Essay On Minorities In The French Revolution

The French Revolution’s Effect on Racial Minorities The French Revolution was a period of time that called for those who had been living under terror and inequality to rise up and declare rights for themselves and generations to come. Through the Revolution, the French people were given the illusion that if they won and tore down the monarchy they would be able to control themselves. Freed people of color and enslaved people were especially expecting and deserving of change in citizenship. The French government was undergoing a period of change prior to the French Revolution, developing into a dictatorship and tyrannical government. The Enlightenment’s philosophes worked diligently to change the absolutist government and focus on liberty and

The French sugar trade in the Caribbean was incredibly successful, with their sole entity rivaling all of the English colonies in production levels. The French were able to gain surplus amounts of financial support from Saint-Domingue, leaving them with no valid reason to declare the end of slavery, as they were benefiting from it so greatly. Despite the fact that there was a growing interest in restricting the industry of slavery, the vast majority of French people saw nothing morally wrong with the enslavement of another being. Furthermore, the newly established French government managed to ignore any organizations with the intentions of shutting down the slave trade industry in order to not direct the publics’ attention to the ethical issue of slavery. When the Haitian Revolution was initiated, turning what was the French colony of Saint-Domingue into the new and free land of Haiti, it came as a great shock to the white people living in France. Despite the fact that the Enlightenment that had occurred in France around a century prior to the Revolution and that the ideas of the Haitian Revolution were largely based off of the ideas of the philosophes from the Enlightenment, all people, racial minorities and not, in France were not expecting such a large uproar to begin over enslavement. The Haitian Revolution sounded the alarm in