On Feb. 4, 1794, the legislators of France’s revolutionary government passed a historic decree abolishing slavery in all its colonies and establishing that all men resident in the colonies, regardless of color, were full French citizens. Their decree made France the first country to end an institution that had been fundamental to the enterprise of European colonization for three centuries.
Historian Jeremy Popkin tells the dramatic story of how pressure from the enslaved populations of France’s colonies met the idealistic principles of the French revolutionaries in an extraordinary moment. When a colonial slave revolt threatened the survival of the revolution, France’s legislators did what America’s wouldn’t: They abolished slavery. The rise of Napoleon Bonaparte just five years later saw the Black populations of most French colonies forced back into slavery. But his first great military defeat was in 1804, as the former French colony Haiti became the second independent nation in the Americas and a beacon of hope to enslaved people everywhere.
Popkin’s new book, The First Emancipation: The Forgotten History of Abolition in Revolutionary France (Princeton University Press), is available for purchase.
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