9
Sex, Savagery, and Slavery in the Shaping of the French Body Politic

Elizabeth Colwill

In 1791, two years after the French Revolution had shattered the remnants of the absolutist state, a slave revolution exploded in Saint-Domingue, the jewel of the French empire in the Caribbean.^[1] In February 1794 the French Convention ceded to necessity and abolished

[1] My discussion of the revolution in Saint-Domingue draws on a rich historiographical tradition. I am especially endebted in what follows to Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990); C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1989); Yves Bénot, La Révolution française et la fin des colonies (Paris: Editions la Découverte, 1987); Julius Sherrard Scott, "The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution" (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1986); Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London: Verso, 1988); and the extensive scholarship of David Patrick Geggus, including Slavely, War, and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793–1798 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982) and "Racial Equality, Slavery, and Colonial Secession During the Constituent Assembly," American Historical Review 95, no. 5 (December 1989): 1290–1308. Several outstanding books that illuminate the issues raised in this essay appeared after the article was written. See especially Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Sue Peabody, "There Are No Slaves in France": The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus, eds., A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); and David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, eds., More than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).

slavery in the French colonies.^[2] The dual revolutions displaced the political order of early modern France and destroyed, if temporarily, the colonial slave regime; in the process they altered categories such as "slave," "citizen," and "woman" within which identity was conceived and contributed to the transformation, in Foucault's words, of "the way in which the body itself [was] invested by power relations."^[3] In the response of French officials and colonial planters to the slave insurrection, the threat of African "atrocities" merged almost imperceptibly with the specter of black passions, even as self-identified bearers of (European) civilization jockeyed to devise the appropriate modes of corporeal repression and containment. Just as proslavery discourses unfolded according to a series of conventions concerning the "corps sauvage" and its control by the forces of civilization, French revolutionaries reconfigured political power and social order in the metropolis by anchoring allies and enemies at opposite poles of civilization and savagery. They did so by rooting their political arguments in what appeared to be the incontestable ground of the body. To mark particular enemies with a lust for bodies and blood was to stigmatize them with passions incompatible with political or moral responsibility. Sex, savagery, and slavery appeared in the political rhetoric of the revolutionary epoch as metaphors for the shifting boundaries of power, but also as a means to reconfigure social relations.^[4]

French and colonial commentators, journalists, deputies, missionaries,

[2] Eugene D. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), interprets the Saint-Domingue insurrection within the context of the European revolution as the first revolutionary slave movement in history. On the other hand, in Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), esp. 161, Michael Craton expresses skepticism that slave rebellions synchronized closely with the bourgeois democratic revolutions, including the French.

[3] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), esp. 24, 182–83. Foucault defines the body politic as "a set of material elements and techniques that serve as weapons, relays, communication routes and supports for the power and knowledge relations that invest human bodies and subjugate them by turning them into objects of knowledge" (28). I use the term body politic to connote both the ways in which all parts of the body social are implicated in the construction of power and the processes of exclusion that define certain groups as unfit for the exercise of formal political rights.

[4] I draw here on Joan Scott's definition of gender as both a means of representing power and a constitutive element of social relations; see her Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

and pamphleteers defined civilization—and by extension the new citizenry—against an astonishing parade of transgressive bodies. In political pamphlets, "seductive" financiers, "immodest" clerics, "infamous courtesans," "vile prostitutes," unnatural nuns, sinful celibates, and lusty "nègres" illustrated the state of savagery produced by centuries of real and metaphorical "slavery."^[5] Revolutionaries sought to link degenerate aristocrats with African lusts the better to discredit the old social hierarchy.^[6] Competing political factions on both sides of the Atlantic struggled to appropriate power, in the name of civilization, by stigmatizing their enemies with the epithet sauvage . The French Creole Milly, avocat en parlement , drew for his audience the shocking tableau of the African femme sauvage , who so lacked maternal feeling that she abandoned her infants to "the voracity of tigers," while the antislavery missionary Abbé Sibire presented the colonists, not the slaves, as "barbarous" and "lustful," bestial and bloodthirsty.^[7] For the royalist Abbé Solignac, unruly and violent Parisian women who abandoned the "compassion natural" to their sex presented a spectacle of "barbarism" to rival those of Algiers, Tunis, and Constantinople.^[8] The femme sauvage assumed many masks in the age of revolution. Even Marie Antoinette, the embodiment of civilization in the Old Regime, emerged in the pornography of the Revolution as a "tiger with a taste for human blood," convicted of adultery, incest, bestiality, and tribadism.^[9] The imaginary encounters in the pamphlet literature defined civilization relationally:

[5] Bordel, Opinion sur la régénération des moeurs (Paris: Imprimerie de Dufart, Year II), 6.

[6] Pierre Manuel, La Police de Paris dévoilée , 2 vols. (Paris, Year II), 1:348.

[7] Père Jean-Baptiste Labat, a missionary in the West Indies, quoted in M. Milly, Discours sur la question relative à la liberté des nègres, discours prononcé le 20 février 1790 (Paris, 1790); Abbé Sibire, L'Aristocratie négrière, ou réflexions philosophiques et historiques sur l'esclavage et l'affranchissement des noirs (Paris, 1789), 18–19.

[8] Abbé Solignac, Relation intéressante, exacte, politique et morale, des événements désastreux du Fauxbourg Saint Antoinne [sic], Quai de la Ferraille, et autres quartiers de Paris, les 24 et 25 Mai 1790 , 1–2; Cornell University French Revolution Collection, Department of Rare Books, DC 141, F87, v. 263, 424868B. On the activism of women of the people, see Dominique Godineau, The Women of Paris and Their French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); originally published as Citoyennes tricoteuses: Les Femmes du peuple à Paris pendant la Révolution française (Aix-en-Provence: Alinéa, 1988).

[9] Silvain, Liste civile, suivie des noms et qualités de ceux qui la composent, et la punition dûe à leurs crimes (n.p., 1789). Philosophes and journalists of the Enlightenment found evidence of the high development of French civilization in the status of aristocratic women and in the sexual enslavement of woman in "her primitive state" who lost "the charms of her sex in enduring the fatigues of the other" (La Croix, Le Spectateur français avant la Révolution [Paris, Year IV], 218–23). On the political pornography of the Revolution, see Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Sarah Maza, "The Diamond Necklace Affair Revisited (1785–1786): The Case of the Missing Queen," in Eroticism and the Body Politic , ed. Lynn Hunt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 63–89; Jacques Revel, "Marie-Antoinette in Her Fictions: The Staging of Hatred," in Fictions of the French Revolution , ed. Bernadette Fort (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 111–29; and Chantal Thomas, La Reine scélérate: Marie-Antoinette dans les pamphlets (Paris: Seuil, 1989).

fraternity against the planters' "monstrous pleasures"; the sacred duties of wife and motherhood against the faithless bodies of market women; the rule of law and nature against slaves' thirst for vengeance; the republican body politic against Marie Antoinette's "corps impure."^[10] Images of sodomitical clerics, African bloodlust, and femmes sauvages drew on older representational conventions in the course of reconceptualizing power and reinventing difference.

The project of grafting savagery and civilization onto the contours of gendered bodies was not, of course, specific to the revolutionary epoch. Felicity Nussbaum, for instance, has recently explored the "interpenetration between the domestic and the exotic, the civil and the savage, the political and the sexual," in the formation of the eighteenth-century British empire.^[11] Throughout the age of European expansion, political and sexual orders, reciprocally defined within a binary opposition between civilization and savagery, were as intimately interwoven as the metropolitan and colonial regimes themselves. By the eighteenth century, as Julia Douthwaite has shown, conceptual devices for talking about savagery and civilization in France ran "the gamut from pseudo-scientific inquiries into humanity's original nature and institutional schemes for improving society through control of 'undesirables' to sensational fictions of exotic peoples and eyewitness views of anthropomorphic apes."^[12] Natural man, envisioned variously as the bestial Hottentot, the noble American native, or the wild and solitary European, figured centrally within Enlightenment classificatory schemes, providing sites of speculation about the nature of just social and political order. "Exotics" such as the "savage" chieftain imported from Africa by Bougainville and displayed at the French court in 1769, then described in great physical detail in the Mémoires secrets , provided a measure of the heights achieved by French civilization. This chieftain, so went the story, confirmed his savagery when he showed "no emotion at the sight of the magnificence of the chateau of Versailles" but a

[10] On Marie Antoinette, see La Confession de Marie-Antoinette, ci-devant reine de France, au peuple Franc, Catherine de Médicis dans le cabinet de Marie-Antoinette à St. Cloud, premier dialogue, de l'Imprimerie royale (n.p., n.d.).

[11] Felicity A. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

[12] Julia Douthwaite, "Rewriting the Savage: The Extraordinary Fictions of the 'Wild Girl of Champagne,'" Eighteenth-Century Studies 28 (1994–95): 62–91, esp. 63–64. On competing visions of the savage in the Renaissance, see Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964), esp. 354–85.

great and undiscriminating "passion for women."^[13] French understandings of sociability, sensibility, and science derived in large part from investigation into the primitive and exotic. As Londa Schiebinger has argued, eighteenth-century anatomists analyzed non-European men and all women as deviations from the (European) masculine norm, with scientific interest focusing especially on the "black male (the dominant sex of the inferior race) and white women (the inferior sex of the dominant race)." African sexuality fell under the objectifying gaze of the French, it seems, in proportion to the state's elaboration of new methods of sexual regulation in the metropolis.^[14]

By the 1790s, discourses of sex, savagery, and civilization, however formulaic, held new and radical political implications, for the slave revolution in Saint-Domingue unfolded in conjunction with a revolution in France that posed in the sharpest terms the question of which "savages"—male or female, sans-culotte or petit blanc , black or white—would be incorporated in the new body politic, and in what ways.^[15] This essay examines the changing nature of proslavery discourses in the revolutionary period, then compares two antislavery treatises that deployed the familiar trope of civilization and savagery to new political ends. In the process, it suggests both the impact of the slave revolution in Saint-Domingue on the meanings of freedom in France and the political constraints inherent in metropolitan constructions of abolition. The conflation of debates over slavery, sex, and citizenship also provides a striking historical example of the ways in which "race" is a gendered category. Sexual hierarchy and the slave regime posed interrelated moral and practical dilemmas for French revolutionaries. The dual revolutions that forced the issue of emancipation and inspired unprecedented numbers of women on both sides of the Atlantic to political action brought the promise of universal rights into direct conflict with French republicans' struggles to obtain political legitimacy at home, retain control of their empire abroad, and establish new forms of "free" and domestic labor. Inventive justifications for racial and sexual hierarchy were necessary to revolutionaries whose political survival

[13] Mémoires secrets pour servir à l'histoire de la République des Lettres en France (London, 1780), 4:266–67 (10 July 1769). For another example of exoticism, see the description of the "white Negress" displayed in France and Italy in Mémoires secrets , 10: 174 (9 July 1777).

[14] Londa Schiebinger, Nature's Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 144; Robert Purks Maccubbin, ed., `Tis Nature's Fault: Unauthorized Sexuality During the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

[15] For the revolutionary period, see Jean-Claude Halpern, "Représentations populaires des peuples exotiques en France, à la fin du XVIIIe siecle" (Thèse doctoral, Histoire, Paris 1, 1992).

required mitigating abstract political idealism with more restrictive notions of citizenship and an apprenticeship in civilization. The pro- and antislavery treatises examined here thus illuminate what Thomas Holt has termed the "problem of freedom" in postemancipation societies, and expose it as a gendered problem.^[16]

To study discourses of sex, savagery, and slavery at the juncture of revolution on both sides of the Atlantic is to glimpse in microcosm the impact of political rupture on early modern conceptions of hierarchy, social order, and difference.^[17] Proslavery theorists of the early modern period had conceived of the slave system, like the sexual order, as one part of an organic social and political hierarchy sanctioned by king and Church.^[18] The assertion that all men were not born with the same faculties or the same rights would have seemed self-evident to most eighteenth-century French subjects of European descent, despite the challenges posed by the likes of Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau.^[19] Privileges did indeed derive from race, but until the late eighteenth century the term referred not to "scientific" sets of fixed physical characteristics, but rather to a broader notion of "race" as bloodline or lineage.^[20] The extent to which Europeans' generally negative view of "savages" derived from "racial difference" itself remains a controversial subject among scholars, in part because the historical malleability of the term race occludes the subject under debate. Weh know, however, that the category sauvage was flexible enough to accommodate the Irish as well as the African, among others, in the early modern period. The fact that travelers and political emissaries not only recognized linguistic, political, and religious distinctions between African peoples but also honored individual African leaders would seem to undermine the ahistorical assumption that racial antipathy proceeded "naturally" from differences of color.

[16] Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

[17] On slavery as a sexual, though not fully gendered, system, see Ronald G. Walters, The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism After 1830 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978).

[18] For an example of relationships of authority conceived within familial metaphors of king and colonies, see M. Dutrône la Couture, Vues générales sur l'importance du commerce des colonies, sur le caractère du peuple qui les cultive, & sur les moyens de faire la constitution qui leur convient (n.p., 1788).

[19] [Anon.], Catéchisme des colonies, pour servir à l'instruction des habitans de la France (Paris, 1791), 38. See Edward Derbyshire Seeber, Anti-Slavery Opinion in France During the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Greenwood Press, 1937).

[20] Jean-Louis Flandrin, Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household, and Sexuality , trans. Richard Southern (London: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 11–12.

Nor did slavery itself generate modern racism.^[21] Before the age of revolution, slave traders and planters could define the "nègre" as peculiarly suited for enslavement without resorting to biological explanations for the subject status of the enslaved. Scientific racism and sexism reached their apogee in the wake of—not prior to—emancipation.^[22] In the eighteenth century, French philosophes were more likely to attribute cultural variation to historical evolution or climactic variation than to biological difference per se. In an era in which many naturalists still perceived age, sex, and nation as more salient categories than "race" for differentiating among humankind, Europeans' sense of superiority over the "primitive" obtained not from cranial measurements but rather from an ethos of politeness and sociability linked to commerce and civilization itself.^[23] Nonetheless, race provided an essential principle of social organization in early modern Europe. If, as Tessie Liu has argued, "the operating definition of race was based not on external physical characteristics but on blood ties—or, more precisely, some common substance passed on" through heterosexual relations and birth, then race was a way of imagining community that embraced both class and gender.^[24]

The dual revolutions in France and Saint-Domingue transformed this early modern terrain by shifting the theoretical and corporeal grounding of social hierarchy. The anonymously authored Catéchisme des colonies, pour servir à l'instruction des habitans de la France resembled its early modern precursors in insisting on the natural inequality among men. Yet this proslavery tract, published in the revolutionary year 1791, differed in im-

[21] Barbara Jeanne Fields, "Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America," New Left Review , no. 181 (1990): 95–118. For the classic statement of an opposing view, see Winthrop Jordan, White over Black (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977). See, in the French context, Pierre Boulle, "In Defense of Slavery: Eighteenth-Century Opposition to Abolition and the Origins of Racist Ideology in France," in History from Below , ed. Frederick Krantz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 219–46.

[22] Fields, "Slavery, Race, and Ideology," 116. On the changing terminology of race in antislavery literature, see Serge Daget, "Les Mots esclave, nègre, noir, et les jugements de valeur sur la traite négrière dans la littérature abolitionniste française de 1770 à 1845," Revue française d'histoire d'outre-mer 60 (1973): 511–48.

[23] On naturalists, see Schiebinger, Nature's Body , 117; on sociability, see Daniel Gordon, Citizens Without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), esp. 134–35, 149–50. William B. Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans: White Response to Blacks, 1530–1880 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 60–99, stresses the philosophes' generally negative view of blacks, but recognizes the differences between their theories of inequality and nineteenth-century scientific visions of race as immutable.

[24] Tessie Liu, "Teaching the Differences Among Women from a Historical Perspective: Rethinking Race and Gender as Social Categories," Women's Studies International Forum 14 (1991): 265–76, esp. 270–71.

portant ways from the proslavery thought of the Old Regime, for it invoked the revolutionary slogan of liberty as buttress for the autonomist aspirations of French and Creole colonists.^[25] By the first months of 1791, colonists in Saint-Domingue had joined political clubs, denounced "ministerial despotism" and the restrictions imposed on colonial trade by the French metropolis, elected a renegade colonial assembly, and achieved colonial representation in the French National Assembly. There, in the company of absentee planters in the Massiac Club and their allies on the French Colonial Committee, colonial representatives proceeded to act as a powerful lobby against those gens de couleur who demanded the extension of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen to the large population of free, property-holding, and in many cases slave-holding men of mixed race in the colonies.^[26] Meanwhile, petits blancs in the colonies had extended the assault on class privilege and claimed the rights of man, which they gained only to wield ever more violently as a club against gens de couleur with similar aspirations to citizenship.^[27] In February 1791, after an unsuccessful insurrection by gens de couleur in Saint-Domingue, Vincent Ogé and Jean-Baptiste Chavannes were broken on the wheel and beheaded, their heads exposed on stakes as an example to those of mixed race insolent enough to aspire to a piece of the liberty the white colonists had claimed for themselves.^[28]

These bloody events in the colonies unfolded in uneven and awkward tandem with the revolution in France, which by the beginning of 1791 had demolished royal "despotism," abolished feudalism, and established a constitutional regime. By the time of the publication of the Catéchisme des colonies , Abbé Sièyes had redefined the Third Estate as the "nation,"

[25] David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975).

[26] Fick, Making of Haiti , 78, shows that the Massiac Club, initially formed in Paris by colonists opposed to colonial representation in the French Assembly, soon made common cause with the colonial deputies in their attempts to block the aspirations of the gens de couleur .

[27] See, for example, the violent denuncation of the terms grands blancs and petits blancs by Baillio l'aîné, L'Anti-Brissot, par un petit blanc de Saint-Domingue (Paris: Girardin, [1791]), 10–11.

[28] John Garrigus, "Blue and Brown: Contraband Indigo and the Rise of a Free Colored Planter Class in French Saint-Domingue," Americas 2 (October 1993): 233–63, argues that the movement for reform by the free colored population on the southern coast contributed to the destabilization of the slave regime. As David Brion Davis demonstrates in The Problem of Slavery , 143–46, not until May 1791 would the Girondin ministry grant rights to all men born of free parents. Only in the spring of 1792, when confronted with the need to ally with gens de couleur in the interests of pacifying the insurgent slaves, would the Legislative Assembly enfranchise all free men of color.

Parisian women had brought the royal family to Paris to remain under the surveillance of the people, and French patriots were well on their way to war with "foreign despots." Shorn of the familiar clerical foundation of hierarchy and privilege, and in the context of increasing hostility toward colonial interests, the unadorned argument that "all men are not equal" required a new evidentiary buttress both in France and in the colonies.

The age of revolution that transformed the meaning of antislavery forced proslavery ideologues to rethink the foundations of social hierarchy and, in the words of David Brion Davis, moved debates over slavery "irresistibly to the ground of race."^[29] As Barbara Jeanne Fields has argued, in the United States "racial ideology supplied the means of explaining slavery to people whose terrain was a republic founded on radical doctrines of liberty and natural rights."^[30] Even prior to the republican era, revolution in France and its colonies dislodged old rationales for slavery and altered the terrain of proslavery thought. The Catéchisme des colonies , for instance, reconciled autonomist ambitions and the interests of civilization and the slave regime with a retreat to the secure terrain of nature; however, unlike its proslavery precursors, it retreated not to the natural hierarchy inherent in lineage, but to the political implications of color. Blacks, explained the author, differed from whites not merely in skin color but in build, behavior, organs, senses, appetites, ideas, and mental faculties; indeed, he insisted, the intellectual divergence was so profound that blacks themselves readily conceded that their race was "incapable of perfection" and that white man was "man par excellence, the model of human perfection."^[31] Since "one must follow nature, and not command it," it

[29] Davis, Problem of Slavery , 303; Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery; Holt, Problem of Freedom . Edward Seeber, Anti-Slavery Opinion , provides ample evidence of eighteenth-century Europeans' fascination with the meanings and origins of "color." According to Robert Dirks, The Black Saturnalia: Conflict and Its Ritual Expression on British West Indian Slave Plantations (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1987), 31–32, slaves were sometimes described earlier in the eighteenth century as a separate "species," but the same term was also used to differentiate between French and English and aristocrat and peasant. Although, as Dirks says, the French and English might define themselves against the African as "members of a single race," race appeared more a question of degree than of kind. Despite the elaborate classification systems based on color in the West Indies, the essential determinant of both species and race was less one's color than one's position within the broader religious and political hierarchy.

[30] "Slavery got along for a hundred years after its establishment without race as its ideological rationale. The reason is simple. Race explained why some people could rightly be denied what others took for granted: namely, liberty.... But there was nothing to explain until most people could, in fact, take liberty for granted" (Fields, "Slavery, Race, and Ideology," 114).

[31] Catéchisme , 37–39, 45. On the intimate relationship betweeen colonial science, medicine, and slavery in prerevolutionary Saint-Domingue, see James E. McClellan III, Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

would be impossible to establish equality constitutionally. Instead, the legislator should devise regulations to govern the drives, or passions, specific to each race.

Thus relieved by nature of the revolutionary dictates of equality, the author was at liberty to reconstruct political order as racial hierarchy, which made a theory of the "intrinsic value" of each race the basis of an equality of classes. If the "sacred" Declaration of Rights of Man made no distinction between categories of men, that was because "no physical or moral differences [existed] between the diverse classes of inhabitants of France." The colonies, however, presented a different case, for the black, condemned to an eternal childhood by the weakness of his faculties, had so little "intrinsic value" that he was unfit to partake in the society of "free and enlightened men." The man of mixed race acquired value in proportion to the percentage of white (paternal) blood that ran through his veins. But only the white man, invested with the highest intrinsic value, had, "essentially," the right to citizenship.^[32]

The comprehensive racial program of the Catéchisme des colonies rooted hierarchy in gendered bodies, black and white. In so doing, it erased gender difference within the category "race," constructed paternity as the determinant of race, rendered French women invisible within the universal "man," and proposed "race" as substitute for class as the "natural" physical and moral foundation of social order.^[33] One can glimpse in the identification, examination, and classification of "racial" characteristics the development of a repertoire of signs of blackness that in their very essence defined inferiority. The author of the Catéchisme des colonies thus reconfigured the older binary oppositions between civilization and savagery, intellect and passion, black and white, model man and his inverse, around

[32] Catéchisme , 44–45, 47–78.

[33] I am not suggesting that race simply replaced class as a "naturalized" category of social order. After various eighteenth-century assaults on privilege, however, defenders of class distinction tended to represent social distinction in racial and gendered terms. In that discursive sense, class became race in the age of revolution. On shifting understandings of the "nature" of sexual, racial, and/or class difference, see Dorinda Outram, The Body in the French Revolution: Sex, Class, and Political Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité , 2 vols. (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1976); Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990); Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, Bodyguards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity (New York: Routledge, 1991); Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); and Henry Louis Gates Jr., ed., "Race," Writing, and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

a racial order that elided gender difference among those with the least "intrinsic value."^[34] In so doing he was typical of French proslavery theorists of his epoch, who with increasing regularity derived a "natural" propensity toward slavery from Africans' "natural" state of moral degeneracy represented by passion, paganism, and sloth. Colonists in the years of revolution tended to embellish Bougainville's voyeuristic charge that in African lands, "men and women deliver themselves without modesty to the sins of the flesh," copulating in broad daylight "on the first mat they find."^[35] The slave system, which represented to proslavery theorists an "amelioration" of the African condition, thus emerged as intrinsic to the civilizing mission itself.^[36]

Even French opponents of the slave trade tended to agree with Monsieur de Milly that slaves summoned too soon to the banner of liberty were likely to confuse liberty with license. The better to represent the threat, Milly presented "evidence" that Africans, unchecked by civilization, inscribed their passions on the body in blood. He walked his readers through the "flesh markets" of the Gold Coast replete with disemboweled dogs and mutilated natives; introduced them to a savage kingdom where bodies received no decent burial and were consumed by panthers and birds of prey; displayed for their view a dozen freshly cut heads mounted as trophies for the pleasure of a king who dipped his feet in his victims' blood and held his wives in seclusion to await his desires.^[37] To the "barbaric" practices of ritual sacrifice, mutilation, and polygamy, Milly added the obligatory reference to cannibalism. Quoting another European traveler, he confided: "The Anicos eat their slaves; human flesh is as common in their markets as beef is in ours." Indeed, cannibalism could be a family affair: "The father devours the flesh of his son, the son that of the father; the brothers and sisters eat one another," and the mother callously feeds upon her newborn infant.^[38] The tale of primitive passions that Milly invented for his readers culminated, then, with the taboos that distinguished man from beast. The femme sauvage who consumed her own infants in a brutal state of nature figured the "nègre" as devoid of family

[34] On race and Manichaean analogies, see Abdul R. JanMohamed, "Sexuality on/of the Racial Border: Foucault, Wright, and the Articulation of 'Racialized Sexuality,'" in Discourses of Sexuality: From Aristotle to AIDS , ed. Domna C. Stanton (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 106.

[35] Mémoires secrets , 4:266–67.

[36] Milly, Discours sur la question relative à la liberté des nègres, prononcé en l'assemblée générale du district des Filles-Saint-Thomas (Paris: Didot jeune, 1790), 3, 9–10.

[37] M. Gourg, royal administrator on the Gold Coast, quoted in ibid., 21–27.

[38] Drapper, quoted in ibid., 20.

feeling, therefore beyond the boundaries of civilized society. Against this backdrop of African bloodlust Milly invoked the specter of an American bloodbath. The mere rumor of freedom, he reminded his audience, had already caused agitation in Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue, and an insurrection in Martinique. The slaves, he warned, were "not disposed to become the fellow citizens of their masters"; it was far more likely that slaves would become their executioners.^[39] This self-proclaimed sympathizer with the slaves concluded, then, by defining fraternity along racial lines.

If the prospect of a massacre was a useful club to wield against the Amis des Noirs and their allies, Creole planters and their French supporters out-did themselves to depict the impact of black passions unleashed after the slave revolution that erupted in Saint-Domingue the night of 22 August 1791. The slaves on the Gallifet plantation who rose according to a carefully orchestrated plan against one of the wealthiest and most murderous slave regimes in the western hemisphere were soon joined by thousands across the Northern Plain and eventually the West and South. In C.L.R. James's classic statement, their acts of vengeance were real, but hardly in proportion to the daily death they had suffered under slavery or, for that matter, to the terror unleashed by the "forces of order" in response to the revolt itself.^[40] Yet French commentators joined Creole colonists in denouncing the murderous passions of the insurgent slaves rather than their masters. In fact, the response of many French revolutionaries to the "calamity" in Saint-Domingue suggests that pro- and antislavery forces both found the prospect of an "empire of blacks" threatening, if for different reasons.^[41] In the account of one French citizen, a witness to the slave uprising in Saint-Domingue, black "monsters" coupled with foreign foes and vermin clerics presented an unholy fraternity responsible for the devastation. The blacks, he claimed, massacred children "on the breasts of their mothers," impaled babies on pikes, and butchered young girls after they had "satiated the brutality of the brigands and endured indignities that the pen refuses to trace."^[42] The letters from Saint-Domingue that trickled into the metropolis as the months passed confirmed earlier suspicions of black savagery. Colonial deputies disseminated tales of gens de couleur who pinned whites' ears to their caps in place of cockades and slaves who

[39] Ibid., 10–11.

[40] James, Black Jacobins , 88–89.

[41] Sibire, L'Aristocratie négrière , 69.

[42] Baillio l'aîné, L'Anti-Brissot , 8–9.

tore a fetus from a pregnant woman and forcibly fed it to her husband.^[43] In such narratives, black men's naked exercise of power despoiled civilization's sacred objects—mothers, virgins, and children—and made beasts of civilized men. The familiar trope of the imposition of savagery on civilization, deployed by colonists in defense of the slave regime, served in the context of slave revolution to refigure the terrain of both racial and gender difference.

The Manichaean boundaries of colonial discourse, however, reveal only one part of the story. If "savages" were a mere discursive effect, slaves were not. Behind the planters' vocabulary of savagery and civilization lay a revolutionary drama in which former slaves, male and female, forced themselves as historical actors on the consciousness of colonists and government officials and claimed liberty for themselves.^[44] Between the opening days of the insurrection in August 1791 and the French Convention's emancipation decree on 16 Pluviôse Year II (4 February 1794), the relationship between France and its colonies had changed dramatically. By Year II, having established a republic, executed their king and queen, and declared war on domestic and foreign foes, the French had sent troops and commissioners to subdue the planters (by this time largely royalists), to enforce the rights of the gens de couleur , and to crush the insurgent slaves. Despite the recall of the Girondin commissioners as opinion turned against Brissot and his followers in the Convention in late 1792, Commissioner Léger-Félicité Sonthonax refused his summons and set about fulfilling his mission. The steady advance of royalist planters in the company of Spanish and British troops, however, drove Sonthonax back on the mercies of the gens de couleur and the former slaves and forced him into a series of concessions that culminated in his emancipation proclamation of the North on 29 August 1793. Commissioner Poverel soon followed suit in the South and West. In the wake of this momentous decree, Sonthonax sent three emissaries to France with the unenviable mission of justifying an emancipation proclamation that had not emanated from the French Convention itself. The task of defending the commissioners' actions fell to the white deputy from the Northern Province of

[43] De Laval, "Extrait d'une Letter des Cayes du 30 janvier 1792," Nouvelles de St. Domingue; Archives Nationales [hereafter cited as AN], W13 (Juridictions Extraordinaires—Parquet du Tribunal Révolutionnaire), no. 45.

[44] For illuminating analyses of the ways in which an exclusive focus on colonial categories of knowledge can flatten the experiences of the subaltern, see the contributions of Gyan Prakash, Florencia E. Mallon, and Frederick Cooper to the forum in American Historical Review , 99, no. 5 (December 1994): 1475–1545.

Saint-Domingue, Louis Pierre Dufay, Parisian born but a longtime greffier and landholder in Saint-Domingue. His speech before the Convention on 16 Pluviôse Year II (4 February 1794) invoked the familiar opposition between savagery and civilization, but this time in opposition to, rather than in service of, the slave regime.

Dufay's defense of the emancipation decree was a masterpiece of political artistry. First, he depicted the slave revolution of 1791 as a conspiracy orchestrated by outsiders, representing the former slaves as incapable of initiative, self-organization, or political leadership. Spanish and British gold and the planters who had "propositioned Pitt" and regarded themselves as a "privileged race" were, he claimed, responsible for the atrocity of insurrection. Next, he constructed the gens de couleur , the "evil, undisciplined men, cruel and ferocious beings" of planter narratives, as the "true sans-culottes of the colonies."^[45] In his narrative, these manly troops, along with loyal black workers, had provided a law-abiding bulwark for the deputies against the bloodthirsty Galbaud, "minister of the vengeance of his caste." Once Dufay had inverted the planters' equation of black with passion and re-created blacks as faithful servants who shared with the deputies a common enemy, he had arrived at a justification for emancipating those black soldiers who had served the French patrie .

His response was far cooler toward those former slaves who after two years in rebellion reappeared en masse armed with weapons and revolutionary vocabulary to strike a bargain with the French delegates. In Dufay's recollection, they explicitly demanded the rights of man in the course of claiming their freedom. "'We are French Nègres,' they said. 'We will fight for France, but in recompense we demand our liberty.'" It was, for Dufay, a humiliating moment: "We were confused," he confessed; "they felt their strength; they could even have turned their weapons against us." Law thus followed the logic of necessity. Unable to force these self-emancipated men into the posture of supplicants, the French delegates granted liberty to all men, regardless of color, who fought for the French republic against foreign or domestic foes. In the days that followed the initial manumissions, Le Cap burned while, in Dufay's inflammatory description, "all" the former slaves of the Northern Province were "delivered to themselves, without brake, without guide, knowing no other law than their Will."^[46] Having summoned for his audience of conventionnels the fa-

[45] [Louis Pierre] Dufay, Compte rendu sur la situation actuelle de Saint Domingue (Paris: Imprimérie Nationale, 1794), 3–4, 14–21.

[46] Ibid., 6–9.

miliar specter of black savagery, he sought to vindicate the deputies' actions and reconstitute their authority by placing the blame for the destruction squarely on Galbaud's perfidy.

Dufay's justification for the sweeping emancipation proclamation of 29 August, however, took the form of a narrative in which former slaves earned the status of citizens when they insisted on the rights of their sex. By the end of August, freedmen, invested with new powers, had assumed the prerogatives of masters of households by demanding freedom for their families. In Dufay's account, freedmen appeared as republican husbands and fathers who claimed their children as personal "property" and represented their wives as patriotic helpmeets and model mothers. "'It isn't our wives' fault that they are unable to take up arms for France. Should they be punished for the weakness of their sex?'"^[47] At least two speakers—Dufay and the former slaves—are present in this text, and two audiences sit in judgment: the colonial deputies who weighed the rebels' argument for emancipation in Saint-Domingue, and the members of the French Convention, who were to determine the fate of the colonial emancipation proclamation of August. We would be mistaken to conclude from Dufay's memory of events that the insurgent slaves shared with French Jacobins a "naturalized" conception of bourgeois womanhood.^[48] Slave women had never enjoyed the privileges of the "weaker sex" in Saint-Domingue, nor had they acted as "ladies" in the years of revolution.^[49] In fact, on this occasion, slave women had organized in their own interests. When the municipality of Le Cap sent a delegation to the French commissioners demanding freedom for the families of black soldiers, "an immense crowd of women," armed with the liberty cap and dragging their children with them, "followed the petitioners, crying 'Long live the French Republic! Long Live Liberty!'"^[50]

[47] Ibid., 9.

[48] Ibid., 4–6. As John K. Thornton has shown in "'I Am the Subject of the King of Congo': African Political Ideology and the Haitian Revolution," Journal of World History 4. (1993): 181–214, two-thirds of the slaves in Saint-Domingue on the eve of revolution had been born and raised in Africa, and thus brought to the revolution their own republican and monarchist ideologies of resistance.

[49] See Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838 (Kingston, Jamaica: Heinemann, 1990); and Arlette Gautier, Les Soeurs de solitude: La Condition féminine dans l'esclavage aux Antilles du XVIIe au XIXe siècle (Paris: Editions Caribéennes, 1985).

[50] Députés de la Partie du Nord de Saint-Domingue, Relation détaillée des évènemens malheureux qui se sont passés au Cap depuis l'arrivée du ci-devant général Galbaud, jusqu'au moment où il a fait brûler cette ville et a pris la fuite (Paris: Imprimérie Nationale, 1794), 73–74. For the broader context of women's revolutionary resistance, see Bernard Moitt, "Slave Women and Resistance in the French Caribbean," in More than Chattel, eds. Gaspar and Hine, 239–58.

Significantly, Dufay chose to exclude from his narrative the initiative women took in their own emancipation. Instead he refashioned slave women as republican mothers and slave men as masters of households endowed with paternal rights—rights entirely at odds with the planters' "right" to property in persons. In domesticating black passions within a European familial model, Dufay deftly assimilated "savages" into civilization.^[51] His speech before the Convention thus reveals the complex ways in which the savagery/civilization trope, whether deployed in service of the slave regime or the new republic, drew its force from the juxtaposition of "primitive" passions to a "civilized" familial order. On the one hand, sexual order paved the route to emancipation. On the other, the dynamic of revolution itself provided its own rationale: "The blacks of the Northern Province were already free in fact; they were the masters." What was the civil commissioner to do but take the "prudent" path and free the remaining slaves?^[52]

It would have been unseemly to leave the republic's delegates thus "mastered." Dufay hastened to assure the conventionnels that the decree of 29 August had "subjected" the former slaves to a severe discipline, "bound them to the soil," and put them to work for a daily wage. Properly disciplined, freedmen and -women would indemnify France by producing workers for the patrie . A new regime, Dufay declared, had come into being, based on the rights of commerce and property and the rule of law.^[53] If recently blacks had "merited some reproaches for indiscipline, excuse them, citizens." Freedmen needed enlightened "guides" on the road to emancipation, just as "a necessary passage" existed between "youth to manhood [virilité ]."^[54]

The analogy was apt. As Dufay traced the road to emancipation on the (white male) body, he constructed a bridge between proslavery paternalism and an antislavery Jacobinism that would gently draw the former slaves from savagery toward civilization through an apprenticeship in republican virtue. To preserve whites from the potential dangers of a black apprenticeship in "manhood," Dufay drew a portrait of black "nature" as

[51] Cf. M. Jacqui Alexander, "Not Just (Any)Body Can be a Citizen: The Politics of Law, Sexuality, and Postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas," Feminist Review 48 (autumn 1994): 5–23, on the relationship between nation-building and the heterosexual family in a colonial context.

[52] Dufay, Compte rendu , 8–10.

[53] On the labor provisions of the emancipation proclamation of Sonthonax, see Robert L. Stein, Léger Félicité Sonthonax: The Lost Sentinel of the Republic (London: Associated University Presses, 1985), 89–90. Fick, Making of Haiti , 168, specifies that the labor codes were not put into practice for several months.

[54] Dufay, Compte rendu , 21–22.

the mirror image of European womanhood. By assimilating the "natural" black—male or female—to the virtues of woman—"patient," "generous," "sweet," "charitable," "respectful"—he stripped them of the passions that could threaten French rule. Schooled in republican virtues by French patriots, the emancipated slave could figure as the quintessential "new man," mascot of the beneficent transformation wrought by the Revolution.

In Dufay's attempt to reconcile the new boundaries of the republican body politic with liberal notions of property, slaves, like peasants, were to "redeem" their obligations to a regenerated French nation. But it would prove impossible both to erase "caste" distinctions based on color within a single national identity and to confine former slaves within a modern coercive labor regime.^[55] Dufay's was a contradictory vision that the conventionnels confirmed as "tutelary divinities" when they decreed universal emancipation in the colonies on 16 Pluviôse Year II (4 February 1794).^[56] The brief emancipation proclamation, which abolished slavery and granted all men in the colonies the rights guaranteed by the constitution, explicitly redrew the boundaries of citizenship without specifying the nature of the labor system that would replace slavery. Yet education, labor, and family would serve as watchwords in the project of reconstructing the black savage as French subject. Just as a feminine liberty could represent the fledging republic while the rights of citizenship remained the rights of man, the emancipated slave could receive Dufay's "fraternal embrace" without fully realizing the promise of equality.^[57] Despite the extraordinary radicalism of the emancipation decrees of Sonthonax and the Convention, empire and tutelage rooted in fears of black passions marked the boundaries of their vision of the "new man." Dufay's text reveals the coercive force of that vision. Most important, it reveals the changing shape of the body politic as the product of negotiation with black revolutionaries, male and female, who had claimed freedom for themselves as full historical subjects.

If Dufay's account had hesitantly incorporated new men into the French body politic following the dictates of political expediency, Pierre Gaspard Chaumette, in his official capacity as representative of the Paris Commune, explicitly designed his speech for the festival at the Temple of

[55] Ibid., 24.

[56] Bénot, Révolution française , 180–83, notes that the emancipation decrees played a critical role in cementing the alliance between white republicans and black insurgents in Saint-Domingue. They brought the leading black generals, including Toussaint L'Ouverture, into the republican forces and turned the tide of the war in Saint-Domingue in France's favor.

[57] Dufay, Compte rendu , 23–26.

Reason on 30 Pluviôse Year II (18 February 1794) to celebrate the principle of emancipation declared by the Convention. Whereas Dufay's conversion to the cause of emancipation had been a recent one, by the time of abolition Chaumette, procureur of the Paris Commune from December 1792 and then agent national , had gone on record as an advocate for blacks and gens de couleur . On 15 June 1793 he had led a delegation of blacks and whites before the Convention to present a petition in favor of abolition. Less than two weeks later he initiated the Commune's "adoption" of an orphaned black child, whom he christened "Ogé, martyr of American liberty."^[58] It was again Chaumette who assumed responsibility at the Festival of Reason on 30 Pluviôse for redrawing the boundaries of the French body politic so as to incorporate former slaves as citizens.^[59]

His speech, delivered in the name of the Paris Commune and in the presence of a delegation from the Convention, conflated antislavery, civilization, and fraternity and defined them in opposition to a state of savagery where passions reigned.^[60] In his text, the "barbarian" was not the slave but the master "who first charged his brother with irons" and destroyed "man in man by opposing nature to nature." For Chaumette, slavery, "the greatest of evils," was in its essence an assault on manhood. Slavery served as a metaphor for the subjugation of all men, the degradation of the species prior to the Revolution when France was a nation of "brigands," "slaves," and "ferocious animals." The revolution that had abolished feudal slavery in France would, in destroying colonial slavery, regenerate manhood at home and abroad.^[61]

Women were absent from Chaumette's text when discussion focused exclusively on fraternity, but they emerged occasionally within the familiar antislavery formulas of dusky maidens sacrificed to the unchaste embrace

[58] On the delegation that Chaumette led to the Convention, see Archives parlementaires , vol. 66, 4 June 1793; and Bénot, Révolution française , 171. For Chaumette's role in ensuring the success of the colonial deputies at the Convention, see Bénot, Révolution française , 83–85. On the adoption, see Affiches de la Commune de Paris , no. I, 14 June 1793.

[59] Nouvelles politiques, nationales et étrangères 85 (25 Pluviôse Year II/13 February 1794), 339; and 92 (2 Ventôse Year II/20 February 1794). Chaumette would pay the price for his militant leadership of the Parisian sans-culottes. While Dufay survived the Terror, sat briefly on the Council of Five Hundred, and held minor juridical posts until 1815, Chaumette, advocate of de-Christianization, was guillotined as an "apostle of atheism" just two months after his speech in the Temple of Reason (AN, W345 [Juridictions Extraordinaires-Tribunal Révolutionnaire], no. 676, pt. 1, pièce 26, Procès Chaumette).

[60] Pierre Gaspard Chaumette, Discours prononcé par le citoyen Chaumette, au nom de la Commune de Paris, le décadi 30 pluviôse an II (18 février 1794), à la fête célébrée à Paris, le décadi 30 pluviôse an II (18 février 1794), en réjouisance de l'abolition de l'esclavage (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, [1794]).

[61] Ibid., 3–4, 10, 13–14.

of their masters and maternal instinct violated by slavers' greed.^[62] Their appearance, if fleeting, was vital to the ideological work of associating the slave system, rather than slaves themselves, with a state of savagery. Just as Dufay had invoked slave women's familial roles to justify their emancipation, Chaumette summoned images of mothers who suffocated their beloved children from "tenderness and pity" so as to condemn slavery as an institution that denatured motherhood. Chaumette supplanted the proslavery cliché of the African mother as a natural cannibal with the representation of the slave system itself as a violation of both maternal sympathies and the female body. Sex was essential to the Chaumette's realignment of proslavery paradigms, for in his text the rape of woman violated the rights of man. "Follow the greedy merchant of men," he urged. "Watch him pile his victims one upon the other in a close, foul, stifling space; [see him] bruise beneath a sinuous rope the breast still swollen with milk; see the young wife torn from her husband, her children ... ; hear the moans of these wretched creatures."^[63] The masculine counterpart to the sadistic romance with the bound body of African woman typical of the male antislavery literature was a masochistic fascination with black passions expressed as male violence. In Chaumette's speech, the slavers' rape of beautiful Africa had transformed "a people sweet by essence" into a herd of "wild beasts" engaged in a "war of vengeance" that left the earth "strewn with cadavers." He evoked for his listeners the specter of the slave uprising, in which three hundred thousand slaves metamorphosed into three hundred thousand armed men who ravaged the countryside. "What do I see? ... black men! ... the homicidal arrow in your hands!" The traffickers in man had created a monster of slavery indistinguishable from its manifestation as black rage.^[64]

Just as Dufay had evoked black passion only to reconstruct paternal authority, Chaumette lowered the curtain on black rage and opened it on a panorama of French nationalism. Now that the conventionnels , "ministers of the morality of the nations," had listened to the voice of nature and passed the "Immortal" emancipation decree, the slaves, Chaumette

[62] The antislavery missionary Abbé Sibire considered the destruction of the African family one the most powerful images in his antislavery arsenal. See, for instance, his description of a young wife and mother who was attacked while tending her fields and pushed violently "toward the abyss" (L'Aristocratie négrière , 57–58). Sibire left to the imagination of his audience the "épouvantables disgraces" suffered by the young wife at the hands of her "inflexible ravishers," and in the process sexualized her maternal sufferings.

[63] Chaumette, Discours , 13–14, 16.

[64] Ibid., 17–19.

promised, would respond with loyalty and gratitude. Now, he urged, was the time for the remaining black insurgents to abandon their English and Spanish allies, join the republican forces, and adopt as their battle cry "France" and the "National Convention." Linking an emancipatory French nationalism to traditions of resistance among men of color, he advised freedmen to erect a monument "as simple as [their] hearts" to honor the "male virtues" and martyrdom of Ogé, inscribed "Decree of the National Convention That Abolished Slavery."^[65] Chaumette thus redrew the boundaries of the French body politic from the common manhood of citizens and former slaves. His address, like the Code Noir discussed by Joseph Roach in this volume, constituted "an act of incorporation, an expansion of the body politic," which, unlike its precedents, reconstructed difference along a divide marked by gender rather than by color. But Chaumette's discursive metamorphosis of slaves into French subjects left even freedmen something short of citizens. Fraternity, he warned, could not immediately obliterate all distinctions among men. Too sudden an ascent into liberty in the new republican order might "excite among the [former slaves] movements that could be fatal, for them" and, significantly, "for us." Just as passengers allow the pilot to guide the ship, freedmen should "celebrate the eternal designs of nature" and count on the "experience" and the "paternal solicitude" of the National Convention. "Vive Egalité! Vive Liberté!"^[66]

It would appear that fraternity had foundered on the shoals of paternalism. Chaumette's speech invested the conventionnels with guardianship of the paternal powers stripped from the master class, not to mention the king. His attempt, like Dufay's, to reconcile "the sacred laws of nature" with the "principles of civilization" and the "rights of man" subjected slaves' passions to a definition of civilization predicated on a strict labor regime under French national authority. The discourses of emancipation thus add another dimension to Lynn Hunt's analysis of the family romance of the Revolution: the patriarchal order of the Old Regime suppressed by the Revolution seems to have emerged in a different incarna-

[65] Ibid., 20–21.

[66] Ibid., 21–22. Chaumette's speech bears comparison with the female antislavery discourses of the time. See, for example, Olympe de Gouges, who, self-identified as a royalist and a patriot, angrily denies that she is the pawn of the Amis des Noirs, in Réponse au champion américain, ou Colon très aisé à connaître (n.p., [1790]). Cf. Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1760–1834 (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

tion as paternalism in the colonies.^[67] In Chaumette's understanding, civilization was inseparable from the reconstitution of masculine authority in the Convention. Slavery was annihilated at the moment the "oracle of truth" sounded in the "breast" of that "assembly of wise men."^[68] Although freedmen forced themselves on the stage as (albeit unwanted) actors in Dufay's historical drama, in Chaumette's text they served as objects, never subjects, of the civilizing process.

Meanwhile, in Chaumette's speech, as in Dufay's, freedwomen's silence spoke loudly indeed. Chaumette proposed no statues of heroines to stand beside the martyr Ogé. Amid the language of fraternity and paternalism, women seemed to vanish not only from the category "brother," but also from the category "slave," emerging from the shadows only occasionally—and then often in tears. Nonetheless, as we have seen, his remapping of the French body politic in the Temple of Reason conjoined debates over slavery and sex. Chaumette cast slave women in cameo roles as ravished wives and despairing (but model) mothers to expose the slave system as the essence of savagery and the antithesis of nature—a project to his mind inseparable from the construction of domesticity as measure of the triumph of French civilization.

Over the course of the previous year, Chaumette himself had played an instrumental role in encouraging French women to act in accordance with their domestic nature. In his capacity as procureur of the Paris Commune, he had served on the committee that interrogated Marie Antoinette's daughter in the search for evidence that the "Austrian wolf" had committed incest with her son. Although the incest charge was never proven, the Revolutionary Tribunal convicted the former queen on grounds that mirrored the charges in the pamphlet literature.^[69] Marie Antoinette, as constructed in the acte d'accusation , was at root a femme sauvage , as ready as her cannibalistic African counterpart to immolate the republic's "first-born child, liberty."^[70] The queen's execution was followed in short order by the closing of women's political clubs and the trial and execution of the Girondin salonnière Madame Roland and playwright Olympe de Gouges, also accused of abandoning the "duties of their sex." On 27 Brumaire Year II (17 November 1793), a group of women wearing the red cap of liberty appeared before the Commune to protest the closure of women's political clubs. Lynn Hunt's essay in this volume helps

[67] Hunt, Family Romance .

[68] Chaumette, Discours , 4.

[69] Hunt, Family Romance , 89–123.

[70] Elizabeth Colwill, " 'Just Another Citoyenne'? Marie-Antoinette on Trial, 1790–93," History Workshop 28 (autumn 1989): 63–87.

explain the jeering that broke out in the galleries at the sight of these women, for their controversial dress and political demands called into question the very boundaries of the new French body politic. On this occasion, it was Chaumette who mastered the day by condemning women's liberty caps as an "insult to nature" that justified women's exclusion from the proceedings. When a member of the crowd protested, Chaumette interrupted with the voice of moral authority. "Since when," he demanded, is "it permitted to give up one's sex?" Morals, enforced by the laws of man, had their foundation in the laws of nature. "Is it to men that nature confided domestic cares? Has she given us breasts to breast-feed our children? No, she has said to man: 'Be a man: hunting, farming, political concerns, toils of every kind, that is your appanage .' She has said to woman: 'Be a woman. The tender cares owing to infancy, the details of the household, the sweet anxieties of maternity, these are your labors.' " The record reports that the women replaced their red caps with "a headdress suitable to their sex."^[71] The Commune unanimously banned women's deputations from presenting their requests before the Council.

Chaumette's words represented far more than mere regression to the patriarchalism of the Old Regime. When he constructed "the divinity of the domestic sanctuary" against the excessive appetites and ambitions of unnatural women, he redefined the boundaries of civilization itself. The law would have its way. Shorn of the femme sauvage in her multiple and threatening incarnations, the full rights of citizenship would remain exclusively male.^[72] The new contours of the French body politic were thus chiseled, in part, on the feminine form: the transgressive bodies of the femme sauvage and the quiescent body of the mother, slave and free. The republican project of domesticity, expressed overtly in the Marie Antoinette pornography and covertly in the antislavery literature, did not repress sexuality in one set of feminine bodies to project onto another; it invested certain bodies with sexual aggression and others with a supine, titillating passivity. The antislavery literature's aching maternal breasts and ravished wives—victims of the savage passions of the planters—stood at the opposite end of the spectrum from Marie Antoinette's orgiastic frenzy, but both were cast within a sexual script that by 1793 sought to define fraternity through the exclusion of women.

To represent this story solely as women's defeat by a masculine frater-

[71] Actes de la Commune de Paris, 1793–1794 , 27–28 Brumaire Year II, nos. 145–46, preface by Albert Soboul (Paris: EDHIS, 1975).

[72] Réimpression de l'Ancien Moniteur (Paris, 1847), 18:450–51, in Women in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1795 , ed. Darline Gay Levy, Harriet Branson Applewhite, and Mary Durham Johnson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 219–20.

nity, however, would be to simplify the transformation of the body politic wrought by the dual revolutions. Revolutionary pornography, the forcible domestication of the femmes du peuple , and the subjection of freedmen to the authority of the French Convention were all part of a broader republican project to domesticate passions, to discipline the uncivilized body, and to recast difference. Chaumette had begun his speech for the festival of emancipation with a parable that traced the fall of man from the paradise of patriarchalism and "primitive morals" to the moment at which man first deviated from nature's dictates. The "degradation and debasement of the human species" that followed was an age of "absolute empire" in which passions reigned and slavery made wild beasts of men.^[73] In the cathartic moment of emancipation, the conventionnels mastered the passions unleashed in the age of despotism: explicitly, those of the slaves and their masters; but implicitly, those of the courtiers, priests, and queens exposed in multiple revealing postures in the pornographic pamphlets. Chaumette's speech provides a window on this process through which the early modern order founded on an organic hierarchy of masters and slaves, king and subjects, husbands and wives, was displaced by a structure of power rooted in the "incontestable" ground of a normalized body, male and female, white and nonwhite.^[74] The transformation of the French body politic was predicated on the elimination of the older "primitive" hierarchy of orders. The repression of "public woman," then, was just one element of the reconfiguration of difference, which assumed the defeat of the old master classes in their various guises as sodomitical monks, merchants of flesh, and aristocratic femmes sauvages .^[75]

Nor did legislation against women's political organizations involve the repression of "the female subject" in any simple or linear sense. The Jacobins who excluded women from full rights of citizenship would enlist the category "woman" in the revolutionary war of civilization against savagery. The feminine breast or heart in tandem with the masculine mind would colonize the new corps social . The vision assumed a new understanding of nature itself. In early modern Europe, medicine, religion, and

[73] Chaumette, Discours , 1–3.

[74] My evidence is consistent with David Brion Davis's case for the United States that "both parties in the Revolutionary debate helped to make race the central excuse for slavery" and that "antislavery. ideology had less to do with race per se than with the discipline of a potentially disruptive lowest class" (Problem of Slavery , 303–4), but it shifts the emphasis to discursive constructions that elide class in race.

[75] Cf. Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).

law posited woman as inferior to man and superimposed the dichotomies civilization/nature and man/woman on the same vertical axis. By 1793 the axes had shifted in a manner that appeared to rehabilitate both Woman and Nature. Woman, in fulfilling her domestic role, would become an agent of civilization and a link between man and nature.^[76] It was a role that offered certain female subjects new possibilities. But which women could properly act the part that nature had assigned? The common physical space occupied by universal Woman and Nature, reconfigured within the realm called Civilization, defined a normative ideal that assumed the bifurcation of both Nature and Woman, not to mention Man. Nature, long understood as civilization's inverse, splintered in the modern era, one part conflated with the imperatives of civilization, the other cast back into a state of savagery.

This was the fractured "natural" landscape in which Chaumette sought to locate the newly emancipated slaves. But for which side of nature—the savage or the civilized—were they suited? The rationale for emancipation rested on an argument of fraternity that assumed the freedmen's humanity. Chaumette, however, considered freedmen, brothers or no, unprepared for the responsibilities of citizenship. His political challenge, then, that day at the Temple of Reason, was to place them deep enough within the realm of savagery to avert any claim to immediate equality, yet on the road toward enlightenment, so as to vindicate the emancipation proclamation and the promise of revolution. Chaumette followed a pragmatic script that begged the question of the "nature" of difference between slaves and citizens. Insofar as he framed his argument for emancipation in terms of the radical implications of fraternity, freedmen appeared as quintessential "new men," symbols of a regenerated French civilization. Insofar as he resorted to paternalism, he assimilated blacks into the civilizing process, but not fully into civilization itself. The freedwoman was of use in his text only in that her abused body provided proof of the outrage of slavery. Reconstructed on the model of European domesticity, the freedwoman would provide a bridge between nature-as-savagery and nature-as-civilization.

But a relationship between men conceived as both fraternal embrace and paternal surveillance was unstable from its inception. As Napoleon's quest for empire severed the revolutionary partnership of fraternity, liberty, and equality, the passageway that Chaumette had envisioned from savagery to civilization narrowed. Napoleon's genocidal campaign to re-

[76] See Schiebinger, "Why Mammals Are Called Mammals," in Nature's Body , 40–74.

store slavery in the colonies with an armada and a force of twenty thousand men marked the decisive end of France's brief flirtation with the implications of fraternity. Reports of the black "atrocities" committed in the bloody war of liberation that ensued provided many Frenchmen with evidence of a "natural" savagery that they found more compelling than the claim to common humanity. If the Jacobins had contributed to the process of naturalizing gender difference, Napoleon institutionalized gender and racial inequality as he cynically restored slavery in Guadeloupe and Martinique under the banner of revolution.^[77] Make no mistake, Napoleon's racial empire constituted an outright betrayal of the radical program of Jacobins like Chaumette who castigated the slave system as "a vast cancer." Nonetheless, one can find in the emancipatory vocabulary of Chaumette and Dufay a precedent for linking authoritarianism, in its diverse manifestations, in France and its colonies. Precisely because they inverted rather than abandoned the trope of civilization and savagery, because they sacrificed fraternity to tutelage in the interest of metropolitan profits, because they linked "natural" sex subordination to a "naturalized" colonial program, Napoleon's initiative could have appeared to many nineteenth-century French nationals consistent with both natural law and revolutionary nationalism.^[78]

Just as the slave insurrection of 1791 shaped in fundamental ways Dufay's vision of the French body politic, the world-shaking war of liberation by the freedmen and -women in Saint-Domingue who proclaimed themselves the liberators of blacks and established the first independent black nation in the western hemisphere marked the limits of Napoleon's racial empire.^[79] But these victories did not prevent nineteenth-century Eu-

[77] See David Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour, and National Independence in Haiti (New York: Macmillan Caribbean, 1979). According to Cohen, French Encounter with Africans , 119, Napoleon not only banned Antillean blacks and people of mixed race from entering France, he also ordered General Leclerc to deport from Saint-Domingue white women who had sexual contact with blacks.

[78] On the ways in which European women both resisted and were implicated within domestic and racial ideologies, see Nussbaum, Torrid Zones ; Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, eds., Women, "Race," and Writing in the Early Modern Period (London: Routledge, 1994); Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others ; and Doris Y. Kadish and Françoise Massardier-Kenney, Translating Slavery: Gender and Race in French Women's Writing, 1783–1823 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1994).

[79] In the process, they subverted the meaning of racial privilege. As Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier , 13, 35–36, has argued, Haitians used race as the basis for their claims for independence, and defined all Haitians as black in their first constitution. See also Hilary McD. Beckles, " 'An Unnatural and Dangerous Independence': The Haitian Revolution and the Political Sociology of Caribbean Slavery," Journal of Caribbean History 25 (1991): 160–77.

ropeans from imagining a physical geography of the body in a manner that inscribed European superiority. As revolutionary openings to equality narrowed, the more rigid became the triangulation of a physical geography that posited the brain (European male) and heart (European female) as forces of civilization whose role was to hold the (black) nether regions in check. Within this European map of a global body politic, black woman had no designated space; or rather, given her irreducibility to a single point within that map, she was fractured, like nature itself.^[80] During the years of slave insurrection, antislavery writers domesticated her, while the planters magnified her sexuality to monstrous proportions.^[81] Nineteenth-century Frenchmen, following political winds, would either assimilate her with both nature and civilization as noble (but domestic) savage or cast her back to nature as a sexualized femme sauvage . The ideal of passionlessness and new "scientific" evidence of racial difference etched a deep and "natural" divide between European and non-European women.^[82] Even the "wild girl of Champagne," to whom some attributed Antillean origins, could reform, repent her state of savagery, and come clean after several washings.^[83] The European woman might fall from virtue, betraying her destiny and her nature, but only the foreign femme sauvage was ineluctably associated with the primitive, her sexual essence a marker that placed her outside the bounds of womanhood itself.

[80] On man as universal racial subject and the equation of "universal woman" with middle-class European women, see Schiebinger, Nature's Body , 148, 181.

[81] During the Revolution in Saint-Domingue, the femme sauvage of African origin has a particular symbolic resonance for the planters, but she is absent from the rhetoric of Chaumette, for whom the femme sauvage of aristocratic origins proved a more compelling target.

[82] Nussbaum, Torrid Zones , 47–48; Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereo-types of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Ludmilla Jordonova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine Between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).

[83] Douthwaite, "Rewriting the Savage," 165.