Le Vérité aux Ouvriers et Cultivateurs de la Martinique

£5,000 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

An excellent copy of this rare work by the pre-eminent French abolitionist of the nineteenth century. Here he takes on another famed abolitionist, Cyrille Bissette, a free person of colour from Martinique. This is an extraordinary work of one abolitionist attacking another : something akin to William Wilberforce publishing a book-length condemnation of Ignatius Sancho. The book was published in the immediate wake of the 1848 abolition, for which Schoelcher was a key figure and, in his capacity as undersecretary of the French Navy, actually wrote the decree. Schoelcher worked tirelessly toward the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean in particular. He was the first European abolitionist to visit post-rebellion Haiti and opposed claims for reparations by plantation owners on the island. He published his first work on the horrors of slavery in 1833 and continued to argue for it in print through to 1875. Bissette was, in fact, an early supporter of Schoelcher’s, writing one of the few positive reviews of his 1840 work, Abolition de l’Esclavage.. . Both advocated for immediate emancipation, but fell out in 1842. Ostensibly, it was over Schoelcher’s Des colonies françaises abolition immediate de l’esclavage, which Bissette called “un mauvais livre”, but it was partly due to Bissette’s jealousy at the sudden rise to prominence of Schoelcher, and further, for being patronised and excluded by white abolitionists. Indeed, he pointedly created the Club des Amis des Noirs . Notwithstand

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