Louis XIV (1638–1715), the Sun King, appears in the vault's Haiti research as the French monarch who promulgated the Code Noir in 1685 — the comprehensive legal framework that defined, organized, and governed slavery in the French Atlantic empire.
His significance for the vault is not biographical but structural: the Code Noir's architecture — its definition of enslaved people as movable property, its requirements for Catholic baptism, its regulation of punishment and manumission — became the...
TimelineAcross the historical record.
- 1793-08-29
North Province Emancipation 1793
The decree that finally abolished what Louis XIV's code had built.