Black Magic and White Terror:
# 048
Black Magic and White Terror:
Slave Poisoning and the Provostial Court in Restoration era Martinique
“Le poison est une force morale:
l’esclave a droit d’empoisonner.
Si j’etais esclave, et que j’eusse perdu force
et courage dans les hontes de la servitude,
je le declare tres haut, je me rejouirais
d’avoir trouvé le poison, et je m’en servirais…”
-Victor Schoelcher
On October 30, 1826, the Provostial Court of Martinique delivered its final verdict on an unwieldy criminal case involving some 30 defendants, including slaves belonging to nine different owners, several runaways with no known master, and three free men of color. At the core of the conspiracy was a group of five slaves, whose confessions uncovered a plot aimed at “entirely ruining” two plantation owners in the vicinity of St. Esprit, by poisoning both livestock and slaves. A few in the group stood accused of selling them the deadly, venomous powder used in the crimes, but the charges against other defendants were more detailed. One was accused of poisoning a horse and providing a poisonous syrup to another slave to be used on his master. A woman named Martherose was said to have performed two abortions using “harmful substances,” and that “two of her own children, and one belonging to another woman seemed to have died from poison, following threats she had made.” The court records go on to say that these offenses “do not seem entirely proven,” but the two were nevertheless condemned to a punishment of forced labor in Senegal, though not subjected to the habitual lashes and branding before their expulsion. Five other slaves were accused of poisoning both men and beasts, “but these charges, though very compelling, are not completely convincing, although time could bring proof of these crimes.” The slaves in this group were not sentenced by the court at all, but sent back to their respective masters to be disciplined.
Finally, the prevot and his fellow magistrates spent some time sorting out the case against Lubin, a freedman denounced by the slave Hyacinth, who claimed to have seen Lubin at a secret meeting of a société d’empoisonneurs. Hyacinth said that Lubin was well among the poisoners for having started a tradition of drinking a toast to their fallen leader. Another slave, Jean-Louis, testified that Lubin had asked him to provide a protective amulet during Lent, a practice said to be common among poisoners. Yet another slave, Simon, asserted that Lubin “is said to be powerful in the sect of poisoners” and, supported by two others, said it was well known he had led poisoning attacks against a nearby plantation. But others defended Lubin, with his former mistress, la Dame Millet, who had herself freed him from slavery, in fact blaming these rumors on a slave Lubin had once owned, “un nègre très mauvais sujet who could have wanted to slander his master’s reputation.” The court decreed that Lubin was to be watched over by the public authorities, but he was given no punishment.[1]
The problem of slave poisoning was not new in 19th century Martinique, but contemporaries claimed the phenomenon was changing. Most importantly, in addition to victimizing livestock and fellow slaves, for the first time slaves were poisoning their white masters, something planters insisted had not occurred in the pre-revolutionary era.[2] Though poisoning by slaves has been identified and studied in many Atlantic slave societies, by the late 18th century the crime had come to be especially associated with the French islands, and Martinique in particular.[3] Minutes of the island’s governing council during the early years of the Restoration betray a sense of despair over the rising tide of these criminal attacks. Planters claimed that the laws governing the colonies were ineffective when it came to these crimes, that they actually stood in the way of fighting the poisoners. In the words of Governor Donzelot, writing to his superiors at the Ministry of the Navy and the Colonies, “Ordinary courts, constrained by their slow and complicated formalities, can rarely get to the wretches who are guilty of this crime and, in any event, can only get convictions that come far too late and whose value as deterrent example is lost.”[4] The result was a turn to martial justice, and in August of 1822, without asking for permission from his superiors in France, Governor Donzelot established a Provostial Court, based loosely on the French tribunals first created in the 17th century and revived at the outset of the Restoration. The courts were mobile, designed to operate from the scene of disturbances and to recruit their personnel from among the local planter elite.[5] They were especially designed to respond quickly, in order, as the Governor put it, to “strike those who might be tempted to imitate (the poisoners( with a salutary terror.”[6] As the Governor’s choice of words suggests, some three decades after the Terror the language of the revolutionary tribunals still infused this colonial incarnation of the Provostial Court. Yet in this case, the idea of “White Terror” was to take on a new meaning.
The documents from a single session of the Provostial Court cited above provide ample evidence that slave poisoning was a phenomenon with complex social, political and cultural dimensions and implications. Perhaps most striking is the way the magistrates saw seemingly unrelated crimes as woven together in a conspiracy of slaves who were part of an underground “secte des empoisonneurs,” complete with its own hierarchy and secret rituals, as well as a black market for various mysterious substances. Further, the magistrates seem to rely heavily on statements made by slaves, which in some cases take the form of mere rumors. Such testimony was officially inadmissible in French courts. Yet the almost complete lack of physical evidence severely constrained judicial efforts to determine the guilty parties. This uncertainty leaves us with many unanswered questions. First of all, the account describes murder and property damage in terms of vengeance of slaves against masters, but was the motivation for these crimes so clearcut? Were the cases of abortion and infanticide faced by the court to be understood in these terms, or was it rather that African herbalism, medicine and religious practices were misunderstood by whites? Indeed, which substances did the poisoners actually use to commit this wide range of crimes? As for the “sect” of poisoners, does the presence of runaway slaves suggest that maroon communities were behind the crimes? Or does the case suggest that coordinated action between slaves and free people of color was the norm, even as one of the freedmen implicated was himself a slaveowner?
The trial records suggest that standards of punishment were fluid, as the colonial council struggled to find effective means of coercion to stem the tide of crime. After all, why would forced labor be seen as punishment by a slave? Indeed, how could transportation to Africa possibly serve as a deterrent to other criminals? The challenge was to stop crime while safeguarding the property interest that accused slaves represented, as well as attending to the personal pleas of slaveowners. In general, the Provostial Courts engaged in spectacular terror of a kind that pushed colonial violence to its extremes. In the end, the human toll was staggering. According to one estimate, more than six hundred slaves were executed in the first year alone, and another claimed that twenty slaves were burned or hanged every month in the mid-1820s, while thousands of others were condemned to forced labor or deportation.[7] Yet, the court’s effectiveness was at best debatable, and within four years it was rejected by both metropolitan authorities and much of the planter elite, and the Provostial Court was abolished. Why was this so? How was it that both the slaveowner’s private justice and the colonial court system proved incapable of disciplining the most dangerous individuals in the slave population? Indeed, if slaveowners were absolutely sovereign over their slaves, why was the legal formalism of the court system necessary at all? Rather than standing as a symbol of the unbridled authority of slaveowners, the Provostial Court seems to point to the limits of their control over unruly slaves. This story of a failure leaves us to ask why slaveowners were unable to harness the metropolitan justice system more effectively to their own ends. Did the use of metropolitan institutional forms, such as the Provostial Court, actually undermine the colonial system in some way?
Recent scholarship on the French colonial project has emphasized the limits and pathologies of metropolitan administration as it played out in the colonies in this period.[8] In general, studies looking at the legal dimensions of French slavery have tended to focus on the vicissitudes of the Code Noir and the dramatic transformations of the revolutionary period, and treated the early 19th century as a historical addendum, a brief prolongation of the status quo ante that lasted until abolition in 1848.[9] While historians have paid much attention to the parliamentary movement for abolition in the 1830s and 1840s, less has been said about the veritable standoff between colonial elites and metropolitan authorities at a time when abolitionist sentiment in France was virtually dormant.[10] On the contrary, the example of the Cours Prévôtales and the problem of slave poisonings in particular demonstrate that the Bourbon Restoration was a watershed in the evolution of the colonial relationship. Because poisoning cases exposed the blurred frontier between the master’s private justice and the role of the state, they proved a crucial testing ground for the question of which legal forms were appropriate for the colonies. As a result, criminal cases involving accused slave-poisoners became the most powerful symbol of the irreducible divide between the demands of metropolitan administration and the desire for colonial self-rule. The Provostial Courts can be seen as a distillation of the tensions generated when the institutional forms of state power were transposed to the colonial context. The failure of the courts can therefore help complicate our understanding of France’s overseas empire during the period of transition from Old Regime colonialism to the new imperialism of the late 19th century.
The Emergence of the Provostial Court
The creation of a Provostial Court in Martinique must be understood in the context of a concerted metropolitan effort to reform the colonial legal system as a means of reintegrating the islands into the French orbit. The end of the Napoleonic Wars brought the return of Martinique to French control and the beginning of an effort to strengthen the bonds weakened during two periods of British occupation. For the colons, the years of reduced or interrupted trade with France coupled with successful commerce with Britain and the United States only strengthened a habitual desire for autonomy. At the same time, the longstanding accumulation of debt from French creditors was a source of acute anxiety among plantation owners. According to the Comte de Vaugiraud, the first governor of Martinique installed by Louis XVIII in 1814, “The present organization of our courts is seen as the central lever of a great local power…Those colons who are debtors, who make up the majority, are all more or less loyal to a court system that has, until now, efficiently protected them from their creditors.”[11] Part of Vaugiraud’s charge was to implement the Napoleonic legal codes in an effort to bring the colonies under the current standards of French legal practice, and make a clean break with the complicated and contradictory laws of the Old Regime. The main problem in doing this was that legislation governing slaves and free people of color was to remain in place, thereby making it difficult for metropolitan legal norms and procedures to be implemented, whether in civil or criminal cases. Given their claim to legal exceptionalism, drawing on a long tradition of independent administration of the courts, colonial magistrates ignored certain provisions of French law and applied 18th century practices as they saw fit, according to their perception of the interests of the island.[12] The question of legal reform was therefore not simply an issue of formalism, but had implications for the whole relationship between colony and metropole.
By 1819, this overt resistance to the French legal regime had tested the patience of the sovereign. In that year, Louis XVIII named a special envoy to go to Martinique to fulfill the task of implementing the Civil Code once and for all, and eventually promulgate all of the French Codes that were in place. The King's envoy, the Baron Delamardelle, was a creole who had spent his adult life in France. According to the instructions he received from the Ministry of the Navy and the Colonies, "the organization of the colony's simple and appellate courts on the metropolitan model (as much as this will be practicable), is today one of the most imperative priorities of the government."[13] Delamardelle found that the realities of criminal procedure were woefully inadequate when it came to slaves and free people of color. One problem was that the islands continued to rely on antiquated usages, such as the need for two “irreprochable eyewitnesses.”[14] Yet slaves could only provide courtroom testimony if they had the explicit agreement of their masters, and even then only in a way that was not legally binding. Such practices made conclusive findings nearly impossible to reach in a broad array of criminal cases. In France, the new foundation for legal decisionmaking was the principle of intime conviction, which did not rely on the so-called counting of witnesses. Instead, it implied the need for “débat oral, contradictoire et public” as a basis for judicial decisions, as well as the use of a juries.[15] As Delamardelle noted, magistrates in Martinique systematically refused the principle of publicité des débats: all discussion and interrogation conducted by the court was closed to outsiders, and they shunned the idea of implementing the jury system.[16]
It was during the first year of Delamardelle's mission, amid these exchanges over procedural issues in both civil and criminal law, that slave poisonings reached epidemic proportions on the island, recalling to locals the waves of crime that had struck decades earlier. Beyond the dearth of witnesses, poison apparently left few or no physical traces that could be presented in court. According to the Governor,
Sometimes a mass of moral evidence comes together pointing to a genuinely guilty individual, whereas the poison itself, administered cautiously and with horrible skill, masks itself before the eyes of the most vigilant observer under the appearance of a slow illness and progressive dissemination; because of this, the bloody book of the human corpse, superficially interrogated about the death, remains silent, or lies with impunity.[17]
Similar claims were repeated over and over by planters who described the difficulty of accumulating any specific evidence of the cause of death from poison. Legal forms required a corpus delicti, but the nature of this particular crime seemed to be precisely that it left few physical traces. Formal autopsies were both expensive and, given the rate of decomposition in the local climate, often indeterminate. As much as the weather, the problem had to do with the lack of competent medical practitioners in rural areas. The cost of bringing in a médecin from town was high, and plantation owners were more likely to opt for the petit chirurgiens, who were cheaper and more familiar to locals.[18]
Governor Donzelot argued that the need to have “material evidence of a certain nature, and notably two witnesses” was the reason judges were often left with no choice but to acquit, “even when guilt was perfectly evident for all to see.” Slaveowners had become so disillusioned by the legal system, he wrote, that they were willing to simply turn murderous slaves over to the government rather than attempt to try them before royal courts, a practice, he suggested, that could have only nefarious consequences over time.[19] Indeed, up until this point, the council had resorted to deporting slaves who had not necessarily been found guilty of specific crimes, but had been identified as “bad subjects,” particularly when suspected of poisoning. But deportation had been a solution that in effect allowed the colonial courts to avoid relying on French justice, and in January of 1822 Governor Donzelot received word from Paris that this extrajudicial system would no longer be tolerated.[20] Even those slaves implicated in the most serious offenses should be dealt with using courtroom procedures that prevailed in the rest of the court system. It was this order from the Ministry of the Colonies that prompted the creation of the Provostial Court, despite concerns expressed by some members of the Sovereign Council that it would mean a return to the “époque funeste” of twenty years earlier, when a special tribunal had attempted to combat poisonings with little success.[21] In general, however, Donzelot’s correspondence with the Ministry is dominated by the effort to justify the Provostial Court. In a sense, his decision to adopt the Court was an effort to use a metropolitan institutional form precisely in order to escape the demands of standard legal procedure used in France.[22]
“Complex or complicated crimes are rare in the colony,” wrote General Donzelot to the colonial Ministry, and in order to maximize the speed and mobility of the new courts, “we are forced to renounce the use of lawyers.”[23] The biggest problem was that, like the body itself in the crime, potential witnesses too, tended to remain silent. According to a report drafted for the Naval Ministry, “slaves never denounce their comrades.”[24] Along with the announcement of the new courts circulated to parish commanders, the Governor included some specific procedural guidelines to overcome this challenge. According to the instructions: “Experience has shown that, in the first moments of fear felt by the suspect, at the moment of their arrest, they let major confessions slip out that not only prove their guilt, but at the same time reveal both their accomplices and the motives that pushed them to such excess.” Later on, warned the document, such information might not be forthcoming.[25] As a result, magistrates were left with what they called the “inner certainty” of guilt, but not the formal proof required to convict. Using the Old Regime parlance of “vehement suspicion” when evidence was incomplete, the new courts would in particular solve the problem that testimony derived from torture was inadmissible,[26] “and the same men, interrogated in prison, denied all they had confessed to at the first moment of their arrest, or attributed it to some supposed violence against them.” The officers of the Provostial Court, on the contrary, must “not give suspects time to get over their initial fear and prepare their answers.”[27] As Donzelot wrote when first justifying the Provostial Courts to the Ministry, it was not that instituting the court would relieve judges of the obligation to count witnesses, but rather that “the provostial form facilitates and induces testimony.”[28]
Dutiful Slaves and Nègres Empoisonneurs
Yet it seems that these crimes were just that: complex and complicated, even inexplicable at times. Most troubling to the colons was their perception that “poison is appearing in areas where we had succeeded in keeping it away until now, on the plantations where the blacks are best managed and taken care of.”[29] Governor Donzelot concurred, finding that poisoners “are found principally on the plantations that are run with the most gentleness and humanity, among the slaves who live in the best conditions and who enjoy the greatest level of their master's trust: the overseers, sugar refiners, livestock herders, chambermaids and children’s nurses.”[30] Another planter asserted that it was “almost always” the most trusted and dutiful slaves who were guilty, and cited in particular the recent conviction of two female slaves “who had the sacrilegious adroitness to disguise their intentions with an external demeanor of devotion to the sacraments.”[31]
In the early 1820s, local planters repeatedly took up the assertion, not only that loyal and dutiful slaves were also involved in the crimes, but that poisoning almost always originated with them. Observers noted that long trusted house servants were no longer allowed inside the house, nursemaids were watched at all times while with children, and ladies who were used to being served who would now only eat food they had prepared themselves.[32] Here, slavery had become absurdly self-defeating: as a basis for everyday life, in these examples, and also ultimately as a general economic system. But the treacherous dissimulation of the dutiful slave found its all too explicit counterpart in the violent revolt that erupted near the town of Carbet just weeks after the creation of the Provostial Court in the fall of 1822. The Carbet revolt led to deaths of several white slaveowners, and sent a shock wave through the plantocracy around the island and beyond.[33] The uprising played on slaveowners’ deepest fears, freshly reviving the specter of revolutionary Saint Domingue. The revolt was put down forcefully, with the insurgent slaves brought to trial and the conspiracy exposed, but the incident only heightened the sense of urgency of the itinerant Provostial Courts as they sought to suppress poisoning attacks on plantations around the island.
In a sense, whites came to see slave poisoning as a kind of parallel to the Carbet revolt itself, that is, as the product of a conspiracy in which otherwise obedient slaves had come under the sway of alternative, hidden masters. Many whites adopted the belief that poisonings were not the product of individual malefactors at all, but were controlled by a sophisticated network of sorcerers and black magicians. According to a leading provostial magistrate, these were true “sociétés, [with] leaders, secret signs and passwords, initiation rituals and ranks… In a word, it is a special masonry dedicated to poison.”[34] This well organized network of poisoners was explicitly out to overthrow the slave system as a whole, and rather than fearing the terror of the courts, it was the fear of this powerful underground network that made so many slaves refuse to cooperate with investigations. “One cannot doubt,” wrote the Governor, “that a large number of blacks have become initiated to the sect of poisoners in order to be safe from its grasp…in order to not become victims (they( have joined the ranks of the assassins.”[35] Plantation owners described the sorcerers in almost supernatural terms, as only such forces could explain the sinister influence that could lead slaves to kill their masters, others of their own race, close family members, and even their own children.
The search for the genuine criminal element among the slaves became all the more urgent given the perception that “good” and dutiful slaves were at their mercy, and planters resorted to extraordinary violence to pursue them. In doing so, they rejected French standards of punishment. Where, in France, the crime of poisoning livestock was punishable by a sentence of two to five years' emprisonment, planters saw livestock poisoning as a threat equal to any other use of poison, since the destruction of livestock threatened an habitation as a whole, and was not to be measured in terms of the specific value of property that was lost. In fact, the insistence on ferocious punishments in response to the poisoning of livestock can be taken above all as an index of where authorities felt most vulnerable, as was often the case with martial justice in the metropole.[36] Apparently, however, severity of punishment was not the solution, as wholesale convictions and executions did not lead to a decline in poisoning cases. After a brief initial drop in their number, officials were frustrated by a general increase in the crimes. One judge lamented that “neither the fear of torture, nor the threat of punishment as accomplices to the crime will bring slaves to denounce their comrades.”[37]
Others claimed that execution itself had little deterrent effect on slaves. "It is a fact demonstrated by daily example that in general the negroes have little fear of the loss of their own life; one is shocked to see the insouciance with which they commit suicide, often for the slightest of motives," wrote the Governor.[38] He did suggest, however, that "they can fear certain kinds of death." Where strangulation was feared by none, for example, beheading would strike a note of terror among the slaves, “by its very novelty.”[39] Using this form of punishment on slaves was a significant innovation relative to 18th century practices. Still, council members expressed considerable uneasiness about "habituating blacks to seeing the flow of blood," and they opposed importing the new technology of the guillotine to the colony, out of concern that using “l’instrument” would recall the execution of aristocrats during the Revolution, and mean that black and white convicts would die by the same means, a form of equality with disturbing implications.[40] Another planter agreed that even the gallows did not impress slaves, and that they approached fire with an unnerving calm. At the same time, the use of such large “appareils” necessarily created a spectacle that drew potentially unruly crowds, and required the services of numerous militiamen—most often recruited from among the gens de couleur. In the end, the “spectacular terror” intended by public executions may have come across more as spectacle than terror by black onlookers, with all of this display leading some to remark simply that the victim “avait eu un bel enterrement.”[41]
Criticism over the inefficiency of torture and extreme punishments was bolstered by a series of attempts by both slaveowners and slaves themselves to appeal the court’s verdicts. In an 1823 letter to Governor Donzelot, one planter pleaded for clemency for his slave, Marie-Thérèse, who was in the process of being interrogated by the Provostial Court about a poisoning conspiracy. He explained that Marie-Thérèse had admitted her complicity immediately and completely, and that it was thanks to her that the ringleaders of the plot had been arrested. Having seen how the court functioned, though, he was certain she would be condemned to death, and given “…that the sentence of this court is executed within twenty four hours, and the distance to where Your Excellence is at the moment… [it] will make it impossible to commute the punishment after sentencing, which forces me to ask in advance.”[42] Too often, he complained, those slaves who cooperate are convicted while those who deny everything go unpunished. Such demandes de grace appeared to have some success, even early on in the functioning Provostial Court. In this case, the Governor noted in the margins of the letter that Marie-Thérèse should be given a temporary reprieve, in the event she might have further “revelations.” Rather than face execution, she was transferred to the prison in Fort Royal. Later on, Donzelot expressed his satisfaction with her cooperation and supported a reduction of her sentence, which finally was limited to 20 years in a French prison.[43]
Cases of slaves like Marie-Thérèse in which the owner intervened directly on their behalf point to how provostial magistrates had to tread lightly at times, even when meting out summary justice. The issue was not just the potential for wrongful accusations, but perhaps more seriously from the point of view of the habitants, the violation of property rights. When convicted slaves were executed, the Council agreed that masters should be reimbursed for their value, a system that was open to misinterpretation and abuse.[44] This public liability contributed to the large number of commuted or partial sentences given by the court, which usually consisted of imprisonment in France, given that local prisons were not meant to accommodate extended sentences. In fact, despite the large number of executions carried out by the Provostial Court, there were many examples of slaves who were jailed due to inconclusive evidence or some sort of extenuating circumstance. In other cases, it was the slaves themselves who appealed their convictions, such as a group of eight slaves who collectively contested a provostial decision of November 1823.[45] Such appeals seem to have been facilitated by their transportation to France, where a network of sympathetic whites could provide some help in the process. One such case is that of Léon, whose remarkable letter is to be found among the many demandes de grace of the Centre d’Archives d’Outre-Mer. It begins as follows: “A poor slave, a French Christian, a man, in the end, victim of a special tribunal, of irregular procedure, and out of his love for justice and truth, determined today to kiss your knees to obtain from your humanity that his appeal for royal clemency be placed at the foot of the throne.”[46] Such artful language was, more than likely, at least embellished by a white patron, perhaps his owner who, the letter tells us, is prepared “to clarify the real cause of Léon’s disgrace.”
To those in France who objected that the system’s abuses were inhumane, however, planters had a clear response. The Director General of the Interior Delhorme, himself a colonial planter, insisted that outsiders should not imagine that poisoning outbreaks were caused by the ill-treatment or abuse of the slave population. “We must search for [the causes] especially in the new ideas given birth by the Revolution,” he claimed. Rather than an indictment of the colonial system, they were a sign of the essential degradation of the slaves, a legacy of the dark African mysticism they still practiced that testified to their fundamental inability to be civilized.[47] Yet rather than helping to defend their position, such arguments left the planters open to charges that the slave system itself was the cause of this extreme moral degradation, as opposed to some essential malevolence that they had brought with them from Africa. Such objections were increasingly raised by the mid-1820s in France, where abolitionist sentiment was on the rise, and public opinion was paying more attention to events in the colonies. General Donzelot’s tendency to side with the most aggressive planters resulted in his removal in mid-1826, to be replaced by the more conciliatory and reform-minded Comte de Bouillé.[48]
Metropolitan Backlash and the Suppression of the Court
This metropolitan attention had perverse effects in Martinique. Indeed, to add to the extraordinary idea that poisoning was controlled by a highly disciplined underground network of black magicians that spanned the island, others decried the influence of “the philanthropic speeches of French liberals” that was spreading among slaves.[49] Planters were incensed by the reappearance of anti-colonial speeches in the Chamber of Deputies in 1821, and the creation of the anti-slave trade commission of the Société de la Morale Chrétienne of that year.[50] Tensions also ran high in the spring of 1823 as metropolitan authorities reinstated the time-limits for debt repayment, a move the Colonial Council successfully repealed within a matter of months.[51] The outcry over the debt problem only exacerbated white anxiety over the growing prominence of the community of free people of color on the island, as many freedmen had become involved in the sugar trade as commercial agents, and therefore often found themselves to be the creditors of struggling white landowners.[52] For many planters, the rising economic and demographic influence of free people of color was a visible challenge to the island’s system of racial hierarchy that echoed “liberal” trends in the metropole. At the same time, free people of color found themselves suspected of complicity in the poisoning crimes. Like the focus on "dutiful slaves," the denunciation of freedmen as accomplices to the poisoners was another new element in the planters' view of the poisoning problem as compared with 18th century accounts that had not typically implicated them in the crimes. As a leading provostial magistrate put it, “behind the poisoning slaves we have found, recently, the free class of color, [and] it is clear to everyone that as soon as the white class is destroyed or diminished, the class of color will be master and dominant.”[53] Remarkably, according to whites planters in Martinique, rural African sorcerers acted in concert with merchant gens de couleur in the towns, as liberal activism and black magic combined forces.[54]
But little by little, appeals to humanity and decency began to be heard on the continent, notably in response to the case of Marie-Louise Lambert, which went before France’s highest court in 1826. This extraordinary appeal of a provostial ruling before the Court of Cassation was made possible by the efforts of a network of anti-colonial sympathizers who seized on her case largely because it involved a free woman of color who seemed to be subjected to the discipline of slaves. The case presented itself as follows: a slave named Marie-Claire stood accused of poisoning her master with the aid of a young accomplice. Hoping to avoid the death penalty, she claimed to have been obeying the demands of the freedwoman Marie-Louise Lambert, a friend from whom, as it turned out, she had become estranged. With only the testimony of Marie-Claire to consider as evidence, the Provostial Court could not deliver a capital sentence, but Marie-Louise was nevertheless convicted for being “vehemently suspected” of being part of the plot, and was therefore condemned to lashes, the brand, and life in prison. For her part, faced with her own imminent execution, Marie-Claire confessed that she had made up the allegations out of a desire for revenge, but the provost himself, le Sieur Davoust, refused to rescind the death sentence. In the extraordinary culmination of the drama that followed, the executioner, himself given that role as a criminal sentenced to death, at first refused to execute Marie-Claire, and nearly caused a riot when he instead placed his own hand on the block and chopped off a finger.[55]
Already in previous cases, French jurists had expressed surprise and concern over the use of the formula “vehemently suspected” as a basis for such harsh sentences. Responding to a ministerial dépeche on the matter, Governor Donzelot took the opportunity “to correct many false ideas on the subject,” by explaining “the sense in which we should understand the sacramental words: violently, vehemently suspect applied to criminals against whom there is no lack of moral conviction on the part of judges, but [a lack of] a certain specific kind of judicial evidence….”[56] The Governor was adamant that overturning such decisions “would produce a very disturbing effect by emboldening the misérables who practice poisoning in this colony.” For his part, the King’s agent for legal reform, Baron Delamardelle, explained to his superiors that there was nothing wrong with the Governor’s logic. In theory at least, because Martinique remained under the sway of the ordinance of 1670, the formula of “vehement soupçon” had to be admitted, “however strange it might seem to us now that were are used to our new forms.”[57] Nevertheless, Delamardelle was deeply troubled by the apparent flexibility with which the standard was being applied. He expressed surprise and outrage at one judgment of the provostial court that stated openly that “no crime is proven against” the accused, and later that “‘without these crimes having exactly been proven…they are sentenced to forced labor for life’!!!”[58] Expressing his distaste for such practices as an homme de loi, he wrote that such convictions based on mere suspicion “[are] how the tribunal revolutionnaire worked in France.”[59]
Ultimately, despite the legal arguments raised in the appeal filed by Marie-Louise’s lawyer, the well-known anti-colonial spokesman François-André Isambert, the Court of Cassation found itself bound by the simple fact that by definition, it could not review cases judged by the Provostial Court.[60] On the surface of things, then, the refusal of the Court of Cassation to intervene was a victory for planter’s justice in Martinique, and the autonomy of the colonial courts more generally. It seemed to many that the court was swayed by Governor Donzelot’s argument that the legal forms needed to be adapted to the “climate of the islands.” But this defeat was also in some ways a victory, as metropolitan attention to the practices of the colonial Provostial Courts grew, both among publicists and some politicians, notably the Duc de Broglie, who presented a request for information about the slaves convicted by the Provostial Court before the Chamber of Peers.[61] There is also some evidence that this sort of attention made leading planters in Martinique more cautious in their use of the Provostial Court. The discovery of a conspiracy “to overthrow the colony” in August of 1826, for example, did not lead to the application of extreme punishments by the Provostial Court. Instead, the principal suspects were quietly deported. Citing the work of the investigating magistrate, one council member commented that “M. de Champvallier’s research has proven the existence of a dangerous conspiracy, but political considerations made it more prudent to suspend judicial pursuits and to turn over to administrative authorities the charge of ridding the colony of these dangerous subjects, without fanfare.”[62] This awareness of “political considerations” undoubtedly reflected concern over the attention drawn to colonial matters, not only by the Provostial Court, but by the profile case of Cyrille Bissette and his co-defendants that reached the Court of Cassation just months after that of Marie-Louise Lambert.[63] As one provostial magistrate later reported, the judicial authorities of Martinique “let indescribable atrocities go unpunished, out of fear they might make noise in France.”[64]
Because whites saw poisoning crimes as implicitly tied to the deeper threats of marronage and revolt, they saw discrete crimes as manifestations of a broader, underlying menace. The investigation of poisoning cases therefore became far less concerned with the individual authorship of criminal acts than it was with fighting a battle for authority over the slave population as a whole. But the problem with poison was precisely that it so hard to document with material evidence, and was therefore also inaccessible to standard categories of legal procedure. As Governor Donzelot remarked in frustration, “the courts can only pronounce a conviction for a material crime prescribed by the law.”[65] With poisonings, however, it seemed that the less hard evidence that could be amassed, the more acceptance there was of the idea of an underground network of poisoners who were able to escape even the inquisitorial campaigns of the courts. As a result, the policing function of the court came to dominate its activities. As one provostial magistrate described his role, he was not “to limit himself to finding out about a specific event, as an ordinary judge would, it is necessary that, using this act, he informs himself outside of regular legal procedure on the morality of all blacks in the area who are reputed to be dangerous; (he( must locate all of those who are potential suspects.”[66]
In practice this meant increased scrutiny of the social lives of slaves, and particularly their ability to congregate while not under the supervision of slaveowners or their surrogates. The social history of slavery reveals how common such opportunities were. In addition to the extraordinary prevalence of so-called “petit marronage,” slaves were often required to leave their plantations, whether to get provisions in town, deliver messages, or have their services rented out to others for sometimes extended periods of time.[67] When traveling, slaves were supposed to carry a pass, or billet, signed by their owners, but in practice these were known to be commonly forged, outdated, or simply forgotten. During the early 1820s, a series of reforms were aimed at cracking down on such practices, as well as the itinerant sale of tobacco and other merchandise from plantation to plantation, but they met with limited success.[68] In this sense, the Provostial Court resembled its metropolitan predecessors dating back to the Old Regime. According to Iain Cameron, though the provostial court had first been developed to deal with military offenses, it became associated with an “open air concept of public menace,” such as thefts involving brigands who carried weapons openly and committed violence in public places. Cameron also emphasizes the courts’ reliance on indirect testimony and rumors to find suspects, which set the stage for their all-important inquisitorial function.[69] The Provostial Court was largely concerned with threats from the lower end of the social spectrum. Many offenses were deemed “provostial” by the very quality of the accused, if they were vagabonds, convicts or otherwise gens sans aveu.[70]
But by the mid-1820s, the Villèle government, facing significant liberal opposition, found such associations with repressive legal practices uncomfortable. Public attention to the strange logic of “vehement suspicion” had raised a perception of grave injustice among French officials, precisely at a time when the Bourbon Regime government was trying to put its own legacy of judicial terror safely behind itself. According to Howard Brown, “the obvious excesses by the [metropolitan] Provostial Courts earned the Restoration monarchy such opprobrium that even an instransigent royalist minister like Hyde de Neuville welcomed their abolition.”[71] This was in contrast to the Napoleonic era, where the use of summary justice reached its height.[72] Meanwhile, its colonial incarnation, the tribunal spécial had the distinction of prosecuting a slave suspected of poisoning the Emperor’s mother-in-law, perhaps ensuring his sympathy to planters’ views on the subject.[73] During the mid-1820s, on the other hand, there was a concerted effort to tout the progress of legal reforms in the provinces as evidence of the enlightened leadership of Charles X. By the same token, even supposedly pro-colonial administrators were becoming less tolerant toward the apparent barbarism of certain colonial practices. The fact that the Court of Cassation had no right to review provostial cases only made questions about the use of Old Regime legal practices all the more pressing, not only to the anti-colonial lobby, but to reformers working to create a standardized system of justice throughout France.[74]
Because they failed to stem the tide of poisonings, criticism of the Provostial Court began to echo with mainstream government figures like Baron Delamardelle, whose early attitude of circumspection gave way to outright frustration by 1825, when he regularly criticized the court in his reports to Paris. The experiment, he concluded, had been a mistake: “the more convictions we get, the more poisonings there [are]," he complained. How was it that despite harshly sentencing fifteen to twenty slaves at a time on the basis of a “vehement suspicion,” the supposed chefs among the poisoners always managed to elude the itinerant magistrates? Delamardelle was also left incredulous by the claim that poisoners were inspired by liberal ideas coming from France, and he did not hesitate to ridicule this logic in his reports, openly wondering how revolutionary rhetoric could have caused the poisoning outbreaks of the early and mid-18th century, and why other colonies, equally populated by ferocious Africans, had not suffered similar ravages.[75] It was in fact sheer exasperation with ideas like these that eventually led the French government to abolish the Provostial Courts by a ministerial decree of November 10, 1826, over the vociferous protestations of plantation owners. The decision came just days after the verdict described at the beginning of this article.
Poison and Colonial Myth
The metropolitan rejection of the Provostial Court was bolstered by increasingly explicit skepticism over the exact nature and prevalence of poisoning. Indeed, this period saw the publication of works by several physicians who had served in the colonies, who claimed that most of the supposed cases of poisoning were in fact the result of epizootic diseases that could strike livestock and spread to the human population. The most prominent of these was Dr. Rufz de Lavison, who cited cholera and dysentery as likely causes, and even undertook a detailed statistical study of the importation of horses, mules and cattle to Martinique that showed that it was poor supply lines from Europe rather than poison that was to blame for sparse herds of livestock. Such evidence did not matter to planters, he wrote, since they were positively obsessed with diabolical conspiracies as the only possible explanation for the death of their animals.[76] As for the poisoned slaves, in a direct challenge to the clichés of white planters, the doctor echoed a number of observers, including Baron Delamardelle, who pointed to their extremely poor physical state as a potential cause of otherwise unexplained mortality. In addition to the work regimen of industrial sugar production, this was especially due to barely subsistence-level nutrition. However, to blame their deaths on poisoning conspiracies was far easier than confronting the reality of the systematic mistreatment of slaves.[77]
It is indeed striking how colonial planters remained attached to their views about poison and related “black magic” even in the presence of open skepticism from metropolitan observers. Just how did slaveowners make sense of the phenomenon of poison? What motivation could explain the crimes if they were being committed by those one would least suspect? Didn’t the death of fellow slaves only put more pressure on those who remained at work? Consider the following description of poisoning in 18th century Martinique as a starting point:
It is said that [the blacks] control their poisons so as to work only on those intended, with no effects on others: they poison by knocking or touching something with their hands or a stick; sometimes by stealthily dipping their fingernail, under which their poison is hidden, in a drink; but more often they bury the poison either at the entrance or in some location within a shack, or in a field, and all a man or beast has to do is pass over or near it, to be struck down dead, either slowly or quickly, according to the wishes of the poisoner.[78]
Such accounts remained common in the early 19th century. When he first arrived in Martinique, even the newly appointed Governor Donzelot privately expressed his uncertainty about such stories, reporting back to Paris that "the facts described [in poisoning cases] were for the most part accompanied by circumstances that were so bizarre, and that supposd such an extreme and gratuitous perversity on the part of the accused, that at times …[I] had trouble believing in their reality."[79]
More common was the idea, promoted by one planter, that “the class of poisoners is made up almost exclusively of slaves who are their masters’ favorites…their crimes are not brought about by despair or excessive labor; it is rather because of laziness and the special advantages they enjoy.”[80] The King’s envoy, Baron Delamardelle, encountered an anecdote with similar implications. According to the story, a planter had spoken in front of his slaves of his desire to return to France and give up his life in Martinique. Soon after, poison struck both animals and slaves on his plantation. After interrogating likely suspects and finding no clues, he finally discovered that the guilty party was a trusted slave whom he had treated extremely well. When asked to explain himself, the guilty slave answered “that the fear of losing such a good master had made him cause damage to his fortune to stop him from going back to France.”[81]
Though several observers suggest that such stories were “often retold,”[82] the counterintuitive notion that slaves were being treated too well was an essential component of a whole worldview adopted by slaveholders. Given the threats of slave revolt and marronage at home and growing abolitionism in France, white panic over poison epidemics functioned in terms of a kind of myth of insubordination and rebellion. The poison conspiracy became a way to criminalize the behavior of the slave population as a whole and juridicize the social tensions generated by slavery. The collective perception that prevailed among whites showed the inability of even the most trusted slaves to be educated and civilized, and also served as proof of the absence of sovereign will in these slaves, that other, unseen forces, were their masters. Thus, in a sort of strange symmetry, the sorcerers who supposedly led poisoning networks acted as the counterpart to the absolute (legal) ownership that masters claimed over their slaves. Since murdered slaves and destroyed livestock represented major capital losses for plantation owners, the attacks went literally to the foundation of the master’s authority.[83] At the same time, where the legal rules of evidence were at first temporarily set aside as impractical, it was now the very absence of evidence that constituted proof of the crime. In effect, the poisoning scares served to demarcate the races precisely at a time when the increased creolization of the slave population heightened fears of intermixing.[84] The only marker left to recognize was race itself.
In a telling formulation, in an effort to help a continental correspondent understand the situation, one planter claimed that “poisoning in Martinique is organized in the same way as the Carbonari in Europe.”[85] The analogy to the underground struggle for national liberation illustrates the way slaveowners understood poisoning to be a fundamentally political act, and used it to justify their increasingly repressive practices. If the bloody uprising of Saint Domingue had become, along with the Terror itself, the purest symbol of irrational revolutionary violence, then the image of the slave-poisoner recalled this dark legacy in the form of an individual act of desperation. Nevertheless, it is paradoxical that historians, like the planters themselves, have often similarly taken up the notion that liberal ideas and the hope for freedom were behind the poisonings, seeing in them a sign of resistance, even a kind of proto-revolutionary consciousness among a vanguard of slave-activists. But the sheer ubiquity of references to the poisonings from all parties concerned has stopped most observers from questioning the extent to which these acts really happened.[86] It is certainly not my purpose here to argue that poisonings never occurred, though the evidence I have cited so far already suggests reasons to be skeptical about the degree and the exact nature of the phenomenon. For example, many commentators refer to the prevalence of arsenic in the islands, a substance whose sale was restricted with only partial success. Yet the deaths described in these accounts do not match those of victims of arsenic.[87] Several authors suggest that the phenomenon is exaggerated by panicked white planters, yet to what extent remains unclear.[88] The literature on magic and sorcery does not provide definitive answers, though medical history suggests possible avenues for alternative explanation.[89] The striking fact that poisoning cases seem to have disappeared after abolition in 1848 also suggests a necessary connection between poisonings and the condition of slavery, but one that cannot necessarily be reduced to a conscious act of political resistance.[90] Rather, as David Geggus points out, “for Africans who attributed misfortune to witchcraft, it may be that resignation or resort to counterwitchcraft seemed a more appropriate response than rebellion.”[91] The obligation to denounce other slaves under threat of torture meant that the accused were most often “selected” through a popular decision that reflected the collective suspicions of a community of slaves. But this choice was more likely to feed into petty jelousies and rivalries among slaves than serve as a vector for concerted rebellion.[92]
In Martinique, there was no tradition of voodoo, but rather forms of sorcery that relied on the sacred knowledge of obies, or obeahs, masters of herbalism and shamanistic practices derived from West African traditions. It was these “healer/sorcerers” that planters suspected of masterminding the poisonings.[93] In her work on African healing practices in the Caribbean, Christiane Bougerol emphasizes the way slavemasters attempted to force European notions of nature and the body onto slaves. For Bougerol, it is plain that whites perceived African healing practices as a threat to their authority.[94] She argues that the advent of Enlightenment models of nature and the body made poisoning claims disappear by the end of the 18th century, thus sealing the victory of the imperialist worldview.[95] In Martinique, however, poison not only persisted, but whites made it the most dramatic justification of the slave system, even as abolitionists presented it as a clear indictment of slavery. In fact, the incompetence of most colonial pharmacists and surgeons, coupled with the insufficiency of medical supplies from Europe meant that many whites looked to “la pharmacopée noire” for their medical needs.[96]
Vincent Brown presents a more nuanced interpretation of white perceptions of the obeahs, arguing that the plantocracy “tried to place its own authority above human contestation by alternately appropriating and censuring the spiritual authority of the enslaved.”[97] This appropriation implied a kind of recognition, an acknowledgement of the reality of power held by the obeahs. Indeed, panic over poisoning actually led whites to build up the magical powers of slaves. When Governor Donzelot wrote that many planters are certain that their slaves have destroyed livestock and murdered others “par des maléfices,” he exemplifies this tendency.[98] In another example, a leading provostial magistrate earnestly recounted the story of slaves who poisoned a priest and fed his remains to a pig whose flesh was distributed around the island by spirits, to be eaten by leaders of the sect.[99] What emerges from these details is a picture of colonial society in which, far from dominating or suppressing traditional spiritual practices, whites stoked them and blew them out of all proportion.
Unwanted Slaves
In February of 1830, the governing council received an urgent request from a group of “terrified” planters, begging for help to control their murderous slaves. The authorities arrested thirty-four slaves who were brought before the chambre d’accusation and charged with poisoning crimes. Strikingly, the slaves were identified as having been accused “either by their masters, or by la clameur publique.” Several were accused of being a danger to neighboring plantations, but not to their own, “and the peacefulness they maintained there was the gauge of their impunity for troubles caused elsewhere.” In a number of cases, the owners demanded payment from the government as reimbursement for their lost investment when the slaves were arrested.[100] For eighteen of the accused slaves, evidence was insufficient for further legal action. As a result, the slaves in this group were turned over to administrative authorities to find a solution. In the period after the elimination of the Provostial Court, this meant transportation from the island, and in the wake of the dissolution of the Provostial Court, we find a rash of deportations of slaves to Senegal, Guiana, Puerto Rico and a few other destinations.[101] By this time, planters had abandoned the effort to find the most effective means of punishment: few, indeed, believed that returning to Africa would strike fear into the hearts of slave poisoners. Instead, stories circulated on the island of how successful deported slaves had become abroad, while one observer noted that, strangely enough, those deported to Puerto Rico no longer seemed to use poison at all.[102] But these deportations again brought the ire of French authorities, who condemned them as desperate and illegal attempts to circumvent the legal process. It went against both international law and common sense, wrote Delamardelle in his legal brief on the subject, to think that other colonies or foreign countries would be willing to accept the most hardened slave criminals.[103]
In the wake of the suppression of the Provostial Court, metropolitan authorities undertook a systematic reform of colonial administration, through the ordinance of February 9, 1827, which sought to tie local decision making bodies more closely to metropolitan oversight. The royal ordinance of September 24, 1828 which focused on judicial practice soon followed, and subjected all rulings of royal courts in the colonies to metropolitan review, limited the term of the chief justice of the royal court to three years, and dramatically increased the authority of the king’s representative, the procureur général.[104] Even before the broad reform of judicial affairs was drafted in 1828, a number of temporary measures were implemented that anticipated these changes.[105] This fundamental reform included the full implementation of the Napoleonic Codes of Civil and Criminal Procedure that sparked, as one planter put it, “a veritable revolution in legal matters," that preceded the better known reforms instituted by the July Monarchy.[106]
Though her case had been rejected by the Court of Cassation, it appears that the appeal of Marie-Louise Lambert helped prompt the decision to dissolve the Provostial court, given that the commutation of her sentence was among several announced immediately before that decision.[107] At first glance, however, the direct impact on slave law was limited. Other than the fact that slaves were required to be given free defense counsel, criminal matters involving slaves remained under the aegis of the ordinance of 1670. But access to legal representation was itself a major step, as slaves were able to become much more active in their own defense in ensuing years. Further, the systematic use of the new Code of Criminal Procedure in all other areas meant that cases involving slaves were less likely to be treated in such an inquisitorial manner, with no public audiences or direct recourse to clemency, and a single magistrate in charge of all phases of the process. Ultimately, as one magistrate put it, the problem was that courts could only concern themselves with “specific facts and not examine the whole life of an individual; despite the fact that it is this evaluation that can decide whether an individual is dangerous or not.”[108] And this was the key change in the legal world of the Restoration, as the influence of the Napoleonic Codes became more pervasive. As inquisitorial as Napoleonic law could be, it remained rooted in an individualism that did not allow the courts to consider the "whole life" of the accused.
Reform also affected methods of punishment. A leading provostial magistrate complained that the French Penal Code punished poisoners of livestock with incarceration, but that slaves would see prison without labor as nothing short of a reward for their crimes. Besides, he wrote, we have few maisons de reclusion, “and our prisons, as we know, are schools for poisoning.”[109] Most decisively with respect to the impact on slaves, the new legislation explicitly barred the use of provostial or other martial jurisdictions from being established without the existence of a state of siege on the island or a severe threat to its security. The Code Pénal did not list livestock poisoning among the offenses that would qualify. Yet while most planters were outraged over the legal reforms and continued to insist that metropolitan laws were out of place in the colonies, there was no sustained local defense of the Provostial Court. In fact, faced with a movement to revive the Court in 1829, despite the clear warnings of the government, members of the Conseil Privé were openly skeptical about its effectiveness. Even if it could be reestablished, one member asked what the Provostial Court could achieve that was different from a Cours d’Assises: “un facheux effet moral sans resultat efficace, voila tout.”[110] Another pointed out that “the crimes only increased, even during the executions, and if it is not all of the habitants, at least the majority soon demanded the elimination of this court as being unable to stop the evil, and also being too rushed in its methods.” The King’s representative, the Procureur général, who was there to stand against reestablishing the court, also pointed out its potential impact in France: “such a court would draw much attention and could allow certain people, who ask for nothing better than to have a plausible pretext, to claim that the colony is in disarray and seeking to use an oppressive system.” Given the great difficulty of getting convictions in cases of poisoning, another council member argued that “we would do much better for the interest of planters who suffer losses, as well as for the colony as a whole, [to] expel the slaves accused of poisoning from Martinique, unless there is irrefutable proof of their crimes.”[111]
As we have seen, after the suppression of the Provostial Court transportation became the standard way local courts dealt with slave poisoners. After 1830, those poisoning cases that did go before regular courts tended to focus on the simple fact of the possession or procurement of noxious substances by slaves, as opposed to their participation in black magic and secret societies.[112] Planters saw transportation as an administrative solution made necessary because the courts were no longer a viable option for dealing with slave crimes. In his remarks before the council, the procureur himself pointed out that not a single poisoning case had been brought before the courts during his tenure on the island, which spanned most of 1829, despite widespread complaints that poison remained a threat. Clearly, he concluded, planters preferred simply to abandon their slaves to the government rather than have them tried in regular courts.[113] In other words the failure of the Provostial Court signalled a real disaffection of planters from the colonial court system, increasingly seen as a tool of metropolitan control, notably in favor of creditors seeking repayment of longstanding debt.[114] It is nothing less than striking that, at a moment when planters demanded help from the state to supplement their own private justice, the court system affirmed the values of the changing legal culture of the metropole rather than upholding their threatened sense of authority.
In her study of slave punishment in Jamaica, Diana Paton writes: “Slaveholders’ participation in slave trials, whether as magistrate, freeholder or prosecutor, affirmed their private power to punish.”[115] It is true that recourse to the colonial court provided greater legitimacy than purely private, exemplary punishment on the part of individual masters. And it remains striking how the colonial provostial court was characterized by a surprising preoccupation with formalism, from recording the “signature” of interrogated slaves to the “counting of witnesses” (albeit tortured or coerced ones). Maintaining the trappings of justice in these extraordinary cases may seem surprising, but in a sense helped justify the greater slave system itself.[116] Ultimately, however, in the case of Martinique, summary justice seemed especially to underscore just how powerless masters could be. Given the presence of an unwanted slave who could undermine discipline and thereby threaten the productivity of a whole plantation, choices were few and all carried risks. In fact, slave deportations unmasked a fundamental contradiction within the slave system, tied to the blurred frontier between public and private law. The problem of unwanted slaves showed the limits of a private market for human beings: though it was founded upon the exalted authority and independence of the slavemaster, it required state intervention to remain viable. That planters were essentially at the mercy of their own worst slaves signalled the death knell for the world they had made.[117]
Conclusion
In his classic study of witchcraft in 17th century France, Robert Mandrou memorably argued that the poisoning scandal at the court of Louis XIV ultimately served the interest of expanding state power. Colbert and Pellot took advantage of “a unique opportunity to make sovereign courts accept the necessity of harmonizing legal decisionmaking, the implicit goal of all of the general criminal ordinances.”[118] This process played out in a slow centralization of royal authority through repeated confrontations between the new intendants and magistrats des cours souveraines. The famous trial of 1682 marked the end of the great witchhunts, since one could no longer be tried for witchcraft itself, but only as a “faux sorcier” accused of one of the “official” crimes of sacrilege, impiety or poisoning.[119] As a result, this was also the year of the first legal restrictions on the sale of poisons. The public scandal over the trial of Mme de Brinvilliers in the 1670s and then Mme de Montespan meant that poison would long be associated with the sophisticated subterfuges of aristocratic women, often in efforts to gain financial independence through the control of inheritance. The nearly hysterical response to the scandals in French society have been linked to deeply felt anxiety over the threat to the authority of the paterfamilias, and therefore to the social fabric itself.[120]
Superstition, argued Pierre Pluchon in his study of Haitian Voodoo, came to the Caribbean islands with the arrival of peasants from the French countryside. He cites in particular a story recounted by Dutertre of a white peasant woman in Martinique who had the ability to place curses on whole plantations.[121] As they melded homegrown beliefs and rituals and adapted them to the brutal context of slavery, reserving a place for Catholic mysticism and peasant tales, African slaves created a new culture that combined resistance, resignation and transcendence of the master’s power. As Joan Dayan has shown, the violence and degradation of slavery can be seen as the reflection of French practices and values, a kind of baroque mirror of French society.[122] As he searched for the sources of poison in the island flora of Martinique, Dr. Rufz de Lavison himself also pointed this out: “the name of Brinvilliers is given to an herb that has since been considered one of the principal agents used by the blacks in their evil spells. It is not the only one of our prejudices that arrived in this way from France.”[123] Indeed, another is the fantasy of unlimited aristocratic privilege and power couched in the trappings of honor and independence that made slaveowners something more than proto-industrial capitalists, and made slavery about more than economic optimization.[124] Rufz de Lavison even went so far as to point out the numerous references to slave poisoning in Romantic literature, implying that such stories were accepted just as uncritically by a public that was largely unsympathetic to slavery as it was by slaveowners. The use of poison by slaves as the quintessential “weapon of the weak” found ready adherents both among island slaveholders and the French public.[125]
During the Restoration, the greater efficiency of the justice system meant there was less of a need for ferocious punishments. This movement involved the adoption of the judicial principal of intime conviction,[126]which reflected a greater reliance on the discretion of magistrates who had been “professionalized, under executive control, and centralized” in comparison with their Old Regime counterparts.[127] By the 1820s, the feeling of opprobrium toward martial justice in France naturally extended to its colonial counterpart, against which the civilized, codified penal law stood in stark contrast. In the colonies, the paradoxical effect was to undermine the social control of slaves, as the Provostial Court and the slave-poisoners before it appeared as remnants of Old Regime excess, inappropriate to a legal world based on a radical individualism. As one colonial magistrate put it, “the time will come when the colons will be forced to respect the metropolitan government and enforce the law; to accept, in a word, with no arrière pensée, all of the consequences of the legal system.”[128] This process, in fact, seemed to be well under way in 1831, the year he wrote these words, and culminated in the momentous legal reforms of 1832.[129] If the threat of slave poison is what first justified a separate legal procedure meant exclusively for slaves in the early 18th century, then the collapse of the Provostial Court was a step toward abandoning that separate sphere of justice.[130] In the colonies, the forced integration of slaves into the regular court system, and no longer in a special tribunal, was a step toward envisioning, and socializing, slaves as legal subjects, and therefore ultimately as political ones.[131]
A decade ago, in an assessment of the historiography of the French Revolution in the American Historical Review, Lynn Hunt wrote that “there is no more telling ground for a consideration of the impact of revolutionary ideas or practices than the Caribbean colonies.”[132] Yet, if we are to take the colonial Provostial Court as symptomatic of the martial justice of the revolutionary era, this impact seems pathological. The language of "salutary terror" used in the Provostial Courts derived from Revolutionary tribunals, as well as those used in the backlash of the postrevolutionary period. But "white terror" in Martinique was double-edged: it was a method of repression that also revealed the depths of anxiety among the white elite. From the continental perspective, the rejection of the Provostial Court must be inscribed within a general movement of legal practices toward the certainty, and away from the severity of punishment. For the planters of Martinique, the Provostial Court was initially an effort to conform to the formal demands of the French legal system, to “dress up” the sovereignty of masters in the clothing of state power and law. Like its continental counterpart a few years earlier, the colonial Provostial Court was less concerned with the individual authorship of crime, and more geared toward controlling a marginal social group. But the “spectacular terror” and the orchestrated interrogations of the Provostial Court were unsuccessful in penetrating the mystical hold the sorcerers supposedly held over the slaves under their command. Furthermore, convicting slaves too haphazardly became a serious threat to property. The issue of reimbursement for convicted slaves and widespread calls for clemency also illustrates a fundamental tension between the master’s absolute right to dispose of property, and the state’s right to curb that right, as in the case of slaves deemed dangerous to other plantations, and the social fabric of the island itself. It appears that even the demands of this form of martial justice could actually undermine the authority of slaveholders and even, in a small way, provide a voice to slaves.
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[1] Archives Nationales, Centre d’Archives d’Outre-Mer (hereafter CAOM), FM SG Martinique 141/1271, third session at St. Esprit.
[2] “…on dit que leurs poisons n’ont point de pouvoir sur les blancs, et qu’ils l’avouent eux-mêmes. Ce qu’il y a de certain est que jusqu’a présent il n’y a heureusement point d’exemple qu’un Blanc soit mort par de pareilles voies….” Annales du Conseil Souverain de la Martinique (1786; rpt. Paris, 1995) I, 1: 497.
[3] This association explains the special legislation devoted to poison in 18th century Martinique. See CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/431, Mémoire Rivière, 1829. See also Pierre Pluchon, Vaudou, sorciers, empoisonneurs: de Saint-Domingue à Haiti (Paris, 1987), 148; Josette Fallope, Esclaves et citoyens: les noirs à la Guadeloupe au XIXe siècle dans le processus de résistance et d’intégration, 1802-1910 (Basse Terre, Guadeloupe, 1992), 189; 204-205; Yvan Debbasch, “Le Crime d’Empoisonnement aux Iles pendant la Période Esclavagiste” Revue d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer 51 (1963): 137-188. Clarence Maxwell, “‘The Horrid Villainy’: Sarah Bassett and the Poisoning Conspiracies in Bermuda, 1727-1730” Slavery and Abolition 21 (2000): 48-74. Maxwell argues that poisoning conspiracies first appeared in Bermuda after 1730 resulting from “a technological innovation whose origins lie within an African…context,” and speculates that this knowledge originated among French speaking slaves (Maxwell, 48; 66-69).
[4] CAOM FM SG Mart. 123/1101, Deportation d’individus dangereux, 1819-1822, letter of Sept. 9, 1822. On Donzelot’s term as governor, see Françoise Thésée, Le Général Donzelot à la Martinique vers la fin de l’ancien régime colonial, 1818-1826 (Paris, 1997).
[5] CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/430, Documents de la Cour Prévôtale, 1822-27. The term Cour Prévôtale has sometimes been translated as "Prevost's Court;" in either case it is the military nature of the institution that must be retained. A military officer presided and named local notables to sit on the court along with local commissaires and a lieutenant of the Gendarmerie. The court was completed by the procureur du roi, and used a clerk recruited on the spot. The process of instruction was accelerated by allowing the gendarmes to serve as bailiffs and lead the interrogation of witnesses. On the continental court, see Daniel Resnick, The White Terror and the Political Reaction after Waterloo (Cambridge, MA, 1966), 83-99, and Jean-Pierre Royer, Histoire de la Justice en France (Paris, 1995), 489-494.
[6] Gazette de la Martinique, Aug. 14, 1822.
[7] Joseph Elzéar Morénas, Précis historique de la Traite des Noirs et de l’Esclavage colonial (1828; rpt. Geneva, 1978), 323.
[8] Examples are Kenneth Banks, Chasing Empire Across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, 1713-1763 (Montreal, 2002); Anne Pérotin-Dumon, La Ville aux Iles, la Ville dans l’Ile: Basse-Terre et Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, 1650-1820 (Paris, 2000); Peter Moogk, La Nouvelle France: The Making of French Canada, A Cultural History (East Lansing, MI: 2000), chap. 3.
[9] For example, Antoine Gisler, L’Esclavage aux Antilles Françaises, XVIIe-XIXe siècle (1965; rpt. Paris, 1981), Armand Nicholas, Histoire de la Martinique des Arawaks à 1848 (Paris, 1996). On the Code Noir, see Louis Sala-Molins, Le Code Noir ou le Calvaire de Canaan (Paris, 1987); Vernon Palmer, “The Origins and Authors of the Code Noir” Louisiana Law Review 56 (1995): 363-390; Malick Ghachem, “Montesquieu in the Caribbean: The Colonial Enlightenment between Code Noir and Code Civil” Historical Reflections 25 (1999): 183-210.
[10] Lawrence Jennings, French Anti-Slavery: The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in France, 1802-1848 (New York, 2000); Paul Michael Kielstra, The Politics of Slave-Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 1814-1848 (New York, 2000); Nelly Schmidt, Victor Schoelcher et l’Abolition de l’esclavage (Paris, 1994).
[11] CAOM FM SG Mart. 400/2267, letter of April 10, 1817.
[12] Yvan Debbasch, “Au Coeur du ‘Gouvernement des Esclaves’: La Souveraineté Domestique aux Antilles francaises (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles)” Revue Francaise d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer LXXII (1985): 31-54.
[13] CAOM FM SG Mart. 140/1265, Papiers Delamardelle, 1820-28. See also FM Gén. 374/2202, Rapports au Roi sur l’organisation judiciaire, 1804-1846.
[14] In France, “ce système de preuves légales etait moribond depuis longtemps, mais toujours professé comme doctrine officielle…” Xavier Rousseaux and Marie-Sylvie Dupont-Bouchat, “Revolutions et Justice Pénale: Modèles Français et traditions nationales (1780-1830)” in Rousseaux, Dupont-Bouchat and Claude Vael, eds., Révolutions et Justice Pénale en Europe (Paris, 1999), 20.
[15] Rousseaux and Dupont-Bouchat, “Révolution et Justice Pénale,” 20; see also Jean-Marie Carbasse, Introduction Historique au droit Pénal (Paris, 1990), 321.
[16] CAOM FM SG Mart. 78/638, Code Penal des esclaves, exposé des motifs. The problem with the jury is that it would mix races together and imply equality. Even if all the parties in a case were freedmen of color, planters argued, a jury composed of freedmen would have authority equal to that of a magistrate, an unacceptable situation; see CAOM FM SG Mart. 140/1265, Papiers de Lamardelle, 1820-28. For a comparative perspective on slave testimony, see Roger Buckley, “The Admission of Slave Testimony at British Military Courts in the West Indies, 1800-1809” in David Gaspar and David Geggus, eds. A Turbulent Time: the French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington, IN, 1997): 226-250.
[17] CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/430, Documents de la Cour Prévôtale, 1822-1827, letter of July 3, 1823.
[18] “Il n’est pas rare aux Antilles de voir des aventuriers se parer du titre de docteur en médecine et pratiquer aux depens de qui de droit...” Moreau de Jonnès, L’hygiène Militaire des Antilles (1816), 82n. See also Debbasch, “Le Crime d’empoisonnement,” 147n. Though the surgeons had little expertise, they were highly valued in colonial society and often became closely linked with great landowning families; see Pierre Pluchon, “La Santé dans les Colonies de l’Ancien Régime” in Histoire des médecins et pharmaciens de marine et des colonies (Paris, 1985), 99, 107. Philippe Masson has argued that the sweeping away of Old Regime medical practices in the Ministry of the Navy during the Napoleonic era led to a dramatic shortage of trained physicians during the Restoration, opening careers to unregulated charlatans; see his “Le corps de santé de la marine de 1789 à 1871” in Histoire des médecins, 135, 143.
[19] CAOM FM SG Mart. 123/1101, Deportation d’individus dangereux, 1819-1822, letter of Sept. 9, 1822.
[20] “L’intention du roi est qu’aux colonies l’on se tienne, autant qu’il est possible, dans les limites du droit commun, notamment en ce qui regarde la liberté individuelle.” “Dépêche ministérielle au gouverneur sur l"illégalité des déportations extrajudicaires par lui ordonnées” Jan. 17, 1822, in Code de la Martinique 7: 320.
[21] CAOM FM SG Mart. Corr. 143, Procès Verbaux des déliberations du Conseil de Gouvernement et d’Administration de la Martinique, Aug. 9, 1822. Nicholas, Histoire de la Martinique, 294-296.
[22] In fact, the royal commission formed to draft legal reforms began meeting during the first week of the Provostial Court’s operation. True to its metropolitan counterpart, the court’s attention to formalism was selective, but real. On the court’s formalism, see below, note 131.
[23] CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/430, letter of July 3, 1823. On the history of the use of avocats in the Caribbean colonies, see Morénas, Précis historique, 243.
[24] CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/430, Rapport au Ministère de la Marine, n.d..
[25] CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/430, Documents de la Cour Prévôtale, 1822-27.
[26] The phrase vehementement soupçonné referred to the condition that justified the use of torture, which would prompt the confession needed for a conviction in capital crimes; see Lisa Silverman, Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth, and the Body in Early Modern France (Chicago, 2001), 43-47.
[27] CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/430, Documents de la Cour Prévôtale, 1822-27.
[28] CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/430. According to the prominent Provostial magistrate Charles Rivière, it was actually crucial that slavemasters judge their own slaves directly: “Slaves know only their masters [among whites]. Rarely do they have to appear before ordinary magistrates, who therefore can never know [the slave’s] situation morale.” CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/431, Mémoire Rivière, 1829.
[29] CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/430, extrait du régistre des déliberations du Conseil de gouvernement et d’administration.
[30] CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/430, Rapport du Général Donzelot, Sept. 28, 1822.
[31] “Ce qui fait frémir, c’est que ce sont presque toujours les nègres les plus riches [sic], les mieux traités par leurs maitres, les domestiques jouissant de toute leur confiance, qui sont les chefs de ces complots.” CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/430, unsigned letter of Sept. 14, 1823.
[32] “Les esclaves employés dans la maison, qui sont traités avec le plus de douceur, sont les plus dangereux.” E. de La Cornillère, La Martinique en 1842 (1843), 132.
[33] On the Carbet revolt, see Nicholas, Histoire de la Martinique, 316-320; Thésée, Le Général Donzelot, chap. 4.
[34] CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/431, Mémoire Rivière, 1829.
[35] CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/430, Rapport du Général Donzelot, September 28, 1822.
[36] In his study of criminal justice in provincial France, Iain Cameron points out that the harshest punishments were used in those areas where repression was least effective; Crime and Repression in the Auvergne and the Guyenne, 1720-1790 (New York, 1981), 10. “It was appropriate that the death penalty—the most exemplary of all punishments, designed for a weak pre-Beccarian system of law enforcement—was in fact used in cases which must have reminded the authorities of their weakness…” (Cameron, 156).
[37] CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/430, Rapport au Ministère de la Marine, n.d..
[38] CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/430, report of Sept. 28, 1822. It should be noted that there was a similar debate over appropriate punishments for members of the military in the islands: Moreau de Jonnes, L’hygiene Militaire.
[39] CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/430, Rapport au Ministère de la Marine, n.d.
[40] CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/430, Rapport Lucy.
[41] The phrase was supposedly common among slaves; see, for example, CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/430, Documents de la Cour Prévôtale, letter of Jan. 25, 1823. Cf. Vincent Brown, “Spectacular Terror and Sacred Authority in Jamaican Slave Society” Slavery & Abolition 24 (2003): 24-53. Brown argues that “masters used “spectacular terror” to deter Africans from self-destruction,” using extraordinary violence, including the mutilation of corpses in order to “impress Africans not only with their power over life, but with their influence on the afterlife.” (Brown, 26). Moreau de Jonnès recounts an example of how a public execution could draw sympathy for victims and turn spectators against authorities, see CAOM FM DFC XI/mémoires/51/518, Recherches Historiques sur les Affranchis ou Gens de Couleurs des Iles de la Martinique, n.d..
[42] CAOM FM SG Mart. 141/1270, letter of Apr. 8, 1823.
[43] CAOM FM SG Mart. 141/1270, Demandes de grace des nègres justiciés, letter of Jan. 10, 1824, and Acte de Commutation of July 21, 1824. This and other dossiers contain dozens of these requests, with many resulting in full amnesty. This regular recourse to clemency is often characteristic of criminal justice systems that rely on extreme punishments. In the classic argument by Douglas Hay, clemency functions mainly to strengthen systems of social authority and deference; see “Property, Authority and the Criminal Law” in Hay, et al., eds. Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in 18th century England (New York, 1975): 17-63.
[44] as well as a great deal of debate, on both specific cases and general principles, see CAOM FM SG Mart. 161/1479, Mode de remboursement des nègres justiciés. A tax to offset this cost was finally added to the capitation tax at the beginning of 1827; Gazette de la Martinique Jan. 3, 1827. However, planters were liable for jail costs and public notices specify that if arrested slaves were not claimed by their owner within eight days they would be sold to pay these costs.
[45] CAOM FM SG Mart. 141/1270, Demandes de grace des nègres justiciés.
[46] CAOM FM SG Mart. 141/1270, Demandes de grace des negres justiciés, lettre de M. Léon, No. 40 provisoire, Bagne de Rochefort, n.d.
[47] Any abolitionist, he wrote, “would run from a land in which human nature presents itself as so degraded, he could not imagine that demoralization could go so far.” CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/431, letter of March 1827.
[48] Nicholas, Histoire de la Martinique, 325-327; Thésée, Le Général Donzelot, 186-188; Yvan Debbasch, “Poesie et Traite, l'Opinion Française sur le Commerce Négrier au début du XIXe siècle” Revue Française d'Histoire d'Outre-Mer 48 (1961): 311-352.
[49] “Les vociférations de prétendu amis des noires à la tribune et dans les journaux, sont parvenu jusqu’à nous sans avoir été démenties. On a prit soins de les répandre parmi les nègres qui répètent que c’est la volonté du Roi qui veut qu’ils aient leur liberté, que le Général Donzelot et ses confidents le veulent aussi, mas que leurs maitres s’y opposent.” CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/430, unsigned letter of Sept. 14, 1823.
[50] Jennings, French Anti-Slavery, 12-13. In a bizarre subplot of this story, apparently in response to this shift in the Chamber members of the governing council sent a representative to France to let a certain deputy know they were prepared “a lui assurer une pension de 20,000 fr. et de lui donner ce qu’il voudrait, afin de s’assurer de son appui,” in support of the colonial cause. The plan did not work. Anonymous, Lettre. Ile Martinique, le 14 fevrier 1821, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 8-LK12-147.
[51] Code de la Martinique 7: 435, 481.
[52] On the commissionaires, see Dale Tomich, Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar: Martinique and the World Economy, 1830-1848 (Baltimore, 1990), 116-123.
[53] CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/431, Mémoire Rivière. White anxiety came to a head in 1823 with the so-called Affaire Bissette, in which a tract denouncing the treatment of free people of color was seized, its presumed author jailed and later branded and deported, leading to a full scale scandal in the French press. The affair helped reawaken support for the abolitionist cause in France at a time when the dramatic details of slave poisonings were also beginning to spread among the reading public. The best account is in Stella Pame, Cyrille Bissette: un Martyr de la liberté (Fort de France, 1999). The present article does not address the occasional involvement of petit blancs in slave crimes and uprisings. I have focused on planters, though I do not mean to depict all whites as acting en bloc. On the complex nature of white creole identity, see Rebecca Hartkopf-Schloss, “'The Distance between the Color White and all Others': The struggle over White Identity in the French Colony of Martinique, 1802-1848” Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 2003; and Georges Mauvois, Un Complot d’Esclaves: Martinique, 1831 (Grenoble, 1998).
[54] It is likely that suspicions over the influence of freedmen on slaves were increased by the extraordinary network of “secret societies” that congregated regularly for dances, weddings and funeral processions in urban areas. There were no fewer than seventeen such societies in each of the islands two major towns in the late 1820s. Scholars have shown that these associations were highly organized, with registries of dues-paying members and the leadership of a “king and queen” and other officials. One account claims that when the leader of one of these societies was convicted as a poisoner by the Provostial Court, the word spread among slaves across the island in a matter of hours. See Yvan Debbasch, “Les Associations Serviles à la Martinique au XIXe siècle,” in Etudes d’Histoire du Droit Privé offertes à Piere Petot (Paris, 1959), 124-126; and Liliane Chauleau, La Vie Quotidienne aux Antilles Françaises au Temps de Victor Schoelcher (Paris, 1979), 178-179.
[55] CAOM FM SG Mart. 141/1270, Requête pour Marie-Louise Lambert, négresse libre de la Martinique détenue dans la maison centrale de Rennes, 1-6.
[56] CAOM FM SG Mart. 141/1270, letter of Feb. 20, 1825, the emphasis is Donzelot’s.
[57] CAOM FM SG Mart. 141/1270, report of Jan. 29, 1827. Delamardelle also expressed his admiration for the courage of the executioner in the case of Marie-Claire.
[58] CAOM FM SG Mart. 141/1270, letter of Nov. 29, 1827, emphasis is Delamardelle’s. Other French authorities were equally critical of the methods used by the court, pointing out that even the Royal Court of Martinique acknowledged that the expression was “purely formal…however violent a suspicion might be, it cannot by itself be the basis for the administration of punishment.” Cited in CAOM FM SG Mart. 141/1270, Requête pour Marie-Louise Lambert, 28, emphasis in original.
[59] CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/431, report of Mar. 27, 1830.
[60] This was perhaps the most obvious way the provostial jurisdiction differed from that of a Tribunal de première instance. The Court of Cassation had the full backing of the Baron Delamardelle’s brief on this point: “Whatever one may think of the Provostial Court,” he wrote, “its judgment is irrevocable.” CAOM FM SG Mart. 141/1270, report of Nov. 17, 1826.
[61] CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/430, letter of Feb. 6, 1827 .
[62] CAOM FM SG Mart. 161/1479, Mode de remboursement des nègres justiciés.
[63] On the Bissette case, see M. Isambert et les principaux avocats de la France, Consultations et Mémoires à l’appui du Recours en Cassation des Hommes de Couleur (Paris, 1827); and Richard Lucy, Note relative au Pourvoi en Cassation à la Martinique sous l’Ancienne Legislation Criminelle (Paris, 1835).
[64] Hermé Duquesne, Lettre d’un Magistrat de la Martinique pour rendre compte de sa conduite au Ministère de la Justice et des Colonies [sic] (Oct, 1831), 30. Emphasis in original.
[65] CAOM FM SG Mart. 123/1101, Déportations d’individus dangereux, 1819-1822.
[66] CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/431, letter of July 27, 1827.
[67] Scholars have shown that petit marronage was often tolerated by masters, who had little recourse when punishment simply exacerbated the problem. Slaves would also engage in activities related to their provision grounds, the small plots that were to provide much of their food and other personal needs during their time away from field work. As Dale Tomich has shown, the provision ground limited planters’ costs, but also gave slaves control over a whole sphere of private life; see Tomich, Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar, chap. 8.
[68] Colportage of tobacco was made illegal in 1819, as the colporteurs were perceived as “étant, la plupart, des sujets dangereux, donnant de mauvais conseils aux esclaves et leur distribuant du poison.” In 1821, the ban was extended to all kinds of merchandise. CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/430, report of Sept. 28, 1822.
[69] According to Iain Cameron, “‘Witness’ should not be understood in too literal a sense. It was exceptional for the ‘witness’ to produce concrete evidence which contributed materially to the case; their usual role was to suggest a suspect, establish his reputation. If two or three witnesses agreed on a suspect, he would be arrested.” Crime and Repression, p. 141. This reliance on rumor is supported by Nicole Castan, “Summary Justice” in Robert Forster and Orest Ranum, eds., Deviants and the Abandoned in French Society (Baltimore, 1978), 131.
[70] Cameron, Crime and Repression, 134-136. According to Nicole Castan, the provost “assumed almost total disciplinary control of the marginal population in the countryside.” “Summary Justice,” 132. See also Bernard Schnapper, “Les Systèmes Repressifs Français de 1789 à 1815” in Révolution et Justice Penale, 34.
[71] Howard Brown, “Domestic State Violence: Repression from the Croquants to the Commune” The Historical Journal 42 (1999), 617. Clive Emsley points out that British reformers pointed to the French Code as a model of both enlightened and efficient justice; see “Law Reform and Penal Reform in England in the Age of the French Revolution,” in Révolution et Justice Penale, 330; see also Alan Spitzer’s discussion of the suppression of the Carbonari in Old Hatreds and Young Hopes: The French Carbonari against the Bourbon Restoration (Cambridge, MA, 1971), 144-146.
[72] Howard Brown argues that the period 1797-1802, not the Terror, is “the pivotal period in three centuries of repression in France.” During these years, traditional means of repression such as the provostial court “were used on an unprecedented scale…” “Domestic State Violence” 612-614. This reading is supported by the work of Bernard Schnapper, “Détention préventive et liberté provisoire de la Constituante à l’Empire” in Philippe Robert, ed. Entre l’ordre et la liberté, la détention provisoire, deux siècles de débats (Paris, 1992).
[73] The special tribunal was set up in November, 1803, and in 1806 heard the case of a “tentative d’empoisonnement commise par Emilie, domestique [sic], sur la personne de sa maitresse, Mme de la Pagerie, mere de l’imperatrice Josephine, et belle mere de l’Empereur.” CAOM C8 A 107.
[74] Jean-Louis Halpérin shows that the centralized hierarchy of courts took a number of years to be achieved, particularly in the South of France. See Histoire du Droit Privé Français depuis 1804 (Paris, 1996), 52-53.
[75] CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/431, reports of August 24, 1827 and March 27, 1830.
[76] Rufz de Lavison, "Recherches sur les empoisonnements pratiqués par les nègres a la Martinique" Annales d'hygiène publique et de médecine légale 31 (1844), 428-429. See also CAOM C8 B14, I, Jean de Laborde, “Effets dangereux de l’erreur et de Superstition dans les Colonies Françaises de l’Amerique,” Jan. 3, 1775, cited in Pluchon, Vaudou, Sorciers, Empoisonneurs, 234. Dr. Laborde concludes that poison is in fact generally cholera morbus (236), to which Dr. Rufz de Lavison would add dysentery, ("Recherches sur les Empoisonnements,” 31:418 and 32: 170-216). Geneviève Léti has found that there was only one veterinarian on the whole island in this period; Santé et Société Esclavagiste à la Martinique, 1802-1848 (Paris, 1998), 56.
[77] Rufz de Lavison, "Recherches sur les Empoisonnements,” 429. CAOM FM SG Mart. Corr. 143. In its session of February 24, 1823, and then again on April 23 and June 13, the governing council recognized the urgency of the widespread problem of malnutrition, especially the inadequacy of supplies of rye flour. See also Fallope, Esclaves et Citoyens, 107. On the relationship between slave labor and mortality rates on sugar plantations, see Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville, TN, 1990), 26-34; Tomich, Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar, 237-248.
[78] M. Assier, doyen du conseil, quoted in Les Annales du Conseil Souverain de la Martinique I, 1: 495-496.
[79] CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/430, Rapport du Général Donzelot, Sept. 28, 1822.
[80] “il est d’autant plus difficile de les decouvrir qu’on se mefie moins d’eux.” CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/431, Mémoire Rivière, 1829.
[81] CAOM FM SG Mart. 140/1268, Rapport Delamardelle du 19 novembre 1819 (1821), 69n.
[82] Dr. Rufz de Lavison recounts the following as an “anecdote souvent racontée” of a slave’s confession: “Eh! c’est à cause de vos bienfaits même que j’ai commis toutes ces mechancetés: j’etais trop bien; si vous aviez été dur pour moi, comme pour les autres, si vous m’aviez force de travailler, je n’y aurais pas songé.” "Recherches sur les empoisonnements,” 400. Another slave supposedly claimed to her master that: “vous m’aviez donné tout ce dont j’avais besoin, tout ce que je pouvais désirer. Il fallait que je fisse le mal.” quoted in Fallope, Esclaves et Citoyens, 205n.
[83] Indeed, planter anxieties sometimes linked slave criminality directly to the specter of expropriation. As the prominent planter M. de Perrinelle (fils) explained the crimes, “For the slave, unused to judging matters of property law, expropriation is but the vae victis; his master is unlucky with his fortune, he [the slave] must now belong to another master; the slave’s displeasure will reveal itself through insubordination, or by the still more dangerous means of poison.” Quoted in de La Cornillère, La Martinique en 1842, 241-242.
[84] Cf. Pluchon, Vaudou, Sorciers, Empoisonneurs, 149.
[85] CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/430, anonymous letter of September 14, 1823.
[86] For example, Bernard Moitt, Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635-1848 (Bloomington, IN, 2001), 139; Fallope, Esclaves et Citoyens, 203; Arlette Gautier, Les Soeurs de Solitude: La Condition Féminine dans l’Esclavage aux Antilles du XVIIe au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1985), 223-225. For the general framework of resistance, see Michael Craton, “Forms of Resistance to Slavery” in Franklin Knight, ed., The Slave Societies of the Caribbean (London, 1997): 222-270.
[87] A forensic test for arsenic was not developed until 1838. Small amounts of arsenic or other poisons were commonly used for household purposes, and several cases focus on copper oxide as the poisonous agent, but with effects that do not match its properties. See CAOM FM SG Mart. 141/1271, trial of Nov. 7, 1826.
[88] For example, Liliane Chauleaux: “Il est possible qu’il y ait eu dans quelques cas des empoisonnements…”Dans les Iles du Vent: La Martinique, XVIIe-XIXe siècle (Paris, 1993), 127; Geneviève Léti: “Il peut arriver que ce soit de vrais empoisonnements…” Santé et Société Esclavagiste, 52. Cf. also Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the 18th Century (Baton Rouge, 1992), 162-165; Thésée, Le Général Donzelot, 112; Pluchon, Vaudou, Sorciers, Empoisonneurs, 254-268.
[89] For example, Phillippe Delisle, “Aux sources de l’univers magico-religieux martiniquais: esclavage et phobie des sorciers” Cahiers d’Histoire XLI (1996), 64-66; Franck Degoul, Le Commerce diabolique: une exploration de l’imaginaire du pacte maléfique en Martinique (Petit Bourg, Guadeloupe, 2000); Genevieve Léti does not make the argument herself, but her research provides much information that supports idea that outbreaks of yellow fever and other diseases correlate with the high death rates attributed to slave poisoning, and she gives strong evidence that planters contributed to the spread of contagion out of ignorance (Santé et société esclavagiste, 122-140). Natural disasters such as hurricanes also struck the island and had a direct impact on death rates (Santé et société esclavagiste, 70-71), a finding that can be read in tandem with David Geggus’s argument that slave revolts increased in proportion to economic slowdowns in slave societies; see his “The Causation of Slave Rebellions” in Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington, IN, 2002), 60.
[90]. Rufz de Lavison, La Martinique sous le gouvernement de M. le contre-amiral du Val d"Ailly, 1840-44 (Paris, 1882), 23.
[91] Geggus, “The Causation of Slave Rebellions,” 59.
[92] According to Orlando Patterson, “Obeah accusations were also made against people who either threatened to be too successful or were the source of much anxiety.” cited in Brown, “Spectacular Terror,” 42.
[93] The etymology of the term suggests that it had a positive connotation in Africa, though it probably took on new meanings in the Caribbean context. See Jerome Handler and Kenneth Bilby, “On the early uses and Origin of the term ‘Obeah’ in Barbados and the Anglophone Caribbean” Slavery and Abolition 22 (2001): 87-100; Clarence Maxwell, “‘The Horrid Villainy’,” 50-51; Brown, “Spectacular Terror,” 36-38.
[94] Christiane Bougerol, “Medical Practices in the French West Indies: Master and Slave in the 17th and 18th centuries” History and Anthropology 2 (1985), 125; 136. The idea that health care was a key locus of the power struggle between slaves and masters is also developed in Sharla Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill, 2002). According to Vincent Brown, the banning of obeahs in the Jamaican consolidated slave law of 1823 represented “a ban on alternative authority and social power.” “Spectacular Terror,” 39.
[95] Bougerol, “Medical Practices in the French West Indies,” 132; 139. “Towards the end of the century, physicians of the kingdom maintained in their post by the government, came to join the surgeons on the habitations. Their medical knowledge… provided a fresh understanding of the situation…. With time, this calming influence won out over the surgeons of the islands who had absorbed the emotions of colonial life…” (Bougerol, 130). Cf. Sean Quinlan, “Colonial Encounters: Colonial Bodies, Hygiene and Abolitionist Politics in 18th century France” History Workshop Journal 42 (1996): 107-125.
[96] Pluchon, “La Santé dans les colonies,” 111.
[97] Brown, “Spectacular Terror,” 46-47.
[98] CAOM FM SG Mart. 123/1101, Déportation d’individus dangereux, 1819-1822, letter of Sept. 9, 1822.
[99] “…on distribua, par des esprits, la chair de cet animal aux chefs qui, à cause de leurs éloignement, n’avaient pas assistés aux repas où les restes du prêtre furent servis.” CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/431, Mémoire Rivière, 1829.
[100] In theory, reimbursement was only possible when a court had delivered an official conviction. CAOM FM SG Mart., 42/346, Police des esclaves, Esclaves dangereux, Déportations au Senegal et à Porto Rico, 1827-1845.
[101] CAOM FM SG Mart., 42/346, Police des esclaves, Esclaves dangereux, Déportations au Senegal et à Porto Rico, 1827-1845. Cf. Debbasch, “Le Crime d’Empoisonnement,” 182.
[102] Rufz de Lavison citing Granier de Cassagnac, “Recherches sur les Empoisonnements,” 404.
[103] CAOM FM SG Mart., 42/346, Police des esclaves, Esclaves dangereux, Déportations au Senegal et à Porto Rico, 1827-1845. Local authorities would continue to demand right to use deportation through the mid-1830s, see CAOM FM SG 78/638, Projet de Code Pénal des esclaves, 1835.
[104] Fallope, Esclaves et citoyens, 62-69; 233-235.
[105] These reforms included the establishment of a second juge d’instruction specialized in criminal affairs in all lower courts, the nomination of two more juges suppléants and an avocat d’office for accused slaves. Code de la Martinique 8: 391; 436; 475. It can be argued that the policies of this period, sealed by the elections of 1827, were a decisive turning point in colonial reforms that preceded the advent of the July Monarchy; see Sherman Kent, The Election of 1827 in France (Cambridge, MA, 1975).
[106] "le mode, la classification, tout a été changé.” CAOM FM SG Mart. 78/638, Projet de Code Penal des esclaves, exposé des motifs.
[107] CAOM FM SG Mart. 141/1270, letter of Oct. 18, 1826.
[108] CAOM FM SG Mart. 78/638, Projet de Code Pénal des esclaves, 1835.
[109] The reference is to article 412 of the Code Pénal; CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/431, Rivière letter of Oct. 30, 1829.
[110] CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/431, déliberations du Conseil Privé, Nov. 13, 1829. The experience of the Provostial Court heightened expectations for speedy judicial procedure, and this demand was resolved by the new Code of Criminal Procedure. See Schnapper, “Les Systèmes Repressifs,” 22n.
[111] CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/431, déliberations du Conseil Privé, Nov. 13, 1829. The Provostial Court was briefly revived in 1831 in response to an arson scare, but was quickly suppressed once again. Some of these cases can be found in CAOM Greffes Mart. 918: Cour d'assise, St. Pierre, 1830-1832, March-April, 1831.
[112] Examples include the case of Né Joachim, Dec. 23, 1831; cases of William and Claire-Felicité dite La Quiote of Dec. 24, 1831; case of Ursula, dite Dédé, Oct. 23, 1832; cases of Zacharie and Venant, Oct. 24, 1832, all in CAOM Greffes Mart. 918, Cour d'assise, St. Pierre, 1830-1832. According to Rufz de Lavison, despite Schoelcher’s attention to the phenomenon by the early 1840s planters were mainly concerned by the poisoning of livestock, and no longer that of slaves and masters. ("Recherches sur les Empoisonnements,” 430).
[113] CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/431, déliberations du Conseil Privé, Nov. 13, 1829.
[114] Some documents relating to the uproar around these reforms are reprinted in Jacqueline Picard, ed., Les Kalmanquious: des Magistrats indésirables aux Antilles en Temps d’Abolition (Gosier, Guadeloupe, 1998).
[115] Diana Paton, “Punishment, Crime, and the Bodies of Slaves in 18th century Jamaica” Journal of Social History 34 (2001), 936; further, “Rather than representing the supposed common discipline of all to a single rule of law, as did the contemporary English spectacle of trial and punishment, Jamaican judicial practice emphasized the difference between enslaved and free, and valorized the slaveholder’s private penal power.” (Paton, 923)
[116] The court stipulated, for example, that each page of the of deposition “will be signed by the accused (if he knows how to sign).” CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/430, Documents de la Cour Prévôtale, 1822-27, which also contains printed forms with precise instructions on how to fill them out, e.g.: “No. 1: Modèle d’Information faite d’Office,” “No. 11: Modèle d’Interrogatoire.”
[117] The contradiction was remarked upon by anti-slavery advocates. As Moreau de Jonnès put it, after emancipation, the planter “n’est plus forcé à les garder malgré leur stupidité ou leurs vices, par l’unique motif qu’ils lui appartiennent, et qu’il ne peut pas plus renoncer à leur service, fussent-ils meme reputés empoisonneurs, qu’il ne peut renoncer à ses cannes à sucre...” Recherches Statistiques sur l’Esclavage colonial (1842; rpt. Geneva, 1978), 258.
[118] Robert Mandrou, Magistrats et sorciers en France au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1968), 545.
[119] Mandrou, Magistrats et sorciers, 537.
[120] Lynn Mollenauer, “The politics of poison: Courtiers and criminals in the Affair of the Poisons, 1679-1682” PhD. diss. (Northwestern University, 1999), chap. 3. As it turns out, the ultimate parricide of the 19th century, the killing of the emperor, may well have been carried out by means of poison, see Jean-François Lemaire, et al., Autour de "l'empoisonnement" de Napoléon (Paris, 2002)
[121] Pluchon, Vaudou, sorciers, empoisonneurs, 31.
[122] Joan Dayan, Haiti, History and the Gods (Los Angeles, 1995), chap. 3.
[123] Rufz de Lavison, “Recherches sur les empoisonnements,” 412-413.
[124] This culture is reflected in the extraordinary writings of individual planters. See, for example, Pierre Dessalles, Sugar and Slavery, Family and Race: The Letters and Diary of Pierre Dessalles, Planter in Martinique, 1808-1856 Elborg Forster, Robert Forster, eds. and trans. (Baltimore, 1996). Cf. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA, 2001).
[125] Rufz de Lavison, “Recherches sur les empoisonnements,” 413. These novels include Victor Hugo’s Bug Jargal, Eugene Sue’s Attar-Gull, and Ourika by Mme de Duras. See Gérard Gengembre, “From Bug-Jargal to Toussaint Louverture: Romanticism and the Slave Rebel” in Marcel Dorigny, ed., The Abolitions of Slavery from Léger Félicité Sonthonax to Victor Schoelcher (1995, New York, 1998): 272-279.
[126] Carbasse, Introduction Historique au Droit Pénal, 308-311; 318.
[127] Xavier Rousseaux, “Une Architecture pour la Justice: Organisation Judiciaire et Procedure Pénale, 1789-1815” in Révolution et Justice Pénale, 57.
[128] Duquesne, Lettre d’un magistrat, 33
[129] On the reform of 1832, see Renée Martinage, Punir le Crime: La Repression Judiciaire depuis le Code Pénal (Villeneuve d’Ascq, 1989), 79. Royer, Histoire de la Justice, 505-507.
[130] On the steps toward the creation of special law for slaves in the early 18th century, see Debbasch, “Le Crime d’empoisonnement,” 140n-141n.
[131] This transition is also the moment of the birth of a “civilizing mission,” perhaps best exemplified by the duel projects of Victor Schoelcher and, less often recognized, Alexis de Tocqueville. See John Savage, “From American Democracy to French Empire: Race and the Law in Tocqueville’s Liberalism” in Nalini Persram, ed., Postcolonialism and Political Theory (Bloomington, IN, forthcoming 2005). This tendency is exemplified by the Loi Mackau of 1845, the most dramatic reformist legislation of the decade, which was followed by the creation of a special Cour Criminelle in 1847 after six years of colonial resistance that was particularly designed to handle crimes committed by slaves and free people of color. See CAOM FM Gén. 371/2195, Rapport sur la composition des cour criminelles et cour d’assises, 1844-7, and 371/2192, Suppression de la cour criminelle, 1848.
[132] Lynn Hunt, “Forgetting and Remembering: the French Revolution Then and Now” American Historical Review 100 (1995): 1129.
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