When did slavery end?
Intellectual historian Zeev Sternhell makes the following observation:
“But it is above all the French Revolution that is overlooked. Slavery was in fact abolished by the French Revolution. The slaves, like the Jews, were liberated, and for the first time in history, all men living within the frontiers of a single country, France, were subject to the same laws and became free citizens with equal rights.”
That’s from page 46 of Sternhell’s The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition (Yale University Press, 2010).
The “first time in history” is striking. Anti-slavery societies had been founded during the Enlightenment in the United States, Great Britain, and France.
But, despite its many sins, the French Revolution should get major credit for being the first to eliminate this ugly, ugly practice. (Though other nations have an argument for priority credit.)
As with many revolutions, including even the American Revolution, the people who dominated the overthrow the old oppressors were not the same people who gained power in the aftermath. The Jacobins turned their hatred on other French revolutionaries who had been far more civic-minded than they were. Similarly, the Social Democrats led the overthrow of the Czar, and then the misnamed Bolsheviks overthrew the Social Democrats.
America’s counter-revolutionary coup was the US Constitution, which was far more monarchial than the Articles of Confederation.
Reply