Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry (1750-1819); Nicolas Ponce (1746-1831); René Phelipeau (1752-1795 or later).

Recueil de vues des lieux principaux de la colonie françoise de Saint-Domingue.

Paris, Moreau de Saint-Méry, Ponce and Phelipeau, 1791 [with the general map dated 1796].

Large folio (47.7 × 33 cm). Title and table of plates; 30 copper-engraved plates, comprising 15 plates of views and figures and 15 maps and plans, several double-page. The (often lacking) general map of Saint-Domingue with contemporary outline colouring; the double-page maps printed on thick blue paper.

Contemporary tree calf, covers within a gilt ornamental roll border, smooth spine decorated in gilt, red title label, marbled edges.

               First edition of this important visual record of the towns, landscapes and plantation society of Saint-Domingue, the French colony that became Haiti. The generous folio format and fine copper engravings give the album an elegance that stands in striking contrast to the revolutionary upheaval beginning in the year of publication. Published in the year of the great uprising of enslaved people in 1791, the album preserves the appearance of the colony before the revolutionary struggle transformed it. Its panoramic harbours, public buildings and carefully ordered town plans document the infrastructure of a colonial economy whose wealth depended on enslaved labour. Issued separately, although intended to accompany Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Loix et Constitutions, the volume brings together topographical views engraved under Nicolas Ponce’s supervision and maps and plans prepared under René Phelipeau.

The illustrations range from expansive views of Cap-Français, now Cap-Haïtien, to the ports and settlements of Port-au-Prince, Léogane, Jacmel and other coastal towns. Particularly significant are the six vignettes representing Black inhabitants, including washerwomen, free people of colour, dancers and men engaged in stick fighting. They provide evidence of dress, work and recreation within the colony’s sharply stratified society. The final two double-page plates show the plan and sections of a sugar works and its processing equipment, linking the inhabited landscape to the industry that sustained the plantation economy. Read together, these subjects make the album valuable both as a record of everyday life and as a picturesque presentation of colonial society, in which the organisation of production is more readily visible than the coercion underpinning it.

The present copy is complete with all thirty published plates and maps, including the scarce Carte de l’Isle St. Domingue, drawn by Sonis and engraved by Vallance, dated 1796 and frequently missing from the volume. Although the table announces thirty-one plates, the Plan général de la Partie Françoise de Saint-Domingue, listed as no. 17, is generally considered never to have been published. Its absence therefore does not constitute a defect. The inclusion of the later general map, together with the contemporary gilt-decorated calf binding and the double-page maps on thick blue paper, distinguishes this copy.

Condition: Title leaf, with the table of plates on the verso, browned, with darker bands along the upper and lower margins. Binding with light rubbing and some darkening around the edges. Otherwise in very good condition, with clean, well-preserved plates and maps.

References:

Joseph Sabin, Bibliotheca Americana: A Dictionary of Books Relating to America, from its Discovery to the Present Time, no. 50578.

Charles Leclerc, Bibliotheca Americana, no. 1404.

Ezequiel Uricoechea, Mapoteca colombiana (London, 1860), no. 224.

Elizabeth Heath, ‘Sugarcoated Slavery: Colonial Commodities and the Education of the Senses in Early Modern France’, Critical Historical Studies, vol. 5, no. 2 (2018), pp. 169–207.