Candide Shoots the Monkey Lovers

Carol Duncan , “Fallen Fathers: Images of Authority in Pre-Revolutionary French Art,” Art History 4, no. 2 (1981): 186-202; Alex Potts, “Beautiful Bodies and Dying Heroes,” History Workshop, 30 (Autumn 1990), 1-21; Norman Bryson, “Gericault and ‘Masculinity’ ” in Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, ed. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994), 228-59; and Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997).

See, for example, Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall , eds., The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Herrick Chapman and Laura Frader, eds., Race in France: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Difference (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004); and Martin Evans, Empire and Culture: The French Experience, 1830-1940 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

Sue Peabody , “There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (New York: Oxford University Press), 4-4; and Cissie Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies: Servants & Their Masters in Old Regime France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 158.

C. L. R. James , The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), ix-ix. I draw on a variety of sources, including Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern 1492-1800 (New York: Verso, 1997); and Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990).

See the groundbreaking work of Hugh Honour , The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 4, From the American Revolution to World War I, pt. 1, Slaves and Liberators (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 34-37, 50-57, and 78-106. On the nineteenth century, see Albert Boime, The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990); and the Web site http://hitchcock.itc .virginia.edu/Slavery/index.html. The apparent paucity of eighteenth-century French images of slaves suggests that such images were considered an embarrassment, and that those who derived wealth from plantation slavery were concerned that slave images might trigger an abolitionist reaction.

Pierre Pluchon , Nègres et Juifs au XVIIIe Siècle: Le Racisme au Siècle des Lumières (Paris: Tallandier, 1984). Many of the blacks who lived in Old Regime France worked as servants in the households of the highest level of the court nobility. In addition, a significant number worked for merchants and others with colonial ties. See Pierre Boulle, “Les Gens de Couleur à Paris à La Veille de la Revolution” in L'Image de la Révolution Française,ed. Michel Vovelle (Paris: Pergamon, 1990), 159-68.

The forcible transportation of Africans across the Atlantic was almost never represented in the visual arts of Europe. See Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America 1780-1865 (New York: Routledge, 2000), chap. 2.

Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies, 145-148, 158-159.

Monkeys were a major presence in eighteenth-century Paris. Louise E. Robbins, Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies, 158-158.

Gertrude Grace Sill , A Handbook of Symbols in Christian Art (New York: Collier Books, Macmillan, 1975), 16-16.

See E. Snoep-Reitsma , “Chardin and the Bourgeois Ideals of His Time,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 24 (1973): 170-172.

On mimicry and the construction of the non-white colonial population as always inferior, see Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 41-41; and Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 85-92. The twentieth century brought an outpouring of novels on the colonial subject as mimic, including E. M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924) and V. S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men (1967).

See, for example, Stewart King , Blue Coat or Powdered Whig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint-Domingue (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 18-22.

Roland Barthes , New Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980), 28-28, 26-26.

Ibid., 25.

Ibid., 28-29.

See Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France” on how the French courts, particularly the Parlement of Paris, strongly supported the so-called Freedom principle, the notion that any slave who entered a free territory, in this case France, became free.

Frantz Fanon , Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 8-8; and Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 13.

On suicide , see, for example, Fick, The Making of Haiti, 46-48.

Jack R. Censer and Lynn Hunt , Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001). See too Louis Sala-Molins, Le Code Noir ou Le Calvaire de Canaan (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987); and Susan Buck-Morss, “Hegel and Haiti,” Critical Inquiry, 26, no. 4 (Summer 2000): 821-65.

James , The Black Jacobins, 12-12.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot , Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995), 83-83.

The famous quotation is line 77 of Terence's “Self-Tormenter” or Heauton timorumenos. On the meaning of this line for Terence's original audience and how misinterpretations gained currency even in antiquity, see H. D. Jocelyn, “Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto,” in Antichthon 7 (1973): 14-46. Honour, The Image of the Black, vol. 4, pt. 1, 312, n. 90. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Voyage à L'Isle de France, à l'Isle de Bourbon, au Cap de Bonne-Espérance, &c. is highly critical of French slave-holding practices; Letter XII, “Des Noirs” relies on pity to build an argument.

I take the phrase “forbidden bestseller” from Robert Darnton , The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: Norton, 1995).

Montesquieu, De l'Esprit des Lois, books 14 through 17, especially the irony-laden section “De l'Esclavage des Nègres,” book 15, chap. 5.

Censer and Hunt , Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, 122-122.

By the 1780s, practical concern that abuses in managing slaves might trigger a revolt led to the Ordonnance du Roi, concernant les Procureurs et Economes-gérans des habitations situées aux Isles sous le Vent, du 17 Décembre 1784, a royal law that tried to limit the harsh treatment of slaves by plantation managers and overseers. The white planters of Saint-Domingue insisted that this new law be weakened, and the colony's high courts supported the planters.

I thank Laurent Dubois for helping me to articulate how this image grants the slave agency.

David Lloyd , “Race under Representation,” Oxford Literary Review 13, no. 1-2, (1991): 62-94.

See Voltaire's remarks on “la race des nègres” in l'Essai Sur Les Moeurs et l'Esprit des Nations, chaps. 2 and 141, in Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire (Paris: Antoine-Augustin Renouard, 1819), vol. 13, 6-8, vol. 15, 254-56.

Lloyd, “Race under Representation,” 62-74. See too David Bindman , Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).

Voltaire writes, “Je crois que des Estampes seraient fort inutiles. Ces colifichets n'ont jamais été admis dans les éditions de Cicéron, de Virgile et d'Horace. Il faut imiter ces grands hommes dans cette simplicité si on ne peut pas imiter leurs perfections. ” Letter 19825, Voltaire to Charles Joseph Panckoucke, 12 January 1778, Voltaire's Correspondence, ed. Theodore Besterman (Geneva, Switzerland: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1964), vol. 98, 18.

Mercure de France, February 24, 1781, 187-189.

Emile Dacier , “Moreau Le Jeune: Illustrateur de Voltaire,” in Voltaire, Romans et Contes de Voltaire (Paris: Aux Horizons de France, 1934), vol. 1, i-vi. By the time Moreau illustrated Candide in 1787, he had established a variety of buyers for his work, and he continued to rely on royal patronage. He belonged to La Loge des Neuf Soeurs, an activist Masonic lodge founded in 1776, that was interested in social reform and drew an array of artists, scientists, and intellectuals, including Condorcet, a leading abolitionist and founder of the Société des Amis des Noirs. Voltaire joined this lodge shortly before his death in 1778. Moreau supported the French Revolution, at least in its early stages. Commentators have tended to view Moreau as a pragmatic man who understood how to make his way successfully in the complex political world of late eighteenth-century Paris. Just as he had under the monarchy, Moreau continued to receive rewards under the new Revolutionary government. Louis Amiable, La Loge des Neuf Soeurs (Paris: Edimaf, 1989), 5, 335-36; and Bernadine Heller-Greenman, “The Monument Du Costume of Jean-Michel Moreau Le Jeune in the Context of Rousseau and the Ancien Régime” (PhD diss., Florida State University of Visual Arts and Dance, Tallahassee, 2002), 14, 21-32.

Voltaire , Candide, Zadig, and Selected Stories, trans. Donald Frame (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 60-60.

Bernard Moitt , “Slave Women and Resistance in the French Caribbean,” in More than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, ed. David Bary Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 239-240; David Geggus, “Slave and Free Colored Women in Saint Domingue,” in Gaspar and Hine, More than Chattel, 261; Arlette Gautier, Les Soeurs de Solitude: la condition féminine dans l'esclavage aux Antilles du XVIIe au XIXe siècle (Paris: Editions Caraïbéennes, 1985), 200; and Fisk, The Making of Haiti, 28-29.

Jacques Lacan , Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 8-29; and Drucilla Cornell, The Imaginary Domain: Abortion, Pornography, & Sexual Harassment (New York: Routledge, 1995).

Darcy Grigsby , Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 29-29; and Helen Weston, “Representing the Right to Represent: The Portrait of Citizen Belley, Ex-Representative of the Colonies, by A.L. Girodet,” RES 26 (Autumn 1994): 89. Italics added.

In his classic account of the Haitian Revolution, C. L. R. James comments, “They, whose women had undergone countless violations, violated all the women who fell into their hands, often on the bodies of their still bleeding husbands, fathers and brothers. ” Yet for all its importance, James's remark, like the broad literature on the insurrection, cannot be assumed to be simply an accurate representation of reality. James, The Black Jacobins, 88.

Gros , Isle de Saint Domingue, Province du Nord. Précis historique (Paris: L. Poitier de Lille, 1793), 7-9. On how Gros's narrative changed with multiple publications, see Jeremy Popkin, “Facing Racial Revolution: Captivity Narratives and Identity in the Saint-Domingue Revolution,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 36, no. 4 (2003): 511-33.

It is difficult to say with certainty that explicit images of black male/white female sexuality were not produced in eighteenth-century France, but several specialists have confirmed my impression (Raymond Birn, e-mail message to author, August 26, 2005; Robert Darnton, e-mail message to author, September 9, 2005). Grigsby observes, “The fantasy of black sexual prowess may have been repeatedly expressed in texts, but it did not appear in eighteenth-century images. ” Grigsby, Extremities, 55.

The German-speaking European powers had no great direct economic stake in the Atlantic slave trade or in plantation slavery. On Jacques-Louis David's refusal to celebrate the freeing of the slaves or depict Saint-Domingue in his art, see Carlos Avierl Celius, “Le Néoclassicisme et la Révolution haïtienne” (paper presented at The Haitian Revolution Viewed 200 Years After, conference organized by the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI, 2004), 5-6.

Laurent Dubois , “Avenging America: The Politics of Violence in the Haitian Revolution” forthcoming in The Haitian Revolution Viewed Two Hundred Years After, ed. David Geggus and Norman Fiering . Note, too, that Jeannot was soon executed by other leaders of the insurrection, seemingly because his use of atrocities against whites was seen by them as a problem.

Laurent Dubois , “Republican Anti-racism and Racism: A Caribbean Genealogy,” in Chapman and Frader, Race in France, 28-28.

See David Patrick Geggus , Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 119-136.

Laurent Dubois , “Republican Anti-racism and Racism,” 28-28.

Grigsby , Extremities, 56-57.

Ibid., 16, 27.

I deliberately focus my analysis on the sexual implications of the Belley portrait. For a fuller account of this painting, see especially Weston, “Representing the Right,” 83-109; Acadèmie Française à Rome, Les Portraits du Pouvoir, ed., Anne-Lise Desmas (Paris: Somogy, 2003), 109-155; and Grigsby, Extremities, 1-63.

Thomas Crow , Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 228-228.

Bryson , “Gericault and ‘Masculinity’,” 235-235.

On some later deployments, see Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 1981), 172-201. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Fanon writes forcefully about how, in white European culture generally, the black man is equated with the genital. Fanon's articulation of this synecdochic move is arresting: “For the majority of white men the Negro represents the sexual instinct (in its raw state). The Negro is the incarnation of a genital potency beyond all moralities and prohibitions.... The Negro is taken as a terrifying penis.... The Negro is the genital” (pp. 177-80).

Grigsby , Extremities, 55-55, 22-22.

See Laurent Dubois , “An Enslaved Enlightenment: Rethinking the Intellectual History of the French Atlantic,” Social History 31, no. 1 (2006): 7-7.

Petrus Camper, Dissertation sur Les Variétes Naturelles Qui caractérisent la Physionomie des Hommes des Divers Climats et Des Différens Ages, Suivie de Réflexions sur la Beauté; particulièrement sur celle de la tête; avec une Manière nouvelle de dessiner toute sorte de têtes avec la plus grande exactitude, trans. H. J. Jansen (Paris: H. J. Jansen, 1791). See too Bindman, Ape to Apollo.

Julien-Joseph Virey , Histoire Naturelle du Genre Humain (Paris: F. Dufart, 1800-1801), 1: 181-1428; 2: 2-38, 121-169.

James, The Black Jacobins, 293; and Grigsby, Extremities, 62-63. Sexuality between white men and women of color was looked upon differently in French culture than was sex between white women and men of color. See Censer and Hunt, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, 119.

Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 300.

Lawrence Jennings , French Anti-slavery: The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in France, 1802-1848 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 3-4. See too Yves Bénot and Marcel Dorigny, Rétablissement de l'Esclavage dans les colonies françaises (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2003); and Yves Bénot, La Démence Coloniale sous Napoléon (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 1992). On French literary depictions of blacks in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, see Léon-François Hoffmann, Le Nègre Romantique: Personnage Littéraire et Obsession Collective (Paris: Payot, 1973), 49-146.

Some of the words on the print are in Spanish. The Spanish colony Santo Domingo had been ceded to France in 1795, but a Spanish administration remained in place until late December of 1800, when Louverture's army crossed the border and conquered the Spanish colony, thereby taking control of the entire island of Hispaniola. Dubois, Avengers, 236-238.

Dacier , “Moreau Le Jeune,” v-vi.

Gillian Lee Weiss, “Back from Barbary: Captivity, Redemption and French Identity in the Seventeenth-and Eighteenth-Century Mediterranean” (PhD diss., Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 2002).

Voltaire , Candide, Zadig and Selected Stories, 37-37.

Grigsby , Extremities, 61-61.

Voltaire , Candide, Zadig and Selected Stories, 43-43.

Ibid, 44.

See Claude Blanckaert, “Of Monstrous Métis: Hybridity, Fear of Miscegenation, and Patriotism from Buffon to Broca,” in Peabody and Stovall, The Color of Liberty, 42-70.

The most famous, Moreau de Saint-Méry's Description de la partie française de l'isle Saint-Domingue (1789), counts and categorizes no less than 128 racial combinations in the colony.

Quoted in Grigsby, Extremities, 59 and 328, n. 134.

Voltaire , Romans et Contes de M. de Voltaire (Bouillon: La Société Typographique, 1778). Moreau evidently knew of this edition, since he did a drawing for it.

In Deny's engraving, the monkeys' facial features look more human and less childlike than in Monnet's drawing.

The monkey's face looks even more menacing in the engraving by de Ghendt than it does in Moreau's drawing. This is significant because most spectators would have seen the engraving, not the drawing.

Some monkeys in French print culture were represented with prominent male genitalia. See, for example, the image of the ouanderou in Buffon's Histoire Naturelle and the jocko, papion, and ouanderou as represented in the plates of Diderot's l'Encyclopédie.

See Comte de Buffon , “Variétés dans l'espèce humaine,” in Oeuvres Complètes de Buffon, ed. J. L. de Lanessan (Paris: A. Pilon, 1884), vol. 2, 128-222; Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton, “Description de l'Ouanderou,” in George-Louis Leclerc Buffon, comte de, Histoire Naturelle, Générale et Particulière (Aux Deux-Ponts [Zweibrücken]: Chez Sanson, 1785), vol. 38, 110; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres Complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Éditions Gallimard, 1964), vol. 3, 210-211; and Voltaire, L'Essai sur les Moeurs, vol. 13, 9.

I recognize that some readers will be skeptical of my claim regarding the monkeys in Moreau's print, understandably concerned that my reading is a product of twentieth-century Western culture. Yet my claim takes into account a number of concurrent developments occurring in France in the years immediately leading up to Moreau's 1803 print, including heightened anxieties about interracial sexuality and expanding associations being made between monkeys and blacks, such as those by Virey, discussed above. A remark by Joan Copjec may be apt: “The psychological fantasy constructs an inscrutable object, a kind of obstacle to all archival work, a question that historical research will never be able to answer. ” In any case, I hope that my essay will help to provoke a fruitful discussion of the broader question, what counts as evidence in the interpretation of both racial domination and visual culture. Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 66.

In 1798 the Directory sent General Hédouville to Saint-Domingue to re-establish metropolitan control. Several of Hédouville's officers referred derisively to Toussaint Louverture as a “monkey” [magot]. H. Pauléus Sannon, Histoire de Toussaint Louverture (Port-au-Prince, Haiti: Héraux, 1920-33), vol. 2, 116. Monnet's 1777 drawing for La Princesse de Babylone represents a black man about to be beheaded by a white man for attempting to rape a white woman. The ancient setting and amusing style of Voltaire's fantasy, and the fact that the impending punishment is clearly represented within the picture, all work to render this image nonthreatening to the white spectator. Voltaire, La Princesse de Babylone, in The Complete Works of Voltaire (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1999), vol. 66, chap. 11, 203.

George Cunningham , “Body Politics: Race, Gender, and the Captive Body,” in Representing Black Men, ed. Marcellus Blount and George Cunningham (New York: Routledge, 1996), 131-135.

On the silencing of the Haitian Revolution, see Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 70-107.

Dubois , “An Enslaved Enlightenment,” 7-10.

See Doris Garraway , The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). I did not receive Garraway's book in time to draw upon it in this essay.