Famille et esclavage à la nouvelle-Orléans sous le régime français (1699-1769)

Since the 1960s, the slave family has been a focus of the historiography of slavery in the United States. This issue sparked intense discussion when first raised, and continues to do so, though political and ideological changes have somewhat blunted the debate. In order to advance the discussion more than two generations after the appearance of the earliest scholarship, it seems necessary to move beyond the framework within which the debates were initially posed, replacing the limited question of family structure with a broader investigation of the relationship between the family and slavery. Taking a case study-the agro-urban region of New Orleans during French rule from 1699-1769-this article examines how the two foundational institutions of slave societies came into conflict and were transformed by contact with one another. Based on close readings of sacramental records, estate inventories, and judicial archives, this article shows how the family, in its definition, its significance, and its social functions, constituted a site of confrontation, contestation and negotiation fundamental not only to relations between Church, masters and slaves in the context of the colonial capital's parochial church, and between planters and slaves on and among the plantations, but also between male and female slaves in the slave quarters, where none of the parties involved could claim clear victory.