When Parisian liberals spoke for Haiti: French anti-slavery discourses on Haiti under the Restoration, 1814–30

Abstract

Abstract This article examines French anti-slavery discourses on Haiti during the Restoration. Integrating anti-slavery struggle into the political contestation between ultra-royalists and liberals during the Restoration, this project investigates how the political imperative of oppositional liberals influenced their anti-slavery politics and induced them to vindicate Haiti. This article focuses on three questions about the role of Haiti in anti-slavery discourses. First, in what terms did the French abolitionists try to measure and advertise the results of this first abolition of slavery? Second, what does their championing of the perfectibility of Africans tell us about their ideas of race and color? And third, how did the birth of Haiti challenge the old colonial order and generate new ideas about the future of the French Empire? This article argues that those anti-slavery discourses vindicating Haiti were deeply ambivalent. Critiques of slavery, color prejudice, and colonialism were entangled with the assumptions of colonial discourses. They were also dominated by notions of the progress of history in which France occupied a privileged place by virtue of its superior civilization and Revolution.