Several artworks in Anticorps argue that not all bodies are subjected to violence and risks exposure equally. Some of the artists summon potential weapons and devise means of resistance or protection that chime with the genealogy of self-defence as shown by Elsa Dorlin in her book Self Defence. A Philosophy of Violence (2017; English ed. forthcoming). The excerpt presented here dwells on rulings and habits developed by the colonial system to keep supposedly violent social groups defenceless, while introducing a “corporal discipline” leading to a dispossession of the self.
Disarming Slaves and the Indigenous:
the Right to Kill Versus
“Bare-knuckled” Subjectivity
In 1685, article 15 of the French Code noir [Black Code] forbade “slaves from carrying any offensive weapon, or large stick,”1 otherwise they would be whipped. The Spanish Código negro of 1768 in Santo Domingo also prohibited Black people from “using any type of weapon on pain of fifty lashes of the whip;”2 the machete was authorised for agricultural labour but its total length could not be more than a half-cubit.3 The 1784 edition, also known as “Código Carolino,” renewed the ban but specified however that the machete had to be replaced by tools that were more “practical” and less “detrimental to the public and private peace and rest on the island,” and reserved their use to the quadroons, half-castes and “beyond.”4
This ban on carrying and possessing weapons betrays the colonists’ endless worry that attests to the effectiveness of the slaves’ practices of resistance. Anything that could give the slaves the opportunity to prepare and to train for revolt also had to be prohibited. In the 19th century, in the US pro-slavery context, Elijah Green, a former slave born in 1843 in Louisiana, reported that it was strictly forbidden for a Black person to be in possession of a pencil or a pen on pain of being sentenced for attempted murder and hanged.5 On the other hand, in most colonial and imperial contexts, the right to bear and use arms was systematically granted to colonists.
Under the French colonial State in Algeria, a decree dated 12 December 1851 prohibited the sale of arms to indigenous people. An order from 11 December 1872, following the Kabyle insurrection of 1871, gave on the other hand the permanent right to “French colonists of European descent” to buy, possess, bear and use arms when living in regions that were isolated or unprotected by garrisons6 : in this way, they “will continue, on their request, and wherever the need arises, to be authorised to possess, in their houses, the weapons and munitions of war deemed necessary by the territorial commander, to ensure their defence and that of their family and the security of their home”.7 In fact, the colonial State cannot function without a militia system capable of ensuring the occupation’s measly jobs.
The Code noir already granted the right to policing8 to the inhabitants of the colonies, specifying that any slave found outside their house without a “pass”9 (a detailed authorisation written in the owner’s hand) would be punished by whipping and branded with the fleur de lys. Any subject of the king who witnessed a gathering or an illicit meeting thus enjoyed the right to arrest the guilty parties “and to take them to gaol, even if they are not officers and there has not yet been any decree issued against them”10 (article 16). Despite these drastic measures, the colonial government was in permanent crisis: the criminalisation of the slaves’ acts and deeds required costly surveillance. The Seven Years’ War against the English having hardly finished, the French, back in Martinique, could not contain the slaves’ “criminality.” In a letter to governor Fénelon, the Comte d’Elva wrote: “I have received many complaints about Maroon Negroes who ravage houses, and about others who march armed, assemble and insult Whites, and who publicly sell in town all kinds of things without a permission slip signed by their masters.”11 The governor’s reply evokes the lack of means and men to carry out policing tasks, but not without promising a new general regulation—to be published the following month—imposing tougher penalties on slaves for the crime of gathering together and freely moving around.12
During the entire pro-slavery period, disarming slaves went arm in arm with a veritable disciplining of bodies to keep them defenceless, which necessitated redressing the slightest martial activity. This process found its philosophical principle in what constitutes the very essence of the servile condition: a slave is someone who does not enjoy the right and responsibility of self-preservation. Disarmament must be immediately understood as a security measure for the free population, but, more fundamentally, it institutes a watershed line between subjects who are their own masters and solely responsible for their own preservation, and slaves who do not belong to themselves and whose preservation depends entirely on their master’s good will. In this context, two views of self-preservation are in play: preservation insofar as it is to do with the preservation of one’s life and preservation as the capitalisation of one’s own value. The collision between these two understandings of self-preservation takes place at the very moment when beings are considered as things and the preservation of their life only depends on the person who owns them and on the market on which they are traded and which sets their price.
At the height of the slave revolts in Martinique, it was custom to execute the “Maroons” in front of their mothers and to force the latter to watch the torture inflicted upon their children.13 This practice was regarded as among the most “didactic” by the administrators, and among the most entertaining by the colonists who enjoyed such torment. It aimed, in fact, at making fugitive slaves understand that by trying to preserve their own life they were only “robbing their master of the price of their value”14 : colonial justice, thereby creating an unprecedented crime, wanted to teach slaves that the right to self-preservation neither belonged to themselves nor to those who had given birth to them, but only fell under their master’s interest, he being the only one able to make decisions about it. Slaves no longer have lives, they only have value.15 As Joseph Elzéar Morénas then wrote in his abolitionist plea: “the right to their own preservation belongs entirely to the master”—any attempt to preserve one’s own life is thus turned into a crime, any act of defence on the part of slaves is akin to an act of aggression towards masters.
In the same way that slaves were deprived of the natural right to self-preservation, they had no right to jurisdiction—a privilege of the colonist alone. Regarding the administration of justice, a royal order of 30 December 1712 forbade White people from interrogating their slaves under torture, for which the penalty was a fine of 500 livres; but Black people were judged in closed courts by a single magistrate, without a lawyer and without the possibility of calling a witness. They were, strictly speaking, defenceless.16 To this, one has to add the principle of impunity. Article 43 of the Code noir allows for “absolving masters who have killed slaves under their power”17—and, if the murder of a slave belonging to another master was punishable by the death penalty, in most cases the killer was acquitted. This was notably the case with the murder of a slave named Colas, aged 25 and pregnant, who was killed by gunshots by a planter, M. Ravenne-Desforges, while she was crossing his coffee plantation in Marie-Galante on 5 October 1821. In the first trial, the court rejected the application of article 43 on the pretext that the colonist was armed with the intention of going hunting and that “the gunshot fired by Master Ravenne can only be considered as the result of the instinctive impulse of his anger, with the design to mark the Negress with a couple of lead pellets so as to be able to recognise her, rather than that of killing her.”18 The punishment sentenced him to be banished for ten months and confiscated his gun; in the event of reoffending, it was provided for that he would definitively lose his right to bear arms in the said colony. A second judgement once again did not apply article 43 of the Code noir, on the basis of a letter from the king in 1744. Finally, while the Minister ordered a retrial of the case, Ravenne-Desforges’ defence consisted in judging his slave Cajou in his place—as the said slave was carrying his gun. Cajou was sentenced to ten years of forced labour, considering that he was still a minor. Customary in the colonies, this “guilty party substitution”19 was eventually rejected by the royal court of justice which nonetheless considered that there was no need to sentence Ravenne-Desforges. Thus, slaves represent a legal replica20 for their master—they are judged, sentenced, tortured on their behalf and constitute their best defence.
The colonial order established the systematic disarmament of slaves, natives and subalterns for the benefit of a White minority who enjoyed the permanent and absolute right to bear arms and to use them with impunity; the “old” rights to preservation and jurisdiction were retranslated into a set of special rules which granted colonists a right to policing and to justice that aligned with disarming certain individuals to render them per se “killable” and “sentenceable”—a privilege that was codified as a legitimate right to self-defence.
But this is not all. The colonial definition of the right to self-defence moreover included much “exceptional” casuistry21, which defined a minority as alone capable of asking for justice to be done. Isabelle Merle cites the decree of 23 December 1887 that fixed a list of special offences for the Indigenous people of New Caledonia, among which featured “bearing Kanak arms in the areas inhabited by Europeans, but also moving around outside an administratively defined perimeter, disobedience, entering cabarets or drinking establishments, and being naked on roads”. The list was continually added to, in 1888, in 1892, then in 1915, including the “refusal to pay head tax,”22 the “failure to appear at the Office of Indigenous Affairs,” refusing to provide the information requested or to collaborate with the authorities, “disrespectful acts,” or “holding public speeches with the aim of weakening the respect due to the French authority.”23 From the exponential creation of special crimes and offences emerged a racialist anthropological categorisation of criminality: from then on, every act, if carried out by a slave, or an Indigenous, colonised or Black person… became unlawful or criminal.24 Justice then proceeded against a type of individuals always presumed guilty25—i.e., whose only recognised agency fell within phantasmagorical aggression—to the benefit of a type of people always entitled to demand justice.
The history of systems of disarmament bears witness to the construction of social groups maintained in the position of being defenceless. They go hand in hand with the regulation of access to weapons and defence techniques that attempt to curb multiple forms of counter-conduct. If we have witnessed throughout Modernity a process of judicialisation of conflicts which has consisted in drastically framing social antagonisms and clashes “among peers,” inciting individuals to turn to justice and the law, this same process has also produced a space outside of citizenship. The exclusion of the right to be defended has implied the production of undefendable subjects because they were deemed to be “dangerous,” violent and always already guilty, even though everything was done to render them powerless to defend themselves.
This text is an excerpt translated from Se défendre. Une philosophie de la violence (Paris: Éditions Zones, 2017). Copyright Éditions Zones, 2017
Forthcoming from Verso Books: Elsa Dorlin, Self Defense: A philosophy of violence, translated by Kieran Aarons.
Elsa Dorlin teaches political and social philosophy at the University of Paris 8. Her main research focuses on the fabrication of modern sexism and racism, approached from the angles of history, philosophy and epistemology. Her publications include: Self Defense: A Philosophy of Violence (2017; English ed. forthcoming), Sexe, genre et sexualités. Introduction à la théorie féministe (2008) and La Matrice de la race. Généalogie sexuelle et coloniale de la Nation française (2006). She coedited Penser avec Donna Haraway (2012) with Éva Rodriguez.
