As with the other colonizing countries, France’s interest in exploring the Western Atlantic began by searching for a sea route to the Far East. That endeavor proved to be unsuccessful, so France began seizing land and extracting commodities for profit. In the 16th and 17th centuries France established colonies first in the north – New France, and later in the south – Caribbean France. The two colonies treated Indigenous Peoples in a similar manner, but the Caribbean colony included African slaves, and the culture there reflected that difference. See French Colonization Practices – New France for more information about that colony.
The Court of King Louis XIV of France developed a series of regulations in the mid 1600s to govern the country and establish acceptable religious, commercial and personal standards. One of the last regulations written wasn’t actually concerned with France, but with France’s Caribbean colonies. The Colonial Ordinance was drafted in 1685, issued in1687 and became known as ‘the Black Code’, because it was specifically about the Africans enslaved on French sugar plantations.
The Code regulated how a slave lived, was purchased and/or sold, the religion that he or she could follow, and how they would be treated by their masters. It established that slaves could not own property and had no legal capacity. The Code also governed their marriages, their burials, their punishments, and what conditions had to be met for them to be free.
The original Ordinance contained 60 separate statements addressing how slaves were to be treated and managed. That original version underwent continual revisions right up to the time slavery was made illegal in 1846. The document was divided into sections, each addressing a specific area of concern, such as Legal Status, Religion, Marriage, Children, and Freedom. The instructions were very specific in some areas, such as in the section entitled ‘Prohibitions’ which listed these rules, among others:
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- Slaves must not carry weapons except with the permission of their masters for hunting
- Masters must give food and clothes to their slaves, even to those who were sick or old
- Slaves couldn’t work, nor be sold, on Sunday or on catholic’s holy days
- A slave who struck his or her master, his wife, mistress or children would be executed
- A slave husband and wife and their prepubescent children under the same master were not to be sold separately
And in the Punishment section these were a few of the rules listed:
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- Fugitive slaves absent for a month should have their ears cut off and be branded. For another month their hamstring would be cut and they would be branded again. A third time they would be executed
- Free blacks who harbored fugitive slaves would be beaten by the slave owner and fined 300 pounds of sugar per day of refuge given
- If a master had falsely accused a slave of a crime and as a result, the slave had been put to death, the master would be fined
- Masters might chain and beat slaves but might not torture nor mutilate them
The Black Code was a comprehensive legal document designed to address every aspect of the lives of both enslaved and free African people in Caribbean France. It also helped preserved the authority of the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman church in the colony. By contrast, the Caribbean Indigenous Peoples were considered naturalized French subjects with the same rights as French nationals if they were baptized. They could not be enslaved or sold as slaves whether they were baptized or not.
French society embraced Enlightenment thinking about liberty and tolerance, but it also believed that people of African descent were property and were not entitled to become French subjects. The Black Code reinforced the French position that a slave, from a natural viewpoint, was a human. But, from a civic standpoint, was property.
NOTE: The Black Code was enforced in the French colony of New Orleans where a number of Caribbean sugar plantation owners resided.
Click here to view an English translation of a late edition of the Black Code.
Primary Sources: Encyclopedia of Black studies, Molefi Kete Asante, Ama Mazama, Thousand Oaks, CA, 2005; Slavery in the French Colonies: Le Code Noir (the Black Code) of 1685, Kelly Buchanan, The Library of Congress Blog, 2011