In a nutshell: this was in the 18th century (not 17th) and rather than aristocrats, this looks to have been the practice of some bourgeois families - merchants and shipowners - in the Atlantic ports of Bordeaux, perhaps Nantes and La Rochelle that were involved in the trade with the French Caribbean (including the slave trade).

The count of Vaublanc

Mendelson does not cite her sources, but there is basically one source for this: the memoirs (1833/1857) of the Count Vincent-Marie Viénot de Vaublanc (1756-1845), a particularly resilient aristocrat and politician whose career spanned all the regimes from Louis XVI to Charles X. Born in Saint-Domingue, Vaublanc spent most of his life in France, only returning to his native island to marry in the late 1770s. In 1782, Vaublanc sailed for France with his family on a merchant convoy of 120 ships. These people, most of them rich white Creoles like himself, arrived in Paris:

A great number of people who had arrived by the fleet of a hundred sails had filled Paris with men and women who were carrying the beautiful linen laundered in Saint-Domingue; this linen attracted attention, as it had struck my eyes when I arrived at the Cap Français. The queen heard about it, and was told that a young lady, Madame la Vicomtesse de ***, was dressed entirely in this beautiful linen. She wished to see her in person; and, on her excuses, because she was not yet properly dressed, she told her that she wanted to see her in American dress. She was struck by the beauty of the linen, and found that this all-white garment was very suitable in the summer. It had not been worn before. The whiteness of this linen was compared to the slightly yellow colour of that of Paris. It was learned that merchants from Bordeaux were sending their linen to Saint-Domingue to be laundered, just as they had their shirts made in Curaçao and their china mended in China. From that day on, the laundering of linen changed entirely; people became fussy. Before, little attention was paid to this, because they wore beautiful lace, a fashionable luxury.

When it became fashionable to wear all-white summer clothes, the queen often appeared in the morning dressed like this. People began to slander her, waiting to persecute her. Severe critics blamed her for this innovation, some out of malice, others for a rather plausible reason. They said that, especially in France, a queen should never show herself dressed as a private individual, and that the lightness of the French character made her eagerly grasp anything that could degrade her in the eyes of malignity.

A couple of remarks here:

First, Vaublanc indeed noted that, when he had came back to Saint-Domingue to marry, he had been impressed by the dress of his fellow officers:

They wore linen of a fineness and azurean whiteness quite different from the linen of France, and which gave us a strong desire to have similar linen.

Let's note here that the (ambiguous) term in French for "to launder" was then "blanchir", to whiten, which still exists today in the word "blanchisserie", a laundry service. This notion of "whitening" was polysemic: it meant both the process of bleaching the raw cloth fibre (and notably that of linen sensu stricto made of flax fibre), and the general process of washing soiled clothes.

The second remark concerns Marie-Antoinette: Vaublanc only says that she adopted the all-white linen fashion, not that she sent her own clothes to Saint-Domingue to bleach them. However, a later history book (Lescure, 1883), citing Vaublanc, does make this latter claim!

The Vaublanc memoir is the main source for the "rich people sent their clothes to the Caribbean to be laundered" and variants of the story found its way in countless books, such as Alfred Franklin's popular series La vie privée d'autrefois (The private life of yesteryear, late 1890s).

However, I've been able to identify a few other sources. One is a short memoir of Francis Lefeuvre, a local writer and historian in Nantes, published originally in 1883. He described the absentee planters and merchants of Saint-Domingue living in Nantes in the late 1700s:

What must be admired most is the fineness and brilliance of their linen. It had been noticed that the water of the mountainous springs of Saint-Domingue gave it a much greater whiteness than that of our rivers in France. What could be simpler than to send it to be washed there, and even send the laundry of the whole household, when one has at his disposal periodically departing ships? [...] I have known families irreparably ruined by the emancipation of Saint-Domingue, who still owned more than a hundred pairs of sheets, the remains of their former splendour.

We cannot be sure that Lefeuvre did not recycle Vaublanc's memoir (which talked about the Bordeaux merchants), but, born in 1820, he may have heard stories about this in his youth in Nantes when the loss of Saint-Domingue was still fresh in the memories of the inhabitants. An article published in the Revue des Deux Mondes (Gabory, 1933) also alludes to the fine clothes of the wealthy merchants of Nantes and to their custom of sending laundry to Saint-Domingue before the Revolution. The language is quite similar to that of Lefeuvre though.

I'll end this analysis by citing two last sources that are quite extraordinary.

Moreau de Saint-Méry and Jean-Baptiste Labat

One source is an article written by none other than Louis-Elie Moreau de Saint-Méry (1750–1819), a lawyer and writer known for a comprehensive description of pre-Revolution Saint-Domingue that is still valuable today. Moreau had a meticulous eye for detail: notably, he wrote about the religious and cultural practices of the enslaved Africans, even though he was a strong supporter of slavery.

Living in Paris in the 1800s (he was, with Vaublanc, an adviser of First Consul Bonaparte on colonial matters, Gainot and Vandeweghe, 2015), the now "Citizen" Moreau wrote a memoir about "Clothes washing in the American Islands", which is an ethnographic report on the practices of the washerwomen (blanchisseuses) in the French Caribbean before the French and Haitian Revolutions. He is genuinely admirative of the women's laundering and bleaching skills, and for some reason, totally omits to mention that they are black, which was odd for a man who had used mathematics to describes hundreds of racial categories in his Description of Saint-Domingue. The memoir starts as follows:

It is known that [in the Caribbean Islands] it acquires such a degree of whiteness, that several people in France, and in particular in the seaports, were in the habit of sending their linen to the Colonies to have it bleached there.

Moreau does not give a reason for the dazzling white of linens washed by Caribbean blanchisseuses, except the "ever-burning fires of the Star that embellishes the universe", and the preference of the washerwomen for drying the wet linen by spreading them on the ground rather than by hanging them. However, he explains in detail each operation and its variants and the working conditions of the women.

Moreau's memoir confirms that some families in France did send their linen to Saint-Domingue, and that the practice was limited to a few families in Bordeaux, Nantes, and other seaports, who were direct participants in the Atlantic trade.

For a wealthy family with several ships in rotation across the Atlantic (including slaver ships), adding a few crates of clothes cost probably little, except the risk of losing them if the ship was sunk or captured. Sending clothes across the ocean was not so far-fetched: these families formed transatlantic networks with members and representatives in Europe and the Americas, and they were well acquainted with long-distance travel and its risks. They would have had their own people on site to take care of the linen, and send it back by the first ship sailing to France. It would take months, but so did regular commercial communications, sending and receiving money, etc. And in any case, this was all about status, in a society where clothing was strongly tied to your identity (see: sumptuary laws). That these bourgeois families made a point of having extra-white linen - even whiter than the Queen's own linen, as told by Vaublanc! - is thus not surprising. It could be interesting to check Vaublanc's claim that these people "had their shirts made in Curaçao and their china mended in China"...

If we go back to the early 1700s, we find the man who may have started the whole idea of super-white Caribbean linen: Jean-Baptiste Labat, Dominican priest, explorer, ethnographer, botanist, engineer, soldier, slave-owner (for an analysis of Labat's ambivalent position on slavery, see Toczyski, 2007), and author of the Nouveau Voyage aux isles de l'Amérique (1722), a formidable compilation of knowledge about the French Caribbean.

I have not been to all the world, but I can assure you that in all the Provinces of France, Spain, Italy, Sicily, Flanders and Germany, where I have been, I have not seen linen laundered to the same perfection as it is in the Windward Islands and in Saint-Domingue. I was so accustomed to this cleanliness that when I returned to Europe, I could not bear either the clothes or the handkerchiefs that were being laundered there, which seemed grey and dirty in comparison with those I was accustomed to using, which had a certain bright and shiny whiteness that was so pleasurable.

Labat, like Moreau, attributes the whiteness to the talent of the black blanchisseuses, though he credit them for using a plant called caratas (Furcraea tuberosa (Mill.) W.T.Aiton, a sort of agave) to achieve this. His book was an international best-seller, translated throughout Europe, and it is not unimaginable that it helped to set in stone the idea that washing linen in the French Caribbean was the nec plus ultra of bleaching.

-> Conclusion and sources