The Impact of the American Revolution on French Anticolonial and Antislavery Views in the 1780s

Abstract

Abstract: The American Revolution happened as Raynal and Diderot were working on the third edition of their monumental Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies . Beyond this bestseller of the 1770s and 1780s, many lesser-known authors started to consider the impact of the American Revolution on the issue of colonies and empires. Among them were journalists and essayists who lived in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. The American Revolution appeared to them, as well as to other French cosmopolitan writers of the same generation and profile, as the starting point of a liberation of the whole American continent from European imperial rule and potentially from the slave trade and slavery. The gradual abolition of slavery in Northern American States was seen as a logical consequence of the American Revolution. However, the writers who thought about the consequences of the American Revolution in terms of decolonization were not the same as those who engaged in a thorough reflection on slavery, a debate in which more well-known figures, like Condorcet and Brissot, played a key role.