Abstract

This article analyzes the published testimonies of French shipwreck survivors to trace the emergence of a settler colonial ideal in nineteenth-century France. Emerging from the encounters of French survivors with the men of the Anglo-World, this ideal encouraged compassionate, paternalist authority as a solution to the ongoing conflict of paternal despotism and disorderly fraternal freedom in France. The community of sentiment imagined in shipwreck testimonies was gendered and racialized, cultivating white compassion across colonial empires. These transimperial affective ties allowed the settler colonial ideal to persist in the early twentieth century, despite the abandonment of further projects for French settlement.