By Alyssa Sepinwall

Historians of France sometimes refer to recent work on colonial Saint-Domingue and on slavery in France as part of a new “colonial” or “Haitian turn” in the field. However, US-based scholars of French history have long been interested in these topics. In this essay, paired with a new curated collection from the journal French Historical Studies, I highlight the earliest publications on slavery and abolition in French Historical Studies, to illustrate how studies of race and slavery have a long lineage among US historians of France. I also highlight some other early twentieth-century writing on slavery in France by African American scholars.

Before the Society for French Historical Studies was formed in the 1950s, much writing in the US on the French Caribbean or on debates on race in France was done by African American specialists in French history. Mercer Cook, who earned his PhD at Brown in 1936 after studying in Paris, was a longtime professor of French at Atlanta University (and later US Ambassador) who did pathbreaking work on Haitian Revolution figures. He published on the mixed-race Haitian planter-intellectual Julien Raimond in the Journal of Negro History (1941), and wrote Five French Negro Authors in 1943. The latter was published by Associated Publishers, which had been created by Black history pioneer Carter G. Woodson as a venue for Black scholars to disseminate work that white publishing houses were unwilling to acquire. 

Another early twentieth-century figure who studied the history of race and abolition in France was Anna Julia Cooper. Cooper is better known for her writings and activism on African Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century US, including her early feminist work A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South. But Cooper was also one of the first Black women to earn a PhD, writing her 1925 doctoral dissertation at the Sorbonne on L’attitude de la France à l’égard de l’esclavage pendant la Révolution (The Attitude of France Regarding Slavery during the French Revolution)

The Society for French Historical Studies itself did not have its first meeting until 1955; its journal French Historical Studies (now the leading French history journal in the US) only began publishing in 1958. But at the very first meeting of the SFHS, as Edward Berenson and Nancy L. Green explain in their history of the SFHS, one of the plenary lectures was on French imperialism, given by Syracuse university historian Vincent Confer. A few years later, in an early issue of FHS (1964), Confer explored eighteenth-century debates on slavery and abolition in his article “French Colonial Ideas before 1789.”

By Autumn 1972, an eighteenth-century themed issue of FHS (under the editorship of David Pinkney, the namesake for the SFHS book prize) included three separate articles on slavery and abolition: Valerie Quinney’s “The Problem of Civil Rights for Free Men of Color in the Early French Revolution”; Perry Viles’ “The Slaving Interest in the Atlantic Ports, 1763-1792,” on merchants in slavetrading ports fighting abolitionists’ efforts to end the traffic in human beings; and Daniel Resnick’s study “The Société des Amis des Noirs and the Abolition of Slavery.” A few years later, amid a wave of reinterest in Alexis de Tocqueville, Sally Gershman turned in FHS to a then-neglected topic: “Alexis de Tocqueville and Slavery.”

Certainly, colonial topics have become much more prevalent in FHS in this century, from John Garrigus’s excellent Spring 2000 essay “Black Jacobins/White Jacobins: Bringing the Haitian and French Revolutions Together in the Classroom” to new Haiti or French Caribbean-themed articles in the February and August 2024 issues. But these early publications remind us that research on slavery and the Caribbean is not a new fad in French history, but has been a core part of US historians’ interest in France since the earliest days of SFHS and French Historical Studies.

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Alyssa Sepinwall is Professor of History at California State University San Marcos. Her research specialties include the French and Haitian Revolutions, modern Haitian history, Slavery and Film, French colonialism, French-Jewish history, history and video games, and the history of gender.

Title Image: Attack and take of the Crête-à-Pierrot (4 – 24 March 24, 1802). Original illustration by Auguste Raffet, engraving by Ernst Hébert. Source: Wikimedia Commons.