The Reason that the French Are Entitled to Give Americans Lessons on Race Relations

I can't tell how many times I have been forced to listen to a litany of castigation, mockery, and scorn by self-assured Frenchmen, in their eager determination to prove that America was inhabited by treacherous hypocrites, greedy monsters, and/or retarded simpletons.

As I have written before, knowing your (world) history well often serves to prove that insofar sins and wicked deeds are concerned, America comes out about every time as (by far) the least guilty perpetrator. And slavery proves a typical example thereof, as The Winds of Change demonstrates (merci à Rhomp):

In the history of the Atlantic slave trade, the French turned four times as many Africans into slaves as the Americans did, they used them far more brutally, and French slavers not only got a head-start on Americans, they continued the slave trade -- legally -- until 1830, long after the rest of Europe had given it up. And they kept at it clandestinely until after the U.S. Civil War. France officially abolished slavery in its colonies only 14 years before Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, and then only under pressure from slave uprisings.

The French New World settlers outstripped the Americans in their greed for slave labor. When the U.S. acquired Louisiana from France, the first governor sent out from Washington reported back that, "No subject seems to be so interesting to the minds of the inhabitants of all parts of the country which I have visited as that of the importation of brute negroes from Africa. This permission would go further with them, and better reconcile them to the government of the United States, than any other privilege that could be extended to this country. ... White labourers, they say, cannot be had in this unhealthy climate."

… The 1794 declaration of universal emancipation did not actually outlaw the slave trade. Yet even this proved unenforcable; the colonies required slaves, and under Napoleon, slavery was reintroduced.

The French never recovered Haiti, though they coveted it for a generation, and France's slave trade had been temporarily shut down by the Napoleonic Wars. But after the restoration of the Bourbons the French retained Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana on the South American continent, all major sugar-producing colonies.

If it had not been for British pressure, the slave trade might still be tolerated in France. But the British had taken a strong anti-slavery position. The French press railed at the British for using morality as a cloak for their supposed desire to rule the world. And the French desire to keep the British at bay, and to compete with them in the seas, seems to have had a lot to do with the French decision to turn officially against the slave trade.

… In 1820, a British cruiser chased a French slaver, La Jeune Estele, whose captain, once he saw himself being overtaken, started throwing barrels overboard. In each was a pair of slave girls, age 12 to 14. Public opinion in Britain was shocked, but in France the people blamed the British.

Ben ouais! C'est la faute aux Anglo-Saxons, pardi!

In an unrelated article, John McCaslin quotes a New York Democrat (Charles B Rangel) as saying that "the destruction of the black family" today can be traced to a single man from England who purposely paid a visit to Virginia during the early 18th century.