Jacques Louis David, la traite négrière et l'esclavage

From his trip to Nantes in the spring of 1790, Jacques Louis David brought back a vast allegorical composition, inspired by the revolutionary spirit that had already taken root in the port city. The present essay offers a close analysis of this work, highlighting the fact that, during his stay in France's first slave port, the painter was inevitably confronted with the reality of the slave trade. By deciphering the iconographic polysemy of his drawing, Philippe Bordes sees it as a metaphor for the slavery - or more precisely, Black-White slavery, in both the colonial and metropolitan sense - that David wanted to deploy there. He links this composition to the influence of his Parisian entourage, which included several members of the Société des Amis des Noirs, and to the lively debates on the abolition of the slave trade within and outside the Assemblée Nationale. The renewed story of David's stay in Nantes is thus revealed as the moment when this giant of painting entered the Revolution as both citizen and artist.