by Tom Reiss
BUT how was it possible, when the French slave empire was at its height, for the sons of slaves, men of color, to be living as gentlemen in Paris—the capital of France, of Europe itself? The answer is that in France’s courtrooms, no less than in its academies, an equally impressive and unexpected combat had been taking place.
French Enlightenment philosophers liked to use slavery as a symbol of human oppression, and particularly political oppression. “Man is born free but is everywhere in chains,” wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract in 1762. A generation of crusading lawyers put Enlightenment principles into action by helping slaves sue for the right to be treated as ordinary French subjects. They took the issue of human bondage to the sovereign parlement courts of France—and won, in nearly every case, liberty for their black and mixed-race clients. The infuriated Louis XV found his hands tied. The phrase “absolute monarchy” is misleading: Ancien Régime France was a state of laws, of ancient precedents, where the spark of enlightened reason could and occasionally did ignite great things.
Royal France did not have a legislative body like the Parliament in England. The French parlements were judicial bodies. While the admiralty courts handled disputes arising from sea warfare and colonial commerce, most important matters went to the twelve regional parlements—and to the Parlement of Paris, also called the Parlement par excellence. The Parlement of Paris was a kind of superregional court, whose rulings were enforced in territories far beyond the capital’s city limits, including almost one-third of the territory of France, and even the king at Versailles could find himself caught in the web of its jurisdiction. There disputes were subject to debate according to the ancient customs of France.*
Decades before the 1772 Somerset decision in London sparked the British abolitionist movement, French lawyers arguing before the parlements started, with their pens, a fight that Thomas-Alexandre and Saint-Georges would eventually take up with their swords.
It was all made possible by the concept, going back to the misty foundations of the nation, that France was the land of the free—that no one should be kept in unwilling servitude on its soil. The idea of applying this concept to the condition of slaves arriving in French ports began in the late sixteenth century. However, one instance at the end of the seventeenth century, just as the French Empire was taking off and black slave labor was exploding, set a kind of precedent and began the era of the judicially fought “freedom principle,” which continued down to the Revolution. That case was resolved when Louis XIV, the Sun King, personally acknowledged a black slave’s undeniable right to freedom once he landed on French soil.
It happened in 1691, when two slaves escaped their master in Martinique and stowed away on a ship to France. Once they reached port, the slaves were discovered and the situation was brought to the attention of the king. Louis XIV had only six years earlier promulgated the Code Noir for the French colonial empire. Slavery was one thing for the empire, however, and another thing entirely within France itself.
“The King has been informed that two negroes from Martinique crossed on the ship the Oiseau,” reads the laconic record of the incident in the Royal Naval Ministry. “[His Majesty] has not judged it apropos to return them to the isles, their liberty being acquired by the laws of the kingdom concerning slaves, as soon as they touch the Soil.” The slaves were free.
In a letter apologizing to the royal intendant of Martinique (a post that combined the roles of governor and police chief), the French secretary of state for colonial affairs wrote that he had tried to find a way to appeal the king’s decision but had “not found any ordinance which permits colonists to keep their negro slaves in France when they want to take advantage of the liberty acquired by all who touch its soil.”
Similar principles existed, theoretically, in other northern European countries, particularly in Great Britain. “England was too pure an air for slaves to breathe in,” a popular expression went, and the song “Rule, Britannia!” featured the chorus “Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves: Britons never will be slaves.” But the song did not apply to outlanders and certainly not to blacks from the islands. As an early-eighteenth-century British judge put it, “The law takes no notice of the Negro.”†
In 1715, a young black girl traveling with her mistress in France was temporarily placed by her, for safekeeping, in a convent in the port city of Nantes. When she later returned to retrieve her property, the nuns refused to surrender the girl. The local admiralty court declared the girl to be free because the owner did not declare her as a slave when entering the country. The mayor of Nantes, France’s main transit port for slaves and colonial products, appealed to Versailles to enact some sort of law to deal with such situations. The government responded by issuing the Edict of October 1716, intended to allow French subjects to bring their slaves into the country without risk of forfeiting them to lawsuits. But like the Code Noir in the colonies, the Edict of October 1716 provided opportunities for slaves by codifying their condition. It helped as well as harmed them. On the one hand, it acknowledged the legal institution of slavery and extended to owners protection from “freedom principle” lawsuits if they met certain conditions. The edict recognized two reasons for bringing slaves into the country: to teach them a trade or craft, or to provide them with religious education. If a master filled out the bureaucratic paperwork seeking permission from his colonial governor to travel with his slave and registered the slave upon arrival in France, the slave could not subsequently sue for his or her freedom. On the other hand: “If the masters fail to observe the formalities prescribed by the preceding articles, the blacks will be free, and will not be able to be reclaimed.”
In the event, the Parlement of Paris, offended by the mere use of the word “slave” in a law governing actions within the kingdom, refused to register the law. A lawyer consulting for the high court used the occasion to produce an elaborate condemnation of the institution of slavery itself, on the grounds that it conflicted with, among other things, French legal tradition, French history, and Christianity. France had long been known as the first Christian country in Europe, the lawyer wrote, and “the God of the Christians is the God of liberty.”
The next great leap for slaves’ rights came two decades later, in June 1738, when the courts received a request from a slave petitioning for freedom. It came from a young man sitting in a prison cell in central Paris. His name was Jean Boucaux, and he had been the property of the governor of Saint-Domingue. But then the governor had died and a series of events ensued that led to Boucaux’s arrest. His crime: getting married.
The trouble really started with another marriage—that of the governor’s widow. Upon remarrying, in France, the widow, with her new husband, a low-ranking military man named Bernard Verdelin, had gone back to Saint-Domingue to settle her affairs. Among the inherited property they brought back to France with them was Jean. For the next decade Jean served as their cook. But then he fell in love with a Frenchwoman and secretly married her. The Edict of 1716 specified that a slave’s marrying while in France was one of the conditions that voided his owner’s rights over him. The edict also stated that slaves could marry only with their owner’s permission. How the courts might decide the case was in doubt, but his owners had Jean arrested before he could bring suit.
Since getting married, Jean had been “the object of Verdelin’s hatred. He suffered indisputably cruel treatment,” wrote a well-known lawyer who took on Jean’s case. A former royal prosecutor joined Jean’s cause as well, and the illustrious legal team not only petitioned for his freedom and his right to rejoin his French wife; they sued Jean’s masters for back pay for the years he had served as their cook. They got their client out of the cell and placed under royal protection pending trial.
Jean’s trial would be a linchpin for defining blacks’ rights in France during the fifty years before the Revolution, as his lawyers set out to prove, once and for all, that slavery was illegal, immoral, and, worst of all, anti-French.
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In their opening statements, Jean’s lawyers painted a panorama of slavery in ancient times, emphasizing that the institution had reached France with the Roman legions’ enslaving of the Gauls, theoretically the ancestors of everyone in the courtroom except their client. From there, they argued that the Franks, who had founded the French nation and empire, had been fundamentally opposed to slavery. (The argument was etymological as well as historical, referring to the roots of the word “franc,” which originally meant “free.”) They quoted a passage from a book called The Universal History of the World, published in Paris in 1570, which stated: “The custom is such that not only the French, but foreigners arriving in French ports and crying ‘France and liberty!’ are beyond the power of those who possess them; [their owners] lose the price of the sale, and the service of the slave, if the slave refuses to serve them.”‡
Throughout the trial, Jean’s lawyers portrayed their client’s race as incidental to the greater issues at hand. In fact, they argued that he was “French, because he was born the subject of our monarch; our equal, as much by humanity as by the religion which he professes; and citizen, because he lives with us and among us.” Nor was the race of the woman he married mentioned, though the miscegenation issue would have set an Anglo-American courtroom of the time ablaze.
Verdelin’s attorney did not dispute the validity of the freedom principle, but, he said, there was one small problem: the principle had never been meant to apply to blacks. The French rule that “whoever sets foot in this kingdom is free” was true for “any slave other than a negro slave.” Slaves from Poland, Georgia, the Levant, or India would all be covered. American Indians would count. “If a foreigner or a French merchant arrives in this kingdom with some American savages that he claims as his slaves,” the attorney said, this would be no problem: a clear violation of the law, set the men free. But blacks, Africans, were a different matter. To apply the freedom principle to blacks, he argued, would bring on a mass slave revolt in France’s colonies: “the infinite riches that the King and the Nation take from these fertile regions would become the price of the disorder and of the revolt.”
Jean won. The court ruled in his favor on all counts. His former master was ordered to give him 4,200 livres in back pay, plus court costs and damages for false imprisonment. The Verdelins appealed, but the king declared himself eager to “terminate this affair which, as you know, has already created too much uproar,” and declined to reopen the case. However, in a sign of where he would stand, Louis XV banished Jean Boucaux from Paris and decreed that he must never return to his native Saint-Domingue, either.
In the trial’s aftermath, the king proclaimed a new edict to address the problem of “the greater part of the negroes [contracting] a spirit of independence [in France] which may have troublesome results.” It contained a toxic new provision: if owners failed to register their slaves or kept them in France longer than allowed or for an unauthorized purpose, the result would not be freedom for the slave—rather, he or she would be “confiscated for the profit of the King” and returned to the sugar colonies. The new law even prohibited owners from voluntarily freeing slaves on French soil (except in their last will and testament).
The freedom suits dried up, and as the 1740s brought Louis XV military victories and prestige he entered the brief period in his reign that gave rise to his overstated sobriquet “Louis the Well-Loved.” But in the 1750s, as his reign was entering one of its more typical periods of failure and discord, a new flood of freedom suits hit the courts, and once again blacks began winning every case, either outright or on appeal. A generation of grandstanding trial attorneys took up the cause of “French freedom” as a fast route to notoriety and renown. These lawyers saw themselves as militant philosophes, a vision captured in a 1770 memoir by the civil rights crusader Henrion de Pansey: “Servitude, like a destructive volcano, desiccates, burns, engulfs everything it surrounds: liberty, on the contrary, always brings in its wake happiness, abundance, and the arts.… Everything is free in a Kingdom where liberty is seated at the foot of the throne, where the least subject finds in the heart of his king the feelings of a father.… No one is [a] slave in France.”
The response to these idealistic antislavery crusaders was given by a former lawyer for the Parlement of Paris, Guillaume Poncet de la Grave, who had changed sides and gone over to work as a royal attorney to the Admiralty. This miserable precursor of so many villains of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries said that the courts’ whole way of presenting the problem was wrong: The problem was not slaves in France. The problem was blacks in France.
“The introduction of too many blacks into France, whether as slaves or in any other guise, is dangerous. We will soon see the French nation disfigured,” Poncet wrote, reacting to the case of a mulatto named Louis who had just been declared free and rewarded back wages. “The negroes are, in general, dangerous men. There is practically not one of those to whom one has given their liberty who has not abused it.”
Poncet called for the compulsory registration of every black in France, slave or free, to manage the threat.
WHILE Poncet was decrying a nation “disfigured” by mixed blood, Thomas-Alexandre’s future mentor, then still known as Joseph Boulogne, was proving that skin color was no measure of a man. He had been admitted to La Boëssière’s academy the same year Poncet joined the admiralty court. “No one has ever deployed more grace,” the younger La Boëssière wrote of his friend. “Such dexterity must seem incredible to those who have not seen it with their own eyes.” When another fencing master sneeringly referred to Joseph as “La Boëssière’s mulatto,” Joseph’s white father encouraged him to stand up to the insult and actually promised him a new horse and carriage if he won the duel. Though young Joseph may have been thinking more about winning the carriage, the duel had great symbolism for civil rights partisans and race-law advocates alike. Many courtiers and other prominent people wagered on it. Hundreds packed the hall of arms and watched this elegant young man of color handily vanquish his more experienced opponent with “a perpetual series of hits” that were unsurprising to those who had seen him practice.
No matter what the king felt about men of color in France, he celebrated the victory by making Joseph a member of his elite honor guard, a gen d’armes—“man-at-arms”—attached to Versailles. This elite formation, sporting scarlet doublets with silver braid, stood beside the king on ceremonial occasions. Joseph had assumed the title of “chevalier” himself, and since a knight had to be “of” someplace, he called himself the Chevalier de Saint-Georges (some said it was after a plantation his father had owned in Guadeloupe). But even as Joseph Boulogne became a chevalier, Poncet de la Grave was promoted to king’s prosecutor. And he expanded his demand that blacks be registered to include men of color—indeed, anyone with the slightest tinge of African blood residing in France—for the supposed safety of the public.
In the spring of 1762, an ordinance was published throughout Paris and its suburbs ordering anyone who had any black African blood to appear before the Parlement of Paris tribunal to register. All residents of Paris who kept blacks on their premises had to declare them as well. There was a one-month deadline.§ Poncet would attend these registration courts personally.
On May 10, 1762, Joseph’s mother, Nanon, whom Joseph’s father had managed to bring over two years after he and his son made the journey, came before one of the first registration courts. The young fencing prodigy was scheduled to follow her two days later.
Instead, the record shows, on May 12 Poncet and his cronies received a visit from “Nicolas Benjamin Texier de La Boëssière, Esquire, master-at-arms at the academies of the King,” who came “in order to satisfy the ordinance,” since he “has entrusted to him as his boarding student a mulatto called Joseph, aged approximately fifteen and a half.” La Boëssière explained that his charge had come to France “in order that he may be instructed in the Catholic, apostolic and Roman religion, to be given all the education suit
able to a young man, subsequently to return to the aforementioned islands of America as soon as the navigation shall become free.”
Poncet must have been angry to have the fencing master appear in Joseph’s place—he was probably looking forward to humiliating the famed young duelist. But now that Joseph was the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, permanent man-at-arms to the king, the prosecutor could hardly insist on his coming in person. The document registering Joseph Boulogne contains Poncet’s signature alongside that of La Boëssière.
DURING the next two decades, while idealistic lawyers and philosophes planted the seeds of true abolitionism in France, Poncet de la Grave spent his time preaching racial pollution to whoever would listen in the halls of Versailles and Paris. He found his most powerful allies in the Ministry of Naval and Colonial Affairs, which issued a warning that a dangerous “mixed-blood” population in Paris and other cities “multiplies every day [as a result of sexual] communication that they have with whites.” Those in charge of France’s empire had every reason to embrace national racist paranoia, because of the very real international problem that beset France in 1763: the loss of France’s entire North American empire—the price the British extracted for the peace treaty ending the Seven Years’ War. “New France,” which had extended from Newfoundland to Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico, had taken nearly two hundred years of exploration and investment to build. (France was allowed to retain its colonial outposts in India on the condition that they not be armed, clearing the way for Britain’s takeover of the subcontinent.) In exchange for all this, France had retained only Saint-Domingue and its other West Indian islands—islands seen as indispensable colonies compared to everything else. The French would simply need to double down on sugar and slavery.
