La petite maison dans les abattis ou l’art de rédiger aux bois par Jean Antoine de Brûletout, chevalier de Préfontaine dans son habitation de la France équinoxiale (1754-1763)

Abstract

Among the rare publications devoted to colonial housing in the West Indies and French Guyana, the manual titled “The Rustic House” (Maison rustique à l’usage des habitants de la partie de la France équinoxiale connue sous le nom de Cayenne) published in Paris by the chevalier de Préfontaine in 1763 stands out as an exception. Rather than being based on the on-site experiences Préfontaine led at La Felicité, his rural estate located in Macouria, a suburb of Cayenne, the book was written for all landowners of the colony and concerned more broadly “all the colonies in general”. Préfontaine “Stirred by patriotic ardor from the bottom of his estate”, energetically wrote a weighty manual on colonial rural architecture outlining the construction of the main house and its numerous outbuildings including the slave quarters, stores, hen house, open air kitchen and well as industrial buildings including sugar mills and coffee mills. Beyond his contribution to the field of rural architecture, Préfontaine’s book responded to a more ambitious political scheme established at the end of the seventeenth century aiming to attract a white population of European settlers in the colony. Published a few months before the disastrous 1764 Kourou expedition led by Chanvallon, which caused the death of more than 4000 immigrants, Prefontaine’s book reveals the structure of political propaganda underlying the deceptively pleasant portrait of the colony in the second half of the eighteenth century in the French colonies.

Keywords

• édition
• architecture coloniale
• Guyane
• XVIIIe siècle
• littérature rurale