How was this process carried out? There are several documents in the French National Archives and the Reunion departmental archives that give some indication. They also provide us with precious details concerning the victims\u2019 experiences, enabling us to understand how they experienced this dramatic event and how they resisted.<\/p>\n
The \u201cestates of the clergy\u201d<\/h3>\n
In the Mascarene islands in the 18th century, the clergy mainly consisted of members of the Congr\u00e9gation de la Mission<\/em> (Congregation of the Mission), more commonly referred to as the \u2018Lazarists<\/em>\u2019. These missionaries were involved in the slave trade as from the 1710s, through contracts signed with the French East India Company. The Company granted them plots of land for their subsistence and slaves to work this land. <\/span> Since these plots depended on the clergy and not directly on the Congregation, they were officially labelled as \u201cestates of the clergy\u201d, their purpose being to meet the needs of the priests. However, since the latter were alone responsible for their management, the Lazarist priests referred to these plots as \u201cour estates\u201d and the slaves working on them as \u201cour Blacks\u201d. <\/span><\/p>\n With time and following requests made by the missionaries, the Company provided more and more slaves to work on these estates \u201cof the clergy\u201d, which flourished and even made profits from their coffee plantations. A census carried out in 1787 listed 426 slaves belonging to the priests on Bourbon island (Reunion). <\/span><\/p>\n It appears that the Lazarists scrupulously followed the rules laid out in the Black Code (Letters Patent of 1723) concerning clothing and food for their slaves. <\/span> They also applied a paternalistic form of oppression towards them, based on surveillance and discipline. <\/span> The missionaries wished to limit any contact their slaves might have with the outside world, through fear, they declared, of corrupting their \u201cgood morality\u201d, thus always keeping \u201cclose watch\u201d on them. <\/span> Their slaves had to regularly attend catechism classes given by the Lararist brothers, the content of which was aimed at fostering obedience to the system of slavery. For example, when brother Philippe Caulier composed a decalogue in Creole around 1760, he translated the Commandment that says \u201cHonour thy father and thy mother\u201d as: \u201cShow respect, obey your Father and Mother, your Master and your Mistress, to all that command us. Do not criticize them.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n The Lazarists declared that they could not avoid using corporal punishment to impose obedience. Certain missionaries were ill-at-ease regarding this aspect of their daily lives. Brother Caulier observed: \u201cThe Lord left us with the shepherd\u2019s crook, not the cart-driver\u2019s whip.\u201d This should not, however, be interpreted as an attitude of principle going against the practice of slavery applied by the priest concerned, but rather the notion that he lacked the resources necessary to meet the temporal needs of the parish, that the Lazarist brothers generally took charge of. \u201cA wise and vigilant Brother in each family,\u201d he explained, \u201cwould create harmony between all its elements, with each in his or her place.\u201d <\/span> However, one of the missionaries was not convinced that the work was in harmony with his vocation, writing to a fellow brother in France: \u201cIt would take a famous Doctor (theologian) to convince me that I\u2019ll gain a place in paradise by doing this job.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n From the very first months of the French Revolution, slavery in the colonies was a hot topic of debate by the members of the National Assembly. <\/span> This governing body declared that for the benefits of French trade, slavery in the colonies would be tolerated, a policy that remained controversial. The decree issued by the Parliament on 8th May 1790 enabled the colonial assemblies to draw up their own constitutions to deal with such issues internally. A second decree, dated 28th March 1790, declared that the colonies were to cover their own governing expenses. <\/span> Considering himself to be the unofficial representative of Bourbon in Paris, the infantry colonel Pierre Riel de Beurnonville, landowner on Bourbon and married to a Creole born on the island, issued a draft constitution soon distributed on the island, in which he proposed liquidation of Church property on Bourbon, with the aim of covering costs of worship and administration. Human being were not spared: \u201cIn the sale of property belonging to the clergy will be included their land, buildings, slaves, tools and utensils, with the exception of six heads of slaves per parish, at the service of each parish priest.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n In December 1790, the colonial assembly of Bourbon, having received the draft constitution drawn up by Beurnonville, prepared to implement the project. It required of the priests to draw up an inventory of all the property they owned. <\/span> As could be expected, the priests expressed their keen opposition, notably father Jean Lafosse, parish priest of Saint-Louis. In favour of the Revolution, he had even been elected Mayor by his parishioners. He wrote a letter to the Prosecutor of his district questioning the legality of the sale of slaves in particular, since, he declared, \u201cthe French constitution recognises each man as being essentially free. Consequently, the National Assembly may never issue a decree for the sale of men with the aim of covering some of the debts of the State…\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n Father Lafosse was publicly accused by his white neighbours of raising trouble with the slaves in the area, by alerting them of the project to put them up for sale as national property. He was even accused of having de facto emancipated most of those working for the parish, after learning that they were to be confiscated. Indeed, father Lafosse had declared owning 73\u00a0slaves in Saint-Louis in 1787, but in 1793 during the public sale of slaves in Saint-Louis, the auctioneer only named 47. <\/span> What had become of them?<\/p>\n Certain salves themselves determined to subvert the colonial statu quo. In January 1791, during Sunday Mass, the slave named Amant refused to give up his seat to a white notable, who called the police. Amant was brutalized and locked up. Father Lafosse soon managed to have him freed by writing a letter denouncing the brutality inflicted on Amant by the local authorities. Following these events, police reports noted a crowd of slaves gathered on the town square, ready to rebel. In a letter addressed to Mr Pierre Duverg\u00e9, a member of his hierarchy and commissioner of Bourbon between 1789 and 1794, wrote that \u201cThe parish priest Father la Fosse is accused of preaching for the freedom of the Blacks. You can imagine, Sir, the danger we could face if a determined [slave] \u2026 decided to side with this new Apostle.\u201d <\/span> His actions forced Lafosse to resign from his position of Mayor. <\/span><\/p>\n However, it turned out that Father Lafosse was mistaken regarding the National Assembly. On 18th August 1791, the Assembly issued a decree to send civil commissioners to the Mascarene islands to organise the sale of \u201cmovable and immovable property belonging to the nation\u201d. The decree made no mention of the presence of human beings as being part of this property. This detail may have been deliberately suppressed by the members of the Colonial Committee initiating the decree.\nThey feared that a large number of deputies might consider approving slavery as being a betrayal of values. For this reason, it seems plausible that they deliberately suppressed the fact that human beings made up an important percentage of the value of Church property and estates to be sold in the colonies. Concerning the operations carried out \u201cunder seal of secrecy\u201d, by the Colonial Committee, see Manuel Covo, Le Comit\u00e9 des Colonies, La R\u00e9volution fran\u00e7aise. Cahiers de l\u2019Institut d\u2019histoire de la R\u00e9volution fran\u00e7aise, no. 3 (December 20, 2012). Indeed, there are clear examples of this dissimulation. When the Colonial Committee published a report and draft decree with this aim at the Legislative Assembly, its author Levavasseur, himself having links with Bourbon, reproduced virtually word for word the article of the petition issued by the Colonial Assembly requesting authorisation to sell the the property of the clergy. However, he deliberately omitted two references to slavery in the text aimed at his colleagues in the Legislative Assembly. L\u00e9on Levavasseur, Rapport et projet de d\u00e9cret, concernant la colonie de l\u2019isle de Bourbon, Pr\u00e9sent\u00e9s, au nom du Comit\u00e9 Colonial, par L\u00e9on Levavasseur, D\u00e9put\u00e9 du D\u00e9partement de la Seine-Inf\u00e9rieure, imprim\u00e9s par d\u00e9lib\u00e9ration du Comit\u00e9, en vertu du d\u00e9cret de l\u2019Assembl\u00e9e Nationale (Paris : Imprimerie de l\u2019Assembl\u00e9e Nationale, 1792). Indeed, it would appear that this report was never read out loud and the bill was never debated by the National Assembly. J\u00e9r\u00f4me Mavidal and \u00c9mile Laurent, eds., Archives parlementaires de 1787 \u00e0 1860: recueil complet des d\u00e9bats l\u00e9gislatifs et politiques des Chambres fran\u00e7aises, vol. L (Paris: Paul Dupont, 1896), 592, footnote 1.\"> <\/span> In October 1792, Marc Antoine Pierre Tirol, civil commissioner, arrived on Bourbon. A moderate abolitionist, like Father Lafosse, he did not believe that the French constitution would allow slavery to be maintained. He initiated reforms aimed at improving the treatment of slaves and simplifying the rules concerning emancipation. However, on 6th June 1793, Tirol launched the sale by public auction of all the property listed as belonging to the church. In a letter addressed to the Ministry of the Navy, Tirol explained: \u201cThe Constitution does not permit slavery, which, in the Colonies can only be tolerated until it can no longer exist. The Republic cannot have slaves there and the least that it can do is to demonstrate its intentions by setting an example.\u201d <\/span> What \u201cexample\u201d was he referring to? In a report drawn up during the auction, Tirol pointed out \u201cwhen I sell national property, which was formerly property of the Church, \u2026 I take all the necessary precautions to avoid separating families of Blacks.\u201d <\/span>\u00a0What actually occurred was totally different.<\/p>\n Between 10th June and 22nd July, among 358 individuals listed as \u201cnational property\u201d, 28 were selected by the priests to continue working for them as servants (in application of the regulatuions voted by the Colonial Assembly, they had the right to retain four slaves of their choice for their personal service, providing these were not qualified as \u201cspecialised\u201d slaves). For example, Father Lafosse chose to keep Amant, ostensibly to remain at his side. In addition, 28 others were purchased by priests. Others remained on the estate due to their old age or disability. A total of 266 persons were sold to private buyers.<\/p>\n Despite written assurance from Tirol, it was only following intercession by the priests or by the slaves themselves that families were able to remain together. <\/span> In several cases, it appears that slaves were recruited by their former masters, the missionaries, who, as we have already mentioned, were determined to maintain the integrity of the sacrament of marriage and guarantee family unity.<\/p>\n In Sainte-Suzanne, for example, the family of Vincent and Louise, a couple of 70-year-olds, was divided up into three separate \u2018batches\u2019, each to be sold separately. Father Rollin, after purchasing the two parents and their daughter Ad\u00e9la\u00efde, purchased their son Honor\u00e9, aged 30, for a sum three times that of his value estimated by Colonial Assembly during the inventory of the parish property in 1791 (amount of 2,000 pounds), as Honor\u00e9 was \u201cdisabled in one arm\u201d. A second priest, father Gadenel, made an offer higher than that of the estimated value for the young Jean-Louis-Vincent, aged 12, whom they had attempted to sell separately. All these transactions made it possible to avoid separating members of Vincent and Louise\u2019s family. <\/span><\/p>\n Other examples in the archives show the priests acting explicitly on behalf of their slaves. In a letter dated 19th March 1795, father Rollin declares that Justine, separated from her husband Louis during sale of property in Saint-Andr\u00e9, \u201cardently wished\u201d to be reunited with him, the latter having recently been sold to the clergy. Father Rollin also hoped to reunite Marguerite, employed by the clergy, with her parents, who remained with him at the presbytery. Father Rollin proposed an exchange \u201cif the Republic accepts\u201d. <\/span><\/p>\n Other examples demonstrate direct action taken by the slaves, with or without the support of priests, in their attempts to improve the lot of their families. As far as possible, they were the actors of their own resistance. In Sainte-Marie, for example, written accounts of the sales carried out in 1793 mention Fran\u00e7ois, qualified as being a \u201cForeman, Creole, epileptic\u201d, with his wife Henriette, also Creole, and their five children, all together. This was not, however, what had been planned. According to guidelines issued by the Colonial Assembly in 1791, only couples married \u201cbefore the altar\u201d and their children aged under seven were to be grouped together in the same \u201cbatch\u201d. Pierre-Louis, aged 11, had been registered in a separate batch. However, in 1791, when the town official was drawing up the inventory of the property of Sainte-Marie, Pierre-Louis\u2019 parents requested for him to remain with them. We may wonder, however, whether the official accepted only because Pierre-Louis was listed as being \u201cdisabled\u201d, and so potentially of a lower value compared to other children of his age. <\/span><\/p>\n Another example is Amand, aged 90, who had spent all his life on the estate belonging to the parish priest of Sainte-Suzanne and who was to have \u201cretired\u201d there, in application of the rules concerning old persons established by the Civil Commissioner Tirol. During the sale of Denis and Pauline, his adult children \u201cthe explicit condition was that the slave named Amand, their father aged 90, did not wish to be separated from his children and the children did not wish to be separated from their father\u201d, and that he would go and live on the estate of the purchaser. His food of corn would be provided by \u201cthe Republic\u201d and he would \u201cnot be subject to working\u201d, these last conditions being proposed by Tirol himself. <\/span><\/p>\n The final product of the sale of former church property (land, slaves and mobile goods) went above Tirol\u2019s expectations and reached close to 5.6 million pounds (livres tournois). Close to half of this amount was the product of sale of human beings who, in the context of war and therefore the interruption of the slave trade, had become a rare commodity. Madame Beurnonville, in a letter addressed to her husband announcing the closure of sales (and so the application of his initial plan), made the remark that \u201cBlacks in particular were sold for exorbitant prices.\u201d <\/span> The financial success of the sales enabled Tirol to set up the first tax system on Bourbon, doing without subsidies from mainland France. <\/span>. On Reunion, those purchasing goods had to pay the Colonial treasurer in several instalments, over a period that could be as long as three years – that is to say until 1796 \u2013 a long time after the decree abolishing the 1794 National Convention, an abolition that island\u2019s elite attempted to completely block, in all impunity.<\/p>\n How did the people in Paris react? The Abbot Henri Gr\u00e9goire, at the time member of the Council of the 500 and well known for taking actions again slavery, enthusiastically welcomed the news whereby Church property on Reunion island had been sold for millions of francs. To him, these sales were a crucial step towards the \u201cregeneration\u201d of the French colonial clergy, whom he considered as having become avid and ineffective, due to involvement in slavery. However, in a report address to this fellow members of constitutional Church, abbot Gr\u00e9goire admitted with consternation that \u201cmiserable Africans\u201d had been sold along with land, since the settlers on the Mascarene islands still had not \u201cissued the decree giving them freedom\u201d. <\/span> These comments suggest that abbot Gr\u00e9goire, and perhaps other legislators opposed slavery, closed their eyes to the fact that the Republic continued to obtain income through the \u201csales of men\u201d, despite the practice being officially prohibited.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":11072,"parent":11092,"menu_order":10,"template":"","class_list":["post-11098","documentaire","type-documentaire","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portail-esclavage-reunion.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/documentaire\/11098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portail-esclavage-reunion.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/documentaire"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portail-esclavage-reunion.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/documentaire"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portail-esclavage-reunion.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portail-esclavage-reunion.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/documentaire\/11092"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portail-esclavage-reunion.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portail-esclavage-reunion.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.portail-esclavage-reunion.fr\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/40P1.CEV_.62.jpg\")
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Collection of Stella Matutina museum, inv. 40P1.CEV.62. All rights reserved<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/a>
Collection of Reunion departmental Library, inv. R03445.315_1<\/figcaption><\/figure>The missionaries also attempted to control the sexual activity of the slaves, by separating the unmarried slaves by gender and locking them up in \u201cstorehouses\u201d at night. <\/span> They encouraged marriage intra-muros<\/em> as the surest way to restrict sexual relations outside the estate and also to prepare the newly arrived slaves for baptism. \u201cThe state of marriage retains and stabilises them,\u201d wrote one of the missionaries. <\/span> It should be emphasised that the Lazarists\u2019 policy of encouraging marriages and births within what they referred to as their \u201cfamilies\u201d was applied for religious but also economic reasons, since the contracts signed with the French East India Company specifically forbade them from actively taking part in the slave trade.<\/p>\n\u201cSale of men\u201d<\/h3>\n
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Description des possessions n\u00e9erlandaises dans la Guyane<\/em>, Pierre Jacques Benoit.
Brussels, Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 des Beaux-Arts, 1839, pl. XLIII.
Coll. Media library of the Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac museum<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nActors of their own resistance<\/h3>\n
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Collection of Vill\u00e8le historical museum, inv. 1989.540<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nWhat historical importance?<\/h3>\n
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Collection of Lorrain museum, deposited at the public art gallery of Nancy, inv. D.III.711<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n