The One-Drop Rule in Reverse? Interracial Marriages in Napoleonic and Restoration France
Jennifer Heuer
Law and History Review, Volume 27, Issue 3, Fall 2009 , pp. 515-548
In the early nineteenth century, an obscure rural policeman petitioned the French government with an unusual story. Charles Fanaye had served with Napoleon's armies in Egypt. Chased by Mameluks, he was rescued in the nick of time by a black Ethiopian woman and hidden in her home. Threatened in turn by the Mameluks, Marie-Hélène (as the woman came to be called) threw in her lot with the French army and followed Fanaye to France. The couple then sought to wed. They easily overcame religious barriers when Marie-Héléne was baptized in the Cathedral of Avignon. But another obstacle was harder to overcome: an 1803 ministerial decree banned marriage between blacks and whites. In 1791, a new law was issued that ended regulations against interracial marriages in the metropole and implicitly discontinued the bans in the colonies. However, with Napoleon's restoration of slavery in the French Empire, another decree was issued in 1803 to forbid marriages between blacks and whites, and this decree would live until 1819 when Napoleon fell out of power.Though Fanaye and Marie-Héléne begged for an exception, the decree would plague them for the next sixteen years of their romance.
JSTOR
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40646056