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Published on
24 May 2015
Updated on
14 June 2017
Colloquia
The archaeology of Migrations

International colloquium organized by Inrap, in partnership with the National Museum of Immigration History.
​November 12 and 13, 2015 at the National Museum of Immigration History.

Archaeology of Migrations 
by Sue Peabody, Washington State University Vancouver

Institutions of slavery were nearly ubiquitious in the ancient, medieval and early modern worlds, but by curious happenstance – not least of which is the name, "France” – during the early modern period the French kingdom came to be associated with the Free Soil principle, the legal maxim of that held that any slave who set foot on French soil thereby became free. However, as France became increasingly dependent upon chattel slavery in its overseas colonies, enshrined in the distinctive Codes Noirs of 1685 (Antilles), 1723 (Mascarenes) and 1724 (Louisiana), the royal government found it convenient to suspend France’s Free Soil principle and eventually to replace it with migratory exclusion legislation based in racial categories, banning the entry of all "noirs, mulatres et autres gens de couleur,” regardless of slave or free status (Police des Noirs, 1777). After a brief hiatus during the Revolution, the Police des Noirs remained France’s guiding principle, banning the immigration of all people of color to the metropole until new legislation drafted during the July Monarchy, when legislators once again wrote Free Soil into positive law. By examining the particular stories of individuals who sought freedom in the metropole, we can better appreciate the changing ideas of Frenchness in the emergence of the modern nation-state. By way of conclusion, the question will be considered: What would an archeology of the Free Soil of France encompass?
Sue Peabody is Professor of History at Washington State University in the United States specializing in the history of slavery, race and the law in France and its colonies through 1848. Her publications include: "There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime, Oxford, 1996; Free Soil in the Atlantic World, co-edited with Keila Grinberg, Routledge, 2014; The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, co-edited with Tyler Stovall (Duke, 2003); and "La Race, l’esclavage et la francité,’: L’affaire Furcy,” in Français? La nation en débat entre colonies et métropole, XVIe-XIXe siècle, ed. Cécile Vidal, (Paris : les Editions de l’EHESS, 2014). Her forthcoming book, Madeleine’s Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets and Lies in France’s Indian Ocean Colonies (Oxford, 2016), tells the particular life story of a family struggling to establish their legal freedom under French and British law, 1750 to 1850. 

Bibliography
  • BOULLE P. H. (2007), Race et esclavage dans la France de l'Ancien Régime, Paris, Perrin.
  • BOULLE P. H., PEABODY S. (2014), Le Droit des noirs en France au temps de l'esclavage, Paris, Éditions Autrement Mêmes, L'Harmattan ?.
  • PLUCHON P. (1984), Nègres et juifs au XVIIIe siècle : le racisme au Siècle des Lumières, Paris, Tallandier.
  • RUSHFORTH B. (2015), Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, University of North Carolina Press..
Year :
2015
Conference