ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to show how the legal framing of the rights and taboos attached to interracial intimacy and marriage has to be analyzed as culturally specific rather than universally applicable to any type of White supremacist social order. The case of metropolitan France from the slavery period of the country’s history to the present demonstrate how the ideology of a sacred soil guaranteeing freedom regardless of color was complicated by the existence of colonies whose economies were dependent on unfree labor and whose political lobbying introduced exceptions to the “law of the land.” Here again, an analysis of court cases from the 1730s to the early 19th century helps the reader understand the cultural specificities of the religious and moral arguments put forward by these Black–White couples to gain recognition of their respectability and property and citizenship rights, in a different macro environment with an equally important gender dimension. The colonial legacy of the French Republic also introduces another parameter which is absent from the case of Alabama, namely the equation between Blackness and immigrant status. This aspect of the historical perceptions of Black–White couples in metropolitan France should lead U.S. readers in particular to question the variety of processes of political Othering and racialization of Black men and women, and further deconstruct their implications on popular representations and social expectations.
