Fugitives

Abstract

Historically, French Guiana was an anomaly in the French Americas, neither a settler colony nor an economically successful slave-based plantation colony like its wealthy Antillean counterparts. Sporadically governed, underpopulated, and generally neglected by the metropole, it was considered a backwater of the French empire. However, by the first decades of the nineteenth century, the punishment of fugitive slaves had become fundamental to how the colony of French Guiana conceptualized itself. The struggle between owner and state about who had the right to punish, and by what means, caused ferocious repercussions over who could claim sovereignty over slaves and their potential labor. The issue of flight came to signify the legal and political battle between settlers and the state. Indeed, the desire of the French state to control the terrain of French Guiana through the recapture—and punishment—of the enslaved echoes what would occur in the latter half of the nineteenth century as French Guiana became the world’s most notorious penal colony. This paper will explore these issues in nineteenth-century French Guiana through the fugitive figure of the enslaved and subsequently that of the runaway convict.