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."