The reinstatement of slavery by Napoleon refers to a series of texts and military events between 1802 and 1804 that restored slavery in French colonies and France's involvement in the Atlantic slave trade during the early years of Napoleon's rule, thus repealing the decree of that had abolished slavery in all colonies during the French Revolution.
Among the notable texts signed by Napoleon were the law of , which maintained slavery in the colonies of Martinique, Tobago, and Saint Lucia. These colonies, returned to France by Britain under the terms of the Treaty of Amiens, had not applied the 1794 abolition decree due to the refusal of local French colonists, who signed the Whitehall Accord with Britain instead. Napoleon also issued the consular decrees of 16 July 1802 and 7 December 1802, which reinstated slavery in Guadeloupe and Cayenne respectively (previously two of the three territories where abolition was effective). In Réunion and Isle de France, Napoleon had already reassured planters of his support for the continuation of slavery there as early as March 1801.
From his coup d'état in late 1799, Napoleon was influenced by the colonial circles surrounding his wife Joséphine, a Creole from a family of slave-owning planters, but especially by his advisors, often drawn from the teams of Marshal de Castries, former Secretary of State for the Navy. Hesitating for two years, like his advisors, due to political and military risks, Napoleon gradually decreed slavery in all colonies, including the three returned by the British. In Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue, this reinstatement was enforced through three expeditions, two to Saint-Domingue, mobilizing two-thirds of the French fleet and several tens of thousands of soldiers. The armed resistance of former slaves was thus defeated in Guadeloupe after several thousand deaths but was victorious in Saint-Domingue, where nearly half of the French slaves lived, and which became Haiti in 1804, the second independent former colony after the United States. France was the only country in the world to reinstate slavery in all its colonies eight years after voting for its abolition, also in all its colonies.
This slaveholding policy of Napoleon is the subject of debate regarding its true ideological motivations. For in 1992, it was deliberate, while for others in the 21st century, it resulted from hesitations and opportunistic calculations.
This reinstatement of slavery was accompanied by the establishment of a policy of segregation and discrimination against free people of color harsher than under the Ancien Régime. In the colonies, this return to the pre-1789 system abolished the Decree of 4 April 1792 granting citizenship to freed slaves. In mainland France, the consular decree of 2 July 1802 (13 Messidor Year X) renewed the ban on French territory for them (and slaves), initially enacted in 1763 and 1777. The Civil Code was also amended to institutionalize a racial hierarchy, separating three classes: Whites, free people of color from before 1789, and slaves. Finally, interracial marriages were banned, fulfilling a long-standing demand of the colonial lobby that the Ancien Régime had previously denied.
During the Hundred Days, under British pressure and the Congress of Vienna, Napoleon officially banned the slave trade (but not slavery) through the decree of 29 March 1815. However, this abolition of the slave trade was not enforced as he was defeated two and a half months later at the Battle of Waterloo, then abdicated before his exile to Saint Helena, where he attributed his 1802 decisions to pressures from the colonial lobby. After him, Louis XVIII, Charles X, and Louis-Philippe officially confirmed the ban on the slave trade, though it persisted clandestinely. Slavery itself was not definitively abolished in the French colonies until the , adopted by the Provisional Government of the Second Republic under the impetus of Deputy Victor Schœlcher.
Maintenance or reinstatement
While slavery was indeed “reinstated” in some colonies where the 1794 abolition had been effective (Guadeloupe, Guiana), in others (Martinique, Réunion), it is referred to as “maintenance” because the abolition decree was not applied due to those colonies being under British occupation or resistance from French colonists. This term is contested by historians.
Several academics, such as Abel Louis and , both doctors of history, have studied this nuance in terminology. The notion of "maintenance" of slavery where it was still practiced is "questionable from a strictly legal point of view, as it confuses legality with effectiveness", according to Frédéric Régent: the February 1794 decree "was indeed applicable in principle to all French colonies, even if its implementation was delayed. Consequently, the law of May 20, 1802 re-established slavery in principle in the territories concerned", even if it had persisted in practice. For Abel Louis, "if the law of May 20, 1802 plays on the use of words, slavery is ultimately re-established".
Historians and Thierry Lentz, members of the Napoleon Foundation, speak of a “gradual advance towards the re-establishment of slavery”, to which Napoleon “was no stranger”, notably through the “violation of the ‘maintenance’ law by his own representatives”.
In the captions accompanying photos of an exhibition by France Télévisions on the subject, the term “official maintenance” is preferred in the specific case of the decree-law of 20 May 1802. However, according to Dominique Taffin, chief curator of heritage and director of the Fondation pour la mémoire de l'esclavage, who organized the exhibition, "it's about recognizing a history and integrating that history, the re-establishment of slavery".
Context
Rise of abolitionism
As slavery expanded in the 18th century through an intensified slave trade across the Atlantic, an international movement demanded its abolition starting in the 1780s, led by the Society of the Friends of the Blacks and the Quakers, bolstered by a century of British abolitionism. The first British anti-slavery petition was presented to the Parliament of Great Britain in 1783. James Ramsay, having returned from the West Indies, published a three-year investigation in 1784, supported by Charles Middleton, head of the Royal Navy, who wrote to William Wilberforce to advocate for abolition among other MPs. Thomas Clarkson published another investigation in 1786. Massive petitions for abolition, numbering 519, totaled 390,000 signatures in 1792, according to historian Seymour Drescher, a significant portion of a still-rural English population of 8 million.
The Anti-Slavery Society secured a British Crown inquiry in 1788, the same year that saw the work of former slave Cugoano translated into French, while another former slave, Olaudah Equiano, married an Englishwoman.
Political and legal context
An “anti-sugar” campaign called for a sugar boycott in 1791, the year the Haitian Revolution erupted, terrifying sugar planters united in the Massiac Club. Sugar production collapsed, and despite the rise in its price, the French Revolution abolished slavery nationally through the decree of 4 February 1794 (16 Pluviôse Year II), following its local abolition on the island of Saint-Domingue by the . The parliament received 653 congratulatory statements by mail, mostly from communes and popular societies, from all departments except three (Corrèze, Alpes-Maritimes, and Léman). Denmark followed in 1794, with the Jamaican sugar boom and that of Louisiana compensating for Saint-Domingue’s production losses by the late 1790s.
Despite the Whitehall Accord between Great Britain and French colonists (through which the latter pledged to cede control of the colonies of Saint-Domingue, Martinique and Guadeloupe to the former in exchange for the preservation of slavery) Guadeloupe remained under the French Republic's control, and in Saint-Domingue, Toussaint Louverture secured the armistice of 1798 for freed slaves, followed by an . French slaveholders fled, forming the : Louisiana, Jamaica, and 7,000 exiles in Cuba, who launched the Quasi-War and the .
In France, the Coup of 18 Brumaire brought Napoleon to power, with several figures from the colonial lobby in his entourage. On 25 March 1802, he signed the Treaty of Amiens with the British, recovering Martinique, under British control since 1795, as Napoleon sought to "revive the prosperity of the sugar islands", two years after securing the first step in the Spanish cession of Louisiana to France.
Economic context The British and American colonies were weakened by the American Revolutionary War, which saw the former’s per capita exports halved during the 1790s. The nearly 100,000 slaves freed by the British between 1775 and 1784 during the American Revolutionary War, many of whom fled or died of smallpox, altered the dynamics of slavery in the New World.
Before 1789, Saint-Domingue produced approximately 40% to 50% of each of the two major emerging markets, sugar and cotton, and nearly as much for coffee, employing over half of the French slaves, with a majority of foreign clients. The , or metropolitan commercial monopoly, was "always at the heart of the colonists' criticisms", who thought to abolish it in 1789, but it had been widely circumvented since the mid-18th century.
When he took power in 1799, Bonaparte envisioned a return to this Exclusif Principle, which had "already become obsolete in the last decades of the Ancien Régime", when Secretaries of State for the Navy, Castries and La Luzerne, tried to enforce it more strictly. For Napoleon in 1801, it could commercially save Saint-Domingue, as its commercial dominance had been overtaken by other countries in just a decade. However, in a private letter to Talleyrand, Bonaparte wrote that the goal of the Saint-Domingue expedition was not “commerce and finance” but “to annihilate the black government in Saint-Domingue”.
Saint-Domingue bypasses the Exclusif Principle The French colony of Saint-Domingue, which circumvented the Exclusif Principle reserving colonial production for the metropolis, was by the end of the 18th century the global leader in the three major colonial commodity markets: sugar, coffee, and cotton, exploiting nearly half a million slaves. The colony thus produced 40% of the world’s sugar and 60% of its coffee.
Secondary export crops (cotton and cocoa first, then coffee), which appeared in Saint-Domingue’s statistics in 1730, took off by mid-century. After the Seven Years’ War, lost by France, Louis XV chose to retain the West Indies and cede Canada to the British, neighboring a booming New England. To weaken their Jacobite opponents in the West Indies, London imposed heavy sugar taxes, giving French islands a competitive advantage. Three-quarters of the sugar from the French West Indies was thus re-exported to the rest of Europe, often smuggled on British ships, while sugarcane molasses was frequently smuggled to New England distilleries.
This dominant colonial position, achieved by Saint-Domingue in the 1770s and 1780s, is also reflected in slave trade statistics. From 1783 to 1792, a "golden age of the slave trade in Bordeaux", saw the city organize over half of its historical slave trade operations. The share of the ’s colonial shipping tripled to 12% by 1783, then continued to rise, benefiting from Saint-Domingue’s land expansion, with 70% of all voyages by Bordeaux slave traders destined for this location throughout their history.