“They Themselves Contribute to Their Misery by Their Sloth”: The Justification of Slavery in Eighteenth-Century French Travel Narratives

Abstract

In 1677, France took the slave trading island of Gorée located off the coast of Senegal from the Dutch and, less than a decade later, drafted Le Code Noir (1685) to formally provide regulations for slave owning practices. This document—created in response to the rapid expansion of the slave economy in French Caribbean possessions made possible by France's position in West Africa—marked the beginning of French involvement in the slave trade. The comparison of French travel narratives written before and after Le Code Noir, shows that, although the descriptions of Sub-Saharan Africa tended to be universally derogatory and Eurocentric, it was not until France became deeply involved in the slave trade that the specific characterization of Africans as lazy emerged. By correlating published descriptions of African laziness with France's growing participation in the slave trade, this paper argues that these portrayals were used to justify slavery to a French public far removed from Africa, Africans, and the ugly realities of the slave trade.

Acknowledgement

This paper was presented at the conference, “Power and Image in Early Modern Europe,” hosted by the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, at New York University, 7–8 April 2006.

Notes

NOTES

1. William Renwick Riddell, “Le Code Noir,” The Journal of Negro History 10.3 (1925): 325.

2. William Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans: White Response to Blacks, 1530–1880 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1980), 1; Christopher Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 26–27.

3. Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans, 33.

4. Miller, Blank Darkness, 63.

5. Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans, 7.

6. Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow, The Africa That Never Was: Four Centuries of British Writing about Africa (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970).

7. Peter Mark, “Fetishers, ‘Marybuckes,’ and the Christian Norm: European Images of Senegambians and Their Religions,” African Studies Review 23.2 (1980): 94.

8. Ibid., 93.

9. Michel Adanson, A Voyage to Senegal, The Isle of Goree, and the River Gambia … Translated From the French. With Notes by an English Gentleman, who Resided some Time in that Country (London, 1759), vii.

10. Louis-Pierre Anquetil, A Summary of Universal History; Exhibiting the Rise, Decline, and Revolutions of the Different Nations of the World, From the Creation to the Present Time, 9 vols. (London, 1800), 196.

11. Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans, 10–11; Genesis 9.18–27 (JPS Hebrew–English Tanakh).

12. It is possible that Anquetil's version may have arisen from the Moorish population in Sub-Saharan Africa, as they would have been versed in the Bible as well as the Koran. However, it seems unlikely that Moors would create a myth that placed them in an inferior position to Europeans.

13. Anquetil, A Summary of Universal History, 195, 196.

14. Vincent Le Blanc, The World Surveyed, or The Famous Voyages and Travailes of Vincent le Blanc, or White, of Marseilles … Originally Written in French, and Faithfully Rendered into English by F.B. Gent (London, 1660), 178.

15. Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans, 1.

16. Ibid., xxiv.

17. Nicholas Villault de Bellefond, A Relation of the Coasts of Africk Called Guinee with a Description of the Countreys, Manners and Customs of the Inhabitants … Being Collected in a Voyage Made By the Sieur Villault, Escuyer, Sieur de Bellefond, in the Years 1666, and 1667. Written in French, and Faithfully Englished (London, 1670), 28.

18. Ibid., 224.

19. J. D. Fage and William Tordoff, A History of Africa, 4th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002), 249–50.

20. Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 78.

21. Jacques-Joseph Le Maire, A Voyage of the Sieur Le Maire to the Canary Islands, Cape-Verd, Senegal and Gamby, under Monsieur Dancourt, Director-General of the Royal African Company. Printed at Paris this Present Year 1695. And now Faithfully done into English (London, 1696), 66, 78.

22. Ibid., 89.

23. Ibid., 33.

24. Martin A. Klein, “Social and Economic Factors in the Muslim Revolution in Senegambia,” The Journal of African History 13.3 (1972): 428–29.

25. Le Maire, A Voyage of the Sieur Le Maire, 51.

26. Thora G. Stone, “The Journey of Cornelius Hodges in Senegambia, 1689–90,” The English Historical Review 39.153 (1924): 95.