French Emancipation

France incorporated slavery in all of its early modern overseas colonies, including Canada, and was the first nation-state in the world to issue a general emancipation act (see the separate Oxford Bibliographies articles on French Atlantic World, the Haitian Revolution, Emancipation, and Abolition of Slavery). In fact, France abolished slavery twice, in 1794 and in 1848, each time in the midst of revolutionary turmoil. Yet the historical forces that prompted these two legislative acts were distinct. The 1794 decree (16 Pluviôse, Year 2) by the Constituent Assembly in Paris—which succeeded two decades of antislavery activism in the British and American contexts, but tepid antislavery activism in France itself—was prompted by the unfolding colonial slave revolt, weak colonial control, and incursions by Britain and Spain in Saint-Domingue. However, the resultant 1794 decree was implemented in only Saint Domingue, Guadeloupe, and Guyana; it remained a dead letter in Martinique, Senegal, Réunion, Ile de France (Mauritius), and French India. Slavery was restored throughout the French empire in 1802, with the exception of Saint-Domingue, which claimed its independence as Haiti, the world’s first black republic, founded by former slaves and their descendants. Antislavery sentiment slowly returned under the Restoration and the early, liberal phase of the July Monarchy, but ran up against the organized colonial lobby, which countered most abolitionist initiatives led by a small, relatively weak coterie in Paris. The 1848 emancipation, organized by the fervent antislavery activist Victor Schoelcher in Paris, was one of the first, decisive steps of a new republican government after decades of procrastination by the July Monarchy; but unlike Britain and America, it was not sustained by a large, populist antislavery movement. In contrast to the robust historiography of antislavery and emancipation in the Anglo-Atlantic over the past three quarters of a century, the abolition of slavery and the lingering legacies of slave emancipation in the French-speaking world have attracted significant attention only relatively recently. However, the recent anniversaries of France’s two emancipations—in 1793–1794 and, following Napoleonic restoration of slavery in 1802, in 1848—have recently prompted more sustained attention, as has the bicentennial of the Haitian Revolution, now understood as the first decolonization movement to successfully expel a major European power and replace it with local rule by formerly colonized people. This article is organized chronologically, from the emergence of antislavery ideology in the 18th century, through the Revolution and the first emancipation, to the second and definitive abolition of 1848. A final section on Emancipation and Memory examines the contested representation of France’s history of slavery and emancipation in the recent past.