Few scholars have so far studied the intersection of Enlightenment debates over suicide, on the one hand, and the transatlantic slave trade and colonial slavery, on the other, despite the importance of slave suicides during the Middle Passage or on American plantations. Recent studies have shown that British abolitionists made slave suicides one of their major arguments for prohibiting the “infamous commerce,” but without making the connection with more general discussions of suicide. Moreover, we do not know what happened on the French side. This lecture will analyse the relationship between suicide and slavery in Enlightenment thought, particularly in France and Britain. It will address the sources on slave suicides available to Enlightenment writers and the place given to Africa and African slavery in universal histories of suicide; the way in which the themes of suicide and slavery intersected in the literary works of major Enlightenment authors, from Montesquieu to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and the role played by voluntary death in the construction of the figure of the black hero; and, finally, the importance of slave suicides in both the Encyclopédie and the Histoire des deux Indes, as well as in the writings of British and French abolitionists.

Cécile Vidal is a social historian of colonial empires, the slave trade, and slavery in the 17th-to the 19th-century Atlantic world. She is the author of the prize-winning Caribbean New Orleans: Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society (2019), and the editor or co-editor of a dozen of edited volumes, including, with Paulin Ismard and Benedetta Rossi, Les mondes de l’esclavage. Une histoire comparée (The Worlds of Slavery: A Comparative History, 2021).