MARTINIQUE. - BEAUHARNAIS - Lot 125

MARTINIQUE. - BEAUHARNAIS Manuscript. “Memoir presented to the Marquis de Beauharnais (…).” No place, March 7, 1759. 11 folio pages, bound as a booklet; annotations, corrections, and additions in the margins, most of which are unpublished. Manuscript on the situation in Martinique, which was printed in a small run in 1759, titled: “Memoir presented to His Excellency the Marquis de Beauharnois, Knight of the Royal and Military Order of Saint Louis, Captain of His Majesty’s ships, Governor and Lieutenant General for the King of the French Windward Islands of the Americas, by the Superior Council of Martinique, pursuant to its decision of this day.” [March 7, 1759]. The manuscript provides an overview of the catastrophic situation in which Martinique finds itself, following English attacks and, above all, as a victim of Governor Bompar’s [sic] policies, who established a “criminal monopoly” and a disastrous fiscal policy. “Hence the cries and outcries raised by the people in their misery pushed to the extreme [these anonymous writings addressed to Mr. de Bompart and the Intendant, beyond these complaints and outcries that the people could not hold back in their extreme misery, reduced, moreover, to the very brink] by a hurricane on August 23, 1758, which, by destroying the island’s food supplies, robbed the people of their sole resource and reduced them to [plunged into] the despair of a cruel famine that leveled master and slave and made the former even more miserable due to his inability to provide for the latter’s sustenance (...)”. The corrective and additional notes single out former Governor Bompar in particular. “The violation of his privileges [judicial and noble rights, the abuse of power in imprisonments], the debasement of all estates, the most distressing humiliations, [the impossibility or] futility of complaints, the deprivation of that honest civic liberty which other subjects of the State [of the Kingdom] enjoy under the protection of the laws—nothing has ever shaken him (…)."