Source archive Tier A
Code Noir (1685), Articles 2 and 3
Édit du roi touchant la police des îles de l'Amérique française (the Code Noir), March 1685. Article 2: all enslaved people in the islands shall be baptized and instructed in the Catholic religion. Article 3: the public exercise of any religion other than Catholicism is forbidden, and assemblies held for that purpose are declared unlawful and seditious.
Custody docket
- Record
- code-noir-article-3-1685
- Type
- archive
- Trust tier
- A
- Status
- published
Sources are graded A (primary) / B (secondary academic) / C (secondary journalism) / D (tertiary or contested). See the manifesto’s Evidence Standard for full criteria.
Two articles, not one. Article 2 mandates Catholic baptism. Article 3 bans the public exercise of any other religion and declares such gatherings “conventicules, illicites et séditieuses.”
Article 3 never names African religion. Its vocabulary is the vocabulary the crown was using against Protestants in the same year it revoked the Edict of Nantes. Article 1 expels Jews; Article 5 targets “la R.P.R.,” the Huguenots. African practice was outlawed without being named, swept into a net cast for someone else.
Corrected 2026-07-14. An earlier version of this record attributed the baptism mandate to Article 3, and stated that the article prohibited “the open practice of African religions.” The first was a miscitation. The second was interpretation typeset as the document’s own content. The error propagated into WR-FCT-007.
Provenance
- Creator
- Kingdom of France (Louis XIV)
- Published
- 1685
- Accessed
- 2026-07-14
Cited by
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