Logística de Exportación

In obverse manner to the physical boundary between islanders and colonisers, which was scrubbed away when colonial policy changed, the conceptual boundaries between the residents of the French Caribbean islands were solidified when metropolitan philosophies altered. Specifically, all islanders became the targets of ‘juridically enforced racial segregation’.24 When the import of slaves began, the regulation of slavery was the domain of

the slaves’ owners themselves.25 As time passed more and more rules were imposed on the

institution by the colonial centre in order to enforce or alter boundaries decided upon in France. The first major act in this narrative was the promulgation of the Code Noir. The Code was a royal ordinance issued by Louis XIV in 1685 to standardise the interaction of masters and slaves. It ‘incorporated the colonies and their inhabitants—slave and free—into the body politic of the ancien régime’; or, in other words, it sought to make the islands adapt to the shape and expectations of continental French society.26

The Code created and specifically defined the status of slaves and freedmen and combined ostensibly humanitarian edicts with abject restrictions of rights. Among its dictates, it stipulated that all slaves should be baptised Catholic; that no work, by anyone, was to be done on Sundays from midnight to midnight; that slaves required their masters’ consent for marriage; that slaves’ offspring belonged to the owner of the mother; that slaves

23 _{Aldrich, Greater France, p. 161.}

24 _{Garraway, The Libertine Colony, p. 197.} 25 _{McCloy, p.15.}

were not allowed to assemble under any circumstances and could carry no weapons, even sticks, or present sole testimony in court. One particularly notable restriction was the Code’s removal of a provision that allowed slaves who came to France to be immediately set free.27

The Code also regulated coupling and reproduction and within and alongside this set the conditions of freedom. In its provisions, children born of a freed slave and one still in bondage were only granted freedom if both parties married. In addition, the Code punished interracial affairs, but ‘only in the presence of offspring’; the production of mixed-race children now resulting in ‘a hefty fine of two thousand pounds of sugar’ and enslavement of the children unless the offender married his mistress.28 Nonetheless, the Code made

emancipation a move into an entirely different status, it ‘was the legal equivalent to “birth in our islands”, and therefore granted the affranchi—the freed individual—the same rights as those born in the kingdom’.29 Although affranchis were obliged to ‘show respect to their

former masters’ and ‘could be re-enslaved as punishment for certain crimes’, African origin, in and of itself, was not a target of discrimination.30 So, boundaries were moved, but ways

and means to navigate them still existed.

The Code was not followed to the letter and the eighteenth century saw additions to its legislature that firmed up borders between groups. Because of the burgeoning influence and power of mulattoes and free persons of colour, much of this legislation sought to keep their place in society fixed and below that of white colonisers, but in doing so, it naturally kept black slaves in their place on the bottom rung of society. 1711 saw the ban of mixed marriage in Guadeloupe; long-term residence of slaves in France was made illegal in 1738; in 1764 ‘people of African descent’ were no longer able to practice ‘medicine, surgery or pharmacy’; in 1765 that was extended to a ban from working in law; in 1773 mulattoes

27 _{Michelle Chilcoat, 'In/Civility, in Death: On Becoming French in Colonial Martinique', boundary 2,} 31 (2004), 47-73 (p. 52).

28 _{Garraway, The Libertine Colony, pp.205-06.}

29 _{Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (London:} Belknap, Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 61.

could not adopt the names of ‘masters or white relatives on the ground that such a practice destroyed the “insurmountable barrier” between the groups’; in 1777, in response to a lack of enforcement of the ’38 law, a new law, the Police des Noirs disallowed entrance into France for all non-whites; in 1778 ‘miscegenation was outlawed’ altogether and, in legislature at this time, slaves began to be referred to by their colour, as ‘“black slaves” […] As opposed to the Code Noir where slaves and free people were not further qualified as black or white’ creating an explicit link between skin colour and bondage; and a last, and particularly sweeping, law of note was that of 1779 which ‘made it illegal for free people of color to ‘“affect the dress, hairstyles, style or bearing of whites”’.31 Many other laws

changed during the eighteenth century. Although the Code Noir allowed masters to manumit their slaves without providing a specific reason, these powers were taken away, in addition, the eighteenth century saw laws that complicated elites’ ability to transfer ‘land, money, and material possessions’ to their mixed offspring.32 These more draconian laws, these shifted

boundaries, led to unrest on the islands, both in the black underclass and within the mulatto middle-class who especially saw their rights slip away while the rights of the béké class remained unchanged. The eighteenth century famously featured twin rebellions in the francophone world that were products of popular frustration both on the islands and on the continent. Both are directly linked: the French Revolution of 1789 set into motion events that culminated with Haitian independence and catalysed a period of frantic change in Martinique and Guadeloupe.

31 _{See Catherine A. Reinhardt, Claims to Memory: Beyond Slavery and Emancipation in the French}

Caribbean (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006), p. 34; and Dubois, p. 62. 32 _{Garraway, The Libertine Colony, p.213.}

Closing Borders: The French Caribbean in the Revolutionary Era