Professor Lauren Clay of Vanderbilt has written a fascinating article for the March, 2023 American Historical Review entitled “Liberty, Equality, Slavery: Debating the Slave Trade in Revolutionary France.” It follows the political contestation over the slave trade in France in late 1789 and early 1790, not just in France’s Constituent Assembly, but in pamphlets, newspapers, political clubs, and other venues. It brings to light a great deal of new material, and casts in sharp relief the Assembly’s decision, taken on March 8, 1790, to keep France’s colonies legally separate from the metropole, and not to “subject them to laws that may be incompatible with their local and specific practices”—most importantly on slavery and the slave trade (quoted on p. 93). Clay shows that the debate was much more extensive than previous scholars, who relied largely on parliamentary records, had realized. In her conclusion, Clay writes that “France’s regime of representative democracy and modern private property was brought into the world with a dark twin, described by Miranda Spieler as an extraconstitutional imperial domain in which the laws of metropolitan France did not apply, where slavery and the slave trade could continue to flourish” (p. 117). I could not agree more.
But Clay also makes another, different argument, and here I have some reservations – not surprisingly, because she takes issue with an essay I published in French Historical Studies nine years ago entitled “Questioning the Global Turn: The Case of the French Revolution.” As she writes in her introduction, studying the debates in question “allows us to interrogate the notion that during the French Revolution, colonial events and concerns, in the words of David A. Bell, ‘seem to have had relatively little impact on metropolitan developments’” (p. 92). In my essay, even while acknowledging how deeply a consideration of global history, and especially the histories of colonization and slavery, has altered our understanding of the French Revolution, I offered a word of caution. Just because we, today, rightly attach paramount importance to these issues does not mean that people in the eighteenth-century metropole necessarily did the same. It does not mean that events in the French colonies, including especially the massive revolt of the enslaved in Saint-Domingue that began in 1791, had an influence on the course of the metropolitan Revolution comparable to that of conflicts over religion, or subsistence, or the authority of the King, or feudal privilege, or the counter-revolution, to name just a few issues. As Clay’s quotation from my essay makes clear, I did not say that colonial events and concerns had no impact, or even little impact on the course of the revolution. I said they had relatively little impact, and there is a difference.
That article of mine has since drawn a fair degree of attention and criticism, including from Richard Drayton and David Motadel in The Journal of Global History, and from several French and Haitian Revolution historians in a special 2021 issue of French Historical Studies edited by Manuel Covo and Megan Maruschke. I responded to some of these last criticisms in a new essay of my own for H-France Salon.
For all my admiration for Lauren Clay’s meticulous and informative scholarship, I think her AHR essay suffers from something of the same problem as the works I criticized in 2014 and in 2021. This problem has to do with that little word “relatively,” and it is easily stated. Here is Clay’s final paragraph:
Moreover, the debates over the slave trade reaffirm that the political and legal history of the colonies cannot be isolated from that of the metropole. In their battle over human trafficking, the Friends of the Blacks and the business lobbyists not only strove to master the Revolution’s emergent political practices but also introduced new ones. The slave trade debates constituted an engine for political innovation, engaging a broad cast of nonelected political actors in the process of lawmaking. At a moment when the relationship between the governing and the governed was in flux, the tactics employed in this high-stakes contest—from using the Jacobin Club as a proxy for the assembly to the canvassing of votes to burying controversial matters in committee—left their mark on France’s developing political systems. They also revealed fault lines, such as frustration by provincial elites who wanted their voices heard in the capital, that would deepen in the years to come. In the meantime, commercial elites in cities such as La Rochelle, Le Havre, and Marseille celebrated victory in what they perceived as their first successful national political campaign (p. 118).
The issue is that Clay does not engage in the comparisons necessary to substantiate the claims advanced here, and to address my point about relative impact, and the extent to which colonial events had an appreciable influence on the overall course of the French Revolution. Was it really just the pro-and anti-slavery lobbies who were introducing “new” political practices in France in 1789-90? Were such practices coalescing around no other issues? Was it only the slave trade debates that “engage[d] a broad cast of nonelected political actors in the process of lawmaking”? What about debates about the royal veto, active and passive citizenship, the status of the Catholic Church, feudal privilege, the counter-revolution? How many contemporary observers actually credited these debates with transforming revolutionary politics in the way Clay describes, as opposed to simply treating them as one area of fervent contestation among many others? Clay notes that at least sixty pamphlets and books were published in French on the slave trade in 1789 and 1790 (p. 90n): an impressive number, but still a drop in the bucket compared to the thousands of publications on a huge variety of political topics in the same years. Without trying to weigh the debates on the slave trade against the many other debates taking place at the same time, it is impossible to judge how much they mattered to the course of events in the metropole.
The French Revolution was an event the likes of which the world had never seen. The degree of political turmoil and innovation was absolutely astonishing. It is not surprising that the Revolutionaries frequently spoke of time itself seeming to elongate, as they struggled to make sense of all the changes and conflicts that were happening so quickly. The flagrant contradiction between the universal promises of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and actual behavior with regard to enslaved people strikes us, rightly, today, as one of the Revolution’s most important aspects. But that does not mean that the Revolutionaries themselves saw it in this way. Some did. But many more remained oblivious, despite the importance of the colonies to France’s economic health. And while this distinction may not matter for our own overall judgments of the Revolution, it matters enormously for our interpretation of the course of events, for this was determined by what people at the time thought and understood.
It’s an important debate and I’m glad you have informed me about it. Maybe there is room here for comparison with America. I am just starting to read Kaminski’s Collection of documents on slavery during the revolution and founding. I suspect you could use a book like this to strengthen your argument. For example some of the state constitutions made gestures toward the abolition of the slave trade or slavery itself. The Quakers were considerable political force. Etc. Slavery was a much bigger issue.In any case, it seems to me that your opponent Is right to say that the debate about slavery during the French Revolution helps us understand the structure and limits of French revolutionary thought. And that you are right to say none of this means that the colonial context is essential for understandingWhere French revolutionary thought came from and what its structure was. This is pretty complicated stuff, however. Again, it’s a real service to give us a glimpse of the debate.
It's obvious that I am going to defend Lauren Clay but I'll do so anyway. I think it's a bit unfair to ask that she offer a comparison with all the other forms of political activism of the time. What she has done, in a compelling way, is to show, as you say, David, that focusing only on the Archives parlementaires, as crucial as they are, leaves out other forms of political discussion. We knew this but I don't think we knew in this detail how much the port/slave cities combined to fight off what they saw as a fatal threat to their livelihoods. I don't think anyone is ever going to describe the March 1790 action in quite the same way again after this landmark article.