Pruning the tree of liberty

Abstract

This study explores the Enlightenment’s intellectual heritage on race and slavery and how French Revolutionaries used these ideas to delay legislating rights for non-whites in the early years of the revolution. Revolutionaries braced themselves for the colonial question armed with a century’s worth of rationale that esteemed whites above blacks and associated black skin with brutality, laziness, lack of civilization, and servitude. The revolution forced the French to confront their entrenched, home-grown racism whose genesis in the French Enlightenment was validated through eighteenth-century French legislation and ultimately the revolution’s denial of non-whites from the new French family. Only by linking the intellectual and political histories of Enlightenment and Revolution can we begin to determine why revolutionaries failed to legislate freedom for non-whites until the post-1790s revolts in Saint Domingue forced racial equality in 1792 and the abolition of slavery in 1794.