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.
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.
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.