A moving plea for Freedom
In 1850, Auguste-François Perrinon, a Black French abolitionist, penned a powerful plea celebrating freedom and denouncing slavery’s roots in ignorance and violence. His manuscript reflects the enduring fight for dignity and justice in post-abolition France.
On July 6, 1850, two years after slavery was abolished in the French Caribbean, a one-page manuscript was written in Paris by a man who had lived its legacy from within: Auguste François Perrinon. Born in Martinique to a free Black family, Perrinon had risen through the ranks of the French military and political establishment, earning a place in the National Assembly and on the Abolition Commission led by his friend Victor Schoelcher.
This document, preserved in remarkable condition, captures the clarity and conviction of Perrinon’s voice at a historic turning point. He writes:
There is nothing more precious to Man than the freedom of his being. No sacrifice should be too great to win it back, once it has been stolen. If Black people were enslaved for so long, it is because their eyes were veiled by ignorance, preventing them from reading this truth wherever it was written, and because the degrading coercion of the whip had stifled in their hearts the feeling of their strength and their right.
In this powerful declaration, Perrinon not only celebrates abolition but exposes the mechanisms that sustained slavery: ignorance and violence.
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