to make slaves work as hard as they could. They concerned themselves little about the deaths such demands produced. Our best data on the workload of Jamaican slaves comes from late in the eighteenth century. At Prospect Estate in the developing parish of Portland, slaves worked twelve hours a day for an average of 272 days, with sixty days off. Illness or other problems stopped work for thirty-three days.48 During their days off, enslaved people produced their own food, constructed their own housing, and attended to the needs of themselves and their children. Like the cotton mills of early industrial England, which depended on fresh inputs of laborers from the countryside to replace worn-out or dead workers, the sugar plantation depended on a functioning slave trade to maintain numbers. It was a consuming industry to cater to the growing consumer markets of western Europe.
In the French Caribbean, early eighteenth-century missionary accounts provide some indication of colonists’ attitudes toward the enslaved men and women whose labor was transforming Saint-Domingue. When the Jesuit Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix described Saint-Domingue sugar slavery in the 1720s, he was struck by the workers’ misery, the rags they wore, and their lack of food. Yet he contrasted their “perfect health” with the “infinity of illness” that plagued their French masters.49 Frustrated by the apparent inability of some Africans to learn even the Lord’s Prayer, Charlevoix used a mechanical metaphor to describe their “extremely limited intelligence,” describing Africans as “machines whose springs must be rewound each time that you want them to move.” Though he called the whip a necessary disciplinary tool, Charlevoix believed that the French were kinder masters than the English. If Saint-Domingue bordered an English colony, he claimed, most of the slaves would decamp to the French side.50
Writing a few decades earlier in Martinique, Jean-Baptiste Labat, who was both a missionary and a planter, also believed the English were crueler than the French. In 1696, after warning his readers about the frequency of deadly accidents at the sugar mill, where careless workers might be dragged into the rollers, he claimed that the English used their sugar mills to execute slaves who committed major crimes, gradually lowering their living bodies into the machine.51 Yet Labat highlighted the industrial character of plantations like the one he directed in Martinique: “Whatever you say about the work in an iron forge or glass factory or others, it is clear that there is nothing harder than that of a sugar mill, since in the former there are no more than 12 hours of work, while in a sugar mill there are 18 hours of work a day.” Because of mill workers’ lack of sleep, Labat advised planters to force them either to sing or to smoke so they would not doze off and fall into the cauldrons of boiling sugar.52
There are almost no such missionary accounts from the French Antilles after the 1730s, but census reports show the rapid expansion of the plantation sector in Saint-Domingue after this date. The number of sugar estates expanded from 450 in 1739 to 636 in 1771. These were large operations, though still notably smaller at this date than estates in Jamaica. For the 1770s, David Geggus calculates that the average size of a sugar estate slave force was roughly 160. Exports from the Antilles to France, of which Saint-Domingue’s products constituted the majority, increased from nearly 60 million livres tournois in 1749 to over 178 million in 1778 (£7.7 million). This output was largely the result of the fact that the colony’s enslaved population more than doubled, from just fewer than 109,000 in 1739 to just under 220,000 in 1771. The free population of color expanded at an even faster rate over the same period, from 2,545 to 6,480. During the same time the white population grew only 60 percent, from 11,600 to 18,400. Where whites were roughly 9 percent of the total population in 1739, in 1771 they were only 7 percent.53
By the 1780s, the twin themes of profit and misery were more central than ever to French Caribbean colonization. An unusual and disturbing map and vignettes of Saint-Domingue’s Févret de Saint-Mésmin sugar estate captures these overlapping realities for an absentee investor. On the one hand, the water-colored estate plan drawn by the royal engineer Louis de Beauvernet conforms to the Enlightenment ideal of rational planning (Figure 6). Trained in the latest surveying and cartographic techniques Beauvernet likely had seen the widely circulated prints of the royal salt works conceived by Claude-Nicholas Ledoux between 1775 and 1778, years when Beauvernet was in France. Ledoux planned a large preindustrial workplace, the Salines de Chaux, at Arc-et-Senans about eighty-nine kilometers from Beauvernet’s native city of Dijon.54 Like Ledoux’s celebrated image, Beauvernet’s sugar plantation map appears, at first glance, to celebrate the idea of harmony between the forces of nature and man’s organizing genius. Tropical savannah land and cane fields dominate the central panel of the image, but they are traversed by rectilinear roads, as well as by a meandering stream. At the center are the plantation’s buildings, the most distinctive of which are the large sugar mill and, nearby, twenty tiny rectangular slave huts aligned in two close columns. One key lists the thirteen buildings and another key names the thirteen parcels of land, mostly cane fields, that surround the manufacturing center. A compass rose and an elaborate cartouche identifying the estate, its owner and location, and the artist provide the aesthetic trappings of an elaborate map.
Figure 6. “Plan de l’habitation de Févret de Saint-Mésmin, à Saint-Domingue, Louis de Beauvernet.” © RMN-Blérancourt, Musée franco-américain du château de Blérancourt.
Beauvernet drew the plan for the estate’s absentee owner, Févret de Saint-Mésmin, a parlementary judge in Dijon who had inherited the estate from his creole mother and army officer father. He kept decades of plantation registers and letter books about this estate.55 Yet the six vignettes that Beauvernet painted around the central map made this document more an artistic object than a management tool. The Févret family had a notable painting collection, and, during the French Revolution, the judge’s son Charles became a well-known portraitist and engraver in New York, until returning to Dijon to serve as director of the city museum. Descended from a Dijon noble family himself, Beauvernet likely knew of the Févrets’ artistic interests.56 Given the modest size of Beauvernet’s estate plan (17 inches by 25.5 inches; 44 cm by 62 cm), Févret likely kept it in a portfolio or album, perhaps for showing to guests in the family’s Dijon mansion.
Beauvernet’s six vignettes of plantation life are somewhat realistic. For example, the plantation had the single refinery and two animal-driven sugar mills he portrayed.57 Nevertheless, the engineer took liberties that made his scenes strikingly metaphorical. All but one vignette shows ships on the sea, although the Févret plantation was completely landlocked. The managers of Févret’s plantation probably used the wharf of the adjoining Motmans’ estate, as Févret’s wife was a member of the Motmans family.58 But Beauvernet’s fascination with shipping, as well as with the machinery of the sugar plantation, reveals his vision of Saint-Domingue as a world of commerce and manufacturing, as well as agriculture. The ships linked the estate to metropolitan consumers, and to the Févret family, who consumed the profits from the estate. Beauvernet understood that his patrons were likely preoccupied with the moment when their barrels of sugar would be boarded onto a ship. In 1776 their instructions pressed their estate manager to send them 120 barrels of sugar a year.59 Beauvernet devoted one vignette to this moment. In it, white men repair a beached ship, and men wave to another vessel out at sea. Two or three white children sit on timbers as a smaller boat arrives at the shore. This is the sole painting in which whites outnumber blacks, who are depicted here only as three diminutive figures in the foreground rolling a large cask toward the sea.
Although he was a royal engineer, Beauvernet was not a military man but rather came to Saint-Domingue to make his fortune.60 There is no evidence that he saw plantation slavery as pernicious. Indeed, when he painted this image he was probably involved in a scheme to open up new sugar land in the undeveloped Cayes de Jacmel parish. Beauvernet’s wife was one of at least six investors who received a royal land grant as part of a group that planned to construct a joint irrigation works on this virgin territory.61 This project was precisely the kind of technical investment that
