Victor Schoelcher and the Abolition of Slavery

Perhaps little known outside France, Victor Schoelcher was a Freemason who actively campaigned for the abolition of slavery. The abolition of slavery in France was a long story, spanning 1315, 1794 and 1848, in which Victor Schoelcher played a crucial role. What were the twists and turns in the history of the abolition of slavery, and what role did Victor Schoelcher play in it? Let's discover the life and convictions of Victor Schoelcher, whose political action, imbued with Masonic ideals, was decisive in the definitive abolition of slavery in France.

The life of Victor Schoelcher 

Victor Schoelcher was born on 22 July 1804 in Paris. His father, of Alsatian origin, was the owner of a porcelain factory. It was probably in 1822 that he was initiated into the Parisian lodge of the Grand Orient of France, Les Amis de la Vérité. This lodge is said to have been one of the most progressive and republican in the first third of the 19th century.

Around 1830, Schoelcher travelled to Cuba to represent the family business, where he was first confronted with the reality of slavery, which shocked him deeply. On his return to France, he became a journalist and pamphleteer and, after inheriting the family business in 1832, sold it to devote himself to writing and campaigning, not only for the abolition of slavery but also for other social and political issues such as education and the abolition of the death penalty.

Victor Schoelcher in 1833

In 1840 and 1841 Schoelcher returned to the West Indies, this time convinced that the abolition of slavery should be proclaimed immediately. He also travelled to several African countries and Greece, and his anti-slavery convictions were strengthened. From 1845 onwards, he wrote numerous articles arguing for the immediate abolition of slavery, in opposition to some who only called for its 'humanisation'. In 1847, he compiled the various articles he had written on the subject into a work entitled Histoire de l'esclavage pendant ces deux dernières années. The political unrest that broke out in 1847 gave Schoelcher the opportunity to achieve his aims.

The July Monarchy, which had promised to be a liberal regime, became increasingly hardline as a result of the parliamentary instability that characterised it and the numerous riots and uprisings that it had to deal with. Louis-Philippe stubbornly refused to consider the universal suffrage demanded by the republicans and became increasingly unpopular. In 1847, the government banned political meetings and attempted to ban army officers and non-commissioned officers from belonging to Freemasonry, which was still considered a troublemaker.

From July 1847, republicans began organising banquets across France, modelled on the republican banquets of the 1789 Revolution, to circumvent the ban on political meetings. Once again the government tried to stop them. And it was the ban on the banquet due to be held in Paris on 19 February 1848 that really set things alight. Postponed to 22 February, the banquet was later cancelled by its organisers, which seemed to vindicate the government. 

But the most republican elements did not stop there. One of the organisers of the banquet, Armand Marrast (1801-1852), leader of the opposition, editor of the newspaper 'Le National' and member of the Grand Orient of France, incited the Parisian population to rise up and on 22 February more than 3,000 people gathered to march on the Palais Bourbon, chanting anti-government slogans. On 23 July, the army fired on the crowds, and on 24 July the situation became untenable: faced with a flood of rebels, the army withdrew from Paris. With the troops guarding the Tuileries hostile to him and his generals seeing no way out, Louis-Philippe abdicated on 24 February in favour of his grandson, the Comte de Paris, before going into exile in England, but not before appointing his daughter-in-law, the Duchesse d'Orléans, regent of the kingdom.

But power was already in the hands of the republicans who had taken over the Palais Bourbon, and although many moderate deputies were prepared to accept the regency of the Duchess of Orléans, the Second Republic was proclaimed on 24 February 1848 by Adolphe Lamartine (1790-1869), a poet, academician and politician with close ties to the Freemasons.

Schoelcher was part of the provisional government set up around Lamartine, as Secretary of State for the Navy and the Colonies. This government only lasted from 24 February to 9 May 1848, but this was enough time for Schoelcher to get the decree abolishing slavery passed on 27 April 1848. This was in fact the third time that France had abolished slavery. A first decree abolishing slavery in French territory had been signed by Louis X in 1315, but Louis XIII had reinstated it in the French West Indies in 1642. The French Revolution abolished slavery in 1794, but Napoleon reintroduced it in the West Indies in 1802. The decree initiated by Schoelcher was to be definitive.

Abolition of slavery in 1848

After the provisional government had been replaced by an executive commission, Schoelcher was elected deputy for Martinique on 9 August 1848 and for Guadeloupe on 24 June 1849, as a member of the Montagne party, i.e. the Democratic-Socialist party, the extreme left of the political spectrum. In December 1849, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (1808-1873), the nephew of Napoleon I, was elected President of the French Republic for the first time. In the elections of 1850, Schoelcher was re-elected deputy for Guadeloupe.

But on 2 December 1851, Louis-Napoléon staged a coup d'état to establish the Second Empire and proclaim himself emperor under the name of Napoléon III. Schoelcher was one of the leaders of the Resistance Committee, alongside the famous writer Victor Hugo (1802-1885), and even fought on the barricades. Proscribed like most republican opposition leaders, Schoelcher chose to go into exile in London, returning only after Napoleon III abdicated following the Battle of Sedan in 1870. In March 1871, having just been re-elected deputy for Martinique, he tried unsuccessfully to reconcile the government sitting in Versailles and the Paris Commune.

As a deputy and then, from 1875, as a senator for Martinique, he continued to fight for the causes close to his heart : the abolition of the death penalty, free and compulsory education for all, the situation of women and children, etc.

Unmarried and childless, Schoelcher died in Houilles, near Paris, on 25 December 1893 and was buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris. His remains were moved to the Panthéon in 1949. Numerous squares, streets and secondary schools bear his name.

The Masonic career of Victor Schoelcher 

Victor's career was neither uninterrupted nor particularly assiduous. And yet it seems that his understanding of Freemasonry was largely the inspiration for his commitment. Les Amis de la Vérité, the lodge into which he was initiated, was one of the most progressive in the Grand Orient de France, as we noted above. It was even one of the few lodges to take an active part in the Three Glorious Years, the 1830 revolution that overthrew Charles X and established Louis-Philippe's constitutional monarchy, known as the July Monarchy.

This lodge, which was close to the various political secret societies active at the time, including Carbonarism, was finally dissolved in 1833. There is no further trace of Schoelcher's Masonic activity until 1844, when he joined La Clémente Amitié, one of the most republican lodges of the July Monarchy. However, he only stayed there for a few months. La Clémente Amitié, too openly challenging the conservatism of the Grand Orient of France and calling for a reform of the order through the mouth and writings of its new Worshipful Master, François-Timoléon Bègue-Clavel (1798-1852), experienced a serious crisis. It was first dissolved by the Grand Orient, but the sentence was later commuted to a two-month suspension. However, 17 members of the lodge were expelled, including Schoelcher. He did not join another lodge until his exile in London in 1851. In London he probably had contact with Les Philadelphes Lodge, but there is no evidence that he attended regularly.

Victor Schoelcher in the evening of his life.

After his return from exile in 1870, although he kept in touch with like-minded Freemasons, he rarely attended lodges. He may have visited the Lodge La Renaissance des Émules d'Hiram in the 1870s and attended the initiation of Jules Ferry and Émile Littré into La Clémente Amitié in 1875. However, there is no record of this in the archives of these two lodges. Similarly, it is sometimes said that Schoelcher helped Maria Deraismes (1828-1894) to be initiated in 1882, a ceremony that gave rise to the mixed Freemasonry of Droit Humain. While it is true that Schoelcher knew Maria Deraismes, whom he had met in feminist circles, there is no evidence that he played any role in her initiation.

Victor Schoelcher's masonic career was therefore sporadic, but the ideals of humanity, liberty, equality and fraternity that he discovered in the lodge remained with him throughout his life and guided his political commitments.