Christy Pichichero, George Mason University

In the spectacular—and spectacularly fictional—first scene of the 2022 biopic Chevalier, the French mixed-race virtuoso fencer, composer, violinist, and military officer from Guadeloupe–Joseph Bologne, chevalier of Saint-George (1745-1799) interrupts Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart during a concert in Paris and challenges him to a violin showdown. As the rivals attempt to out-fiddle one another, Saint-George descends into the stunned audience of aristocrats while weaving soulful jazz notes into the classical melodies. The camera fixes on a middle-aged white woman decked out in satin and jewels as she gasps in sensual rapture fanning her bosom. Cringe.

Marked by American cultural myopia, Searchlight Pictures’ Chevalier falls dreadfully flat. Starring Kelvin Harrison, Jr. as the chevalier and Ronkẹ Adékoluẹjo as his mother Nanon, the film was written by Stefani Robinson and directed by Stephen Williams with a score by composer Michael Abels. This team clearly had a Black Lives Matter-touting, Bridgerton-watching American audience in mind as they extracted and fabulated aspects of Saint-George’s life and times between his arrival in Paris as a boy and the early phase of the French Revolution. Reflecting today’s post-2020 cultural context, the creators and cast brought commendable intentionality and inclusivity to the project and produced a picture that some may find entertaining. Yet Chevalier was roundly panned in reviews around the Atlantic world and quickly pulled from movie theaters. Even spectators and critics who knew virtually nothing about Saint-George—let alone anything about race and slavery in the eighteenth-century French empire, the French Enlightenment and Revolution, or eighteenth-century music—could not stand the movie’s jarring anachronisms, heavy-handed fictionalizing, overblown characters, hyper-dramatized plot, and Americanized aspects of the film.

As an expert on Saint-George who has spent years researching him, his family, and their turbulent world during the era of chattel slavery and the French and Haitian Revolutions, I knew I’d need to put away my fact-checker when watching a Hollywood film. Indeed, Hollywood aside, some degree of fabulation about Saint-George and his life characterizes most works about him. As I’ve shown in my own research, stories about him were already being invented during his own lifetime—a facet of elite gossip and the culture of celebrity more broadly.¹ Historians of Saint-George have unhesitatingly advanced fallacious claims as well, which forego not only the strictures of classical empiricism but also the rigor of critical fabulation.² Fictionalizing may be particularly tempting because of the paucity of available evidence on Saint-George and his family. We have found no repository of “ego documents” from Saint-George: no correspondence, no personal diary, no other such intimate papers. Despite Saint-George having been a celebrity in his own time, historians are left to piece together fragments that offer a skeletal view of his life.

However, the lack of a robust archive—let alone the desire to produce a box office success—does not justify the blithe projection of fantasy or rehashing of harmful gendered racial tropes regarding Saint-George and Nanon. This type of overwriting of Black bodies, lives, and histories is a wielding of power and a form of violence that replicates the extractive, exploitative, and colonialist arrangements of the Atlantic slave trade dating back to the fifteenth century.³ In this essay, I intend to make a series of restorative gestures. First, I will present in brief what we do know about the life of Joseph Bologne, chevalier de Saint-George and his mother Nanon, weaving in commentary about their treatment in Chevalier. I will then offer my analysis of the film’s deployment of racial (and in some cases, racist) Black stereotypes. Lastly, I will leave Chevalier behind to make recommendations regarding other live and recorded media sources related to Saint-George, from performances and recordings of his music to operettas and documentary shorts. These references can support educators and members of the public interested in teaching and learning about Saint-George, his life, and his works.

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Joseph Bologne, chevalier de Saint-George was a brilliant, complex, and fascinating figure. He was a polymath of astounding talents, a celebrity showman, and a patriot—first for the French monarchs and then for the Revolutionaries who cut off their heads. He was born enslaved in 1745 on the plantation of his white Creole father Georges Bologne in the French colony of Guadeloupe. His mother Nanon was a Black Creole born in Guadeloupe who served Georges’s white Creole wife Élisabeth and daughter Élisabeth-Bénédictine. There is little trace of Nanon in the archives, as is the case for millions of enslaved and free Black women in slaving empires.⁴ We do know that Nanon was forced to follow Georges across the Atlantic with their young son. Upon reaching the metropole, Nanon and her son were faced with a paradox: they were simultaneously emancipated by Georges and plunged into a virulently racist society where Blackness signified chattel slavery. Joseph battled to shake the association with slavery throughout his life; Nanon was not at liberty to wage such battles. She lived a gendered existence as an unfree free Black woman in Paris, remaining cloistered in domestic spaces while Joseph pursued his struggle to win public recognition for his formidable talents.

Joseph came of age as a privileged European man of color in Paris, his wealth built on the backs of maternal family and friends who remained in chains. He wasn’t an abolitionist for most of his life, even though anti-Black racism took him down time and again. He moved to Paris with his parents in 1755. In 1757, his father Georges purchased the charge of “gentilhomme ordinaire de la cour,” securing an important mark of social ascension for himself and his family. In 1759, Joseph enrolled in the recently opened fencing academy of Nicolas Texier de la Boëssière where he quickly blossomed into one of the best fencers in Europe. As his reputation grew, so did the venomous racism against him, including that of other fencing masters. When Alexandre Picard of Rouen challenged Joseph to a match, he called him “la Boëssière’s mulatto,” a racial slur that evoked a mule and, through the possessive formulation, insinuated enslaved status. Joseph won the match, and his fame grew. This match is fancifully depicted in the movie Chevalier as having been presided over by Queen Marie Antoinette, who decides to reward him with the noble title of “chevalier.” This is patently false. The match took place long before Marie Antoinette came to France. Moreover, it was Joseph’s father who acquired the title of chevalier for him, by purchasing the charge of L’Office d’Écuyer, Conseiller du Roy, contrôleur ordinaire des guerres in 1763 and furnishing a false Italian genealogy as proof of nobility.⁵ The following year, Saint-George joined the gendarmes de la garde du roi at Versailles. He had reached the pinnacle of French society, though his racial attribution made him an “outsider within.”

Saint-George trained in violin and composition throughout his childhood and teenage years, although we have no record of who might have been his teachers. We do know that violinist, composer, and musical director François-Joseph Gossec dedicated a violin trio to Saint-George in 1766 and that in 1769 Gossec invited Saint-George to play a solo in the Concert des Amateurs orchestral ensemble that he conducted. By mid-1773, Saint-George had composed his first six string quartets. That same year, Saint-George made his triple début as first violin, composer, and conductor at the Concert des Amateurs, after Gossec left to direct the Concert Spirituel. In the years that followed, Saint-George went on to write concertos, symphonies concertantes, and opera scores. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was ten years Saint-George’s junior, and neither as famous nor as wealthy, but the two briefly lived under the same roof in 1778, at Louis-Philippe I, duc d’Orléans’s residence at the Chaussée d’Antin in Paris. It was Mozart who took music from Saint-George, lifting a passage from the allegro moderato of Saint-George’s violin concerto opus 5, no. 2 to incorporate into his symphonia concertante of 1779. No one should ever call Saint-George the “Black Mozart.”

Saint-George’s father died in 1774 and, in keeping with the law, his plantation and inheritance went to his legitimate daughter Élisabeth-Bénédictine. She and her husband helped Saint-George secure two loans in 1776 as he grappled with his new, more challenging financial reality. This was also the year of the famed opera scandal, when anti-Black racism cost Saint-George the position of director of the Académie royale de musique. Singers Sophie Arnould and Rosalie Levasseur, and dancer Marie-Madeleine Guimard weaponized anti-Blackness to eliminate him as a candidate, declaring to Queen Marie Antoinette that “their honor and delicacy of their conscience would never permit them to be submitted to the orders of a mulatto” (“leur honneur et la délicatesse de leur conscience ne leur permettraient jamais d’être soumises aux ordres d’un mulâtre”).⁶  Their playing of the race card succeeded. Faced with this dramatic gesture and the power of racial hierarchy, Saint-George withdrew his candidacy. The movie Chevalier dramatizes the episode but reduces its veracity and its potency. Instead of a manifestation of structural racism, the movie plot frames it as an episode of trivial romance. The film’s version has Saint-George spurn Marie-Madeleine Guimard’s sexual advances, which makes her want to destroy him (consider, too, the misogynistic image here of the dancer. White female characters are also depicted in objectionable ways in Chevalier). In the end, Saint-George’s downfall is chalked up to the liabilities of his own sexiness and romantic decision-making, rather than to white supremacy and anti-Black racism.

In reality, Saint-George experienced still more remarkable achievements and travails as he embraced the French Revolutionary cause. He traveled to London in 1789 with Louis-Philippe II (then styled “Philippe Égalité”), Brissot, and others, and so encountered abolitionist thinking on both sides of the channel. He served in the National Guard unit of Lille and defended the city when it was besieged by Austrian forces in 1792. That same year, he became the first African-descended commander of the first all African-descended unit in the French army, Julien Raymond’s Légion Franche des Américains et du Midi. He then prevented General Charles François Dumouriez from a treasonous attack against the fledgling French republic. In return for this patriotic gesture, Saint-George was dismissed from his military commission and wrongfully jailed as a traitor.⁷ After he was released from prison, he tried in vain to return to his command, only to die poor and virtually alone in 1799. The last ten years of Saint-George’s life, which deserve a film of their own, is not the main focus of Chevalier. Nonetheless, the movie’s creators miss the mark as badly as they did in reframing the opera affair of 1776, here domesticating Saint-George’s patriotic revolutionary fervor by turning his public life and engagements into a racial journey inward toward accepting his African roots. 

Despite any impressions to the contrary, Chevalier is not a historical film and should not be compared with biopics that aim to represent the lives of historical figures with verisimilitude. No, Nanon was not held captive in Guadeloupe, far from her son until George’s death in 1774. No, Marie Antoinette did not make Saint-George a knight due to a recreational fencing match. No, Saint-George was not “besties” with Marie Antoinette and Louis-Philippe II, duc d’Orléans. No, we do not have any evidence regarding Saint-George’s alleged affair and child with Marie Josephine de Comarieu, the marquise de Montalembert, let alone the murder of their purported child, which the movie plays up to elicit tears. No, the French Revolution cannot be portrayed as the American Civil Rights Movement in eighteenth-century costume.

The list of gross inaccuracies in Chevalier could go on for pages and is hardly excused by the tiny-print disclaimer regarding fictionality at the very end of the film’s credits. As I said in the opening of this essay, this treatment of Saint-George’s and his mother’s lives cannot be written off as simple creative license. It betrays negligence, entitlement, and exploitation. Notwithstanding the African-descended identities and inclusive ambitions of the film’s creators, Chevalier participates in a damaging social, political, and cultural system grounded in white supremacy. This is no more evident than in the film’s narrow, insulting depiction of Blackness itself.

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Chevalier’s creators spend the film’s duration reducing its protagonists to crude stereotypes. Saint-George appears as an amalgam of nefarious anti-Black stereotypes about African-descended men. He is hypersexual, a roving Black phallic figure who is irresistible to white women and a threat to white men. In an early scene, Marie-Madeleine Guimard (Minnie Driver) sexually propositions him, saying that the men of Paris “are all extremely jealous of your very large… ‘talent’” (00:18:29). Another scene (with zero historical basis) shows the aftermath of an orgy during which Saint-George seems to have ravished numerous women in one night, two of whom are still in bed with him (00:26:24). A host of other stereotypes are attributed to him too, including the trope of the tragic mulatto driven to drunken madness by his inability to fit into Black or white society, and that of the hot-blooded Black man unable to control himself who must be thrown out of white spaces by security (exemplified by his angry outburst at Queen Marie Antoinette during a palace gathering—this never happened, of course). Such stereotypes have been used for centuries to justify the debasement, abuse, incarceration, torture, and lynching of Black men.

The treatment of Nanon is no better. Instead of a woman keenly aware of the politics of race under French white supremacy, she is essentialized as the enforcer of all things African and Black. While socializing and speaking Wolof with Black friends in Joseph’s house, she and the group make fun of her son’s clothing saying “you look like a white boy” (00:49:29). In a climax of cliché, she tells Saint-George “you’ve let these rich white people soften you” (01:20:01), then brings him to a fantastical Afro-Caribbean street party in Paris so he can toughen up and find his roots by playing African drums (01:21:04). Soon after, Nanon braids his hair into cornrows (01:24:39), another stereotypical image symbolizing Joseph’s acceptance of his Blackness and rejection of white norms (he never did this in real life). Nanon’s role also embodies the archetype of the Black Creole woman—the “potomitan” in Kreyòl—that many Creole women and afro-feminists staunchly reject. In Chevalier, these stereotypes distract from realities of Nanon’s life that the film barely touches on: the many layers of violence, sexual and otherwise, that characterized her relationship to Georges Bologne and the horrors of slavery itself.

Peddling stereotypes of Blackness is not only irresponsible but dangerous in our time of continued anti-Black violence. Erasing the racial violence of history plays into the hands of those who would have current and future generations remain ignorant of the crimes of the past and the brutality and inequities of the present. When will Hollywood take a stand in this world where visual media play such a central role, to move beyond stereotype and tokenism in its treatment of Blackness? Can cultural producers and publics conceive of Blackness that is outside of American codes? Why refuse a more nuanced view of the incredible diversity of identity and experience in the history of the African diaspora from the era of chattel slavery to today? Though I do not plan on teaching Chevalier, to my mind, the only value in doing so would be to work with students on the above questions. 

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We can take courage until better films are made about Saint-George. We are graced with his extant music, which is an excellent entry point for interested scholars, teachers, and publics. A number of Saint-George’s compositions have been lost—particularly his operatic works—but many survive to demonstrate the unique, virtuosic style of his writing for violin. Recordings and live performances of Saint-George’s music, including the international Saint-George music festival held in his native island of Guadeloupe, have become more widespread, especially since the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. Modern recordings of his violin concertos, symphonic works, and his 1780 opera L’Amant anonyme (libretto by Desfontaines-Lavallée based on the comedy in five acts by Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis) are widely available.⁸ Saint-George’s compositions are wonderful resources for teaching, be it Music (musical composition, musicology, applied music), French, Atlantic, and Cultural History, or Africana Studies.

Equally useful for teaching and public history are representations of Saint-George, dating from his lifetime to the present. The famous painting (ca. 1787-1789) by Alexandre-Auguste Robineau featuring Saint-George fencing with the chevalier d’Éon, the latter in women’s dress, is an opening toward analyses of race, gender, violence, and performativity that one can calibrate for coursework with undergraduates or graduate students.⁹ There is also the beautiful portrait of “Monsieur de Saint-George” by British painter Mather Brown.¹⁰ Several plays, of varying quality, have been written about Saint-George since the nineteenth century. Two standouts deserve mention. First, is the recent operetta “By Georges!: A Day in the Life of the Legendary Chevalier de Saint-Georges” with book and lyrics by James D. Sasser and music and lyrics by Charles Vincent Burwell, commissioned and premiered in 2023 by the Lamplighters Musical Theatre group in San Francisco, CA. Sasser and Burwell brilliantly adhere to the light comedic dialogue and approachable music associated with the genre of operetta while telling a story that does not rely on exoticizing and sensationalizing Saint-George himself. Rather, and quite cleverly, the comedy and over-the-top spectacularity rightfully come from the bizarre cultural practices and fantasies of the white French aristocracy of the eighteenth century. The second production of note can be viewed on DVD. “Le Chevalier de Saint George, un Africain à la cour” is a spectacular equestrian ballet (design and mise-en-scène by Bartabas, film by Mathias Ledoux) performed at the Neptune fountain in the gardens of the royal palace of Versailles in front of thousands of people in 2004.¹¹ Saint-George would likely have approved of the grandiosity and rarified location of the show, replete with fencing, acrobatics, and pyrotechnics in addition to music, dance, and horses, even though he would likely have detested its title.

Other films are varyingly apt for pedagogical and public history purposes, from documentary shorts to feature-length documentaries. Short-form videos, such as those produced by the BBC and Royalty Now Studios, tend to contain incorrect information. I do not use these in my teaching.  In the category of longer documentaries, I recommend Le Mozart Noir: Reviving a Legend (Raymond Saint-Jean, 2003). While slightly dated in appearance and vocabulary, it intermixes documentary-style reportage, satisfying orchestral musical performances and technical commentary, as well as live action. It is the best film available on Saint-George and I use it in my classes, despite its flaws, fantasies, oversimplification, and omissions (that must be addressed with students). A more recent documentary entitled Saint-George: l’archet des lumières (Martin Mirabel, 2022) also alternates between interviews and musical excerpts, including string quartets, piano/harpsichord, and vocal music from the opera Ernestine (1777). Unfortunately, this film presents far too many falsities to be a legitimate teaching resource. Alain Guédé, a journalist who wrote the shockingly titled biography Monsieur de Saint-George: le nègre des lumières (Actes Sud, 1999), served as an historical “expert” on this French documentary and on Searchlight Pictures’ Chevalier, propagating biographical and historical falsehoods concerning the life and family of the chevalier de Saint-George. I do not endorse this film.

It is high time to do better in representing the multi-faceted histories, identities, experiences, and legacies of individuals like Joseph Bologne, chevalier de Saint-George and his mother Nanon. I fervently hope that such stories will grace screens big and small many more times, showing greater care and rigor in the future.   

Bibliography

Primary Sources (Written):

Archives Nationales, AN/MC/ET/XVI/756, Paris, France.

Friedrich Melchior Grimm in the Correspondance littéraire, January 1776, XIII, 491-492.

Primary Sources (Music, Film):

Joseph Bologne, chevalier de Saint-George, L’Amant anonyme. Performed by Haymarket Opera Company. USA. Cedille (2022).

Mathias Ledoux, Le Chevalier de Saint George, un Africain à la cour. France. 1 hour 12 minutes. MK2/Bartabas (2005).

Martin Mirabel, Saint-George: l’archet des lumières. France. 54 minutes. BelAir Classiques (2022).

Raymond Saint-Jean, Le Mozart Noir: Reviving a Legend.Canada. 53 minutes. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (2003).

Stephen Williams, Chevalier. USA. 1 hour 47 minutes. Color. Searchlight Pictures (2022).

Secondary Sources:

Gabriel Banat, The Chevalier de Saint-Georges: Virtuoso of the Sword and the Bow (Pendragon Press, 2006).

Pierre Bardin, Joseph de Saint-George: le Chevalier Noir (Paris: Guénégaud, 2006).

Marisa Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016)

Alain Guédé, Monsieur de Saint-George: le nègre des lumières (Paris: Actes Sud, 1999).

Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14.

Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2020)

Antoine Lilti, Figures publiques: l’invention de la célébrité, 1750–1850 (Paris : Fayard, 2014)

______, The Invention of Celebrity: 1750-1850, trans. Lynn Jeffress (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2017).

Jennifer Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2021)

Christy Pichichero, “Saint-George, Le chevalier sauveur de la République,” L’Humanité N° Hors-série, no. 1 (May 3, 2023): 61–63, https://doi.org/10.3917/hum.hs4.0061.

Christy Pichichero, “Race, Revolution, and Celebrity: the Case of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-George” in David A. Bell and Colin Jones, eds., French Revolutionary Lives (Palgrave MacMillan, forthcoming).

Notes

1. Christy Pichichero, “Race, Revolution, and Celebrity: the Case of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-George” in David A. Bell and Colin Jones, eds., French Revolutionary Lives (Palgrave MacMillan, forthcoming). On the rise of celebrity culture during the eighteenth century, see Antoine Lilti, Figures publiques: l’invention de la célébrité, 1750–1850 (Fayard, 2014) and its English translation, The Invention of Celebrity: 1750-1850, trans. Lynn Jeffress (Polity, 2017). ↩︎
2. The best biography is Pierre Bardin, Joseph de Saint-George: le Chevalier Noir (Paris: Guénégaud, 2006). For a biographical work more focused on Joseph Bologne’s musical career, see Gabriel Banat, The Chevalier de Saint-Georges: Virtuoso of the Sword and the Bow (Pendragon Press, 2006). While these are the two best biographies of the chevalier, they are both riddled with fantastical speculation and historical errors. On critical fabulation, see Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14. ↩︎
3. For more on this problem in the context of history writing, see Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). ↩︎
4. A few important historiographical works on this issue include Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts” (op. cit.), Marisa Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2020), and Jennifer Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2021). ↩︎
5. Archives Nationales, AN/MC/ET/XVI/756. ↩︎
6. This event and its precise language was reported by Friedrich Melchior Grimm in the Correspondance littéraire, January 1776, XIII, 491-492. ↩︎
7. For a short history of this episode, see Christy Pichichero, “Saint-George, le chevalier sauveur de la République,” L’Humanité N° Hors-série, no. 1 (May 3, 2023): 61–63, https://doi.org/10.3917/hum.hs4.0061. ↩︎
8. Of note is the 2022 Cedille recording of the opera by the Haymarket Opera Company starring the luminous soprano Nicole Cabell as the lead role of Léontine and tenor Geoffrey Agpalo as her secret admirer, Valcour. ↩︎
9. This painting is a part of the British Royal Collection Trust. For detailed information, see https://www.rct.uk/collection/400636/the-fencing-match-between-the-chevalier-de-saint-george-and-the-chevalier-deon#:~:text=The%20Chevalier%20d’%C3%89on%2C%20was,revealed%20them%20to%20be%20male. ↩︎
10. The British National Portrait Gallery has a William Ward engraving of the original painting. See https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw38399/Joseph-Bologne-Chevalier-de-Saint-Georges. This and other portraits show Saint-George’s skin tone shaded differently—sometimes lighter, sometimes darker—which is another opening toward analysis and discussion with students. ↩︎
11. Claude Ribbe, who has dedicated years to studying and publicizing the life and work of Saint-George, also had a part in this production. ↩︎