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NotAriales
Pierre Goubert, the great social historian and historian of provincial France, drew attention in 1952 to a “belle enquête”: the study by Robert Richard, published in 1951, of the notarial archives of Saint-Domingue, the modern Haiti. The archives are immense, an extraordinary, tantalizing source, at the same time “isolated” and “superabundant”. All the procedures for finding one’s way were unsatisfactory, in Richard’s description. There was the route of the sample, the route of the fil conducteur, and the route of the dépouillement systématique. The disadvantage of the sample was that it was of interest only when it was located within a “vast archival whole.” The disadvantage of the fil or thread, “usually a family name,” was that while it can lead to an “individual” study, of a place or an institution or a family, it also leads to a question, of whether the “individual” is an example (“a case proximate to the median”) or an exception. The disadvantage of the dépouillement, which was always the “work of a team” (for how could the “isolated researcher” study the “hundreds of thousands” of notarial acts for the part-island of Saint-Domingue?) was that it has no obvious point; “what would be the benefit of such an effort?” Or rather, the benefit would be to produce an index, which would itself be a list, like the map of the world as large as the world, of names and also of words; absents, affranchissements, café, caféières, capitaux, climat (avalasses, ouragans, orages, secs), irrigation, marronnage, nègres, procès, veuves.
Richard’s and Goubert’s studies make the archives irresistible. There were more than 460,000 enslaved people in Saint-Domingue in 1790; a larger population of the enslaved than anywhere in the Atlantic world except Brazil and the United States, with some 700,000 slaves in a land area more than eighty times as large. Saint-Domingue was by far the richest French colony, and the consquences of the end of property in slaves were of profound importance in France for much of the nineteenth century. It was a society in which the relationships of credit, inheritance, marriage, investment and emancipation – the relationships that are so vivid in notarial records – are still, after more than a century of outstanding scholarship, only very little known.
The archivists of the ANOM have completed a remarkable répertoire and inventaire of the holdings in the Dépôt des papiers publics des colonies – Notariat.
Dépôt des papiers publics des colonies. Notariat. Saint-Domingue.
Dépôt des papiers publics des colonies. Notariat. Saint-Domingue, Supplément.
The list of notaries by location and date is most easily accessible via the “tableau de correspondance entre anciennes et nouvelles cotes,” 7DPCC_Saint_Domingue_concordance.pdf, accessible here.
The Saint-Domingue actes have not yet been digitized by the ANOM. But a number of the notarial archives of Jérémie, in the south west of Haiti, were acquired by the University of Florida (Gainesville, United States) in 1959 from the Haitian-Austrian archeologist Kurt Fisher. Some of these actes are available online as part of the “Jérémie Papers” via here and a guide to the papers is available here.
There is further information about the collection at the New York Public Library.
In a 2006 report available here, Professor David Geggus estimated that the notarial records “in the Jérémie Papers are the equivalent of probably ten or fifteen of the 1,711 volumes from Saint-Domingue housed in the Centre des Archives d’Outre-mer in Aix-en-Provence (CAOM).”
Richard Robert. Les Minutes des notaires de Saint-Domingue aux Archives du Ministère de la France d'Outre-Mer. In: Revue d'histoire des colonies, tome 38, n°135, troisième trimestre 1951. pp. 281-338; https://doi.org/10.3406/outre.1951.1162
Goubert Pierre. Une belle enquête : Saint-Domingue au XVIIIe siècle. In: Annales. Economies, sociétés, civilisations. 7ᵉ année, N. 3, 1952. pp. 329-331: https://doi.org/10.3406/ahess.1952.2082
Even Pascal. « La traite négrière et l’esclavage à travers les actes notariés ». Histoire de la justice, 2021/1 (N° 31), p. 63-70: 10.3917/rhj.031.0063
Emma Rothschild 2 May 2021