Researchers have built a database and a search engine that will allow the public to have precise information on the compensation received by French slave owners.
Doctoral student Jessica Balguy has identified at least 30% of descendants of slaves among the owners of Martinique, and between 30 and 40% of women.
Myriam Cottias, who coordinates the Repairs project, which
20 Minutes
reveals to you in three parts, was able to find her grandfather, Eugène Ozier-Lafontaine, a man of color, who received compensation for the equivalent of five or six slaves.
This is a project on which researchers have been working for two years: this Friday, May 7, three days before the National Day of the Memories of Slavery, a database is made public, which lists all the slave owners. who received compensation at the time of the abolition of slavery. A tool that will allow individuals, businesses and institutions to do research on their ancestors, or on people who held members of their family in slavery this Friday afternoon. And above all a tool which could well revive the debate on reparations, by providing precise quantified elements to civil society.
The database is presented as a search engine, where you can sort by name, city, colony (Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyana and Réunion but also Senegal, Sainte-Marie de Madagascar and Nocibé), or even amount granted.
Names of slave owners appear, which contain biographical information, and a history of the compensation titles they have received.
You enter through two entrances: 1825 and 1849, corresponding to the two dates when the slave owners were compensated.
The two abolitions of slavery
France has indeed abolished slavery and compensated slave owners on two occasions. The uprising in Saint-Domingue - which would become Haiti - in 1792 opened the way for a first abolition of slavery, re-established two years later with the arrival of Bonaparte to power. Toussaint Louverture wins a resounding victory against General Leclerc, sent by France, but the country is forced to pay an immense debt to the colonists, by virtue of a treaty signed in 1825. “Haiti has paid up to the last franc, in 1888 ”, remarks Myriam Cottias, director of the International Center for Research on Slavery and Post-Slavery (Ciresc), which coordinated the Repairs project (see box at the end of the article).
The bloody revolt in Santo Domingo spread fear among settlers in other regions, who therefore prepared for the end of slavery.
They began an intense lobbying for compensation which they obtained in 1849, about a year after the abolition by the provisional government of the Second Republic.
126 million francs are paid, or the equivalent of between two to 12 working days per French or French, divided into three positions: cash the first year, an annuity, and on this annuity, a participation in a bank of ready, to support the economy of the colonies.
Compensation vouchers used as currency
The research carried out by doctoral student Jessica Balguy to constitute this database, as well as for her thesis, revealed that the titles of the indemnities received by the slave owners were widely circulated in the French colonies even before the law made them. make it official. They have thus become a real "bargaining chip", remarks the doctoral student. If the people present in the base are mostly slave owners, some are simple creditors, who have recovered these titles. “Even before the compensation commission determined the price of a slave, some people got paid in compensation. The slave owners were in debt, and it was a way for them to pay off their debts, ”explains Jessica Balguy.
This is how we find a certain Auguste François Perrinon, an abolitionist convinced of Martinique and "free of color", as the descendants of slaves who have been freed are called.
This polytechnician had recovered a title, no doubt because a slave owner owed him money.
In an entirely different genre, the database includes the name of Louis Marie Gabriel Lecoat De Kerveguen, in Reunion, who had 213 titles, either as owner or as creditor.
We learn that he received 1.8 million francs equivalent to about 1,680 slaves.
He is the biggest claimant on the base, and arguably one of the biggest slave owners.
The slave owner is not necessarily a white man
Another rather disturbing revelation at first glance from the research of Jessica Balguy: the proportion of "free of color" and of women appearing in these titles upsets the image that we usually have of the slave owner, that we imagine. must be a white man. The reality is more complex than that: Jessica Balguy for example identified at least 30% of descendants of slaves among the owners of slaves who claimed their indemnities in Martinique.
This is because “the system takes everyone,” explains Jessica Balguy. “In a society founded on slavery, there is no working relationship outside of slavery,” adds Myriam Cottias. You can only have slaves ”. Among the non-white people who own slaves, we can also find families who have succeeded in emancipating themselves, but who for financial reasons have redeemed their children without succeeding in emancipating them, explains Jessica Balguy. "Can we speak of slave owners in this case?" "Asks the researcher, for whom this database reveals" the heterogeneity of profiles "and the multiplicity of cases:" There are free families of color who were very rich, who had slaves. There are free personalities of color who did not have a single slave ”.
Many women among slave owners
Women are also numerous among slave owners: between 30 and 40%, according to Jessica Balguy. Again, there is a reason: for white women, many are widows, who find themselves owners of slaves upon the death of their husbands. Women of color are also found among the free of color to hold titles, because they were more numerous than men to have been emancipated. In Martinique, they are in fact the majority in the population of free of color, and logically find themselves "more involved in economic relations", summarizes the doctoral student. In Senegal, mixed-race or black women who owned slaves, and lived with European settlers, even had a name: the Signares. "It's incorporated violence", summarizes Myriam Cottias.
Seen from the telescope of our 21st century, these facts and figures seem totally incomprehensible, but because the times are radically different. Likewise, anyone who has not delved into the archives of the commission responsible for working on the compensation to be paid to slave owners cannot understand why the French State made this choice, rather than that of compensating them. slaves. This is the reproach addressed to Victor Schœlcher by activists from Martinique last May, before destroying two of his statues. However, the documents gathered by Jessica Balguy in her book
Indemniser l'sclavage in 1848?
are categorical: Victor Schœlcher fought to compensate the slaves, but the lobbying of the owners was stronger, who threatened to leave the colonies and a collapse of the economy. "They compensated the owners because they had leverage that the former slaves did not have," says Jessica Balguy.
Will the base built by researchers revive the debate on reparations? Perhaps, if the public and associations take advantage of this tool, as do businesses and institutions. Like the University of Glasgow in Scotland, which launched a scholarship program for Caribbean students, after discovering that it had received donations from people who benefited from slavery. "There are people for whom it may be a shock or a surprise to see his name in the database," asks Myriam Cottias. But Jessica Balguy puts it into perspective: “In the West Indies, many people are already able to say which family has received how many benefits. People know a lot of things ”. And to add: "My job is to share the information that I find in the archives,but what people do with it next is not up to me. "
"The inequalities of slavery persist", according to Magali Bessone
Click on our interactive slavery reparations map
The REPAIRS project
REPAIRS, is a research project that studies compensation, reparation and compensation for slavery between the 19th and 21st centuries.
“There are few informed, data-backed answers to the question 'is it legitimate to talk about reparations?'
We said to ourselves that we were going to take it seriously, ”explains Myriam Cottias, director of the International Center for Research on Slavery and Post-Slavery (Ciresc) and coordinator of REPAIRS.
At the center of the program, a database and a search engine that will allow the public to have precise information on the compensation received by the owners of French slaves. A painstaking work on thousands of people carried out by doctoral student Jessica Balguy in the documents of the time, which made it possible, among other things, to find the archives of Guyana in Aix-en-Provence, to which researchers had never had had access.
The database of the REPAIRS project will allow each French person to do their own research on their ancestors.
The director of Ciresc herself was able to find her grandfather, Eugène Ozier-Lafontaine, a man of color, who received compensation for the equivalent of five or six slaves.
For Myriam Cottias, “this database provides content, even answers, to questions that haunt the mind and allows us to realize what a slavery, complex and perverse society really was, a society of domination and of violence.
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