René-Josué Valin (1695–1765).

Nouveau commentaire sur l’Ordonnance de la Marine du mois d’Août 1681.

La Rochelle, Jérôme Legier, 1766.

2 vols., 4to. [8], XLIII, [1], 804; [4], XII, 852 pp.

Contemporary mottled calf, raised bands, richly gilt compartments, gilt lettering and numbering pieces, red edges.

               Second, revised and enlarged edition of Valin’s major commentary on Colbert’s 1681 maritime ordinance, with an important body of legislation documenting the legal machinery of slavery in the French Atlantic.

Of particular significance is the sequence of colonial laws printed in the first volume. At p. 428 begins the 1685 edict governing slavery in the French Caribbean, later known as the Code Noir, which established the legal framework for the status, treatment, punishment, marriage, religion and manumission of enslaved people. It is followed by the 1716 edict concerning enslaved people brought from the colonies into France (p. 434) and the Royal Declaration of 15 December 1738 concerning enslaved Black people of the colonies (p. 436). These later measures sought to preserve slaveholders’ claims over enslaved people transported to metropolitan France and to regulate the circumstances under which they could remain there.

The context is particularly significant. Valin (1695–1765) served as royal advocate and prosecutor at the Admiralty of La Rochelle, one of France’s principal Atlantic ports and a major centre of the eighteenth-century slave trade. His commentary thus brings together maritime commerce, colonial administration and slavery within the practical legal framework that sustained France’s Atlantic empire.

An important source for the institutional history of French slavery, here embedded within one of the principal works of eighteenth-century French maritime jurisprudence.

Provenance: eighteenth-century armorial ex-libris of the Warenghien family.

Condition: Bindings heavily worn and rubbed, with abrasions, worn extremities and substantial loss of leather to the spine of the first volume; further wear to spine ends and joints. Internally generally clean and fresh, with strong impressions and generous margins.

Reference:

Polak, Jean. Bibliographie maritime française: depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu’à 1914. Grenoble: Éditions des 4 Seigneurs, 1976, no. 9313.