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Chapter 7 Benezet and the Development of the Antislavery Movement in France Anthony Benezet had a powerful influence on the leaders of the French antislavery movement. Following the lead of Abbé Henri-Baptiste Grégoire, French writers considered Benezet to be one of their own. Grégoire dedicated his Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Facilities, and Literature of Negroes ‘‘to all those men who have had the courage to lead the cause of the unhappy blacks and mulattoes, whether by the publication of their works, or by discussion in the national assemblies, &c.’’1 Grégoire did not list Benezet among the dozen Americans—such as Franklin and Rush—but with the roughly fifty Frenchmen. Here Benezet’s name is placed alongside those of the founders of the Société des Amis des Noirs, like Brissot, Condorcet , Lafayette, and the Abbé Raynal. In the text itself Grégoire argued that great men, such as Samuel Pufendorf , are often omitted by history. He added his own choice to the list: ‘‘And the good Quaker Benezet, born at St. Quentin, the friend of all men, the defender of the oppressed, who during his whole life, combated slavery by reason, religion and example.’’ He added, ‘‘His name is not mentioned by our compilers of dictionaries, but Benjamin Rush and a number of English and Americans, have at least repaired this omission.’’2 From the French perspective Benezet’s writings belonged to a growing body of littérature négrophile, literature written about Africa or the black presence in Europe. Among those works were Abbé Prévost’s Le Pour et contre (1733), Gabriel Mailhol’s Le Philosophe nègre (1764), Jean-François SaintLambert ’s Ziméo (1769), and Jean-François Butini’s Lettres africaines, ou Histoire de Phédima et d’Abensur (1771). In addition, French translations of such works as Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko came out between 1745 and 1799.3 Benezet ’s work thus fit into a larger pattern. A French edition of A Caution and a Warning to Great Britain appeared as early as 1767; a later work, A Short Account of That Part of Africa, Inhabited by the Negroes, was also published in Paris in 1767 and republished in 1788, the year of the founding of the Société des Amis des Noirs.4 The extent to which these works were read in France in their first years of publication remains unclear, but the textual evidence strongly suggests that such French authors as Raynal, Grégoire, and the encyclopédistes read them.5 The Antislavery Movement in France 169 The intellectual connection between Benezet and France began with Guillaume-Thomas Raynal’s Histoire philosophique et politique, des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes. Known as L’Histoire des deux Indes and initially published in 1770, the book gained Raynal a reputation both in France and abroad as a leading voice among antislavery intellectuals .6 Raynal’s comments on Quakers followed earlier French writings about them. Sue Peabody, a historian of France, tells us that the first French abolitionist, Henrion de Pansy, spoke of the role of some Pennsylvania Quakers in freeing their slaves.7 Voltaire, in his Letters on the Quakers (1733), Lettres philosophiques (1734), and Traité sur la tolérance (1763), praised the virtue and tolerance that guided Quaker attitudes against slavery .8 As we know, Voltaire had been an associate of Benezet’s father when they both lived in exile in England; he took English lessons at the same school that Anthony Benezet attended. Like Voltaire, in L’Histoire des deux Indes Raynal praised the Quakers for setting an example that he considered extraordinary in ‘‘the epoch of the history of the religions of humanity.’’ Raynal included the story of a Quaker, no doubt Benjamin Lay, who rose in meeting to deliver a powerful speech condemning slavery. Raynal most likely acquired this anecdote from a letter written by Benjamin Rush (August 30, 1769), later published in Ephémérides du citoyen.9 As Sue Peabody has demonstrated, African slavery created many ambiguities and uncertainties in France because of the ‘‘freedom principle,’’ which proclaimed that ‘‘there are no slaves in France’’ and that ‘‘a slave who sets foot on French soil becomes free.’’10 The legal situation of a slave in France itself was as confused as it would be in Britain after the Somerset case. Raynal illustrated the ambiguities: on the one hand he made a cry for...

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