It will run through the beginning of the Capetian dynasty to nowadays and will focus on everything related to France and its history.
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Manière dont combattent les Nègres, entre les buissons.
Eau forte. Gravure de Tardieu.
Extrait de la traduction française Voyage à Surinam et dans l’intérieur de la Guyane… par le capitaine J. G. Stedman, parue à paris, chez F. Buisson, an VII -1798-1799. Pl. 31.
In 1809, a former slave who became “maroon” for more than fifty years, Simon Frossard, managed to create a small community of fugitives, increased by the arrival of farmers escaping from the re-establishment of slavery in French Guiana in 1802. Having learnt how to survive in the Amazon forest by imitating the Natives, sometimes robbing and plundering plantations, two hundreds of people followed a rude discipline to keep their existence a secret.
With experimented leaders, they managed to create villages around 50 kms from the littoral, such as Jolie Terre commandé par Simon ; Couleuvre, commandé par Charlemagne, Berthier et Léveillé-Terrasson ; Sainte-Elisabeth, commandé par Georges « créole des Bois » et Paulin, commandé par ce même Paulin…
But the milicia of Cayenne, supervising the repression of marooning and counting 80 armed men was searching for them. Sévère Hérault, enrolled in the milicia, described the campaign: destroyed villages, burnt houses, maroons chased and killed in the woods, until the capture of Simon Frossard, whose head was brought back to Cayenne and exposed on the public place.
Sévère Hérault was impressed by the maroon’s fighting technics, really effective in the abrupt landscape and in the forest:
“Knowing all about the forest and the rivers, Simon Frossard never lost his way and always assured himself to meet us in tight pathways, nearly impracticable: it is where we took high risks and we got much everytime one of them touched or killed as they shot at us. As soon as they were done, they ran away screaming from joy. We replied, but against whom? We saw no one. Twenty feet away, they were hiding behind the bushes and welcomed us as usual. That was their way to wage war. Despair for the one who fell into their hands, he would be slaughtered without any doubt.”
François-Auguste_Biard, L’abolition de l’esclavage dans les colonies françaisesOn 27 April 1848, under the Second Republic (1848–52), the decree-law Schœlcher abolished slavery for the second time. The state bought the slaves from the colons, and then freed them.
Les Îles Eparses
After leaving Bayonne in 1760,the ship l’Ecluse belonging to the Companie française des Indes Orientales sank on the 17th of July 1761 on the island Tromelin. On its board, slaves from Madagascar, illegally bought and destined to what is now Mauritius. Two months later, the crew manages to reach Madagascar, leaving 60 slaves behind them.
It is only fifteen years later, on the 29th of November 1776 that the Knight of Tromelin rescued the eight survivors : seven women and a eight months baby.
Archeological researches have been made to study the remnant of the ship and the life of the people on the island. Two reports (in French) can be found here and here.
Exemple d’art tembé
Tembé is an artistic style often depicted with paintings or gravures on doors, walls or on many objects of the everyday lifein the Businengé community (which means “men of the forest”, or maroon people) in French Guiana. Most of the art is composed of geometrical drawings made with a compass and a scale and vivid colours. The lines form figures which have a meaning.
Fouet de commandeur/ Commander’s lash
N° inventaire : 71.1881.45.32Rapporté de la Martinique par V.Schoelcher en 1841
Fêtes des Cafres (fête caf’) - La Réunion
Cafres or Kafs are people born in Réunion of Malagasy and/or African origins. They often have mixed origins.
The term is also used in the phrase ‘fête des Cafres’. This is one of the names given to the annual celebration of the abolition of slavery on the island on 20 December 1848.
Gorée, Sénégal
The island of Gorée was one of the first places in Africa to be settled by Europeans, as the Portuguese settled on the island in 1444. It was captured by the United Netherlands in 1588, then the Portuguese again, and again the Dutch. They named it after the Dutch island of Goeree, before the British took it over under Robert Holmes in 1664.
After the French gained control in 1677, the island remained continuously French until 1960. There were brief periods of British occupation during the various wars fought by France and Britain. In 1960 Senegal was granted independence. The island was notably taken and occupied by the British between 1758 and 1763 following the Capture of Gorée and wider Capture of Senegal during the Seven Years War before being returned to France at the Treaty of Paris.
Gorée was principally a trading post, administratively attached to Saint-Louis, capital of the Colony of Senegal. Apart from slaves, beeswax, hides and grain were also traded. The population of the island fluctuated according to circumstances, from a few hundred free Africans and Creoles to about 1,500. There would have been few European residents at any one time.
Lassus, Les esclaves au travail sur la plantation de la Compagnie des Indes, face à La Nouvelle Orléans (1726) CAOM, DFC Louisiane 6A/71
Slaves working in a plantation belonging to the Compagnie des Indes, dacing New Orleans (1726)
Émancipation à la Réunion.
Alphonse GARREAU (1792-?)
During the 19th century emerges a class of colons, whose power comes from the sugar can and the ownership of vast propriety, where many slaves were working. At the beginning of the 19th century, they were around 62 000 at La Réunion. Slavery was abolished by Victor Schoelcher in April 1848, and the law was officially registered in October on the island.
The painting shows an heroical and allegorical depiction of the registration. The focus isn’t on the slave but on the representant, Sarda Garriga, wearing the traditionnal symbol of the Republic while holding the text of law. He’s facing the crowd gathering around him and he’s standing under a building where the bust of the republic is associated with the words “liberty” and “equality”.
It is one of the first paintings that construct a Republican iconography around events and dates, and not only around ideas
Belley was said to have been born on 1 July 1746 or 1747 on the island of Gorée, Senegal, but the dates of his birth and death are uncertain. At the age of two, he was sold to slavers sailing for the French colony of Saint-Domingue. With his savings, he later bought his freedom.
In 1791, the enslaved Africans of Saint-Domingue began the Haitian Revolution, aimed at the overthrow of the colonial regime. As their fellow revolutionaries in France thought the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789, they began to see that slavery would need to be abolished.
In 1793, Bellay was a Captain of infantry, fought against the colonists of Saint-Domingue and was six times wounded. On 24 September 1793, he was one of three members (deputés) elected to the French National Convention by the northern region of Saint-Domingue, together with Jean-Baptiste Mills, a mulatto, and Louis-Pierre Dufaÿ, a European, thus becoming the first black deputy to take a seat in the Convention. On 3 February 1794, he spoke in a debate in the Convention when it decided unanimously to abolish slavery.
However, the formal abolition of slavery did not disarm the European colonists’ supporters, and although he was recognized as a full citizen of the Republic, Belley had to struggle against racist insinuations. He was an active spokesman for people of colour. When Benoît Gouly, a pro-slavery deputy from Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, called for special laws for the colonies, Belley denounced a pressure group of colonists meeting at the Hôtel Massiacin a speech published under the title Le Bout d’oreille des colons, ou le système de l’Hôtel Massiac mis à jour par Gouly He succeeded for a time in maintaining the Republican principle of equality between people in France and in its colonies, whatever their colour.
In a declaration of age and marital status for the representatives of Saint-Domingue in the Convention, Belley says that he was born at Gorée, is forty-eight years old, has never left the territory of the Republic, and has lived forty six years at Cap-Français. In a ‘declaration of fortune’ dated at Paris on 10 Vendémiaire, Year 4 of the Republic (viz., 1 October 1795), Belley declares that from the Republic he has only his ‘emoluments’, that he has bought no property, and that he owns only the contents of his room.
Belley remained as a Convention member until 1797, when he lost his seat.He returned to Saint-Domingue with Charles Leclerc’s expedition of 1802 as an officer of gendarmes, but he was arrested, sent back to France and imprisoned in the fortress of Belle Île. He was still being held prisoner there in 1805 when he wrote to Isaac Louverture, the son of Toussaint Louverture. He died later the same year.
