France formally restored slavery and the slave trade in 1802

Evidence

The disarmament alarmed many in Saint-Domingue, and news arriving in the colony from across the Atlantic and from other parts of the Caribbean soon confirmed their fears about Leclerc’s ultimate mission. In May 1802 Bonaparte signed a decree that publicly declared what had been decided the year before: in colonies such as Martinique that had been returned to France by the Treaty of Amiens, slavery would be “maintained in conformity with the laws and regulations anterior to 1789.” The transatlantic slave trade would once again be open to French ships. An explanation attached to the law made clear that the proslavery planters of Paris had succeeded in winning over Bonaparte. “We know how the illusions of liberty and equality were propagated in these far-off countries, where the remarkable difference between men who are civilized and those who are not, and the difference in climates, colors, and habits, and, most important, the security of European families, inevitably require great differences in the civil and political state of people.” “Those innovations so ardently desired by zealots”—that is, emancipation—had had “disastrous effects”; “in searching to indiscriminately make all the men of the colonies equal in their rights,” they had “only made them all equally miserable.” The application of “philanthropy” had “produced in our colonies the effect of the siren’s song: with them came miseries of all kinds, despair, and death.” — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 1003

Categorization

• XREF: This is the decisive reversal document — the proslavery planters of Paris winning Bonaparte links to the reader’s memory of the 1794 emancipation and how its ideals were traded away.
• ADDENDUM: The framing of “philanthropy” producing “the effect of the siren’s song” parallels the rhetoric-of-innocence-through-restraint the immodesty article tracks across cultures.