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Public Culture 110 Schoelcher’s unrealized vision of comprehensive abolition. From Césaire’s postwar vantage, Schoelcher’s 1848 commitment to immediate and total emancipation — including full French citizenship, voting rights, and universal education without a paternalistic period of transition — was an untimely revolutionary act. Schoelcher made a decisive move that challenged the dominant sentiment among republi- can legislators, for whom slavery remained a normal and legitimate institution. Césaire also emphasized Schoelcher’s integrated vision of colonial emancipation: juridical liberty for freed slaves would evolve into substantive freedom through a “second emancipation” that would require and propel economic development, social restructuring, and democratic reforms.15 Pragmatically, Schoelcher was mindful that legal abolition as such was a lim- ited response to the complex problem of freedom. Strategically, he wanted to avoid another Haitian Revolution while honoring the legacy of radical republican- ism. His aim was to reorganize Antillean society and fully integrate its people into the republican nation-state. These pragmatic and strategic concerns were also elements of a utopian vision. Schoelcher’s project, as refracted through Césaire’s postwar imagination, envisioned that slave emancipation would necessitate social reorganization within Antillean territories. Closer juridico-political integration between these colonies and the metropolitan state would transform France itself in fundamental ways. Schoelcher’s constitutional measure was meant to motivate a long-term self-surpassing project for social democracy and human emancipation that anticipated a future republican order. The historical opening provided by the 1848 Revolution made this a viable plan for comprehensive change even as the republic then created in fact foreclosed this possibility. From a strictly juridical perspective, the abolition of slavery in 1848 was an immediate and enduring success. It also secured Schoelcher’s literal membership in the Panthéon, France’s official tomb for republican luminaries. Yet abolition as actually instituted in the Antilles initiated new forms of labor ser- vitude and racial domination by what now became a paternalistic colonial state. If political power was redistributed, béké socioeconomic power was secure even 15. Césaire, “Hommage à Victor Schoelcher,” “Discours prononcé,” and “Victor Schoelcher et l’abolition.” Schoelcher’s evolving political vision may be traced through his writings in Esclavage et colonisation. For comprehensive accounts of Schoelcher’s life and political initiatives, see Nelly Schmidt, Victor Schoelcher et l’abolition de l’esclavage (Victor Schoelcher and the Abolition of Slavery) (Paris: Fayard, 1994); and Anne Girollet, Victor Schoelcher, abolitionniste et républicain: Approche juridique et politique de l’oeuvre d’un fondateur de la République (Victor Schoelcher, Abolitionist and Republican: Juridical and Political Approach of the Work of a Founder of the Republic) (Paris: Karthala, 2000).