Plaçage () was a recognized extralegal system in French slave colonies of North America (including the Caribbean) by which ethnic European men entered into civil unions with non-Europeans of African, Native American and mixed-race descent. The term comes from the French meaning "to place with". The women were not legally recognized as wives but were known as placées; their relationships were recognized among the free people of color as mariages de la main gauche or left-handed marriages. They became institutionalized with contracts or negotiations that settled property on the woman and her children and, in some cases, gave them freedom if they were enslaved. The system flourished throughout the French period, reaching its zenith during the latter, between 1769 and 1803.
The system may have been most widely practiced in New Orleans, where planter society had created enough wealth to support the system. It also took place in the Latin-influenced cities of Natchez and Biloxi, Mississippi; Mobile, Alabama; St. Augustine and Pensacola, Florida;Chained to the Rock of Adversity, To Be Free, Black & Female in the Old South, edited by Virginia Meacham Gould, University of Georgia Press, 1998 as well as Saint-Domingue (now the Republic of Haiti). Plaçage became associated with New Orleans as part of its cosmopolitan society.
Emily Clark has challenged the popular notion of plaçage as being a systemic practice based on contractual marriages, and proposes that the practice largely consisted of a broad range of relationships between free women of color and white men that originated in various ways, which often lasted for a lifetime. Genetic evidence strongly supports the historical record of mass intermarriages between white men and women of color in New Orleans.
History and development The plaçage system developed from the predominance of men among early colonial populations, who took women as consorts from Native Americans, free women of color and enslaved Africans. In this period there was a shortage of European women, as the colonies were dominated in the early day by male explorers and colonists.
Given the harsh conditions in the colonies, persuading women to follow the men was not easy. France sent women convicted along with their debtor husbands and in 1719 deported 209 women felons "who were of a character to be sent to the French settlement in Louisiana."Katy F. Morlas, "La Madame et la Mademoiselle," graduate thesis in history, Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, 2003
The placage system first developed in Saint-Domingue. France sent women from the poor houses to the West Indies, but they had the reputation of also being former prostitutes from La Salpêtrière, and in 1713 and again in 1743, the authorities in Saint-Domingue complained that Paris sent the settlers unsuitable former prostitutes as wives.Trevor Burnard, John Garrigus: The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue The custom of sending brides from France was therefore discontinued in the French West Indies in the mid-18th century, which benefitted the development of a placage system there. A new colonisation policy was adopted in which male colonists from France merely came to the colony to make their fortune and returned to France after a few years during which they did not marry but lived with a free woman of colour.
France also relocated young women orphans known as King's Daughters () to their colonies for marriage to both Canada and Louisiana. France recruited willing farm- and city-dwelling women, known as casket or casquette girls, because they brought all their possessions to the colonies in a small trunk or casket.
Historian Joan Martin maintains that there is little documentation that "casket girls", considered among the ancestors of white French Creoles, were brought to Louisiana. The Ursulines, an order of nuns, chaperoned the casket girls until they married. Martin writes that some Creole families who today identify as white had ancestors during the colonial period who were African or multiracial, whose descendants married whites over generations.Joan M. Martin, Placage and the Louisiana Gens de Couleur Libre, in Creole, edited by Sybil Kein, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 2000.
Through warfare and raids, Native American women were often captured to be traded, sold, or taken as wives. At first, the colony generally imported African men to use as slave labor because of the heavy work of clearing to develop plantations. Over time, it also imported African women as slaves. Marriage between the races was forbidden according to the Code Noir of the 18th century, but interracial sex continued. The upper class European men during that period often did not marry until their late twenties or their early thirties. Premarital sex with an intended white bride, especially if she was of high rank, was not permitted socially.
Free people of color White male colonists, often the younger sons of noblemen, military men, and planters, who needed to accumulate some wealth before they could marry, had women of color as consorts before marriage or in some cases after their first wives died. Merchants and administrators also followed that practice if they were wealthy enough. When the women had children, they were sometimes emancipated along with their children. Both the woman and her children might assume the surnames of the man. When Creole men reached an age when they were expected to marry, some also kept their relationships with their placées, but that was less common. A wealthy white man could have two (or more) families: one legal and the other not. Their mixed-race children became the nucleus of the class of free people of color or gens de couleur libres in Louisiana and Saint-Domingue. After the Haitian Revolution in the late 18th and the early 19th centuries, many refugees came to New Orleans, adding a new wave of French-speaking free people of color.
During the period of French rule, the gens de couleur came to constitute a third class in New Orleans and other former French cities between the white Creoles and the mass of black slaves. They had certain status and rights and often acquired education and property. Later, their descendants became leaders in New Orleans, held political office in the city and state, and became part of what developed as the African-American middle class in the United States.
By 1788, 1,500 Creole women of color and black women were being maintained by white men.Monique Guillory, "Under One Roof: The Sins and Sanctity of the New Orleans Quadroon Balls", in Race Consciousness, edited by Judith Jackson Fossett and Jeffrey A. Tucker, New York University Press, 1997. Certain customs had evolved. It was common for a wealthy, married Creole to live primarily outside New Orleans on his plantation with his white family. He often kept a second address in the city to use for entertaining and socializing among the white elite. He had built or bought a house for his placée and their children. She and her children were part of the society of Creoles of color. The white world might not recognize the placée as a wife legally and socially, but she was recognized as such among the Creoles of color. Some of the women acquired slaves and plantations. Particularly during the Spanish colonial era, a woman might be listed as owning slaves, who were sometimes relatives whom she intended to free after she had earned enough money to buy their freedom.
While in New Orleans (or other cities), the man would cohabit with the placée as an official "boarder" at her Creole cottage or house. Many were located near Rampart Street in New Orleans, once the demarcation line or wall between the city and the frontier. Other popular neighborhoods for Creoles of color were the Faubourg Marigny and Tremé. If the man was not married, he might keep a separate residence, preferably next door or in the same or next block as his placée. He often took part in and arranged for the upbringing and education of their children.
For a time, both boys and girls were educated in France, as there were no schools in New Orleans for mixed-race children. As supporting such a plaçage arrangement ran into thousands of dollars per year, it was limited to the wealthy.
Inheritance and work Upon the death of her protector, the placée and her family could, on legal challenge, expect up to a third of the man's property.
The women in those relationships often worked to develop assets: acquiring property, running a legitimate rooming-house, or a small business as a hairdresser, marchande (female street or country merchant/vendor), or a seamstress. She could also become a placée to another white Creole. She sometimes taught her daughters to become placées, by education and informal schooling in dress, comportment, and ways to behave. A mother negotiated with a young man for the dowry or property settlement, sometimes by contract, for her daughter if a white Creole were interested in her. A former placée could also marry or cohabit with a Creole man of color and have more children.
Contrary to popular misconceptions, placées were not and did not become prostitutes. Creole men of color objected to the practice as denigrating the virtue of Creole women of color, but some, as descendants of white males, benefited by the transfer of social capital. Martin writes, "They did not choose to live in concubinage; what they chose was to survive."
In the late 19th and the early 20th centuries, after Reconstruction and the reassertion of white supremacy across the former Confederacy, the white Creole historians, Charles Gayarré and Alcée Fortier, wrote histories that did not address plaçage in much detail. They suggested that little race-mixing had occurred during the colonial period and that the placées had seduced or led white Creole men astray. They wrote that the French Creoles, in the sense of having long been native to Louisiana, were ethnic Europeans who were threatened, like other Southern whites, by the spectre of race-mixing.
Gayarré, when younger, was said to have taken a woman of color as his placée, and she had their children to his later shame. He married a white woman late in life. His earlier experience inspired his novel Fernando de Lemos.
Notable placées
Marie Thérèse Metoyer Marie Thérèse Metoyer dite Coincoin became an icon of black female entrepreneurship in colonial Louisiana. She was born at the frontier outpost of Natchitoches on Cane River in August 1742 as a slave of the post founder, the controversial explorer Louis Juchereau de St. Denis. She would be, for twenty years, the placée of a French colonial merchant-turned-planter, Claude Thomas Pierre Métoyer, who was two years her junior. At the onset of their plaçage, she was already the mother of five children; she would have ten more with Métoyer. In 1778, he freed her after the parish priest filed charges against Coincoin as a "public concubine" and threatened to have her sold at New Orleans if they did not end their relationship. As a free woman, she remained with Métoyer until 1788, when his growing fortune persuaded him to take a wife who could provide legal heirs. (He chose another Marie Thérèse, a white Créole of French and German birth.)