Dark Side of the Light: Slavery and the French Enlightenment (review)

As John Conteh-Morgen points out in his introduction to this translation of the 1992 book Les Misères des Lumières: Sous la raison, l’outrage, Louis Sala-Molins has been a key figure in raising French public awareness of the dimensions and significance of France’s involvement in the slave trade and slavery, as well as the frequently less than “heroic” or “progressive” positions of Enlightenment thinkers on Afro-Atlantic slavery. Sala-Molins’ work has had a similar importance for many non-French scholars of France, including this reviewer, who over the last two decades have increasingly turned their attention to early modern French colonialism. In this sense, the translation of his work into English is long overdue, and Dark Side of the Light is a first step to be welcomed. It is also a questionable first step, however, for of his books treating French political and philosophical engagements with Atlantic slavery (all of which, given the intellectual environment in which they appeared, understandably contain elements of polemic), Dark Side of the Light is the least scholarly and most polemical, in form, content, and pointedness. The author is less concerned with interrogating the limits of Enlightenment thought on the subject than deflating the overly self-congratulatory, simplistic, and frequently misleading celebrations of the “liberatory” essence of the Enlightenment and French Revolution during the 1989 Bicentennial. He does so by underlining their “failure” to move towards immediate general emancipation (at least until the question was forced by enslaved uprisings and imperial warfare in the Caribbean). As such, re-reading this book over a decade after its initial appearance, and despite the fact that it contains provocative and insightful readings of important “Enlightened” texts, this reviewer was left with an overall sense of its datedness and the feeling that it tells us much more about debates surrounding French public history than its ostensible subject.

In the translator’s introduction, Conteh-Morgen ably situates Dark Side of the Light in those debates. He also examines the affinities between Sala-Molins’ approach and the broader intellectual current of postcolonialism, highlighting the fact that unlike some “postmodern” and “postcolonial” thinkers, Sala-Molins does not critique the “core values [of the Enlightenment] per se…but rather…[its] failure to extend these values to apply to all human beings at all times” (p. xv). Of equal utility for the uninitiated (or non-Francophone) reader, the translator revisits the arguments contained here in light of the Sala-Molins’ 1987 Le Code noir ou le calvaire de Canaan, whose contents the author presumed his readers to know.

Basically, Sala-Molins’ argument is that “the crucial test case for the Enlightenment is the slave trade and slavery” (p. 8) and that the philosophes and the French Revolutionaries failed this test. By not calling for and taking moves to implement immediate general emancipation before 1794, they failed to live up to the universal pretensions of their principles of justice, reason, and equality. As such, according to the author, “the Enlightenment…dabbles in the non-negotiable, cheapens what it adores, displays for auction on the steps of the temple that against which its anathema should be directed, upholds slavery even as it condemns it…extols submissiveness and yet glorifies revolt, crushes liberty at the same time it celebrates it” (p. 30).

Sala-Molins argues that this failure (or better, alleged “hypocrisy”) had two roots. First, the philosophes and revolutionaries sacrificed their principles for economic concerns, namely the prosperity of the plantation complex in France’s Caribbean and Indian Ocean colonies. For some, e.g., Condorcet, these were general physiocratic concerns with France’s welfare, while for others, e.g., Montesquieu, such general concerns were intertwined with personal investments in slavery and plantation-based trades. Second, and more interestingly, he claims that the Enlightenment’s linking of universal rights to being human was itself compromised by a flawed...