Free people of color (Saint-Domingue)
자유 유색인 (생도맹그)
A legal and social category in Saint-Domingue and other French Caribbean colonies that lay between the enslaved population and the white colon class. Under the Code Noir these people were legally free but did not hold the same rights as the French, and a 1789 royal census counted about 25,000 of them. Called free people of color in English and gens de couleur libres in French.
In depth
Formation of the category
The class of free people of color took shape within the order established by the Code Noir promulgated by Louis XIV in 1685 and the establishment of French Saint-Domingue in 1697. Saint-Domingue was legally divided into free whites, the freed (affranchis), and the enslaved; more than half of the freed were free people of color. They included both blacks and mulattoes, most of them descendants of French settler men and enslaved black women. As coffee plantations expanded, free people of color had become an economic force by 1789, holding a third of the coffee plantations and a quarter of the enslaved.
A class that was not unitary
The relation between class and race varied by region. In the south, high mortality and small slaveholdings led slaveholders to forbid self-purchase by the enslaved, so the free colored population was markedly smaller than in the north. Wealthy gens de couleur bought land and owned slaves, and some were tied to the system for suppressing slave revolts. At the same time they could not hold public office or practice many professions such as medicine.
The struggle for rights and the revolution
Despite the nominal equality clauses of the Code Noir, free people of color did not hold the same rights as the French and were excluded above all from voting. In October 1790 some 350 mulattoes rose in revolt; regular French troops and local planter militia dispersed them, and in February 1791 leaders including James Ogé were publicly executed.
On 15 May 1791 the Constituent Assembly granted full French citizenship to free people of color with two free parents, but this confined the franchise to a few hundred free blacks, and white colonists swore to resist the law's application. When the National Assembly revoked these rights on 24 September 1791, after the slave uprising, free people of color took up arms against the whites again. On 4 April 1792 the Assembly replaced this with a more generous decree granting full citizenship to all free persons regardless of skin color or parentage. That year the French government sent commissioner Léger-Félicité Sonthonax to calm the uprising, and Sonthonax began allying with free colored people who wanted more freedom. White colonists, opposed to emancipation, fought the revolutionary government forces alongside free people of color with British support.
After emancipation
When the revolutionary government ended slavery in the colonies in 1793, Saint-Domingue had about 28,000 anciens libres (those "free from before"), a term used to distinguish them from people freed by the general emancipation. Many mulattoes opposed the Convention's abolition of slavery in all colonies on 4 February 1794 because they owned slaves. Relations between free people of color and the enslaved were complex. They sometimes presented themselves as the whites' bulwark against slave revolt, but as the uprising continued they abandoned their earlier distance from the enslaved and strengthened their alliance with the freed. Conflict between free blacks and the freed erupted in 1799 in the War of the Knives between Rigaud's faction and Toussaint's black forces; defeated wealthy gens de couleur fled to France, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the United States. Many free people of color remained after 1793 and exercised influence in independent Haitian politics, so the end of the category's legal order in 1794 did not end the group's political role.
Distinguishing the term
Gens de couleur libres was often used to refer specifically to free people of mixed African and European descent, but free people of color also included those of non-mixed black origin. It should therefore be distinguished from the generic "free people of color" concept used in other territories such as the United States.