As the remnants of France’s old empire dating back to the seventeenth century, the colonial citizens of Martinique and Guadeloupe had long participated in the French nation. During the eighteenth century, the military police in the Caribbean had recruited free black persons, charging them with defending the islands against numerous aggressive campaigns by the English. An ordinance in 1702, for example, declared that “all black inhabitants with a renowned loyalty” would be recruited to “serve for the defense of this island of Martinique.” Over the rest of the century, this trend continued and soldiers of color played a vital role in the Atlantic Revolutions, participating in the American War of Independence as well as in the French Revolutionary Wars.1 For example, Louis Delgrès, a mulatto military officer from Martinique who had been exiled by royalists, fought for the Republic against the British during the Revolutionary Wars, and later struggled against Napoleon for Guadeloupean emancipation, seeing the restoration of slavery as a betrayal of the Republic and its ideals. Black Antilleans fought for emancipation again in 1848, and even raised arms to support the Republic in southern Martinique in 1870. Eventually France granted Antilleans citizenship rights with the constitution of the Third Republic, ushering in a new era of political participation. As France enlarged its empire to its greatest extent and made subjects of countless peoples in Africa and Indochina, the oldest of France’s colonial populations put forth a vision of a “tropical Frenchness” predicated on racial intermixing and environmental adaptability, but nevertheless rooted in French political and cultural traditions.
Over the course of the Third Republic, colonial bureaucrats actively reframed the French Antilles as a settler colony where French civilization had taken root, rather than an exploitive colony where Africans and their descendants had been mistreated for economic profit, thus yielding credence to the belief that French civilization and universal rights were one and the same. Yet officials met a troubling paradox, because the myth of settlement required a legacy of white settlers that did not exist. The “settler population” of the French Caribbean—if we can call it that—were in fact Africans who had been forcibly brought there as slaves and then acculturated over generations to the very French values that ultimately toppled slavery. Thus the population of Martinique and Guadeloupe that participated in the process of national integration as citizens of France, giving a unified national culture to the political entity known as France, was not white. This process dates to the French Revolution itself, when black Jacobins from Saint-Domingue participated in the National Assembly in the wake of the French Revolution and forced the new government to enact the ideals the revolution had purported to support: liberty, equality, and fraternity. Antilleans’ tropical Frenchness challenged a competing vision of France rooted in a blood-and-soil narrative that traced French heritage back to the Gauls, helping to redefine, oftentimes by directly contesting, the national values and mores of a Third Republic forever stained by its brutal suppression of the democratic values of the Paris Commune.
Environmental disasters in the French Caribbean brought to the fore the existing racial and social tensions that tested the Republic’s ideological convictions of assimilation and citizenship. As the republican project of empire came in contact with the environment of the Caribbean, the rhythms of Antillean life became a perceived threat to French civilization. The impact of hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, and volcanic eruptions, as well as the population’s collective action and civil unrest, on the colonial economy and sugar extraction foregrounded societal issues that challenged the French state to safeguard its colonial citizenry. By intervening in the islands’ economy, the French state put the French Caribbean’s relationship to the metropole on display for all to see, particularly as representatives from the islands began demanding the economic and civil rights that belonged to citizens of French departments.
On the one hand, the tropical environment of the Caribbean separated it from the French nation, underscoring the creole distinctness of the islands and marking them as a dangerous, colonial locale. Yet, while the environmental climate distinguished the Caribbean as a world apart, the political climate coincided with that of the metropole, and the government’s efforts at humanitarian aid reflected the Republic’s faith in shared citizenship and a civic conceptualization of the French state that saw the French race in terms not of black and white but of cultural mores, political participation, and a unifying faith in liberty, equality, and brotherhood. The Republic’s relationship to Martinique and Guadeloupe, therefore, demonstrates most clearly what Gary Wilder has described as the “imperial nation-state,” for France articulated imperialism in the framework of a parliamentary republic struggling to accommodate a citizenry’s demands for social equality and governmental protection through disaster relief within the metropole and within the colony. In other words, the same political formation—a semi-representative French bureaucracy—expressed both the parliamentary republic and the imperial administration with regard to the French Caribbean’s representation in the French legislature. In response to this political co-identification and in light of what Josh Cole has described as the development of the “statistical state,” the French government exhibited a form of bureaucratic humanitarianism that provided assistance to the suffering population in the form of economic engineering—an attempt to reconcile liberal, free-market economics and humanitarian intervention.
Therefore, at the same time that a language of citizenship that underscored compatriotism with the colonial citizens of Guadeloupe and Martinique marked French response to disasters, environmental disasters threatened the republican fantasy that placed mulattos at the heart of the civilizing mission and reinforced republicans’ fear of the black laboring class, who, as socialists as well as a colonial population, were cast as agitators threatening the very fabric of the French nation. The response to the devastation of the island’s sugar economy by the hurricane of 1891, which foregrounded the framing of human suffering as a statistical and economic problem ceded to the 1900 debate over the legitimacy of colonial citizens’ right to strike, and then to the privileging of the white minority over the nonwhite majority in receiving governmental assistance and sympathy in the press after Mount Pelée erupted. Yet these disasters also forced the French state to publicly deal with issues of social welfare and social justice at a time when liberal economic theory stood against governmental intervention, and in turn the disasters helped define the relationship of the French state to its citizenry, not just in the colonies but more broadly in France as well. The general strike of 1900, which cast light on labor unrest within the metropole as well as the mounting dissatisfaction with the colonial economy in the Caribbean, in particular reflects this dynamic.
Through environmental disasters and civil unrest in the late nineteenth-century French Caribbean, this book has addressed two central questions: How did modern France reconcile its liberal convictions with its imperial ambitions? And how did a colonial citizenry transform the Republic and its concomitant definition of citizenship? Looking at the legacy of old imperialism at the close of the nineteenth century reveals that the colonial periphery helped guide France’s national integration. The environment played a key role in the race-making identity formation and class-based politics that defined this nation, and the Caribbean ecology—both as it relates to sugar production and its rhythm of catastrophe—affected countless lives and shaped both colonial and national politics. Citizenship rights came into the public eye in the face of cataclysmic events, as the French nation wrestled with issues of national as well as colonial identity, race, class, and the very nature of French civilization.
*
When Europe plunged into war in 1914, tropical Frenchness came home to roost as the French government called on Antilleans to pay a “blood debt” to France as their motherland. While it may have seemed that the islands had little blood left to let due to the perpetual violence inflicted on them by nature’s wrath, they nevertheless heeded the call. In general, Antilleans supported the enactment of conscription in the French Caribbean as essential to their integration into the French nation, just as small towns and villages within metropolitan France had integrated through military service by 1900.2 Employing a colonial census taken in 1913 in preparation to draft young Antillean men into the looming war, the governor of Martinique, Georges Poulet, called on the colonial population to defend the mère-patrie. Confident of their courage, dedication, patriotic sentiment, and spirit of sacrifice, Poulet had little doubt that the old colonies would, in light of the “links that tie us all to the mère-patrie,” rise to the call.3
And rise to the call they did. Upwards of twenty-five thousand young Antilleans of color boarded ships bound for Europe. Over half would be sent to the front lines, and more than three thousand would breathe their final breath in service to France on the battlefield. These numbers were unprecedented, and the number of French Antilleans sent to war was roughly equivalent to those lost during the eruption of Mount Pelée in 1902. Scholarship has thoroughly documented the importance of the First World War for the Antilles’ assimilation into the metropole, typically focusing on the blood debt and Antilleans’ sacrifice, which France would pay with interest upon the conclusion of the war.4 The First World War not only cemented the French identity of Antilleans, which has been the underlying theme of this book, but also flipped the motherland-child relationship to some extent. Antillean soldiers would witness firsthand the brutality of France at war, exchanging the barbarity of the Caribbean climate for the barbarism of the European battlefield, which challenged the very idea of French civilization. On their return they would come to defend French civilization from itself as they solidified their demands to become part of the French nation.
En route to Turkey in May 1915, a young Martiniquais soldier traveling in a regiment made up of West Indians, Senegalese, Algerians, and Alsatians declared his “happiness to contribute to the defense of civilization” and his willingness to show himself to be “a worthy son of Martinique and his race.”5 Such a sentiment was common among the Martiniquais poilus—the French term for young soldiers, much like doughboys in the United States—who had been cast as irrefutably republican and treated as the bastion of French civilization against hostile external forces for the past four decades. As one enlisted man from French Guiana observed when discussing the colonial enthusiasm and patriotism for the Great War, “The remoteness of the Mère-Patrie does not diminish the sentiments of the children of France, no matter their origin or the latitude at which they see the day. There are not two ways to love France, as there are not two ways to be a Frenchman: one either is or is not.”6 While French Antilleans knew themselves to be French beyond a shadow of a doubt, they nevertheless felt the need to repeatedly prove their Frenchness to their comrades, who were by and large ignorant of just how French the French West Indies were.
Many Antillean politicians who had been struggling to integrate the islands into France proper saw the outbreak of war as an opportunity to prove once and for all the islands’ indefatigable patriotism and thereby secure eventual departmentalization. Antillean soldiers saw themselves as embodying the wishes of the great Victor Schoelcher, the champion of emancipation and civic inclusion for black Antilleans, singing as they marched to battle, “Schoelcher, may your spirit quake, your dearest wish accomplished, whether your skin is light or dark, for all there is only one flag.”7 Since the end of slavery in 1848, and particularly since the codification of the Third Republic’s constitution in 1875, the French Caribbean’s elected representatives in the Chamber of Deputies and in the Senate had been pushing for integration into the French military service as part of their mission to make real the benefits of citizenship for the French Caribbean’s former slaves. With the integration of the military on the eve of war in 1913, enthusiasm was high from Guadeloupe to Martinique to French Guiana, as individuals volunteered for service and were attached to infantry regiments in Rochefort, Marseille, and Perpignan.8
The white planter population, never supporters of republicanism or national integration, did not share the enthusiasm of Antilleans of color for the involvement of Antillean soldiers in the war effort. Viewing it as a republican conspiracy to harm the Antillean economy that the békés had controlled for centuries, they rejected republicans’ oft-championed language of civic inclusion in favor of an economic calculus focused on the bottom line. Not only would they be losing their labor force, but also Antilleans’ integration into French society threatened planters politically. The treatment of Antilleans as French citizens, obliged to join, belied the békés’ belief that the Caribbean colonies had the sole purpose of increasing France’s power and wealth.9 As a token of their commitment to this belief, they had lobbied the French government to create a general colonial government for the Antilles and Guiana as had been done for Indochina and West Africa. This move would have consolidated their power and more firmly defined as colonial the relationship of the Antilles to the metropole.
The white planters were no more successful in blocking the participation of Antilleans of color in the military than they had been in creating a general colonial government. Over their objections the French state incorporated French Antilleans into the metropolitan French military, unlike those colonial troops assigned to colonial battalions. The planters had little opportunity to find willing ears in the French legislature. Although French officials defined political classes as racial categories vis-à-vis natural disasters and civil unrest, they understood the békés as the landed aristocracy of the Old Regime, the utter antithesis to the republican project. Meanwhile, the islands’ mixed-race population, by virtue of their politics and their economic status as a local middle class, came to represent the republican project in the New World, while the black laboring population draped itself in the values of socialists’ mounting challenge to the Republic’s dilettantish parliamentarianism. Social divisions over economic rights and social welfare that resonated with similar class tensions within the metropole set the stage for the political impotence of the planters in this manner.
Antilleans’ longtime role in the metropolitan military likewise doomed planters’ objections. Antilleans of color had served in the colonial administration for decades and were at times renowned. In fact, a Caribbean mulatto named Thomas-Alexandre Dumas rose to become the general-in-chief of the army of the Alps during the Revolutionary Wars. Born of a white French noble and an enslaved African, Dumas was known for his military acumen during campaigns in Italy and later Egypt, and consequently the Austrians nicknamed him the “black devil” and Napoleon referred to him as a Roman hero who had come to protect France and its revolution.10 Dumas’s success in the French military, as well as his aristocratic upbringing, brought his family notoriety and wealth, which in turn helped his son Alexandre, author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, become one of France’s most renowned authors and playwrights.
Such examples of nonwhite citizens using the military to climb France’s social ladder were sobering to a white planter class who saw the mounting strike activity, civil unrest, and political fallout from natural disasters at the end of the nineteenth century as reflecting hatred of white people as well as an economic problem. As one prominent planter, Roland Pichevin, wrote in a report to the French legislature in 1906, all the islands’ troubles began with the emancipation of the slaves, which “caused troubles to rise: assassination and fire were the savage response to this beautiful gesture from the metropole.”11 The natural disasters and civil unrest of 1870–1902 had hardened antagonism of the white elite toward black citizenship, when sugar production was paramount and civic inclusion was pushed to the sidelines. Participation in the Great War further threatened white control over black laborers, so vital to békés’ economic dominance of the islands, while furthering the incorporation of people of color as French citizens. Planters’ anxiety over losing control of their workforce grew now that financial valuations showed the Caribbean—and indeed all of France’s colonies—to be vital for the war effort. As Guadeloupe’s commissary described at the National Colonial Exposition in 1922, the islands’ rum kept the soldiers warm and permitted “our poilus to stay in the trenches during the winter.”12 Meanwhile, the scarcity in Europe of sugar, coffee, and cacao—the staple cash crops of the islands for centuries—made the French Caribbean’s produce that much more important and financially viable, exacerbating planters’ unease.
The white planters’ fear that the war would further the assimilation of the West Indies came to pass, however. Unlike West Africans and Arabs in the French service, who were infantilized as “little brothers” who had to be kept in line by paternal white captains, the military treated French Antilleans as comrades and equals. Soldiers from the Caribbean were not subjects but citizens of the empire. White officers, who had been told so many times by parliamentarians and fund-raisers of the dedication of the French Caribbean to French ideals, did not feel the need to use the firm grip it held on North and West African soldiers whose loyalty might be unstable.13 Whereas Great Britain’s army segregated its West Indian battalions from the general army, France placed the Martiniquais and Guadeloupians into mixed regiments where they served alongside white troops from the metropole, and they often held important posts. For instance, Commander Camille Mortenol, the son of a slave from Guadeloupe and the first black graduate of the École Polytechnique, received the Legion of Honor for his anti-air defense of Paris and long-time service at Brest.
Evidence of tension between white and black soldiers along the front nonetheless exists. One Martiniquais man, simply identified in his letter as “X,” who had given up his government job as an accountant and volunteered for service, lamented the poor treatment of people of color by white Europeans on the Western Front. As a sergeant major in the artillery, he complained in a letter home in December 1915 that his comrades in the trenches from Brittany and Picardy watched the Martiniquais out of the corners of their eye, identifying “base prejudices in the Aurelle and Marseille barracks,” and saying that soldiers “continue to offend, humiliate, and mistreat our black compatriots.” However, in his eyes, not everyone in France believed that Antilleans were different or aberrant and untrustworthy. Many other soldiers he had met “unanimously said that we [Antilleans] show more patriotic spirit than those living in many French towns.” He ended with a provoking question: “On the battlefield, as in the weapons depots, we [French Caribbeans] are none the less ready to sacrifice ourselves for our Patrie, and isn’t that one of the best qualities of a good Frenchman?”14
Another contemporary soldier recruited from Martinique in July 1915 noted before his departure to France that what “distinguishes our sergeants [of color] from some of their white peers is that they neither despise nor disdain the colored race . . . [, but] interact with them as men and not as animals.”15 But he goes on to state that experienced recruits had warned him that “all this would change in France, where our compatriots find neither urbanity nor goodwill.”16 He hoped this prediction, that the congeniality among the white command and black soldiers would break down along the front lines, would not actually happen “for the benefit of us all.”17
While some of the racial goodwill did dissolve in crossing the Atlantic, the military treated French Antilleans differently than they did the rest of the colonial troops, and this attitude influenced the civilian population. In many ways, French Antillean soldiers had to serve as a sort of cultural ambassadors who proved the islands’ Frenchness to France. One creole Martiniquais soldier who had fought in Europe, Pierre Dalmas, explained in October 1915 that metropolitan France received him and his fellow countrymen more amicably than those from the newer colonies such as Senegal, in spite of the civilian population’s ignorance of the West Indies. His account of his time in France, however, included French citizens often misplacing him on the racial hierarchy: “creoles suffer from the fact that they were relatively unknown in France,” he wrote, angry at being confused for a West African, and experiencing prejudice as a member of the newer colony. But he also complained, “People imagined that the mere fact of being from Martinique, Guadeloupe, or Guyana necessarily implied the complete absence of culture. . . . Everywhere we go, we are questioned by people somewhat amazed to hear us express ourselves in French and curious to know how we came to possess our modest French culture.” At times he had to explain to his fellow countrymen that his homeland of Martinique had belonged to France for three centuries, that the educational system there mirrored that of the metropole, and therefore that there “is nothing extraordinary about [creoles] resembling [the French] with regard to civilization.” Yet he felt that as an ambassador for the French West Indies among the military population, he could explain to civilians that he was not from a “barbarous” population, and “old prejudices disappeared.”18
The experience of war, on the other hand, was barbarous. Whereas natural disasters in the Caribbean amounted to Damocles’ sword suspended over the heads of the Antilleans, fighting for France meant a gun pointed at their backs. As another Martiniquais soldier, Corporal Banaré, stated after a raid on his trench in September 1916, his life was now one of “horrible carnage” and he expressed fear and frustration at being perpetually surrounded by mortal dangers. Of the nine fellow Martiniquais who had recently been assigned to his regiment, two days after deployment, only three remained alive.19 Facing the horrors of war and the true meaning of the blood debt, many Antilleans deserted, as did others in the French military. Antilleans’ belief that French civilization was glorious, however, may have been more fragile than that of their compatriots born and raised in metropolitan France.
The barbarity of French war and the pride of valiant service combined to enable Antilleans like Pierre Dalmas to see themselves as the protectors rather than the recipients of French civilization. The ideology of the “civilizing mission” that had privileged Europeans over colonial populations by putting the latter in the tutelage of the former broke down. Citing the valor and bravery the colonial troops with whom he had served displayed, Dalmas rejected outright the idea of superior and inferior races and tacitly jettisoned the civilizing mission as whole, as did many of his contemporaries who had faced the barbarity of European warfare and claimed a definition of resilience and honor forged in the tropics rather than Europe, yet considering it French in character.
The First World War and its horrors provided a foundational experience for the integration of the Antilles into the French nation. As the Guadeloupean newspaper La Démocratie colonial expressed at the end of the war, Antilleans’ “secret thought, while we asked to be allowed the honor of serving France during this time of war, was to be in return for our modest sacrifices fully assimilated as French.”20 The process that had begun under the barbarity of the Caribbean climate had finished under the barbarism of war. Reflecting on the old colonies’ participation in the war, General Émile Ruillier, a white creole from Guadeloupe, wrote, “Mixed with soldiers from France, the Antilleans of all colors showed themselves dignified by their discipline, their dedication, and their courage, meriting once again the title of Frenchmen.”21 The occasion, his visit to Pointe-à-Pitre for the Antilles’ tercentennial of Guadeloupe coming under French control in 1635, gave weight to these words.22 As in metropolitan France, war monuments inscribed with names appeared in communes throughout the French Caribbean as early as the 1920s to commemorate those “heroic” children “who died for France” and for the “fatherland.”
In the years following the Great War, the metropolitan government concurred that Antilleans had proven themselves French. The French Republic held up Antilleans’ participation in the war as emblematic of the islands’ special relationship with France, and recognized the brave defenders of French civilization who “died for France during the war 1914–1918” by inscribing their names in a book marking colonial heroism, a Livre d’or that would be stored in the Pantheon alongside the greats of French history.23 The book underscored the heavy price paid by Caribbean combatants throughout the war for Antilleans’ participation in French nationalism. Each commune in the Caribbean received a copy of the Livre d’or with condolences and a list of inhabitants from that commune who had perished in the war to safeguard the French Republic. Those who received the distinction “mort pour la France” were eligible to be buried in France’s state military cemeteries. Enshrined in the Pantheon and entombed on French soil, Antillean soldiers were integrated into the French nation.
As historian Veronique Hélénon has shown, Caribbean participation during the First World War played a vital role in the assimilation of the old colonies into the metropole, and Antilleans continued to see enlistment in the national French army as an act of ultimate patriotism long after the final shots were fired in 1918. In what historian Jacques Dumont calls “a quest for integration,” Antilleans amplified their demands for integration after the war, particularly as a way to further distinguish Antillean citizens from colonial subjects. This sentiment became that much stronger as Antillean, as well as other colonial, intellectuals flocked to Paris throughout the 1920s and 1930s. As one such intellectual, Jules Monnerot—founder of Martinique’s communist party—stated in 1935, Antilleans “are the descendants of ancient settlers, serfs, slaves, all imported, mostly mixed of two races intimately connected—racial prejudices notwithstanding—and who feel and live as Frenchmen.”24 The war had helped cement this view. In 1919, for example, former soldiers formed a veterans’ association in Martinique that repeatedly lobbied the governor and the metropolitan government for colonial equality, using the theme of the blood debt to substantiate their demands; France now owed them, rather than the other way around.25 The dedication of the Antillean soldiers who gave their hearts and souls in the conflict proved, beyond doubt, the French Caribbean’s devotion to France. In 1921 the Colonial Institute in Paris paid its respects to the unknown colonial soldiers who died during the Great War, proposing, “Perhaps overseas France has nurtured this obscure soldier, dead to save the Homeland and the world from barbarism.”26 In reality, however, France’s colonial aspirations and national pride had created the barbarism from which the colonies had spared it, just as it had in the rest of Europe. French civilization owed Antilleans a debt of gratitude dating back nearly three centuries, as Antilleans not only had safeguarded French civilization from physical destruction in the tropics but also protected the Republic since 1871 from the vestiges of the ancien régime as embodied by the béké planter class.
The service of Antilleans in World War I made the incorporation of Martinique and Guadeloupe as departments of France in 1946 possible, although the language of citizenship that went with France’s civilizing mission in all its colonies had set the stage for the eventual integration of the French Antilles into metropolitan France. Racism did not dissipate overnight, however, and the old Caribbean colonies remained stuck between integration and segregation. To this day the Overseas Ministry administers the départements d’outre-mer of Martinique and Guadeloupe, simultaneously making them integrated parts of the metropole and cordoning them off as different and distinct—a tropical France linked to the mère-patrie by a postcolonial relationship marked by income inequity and economic dependence. The natural and political disasters this book has described, occurring when the Caribbean sugar economy was in its twilight years, cemented the view that despite the cultural affiliation of metropolitan France with the Antilles, the islands were a distinctly different and dangerous locale. The Great War had done little to overturn this association, and one hundred years later Antilleans continue to be French and not French.
Through the cycle of Caribbean catastrophe at the close of the nineteenth century, this book has described a shift from extracting capital from the island in the form of sugar to the injecting of capital in the form of disaster relief. The age of new imperialism left investors and many zealots of free-market economics in the governmental bureaucracy dissatisfied with the old colonies. They had hoped that the strategic injection of capital would reinvigorate the sugar economy. But as that economy waned and began to die in the 1890s when the cost of rebuilding seemed to wax, many questioned why France held onto a colony as costly as Martinique or as unruly as Guadeloupe. Such detractors and their critics came to the same answer: cultural affiliation and tradition. Therefore, as the French state injected capital into the islands, they simultaneously began to extract a new resource: the dedication of a citizenry devoted to the ideals of the Republic, the very citizens who would bolster the military’s ranks during the First World War. At a time when bureaucrats began to believe that the Antilles had lost their utility to the French nation and become a drain on national resources, the First World War not only rekindled sugar production on the islands, largely transforming it into the production of rum for French poilus during the war and the Prohibition-era United States afterward, it also reinvigorated the close association between France and its oldest colonies in the Caribbean.27
The cycle of environmental catastrophe had at last transformed the republican ideology of the civilizing mission by redefining French citizenship rights to include an entitlement to governmental assistance. The First World War catalyzed this trajectory vis-à-vis a blood debt that cut both ways; just as Antilleans owed the mère-patrie their allegiance in time of war, so too did the state owe Antilleans for their sacrifice. The wartime experience, like the countless disasters before it, helped put forth an alternative image of the French citizen with a tropical rather than Salic or Gallic heritage. Servicemen solidified this compatriotism in the trenches of Europe, and the so-called civilizing mission had reached its endpoint by the middle of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the specter of geographic, racial, and climatic difference continues to haunt French Antilleans who still fight, as they have since 1789, for social, civic, and economic parity in a Republic that purports to champion liberty, equality, and fraternity.