CHAPTER FIVE

We have hitherto been concerned almost exclusively with England and the United States. The truth is that the liberal party in France betrayed its weakness fairly early on. And yet, several years before the appearance of The Spirit of the Laws, Voltaire likewise proceeded to celebrate the country that embodied the cause of liberalism at the time: ‘Commerce, which has brought wealth to the citizenry of England, has helped to make them free, and freedom has developed commerce in its turn. By means of it the nation has grown great’.¹ Indeed, ‘[t]he English are the only people on earth who have managed to prescribe limits to the power of kings’; they alone were genuinely free.² More generally, given the difficulty they faced in dealing with comprehensive censorship, the philosophes hoped to escape this kind of cage and hence looked with sympathy across the Channel. Even Helvétius, whom Diderot rebuked for his indulgence towards enlightened despotism, was compelled to make a significant concession: ‘It is said that this century is the century of philosophy … Today, everyone seems occupied with the search for truth. But there is only one country where it can be published with impunity—and that is England.’³ The island happily rid of absolute monarchy exercised a powerful attraction. In the columns of the Encyclopédie, Diderot held up England as an example of ‘temperate monarchy’, where ‘the sovereign is repository solely of executive power’.⁴ A little less than ten years later, proposing to restrict representative bodies to ‘major property-owners’,⁵ he still viewed cross-Channel political institutions with great interest. In Condorcet’s view, too, they had the merit of having realized, albeit to an inadequate extent, the principles of the limitation of royal power, freedom of the press, habeas corpus and judicial independence.⁶

In fact, two years prior to the storming of the Bastille and the intervention of the popular masses on the political scene, the English model seemed to have triumphed in France as well. Supported by a wide popular consensus, the noble parlements challenged royal absolutism: ‘the anti-absolutism of the parlements’, or ‘aristocratic liberalism’, became the vehicle for widespread ‘liberal demands’.⁷ Preserve of a nobility which, as a result also of the sale of offices, was open to the bourgeoisie, the French parlements for a while seemed destined to play godfather to the advent of a constitutional monarchy and to perform a role similar to that of the House of Lords and the House of Commons in England. Not by chance they appealed to Montesquieu, president of the Bordeaux Parlement and a great admirer of the country that had emerged from the Glorious Revolution.

Burke viewed this sensationally missed opportunity with regret, when he delivered his harsh indictment of a revolution that had degenerated rapidly and wickedly. Had it ended at the stage when the struggle was led by the parlements, the French

Unfortunately, this happy, auspicious moment had been short-lived; and people had started chasing after ‘a pure democracy’ that in fact secreted a tendency to a ‘party tyranny’ and ‘a mischievous and ignoble oligarchy’.⁹

Reflections on the Revolution in France was published on 1 November 1790, but its basic arguments had already been set out with great clarity in a speech by Burke in the Commons on 9 February of that year. Jacobinism lay in the future. Rather than transforming the British Whig into the prophet of a catastrophe no one was in a position to predict at the time, we should examine the events that had occurred when he levelled his serious charges against the French Revolution. Revealing is the observation that, rather than striving to create a ‘bad constitution’ ex nihilo, the French should have engaged in further improving the ‘good one’, of which ‘[t]hey were in possession … the day the states met in separate orders’. The ruinous turn occurred when, in the course of the meeting of the Estates-General summoned by the King—at which the ‘good’ Constitution finally emerged or, rather, re-emerged—the tradition whereby the orders sat in separate chambers was abandoned and the transition to voting by head was decided, with the consequent transformation on 9 July of the Estates-General into a constituent National Assembly wherein the former Third Estate now possessed a majority. Thus burst onto the scene the ‘bad constitution’, which ‘melted down the whole into one incongruous, ill-connected mass’. Everything else flowed from this: the attack on ‘the root of all property’ and ‘confiscat[ion] [of] all the possessions of the church’—the reference is to the night of 4 August 1789 and the abolition of feudal privileges (hunting rights, tithes, and so on)—and the promulgation on 26 August of the ‘mad declaration’ of the Rights of Man, that ‘sort of institute and digest of anarchy’.¹⁰

But everything began on 9 July. The French Revolution proved fatally degenerate even before the capture of the Bastille and the intervention of the popular masses—in a sense, even before its inception. And in fact Burke was concerned to stress that ‘the glorious event commonly called the Revolution in England’ was in fact ‘a revolution, not made, but prevented’: William of Orange ‘was called in by the flower of the English aristocracy to defend its antient constitution, and not to level all distinctions’,¹¹ as, alas, had happened in France. The latter had now gone beyond its fleeting liberal phase, which extended from the agitation of the parlements to the summoning of the Estates-General.

The subsequent liberal tradition is inclined to extend the felicitous phase of the French Revolution somewhat, and identify the turning point in the tumultuous intervention of the popular masses, initially rural and then urban; thus de Tocqueville. But it is interesting to note that he, too, after 1848 at any rate, extolled the period when the movement was directed by the parlements, all of them striving to reverse ‘the old absolute power’ and ‘the old arbitrary system’, and win ‘political liberty’, in a struggle promoted and led not by the ‘low classes’ but by the ‘higher’.¹² Certainly, contrary to Burke, who tended to conceive the parliamentary agitation on the model of the so-called Glorious Revolution, de Tocqueville was prepared to stress that in this phase, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, an authentic revolution was underway:

It was ‘a very great revolution, but one that should rapidly have faded into the immensity of what happened and thus disappeared from the view of history’.¹⁴ Only in a subsequent phase ‘was the Parlement no longer praised’ in the revolutionary movement, but ‘reviled, turning its liberalism against it’.¹⁵ The ruinous parabola of the French Revolution could be synthesized thus: ‘At the outset it was Montesquieu who was quoted and expounded; at the end people spoke exclusively of Rousseau.’ The turning point was described in terms similar to those we have noted in Burke: the rot set in when people rushed towards ‘pure democracy’ and laid claim to change ‘the very structure of society’.¹⁶

Even closer to Burke was Guizot, who pointed to the eruption of the ‘Third Estate’s struggle against the nobility and the clergy’ as the moment when the French Revolution ceased to have ‘liberty’ as its goal and aimed exclusively at ‘power’, paving the way for the subsequent, interminable struggles—‘those of the poor against the rich, of the common people against the bourgeoisie, of the rabble against respectable folk [honnêtes gens]’.¹⁷

2. Parliaments, diets, the liberal aristocracy and serfdom

No distinction is made here between slavery in the strict sense and the serfdom prevalent, in its harshest forms, in eastern Europe. In any event, the servile subjection of blacks or peasants, far from contradicting it, rendered the love of liberty by property-owners and freemen stronger and more credible.

Sidney too was an admirer of Poland. Along with other ‘northern nations’, it was inspired by a love of liberty. What demonstrated this was, among other things, the fact that the king derived from ‘popular elections’—in other words, appointment by the Diet of nobles.¹⁹ Certainly, proudly asserting their condition as free, equal men in the face of the monarch were magnates who wielded absolute power over their serfs. But Sidney argued along the lines we have already encountered: as with slavery, liberalism was also compatible with serfdom. In fact, both institutions rendered the appreciation of liberty more profound and more jealous.

In Burke there is complete consistency between the recognition granted Poland and that granted the French parlements. The latters’ agitation was quite the reverse of an isolated phenomenon: ‘In Sweden the years from 1719 to 1772 are known as the Age of Freedom, because at this time the Diet or Riksdag ruled without interference by the King. Indeed, these Swedish Whigs, after their revolution of 1719, had the works of John Locke translated into Swedish.’ In Hungary the nobles instead appealed above all to Montesquieu,²⁰ while, in even more ringing language, the Polish aristocracy paid homage to ‘republican liberty’.²¹ In conclusion, ‘[t]he diets, estates, parlements, and councils all stoutly defended liberty, and indeed stood for many genuine liberal ideas; but at the same time they palpably insisted on the maintenance or enlargement of their own privileges.’²² In this context we can also situate Bismarck’s celebration some decades later of the ‘liberal caste sentiments’ (ständisch-liberale Stimmung) of the class he belonged to,²³ which was interested in extending the jurisdiction and powers of representative bodies also in order to reinforce control over servants.

A similar observation can be made in connection with the agitation set off by the French parlements: guiding the ‘assault’ on royal absolutism was ‘one of the ancien régime’s most traditional institutions’.²⁴ And, in addition to the English model, it was to this initial phase of the French Revolution—the one admired by Burke and de Tocqueville post-1848—that the liberal nobility of the Hapsburg Empire appealed to condemn Joseph II’s anti-feudal reforms, to reassert the role of diets and intermediate bodies, and hence ‘regain … control over their peasants’ and the ‘other political liberties’ they had lost.²⁵ Sidney had already specified that a common feature of ‘northern nations’, which embodied the principle of liberty, was assignment of a decisive role to ‘lords, commons, diets, assemblies of estates, cortes, and parliaments’.²⁶

The aristocratic liberalism represented in France by the parlements was thus widely diffused in Europe, especially central and eastern Europe. Certainly, unlike Burke, Montesquieu expressed a negative opinion of Poland, ‘where the peasants are slaves of the nobility’.²⁷ The British Whig was well aware of these social relations. In fact, he started out from them to underscore the emphatic love of liberty displayed by slave-owners in Poland, as across the Atlantic. By contrast, Montesquieu saw liberty at work in the English colonies in America, but not in Poland. Does Burke demonstrate greater logical rigour? In reality, in accordance with his principle of the ‘uselessness of slavery among ourselves’, Montesquieu did not identify with Poland, which could not invoke the justification or extenuation of a hot climate and where the zone of unfreedom lacked spatial as well as racial delimitation.

It remains the case that Burke’s attitude had deep roots in the philosophy of history of the liberal tradition, which from Montesquieu onwards tended to date the inception of the history of freedom and free, representative government from the ancient Germans. Among them, as we know from Grotius, the institution of slavery was very much present and yet (according to the author of The Spirit of the Laws), ‘the English have taken their idea of political government from the Germans’.²⁸ On the basis of such presuppositions, Madame de Staël celebrated the liberty enjoyed by old France, despite the heavy presence of serfdom,²⁹ and Constant ‘the intermediate bodies’ and ‘Parlements’ wrongly weakened by royal despotism,³⁰ which played an important role in the initial phase of the revolution.

3. The American Revolution and the crisis of the English model

Despite the seemingly favourable initial prospects, the English model met with rapid defeat in Paris. In reality, it was already deeply tarnished when the crisis of the ancien régime reached maturity in France. In the 1760s, while the colonists’ rebellion was brewing across the Atlantic, John Wilkes attacked ‘the whole organization of the British oligarchy’ in London and initiated a crisis of such gravity as to make the Italian Pietro Verri believe in the imminence of ‘civil war’. Persecuted at home, Wilkes for a time found refuge in Paris, where he formed relations with the group of philosophes.³¹

However, the turning point in the process that threw the English model into crisis in France was represented by the American Revolution. The British Constitution now ceased to be celebrated, and criticisms of Montesquieu for having transfigured it were not lacking.³² The increasingly bitter condemnation of the ancien régime derived comfort from transatlantic political and social developments. Although not refusing England acknowledgement of the merits earned with the liquidation of royal absolutism, Condorcet looked primarily to America, with its magnificent ‘spectacle of equality’, without any trace of the belief diffused, albeit to different degrees, on both sides of the Channel that nature had ‘divided the human race into three or four orders’, condemning only one of them to ‘work much and eat little’.³³ Now appeal was no longer made to the Glorious Revolution, from which a liberal but also aristocratic England had emerged, but to the ‘happy revolution’ across the Atlantic,³⁴ which had given birth to a markedly superior politico-social reality: ‘there is no distinction of orders’ and ‘there is nothing that confines one part of the human species to an abjectness consigning it to idiocy as well as misery’.³⁵

Diderot was even more swingeing. The new country, which offered ‘all the inhabitants of Europe an asylum from fanaticism and tyranny’, was an alternative model to the ancien régime that continued to be all the rage in the old continent as a whole, and where ‘the inept, the corrupt rich and the pernicious [are promoted] to the most important offices’. Adherence to the cause of the rebel colonists was, at the same time, a ruthless critique of the behaviour of British troops and against Britain as such. This emerges from celebration of the ‘brave Americans, who have preferred to see their women outraged, their children slain, their homes destroyed, their fields ruined, their cities burnt, and who have preferred to shed their blood and die, rather than lose the least part of their liberty’.³⁶ Thanks also to the support furnished to the American revolutionaries by France, their arguments were bound to find a favourable echo in Paris, and they involved an unequivocal condemnation of the country that Paine in Common Sense (substantially translated immediately after its publication) branded as ‘British barbarity’, ‘the Royal Brute of Britain’, whose aristocratic character was already evident from ‘what is called the Magna Charta’.³⁷ Nor should we lose sight of the presence in Paris, in the decisive years of the revolutionary crisis, of Jefferson, who, a few weeks after the storming of the Bastille, advised France to keep its distance from England’s worst aspects (a form of representation that was quite the reverse of equal—in fact, ‘abominably partial’—as well as the ‘absolute’ power which the monarch continued to possess in reality thanks to the venality of parliamentarians).³⁸

This was the intellectual climate in which Brissot and Clavière, two figures destined to play a central role in the French Revolution, published a book in 1787 dedicated ‘to the American Congress and the friends of the United States in the two worlds’, and marked throughout by admiration for ‘free Americans’ and ‘free America’, for its ‘free’ and ‘excellent’ Constitution and noble ‘republican customs’.³⁹ The counterpoint to such celebration was, of course, condemnation of ‘London’s ministerial despotism’ and the ‘ferocity’ of its troops. The ‘English nation’ was now vainly seeking to remedy the ‘devastation of its cruel dementia’ and renew relations with the country born in the wake of the struggle against it.⁴⁰ This division must be followed by an intellectual and political alliance between those who had struggled together against England—namely, the United States and France, which ‘with its arms helped assert the independence of free America’, and which was now summoned to take inspiration from the great new model embodied by the country thrown up by the revolution.⁴¹ On this basis, Brissot and Clavière set up the French–American Society.

When, two years later, the debate began that issued in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, not a few interventions appealed to the American example and the sort of synthetic proclamation of the rights of man contained in the Declaration of Independence. In an attempt to counter the revolution’s radicalization, Malouet, who became the spokesman for the interests of slave-owners in the colonies, drew attention to the radical differences between the United States and France. In the first case, there was a society ‘entirely composed of property-owners already accustomed to equality’. In the second, one witnessed the agitation of ‘an immense multitude of men without property’ in a daily struggle for survival and ‘placed by fate in a condition of dependency’: a gulf separated ‘the fortunate and the unfortunate classes of society’. This was where appeals to ‘democracy’ and the rights of man could have devastating consequences for the social order.⁴² Stripped of its ideological caution and reticence, the meaning of the speech was clear. In America, thanks to expansion into territories occupied by the Indians and their expropriation, it was possible significantly to expand the ranks of property-owners who were European in origin. On the other hand, the ‘unfortunate classes’ were not in a position to do harm: they mainly comprised blacks reduced to slavery or relegated to a subaltern caste and subject to iron social control. Waved exclusively within the white community and the superior race, the flag of democracy and the rights of man had nothing subversive about it. But in France …

Malouet’s reasoning was not flawless. However, it was no longer possible to revert to the situation prior to the American Revolution. After the formation of significantly more democratic representative bodies at federal and state levels in the United States, little credibility could attach to the British parliament, which on the basis of a law of 1716 that remained in force for nearly two centuries (until 1911) was elected every seven years,⁴³ and monopolized by the landed aristocracy. Moreover, it was undermined by a corruption that had become proverbial in Europe and across the Atlantic, which seemed in France to be a repeat of the sale of offices—an essential element of the ancien régime that was to be got rid of.

In the course of their argument with London, the American revolutionaries had equated citizens deprived of the right of representation with slaves. But now this argument came to be applied in France by those who were opposed to censitary discrimination in the suffrage. This, thundered Robespierre, criticizing those inspired by the ‘example of England’, reduced the excluded to a condition similar to the slave: ‘liberty consists in obeying the laws one has given oneself and slavery in being forced to submit to an alien will’.⁴⁴ Some years later, Babeuf argued in similar fashion: ‘citizens whose will is inactive—such men are slaves’.⁴⁵ These were declarations that could have come from the mouth of an American revolutionary; only now, pronounced in favour not of a narrow elite of gentlemen and property-owners, but of the mass of the dispossessed, they assumed a very different political and social value.

4. The transfiguration of American ‘master-race democracy’ in a universalistic key

Focusing attention on the problem of slavery, the argument that developed on both sides of the Atlantic initially discredited England, protagonist of the slave trade, more than it did the rebel colonists: ‘staining the reputation of that nation’ (observed Diderot in 1774) ‘is the fact that its blacks are the unhappiest of blacks’. Indeed, ‘the Englishman, enemy of tyranny at home, is the most ferocious despot abroad’.⁴⁶ The Philosophical and Political History of the Two Indias reiterated the point: ‘The English, this people so jealous of their own liberty, have contempt for that of other men’. They did not hesitate to employ the most bestial methods and the most refined forms of torture to smother any hint of rebellion and any aspiration to freedom by their slaves; ‘it is to this excess of barbarism that the trading and slavery of blacks have necessarily led the usurpers’.⁴⁷

Later, when it allied with the powers of the ancien régime to fight revolutionary France, and refused to follow the latter’s example in abolishing slavery (decreed by the Jacobin Convention in February 1794, in the wake of the revolution by the black slaves led by Toussaint L’Ouverture), England was widely discredited in Europe. Robespierre was not alone in declaring that the island across the Channel could seem like a model of liberty only at a time when France groaned under monarchical absolutism. This was also Kant’s opinion: ‘England, which at one time could count on the sympathy of the best men in the world … has now completely lost that sympathy.’⁴⁸

While it provoked the crisis of the English model, the American Revolution prompted portrayals and hopes that were destined to prove completely unrealistic. At work was the illusion that the institution of slavery was destined rapidly to disappear in the republic produced by a great struggle for freedom. The founders of the French–American Society explicitly expressed themselves in such terms: ‘The most beautiful feature for which one honours the public spirit in the United States’ was ‘the emancipation of the blacks’. Thanks to the Quakers’ abolitionist campaigning, it ‘will soon be universal in all this part of the world’, so that only the Europeans, still committed to the slave trade and the oppression of blacks, would remain to blush at ‘their barbarism’.⁴⁹

Condorcet adopted a similar position: the rebel colonists were the ‘friends of universal liberty’.⁵⁰ Consequently, one could start from the presupposition that the stain of slavery would soon be washed away:

This illusion is readily explicable: it involved a confusion between the abolition of the slave trade (effectively provided for by the US Constitution, which sanctioned its termination in 1808) and the abolition of slavery (which continued to flourish); and there was a sense that the process set in train in the North would shortly encompass the Union as a whole. More generally, the rebel colonists’ passionate denunciation of despotism and political slavery sounded like a declaration of war on any form of enslavement, and hence like the inception of black emancipation.

The process of transfiguring events across the Atlantic sometimes became a total misunderstanding. Enthusiastically saluting the rebel colonists, Raynal advertised a prize for answers to the question whether ‘the discovery of America has been useful or harmful to the human race’. The four responses submitted concurred in denouncing the event as a harbinger of intolerance and slavery and pointing to the American Revolution as the remedy for such ills.⁵² The rebellion that broke out in the name also of the right to untrammelled expansion into lands inhabited by savages was thus construed in the completely opposite sense!

5. The colonists of San Domingo, the American model and the second liberal inception of the French Revolution

At the outset, it was not understood in France that the independence secured by the white colonists strengthened their control over the Indians and blacks; and it was not realized that a similar dialectic was tending to develop in the French colonies. In the 1781 edition of the History of the Two Indias, Diderot on the one hand evoked the figure of a ‘black Spartacus’, summoned to rise up against the slave-owners, but on the other, harking back to the example of the American Revolution, declared for the concession of self-government to San Domingo too, which would precisely have entailed the triumph of the slave-owners. The philosopher did not perceive the contradiction, and nor did Brissot, who took a similar position.⁵³

With the outbreak of the French Revolution, self-government became the watchword of colonists interested in preserving the institution of slavery and shielding their property from the interference, whims and despotism attributed to central government. Among the first to make himself spokesman for these ideas and interests was Malouet, who in 1788 had already engaged in a sharp polemic against the abolitionists. Certainly, the institution of slavery was out of the question for a ‘free and proud nation’ like France. To tolerate it on metropolitan territory would risk erasing the boundary between liberty and slavery and inducing a ‘general enslavement’. Malouet was a liberal and admired England, where he took refuge following the failure of projects for establishing a monarchy on the English model in France. He appealed to the ‘wise Locke’ and his Treatises of Government to argue that slavery for ‘barbarous peoples … does not offend the right of nature’.⁵⁴ Hence Malouet took care not to challenge the spatial and racial delimitation of slavery, as had his contemporary and fellow countryman Melon (against whom Montesquieu argued): slavery was inconceivable in the metropolis and, within the colonies, for the white race.

In relation to blacks, however, the discourse was very different: transported to America, they were providentially released from the ‘most absurd despotism’, which raged in Africa. It was true that they continued to suffer slavery, albeit of a decidedly milder variety than that prevalent in their countries of origin. However, much more so than the American slave, whose subsistence was guaranteed and who was protected by a series of laws, it was the European ‘worker’ (journalier) who was ‘subject to the absolute will’, the power of life and death, of his master, who, denying or ejecting him from work, could calmly condemn him to death. People cried scandal at the punishments inflicted on slaves, but what happened in Europe? A peasant who stole was hanged, a poacher was condemned to ‘forced labour’—a slavery much more pitiless than that typically existing across the Atlantic.⁵⁵ Thus, we encounter the arguments that would later receive more developed theoretical systematization particularly in Calhoun.

Once the French Revolution had broken out, supporting the colonists’ interests and arguments was the Massiac Club, founded in Paris in August 1789, of which Malouet was a prominent member. Likewise aligned in defence of the colonists’ right to self-government and the undisturbed enjoyment of their property (plantations and slaves) was Antoine Barnave. We are dealing with an important author who expressed his liberal convictions not only in immediately political terms, but also at the level of the philosophy of history. In him too we find the dialectic we are already familiar with: ringing condemnation of political ‘slavery’⁵⁶ did not prevent him from forcefully and skilfully defending the cause of the slaveholding colonists. The ‘spirit of liberty’ (he observed) increased and strengthened with the expansion of ‘industry’, ‘wealth’ and, above all, ‘movable wealth’. That was why, even prior to England with its splendid ‘Constitution’, it emerged in Holland, ‘the country where movable wealth has accumulated most’.⁵⁷ Slaves were an integral part of this ‘movable property’, and had already been classified among the ‘movable’ goods in Louis XIV’s Code noir.⁵⁸

The Massiac Club and Barnave were generally considered ‘Anglomanes’ and genuinely were, in the sense that they opposed the radicalization of the French Revolution and admired and envied the country across the Channel for its orderly rule of law and strict censitary discrimination, which consecrated the untrammelled, exclusive domination of the property-owning classes. However, in another respect they were led to appeal predominantly to the American model, with its pathos of the inviolable autonomy of representative bodies and states from central power and the guarantee that derived from it of the inviolability of the institution of slavery. In the face of central government, the colonies adopted the stance of the southern states. In March 1790 the colonists won a temporary victory:

It was a success that was repeated about a year later: ‘The National Assembly made it a constitutional rule that no law on the condition of unfree persons in the colonies could be made except at the formal, unsolicited request of the colonial Assemblies.’⁵⁹ Even if the whole discourse revolved around the problem of slavery, the relevant term did not appear: the articles of the US Constitution were imitated in substance and form alike. This was the French Revolution’s second liberal inception. Just as the parlements expressed the desire for self-government by the liberal nobility in the metropolis, so the colonial Assemblies gave voice to the slave-owners’ desire for self-government in the colonies.

Yet this second liberal inception was even more precarious than the first. Following the defeat suffered during the Seven Years’ War, France had lost virtually all its colonial empire in 1763. This had imparted to the critique of colonialism and the institution of slavery a diffusion and radicalism hampered, by contrast, in the English and American world by substantial material interests and a national, chauvinistic spirit understandably reinforced by victory. We can thus understand the split that immediately occurred in the French liberal party. Aspiring to a constitutional monarchy with the right to make war and peace reserved to the king, Mirabeau, like Malouet and Barnave, looked to England. Unlike them, however, he ended up rejecting the American model when it came to regulating the relations between central power, on the one hand, and colonies and colonists, on the other. In the Constituent Assembly the latter demanded that they be represented in proportion not only to their numbers, but also to the number of their slaves, in accordance with a criterion identical or similar to that adopted by the US Constitution. Here is Mirabeau’s stinging reply:

It was an argument that also applied in the United States, as is confirmed by a subsequent position of Mirabeau’s:

The condemnation of ideologies of slavery targeted both French colonists and the English colonists who had now constituted themselves as an independent state: the polemic against the former could not but encompass the latter; the initial ambiguity, which had led French abolitionists to attribute a completely imaginary universalistic impetus to the authors of the American Revolution, was dispelled—all the more so in that it was the very ideologues of slavery who drew attention to the vitality of that institution in the United States. Brissot had believed that the example of the Quakers of Pennsylvania would act as a model; in a sense adopting an observation already present in Smith, Malouet had pointed out in 1788 that the abolition of slavery decided by it affected a fairly limited number of people and certainly did not extend to the southern states, where the presence of slaves and blacks was much more pronounced.⁶² In 1802 Baudry des Lozières’ sarcasm was stinging. Precisely where ‘Brissot locates perfection’, slavery not only flourished undisturbed, but manifested itself in particularly rigid form: ‘The North Americans, those lovers of liberty, those ardent republicans, who in their books celebrate their independence so much, buy and sell slaves.’ Moreover, ‘this country of liberty is very miserly in granting freedom’ and ‘those who are freed’ were treated ‘extremely harshly’.⁶³

6. The crisis of the English and American models and the formation of French radicalism

Certainly, figures were not lacking in the abolitionist camp who continued to harbour illusions about a possible restoration of the American model to its former splendour. The abolition of an institution whose stubborn survival was incomprehensible in a country so strongly attached to the cause of liberty would suffice. When in 1824 Lafayette visited the United States, where nearly fifty years earlier he had fought in the War of Independence, he cautiously tried to point out ‘the disadvantages of slavery’ in Ohio. However, his speech met with no success; in fact, his good intentions had an ironic objective accompaniment, since in various southern cities public notices warned ‘people of color’ to stay away from the ceremonies in honour of the illustrious guest.⁶⁴

Residual illusions were also evident in Grégoire. Demonstrating political naivety, in an attempt to convince Jefferson to abandon his racial prejudices, he referred to the figure of Toussaint L’Ouverture to prove the ability of blacks to achieve a level of excellence!⁶⁵ The French abbot was unaware of his interlocutor’s efforts, in his capacity as US president, to reduce the republic born in the wake of the black slave revolution led by Toussaint L’Ouverture to hunger and force it to surrender (see below, Chapter 5, §8). Similarly, he did not know that in 1801 the latter was lamenting in his correspondence the fact that citizens of San Domingo were abducted by American corsairs and sold as slaves.⁶⁶ Leading the United States in 1801 was precisely Jefferson who, some years later, wrote to a friend in ironic terms about the French abolitionist abbot.⁶⁷

As the predicted and desired emancipation of black slaves became an ever more problematic and remote prospect, bitter disappointment set in, as demonstrated in particular by Condorcet’s evolution. On the immediate eve of the French Revolution, when the Constitution consecrating slavery was in force across the Atlantic, he still continued to draw a rather optimistic picture. The various states of the new republic and the ‘common Senate that represents them’ were unanimous in desiring the abolition of slavery; it was an ‘act of justice’ dictated by ‘humanity’, but also by ‘honour’. A severe warning was already implicit in this final observation: ‘How, without blushing, can one dare to demand these declarations of rights, these inviolable bulwarks of the liberty and security of citizens, if every day one permits oneself to violate the most sacred articles?’⁶⁸

Some years later, where once it had been implicit, the distancing became explicit, even if it continued to be cautiously phrased. Compared with the French Revolution, the American presented itself as ‘more peaceful’, but also as ‘slower’ and ‘more incomplete’. Sooner or later, it too would end up applying the principle of liberty and equality in its universality. But for the time being there continued the ‘crimes whose avarice soils the shores of America, Africa or Asia’, the ‘bloody contempt for men of another colour’, the slave trade between the two shores of the Atlantic, the tragedy of Africa and the ‘shameful brigandage that has corrupted and depopulated it for two centuries’. By contrast, it was a merit of the more advanced French culture to treat as ‘friends … those blacks whom their stupid tyrants disdain to rank among men’.⁶⁹

We have seen Condorcet denounce the ‘general corruption’ of Holland and England as slaveholding societies. This denunciation increasingly tended also to encompass the country that emerged from the third liberal revolution. The Terror was already hanging over Condorcet himself, who nevertheless identified revolutionary France as the country called upon to put an end to

The United States no longer represented the genuine antithesis of the ancien régime, construed by Condorcet as a complex system of forms of discrimination and privilege that lacerated the unity of the human race. It was necessary to overcome once and for all a political order in which, intertwined with the hierarchization of peoples on the basis of climate, geographical location or differential economic development, there was a hierarchization within any individual people on the basis of birth or membership of an estate. While the first type of discrimination found concentrated expression across the Atlantic, the second had certainly not disappeared in England. The critical or scornful reference to the argument of ‘climate’ (a position prominent in Montesquieu and often used to justify the slavery of colonial peoples), and to the argument of the ‘balance’ of powers (often invoked in England to justify the privileges of the House of Lords and the landed aristocracy), demonstrates that Condorcet had become critical of the American and English models alike, and had ultimately broken with both fractions of the liberal party.

Fully to understand Condorcet’s mature view, it is important to take account of a peculiarity of the French Revolution. In the course of its development, the popular uprising in the metropolis against the ancien régime was soon followed by the clash in the colonies between freemen and slaves and between blacks and whites. The two conflicts were all the more closely intertwined because sections of the bourgeoisie and liberal nobility, engaged against the process of radicalization underway in Paris, were sometimes simultaneously interested, as the owners of slaves in the colonies, in preventing their emancipation. Those on the opposite side were thus led to assimilate noble privilege and racial privilege, branding them conjointly as two different expressions of aristocratic arrogance. In 1791 the Jacobin Sonthonax pointed to the liberal and spokesman for the slaveholding colonies, Barnave, as the ‘protector of the aristocracy of the epidermis’.⁷¹ A few years before the outbreak of the July Revolution, although now ferociously critical of Jacobinism, Abbé Grégoire issued a firm denunciation, already encapsulated in the title of his little book, of the ‘nobility of the skin’. The analogy was now developed in all its aspects. The ban on interracial marriages in the United States was compared to the social obligation which, under the ancien régime, required the aristocracy not to contaminate itself with elements alien to it, with commoners: at work in both cases was an insane concern to safeguard ‘the purity of the blood’.⁷² It was understood that ‘the nobility of the skin will suffer the same fate as the nobility of the scroll’.⁷³ In short, the absolute power possessed by the slave-owner was certainly no more tolerable than that exercised by the monarch, and hence the ‘colonists’ were ‘similar to all despots’.⁷⁴

In this comparative perspective, the negative judgement on the United States was manifest: ‘Civilization is only dawning: five million Africans transported to America are still in chains there.’⁷⁵ And if there was an encouraging example in the New World, it was not afforded by the ‘colonists’ and the country they had founded in North America:

Criticism of the American model became even more explicit and bitter as those who wished to preserve slavery in the colonies appealed to it. Against the abolitionist projects or ambitions of Paris, the colonists invoked the spectre of a repeat of the American Revolution. They too would be forced into independence if they did not succeed in securing self-government, so as to be able to freely dispose of their slaves, without a ‘despotic’ power interfering with their legitimate property from without and above. Again, after the July Revolution, the French colonists declared themselves ready ‘to hand themselves over to the American Union if the metropolis did not permit them slaves’.⁷⁷ Making this observation in 1842 was Victor Schoelcher who, six years later, played a key role in the definitive abolition of slavery in the French colonies, which had been reintroduced by Napoleon in 1802. And we can then understand the bitterness of the polemic against the transatlantic republic. ‘Skin prejudices’ remained particularly ‘inveterate among the Americans’; they could be considered ‘the most ferocious masters on the earth’,⁷⁸ authors of ‘one of the most upsetting spectacles the world has ever offered’. Not only blacks, but also white abolitionists, were hit by the most savage violence. Lynching threatened anyone who dared to challenge the ‘iniquitous property’ and ‘demand freedom for all members of the human race’. ‘There is no cruelty of the most barbarous age that has not been committed by the slave states of North America.’ Hence the hope for a revolution from below: ‘I hope that these brusque lynchers will one day all be hung by rebellious slaves’.⁷⁹ Not by chance, Schoelcher, in condemning the crimes committed by ‘us other barbarians of the West’,⁸⁰ expressed his admiration for the ‘colossal revolution of S. Domingo’⁸¹ and for the figure of Toussaint L’Ouverture, to whom he devoted a sympathetic biography.

The gulf separating the new political current forming in France from the two fractions of the liberal party is clear. Like Schoelcher, Brissot, who had played a significant part in founding the French–American Society, did not hesitate to justify armed rebellion by black slaves and their right to revolution.⁸² At this point the French–American Society was dead and buried. Between the July Revolution and the 1848 Revolution, manifestly in debate with French radicalism, de Tocqueville could once again present the United States as a model or source of inspiration only on condition of dropping the analogy between noble aristocracy and racial aristocracy, between monarchical despotism and slave despotism—the analogy on whose basis the North American republic was configured not as a model of liberty and democracy, but as a variant (and then not even the best) of the ancien régime.

7. The liberal inception of the revolution in Latin America and its radical outcome

In the metropolis and colonies alike, the French Revolution was transformed in a radical direction. To clarify this process further, we must begin with the definition which, in the course of the struggle against Stuart absolutism, at the start of the English liberal movement, one of its exponents gave of the ‘true liberty’ dear to him: ‘we know by a certain law that our wives, our children, our servants, our goods, are our own, that we build, we plough, we sow, we reap, for ourselves’.⁸³ In the event, ‘our servants’ did not passively endure assimilation to ‘our goods’ and, in opposition to the ‘true liberty’ cherished by the exponent of English proto-liberalism, demanded a quite different liberty, which required the intervention of political power to abolish servitude in its various forms and promote the emancipation of the subaltern classes. This is what occurred in France, thanks to the historically auspicious context already analysed. In the metropolis, the first liberal inception of the French Revolution was immediately followed by the revolt of the peasants (with the end, sealed on the night of 4 August 1789, of the feudal system), and then the agitation of the urban popular masses. The second liberal inception, which was to have consecrated self-government by slave-owners, ended up inciting the revolution of the slaves themselves. The latter achieved emancipation and later managed to frustrate the terrible war machine of Napoleonic France.

A similar dialectic manifested itself in Latin America. Initially, the independence movement and revolution took the form of reactions against reform by the Spanish crown, which ‘reversed the old policy of segregating the Indians and urged them to assimilate by speaking Spanish and dressing in European style’. Such integrationist measures soon provoked the hostility of the Creole elite. The latter professed liberalism, and was liberal: it read Locke, Montesquieu and Adam Smith; it sometimes sought to enter into relations with Jefferson; it protested against central government interference and the obstacles it placed in the way of developing local industry; it aspired to emulate the example of the American Revolution.⁸⁴ As for the English colonists in the North, so for the Latin American Creoles in the South, the slave, as the planter’s private property, did not pertain to the public sphere. In the various manifestos that signalled the start of the war of independence against Spain, no positions in favour of abolishing slavery were adopted.⁸⁵

Where the English colonists had indignantly rejected London’s attempt to block their expansion beyond the Allegany Mountains, and proudly declared that they did not want to be treated ‘like negroes, the Latin American Creoles claimed equality with the peninsula’s ruling class and superiority to the Indians and, obviously, slaves deported from Africa. To this end they reminded Madrid that they were descendants of the conquistadores and, ultimately, artisans of the grandeur of the Spanish Empire. We are reminded of Franklin who, in the course of the controversy with the London government, had stressed the merits earned by the American colonists, ‘hazarding their Lives and Fortunes in subduing and settling new Countries, extending the Dominion and encreasing the Commerce of their Mother Nation’, enhancing the glory, ‘the Grandeur and Stability of the British Empire’.⁸⁶

But it was not long before the two roads diverged sharply. The fact is that in Spanish America, together with the Creole revolution but counter to it, an Indian revolution developed. In fact, the latter had announced itself decades earlier, as demonstrated by the series of revolts culminating in 1780–81 in the Túpac Amaru rebellion, which sought to win the blacks to its cause, liberating them too from the shackles of slavery. By contrast, the Creoles initially rose up with liberal slogans, demanding self-government, challenging interference by central power, aiming, like the North American colonists, to strengthen their control over the native populations and blacks. It was precisely this political project that formed the main target of the struggle by the Latin American Indians. Their revolution brings to mind the one that later erupted in San Domingo, and which issued in the formation of a new country: Haiti.

There is no doubt: it was San Domingo–Haiti that gave the Creole independence movement a decisive turn. To overcome the fierce resistance of the Spanish troops, Simón Bolívar sought to secure the support of the rebel ex-slaves of the Caribbean state, which he personally visited. The president at the time was Alexandre Pétion, who immediately received the Latin American revolutionary. He promised him the aid he requested on condition that he freed the slaves in areas as they were wrested from Spanish control. Transcending the class and caste limits of the social group he belonged to, and demonstrating intellectual and political courage, Bolívar accepted. Seven ships, 6,000 men with arms and munitions, a printing press and numerous advisors set out from the island.⁸⁷ This was the beginning of the abolition of slavery in much of Latin America.

Bolívar started out as a liberal, appealing to Montesquieu,⁸⁸ underlining the need for ‘a liberal Constitution’⁸⁹ with ‘eminently liberal provisions’, which were to sanction ‘the rights of man, the freedom to act, think, speak and write’,⁹⁰ as well as ‘the division and balance of powers, civil liberty, freedom of conscience, a free press’—in short, ‘everything sublime that there is in politics’. He celebrated the ‘British Constitution’ and, above all, the American, the ‘most perfect of Constitutions’.⁹¹ However, when he demanded not only liberty, but the ‘absolute freedom of the slaves’, Bolívar in fact took his distance from the United States, where, even in the North, blacks were confined to a caste which was not that of genuinely free men. And this distancing from the North American republic was confirmed by a further observation that ‘it is impossible to be free and slaves at the same time’. But especially significant was another element: the slave revolution from below, which in the United States represented a general nightmare, now became an object of explicit celebration. Bolívar not only appealed to the ‘history of the helots, Spartacus and Haiti’,⁹² but in so doing defined Venezuelan and Latin American identity in a way that is worth reflecting on:

The countries formed out of the independence struggle against the Madrid government thus acquired a political, social and ethnic identity characterized by an admixture of black and Indian, and hence very different from US identity. While the North American colonists identified with the chosen people who sailed across the Atlantic to conquer the promised land, to be wrested from its unauthorized inhabitants and cleansed of their presence (see below, Chapter 7, §5), the Latin American revolutionaries, in the wake of their argument with Spain, tended to denounce the genocidal practices of the conquistadores, Spanish in particular and European in general. Here too the road had been indicated by the black slaves of San Domingo who, after having broken with Napoleonic France and defeated its attempts to re-conquer it and reintroduce slavery, had assumed the Indian name of Haiti. For Bolívar miscegenation—the mixing denounced in the United States, and sometimes with particular fervour by abolitionist circles—became a political project, which rejected any racial discrimination, and an essential element in a new, proud identity. However, precisely on account of its radicalism, this project found itself confronting almost insurmountable difficulties. Thanks to the politico-social homogeneity (strengthened by the availability of land and westward expansion) of its dominant class, and thanks also to the confinement of much of the ‘dangerous classes’ in slavery, the North American republic soon succeeded in achieving a stable structure. It took the form of a ‘master-race democracy’ and a racial state, based on the rule of law within the white community and among the chosen people. The situation in Latin America was very different: between liberal beginnings and radical outcomes, the revolution had mobilized a front stamped with profound social and ethnic contradictions. Thus two contrasting ideas of liberty confronted one another: one calls to mind the English gentleman determined to dispose freely of his servants; the other ultimately refers to the struggle that had put an end to black slavery in San Domingo—Haiti.

Hence the tension between those two poles is understandable. When, in 1826, Abbé Grégoire pointed to Haiti as the ‘beacon’ looked to by slaves, he clearly had in mind the island’s contribution to the abolition of slavery in Latin America. On the other side, with the emergence and advance of the slave revolution, the French colonists of San Domingo responded by entertaining the idea, and brandishing the threat, of secession from France and adhesion to the North American Union. Once the new revolutionary power had consolidated itself, it was a constant concern of the United States, where not a few ex-colonists took refuge, to overthrow or at least isolate it through a cordon sanitaire. It would be dangerous, observed Jefferson in 1799, to enter into commercial relations with San Domingo. That would result in ‘black crews’ disembarking in the United States, and these emancipated slaves could represent ‘combustion’ for the slaveholding South.⁹⁴ On the basis of such concerns, South Carolina banned the entry into its territory of any ‘man of colour’ from San Domingo or any of the other French islands, which might in some way have been infected by the new, dangerous ideas of liberty and racial equality.⁹⁵

Regardless of commercial exchanges, stressed influential political figures in the North American republic, by its very example the island risked challenging the institution of slavery far beyond its borders. Its inhabitants would in fact be ‘dangerous neighbors to the Southern States, and an asylum for renegades from these parts’.⁹⁶ In conclusion, ‘the peace of eleven states will not permit the fruits of a successful negro revolution to be exhibited among them’.⁹⁷ We can now understand Jefferson’s support for Napoleon’s attempt to re-conquer the island and reintroduce slavery. The US president assured the representative of France that ‘nothing will be easier than to furnish your army and fleet with everything and to reduce Toussaint to starvation’.⁹⁸ Having succeeded Jefferson, Madison was likewise in no doubt as to the position to adopt: France was ‘the sole sovereign of Saint Domingue’.⁹⁹

With the consolidation of black power and the emergence of Haiti, the conflict did not come to an end. It also extended to the Caribbean islands under British control. Unrest spread among the black slaves and the governor of Barbados was well aware of ‘the dangers of insurrection’. For this reason, projects to reform and moderate the institution of slavery were entertained in London. This was a prospect immediately opposed by the colonists of Jamaica, who, sheltering behind defence of ‘their undoubted and acknowledged rights’ to self-government, threatened revolt against royal despotism and secession and adhesion to the North American republic.¹⁰⁰

But the example of San Domingo—Haiti had its most profound influence on Latin America. In 1822 the president, Jean-Pierre Boyer, proceeded to the annexation (which proved short-lived) of the Spanish part of the island, with the consequent emancipation of several thousand blacks, who along with freedom experienced notable social ascent, becoming small landowners. Slaves and free blacks in Cuba, who secretly kept the image of the Haitian leader, hoped for something similar. On the opposite side, sensing the danger, slave-owners of a liberal persuasion had already made contact with the US consul in Havana a decade earlier and outlined a project for joining the United States, which elicited the interest of Madison and Jefferson. In Calhoun’s view the annexation desired by him was a sort of pre-emptive counter-revolution: it would put paid for ever to the danger of a Cuba ‘revolutionized by Negroes’, which would have increased or doubled the threat already posed by Haiti.¹⁰¹

Later, while the island of black power helped spread black emancipation in much of Latin America, the United States reintroduced slavery in Texas, which had previously been taken from Mexico. In the years immediately preceding the Civil War, an attempt was made to expand the territory of the North American republic and, with it, the institution of slavery into other parts of Mexico and, above all, Nicaragua. One participant in this adventure, which after initial successes ended in dramatic failure, was William Walker. He considered himself—and in his own way was—a liberal, who enjoyed significant support in the United States. He proposed to fight the despotic legacy of Spanish power and extend his country’s free institutions, but exclusively for the benefit of the authentic white community. For those alien to the ‘strong, haughty race, bred to liberty’ who were the custodians of ‘a mission to place Americans under the rule of free laws’, slavery was indicated. The decree of abolition promulgated in the wake of a movement that had found inspiration and support in Haiti was therefore cancelled.¹⁰²

Only after the end of the Civil War did the United States agree to open diplomatic relations with Haiti. But it was a move bereft of any warmth, and in fact functional for a project of ethnic cleansing. The idea, also entertained by Lincoln, of depositing on the island of black power the ex-slaves, who were to be deported from the republic that continued to be inspired by the principle of white supremacy and purity, had not yet been abandoned.¹⁰³

9. Liberalism and the critique of abolitionist radicalism

Hence a distinguished historian of slavery has appropriately warned against the tendency ‘to confuse liberal principles with antislavery commitment’.¹⁰⁴ Let us examine the reaction of various authors and sections of the liberal movement to the conflict that issued in the Civil War. We shall set aside Calhoun and the other theorists of the slaveholding South. And we already know Disraeli’s denunciation of the catastrophe of abolishing slavery in English colonies. On the point of the Confederacy’s military collapse, Lord Acton wrote to the general who had commanded its army:

The defeat of the liberalism embodied in the Confederacy weighed more than the victory won some decades earlier by liberal England over Napoleonic despotism. Why? On the outbreak of the Civil War, although acknowledging ‘all the horrors of American slavery’, Lord Acton had unhesitatingly rejected ‘the categorical prohibition of slavery’ demanded by the abolitionists, as informed by an ‘abstract, ideal absolutism’ quite contrary to ‘the English spirit’,¹⁰⁶ and to the liberal spirit as such, characterized as it was by flexibility and practical common sense.

Some years earlier, Lieber had expressed himself in similar terms. He condemned the abolitionists as ‘jacobins’, followers of the ‘fifth monarchy’, incorrigible visionaries and fanatics: ‘if people must have slaves it is their affair to keep them’.¹⁰⁷ Were such a declaration to be interpreted literally, not only would the right of states to self-government be inviolable, but also the right of each individual citizen to choose the type of property he preferred: let us not forget that at the time Lieber was himself a slave-owner! And hence while Disraeli ironized about the naive, misinformed ‘philanthropy’ of ‘the pure abolitionists’,¹⁰⁸ the American liberal took his distance from such circles even more clearly: ‘I am not an abolitionist.’¹⁰⁹

Lieber was on excellent terms with de Tocqueville, who in his turn declared: ‘I have never been an abolitionist in the ordinary sense of the term’; ‘I have always been strongly opposed to the abolitionist party’. What was meant by these declarations, contained in two letters from 1857? ‘I have never believed it possible to destroy slavery in old states’: the abolitionists’ error was to seek ‘to effect a premature, dangerous abolition of slavery in countries where this abominable institution has always existed’. We are dealing with a firm condemnation of slavery at a theoretical level, but one without results on the practical level. The situation in the South could only be altered through an initiative from above and from the centre, thereby throwing ‘the great experiment of Self-Government’ into crisis. And so? Preservation of the status quo was appropriate. However regrettable, people must resign themselves to the continuation of slavery in the South for a long time. However,

In fact, an expansion of the zone of slavery had already occurred at the time of the annexation to the Union of Texas, seized from Mexico. De Tocqueville seemed to be ready to accept a compromise even more favourable to the slaveholding South, as emerges from a letter of 13 April 1857, once again sent to a transatlantic interlocutor:

Yet this could not go on indefinitely. It was inadmissible that there ‘can be contained in the clauses of any contract the destruction of the right and duty of the present generation to prevent the spread of the most horrible of all social evils to millions and millions of men of future generations’.¹¹¹ The condemnation of slavery was passionate, but it was possibly necessary to tolerate the preservation and even the extension of the institution for some time. The reason emerges from a letter sent to the English economist Senior: dismemberment of the country which, more than any other, embodied the cause of liberty, ‘would inflict a serious wound on the whole human race, stoking up war in the heart of a great continent from which it has been banished for more than a century’.¹¹² De Tocqueville was ready to sacrifice the cause of abolishing slavery to the objective of preserving the unity and stability of the United States.

Although powerfully encouraged first by French defeat in the Seven Years’ War and the loss of many of its colonies, and then by the revolution in San Domingo, radical abolitionism was a short-lived affair in France itself. Immediately after Thermidor, and in fact even at the moment of its preparation, the colonists’ agitation in defence of the liberal principle of self-government (and white supremacy) resumed: it must be local assemblies that determined people’s status and hence the condition of the blacks in the colonies. As we know, this was the position of the liberal Massiac Club. Those who resisted the Thermidorian turn were immediately branded traitors and renegades to the white race (see below, Chapter 8, §12). The ‘Anglomane’ and pro-slaveholding Malouet returned to hold positions of power under Napoleon,¹¹³ who reintroduced colonial slavery and the black slave trade.

The liberal movement certainly did not respond to this restoration, terminated only by the revolution of February 1848, with united, decisive opposition. There were some (including Granier de Cassagnac) who defended the institution of slavery in the name of liberalism, who in fact (polemically observed an ardent abolitionist) even claimed ‘a monopoly on liberalism’.¹¹⁴ To be precise, along with ‘liberalism’, Cassagnac also professed himself a follower of ‘democracy’: positions no different from those maintained across the Atlantic by Calhoun, with the difference that the former regarded slavery as ‘a provisional and empirical means of creating order’ and ‘maintaining the blacks in the apprenticeship of Christianity, work and the family’.¹¹⁵ On the other side of the scale it is to be noted that, at least in his opponents’ view, the French author was mistaken in having developed in justification of slavery a philosophy of history that did not maintain the spatial or racial delimitation of the institution, with a tendency hence to regress to positions à la Fletcher, who was now alien to the liberal movement. By contrast, an integral part of it was Thiers, who, drawing up a catastrophic balance sheet of the abolition of slavery in Britain’s colonies, pointed to the ‘base and barbarous idleness [of] Negroes left to their own devices’.¹¹⁶

Guizot seemed more susceptible to abolitionist ideas. Nevertheless, he stressed their impracticality with an argument that is already familiar from US history: it would be necessary to compensate the owners of a legitimate form of property, but there were insufficient funds for this operation.¹¹⁷ Le Courier de la Gironde came out in favour of a gradual abolitionism which, avoiding the ‘savage liberty’ of ‘brutalized beings’, would take the form of an extended phase of ‘liberal slavery’ (esclavage libéral)—i.e. a somewhat mitigated slavery.¹¹⁸ Likewise opposed to hasty measures was de Tocqueville. In May 1847, noting that the ‘Bey of Tunisia’ had already abolished the ‘odious institution’—which in Muslim countries, by the French liberal’s admission, took a ‘milder’ form—de Tocqueville expressed the opinion that ‘we should doubtless only proceed to the abolition of slavery with care and moderation’.¹¹⁹

We can conclude with a general consideration relating to the France of the July Monarchy: ‘Immediate and complete emancipation was not even considered as an abolitionist program until less than a year before the Revolution of 1848.’ In fact, the golden age of French liberalism, far from involving the abolition of slavery, saw its expansion: ‘as a result of the expanding French conquest of Algeria, there was far more territory with slaves under French sovereignty by the mid-1840s than there had been at the time of the July Revolution in 1830.’¹²⁰

10. The enduring effectiveness of the black revolution from below

But if things stood thus, how was the abolition of slavery achieved? Although firmly opposed by a formidable international coalition and the liberal movement as a whole, the San Domingo revolution had a lasting influence, which proved all the stronger when conflicts within the community of the free and the white community as a whole intensified. We already know the decisive role played by the country governed by ex-slaves in propelling the independence movement in Latin America towards abolitionist positions.

Outside the southern United States, slavery continued to be very much present in the European colonies in the Caribbean. However, here too Haiti’s presence made itself felt. Proceeding in 1822 to annexation of the Spanish part of the island, the ex-slaves now in power delivered a further serious blow to the institution of slavery. The following year, the revolt of the black slaves in Demerara (today’s Guyana) erupted. This was a colony that had been affected by the upheavals which had reverberated in San Domingo from France. In 1794–95 a revolution exported and imposed by French forces had transformed Holland into the Batavian Republic and forced the Prince of Orange to flee to England. In the wake of events in Demerara, at the time under Dutch control, liberal agitation had developed, promoted by slave-owners who, witnessing the emergence of the prospect of black emancipation on the San Domingo model, had rapidly abandoned any sympathy for France and sought Britain’s intervention and protection.¹²¹

But the incorporation of Demerara into the British Empire did not extinguish the fire, which smouldered under the ashes. A black revolt broke out in 1823 and led to the death of three whites; martial law was proclaimed and 250 slaves were killed or executed. And yet, repressed in one place, revolts exploded again some years later and only a short distance away—this time in Jamaica, in 1831. In both cases Methodist and Baptist missionaries played a significant role. By converting the slaves to Christianity, they furnished them with a culture, consciousness and the possibility of meeting and communicating that clashed irreconcilably with the de-humanization and commodification of human livestock upon which the institution of slavery was based. The first revolt saw the death sentence for the Reverend John Smith, and his death in prison shortly before execution of the sentence and the arrival from London of a notice of pardon. The second became known as the ‘war of the Baptists’. In both cases, in addition to rebellious slaves, the repression by the white dominant class struck the Baptist and Methodist community. In Jamaica hundreds of black Christians were flogged, tortured or shot; and English missionaries also suffered arrest and humiliation of every kind. In fact, in neighbouring Barbados churches were sacked and destroyed and there were riots and attempted pogroms against the Methodist community. The colonists’ hatred of the non-conformist churches, accused of encouraging the slave revolt, could not be contained.¹²² It was a danger that seemed all the more real and immediate because of Haiti’s proximity and the processes of emancipation underway in Latin America. Thanks to this geographical proximity, there now intervened in the struggle (wrote a white Jamaican to his governor) a ‘third party’ (in addition to the Crown, prompted in a reformist direction by Christian abolitionism, and the colonists, engaged in defence of self-government and their property). And this ‘third party’ comprised the slave, who ‘knows his strength, and will assert his claim to freedom’.¹²³

At this point, the abolition of slavery in the colonies presented itself to the dominant class of liberal England as the requisite way out in the face of two challenges: the first consisted in the black slaves’ revolution from below; the second in the indignation that was widespread in the British Christian community which, with growing impatience, demanded decisive measures against the colonists, guilty of enslaving blacks and persecuting Christians.

11. The role of Christian fundamentalism

This second challenge brings us to a movement we have not hitherto been concerned with, and which cannot be confused with either the liberal tradition or French-style radicalism. While the crisis that soon led to the black revolution in San Domingo was deepening, at a time when the campaign to suppress the slave trade seemed to be at an impasse, the dying John Wesley wrote a heartfelt letter to William Wilberforce:

The recipient of this letter was unquestionably one of the major actors in the struggle that led to the abolition first of the slave trade and then of slavery as such. A fervent Christian, member of the House of Commons and on close terms with Pitt the Younger, while he received honorary French citizenship in 1792 for his anti-slavery campaign, he had nothing to do with the revolution of 1789 or, a fortiori, with radicalism. Far from welcoming the black slave revolt in San Domingo, he continued in his unwavering support for the British government, which, during the war against France, was the guarantor in the West Indies of the repression of slave revolts and the preservation of slavery.

But if he identified with the England of the time and its dominant class, Wilberforce can scarcely be regarded as a liberal. Prior to directing his efforts against slavery, his religious zeal was engaged in the ‘reform of public manners’, to be advanced through the foundation of a new society intended as the ‘guardian of the religion and morals of the people’, which proposed to struggle ‘against Vice and Immorality’ and even aspired to the ‘suppression of Vice’. Hence the crusade launched against publications branded blasphemous and indecent, against rural feasts considered licentious, against the non-observance of the Sabbath among the popular classes.¹²⁵ Only subsequently did Christian fervour target the particular sin that was slavery—an institution completely unacceptable not only because of the obstacles it often put in the way of the spread of Christianity among slaves, but also because of the sexual libertinism in which it permitted their masters to indulge. Thus, another prominent supporter of English abolitionism (James Ramsay), along with slavery, called for an attack on ‘arbitrary divorces and bigamy’. Similarly, Granville Sharp combined abolitionist campaigning with a struggle against divorce legislation which, in flagrant violation of divine law, allowed the guilty couple to proceed to new weddings; and from this he moved on to announce that, together with those responsible for the slave trade and their accomplices, adulterers and those guilty of immorality would not escape divine punishment.¹²⁶

In Sharp’s view, defenders of the institution of slavery were ‘refined modern Sadducees’. The Sadducees of Biblical fame had not hesitated to come to terms with Hellenistic and Roman culture, thereby contaminating Judaism and the word of God, and depriving them of their purity. Caught up in the enjoyment of wealth and the material world, they had forgotten or denied spiritual, otherworldly values. According to the English abolitionist, the modern Sadducees were no different. Ultimately, they were susceptible to the blandishments of the Demon, or the ‘Demon of Demons’. But the Bible must not be venerated in church, while remaining a dead letter in real life. On the contrary, it must serve as a guide in all political questions and the smallest problems of everyday life. All the more so in that the turning point was at hand: the times in which slavery continued to survive were the ‘latter days of Infidelity & Deism’, representing the agony of the apocalyptic ‘Beast’.¹²⁷

There is no doubt that here we have an attitude which, in contemporary terms, we would define as fundamentalist. It is a trait that was even more clearly exhibited in the United States. Here too Christian abolitionism had a programme which, along with slavery, wanted to attack vice and immorality as such. Theodore Parker denounced as contrary to the Scriptures and divine law (the only truly valid law) the ‘usury’ by which ‘banking capital’ was stained, the ‘brothels’ and bars that sold rum, and which the police not only did not target, but in fact frequented more assiduously than the ‘house of God’.¹²⁸

Compared with Britain, there was in fact a novel element. In the United States, where the law on the return of fugitive slaves required all citizens to be complicit with an institution that became ever more odious, a delicate dilemma of conscience emerged. The ‘higher laws’ of Holy Scripture must not be forgotten. For a true Christian, admonished the English abolitionist Sharp in an indignant letter to Franklin, the other laws were ‘so clearly null and void by their iniquity, that it would be even a crime to regard them as law’.¹²⁹

Along with its fundamentalist character, the radicalism of Christian abolitionism was strengthened in the United States. ‘When rulers have inverted their function and enacted wickedness into a law that treads down the inalienable rights of man’, declared Parker, the Christian must know how to go to the limit: ‘I know no ruler but God, no law but natural Justice … I am not afraid of men. I can offend them. I care nothing for their hate or their esteem. But I should not dare to violate His laws, come what may come …’¹³⁰ Sanctioned by Holy Scripture, divine, eternal, natural law was, in any event, inviolable: ‘To say that there is no law higher than what the State can make is practical atheism … If there is no God to make a law for me, then there is no God for me.’ The challenge to constituted authority was open and declared: ‘REBELLION TO TYRANTS IS OBEDIENCE TO GOD’.¹³¹

The federal Constitution, which obliged the Union as a whole to defend the slaveholding states against any potential slave revolution, seemed to William Garrison ‘An Agreement with Hell’ and a ‘Covenant with Death’. In 1845 another abolitionist, Wendell Phillips, drew attention to slave-owners’ purchase of the most important public offices and the tripling of slavery that had occurred since the ratification of the federal Constitution, which came to be branded as a ‘pro-Slavery Compact’. The coexistence of slaveholding states and free states was no longer licit, unless the latter wanted to become ‘partners in the guilt and responsible for the sin of slavery’.¹³² Street demonstrations in which the American Constitution was burnt were understandable. In the years preceding the Civil War, when he briefly harboured the illusion that the South was on the point of giving in, Parker exulted in these terms: ‘The Devil is in great wrath because he knoweth that his time is short.’¹³³

On the basis of this view, no compromise was possible. And Garrison explicitly stated as much. His polemic against defenders of the institution of slavery and their accomplices assumed openly threatening tones. But also unequivocal was his condemnation of theorists of ‘gradual abolition’ and ‘moderation’, and even of those in the North who displayed ‘apathy’ or limited enthusiasm for the ‘standard of emancipation’¹³⁴ and the struggle against slavery, that ‘heinous crime in the sight of God’.¹³⁵ Abolitionist radicalism and Christian fundamentalism were closely interwoven, as emerges from the summons to a crusade against ‘the governments of this world’, which ‘in their essential elements, and as present administered … are all Anti-Christ’. This involved achieving

The fundamentalist character of such positions did not escape Calhoun. He thundered against ‘the rabid fanatics, who regard slavery as a sin, and thus regarding it, deem it their highest duty to destroy it, even should it involve the destruction of the constitution and the Union’. For them abolition was a conscientious obligation; only thus did they conceive it possible to liberate themselves from the agonizing sense of being accomplices of the unforgivable ‘sin’ allegedly represented by slavery, against which they then proclaimed a full-scale ‘crusade’, ‘a general crusade’.¹³⁷ In the view of southern theorists, these Christians blinded by abolitionist fury were alien to the liberal world and substantially akin to Jacobins. In fact, a movement similar to French radicalism tended to emerge in the United States, at various times and in various modes, but always on the basis of the crisis of the English and American models. The crisis of the first coincided with the rebellion against the London government. What provoked or intensified the crisis of the second was the progressive isolation of the North American republic as a slaveholding state, engaged not only in the defence of slavery but also its expansion, and which resisted unperturbed, despite the disappearance of that institution first in much of Latin America and subsequently in British and French colonies. At this point, the country that at its birth had celebrated itself as the land of liberty appeared as the champion of slavery.

There thus developed in the United States as well a radicalism that drew on Christianity. Such a ‘party’ no longer identified with either the English or the American model. It rejected both the spatial and the racial delimitation of the community of the free, and thus regarded the exclusion clauses that characterized the English and American models as unacceptable. And in order to change things, it did not preclude appeals to the revolutionary initiative of the excluded. This was the religious and political climate in which John Brown’s armed raid into Virginia in 1859 matured, intent on inciting a slave uprising and convinced that, without the shedding of blood, there was no remission of sins. The attempt failed miserably and ended with the protagonist being hanged, but Parker reiterated the slaves’ right to armed rebellion: sooner or later, ‘the Fire of Vengeance may be waked up even in an African’s heart’.¹³⁸

12. What is radicalism? The contrast with liberalism

Formed in the wake of disappointment in the English and American models, how did ‘radicalism’ differ from liberalism? The answer is obvious, if we refer to authors like Locke and Calhoun, profoundly liberal and yet at the same time without any doubts as to the legitimacy of black slavery. The answer is not even difficult if we draw a comparison with authors such as Burke, Jefferson and Acton who, notwithstanding reservations and criticisms of the institution, on various grounds represented ideological and political reference points for the slaveholding South, or even continued to defend it to the end. The line of demarcation also proves sufficiently clear if we compare authors like Blackstone and Montesquieu, who tended to contest ‘slavery among ourselves’ rather than slavery as such, with a radicalism committed to rejecting both the spatial delimitation (the English model until 1833) and the racial delimitation (the American model until 1865) of the community of the free. But how is de Tocqueville clearly distinguished from authors like Diderot, Condorcet and Schoelcher, whom I have included in the process of French radicalism’s formation and development? What sense does it make to situate in two different, even opposed formations de Tocqueville and Condorcet, who were, respectively, one of the great critics of the Terror and one of its most illustrious victims? Is it right to include in the same party French and American radicals who adopted such a different attitude towards Christianity?

Before answering these questions, it is worth lingering over something that characterized the liberal tradition from its outset. Let us take authors like Montesquieu, Smith and Millar. Although condemning slavery more or less sharply, all three continued to regard England—a country in the front rank in the slave trade—as a model. In no instance did criticism or condemnation of slavery involve exclusion of the beneficiaries or theorists of the institution from the community of the free and the liberal party. On more than one occasion, Burke distanced himself from the institution of slavery, but when the conflict between the two Atlantic shores erupted he not only celebrated the love of liberty which particularly animated southern colonies, but disdainfully rejected the idea that, in an attempt to suppress the rebellion, appeal might be made to ‘servile hands’.¹³⁹ In other words, the British Whig continued to include slave-owners in the community of the free while excluding a priori their victims.

Criticism of the institution of slavery was clear and firm in Hume. But this did not prevent him from asserting that ‘European nations’ represented ‘that part of the globe [which] maintain[s] sentiments of liberty, honour, equity and valour superior to the rest of mankind’.¹⁴⁰ By contrast, there was reason to believe that blacks were ‘naturally inferior to the whites’ and inferior to the point of lacking any ‘symptoms’ of ‘ingenuity’ and free spirit.¹⁴¹ So once again, despite the condemnation of slavery, it was its beneficiaries—not its victims—who formed an integral part of the community of the free and the liberal party.

The boundaries of the community of the free could lose something of their naturalistic rigidity; but the rituals of self-celebration, and the enormous repression it was based on, persisted. In 1772 Arthur Young calculated that, out of 775 million global inhabitants, only 33 million enjoyed liberty; and they were concentrated in a fairly restricted zone of the planet, excluding Asia, Africa and virtually all of America, as well as the southern and eastern parts of Europe itself.¹⁴² This was a theme subsequently taken up and eloquently developed by Adam Smith:

In similar vein, Millar contrasted ‘Great Britain, in which liberty is generally so well understood, and so highly valued’, with ‘all those tribes of barbarians, in different parts of the world, with which we have any correspondence’ and among whom ‘the practice of domestic slavery’ continued to rage.¹⁴⁴ Europe and the West were complacently depicted as a tiny island of liberty and civilization in a tempestuous ocean of tyranny, slavery and barbarism. In order to indulge in such self-celebration, Young, Smith and Millar were in fact obliged to overlook a far from trivial detail: the slave trade, which involved the most brutal form of slavery—chattel slavery—and in which western Europe, starting precisely with liberal England, was engaged for centuries.

De Tocqueville’s attitude was not very different. When he published Democracy in America, there were few countries or colonies in the western hemisphere where slavery persisted, since it had been abolished in much of Latin America and the British colonies. In the interval between the publication of the first and second volumes of the work, the United States introduced into Texas the institution that should have been synonymous with the absolute power of man over man. But this prompted no uncertainty in the French liberal when it came to identifying the American continent as the locus of liberty. Volume One of Democracy in America appeared shortly after the abolition of slavery in the British colonies. But that would appear to have been an irrelevant event in the opinion of de Tocqueville, who, when it came to comparing England and the United States, had no doubt that the latter country most fully embodied the cause of liberty. And Jefferson, the president slave-owner and unyielding opponent of the country born out of a revolution by black slaves, seemed to the French liberal to be ‘the greatest democrat whom the democracy of America has as yet produced’.¹⁴⁵

Lincoln himself initially conducted the Civil War as a crusade against rebellion and separatism, not for the abolition of slavery, which could continue to survive in states loyal to central government. It was only later, with the recruitment of blacks into the Union army and hence with the direct intervention of slaves and ex-slaves in the conflict, that the civil war between whites was transformed into a revolution, conducted partly from above and partly from below, making the abolition of slavery inevitable. But in the first phase of the war the Union did not a priori exclude slave states from its bosom, just as liberal critics of the institution of slavery did not expel those who had a different and even contrary position on the problem from the liberal party.

The tendency we are examining finds fullest expression in Lieber. Cautious criticisms of the institution of slavery did not prevent him, even on the immediate eve of the Civil War, from attributing to the United States—the country that even more than England embodied the great cause of ‘liberal institutions’ and ‘self-government’—the ‘great mission’ of spreading liberty throughout the world. ‘[E]very American’ must always bear in mind the grandeur of the constitutional principles and texts of his country. Otherwise, they would resemble ‘the missionary that should proceed to convert the world without bible or prayer-book’.¹⁴⁶

While it was the sacred text of liberty for the liberal author, for the radicals Garrison and Phillips the US Constitution, which sanctioned slavery and the racial state, was an instrument of Satan. Over and above the very different significance assigned to the problem of slavery, here we have two opposed delimitations of political geography, of the camp of friends and enemies. Notwithstanding the argument and conflict over slavery, liberalism’s various exponents continued to recognize themselves as members of the same party and the same community of the free. By contrast, excluded from it were blacks, whom at an interval of decades Jefferson and Lincoln intended to deport from the Union and who, not by chance, after emancipation first in the North and then in the South did not come to enjoy either political or civil equality. Montesquieu and de Tocqueville, not to mention Lieber and Acton, could indeed criticize slavery, but it was understood that that their interlocutors were not black slaves but their masters. The latter were called upon to demonstrate moral sensitivity and political consistency and hence agree to expunge a stain that affected the credibility of the community of the free as such.

The French philosopher was not yet aware of it, but the ruling group in the North American republic was on the point of being situated outside not only the party of liberty, but even the human race. What we have here is a political and ideological current different from liberalism—the radicalism that had been formed or was in the process of being formed. It might seem debatable to apply this category to an author who recommended extreme gradualism in the process of abolishing slavery. But that is not the main point. Marat himself, in 1791, proposed ‘gradually to prepare the transition from slavery to liberty’. And yet, already unequivocally condemning ‘the barbarism of the colonists’, it was not to them that he looked to make the desired change, and not even to the National Assembly which, coming to terms with the slaveholders, rode roughshod over the rights of man and ‘the sacred foundations of the Constitution’.¹⁴⁸ The actual interlocutors tended to be the black slaves themselves, as would become clear in the course of Marat’s subsequent evolution. As for Condorcet, despite the gradualist character of his abolitionism, he deflected back onto slaveholding whites the de-humanizing drive they had mobilized against blacks.

But some decades earlier the English abolitionist Percival Stockdale had already declared: ‘We are the savages; the Africans act like men; like beings endowed with rational and immortal minds’.¹⁵⁰ Once again, indignation at the treatment inflicted on the black slaves could even conduce to a de-humanization of the de-humanizers.

In regarding slaves as their interlocutors, radicals did not hesitate to appeal to a revolution from below by victims of the institution it was intended to abolish. Even prior to the revolution by San Domingo’s slaves, Raynal and Diderot’s History of the Two Indias evoked a massive uprising, led by a black Spartacus, which might involve replacing the Code noir in force by a ‘Code blanc’ that repaid the slaveholders for the injustices they had committed.¹⁵¹ Within the liberal tradition, in Smith we can come across evocation of a dictatorship from above putting an end to the scandal of an institution that sullied the community of the free, but certainly not hopes for a revolution from below. We know the sympathy or admiration with which Grégoire and Schoelcher viewed Toussaint L’Ouverture and Haiti. These are two names that do not appear in de Tocqueville. In connection with San Domingo, he limited himself to mentioning the ‘bloody catastrophe that has put an end to its existence’.¹⁵² Paradoxically, the island ceased to exist the moment it put an end, for the first time in the Americas, to the institution of slavery!

Finally, Diderot reported an observation by Helvétius: ‘What is the cause of England’s extreme power? Its government.’ He followed up this assessment with a polemical question: ‘But what is the cause of the extreme poverty of Scotland and Ireland?’¹⁵³ Judgement of the metropolis could not be separated from judgement of the colonies and semi-colonies. From the standpoint of authors like Diderot and Schoelcher, England and the United States, the holy sites of liberty in de Tocqueville’s view, were responsible for the most ferocious and barbarous despotism. Even when it criticized slavery, the liberal tradition did not question the identification of the West with civilization and of the colonial world with barbarism. Radicalism’s position was different: in the first instance, it identified and denounced barbarism in those responsible for, and complicit with, the most macroscopic violation of the rights and dignity of man.

Marx and Engels may be regarded as critical inheritors of radicalism. For the first in particular, not only was it epistemologically and politically arbitrary to ignore the politico-social reality of the colonies, but (as we shall see) those colonies were the requisite starting-point for understanding the ‘barbarism’ of bourgeois society.

13. Liberalism, the self-celebration of the community of the free and repression of the lot imposed on colonial peoples

The discourse developed by liberalism is profoundly marked by repression of the lot imposed on colonial peoples. The self-celebration of the land of the free or the people of the free proved all the more persuasive in that it overlooked the slavery inflicted on colonial populations or populations of colonial origin. Only on this condition could Montesquieu, Blackstone and the American revolutionaries point to England or the United States as a model of liberty.

This also applies to de Tocqueville. He lucidly and unsparingly described the inhuman treatment meted out to Indians and blacks. The former were forced to endure the ‘frightful sufferings’ attendant upon ‘forced migrations’ (the successive deportations imposed by the whites), and were even close to being wiped off the face of the earth.¹⁵⁴ As to the blacks, let us leave to one side the specifically slaveholding states of the South: What was the situation in the rest? Over and above harsh material living conditions, ‘a wretched and precarious existence’, desperate poverty and a higher mortality rate than among slaves,¹⁵⁵ on the notionally free black also weighed exclusion from the enjoyment of civil rights (as well as political rights): he was subjected to the ‘tyranny of the law’ and the ‘intolerance of customs’ (see above, Chapter 2, §7). And so, discounting the Far West and the South, even in the case of the free states we cannot speak of democracy or even strictly of the rule of law. But that was not the conclusion reached by de Tocqueville, who celebrated the democracy, ‘alive, active, triumphant’, he saw operative in the United States:

While he felt sympathy for the tragedy of the Indians and blacks, their fate had no epistemological relevance and in no way altered his overall political judgement. The programmatic declaration made by de Tocqueville at the start of the chapter devoted to the problem of ‘the three races that inhabit the territory of the United States’ is unequivocal: ‘The principal task that I had imposed upon myself is now performed: I have shown, as far as I was able, the laws and the customs of the American democracy. Here I might stop’. It was only in order to avoid possible disappointment on the reader’s part that de Tocqueville spoke of relations between the three ‘races’: ‘These topics are collaterally connected with my subject without forming a part of it; they are American without being democratic, and to portray democracy has been my principal aim.’¹⁵⁷ Democracy could be defined and liberty lauded focusing exclusively on the white community. If, instead, we regard this abstraction as arbitrary, and bear in mind the entanglement of slavery and liberty revealed by authoritative US scholars, we cannot but be even more surprised by de Tocqueville’s epistemological than his political naivety. He celebrated as the locus of liberty one of the few countries in the New World where racial chattel slavery reigned and flourished and which, at the time of the French liberal’s journey, had as its president Andrew Jackson, slave-owner and protagonist of a policy of deporting and decimating the Indian; a president, moreover, who, blocking the circulation of abolitionist material by post, also struck at the freedom of expression of significant sections of the white community.

Such naivety reached its culmination in a French follower of de Tocqueville—namely, Édouard Laboulaye. He too contrasted the United States with a France plagued by constant revolutionary upheavals. In the former, he observed in 1849 in the inaugural lecture (published separately the following year) of a course devoted to US history, a Constitution characterized by extraordinary ‘wisdom’ and rejection of any ‘demagogic’ element made it possible to enjoy peace and, at the same time, the greatest liberty and ‘the most absolute political equality’—an equality that was ‘complete, absolute, in laws and customs alike’.¹⁵⁸ As to the problem of the relations between the three races referred to by de Tocqueville, nothing remains in the text we are examining but the celebration of the remarkable successes achieved by ‘a nation of European race’, by this ‘strong race of emigrants’ or this ‘people of Puritans’—in other words, the ‘American race’. Even if it was a story that had unfolded across the Atlantic, it covered ‘our race’ (European and white) as a whole in glory.¹⁵⁹ This was a view reiterated ten years later, in an emotional essay published on the occasion of de Tocqueville’s death: the homage paid to the author of Democracy in America ended with homage to the ‘beautiful federal Constitution that has protected the liberty of the United States for seventy years’.¹⁶⁰ We are on the eve of the Civil War. But even its outbreak does not seem to have prompted any second thoughts in Laboulaye: it was understood that ‘complete, candid, sincere liberty’ reigned in the United States. The bloody conflict underway demonstrated the ‘courage’ of a ‘free people who sacrificed everything to maintain the unity’ of the country.¹⁶¹

Only when reconstructing the history of America in the colonial period did Laboulaye feel obliged to confront the issue of slavery. Although mitigated by reference to ‘climate’ (which rendered work intolerable for whites but not blacks), historical circumstances (at the time it was at its height, ‘the slave trade was regarded as a pious undertaking’), and the particular characteristics of the people subjected to it (it involved a ‘race of eternal minors’),¹⁶² condemnation of the institution was sharp. In the first volume, whose Preface is dated 1855, we read:

Although sketching this realistic picture, the Preface continued to celebrate the United States indiscriminately as the privileged site of liberty, guaranteed and guarded by an ‘admirable Constitution’.¹⁶⁴ However hard the lot of the blacks—silence persisted about the Indians—it was irrelevant when it came to formulating an overall judgement of the country under investigation. But there is more. Laboulaye acknowledged that slavery made its oppressive influence felt on the white master himself: he was denied the right to educate and emancipate his own slave, even if he or she was a child born from a relationship with a slave. He was required by law to inflict even the most drastic of punishments, including castration, on the guilty slave.¹⁶⁵ However, although criticized, these serious interferences with the individual freedom of white property-owners did not in the slightest darken the bright picture we already know.

In 1864 Laboulaye denounced the privilege granted by the ‘three-fifths’ constitutional provision to the ‘particular, superior race’ made up of the ‘great lords’ of the South who were the slave-owners (see above, Chapter 4, §1). But if things stood thus, if inequality marked relations within the elite itself, if even within the white community there was a privileged ‘particular race’, what was the meaning of the claim that the United States was characterized by ‘the most absolute political equality’? Laboulaye felt no need to revise his positions. On the contrary, he did not hesitate to reiterate them in the Preface to the third volume, which continued to celebrate the American Revolution as the sole genuinely democratic one.

Like colonies in the strict sense, Ireland continued to be ignored. In the course of his journey to the British Isles, de Tocqueville visited the unhappy island and described its desperate situation unsparingly. It was not simply that ‘the poverty is horrible’; denied here was liberal freedom itself, crushed by ‘military tribunals’ and a ‘large gendarmerie hated by the people’. At this point a comparison between England and Ireland occurred: ‘The two aristocracies I have referred to have the same origin, the same customs and almost the same laws. Yet the one has for centuries given the English one of the best governments in the world, while the other has given the Irish one of the most detestable imaginable’.¹⁶⁶ This is an astonishing statement: not only are readers not informed that the aristocracy dominant in Ireland was itself British or of British origin, but they have the impression that they are dealing with two different countries, not two regions of a single state, subject to the authority of the same government and the same crown.

We can then understand de Tocqueville’s admiring conclusion: ‘I see the Englishman secure under the protection of his laws’.¹⁶⁷ Clearly, the Irish were not subsumed under the category of ‘English’, but such non-subsumption does not seem to be a problem, does not affect the laudatory judgement passed on the country visited and held up as a model of liberty.

14. The colonial question and the differential development of radicalism in France, England and the United States

Reference has sometimes been made to ‘philosophic radicalism’ in connection with Bentham and his school.¹⁶⁸ The theorist of utilitarianism adopted a debunking tone towards his country’s political, legal and ideological tradition. He did hesitate to denounce the ‘almost universal corruption’ that raged in England and the ill-starred role of a ‘corrupted and corrupting aristocracy’.¹⁶⁹ He did not even spare the Glorious Revolution, despite the religious aura habitually surrounding it: the ‘original compact—the compact between king and people—was a fabulous one—the supervening compact—the compact between King, Lords, and Commons, was but too real a one’,¹⁷⁰ and sanctioned the domination of an oligarchy.

However, it is sufficient to look at the attitude Bentham took towards the liberal tradition’s exclusion clauses to realize that we are very far removed from radicalism in the sense specified here. Of the refuse and ‘dross’ and those confined in workhouses, we have already spoken. We must now concern ourselves with the condition of the blacks. Bentham included ‘the still unabrogated sanction given to domestic slavery on account of difference of colour’ among the ‘imperfections of detail’ to be found even in the ‘matchlessly felicitous system’ of the United States.¹⁷¹ Starting from this rather euphemistic description of the institution of slavery, the English liberal stressed that a project of emancipation must proceed with extreme gradualism, and be implemented exclusively from above. In a text from 1822, we come across a significant declaration: ‘The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor.’¹⁷² We are led to think of the abolition of slavery in the French colonies. But instead, as a note makes clear, the reference is to Louis XIV’s Code noir!

As for gradualism, this was necessary for the purposes not only of respecting ‘rights of property’ (which must be compensated for the loss suffered), but also of educating slaves for liberty.¹⁷³ Bentham wanted an emancipation ‘lottery’ that might occur at the moment of hereditary transmission of this special property, and from which one-tenth of the slaves owned by the deceased could benefit. An appeal to masters to demonstrate flexibility was the counterpart of indignant condemnation of any initiative from below:

Unquestionably, the prime site of the formation of radicalism, in the sense I have defined it, was France. It is easy to see why. The country was favourably disposed to accommodate it following defeat in the Seven Years’ War and the loss of a large number of colonies. Subsequently, the controversy that developed either side of the Atlantic on the occasion of the English colonists’ rebellion ended up discrediting both fractions of the liberal party. The American Revolution, with its development of relations of equality within the white community and clear demarcation from the world of feudal privilege, galvanized harsher criticism of the ancien régime in France and the crisis of the English model. Disenchantment with the non-abolition of slavery in America and the emergence of an unprecedented racial state also threw the American model into crisis. The roots of French radicalism lay in this dual crisis.

But what was its influence across the Channel and the Atlantic? The problem can be reformulated as follows. Liberal England, derived from the Glorious Revolution, and especially the American Revolution, made a powerful contribution to the ideological preparation of the French Revolution and subsequently, through the crisis of the two models, to the formation of radicalism. But why did the latter not seem to take deep root in the two classical countries of the liberal tradition? Obviously, the vexed course of the revolution and the explosion of the Terror immediately damaged France’s powers of attraction. A far from negligible role in frustrating the diffusion of radicalism was also played by repression. In England in 1794 habeas corpus was suspended for eight years; a further suspension followed in 1817; while two years later there occurred what has passed into history as the Peterloo Massacre or (to put it in the indignant words of an English paper of the time) the ‘slaughter of defenceless men, women and children, unprovoked and unnecessary’.¹⁷⁵ Suffering deportation to Australia and meeting with a horrible fate, sometimes dying under the lashes of merciless flogging, were members of workers’ societies, clubs that were or more or less Jacobin in orientation, and Chartists engaged in the struggle to extend the suffrage, not to mention ‘Irish dissidents’ for whom ‘Australia was the official Siberia … at the turn of the century’. In total, ‘between 1800 and 1850 … about 1,800 were deported for political “crimes”. Among them were representatives of nearly every protest movement known to the British Government’.¹⁷⁶ Obviously, the repression also struck circles that regarded violent revolution by black slaves as legitimate, or even invoked it.¹⁷⁷ In 1798 the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed in the United States, containing serious restrictions on constitutional liberties, granting the president a wide range of discretionary power and particularly hitting followers of ideas suspected of being influenced by the French Revolution. And we already know about the violence, predominantly from below, to which abolitionists were subject.

However, neither the Terror in France nor the repression in Britain and the United States suffice to explain the weakness of radicalism across the Channel or the Atlantic. The analysis must be taken further. In England the outbreak of war made it possible for the dominant class to present as a patriotic duty the struggle against the revolutionary fanaticism raging in France, and which threatened to spread to Ireland, posing a mortal risk to the British Empire. As for the United States, it is interesting to observe the debate which, on the eve of the war against Britain that broke out in 1812, involved two prestigious representatives of the South. The first, Randolph, declared himself against the opening of hostilities. The situation was full of peril on the home front, where the ‘infernal principles of French liberty’ risked provoking a revolt by slaves; ‘[t]he French Revolution has polluted them.’¹⁷⁸ Calhoun, by contrast, did not share these concerns. Certainly, attention should be paid to the slaves’ moods, but happily ‘more than one-half of them never heard of the French revolution’.¹⁷⁹

So radicalism, with its recognition of the right of black slaves or Irish semi-slaves to take up arms against their masters, posed a serious threat to the stability of the United States and the territorial integrity of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The lesser weight of the colonial question, or of populations of colonial origin, also helps explain the greater diffusion of radicalism in France. When the black revolution in San Domingo broke out, radical circles in Paris had no great difficulty recognizing and legitimating the fait accompli. Even if there was a risk of losing the remaining colonies, as anti-abolitionists never tired of warning, that would not be an irreparable tragedy.

The situation was different when it came to Britain and the United States. The black revolution in San Domingo provoked a wave of indignation in both countries. ‘A Black State in the Western Archipelago’, wrote The Times, ‘is utterly incompatible with the system of all European colonisation.’ And hence ‘Europe will, of course, recover in that quarter the ascendancy and dominion which it justly claims from the superior wisdom and talents of its inhabitants’.¹⁸⁰ The United States not only refused to recognize the country born of a black revolution, but did everything it could to isolate, weaken and overthrow it.

Jefferson distinguished himself in this operation. At first sight he seems closest to radicalism. In January 1793, without allowing himself to be impressed by the charges against the Jacobins levelled by his former private secretary (referring to Paris, he spoke of ‘streets … literally red with blood’), he continued passionately to defend the ‘cause’ of the French Revolution: ‘rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam & an Eve left in every country, & left free, it would be better than it now is.’ Moreover, Jefferson positively contrasted France with the United States, where Anglophiles regarded the 1787 Constitution, with the very wide powers it conferred on the president and executive, as a first step towards the establishment of a monarchy.¹⁸¹

Yet the picture changed markedly following the black revolution in San Domingo. We know that Jefferson interpreted the principle of equality in radical fashion, but always within the ambit of the white community. He never believed in the possibility of whites and blacks coexisting on an equal basis: it would represent an unjustifiable challenge to ‘the real distinctions which nature has made’ and end in ‘the extermination of the one or the other race’.¹⁸² When the conflict between white owners and black slaves exploded on the Caribbean island, the North American statesman’s sympathy immediately went to the former; his anxiety about ‘the revolutionary storm now sweeping the globe’ was profound. Hence his support for the invading army sent by Napoleon, which did not cease even in the face of recourse to revolting practices, such as the introduction of trained dogs to tear blacks to pieces and the organization around such events of mass spectacles, at once thrilling and educative.¹⁸³

15. The liberal ebb of Christian radicalism

In the United States radicalism took shape on a Christian basis. Interpretation of the conflict in religious terms in fact involved serious limitations. Scarce attention was paid to the humiliation and oppression blacks also suffered in the North: this was a condition which did not take the immediately obvious form of slavery and sin. With the end of the Civil War, the abolitionist movement soon split, and thus was not in a position to offer theoretical, and still less practical, resistance to the regime of terroristic white supremacy that asserted itself in the South after the (anti-black) compromise of 1877 between the two sections of the white community. The weight of racial prejudice was too strong, and only the massive, prolonged presence of Union troops could have guaranteed blacks the enjoyment of political rights and full recognition of their civil rights. But all this would have involved too serious a violation of the liberal principle of self-government. Among the theorists of abolitionism, possibly the only one who was inclined to go the whole way on the road of imposing the principle of racial equality by force of arms was Wendell Phillips. But when in 1875 he sought to set out his reasons at an assembly in Boston, he was brusquely silenced. The previous year, a senator from the South had observed with satisfaction: ‘Radicalism is dissolving—going to pieces’.¹⁸⁴ With the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, local self-government was reasserted, but radical democracy disappeared and the Calvary of the blacks resumed.

Moreover, what prompted Anglo-American Christian abolitionism to condemnation of the sin of slavery was sympathy for a people largely converted to Christianity, who regarded Christianity as an instrument with which to overcome the condition of total de-humanization and achieve a minimum of recognition. Liberated from an obsession with sin and complicity in sin thanks to the abolition of slavery, Parker believed that there was no political solution to the persistent problem of the discrimination and injustice suffered by blacks: one could only place hope in the matrimonial fusion of the two races or the beneficent effects of the infusion of ‘dreadful Anglo-saxon blood’ in black veins. In a sense, this was a radical perspective, strongly counter to the dominant ideology. However, rather than on organizing the oppressed blacks, attention focused on overcoming the prejudices on the part of the oppressors that cemented barriers of race and caste. Radicalism thus tended to be reabsorbed by liberalism. Things were even worse for the Indians, regarded as savages and pagans. Parker had no hesitation in justifying the policy of ‘continual aggression, invasion, and extermination’ pursued by the indomitable people that were the Anglo-Saxons.¹⁸⁵ In fact, the end of the Civil War gave new impetus to the march into the Far West. The influence of the colonial question once again intervenes to explain the weakness of American radicalism.

16. Liberal socialism and radicalism

Much more so than Bentham, it was Kant who came close to radicalism. His clear adoption of a position favourable to revolutionary France is not so significant. More relevant is the fact that, intervening in 1795, a year after the abolition of slavery in the French colonies, with clear critical reference to England, Perpetual Peace identified ‘the sugar cane islands’ as the ‘site of the cruellest slavery that has ever been imagined’. There were two further decisive elements. Like the French radicals—we must not forget that the colonial question weighed even less heavily on Germany than France—Kant problematized the boundaries between civilization and barbarism: it was England that now represented the cause of ‘slavery and barbarism’. Finally, quite unlike the liberals, he did not confine himself to criticizing Pitt, whom he said was rightly ‘hated as an enemy of the human race’.¹⁸⁶ The German philosopher’s radicalism did not escape his contemporaries: while Goethe regarded his attitude towards England as scarcely ‘liberal’, Wilhelm von Humboldt sharply distanced himself from the ‘democratism’ pervading Perpetual Peace.¹⁸⁷

In England, rather than Bentham, it was John Stuart Mill who approximated to radicalism, when he identified slavery as ‘the most flagrant of all possible violations’ of liberal principles and branded those who defended it ‘the powers of evil’.¹⁸⁸ In his Autobiography, along with ‘the noble body of Abolitionists’, Mill also celebrated John Brown, author of the failed attempt to get the slaves of the southern United States to rise up.¹⁸⁹ In a text of 1824 the English philosopher expressed his sympathy for the cause of the blacks of San Domingo–Haiti, whom the Napoleonic expedition vainly sought half to ‘exterminate’ and half to reduce to conditions of slavery once again.¹⁹⁰ Putting clear distance between himself and the overwhelming majority of his contemporaries, Mill did not seem to recoil in horror from the prospect of a revolution from below by black slaves. And yet, in another respect, he was the theorist of a new ‘slavery’, temporary and pedagogical in kind, for ‘savages’ (see below, Chapter 7, §3).

The English author asserted that the final stage of his development was characterized by gravitation towards ‘socialism’ and, at the same time, renewed distrust of ‘democracy’. What caused and justified the latter was ‘the ignorance and especially the selfishness and brutality of the mass’.¹⁹¹ Already problematic in the metropolis, democracy proved decidedly dangerous and inadvisable when it came to the colonies and peoples of colonial origin (including Afro-Americans). Theorist of the planetary despotism of the West, Mill seems equally remote from radical, ‘abolitionist democracy’.

Hence radicalism and socialism must not be confused. Socialist aspirations can readily be combined with colonialism. Followers of Fourier and Saint-Simon envisaged building communities of a more or less socialist type on land taken from the Arabs in Algeria.¹⁹² Like ‘democracy’, ‘socialism’ can be envisaged restrictively for the ‘master race’ and at the expense of colonial peoples or peoples of colonial origin. At certain points in his evolution towards liberal socialism, Mill approached the threshold separating it from radicalism, but without crossing it.

With reference to Zionism, Arendt drew attention to the presence within it of what at first sight is a peculiar tendency. It was characterized, on the one hand, by support for ‘chauvinist’ objectives and, on the other, by commitment to pursuing collectivist experiments and a ‘rigorous realization of social justice’ within its own community. Thus crystallized ‘a most paradoxical conglomerate of radical approach and revolutionary social reforms domestically, with outmoded and outright reactionary political lines in the field of foreign policy’, and in the field of relations with colonial peoples.¹⁹³ In other words, ‘master-race democracy’ can also go further and take the form of ‘master-race socialism’, whereas what defines radicalism is precisely the argument against any claim by a particular ethnic or social group to pose as ‘master race’.

When in 1860, during the Second Opium War, a Franco-British expedition destroyed the Summer Palace, it was Victor Hugo who proved to be the inheritor of radicalism with his denunciation of the barbarity committed by self-styled civilizers, while for Mill, as for the liberal culture of the time, there continued to be few doubts about the complete identity between the West and civilization (see below, Chapter 8, §3 and Chapter 9, §5).