ABSTRACT
This chapter is a case study of the legal proceedings resulting from the capture of the French slaver Le Succès in the early 1820s. These cases are particularly illuminating because they occurred in the period following the Napoleonic Wars, when the French government had bowed to British pressure to ban the transoceanic slave trade and when they had also ceded the colony of Mauritius to Britain. Because this slaving ship was twice captured for smuggling slaves, the two successive trials enable a comparative analysis of how French and British justice addressed the slave trade in the early nineteenth century. But because confiscated correspondence shows that many of the slaves purchased in Zanzibar were sold to Ile Bourbon’s elites, including relatives of the island’s judges and administrators, this chapter also illustrates the complex ways in which local systems of power and the economic interests of local elites often prevailed, thus undermining the official French commitment to banning the slave trade.
