Racism in Post-Revolutionary France:

The French Revolution of 1789 marked an inflection point in the attitudes towards race and slavery in France. For more than a century before the revolution, slavery was not legal in continental France, while an increasing number of African slaves became essential for agricultural production in the French West Indies. The revolution, with its slogan “Liberté. Equalité. Fraternité.”, should have automatically freed the slaves and made them citizens, along with the previously freed blacks and mulattos. On the contrary, during the century that followed, French attitudes towards race and the colonized hardened into brutal exploitation. The progressive experiments at constitution building at home had one feature in common: all enforced a separate set of exploitative laws and policies on the colonies. By contrast, the monarchy and even Napoleon, with his famous Code, considered all the people except slaves, as equal subjects, no matter where they lived. Physical slavery was finally abolished in 1848, but this did not stop the growing economic and mental slavery of the colonized people in the Caribbean, Africa and the Far East. Even today the citizens of the countries that were previously colonies are paying the price of the mental slavery to Europe that developed during the colonial period.

Before the Revolution, Legally, “There are no slaves in France”

During the seventeenth century, as France developed its colonies in the West Indies, particularly Martinique, Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue, it faced a shortage of laborers. Very few of the original inhabitants, the Caribs and the Arawaks, had survived the encounter with the Europeans, and farmers from France could not get acclimatized to the hot weather and were easily sickened by tropical diseases. To resolve this problem, slaves were brought from Africa to work on the farms. As their numbers grew, the legal basis of slavery in the colonies was decreed in the Code Noir (1685). This law applied only to the colonies in the Americas, and “in the early years of French colonial slavery, at least, the king, his ministers and the parlementaires all cooperated to uphold the tradition of France as a land free of slaves”[i]. As the colonies grew however, and more and more returnees or visitors to France brought their slaves with them, there was pressure from the slave-owners to change this viewpoint, whilst others attempted to control the growing black population at home.

The Edict of October 1716 set conditions whereby slave owners could bring their slaves to France without fear of their being set free, with restrictions on the purpose and maximum duration of the visit. Instead of the previous appeals to “customary practice” in order to free slaves who had been brought to French soil, this provided the first statutory basis for slaves to claim their freedom[ii]. As the Edict was not registered by the parlement of Paris, it was used to argue that slaves were free in France. In case the courts did recognize the edict, lawyers argued that violation of the conditions regarding registration of the slaves, or the purpose of the trip and its duration, merited freeing the slaves. The courts under the jurisdiction of the parlement of Paris used this tactic to grant freedom to most of the slaves who applied for it.

In 1738, as increased numbers of slaves were being brought to France, the edict was reinforced but once again it was not registered by the parlement. However there were now two groups that wanted restrictions on the travel of slaves to the mainland. Firstly, colonial administrators did not favor the return of slaves who had been to France as they were thought to be troublemakers. Whether they returned as slaves or were freed, their experiences on the continent opened them to the possibilities of freedom, and the stories they told their fellow slaves only increased the general discontent. Secondly, some administrators on the mainland were disturbed over perceived threats to racial purity and exaggerated fears that whites were being outnumbered by blacks, even though they formed a tiny fraction of the population. This was the beginning of the use of race rather than status, “free” or “slave”, in the legal controls.
On August 8 1777 there was major change in legislation that was based on skin color alone, since “the government is intent to cleanse France of blacks”[iii]. This law prohibited the importation of blacks into France but did not disturb the status of those already there. It also attempted to stop the intermingling of blood, but a proposed article against interracial marriage was opposed by the church and didn’t survive the draft stage.

With the development of the liberation philosophy, Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu and de Pansey all wrote against slavery. Especially de Pansey, who castigated Christianity for creating and maintaining rather than removing slavery, and wanted to extend the freedom of the slaves in France to the colonies and linked anti-despotism to anti-slavery[iv]. However, while the theoreticians of the coming revolution were to use slavery as one of the examples to argue for freedom from the monarchy, the post-revolutionary regimes were too dependent on the production of the colonies, to completely free the slaves.

Racism Develops

As the number of freed slaves increased both in the colonies and France, race started to become an important characteristic: not just between whites and blacks, but even amongst the “blacks” from the other colonies such as India[v]. Laws based on race rather than status, started emerging, ushering in a trend of differentiating between humans based on race.

There was a progressive redefinition of the meaning of race that started in the seventeenth century. Initially associated with lineage and the concept of nobility, race transcended the inherited biological character to posit that diet, education and “placing the individual in a family with a long history of noble deeds”[vi] counted to develop a person’s race. In 1684, Bernier proposed to divide all of humankind into mostly four or five species or races of men: the Europeans (which included not just whites, but also people of the Mediterranean, Arabia, Persia, India, Siam and even Native Americans), African, Asians (China and Japan) and the Samoeds of Lapland. This equation of race and species ignoring skin color changed in the late eighteenth century: from that time race was synonymous with skin color.

For example, in the post-revolutionary battle for supremacy over the most important French colonial possession, Saint-Domingue, the many re-alignments between the grand blancs, (the white farm owning aristocracy), the petits blancs (bourgeois whites who were traders and artisans), the mixed race mulattos, and the slaves who had freed themselves, were based as much on race as they were on their republican or monarchial political views. The racism of the petits blancs was typical: ”This was the type for whom race prejudice was more important than even the possession of slaves, of which they had few. The distinction between a white man and a man of color was for them fundamental. It was their all. In defense of it they would bring down the whole of their world”[vii].

The question whether the differences between men were differences of race or of species was strongly debated in the nineteenth century. According to Blanckaert, one school of thought held that “species is defined not in the outward resemblance of forms, but on the continuing fecundity of the métis”, i.e. the mixtures between the purported species. If intermixtures survived and were themselves able to propagate, then they were part of the same species, and any outward difference was that of race. This was no value-neutral scientific debate: it formed the basis of arguments for and against miscegenation, as well as the treatment of the mulattos.
Apart from experiments on animals and plants, selected studies were made of mixed race families. Many concluded that “regeneration of the human species, or the return of all the colored races to the white type … was by means of perpetual cross breeding of the métis with the primordial, now European, white race”. Thus even those who supported miscegenation did it for a racist reason[viii]. This supremacist ideology was reinforced by Gobineau who in 1853 said that groups that remained the most pure enjoyed a relative superiority, although there were others like Paul Broca whose participation in the Republican clubs of 1848 led him to argue against this position.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the division of mankind on the basis of skin color and the supremacy of white skin triumphed. Not only did the whites believe in their natural superiority, but they used it to justify colonialism. In the colonies like the French West Indies, where there had been significant mixing of the races, social and economic advancement was seen in marrying someone lighter skinned: “marrying up” was transformed into “marrying white”. This was natural in a society where white colonists were at the top of the economic pyramid[ix], and led to the development of an inferiority complex about language, culture and customs that were not “white”.

From Adventurers to Economic Exploitation: Bourgeois Colonialism

In the years after Columbus’s landfall in the Caribbean, Spain, Portugal, Britain, France and later the Netherlands, after overcoming Spanish domination, competed with one another to exploit the newly discovered lands in the Americas. While there was much debate for and against the pursuit of “God and Gold”, and much dissension between the powers, each pursued the expansion of their colonies[x]. The adventurers who had been looking for quick riches were supplanted by settlers who took over the land from the natives and set up farms. The European powers would eventually use the colonies as sources of raw materials and, in some cases, markets for their industrial products. Britain, starting its Industrial Revolution before the continent, was the leader in this.

The revolutionary changes in France after 1789 reinforced this expansion of the bourgeois interests. For example, even though slavery was abolished in 1794 by the Assembly, Napoleon later capitulated to the commercial interests and reinstated slavery in 1802. This prompted the final stage of the insurrection that led to the freedom of the colony of Saint-Domingue and establishment of Haiti. The restoration of 1815 brought back a monarchy that was influenced by the commercial interests; Louis Blanc characterized it aptly: ‘France was a nation of warriors doomed to impotence because it was governed by shopkeepers’[xi]. The 1830 revolution was once again hijacked by the bourgeoisie “the workers…had been badly disillusioned in 1830, having made a revolution then and let the bourgeoisie run off with the profits”[xii]. Only the 1848 revolution abolished slavery universally throughout France and its colonies. This attitude towards material success, even if it came at a moral cost, can be seen in the autobiography of Earnest Renan (1823-1892), which demonstrated a strong moral position, but didn’t condemn his distant relative, Monsieur Z who made his money in the slave trade[xiii]. Thus morals and principles were sacrificed to commercial interests, and exploitation justified by racism.
By the latter half of the nineteenth century, France was following in the footsteps of the English and commercial interests were very active. For example the city of Lyons, whilst far from any port, concerned itself with colonization and “confronted serious problems both in securing a dependable supply of raw silk and reliable markets for the finished products”[xiv]. Changing their focus from just sending missionaries to the Far East, the city established a local geographic society and created business undertakings to exploit the colonies. This support for colonization began in 1830 with an address to the King that stressed the value of setting up enterprises in Algeria. While Lyons had previously been trading with China for its silk business, it set up enterprises in the new colonies in Indo-China so that it could import silk and export its products. This is just an example of how important the colonies had become for the bourgeois.
Import and export of commodities at terms extremely favorable to France was not enough, and the colonial government established monopolies for the exploitation of populace through its addictions. In Indo-China “the opium monopoly constituted one of the most perfect administrative organizations of the colony, it is indeed the only indirect tax which functions well and which causes the administration no variations”. Laffey goes on to say that the “opium monopoly has always been the most important of the direct taxes. Its only real defect lay in its immorality and that addiction is spreading to France”. Along with the liquor monopoly “it seems difficult to make the Annamite understand the benefit of civilization consists in selling him at a high cost a product of prime necessity” [xv]. Pagden quotes Benjamin Constant: “Commerce had not in any way altered the nature of humankind, since commerce and warfare are only two different means to achieve the same end, that of possessing that which is desired”.

Divergence of Laws and Policies between Home and Colony

The opium trade in Indo-China illustrated another aspect of colonization: having separate laws and policies at home and in the colonies, and denying the colonial subjects the constitutional rights granted at home. The French only developed this strategy in the post-Napoleonic period: during the monarchy, French colonies were considered a part of sovereign France, governed by the same laws and their inhabitants equal citizens, except for the slaves. For example, as Pagden points out, the 1664 charter of the Compagne des Indes decreed that all American Indians who converted to Christianity should be treated as French natives.

During the 1789 revolution, plantation and slave owners from Saint-Domingue claimed 18 seats in the Assembly, but Mirabeau turned fiercely on them: “You claim representation proportionate to the number of inhabitants. The free blacks are proprietors and tax-payers, and yet they have not been allowed to vote. And as for the slaves, either they are men or they are not; if the colonists consider them to be men, let them free them, and make them electors and eligible for seats; if the contrary is the case, have we in apportioning deputies according to the population of France, taken into considerations the number of our horses and our mules?”[xvi]. This illustrates that at that time the colonies were treated the same as any other part of France.
This principle of equality continued in the Code Napoleon and its application to the lands conquered in Europe: Napoleon’s goal was a greater France created by conquest with a single constitution and rule of law.

The British denied equal treatment to both the colonizers and the colonized. In North America the English settlers were denied the same status as the residents of Britain and did not have seats in Parliament, leading to the complaint of “no taxation without representation”. Edwin Burke observed that the “oriental despotism” practiced by Warren Hastings, the Governor General of Bengal, did not treat the colonized Indians as fellow subjects[xvii]. Later this exploitative model used by the British was applied by France in its nineteenth century colonies in Algeria, Africa and Indo-China leading to laws and official practices that would never be accepted back in France.

Civilization, Colonization and Culture

Mahatma Gandhi was once asked what he thought about western civilization. Famously, he answered: “I think it would be a good idea!”[xviii]. He would have agreed with Césaire who said: “what fundamentally is colonization? To agree on what it is not: neither evangelization, nor a philanthropic enterprise, nor a desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease and tyranny, nor a project undertaken for the greater glory of God, nor an attempt to extend the rule of law”[xix]. In fact, Césaire vehemently argues that colonization is the opposite of civilization. The brutal behavior and policies adopted in the colonies would leak back to the home country in due course, destroying all that western civilization had built. He goes further and equates the treatment of the colonized with that visited upon Europe by Hitler. Césaire sees Hitler as a natural progression of colonization, in that he “applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India and the blacks of Africa”[xx].

On the supposed modernization of the colonies by the colonizers he counters: “no one knows at what stage of material development the same countries would have been if Europe had not intervened”, giving the example of Japan which became a major power even though it was never colonized. It is not difficult to find at the present time numerous failed states, dictatorships and struggling economies amongst the ex-colonies of the European powers and wonder how much of this was caused by the aftermath of colonization.

The imposition of French language, religion and culture on the colonial subjects was mandatory, with French replacing the local language for official purposes. Even those who opposed slavery, such as the Abbé Gregoire, a delegate to the Assembly in 1789, did not respect the native or African cultures; his ideal was that all were assimilated into Catholicism. While skin color was not a source of difference to him, language, culture and religion were[xxi]. In the Antilles, the native patois language was discouraged, Paris was considered as the center of all culture and any higher education had to be garnered only by travelling to the French capital. In Vietnam, the written script was replaced by the Latin alphabet, making centuries of literature unavailable to future generations who would now be completely dependent on French literature. As Benjamin Constant pointed out: “earlier the conquerors expected the deputies of conquered nations to appear on their knees before them. Today it is man’s morale that they wish to prostrate”[xxii]. The colonized lost confidence not only in their culture but even in the color of their skin: the aspiration to be “white” is the legacy of colonialism. For example, Fanon describes the superior airs and behavior not only of the ones who had been to Paris and returned to Martinique, but even those who just booked their travel!

Thus we see that slavery was replaced by racism, glory-seeking kings and adventurers by the bourgeois seeking exploitative profits, and the rule of law by policies of subjugation. The revolution of 1789 indeed led to many changes in France and its interactions with other nations. The enlightened ideas of the eighteenth century that led to the revolution were supposed to liberate not just France, but the whole world. Instead they led to paradigms that enslaved the minds and destroyed the language, culture and religion of the colonized.

Works Cited

Blanckaert, Claude. “Of Monstrous Métis? Hybridity, Fear of Miscegenation, and Patriotism from Buffon to Broca.” Peabody Color 42-72.
Boulle, Pierre H. “Francois Bernier and the Origins of the Modern Concept of Race.” Peabody Color 11-27
Césaire, Aimé, Discourse on Colonialism, Trans. Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967
Hart, Jonathan. Contesting Empires. New York: Palmgrave Macmillan, 2005.
James, C L R. The Black Jacobins. New York: Random House, 1963.
Laffey, John. Imperialism and Ideology: An Historical Perspective. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2000.
Pagden, Anthony. “Fellow Citizens and Imperial Subjects: Conquest and Sovereignty in Europe’s Overseas Empires” 28-46 in History & Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History, Theorizing Empire. Ed. Philip Pomper, Volume 44 No 4, Dec 2005
Peabody, Sue. There are No Slaves in France: The political culture of race and slavery in the ancient regime. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996
---. The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
Renan, Earnest. The Memoirs of Earnest Renan. Trans. J. Lewis May. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1935.
Robertson, Priscilla. Revolutions of 1848: A Social History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952.Sepinwall, Alyssa Goldstein. “Eliminating Race, Eliminating Difference.” Peabody Color 28-

[i] Peabody No Slaves, pg 12
[ii] Peabody No Slaves, pg 17
[iii] Peabody No Slaves, pg 117
[iv] Peabody No Slaves, pg 105
[v] Peabody No Slaves, pg 68
[vi] Boulle, pg 12
[vii] James, pg 34
[viii] Blanckaert
[ix] Fanon, pg 43
[x] Hart, pg 12
[xi] Robertson, pg 16
[xii] Robertson, pg 32
[xiii] Renan, pg 79
[xiv] Laffey
[xv] Laffey, pg 37
[xvi] James, pg 60
[xvii] Pagden, pg 33
[xviii] http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gandhi
[xix] Césaire, pg 10
[xx] Césaire, pg 14
[xxi] Sepinwall, pg 28
[xxii] Pagden quoting Constant in “The Spirit of Conquest”, pg 77