Guest Lecture: Angola, Hamburg und Napoleon. Das (gegen)revolutionäre Leben des Louis de Grandpré Guest Lecture: Angola, Hamburg und Napoleon. Das (gegen)revolutionäre Leben des Louis de Grandpré

In 1801, the slave trader Louis de Grandpré published an account about his travels to the Loango Coast, today located in Angola and the DR Congo. In this book, he not only describes Loango society as feudal in character, but also equates feudalism with slavery, thus creating the notion that in Loango, practically everyone was enslaved. In this talk, Jutta Wimmler asks why the author chose to depict an African society in this way, arguing for the importance of understanding the book’s publishing context. The life story of this emigrant Frenchman who spent most of the 1790s either in the Indian Ocean world or in the Holy Roman Empire before being imprisoned in Paris, provides intriguing insights into the French revolutionary period and the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. In addition, it points to the importance of revolutionary discourse in forging the idea of ‘African slave societies’ in European thought. The presentation elaborates on Jutta Wimmler’s paper “Feudalism on the Loango Coast,” published in the Journal of Global Slavery (forthcoming in 2024). The presentation will be held in German.