Bonapartists in the Borderlands: French Exiles and Refugees on the Gulf Coast, 1815-1835 - Hardcover

Rafe Blaufarb

3.78

9 ratings by Goodreads

9780817314873: Bonapartists in the Borderlands: French Exiles and Refugees on the Gulf Coast, 1815-1835

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0817314873 ISBN 13: 9780817314873

Publisher: University of Alabama Press, 2006

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Bonapartists in the Borderlands recounts how Napoleonic exiles and French refugees from Europe and the Caribbean joined forces with Latin American insurgents, Gulf pirates, and international adventures to seek their fortune in the Gulf borderlands. The U.S. Congress welcomed the French to America and granted them a large tract of rich Black Belt land near Demopolis, Alabama, on the condition that they would establish a Mediterranean-style Vine and Olive colony. This book debunks the standard account of the colony, which stresses the failure of the aristocratic, luxury-loving French to tame the wilderness. Instead, it shows that the Napoleonic officers involved in the colony sold their land shares to speculators to finance an even more perilous adventure - invading the contested Texas borderlands between Spain and the U.S. Their departure left the Vine and Olive colony in the hands of French refugees from the Haitian slave revolt. While they soon abandoned vine cultivation, they successfully recast themselves as prosperous, slaveholding cotton growers and gradually fused into a new elite with newly-arrived Anglo-American planters. Rafe Blaufarb examines the underlying motivations and aims that inspired this endeavor and details the nitty-gritty politics, economics, and backroom bargaining that resulted in the settlement. He employs a wide variety of local, national, and international resources: from documents held by the Alabama State Archives, Marengo County court records, and French-language newspapers published in America to material from the War Ministry Archives at Vincennes, the Diplomatic Archives at the Quai d'Orsay, and the French National Archives.

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Review:

A well researched and intriguing book.... Professor Blaufarb focuses the reader's attention on the flight of Bonapartists from France and combines the development of the Vine and Olive Colony with the struggle between Spain and the United States for control of the borderlands of the Southeast and the revolt of Spain's colonies in Latin and South America. - Joe B. Wilkins, University of West Alabama ""This is an ambitious, very well written, extensively researched book... The author situates it at the intersection of public land policy, western expansionism, and the Latin American independence movement."" - Michael A. Morrison, author of Slavery and the American West

About the Author:

Rafe Blaufarb is Associate Professor of History at Auburn University and author of The French Army, 1750-1820: Careers, Talent, Merit.

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