Marie Piquemal, the "Colonial Madam": Brothel Prostitution, Migration, and the Making of Whiteness in Interwar Dakar

On May 4, 1938, Marie Piquemal, a forty-six-year-old French woman, disembarked in Dakar after sailing on the Banfora from Marseille. Traveling by her side were four French women aged twenty-five to thirty who were venturing to Dakar for the first time.¹ In contrast to the younger women, Piquemal had been living on and off in what had been the capital of French West Africa since 1902, where she owned and ran multiple houses of prostitution. The purpose of her recent trip to France had been to supply La Poularde, an upscale house of prostitution, with white women to cater to the growing population of white French men serving in the colonial capital as colonial administrators, merchants, small-time traders, and various other professions. Although no colonial policy set restrictions on who could patronize brothels, Piquemal ensured the exclusion of African men from her business, regardless of their status as French citizens or colonial subjects.² In doing so, she erected an informal "color bar," providing white Frenchmen stationed overseas with exclusive access to white women at a time of increased stigma toward interracial sexual and conjugal unions.

This article traces the story of Marie Piquemal, a French prostitute turned "colonial madam" who capitalized on the commercialization of white women's bodies in colonial Dakar. It reveals the key role that brothel keepers played in the hardening of racial boundaries in the French Empire. White brothel prostitution served to alleviate French anxieties about the outcome of interracial intimacy—that is, the emergence of a mixed-race population, the métis, who could make claims to French citizenship—by providing a supervised locus where French men could satisfy their purported sexual needs without risking taking on the responsibility of father-hood.³ Despite the growing stigma around interracial intimacy, France's adherence to republican universalism precluded colonial authorities from banning interracial marriage or concubinage.⁴ Piquemal, by contrast, informally enforced a ban of nonwhite clients in her business—and did so brazenly, to the knowledge of local authorities. This tacit racial policy at once allowed Piquemal to maximize her profits by selling the illusion of French exclusivity in an increasingly racially segregated colonial port city, while simultaneously participating in the very production of whiteness in colonial Dakar. The making of racial boundaries in...