Slaves of justice: Saint Domingue's executioners and the production of shame

Historical Reflections

Volumn 29, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 275-293

  Ogle, Gene E ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA   (United States)

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EID: 60950231690     PISSN: 03157997     EISSN: 19392419     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (60)

1. The French word bourreau has no exact English equivalent. Terms like hangman and headsman convey some of the same disparaging inflections, but tend to define executioners more by their trade than their existence as social and cultural types as in the case of bourreau. The procureur du roi was the public prosecutor and representative of the King's interests before the colony's lower courts. Arrêt du Conseil Supérieur de Cap François, 6 avril 1728, F/3/270, Centre des Archives d'Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence, France, hereafter CAOM. All translations from the French are mine unless otherwise indicated
2. Ibid
3. Robert Chesnais, ed., Le Code noir (Paris, 1998), pp. 30-31
4. M.L.E. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description lopographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l'Isle Saint-Domingue, éd. Blanche Maurel and Etienne Taillemite (Paris, 1958 [Philadelphia, 1797|), 1:330; 2:580
5. I have borrowed the term "generally dishonored" from Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA, 1982)
6. Peter H. Wood, Black Majority; Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974), pp. 281-282
7. Kathy Stuart, Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts: Honor and Ritual Pollution in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1999)
8. André Lachance, Le Bourreau au Canada sous le régime français (Québec, 1966)
9. My emphasis. Mémoire de l'Intendant Bégon, 26 août 1684, C/9a/l, CAOM. For another such case, see M.L.E. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions des colonies françoises de l'Amérique sous le vent, 6 vols. (Paris, 1784-1790), 1:500
10. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions, 1:MS note 83, MS note 479, 522; 2:117-118. The references marked by MS are drawn from manuscript notes in Moreau de Saint-Méry's hand in the margins of a copy of his Loix et constitutions in the possession of the Centre des Archives d'Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence
11. Ariette Lebigre, La Justice du roi: La vie judiciaire dans l'ancienne France (Paris, 1988; reprint, Paris, 1995), pp. 54-55; 81-82; 99-100
12. Beyond these means deemed legitimate and variously encouraged by the monarchy, individuals and families might employ gossip and rumor to attack the reputations of others. Less acceptable to the monarchy, they practiced various forms of personalized violence such as the duel or having their servants beat those they considered beneath them. See François Billacois, The Duel: Its Rise and Fall in Early Modern France, ed. and trans. Trista Selous (New Haven, 1990)
13. Julian Pitt-Rivers, "Honour and Social Status" in Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society, ed. J.G. Peristiany (Chicago, 1966), p. 31
14. Lebigre, La Justice du Roi, 13-33
15. Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression: From a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 4-6, 9-12
16. Arrêt du Conseil Supérieur de Léogane, 6 mars 1741, F/3/271, CAOM. This linkage became the means by which the absolute monarchs and their local representatives regularly created, reaffirmed and legitimated their power. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977), pp. 32-69
17. Lisa Silverman, Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth, and the Body in Early Modern France (Chicago, 2001 ), pp. 3-106
18. The links between infamy, torture and judicial practice had a long and complex history in "Western" legal traditions. In fact, while the medieval réintroduction of torture that formed the precedent for Old Regime practices does not appear to have been directly related to matters of honor, in Greek and Roman legal practice, it was originally to be used only against generally dishonored people like slaves. Edward Peters, Torture, exp. ed. (Philadelphia, 1996), pp. 11-102
19. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions, 6:225
20. Arrêt du Conseil Supérieur de Léogane, 6 mars 1741, F/3/271, CAOM. The typical "ideal" execution I am describing here is primarily drawn from my readings of over 200 colonial sentences. However, excepting variations in who was being executed for what crimes and who was performing the execution, they seem to have rarely differed from those
21. Arrêt du Conseil Supérieur de Léogane, 6 mars 1741, F/3/271, CAOM
22. Arrêt du Conseil Supérieur du Cap François, 28 février 1761, F/3/272, CAOM
23. Silverman, Tortured Subjects
24. Quoted in Jaques Delarue, Le Métier de bourreau (Paris, 1979), p. 107
25. Daniel Arasse, The Guillotine and the Terror, trans. Christopher Miller (London, 1989 [1987]), pp. 19-20
26. Similarly, according to Guyot's Répertoire universel, being whipped in the jail was considered a lesser penalty than being whipped publicly, not only because it was less public but also because the jailer-and not the executioner-delivered the lashing. Quoted in Lachance, Le Bourreau, p. 35
27. Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, facsimile reprint (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstat, 1966), 2:372
28. Nicole Castan, Justice et répression en Languedoc à l'époque de Lumières (Paris, 1980), p. 253
29. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 53
30. These contributions have primarily been made by historians of the early modern German states. Richard J. Evans, for example, has argued that the executioner's pariah status resulted from his role in patrolling the border "between the settled and honourable society of the towns, the guilds, and the princely order, and the threatening and uncontrolled world of the sick, the rabid, the violent and the deviant." Richard J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany, 1600-1987 (Oxford, 1996), pp. 63-64
31. Stuart, Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts
32. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, 1984 [1966])
33. Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1978)
34. Spierenburg, Spectacle of Suffering, pp. 27-28
35. Delarue, Le Métier, p. 58
36. Examples include occasions when French nobles had their servants beat commoners whom they deemed lacking in respect. Billacois, The Duel
37. Pitt-Rivers, "Honour and Social Status," p. 31. In the Caribbean, planters and plantation directors frequently had their slaves punish other slaves rather than do so themselves
38. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions, l:xvii
39. Quoted in Yvan Debbasch, Couleur et liberté: Le jeu du critère ethnique dans un ordre juridique esclavagiste (Paris, 1967), p. 64 n. 4
40. James E. McClellan III, Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime (Baltimore, 1992), p. 49
41. Arrêt du Conseil Supérieur de Léogane, 14 octobre 1726, F/3/270, CAOM
42. Arrêt du Conseil Supérieur du Cap François, 7 avril 1728, F/3/270, CAOM
43. Arrêt du Conseil Supérieur de Petit-Goave, 10 mars 1736, F/3/270, CAOM
44. Arrêt du Conseil Supérieur de Saint-Domingue, 9 septembre 1788, F/3/280, CAOM
45. Ariette Farge, Fragile Lives: Violence, Power and Solidarity in Eighteenth-Century Paris, trans. Carol Shelton. (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), p. 184
46. They have argued that so long as the spectacle proceeded as crowds believed it should, they were willing participants, expressing discontent only when something occurred contrary to their expectations. This participation, however, did not necessarily involve agreement with the authorities regarding what these rituals meant. Michel Bée, "Le spectacle de l'exécution dans la France d'ancien régime," Annales E.S.C. 38 (1983): 843-859
47. Farge, Fragile Lives, p. 179
48. McClellan, Colonialism and Science, p. 50
49. rd series, 58 (2001): 119-138
50. G. Debien and J. Houdaille, "Les origines africaines des esclaves des Antilles françaises," Caribbean Studies, 10 (1970-1): 5-29. A number of different, if often overlapping, common créole cultures were in the process of formation throughout the colonial period, but they built on a wide range of African, European and indigenous American traditions
51. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 2:630-631
52. Relation d'une conspiration tramée par les Nègres dans l'Isle de Saint-Domingue, quoted in Justin Girod de Chantrans, Voyage d'un Suisse dans les colonies d'Amérique, ed. Pierre Pluchon (Paris, 1980 [1785]), pp. 79-80
53. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions, 2:73-74; 4:847-848; 5:764-5. Their attacks were sometimes so vehement as to prove lethal. In his description of the area of Haut du Cap, Moreau de Saint-Méry noted the site "of the massacre of a Negro Executioner of High Works that the rather inexplicable hatred of the other Negroes made perish under sticks and stones ... solely because of his functions." He also remarked that this event was not unique and was repeated later "at the equally unreasonable provocation of some children."
54. Moreau de Saint-Méry M. Idem, Description, 1:329-330; 2:580
55. Mémoire des administrateurs, 28 septembre 1739, F/3/91, CAOM
56. Moreau de Saint-Méry Idem, Loix et constitutions, 5:764
57. This event followed from a combination of particular circumstances with the long-standing antagonism of some members of the crowd towards colonial justice. First, when the executioner tried to hang the condemned a second time and after the condemned as well as the crowd had called for grace, he upset certain popular French expectations regarding public executions. Despite the fact that sentences read "to be hanged and strangled until dead," according to a widely-held tradition whose origins remain dim, the condemned should have been pardoned at this point. (Bée, "Le spectacle," p. 856
58. Spierenburg, Spectacle of Suffering, p. 15. Second, the composition of the crowd and the identity of the condemned helps to explain the series of events
59. The fact that two sailors took action to free one of their comrades was no coincidence. Group solidarities were common in the Old Regime, and as Marcus Rediker has pointed out, they tended to be particularly strong among sailors. (Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 [Cambridge, 1987]). Finally, the flight of the maréchaussée under a hail of stones and the subsequent absence of any repressive mechanism set the scene for the last act of this execution gone wrong. Where there was little reason to fear reprisal, at least some of the attending "Negroes," in all likelihood slaves, took the opportunity to exact some small measure of revenge for their grievances
60. Eugene D. Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1976 [1972]), pp. 597-598