Salvery and the Haitian Revolution

Since the revolutionaries explicitly proclaimed liberty as their highest ideal, knuckle downry was move to come into question during the French Revolution. Even before 1789 critics had attacked the slave trade and slavery in the colonies. France had several colonies in the Caribbean in which slavery supported a plantation economy that produced sugar, coffee, and cotton. The close important of these colonies was shrine Domingue (later Haiti), which had 500,000 slaves, 32,000 whites, and 28,000 free blacks (which included both blacks and mulattos). both(prenominal) free blacks owned slaves; in fact, the free blacks owned third of the plantation property and one-quarter of the slaves in Saint Domingue, though they could not hold public office or practice numerous professions (medicine, for example). The slave system in the colonies was regulated by a series of royal edicts, the most important of which was promulgated by Louis XIV in 1685. Taken together, the edicts constituted the Code noir, or slave code. This code prescribed a harsh regimen of penalties for slaves who resisted their captivity, especially if they tried to harm their masters in each way. Saint Domingue provided extraordinary sources of wealth to the French.

To protect their investments, French slaveholders had to memorize at least a minimal amount slightly their slaves. One of the most astute commentators, Médéric-Louis-Elie Moreau de Saint-Méry, wrote a massive two-volume work on vivification in Saint Domingue in the 1780s. He described many of the features of slave life that worried slaveholders, including voodoo imported from Africa, the presence of many masses of mixed race (mulattos), the threat of slaves becoming Maroons (runaways), and the intense misgiving among slaveholders that their slaves would try to poison them. After the French Revolution stone-broke out, planters looked back on pre-1789 conditions, trying to understand how slavery aptitude have been better organized. Their observations provide yet another coeval perspective... If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: Ordercustompaper.com

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