In the late 18th century, Saint-Domingue was France’s richest Atlantic plantation colony, producing sugar and coffee through a system of brutal forced labor. Although France’s Code Noir theoretically regulated the treatment of enslaved people, including prohibitions on torture and murder, enforcement was weak in the colonies, where planters routinely resorted to extreme violence to maintain control.
In 1784, due to widespread abuses by slaveholders, the French crown tightened some protections under the Code Noir, formally granting enslaved Africans the right to petition courts for mistreatment by masters. Yet colonial courts remained deeply biased in favor of planter interests.
It was against this fraught legal background that the incident involving Nicolas Le Jeune unfolded in 1788.
The Le Jeune Case
Nicolas Le Jeune was a French coffee plantation owner in Plaisance, in the northern district of Le Cap (now Cap-Haïtien). In early 1788, enslaved people on his estate accused him of torturing and killing several of their fellow captives.
According to surviving records, four enslaved Africans were put to death by Le Jeune after he accused them, without credible evidence, of participating in a poisoning plot against him.
Two enslaved women, Zabeth and Marie-Rose, were also found chained and severely tortured at the plantation. They had been burned and mutilated during interrogation and later died from their wounds.
The accused women were never found with poison, and no evidence of such a plot was uncovered.
Colonial investigators who came to the plantation documented the horrific treatment. The women’s legs were charred from burns; they were in chains and visibly dying when authorities arrived.
In March 1788, fourteen enslaved people from Le Jeune’s plantation took the extraordinary step of traveling to the colonial court in Le Cap to formally file a complaint against their master, despite Le Jeune’s threats to kill anyone who attempted to denounce him. Their action was remarkable, as enslaved people had almost no legal standing, and colonial courts typically protected planters from any prosecution.
The slaves’ petition detailed Le Jeune’s acts of torture and murder. Colonial authorities formed a commission to investigate, and the preliminary findings confirmed the credible testimony about Le Jeune’s brutality.
The governor of the colony quickly ordered the arrest of Nicolas Le Jeune, recognizing the severity of his crimes. But Le Jeune fled before he could be taken into custody, leaving the case to unfold without him. Despite overwhelming evidence and the testimony of the enslaved petitioners, a local court acquitted Le Jeune, influenced by planters’ fear that punishing one of their own would destabilize the racial order and undermine slavery itself.
When prosecutors appealed to a superior court in Port-au-Prince, the prosecutor simply disappeared on the day of the hearing, widely interpreted as a capitulation to planter power, and Le Jeune was again acquitted.
The timing of the case is critical. The Haitian Revolution began in 1791, just three years after the Le Jeune trial. Historians have long argued that cases like this helped convince enslaved people that legal reform was meaningless. Even when the law existed on paper, it could not touch those who owned slaves. The Le Jeune affair demonstrated that brutality was not a deviation from the system but an accepted feature of it, protected by colonial justice.
The revolution that followed brought a decisive outcome. Slavery was permanently abolished, French colonial rule was destroyed, and in 1804 Haiti emerged as an independent state founded by formerly enslaved people.
For the first time in modern history, a slave society was overturned completely, not reformed, and a population that had been legally treated as property became citizens of a sovereign nation.
Today, the Le Jeune case is remembered as a rare act of legal resistance by enslaved Africans. Though they lost, it exposed the brutality of colonial law and foreshadowed the Haitian Revolution, which would finally overthrow the system that protected masters like Le Jeune.
Sources:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/law-and-history-review/article/abs/prosecuting-torture-the-strategic-ethics-of-slavery-in-prerevolutionary-saintdomingue-haiti/B0F37D9ACE3757BFB3B5E5D4C41FEECC
https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/275/article/835803/pdf
https://thehaitianrevolution.com/french-rule
