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# 048
Black Magic and White Terror:
Slave Poisoning and the Provostial Court in Restoration era Martinique
“Le poison est une force morale:
l’esclave a droit d’empoisonner.
Si j’etais esclave, et que j’eusse perdu force
et courage dans les hontes de la servitude,
je le declare tres haut, je me rejouirais
d’avoir trouvé le poison, et je m’en servirais…”
-Victor Schoelcher
On October 30, 1826, the Provostial Court of Martinique delivered its final verdict on an unwieldy criminal case involving some 30 defendants, including slaves belonging to nine different owners, several runaways with no known master, and three free men of color. At the core of the conspiracy was a group of five slaves, whose confessions uncovered a plot aimed at “entirely ruining” two plantation owners in the vicinity of St. Esprit, by poisoning both livestock and slaves. A few in the group stood accused of selling them the deadly, venomous powder used in the crimes, but the charges against other defendants were more detailed. One was accused of poisoning a horse and providing a poisonous syrup to another slave to be used on his master. A woman named Martherose was said to have performed two abortions using “harmful substances,” and that “two of her own children, and one belonging to another woman seemed to have died from poison, following threats she had made.” The court records go on to say that these offenses “do not seem entirely proven,” but the two were nevertheless condemned to a punishment of forced labor in Senegal, though not subjected to the habitual lashes and branding before their expulsion. Five other slaves were accused of poisoning both men and beasts, “but these charges, though very compelling, are not completely convincing, although time could bring proof of these crimes.” The slaves in this group were not sentenced by the court at all, but sent back to their respective masters to be disciplined.
Finally, the prevot and his fellow magistrates spent some time sorting out the case against Lubin, a freedman denounced by the slave Hyacinth, who claimed to have seen Lubin at a secret meeting of a société d’empoisonneurs. Hyacinth said that Lubin was well among the poisoners for having started a tradition of drinking a toast to their fallen leader. Another slave, Jean-Louis, testified that Lubin had asked him to provide a protective amulet during Lent, a practice said to be common among poisoners. Yet another slave, Simon, asserted that Lubin “is said to be powerful in the sect of poisoners” and, supported by two others, said it was well known he had led poisoning attacks against a nearby plantation. But others defended Lubin, with his former mistress, la Dame Millet, who had herself freed him from slavery, in fact blaming these rumors on a slave Lubin had once owned, “un nègre très mauvais sujet who could have wanted to slander his master’s reputation.” The court decreed that Lubin was to be watched over by the public authorities, but he was given no punishment.[1]
The problem of slave poisoning was not new in 19th century Martinique, but contemporaries claimed the phenomenon was changing. Most importantly, in addition to victimizing livestock and fellow slaves, for the first time slaves were poisoning their white masters, something planters insisted had not occurred in the pre-revolutionary era.[2] Though poisoning by slaves has been identified and studied in many Atlantic slave societies, by the late 18th century the crime had come to be especially associated with the French islands, and Martinique in particular.[3] Minutes of the island’s governing council during the early years of the Restoration betray a sense of despair over the rising tide of these criminal attacks. Planters claimed that the laws governing the colonies were ineffective when it came to these crimes, that they actually stood in the way of fighting the poisoners. In the words of Governor Donzelot, writing to his superiors at the Ministry of the Navy and the Colonies, “Ordinary courts, constrained by their slow and complicated formalities, can rarely get to the wretches who are guilty of this crime and, in any event, can only get convictions that come far too late and whose value as deterrent example is lost.”[4] The result was a turn to martial justice, and in August of 1822, without asking for permission from his superiors in France, Governor Donzelot established a Provostial Court, based loosely on the French tribunals first created in the 17th century and revived at the outset of the Restoration. The courts were mobile, designed to operate from the scene of disturbances and to recruit their personnel from among the local planter elite.[5] They were especially designed to respond quickly, in order, as the Governor put it, to “strike those who might be tempted to imitate [the poisoners] with a salutary terror.”[6] As the Governor’s choice of words suggests, some three decades after the Terror the language of the revolutionary tribunals still infused this colonial incarnation of the Provostial Court. Yet in this case, the idea of “White Terror” was to take on a new meaning.
The documents from a single session of the Provostial Court cited above provide ample evidence that slave poisoning was a phenomenon with complex social, political and cultural dimensions and implications. Perhaps most striking is the way the magistrates saw seemingly unrelated crimes as woven together in a conspiracy of slaves who were part of an underground “secte des empoisonneurs,” complete with its own hierarchy and secret rituals, as well as a black market for various mysterious substances. Further, the magistrates seem to rely heavily on statements made by slaves, which in some cases take the form of mere rumors. Such testimony was officially inadmissible in French courts. Yet the almost complete lack of physical evidence severely constrained judicial efforts to determine the guilty parties. This uncertainty leaves us with many unanswered questions. First of all, the account describes murder and property damage in terms of vengeance of slaves against masters, but was the motivation for these crimes so clearcut? Were the cases of abortion and infanticide faced by the court to be understood in these terms, or was it rather that African herbalism, medicine and religious practices were misunderstood by whites? Indeed, which substances did the poisoners actually use to commit this wide range of crimes? As for the “sect” of poisoners, does the presence of runaway slaves suggest that maroon communities were behind the crimes? Or does the case suggest that coordinated action between slaves and free people of color was the norm, even as one of the freedmen implicated was himself a slaveowner?
The trial records suggest that standards of punishment were fluid, as the colonial council struggled to find effective means of coercion to stem the tide of crime. After all, why would forced labor be seen as punishment by a slave? Indeed, how could transportation to Africa possibly serve as a deterrent to other criminals? The challenge was to stop crime while safeguarding the property interest that accused slaves represented, as well as attending to the personal pleas of slaveowners. In general, the Provostial Courts engaged in spectacular terror of a kind that pushed colonial violence to its extremes. In the end, the human toll was staggering. According to one estimate, more than six hundred slaves were executed in the first year alone, and another claimed that twenty slaves were burned or hanged every month in the mid-1820s, while thousands of others were condemned to forced labor or deportation.[7] Yet, the court’s effectiveness was at best debatable, and within four years it was rejected by both metropolitan authorities and much of the planter elite, and the Provostial Court was abolished. Why was this so? How was it that both the slaveowner’s private justice and the colonial court system proved incapable of disciplining the most dangerous individuals in the slave population? Indeed, if slaveowners were absolutely sovereign over their slaves, why was the legal formalism of the court system necessary at all? Rather than standing as a symbol of the unbridled authority of slaveowners, the Provostial Court seems to point to the limits of their control over unruly slaves. This story of a failure leaves us to ask why slaveowners were unable to harness the metropolitan justice system more effectively to their own ends. Did the use of metropolitan institutional forms, such as the Provostial Court, actually undermine the colonial system in some way?
Recent scholarship on the French colonial project has emphasized the limits and pathologies of metropolitan administration as it played out in the colonies in this period.[8] In general, studies looking at the legal dimensions of French slavery have tended to focus on the vicissitudes of the Code Noir and the dramatic transformations of the revolutionary period, and treated the early 19th century as a historical addendum, a brief prolongation of the status quo ante that lasted until abolition in 1848.[9] While historians have paid much attention to the parliamentary movement for abolition in the 1830s and 1840s, less has been said about the veritable standoff between colonial elites and metropolitan authorities at a time when abolitionist sentiment in France was virtually dormant.[10] On the contrary, the example of the Cours Prévôtales and the problem of slave poisonings in particular demonstrate that the Bourbon Restoration was a watershed in the evolution of the colonial relationship. Because poisoning cases exposed the blurred frontier between the master’s private justice and the role of the state, they proved a crucial testing ground for the question of which legal forms were appropriate for the colonies. As a result, criminal cases involving accused slave-poisoners became the most powerful symbol of the irreducible divide between the demands of metropolitan administration and the desire for colonial self-rule. The Provostial Courts can be seen as a distillation of the tensions generated when the institutional forms of state power were transposed to the colonial context. The failure of the courts can therefore help complicate our understanding of France’s overseas empire during the period of transition from Old Regime colonialism to the new imperialism of the late 19th century.
The Emergence of the Provostial Court
The creation of a Provostial Court in Martinique must be understood in the context of a concerted metropolitan effort to reform the colonial legal system as a means of reintegrating the islands into the French orbit. The end of the Napoleonic Wars brought the return of Martinique to French control and the beginning of an effort to strengthen the bonds weakened during two periods of British occupation. For the colons, the years of reduced or interrupted trade with France coupled with successful commerce with Britain and the United States only strengthened a habitual desire for autonomy. At the same time, the longstanding accumulation of debt from French creditors was a source of acute anxiety among plantation owners. According to the Comte de Vaugiraud, the first governor of Martinique installed by Louis XVIII in 1814, “The present organization of our courts is seen as the central lever of a great local power…Those colons who are debtors, who make up the majority, are all more or less loyal to a court system that has, until now, efficiently protected them from their creditors.”[11] Part of Vaugiraud’s charge was to implement the Napoleonic legal codes in an effort to bring the colonies under the current standards of French legal practice, and make a clean break with the complicated and contradictory laws of the Old Regime. The main problem in doing this was that legislation governing slaves and free people of color was to remain in place, thereby making it difficult for metropolitan legal norms and procedures to be implemented, whether in civil or criminal cases. Given their claim to legal exceptionalism, drawing on a long tradition of independent administration of the courts, colonial magistrates ignored certain provisions of French law and applied 18th century practices as they saw fit, according to their perception of the interests of the island.[12] The question of legal reform was therefore not simply an issue of formalism, but had implications for the whole relationship between colony and metropole.
By 1819, this overt resistance to the French legal regime had tested the patience of the sovereign. In that year, Louis XVIII named a special envoy to go to Martinique to fulfill the task of implementing the Civil Code once and for all, and eventually promulgate all of the French Codes that were in place. The King's envoy, the Baron Delamardelle, was a creole who had spent his adult life in France. According to the instructions he received from the Ministry of the Navy and the Colonies, "the organization of the colony's simple and appellate courts on the metropolitan model (as much as this will be practicable), is today one of the most imperative priorities of the government."[13] Delamardelle found that the realities of criminal procedure were woefully inadequate when it came to slaves and free people of color. One problem was that the islands continued to rely on antiquated usages, such as the need for two “irreprochable eyewitnesses.”[14] Yet slaves could only provide courtroom testimony if they had the explicit agreement of their masters, and even then only in a way that was not legally binding. Such practices made conclusive findings nearly impossible to reach in a broad array of criminal cases. In France, the new foundation for legal decisionmaking was the principle of intime conviction, which did not rely on the so-called counting of witnesses. Instead, it implied the need for “débat oral, contradictoire et public” as a basis for judicial decisions, as well as the use of a juries.[15] As Delamardelle noted, magistrates in Martinique systematically refused the principle of publicité des débats: all discussion and interrogation conducted by the court was closed to outsiders, and they shunned the idea of implementing the jury system.[16]