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chapter 3 In the Shadow of the Plantation: Women of Color and the Libres de fait of Martinique and Guadeloupe, 1685–1848 Bernard Moitt Although it was always possible for slaves in the French Antilles to acquire freedom,not all who did so followed legal and official channels.From the very early development of slave society in these colonies there existed a group of people—libres de savane, also known as libres de fait—who lived in a state of quasi-freedom, having been manumitted by their owners without the authority of the state or the official documents of free status. Libres de fait were male and female, black and of mixed race, African and Creole, urban and rural, and specialized and nonspecialized by profession or occupation. Most of them, however, were mixed-race and Creole women of color and their children. Throughout slavery the number of libres de fait remained small compared to the total population of free persons with clear titles, which was insignificant compared to the number of slaves in each French colony. During the 1830s and 1840s, when new legislation made normalization of their status more attainable, however, more libres de fait came out into the open, giving colonial authorities a stronger sense of the size of the group and abolitionists more ammunition to argue that the pace of liberation was too slow. At this time,when the amelioration of slavery came under greater scrutiny,French authorities paid more attention to libres de fait. These people, however, like others without clear titles, made no remarkable strides toward fully recognized freedom until the abolition of slavery in the French colonial empire in 1848. This chapter examines the libre de fait phenomenon as a mode of manumission and its effects in Martinique and Guadeloupe. It shows that the status of libre de fait dates to the early days of plantation slavery in the seventeenth century and that this mode of manumission persisted until 1848. The libre de fait 38 bernard moitt phenomenon endured largely because of restrictive metropolitan and colonial laws that circumscribed the freedom of people of color and made official manumission difficult to obtain. Even so, sincere and determined slave-owners willing to pay the required legal fees and support slaves who sought freedom could follow the process through to official manumission. Most slave-owners circumvented the law and adopted a casual,and economical , approach to manumission. One advantage of this approach was that while slave-owners released slaves from the day-to-day drudgery of slavery they still retained some measure of control because the slaves were not entirely and officially (or legally) free. Indeed, in a pattern that suggests connivance, the labor of libres de fait was exploited by their owners, by people to whom their owners rented them, and by others to whom they contracted themselves. As a result, libres de fait were able to live in the shadows of plantations. In time they might even exit the slave system quietly if their owners died. Or—if they lived in a state of independence long enough—they could be regarded as free, even without official documentation.Contrary to Gabriel Debien’s portrayal of libres de fait as carefree socialites, this chapter demonstrates that they were not a monolithic group.1 They generally lived a precarious existence, almost as vulnerable as that of slaves, between slavery and freedom in the French colonies. Many, conscious of their vulnerability, tried to obtain outright freedom when legislation made it possible. French scholars have largely ignored libres de fait in their work on colonial slave societies and have paid more attention to gens de couleur libres (free coloreds) because data on libres de fait,who remained hidden from official view, are fragmentary at best.2 They were not counted in censuses. The lack of studies about manumission in French colonies also helps make scholarly exploration of libres de fait particularly challenging. Apart from works by Victor Schoelcher, Augustin Cochin, and Pierre Baude, there is little work that deals directly and substantially with the subject.3 In her work about slave women, Arlette Gautier gave libres de fait scant treatment.4 In one of the few detailed studies of manumission in the French Antilles,Léo Elisabeth made no mention of libres de fait at all.Rather,he subsumed them under the category of soi-disant libres (so-called free), a term that appears to have gained currency in the...

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