Candide Shootsthe Monkey LoversRepresenting Black Men inEighteenth-Century French Visual Culture. Mary L.

Bellhouse This essay analyzes a shift in racialized regimes of visual signification in French metropolitan culture during the long eighteenth century. The authorexplores two symbolically central figures the dismembered black slave andthe black rapist/lover who is duly punishedby undertaking an intertextual reading of two sets of illustrations of Voltaires Candide (1759) designedby Moreau le Jeune. Separated by the French and Haitian Revolutions, Moreaus two sets of Candide illustrations (1787 and 1803) register animportant shift in the French cultural imaginary. The figure of the maimedblack male slave was put directly in circulation in French visual culture during the eighteenth century. In contrast, interracial sexuality remained unrepresentable in French visual culture throughout the century. By the time Haiti declared its independence (1804), this taboo was contravened by Moreaus metaphorical substitution of the figure of the monkey in 1803 to picture the black male as a bestial rapist. Ever since Carol Duncan identified a crisis in white masculinity in visualimages of authority in pre-Revolutionary France (1981), art historianshave recognized male troublein French paintings and prints from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A variety of white men who are not adequately masculine according to earlier standards make their appear-ance in art, including fallen fathersdisobeyed by their sons and unable to carry out their duties, strikingly beautiful highly feminized male adolescents (ephebes), and wounded and defeated veterans of the Napoleonicwars.1Culturally valorized codes of white masculinity were thrown intoconfusion with the weakening of the monarchy, regicide, and the failure of Napoleons military campaigns. But what about race,a topic not addressedin this art history literature on altered or failed masculinity? Codes of whitemasculinity were destabilized in French visual culture just as France wasforced to confront new possibilities of black male freedom and agency. Arich new interdisciplinary scholarship on race and slavery in the FrancophoneAtlantic world is now developing, but not much work has been done on howFrench visual representations constructed race.2In this essay I focus onimages of black men and trace changes in the racialized regime of visionthat developed in France during the long eighteenth century. From the late seventeenth century until 1789,French visual culture represented black males in two main ways, as exoticized servants in metropolitanFrance and as plantation slaves in the colonies. On one hand, the black man is figured as a man by building up markers of masculinity within the picture frame. On the other hand, he is simultaneously constituted as inferior to thewhite man through the use of additional signifiers that infantilize him andlimit his power. These visual constructions of the black male deploy conspicuous signifiers of lackof manliness: he is a boy, he is disciplined by whitesurveillance, his body is dismembered, he is dependent on whites for freedom, he appears incapable of military valor. Then, in the 1790s, a rupture occurs in the semiotics of blackness. The earlier tropes of limited masculinity are replaced by a new imago of the black man as a potential sexual competitor: a fellow citizen-soldier with oversized genitalia, an armed attacker, and, through a metaphorical substitution,a bestial rapist who chases after white women. In the discussion that follows, I rely in part on a psychoanalytic framework to interpret the relationship between French visual constructions of race and the subjectivity of the French white spectator. I build my argument by developing an intertextual reading of two sets ofillustrations to Voltaires Candide (1759) by Jean-Michel Moreau le Jeune, a prodigiously talented and celebrated French artist who specialized in print making. Moreau made two different sets of illustrations for Candide, the first in 1787 and the second in 1803. The two sets of pictures are paired with the same verbal text; the images change though the words do not. Separated by the French and Haitian Revolutions, Moreaus illustrationsregister a crucial shift in the French imaginary.

There were very few blacks living in France in the eighteenth century (about five thousand in 1789), but Frances extensive involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and brutal exploitation of African labor in thecolonies made the meaning of blacknessan increasingly pressing political and philosophic question in France.3By 1789 the French colony Saint Domingue (present-day Haiti) was the most profitable colony in theWestern world and the principal destination of the Atlantic slave trade. In1789 this one colony accounted for two-thirds of Frances overseas trade, and its labor force included a half million black slaves. When French abolitionism coalesced in the 1780s,it was met with intense opposition fromthe white planters in the colonies and the maritime bourgeoisie in France. The events of 1789 brought new demands to extend freedom to nonwhitesin the colonies. On both sides of the Atlantic, people argued about whetheruniversal codes of rights should apply to blacks and free people of color (that is, freed black slaves and mulattoes) in the French colonies. With theoutbreak of the Haitian Revolution in August 1791,earlier patterns of whiteviolence against blacks were reversed. Incidents of black violence againstwhites, including the rape of white women by black men, were soonreported in European newspapers,and these accounts intensified anxietiesin France about race,gender,and interracial sexuality. As French visual culture constructed racial identity, it simplified socialrealities that were in fact much more complicated. Visual culture worked toproduce a binary opposition between black and white,a highly simplifiedschema that tended to suppress ambiguous or hybrid groups that existedbetween these opposed categories,as well as the diversity that existedwithin the categories black and white. Contrary to the tendency toward abinary split in art, Saint-Domingues mulatto population actually grew inboth size and wealth, and after 1763 the white planters in the colonyimposed severe legal restrictions on this group. The images that I analyzehere are representative, with the caveat that apparently not many images ofblacks were produced in toto.5I explore six earlier images, dating from the1680s through the 1770s,before turning to Moreaus 1787 Candideillustrations. The images that I begin withan exoticized child, sugar plantationslaves,a dismembered fugitive slave,and a civilizedEuropeanprovidenecessary background for framing my central argument. The Exoticized Child When blacks appear in images of life in metropolitan France, they are almost always depicted as servants, usually male servants, and often boys. Echoing earlier paintings by Titian, Rubens, and Van Dyck, black boys appear attending the wives of the princes of the royal family, of the ministers, and other grandes damesof quality.As Frances encounters withAfrica increased in the late seventeenth century, provincial governors andadministrators, leading colonists, and outfitters and owners of privateersgave black children as gifts to the women of the French court; this was understood to be the most noble and favored way to express gratitude.6The central focus in these images is usually a white woman. The blackboy is reduced to a living fashion accessory who marks the beauty ofwhitenessand the high status of his mistress. Meanings of blackness are constructed through multivalent signifiers and omission. The history ofviolent capture, the forced separation of children from parents, and the brutality of the slave trade and slave practices in the colonies are all omitted. The black servant appears perfectly submissive: domination is representedas unproblematic and complete, apparently a function of nature, not power. Representing blacks as servants forged new linkages in signification between blackness and a host of negative traits already widely attributed toservants. As Cissie Fairchilds points out, the French middle and upperclasses looked upon servants as licentious, gluttonous, drunken, lazy, shiftless, dishonest, ignorant, and stupid. Black servants were also viewed aschildlike and dependent creatures who displayed doglike devotion and loyalty. Antoine Coypels small, finely executed painting titled Young Black Holding a Basket of Fruit and a Young Woman Stroking a Dog, c. 1682,isa compelling example (Figure 1). The painting, originally in the collection of Louis XIV, was produced about three years before the Code Noir

of1685, a royal edict that officially regulated the treatment of slaves in theFrench colonies. The painting features the visible fetish of skin color set upas a binary opposition between whiteness and blackness. At the center ofthe canvas, a dark-skinned boy appears sumptuously and exotically dressed. His skin color is set off by a brilliant white turban adorned with feathers, a signifier of difference that persisted in French visual culture throughout theeighteenth century. The fetishism on the black body, a costly and elaboratemasquerade, codes the body itself as different. The white female who lookstoward the boy functions as a site of identification for the French spectator. Her gaze invites the viewer to enjoy the scopic pleasure of seeing exoticizeddifference rendered nonthreatening. By figuring the black male as a child, his sexuality is rendered harmless, and the emergent taboo of the black manand white woman is avoided. The boys foreignness is accentuated by the inclusion of two monkeys, one on either side of him. This painting establishes a metonymic link of contiguity between the monkey and the African. In the course of the eighteenth century the figure of the monkey was increasingly connected toblack males in French codes of signification. The practice of inferiorizing servants by associating them with animals was extended to blacks, whowere often likened to monkeys. The monkey was already demonized in French culture: it had been used for centuries in Christian iconography as a symbol of vanity, luxury, licentiousness, and the devil. As Frenchinvolvement in slavery and the slave trade increased, French spectatorsprojected these Christian associations, especially baseness and lust, onto blacks. The monkey also functioned as a trope of mimesis in French culture, as in Chardins paintings The Monkey Painterand The Monkey Antiquarian, c. 1735-1740,pendants that circulated widely in print form. Through reiteration, the conflated terms monkey, non European, darkskin, and mimic gradually gained ontological status in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century stereotype of the colonial subject as failed mimic. Thehybrid iconography at work in the plate representing Africain the 1758-1760 Hertel edition of Ripas Iconologia is a transitional example: in thisprint, a monkey mimicking a man is placed in the foreground of the geographical space of Africa. Plantation Slaves Blacks continued to be represented as exoticized pages until 1789,but inthe course of the eighteenth century such images were gradually supplantedby representations of blacks figured as plantation slaves. Slave labor wasexploited to grow and process a number of crops in the colonies, including indigo, coffee, and, most importantly, sugar cane. The extraordinary expansion of the slave system in Saint-Domingue in the eighteenth century wasdirectly tied to the intense use of slave labor on the sugar plantations. In The Sugar Mill, an engraving for Du Tertres Histoire g.n.rale des Antilleshabit.es par les Franois (1667-1671), a relatively primitive sugar millpowered by draft animals, apparently oxen, is depicted in the upper rightcorner of the print (Figure 2). In the lower right, a white overseer holds along stick outstretched in front of him toward some black workers, and the gesture is echoed above by a black man who holds a stick over the backs of the oxen. The white man is dominant over the black men, despite theirsuperior strength, just as the black slave is dominant over the stronger butless intelligent oxen. The intermale gaze within the image places the blackman under white subjugation: disciplinary control here outweighs physicalstrength as a signifier of manliness. A plate to Diderots Encyclopedia, titled Rural Economy, Sugar Works: Sugar Mill, engraved by Bernard,and published in 1762,depicts a waterdriven mill,a much larger and more massive structure than an animal-drivenmill (Figure 3). Neither the dangers of inserting cane between the crushing rollersmany slaves lost a hand or an arm doing this tasknor the slavestatus of the workers is overtly indicated. Indeed, Roland Barthes arguesthat what is striking in the entire Encyclopedia (and especially its images) is that it proposes a world without fear,a world with no trace of socialdistress.15Barthes offers a vivid characterization of how human beings andmachines are depicted in the plates. He writes,

Nothing shows woods humanizing power better than the Encyclopediasmachines; in this world of technology (which is still artisanal, for the industrial is as yet unborn), the machine is obviously a capital object.... contraryto modern images, man, always present in some corner of the machine, does not accompany it in a simple relation of surveillance; turning a crank, pressing a pedal, spinning a thread, he participates in the machine in a manner that is both active and delicate; the engraver represents him for the most part dressed neatly as a gentleman; this is not a worker but a little lord who playson a kind of technological organ,all of whose gears and wheels are exposed. In the case of sugar mill workersand other plantation slaves representedin the Encyclopediaplates, such as indigo workersBarthess observationson the absence of fear are apt: the dangers of cane feeding are not conveyed. But what of racial difference? Slave work is not pictured as delicatein theplates, and, as was actually the case in the colonies, the slaves appear nakedor dressed in little more than rags covering their loins, whereas white workers appear fully dressed. In these ways the colonial slave labor force is visually marked as non-Frenchand nonwhite in the Encyclopedia plates. Barthes is rightly struck by how many of the Encyclopediaplates featurehands, delicate white hands, remarkably graceful, adorned with fancy cuffs, hands often pictured as fragments, floating and disembodied (Figure 4). According to Barthes, the plates represent hands as the essence of humanity: We can even specify more clearly what the man of the Encyclopedic imageis reduced to what is, in some sense, the very essence of his humanity:hishands. In many plates (and not the least beautiful), hands, severed from anybody, flutter around the work (for their lightness is extreme); these hands aredoubtless the symbol of an artisanal world... but beyond artisanship, the hands are inevitably the inductive sign of the human essence. This synecdoche is reversed for the slave who loses a hand to the rollers ofthe sugar mill. Though blacks were explicitly categorized as human in someeighteenth-century French verbal discourses, particularly in lawyerspetitions for slavesfreedom, their status as human was more ambiguous French visual culture.18The arguments made by Frantz Fanon and morerecently Judith Butler that as the category humanwas articulated in fullyracialized ways no black man could qualify as human,are worth keeping inmind in considering the nuances in visual imagery.19In visually celebratinghighly cathected delicate white handshands not lined or calloused bymanual labor the Encyclopediaplates avoid the specter of missing blackhands. No black hands appear as decorative visual synecdoche in the plates, any more than the danger of mutilation is represented. The Dismemberment of Fugitive Slaves Many plantation slaves tried to escape from the horrors of their condition by suicide or by running away. Article 38 of the Code Noir decreed that colonial tribunals should punish fugitive slaves by branding, mutilation, and, after a third attempt, death: The fugitive slave who has been on the run for one month... shall have his ears cut off and shall be branded with a fleur de lyson one shoulder. If he commits the same infraction for another month... he shall have his ham-string cut and be branded with a fleur de lyson the other shoulder. The third time, he shall be put to death. Mutilated ears, easily seen, were a useful marker for surveillance and, unlike hands, not essential to worker productivity. The Code Noir stated thatno master should torture or dismember a slave, but the Code was often ignoredin practice. Mutilations were common, including limbs, ears, and genitals. The Code Noir provision for crippling the fugitive slave by cutting the hamstring (rather than severing the leg) is represented as a French inventionin anOld Regime printtitled How the Portuguese Whip Their Slaves,Invention of aFrenchman from Martinique (Figure 5). This rather crudely drawn print compares how the French and Portuguese dealt with fugitive slaves. The man onthe lower right, shown frontally,is missing his left leg; the

accompanyingwords state that this man is a slave who has had his leg cut off as punishmentfor running away. The body of the man next to him appears intact, but, consistent with the Code Noir, his hamstring has apparently been cut as an alternative method of crippling. The print represents extraordinary brutality, while at the same time claiming that the French treatment of fugitive slaves is somehowmore humane than the practices of the Portuguese. The imagery supports thegeneral tendency, especially strong on the part of planters and managers, to refuse to look at slave resistance as a global phenomenon, but rather to treateach act of slave resistance separately and drained of its political content. Thedanger of the slaves powerful musculature is neutralized in the image by signifiers of vulnerability: the hanging, whipping, chains, and dismemberment. The CivilizedEuropean While the French economy continued to draw an increasing percentage ofits wealth from slavery and the slave trade, more attacks on the barbarism ofslavery were put in circulation in France in the 1770s and 1780s. The centralquestion at stake was the moral legitimacy of slavery, not the equality ofblacks, who continued to be widely viewed as inferior to whites. At this time French visual culture adopted an increasingly defensive and conflicted posture in relation to slavery. An important example is an image drawn by Moreau in the early 1770s that represents the Code Noir within the print itself (Figure 6). The image, engraved by Masquelier, was designed as the frontispiece for Bernardin de Saint-Pierres Voyage . lIle de France (1773). The engraving includes a famous inscription, taken from the comic poet Terence, himself a slave in his youth, in which the slave gives voice to his own humanity: Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto.... Je suis Homme; et riende ce qui int.resse lHomme ne mest etranger. The print was produced three years after the first publication of Raynalsfamous Histoire philosophique et politique de deux Indes, a huge compilation of writings about European colonization that expressed abolitionist sentiment and became a forbidden bestsellerin France.25Moreaus printfeatures an early example, perhaps the first, of a construction that would come to found a tradition of famous abolitionist imagery:a muscular blackman wearing only shorts, bending on one knee,in a position of petition and pleading, before a white man. The white man in the print is fully dressed inan elaborate style of clothing associated with the privileged classes of France. Presumably, one of these two men is too warm or the other too cold, bringing to mind Montesquieus famous discussion of climate in DelEsprit des Lois. With one hand, the black man holds up an apparatus thatrecaptured runaway slaves in the French colonies were often forced to wear, a large chain with an iron collar at one end and an ankle cuff at the other. With his other hand, he holds open a book labeled Code Noir. Hardly anyof the slaves in Saint-Domingue could read or write, yet the image impliesthat the black man has some sense of the significance of the text and itshigh-minded references to emancipation (articles 55 and 59). The scene takes place by the waters edge, presumably the port of Ile deFrance (a French slave colony on the Mascarene Islands). The half-nakedblack man appears as a slave,or perhaps a former slave. It is unclear what theplacement of the collar on the floor, rather than around his neck, signifies. Thewhite man appears as a contrasting figure of authority, an enlightened man ofreason,surrounded by his dominion: the sense of possession and controlextends outward from him, encompassing the harbor, the slave, the dog besidehim, the potted plants,and other specimens of exotic natural history situatedin the foreground like spoils on their way to a museum display. Judged fromabove,that is, read by the moralizing and politicizing codes of significationin circulation among the French middle and upper classes, the contrasts workto reinforce the white mans power and superiority. The image offers the whitespectator a more complicated elaboration of the pattern found in the previous print: in both prints the French represent themselves as compassionatecompared with the other European slave-holding powers. Yet the image of the kneeling slave became a powerful abolitionist statement for a reason: it places the viewer in direct relation to the slave. It asks the viewer to consider the slaves request, and the suffering behind it, and forces the spectator in some sense to consider slavery itself. This

aspect ofthe image of the kneeling slave is heightened by how the black man holdsthe Code Noir, suggesting that not only were slaves familiar with the CodeNoir, but also that it was a reference point for them, a textual foundation ofclaims for liberty. In reality, many slaves did understand the possible routesto freedom and regularly pursued them, and this was widely known in thecolonial world at the time. This complex print, then, for all its assertions ofwhite superiority, also grants the slave agency and serves as an acknowledgement of a dialogue between slave and master about slavery itself. In an important move, distinct from Voltaires claims about race, anumber of European philosophers writing in the late eighteenth century, including Schiller and Kant, formulated a fundamental structure of culturebased on a universal temporalschema in which the white male European ispositioned as the universal Subject and the perfect, disinterested judge. As David Lloyd explains, in this formulation every racial judgment becamesimultaneously an aesthetic,an ethical,and a political judgment. The non -European was seen to demonstrate hisinadequacy both by hisallegedsubordination to immediate sensual gratification and by hisalleged lackof aesthetic productions. The non-European, according to this new temporal schema, was as yet undeveloped. In turn, it was the civilized European, as disinterested judge,who would decide when the nativewasready for freedom. Moreaus frontispiece contributes both to imagery and to this emerging paradigm. The white man, positioned withinthe image as the Subject that judges, functions as a site of identification forthe French spectator, while the black man is figured, at this level, as an underdeveloped human animal whose under development becomes the index of the judging subjects own superior stage of development. The Price of Eating Sugar in Europe I turn now to Moreaus two sets of illustrations (1787 and 1803), produced decades after Voltaires Candide was first published (1759). Moreausillustrations were put in circulation in environments very different from themidcentury world in which Voltaire wrote Candide, and they do not simplymirror Voltaires intentions or his textMoreaus images produced new meanings. An illustration could change a viewers interpretation of Voltaireswords, and the engravings based on Moreaus drawings were sometimesviewed as stand-alone prints. With respect to skin color, Voltaire repeatedly privileges whiteness in Candide. He clearly viewed blacks as inferior towhites, but he was not centrally interested in proving black inferiority. Voltaire was immersed in debates about whether different racesor species of human beings had separate origins, and he supported polygenesis. Illustrations added an enormous amount of work and expense to a publication in the eighteenth century. In a letter to Panckoucke dated January12, 1778, Voltaire expressed his strong opposition to publishing his writingswith any illustrations, declaring that such prints would amount to uselessb aubles. When the Kehl edition of the complete works of Voltaire wasfirst conceived and a prospectus issued, there was no plan to include illustrations. But Moreau thought he might profit from the immense publicity surrounding this new edition, and therefore undertook illustrations on hisown initiative and at his own expense. Moreau himself chose the passagesto be illustrated and hired engravers to translate his drawings into prints. He announced the sale of the print series in the Mercure de Franceon February 24,1781,about the same time that Beaumarchais issued the prospectus for theOeuvres Compl.tes de Voltaire. Moreau emphasized in his announcemen tthat the print series was a totally separate and distinct project from the Kehl edition. But he failed to gain enough subscribers. As a result, in amodestly worded letter dated July 15, 1782, Moreau asked Beaumarchaisto send the print announcement to everyone who subscribed to the OeuvresCompl.tes. In the end, despite the added expense, Beaumarchais was ableto include the Moreau engravings in some printings of the Kehl edition.

Moreau made a total of four drawings in 1787 to illustrate Candide. The third image in the set, engraved by Baquoy (Figure 7), pictures the momentin chapter 19 when Candide and Cacambo approach the Dutch colony ofSurinam and encounter a maimed slave. Voltaire writes, As they [Candide and Cacambo] approached the town they met a Negro [unN.gre] stretched on the ground, with only half his clothes left, that is to saya pair of blue cloth shorts; the poor man had his left leg and his right handmissing. Oh, good Lord! said Candide to him in Dutch. What are youdoing there, my friend, in that horrible state I see you in? I am waiting for my master Monsieur Vanderdendur, the famous merchant,the Negro replied. Was it Monsieur Vanderdendur,said Candide,who treated you this way? Yes, sirsaid the Negro,it is the custom. They give us a pair of clothshorts twice a year for all our clothing. When we work in the sugar mills andwe catch our finger in the millstone, they cut off our hand; when we try to run away, they cut off a leg; both things have happened to me. It is at thisprice that you eat sugar in Europe. Candide weeps as he looks at the slave, and he enters Surinam in tears. Theslaves acid comment on his own mutilationIt is at this price that you eatsugar in Europeis repeated as the caption to Moreaus illustration, thereby inscribing Voltaires bitter tone onto the image and encouraging thespectator to recognize the intimate connection between the inhuman treatment of slaves in the colonies and the consumption patterns in Europe thatsupported it. In giving a voice to the slave, the caption gives him agency andresists the silencing that often accompanies extreme trauma. The work of cane feeding was done by women, at least in the French Antilles, but Voltaire and Moreau each depict the maimed cane feeder asmale. The choice of a male as cane feeder in Voltaires story and Moreausdrawing may indicate their ignorance of gendered labor practices in theslave colonies, and it may also suggest a psychosocial desire and expectation that violence and mutilation be done to men,not women. In any case, the novel and print each put the figure of the mutilated black male into circulation in France. In Moreaus illustration, light skin color is linked tomultiple signifiers of phallicpower, while dark skin color is linked to dismemberment. At the center of the composition is a long walking stick thatCandide holds upright. The shape is repeated in the depiction of the rifle Candide carries on his back, and in the way Candides legs are drawn as vertical shapes next to the walking stick. Especially important in the composition, Candides legs, the edge of his cape, and his stick are all flooded with light. In contrast, the doubly maimed slave, whose peg leg and crutchlie horizontally on the ground, is placed in shadow. The slave is the objectof Candides gaze, and this structure of focalization invites the spectator to identify with Candide and join him in looking down at the slave. Theslaves facial features appear rather European; the use of shadow contributes to placing emphasis in the determination of race on skin color. For the white spectator, the signifier of blackness takes on addedurgency as a marker that differentiates the spectators own body from theblack body in pieces.Here it may be useful to change registers for amoment. In Lacanian terms, the self is constituted through a complex mirroring process that denies the reality of bodily disorganization. The achievement of individuation, a fragile process repeated throughout life and neverfully completed, is dependent on others who must mirror back and therebyconfirm the wholeness of ones projected identity and bodily integrity. Imagistic signifiers of dismemberment, deeply troubling for obvious reasons at a conscious level, may be even more disturbing at an unconsciouslevel, as they threaten to expose the factitiousness of the integrated body and sense of unity that is central to achieving a coherent self. There is a third figure in Moreaus print, Cacambo. Voltaire constructsCacambo as a hybrid: the reader is informed that Cacambo is from a provincein Argentina, that his mother tongue is Peruvian, and that he is one-quarterSpanish. Voltaire does not state explicitly that Cacambo is

partly of Africandescent, but he remarks that Cacambos face is soot-colored.In the Moreau illustration Cacambos hybridity is downplayed: all three faces appear rather dark; Cacambo, like Candide, is depicted standing, wearing European-styleclothing,and holding a vertical object. In the end, body position, dress, muscularity, and dismemberment, more than skin color, mark the figure onthe right as a slave. Here again, the black man appears muscular yet mutilated, and therefore not threatening. In the French images of plantation slaves discussed thus far, the slave isdepicted naked from the waist up. When abolitionism gained strength in Paris in the 1780s,crucial supplements,such as European dress, began to appear in some images to signify that blacks might be adult and free. Legal and customary signs of libertydocuments and dresswere nowneeded to convey the idea of a freeblack. On May 15,1791, the French National Assembly extended full civil rights to all free blacks and mulattoes in Saint-Domingue who were born of free mothers and fathers, a move of considerable symbolic importance even though it applied to only a few hundred men and was rescinded a few months later. Many of the images celebrating this event continued to figure black men as dependent and immature. For example, in an engraving titled The Rights of Man, The Liberty of the Colonies,a white woman in full European dress offers a French military jacket to a scantily clad black man (Figure 8). HelenWeston observes that this print reverses so much ancien r.gime imagery, where white women are seen to be infantilizing black pages and servants intheir possession by washing and undressingthem.But infantilization hasnot disappeared; the black male still occupies the position of a child, a childwho receives properclothing from Europeans. The Black Man as Sexual Aggressor The long tradition in French visual culture of representing the black man as infantilized, subservient, and dismembered was upset by the eruption of massive violence in Saint-Domingue in August 1791, a date that marks the beginning of the Haitian Revolution and the beginning of a rupture in the French racialized regime of visual signification. The uprising in Saint-Domingue quickly brought a reign of violence of blacks against whites, including many atrocities. Reports of these atrocities in all their staggering horror made theirway to Europe within months, and anxiety increased in France as stories circulated that black men had raped white women in the colony. A number of French images of the August 1791 uprising depict armed struggle and burning cane fields. A more graphic image of violence, ananonymous German engraving, pictures black men reducing whites tobodies in pieces(Figure 9). There were in fact many atrocities committed in the slave insurrection, but this print cannot be assumed to simply mirror reality. In its attributions of violent intentionality and evidentiary aura, the print participates in and contributes to a new racist epistemic regime. The foreground is filled with blacks killing and torturing white men, a white woman, and a small white child. The ground is strewn with severedheads, limbs, and decapitated bodies of white people. The midground isfilled with a line of armed black soldiers, while a turbaned black man, identified in the inscription as Jeannot, rides by in an open carriage. Jeannot, who served briefly as a commander and a judge with complete authorityover the life and death of prisoners, was notorious for his extreme cruelty. The image is an extraordinary representation of a world utterly out of whitecontrol. What had been unrepresentable in French visual cultureblackviolence directed against whitesis put into conscious awareness and offered up as a visual display, a print reproduced in multiple copies and put on sale. The inscription states that raped women are strangled.But explicitblack male sexuality was proscribed in French visual culture, even in pornography, throughout the eighteenth century. How does the image circumventthis prohibition? In the lower right of the print, a black man leans over a white woman and uses a cord to strangle her. The womans hands are tied together, and her facial expression is one of pain and distress. Given the reports of rapes in Saint-Domingue then circulating in Europe, the prints inscription, the isolation of these two figures, and the way their bodies are positioned,it is reasonable to conclude that spectators would have associated this scene

with rape. But only hints of rape are supplied in the picture, and the woman in the lower right remains dressed. This complex allusionto what cannot be seen is an important point, and I will return to it later when I consider how the taboo on representing interracial sexuality between black men and white women was again circumvented. This German atrocity print would have found a receptive audienceamong Frances enemies, who could read it as an attack on France and theFrench Revolution. The slave revolt in 1791 began only a few weeks afterLouis XVI and his family were arrested near the French-Austrian border during their failed attempt to escape France. Conservatives inside and outside of France blamed the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue on the radical events of the French Revolution. Read this way, the print would haveappealed to German-speaking viewers with royalist sympathies and to French aristocratic emigres who had fled France by August 1791. Part of what makes such representations of violence in Saint-Domingue significant is that in actuality there is a rather impressive history of restraint from atrocity on the part of the leaders who gained hold in the slave insur rection, notably Louverture. For example, a famous image of a white child impaled on a stake, included in another atrocity print and described as having taken place on a particular plantation, was not mentioned in eyewitness accounts of that attack and was probably added after the fact. Moreover, these representations tend to omit atrocities committed as part of the counter insurgency by French troops in Saint-Domingue. These atrocity prints encouraged spectators to read the uprising of 1791as anti-white and antiFrench. But the gens de couleurand the blacks in thecolonies insisted instead that their violence against the white planters con stituted proof that they were loyal to the new Republican government inFrance. This argument made considerable political sense since the whiteplanters, fearing that the French Revolutionary government might abolishslavery, were increasingly expressing royalist sympathies.45In 1793,faced with the dual threat of invasion by the British and an anti-Republican insur rection by the white planters, the French Commissioner in SaintDomingueoffered freedom to any slave who would serve in the Republican Frencharmy. He soon declared all the slaves in Saint-Domingue emancipated, and is decision was quickly ratified in Paris. Desperate to retain the colonies, the French National Assembly in February 1794 abolished slavery andextended full rights to all black men in the colonies. The action of theslaves in the Caribbean in support of the French Republic brought about a radical new policy, aimed at the political integration of colony and metropole based on equality. Laurent Dubois explains, It was in effect the deep politicization of the idea of citizenshipthe fact thatcitizenship was defined, and performed, through forceful adherence to therepublican project, and a willingness to fight and if necessary destroy thosedefined as enemies of this projectthat made this unique historical transformation possible. By proclaiming themselves citizens, slave insurgents expanded the possibilities of citizenship as it gave content to the abstract universalityof the language of rights. The Black Citizen-Soldier French opinion on abolition remained deeply divided after 1794, and by the summer of 1797 the pro-slavery constituency appeared on the verge ofpolitical victory in France. This reactionary trend was reversed, albeit onlytemporarily, by the coup-detat of September 4,1797. Royalists and counter-revolutionaries were purged from the government, and the Directory reaffirmed the governments earlier commitment to the abolition of slavery. It declared plantation workers and black soldiers to be citizens. Anne-Louis Girodets remarkable painting C[itizen] Jean-Baptiste Belley, Ex-Representative ofthe Colonies,completed in 1797, recalls the February 1794 abolition of slavery under the Jacobin regime and rejects the recent reactionary back lash against emancipation (Figure 10). The famous canvas portrays a well known Jacobin black deputy from Saint-Domingue who arrived in Francein 1794 and continued on as a member of the lower house under theDirectory. Girodet exhibited this portrait at the Exposition de lElysee in October 1797

and again at the Salon of 1798. Unique among the paintingshung at the Salon of 1798 in its recollection of Jacobin politics, it was seenby large crowds of spectators. Belley was born in Senegal in 1747,enslaved as a child, and freed sometime in the 1760s. He gained his freedom by joining the French army inSaint-Domingue (prior to the blanket emancipation of 1793); he served fortwenty-five years and rose to the high rank of captain.49The title of thepainting, given in the Salon catalogue, indicates that Belley is a citizen, and he wears the uniform of an officer in the French army and the sash of a representative. This is an image of a new kind of French manliness: the Republican citizen-soldier. (Where the army of the ancien regime wasmade up of mercenaries, the Republican army was one of citizens.) The painting portrays Belley as black andas noble, heroic, dignified, powerful, and confident. It thus breaks with the semiotics of blackness at work earlierin the century and begins to open up possibilities of cross-racial intermale identification. But Girodets portrayal of Belleys genitals complicates matters considerably. As Thomas Crow points out, Girodet violated long-standing artconventions by portraying Belleys genitalia as large and conspicuous: Not content with having emphatically outlined the size of the deputys penis, he [Girodet] arranged the index finger of the right hand so that the most inattentive viewer could not fail to notice. In order to push this idea he was willing to upset the classical canon of proportions in the treatment of the malegenitals, despite the insistence of the rest of the painting. This radical departure from orthodox masculine coding is charged withlibidinal currents that go all the way back to ancient Greek scenes of the comic, bacchic, and satyrical. To understand this aspect of the Belley portrait, I turn to Norman Brysons psychoanalytic reading of the theme of failed masculinity in Gericaults paintings. Bryson links the tradition of classically proportioned genitalia to thefundamental contradictions at stake in the assumption of the male positionin the Oedipal structure. Commenting on a particular Greek sculpture, the Doryphoros of Polykleitos, Bryson explains the connection between the convention of representing male genitalia as very small and the structure of intermale relations: The convention is so familiar that it is still possible to overlook its aspectof the bizarre; for idealization here entails that the discrepancy between theviewers sense of his own sex and the ideal, as well as the accompanyinganxiety, be resolved by so diminishing the genitalia that no anxiety concerning discrepancy will arise. The gap between actuality and the imago isdealt with by reversing it so that the idealized genitalia do not compete with the real thing; or, more precisely, they are made to competegap and disparity are presentedbut the spectator wins. In this case, the anxiousgap between the male spectator and the imago of masculinity can be precisely measured as a ratio: as the sculptures genitals are diminished relative to actual genitals, so the sense of the males genital self-possessionand sexual power stands in relation to the masculine imago. What is feared and cannot be assumed by the male subject is the sexuality of the imago, afear that in the case of the sculpture is defused by the strategy of diminution and sublimation. According to psychoanalytic theory, the male is necessarily threatened withfeeling inadequate in relation to other men, because the production of the masculine rests on comparison with an unknown foreclosed imago. It is forthis reason that the structure of hierarchy has such a deep purchase on malesubjectivity. But the Belley portrait with its violation of classical canons threatens the male spectator who may confront a gap between the size ofhis own genitalia and what is shown in the painting. Whatever Girodetsintentions, the Belley portrait puts into circulation in the public sphere in France an early version of the charged claim that black men have unusuallylarge genitals. Another feature of the painting deserves mention: the polarity of black and white provided by the marble bust of Raynal. Raynal, whohad died in 1796, is

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represented here not only as hyper-white, but as allhead, as reason. The black/white polarity reinforces the declining significance of the category mulatto,an intermediate category that lost some of its importance in French politics after 1793 and abolition. The relation of Belley and Raynal in the painting also serves to echo the possibility that Louverture was inspired by Raynals work. There are so many competing signifiers at work in Girodets portrait thatit eludes one stable reading. One more feature of the painting would havestruck contemporary spectators, namely, the so-called facial angleof thesitter, emphasized in the pose of Belleys head and torso. Around this time, facial angle became a central aspect of European ideas on physiognomy, and it was increasingly deployed to support alleged distinctions amongpeoplesor races. Claims about facial angle were used to link blacks tomonkeys and to assert European superiority over nonEuropeans. In 1791, a French translation of Petrus Campers influential treatise on head shapes (designed in part to aid artists in drawing the head accurately) was published posthumously in Paris, accompanied by engravings depicting eightcategories of heads arranged horizontally across the page, with the monkeyand orang-outang at one end, the negrein an intermediary position, and the European and Greek Apollo at the other end. Camper himself made noclaims about racial hierarchy, but the engravings accompanying his texttended to be misread in this way. When Campers treatise was published ina French translation for the first time in 1791,the translators commentarypublished with it stated emphatically that Campers observations were evidence of European superiority. In the year IX (1800-1801), Julien Joseph Virey, a disciple of Buffon, published his Histoire Naturelle du Genre Humain, a popularizing synthesis based on a wide range of ideason aesthetics, natural history, early anthropology, philosophy, along with analogic arguments about gender difference. Citing Camper, Virey takes the idea offacial angle in a racist direction by insisting that facial angle is linked tobrain size, intelligence, and level of civilization. Virey compares le n.gre and the monkey at length and characterizes the negreas morally degraded, stupid, ugly, with especially large genitals, and, more broadly, as the inverseof the European.In an engraving by Duhamel published in the 1800-1801French edition of Vireys book, an important simplification occurs: now theschema on facial angle is reduced to three heads, arranged in a verticalorder, with the sublimeApollo on top, the n.grein the middle and the orang-outang on the bottom. Napoleon and Slavery In 1799, Napoleon seized power and aligned himself with the interests of thewhite planters in the colonies. Under Napoleon, government policies regardingthe colonies, slavery, and the slave trade hardened in profoundly racist ways. Cultural anxiety concerning the sexual desires of white women heightened. Ina tellingly anxious move, Napoleon ordered that all white women in SaintDomingue who had had sexual relations with black men were to be returned toEurope. In 1802, Napoleon launched a military campaign led by his brother-in law General Leclerc to retake SaintDomingue. In the same year, Napoleon reintroduced the slave trade and decreed the restoration of slavery in thecolonies. Belley returned to Saint-Domingue with Leclercs troops and fought with the French against the insurgent blacks. In October 1802, Leclerc sent aletter to Napoleon recommending that the French carry out genocide againstthe blacks in the colony, and he urged that every black man who had worn the French military uniform be killed. French officials arrested Belley despite his continued allegiance to France; he died in a French prison in 1805. The expeditionary troops sent by Bonaparte to reconquer Saint-Domingue were defeated. In all, some fifty thousand French soldiers died in Saint-Domingue from yellow fever and battle wounds, more than the number of French soldiers lost at Waterloo. Dessalines, the commander-in-chief of the army of blacks and gens de couleur, issued a proclamation declaring Haiti independent on January 1,1804. He then ordered a series of massacres of the white inhabitants remaining in the former colony and declared that all Haitians would henceforth be known as black,irrespective of actual skincolor. In France, government censorship suppressed most abolitionist writings, and

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writings on the colonies in general, from 1802 until 1817. AsLawrence Jennings points out, French sympathy for blacks was reduced by the stories circulating in France about the black massacres of whites in theformer colony and by Bonapartes failure to retake Saint-Domingue. By1803, advocates of slavery and the slave trade had emerged victorious inpolitical debates in France.60In this charged atmosphere, French militaryaction in Saint-Domingue was pictured in ways that fueled racist attitudes. Consider, for example, the semiotics at work in the engraving Disembarkation of the French Troops at Saint-Domingue January 1802, designed to decorate a ladys fan (Figure 11). The design functions as warpropaganda, as womens fashion, and as psychic reassurance that whiteFrench soldiers are more powerful than the black revolutionaries in Saint Domingue. It depicts white French troops landing with bayonets fixed, utterly dominant over blacks, who are depicted in horizontal positions, fallen or scrambling away. Displayed in the hands of a white woman,the fan would advertise both her support for the French campaign to retake thecolony and her lack of sympathy for the former slaves. Moreaus Second Set of Candide Illustrations Moreau drew his second set of illustrations for Candidein 1803, the yearNapoleons troops were meeting their final defeat in Saint-Domingue. Heundertook this second set for a new edition of the complete works ofVoltaire in response to a request made in 1799 by the editor Renouard. Moreau designed 113 illustrations in all for the Renouard edition, and hisdrawings were engraved from 1799 to 1805. The engravings were first published and sold as stand-alone prints. Renouards 66-volume edition did notbegin to appear in print until 1819,several years after Moreaus death in1814. For many years, then, spectators would have seen Moreaus 1803 Candide illustrations apart from Voltaires writings. Though Voltaires workswere famous, the anchoring force of his text would have been weaker whenthe prints were viewed alone. Moreaus second set of Candide illustrations is larger (seven imagescompared with four) and more violent than his first set. The scenes of violence that Moreau chooses for illustration are not limited to violence doneto or carried out by Africans. The second illustration in the 1803 set depicts Candide running through heaps of dismembered white bodiesraped, scorched, disemboweledas he flees the killing fields of war in Europe. The fourth and fifth illustrations of the second set are of particular interesthere. The fourth engraving illustrates a moment in chapter 11, a scene of violence that invokes the specter of socalled Barbary captivity. French travelers, fishermen, and merchants had long feared being captured andenslaved by the Muslim pirates who worked out of the Barbary states of Algeria, Tunis, Tripoli, and the kingdom of Morocco. The Old Woman relates how, as a young virgin traveling by ship, she wascaptured and raped by a pirate captain whom she identifies as an abominable Negro[un N.gre abominable]. The pirates take her to Morocco, where a civil war is being fought by factions of various skin tonesblacks against blacks, blacks against tans, tans against tans, mulattoes againstmulattoes.Soon after they land, some blacks attempt to seize the Europeanwomen from their captors. The Old Woman exclaims,I was witness to acombat such as you never see in your European climates. The blood of the northern peoples is not ardent enough. They are not mad about women to thepoint that is common in Africa.The black attackers end up cutting, tearing, and massacring everyone captors and captives alikeexcept her. Moreaus drawing, engraved by Villerey, represents the moment when themen are fighting over the white women (Figure 12). Following Voltaires text, the skin tones of the men in the print range in darkness. But the center of thecomposition reinforces the binary split between black and white. The spectator sees the front of the slumping white body of the then young Old Womanas the captain holds her behind his back. The captains face is not visible; instead, the viewer sees the face of the captains opponent, a man depictedwith notably dark skin. Thus, while the scimitars and Arab attire evoke North Africa, the composition focuses attention on a racialized scene now

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associated with the war in Saint-Domingue: a violent black man threatening a collapsing white woman. At the same time, the image points toward a futurechange in Frances racialized regime of vision: the binary split between blackand white will shift toward a new graduated racial hierarchy in which theArabwill be placed in between the white and black. Candide Shoots the Monkey Lovers The fifth image exploits another episode in Candidethat raises the specterof black men with white women: the moment in chapter 16 when Candidesees two naked girls being followed by two monkeys nibbling at their buttocks. The drawing by Moreau was engraved by de Ghendt (Figure 13). Voltaires narrative reads, The two wanderers [Candide and Cacambo] heard a few little cries thatseemed to be uttered by women. They did not know whether these were cries of pain or of joy; but they jumped to their feet... These sounds came fromtwo girls, stark naked,who were running lightly along the edge of themeadow,while two monkeys followed them and bit their buttocks. Candidewas moved with pity... He takes his double-barreled Spanish gun,fires, and kills the two monkeys.... [Candides] tongue was silenced when he sawthese two girls tenderly embrace the two monkeys, burst into tears over theirbodies, and fill the air with the most grievous cries. Cacambo informs Candide that the monkeys were the two lovers of these young ladies.Candide is incredulous:Their lovers? Can this be possible! You are making fun of me, Cacambo; how can I believe you? In Voltairestext from 1759,Candide stands in danger of being cooked and eaten by thelocal inhabitants as a punishment for his unwelcome intervention. But in Moreaus illustration from 1803,Candide can easily be read as acting tosave the young women from danger. By the time Moreau chose the monkey scene for illustration, earlier debates on cross-species breeding had been complicated by intensifyinganxiety concerning interracial sexuality and by years of war in Saint-Domingue. The mixing of races in Saint-Domingue was the subject ofnumerous commentaries, most hostile and contentious. Darcy Grigsby observes that in France between 1800 and 1802,police bulletins, press reports, and published tracts reveal a growing suspicion of blacks, increasingly conceived as an enemy requiring surveillance.A Paris police reportdated November 12,1802 makes explicit the growing fear of racial mixing: One is generally alarmed by the great number of blacks arriving in Paris; it is said that there will soon be only mixed blood in France. Moreaus choice of white skin color and European facial features for thewomen in the illustration is his own, not Voltaires. On the contrary, Voltaire locates this scene in South America, in the vicinity of Paraguay, and he impliesthat these naked girlsare indigenous, not white or European. The fourbodiestwo white women and two monkeysall appear in movement, leaning forward, each with a foot off the ground. It is easy to read thewomens movement as an effort to flee from the monkeys. The monkey inthe foreground is given a menacing expression, reinforcing Candides mistaken interpretation of what he sees. Comparing this illustration with an earlier one of exactly the same scene, drawn by Charles Monnet in 1776 for the 1778 Bouillon edition ofVoltaires writings (Figure 14), makes clear that a rupture in visual signification has taken place.71In Monnets drawing and in the 1777 engraving based on it by Deny, the monkeysfaces are benign. Monnets monkeys, pictured with prominent tails, look like toys. One monkey is almost smiling. What is most striking when the two drawings and the engravingsbased on them are compared is the marked shift away from the gentle andfriendly rendering of the monkeys in 1776-1777 to the menacing expression, developed musculature, and darker fur given the central monkey in 1803. The genitalia of the monkeys are not visible in Moreaus 1803 illustration. Yet the prominent arm muscles of Moreaus monkeys and the idea, repeated in numerous French scientific and philosophic texts during thesecond half of the eighteenth century, that male monkeys have sex withhuman females, would have encouraged spectators to read these monkeys as male. I want to

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push this point further and make a stronger claim. Bythe time Moreau produced the monkey image in 1803, the emerging racistepisteme in Francean episteme forged by revolutionary events in Franceand Saint-Domingue and by Napoleons racist policieswould haveprompted French spectators to read these monkeys not only as male, and not only as men,but as blackmen. The monkeys nibbling at the buttocks of the deux filles toutes nu.sinMoreaus 1803 Candideprint represent what cannotbe seen: the spectacleof interracial sexuality between black men and white women. In theMoreau print, the ban on such visual imagery is circumvented by the use of metaphor. The monkeys earlier metonymic associations with Africa shift. Skin color replaces geography on the side of the signified, and the slippagefrom metonymy to metaphor is complete: the monkey isthe black man. What began in Voltaires 1759 text as a scene tied to polygenesis is transformed half a century later into an image linked to anxieties about inter-racial sexuality. Writing about later interracial sexuality, George Cunningham speaks ofa triangle of desirethat positions black men and white men as adversaries in a contest over the body of women. This structure of triangulation, which takes its interpellative, subjectifying power from repetition, is already at work in Moreaus monkey-lover scene. A rupture has occurred inFrances racialized regime of vision. Moreau offers a new kind of visualization, in which normative heterosexuality, gender, and race are mutuallyconstitutive. In my reading, Candide adopts the stance of the prototypicalpatriarchal white hero who upholds honor against the sexual threat allegedlyposed by black men. Indeed, the absence of representations of interracialblack/white sexuality in French visual culture, this visual lacuna, may beunderstood as a matter of honor,the required honorable response of theimagined community of the white French nation to what it perceives assexual assaults by the simian black. White Men on Top The aura of anxiety surrounding Moreaus 1803 image is heightened bythe moment in Voltaires text that Moreau illustrateswhen the monkeysare fully in the circle of desire, in the act of nibbling. The scene conveys asurfeit of meanings, at once uncanny, familiar, and forbidden. In the next moment in Voltaires story, Candide kills the monkeys. Candide becomes the oedipal white man who stops inappropriatedesire, restores socialorder, and protects white women from the un oedipalized black male. The ultimate horror is left ambiguous in Moreaus image, namely that, according to Voltaires story, these young women desired the monkeys. For this themonkeys will have to be annihilated. From a Lacanian perspective, one might say that Candide kills the monkeys because he was jealous of the lustthe monkeys stole from him. But Moreaus 1803 illustration does not take us this far:it remains allfear and desireprovocative, mysterious, anticipatory. Moreaus print endsup as a visual deployment of metaphor used as a racial epithet; it works to exclude blacks from the human by exploiting fear. It is part of the long history of forces that worked to subvert the universal character of French identity and citizenship, a universalism that was the product not only of the French Revolution but also of events in the Caribbean, particularly the Haitian Revolution. The print helps to undermine the possibility that suchuniversalism would be applicable across lines of race. In broader terms, Moreaus image contributes to the exclusionary, anti democratic formulation of culture then being established in the West,a formulation based ondegreesof humanity and hierarchical ordering. Through a new deploymentof a link in signification, that between the figure of the monkey and un restrained sexuality, Moreaus print pictures the black man as the undevelopedsavagewho needs to be civilized (read: colonized) by the white man. The racialized regime of vision produced in France during the long eighteenth century encouraged white men to view their own whiteness as abadge of superiority. By avoiding explicit images of black-white interracialsexuality, French visual culture protected white men and white womenfrom dishonor. The tentative and short-lived move to accept the black manas a fellow citizen in the mid-1790s, attempted in the midst of war and continued dependence on plantation commodities, was profoundly troubledfrom the start. The contradictions and inconsistencies contained within

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Girodets portrait of Belley were tenuously resolved in the nineteenth century by silencing the past the erasure of the Haitian Revolution fromthe history of the Westand by further exaggerating the binary split between whiteness and blackness. Renewed colonial expansionism set aside theradical vision of a heroic, dignified, black citizen of France in favor of arevival of a figure already prominent in pre-Revolutionary abolitionism: the submissive non-white animal/ man who is well suited for physical labor, but not yet advanced enough to be free or French. I have focused on the visual culture of metropolitan France, but as scholars continue to rethink the history of the French Atlantic, one of the mostcompelling developments now emerging is the turn toward a less Franco centric approach. Political theory has much to contribute to this move to destabilize the presumption that Europeans and European colonists werethe exclusive agents of democratic thinking. As Dubois and others haveargued, more work needs to be done to construct a picture of the Atlanticas an integrated space of debate over rights, of universalism,over governance and empire,a debate that was expressed in multiple cultural forms. For example, it would be valuable, if possible, to pursue an idea embeddedin the white planter Felix Carteaus memoir: the claim that slaves developedrevolutionary ideals in part through seeing engravings. On another front, feminist theorists will learn from and want to contribute to the rich newwork now appearing on sexuality, desire, race, and power in the Caribbean colonies, particularly SaintDomingue.

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