L'Ecole des Peuples et des Rois; ou Essai philosophique sur La Liberté, le Pouvoir arbitraire, les Juifs et les Noirs. [The School of Peoples and Kings; or Philosophical Essay on Liberty, Arbitrary Power, the Jews and the Blacks].

Issued only one year after "the fall of the Bastille transformed the political history of the world," French abolitionist Jean-Baptiste Sanchamau, a member of the Société des Amis des Noirs, published L'Ecole des Peuples et des Rois (Thomas, 513). With nearly 40,000 Jews in France still denied citizenship and the fight against slavery re-invigorated by abolitionists such as Thomas Clarkson, Sanchamau calls upon American revolutionary principles and Quaker abolitionists to attack the denial of rights and liberties to Jews and African slaves, even as he calls for gradual steps toward the emancipation of both. "It is necessary to prepare Negroes for liberty," he writes, "... The sudden passage of thousands of slaves to independence would produce, without doubt, a very dangerous uprising" (151). Sanchamau also was among those who, "despite their highly humanitarian character... show that even the best friends of the Jews did not really know much about Jewish life" (Szajkowski, Jews and the French Revolutions, 504). After extensive "parliamentary and public discussion, the Jews of France finally became French citizens, the Portuguese Jews on Jan. 28, 1790, and the Ashkenazim on Sept. 27, 1791. The law of 1791, however, although conferring civic rights on Jews as individuals, was coupled with the abolition of their group privileges, i.e. their religious-legal autonomy" (Encyclopaedia Judaica). That same year the French National Assembly "condemned slavery in principle but insisted that any immediate extension of the rights of man to slaves would be certain, at least at that stage, to be accompanied by many evils... Eventually, in 1794, on February 4, the Convention in Paris declared the universal emancipation of slaves (though not actually outlawing the trade)" (Thomas, 523).