France banned slavery at home in 1315; Mauritania only in 1981
Abolitionism, the campaign to end slavery and free the enslaved, surged in the West in the late 18th and 19th centuries, but its story is far longer and messier. France outlawed slavery on its own soil in 1315 while later running slave colonies, and Mauritania did not formally abolish it until 1981.
Early steps were partial. Balthild, a former slave who became regent of Neustria and Burgundy in 657, banned the slave trade though not slavery itself. In 1315 Louis X of France declared that any slave touching French soil became free, and in 1571 a Norman merchant trying to sell slaves in Bordeaux was arrested and his captives released. Spain’s New Laws of 1542 were the first to abolish and punish the enslavement of indigenous people, and in Japan Toyotomi Hideyoshi ended chattel slavery from 1590.
France’s Caribbean sugar colonies, however, ran on the Atlantic slave trade, regulated by Louis XIV’s Code Noir. Enlightenment writers such as Montesquieu and Diderot attacked slavery, and Jacques Pierre Brissot launched the abolitionist Société des Amis des Noirs in 1788. A revolt in Saint-Domingue in 1791, led by figures such as Toussaint L’Ouverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, began the Haitian Revolution, and on 4 February 1794 the Convention abolished slavery across France and its colonies. Napoleon restored it in 1802, but two-thirds of the more than 20,000 troops he sent to Saint-Domingue died, mostly of yellow fever, and Haiti became the only country to free itself from slavery by revolt.
Britain’s 1772 Somersett case found no basis for slavery in English law. Campaigners later freed the Roma of Wallachia and Moldavia between 1843 and 1855, Russia emancipated its serfs in 1861, the United States passed the 13th Amendment in December 1865, and in 1888 Brazil closed out legal slavery across the Americas.
The League of Nations set up slavery commissions and the 1926 Slavery Convention, and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights declared slavery illegal. Saudi Arabia and Yemen abolished it in 1962–1963 and Oman in 1970, yet trafficking for forced labour and sexual slavery still affects tens of millions of people.
Source: Abolitionism
