During its short publishing life, the Iris Américaine proposed a complement to the enlightened White male American citizen promoted by Saint-Domingue’s other two periodicals, the Affiches Américaines and the Journal de Saint-Domingue. After summarizing the contributions of the Affiches and the Journal to the island’s cultural life and discussing the importance of “taste” in French cultural life, the chapter documents how the Iris honored the age-old dictum “to instruct and delight” by publishing a mix of diverting poetry, short stories, and nonfiction essays. Yet its content, however light, had the serious intent of tutoring White women in good taste—both for their own good and to civilize their men by transforming unruly passions into refined pleasures. While these objectives were framed in a metropolitan terms, they assumed special urgency in a society infamous for racial brutality and “disordered” sexuality. Thus, the Iris spoke to deep social anxieties and threatening realities: the failure to establish a stable, White population; the ubiquitous concubinage of enslaved Black women and free women of color; the consequent increase in the number of mixed-race people; and the fact that White colonists were vastly outnumbered by enslaved Black people.

Part II, “Creating Enlightened Citizens: The Periodicals of Saint-Domingue in the 1760s,” begins at the end of the Seven Years War. An era of deep colonial discontent, many colonists were also confident that their colony had turned the page on an earlier tumultuous history to enter a future of civilized amenities and cultural achievement. Part II explores their cultural aspirations through the colony’s new periodicals: the long-running Affiches Américaines and its ephemeral siblings, the Journal de Saint-Domingue and the Iris Américaine. Together they advanced a coherent, gendered Enlightenment project that urged readers to identify themselves as French and American, patriots and citizens, and connected those identities with the Enlightenment practices of civil discourse and civilized taste. The introduction considers the meaning of Habermas’s “public sphere” in a slave society of hardening racial barriers; it concludes by briefly sketching the political, social, and economic situation of the colony at war’s end and the tensions between planters and merchants, colonists and royal governance that generated controversy and crisis in the postwar years.