On 8 October 2018 at the Institut de France, the Prix François Guizot-Institut de France was awarded to Olivier Grenouilleau for his book:
The Abolitionist Revolution, Editions Gallimard.
«In this new study of global history, Olivier Grenouilleau takes a fresh look at the three main dimensions of a very old subject: chronologically, by going back in time to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, sometimes as far as antiquity; geographically, by looking beyond the Western world to China, Japan and the Muslim worlds; thematically, by going beyond the history of religions to look at the analysis of political thought and practices, geopolitics and international relations.
Far from being limited to France and Victor Schœlcher or the United States and the colonial Atlantic, the question of abolitionism covers a wide spectrum. If slavery has never been taken for granted (otherwise why would so many alibis have been invented to legitimise it?), it was only at the end of the eighteenth century that men rose up not to reform or ’humanise« it, but to abolish it.
The author shows that the profoundly revolutionary and largely unknown character of the abolitionist project was combined with a reformism of action. It emerged around a few men involved in international networks, and was embodied in the creation of abolitionist societies, which, via Great Britain, succeeded in transforming it into a global crusade.
Although founded on secular and religious values, abolitionism had to constantly justify itself on the grounds of utility, and in particular political economy. This led to ambiguous relations between abolitionism and colonisation, in the name of «legitimate trade» with Africa in particular. In the end, Olivier Grenouilleau shows how the abolitionist project was able to rise from a solitary struggle by a few individuals to a global phenomenon inaugurating an uninterrupted list of conquests in the name of human rights».»
Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, born on 20 April 1962 in Rumilly (Haute-Savoie), is a French historian specialising in the history of slavery. He has been a professor at the Université de Bretagne-Sud since 1999 and at Sciences Po Paris since 2007, where he succeeded Jean-Pierre Azéma.
Since 1990, it has been studying the slave trade and, more specifically, the Nantes slave trade.
From 1999 to 2004, he was appointed a junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. As a result, he was able to write a comprehensive work that brought to the attention of French readers the many works carried out by American and British historians on the subject of Les Traites négrières. Essai d'histoire globale. It reconsiders the subject of the slave trade from a global perspective, and from its various aspects:
- oriental trade ;
- intra-african trade ;
- western slave trade.
In 2009, he joined the History and Geography group of the General Inspectorate of Education.
He is also the author of numerous books.
Catherine Coste, Jacques Julliard, Michel Zink and Jean-Claude Casanova.
