Cover not available
Part of
A Comparative Literary History of Modern Slavery: The Atlantic world and beyond
Edited by Madeleine Dobie, Mads Anders Baggesgaard and Karen-Margrethe Simonsen
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXVI] 2024
► pp. 272–288

Chapter 15
Scenes of emotion in French early-modern travel writing from the Caribbean

Du Tertre, Mongin, Labat

This chapter examines the inclusion of voices of the enslaved in seventeenth-century French travel writing to the Caribbean by looking at three missionaries writing at different moments of the French settlement and early colonization: Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François (1654 and 1667–1671), written by the Dominican missionary Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre; Jesuit missionary Jean Mongin’s letters on the evangelization of slaves, written in the 1680s; and Dominican Jean-Baptiste Labat’s Nouveau voyage aux Isles de l’Amérique, from his stay in Martinique between 1694 and 1706. It makes the argument that while commerce and profit were unquestionably the main motivations for allowing and sustaining slavery, travelogues also play on another, emotional register when representing slavery. The aim of the chapter is to interrogate the factors underpinning this representational strategy and in so doing to draw conclusions about how the techniques and motivations for including voices changed as slavery was gradually naturalized in the Caribbean.
Keywords: early modern Caribbean, travel writing, slavery, Du Tertre, Labat, Mongin, French literature, Francophone studies
Article outline
  • Du Tertre: Voicing contradictions
  • Mongin: The divine voices of the enslaved
  • Labat: Controlling speech and emotions
  • Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
References (34)
References
Aljoe, Nicole, Dillon, Elizabeth, Doyle, Benjamin, and Hopwood, Elizabeth. 2015. “Obeah and the Early Caribbean Digital Archive.” Atlantic Studies. 12 (2): 258–266. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bailey, Amanda, and Mario DiGangi. 2017. Affect Theory and Early Modern Texts: Politics, Ecologies, and Form. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bailey, Amanda. 2017. “Speak what we Feel: Sympathy and Statecraft.” In Affect Theory and Early Modern Texts: Politics, Ecologies, and Form, edited by Amanda Bailey and Mario DiGangi. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 27-46.Google Scholar
Boucher, Philip. 2008. France and the American Tropics to 1700: The Tropics of Discontent? Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2009. Cannibal Encounters: Europeans and Island Caribs 1492–1763. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bouyer, Christian. 2005. Au temps des isles: esclaves, planteurs et flibustiers. Paris: Tallandier.Google Scholar
Chatillon, Marcel. 1984. “L’evangélisation des esclaves au XVIIe siècle: Lettres du R.P. Jean Mongin.” Bulletin de la société d’histoire de la Guadeloupe, 61-62: 3-136.Google Scholar
De Certeau, Michel. 1978. L’Écriture de l’histoire. Paris: Bibliothèque des histoires.Google Scholar
Dobie, Madeleine. 2010. Trading Places. Colonization and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century French Culture. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Du Tertre, Jean-Baptiste. 1667–71. Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François, divisée en deux tomes, et enrichie de cartes et de figures. Paris: Thomas Jolly. [URL]
Fanon, Frantz. 2007 [1956]. Black Skin, White Masks, translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.Google Scholar
Fuentes, Marisa. 2016. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Garraway, Doris. 2005. The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean. Durham NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Gikandi, Simon. 2015. “Rethinking the Archive of Enslavement.” Early American Literature. 15 (1): 81–102. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gomez-Géraud, Marie-Christine. 2000. Écrire le voyage au XVIe siècle. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Harrigan, Michael. 2018. Frontiers of Servitude: Slavery in Narratives of the Early French Atlantic. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Keller-Rabhé, Edwidge. 2010. “Représenter la parole historique au XVIIe siècle: stratégies de deux romanciers-historiens, Mme de Villedieu et Saint-Réal.” Dix-septième siècle 1 (246): 119–142. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kullberg, Christina. 2020. Lire l’Histoire générale des Antilles de J.-B. Du Tertre: Exotisme et établissement français aux îles (1625-1671). Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
. 2023. Points of Entanglement in French Caribbean Travel Writing (1620–1722). London: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Labat, Jean-Baptiste. 1722. Nouveau voyage aux Isles de l’Amérique. A La Haye: Chez P. Husson. [URL]
Maingueneau, Dominique. 2004. Le Discours littéraire. Paratopie et scénographie de l’éconciation. Paris: A. Colin.Google Scholar
McClellan III, James E., and François Regourd. 2011. The Colonial Machine: French Science and Overseas Expansion in the Old Regime. Turnhout: Brepols. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Miller, Christopher L. 2008. The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade. Durham NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Mongin, Jean. 1984. “L’évangélisation des esclaves au XVIIe siècle — Lettres du R.P. Jean Mongin.” Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe 61–62: 3–136. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Moureau, François. 2005. Le Théâtre des voyages. Une scénographie de l’Âge classique. Paris: PUPS.Google Scholar
Ouellet, Réal. 2010. La Relation de voyage en Amérique (xvie–xviiie siècles). Au carrefour des genres, Québec, Presses de l’université de Laval/éditions du CIERL.Google Scholar
Peabody, Sue. 2004. “‘A Nation Born to Slavery’: Missionaries and Racial Discourse in Seventeenth-Century French Antilles.” Journal of Social History 15 (1): 113–126. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pioffet, Marie-Christine. 1997. La Tentation de l’épopée dans les relations des jésuites. Sillery: Septentrion.Google Scholar
Régent, Frédéric. 2019. Les Maîtres de la Guadeloupe: propriétaires d’esclaves (1635–1848). Paris: Tallandier. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Requemora-Gros, Sylvie. 2012. Voguer vers la modernité : Le voyage à travers les genres au xviie siècle. Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne.Google Scholar
Roulet, Éric. 2017. La Compagnie des îles de l’Amérique 1635–1651: Une entreprise colonial au XVIIe siècle. Rennes: Presses de l’université de Rennes. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rubiés, Joan-Pau. 2017. “Were Early Modern Europeans Racist?” In Ideas of ‘Race’ in the History of the Humanities, edited by Amos Morris-Riech and Dirk Rupnov. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 33–87. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sala-Molins, Louis. 2006. The Dark Side of the Enlightenment, translated by John Conteh-Morgan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Williard, Ashley. 2018. “Ventriloquizing Blackness: Citing Enslaved Africans in the French Caribbean c. 1650–1685.” In Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology, edited by Cassander L. Smith, Nicholas R. Jones and Miles P. Grier. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 83–105. DOI logoGoogle Scholar