Introduction

In October 1776, Moritz (Móric) August Beňovský, commander of the French troops in Madagascar, sent to the Minister of the Navy in Versailles the text of an oath taken by the ‘kings, princes and chiefs of the island of Madagascar’. According to the document, the native princes pledged allegiance to Beňovský and elected him ‘Ampansakabe’, King of Kings of Madagascar:

After we have eaten the sacrificed animal and sworn the blood oath before our peoples, we sing, declare and acknowledge Moritz August count Beniovsky [sic!] as our supreme head, as Ampansakabe […]. Therefore […] we submit to his authority by an inviolable oath; accordingly, we resolve to erect a monument in our province of Mahavelou [sic!] to commemorate this union and immortalise our sacred vow, so that our children and our children’s children will remain into the remotest future devoted to the sacred and priestly Ampansakabe family, this we sanctify by our submission […].1

According to Beňovský, this election led to the establishment of French rule in northern Madagascar, although only indirectly, as it could not function without him. His letters reveal that this breakthrough did not happen without preparation. A few months earlier, Beňovský had explained to the Minister of the Navy how he had succeeded in subjugating the island:

The plan I have pursued regarding the natives has always been marked by justice. The islanders were always wary […] and for a long time they thought my ventures were traps. They came to realise that their own manoeuvres of deception and breaches of trust were of no use to them; they dared to use violence. This, however, opened their eyes to the unreasonableness of their actions. Defeated and homeless, they decided to submit themselves as slaves; I have received them as friends and given them back their old possessions; I have even received them as allies. Such an approach […] also showed the other nations that peoples who are subject to the [French, D. T.] government are happy. They come from all corners of the island to subject themselves and enjoy dependence on the [French, D. T.] government. The rule of justice has moved them to call us wise men.2

For the Minister of the Navy, this was splendid news. But should he trust it? The reports of Beňovský’s direct superiors, the governor and the intendant of Île de France (today’s Mauritius), painted a completely different picture. With his impetuous war policy, Beňovský had put the king to great expense without being able to show any tangible success.3 Nonetheless, an employee of the Bureau de l’Inde at the Ministry of the Navy proposed on 30 June 1776 that the king should grant Beňovský independence from the administration of Île de France. Though it was not yet possible to be absolutely certain that the reports of victory from the Great Island, as Madagascar was often called, were true, they were so precise and in keeping with the extraordinary audacity of this exceptional man that one could assume his reports contained at least partial truths.4 A genius like him should be able to act freely:

Be that as it may, […] one must recognise in [ Beňovský, D. T.] an exceptional man made to instigate revolutions and able to create a colony. But a man of his stature was not born to be dependent on the government of Île de France. Any dependence hinders the momentum of genius.5

A year earlier, the ministerial administration had already prepared a whole series of legal documents and instructions to help establish a new independent administration for a large colony in Madagascar.6 Thus, it appears that in Versailles, not just a few believed in Beňovský’s success. To the contemporary reader who knows that Beňovský was one of the most daring impostors of the eighteenth century and who reads how the minister had been warned against him by the governor and the intendant of Île de France, such excessive credulity is positively astounding.

The case of Beňovský reveals phenomena that play a central role in this book, namely the imaginary colonisation of Madagascar after the Seven Years War, and a tendency that may be described as the colonisation of the imaginary. After 1763, the establishment of certain colonialist conceptions of the self and the Other can be observed in France. With regard to the Red Island, as Madagascar is sometimes called, perceptions became prevalent that had little to do with local realities. Colonial politicians were inclined to follow colonial dreams rather than an empirical assessment of the particular situation. Information about the situation in colonised areas was easily manipulated by adventurers. Such developments are linked to personal interdependencies, relationships of patronage, techniques of knowledge acquisition in the French administration and norms for the legitimisation of knowledge. That Beňovský’s fantastic tales were given credence was due to his position in the service of the Minister of the Navy. Also, he made use of the media of information generation (memoranda, maps, etc.) which created their own reality and guided the worldview of the political actors in the motherland, thus contributing to his success. Finally, the commander embedded his account in an accepted discourse on the right and proper way to colonise Madagascar. The adventurer showed himself as a ‘civiliser’ who, beyond all conflicts, ultimately won the hearts of the natives through gentleness, fairness and trade, and raised them to the next level of civilisation.

In doing so, Beňovský in his self-fashioning drew on ideas that had emerged in the 1760s especially in writings on Madagascar and which, in the following decades, were to have a strong impact on public discourse about this island in the Indian Ocean, and colonial expansion in general. In fact, hardly any other part of the world captured the imagination of French colonial politicians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as much as Madagascar – “the largest island in the world”, as it is relentlessly called in the sources. In 1793, for example, a senior official of the Ministry of the Navy noted that “the Naval Department has a large number of memoranda on Madagascar”.7 The memoranda of the later eighteenth century, which plead for colonial expansion in Madagascar, fill several boxes in the archives of the Ministry of the Navy. Numerous other memoranda can be found in holdings containing the correspondence of various personalities with the Ministers of the Navy as well as in several files of the Foreign Ministry. In the second half of the eighteenth century, these memoranda inspired no less than three actual attempts to establish a colony in Madagascar: on Nosy Boraha (the island of Sainte-Marie) by the Compagnie des Indes in the 1750s, in Tôlanaro (Fr. Fort-Dauphin) by the Comte de Maudave in the years 1768 – 1772, and in Antongil Bay by Moritz Beňovský and his successor Sanglier in the period 1773 – 1785. Further expansion plans were about to be implemented, such as the project to create a penal colony as decided by the National Convention in 1793, or the plan of 1800 to establish protectorates. The fact that all these projects failed miserably did not deter the authors of such plans from proposing similar projects right up to the Napoleonic era. Rather, these colonial planners saw themselves encouraged by the fact that other enlightened men had had similar ideas before them. In short, a self-referential discourse on Madagascar established itself.

This book, among other things, is concerned with understanding how such a discourse could emerge and gain acceptance. Its history is not only relevant for an analysis of the ultimately failed attempts at colonial expansion on the Great Island, but it also provides insights into the history of the Enlightenment, French colonial history and the history of knowledge in the French administration. The discourse on Madagascar was central to the definition of the roles in the world that French elites ascribed to themselves during the second half of the eighteenth century. It provided the framework for new colonial policy objectives. Its genesis also reveals much about the history of ideas and knowledge, which are usually summarised under the headings of “Enlightenment” and “ruling from a distance”. With the study of the history of French colonial expansion in, and knowledge of, Madagascar, this work aims to contribute to two areas of research, namely colonial and global history on the one hand, and the history of knowledge and the Enlightenment on the other.

Colonial and Global Histories

This book approaches colonial and global history on three levels. At a microhistorical level, the focus is a case study of Madagascar, which in recent research has been largely neglected and is therefore, to some extent, still interpreted according to older patterns dating back to the colonial period. It is necessary to “decolonise” further the history of Madagascar in the eighteenth century. More generally, the aim is to contribute to a better understanding of continuities and ruptures in colonial history, particularly that of the French empire. The case of Madagascar is helps answer the question of the extent to which the Enlightenment period constituted a colonial-historical watershed.

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