Policing Saint Domingue: Race, violence, and honor in an Old Regime colony

This dissertation explores the links between violence, race, and honor in French Saint Domingue (Haiti) from its seventeenth-century foundation to 1789. Using judicial sources, government correspondence, and contemporary descriptions, it argues that early modern French honor played a major role in structuring colonial social and political relationships. Honor-bound practices and ideas influenced the operation of the colony\u27s penal apparatus and contributed significantly to the development of its racialized social hierarchy. As French honor gave cultural meaning to slavery and race, it was transformed by the colony\u27s radically different social environment, dominated as it was by the Americas\u27 most productive slave-based plantation complex. Part One investigates race, honor, and violence in the criminal justice system. It explores how it came to be that system\u27s hierarchy replicated the colony\u27s racialized social hierarchy. Focusing on the system\u27s personnel, it highlights the extent to which the colony\u27s condemned slave executioners and “colored” policemen did what they could to better their own conditions at the expense of the projects of Saint Domingue\u27s rulers. Part Two examines how honor shaped colonial political interactions. It concentrates on magistrates\u27 attempts to gain authority by living up to honor-bound metropolitan models of what men of law were supposed to be. It also explores their struggles with the colony\u27s other royal officers, chronicling a major shift in imperial political culture from one based solely on representing the King to one in which authority was also based on the cultivation of “Enlightened” knowledge. Part Three investigates how French practices and ideas regarding honor shaped social relations in Saint Domingue. Honor-bound violence, marriage strategies, and gossip gave everyday meaning to race and slavery, even as these practices became racialized in the colonial context. This Caribbean transformation of French honor made possible new visions of Saint Domingue\u27s social and political order. In doing that, the racialization of honor paved the way for the revolutionary struggles that began in 1789 and resulted in Haitian independence in 1804