Pierre Force. Wealth and Disaster

Under the prevailing house system in the western Pyrenees in the eighteenth century, the eldest son inherited the family’s estate, while younger sons had to be satisfied with considerably less and hope to build sustainable futures through dowry from potential spouses. One avenue open to the latter was emigration. So it was that in 1729 Marc-Antoine Lamerenx, a minor nobleman, moved across the Atlantic to Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) to seek his fortune at a time when in the Pyrenees the image of the “American uncle” was one of an emigrant not to the United States, but to the Caribbean—the land of El Dorado. Almost two decades after Lamerenx’s departure, Jean Mouscardy, the first son in a family of farmers, followed in his footsteps. Both ended up in the same Saint-Domingue community, Dondon, where they established coffee plantations worked by enslaved Africans. Pierre Force’s Wealth and Disaster is a story of emigration centered on these two migrants and their white and mixed-race descendants, though more so about Lamerenx than Mouscardy, about whom less is known.

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