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The French Slave Trade: An Overview
David Geggus
| IN comparative studies
of race and slavery, France's colonies often appear in an intermediate
position between Iberian and Anglo-Saxon extremes. The institutions
of the French colonies exhibited in attenuated form the Catholic
absolutism of the Iberians, whereas the colonies' social structures
closely resembled that of the North European colonies. Scholars
who discuss colonial slave laws, the frequency with which slaves
were freed, or racial integration often situate French slave society
somewhere between northern and southern European polar types. In
the history of the Atlantic slave trade, too, we find the French
occupying an in-between position. Whether the subject is the length
of time the French actively participated in the slave trade (as
importers or as traders), their share of its total volume, or the
pace of their withdrawal, the mortality suffered by the captives
they carried or the balance between males and females among those
they transported, French activity tended to have that same intermediate
character. In the history of the slave trade, the Iberians are often
grouped at one end of the spectrum and the Northern Europeans at
the other, but, invariably, the French appear somewhere near the
middle. |
1 |
| This
article begins by addressing the contribution of the Du Bois Institute's
dataset to existing knowledge of the French slave trade. It then
examines the general contours of the trade, notably its temporal
and spatial distribution, its mortality rates, and the age and sex
composition of the people transported. The second half of the article
focuses on France's Caribbean colonies, which were the principal
destination of 90 percent of French slave ships. It identifies a
pattern of variations among different colonies and regions in the
ethnic, age, and sex composition of their African migrants. This
pattern is attributed to factors that include planter preferences
determined by crop type, differing chronologies of colonial expansion,
and the commercial aspects of markets that were valued by merchants.
Finally, the cultural implications of this pattern for different
areas are briefly considered. |
2 |
| The
Du Bois Institute dataset lists 4,033 slaving voyages by French-registered
ships destined for the Americas that sailed between 1669 and 1864.
It excludes a large number of voyages whose final destination lay
in the Indian Ocean. The systematic efforts of Jean Mettas and Serge
Daget in the 1970s and 1980s to inventory the post-1706 French slave
trade left the compilers of the Du Bois Institute database less
scope for extending knowledge of France's contribution to the Atlantic
slave trade than that of most other participants.1
In a 1990 article, David Eltis argued that the Mettas-Daget Répertoire
of eighteenth-century slaving expeditions was at least 90 percent
complete.2
To judge from the sources it lists, the new database adds to this
corpus primarily a dozen new cases found in Lloyd's Lists,
five others collected by Robert Stein, and French voyages to Spanish
America drawn from the research of Herbert Klein and Elena Studer.
In terms of new voyages, the Du Bois Institute material contributes
most to knowledge of French activities during the "illegal"
period that began in 1814. From British archives alone, Eltis, Stephen
Behrendt, and David Richardson have added at least twenty expeditions
that did not appear in Daget's study of "la traite illégale."3
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