French Atlantic Appropriations: Montlinot, Eighteenth-Century Colonial Slavery, and Penal and Forced Labour Schemes between Europe, Africa and the Americas

Abstract

This article examines the problem of labour in the late eighteenth-century French colonial world through a reading of three archived colonial projects from the 1780s and 90s, none of which ever came to fruition. The first proposed a resettlement of a group of gypsies from the Black Forest to French Guiana, subsequently the most notorious penal settlement in French history. The second suggested the removal of vagrants and ‘loose women’ from Northern France to the West African island of Bulama, and the third proposed to resettle part of the demobilized revolutionary army on either Bulama or Madagascar. These visions, which spanned French maritime possessions from the Indian Ocean to the coast of South America, aimed through the appropriation of indigenous and imported labour to further imperial goals, while ridding France of its more problematic elements. The article considers how specific projects involving appropriation of the labour of designated groups were developed in revolutionary France alongside contemporary theories of colonization, slavery, race and empire.