by Tom Reiss
In 1776, the year Thomas-Alexandre arrived in France, a new proposal was drafted to respond to the issue of blacks and mixed-race people. The problem, it said, was that lawyers and philosophers had turned slavery into a referendum on ancient French rights and current politics. It repeated Poncet’s old diagnosis—the issue was not one of slavery but of race—and it proposed a new solution.
On August 9, 1777, King Louis XVI decreed the Police des Noirs, a comprehensive legal code whose chilling goal had been brazenly stated in an early draft: “In the end, the race of negroes will be extinguished in the kingdom.”
The Police des Noirs established “depots”—prisons, essentially, or proto-concentration camps—in the eight main French ports, for holding blacks and people of color brought onto French soil or found to be living in France illegally. The idea was to circumvent the whole fifty-year tradition of freedom trials by refusing to allow blacks into France at all: the depots were on French soil but were explicitly extraterritorial, so that the freedom principle could not apply to them. The Police des Noirs also called for rounding up all slaves who could be found to have entered illegally before 1777, for removal to the depots and subsequent deportation.
Surprisingly, the Parlement of Paris did not take a stand against these new laws. Part of the problem was that the concept of race itself was still quite new: the high court had no tradition of defending the rights of blacks per se, except as either slave or free. Persecution based purely on skin color had not been examined judicially, or, like slavery, had been used widely as a metaphor for oppression. This was a concern to Parisian gentlemen of color like Thomas-Alexandre and Saint-Georges, because it meant their status could be legally revoked, with no recourse.
In 1778, the Police des Noirs laws were supplemented by two orders. One required “colored” subjects living in Paris to carry a special certificate, with name, age, and owner (if slave). The other forbade “white” subjects from marrying “blacks, mulattos, or people of color”—a longtime goal of the hard-core racist lobby. In 1780, as Thomas-Alexandre turned eighteen, the king issued a new law prohibiting people of color from using the titles Sieur or Dame (“Sir” or “Madame”). Saint-Georges remained a chevalier—and Thomas-Alexandre was a count—but neither could use “Sir” before his name without risking arrest.
Like so many initiatives in the last years of the Ancien Régime, the new race laws were poorly administered. In this sense, the rule of kings offered a kind of humanity in inefficiency. It would take the rise of a different kind of leader, two decades later—Napoleon Bonaparte—for the depots to become efficient. And by then blacks and people of color in France would have experienced true freedom and thus feel the full pain of knowing what it meant to lose it.
* The Sun King’s famous statement “L’État, c’est moi”—“I am the state”—was supposedly made during an argument he had with the Parlement of Paris. Indeed, Louis XIV managed largely to suppress the parlements. After his death in 1715, however, the noble law courts reasserted themselves, and most important government rules were made not on the king’s whim but rather based on the extensive study of French “customary law.” Unlike France’s modern legal system, based on the Napoleonic Code, the Ancien Régime system relied heavily on precedent: France was governed through maxims distilled by lawyers examining hundreds of years’ worth of paper. Absent a legislative body like England’s Parliament, these French high courts not only interpreted the law, they wrote it. The power and independence of the Ancien Régime courts is all but forgotten today.
† Until the Somerset decision, which was itself influenced by the many court cases in Paris, British courts passed only contradictory rulings on slavery and British lawmakers avoided passing laws on the subject. In the Thirteen Colonies, slaves actually had some luck petitioning for their freedom in various colonies, such as Massachusetts and even Virginia, but they found no consistent precedents defending the right to freedom, or courts that could decide the issue on more than a local or regional basis.
‡ More than a century later, the American slave Dred Scott would try a version of this, claiming that his periodic residence in free territories should mean that he could not legally be kept in bondage. The United States Supreme Court ruled, in 1857, that Scott, as a person with African ancestry, was not a citizen, and therefore could not even bring suit, and that blacks, were “regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations.” Justice Campbell, writing for the majority, attacked the decision in the Boucaux case.
§ The widespread registration that the ordinance required left a detailed historical snapshot of the black population of Paris at the time: the majority who registered came from Saint-Domingue and other West Indian islands; 25 percent came from colonial outposts around the Indian Ocean (in Mozambique, Madagascar, India, etc.), while only 10 percent came from West Africa and about 6 percent from North America. Men outnumbered women three to one, and 27 percent of the registrants identified themselves as free.
5
AMERICANS IN PARIS
THOUGH Thomas-Alexandre was dark-skinned and clearly of African descent, his looks were not disparaged by his contemporaries; rather, they were admired and celebrated. “One of the handsomest men you could ever meet,” a 1797 profile would declare, whose “interesting physiognomy is accompanied by a gentle and gracious manner.” His “dark—very dark” looks and non-European features were taken not as signs of primitive inferiority—as they would be in nearly every time and place over the next two hundred years—but rather as echoes of antiquity, when the great civilizations had been the melting pots of the ancient world. “His frizzy hair recalls the curls of the Greeks and Romans,” the 1797 profile announced. In this period of neoclassicism, no compliment was higher.
His proportions were those of a Greek hero as well: wide shoulders, a slim waist, and powerful, well-shaped legs. He was “well built at a time when it was an advantage to be well built,” his son would write. “At the time of his marriage … his leg was the same width as my mother’s waist.” (In a reversal of later eras, well-proportioned legs were then far more important for men, who went around in tights or breeches, than for women, whose legs were hidden beneath floor-length gowns.) Thomas-Alexandre was tall—nearly six foot one when the average height was around five and a half feet—and his strength would be compared to Hercules’s, though his hands and feet were said to be as delicate as those of the ladies he escorted about town.
Thomas-Alexandre’s looks were the perfect calling card for an age that regarded a man’s physique as a sign of virtue as well as vigor, and when even a city man spent much of his time on horseback and might dance the evening away with a grace that can today be seen only onstage. His natural gifts allowed him to do all these things as well as or better than youths who had been born to the life.
“In the midst of the elegant youth of that period,” his son would write, “among the Fayettes, the Lameths, the Dillons, the Lauzuns, who were all his companions, my father lived as a true gentleman’s son.” In addition to all the new skills he was picking up, many of the things he’d done as a boy in the Great Cove highlands now stood him in good stead. Though the animals and the terrain were different, the hunt was the favored sport of French gentlemen, being viewed as the best means of staying fit for battle. (It was Louis XVI’s favorite activity, along with tinkering with clocks and door locks.) After a hunt there might be feasting at a neighbor’s château, or even at a palace, where the menu could include a dozen hors d’oeuvres along with as many dishes of fish, fowl, and game and, of course, wines, soups, desserts, dessert soups, and more wines. The setting might be enhanced by waterfalls, topiary gardens, artificial lakes, fireworks, and outdoor theater, with the most beautiful music seeming to rise out of the earth itself, owing to the fashion for concealing orchestras in dug-out pits (the opposite of modern gatherings, where live music adds prestige).
Thomas-Alexandre wa
s living a life that earlier Davys could only have dreamed of. When Antoine was his age, he—like his brothers—had learned swordsmanship not at a fencing academy but at war. None of his own father’s generation had had an income that did any more than maintain the property in Caux.
Antoine fully supported his son’s lavish lifestyle, perhaps in vicarious wish fulfillment. He may also have relished scandalizing his niece’s stuffy husband, the Count de Maulde, whose former fortune Antoine and Thomas-Alexandre were now disposing of as quickly as possible. They had made it to Paris, the capital of the empire, of the world—of everything! Here they drank Dominguan coffee with Dominguan sugar out of cups plated with Peruvian silver and Guinea gold. Here was where all the products of the empire ended up, and here they’d ended up, too.
Thomas-Alexandre could enrapture his hosts with tales of the colonial frontier, of facing down alligators and pirates. Beyond his looks, his grace, and his charm, what may have made him most attractive in this rarefied world was that he was “an American.”
In late-eighteenth-century France, the term “American” was usually used synonymously with “man of color.” He was from the American sugar islands, and was thus a former slave or the son of a slave. Thomas-Alexandre was newly arrived, while the Chevalier de Saint-Georges had left the islands over a quarter century before, but it made no difference: both would always be “Americans” in Paris. The term was laden with implications, of adulation or contempt, but always denoted much more than a birthplace. From 1778 onward, it had a new meaning: “comrade-in-arms.”
A handful of white British colonists living in Paris were also “Americans” (though going strictly by the French definition they were Creoles), and in early February 1778 France entered into a formal alliance with them to help them win their independence from England. The alliance was negotiated by Benjamin Franklin, whom Parisians affectionately nicknamed the “electrical ambassador,” and signed by young King Louis XVI, who thus became, with irony too delicious for anyone to mention, the world’s prime sponsor of antimonarchist insurgency and revolution.
Louis XVI’s government supported the Americans to get back at England for France’s humiliating defeat in the Seven Years’ War—for the loss of French North America and humiliation in French India. To the ministers in Versailles, the American War of Independence was the latest battle in the global war for trade and colonial power that the two countries had been fighting for a century. England had knocked France out of the Americas in 1763. France hoped to return the favor in 1778.
But the aristocratic French officers who volunteered for the American cause—the Marquis de Lafayette being only the most prominent of many—had more personal reasons than geopolitics. There was a certain restlessness, since over a decade of peace had meant few chances to prove one’s mettle; all that training at La Boëssière’s wasn’t meant merely for garden duels. The war in America might be their sole chance for the thrill of battle. Still deeper than their desire for combat was this generation’s desire to experience the exciting political concept the Americans had practically made their own: patriotism.*
To be a “patriot” was all the rage in Paris. And no one admired the American patriots more than the liberal members of the French aristocracy, who saw the proud colonists as standing up to the despotism of George III. The French nobles particularly identified with the American colonists’ “antitax” message.† Like slavery, the American cause had become a metaphor for what Frenchmen felt about their own condition, another proxy for the struggle of the enlightened nobility against the backward monarchy. (This also marked the beginning of the French love/hate relationship with America.)
Suddenly Paris fashion—that bellwether for the French mind—had to be à l’Amérique: tailors manufactured “insurgent coats” and “lightning-conductor dresses” (in honor of Ben Franklin, with two wires hanging to the ground). Hairdressers created coiffures à la Boston and à la Philadelphie. The queen’s milliner created a hat à la John Paul Jones—it featured the kind of showy plume the queen had declared she wanted to stick in the cap of the American naval hero—as well as one that was a fully armed sailing ship, perfect down to the rigging, masts, and cannon, in honor of a recent naval battle with the British. It was a small but telling sign of the growing cognitive dissonance when, by year’s end, the Paris police forbade the name of the newest hairdo—aux insurgents—though not the coiffure itself. This only made the style more popular.
But while Versailles tried to suppress the mere word “insurgent” at home, in its support of insurgency abroad it never looked back. Only the full tonnage and firepower of the French navy made the American Revolution more than a glorious pipedream. While Americans view the Revolutionary War as a conflict fought from Maine to Florida, France actually forced Britain to fight the Revolution as a world war, defending its outposts in India, Jamaica, and Africa. The British had to divert most of their celebrated navy from the American coast to defend against French attacks elsewhere.‡
Thomas-Alexandre and La Boëssière’s other students could follow news of the adventures of France’s finest on the battlefields of Massachusetts, New York, Maryland, and Virginia as the French navy terrorized the British from the West Indies to the Bay of Bengal. And when the young Viscount Louis-Marie de Noailles, a neighbor from Saint-Germain-en-Laye, was given a role by General Washington in negotiating the British surrender at Yorktown (alongside an American negotiator), it was a final emblem of the importance of French aid in winning the American Revolution.
Thus the oldest great monarchy in the West assured the establishment of the first great republic since ancient times. In the process, Versailles bankrupted itself. In 1781 alone, the Crown spent 227 million livres, a huge portion of its budget, on the American cause; its naval costs alone were five times their normal peacetime levels. No one has ever determined exactly how Louis XVI’s government came up with the money, but clearly it involved borrowing on a massive scale.
The peace deal that ended the Revolutionary War was negotiated in Paris, but France got little more for its decisive help than Britain’s return of Senegal. (Owing to some bizarre diplomacy, Spain received far more territory in the New World.) “France retained glory and ruin” from its American adventure, wrote the historian Michelet. The French monarchy’s reputation was never higher than during the celebrations of the Anglo-American treaty in Paris in 1783.
President George Washington hung a full-length portrait of Louis XVI on his wall at Mount Vernon, and American patriotic commemorations featured toasts to the French king as “the protector of the rights of mankind,” as well as to “the Count de Rochambeau and French army.” For some years, the French king’s birthday was even celebrated as one of the United States’ first national holidays.
But there was something fundamentally off kilter about the most powerful monarchy in Europe being feted as the champion of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It was not, as we now say, a sustainable situation.
The musket-toting patriot was the new chivalric knight, tilting at tyrannical redcoats. Fashionable Paris gentlemen joined Le Club de Boston ou des Américains, founded by the Duke d’Orléans, returning from a trip to England in a mood of revolutionary insouciance.
Yet, while the American Revolution would later come to be seen as a model of decorum—mainly because of its contrast with the bloody French Revolution that followed it—men like Lafayette worried that their countrymen would go wrong in revolution not by being too violent but by being too meek. “French affairs are harder to resolve because the people of this country seem in no way ready to turn to extreme measures,” he wrote to Washington. “ ‘Liberty or death’ is not a fashionable motto on this side of the Atlantic.”
Eighteenth-century French intellectuals embraced the American Revolution in much the way twentieth-century French intellectuals would embrace the Russian Revolution and its offshoots—wholeheartedly. Just as their modern counterparts would talk away the oppressions of Communist r
egimes, so did eighteenth-century French intellectuals defend the new United States against charges—loudest from England, of course—of hypocrisy on the issue of slavery. What did it mean to declare all men free and equal if the patriots continued to keep slaves? Many of the Founding Fathers themselves foresaw that their compromise with southern states was a poison pill that would eventually lead to tragedy. But the French stalwarts of the new America found every way of glossing over the problem. Paris theaters staged plays about the idyllic life in Virginia, where black slaves and their masters sang songs of liberty as they worked together side by side.
AS Thomas-Alexandre grew up, he spent ever more time in Paris, only a three-hour coach ride away. The City of Light must have offered many temptations after nightfall on its newly lit streets; in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, there were no streetlights at all, whereas Paris sported candlelit lamps and even brand-new oil lamps to defy the dark—even if the idea still outstripped the technology. At a distance the streetlamps “dazzle, but close to give little light, and standing underneath you can hardly see your hand before you,” wrote the memoirist Louis-Sébastien Mercier, who recorded his observations throughout the 1780s. Where streetlights failed, there were lanternmen. The lanternmen—numbered, so the police could keep track of them—waited around the doors of townhouses in Paris whenever an entertainment was going on inside, and, for a few coins, one of them would accompany a reveler home, lighting his way even up the stairs and into his room. But, of course, any young gentleman like Thomas-Alexandre had a lackey to do this.