Very Rare. OCLC records copies at UCLA, University of Rochester, Yale (defective: “t.-p. and p. 1-2 of v. 2 wanting; Manuscript leaf inserted for p. 1-2”), Lilly Library and Library Company of Philadelphia (we have not been able to find this in the online catalogue) only in the USA. No copies recorded in the UK. A second edition in French was published in 1791 and a third in 1795. Translated into English as The Negro as there are few White men by J. Trapp (London: printed for the author, 1790, dedicated to William Wilberforce) and as The negro equalled by few Europeans (London: by G.G.J and J. Robinson c.1790). A translation was also published in Philadelphia in 1801 which paired the novel with poems by Phillis Wheatley (The Negro equalled by few Europeans: translated from the French : to which are added, poems on various subjects, moral and entertaining by Phillis Wheatley, Negro servant to Mr. John Wheatley, of Boston, in New-England (Philadelphia: William W. Woodward, 1801).
The very rare first edition of an important abolitionist novel published in Paris under a disguised imprint (“a Madras”) in the midst of the French Revolution. The story follows the life of Itanoko, a black African prince born in Senegal, who is captured by slave traders and crosses the Atlantic to Saint-Domingue as a slave. Lavellée specifically states in his preface that he has cast his abolitionist message as a novel as, “un roman est lu de tout monde.” The novel includes a very shocking and detailed description - most likely taken from an eye-witness account - of a voyage on a slave ship.
This remarkable novel was published during the early turmoil of the French Revolution when censorship laws were loosened resulting in a flood of polemical works appearing on to the market calling for political freedom, the equality of women and the abolition of slavery. The Société des Amis des Noirs had also been founded in Paris the year before the publication of this work and the first French translation of Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (London, 1787) was also published in Paris in 1788 as Réflexions sur la traite et l’esclavage des Nègres. It has been noted that the novel also seems to borrow from Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) which was very popular in France.
Kristiina Taivalkoski-Shilov summarises the plot of the novel:
“The narration of Lavallée’s lengthy three-volume tale is in the first person and takes the form of an autobiographical slave narrative. The Senegalian-born Itanoko relates retrospectively his happy childhood and youth in Africa, his education by a Frenchman and his love for his mentor’s daughter, his transportation on a slave-ship after a tribal war, his captivity and other Africans’ sufferings in slavery in St. Domingo (now Haiti) and finally his liberation and reunion with his lost beloved, the half-African, half-French Amélie. There are also some interpolated stories in the first-person narration by other characters, the longest of which is situated approximately in the middle of the novel. **At the end of each volume several polemical endnotes containing additional information and slave anecdotes condemn racism and slavery.”** (Kristiina Taivalkoski-Shilov, Translating for a Good Cause Joseph Lavallée’s antislavery novel Le Nègre comme il y a peu de Blancs (1789) and its two English translations (1790) p.313-4)
In the author’s preface before the main body of the text Lavallée states his desire to disseminate the abolitionist message widely through the use of literature: “O Noirs! elle ne vous oubliera pas alors. Je sens qu’un roman n’est pas fait pour opérer cette grande révolution; mais un roman est lu de tout le monde” (xij).
In a remarkably detailed essay, Kristiina Taivalkoski-Shilov, has compared this original French text of the novel with the two English translations that appeared in 1790 in London. The essay expertly notes the omissions made by the two different translators in their own translations as well as the amplification of various undertones in English editions such as the “homoerotic aspects” of the novel (p.311). Taivalkoski-Shilov notes, “Lavallée’s novel seems not only to have influenced American ideas about slavery, but also created a model for later antislavery writing, which often had as a central theme the sentimental friendship between a black man and a white man.” (p.313)
The novel ends with a rousing and direct plea:
“O Blancs ! Hâtez-vous, saisissez l’instant où [sic] la postérité vous en ravira la gloire, où [sic] le retour de la barbarie en reculera l’époque. Ne mettez point au hazard l’intérêt des générations futures. Ne calculez plus, mais agissez. Ceignez le front de votre siècle d’un diadême de bienfaisance, qui lui assure l’empire sur les mémorables révolutions consacrées dans le temple des annales du monde. Brisez ce mur d’airain dont le préjugé s’applaudit depuis tant de lustres. Brisez-le ! il vous cache des hommes ; il vous cache des frères.” (III, p. 189-90)
Perhaps surprisingly this first French edition was discussed in the English Critical Review shortly after publication and may have prompted the English translations:
“[O]ur present author has drawn into action, by a fictitious story, what he considers as the true character of the African. This man, says he, has virtues, and is amiable: if these virtues are those of his nation, we ought to respect it; this is the plan and object of my work. … The story is interesting, and, notwithstanding some occasional improbabilities, well conducted. The negro is painted in very flattering colours; but many of his advantages are supposed to be owing to Dumont, a Frenchman, shipwrecked on the coast. … The whole is interspersed with numerous anecdotes of the knavery, the avarice, the cruelty, and the perfidy of the whites, contrasted with the confidence, the liberality, the courage, the candour, and the patience of the blacks.” (Critical Review, 1790)
This polemical novel, with its detailed supplementary notes and clear abolitionist message, requires much further scholarly study. As Taivalkoski-Shilov has noted, the work, “created a model for later antislavery writing”, and as such needs to be compared and studied alongside other writings on the same subject published in England and America at the end of the 18th-century.
