Four hundred suspects in the poison affair at the court of Louis XIV

Between 1677 and 1682 an investigation at the court of Louis XIV drew in close to four hundred suspects. At its centre was a circle of noblewomen who commissioned love magic from a sorceress in Paris. Investigators then turned up something else. The same sorceress was said to have sold deadly poisons made from toads to heirs impatient for their inheritances, and to have had charms consecrated by rogue priests. The French script of the moment held that women used potions to make men love them, an inversion of order that frightened the powerful. The affair produced a royal edict in 1682 that criminalised pretended magic, punished superstitious use of sacred objects and prayers, and tightened the sale of arsenic and mercury sublimate. Its effect in France was to cut accusations of sorcery by renaming the accused as false sorcerers or poisoners. Forty two years later that edict was extended to the French islands of the Caribbean.

By the middle of the seventeenth century there were sizeable black Catholic communities in Brazil, Portugal, Angola and the Kongo, some of them organised into their own lay brotherhoods for prayer and mutual aid. A leader of one in Lisbon, Lourenco da Silva, used the title procurator general for a congregation of blacks and mulattos named after Our Lady of the Rosary, and claimed descent from the royal houses of Kongo and Angola. He was probably born in Brazil. In 1684 he got himself to Rome and protested to the Pope against the perpetual enslavement of black Christians and the cruelties inflicted on them. His case joined the Capuchin protests, convinced Propaganda Fide, and produced a broad condemnation of the slave trade from the Holy Office in 1686. It was blocked by the governments of Portugal and Spain and had no effect. The papacy was in a weak position to press it, since popes were still using purchased slaves in their galleys.

Bertrand d'Ogeron reached Tortuga in February 1665 and set about converting hunters and pirates into settled colonists. He pushed cocoa as a crop that paid, and lent money at low interest out of his own pocket to men starting plantations. He also arranged the shipment of about one hundred women from French jails, recorded as orphans, to be married to the settlers. The count of planters rose from 400 to 1,500 by 1669. In June 1670 the colonists revolted briefly over the prices charged by the chartered company, and it passed. When d'Ogeron died on 31 January 1676 the economy of the French west had shifted from raiding to farming, and the civil and religious institutions of a permanent colony were in place. Read the measures together and the shape is plain. Credit for the planters, a crop that sells, and women delivered like stock. The workforce for these fields was already being bought on the African coast.

The census of Martinique taken in April 1683 recorded 8,967 enslaved people, already 66 per cent of the island's population, most of them probably working its 122 sugar plantations. By the general census of 1726 the number of sugar plantations had nearly quadrupled and the enslaved population stood at 40,403, or 77 per cent, with a further 1,304 free people of African descent. Together they outnumbered white residents four to one. The arrivals behind those figures rose steeply. Landings climbed from 1,750 Africans across the 1680s to 2,084 in the decade after, then to 5,556, then to 12,350, and reached 20,393 during the 1720s, the second highest decade in the colony's history. Sixty per cent of the people landed between 1680 and 1730 had embarked in the Bight of Benin and twenty per cent in West Central Africa. Martinique's first poison law and its first wave of accusations belong to exactly these decades.