Imagined as a colony of settlement and an entrepôt of trade, France’s first outpost in the Indian Ocean began in 1642 in a region of south-east Madagascar called Anosy. The settlement lasted 32 years. The abandonment of Fort Dauphin, as it become known, in 1674 and the shift of French Indian Ocean empire toward South Asia and île de Bourbon has obscured the scale, nature and astounding impact of the ‘lost’ French settlement. Because Fort Dauphin was conceived as a colony of European settlement, the composition of its population was a leading concern for all who invested in, administered, religiously supervised and commented upon it. This article focuses on certain dimensions of that preoccupation: marriage, sex and household formation during the 1660s, when the colony’s European population was largest and when Fort Dauphin was ruled by the 1664 French East India Company. War and raids represented one key mode of Fort Dauphin’s engagement with the indigenous people of Madagascar. Sex and marriage represented another, extraordinary for the violent, unstable environment in which they transpired. Many French men at Fort Dauphin engaged in sexual relationships with free and enslaved Malagasy women. While dimensions of Anosy’s sexual culture were unfamiliar to them, they soon adapted and became integrated into local circuits of friendship and marriage. The households formed from these unions played a key role in recycling plunder taken in war into the local networks in which French men became embedded. Sexual and companionate relationships in Fort Dauphin emerge as important sites for understanding both the colony and later French empire in the Indian Ocean.

1642 年，法国在印度洋的第一个前哨被想象为一个定居点和一个贸易转口点，始于马达加斯加东南部的一个名为 Anosy 的地区。和解持续了 32 年。众所周知，多芬堡在 1674 年被废弃，法属印度洋帝国向南亚和波旁岛转移，掩盖了“失落”的法国定居点的规模、性质和惊人的影响。由于多芬堡被认为是欧洲定居点的殖民地，因此其人口构成是所有投资、管理、宗教监督和评论的人最关心的问题。本文重点关注这种关注的某些方面：1660 年代的婚姻、性和家庭形成，当殖民地的欧洲人口最多时，多芬堡由 1664 年法国东印度公司统治。战争和袭击是多芬堡与马达加斯加原住民接触的一种关键模式。性和婚姻代表了另一个，对于他们所发生的暴力、不稳定的环境来说是非同寻常的。许多法国男子在多芬堡与自由和被奴役的马达加斯加妇女发生性关系。虽然阿诺西的性文化对他们来说并不熟悉，但他们很快就适应并融入了当地的友谊和婚姻回路。由这些工会组成的家庭在将战争中掠夺的战利品回收到法国人融入的当地网络中发挥了关键作用。