Lislet Geoffroy (1755 - 1836), son of a man of the Enlightenment and a princess of Senegal, is the first major scholar of Bourbon. It has never been a slave, but he was the son of a slave. It was also the first "black" member of the Academy of Sciences in Paris (where he never set foot).
Lislet was two years younger qu'Evariste Parny, did they meet? Lislet knew he Evariste these sentences (in a letter to Bertin 1775):
" I can not please me in a country where my eyes can not fall on the show the easement, where the noise whips and chains and stun my ears rang in my heart. I can only see tyrants and slaves, I do not see my fellow man. It swapped every day a man against a horse: it is impossible for me to accustom myself to a quirk so shocking. "
Those are my two heroes of the Enlightenment of Bourbon *: black, scientific, rational, son of a slave, we imagine serious and composed, and white, literary, whimsical, son of slave, one imagines strange and agitated. Both have fully adhered to the philosophers of their age, all Both have been recognized by institutions of their time (the Academy of Sciences for Lislet, the French Academy for Evariste), and both are dead out of their island where, however, they wanted to return.
(and both are pretty ugly in the portraits that represent them.)
* hey, it would make a great book title!
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