L' ouvrage apporte un éclairage neuf sur le processus qui aboutit à l'abolition de l'esclavage décrétée par le Gouvernement provisoire de la République le 27 Avril 1848: cette seconde abolition, définitive cette fois, n'a pas été l' oeuvre d'un seul homme, Schoelcher, mais bien au contraire le fruit de la lutte collective d'un courant politique et intellectuel incarné depuis 1834 par la Société Française pour l'Abolition de l'Esclavage (dont les membres les plus actifs étaient des libéraux illustres comme Tocqueville, de Remusat, Lamartine, de Broglie ou des républicains renommés tels Ledru Rollin, Garnier-Pages, Schoelcher).

The abolition of slavery and similar institutions of servitude was an important global experience of the nineteenth century. Considering how tightly bonded into each local society and economy were these institutions, why and how did people decide to abolish them? This collection of essays examines the ways this globally shared experience appeared and developed. Chapters cover a variety of different settings, from West Africa to East Asia, the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean, with close consideration of the British, French and Dutch colonial contexts, as well as internal developments in Russia and Japan. What part of the abolition decision was due to international pressure, and what part due to local factors? Furthermore, this collection does not solely focus on the moment of formal abolition, but looks hard at the aftermath of abolition, and also at the ways abolition was commemorated and remembered in later years. This book complicates the conventional story that global abilition was essentially a British moralizing effort, “among the three or four perfectly virtuous pages comprised in the history of nations”. Using comparison and connection, this book tells a story of dynamic encounters between local and global contexts, of which the local efforts of British abolition campaigns were a part. Looking at abolitions as a globally shared experience provides an important perspective, not only to the field of slavery and abolition studies, but also the field of global or world history.

This book provides a detailed study of French anti-slavery forces in the nineteenth century.

The French slave trade forced more than one million Africans across the Atlantic to the islands of the Caribbean. It enabled France to establish Saint-Domingue, the single richest colony on earth, and it connected France, Africa, and the Caribbean permanently. Yet the impact of the slave trade on the cultures of France and its colonies has received surprisingly little attention. Until recently, France had not publicly acknowledged its history as a major slave-trading power. The distinguished scholar Christopher L. Miller proposes a thorough assessment of the French slave trade and its cultural ramifications, in a broad, circum-Atlantic inquiry. This magisterial work is the first comprehensive examination of the French Atlantic slave trade and its consequences as represented in the history, literature, and film of France and its former colonies in Africa and the Caribbean. Miller offers a historical introduction to the cultural and economic dynamics of the French slave trade, and he shows how Enlightenment thinkers such as Montesquieu and Voltaire mused about the enslavement of Africans, while Rousseau ignored it. He follows the twists and turns of attitude regarding the slave trade through the works of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century French writers, including Olympe de Gouges, Madame de Staël, Madame de Duras, Prosper Mérimée, and Eugène Sue. For these authors, the slave trade was variously an object of sentiment, a moral conundrum, or an entertaining high-seas “adventure.” Turning to twentieth-century literature and film, Miller describes how artists from Africa and the Caribbean—including the writers Aimé Césaire, Maryse Condé, and Edouard Glissant, and the filmmakers Ousmane Sembene, Guy Deslauriers, and Roger Gnoan M’Bala—have confronted the aftermath of France’s slave trade, attempting to bridge the gaps between silence and disclosure, forgetfulness and memory.

Pour parvenir à l'abolition de l'esclavage, le Journal de la Société de la Morale chrétienne publie les expériences et les témoignages venus des colonies françaises qui s'opposent au lobby des planteurs et révèle le rôle joué par cette Société, à l'origine directe de la Société française pour l'abolition de l'esclavage, fondée en 1834 après le vote du Bill anglais.