Adresse à l'Assemblée nationale, pour l'abolition de la traite des Noirs

First edition of one of the most important revolutionary publications against the African slave trade and the first manifesto of the Society of the Friends of the Blacks, founded in February 1788 by Jacques-Pierre Brissot, Étienne Clavière, and Mirabeau, barely nine months after the London Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, which served as their model.
 

 

It was in London, while in exile and under threat of a lettre de cachet for his anti-monarchist writings, that Brissot encountered Thomas Clarkson, the driving force behind the first political association for the rights of Black people, born from the scandal provoked by the massacre of 142 enslaved Africans aboard the slave ship Zong. Even before the success of the French Revolution and the proclamation of the Rights of Man, Brissot resolved to undertake this necessary but highly controversial struggle for the universality of human rights.
First inaugurated by Bartolomé de Las Casas and La Boétie, and later carried forward by Anglo-Saxon Quakers and French Enlightenment philosophers, this fight for the recognition of fundamental human rights was, from its outset, confronted with the economic logic of a West that had built its wealth and power on the triangular trade.
 
The Society of the Friends of the Blacks, following in the footsteps of its English counterpart, resolved to pursue the struggle in two stages, the first of which was the abolition of the slave trade. This was the stated aim of Brissot’s exhortation to the National Assembly, which, he writes, had just “engraved on an immortal monument that all men are born and remain free and equal in rights.”
 
Yet, although Brissot de Warville disclaimed any immediate intent to abolish slavery (“the immediate emancipation of the Blacks would [...] be a fatal operation for the Colonies”), his discourse remains one of the most powerful humanist pleas of the age. With rhetoric worthy of the greatest revolutionaries, the Girondin transformed his pragmatic demonstration of the economic futility of the slave trade into an ethical and philosophical manifesto of the founding principles of the French Revolution:
“Vous les avez rendus ces droits au peuple Français que le despotisme en avait si longtemps dépouillés [...] nous vous supplions de prendre promptement en considération ce sujet important.”

While rebutting suspicions of collusion with the English aimed at weakening France – accusations that would later cost him dearly when Robespierre denounced him as a royalist – Brissot described the condition of the enslaved, from their capture to their exploitation, offering a powerful analysis of the causes and consequences of this inhuman system and its irreducible logic:
 
“Ainsi ceux-là même qui sollicitent la continuation de cet exécrable trafic ont déclaré qu'en dernière analyse, pour le rendre profitable, il fallait conserver tout ce qu'il a d'atroce [...] que la Traite des Noirs devient un commerce ruineux si l'on ne peut pas [...] contenir leur désespoir par la Terreur.”
 
By establishing a constant parallel between the abolition of privileges and that of slavery, Brissot achieved far more than a mere denunciation of the cruelty of the oppressors: on the very eve of the French Revolution, he affirmed the universality of the Rights of Man and the equality in rights of the Black population, as well as in intellect and maturity. He thus adopted a position far removed from the paternalistic and condescending benevolence that would continue to poison relations between Europeans and Africans for decades to come:
 
“Enfin l'on vous dira [...] Eh quoi donc ! Il n'y aurait pour les Noirs que des fers & des gibets, lorsque le bonheur luirait pour les seuls blancs ?”
The device chosen for the title-page was a reproduction of the celebrated seal designed by William Hackwood or Henry Webber for the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, originally inscribed with the motto: “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” This image remains the most iconic representation of the international abolitionist movement. The French, however, chose to alter the motto slightly, rendering it: “Ne suis-je pas ton frère?”, thus shifting the recognition of Black humanity towards an emphasis on fraternal bonds between peoples.
 
Brissot’s Adresse to the National Assembly produced no immediate effect, despite two further attempts in 1791 and 1792. The Society did, however, secure on 24 March 1792 a decree granting civic equality to free men of color. Slavery itself was only abolished on 4 February 1794, before being reinstated by Napoleon in 1802. After a succession of intermediate decrees and laws, this crime against humanity was definitively abolished in France only on 27 April 1848, nearly sixty years after Brissot’s speech.
 
“Eh ne vous laissez pas écarter du devoir que vous impose ici l'humanité [...] Il est digne de la première Assemblée libre de la France, de consacrer le principe de philanthropie qui ne fait du genre humain qu'une seule famille, de déclarer qu'elle a en horreur ce carnage annuel qui se fait sur les côtes d'Afrique.”
 
At a time when certain fundamental rights once thought irreversibly secured are again being called into question, Brissot’s declaration—fruit of a two-hundred-year humanist struggle that would require yet another half-century to be fully realized—stands as an essential milestone in the long, unfinished fight for the defense and preservation of human dignity.