The debates on slavery are explosive. Few, however, speak of it knowingly. Long before the university looked into these questions, Olivier Grenouilleau was one of the rare historians to devote his work to them. This man who flees polemics was treated as a “negationist” by anti-racist organizations for having asserted that slavery could not be qualified as “genocide”, its objective being to use the labor force of those it puts in subjection. .
Fifteen years in advance, this controversy announced those which are currently tearing the university apart. It did not prevent the one who grew up in Nantes, the French capital of slavery, from continuing his work. After a dozen books and eight history awards, he is publishing these days Christianity and slavery (Gallimard).
Why has Christianity, founded on love of neighbor, been slow to defend abolition? Grenouilleau resuscitates the complex debates that will gradually lead to the prohibition of slavery of Christians, then in the XVIe century that of the Indians of America, before one finally wonders about that of the Africans.
Christianity appears in a world where slavery is the norm. Why will it take so long for the equality of believers before God to come back down to Earth?
There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave or free, neither male nor female, says Paul (Galatians, 3, 28), who asks Philemon to welcome his slave Onesimus as a brother. However, in the first letter to the Corinthians (7, 20-24), the same Paul says that nothing should be changed in the situation in which we found ourselves when we heard the Lord’s call. And therefore remain a slave if that was the case. Is this contradictory? No. The equality of men is recognized and claimed. The Christ message does not deny social or status differences. He intends to transcend them. The here below is not forgotten. But the Christians not intending to transform themselves into theocracy, the reform passes first by the appeal to the conscience. It allows practical openings, not the legal abolition of social inequality, which only political power can decide.
Would you say that Christendom is still sowing the idea of abolition in people’s minds?
It all depends on how one hears the divine message. Some, like Augustine or Luther, consider that the earthly order proceeds from the divine order. Others try to reconcile dogmatic and moral theology. Gregory of Nyssa (Homilies on Ecclesiastes) considers that to enslave a man (created in the image of the divinity) is equivalent to bringing “God to the market”. It all depends, too, on the way in which we consider the here below: as a propaedeutic to eternal life or as a world that we must try to reform in order to best accord with its principles?
Did abolitionism proceed from near to far? What would explain why black Africa and the colonies were the last bastions where slavery would be tolerated?
Global history brings to light some disturbing coincidences. In the barbarian kingdoms born from the rubble of the Roman Empire, the idea that one must be free in one’s kingdom is gradually reinforced. In the XVe century, the slave trade of Orthodox Christians from central and eastern Europe ceased. This corresponds to the moment when Europe and Christianity coincide.
In 1435, Pope Eugene IV threatened to excommunicate those who would enslave the inhabitants of the Canary Islands. They are not Europeans, but evangelized and led by Christian princes. It is because they are “subjects” of the Crown of Spain that Isabelle of Castile opposes Christopher Columbus from the start on the subject of American Indian slavery. What allows the legal end of Indian slavery, between 1530 and 1542, is the tacit agreement of Pope Paul III and Emperor Charles V.
In all cases, the rapprochement of political and religious identities, of the prince and his subjects, opens up a space of freedom. Heavy abuses may persist, but slavery is gradually being ruled out.
Why is this not happening for Africans?
Slaves from Africa (from pagan regions) are not considered subjects. Churches (especially Catholic) are interested in their evangelization, sometimes in the way they are treated. But they hardly go further. Except in 1685. The apostolic nuncio, the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith and the Inquisition then raised the question of the prohibition of African slavery in Spanish colonial America. Charles II instead follows the Council of the Indies and buries the idea.
Two things don’t happen. First, political and religious convergence. It will only be effective with colonization. The Europeans will then try to eradicate the slave trade and slavery in Africa, not without increasing the exactions and a certain complacency towards the elites in place.
Second, after the abolition of Indian slavery in Spanish America, there is no longer any real convergence between religious institutions and state powers. Churches can denounce, Christians get busy, only states can decree the abolition of slavery.
Let us add that the rise of the Atlantic slave trade from the end of the 17th centurye century corresponds to a time of demoralization. The hold of the States on the national Churches is reinforced and mercantilism brings economic interest to the fore. The primacy of the Catholic Church is contested.
Critics of the slave trade and slavery, which had previously been numerous, became inaudible. Even the defenders of slavery no longer really need to legitimize it. Colonial exceptionalism proclaims that what is good in Europe – freedom – is not mechanically good elsewhere. Because it is economically useful, slavery is considered a necessary evil.
At that time, abolitionists were rarer among Protestants. Why ?
The fathers of the Reformation were not interested in colonial slavery. Calvin hardly speaks of it when he is contemporary with its abolition for the Indians of Spanish America. For Luther, who contributed to a sort of sacralization of the earthly order, slavery was first of all that of the Germans under the subjection of the Pope. Contrary and isolated voices are, it is true, being heard in English America. But the close analysis of these few cases shows that the system is hardly contested. It was later, with the XVIIIe century, that the Reformed, especially the Evangelical Churches, play an important role in abolitionism.
If we follow you, slavery would not have always been associated with the color of the skin as we tend to believe today?
Slavery has existed almost everywhere, in all times and in all latitudes (with the notable exception of the Aborigines of Australia). The example of the Canaries and the American Indians shows that color does not play a role. Spaces of freedom are de facto created when political and religious identity, religious institutions and state powers converge. On the other hand, once the American slave system was launched, color played a growing role. Because, little by little, all the slaves come there from Africa and that, for some, a connection is established between color and slavery. Racism against black populations is therefore one of the most lasting and strongest consequences of this American colonial slavery system.