Mémoire en faveur des gens de couleur ou sang-mêlés de St.-Domingue, & des autres Isles françoises de l'Amérique, adressé à l'Assemblée Nationale.

"In favour of people of colour" Pivotal point in the fight for racial equality and to abolish slavery

Henri Grégoire (1750-1831).

Mémoire en faveur des gens de couleur ou sang-mêlés de St.-Domingue, & des autres Isles françoises de l'Amérique, adressé à l'Assemblée Nationale.

Paris, Belin, 1789.

8°. 52 pp. With a woodcut device on title and a woodcut headpiece. Collates: A-C8, D2.

Modern marbled boards with gold-tooled title on red Morocco on spine.

The first work against slavery by one of the architects of the first abolition. This publication is the first printing of a controversial speech that Henri Grégoire gave at the National Assembly of France, which was of the utmost importance for the instigation of the road to abolition. Copies are now considered of extreme rarity.
Grégoire was a most prominent figure of the French Revolution. In 1789 he was the initiator and author of the First Article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. From him came the crucial sentence "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights". An inevitable consequence of this belief was the equality of all skin colour and thus the end of slavery. So, soon after this declaration he gave his speech "In favor of the People of Color or Half-Bloods of Santo Domingo, & of the other French Isles of America" of which the transcript was subsequently published (the copy offered here). In the same year he became a member of the "Society of Friends of the Blacks" (Société des amis des Noirs), of which he would become President a year later.
His speech met with much resistance, especially by planters in the West Indies and those who had an interest in slavery. For example the anonymous Observations d'un habitant des colonies sur le Mémoire en faveur des gens de couleur, ou sang-mêlés, de Saint-Domingue & des autres isles fran̨coises de l'Amérique, adressé à l'Assemblée nationale, par M. Grégoire (Paris, s.n., 1789).

Condition: margins of the last seven leaves repaired without affecting text.

Reference: Bissainthe 6045; Cioranescu, A. 18. s., 32008; Sabin 28730.

Rita Hermon-Belot, L'Abbé Grégoire, la politique et la vérité, Paris, Seuil, 2000.