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Boyer writes Vodou into the penal code and leaves it there

1826 · year only · Haitian

The 1800sSovereignty1 source
1826 · Haitianyear only

Boyer writes Vodou into the penal code and leaves it there

Three to six months in prison for making a wanga, enforced whenever a local official cared to.

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In 1826 Jean-Pierre Boyer, president of Haiti, moved against Vodou in law. The relevant section of the penal code sat under a heading on sorcery. It set three to six months in prison and a fine of fifty to a hundred and fifty gourdes for anyone who made wanga, caprelata, vaudoux or don pedre, or worked any other spell, and six months to two years plus a fine of three hundred to a thousand gourdes for a second offence. The next article reached fortune tellers, diviners, dream interpreters and card readers, with two to six months. Any dance or practice judged likely to maintain a spirit of fetishism and superstition among the population carried the same penalties. The measure worked only on paper. Whether the articles were applied depended entirely on how the local authorities felt about the religion, and Vodou societies remained part of national holidays. Presidents who signed such measures were often consulting houngans themselves.

Jean-Pierre Boyer Haiti
Where this comes from Simpson, G. E. (1945). The belief system of Haitian Vodun. p. 57.
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Meanwhile, and next door

1826 · Caribbeanyear only

Paris shuts the poison court down and the planters protest

The governor disbanded it while predicting the poisonings would climb again at once.

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The Cour Prevotale ended abruptly. Late in 1826 an order from the metropole suppressed it, and the reaction in Martinique was anger. The governor disbanded the court reluctantly while predicting that poisonings would climb again at once, and the slaveholders who had used it, and served on it, objected. Two years later, by a royal ordinance of September 1828, France applied the Napoleonic penal code of 1810 to its remaining Caribbean colonies, a code mentioning poison only as an instance of voluntary homicide and punishing divination and similar practices with a fine and a few days in jail. In 1831 the Martinique council drafted rules for applying the new law to enslaved people. The draft kept the old fear of societies formed to poison, and made the killing of an owner by any means a parricide, and for the first time in a century it treated sorcery and medicine as separate from poison.

MartiniqueParis
Meanwhile, and next door Read these right here. You keep your place. Peek ›1830France takes Algiers and pulls Algeria into the Atlantic system
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6 September 1826 · Diaspora

A Bowdoin graduate makes Haiti the subject of his commencement address

John Brown Russwurm speaks on the condition and prospects of Haiti, then founds the first black newspaper.

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Russwurm delivered his commencement address at Bowdoin College on the condition and prospects of Haiti, and the speech was carried in Maine and Boston papers within the week. The following year he and Samuel Cornish founded Freedom's Journal, which reached white as well as black readers in the northern and some southern states and in England, Canada and Haiti, and which they began partly to oppose the American Colonization Society. Its treatment of the revolution argued that few recorded events had produced more extraordinary effects, that the black character had burst upon the world in its original greatness, and that given liberty, independence and education the race would not be found wanting in minds capable of wielding the sword and swaying the rod of empire. David Walker's Appeal followed in 1828.

David WalkerJohn Brown RusswurmSamuel Cornish BrunswickNew York
Meanwhile, and next door Read these right here. You keep your place. Peek ›1830France takes Algiers and pulls Algeria into the Atlantic system
Where this comes from Source not recorded for this entry.
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1830 · Africanyear only

France takes Algiers and pulls Algeria into the Atlantic system

Ottoman rule ended and a different kind of empire began, one built on capital and race.

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Algeria was conquered by the Ottomans shortly after the Spanish reconquest of Granada in 1492, and Ottoman rule lasted until about 1830, when the country fell into French hands. The change was larger than a change of rulers. Under the French, Algeria entered the imperial domain of western capitalism, which the Ottoman sultanate had never belonged to, and it was governed by the same machinery of racial classification and economic extraction that had been assembled in the Americas. Settlers took the land. The people already there became a category to be administered. Haiti had been independent for twenty six years when this happened, and the French army that crossed to Algiers belonged to the state that was at that moment collecting the indemnity it had imposed on Haiti in 1825. The war that ended French rule in Algeria ran from 1954 to 1962.

AlgeriaAlgiersFrance
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