriots in the Caribbean. The military had opened fire on strikers at Le François in Martinique, and that same year, the military used force in Chalon-sur-Saône in eastern France to suppress an industrial strike in the metropole. These events made it difficult to consider the problems of the French Caribbean exotic or strictly colonial: the issues brought to light by the shooting at Le François, when cast with the unrest evident at places like Chalon, reinforced French cultural identification with their compatriots in Martinique.
Chapter 5 turns toward the deadliest natural event in the Western Hemisphere in recorded history: the 1902 eruption of Mount Pélee and the destruction of Saint-Pierre, “the Paris of the Antilles.” If disaster had previously characterized how the French understood the Caribbean and the tropics more generally, the eruption of Mount Pelée solidified that association. As one of the world’s deadliest catastrophes, this eruption became the prevailing leitmotif for Martinique in the French imaginary, solidifying the ideological division between the Frenchness of the Antilleans themselves and the tropical space in which they lived.
The epilogue looks at a new form of catastrophe: the violence inflicted by the First World War. The book moves, therefore, from the barbarity of the Caribbean climate to the barbarism of the European battlefield, which challenged the very idea of French civilization. Therefore, as this race of tropical Frenchmen left the West Indies for Europe, they defended French civilization not from the harshness of a tropical climate but from itself. The cycle of catastrophe closed around colony and metropole, and the dynamics and political struggles surrounding disasters at the turn of the century, coupled with Antilleans’ role in the First World War, set the French Caribbean on a path toward eventual departmentalization in 1946. While departmentalization was in no way predetermined, the debates over inclusion and exclusion, as well as the habits of practice forged during times of catastrophe, helped set the stage for the struggles over “black France” that characterized French discourse in the twentieth century. French citizens in the Caribbean—whose race, geographic distance, and exposure to environmental risks often cast them as outsiders in France—continue to demand parity with their metropolitan counterparts, evidenced most recently by the 2009 general strike, and this book explores the roots of this dynamic.