The purpose of this research is to examine the circumstances surrounding the presence of black people, particularly Americans, in France from the late nineteenth century to the present period. The plan of the research will be to set forth the context for the presence of blacks in the country (especially Paris), and then to discuss their mode of life, their treatment by the government, and the political, religious, and educational emphasis of their activities in the country.
One of the challenges of discussing the black presence in France from the nineteenth century to the present is to know where to begin and how to limit the research so that it can convey the core of the experience. The fact that Dumas pFre, who was born in Haiti and died in 1870, was a Creole and fathered Dumas fils, who was active in the French theatre until the 1890s, is one aspect of this; the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who traveled in France and liked Paris, complained that pFre was never an advocate of the Negro race (Fabre, 1991; also Phillips, 1975b). But such basic facts are not remarkable, for black heritage has been a feature of American and European culture more generally. Bennett, for example, notes that miscegenation in America "started not in the thirteen original colonies but in Africa" (1966, p. 242) among white slave traders who impregnated abducted African women, adding that European colonial slavers arrived in an Africa that had for centuries been accustomed to the societal mixing of Caucasian, Negroid, and Asian peoples. Even more central than the project of, say, developing a catalogue of famous names of black heritage to cover the period is the project of exploring reasons that the phenomenon of prominent black people is to be noticed. Accordingly, a useful context for examining the presence of black people in France in the modern period is to look at high culture. For it is in the area of the fine arts that the presence of black people...