Race, Slavery and
Enlightenment
French philosopher Tzevan Todorov (1939-)
If one makes the effort to get beyond historical contingencies and reconstruct an
‘ideal type’ of the Enlightenment, its ideology can be described, for a number of
reasons, as universalist and egalitarian—as far removed as possible from racialism. . .
. This opposition became very clear-cut in the course of the nineteenth century:
those who defended and promoted racialism ... were the self-declared enemies of
the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the ensuing democratic model of
government.’
The Enlightenment: the erasure of race or the
invention of « modern race »?
New conceptions of knowledge
: empiricism, observations,
experiments
The science of nature,
discovering natural laws
Classifications, taxonomies
Swedish Botanist and Zoologist
Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778)
A global context: the century of the slave trade
Africans embarked on slave ships
A global context
• Part of European Enlightenment- circulation of ideas (Scottish
Enlightenment, Aufklärung, Lumières)
• Distinction between the metropolis and the colonies
• European France: only around 10 000 people of color at the end of
the eighteenth century
• Colonies (French Caribbean, Louisiana and Quebec, Guyane, Coast of
Senegal, Mascarene Islands: around 800 000)
Race in old regime societies: « the purity of
blood »
• Greek heritage
• Christian monogenesis but biblical differentiation: the curse on Cham
• Limpieza de sangre, from Spain to Europe
• The noble lineage and aristocratic blood: Henri de Boulainvilliers,
Essays on French nobility, 1732
• In the colonies, the fear of miscegenation: differences between the
first Black Code (1685) and the Code of Louisiana (1724)
• The color prejudice: discriminatory laws against Free people of color
in the West Indies
Blacks in European France
Chevalier de Saint-Georges (17451799) Fencer and Musician
Mademoiselle de Clermont en Sultane
by Jean-Marc Nadier, 1733
Travel literature and ethnography
• Jean-Baptiste Labat, New Travels
to the American Islands, 1722
• Pierre François de Charleroix,
History of the Spanish Island or
of Saint Domingue, 1730-1731
• Abbé Prévost, General History of
Voyages, 1745-1747
One humankind?
Voltaire (1694-1778): antislavery
and polygenisis
Candide or the optimism (1759)
Buffon (1707-1788) and the climate theory: the
Degeneration thesis
A debate of the Enlightenment
• Montesquieu’s antislavery and climate’s theory in The Spirit of the
Laws, 1749
• David Hume and Racial hierarchy
• Emmanuel Kant and the Polygenesis theory
Anatomical explorations
Pierre Barrère, Anatomical
Observations, 1753
Claude-Nicolas Le Cat, Treaty on the
Color of the Human Skin, 1765.
The Black Albino Debate
Petrus Camper and the measurement of skulls
Johann-Friedrich Blumenbach(1752-1840)
and the Caucasian Skull
Slavery, Abolitionism and the American Revolution
• The Quaker Movement: Anthony Benezet
• African-Americans in the American Revolution
• A slaveholding Republic
• Abolitionists societies in Philadelphia, London and Paris: Thomas
Clarkson and Granville Sharp in England.
The attack on slavery
Raynal, Diderot and the History of Two Indies
Olympe de Gouge (1748-1793): the rights of
women and the rights of Blacks
• Anti-slavery play Zamore and Mirza or
the Happy Shipwreck, 1784
• Declaration of the rights of Woman
(1791)
Revolutions and the radicalization of racial
discourse
Moreau de Saint Mery (1750-1819): A Creole Enlightenment
The Haitian Revolution or the Enslaved
Enlightenment (1791-1804)?
Toussaint Louverture and the
rights of man.