Rewriting the Grand Siècle: Blackface in Early Modern France and the Historiography of Race

Abstract

This essay critiques the French cultural aversion to racial thinking which has resulted in the absence of race as a theme and analytic in French historiographic practices, especially in relation to the ancien régime. This essay argues that focusing on 17th century theater and performance culture, especially on baroque ballets and their oblique representations of Blackness and slavery through blackface, reveals a long national history of racism against Black people. This essay is a call to rewrite as an age of race-making a period often construed as a cultural and literary golden age that still plays a central role in definitions of French heritage and identity today.