Abstract
In 1767 the free mulatto Paul Carenan bought an indigo plantation in a valley adjoining the fertile parish of Fonds des Nègres. He paid 130,000 livres for the estate and its 60 slaves, by far the most valuable purchase any free person of color in the region made during the 1760s. The notary used the respectful title “Sieur” to describe Carenan in the sales contract. Yet three years later the Port-au-Prince Council decreed that Paul Carenan was a slave. Because his manumission papers had never been officially registered, every contract he had concluded was void, including purchases. This slave owner was to become, himself, the property of the court.1
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Notes
Gabriel Debien, Les esclaves aux Antilles franfaises (Basse-Terre: Société d’histoirc dc la Guadcloupc, 1974), 374.
David A. Bell, “The ‘Public Sphere,’ the State, and thc World of Law in Eighteenth-Century France,” French Historical Studies, 17 (Fall 1992), 919.
David P. Geggus, “Marronage, Voodoo and the Saint-Domingue Slave Revolution of 1791,” Proceedings of the Fifteenth Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society, eds. Patricia Galloway, Philip Boucher (Lanham, MD, University Presses of America, 1992), Meeting held in Martinique and Guadeloupe, May 1989, unpaginatcd; Alfred Mctraux, Le vaudou haïtien (Paris, 1958), 37–38.
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© 2006 John D. Garrigus
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Garrigus, J.D. (2006). Freedom, Slavery, and the French Colonial State. In: Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue. The Americas in the Early Modern Atlantic World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403984432_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403984432_4
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