The regulation of 1777 turns pity into a reason to keep slavery

The regulation of 1777 described the Africans held in the French islands as beings degraded by nature and debased by their condition, born in the bosom of ignorance and barbarism, who had lived without worship, without laws and without morals, abandoned to the corruption of a brutish nature, simple and coarse men. This was the enlightened metropolitan opinion of the day, the anthropology circulating through Buffon, Voltaire, Diderot and the Encyclopedists. In it the Africans formed a race in degeneration whom only slow education could bring to a civilised state. The practical consequence favoured the master. Since the slave deserved his condition, brutality toward him was now improper and pity was the correct attitude, and slavery acquired a fresh justification as a school. The same reasoning surfaces later in Haitian arguments that Vodou and the Creole language are backward and are the cause of the country's poverty.

An enslaved woman named Quamina died in 1775 on a Suriname plantation after weeks of pain in her belly. Everyone on the estate went together to the overseer, H. C. Dorfeld, accused Quacoe of poisoning her and asked that he be put in irons. Quacoe was the head carpenter and, judging from the letter Dorfeld sent the court, a healer too; the others believed he could have cured Quamina and had refused. At the funeral in the slave quarters the crowd ran behind the coffin and flung it against Quacoe's door. They searched his house for evidence and found none. They washed the body and gave him the water to drink, on the understanding that a guilty man would die of it, and he drank it willingly. Later four men beat him, joined by several young women with sticks, and he reached the main house covered in blood. The court punished the four and let Quacoe go.

Girard reconstructs Louverture's life before 1791 from the awkward parts. He was a coachman on the Breda plantation, spared field labour, given some education by his master though he remained partly illiterate and wrote in a mixture of French and Creole. In 1776, years before any general emancipation, his master freed him voluntarily. He then rented a few acres together with the thirteen enslaved people who came with the land and set up as a planter. Girard observes that he spent the rest of his life reminding other black people that he had been born in slavery and not that he had also been a free man living off slave labour. He adds a detail that fits the pattern, that when the revolt broke out in 1791 Louverture's first act was to take his former master to safety, and only then did he join the rebellion, as a veterinarian.

When the French government drew its colonial slave law together in 1685, it also stated that Africans who reached France as slaves could become free under French law and custom and could not be forced back to the West Indies. Owners found ways around it. A decree of 1716 let planters register enslaved people as having been brought over for education, which blocked their freedom claims. Read alongside the remnants of serfdom, that reasoning allowed four thousand enslaved people to be kept in France in 1738. Later, labour shortage in the colonies moved the government to order them shipped back, even though they returned carrying a spirit of independence. In 1777 a royal decree closed France to black and mixed race people, free and enslaved alike, allowing a West Indian owner only one personal servant while travelling. The stated reason was the well-being of the colonies. The following year a decree forbade black and white marriages in France.