Trading Places: Colonization and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century French Culture (review)

Historians and literary scholars working on Atlantic topics will have observed that the Caribbean colonies, slavery, and the wealth of sugar planters featured far more prominently in eighteenth-century British cultural discourse than in its French counterpart. Madeleine Dobie does not explain why this was so, but she does offer a persuasive model of the ways Enlightened French culture faced (or refused to face) the issue of colonial slavery. The title of her book expresses her argument with a triple entendre. In one sense, 'Trading Places' conveys Dobie's contention that until the late 1760s nearly all French writers treated slavery as an Oriental or Native American practice. This 'displacement', as she labels it, allowed them to depict slavery as a sexualized or familial foreign institution rather than as a violent and profitable sector of the French economy. The phrase 'Trading Places' also refers to the tendency of those writers who did describe Caribbean colonies to consider them primarily from a commercial point of view, starting with Montesquieu's famously ambiguous critique of slavery. Only when physiocrats began to argue that free trade and free labour would increase the profitability of France's tropical colonies did an anti-slavery literature emerge. This focus on political economy was true not only for a line of philosophes from Mirabeau père to Condorcet, but for novelists, poets, and playwrights. The rise of sentimental anti-slavery literature is Dobie's third kind of 'Trading Places'. Even in fictions that allowed readers to imagine that they themselves were enslaved, authors from Saint-Lambert to Olympe de Gouges and Germaine de Staël kept questions of free versus enslaved workers' productivity in the forefront. Before physiocrats like Dupont de Nemours developed such theories, Dobie argues, the slave trade and Caribbean plantation economy were invisible in French literary material. New missionary accounts from the Antilles disappeared after the 1730s, as captive Africans replaced the indigenous Carib Indians. Two chapters describe how master artisans transformed slave-harvested Caribbean hardwoods, fibres, and dyes into Asian-inspired furniture and textiles, just as contemporary novelists depicted slavery as a feature of Ottoman, not French, society. Only after the anti-slavery question had become established in literary discourse did craftsmen depict Antillean themes, including black men and women. It is unfortunate that the book says little about the emerging scientific literature on race, since French writers played an important role in this discourse. And there are a few historical slips, like Dobie's suggestion that the Code Noir was significantly revised in 1784. But she has produced an important book. She shows how writers who found slavery both philosophically fascinating and morally repulsive avoided acknowledging France's slave industry until they found an anti-slavery argument that promised to maintain the profits of Antillean commerce. Trading Places should be required reading for cultural historians interested in Atlantic slavery, whether or not they study France.