France decrees abolition throughout its colonies and possessions

Caroline, identified as 31 in the notice, left her enslaver’s home on 16 March 1842. The report does not specify where she went or what happened next; it documents a decision to leave the immediate...

The colonial notice records Coralie leaving Cayenne on 19 March 1842. As with other marronnage advertisements, the source’s purpose was administrative identification; reading it against that grain...

François and Gervais left the Mondésir habitation at Macouria together on 14 November 1842. The notice describes one as a field worker and the other as a fisher, showing enslaved labor’s varied...

Achille, assigned to the colonial domain’s river crossing at Kourou, left on 4 June 1844 and was reported to have returned on his own on 22 July. The record does not explain his decision to return;...

On 4 March 1848, the provisional government created a commission to prepare abolition. This political opening followed the February Revolution and decades of resistance by enslaved people,...

On 10 June 1848, Commissioner-General André-Aimé Pariset proclaimed the abolition decree in French Guiana. The proclamation made the decree public in the colony; it did not mean emancipation took...

On 10 August 1848, the April abolition decree took legal effect in French Guiana, freeing people still enslaved under colonial law. About 12,943 people were recorded as enslaved in the colony in 1847....

On 10 August 1848, abolition took legal effect in French Guiana. In the following years, many formerly enslaved people left plantations. Historical research records some establishing small...

Article 6 of the Constitution of the Second Republic states that slavery cannot exist on any French territory. The constitutional guarantee followed emancipation in French Guiana and made abolition...

A law provides indemnities to colonial owners after abolition. The state compensated former enslavers for the loss of people it had treated as property; formerly enslaved people received no equivalent...