[DEPORTATION AUX COLONIES] Déclaration du Roy, donnée à Versailles le premier jour de juillet 1722. Concernant les vagabons & gens sans aveu

First edition of this important royal declaration partially reversing the compulsory deportation measures established by the declarations of 8 January and 12 March 1719.

Responding to repeated complaints from colonial governors, the royal government henceforth resolved that only voluntary emigrants should be sent to populate the colonies.

Our copy is offered disbound.

Rare royal decree bringing an end to the forced deportation of the destitute to John Law’s Louisiana, here in the Dauphiné edition issued for registration by the Parliament of Grenoble.

During the Regency of the Duke of Orléans, deportation was established as an alternative sentence to the galleys for vagrants and persons of no fixed status, with the explicit aim of populating the French colonies. A royal declaration of 12 March 1719 accordingly empowered judges to sentence offenders to transportation to the colonies in place of the galleys, and in 1719-1720 the government extended this policy to vagrants and the unemployed in the kingdom’s principal cities, beginning with Paris. The principal destination was Louisiana, over which John Law’s Compagnie d’Occident had obtained a monopoly in 1717. Some 200 women of ill repute, confined at La Salpêtrière for begging, vagrancy or prostitution, were thus deported to the Mississippi, among them one Marie-Anne Lescaut, who inspired Abbé Prévost’s heroine in Manon Lescaut.

The collapse of Law’s financial System in 1720 and the scandal surrounding these forced deportations prompted a complete reversal of policy. The present declaration of 1 July 1722, issued at Versailles in the name of the still underage King Louis XV, prohibited judges from ordering transportation to the colonies and reinstated the declarations of Louis XIV dated 25 July 1700 and 27 August 1701, which relied instead upon banishment and sentences to the galleys.

Wroth & Annam, 966, record this text only from Moreau de Saint-Méry’s legislative collection.