To Be Free and French
Citizenship in France's Atlantic Empire

A new vision of French citizenship from the perspective of Africans and Antilleans living in the colonies and in France.

Lorelle Semley (Author)

9781107498471, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 10 July 2017

382 pages, 27 b/w illus.
22.8 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.55 kg

'Lorelle Semley's work ambitiously integrates the fields of African diaspora and Atlantic studies with the history of citizenship, French empire, gender, law, transnationalism, and urban studies. … Semley's work offers a praiseworthy contribution to the existing literature on French empire and colonial citizenship as well as an important foundation for understanding contemporary debates about citizenship in France.' Elizabeth Heath, The American Historical Review

The Haitian Revolution may have galvanized subjects of French empire in the Americas and Africa struggling to define freedom and 'Frenchness' for themselves, but Lorelle Semley reveals that this event was just one moment in a longer struggle of women and men of color for rights under the French colonial regime. Through political activism ranging from armed struggle to literary expression, these colonial subjects challenged and exploited promises in French Republican rhetoric that should have contradicted the continued use of slavery in the Americas and the introduction of exploitative labor in the colonization of Africa. They defined an alternative French citizenship, which recognized difference, particularly race, as part of a 'universal' French identity. Spanning Atlantic port cities in Haiti, Senegal, Martinique, Benin, and France, this book is a major contribution to scholarship on citizenship, race, empire, and gender, and it sheds new light on debates around human rights and immigration in contemporary France.

List of figures
List of maps
List of tables
Preface: coincidental crossings
Acknowledgments
Part I. Revolutionary Foundations: Prologue: citizens of the world
1. To live and die, free and French
2. Signares before citizens
Part II. Colonial Constructions: 3. When Blacks broke the chains in the 'Little Paris of the Antilles'
4. The trans-African origins of Porto-Novo
5. An 'evolution revolution' in Paris
Part III. Planning after Empire: 6. A more perfect French Union
Epilogue: the art of citizenship
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Black & Asian studies [JFSL3], Colonialism & imperialism [HBTQ], European history [HBJD], General & world history [HBG]