In 1729, Marc-Antoine Lamerenx, a minor French nobleman, set sail for Saint-Domingue. Twenty years later, peasant Jean Mouscardy also made the long and difficult journey to Saint-Domingue. Although the men were not related and had little in common, they hailed from the same Pyrenean town, La Bastide Clairence. In the New World, they both settled in Saint-Martin-du-Dondon, approximately twenty miles south of Cap-Français, where they made their fortunes growing coffee in the mountains. After being displaced by the Haitian slave insurrections, some of their descendants stayed in Haiti and took part in the building of the new nation. Others took refuge in France, started businesses in New Orleans, or used their know-how and that of their household slaves to open Cuban coffee plantations.
In Wealth and Disaster, Pierre Force follows the emigrant Lamerenx and Mouscardy families over three generations and various locations across the Caribbean. He traces their white and mixed-race descendants from the early-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries and over decades of comings and goings between their French ancestral town and Saint-Domingue, Cuba, and New Orleans. Touching on pirates, revolution, staggering riches, financial ruination, natural disaster, harsh imprisonment, and the rise of the plantation economy, this epic saga is a fascinating character-driven true story.
By observing the circulation of a few individuals between the Pyrenees and the Caribbean, Force is able to show how these two worlds became interconnected. Arguing that who emigrated and how depended on one's position in the Pyrenean house-based system, Force also reveals how capital accumulation in Saint-Domingue relied on Pyrenean networks and how, in turn, wealth acquired in America changed the rules of the game back home. An exciting and accessible history, Wealth and Disaster offers riveting insight into the matrimonial strategies and inheritance customs of French rural society and the resulting choices to emigrate or to stay.
