Brexit

[CharlesHarris]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/20...paris.html

YEEHAW!! Texas Secessionists Already Have an Embassy in Paris

Secession talk is heating up again in Texas. Will France once again recognize it as its own country?

PARIS — Near Place Vendôme in the most luxurious corner of Paris, a few steps from the Ritz and across from a new Louis Vuitton store, but high above the street where nobody is likely to notice, a legend engraved in stone marks the site of the Ambassade du Texas, and informs the passer-by below that on 29 September 1839 France was the first nation to recognize that short-lived republic.

This historical relic of Lone Star independence in la ville lumière is a quaint reminder of the nation that once was and, between the etched lines, of its particularly grim, even gruesome, history of slavery, anti-Hispanic racism, grand delusions and grinding privations. French recognition, after all, was not a matter of idealism or ideology, but of greed, and much of Texas at the time was a hell on earth that some of the cynical French tried to sell to their countrymen as paradise...

In 2009, Texas Gov. Rick Perry flirted with the notion of secession, if Washington “continues to thumb their noses at the American people, who knows what may come out of that?...”

François Lagarde, a professor emeritus at the University of Texas who is now back in his native France, is one of the few scholars who’s looked closely at that period from a European perspective. In the 2003 book, The French in Texas, which he edited, Lagarde notes that while the slave-holding guarantee encouraged immigration from the southern United States, it complicated hoped-for annexation because of Northern opposition, and it caused a problem when it came to desperately needed international recognition.

The French and British, clearly, did not give a damn about the so-called Monroe Doctrine warning foreign powers to stay out of the Western Hemisphere. They were all over the place, in fact, and ready to protect their interests. But the British, who had abolished slavery in 1833, would not recognize the independence of Texas “until the Texas Congress ratified a secret treaty on the suppression of the slave trade in 1842,” according to Lagarde. (As I wrote in my book, Our Man in Charleston, last year, stopping the African slave trade was a British obsession.)

The French weren’t so picky. They still had slaves in their colonies (abolition didn’t come until 1848) and they had considerable ambitions in Latin America. Decades later they would conquer Mexico and try to establish a satellite empire there, and in 1838 they already were nibbling around the fringes of the country...

One of the French admiral’s aides visited Galveston and Houston a few months later and wrote a report, quoted by Lagarde, that seems to have been a model of the genre: “Mexico would never win Texas back as the ‘Anglo-Saxon race’ was obviously superior to the ‘degenerate’ Spanish race. Slavery was unavoidable, as the profit was high, and if France were to establish ‘very advantageous commercial relationships’ with Texas, it would have to allow slavery.”

At about the same time, Lagarde tells us, the French embassy in Washington sent a young, ambitious and rather unscrupulous junior diplomat, Alphonse Dubois de Saligny, to check out the new republic. It took him three months to get there from D.C., he spent about the same amount of time traveling to some parts of Texas, lied about traveling to others, and wrote a glowing report in which he opined that the Mexican race was doomed to “disappear before the onrush of modern civilization pioneered by the Texians,” that annexation by the United States “would never take place,” and that the Indian threat was “negligible.”

Thus France should recognize the Republic of Texas to take advantage, in de Saligny’s words, of “the opportunity open to us to establish our influence over a portion of this continent, and to open important outlets for our industry and navigation.”
De Saligny then went back to Paris, where he worked with the Texas envoy there on the Treaty of Amity, Navigation and Commerce signed in October 1839. According to Lagarde, there may have been a little sweetener involved: a $50,000 bribe to the French authorities.

But the hoped-for influence and commerce between France and Texas never did materialize. Internationally, the Anglo-Saxon Texans preferred the Anglo-Saxon English, and, close at hand, yes, they did want to be annexed by the United States, and finally they were—provoking the 1846-1848 war in which the U.S. won California as well.

De Saligny, meanwhile, seems to have let his easily caricatured French arrogance get the better of him...paying his bills with counterfeit currency...sending a flunky to kill the pigs (with pistols and a pitchfork) of one of the men to whom he owed cash. When the man with the pigs grabbed de Saligny by the throat and shook him, de Saligny, indignant, wrote, “In view of such facts, Sir, I should be tempted to believe myself in the midst of a savage tribe, rather than in the bosom of a civilized and friendly nation.”

As Lagarde tells us, despite efforts to persuade the French to come to beautiful Texas, few did...A few of the French who did come left a mark. One Parisian designed the first state capitol building in Austin, but Lagarde concludes on a note that suggests just how difficult life was for most of those who put their faith in the vaunted promise of an independent Texas. He quotes a report in the Houston Telegraph and Texas Register written in 1843 from the settlement at Victoria, about 120 miles southeast of San Antonio:

“The few French Families that settled near this town have suffered many privations. … They expected to find a paradise in Texas, where they would obtain the comforts and even the luxuries of life with little labor, and of course they were disappointed. Several of them became insane, probably from discouragement and the suffering they were enduring. One of them, an old lady, while insane paddled across the Guadeloupe [River] on a log, and as soon as she got upon the opposite bank, she commenced dancing and singing in high glee, supposing she was out of Texas. She had previously been exceedingly melancholy.”