About the Author

Eric Saugera is a French historian who specializes in the study of the nineteenth-century French slave trade. He is the author of the seminal Bordeaux, Port Négrier. He lives in Nantes, France.
Madeleine Velguth, Professor Emerita of French at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, was awarded the 1998 Florence Gould Foundation and French American Foundation Translation Prize for the best translation of a prose work from French to English.

Reviews

Reborn in America has the great merit of making an original and significant contribution to the history of the Vine and Olive Colony. It is one thing to say something new about an unknown topic; it is an accomplishment of a more impressive sort to open an entirely new perspective on a subject that other historians have already treated. Eric Saugera's study is of the latter variety.--Rafe Blaufarb, author of Bonapartists in the Borderlands: French Refugees and Exiles on the Gulf Coast, 1815-1835

French scholar Saugera has finally laid to rest the myth about French Napoleonic refugees who traveled to the confluence of the Tombigbee and Black Warrior Rivers in March 1817, purportedly to practice viticulture. The romantic story of the Vine and Olive Colony has held sway over Alabama's early history, providing a cultured and refined vignette to the state's oft-troubled past. Yet drawing on a cache of unpublished French letters and other little-used sources, Saugera reveals how the drama contributed to the broader story of the Atlantic world, involving slave rebellion in Haiti, the turmoil of the French Revolution, and post-War of 1812 US expansion. French instability following Napoleon's abdication in April 1814 drove many Bonaparte supporters to welcoming US ports, and the US Congress granted to the emigrants fertile Black Belt lands to establish a US presence in the area, where they founded the city of Demopolis. Yet by the 1830s, the experiment had failed, as many of these colonists had returned to Restoration France. This work, combined with Rafe Blaufarb's Bonapartists in the Borderlands (CH, Feb'07, 44-3456), explains the local and international dimensions of French influence along the gulf borderlands. Summing Up: Recommended. Most levels/libraries.
--CHOICE