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The One-Drop Rule in Reverse? Interracial Marriages in Napoleonic and Restoration France

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2010

Jennifer Heuer
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In the early nineteenth century, an obscure rural policeman petitioned the French government with an unusual story. Charles Fanaye had served with Napoleon's armies in Egypt. Chased by Mameluks, he was rescued in the nick of time by a black Ethiopian woman and hidden in her home. Threatened in turn by the Mameluks, Marie-Hélène (as the woman came to be called) threw in her lot with the French army and followed Fanaye to France. The couple then sought to wed. They easily overcame religious barriers when Marie-Héléne was baptized in the Cathedral of Avignon. But another obstacle was harder to overcome: an 1803 ministerial decree banned marriage between blacks and whites. Though Fanaye and Marie-Héléne begged for an exception, the decree would plague them for the next sixteen years of their romance.

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Law and History Review , Volume 27 , Issue 3 , Fall 2009 , pp. 515 - 548
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Copyright © the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois 2009

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References

1. Archives nationales (henceforward A.N.) BB15–211, R4, no 3266. This description of their encounter dates from early 1819. See also A.N. BB15–200, for the refusal of their marriage in 1816. Napoleonic census records place them in the department of Eure et Loire in 1807 and note that she had also nursed him back to health after a grave illness; see A.N. F7–8705.

2. A.N. BB15–183.

3. Marcel Dorigny mentions the law in Révoltes et révolutions en Europe et aux Amériques (1773–1802) (Paris: Belin, 2005), 170Google Scholar . He presents it as a return to the legislation of 1778, which is partially true. Dwain Pruitt has also discovered a case from 1817 in Nantes, when local officials sought to determine if a man who called himself an Indian was allowed to marry. See Pruitt, , “Nantes Noir: Living Race in the City of Slavers” (Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 2005), 131, note 63Google Scholar.

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8. A.N. BB15–206 to BB15–211 are most relevant; alphabetical records are in BB15–18 through BB15–178.

9. A.N. series BB16.

10. Such records include those for Placide, a former servant living in Bordeaux in 1806, in A.N. BB16–142, R7 no. 1174, and Jean-Baptiste Lafortune, also a servant, in Potiers in 1820, in A.N. BB15–211, R4, no. 7253.

11. A.N. BB15–211, R4, no. 6161.

12. The “one-drop” policy is most associated with the United States in the Jim Crow era, especially the series of laws beginning with Tennessee's one-drop statute in 1910. By the early nineteenth century, however, various southern states applied if not “one-drop” laws, then at least “one quarter” or “one eighth” rules about “African blood” to determine one's legal ancestry. See Peter W. Bardaglio, “Shameful Matches”: The Regulation of Interracial Sex and Marriage in the South Before 1900,” in Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History, ed. Hodes, Martha (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 112–38Google Scholar.

13. In June 1814, the procureur general at the Royal court of Douai in the Nord referred to a recent work on the duties of civil officers that included the circular. A.N. BB15–206, R2, no. 1070. I have not yet been able to track down the work in question, but it may have been Léopold, M., Dictionnaire général de police civile et judicaire de l'empire franéais (Paris: Eymery, 1813)Google Scholar . The ban also appears in later editions of the Dictionnaire from 1816 and 1822. The text contained a telling mistake; all three versions claimed the ban forbade marriage between “white men and black women and between black women and white men.” Clearly, Leopold did not register that the decree could affect relationships between black men and white women, or consider the text important enough to correct; he also did not register the end of the ban in 1818.

14. Aubert, Guillaume, “The Blood of France': Race and Purity of Blood in the French Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly 61 (2004): 439–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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17. Spear, Jennifer, “Colonial Intimacies: Legislating Sex in French Louisiana,” William and Mary Quarterly 60 (2003): 75–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar . There is a lively debate about how to interpret inter-racial attitudes and comparative policies towards marriage with Native Americans and with blacks.

18. Peabody, Sue, There are no slaves in France: the political culture of race and slavery in the Old Regime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)Google Scholar ; and Boulle, Pierre H., “Racial Purity or Legal Clarity? The Status of Black Residents in Eighteenth-Century France,” The Journal of The Historical Society 6 (2006): 19–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19. Several interracial couples appear in the Napoleonic survey of 1807, who had clearly married during the Revolution. See A.N. F7–8705 and F7–8444.

20. The 1777 decree is available at http://www.napoleonica.org/gerando/GER00285.html (accessed August 1, 2007); the 1802 decree at http://www. assemblee-nationale.fr/histoire/ esclavage/arrete_2juil1802.pdf (accessed August 1, 2007). The 1802 decree is also reprinted in Benot et Dorigny, 1802, 564.

21. Arrest du Conseil d'état du Roi concernant les mariages des noirs, mulétres, ou autres gens de couleur, du 5 avril 1778 (Lille: NJB Peterinck-Cramé;, 1778).Google Scholar

22. A.N. BB15–206, R2, no. 3057.

23. A.N. BB15–211, R4, no. 3266.

24. Boulle, , “Racial Purity,” 25Google Scholar . Sartine's subordinate, the procureur du roi, Poncet de la Grave, also repeatedly denounced interracial sex, and helped promote the ban. Peabody, No Slaves, especially 110, 124, and 182–131.

25. A.N. BB15–210, R4, no. 3002.

26. Staum, Martin, “Paris ethnology and the perfectibility of ‘races,’” Canadian Journal of History 35 (2000): 453–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; and Staum, Martin, Labeling People: French Scholars on Society, Race, and Empire, 1815–1848 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's press, 2003)Google Scholar.

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30. Indeed, some nineteenth-century theorists, like Michel-Hyachinthe Deschampes, argued explicitly for the regeneration of the human species by successive whitening through cross-breeding. See Blanckaert, “Of Monstrous Métis?”

31. A far from comprehensive list includes Garrigus, John, “Redrawing the Colour Line: Gender and the Social Construction of Race in Pre-Revolutionary Haiti,” The Journal of Caribbean History 30 (1996): 29–38Google Scholar ; Garrigus, John, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Biondi, Carminella, “Le probléme des gens de couleur aux colonies et en France dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siécle,” Cromohs 8 (2003)Google Scholar , <http://www.cromohs.unifi.it/8_2003/biondi.html> ; Rogers, Dominique, “Les libres de couleur dans les capitales de Saint-Domingue: Fortune, mentalités, et intégration á la fin de l'ancien régime (1776–1789)” (Ph.D. dissertation, Universite de Bordeaux-III, 1999)Google Scholar ; and King, Stewart, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

32. Geggus, David, “Racial Equality, Slavery and Colonial Succession During the Constituent Assembly,” American Historical Review 94 (1989): 1290–308CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Forster, Robert, “The French Revolution, people of color, and slavery,” in The Global Ramifications of the French Revolution, ed. Klaits, Joseph and Haltzel, Michael H. (New York: Woodrow Wilson Center and Cambridge University Press, 1994), 89–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; and Renard, Didier, “Vivre blanchement: les hommes de couleur et la révolution,” in Les droits de l'homme et la conquéte des libertés: Des lumiéres aux révolutions de 1848, ed. Vovelle, Michel (Grenoble-Vizille: Bicentenaire de la révolution française en Dauphiné, 1986), 257–63Google Scholar.

33. A.N. F7–8705, Eure et Loire.

34. See for example, Réponse au préfet de la Meurthe, Thermidor an 12 (juillet 1804) or the 1808 Réponse au préfet des Alpes maritimes, both in A.N. BB15–208.

35. Boulle, , Race et Esclavage, 127.Google Scholar

36. Sibalis, , “Les Noirs en France,” 102.Google Scholar

37. See Cottias, , “Séduction”; Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999)Google Scholar ; and Garraway, Doris, The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the early French Caribbean (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38. See John Garrigus, “Redrawing the Colour Line.”

39. Stoler, Ann Laura, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)Google Scholar , especially chapter four. See also Wildenthal, Lora, “Race, Gender and Citizenship in the German Colonial Empire,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Cooper, Frederick and Stoler, Ann Laura (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 263–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40. For some examples, see White, Children of the French Empire. For the British empire, see McCulloch, Jock, lack Peril, White Virtue: Sexual Crime in Southern Rhodesia, 1902–1935 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000)Google Scholar ; and Kennedy, Dane, Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1939 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

41. Private correspondence, September 16, 2005. See also Schloss, Rebecca Hartkopf, “The February 1831 Slave uprising in Martinique and the Policing of White Identity,” French Historical Studies 30 (2007): 203–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42. I thank Sue Peabody for reminding me of this dynamic. Free colored men played an increasing role in pre-revolutionary militia companies; see King, Blue Coat. On the revolutionary “transformation of slaves into citizen-soldiers,” see Dubois, Laurent, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)Google Scholar , particularly chapter 8, “War and Emancipation.” See also Sheller, Mimi, “Sword-bearing citizens: Militarism and Manhood in Nineteenth-century Haiti,” Plantation Society in the Americas 4 (1997): 233–78Google Scholar.

43. In many cases, records did not include the occupation of petitioners. The largest category of those whose occupation was given in their files is that of servant (domestique); soldiers or former soldiers formed the next largest group. A few servants were also former soldiers, or were employed by military officers.

44. This was most explicit in the public weddings of young women to veterans, accompanied by state-sponsored dowries. These began in 1802, but Napoleon particularly promoted them in 1810 and 1811.

45. “Rapport de la préfecture de police du 19 nivose an XI (sur 18 nivose an XI, 8 janvier 1803),” in Aulard, François Alphonse, Paris sous le Consulat: Recueil de documents pour l'histoire de l'esprit public á Paris (Paris: Maison Quantin, 1903–1909), 3: 553–54Google Scholar . The date of January 3, 1803 for Régnier's original declaration comes from Léopold, Diction-naire général de police civile, 366; most discussions of the decree do not actually date it precisely.

46. For more on Régnier, see Yvert, Benoit, Dictionnaire des ministres de 1789 á 1989 (Paris: Perrin, 1990)Google Scholar ; and Laurent, Elisabeth, Claude Ambroise Régnier, duc de Massena, Ministre de Napoleon (Paris: E. Laurent, 1980)Google Scholar.

47. Gaudamet, Eugène, L'intérpretation du Code Civil en France depuis 1804 (Paris: Editions Mémoire du Droit, 2002).Google Scholar

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49. For an example of contemporary colonial classifications, see Méry, Louis Elie Moreau de Saint, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l'isle Saint-Domingue, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: chez l'auteur, 1797)Google Scholar . See also Régent, Frédéric, Esclavage, métissage, et liberté: La révolution française en Guadeloupe, 1789–1802 (Paris: Grasset, 2004)Google Scholar ; Garrigus, “Redrawing the color line”; and Garrigus, Before Haiti.

50. Sibalis, “Les noirs en France.”

51. A.N. BB16–142.

52. See A.N. BB15–208, and for an earlier petition by Désiré, BB15–206.

53. A.N. BB15–209, R3, 9359.

54. A.N. BB15–207.

55. A.N. BB15–208, Rapport au gouvernement, travail du 3 messidor an 11. June 21, 1803.

56. Dispenses d'age were one of the most common requests. See A.N. BB15–18 through 178.

57. Heuer, Jennifer, The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).Google Scholar

58. Chambre des Députés. Motifs présentes par Emeric-David, M. á l'appui de sa proposition tendante á ce que le Roi soit investi du droit d'autoriser, par des dispenses, les Mariages entre Beau-Frère et Belle-Sœur (Paris: Hacquart, 1814), 4. In A.N. C2030Google Scholar.

59. See Heuer, The Family and the Nation.

60. A.N. BB16–295.

61. A.N. BB15–207, R2, no. 5848.

62. A.N. F7–8705.

63. A.N. BB15–206, R2, no. 1515. I have been unable to locate Eugene in the marriage registers in the Archives de Paris, but suspect that as an homme de couleur he was able to marry.

64. A.N. BB15–211.

65. A.N. BB15–206, R2, no. 1070.

66. A.N. BB15–209, R3, no. 8688.

67. A.N. BB15–210, R4, no. 318.

68. A.N. BB15–210, R4, no. 3002.

69. A.B. BB16–295, Gironde, R7, no. 1426.

70. See Charlotte's 1828 court battle with her sister in the Cour royale de Bordeaux.

71. Devilleneuve, L. M. and Carette, A. A., Recueil Général des Lois et des Arrřts, 1er série 1791–1830, vol. 2, An XIII-1808 (Paris: Bureau de l'administration, 1840), 144.Google Scholar

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75. I have not been able to track down the instructions in question, but suspect that they were a reiteration of the ban on interracial marriage.

76. A.N. BB15–210, R4, no. 2265.

77. A.N. BB15–211, R4, no. 3214.

78. A.N. BB15–211, R4, no. 4102.

79. McCloy, Shelby T., The Negro in France (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1961), 130–31.Google Scholar

80. On the continuation of an illegal slave trade, see Jennings, Anti-Slavery ; Stein, Robert, The French Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century: An Old Regime Business (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980)Google Scholar ; Daget, Serge, La répression de la traite des Noirs au XIXè siècle: l'action des croisières françaises sur les cétes occidentales de l'Afrique, 1817–1850 (Paris: Karthala, 1997)Google Scholar ; and Miller, Christopher L., The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

81. The circular appears in the Code de la Martinique on August 5, 1818. My profound thanks to Rebecca Hartkopf-Schloss who first pointed out this decree to me, citing CAOM-Code de la Martinique- 1814–1818, volume 6, 44645/vi), 557–no 1942: circulaire minis-minis-terielle qui déclare que les gens de couleur libres peuvent librement et sans étre assujettis a aucun cautionnement sortir des colonies pour se rendre soit en France, soit a l'étranger, inspection. reg. 10, 5 aoét 1818. On Martinique, see also Ghislaine Ornème, “Identité et combat assimilationniste des libres de couleur de la Martinique de 1789 á 1833,” in Esclavage, résistances et abolitions, ed. Dorigny, Marcel (Paris: CTHS, 1999), 295–303Google Scholar . For the circulation of the decree in France, see the Minister of the Marine to the Commissaire principal at Nantes, Archives de la Ville de Nantes 12 Police générale, 147, carton 34, dossier 1, as cited in McCloy, Shelby T., The Negro in France (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1961), 131Google Scholar.

82. McCloy, , The Negro in France, 131–34.Google Scholar

83. While the policy of “free in France” appears to have been unofficially in effect, the 1791 law, was probably the first time that the Free Soil principle had been articulated as positive law by a French legislative body.

84. A.N. BB15–211, R4, no. 4160, 13 juillet 1819.

85. A.N. C2046.

86. Villevěque, Laisné de, Opinion de… Sur une pétition sur une pétition présentée á la chambre dans la séance du 17 février 1819, par M. Régis, homme de couleur qui réclame contre une décision ministérielle qui interdit les mariages entre les blancs et les noirs (Paris: Veuve Agasse, 1819).Google Scholar

87. For the original prospectus to establish a colony in Mexico by the Compagnie du Chalchisapa, see Villevéque, Gabriel-Jacques Laisné de, Giordan, Jean François, and Baradère, H., Colonie du Guazacoalco dans l' état de Vera-Cruz, au Mexique, projet de société en commandite par actions (Paris: Tasu, 1827)Google Scholar.

88. He was a member of the Société française pour l'abolition de l'esclavage, which was founded in 1835, soon after the official end of slavery in British colonies . Jennings, , French anti-slavery, 57, 65, and 152Google Scholar.

89. Gabriel Jacques Laisné de Villevěque et Valère Darmiant , De la situation des gens de couleur libres aux Antilles françaises (Paris: Mac-Carthy, 1823)Google Scholar . For a summary of the Bisette Affair, see Mesnard, Eric, “Resistance Movements in the French Colonies: the Bisette Affair (1823–1827),” in The Abolitions of Slavery: From L. F. Sonthonax to Victor Schoelcher, 1793, 1794, 1848, ed. Dorigny, Marcel (London: Berghahn Books, 2003), 255–60Google Scholar . Laisné also championed the civil rights of free people of color in the French legislature on various forums, including shortly after his speech on interracial marriages; see Laisné, , Chambre des Députés. Opinion…sur les colonies. Séance du 5 juin 1819 (Paris: Hacquart, n.d.)Google Scholar

90. Archives Parlementaires, 2nd series, vol. 23 (Paris: Dupont, 1873), 50.Google Scholar

91. Stein, Robert, “From Saint Domingue to Haiti, 1804–1825,” Journal of Caribbean History 19. 2 (1984): 189–226.Google Scholar

92. AN Col CC9A 51, April 17, 1819, Commissaire general de la marine (Bordeaux) to the Minister of the Marine and Colonies, as cited in Stein, “From Saint Domingue,” note 78, 223.

93. Sepinwall, Alyssa, The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar , especially chapter 8; and Sepinwall, Alyssa, “Exporting the Revolution: Grégoire, Haiti, and the Colonial Laboratory,” in The Abbé Grégoire and His World, ed. Popkin, Richard and Popkin, Jeremy (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Press, 2000), 41–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

94. Grégoire, Henri Baptiste, Considérations sur le mariage et sur le divorce adressées aux citoyens d'Haéti (Paris: Badouin Frères, 1823).Google Scholar

95. Grégoire, Henri Baptiste, De la noblesse de la peau, ou, Du préjugé des blancs contre la couleur des africains et celle de leurs descendants noirs et sang-málés (Paris: J. Millon, 1996)Google Scholar . Grégoire dated the decree to Year 14, or 1805, and believed that it affected both blacks and those of mixed race; he also thought it had been overturned by usage and opinion, rather than a formal abrogation.

96. Ann Stoler argues that the early twentieth century, especially the 1920s, was a turning point in policies towards concubinage in French, British, and Dutch empires. She also points out that even when employers and administrators tolerated intermarriage, they often effectively discouraged it; for example, the Dutch East India Company did allow European men to marry native wives, but prevented those with native wives and children from returning to Holland, making concubinage a more attractive option. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge.

97. Archives Parlementaires, 2nd series, vol. 23 (Paris: Dupont, 1873), 51.Google Scholar

98. Duras, Claire de, Ourika: An English Translation (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1994 (1824).Google Scholar

99. See especially the collection of plays reprinted in Chalaye, Sylvie, ed, Les Ourika du Boulevard (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2003).Google Scholar

100. Théalon, Marie-Emmanuel-Guillaume Marguerite, Dartois, Armand, and Brasier, Nicolas, La Vénus hottentote ou haine aux françaises (Paris: Martinet, 1814Google Scholar .) The play is reprinted and translated in Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus.

101. Fredrickson, “Mulattoes and Métis.”

102. Several historians have argued that there was more tolerance—if not toleration—of interracial sex in antebellum America than has often been assumed; see especially Hodes, Martha, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997)Google Scholar . However, such cases seem to be much rarer than in contemporaneous France; the very number of petitions asking for exemption from the law does suggest the existence of a variety of long-term interracial relationships, and indirectly support some of Fredrickson's comparison.

103. See Régent, Esclavage, métissage, et liberté, and Régent, “Le rétablissement de l'esclavage et du préjugé de couleur en Guadeloupe,” in Dorigny and Benot, 1802, 283–96. For a comparative analysis, see also Dubois, A Colony of Citizens.