Of Citizenship In France's Atlantic Empire By Lorelle Semley

Lorelle Semley’s book, To Be Free and French: Citizenship in France’s Atlantic Empire, explores the dynamics of race, gender and sex, and citizenship in the context of France and its colonial holdings both in Africa and across the Atlantic Ocean. The book spans centuries, beginning in the 1700s, working its way up to the late twentieth century. She focuses on the idea of citizenship and how it functions across the French empire through different identities. To fully understand citizenship in this context, gender, sex, and race must be at the focal point of conversations. By emphasizing the importance of these facets, Semley creates a comprehensive and diverse portrait of French citizenship, sharing the stories of women of color, enslaved communities,

In doing so, Semley calls into question what it means to be “free and French,” as Touissant Louverture famously said while delivering his Constitution in Le Cap in 1801. Citizenship is more than legal rights and the cultural aspect is just as meritorious as any legal procedure.

Semley’s book follows a roughly chronological outline of events in the French empire, using case studies on different figures and groups of people in different areas of the empire. Semley weaves together a cohesive narrative by connecting the individuals and places in these stories to create a cascading effect that makes it easy to understand the gradual evolution of citizenship and its relationship to people of color. Semley uses a painting called “Signare et negresse de Saint-Louis en toilette” as a starting point to introduce the concept of gender, race, and citizenship in the French empire, immersing the reader in the rich history of the people who are left out of typical narratives: women of color and people of color as a whole in French colonies. She takes the reader through the Haitian Revolution, where Toussaint Louverture, using both colonial power and resistance to it, racial

A signare, as introduced in the painting at the beginning of the book, is “an elite woman of African descent from the region of Senegal and neighboring coastal regions” (Semley, 3). Semley uses the Rossignol family as a case study for what the life of signare looked like. Anne Rossignol, a woman of color from Senegal, moved to Le Cap, Saint-Domingue with her children in 1775, prior to the Haitian Revolution. There, Anne Rossignol and her daughter Marie Adélaïde Rossignol Dumont thrived as elite, propertied women of color. “The presence of someone like Rossignol in the historical record…demonstrates how race, color, status, and gender animated daily life and high politics during the eighteenth-century revolutions” (Semley, 24). These women were able to move freely across the Atlantic and live well in Saint Domingue, which subverts the traditional narrative of women, especially women of color, as dependents. It is important to note that the Rossignol women were fair skinned, and if they had not been, their opportunities would have been more limited. However, their story still serves as an example of women of color staking a claim in French citizenship and taking advantage of French systems to elevate their status in society. The signare class proves the idea that a “woman’s place in human social life is not in any direct sense a