Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges
The Father of Black Classical Music
Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges
1745-1799
Chevalier was born Joseph Bologne on the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe in 1745. His father, Georges Bologne, was a minor French nobleman and plantation owner there; his mother, Anne, was a young enslaved Black woman of Senegalese descent. Most children born in such circumstances were, of course, studiously ignored by their fathers; by contrast, young Joseph was packed away to boarding school in Paris at the age of seven, and two years later his both his parents followed him to Paris, where they set up house in a spacious apartment on the left bank. France’s “Black Laws” forbade his parents to marry and prevented Joseph from inheriting his father’s title, but the young man was raised as a gentleman and mastered the arts of swordsmanship and horsemanship.
He gained his first fame as a fencer, defeating some of France’s most celebrated swordsmen while still just a teenager and becoming a hero to Paris’ nascent anti-slavery movement by casually conquering powerful opponents who peppered him with racist insults. Louis XV became such an admirer that in 1766 he made the young man an officer of the Royal Bodyguard and bestowed on him the honorific “Chevalier de Saint-Georges,” after the estate on which he was born. His grace and charm made him a favorite of the ladies of Versailles, but the Black Laws prevented him from ever marrying a woman of his own social station.
Remarkably — and evidently in his spare time at military school — Jospeh managed to become a virtuoso violinist. The eminent Parisian composer Gossec dedicated a set of string trios to him in 1766, and in 1769 Parisian high society was amazed when, in Gossec’s new orchestra, the Concert des Amateurs, they saw in the first violin section the celebrated swordsman St.-Georges. He created a sensation three years later when he first appeared as a soloist with the orchestra, “enrapturing particularly the feminine members of the audience” in concertos of his own composition. The next year he assumed leadership of the orchestra, and when in 1776 a new director of the Paris Opera was needed, St.-Georges was the obvious choice.
Three of the Opera’s leading ladies, however, begged to differ. They petitioned Queen Marie Antoinette to the effect that their sensibilities would prevent them from receiving direction from a mere “mulatto,” and St.-Georges withdrew his name to avoid involving the queen in a scandal. He returned to the Concert des Amateurs, honing that group until they were recognized as one of Europe’s best ensembles, until it went bankrupt in 1781: in that year St. George’s friend Beaumarchais, playwright of both The Marriage of Figaro and The Barber of Seville, persuaded the orchestra’s backers to fill fifty ships with armaments and send them to the American revolutionaries. Beaumarchais was under the impression that the grateful Americans would refill the ships with rice and grain to be sold in Europe, but our Founding Fathers sent the ships back empty, a number of liberal-minded and previously-wealthy Parisians were ruined, and the Concert lost its funding.
Like his contemporary, Mozart, St.-Georges had joined the Freemasons in the 1770’s, and it was wealthy Masons who saw to it that he landed on his feet with a new orchestra of his own. He commissioned and premiered Haydn’s six “Paris” symphonies in 1785 — only to see his career take another sudden turn.
His old military-school chum Philippe of Orléans was by that time a duke, the second-most powerful man in France, and the leader of what was then the political opposition to Louis XVI’s absolute monarchy. Louis, sensing his own vulnerability, sought to triangulate by sending St.-Georges on a diplomatic mission to London, where the Prince of Wales had long expressed desire to meet and learn from the celebrated swordsman and virtuoso. Not one to be outmaneuvered by a mere king, St.-Georges became a great friend of the Prince, courted him as a supporter of Philippe’s plan for a constitutional monarchy, and built relations between France’s small but vocal anti-slavery lobby and England’s more-developed Abolitionist movement.
When in 1789 the Revolution came, St.-Georges found himself sufficiently marginalized by his time in London that he was unable to propel the politically moderate Phillippe into a position of power. And while St.-Georges may have had misgivings about the revolutionaries’ increasing radicalism, he could not but have been delighted when they rescinded the Black Laws and he finally had the full rights of a French citizen. So when Austria massed troops for an invasion a year later, he was happy to assume command of a newly-created regiment of Black soldiers, the Légion St.-Georges.
St.-Georges’ regiment served bravely, but as the longtime confidante of the hated Philippe of Orléans he was viewed with suspicion by the increasingly bloodthirsty revolutionaries. Betrayed by his lieutenant Alexandre Dumas père (father of the Three Musketeers author), St.-Georges found himself imprisoned during the worst of Robespierre’s reign of terror, but in 1794, before the composer could be executed, Robespierre himself was led to the guillotine, the revolutionary fever broke, and St.-Georges was released. He immediately led a delegation to Haiti, in an unsuccessful attempt to mediate the bloody slave rebellion there, ultimately wound up back in Paris at the head of another orchestra in 1796, and finally died of bladder cancer in 1799. It’s unarguably the stuff of movies, and in fact Disney subsidiary Searchlight Pictures will release a biopic in April 21, 2023.