Description
Conference on slavery in the light of Breton judicial archives. Annick Le Douguet
The ports of western Brittany were not involved in the slave trade on the scale of Nantes or Bordeaux?
but they did play their part, particularly Lorient.
The conference will provide an opportunity to take stock of the slave trade from our ports, before looking at the presence of black slaves or freedmen who came to mainland France to serve their masters, colonists, naval officers or merchants, a presence that was authorised from 1716, but very strictly controlled, before being banned in 1776.
Abolitionist voices, voices of resistance to the slave trade and slavery, were rare in eighteenth-century France.
century. But two of them came from Brittany, that of the slave abandoned in Brest, Jean Mor, a pathetic victim crushed by the legal machine, and that of the Quimper judge Théophile-Marie Laennec, who spoke out against the barbarity of human trafficking.
What happened in the 19th century, when the slave trade, which became illegal after its abolition, was considered a crime?
a crime?
