2 Doux commerce, commerce odieux The Commerce in Humans
The Rhetoric of Slavery
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. One believes himself the others’ master, and yet is more a slave than they. How did this change come about? I do not know.”1 With these now familiar lines, Jean-Jacques Rousseau opened his Du contrat social (Of the Social Contract) (1762) and introduced his powerful reconfiguration of the “principles of political right” and the bases of legitimate political authority. These principles he explicitly contrasted with the theories of Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and, by extension, the jurisprudence of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and Samuel Pufendorf (1632–94). According to Rousseau, these three “abettors of despotism” had grounded political authority in submission.2 Their theories had established the prevailing relationship between illegitimate governors and their subjects, which Rousseau famously cast as a form of slavery.
While this metaphoric use of slavery to describe a political relationship was central to the Social Contract, it was by no means exclusive to it. Rousseau’s influential treatise was but one example of a broader trend in eighteenth-century French writings on politics, in which we can note how slavery metaphors dominated the language of protest against unjust political rule. This rhetoric provided a powerful tool for conceptualising relations to absolute authority in France as despotism, the Frenchman’s “chains.”3 A systematic analysis of the uses of the metaphor of slavery to portray relations to despotic authority in broader contexts lies beyond the scope of this chapter. Yet a search of one of the largest available databases in the French language suggests a significant increase in the use of the term esclave in eighteenth-century writings across several genres.4
To be sure, the metaphor of political slavery was not new. In France, it derived from a rich heritage that can be traced through, for example, Henri comte de Boulainvilliers’s Histoire de l’ancien gouvernement de la France, avec les XIV lettres historiques sur les Parlements ou Etats-Généraux (1727), the anonymous Soupirs de la France esclave, qui aspire après la liberté (n.p., Reference Anonymous1689), and Étienne de la Boétie’s Discours de la servitude volontaire (c.1548).
We can also locate this rhetorical strategy in prerevolutionary journalism. For example, several articles in Pierre Rétat’s Révolutions de Paris referred to the need to break “the chains of despotism” and argue, for example, that “each day decides whether France will be ‘enslaved or free,’ whether the French will be the happiest or the unhappiest of people.”5 Finally, in one of its most potent formulations, the metaphorical use of slavery to describe politics was manifest in Jean-Paul Marat’s The Chains of Slavery, A Work wherein the Clandestine and Villainous Attempts of Princes to Ruin Liberty are Pointed Out, and the Dreadful Scenes of Despotism Disclosed (Reference Marat1774).6 First written to urge English voters to support Wilkes and parliamentary reform in Britain, the tract was revised and published in French by the “friend of the people” himself in 1793 as the Revolution turned to Terror.7
In one parallel account of this problem, Thomas Kaiser’s study of the orientalisation of despotism in eighteenth-century France explains how the content of prerevolutionary French references to despotism was informed by reactions to Ottoman society and Franco-Turkish diplomatic relations.8 When we read his sources further, we can also note that, in them, despotism was described as a form of “enslavement,” and France a “slave” to despotism. Consider the article’s opening citation from Jean-Louis Carra: “to enslave this beautiful nation [of France] under the ruins of her moeurs, her fortune, and her liberty.” Kaiser also draws upon the “celebrated anonymous Huguenot attack on Louis XIV’s monarchy, Soupirs de la France esclave,” which, as he shows, “explicitly drew from contemporary accounts of the Ottoman Empire.”9 Of interest to us here, however, is the coincident status of these accounts as metaphorical.
In her work on slavery in France’s “old regime,” Sue Peabody points further to the rhetorical strategy linking slavery to despotism in legal discourse of the period.10 Her study of lawyers’ petitions to the Paris Admiralty Court calling for the freedom of slaves brought to France demonstrates that some legal arguments employed the symbol of the African slave to criticize the perceived tyranny of the French crown. One example was the legal deposition, or mémoire, in which soon to be famous lawyer Henrion de Pansey pleaded for the freedom of a slave called Roc by making explicit the connection between despotism and slavery in France.11 Henrion followed most lawyers arguing for the freedom of slaves brought to France when he began his mémoire with a history of the abolition of medieval slavery manufactured to justify a freedom principle, the notion that any slave setting foot in France was free.12 Such histories explained the abolition of slavery in Europe as a consequence of the advent of Christianity and the moral system it allegedly espoused, which made the enslavement of fellow Christians morally unacceptable.13 The briefs also drew on the symbol of the African slave to represent their audiences’ own perceived enslavement to the tyranny of Louis XV and the attempts of Chancellor Maupeou to control the Parlement of Rennes and restrict the authority of the Parlement of Paris.
Not unlike the rhetoric of political tract writers like Rousseau, these lawyers arguing before the Admiralty Court remained focused on what one might call a static form of slavery on the French territory, be it of “Nègres” to former masters or of “François” to a despotic king in France.14 The traite négrière, as the massive displacement of captive Africans by Europeans to serve as slaves in the Americas was then called, did not figure in these texts. Nor did other writers using the rhetoric of slavery, including Rousseau, address it.
French historian Jean Ehrard pointed early on to the paucity of references to the slave trade in mid-eighteenth-century works. Among the seventy-two thousand articles of the Encyclopédie, only thirty-three made explicit reference to the slave trade.15 Louis Sala-Molins has in turn criticized modern scholarship of the eighteenth century for continuing to “read” without slaves, and blacks, in view.16 Yves Benot noted that this “lacuna in memory” was “helped if not incited by intellectual historians,” dating as far back as the famed nineteenth-century historian of the French Revolution, Jules Michelet (1798–1874), who for generations construed the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue as “the most appalling war of savages ever seen” without any mention of the abolition of slavery it spurred in 1794.17
Yet, as Benot and Sala-Molins have noted, no reader of the Histoire des deux Indes can ignore that in it “the commerce in man” as a social practice was clearly targeted.18 Under the title “The Europeans go to Africa to purchase cultivators for the Antilles; Manner in which this commerce is carried out,” book 11 explicitly announced that it would investigate how the “tragedy” of the “commerce in man sold & bought by man” came about and of what it consisted.19 This subject was in and of itself remarkably original for the period. Book 11, and consequently the Histoire des deux Indes, also brought to bear the contemporary realities of the slave trade upon the pre-existing rhetoric of metaphorical slavery in historical and political texts of the period. To be sure, the metaphorical use of slavery to describe a politics of oppression also figured in the Histoire. But the work’s novelty and polemical force stemmed largely from the innovative manner in which it historicised that rhetoric and, in doing so, harnessed its power to bolster an argument against the iniquitous “species of commerce” that was the triangular slave trade.20
The Commerce in Humans
Book 11 of the first version of the Histoire des deux Indes (1770) began by promising its readers an account of the “climate, soil, agriculture, animals, birds, fish, plants, fruit, minerals, mores, customs, superstitions, prejudices, sciences, arts, commerce, government and laws” of Africa and Africans, declared the necessary components of “good” history.21 The account of slavery in Africa and the details about the culture and politics of life on its west coast were for the most part written by Jean-Joseph Pechméja, with Raynal adding or removing sections.22 A fellow Aveyronnais living in Paris, Pechméja (1741–85) was later celebrated as an author, publishing a well-received didactic “voyage-and-exploits” novel, Télèphe, in 1784, after winning honourable mentions from the Académie française for two of his essays.23
We learn from these initial accounts by Pechméja that slavery existed in Africa before the arrival of Europeans. But this slavery was here characterised as innocuous and as yet uncommercialized.24 In time, however (no dates are mentioned), a number of “piracies” were “committed upon the eastern coasts of Africa.” This was the Histoire des deux Indes’ principal explanation for the rise of the commerce in slaves. Exiled from Spain, a group of “suspicious subjects” sought refuge along the Barbary Coast, and their “spirit of revenge made them pirates.” These “sea monsters” began to attack ships laden with “spoils” from the New World and made “some desert islands” their “country.” With gold and silver in short supply, and farming “under a burning and unwholesome sky” too burdensome, their “self-interest, ever fruitful in expedients, suggested the plan of seeking cultivators in Africa.” The “civilised nations” then “adopted this infamous scheme without hesitation.”25 Thus the “shocking” commerce in humans began. This extreme synthesis is almost comic in its terseness: In one paragraph, the Histoire accounts for the Black Legend, the history of settlement on the African coast, the creation of the filibusterers, settlement in the Caribbean, and the slave trade “plan.”
The chapters that follow, in contrast, offer the many details devoted to providing a description of the “Western Coast of Africa, known by the name of Guinea,” promised in book 11’s title. Although slavery “is of very high antiquity” in Guinea, Raynal and Pechméja explain that many of the beneficent rules governing it had been rendered “ineffectual” ever “since the Europeans established luxury on the coasts of Africa.” It was then that “corruption” spread and slave procurement led to armed conflict. Nevertheless, the trade gained the complicity of princes and chiefs, who began to encourage it; indeed, the authors allege that “injustice has known no bounds or restraints.”
Later sections discuss not only the “colour of the inhabitants” but also the “nature of the soil,” the “idea of the several governments,” the “manner of making war,” the “modes of worship,” and the “manners, customs, and occupations of the people of Guinea.”26 They describe early Guinean trade as consisting primarily of “certain exchanges of salt and dried fish” for “stuffs made of a kind of thread”; small in scale, it was unable “to cause a material alteration in the manners of its inhabitants.” Early European arrivals fixed prices for wax, ivory, and other trade goods and attempted to exploit the area’s gold, but they were “unmercifully repulsed.” The search for gold was then “abandoned,” and “the attention of all men … turned to the slave trade.”27 Thus, the Histoire des deux Indes traced the beginnings of commercial society in Guinea to the trade in slaves.
The account that immediately followed, however, focuses less on the slave trade’s “injustice” than on its fundamental inefficiency. The result of these “infamous arts” was that the “people of the coast” had “found it impossible to supply the demands of the merchants.” This predicament meant that the Guineans themselves had become “the currency of the state of Guinea,” and every day “this currency [was] carried off and nothing is left them but articles of consumption.”28 Consequently, “their capital gradually vanishe[d].” These conditions necessarily impoverished and indebted the Guineans further. The “trade for blacks” would have been “entirely lost,” the Histoire argued, if “the inhabitants of the coast had not imparted their luxury to the people inland, from whence they now [drew] the greatest part of the slaves that [were] put into [their] hands.”29 This other form of commercial society, of which luxury was symptomatic, had thus embedded itself into the coastland.
The result was that the price of slaves was augmented to “four times the former cost.” The profits received by the proprietor were “intercepted” by different hands for the expenses of transport and taxes, such that the amount received was far less than European traders paid. These expenses, continually increasing as the distances at which slaves were sold increased, could, the Histoire predicted, become so great that potential sellers would decide to keep their slaves rather than sell them. The implication was that the end of the slave trade might come about as a result of, on one hand (to impose a not yet fully theorised economic vocabulary), the opportunity cost calculation in the mind of the trader, and, on the other, the depletion of what was (curiously) construed as a non-renewable resource. But the Histoire predicted that that time was a long way off, because in the near future at least the colonists would continue to find people willing to purchase and sell slaves.30
A further iniquitous detail of the trade in African captives, according to the Histoire, lay in the way that slave merchants collected themselves into “companies” and formed “caravans” by which they drove several files of thirty or forty slaves through “barren deserts.”31 These slaves were secured in a manner “ingeniously contrived”32: “a fork of wood, from eight to nine feet long, is put round the neck of each slave. A pin of iron, riveted, secures the fork at the back part in such a manner that the head cannot disengage itself.” However, the text argued, it was not this cruel device but “the public faith” that “secure[d] to the proprietor the possession of his slave,” and that same public faith was “silent with regard to a slave and a trader who exercises the most contemptible of all professions.” The French were thus with their silence perpetuating the trade in slaves, though they simultaneously protested their metaphorical slavery to despotism. This perceived double standard lay at the core of the Histoire’s critique.
Thus, in the 1770 version of the Histoire des deux Indes, book 11 offered a detailed account of the iniquitous contemporary realities of the slave trade, that “infamous commerce of crimes and misfortunes, of men exchanged for arms, of children sold by their fathers!”33 Although the authors of the Histoire claimed not to have “tears sufficient to deplore such horrors,” it would seem that by the 1780 version, the details of the slave trade provided by the original book 11 were deemed insufficient rhetorical ammunition against the trade.
From “Details” to “War Machine”
The Histoire des deux Indes changed in 1780. Though attributed to Raynal in 1770, his engraved frontispiece first appeared in the 1774 La Haye edition, portraying the engraved profile (by Charles-Nicolas Cochin) of a sober abbé in full ecclesiastical dress. The motto read, “G.ME T.MAS RAYNAL, / De la Société Royale de Londres et de l’Académie / des Sciences et Belles-Lettres de Prusse.”34 In 1780, however, the abbé’s religious garb was replaced by the négligé of the quintessential eighteenth-century man of letters, and a cloth head wrap took the place of the curled wig. He was shown writing at his desk, on which stood three volumes of the Encyclopédie. The pedestal beneath depicted an allegorical scene containing a number of figures, including the goddess of liberty (holding a spade on which there is also a Phrygian bonnet) attentively surveying slaves liberated from their chains. The motto now read, “To the Defender of Humanity, of Truth and of Liberty.”35
Figure 2. The abbé Raynal in 1774. The abbé Raynal in ecclesiastical dress by C. N. Cochin (drawing) and Le Grand (engraving). Frontispiece to vol. 1 of the 1774 edition of the Histoire des deux Indes (La Haye: Gosse, fils, 7 vols., in 8). Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.
Figure 3. Raynal the philosophe in 1780. Raynal as philosophe by N. Cochin, “Secretary of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture” (drawing), and N. De Launay, “Of the same Academy and That of the Arts of Denmark” (engraving). Frontispiece to vol. 1 of the 1780 edition of the Histoire des deux Indes (Geneva: J. Pellet, 1780, 3 vols, in-4). Courtesy of the Rare Books and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
The transformation of the frontispiece signalled an equally important transformation in the text. In the 1780 version, the Histoire des deux Indes became what one influential commentator has called a “war machine.”36 In large part, this change was a result of Diderot’s revision of the second version and subsequent augmentations of the work. For Diderot, the Histoire had become a prolongation of the spirit and function of the Encyclopédie. He used it as a vehicle to expand upon ideas on which he was working and to win them public attention in the hope of affecting popular opinion without drawing the authorities’ attention to himself.37
We can now ascertain with confidence which sections of the Histoire were drawn from fragments of Diderot’s other, often unpublished, writings. Recent accounts of Diderot’s contributions attribute the greater part of the “philosophical” content of the Histoire philosophique…des deux Indes to him, that is, those sections of the text comprising more general and theoretical reflections.38 Book 11, in particular, was so expanded, but also radicalised.39 To the description of the cruel fetters binding the African captives, for instance, a passionate appeal to the reader was added: “Reader, while you are perusing this horrid account, is your soul not filled with the same indignation I experience in writing it? Do you not, in your imagination, rush with fury upon those infamous conductors? Do you not break the forks with which these unfortunate people are confined? And do you not restore them to their liberty?”40 Most curious, however, was the change to chapter 24: To the details on the origins and progress of the triangular slave trade, Diderot inserted a polemical history of the origins and development of slavery in Europe. This addition has been afforded minimal attention, but I suggest that it alters book 11’s overall effect and heightens its moral and political significance.41
Against Rousseau’s claim that he did not know how “man” born free came to be “everywhere in chains,” Diderot’s 1780 addition explicitly set out to offer an account of that process. As we shall see, the aim of this history within a history was both didactic and moralising. Chapter 24 began by announcing that “some considerable revolution” would be necessary to make “the evidence of the great truth felt” by the promoters of the slave trade, that is, that their commerce was “reprobated by morality.” Meanwhile, to encourage those writers who justified the trade to reconsider their actions, it provided an account of how European slavery came to its end as “proof” that “there is no reason of state that can authorise slavery.”42
The proof Diderot offered was historical. It begins with a definition of slavery, the first in book 11: “Slavery is a state in which a man has lost, either by force or by convention, the property of his own person, and of whom a master can dispose as his own effects.”43 This definition is encompassing enough to include both metaphorical and real slavery. Next, he delineates the different stages of the development of this “odious state,” from “the first ages” when it was “unknown” through to its “end.” The history that follows is generic, in stark contrast to the exhaustive and detailed accounts of the slave trade that precede it.
The reader first learns that the “natural equality” of men in the first ages did not endure, as the weakest and “less cunning” were soon obliged to submit to those “who were able to feed and defend them.” Soon those in command came to see themselves as superior to those who obeyed them, and they began to consider their subordinates as slaves. When societies “acquired a knowledge of the arts and of commerce,” the weak found support in the magistrate, the poor found resource in industry, and “both emerged, by degrees, from the kind of necessity that they had experienced of submitting to slavery, in order to procure subsistence.” At this point, although liberty came to be considered “as a precious and unalienable property,” the laws continued “to impose the penalty of servitude.” At a fifth stage, as armies “became mercenary,” wars led to the “necessity” of procuring slaves, as was “the practice of the Greeks and Romans and of all people who chose to increase enjoyments by this inhuman and barbarous custom.”
This narrative of the development of European slavery would have been familiar to eighteenth-century readers. Up to this point, it was highly derivative in many ways, perhaps most obviously of the four stages theories of the rise of commercial society.44 The account also paralleled those proffered by the lawyers pleading before the Admiralty Court and seized more generally on the concomitant rhetoric of political slavery. The section’s most obvious reference was, however, to Montesquieu. Indeed, Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, famously a président à mortier of the Bordeaux Parlement and author of The Spirit of the Laws (1748), was explicitly targeted in the work’s opening chapter and represented one of its central interlocutors.45 The Histoire’s account of the “origins and progress of slavery” paralleled Montesquieu’s accounts of the “origin of the right of slavery” in book 15 of The Spirit of the Laws.46
These two works diverged on a crucial point, however: their explanation of how slavery ended. For Montesquieu, as for the lawyers pleading the cases of French slaves in the Admiralty Court, it was Christianity that “in our climates” had “brought back that age” when slavery “has so fortunately been abolished.”47 In the historical account added by Diderot in 1780, by contrast, it was commerce that had ended both “personal” and “real” slavery in Europe.48 Returning to Diderot’s addition, we find a description of two different but concurrent episodes that took place at some point in the “Middle Ages” wherein commerce acted as the catalyst for the elimination of slavery. First, Italian city-states acquired sufficient wealth through commerce to become “ashamed” of the era’s “humiliating vassalages” and responded by “shaking off the yoke of their feeble despots.”49 Meanwhile, in the rest of Europe, the Germans invaded and appropriated lands so vast that their proprietors could not “retail all his slaves under his own inspection”; instead, they had to “disperse them over the soil they were to cultivate.”50 Since this distance prevented their being managed, “it was thought proper to encourage them by rewards proportioned to their labour.” By this account, “personal slavery” ended when lords “universally adopted” the situation that eventually developed, whereby they accumulated more wealth when they were able to “offer a fixed rent” for the land being worked upon, and the slaves began to cultivate the land at their own expense.51
The catalyst for the end of both personal and real slavery, then, was a commercial transaction, the institution of a system of exchange of labour for income, which, recalling the definition of slavery provided at the beginning of the history, meant that slavery ended when man regained the ability to “dispose of his own effects.” The role of commerce as the catalyst for the end of slavery was made more explicit in the introductory section of the work, when, pace Montesquieu, Diderot wrote, “It was through that sound policy, which commerce always introduces, and not through the spirit of the Christian religion” that this end of slavery came about.52 This “great change,” he argued in book 11, was “brought on in a manner by itself”; it was an auspicious and beneficent development.53
There was, however, one additional agent that hastened this development: We could call it politics. Diderot explained that it was “the chief of every republic” who, “perpetually at war with his barons” but “unable to resist them by force,” used “artifice” to protect the slaves against the tyranny of their masters and to “undermine the power of the nobles, by diminishing the dependence of their subjects.” Although the “motive of general utility” may have inspired some, “most of them were visibly induced to adopt this fortunate policy, more on account of their personal interests, than from principles of humanity and benevolence.”54 Thus, the history of slavery first added to book 11 in 1780 explained slavery’s end in Europe as deriving from two coterminous agents: commerce in combination with or precipitated by politics, or, the “visible hand” of political authority with its “self-interest rightly understood.”
While this history of slavery in Europe challenged the traditional Christianity thesis postulated by Montesquieu and others, its alternative causal explanation for the end of slavery, commerce, was in itself modelled on Montesquieu’s theory of commerce, what Albert Hirschman has conceptualised as doux commerce.55 As we have seen, for Montesquieu, commerce was sweet or gentle because it “cures destructive prejudices” and “polishes and softens barbarous mores.” Its “natural effect” is “to lead to peace” and to “unite nations,” and it “produces in men a certain feeling for exact justice.”56 But another look at The Spirit of Laws reveals that commerce alone could not achieve these ends. Book 20, chapter 12 argues that states and their laws play an important role in facilitating commerce and ensuring that it is free. Montesquieu explained: “Liberty of commerce is not a faculty granted to traders to do what they want…. What hampers those who engage in commerce does not, for all that, hamper commerce.” Here, he offered the example of England, which forbade the export of wool or ungelded horses: “It hampers the trader, but it does so in favour of commerce.”57 In his next chapter, Montesquieu added that if one sought to enjoy “the liberty of commerce,” then the state had to “be neutral between its customs houses and its commerce and must arrange that these two things never thwart one another.” Thus, according to Montesquieu, the potential of commerce to liberalise and civilise could be realized only with the help of government guidance or leadership.
In the history of slavery added by Diderot to book 11 of the Histoire, the auspicious development of commerce was spurred by the “fortunate policy” of heads of state acting with a heightened sense of their self-interest. This development brought an end to political, real, and personal slavery in Europe. Diderot’s challenge to the traditional account of slavery’s abolition is significant but not surprising in this context. In contrast to the approach of most universal histories of the time, the Histoire des deux Indes was, above all, a history of commerce.58 For Diderot, the changes brought on by commerce and politics at the end of the Middle Ages consisted in a “revolution [that] was … so complete” that “liberty became more general throughout the greatest part of Europe than it had been in any climate, or in any age.”59
Doux commerce, commerce odieux
But as the first twenty-three chapters of book 11 documented, the story of European slavery did not end with its Old World abolition: “[H]ardly had domestic liberty been reborn in Europe than it was buried in America.”60 It was the “Spaniard, the first to be vomited up by the waves onto the shores of the New World,” who “called for slaves in Africa,” and “all the nations, free or subjected,” had “without remorse sought to increase their fortune in the sweat, blood and despair of these unfortunates.”61 Unlike Rousseau, contemporary lawyers arguing in the Admiralty Court, or even Montesquieu, here the Histoire des deux Indes explicitly tied the story of European slavery to the “horrible system” that was the “commerce in man.” In the Histoire’s account, no sooner did slavery end in Europe than it was absorbed in Atlantic commercial relations. In this way, the Old World’s past was shown to be indelibly linked to the New World’s future. This appears to be the first time that any French work explicitly made that connection.62
Yet, as we have seen, the accounts of the slave trade provided in the first part of book 11 contrasted with the history of slavery added by Diderot by revealing that New World slavery was by most counts even more abominable than its Old World analogue.63 The material conditions differed significantly, making for differences in the degree and kind of captivity experienced by New and Old World slaves. The slave of Europe’s Middle Ages was under the command of a master who “disposed of his own effects”; this slave had, according to the Histoire’s account, lost “the property of his own person.”64 The African slave brought to the New World, by contrast, was fettered; he was also “disgraced” by being branded with “the name or the mark of his oppressor.”65 A second iniquitous feature of the New World commerce in humans was its status as a trade. As a “species of commerce” wherein humans were both subjects and objects of trade, slavery in the New World worsened the condition of the Africans held captive because it in effect sullied and thwarted the panacean potential of commerce.
This potential was repeatedly invoked outside of book 11. The Histoire des deux Indes was replete with references to the awesome powers of commerce as an essentially civilising, liberalising, and pacifying agent. That is why the idea of doux commerce is so often considered to be the work’s central leitmotif. Some of its praise of the panacean virtues of commerce was unrestrained and bordered on the phantasmagorical: It was commerce that had “dug canals,” “drained plains,” “founded cities,” and “collected, clothed and civilised” entire populations.66 Moreover, the progress of commerce across the globe ensured nothing less than that “clouds will be dispelled in all parts; a serene sky will shine over the face of the whole globe…. [T]hen, or never, will that universal peace arise … [and] the general felicity of men will be established upon a more solid basis.”67
The “commerce in man” provided a foil for this celebratory and essentialist understanding of the powers of commerce: This was book 11’s influence on the work as a whole. The account of the slave trade, of commerce described in all of its “shocking” and “horrid” detail, inadvertently challenged the assumed coherence of the theory of commerce as a vehicle for liberty, civility, and morality around the globe. First, as evident in the history of European slavery, commerce was portrayed as unable to achieve its magnificent ends independently of the direction of the “chief of every republic” or the “sovereigns of the earth.”68 Second, the account exposed the idea that commerce was not uniform. Whereas some commerce may indeed have been liberalising, civilising, and pacifying, other forms of commerce, namely, the commerce in humans, were fundamentally immoral and intolerable.
While the “commerce in man” was indeed a “species of commerce,” it constituted the very antithesis of doux commerce. It was, rather, a commerce odieux on at least two levels. First, it was inefficient, turning humans into non-renewable capital and exhausting supplying nations’ “only saleable commodities.”69 Still worse, the commerce in humans was inimical to any universal sense of humanity: It was fundamentally immoral. This is a point that the eighteenth-century French esclavagistes, apologists for slavery, ignored at their peril.70 When they participated in the commerce odieux, when they listened “coolly and without emotion” to accounts of African slaves “tyrannised, mutilated, burnt, and put to death,” Europeans in effect jeopardised their own humanity.71 Thus, while a version of the doux commerce thesis was posited as the universal “soul of the moral world,” the account of the slave trade in book 11 complicated that seemingly uniform concept and established that some forms of commerce were in fact less sweet, less efficient, and less moral than others. The ultimate effect was to furnish the idea of commerce with an important moral and political dimension.
The Antidote?
Given, then, that the slave trade was a diseased form of commerce that not only thwarted the potential of doux commerce but also tainted the moral fibre of all Europeans who sanctioned it, what was to be done with it? The Histoire des deux Indes was ambivalent on this point. Certain passages suggested that the mechanisms that put an end to slavery in Europe should be revived to purge it in the New World.72 Thus, we find a call for the “sovereigns of the earth” to “overturn the whole system of slavery”:
If you do not sport with the rest of mortals, if you do not regard the power of kings as the right of a successful plunder, and the obedience of subjects as artfully obtained from their ignorance, reflect on your own obligations. Refuse the sanction of your authority to the infamous and criminal commerce of men turned into so many herds of cattle, and this trade will cease. For once unite, for the happiness of the world, those powers and designs which have been so often exerted for its ruin.73
Just as the abolition of slavery in Europe was “hastened” by the intervention of “chiefs of every republic” acting in their own self-interest, so too could the New World slave system be stopped, making way for sweet commerce.74
In a similar passage, the Histoire called for “all the maritime powers” to work together to bring an end to piracy.75 Through “salutary laws and examples of humanity,” the maritime powers could ensure that these “sea monsters” would be “changed into men.” Their plunder curbed, the pirates would see fit to grow “corn and various fruits” on the coasts of Africa they had once pillaged, which they would exchange for European goods. This would establish a communication “so natural” between the European and African coasts and clear the way for a “new kind of conquest” that would “amply compensate for those which, during so many centuries, have contributed to the distress of humankind.” Thus, the proposed plan for the eradication of the illicit commerçants, the pirates, also followed the pattern set in the history of European slavery: Self-interested political intervention would necessarily clear the way for “the spirit of commerce,” the antidote to the commerce odieux, leading to universal peace and happiness.
From these passages, then, one might conclude that the history of European slavery provided a formula that, if repeated, could put an end to the slave trade. But the Histoire des deux Indes was not so consistent. In reading book 11, it is important to measure these calls for “politics” and “new commercial conquests,” this apparent remède dans le mal, against the text’s equally passionate calls for reform.76 We find, for instance, passages recommending ways of improving the slaves’ voyage from Africa to America.77 The work also suggested a six-step programme to alleviate the slaves’ suffering and improve their morale once in America.78 Finally, it advocated a plan by which to eventually “ease them from their chains” into liberty by “subjecting them to our laws and manners” and providing the newly freed men and women with cabins and plots of land.79
While the text is in this sense ambivalent, if not contradictory, about what to do with the slave trade, it is quite clear about the risks involved in not taking any action: “There are so many indications of the impending storm, and the Negroes only want a chief, sufficiently courageous, to lead them on to vengeance and slaughter.”80 Once this chief appeared, “Spaniards, Portuguese, English, French, Dutch, all their tyrants will become the victims of fire and sword.”81
It is on this foreboding note that chapter 24 ends. The reader is left with a clear sense of inaction’s dangers but confusion about what action would be appropriate.82 The history of European slavery added by Diderot in 1780 offered no strategy for ending the slave trade. This begs the earlier question of what its purpose actually was.
The answer may lie in the realm of rhetoric. This history of European slavery could, in effect, be seen as an additional form of rhetorical ammunition against the slave trade. At a time when “history still provided the essential ideological resources for political contestation,” to borrow Keith Baker’s formulation, Diderot’s addition served to “alert moral recognition in the reader,” who, previous to the 1780 version, had not in either Raynal or Diderot’s view been sufficiently moved by the accounts of the slave trade to contest or reform it.83 By juxtaposing an account of how their ancestors had eventually been freed from their state of slavery with detailed descriptions of contemporary slavery, the history within the history encouraged European readers to make a causal connection between an enslaved past thought buried and a present that propagated that enslavement in its most iniquitous form. In this way, the Histoire derided the deplorable situation wherein “the torments of a people to whom we owe our luxuries, can never reach our hearts” but “even imaginary distresses draw tears from our eyes, both in silent retirement of the closet, and especially at the theatre.”84
By drawing on a familiar story – that of their own sense of enslavement and slavery, historical and contemporary – and juxtaposing it to accounts of the trade in slaves, Diderot in effect elicited readers to draw a parallel that, in turn, took the metaphorical rhetoric of political slavery used by theorists such as Rousseau and lawyers such as Henrion to task for its obliviousness to the slave trade. The effect was to unsettle the politics of defining slavery in abstract terms. In combining this challenge to both metaphorical slavery and the slave trade, the Histoire des deux Indes constituted one of eighteenth-century France’s first wholly anti-slavery tracts.85 Its accounts of slavery and the slave trade also hold hermeneutical importance for our interpretation of the idea of commerce in the Histoire. Not only do they amplify the work’s critical force, they provide a lens through which the idea of doux commerce is revealed to be fundamentally unstable, though commerce is also clearly understood as a deeply moral and political force. This moral and political nature of commerce also comes to the fore in the representation of piracy, a second site of collapse of the doctrine espousing the sweet effects of commerce
This chapter was presented to the Johns Hopkins University European History Seminar (1998), the Europe and Empire Conference held at the Minda da Gunzburg Centre for European Studies, Harvard University (1998), the Johns Hopkins Interdisciplinary Forum on Political Thought (Reference Tuck1999), Professor Toby Ditz’s Workshop in Early American History (2003), and the Carolina Seminar in French Studies (2005). I thank participants in each of these helpful settings for their constructive comments. In particular, I am grateful to David Bell, Paul Cheney, Toby Ditz, Madeleine Dobie, Gianluigi Goggi, Julia Holderness, Matthew Klemm, Lloyd Kramer, Catherine Larrère, Natasha Lee, John Marshall, Anne-Beate Maurseth, Pratap Mehta, Sankar Muthu, Anthony Pagden, Jennifer Pitts, J. G. A. Pocock, Orest Ranum, Louisa Shea, Jay Smith, Philippe Steiner, Ann Thomson, Richard Tuck, and Steven Vincent for their helpful comments.
1 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social (1762), book 1, chap. 1. As we saw in Chapter 1, Rousseau’s claim that he “does not know” was a rhetorical ruse, since he had provided an account of this phenomenon in his Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men (1755).
2 Rousseau referred to “Grotius and the others” (book 1, chap. 5) as “les fauteurs du despotisme” (book 1, chap. 4).
3 This is just one of many ways that the metaphor of slavery was used in eighteenth-century France. The notions of being slaves to passions, to luxury, or, especially poignant in Rousseau, to civility or civilisation were also pervasive and warrant further exploration. Whereas despotism was a central preoccupation of the Physiocrats, especially Chinese despotism (cf. Quesnay’s “Despotisme de la Chine” [1767]), they and their fellow économistes’ views on slavery and the slave trade have received little scholarly attention. Michèle Duchet’s detailed account of the anti-esclavagisme or anti-slaveryism of the Physiocrats and the philosopheswas the first comprehensive study of the ways in which a neocolonialist politics of a metropolitan bourgeoisie was formulated. See her Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des lumières: Buffon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Helvétius, Diderot (1971; Reprint, Paris: Albin Michel, 1995). Since Duchet, there are three principal studies of the physiocratic approach to slavery: Philippe Steiner’s “L’Esclavage chez les économistes français;” Yves Citton’s Portrait de l’économiste en physiocrate (Paris, 2000); and Madeleine Dobie’s Trading Places (Ithaca, NY, 2010).
4 Here I emulate Keith Baker’s study of the occurrence of révolution in the same eighteenth-century corpus – the American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL) at the University of Chicago (with the Institut national de la langue française, CNRS) database. Although ARTFL is not a fully representative sample of French published works from the period, it can suggest a term’s prevalence. From 1700–89, the database retrieves 1,696 references to the term esclave and 886 to the term esclavage in 436 documents. This compares to 708 references to esclave and 141 to esclavage in 349 documents from 1600–99.
5 Cited in , Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 223.
6 On Marat’s text, see , “Jean-Paul Marat’s the Chains of Slavery in Britain and France, 1774–1833” in The Historical Journal48, no.3 (2005): 641–60.
7 Keith Michael Baker has argued that this text exemplifies the “metastasization” of the discourse of classical republicanism and that it is “an extreme version of the idiom of classical republicanism.” See his “Transformations of Classical Republicanism in Eighteenth-Century France,” Journal of Modern History73, no. 1 (March Reference Baker2001): 43–47. Whereas studies of classical republicanism have rightfully emphasised this central discourse’s concern with liberty, the goal in countering despotism, little attention has been brought to the study of the language used to represent despotism. To put it another way, because existing scholarship tends to accent the aim of reform – liberty – its foil – slavery – has received scant attention in this discourse.
8 Cf. Madeleine Dobie’s latest work which brings to light the pervasive influence of Orientalist gestures in French absolutist cultural norms and practices. See Trading Places: Colonization and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century French Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010) 9, and especially Chapter 3.
9 Thomas E. Kaiser, “The Evil Empire? The Debate on Turkish Despotism in Eighteenth-Century French Political Culture,” Journal of Modern History 72, no. 1 (Reference Kaiser2000): 8 and 13.
10 , There Are No Slaves in France: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
11 Pansey, Mémoire pour un Nègre.
12 Robert Harms draws on Peabody’s work in The Diligent, wherein he discusses the case of Pauline Villeneuve’s enfranchisement and the legal arguments made by Gérard Mellier and Pierre Lemerre Le Jeune for and against this former colonial slave’s freedom.
13 See Mallet and Le Clerc du Brillet’s opening arguments in the case of the slave Jean Boucaux versus his master Bernard Verdelin, Mémoire pour Jean Boucaux. In their view, a “Christian” spirit of charity caused the French to release their slaves through several methods of manumission. See Peabody, No Slaves in France, 27. In a slight departure from these arguments, Henrion’s historical account of the rise of slavery is more “secular” because, although it links Christianity with liberty, it does not credit it with the decline of slavery in medieval France. Rather, it “hints that Christian missionaries may have been responsible for introducing modern slavery to French territories.” Peabody, No Slaves in France, 100. It is important to note, however, that there is no mention in Peabody – nor is there any mention in Henrion’s mémoire – of what, then, was responsible for the decline of medieval slavery in France.
14 At this period, the terms Nègres or noirs were often used as shorthand to describe African slaves. The HDI uses Nègres, noirs, and esclaves interchangeably. For a good overview of the social and legal implications of this racial language, see Pierre H. Boulle, “In Defense of Slavery: Eighteenth-century Opposition to Abolition and the Origins of a Racist Ideology in France,” in Frederick Krantz, ed., History from Below: Studies in Popular Protest and Popular Ideology (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, Reference Boulle and Krantz1988). For a more general discussion, see Carminella Biondi, Ces esclaves sont des hommes: Lotta abolizionista e letteratura negrofila nella Francia del Settecento (Pisa: Ed. Libreria Goliardica, Reference Biondi1979).
15 “L’esclavage devant la conscience morale des lumières françaises: indifférence, gêne, révolte.” , “L’Encyclopédie et l’esclavage: Deux lectures de Montesquieu,” in Enlightenment: Essays in Memory of Robert Shackleton (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1988), 143.
16 Louis Sala-Molins, Les Misères des lumières: Sous la raison, l’outrage (Paris: R. Laffont, Reference Sala-Molins1992), 15.
17 “La plus épouvantable guerre de sauvages qu’on ait vue jamais.” Yves Benot, La Révolution française et la fin des colonies(Paris: La Découverte, Reference Benot1988), 10, 205–16. Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic encourages an approach to the period which takes into account the influence of events such as the revolution in Saint-Domingue on the shape of democratic ideas under development in Europe at the time. Other recent works seeking to “re-read” the history of Europe in this period with attention to events and ideas emanating from the colonies include, especially, Laurent Dubois’s Les esclaves de la République: L’histoire oubliée de la première émancipation, 1789–1794 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, Reference Dubois1998); Marcel Dorigny ed. Les Abolitions de l’esclavage de L.F. Sonthonax à V. Schoelscher, 1793, 1794, 1848(Paris: Éditions UNESCO and Presses universitaires de Vincennes, Reference Dorigny1995); Michel Vovelle ed., “Révolution aux Colonies,” Annales historiques de la révolution française, no. 293–94 (Reference Vovelle1993): 345–509; and Alain Yacou and Michel Martin, eds., De la Révolution française aux révolutions nègres et créoles(Paris: Éditions Carribéennes, Reference Yacou and Martin1989).
18 HDI, book 11, 157. Let us recall here the full title of the work: Histoire philosophique et politique des établissementset du commercedes Européens dans les deux Indes (my emphasis). The “commerce in man” is at the centre of the HDI’s concerns and not simply a veiled attempt to show that “the condition of the Frenchman under a despotic ruler was linked metaphorically to that of a slave,” as Peabody has contended, No Slaves in France, 97. Here I depart from her portrayal of the HDI as one of a canon of Jansenist parlementairecritiques seeking to advocate “a radical equality whereby all social hierarchies [in France] would be levelled.”
19 The malheur, that is, “le commerce de l’homme, vendu & acheté par l’homme.” HDI, book 11, 157.
20 Cf. , Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des lumières: Buffon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Helvétius, Diderot. (Paris: Maspéro, 1971. Reprint. Paris: Albin Michel, 1995), 125–33, 151–72. This first and important study of the colonialist ideological context in which the HDI was produced maintained that the HDI’s arguments against the slave trade were in fact disingenuous. Duchet contended that the work actually consisted of a thinly veiled defence of the interests of French imperialism. Louis Sala-Molins, among others, followed suit in Les misères des lumières, 19. If we turn to the works of Émilien Petit or Jean-Baptiste Dubucq, both senior officials in the colonial administration, we can notice their highly critical remarks of the disparaging descriptions of the slave trade in the HDI. See Émilien Petit, Observations sur plusieurs assertions extraites littéralement de l’Histoire Philosophique des Etablissements des Européens dans les deux Indes, édition de 1770(Amsterdam and Paris: Chez Knapen, Imprimeur de la Cour des Aides, au bas du Pont Saint Michel, Reference Petit1776). See Michel Antoine, “Le Conseil du Roi sous la règne de Louis XV.” In Mémoires et documents publiés par la Société de l’École des Chartes. Vol. 19. (Geneva and Paris: Droz, Reference Antoine1970), 154, 558, for what little is known about Petit.
21 HDI, book 11, 200–01. This list comprised a description of the proper pursuits of “good” history – one that gives us “information upon those points which it most concerns us to know; upon the true glory of a sovereign, upon the basis of the strength of nations, upon the felicity of the people, upon the duration of empires” – a fragment of Diderot’s added in 1780, but it nevertheless offers an adequate summary of Raynal’s original aim in launching the HDI. Michèle Duchet suggests this piece is a fragment of an unpublished tract of Diderot’s entitled “Sur les Beaux-Arts et Belles-Lettres.” See her Diderot et l’Histoire des deux Indes ou l’Écriture Fragmentaire(Paris: A. G. Nizet, Reference Duchet1978), 84.
22 In a letter dated “ce 3 août 1786,” Naigeon writes (probably) to Monsieur Vandeul: “Mr. Diderot n’a rien mis du sien dans la 2e Edit. de l’abbé raynal.[sic] le morceau sur les negres qu’on trouve dans cette seconde Edit. est comme le premier de mr. Péméga [sic]…. Diderot a fort ajouté à ce morceau sur les negres dans la dernière Edition, mais il a plutôt étendu les raisonnemens de péméga et fortifié ses preuves.” Reprinted in Herbert Dieckmann, Inventaire du Fonds Vandeul et inédits de Diderot (Geneva: Droz; Lille: Giard, Reference Dieckmann1951), 93–94.
23 For what little is known about Pechméja, see L. G. Michaud, Biographie universelle ancienne et moderne … Nouvelle édition. 45 vols. (Paris: Madame C. Desplaces et M. Michaud, Reference Michaud1854–1865), “PEC,” 338–39, and , “Pechméja, Jean-Joseph” in Roland Mortier and Raymond Trousson, eds., Dictionnaire de Diderot (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1999). Jeffrey Merrick has recently analysed the novel Télèphe in “Male Friendship in Pre-revolutionary France,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10, no. 3 (Reference Merrick2004).
24 The Mameluc dynasty in Egypt was “composed of ten or twelve thousand slaves, brought from Georgia and Circassia when they were very young”; Algiers was “well cultivated by slaves”; and the despotic ruler of Morocco maintained “a feeble guard of negroes.” HDI, book 11, 163, 182, 183.
25 These citations are drawn directly from the three sections in book 11 where the pirates, or flibustiers, are discussed: Ibid., 157–59, 188–93, and 276–77.
26 Ann Thomson has carefully demonstrated that the first two versions of the HDI drew on Cornélius de Pauw for their contemptuous accounts of the Guineans deemed, like Pauw’s Americans, to be a “particular species of man.” But, as Thomson argues further, one of the important changes to the HDI’s third version was the “overturning of the perspective” on the Africans undertaken by Diderot, who incorporated the more moderate theses and language from the abbé Demanet’s Nouvelle Histoire de l’Afrique françoise (Paris, 1767), and especially from Volume 12 of the abbé Pierre-Joseph-André Roubaud’s Histoire générale de l’Asie, de l’Afrique et de l’Amérique, published from 1770–75. See “Diderot, Roubaud et l’esclavage” Recherches sur Diderot et sur l’Encyclopédie 35 (2003): 71, 75–80. The HDI’s descriptions of Africa warrant further systematic attention. The critique offered by Hédia Khadhar in “La description de l’Afrique dans l’Histoire des deux Indes,” in and , eds., L’Histoire des deux Indes: Réécriture et polygraphie (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1995), the only one available to date, suggests that Africa is portrayed as a terrain ripe for European control, development, and enlightenment. Cf. Jean-Claude Halpern, “L’Africain de Raynal,” in Gilles Bancarel and Gianluigi Goggi, eds., Raynal, de la polémique à l’histoire (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, Reference Halpern, Bancarel and Goggi2000), 235–42.
27 HDI, book 11, 218–20.
28 “Les têtes de negres [sic] représentent le numéraire des états de la Guinée. Chaque jour ce numéraire leur est enlevé, & on ne leur laisse que des choses qui se consomment.” Ibid., 221–22.
29 “C’est de cette manière que le commerce des Européens a presque épuisé les richesses commerçables de cette nation.” Ibid., 222.
30 Ibid., 222–23.
31 No commentary on the nature of these companies follows, however. In fact, other than mentioning that most of the Europeans on the coast of Guinea maintained companies, there is no discussion of their worth (or, rather, deleterious effect) in book 11.
32 “assez heureusement imagniée.” HDI (1772), book 11, 146.
33 HDI (1772), book 11, chap. 20, 286.
34 Compare Histoire … [des] deux Indes (A Amsterdam, 1770 (and 1772), 6 vol. in-8) with the Histoire … [des] deux Indes (A La Haye: Chez Gosse fils, 1774, 7 vols. in-8) and Histoire … [des] deux Indes (A Maestricht: Chez Jean-Edme Dufour, Imprimeur et Libraire, 1775, 7 vols. in-8).
35 “Au Défenseur de l’Humanité, de la Vérité, de la Liberté.” This frontispiece, appearing in Vol. 1 of the in-4 1780 edition by Pellet, was signed twice: It was drawn by Charles-Nicolas Cochin and engraved by Nicolas de Launay. For a more detailed comparison of this portrait with the previous one, see Ottmar Ette, “La mise en scène de la table de travail: poétologie et épistémologie immanentes chez Guillaume-Thomas Raynal et Alexander von Homboldt,” in Peter Wagner (ed.) Icons, texts, iconotext: Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality (Berlin: De Gruyter, Reference Ette and Wagner1996), 175–212. On the pedestal, see Lise Andries, “Les illustrations dans l’Histoire des deux Indes,” in Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink and Anthony Strugnell (eds.) L’Histoire des deux Indes: réécriture et polygraphie (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, Reference Andries, Lüsebrink and Strugnell1995), 34.
36 The term is Hans Wolpe’s from his Raynal et sa machine de guerre. Indeed, as discussed in the Introduction, it is the 1780 version that caught most of the attention of the book censorship authorities.
37 In a letter from Mme de Vandeul to her mother dated 11 April 1777, she writes that the last days of Diderot’s life were spent writing for and reviewing the HDI; he sometimes worked “fourteen consecutive hours” [“quatorze heures de suite”] on it. Thus, the HDI appears to have replaced the Encyclopédie as Diderot’s central preoccupation. See J. Massiet du Biest, La Fille de Diderot (Tours, Reference Massiet Du Biest1949), cited in Duchet, Diderot et l’Histoire, 10.
38 Our ability to do so is due largely to the meticulous work of Gianluigi Goggi. The principal writings are found in the Fragments politiques and the Fragmentséchappés published by Assénat-Tourneux (Diderot, Oeuvres, vols. 4 and 5) and are formally attributed to Diderot in the Correspondance littéraire. For identifications of Diderot’s texts, see Gianliugi Goggi, Denis Diderot, Pensées détachées, Contributions à ‘L’Histoire des deux Indes.’ 2 vols. (Siena: Tip. del Rettorato, Reference Goggi1976–77), Denis Diderot, but also, previously, Duchet, Diderot et l’Histoire; Hans Wolpe, Raynal et sa machine de guerre: “L’Histoire des deux Indes” et ses perfectionnements(Paris: M. Th. Litec, cop., Reference Wolpe1956) Raynal et sa machine de guerre; Dieckmann, Inventairedu Fonds Vandeul; and Feugère, Un précurseur de la Révolution.
39 That is to say, the text was transformed into a political tool, critical of the political status quo and aiming to instigate reform. The term is Yves Benot’s. See “Diderot, Pechméja, Raynal et l’anticolonialisme,” Europe; revue littéraire mensuelle 41 (Jan.–Feb. Reference Benot1963): 147.
40 HDI (1780), book 11, chap. 17, 149.
41 In her pioneering discussion of Diderot’s “anthropology and history,” for example, Michèle Duchet mentions the fact that Diderot added the history of slavery to book 11, but she does not discuss its implications. See Anthropologie et histoire, 175. Recent studies have revisited the construction of chapter 24. See , “Diderot, Roubaud et l’esclavage” Recherches sur Diderot et sur l’Encyclopédie35 (2003): 69–93, and , “Diderot-Raynal, l’esclavage et les Lumières écossaises” Lumières3 (2004): 53–93.
42 HDI, book 11, chap. 24, 267.
43 Ibid., 268.
44 As Gianluigi Goggi has shown in meticulous detail, one of Diderot’s key sources for this account was the Scot John Millar’s Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society, published in London in 1771 and translated by J. B. Suard in 1773. Goggi argues that Millar, in turn, drew from and reconfigured Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet’s Théorie des loix civiles. Gianluigi Goggi, “Diderot-Raynal,” 56–93. This version of the stadial history of human origins also closely resembled William Robertson’s account of the rise of commercial society in his Histoire du règne de l’empereur Charles-Quint, précédée d’un Tableau des progrès de la société en Europe depuis la destruction de l’Empire Romain jusqu’au commencement du seizième siècle […] ouvrage traduit de l’anglois. (Amsterdam and Paris, 1771). On the four-stages theory of history and commercial society and its theoretical foundations most famously articulated by Adam Smith in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), see , “The Language of Sociability and Commerce: Samuel Pufendorf and the Theoretical Foundations of the ‘Four-Stages Theory,’” in Anthony Pagden, ed., The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). See also Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, Reference Smith, Mossner and Ross1976); Ronald L. Meek, “Smith, Turgot, and the ‘Four Stages’ Theory,” in Smith, Marx and After: Ten Essays in the Development of Economic Thought. London: Chapman & Hall, Reference Meek1980; and Harro M. Höpfl, “From Savage to Scotsman: Conjectural History in the Scottish Enlightenment,” Journal of British Studies 17 (Reference Höpfl1978): 19–40.
45 HDI, book 1, chap. 1, 16. This reference is discussed in greater detail later.
46 So does the article “Esclavage” in the Encyclopédie, of which the HDI was in many ways an extension. See Ehrard, “L’Encyclopédie et l’esclavage.”
47 The Spirit of Laws (1748), book 15, chap. 7. See also book 15, chap. 8. On the ways in which Montesquieu’s Christianity thesis was already under challenge by Voltaire and Linguet, as Diderot revisited the HDI’s third version, see Goggi, “Diderot-Raynal, l’esclavage et les Lumières écossaises,” 59.
48 The distinctions are Montesquieu’s in The Spirit of Laws. Book 15, chap. 10 explains that there are “two sorts of slavery: real and personal. The real one is the one that attaches the slave to the land,” whereas personal slavery “is service in the household, and it relates more to the person of the master.”
49 HDI, book 11, chap. 24, 272. Emphasis added.
50 “Des lors, le propriétaire ne pouvoit pas retenir sous ses yeux ses esclaves [sic], & il fut forcé de les disperser sur le sol qu’ils devoient defricher.” It is important to note this use of the term esclaves to describe serfs. Ibid., 273–74.
51 Again, these are Montesquieu’s terms: servitude personelle and servitude réelle. Ibid., 274.
52 HDI, book 1, 16. We know that this section is Diderot’s as well; it too appears to have been added in 1780. See Duchet, Diderot et l’Histoire, 65.
53 “Ce grand changement, qui se faisoit, pour ainsi dire, lui-même.” HDI, book 11, 274.
54 Ibid., 275. Again, this point is partially reiterated in the introduction to the work cited previously, where “the honour of having abolished slavery” is attributed to “that sound policy, which commerce always introduces” and which in turn “induced” kings to “bestow freedom upon the slaves of their vassals.” Ibid., book 1, 16.
55 Montesquieu may have been the first to coin the phrase and is its most authoritative exponent, but the theory runs large. See, for example, , Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 103–56; , European Encounters with the New World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 169–71, and Lords of all the Worlds: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France c.1500-c.1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, Reference Pagden1995), 178–81. It is important to note here that while Montesquieu discusses slavery, he does so without reference to the trade in slaves. Conversely, there is no discussion of the “commerce in humans” in all of part 4 of The Spirit of Laws, the section on commerce, other than an oblique reference in chapter 21 of book 21, “On laws in their relation to commerce considered in the revolutions it has had in the world.” In this chapter, he lists one of the “consequences of the Discovery of America” to be that “voyages to Africa became necessary; they furnished men to work the mines and lands of America.”
56 Montesqieu, The Spirit of Laws, part. 4, book 20, chaps. 1–2. This is where most traditional readings of Montesquieu’s theory of commerce tend to stop.
57 Ibid., emphasis added.
58 Voltaire began his own popular “French” universal history, the Essai sur les moeurs, by stating the aim of continuing where the Bishop Bossuet left off in his Discours sur l’histoire universelle, to write a universal history with attention to the “mores,” “customs,” and “spirit” of “men.” Ibid., 196. J. G. A. Pocock’s recent Barbarism and Religion. Volume I: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) offers the most comprehensive analysis to date of the varying methodologies and philosophies of this trend – what he has called “Enlightenment historiography.”
59 HDI, book 11, 275. Emphasis added. This assertion is followed by the claim that “[s]ince it [slavery] has been abolished among us the people are a hundred times happier, even in the most despotic empires, than they were formerly in the best-ordered democracies.” It appears that, once again, Diderot engages the rhetoric of slavery by confronting its metaphorical quality and asserting that in the “real” social life of Europeans, no institutionalised social relation like the slavery of the “Middle Ages” and before exists any longer. This statement ignores the “domestic slavery” of women in Europe, to which Montesquieu devoted an entire book (book 16) in The Spirit of Laws.
60 Ibid.
61 HDI, book 11, 276. This abridged version of the slave trade’s initiation, provided at the end of the “history of slavery,” differs slightly from the accounts provided elsewhere in the HDI, where it is the “pirates,” called Spanish “refuse,” who initiate the “traffic of man.” It is probable that “Spaniards” was shorthand for pirates here, a significant conflation worth further study.
62 Later works explicitly refer to the HDI’s forceful claim while making the same rhetorical point about the hypocrisy of the Frenchman’s repugnance for the “enslavement” of despotism and simultaneous support of the enslavement of the “Negroes.” See, e.g., Febvé, Essai philanthropique sur l’esclavage des nègres. Par Mr. L’abbé Febué Chanoine de Vaudemont: Membre de la Société du Philantrope (S. l. n. d. Reference Febvé1778), 27.
63 “Non, quoi qu’on en puisse dire, la condition de ces infortunés n’est pas la même que la nôtre.” HDI, book 11, 284.
64 Ibid., 268.
65 Ibid., 224, 257.
66 Ibid., book 1, chap. 1, 4.
67 HDI, book 19, 374. For more on the passages in the HDI extolling commerce as the instrument of world peace, see , “Le commerce instrument de la paix mondiale,” in Gilles Bancarel and Gianluigi Goggi, eds., Raynal, de la polémique à l’histoire (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2000), 243–54.
68 HDI, book 11, 275, 287.
69 HDI (1780), 222.
70 This is a point Diderot made later in a dialogue with an imaginary slave merchant (an armateur). See HDI (1780), book 11, chap. 24, 277–87.
71 Ibid., 277. See also book 11, 264, where, in a description of the colonial “masters,” Raynal claimed that “by committing such outrages against humanity, they injure themselves.” This notion of the contagion of diseased commerce is likely informed by Montesquieu, who remarked that “[slavery] is useful neither to the master nor to the slave: not to the slave, because he can do nothing from virtue; not to the master, because he contracts all sorts of bad habits from his slaves, because he imperceptibly grows accustomed to failing in all the moral virtues, because he grows proud, curt, harsh, angry, voluptuous and cruel.” The Spirit of Laws, book 15, chap. 1.
72 HDI, book 11, chap. 24, 277.
73 Ibid., 287.
74 Ibid., 275.
75 We can here recall that in an earlier passage, the HDI attributes the initiation of the slave trade to this “peuple de pirates, ces monstres de mer,” that is, “this people of pirates, these sea-monsters.” Ibid., 190.
76 This is Jean Starobinski’s phrase describing Rousseau’s social thought: in essence, that the cure for civilisation’s ills lay in civilisation itself. See Le remède dans le mal, 170. The “reform track,” as Laurent Dubois has called it, increasingly came into vogue later on in the decade. Dubois, Les esclaves de la République, 59–62. See also, “L’esclavage est-il réformable? Les projets des administrateurs coloniaux à la fin de l’Ancien Régime,” in Les Abolitions de l’esclavage, 133–41.
77 HDI, book 11, chap. 24, 248–50. As Gianluigi Goggi has elucidated, these ideas had been circulating in Physiocratic circles, especially in the works of Dupont de Nemours and the abbé Baudeau, and were already present in Roubaud’s Histoire générale de l’Asie, de l’Afrique, et de l’Amérique. But they reached the corridors of power by way of a colonial official, the baron of Bessner, whose memorandum, De l’esclavage des nègres (1774) sparked a great debate in the Bureau des colonies, and notably fierce opposition from Malouet. According to Goggi, Raynal’s decision to broadcast Bessner’s memorandum through the HDI suggests a reading of the text as an imperial voice box. See Goggi, “Diderot-Raynal, l’esclavage et les Lumières écossaises,” 72–73. The puzzle of how to interpret Diderot’s decision to leave these controversial theses in the text remains, however.
78 Chapter 22 discusses “the wretched condition of slaves in America” and how each nation “treats the slaves differently,” as do the different religions. Chapter 23 offers detailed suggestions as to “how we could render the state of the slaves more tolerable.” Ibid., 261–65.
79 Ibid., 287.
80 Ibid., 288–89.
81 There is agreement among most scholars studying the HDI that this passage was “borrowed” from Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’an 2440, chap. 22. The language is almost identical. Anatole Feugère was the first to remark on this in his Un précurseur de la Révolution, 204–05.
82 David B. Davis has argued that this ambivalence and apparent “narrowing of alternatives” is a sign of increasing moral uncertainty in the mind of the Enlightenment. See David B. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, Reference Davis1966), 422.
83 Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, 32. The phrase “alert moral recognition” is Judith Shklar’s. She used it to describe the role of utopias, but I suggest it also aptly describes one of the functions of the history of European slavery added by Diderot in 1780. See Men and Citizens, 2.
84 HDI, book 11, chap. 24, 256–57.
85 Indeed, the HDI served as one of the foundational texts upon which the soon-to-be Girondin député, Jacques-Pierre Brissot (de Warville, 1754–93), founded the Société des Amis des Noirs, the first abolitionist society in France, in 1788.
