How the Huguenots became White : Confession, Race and the Making of French Caribbean Slave Societies (1635-1715)

Since 1685, the Edict of Fontainebleau and the oath of abjuration imposed on Protestants in the French Caribbean led some to flee to the neighboring English, Dutch, and Danish colonies. While the Protestant diaspora, accused of breaking religious unity and corrupting the slaves, had been the target of repressive measures since 1674, these departures nevertheless fueled a policy of tolerance from the metropole. This policy illustrates a major distinction between Caribbean colonies on the one hand and New France and the metropole on the other hand. So much so that 400 Huguenots were displaced in 1686 from the metropole to the Caribbean islands in the hope they would join the ranks of planters. This article examines the motives behind this policy shift in light of the reshaping of slave societies in the French Caribbean in the last third of the 17th th century. The joint growth of the transatlantic slave trade and the sugar plantation complex created a demographic imbalance between the white and the black population that worried the authorities. In this context, the presence of Protestants, who despite constituting a confessional minority came to play a major socio-economic role among planters, became crucial for the white settlement and the development of the plantation economy. Studying the evolution of how the Protestant diaspora was treated shows that confession, though originally paramount, is gradually replaced as a criterion of inclusion or exclusion in theses colonial societies by economic and racial distinctions that turn whiteness into the overriding manifestation of domination.