From the outset, French law has sought to regulate the brutal power of masters. From 1928, a judicial reform allowing them to be tried for their abuses led to a slight increase in the number of trials during the last two decades of the slavery era.
In the report of the Affaire Vallentin, 15 enslaved individuals testified, nine of them openly disclosing the cruelties they endured and blamed their enslaver. These are such Valuable and courageous words, spoken in fear, in front of a white jury and with their backs to a hostile crowd, just a few steps away from a master confident of his impunity.
Since 1685, the Code Noir has ruled the lives of slaves. Slaves were defined not as persons, but as the property of their masters, unable to own anything that did not belong to them, and naturally denied fundamental rights. They were deprived of their name, civil status, filiation or transmission … Punishments of death, mutilation and shackling were inflicted on them at the slightest deviation, and they were left defenceless to the abuses of their masters. Over time, some of these regulations were blunted or fell into disuse. In Guadeloupe, the ordinances of 1810, drafted under English influence, dusted off the Code Noir without fundamentally changing the situation
«If, as in the Code Noir, we no longer find in these regulations burning iron cages, pyres and cut hocks, aren’t the penal sanctions for the slightest misdemeanours still lashes or ropes, branding, the straitjacket, irons or death? (…) Compare this appalling severity with the complete absence of any penal provision against the crimes of whites against slaves, and you will see that it is impunity consecrated in favour of the most shameful and revolting nepotism”.
Xavier Tanc. De l’esclavage aux colonies françaises et spécialement à la Guadeloupe. Paris. 1832.
The ordinances of 1829 opened a new era, introducing a new judicial organisation, a colonial penal code and a code of criminal instruction. The colonial penal code specified that crimes and other offences committed by slaves, as well as those committed by free persons against slaves, would be determined and punished by special ordinances; but that in the meantime, crimes and misdemeanours committed by slaves should be punished in accordance with existing legislation.
From 1829 onwards, slaves were prosecuted in the same way as free people, brought before the same courts and judged according to the French Code, but punished according to the old legislation inherited from the Code Noir.
The judicial reform introduced the beginnings of an enquiry system, compelled the courts to give reasons for their decisions and set up a justice of the peace to moderate the abuses of slave masters. In 1840, with the institution of patronage, public prosecutors or their substitutes were required to visit plantations on a regular basis to ensure compliance with regulations and record slaves’ complaints.
But in the reality of the situation, there was no guarantee that slaves would be in a position to make use of these new rights. How could they lodge a complaint against their master, how could they trust an itinerant magistrate, how could they raise their voice in a court of law, how could they oppose the word of the whites and that of the commander? What guarantees, what protection, what consequences? Because once the master is acquitted, it’s back to the plantation, back to life as a slave, back to the whip of the commander. Faced with such absolute vulnerability, we can measure the courage and the inestimable value of these words of Negroes.
To go further : Göltl, T. (2024). Trials of Enslavers in Former French Colonies in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Testimonies of the Enslaved between Gratitude and Fear. Slavery & Abolition, 45(1), 117–134. https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2023.2260186