'Francais, negres et sauvages': Constructing race in colonial Louisian

This dissertation explores the dynamics of racial construction and the emergence of racism in eighteenth century French Louisiana in the light of the evolution of French colonial discourses and attitudes towards Indians, Africans, and people of African descent in New France and the French Caribbean during the seventeenth century. It thus analyzes the emergence of "race" in eighteenth century French Louisiana from an Atlantic world rather than regional perspective. My dissertation proposes to revise the current historiography of the French colonial Americas which holds that, by contrast to bipolar race relations in the English and Spanish Americas, the French colonial experiences in the Americas did not lead to the construction of exclusive racial groups until the last decades of the eighteenth century.;My argument is twofold. First, I maintain that the French colonial ethos of assimilation and relative tolerance that characterized seventeenth century conceptualizations of Indians and Africans in French Canada and in the French Caribbean, and which emphasized cultural rather than racial differences between French and Indians and French and Africans, underwent dramatic transformations during the last decades of the seventeenth century. I argue that the increasingly racial conceptualization of Indians and Africans inaugurated in late seventeenth century New France and French Antilles crystallized in the peculiar frontier context of eighteenth century Louisiana where French colonial officials and missionaries desperately struggled to establish an orderly slave regime in the midst of large and powerful Indian groups, and growing numbers of Africans. Secondly, I suggest that the movement from cultural to increasingly racial conceptualizations of Indians and Africans stemmed in large part from French colonial responses to French-Indian and French-African sexual encounters, and that these responses were shaped by early modern French metropolitan interrelated constructs of gender, social order and class, that emerged in association with the rise of metropolitan absolutism.