Abolitionism - France

France

In 1315, Louis X, king of France, published a decree proclaiming that "France signifies freedom" and that any slave setting foot on the French ground should be freed. This prompted subsequent governments to circumscribe slavery in the overseas colonies.

As in other "New World" colonies, the French relied on the Atlantic slave trade for labor for their sugar cane plantations in their Caribbean colonies. The French West Indies included Anguilla (briefly), Antigua and Barbuda (briefly), Dominica, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Haïti, Montserrat (briefly), Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Sint Eustatius (briefly), St Kitts and Nevis (St Kitts, but not Nevis), Trinidad and Tobago (Tobago only), Saint Croix (briefly), Saint-Barthélemy (until 1784 when became Swedish for nearly a century), the northern half of Saint Martin, and the current French overseas départements of Martinique and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean sea. In addition, French colonists in La Louisiane in North America held slaves, particularly in the South around New Orleans, where they established sugar cane plantations. Over time in all these areas, a class of free people of color developed, many of whom became educated and property owners.

Louis XIV's Code Noir regulated the slave trade and institution in the colonies. Any slave brought to Metropolitan France would be immediately considered free. Although the Code Noir authorized and codified corporal punishment against slaves under certain conditions, it forbid slave owners to torture them and encouraged them to instruct them. It was instrumental in asserting that Africans were human beings, endowed with a soul.

During the Age of Enlightenment, many philosophers wrote pamphlets against slavery and its moral and economical justifications, including Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws (1748) or in the Encyclopédie In 1788, Jacques Pierre Brissot founded the Society of the Friends of the Blacks (Société des Amis des Noirs) to work for abolition of slavery.

After the Revolution, on 4 April 1792, France granted free people of color full citizenship.

The revolt of slaves in the largest French colony of Saint-Domingue in 1791 was the beginning of what became the Haïtian Revolution led by Toussaint L'Ouverture. Rebellion swept through the north of the island, and many whites and free people of color were killed, as well as slaves. Slavery was first abolished in 1793 in St. Domingue by Sonthonax, a French Commissioner sent by the Convention in order to safeguard the allegiance of the population to revolutionary France.