During the 1780s, France’s transatlantic trade in enslaved human beings was at its peak. Wealth produced in French plantation colonies, including Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti), Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Guiana, was felt by many pro-slavery advocates to be essential to the flailing French economy. In Saint-Domingue alone, over 500,000 enslaved Africans were brutally exploited to produce sugar, cotton, indigo, and coffee for Europeans, making this island the most profitable colony on earth.

French antislavery movements were also building in strength during this period. One of the most prominent was the Société des Amis des Noirs, which adapted many of its arguments and materials from the London-based Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, including the image made famous by Wedgwood’s antislavery medallion. As the French Revolution took hold, many abolitionists argued that the institution of slavery was incompatible with France’s new ideals. They pointed to the National Constituent Assembly’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man, which proclaimed: “all men are born free and remain free in equal rights.”

By 1789, the first year of the French Revolution, fears of rebellions in France’s colonies were intensifying, fed by the growing popularity of abolitionism in Britain and the United States, and France’s own political upheavals. These fears were warranted. In 1791, just two years later, enslaved people in Saint-Domingue did rise up against their oppressors, instigating the Haitian Revolution. Slavery was abolished in France and its colonies in 1794. However, it was reinstated in 1802 by order of Napoléon Bonaparte, except in Haiti, which became an independent republic in 1804.

Despite Régnier’s agreement to halt production of the antislavery medallion at Sèvres as requested in this letter, a successful uprising of enslaved people began just two years later, in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, which in 1804 proclaimed its independence from France as the sovereign nation of Haiti.

Louis-Simon Boizot, under whose direction the Sèvres antislavery medallion was made, was head artist in charge of sculpture at Sèvres during the French Revolution. This was a difficult time for the manufactory: in addition to severe financial pressures, the character of the French state changed dramatically several times between 1789, when the Revolution began, and 1804, when Napoléon I was crowned emperor. Nevertheless, the work of designing and executing sculpture continued, with smaller objects such as medallions and busts dominating production. While Boizot’s personal involvement with abolitionism is unclear, given the popularity of the Wedgwood antislavery medallion in Britain, the production of a similar object at Sèvres likely seemed a sound idea in 1789.

In 1794, following the revolution in Haiti and the abolition of slavery in France and its colonies, abolitionism was on firmer footing in France. In that year, Boizot created designs for two more allegorical sculptures conveying antislavery ideals. The first, La Nature, depicts a woman nursing two babies; one infant appears European, the other African. The second, Les Noirs libre, depicts a freed African man and woman. The man wears a Phrygian cap, a symbol of liberty adopted during the French Revolution, and the woman a set square, a masonic symbol of equality shaped like a triangle. Both were produced in white biscuit.

Neither of these sculptures sold well, and once Napoléon Bonaparte reinstituted slavery within France and its colonies in 1802, there was no question of continuing their production. The Phrygian cap featured on the male figure of Les Noirs libre reappeared on another, much later, allegory of the Republic, Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse’s bust of La République.