Legacies of French Slave-Ownership, or the Long Decolonization of Saint-Domingue

Fig 1.

Quartier de l'Abeille, La Ciotat, France.

On a slight rise overlooking the Mediterranean Sea in the French city of La Ciotat, near Marseille, sits a vast housing project in the neighbourhood known as 'Le Quartier de l'Abeille'. Built in 1959, its early inhabitants included former white settlers of Algeria and harkis (Algerians who had fought on France's side during the Algerian War), both of whom fled independent Algeria en masse, fearing reprisals. But another legacy of colonialism in the quarter is less apparent: it sits on land once belonging to slave-owning planters in Saint-Domingue.¹ (Fig. 1)

Although the symbol of the bee (l'abeille) is scattered around the neighbourhood, the quarter is named not for an insect but for a family. The Abeilles had roots in Italy and long ties to Provence, where they were probably ennobled in the seventeenth century and were made rich by involvement in colonial commerce, particularly in Saint-Domingue (today's Haiti). Joseph Abeille (d. 1743?) and his son Jean-Louis (1720–94) were captains in the merchant marine, and while Joseph's trade was focused primarily on Pondicherry, in India, Jean-Louis turned the family's sights toward the Antilles. It was the son of Jean-Louis, Jean-Joseph-André, known as André (1756–1842), who amassed a vast fortune through commercial, land and marital ties to the most lucrative colony in the New World, Saint-Domingue.²

The owner of about sixty slaves, André Abeille understood that his family's wealth – valued at some 700,000 livres tournois in 1790 (about 26,000 pounds, or today some 2.8 million pounds) – depended on the 'plantation complex' and the slave labour that was integral to it.³ So when offered the opportunity to serve as a commercial deputy to the Estates General in 1789 and later the National Assembly, he used his position to lobby on behalf of slave-holder interests. In March 1790, as the Colonial Committee of the revolutionary assembly considered extending the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) overseas, Abeille cautioned them. 'If your declaration included our Negroes (Nègres)', he wrote using the possessive pronoun with regard to slaves, the colonists of Saint-Domingue 'would have no choice but to accept foreign domination, or to perish under the Black sword (glaive des Noirs)'.⁴ That remark was prescient, for only a few years later, as revolutionary wars raged among the European powers, some white planters in Saint-Domingue encouraged Britain to invade the colony, precisely in order to protect the slave economy.

On the eve of the revolution, Saint-Domingue was the most lucrative colony in the world, with sugar exports outstripping those of all the British Caribbean islands combined. Plantation slavery in Saint-Domingue was so profitable that Abeille could boast of paying almost a million livres in duties during a five-year period.⁵ By 1791, however, slave rebellion had erupted on plantations in the Northern Plains near Le Cap Français, the main city of French settlement in the colony.⁶ The following year, wars between a new French Republic and a coalition of counter-revolutionary European monarchies catalyzed further conflict in the colony, including massive arson-induced fires set by insurgent slaves in Le Cap in June 1793. Slave insurgency, along with the growing British and Spanish military threats in the colony, prompted local commissioners to court slave allegiance by emancipating them in the fall of 1793, a decision ratified by the National Convention's abolition of slavery in all French colonies in 1794. Among those joining the republican effort was Toussaint Louverture, a former slave turned brilliant military strategist. By 1801, Louverture had risen to such prominence that he promulgated a new constitution acknowledging Saint-Domingue's place as part of the French empire, while simultaneously asserting its partial autonomy vis-à-vis the metropole under Louverture's leadership. Although Louverture worked to defend plantations and to force former slaves to work on them, an ascendant Napoleon...