Imagining the “grand colonial family” in French Guiana, 1819–1823

Abstract

This article examines trans-Atlantic debates about colonization in French Guiana between 1819 and 1823, the years immediately following the ban on the Atlantic Slave Trade and the governorship of Pierre Clément Laussat, a career administrator in the French Atlantic Empire. Drawing on official and private correspondence, published and unpublished reports, and numerous mémoires, it considers the variety of individuals involved in the discussion – merchants, colonists, soldiers, and French officials from around the Atlantic basin – and the many plans proposed to clear and settle the colony from sending free, enslaved, or indentured Africans to French Guiana to encouraging the migration of white Europeans or subsidizing the transport of colonists from France's former holdings in Louisiana and Saint Domingue. In so doing, it explores how ideas about race and place informed ideas about the future form of the French empire and the composition of the colonial family in the postrevolutionary Atlantic. It also illustrates the important connections among France's former and existing holdings in the Gulf South, the Caribbean, and Senegal, the complex personal and professional networks developed by individuals migrating, voluntarily or involuntarily, around the Atlantic basin after the close of the Napoleonic wars, and the ways individuals in France's pre- and postrevolutionary colonies built on such relationships to negotiate a new economic and political climate.