Déserter des troupes coloniales ? Cadre juridique et comportements (Caraïbe française, xviiie siècle)

Military desertion in the French Caribbean during the eighteenth century constitutes a privileged vantage point for examining the effects of normative change on individual behavior. By mobilizing automatic text recognition and layout analysis models specifically trained on handwritten colonial archives, this research analyzes an original corpus of 127 judicial case files concerning deserter soldiers. The quantitative and qualitative exploitation of these sources reveals a significant correlation between the royal ordinance of 1776 (which replaced capital punishment with forced labor) and a measurable increase in acts of desertion, particularly pronounced in Saint-Domingue. These findings suggest that the relative mitigation of punishment altered soldiers’ risk calculations, thereby revealing the sensitivity of individual practices to transformations in the legal framework. The study contributes both to the history of colonial penal systems and to the use of computational methods in social history.