Slaveholder Indemnities as Economic Development: France, 1848-1852

France abolished slavery in 1848. Enslavers were indemnified – as they had been in 1825, when France extracted payment from postcolonial Haiti for the 1794 abolition. This time, however, colonial officials and ex-slaveholders justified indemnities less in terms of ostensible individual property rights than of notional economic development – of providing the new post-slavery, wage-labor economy with adequate resources to get off the ground. This change in the understanding of indemnities proceeded from the July Monarchy-era literature on the reorganization of the colonies as socialist associations or shareholder corporations. Yet such economic development was scarcely a neutrally technical matter. This indemnification formed a crucial step in the process whereby the post-emancipation, postrevolutionary aspiration for racial and class equality in the colonies was squelched in favor of a re-inscription of pre-emancipation hierarchies in the absence of anything that counted as slavery.