Preface

Once again I am happy to present to readers a collection of papers that I think will be of interest to the growing audience taking an interest in the implications of French colonialism. Most of the papers for this volume were drawn from the 30th annual meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society in Washington, D.C. The papers from that meeting, strongly weighted toward France's nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial efforts, join a strong minority of papers that address France's western empire to draw into newly relevant focus several important themes: empire, gender, and race, and the importance of formal and informal representations in shaping all three. This work is not limited by a single view from the metropole or even by a French viewpoint, but in large part seeks understanding of how colonizers and colonized had reciprocal influences on one another.

The volume begins with Thomas Worcester's investigation of the Jesuit Relations for evidence that the Jesuits, under pressure from Jansenist opposition in France, sought to frame their reports—most notably, of the terrible European-induced disease conditions from which First Nations people were suffering—in such a way as to emphasize their own spiritual success. But there could be many pitfalls in efforts to manage communications and images over the distance between colony and metropole. Kenneth Banks's Chasing Empire across the Sea—the 2003 Heggoy prizewinner—addressed this topic, and in 2004 we were fortunate to have a symposium of three papers that discussed the book. Banks himself reflects here on both the dangers of "imperial overstretch" in making human and monetary commitments to empire, and the lessons of communications difficulties in the eighteenth century for imperial efforts, even in the twenty-first century. Alexandre Dubé discusses Banks's work with a view to extending it, raising the additional issue of the complex personal relations that developed over time between administrators in France and in the colonies. Then William Cormack takes up Banks's argument for a significant disconnect conditioned by vicissitudes of season and weather and applies those lessons to an analysis of the political turmoil in the moment when political authorities failed to control news of the French Revolution when it arrived in the Caribbean.

Beyond this discussion but relevant to it, Philippe Girard's paper on Napoleon's use of the Leclerc expedition to put down revolution in Saint-Domingue focuses on a little-discussed cause of the failure of the expedition: the effect on French and allied troops of recognizing that black ex-slaves had the moral high ground in their fight for the liberté and égalité that the expedition had come to deny them. Michelle Cheyne's investigation of the censor's records reveals that both black slavery and the success of revolution in the Caribbean were still hot-button issues in Paris well after the turn of the nineteenth century. Her article chronicles a minor, unsuccessful 1824 melodrama with Saint-Domingue as its setting and a black revolutionary as its central character. The censors, notably lacking in foresight for the longue durée, thought it would be safer to relocate the action to Madagascar and to change the ethnicity of the revolutionary by making him into an Arab, thereby diluting the power of the racial issues by smothering them in exoticism. How Haiti remained an issue in France is explored by Philippe Zacaïr, who uses content analysis to examine how the intensity of treatment of the Caribbean—and especially the "Haitian Question" in the French press of the nineteenth century—varied over time with the force of events.

Blacks from the Caribbean became a significant force in France by their presence in the first third of the twentieth century as they sought education; Jennifer Boittin nuances our appreciation of the feminist and racial sensitivities that Paulette Nardal brought to her writing for LaDépêche Africaine and other more radical political newspapers in the 1930s. Blacks from Africa also made their influence felt in France, at least if Nicole Zehfuss is right in her reading of the changing image of the tirailleurs sénégalais of World War I as...