Forum. At the time the statues of the merchants of slaves fall to Bristolit is difficult not to feel the shivers of emotion before a justice by a delay of almost three hundred years. How is it that we have been able to live in the shadow of these monuments to the horror of slavery among us without acting, without popular reaction for so many centuries ?
In the aftermath, for the same reasons, some are now calling for the dismantling of the statues of the great minister of Louis XIV, Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683). Colbert, a synonym of the Great Century of science, art, and scholarship, master police officer and spy, father of the French navy and the ministry of foreign affairs, creator of Versailles, enemy of a noble freedom, the founder of the Companies of Senegal, of the east Indies and of the North, and yes, the man who has made the expansion of the colonial system in French and its machinery, deadly, violent : slavery.
How to do with this giant of French history, so clearly, responsible for the transatlantic market for the trafficking of men ? Colbert follows the colonial policy and slavery begun by Henri IV and cardinal Richelieu. In 1626, Richelieu creates the Company of Saint-Christophe and the adjacent islands.
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It is the rival of Colbert, Nicolas Fouquet, who founded in 1660, in Martinique, the plantation of Trois-Rivières (always a big producer of rum under the aegis of Campari, and with a luxury hotel !). Coming to power in 1661, Colbert has created neither the treaty the French, nor the plantations. He wants to make France a country of trade, rich manufactures, and gold to compete with the Dutch and the English, who have an advantage over the French.
In a classical tradition of roman and machiavélienne, revived by Jean Bodin (1529-1596), in its Six Books of the Republic (1576), the survival of the State and the expansion of its wealth through colonies. And in the roman law, slavery is legal. The time of Colbert, the brutality is internal to the feudal society. Slaves, like peasants and convicts, are, in the cosmology of catholic and aristotelian time, all human beings, with restricted rights.
Colbert is a man hard and even cruel. But neither his cruelty nor his attention will be brought to the slaves. The idea of the colonies is to take the wealth of the country competitors and to enrich France, its cities and especially its industry.
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