Les injustices révoltantes: Gustave de Beaumont and the Pre-history of Crimes Against Humanity

Forty years ago, Seymour Drescher argued persuasively that Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont drew throughout their public and intellectual careers on a mutual fund of research, notes, and conversations.¹ Beyond Tocqueville's undisputed superiority as thinker and writer, however, there remained important differences between them. If Tocqueville was the anthropologist of modern equality, Beaumont was the horrified observer of unjust inequality. His romantic and evocative style, noted Drescher, was often morally polarized: "black and white, lord and peasant, free man and slave, famine and opulence."² Moreover, Beaumont was sometimes a more faithful purveyor of facts and contemporary opinion.³

This essay focuses on Beaumont's distinctive concerns—his preoccupation with unjust inequalities and his more fact-bound accounts of them—as an entrée to the pre-history of "crimes against humanity."

Indeed, Beaumont's writings cluster around a set of cases often collected as instances of such crimes avant la lettre: systematic enslavement of Africans and attempts to expel or exterminate indigenous peoples.⁴ Beaumont uses the phrase "injustice révoltante" to characterize the fate of slaves and freedmen in the United States in his novel Marie. I use it in this essay to cover as well his analogous judgments of the English conduct toward the Irish and the American treatment of the Indians. The point is not to impose contemporary legal understandings anachronistically on Beaumont's texts. On the contrary, I wish to discover what the nineteenth-century civilized conscience found "shocking" without prejudging the cases. My essay has two aims. First, based on a close reading of Beaumont's major works—together with the manuscript sources in the Yale archives—I develop the model of shocking injustice implicit in his work: a pattern of conduct that crosses the moral border into unthinkable atrocity.⁵ Second, I argue that we should not too easily assume that this is entirely familiar territory. Since Beaumont wrote not only about America and Ireland, but also about Algeria, his work offers important clues about why the French imperialist project in North Africa, sometimes included by modern historians as an early instance of a crime against humanity, failed to shock. Beaumont, like most French liberals, remained steadfastly committed to the conquest and settlement of Algeria.

What, then, were the elements of government conduct that seemed to Beaumont so disturbing as to appear criminal? I find three: (1) the commission of "inhuman wrongs," an original act or set of actions shocking to the civilized Christian conscience, (2) the intensification of these wrongs by their reification in law, and (3) the creation of a divided society so polarized that any attempted solution was likely to provoke even worse injustices.

I - Inhuman Wrongs

According to Beaumont, enslavement, expulsion, and extermination of fellow humans on the basis of racial or national characteristics are acts that today would be called violations of jus cogens norms, that is, norms that are known and binding throughout humanity. For Beaumont, however, the standards of humanity are explicitly those acknowledged by "civilized" Christian peoples. His indictment of the Americans and English rests first on their prime facie violation of those norms

The dramatic interest of slavery and racism in the United States— in Beaumont's novel Marie and for the French more generally during this period—lies in the transparent contravention of America's identity as both a civilized democracy and a Christian nation. Before his journey of discovery, Ludovic, the main character in Marie, asks naively, "But why do not the American people, enlightened and religious, recoil in horror from an institution which offends the laws of nature, morality and humanity? Are not all men created equal?" (58) Ludovic objects to barbarous laws (lois barbares, contradicting civilized standards) and hateful prejudices (odieux préjugés, contradicting Christian charity) (74). Civilized standards are understood as the singular fruit of European social and cultural history, gradually instantiated in public law. Although the United States is a civilized country—it attracts Ludovic precisely because it is "new, yet civilized"—Americans partake of civilization only in...