First Abolition of Slavery by France
The French Convention abolished slavery in all the colonies on 4 February 1794, and Napoleon restored it eight years later. The decree was not the result of a philosophical argument in Paris. It ratified what enslaved people in Saint-Domingue had already achieved by rising in August 1791, burning the plantations of the richest colony in the world, and fighting the French, the Spanish and the British to a standstill. The commissioner Sonthonax had proclaimed emancipation in the north of the colony in August 1793 in order to recruit its former slaves against a British invasion and a Spanish-backed royalist force, and had done it without authority. Three deputies from Saint-Domingue — a white, a free man of colour and a formerly enslaved man, Jean-Baptiste Belley — arrived in Paris and were seated in the Convention, which then voted abolition without debate and to applause. The decree applied to all the colonies, and was implemented in Saint-Domingue and Guadeloupe and not at all in Martinique, which the British had taken, or in the Indian Ocean colonies, which refused it. Toussaint Louverture changed sides from Spain to France on the strength of it. Napoleon, under pressure from the colonial lobby and his Creole wife's circle, restored slavery by the law of 20 May 1802 and sent an army to enforce it, which lost Saint-Domingue and produced Haiti. France abolished it again in 1848, and paid compensation to the owners rather than the enslaved. The decree is nonetheless the first general abolition by any European state, twelve years before Britain ended the trade and forty before it ended slavery. That it was extorted by the enslaved rather than granted to them is the part the nineteenth century preferred to forget.
- Year: 1794 CE
- Category: Political
