In Paradise Destroyed, Christopher Church parses out the complex and convoluted relationship between metropolitan France and its Antillean colonies. Church organizes his inquiry through disasters that affected Martinique and Guadeloupe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. According to Church, “when disaster struck the French West Indies … France faced a tempest at home as [its citizens] debated the role of the state not only in the Antilles but in their own lives as well” (3). These debates examined the social placement of France's Caribbean colonies, these islands’ economies, and the meaning of French citizenship itself. Disasters in the Caribbean prompted discourse between economic opportunists who saw Martinique and Guadeloupe as arenas for financial gain and the optimists of Social Darwinism who saw the potential of a “new race of Frenchman” in the Caribbean (38). Both colonial administrations and the French state in Europe “saw catastrophic events as an opportunity for restructuring society” (6). This fact, in turn, altered the place of French citizens in Martinique and Guadeloupe who, while officially “concitoyens” (i.e., fellow-citizens), had always been relegated through the paternalism of the metropole (97).
The book moves chronologically through tragedies that blighted Martinique and Guadeloupe. Chapters Two to Five contextualizes these catastrophes through metropolitan France's temporarily invigorated interest in its colonies thanks to their plight while Chapter One explains the “longevity of French civilization abroad in the cultural imaginaire of the Third Republic” (61). Church centres Chapter Two around fires that raged through Fort-de-France and Port-Louis in 1890. Here Church unpacks French assumptions about the Caribbean as a “volatile, exotic environment” explained the “tension between inclusion and exclusion” at the heart of the metropole's relationship with the Antilles (63 and 107). Chapter Three focuses on the 1891 hurricane and global economic downturn of the 1890s. This depression disproportionately affected the Caribbean sugar market and led French financial luminaries to question the utility of supporting fiscally failing colonies across the Atlantic while “either ignoring or glossing over the societal inequities at play” (145).
In Chapter Four, the author turns his attention to another fire in Pointe-à-Pitre and a general strike in Martinique to show the colonies’ importance to French politics. The fire in Guadeloupe triggered Martinique's strike and led to a schism in metropolitan France, as socialists saw an “inherently French issue” made visible by Antillean disasters while nationalists found “strictly a colonial problem” (188). Chapter Five focuses on the 1902 eruption of Mount Pélee, “one of the world's deadliest natural disasters” and a response from France that was both informed and hindered by imperialist blinkers (191). Church ends with an epilogue centred on the First World War. The preceding decades had caused France to accept that their Caribbean citoyens deserved metropolitan assistance in times of disaster. With the outbreak of war, though, the state demanded aid from its tropical citizenry and so purportedly solidified their place as equal in the French Republic. This neo-feudal loyalty, however, only temporarily obscured the “geographic, racial, and climatic difference” that continues to haunt the West Indies to this day (246).
These narrative explorations are grounded in thorough archival research. Church found sources at the Archives Départementales in Martinique and Guadeloupe, Archives Nationales d'Outre Mer in Aix-en-Provence, and Archives Nationales de la France just outside Paris. More impressive than the volume of archival material in Paradise Destroyed, though, is Church's employment of his sources. Unsatisfied by a purely qualitative approach to what might so easily have resulted in a nebulous and meandering cultural analysis of citizenship's many meanings, Church employs meticulous data analysis to chart the islands’ demographic makeup. In doing so, the author corrals disparate populations to argue for the central place of the Antilles in France's late-nineteenth crises of identity.
Church's historiographical approach is likewise sound. He positions Paradise Destroyed as doing for the Third Republic what Laurent Dubois’ Colony of Citizens and Avengers of the New World (both 2004) accomplished for the First; events in France's Caribbean colonies defined the nature of French citizenship in the metropole at a time of upheaval and uncertainty (9–10). To do so, Church leans on the extensive secondary literature on late-nineteenth century France, and to good effect. The author provides a robust scholarly context for his insistence that Antillean disasters triggered alterations in metropolitan French attitudes towards citizenship and belonging and is most persuasive for doing so.
Due to its sweeping and multifaceted scope, in the hands of a lesser scholar, Paradise Destroyed could well have been a calamity. Church's clarity of prose, care in source presentation, and justification for his narratives’ importance allow the work to be a fresh and thought-provoking read. Scholars of environmental and Caribbean history are undeniable audiences for the book, but Church's work reaches further. Those interested in the Ages of American colonisation, Revolutions, and Emancipation would do well to consult Church's conclusions if only to understand their own analyses' reverberations into the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
