Highlights

Victoria Dickenson (McGill Library and Collections)

On 19 February 1766, a French engineer who had lived almost half his life in the French colony of Saint Domingue (now Haiti) sat down to paint a moth. This would not have been a remarkable event, if it had not heralded the beginning of a project of natural history that was to occupy René Gabriel de Rabié (1717-85) for the rest of his life. Over the next two decades, de Rabié painted over 300 watercolors of the flora and fauna of Saint Domingue. Now bound in four albums, the watercolors were acquired in 1930 by Casey Wood for the Blacker Wood Natural History Collection at McGill Libraries in Montreal.

The life of René Gabriel de Rabié is a minor footnote to the larger story of the French colonial enterprise in Saint Domingue, which transformed the natural and cultural environment in remarkable and appalling ways, creating a plantation economy and a slave society.[1] Of all the colonies in the French Caribbean, Saint Domingue had the highest ratio of enslaved peoples to French colonists and free people of color. The town of Cap François, with its stone architecture, public squares, gardens and fountains, some designed by de Rabié, was described as the “Paris of the Antilles,” which belied the composition of its population. Of the 15,000 inhabitants in 1790, fully two-thirds were enslaved peoples; the remaining one-third were European colonists (24%) and free people of color (10%).[2]

Around 1747, de Rabié married Anne Lebon or Le Bon, a name associated with a large Créole family in Saint-Domingue. (In the context of Saint Domingue in the eighteenth century, the term “Créole” referred to a person born in the colony, and could comprise residents of European, African, or mixed descent.^[3]) De Rabié and his family lived in a slave society. He owned numerous enslaved people who managed the house and gardens in Cap François or farmed the provisioning grounds close to the establishment of Les Pères de la Charité outside the town. There is a telling entry in the estate inventory made after de Rabié’s death in 1785: “Item, a notebook that appeared to have served the said S[ieur] Rabié as a journal in which he recorded family affairs, the births of the Blacks in his household, the proceeds and expenses….”[4] It is difficult to document the lives and activities of these unnamed workers, but we can catch glimpses of de Rabié’s extended household through brief notices in newspapers and public records.

Notices in the Saint-Domingue periodical Les Affiches Américaines reveal that De Rabié was an active participant in the buying, selling, and trading of enslaved workers. In 1774 he acted as agent for the sale of five enslaved people belonging to Jean François Vincent de Montarcher (1730-83), a former Intendant of Saint Domingue. These individuals included two coachmen, Charlot and Cesar; Louis, a maître d’hôtel and confectioner (confiseur); Laviolette, a servant and wigmaker; and Perrine, a laundress. They were available for a trial period, to be sold separately or together.[5] This notice highlights the diversity of skills that enslaved people acquired. Either recently arrived or second- and third-generation (Créole) enslaved people drove coaches, made preserves and sweets, styled wigs, and laundered and pressed clothes. Other advertisements in Affiches describe enslaved people as sailors, fishers and divers, cooks and domestics, seamstresses and tailors, saddlers and coopers, bakers, smiths, and carpenters. When de Rabié’s son and daughter-in-law left for France in spring of 1786, they advertised for sale not only their maid, who was a cook and a laundress, with her child, but also a forge, complete with four enslaved smiths.[6]

Did De Rabié’s enslaved workers assist him with the gathering of specimens or with the production of his natural history illustrations? While there is no direct evidence in the notes on his drawings, nor in any existing correspondence, it is very unlikely that de Rabié would have been able to acquire specimens or paint and name the plants and animals without the skills and knowledge of many hands, from family members to enslaved servants. When birds were procured by enslaved hunters, the skins were likely prepared by a cook or other enslaved kitchen workers. The fish caught by crews of enslaved fishers were brought back from the market by enslaved servants. The caterpillars plucked off leaves were supplied with fresh food by the gardeners, who may also have captured the butterflies on the wing.[7] Fetching and grinding pigments from the apothecaries, sharpening quills, cleaning brushes, and mixing colors were also tasks often done by enslaved domestic workers. It was not, however, only physical labor that these unnamed assistants supplied. In some cases, they also provided knowledge that de Rabié lacked.

On 3 September 1778 de Rabié painted “Le Plongeon” or “The Diver.” Like many eighteenth-century collectors, de Rabié relied on local hunters to procure birds. This bird’s awkward posture suggests he painted from a skin, but he included an unusual detail: a tiny chick tucked under the wing of the adult. On the back of the watercolor he wrote: “The female diver, this bird has a great love for her young … She hides them under her wings, diving with her young, she does not abandon them even up to her last day….”[8] The Plongeon is the Least or Antillean Grebe (Tachybaptus dominicus), called in Haitian Creole “Ti Plonjon,” still resident in the Caribbean but uncommon today in Haiti. The birds build floating nests in freshwater ponds and are notoriously shy, diving swiftly at the first sign of an intruder. Both male and female protect their young by concealing them in their feathers and even diving with them under water. This behavior was not recorded by another European naturalist until Prince Maximilien von Weid described it in Beiträge zur Naturgeschichte von Brasilien (Weimar, 1825-33). It is very unlikely that de Rabié would have seen the behavior of such an elusive bird; a hunter, however, would have had ample time to watch the bird and to capture not only the adult but also the chick. The note is unattributed, but it is easy to imagine the story told to the French engineer by an enslaved hunter who brought the bird to Cap François.

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[1] There is a large literature on Saint Domingue, particularly focused on the revolution in the 1790s. There are fewer works that examine the environment and social history of Saint Domingue before that period. These include P. Morgan et al, Sea and Land: An Environmental History of the Caribbean (2022); J. McClellan and V. Saint-Louis, Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime (1992); J. McClellan and F. Regourd, The Colonial Machine: French Science and Overseas Expansion in the Old Regime (2011); R. Anderson et al (eds.) Islands, Forests and Gardens in the Caribbean: Conservation and Conflict in Environmental History (2006). Authors writing about slave society in Saint Domingue include among others G. Debien, Les Esclaves Aux Antilles Françaises, XVIIe-XVIIIe Siècles (1974), and J. Garrigus, A Secret among the Blacks: Slave Resistance before the Haitian Revolution (2023). Londa Schiebinger has published extensively on colonial botany, and more recently on Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (2020). Science in the French Atlantic was included in J. Delbourgo and N. Dew, Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (2008).

[2] P. Morgan et al, Sea and Land: An Environmental History of the Caribbean (2022), Table 1.3

[3] ‘The term itself derives from the Spanish criollo and Portuguese crioulo, meaning someone or something usually of foreign derivation that becomes native to a new locality. Creolization thus refers to processes of exchange and adaptation …’. P. Morgan, op. cit., n.p. (online edn.).

[4] “Item un cahier qui parait avoir servi aud. S. Rabié de journal surquel il inscrivait ses affaires de famille, les naissances des nêgres de son habitation, le produit d’icelle et ses depenses…” Rabié Inventaire. The notebook has not been located. For another example of a similar notebook, see François Amable Dubreuil de Foureaux, Liste d’esclaves, 1775-1780, Bibliothèque Mazarine, Fonds Marcel Châtillon, Papiers concernant François Amable Dubreuil de Fonreaux [sic], Ant Ms 16-9; https://bibnum.institutdefrance.fr/ark:/61562/mz2737 (accessed 7 April 2023).

[5] “Quatre Nègres & une Négresse, appartenans à M. de Montarcher, ancien Intendant de Saint-Domingue, nommés Charlot, cocher; Cesar, Indien, aussi cocher; Louis, maître d’hôtel & confiseur; Laviolette, domestique & perruquier; & Perrine, blanchisseuse: on les donnera à l’essai, & on les vendra ensemble ou séparément, à la meilleure composition possible. Il faut s’adresser à M. Rabie, Ingénieur en Chef au Cap, ou à M. Rocher, fondé de pro-curation M. de Montarcher.” Affiches Américaines, 18 June 1774, p. 310. A note on “Indien”: Cesar was likely a “panis” or Amerindian slave, traded into Saint Domingue from Québec. See discussion in B. Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (Chapel Hill, 2013), pp. 165–73, pp. 299–367.

[6] “M. & Madame Rabié partent pour France du 10 au 15 du mois prochain … il vendra son fonds de boutique, consistant en deux forges bien montees, quatre Negres forgerons, bons ouvriers, & une Négresse nourrice, avec son enfant, cuisiniere, bonne blanchisseuse & repasseuse …” Affiches Américaines, 12 April 1796, p. 192.

[7] See the example of Maria Sibylla Merian, who directed her Black enslaved servant to bring her caterpillars and other insects that he found in the woods. Maria Sibylla Merian, Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, Den Haage (1726), p. 66. BHL: https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/200100 (accessed 20 October 2025).

[8] “le plongeon femelle, cet oiseau a un grand amour pour ses petites, [writing trimmed] Elle les cache sous les ailes, en plonger avec ses petits, elle ne les abandon pas mesme dernyer de celle …,” inscription on verso, “Le Plongeon” in Original water-colour paintings on the natural history of St. Domingo, vol. 1, p. 35.

Cite this post as: Victoria Dickenson, “René de Rabié, the Hunter, and the Ti Plonjon,” Colonial Networks (December 2025), https://www.colonialnetworks.org/?p=921.

Meredith Martin (NYU) and Hannah Williams (Queen Mary University of London)

Throughout 2025, we have had the honor and pleasure of working with the Haitian-born international digital and video artist, Maksaens Denis. Maksaens generously agreed to work with us to produce an animation and digital collage which will feature as the introduction and framing design for our Critical Counter Map. From the beginning, Maksaens was deeply engaged in the historical context surrounding the counter map and intuited what we are seeking to do through this remapping project. We learned so much from him and are grateful that he contributed his time, energy, and creativity to the project. We would also like to thank Florence Alexis and Pascale Monnin, who introduced us to Maksaens and his work.

Maksaens’s contemporary art practice is deeply engaged with Haitian history and its multilayered complexity. He agreed to answer some of our questions about his creative process and broader interests. We have published the interview here with the questions we posed in English, the answers Maksaens gave in French, and our English translation of those responses. We have also included an artist biography and some examples from Maksaens’ historically embedded and visually arresting œuvre.

Artist Biography

Maksaens Denis is a visual artist, born and raised in Haiti, who currently lives between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He is recognized for his activism through his artwork, creating works that speak of the dramatic economic and political situation experienced by the population in Haiti. His work deals with topics related to spirituality, Vodou, and the questions that surround it, and he is also interested in exploring homosexuality and same-sex love as well as the injustice and discrimination experienced by the LGBTQI community in Haiti. Denis’s work spans several disciplines, from installation to video art, photography, printmaking, and sculpture, and since the 90s, he has also acquired significant experience in Techno VJ-ing.

Denis is an established international artist who has exhibited worldwide in Europe, America, Africa, and Asia. He is the recipient of multiple international grants, awards, and fellowships, and is renowned as a pioneer in multi-media and digital art using mapping techniques in the Caribbean. Denis loves to play with the duality and contrast of images, and effortlessly combines a visual aesthetic inspired by electronic music, Vodou culture, and other sources. He collaborates with artists from diverse disciplines, including visual artists, filmmakers, photographers, poets, dancers, and performers, in residencies held in various countries worldwide.

Interview with Maksaens Denis

1. What can you tell us about the role that Haiti’s past plays in your work?

Avant de répondre directement à cette question il faudrait que j’explique ma surprise durant les premières années quand je suis arrivé en France, dans les années 90, de voir la méconnaissance totale de l’histoire d’Haïti (jadis colonie française de Saint Domingue) et de cette partie de leur propre histoire. Cette méconnaissance, voire cette ignorance d’une grande partie de la population française m’a tout de suite fait sentir qu’il y avait une volonté de cacher la vérité et, par racisme, de minimiser la révolution haïtienne, la victoire des Haïtiens et la 1ère grande défaite de Napoléon.

Ce constat m’a porté à réaliser en 2004 le documentaire “l’Arbre de la Liberté” expliquant l’histoire d’Ayiti du 14e au 19e siècle puis j’ai trouvé intéressant d’intégrer des images visuelles issues de mon documentaire dans mes performances video Live (Vj).

Before answering this question directly, I should explain how surprised I was during my first few years in France, in the 1990s, to see how little French people knew about the history of Haiti (formerly the French colony of Saint Domingue) and about this part of their own history. This lack of knowledge, or even ignorance, for a large part of the French population immediately made me feel there was a desire to hide the truth and, out of racism, to minimize the Haitian revolution, the victory of the Haitian people, and the first major defeat of Napoleon.

These observations led me to make the documentary “The Tree of Liberty” in 2004, explaining the history of Haiti from the 14th to the 19th century. I then found it interesting to incorporate visual images from my documentary into my live video performances (VJ).

2. How does your multilayered, multidisciplinary work as a digital and video artist lend itself to explorations of Haiti’s complex, interwoven histories?

Nous avons une histoire unique, magnifique, mal connue et aussi comme vous dîtes, des histoires complexes et entremêlées. Pour moi c’est important de montrer à chaque fois des bribes de notre histoire et le traitement multicouches que j’utilise souvent, est d’après moi très approprié pour montrer la complexité de nos histoires. Aussi, que ce soit dans mes performances ou dans mes créations plus plastiques j’aime bien qu’il y ait plusieurs niveaux de lecture. En ce sens, le contemporain peut parfois renvoyer au passé et vice-versa dans mes créations.

We have a unique, magnificent, little-known history and, as you say, histories that are complex and intertwined. For me, it is important to show snippets of our history each time, and the multi-layered treatment I often use is, in my opinion, very appropriate for showing the complexity of our stories. Also, whether in my performances or in my more visual work, I like there to be several levels of interpretation. In this sense, the contemporary can sometimes refer to the past and vice versa in my creations.

3. Have there been any specific encounters with historical or archival materials – artworks, documents, maps – that have shaped your artistic approaches or shifted your creative directions?

En 2003 quand j’effectuais mes recherches pour mon documentaire, j’ai trouvé très peu d’images d’archives. Ce sont souvent les même que je rencontrais dans les livres ou sur internet. Je me suis servi de quelques-unes mais pour pallier ce manque, je me suis tourné vers les œuvres de peintres haïtiens modernes et contemporains, principalement de la seconde moitié du XXe siècle, parmi lesquels Frantz Zéphirin, Serge Moléon Blaise, Jean Saint-Fleur et Jean-Baptiste Théard. A l’occasion d’une exposition de peintures haïtiennes à Pontarlier, France organisée par la Galerie Monnin en 2003 j’ai pu obtenir l’autorisation de filmer les peintures haïtiennes qui s’y trouvaient, racontant d’une manière très particulière l’histoire d’Haïti. Ces peintures se retrouvent dans mon documentaire mais ont aussi souvent été utilisées dans mes projections live avec musique électronique.

En 2020, la Fondation Haïti Jazz et l’UNESCO m’ont confié la réalisation d’un mapping sur les murs du palais Sans-Souci, qui a été accompagné d’une performance de Linda François et d’autres danseurs, avec une mise en lumière signée Pro-Fête. Pour créer la vidéo du mapping, j’ai pu utiliser des images de la bibliothèque d’archives en libre accès en ligne et libre de droits de la New York Public Library (NYPL Digital Collections). J’y ai trouvé des images d’archives d’Haïti que je n’avais vu nulle part ailleurs : dessins, gravures, peintures de nos héros de l’indépendance, photo des pièces gravées par le roi Christophe, à l’effigie de Makandal, etc… Puis pour ce travail pour la Contre carte, j’ai pu avoir accès aussi à d’autres images très intéressantes.

In 2003, when I was conducting research for my documentary, I found very few archival images. They were often the same ones I had come across in books or on the internet. I used a few of them, but to make up for the lack of material, I turned to works by modern and contemporary Haitian painters, mostly from the second half of the 20th century, among them Frantz Zéphirin, Serge Moléon Blaise, Jean Saint-Fleur, and Jean-Baptiste Théard. During an exhibition of Haitian paintings in Pontarlier, France organized by the Galerie Monin in 2003, I was able to obtain permission to film the Haitian paintings on display, which tell the story of Haiti in a very unique way. These paintings are featured in my documentary but have also often been used in my live projections with electronic music.

In 2020, the Haiti Jazz Foundation and UNESCO entrusted me with creating a mapping projection on the walls of the Sans-Souci Palace, accompanied by a performance by Linda François and other dancers, with lighting design by Pro-Fête. To create the mapping video, I was able to use images from the New York Public Library (NYPL Digital Collections), an online archive that is freely accessible and royalty-free. I found archival images of Haiti that I had never seen anywhere else: drawings, engravings, paintings of our independence heroes, photos of coins engraved by King Christophe, bearing the image of Makandal, etc. Then, for this work for the Counter Map, I was also able to access other very interesting images.

4. We’ve been so honored to engage collaboratively with you on our Critical Counter Map. What was your experience like developing this work? Either in terms of your reaction to the visual sources or to the historical themes you encountered with the project?

Cette proposition de travailler sur la “contre-carte historique” et la manière de montrer l’histoire de mon pays m’a tout de suite interpellé. J’ai senti encore une fois ce besoin, et cette fois cela ne venait pas de moi, de rétablir la vérité en faisant parler les images. Tout de suite après avoir été approché par Meredith Martin et Hannah Williams pour réaliser ce travail j’ai pu avoir accès à des documents d’archives très importants et bien documentés. J’ai été impressionné, surpris, honoré moi aussi, et tout de suite intéressé à travailler sur le projet. J’ai aussi pu avoir l’autorisation d’utiliser la création d’un autre artiste contemporain que j’admire, Raphael Barontini, dans l’œuvre ce qui m’a aussi honoré.

Dans l’ensemble j’ai senti que c’était un grand défi par rapport à l’importance du sujet. Mais ce qui m’a le plus plu, c’est le fait de résumer 3 siècles d’histoire d’Haïti en 12 secondes d’animation. Morceaux choisis, bien sûr. Tout n’y est pas.

This invitation to work on the Critical Counter-Map and to find a way to show the history of my country immediately appealed to me. Once again, I felt the need—and this time it didn’t come from me—to restore the truth by letting the images speak for themselves. Immediately after being approached by Meredith Martin and Hannah Williams to do this work, I was given access to very important and well-documented archival materials. I was impressed, surprised, honored, and immediately interested in working on the project. I was also given permission to use the work of another contemporary artist I admire, Raphael Barontini, in the project, which was also an honor.

Overall, I felt that it was a great challenge given the importance of the subject. But what I liked most was the fact that I was able to summarize three centuries of Haitian history in 12 seconds of animation. Selected pieces, of course. Not everything is there.

5. What responses do you hope to evoke in contemporary viewers encountering your work – especially regarding perceptions of Haiti’s past?

J’espère que ce travail va provoquer des interrogations, susciter la curiosité et va pousser les viewers à entrer dans les pages du site pour voir et comprendre l’histoire d’Haïti, une partie importante des histoires du capitalisme et du colonialisme et avoir une autre (meilleure) compréhension du passé.

I hope that this work will provoke questions, spark curiosity, and encourage viewers to visit the website to see and understand Haiti’s history, an important part of the histories of capitalism and colonialism, and to gain a different (better) understanding of the past.

Cite this post as: Meredith Martin and Hannah Williams, “Counter-Mapping Haitian History: An Artist’s Interview with Maksaens Denis,” Colonial Networks (September 2025), https://www.colonialnetworks.org/?p=899.

Arielle Xena Alterwaite (Brown University)

On June 26, 1826, the French merchant vessel L’Hébé left Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Captained by Mr. Forsans, it contained the purported monetary value of one million Haitian gourdes in coins, carried in 20 chests, each filled with five numbered boxes, totaling 100 boxes.[1] One of these chests (Fig. 1) survives in the museum of the Château de Compiège; it was donated by the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations, the French state financial institution charged with the arbitration of Haiti’s sovereign debt. Each of the chest’s boxes was meant to contain 625 “quadruples d’espagne” in Spanish gold, which would form a total estimated sum of 62,500 “quadruples.” This was the amount required to pay the first installment of Haitian debt owed to the French state following the passage of what has since become known as the 1825 Haitian Indemnity.

In 1791, the enslaved and free people of color in the French plantation colony of Saint Domingue rebelled. After the spectacular defeat of French, British, and Spanish troops over the next decade, in 1804, the revolutionaries secured independence, renamed their polity Haiti, and abolished slavery within its borders. Finally, after two decades of diplomatic negotiations and several regime changes within Haiti and France, respectively, Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer and French King Charles X reached an agreement that resulted in the passage of two separate laws, one in France and the other in Haiti.

On the French side, France would gain favorable trading privileges with Haiti, and Haiti would owe former French plantation owners 150 million francs in indemnities due in annual installments (Fig. 2). In exchange, France would recognize the eastern part of the island—the territory that had formerly fallen under French colonial rule—as a sovereign nation, but not the entire island, despite its recent consolidation under Haitian rule.

By contrast, in Haiti, the law that established the 1825 Haitian Indemnity looked very different (Fig. 3). It recognized the 150 million francs indemnity as a national debt owed to France, and it passed the Haitian senate without mention of the planters or Haiti’s responsibility to them. It was instead established as a debt between two sovereign entities. Furthermore, no mention was made in Haiti about either the trade deal or the territorial limitations on sovereign recognition established by France—a significant omission, considering that in 1822 Boyer had successfully unified the entire island, including today’s Dominican Republic, under the jurisdiction of the Haitian state.

In addition to the encoded discrepancies between the French and Haitian laws, there were more complications that impacted the payment or nonpayment of Haiti’s debt. For one, the departure of L’Hébé from Port-au-Prince’s harbor did not go as smoothly as French foreign agents anticipated, and Mr. Forsans reported an altercation among Haitians and Frenchmen as the chests were loaded onto the ship. Perhaps the encounter was similar to another Mr. Forsans experienced several months later when he returned to Haiti to engage in commercial transaction. Then, when L’Hébé’s departure passed below Fort Bizoton to the east of Port-au-Prince, Mr. Forsans reported that seven or eight men approached the ship in a “red boat with lavender sails.” Following an hour-long exchange of “the most insulting words,” Haitian sailors, racially identified by Mr. Forsans as both “colored” and “black,” allowed L’Hébé to depart with the coin-stuffed chests that had been filled at the Haitian treasury.[2] And although their names and voices remain absent from the fraught historical record, we nonetheless have a glimpse at the real threat that their actions posed to shipment of money and goods in the name of indemnity payments. 

There were still further material realities that threatened to undermine the French extraction of specie payments from Haiti in practice. Although chests like the one pictured above were supposed to contain a set sum in the currency of the franc (France’s national currency, which was pegged to gold and silver), the Haitian government had valued the sum in its own national currency, the gourde. At the same time, despite France’s efforts to establish the franc as an international standard during an era of many global currencies, Haitian authorities often filled the payment chests with a variety of coins, not solely French francs. For example, in the first installment shipment, 34,551 gourdes of the total million were paid out specifically in Haitian-minted coins, rather than French specie. French officials, tasked with verifying and sorting these mixed payments, kept meticulous records of the different coins received—an act documented in their official tallies (Fig. 4). In so doing, these officials bolstered France’s efforts to standardize payments solely in the monies of the lender. In today’s terms, this is precisely what economists Barry Eichengreen and Ricardo Hausmann refer to as the problem of “original sin,” in which a sovereign nation is unable to borrow abroad in its own national currency, resulting in an external debt denominated in foreign currency that exposes the developing nation to exchange rate risk and financial fragility.[3] We might, therefore, argue that the monetary form Haiti’s sovereign debt took constituted an early experiment in a practice that would pervasively expand to impoverish nations in the Global South.

Yet Haiti’s metallic messiness was not merely arbitrary. It signaled Haitian actors’ attempt to exercise some agency over how the debt would be paid and to resist French demands. French officials, meanwhile, readily attempted to sabotage the Haitian state’s monetary sovereignty by undervaluing Haitian specie shipments. For example, although this first payment of the indemnity was meant to be equivalent to six million francs, upon arrival in France, the specie was valued by French officials at a mere 5,300,000 francs. The French state further discredited Haitian coins, noting they lacked sufficient metal content to be of equivalent value to other European currencies.

On the surface, the problem of Haitian coins was repositioned as an issue of international monetary standards, but at the same time, it served as a means through which France could impose structural barriers to Haitian autonomy. When Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer came to power in 1818, he issued a new coinage featuring his effigy, based on a weighted system (with each gourde weighing “50 grains,” the half-piece escalin “25 grains,” and the quarter trois sous “12 ½ grains”). Yet according to a French consular report from October 30, 1826, French officials claimed that the Haitian government had gathered “all the materials of money which one could find, & in particular all the Spanish species which existed in the various coffers of the State and put them in the furnace with unspecified proportions of other metals.” Copper, brass, tin, zinc, and lead were all used as alloys, resulting in coins that, again according to the French, contained only a quarter and sometimes as little as a fifth of gold or silver. Furthermore, the French consuls claimed, “various materials were thrown into molds” without being weighed separately, resulting in different metal values for coins minted “from one day to the next”[4] (Fig. 5).

Over and above French officials’ squabbles, the symbolism of the coins minted in Port-au-Prince both synthesized and challenged Western monetary ideas, showing material faces that represent the crux of modern financial imperialism. For example, in 1813, Haitian President Alexandre Pétion issued the minting of new silver coins in denominations of 6, 12, and 25 centimes. They bore the Haitian palm tree of liberty topped with a French revolutionary Phrygian cap on one side, and a serpent biting its tail on the other. Historian Johnhenry Gonzalez has argued that the snake represented the Dahomey and Vodou deity Damballah Wedo, or the creator. In his words, these “unique coins are the first and only New World currency to feature the image of an African deity.” [5]

The very existence of these coins symbolized a profound transformation: in a society where slavery had once forbidden the enslaved from handling money, the ability to mint and circulate national currency now marked the political change brought by emancipation, making it possible for formerly enslaved people to participate in commercial life as economic actors. Although it is difficult to definitely say whether the symbolism was, in fact, perceived by many Haitians as such, in the wording of the official law, the serpent consuming its own tail was meant to be interpreted as an “emblem of prudence,” avoiding any official mention of anything that might approximate vodou epistemology.[6] Still, by 1828, Boyer ordered the snake coins to be removed from circulation, replacing their effigy with his own, effectively effacing the potentially spiritually potent token with a classically Western motif.[7] While the placement of Boyer’s profile now parroted the design of European coins like the franc (which displayed the portrait of Charles X on one side, and the House of Bourbon’s coat of arms on the other), Haitian resilience nonetheless persisted in the national insignia—threatening canon fire—and in the very fact of their domestic minting and global circulation.

Even if fixing the metal content of Haitian gourdes were possible, and even if specific expressions of Haitian symbolism were removed from its coinage, foreign powers continually cast Haiti as a place plagued by counterfeit coins. There were “immense quantities of false gourdes being made in the United States, mainly in New York,” one report claimed, “where they are sold publicly and in various price ranges.” False coins were supposedly also minted in Glasgow, Scotland, and, in both cases, “the introducers take care to make an assortment of the various false types, to which they mix good ones, a necessary precaution to deceive more surely the farmer, who, in spite of his ignorance, would be suspicious at the appearance of a certain number of entirely similar pieces.” As a result, false money circulated less among merchants in commercial ports, but was traded directly with Haitian coffee producers in “the houses of the interior.”[8]

Although French officials devalued Haiti’s material payments, this did not stop the sale and liquidation of what Haiti did ship within the French state. In subsequent years, the Haitian state sent still more assorted metals and even commodities like coffee to make payments on the indemnity. Just a few months after the initial specie-only shipment brought to France on L’Hébé, the Haitian government used its own recently purchased ship L’Haïtien, loaded with “old copper,” coffee, cotton, and dyewood, for the second payment bound for Le Havre, only to be denied by the French government as a full means of payment.[9] But in the event that the Haitian government did send chests of coins, when these monies arrived in Paris, they would be offered up for sale at a public auction by posters (see Fig. 6 for a surviving example, albeit from the 1840s) so that they could be sold to private bankers in exchange for French francs.

Only once the conversion took place could francs purchased on behalf of the Haitian government be deposited in the Caisse des dépôts et consignations. The francs would be held by the Caisse until, in every case, a former French plantation owner and his or her descendants were deemed eligible by a French government commission to apply for an indemnity payment. They would only receive the portions of the total amount in annual instalments, subject to when Haitian chests filled with coins again arrived in France. Ultimately, the form of Haiti’s debt payments mattered greatly in the first half of the nineteenth century. The materials of money—the actual coins, metals, and even goods sent from Haiti to France—played a crucial role in shaping both the immediate and long-term valuation of the 1825 Haitian indemnity. As detailed in The New York Times, the 1825 Haitian indemnity, initially set at 150 million francs (roughly $600 million today), was not simply a number, but a sum that, compounded over time, could have added over $21 billion to Haiti’s economy.[10] Debt payments were never simple, and their real value fluctuated with the physical currency and commodities used for payment, the variability in metal content, and the contested legitimacy of Haitian coinage. As legal historian Malick Ghachem emphasizes, the indemnity’s actual cost was not only financial but also a blow to Haiti’s monetary sovereignty—the nation’s ability to control its own currency and financial system without external interference.[11] By forcing Haiti to pay in forms dictated and devalued by foreign powers, France used the 1825 Indemnity to extract gold and silver and to entrench a system where Haiti’s economic fate was dictated from abroad with every chest that crossed the Atlantic.

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[1] Archives Départementales des Landes, France, 49J73, “Procès Verbal,” June 1826.

[2] Letter from Mr. Forsans cited in Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti: Tome VII 1827-1843 (1847; Reprint, Port-au-Prince, Haïti: Editions Henri Deschamps, 1988), 544. On these events, see also François Blancpain, Un siècle de relations financières entre Haïti et al France (1825-1922) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 66.

[3] Barry Eichengreen and Ricardo Haussmann, “Exchange Rates and Financial Fragility,” National Bureau of Economic Research no. 7418 (November, 1999).

[4] Archives Nationales, Paris, France AE B III 380, Dépêche des Cayes, October 30, 1826.

[5] Johnhenry Gonzalez, Maroon Nation: A History of Revolutionary Haiti (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 506.

[6] Linstant Pradine, Recueil general des lois et actes du gouvernement d’Haïti: Tome II (Paris: August Durand, 1860), 168. The significance of the ouroboros has origins in Egypt and is pervasive throughout much of antiquity, but it is true that it is not a prevalent feature of many ancient coinage systems.

[7] Robert Lacombe, “Histoire monétaire de Saint Domingue et de la République d’Haïti, des origins à 1874,” Revue d’histoire des colonies 43, no. 152-153 (1956), 322.

[8] Archives Nationales, Paris, France AE B III 380, Dépêche des Cayes, October 30, 1826.

[9] Centre des Archives diplomatiques du ministère des Affaires étrangères, 248 CCC 1, Port-au-Prince, September 18, 1826.

[10] Catherine Porter, Constant Méheut, Matt Apuzzo, and Selam Gebrekidan, “The Root of Haiti’s Misery: Reparations to Enslavers,” The New York Times, May 20, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/world/americas/haiti-history-colonized-france.html (all web links accessed August 4, 2025).

[11] Malick Ghachem, “The Real Intervention Haiti Needs,” Foreign Policy, September 14, 2023, https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/09/14/haiti-crisis-intervention-gangs-colonialism-france-us-history-monetary-policy/.

Cite this post as: Arielle Xena Alterwaite, “The Many Monies of the 1825 Haitian Indemnity,” Colonial Networks (August 2025), https://www.colonialnetworks.org/?p=882.

Julia I. Doe (Columbia University)

Louis Julien Clarchies was a violinist, composer, and director of dance orchestras who achieved transatlantic fame in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.[1] Clarchies was born into slavery in Dutch colonial Curaçao, and first rose to prominence on the public stages of Saint-Domingue. Manumitted on the eve of the Haitian Revolution, he became a key artistic figure at the Napoleonic court, where he was closely associated with the creole empress, Joséphine de Beauharnais.[2] His volumes of published music—comprising several hundred pieces in total—circulated widely both during his lifetime and in the decades after his death (Fig. 1). As one aristocratic observer noted, with only modest hyperbole, Clarchies wrote “the quadrilles that made all of France dance.”^[3]

The circumstances of Clarchies’s early life are poorly documented, obscured within a fragmentary and violently asymmetrical set of imperial archives. The musician’s own approximations of his age place his birth between 1766 and 1769.[4] While still a young child, he was trafficked to Saint-Domingue as the attendant of a French ship captain, Louis Frédéric Pichon de Premeslé, sieur de Trémondrie.[5] Across the early modern Caribbean, facility on an instrument factored among the skilled expectations of domestic servitude. On plantations and in urban spaces, enslaved violinists frequently provided music for dancing.[6] In this context, though, Clarchies’s trajectory was remarkable. By his teenage years, he was known as a performer of European concert repertoire. He was a member of the opera orchestra at the Comédie du Cap, and appeared intermittently as a violin and viola soloist at the theater in Port-au-Prince.[7]

Reports from the Affiches américaines indicate that Clarchies was immensely gifted. In 1783, for example, he covered the concertino viola part in Jean-Baptiste Davaux’s C-major symphonie concertante (from the opus 7), appearing alongside two white virtuosos from the metropole.[8] The passagework here is so difficult that the composer added a cautionary note in the score. Davaux writes that the work “was not fashioned for a typical violist,” but should only be executed by a player adept at rapid, violin-style figuration.[9]

As he received accolades as a concert soloist, Clarchies continued to serve a new enslaver—a Crown bureaucrat named Paul Jean-François Le Mercier de la Rivière—as a domestic valet. In this capacity, he made several journeys across the Atlantic in the 1780s.[10] In 1790, this dislocation became permanent.[11] In brief: amidst growing anti-slavery sentiment in the metropole, Mercier de la Rivière traveled to Paris to lobby for the interests of the Saint-Domingue plantocracy.[12] Less than a year into this trip, Mercier de la Rivière died, leaving Clarchies to definitively claim his freedom and rebuild his life in the French capital.[13] He became a citizen when the revolutionary government granted such rights to “every man, regardless of color,” and successfully petitioned for financial compensation as a “refugee” from the colonies.[14] Registering his identification with local authorities in 1793, he described his occupation in a single word: “musician.”[15]

Clarchies seems to have gained a foothold in metropolitan high society by exploiting the networks of his former enslavers. By the late 1790s, he had been hired to perform dance music for the Martinique-born Joséphine, whose family had ties to Mercier de la Rivière through the ancien-régime colonial administration.[16] As other elites clamored to copy her esteemed example, Clarchies became a bona fide Parisian celebrity. Memoirs from the turn of the nineteenth century document the violinist’s presence at salons throughout the capital, entertaining government notables, military officials, nouveaux riches, and members of the reconsolidating aristocracy.[17]

The virtuoso reached yet broader audiences by organizing public dances at the many pleasure gardens that had opened in the aftermath of the Terror. Clarchies’s primary employer was the Elysée-Bourbon (on the grounds of the future Elysée palace). But he also appeared at the Hôtel Mercy, Cercle des Victoires, Hôtel de Longueville, Vauxhall d’Été, Petit Hôtel Montmorency, Théâtre Molière, and Tivoli Gardens, among other sites.^[18] In his dispatches from Paris, the Habsburg diplomat Charles de Clary-et-Aldringen described the situation matter-of-factly: “in order for a ball to be truly fashionable, it must showcase Julien.”^[19]

As Clarchies’s engagements proliferated, he remained loyal to his most famous supporter: Joséphine. The violinist followed her to the imperial court upon her husband’s accession as Emperor in 1804. At the outset of the Napoleonic Empire, Clarchies programmed small-scale dances for his patron, a continuation of his role at her private salon (Fig. 2). As in his freelance career, however, the virtuoso’s duties were rapidly expanded, a reflection of both his well-earned reputation and Joséphine’s considerable influence. By 1806 Clarchies was granted the title of chef d’orchestre des bals de la cour. After this juncture, he would become one of the most prominent musical artists in Napoleon’s employ, directing regular state balls while commanding an ensemble of up to three dozen players.^[20]

Indeed, one could argue that the violinist’s contributions were more influential than those of his better-known contemporaries (i.e., Rodolphe Kreutzer, the leader of the imperial chapel-orchestra, or Pierre Gardel and Jean-Étienne Despréaux, famed court choreographers) for the way they resonated beyond official sites of government power. Clarchies published extensively after his court appointment, marketing his works through their link to state-sanctioned sociability. In essence, to purchase and perform the violinist’s compositions—“L’Austerlitz,” “La Joséphine,” “La Westphaline,” etc.—was to import imperial festivity into the domestic sphere, a personalization of politics through the enactment of social dance. Eminently adaptable, Clarchies’s final publications (from 1814–15) alluded to the restored Bourbon royals, as extracted in the recording below.

Louis Julien Clarchies, “Quadrille du Duc de Berry,” 25e Recueil des contre-danses et walzes (Paris, 1815).

Clarchies’s musical life reflected the complex and multi-directional mechanisms of artistic transfer between France and the Caribbean in the Age of Revolutions. In his teenage years in Saint-Domingue, the violinist served as an emissary of European concert repertoire. In his adulthood in Paris, his reception was shaped by the biases of his transplanted creole patrons. Despite his manifold performing talents, Clarchies was often perceived as a ménétrier (a minstrel or fiddler) rather than a classical virtuoso—a colonial stereotype of “African” musicianship that became embedded in the metropolitan cultural imagination.

Paul Thiébault, a general in Napoleon’s army, recounted one memorable ball where Clarchies “led his contredanses [from the orchestra] so marvelously that the assembled crowd demanded that he play them again, like a soloist. The greatest violinist in the world could not have presented them as splendidly as he.”^[21] Thiébault was unaware of the inadvertent prescience of his statement: Clarchies had, in fact, been a sought-after soloist before circumstances forced him to reorient his career for the Parisian marketplace.

Clarchies’s music circulated long after his death in 1815—both within France and across the vast terrain over which France asserted political dominance. His compositions can be found in manuscript collections from regions of Italy controlled by Napoleon’s Grande Armée;^[22] and they were reprinted in Philadelphia, home of many colonial refugees of the Haitian Revolution.^[23] They were almost certainly disseminated in New Orleans and in Martinique, sites of vibrant quadrille culture, where they would have been placed back into the fingers of Afro-descendant performers of dance music.

The most important ambassador for Clarchies’s compositions was his son, Isidore Julien Clarchies, who was also a violinist and a leader of dance orchestras. The younger Clarchies had a precarious career, moving frequently in search of work. In the 1830s, he organized spectacles at the Parisian Cirque Olympique; in the 1840s, he directed balls in Bordeaux and in Bilbao, Spain. By the 1850s, he had immigrated to Algeria, which became an official department of France under Napoleon III.[24] Isidore Julien Clarchies brought with him to Africa a repertoire inherited from his father, compiled in the Hexagon but based on a technique forged in the Caribbean. The recursive pattern across this vast distance and longue durée is both striking and sobering: another Napoleonic Empire, another violinist playing dances in its wake.

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[1] A longer version of this post appeared in the Spring 2025 newsletter of the Society for Eighteenth Century Music. I am grateful to the society for allowing me to adapt it here.

[2] Pierre Bardin et al., “Julien Clarchies, griffe de Curaçao, affranchi, violoniste et chef d’orchestre des bals de la cour impériale,” Généalogie et histoire de la Caraïbe, 2018, art. 4 (https://www.ghcaraibe.org/articles/2018-art04.pdf).

[3] “Julien, surtout, qui dirigeait les bals de madame Bonaparte, composait alors les quadrilles qui faisaient danser toute la France.” Henri Marie Ghislain de Mérode, Souvenirs du comte de Mérode-Westerloo (Paris: E. Dentu, 1864), 1: 134.

[4] Archives nationales de France, Paris [AN], F/7/4794, “Police générale, Comité de sûreté Générale, Cartes de sûreté délivrées par les comités révolutionnaires des sections du: Finistère et de la Fontaine de Grenelle, 1792/an III,” June 6, 1793; Archives de Paris, 5Mi1 1182, “Extrait du Registre des Actes de décès de l’an 1815,” no. 286, December 26, 1815.

[5] With Trémondrie, Clarchies also traveled to Bordeaux between 1776 and 1778. See Archives départementales de la Gironde, Bordeaux, 6 B 56, folio 88, May 30, 1778; and Érick Noël, ed., Dictionnaire des gens de couleur dans la France moderne (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2017), 3: 608.

[6] Maria T. N. Ryan, “Hearing Power, Sounding Freedom: Black Practices of Listening, Ear-Training, and Music-Making in the British Colonial Caribbean” (PhD Diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2021), 25–93.

[7] Julia Prest, Public Theatre and the Enslaved People of Saint-Domingue (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), 158–61.

[8] Supplement to the Affiches américaines, July 12, 1783, 396.

[9] “Cette partie n’est pas faite pour un Alto ordinaire; elle ne pourra être bien exécutée que par quelqu’un qui aura une grande habitude du Violon.” Jean-Baptiste Davaux, Deux symphonies concertantes, la première pour deux violons principaux et un alto viola- récitans … la seconde pour deux violons principaux, oeuvre VII (Paris: Bailleux, 1773).

[10] Bardin et al., “Julien Clarchies,” 3.

[11] Bardin et al., “Julien Clarchies,” 5; Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence [ANOM], COL F5/B/17, 198 (“Liste des passagers & autres qui ont été débarqués en ce Port [Bordeaux], venant des Colonies, pendant le mois de Novembre [1790] sur les Navires ci-après désignés”).

[12] Philippe Haudrère, “Les tribulations de Paul Jean-François Le Mercier de la Rivière, ancien ordonnateur de la Marine, devenu habitant de Saint-Domingue, 1787–1791,” in L’esclave et les plantations de l’établissement de la servitude à son abolition, ed. Philippe Hrodēj (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009), 187–208.

[13] While a statement of manumission was filed with Parisian notaries in the 1780s (AN, Minutier Central, Étude CXVII, 922, September 4, 1785), Clarchies does not seem to have separated from the household before Mercier de la Rivière’s death. See Bardin et al., “Julien Clarchies,” 5; Archives départementales des Hauts-de-Seine, Registres paroissiaux (Boulogne [paroisse Notre Dame]), “Sépulture de Mr. Paul Jean François le Mercier de la Rivière,” July 9, 1791, E_NUM_BOU_BMS_35 – 1790-1792.

[14] AN, F/15/3376, “Secours aux réfugiés des colonies autres que Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon” (Ci-Coll., dossier 20). 

[15] AN, F/7/4794, “Police générale,” June 6, 1793.

[16] Pernille Røge, Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire: France in the Americas and Africa, c. 1750–1802 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 105–52.

[17] Maurice Dupin de Francueil to Marie-Aurore du Saxe, letter of 24 pluviôse an X, in George Sand, Histoire de ma vie (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1856), 3: 99; Mary Berry, Extracts from the Journals and Correspondence of Miss Berry from the Year 1783 to 1852, ed. Lady Theresa Lewis, 2^nd edition (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1866), 2: 174; Paul Thiébault, Mémoires du Général B^on. Thiébault (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1894), 3: 271; J. de Norvins, Souvenirs d’un historien de Napoléon (Paris: Librarie Plon, 1896), 2: 288; A. Laquiante, Un hiver à Paris sous le Consulat, 1802–1803, d’après les lettres de J.-F. Reichardt (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1896), 100–1.

[18] Berry, Extracts from the Journals and Correspondence, 2: 178; Journal de Paris, 24 nîvose an IX, 694; Journal de Paris, 7 ventôse an 9, 950; Journal de Paris, 23 frimaire an IX, 506; Journal des débats, 14 brumaire an X, 2; Journal des débats, 17 frimaire an XII, 2; Journal de Paris, 24 pluviôse an IX, 872.

[19] “Pour qu’un bal soit fashionable, il faut y avoir Julien.” Charles de Clary-et-Aldringen, Souvenirs du Prince Charles de Clary-et-Aldringen: Trois mois à Paris lors du marriage de l’empereur Napoléon I et l’archiduchesse Marie-Louise (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1914), 233.

[20]  AN, O/2/25–O/2/65^b, “Intendance générale de la Maison de l’Empereur.”

[21] Julien “jouait la contredanse si merveilleusement qu’on lui demandait de la jouer en soliste, et que le Premier violon du monde ne l’aurait pas mieux jouée que lui.” Thiébault, Mémoires du Général B^on. Thiébault, 3: 271.

[22] Susan Parisi, ed., The music library of a noble Florentine family: a catalogue raisonné of manuscripts and prints of the 1720s to the 1850s collected by the Ricasoli Family now housed in the University of Louisville Music Library (Sterling Heights, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 2012); Cornelis Vanistendael, “Shaping Europe’s First Dance Craze—The Role of Napoleon’s Grande Armée in the dissemination of the Quadrille (1795–1815),” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 36, no. 1 (2018): 91–111.

[23] William B. Crandell, Cotillons & Waltzes Selected for the Cotillion Balls, Adapted for the Piano Forte (Philadelphia: G. Willig, 1815).

[24] Bardin et al., “Julien Clarchies,” 8; ANOM, État Civil (Algérie ALGER 1853), “Acte de décès,” September 10, 1853, 273.

Cite this post as: Julia I. Doe, “Louis Julien Clarchies, c. 1767-1815: A Transatlantic Musical Legacy,” Colonial Networks (July 2025), https://www.colonialnetworks.org/?p=869

Meredith Martin (NYU) and Hannah Williams (QMUL)

We are excited to announce the launch of Slaves in Paris: A Digital Mapping Project, a collaboration between historian Miranda Spieler and Colonial Networks. This new website aims to uncover and visualize the drastically overlooked histories of enslaved people within the heart of France’s capital in the eighteenth-century.

Uncovering Hidden Histories

“Slaves in Paris” utilizes archival research to identify and map the presence of enslaved people in Paris during the 1700s. By plotting these individuals’ locations and associated historical data, the project provides an interactive platform for exploring the complexities of slavery in the French capital. This initiative challenges the traditional narratives that confine slavery to colonial territories, highlighting its pervasive impact within metropolitan centers.

Collaborative Efforts

This site takes its inspiration and name from Miranda’s book,  Slaves in Paris: Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories  (Harvard University Press, 2025), which pieces together the biographies of enslaved and formerly enslaved people and develops an alternative picture of eighteenth-century Paris, capital of the Enlightenment, through the prism of their experiences. In terms of its functionality and design, the site is modelled on the Colonial Networks counter-mapping project that we ran with students at NYU – Art, Enslavement, and Resistance in Cap-Français – which uses ArcGIS StoryMaps.

Explore the Project

We invite scholars, students, and the public to explore the “Slaves in Paris” digital map and accompanying resources. The platform offers a unique opportunity to engage with the spatial and human dimensions of slavery in Paris, fostering a deeper understanding of its historical context and legacy.

Visit the project at slavesinparis.org to learn more and explore the interactive map.

Cite this post as: Meredith Martin and Hannah Williams, “Mapping Slavery in the Metropole: Launch of ‘Slaves in Paris: A Digital Mapping Project’” Colonial Networks (July 2025), https://www.colonialnetworks.org/?p=861.

Oliver Wunsch (Boston College)

In a pastel portrait by Jean-Baptiste Perronneau, an array of colors define the face of the French plantation owner Aimé-Benjamin Fleuriau (1709–1787) (Fig. 1). A shadow of bluish grays and earthen browns creeps across his right side. On the left, yellow striations give his jaw a warm glow. Touches of pink dash across his cheek and nose, suggesting the blood pulsing beneath the surface. Step close to the pastel and you will count many more colors, flesh disaggregating into discrete deposits of wide-ranging pigments.

In the eyes of the law, however, Fleuriau was white, and this fact determined much about his life. Thanks to Jennifer L. Palmer’s careful study of family relationships in the French Atlantic, we know much of Fleuriau’s biography.^[1] Born in La Rochelle to a bankrupt sugar refiner, he sought fortune abroad, arriving in the French colony of Saint-Domingue around 1729. There, he built a prosperous career, organizing the sale of enslaved people, then buying his own sugar plantation in the plain of Cul-de-Sac, to the east of Port-au-Prince. A perspectival map of the plantation from 1753 shows both its considerable acreage and, in the left foreground, the enslaved people whose labor allowed Fleuriau to profit (Fig. 2). Exaggerated in size relative to the land, the figures collect cane extract from an ornately rendered sugar mill, whose shell-like structure transforms the brutal realities of their work into a Rococo fantasy.

When Fleuriau returned to La Rochelle in 1755, he used his newfound wealth to rise into the upper echelons of French society, marrying Marie-Anne-Suzanne Liège, a young woman from a prominent merchant family. At the same time, Fleuriau remained intimately connected to the life he had led in Saint-Domingue, most notably through the children he had fathered with a woman of color named Jeanne Guimbelot, whom he had once enslaved. Five of these children joined him in France. Named Joseph, Paul, Jean, Marie, and Charlotte, they all carried the surname “Mandron,” and Fleuriau did not acknowledge paternity of them once they arrived in France.^[2] He nonetheless sought to maintain their connection with his family and to guarantee their freedom—a pressing matter at a time when French law increasingly equated Blackness with enslavement.^[3]

To what extent do these biographical facts bear on Perronneau’s portrait of Fleuriau? Can we “map” Fleuriau’s entanglement with Saint-Domingue and slavery onto the portrait? Commissioned along with a pendant portrait of his wife Marie-Anne-Suzanne on the occasion of their marriage in 1755, the pastel marked the moment in Fleuriau’s life when he sought to reintegrate himself within the elite merchant class of La Rochelle (Fig. 3). As Dominique d’Arnoult has noted, Fleuriau likely saw the portrait as part of the “social rehabilitation” of his family after the embarrassing bankruptcy of his father a generation earlier, a purchase made to signal his reentry into the world of respectable appearances.^[4] Pastel portraits served as fashionable tokens of power and prestige in this milieu, their fragile materiality evoking the courtly délicatesse that the newly affluent sought to cultivate.^[5] Perronneau fulfilled numerous commissions for the merchants and financiers on the western coast of France, many of whom derived their fortunes from colonial investments and the slave trade.^[6] In that respect, these portraits owed their existence to the plantation economy and the systems of exploitation that undergirded it.

It is tempting to stretch the connection further, to argue that the varied tonalities in Perronneau’s depiction of Fleuriau relate in some way to the intertwined lineages that defined his familial identity or the eighteenth-century racialization of skin color more broadly. Perronneau’s attention to the material subtleties of Fleuriau’s complexion could, for example, be interpreted as a product of what Angela Rosenthal described as an eighteenth-century European belief in the “talkative” legibility of white complexion, whose capacity to blush was implicitly or explicitly contrasted with the supposed “muteness” of Black skin.^[7] On the other hand, the variegated marks of the pastel crayon could be taken as a challenge to the binary opposition of white and Black. As Anne Lafont has recently observed in her examination of Watteau’s trois crayons head studies of a white woman and a Black child, the nuanced materiality of a carefully rendered portrait can reveal the reductiveness of racial terminology, particularly in works made of friable pigments that blur the semantic distinction between white and Black.^[8]

But in contemplating the possible connections between Fleuriau’s portrait and his interracial family, I am reluctant to assume a direct relationship between the two. Artistic conventions from the period militate against reading the polychromatic streaks of Perronneau’s pastels as straightforward statements about skin itself. Roger de Piles, for example, argued in his Cours de peinture par principes (1708) that portraitists should not replicate the actual appearance of skin, recommending instead that they exaggerate the contrast between patches of different colors to create pleasing flesh tones that blend together only when seen from a distance:

A painter who only renders what he sees will never achieve a perfect imitation, because if his work appears good to him from close and on the easel, from a distance it will displease others and often the artist himself: a tone that from close appears distinct and a certain color will appear another color from a distance and blend into the mass of which it is part. Therefore if you wish your work to make a strong impression from the place where it is supposed to be seen, the colors and lights should be a little exaggerated.^[9]

Artists of the subsequent generation would elaborate on this advice, distinguishing the materiality of a portrait from the physical character of its referent. In a lecture on portraiture to the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture from 1750, the painter Louis Tocqué argued that the flesh tones in a portrait should not directly reproduce the materiality of flesh: “if you limit yourself to the material aspect, you fall into that coldness and bland neatness which reduce the artist to the level of a mere craftsman, and the paintings you produce will typically be either the color of bronze or of ivory.”^[10] Tocqué instead advised portraitists to paint with “sentiment in the brush” and “to make yourselves masters of your touch,” granting the color and light of a painting a degree of autonomy from the subject that they represent. For Tocqué, it was this refusal “to limit yourself to the material aspect” that separated the artist from the “mere craftsman,” ennobling the act of making.

This socially elevated understanding of a portrait’s materiality held value to the artist and sitter alike. For Fleuriau, eager to rise within the ranks of French society and aspiring toward a noble title, an appreciation for the transcendent subtleties of aesthetic experience was de rigueur.^[11] As Brice Martinetti has shown, the eighteenth-century merchants of La Rochelle carefully modeled their consumption and collecting practices on habits they associated with the court aristocracy.^[12] The largely Protestant merchant class of La Rochelle, including the Fleuriaus, showed little propensity for the austerity traditionally associated with their faith. The Rochelais embraced the latest fashions in art and architecture, generally conforming to the culture of the affluent elite in France’s other urban centers. Their homes sometimes included oblique references to the colonial origins of their wealth, such as the globe and navigational instruments in a gilded boiserie overdoor of the hôtel Fleuriau.^[13] But these emblems of commerce were nonetheless expressed in a form that could just as easily be interpreted in terms of enlightened learning and good taste. They testify to what the Abbé Coyer described in 1756 as the desire among colonial merchants “to make people forget that they once engaged in trade.”^[14]

The delicate materiality of a pastel portrait, in its capacity to evoke the delicate manners of the court nobility, offered merchants such as Fleuriau an ideal instrument for such strategic forgetting. Any attempt to find traces of Saint-Domingue in Perronneau’s portrait of Fleuriau therefore likely runs counter to the sitter’s intentions. Those traces may nonetheless be present. The pinks and crimsons that give Fleuriau’s cheeks and lips their vital warmth, for example, may well be made from carmine, a pigment derived from cochineal harvested largely by enslaved laborers in the Americas. Pastel treatises from the period particularly recommended the pigment for use in flesh tones because of its lively brilliance and relative permanence.^[15] The exploitation and violence that went into the production of the material became, in the downy powder of pastel portraiture, all but invisible. If the substance is present in Perronneau’s depiction of Fleuriau’s skin, the very obscurity of its origins is perhaps fitting, imperceptibly connecting the portrait to a world that Fleuriau now wished to keep at a distance. Art can be both a site of colonial entanglement and a tool for its disavowal.

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^[1] Jennifer L. Palmer, Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 129–57.

^[2] On the lives of these children, see the information compiled by Olivier Caudron in Érick Noël, ed., Dictionnaire des gens de couleur dans la France moderne, vol. 3, 3 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 2017), 854–60. See also Palmer, Intimate Bonds, 140–46.

^[3] Palmer, Intimate Bonds, 140–42.

^[4] Dominique d’Arnoult, Jean-Baptiste Perronneau, ca. 1715-1783: un portraitiste dans l’Europe des Lumières (Paris: Arthéna, 2014), 260.

^[5] On pastel’s delicacy as a means of connoting social délicatesse, see Oliver Wunsch, A Delicate Matter: Art, Fragility, and Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2024).

^[6] Perronneau’s multiple portraits of the Journu family are the most conspicuous examples. See Melissa Hyde, “Men in Pink: The Petit-Maître, Refined Masculinity, and Whiteness,” Journal18, no. 17 (2024), https://www.journal18.org/7284.

^[7] Angela Rosenthal, “Visceral Culture: Blushing and the Legibility of Whiteness in Eighteenth-Century British Portraiture,” Art History 24, no. 4 (2004): 563–92.

^[8] Anne Lafont, “Blackness Is in the Making: Materials of the 18th-Century Artist” (Getty Research Institute, December 6, 2020), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg_TkfxlIpM&t.

^[9] “Un peintre qui ne fait que ce qu’il voit, n’arrivera jamais à une parfaite imitation : car si son ouvrage lui semble bon de près, et sur son chevalet, de loin il déplaira aux autres et souvent à lui-même: une teinte qui de près paraît séparée et d’une certaine couleur, paraîtra d’une autre couler dans sa distance, et se confondra dans la masse dont elle fait partie. Si vous voulez donc que votre ouvrage fasse un bon effet du lieu d’où il doit être vu, il faut que les couleurs et les lumières en soient un peu exagérées.” Roger de Piles, Cours de peinture par principes (Paris: Jacques Estienne, 1708), 272.

^[10] “Si vous vous bornez au matériel, vous tombez dans cette froideur et cette plate propreté qui mettent l’artiste au rang de l’ouvrier, et les tableaux que vous peignez seront ordinairement, ou de couleur de bronze ou d’ivoire.” Louis Tocqué, “Sur la peinture et le portrait,” in Conférences de l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, ed. Jacqueline Lichtenstein and Christian Michel, vol. 5, 6 vols., (Paris: École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, 2012), 454.

^[11] On Fleuriau’s multiple petitions for letters of nobility, see Jacques Cauna, Au temps des isles à sucre: histoire d’une plantation de Saint-Domingue au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Karthala, 1987), 48–50.

^[12] Brice Martinetti, Les négociants de La Rochelle au XVIIIe siècle (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2013), 287–327.

^[13] Ibid., 299. On the decoration of the hôtel Fleuriau, see also Cauna, Au temps des isles à sucre, 51.

^[14] Gabriel-François Coyer, La Noblesse Commerçante (London: Duchesne, 1756), 125.

^[15] Paul Romain Chaperon, Traité de la peinture au pastel (Paris: Defer de Maisonneuve, 1788), 121.

Cite this post as: Oliver Wunsch, “Fleuriau’s Skin,” Colonial Networks (July 2025), https://www.colonialnetworks.org/?p=849.

Esther Chadwick (Courtauld Institute of Art)

On November 18, 1816, King Henry Christophe (1767-1820) wrote from his palace in the postrevolutionary Kingdom of Hayti to Thomas Clarkson, the British abolitionist, to announce the presence of a new art school: “Mr. Evans, the teacher of drawing and painting, is established at Sans Souci, and his school is also functioning.”[1] This detail is corroborated by a passage in Christophe’s official Gazette royale of October 1816—”Already an academy of drawing and painting is established in the town of Sans-Souci”—and by the entry in the Kingdom’s Almanach royal of 1817 for the “Académie de Dessin et de Peinture, établie à Sans-Souci,” underneath which is printed “M. Evans, professeur.”

The Academy of Drawing and Painting mentioned briefly in these sources was conceived as part of a raft of educational and cultural reforms implemented by Christophe over the course of his reign (1811-1820). Numerous national schools, academies and colleges, including a Royal Medical College, an Academy of Belles-Lettres, and a Royal Academy of Music, were founded in these years with the aim of diffusing knowledge among the Haitian people and (as Christophe put it in his letter to Clarkson) “extending moral principles as widely as possible.” Crucially, this programme of improvement was intended to demonstrate Haitian legitimacy on an international stage—a project in which the visual arts played a vital role.[2] For Henry Christophe, a former revolutionary general who had risen to power in the northern part of Haiti following the assassination of Jean-Jacques Dessalines in 1806, the education of his citizens and the flourishing of the arts were central not just in the civil war against Alexandre Pétion’s rival southern Republic but also to the larger project of Haitian independence and Black sovereignty after slavery.[3]

What is known about the art school itself? Christophe’s letter to Clarkson makes clear that the British artist Richard Evans played a leading role, describing the academy as “his school.” Evans (1783?-1871) had trained as an assistant and copyist in the studio of Britain’s leading Regency portraitist, Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830). In 1815, he was officially admitted to the Royal Academy Schools in London, having attended the Royal Academy (RA) as a probationer for some time already.[4] The following year, Evans was recruited by Christophe’s agent in London, the African-American author and teacher Prince Sanders (or Saunders), who had been charged by Christophe to help staff his schools (and whose portrait Evans drew for the frontispiece of Haytian Papers in 1816). Evans arrived with Sanders at Cap Henry (formerly Cap-Français) on September 21, 1816, in the company of an agriculturalist and two schoolmasters who had also been appointed from England.[5] Shortly after his arrival, he set to work on royal portraits, including small-format full-lengths of Henry Christophe (Fig. 1) and his son, Prince Victor-Henry (Alfred Nemours Collection, University of Puerto Rico) which were sent as gifts to the abolitionist William Wilberforce and exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1818. Evans was reportedly offered a salary of 400 gourdes a month, or 24,000 francs a year.[6] Given Christophe’s desire to implement English as the language of instruction throughout the Kingdom, and his pointed reliance on British rather than French imports for the decoration and furnishing of his court, it is not surprising that he turned to an Englishman as the new Academy’s professor.

There are no known records of Evans’ day-to-day work in Haiti, how the art school functioned, or what exactly was taught. It has been said that Christophe’s model was the Académie de peinture et de sculpture in Paris.[7] But although Evans had recently visited the Louvre to copy paintings, the precedent freshest in his mind was surely London’s Royal Academy, where (as in France) students were required to progress from drawing after casts of antique sculpture to ‘life drawing’ of nude models. For artists at the Academy in London, however, the most hands-on instruction was typically provided in the studios of individual masters. It is possible that Evans ran the Haitian school more like a painting studio on the model of his own teacher, Lawrence. We can only speculate as to where the Academy might have been situated within Sans-Souci, Christophe’s magnificent neoclassical palace complex.

Thomas Madiou, the nineteenth-century Haitian historian, stated that Evans trained some good pupils (“d’assez bons élèves”), among whom one named Déjoie deserved special mention.[8] Was this Thimoléon Déjoie (1801-1865), who worked for President Boyer, Pétion’s successor in the south and ruler of the reunited Haiti after Christophe’s death in 1820? The Port-au-Prince born painter Xaviar Gazul (b. 1783) and Numa Desroches (1802-1880?) have also been linked to the Academy at Sans-Souci.[9] Another may be the Haitian illustrator of Charles Mackenzie’s Notes on Haiti (1830), “who owed all his instruction to the institutions of the king.”[10] There were other artists active in the Kingdom of Hayti during Evans’ tenure, but whether they had any involvement in the Academy of Drawing and Painting is unclear. The Haitian royal almanacs of 1814-16 record a group of “Peintres du Roi”: Revinchal, Frédéric Toucas, Baptiste, Manuël, Beaumy, Châtel, Bazile, and Charles. Toucas is also recorded as “dessinateur des decorations” for Christophe’s Théâtre Royal (and, in 1820, as an English language interpreter). Of the others in this group, little else is known, but the absence of second names suggests enslaved status before the Revolution.[11] When Evans enters the Almanac royal in 1817, Revinchal is listed as the sole “Peintre du Roi” (King’s Painter). Professor of the Academy and “Peintre du Roi” were evidently separate roles.

The Sans-Souci Academy appears to have been short-lived. No further mention is made of it in the Kingdom’s official publications after 1817. Echoes of its presence were felt later in the nineteenth century when President Fabre Geffrard (in office 1859-1867) founded a “School of Painting and Design” under the direction of Colbert Lochard, who had risen to prominence as the “Emperor’s Painter” under Faustin Souloque (1782-1867).[12]

Cite this post as: Esther Chadwick, “The Academy of Drawing and Painting at Sans Souci, 1816-17,” Colonial Networks (June 2025), www.colonialnetworks.org/?=840.

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[1] Henry Christophe & Thomas Clarkson: A Correspondence, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs and Clifford H. Prator (University of California Press, 1952), 98. Original French (p. 276): “Mr Evans professeur de dessein & de peinture a été établi à Sans Soucy et son école est en activité.”

[2] See Tabitha McIntosh and Grégory Pierrot, “Capturing the Likeness of Henry I of Haiti (1805-1822),” Atlantic Studies 14, no. 2 (2017): 127-151; and Esther Chadwick, “The Aesthetics of Postrevolutionary Haiti: Currency, Kingship and Circum-Atlantic Numismatics,” Art History 46, no. 5 (November 2023): 1014-45.

[3] For Christophe see Marlene Daut, The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (Alfred A. Knopf, 2025); Paul Clammer, Black Crown: Henry Christophe, the Haitian Revolution, and the Caribbean’s Forgotten Kingdom (Hurst & Co, 2023); and Laurent Dubois, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (Metropolitan Books, 2012).

[4] Martin Myrone, A Biographical Dictionary of Royal Academy Students, 1769-1830, ed. Gillian Forrester (Walpole Society, 2022), 177.

[5] Caledonian Mercury, January 30, 1817.

[6] Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti (Editions Henri Deschamps), vol. 5, 348.

[7] Gauvin Alexander Bailey, The Palace of Sans-Souci in Milot, Haiti (ca. 1806-1813): The Untold Story of the Potsdam of the Rainforest (Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2017), 27.

[8] Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, vol. 5, 348.

[9] Clammer, Black Crown, 248-9.

[10] Charles Mackenzie, Notes on Haiti, made during a residence in that republic (London, 1830), vol. 1, 158.

[11] Michel-Philippe Lerebours, Bref regard sur deux siècles de peinture haïtienne (1804-2004) (Editions de l’Université d’État d’Haïti, 2018), n. 4, 23.

[12] Lerebours, Bref regard, 31.

Sophia Kitlinksi (Yale University)

In the final years of King Henry Christophe’s reign over northern Haiti (r. 1811–20), a Black man arrived at Christophe’s royal court in the opulent palace of Sans-Souci. He sought artistic instruction under British painter Richard Evans at the recently established Academy of Painting and Drawing. To reach the Academy, the aspiring artist would have traversed a landscape still carrying the memory of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). He would, years later, render the ruins of plantations which lined the surrounding roads (Fig. 1).

The man’s artistic education was short-lived. Amid growing popular unrest, Christophe took his own life in his bedchamber at Sans-Souci in 1820. This cataclysmic event shuttered the Academy, and the curtains fell on Christophe’s kingdom. Yet the artist continued to reside in the region after Christophe’s downfall and produced new works of art. In 1827, two of the artist’s now-lost drawings were taken to England and made into lithographs by Scottish printmaker John Heaviside Clark. These lithographs appear in an 1830 memoir titled Notes on Haiti authored by Charles Mackenzie, who had served as Consul General of Haiti between 1825 and 1827. Mackenzie offers only a single acknowledgment of the today-unknown Black man’s contribution of the only two illustrations included in his ambitious six-hundred-fifty-page work: “The individual who made the sketches which are engraved in these volumes, is a native Haitian, who owed all his instruction to the institutions of the king.”[1]

Mackenzie frames Notes on Haiti as an objective report on Haiti’s social and political conditions, but his motives were overtly ideological. In the book’s preface, Mackenzie claims that his earlier reports had been used to describe Haitian society and its leadership favorably—prompting him to publish a scathing and often overtly racist rebuttal.[2] Mackenzie fills his text with gruesome accounts of the atrocities committed by Black leaders both during and after the Revolution while conspicuously omitting any mention of the violence of slavery. Mackenzie furnishes his visit to Christophe’s palace with particular prominence within the book, writing that the edifice was a “place in which, I believe, for a time, more unlimited despotism had been exercised than has ever prevailed in any country aspiring to Christianity and civilization.”[3] Within a narrative that relentlessly discredits the capacity of Black people for self-governance, it is striking that an artist who worked under Christophe created the book’s sole visual representations of the country.

Mackenzie’s book includes two scenes: one depicting Sans-Souci and the other showing a road passing alongside the partial ruins of a former plantation (Fig. 1). As one of the most talked-about edifices in the world at the time of its construction, the image of Sans-Souci represented a predictable selection. However, the lithograph of the ruined sugar plantation adjacent to Sans-Souci initially appears incongruous. Mackenzie only makes a passing and imprecise reference to the plantation in his text: “We traveled over a tolerably good road, through the ruins of sugar plantations, of one of which the plate gives a very accurate representation.”[4] Even if Mackenzie requested an image of an abandoned sugar plantation, the decision to depict La Victoire likely belonged to the artist. What was his intention in drawing this scene?

The artist likely selected the site in reference to a key event in Christophe’s rise to power. In the final years of the Haitian Revolution, Christophe’s military rival Jean-Baptiste Sans-Souci—an ethnically Kongo rebel leader—rose to prominence between 1802 and 1803. Sans-Souci amassed a wide, primarily African-born following and thus challenged the emerging post-revolutionary political hierarchy led by Christophe, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Alexandre Pétion. Although Sans-Souci had pledged his allegiance to Dessalines, Christophe lured Sans-Souci to his camp on the Grand Pré plantation and murdered him—an act which consolidated Christophe’s power.[5] The title of the work, “La Victoire, formerly Grand Pré,” explicitly articulated that the plantation’s current name had changed from that which we can distinguish on René Phelipeau’s map. The renaming of an abandoned plantation may appear illogical, but the choice of a name that can be translated as “The Victory” for the precise location where Henry Christophe defeated Sans-Souci was almost certainly calculated. While the moment of Christophe’s triumph is not visually represented in the lithograph, the site evidently served as a monument to his victory. When paired with the drawing of the palace of Sans-Souci, the scene forms a diptych demonstrating Christophe’s authority, even years after his death.

The renaming of the abandoned plantation is just one example of the ways in which Haitians remapped the plantation terrain after the end of the Revolution, exerting their control over the landscape and eliminating signs of French colonial rule. This transformation commenced with the nation’s name: Saint-Domingue would be re-baptized Ayiti, the island’s Indigenous Arawak name, meaning “land of mountains.” Christophe also baptized the wealthy port city near his palace (formerly called Cap-Français) Cap-Henry in his honor. Yet the Haitian artist not only invoked the changing of a social order away from white supremacy in the lithograph’s title—he also showed it in the scene itself.

The lithograph of the artist’s drawing presents a striking departure from the plantation’s appearance under slavery. The image shows a babbling brook with an arched stone bridge, a woman patiently accompanying a child along a road, and the poetic backdrop of hills. Likely drawing on Evans’ artistic instruction, the artist uses the familiar visual tropes of the English countryside to portray a bucolic Haitian landscape. The Black figures walking by the plantation on the road are occupied with conversation, the restraint of a rambunctious child, and travel on horseback: not a single figure pauses to gaze at the ruined plantation buildings to their right, their bare terrain devoid of the quotidian labor of the plantation. The figures’ apparently uninhibited mobility represents an act of freedom incompatible with Haiti’s slaveholding past. In the hands of the Haitian artist, the plantation transforms from a relic of slavery to a backdrop to Black freedom.

Cite this post as: Sophia Kitlinski, “Drawing the Legacy of Henry Christophe,” Colonial Networks (June 2025), www.colonialnetworks.org/?p=835.

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[1] Charles Mackenzie, Notes on Haiti: Made during a Residence in That Republic, vol. 1 (London: H. Colburn and R. Bentley, 1830), 158. Mackenzie consistently uses the term “native” to refer to anyone born in Haiti, with the implicit understanding that a “native Haitian” would be Black; he refers to exceptions as “native whites.”

[2] Ibid., vii.

[3] Ibid., 170.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Michel-Rolph Trouillot contends that Christophe’s palace was named after Jean-Baptiste Sans-Souci. Trouillot links Christophe’s selection of the location and name of his abode to a practice in the West African kingdom of Dahomey, located in what is today Benin. There, military leaders founded their palaces in locations where important enemies had been defeated and killed and then baptized the edifice with their names, part of a “transformative ritual to absorb [their] old enemy.” See Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 2nd ed. (Beacon Press, 2015), 211.

Meredith Martin (New York University)

In 1786, an enslaved man called Jean-François escaped from the Lilavois plantation, where this marker is located (Fig. 1). A reward was offered for his capture in the Saint-Domingue newspaper Affiches américaines, which regularly published advertisements for enslaved “runaways” (maroons). From this ad we learn, among other things, that Jean-François was an accomplished wigmaker.

Wigs (perruques) were a ubiquitous fashion item in both metropolitan and colonial France. Originally associated with aristocrats, by the mid-eighteenth century they were widely worn by merchants, artists, and other professionals, like the Saint-Domingue slave trader Stanislas Foäche, who found them both practical and vital as a means of self-expression. Shops selling all manner of wigs proliferated in Paris and in other metropolitan cities like Le Havre and Nantes, as well as in the Saint-Domingue towns of Port-au-Prince and Cap-Français (now Cap Haïtien). Wigmakers or perruquiers also worked in theaters and domestic residences, where hairdressing was an intimate daily task typically performed by servants.

Hundreds of enslaved men and (less often) women were identified as wigmakers in two period sources: government records documenting the entry of persons of color into metropolitan France; and newspaper advertisements for fugitive slaves like the one posted for Jean-François. Regarding the former, since French colonists had to justify bringing enslaved men and women to the metropole, many claimed they were planning to instruct these individuals in the art of hairdressing, which they could then practice once they returned to the colonies. Such a claim, specious or not, would not have been questioned by Crown authorities, given the popularity of wigs and the fact that the latest trends originated in France.[1]

Scores of young men were brought from Saint-Domingue to France for the supposed purpose of learning this métier. One such man was “Laurent,” a fourteen-year-old creole who arrived in Paris in 1762 and was portrayed alongside his white enslaver, Mlle Desgots.[2] Another was “Polidor, called Joseph after baptism,” a twenty-year-old man originally from Sierra Leone who was recorded (in 1748 and 1762) as being “owned” by the Deurbroucq family, prominent colonial traders in Nantes.[3] A 1753 portrait of the merchant Dominique-René Deurbroucq and an African servant wearing a prominent metal collar (possibly Polidor/Joseph himself) gives a sense of the appearance and role of enslaved domestics who may have been forced to practice hairdressing among their many duties (Fig. 2). Following the conventions of this portrait type, it uses strong color contrasts to accentuate the difference—and suggest a racialized power dynamic—between Deurbroucq, with his pale skin and white powdered wig, and his Black servant and dog. Powdered wigs, as Angela Rosenthal has shown, amplified these racist divisions by highlighting the supposedly superior whiteness of European wearers, and by pitting their controlled tresses against the dark, “allegedly unkempt” hair associated with Africans.[4]

Such categories were brutally enforced but also subverted in Saint-Domingue. White colonists wore powdered wigs, but so too did free persons of color, sometimes to indicate their membership in the elite planter class.[5] The contrast between a white powdered wig and dark skin, as evoked in a 1788 portrait of the Chevalier de Saint-Georges (a mixed-race composer born in Guadeloupe), may have challenged racial hierarchies by underscoring how wigs, and the supposedly superior values they connoted, could be acquired or performed regardless of race. Many prominent members of the free Black community in Saint-Domingue also established themselves professionally as wigmakers, most notably Jean-Baptiste Belley, who lived in the town of Cap-Français and was identified as a perruquier in notarial and parish registers.[6] Some of these free Black wigmakers, including Belley, may have learned the art of hairdressingas former slaves, perhaps using their skills to obtain their freedom.

Based on advertisements in the Affiches américaines, wigmakers represented the second highest occupational category of enslaved escapees from plantations in the pre-Revolutionary period. These inhabitants may simply have had greater means to escape (since they likely lived in the main residence and needed to travel to town for supplies), but they may have also recognized the demand for their craft and the possibilities it afforded. One such escaped wigmaker, mentioned at the beginning of this essay, was a mixed-race man known as Jean-François. An ad published in the Affiches on April 5, 1786 claims that he had formerly been apprenticed to a Port-au-Prince perruquier named “sieur Montreal,” but at the time of his escape had been residing at Mare-à-Daniel, a plantation partly owned by M. Lilavois. The ad further describes Jean-François as having “lively eyes” and “sunken cheeks,” and it notes that he could play the horn and speak Spanish but says nothing about his hair. It does, however, warn readers that he was “perhaps calling himself free”—suggesting his decision to self-emancipate and cast off the dehumanizing yoke of enslavement like an old wig.

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[1] Jennifer L. Palmer, “Atlantic Crossings: Race, Gender, and the Construction of Families in Eighteenth-Century La Rochelle” (PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 2008), 262.

[2] Julia Doe, “Musical Sociability, Atlantic Slavery, and the Portraiture of Carmontelle,” The Journal of Musicology 41, no. 1 (2024): 1-40.

[3] Érick Noël et al., eds., Dictionnaire des gens de couleur dans la France moderne, 3 vols. (Geneva: Libraire Droz, 2001), 1, n. 446; and 2, n. 2775.

[4] Angela Rosenthal, “Raising Hair,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 38, no. 1 (Fall 2004): 2. See also Palmer, “Atlantic Crossings,” 262.

[5] Stewart R. King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint-Domingue (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001).

[6] Jean-Louis Donnadieu, “Derrière le portrait, l’homme: Jean-Baptiste Belley, dit ‘Timbaze’, dit ‘Mars’ (1746?-1805),” Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe 170 (January-April 2015), 29-54, dit.org/en/journals/bshg/2015-n170-bshg01792/1029391ar.pdf

Cite this post as: Meredith Martin, “Wigs and Enslaved Wigmakers,” Colonial Networks (May 2025), https://www.colonialnetworks.org/?p=810.

Julia Prest (University of St Andrews)

Elisabeth Alexandrine Louise Ferrand, known as “Minette” (1767-1807), was an actor-singer of mixed racial ancestry.[1] She and her half-sister, Lise, are the only two performers of color known to have appeared on the Saint-Dominguan stage whose names have made their way down to us.[2]

Minette was born and raised in Port-au-Prince and her first public appearance, when she was only 13 years old, was as a soloist in a Christmas concert in 1780 at the local playhouse. The announcement in the Supplément aux Affiches américaines newspaper does not name Minette but refers to her respectfully, if also somewhat coyly, as “une jeune Demoiselle” (a young lady), noting that she will sing “plusieurs Ariettes dans le grand genre, & plusieurs Duo” (i.e. solos and duets from various opéras-comiques). Minette’s first full theatrical performance was in a benefit performance organized by her mentor, the actor-singer Mme Acquaire (née Dézi), in Port-au-Prince on 6 March 1781.  Minette took the soprano role of Isabelle in the opéra-comique, Isabelle et Gertrude (by Blaise and Favart), which featured in a double bill alongside the Créole parody, Thérèse et Jeannot. 

In the newspaper advertisement announcing this performance, Minette is referred to again as “une jeune Demoiselle,” and her age is wrongly given as 14 years (she was still only 13). In Moreau de Saint-Méry’s retrospective account of this event, he does not comment explicitly on Minette’s racial ancestry, but refers to her as “une jeune personne” (a young person rather than a young lady)—an epithet that was also used near the beginning of Minette’s career in the press, where she was subsequently referred to as “la jeune personne” (the young person) and later as “Demoiselle Minette”. Moreau de Saint-Méry notes that the young performer was “créole” (i.e. born locally) and indicates that her exceptional talents enabled her to overcome (unspecified) colonial prejudices. The launch of Minette’s career was facilitated by the then director of the Port-au-Prince playhouse, François Saint-Martin (died 1784), who may also have been Minette’s life partner.

This debut marked the beginning of a successful, if also somewhat erratic, solo career at the Port-au-Prince playhouse that lasted until 1789. During this time, Minette performed a wide range of roles, most of them in opéras-comiques—a genre combining sung and spoken elements and the most popular form of theatre in the colony. Minette participated in subscription performances as a regular member of the Port-au-Prince troupe; like other troupe members, she also organized occasional benefit performances where she was free to choose her own repertoire. Roles taken by Minette included Lucette in Grétry and Marmontel’s Silvain, Miris in Monsigny and Sedaine’s La Belle Arsène, Robinette in Duni and Favart’s La Fée urgelle, Zémire in Grétry and Marmontel’s Zémire et Azor. Interestingly, when announcing her upcoming benefit performance in 1787 in which she would perform the demanding title role in Dalayrac and Marsollier’s Nina, Minette addressed the locals in the Port-au-Prince theatre audience and reminded them of their shared status as créoles.[3] In addition to her many roles in opéras-comiques, Minette played Galathée in Rousseau’s melodrama, Pygmalion; Cupid in Gluck’s opera seria, Orphée et Eurydice; and, seemingly, the (spoken) trouser role of Chérubin in a performance of Beaumarchais’s Le Mariage de Figaro.[4]

Minette’s final documented performance in Port-au-Prince was as herself in a metatheatrical work by the editor of the Affiches américaines, Charles Mozard, whose La Répétition interrompue was written as a local response to news from France about the French Revolution. Performed on 4 October 1789, the work responds specifically to—and purports to celebrate—the unification of the three (social) orders or estates, which led to the creation of a National Assembly.

The fact that Minette was not given a solo role in La Répétition interrompue is a telling reminder of the precarious nature of her social position as a successful performer of color in a theatrical world—and wider society—that was dominated by white people, particularly at a time of social change. However, it is important to acknowledge, too, the fact that Minette, as a free person of color from a relatively privileged background, belonged to a slave-owning community.

Minette’s mother owned a house with a slave hut, and there is evidence to indicate that Minette herself was also an enslaver: in 1786, a man named Longuet left Minette two enslaved young women in his will and, in February 1790, a jail list in the Affiches américaines includes “Isidore, se disant appartenir à la Dlle Minette” (Isidore, claiming to belong to Mlle Minette). The purpose of such a list was for enslavers—or their representatives—to go to the jail and reclaim and re-enslave their human “property”.

Research into Minette’s life and career, particularly during the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period, is ongoing. However, we know that she performed in Baltimore in 1796 and gave birth to a daughter in Philadelphia later that year. Minette was back in Saint-Domingue in 1799 and appears to have travelled to Cuba in 1802. She ended up in New Orleans, where she attempted to pursue her performing career but was dogged by ill-health and died in 1807. Minette’s fascinating and complex life has been fictionalized in a novel by the Haitian writer Marie Vieux-Chauvet, La Danse sur le volcan (1957; 2008) (translated into English by Kaiama Glover in 2016), and, more recently, in a play, Placeholder, by Catherine Bisset (2023) (translated into French with Haitian Kreyòl by Elise Finielz).

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[1] For more on Minette’s ancestry, see Bernard Camier, “A ‘Free Artist of Color’ in Late-Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue: The Life and Times of Minette,” Music & Musical Performance: 1. Available at: https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/mmp/vol1/iss1/1.

[2] For more on performers of colour, including enslaved performers, in the theatres of Saint-Domingue, see Julia Prest, Public Theatre and the Enslaved People of Colonial Saint-Domingue (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), chapter 5, pp. 153-87.

[3] For more on the significance and dynamics of Minette performing this role, see Julia Prest, “Parisian Palimpsests and Creole Creations: Mme Marsan and Dlle Minette perform Nina on the Caribbean Stage,” Early Modern French Studies 41.2 (2019), 170-88. Available at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20563035.2019.1592813.

[4] Details of all performances documented in the local press can be found at https://www.theatreinsaintdomingue.org.

Cite this post as: Julia Prest, “A Créole Performer Onstage: Minette,” Colonial Networks (May 2025), https://www.colonialnetworks.org/?p=803