The Other Citizen: Civic Universalism and Social and Political Exclusion in the Post-Slavery Colonies of the French Caribbean (Martinique, Guadeloupe, 1840s - 1890s)

Summary This thesis questions the apparent "contradiction" between civil and political equality and the exclusion from common law of the citizens of the French West Indies colonies after the abolition of slavery. This paradox is resituated within the general economy of French citizenship and at the crossroads of the history of the legal status of persons in the French colonial empire during the second nineteenth century. The investigation traces, in the long time, a conceptual genealogy of the French citizenship from its margin. It shows that the civil and political equality of individuals does not lead to full inclusion in the city: the community of citizens does not end with the granting of rights. The setting aside of the former slaves citizens is based on the political and moral evaluation, according to the ideal of coincidence between liberal autonomous individual and modern citizen, of the social and historical heritages of the societies to which they belong: the universalization of the rights and the generalization of the law require the belonging of the individuals to a same social ethos. At the head of modern principles, the alteration of equals is based on the assignment of individuals to the social and historical heritages that have shaped them. It operates in this way as a mechanism of racialization: exclusion proceeds from a politicization of origins. French citizenship has not always been unitary or abstract - as much to include as to exclude. Its historical construction was articulated to a certain modality of "race", the latter being understood not simply in colorist terms, but in "civilizational" or "cultural" terms.