Practice question · Multiple choice
The Declaration of the Rights of Man asserted universal rights in 1789, yet France only abolished colonial slavery in 1794 under the pressure of the Saint-Domingue uprising. What does this gap reveal about the initial revolutionary consensus?
Hints
- Did metropolitan deputies immediately apply abstract rights to the plantation economy?
- What finally compelled the French Convention to decree abolition five years later?
Show the answer
A. Universal principles were bounded by imperial and economic priorities
Why
Metropolitan legislators initially decoupled domestic civic equality from the colonial plantation economy. Emancipation was forced by the enslaved population's revolt rather than being an immediate translation of 1789 philosophy. Modern scholarship stresses how imperial commerce circumscribed abstract universalism.
Practise The Age of Revolutions I: the Atlantic and France
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