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프랑스혁명과 물라토의 정치적 권리-삼부회 소집에서 1790년 3월 8일 법령까지-

  • Korean Review of French History
  • Abbr : KRFH
  • 2011, (25), pp.59~85
  • Publisher : KOREAN SOCIETY FOR FRENCH HISTORY
  • Research Area : Humanities > History

Yang Heeyoung 1

1서울여자대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This article examines the free coloureds’ struggles for the political rights from the convocation of the Estates-General to the vote of the decree of March 8, 1790, the first comprehensive decree on the colonial questions. The free coloureds demanded the civil and political rights of the citizen, insisting that they were free property owners and descendants of Europeans. They didn’t think that their demand for the political rights would endanger the racial system in the colonies, because they didn’t claim the abolition of slavery. Therefore they tried to obtain the support of the french ministers and the white plantation owners who they considered their allies defending the colonial system. After this attempt turned out a failure, the free coloureds submitted their own cahier de doléances and demanded their representation in the Constitutional Assembly. In this process, they freed themselves from the fixed idea of the rights of mixed-blood and advanced toward the equal rights of all free coloureds including blacks, and forward the essential criticism on the slavery by acception of the discourse of the universal rights of men. French Revolutionaries, prisoners of the interests around the colonies, could not maintain their revolutionary ideals. Finally, abandoning the principles that they had announced, they shifted onto the colonies the decision and the responsibility on the question of racial equality. In Saint-Domingue, since most of the plantation owners and small whites obsessed with the racial hierarchy, it was only by the violent confrontations that the abstract principles and ambiguous rights could obtain the practical meaning. French Revolutionaries had to sanction the colonial revolution with haste too late and acknowledge their error of judgement and indecision bound by practical interests. These circumstances, which continued till the official abolition of slavery, were already foreseeable in the light of the question of free coloureds at the beginning of the French Revolution.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.