“ Le Fraudulent ” How French Colonizers Faked Slave Records and Erased Indigenous Slavery

When the Archive Lies

Most people assume that archives and official records are neutral, objective, and true. But in colonial slavery, the paper trail was often as deceptive as the trade itself. French colonizers and their allies forged, redacted, or outright fabricated documents to hide the scale of human trafficking. At the same time, they obscured the enslavement of Indigenous peoples by recording them as “African,” “mulatto,” or erasing their bondage altogether. The result is a double silence: African voyages disguised and Indigenous captivity erased.

This isn’t just an academic footnote. It has consequences today, as descendants struggle to prove heritage, reclaim memory, and confront governments with evidence deliberately distorted centuries ago.

Section I: French Slave Ships and the Art of Deception

French archives reveal a disturbing pattern: when abolition laws threatened profit, ship captains and merchants responded not by quitting the trade, but by faking the paperwork.

• The Jeune Louis (1825): A French brig that trafficked over 300 captives from West Africa to Cuba, despite abolition. Surviving unexpurgated papers (logbooks, insurance contracts, letters) show a dual record system: sanitized manifests for authorities, and private books detailing human cargo. Coded documents referred to captives as “cattle” or omitted them entirely.

• The Marcelin (1830s): Used Haiti’s legal commerce as cover for clandestine slaving. Manifests listed sugar and coffee, but provisioning records revealed food for far more people than declared.

• Bourbon Island (Réunion): Captains renamed ships, forged bills of health, or described enslaved people as “livestock” to avoid scrutiny. Entire voyages vanish from customs registers, even as population counts mysteriously rise.

These were not mistakes; they were strategies. French colonizers built a system where the absence of evidence was itself evidence of concealment.

Section II: Erasing the “Other Slavery” — Indigenous Captivity Disguised as African

Just as African voyages were hidden, Indigenous enslavement was erased in plain sight.

• Legal Loopholes: French, Spanish, and English colonial laws banned Indian slavery earlier than African importation. But instead of stopping, colonists simply changed the labels.

• French Louisiana: Parish records and bills of sale list Natchez and Choctaw captives as “negro” or “mulatto.” By the mid-1700s, “Indian slaves” virtually disappeared from the record not because they were free, but because they had been recategorized.

• Spanish Florida and the Gulf Coast: Apalachee and Timucua captives were sold into Havana markets as “bozales” (new Africans), erasing their Indigenous origins.

• Caribbean Colonies: French censuses often grouped “Indiens esclaves” under “Noirs,” eliminating Indigenous categories altogether.

Historian Andrés Reséndez calls this the “Other Slavery”  , an enslavement system hidden in racial renaming. Christina Snyder adds that captivity was central to Native societies’ encounters with Europeans, but colonial archives warped those realities into a “Black/white” binary.

Section III: Shared Tactics of Disappearance

Whether African or Indigenous, the methods of archival distortion were strikingly similar:

Method	African Slave Trade	Indigenous Enslavement
False manifests / euphemisms	“cattle,” “vegetables,” or blank cargo lines in ship logs	Indians reclassified as “negro,” “mulatto,” or “mestizo”
Dual record keeping	Private logbooks vs sanitized official copies	Parish vs civil records with racial mismatches
Legal camouflage	Bills of health, false flags, insurance tricks	Recorded as “servants” or “apprentices” instead of enslaved
Archival silence	Entire voyages vanish from customs records	Indigenous slaves vanish from censuses after bans

Both strategies worked to launder human beings into legal categories, protecting profits while obliterating Indigenous and African identities.

Section IV: Consequences for Descendants

Today, these falsifications mean:

• For African-descended peoples: The true scope of French trafficking is undercounted; ship records are riddled with forgeries and gaps.

• For Indigenous-descended peoples: Ancestors were erased from Indian identity on paper, making lineage appear “Black” or “mulatto,” complicating efforts to reclaim Indigenous citizenship and rights.

The archive doesn’t just forget; it was designed to misremember on purpose.

Section V: Reclaiming Truth from a Broken Archive

To confront this, historians and communities rely on:

• Triangulation: Comparing censuses, oral histories, and private letters against official ledgers.

• Databases: Projects like Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database identify missing voyages.

• Critical Reading: Seeing absence, euphemism, or sudden reclassification as signs of violence, not neutrality.

As Joseph La Hausse de Lalouvière writes, the Jeune Louis papers prove that “archival silence is not natural; it was manufactured.”

 Breaking the Paper Chains

The French colonial archive is filled with lies ships that “carried no cargo,” captives turned into “cattle,” Indigenous children erased into “mulattos.” These fictions weren’t sloppy record-keeping; they were deliberate acts of violence. Paper became a weapon: forging legal cover for illegal trade, and erasing entire peoples from history.

To dismantle those paper chains, we must read archives not just for what they say, but for what they hide. For African and Indigenous descendants, truth requires exposing the lies embedded in ink, and restoring names, identities, and histories deliberately erased.

Key Sources for Readers

• Joseph La Hausse de Lalouvière, A Business Archive of the French Illegal Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century, Past & Present (2021).

• Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Harvard Univ. Press, 2010).

• Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016).

• Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana (LSU Press, 1992).

• Hubert Gerbeau, L’océan indien n’est pas l’Atlantique. La traite illégale à Bourbon au XIXe siècle.

Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.

French clandestine slave trade records, Approximately 1822-1828 https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:%2F13030%2Ftf6z09n8mz

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