Adresse à l'Assemblée nationale, pour l'abolition de la traite des Noirs De l'imprimerie de L. Potier de Lille Paris 1790 | 8vo (12 x 19.3 cm) bradel binding
First edition of one of the most important revolutionary publications against the African slave trade and first manifesto of the Société des amis des Noirs, founded in February 1788 by Jacques-Pierre Brissot, Étienne Clavière and Mirabeau, just nine months after the London Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, which served as their model.Full Bradel binding with motif boards, spine title label, all edges marbled, binding signed Boichot.
It was in London that Brissot in exile and under the threat of a “
lettre de cachet” for his anti-monarchical writings, met Thomas Clarkson at the beginning of this first political association for the rights of Blacks born of the scandal caused by the massacre of 142 slaves on the Zong slave ship.
Even before the success of the French Revolution and the Déclaration des Droits de l'Homme, Brissot decides to lead this necessary but highly controversial fight for the universality of human rights.
Inaugurated by Bartolomé de Las Casas and La Boétie then led by Anglosaxon Quakers and French Enlightenment philosophers, this fight for the recognition of fundamental human rights was initially confronted with the economic logic of a West that builds its power and wealth on triangular trade. The Société des amis des Noirs like its English alter ego decides therefore to conduct the fight in two stages, the first of which must be the abolition of the slave trade. This is the express idea of this plea to the Assemblée Nationale which as Brissot writes comes from “engraving on an immortal monument that all men are born and remain free and equal in rights”.
Although Brissot de Warville defended himself from any desire to abolish slavery (“The immediate emancipation of the blacks would [...] be a fatal operation for the colonies”), his speech was one of the most beautiful humanist appeals of the time. Thanks to an oratory rhetoric worthy of the greatest revolutionaries, the Girondin transforms his pragmatic demonstration of the economic uselessness of the slave trade into an ethical and philosophical manifesto of the founding principles of the French Revolution:
“You have restored to the French people these rights that despotism had for so long despoiled. You have restored them to these courageous islanders in Corsica, thrown into slavery under the veil of charity. You have broken the chains of feudalism that still degraded a good number of our fellow citizens; you have announced the destruction of all the stigmatizing distinctions that religious or political prejudices introduced into the great family of humankind. Men whose cause we defend do not have the same high claims, although, citizens of the same Empire and men like us, they have the same rights as us. We are not asking you to restore to French blacks those political rights which alone, nevertheless, attest to and maintain the dignity of man; we are not even asking for their liberty. [...] No, never has such an idea entered into our minds. [...] we ask only that one cease butchering thousands of blacks regularly every year in order to take hundreds of captives; we ask that henceforth cease the prostitution, the profaning of the French name, used to authorize these thefts, these atrocious murders; we demand in a word the abolition of the slave trade, and we beg you to take promptly into consideration this important subject.”
Brissot while rejecting suspicions of intelligence with the English enemy to ruin France – and we know what it will cost him to be accused of Royalism by Robespierre -, exposes the condition of slaves from their capture to their exploitation, offering a powerful analysis of the causes and consequences of this inhuman treatment and its irreducible logic:
“Thus those who are calling for the continuation of this appalling traffic have declared that, in the final analysis, in order to make it profitable, everything that is atrocious must be preserved; that everything is combined in it, that the Black slave trade becomes a ruinous trade if one cannot, at all risks, cram a large number into the space rigorously calculated for a much lower number, if one cannot at last contain their despair by the Reign of Terror.”
By establishing a constant parallel between the abolition of privileges and that of slavery, Brissot makes much more than a simple denunciation of the inhumanity of the executioners. He affirms, at the dawn of the French Revolution, in intelligence and maturity, the universality of human rights and the black population's equality of rights. Thus he adopts an intellectual position that is very far removed from the paternalistic and condescending goodwill that will pollute relationships between Westerners and Africans for a long time to come:
“Finally, you will be told [...] that abolishing the Slave Trade, [...] is to ignite the revolt among Blacks.
This was also the language we used in the past to prevent the reform of abuses among us.
If some motive might on the contrary push them [the blacks] to insurrection, might it not be the indifference of the National Assembly about their lot? Might it not be the insistence on weighing them down with chains, when one consecrates everywhere this eternal axiom: that all men are born free and equal in rights. So then therefore there would only be fetters and gallows for the blacks while good fortune glimmers only for the whites?”
The fleuron chosen for the title page is the reproduction of the famous seal created by William Hackwood or Henry Webber for the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, originally surmounted by the motto: “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?”. To this day, this image remains the most iconic representation of the international anti-slavery movement. However the French decide a slight change the message: “Am I not your brother?”, thus testifying to a significant evolution from the recognition of black humanity to the need for brotherhood among people.
Brissot's
Adresse à l'Assemblée Nationale will not have an immediate effect, despite two other attempts in 1791 and 1792. However, on 24 March 1792, the Société will obtain the vote on a decree granting civic equality to free men of colour. The abolition of slavery will not be voted on until 4 February 1794, and was then revoked in 1802 by Napoleon. After a succession of degrees and intermediate laws, this crime against humanity was not definitively abolished in France until 27 April 1848, almost sixty years after Brissot's speech.
“Well, do you not allow yourself to be deviated from the duty that humanity imposes on you here, for fear of some interruption to the few works that the Black slave trade brings about in France? Did you listen to this fear when, with a bold hand, you overthrew all the abuse that thwarted a free Constitution? This abuse, however, fed thousands of individuals; the commotion caused by this revolution threw all fortunes into uncertainty, caused capital to tighten, suspended almost all work. What bad citizen, however, dares to complain about this necessary suspension? Yet it was not your blood that your tyrants shed; they did not, at every moment, violate the sanctuary of your home; they did not condemn you unjustly to have the right to sell you; they did not tear you from your homes to plunge you into eternal captivity, and in a foreign land. Now if, in order to regain freedom, for which life itself must no doubt be sacrificed, you have not hesitated to suspend the movement of an immense Société, could you hesitate, when it is a question of the blood of thousands of men, to suspend the trade of a few individuals for fear of comprising their fortunes? They are fathers! What! Aren't these black men fathers too? Do they not also have a family to support? [...]
Hurry up [...] and declare your principles on this issue, declare to the universe that you do not intend to discard them, when it comes to the interest of another Nation. The honour of the name François demands it. The free people of other times have dishonoured freedom by consecrating the slavery that benefited them. It is worthy of the first Assemblée Libre de France, to consecrate the principle of philanthropy which makes the human race but one family, to declare that it abhors this annual carnage which takes place on the coasts of Africa.”
At a time when certain fundamental rights that we believed to have been definitively acquired are called into question, Brissot's declaration, the result of a humanist struggle lasting two hundred years and which will require another half century to see through, constitutes an essential step in the long, still unfinished, battle for the defence and preservation of human dignity. 
