Resistance, Race, and Revenge

That a citizenry can rightfully resist unlawful, tyrannous rule is an important principle of Early Modern and Enlightenment conceptions of popular sovereignty. The right to resist is, fundamentally, a biopolitical right in that tyrannous rule is imagined figuratively to reduce “free” citizens to the status of slaves who lie under the tyrant’s power of life and death. Critical to the valorization of “liberty,” the right of political resistance applies within the metropole but not to populations considered to be without civil liberties, much less to the collective resistance undertaken in slave uprisings or in the revolution in Saint Domingue. This paper will explore the tacitly racialized terms in which the right of resistance is occasionally extended to non-European populations and more often denied them. Some radicals, Thomas Paine and Denis Diderot, for example, occasionally transvalue revenge (usually considered barbarous) as a means of according rightful resistance to those outside the metropole. More commonly, however, anti-slavery and abolitionist writers focus on acts of individual resistance, which are less threatening politically and can also be conceptualized as acts exercising a natural right to self-defence. Although far less controversial than a natural, collective right of political resistance, even a natural right to self-defence may be associated with Europeanization. In L’ésclavage des noirs (Black Slavery) for example, Olympe de Gouges suggests that the hero’s murder of the brutal overseer is an act of self-defence yet also an effect of his loving French master’s education of his sensibilities, which have been refined so as to be incapable of tolerating brutality. Related attempts to extend natural rights claims while at the same time affirming their racialized exclusivity will be examined as they appear in selected English and German texts written during the Age of Revolutions.