ABSTRACT
Nineteenth-century French cultural representations of Black women reflect historical events going back to the establishment of France's Caribbean colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The social and economic conditions of slavery in Martinique and elsewhere generated pervasive tropes about Black women who made their way to metropolitan France, where they provided an attractive canvas for the subjects and citizens of a traumatized country digesting the ramifications of their political and social losses in places such as Haiti. Yet the historical presence of and discursive focus on Black women in the metropole remains under-examined. How Black women in nineteenth-century France were seen, perceived, produced, and represented suggests that French elites were deeply unsettled by consequences of the Haitian Revolution. Focusing on Black women such as Sarah Baartman, Ourika, and Jeanne Duval not only provides a history of these women but also illuminates the cultural histories of the white Frenchmen and Frenchwomen looking at them. Black women mattered in France. This can be seen from the zeal of legislators, writers like Charles Baudelaire and Victor Hugo, artists such as Louis-Léopold Boilly and Marie-Guillemine Benoist, and laypeople trying to convince themselves that these women lacked importance. Black women were not supposed to be in France. Yet they were. And that anxiety needed to be managed.
