Les esclaves révolutionnaires : étude du discours historien sur l'agentivité des esclaves à l'ère des révolutions

Since the 1960s, the history of slavery and that of the Atlantic Revolutions have carved out a significant place in the historiography. These developments have had a beneficial effect on the representation of populations of African origin in the historical literature, contributing in particular to putting the Haitian Revolution back on the map in the 1990s and 2000s. The purpose of this thesis is to examine a few works on the various revolutions of the Americas, namely the American, the Haitian and the South American, in order to study the changing importance that historians attribute to the agency of black people, and principally to slaves. The first chapter follows the evolution of this historiography by submitting to serial analysis the bibliography assembled by Aline Helg in Slaves No More!, before examining the pioneering works of Anna Julia Cooper and C.L.R. James and a sort of prehistory of the notion of the Atlantic revolution. The second chapter focuses on a selection of work individually targeting the different revolutions of the Americas, in order to observe the treatment of slaves’ roles. The last deals with the treatment of the agency of slaves in four surveys published between 1988 and 2016 covering summarily or in detail the various American revolutions.

Accepted: 2023-10-25T18:49:12Z