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Article
Breaking the Ties: French Romantic Socialism and the Critique of Liberal Slave Emancipation
History
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
9-1-2013
Publisher
The University of Chicago Press
Disciplines
Abstract
In 1846, the romantic socialist Désiré Laverdant observed that although Great Britain had rightly broken the ties binding masters and slaves, “in delivering the slave from the yoke, it has thrown him, poor brute, into isolation and abandonment. Liberal Europe thinks it has finished its work because it has divided everyone.” Freeing the slaves, he thus suggested, was only the beginning of emancipation. Laverdant’s comment reflects a broader political conversation about the individual and society that was ongoing in France during the 1830s and 1840s in which the issues of colonial slavery, metropolitan wage labor, and imperial expansion in Algeria were intertwined.
Citation Information
Andrews, Naomi J. (2013). Breaking the Ties: French Romantic Socialism and the Critique of Liberal Slave Emancipation. The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 85, No. 3 (September 2013) , pp. 489-527. Published by: The University of Chicago Press. Article DOI: 10.1086/668500. Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/668500