France’s scale in the Atlantic slave trade places it firmly among the nations with significant historical responsibility for its consequences. Approximately 1.4 million enslaved Africans were transported on French ships, making France the third-largest participant after Portugal and Britain.
French Caribbean colonies, particularly Saint-Domingue (Haiti), Martinique, and Guadeloupe, were intensive plantation economies that consumed enslaved labour at rates requiring constant resupply. Saint-Domingue alone, at the height of its plantation economy, was producing roughly half of Europe’s sugar and coffee on the labour of approximately half a million enslaved people. The conditions on these plantations were notoriously brutal even by the standards of the era.
France abolished the slave trade in 1794 during the Revolution but restored both the trade and slavery itself in 1802 under Napoleon. Final abolition did not come until 1848, forty years after Britain. French colonial slavery continued in some territories until that date.
