ABSTRACT
This chapter examines ministerial correspondence, printed legal sources, and cases of transatlantic litigation heard on appeal by the Conseil Privé in order to reconstruct early modern French debates about the nature of slaves as property. These sources reveal that although the Code Noir defined slaves as personal property, it also endowed them with attributes akin to real estate. Article 48 stipulated that although personal property was traditionally subject to distraint, creditors could seize the slaves of their debtors only if they also seized the plantation on which they were working. Colonial administrators contended that this restriction was necessary because colonial land was worthless without slave labor needed to clear it, while some colonists wanted to treat slaves as a form of real estate because landed wealth was explicitly tied to social status in early modern France, so that slaves constituted the true wealth of colonial families. However others wished to view slaves as personal property to reduce risk to creditors. One can therefore discern within these disputes tensions between agrarian and mercantile ideals and practices as well as between metropolitan and colonial conceptions of the relationship between wealth and social status.
