Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire: State, Church, and Society, 1604–1830

It would have been nice to be able to claim that this remarkable study was the “best of the bunch.” Unfortunately, I cannot do that. On this vine there is no bunch, only two grapes, and the other one is much more specific (Nelson 2016). This study tackles a subject not previously treated in an appropriately scholarly manner.

Gauvin Alexander Bailey’s new book takes as its subject the built environments of the entire French Atlantic world. It is a history unlike others. Any history that taps into severely underutilized sources of documentation and reveals them through a panorama of seldom-seen historic maps, city plans, art, and written documents, set as handsome large-format illustrations, is rare, indeed. One that integrates the contributions of all levels of society from the indigenous and the enslaved, to trained military engineers, architects, city planners, priests, and colonial administrators is an exemplar of its genre. One that offers new interpretations of the processes of culture building across an entire hemisphere rises to essential reading for geographers, anthropologists, historians, and Americanists. Insert all of this into the format of a smaller coffee-table book in which all illustrations are published in full color, and the study becomes an essential holding for libraries everywhere, both private and public.

Bailey sets out to describe the contributions of French professional and vernacular architects, engineers, city planners, military engineers, and religious and private builders, free people of color and enslaved blacks, to the landscapes of the French Atlantic world in the colonial period. This is important work. No other writer to my knowledge has attempted to interpret the contributions of professionals, artisans, and mechanics over so broad an area and across such an extensive time period.

Bailey is Professor and Alfred and Isabel Bader Chair in Southern Baroque Art at Queen’s University. This is his ninth single-authored book. He specializes in Renaissance, Baroque, and religious art in Latin America, but also in the Caribbean. For this study he gathered documents from a wide variety of archives and libraries in France, Great Britain, Holland, and the Americas. Some 294 documents and photographs of historic places adorn this handsome volume.

No other study attempts such a broad overview of French colonial cultural landscapes in the Atlantic world. The topics of Bailey’s seventeen chapters are so varied that at first glance one would not assume they might be assembled into a single coherent study. Some of the subjects covered include the architecture of empire; the training of French architect-engineers; the influences of indigenous architecture; the roles of the enslaved, free people of color, and European designers and builders in the development of French colonial landscapes; colonial urbanism and city planning; scientific gardens with their monuments and décor; secular colonial architecture; religious colonial architecture; vernacular architecture; and competing theories of creolization and cultural diffusion in the makeup of the French colonial landscapes of the American tropics.

Bailey strictly limits the time span of his study to that of the French Empire, 1604 to 1830, although there are significant qualifications. He eschews much of the development of some of the most prolific and well-documented areas of French Atlantic world culture: French Canada, Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, and Saint-Domingue/Haiti. Because his book is about mechanisms of control over its colonial system, Bailey’s story ends whenever other nations assumed sovereignty over French colonies. French control of Canada and Louisiana ended at the end of the Seven-Years War (1763). This is unfortunate because French culture, French architecture, and French-inspired law persisted and even dominated after 1763, particularly in document-rich Louisiana, where the Spanish employed French architects and notaries, and where the culture, language of the street, and worldview of its citizens remained strongly French for a half-century thereafter.

Bailey divides French Atlantic world architecture into two broad categories: (1) the architecture of empire, in which buildings were designed under a philosophy of design with emphasis on gloire, relatively unrestrained by considerations of practicality and adaptability; and (2) postempire, mostly vernacular architecture in which French designers adapted to the realities of climate, environment, and the influences of foreign ideas. Creolized buildings were inspired mostly by Spanish and British conceptions of fitting a building to its environment. “After the departure of French colonial authorities, French forms blended more vigorously with non-French influences, resulting in completely new styles of buildings” (pp. 15–16).

Because the bulk of this study is devoted to empire and the role of colonial architects and engineers in enhancing the appeal of French civilization and French power, certain limitations arise. Through a combination of destruction and deterioration, nearly all of the built environment of the French-administrated Atlantic empire has disappeared. The predominant bulk of historic evidence survives in archives, libraries, museums, and personal collections. The several recognized biases of archival documentation cannot be balanced against physical evidence flowing from field studies, archaeology, or ethnology (Trouillot 1995, 25–28, 48–66).

Colonial vernacular architecture is treated in four chapters of this book, and forms commissioned through official orders and designed by professionals are covered in the other thirteen. With this limitation in mind, Bailey sets out to describe and explain the origins and the impacts of a lost world of French imperial creativity.

To his considerable credit, Bailey expands his perspective to tell the stories of people of color who made substantial, unacknowledged contributions to the shaping of French colonial landscapes. He asks us to keep in mind the enormous levels of racism and misery that accompanied the construction and maintenance of the churches, elegant grand palaces, and exotic gardens and planned cities—essential ingredients of the French imperialist agenda (p. 13).

Chapters 4 and 5 deal with the contributions of African slaves and free people of color, respectively. The question arises as to how a document-dependent study can adequately cover these topics for which there is so little detailed insider’s evidence. Bailey counters that some good evidence of the contributions of slaves can be obtained from court proceedings, newspapers, and traveler’s accounts, although written evidence seldom expands beyond names, occupations, and special events (being sold, running away, or being accused of a crime). He well recognizes the magnitude of the problem: “[I]t was, above all, African slaves who made possible the monuments and public spaces of the Caribbean, Louisiana, Guiana, and West Africa. … [O]ne of the main disparities between architecture in France and that of the colonies was that so much of the latter was built by African slave labour, another challenge to France’s promotion of its overseas possessions as a pure reflection and seamless extension of the metropole” (p. 94). “[S]laves did not just provide brute force. Many of them learned a trade, particularly carpentry, masonry, roofing, and joinery, most frequently in ateliers run by whites or gens de couleur” (p. 99). Unfortunately, several pages of rather brief accounts must substitute for more detailed stories about the lives and accomplishments of enslaved French builders.

The same database restrictions do not apply to the free people of color. The author examines about 100 notarial acts for people in the building trades, dated between 1770 and 1803. These enable a fuller portrait of “the personalities, training, social and family life, ethnic and cultural backgrounds—and even passions and goals—than is possible for the slave communities” (p. 106). Perhaps due to their less secure legal status, free people of color made extensive use of notaries. As such, they left a substantial archival footprint. This enables Bailey to publish for the first time some remarkable rags-to-riches stories of industrious business people who worked as builders, landlords, and estate agents, some of whom were born in Africa and who rose to assemble considerable fortunes in Cap François and other Caribbean cities (pp. 107–10). Architects, especially, will find the chapters on free people of color (Chapter 5), on white civilian architects and builders (Chapter 6), and on the Royal engineer architects (Chapter 7), of particular interest. Typical building contracts and practices are described in considerable detail.

Of interest to geographers and Caribbean historians will be chapters on urbanism and urban planning and on the creolization and the diffusion of architectural forms across the Atlantic World. In Chapters 9 and 10, the author revisits the much discussed and contested subject of the origins of the grid-plan city in the New World. He begins with Spanish grid-plan cities, emphasizing the differences between early Latin American urban plans and those of the French urban planners of the following centuries. He places less emphasis on the practical experience of the earliest city planners, in particular Nicolás de Ovando, governor of Santo Domingo, who introduced the Roman style grid-plan-plus-central-square design into the New World in his 1502 layout of (new) Santo Domingo City. Clearly this originated in large part from his experiences at the bastide of Santa Fe de Granada (1491), during the Reconquista siege of Granada under Ferdinand and Isabel. There, Ovando was a military officer (Foster 1960, 34–49). Bailey’s contribution is, rather, that of the most detailed English-language analysis of the influences of French military engineers in the layout and design of such planned cities as New Orleans, Cap François, and Port-au-Prince, among others.

The penultimate and most controversial chapter (16), summarizes Bailey’s view of the evolution and diffusion of French colonial vernacular architecture in the Atlantic world. The origin of Caribbean architectural traditions is a topic never previously adequately addressed. Given the fact that the literature on the creolization of Atlantic world material culture was not central to Bailey’s prior interests and, therefore, recently acquired, he does an excellent job of summarizing the various scholarly positions on African influence, and on the origins of creolized colonial architecture.

The several theories of the African hut are outlined: the African retentions theory, the Eurocentric labor-only theory, and the syncretic theory. The author emphasizes the fact that eighteenth-century slave houses in Saint-Domingue and other French colonies were of European form and built with European technologies, but that earlier cazes à negres (slave huts) included widely shared African-like features. He cites a couple of descriptions that partially clarify our portrait of early slave houses, but he fails to mention that prior to about 1670, slaves on most plantations were instructed to construct their own houses. This produced seemingly unorganized groupings of thatched huts of African appearance in what came to be called slave quarters. Mid-seventeenth-century observers such as de Rochefort (1666) and Ligon (1657), and more recent ethnological specialists such as Metraux (1949, 3–14), are omitted from the discussion. Here, the broadest possible collection of contemporary descriptions is essential to a balanced view. African-style slave houses have been completely erased from the landscape, leading some observers to discount African heritage in post-1670 houses, when the profits from sugar plantations permitted planters the affectation of rebuilding slave quarters in the form of neat little European villages with carefully aligned streets and roofs all pitched at the same angles. Complicating the issue is the fact that certain Iberian building traditions such as three-pole interpost wattling had already become accepted by local Africans in and around Portuguese trading posts of Upper Guinea, even before the massive influx of enslaved workers began in the seventeenth century.

The question that has “caused a more protracted and impassioned debate than any other in the field” is that of the origins of the open-air gallery (veranda, piazza) in Atlantic Creole architecture (p. 448). Bailey describes several components of this complex cultural-historical problem: Spanish architect-builders introduced north Italian-style arcaded loggias in their larger residences and public buildings as early as 1510 in Santo Domingo. Loggias were not full-length galleries of the forms found in later Spanish and French creole architecture, but almost certainly they functioned as open-air rooms. The arcaded loggia tradition was popularized quickly and spread throughout much of Spanish America (pp. 449–50), often adorning a tripartite-symmetrical floor plan.

Mark and this reviewer have previously suggested that the principal routes of diffusion of the Atlantic open-air, full-width “living gallery” began with the Creole-style houses of the Portuguese lançados (Portuguese mariner runaways) and tangomaos (their Luso-African progeny) who became the principal cultural brokers between Europeans and Africans in Upper Guinea, between 1500 and 1750 (Edwards 1980; Mark 2002). Their Creole architectural traditions were carried to Pernambuco in the sixteenth century as part of the development of the Portuguese sugar plantation complex, beginning in the Brazilian captaincy around 1550. Pernambuco was captured by the Dutch circa 1630. It was then illustrated by two Dutch landscape painters, Albert Eckhout and Franz Post, between 1637 and 1644. Together, they produced our best look at an early Atlantic world plantation landscape.

Bailey argues that the Pernambuco plantation architectural tradition was Spanish, based on the Portuguese-Dutch use of Spanish zapatas or bracket-like tops on gallery posts, and a tripartite style of building form. He states, “it is likelier that the housing types depicted in the Dutch paintings and engravings … derived from Spanish precedents originating in the south” (p. 454). This reviewer has copies of twenty-two illustrations by Post and Eckhout showing houses with galleries and chapels with front porches in Pernambuco. Almost none of the paintings and engravings show porch posts topped by zapatas, although some posts are topped by enlarged squarish tops functioning as capitals. Nor do the plantation houses of Pernambuco emphasize the rigidly symmetrical tripartite floor-plan-plus-loggia of seventeenth-century Spanish colonial houses. Most Portuguese plantation houses are, rather, raised on a full-story base and partially surrounded by open galleries. Rigid symmetry is not an overriding consideration.

Bailey also rejects the possibility that open galleries were adopted as part of the French Caribbean sugar plantation complex when the Dutch and Sephardic Jews of Pernambuco were driven out by resurgent Portuguese forces in the 1650s. Here, I believe that Bailey has neglected some of the important characteristics of long-distance diffusion of Caribbean architectural forms in creating new cultural landscapes. First, large numbers of settlers came from Portuguese posts in West Africa to Pernambuco in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. There is no evidence that any significant number of Spanish from southern Brazil or Argentina or even Spain arrived in Pernambuco in this period. Nor did the Spanish control a lucrative sugar complex such as that developed by the Portuguese in the Gulf of Guinea islands in the sixteenth century. Second, the same is true for the establishment of Creole architectural forms in the French and British Caribbean, around 1645 to 1655. Large numbers of influential settlers arrived from Pernambuco, but no new Spanish settlers arrived in the French and British West Indies. Third, there is substantial documented evidence that aspiring British West Indian planters actively sought knowledge of the sugar production complex. Some traveled to Pernambuco to learn about sugar production (Captain Henry Powell in 1627, Planter James Drax between 1642 and 1646, both sailing from Barbados to Pernambuco; Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh 1972). The same might be true for French planters, although no one to my knowledge has looked at the record. Fourth, the timing of the origins of galleried houses in the sugar islands matches relevant historical events closely. Finally, French and British sugar plantation architectural forms would not resemble those from Pernambuco perfectly, as each culture developed its own plantation architecture based on its prior vernacular traditions and building technologies. Each culture incorporated environmentally suitable features into its own existing traditions. The best example is the Atlantic world “living gallery.” The incentive for this form of adaptation was strengthened because the creolized gallery was not merely an environmental convenience; it functioned as a symbol of commercial success and hospitality across the entire Atlantic world.

Bailey concludes, “No concrete evidence has yet emerged that Sephardic sugar-specialists brought this form to French America” (p. 455). This is true enough, for now. We cannot say that this issue is settled. Sequestered in the archives of Holland, Portugal, and Brazil, much evidence awaits determined new investigators. They will need to begin with Bailey’s new study. Its scale is expansive—practically breathtaking. This is a project that could be written only by two or three specialists in the entire world, and then after many years of research. Bailey, his colleagues, and his publisher are to be congratulated for the enormous scope as well as the careful attention to detail lavished on this excellent volume. They have done an outstanding job of raising challenging issues and setting them in a remarkably handsome tome.