Racial Equality, Slavery, and Colonial Secession during the Constituent Assembly
1989; Oxford University Press; Volume: 94; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/1906352
ISSN1937-5239
Autores Tópico(s)American Constitutional Law and Politics
ResumoTHE COLONIAL QUESTION IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION involved three broad issues: self-government for France's overseas possessions, civil rights for their free colored populations, and the abolition of the slave trade and slavery itself. This article is primarily concerned with the pursuit in France of racial equality and slave emancipation, but it is difficult to understand that effort without reference to developments in the colonies, as well as to the contemporary debate about the limits of metropolitan control and the threat of white secessionism within the empire. ' Indeed, one of the chief interests of the colonial question lies in the interaction of its three component issues and the complex counterpoint that developed between events in Europe and the Caribbean. Until recently, the colonial question has received remarkably little attention from scholars of the French Revolution. As Mitchell Garrett observed in 1916, historians have been less interested in French attitudes toward the colonies during the revolutionary period than in the colonies themselves.2 The abolition of slavery in 1794, surely one of the most radical acts of the entire revolution, gets no mention in the classic studies of Jules Michelet, Jean Jaures, Albert Mathiez, and Albert Soboul, nor in the recent histories of George Rude, D. M. G. Sutherland, and Simon Schama.3 Matters of empire, race, and slavery fail to appear in the documentary collections of J. M. Roberts and John Hardman, or in such different works as those of Peter Kropotkin, Pierre Gaxotte, and (barring a misleading half-sentence) Alexis de Tocqueville.4 Even
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