Anthony Benezet's Antislavery Reputation in France

Chapter 10 Anthony Benezet’s Antislavery Reputation in France: An Investigation

Marie-Jeanne Rossignol

Introduction

This chapter challenges an established historiographical tradition that has claimed that two of Anthony Benezet’s antislavery pamphlets were translated into French decades before the French Revolution, and that Benezet’s ideas were well known in France. It is in fact more likely that only one pamphlet, written in French by Benezet himself, and presenting the Quaker religion (with no major emphasis on antislavery), found its way to France as a translation. Part of this chapter tells the story of how this conclusion was reached. Although there is no evidence that his antislavery pamphlets were either read or circulated, Benezet did enjoy a remarkable reputation in France as an antislavery figure, as well as other North American Quakers. I trace how and why Benezet and the Pennsylvania Quakers came to be so highly regarded in the Atlantic world starting in the late 1760s, as it became known that this group had emancipated their slaves. By the late 1780s, the French antislavery society (les Amis des Noirs), now work- ing jointly with the British Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in London, felt it could no longer do without a proper translation of Benezet’s works. It thus commissioned translations which apparently were never com- pleted, as we shall later see. One antislavery tract by Benezet was translated into French in 1788, though it did not enjoy much posterity as it remained anony- mous: Tableau précis de la malheureuse condition des négres dans les colonies d’Amérique: suivi de considérations adressées aux Gouvernemens de l’Amérique libre sur l’inconséquence de leur conduite en tolérant l’esclavage (A Caution and a Warning to Great Britain and Her Colonies). This confirms the view that although Benezet was a key name in French antislavery circles, his published ideas on the subject never circulated as such. The broader goal of this chapter is thus to qualify the very notion of “Atlantic circulation” with regard to the supposed existence of an “Antislavery international” network which emerged in the 1780s.1

1 Yves Bénot salutes this network but calls it ‘a sketch’ in “L’internationale abolitionniste et l’esquisse d’une civilisation atlantique,” Dix-huitième siècle 33 (2001): 265–79.

The case of Benezet illustrates the importance of national contexts: though he proved to be a source of inspiration for French activists as an iconic antislavery figure, his own antislavery arguments were not readily available in print in French, and, as a result, his humanitarian and religious rationale could do little to shape the French antislavery argument, which was characterized by the preva- lence of philosophical, administrative, and economic arguments, together with moral indignation targeted at colonial planters.2

Benezet’s Antislavery Tracts and the Absence of French Translations

Before examining which Benezet publications may or may not have been translated into French, it is necessary to present the corpus of Benezet’s antislavery publications, a task made easier thanks to David Crosby’s 2014 edition of The Complete Antislavery Writings of Anthony Benezet 1754–1783.3 Benezet’s first written piece was An Epistle of Caution and Advice Concerning the Buying and Keeping of Slaves (1754), a brief work of three pages. This was followed in 1759–60 by Observations on the Inslaving, Importing and Purchasing of Negroes, also a short publication of about eight pages. In 1762 Benezet published A Short Account of that Part of Africa Inhabited by the Negroes, a much longer work of around sixty pages focused on how much destruction the slave trade caused in Africa—a pioneering argument. This was followed by A Caution and a Warning (1766), a shorter, twenty-five-page treatise, before Benezet turned to Africa again in what came to be his most famous publication, Some Historical Account of Guinea (1771). Some Historical Account was not simply Benezet’s longest pamphlet (around eighty pages in the Crosby edition4) but also proved to be so convincing through its array of arguments and examples that it became “a kind of bible for later

2 Jean Ehrard, Lumières et esclavage. L’esclavage colonial et l’opinion publique en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 2008); Madeleine Dobie, Trading Places: Colonization and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century French Culture (Ithaca, NY, 2010). 3 David L. Crosby, ed., The Complete Antislavery Writings of Anthony Benezet 1754–1783: an Annotated Critical Edition (Baton Rouge, LA, 2014). The Crosby edition will serve as a yard- stick to compare the length of Benezet’s antislavery writings. 4 The 1771 Philadelphia edition and the 1772 London edition are both very long pamphlets, comprising Benezet’s views for over two-thirds of the text, while the rest reproduces excerpts from famous or less famous antislavery texts (Granville Sharp, George Wallace, Frances Hutcheson, James Foster, newspaper editorials, or sermons). The two editions are similar but paginated differently. The London edition (paginating the document in a continuous way) lists 198 pages, without the index. Benezet’s fifteen chapters make up 144 out of the 198 pages.