Compensation paid to slave owners by France in the 19th century made public

A team of researchers from the CNRS has published the list of beneficiaries of the compensation decided by the Second Republic following the abolition of slavery in 1848.

By Coumba Kane and Julien Bouissou, Le Monde, 8/5/2021

Translated by Fausto Giudice

 

At the ACTe Memorial, or Caribbean Centre of Expression and Memory of the Slave Trade and Slavery, in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, in 2015. NICOLAS DERNE / AFP

One hundred and fifty-three years after the definitive abolition of slavery in France on 27 April 1848, a team of researchers from the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) put online on Friday 7 May, as part of the "Repairs" project, a database detailing the compensation paid by the French State to slave owners . This information provides a better understanding of the slave society of the time and allows us to trace the origin of investments that gave rise to entrepreneurial dynasties or companies that still exist today.

Contrary to popular belief, the 10,000 slave owners who received compensation of 126 million gold francs (1.3% of national income, the equivalent of 27 billion euros today) from 1849 onwards were not all white settlers. The abolition law of 27 April 1848 is the source of a semantic confusion," explains Myriam Cottias, a researcher at the CNRS who heads the "Repairs" research project. It states that the "colonists", i.e. whites, must be compensated, whereas it is the slave owners, some of whom are coloured, who receive the compensation." According to the calculations of Jessica Balguy, a doctoral student at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), 30% of the slave owners in Martinique were black or of mixed race, most of them small owners. Among them, there were some freedmen, called “free men of colour”, who had bought their children or grandchildren without having the means to pay taxes to the State to emancipate them. Women also occupy a significant place among the beneficiaries of the colonial indemnity. “Many of these women were widows of colonists and single women who owned a few slaves,” explains the researcher.

 Profiles of great heterogeneity

 The compensation paid by the French state was fixed according to the price of slaves in each territory. The prices were highest in the sugar colonies, and in particular in Reunion, where the plantations were booming at the time of abolition. Reunion (where an owner received 671 gold francs per slave), Martinique (409 gold francs) and Guadeloupe (447 gold francs) received the bulk of the compensation, followed by Guyana, Senegal, Nosy Be (less than 40 gold francs) and Sainte-Marie de Madagascar.

 Another interesting finding was that the indemnity titles often ended up in the pockets of traders in the metropolis, or creditors as debt repayment. In other words, not all owners are rich plantation owners. Their profiles are very heterogeneous. Among the largest owners is Louis Marie Gabriel Le Coat de Kerveguen, originally from Reunion Island, who received 1.9 million gold francs for the emancipation of 1,680 slaves. Or the Gradis family, merchants who owned hundreds of slaves and received hundreds of thousands of gold francs and whose descendants now run a financial investment management company.

 The database also reveals how speculators got rich from the compensation. Thus, in the Martinique registers, the name of a metropolitan who came a few months before abolition to buy back title after title, in the hope of getting a better price once the amount of compensation had been established, appears. "He won the largest amounts of money on the island even though he had nothing to do with slavery. Many did as he did in the period before abolition", notes Jessica Balguy.

 Earlier, when France recognised Haiti's independence in 1825, it was not the French state that gave compensation to slave owners, but the latter who demanded it from the new Haitian Republic. This debt was not paid off by Haiti until 1883 [and the agios ran until the middle of the 20^th century]. These indemnities were collected in another database of the 'Repairs' project, whose information is extremely precise, since even the addresses of the slave owners are given.

 Debates on repairs

 In the mid-19^th century, the issue of reparations was debated. Based on the fact that slave ownership was legal, some considered abolition as an expropriation deserving compensation. Others were opposed to it, in the name of moral justice and the principle that no human being can be assimilated to property, and even demanded reparation for the now former slaves. "Even though Victor Schœlcher, one of the architects of abolition, initially defended the compensation of slaves, he gave in to pressure from the colonists out of political calculation, so that the decree would be adopted," explains Myriam Cottias.

 The French database is the successor to the one published in the UK in 2013. The meticulous work carried out by researchers at the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership (LBS), an institute attached to University College London, has made it possible to exhume the names of the 47,000 beneficiaries of the colonial indemnity, listed in an online catalogue. In Great Britain, following the abolition of slavery in 1833, £20 million, or 40% of the national budget, was paid to the former owners. As in the French case, the proportion of women among those compensated is significant, at around 40%.

 While the French researchers want to show the complexities of a slave society, in England the database does not distinguish between people of colour and gives indications of the development of capitalism during the industrial revolution. The windfall from the colonial indemnity supported the development of key sectors of industry, such as cotton and railways. In an article published in 2015 by the Revue d'histoire du XIXe siècle, historian Fabrice Bensimon writes that the British database has established a "continuity between abolition money and contemporary estates, such as that of former Prime Minister David Cameron's family".

The opening of these archives has also revived the debate on reparations for the harm suffered during slavery. In the Caribbean, some fifteen states have made an official request since the publication of this database. "The demand for reparation must be taken seriously, it is also a demand for equality that can hardly be translated into reimbursement in individual names," insists Myriam Cottias.

 For historian Pap Ndiaye, a professor at Sciences Po, these "precious" archives cannot be used as a basis for demands for reparations. "The database provides unclear answers to our contemporary questions. It does not allow for a clear identification of the people to whom reparations can be asked," he explains. The historian warns against any instrumentalisation for political purposes. "Instead of asking about reparations, let's start from current inequalities. Who in the former French colonies suffers most from inequality? Who owns the land? The descendants of slaves are at the bottom of the social ladder. Let's start from these realities to bring more social justice."

 Coumba Kane and Julien Bouissou