Gustave De Beaumont Research Articles

A Revolution in Property: Tocqueville and Beaumont on Democratic Inheritance Reform

Abstract Among the most controversial reforms investigated by Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont was the idea of using inheritance as an instrument to diffuse property ownership. This article offers the first comparative account of the development of this concept across each of their major works. By situating their interventions within wider inheritance law debates, it is demonstrated how their evolving visions of democracy forced them to innovatively combine two normative arguments: (i) diffusing property ownership via inheritance was a precondition for placing democracy upon stable political foundations, and (ii) this could counter the rise of pauperism and the extreme wealth inequality of nineteenth-century industrial society. Far from being an anachronistic republican notion, such reforms were long considered too radical to be implemented in England and Ireland.

Sentiment and the Contradiction of Racial Inequality in Beaumont's Marie or, Slavery in the United States

AbstractFrom the American travels of Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont in 1831 and 1832, there emerged three books aimed at presenting European audiences with the lessons to be learned from the young democratic regime of the United States: the cowritten On the Penitentiary System in the U.S. and Its Application in France, Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and Beaumont's Marie or, Slavery in the United States. This essay aims to clarify the specificity of Beaumont's account of the United States in Marie by focusing on the central role he gives to sentiment as both formal principle and analytical concept. Through a reading of the book's sentimental novel form and its use of moral sentimentalist theory, this essay argues that Beaumont depicts American racism as the effect of a fundamental flaw in European American national character: an incapacity for sentiment that renders the United States incapable of fully realizing its democratic principles.

The Color Consciousness of Constitutional Color Blindness

The Color Consciousness of Constitutional Color Blindness Jack Jackson (bio) Mark Golub. Is Racial Equality Unconstitutiona? New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 232 pp. $29.95 (pb). ISBN: 9780190090081. In reading Mark Golub's quite thought-provoking book, Is Racial Equality Unconstitutional?, I found myself returning throughout to two canonical theorists not engaged in the text: Karl Marx and Alexis de Tocqueville. Golub's excellent exploration of white supremacy and constitutional politics is in many ways carrying forward Marx's critique of "rights" and the liberal constitutional state developed in "On the Jewish Question" and updating Tocqueville's observation in Democracy in America that formal legal equality and flourishing white supremacy are compatible political projects. Marx's critique was spurred, in small part, by a report from Tocqueville's travel companion Gustave de Beaumont: "'There is not, in the United States, either a state religion or a religion declared to be that of a majority, or a preponderance of one religion over another. The state remains aloof from all religions.'"1 Marx zeroes in on the fact that a religion-blind constitutional state may exist harmoniously with, and indeed help reproduce and secure, a social condition where "religion not only continues to exist but is fresh and vigorous."2 Echoing Marx, Golub criticizes a Supreme Court that "privatizes racial preferences as [End Page 844] beyond the legitimate concern of a color-blind state" and argues that the col-or-blind project enables and ensures the continuity of a polity "fundamentally structured by relations of racial domination and subordination."3 Tocqueville directly addressed the social conditions of white supremacy in the United States. Although slavery still existed when Tocqueville toured the country, he noted the virulence, or perhaps vigorousness, of white supremacy in those areas where slavery had been formally abolished. Here is Tocqueville: "the prejudice rejecting the Negro appears to increase in proportion to their emancipation and that inequality cuts deep into social customs, as it is effaced from the law."4 Golub is following a similar path of inquiry when he states that he seeks to "understand the social processes through which racial subordination is rendered ordinary, legitimate, and just" in an era of formal legal equality articulated through both the constitutional doctrine and constitutional vision of "color blindness."5 Golub trains his fire on the fantasy of the "color-blind" Constitution. Entering into constitutional law with Justice Harlan's famous dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), today colorblindness is a pillar of constitutional faith on the political Right. It is a theoretical cudgel used to whack even the most mild and limited programs designed to address the legacies and contemporary practices of racial exclusion and domination. To illustrate, Golub cites Justice Clarence Thomas quoting Justice Harlan in a 2007 case striking down a democratically enacted (rather than judicially imposed) integration plan in Seattle's public schools: "I am quite comfortable in the company I keep. My view of the Constitution is Justice Harlan's view in Plessy: 'Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.' And my view was the rallying cry for the lawyers who litigated Brown."6 Golub does a masterful job of exploding this smooth citational line linking Harlan's dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court's opinion in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and today's right-wing majority on the Court. He offers a superbly rich and nuanced reading of both the facts and reasoning in Plessy v. Ferguson to demonstrate that even at its inception in Justice Harlan's dissent, "color blindness" was a confusing and contested concept that surely was not blind to race in either law or society. As well, he helpfully reminds us that the phrase "our Constitution is color-blind" never appears in Brown v. Board of Education. Moreover, in the hands of the current Court majority it functions as a paradoxical doctrine, relying on the very thing it claims to erase: color consciousness. That is, color blindness is a form of "white identity" politics on the Right.7 And, Golub contends, this project surprisingly constitutes the conceptual and political grounds of its would-be liberal critics. The last point strikes...

Outrageous Flirtation, Repressed Flirtation, and the Gallic Singularity

This article offers a new way of understanding Alexis de Tocqueville’s complex position as a French observer who studied the United States, an ambivalent aristocratic cultural commentator who put his hopes for the future in democratic society, and a paradoxical figure in the history of debates over the so-called “Gallic singularity” who ultimately argued that the new American sex/gender system could provide a better model for women in a democracy than the traditional French one. The introduction and first section highlight Tocqueville’s changing attitudes toward what he saw as the key contrasts between European marriages and American marriages by comparing his initial letters home from the United States with his eventual work in Democracy in America. The second section compares his views of French and American women with those of his contemporaries Germaine de Staël and Gustave de Beaumont. The third section explains his changing views by establishing the connections between his comparative arguments about women and marriage and his comparative arguments about democracy itself.

La cabaña del Tío Tom (Uncle Tom’s Cabin), la esclavitud atlántica y la racialización de la esfera pública en la ciudad de México de mediados del siglo XIX

Las representaciones teatrales de La cabaña del Tío Tom en la Ciudad de México en 1857 tienen que ser entendidas como constitutivas del fenómeno cultural “Tom Manía” que cautivó al mundo atlántico en los años 1850. Sin embargo, hasta ahora tanto historiadores como críticos literarios han ignorado la resonancia de la famosa novela de Harriet Beecher Stowe en México, subestimando, asimismo, su importancia en América Latina. En consecuencia, han perdido de vista cómo los proyectos esclavistas e imperiales de España influyeron en la articulación de un campo intelectual hispano-mexicano en torno a temas como la esclavitud, abolición y raza. Este estudio ilumina estas conexiones a través de una perspectiva transnacional de la circulación de La cabaña del Tío Tom en la Ciudad de México. En la primera parte, rastreamos como éste y otros textos importantes de la época que también trataban el tema de la esclavitud—Bug Jargal de Victor Hugo y María, o la esclavitud en los Estados Unidos, de Gustavo de Beaumont—ganaron espacio en las librerías, periódicos y salones literarios capitalinos. En la segunda parte nos enfocamos en las representaciones teatrales de 1857. Mantenemos que aspectos de los espectáculos de Tom pusieron de relieve la aparente aceptación y familiaridad con el tropo del “negrito” en la arena cultural, mostrando cómo estas actuaciones antiesclavistas sin embargo también activaron y reforzaron prácticas que estigmatizaban la negritud.

Hess: Tocqueville and Beaumont

This is a review of Andreas Hess's intellectual joint biography of the French writers, politicians and early sociologists Alexis deTocqueville (1805-59) and Gustave de Beaumont (1802-66).

Democracy and Unfreedom: Revisiting Tocqueville and Beaumont in America

This essay reexamines the famous 1831 prison tours of Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont. It reads the three texts that emerged from their collective research practice as a trilogy, one conventionally read in different disciplinary homes ( Democracy in America in political science, On the Penitentiary in criminology, and Marie, Or Slavery: A Novel of Jacksonian America in literature). I argue that in marginalizing the trilogy’s important critique of slavery and punishment, scholars have overemphasized the centrality of free institutions and ignored the unfree institutions that also anchor American political life. The article urges scholars in political theory and political science to attend to this formative moment in mass incarceration and carceral democracy.

Tocqueville’s America, Beaumont’s Slavery, and the United States in 1831–32

This essay first outlines Alexis de Tocqueville’s well-known argument from Democracy in America that religion shapes the mores that keep American “equality of conditions” from deteriorating into the “tyranny of the majority.” The paper then turns to the superb research of scholars who have published the notes, letters, and journals that Tocqueville and his traveling companion, Gustave de Beaumont, produced during their 1831–32 US journey. That material allows a clearer picture of where Tocqueville was perceptive, where he failed to record important aspects of American religion as it actually existed, and where what he observed accurately in 1831–32 changed significantly shortly thereafter. More attention to the neglected book that Beaumont published after their trip, Marie; or, Slavery in the United States, shows that his detailed assessment of United States’ deeply ingrained racist attitudes would have helped make Tocqueville’s insightful analysis of American democracy even more compelling.

A counter voice: Gustave de Beaumont and the theory of national characters

Gustave de Beaumont was clearly a counter voice within the debate about national characters that engaged nineteenth-century French political thought. This was not the first time that Beaumont set himself apart for the originality of his convictions. For instance, on the Irish question, he did not take Ireland's part against England out of allegiance to the Catholicism of the Irish as opposed to the Anglicanism of the English (which was why most of French public opinion was for Ireland); rather, studying the issue led him to see the English presence in Ireland as a policy of oppression and discrimination.

A counter voice: Gustave de Beaumont and the theory of national characters

A counter voice: Gustave de Beaumont and the theory of national characters

Introduction: The long life of characters

Ubiquitous and elusive: this is how the theory of national characters appears in nineteenth-century French political thought. One could also add “mysterious”. I arrived at national characters in fact—as you can read in my article featured in this issue—via a mystery that Gustave de Beaumont left unsolved in his L'Irlande.1 Indeed, it was the wish to explain it that propelled me to explore the theory of national characters, firstly as regards Great Britain and then followed by Germany and France. Altogether, the idea was hatched to gather around this theme the voices of certain scholars specialized in this field. Finding them proved hard; although it is indeed the case that the theme of national characters exists in countless works with a focus on nineteenth-century France and Europe and on nationalism, there is not one single work specifically focused on the theme. This monographic issue precisely seeks to deal with this issue in a specific way.

Remembering and Forgetting the Great Famine in France and Ireland

Remembering and Forgetting the Great Famine in France and Ireland Grace Neville The columnist and critic Fintan O'Toole posed a characteristically provocative question in the Irish Times on August 5, 1997, when, in the course of discussing the scarcity of artistic responses to the seminal event in modern Irish history, he asked "Whatever happened to the Famine?"1 The Great Famine of the 1840s is often seen as a lieu de mémoire, or site of memory, but also as a locus of forgetting in Irish history. Despite the seismic shift that it set off across Irish society, the Famine was frequently shrouded in silence throughout succeeding generations. One might wonder, therefore, what was known of it elsewhere—for instance, in Ireland's nearest continental European neighbor and age-old ally, France? A great deal, it would seem. To date, I have identified more than two thousand French texts from the nineteenth century that refer briefly or at length to the Famine. The French commentators include journalists, priests, poets, playwrights, satirists, statisticians, scientists, lawyers, horticulturalists, botanists, epidemiologists, postgraduates, aristocrats and proletarians, conservatives and revolutionaries. They published mainly in Paris but also in provincial cities like Grenoble and Clermont, and even further afield—for instance, in Montréal. Yet, even as they set pen to paper, the French observers repeatedly question the very aim of their work as they cast doubt on the ability of mere words to capture a catastrophe so huge as the Irish famine. Decades after the event, Ernest Fournier de Flaix wondered, "Comment écrire sur l'histoire de cette famine? Des milliers, des dizaines de milliers, des centaines de milliers d'hommes et de femmes périrent. Elle a couté plus de vies que l'Angleterre n'en a perdu dans aucune de ses guerres depuis Hastings jusqu'à Waterloo" ("How can the story of this famine be written? Thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of men and [End Page 80] women perished. It cost England more lives than any of its wars from Hastings down to Waterloo.").2 Their reactions range from empathy and searing passion to clinical detachment: in an 1862 study, the editor-in-chief of L'Economiste français, Jules Duval, actually put a positive gloss on the mass emigration triggered by famine in Ireland: "Thus, Ireland's excess population was happily drained and the country was led into a state of prosperity that it had never heretofore known."3 One surprising finding, in surveying the French literature, is the extent to which Ireland and potatoes were already linked in French minds. Writing at the height of the Famine in 1846, Balzac describes in his novel La Cousine Bette a typical impoverished Parisian who "eats potatoes like the Irish, but fried in rat fat." Elsewhere, his praise of a restaurant in the Quartier Latin, Flicoteaux, depicts Ireland as the land par excellence of the potato: "potatoes are always on the menu [in Flicoteaux' restaurant]. Even if there were no potatoes in Ireland, even if they were in short supply everywhere, you would still find them in Flicoteaux."4 However, more than the equation that "Ireland equals potatoes," the French had long made the connection that "Ireland equals famine." From at least the late seventeenth century onward, French commentators depict Ireland not as a land of famine but of famines. The Famine of the 1840s is thus contextualized as just one of countless such events, albeit admittedly the worst. In an award-winning 1827 study on the death penalty, a lawyer at the royal court in Paris, Adolphe Garnier, refers to "Ireland where, through poor administration, entire families sleep in cellars and on the streets, beset by fever and hunger."5 Elsewhere, the eminent traveller Gustave de Beaumont—who had visited Ireland along with his friend, Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s—comments, "Every year, nearly at the same season, the commencement of a famine is announced in Ireland, its progress, its ravages, its decline. . . . When Bishop Doyle was asked, in 1832, what was the state of the population in the west, he replied, 'The people are perishing as usual'."6 De Beaumont concludes by quoting the Commission for Inquiry into the State...

<em>Social Thought on Ireland in the Nineteenth Century</em>, edited by Séamas Ó Síocháin

Reviewed by: Social Thought on Ireland in the Nineteenth Century Julie M. Dugger (bio) Social Thought on Ireland in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Séamas Ó Síocháin; pp. xiii + 178. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2009, £24.00, $52.95. The essays in this useful collection had their origins in a conference held by the Anthropological Association of Ireland, their stated purpose being to provide a “building block in an anthropological history of Ireland and point up the significance of Ireland as a case study for the emerging social sciences in the nineteenth century” (ix). To this end, editor Séamas Ó Síocháin has assembled a set of analyses that consider Ireland’s treatment by individual nineteenth-century intellectuals, mainly English or writing in England, along with two essays on period attitudes toward race and ethnicity in Ireland. The intent of Social Thought on Ireland is thus to clarify the Irish social sciences, but the book is at least as effective as an aid to Victorian studies. For Victorian writers in England, Ireland had great rhetorical significance as an all-too-visible reminder that not all was well. While the English presided over a growing British empire abroad and relative political stability at home, Ireland refused to grow or stabilize, falling prey to poverty, famine, and rebellion despite its long-term rule by the supposedly civilizing nation next door. Why, asked the nineteenth-century commentators, couldn’t English governance drag a backward Ireland forward? Social Thought on Ireland’s essays on Gustave de Beaumont, J. S. Mill, Harriet Martineau, Henry Maine, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and J. A. Froude describe these writers’ wide-ranging answers to this question: because the Irish were racially inferior, because they were Catholic, because there were too many of them, because they resisted a mishandled English rule, because their landlords were indifferent, because their land was boggy, and many other hypotheses. Whatever the answer, it illuminates each writer’s understanding of history and the place of England and Ireland within it. Some essays are sketchier than others: this book may be only the beginning of a conversation. But it’s a good beginning, demonstrating the ways in which nineteenth-century intellectuals expressed their own anxieties about failure in the face of opportunity through reflection on the foreigners next door. One of the strengths of Social Thought on Ireland is the diversity of the commentators it considers. It offers the liberal Mill, the socialist Marx and Engels, and the Carlylean Froude; it evaluates sociology, economics, political science, history, and even a couple of attempts at the novel (by Froude and Martineau). Further, the writers analyzed are carefully positioned in their intellectual, political, and historical contexts. This work is a good introduction to the field it surveys: an opening chapter on “Ireland’s Nineteenth Century” covers some of the issues on which the nineteenth-century commentators weigh in, and the authors of the subsequent chapters offer brief biographies for some of their less-familiar subjects (Beaumont, Maine, Martineau) or summaries of the historical issues that moved them (Ó Síocháin’s outlining of the Irish Land War is particularly helpful). The authors also consider the ways in which Ireland was viewed “within a broad comparative context (empire/India/Anglo-Saxons)” (viii), and they excel at this. We see that both the United States and India were regularly compared to Ireland as countries also working through a legacy of English influence, and we see as well the growing role that Irish-American emigrants played in the question of Irish independence. At times the collection seems a little too far-ranging. Though the essay on Beaumont is well-written, and Beaumont himself is clearly significant to Irish studies as [End Page 573] “Ireland’s Alexis de Tocqueville” (9), he feels out of place among so many English writers. The essay on Marx and Engels is similarly frustrating because its most developed discussion is on India rather than Ireland, which it seems to reserve for future exploration. In another departure, the essay on race theory admits that popular attitudes toward race in Ireland have already been covered well elsewhere (notably by L. P. Curtis) and directs...

Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont in America: their friendship and their travels

de Tocqueville, a young aristocrat of twenty-five, worried deeply about the future of France as well as his own fate in his native country, which had just experienced its second revolution in less than fifty years. Along with Gustave de Beaumont, a fellow magistrate, Tocqueville conceived the idea that by traveling to he could penetrate the secret of the modern world, in which democracy and equality were destined to rule. Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont in America reproduces the journey of these two friends in an authoritative and elegant volume. Zunz and Goldhammer present most of the surviving letters, notebooks, and other texts that Tocqueville and Beaumont wrote during their decisive American journey of 1831-32, as well as their reflections and correspondence on following their return to France. Also reproduced here are most of the sketches from the two sketchbooks Beaumont filled during their travels. The two young men relied on these documents in writing their individual works on America, Tocqueville's seminal Democracy in (1835-40) and Beaumont's novel Marie or, Slavery in the United States (1835). Focusing on American equality, Tocqueville made a lasting contribution to Western political thought by framing modern history as a continuous struggle between political liberty and social equality, and presented the United States as having struck a proper balance between the two ideals. Beaumont concentrated instead on the brutality of racial prejudice. These extraordinarily rich and often profound texts constitute the indispensable record of their intertwined engagement with the United States, which we see here through the unfailingly intelligent gaze of two young Frenchmen with a unique appreciation of what was novel in the American experiment.

Tocqueville in America: An Interview with Leo Damrosch

Tocqueville in America: An Interview with Leo Damrosch Randall J. Stephens LEO DAMROSCH IS THE ERNEST BERNBAUM PROFESSOR OF Literature and Harvard College Professor, Emeritus. He has written an array of biographies and works of literary history, including Samuel Johnson and the Tragic Sense (Princeton University Press, 1972); Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth (Princeton University Press, 1980); God’s Plot and Man’s Stories: Studies in the Fictional Imagination from Milton to Fielding (University of Chicago Press, 1985); The Imaginative World of Alexander Pope (University of California Press, 1987); The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit (Harvard University Press, 1996); and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (Mariner Books, 2007), a National Book Award finalist. His latest book, Tocqueville’s Discovery of America (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010), uses the journey of Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont to reveal the lively character of 1830s America. Historically Speaking editor Randall Stephens caught up with Damrosch at his Widener Library office and spoke to him about the work and influence of one of America’s keenest observers. Randall Stephens : There were many Europeans who traveled through America in the 1830s and 1840s and wrote about their experiences. Why has Tocqueville’s account withstood the test of time while the published observations of so many others have faded into obscurity? Leo Damrosch : Tocqueville had an overriding purpose. He wanted to understand American democracy. He was convinced that democracy was the way of the future. His family was very reactionary and had reason to be. They suffered in the French Revolution, and his parents barely escaped execution. They wanted to turn back the clock, and he was certain that that could never be. But he was also of two minds about democracy. He was interested but skeptical. He asked Americans a lot of really penetrating questions and was more open-minded than most visitors were, particularly when it came to politics. Most Europeans came to see what American manners were like. If they were interested in politics, they tended either to be quite conservative, so they came here to prove that democracy doesn’t work, or they were very liberal and came armed with even more radically egalitarian ideas for Americans to adopt. They had an ax to grind. He didn’t in that sense. He paid attention to anyone with something interesting to tell him. It didn’t matter if they were famous, as some of them were, or backwoods storekeepers. He wanted to know what Americans themselves had to say about American democracy. Sam Houston is a great example. I believe that he gave Tocqueville the kernel of his great chapter on race in America. Houston had grown up with the Cherokees and lived with them even in adult life. Houston said that the Indian has always enjoyed absolute liberty; he has been taught from infancy to make every decision for himself. You will never get him to assimilate into American society. And at the other extreme slaves had never been allowed to make any decisions for themselves. They wouldn’t know what to do with freedom because they’d never had any. This notion is the lynchpin of Tocqueville’s long chapter on race. And I think it came from Houston. When Tocqueville met him, he seemed at first like an absurd kind of backwoods raffish character. Tocqueville couldn’t believe he had ever been governor of one of the states, but when he got to know him he paid attention to what Houston had to say. When Tocqueville arrived in America, his English was only passable. He could read it better than speak it, which is true of my French. By the time he left he was pretty fluent, but he didn’t have an ear for slight differences in usage that drove English visitors up the wall. So what seemed to them vulgar or coarse or uneducated didn’t matter to Tocqueville. He was an aristocrat. He believed that it was his duty to work hard for the public good as had his father, an administrator of the French government. In America he saw that status was...

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democrat in America, Colonizer in Africa

Alexis de Tocqueville was born an aristocrat, in the very conservative region of Normandy, in France in 1805. He was at the same time an admirer of the French Revolution, although due to his upbringing and family, he was unable to subscribe to all the principles inherent to that revolution. Tocqueville remains admirable on that score, as he lived under the counterrevolution and participated in the government of the new monarchy. His contradictions made him an observing outsider. He studied law and went into politics. He accompanied his friend, Gustave de Beaumont, who was sent by his government to the New Republic of America, to study the U.S. prison system for its eventual application in France. They cosigned the subsequent report.

Gustave de Beaumont’s Ireland and the Anxieties about Corruption and Forms of Empire

In the last few years there has been a surge of interest in early nineteenth century views on empire, including those of Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont. Yet despite this important development, I beleive there is a significant gap in the historiography of liberal conceptions of empire. This lacuna results from a neglect of the connection between democracy, moral corruption, and empire. In this essay I will contend that Beaumont’s liberalism harbours a deep anxiety about how modern democracy brought about what might be described as a form of moral corruption. I will argue that this disquiet must be understood against the larger backdrop of liberal anxieties about how democracy corrupted both self and society, worries articulated especially clearly by the French Doctrinaires. It was this disquiet that marked Beaumont’s analysis of what he, Tocqueville, and many other Frenchman considered to be an ‘aristocratical’ tyranny in Ireland.

Gustave de Beaumont's Ireland and the Anxieties about Corruption and Forms of Empire

Gustave de Beaumont's Ireland and the Anxieties about Corruption and Forms of Empire

Les injustices révoltantes: Gustave de Beaumont and the Pre-history of Crimes Against Humanity

Forty years ago, Seymour Drescher argued persuasively that Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont drew throughout their public and intellectual careers on a mutual fund of research, notes, and conversations. Beyond Tocqueville’s undisputed superiority as thinker and writer, however, there remained important differences between them. If Tocqueville was the anthropologist of modem equality, Beaumont was the horrified observer of unjust inequality. His romantic and evocative style, noted Drescher, was often morally polarized: “black and white, lord and peasant, free man and slave, famine and opulence.” Moreover, Beaumont was sometimes a more faithful purveyor of facts and contemporary opinion.

Les injustices révoltantes : Gustave de Beaumont and the Pre-history of Crimes Against Humanity

If Alexis de Tocqueville was the anthropologist of modern equality, his companion in America and lifelong associate Gustave de Beaumont was the horrified observer of the anachronistic persistence of inequality: morally polarized worlds of black and white, slave and master, bound and free, conquered and conqueror, famine and opulence. Beaumont’s writings in fact cluster around a set of cases that have often been retrospectively collected as “crimes against humanity” avant la lettre: enslavement of Africans, extermination or “ethnic cleansing” of indigenous peoples by the English in Ireland the US in America, and the French conquest of Algeria. I read Beaumont’s texts as a privileged entre to reconstructing what nineteenth-century liberals understood to constitute conduct that was morally beyond the pale, either in peace or war. In the last half century the notion of a category of crimes that shock the conscience of humanity has emerged at the intersection of humanitarian and human rights law. Yet the notion of scandalizing or sinning against humanity, and even the phrase “crimes against humanity” itself, was used earlier and more widely—in both English and