Selections from the Revue des Colonies (July 1834 and July 1835)

From the Prospectus to the Bill for Immediate Abolition

Maria Beliaeva Solomon, University of Maryland

DOI: 10.55520/5M5YRJS2 | Scholarly Editing, Volume 40
Edition Contents

Founded in 1834 in Paris by Cyrille Bissette, a Martinican abolitionist, the Revue des Colonies, by its full title Monthly compendium of politics, administration, justice, instruction and colonial customs by a society of men of color, was the first periodical in France to be directed by people of color. The Revue was remarkable, furthermore, for its stated objective to amplify the struggles of disenfranchised people on a global scale and for its circulation spanning not only the territories of the French, British, and Spanish colonial empires but also the United States and Haiti.

Monthly issues—published with occasional hiatuses until 1842—systematically denounced the abuses of colonial administrators and exposed the influence of slaveholding landowners over the metropolitan French government.1 This political agitation reflected the editors’ and director’s personal struggles for political recognition as freeborn men of color. More radically, however, the Revue stridently campaigned for immediate rather than gradual abolition years before members of the French Society for the Abolition of Slavery, including Victor Schoelcher, would adopt this position, and thus impacted the trajectory of the abolitionist movement in the years immediately preceding France’s second abolition in 1848.2

Taking after fashionable general interest periodicals,3 the Revue employed an array of innovative media strategies—serialized fictions, regular features, reviews, previews, advertisements, and collectible prints—to generate public interest in Afrodiasporic literature and culture. The Revue also gave international prominence to Black writers and their allies by publishing essays, poems, and fictions by a vast network of correspondents. Little known today beyond a few reedited selections,4 the journal remains a fundamental source of insight into the complex relationships between colonial, national, and racial identities, illuminating the role of the periodical press as a vector for political and social change and the shifting power relations between different colonial and metropolitan actors over the first half of the nineteenth century.

This micro-edition thus seeks to preserve the Revue’s legacy by making a selection of annotated and translated articles available in an open-access format. As such, it builds on the work of several recent digital archival projects focusing on nineteenth-century periodicals, including collective projects such as Médias 19, directed by Guillaume Pinson and Marie-Ève ​​Thérenty, a comprehensive set of resources for the study of nineteenth-century French media culture, and individual digital edition projects such as Marlene Daut’s La Gazette Royale d’Hayti. Following Daut, this edition grounds its recovery of a landmark periodical in a commitment to “both preservation and institutionalization in a way that opens up access rather than closes it down with a paywall.”5

Comprised of a selection of articles from the first issue of the first volume of the Revue des Colonies (July 1834) and the first issue of the second volume (July 1835), this edition aims to make this essential but overlooked text accessible to a wide audience, showcasing the Revue’s self-fashioning in response to the political, material, and legal contexts that informed its inception. The selections from July 1834 consist of a “Prospectus” and a “Declaration of Principles” invoking ideas of natural law inherited from the French Revolution of 1789—including a reprint of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen—followed by an article entitled “A look at the colonial regime and its effects” criticizing the slave economy, the abuses of white planters, and the exclusion of “free men of color” from civic and political life in the colonies. The selections from the July 1835 issue include a draft of a bill for the immediate and unconditional abolition of slavery accompanied by a description of the social and economic measures that would facilitate and support the proposed reform.

These articles constitute a logical entry point for the study of the Revue, offering an overview of its emancipatory politics as well as its heterogeneous composition. Their transcription and translation, including bilingual annotations, not only make them accessible to a wide international readership but also contextualize these excerpts, both historically and in relation to one other, in order to facilitate interpretation. This critical intervention does not, however, constitute an act of archival “discovery” but rather expands the work undertaken by generations of researchers across multiple continents who have contributed to our understanding of the Revue, providing important historical perspectives and proposing generative modes of analysis.6

This open-access micro-edition and the accompanying critical apparatus belong to a growing research corpus on the history of slavery and its abolition, on the contributions of people of African descent to the political and cultural transformations of the nineteenth century, on the onset of “mediatic modernity” in this period, and, more generally, on epistemological and ethical issues in the digital humanities. Even as efforts to digitize print archives increase exponentially, they risk reproducing dominant models and canons by amplifying certain asymmetrical power relations. This edition seeks to resist this tendency by entering a set of historically marginalized texts, in all their inherent subversiveness, into the digital record. In this sense, it is founded on a conception of digital scholarship as a “technology of recovery,” in Kim Gallon’s formulation,7 and is modeled on the approach articulated by Kelly Baker Josephs and Roopika Risam, who emphasize in their introduction to The Digital Black Atlantic “how Black communities have taken advantage of the affordances of technology to assert their humanity, histories, knowledges, and expertise.”8

In highlighting the original and innovative media strategies implemented by the editors of the Revue to advance the cause of emancipation, this edition seeks to counter the invisibilization of authors, editors, and publishers of color in the nineteenth-century media landscape, and to challenge accounts of the French abolitionist movement that center the efforts of metropolitan philanthropists rather than the struggle carried out by Afrodescendants themselves, whether through uprising, marronage, or public activism, including mediatic.9

§Historical and Mediatic Context

Over the course of the nineteenth century in France, newspaper subscriptions increased exponentially, becoming the dominant channel for political and cultural discourse. In Benedict Anderson’s influential formulation, print culture, most notably newspaper distribution and readership networks, form the basis of the “imagined community” of the modern nation state.10 More recently, Dominique Kalifa, Alain Vaillant, Philippe Regnier, and Marie-Ève Thérenty have referred to nineteenth-century France as a “civilisation of the newspaper” in recognition of the centrality of print culture to the period’s social transformations and sequence of revolutions.11

Over the first half of the nineteenth century, the periodical press and antislavery sentiments developed in parallel with one another. Indeed, the events of July 1830, which put an end to the Bourbon Restoration and reinvigorated calls for emancipation, originated in liberal mobilizations against Charles X’s ordinances, the most important of which being the suspension of freedom of the press. Although Louis-Philippe’s regime would restore freedom of the press and constitutionally prohibit censorship, it nevertheless maintained control over publicly circulating print matter. These repressive measures brought about changes in the periodical press, with formats and methods of dissemination evolving to avoid restrictions. This period, which has been called “without exaggeration—that of reviews,”12 saw a proliferation of new periodical titles with increasingly heterogeneous contents. Among them, two important Parisian periodicals aimed at a readership of educated elites—La Revue des Deux Mondes and La Revue de Paris—would serve as models for the Revue des Colonies.

The years 1830–1840 marked the onset of a new “media era”13 and a turning point in the expansion of the French colonial empire with the conquest of Algiers. Accordingly, it is in this period that a colonial periodical press emerged, with the objective of binding various metropolitan and colonial identities within a consistent imperial paradigm. Whether in the Caribbean, the Mascarene Islands, or Algeria, the press was indeed among the first infrastructures linking colonized territories to the metropole, thus constituting an integral part of the apparatus of colonial conquest.14 In parallel to its mediatic construction of the French Empire, the periodical press chronicled the evolving power dynamics between different metropolitan and colonial actors. After 1830, these dynamics underwent a series of shifts as controversies emerged over the status of different segments of the colonial population—enslaved people, “free people of color,” and white planters. Though the law of April 24, 1833, “concerning the exercise of civil and political rights in the colonies” granted full citizenship rights to free men of color, the land and tax qualifications necessary to exercise these rights made them functionally inaccessible to the vast majority. Furthermore, the colonial councils established by the law “concerning the legislative regime of the colonies,” passed on the same day, left local administration, including regulation of the press, law enforcement, and the setting of terms for the enfranchisement of enslaved people, entirely in the hands of white planters.15

This manifest discrepancy between the egalitarian ideals promulgated by the Revolution of 1789 (and reaffirmed in 1830 and 1833) and the persistence of racial hierarchies in the colonies elicited the indignation of free people of color, as evidenced by the article “A look at the colonial regime and its effects” in the first issue of the Revue, wherein Bissette, the director, asks:

Is there anything more perfidious, I would even say more odiously ironic, than to thus concede the right while prohibiting the means. Would it not have been truer to declare outright that only whites could vote?16

The disappointment of the April 1833 laws, especially in light of the impending implementation of the British Abolition Act in August 1834, galvanized the initial publication of the Revue des Colonies, which preceded the creation of the French Society for the Abolition of Slavery by several months.

§1834–1835: From Dissent to Advocacy

From its first issue, in July 1834, the Revue presents itself as the work of a “society of men of color.” This gesture of self-legitimization, common in the media literature of the time, here serves to underline the demographic and political weight of a group excluded from citizenship by the colonial councils and the prejudice of color. It is worth noting that, since the laws of April 1833, the expression “men of color” was no longer imbued with legal weight.17 Nonetheless, the presumed members of the “society” at the inception of the journal—Bissette and at least two of his coauthors for a number of emancipatory petitions, Louis Fabien fils and Mondésir Richard—identify themselves as “mandatories” of the men of color of Martinique and Guadeloupe, respectively. This designation, as well as the title page’s reference to a “society of men of color,” however, disappear fairly quickly from subsequent issues.

While the Revue promises to treat the “great question of the abolition of slavery, the cornerstone of liberty” with the greatest care, its primary mission remains, according to the opening prospectus, “the desirable fusion of the diverse populations of the colonies” in order to support “the political, intellectual, moral and industrial interests of colonists of either color.”18 It bears noting, following Sara Johnson, that for all of the Revue’s abolitionism, it was never anticolonial; indeed, it aspired to reform rather than to dismantle the colonial system.19 This notion of “fusion,” which is the subject of an article in the December 1834 issue, calls for the leveling of the racial hierarchy of the colonies through racial mixing, of which Bissette and his associates represent implicit models. This somewhat utopian solution—perhaps even “excessively simplistic,” as Chris Bongie characterizes it—nevertheless remains anchored, as Daut argues, in an intimate awareness of the unequal power relations that the idea of ​​racial fusion entails, in practice, in the colonial context.20 These first pages thus reveal the fragile and painful balance of an editorial policy caught between activism and conciliation.

This cautious beginning is explained, moreover, by the tribulations experienced by the journal’s founder, a famous victim of the prejudice of color. Arrested in 1823 alongside other landowners of color (including Fabien) for allegedly distributing seditious writings, Bissette was branded and condemned to the galleys for life. The so-called affaire Bissette also prompted the deportation from Martinique of several hundred people—that is, most of the island’s elite men of color.21 Once his sentence was reduced, after appeal, to ten years of banishment, Bissette settled in Paris and campaigned directly to the French government for the civil and political equality of the free people of color of the colonies.

This parliamentary approach is reflected in the Revue’s “Declaration of Principles,” which situates its emancipatory commitments within the discourse of natural law and within the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in particular. By reprinting this foundational text predating the legal distinction between metropole and colony that allowed Napoleon to restore slavery in 1802, the Revue appeals to the liberal foundations of the July Monarchy.

The article “A look at the colonial regime and its effects” that follows the “Declaration of Principles” elaborates on the preceding sections by demonstrating how existing legal measures fail to curb the slave trade or meaningfully secure the rights of free people of color. Here Bissette denounces the endemic injustices of colonial society, governed by what he terms an “aristocracy of the skin,” through which the Old Regime system of nobility is translated to the colonies as an even less legitimate and indeed “absurd” colorist hierarchy. Though Bissette is bold in his condemnation of colonial elites, he remains careful never to impugn the metropolitan regime directly; instead, he presents the abuses of the plantocracy as a threat to national interests. The conclusion of the article, however, offers a more radical statement of the Revue’s political purpose, as conceived by its founder and director:

Ah! if some day an eloquent pen tearing the funereal veil which covers our colonies would retrace the history of domination of the possessors of men; if it evoked from the depths of their tombs the sad victims who are heaped there every day, never would a country defiled by tyranny offer such horrible pages.22

The Revue becomes noticeably more radical in ensuing issues, moving from tempered criticisms to clear and urgent demands. Thus in July 1835, a year after its launch, the Revue, now published with a popular antislavery illustration on its title page,23 concretizes its position in a set of proposals inspired by “the independence of Saint-Domingue [and] what has just been organized in the English colonies, namely: the emancipation of blacks and free labor” claimed “in the name of principle and necessity” according to “a law of justice and reparation, without delay.”24 In its urgency and comprehensive scope, the law proposed by Bissette challenges the gradualist bill put forth by the French Society for the Abolition of Slavery in July 1834, as well as the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act that granted gradual emancipation, with a mandatory “apprenticeship” period, to some 770,000 enslaved people across the British colonial empire.25 Bissette’s proposed emancipation is, moreover, accompanied by a set of social and economic initiatives aimed at ensuring its success, including, for example, central regulation of laborers’ wages and free and compulsory education up to age twenty-one.

The text of the bill not only frames its call for emancipation in revolutionary rhetoric, with several articles referring explicitly to those of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, reprinted in the pages of the Revue a year earlier, but also draws—remarkably, for the time—on the legacy of the Haitian Revolution. Indeed, over the course of the nineteenth century, public discourse in France and beyond (notably in the United States) typically presented Haiti as an argument for tightening colonial authority and limiting the freedoms of people of color. 26 The Revue, however, does not hesitate to incriminate colonial European powers in order to celebrate the independence of the new sovereign nation whose social foundations it deems “far superior to that of many supposedly civilized European nations.”27

The Revue’s support of Haiti throughout its print run is not, however, limited to praise for the nation’s founding. Consistently attending to Haitian news and affairs, the Revue also provides a platform for the writings of Haitian authors such as Coriolan Ardouin, Ignace Nau, and Beauvais Lespinasse, particularly following the Boyer government’s strict censorship of periodicals, as Anna Brickhouse has noted.28 These writers, after 1835, thus turned to the Revue to promote Haitian literature and culture to a divided, even hostile public.

If the Revue’s political positions would seem to imply a liberal readership, one of its central objectives was to sensitize metropolitan and colonial elites to the abolitionist cause. This approach, as media-savvy as it is politically paradoxical, might account for its persistent unpopularity. Its circulation is not easy to assess in the absence of editorial archives, and it is difficult to determine the number of subscribers. In his private correspondence, Bissette estimates around 250, a remarkably low number given the vast geographical extent of the journal’s circulation in the French and British colonial worlds, in addition to former sites of French presence such as the United States and Haiti. As Kelly Duke Bryant notes, however, the actual readership of the Revue was undoubtedly much greater than the subscription figures suggest, not least of all because association with the Revue presented a real risk in many of the territories in which it circulated, as contributors, distributors, and even subscribers faced intimidation from local authorities.29 Thus, in a May 1836 letter published in September of that year, Louis-Timagène Houat writes to Bissette from Bourbon (today Réunion), offering to replace that island’s previous correspondent, all while himself imprisoned on charges of inciting insurrection, for which his alleged prior correspondence with Bissette was held as evidence.30

The Revue was, for the duration of its print run, the target of colonial administrators and landowners’ incessant persecution. The inaugural issue was in fact the subject of a defamation lawsuit from a vindictive plantation owner. The costs of such litigations would present a consistent obstacle to the Revue, forcing several interruptions in production before the journal finally ceased printing in 1842. Bissette would briefly publish another monthly periodical, the Revue Abolitioniste [sic], but his career as an activist and pamphleteer was, from 1842 onward, largely overshadowed by his conflict with Victor Schoelcher—a conflict that kept him out of the political process leading to the abolition of 1848. It is nevertheless difficult to conceive of the progress of public opinion and of parliamentary debates in the period between the two abolitions (1794 and 1848) without the ceaseless campaigning of Bissette and of the Revue des Colonies. An essential goal of this micro-edition is therefore to contribute to the preservation of the Revue in the historical record in order to enable recognition of its political and cultural impact.

§Technical Aspects of the Micro-Edition

The editorial choices of this micro-edition are primarily motivated by issues of accessibility and legibility. The first objective is to make a selection of articles representative of the entire Revue and its commitments available to various audiences—researchers, students, specialists of the period, and readers with no prior knowledge of the journal or its context, whether Francophone or Anglophone. To this end, I have endeavored to offer a version accessible to all by modernizing the spelling and the accentuation of the original French, which uses variants predating the French orthographic reform of 1835. Readers can nonetheless switch to reading the text in the original spelling via the edition’s interface.

In order to facilitate the analysis of the selected articles, the edition offers several reading modes: articles transcribed in modernized or original spelling, English translations, or a synoptic mode that allows the articles of July 1834 and July 1835 to be viewed side by side. This mode promotes comparative reading, particularly between the “Declaration of Principles” of the first issue and the abolition bill of July 1835, making it possible to assess the evolution of the political project of the Revue over the course of its first year of publication. This synoptic mode thus invites the reader to assess the relationship between the two issues through consideration of both the formal coherence between them and the progress of the rhetoric over this critical year. The digitized reproductions of the Revue’s folios are scrollable by clicking on the minimized bar marking the page change. These reproductions were made available to the project thanks to the kind support of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library and the National Library of France.

In order to evoke the political and material conditions of the Revue and promote critical engagement, explanatory notes are included, accompanied by bibliographic citations. Available in French or English, the annotations are divided into two main categories: notices, which can be consulted at each first mention of a given individual or location, and commentary throughout the text, which provides historical, cultural, or textual contextualization or interpretation. The English version also includes translation notes aimed at clarifying the rhetorical choices and arguments that distinguish the Revue in the media landscape of its time. The intention of such annotations is to place the contemporary reader in a position close to that of the Revue’s original assumed audience, for whom its characterization of current and historical events would have more or less transparently reflected the political positions of the articles.

This edition has been encoded according to the P5 Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Each selection from the two respective issues, along with their translation, has been transcribed into a TEI file. These files, along with the files related to the edition’s specific customization, can be accessed and downloaded by clicking the TEI icon at the bottom right-hand corner of the edition page.

§Note on the Translation

For decades, theorists of translation have argued that the practice of translation inherently partakes in relationships of power.31 Because the Revue des Colonies explicitly articulates its mission of advocacy and community building in terms of mediation—speaking for or translating on behalf of disenfranchised people—it is all the more crucial to remain attentive to the power dynamics conveyed through the journal’s lexical choices.

Such attention is especially important in the case of terminology pertaining to race and racial difference. Unlike many contemporaneous outlets, the Revue only rarely uses the derogatory term “nègre” in reference to people of African descent, preferring instead the term “noir,” a distinction accurately reflected by the English usages of “negro” and “black,” both currently and at the time of the Revue’s publication. The translatability of these terms, as Brent Hayes Edwards has suggested, is central to the possibility of diasporic identification.32 The Revue, which frequently translated material from English-language sources, in other words, imagined and in some ways enabled its own translation by presenting itself as a node in a translinguistic network of exchange.

In light of this, this English translation is especially attentive to the intentionality of the Revue’s language, striking a balance between preserving turns of phrase, rhythms, and conventions of the period, to the extent that they do not hinder comprehension, and rendering the positionality inherent in the original’s lexical choices. This approach is informed by recent criticism challenging invariance or stability as the basis of translation, particularly in cases where the original text is not reducible to a stable, self-contained referent.33

While highlighting the Revue’s progressive politics, this translation does not, however, attempt to bring the Revue in line with contemporary standards of inclusive language. Instances of the use of “homme” and “hommes,” referring to humankind, for instance, are translated with the noninclusive terms “man” or “men,” reflecting the patriarchal ideology endemic to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French evocations of universalism. The goal, in these instances, is to enable informed engagement with the text as a historical artifact, one whose ability to speak to our moment requires appreciation for its distance from it.

§Acknowledgments

Research for this bilingual micro-edition was made possible through the generous support of the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Maryland, the Bibliographical Society of America, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. My profound gratitude goes to the archivists and librarians of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division of the Schomburg Center for their indispensable assistance in accessing the original copies of the Revue. I would also like to extend my sincere appreciation to the editorial team of Scholarly Editing, and in particular to technical editor Raffaele Viglianti, for his patience, recommendations, and assistance in building this micro-edition. The thorough feedback from the anonymous peer reviewers for Scholarly Editing was immensely valuable and deeply appreciated. I am especially indebted to my fellow scholars in residence at the Schomburg Center for their encouragement and advice, and to the program director, Brent Hayes Edwards, for his generous and insightful review of the various drafts. Finally, my deepest thanks go to Laure Demougin, Pratima Prasad, and Grégory Pierrot for their unwavering support and thoughtful suggestions throughout this project.

§Notes

§Footnotes

  1. The term métropole, or “metropolitan” France, here refers to the part of the country located geographically in Europe, as distinct from overseas territories. ↩

  2. Victor Schoelcher was a leading abolitionist in the July Monarchy years, who, during the Revue’s print run, generally favored a gradualist approach. Appointed as undersecretary of state for the colonies in the provisional government of the Second Republic, he was responsible for the April 27, 1848, abolition decree, which immediately and definitively abolished slavery across all French territories. His personal rivalry with Bissette largely contributed to the latter’s exclusion from the legislative process of this ultimate abolition. For a detailed analysis of the relationship between Schoelcher and Bissette, see Chris Bongie, “A Street Named Bissette: Assimilating the Cent-Cinquantenaire of the Abolition of Slavery in Martinique (1848–1998),” in Friends and Enemies, vol. 3 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 185–220, and Léo Ursulet, “Cyrille Bissette et Victor Schœlcher,” Humanisme 388, no. 2. (2010): 91–100. For a contextualization of the abolitionist demands of the Revue within contemporaneous antislavery discourse, see François Manchuelle, “Le rôle des Antillais dans l’apparition du nationalisme culturel en Afrique noire francophone,” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 32, no. 127 (1992): 375–408; Nelly Schmidt, Abolitionnistes de l’esclavage et réformateurs des colonies, 1820–1851 (Paris: Karthala, 2000). ↩

  3. On monthly reviews within nineteenth-century print culture, see Pascal Berthier, “Miroirs des littératures du monde: les revues parisiennes, 1830–1835,” Romantisme 89 (1995): 7–27, and Thomas Loué, “La revue,” in La civilisation du journal: Histoire culturelle et littéraire de la presse française au xixe siècle, ed. Dominique Kalifa, Philippe Régnier et Marie-Ève Thérenty (Paris: Nouveau Monde Éditions, 2011), 333–52. ↩

  4. Few pieces from the Revue have ever been reedited, and even fewer translated. The short story “Le Mulâtre” (“The Mulatto”) by Louisianan Victor Séjour, published in the March 1837 issue, has been the subject of a critical edition; see Séjour, Le Mulâtre: Suivi de La tireuse de cartes, ed. Lydie Moudiléno (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2014). It also appears in English translation in several editions of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, where it is recognized as the first work of fiction published by an identified African American writer. The story “Moeurs coloniales: Esquisses” by Mme Letellier, printed serially in the Revue between August and December 1835, appears (in the French original) in Deux récits guadeloupéens de 1833: Mme Letellier, Moeurs coloniales. Esquisses suivi de Eugène Chapus, La Falaise-Blanche, ed. Barbara Cooper (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2021). Ignace Nau’s short story “Isalina,” printed serially in the Revue between July and September 1836, appears (in the French original) in Échos de Saint-Domingue: Nouvelles du dix-neuvième siècle, ed. Grégory Pierrot (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2020). The 1835 bill for immediate abolition has been reprinted in Nelly Schmidt, Abolitionnistes de l’esclavage et réformateurs des colonies 1820–1851 (Paris: Karthala, 2001), and Jessica Balguy, Indemniser l’esclavage en 1848? Débats dans l’empire français du XIXe siècle (Paris: Karthala, 2020). ↩

  5. Marlene Daut, “About: La Gazette Royale d’Hayti,” La Gazette Royale d’Hayti, accessed May 17, 2021. ↩

  6. See Chris Bongie, Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 264–87; Juliane Braun, Creole Drama: Theatre and Society in Antebellum New Orleans (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019), 138–64; Anna Brickhouse, Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 84–131; Kelly Duke Bryant, “Black but Not African: Francophone Black Diaspora and the Revue des Colonies, 1834–1842,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 40, no 2. (2007): 251–82; Lawrence C. Jennings, “Slavery and the Venality of the July Monarchy Press,” French Historical Studies 17, no. 4 (1992): 957–78; Sara E. Johnson, The Fear of French Negroes: Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolutionary Americas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 157–87; Stella Pâme, Cyrille Bissette, Un Martyr de la Liberté (Fort-de-France: Éditions Emile Désormeaux, 1997). ↩

  7. Kim Gallon, “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctt1cn6thb.7. ↩

  8. Kelly Baker Josephs and Roopika Risam, “Introduction: The Digital Black Atlantic,” in The Digital Black Atlantic (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021), https://muse.jhu.edu/book/84470. ↩

  9. Critiques of the monumentalization of Victor Schoelcher relative to other actors in the fight against slavery arise as early as 1948, with Aimé Césaire’s address at the ceremony for the centenary of the 1848 abolition held at the Sorbonne. See Aimé Césaire, “Victor Schoelcher and the Abolition of Slavery,” in Esclavage et colonisation (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1948), 20. On the recognition of acts of resistance by colonized and enslaved populations, see Marie-José Jollivet, “La construction d’une mémoire historique à la Martinique: du schoelchérisme aubronisme,” Cahiers d’études africaines 27, no. 107–108 (1987): 289–309; Nelly Schmidt, “Abolition de l’esclavage: entre mythes et réalités,” Africultures 67, no. 2 (2006): 18–24; Dominique Rogers, ed., Voix d’esclaves: Antilles, Guyane et Louisiane françaises, XVIIIe–XIXe siècles (Paris: Karthala, 2015), 13. See also the publications of the International Center for Research on Slavery (CIRESC), under the direction of Myriam Cottias. ↩

  10. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006). ↩

  11. Kalifa, Regnier, ​Thérenty, and Vaillant, La civilisation du journal: Histoire culturelle et littéraire de la presse française au xixe siècle. ↩

  12. Claude Bellanger, Jacques Godechot, Pierre Guiral, and Fernand Terrou, Histoire générale de la presse française, vol.2 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1969), 108. ↩

  13. See Marie-Ève ​​Thérenty and Alain Vaillant, 1836, l’an I de l’ère médiatique (Paris: Nouveau monde éditions, 2001). ↩

  14. See Laure Demougin, L’empire de la presse: Une étude de la presse coloniale française entre 1830 et 1880 (Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2021). ↩

  15. These two laws, together, are commonly referred to as the “Colonial Charter.” See Nelly Schmidt, L’engrenage de la liberté: Caraïbes–XIXe siècle (Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 1995), and Silyane Larcher, L’autre citoyen: L’idéal républicain et les Antilles après l’esclavage (Paris: Armand Colin, 2014), 114–17. ↩

  16. Revue des Colonies, July 1834, 11. ↩

  17. The expression “men of color” in the context of transatlantic slavery referred to the category of gens de couleur libres (“free people of color”), which included freeborn descendants of interracial unions and emancipated people. The Revue’s usage of this term challenges and extends this prior meaning: once the civil and political equality of all free and emancipated citizens is proclaimed, the principle requires, as the Revue repeatedly argues, that there be “no more men of color” but “only Frenchmen”(Revue des Colonies, August 1834, 10). However, a set of local ordinances, collectively known as the “prejudice of color,” maintained the inequality of whites and free people of color. See Larcher, L’autre citoyen, and Frédéric Régent, “Préjugé de couleur, esclavage et citoyennetés dans les colonies françaises (1789–1848),” La Révolution française 9 (2015), http://journals.openedition.org/lrf/1403. On the history of the category of gens de couleur libres, see Abel A. Louis, Les Libres de couleur en Martinique, 3 vols. (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012), and Frédéric Régent, Esclavage métissage liberté : La Révolution française en Guadeloupe 1789–1802 (Paris: Grasset, 2004). ↩

  18. Revue des Colonies, July 1834, 3. ↩

  19. Johnson, The Fear of French Negroes, 185. ↩

  20. Chris Bongie, “‘C’est du papier ou de l’Histoire en marche?’: The Revolutionary Compromises of a Martiniquan homme de couleur Cyrille‐Charles‐Auguste Bissette,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 23, no. 4 (2002): 450; Marlene L. Daut, Tropics of Haiti (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 348. ↩

  21. On the affaire Bissette, see, in particular, Eric Mesnard, “Resistance Movements in the French Colonies: The Bissette Affair, 1823–1827,” in The Abolitions of Slavery from L. F. Sonthonax to V. Schoelcher, ed. Marcel Dorigny (Paris: UNESCO, 1995), 255–61; Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss, “‘Your French and Loyal Hearts’: The First Decade of the Restoration,” in Sweet Liberty: The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique (Philadelphia. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 72–108. ↩

  22. Revue des Colonies, July 1834, 13. ↩

  23. The image, caption included, is derived from a medallion designed by Josiah Wedgwood as the official seal of the London Committee of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787 and circulated in France as early as 1788, on the documents of the Société des amis des Noirs. ↩

  24. Revue des Colonies, July 1835, 6. ↩

  25. See Lawrence C. Jennings, “Slavery and the Venality of the July Monarchy Press,” in French Historical Studies 17, no. 4 (1992): 957–78. ↩

  26. Christopher L. Miller, “Forget Haiti: Baron Roger and the New Africa,” The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 246–73; Grégory Pierrot, The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019), 130. ↩

  27. Revue des Colonies, July 1835, 6. ↩

  28. Brickhouse, Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere, 87. ↩

  29. Kelly Duke Bryant, “Black but Not African,” 260. ↩

  30. Revue des Colonies, July 1836, 118–120. The arrest and trial of Houat, along with dozens of alleged coconspirators was chronicled as the affaire Houat in the Revue during the year 1836–37. See Pratima Prasad, “Colour and Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Île Bourbon: The Case of the Houat Affair,”Dix-Neuf 24, no. 1 (2020): 1–16. ↩

  31. See Talal Asad, “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Politics of Translation,” in The Translation Studies Reader, 4th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2021). ↩

  32. As Edwards argues, “the cultures of black internationalism can only be seen in translation,” which is to say in recognition of the modes of difference that make translation, and the risk of unhappy translation, necessary. Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 7–14. For analysis of the uses of “nègre” and “noir” historically, and in relation to the English “black” in contemporary French discourse, see Grégory Pierrot, “Nègre (Noir, Black, Renoi, Négro),” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 26, no. 2 (2022): 100–107. ↩

  33. See Lawrence Venuti, Contra Instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019), and Karen Emmerich, Literary Translation and the Making of Originals (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). ↩