Guadeloupe

By: Nick Nesbitt

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Guadeloupe

Island group in the Caribbean Sea that is an overseas department of France.

Located at the northern end of the Windward Islands chain in the Caribbean Sea, Guadeloupe is a group of nine inhabited islands. Colonized by the French in 1635, it produced sugarcane and sugar products for France through the labor of African slaves and their descendants. Since the abolition of slavery in 1848, and the incorporation of the island and its dependencies into France in 1946, the predominantly black population of Guadeloupe, like other Creoles, has struggled to balance a double cultural inheritance.

Guadeloupe is both African and French, with smaller elements of Native American, East Indian, and Chinese cultures. Guadeloupeans feel tension between the centralized structure of French institutions and their desire for economic, cultural, and psychological independence. For a long time, emphasis on Guadeloupe's ties with France led to a denial of the islands' African heritage. That began to change in the 1930s, when Aimé Césaire, a poet and political leader in the French Caribbean island of Martinique, promoted the Négritude movement. Like two other largely black French overseas departments in the Americas—Martinique and French Guiana—Guadeloupe has been shaped by its divided cultural identity. However, this conflict, like the one that W. E. B. Du Bois identified among African Americans in the United States, has sparked artistic creativity. Guadeloupe, about ten times the size of Washington, D.C., with a population estimated at 440,000 in 2003, has produced a number of well-known writers, including Maryse Condé, Simone Schwartz-Bart, and Gisele Pineau.

Colonization and Early History

The French overseas department of Guadeloupe consists of the island of Guadeloupe, which is divided into two sections called Basse-Terre and Grande-Terre, as well as a number of smaller islands: Marie-Galante, La Désirade, the Petites-Terre Islands, Saint-Barthélémy, the Saintes islands, and Saint-Martin, which is the French section of the island of Saint Martin (the rest of that island is a Dutch possession). Guadeloupe became known to Europeans during the second voyage of Christopher Columbus, who stopped there in 1493. The island was then populated by the Carib people, Native Americans who were originally from the Amazon region of South America. Spanish slave raids drastically reduced the Carib population. By 1660 those who remained had fled to the neighboring, uncolonized islands of Dominica and Saint Vincent. During the era of European exploration and colonization in the Americas, Spanish galleons crossing the Atlantic landed often at Guadeloupe, but Spain was more interested in colonizing islands farther north, such as Cuba, and in exploring North and South America. As a result, the French were free to colonize Guadeloupe in 1635.

France wanted to occupy Guadeloupe and Martinique in order to benefit from piracy and the slave trade, following the example of Great Britain and The Netherlands. A single boatload of Africans arrived at Guadeloupe in 1502, but it was only in the seventeenth century, under King Louis XIV of France, that organized importing of slaves to the island began. Louis's finance minister Colbert oversaw the creation of the West Indies Company (1664) and the Company of Senegal (1672) to administer trade in slaves and goods. The French Code Noir (Black Code) of 1685, which defined slavery within the French colonies, was one of many Black Codes in Latin America that specified how Africans could be exchanged, used, and punished.

Under the Code, slaves received punishments ranging from whipping and imprisonment to torture, dismemberment, and death by hanging. Guadeloupean slaves responded by stealing, poisoning animals, burning buildings, and organizing revolts. Escaped slaves, called maroons, formed communities in the forests of Basse-Terre and Grande-Terre, getting weapons and food through wide-ranging networks of supporters. In 1736, one of these groups tried to launch an islandwide revolt. The revolutionaries were betrayed, and the revolt failed. Its leaders were beaten or hanged, and the island's rulers systematically hunted down maroons, greatly diminishing their numbers for the next forty years.

Great Britain controlled the island briefly, from 1759 to 1763. During this period, the plantation system grew especially quickly. The British brought in 40,000 slaves to work the sugar plantations, nearly doubling the slave population, which rose from 41,000 in 1750 to 90,000 in 1790. When word reached the Caribbean of the French Revolution of 1789, slaves in the French Caribbean colony of Haiti responded with a revolution of their own. The enslaved population of Guadeloupe reacted more slowly and did not stage a major rebellion, although isolated revolts occurred in various towns. After the new French republic abolished slavery on February 4, 1794, two officials of the government, Victor Hugues and Pierre Chrétien, brought the news to Guadeloupe. They also brought the instrument that revolutionaries in Paris had used in their campaign of terror against the monarchy and the aristocrats: the guillotine. Hugues successfully enlisted freed slaves to drive out the British, who had seized the island while the French were busy with the revolution. Hugues then executed or exiled many of Guadeloupe's white landowners and merchants who were sympathetic to the British or favored the restoration of the French monarchy.

A public square in Basse-Terre, the capital of Guadeloupe.

Henderson/Hutchinson

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Hugues's acts weakened the social and economic hold of the whites on Guadeloupe. At the same time, the black population increased rapidly. In 1735 whites had made up more than a third of the total population, but by the end of the eighteenth century they accounted for only a tenth of it. As the power of the white landowning class declined, a class of mixed-race merchants gained importance in the 1790s. Blacks and people of mixed race were also included in the colonial military. In 1802 these soldiers, including Martinicans Louis Delgrès and Magloire Pélage and Guadeloupean Jean Ignace, revolted against the troops of Napoléon Bonaparte, who were sent to reintroduce slavery to Guadeloupe. Unlike former Haitian slaves who led revolts against the Europeans, these mulatto leaders had never known the terrors of slavery. They still felt an identification with France that prevented them from adopting the guerrilla tactics that had been successful in Haiti. Their revolt was quickly suppressed, and on May 28, 1802, Louis Delgrès spectacularly blew up himself, his troops, and some of the attacking French in a desperate refusal to accept slavery, which French forces then brutally reinstitituted.

Guadeloupe saw a burst of activity during the 1820s, when new sugar plantations were created and thrived. During this time the French government granted full legal rights to free colored men, who by 1835 outnumbered whites in Guadeloupe 19,000 to 12,000. After Great Britain outlawed slavery in its colonies in 1833, many Guadeloupean slaves risked their lives escaping to freedom in the neighboring British-controlled islands of MONSERRAT, Antigua, and Dominica. In 1845 France adopted the Mackau Law, an attempt to “humanize” the institution of slavery. For the first time, the law recognized slaves as human beings, allowed to own possessions and land, allowed to buy their freedom, and limited to nine and a half hours of work per day. Beyond the questionable logic of a “humanized” slavery, the law was completely ineffectual, since slave owners were free to interpret it as they saw fit. Slavery continued to exist in Guadeloupe until, following another revolution in France, a new French government abolished it for good in 1848.

Around the same time, Guadeloupe experienced an economic crisis. Increasingly, France was getting sugar from sugar beets, which could be inexpensively grown and processed in France. Although competition with this source of sugar led to an economic depression in Guadeloupe, the French government wanted to keep the island's sugar plantations functioning. Therefore, although abolition ended the enslavement of the plantation workers, other laws turned them into agricultural laborers. At first, contracts bound the freed slaves to the plantations, specifying the division of profits among landowners, overseers, and workers, who benefited least. Later, workers were granted land to cultivate on their own, selling their crops to the landowners or to the new centralized sugar factories, or grandes centrales. Neither practice was sufficiently profitable for the large landowners, who imported 6,000 African and 40,000 East Indian laborers between 1854 and 1889. These newcomers replaced former slaves and their children who were unwilling to work for minimal wages.

Since the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Despite an economic recovery during the 1860s, in 1884 Guadeloupe once again entered into economic decline. Political power had been spread among conservative landowners and Republican, mixed-race moderates, but the economic crisis of the 1880s and 1890s, together with the fact that France renewed universal male suffrage, allowing men of all races to vote, led to the birth of a new political force after 1892. Black politicians such as Hégésippe Légitimus and Achille René-Boisneuf promoted ideas about racial pride that shifted the balance of political power away from the financially weakened and outnumbered white landowners and mixed-race moderates. Since that time Guadeloupe has maintained a liberal position on social issues, though voters have also consistently supported whichever party happened to hold power in France.

During World War I (1914–1918), 11,000 Guadeloupeans served in the armed forces and 1,470 died. The island's sugar economy remained in a state of crisis, and crops such as bananas and flowers gained importance. Beginning in the 1960s, the French government promoted a tourism-based economy for Guadeloupe. The island is highly dependent upon imports, mainly from France. These include fuel, manufactured goods, and foods. In the 1970s Guadeloupe imported goods worth four times as much as its exports, but by the late 1990s the value of imports had risen to more than ten times that of exports.

Guadeloupe's dependence on France was confirmed with the March 19, 1946 law of departmentalization, defended by representatives from French Guiana and Martinique. Departmentalization was supposed to give Guadeloupe legal equality with the mainland French departments, but the law's effectiveness was limited when conservative forces returned to power in France. At the same time, economic underdevelopment and the high cost of labor in Guadeloupe (due to new social benefits) made it increasingly difficult for Guadeloupe to compete in the global sugar and banana markets.

Social movements in Guadeloupe since the mid-twentieth century have focused on political rights rather than on racially oriented struggles. The writings of Martinique-born Frantz Fanon, the war waged in France's North African colony of Algeria between 1954 and 1962, and the socialist revolution led by Fidel Castro in Cuba all fed Guadeloupeans' desire for independence and an end to colonialism. A series of social movements and strikes led to the formation of the Group for the National Organization of Guadeloupe (GONG) in January 1963 and the Front for Guadeloupean Autonomy (FGA) in 1965. Both organizations worked openly—and at times violently—for Guadeloupean independence from France, despite the the fact the majority of Guadeloupeans favored continuing the relationship with France. After a white merchant unleashed his dog on an invalid cobbler in front of his store in March of 1967, riots erupted throughout the island. Two months later, French troops opened fire on striking workers, killing between seven and forty-nine of them.

The Guadeloupean independence movement continued, sometimes violently, through the 1970s, but the desire for independence was always limited to a minority of the population, and it gradually weakened throughout the 1980s. In 1989, Hurricane Hugo dealt a blow to the independence movement when it struck and severely damaged the island—after the disaster, Gaudeloupe's need for French support was clearer than ever. The island's ten-to-one trade deficit makes it deeply dependent on funds from the French government for such services as social security medical support, unemployment payments, aid to families with children, and pensions. This ongoing dependency has brought on what Edouard Glissant has called “one of the rare ‘successful’ colonizations of modern history.” In 2003 voters in both Guadeloupe and Martinique showed that they do not want to change the relationship between the island departments and mainland France. They rejected a proposal to combine their two legislatures into one, a move that many had seen as a possible step toward independence for the islands.

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