Colonial Mésalliances: The Metropolitan Roots of Racial Prejudice in the French Americas

Guillaume Aubert

This paper proposes to analyze the circulation and transformation of the French metropolitan idea of mésalliance (marriages between people of different social ranks) in the contexts of New France, the French Caribbean, and French Louisiana during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It argues that the biological determinism stemming from early modern metropolitan discourses over the issue of mésalliance progressively found its way into French colonial discourses and policies regarding French-Indian and French-African sexual encounters. By the turn of the eighteenth century, French colonial leaders frustrated in their efforts to establish orderly colonies began progressively to equate corruption of the social order with corruption of 'blood' by drawing on the metropolitan idea of mésalliance. By the mid-eighteenth century, the language of race that had thus far been confined to the preservation of the purity of metropolitan aristocratic blood had been extended to the French colonial population at large.

[WP # 00001]