UC Berkeley

As politicians of France's Third Republic vied to build a democratic consensus and distance themselves from France's recent autocratic past, they projected a fantasy of assimilation onto Martinique--one of France's oldest colonies where the predominately non-white population had received full citizenship and universal manhood suffrage with the ratification of the Constitution of 1875. However, at the close of the nineteenth century, a series of disasters struck the French island of Martinique that threatened the republican fantasy of seamless assimilation: (1) the 1890 fire that destroyed the island's capital of Fort-de-France; (2) the 1891 Atlantic hurricane that devastated the island's economy and prompted a reevaluation of the place of the colony within the French nation; (3) the first general strike in 1900 wherein civil unrest in the colonies caused a political disaster in the metropole; and (4) the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée that killed over 30,000 people nearly instantaneously and cemented a postcolonial relationship characterized by dependence. Throughout the Third Republic, the Martiniquais sugar economy was in rapid decline, and as capital was injected into the island in the form of disaster relief, the "old colony" that had once been a valuable asset was fast becoming a financial drain on the French economy. In their interactions with French economic and political imperatives, environmental disasters brought to the fore existing racial and social tensions and held to the fire France's ideological convictions of assimilation and citizenship.

The present work intervenes in the current historiography of France by bringing France's old colonies into the story of late-nineteenth-century nation-building and by underscoring the role played by the environment in race-making, identity formation, and class-based politics. Scholars of the French West Indies have extensively examined the importance of assimilation in Antillean politics and culture, clearly elucidating the significance of the short-lived emancipation of 1794; the transient citizenship gained in 1848 and suspended in 1851; and finally the full citizenship restored in 1871 and codified in the Third Republic's Constitution of 1875. This work does not seek to retrace their steps, but to explore how disastrous events in the French West Indies shaped the colonial relationship and interacted with broader developments in the metropole itself. During the age of new empire, the "old colony" of Martinique redefined what it meant to be a French citizen by precipitating a discussion over economic rights and social welfare.