linguistic:paraphrasing, structural:scholar_edition
Demographics

The largest sugar plantations and concentrations of slaves were in the north of the island, and whites lived in fear of slave rebellion. Even by the standards of the Caribbean, French slave masters were extremely cruel in their treatment of slaves. They used the threat and acts of physical violence to maintain control and suppress efforts at rebellion. When slaves left the plantations or disobeyed their masters, they were subject to whipping or to more extreme torture such as castration or burning, the punishment being both a personal lesson and a warning for other slaves. King Louis XIV of France passed the Code Noir in 1685 in an attempt to regulate such violence and the treatment of slaves in general in the colony, but masters openly and consistently broke the code. During the 18th century, local legislation reversed parts of it.

In 1758, the planters began passing legislation restricting the rights of other groups of people until a rigid caste system was defined. Most historians classify the people of the era into three groups:

The first group were white colonists, or les blancs. This group was generally subdivided into the plantation owners and a lower class of whites who often served as overseers or day laborers, as well as artisans and shopkeepers.

The second group were free people of color, or gens de couleur libres, who were usually mixed-race (sometimes referred to as mulattoes), being of both African and French descent. These gens de couleur tended to be educated and literate, and the men often served in the army or as administrators on plantations. Many were children of white planters and enslaved mothers, or free women of color. Others had purchased their freedom from their owners through the sale of their own produce or artistic works. They often received education or artisan training, and sometimes inherited freedom or property from their fathers. Some gens de couleur owned and operated their own plantations and became slave owners.

The third group, outnumbering the others by a ratio of ten to one, was made up of mostly African-born slaves. A high rate of mortality among them meant that planters continually had to import new slaves. This kept their culture more African and separate from other people on the island. Many plantations had large concentrations of slaves from a particular region of Africa, and it was therefore somewhat easier for these groups to maintain elements of their culture, religion, and language. This also separated new slaves from Africa from creoles (slaves born in the colony), who already had kin networks and often had more prestigious roles on plantations and more opportunities for emancipation. Most slaves spoke a patois of the French language known as Haitian Creole, which was also used by island-born mulattoes and whites for communication with the workers.

The majority of the slaves were Yoruba from what is now modern Nigeria, Fon from what is now Benin, and Kongo from the Kingdom of Kongo in what is now modern northern Angola and the western Congo. The Kongolese at 40% were the largest of the African ethnic groups represented amongst the slaves. The slaves developed their own religion, a syncretic mixture of Catholicism and West African religions known as Vodou, usually called "voodoo" in English. This belief system implicitly rejected the Africans' status as slaves.