Before reading this book, one needs to familiarise oneself with three concepts that continuously inform the writing. These are "the narrative," "pla�age" and "the cult of the will." These concepts become clear by the time one reaches the second part of the book, but they should have been explained at the beginning. "Narrative" in this text is not mere narration; it is not just a recounting of the French Creole and the Afro-French Creole past, but rather the spin that is put to that recalling. Narrative here means who is included and who is excluded, and the book deals at length with the consequences of that deliberately-created narrative. It is the argument of this book that Eric Williams, the historian, tailored his narrative to exclude or underplay the role of major contributions to the creation of Trinbago.
"Pla�age" refers to the high incidence of concubinage practised by European merchants, planters, military men, civil officials and the motley crowd of adventurers who came to this side of the water where European women were in very short supply, and took full advantage of slave women over whom they had total control. Later on, they pounced on the mixed-race, coloured women produced by these first encounters. Quite often, these coloured offspring were invited to share their fathers' houses alongside his legitimate children, to be cared for by the lawful wife. There was little effort to hide placage. Besson recounts the case of John Nicholas Boissiere, who had married a woman of colour with whom he had several children, living in a posh home opposite his father's mansion at Champs Elys�es in Maraval.
In this abode, his outside, pla�age children also lived, and when some local wags commented on the number of crows (blacks) who lived in this rookery, his response was to name the residence "Rookery Nook," which name the place proudly bears to this day. The third term that requires explanation is "the cult of the will," which derives from the practice of pla�age. In the tangled history of the Caribbean, where paternity was often disputed, the offspring of these macho men faced an uncertain future. The will became a major determinant of either a good start in life or the prospect of abandonment. Those who were favourably treated in the will could go on to live a comfortable life, but those who were not had to paddle their own canoe in a society where skin colour and/or the kind of hair were major criteria of social and economic mobility.
Even so, being included in the will did not mean that benefits could be reaped. Besson argues that Eric Williams' forebears, coming from this Afro-French Creole stream, were twice denied benefits that should have accrued to them by ancestors who did not consider them deserving of any patrimony. Such deprivation forced Eric's parents into a penurious living, and this impacted negatively on the young man. Williams, the historian, made frequent references to his parents' strained circumstances, and this sense of victimhood became a major feature of his writing, as well as his political philosophy. The cult of the will, therefore, which determined who benefited and who did not, forms a major theme of Bessons' work. The book is divided into two parts. Part one is a carefully-gathered genealogy in which the saga of the Besson dynasty is painstakingly traced, beginning 1,000 years ago with the establishment of a church at Besson in the Auvergne region in France.
The research is thorough; the author was able to locate authentic documents in France, in England and in Grenada, and to organise this diverse material into a coherent narrative. He gives reasons for the Bessons' migration from France to the Caribbean. In the wake of the French Revolution, Royalists fled to Santo Domingo and to the southern Caribbean, particularly to Grenada. Under the Cedula of Population (1783), hundreds of French settlers migrated to a sparsely-settled Trinidad. Fran�ois Besson was one of these, and in 1788 he received a grant of 256 acres in South Naparima. Within a few years, he was able to acquire La Romaine, La Fortun�e and Bellevue (at Guapo) where, with his many slaves, he prospered. Buoyed up by this mini-empire, Fran�ois moved north to Port-of-Spain, acquiring a number of prime properties, including one at Besson Street, where his descendants lived, up to the 1920s.
This prosperity continued until the second half of the 19th century, when the depression of the sugar industry hit the French Creoles hard.
Some lost their properties or had to sell cheaply to the English investors, and others went into the cocoa industry. The first part of the book contains much detailed information on the fortunes of the French and French Creole settlers and the accompanying miscegenation, which spawned the Afro-French Creole segment. It tells of their spreading influence everywhere, even as far as Mayaro. It is a micro-study that complements the exacting macro-studies, providing hard evidence that supplements the general, known framework. Many of the pictures are published for the first time, and these are embellished by the family trees that can be of use for people whose ancestry derives from the French Creole input.
The copies of wills that form the appendices are treasure troves of information. These wills emphasise the importance of the cult of the will. The second part of the book, one suspects, will be of major interest to most readers. For it is in this section that Besson's thesis is expostulated. He sees an aggressive streak in the male offspring of pla�age, evident, for example, in the mixed-race Grenadian revolutionary Fedon, who led a bitterly-fought uprising against European domination in Grenada in 1795. That rebellious spirit is later transferred to Trinidad, and is manifested in the rise of a number of people of colour who rise to positions of eminence here. Eric Williams, as a 20th-century descendant of that Afro-French Creole matrix, falls within that same tradition.
As a student in England, he came under the influence of the black nationalist CLR James, who impressed on his mind that revolutionary tendency in the leaders of the Haitian revolution, so passionately espoused in James' The Black Jacobins. Besson believes that Williams combined these elements of thought with his own personal sense of victimhood, evidenced by his family's excision from the cult of the will, to create an ideology based on righting the wrongs visited upon Caribbean people. Thus, when he gave us the slogan, "Massa Day Done," he was indicating that all of the remaining descendants of the Europeans must take note of the new reality. The term "French Creole" now meant all persons of European descent, without regard to their actual ancestry. By the same token, Besson argues, East Indians were no more than marginal in Williams' calculation.
For this reason, they are virtually excluded from the Eric Williams narrative. They are no more than peripheral to the story of our development. This theme, the major thesis of The Cult of the Will, is, to say the least, highly-controversial, and will no doubt be the subject of intense scrutiny over the next few decades. It is a major addition to the Williams debate, not to be dismissed lightly. So what does one make of the book as a whole? The first part is a compendium of carefully-gathered information, detailing a major hitherto unwritten dimension of our history. The cultural and economic contributions of the French Creole and Afro-French Creole community is detailed, and we learn much of their social life and interactions with the larger society.
This useful introduction then leads us into the second part, which deals with Williams' transference of his own historical hurt into his writing of history and into his practice of politics. Because of the decisive role of politics in small societies such as ours, that assertion of personal pain into the business of governance has had damaging consequences on our efforts to create unity and productivity out of our diversity. The book argues that diversity was used to create division rather than harmony. The Cult of the Will now seeks to add that broad group who are called French Creole into the discourse, so that there can be greater balance in the chronicle of our nation. The book is, therefore, a welcome addition to the literature of development, and must now be included in our national dialogue.
