Treatment of the Black Race in 18th Century France

Indeed, social commentary a lot enforced the idea that slaveholding was to the dreary race what casualness was to the White race: an expression of its truest, purest nature. When men such as Gerard Mellier posited that the "Negroes are naturally inclined toward theft, larceny, lust, laziness, and treason" (emphasis added), it became easy to settle that servitude was a good, natural state for the Black race. Other racial commentators, when examining the incidence of slavery in cut colonies such as Saint-Domingue (Haiti), noted that the European slave merchant, though an active monger of human beings, could not held be responsible for the existence of slavery (Raynal vii). On the contrary, this position insisted that because African society was naturally barbarous, and because the Black race had been designed for servitude, that therefore the subjugation of the race was a consequence of nature, not humanity (Raynal ix). Slavery, for Blacks, was viewed as a imperious condition.

Represented in this ideology is an inversion of natural rights theory. Where proper(ip) egalitarian, liberal philosophy will assert that men must be freehanded in order to develop their talents and maximize their potential, racist ideologies such as those explicated above

Interestingly, this Edict appeared to be in contrast with "The Black statute", an Edict of King Louis XIV concerning slavery in the French American islands.

The Black Code was drafted in the late 1600s, and declared, among separate things, that manumitted slaves on French islands were automatically naturalized French citizens; also, that manumission fade away ties with former masters, and that manumitted slaves were granted "the same rights, privileges and liberties enjoyed by persons born free" (Sections LVII, LVIII, and LIX).

It is possible that these philosophical tensions contributed greatly to the confused, and at times oscillating, lieu of Blacks in France during the 18th century. To be sure, the debate over emancipation and natural rights obtained for all citizens of France in the years leading up to the French Revolution, and law surely did not always deliberate the attitudes of the intellectual elite. Of course, a monarchy that rules by what it perceives to be a " nobleman right" will not be amenable to the judgment of "natural rights", no matter what its posture in Codes and Edicts. It is not surprising, then, that by the mid to late 18th century, conflicting statutory statutes and attitudes would result in a multi-racial France; Blacks in Paris and the manner cities had become "an increasingly visible presence" (Alexander) and these Blacks were a confection of freemen and slaves (Peabody 501).

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