Masters of Disaster: Controlling Nature and Revolution in French and Francophone Plantation Novels

Violent revolution and natural disasters define the colonies of nineteenth-century French plantation novels, striking transformations from the utopic societies of eighteenth-century works. Using the Lisbon earthquake and the French Revolution to explain this shift, this thematic study examines the intersection between natural disasters and sociopolitical turbulence in eighteenth and nineteenth-century novels set in France's colonies and Louisiana.;While the French and Haitian Revolutions contributed to the prevalence of social turbulence in nineteenth-century French plantation novels, the consistent presence of natural disasters accompanying this upheaval can be attributed to the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. The catastrophe sparked philosophical and scientific debate illustrating the mutual influence between European civilization and natural disaster. This intertwining of nature and civilization led writers and political figures to describe the French Revolution as both a social and natural uncontrollable phenomenon that would clear the way for the establishment of a stable republic. The violence of the Terror eventually forced them to reconsider this notion and provoked a desire to re-establish order over society and nature alike.;An example of the eighteenth century's paradisiacal representation of the colonies, Bernardin de Saint Pierre's depiction of a utopic microsociety in Paul et Virginie (1788) encourages the passive acceptance of natural turbulence and unjust social orders. By contrast, nineteenth-century writers call for domination over the natural world as a means of challenging unjust social hierarchies and directing revolution. Despite their inclusion of slavery and revolution in their novels, they still impose metropolitan French ideals on their imaginary locations. The rebel slave prince of Victor Hugo's Bug-Jargal (1826) navigates subterranean spaces to undermine the plantation hierarchies in what is arguably a defense of Royalism. Alexandre Dumas' hero in Georges (1843) uses his metropolitan education to dominate dangerous natural spaces in a justification for French imperialism. By contrast, Franco-American planter Alfred Mercier suggests in L'Habitation Saint-Ybars (1881) that nature can never be fully controlled, but that it is still necessary to struggle for sociopolitical ideals. Despite the authors' varied approaches, their novels share common threads alluding to the dangers of rationalizing nature, from the notion of a "natural" revolution to the "scientific" justifications of racism and imperialism.