3
The Calculus of Disaster
Sugar and the Hurricane of 18 August 1891
Famous Antillean writers such as Daniel Maximin and Patrick Chamoiseau have described life in the Caribbean as shaped by the environment: the tropical sun, cyclonic winds, and torrential downpours have had very real consequences for Caribbean life and society. Not only did the yearly rhythm of hurricanes shape life on the islands, but it also influenced the islands’ political and economic development. French officials at the turn of the century viewed the Antilles through the lens of natural disasters, seeing a foreign tropical environment that perpetually threatened French civilization in the Caribbean. Moreover, the French legislature predominantly focused on economic extraction, describing the effects of natural catastrophes in terms of lost harvests and damage to public infrastructure, all the while trumpeting the extension of French citizenship to those living there.
The Antilles’ position as more than colonies but not quite departments, as well as French officials’ erroneous conception of them as colonies of settlement, created a tension between the realities of economic investment and the ideals of cultural and political incorporation. To the chagrin of assimilationist politicians fighting for Antillean political rights, the islands’ Frenchness hinged on their economic utility. Tabulating data with respect to the islands’ natural environment and monocultural economy, officials subjected them to financial profit-and-loss analyses and economic valuations as they quantified human suffering in charts, graphs, and tables. Numbers mattered in the nineteenth century, when the advent of censuses and statistical measuring encouraged officials to comprehend their world through faceless numbers.1 In the case of the Caribbean, it permitted the French state to translate centuries of exploitation and racism into a seemingly more benign language of financial feasibility, sound investments, and economic measurement.
The tension between economic measurement and political ideology came to a head in 1891 in the aftermath of the largest hurricane to hit Martinique in several generations. The hurricane came on 18 August, one year after the 1890 fires when the capital city was still in the process of being rebuilt, and killed seven hundred people.2 While it was nowhere near as deadly as the Great Hurricane of 1780—the deadliest hurricane in recorded history, which killed around twenty-two thousand people throughout the Atlantic coastal region, with at least seven thousand deaths on Martinique alone—or even the hurricane of 1813, which killed three thousand people across the Caribbean—the 1891 hurricane was the forty-fourth most deadly Atlantic hurricane in the period from 1492 to 1996.3 It concentrated its fury almost exclusively on Martinique, and the island suffered more than five hundred deaths and two thousand wounded.4 Combined with the destruction from the year prior, the island’s distress was overwhelming. One contemporary observed that “the shock [on the night of the hurricane] was such that most women who were pregnant gave birth to stillborns.”5 While likely an exaggeration, this contemporary’s assertion nevertheless elucidates the truly strong emotional and physical ordeal experienced by Martinique’s population—an ordeal that did not end once the storm had passed. The hurricane continued to claim victims over the following months: from 18 August to 31 December 1891, 1,120 people died as a consequence of the cyclone, largely due to poor hygienic conditions.6
With the amount of damage to the economy taken into account, the 1891 hurricane caused more devastation spread more widely on Martinique than the 1890 fire. However devastating the fire, damage had been contained in Martinique’s administrative capital. Most important to French officials, who by this point had begun to feel disheartened by what seemed to be an endless supply of Caribbean catastrophes, the hurricane had much farther-reaching consequences for the island’s plantation economy. At the opening of the extraordinary session of Martinique’s General Council, the minister of the interior focused on the economic toll of the storm, exclaiming that “prosperous days before, [Martinique] is now more beaten down, more ruined than at any other time in its history.”7 In the words of Martinique’s governor, “Since 1817, we haven’t had a disaster so lamentable.”8
The previous year’s fire amplified the relative damage and sense of danger the hurricane had caused. In the island’s capital, a tornado had torn through the city’s recently rebuilt urban landscape, causing over four million francs in damage to Fort-de-France alone.9 And in the days following the hurricane, the undersecretary of the colonies cabled Martinique’s governor, Delphino Moracchini—a Corsican-borne career functionary who had served as the organizer of the 1890 relief campaign under Governor Germain Casse—to inquire whether any funds and foodstuffs remained from the previous year’s relief campaign.10 In response, the governor requested that the central government send as much flour, salted cod, dried legumes, potatoes, and salted meats as possible, for of the 1.7 million francs raised for relief after the 1890 fire, only seventy-five thousand francs remained.11 In fact, by the end of 1891, the General Council of Martinique had voted to use some of the money received for hurricane relief to instead rebuild some of the buildings that had been destroyed in the 1890 fire, and to use the “relief measures” from the 1891 hurricane to assist the fire victims who were still struggling.12 Facing financial instability, the government requested a prorogation of all debts for three months, and the undersecretary tried to arrange a one-million-franc loan to keep the colony solvent, though the finance minister summarily denied both measures.13 In short, the 1891 hurricane had put the island under water literally as well as figuratively.
Instead of providing a million-franc loan and suspending the colony’s debt, the central government once again drew upon the patriotism of the French population and international sympathy to come to the aid of Martinique. Over the next few months, workers’ organizations, Martinique’s local government, the central French government, concerned individuals, and particularly other Caribbean islands all donated to help the 1891 hurricane victims. By December 1891, over 791,000 francs in financial and in-kind assistance had been provided “in favor of the victims of the Cyclone of 18 August.”14
Yet, while an outpouring of public support and an overt—if at times, qualified—display of shared compatriotism between metropolitan France and its “colony of citizens” in the Antilles had met the 1890 fire, economic concerns constrained relief efforts and undercut aid distributions after the hurricane, despite the damage being far more widespread. Though the rank and file in France heeded the call for compatriotism once more, and the international community opened its wallets in sympathy once again, disaster fatigue had set in among French officials who saw all the work rebuilding Fort-de-France literally washed away overnight. Therefore, in contrast to the previous year’s fire-relief campaigns, the hurricane inspired an economic calculus that French officials couched in racially coded terminology and phrases, all the while disregarding the history of slavery that had shaped Martinique’s monocultural economy and placed it in such a financially vulnerable position. As the French government took stock of the 1891 hurricane, its conceptualization of Martinique’s “Frenchness” and the island’s belongingness suggested the Martiniquais were responsible for the very socioeconomic circumstances that French colonialism had helped to create.
For instance, just days after the hurricane, Martinique’s appointed governor invoked the ideals of French ancestry in a press release. Moracchini glossed over the island’s complicated history of plantation slavery, saying Martiniquais should “imitate our ancestors who never new discouragement,” suggesting Martiniquais should emulate either “the Gauls” or the founders of the French republic. Beyond merely imposing an inaccurate historical narrative onto the island, Moracchini’s address implied that Martinique’s lazy black workers were not doing enough to rebuild and that they needed to be more “Gallic” or French in their approach. Such a prejudice was held by many during the Third Republic who criticized the island’s working class as plagued by an “incurable laziness.”15 Dating to the days before emancipation, this racist trope undermined slaves’ bids for freedom by pinning the islands’ profitability on their unfree status. Although abolitionist Victor Schoelcher had railed against such commonplace prejudices fifty years earlier, explaining that the black man “is lazy because his work is not paid, because he does not receive the fruit of his labors,” they were given new life under the Third Republic as an explanation of the islands’ declining economic relevance.16
Despite being devoid of any explicit references to race, therefore, the implication of Moracchini’s address, effectively an exhortation to work, was not lost on contemporaries. In response, the island’s republican paper, Les Colonies, pointed out that the ancestors of the Martiniquais were not Gauls but hardworking slaves who had rebuilt the island following major hurricanes in 1723, 1724, 1756, 1758, 1766, 1779, 1786, and 1788 by force. These slaves had become republicans themselves, despite lacking a Gallic ancestry, and would rebuild the island again, but not under duress. Now that slavery had been abolished, the free market established in the colony, and a class of free and independent workers had been created, Martinique’s laborers would work hard to recover, but like everyone else in France, they would do so for pay and could not, as citizens, be forced to work without compensation. Therefore, the republican mouthpiece on the island contended that the French government needed to put its money where its mouth was and inject capital into Martinique to improve laborers’ employment prospects, lest class warfare threaten the stability of the island. Having merged the legacy of slavery with demands for financial assistance from the central government, Les Colonies invoked the Frenchness of Martinique in its turn, asserting that at this juncture it was all the more important that the metropole not “leave its oldest colonies in the Antilles to perish—these old colonies, so devoted and patriotic, that form in reality French departments on the American continent.”17
The Howling Wind: The Events of 18 August 1891
Around 6 p.m. on 18 August 1891, the most powerful hurricane to hit the French Antilles in over a century made landfall on the eastern side of the island of Martinique. The hurricane was compact, powerful, and fast, crossing the island’s seventy kilometers in a matter of hours. The tempest had picked up speed as it strengthened over the warm waters of the Caribbean, and Martinique lay in its direct path, receiving the brunt of the storm’s most powerful winds along what meteorologists call the storm’s eye-wall. The destruction was overwhelming. Counting on the “generosity [of the] Parliament and concitoyens [of the] mere-patrie,” the governor of Martinique telegraphed the colonial undersecretary:
Colony ravaged; towns completely destroyed; plantations18 annihilated; sugar cane, colonial services ravaged, foodstuffs disappeared; factories half-demolished; village, rural buildings razed; 50 million in losses; population without respite, without food; famine menaces; aid urgently needed, in food and in money.19
While it is impossible to know the exact strength of the hurricane, eyewitness accounts and contemporary measurements suggest that the storm was small in diameter but intense. Modern meteorologists since 1969 have rated hurricanes and their damage potential according to the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale, which ranks hurricanes on a scale of one to five.20 They consider anything category three or above to be a major hurricane due to its potential for substantial property damage and the risk of a significant loss of life. The scale’s damage estimates are not linear, as the damage potential of a major hurricane is exponentially greater than that of a minor one. In fact, while only accounting for 24 percent of yearly land-falling storms from 1900 to 2005, major hurricanes category three and above caused roughly 85 percent of all hurricane damage in the United States.21
The reported barometric pressure in Fort-de-France at the time of the storm’s landfall was 28.35 inches (720 millimeters) of mercury, and the pressure at the eye of the storm had dropped to 27.95 inHg (710 mmHg).22 According to the Saffir-Simpson scale as well as modern meteorological data, the storm was at least a category-three hurricane with sustained winds of 111 to 129 miles per hour, and may have been a category-four storm, with sustained winds of 130 to 156 miles per hour. The Saffir-Simpson scale states that a category-three hurricane causes “devastating” damage to well-built homes constructed according to twenty-first-century standards. The scale rates a category-four hurricane as causing “catastrophic” damage, with large numbers of buildings sustaining severe structural damage or being destroyed.23 Thus, the 1891 hurricane certainly caused devastating damage; it was very likely catastrophic.
A great deal of the damage caused by hurricanes comes from the storm surge, or the difference between the normal tide and the storm’s tide. In other words, the storm surge is the amount by which the sea level rises as the hurricane makes landfall, and it depends on the hurricane’s wind speed, among other factors like its forward speed and heading with respect to the shoreline. Although the storm’s small diameter mitigated the likely damage—storms with a larger surface area produce more significant storm surges—the island’s topography made it ripe for flooding. With the copious rainfall that accompanies hurricanes, flooding typically becomes concentrated in the low-lying areas, and therefore the shape and composition of the shoreline largely determines flooding. Though Martinique is mountainous, much of its farmland and urban space is in low-lying coastal areas, ravines, and valleys. As the runoff from the higher altitudes collected in areas of lower elevation, the hurricane’s rainfall and storm surge utterly destroyed Martinique’s urban and agricultural landscape. As an observer of the 1891 hurricane remarked to the Chamber of Deputies, during that “horrible night” of 18 August, “water penetrated everywhere, flooding everything.”24
Stone or concrete would have afforded some protection against gale-force winds, but the earthquake-tolerant wood homes popular in the nineteenth-century Caribbean had little chance against the hurricane. Weathering by the unforgiving Caribbean elements compounded the problem. While the walls of most structures remained, the roofs were often lost and the interior destroyed.25 On the one hand, the undulating roofs of the island’s urban structures made with corrugated steel or overlapping tiles were quite susceptible to uplift from the pressure differential caused in gale-force winds, easily blowing off and leaving the interior exposed. On the other hand, the homes of the island’s rural peasantry had roofs made from cane stalks, which had no hope of withstanding sustained winds. Few urban dwellings remained intact, and almost none of the island’s many rural and isolated dwellings could withstand the hurricane.26 In the countryside where the homes had weak foundations and poor construction, several homes completely inverted, while others rolled through the fields spurred along by the winds.27
In correspondence to table 4, “Hurricane damage by commune, 1891,” map 5 shows the distribution of damage across the island normalized by population. Communes that sustained less damage per capita are shaded a lighter color than those with heavier losses. By cross-checking eyewitness reports with a geospatial map of the damage sustained from the hurricane, we can estimate the storm’s path. The hurricane made landfall at the communes of La Trinité and Le Robert. Over the course of approximately three hours, with a brief twenty-minute calm as the storm’s eye passed, the hurricane successively destroyed the communes of Gros-Morne, Le Lamentin, Le François, Saint-Joseph, and Fort-de-France on its way westward. Reports state that Saint-Joseph, Duclos, Le Vauclin, and Gros-Morne suffered total devastation.28 Those areas with higher populations, such as Le Robert and Le François, and those with large swaths of low-lying and beachfront dwellings, like Saint-Luce and Le Marin, felt the brunt of the storm. Halted by the heights of Mount Pelée, the hurricane paused as its powerful winds batted the communes in the valley below: Saint-Pierre took the heaviest damage on the island, both overall and per capita, because the heavily populated city sat directly under the hurricane as it perched itself on Pelée’s southern slopes. Meanwhile, the mountain shielded the communes of Le Marigot, Lorrain, Basse-Pointe, and Macouba on its far side. The storm then headed westward from Saint-Pierre, leaving Martinique and continuing its march through the Caribbean.
Table 4. Hurricane damage by commune, 1891
| Commune | Francs |
|---|---|
|
Saint-Pierre |
12,191,800 |
|
Le Lamentin |
6,569,658 |
|
Le François |
5,665,200 |
|
Le Robert |
5,407,100 |
|
Fort-de-France |
4,392,320 |
|
La Trinité |
4,166,756 |
|
Gros-Morne |
2,903,266 |
|
Le Marin |
2,658,720 |
|
Le Vauclin |
2,386,000 |
|
Le Morne-Rouge |
2,357,000 |
Source: Based on the reports from communal commissions, September 1891, FM SG MAR 72, d. 581, ANOM.
All told, the storm ruined countless cash and subsistence crops, and early reports warned of an oncoming famine.29 For example, the cacao plantations of Le Precheur, as well as the cacao and coffee plantations and subsistence farms of Le Vauclin that had existed for generations, were totally leveled. The sea level rose substantially, hammering ships docked at Saint-Pierre’s port and completely flooding the commune of Le Robert. Schools, churches, city halls, roads, bridges—that is, public infrastructure of all kinds—were completely obliterated in under three hours. Lines of communications between Fort-de-France and the rest of the island, including Saint-Pierre, were interrupted, and the town of Le Lamentin, which sits at sea level, was completely destroyed. In Le Morne-Rouge, where picturesque and isolated homes dotted the mountainous landscape of the slopes of Mount Pelée, the tempest destroyed every single “vacation villa” of Saint-Pierre’s wealthy elite. Because the destruction was limited to Martinique, commerce minister Jules Roche and finance minister Maurice Rouvier observed that “it seems to have concentrated and exhausted on our unfortunate colony all the rage and destruction that nature holds in reserve.”30
Map 5. Total hurricane damage in Martinique by commune, 1891
Normalized per capita with six equal interval breaks. Map created in ArcGIS. Shape file of Administrative Communes: The GADM Database of Global Administrative Areas, version 2, January 2012. Retrieved 12 December 2012 at http://www.gadm.org/. The 1891 population figures are estimated from two censuses: Lanessan, L’expansion colonial, 773; Annuaire de la Martinique: 1901, 142–45.
The government of Martinique—left insolvent by the previous year’s fire, initial relief efforts, and the complete destruction of its sugar crop—requested a prorogation of all public debts by three months immediately following the hurricane. The French minister of finances, who himself admitted that the hurricane was one of the “most gruesome in its effects . . . ever unleashed on the sea of the Antilles,” denied the request, citing the need for a special law passed by the National Assembly to allow the measure.31 The ministry also denied a follow-up request for a loan of one million francs, made on behalf of Martinique by Undersecretary Étienne, on similar grounds. The minister of finances argued the specter of human suffering and the nobility of relief did not obviate the need for the National Assembly to deliberate about the loan and pass it as a budgetary law.32 In other words, the state needed time to ensure that the terms of the loan would permit a timely financial return and that the colony would not default on its debt. Ultimately, the Chamber of Deputies did provide one hundred thousand francs in immediate assistance to supplement the remaining seventy-five thousand francs from the 1890 fire relief, levied from the state’s reserve funds.33 However, in light of the devastating consequences of the storm and the longer legacy of environmental destruction, as well as the state’s reluctance to embroil its finances in Martinique’s economic recovery, this sum was far from enough to bring the island out of insolvency. With disaster fatigue setting in amidst a collapsing sugar economy, as Martinique scrambled to provide the state with damage estimates that would justify the requisite budgetary laws to alleviate the island’s fiscal troubles, France’s central government began to question whether the juice was worth the squeeze.
The Road to Economic Recovery: A Calculus of Human Suffering and Colonial Belonging
Randomly selecting members from among its assembly, the General Council of Martinique formed a commission the day after the hurricane to estimate the losses it caused. After an investigation, which Martinique’s Senator Vincent Allègre described as “meticulous,” the General Council calculated that the storm caused nearly eighty-nine million francs’ worth of damage. The average yearly wage for a French worker in the metropole during the 1890s was 1,080 francs, paid at 35 centimes per hour, making the storm’s costs equivalent to the yearly wages of approximately 82,000 metropolitan workers.34 Martinique’s entire male population likely numbered around 82,000, and its working population earned less than its metropolitan counterparts. Sugar workers, for instance, earned between 1.50 francs and 2 francs per day in 1884, while miners earned about 3.8 francs per day.35 To put it simply, the storm had brought the island’s economy to a grinding halt. But the eighty-nine-million-franc estimate was seen as extreme by the Parisian business elite and the central government. On 25 August, the governor’s minister of the interior, Maurice Fawtier, created the “Central Aid Commission” to handle all food and monetary assistance, national and foreign, to Martinique’s population. Governor Moracchini presided over this commission, while Carméné, Martinique’s bishop, and Fawtier carried out its day-to-day tasks, which included enumerating the hurricane damages in greater detail than the initial commission had. On 5 September it solicited evaluations of communal damage and individual losses, as well as substantiation from each local commune. The minister of the interior asked communes to detail the following losses in francs: colonial works, roads, bridges, and buildings; communal works, roads, and buildings; factories; homes and plantation dwellings outside towns; individual homes in the towns; home furnishings and other such property; merchandise; sugar harvests as a percentage loss based on annual yields; food harvests, and all others; and finally, total losses of all other sorts.36
Each commune created a local commission consisting of the mayor, the director of the civil engineering service, and the receiver-general (a tax official) following protocols that had been established for earlier natural disasters, such as the 1875 hurricane.37 Supplementing property evaluations from the Banque Coloniale, the commission surveyed the towns and countryside; visited agricultural fields and subsistence plots; and consulted administrative and financial documents to arrive at their figures. Inhabitants of the various communes were also encouraged to come forward to report their own losses, which delegates of the commission then verified by surveying the damage for themselves. The commission reserved editorial control and lowered or raised the figures as they saw fit.38 Most of the reported losses were ruined harvests of sugar, tafia (a cheap rum consumed locally), and foodstuffs, as well as damage to plantations and factory equipment. The communes also reported the loss of homes and public infrastructure (roads, bridges, and municipal buildings), but commercial casualties largely overshadowed these losses in terms of the attention commanded in the official reports.39
Faced with the lack of food, water, and shelter, the Central Aid Commission set about distributing foodstuffs and supplies to the populace, using the government’s advance and the remaining 1890 fire-relief funds. Due to the damage to the island’s infrastructure, as well as the virtually complete destruction of the island’s shipping capacity, the commissioners looked to neighboring islands, such as Saint Lucia and Guadeloupe, to provide supplies. But the storm and a protracted economic downturn had limited the capacity of local islands to provide aid, particularly in Guadeloupe, where the collapsing sugar market had left many destitute. When the governor of Guadeloupe pledged fifty thousand francs in food aid to Martinique’s victims, Guadeloupe’s irritated labor class asked, “Where are we going to find 50,000 francs’ worth of food? Who has that? Our markets are empty; our boutiques, our stores are poor. Our fields no longer produce anything.”40 While the local islands could not provide substantial financial and material aid, they could provide stop-gap services such as shipping. Therefore, the commission ceded shipping rights to foreign governments to get food to the worst-afflicted areas. The hungry population needed food, so the commission resolved to secure foodstuffs, some of which they distributed free to the designated needy. They also distributed money and sold foodstuffs to the general population at a fair price. They determined that if local vendors were suspected of price gouging, municipal stores would be set up as an alternative.41 Local mayors were tasked with distributing both the food and the funds, though they found their role in bureaucratic oversight a burden on their local personnel and budgets.42 Once the reports came in from the local commissions by the end of September, the governor believed that food aid was under control and turned his attention to repairing the island’s infrastructure, particularly that involved in agricultural output.43
The impact of the storm on the economy was of major concern not only to the business elite on the island but also to the laborers they employed. The scope of the disaster necessitated a substantial rebuilding effort, a fact not lost on the socialists of Martinique’s sister island of Guadeloupe. The socialist newspaper Le Peuple called on workers to come to the aid of Martinique, not through finances—the workers were themselves destitute—but through their labor: “Let’s go, therefore, workers! En route! To Martinique! There is the work you need. Go there, therefore, and you will have paid your part of the common debt of charity for which we are all creditors to one another.”44 While the gesture was largely symbolic and there is little evidence that Guadeloupean workers did in fact travel to Martinique to help rebuild, the symbolism highlighted the human misery and economic despair in the minds of the working and capitaled classes alike. For the workers, employment was a result of the catastrophe. For the plantation owners, sugar production would get back on track. The initial press reports, ministerial letters, administrative circulars, and communal reports emphasized the inundation of sugar plantations and the destruction of fruit orchards, as well as the destruction of rum distilleries, sugar refineries, and shipping ports, over the more human consequences of lost homes and ruined subsistence crops, by and large. The images that accompanied the news reports (figure 16) as well as the reports themselves reveal this preoccupation. The conservative, béké-dominated paper, Les Antilles, reported the following on its front page just days after the hurricane, when people were still without food, water, or shelter:
As for the large sugar mills and distilleries that are the powerful lever of our agricultural production—the instrument without which our agriculture would be sterilized—they are deeply affected, some completely destroyed. We know the huge capital allocated to these large industrial facilities—capital exceeding 24 million francs. A small part of that capital has been annihilated, and the rest has been immobilized until the power plants can be restarted after painful repairs.45
Fig. 16. Damage following the 1891 hurricane
Shipping was a major concern after the hurricane, but so was humanitarian relief to the populace. Images accompanying news reports, however, typically focused on the commercial rather than human losses. B. Guliet, “Le Cyclone de la Martinique,” Journal des Voyages et des aventures de terre et de mer, no. 750 (22 November 1890), 335.
Though many viewed the hurricane through the lens of human suffering, many others saw it in terms of realpolitik. As a writer for the colonial paper, the Journal des Voyages, wrote, “with the local resources lacking, there is no doubt that the metropole will come to the aid of this old colony so cruelly afflicted, in order to permit it to [once again] fulfill its strategic function in the Atlantic.”46 Since Martinique served as an important entrepôt in the Caribbean with a nontrivial sugar industry, the local press shared this faith and repeatedly asserted its belief that the French government would come to the aid of “one of its most loyal children” if for no other reason than to safeguard the sugar industry.
While the business elite were concerned about lost capital and the damage done to the sugar harvest, the island’s workers were concerned about lost wages, property damage, and where their next meal might come from. In the aftermath of the hurricane, the island’s working class experienced a heightened concern about competition in the labor market, since the diminished sugar harvest offered few jobs, and they expressed a growing animosity toward foreign workers from the neighboring British West Indies as well as toward indentured servants. Following emancipation, plantation owners imported approximately 25,700 indentured servants from South Asia to Martinique, particularly to keep labor costs low and black laborers disenfranchised.47 As one observer remarked in 1886, “without immigration, the plantation owner is at the mercy of the blacks, and a single strike of a few weeks could ruin a plantation.”48 With immigration, however, plantation owners could sidestep laborers’ agitation by supplementing the workforce with indentured servants under low-cost, mandatory contracts. Given that many of these workers had signed labor contracts before the hurricane struck and therefore were already part of the job market pool, the resentment was based not strictly on newfound competition after the hurricane but on longer-term labor shortages, xenophobia, and a postcatastrophe closing of the ranks on those whom laborers saw as belonging in Martinique.49
Tensions reached a high point as the local government began trying to take stock of the damage that the press had deemed “incalculable.” While the local General Council had reported damages totaling almost eighty-nine million francs to the central French government, Governor Moracchini’s Central Aid Commission calculated only seventy-two million francs based on the reports of the local communal administrations. Outraged, Senator Allègre complained to the undersecretary of the colonies and began petitioning the Chamber of Deputies. The nearly seventeen-million-franc difference between the cabinet and the General Council reflected the General Council’s inclusion of the impact of the hurricane on successive harvest seasons in its estimate. The gubernatorial commission had accounted for only the impact on the immediate growing season, perhaps because the metropolitan officials did not understand that planters used cane stubs left from the previous year’s harvest to plant the next. The disputes over the damage estimations did not end there. The governor himself guessed that there was only thirty-five to forty million francs’ worth of damage, much lower than either the estimates by the General Council or the local communes. This tension strained relations between the island’s elected representatives and the national leadership, and local legislators feared that this number would continue to fall.
Local legislators proved prescient. By late January 1892, the figure dropped further, to fifty million francs, following an administrative report by colonial inspectors sent to Martinique to look into the impact of the hurricane on sugar harvests, the living conditions of the population, and the overall property and structural damage caused by the hurricane. Led by Émile Chaudié, a long-time colonial administrator who would eventually become the first governor general of West Africa in 1895, the investigatory commission traveled the island, retraced the steps of the local commissions, and cross-checked figures from financial annuaries and property evaluations. According to investigators, the earlier reports by the local communes could not be trusted: they were “exaggerated” and “fanciful,” and, in the case of the communes of Le Francois, Le Vauclin, Sainte-Marie, and Saint-Esprit, guesstimates of the total damage submitted in lieu of in-person inspections and concrete valuations.50 Though the investigators did see the situation as desperate, they nevertheless believed that emotion had driven the initial estimates, and they scrutinized every expense and aspect of the island’s relief effort. They could not understand why each commune reported wildly different amounts of damage, because all had been equally decimated, and each commune’s property should have roughly the same value.
One aspect of the relief campaign that was subjected to the colonial investigator’s scrutiny was the arrival of food aid. In the month following the hurricane, food assistance arrived from Barbados (15,135 francs), Saint Lucia (12,791 francs), Guadeloupe (52,178 francs), and metropolitan France (158,162 francs). Since so much of Martinique’s food crop had been destroyed, local officials argued that sustained foreign assistance was necessary. Consequently, Saint-Pierre and Fort-de-France requested an additional 1.8 million francs’ worth of food from the central government. But colonial investigators claimed that the food aid already received—a total of 238,266 francs—should have sufficed to feed the island until it could sustain itself, and that communal administrators had given food to the capable as well as the needy to secure their own reelection. Inspector Chaudié criticized the island’s laborers for working the system, traveling great distances to the island’s urban centers to receive aid that they did not really need. He accused them of self-interest, sloth, and greed, because the state assistance was worth more than their salaries. Though he refrained from referring to the laborers’ race, Chaudié leveraged age-old stereotypes against the islands’ black laboring class, wrapping them in an economic justification centered on salary-to-assistance ratios, to justify lowering the amount of state aid.
Table 5. Enumerated hurricane damages from Martinique’s General Council, 1891
| Enumerated damages | Cost (in francs) |
|---|---|
|
40 percent of a harvest of 40,000 tons of sugar and 10 million liters of alcohol |
8,400,000 |
|
Loss of the harvest of 1893 affected by the destruction of the cane |
5,000,000 |
|
Food-producing habitations (plantations) employing 70,000 people at 200 francs per person |
15,000,000 |
|
Buildings of 540 sugar establishments |
13,500,000 |
|
Buildings and machinery of 25 factories |
2,500,000 |
|
Damage to the ceramic industry |
400,000 |
|
Industrial, commercial, property, and national (direct and indirect costs) |
44,000,000 |
|
Total |
88,800,000 |
Source: Compiled by Special Commission, Saint-Félix, Rapport de la Commission spéciale du Conseil Général sur le cyclone du 18 août 1891, FM SG MAR 72, d.581, ANOM.
Table 6. Enumerated hurricane damages from gubernatorial Central Aid Commission, 1891
| Losses to | Cost (in francs) |
|---|---|
|
Colony |
854,507 |
|
Communes |
2,797,110 |
|
Factories |
4,644,650 |
|
Rural homes and estates |
19,443,086 |
|
Urban homes |
15,534,475.5 |
|
Property/furnishings |
6,254,514.5 |
|
Merchandise |
2,080,397 |
|
Cane harvest |
10,315,833 |
|
Food harvest and orchards |
10,100,858 |
|
Total |
72,025,431 |
Source: Letter from governor of Martinique Moracchini to undersecretary of the colonies, 30 September 1891, FM SG MAR 72, d.581, ANOM.
The Central Aid Commission echoed Chaudié’s concern about the misuse of materials—or the “mob of abuse in the Communes,” in the words of Bishop Carméné—as well as the waste that accompanied the relief effort’s lack of organization. To combat the alleged abuse by those who “do not really need it,” the Central Aid Commission demanded the local commissions create registers with the names of the neediest, which it would have to approve prior to the distribution of aid. Though the governor insisted that the secular local commissions distribute aid, it was decided that religious charity institutions would verify and distribute the aid only to those named on the approved list.51 But the Central Aid Commission experienced extreme difficulties coordinating the relief effort with the various mayors on the island, many of whom declined to cooperate, and the Commission’s efforts were poorly organized. In a deposition to investigator Chaudié, the mayor of Gros-Morne admitted to having received but ignored the instructions from the island’s minister of the interior, refusing to restrict access to foodstuffs to only those designated as the “most needy.”52 Instead, the mayor gave food to anyone who presented himself at the town hall, determining how much to give by the individual’s outward appearance of poverty. Officials charged him with favoring his own daughter, in the process, and although he was cleared, the charge reflects the distrust common at the time. It also highlights the widening divide between locally elected officials, most of whom were people of color, and the appointed colonial officials performing the evaluations. In fact, several other mayors never even convened their local commissions, completely flouting the regulations imposed by the metropole, while the commissions of other towns remained deadlocked in deciding how to apportion the aid to their constituents and whether to follow the state’s instructions.53 Compounding the lack of adherence to the directives, communication between the central and local commissions repeatedly broke down. For instance, the town of Le François continued to receive food assistance long after the mayor had requested that it cease.54
After reviewing the manner in which aid was distributed, the colonial investigators reiterated the Central Aid Commission’s concerns about assistance going to those who do not “merit” it, and they even characterized the lack of coordination as a form of malfeasance. Claiming that such “abuse and waste” constituted “economic and social peril” to the “great detriment of the interests of the treasury,” inspector Chaudié argued that “thinking the hurricane brought famine” constituted “a grave error.” Investigators insisted that only those whom the cyclone left with “neither bed, nor linens, nor rags” merited assistance, while all others had “lost nothing but their jewels” and would “get over it, like those who never had any.”55 Although Chaudié profoundly distrusted the hurricane victims and saw many of them, particularly men of working age, as having cried wolf to obtain state funds and sit back on their haunches, he did criticize the Central Aid Commission for dragging its feet in distributing the funds and supplies to those he saw as truly needy: the sick, old, and utterly destitute.56
In general, however, the inspectors were eager to set aside their own sympathy in the interest of fiscal accountability. Though they did underscore the suffering of the population in their report to the colonial undersecretary, they nonetheless insisted that estimates of damage were elevated. Since poor populations have little to begin with, their losses do not represent high financial stakes. Moreover, the lure of financial assistance promoted abuse, waste, and laziness—all racist criticisms from a bygone error, though absent of explicit reference to race and heralded in the name of equity. Ultimately, the investigators saw the suffering of their Martiniquais compatriots in financial terms—that is, as part of what Chaudié called an “evaluative work that is not personal, but based on statistical givens”—and concluded that the assistance had heretofore been a poor investment. Pointing to the uncultivated land and abandoned dwellings around La Pagerie and Les Palmistes, the investigators argued that “the losses caused by the hurricane cannot include the value of structures that have none.”57 Moreover, given that public buildings had already sustained damage in Fort-de-France for reasons other than the hurricane (i.e., the previous year’s fire, as well as neglect), the official assessment of hurricane losses should not include those damages (even though some of the funds dedicated for hurricane relief had initially been designated for fire relief), inspectors claimed. They insisted that the damage estimates should not reflect the costs necessary to completely renovate the damaged structures and homes, restoring them to a like-new condition but rather to return them to their—in their eyes—often dilapidated state prior to the arrival of the hurricane. In all, they cut the damage estimates nearly in half, lowering the overall property damage of urban homes from nearly 15.5 million francs to 8.4 million francs.
Laden with implicit racism and classism that denigrated the island’s class of black laborers, the investigators’ skeptical and miserly report superseded both the damage estimates by the General Council and those proposed by the local communes, and the calculations done by the investigators were not only precise but also manufactured to lower the damage estimates.58 For instance, Chaudié figured that since the costs of recently imported zinc, tiles, and other roofing materials amounted to only six hundred thousand francs, the estimates of structural damage in Saint-Pierre of 2.4 million francs were felonious. Slashing the original estimates by as much as 75 percent in some cases—such as the loss of merchandise in Gros-Morne, a town that investigators had identified as one of the most afflicted by the hurricane—the investigators eventually lowered their estimate even further, to forty-three million francs, its final resting place.
Table 7. Reported hurricane damages from gubernatorial Central Aid Commission, 1891 (estimated)
| Losses to | Francs |
|---|---|
|
Colonial roads, bridges, and buildings |
854,507 |
|
Communal roads, bridges, and buildings |
2,797,110 |
|
Factories |
4,644,650 |
|
Rural homes and estates |
19,443,086 |
|
Urban homes |
15,534,475.5 |
|
Property/furnishings |
6,254,514.5 |
|
Merchandise |
2,080,397 |
|
Cane harvests |
10,315,833 |
|
Other agriculture (food/orchard) |
10,100,858 |
|
Total |
72,025,431 |
Source: Letter from governor of Martinique Moracchini to undersecretary of the colonies, 30 September 1891, FM SG MAR 72, d.581, ANOM.
While the investigators claimed to touch the estimations of the losses felt by sugar cane growers and manufacturers “with the most extreme reserve” and insisted on the urgency of getting the sugar factories running as soon as possible, they nevertheless slashed the local estimates in half. Though Chaudié added a million-franc “coefficient” in the budget for the dashed expectations of an exceptionally bountiful harvest, the inspectors’ valuation paled in comparison to that of local sugar growers. In addition to lowering the losses felt by big industry, the investigators made extensive cuts across the board: homes, communal structures, colonial infrastructure, and personal and public property.
During their inquiry into the use of relief funds following the 1891 hurricane, the investigators even returned to the distribution of food and monetary relief after the 1890 fire, looking for a long history of wasted funds and foodstuffs. The mayor of Fort-de-France, Osman Duquesnay, vociferously denied such allegations, pointing to the investigatory commission that cleared his name in December 1890. However, colonial inspector Blanchard concluded in his report of February 1892 that municipal officials wantonly distributed the public monetary and in-kind assistance with a “general tendency to be ignorant of the individual character of the charitable acts” and to dole out assistance to any “beggar” who presented himself. In large part, the antagonism toward Duquesnay owed to the fact that he was himself a mulatto and his municipal government was staffed by people of color, whom colonial administrators did not trust. Frustrated with the general lack of accountability, Blanchard asserted that municipal and military authorities refused to take responsibility for the distribution of donated foodstuffs and supplies, and that these supplies were sold on the black market in some cases.59
Table 8. Accepted hurricane damages from colonial investigators, 1891
| Losses to | Francs |
|---|---|
|
Colonial roads, bridges, and buildings |
618,038 |
|
Communal roads, bridges, and buildings |
2,123,500 |
|
Factories |
3,146,700 |
|
Rural homes and estates |
12,931,000 |
|
Urban homes |
8,467,550 |
|
Property/furnishings |
3,619,000 |
|
Merchandise |
1,904,500 |
|
Cane harvests |
5,691,915 |
|
Other agriculture (food/orchard) |
4,754,800 |
|
Total |
43,261,000 |
Source: Annales de la Chambre des Députés 38:76–77; M. Chautemps, Report No. 2125, FM SG MAR 72, d.582, ANOM.
In the aftermath of the 1891 hurricane, investigators from the colonial undersecretary’s office reevaluated the efficacy and honesty of the distribution of aid by the municipal government of Fort-de-France and, as a result, concluded that national aid from the central government should not come in the form of direct monetary or in-kind relief. They believed that the local government, made up of citizens of color, could not be entrusted with direct funds—though they never explained it in such terms—and that direct aid to the suffering would do little to get the economy back on track. Rather than thinking of the individual needy, therefore, authorities concerned themselves with economics in the abstract, deciding how they should intervene strategically to jump-start the crashing Martiniquais economy to help the hurricane’s victims indirectly and thereby line the coffers of financiers in the metropole. For example, with regard to the sugar and tafia industry, the government used tax breaks to the planter class to revitalize the economy and thereby recuperate industrial losses, and colonial officials tied economic assistance to specific and quantifiable property damage. For instance, cocoa and coffee farmers would be compensated one franc for each destroyed tree that was six to eighteen months old.60
Overall, the investigators found that the hurricane caused the most harm to the islands’ cultivateurs and small planters who worked subsistence and small cash-crop plots, as well as the urban population of the sick, old, and young. But Inspector Chaudié had little sympathy for the male and healthy. In his eyes, while the urban factory workers sustained heavy losses, they were part of a prosperous industry that paid them for their labor rather than the fruits of that labor, which in turn shielded them from the overall impact of the hurricane on their industry. In fact, he reasoned that their salary would double or even triple in the aftermath of the hurricane, because restoring the beleaguered sugar market would create a high demand for labor. In Chaudié’s view, wage earners’ suffering paled in comparison with that of small farmers—whom he romantically referred to as the “peasants of Martinique”—who had little to begin with, whose very survival depended on their daily toil, and whose crops of manioc, yams, taro, and fruits had been decimated.61 Although tuberous plants like yams and manioc can withstand the uprooting gale-force winds of hurricanes far better than their aboveground counterparts, they remain particularly vulnerable to heavy rains that saturate the soil and lead to rot.62 Tubers are also exceptionally susceptible to salt spray, which chemically burns the crops, and to being washed out by floods.63 In the case of the 1891 hurricane, it is possible that the high rainfall and the subsistence plots’ proximity to the ocean led to a combination of flooding, crop burn, and rot that decimated the harvest. In any case, following the hurricane, the price of manioc nearly doubled, straining the population’s limited resources to find food.64
While the inspectors criticized doling out unneeded assistance to the urban or working poor, their rose-tinted view of the countryside encouraged them to provide direct assistance to the Martiniquais peasantry. Inspector Chaudié recommended that the Chamber of Deputies attribute a fixed sum of 150 francs for the estimated ten thousand owners of rural homes, while the governor’s office estimated that ten thousand subsistence farmers should each receive fifty francs in direct aid (for a total of five hundred thousand francs) as well as a grant for 6 percent of their total losses of ten million francs (which would amount to six hundred thousand francs). The Chamber of Deputies accepted Chaudié’s conclusion, resolving to distribute the bulk of its direct aid to the population (the paysans of Martinique, as he called them) and give to only the neediest urban populations.65 For the neediest urbanites, Chaudié recommended that the chamber allocate an as yet undetermined indemnity for those “inhabitants of the villages and towns whom the hurricane left without shelter.”66
Chaudié’s awkward glorification of the so-called peasants of Martinique—completely incongruous with his thinly veiled prejudices against the black laboring population of the island—reflected a French drive to recast Martinique as a colony of settlement as opposed to a colony of extraction, perhaps in part to assuage republican guilt about the history of plantation slavery while at the same time being able to figure Martinique into the republican myth of assimilation. This motif—that of the poor, hard-working “small planter” from the countryside suffering at the hands of Mother Nature—not only figured prominently in the ministerial reports following the 1875 hurricane sixteen years prior but also typified a vision of rural Martinique as populated by willful migration and thereby overlooked the legacy of forced migration and unfree labor.67 Though an Antillean sugar-growing peasantry did not exist in the classic sense of the term, contemporaries nevertheless uncritically and inaccurately applied the term to all black agricultural workers outside the islands’ cities and larger villages.68 As one historian wrote in 1904, “Blacks remain the base of the peasantry. They live in the countryside, in the prairie, as it’s called.”69 They lived off the land and grew subsistence crops, as well as small cane crops sold to local sugar refineries, but did not become large-scale growers themselves.70 Even though they spoke Creole and not French, republicans like Chaudié felt compelled to cast them as French peasants, perhaps because they inhabited rudimentary dwellings known as cases-nègres that differed little from those of the early colonists or perhaps because they were themselves sugar growers of color who seemed to belie the racism inherent to the plantation economy.71 Even the Creole language was cast as peasant-like, as Louis Garaud had described the hybrid language as a form of French patois akin to that spoken by peasants in the metropole.72 Moreover, colonial bureaucrats led by Paul Dislère at the École Coloniale, as well as cultural commentators like August Terrier and Albert Bouinais, had referred to the Antilles as the exemplars of French assimilation, as “settlement colonies” where the people were inherently French and their politics coincided with that of the metropole.73 As historian Elizabeth Heath has shown, republican officials were ideologically drawn toward creating an economy centered on small-scale farmers in southern France as well as Martinique’s sister island of Guadeloupe. Consequently republican officials saw in the Martiniquais paysans the potential for the small-owner agricultural class that they idealized in metropolitan agricultural schools during the Third Republic.74
The fact remained, however, that the French Antilles were not settlement colonies. Colonization had completely eradicated the islands’ indigenous populations, supplanting them with forcibly migrated slaves. Frenchmen migrated to the Antilles not for settlement but to invest their money in slave economies of sugar, amassing fortunes from extracted resources and labor. This elision—the reconfiguring of Martinique as a settlement rather than an exploitive colony—permitted officials, in part, to look past their own participation in creating the problems that investigators now used as evidence against Martinique’s local damage valuations. To some extent made obsolete by advances in beet sugar production, the plantations abandoned prior to the hurricane, such as La Pagerie, which Chaudié saw as valueless and thus excepted from the official damage valuations, bear testament to that exploitive past.
If Only We Were a Department: Martinique’s Demand for Aid
In addition to debating the merits of direct versus indirect assistance, officials considered the impact of Martinique’s status as “not quite” a department. Martinique’s General Council foregrounded the quasi-metropolitan status of the island in its demand for national relief, arguing that while national support mitigates the distress of a department, a colony is typically completely on its own and must pay all its own expenses. Therefore, the Council argued that it behooved the government to grant Martinique national assistance, because the alternative would be to allow the island to collapse. The Council contended that “[f]or a French department struck as cruelly as Martinique, rebuilding would be impossible without the powerful and effective help called for by the governor. But for a colony, the state’s help is that much more indispensable, not only to rebuild, but also to survive.”75 Faced with a budgetary deficit of 870,000 francs in 1891 and over one million francs in 1892, the colony demanded direct national aid and tax relief as if it were a department—arguing that Martinique should be a department—because the colony lacked the necessary money and credit to rebuild its devastated economy, referring to the Martiniquais as “175,000 Frenchmen.”76
The discrepancy between the two relief commissions, as well as the fear of an ever-dropping damage estimate from the colonial investigators, was not lost on Martinique’s Senator Allègre. In a letter to the undersecretary of the colonies, he argued that the inspectors—because they were born in mainland France rather than “in the province itself,” that is, Martinique—could neither appreciate nor fully comprehend the losses experienced by Martinique’s “energetic population who, in trying to lift itself up, will use up its last resources and count on the future as well as the goodwill of the mother country.”77 To underline the “desperate calls” of France’s “unfortunate compatriots” and to express their dissatisfaction with the colonial investigation carried out by the undersecretary’s office as well as the disparity between their estimates and those of the governor’s office, members of Martinique’s General Council signed on to Senator Allègre’s letter to the colonial office of the Ministry of the Marine.
Both the Council and Allègre focused on the economic impact of the disaster, depicting financial recovery as the best path forward to restoring a sense of normalcy on the island. To this end, they demanded from the central government a tax exemption on Martiniquais sugar and an annual grant accorded to the colony to help balance its budget. With the backing of the governor, the General Council of Martinique requested a total of 7.6 million francs from the central government, which included three million francs to balance the budget, eight hundred thousand francs in tax and customs relief, and two million francs in agricultural allocations.78 Compared with the forty-three-million-franc estimation made by the colonial investigators—a substantial reduction from earlier estimates—in the end the central government offered only three million francs to balance the colony’s budget, which would be provided as an advance that would ultimately have to be reimbursed beginning on 1 July 1898 in ten annuities of three hundred thousand francs each.79 It was further recommended, though not legislated, that the money from the budgetary advance be distributed as follows: 550,730 francs for tax relief via customs duties on sugar and tafia, 449,250 francs toward the restoration work necessary to repair the damage caused by the hurricane, and finally, two million francs as allocations (primes) to small planters.80
While direct aid would help tremendously in rebuilding public infrastructure and homes in the island’s cities and towns, it would not be enough to help the island’s rural “peasant” population of subsistence growers nor the large industrial cane growers, insisted representatives from Martinique in a presentation to the Chamber of Deputies. They asked for an exemption on property taxes and export duties on both sugar and tafia to help the large plantations, and that the state provide assistance to the island’s peasantry with the tax revenue left to the cane planters, for “[i]n this manner we will stop the culture of death, that is to say, we will save Martinique itself.”81 Referencing the precedent of relief from custom duties and taxes following the 1817 hurricane in Martinique and various others afflicting Réunion, they pointed out that the state would not hesitate to provide such relief to metropolitan departments, such as those grape-growing regions plagued by phylloxera. The planter lobby even used their relatively small impact on the metropolitan market as ideological leverage: since they produced only thirty thousand to forty thousand tons normally, they figured, relaxing the tax duties would negatively impact neither the domestic beet sugar nor the colonial cane sugar markets. Rather, the representatives claimed that the state had a moral duty to help Martinique’s sugar economy, which in turn would help the island’s peasantry—again, a slippery term contemporaries used to refer to the islands’ black agricultural laborers. Ultimately, however, the state denied both these proposals, because the colonial investigators had deemed that the hurricane’s impact did not extend beyond the 1892 sugar harvests and thus there was no need to grant a five-year exemption.82 In light of the inspectors’ reports, the chamber decided that a tax exemption would be unwarranted, because the crops, which Chaudié had said “suffered little,” would rebound quickly. Therefore, the only measure proposed to assist what the chamber had acknowledged were “the unfortunate concitoyens in Martinique” was a loaned budgetary advance of three million francs to be distributed as Martinique’s General Council saw fit.83
Referencing the privilege of departments compared with colonies, Senator Allègre demanded a law identical to that which provided aid to Nice following a large earthquake in February 1887 that was centered in the nearby Italian Alps. The earthquake in the Alps had incurred costs in Menton of about seven to eight million francs and damages in Nice of about 1.5 million francs. By the law of 22 July 1887, the central government had borrowed 4.6 million francs from the Crédit Foncier de France to help the region rebuild. The central government took responsibility for three-fifths of the loan and left two-fifths for the department to repay. Much like investors’ concerns about the economic impact of the hurricane in Martinique, both the Crédit Foncier and the central French government were aware of the financial necessities and risks of rebuilding the towns of Menton and Nice in the metropole. In 1887 the government found such a deal to be feasible, citing that since the Crédit Foncier had “considerable engagements” in the department of Alpes-Maritimes, lending money for reconstruction would be to the bank’s benefit.84
In response to pressure from Senator Allègre and Martinique’s General Council, both of whom deemed the central government’s response underwhelming two and a half months after the hurricane, Colonial Undersecretary Étienne argued that the government’s response would be “analogous” to the aid it gave to the Alpes-Maritimes department, including a grant to help meet local budgetary shortfalls.85 Senator Allègre had emphasized that departments in France had access to support, supplies, and funds unavailable to colonies, which in his estimation were expected to stand alone with only a yearly budgetary allowance as assistance. Therefore, he put pressure on Undersecretary Etienne, who in turn conceded the argument and agreed to find support equitable to that given to departments in emergency situations.
On 25 November, the Crédit Foncier responded to the central government’s request for a loan on Martinique’s behalf, agreeing to provide the funds at an interest rate of 4.1 percent if the state were to authorize the loan with a law and guarantee its repayment.86 The terms would require the state to repay the entirety of the loan, rather than splitting the loan between the colony and the state. The undersecretary intervened, claiming that the rate was too high, and that he expected the Crédit Foncier to accept terms analogous to the agreement made with regard the 1887 earthquake in Alpes-Maritimes. In response, the Crédit Foncier insisted that such terms were impossible, because it was authorized to loan only to departments. In fact, the only colony it could loan money to was Algeria, and beyond that, the bank had no organized service or presence in Martinique. The bank did agree, however, to lower the interest rate to 4 percent.87
The undersecretary of state of the colonies then turned to the Caisses d’Amortissement, the governmental body in charge of public debts, to see if it could intervene or lend the money to Martinique on behalf of the central government. After a meeting of the board, the general director of the Caisses d’Amortissement informed the undersecretary that lending money to a foreign entity—in this case, a colony—would be a “difficult accomplishment” that would violate the organization’s traditions, and thus it would be impossible.88 Under pressure from the undersecretary to circumvent “the difficulty,” the Caisses responded by agreeing to lend the money directly to the colony rather than to the affected proprietors like the Crédit Foncier had done in the Alpes-Maritimes.89 This move would allow the state to guarantee three-fifths of the loan, as it had in Alpes-Maritimes. But the deal would be contingent on the proof of the loan’s importance, an agreement on the amortization schedule, and the strength of the guarantees provided by the state.90 In short, obtaining the loan for Martinique on terms equitable to those provided to Alpes-Maritime was unlikely.
Both the hesitation on the part of the Crédit Foncier and the Caisses d’Amortissement, as well as Colonial Undersecretary Étienne’s insistence on an agreement analogous to that made for the Alpes-Maritimes, speak to the incomplete integration of Martinique into the domestic sphere in 1891. While the language the colonial undersecretary used emphasized compatriotism and Martinique’s General Council underscored the island’s “near departmental” status, both financing institutions shied away from breaking with their “tradition” of lending only to full departments and resisted giving money to a colony on such lenient terms.
Arguments against Considering Martinique a Department
The Crédit Foncier was not the only significant actor to argue the French legislature should not treat Martinique as an afflicted department. The Chamber of Commerce of Bordeaux insisted that though Martinique was “one of the oldest and most loyal overseas possessions,” it was nonetheless a colony. Pointing to Martinique’s status as a colony of extraction characterized by a monoculture of sugar cane, the chamber argued that investing in a colony with a bleak economic outlook was bad business:
It would be a mistake, ahead of the planned assimilation, if we considered Martinique to be a French department, ignoring the profound divergences created by its geographical, physical, and agricultural situation. French Departments form a whole—if not uniform, at least almost homogeneous. Their extent, the variety of their cultures, their many industries, their intimate union, the proximity of communal assistance, the flexibility and multiplicity of mechanisms of public credit—all of these allow for a speedy recovery in a community struck by an event of major force. Moreover, [when such an event strikes in the metropole, which isn’t economically reliant upon a monocrop] all the means of public wealth are not extinguished in one fell swoop. Martinique, like all the West Indian colonies, is isolated at a large distance from the mother country: deprived of industry, Martinique has only agriculture and its trade closely depends on agriculture. . . . All the means of livelihood in the country, all means of existence therefore, for both the poor as well as the rich, for the proletarian and proprietor, depend solely on sugar cane.91
Bordeaux’s economic calculus applied to Martinique’s well-being stood at odds with the general outpouring of “patriotic” support during the fires the previous year; though we must recall that Bordeaux was among the bottom tier of donors, and even during the height of public support for the fire victims, in the background we heard the concerns of agitated investors fearful that the Martiniquais sugar economy would falter. In the case of the 1891 hurricane, commerce and agriculture—in other words, sugar production—were at the forefront of the minds of many. As Bordeaux asserted, it’s not personal; it’s just business. Although racism most likely tinted Bordeaux’s hard-nosed attitude toward Martinique, the Chamber of Commerce cast its hesitation not in racial or cultural terms but in purely economic ones. In other words, though shared culture and the myth of assimilation might compel France to treat Martinique as a department—or at least, a “near department”—Bordeaux’s Chamber of Commerce provided a calculated reminder that economics trumped culture, that giving Martinique aid as if it were a department would be a fiscal blunder.
The solution put forth by the Chamber of Commerce of Bordeaux asserted that the best and most direct avenue toward recovery—that is, the best way to ameliorate the destitution of the island’s denizens—would be to grant a tax exemption on sugar and tafia.92 The Chambers of Commerce of Le Havre and Marseilles, supported by the local General Council of Martinique, echoed this statement, and even Senator Allègre advocated for this solution. In the words of Martinique’s General Council, “What industry has created, it’s up to industry to recreate. . . . It’s through the import tax, the most powerful social agent there is, that we must ask the state to save us.”93 Faithful that “the metropole will not leave her loyal Martinique to die,” the General Council asked for a complete prorogation of all taxes (import, export, rent, property, etc.) for the year of 1892, and a successive reinstatement of taxes in 20 percent intervals for the five years after that (i.e., taxes attenuated by 80 percent of their pre-1891 amounts in 1893, 60 percent in 1894, 40 percent in 1895, 20 percent in 1896, and 0 percent in 1897).
In drafting their response to the hurricane, the Chambers of Commerce referenced the government’s response to the sugar crisis of 1884: keeping cheap German beet sugar out of French markets by introducing foreign tariffs and a taxation scheme that encouraged better mechanization by taxing sugar yields in relation to the number of beets grown. With tax breaks and taxation schedules set in 1884, governmental intervention favored the producers of domestic beet sugar rather than the consumers.94 Following the hurricane, the metropolitan Chambers of Commerce proposed similar protections for Martiniquais cane sugar, asking for a significant reduction in taxation for Antillean sugar that would effectively increase production.
To secure the assistance of the metropole, Martinique’s sugar planters in Saint-Pierre sent a joint letter to the undersecretary on 2 March 1892 outlining the dire situation of the island’s economy, the key importance of sugar cultivation, and the breadth of the devastation following the 1891 hurricane.95 Asserting that the situation in Martinique was direr than that of the Alpes-Maritimes region four years prior—that the Alpes-Maritime agreement Etienne had sought was actually too little rather than too much assistance to the island’s economy—the planters of Martinique, with the backing of Martinique’s Chamber of Commerce, the agricultural syndicate, and the manufacturing syndicate, made the accusation that such “assistance has never been refused in the metropole to industries that have never experienced suffering as terrible as what we’ve just experienced.” Dissatisfied with the reports the colonial investigators had made, the planters and the syndicates claimed that official reports overlooked the indirect effects of the hurricane. For example, they alleged that electrical storms desiccated the sugar crop, which lowered crop yields by at least 25 percent and in turn affected molasses production. Since the sugar crop represented 97 percent of the colony’s economic production, the agricultural and manufacturing syndicates purported that the livelihood and well-being of everyone in the colony—not just the wealthy landowners, but everyone from “city workers, to cultivateurs, to merchants, to proprietors, to manufacturers”—was at stake, because no secondary crops stood in line to replace the devastated sugar economy.96 In their estimation, the moral and “democratic” thing to do would be to support Martinique’s decimated sugar production through tax relief and assistance in the amount of thirteen to fourteen million francs, far more substantial than proposed, and that an agreement analogous to that made in Nice would actually privilege the urban spaces over the rural and do little to jump-start the sugar economy. The sugar planters on the island underscored the preeminence of the island’s sugar monoculture, viewing tax and customs relief rather than direct public assistance as the true way to alleviate suffering on the island.
However, although inspectors Chaudié and Blanchard had thoroughly slashed the original damage estimates by submitting Martinique’s suffering to an impersonal calculus, they nevertheless supported a direct loan to the colony as a means to rebuild the island’s colonial and communal buildings.97 Chaudié explained that the reconstruction must be warranted, however: “the metropole can only make financial sacrifices in favor of a department or a commune insofar as the expenditures for which it loans its aid are put toward buildings that serve a necessary and public utility.” Therefore, he argued that the state should not rebuild the island’s many churches and rectories, which only serve a religious function, and should instead only fund the reconstruction of the vital communal buildings that serve a secular or administrative function. This ran counter to the interests of the Central Aid Commission in Martinique, which not only had the Bishop of Martinique on its governing board but also did not distinguish between private, public, and religious institutions. For instance, in November 1891, the commission allocated three thousand francs to assist the Nuns of the Déliverance from Le Morne-Rouge.98
By May 1892, Undersecretary Étienne had abandoned the plan to secure a loan on terms analogous to those the department of Alpes-Maritimes had received, even under the conditions of the state treating the colony itself as the borrower rather than those afflicted citizens who lived there. In light of the colonial investigation, the Chamber of Deputies decided that the damages did not warrant the degree of assistance Étienne sought, and that the lure of two million francs’ worth of direct subsidies would engender far too much corruption.99 While the sugar industry was pushing for more aid than was originally proposed, the central government was only willing to grant less. Ultimately the colony received only the aforementioned loan of three million francs, and it would have to pay it back in full in installments of three hundred thousand francs beginning in 1898.100 The president of the Republic, Marie François Carnot, signed this loan into law on 20 July 1892.101 All the valuations—by the General Council, the municipal commissions, and the colonial investigators—were irrelevant to the final decision. That is, the investigatory work Chaudié had done, his willingness to slash valuations throughout his endeavor to lower the estimated damages from eighty-nine million to forty-three million francs, had no ultimate impact on the aid Martinique received.
The Méline Tariff of 1892
With the rise of empires and the return of protectionist economies, the close of the nineteenth century saw the sunset of what historian Eric Hobsbawm deemed “the age of capital”—that “enlightened, sure of itself, self-satisfied” age when governments had an unshakable faith in free market economics, state nonintervention, and aggregate statistics.102 Though the sun was slow to set, France had lost its faith in the international free market by the 1890s. Officials’ economic calculus of disaster and recovery ran side by side with debates throughout 1891 and 1892 about the passing of a new customs law that would reconfigure tariffs between France’s colonies and the metropole, effectively bringing the Antilles and France into the same tax zone. The law of 11 January 1892—named the Méline tariff after its champion, Jules Méline—was designed to protect national agricultural interests, stabilize domestic prices, and safeguard the French domestic market from external threats; the Méline tariff ended France’s thirty-two-year flirtation with free trade following the Cobden-Chevalier Treaty of 1860.103 At the same time that the metropolitan agricultural sector was floundering in the international market, the Martiniquais economy was struggling due to widespread agricultural devastation.
That the 1892 customs tariff folded the old colonies into the domestic market demonstrated that they were economically considered part of France, as were all of France’s colonies under this law.104 But as historian Christian Schnakenbourg has pointed out, while the tariff proclaimed the principle of “customs assimilation into the metropole,” it was only an inequitable half measure that created a new form of subordination within the metropolitan economy.105 Since the Antilles were economically considered part of the metropole, they now paid metropolitan duties for imported staples but still had to pay a customs tariff when selling goods to mainland France, albeit at a lower rate than foreign companies.106 The Méline tariff was an important, if highly problematic, step toward the old colonies’ eventual integration into the French nation as departments in 1946, but it imposed discrimination in the domestic French market on Antillean industry and substantially increased the cost of living in the French Caribbean. This situation caused political fallout in the colonies that had come to a head by 1899, when prices for Antilleans reached new heights within the French customs zone. For instance, factory owners by the close of the century were attacking those representatives who had voted to pass the Méline tariff, mostly on ideological grounds.107
The customs law, as well as the governmental response after the 1891 hurricane, reflects the split—or rather liminal—nature of France’s oldest colonies: not really a colony but not yet a department. Schnakenbourg’s assertion rings true, given the dual-edged nature of the metropolitan response. Oscillating between a near department and an extractive colony, Martinique met an underwhelming amount of support, as those financial heavyweights with the strongest economic ties to Martinique—Le Havre, Marseille, and Bordeaux—weighed in and demanded a way to get the most money out of Martinique while putting the least money in. It was on the basis of arguing that Martinique was a full department that Martiniquais politicians petitioned to receive aid analogous to that the Alpes-Maritime department had received following the earthquake in 1887. Moreover, Martinique’s business elite, along with the agricultural and manufacturing syndicates, advocated for a five-year tax relief plan that would jump-start the flagging sugar economy.
Ultimately, however, negotiations with respect to both these plans broke down, and while Martinique was in fact folded into the French customs zone following the Méline tariff, it remained on unequal footing with metropolitan beet growers and received little in the way of substantial aid. Beet sugar continued to outstrip the production of sugar cane, and by 1895, the land cultivated for sugar cane dropped to half of what it was in 1889 (from roughly twenty-one thousand to ten thousand hectares).108 The value of Martinique’s commerce dropped precipitously, cut nearly in half from its high-water mark of seventy million francs in the early 1880s to roughly forty-five million francs a decade later.109 Over this period, Martinique’s trade with foreign nations took the largest losses.110 Consequently, real wages for Martinique’s sugar workers continued to fall over the course of the 1890s, precipitating the island’s first general strike in 1900 which, as we will see in the following chapter, nearly toppled the metropolitan administration as parliamentarians and activists argued over the relationship between the state and its labor force.
As the sugar industry collapsed from natural disasters, market forces, and political neglect, Martinique was denied the tax relief departments afflicted with phylloxera in the metropole had received, and colonial investigators were questioning the efficacy of direct governmental aid to the island’s suffering populace. Sidestepping Martinique’s slave plantation past by focusing on the island’s unstable monoculture as if it emerged of the victims’ own volition, French officials, the Chambers of Commerce, and the financial system all refused to acknowledge their own role in Martinique’s market instability. That is, at the same time that France’s colonial empire was being folded into the metropolitan market, politicians were figuring out a way to keep Martinique from receiving the same sort of national assistance that regularly went toward departments.
Conclusion
Overall, in their response to the 1891 hurricane French officials displayed their economic motives, as they depicted humanitarian aid as nothing more than, in the words of Émile Chaudié, “evaluative work that is not personal, but based on statistical givens.”111 Though the real economic aid proposed by the chamber had no relationship to this evaluative work, the work itself nevertheless reflects an ideological approach to disaster relief. As historian Joshua Cole has pointed out, social science, censuses, and statistical measuring rose in the nineteenth century, and consequently officials retreated to the comfort of faceless numbers to describe French society, in many cases quantifying human experience in the name of scientific endeavor and justifying policy decisions and cultural prejudices with tables, charts, and aggregate statistics.112 Faced with two back-to-back disasters, the colonial investigators, as well as the Chambers of Commerce of Le Havre, Bordeaux, and Marseille, crunched the numbers to find and thereby avoid the point of diminishing returns, all the while either ignoring or glossing over the societal inequities at play. For fear of providing too much and thereby engendering waste and abuse, “to the great detriment of the interests of the treasury,” officials sought a way to restore the economy, restart the sugar factories, and recuperate their losses, all while injecting the least amount of capital. A far cry from the outpouring of support the previous year, this calculus—which even reevaluated the 1890 fire-relief campaign—dashed Martinique’s hopes to receive money on par with those afflicted departments that sought governmental aid. The cold calculus performed by colonial investigators reflected—implicitly, if not overtly—racist and classist stereotypes of indigent and lazy black laborers.
Owing to the Antilleans’ status as citizens and their legal, albeit uneven, incorporation into the metropole, as well as the prohibition of officially tracking or addressing the race of French citizens since 1848, official documents on the hurricane never spoke outright of race. But systemic racism predicated on economic inequity and rooted in the legacy of planation slavery faced Antilleans, as officials like Chaudié couched their discriminatory rhetoric in the language of good finance. As investigators slashed the damage estimates and emphasized Martinique’s economic instability, they in turn sidestepped race altogether—including the legacy of slavery, the inequitable market forces at play, the history of inequality between the wealthy white elite and the black labor force, and the perennial underfunding of public infrastructure. The investigators even glorified a mythic island peasantry to justify keeping money out of the hands of the afflicted urban spaces, and they performed a calculus meant to inject the “appropriate” amount of capital for maximum economic effect, which they assured a disaster-fatigued administration would be to the benefit of all. In subsuming humanitarianism into economics, Chaudié and his colleagues relied on a longstanding republican tradition dating to the French Revolution, when, with their hands tied by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, advocates for slavery couched their arguments as good economic sense rather than prejudice.113
But Martinique’s elected representatives and their assimilationist allies pushed back. Regrettably, assimilationists’ plans for substantial governmental assistance to Martinique never materialized. And yet their insistence that Martinique receive the sort of aid that had previously gone toward metropolitan departments, which they grounded on cultural imperatives as well as economic justifications, and the brief moment for which Undersecretary Étienne entertained and even advocated for the Alpes-Maritime plan, highlighted the way in which Martinique was always almost a department—or at the very least, “nearly an Algeria”—and that its colonial citizenry was constituted by, in the words of Frantz Fanon, quasi-metropolitans. Unfortunately it also meant that Antilleans, though heralded as compatriots who embodied the myth of assimilation, were nonetheless treated as second-class citizens.