“Comme des bons pères de famille:” Masculinity, Patriarchy, and the Transnational Violences of Slavery in French Colonial North America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
French colonial Louisiana has long captured the imaginations of academic and amateur historians alike. However, the histories of French Louisiana and New Orleans have often been analyzed within the canon of American history, overlooking its transnational and transcontinental connections to New France and the French Empire. This paper mobilizes 18th Century court documents from French colonial New Orleans that detail an assault perpetrated by a plantation overseer against enslaved workers. Jacques Charpentier dit le Roy migrated to Louisiana from what is now known as Canada, and was employed as an overseer by plantation owner and Superior Council member Amyault d’Auseville. Charpentier’s violent conduct led to the death of an enslaved man by the name of Brunet, and perpetrated multiple physical and sexual assaults against enslaved women, including Brunet’s wife, Bizao. The d’Auseville vs. Charpentier case not only illustrates the violence of slavery within the French Empire, but also the ways in which class differences were mobilized to entrench racial hierarchies. Above all, the case shows that the institution of slavery was sustained by migrations within the French Empire in North America, and provides concrete evidence of the transnational and transcontinental nature of slaveholding. This paper problematizes historiographical arguments that slavery was ‘less brutal’ in the French Empire by bringing the d’Auseville vs. Charpentier case in conversation with the Codes Noirs and its patriarchal foundations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".