Code Noir (1685)

The Code Noir, issued by Louis XIV in March 1685, was the comprehensive legal framework regulating slavery in French colonies, including Saint-Domingue. Its sixty articles simultaneously baptized the institution of slavery in Catholic doctrine, codified the absolute power of masters over enslaved people, specified punishments (branding, mutilation, death) for resistance, and set minimal obligations of masters. It required the expulsion of Jews from French colonies and mandated the conversion of enslaved people to Catholicism. Scholars have analyzed the Code as a legal architecture that made Saint-Domingue's plantation economy possible while also creating the legal category of 'slave' whose very definition would be contested in 1791.