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’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.
Lynn, I think Dan Gordon put it very well here. I agree entirely with you about the considerable merits of the article. I think it is an important contribution to scholarship. My reservations are entirely about the broader framing that she tried to put on the 1790 debates, claiming that they show the influence of colonial events on the overall development of the metropolitan revolution. To make that case, I think she would have needed to go beyond the debates themselves.
I wrote a comment above that Is a bit more in favor of David’s piece than yours. But I have to admit, I
Momentarily forgot that we were talking about an article, not a book. It sounds like this article packs a very strong scholarly and interpretive punch. The article also has a very good title! I will definitely read it soon. Nevertheless, it seems to me that David is not critiquing the article at the level you described. He’s discussing the meta-interpretive framework, or the effort to give the scholarly findings the biggest possible significance for the field. It seems to me you are interpreting it as more of an important but still incremental addition to our knowledge. Which is how I think David sees it too.
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.
Lynn, I think Dan Gordon put it very well here. I agree entirely with you about the considerable merits of the article. I think it is an important contribution to scholarship. My reservations are entirely about the broader framing that she tried to put on the 1790 debates, claiming that they show the influence of colonial events on the overall development of the metropolitan revolution. To make that case, I think she would have needed to go beyond the debates themselves.
I wrote a comment above that Is a bit more in favor of David’s piece than yours. But I have to admit, I
Momentarily forgot that we were talking about an article, not a book. It sounds like this article packs a very strong scholarly and interpretive punch. The article also has a very good title! I will definitely read it soon. Nevertheless, it seems to me that David is not critiquing the article at the level you described. He’s discussing the meta-interpretive framework, or the effort to give the scholarly findings the biggest possible significance for the field. It seems to me you are interpreting it as more of an important but still incremental addition to our knowledge. Which is how I think David sees it too.