Colloquium organized in partnership with the BnF as part of the postdoctoral contract co-funded by the Collège de France and the Bibliothèque nationale de France on the Abbé Grégoire collection at the BnF (Arsenal site).
Thursday June 18 , from 9 h 30 to 17 h 30, at Richelieu BnF (public reception at 9 h), salle des conférences(https://www.bnf.fr/fr/agenda/lanti-esclavagisme-un-ideal-cosmopolite-1730-1830).
Friday 19 June, from 10 hto 15 h 30, at Collège de France (public welcome at 9 h 30), Mireille Delmas-Marty amphitheater.
Presentation
Linked to the globalization of trade and the expansion of colonial empires, the spread of colonial slavery has helped to call into question the relevance of the national framework in political debates. From the Haitian revolution to the call for a boycott of colonial products, most political events and decisions were conceived in terms of their global repercussions.
Long focused on the British case, historiography has gradually opened up to the transnational dimension of the struggle against colonial slavery. Today, anti-slavery appears as a worldwide movement, which spread not only in Europe and the United States, but also in the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa. Is the awareness and global dimension of the fight against slavery linked to the defense of a cosmopolitan ideal ?
The question is all the more relevant given that colonial slavery and the slave trade, which reached a climax at the end of the XVIIIthcentury, embody more than any other phenomenon the contradictions of the expanding world horizon. Indeed, the domination and exploitation of one part of humanity by another seems to render impossible the emergence of a global moral and political community, rooted in the idea of a common humanity that lies at the heart of the cosmopolitan ideal.
The international colloquium, to be held on Thursday 18 and Friday 19 June 2026 (at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, site Richelieu, and the Collège de France respectively), has three main objectives . Firstly, it will assess the place and stakes of the mobilization of the cosmopolitan ideal in debates on colonial slavery. Secondly, we will analyze the internal contradictions of antislavery, between the demand for the equal dignity of all human beings and a differentiated approach to emancipation processes, based on a hierarchical vision of the world. Finally, we will show how the study of the diversity of anti-slavery movements around the world makes it possible to defend a plural approach to cosmopolitanism, which breaks with its exclusive identification with the Western philosophical tradition.