On the Margins of the Enlightenment: Blacks and Jews

Abstract

The postmodern critique of the Enlightenment is much concerned with what it regards as the unwillingness of progressive thinkers of the eighteenth century to accept the legitimacy of national or cultural groups that differed significantly from norms in Western Europe. My aim is to examine how eighteenth-century thinkers, including Hume, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Condorcet, and the Abbé Grégoire, perceived prototypical “others” such as Blacks and Jews, by looking at the sources—from contemporary medical science to travel literature, proto-anthropology, history, biblical scholarship and reformist projects—on which these views were based. Perceptions of Blacks cannot easily be separated from the issue of slavery, nor that of the Jews from biblical history and theology. I argue that those who wanted to exclude these groups from mainstream society generally based their arguments on a one-dimensional, self-referential empirical methodology, while those who argued for their eventual inclusion usually posited a multidimensional reality in which a shift from one dimension to the other was a matter of will and planning. While the inclusionists tended to use general categories, such as humanity or a universal spiritual order, the exclusionists tended to use particularizing categories such as race or nation.

Acknowledgement

The author wishes to thank Jonathan Judaken, Harvey Mitchell, Roger Emerson, Norbert Ruebsaat, Peter Sorek, and Bertram Schwarzbach for having read and helpfully commented on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

1. On the Jews in the Enlightenment, see Arthur Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968); Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Studies in Jewish-Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times (New York: Shocken, 1961), and Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770–1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973); Frank E. Manuel, The Broken Staff: Judaism through Christian Eyes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Ronald Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France, 1715–1815 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003); Adam Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Harvey Mitchell, Voltaire’s Jews and Modern Jewish Identity: Rethinking the Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 2008). A recent attempt to show that at least in everyday life, relations between Jews and Christians were not necessarily antagonistic is Daniel Jutte, “Interfaith Encounters between Jews and Christians in the Early Modern Period and Beyond: Toward a Framework,” American Historical Review 118 (2013): 378–400. For an excellent account of the way Judaism was seen and treated in early Christianity, see David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: Norton, 2013), chaps. 2 and 3.

2. One scholar puts the number of Africans sold into slavery down to the early nineteenth century at 9 million, 1.6 million before 1700 and 7.4 million from 1701 to 1810. See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 119. Another estimate puts the number of Africans sent to the Americas from the sixteenth century to 1867 at 11 million or more, of which the French share was 1.5 million. See David Richardson, “Slavery and the African Slave Trade,” in History of World Trade since 1450, ed. John J. McCusker, 2 vols. (New York: Thomson Gale, 2006), 2.686–89. The French colonies, primarily the West Indies, were buying roughly 16,000 slaves a year between 1737 and 1743, 20,000 a year between 1763 and 1777, and 37,000 a year between 1783 and 1792. See Robert Louis Stein, The French Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century: An Old Regime Business (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 23, 32, 38. On an average Atlantic crossing, which took about two months, some 10% to 15% of the slaves died. On particularly bad voyages the mortality rate rose to half and above (xv).

3. Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews, 22–32, 233–39. Money-lending was universally detested in France at the time, whoever the money-lender, because default on the debt meant loss of the security, which for most peasants was some or all of their land, the main asset on which their livelihood and self-image depended.

4. For a comparison of the loss of personal freedom and perceptions thereof among Europeans, see David Eltis, “Europeans and the Rise and Fall of African Slavery in the Americas: An Interpretation,” American Historical Review 98 (1993): 1399–423.

5. Jonathan Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 7, 57–61, 276, 288.

6. Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World, 58–59. Jews accounted for about a third of the European population of Surinam and Curaçao and roughly half of the Europeans of the Dutch colony of Recife.

7. The Jews of Surinam even launched such an expedition on a Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the Jewish year. Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World, 283–84.

8. Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World, 291.

9. Code Noir in Condorcet, Réflexions sur l’esclavage des nègres (1781), ed. Jean-Paul Doguet (Paris: Flammarion, 2009), 170–71. This basic document on French slavery dates from the same year as the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and accords primacy to religion that was foreign to the policies of Colbert, who died a short time before. The absence of racial categories in this first version of the Code Noir is notable, slavery being treated purely as a matter of personal status.

10. Pierre Pluchon, Nègres et juifs au xviiiè siècle: Le Racisme au siècle des lumières (Saint-Amand-Montron: Taillandier, 1984), 15–42, and Sue Peabody, There are No Slaves in France: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 107–8. For a close critical reading of the Code Noir, see Louis Sala-Molins, Le Code noir, ou le calvaire de Canaan (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987).

11. Abbé Grégoire, De la littérature des nègres, ou Recherches sur leurs facultés inellectuelles, leurs qualités morales et leur littérature (1808), intro. Jean Lessay (Paris: Perrin, 1991), 87.

12. Condorcet, Réflexions sur l’esclavage des nègres, 63. Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, article “Abraham” (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1961), 2. However, later in the Réflexions Condorcet called for granting civil rights to Jews (107).

13. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 440.

14. Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Fania Oz-Salzberger, “The Jewish Roots of Western Freedom,” Azure (2002): 88–132; and Gordon Schochet, Fania Oz-Salzberger, and Meirav Jones, eds., Political Hebraism: Judaic Sources in Early Modern Political Thought (Jerusalem: Shalem, 2008).

15. The hostility of enlightened thinkers to rabbinic Judaism and the Talmud is roughly parallel to their hostility to scholasticism. The two systems rely on supernatural authority and broadly deductive rationalist methodologies that stood in sharp contrast to Enlightenment empiricism. For some of Henri Grégoire’s comments on rabbinic Judaism and the Talmud, see his Essai sur la régénération physique, morale et politique des juifs, ed. Rita Hermon-Belot (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), chap. 10, 87–89, and chap. 25, 161, 165–68. An enlightened Jew who had studied Talmud in his youth and made criticisms of the same sort was Solomon Maimon. See his Autobiography, trans. J. Clark Murray (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 27–28. However, Maimon also observed that to be properly evaluated the Talmud needed to be appropriately contextualized (126–27). Zalkind Hourwitz, like Maimon a Polish Jew who through his own efforts acquired the cultural tools necessary to participate in Enlightenment discussions, and who was the author of one of the three essays on the Jewish question crowned by the Academy of Metz in 1787, defended the Talmud against Grégoire’s aspersions. Frances Malino, A Jew in the French Revolution: The Life of Zalkind Hourwitz (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 53–54.

16. In Anti-Judaism Nirenberg contends that the Enlightenment secularized anti-Jewish tendencies within Christianity without significantly modifying their negative impetus. This claim is made with respect to Spinoza, Holbach, the philosophes generally and Kant (338, 357 and 360). Nirenberg also refers to “an Enlightenment that so frequently encoded Christian logic in its philosophy” (367). He reaches this conclusion while ignoring pragmatic and improving currents of Enlightenment thought.

17. See the works of Hertzberg, Manuel, Sutcliffe, Schechter, and Mitchell cited in note 1, as well as: Allan Arkush, “Voltaire on Judaism and Christianity,” AJS Review 18 (1993): 223–43; Pierre Auberry, “Voltaire and Antisemitism—A Reply to Hertzberg,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 217 (1983): 177–82; Peter Gay, “Voltaire’s Anti-Semitism,” in The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment (New York: Knopf, 1964), 97–108; Jacob Katz, “Le Judaïsme et les Juifs vus par Voltaire,” Dispersion et Unité 18 (1978): 135–49; David Levy, “Voltaire et son exégèse du Pentateuque: critique et polémique,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 130 (1975); Haydn Mason, “La Tolérance chez Locke, Bayle et Voltaire: fausses influences?” in Etudes sur le Traité sur le tolérance de Voltaire, ed. Nicholas Cronk (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2000), 7–11; Charles Porset, “Voltaire et les Juifs,” in L’Affaire Dreyfus: Juifs en France. Symposium Internationale de Mulhouse (Besançon, France, 1994), 79–104; Adam Sutcliffe, “Myth, Origins, Identity: Voltaire, the Jews and the Enlightenment Notion of Toleration,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 39 (1998): 107–26; B. E. Schwarzbach, Voltaire’s Old Testament Criticism (Geneva: Droz, 1971), and “Voltaire et les Juifs: bilan et plaidoyer,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 358 (1998): 27–91; and Harvey Chisick, “Ethics and History in Voltaire’s Attitudes toward the Jews,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 35 (2002): 577–600.

18. Manuel, The Broken Staff, 193–201.

19. Summarizing Voltaire’s attitudes toward Jews, Pierre Pluchon writes, “Le Juif, c’est l’anti-philosophe, la conviction sectaire face à la tolérance” (Nègres et Juifs, 70).

20. William B. Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans: White Responses to Blacks, 1530–1880 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1980), chap. 1.

21. On the emergence of anthropology in France, see Michèle Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des lumières (Paris: Maspero, 1971). This is a book esteemed by historians as different in outlook as Louis Sala-Molins in The Dark Side of the Light: Slavery and the French Enlightenment (1992), trans. John Conteh-Morgan (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), which is highly critical of Enlightenment approaches to colonial slavery, and the eminent eighteenth-century scholar Jean Ehrard in his study Lumières et esclavage: L’Esclavage colonial et l’opinion publique en France au xviiie siècle (Brussels: André Versaille, 2008), which focuses on the development of anti-slavery thought over the eighteenth century.

22. Voltaire, “Histoire des voyages de Scarmentado, écrite par lui-même,” in Contes en vers et prose, ed. Sylvain Menant, 2 vols. (Paris: Bordas-Classiques Garnier, 1992), 1.210–11, and Grégoire, De la littérature des nègres, 276.

23. In his Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, which appeared in 1750, Franklin calculated that it cost more to use slave labor than free workers. See Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 426–27. For Smith’s views on slavery, see An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 1.98 and 388–89. Ehrard points out that while the colonial administrator Pierre Poivre and the physiocrat Dupont de Nemours argued that free workers were more productive than slaves, Forbonnais and another physiocrat, Le Mercier de la Rivière, held that slave labor was necessary in the colonies. See Ehrard, Lumières et esclavage, 130–32. According to Sala-Molins, economists and administrators who justified the slave trade and plantation slavery appealed to “unavoidable realities of the market.” The Dark Side of the Light, 121.

24. Among those who place the development of racism in the High Enlightenment are Richard Popkin, “The Philosophical Basis of Eighteenth-Century Racism,” in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, ed. Harold E. Pagliaro (Cleveland, OH: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1973), 3.245–62; Pierre H. Boulle, “In Defense of Slavery: Eighteenth-Century Opposition to Abolition and the Origins of a Racist Ideology in France,” in History from Below: Studies in Popular Protest and Popular Ideology in Honour of George Rudé, ed. Frederick Krantz (Montreal: Concordia University Press, 1985), 221–41; Nicholas Hudson, “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race’: The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29 (1996): 247–64; Peabody, There are no Slaves in France, 68–69; and Schorsch, Jews and Blacks, 11. It has been argued, however, that French racism began to develop earlier. See Guillaume Aubert, “The Blood of France: Race and the Purity of Blood in the French Atlantic World,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. 61 (2004): 439–78.

25. The text of the Code Noir used here is that provided by Jean-Paul Doguet as an appendix to his edition of Condorcet’s Réflexions, 67–87.

26. Peabody, There are no Slaves in France, 53–55.

27. Peabody, There are no Slaves in France, 38–39.

28. Peabody points out that the term “nègre” was taken to imply slavery and so came into conflict with the “freedom principle.” For this reason the term “noir” came to be preferred in French domestic legislation. There are no Slaves in France, 114–15.

29. Most commentators on Enlightenment views of slavery regard Book 15 of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1748) as the first explicit condemnation of Black slavery by a major Enlightenment thinker. It certainly contains a scathing condemnation of slavery and racism. Arguably, however, the Persian Letters (1721) with its imagery of the seraglio with its Black eunuchs, whose condition Montesquieu describes sympathetically, and its criticism of despotism also contains a far-reaching criticism of slavery cutting across lines of race, class and gender. Jaucourt’s article in the Encyclopédie, “Traite des nègres” is an impassioned and radical denunciation of slavery, while Le Romain’s contribution “Nègres (Commerce)” and Formey’s “Nègre (Histoire naturelle)” are largely descriptive.

30. David Hume, “Of National Characters,” in Essays Moral and Political, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1985), 208. That these views are not an aberration in Hume is made clear by John Immerwahr, “Hume’s Revised Racism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 53 (1992): 481–86. This note did not appear in the first edition of the Essays in 1748, but was added to the 1753 edition. Hume revised it in the early 1770s, removing references to all groups other than Blacks. See Emmanuel C. Eze, “Hume, Race and Human Nature,” Journal of the History of Ideas 61 (2000): 692. This last revision has not been included in most editions of the Essays. While holding clearly racist views, Hume did not approve of slavery whether in antiquity or in his own time. In his essay “On the Populousness of Ancient Nations” he condemned the slavery of the classical world and wrote: “The remains which are found of domestic slavery in the AMERICAN colonies, and among some EUROPEAN nations, would never surely create a desire of rendering it more universal” (Essays, 383). In addition to the inhuman treatment to which slaves were subjected, Hume also criticized the corruption of masters through the “unbounded dominion” that they exercised, rendering them “petty tyrant[s]” (384).

31. Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, letter 18.

32. Voltaire, L’ABC, seventh conversation. Cited in Ehrard, Lumières et esclavage, 117.

33. The portrait of Francis Williams is reproduced in David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 35. Williams objected to Hume’s characterization of him. Hume ignored his objections. Immerwahr, “Hume’s Revised Racism,” 485.

34. On Bernier, see Siep Stuurman, “François Bernier and the Invention of Racial Classification,” History Workshop Journal 50 (2000): 1–21.

35. Cited from E. C. Eze, Race and Enlightenment: A Reader (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997), 11.

36. Eze, Race and Enlightenment, 13.

37. William Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans, 97.

38. Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World, 255.

39. Popkin, “The Philosophical Basis of Eighteenth-Century Racism,” 252–53.

40. Buffon, Natural History from Eze, Race and Enlightenment, 27. For Grégoire see the first chapter of his De la littérature des nègres. While the notion of separate creations could provide a secular basis for justifying Black slavery, the Bible explicitly consigns the descendants of Ham, from whom Blacks were thought to descend, to slavery (or service) to his brothers. See Genesis 9.18–27, and the thematic studies of David M. Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); and David M. Whitford, The Curse of Ham in the Early Modern Era: The Bible and the Justification for Slavery (London: Ashgate, 2009). The curse of Ham is also treated in Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World, chap. 6.

41. See Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire, Part II, chap. 1.

42. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 396–99.

43. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), 51–55, 148–49.

44. Grégoire, De La Littérature des nègres, gives detailed accounts of the intelligence, courage, bravery, industry, integrity and love of liberty of Blacks (chaps. 3, 4, and 6) and their literary and academic achievements (chaps. 5, 7, and 8). His treatment is highly specific, citing instances of meritorious behavior and giving short biographies of Black authors and lists of their works.

45. It is important to note, however, that many Enlightenment authors who asserted significant racial differences or who maintained the superiority of Europeans, from Hume to Buffon to Blumenthal to Raynal, explicitly denied that these differences justified oppression or enslavement of non-Europeans. Shanti Singham, “Betwixt Cattle and Men: Jews, Blacks and Women, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man,” in The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789, ed. Dale Van Kley (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 29–30.

46. Christian Wilhelm von Dohm, Concerning the Amelioration of the Civil Status of the Jews, (1781) trans. Helen Rivka Lederer (n.p., n.d.) 18, 19, 21

47. Grégoire states in his Essai that the debasement of German Jews was the “necessary result” of the conditions to which they had been subjected (vi, 67), and repeats this with slight variations a number of times (vi, 71, xxvii, 176). “Voilà notre ouvrage, à leur place nous eussions été tels, peut-être pires” (x, 91).

48. “Dans leur avilissement actuel, ils [Jews] sont plus à plaindre que coupables; et telle est leur déplorable situation, que pour n’en être pas profondément affecté, il faut avoir oublié qu’ils sont hommes, ou avoir soi-même cessé de l’être” (xix, 132).

49. Grégoire, De La Littérature des nègres, 36–37.

50. Grégoire, De La Littérature des nègres, 276. “Français, Anglais, Hollandais, que seriez-vous, si vous aviez été placés dans les mêmes circonstances?”

51. Condorcet, Réflexions sur l’esclavage des nègres, 81, 86–87, 119.

52. Cited in Ehrard, Lumières et esclavage, 198, 201.

53. Cited in Ehrard, Lumières et esclavage, 187.

54. The Academy of Metz posed as the subject of its essay contest for 1785 the question, “Are there means for making the Jews more useful and happier in France?” Grégoire’s printed response to this question was entitled Essay on the Physical, Moral and Political Regeneration of the Jews. For the broader context of the notion of regeneration in Grégoire’s thought, see Alyssa G. Sepinwall, The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), chap. 5.

55. See Mona Ozouf, “Regeneration,” in the Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed. François Furet and Mona Ozouf (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 781–91, and “La Révolution française et la formation de l’homme nouveau,” in L’Homme régénéré: Essais sur la Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 116–57; and Alyssa Sepinwall, The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution, 90–113, 130–36.

56. Condorcet, Réflexions sur l’esclavage des nègres, 61–62, 80.

57. Anne François Doublet de Persan, cited in David Feuerwerker, L’Emancipation des Juifs en France: De l’Ancien Régime à la fin du Second Empire (Paris: Albin Michel, 1976), 3. “Les juifs sont hommes. Si on les considère comme tels, pourquoi les laisser plus longtemps dans l’esclavage et l’humiliation?”

58. Dohm, Concerning the Amelioration of the Civil Status of the Jews, 14. Dohm likewise applies the categories rights of man (6) and natural rights (11) inclusively to Jews.

59. “Rectifions leur éducation pour rectifier leurs coeurs; il y a longtemps qu’on répète qu’ils sont hommes comme nous, ils le sont avant d’être juifs” (Grégoire, Essai, xvi, 118). In the same chapter Grégoire observes of the Jews, “On voit éclore en eux des vertus, des talens partout où l’on commence à les traiter en hommes, surtout dans les Etats du pape” (117).

60. On the application of the category of humanity to Blacks during this period, see Kaija Tiainen-Antilla, The Problem of Humanity: The Blacks in the European Enlightenment (Helsinki: Finnish Historical Society, 1974).

61. Ehrard, Lumières et esclavage, 211–13.

62. Ehrard, Lumières et esclavage, 212. These clerics could rely on the authority of Saint Augustine who had asserted that “shape and color matter not.” See Sala-Molins, Dark Side of the Light, 86.

63. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 97–98.

64. Jeremy D. Popkin, “Saint-Domingue, Slavery and the Origins of the French Revolution,” in From Deficit to Deluge: The Origins of the French Revolution, edited by Thomas Kaiser and Dale Van Kley (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 232. Popkin is here drawing on the work of Lucie Maquerlot.

65. Popkin, “Saint-Domingue, Slavery and the Origins of the French Revolution,” 237. Necker did not propose immediate practical measures to end the evil he identified.

66. Schorsch, Jews and Blacks, 280. On Jewish views of Blacks, see Abraham Melamed, The Image of the Black in Jewish Culture: A History of the Other (London: Routledge, 2003), and Iris Idelson-Shein, Difference of a Different Kind: Jewish Constructions of Race during the Long Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).

67. Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 2:781–82.

68. David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), xvi.

69. Justin Roberts, Slavery and the Enlightenment in the British Atlantic, 1750–1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 5.

70. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, chaps. 10–12. Abbé Grégoire is an interesting case, as he speaks both in the idiom of the Enlightenment and in that of traditional Christianity. He writes with respect to the Jews, “Il semble qu’on ait voulu reprocher au créateur de les avoir formé à son image, et détruire cette divine empreinte” (Essai, vi, 70). Of course, religious and humanitarian motives are not mutually exclusive, and were not so regarded in the eighteenth century. John Millar in his Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1771) described the motives of the Quakers in condemning slavery as “religion and humanity.” Cited in Smith, The Wealth of Nations, I, 388–89, n. 28.

71. Davis points out that Christian sects most sympathetic to Blacks tended to be those who had themselves suffered persecution. The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 212–14. See also Ehrard, Lumières et esclavage, 95–104.

72. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 394–96.

73. Voltaire, Candide, chap. 19. Robert Darnton sees in this passage a “passionate denunciation of slavery” typical of Enlightenment attitudes. See Robert Darnton, George Washington’s False Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century (New York: Norton, 2003), 14. Jean-Paul Doguet, on the other hand, draws a distinction between “deploring” something and combating it, the former representing moral condemnation, the latter an attempt to effect change. According to Doguet, Voltaire’s position is one of moral condemnation without practical application, while Condorcet’s position contains a program for reform. See Jean-Paul Doguet, “Présentation” to Condorcet, Réflexions, 11–12. It is true that in the passage in question Candide, having seen the condition to which the Black slave had been reduced, continues on his quest to find Cunégonde, but this is, I believe, the only passage in a work filled with horrendous, impossible, almost cartoon-like violence, that the hero cries. While Voltaire’s comment on the cost at which Europeans get their sugar is perhaps best known, it is not the earliest philosophe observation on the subject. See Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, bk. 15, chap. 5, and Helvétius, “il n’arrive point de barrique de sucre en Europe qui ne soit teinte de sang humain.” De l’Esprit (1758), Discours 1, chap. 3, note e (Paris; Fayard, 1988), 37.

74. Grégoire’s position, broadly stated, was that Jews were welcome to become full citizens, provided that they cease to be Jews. Alyssa Sepinwall observes that revolutionary universalism and regeneration allowed integration of formerly excluded groups, “but at the same time it necessitated that they relinquish their peculiarities in order to be seen as full members.” Sepinwall, The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution, 7. On Jewish emancipation in the French Revolution, see Robert Badinter, Libres et égaux: l’émancipation des Juifs sous la Révolution française (Paris: Fayard, 1989); Patrick Gerard, La Révolution française et les Juifs (Paris: Lafont, 1989); Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson, eds., Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States and Citizenship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Michael Brenner, Vicki Caron, and Uri R. Kaufmann, eds., Jewish Emancipation Reconsidered: The French and German Models (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003); Frances Malino, A Jew in the French Revolution: The Life of Zalkind Hourwitz, chaps 3 and 4; Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews, chap. 10; Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews, chap. 5; and Sepinwall, The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution, chap. 4.

75. Singham, “Betwixt Cattle and Men,” 122.

76. For many years the only extensive treatment of the successful slave rebellion in Santo Domingo/Haiti was C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London: Secker & Warburg, 1938). More recently historians have paid much more attention to this subject. See, for example, David P. Geggus, ed., The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina, 2001); Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); John D. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (New York: Palgrave, 2006); Nick Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (Charlottesville, VI: University of Virginia Press, 2008); Jeremy D. Popkin, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Malick W. Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

77. Omi and Winant summarized by Robert Bernasconi and Tommy L. Lott in The Idea of Race (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2000), xvii–xviii.

78. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckman, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Anchor, 1967), 49.

79. Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography, intro. Dumas Malone (New York: Capricorn, n.d.), 62.

80. On specific points on which they differ, such as whether Montesquieu, Diderot or Raynal profited from the slave trade, Ehrard on the whole tends to be more careful and better informed. See Sala-Molins, Dark Side of the Light, 11, 15, 48–49, 81; Ehrard, Lumières et esclavage, 26–32. For Sala-Molins the painful slowness of practical proposals for the emancipation of slaves is an indication of the Eurocentrism and insincerity of the philosophes, while for Ehrard it is a matter of practicality and awareness of context.

81. For Bernadin see Ehrard, Lumières et esclavage, 42, 57, 94: “étant riche, nous aurions beaucoup de Noirs qui travailleront pour vous.”

82. Nicholas Kristof, New York Times, 1 June 2011. Kristof uses the phrase “enter the commercial sex trade,” not “sex slavery.” Dignifying relations in which people are sold and used without regard for their wishes or well-being as a “trade” is about as appropriate as calling the slaves on a Roman latifundia agricultural workers.