Gens de couleur

Gens de couleur is a French term meaning "people of color". The term was commonly used in France's West Indian colonies prior to the abolition of slavery, where it was a short form of gens de couleur libres (French: [ʒɑ̃ də kulœʁ libʁ], free people of color). It referred specifically to free people of mixed-race, primarily European and African.

In some cases, planters or other relatively wealthy white men took slave women or free women of mixed race as concubines. If the woman was enslaved, the man might free her and their children, adding to the class of free people of color. Such planters often sent their mixed-race sons to France for education and service in the military, and sometimes settled property on them. Prior to the Haitian Revolution, Saint-Domingue was legally divided into three distinct groups: free whites (who were divided socially between the plantation-class grands blancs and the working-class petits blancs), freedmen (affranchis), and slaves. More than half of the affranchis were gens de couleur libres. In addition, maroons (runaway slaves) were sometimes able to establish independent small communities and a kind of freedom in the mountains, along with remnants of Haiti's original Taino people.

At the time when slavery ended in the colony in 1793, there were approximately 28,000 anciens libres ("free before") in Haiti. The term was used to distinguish those who were already free, compared to those liberated by the general emancipation of 1793. About 16,000 of these anciens libres were gens de couleur libres. Another 12,000 were black slaves who had either purchased their freedom or had received it from their masters for various reasons.

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