The discovery some 20 years ago of the diaries of Martiniquan magistrate and planter Pierre Dessalles (privately published in four volumes in the mid-1980s) created a minor stir among Caribbeanists. Now the Forsters have provided in a sensitive translation an abridgment that includes a selection of correspondence and an insightful introduction. The text joins the writings of other French West Indian lawyers of the late slavery period: Grenonville, Lacour, Listré, Duboys, and Moreau de Saint-Méry; Dessalles’s father and son also each wrote a history of Martinique. But the diaries most obviously invite comparison with those of the infamous Thomas Thistlewood of Jamaica. We find similar abundant detail on slave management, the sugar business, and agricultural practice; there are dramatic episodes detailing suicides, revolts, and poisoning scares.
Dessalles, however, was a very different man from the hedonistic Thistlewood and he lived in a time of more rapid change. Pious, pompous, and dourly conservative—every year he recorded the anniversary of Louis XVI's execution—he was a dutiful family man who accepted with resignation an unhappy marriage and fractious relations with his children. The diaries offer a fascinating portrait of how he, born and educated in France, came to regard Martinique as home, while his island-born wife and children rejected it.
Race relations form a dominant theme of the book. Dessalles’s writings cover a half-century that saw the dismantling of legal white supremacy in the colonies, the rapid growth of the free colored community, and the ending of the slave trade and of slavery. A paternalistic defender of slavery, Dessalles displayed an obsessive dislike of most free persons of color. He found them incorrigibly immoral and offensively pretentious. In the famous 1823 trial of abolitionist Cyrille Bissette, he sought the death penalty. Yet, in a memorable passage, Dessalles describes his coming to terms with Bissette a quarter-century later. With the ending of slavery in 1848, men of education like Bissette became a bulwark for colonial whites. The diarist, however, does not tell all. It is unclear, the editors note, if Dessalles’s two lifelong mulatto servants were also his sons or if one of them was even his lover. We thus remain uncertain if the colored family with which the crotchety old man spent his last years was also his own, unacknowledged in public and to posterity.
This is a rich document that contributes much to the study of plantation society. Despite one or two inaccuracies in the editorial apparatus — une veillée (p. 70) was a night shift not a party; Henri Christophe (p. 36) was a king not an emperor—the presentation is informative and deft.