Matt K. Matsuda - Empire of Love, Histories of France and the Pacific (2005)

EMP IRE OF LOVE X
MATT K. MATSUDA
Histories
of France
and
the Pacific
3

LEmpire ofEmpire of
ove
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Matsuda, Matt K.
Empire of love : histories of France and the Pacific / Matt K. Matsuda.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN ---; --- (pbk.)
. France—Colonies. . Imperialism. . Acculturation. . France—
Civilization. I. Title.
JV.M 
'.'—dc 
        
Printed in the United States of America
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ACKNOWLED GMENTS X
L
ike the stories they tell, the notes and fragments of this work have
been pieced together during peregrinations around the world with
the aid and support of friends, scholars, and loved ones in Europe,
Asia, and the Pacific. The dedication is to my family in California.
In the South Pacific, a particular thanks for the insights and encourage-
ment of Robert Aldrich at the University of Sydney, whose support and
pioneering work have made much of this possible. At the Australia National
University, Canberra, thanks to Dipesh Chakrabarty and the Centre for
Cross-Cultural Research, and the fabled Research School of Pacific and
Asian Studies, particularly the generosity of Bronwen Douglas, with regards
to Donald Denoon and Brij Lal. In Melbourne, gracious recognition to the
estimable Greg Dening, and to Charles Sowerwine. My friends Alastair
Davidson and Kathleen Weekley, between Wollongong and Ouroux-en-
Morvan, are with me wherever I go.
In Auckland, Aotearoa–New Zealand, I am indebted to the good works
and hospitality of Hugh Laracy and his family. My way to Noumea, New
Caledonia, was opened by the generosity of Paul DeDeckker, Université
Française du Pacifique, and the archival energies of Ismet Kurtovich. Fré-
déric Angleviel has provided me with more challenges than I can ever hope
to meet. Thanks to the Centre Culturel Jean Marie Tjibaou for research
assistance and recommendations, and, in Hienghène, to Jean Philippe Tji-
baou for his patient introduction to things Kanak. In Tahiti, debts are owed
to Jean Marc Regnault, Université de Polynésie Française, Veronique Mu
Liepmann of the Musée de Tahiti et des îles, Robert Koenig, Société des
Etudes Océaniennes, and the équipe at the Service des Archives Territoriales,
Tipaerui. For helping me imagine larger and comparative questions thanks
to Stewart Firth and Sandra Tarte at the University of the South Pacific,
Laucala, Fiji.Thanks also to the helpful staff at the National Archives, Suva,
the insights of Vincent Lobendahn, and the inspiration of Epeli Hau‘ofa.
My gracious thanks to my students and colleagues at Rutgers University,
and the special support of John Gillis,Jackson Lears,Bonnie Smith,and Don
Roden. Thanks also to Alice Bullard, Eric Jennings, Herman Lebovics, and
Christine Skwiot, and to those who have allowed me to research and present
my work across the United States. In France, remerciements to Marie-Colette
Depierre and Sébastien Leboucher, John-Simon Loche, Jean-Pierre Melot,
Gaby Marcon, and Mme. Fradin and M. Prisot of La Maison Pierre Loti at
Rochefort. Regards to Isabelle Merle, Christian Genet, Francis Macouin of
the Musée Guimet in Paris, and the directors and staffs of the Service des
Archives de la Marine, the collections of the Musée de l’Homme, the Musée
des Arts Océaniens et Africains, Le Centre des Archives du Monde du Tra-
vail in Roubaix, the Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer at Aix-en-Provence,
and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris.
In Rome, thanks to Pères Carlo Maria Schianchi and Hubert Bonnet-
Eymard for access to the collections of the Padri Maristi. In Japan I have
profited much from contacts with the Maison Franco-Japonaise in Tokyo
and the Institut Franco-Japonais in Kyoto. Thanks to my friends Yutaka
Sasaki and Kiyofumi Tsubaki for their kindness. In Hanoi, my thanks to
Phan Huy Le. At the University of Hawai‘i, Manoa, thanks also to Geoffrey
White, Tisha Hickson, David Hanlon, and David Chappell for inspiring
and allowing me to participate in rethinking Pacific histories.
This book was written and completed under the watchful eye of my editor,
Susan Ferber; thanks to her, Robert Milks, my readers, and Oxford Univer-
sity Press for seeing it through. For so many years, Matt Symonds and Maria
Spada have kept me coming and going across another ocean—the Atlantic.
Priceless thanks to Jaap Talsma and Marjan Schwegman in the Netherlands
and around the world for their many insights on love and history.
Parts of this book have appeared in earlier versions in scholarly journals.
I am grateful to the editors of these publications for permission to reprint
this material here: “The Tears of Madame Chrysanthème: Love and His-
tory in France’s Japan,” French Cultural Studies, vol. , no.  (), Sage
Publications; “Pierre Loti and the Empire of Love,” Raritan, vol. , no. 
(); “Geopolitics of Desire,” Proceedings of the Western Society for French
History, vol. .


CONTENTS X
 Empire of Love: Histories of France and the Pacific 
 Rochefort: The Family Romance
of the French Pacific 
 Panama: Geopolitics of Desire 
 Wallis and Futuna: Martyrs and Memories 
 Society Islands: Tahitian Archives 
 New Caledonia: Prisoners of Love 
 Indochina: Romance of the Ruins 
 Japan: The Tears of Madame Chrysanthème 
 The Lost Continent 
Notes 
Index 
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EMP IRE OF LOVE X
Idylls and imperialists: Entangled lives in the Pacific.
Two native girls and European man by a palm tree (),
Charles-Claude Antiq. Source: National Library of Australia

INTRODUCT ION X
EMP IRE OF LOVE
Histories of France and the Pacific
T
he territorial archives of French Polynesia are kept up a winding
roadway in the hills of Tipaerui, a green valley whose summits over-
look Papeete, Tahiti. Among the scores of registers, requisitions,
and cartons filled with stamped, scripted orders and reports to bureaus and
ministries remain references to a striking project that made its way into both
French literature and administrative practice in the nineteenth century: the
forging of an Empire of Love in the Pacific.
The following stories focus on the historical constitution—and con-
testation—of that project. The navigator Louis-Antoine de Bougainville
famously set one of the narrative myths for Europe and the world in the
s by reporting of his reception in Matavai Bay, about ten kilometers
from Tipaerui, “The canoes were filled with women, who in the charm of
their features conceded nothing to most European females . . . most of these
nymphs were naked, for the men and old women who were with them had
taken off the loin-cloths which they usually wore.” His enthusiastic tales
purposefully underscored notions of sensuality and erotic attraction as con-
stituents of a French presence in the Pacific. These launched an exotic genre
that never separated itself from reports of unpredictable, yet generous, local
hosts and “island women” of ripe sensuality and easy sexual encounter.1
Within two generations, Pacific encounters would be overwhelmingly
colonial, coded in languages and practices of dominance and possession—
yet no less amorously defined. The Tipaerui archives conserve instructions
from nineteenth-century colonial commanders to their station heads that
  

illustrate this at the most local level. Notes to a gendarme on the island of
Rapa begin with exhortations of responsibility:“You will take, from this date,
command of the post on Rapa,” a charge that includes organizing a school,
mail service, weather station, supply house, and administrative office. These
primary colonial institutions are enclosed within a familiar logic: “You will
make all efforts to extend throughout this small population your beneficial
and civilizing action.”This evocation of the famous French imperial “civiliz-
ing mission” is in turn contained within the largest priority: “Your role will
consist above all in making the natives love France, their new patrie.”2
Bougainville’s tales and the imperatives informing the gendarme’s post-
ing and charge raise arresting questions. What historical configurations
placed “France” and “natives” in relations of “love” for and against “empire”
and “patrie”? What roles do these configurations play in writing of “the
Pacific” as a place of Oceanic, Asian, and European engagements? I address
these questions by interrogating empire as a shifting arrangement of Pacific
places, bounded by and invested in demonstrations of love as vital constitu-
ents of French imperial projects. Whether a yearning for exotic sensuality or
political affinity, love was historically implicated in practices of rule, resis-
tance, and alliance from Polynesia to Southeast Asia.
The following chapters detail the operations of love and empire within
different constituencies, outlining and examining the specific presump-
tions, challenges, and legacies of men and women who were Tahitian mon-
archs, Kanak warriors from New Caledonia, French bourgeois politicos,
poor white Oceanic emigrants, deported prisoners, Futunan chiefs, Cen-
tral American Indians and laborers, East and Southeast Asian denizens of
treaty ports and colonial compounds. These stories—about power and art,
work and slavery, faith and tradition, class and race, family and ideology—
lend local distinction to multiple perspectives that constituted the greater
narration of an “Empire of Love” in a French Pacific. There was no singular
experience, yet the apparently dissimilar expressions of “love” here emanate
from a consistent historical configuration: all are bound up in negotiating
tensions provoked by multiple appropriations of and struggles over amour
for and against empire.
X
The stories emerge in multiple locations and contexts, and so I begin
with space and places, trying to reimagine European Pacific histories
restructured as Oceanic moments and crossings. From Europe, the Pacific
was a world apart, lacking the immediate and contiguous significances of
the Mediterranean or the Atlantic. What to make of this great space, one
third of the surface of the planet, which touches no part of Europe at all?


French maritime writers called it the Grand Ocean, a vast expanse whose
shores touched both East and West, an emptiness of routes and exchanges
in the manner of the desert sands and caravans of the European “Orient.”3
In such narrations the Pacific was remote, written and drawn into being
through distance in time and space. A familiar narration imposed “isolation”
upon Pacific peoples: “slow development” in  Tahiti was blamed on “her
isolation from the rest of the world, her great distance from the mother
country”; the “inferior degree of humanity” in New Caledonia, attributed to
the “extreme isolation” of the islands.4
Such attributions, always in reference
to Europe, ignored centuries of Pacific migration and navigation, in many
ways interrupted by colonial boundaries themselves.
In contrast to the clichés of a vast and void Pacific, scholars such as Epeli
Hau‘ofa have reimagined empty ocean as a “Sea of Islands,” replacing dis-
tance with connection, rethinking presumably isolated Islanders as mobile,
Oceanic peoples. Pacific space also can be seen in traditional Micronesian
navigational charts of the Marshall Islands, constructed frameworks of rigid
sticks, joined and bound to map seafaring routes and deep ocean swell pat-
terns. Such models present island groups as points of crossing supported by
the framework of their multiple interconnections where currents and tides
refract, the negative of a paper map in which landfalls register as positive
space, and water as emptiness, a forbidding barrier.5
To take such navigational representation—in all its nautical, astronomi-
cal, and mythical richness—as metaphor is reckless, yet also revelatory:
rather than isolated, the Pacific is full of entangled histories. For all the nar-
ratives imposed upon the Pacific, here “the Pacific” shapes European history
in return. Stories of an interloping Europe are reconfigured by a “chart” for
which the framework of sticks itself takes on the particular shape of time,
space, and destination, as opposed to an Occidental map in which all points
are enclosed by the formal border of the illustration.6
These redefinitions are absorbing. Such an approach draws together
the Oceanic and the European by pursuing Bronwen Douglas’s “strategic
appropriation of others’ concepts.”7
Thinking through navigational cross-
ings illuminates certain aspects of French maritime policy—particularly the
imagination for defining the Pacific by a mapping of points and intersec-
tions of staging, supply, and transfer. In , one French writer asserted
that Pacific islands would “probably never be more than points de relâche”;
in  another pointed to “those famous points d’appui which ought to
be [our] bases of operation or ports of refuge.” In their literal definitions
evoking points of rest and force, these markers declare control not of larger
regions, but a mastery of critical maritime passages and places of crossing
and provision.8
  

History drawn through such particular locations should give little pause;
even European scholars with no consciousness of the Grand Ocean have
long profited from the sort of locale-specific thinking in which Pacific stud-
ies have been so heavily invested. Such approaches have made possible eth-
nographic-historical studies of small villages, regionally specific commemo-
rations and festivals, obscure revolts and rebellions, ephemeral mentalités,
discursive practices, and lieux de mémoire. In Pacific history, scholars such as
Greg Dening and Nicholas Thomas have repeatedly demonstrated through
studies of encounter,exchange,and mutual representation how instances—or
a series of connected instances—can incorporate stirring generalities about a
population, culture, or a given age.9
Points de relâche and points d’appui engage histories of the Pacific through
such sets of unique locations, each rich with specific moments and outward
resonances constituting tidal and wave patterns of meanings. These indicate
shifting routes and navigations shaped by contacts, encounters, and cultural
transferences between other Oceanic locations. Imagined as this series of
locations and instances, a “French Pacific” would be defined less by a politi-
cal or institutional narrative of conquest and adventure than as an underscor-
ing of moments and places where European, Oceanic, American, and Asian
temporalities and geographies came together. Such an approach might be
profitably defined by Hau‘ofa’s “Sea” framing Marshall Sahlins’s memorable
turn of phrase, “Islands of History,” evocative wordings that strongly capture
mythic distinction and apartness, yet also the deep implication of Pacific
places in contested schemes of time and chronology.10
This emphasis on particularities is in fact perfectly consistent with aca-
demic histories of the region, which concur that French empire in Oceania
was a haphazard creation, an unpredictable set of ministerial decisions, faits
accomplis by naval commanders, responses to settler agitation, islander con-
cerns, nationalist pressure, and the presence of other European powers. The
geography of a French Pacific over the nineteenth century was never that
of a positively defined and defended area but the tracing of a constantly
shifting series of points that gained and lost significance in accordance with
political, commercial, and ideological fortunes.
X
How did this tenuous array of points and sites constitute an Empire
of Love? The very instability of its own presumed territory supplies
many responses. What made the “French Pacific” a unique area was the way
in which multiple and often contingent claims intersected in the region.
The daily colonial authority of Britain’s India or of expanding frontier nar-
ratives in Australia and the Americas was widely dispersed among numerous


conflicting parties, both local and imperial, often with only tentative author-
ity over extraordinary varieties of peoples and circumstances. This under-
scored the Pacific as less a site of colonial history or expansionist territorial
mastery than of highly unstable and charged encounters, especially for the
French who never had commanding settlements such as Australia and New
Zealand and only consolidated their control of “Indochina” very late in the
nineteenth century.11
For the “French” Pacific, extended over Polynesia and the penal colony
of New Caledonia in the south, Oceania was much more a realm of shift-
ing struggles and accommodations than settler colonies. Writing from Pap-
eete in , Armand Bruat, governor of the French Possessions in Oceania,
reported, “Many people are in error because they suppose that the govern-
ment has the goal of creating a colony for products of exportation, whereas
the small size of the islands, the lack of manpower and working populations
. . . throw disfavor upon their occupation.” At the same moment, the Tahi-
tian Queen Pomare would note, “The only Frenchmen who resided upon
my islands before the year  were nine and nine only.”12
With such fitful debuts, compelling narratives played a critical role in
attracting, shaping, defining—and maintaining—a French presence in the
Pacific. Through monarchies, empires, and republics, missionaries, traders,
and admirals began marking stations, territories, and protectorates, but the
“Empire” existed heavily in the realm of words, emotions, and Enlight-
enment visions: the exile tales of Chateaubriand, sensuous New Cythera
of Bougainville, generous mockery of Diderot. Royal South Seas missions
created a topography of loss, of memory, ruin, and secrets: the disappear-
ance of La Pérouse as opposed to the heroic, if ultimately fatal, successes
of Cook.13
The French romance of nineteenth-century imperialism is inexpli-
cable without these literary and philosophical templates; as such, what
was “French” about the “Empire” developed as a curious concatenation of
story and unrealized ambition of possession. Havelock Ellis once suggested
a “French mode” for parts of the Pacific drawn from eighteenth-century
sentimentalism. “These French voyagers and missionaries—although there
were some notable but more sober-minded English and other sailors among
them—were delighted and intoxicated as these strange manners and cus-
toms, often so gracious and fantastic, opened out before their astonished
vision.”14
Patricia Seed has suggested how, from the sixteenth century, property-
centered English colonialism focused on settlements and plantations,
whereas French empire, shaped by a politics of ceremony and royal favor,
was characterized by “seeking an alliance and watching the faces and ges-
  

tures of indigenous peoples for signs of assent.”15
In the nineteenth century,
sentimentalism and politics of affinity were reconfigured into varieties of
attachment to peoples, nations, and new territories. In his classic De l’amour
(), Stendhal proposed varieties of European sentimental character, from
the jealousy of Italians to the mysticism of Germans. The postrevolutionary
French, he thought, w...