Today we commemorate the Abolishment of Slavery in Martinique. May 22, 1848. So recent! https://twitter.com/Tanlistwa/status/1263765300811649024

On March 25th, 1848, a boat arrives at the coastal town of St Pierre, cultural capital of Martinique, nicknamed "The Paris of the Caribbean" until its annihilation by a volcano.
Messengers hurry to the city with a stunning message: a Revolution has happened on the continent.

King Louis Phillippe has abdicated. The Republic is born. The news travels fast to the capital, Fort Royal. It's a big deal: the new French government is made of Republicans and radical abolitionists.

It brings anguish to the white plantation owners, and hope to enslaved people.

It is a Sunday, church day. On the way out, one subject of discussion: on March 26, slavery will be abolished. But the government is asking to residents to wait until further notice: matters will be decided "soon".

March 28: still waiting. The Free Men of Color, who by virtue of being born from white men and enslaved black women, could be granted freedom by their fathers, congregate and decide on 7 demands.

1st, the capital must be renamed. No more Roi, no more Fort Royal!

Fort Royal must be renamed Fort de France. Without waiting for the governor, they petition the city council. Fort de France is still named that way nowadays, except in Creole, where it is named Foyal (a contraction of Fort Royal).

Among other demands: cessation of censorship, freedom of assembly, and total and complete adherence to the Republican ideals.

Enslaved people have reservations. 50 years earlier, they had been promised freedom; but Napoleon brought slavery back.

(Napoleon's wife, France's Emperess Josephine and Queen of Italy, was by the way born and raised in Martinique. Her grandson is Napoleon III.
As you can imagine she is not well liked in Martinique, and a 1859 statue of her was decapitated in 1991 and stayed that way.)

10 days pass, and enslaved people are still not free. They await calmly, but ask what is taking so long.

3 weeks pass. A boat arrives, again. People mass on the port. White colons pounce on the postmen. Black people demand to know what are the latest news.

The news is that a commission for the Freedom of Slaves has been formed on the continent; among them, not one ally for the Whites of Martinique: free people of color, revolutionaries, and one Victor Schoelcher.

(Schoelcher is famous for his tireless fight against slavery;

one of the biggest city in Martinique took his name to honor his legacy while he was still alive; after his death he was buried in the French Pantheon, the highest posthumous honor for a civilian, at the same time as the first black person, Felix Eboue, WWII resistant)

April 10th. Rumor has it that there will be an election; and that freed black people (well, men only of course) would become *citizens*. That would be huge, going from being considered as furniture before the law, to being a voting member of the broad society (... except women).

Don't forget, that you a white person, would have been encouraged to torture me, a black person; to deform my skull, to cut my hands, to order men of your choosing to rape me, so that you can sell or kill my infant children year after year.

Just as all of these grandiose promises are made, everyday in the newspaper continue to be published lists of people imprisoned for "maronnage": fleeing from sugar plantations and seeking freedom in the mountains. Pierre, 53; Anna, 25.

The enslaved population grows suspicious.

How to pacify them? Some white colons decide to officially marry the black women they have had children with; they pressure their peers to do as well. The message, unlike i.e. the US, is that black and white can mix "peacefully" (but only if it's a white man taking a black woman)

Btw, I'm just translating what the historian in the first link is saying. But don't forget, to write history, you have to be able to write; therefore we don't know what the enslaved population thought. We only have the writings of the whites and the free men of color.

April 16.
Tensions are growing. A Mrs Suzanne is attacked at the market, after insulting enslaved and free black people at the end of the Sunday Mass (some things just don't change!). She is rescued by the police, but black people are emboldened.

May 1st.
Still no Abolishment from the continent.
More and more enslaved people are being formally freed by the Free Men of Color, "in the name of Makhau", a man who earlier had temporarily rendered whipping illegal.

Some colons flee their sugar cane plantations.

That's the plantation house (French: habitation) behind my house.
When I walked 15 min through the banana fields, on the other side of the big road I could see the big gardens of this habitation, now a museum and rum distillery.

The power dynamics in those banana fields behind my house mirror those of 1800. They still belong to a white descendant of the colons, who employs in murky conditions black immigrants from poorer islands.

May 8.
Still nothing from the continent.
Enslaved people have stopped going to the plantations. They have stopped cleaning the streets. They refuse to work for free; they want to be paid for the work imposed on them.
Colons flee to FdF, garrison city, and block the roads.

May 22.

The enslaved population has had enough. Freedom was promised 2 MONTHS ago. The colons are inferior in number and they are afraid. The air is sizzling.

The event that makes the island explode is as STUPID as the stuff you see nowadays.

Colons had recently forbidden that drums be played; no singing, no drumming, things that were usually used to keep people energized and synchronized while working.

2 weeks prior, an enslaved man named Romain was cleaning cassava roots with other people, and there was a drum...

So one of the colons decided he'd have that man arrested, in the middle of a social uprising, for being near a drum 2 weeks before that while *working for the colons*.

That did not go well.

Romain is briefly imprisoned, then freed after enslaved people come on foot from all cities around, demanding his freedom.

He's freed, big party from 11am to 3pm, then everyone decides to go home. But then the mayor of the closest city decides he'd rather have everyone massacred

Because what else are you going to do when thousands of people decide to disperse peacefully?

People are massacred. That's it. The enslaved people revolt. They take St Pierre, and demand that slavery be abolished right there and then, or they burn the cultural capital down.

The next day, the Abolishment of Slavery is officially proclaimed. But we celebrate May 22, the day when enslaved people took their freedom, pushed by senseless cruelty and a massacre, not waiting for it to be bestowed on them.

Unlike in neighboring islands, people decide to show mercy on the white colons rather than cutting their heads off. Those received money from the government to "compensate" the loss of slaves.
Their descendants still own my island and its economy.