Olympe de Gouges, “Preface to <i>Black Slavery, or the Happy Shipwreck</i> ” (1792)

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Olympe de Gouges (1748–1793) was a White French philosopher, political activist, playwright, and the most vocal female antislavery writer in eighteenth-century France. This chapter is the preface of the 1792 edition of her first play Black Slavery, a prose drama that she had originally composed in 1783. The play contains strong political messages and caused quite a stir; some contemporaries even accused Gouges of having instigated the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti). Yet the 1792 preface shows that Gouges’s antislavery stance is not as radical as it may seem from some of her other writings, such as the play itself and her 1788 essay “Reflections on Negroes” (Chapter 27)—at least if we take this preface at face value and not merely as an attempt to avoid censure. She portrays slave revolts as unjustified, plantation owners as mostly benevolent, and blames Africans for the slave trade.</jats:p>