French West Indian Colonists’ European Roots
In the 17th century, the French West Indies beckoned to nobles, merchants, and master craftsmen from the Kingdom of France, as well as to people in indentured servitude. The first colonists were recruited from Normandy, or northwestern France (the Paris area, Brittany, Val de Loire and Poitou). During the late 17th century, a great many more came from the southwest (Charente, Aquitaine), especially to Saint-Domingue.
Other Europeans also settled in the West Indies, especially Dutch people who had been chased out of Brazil. From 1654, they played an outsized role in developing sugar-cane as a cash crop. There were also some Irish and Scottish people.
In the 18th century, the French West Indies continued to appeal to young people of all social conditions seeking to make their fortune and to climb the social ladder. Not all of them wound up as landowners, which required significant amounts of capital. Europeans born in the colonies were known as “creoles,” a term that distinguished them from colonists born in Europe. The elite – large and medium-sized landowners with European roots – became social role models that defined standards of desirability for the rest of the free population, both white or people of color.
Elitist European Practices…
The sugar-cane-plantation-owning elite tended to adopt social and cultural practices that brought them as close as possible to European elites. That is reflected most noticeably in material culture. Since clothing was a key marker of social status, planters’ families – especially the women – were intent on adopting Paris fashions.
Early 19th-century male wardrobes were made up of drill trousers and silk cravats, as well as silk stockings and vests. The whole look was topped with an Italian straw hat for protection from the tropical sun. Wealthy 19th-century women’s wardrobes included silk dresses, high-collared dresses, moiré fabrics and merinos-woolen scarves, despite how ill-suited that fabric was to the hot, humid climate. As proof of economic success, jewelry was an indispensable personal ornament. So keeping up with Paris fashion without adapting it, was a mark of prestige for white Creole women, who flaunted their social status through the elegance of their attire.
Furniture and tableware bear witness to the elite’s determination to keep up with fashion in mainland France and to their luxurious tastes. Both their “Habitations” (or i.e. main house on a plantation) and their town houses were furnished with marble-topped furniture, porcelain dishware, crystal glassware, and heavy silverware. Although sources don’t always specify where those items came from, their luxuriousness makes it likely that they were imported from mainland France. Owning high-quality furniture flaunted both the elite’s membership to European culture and their undeniable economic success.
White Creoles were often described by 18th-century travelers as showing little interest in culture or books. Yet several different elements make it possible to quality those statements. We can find documents referring to cabinets de curiosités, and, more frequently, to libraries that sometimes contained precious volumes. In her study of the late 18th-century library of the Guadeloupean colonist and solicitor Mercier, Danielle Bégot notes, in addition to a large number of law books, the presence of volumes that are typical of the Enlightenment, including works by Voltaire and Montesquieu, the Encyclopédie, and a few libertine novels that were particularly fashionable. In 1848, when the Habitations were burned down in Martinique, many landowners lamented the loss of their book collections, which they were very attached to. European book culture was indeed particularly important to many white Creole families.
Those elements reflect the practices of a dominant class that reproduced those of the elite in mainland French society. Yet faithfulness to standards imported from Europe was not absolute.
… and Creole Adaptations
For European families who had been living in the French West Indies for generations, the Caribbean context generated tension in terms of abiding by the social norms and practices that held sway in Europe. That tension was particularly palpable in the realm of religious practices. The historian Philippe Delisle has written about the hostility that slave-owners’ repeatedly displayed toward missionaries preaching to the slaves on their plantations. Slave-owners looked unfavorably on any religious education, even the most perfunctory, that might fuel their slaves’ desire for freedom. In return, the clergy regularly lambasted the planters’ lack of interest in religious practices, and especially in the immorality of the men who openly flaunted their extra-conjugal relations with women of color, or even with their own slaves, without hiding their illegitimate progeny. Even the planters’ spouses’ piety was judged severely. Although colonists did reject any challenges to their authority on their plantations, those judgements should also be qualified.
Nevertheless, we do find references to religious practices, to attendance at Mass on Sunday and to women’s strong adherence to the principles of Christian charity, which some of them put into practice on their plantations by tending to the enslaved when they were ill, for instance. Some sources do however, refer to the tension between austere religious practices, which were seen as European, and practices that were more oriented toward devotion to the saints and the Virgin Mary, which, being more permissive and leaving more room for pleasure, were described as a typical Creole adaptation. That tension can be seen, for example, in elite white Creole parishioners greater or lesser tolerance for black musicians playing the Gloria and the Credo to carnival tunes, with their syncopated rhythms, during Mass.
That tension between traditional French and Creole culture can also be seen in the music people played at home, where the repertory switched between tunes that were popular in Paris and Europe, including Wagner in the late 19th century, and Creole tunes, especially those from carnivals in the towns of Basse-Terre and Saint-Pierre. Some first-person accounts afford a glimpse of white Creole children’s powerful attachment to everything related to their own creole culture, which was shared with descendants of the enslaved, especially Creole nursery rhymes and children’s stories. Indeed, white Creole children and adults spoke the Creole language, both at home and when speaking to either the enslaved or other workers, on the plantations and in town.
Lastly, the material culture itself was riddled with an inevitable tendency to adapt to local conditions, both for furniture and for garments. During the 18th and 19th centuries, while furniture design copied French trends, it was made locally, by local craftsman using local materials, particularly mahogany. As for clothing, while Paris fashions were flaunted in public as status symbols, at home, in the strictly domestic sphere, women generally wore a gaule (or golle) creole, a gauzy, light-weight dress that was better suited to the climate.
The cultural identity of plantation owners in the French West Indies was deeply affected by that ambivalence, which Danielle Bégot summarized in these words: “Conflicting attachments: their minds were in Paris, but, for better and for worse, their realities were there, in the West Indies.”