Free-colored planters claimed the Code Noir promised them citizenship rights

Evidence

Whatearthlypowercangiveitselftherightto create unjust laws, when the Eternal itself has abstained from doing so?” So asked Julien Raimond in a 1791 pamphlet tracing the “origin and progress” of prejudice against free people of color in Saint-Domingue. In unveiling this history, Raimond hoped to end it. Free people of color, many of them wealthy planters, others serving in colonial military or police units, had proven their value and loyalty to the French regime, he argued. And yet they were being prevented by whites from participating in the political assemblies of the colony. This act of racial prejudice went against everything the French Revolution stood for. Even Louis XIV’s 1685 Code Noir had recognized that once they were no longer slaves, free people of color had the “the right to citizenship.” “Will the National Assembly be less just than a despot?” — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 213

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes that the 1685 Code Noir recognized citizenship for freed people of color, a key legal baseline the chapter’s argument turns on
• QUESTION: Worth verifying how the Code Noir’s citizenship clause was interpreted and then stripped away in later colonial practice before the revolution