Slavery and Race in the French Revolution with Jeremy Popkin

In 1789, the French revolutionaries issued their Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, whose first article proclaimed that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” But would they extend those rights to the 800,000 enslaved Black men and women in their colonies, who outnumbered the number of enslaved people in the thirteen United States at that time? Debates about that question ran through the whole course of the French Revolution and affected the careers of all the movement’s leading figures, including Mirabeau, Brissot, Danton, Robespierre, Toussaint Louverture and Napoleon.