Colonial Intimacies: Legislating Sex in French Louisiana

Abstract

colonists and their African laborers. La Vente's statement was part of a decade long debate between secular and religious officials on both sides of the Atlantic over the propriety of permitting marriages between Indian women and French men, an issue that was never definitively settled. The Code Noir, issued in 1724 by the French metropolitan government to regulate the institution of slavery in its Louisiana colony, explicitly and expressly prohibited marital and nonmarital sexual relations between Africans, whether slave or free, and Europeans. This proscription was received by colonists with neither complaint nor praise but rather with silence.