A White Justice

In 1829, under pressure from public opinion, the government of Charles X was forced to initiate a reform of the colonial legal system. Since the Restoration, the liberal press had reported a number of resounding scandals: total impunity for slave traders (officially forbidden since 1817), unsanctioned abuses by masters, etc. This was an attempt to take back control and normalise the colonial judicial system. But the Code Noir continued to apply, and adjustments were made to avoid colliding head-on with Creole society: the jury of Assises, for example, was replaced by assessors, notables from civil society, as this institution was deemed “incompatible” with the mores of the colony. Assize juries in their tropical version were thus made up of 3 magistrates, generally from France (but sometimes “tropicalized” because they had long since settled and married into wealthy Creole families) and 4 assessors appointed from among the notables, who were almost always slave-owners themselves.)

A wave of new magistrates arrived from France to replace local judges who had become too compromised or had chosen to resign in protest. But with little support from the central administration and open hostility from the colonists, they arrived in a climate of mistrust that turned into open warfare as they opened investigations and implicated masters. A few trials took place, all resulting in acquittals or symbolic sentences, and the petty judges were finally ruthlessly put back on the return boat. Bitter and bruised, they wrote testimonials and libels that reinforced abolitionist opinion.

The Judge Hardouin Cherest, who investigated the Vallentin case, did not have an easy life: the unfortunate youngest son of a family of jurists, he arrived in the West Indies in 1827 as a Justice of the Peace. With his liberal reputation, he very slowly climbed the ladder of the magistrate’s career. No sooner had he arrived than he was denounced to the Minister of the Colonies as a Republican and accused of leaking to the metropolitan press. Appointed lieutenant judge in Marie Galante in 1840, he led the investigation into the Vallentin affair and succeeded in having him charged and tried by the Assize Court. But despite the strength of the case, which left no doubt as to the crime and premeditation, the accused was acquitted.

A few months later, Hardouin was appointed to Martinique, where he investigated other particularly horrific cases, followed by no less scandalous acquittals. Schoelcher himself mentions in his writings the attacks against him. Rewarded in 1848 with a post as President, as the tide had turned two years later, he was put into early retirement.

The reforms fizzled out, and the slave-owning order was soon re-established. That same year, 1842, Victor Schoelcher continued to denounce the administration’s complacency towards the masters and the fact that the judiciary was composed half of Creoles, themselves slave owners, and half of Europeans with family ties and wealth in the country. (This was the case in the Vallentin affair, of Marais, the King’s prosecutor, married to a Creole woman from a wealthy family).