Colonial Experiments in French Guiana, 1760-1800

Abstract

No French colony has had a more unfortunate history or a more miserable reputation than French Guiana. From the first settlement in 1604 to the present day, from Indian massacres to the infamies of Devil's Island, French Guiana has suffered one catastrophe after another. Much of the colony's story can be told in terms of the studied neglect it received at the hands of the French government, punctuated occasionally by brief periods of misguided zeal and spectacular misfortune. Only once, during the latter part of the eighteenth century, did there appear to be any hope for improvement. After the loss of Canada, France took a new interest in her southernmost American possession; an administrator fired with the idea of progress took charge, and great things were in the offing. But it was too late; the character of the colony precluded its redemption. New projects brought only disaster in their train, and as the century came to a close French Guiana relapsed into tropical somnolence. At the end of the Seven Years' War France had but little to show for a century and a half of desultory colonizing on the eastern coast of South America. Portuguese and Indian attacks in the first years of the seventeenth century had forced the French to quit the island of Marajo, that land of marvels which might be called a celestial paradise !' at the mouth of the Amazon. A few who survived drifted four hundred miles up the coast to the rocky island of Cayenne, which they selected as their new headquarters for trade with the Indians. To Cayenne, the only significant break in the swampy, mangrovefringed shore, came a succession of would-be colonists, indigent nobles, pirates, and military men on the make, who