Jennifer L. Palmer. Intimate Bonds

In 1755, after twenty-six years in Saint-Domingue, slave owner Aimé-Benjamin Fleuriau returned to France with five mixed-race teenagers in tow. In La Rochelle, he and his new white wife raised his illegitimate offspring in their household. He gave them generous financial gifts and even bestowed six slaves on one of his sons for his coffee plantation back in the Caribbean. Yet in France, Fleuriau never acknowledged paternity of his Saint-Domingue children; nor did he share his name with them, and he deliberately excluded them from his lineage and estate. In the end, his identity as a white patriarch trumped his more elastic vision of family. Little wonder that—come the French and Haitian Revolutions—his son Paul petitioned for citizenship rights for free men of color. He signed with the name his father never gave him: P. Fleuriau. By examining intriguing stories such as this one, Jennifer L. Palmer compellingly demonstrates how the intimate bonds of family and household shaped the nature of slavery and race relations in the French Atlantic world. Her analysis emphasizes how whites and people of color, enslaved or free, “understood race as a fluid category with extremely unstable boundaries that they could adapt and subvert” (16). While many historians have explored sexual relations, often coerced, between white owners and black slave women, Palmer expands the lens of intimacy to include a wide range of close interracial relationships within households. She focuses mainly on experiences in the metropole, especially the port city of La Rochelle, and she sometimes follows her Rochelais families to Saint-Domingue and back.

Art history · Citizenship · Estate · Ethnology · Genealogy · Political science · Race (biology) · SAINT · Sociology · White (mutation) · Wife · Wonder · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies