Blog: April

The French Atlantic

"Could it be that freedom is only maintained through the support of servitude? Perhaps. The two extremes meet." [Rousseau]

Enticement for early French settlement in the Antilles came from Jean Baptiste Du Tertre, a missionary priest in the mid-seventeenth century, who deplored the sale of young white men "as slaves" (his characterization of indentured labor) on the islands, which he called a "detestable" and a "shameful commerce." Du Tertre, however, optimistically reported that a settler owning "two good Negroes" can live "well at ease and honorably" because the slaves can produce "1700 or 1800 pounds of tobacco, not counting the food they grow."

For the European slave traders the transformation of value by displacement was almost a miracle. At the height of the trade the businessmen of Nantes could hardly believe their good fortune: "We have in our State no ... commerce as precious as the commerce with Guinea [Africa], and one can hardly do enough to protect it. What other commerce could be compared to this one, which results in obtaining men in exchange for merchandise?" [...]

In the upper echelons of society colonial products were not only found to be delicious and stimulating; they also connoted imperial power. Blackburn points out the symbolic value at Versailles of colonial accessories and elaborate confections made of sugar. The rising craving for sweetness and stimulation in Europe [...] played a large role in the enslavement and forced migration of Africans, through the workings of the Atlantic triangle.

[...]

It seems clear that under the regime of slavery from the time of the Code Noir until abolition, "instruction" was seen as instruction in religion only, as catechism; that it was oral, with no attempt to impart literacy; and that very little of it took place. [...] Fenelon, the governor of Martinique in 1764, wrote, "Education... is a duty for the principles of holy religion, but wise policy [la saine politique] and human considerations are against it. ... The safety of the Whites demands that we keep the Negroes in the profoundest ignorance."

[...]

The problem of silence about the slave trade touches all points of the triangle and constitutes a veritable complex. The slave-trading ports of Europe (Liverpool excepted) have shown little inclination to acknowledge this part of their past: the elites of the slave-trading cities prefer to keep their "little green boxes" of family secrets secret; [...]

In a recent novel Edouard Glissant evokes the condition that underpins France's forgetfulness: the absence of slaves on French soil, a fact of the triangular trade. "The former slave-trading cities of Europe [...] did not know the crowds of piled-up and festering slaves, nor the shouting markets nor the shitholes, the din and the public whippings, which haunt the atmosphere of the port cities of the Americas, of the Caribbean or of Brazil.... We look in vain for the stigmata of the Trade: the odor has not remained in the air; there was never any odor; no noise left a trace."

The French Atlantic Triangle (2008)
Christopher L. Miller

Posted on:
2010.04.21 -0500

Tags:
homo homini lupus , texts