Bissette and the Police des Noirs: Free Soil, Mobility, and the Status of the Patroné in the Early Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Abstract In the early years of the July Monarchy, the antislavery activist of color Charles Auguste Bissette petitioned the Ministry of the Navy and Colonies on behalf of Hippolyte Roux, a former slave, to reclaim a security deposit left in the Martinique Treasury a decade earlier, prior to Roux's arrival in Paris. Roux's journey to freedom, and Bissette's advocacy for him, allow us to see how French policy evolved towards slaves and free people of color entering the metropole over the first half of the nineteenth century. As the July Monarchy sought to eliminate racially discriminatory legislation, it encountered the liminal status of the patroné, which had precedents in the colonial laws of Île Bourbon and Martinique during the Empire and customary practice in Martinique during the Restoration. Bissette, at the height of his influence with the July Monarchy, was successful in persuading the Ministry—through legally suspect arguments—to refund Roux's 1,000 livre deposit since the aim of regularizing Roux's status as a free man in the metropole coincided with the Ministry's aims of reconciling the ambiguous status of the patronés (also known as libres de fait and libres de savane) in the colonies. The restoration of France's Free Soil policy in 1836 marked a return to class-based distinctions of colonial slavery and metropolitan freedom and the elimination of the category of patroné.