WI: A Gradual Abolition of Slavery in France?

[Christian]

Reading up on the attitudes of 18th century French abolitionist, what always comes up is that none of them were for a wholesale abolition of slavery. Not Condorcet or even the Abbe Gregoire who thought that the black slaves were not yet worthy of citizenship or civilization and at most, they wished for abolishing the slave trade and that the end of slavery should be a very gradual process guided by the civilized whit-I mean, Frenchman.

So, would it be possible for slavery to be slowly phased out over the years? Is that an actually realistic premise or is slavery just bound to blow itself up from not wanting to die?

 

[Gary Oswald]

Reading up on the attitudes of 18th century French abolitionist, what always comes up is that none of them were for a wholesale abolition of slavery. Not Condorcet or even the Abbe Gregoire who thought that the black slaves were not yet worthy of citizenship or civilization and at most, they wished for abolishing the slave trade and that the end of slavery should be a very gradual process guided by the civilized whit-I mean, Frenchman.

So, would it be possible for slavery to be slowly phased out over the years? Is that an actually realistic premise or is slavery just bound to blow itself up from not wanting to die?

Well we have a great example of this happening just across the channel.

The UK saw a very gradual process of abolition of slavery. Something won and debated in parliament and pushed through slowly by an establishment that is willing to bow to change but controls the speed of it so it took decades.

France saw slavery discredited on the battlefields of Hispaniola and the man on the spot recognise emancipation in order to win those battles. The French parliament voted to recognise what had already happened. The vote was not 'should we abolish slavery as proposed by le wilberforce' it was 'should we recognise the law passed in Haiti as being legitimate' and the answer was 'yes, every slave across the empire should be a full citizen'. Which is stunningly progressive and obviously there was big pressure to walk that back (a lot of the empire flat out didn't pass those laws, the Seychelles declared themselves independent to avoid passing it and Napoleon obviously reversed it). But the door was open for radicalism, due to Sonthonax. Without it having already happened, the vote won't be on anything so radical.

So lets' say Haiti doesn't go up (which I think is perfectly possible). Would a British style emancipation be able to happen in France?

Well, there's an argument to be made that the British style emancipation only happened in the UK because of Haiti and the British campaign there. That you need the slave system to burn itself out fighting to put the genie back in the bottle before the elites give away to the inevitable.

Full Turtledove parallelism is of course Jamaica going up, the Brits having emancipation forced on them and then the French pushing it through gradually in response.