Dark Side of the Light: Slavery and the French Enlightenment

In the citing paper

“The ideas of the Enlightenment, Sala-Molins concludes, were evidently never meant for enslaved people.”

In the citing paper

“Indeed, as the Spanish-French philosopher Louis Sala-Molins has argued in his provocative book Les misères des Lumières -translated into English as Dark Side of the Light: Slavery and the French Enlightenment -such methods were by no means opposed to Enlightenment ideas.”

In the citing paper

“On the contrary: while celebrated Enlightenment authors such as Denis Diderot derived income from a shipping company involved in the transatlantic trade in enslaved people, the Code Noir , the 1685 decree that de fi ned the treatment of the enslaved in the French empire, still remained valid (Sala-Molins, 2006 [1992]: 11).”

In the citing paper

“As the Code Noir was still legally binding, philosophers did not face a moral con fl ict when they promoted Enlightenment values on the one”

In the citing paper

“As Sala-Molins argues, this was not a contradiction: the ' Black Code ' had deprived enslaved people of the possibility of being considered as human, and not merely as someone else ' s property.”

In the citing paper

“As the Code Noir was still legally binding, philosophers did not face a moral con fl ict when they promoted Enlightenment values on the one hand, while being directly or indirectly involved in the structures of enslavement on the other (Sala-Molins, 2006 [1992]: 62).”