Terror, not force alone, secured slave obedience in the French colonies

Evidence

In 1802 the British abolitionist James Stephen would note that what had “secured in great measure the tranquility” of the French colonies “before their revolutions” was “the nameless and undefined idea of terror, connected in the mind of a negro slave, with the notion of resistance to a white man and a master.” — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 181

Categorization

• XREF: The idea that slave societies run on symbolic terror more than observable force echoes Orlando Patterson’s slavery-as-social-death framework and connects to the reader’s prior material on sacrifice stabilizing hierarchical societies.