1779
Paris / Madrid
Over the course of the previous decades, the esteem of an army career in the service of the King of France had waned drastically as men died by the thousands in the pestilential West Indies and were treated with hatred and contempt in their barracks in England. Volunteers for enlisted men dropped to nothing and the nation was forced to conscript even in peacetime.
Young officers, particularly fashionable nobles which populated the lower ranks, would come to oppose many key policies of the King. Abolitionism was part of it but also the exhaustion of seeing so many good officers and enlisted men die in the West Indies keeping order over the slaves so a small number of planters may profit.
With ever deposit of fresh slaves from Africa, a new uprising seemed to occur. Eventually, France changed its policy from preferring African-born slaves to native West Indian slaves. Previously, the former had been considered the formenters of rebellion and later the latter. By 1779, so many of the native born slaves had been sold (mainly to the Kingdom of North America) that the number of females had dropped so much that the already small birthrate plummeted even further. As French policy restricted the number of females imported from Africa over the course of so many years, it seemed that the French had backed themselves into a corner. They had to import more Africans to maintain the population...but this only created more rebellion.
Having been in near constant rebellion for so many years, the slaves of Saint Domingue had perfected the tactics of insurrection despite a near total lack of modern arms. A ten year old boy with a torch could burn an entire crop in the middle of the night, costing a farmer hundreds of thousands of livres.
In one particularly dry season, over a third of the cane on the island burned before it could be harvested.
As many rebels would be caught when they attempted to entice other slaves to leave the plantations (given that informers were rewarded with extra rations and perhaps an overseer position), the tactics changed to sabotage. One particularly memorable raid on a port town in Saint Domingue saw four warehouses burned in one night holding half a million livres of sugar and coffee.
With decades of trial and error, the slaves had learned to attack the source of French profit, not the French themselves. Plantation after plantation, often heavily in debt, would go bankrupt and the slaves sold off to other owners while once-productive land went untilled.
Even in remote areas known for being calm, slaves would occasionally take it upon themselves to sneak off in the middle of the night and torch a few fields and then return to their beds. This was particularly popular just prior to harvest. Expensive refineries were particularly vulnerable to sabotage and arson. As so many were destroyed, the colonies would cease producing refined sugar, molasses or rum and concentrate upon shipping raw product. The slaves whom once ran this sophisticated (and dangerous) processing equipment would be put back in the fields.
Naturally, this reduced profits even further. With vast reduction in the size of the workforce, the constant rebellions and escapes, the assault upon the production itself and the loss value-added processing, the Island of Saint Domingue was languish despite being given a "privileged" position in the French hierarchy of colonies.
In hopes of resuscitating the still-shrinking economy of the West Indies, the French Ministers would look to alternative options than these apparently incorrigible Africans. Prisoners rotting in the assorted French prisons had long been exiled to the colonies though with low survival rates and rarely produced much before they died. However, the risk of disease spreading from prisons had encouraged the government to clean them out with any expected to survive the voyage. If they died under the hot West Indian sun, so be it.
The government also encouraged and subsidized migration of free French people to the islands. However, the reputation as a "white man's grave" as well as the place where prisoners and African slaves went did little to entice migrants. Oh, there were some whom found the lure of free land where they may grow a profitable crop enticing enough to give it a try. But this barely kept the white population of Saint Domingue at its previous levels (about 30,000 whites, excluding the soldiers) and only very, very slowly would this grow.
They fell upon one sub-group of people whom had proved unpopular in France...and most of Europe, one whom could be moved against their will without any particular hesitation. The Roma people, commonly known as Gypsies in England (Gitanos in Spain and Tziganis in France), had originated in India and spread across the continent, often viewed as the pariahs of Europe. Loathed as thieves, the Roma were still kept as slaves in parts of Eastern Europe and often confined to certain areas in other parts of Europe. Spain, for example, spread them out among 75 towns and villages in order to keep them from forming a true demographic threat.
Similar laws constricted their movement in France, Austria and other regions. In the Balkans, they were held in special contempt.
In 1777, French Ministry would approve the "transportation" of the French Tziganis to Saint Domingue by the thousands. Unlike many other harsher government policies, this was approved by the general population. Some radicals even wanted the Jews and Protestants transported as well but this was rebuffed.
By 1779, the policy was in full motion and the largest "immigrant" group to Saint Domingue was not free French (or whites in General), French prisoners or Africans but the Roma. Also, in this year, the King of Spain, Carlos III (whom normally was quite an enlightened ruler), would commence shipping tens of thousands of Spanish Roma, Gitanos, as well but not to Saint Domingue. The Spanish loathed the people and feared that any Roma bound for French Saint Domingue would eventually enter their own colony of Santo Domingue (which shared the island of Hispaniola). Instead, the Spanish would seek and receive permission to dump them off on other French islands like Martinique, Guadeloupe, Barbados and Jamaica.
Unlike the French, this was not intended to populate these regions and exploit them as labor in the cane fields. Had that been the case, the Spanish would have sent them to Brazil. No, this was intended to simply rid the Iberian Peninsula of the scum which had infected it for centuries. Eventually other nations would "request" if their own Roma could be redistributed to these French islands. Desperate for any kind of labor, the French were happy to accept Roma from Piedmont, the Dutch Republic (whom REALLY hated Gypsies), Portugal, England, Scotland, and even as far east as Wallachia and Moldavia where many (but not most) of the Roma were still bought and sold as slaves as the Russian Czar had not gotten around to eliminating the practice as of yet in his new provinces. Fearing that the Czar would eventually change the status of the slaves to serfs (and therefore reduce the power of the owners), thousands upon thousands would be sold west. Though technically "freed", they were reduced to indentured servants and forced to labor along with the rest of their kin.
As Roma were transported with no preference to men, women or children, the 160,000 which were transported from Europe to the West Indies from 1777 to 1790 would have a disproportionate affect on the demographics of the French West Indies. In contrast, the 40,000 Africans transported were 94% male and the 35,000 French prisoners were 85% male (despite efforts by France to clean out the brothels and women's prisons. Even the 60,000 free French (and other white migrants) entering these isles during this period would bear over 75% males despite defacto free transportation for women and greater landgrants for men whom brought women with them.
The Roma, on the other hand, were nearly equally distributed between male and female. Also, they were forbidden to leave the islands themselves while many of the French prisoners were eventually allowed to leave (those not condemned to life sentences). Even liberated African slaves (the gens de colour) departed in some numbers.