Race and scripture in the eighteenth-century French Caribbean

Abstract

This article focuses on a 1730s debate about the causes and significance of human diversity, particularly that of Africans, between three French Caribbean clerics: Augustus Malfert, Jean-Baptiste Labat, and Jean Baptiste Margat de Tilly. Their ideas attest to the continuing importance of the biblical account in structuring thinking about human diversity; at the same time, they demonstrate how explanations thereof were shifting from largely religious to secular bases before the publication of such influential works as the Comte de Buffon's “Variétés dans l'espèce humaine” (1749). On the one hand, Malfert profoundly “racialized” scripture by advancing unexpected biblical ancestors for Africans, Asians, and Amerindians, and making skin color a sign not only of heinous sin, but of heritable and fixed distinctions. On the other, Margat looked to nature, not the Bible, for the source of physical differences between peoples; arguing that they resulted from a complex interplay of environmental factors, he also asserted their mutability. All three men were well placed to interject what they had learned from their Caribbean experiences into metropolitan disputes by contributing to popular and well-regarded publications, thus participating in the early Enlightenment and engaging individuals on both sides of the francophone Atlantic world.

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