Published in the early years of the Revolutionary War, this was one of the must brutal Royal Decrees of late eighteenth-century France, which significantly tightened the edict of October 1716 and the declaration of 15 December 1738.
The first article levies a fine of at least 3000 livres for any person of any rank - French or foreign - who brings any “Black, Mulatto or other coloured people of either sex” into France. The second article takes it another step further by expressly forbidding “all Blacks, Mulattoes or other coloured people of either sex, who are not in service, to enter our kingdom in the future, under any cause or pretext whatsoever.”
Article five makes provision for those living in French colonies to bring with them one “Black or Mulatto” to serve them so long they’re registered with the police at the port of disembarkation and pay a levy a thousand livres.
Importantly, the declaration distinguishes people by colour rather than whether they are enslaved or free. “In 1777 the minnister of the Marine reported that the terms ‘slave and free cannot appear in the text of the law.’ Instead, the 1777 Police des Noirs used the phrased ‘cannot change status’ to prohibit the sale, inheritance, or exchange of slaves, since the Parlement could not refuse to adopt these terms.’ So beginning in 1762, all laws concerning black slaves were counched in terms of race, not slave status” (Peabody).
These conditions were relaxed by various decrees in 1778, but are regardless an extraordinary example of institutional racism a mere dozen years before the French Revolution and its famous slogan Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.
The declaration is held in a number of instutions but is rare in the trade with just a single copy recorded at auction.
Peabody, S., “Race, Slavery, and the Law in Early Modern France” in The Historian, Vol. 56, No. 3 (1994), p.509.
