Republican France abolishes slavery

The second time will be good. It was the revolutionary Convention of 1794, animated by the ideas of the deputies Dufray and Danton, which proclaimed the first time the abolition of the slave trade and slavery in the French colonies. But Napoleon Bonaparte restored them in 1802. It was then necessary to wait for the advent of the Second Republic in 1848 to see them definitively abolished in the French colonies. In the meantime, thanks to the campaigns carried out for almost half a century by the anti-slavery movements, public opinion had become massively abolitionist, says Marcel Dorigny, a leading specialist in slavery in France.⁽¹⁾

Two months, in fact, will be enough for the provisional government, which came to power in February 1848, to put an end to a social and economic regime that is more than three centuries old. The abolition decree was signed by the Under-Secretary of State for the Navy in charge of the Colonies, Victor Schoelcher, who had convinced François Arago, his supervising minister, to take urgent measures in favor of slaves. This humanist decision, and especially political, because the revolt rumbled in the colonies, made France one of the first abolitionist countries. Behind England where slavery was abolished in 1833, but ahead of other slave bastions such as the United States, Brazil and Cuba where the practice of slavery will continue for several decades.

11 million Africans deported

At the origin of colonial slavery, the slave trade Atlantic organized by Europeans from the 16th century to exploit the wealth and immense territories of America that they had just discovered. This odious transatlantic trade was one of the most massive enterprises of forced displacement of human beings. From the middle of the 15th century until the 19th century, it is estimated that around 11 million captives were deported from Africa to the Americas and the Atlantic islands to work in the plantations or mines of the New World. Only 9.6 million made it to their destination, the others having perished during the crossing.

Reduced to slavery, the survivors toiled under duress in extremely harsh conditions, which explains why, on average, the survival expectancy of a plantation slave rarely exceeded ten years. Sold at auction on the slave markets, this slave labor was destined to work for life, without pay, under the leadership of ruthless commanders.

Read also : Slavery, slave trade and abolition

Most European nations participated in the colonial slave trade and slavery. With 1.6 million Africans brought by force to the French colonies in the West Indies, but also to Reunion and Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, France was one of the main actors in this real crime against the humanity, behind England and Portugal.

If, from the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade, voices were raised to protest against the fate reserved for black slaves, the general public saw them for a long time as “movable property” hardly different from beasts of burden. Slavery had been legalized under the Old Regime by the code black, work of Colbert who was minister of Louis XIV. This code, which governed the life and death of slaves in the colonies, giving their masters the right to whip, chain and mutilate them, remained the reference text for slavery legislation until 1848.

“A good soul in an all-black body”

The emancipation of African slaves in the French colonies was the result of three centuries of fighting. The best fighters against slavery were the slaves themselves. By their passive resistance going as far as suicide or abortion, by their actions of sabotage, their revolts and their flight (maroonage), they waged a constant battle against an inhuman system of servitude to the point of making it fragile and unviable. The fear of seeing the slave population rise up, as it has done on many occasions and often in a bloodbath (Santo Domingo 1791, Jamaica 1832…), was not unrelated to the acceleration of the liberation process in the nineteenth century.

At the same time, in the metropolises, the fight against slavery was waged by European abolitionists. Their precursors were found among the religious who broke with the official position of the Church, then among the French philosophers of the Enlightenment. The most illustrious men of the 18th century such as Montesquieu, Condorcet, Rousseau, Diderot, to name only the best known, denounced the horror of the slave trade, shaking its moral foundations through their writings. ” Those in question are so black, from the feet to the head; and their noses are so squashed that it is almost impossible to pity them. We cannot imagine that God, who is a very wise being, put a soul, especially a good soul, in an all black body. wrote Montesquieu in a passage from The Spirit of Laws (1748), making fun of the racial prejudices by which European settlers and slave traders justified slavery.

The condemnations also aimed at the economic relevance of the slavery enterprise from the pen of the thinkers of nascent liberalism. These pointed to the archaism of forced labour. For business circles, slavery was a brake on the growth of the new economy based on free labor and the development of the market. It was these ideas and themes that the anti-slavery societies that were set up on the eve of the French Revolution would help to make known and popularize, preparing the intellectual ground for the first abolition of slavery in 1794. Their main spokesperson was a certain Marquis de Mirabeau, whose speeches at the rostrum of the Constituent Assembly were feared by the settlers’ and shipowners’ lobby.

Towards emancipation

On August 4, 1794, the revolutionary Conventionnels, led by another relentless reformer, Abbé Grégoire, voted for the first abolition of slavery. It is a major date on the road to emancipation, even if the experience will be short-lived, with Bonaparte restoring the old order in 1802. This step back was very badly experienced by the former slaves. Having tasted freedom during the eight years that the first abolition lasted, the slaves were no longer satisfied with the servile life into which the decree of May 20, 1802 had plunged them again.

Moreover, Haiti, which was the largest French colony in the Caribbean, will not allow enslavement to be imposed, despite the dispatch by Paris of an expeditionary force of 35,000 men. Haiti’s independenceOr ” negritude stood up for the first time “, according to the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, had a huge echo in the imaginations of blacks and whites.

For the first time, a servile population tore themselves from their chains and founded a new state. The Haitian cause also had a romantic dimension thanks to the figure of the hero of Haitian independence, Toussaint Louverture, whose legend inspired poets and essayists, even in the metropolis.

After the fall of Napoleon (1815), the abolitionist current gradually resumed its growth. This resulted in the creation in 1834 of the French Society for the Abolition of Slavery (SFAE). The latter will become the main interlocutor of the French government on the question of the colonies. However, if the liberals in power in Paris were intellectually won over to anti-slavery theses, they wanted, like good men of order, to reconcile their ideal with the interests of the settlers and the shipowners who constituted a powerful lobby. It is in this context that England abolished slavery in these colonies in 1833 [en anglais], giving new impetus to demands for the emancipation of slaves in the French colonies. France seems to be behind in this area, having been the precursor of emancipation in 1794. But the government of Louis-Philippe, at the end of the race, did not dare to take the decisive turn, although the refusal to enfranchise seemed less and less defensible.

A slave liberator named Victor Schœlet go

Change of situation in 1843 with the seizure of power by radical Republicans within the SFAE. Victor Schœlcher, already notoriously committed to the abolitionist fight, was part of the movement’s new leadership team. It was under the impetus of the latter, who advocated the pure and simple eradication of slavery, that the SFAE radicalized its positions and campaigned to demand immediate abolition.

Born into a bourgeois family, the man had abandoned his father’s porcelain business to devote himself to philanthropic activities, following a trip to the Caribbean in the late 1820s. He had been horrified by the mistreatment inflicted on slaves. Having become a journalist and political activist on his return to Paris, he had taken over the fight against slavery after the death of Abbé Grégoire, by multiplying articles and works taking stock of the reality of the phenomenon in the French colonies. ” It is impossible to bring humanity into slavery. There is only one way to really improve the lot of the Negroes, it is to pronounce complete and immediate emancipation », he wrote in 1847, in the preamble of his voluminous History of slavery during these last two years which gathers all his articles.

When the February Revolution of 1848 broke out, Victor SchœIcher is called upon to sit in the provisional government of the nascent Second Republic. We know the rest of the story. The decree definitively abolishing slavery in France and in the French colonies that the new minister signed on April 27, 1848 was the culmination of a century of battles waged by abolitionists. Their names still adorn the wall of the library that Schœlcher built in Fort-de-France at the end of his life. The name of Toussaint louverture there rub shoulders with those of Condorcet, the Abbé Grégoire, the English abolitionist Wilber Force and a few others. Names that the 250,000 blacks that this historic decree gave access to full citizenship knew by heart.

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⁽¹⁾ Marcel Dorigny teaches in the history department of the University of Paris 8. His research focuses on the currents of French liberalism in the 18th century and in the French Revolution, mainly in colonial areas. He is the author of numerous books, including (with Bernard Gainot) The Society of Friends of the Blacks, 1788-1799. Contribution to the history of the abolition of slavery (UNESCO Publishing, Paris, 1998, 430 pages) and Atlas of slavery. Slave trade, colonial societies, abolition from antiquity to the present day (Editions Otherwise, Paris, 2006).

Article originally published on 04/27/2018.