From Viticulture to Commemoration: French Huguenot Memory in the Cape Colony (1688-1824)

The Franschhoek Bastille Day celebration in Cape Province, South Africa, draws thousands of people annually to a festival of fine South African wine and traditionally French foods. The centerpiece of the festival is the Food and Wine Marquee, set against the backdrop of the Huguenot Memorial Monument. At the festival, oenophiles can taste wines from historic Cape wineries, many with French names such as La Motte, Grande Provence, Haute Cabrière, La Bri, La Couronne, Mont Rochelle, and L’Ormarins.[1] Not surprisingly, as is implied visually by the marquee set against the backdrop of the Huguenot Memorial Monument, the afore-listed wineries share a common founding history: the arrival of French Protestant refugees in the late seventeenth century, many from wine-making regions in France, the majority on seven Dutch ships between the years 1688 and 1689.

The French Huguenot Society of South Africa claims that the Huguenot Memorial Monument – inaugurated, not coincidentally, the same year as the brutal apartheid regime (1948) – stands as a testament to the noble and courageous character of the French Protestant refugees. According to the Society, the iconography of the monument highlights that these refugees came to the Cape to escape persecution and that, once arrived, they created a collectivity rooted in art, culture, agriculture, viticulture, industry and, above all, freedom of religion.[2]

As post-apartheid historiography shows in great detail, though, this claimed collective culture has little in common with the documented history of these first French refugees.[3] In fact, similar to refugees throughout the Atlantic world, the French refugees in the Cape Colony quickly assimilated into their host culture – Dutch culture – and within less than fifty years, only a handful of Cape elders continued to speak French.[4] Furthermore, documentation does not confirm any systematic attempt on the part of the first generation of French refugees to transmit French Huguenot culture to future generations.[5] Post-apartheid historiography on French Huguenots instead comes to the conclusion that the Afrikaner people – descendants of the Dutch and French Huguenot burghers at the Cape – resuscitated the forgotten refugees for two major reasons: first, to justify a posteriori the Great Trek (1835-1846) away from British control of the Cape; and second, to buttress their doctrine of white supremacy, moral superiority and exclusive control of a socio-political order that held as inferior indigenous Khoikhoi, San and Xhosa populations as well as the formerly enslaved Indian, Javanese, Malagasy, Mozambican and other East African populations.[6] Until the release of Mandela in 1990 and the fall of apartheid in 1994, the resuscitated and recreated Huguenot, emblematized by the Huguenot Memorial and enshrined in the nationalist historiography of the most prominent apartheid-era scholars, served to complement the image of the Afrikaners as a noble people, chosen by God, persecuted by the British, who rightly inhabited their promised land, the Afrikaner nation.[7]

When understood within the larger context of global refuge studies, as conceived by Owen Stanwood, it is not surprising that the "Huguenot" was resuscitated and refashioned by Afrikaners to glorify an Afrikaans nationalist identity.[8] As Bertrand Van Ruymbeke explains, across the Atlantic World, the French refugee immigrant story had mythical appeal. Cultures into which the refugees assimilated invented and deployed different facets of the refugee immigrant story to justify local and national historical myths and traditions.[9] Work has shown the symbolic use of Huguenots in Massachusetts, South Carolina, and Virginia in North America, as well as on a national scale in South Africa.[10] Less is known, though, about how the Huguenot was first resuscitated locally in the Cape Colony. This article seeks to fill that information gap. In this article, I argue that the French refugee was first re-conceptualized by a very specific segment of the Cape population – Huguenot-descendant winemakers – for a very specific cause: to assert their identity through a memorial that was to stand in defiance of English nationalism in the early nineteenth century in the Cape. While, indeed, this first commemoration effort never came to fruition, it likely served as a precedent for future societies, commemorations and memorialization attempts, the most notable of which is the present-day French Huguenot Memorial, a symbol of Afrikanerdom, in front of which the Cape Bastille Day celebrations take place today.

This study is the first of its kind most probably because, while historical studies on the French refugee arrival at the Cape are vast and span decades if not centuries, critical post-apartheid studies on French Huguenots are only now being published. Similarly, critical studies of French Huguenot commemorations and scientific economic histories of the Cape Colony wine industry are limited and more recent. Finally, the originality of this study also stems from the fact that it pivots around a list of contributors to the 1824 memorial attempt, published in 1895 by S.J. du Toit, a Huguenot descendant himself, which has not yet received critical attention.[11]

With regard to the structure of this study: Given that the history of French Huguenots in South Africa has received little attention in French studies, I first contextualize the French refugee arrival in the Cape Colony. To do this, I draw from critical post-apartheid historical studies, and especially from a recent in-depth historical account of French Huguenots at the Cape by Marilyn Garcia-Chapleau.[12] Next, I highlight noteworthy post-apartheid studies that conclude that no systematic effort was made by the original French refugees to pass down a "Huguenot" culture.[13] Then I introduce a study by Johan Fourie and Dieter von Fintel that convincingly posits that French refugee descendants did pass down savoir-faire related to vines and wine.[14] Using Fourie and von Fintel’s economic study of the rise of a Cape aristocracy as a springboard, I argue that, through viticulture and winemaking, members of families like the de Villiers ascended to a Huguenot elite that exerted much influence over economic and cultural policy at the Cape.[15] As I additionally highlight, the practice of endogamy among Huguenot winemaking families and matrilineal inheritance buttressed this ascension to elite status.[16] Finally, I posit that in response to major threats by the newly arrived British to the long-standing economic and cultural practices in the Cape Colony, but more importantly to the wine industry itself, influential members of the aforementioned winemaking elite proposed a first Huguenot commemoration effort in 1824 as an emblem of resistance.[17] These efforts, while unsuccessful, paved the way for winemakers and their descendants to successfully organize the building of a school-monument in 1851.

Background History

To frame the question of how and why Huguenot winemakers might have contributed to the creation of a French Huguenot myth, it is helpful first to situate the French refugee arrival in the Cape Colony historically. Desirous to extract the Dutch East Indies Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, henceforth VOC) from the political perils of mooring at trading posts held by rival imperial powers along the Atlantic coast, the governing body of the VOC, the Lords XVII, agreed to the establishment of a refreshment post at the Cape of Good Hope for its maritime route to Batavia, or present-day Java, Indonesia. To lead this initiative, it chose the surgeon Jan van Riebeeck. During the years 1652 to 1670, van Riebeeck successfully managed to establish a victualing post comprised of a fort and Company gardens. He also realized that ideal conditions existed at the Cape for viticulture and winemaking so he immediately ordered thousands of vitis vinifera cuttings from France and Germany and harvested the first grapes in 1659.[18] Challenges to his success became increasingly intense, though. These challenges included: increasing conflicts with the local Khoikhoi upon whom the VOC depended for the procurement of cattle; few European women; tensions associated with the enslavement of peoples forced into labor in the Company garden and on the Company farms; and the increasing corruption of VOC officials. As it pertains to this article, the principle challenge to the success of the refreshment post was the difficulty of producing enough fresh produce, meat, and wine, which was increasingly in demand, for both the Company and for the increasing number of merchant fleets from other nations stopping at the Cape.[19]

At the time of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, the refreshment post at the Cape had begun to expand into a Dutch settlement and was overseen by a Governor and his political council, who in turn reported to the Lords XVII. The Lords XVII conceived of a colonization scheme whereby recently arrived French refugees of the Reformed religion specializing in fruit, wheat, wine and/or brandy production would be sent to the Cape peninsula in order to fulfill the growing agricultural and viticultural needs. In return for free passage to the Cape, for cattle, and for “as much land as they could till” upon arrival, these refugees had to agree to the following: to take an oath of allegiance to Estates General of Holland, its Prince, its Directorate, the Captain and Admiral General of the VOC, and the Governor of the Indies; to bring nothing with them except for cash and “such luggage as was necessary for their use;” to earn a living through “agriculture, trade or any industry;” and to repay the land and resources attributed over a period of five years.[20]

On April 13, 1688, the first group of French Protestant refugees arrived in a convoy of six ships at the Cape of Good Hope as part of this official colonization scheme. In total, between 1688-89, 159 French refugees would arrive at the Cape. They were from multiple regions throughout France including significant wine-producing regions such as Champagne, Poitou, La Rochelle, Orléans, Ile de France, Languedoc and Provence.[21] Governor van der Stel enthusiastically greeted the fleet and settled the families in and around Stellenbosch and the Drakenstein valley, with some in an area that quickly became known as Franschhoek (French Corner), and others in nearby regions.[22] It was with the arrival of these refugees that wine making in the Cape Colony received the boost it needed.

Refugees, Assimilation, and Cultural Transmission

The French Huguenot Memorial in Franschhoek suggests that, in addition to boosting wine and agricultural production, these original French refugees transmitted religious freedom, culture, and a sense of community to future generations of Huguenots.[23] Indeed, upon arrival, the French refugees had hoped to be settled in neighboring farms around the same French Calvinist Church, which would have allowed them to create community, and especially religious community. After all, they had arrived with their own French pastor, Pierre Simond.[24] Problems with this aspiration arose right from their arrival. The most fertile plots of land had already been given out in Stellenbosch, so Governor van der Stel could only settle four families on the remaining plots in this region. He sent the remaining refugees to the new settlement of Drakenstein, a vast territory traversed by the Berg River.[25] Dispersed, the refugee families became effectively separated by distance. As a consequence, they immediately asked to be resettled on different land parcels, and they also asked for their own French congregation.[26] Fearful of the refugee attempts to create a separate French body within the Dutch Cape Colony, Governor Simon van der Stel and the Political Council in the Cape refused these requests in a serious rebuke to the French refugee settlers.[27] Additionally, in direct admonishment, Simon van der Stel wrote: “It is our aim that [the refugees] should become integrated with their fellow countrymen.”[28]

In the meantime, in June of 1689, the Reverend Simond had already written a letter to the Lords XVII and had received permission to establish a French congregation in Drakenstein.[29] This congregation would allow the French refugees to discontinue worship at the Stellenbosch parish, where the majority of Dutch settlers went. In response to the establishment of this congregation, Governor Wilhelm Adriaen van der Stel (Simon’s son) wrote to the Lords XVII and stated that he did not want any further French refugees to be sent to the Cape. In 1699, the Lords XVII ruled that they would continue sending colonists of the Lutheran faith to the Cape, “but no French.”[30] After the departure of the Reverend Simond in 1702, the Lords XVII officially withdrew permission for the use of French at church services and schooling in Drakenstein, and by 1723, the French congregation had become part of the Dutch Reformed Church.[31]

The maneuvering by Pierre Simond to establish a French congregation in Drakenstein might suggest that the refugees were, first and foremost, dedicated to building a French community around Reformed piety. As theological historians Philippe Denis and Randolph Vigne have underscored, though, there is reason to doubt the absolute devotion to faith that their descendants later claimed. As Denis writes: “The dedication of the French refugees to the Reformed cause was far from [...] unanimously recognized.”[32] Vigne highlights that not only had Dutch perceptions of the refugees shifted from favorable to unfavorable within a few months of their arrival at the Cape, but also the refugees were battling a schism within their own religious community. Simon van der Stel, the same governor who had welcomed the refugees to the Cape wrote, for example:

... under the appearance of having left their King on account of religious oppression, [the refugees] escaped from France to other countries, and especially Holland in order that, under the guise of zealous and staunch adherents of the Protestant religion, they might lead lazy, indolent lives.[33]

Additionally, Simond found himself at the center of a conflict with a refugee named Jacques de Savoye that roiled his parish, called attention to how he had become the wealthiest of all the refugee slave owners at the Cape, and eventually incited major infighting between defenders and opponents of Simond.[34] Between the conflict that existed between the refugees and Simond, and the anecdotes by the Dutch attesting to a perceived indolence on the part of the refugees, it would seem that, at the outset, the conditions were less than optimal for the building of a strong community around French Reformed faith.

A major consequence of the failure to build religious community was the disappearance of the French language. Adriaan van der Stel wrote almost gleefully to Simond upon his departure, as Randolph Vigne points out, that : “...by the use of Dutch in church and school [at Drakenstein], the French tongue will fall into disuse among the inhabitants of that community, and, afterwards, in the course of time, die out; this will take place more easily because there are no French schools.”[35] Nicolas de la Caille, a French traveler to the Cape in 1751, confirmed the relatively quick death of the French language at the Cape when he remarked that there were only twenty-five to twenty-six elderly refugees who still spoke French. ^[36] The French refugees had effectively failed in their attempt to transfer a durable French ecclesiastical structure to the Cape, thereby also failing in their attempt to build a French religious community. Complete linguistic integration became inevitable.

Linguistic and religious integration does not, of course, guarantee social or cultural assimilation. However, well-researched post-apartheid historiography shows that, as far as the French refugees in the Cape Colony were concerned, no concerted effort to maintain a social or cultural identity existed in the late seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth. For example, through a study of inventories of French Huguenot households in the Cape, Thera Wijsebeek confirms that the French refugees had completely assimilated materially into the Dutch Cape culture, and virtually no material trace remained of the French culture that they had left behind.[37] As Marilyn Garcia-Chapleau shows, even French Bibles, the material object par excellence that could be expected to be in almost all refugee households and passed down from family to family, were remarkably few. Her inventory confirms this material integration in her inventory of French Bibles in refugee households. Households revealed only seven recorded in the archives from 1700-1774, and two French psalm books.[38]

As another example of assimilation, it is worth considering marriage. When the French refugees arrived in the Cape Colony, because of demographics, they were forced to enter into exogamous unions with the local Dutch and German families. Of the 185 refugees that arrived at the Cape Colony (twenty-one died en route), there were sixty-one children (twenty-eight girls and thirty-three boys) and 124 adults.[39] Of the 124 adults, there were sixty-six single men and fourteen single women without children, twenty couples (eighteen with children), and a small group of widowed women, two of whom had three children each.[40] Clearly, the ratio of single men to single women tipped disproportionately in favor of exogamous marriage, and thus in favor of the dissipation of the French refugee culture.

The examples presented do not represent an exhaustive study of the question of cultural assimilation, but the scholarly works that they draw from are indeed thorough and highlight a stark absence of indicators of transmitted religion, culture and community. In the concluding chapter of her remarkably documented study of the French refugees at the Cape, Garcia-Chapleau looks in detail at multiple factors ranging from patrimony to an attempted Huguenot reading of the Great Trek and concludes:

Garcia-Chapleau’s conclusion provides a framework through which we can now examine refugee-descendant winemakers’ attempts to memorialize Huguenot culture in 1824. To this end, in this next section, I will present the rise of a Huguenot winemaking elite. Additionally, I will highlight how, contrary to the majority of French refugees and their descendants, this Huguenot elite came into power and influence through the inheritance of a culture of winemaking, the practice of endogamy, and the matrilineal transmission of hereditaments.

French Refugees and Wine

Fourie and Von Fintel argue that the descendants of refugees originally from winemaking regions in France fared much better socio-economically and enjoyed much greater success in viticulture and winemaking than descendants of refugees from non-winemaking regions in France who went into wine, wheat and/or fruit farming. Indeed, the VOC recruited a small group of French refugees, from winemaking regions, to come to the Cape Colony specifically for their viticulture and winemaking skills.[42] The most well known in today’s historiography include: Josue Cellier from Orléans; Paul Couvret from near Orléans; the de Villiers brothers (Pierre, Jacques, and Abraham) from La Rochelle; Pierre Joubert from Luberon; the Le Roux brothers (Jean and Gabriel) from near Orléans; Jacques Malan from Luberon; Charles Marais from Plessis Marly; François Retif from near Orléans; and Isaac Taillefert from Champagne.[43] In an economic study that controls for multiple factors including quantity and quality of land, scale and scope of slave labor, and institutional differences between France and the Cape Colony, Fourie and von Fintel convincingly show that the only factor that could have led to persistently high wine yields among these French Huguenot descendants, from the late seventeenth century and well into the nineteenth century, was the transmission of viticulture and winemaking skills. ^[44] They argue that the transmission of these skills, which led to prosperity, consequently allowed the most successful members of these families to ascend to a winemaking elite.[45]

While the transmission of skills was a likely precondition for the building of a winemaking elite, the practice of endogamy constituted one of the ties that bound this elite together.[46] The aforementioned French refugee winemakers, recruited to come to the Cape for their viticulture skills, enjoyed great possibilities for rapid success because very large gains could be had on small investments.[47] To guarantee that the wealth and influence amassed by the original refugees remained “in the family,” though, these winemaking refugees created strategic alliances with other winemaking refugee families, and encouraged their children to marry within this community or, as often was the case, to marry back into the family.[48] Indeed, this endogamy practiced by the small community of successful winemakers stood in stark contrast to the normative practice of exogamy by refugees outside of the wine industry. One could suppose that this practice of endogamous marriage could have been for reasons related to an elite desire to preserve French culture; however, given that recent historiography has shown no concerted attempt on the part of the refugees to preserve a distinctly French Huguenot culture, one is left to conclude that the reasons for the practice of endogamy were tied to the laws of inheritance at the Cape.

Dutch colonial laws stipulated that in the case of a patriarch’s death, inheritance should be split in two, with one half of the estate going to the spouse of the patriarch and the other split equally between the children. These laws created a framework for the empowerment of women and the matrilineal transmission of inheritance.[49] Given the disproportionate ratio of men to women at the Cape in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these laws also empowered women to select strategically the men with whom they would remarry and to dictate the terms of these remarriages.[50] One could easily envision, for example, criteria for remarriage to include agreements by which property from the wife, while controlled by the new husband until his death, would be sold into or given back to her original married family upon serious sickness of the new husband. When we consider this inheritance system in the context of Huguenot winemakers, genealogical studies point toward the conclusion that marriages were, before anything else, strategic alliances to acquire and conserve vineyards, with the goal of attaining and maintaining wealth, power and elite status.[51] Genealogies and inventories also point to the shadow influence that women exerted in what would otherwise be considered a purely patriarchal system.[52]

An illustration of the interplay between the inheritance of a culture of winemaking, endogamy and hereditaments transmitted matrilineally can be found in the history of the influential de Villiers family – a family originally selected to emigrate to the Cape for its knowledge of wine. Beginning with the arrival of the three de Villiers brothers in 1689, in this next section, I trace forward this influential family to show how certain members ascended to power through work in the wine industry and endogamous marriage within the minority circle of winemaking families. I then highlight how this power, and the family networks that sustained it, enabled them to contribute to the economic, political and social debates of 1824, and, substantially, to the 1824 memorialization attempt.

The De Villiers Family and Winemaking

Three brothers – Pierre de Villiers (1657-1720), Jacques de Villiers (1661-1735) and Abraham de Villiers (1659-1720) – arrived in the Cape Colony aboard the Zion in 1689. They all came originally from La Rochelle, and their family had previously worked successfully in wine for at least 100 years.[53] They arrived in Cape Town with a letter addressed to Governor van der Stel from the VOC’s governing council at Delft attesting to their solid knowledge of viticulture.[54] Before they married, they lived and worked on the communal farm attributed to them, La Rochelle, situated on the Cape Town side of the Berg River, across from Franschhoek (formerly known as Oliphant’s Hoek or Elephant’s Corner). They then went on to acquire three land plots adjacent to each other in Franschhoek, which they named Champagne (owned by Abraham), Bourgogne (owned by Pierre) and La Bri (owned by Jacques).[55] Abraham married Susanna Gardiol in October 1689, Pierre married Elisabeth Taillefert in 1690, and Jacques married Marguerite Gardiol in 1691.[56] Elisabeth Taillefert was the daughter of Isaac Taillefert, another refugee recruited for his winemaking skills, and the sisters, Susanna and Marguerite, were originally from Lacoste, in Provence, a French wine-producing region. While, generally speaking, marriage of French refugees arriving at the Cape tended toward exogamy, the de Villiers brothers chose wives who came from wine-producing regions, and who were likely familiar with viticulture.

All three brothers became successful wine-farm owners at the Cape. In addition to co-owning La Rochelle with his brothers and owning the farm La Bourgogne, Pierre went on to acquire Picardie and another farm. In addition to Champagne in Franschhoek, Abraham acquired three more farms in the Dwars Valley: Meerrust, Lekkerwyn and Boschendal, which he would eventually sell to his brother Jacques. Abraham, in fact, became the largest landholder in the Valley. In addition to Boschendal, Jacques, who increasingly became known as Jacob, acquired La Bri, Leeuwendans, Bakoven, De Goode Hoope, and Rhenosterrug.[57]

Additional corroboration of the wealth of the de Villiers brothers can be found in the number of vines and enslaved peoples owned (both of which were typically underreported to avoid taxation).[58] According to the opgaaf rolle (muster roll), the taxation records of the early eighteenth century, Abraham de Villiers possessed 6,000 vines in 1692. In 1719, the year before he died, he reported possession of more than four times his original vine stocks (25,000) and he had acquired six slaves.[59] Similarly, Pierre possessed 15,000 vines and two slaves the year before he died, and Jacques reported possession of 15,000 vines and twelve slaves.[60] To put these figures into context, Fourie and von Fintel explain that by the 1730s a small elite began to emerge because “the conditions at the Cape created the right environment for the formation of a slave-based economy where a small elite [could] attain[ ] economic and political power.”[61] Fourie and von Fintel describe this new-forming elite as those farmers in possession of sixteen or more slaves.[62] Jacques de Villiers clearly began to ascend to this elite with his ownership of twelve slaves who produced 5,000 liters of wine for him annually.[63]

While Abraham de Villiers amassed great wealth and corresponding power during his lifetime, with no able male heirs he could not transfer this wealth and power to any direct male lineage. In an example of matrilineal influence, it was his wife, Susanna Gardiol, and his brother Jacques who played a pivotal role in the building of his legacy. Abraham passed away in 1720 and left to Susanna his two farms – Meerust and Lekkerwijn – as well as a house in Cape Town. Two years later, Susanna married Claude Marais, who officially became the new owner of Meerust and Lekkerwijn.[64] Undoubtedly by common agreement between Susanna and Claude Marais, upon Susanna’s death, Jacques de Villiers, Abraham’s favorite brother, inherited both Meerust and Lekkerwijn. Almost immediately thereafter, he turned both farms over to Abraham’s daughter, Marie de Villiers (though it is Johannes Christoffel Schabort, her husband, who was listed as the new owner).[65] Marie de Villiers and Johannes Christoffel Schabort, who most likely did not have a viable heir, then transferred both of these properties back into a male de Villiers line, selecting Jacques’ son Jan de Villiers (1717-1796), a winemaker, as the heir to the two properties. This decision was made surely because Jan had already shown success in wine with the inheritance of Boschendal from his father in 1736 and also because Jan had married into another very successful wine family: the Joubert family.[66] It is from Jan’s line that an 1824 memorial contributor, Jacobus Stephanus de Villiers, descended, a winemaker himself listed as possessing 100,000 vines in 1824, the wine farm Lekkerwyn (Lekkerwijn), and twenty-eight slaves during the time he was owner of this farm.[67]

If we continue to follow Jacques’ line as an example of the transmission of the culture of viticulture and winemaking coupled with the transmission of an expectation of endogamous marriage, three of his four sons – Abraham (1707-1763), David (1702/04-1770) and Jan (1717-1796) – went on to work in wine.[68] According to the opgaaf rolle, Abraham de Villiers is recorded as owning 25,000 vines and six slaves on average between 1757 and 1762. In 1752, David is recorded as possessing 80,000 vines and twenty slaves, and his brother Jan is recorded as having 80,000 vines and eighteen slaves in 1762. According to Fourie and von Fintel, these numbers of vines and slaves would have squarely placed David and Jan in the Cape elite. Jacques’ son David married a de Villiers – Marie-Madeleine de Villiers, Pierre’s (1657-1720) daughter – and thus is an example of marriage back into the de Villiers family. In the second and third generations, a number of marriages back into the family exist too. Tracing the lineage of Jacques de Villiers (1661-1735) and his wife Marguerite Gardiol, Marq de Villiers humorously notes:

The endogamy that characterized the winemaking elite within the de Villiers family was by no means unique. While much work needs to be done to bring together the genealogies of the French refugee winemaking families in a comparative study, cursory examination of the most successful winemaking families reveals similar endogamy. For example, in 1825, ten members of the Joubert family were working in the wine business.[71] Two were unmarried. Of the eight remaining members, five married into historical winemaking families. We find the Marais name twice, the Retief name twice, and the de Villiers name once among the spouses. If we take the Le Roux family, eleven members were working in winemaking in 1825 and all were married.[72] Of those married, three married back into the Le Roux family, three married a Retief, two married a du Toit, and one married a Marais (Maree). Similarly, of fourteen du Toit members working in winemaking in 1825, over half married back into winemaking Huguenot families.[73] These families in conjunction with families from the other major Huguenot winemaking names in ascendancy, such as Malan, Rossouw, Theron and Taillefert, came to constitute an elite winemaking community with a shared history that would endure at least through the early- to mid- nineteenth century.

Access to elite status by successful members of winemaking families, not surprisingly, led to influence. For example, if we jump from the success of the three de Villiers brothers in 1689 to the state of the wine industry in 1824-25 – the same period as the first memorialization effort – we find thirty-three members of the de Villiers family listed and a total of 2,532,000 vines owned.[74] Ten members of the family are reported as owning 100,000 vines or more.[75] Of these de Villiers viticulturists, four sat on the Cape Wine Trade Committee, a committee appointed directly by Governor Somerset with the express goal of helping Cape viticulturists and wine-makers to improve the quality of their practices, and thus of Cape wine exports.[76] Additionally, de Villiers winemakers participated in the founding of the Cape Chamber of Commerce.[77] As a result, they also possessed the power to influence policy for all trade and commerce in the Cape.[78] In Jacques de Villiers’ line, one of the fourth-generation de Villiers family members and a contributor to the 1824 memorial, Pieter Hendrick, member of the Cape Wine Trade Committee and deputy magistrate as well as winemaker himself, even went on to found his own town, named after the de Villiers clan: Villiersdorp.[79]

While the de Villiers name dominates the wine inventories of 1824-25 and the influence that certain members possessed was impressive, it is important to keep in mind that the years 1824-1826 fall approximately into the fourth generation of adult Huguenot descendants. As such, thirty-three members represent a small percentage of the hundreds of fourth-generation descendants of Jacques, Abraham and Pierre, the original stamvaders, or progenitors. In fact, while a small group of de Villiers family members accumulated wealth, influence and prestige, and became part of a winemaking elite, many more fell into a struggling lower class.[80] It may be precisely the fact that de Villiers winemakers found themselves in a minority in their own expanding family that might explain, at least in part, their zeal for their heritage and commemoration thereof, as we shall see below.

Strategic alliances within winemaking families allowed for the construction of a Huguenot elite. However, select families outside of winemaking also gained access to the influence and power of these families, if these winemaking power figures had strategic interests in the non-winemaking families. One such family is the Faure family, from which major contributors to the 1824 memorial initiative also came. Antoine Alexandre Faure (1685-1736), the progenitor of the Faure family, arrived at the Cape in 1714 under a five-year contract with the VOC. First, he was assigned to work as a clerk at the Orphan Chamber, a place where all last wills and testaments were kept, where some inheritances were administered, and where orphans were overseen.[81] Then he was appointed Reader-Teacher of the Stellenbosch parish from 1719-1761.[82] Though he had little to do with the wine industry, his desire to hold a role within the Church most likely interested Abraham de Villiers, a religious man, who authorized the marriage between his daughter, Rachel de Villiers (1694-1773), and Antoine.[83] (Abraham was one of the “Commission of Four” that accompanied Pierre Simond to the Cape to petition for a French consistory in Drakenstein. Subsequently, he became one of the first Deacons appointed to the French Congregation at Drakenstein.[84]) As a result of his liking for Antoine, Abraham de Villiers and his wife, Susanna Gardiol, laid the financial foundation for subsequent alliances between the two families. They provided Antoine and Rachel with their first house in Cape Town, before they moved to Stellenbosch, and Abraham left an inheritance to Rachel, which she then left, by common agreement with Antoine, to the only son who succeeded her, Abraham Faure (1717-1792), named after her father, Abraham de Villiers.[85]

Abraham Faure took Antoine’s place as Reader-Teacher of the Stellenbosch parish and, as the sole heir to his mother’s de Villiers inheritance, had the means to empower two of his sons, Anthony Alexander Faure (1717-1792) and Jacobus Christian Faure (1769-1834), who would also play important roles in the 1824 memorial initiative.[86] Anthony Alexander (1758-1824) became a magistrate of Swellendam and committed handsomely to the 1824 memorial initiative.[87] Jacobus Christian Faure became a winemaker, in the tradition of his grandmother’s family, and was recorded as owning 77,000 vines in 1825.[88] Jacobus Christian’s son, Abraham Faure (1795-1875), a religious activist and successful intellectual, went on not only to publish the appeal for the memorial in 1824 but also to start the first Dutch non-governmental newspaper, Die Zuid-Afrikaansche Tydschrift, in which this initial call to memorialize Huguenot culture appeared.[89]

The visibility of the cultural, economic and political power held by the de Villiers family as well as the other elite winemaking families and allies of these families, such as the Faure family, crystallized in 1824 when Abraham Faure published an open letter to his readers entitled “A Memorial in Honour of the French Refugees,” sent to him by “descendants” of French refugees.[90] As we will now see, these “descendants” were not just a sampling of random contributors from the thousands of Huguenot descendants alive in 1824. On the contrary, every single contributor had a tie to the wine industry, whether immediate or more distant.

The 1824 Memorial Initiative

In the letter published by Abraham Faure, “descendants” of the French refugees announce the project to build a memorial:

After this appeal to memorialize, the authors of the letter in Die Zuid-Afrikaansche Tydschrift ask for financial contributions for the memorial from French refugee descendants and Dutch descendants alike, and they also makes an appeal for “memorabilia” from the families of descendants.[92] The following people contributed the following amounts, noted in the local currency of rix dollars: [93]

Of particular note in this register of contributions are the recurring names and their ties to the major Huguenot families in the wine industry. We can quickly identify the interconnectedness of the de Villiers, Faure, Marais, Joubert and du Toit names and their ties to the wine industry in the Cape Colony thanks to our cursory, albeit incomplete, examination of Abraham and Jacques de Villier’s lineage. As it turns out, of the fifteen different family names listed, all fifteen can be found in the inventory of winemakers during the years 1824-25.[95] Of course, this does not mean that all thirty-one contributors worked in wine; however, all thirty-one contributors had a family tie to the wine industry. Of the thirty-one contributors, fourteen were working directly in wine at the time of the 1824 memorial attempt, twenty-one were from historical wine-making families and nine contributors, or roughly one-third, would become appointed members of the Cape Wine Trade Committee, founded in 1826.[96]

Next of note is the value of the contributions in terms of real wages. Through either direct contribution or lineage (maternal and/or paternal), the name de Villiers appears ten times, Faure seven times, Roussow seven times, and du Toit six times. If we take into account direct contributions and lineage, the average contribution of a de Villier was 25.6 rix dollars, a Faure was 17.14 rix dollars, a Roussow was 17.80 rix dollars, and a du Toit was 20 rix dollars. The de Villiers family is not only remarkable for the number of contributions but also for the average amount of these contributions. In terms of real wages, the average contribution to the 1824 memorial was 21.29 rix dollars, which equaled 173.13 grams of silver or roughly the equivalent of seven days of labor for a “skilled European,” twelve days of labor for an “unskilled European,” eighteen days of labor for a “rural European,” fifteen days of labor for an “unskilled Coloured,” and forty-eight days of labor for a “rural Coloured.”[97] A contribution of 50 rix dollars – as was made by Jacobus du Toit, A. Faure Sr., J.A. Joubert and Pieter Marais – equated to just over double the days of labor mentioned above. The donations thus reveal the financial ease of the contributors. Additionally, five of these contributors were also members of the Chamber of Commerce as well as petitioners to the British Treasury in 1824, for reasons that I will highlight below.[98] While the call to “vivify” the memory of the forefathers might have been Abraham Faure’s motivation to publish the call for a memorial, given the predominance of contributions from influential winemakers and winemaking families, it is highly probable that the writers of the actual letter were motivated by forces and motivations intricately tied to the wine industry.

British reform and the year 1824

As I will highlight in this section, 1824 was a pivotal year, as it represented the year that the British Treasury reversed its 1813 decision, entitled Act No. 84, to cut tariffs on Cape imports, and especially wine, by two-thirds.[99] 1824 thus marked the last year of an economic boom in the Cape Colony before the impending market crash of 1825 and the ensuing deep depression.[100] Additionally, 1824 is also significant in that it represents one of the first years of a seismic shift in Cape economic and social policy that shook the winemaking industry.

In 1806, the Cape Colony, now under British rule, was functioning in chronic trade deficit, importing more than it was exporting. In an attempt to resolve this precarious economic practice, early British governors of the Cape identified the wine industry as the potential economic conduit to economic stability.[101] Two factors had to be overcome, however. The quality of Cape wine needed to improve dramatically, and Great Britain, targeted to become the major importer of Cape wines, would need to reduce tariffs on Cape wines so that they would not need to compete with French and Spanish wines, which were of superior quality.[102] Governor Craddock, who oversaw the Cape Colony from 1811 to 1814, attempted to foster wine production of better quality through the creation of an Office of the Taster of Wines. He accused winemakers in the Colony of succumbing to “profit of the moment,” which in turn led, in his view, to the “depreciation [of] and disesteem” for Cape wines.[103] As an incentive to winemakers, Craddock floated the possibility of Great Britain opening its markets further to Cape wines if they met strict criteria related to planting, harvesting, quality of production methods, minimum time for fermentation before sale, and conditions of storage.[104]

Governor Craddock’s incentives motivated the wine farmers, and Act No. 84 created the economic conditions for wine production in the Cape to flourish by allowing Cape wine to flood British markets. As a result, wine production doubled from 1814 to 1825, from 8,697 leaguers of total production in 1814 to 14,641 leaguers in 1825.[105] Specifically concerning exports to Great Britain, in 1813, the Cape Colony exported 200 leaguers of wine to Great Britain. By 1824, Cape exports to Great Britain had reached 6,672 leaguers. By 1825, though, after the revocation of Act No. 84, Cape exports fell by just over 1,600 leaguers, indicating the beginning of a market collapse.[106]

As if the prospect of the collapse of the wine market were not enough to shake the wine industry, Cape political, economic and social structures were also undergoing massive transformation. Up until 1820, the Cape Colony had functioned under Dutch mercantilist policies, which were characterized, on the one hand, by the alignment of the interests of the state with the interests of the merchant class, and, on the other, by “a poorly capitalised productive sector reliant on coerced labour.”[107] These policies led to rampant corruption, the institutionalization of slavery, and the concentration of power in the hands of the wealthy, amongst whom figured prominent Huguenot wine makers and their descendants. The Cape changed hands permanently, from Dutch rule to British rule, in 1814. However, Lord Charles Somerset, the first permanent British Governor, had little appetite for economic reform, given a social structure at the Cape that was deeply distrustful of administrations and that was equally distrustful of reform.[108] In 1820, though, the Cape Colony experienced the beginnings of seismic change. Conceived as a Tory ploy to show concern for unemployment in Great Britain, a British scheme promised fertile lands and grants of £50,000 to those who accepted to settle in the Cape Colony. Over 80,000 Britons applied, and 4,000 settlers were chosen.[109] This influx of British settlers fundamentally shook the economic and social foundations of the Cape Colony, because with Briton immigration came liberal social and economic expectations that ran counter to Lord Somerset’s mercantilist rule and to the entrenched Cape Dutch aristocracy which had benefited from his rule. The new settlers pushed for a capitalist system rooted in free trade and free labor, which ran entirely counter to the wine industry’s heavy dependence on slave labor and on privileges accorded by the Dutch mercantilist system.[110]

The beginnings of Boer migration provided an additional contribution to instability in 1824. J.P. Peires argues that the British economic policies of 1824-28, which represented a radical shift in colonial governance, could be held largely responsible for spurring what would come to be known as the Great Trek: the massive emigration of Afrikaners (Dutch-Huguenot-German Cape burghers) from the Cape to the northeastern hinterlands of South Africa, “in search of a place where they could govern themselves according to the ‘old Burgher regulations and duties.’”[111] Outraged at the prospect of the abolition of slavery, the institution upon which farmers of all types of agriculture relied heavily, Voortrekkers (Afrikaner frontiers people) vowed to leave the British colony and settle autonomously in a land where they could “preserve the proper relations between master and servant.”[112] While this trek only began en masse in 1835, many members of Huguenot families had already started to move northward and eastward in the decades prior.[113] To see the nascent migration patterns in many of the Huguenot family branches must have caused conflicting reactions in the elite winemaking families that were literally rooted to their industries but that, increasingly, like the more distant members of their families, felt the effects of an increasing anti-French, anti-Dutch sentiment that was taking hold at the Cape.

As Robert Ross explains, the British colonization of the Cape not only introduced political and economic upheaval in favor of liberal policies but also produced and consolidated “a phenomenon of enormous significance for the history of South Africa since 1795, namely the emergence of an English nationalism.”[114] This nationalism was rooted both in historical anti-French sentiment and a belief of the superiority of British liberal ideologies over the reigning Dutch mercantilist structures at the Cape. It also became, according to Ross, “the prime nationalism of South Africa, against which all the subsequent ones, whether Afrikaner or African, reacted, either directly or at a remove.”[115] Englishness became the measure by which what was acceptable in the Colony was determined.[116] Given this growing dominance of English nationalism and the escalating political changes and economic crises weathered by the French-descendent winemakers, it becomes next to impossible not to view the 1824 memorial attempt partially as an act of resistance. By resuscitating the French refugee, winemakers were effectively leveraging their position to assert a Huguenot identity against the growing British threat to their wine industry and to their emerging Afrikaner identity.

Regrettably for the organizers of the 1824 Huguenot memorial, the project never came to fruition. Not enough has been documented about the inner workings of this project to know why, ultimately, it failed. One of the reasons advanced by Reverend S. J. du Toit in 1895 had to do with the internal regulations of the Huguenot group that formed to carry out the memorialization. To be an official member of this group, the contributor had to descend patrilineally from a refugee family. Unfortunately for the group, it came to light that the Secretary and Treasurer both descended matrilineally from refugee families, which must have contributed to the political tensions that undermined the project.[117]

Numerous subsequent attempts were made to resuscitate a "Huguenot" culture through the creation of societies (1885, 1953), the opening of schools (1853, 1882), public celebrations of Huguenot "history" (1885, 1939), including the creation of a monument (1948) and the establishment of a museum (1967).[118] The scope of this study does not include analysis of the degrees to which the Huguenot winemakers’ 1824 memorial attempt influenced these subsequent Huguenot commemoration and memorialization initiatives; however, cursory inquiry reveals that it is plausible that at least three of the winemaking Huguenots of 1824 had influence on the organization of the next memorial attempt of 1851-53, a school-monument called the Sticht Simondium. This influence, as I will detail below, was wielded through the wine farm Vrede en Lust.

The Sticht Simondium Memorial

The depression that began in 1825, coupled with the abolition of slavery in 1834, brought crippling economic hardship to wine farmers.[119] A consequence of this hardship was growing poverty in the Drakenstein region. Recognizing the “huge lack in proper education that exist[ed] in Groot Drakenstein,” especially among the “poor members” of the Reformed Church, a meeting was called on May 15, 1851 at the house of Jacob Eliza de Villiers Louw to discuss the construction of a school.[120] The meeting organizers, eager to have the school double as a memorial to the French refugees, undoubtedly chose J.E. de Villiers Louw’s wine farm, Vrede en Lust (Peace and Delight), because it was also the site of “Oude Kerk Grond” (Old Church Land), the first Huguenot church of which Pierre Simond was the minister and Jacques de Savoye, the landowner.[121]

Three of the 1824 memorial contributors – half-brothers David Pieter de Villiers, Abraham Johannes Marais and Pieter Marais – all lived together on the farm Vrede en Lust under the roof of their mother, Maria Elisabeth de Villiers Marais, granddaughter of the French refugees Jacques de Villiers (1661-1735) and Marguerite Gardiol (1674-1716). In an example of matrilineal influence, after Maria’s first husband, Jan de Villiers, died in 1787, she strategically remarried in 1789 with another winemaker, Jacobus Stephanus Marais, thereby transferring the very successful farm that she and her first husband had run from the de Villiers family to the Marais family. At the time of the 1824 memorial attempt, David Pieter de Villiers, Jan’s son, had become a prosperous wine farmer like his father, owning among the most vines and leaguers of wine of all the refugee-descendant winemakers of that time.[122] Pieter Marais had just become the new owner of Vrede en Lust, which at that time was also one of the most successful Huguenot vineyards in the Cape, and his brother Abraham Johannes was doing reasonably well in wine.[123] Given that the three half-brothers had all lived on a site essential to the resuscitation of the Huguenot myth, namely the site of the first and only French Reformed Church, the only symbol of a possible collective refugee culture, and given that they had much to lose with the abolition of preferential British tariffs, it is not surprising to learn that they had been instrumental in the discussions to resurrect the Huguenot as both a symbol of resistance and of historical identity. It would furthermore be plausible to assume that, Jacobus Stephanus, who inherited Vrede en Lust from his father Pieter, felt compelled to promote the resuscitated 1824 Huguenot memorial so dear to his father and uncles by becoming a member of the board of directors of the Stichte Simondium construction effort.[124] This is just one example of potential direct influence of the 1824 memorial effort on a subsequent memorial initiative. Given the names of the major stakeholders in the project to build the Sticht Simondium (de Villiers, Joubert, Hugo, du Pree, and Marais), which all harken back to the major winemaking contributors of the 1824 memorial attempt, it is probable that there were also other members with direct ties back to the 1824 memorial attempt who were working on this 1851 effort.

While it is possible, and even probable, that the 1824 memorial attempt inspired in part the 1851 school-memorial, the two tributes to Huguenot memory were notably different. First, the economic contexts were stark opposites. The 1824 memorial attempt happened at the height of the wine industry, on the eve of the depression. The 1851 school-memorial project took place during an extended period of hardship for wine farmers. Next, the two memorialization projects differed in how they related to identity. The Sticht Simondium, named after Pierre Simond, was indeed a monument to the French refugees in name. In reality, though, it was conceived to be fully integrated into the Dutch community. Designed for poor Dutch families, the education was to be delivered by a teacher who was a member of the Dutch Reformed Church.[125] In contrast, the 1824 memorial attempt sought to emphasize the exceptional nature of Huguenot (winemaking) descendants by creating the Huguenot as an emblem of cultural, economic and political resistance and by affirming a clear historical identity in a culturally changing landscape. Rather than resuscitate a very particular image of the Huguenot, the 1851 school-memorial fit more into the mold of what Van Ruymbeke has identified as a typical relationship to Huguenot memory in the Atlantic World: an artificial glorification based on family attachment and the knowledge that, if (the winemaking) families that recreated the Huguenot did not keep this myth alive, history would sweep it away.[126] If the 1851 memorial was not exceptional in its presentation of Huguenot memory, it was likely because, contrary to the remarkable success of the Huguenot winemakers in the early nineteenth century, post-1824, the Huguenot winemakers were fighting to remain relevant.[127]

Conclusion

More than the actual commemoration attempts themselves, the commemorative work done by the 1824 winemakers and their 1851 winemaking descendants, taken together, demonstrate the organizational beginnings of what would eventually crystallize into the Huguenot Society of South Africa.[128] The establishment of the Paris-based Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français (Society for the History of French Protestantism) in 1852, and the subsequent appearance of national and regional Huguenot societies across the Atlantic World would eventually catalyze the crystallization of the Huguenot Society of South Africa. This society and its members would ultimately embed the Huguenot, originally resuscitated by the 1824 winemakers, into the specific attributes of Afrikaner culture held dear by Afrikaners still to this day. With the inauguration of the apartheid regime within a South Africa freed from British rule, Afrikaners would finally be able to recognize the superiority of their cultural co-founders. As represented in the Huguenot Memorial Monument, the Huguenots, and by extension Afrikaners, would be celebrated nationally as the ‘brave champion[s] of freedom of conscience and freedom of religion,’ the image of founding Calvinism, and the ‘chosen’ people of South Africa.[129] Of course, as we know, apartheid and the myths it was founded upon, were nothing but a pretext to justify the continued use of cheap ‘black’ labor on Afrikaner (wine) farms.

1. “Franschhoek Bastille Festival 2018,” Franschhoek Bastille, https://www.franschhoekbastille.co.za/ (accessed February 13, 2018).

2. “The Huguenot Monument in Franschhoek,” Huguenot Society of South Africa, http://www.hugenoot.org.za/huge2.htm (accessed February 13, 2018).

3. The most comprehensive and authoritative post-apartheid work on the French refugees is Marilyn Garcia-Chapleau’s Le Refuge Huguenot du Cap de Bonne-Espérance (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2016). See also Philippe Denis’ chapter entitled “The Cape Huguenots and Their Legacy in Apartheid South Africa” in Memory and Identity: The Huguenots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora, eds. Bertrand Van Ruymbeke and Randy J. Sparks (Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 285-309. Other studies include: Pieter Coertzen, “The Huguenots of South Africa in History and Religious Identity,” Nederduitse Gereformeerde Teologiese Tydskrif, 52, no. 1 (September 2011): 45-57; Pieter Coertzen, “The Huguenots of South Africa in Documents and Commemoration,” Nederduitse Gereformeerde Teologiese Tydskrif, 52, no. 3&4 (September and December 2011): 301-324; Thera Wijsenbeek, “Identity Lost: Huguenot Refugees in the Dutch Republic and Its Former Colonies in North America and South Africa, 1650 to 1750: A Comparison,” South African Historical Journal, 59 (2007): 79-102.

4. Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, “Minority Survival: The Huguenot Paradigm in France and the Diaspora,” in Memory and Identity: The Huguenots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora, eds. Bertrand Van Ruymbeke and Randy J. Sparks (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 2. Nicolas de la Caille, Journal Historique du Voyage Fait au Cap de Bonne Espérance (Paris: Guillyn, 1763), 170-171.

5. On refugee transmission of culture, see Garcia-Chapleau, Le Refuge Huguenot and 340-379; Wijsenbeek, “Identity Lost,” 79-102. On the Huguenot diaspora and Refugee assimilation, see Van Ruymbeke, “Minority Survival,” 1-25.

6. Denis, “The Cape Huguenots,” 300-03; Garcia-Chapleau, Le Refuge Huguenot, 379.

7. Denis, “The Cape Huguenots,” 285; Garcia-Chapleau, Le Refuge Huguenot, 394.

8. I take the term “global refuge” from Owen Stanwood’s The Global Refuge: Huguenots in an Age of Empire (New York: Oxford UP, 2020).

9. Van Ruymbeke, “Minority Survival,” 15.

10. Van Ruymbeke describes the symbolic use of Huguenots in Massachusetts, South Carolina, and Virginia in North America and nationally in South Africa in his two articles “Minority Survival” and “Lieux de mémoire et musées huguenots aux États-Unis et en Afrique du sud,” Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire du Protestantisme français (1903-2015) 157 (October – December, 2011), 597-618. Colonists in North America, for example, symbolically used the Huguenot to buttress the myth of ‘America’ as a place settled by people fleeing religious persecution and seeking religious freedom. Locally, citizens of Massachusetts, on the one hand, and South Carolina and Virginia, on the other, appropriated the Huguenot into two antagonistic American traditions: the pious Northern Puritan and the industrious Southern planter and cavalryman. In the case of South Africa, the Huguenot was similarly appropriated into national and local traditions. At the national level, “although the Huguenots constitute[d] less than 15 percent of their ethnic makeup, twentieth century Afrikaners ‘sp[oke] of all the Afrikaans settlers as having settled in South Africa to escape religious persecution.” “Minority Survival,” 15.

11. Du Toit, S.J. Die Geskidenis van ons Land in di Taal van ons Volk (Paarl: D.F. du Toit & Co, Drukkers en Uitgevers, 1895), 49. Fascinatingly, this study sought to condemn English nationalist histories of South Africa much like the 1824 memorial attempt sought to resist English nationalism. Similarly, this work promoted the French refugees as those who, from a religious standpoint, purified Boer culture, claiming that the first Boers “were not of the best sort.” (48-49)

12. Garcia-Chapleau, Le Refuge Huguenot.

13. Since, as I will argue, "Huguenot" culture is an invention by generations that came after the original French Refugees, in this essay, I refer to the first-generation French Protestants who arrived in the Cape Colony, and the children that they had, as "French refugees." I refer to future generations who self-identify as coming from French Refugee families as "Huguenots." My nomenclature does not strictly follow the timeline of the appearance of the word "Huguenot" because this study is more concerned with how a Huguenot culture came to appear in South Africa. Pieter Coertzen estimates that "Huguenot" came to replace "French refugee" somewhere between 1867-1873 (“Documents and Commemoration,” 310).

14. Johan Fourie and Dieter von Fintel, “Settler Skills and Colonial Development: the Huguenot Wine-makers in Eighteenth-century Dutch South Africa,” The Economic History Review 67, no. 4 (2014): 932-963.

15. Fourie and von Fintel, “The Dynamics of Inequality in a Newly Settled Pre-Industrial Society: the Case of the Cape Colony,” Cliometrica 4, no. 3 (October 2010): 229-267; Fourie and von Fintel, “A History with Evidence: Income Inequality in the Dutch Cape Colony,” Economic History of Developing Regions 26, no. 1 (2011): 16-48.

16. Since very few of the French refugees and their winemaking descendants have been the subject of biographical studies, I have had to rely quite heavily on genealogical studies, anecdotal family histories and a wine inventory to trace relationships and inheritances in this study. The wine inventory that I use was composed by D.J van Zyl: Kaapse Wyn & Brandewyn 1795-1860 (Pretoria: Hollandsch Afrikaansche Uitgevers Maatschappij, 1975).

17. Pieter Coertzen’s “Documents and Commemoration” is the only authoritative study on commemoration of Huguenots in South Africa, and I draw from this study.

18. Stefan Estreicher, “A Brief History of Wine in South Africa,” European Review 22, no. 3 (2014): 509.

19. Van Riebeeck initially attempted to solve the challenge of food and alcohol production by releasing a limited number of Company officials to become free farmers, or burghers, imagining that they would settle and richly cultivate small plots of land. The problem, though, as Fourie and von Fintel explain in their article “Settler Skills,” was that the burghers went on to become cattle farmers and stockholders, thereby thwarting van Riebeeck’s long-term agricultural plan. Quickly, then, as a result of the growing number of cattle herders, the Cape Colony found itself in dire need of skilled laborers who could grow wheat and fruit as well as produce wine and brandy. Johan Fourie and Dieter von Fintel, “Settler Skills and Colonial Development: the Huguenot Winemakers in Eighteenth Century Dutch South Africa,” The Economic History Review 67, no. 4 (2014): 935.

20. C. Graham Botha, The French Refugees at the Cape (Cape Town: Cape Times Limited, 1921), 3.

21. A complete list of the French refugees and the regions in France that they came from can be found in Garcia-Chapleau’s Le Refuge Huguenot, 397-616.

22. Estreicher, “A Brief History,” 511.

23. The Huguenot Society of South Africa, founded in 1953, describes the Huguenot Memorial Monument on their website in the following terms:

    With its simplicity and elegance of line the monument displays a historic French character. The female figure, with the Bible in her right hand and broken chain in her left hand, personifies the spirit of religious freedom. The fleur-de-lis (French lily) on her robe represents a noble spirit and character. She discards the cloak of suppression to triumph above the earth globe in its own spiritual space. Her gaze is fixed on a majestic vision of coming things. On the portrayed Southernmost point of Africa to where the frail ships transported the Huguenots, the symbols of their religion (the Bible), art and culture (the harp), the agriculture and viticulture (the sheaf of corn and grape vine) and industry (spinning wheel) are portrayed. 

    The three lofty arches are a symbol of the Holy Trinity. Above it the Sun of Righteousness shines, and above that, the Cross as symbol of Christian faith is mounted. The water pond, reflecting the colonnade behind it, expresses the undisturbed tranquility of mind and spiritual peace the Huguenots experienced after much conflict and strife.

    “The Huguenot Monument in Franschhoek,” Huguenot Society of South Africa, http://www.hugenoot.org.za/huge2.htm (accessed February 13, 2018).

24. Denis, “The Cape Huguenots,” 288-89.

25. Pieter Coertzen. The Huguenots of South Africa 1688-1988 (Cape Town: Tafelberg Publishers Limited, 1988), 87-88.

26. Coertzen, “Documents and Commemoration,” 303.

27. Coertzen, “Documents and Commemoration,” 303.

28. Denis, “The Cape Huguenots,” 289.

29. Denis, “The Cape Huguenots,” 289.

30. Coertzen, “Documents and Commemoration,” 303.

31. Denis, “The Cape Huguenots,” 290.

32. Denis, “The Cape Huguenots,” 293.

33. Randolph Vigne, “South Africa’s First Published Work of Literature and Its Author, Pierre Simond,” South African Historical Journal 39, no. 1, (January 2009): 8.

34. Denis, “The Cape Huguenots,” 293; Vigne, “South Africa’s First Published Work,” 8-12; and Randolph Vigne, “The Rev. Pierre Simond: 'Lost Leader' of the Huguenots at the Cape,” Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 65 (December 1988): 17-19.

35. Vigne, “The Rev. Pierre Simond,” 24-25.

36. De la Caille, Journal, 171.

37. Wijsenbeek, “Identity Lost,” 79-102.

38. Garcia-Chapleau, Le Refuge huguenot, 665-67.

39. Garcia-Chapleau, Le Refuge huguenot, 164.

40. Garcia-Chapleau, Le Refuge huguenot, 164.

41. Garcia-Chapleau, Le Refuge huguenot, 379 (my translation).

42. For example, in 1689, the de Villiers brothers – Pierre, Abraham and Jacques – arrived in the Cape with a letter from the VOC’s governing council at Delft, addressed to Governor van der Stel, which stated that “these persons have a good knowledge of laying out vineyards and managing the same, and thus we hope the Company will acquire their good service." Marq de Villiers, White Tribe Dreaming: Apartheid’s Bitter Roots as Witnessed by Eight Generations of an Afrikaner Family (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), 5.

43. Fourie and von Fintel, “Settler Skills,” 937; Stefan K. Estreicher, “A Brief History,” 504-537.

44. Fourie and von Fintel, “Settler Skills,” 952-53.

45. Fourie and von Fintel, “Settler Skills,” 953-54.

46. Gavin Lucas, An Archaeology of Colonial Identity: Power and Material Culture in the Dwars Valley, South Africa (New York: Springer, 2006), 78-79.

47. Lucas, An Archaeology, 78.

48. De Villiers, White Tribe, 40. This intermarriage can also be seen in the 1824-25 wine inventory in Van Zyl, Kaapse Wyn, 312-341.

49. Lucas, An Archaeology, 79.

50. On the enduring disproportion of men to women at the Cape during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Richard Elphick and Robert Shell, “Intergroup Relations: Khoikhoi, Settlers, Slaves and Free Blacks, 1652-1795,” The Shaping of South African Society, 1652-1840, eds. Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 184-230.

51. Through an overview of how the De Villiers and Faure families ascended to the wine-making elite, I will show two in-depth examples of the practice of marriage as a means to build strategic alliances in the next section.

52. Through the examples of the De Villiers and Faure families, I will also show the role that women and inheritance played in the amassing of wealth.

53. Alexander Pierre Faure, Michael John Harris and Albert Pieter Verner Faure, A Faure Genealogy: Book 1 (of 8): History and 3 Generations After Antoine Faure (1685-1736), n.d., “Die Faure familie in Suid-Afrika,” 38, http://faure.co.za/faurefiles/faurepdf/faure-book1.pdf.

54. Marq de Villiers, White Tribe, 5.

55. Lucas, An Archaeology, 78.

56. “Pierre de Villiers (1657-1720),” WikiTree, accessed August 5, 2018, https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/De_Villiers-198; “Abraham de Villiers (1659-1720),” WikiTree, accessed August 5, 2018, https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/De_Villiers-208, “Jacques de Villiers (1661-1735),” WikiTree, accessed August 5, 2018, https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/De_Villiers-114.

57. “History of A Faure Family Branch in Winemaking,” accessed October 20, 2020, https://www.faurewine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/faure-wines-story.pdf. This document is a summary of information on the Faure family, and the De Villiers family by marriage, found in books one and four (of eight) of the self-published A Faure Geneaology (2016), by A.P. Faure, M.J. Harris and A.P.V Faure. This same information can be found on the WikiTree pages of Jacques de Villiers (1661-1735), Pierre de Villiers (1657-1720) and Abraham de Villiers (1659-1720) referred to earlier.

58. By the turn of the century, the output of arable farms was closely correlated with the number of adult male slaves owned, as Fourie and von Fintel argue in “The Dynamics of Inequality,” 239-240..

59. Fourie and Von Fintel, “The Dynamics of Inequality,” Opgaafrolle (muster roll) statistical table created in 2010 upon which this research article was based and that was made accessible in an Excel file at the following link: https://www.ekon.sun.ac.za/jfourie/opgaafrolle_30-oct-2011.xlsx.

60. Fourie and von Fintel, “The Dynamics of Inequality” (Opgaafrolle).

61. Fourie and von Fintel, “The Dynamics of Inequality,” 256.

62. Fourie and von Fintel, “The Dynamics of Inequality,” 236.

63. De Villiers, White Tribe, 33.

64. Lucas, An Archaeology, 79.

65. Lucas, An Archaeology, 79-80.

66. Lucas, An Archaeology, 80.

67. Van Zyl, Kaapse Wyn, 319. Hans Friedrich Heese, Amsterdam tot Zeeland – Slawestand tot Middestand? ‘n Stellenbosse slawegeskiedenis, 1679 – 1834, (Stellenbosch: SUN Press, 2016), CD Rom, file number 5, “Slawe in Stellenbosch.”

68. De Villiers, White Tribe, 37.

69. De Villiers, White Tribe, 39-40.

70. In the wine inventory entitled “Vernaamste wynboere in die Kaapkolonie teen die eerste kwart van die Neëntiende Eeu,” 312-341, in Van Zyl’s book Kaaps Wyn, it shows that many spouses of French Huguenot winemakers are from other French Huguenot winemaking families as I will highlight in the next paragraph.

71. Regarding the Joubert family in the wine inventory: Van Zyl, Kaapse Wyn, 325-26.

72. Regarding the Le Roux family in the wine inventory: Van Zyl, Kaapse Wyn, 327.

73. Regarding the Du Toit fanily in the wine inventory: Van Zyl, Kaapse Wyn, 321-322.

74. Regarding the De Villiers fanily in the wine inventory: Van Zyl, Kaapse Wyn, 317-320.

75. Van Zyl, Kaapse Wyn, 317-20.

76. Van Zyl, Kaapse Wyn, 63-64.

77. Van Zyl, Kaapse Wyn, 128.

78. Van Zyl, Kaapse Wyn, 133.

79. “Pieter Hendrik de Villiers (1788-1853),” WikiTree, accessed August 5, 2018, https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/De_Villiers-1333.

80. De Villiers, White Tribe, 34.

81. Faure, Harris and Faure, A Faure Genealogy, 25.

82. Faure, Harris and Faure, A Faure Genealogy, 28.

83. Faure, Harris and Faure, A Faure Genealogy, 26.

84. Faure, Harris and Faure, A Faure Genealogy, 41.

85. Faure, Harris and Faure, A Faure Genealogy, 30.

86. Faure, Harris and Faure, A Faure Genealogy, 58

87. Faure, Harris and Faure, A Faure Genealogy, 33; Du Toit, Die Geskidenis, 49.

88. Van Zyl, Kaapse Wyn, 323.

89. Du Toit, Die Geskidenis, 49.

90. Coertzen, “Documents and Commemoration,” 306.

91. Coertzen, “Documents and Commemoration,” 306.

92. Coertzen, “Documents and Commemoration,” 306.

93. Du Toit, Die Geskidenis, 49. This is a table that I created drawing from data in Du Toit’s text. All the names and filiations are transcribed as they are cited in this text. I have added in parentheses the standard French spelling of the surnames in the “Claimed Huguenot patrilineage” column.

94. Jardine, or some variant thereof, is not noted in Marilyn Garcia-Chapleau’s inventory of original Huguenot arrivals.

95. Van Zyl, Kaapse Wyn, 312-341.

96. According to Van Zyl in Kaapse Wyn, 63-64, members of the Cape Wine Trade Committee included: J.F. Beck, Corns. Brink, Jacobus du Toit, Jacs. de Villiers, Pieter Hend. de Villiers, Pieter Marais, F.D. Roussouw, Gi. Jac. Roussouw, and Gabr. Jas. Vos.

97. M.I. Rayner, “Wine and Slaves: The Failure of an Export Economy and the Ending of Slavery in the Cape Colony, South Africa, 1806-1834,” PhD diss, (Duke University, 1986), 33.

98. Members of the Cape Wine Trade Committee included: J.F. Beck, Corns. Brink, Jacs. de Villiers, Pieter Marais and Gabr. Jas. Vos, according to Van Zyl in Kaapse Wyn, 133.

99. Van Zyl, Kaapse Wyn, 124.

100. J.B. Peires, “The British and the Cape, 1814-1834,” The Shaping of South African Society, 1652-1840, eds. Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 493-494.

101. Van Zyl, Kaapse Wyn, 51.

102. Van Zyl, Kaapse Wyn, 52.

103. Van Zyl, Kaapse Wyn, 53.

104. Rayner, “Wine and Slaves,” 14.

105. Van Zyl, Kaapse Wyn, 123. According to the Dictionary of South African English, a leaguer was a unit of liquid measure in the Cape Colony equal to “120 to 136 imperial gallons (545 to 620 litres), but said by some to represent 150 imperial gallons (682 litres);” “Leaguer (noun),” https://dsae.co.za/entry/leaguer/e04261 (accessed 23 October 2020).

106. Van Zyl, Kaapse Wyn, 123.

107. Peires, “The British,” 490.

108. Peires, “The British,” 472-73.

109. Peires, “The British,” 474.

110. Peires, “The British,” 490.

111. Peires, “The British,” 499.

112. Quoted in Peires, “The British,” 500. Here Peires cites the “Manifesto of the Emigrant Farmers” written by Piet Retief. This manifesto sought to express Afrikaner’s grievances against the British government, justify the Great Trek away from the British, and affirm an Afrikaans identity.

113. De Villiers, White Tribe, 55.

114. Robert Ross, Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony 1750-1870: A Tragedy of Manners, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), 43.

115. Ross, Status and Respectability, 43.

116. Ross, Status and Respectability, 43.

117. Du Toit, Die Geskidenis, 49.

118. Garcia-Chapleau, Le Réfuge Huguenot, 382-386.

119. Romi Boom, Vrede en Lust Depuis 1688: Passionate for 300 Years (Cape Town: TiP Publishing, 2011), 37, https://issuu.com/wild_magazine/docs/vrede_en_lust (accessed June 15, 2020).

120. Coertzen, “Documents and Commemoration,” 307.

121. On the school as monument to the French Refugees, see Coertzen, “Documents and Commemoration,” 307. On the history of Vrede en Lust and Jacques de Savoie’s ownership, see Boom, Vrede en Lust, 13. As Boom details, this wine farm enjoyed immense success under a century of de Villiers family ownership.

122. Van Zyl, Kaapse Wyn, 318.

123. Van Zyl, Kaapse Wyn, 329-330.

124. Coertzen, “Documents and Commemoration,” 308. Jacobus Stephanus Marais immediately sold Vrede en Lust, perhaps because of the major economic downturn in the wine sector.

125. Coertzen, “Documents and Commemoration,” 309.

126. Van Ruymbeke, “Minority Survival,” 14-15.

127. Van Zyl, Kaapse Wyn, 138-152.

128. Coertzen, “Documents and Commemoration,” 309.

129. Coertzen, “Documents and Commemoration,” 302; André du Toit, “The Myth of the Calvinist Origin of Afrikaner Nationalism and Racial Ideology,” The American Historical Review 88, no. 4 (October 1983): 922.