Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (76 page)

The ideological basis of the Revolution’s écoles centrales, established in recently conquered Belgium and the Rhineland, as well as in France proper between 1794 and 1797, was the uncompromising secularism and scientific academicism of the Radical Enlightenment and in no way the populist egalitarianism Robespierre and the Montagne had urged. Following Condorcet’s concept, seconded by Lakanal, each department capital’s école central, in theory staffed by thirteen “professors,” was equipped with a public library, public botanical garden, a cabinet of natural history, and a laboratory for scientific experiments.
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Philosophy teaching in these schools was saturated in democratic republican ideology exhorting both teachers and students to demolish what government instructions called the “yoke of prejudice and fanaticism.” The output of schoolbooks supplied from Paris for this new sector formed a whole new dimension of publishing encouraged in particular by Condorcet’s ally François de Neufchâteau. It consisted of editions and abridgements of Buffon, Daubenton, Bonnet, Linnaeus, Rousseau, Mably, Raynal,
d’Alembert, and d’Holbach. D’Holbach’s
Politique naturelle
was purposely used in teaching social studies and politics throughout the system, including, for example, in the Mons école central set up in 1798.
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The importance assigned in these schools to the
Encyclopédie
, and to the ideas of Diderot, d’Holbach, Helvétius, and Condorcet, on the reciprocal interaction of all the various branches of human learning and science was striking.
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Often established in buildings formerly housing convents or monasteries, in Mons the old convent of the Ursulines, by late 1797 a majority of French departments had écoles centrales already operative, sixty-eight reportedly by June of that year. There were by then three of these institutions in Paris, although a total of five were planned for the capital. By 1802, the year in which Napoleon suppressed the entire system of écoles centrales as being too emphatically revolutionary, democratic, and secular in character, there were no less than ninety-five of these establishments functioning in places as diverse as Ajaccio, Cologne, Mainz, Maastricht, Antwerp, Liège, and Brussels, as well as in all the departmental capitals of France proper. Nothing more clearly revealed the Montagne’s defeat and the true face of the “real French Revolution.” The Revolution’s flagship achievement in the educational sphere, the écoles centrales were truly Condorcet’s posthumous revenge on the Montagne.

CHAPTER 15

Black Emancipation

“We are trying to save millions of men from ignominy and death,” wrote Condorcet in 1788, in a text condemning the slave trade, “to enlighten those in power about their true interests and restore to a whole section of the world the sacred rights given to them by nature.”
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The advent of black liberation in the Caribbean during the years 1788–94 confirms that la philosophie moderne was not only the primary shaping impulse of the French Revolution but the primary spur to black emancipation in the late eighteenth-century Caribbean world. The social revolution that ensued during the years 1792–97 was not merely concerned with abolishing slavery as such, like the Christian abolitionist movements in England and Pennsylvania, but formed a broader, more comprehensive emancipationist movement seeking to integrate the entire black population—“free blacks” and slaves—into society, legally, economically, educationally, and also politically.

The movement for black emancipation in its broad philosophique sense was thus unique to the French context, having no parallel in Britain or the United States. Offspring of the Radical Enlightenment, it emerged as a political factor for the first time in 1788–90. The organization the republican democrats founded to work toward black emancipation, the Société des Amis des Noirs was inaugurated in Paris on 19 February 1788. By early 1789, it had 141 signed-up members headed by Brissot, Clavière, Mirabeau, Condorcet, Carra, Lafayette, Bergasse, Grégoire, Pétion, Volney, Cerisier, and Raynal, though the latter soon broke with it.
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Besides this group there were several key advocates of black emancipation, notably the philosophe Antoine Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836), active in the National Assembly, who were not members of the Amis des Noirs.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man was a manifesto entirely incompatible with all ancien régime notions of social, racial, and religious
hierarchy, and of itself imparted a vigorous impulse to revolutionary esprit as a reforming force in all social contexts. The implications for women, religious minorities, the illegitimate, ethnic minorities, and homosexuals, as well as free blacks and black slaves, were bound to be far-reaching. The very first meeting of the Société des Amis des Noirs, after the Bastille’s fall on 23 August 1789, with Condorcet presiding, issued a public statement calling for an immediate end to the slave trade between Africa and the New World, and for existing slaves in the Americas to be treated better. The Société’s manifesto, stressing the implications of the Declaration of Rights, echoed widely in the French Caribbean and was reissued in Canada by the
Gazette de Montréal
, a paper edited by Fleury Mesplet (1734–94), a radical-minded pro-Revolution printer (originally from Lyon). Officially, there were then only around three hundred black slaves in Canada. But the French landowners there were already flatly against the ideas of the revolutionary philosophes, knowing these involved a thoroughgoing attack on privilege, noble status, and social hierarchy. The French Canadian clergy were equally hostile, seeing religion under threat. Landowners and clergy closed ranks with the British administration. Canada, the British authorities were assured, detested the principles of 1789 and would stand unshakably firm with Britain against the Revolution.
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From August 1789 ensued a fiercely contested, widely publicized transatlantic debate focused on the French National Assembly, with antiemancipationist and antiegalitarian arguments being assiduously promoted by the colonial and slaving commercial interest in Nantes and Bordeaux. The Société was accused of planning to disrupt the colonies and colonial trade. As yet, there could be no immediate end to slavery itself, responded Brissot, Condorcet, and the Société, because the slaves were not yet sufficiently “mature” to adjust to freedom and equality in an orderly fashion. But while the slaves had first to be prepared, abolition must be urged, justified, and planned at once to win over public opinion and create the conditions for emancipation.
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Ending slavery, they explained, was not just a matter of legal emancipation but of absorbing former slaves into society in a nonviolent, meaningful, and durable manner. Their resulting press campaign impacted powerfully through the pages of the republican papers, Brissot’s
Patriote française
, Mirabeau’s
Courrier
, the
Chronique de Paris
, Prudhomme’s
Révolutions de Paris,
and other papers. “Humanity demands, commands, that slavery be softened first and abolished soon,” explained the main paper reporting revolutionary developments to the French peasantry,
the
Feuille villageoise
, in January 1791. “But this great change, humanity also requires, must be carefully prepared to avoid civil war and safeguard France’s commerce.”
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Brissot and Condorcet agreed that France’s colonies were essential to the country’s overseas trade and must be preserved from chaos and economic ruin. Between 1770 and 1790, sugar, indigo, tobacco, coffee, and other cash crop exports from Saint-Domingue, Cayenne, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and the other French colonies rose to a value of 217 million livres, or nine million pounds sterling, approaching double the figure for Britain’s Caribbean exports (five million).
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The total area cultivated using slaves in the French colonies was now also considerably larger than the plantation area cultivated in the British Caribbean. Reflecting this expansion, the slave population of the French Caribbean colonies grew during these two decades from approximately 379,000 to 650,000. Meanwhile, answering to the high mortality rate, the slave trade, indispensable to maintaining levels of black labor in all the plantation economies, burgeoned. In 1790, only about half the slaves on Saint-Domingue were locally born “Creoles,” the remainder having been transported from Africa on the slave ships. To avoid devastating the colonies, the Société maintained, it needed to proceed in planned stages, publicizing the black cause first, then legally suppressing the slave trade, something that, of itself, would end the practicability of slavery as the legal-economic basis of Caribbean plantation agriculture. Abolishing the slave trade would render the slave population a rapidly shrinking, inadequate labor force while simultaneously forcing slave-owners to treat their surviving slaves better, and improving the status of poor “free blacks.” Only with these goals achieved could slavery itself be dismantled. Abolition, however, Brissot, Condorcet, Lanthenas, and their circle regularly stressed, would not be enough. The culminating phase was to educate and integrate both former slaves and those who were already legally free into society.
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The clashes in the revolutionary press and the National Assembly were fierce. Revolutionary propaganda was vigorously countered by the slaving interest and the Caribbean planters. The declarations issued by Condorcet, as the Société’s president, in December 1789, were answered by Caribbean planters claiming the Société’s ideals were impracticable and reckless, apt to plunge the colonies into fearful disruption, pillage, and strife. Initially, the democratic republicans made little concrete progress, as most deputies (some 15 percent of whom themselves owned properties in the colonies) were monarchists and modérés who
were in varying degrees hostile to the Société and its egalitarian aims. By March 1790, some aristocratic émigrés reportedly drew more satisfaction from the wrangling over black emancipation than virtually any other current quarrel of the Revolution. Should the democrats indeed attempt to emancipate the blacks, they would surely open up an unbridgeable rift in the National Assembly, causing the colonies to secede and Bordeaux and Nantes to revolt. The consequent civil war and collapse of the Revolution could be expected to mean the triumph of monarchy, colonial trade, and the landed interest in both France and the colonies.
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The General Revolution in the Caribbean thus began with a war of words, an international battle of values and concepts centering on Paris with both the press and the arts enlisted by the philosophe-révolutionnaires to help shift public perceptions. The author of a novel entitled
Le Nègre comme il y a peu de blancs
, judged “mediocre” in the
Chronique de Paris
in October 1789, was nevertheless praised for helping change the way Frenchmen viewed blacks, especially by restoring “their virtues” in white eyes and hence fostering “love and esteem” for them. These excellent aims, noted the
Chronique
, echoed what “des philosophes éloquens et sensibles” had continually written in defense of the blacks in recent decades.
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A play entitled
Les Esclaves (
reviewed in January 1790), which presented an imaginary conspiracy of blacks and Indians to expel the English from Barbados and emancipate all the non-whites together, was also pronounced “mediocre” literature but full of admirable ideas manifestly inspired by “Raynal” and the
Histoire philosophique
. The Paris stage, aided by freedom of the theater, could help propel “la réformation publique” and gradually weaken the defenders of the old order and “corruption.”
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But the opposing pro-planter, colonial lobby also won notable successes in the world of the arts, press, and the theater. In January 1790, Olympe de Gouges’s abolitionist drama,
Zamore et Mirza
, after three reasonably successful performances on 28 and 31 December 1789, and 2 January 1790, suddenly disappeared from the Comédie-Française’s repertoire. This play, originally written in 1784 but not staged until the Revolution, now renamed
L’Esclavage des nègres
, centers on two fugitive slaves condemned to death for murdering a tyrannical slave-owner. It was forced off the stage by shouting and audience disruption, assisted by the actors’ palpable reluctance to perform it, following a vigorous drive to discredit Gouges by the Club Massiac, a focus of monarchist sentiment and chief haven of procolonial money and influence.
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Disgusted by the intensity of conservative sentiment, this courageous female writer, who before any other French dramatist boldly presented slavery, divorce, and illegitimacy onstage, retorted by expressing her loathing of race prejudice and injustice in her terse
Réflexions sur les hommes nègres
, calling on France’s “philosophes bons et sensibles” to fight together to rescue the Revolution from the “destructive efforts of our common enemies.”
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