Alongside their naturalization and evangelization programs, French authorities were planning to “civilize” (or “Frenchify”) local populations not just in New France but also in Brazil and Madagascar. “Civilization” implied following certain social codes: seventeenth-century French dictionaries defined the expression “to civilize” (civiliser) as “to make civil and sociable; to polish the manners.” The word “civil” was defined as the act of being courteous and honest. Being “civilized” in the eyes of the French could also have linguistic and legal ramifications. According to Sophie White in her study of the Illinois Country, “Frenchification” involved turning Native American allies “into French subjects of the king: not only Catholic but also linguistically, culturally, and legally ‘French.’”
The genesis of this “civilization” project went at least as far back as the French encounter with the Tupinamba of Brazil in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The famous festival that took place in the French port city of Rouen in 1550, which featured French actors performing the daily life of a Brazilian Tupinamba village, was explicitly intended to represent a journey from barbarism to civilization. It praised King Francis I “for having [. . .] saved [Rouen] from barbarism” and encouraged the young King Henry II to follow his predecessor’s example by assigning him the character role of the messiah bringing different peoples to civilization. Over sixty years later, in addition to being given French names and French clothes, the six Tupinamba who were taken from Equinoctial France to France by the Capuchin missionaries in 1613 received a Christian education and were taught French manners.
It is only after those events that French authorities endeavored to “civilize” the local populations of New France, as well as those of Madagascar. Like the naturalization project, the “civilization” one was intended to support France’s empire-building strategy. By “civilizing” local people and turning them into Catholic subjects, authorities hoped to increase the number of people who could qualify as French. The settlers of New France were not the only ones to have been overwhelmingly outnumbered by local populations in the first decades of French colonization. Only about 4,000 European soldiers and settlers traveled to Madagascar between 1642 and 1674, most of whom died as a result of tropical diseases and brutal conflicts with local clans: in comparison, an official document estimated the precolonial population of the island at over two million people—probably an overestimate, granted, but a valuable indicator of how outnumbered the French thought they were.
French missionaries in Madagascar planned to embrace the same tactics that missionaries had practiced before them in the American Spanish colonies and New France. From the early sixteenth century to 1568, the Spanish crown had encouraged the Indigenous people of New Spain to cohabitate with the Spaniards in an attempt to make them learn Spanish customs. We also know that, from the early years of colonization, authorities in New France encouraged their Native American allies to move to the Saint Lawrence valley so they could be converted and “civiliz[ed]” “by [following the] doctrine and example [of the French].” In 1650, just like the missionaries of New Spain and those of seventeenth-century New France, Nacquart thought that the people of Madagascar would acculturate if they were allowed to interact with French people who would set a good example. He specified that the nuns sent from the metropole to start a seminary in Madagascar should be able to read and write, to make lace and other garments “suitable for women,” and to sew cotton stockings “like those made in France.” Meanwhile, the orphans were to be “skilled in some form of manual labor,” such as sewing. He explicitly stated his expectation that local children would “emulate these French children and these Sisters in every way.” There was no clear consensus on what it meant to “civilize” (or “Frenchify”) a population, perhaps because there was no single definition of “Frenchness” in France. Early modern France was a very fragmented kingdom in terms of culture and language. Many of the behaviors described as “civilized” or “French” in documents from the early modern period were in no way representative of commoners’ practices in metropolitan France. When literate observers identified cultural features that distinguished “the French” from other populations, they did so from their own elite and idealistic perspective. Many of those cultural features were not exclusive to the French: they could be found across most Western European societies throughout the early modern period. The recurring themes in plans to bring “civilization” to the populations of Madagascar and New France were religion, agriculture, craftsmanship, and clothing. Conversion to Catholicism was indeed considered central to achieving “civilization” because religion informed every aspect of society in early modern France, including moral codes, the law, and the legitimacy of the monarchy. This is why local converts were initially expected not just to learn Christian dogmas and rituals but also to change their day-to-day behavior.
The objectives of the French civilizing project had a lot in common with those of the Hispanization program pursued in the Spanish colonies since the sixteenth century. The missionaries of New Spain had taught Indigenous people the basic principles of Spanish culture: they made them embrace the Spanish sartorial style, live in houses, use European tools (such as saws and chisels), and learn the Latin alphabet, Latin songs and European agricultural techniques, as well as European arts and crafts such as painting, drawing, carpentry, tailoring, shoemaking, and smithing. This Spanish program was echoed in some of the language employed by the French in Equinoctial France in the early seventeenth century. Eager to lobby more support to the missionary cause in Brazil, the Capuchin father Claude d’Abbeville—who had spent time on Maranhão Island—related these words, allegedly voiced by a Tupinamba chief in 1613: “The hope that we have that our children will learn the law of God, and your arts and sciences, makes us believe that in the future [. . .] we will be considered French.” We know that religious and secular authorities in New France took those plans one step further by endeavoring to teach cultivation, as well as “different arts and trades,” to Native Americans, in the words of Jesuit missionary Le Jeune.
The content of the civilizing project for Madagascar was similar to that of New France, Brazil, and the Spanish Americas. French secular and religious authorities in Madagascar also planned to teach local populations about agricultural techniques, trades, and the arts. According to governor of Madagascar Étienne de Flacourt in the 1650s, France had a duty “to teach [the inhabitants of Madagascar] the right way of cultivating the land, the arts, trades and crafts.” Charpentier explained how the French Company of the East Indies envisioned caring for the Malagasies by “teaching them fine arts; [. . .] training them to cultivate the land that is so fertile, & enjoy the produce that Nature offers them, & of which they have been deprived by their ignorance.”
The practice of the “arts” and “fine arts” referred to a broad range of skills. The fine arts typically included painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and dance, while the “arts” could also encompass craftsmanship. From the point of view of French elites, these skills were supposed to distinguish “civilized” populations from the “natural” state that was often attributed to the local populations of Madagascar and New France. The Dictionary of the French Academy of 1694 opposed the word “art” (art) to the concept of “nature” (nature). The arts-and-crafts dimension of the civilization project was extremely gendered. Girls in Madagascar were expected to engage in activities that were the preserve of women in Europe, mirroring how, in 1650, Nacquart was hoping to have a group of nuns sent from the metropole start a seminary in Madagascar in order to teach local girls ways to sew lace and other garments “suitable for women,” as well as cotton stockings “like those made in France.”
In order to “civilize” the populations they encountered overseas, French authorities also endeavored to make them change their sartorial habits, as Spanish missionaries had done years prior in New Spain. This is illustrated by Nacquart’s plan to teach local girls in Madagascar how to make French garments. The French preoccupation with clothing went at least as far back as 1613, when the Tupinamba brought from Equinoctial France to the French kingdom by the Capuchin missionaries were “dressed in a French way” before their baptism. It was echoed in the missions and the Ursuline convent of New France, where Native American children were famously required to wear French outfits as well. In Anosy, secular and religious authorities took offense at the Tanosies’ nudity, although they seemed less attached to the French clothing style—perhaps due to the severe shortages of imported clothing in Anosy. A regulation issued in 1665 simply instructed the colonial Council of Madagascar “to use all means to force the nègres to wear clothes.” In 1650, when discussing the dress code for children in the seminary that he intended to start in Fanjahira, Nacquart specified that while there was no need for French linen and clothes, woolen scarves would be needed to cover their naked bodies. Six years later, Lazarist missionary Toussaint Bourdaise recounted explaining to a group of Tanosy women who attended church with their breasts uncovered “that it would be better to hide their breast [sic] and that women in France would feel ashamed to see them like this.” Like those in New France, missionaries in Madagascar were hoping that “civilized” and converted women would eventually be married to Frenchmen. By 1655, Bourdaise already rejoiced that several local girls who had been educated in Fort-Dauphin were now praying three times a day and waiting to find (presumably) French husbands before being baptized and married.
“We Shall Be One People”—Intermarriage
Just like the French “civilization” program, the seventeenth-century French approach to intermarriage in New France was echoed in colonial policies and practices in Madagascar, mostly because the French endeavored to adapt to the wishes of the roandria. When they decided to promote intermarriage in their colonies, the French might have been inspired by the earlier empire-building strategies of the Spaniards, the Portuguese and the Dutch. The Spanish crown had made the decision to endorse existing mixed unions between European men and Indigenous women in the sixteenth-century Spanish Caribbean and New Spain, in order to populate their overseas positions and advance the conversion and Hispanicization of overseas populations. As early as 1501, the Spanish crown had ordered the governor of Hispaniola, Nicolás de Ovando, to let those mixed relationships continue if they were consensual. This demand was reiterated in 1514, 1515, and again in 1525 on the grounds that such alliances were “useful and beneficial to the service of God and [the crown], and convenient for the populating of the island.” The founder of the Portuguese Indian Ocean empire, Afonso de Albuquerque, had also promoted mixed marriages between Portuguese men and local women on the other side of the globe in early sixteenth-century Portuguese India.[100] Meanwhile, a policy endorsing intermarriage with Asian women in the Dutch East Indies had been initiated shortly after the Dutch East India Company (also known as the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC) had established a settlement in Ambon (Indonesia) in 1605. Later, in 1650, Dutch officials endorsed a proposal to establish Dutch outposts in Ceylon by promoting intermarriage between Dutch men and Asian women. Those precedents might have influenced French authorities when they began to promote intermarriage overseas.
The French intermarriage program appears to have first emerged over a century after Spanish authorities had explicitly endorsed mixed relationships overseas, when the six Tupinamba from Equinoctial France were taken to mainland France by the Capuchin missionaries in 1613: in this “foundational moment,” three of the men who had converted to Catholicism had married French women. They had done so in Catholic ceremonies attended by the king of France himself, after they had been taught the French manners and customs and before returning to Brazil. The fact that these intermarriage ceremonies involved Indigenous men marrying French women—and not Frenchmen marrying Indigenous women—may seem surprising.
The specific kind of intermarriage that was promoted in other places, including seventeenth-century New France and Madagascar, was only between Frenchmen and local women (not between local men and French women), because of political, cultural, and demographic considerations. Gender expectations in early modern Europe dictated that men should act as heads of household, and family names, property, and status were transmitted patrilineally. As a result, relationships between European women and men of non-European ancestries could be considered a threat to colonial socioeconomic orders overseas. Another obvious reason why authorities promoted intermarriage with local women was the fact that there were far fewer French women than French men in the settlements. The gender imbalance was even more pronounced in Madagascar than it was in New France: only sixteen French women set foot on the island in the seventeenth century, and most of them died almost immediately after their arrival in 1674. In promoting intermarriage, French authorities thus hoped to populate Anosy with subjects who could count as French. Although the gender imbalance was probably important in the European population of Equinoctial France as well, the demographic situation in the kingdom of France was radically different from that of Brazil in the early seventeenth century: most people in the metropole were Europeans, only a handful were Tupinamba, and all of these Tupinamba were men, because the journey from Brazil to France was deemed too long and dangerous for women. This explains the decision of French authorities to marry three male Tupinamba to French women: they did not have much of a choice in the absence of female Tupinamba.
The French intermarriage plan was extended from the French kingdom to North America not only as a result of a strategic adaptation to local kin-ship traditions—as illustrated by Champlain’s declaration during the French-Innu council of 1633 that “we shall be one people”—but also partly because it was common practice within Europe to seal alliances with other kingdoms though intermarriage with other royal lineages. To the French in North America, this convergence with Native American diplomatic practices was fortuitous and made it easier to gain the cooperation of possible high-profile allies. Intermarriages with the daughters of Native American leaders were intended to advance fur trading exchanges and sustain the formation of diplomatic alliances—for example, with the Innu, Algonquian, Wendat, and Illinois—that were vital to the survival of the French in the region. As opposed to what happened in Europe, where intermarriage was mostly encouraged between royal lineages, however, with regard to New France, French authorities also promoted intermarriage between Frenchmen and non-high profile women. As had been the case in the sixteenth-century Spanish colonies, those Catholic intermarriages were meant to populate the colony and encourage local populations to convert to Catholicism and acculturate.
In line with the European tradition, the practice of promoting intermarriage in New France was subsequently extended to Madagascar, in another attempt to align French policy with local tradition. Both French authorities and the roandria of Anosy supported intermarriage in Madagascar from the time of the arrival of the first French fleet in 1643. The roandria themselves encouraged Frenchmen to marry their daughters in Catholic and local vodin’omby (marriages à la mode du pays—which could be broken and could only be sanctified after the sacrifice of an ox whose best meat was offered to the bride).In 1661, Governor Flacourt noted how the roandria would even reward the Frenchmen who “wished to marry their daugh-ters” by giving them “everything they want[ed],” and with the opportunity to live in their villages and cultivate their land. Two factors may explain why the roandria encouraged Frenchmen to form alliances with women in their communities. First, as demonstrated by Pier Larson, some might have strategically used intermarriage as a way to “domesticate” French colonizers and “assimilate them to island ways through dispersion away from [Fort-Dauphin].” This practice echoes that of the Haudenosaunee, who—according to historian Matthew Dennis—also promoted intermarriage in order to incorporate the French into their communities. It is true that the people of Madagascar had been used to assimilating foreigners— especially traders and migrants from Austronesia, East Africa, and the northern rim of the Indian Ocean—into their increasingly stratified societies through trade and marriage, since the first centuries of the first millen-nium. By the seventeenth century, Madagascar’s societies were structured around ideas of purity and rank presumably derived from Hinduism. People across most of Madagascar were divided into two social groups: the mainty, described as “Blacks,” who formed a class of commoners or enslaved people and had African origins, and the fotsy—nobles of allegedly purer ancestry, often described as “whites” because of their fairer skin tones. Among the fotsy were the roandria, who claimed Arab origins, as well as the anacandrian and the ondzatsi. The fotsy favored endogamous marriages within their own groups since the fifteenth century. Sexual relationships with members of different groups were frequent outside of vodin’omby marriage, however, allowing outsiders to become allies or kin. Moreover, roandria women were traditionally the only ones allowed to marry outside of their own group without losing their status: this might explain why most of the free women who married Frenchmen in Anosy were roandria.
The roandria also supported mixed relationships with Frenchmen to get material and diplomatic support from them. This is why, in the 1640s, when the French Protestant governor of Fort-Dauphin, Jacques Pronis, married a roandria princess named Dian Ravellom Manor (or Andianramariuelle), the daughter of a chief named Dian Marval, and the niece of the king of Anosy (Dian Ramach), his new relatives expected that he would side with them against their Antemoro enemies (a people from the area between Manakara and Farafangana, on the southeastern coast of the island). The roandria also expected that the French who married women in their communities would help them raid livestock in the villages of rival clans and hand them over a portion of their booty—livestock raiding was a very important activity in Malagasy cultures.
Because the French governor of Madagascar, Étienne Flacourt, knew the benefits that intermarriage could bring to the French, he, too, endorsed vodin’omby and Christian intermarriages between Frenchmen and local (especially though not only roandria) women in the 1640s and 1650s. By forming alliances with roandria women in vodin’omby and Catholic marriages, and also through extramarital sex, the French in southeastern Madagascar gained access to protection, arable land, raided livestock, enslaved captives, and trading connections—they often traded farm products, glass beads (rassades), mirrors, metals, firing weapons, and ammunition in exchange for enslaved captives, food, ebony, leather, wax, aloe, benzoin, wild pepper, and copper from local populations. Getting food and protection was vital, given the lack of French supplies and the constant threat of attacks from local enemy clans in Anosy. This is why Flacourt rejected the idea of sending French families to Madagascar, claiming that “there [were] enough women [on the island] at the disposition of those who shall wish to marry them.” His position on the subject was initially endorsed by the king: The crown’s letters patent of 1642 specified that all local brides had to be baptized Catholics. Catholic intermarriage on the island helped the French advance their evangelization program, since the women who married Frenchmen in Catholic ceremonies converted to Catholicism. This is illustrated by the story of Dian Ravellon Manor, the roandria princess who married the French protestant governor Pronis: she converted to Christianity before marrying him in the Church in 1646.
From By Flesh and Toil: How Race, Sex, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire. Used with permission of Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2025 by Mélanie Lamotte.
