Jilted French women’s jealousy drove the expansion of racist legal codes

Evidence

But for the increasing number of French women who came to the colony in the second half of the eighteenth century and were jilted by white men in favor of women of color, jealousy quickly turned to racial hatred. This animus, he argued, drove the expansion of racist laws. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 223

There were those who were wary of such marriages and other unions between white men and women of African descent. In 1723 the intendant of Saint-Domingue wrote to request that French orphan girls be sent to provide wives for young men who used the “lack of white women” as a pretext to “stay in their libertinage with the négresses, ” becoming seditious vagabonds instead of productive settlers. But despite the increasing presence of European women in the colony over the next decades, there remained powerful economic motivations for European men to connect themselves with the free-colored community. “There was no dishonor in seeing them, frequenting them, living with them, marrying their daughters,” wrote Raimond, especially the daughters “whose parents had become rich.” But for the increasing number of French women who came to the colony in the second half of the eighteenth century and were jilted by white men in favor of women of color, jealousy quickly turned to racial hatred. This animus, he argued, drove the expansion of racist laws. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 223

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly extends the ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ thesis - here class/romantic jealousy, not modesty, fuels racialized lawmaking.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: is this Raimond’s self-serving theory, or was there concrete evidence that female settler jealously shaped specific statutes?
• XREF: Parallel to the reader’s article ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ on moral panics as class/identity signaling; here racial panic among white women converts personal jealousy into sumptuary-style law.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 223