French Colony of Guiana

The colony's exports were annatto, cotton, coffee, cocoa and, from the 1780s, cloves. Sugar, the crop that made Saint-Domingue the richest colony in the world, had been tried and largely abandoned. There were perhaps two hundred plantations of any size along the coast, most of them small and in debt, chronically short of labour and of food, importing flour and salt meat from the metropole and paying for them with dye and spice. Guiana was the oldest French possession on the South American mainland and one of the least profitable of France's American colonies.

That makes it a useful place to look at the French Revolution. In 1791 the colony had to decide whether the Declaration of the Rights of Man applied to the people who grew its annatto, and it spent the next twenty-six years working through the answer: abolition in 1794, re-enslavement in 1802, a Portuguese occupation in 1809, and restitution to France in 1817. In between, the colony was used as a laboratory for a white settler colony that killed most of its colonists, as a dump for the Revolution's political enemies, and finally, after 1852, as the penal colony that gave the world Devil's Island.

At a glance

What did the French find on the Wild Coast?

Rain, mud and no gold. The coast between the Orinoco and the Amazon — the Spanish called it the Costa Salvaje, the Wild Coast — lay east of the line the Treaty of Tordesillas had drawn in 1494, inside the hemisphere that treaty reserved to Portugal — which is why the Portuguese claimed it, and why French, Dutch and English ships, who had signed nothing, treated it as fair game. Columbus ran along it in 1498 and Vicente Yáñez Pinzón in 1500; neither found anything the crown wanted.

What the French found in the seventeenth century was a low, drowned plain of mud and mangrove, flooded twice a day by the tide and soaked by more than two and a half metres of rain a year, backed by forest that swallowed any expedition that entered it. The dry season lasted from August to October; the rest of the year was the wet one. There were no mountains, no mines and no good natural harbour — Cayenne's roadstead was shallow and open. The Amerindian peoples of the coast and the interior, the Kali'na (whom the French called Galibi), the Arawak, the Palikur, the Wayana, the Wayampi and the Teko, lived by fishing, hunting, bitter cassava and trade, in numbers that contemporaries guessed at 25,000 to 30,000 for the whole territory. They controlled the rivers, and they knew what happened to strangers who tried to stay.

The French came anyway, in a series of ventures that failed for the same three reasons each time: no food, no labour, and no understanding of the country. In 1604 Daniel de La Touche, sieur de La Ravardière, made the first serious reconnaissance and gave the country a name, France équinoxiale, because it lay on the equator where days and nights are equal. La Ravardière went to Brazil instead and was expelled by the Portuguese in 1615. Louis XIII ordered settlers from Normandy in 1624, Richelieu licensed the colonisation in 1626, a company under Constant d'Aubigné planted itself on the Sinnamary in 1630, and in 1638 Richelieu gave a captain named Bontemps 1,200 men for the same purpose. Of these expeditions almost nothing survived except graves and a handful of place names.

The Dutch and English were doing the same thing a few hundred kilometres west with better results: Dutch colonies on the Essequibo, Berbice and Demerara from about 1616, and English planters from Barbados on the Suriname after 1650, with 500 sugar plantations and 3,000 servants and enslaved Africans — a going concern of the kind Guiana lacked. In 1656 a Dutch merchant from Amsterdam, Jan Claes Langedijck, occupied the ruins of a French post on the Cayenne river and called it Fort Nassau. By 1660 there were three Dutch settlements on the island, including one of Jewish planters from Livorno, whose fifty or so adults owned eighty enslaved Africans and had the only sugar mill in the colony.

The French attempt of 1652 showed how not to do it. A company of Paris shareholders — the Compagnie de la France équinoxiale, financed by twelve seigneurs — recruited 500 soldiers and as many workmen, put 800 men ashore at the Mahury in the autumn of 1652, and found the survivors of the previous collapse living in the ruins. Fevers and a war with the Kali'na finished the enterprise within fifteen months. On 27 December 1653 the survivors sailed for Suriname and then the Antilles; one of them, the priest Antoine Biet, published an account of the disaster in 1664 which remains the best description of why early Guiana killed people.

How did Cayenne become a French colony?

By conquest, twice over, and then by treaty. The French settlement of Cayenne dates from 1643, when Charles Poncet de Brétigny arrived with 300 or 400 men under letters patent from the king as "governor and lieutenant-general for the King in the country of Cape North". He bought a hill at the mouth of the Cayenne river from the Kali'na, built a village below it and a small fort on top, and named it Cépérou after the chief who sold it. He also governed by terror: he humiliated and attacked the people who had sold him the land, and in 1644 or 1645 — the sources differ — they killed him on the pointe de Macouria. By 1648 twenty-five French colonists remained.

The second conquest was a European affair. In May 1664 a French squadron of five ships under Joseph-Antoine Le Febvre de La Barre and Alexandre de Prouville de Tracy took Cayenne from the Dutch, landing about 1,200 colonists. The Dutch commander, Quirijn Spranger, sold his estate and the thirty-two enslaved Africans still on it for 14,000 guilders; about 300 of the Jewish settlers left for Suriname. French Cayenne was from the first a mixed and provisional place, half Dutch in its plantations and dependent on Dutch slavers. The governor's report of 1666 counted 260 enslaved Africans in the colony, fifty of them inherited from the Dutch estates.

The English tried to take it back. In the second Anglo-Dutch war the French were allied to the Dutch, and in August 1667 an English force under John Harman and Henry Willoughby sacked Cayenne and destroyed Rémire. The Treaty of Breda, signed in Europe on 31 July 1667, had already settled the matter: Suriname went to the Dutch in exchange for New York, and Cayenne was restored to France. In March 1676 a Dutch squadron under Jacob Binckes took the colony again; on the night of 21 December 1676 the French admiral Jean II d'Estrées retook it with eight ships, and the treaties of Nijmegen in 1678 confirmed the position.

So French Guiana exists as a French territory because in 1664–78 nobody wanted it enough to fight for it twice. It was a leftover of the Dutch wars, kept because it was already occupied and because a foothold on the Wild Coast was thought to be worth something. That origin explains a good deal of what followed: the colony was never designed, only inherited.

What was the Compagnie du Sénégal supposed to do?

It is often said that Guiana passed to the Compagnie du Sénégal in 1674. The truth is narrower and more interesting. On 2 December 1674 an edict of Louis XIV dissolved the Compagnie des Indes occidentales, Colbert's general company for the Americas, which had run up a deficit of five million livres; the king resumed the administration of the colonies himself, and the Compagnie du Sénégal, chartered in 1673, took over the African trade and the slave traffic that went with it. From 1679 the company contracted to deliver 2,000 captives a year to the French islands. Guiana was a crown colony; the Senegal company was its supplier, its banker and, on occasion, its raider.

What that meant in practice can be seen in April 1689, when the company's captain Jean-Baptiste du Casse arrived at Cayenne with five ships and orders to requisition the white population for a raid on the Dutch in Surinam, to bring back the enslaved people he captured. The raid was, in the words of a document of 1693, a "complete disaster", with about a hundred men lost. Du Casse went on to become one of the founders of French Senegal; Guiana got the losses.

The colony's own account of the 1690s is a story of construction on borrowed labour. On 29 December 1689 the governor reported that he had supplied the king's engineer with 500 enslaved workers over seven months to throw up a fortress at Cayenne; eight months later he reported that 150 of them had died in the work and that the colony was ruined. The Jesuit mission at Rémire, which bought a Dutch plantation in 1668, ran the habitation Loyola with up to 500 enslaved people, and catechised new arrivals "in the languages of Guinea" before they were dispersed to the estates. The Code Noir of 1685 fixed the legal machinery of all this: baptism, Sunday rest, limits on punishment, and the ban on marriage across the colour line that made the colony's free population a separate caste.

The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 fixed the Maroni as Guiana's western boundary and left the southern one deliberately vague, naming the river "Oyapock or Vicente Pinzón" without saying which river that was. That ambiguity was worth two centuries of dispute, and it is the reason the map's eastern edge of the colony has never been a settled line.

Why did sugar fail and cloves succeed?

Because sugar needs capital, flat land and a great many workers, and Guiana had mud, rain and very few. The colony's planters tried sugar in the seventeenth century and kept trying into the eighteenth, but the crop declined steadily after the 1750s until the estates were producing barely enough to make tafia, the rough rum drunk locally. What replaced it was annatto, the red dye made from the seeds of the achiote tree: light, valuable, tolerant of small holdings and careless cultivation, and saleable in Europe to the silk and cotton trades. By the 1770s annatto and cotton were the colony's main exports, with coffee and cocoa steady behind them.

The estates were small, mixed and improvised. Contemporaries counted 180 to 200 "habitations" of any substance along the coast between Sinnamary and the Oyapock, most of them growing two or three crops because no single one paid. Two-thirds of the population and 60 per cent of the substantial properties were on the Île de Cayenne, at Roura and at Macouria; the rest straggled along the rivers — Kourou, Mahury, the Comté, the Approuague — with military posts at Iracoubo and on the Maroni and some cattle ranches on the Oyapock. About 200 holdings had more than ten enslaved workers by 1770; Saint-Domingue had 460,000 people on 7,858 estates.

Spices were the colony's attempt at a monopoly of its own. The Dutch held the world clove and nutmeg trade from the Moluccas, and French ministers had dreamed since Colbert of breaking it. Cinnamon and vanilla were harvested by the end of the seventeenth century and saffron was tried in the 1740s; in 1768 pepper, clove and nutmeg were introduced, and in 1773 came six clove trees, cinnamon from Ceylon and a case of nutmegs, with instructions carried from the Moluccas by a naval commissioner named Provost. Cloves took. By the 1780s the clove was a significant Guianese export; cinnamon began to be exported in 1787; pepper was grown seriously only from 1784 and exported from 1813; nutmeg failed, because the trees are sexed and no one could tell which was which for seven or eight years.

The royal administration tried to make the colony work by engineering. Pierre-Victor Malouet, governor from 1776 to 1778, arrived with a programme of reform, and the Swiss engineer Jean Samuel Guisan surveyed and drained the coastal marshes on the Dutch model, the "low lands" that the Surinamese had made profitable. The scheme required years of digging before it produced anything, and it was abandoned in the Revolution. In 1785 the Marquis de Lafayette bought an estate on the Oyapock, La Belle Gabrielle, where clove and cinnamon trees flourished, and tried an experiment in gradual emancipation: nearly seventy enslaved people, paid for their labour and not to be sold. When he was imprisoned in 1792 the estate was confiscated and the people on it were sold.

How did the slave trade work in so small a colony?

Badly, and late. The first enslaved Africans in Guiana arrived in the 1650s, most of them from English Barbados by way of Dutch sellers; the first documented cargo was fourteen people taken from an English ship by the French in October 1652. Growth was slow because Guiana was at the end of the queue. A Dutch trader named Vernal sold a cargo less than a year after the French conquest of 1664, and another between 1669 and 1671, but the planters' letters to the Ministry of the Marine in the 1670s are a chorus of complaint that the company sent them no workers at all. In 1679 the slave ship Soleil d'Afrique sold 134 people at Cayenne after a voyage of eleven months, during which it had bought 380 on the Gold Coast, just under half of them from European forts — 84 from the Danes, 78 from the English, 10 from the Dutch.

The pattern held for a century. Slave ships bound for the French Americas went first to the Windward Islands and to Saint-Domingue, where the sugar was; Cayenne got what was left, often the least robust. The arrivals were correspondingly small: 22 people in 1786, 420 in 1787, 372 in 1788, 294 in 1789, and 20 in 1790. The planters were the weakest buyers in that market, dependent on Dutch, English and Portuguese carriers as much as on French ones.

The demography of the colony reflects those arrivals. Of the 10,563 enslaved people counted in 1788, 4,287 were adult men and 3,747 adult women, with 2,396 children; 133 were recorded as marrons, fugitives living in the forest, some of them for years. Work ran from sunrise to sunset, with Saturday and often Sunday given over to the gardens that fed them — an arrangement that spared the master the cost of provisioning. Food, clothing and medical care were poor, and contemporaries agreed that a Guianese estate yielded less than one in the Antilles or in neighbouring Surinam, which was another way of saying that its people were worked less efficiently and died at least as fast.

The free people of colour — 483 of them, 4 per cent of the population — were the colony's fragile middle. They served in the militia, owned small plots, and were subject to the humiliations the Code Noir and colonial practice had perfected. Resistance took the forms it took everywhere in the Americas: flight, sabotage, poison, African religious practice, and, where the forest was close enough, communities beyond reach. Guiana's geography, a wall of rainforest behind a narrow coastal strip, made flight easier than anywhere else in the French empire; it also made the colony's planters more dependent than they liked to admit on the goodwill of the people they owned.

Why did the Kourou colony collapse?

Because 13,000 people were put ashore on a tidal mudflat in the rainy season with no food, no shelter and no reason to be there. The Seven Years' War had ended with the Treaty of Paris in February 1763: France lost Canada, Grenada, Dominica and Tobago to Britain and had ceded Louisiana to Spain the year before. Guiana, with its 575 white settlers and nearly 7,000 enslaved people, was the only French territory left on the American mainland. Choiseul, the minister of the navy and colonies, decided to make it a white settler colony of the kind Britain had in North America: loyal, populous and useful as a base against the British islands.

The recruitment was one of the great advertising campaigns of the eighteenth century. Settlers were promised free passage to Rochefort, two and a half years of full support in Guiana, land, housing, cattle, poultry, clothing, freedom of religion, and freedom from taxes. Enslaved labour was to be prohibited except "in the direst circumstances", the Indians were to be protected, and marriages between settlers and Indian women were encouraged. The organisers hired clowns and musicians to keep the colonists cheerful, among them a violinist-composer, nine German musicians and an eight-year-old harpist from Koblenz. Some 17,000 people volunteered; between 13,000 and 15,000 were actually shipped, most of them from Alsace, Lorraine and the Rhineland. Victor-Pierre Malouet, the naval administrator sent to screen them at Rochefort, described what he saw as a "deplorable spectacle" — farmers mixed with townsmen, gentlemen, servants and, in his view, "imbeciles of all kinds".

They arrived at Kourou, a river about 37 miles north-west of Cayenne, on a coastal plain flooded by the tide and by a hundred inches of rain a year, and were set to clearing ground that was under water half the time. The first group got up fourteen rows of leaf huts with the help of enslaved workers lent by the Jesuits. Then 300 more arrived, then 1,400, then another 1,400 in the spring of 1764, who were put on the Îles du Diable — hastily renamed the Îles du Salut, the Islands of Salvation, so as not to frighten them. By the autumn of 1764 the medical officer was treating 1,400 to 1,500 sick people a day. The diagnosis is uncertain — typhoid is the most likely candidate, with dysentery and malaria — and the death rate was so high that the dead could not be counted.

Étienne-François Turgot, the new governor and brother of the economist, reached Cayenne in December 1764 and wrote to Choiseul that he could not restrain his tears at the sight of "a multitude of emaciated and pale widows and orphans of both sexes". Twelve of the twenty people in his own household died, and he was nearly blinded by disease. In April 1765 he abandoned Kourou with 919 survivors. Perhaps 3,000 people eventually got back to France, many of them dying on the way or carrying epidemics into the ports they reached. By 1770 the colony's population had recovered to about 1,178.

The failure was over-determined. The site was the worst available; the promises were impossible; the food supply did not exist; the Cayenne planters, who thought the whole scheme mad, refused to help; and no one had thought about what unacclimatised Europeans could actually do in a tropical forest. Its consequences were lasting. France gave up on white settlement in Guiana and turned back to enslaved African labour and tropical produce; Choiseul's reputation survived, the settlers' did not; and no French government tried again to plant a European colony on that coast.

What did the planters do with the Revolution?

They tried to take the Revolution's government for themselves and keep its principles out. News of 1789 reached Cayenne within months. In October the governor, Jacques Martin de Bourgon, moved the curfew from ten o'clock to nine; at the end of December enslaved people at Roura and Rémire demanded more freedom to dance, threatened their masters and said that in France they had been declared free. Bourgon armed the whites in each quarter and reinforced the military posts.

The white colony split three ways — governor against intendant, both against the colonial assembly, and the garrison agitating on its own account. Two deputies, Jean-Baptiste Leblond and Nicolas Benoît Mathelin, were bundled off to Martinique and then France. The assembly, elected by whites only, legislated beyond its competence and in September 1791 sent two of its members, André Pomme and a man named Bagot, to put the planters' case in Paris. Bourgon left in January 1791, handing his powers to the battalion commander Henri Benoist.

The enslaved population did not wait for the assembly's debates. In December 1790 the workshops on the Approuague rose: the settler Saint-Marcel was killed, along with the Léanville brothers and two other whites; five white women and two soldiers were taken prisoner; a second workshop refused to join and betrayed the rising; forty insurgents fled into the woods and were retaken. Seven were tried and hanged in February 1791, by a court to which the assembly had added two Approuague planters — judges in their own cause. Two enslaved people who had informed on the plot were given their freedom, on condition that they serve in the militia that hunted fugitives. According to the widow of Saint-Marcel, one of the insurgents, Bazile, had asked her: "Have you not heard of our liberty? We know that the priest has a large packet of papers which has come from France."

On 5 April 1791 the colonial assembly granted French citizenship to the Indians of the colony — but not to people of mixed Indian and African descent. The line is worth pausing on. In the same months that the National Assembly in Paris argued about the rights of free men of colour, the assembly of Cayenne extended the rights of man to one race while explicitly withholding them from another, in a colony where four-fifths of the population was enslaved and had no rights at all.

War made everything worse. The French Republic declared war on Britain in February 1793, and the Royal Navy's blockade cut Guiana off from its supplies. In April 1793 the civil commissioner Georges Jeannet-Oudin arrived at Cayenne with instructions from the minister Monge to improve the condition of the enslaved, and with his own sympathies on the side of abolition. They had no money, no troops they could trust and no food. Jeannet armed a schooner to drive off the privateers and waited for Paris to decide what the colony was for.

How was abolition received in 1794?

As a decree from outside, administered by a commissioner, welcomed by the people it freed and obstructed by everyone with property. The Convention abolished slavery in the French colonies on 16 Pluviôse An II — 4 February 1794 — without compensation to the owners. The news reached Guiana in a convoy of warships under the commander Polony, which arrived on 13 June 1794 carrying the decree but no instructions for carrying it out. On 14 June Jeannet proclaimed immediate abolition throughout the colony.

The planters did not resist openly, but a good many left: the white population fell from 1,346 in 1788 to 873 in 1796. The battalion of Guiana did resist, and Jeannet sent its commander and several officers back to France. Within two days he had issued a set of measures that show exactly what abolition meant in practice. The "new free" were to register with their municipalities, giving their residence and occupation, and to join the national guard; the fugitives were given the right to return; everyone was ordered to plant food, since the shipping was cut. And work was to be freely agreed between the new citizens and the owners, by contract, under the supervision of commissioners in each quarter — because the colony's exports were thought indispensable to its economic life.

On 6 July 1794 the colonial assembly published an Adresse à ses nouveaux Frères which is one of the most revealing documents of the period. "The Nation, in breaking your chains, has taught you to make sacrifices," it told the freed people. "You will show yourselves as generous as she. You will give her the fruit of your labours and your sweat by feeding her commerce and industry." Liberty, equality, security and property were announced in the same breath, and the last of them was addressed to the masters. The freed people celebrated for a fortnight with dancing; a federation festival was held at Cayenne on 14 July; new elections, under universal male suffrage, returned two men of colour and one former slave, Hector Ménénius, the only Black man in the colony who could read and write.

Then came the contracts. In 1794 wages ran from 300 to 500 livres a year, but the employer kept two-thirds of it in exchange for the provisions he supplied, and the working day was cut by a quarter. The freed people mostly chose wages over shares, and a good number left the estates altogether to farm abandoned land, raise poultry and pigs, and live as peasants. The administration banned these holdings, destroyed them more than once, and issued regulation after regulation reminding the new citizens of their "true obligations". In February 1795 the commissioner Cointet made every cultivator show a fixed contract of employment and banned independent plots; in April he raised a black battalion, officered by whites.

The result was predictable. Wages were paid late and fell in value; supplies were short; the cost of living rose; and the rumour that slavery would be restored never went away. In January 1796 a plot was uncovered in Cayenne to seize the fort and the powder magazine and to raise the estates. Nineteen death sentences were passed, four in absentia. Ménénius, member of the colonial assembly, was hanged with thirteen other Black men and one white, the gunsmith Dubart; four white assembly members were deported. The historian Yves Bénot read the plot as an attempt at independence, inspired by Saint-Domingue. In December 1798 there was a second, smaller mutiny among mulatto NCOs demanding commissions, which the new commissioner Étienne Laurent Pierre Burnel commuted to imprisonment and deportation.

Abolition in Guiana was therefore real but administered. The enslaved became citizens with the vote, and a former slave, Hector Ménénius, took a seat in the colonial assembly; but freedom came without land, wages came without cash, and the planter class kept the machinery of the estate, the municipality and the courts. The demographic record suggests what the freed people thought of it: the number of Black children rose from 2,396 in 1788 to 3,185 in 1796 and 3,195 in 1798, in a population that was otherwise shrinking — an argument, made by Monique Pouliquen, that parents who had refused to bear children into slavery chose to have them in freedom.

Why did the Republic send its enemies to Guiana?

Because the colony was distant, unhealthy and cheap to reach, and because a man sent there was unlikely to come back. Deportation to Guiana had been mooted in 1792; it began in earnest after the fall of Robespierre. In June 1795 a small squadron under Polony brought Billaud-Varenne and Collot d'Herbois, two former members of the Committee of Public Safety, to Cayenne, where they stayed until the end of September. Their presence unsettled the colony, encouraged the planters to protest, pushed up prices and, on the commissioner's own account, put powder in the hands of enslaved people in exchange for fresh food.

The great shipment came after 18 Fructidor. On 11 November 1797 a corvette brought the deported deputies of the Fructidor purge to Cayenne, and Jeannet installed them at Sinnamary, up the coast in the forest. Others followed: priests deported in August 1798 and sent to Conamama, of whom about half died. Some escaped — in June 1798 and again in October 1799 — across the Maroni into Dutch Surinam and eventually to England. Those who stayed did what political prisoners do in a small colony: they made alliances with the planters, encouraged the pro-slavery party, and intrigued against Jeannet and then against Burnel.

By 1799 the colony's politics had become a comedy of rival coups. Burnel, convinced that the planters were preparing to hand Guiana to the English, proposed a second black battalion. On 18 Brumaire, the very day of Bonaparte's coup in Paris, the whites of Cayenne, joined by the deportees and the white officers, forced him to abandon the scheme and bundled him onto a ship for France. Étienne Franconie took over as interim commissioner. Between 1795 and 1805 the territory served as a place of punishment for the Revolution's losers; the mortality was not a by-product of the policy, it was the policy.

How did slavery come back?

Legally, by an administrative step that the law of 20 May 1802 did not quite cover, and physically, by hunting people down. The law of 30 Floréal An X (20 May 1802) restored slavery in the colonies that the Treaty of Amiens had returned to France; Guiana was not named in it, and the minister Decrès simply sent the text to the new commissioner, Victor Hugues, in June 1802. Hugues — the man who had proclaimed abolition in Guadeloupe in 1794 — reported in October that he had restored slavery, and on 7 December 1802 (16 Frimaire An XI) the three consuls signed an arrêté that did it for Guiana: those freed in 1794 were to be "conscripts", attached to the soil they worked, and those who had arrived since abolition were to be subject to the Code Noir of 1685.

Hugues then went further than his instructions. On 23 March 1803 he proclaimed that the cultivators present in the colony at the time of abolition were "irrevocably attached to the soil"; on 29 May 1803 he issued a circular declaring that "the class of conscripts shall be merged into that of slaves", and that those who could prove they had paid their value might sell them from 20 June 1804. Former slaves who had bought property since 1794 were told to repay their former owners the price of their liberty or lose both liberty and property. Some managed it: the notarial dossiers in the Archives départementales de la Guyane record 218 manumission purchases in 1803–04, covering 357 people, before Hugues suspended the procedure. Against a servile population of 12,000 to 13,000, that was very little.

The physical restoration of slavery meant catching people. In January 1803 Hugues reported to Decrès that he had destroyed bands of fugitives in the quarters of Approuague, Roura, Kourou and Sinnamary who had lived in the forest for twelve to twenty years, and that 173 of them had been taken. Most were returned to their former owners with orders to chain them and give them the hardest work; others were put in a prison where they were chained for three to twelve months, a measure Hugues thought "preferable to bringing them before the courts". Many others simply ran again. Cardoso estimated that two or three thousand fled around 1803, a figure the sources do not support; Serge Mam Lam Fouck would reduce it to a few hundred, and a militia officer counted 200 fugitives in 1809. What is not in doubt is that the "great marronage" lasted into the 1820s, and that its leaders were killed when caught: Simon Frossard, after fifty years in the forest, was cut down with sabres in 1808 and his head displayed at Cayenne "to the eyes of all the negroes, as a scarecrow".

The economy Hugues built on this was, by Guianese standards, a boom. The number of enslaved people rose from 8,894 in 1798 to 13,474 in 1807, fed by 1,795 captives taken from prize ships in 1797–1801 and 1,311 imported by the revived slave trade between 1803 and 1808, 854 of them in 1806 alone. In 1809, 234 estates held ten or more enslaved workers, a figure never reached before. Exports were worth 2,455,958 francs between 1802 and 1807, and 1,510,000 francs in 1809 alone, against just over a million for the whole of 1796–1801. Hugues drained the "low lands" that had been abandoned in the Revolution and cut the Torcy canal to link Cayenne with the Approuague, on which he established a large estate of his own. Free people of colour, about 500 of them, had a month to produce their manumission papers and were then forbidden to move about, to rent lodgings in town, to bear white names or to call themselves "citizen".

How did Portugal take Cayenne, and why did it take eight years to get it back?

The occupation was a by-product of the war in Europe. In November 1807 the Portuguese court, escorted by the Royal Navy, left Lisbon for Rio de Janeiro as French troops under Junot entered Portugal. Britain, with no troops to spare for a side-show in South America, asked the Portuguese government in Brazil to mount the operation. In January 1809 a Portuguese force under Brigadier Manuel Marques, carried and supported by a small Royal Navy squadron under Captain James Lucas Yeo, landed near Cayenne.

The campaign lasted a week. The forts on the Mahury fell, and Hugues marched out with most of his 600 regulars to attack the landing ground; he was beaten at Dégras de Cannes when Yeo's ships came back up the river, and a second force sent against Fort Diamant withdrew. On 10 January Yeo, with about 400 French troops in front of him on the Beauregard plain, sent two officers into Cayenne to offer an armistice. Hugues accepted, recognising that he was outnumbered, and the capitulation was signed on 12 January; the Allies entered the town on 14 January. The French lost 16 killed and 20 wounded, the British a lieutenant killed and 23 men wounded, the Portuguese one man killed and eight wounded. Four hundred French regulars went into captivity, 600 white militia and 200 black irregulars were disarmed and sent home.

The terms matter more than the fighting. Property was guaranteed, the Napoleonic civil code was preserved, and the colony was handed to Portugal to administer on the understanding that it would be returned to France at the end of the war. Hugues, who feared above all that the Portuguese would arm the enslaved, insisted on a clause recording that he surrendered "less to force than to the destructive system of emancipating all the slaves who should range themselves on the enemy's side", and on the expulsion of the Black men who had been freed that way. The enslaved people who had been promised liberty by the Portuguese were not freed either; they were sent back to the estates. Hugues was shipped to Brazil and then to Morlaix, court-martialled for the loss of the colony, acquitted, and set aside; he returned to Cayenne and died there in 1826.

The Portuguese kept the colony for eight years. Under Governor Maciel da Costa the administration ran the place at a loss, kept slavery and the slave trade, and tried to revive the sugar economy along the Torcy canal, where a dozen estates survived, one of them a crown plantation named Tilsit after the treaty of 1807. The Treaty of Paris of 30 May 1814 provided for restitution, and the Congress of Vienna confirmed it, but the Portuguese stalled, using the old Spanish-Portuguese quarrel over Olivença and the equally old ambiguity about the Oyapock to argue that the terms were not binding and the frontier not settled. In July 1817 the conference of ambassadors in Paris voted on a French motion to end the delay; Portugal got one vote, Austria's. A royal order despatched from Rio on 5 September 1817 was followed, in early October, by the raising of the French flag over the fort, and the last Portuguese troops and ships left in December. The convention of 28 August 1817 had already fixed the handover and referred the boundary question to commissioners — where it stayed until 1900, when the Swiss federal council awarded the disputed territory to Brazil.

What was Guiana after 1817?

A small, stagnant slave colony that France turned into a prison. The restored Bourbon monarchy tried once more to populate the interior: the baron de Laussat, governor from 1819 to 1823, produced plans for white settlement and canals that came to nothing. Sugar recovered along the Torcy canal in the 1820s, but the colony remained dependent on enslaved labour it could not replace, and the abolition of the slave trade in 1831 and tighter laws in the 1840s squeezed it further. When the Second Republic abolished slavery on 27 April 1848, the news reached Guiana in August and freed about 13,000 people out of a population of 19,000. The owners were compensated at 624 francs a head; the freed received nothing.

The plantations lost their labour force within months, and the government's answer was to replace one form of coerced labour with another. A decree of 27 March 1852 sent convicts serving hard labour to Guiana; the law of 30 May 1854 organised transportation and the doublage, by which a convict who survived his sentence was obliged to stay in the colony for as many years again, or for life if his sentence had been eight years or more. Camps were built at Cayenne, on the Îles du Salut — including the Île du Diable, where Alfred Dreyfus spent nearly five years — and from 1858 at Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni on the Maroni, which became the administrative capital of the penal territory. Some 77,500 men and 315 women were transported between 1852 and 1938, and the system was segregated by race from the start, with African and Asian convicts held apart from Europeans and Algerians.

The colony's other nineteenth-century windfall was gold. In 1855 Félix Couy found the first payable deposit on a tributary of the Approuague, and the rush that followed drew thousands of miners, mostly from the Antilles, into the interior and kept the territory's accounts afloat into the 1930s. The journalist Albert Londres visited the penal colony in 1923 and wrote Au bagne; a campaign by him, by the deputy Gaston Monnerville and by the Salvation Army's Charles Péan led to the abolition of transportation by decree-law on 17 June 1938. The last convoys stopped, but the men already there served out their sentences, and the final repatriations were not completed until 1953. In 1946 Guiana became a French department; in 1964 the decision was taken to build the space centre at Kourou, on the same stretch of coast where 13,000 settlers had been landed two centuries earlier, and the first rocket went up from it in 1968.

Common myths about the French Colony of Guiana

Timeline of the French Colony of Guiana

What the map shows next

At 1791 on the map the colony is drawn as a single coastal territory between the Maroni and the Oyapock: the year of the Approuague hangings and the citizenship decree for Indians, when the planters still held the assembly and the Revolution had not yet reached the workshops. It is the only frame the border data holds for French Guiana, so everything before and after it — the Dutch wars, Kourou, abolition, the occupation — has to be read from the text rather than from the slider.

At 1791 on the map again, the stretch of coast north-west of Cayenne is the one that swallowed the Kourou settlement: the islands where Turgot's survivors were camped in 1764 lie off that river, and the penal colony would later keep its most famous prisoners on them. The same coast that made the colony ungovernable made it useful as a prison, and the two facts belong together.