Eeconomist, ethnologist, former director general of the Caribbean confederation and member of parliament, Christiane Taubira proposed in 1999 that slavery and the slave trade be qualified as crimes against humanity. This request marks an essential stage in the history of relations between France and its former colonies, 150 years after the abolition of slavery. Christiane Taubira asks that the possibility of material reparation be considered for the overseas departments, the first victims of slavery and trafficking. This request was refused by the law commission, but the bill was adopted unanimously by the deputies present.
“[….] The subject that we have seized upon is not a cold object of study. Because it will still pass some time before peace and serenity come to soften the deep wound that irrigates an unfulfilled emotivity, because it can be rude to hear certain aspects of what was described by the menu. a long and terrible tragedy because history is not an exact science […] This report is not a history thesis […]
It is not the script for a horror movie, carrying the inventory of chains, shackles, shackles, handcuffs and whips that have been designed and perfected to dehumanize. Nor is it an indictment, because guilt is not hereditary and because our intentions are not revenge. It is not a request for repentance because no one would think of asking for an act of deep and sincere regret from the secular republic, whose founding values nourish the refusal of injustice. It is not a cathartic exercise (which liberates psychologically from what is repressed, traumatizing or oppressive) because the intimate wrenching imposes tenacious modesty on us. Nor is it a profession of faith, because we have yet to chisel our crowd cry. Yet we are going to describe the crime, the work of oblivion, the silence, and say the reasons for giving name and status to this abomination. From the start, the enterprise was marked by ferocity. Fifteen years were enough to completely eradicate Haiti's first inhabitants, the Amerindians. While there were 11 million along the Americas in 1519, there were only 2,5 million at the end of the 16th century. It was quickly justified: it was part of the civilizing mission, aimed to save soulless beings, sought to reassure the redemption of some. It was legitimized by the alleged curse of Ham. (reference to the second son of Noah and his descendants, ancestors according to the Bible of the black peoples of Africa who were cursed) […] The slave trade and slavery were extremely violent. The figures that claim to sum them up are extremely brutal.
In 1978, a comprehensive review of the slave trade and slavery practiced by France has been established. It appears as the third European slave power. It has therefore practiced the trade, this trade, this trade, this traffic whose only motives are gold, silver, spices. It has been implicated after others, with others, in slavery that turns man into a captive, making him a beast of burden and the property of another.
The black code, (under the reign of Louis XIV, this Code promulgated in 1685, regulated the status of slavery in the French colonies and the life of black slaves in the islands. It ratified (legal ratification which makes valid (an act ) in fact the practice of triangular trade) which has remained in French law for nearly two centuries, stipulates that the slave is a piece of furniture and that the freed slave owes special respect to his former masters, to widows and children. The triangular trade lasted four centuries, since the first navigators reached Cape Bojador in 1416, on the Rio de Oro (southern part of the Sahara).It soon appeared that the Native Americans were to be decimated ruthlessly, by the slavery, mistreatment, forced labor, epidemics, alcohol, wars of resistance.The Dominican father Bartholomé de Las Casas, who proposed to protect them, suggested the massive importation of Africans, reputed to be more robust .
Fifteen to thirty million people, according to the wide range of historians, women, children, men, have been trafficked and slaved and probably, at the very least, seventy million, if we retain the estimate that establishes that a slave arrived in the Americas, four or five perished in the raids, on the way to the coast, in the slave houses of Goree, Ouidah, Zanzibar and during the crossing.
Triangular trade has been practiced privately or publicly for particular interests or for reasons of state. The slavery system was organized around estate plantations (right which is part of a domain or which belongs to the public domain) more prosperous or as prosperous as those of the clergy and private settlers. For a very long time, until 1716, monopoly companies ruled out private initiative (notably the Compagnie des Indes Occidentales, created by Colbert in 1664, then the Compagnie du Sénégal in 1674. But the development of the plantation economy, In the centuries of the Enlightenment, it was necessary to open this monopoly.The letters patent (naval certificate of the sanitary condition of a departing ship) of January 16, 1716 authorized the ports of Rouen, Saint-Malo, La Rochelle, Nantes and Bordeaux to engage in the slave trade, in exchange for twenty pounds per head of black introduced into the islands and an exemption from import tax […] This violence and this brutality very probably explain, for a large part, the silence which tends to come together and lead to an agreement between the public authorities, who wanted to make people forget, and the descendants of slaves, who wanted to forget.However, we know the sharing of responsibilities.[…] We are here i to say what the slave trade and slavery are, to recall that the Age of Enlightenment was marked by a revolt against the domination of the Church, by the demand for human rights, by a strong demand for democracy , but also to recall that, during this period, the plantation economy was so flourishing that the triangular trade reached its maximum rate between 1783 and 1791. We are here to say that if Africa gets bogged down in the no development, it is also because generations of his sons and sons have been torn from him; that if Martinique and Guadeloupe are dependent on the sugar economy, dependent on protected markets, if Guyana has so many difficulties in controlling its natural resources (in particular wood and gold), if Reunion is forced to trade so far from its neighbors is the direct result of colonial exclusivity; that if the distribution of land is so inequitable, it is the reproduced consequence of the housing system.
We are here to say that the slave trade and slavery were and are a crime against humanity; […] This inscription in the law, this strong word, without ambiguity, this official and lasting word constitutes a symbolic reparation, the first and undoubtedly the most powerful of all. But it induces a political reparation by taking into consideration the unequal foundations of overseas societies linked to slavery, in particular to the compensations in favor of the colonists who followed the abolition. It also presupposes a moral reparation which propels into full light the chain of refusal which has been woven by those who resisted in Africa, by the maroons (Fugitive Slaves) who led the forms of resistance in all the colonies, by the villagers and the French workers, through political combat and the action of philosophers and abolitionists.
It (this inscription in the law) supposes that this reparation combines the efforts made to uproot racism, to uncover the roots of ethnic clashes, to confront fabricated injustices. It presupposes cultural repair, in particular through the rehabilitation of places of memory.[…] But we are going to journey together in our diversity, because we are instructed in the marvelous certainty that if we are so different, it is because the colors are in life and life is in colours, and cultures and designs, when they intertwine, have more life and more flamboyance. […] Léon Gontran Damas (1912-1978), Guyanese poet and socialist deputy of Guyana, Co-founder of the negritude movement with Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor: Screamed his resentment: “I feel capable of screaming forever against those who surround me and who prevent me forever from being a man”.