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Observations sur l'esclavage et le commerce des nègres. Pour répondre aux questions insérées dans le Journal de Paris, et qui avoient été faites par M. B. S. Frossard, auteur d'un excellent ouvrage, intitulé: 'La Cause des Noirs portée au tribunal de l'humanité, de la justice et de la religion'

Bibliothèque Nationale de France. British Library. Brotherton Special Collections, University of Leeds.

Obervations Slavery Slave Trade English French Revolution National Liberty Sovereignty Nedham Frossard

The translator and abolitionist Théophile Mandar published this essay on slavery and the slave trade as the appendix to his translation of the seventeenth-century English political theorist Marchamount Nedham's writings on freedom and self-governance during the English Revolution. Mandar argues that a free people cannot remain indifferent to the suffering of the slaves, and calls on national pride, enlightenment, liberty and the French Revolution to "raise up" the slaves to an equal level with their master. He predicts: "from a long and unhappy slavery, I see the birth over centuries of a nation of free men!" (293), and suggests that the subject of Nedham's writings, human rights and self-governance was closely linked to the problem of abolition.

In Théophile Mandar's translation of Marchamont Nedham's The Case of the Commonwealth of England, stated (1650), published in 1790 and entitled: De la souverainété du peuple et de l'excellence d'un état libre, par Marchamont Needham. Traduit de l'anglais, et enrichi des notes de J. J. Rousseau, Mably, Bossuet, Condillac, Montesquieu, Letrosne, Raynal, etc. etc. etc. (Paris: Lavillette, 1790). Appendix to volume II, 277-304. The essay was influenced, as the title suggested, by Benjamin Frossard's La Cause des esclaves nègres et des habitants de la Guinée portée au tribunal de la justice, de la religion et de la politique (Lyon: A. De la Roche, 1789).