Throughout the nineteenth century, the complexities surrounding the abolition of slavery were enormous. The events of Toussaint Louverture's capture and sacrifice, the defeat of Louis Delgrès's and Ignace's 1802 rebellion in Guadeloupe, and the subsequent defeat of Napoleon's troops in Haiti meant that slavery would be reimposed in the French Caribbean colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe at the same time that it was destroyed in the new state of Haiti. From 1802 to the 1848 abolition, this strange situation meant that slavery had been both abolished and reinstated in the remaining French colonies, while France's only former colony became an international pariah. Slave labor persisted throughout the Atlantic world during the first part of the nineteenth century, even as the slave trade and eventually slavery itself were gradually abolished by Britain (1834), France (1848), and, eventually, the United States (1865) and Brazil (1888).

One of the key figures of Caribbean Critique emerged at the moment of the 1848 French abolition of slavery. Victor Schoelcher's writing during the few months of the short-lived Second Republic focalize the struggle around abolition with uncompromising clarity and unyielding fidelity to the imperative of universal, absolute abolition. Schoelcher's was emphatically and self-consciously a politics of principle in the mode of Robespierre and Louverture, and it was particularly notable for its success in seizing the strategic opportunity available in the spring of 1848.

The problem of slavery and its abolition was enormously important for thinkers across the spectrum of what we might now call ‘leftist’ thought in nineteenth-century France. In the period of the July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe (1830–1848), two public intellectuals, in particular, forcefully and repeatedly placed the problem of slavery in France's American colonies before the French public and paved the way for its eventual abolition on April 27, 1848: Alexis de Tocqueville and Victor Schoelcher. Each traveled extensively throughout the Americas, and each brought the experience of their New World encounters to bear upon his attempts to eradicate French participation in the brutally inhuman crime of slavery.