The Code Noir makes Catholicism the only lawful worship in the islands

Drawn up in France at Colbert's instance and issued by Louis XIV in 1685, the Black Code set out how the official justification for slavery was to be handled. Article two required that every slave in the islands be baptised and instructed in the Catholic, apostolic and Roman religion. Article three forbade the public practice of any other. Gatherings of enslaved people, by day or by night, were outlawed, which was aimed squarely at African rites. The code regulated work, rest and family, and classed human beings as movable property with no rights at all. Of its sixty articles not one calls for any easing of the treatment slaves received. Its clauses on food, rest and religion are all designed to discourage flight and to leave the owner in complete command. An owner could in theory be punished for cruelty, but slaves could not be called as witnesses in any court, civil or criminal, which made the theory useless.

Isabel Pacheco, a widow of mixed African descent taken at Veracruz, was being held at Petit-Goave with her two children, aged twelve and fourteen, in November 1684. Earlier that year a young black woman named Maria, who had been Pacheco's slave in the Mexican port, was picked up during a Spanish incursion and taken to Azua and then to the city of Santo Domingo, where she reported her owner's situation to the president. Since 1680 anyone who escaped a French master on the island was granted refuge and freedom on the Spanish side, and people in the French settlements knew it. Maria's case was awkward, because under Spanish law Pacheco still owned her, and she was ordered to stay in Santo Domingo until her owner's position was settled. In the same month the president reported that the French settlements were full of black people from the sack of Veracruz.

Two Capuchins of the Flanders province, Celestin de Bruxelles and Benedict de Hulst, embarked for Whydah late in 1681. Celestin wrote home in November 1682 that the king had given him a house beside the palace, received him often in private, and handed over his elder sons to be taught. Accounts gathered in Whydah a generation later go further. A number of local people were instructed, and some could still recite parts of the scriptures decades afterwards. The king himself and several of his chiefs agreed to be baptised and, as a condition, to give up all but one wife. The night before the ceremony the mission chapel burned down. One version has the king reading the fire as punishment from the gods he was about to abandon. Another has him seeing human hands behind it and fearing a rising that would cost him his throne. He dropped the plan and his people followed him. Benedict died inland in November 1683 and Celestin died in Europe in 1684.

A census of Suriname in 1684 counted 4,137 enslaved Africans and creoles of African descent, 81 per cent of the population, along with 144 enslaved Indians. At the height of the English colony in 1663 the comparable proportion had been 55 per cent. The census of 1701 recorded 8,500 enslaved people and roughly a thousand maroons against 700 Europeans. Large sugar estates began pushing out the smaller ones in the middle of the 1680s, the enslaved population doubled again across the 1690s, and coffee added its own demand in the 1720s. By 1752 there were 37,835 enslaved people and they made up 95 per cent of everyone in the colony. The earliest surviving poison trial in the Suriname court records dates from 1731, and from 1735 to 1739 poison accounted for a tenth of all trials. The arithmetic of the plantation and the arithmetic of the poison docket moved together.