This dissertation is a study of the visual discourse of race in seventeenth and eighteenth century France. A primary goal of this project is to uncover the early meanings of the word "race", a term that circulated in the French language for well over two hundred years before it became indelibly linked to skin color. "Race" existed as one concept among many to measure and describe civility, pedigree, and genealogy. I therefore begin my study of "race" in the ancien régime by considering engraved depictions of French nobles produced during the so-called "crisis of identity" (ca. 1560-1640), a period in which definitions of nobility were disputed, adapted, and redefined according to changing "racial" concerns. While this crisis of identity unfolded in metropolitan France, an entirely different project of "racial" differentiation was occurring in France's burgeoning empire. Looking at mid-seventeenth century engravings of sugar, indigo, and tobacco plantations in the French Antilles, I explore the way in which slavery became naturalized as a racially determined institution, one that correlated the "blackness" of African men and women with their alleged enslavability. I consider the way in which printmaking--a black and white medium--generated a dichotomous ideology, whereby skin color became the supreme measure of racial difference. I then turn to the complicated matter of slavery within France, and I examine the way in which portraits of elite women ( dames de qualités ) and their slave domestics ( petits nègres ) visualized a more nuanced, variegated understanding of race.
I investigate constructions of whiteness and blackness from an artistic perspective, uncovering moments where skin color functions as a malleable visual trope, rather than as an exacting tool of scientific categorization as it would become in the nineteenth century. I propose that the physiognomy and skin color of the black servant is often the subject of curious painterly attention, providing a vivid, exotic and polychromatic foil to the relative austerity of the named female subject. Finally, I address the manner in which the figure of the slave domestics is adapted to confront various societal concerns and demands regarding female subjectivity and colonial desire. In the work of the eighteenth century portraitist Nicolas de Largillierre in particular, the slave domestic is used to denote luxury, vanity, acquisitiveness, and various other "feminine" ills of imperialist accumulation. To this end, my dissertation addresses a wide range of imagery produced during a period of colonial expansion and disempowerment of the nobility, when categories of race, gender, and social status were consistently being constructed, blurred, and renegotiated.
