Depicting Racial Conflict in Charles Garand’s Georges le mulâtre (1878)

This article examines the way Charles Garand’s Georges le mulâtre (1878), a play based on Alexandre Dumas’s novel Georges (1843), forces theatergoers and readers to look at race and racial prejudice. Each act shows the division and divisiveness that racial prejudice imposes on the drama’s characters and suggests that it is only by overcoming the long-held biases built into the colonial setting can people learn to live together happily and fruitfully. France is represented as the utopian opposite of the île Maurice (Mauritius) where judgments about individuals are not made based on skin color and ancestry but rather on a person’s actions and character.