Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guyana by Miranda Frances Spieler (review)

Empire and Underworld is the first academic monograph by Miranda Frances Spieler, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Arizona. Well aware that her area of specialization, Guyane (French Guiana), was economically an irrelevant corner of the first French empire, she chooses to focus instead on Guyane’s penal establishments from the French Revolution to 1870, a period that saw the deportation of about 70,000 people to Guyane (she does not cover deportations from the Caribbean to France, an interesting topic studied by Claude and Marcel Auguste, Francis Arzalier, and Léo Elisabeth). Rather than simply retracing the history of deportation, as done in a 2004 dissertation by Allyson Delnore, Spieler situates it within the context of three developments of the French revolutionary era: the abolition of slavery, political struggles, and convict laws. Seen through this legal prism, Guyane comes across as a terrifyingly modern monstrosity where metropolitan and colonial bureaucracies created special regimes of law so as to oppress racial, political, and criminal enemies and even deny their existence: Kafka in the tropics.

The penal history of Guyane began with the 1793 deportation of refractory priests and the 1797-1798 deportation of royalist politicians. They were followed by several waves of criminals and political opponents throughout the 19^th century. Spieler also covers other social “deviants” like slaves, free blacks, Africans seized on slave ships (noirs de traite), Surinamese runaways (marrons de Boni), foreigners, immigrants, and ex-convicts (forçats libérés). Most people know the French Revolution as the period when France expanded citizenship to slaves and Jews and deepened individual rights; Spieler shows that these rights were simultaneously curtailed by excluding people from the body citizen.

These special laws, which deprived certain individuals of customary legal rights, were devised in France to combat counterrevolutionaries and control ex-convicts as well as in Guyane, where restraining free blacks was a greater concern. Whether the threat was political, criminal, or racial, authorities responded in remarkably similar ways: they denied their enemies their legal existence through such techniques as civil death (which turned an individual into a legally “dead” person unable to marry, among other things) or police surveillance (which forced ex-convicts into years of wandering). In time, Ancien Régime laws that had once been limited to labor camps in military ports came to cover ever more individuals, accompany them throughout their life, and engulf vast swathes of the colony in a process she aptly describes as “metastasis” (190). By 1870, special laws were the norm and common law the exception in Guyane.

This book has its strengths. It is thoroughly grounded in legal theory and archival research in France. The scholarly style may overwhelm the casual reader, but mistakes are few, with the notable exception of a claim that the 20 May 1802 law “revived slavery where it had not been abolished,” when it left the issue open-ended (58). Historians specializing in penal law and the concept of citizenship will no doubt be intrigued by the implications of the little-known Guianese case.

Though Spieler refrains from doing so, many readers will be tempted to tie legal developments in Guyane to the wider world. The incomplete abolition of slavery in a society tightly controlled by elites had its parallels in Saint-Domingue (cultivateur system), Cuba (patronato), Jamaica (apprenticeship), and the U.S. South (Jim Crow laws). The total bureaucratic control of the individual anticipated totalitarian regimes. The willful creation of extralegal zones brings Guantánamo to mind.

Historians of slavery and colonialism, however, will likely find the book overly theoretical and detached from the realities of colonial life. Because of the angle of approach (the law) and the archival base (French administrative records), this is largely a history of Guyane as seen by French legislators and bureaucrats. “Had the people spoken,” Spieler acknowledges, “this would be a different book” (11). Her Eurocentric method contrasts with Laurent Dubois’s A Colony of Citizens (2004), which...