*La police des Noirs en Amérique (Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyane, Saint-Domingue) et en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles.* Hurard Bellance. Matoury, Guyane: Ibis Rouge, 2011. 331 pp. (Paper €30.00)

In the introduction to *La police des Noirs en Amérique*, Hurard Bellance contends that while much has been written about the condition of enslaved people in the French Antilles during the Ancien Régime, scholars have ignored the ways in which they were policed. So he set out to remedy this lacuna by writing a book “not to engage in a systematic comparison of the treatment of blacks in the regions covered by the study, but to get as close as possible to the truth about each aspect of policing” (p. 16).

The book consists of eight long, extensively detailed chapters and a conclusion. Chapter 1 offers a demographic picture of blacks in the French colonies and their African origins. Heavy on population statistics, it also deals with the evolution of the small farming economy that emerged in other regions of the Caribbean in the seventeenth century as well. In Chapter 2, Bellance outlines the dimensions of policing, including the state agencies involved in the enactment and execution of law and order, the establishment of local laws, and the mechanisms of control, including the work of the dreaded *maréchaussée*—slave-catchers. The administrative divisions within colonies, the structure of the colonial administration, and the role of administrative officials are also taken up and explained with clarity. Chapter 3, which constitutes the heart of the study, focuses on the laws governing slave society and shows how French authorities dealt with contravention of the laws. The next two chapters are dedicated to slave resistance. One concentrates on *marronnage* with particular emphasis on the flight of slave drivers, the other on acts of poison in which the enslaved allegedly engaged and for which they were often punished in spite of lack of evidence. Chapter 6 looks at the ways in which Christian missionaries, mainly Dominicans, Jesuits, and Capuchins, disseminated religion among the enslaved.

Chapter 7 addresses the social condition of freed slaves in France and the French colonies. Oddly, Bellance does not pay much attention to the ways in which the authorities policed freed slaves; rather, he dedicates much of the chapter to regulations governing interracial unions and manumissions based on concubinage. And no wonder, for he gives examples of white colonists who preferred to marry free black women of economic worth; this, for example, was the case of Saint-Martin l'Arada, one of the largest
planters in the Antibonite, Saint-Domingue, who owned more than 200 slaves, and who married a black woman, herself the owner of at least 30 slaves (p. 222). Aside from going into the reasons for liberating slaves, the mechanisms of manumission, and the measures for identifying and registering freed slaves, Bellance profiles many people of color (mostly women) who went to France and found employment as seamstresses and chamber maids. Were the laws enforced? This is the question that he raises and resolves in Chapter 8, where he shows that negligence and violation were widespread. But to argue, as Bellance does, that the colonial administration turned a blind eye to law enforcement for the sake of peace in the colonies is to overlook the fact that the white planter class acted with impunity in the interest of maintaining white racial solidarity. Clearly, the range of subjects that *La police des Noirs* covers is wide, but the text explores many areas of policing that offer glimpses into the lives of the enslaved which reinforce the findings of scholars over the last several decades.

The policing of religion is particularly revealing in this regard. Under the French *Code Noir* of 1685, slave owners were required to baptize the enslaved within a prescribed period after they entered the colonies, and instruct them in Roman Catholicism. Bellance notes that enslaved children would normally be baptized as soon as they got off the ships, and posits that the colonial administration depended on missionaries to disseminate religion, as their role was “to put Africans and Indians in touch with God” (p. 165). But there were never enough of them. The missionaries also owned slaves and dabbled in slave trading. For example, the Abbot Enos of Saint-Domingue held a public sale of elite slaves in 1773, and a parish priest in Croix-de-Bouquets, Saint-Domingue, sold a thirty-three-old Congolese slave to a doctor in Port-au-Prince in 1789 (p. 159).

Bellance is at his best when he examines the ways in which French authorities dealt with slave crimes. He highlights a number of cases involving theft and other offences. One occurred in Martinique in 1767 when a shopkeeper complained to the authorities that thieves broke into her enterprise and stole merchandise worth 14,000-15,000 francs. Upon investigation, authorities found some of the stolen goods among a group of enslaved people in an almost inaccessible mountainous hideout. Four of them were captured and imprisoned, and upon interrogation, revealed the identity of the others, following which most were executed. Another case involved a European who set up slaves in Guadeloupe to steal from his neighbors
and then purchased the stolen goods from them; he was charged 100 livres, whipped, branded with a hot iron, chained, and banished permanently from the colonies (p. 75).

A well-researched and solid synthesis of established scholarship on the French Antilles supported by overwhelming evidence drawn from archival data and secondary sources, *La police des Noirs* lacks analysis and a critical perspective on historical events. This is not history written from the perspective of the enslaved. The chapters are long and overloaded with citations, some spanning a page and more. The book's major contribution is its comparative approach, especially the inclusion of substantial material on French Guiana. For this, scholars and researchers will be grateful.

Bernard Moitt

Department of History, Virginia Commonwealth University

Richmond VA 23284, U.S.A.

bmoitt@vcu.edu