Caste in the French Revolution: Between Colonial Justice and Metropolitan Critique

In the last decades of the eighteenth century, 'caste' became a term of abuse in French political culture, as privileged groups like the aristocracy, clergy and guilds were increasingly attacked as 'castes'. This rhetorical strategy appealed to critics of the Old Regime, and particularly to the abbé Sieyès, who condemned the division of French society into three estates as a variation on South Asia's caste system in his incendiary and influential pamphlet What is the Third Estate? (1789). With references to such texts as Guillaume Raynal and Denis Diderot's History of the Two Indies (1770), Sieyès placed emerging Orientalist tropes according to which caste was responsible for or symptomatic of South Asia's supposed oppression and civilizational torpor at the center of revolutionary discourse.

Yet, while a growing number of philosophes and political figures in France condemned caste, the administrators of France's South Asian colonies, like their British counterparts, were putting Orientalist notions of caste at the center of their practices of governance. In the 1770s, they attempted to discover and codify 'caste laws', timeless norms that were imagined to give order to South Asian society. This project ended in failure, but in the follow years the colonial government only stepped up its efforts in this direction, especially during the Revolution, undertaking unprecedented caste censuses in 1789 and 1791. As 'caste' became a by-word of everything anti-revolutionary in the metropole, the colonial government committed itself to a project of restructuring its legal system on the basis of mythical caste laws. Tracing the circulation of 'caste' in both metropolitan political rhetoric and the logics of colonial justice, this paper explores how a common fund of Orientalist tropes provided a flexible repertoire within which French agents could pursue projects both of revolutionary change within France and a reordering of colonial power.