The Words of Negroes
Slaves' Words, Distant Voices
The judicial archives of the last two decades of slavery contain a precious and unknown source: the transcriptions of the words of slaves testifying at their master’s trial. Those words, pronounced facing the white justice and facing their own masters, translated from Creole by a court clerk in French, are the only trace, the only echo, the only “recording” that has come down to us of the voices of French slaves.
While we don’t have autobiographical accounts of former slaves in France, as is the case in the United States and the British colonies, court archives hold a treasure trove: the statements made by slaves in court and reported in the press. Indeed, in the last decades of the slavery era, French law authorised slaves to testify against their masters, to complain to prosecutors, and itinerant magistrates even toured the plantations to collect their grievances. Better still, trials were organised, and masters were brought to justice and publicly confronted…
Yet this was hardly a matter of justice: the number of such trials increased from the 1830s onwards, in parallel with the political evolution of the July Monarchy, which sought to improve the condition of slaves through legal intervention rather than demanding immediate abolition.
It’s hard to imagine today how the notions of justice, law and slavery can be reconciled, but this attempt says a lot about colonial reality. From the outset, the authorities’ concern was to reconcile “the necessity and maintenance of the master’s authority with the rights of humanity”. This context of moral and legal contortion is illustrated by the punishments inflicted on slaves driven to irreparable action by the cruelty of their masters: hanged, mutilated, deported… Moreover, the masters implicated, whose crimes were established by investigators, were for the most part acquitted or condemned for the sake of form. But at least the torments inflicted on slaves were described in court.
In most cases, extensive trial records or court minutes no longer exist. A vast amount of our knowledge stems from publications that are commonly referred to as judicial chronicles. This literary genre gained popularity in the 19th century, in newspapers such as the Gazette des Tribunaux dedicating their columns almost exclusively to reports on judicial cases. In the colonies, similar reports of trials involving enslavers circulated in local newspapers, such as the Gazette Officielle de la Guadeloupe. The Affaire Vallentin proves that such trials could make the headlines for several months, given the exhilaration generated by such legal proceedings.
The fact remains that media agitation played a decisive role in the slow spread of abolitionist ideas.
Victor Schoelcher and others used the publicity generated by these cases to arouse public indignation: the Vallentin trial was actually the last Assize Court trial whose proceedings were published in the “Gazette de la Guadeloupe”.
For, as Schoelcher himself says :
“The revelation of what happened in the slave quarters, the impossibility of denying the facts (…) the certainty of the crime and its details, the scandal of the acquittals noted in the eyes of all, frightened the colonists; they were quick to judge the significance of these authentic accounts, and since they have the secret of obtaining whatever they want from the navy department, they obtained that the judgments of the crimes of slavery be given back to the ocean silence”1.