Introduction
Quobna Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Humbly Submitted to the Inhabitants of Great-Britain, among the most radical antislavery works published in the eighteenth century and the first comprehensive antislavery treatise authored by a black writer in the Western world, was originally published in London in 1787. An anonymous French translation with an extensive translator’s preface was published the following year, under the title Réflexions sur la traite et l’esclavage des Nègres, Traduite de l’Anglais, d’Ottobah Cugoano, afriquain, esclave à la Grenade et libre en Angleterre, by the printer and bookseller Jean-François Royez (1754?–1823).Footnote 1 We cannot be altogether certain who undertook the translation and printing of the Réflexions, but we believe there is a plausible case that Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, the Marquis de Condorcet (1743–94), may have been a primary agent in bringing Cugoano’s powerful jeremiad against slavery to the people of France. Indeed, he may himself have been the translator, perhaps with the help of his wife, Sophie de Grouchy. We consider the implications, for understanding both Condorcet’s thought and the French antislavery movement, of his possible role in this effort to make Cugoano’s remarkable treatise quickly available to the French public at a moment when the abolitionist cause was among Condorcet’s most cherished commitments.
The course of abolition in the French Empire was erratic and nonlinear. The most ardent French abolitionists arguably nurtured higher ambitions in 1788 than they would for the next several years. Soon the planter lobby would organize and persuade a majority of revolutionary legislators that the extraordinary importance of the Caribbean colonies to France’s economy meant that abolition was impracticable.Footnote 2 France’s major antislavery organization, the Société des amis des noirs, was launched in February of 1788 by the future Girondin leader Jacques Pierre Brissot de Warville, with a plan to transform French public opinion by publishing abolitionist texts, including translations of the latest works from Britain and America, “to procure for Blacks [aux Noirs] a greater number of readers, and therefore more partisans.”Footnote 3 Although the Société des amis des noirs’s publishing effort was short-lived, because of the political crisis that soon erupted, a flurry of abolitionist publications became available to the public between February and May of 1788.Footnote 4
The depredations of the Revolution leave the documentary record incomplete, but the Paris publication of Cugoano’s spirited indictment in 1788 makes it clear that a powerful actor in France on the eve of the Revolution invested significantly to introduce the voice of a formerly enslaved African into this ferment of debate. What’s more, the Société des amis des noirs continued to champion this remarkable text amid the increasing unlikelihood of achieving abolition at a time of social, political, and economic instability. In Brissot’s publication Le patriote françois in May 1790, the society des amis des noirs published their Seconde Adresse à l’Assemblée Nationale. In the face of strong headwinds, Petion and Brissot claim the right to argue their case in the public forum, the freedom to write against the crimes of the slave trade:
Legislators who have engraved the freedom to write in an immortal monument cannot command silence, especially from men of good will who write only to staunch tears and avert crimes. They cannot forbid us from proving that the trade and slavery are not only attacks on all rights but useless and fatal barbarities … The sacred mission embraced by the Société [des amis des noirs] would have forbidden us any kind of alarm, even under despotism: what must it be under a free constitution?
Following their signatures as president and secretary is a list of twenty-five books on the slave trade published in French since 1788. This list can usefully be read as an affirmation of battle, a declaration of the freedom to publish, an assertion of the moral necessity of voicing the criminal nature of a traffic that debases the nation. Among the assembly of authors, the lone black voice is that of Cugoano.Footnote 5
Condorcet was one of France’s most prominent abolitionists when the Réflexions was published in 1788. An early member of the Société des amis des noirs and one of its most active, he was elected its president in December and was one of the small number of people for whom abolition remained a central cause throughout the revolution.Footnote 6 In February 1789 he drafted a letter from the society to the local electors charged with sending deputies to the Estates General, urging them to instruct their deputies to pursue the abolition of both the trade and slavery, in the name of the “twenty nations and several million men” whose liberty and peace had been sacrificed to misconceived French interests.Footnote 7 He published abolitionist articles in newspapers between 1790 and 1793, urging the Assembly, for instance, not to forget the slaves as they debated granting political equality to free men of color in the colonies.Footnote 8
The clarity and vehemence of Condorcet’s antislavery convictions may be traced back to the 1770s, when he first wrote extensively on the evils of slavery in his “Remarques sur les Pensées de Pascal,” describing slavery as a public crime. It was a violation of natural right that could never be legitimated by positive law, and an offense against the most basic moral intuitions, tolerated only because racial prejudice “changes all our ideas.”Footnote 9 His most extensive abolitionist work, Réflexions sur l’esclavage des Nègres, was first published in 1781 under the ostentatiously pseudonymous persona of “Monsieur Schwartz,” an evangelical Swiss pastor. It was republished with minor changes in 1788, though we find no evidence in those changes of an encounter with Cugoano’s ideas.Footnote 10 (Both Condorcet texts are mentioned in the Cugoano translator’s preface, as we discuss below.) In the Schwartz Réflexions, Condorcet argued that immediate abolition was “the sole means of destroying slavery that conforms rigorously to the demands of justice.” But the work also proposed gradual abolition as a practical necessity, in part because the brutalization of slaves by the experience of enslavement made them temporarily incapable of exercising their natural rights: it would be dangerous to them and their fellow citizens if slaves were immediately freed and granted full legal rights.Footnote 11
Recent literature has been divided in its assessment of Condorcet’s abolitionism. Some scholars have stressed Condorcet’s uncompromising moral condemnation of slavery, a stance in keeping with his commitments to rights for women and religious minorities. For such scholars, the slow pace of abolition outlined in the Schwartz Réflexions represents a pragmatic concession to political realities.Footnote 12 Others have argued that Condorcet’s gradualism betrays deeper shortcomings, also apparent in the paternalist and Eurocentric vision of progress he outlined in his posthumous Sketch for a Historical Survey of the Progress of the Human Mind (Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain).Footnote 13
Laurent Dubois describes the argument that slavery’s brutality had rendered its victims unfit for immediate emancipation as a form of “Republican racism,” in which “an abolitionist version of the history of slavery became a vehicle for justifying continued racial exclusion.”Footnote 14 Condorcet’s “authoritarian social epistemology,” Elizabeth Anderson has argued, meant that he was incapable of imagining that the enslaved might have something to teach Europeans about justice.Footnote 15 Anderson, Dubois, and other critics are right to point to the troubling inconsistencies of the gradualist program in Condorcet’s Réflexions, particularly its willingness to consign the enslaved, during the transitional period, to the control and guidance of the white planters whom Condorcet condemned as morally depraved criminals.
Yet if Condorcet was indeed the primary agent responsible for publishing a translation of Cugoano’s book, as the work’s bookseller Royez claimed on several occasions, his abolitionism and his social epistemology appear in a new light. Cugoano called for the immediate abolition of slavery, flatly rejected the idea of indemnifying slaveholders, and entertained the idea of enslaving the enslavers as a form of punishment and restitution. Condorcet’s efforts to make Cugoano’s treatise available to the French public would indicate his eagerness to circulate ideas more radical than he was willing to avow under his own name.Footnote 16 They suggest his interest in placing such arguments, by a formerly enslaved African author who wrote from a particular position of moral authority, before the French public.
The publication of the translation tells us that Condorcet, or someone like him with the means and ability to do so, undertook to insert Cugoano’s testimony and beliefs into the rapidly changing arena of contestation over slavery in the French Empire. This was a world of argument about principle and policy of the highest possible stakes: one that was rapidly shifting, in part because of the astonishing transformations in France’s trade in African captives and in its plantation colonies during the 1780s. After the American Revolutionary War ended in 1783, the number of enslaved Africans disembarked in Saint-Domingue, France’s largest Antillean colony, rose from a prewar average of 10,000 per year to more than 24,000 in 1784. From 1784 to 1790, more than 220,000 enslaved Africans arrived in Saint-Domingue, nearly 40 percent of the transatlantic slave trade during that period.Footnote 17
French planters, including increasing numbers of absentee investors, “poured capital into the colony,” and they fiercely resisted the state’s modest efforts to rein in abuses that might provoke slave revolts.Footnote 18 The planters’ savagery in search of short-term profits was such that on average Africans died within eight years of their arrival.Footnote 19 After the American War, as Bernard Gainot has emphasized, “colonial affairs were no longer the preserve of the closed world of Versailles offices,” but “were scrutinized in public debate, which was fueled by a wave of memorandums and pamphlets, the establishment of sociétés de pensée, and an incipient independent press.”Footnote 20 Accordingly, the lack of a black voice in the debates was a glaring omission, one that was remedied by introducing Cugoano’s attack on the system of transatlantic slavery into the fray.
Cugoano’s Réflexions as an intervention in French antislavery debates
Nothing like Cugoano’s text had existed before.Footnote 21 Cugoano was the first formerly enslaved sub-Saharan African to add to the story of his captivity an extensive, fully fledged indictment in a European language of the system and the culture that had enslaved him. Unlike other books by African authors in the eighteenth century, Thoughts and Sentiments is not an autobiography. After a brief account of Cugoano’s enslavement and emancipation, the book elaborates arguments against racism and slavery on the basis of Scripture, natural law, and English law, presenting a program of immediate abolition, national repentance, and restitution for the evils of slavery. Perhaps the most radical feature of Cugoano’s argument in its political context was his demand for immediate abolition. He called for the “total abolition, and an universal emancipation of slaves, and the enfranchisement of all the Black People employed in the culture of the Colonies, taking place as it ought to do, and without any hesitation, or delay for a moment, even though it might have some seeming appearance of loss either to government or to individuals.”Footnote 22
Cugoano offered his plan for immediate abolition in the context of an argument that the British nation, collectively guilty of the crime of slavery, must undertake a comprehensive reparation of relations with the enslaved people of the British colonies and the political entities of Africa that had been devastated by the triangular trade. While insisting that the evil of slavery was irreparable, he wrote movingly of the need to make “a just commutation for what cannot be fully restored, in order to make restoration, as far as could be, for the injuries already done.” He called on the nation to carry out a collective reckoning with its participation in the crime of slavery: a “universal reformation and national repentance.”Footnote 23 This national awakening should lead the British to transform not only their plantation colonies, but also their entire international policy.
Cugoano’s remarkable text seems to have disappeared almost without a trace in Britain after its publication. Other than the publisher’s prospectus, not a single advertisement or book notice is known to exist, and no contemporary review made its way into print. The book made no appearance whatever in the public press.Footnote 24 It appears that Cugoano’s thoroughgoing attack on slavery, on the commercial trade that had enslaved him, and on the king, parliament, and culture that countenanced such moral enormities was too radical for the taste of the main English abolitionist group, the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (London). They chose neither to champion the volume, nor even so much as to mention it in any of their many publications.Footnote 25 Cugoano’s call for the immediate abolition of slavery—and not merely the slave trade—ran counter to the committee’s carefully calibrated strategy of winning the middle in Parliament by not being too extreme. His book’s fate was very different from the small number of earlier publications by formerly enslaved African authors, far more politically moderate, that had been published with the support of British philanthropists and with considerable public success.Footnote 26
Given how little uptake it seems to have had in England, it is striking that Cugoano’s book was quickly translated into French. Whoever chose to undertake this translation made a significant cultural and material investment in it. It was printed in two formats, a compact duodecimo printed on ordinary paper, and an octavo printed on fine paper (beau papier), in which the text is surrounded by unusually wide margins.Footnote 27 Most probably, the more workaday and less expensive duodecimo was aimed for sale to a broader audience of common readers, while the octavo was a deluxe issue intended for distribution to political elites and other public dignitaries. Printing on large, high-quality paper, though more costly, would have accorded the publication greater dignity and importance, and thus more attention.Footnote 28 A copy was almost certainly sent to the king by those responsible for publishing the French translation, as evidenced by the fine-paper copy bound in red morocco, bearing in gold the royal arms and cipher of Louis XVI and originally housed in the Bibliothèque royale, as demonstrated by the many stamps added to the text block documenting its provenance. In the Schwartz Réflexions, Condorcet had argued that the “revolution” needed to bring about the abolition of slavery would require convincing both the sovereign and public opinion.Footnote 29 Notably, then, the dual printing strategy of the French edition of Cugoano’s text—in a cheaper edition for widespread distribution and an elite edition, including a copy sent to the king—realized a project that Condorcet had previously outlined.
The case for Condorcet as translator
Three forms of evidence—bibliographical, biographical, and textual—support the attribution of the translation to Condorcet. The main bibliographical evidence attesting to Condorcet’s responsibility for the translation of Cugoano’s work appears in the book catalogues of the work’s printer–bookseller, Jean-François Royez, listing Condorcet as the translator, though only after the marquis’s death in 1794.Footnote 30 A one-page Royez catalogue from 1796–7, for instance, lists “Réflexions sur l’esclavage et les nègres, trad. de Cuagano [sic], Africain, par Condorcet. 24 sols. Le même, beau papier, in-8°.”Footnote 31 At the time Réflexions was published, Condorcet and Royez were working together on Condorcet’s edition of the Letters of M. Euler to a German Princess (1787–8).Footnote 32 Royez completed that mathematical project with the posthumous publication of Condorcet’s related work, Élémens du calcul des probabilités, in 1804–5. At that time, he again advertised Condorcet’s role in the Cugoano Réflexions.Footnote 33 It seems unlikely that Royez simply invented Condorcet’s connection to the Cugoano project, for he repeated it in multiple catalogues and did so during the lifetime of Condorcet’s widow, Sophie de Grouchy, who would have been in a position to object, had it been false.
In addition, a copy of the work in the University of Chicago Library has “par Condorcet” written in ink in an eighteenth-century hand on the title page.Footnote 34 If taken as independent pieces of evidence, the manuscript and publisher’s attributions powerfully reinforce one another. It is possible, of course, that the basis for the attribution in the Chicago copy was a Royez advertisement; if this were the case, it would at least indicate that a contemporary reader found the attribution to Condorcet convincing and worthy of note.Footnote 35
Second, biographical hints in the translator’s preface support our provisional attribution. The preface begins by stating that M “Piatoli,” “who lived for a long time in London and who particularly knew Ottobah Cugoano,” had sent the translator a note in Italian providing biographical background and testimony of Cugoano’s character, his “excellent morals,” and his piety.Footnote 36 Condorcet’s personal connections to Scipione Piattoli (1749–1809) comport with the translator’s invocation of this intermediary. The Florentine, a member of the Piarist order, came to know Condorcet in Paris in the late 1780s.Footnote 37 Notably, the translator’s preface identifies Piattoli as the author of the Italian treatise Saggio intorno al luogo del seppellire, published in French translation in 1778 as Essai sur les lieux et les dangers des sépultures, a work on public health that Condorcet had reviewed admiringly in the Mercure de France.Footnote 38 One of Condorcet’s correspondents later invoked Condorcet’s esteem for Piattoli and his fellow Florentine Filippo Mazzei,Footnote 39 who were both foreign members of the Amis des noirs.Footnote 40
Piattoli, a foreigner in England as he was in France, thus came from outside the circle of the London Committee, the group of businessmen who in their campaign for abolition of the slave trade had kept their distance from Cugoano and his radical text. Piattoli knew Cugoano personally, perhaps through Richard and Maria Cosway, the London painters for whom Cugoano worked as a servant from at least 1784 until 1791.Footnote 41 As Piattoli’s note to the French translator attests, he held Cugoano in high regard for his “fidelity, exactitude, and intelligence.”Footnote 42 It would make sense that, recognizing the book as an astonishing document, he chose to send it to his friend Condorcet—a conspicuous, published, and powerful advocate for the abolition of the slave trade—believing that Condorcet would find a sympathetic and compelling spirit in the words of Cugoano. Piattoli’s assurance in his letter to the future translator that the book had made the “greatest sensation in London” may indicate his willingness to stretch the truth in order to convey his own sense of the book’s importance, or it may be that in the Cosways’ circle the Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery had indeed made a splash and he was thus unaware of how modest its reception in London truly was.
The Piattoli–Condorcet association is deepened by the fact that in 1787–8 Condorcet and his wife, Sophie de Grouchy, were already collaborating with Piattoli’s close associate Mazzei on the publication of his Recherches historiques et politiques sur les États-Unis de l’Amérique septentrionale … par un citoyen de Virginie, which contained Condorcet’s own Lettres d’un Bourgeois de New-Heaven, as well as an antislavery chapter consisting largely of an extract from the Schwartz Réflexions.Footnote 43 Mazzei recalled in his memoirs that Grouchy had undertaken to improve the translation of his Italian manuscript on America and had drawn her husband into the project.Footnote 44
It is plausible, then, that Condorcet and Grouchy might have been involved with another 1788 translation circulating among the same figures, all of whom were particularly invested at this moment in the antislavery cause. Grouchy would soon become an accomplished translator of works from English. Given her intellectual partnership with Condorcet, and the fact that 1788 was a tremendously busy year for him, it is worth considering the possibility that the two collaborated on the Cugoano translation. The translator’s preface refers to “L’écrit dont je publie la traduction” (“The writing whose translation I publish”), wording that leaves open the possibility that the author of the preface was not the sole translator of the work. Grouchy and Condorcet had married in 1786, and by 1788, thanks to Condorcet’s appointment as inspecteur général des monnaies, they were installed in the Hôtel des monnaies (incidentally near Royez’s bookstore), where Grouchy kept a salon frequented by American and British visitors, including Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, whose work she would translate.Footnote 45 In 1790, she translated Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, publishing it in 1798 together with her own Letters on Sympathy.Footnote 46
Grouchy was the first woman to join the Société des amis des noirs when Condorcet presented her for membership on 23 June 1789.Footnote 47 There is also evidence that she continued to work with Condorcet on matters concerning slavery and the volatile situation in the French colonies. As Kathleen McCrudden Illert has shown, annotations in Grouchy’s hand suggest that she commented on a draft of Condorcet’s (written in 1791 and published in 1792) that concerned a battle in the National Assembly between the proslavery lobby and the Amis des noirs over the decree of 15 May 1791 extending limited rights to free blacks in Saint-Domingue.Footnote 48 She also wrote to Brissot on Condorcet’s behalf about that struggle, noting that Condorcet was sending the Amis des noirs a financial contribution, the “feeble tribute that his fortune permits him to offer at this moment, to liberty, humanity, and peace.”Footnote 49 Publishing the Cugoano translation required a financial as well as an intellectual investment; Condorcet was evidently contributing funds to the Amis des noirs’s activities and would likely have been in a position to subsidize the publication of Cugoano as well.
Third, there is suggestive textual evidence linking the Cugoano translation to Condorcet. The translator’s preface calls attention to a series of abolitionist French authors: “the author of the notes on Pascal’s Pensées,” Saint-Lambert, Raynal, Garat, Saint-Pierre, and “especially M Schwartz.”Footnote 50 Here Condorcet may be inserting himself into the translator’s preface with a sly wink, not once but twice. He was not only M Schwartz, but also the author of the passionately abolitionist note in his 1776 edition of Pascal’s Pensées discussed above.Footnote 51 Both references remind us that some of Condorcet’s own long-standing abolitionist beliefs were closely aligned with Cugoano’s, as we delineate below.
Further, many of the names listed in the translator’s preface also appear in a list of authors Condorcet included in his “Lettre à un marquis” (probably 1789), a response to a proslavery pamphlet by Pierre Victor Malouet.Footnote 52 There, Condorcet, writing as M Schwartz to a marquis, likely Lafayette, responded to Malouet’s insult that he suffered from an “inflammatory fever” with a list of authors with whom he said he shared a different maladie, the affliction of “philanthropy” (etymologically, the love of humankind): “Voltaire, l’abbé de Saint Pierre, Diderot, Rousseau, Helvetius, Saint-Lambert, [Bernardin] de Saint Pierre, l’abbé Raynal, Jefferson, Franklin, Smith, Garat, Dupont, &&&&, and even you, M le Marquis.”Footnote 53 Condorcet’s later list includes more authors, including some who were not consistently antislavery throughout their careers, but the appearance of all the names on the translator’s list—and in largely the same order—is noteworthy. Other echoes of word choice also suggest affinities between the preoccupations of Condorcet’s Réflexions sur l’esclavage des Nègres and those of the translator. Prefatory material in both books, for instance, represents these publications as works that combat the “insults” and “calumnies” against African slaves that the proslavery cause has been able to perpetrate.Footnote 54
Cugoano’s book offered access to an extended argument in multiple registers: philosophical, scriptural, legal, economic, moral, and political. The translator repeatedly draws attention to the intellectual achievement that Cugoano’s book represents, displaying his “piety and his knowledge” (“sa piété et ses connaissances”), and the “virtues and talents” (“des vertus et des talens”) that formerly enslaved Blacks could cultivate if they were “free and educated” (“libres et instruits”).Footnote 55 The varying levels on which Cugoano conducted his argument were ample proof against the prevailing idea of the intellectual incapacity of the native African fully to apprehend and apply the core truths upon which European civil society is based.
The translator even offers instances of critique to compare Cugoano favorably to Europeans. Conceding the author’s occasional infelicities of style and errors of judgment, the translator takes care to mention European authors who have been similarly verbose or religiously dogmatic, concluding, “Perhaps it is not dishonorable for an African, without teacher or model, to reason better than men who read Demosthenes, Aristotle, Cicero, Tacitus, etc. etc.”Footnote 56 In a note to the main text, the translator specifies his chief aim in publishing the translation as destroying “two prejudices: 1) the belief in the legitimacy of the slave trade [traite des Nègres]; 2) the charge of an incurable brutalization [abrutissement] that has been made against all Africans.”Footnote 57
Both misapprehensions correspond closely to Condorcet’s long-standing concerns. From his first recorded mention of enslaved Africans, in a 1773 letter to Benjamin Franklin, Condorcet had sought out evidence to dispel the claim that Africans were naturally inferior to Europeans.Footnote 58 And while in the Schwartz Réflexions Condorcet had written caustically that, “it cannot be denied that slaves have in general a great stupidity [grande stupidité],” he was stressing the profound injury that slavery inflicted on the capacities of the enslaved, thus insisting on their masters’ culpability for their condition.Footnote 59 Despite such debasing effects of enslavement, Condorcet asserted that Africans are not only inherently equal to Europeans, but are shown to advantage by the comparison to white colonists.Footnote 60 The trope of favorable comparison prominent in the translator’s preface is thus also consistent with Condorcet’s long-established beliefs.
One strand in the translator’s preface that might be considered at odds with Condorcet’s views is its appreciation for Cugoano’s religious convictions. The translator admires Cugoano’s piety, recommends the book to “all friends of humanity and of religion,” and argues that its readers will learn that if blacks were free and educated, “they would bow their heads under the salutary yoke of a religion of peace, benevolence, charity and moderation.”Footnote 61 It might be thought that Condorcet, as a philosophe and an ally of Voltairean anticlericalism, would have found Cugoano’s strongly scriptural argument entirely alien. The French version certainly trims some of the book’s most elaborate scriptural arguments, especially Cugoano’s extended refutation of the belief that the Bible marks Africans out for slavery, whether through God’s mark on Cain (Genesis 4:1–16), or through Noah’s curse of his son Ham and grandson Canaan (Genesis 9:20–27).Footnote 62
Yet Condorcet need not have agreed with all aspects of the work to consider it worthy of translation and publication, and even to highlight religious language showing that, properly understood, Europeans’ own religious convictions proscribed slavery. Further, there is a precedent in his adoption of an evangelical voice in his own work in the persona of “M Schwartz,” a “pastor of the holy Gospel.”Footnote 63 As David Williams has observed, Pasteur Schwartz enabled Condorcet “to inject a slight note of protestant evangelicalism into his attack on slavery, a central feature of English abolitionism,” though one less prominent in French debates of the time.Footnote 64
Thus, while we cannot yet definitively prove that Condorcet was the motive force behind this translation, we believe that the available evidence supports our provisional attribution to him. Further, Condorcet’s own antislavery convictions both before and during the Revolution make it plausible and consequential that he might well have undertaken this translation and publication in 1788.
Intellectual affinities between Condorcet and Cugoano
Many of Cugoano’s arguments accord strongly with the abolitionist positions that Condorcet had articulated in his writings before 1788. Principal among these shared convictions were seven core beliefs. Immediate emancipation was the only truly just policy.Footnote 65 Emancipation was economically viable and even advantageous for the nation.Footnote 66 Enslavement is an act of theft, one vastly graver than other forms of that crime.Footnote 67 Arguments presenting African slaves as prisoners of war captured in tribal battles are not credible: rather, the European traders were causing African wars in order to generate a supply of slaves.Footnote 68 Because enslavement was a crime even when it was not recognized as such by the state, slaveholders had no property rights in those they purported to own, and no right to compensation if the state abolished slavery. On the contrary, it was the slaveholders who owed restitution to the emancipated slaves.Footnote 69 Finally, racial prejudice is essential to the operation and survival of such an obviously criminal system.Footnote 70 For all these arguments, Condorcet would have found corroboration of his own existing views in Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery.
Moreover, in his own Réflexions, Condorcet had given voice to his desire for intellectual connection with Africans in a dedicatory letter “aux Nègres esclaves,” whom he addressed as his friends and brothers, lamenting the obstacles that prevented him from communicating with them.Footnote 71 The translation’s title page calls attention to Cugoano’s authority as an “African, slave in Grenada and free in England,” and the editorial apparatus often refers to “the African author,” highlighting the novelty and significance of this authorial figure. Given what Condorcet had written about the enslavement of Africans over the previous decade and more, we may imagine that Cugoano’s book would have struck him as the fulfilment of a great desire: that an African who had been enslaved, and then became fluent in the Christian religion and European law, would turn his education and experience to account by publishing a thoroughgoing refutation of slavery. The existence of Cugoano’s volume gave the lie to two falsehoods that, according to Condorcet, fundamentally compromised the possibility of the brotherhood of humanity: that slavery is a legitimate commercial undertaking that does not taint the society as a whole, and that the non-European races are inferior and hence incapable of being fellow citizens and dependable trading partners.
In certain key respects, Cugoano’s argument was far more radical than Condorcet’s, above all in its insistence on the immediate abolition of slavery and its call for far-reaching projects of reparation by slaveholders and slaveholding nations. Like most British and French abolitionists at the time, Condorcet maintained that practical considerations made it necessary to abolish slavery gradually. Under the plan he proposed in the M Schwartz volume, slavery would not be completely abolished for seventy years.Footnote 72 This cautious approach continued during the revolutionary period, when, like his associates in the Société des amis des noirs, he focused his efforts on the abolition of the slave trade, rather than of the institution of slavery itself.Footnote 73 Yet, by publishing Cugoano’s text, Condorcet would have been making available to the French public arguments in favor of immediate abolition, even if he was not prepared at the time to present them in his own name.
There are suggestions in the text that the translator did not shy from Cugoano’s more provocative arguments, but even accentuated them. Cugoano, for instance, condemned revenge as unchristian, an inappropriate arrogation of God’s power of punishment. But his arguments for the criminality of slavery and the duty of repentance and restitution led him to entertain a particularly explosive suggestion: that unrepentant former slaveholders could justly be held in enslavement by the community—put to work at tasks for the common benefit such as reclaiming waste land—in order to make some restitution to the injured and bring about their own reformation. Strikingly, it is this section that the French translation relegates to a footnote. The translator thus deftly brackets a contentious argument while also preserving it; indeed, the translator may be calling attention to the passage even while purporting to present it as a pericope of purely technical or historical interest.
Cugoano ended his book with a final prediction of the divine vengeance that would follow upon the nation’s failure to repair the evils of slavery. Cugoano’s English is ambiguous about what form that vengeance would take: he only hints at the possibility of retributive violence by the enslaved (“rend the mountains … cleave in pieces the rocks … smite the stoutest oaks in the forest”).Footnote 74 In contrast, the French translation, with some small but significant changes to the final sentences, inserts an explicit prediction of a slave uprising: “the good-naturedness of the Blacks will become an indomitable fury that will overturn everything” (“la bonhommie des Noirs deviendra une fureur indomptable qui renversera tout”).Footnote 75 The translator thus chooses to resolve the ambiguity of Cugoano’s prophecy in the most militant direction the text allows. Far from holding Cugoano’s book at arm’s length, as the London abolition society had done, the French abolitionist responsible for this translation appears to be embracing, even intensifying, its radicalism.
Potential doubts and objections
Why has this translation not been attributed by scholars to Condorcet before now? Cugoano and his book are not, to our knowledge, mentioned in Condorcet’s surviving papers and correspondence, nor is there any surviving direct correspondence with Piattoli. In the early nineteenth century, Antoine-Alexandre Barbier (1765–1825), then France’s leading bibliographer and the state’s chief librarian under the Directory and the Consulate, attributed the translation to two different and unrelated translators, though without justification. Tellingly, Barbier makes these attributions in entries that misspell Cugoano’s name or omit it altogether.Footnote 76 Yet scholars have accepted, without additional evidence, these attributions to either Antoine Diannyère (1762–1802) or Antoine-Gilbert Griffet de Labaume (1756–1805), even though neither was affiliated with the Amis des noirs.Footnote 77
The attribution of the translation to Diannyère appears for the first time in the second edition of Barbier (1824): “Cuyoano” is given as the author of this work.Footnote 78 Diannyère, a political economist and physician, was the author of the Notice sur la vie et les ouvrages de Condorcet (1795) and several works of political “arithmetic.”Footnote 79 It is not clear why Barbier attributed the translation of Cugoano’s work to Diannyère. He ascribes to Diannyère no other translations of English works into French, nor have we located any. (Barbier elsewhere wrongly attributed to Diannyère a translation into English of Condorcet’s “Déclaration des droits.”Footnote 80) Unlike Condorcet, who, as we have seen, was working with Royez in 1788, Diannyère published with other booksellers.Footnote 81
All editions of Barbier’s Dictionnaire des ouvrages anonymes et pseudonymes, beginning with the first in 1806, also include a listing for Réflexions sur l’abolition de la traite et de l’esclavage des Nègres, traduites de l’anglais, whose translation is attributed to Labaume; no 1788 work by this title exists, however, and it seems likely that this is an erroneous reference to the work by Cugoano.Footnote 82 Labaume seems in some respects a more fitting candidate for the translator of Cugoano than Diannyère. Unlike Diannyère, he was an accomplished translator from English and he worked regularly with Royez.Footnote 83
Yet Barbier himself gives reason both to doubt his attributions and to place some weight on the manuscript attribution of the translation to Condorcet in the University of Chicago’s copy of Réflexions.Footnote 84 In his 1822 preface to his work’s second edition, Barbier wrote that the first edition contained so many errors that he had been continually updating it since 1806, and that the second edition was less a revision than a new work altogether. He further observed that, of the two major sources for improved attributions, the first was manuscript notes found in individual copies of books: “nothing is more authentic than such articles: I pass up no occasion to procure them for myself, and they are to be met with very frequently in a city such as Paris, where book sales are so frequent.”Footnote 85
Barbier also collaborated with Sophie de Grouchy on the twenty-one-volume Oeuvres complètes de Condorcet between 1801 and 1804.Footnote 86 Their work together on that edition could have put him in a position to learn from Grouchy of Condorcet’s role in the Cugoano translation, so the fact that he did not attribute the translation to Condorcet represents a potentially significant gap in our evidence.Footnote 87 That said, it was not until after Grouchy’s death in 1822 that Barbier listed Cugoano’s work by name: as we noted above, the 1804 edition includes only a work with similar title but no author. Given the complexity of their work on the ambitious Oeuvres complètes of Condorcet, it is perhaps not surprising that this translation would not have arisen in their discussions of Condorcet’s copious body of manuscripts.Footnote 88
Conclusion
A full history of Condorcet’s abolitionist activities has yet to be written, and his possible engagement with the mind and writings of Quobna Ottabah Cugoano should figure in that history. Condorcet’s participation in making this unprecedented and uniquely radical text available to the French public and political leadership represents the possibility of a hitherto unacknowledged intervention in the slave trade debate by a major figure who was one of the most active abolitionists in the country at that moment. Any future discussion of Condorcet and the Amis des noirs would benefit from taking this intervention into account.
Like Cugoano’s English original, the French translation unfortunately seems to have enjoyed only limited circulation. The bookseller Jean-François Royez continued to advertise the work into the early years of the nineteenth century, suggesting that he or the book’s patron had anticipated far greater sales than the Réflexions actually had in 1788 and that a number of copies were available for sale as late as 1805.Footnote 89 We know that the prominent Saint-Domingue colon Moreau de Saint-Méry, one of the leaders of the proslavery lobby the Club Massiac, had a copy in his library.Footnote 90 And the abolitionist Abbé Grégoire wrote about Cugoano in his 1808 book De la littérature des nègres, where he stressed Cugoano’s belief that divine punishment would be visited on the nation for the crime of slavery.Footnote 91 But beyond these instances, there is little evidence of the circulation or readership of Cugoano’s book in France. Remarkably few copies remain: in addition to Moreau’s copy in the national archives, the Bibliothèque nationale holds two, including the copy from the Bibliothèque royale, and libraries at Avignon and Blois each hold a single copy. In March 2024, the Parisian antiquarian bookseller Rodolphe Chamonal advertised a large (octavo) copy for sale, describing it as “très rare.”Footnote 92 Copies in the US include those in the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, at the University of Chicago, and at Howard University. We have identified only a single copy in the UK, held by the Museum of London.Footnote 93
Why did the Réflexions sur la traite et l’esclavage des Nègres not secure widespread popular appeal in France? The reasons for the book’s failure to circulate widely appear to have been very different from the causes of the publishing fiasco of the Thoughts and Sentiments in England. Whereas it seems the book’s radicalism led the London abolition society to ignore it altogether, French abolitionists were apparently prepared to champion the book. Someone clearly made a serious investment in its translation and publication. And, as we mentioned earlier, in May 1790 the Société des amis des noirs listed the translation in Brissot’s journal Le patriote français among noteworthy abolitionist works in their collection available for consultation (“existent aux archives de la société des Amis des Noirs, et peuvent y être consultés”).Footnote 94
The profound disruption to public and private life occasioned by the Revolution and its aftermath may have been a contributing factor to slow sales of the Réflexions. The Société des amis des noirs’s ambitious project of publishing translations of English abolitionist works, which lay at the center of its agenda from its first meeting on 19 February 1788, was quickly eclipsed by political upheaval. Less than three months after its founding, the society voted to delay its publishing program: given the political impasse between the king and the Paris Parlement, “current circumstances absorbing all the public attention, in publishing translations of English works on the slave trade, we would risk not being read.”Footnote 95
The very different fate in England and France of another Afro-British author’s book helps us to understand the implications of the society’s aborted publishing program and the reading public’s shifting attention away from abolitionist works. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, by Cugoano’s friend and fellow leader of the abolitionist group the Sons of Africa, was published in London in 1789. In England, Equiano’s book, with its more conciliatory tone and gradualist approach to abolition, was embraced by the London Committee, supported by extensive subscriptions, and frequently republished. It went into nine English editions before Equiano’s death in 1797 and was translated into Dutch (1790), German (1792), and Russian (1794).Footnote 96 But Equiano’s book was published after the progress of the Revolution had interrupted the translation activities of the society, and it was not translated into French in the eighteenth century; indeed, no French edition was printed for nearly two hundred years.Footnote 97
The courses of abolition in France and Britain were also very different. The British abolitionists, earlier to organize, had a much more robust network of supporters, with antislavery societies in all the major cities, a vast project to gather evidence of slavery’s manifold abuses, and a powerfully orchestrated program to publish and distribute books and pamphlets denouncing slavery and the slave trade. Nonetheless, Britain first abolished the trade only in 1807, and slavery in 1833.Footnote 98 Slavery was initially abolished much earlier in the French Empire, on 4 February 1794, by the decree of 16 pluviôse, an II. The Convention’s vote to abolish slavery was not due to the simple triumph of republican or humanitarian argument, however. Rather, the pressure of slave uprisings in Saint-Domingue had led France’s commissioners in the colony, Léger-Félicité Sonthonax and Étienne Polverel, to order the abolition of slavery in a series of decrees in the summer of 1793.Footnote 99 This decision was belatedly ratified by the Convention’s February 1794 vote, a decision that Popkin has described as “impulsive.”Footnote 100
Yet the translation of Cugoano’s book stands as compelling evidence of something further that is important for understanding the course of abolition in France: the coexistence of multiple temporalities of abolition, of arguments for what was morally necessary—immediate emancipation—alongside plans for what was politically possible—abolition by stages. Even if their main agenda was a pragmatic program of gradualism, the French abolitionists showed themselves to be less reluctant than their British models to sponsor a radical call for immediate emancipation.Footnote 101 And they seized the opportunity for the immediate abolition of slavery when it presented itself.
The first French abolition was the product of a combination of rebellion by the enslaved and the action of elites. Because the French abolitionist movement was less deeply rooted in society than the British campaign, however, the decision was also less stable, and Napoleon did not encounter any generalized resistance when he reinstated slavery in 1802.Footnote 102 In Britain, the evolution of abolition was slower but more solidly anchored in the general populace. France’s elite antislavery lobby bore little resemblance to the extensive, regionally dispersed movement in Britain, and even less to the vast national project of repentance and restitution envisioned by Cugoano. For Cugoano’s program of immediate abolition was only one facet of his strategy for a morally appropriate response to European society’s complicity in slavery. He believed that the work of reparation and restitution would require engagement of the whole society over a long period. As the lone black voice in French abolitionist debates, Cuogano’s Réflexions offered a profound vision of the multigenerational work requisite for confronting the legacies of slavery. It should be remembered as part of the intellectual history of the French Enlightenment.
Acknowledgments
We owe particular debts of gratitude to Gabriel Darriulat, Kathleen McCrudden Illert, and Nicolas Rieucau for generously sharing their expertise. We thank three anonymous readers for Modern Intellectual History and Tracie Matysik for her stewardship of this article. For their questions and feedback on earlier drafts we are also grateful to David Armitage, Richard Bourke, Adom Getachew, Arthur Goldhammer, Mary Lewis, Antoine Lilti, Sankar Muthu, Emma Rothschild, Céline Spector, Lisa Wedeen, and Linda Zerilli, as well as to the organizers and audiences at Cambridge University, the Collège de France, Harvard University, Queen Mary University of London, and Sorbonne University, where earlier versions of this research were presented. We thank Clovis Gladstone of ARTFL for undertaking a digital comparison of Grouchy’s translation of Adam Smith with the Cugoano translation. We also thank Thierry Leclair of the Bibliothèque Abbé-Grégoire in Blois, Lluís Tembleque Terés of the Museum of London, librarians at Avignon Bibliothèques and the Bibliothèque nationale, and Rodolphe Chamonal for giving us the opportunity to examine his copy of Cugoano’s Réflexions.
Open access
