Napoleon's Egypt: Invading The Middle East - Reenactor.ru

180 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTFrench slave plantations in Martinique, Guyana, and Haiti produced sugar, coffee,indigo, and other goods, while imposing the most miserable existence onthe workers. Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire, and the authors of the Encyclopédie,for all their often racist attitudes toward persons of African descent, hadroundly condemned the institution of slavery as far as they could do so withoutfalling afoul of the monarchy. The Encyclopédie contained articles insisting that“if a commerce of this kind can be justified by a moral principle, then there is nocrime, however atrocious, that cannot become legitimate,” and another assertedthat “buying Negroes, to reduce them to slavery, is a trade that violates religion,morality, the natural law, and all the rights of human nature.” 34 Voltaire denouncedslavery in his novel Candide and thundered against the slave sugar plantationsmaintained by the French in Haiti, where, he said, people died for theluxury of others. The Revolution itself put the issue on the legislative calendar,as did the uprisings in Haiti, which provoked frantic letters from the landlordclass there to Paris. The Jacobins tended to dismiss these pleas as the manipulationsof effete royalist expatriates. Abolitionists pressed for antislavery legislation.After a rancorous debate in which many delegates recognized that endingslavery might well finish off French colonialism, in February, 1794 (the Year 2),the National Convention outlawed slavery in French colonies abroad, though itdid not outlaw the slave trade. 35 The law forbade any compensation to the slaveowners, whom the revolutionaries considered on the same level as exiled royalists,that is, thieves of the property of the people. The French planters in theCaribbean and French Guyana largely ignored the proclamation, and it is saidthat it never reached Martinique. The French officers and others in Egypt, despitethese Enlightenment debates, often purchased household slaves and concubines,and no one seemed to invoke the 1794 law.