The Long Way Back to Ourselves

6.6

Enlightenment and Its Opponents

This episode follows what happened after a single sentence, resolved in Versailles on 26 August 1789, declaring that men are born free and equal in rights, and shows you how groups its authors had not imagined soon claimed it for themselves. It tests common claims about "the Enlightenment" against named contemporaries who disputed them. The episode covers the Haitian Revolution of 1791 to 1804, in which enslaved people in Saint-Domingue took the French declaration at its word, and the indemnity France then forced Haiti to pay former slaveholders, its loans serviced until 1947. It also examines the contradiction inside Kant himself, whose geography lectures contain racial hierarchies alongside the universal categorical imperative.