Recontextualizing French History: The French Atlantic Triangle and Globalization

French Atlantic slavery and the slave trade have not, given the foundational role they played in shaping the coordinates of the global economic and political landscape today, received the kind of concerted scholarly attention they warrant. Yet, the subject itself continues to inform public debate on the appropriateness of commemorative mechanisms, claims for reparation, official revisionist discourse, pedagogic and institutional responses, lingering structures of inequity associated with the disparities the trade engendered, and naturally the claims made by and on behalf of minority populations in Europe with historical ties to slavery and the slave trade. Discussion of these issues has more often than not been characterized by a glaring absence of accurate information, countered in part by a handful of innovative measures such as the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool and educational initiatives such as London's Hackney Museum's special exhibition "Abolition 07" to commemorate the bicentennial of the British abolition of the slave trade. Paul Gilroy's influential work, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), highlighted the importance of the "Atlantic" space as a category of inquiry. But what is at stake in exploring the particularities of the French Atlantic?

Christopher L. Miller's The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade (2008) builds in productive ways on his previous work—Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (1985), Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa (1990), and Nationalists and Nomads: Essays on Francophone African Literature and Culture (1998)—underscoring the crucial importance of signaling the ways in which negative and stereotypical representations of Africans influenced the pragmatic and dehumanizing practice of slavery and were subsequently reformulated during the colonial period. Complex associations between literacy, political consciousness, and resistance materialize as intrinsic modules in the assessment of the legacy slavery in considerations of nationalism, decolonization, and postcolonial politics. Given the significance of these questions in France today, Miller's The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade offers precisely the kind of historical contextualization recent debates have sorely lacked.

The French context exhibits a specificity that is worth underlining from the outset, because slavery was initially "suspended" as early as 1794, subsequently restored under Napoleon in 1802, and only "abolished" in 1848. We are thus confronted with "two distinct issues: abolition of the slave trade and abolition of slavery itself" (Miller, French Atlantic Triangle 84; emphasis added). The French slave trade distinguished itself as a commerce or trafic triangulaire:

The Atlantic triangle was invented by a system of trades, following a certain pattern. The French version of the Atlantic, perhaps more than any other, was triangular in its configuration. The Atlantic triangle was traced onto the earth and into world culture by men and women and ships, moving goods to Africa, captive Africans to the New World, and colonial products back to the mother countries.… Any vessel leaving France to move slaves from Africa to the Caribbean would have traced a rough triangle spanning the Atlantic from north to south, from east to west, and then back.

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"The apex" of this trade, as Miller shows, was "the metropole" (54) itself; of course "one of the cruel ironies of the Atlantic triangle is that it completed itself by 'realizing' the value of these human lives beyond their reach, in Europe. Their persons stayed in the islands, while the profits from selling them and the products of their labor both traveled back to the point of the scheme's origin—there to be reinvested in products that would be traded for the enslavement of more Africans" (54). The French secured the parameters of their Atlantic space by implementing an "institutionalized" economic monopoly known as the exclusif, whereby "[f]oreign ships were not to enter French colonial ports, and French colonial products were not to be shipped elsewhere but to France" (24). As we shall see, the accompanying invisibility of slaves in the French metropole played a...