Freedom of Movement, Access to the Urban Centres, and Abolition of Slavery in the French Caribbean

Abstract How did the abolition of slavery influence the relations between urban centres and rural areas? How did “new” French citizens experience access to the urban environment? Based on the archives of the correctional courts, this article focuses on how race and citizenship determined the accessibility of French colonial urban spaces and institutions after 1848. The abolition of slavery in the French Antilles on 27 April 1848 led to a modification of the legal and judicial systems: the changing legal status of former slaves gave them new opportunities to move around the colonies, at least on paper. In theory, after 1848, everyone should have had freedom of social and spatial mobility and access to the urban centres and their institutions; what happened in practice, however, still needs to be researched. This article shows that the abolition exacerbated two dynamics already at play since the beginning of the nineteenth century: the control of the population and the attraction of the urban environment for the elite. The plantation system in the mid-nineteenth century was suffering both economically and politically: the newly acquired freedom and possible migration of former slaves to the towns (Saint-Pierre and Fort-de-France in Martinique, Pointe-à-Pitre and Basse-Terre in Guadeloupe) threatened to destabilize the system of private justice as well as the economic apparatus. To counteract these legal changes, vagrancy laws were implemented to restrict citizens’ mobility while, at the same time, the white elite's discourse on urban spaces changed from them being seen as a hotbed for revolutionary ideas to representing a safe environment to which access needed to be restricted.

had been used as a safety valve by some states, such as Portugal and the UK, to send vagrants from Europe to work, and labour shortage dictated where they were to be sent.  The idea that colonial subjects could move where and when they chose was greatly undermined by the eighteenth century. Sarah Nicolazzo has shown how, in the eighteenth century, vagrancy took on a new meaning in the British colonies as labour became an essential value to the developing economy.  Vagrancy acts, originally copied from the metropoles, multiplied in the colonies to meet various purposes. The authorities used vagrancy laws to: control work supply; supervise the population; prevent the use of "non-conformist culture" such as obeah;  and as a form of social control to "improve" the nature of the population living in these territories. Some historians have suggested that, before emancipation and abolition, vagrancy laws were mostly aimed at "undesirable" Europeans, who were not carrying their weight in the development of the colony.  In port cities such as Calcutta and Zanzibar, vagrancy acts were used to get rid of drunk and disorderly Europeans, who were seen as a bad influence to the local communities whose labour was essential for economic development.  The means for sanctions against these subjects were however limited: it was not always possible to make them leave the colony, especially if they had been sent there as a punishment for vagrancy from their home country. In the nineteenth century and from the emancipation era onwards, vagrancy laws became a tool to force freed people to work in colonies relying mostly on an agricultural economy: studies on South African legislations against vagrants during the emancipation or on the West Indian British colonies and the United States after the civil war have shown how vagrancy laws were used to prevent freed people's mobility.  Vagrancy acts in the Caribbean colonies have often been seen as distinct from legislations and practices against marronage; however, as suggested by Robert Bancroft Cummings,  the distinction between the two is more subtle than initially thought. Before the nineteenth century, policing of vagrancy and marronage was carried out by masters and civilians, as were the punishments against runaway slaves. Control was thus exercised first and foremost by the plantation owners and their intendants, with help, if possible, of the local authorities. The ad hoc construction of justice in the colonies, especially in the British and French Caribbean colonies, which followed a proto-national model of development, meant that discretion on the side of the prosecutors was relatively large. Nicolazzo demonstrates how, in the eighteenth century, the "unpredictable mobility" of certain people, not easily identifiable, became synonymous with social and economic threats and therefore justified the extension of policing powers, as did marronage.  Viola Müller argues in this Special Issue that a more nuanced understanding of marronage is necessary to fathom the reality experienced by runaway slaves. Likewise, this article on vagrancy in the French colonies argues that the study of vagrancy acts against the new French citizens reveals more than a willingness by the local elite to prevent the mobility of the workforce. It highlights their attempts to create white urban enclaves by limiting access to the urban territory and urban institutions by freed people. The premises of racial segregation and urbanization control in colonial cities, which have usually been studied from the perspective of British colonies,  appear to have been well established in the agricultural colonies of the French Caribbean.
In theory, everyone after  should have had freedom of social and spatial mobility and access to the judicial system and the urban market; but what happened in practice still needs to be researched. The question of former slaves' mobility has never been framed by historians of the French Caribbean in relation to the changing perception of the urban environment in a predominantly agricultural system. How did these legal changes impact freemen and freewomen and former slaves' access to the urban environment? The changing legal status of former slaves gave them new opportunities to move around the colonies, at least on paper. And having access to the urban environment also meant having access to the highest institutions of the colonies, particularly the courts of justice. Based on the archives of the Freedom of Movement and Abolition in the French Caribbean  correctional courts, this article focuses on how race and citizenship  determined the accessibility of French colonial urban spaces and institutions after .
The development of the sugar economy in the French Caribbean territories since the seventeenth century led to a relatively high population density in the most favourable islands.  Calm bays such as Fort-Royal (now Fort-de-France) and Saint-Pierre in Martinique, Port-au-Prince and Cap-Français in Haiti, or Basse-Terre and Pointe-à-Pitre in Guadeloupe became important ports of commerce, growing thanks to the colonial trades of, among others, slaves, sugar, indigo, and cotton.  These towns, which developed out of the port and/or military defences, followed an orthogonal street plan, often bordered by drainage canals or rivers, as in Fort-de-France, creating "natural" borders to the urban enclaves.  Saint-Pierre was surrounded by volcanic slopes that prevented its development towards the east and was also crossed by a river on its northern side ( Figure ).  These canals, rivers, and hills became a border between the colonial town and the faubourgs, which grew in connection with the port economy, but were not yet subject to urban planning.  Other French settlements of military origins in the Caribbean remained relatively small, such as Marigot in Saint Martin or Cayenne in French Guyana.  Despite being a strong contender in the eighteenth-century slave trade, with more than , men and women being transported to the French Antilles, the French settlements experienced limited urban development until the nineteenth century. Small parishes or bourgs were, however, . "Citizen" in this article refers to a person with civil rights, not political rights. On the possibility of being a "French man" without being a "French citizen", see Silyane Larcher, L'Autre citoyen. dotted along the coast.  Transport connections between the parishes in Martinique were relatively well established and frequent, but the geographical landscape of Guadeloupe made travel between the two sides of the island more difficult. The development of Pointe-à-Pitre, as a link between Basse-Terre and Grande-Terre, really started only with the British occupation of the island during the Seven Year's War. Drainage of the swampy grounds was necessary before any settlement was made possible.  The distinction between urban and rural was sharpened in the French Antillean colonies:  the model of economic development followed in Martinique and Guadeloupe meant that most of the workforce was spread in the rural areas to cultivate and harvest crops. The urban centres provided seats for the governmental, military, and judicial institutions, as well as some forms of entertainment for the elite and, for some, a place of residence. The number of inhabitants in the countryside was therefore much higher than in the urban centres, with an important concentration of slaves. Urban slavery may have Freedom of Movement and Abolition in the French Caribbean  been more limited than in the rural areas, but it did exist:  domestics,  laundresses, and day labourers lived in the urban centres or in their immediate proximity and were more numerous than the white population. The rest of the white planters resided on their plantations, the habitations sucrerie, which started to decline in the second half of the nineteenth century.  The main towns in the French Caribbean were located on the largest French islands: Martinique ( Figure ) and Guadeloupe ( Figure ), which, after the Napoleonic episode and an English invasion, continued to be governed by the French. Martinique was the official centre of the French Antilles, with the governor residing in Fort-Royal since . Both Guadeloupe and Martinique's economies turned towards the production of sugar in the seventeenth century and the labour-intensive monoculture of sugar cane had a strong impact on the demographics of the islands: sixty to seventy per cent of the population were still working in the rural areas by the mid-nineteenth century.  The urban centres of Saint-Pierre, Fort-Royal,  and those of Basse-Terre and Pointe-à-Pitre developed thanks to the colonial economy and the importance of maritime trade.  The population living in what can be defined as villes et bourgs was therefore rather limited: twenty-three per cent of the inhabitants of Guadeloupe (without dependencies) lived in a town or large village in ; in Martinique this was . per cent. White people accounted for eight per cent of the total population in Martinique in . The administration of Guadeloupe claimed that they could not give a precise number for the "white/coloured" ratio in  but assumed it to be the same as in Martinique, and claimed that the class of freemen/freewomen was four times higher than the white class.  A further note in  explained that white people constituted one-twelfth, or . per cent, of the total population.  . Anne Pérotin-Dumon, La ville aux îles, la ville dans l'île (Paris, ), p. . . Bernard Moitt, Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, - (Bloomington, IN, ), pp. -. . Christian Schnakenbourg, "La disparition des 'habitation-sucreries' en Guadeloupe (-). Recherche sur la désagrégation des structures préindustrielles de la production sucrière antillaise après l'abolition de l'esclavage', Revue française d'histoire d'outre-mer, : (), pp. -. . Myriam Cottias, "Droit, justice et dépendance dans le Antilles françaises (-)", Annales. Histoire, sciences sociales,  (), pp. -, . . Roughly , inhabitants in Saint-Pierre in  and , inhabitants in Fort-de-France in : Des villages de Cassini aux communes d'aujourd'hui. Available at : http://cassini.ehess.fr/ cassini/fr/html/_navigation.php; last accessed  December . . In , Basse-Terre and its suburbs counted , inhabitants; Pointe-à-Pitre and suburbs , inhabitants according to Tableaux de population, de culture, de commerce et de navigation (Paris, ), p. . Note that Pointe-à-Pitre was badly destroyed in  after an earthquake that killed an estimated , people. . Tableaux de population, de culture, de commerce et de navigation (Paris, ), pp. -. . Tableaux de population, de culture, de commerce et de navigation (Paris, ), pp. -.

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The urban centres (the bourgs, large villages, and towns) of the French Antilles were dominated thus by the free population consisting of the white elite (comprising settlers, or colons, and creoles), poor whites, the mixed-races, foreigners, and black freemen and freewomen.  In Martinique before the abolition, the villes et bourgs counted around , free people and , slaves. In Guadeloupe and its dependencies, , free people and , slaves lived . This category includes free-born blacks and freedmen and freedwomen.

Freedom of Movement and Abolition in the French Caribbean 
in the towns and large villages. In contrast, rural Martinique had , free people and , slaves in , while Guadeloupe had a larger share of slaves, with around , slaves and , free people (Table ).  The settlement of the official colonial government in the urban centres also brought with it a certain number of metropolitan civil servants and officials who resided close to the seat of the government. Many white colon families settled in these towns, but also freed blacks who had been manumitted and left their

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former masters to work in towns.  Before , slaves formed seventy-five per cent of the population in the French Antilles  and although most of them were employed in the plantations, some were living in the towns as domestics for white and freemen's families, and they could also be seen working in the ateliers adjoining the port.  According to the  census in Guadeloupe, sixty-five per cent of urban families had between one and three slaves working in their household, most of them women, employed to cook, wash, and generally run the house.  A list of  slaves from the French Caribbean colonies and La Réunion, whose slaves received their freedom in , gives an example of the role of urban domesticity in slaves' occupations. Domestics counted for roughly forty per cent of the occupations of the urban slaves, along with manual labouring and working as a field hand, a much higher percentage than in the countryside.  At the beginning of the nineteenth century, some urban slaves were also employed as day labourers and were hired out by their masters and mistresses (notably impoverished creole women)  who were living in town.  Overall, the ratio of "whites" to "people of colour" was therefore less disproportionate in the urban centres than in the countryside, especially on the sites of original settlement, which were the richest and best built.  Before the abolition of slavery, the demography of the towns changed little, although the first half of the nineteenth century saw an increase of freedmen and freedwomen moving to the towns, linking urban development with the increase of free people.  Following the expansion of the colonial society from the seventeenth century, the socio-economic positions and the mobility (both social and spatial) of people inhabiting the Antillean islands were strongly defined by their colour, gender, and civil status.  How one was to behave would depend on these criteria and going against prescribed behaviours, such as being absent from the master's house for too long or not taking care of one's family, would lead to various punishments for both white and black people.  These could include fines, being shunned by the community, and even official expulsion from the colony.  However, slaves and freemen and freewomen had to endure much harsher punishments than white people, rich or poor. Slaves were regularly whipped and sometimes tortured for bad behaviour against their masters or against another white person. The society was strictly divided and people who did not belong to the two well-defined categories of black slaves or white elite often struggled to find their place and, more importantly, their rights in this colonial society. Black freemen and freewomen, mixed-race children and adults, and poor white people, also known as petit-blancs, were constantly negotiating their position in society, in relation to each other and under the control of the elite. Despite these strict divides between classes, members of the free black and slave classes experienced a degree of social and spatial mobility before the abolition; and opportunities for mobility could often be found in the urban centres. Since the eighteenth century, some masters ignored the colonial legislation regarding slaves' work and freedom of movement by giving them substantial responsibilities in their business or by letting them carry out tasks away from the master's household and with little supervision. Indeed, in order to maximize their assets, some masters provided their slaves with an education and allowed them to keep small shops or take care of the accounts, or even gave them "managerial" responsibilities that, according to Coquille, the procurer of Guadeloupe, made them particularly "arrogant".  . For instance, the parish of the Fort in Saint-Pierre, which contrasted strongly with its poorer faubourgs. Or the poor district of Terres-de-Sainville in Fort-Royal, which grew after .

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In receiving permission to rent a room in town as long as they share their wages with their master, the comings and goings of slaves in the urban environment were a common sight. Their role in the urban merchant economy was thus clearly visible. Some slaves were free to sail between villages to sell their master's products; one was trained as a jeweller and permitted by his master to roam the colony.  The attitude of the masters towards marronage during the ancien régime sheds a similar light on the mobility of slaves: marronage was considered a problem only when slaves deserted in groups and formed "gangs", thus becoming a threat to the general order. Petit marronage, defined as the absence of a single individual or very small group for a few days, was often treated casually by the planter or his manager.  Likewise, the punishment for a long period of time spent away from the plantation was contingent on the amount of time the slaves had already spent on the island: a newcomer accused of marronage was less likely to be branded than a slave who had already had the opportunity to build a network in and outside the plantation.  This led to situations where maroon slaves were only reported missing after a few weeks or even a couple of months.  Price notes that creole maroons were more likely to run away to the cities, where they knew they would be less likely to be questioned about their whereabouts, being surrounded by other people of colour, freemen, and freewomen, but also slaves, and thus experiencing a certain freedom of movement.  Thus, the economic interests of planters encouraged a certain mobility of slaves to and from the urban centres. But the judicial system also unwittingly aided the connection between rural areas and urban centres by pushing certain victims to seek justice against their master in urban institutions. The slavery system led to the development of a particularly cruel private justice in the hands of the white masters. Slaves brought to or born in the French colonies were subject to the Code Noir, implemented in  by Jean-Baptiste Colbert. The Code Noir was meant to cover the possession, transaction, and legal status of slaves in the French colonies. One of its paradoxes resided in the legal status of a slave; whereas they were considered movable possessions (for instance they could be inherited by the children of their owner), they were still legally responsible if they committed a crime.  This situation meant that they could be tried by the judicial system in place in the colony and sent to prison: this sentence had a direct impact on the owner of the slave, as he was losing for a certain amount of time a member of his workforce. To counteract this loss of revenue, the colonial system developed specific regulations concerning punishment, which allowed the master to punish them privately.  Although most cases of mutilations and violence by owners went unpunished, a small number of slaves succeeded in getting their master condemned for excessive punishments.  This was made possible by the fact that slaves had a legal identity even if they were considered movable possessions. Therefore, they could access the court of justice to seek reparation. The courts of justice in the colonies were located in the urban centres and gaining access to them could be difficult if the slaves were not allowed to leave the property. However the number of freemen and freewomen had increased since the eighteenth century and they could serve as intermediaries with officials to transfer the slaves' complaints or to help them buy their freedom.  Slaves could benefitafter the imposition of the Penal Code in  -from the pourvoi en cassation (appeal to have the legality of a judgment assessed by the highest judicial court in Paris) if they were involved in the same criminal affair as a freeman or freewoman; by  they could do it by themselves.  Thus, a network of information and assistance was created between rural slaves, rural freemen and freewomen, and the urban environment, and this network was strengthened by their meetings during balls, festivities, and urban processions.  Unwittingly, the flawed colonial justice system in Martinique and Guadeloupe helped create links between people from the lower classes, which then produced networks of information about rural and urban concerns. Likewise, the relative mobility between plantations and the urban environment afforded to certain slaves helped facilitate the exchange of political news from other countries and the metropole.  Urban domestics who heard and repeated their masters' discussions during dinner were often complained about by officials, especially in times of rebellion.  As such, the links between slaves, former

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slaves, and pro-abolitionist white people were strengthened thanks to the judicial identity of the slaves and the economic possibilities of the towns, this dynamic being most visible in the urban environment where contact between people of different backgrounds was regularly observed.

P O P U L AT I O N C O N T R O L A N D R E S T R I C T E D M O B I L I T Y I N T H E N I N E T E E N T H C E N T U RY
The question of mobility became particularly conspicuous after the abolition of slavery in , when the codes that regulated the travelling and movement of people (for instance the sale of a slave to another planter) officially disappeared. The abolition brought a new legal and social status to the former slaves: more than , inhabitants of Martinique and Guadeloupe became freemen and freewomen and French citizens, now deserving of treatment equal to that of white French citizens.  With the abolition of slavery, every citizen was given the right to travel throughout the colony, as long as he or she could prove a place of residence and means of subsistence. This meant that citizens should have been allowed to settle where they wished, also in the urban areas. The reality was very different, however. Historians have shown that the white elite in French plantation colonies refused for a long time to submit to legal and judicial changes imposed by the metropole.  There are several reasons for this. First, the white elite feared a loss of power and identity. Second, they were afraid of losing the opportunity to punish their slaves privately; up until that point the responsibility of punishing slaves had been controlled by private justice. In reality, restrictions on mobility had already begun after the return of slavery in . Access to urban areas became more and more restricted after the Napoleonic wars with the development of vagrancy laws and an increased police and militia presence in both towns and the countryside. Indeed, the nineteenth century changed the dynamic at play during the ancien régime, with the creation of a "slave police" after the reinstatement of slavery in the colonies in . Police commissaires were appointed in every town and were charged with keeping the peace and forcing ex-slaves to return to their masters.  Officials focused on urban areas in order to limit the apparent freedom enjoyed by certain slaves and frustrate their attempts to pass as freemen and freewomen in the urban economy. During the discussions that preceded the abolition of slavery, the commission for the abolition of slavery, presided by Victor Schoelcher, advised the Ministère de la Marine et des Colonies (Ministry of the Navy and Colonies) to implement new legislation against vagrancy to prevent former slaves leaving for another planter.  The influence of the British colonies is perceptible in Schoelcher's legal provisions: in Barbados, for instance, during the apprenticeship period, vagrancy laws were designed to prevent "idleness" and used to complicate the search for a new job by former slaves. Former slaves were forced to stay in the countryside to work for their former masters to avoid arrest. The vagrancy laws in the British islands in the s formed part of the white attempt to prolong the plantation system and sustain its economic development despite the abolition of slave labour.  In the French islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, where economic resources were also based on the plantation system, preventing the new French citizens from leaving the countryside also became a necessity for the creoles. The abolition of slavery on  April  led to a modification of the legal system in the Antillean colonies regarding mobility and the right to work: in order to maintain and eventually reinforce their governmental powers, local authorities quickly imposed new regulations on the movement of the new French citizens. The plantation system suffered economically and politically: the migration of former slaves to the urban centres (Saint-Pierre and Fort-de-France in Martinique, Pointe-à-Pitre and Basse-Terre in Guadeloupe) destabilized the system of private justice as much as their newly acquired freedom. In July and August , various decrees were published to prevent vagrancy and idleness. The definition of vagrant was very broad: it included people who had no precise address; those who had a home but no job; those who were eating in someone else's house; those who built an ajoupa (a cabin or wooden shack); and those who had temporary employment but no home.  In order to tighten control of the population, the authorities encouraged the development of a (rural) police force to patrol the colonies.  In addition to this police force, the governor of Guadeloupe encouraged the use of militia constituted by citizens, "to protect people and property" and specifically to arrest vagrants.  The militia was meant to "forget all distinctions of origins", however Schoelcher himself, during the first elections organized around universal suffrage in , denounced the discrimination suffered by black people at the hands of the militia and gendarmerie. They did not hesitate to shoot black citizens who tried to free a man unjustly accused.  This was followed in February  by the creation of the livret de travail (work pass) for labourers employed for less than a year, and new restrictions "to combat vagrancy".  Eventually, on  September , the governor of Martinique Louis Henri de Gueydon passed an edict making it compulsory to have a passport to move between parishes for everyone over sixteen years old.  This local legislation, published under the title Police du travail, went against the French rules of free movement but it was not until  that its repeal became a subject of discussion in the assembly.  The increase in prosecutions against "vagrants" was not, in itself, unique to the colonies. Parallel to the bureaucratization and professionalization of the police system at the beginning of the nineteenth century (in the city but also in the countryside with the gendarmerie), a more efficient control of the population was imposed by officials from the metropole. The prosecution of vagrancy was defined by Article  of the  Penal Code as being without a permanent address, travelling with no means of subsistence, and having no regular employment. It became an offence (délit) to be tried by the Tribunal of First Instance.  This legislation was officially applied in the Caribbean colonies in .  However, as Philips has shown in the case of Barbados, where the vagrancy laws in place followed the wording of their British domestic counterparts but had very different purposes,  the practice of the law was much more radical in Martinique and Guadeloupe than in the metropole. The Antillean colonies could still be ruled by gubernatorial decrees and had therefore developed specific legislation on labour and vagrancy, in place until . Although in the judicial archives we see an attempt by the clerk to delete any form of discrimination by not mentioning the colour or (ex-) civil status of the suspect, it becomes obvious that the law was discriminatory in practice. Indeed, in the duplicates of sentencing papers sent to Paris, the mention of colour or origins (mulatto, "mixed-race"; capresse, child born from a mixed-race person and a black person) disappeared, giving the . Victor Schoelcher, quoted in Bulletin colonial. Supplément à la revue du XIXe siècle (Paris, ), n.p. . Butel, Histoire des Antilles françaises, p. ; Bruno Maillard, "'Ils sortiront des hommes'. Les enfants du pénitencier de l'Ilet à Guillaume (île de la Réunion) -", Criminocorpus. Revue hypermédia. impression that the suspects were treated equally. In reality, numerous former slaves did not have a surname and were still registered without one, giving away their origins.  The judicial archives thus show the specific focus set by the administration on these former slaves. It is interesting indeed to see that, except in two cases, the vagrancy cases brought to the court only concerned black people.  In the early months after abolition, the number of vagrants arrested by the gendarmerie was still relatively low: in August , in Guadeloupe, only six vagrants among fifty-eight suspects were arrested, and at the end of the year, an average of fifteen prisoners were sent to the ateliers de discipline (type of forced labour).  In the session of January  of the Guadeloupe Court of Appeal, ten cases referred to the délit of vagrancy.  It appears, however, that all of the suspects arrested for vagrancy could give an address where they lived and slept. By definition, they were therefore not vagrants but had come to town to look for work. For instance, Marcelin, a young carpenter apprentice, was born in Les Anses d'Arlet in the south of the island but came to Saint-Pierre to find employment:  as he was paid by the task, his work migration was legitimate and even if he had meagre resources, he could not, if they were to follow the wording of the original Penal Code, be considered a vagrant. He was, however, arrested when he decided to settle in the old town of Saint-Pierre to look for work. Multiple accounts reveal similar experiences in the years following abolition; the suspects gave their place of birth and residence but were still tried for vagrancy due to the fact that they were moving and walking within the region, searching for employment.
In the first semester of , in Saint-Pierre, out of ninety-one cases tried in the Tribunal of First Instance, thirty-two were related to accusations of vagrancy (twenty men and twelve women).  Julie's case is representative of the treatment received by "vagrants". She was born in Africa and lived in Grand'Rivière, working as a faiseuse de bouts (cigarette maker), but was arrested in Saint-Pierre while at work. She was then sentenced to six months in prison, the usual sentence in Martinique against vagrancy, whereas the Penal Code required a three-to-six-month sentence.  Had she been a man she would have been sent to work on the public roads or sent to an atelier

Marion Pluskota 
de discipline, which were created to put vagrants to work.  Five ateliers de discipline were created in Guadeloupe: two in Basse-Terre and Pointe-à-Pitre and three others in the islands of Saintes, Saint-Martin, and Marie-Galante, where urbanization was almost null. Prisoners were forced to do public work, often outside the urban enclaves, but they could also be sentenced to work for a planter.
The mobility and access to urban areas of former slaves were not only limited by vagrancy laws, but also by the restructuring of the judicial system. As we discussed previously, the way the judicial system worked during the ancien régime encouraged the development of links between rural and urban areas, essential to gaining access to official institutions. However, the reorganization of the judicial system that occurred in , with the imposition of the Code d'Instruction Criminelle and the Code Pénal, and the bureaucratization of the justice system from the Revolution onwards led to the creation of local courts ( juges de paix and tribunal cantonal) in the more rural areas to deal with conflicts between employers and employees; in a similar fashion to the appointment of local commissaires, the judicial system was brought closer to the rural population, but it mostly benefited the white employers. Likewise, the existence of local courts prevented former slaves from going to the cities to seek redress as it was not possible to bypass the local judge, meaning that one very important reason to go to the city (to access formal institutions) became obsolete after .  Finally, the economic opportunities offered by the towns before abolition did not increase sufficiently to provide enough outlets for the newly freed population, at least according to the government. The fact that the economic resources of the islands remained the same in the three decades following abolition suggests that the planters did not take the opportunity to change their economic model. The culture of sugar cane continuedmany former slaves were now being employed as day labourers. Urbanization continued to increase but at a relatively slow pace compared to European cities.  Indeed, the new factories that opened for the transformation of the sugar cane economy were located close to the fields and did not encroach on the urban landscape. Thus, as various historians have shown, many socio-economic aspects of the pre-abolition Antillean society prevailed even after the abolition of slavery and the process of restraining citizens' mobility continued.  . Gatine, Abolition de l'esclavage à la Guadeloupe, p. ; Recueil de la législation nouvelle, p. ; Nelly Schmidt, " dans les colonies françaises des Caraïbes. Ambitions républicaines et ordre colonial", Revue française d'histoire d'outre-mer, : (), pp. -, -. . Ministère de la Marine et des Colonies, Les colonies françaises en  (Paris, ), pp. -. . Tableaux de population, de culture, de commerce et de navigation (Paris, ), p.  for Martinique. . Gilbert Pago, L'Insurrection du sud. Contribution à l'étude sociale de la Martinique (Fort-de-France, ), pp. -; Nelly Schmidt, La France a-t-elle aboli l'esclavage? (Paris, ).

Freedom of Movement and Abolition in the French Caribbean 
Access to the urban environment during slavery was also linked to economic opportunities but the job market in the towns after abolition remained limited, agricultural labour still providing most of the employment.  Skilled artisans were sought after, but most of the new citizens were unskilled labourers and many former slaves chose to become owners of their cabins and small gardens, if they were successful in gaining ownership from planters. Likewise, more than , cabins were said to have been built in the Guadeloupian countryside between  and , and in Rivière-Pilote in Martinique, on the slopes of the mountain, former slaves joined freemen and freewomen in cultivating vegetables for domestic and market consumption.  In addition to the risk of being arrested as a vagrant, a heavy tax (impôt personnel) was imposed on each worker: fifteen francs per year for someone leaving a town, ten francs for a villager (living in a bourg), and five francs for a countryside inhabitant. This tax was initially imposed in  in order to prevent the affranchis from leaving the plantations, where their labour was needed, and was increased in .  The newly acquired freedom created fear in the white population (due to the large number of former slaves, the fear of riots and demands for redress, the reduction in employment opportunities as new workers entered the market) and the white elites actively blocked the migration and potential settlement of former slaves in the towns. Again, contradictory dynamics were at play in the practice of the law: on the one hand, freedom of movement had to be given to every citizen, as long as they could claim a residential address and employment (per task or per contract), but on the other hand, mobility towards the urban centres was strongly limited by the misuse of vagrancy laws in an attempt to prevent the loss of workforce on the plantations. Mobility from one plantation to another was not the main issue, however; when looking at the way the laws were used, it appears that it was mobility towards and settlement within the towns that were criminalized.

W H I T E T O W N S , B L AC K C O U N T RY S I D E ?
The white elite's efforts to hold back former slaves in the rural plantations through the strong use of vagrancy laws reveal another facet of their concerns, which was not directly linked to the possible loss of income. By strengthening the repression against "idle" or seemingly "vagrant" citizens (who did nevertheless have a place of residence), the elite also tried to limit the migration of former slaves to the urban enclaves. The cases brought to the judge of the . Rosamunde Renard, "Labour Relations in Martinique and Guadeloupe, -", Journal of Caribbean History, : (), pp. -, . . Fallope, Esclaves et citoyens, p. ; Larcher, L'Autre citoyen, p. . . Gatine, Abolition de l'esclavage à la Guadeloupe, p. .