An African Prince at the Court of the Sun King

An African Prince at the Court of the Sun King

Philippe Halbert

Louis XIV’s royal residence at Versailles had been designed to awe and impress. With its court formally established in 1682—after twenty years of construction that would continue through 1789—Versailles was to become a beacon from which the king’s absolutism could emanate over France and across oceans. As the kingdom’s political nucleus and de facto capital, it was at Versailles that ambassadors and other foreign dignitaries were received with the grandeur of which only the Sun King was capable.1 One such royal guest was an African “prince,” Aniaba, who reached France aboard the Saint-Louis circa 1688 alongside his countryman and possible cousin, Banga. Docking at La Rochelle, the pair had been sent at the behest of Aniaba’s supposed father, the king of Issiny. Period maps identify this kingdom as west of modern-day Côte d’Ivoire, near Ghana. Instructed in the tenets of Roman Catholicism by Dominican missionaries, Aniaba and Banga were soon taken to Paris. Aniaba continued his religious training under Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, court chaplain and one of the greatest French theologians and orators of the seventeenth century. Under his protection and that of the marquise de Maintenon—who secretly married the king in 1683—Aniaba was presented at court sometime before 1690.

Who was this African who moved in noble and elite circles for over a decade until his return to Issiny in 1701? Multiple period sources—from travel narratives to contemporary periodicals and even a novel—indicate that he was indeed a real person. Historians, however, disagree over his true identity, with many historians accusing

PhiLiPPe haLbert is a senior at The College of William and Mary majoring in Francophone Studies and history. he would like to thank Professor Livesay for his help and guidance during the drafting of this paper, as well as his parents for their continued support.

8 The Monitor - Summer 2011

the Dominicans or Aniaba himself of fabricating the story of his royal origins. Whether or not he was a prince, the saga of Aniaba— baptized Louis in honor of the king in 1691—is noteworthy in what it reveals about the intersection of racial attitudes and religious thought in early modern France.2

In light of the religious division of the late seventeenth century and the passage of racial legislation such as the Code Noir in 1685, Aniaba’s story demonstrates the ostensible erasure or accommodation of racial distinction by religious activity and instruction when it suited political policy—which is itself inextricably tied to religious concerns and issues. As Louis XIV’s policy near the end of his reign was largely fuelled by asserting Roman Catholicism—specifically, his hold on the French or Gallican Church—the attraction of welcoming to court and ultimately converting an African sovereign was great. The fact that Aniaba was touted as a prince could only have made things easier for a king whose reputation was built on the image of glory, grandeur, and display.

Baroque Bodies: Africans at Court in the Grand Siècle

Aniaba and Banga would not have seemed entirely out of place to the Sun King’s court. African visitors had made their way to the French court as early as 1479 when “Antoine de Neyne, Nègre,” visited Louis XI.3 By the fifteenth century, Portuguese traders were returning home with objects from West Africa—turned ivory drinking vessels and eating utensils—that were destined for aristocratic tables and curiosity cabinets.4 African-inspired entertainments had been a part of the Bourbon court spectacles since the reign of Henri IV. Pseudo African- and even Amerindian-inspired music was a mainstay in court ballets, where European interpretations of the comba and other exotic dances were regularly featured on-stage at court, at Paris theatres and opera houses, and in popular street theatre during fairs. African animals, including rhinoceroses, lions, flamingos, and elephants were kept at the royal menagerie to the delight of the king’s court and visitors to Versailles. Christian religious tradition also incorporated African figures. Balthasar—one of the three Biblical Magi—was often represented as an “Ethiopian” or black African in illuminations,

9An African Prince at the Court of the Sun King

sculpture, and other artistic media from the medieval to baroque periods. Likewise, Saint Maurice, an Egyptian Copt who lived in the third century, was often depicted with African features.

African figures even adorned furniture and other decorative arts of royal residences. The Moor—a circa-1610 bronze and mixed-marble sculpture by Nicolas Cordier—was part of the royal collection of Versailles. At the dauphin’s residence at nearby Meudon, a whole oval-shaped salon des Maures, or Moorish salon, housed twelve busts of male and female Moors.5 Also composed of mixed marble, these sculptures us black Italian marble to highlight the dark skin of the African “Moor,” a term which collectively grouped African people. Dressed in classical togas, the six surviving busts also feature neoclassical diadems, indicative of popular perceptions of foreign riches and the wealth of African rulers. Such perceptions had existed since Antiquity. As recently as the thirteenth century, Charles V of France’s 1375 Catalan atlas of Europe and Africa had depicted Mansa Musa, ruler of the Songhai Empire, wearing a gold crown and holding a golden nugget. The uncovered breast of the female Moor, however, reveals underlying suspicions of savagery associated with the wilds of the African jungle.

Aniaba and Banga would have encountered both black and white faces at Versailles. Since the Renaissance, it had been fashionable for wealthy courtiers to maintain African servants as pages and ladies’ maids. Court portraiture of the late-seventeenth-century depicts many such people who occupied an ambiguous status between free and enslaved.6 In the 1660s, the vicomte de Turenne—Marshall General of France and one of Louis XIV’s ablest generals—posed with a “négrillon,” roughly translated as a “little negro.” Even members of the royal family demonstrated power, prestige, and physical beauty by posing next to darker-skinned servants. The king’s sister-in-law—the duchesse d’Orléans, known as Madame—sat for François de Troy in 1680 with her black attendant lifting a basket of flowers.7

Mesdemoiselles de Blois and de Nantes—the king’s legitimized daughters by his mistress the marquise de Montespan—can be seen in a 1690s portrait by Claude-François Vignon with the same black servant as the duchesse d’Orléans.8 As Mademoiselle de Blois reaches for flowers contained in the exotic porcelain bowl, her sister rests her hands on the


anonymous page’s shoulder, showcasing the whiteness of her skin. In similar fashion, a contemporary portrait identified as that of the duchesse de Valentinois also features a black female attendant, whose skin tone is offset by the whiteness of the strand of pearls that she is holding.9

Like the “Moorish” busts at Meudon, these African attendants are dressed in similarly imaginative costumes that reference the fashion for exoticism and wealth. While the duchesse de Valentinois’s maid wears a fanciful turban, Madame’s page sports a hanging pearl earring; both are dressed in costly fabrics worthy and reflective of the people they serve. The presence of such non-white servants at court was symbolic of the king’s aspirations of international grandeur; in effect, royal authority had no bounds. Aniaba’s reception at court would have similar significance, although its implications would be vastly greater.

Presented to the King

Unlike the domestic servants pictured in the portraits, Aniaba was fêted as a visiting dignitary and as a prince. Claims of royal lineage set him apart from the valets, footmen, pages, and other African and mixed-race attendants that were already a part of court life. Although rank, status, and titles meant everything in prerevolutionary France, since the sixteenth century many such honors could be purchased. Aniaba’s supposed title of prince linked him to the royal family of Issiny. For a European audience—especially that of the Versailles court of Louis XIV—such a heritage was enough to ensure him a privileged reception. Furthermore, his experience in France is noteworthy in light of the state of French religious and racial thought at the turn of the eighteenth century.

That Aniaba’s first experience in France was religious in nature should be no surprise. The king of France ruled by divine right, and among his principal duties was maintaining the Roman Catholic faith. Louis XIV had expelled the Huguenots from the kingdom in 1685 with the Edict of Fontainebleau. In the same year, Roman Catholicism was declared the only legal religion in the colonies with the passage of a collection of legislation later called the Code Noir, which also governed miscegenation and slavery. Jews, Huguenots, and Dutch Calvinists—who had brought with them the techniques for refining sugar cane—were subsequently exiled from Martinique and Guadeloupe. Despite


such declarations, Huguenot rebels—such as the Camisards in southern France and Jansenist thinkers in Paris and at the nearby convent of Port-Royal—and Jews that remained in France continued to pose a threat to a centralized, Gallican Church, at the head of which stood the king.

Simply put, religious pluralism was an obstacle to Louis XIV’s “cherished ambition of creating a truly united state.”10 By converting the heir to the throne of a potential French colony or dependent kingdom, French colonial policy—an extension of royal authority—would also be both valorized and ascertained. The cultural symbolism of the converted African idolater—prince or not—was also valuable. In effect, the king’s glory as defender of the Church could be measured and ascertained by someone such as Aniaba. The sacramental ceremony of Aniaba’s 1691 baptism at the Chapel of Foreign Missions attests to this symbolism. Although tradition maintains that the king was his godfather, the honor actually went to Jean-Baptiste de Lagny, coincidentally intendant of commerce. Aniaba was baptized and given the name Louis by Bishop Bossuet. He took communion from the Cardinal de Noailles, the Archbishop of Paris with whom he had also studied. Placing his “kingdom” under the protection of the Virgin Mary, he dedicated a painting to her “with the solemn vow to make, upon his return to Africa, all the efforts necessary to gain the conversion of his people.”11

The ceremony resembled an earlier baptism of a Turk, described by the baron d’Eulenbourg in 1661. During the course of a mass celebrated at the church of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois—the parish of the royal family when the court was in residence in Paris at the Louvre—he was “led dressed in white…processed with his high and mighty godparents…before him were carried his turban and his saber as trophies of the Roman Church over the Mahometan religion.”12 In the case of Aniaba, the real beneficiary of the baptism was the king’s reputation. As king of France, the “Eldest Daughter” of the Church, the apearance of Louis XIV’s devotion to maintaining Catholicism as the state faith was at stake. This stake could be measured by the king’s ability to convert and propagate the faith, both among his subjects and ostensibly subservient princes such as Aniaba. In a period of religious uncertainty within France, preaching to non-Europeans and related missionary activities in the colonies and foreign trading centers were extensions of such concerns.


Aniaba’s royal favor allowed him to attain a post in a royal cavalry unit stationed in Picardie with an annual pension of 12,000 livres (complete with “horses, servants, and debts”).13 Army posts presented many oportunities for non-whites to rise socially in Ancien régime Europe. Henri Léger was born in Paris to mixed-race or African parents in 1629 and joined the army in 1660 as a timbalier or mounted drummer. He was later admitted to the Invalides in 1693, when thousands of French soldiers were clamoring for the same distinction.14 “A native of Guinée,” a “Moor” named Baptiste enrolled in the Dauphin-Calaverie in 1699. The Comte de La Bassetière noted that such African soldiers would mount white horses and “parade with address and agility.”15 With military service often serving as a launching pad for social advancement and claims of social legitimacy, such a profession went hand in hand with general identification with the French state as envisioned by Louis XIV, himself a soldier king.

An even greater spectacle than his baptism or military honors was to take place when news reached France of the death of Aniaba’s father, the Issinian king, in January of 1700. Before departing France, the new “Negro king” asked Louis XIV “to make marks of his conversion” by granting him permission to found a new chivalric order.16 This “Order of the Star Our Lady” was apparently devised by Aniaba, the king, Bossuet, and Madame de Maintenon. Taking place at the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris in February of 1701, the investiture ceremony also included the dedication of another painting. This work depicted Aniaba kneeling before a statue of the Virgin and Child surrounded by the king and Bossuet, a fitting subject in light of the choice of the cathedral’s chapel of the Virgin to hold the ceremony. Whether or not this was done on his own initiative, the fact that Aniaba ostensibly commissioned and dedicated religious art permitted Aniaba to draw a parallel between himself and the French royal tradition—a tradition that allowed the king and members of the royal family to dedicate works of art, chapels, and whole churches.

Outfitted in to the latest French fashion—as Don Miguel Castro had been in the Low Countries sixty years before—and decorated with his new medal, Aniaba returned to Issiny in April of 1701 aboard the Poly, belonging to the French Guinea Company. Accompanied by the


chevalier d’Amon—who had earlier been directed by Louis XIV to explore the Guinea coast in 1687—Aniaba’s return led to a series of events that could not have been anticipated by the king. For unknown reasons, an argument began between Aniaba and d’Amon onboard one of the ships; it is speculated that his lineage was uncovered to be less than royal. One historian offers the possibility of his mother’s identity as an enslaved concubine of the king’s and not his true wife; this could have led to confusion on the part of the French, who might have seen such a fact as evidence of Aniaba’s treachery.17

This Issinian homecoming is best described in abbé Godefroy Loyer’s 1714 account, the relation du voyage d’issiny.18 Charged with the propagation of the faith in what many hoped would become a Catholic Issiny ruled by Aniaba, the abbé Loyer encountered a much different situation. Although he had met Aniaba in France prior to the 1701 departure, once in Issiny Loyer witnessed him “become naked like the other Negroes” and “take five or six idolatrous wives, with whom he took to the shameful excesses.”19 According to Loyer, Aniaba never assumed the throne of Issiny, reverting back to the savage ways of the country and forgetting any of his princely French education. The chevalier d’Amon left Aniaba and began negotiations with the neighboring king, Accasigny. Aniaba would reapear in 1704, when he had taken the name of Hannibal and served the king of Quita, modern Togo, as a counselor. From there, he disappears from the historical record.

Conclusion

At the same time of Aniaba’s presentation at court, a woman of about thirty years entered the Benedictine convent of Mouret-sur-Loing, in the same region as Paris and Versailles. Taking the name of Louise-Marie-Thérèse, she had taken her vows as a nun in 1695. Although this was in and of itself hardly unusual in late-seventeenth-century France, Louise-Marie was of either African or mixed-race ancestry. The legends surrounding her story identify either the queen Marie-Thérèse and her black dwarf, Nabo, or Louis XIV and a black maid as her parents. A contemporary portrait, identified as the “black nun of Moret” or the “Mauresse of Moret” is said to depict her in her Benedictine habit.20


Regardless of her racial background or supposedly royal heritage, evangelical and religious activities in France accommodated Louise-Marie as they had Aniaba. The Mercure de France—a popular gazette and literary magazine of the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries—recorded in 1701 that Louis XIV once remarked to Aniaba that, “There is thus no more difference between you and me than black from white.”21 Despite this difference in color, religion had been a means by which to erase Aniaba’s African identity and mold him into something of use to French policy; he had been a tool in advancing French political and religious interests in Europe and abroad. Although the 1701 mission had failed, the attention given to Aniaba’s upkeep, education, and conversion is indicative of the power still associated with religion at the turn of the eighteenth century. It still maintained—or was at least believed to possess—the power to trump racial differences. The irony of this story is best summarized in a 1753 text. Looking back on the story of Aniaba in 1753, authors Élie-Catherine Fréron and Joseph de La Porte quipped, “You see, despite the stupidity that we attribute to Negroes…they have yet enough wit to dupe us.”22

Fig. I. Engraving of Louis XIV receiving the ambassadors of the king of Siam in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, from the September 1686 almanach de France, found at the Domaine national des châteaux de Versailles et des Trianons.


Fig. II. Two mixed-marble busts of a male and female Moor, ca. 1680, found at the château et musées nationaux de Compiègne. Partially burnt in 1795 and razed by 1803, the contents of the château of Meudon were scattered; six of the original twelve Moorish busts are now displayed at the former royal and imperial château of Compiègne outside of Paris.

Fig. III. Claude-François Vignon (1633-1703), Françoise-Marie de bourbon, “Mademoiselle de blois” (1677-1749) et Louise-Françoise de bourbon, “Mademoiselle de Nantes” (1673-1743), ca. 1695.


Fig. IV. Anonymous, La Mauresse ou la religieuse noire de Moret, late-seventeenth or early-eighteenth century, found in Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève.


Notes1 Figure I.2 Stefan Goodwin, africa in europe (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009), 27.3 Jules Mathorez, Les étrangers en France sous l’ancien régime: histoire de la

formation de la population (Paris: E. Champion, 1919), 387.4 Exhibition catalogue, “D’un regard l’autre: Histoire des regard européens sur

l’Afrique, l’Amérique et l’Océanie,” Musée du Quai Branly and the Réunion des musées nationaux (2006), 68.

5 Figure II.6 Sue Peabody, There are No Slaves in France: The Political Culture of race and

Slavery in ancien régime France (Oxford University Press, 1996).7 François de Troy (1645-1730), Charlotte-elisabeth de bavière, princesse Palatine,

duchesse d’Orléans (1652-1722), The Domaine national des châteaux des Versailles et des Trianons, 1680.

8 Figure III. 9 Louise-hipolyte, princesse de Monaco and duchesse de Valentinois, The Domaine

national des châteaux de Versailles et des Trianons.10 Nancy Mitford, The Sun King (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1966), 144.11 Jean-François de La Harp, abrégé de l’histoire générale des voyages (Tome II. Paris:

Ledoux, 1820), 208.12 Anne Lombard-Jourdan, “Des Malgaches à Paris sous Louis XIV: exotisme et

mentalités en France au XVIIe siècle,” archipel 9:9 (1975), 82.13 Hans Werner Debrunner, Presence and Prestige, africans in europe: a history of

africans in europe before 1919 (Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien 1979), 71.14 Marcel Koufinkana, Les esclaves en France sous l’ancien régime (Paris:

L’Harmattan, 2008), 79.15 Eric Noel, etre noir en France au XViiie siècle (Paris: Tallandier, 2006), 131.16 Le Mercure de France, February 1701, 205.17 Kenneth Banks, “Financiers, Factors, and French Proprietary Companies,”

Constructing early-Modern empires: Proprietary Ventures in the atlantic World, 1500-1750 (Leiden: Brill), 110.

18 Miller, blank Darkness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 34-35.19 Miller, 33-34; Pierre Helyot and Maximilien Bullot, histoires des ordres religieux,

Tome VII (Paris: Jean-Baptiste Coignard, 1719), 446.20 Figure IV. 21 Le Mercure de France, 205.22 Élie-Catherine Fréron and Joseph de La Porte, Lettres sur quelques écrits de ce

tems, Vol 10 (Nancy: Duchesne, 1753), 207.

An African Prince at the Court of the Sun King

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