In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Non-Economic Components of SocialStatus The Raimond family of Aquin are among the most famous of the free coloreds of Saint Domingue. Their most illustrious member, Julien Raimond, was sent to France as an unofficial envoyof the free colored planter elite to help gain legal protections from the royal government just before the Revolution. He was still in France in 1789 and played an important role in the debates of the revolutionary assemblies over slaveryand civil rights for people of color. His writings constitute an important sourcefor students of the politics of race in the French Revolution.1 The Raimond family offers an object lesson in the way free coloreds manipulated noneconomic markers of social status to assume a higher place in society than that assigned to them by racialprejudice.For example,rarelyin the notarial record are the Raimonds referredto asle nommecxla nominee although this formulawas supposed to be used for all free coloreds. Instead, they are often referred to as Sieur orDame Raimond, although these terms were generally reserved for whites. When the nomme formulation is found, it is often interlined as if the notary put it in the second copy in his files but, presumably,not on the original given to the client. Writing in the 17808 at the beginning of his civil rights campaign, Raimond suggested that quarterons be considered legally white and benefit from full citizenship .2 Raimond himself was a quarteron, but he reflects the attitude of the lighterskinned gens de couleur who might have been thought to be approaching white. Raimond, in any case, was not alone in making this suggestion: the influential Chambre de 1'Agriculture de Cap Fran9aishad made a similar recommendation in 1776.3 Other proposals would have limited this official "whitening" to "legitimate" 158 C H A P T E R E I G H T Non-Economic Components of Social Status • 159 quarterons or to those who had performed military service, but the principle remained that free people of color could somehow whiten themselves through some combination of racial titles, proper behavior, patriotic values, and wealth. "Whitening" remainedan unattainable holy grail in colonial times, but manipulation of an extremely complex galaxy of different indicators of status could grant social status. Status was agoal unto itself, aswell as awayto secureeconomic gains. It should be no surprise to the reader that race and color were socially defined concepts in colonial Saint Domingue. It is hardly unusual in modern scholarship to refer to race as a malleable idea, although observers at the time and since have tried to treat it as a scientific and invariable classification. Free coloreds in Saint Domingue manipulated the variable of color in their quest for socialadvancement. The incomparable Moreau de St. Mery, in his Description of the colony, spent many pages discussing the thirteen racial types he identified, both by their physical appearance and moral character, in an attempt to create an invariable scheme of scientific genotypes.4 Even he was awarethat these categories were by no means stable. He noted that the "sang-melee [one-sixteenth African ancestry] approaches the white" in appearanceand, he did not add, became identical in official characterizations after a while.5 From long before the time of Moreau de St. Mery, as soon as the Code Noir and other legal disabilities began to draw a line between mixed race and white, those who were mostly white began to try to slip into the dominant group. Milliard d'Auberteuil used the phrase tache inejfarable (indelible stain) to refer to the principle that even one part in a thousand of African and slave ancestry made a person a member of a lower social order, but in practice, there was a point at which mixed race became indistinguishable from white.6 Many light-skinned people of partial African descent climbed up a racial category by passing as partially Amerindian. A March 1642 regulation of the Compagnie des Indes declared the Indians of the French Caribbean islands the equals of whites in all respects. Moreau de St. Mery took the case of a purported sangmelee woman who was able to prove to the satisfaction of the court that her only nonwhite ancestor was a Carib Indian.7 At the time of his visit to the colony in 1721, Father Jean-Baptiste Labat said of the earlysettlers of the Plaine des Cayes in the South provincethat there washardly one who was pure white, all being suspected of some sort of racial mixing.8 Yvan Debbasch, modern...

Share