Source: Edict of the King, (Paris, 1687)
Article IX. Free men who shall have one or more children during concubinage with their slaves, together with their masters who accepted it, shall each be fined two thousand pounds of sugar. If they are the masters of the slave who produced said children, we desire, in addition to the fine, that the slave and the children be removed and that she and they be sent to work at the hospital, never to gain their freedom. We do not expect however for the present article to be applied when the man was not married to another person during his concubinage with this slave, who he should then marry according to the accepted rites of the Church. In this way she shall then be freed, the children becoming free and legitimate. . . .
Article XIII. We desire that if a male slave has married a free woman, their children, either male or female, shall be free as is their mother, regardless of their father's condition of slavery. And if the father is free and the mother a slave, the children shall also be slaves. . . .
Article XV. We forbid slaves from carrying any offensive weapons or large sticks, at the risk of being whipped and having the weapons confiscated. The weapons shall then belong to he who confiscated them. The sole exception shall be made for those who have been sent by their masters to hunt and who are carrying either a letter from their masters or his known mark.
Article XVI. We also forbid slaves who belong to different masters from gathering, either during the day or at night, under the pretext of a wedding or other excuse, either at one of the master’s houses or elsewhere, and especially not in major roads or isolated locations. They shall risk corporal punishment that shall not be less than a whip and a fleur de lys, and for frequent recidivists and in other aggravating circumstances, they may be punished with death, a decision we leave to their judge. We enjoin all our subjects, even if they are not officers to rush to the offenders, arrest them, and take them to prison,a nd that there be no decree against them….
Article XXVII. Slaves who are infirm due to age, sickness, or other reason, whether the sickness is curable or not, shall be nourished and cared for by their masters. In the case that they be abandoned, said slaves shall be awarded to the hospital, to which their master shall be required to pay six sols per day for the care and feeding of each slave….
Article XXXI. Slaves shall not be a party, either in court or in a civil matter, either as a litigant or as a defendant, or as a civil party in a criminal matter. And compensation shall be pursued in criminal matters for insults and excesses that have been committed against slaves…
Article XXXIII. The slave who has struck his master in the face or has drawn blood, or has similarly struck the wife of his master, his mistress, or their children, shall be punished by death. . . .
Article XLII. The masters may also, when they believe that their slaves so deserve, chain them and have them beaten with rods or straps. They shall be forbidden however from torturing them or mutilating any limb, at the risk of having the slaves confiscated and having extraordinary charges brought against them.
Article LIX. We grant to freed slaves the same rights, privileges and immunities that are enjoyed by freeborn persons. We desire that they are deserving of this acquired freedom, and that this freedom gives them, as much for their person as for their property, the same happiness that natural liberty has on our other subjects.
Source: “The Roots of Haiti’s Misery,” The New York Times, November 16, 2022
Between 1785 and 1790, Saint-Domingue absorbed 37 percent of the entire trans-Atlantic slave trade. Many kidnapped Africans died within a few years of being pulled from the putrid, crowded bowels of slave ships and branded with their new masters’ names or initials.
The survivors made up an astounding 90 percent of the colony’s total population, kept in line by hunger, exhaustion and public acts of extreme violence. Crowds of colonists gathered in one of the island’s fancy squares to watch them be burned alive or broken, bone by bone, on a wheel.
Sadistic punishments were so common they were given names like the “four post” or the “ladder,” historians note. There was even a technique of stuffing enslaved people with gunpowder to blow them up like cannonballs… according to French historian Pierre de Vaissière, who cited a 1736 letter from a colonist.
“O land of mine, is there any other on this planet whose soil has been more soaked in human blood?” asked the Baron de Vastey, a government officer in the northern part of Haiti in his 1814 work “The Colonial System Unveiled.”
“To France’s shame, not a single one of the monsters,” he wrote, singling out plantation owners and their managers by name, has experienced “even the slightest punishment for his crimes.”
France strengthened its laws forbidding the mutilation or killing of enslaved people in the 1780s, a sign of how openly cruel some plantation owners had become. A few years later, 14 enslaved people from a remote coffee plantation made the long trip to the Cap-Français courthouse to test the new laws. Their master, a rich planter named Nicolas Lejeune, had tortured two women whom investigators found in chains, their legs charred from burns. They died soon after, yet Lejeune was acquitted.
The only thing that will prevent “the slave from stabbing the master” is “the absolute power he has over him,” Lejeune wrote to the prosecutor, according to historian Malick Ghachem. “Remove this brake and the slave will dare anything.”
Source: "Grievance List (September 1789)," in World History Commons
JOURNAL, Containing the Complaints, Grievances, and Claims of the Free-citizens and colored landowners of the French Islands and Colonies:
Article I. The inhabitants of the French colonies are exclusively and generally divided into two classes, Freemen and those who are born, and live, in slavery.
Article II. The class of Freemen includes not only all the Whites, but also all of the colored Creoles, the Free Blacks, Mulattos, small minorities, and others.
Article III. The freed Creoles, as well as their children and their descendants, should have the same rights, rank, prerogatives, exemptions, and privileges as other colonists.
Article IV. For that purpose, the colored Creoles request that the Declaration of the Rights of Man, decreed by the National Assembly, be applied to them, as it is to Whites. Therefore, it is requested that Article… LIX of the Edict [the Black Code] dated March 1685, be rewritten and carried out in accordance with their form and content.
Article. V. With disregard for the law, humiliating distinctions have been made until now between White men and men of color, in whichever class Nature may have placed them. To bring an end to these distinctions, resolutions must be taken that irrevocably set the respective rights and claims of those Citizens who oppress, and those who are oppressed.
Article. VI. Consequently, the National Assembly shall be requested to declare:
That Negroes and colored Creoles shall be admitted, concurrently with Whites, to all ranks, positions, responsibilities, dignities, and honors. In a word, they want to share with Whites the difficult and honorable roles of Civil government and Military service;
That in order to achieve this, they shall have access to the courts. Additionally, they shall be eligible to attain, not only the highest ranks of the Judiciary, but it would also be just that they have the freedom to fulfill the secondary roles. These functions would include: solicitor, public notary, state prosecutor, court clerk, bailiff, and any other function, regardless of title, either in France or in the Colonies.
That they shall be promoted equally with their class peers, and may try for all military positions and responsibilities, such that their color can no longer be a reason for exclusion.
That the Companies of Volunteers, Negroes, Mulattos, and small minorities, confused one with another and mixed together, shall cease as a pretext to create a distinction which should not exist between free men. That from this day on, they shall be indiscriminately made up of Whites and men of Color, without, under any pretext, the latter being excluded. . . .
Article VIII. This article shall be replaced by a disposition that simultaneously consecrates the dignity of man, the honor and safety of women slaves, their rights and the rights of their children.
For that purpose, explicit interdictions and punishments shall be given to all Citizen slave-owners of either sex and either White or of color. They shall be forbidden, under penalty, to live as husband and wife, or even cohabit in any way with their slaves. When proof of this is obtained, a fine of 1000 livres shall be given to the poor, and the slave with whom the master had lived shall be granted absolute freedom.
Article IX. These same restrictions shall apply to any free man and a female slave belonging to any other citizen.
Article X. In the case that Article VIII or IX above is breached by Free men who have cohabited with Slaves and escaped punishment heretofore indicated and who have one or more children from the cohabitation, the woman, by the sole fact of being pregnant, and the children, at the instant of their birth, shall be and shall remain free, and be masters of their own person and of their rights. . . .