Anna Julia Cooper on the French Republicans’ Attitude to Slavery

Abstract In 1924, African American philosopher and historian Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964) travelled to Paris from the United States to complete the doctorate she had begun in 1911, in Columbia University, and had had to interrupt to raise five grandnieces and nephews. Her research at the Sorbonne culminated in the successful defence of a doctoral thesis entitled “The French attitude to slavery during the Revolution.” Her meticulous research into the archives of the main actors in the abolitionist debate, in Paris and in Saint Domingue, does more than clarify the course of events that led to the Haitian revolution, and eventual abolition of slavery on all French territory in 1848. Cooper asks difficult questions about the power of philosophers to effectuate real change, seeing abolitionism as a real test case for the republican principles that led the Revolution.