Oh man, I just realized that I wrote "Ancient" instead of "Ancien." This is horribly embarassing.

France’s modern encounter with Africa began in the sixteenth century, when French traders, explorers and missionaries began to travel the coast of West Africa and its rivers in search of ivory, gum, gold, and people. In the 1630s, a group of merchants from Rouen founded a base at the mouth of the Senegal River, near which the town of Saint-Louis was later established. From this germ, a permanent French presence in West Africa grew until they had established themselves not only as the preeminent traders in the area, but also as the political masters of the coast and near-by hinterlands. In these encounters with African natives, the French perceived strangeness in local customs and religion, and believing themselves to be the bearers of civilization, they sought explanations for these apparent differences between races -- creating them wholesale when need be. So, although the language of race would not be refined into the concept of biological racism until the advent of Enlightenment thought, the Ancien Régime’s colonial adventurism inculcated ideas about the differences between peoples that would form the basis for more explicit and longstanding racism.

As described by William Cohen, the French reaction towards Africa and its inhabitants was underlain by a basic “impulse to inequality” which long predated their setting foot on the continent. Their expansionist course produced a “culture clash between European and non-European peoples” that “helped shape whites’ reactions to non-Europeans” from that point onward. It was during those moment in which trade and settlement were beginning that the French were creating a rhetorical base from which they would position themselves as rightful superiors to an entire continent. Having observed basic differences in behavior, custom and apparent constitution (the French were absolutely perplexed as to why they kept dying of disease when supposedly inferior Africans survived), the French reached back into history to the accounts left behind by Greeks and Romans for explanation.

Those ancients, while they may not have held any particular race prejudice, had nonetheless developed a number of “negative stereotypes about the inhabitants of what was commonly called either Libya or Ethiopia.” Perhaps with the aid of a vivid imagination, these stereotypes were chronicled by historians like Herodotus who described Africans that ate “locusts and snakes,” shared wives in common, and screeched “like bats” in lieu of human speech. These descriptions were then repeated and bastardized and further distorted over hundreds of years as they passed through Solinus and then later Renaissance chroniclers. Unknown to Europeans were the more recent and more factual accounts by Arab travelers who had contacted the African interior.

As a result, the basis for French knowledge about the new peoples that they were encountering was either first-hand conjecture and anecdote, or else wild exaggerations inherited from the past. As characterized by Richard Hargreaves, the earliest descriptions of indigenous life that returned with travelers therefore “relied on stereotypes already existing in France or on facile generalizations to formulate their own opinion.” Such accounts “shared a fault common to many travelers: every act they observed became typical of a whole society; every individual, a prototype of all his fellow inhabitants.” They held that it was particular climates and environments, or else “some inherent force [which] created the physical difference between Europeans and Africans.” Questing after “the cause of blackness” even had something of a theological dimension. In the 1670s, a Frenchman by the name Chambonneau, declared that it was not climate or soil from which such difference arose, but rather the inherent and enduring curse of Ham. He wrote that Africans were descended “from the line of Ham, cursed by his father [and so] they have been distinguished from other men in eternity as a sign of the curse.” This was an especially convenient explanation for any Frenchman who sought to characterize native Africans as inferior, but could not otherwise reconcile that status with the idea of Adam as a common ancestor of all mankind.

Regardless of the particular explanation they settled upon, all such speculation “shared the assumption that there was something special in the creation of Africans that set them apart from white people.” Furthermore, interactions with Africans afforded an opportunity through which Europeans could project “their own fears about themselves and their world” unto the apparent and presumably inherent differences of the African peoples. Ultimately, whether the French image of Africa and its inhabitants had any reasonable basis is insignificant besides the fact that the French behaved as if it did. Even whimsical French beliefs about Africa and Africans could gain a certain reality as a consequence of France’s ability to exercise material power as if they were reality.

This is seen especially in the growth and regulation of African slavery in the West Indies. As Cohen argues, “the social context of slavery dictated to an important degree how Frenchmen viewed blacks,” because it was through the establishment of slave societies in the Caribbeans that the arbitrary origins of classifications of racial difference were obscured by the implementation of imperial policies which reified them.

Furthermore, because the transfer of human beings into servitude was an exploitation which lay “at the heart of the thriving system of merchant capitalism that was profiting Europe … the most powerful Empires were deeply involved and invested in slavery’s continuing existence.” According to Laurent Dubois’ calculation, by the late eighteenth century “the livelihood of as many as a million of the 25 million inhabitants of France depended directly on the colonial trade.” The practice of slavery was consequently closely tied to ideas about national wealth and security, and although ideas about Africa and the inferiority of its inhabitants predated the slave economies of the Caribbean, it was in those fields and island towns that racial distinctions were formalized so that by “the eighteenth century, law, economy, and discourse worked together to produce a set of racist practices that, once in place, appeared to many as both natural and permanent.” Although the slave trade may have come about independent of racism, once begun its policies acted to independently confirm negative prejudices about Africans.

Among these policies the most infamous is the Code Noir, which was a system of laws that was set down in 1685 for the purpose of regulating the treatment of slaves. It was also a blatantly exploitative document, the scant protections of which Laurent Dubois characterizes as having been “brazenly, openly, and consistently” defied by slave masters. While maltreatment does not alone distinguish the experience of African slaves, their history is marked as different by the fact that “the black man, because of his African origin, was made a slave for life.” Up for dispute, however, is exactly why the black man should have been marked for such difference. Though Cohen is quick to note that “race prejudice and slavery were interconnected,” he believes that that slavery simply “was not a moral problem for Frenchmen in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,” and consequently he finds it harder to discern which was cause and which was effect.

In part this difficulty may be due to the different notions of race which prevailed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Pierre Boulle argues that up through the seventeenth century, race was not yet thought of as the immutable characteristic which some take it for today. In his study of François Bernier’s 1684 article titled “A New Division of the Earth,” Boulle notes that when the term race first entered French usage it was used “to define the qualities sought in breeding animals for the hunt or for warfare,” and was soon “applied to humans supposed to possess similarly valuable inherited qualities.” According to the assumptions of the Ancien Régime, those humans supposed to possess the most valuable inherited characteristics were naturally those who had inherited their station. Per William Cohen’s words, “the single most important factor affecting a person’s power, wealth, and life-style” was their birth. Race was extended as an analogy for the difference between common and noble and as an explanation for “the great differences [which] they found among other climes.” Cohen therefore finds it rather natural that the “men of the Ancien Régime” would “assert the importance of biological heredity.” Pierre Boulle, on the other hand, sees it somewhat differently, cautioning that “unlike the modern advocates of race … noble theorists of the sixteenth century did not see such qualities as fixed or inevitable.” Besides natural inheritance, the “transmission of noble qualities” was assumed to be as much a consequence of a sound education or diet as of proper parentage.

However, outside of academic discussion, the method behind the madness of the Ancien Régime’s discrimination is somewhat besides the point. Although they were not necessarily expressing themselves in the terms of more modern biological racism, French policy makers seized upon skin-color as a signifier of an entirely different category of human. They then enshrined this distinction as law by defining Africans as chattel.