TY - JOUR
AU - Church, Christopher, M
AB - Abstract Whether by accident or by will, the French Caribbean repeatedly erupted into flames at the end of the nineteenth century, leading Guadeloupe’s governor to recall ‘when the torch was the only instrument of vengeance left to the slave’. This article critically juxtaposes colonial officials’ accusations of incendiarism against labourers’ everyday use of fire and the commonplaceness of accidents and natural catastrophes. Providing an environmental ‘history from below’, it demonstrates how a fundamental continuity in the use, knowledge and political power of fire bridged the slaves’ transformation into wage labourers during the nineteenth century. Reading against the grain of official sources to describe the social and political world of the Antillean labourer, this article explains how labour unrest and the subsequent governmental response uncovered islanders’ liminal status as workers demanding, like their white metropolitan counterparts, a liveable wage, and also as former slaves labouring under the thumb of an exploitative economic regime forged during the age of slavery and haunted by fire, the perennial ecological hazard and weapon of the disenfranchised in the Caribbean. ARTICLE In the opening scene of the 1969 French-Italian film Burn!, Marlon Brando’s character, Sir William Walker, gazes through a telescope at the fictional Caribbean island of Queimada, an island set on fire so frequently throughout its history that its name literally means ‘to burn’ in Portuguese. An agent provocateur hired by British sugar interests, Brando’s William Walker has been sent to the island to secretly instigate a full-scale slave revolt. He duplicitously convinces a dock porter named José Dolores to lead the rebellion and then uses the threat of black insurrection to persuade white planters to hand over control of Queimada’s sugar industry. A widespread rising ensues, as the island is set alight in a revolution that would sever its ties with Portugal and emancipate the slaves. To end the rebellion, British authorities promise the slave leader Dolores that they will abolish slavery, but they secretly make backdoor deals with the white planters. For years following emancipation, the British puppet state continues to exploit the now nominally free workers, and under Dolores’ leadership they make Queimada burn once more. Fearing that this new revolution might spread across the Caribbean and bring down the entirety of the sugar labour regime, British sugar interests send Walker back to the island to catch and execute his former revolutionary comrade. Though fictional, this story resonates with the history of the nineteenth-century French Caribbean. A generation after the largest slave rising in modern memory earned Haiti its independence, France emancipated the slaves of Martinique and Guadeloupe, two sugar plantation islands in the Lesser Antilles. Like those under Dolores’ charge, the islands’ workers had been granted their freedom but still toiled under an exploitative system. As in Queimada, fire maintained a sugar regime that dominated the islands’ economies, while at the same time presenting its greatest threat.1 It was essential not only to the islands’ economic output, used as it was in various stages of sugar production, but also to the progress made by former slaves as they fought for better wages, better living conditions and political and economic enfranchisement. Striving to ‘view history from the bottom rather than from the top’, to borrow Lucien Febvre’s famous phrase, this article provides a portrait of post-emancipation Antillean labourers through their relationship with fire during the second half of the nineteenth century, showing how the environment, labour unrest and the legacy of slavery and resistance were inextricably connected. Such an environmental ‘history from below’ uncovers continuities between the pre- and post-emancipation periods often obscured in histories focused on the revolutionary changes in law, policy and citizenship. The use, knowledge and political power of fire bridged slaves’ transformation into wage labourers during the nineteenth century, as fire provides a through-line for exploring how slavery continued to animate the so-called free labour system that succeeded it. Even as Antilleans became citizens by the second half of the century, the slave plantation system continued to shape their lives, their choices and their forms of resistance, much as it did in the rest of the Caribbean. In unpacking the continuities of labour through the lens of fire, this article critically examines how colonial officials accused Caribbean workers of incendiarism and insurrection and juxtaposes this accusation against the everyday use of fire and the commonplaceness of accidents and natural catastrophes. Fire itself was a form of political speech in an economic and social world characterized by inequity and exploitation, bound up in labourers’ lived experience and laden with symbolic meaning, whether accidental or deliberate. In fact, whether labourers intentionally set the majority of the fires that plagued the late nineteenth-century French Caribbean is unknowable based on the archival evidence. However, we know that officials blamed them; we know of select incidents where evidence suggests they deliberately set fires; and we know they had cause: post-emancipation Caribbean society was a hierarchy with indentured servants at the bottom and black labourers only one small step above that. Reading between the lines of official sources and contextualizing them against the downturn in the Antillean sugar economy caused by international competition and local environmental catastrophe, it becomes apparent that the unrest and subsequent governmental response uncover the islanders’ liminal status as (1) workers demanding, like their white metropolitan counterparts, a liveable wage; and (2) former slaves labouring under the thumb of an exploitative economic regime forged during the age of slavery and haunted by fire, the perennial ecological hazard and weapon of the disenfranchised in the French Caribbean. The pioneering work of French Antillean scholars such as Armand Nicolas, Jean-Paul Sainton, Jacques Adélaïde-Merlande and Josette Fallope has demonstrated the role played by sugar workers as an economic and increasingly political class. Recent scholarship by Elizabeth Heath has elucidated workers’ demands in the face of the sugar crisis of the late nineteenth century.2 Scholarship has demonstrated, primarily through documents left by the political elite, that freedom and citizenship did not bring Antillean workers parity with their metropolitan brethren. However, despite the prominent role played by fire in the Caribbean experience, captured by the island’s fictional name of Queimada in the film Burn!, French Caribbean historiography has underexamined the connection between post-emancipation Antillean sugar labourers and fire—a connection that demonstrates, most saliently in the work of Bonham Richardson, the commonality of the post-emancipation experience across the Caribbean.3 The reason for such an oversight is twofold. On the one hand, natural disasters and civil unrest have destroyed many of the records needed to study the impact of such catastrophic events on the French Caribbean. For instance, two disasters in Guadeloupe, the earthquake of 1843 and the fire in 1871 in Pointe-à-Pitre, destroyed numerous governmental records and administrative minutes.4 Likewise, a fire in Martinique’s capital of Fort-de-France in 1890 incinerated countless written accounts, while the eruption of Mount-Pelée in 1902 ruined virtually all economic registers and documents held in the principal commercial town of Saint-Pierre. On the other hand, former slaves and wage labourers, who were by and large illiterate, left few written sources to begin with, leaving the historical record populated by the writings of planters, merchants and government officials on the one hand, and the rhetoric of socialist organizations, newspapers and leaders on the other. We know the most about rank-and-file Antillean workers through their run-ins with colonial officials, which presents numerous challenges about source veracity and content. For instance, authorities often failed to be impartial, allowing their prejudices to shape their accounts of events and frequently determining guilt based upon thin evidence. Authorities’ biases were also strongly felt around gender: despite historical evidence that women as well as men participated in incendiary behaviour, many more men than women were accused and later convicted of arson.5 Therefore, we must read history against the grain of documents produced at the top in order to arrive at an image from below, one that captures labourers’ experiences and their use of fire. To do so, we must give voice to the traces that the dispossessed left in the historical record, such as statements reproduced in newsprint, quotes in depositions or placards posted around town in the name of revolution. More often, however, we must contextualize documents produced by colonial officials and the socialist leaders who resisted them by cross-checking them with what we know about workers’ lives and what we might surmise to be their motivations. Giving voice to workers does not just mean replicating their words, which is difficult to do given the silences of the historical record, but also looking at their deeds and explaining the world they inhabited, complete with the avenues and options available for them to express their displeasure with an exploitative sugar economy and a striated plantation society. In other words, rather than accepting officials’ accusations that the poor and economically marginalized were criminals and arsonists with no discernible agenda, we must describe the lives of Antillean labourers as they would have lived them and listen for what fire would have meant to them given their sociological context. This process is what E. P. Thompson, one of the paragons of history from below, called ‘historical sociology’.6 Forms of political expression beyond large-scale, organized protest movements often gave a voice to the voiceless.7 Arson was an attractive way to contest authority, because there was no way to prevent access to fire, as you could with weaponry. Fire’s ubiquity made it seem possible, both to those with power and those without, that the weak could overturn the social and labour order. As sugar production became mechanized and the labour force entered the free market, fire remained central to the economic and social fabric of the Caribbean. This article thus presents two sides of fire: its ubiquitous necessity, but also its intrinsic danger. Fire branded the lives of Antillean workers, free or unfree, and is thus vital to understanding the world of those at the bottom of Caribbean society. I To fully understand the role played by fire in French Caribbean labour, however, we must first examine the lives of Antillean sugar labourers themselves, which were difficult and contingent, against the backdrop of the region’s ecology and economy. Post-emancipation Antillean workers had either been born on the island, their ancestors brought to the Caribbean against their will to toil in the cane fields as slaves, or they had signed contracts and ventured from India or Africa in search of a better life only to find back-breaking work and low pay. They were assuredly of a dark skin tone, most likely young and poor. If they were black, they experienced denigration from their bosses and exploitation from plantation owners. If they were East Indian, they experienced both denigration and exploitation, but were also disdained by their fellow black labourers for their role, beyond their own wishes or doing, in keeping wages low and filling the labour gap left by black emancipation. Following emancipation in 1848, French sugar planters brought approximately 75,000 East Indians and Africans to the French Caribbean as indentured servants to fill labour shortages created when former slaves began subsistence farming instead of working in the cane fields, causing resentment among black labourers now facing declining wages as they competed with what was essentially unfree labour.8 Sugar was king in French Caribbean society, but the profitability of sugar production relied upon the commonplace use of fire in a climate where fire could spell catastrophe. In the nineteenth century, harvested cane was brought to what were known as boiling houses, where labourers would either tend kettles over an open flame or use compressed steam and machinery to boil away the cane juice’s water content to turn it first into syrup and then into crystallized sugar. They would then use animal charcoal, produced by burning away all the organic material in a carcass, to further purify and clarify the crystalline sugar.9 Increasingly as the century went on, sugar refining took place at a true sugar factory—known as a usine centrale—powered by steam engines and boilers fuelled by bagasse, the combustible sugar pulp left over from the boiling process.10 While economical, the use of bagasse presented its own hazards, as it was a highly combustible by-product. As a result, the sugar refining process often erupted into flames, as it did in the spring of 1886 when a sugar factory at Rivière-Salée in Martinique completely burned down, causing 700,000 francs in losses. A spark from the machinery had landed on bagasse that had accumulated on the floor, which immediately caught fire, taking the entire structure with it.11 The intersection of the region’s ecology with sugar cane production further led to disastrous outbreaks of fire, particularly at harvest time and during droughts. Young sugar cane is difficult to burn, but cane stalks become particularly inflammable as they near harvest or when they dry out due to weather, making it so that, as one official remarked during a dry spell in 1899, ‘a poorly extinguished match thrown by a passer-by or farmer would be sufficient to enflame a plantation’s straw’.12 In the path of the trade winds, and thus aptly named the windward islands, Martinique and Guadeloupe also experienced strong sea breezes and winds, which could gust over forty miles per hour during harvest time.13 These winds provided such fires much-needed oxygen and helped them to spread rapidly, while at the same time thwarting the efforts of firefighters. This is not to mention the immense heat common to tropical latitudes, which ensured that at the precise moment when cane production was as its height, the islands experienced the ideal conditions for uncontrollable wildfires. At sugar factories and at home, Antilleans relied heavily on imported kerosene for their lighting and cooking needs, particularly from the 1870s onward.14 Early kerosene was highly unstable, and if the kerosene had been improperly mixed, as was common for the low-quality kerosene oftentimes purchased by the working poor, ‘the purchaser’s attempt to light it could be his last act on earth’.15 Widespread reliance on such an easily combustible fuel represented a constant risk, and kerosene itself was a key player in many accidental and oftentimes fatal fires. In one instance, a young woman in Le Lamentin, Martinique, became ‘a victim of kerosene’ in 1893 when she dropped her kerosene lantern and tried to put out the flames with her dress.16 Her clothing caught fire and she burned alive, leading contemporaries to remark that ‘kerosene plays a key role in urban fires, oftentimes with fatal consequences’.17 In fact, Martinique’s capital city, Fort-de-France, burned in 1890 when someone left a teakettle on the stove next to a vase of kerosene.18 Workers’ homes themselves were prone to burn. If workers lived in the city or town, they lived in a wooden structure liable to catch fire in the region’s blistering sun. By and large, however, they lived in the countryside, where they most likely occupied a small home known derogatively as a case nègre, a rudimentary hut-like dwelling dating to the age of slavery.19 These were themselves likely to burn due to their thatched-roof construction, and they were not particularly well constructed: for example, during hurricanes they were known to topple end over end due to their lack of proper foundations. Due to the ecology of the region, the haphazard use of makeshift lighting and heating and the use of inflammable materials in construction, uncontrolled fire was a common occurrence in the lives of Caribbean workers. In fact, Guadeloupe’s towns and villages burned to the ground several times: Grand-Bourg in 1838, Basse-Terre in 1844, Port-Louis in 1856 and 1890, Le Moule in 1873 and 1897, and the principal town of Pointe-à-Pitre in 1871, 1879 and 1899.20 Many times this was accidental, as it was when a fire in a home next to the telegraph office spread throughout Le Moule at 3 o’clock in the morning in July 1897.21 Fire was such an endemic problem in the Caribbean that newspapers were littered with advertisements for fire insurance, which promised to protect against lost property and investment.22 While the working poor were often left to their own devices, the wealthy had the resources to purchase healthy fire insurance plans, which helped them recover in the wake of inevitable disaster. In the case of the 1886 fire at the sugar factory in Rivière-Salée, for instance, approximately 43 per cent of the losses were recuperated via such insurance.23 By contrast, Antillean workers laboured in an unsafe environment, marked by hasty mechanization and few safety standards. It was not until 1893 that the French state established a law outlining a regulatory regime for industrial work, and it was not until 1898 that it legislated compensation due to work accidents, which was not initially extended to agricultural labour.24 And while we know that such laws were promulgated in Martinique in 1900, it is unclear how well they were enforced in the Antillean colonies. In fact, the Labour Ministry was not created until 1906, with the first labour code created in 1910, and the French Senate was still debating these laws’ application to the sugar-producing colonies during the first decade of the twentieth century.25 Antillean workers faced incendiary dangers, but they also faced the inhospitability of the sugar market. Despite the possibility of employment as fire-stokers, service workers and dockhands for men, or domestic servants, laundresses or seamstresses for women, post-emancipation labour continued to revolve around the sugar industry. While indentured servants had their wages set by decree rather than by market rates, the sugar labourer’s salary was contingent, paid not hourly but by the piece. Workers’ salaries floated, inextricably tied to the performance of the sugar industry, and consequently wages could vary wildly depending on the season and on market conditions, though on average a sugar worker could expect to make approximately 1.50–2 francs per day.26 When sugar production waxed, so did salaries; when sugar production waned, fields caught fire—as they did between 1879 and 1881, when a decline of about 12 per cent in sugar production led to an uptick in fires at cane fields and refineries, or when sugar production hit an all-time low from 1898 to 1900 and the increase in cane fires led authorities to complain of labourers’ ‘fires and marauding acts’.27 As the century came to a close, the market increasingly turned against the Antillean labourer. Cheaper to produce at scale with modern mechanization, beet sugar saturated the international market and drove cane sugar prices disastrously low. The Antillean worker relied upon high output numbers in order to secure a liveable wage, but those production numbers were always in flux at the hands of environmental catastrophes, the whims of free market economics and the precariousness of a monocrop that comprised upwards of 90 per cent of the islands’ economic output.28 Following the numerous disasters that so often upturned their lives, destroying the fields of their employment and disrupting the environmental order on which their livelihoods depended, Antillean workers received little to no aid, for officials maligned them as prone to sloth.29 In the wake of the 1891 hurricane that devastated Martinique, for instance, colonial investigators diverted the bulk of the relief funds to the island’s wealthiest planters.30 A decade later, officials limited direct aid to working-age black men ‘who could do without help’ for fear that it would engender indolence and encourage indigence.31 Antillean labourers worked punishing hours to make a living. Each day they woke with the rising of the sun to either take their machetes to the fields and begin the arduous task of harvesting sugar cane, or, increasingly as the century came to a close, to head to the islands’ sugar refineries to prepare the harvested cane, which rots remarkably quickly, for export before it spoiled.32 In the first years after emancipation, Antillean labourers were contractually obligated to work on the plantations of their former owners for nine hours per day, five days per week.33 By the end of the nineteenth century, the French Caribbean had moved to a nominally free labour force working in industrial sugar production. Guadeloupe’s sugar industry became centralized in large-scale sugar factories, which doubled in number from twelve in 1844 to twenty-three by 1882. Industrialization led Guadeloupe’s governor to remark in 1895 that the population ‘lives exclusively on factory salaries’.34 Despite mechanization, however, the entirety of the Caribbean’s sugar production continued to rely heavily upon human labour, so that each day Antillean cane workers returned home exhausted, having worked gruelling hours to produce enough at piece-rate wages to afford life’s necessities. Typically working six-hour shifts, from about 9 o’clock in the morning to about 3 o’clock in the afternoon, Antillean labourers spent the late afternoon working their own subsistence plots, growing the manioc necessary to provide the caloric intake to sustain their physically demanding labour.35 At piece-rate wages, they simply could not afford not to grow their own food. II Emancipation—the transformation from slave to wage worker—had not brought the islands’ labouring population an easy life, and it spurred the revitalization of an unfree labour market centred on East Indian indentured servitude. Now reliant upon wages from their employers, the well-being of Antillean workers was insecure. If they were free and could not work a day for any reason, they would not receive wages for that day, and if it turned into a trend, they might no longer be hired as day-labourers. Meanwhile, indentured servants, who contractually owed money to their employers to begin with, would lose a day’s pay and then be docked an additional day of pay without recourse to a judge.36 Both indentured servants and free workers bristled under the strict labour regime established by their employers and the social realities of life on the islands, leading historian Nelly Schmidt to assert that ‘the phenomenon of post-slavery immigration led to a new period of social protest by fire’.37 Contemporaries repeatedly accused sugar workers of ‘avenging themselves traitorously’ with matches, setting fire to cane fields and plantation buildings.38 Due to the long-standing racial conflict in the colonies, there was an established tradition of authorities and the public at large pinning any sort of fire on malfeasance and discontentment among Antillean labourers. For instance, following an apartment fire on 30 July 1846, local officials immediately began searching for a culpable party despite not having any hard evidence. The apartment had been rented by a man of colour, who had vacated the residence eight days prior to the fire following discussions between him and his landlord. The man ‘belonging to the coloured class’ still had his furniture and other assorted belongings in the apartment when it burst into flames at 10 o’clock in the evening. The fire was promptly extinguished, though the public fervour had only begun. As the abolitionist publication Réforme explained in its 13 October 1846 issue, a ‘great rumour [began] in the public the following day, because never in the colonies is a fire set by accident: it must be therefore a mulatto or a negro [who set the fire]’.39 The former tenant was arrested and put in prison, based on the testimony of an elderly neighbour and her servant who claimed to have seen him enter the domicile earlier that day, and despite conflicting testimony that put the former tenant at his new home working in his garden that entire day. In a world where fire was commonplace and oftentimes idiopathic, those in power—white landowners, magistrates and administrative officials—suspected dispossessed people of colour to be responsible for any fires in the Caribbean due to racial antipathy. In the words of Réforme, ‘judges have an interest in perpetuating the hatreds of caste and promoting the evil passions of their teachers, parents, and associates’.40 These evil passions stemmed in large part from officials’ fears that the labouring populace would repeat the violence of the Haitian Revolution, as few had forgotten the fires set in and around Le Cap that inaugurated the slave insurrection in 1791. On the night of 14 August 1791, slaves had gathered at the Bois-Caiman to initiate a revolution that would topple white supremacy on the island. Following that night, the slaves set alight the northern plains of the island, using fire to christen their new revolution, prompting one Frenchman to ride into Le Cap proclaiming that ‘our properties are being burned: all the slaves of the plain are advancing with fire and iron in hand’.41 Setting fire to houses, barns and fields, the rising slaves burned down all plantations within fifty miles of the island’s capital before burning down the principal city of Saint-Domingue itself.42 The flames and the ashes of the cane fields came to embody the Haitian Revolution, and the image of Le Cap burning seared itself into the minds of slave owners everywhere, as it represented their worst nightmare: the revenge of the slave against his master and the overturning of the plantation economy. As one eyewitness testimony put it in 1791, ‘the Negro[es] … prepared to bring their horrible plan to completion with fire and sword’.43 Likewise, when colonial officials delayed implementing the emancipation legislated by the central government in order to get in one last harvest in 1848, slaves at the maison Sannois in Martinique burned alive their white master, his family and thirty-seven others in his plantation home during an insurrection that would in fact, rather than merely in law, free the slaves in the French Caribbean.44 Given the role of flame and iron in securing liberty, one contemporary described the struggle for black freedom as the ‘impetuous and violent emancipation of 1848’.45 The revolutionary and violent use of fire continued throughout the Second Republic, because the 1848 rebellion saw approximately 75,000 slaves earn their liberty only to become wage workers tied to their employment.46 This left the white population, as one contemporary explained, ‘under the menace of all being put to fire and sword’.47 For instance, the Gazette des Tribunaux exclaimed on the occasion of the Casterat affair in 1850, wherein Alphonse Augustin, a mulatto cabaretier, along with six others had been accused of arson: ‘Poor Guadeloupe is on the edge of the abyss … The February Revolution awakened in men of colour appetites of domination and the dormant idea to expel whites by unemployment and fire. An army of conspirators sneak into plantations in the night to propagate the spirit of revolt … Long live the guillotine! Death to the White! Such is the rallying cry of these barbarous hordes … the fanatical hope to repeat Saint-Domingue.’48 It was precisely because emancipation had not truly brought freedom and proper representation, therefore, that Antillean workers continued to use fire as a means of resistance, embodying the French revolutionary spirit that had in part motivated the Haitian Revolution.49 When officials found arsonists everywhere throughout 1850 and 1851, Victor Schoelcher described this ‘fire plot in Guadeloupe’ as a successor to the struggles of the French Revolution itself. In early May 1850, two youths were found guilty of setting a fire in Pointe-à-Pitre that burned down sixty homes, giving cover for another three individuals to attempt to set fire to the gunpowder depot at the local barracks, which had been serving as a makeshift prison.50 Schoelcher described such tribulations as spurred along by class and racial prejudices that had survived the abolition of slavery, identifying the islands’ tensions as intricately tied to what he saw as the feudalism of the Antilles. The reign of the de facto aristocracy in the Antilles was challenged by those people of colour whom he called Guadeloupe’s ‘Montagnards’— the radical spearhead of the Jacobin party during the French Revolution that ultimately ushered in the First Republic.51 Those in power saw these Montagnards, in Schoelcher’s view, as flying the flag of socialism. Consequently, in a world where ‘creole carelessness and bad habits [make fires] always very frequent in the Antilles’, officials have ‘not stopped finding arsonists everywhere, or the accomplices of arsonists’ as a result of what they perceived to be the mounting challenge to white supremacy in the form of fire.52 Connecting working-class tribulations in the post-emancipation Antilles to those of peasants in the French Revolution persisted. By the 1880s, as collective action mounted worldwide and the global economic depression deepened, the republican and assimilationist newspaper in Martinique, La Petite France, viewed recent strikes in London as an object lesson in workers’ agitation applicable to the plight of labourers in the Caribbean colonies: ‘they don’t pillage for bread; they want to strike at the master, [because] they no longer accept the yoke. It’s a revolution as deep as the one in ’89 that prepared it. The peasants of France had burned the chateaux and destroyed the noble titles to gain not bread, but liberty; workers in turn march on a quest for their independence.’53 With a revolutionary past in mind, many turned to the flame in order to voice their displeasure at their disenfranchisement. Between 1853 and 1861, 185 individuals stood accused of arson in eighty-one trials in Guadeloupe and Martinique.54 The Napoleonic regime that followed emancipation severely limited the rights of Antillean workers, forcing them to carry a passport documenting their employment and monitoring their movements. If they could not prove employment, they would be sent to an involuntary workhouse.55 This new form of ‘wage slavery’ stoked workers’ ire, and according to historian Armand Nicolas, a year did not go by that Martinique’s governor did not notify his superiors of fires set by malevolent hands.56 In 1861, Martinique’s governor complained to the island’s General Council of the ‘frequent fires set by an audacious malevolence’, and in 1868 he complained of the ‘malevolent spirit manifesting itself … in certain workshops of these immigrants who set fire to various plantations’.57 The Third Republic that followed fared no better. At its outset, an insurrection in southern Martinique scorched the countryside in the name of the newly born republic in 1870. Revolutionary workers, led by small-scale farmers in and around Rivière-Pilote, turned fifty plantations to ashes within eight days.58 After those incendiary beginnings, barely a month went by that officials did not attribute a fire to malevolence between 1870 and 1879.59 And from 1878 to 1879, there were 138 fires in the vicinity of Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, alone.60 In many of these fires officials suspected foul play, and to some extent for good reason. In February 1872, six indentured servants were sentenced to hard labour or exile for setting fire to the cane fields and plantation buildings the preceding year, and in 1876 one female servant abandoned her contract and set fire to some cane pulp at a plantation in Macouba, while two others tried to burn down the prison of Gros-Morne, Martinique.61 The legal consequences of arson were steep. Anyone convicted of illegally setting a fire, whether an ‘isolated miscreant’ or ‘black conspirator’, could be sentenced to eight to ten years of hard labour.62 If Antillean workers turned to cane burning, they were willing to face such steep punishments and likely saw themselves as morally justified. In a physically demanding job without any time off for illness, Antillean labourers’ health was precarious, even more so if they lived in an urban space that concentrated diseases such as tuberculosis and cholera, and though they ostensibly lived in a free republic, Antillean workers were anything but free. Despite living in a purportedly colour-blind society characterized by the French Revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, they were ostracized. As the socialist paper Le Peuple explained, planters wanted to roll back the clock and force ‘blacks to return to being simple beasts of burden’.63 Though they had gained citizenship and the right to vote—if they were not indentured servants, that is—Antillean workers experienced great difficulty in exercising it. Between 1852 and 1870, for instance, black Antilleans made up only 15 per cent of Guadeloupe’s voting population.64 With wider participation during the Third Republic, politicians seeking election seemed to cater to black Antilleans’ wishes, only to disavow them once they left for Paris. Often this incensed the French Caribbean worker, leading to collective action, work shutdowns and allegations of arson—as it had when elected representatives failed to secure pay increases in 1900, leading to the French Caribbean’s first general strike.65 Caribbean workers’ experience was, like the fire they were accused of setting, a holdover from the days prior to emancipation when they had no rights. Workers wielded fire to manipulate an economic system otherwise seemingly beyond their power, seeking to secure more hours or better pay. Often a fire’s goal was not to destroy the crop but to increase labour demand. As historian Bonham Richardson explains for the British Caribbean, ‘rogue fires that disrupt the smooth flow of canes to sugar grinding mills [are] probably … motivated only slightly by a desire to destroy the crop itself … [because] these fires … provide immediate employment, including important overtime wages, for the workers of a particular village, estate, or district’.66 In the French Caribbean, it was common for officials and plantation owners to offer wages to labourers to clean up debris in the wake of fires or other disasters. Following the 1890 fire that burned down Fort-de-France, for instance, the mayor offered the town’s workers two francs per day, as well as food rations, to clean up the rubble and rebuild the city.67 One colonial investigator believed that workers stood to enjoy higher wages following the hurricane of 1891 in Martinique, due to the overtime work needed to get the plantations back up and running.68 After Mount Pelée’s eruption in 1902, officials focused efforts on finding labourers gainful employment cleaning up after the disaster, and following the slew of fires that plagued northern Martinique during the three-year-long eruption of Mount Pelée in 1929, they hired workers to clear roads and build new evacuation routes.69 A disaster brought disruption, but it also provided potential, limited employment outside of sugar harvesting and refining, if not the possibility of state aid for the indigent worker. However, the use of fire to secure more work or better pay fostered a profound distrust between those in power and labourers. As the conservative paper La Vérité explained in early June 1898 following several weeks of fires in Pointe-à-Pitre, ‘Some time ago, and still these days, news of fire plans prepared by the wretches who live off public calamities, have spread throughout the city … Protect yourself against the criminal enterprises of some sinister bandits who watch for the opportune moment to sow death and desolation among you.’70 Without much evidence aside from the high prevalence of fires—including fairly large ones on 23 May, 8 June, 11 June and 14 June—the white press warned its readership that there was a ‘concerted plan to destroy the city’ among the island’s black labourers.71 Perhaps this so-called concerted plan stemmed from the fact that there was little upward social mobility for labourers in the French Caribbean. To assuage the fears of insurrection among the islands’ elites, the educational regime in the French Caribbean focused exclusively on agricultural instruction, because officials contended that it taught Antilleans to be good workers, loyal cultivators and demure members of society. By contrast, teaching philosophy and other ‘higher’ concepts could potentially encourage workers to put on airs and try to rise above their station, only worsening the unrest officials wished to avoid. Instead, argued contemporary officials, an instructional regime centred on manual labour would make men ‘more dignified and more moral’, because the goal of education was to ‘habituate [the young] to count on themselves, to avoid deceptive callings, unproductive jobs, and above all idleness’.72 This meant downplaying literary instruction and focusing instead on agricultural output, and in fact, as late as the 1950s, Martinique’s rate of illiteracy was more than sevenfold that of mainland France.73 Nevertheless, Antillean workers had an intimate knowledge of their piece of the sugar growing, harvesting, refining or distilling process, though officials, plantation owners and factory managers treated them as if they were unskilled and expendable. The truth of the matter was, however, that labourers did hold a trump card: the entirety of white supremacy on the islands depended on the success of the sugar crop, and for that crop to flourish, labourers had to show up to work in the fields or at the refinery, which is why officials leaned so heavily on vagabondage laws during the Second Empire and ruthlessly prosecuted errant indentured servants into the Third Republic. As one plantation owner explained in 1881, ‘if the workers desert the fields, that’s the end of the next harvest, the beginning of colonial ruin, and for our commercial ports, an immense loss’.74 In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, Antillean labourers were met with discrimination and animosity on a daily basis by a wealthy white planter class who, seeing themselves as those who led the islands’ agriculture and commerce ‘through their activity and industriousness’, longed for the political privileges they had prior to the Third Republic and jealously guarded the economic dominance they enjoyed throughout the nineteenth century. White planters on the islands looked down upon labourers of colour with disdain, seeing them as naturally ‘lazy’ and ‘apathetic’ to French ideals at best, or detrimental at worst. This, of course, was untrue, as black labourers in southern Martinique rose up in 1870 in the name of the new republic, publishing what contemporaries saw as ‘incendiary pamphlets’ extolling the virtues of black republicanism.75 In addition to cane workers and small-scale farmers, many women—domestics, seamstresses and field hands—took part in the rebellion, fourteen of whom were condemned to death or hard labour in Guyana for starting fires and raiding plantations.76 Paradoxically, as Guadeloupe’s governor explained, the island’s workers did not sufficiently respect their employers because they had ‘an exaggerated sense of dignity and independence’.77 However, the jealousy with which planters held onto remnants of the slave plantation regime meant that when labourers protested poor wages and working conditions, they were treated by economic authorities as unintelligent rioters, members of a race—whether black or Indian—seen as ‘so irritable and excitable’ that riotous violence was always at their fingertips.78 When labour tensions were high, East Indians could become targets and an Indian establishment might burn down under mysterious conditions, as did the shop of Matadine, an indentured servant on the Bellevue plantation in Guadeloupe.79 White readers relished stories about the violence allegedly carried out by and against workers and the poor, as they did when one Indian man was accused of decapitating a woman with his machete—an implement for cane harvesting—on the night of 22 February 1897.80 They also often blamed the victim, as they did when another man was murdered with a machete and the press reported, without evidence, that he likely owed someone money.81 In such a climate, communal justice and mob violence remained a powerful arrow in the labourer’s quiver. An incident in Saint-Pierre, Martinique, in 1881 illustrates both the intense animosity between the labouring and bourgeois class, as well as the role played by extra-legal punishment in enforcing norms of behaviour and fairness. Antoine-Louis Lota, a cantankerous doctor who championed white planter interests and slandered people of colour, and Marius Hurard, a politician of colour and the editor of the republican newspaper Les Colonies, had a long-standing feud. On the occasion of Bastille Day, readers of Les Colonies allegedly marched through the streets outside Lota’s home in St. Pierre, hurling insults and shouting ‘Down with Lota!’ and ‘Death to Lota!’ Later, following a physical confrontation between Lota and Hurard, in which the white physician hit the journalist with his cane, members of the surrounding crowd attacked Lota’s horse and carriage, driving him from the area and allegedly injuring him in the process. Lota illegally fired his pistol upon Hurard, and though local magistrates planned to arrest Lota, a crowd of thirty-two angry workers led by Gédéon Moscou, a local baker, ransacked his home and that of his neighbour in retaliation, breaking windows and furnishings with rocks, machetes and wooden clubs.82 Authorities arrested members of the crowd, one of whom went by the alias ‘Kérosine’, perhaps in honour of his incendiary behaviour as well as his job as a fire-stoker, both of which recall the prominence of fire in the lives of labourers. Such collective violence and mob justice were intricately tied to the labouring community’s response to an unfair system, one in which they worked the cane fields but saw little if any of the profits. In one instance in Guadeloupe in 1899, three private armed guards forcibly stopped a labourer from taking home some sugar cane from the harvest. Nearby townsfolk heard of the incident, and it lit a fire in their bellies. Approximately six hundred individuals—the ‘neighbourhood’s entire creole population’—marched on the plantation where the labourer worked, storming the planter’s mansion and attacking his private security guards with batons and machetes. In a fury, the crowd destroyed the home’s furniture, smashed its windows and even ripped the doors from their frames.83 Alongside the communal violence, fires had increased across the countryside due to drought and harvest conditions, seeming to dovetail with the crowd’s actions and thereby alarming a business elite who complained that a ‘great inquietude manifests itself’ as a result of a ‘series of criminal fires’.84 III From the last decade of the nineteenth century into the first decade of the twentieth, labour agitation in the French Caribbean had been skyrocketing in lockstep with the growth of socialist ideology, particularly on the island of Guadeloupe, where the island’s first socialist newspaper, Le Peuple, appeared in 1891 to give voice to the frustrations of Guadeloupe’s disempowered. By the close of the decade, Schoelcher’s so-called Montagnards had become a vocal electoral bloc, stoking the fears of the white planter class and agitating for better work conditions, higher wages and more equal representation for workers of colour. The rise of socialism in Guadeloupe did not go unnoticed in European circles, leading Rosa Luxembourg to remark on the 1898 election of Hégésippe Légitimus, a black socialist, to the French legislature. Luxembourg described him as ‘un nègre pur sang’ whose dedication to revolutionary socialism caused great consternation among the petty bourgeois crowd in the Chamber of Deputies.85 The election of a black individual to the French legislature represented black enfranchisement, which in turn enflamed the racist prejudices of many plantation owners fearful that black socialism would overturn the island’s labour regime. Meanwhile, French officials worried that Caribbean society was a powder keg and Légitimus was purposefully fanning the flames of discontent among the island’s working class. When a blaze swept through a Pointe-à-Pitre neighbourhood after originating in a home under construction, the local press reported that the town’s working poor exclaimed: ‘Those are the homes of the whites. Let them burn.’86 When dozens more fires afflicted Pointe-à-Pitre and its surrounding plantations from late 1898 through early 1899, the right saw the phantoms of insurrection everywhere, blaming the incendiary and socially revolutionary rhetoric of Légitimus.87 And when a disgruntled former employee broke into a pharmacy and inadvertently started a fire in April 1899 that would consume one-tenth of Pointe-à-Pitre, they saw a full-scale rising just over the horizon.88 Officials initiated martial policing of the streets to quell what they saw as mounting unrest, and Guadeloupe’s conservative press described the culprit as a ‘dirty Negro, sorcerer, thief of Indians, arsonist’.89 In hindsight, elites’ fears that they were witnessing the manifestation of working-class frustration seems justified, even if many of the fires were likely caused or worsened by the drought, strong seasonal winds and dry ripeness of the cane. The day after the Pointe-à-Pitre fire in April 1899, police apprehended a man disguised as a woman and armed with a machete who had attempted to set fire to a nearby store in order to rekindle the previous day’s conflagration.90 Subsequently, angry workers set several plantations and refineries ablaze, and they burned down the homes of several other wealthy planters and merchants in the vicinity of Pointe-à-Pitre. In fact, when police arrested one of the suspected arsonists, he had a stick of dynamite on him.91 When the city hall in the town of Le Gosier burned in October 1899, it seemed likely that the fire had been set by workers as well.92 These fires in Guadeloupe indicated an intense dissatisfaction among the working class of the Antilles, as fire had come to embody the antagonism between the poor and the rich, between the islands’ haves and have-nots. Within a few months, Guadeloupe’s sister island of Martinique would erupt into a full-scale strike in protest of declining piece-rate wages and poor working conditions, with workers throwing down their tools, abandoning the fields and realizing the white planters’ fear that labourers would discern that they held the trump card: deserting the fields and bringing sugar production to a screeching halt. Beginning on 5 February 1900, Martinique’s workers stormed plantations in a mounting movement to secure a salary increase, which did not sit well with white planters who believed their workers to be animated by a ‘primitive objective and completely versed in brigandage’.93 From there, the movement spread as workers moved about the island. On 9 February, for instance, 150 workers armed with sticks and machetes marched on the Macouba plantation, ‘forcing the cabrouetiers [workers who push the sugar handcarts] to let the animals go’.94 By the next day, police had confiscated provocative posters throughout Saint-Pierre that exclaimed ‘pillage, fire, and riot, those are the weapons at your disposal … Let’s make blood flow to wash our injuries, let’s light fires to purify our country.’95 Calls to ‘avenge’ fallen brothers—namely those killed and wounded in confrontations with police—with ‘fire and blood’ were posted on the gate at the Perinnelle plantation as well.96 At one plantation in La Trinité, a fire devoured about one thousand pounds of cane on 11 February, and at midnight on 14 February, striking workers set alight the plantations of La Cocette and Champigny.97 While numerous other fires were lit but quickly extinguished, fires had consumed several cane fields in and around Le Francois, La Trinité and Fort-de-France; work had ceased at numerous plantations and factories; and plantation owners feared their loss of profits.98 While there were twenty-three fires in February and March, the fires themselves never burned more than forty-five out of about 10,000 hectares of cane on the island.99 However, seen by planters and officials as the dawn of an insurrection, the threat of fires and work stoppages ultimately secured a pay increase for the workers, who reached an agreement with their employers at Rivière-Salée just over a week after the strike started.100 IV In a society in which money and education seemed to whiten the skin, Antillean labourers had neither. In an economic order dominated by vested white interests, they remained poor. And in a political world controlled by bureaucrats of means, they were marginalized. Alone, a labourer was isolated, weak and vulnerable. His voice went unheard and his concerns unanswered. As a member of a social class, however, a labourer gained the power to challenge France’s colonial designs in the region and even the ability to, as Burn!’s William Walker feared, shake the apartheid regimes across the Caribbean Basin. To do so, Antillean labourers frequently turned to the weapons of the weak, chief among them the use of fire. Given its immense capacity to destroy, as well as its ubiquitous use in human society, fire has long provided an outlet for the disempowered. It was simple, universally available and necessary to sustain basic human needs as well as the complexity of the Caribbean economy. But it was also dangerous. And it was not only Antillean workers who turned fire against the powerful, but their brethren across the Caribbean and their ‘free labour’ counterparts in metropolitan France as well. Just as Antillean workers set alight the fields of their employers and torched the cities of Pointe-à-Pitre and Fort-de-France in the tradition of their slave forebears, so too did frustrated peasants use the flame against their feudal lords, revolutionaries burn the symbols of the monarchy and angry Communards burn down Paris to spite the Versailles government.101 Fire sustained but also threatened the very modernity of society, providing its economic means while at the same time threatening to turn it to ashes. While some bemoaned what was lost in the conflagration, others hoped that something new might rise from its remains. To this day fire represents a prevalent factor in Caribbean life, particularly among the developing islands.102 With over 5000 fires occurring across the Caribbean Basin annually, it continues to threaten the stability of Antillean society: while naturogenic fires spread rapidly to consume homes, businesses and agricultural fields, anthropogenic fires have not lost their revolutionary underpinnings. In 2009, over 100,000 French Antilleans took to the streets in the largest general strike on the islands in almost a century, and while the strike mostly took the form of organized protest, the threat of fire remained nonetheless. In Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, disaffected youths set fire to dumpsters, cars, barricades and local businesses.103 Meanwhile, protesters in Fort-de-France lit trash and dumpster fires and threw stones at authorities, who ultimately responded with canisters of tear gas.104 Referencing the fact that the white descendants of slave owners still own most Antillean industries, demonstrators chanted ‘Martinique is ours, not theirs!’ during what one news report described as a ‘battle against the vestiges of slavery’.105 Just as emancipation had changed the legal and citizenship status of Antilleans, departmentalization had altered the legal and political framework of the islands. But these top-down changes did little to ameliorate the underlying social and economic inequities inherited from the old slavery regime.106 After 1848 as well as 1946, when Antilleans came to realize that they had been swindled just as Walker had deceived Dolores in Queimada, they unnerved those in power with the threat of incendiarism. The French Caribbean repeatedly burst into flames over the course of the nineteenth century, burning plantations and cities alike. In a world where a stray match could set the cane fields or a transgressor’s home alight, Antillean workers’ lives were shaped by the environment and the coming of the seasons, but they were also shaped by the memory of slavery and its legacy. Slave resistance played a key role in shaping late nineteenth-century labour unrest in the French Caribbean and the governmental response to it, for it seemed to colonial officials that when fires broke out, islanders had put their vexations to the flame and employed the only means of protest available to their disenfranchised ancestors: burning the master’s house and his cane fields. With a slave past and an inequitable present, officials viewed fires as evidence of public disquietude and foresaw the threat of open insurrection. As the governor of Guadeloupe remarked in 1899, such fires recalled a time ‘when the torch was the only instrument of vengeance left to the slave’.107 Footnotes 1 C. Schnakenbourg, ‘La création des usines en Guadeloupe (1843–1884): recherche sur la modernisation de l’industrie sucrière antillaise après l’abolition de l’esclavage’, Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe, 124–25 (2000), 21–115; C. Schnakenbourg, ‘From sugar estate to central factory: the industrial revolution in the Caribbean (1840–1905)’, in Crisis and Change in the International Sugar Economy, 1860–1914, ed. B. Albert and A. Graves (Edinburgh, 1984), 83–91. 2 J. Adélaïde-Merlande, Les Origines du mouvement ouvrier en Martinique: 1870–1900 (Paris, 2000); J. P. Sainton, Les Nègres en politique couleur, identités et stratégies de pouvoir en Guadeloupe au tournant du siècle (Lille, 2003); J. Fallope, Esclaves et citoyens: les noirs à la Guadeloupe au XIXesiècle dans les processus de résistance et d’intégration: 1802–1910 (Basse-Terre, 1992); E. Heath, Wine, Sugar, and the Making of Modern France: Global Economic Crisis and the Racialization of French Citizenship, 1870–1910 (Cambridge, 2014). 3 B. Richardson, Igniting the Caribbean’s Past: Fire in British West Indian History (Chapel Hill, 2004). 4 Annuaire de la Guadeloupe et dépendances, année 1901 (Basse-Terre, 1904), 209–10. 5 For instance, in May 1848, a seamstress named Exulie Cazenave was condemned, along with thirteen men, for an attack on a plantation during Martinique’s uprising for abolition. The following year, a washerwoman was jailed along with eight men for instigating another plantation uprising: U. Schmieder, ‘Histories under construction: slavery, emancipation, and post-emancipation in the French Caribbean’, Review, 31 (2008), 217–42. 6 E. P. Thompson, ‘History from below’, Times Literary Supplement, 7 Apr. 1966. 7 J. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 2008). 8 D. Northrup, ‘Indentured Indians in the French Antilles. Les immigrants indiens engagés aux Antilles françaises’, Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer, 87 (2000), 245–71. 9 D. Tomich, Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar: Martinique and the World Economy (Albany, 2016), 279–80. 10 Ibid., 221. 11 ‘Incendie de l’usine de la Rivière Salée’, La Petite France, 17 Apr. 1886. 12 A[rchives] D[épartmentales de la] G[uadeloupe], 1 Mi 667, Prosecutor general to the governor of Guadeloupe, 14 Mar. 1899. 13 Aggregated historical weather statistics for the months of June through December, 1992–2017, for Le Lamentin, Martinique: ‘Le Lamentin, Martinique’, Weather Underground. Accessed 3 March 2018. <https://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/TFFF/>. 14 Richardson, Igniting the Caribbean’s Past, 63. 15 D. Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power (New York, 2014), 56. 16 ‘Un victime de la kérosine’, La Petite-France, 11 Mar. 1893. 17 Ibid. 18 Janin, ‘Nos gravures: L’incendie de Fort-de-France’, L’Illustration, 26 July 1890. 19 According to a report in 1877, 48,000 Martiniquais lived in cities and towns, whereas 113,000 lived in the countryside: Adélaïde-Merlande, Les Origines, 37. 20 ADG 1 Mi 677, ‘M. Isaac Sur-Directeur de l’Intérieur à la Guadeloupe du 20 mars 1879 au 24 août 1882’. 21 ‘Incendie du Moule’, Le Courrier de la Guadeloupe, 20 July 1897. 22 Advertisement pages of Le Courrier de la Guadeloupe, Le Peuple, La Petite France, Les Antilles, Les Colonies. 23 ‘Incendie de l’usine de la Rivière Salée’, La Petite France, 17 Apr. 1886. 24 ‘Loi concernant l’hygiène et la sécurité des travailleurs dans les établissements industriels du 12 juin 1893’, La Sucrerie Indigène et Coloniale: revue bedomadaire, 68 (Paris, 1906), 401; Heath, Wine, Sugar, 142. 25 C. Mourey and L. Brunel, L’Année coloniale (Paris, 1902), 250; C. Laplane, ‘La législation du travail dans les colonies francaises avant 1914’ (MA, University of Nantes, 2014) <http://www.droit1.univ-nantes.fr/servlet/com.univ.collaboratif.utils.LectureFichiergw?ID_FICHIER=1448288934964>; Annales du Sénat: Documents parlementaires, 52–53 (Paris, 1910), 486. 26 É. Légier, La Martinique et la Guadeloupe, considérations économiques sur l’avenir et la culture de la canne, la production du sucre et du rhum et les cultures secondaires dans les Antilles françaises (Paris, 1905), 24. 27 ADG 1 Mi 677, Rapport du 11 mai, 1879–82; ADG 1 Mi 677, ‘Incendies et actes de maraudage commis à la Guadeloupe avant l’incendie du 17 avril 1899’. 28 Schnakenbourg, ‘La création des usines en Guadeloupe’; Schnakenbourg, ‘From sugar estate to central factory’. 29 A[rchives] N[ationales d’]O[utre] M[er], F[onds] M[inisteriel] S[érie] G[éographique] Mar[tinique], 72, d[ossier] 582, ‘Commission Centrale de secours aux victimes du cyclone du 18 Aout 1891, Troisième Séance du Samedi 26 Septembre 1891’; ANOM FM 1AFF[aires]POL[itiques] 1092. Aid registers. 30 ANOM FM SG MAR 72, d. 581, Inspector of the colonies to colonial undersecretary, dated 15 Jan. 1892. 31 ANOM FM AFFPOL 782/2. Official committee of assistance and aid to the victims of the catastrophe in Martinique, summary of works, 1909. 32 C. Schnakenbourg, Histoire de l’industrie sucrière en Guadeloupe aux XIXeet XXesiècles (Paris, 1980), 75. 33 D. Tomich, ‘Contested terrains: houses, provision grounds, and the reconstitution of labour in post-emancipation Martinique’, in From Chattel Slaves to Wage Slaves: The Dynamics of Labor Bargaining in the Americas, ed. M. Turner (Bloomington, 1995), 241–57. 34 Fallope, Esclaves et citoyens, 529; Schnakenbourg, Histoire de l’industrie sucrière, 75. 35 Légier, La Martinique et la Guadeloupe, 24. 36 Adélaïde-Merlande, Les Origines, 59. 37 N. Schmidt, ‘Procès et condamnés politiques en Guadeloupe: 1848–1871’, in Répression et prison politiques en France et en Europe au XIXesiècle, ed. P. Vegier and A. Faure (Paris, 1990), 77–93. 38 V. Schoelcher, Polémique coloniale: 1871–1881 (Paris, 1882), 238; L. Farrugia, Les Indiens de Guadeloupe et de Martinique (Basse-Terre, 1975), 14. 39 M. Just, Les Magistrats des colonies depuis l’Ordonnance du 18 juillet 1841 (Paris, 1847), 142. 40 Just, Les Magistrats, 142. 41 Cited in L. Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2004), 96. 42 J. L. Polasky, Revolutions without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World (New Haven, 2016), 154. 43 D. P. Geggus, The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History (Indianapolis, 2014), 79–81. 44 C. Mismer, Souvenirs de la Martinique et du Mexique pendant l’intervention française (Paris, 1890), 8. 45 A. Fouquier and C. L. Lesur, Annuaire historique universel ou histoire politique pour 1850 (Paris, 1851), 374. 46 Nicolas, L’Insurrection du Sud, 3–5. 47 Mismer, Souvenirs, 8. 48 Letter from M. M. Gatine and Jouannet to the minister of the marine and colonies, 26 March 1850. Reproduced in Victor Schoelcher, Protestations des citoyens français, nègres et mulâtres contre des accusations calomnieuses (Paris, 1851), 10. 49 Dubois, Avengers of the New World. 50 Fouquier and Lesur, Annuaire historique, 375. 51 V. Schoelcher, ‘Le Complot du feu à la Guadeloupe’, La Liberté de penser: revue démocratique, 8 (Paris, 1851), 550. 52 Ibid., 550, 565. 53 ‘Une leçon’, La Petite France, 22 May 1886. 54 Schmidt, ‘Guadeloupe: 1848–1871’, 89. 55 R. Renard, ‘Labour relations in Martinique and Guadeloupe, 1848–1870’, Journal of Caribbean History, 26 (1992), 37–57. 56 A. Nicolas, L’Insurrection du Sud à la Martinique: septembre 1870 (Fort-de-France, 1970), 19. 57 Ibid., 20. 58 Nicolas, L’Insurrection du Sud, 3–5. 59 Adelaide-Merlande, Origines, 97. 60 ADG 1 Mi 677, List of condemnations, 1879–82. 61 Bulletin officiel de la Guadeloupe, 2 Feb. 1872; Schœlcher, Polémique coloniale, 247; Adelaide-Merlande, Origines, 97. 62 ADG 1 Mi 677, List of condemnations, 1879–82; ADG 1 Mi 677, Letter from Guadeloupe’s Governor to the Minister of the Colonies 22 June 1898; ADG 1 Mi 677, Attorney General’s Report on the Fires of Port-Louis, 29 June 1898; Governor’s decree from the assize court on the criminal acts of 17, 18, 19 and 20 October 1871, Bulletin officiel de la Guadeloupe, 2 (Feb. 1872). 63 J. Prolo, ‘Haine des Races’, Le Peuple, 7 October 1899. 64 Heath, Wine, Sugar, 55. 65 C. Church, ‘ “Strikingly French”: Martinique, agitation ouvrière et politique métropolitaine au tournant du siècle’, Le Mouvement Social, 248 (2014), 109–24. 66 Richardson, Igniting the Caribbean’s Past, 106. 67 ‘Derniers renseignments’, Les Antilles, 25 June 1890. 68 ANOM FM SG MAR 72, d. 581, Colonial inspector Chaudié to Undersecretary of the Colonies, 15 Jan. 1892. 69 ANOM FM AFFPOL 782-2, Official committee of assistance and aid to the victims of the catastrophe in Martinique, summary of works, 1909; ANOM FM AFFPOL 782-1, President of the commission charged with measures to take in favour of evacuated populations to the governor of Martinique, signed Digeon and dated 6 November 1929. 70 La Vérité, 12 June 1898, cited in ‘L’Incendie du 11 Juin’, Le Courrier de la Guadeloupe, 14 June 1898. 71 ‘L’Incendie du 11 Juin’, Le Courrier de la Guadeloupe, 14 June 1898. 72 Exposition universelle international de 1900 à Paris: Rapports du jury international, Groupe 1 (Paris, 1902), 639; A. P., ‘Education à refaire’, Le Courrier de la Guadeloupe, 10 June 1898. 73 Unesco, World Illiteracy at Mid-Century: A Statistical Study (Westport, CN, 1970), table 5. 74 ‘La Vérité sur les évènements’. 75 ANOM FM SG MAR 71, d. 578, ‘La Vérité sur les évènements de Saint-Pierre (Martinique)’ by Dr Lota, dated 24 Nov. 1881. 76 O. Krakovitch, ‘Le rôle des femmes dans l’insurrection du Sud de la Martinique en Septembre 1870’, Nouvelles Questions Féministes, 9/10 (1985), 34–51. 77 ADG 1 Mi 677, Governor of Guadeloupe to minister of the colonies, 29 Apr. 1899. 78 ADG 1 Mi 677, Governor of Guadeloupe to minister of the colonies. 79 ‘Les incendies’, Le Courrier de la Guadeloupe, 28 June 1898. 80 ‘Informations’, Le Courrier de la Guadeloupe, 27 Feb. 1897. 81 Le Courrier de la Guadeloupe, 26 Sept. 1898. 82 ANOM FM SG MAR 71, d. 578, ‘Acte d’accusation: Le ministre public contre Gédéon Moscou et autres’, dated 23 Nove. 1881. 83 ADG 1 Mi 677, Banque de consignations. 84 ‘Séance du 29 Mai 1899’, Annales du Sénat, 789. 85 R. Luxembourg, ‘Der Sozialismus auf Guadeloupe’, Sächsische Arbeiterzeitung, 177, trans. L. Roignant, accessed 27 November 2017. <https://www.marxists.org/francais/luxembur/works/1898/08/rl03081898.htm>. 86 ‘L’Incendie du 11 juin’, Le Courrier de la Guadeloupe, 14 June 1898. 87 ‘Vagabondage et maraudage’, Le Courrier de la Guadeloupe, 24 Jan. 1899; ‘Vagabondage et maraudage’, Le Courrier de la Guadeloupe, 21 Feb. 1899. 88 ‘Terrible Incendie à la Guadeloupe’, L’Illustration, 113 (Paris, 1899), 340. 89 Prolo, ‘Haine de Races’; ‘Projet de loi sur la police: la Police enlevée aux municipalités’, Le Courrier de la Guadeloupe, 21 May 1899. 90 ‘Séance du 29 Mai 1899’, Annales du Sénat, vols 54–5, 789. 91 ADG 1 Mi 677, Note from the minister of the colonies. 92 ‘Incendie’, Le Peuple, 31 Oct. 1899. 93 ‘Brigandage’, Les Antilles, 10 Feb. 1900. 94 A[rchives] D[épartmentales de la] M[artinique], 10M11586, Letter to the governor from a plantation owner. 95 ADM 10M11586, Commissary of the police, 10 Feb. 1900, with attached documents. 96 ADM 10M11586, Letter from a plantation owner, 10 Feb. 1900. 97 ADM 10M11586, Letter from the Police Commissary of La Trinité to the Governor, 12 Feb.; ‘Incendiarism in Martinique’, New York Times, 15 Feb. 1900. 98 ADM 10M11586, Letters from the police commissaries (Saint-Esprit, La Trinité), 12–14 Feb.; ‘Trouble in Martinique’, New York Times, 10 Feb. 1900; ‘Incendiarism in Martinique’, New York Times, 22 Feb. 1900; ‘The Martinique situation’, New York Times, 2 Mar. 1900. 99 Adelaide-Merlande, Les Origines, 207–11. 100 ‘Accord intervenu à la Rivière Salée’, Les Antilles, 21 Feb. 1900. 101 J.-C. Caron, Les Feux de la discorde: conflits et incendies dans la France du XIXesiècle (Paris, 2006). 102 Recent GIS research has demonstrated that between 2000 and 2007, there were an average of 5185 fires per year across the Caribbean Basin, with the majority of them in the forested Greater Antillean islands such as Cuba and the Dominican Republic—the vast majority of which were wildfires initiated by human activity. Modern building practices and standards, with investment from the European Union, have cut the prevalence of fire in Martinique and Guadeloupe dramatically in recent years, with only a handful of fires over this same period: A. M. Robbins, C. M. Eckelmann and M. Quiñones, ‘Forest fires in the insular Caribbean’, Ambio, 37 (2008), 531. 103 Y. Bonilla, ‘Guadeloupe on strike: a new political chapter in the French Antilles’, North American Congress on Latin America, 1 Apr. 2009. 104 ‘Grève générale: incidents en Martinique’, Le Monde, 3 Mar. 2009; ‘Negotiations stall as Martinique sinks deeper into violence’, France 24, 26 Feb. 2009. 105 J. Katz and D. Coto, ‘Unrest in Caribbean has roots in slavery past’, San Diego Union-Tribune, 22 Feb. 2009. 106 J. Dumont, ‘Antilles françaises: une histoire faite d’attirance et de rejet’, L’Express, Interview, 5 May 2013. 107 ADG 1 Mi 677, Transmission d’un rapport de M. Le Procureur General au sujet des incendies qui ont eu lieu à la Grande-Terre. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Study of French History. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - The last resort of the slave: Fire and labour in the late nineteenth-century French Caribbean
JO - French History
DO - 10.1093/fh/cry088
DA - 2018-12-31
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-last-resort-of-the-slave-fire-and-labour-in-the-late-nineteenth-0hi5WJQa0K
SP - 511
VL - 32
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DP - DeepDyve
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