Abstract

This paper analyses the use of the Classical antiquity in the works of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century pro-slavery planters of Saint-Domingue. By the late eighteenth century, triumph of the concept of civilisation and Enlightenment critiques of system of slavery and its philosophical and economic implications had called into question the planters’ wealth and power in the colonial societies and the outrageous treatment reserved to their slaves. The outbreak of French Revolution, the debates on the application of Declaration of the Rights and the starts of the civil wars in the French Antilles lead the planters to turn to the ancient past to reject revolutionary principles of freedom and equality for enslaved black people and to rewrite a different history of the humankind. Employing the classical past as a comparative tool to criticise the effects of revolutionary principles, the planters invented a new justification to defend their power and the necessity of slavery, based on exclusion and invention of different degrees of human faculties.