The French buried their black slaves alive, burned, choked with sulfur, blew them up, threw them to the dogs ... And what about the great French philosophers? They severely condemned slavery, but ... in serfdom in Poland!
Who has not heard of the cruelty of the Spanish colonizers in the New World? And remember how the hero of "Django" was treated in the South of the USA? All this pales, however, with the policies pursued by the French in the Caribbean.
The Black Code (Code Noir), adopted during the reign of King Louis XIV in 1685, was intended to stop atrocities, but only powdered a hideous reality. A historian of culture and customs, prof. Stanisław Grzybowski summed it up this way:
( that despite the resistance of the colonizers, he tried to fulfill this task properly. In the English colonies, the legal status of slaves was sometimes regulated by local laws. On the other hand, the famous French Code Noir from 1685 administered cruel punishments, including the death penalty , for just a misdemeanor, even accidental.Ships drowning in blood and feces
As the professor pointed out, the ordeal had already begun on ships where there were acts of cruelty beyond any moral norms . This applied not only to French ships, but also to other colonial powers.
Slaves brought from Africa for a song were stuffed on board like herring. Chained in pairs with chains, kept in cages . must have spent the journey lying on their side - most often there was no room to straighten up. They slept in excrement, which they could clean up to a maximum of once a day, on board, for fresh air .
But it was only possible in good weather. With the poor slaves vegetated in filth, stench and germs . They got diarrhea from improper food, vomited, got sick and lost consciousness. Infection was spreading into the skin, torn by shackles.
In the 17th-18th centuries, the French brought 1-1.25 million slaves from Africa to the Caribbean. But how many did not arrive, dying on the way? Such detailed statistics are hard to come by. Some historians estimate that 250,000 Africans did not survive the murderous shipments to the Caribbean. Others indicate that the death rate on ships hovered around 20 percent so there must have been many more victims…
"Converting" with iron and violence
On the spot - i.e. in Martinique, Guadeloupe or Haiti - live goods were delivered to the market. The slave was branded with a fiery iron, hastily taught by a monk about the Christian truths of faith, and baptized.
However, these are only empty gestures. The owners didn't care about the Gospel, and the slaves pretended to be believers to survive. And it wasn't easy. They were given starvation rations. And while they were struggling in sugar cane plantations, they were put on iron masks - hoops with a metal mouth guard - so they don't eat your good sometimes.
Slave labor was not the end of the humiliation. The women have either voluntarily consented to sexual abuse by owners and overseers or have been raped . Then they gave birth to children who also became slaves. He did not protect slaves from disgrace, neither by marriage, nor motherhood, nor faith. Their fathers, husbands and children had to come to terms with it. The only salvation seemed to escape to the mountains. However, it could have cost a life, and the French trained special mulatto units to track down fugitives.
For trying to escape - severed leg
Besides, slaves were severely punished in the event of sheer insubordination, let alone rebellion or flight! The Black Code stipulated that a slave who hits his master severely or bleeds or slaps his master is to be put to death - described by Tomasz Łepkowski, a researcher of Caribbean history - For coincidence, the ear is cut off, for recidivism, the leg is cut to the knee, and for the third escape, death awaits the slave .
Minor crimes, such as theft, were usually punished with flogging. Wounds were treated with salt, pepper, lemon juice or ash - to enhance the effect. Code Noir tried to limit the number of lashes delivered and forbid torture, but to no avail.
The growers were not convicted of abuses. When in 1788 in Haiti a certain Nicolas Le Jeune killed four slaves and killed two slaves burnt by fire - suspecting the group of involvement in a poisoning plot - the authorities acquitted him. They stated that the sadist was acting for the security of the colony.
And Montesquieu worries about the price of sugar
The pathologies allowed by the Black Code did not even interest moral authorities.
No great Enlightenment philosopher protested against him. Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau wrote about laws, history, philosophy and the human condition as if they did not know about Code Noir, or knew and considered it irrelevant - writes the Congolese historian and democracy activist Jacques Depelchin.
Montesquieu actually preferred to criticize Poland in 1748 that it was there the peasants are the slaves of the nobility . He justified the colonial exploitation of the French with the words: Louis XIII found it very hard to get hold of the law that made blacks slaves in his colonies:but when he was convinced that this was the surest way to convert them, he agreed .
The slave who fell victim to the scourging
Laughable, but the great philosopher wrote things even more shocking:
If I had to defend the law by which we made Negroes slaves, here's what I would say:Since the peoples of Europe had exterminated the Americans, they had to be enslaved to use them to clear such a vast country.
Sugar would be too expensive if the plants producing it were not grown by slaves. These people are black from head to toe and have a nose so flattened that it is almost impossible to regret them . It is impossible to imagine that God, in His infinite wisdom, would place a soul, and especially a good soul, in a black body.
Napoleon's war crimes
The French Revolution was to change everything, abolishing slavery in 1794. But when Napoleon came to power, he considered the slogans "freedom-equality-fraternity" to be mere pharases . More important is the money France gets from overseas plantations. In 1802, he restored slavery in the colonies, and sent an army to suppress the rebellion in Haiti - including several thousand Polish legionnaires he no longer needed in Europe.
This is how a Haitian politician recalled French atrocities in 1814:
Haven't they hung people upside down, drowned in sacks, crucified on boards, buried alive, crushed to death? They did not make them eat feces ? They did not strip their skin with a whip, did not throw them alive to be eaten by worms and ants, or left them tied up in a swamp to be eaten by mosquitoes ?
They didn't throw them into the boiling syrup kettles? Didn't they stuff men and women into barrels bristling with spikes inside and roll them down the slope into the abyss? They weren't throwing unfortunate black dogs to man-eaters until these were already so eaten with human flesh that the mutilated victims were finished off with bayonets and daggers ?.
He didn't mention all the penalties anyway. Choke rebels with sulfur under the decks of Napoleonic ships. Hanging on nails driven in the ears. Castration. To push the gunpowder into the anus and blow up . Acts of genocide during the war between the French and the rebellious slaves.
All the Negroes of the mountains must be slain, men and women, keeping only the children under the age of 12; destroy half of the Negroes from the lowlands and not leave a single mulatto wearing epaulettes in the colony - wrote General Leclerc, Napoleon's brother-in-law. He did not live to see the end of the war. France lost and lost Haiti (1804), and the slaves took fierce vengeance on their former masters.
Meanwhile, in the Indian Ocean…
France was unable to eliminate slavery for several decades. And it concerned not only the Caribbean, but also Africa and the archipelagos in the Indian Ocean. In the Comoros, a French protectorate since 1866, slavery was only abolished in 1899!
The example of the islet of Amsterdam, which was cultivated with Malagasy slaves , is especially interesting for Poles. - as Jules Verne wrote - a compatriot of ours flying under the French flag. He was a globetrotter and revolutionist Adam Piotr Mierosławski. Brother of the legend of the Spring of Nations and the dictator of the January Uprising - Ludwik Mierosławski.
Although Adam Piotr used slaves from Madagascar, and Verne was an opponent of this practice, the writer dismissed this fact in silence. Moreover, the Pole probably became an inspiration for the French writer in creating one of the most characteristic figures of mass culture:Captain Nemo - a soldier of freedom, abhorring slavery and the oppression of peoples by the invading powers.