French Anti-Slavery: The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in France, 1802–1848 by Lawrence C. Jennings (review)

HUMANITIES 257 to the use we can make of what Reisner has given us. (C.T. MCINTIRE) Lawrence C. Jennings. French Anti-Slavery: The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in France, 1802B1848 Cambridge University Press. x, 320. US $54.95 The enslavement of Africans from south of the Sahara desert and their sale for work on the plantations of the Americas and elsewhere has had a huge impact on world history since 1500. One central element in that unfolding story was the emergence of a critique leading on in the nineteenth century to legal abolition of the trade and of slavery. In 1794 France was the first great power to abolish colonial slavery, but Napoleon re-established it in 1802. Lawrence C. Jennings of the University of Ottawa is a leading authority on nineteenth-century French efforts to abolish slavery after Napoleon . He argues rightly that this second abolitionist movement has been neglected in the historical literature, and he provides a detailed investigation of the drawn-out prelude to the definitive eradication of French colonial slavery in 1848. In 1988 Jennings published a study of French reactions to British slave emancipation. In this volume he extends his investigations into the organizational and parliamentary politics in Paris prior to the 1848 abolition of slavery throughout the French colonies and protectorates. It is a story of indecisive politicians, of rivalries between intellectuals, and of provincial and colonial lobbies trying to delay the implementation of proposed legislation. Much of the encouragement and some financial assistance for the French abolitionists came from Britain, which had already implemented an end to slavery in the colonies. Jennings underlines the influence of King Louis-Philippe in steadfastly blocking the passage of abolition because he feared the costs of reparations and the disruption to the colonial economies. Jennings does not say much about the intellectual origins of the attitudes current in France towards the slaves. In the nineteenth century, the Enlightenment attitudes studied by Kaija Tiainen-Anttila in The Problem of Humanity: The Blacks in the European Enlightenment (1994) were about to undergo the huge revision of thinking about human diversity in the world which derived from evolutionary thought. In November 1844, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation was published anonymously in London (it was by Robert Chambers) and caused a sensation. James A. Secord has argued recently that Vestiges advanced the idea of human evolution in a popularized form that prepared the ground for the later reception of Charles Darwin=s On the Origin of Species. At the same time that British abolitionists were discussing with French colleagues the possibilities of social development in the French slave colonies, the whole existing paradigm of racial distinctions was being undermined. Many French abolition- 258 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 ists accepted that slavery could not be abruptly terminated in the colonies, since it was felt that the slaves would be incapable of dealing with freedom without a transitional period in which they were moralized and missionized . Some abolitionists were informed by abstract principles, while the colonists referred to their experiences of dealing with African slaves. Curiously the one abolitionist militant of African descent who was prominent in Paris, Cyrille Bissette, was distrusted by most of the abolitionist group. A contemporary engraving portrayed him with a light European complexion. Bissette was seen as an impulsive spendthrift and a liability by the genteel abolitionists. He called for immediate abolition, whereas many abolitionists were gradualists. Foreign and religious elements in the French abolitionist campaign were significant, and negative, factors. An English Quaker and some French Protestants were involved in the 1822 committee against the slave trade. The person identified as a Catholic theologian is certainly Juan Antonio Llorente, a former Spanish inquisitor who became a collaborator with the French at the time of the invasions of his country and subsequently lived for years in Paris during the Restoration, where he was the darling of the liberals. A recent book by Sheryl Kroen has shown how strong the anticlerical element was in political agitation against pious ultra-royalism. Abolitionism was resisted by Anglophobes and also by Catholic royalists hostile to Protestantism. Jennings has written a richly informative book about the pervasive conservatism...