From Civil Death to Genocide in Napoleonic Europe: The Erasure of “Noirs, Mulâtres et Autre Gens de Couleur”

Scholars of European History are increasingly emphasizing that multiethnic diversity was the norm across most of metropolitan Europe prior to that advent of the nation-state in the Napoleonic Era. In this paper I ask why was the population of color gone from Europe by 1814 and what was its impact in the new Latin American nations, particularly in Haiti?! While scholars of the Haitian Revolution have given some attention to the role of people of color in metropolitan Europe in the 1790s, there has been little research on what happened to these populations, not only as the LeClerc Expedition set sail for the “Pearl of the Antilles,” but in the aftermath of the economically devastating loss of what was the engine of French global trade.! Already from 1799 an ever increasing barrage of anti-black, mulatto and gens de couleur legislations put these populations to mort civil (civil death) in France and occupied Europe. This was soon followed with numerous deportation orders, which he also signed. Deportation was in effect civil death, which opened the door for mass physical death. This genocidal operation was run out of the Interior Ministry. Already by 1800 people of African and Eastern Mediterranean descent were put under the surveillance of special police and lists were compiled of their whereabouts. They were rounded-up by the militarized Gendarmerie and placed in depots on small islands off the French coast. In Latin America, once pardos realized that Napoleon was the bearer of unfreedom, inequality and exclusion, it contributed to independence movements in the Spanish colonial world. However, this history also explains why gens de couleur who had long viewed themselves as distinct from noirs, shifted their politics and banded together in the Haitian Revolution.!