In March 2007, on the two-hundredth anniversary of the British parliament’s decision to abolish the slave trade, there was a flurry of contention in the letters pages of several newspapers and blogs. The points at issue were whether the British had really been the first in the world to take such action and whether the parliamentarian William Wilberforce deserved as much credit as he was then getting in the news media. Those taking umbrage were members of the political Left, who were determined to insist their side always led the way in the progress and liberation of the downtrodden. They claimed the first to abolish slavery were actually the Jacobins of the French Revolution in 1794, thirteen years before the British. The last thing they wanted to concede was that one of the greatest single blows ever struck in the history of human freedom had been initiated and enacted by a conservative, middle-class Englishman heading a political movement of evangelical Christians.

One of the threads that William Hague weaves though his compelling new biography of Wilberforce is his narrative of developments in France that paralleled those in England.[1]The Convention in Paris did declare the universal emancipation of slaves in February 1794. This was precisely in the middle of the eleven-month period known as the Reign of Terror, when most of the revolutionaries had more urgent priorities. In practice, the declaration did nothing to affect the trade in slaves except abolish the bounty the French government had