1685-00-00: (France Enacts the Code Noir, the Legal Framework That Regulated Slavery in French Colonies, Defining Enslaved People as Movable Property While T…

1685-00-00: (France Enacts the Code Noir, the Legal Framework That Regulated Slavery in French Colonies, Defining Enslaved People as Movable Property While Theoretically Granting Them Minimal Protections That Were Never Enforced): In 1685, France enacted the Code Noir, the comprehensive legal code that regulated the institution of slavery in all French colonies. The Code defined enslaved people as movable property, subject to purchase, sale, and inheritance like livestock. It required slaveholders to baptize their slaves as Catholics and theoretically prohibited certain forms of torture, but these protections were never enforced in practice. In Saint-Domingue, the Code Noir provided the legal architecture for the most brutal slave system in the Americas, where the average life expectancy of an enslaved person after arrival was seven years and where slaveholders routinely used torture, mutilation, and murder as instruments of labor discipline. The Code Noir was the law that the Revolution of 1791 destroyed, and its legacy, the legal reduction of human beings to property, was the condition that made Haiti’s declaration of independence not merely a political act but a philosophical one.