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Sentiment and the Contradiction of Racial Inequality in Beaumont's Marie or, Slavery in the United States
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 June 2022
Abstract
From the American travels of Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont in 1831 and 1832, there emerged three books aimed at presenting European audiences with the lessons to be learned from the young democratic regime of the United States: the cowritten On the Penitentiary System in the U.S. and Its Application in France, Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and Beaumont's Marie or, Slavery in the United States. This essay aims to clarify the specificity of Beaumont's account of the United States in Marie by focusing on the central role he gives to sentiment as both formal principle and analytical concept. Through a reading of the book's sentimental novel form and its use of moral sentimentalist theory, this essay argues that Beaumont depicts American racism as the effect of a fundamental flaw in European American national character: an incapacity for sentiment that renders the United States incapable of fully realizing its democratic principles.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of University of Notre Dame
Footnotes
The author would like to thank Shirley Samuels, Sandra Gustafson, and the members of the NEH seminar “Situating Democratic Writers in Western New York,” where these ideas took shape; and to express gratitude to Joshua Craze, Ryan Pilcher, Margot Szarke, Ruth Abbey, and the journal's reviewers, for their thoughtful feedback.
References
1 On the problem of unfreedom in American democracy presented in these three works, see Benson, Sara M., “Democracy and Unfreedom: Revisiting Tocqueville and Beaumont in America,” Political Theory 45, no. 4 (2017): 466–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Andreas Hess, Tocqueville and Beaumont: Aristocratic Liberalism in Democratic Times (London: Palgrave, 2018), 1.
3 See, for example, Janara, Laura, “Brothers and Others: Tocqueville and Beaumont, U.S. Genealogy, Democracy, and Racism,” Political Theory 32, no. 6 (2004): 773–800CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kohn, Margaret, “The Other America: Tocqueville and Beaumont on Race and Slavery,” Polity 35, no. 2 (2002): 169–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Noll, Mark A., “Tocqueville's America, Beaumont's Slavery, and the United States in 1831–32,” American Political Thought 3, no. 2 (2014): 273–302CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Schaub, Diana, “Perspectives on Slavery: Beaumont's Marie and Tocqueville's Democracy in America,” Legal Studies Forum 22, no. 4 (1998): 607–27Google Scholar.
4 Gustave de Beaumont, Marie or, Slavery in the United States, trans. Barbara Chapman (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 4.
5 The vast majority of recent studies of Beaumont are explicitly studies of Tocqueville and Beaumont together; see Benson, “Democracy and Unfreedom”; Hess, Tocqueville and Beaumont; Janara, “Brothers and Others”; Kohn, “The Other America”; and Schaub, “Perspectives on Slavery.” Even those few that are focused on Beaumont foreground the resonances between his ideas and Tocqueville's; see Jennifer Greiman, “Color, Race, and the Spectacle of Opinion in Beaumont's Marie,” in Democracy's Spectacle: Sovereignty and Public Life in Antebellum American Writing (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 75–120; and Christine Dunn Henderson, “Tyranny and Tragedy in Beaumont's Marie,” in America through European Eyes: British and French Reflections on the New World from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, ed. Aurelian Craiutu and Jeffrey C. Isaac (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), 143–60.
6 Greiman, “Color, Race, and the Spectacle of Opinion”; Henderson, “Tyranny and Tragedy”; and Schaub, “Perspectives on Slavery.”
7 Janara, “Brothers and Others”; and Kohn, “The Other America.”
8 Janara, “Brothers and Others,” 790.
9 François Furet, “The Intellectual Origins of Tocqueville's Thought,” in Tocqueville et l'esprit de la démocratie, ed. Laurence Guellec (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2005), 121–40.
10 Beaumont, Marie, 17.
11 Aurelian Craiutu, review of Marie ou l'esclavage by Gustave de Beaumont, Nineteenth-Century French Studies 39, no. 3–4 (2011): 355, emphasis added.
12 “Marie: ou l'Esclavage aux États-Unis,” in the Online Library of Liberty, Liberty Fund, accessed Sept. 6, 2021, https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/beaumont-marie-ou-l-esclavage-aux-etats-unis, emphasis added. See also Henderson, “Tyranny and Tragedy.”
13 Beaumont, Marie, xxiii. We will return in what follows to some of the over 6,000 words cut from this translation in order to demonstrate that they are, on the contrary, highly relevant “to the theme.” The abridgments in the translation are focused in two areas that represent serious misunderstandings of Beaumont's project as it will be laid out in this article. First, the translation cuts many of Beaumont's reflections on the importance of sentiment as a faculty necessary to the flourishing of human life and community. Second, the translation removes many of the set-pieces of nineteenth-century fiction, from scenes of melancholic reverie and aesthetic experience to a highly emotional deathbed apology—scenes that would have helped contemporaneous readers to situate and interpret Beaumont's book within the powerful cultural idiom of sentimentalism.
14 See Greiman, “Color, Race, and the Spectacle of Opinion.”
15 Beaumont, Marie, 3, 6, both emphases in the original.
16 See, for example, Schaub, “Perspectives on Slavery,” 619.
17 Beaumont, Marie, 3.
18 This story of what is known as the “mal du siècle” was pioneered in the American fictions of Chateaubriand (Atala [1801] and René [1802]), whose influence on Beaumont is evident, and reached its apogee in Musset's Confession of a Child of the Century (1836), published the year after Marie.
19 Germaine de Staël, Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution, ed. Aurelian Craiutu (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2008), 707.
20 Beaumont, Marie, 75.
21 Ibid., 63. Beaumont makes clear reference here to the Revolutionary conception of the colonial “aristocracy of the skin” as one hierarchy among others in need of abolition.
22 There is only one indirect depiction of slavery in Marie, of an enslaved man whom Marie visits in the Baltimore almshouse, which, while it certainly implies a condemnation of slavery, teaches his character less about the workings of slavery than about the un-American empathy and generosity of Marie (45–46).
23 Alongside this central plot, there unfold two sublots that fall outside the scope of this article: Marie's father's failed attempts to advocate for fair treatment of Native Americans, and her brother's disastrous coordination of an abortive uprising of slaves and displaced Native Americans.
24 Margaret Cohen, The Sentimental Education of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 33.
25 Ibid., 21.
26 Ibid., 34.
27 Ibid., 42.
28 On the double bind of liberalism in Constant's masculine take on the sentimental novel, see Margaret Waller, The Male Malady: Fictions of Impotence in the French Romantic Novel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993).
29 Beaumont, Marie, 66.
30 Marie thus appears as an early instance of the trope of the “tragic mulatta”; see Werner Sollors, Neither Black nor White yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). She is contrasted to her brother George, who actively fights the racist ideology that his sister internalizes.
31 Schaub, “Perspectives on Slavery,” 617.
32 Greiman, “Color, Race, and the Spectacle of Opinion,” 116.
33 Cohen, Sentimental Education, 120.
34 Ibid., 103.
35 The most famous author of this genre was also one of the highest-profile advocates for social justice in mid-nineteenth-century France: George Sand.
36 Beaumont, Marie, 169.
37 Cohen, Sentimental Education, 65.
38 Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2017).
39 Doris Y. Kadish and Françoise Massardier-Kenney, eds., Translating Slavery: Gender and Race in French Women's Writing, 1783–1823 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1994). On the complex relationship between abolitionist sentimentalism and racialist ideologies, see Kyla Schuller, The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).
40 Though, as William Reddy has argued, rationalism gained hold of liberal political thought after the Revolution, Staël remained a fierce proponent of this older, eighteenth-century model of the political faculties that valued reason and sentiment; see The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
41 See Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755). See also Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, and Nanette Le Coat, “The Virtuous Passion: The Politics of Pity in Staël's The Influence of the Passions,” in Staël's Philosophy of the Passions: Sensibility, Society and the Sister Arts, ed. Tili Boon Cuillé and Karyna Szmurla (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2002), 39–56.
42 Le Coat, “Virtuous Passion,” 41.
43 Staël, Reflections on the Trial of the Queen, by a Woman, cited in ibid., 49.
44 On Beaumont's conception of national character, see Michela Nacci, “A Counter Voice: Gustave de Beaumont and the Theory of National Characters,” The Tocqueville Review / La revue Tocqueville 35 (2014): 87–116.
45 Beaumont, Marie, 59. It seems to be against Nelson's ideas in particular that Beaumont warns the American reader in the foreword that “the opinions expressed by the characters are not always those of the author” (6).
46 See, for example, Schaub, “Perspectives on Slavery,” 618–22; and Henderson, “Tyranny and Tragedy,” 150–55.
47 Beaumont, Marie ou l'esclavage aux États-Unis, vol. 1, Le Roman (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2009), 120, my translation. This paragraph and the longer reflection on the relationship between religion, government, and art to which it belongs were cut from the English translation.
48 For a comparative study of Tocqueville's, Staël's, and Beaumont's writing on women, see Pedersen, Jean, “Outrageous Flirtation, Repressed Flirtation, and the Gallic Singularity: Alexis de Tocqueville's Comparative Views on Women and Marriage in France and the United States,” French Politics, Culture & Society 38, no. 1 (2020): 26–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
49 Beaumont, Marie, 16.
50 Ibid., 18.
51 Beaumont, Marie ou l'esclavage, 54, my translation. This discussion of religion is largely excised from the English translation.
52 Beaumont, Marie, 113.
53 Ibid., 95, translation modified.
54 Ibid., 112.
55 On the social and political function Staël assigns to literature in a republic, see Guerlac, Suzanne, “Writing the Nation,” French Forum 30, no. 3 (2005): 43–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
56 Beaumont, Marie, 61.
57 Ibid., 47.
58 Ibid., 36. On Staël's analysis of Jacobin rationalism, see Le Coat, “Virtuous Passion,” 43.
59 Beaumont, Marie, 31.
60 Schaub, “Perspectives on Slavery,” 618.
61 Henderson, “Tyranny and Tragedy,” 154.
62 Beaumont, Marie, 58.
63 Henderson, “Tyranny and Tragedy,” 151; and Schaub, “Perspectives on Slavery,” 622.
64 Beaumont does briefly deploy in the appendices the Tocquevillian idea that “the color of American slaves changes all the consequences of liberation” (214); however, as this section demonstrates, the exploration of racial prejudice within the novel offers considerable nuance to this position.
65 Marie differs in this way from other nineteenth-century literary works that initiated French readers into the nuances of colonial racial hierarchies, like Joseph Levilloux's Les Créoles ou la vie aux Antilles [Creoles or life in the Antilles], also published in 1835, and later works like Camille Lebrun's Friendship and Devotion, or Three Months in Louisiana (1845) and Jules Barbier's Cora ou l'esclavage [Cora or slavery] (1861); these works treat race as an epistemological problem of which French people have a less sophisticated understanding than their Creole counterparts, who know how to identify the subtle traces of African ancestry in eyes and fingernails.
66 Greiman, “Color, Race, and the Spectacle of Opinion,” 81.
67 Greiman has traced such anti-Blackness in Beaumont's informal writings on America (80); however, the narrative effect of Beaumont's choice of white-passing characters is more complex.
68 Henderson, “Tyranny and Tragedy,” 156. On the ways in which Tocqueville and Beaumont anticipate the insights of Critical Race Theory, see Tillery, Alvin B., “Tocqueville as Critical Race Theorist: Whiteness as Property, Interest Convergence, and the Limits of Jacksonian Democracy,” Political Research Quarterly 62, no. 4 (2009): 639–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
69 Greiman, “Color, Race, and the Spectacle of Opinion,” 77–85.
70 Beaumont, Marie, 5.
71 Painter, Nell Irvin, “Was Marie White? The Trajectory of a Question in the United States,” Journal of Southern History 74, no. 1 (2008): 12Google Scholar.
72 Beaumont, Marie, 78, emphasis in original.
73 Ibid., 77.
74 Ibid., 86.
75 Ibid., 87.
76 Greiman, “Color, Race, and the Spectacle of Opinion,” 83.
77 Beaumont, Marie, 93.
78 Ibid., 181.
79 Ibid., 187.
80 Henderson, “Tyranny and Tragedy,” 159.