Furthering Their Family Interests: Women, French Colonial Households, and Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic

Abstract

This article examines the ways that three elite white women—Marie Anne Péborde Laussat, Manon d'Albis de Gissac Dessalles, and Anna Bence de Saint-Catherine Dessalles—furthered their families' social and economic status around the nineteenth-century Atlantic basin. It demonstrates that these women, and the enslaved and free African- descended servants who accompanied them, adapted eighteenth-century strategies for household advancement in response to the increased constraints on French women's legal and economic positions in post-Napoleonic France and also different social, legal, and political responses to racialized chattel slavery throughout the French Caribbean. For elite white women, such adaptations included not only more frequent travel around the Atlantic but also extended periods apart from other family members, all of which required them to independently make decisions for their extended households based on their knowledge of local circumstances and often their own resources. For the enslaved and free African-descended servants who moved between colonial and metropolitan France, differing social and legal regimes provided opportunities for personal and family advancement, in particular de facto freedom, which further blurred the line between enslaved and free status.