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Lafayette, (La) Daily Advertiser, May 25, 1999
France finally abolished slavery in it's colonies in 1848
Assembly called practice 'attack on human dignity'
by Jim Bradshaw
In 1848, when France became a republic, the nation claimed an overseas empire extending from the Americas to Africa and the Indian Ocean.
The sugar islands of the Caribbean were gone, and Louisiana had been sold, but France still held the islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon off the coast of Newfoundland, the islands of Martinque and Guadeloupe in the West Indies, and the vast territory of Guyane on the coast of South America.
In the Indian Ocean, France possessed La Reunion, the island of Mayotte in the Comoros chain, and bases in Sainte-Maire and Madagascar. France also controlled some areas of India, held trading posts still in Senegal and on the Guinea coast, and in Algeria.
In the Pacific, France had held a protectorate over Tahiti since 1842, as well some of the Society Islands and the Marquesas chain.
The revolution of 1848 made the colonies into territories of the republic and gave them representation in the national assembly. But the greatest achievement of the 1845 revolution for the colonies was the final abolition of slavery. It had been abolished in French possessions once before, in 1794 but was reinstated by Napoleon Bonaparte. On April 27, 1848, the French assembly adopted a decree declaring slavery as "an attack on human dignity," and emancipated more than 250,000 slaves, most of them in the plantation colonies in the West Indies and La Reunion. However, before the emancipation decree reached the Caribbean, slave revolts had broken out in Martinique and Guadeloupe and the governors of the colonies abolished slavery on their own authority on May 23 and May 27, respectively.
Here is the text of the decree adopted on April 27, 1848, by the French assembly.
In the name of the French Nation, the provisional government, preambling that slavery is an attempt against human dignity; that in ruining the man's free will, it suppresses the natural principle of right and duty; that it is a flagrant transgression of the republican dogma: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, decrees:
1st Article: Slavery is completely abolished in the French colonies and possessions.
2nd Article: The system of engagement in time, established in Senegal, is suppressed.
3rd Article: Governors and general commissioners of the Republic are laden with applying all the measures, appropriate to ensure liberty in Martinica (sic), Guadeloupe, and it's "dependencies," Reunion, Guyana, Senegal and other French settlements of the African's occidental cost, "Mayotte" and the dependencies, and Algeria.
4th Article: Old slaves who were fated to misdemeanors or personally entailed this punishment for facts which, ascribed to free people, shouldn't have entailed punishment, are (freed). People who were deported by administrative measures are recalled.
5th Article: The national Assembly will settle the quota of the indemnity which will be granted to the colonists.
6th Article: The colonies purified from bondage and the Indian possession will be represented at the national assembly.
7th Article: The principle that the French ground liberates the slave who reaches it applies to the republic's colonies and possessions.
8th Article: In the future, ever in foreign countries, it is prohibited for French people to posses buy or sell slaves or participate either directly or indirectly in all that kind of traffics or exploitations. All infractions of these decisions will entail the loss of French citizenship.
9th Article: The Minister of the Navy and the colonies and the Minister of the War are laden with (each in what they are concerned the execution of the present decree.)