Reactions to the problem
of the slave trade33only be answered by ignoring details of facts and events and going in each
case to the heart of the matter : the overall conjuncture, constraints, official
attitudes, the issues at stake, ideologies. I shall therefore deal separately with
two distinct periods, divided in terms of the prevailing 'conjuncture':
From the fifteenth to the end of the eighteenth century. This was the age of
slavery as an institution and the economic system to which it was linked.
The 'abolitionist' trend was very slow to develop, and only reached its
peak with the independence of the American colonies.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there was a strong anti-slavery
movement and it had won the legal battle, but 'forced labour' and the
slave trade gained momentum in defiance of human rights. The fact that
they were carried on clandestinely meant that the anti-slavery cause
became a humanitarian battle.
The slave trade and anti-slavery from the fifteenth
to the end of the eighteenth centuryIt should not be forgotten that the introduction of African labour to America
and the West Indies was a direct consequence of the extermination of the
Indians. This is why Las Casas, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Chiapas, was
accused of causing the downfall of the Africans by taking up the cause of the
Indians. In fact, he should be given credit, as he was by the eighteenth-century
philosophers, for having been 'more of a man than a priest', for having been
more intent on defending the Indians than on converting them.^9 Because,
before his time, the Church had scarcely concerned itself with the enslavement
of the Indians, as long as they were converted. The arrival of the African slaves
was that much less of a problem in that they had already been reduced to
slavery in accordance with the laws of their own countries, and had been
bought as such by the slave traders and planters. There was nothing in the
Holy Scriptures (Old or New Testament) forbidding Christians to own slaves.
In 1836, a theologian, Monseigneur Bouvier, Bishop of Le Mans, declared
that the slave trade was permissible, on condition—the only condition—that
the blacks were justly deprived of their freedom, that they would be treated
humanely and that there would be no unlawful transactions.^10 Once these
prescriptions had been complied with, slaves were to be instructed in the true
precepts of religion, a task that was easier than it would have been, had the
slaves remained in their own countries, free.
In fact, to the theologians,^11 the right to spread the Gospel came first:
slavery was deemed legitimate as long as it contributed to the propagation of
Christianity. Thus the various missions all had their slaves, playing on the
fact that they truly needed them to carry out their task effectively, and that
the slaves would, moreover, be their most zealous disciples. There is little