Ourika and the Chevalier de Boufflers

This chapter reconstructs the story of Ourika, a small child from Senegal who came to France in 1786 with the colony’s governor, Stanislas-Jean de Boufflers. She was one of several young children whom Boufflers purchased during his stint in Africa (1786–1787) and later bestowed on patrons and loved ones in Paris. Ourika wound up in the household of the Prince de Beauvau, Boufflers’s uncle, where she died of unknown causes in 1799. To understand Ourika’s journey from Africa to Paris, this chapter examines Boufflers’s ambivalent participation in the slave trade, the eighteenth-century culture of feeling, and child-gifting during the final decades of the Old Regime.