Aimé Césaire's struggle to define a politics of principle in the tradition this book is calling Caribbean Critique took shape with explicit reference to the legacy of Jacobinism, the Black Jacobinism of Toussaint Louverture, and the radical abolitionism of Victor Schoelcher. Both Jacobinism and Black Jacobinism became crucial to Césaire's brand of critical thought and politics in the period of decolonization, but when Césaire made his first and perhaps most consequential political intervention, he was a young, inexperienced Martinican deputy to the French Assembly in the then-dominant French Communist Party. At that point, Victor Schoelcher was the abiding reference of Césaire's politics of principle.

Césaire recognized that Schoelcher had been the first to call for the juridical integration of France's overseas colonies as ‘French Overseas Departments’ whose citizens would bear the full and undivided rights of the Republic. In the Jacobin and Black Jacobin traditions, one might argue, decolonization has always meant universal equality under not just any republican law, but specifically a constitution such as that of l'An II whose fundamental aim was the promotion of popular sovereignty. On June 30, 1945, Césaire wrote in Justice, the newspaper of the Martinique section of the Parti communiste français (PCF), that: ‘l'ordre que je vous demande de respecter et de faire respecter c'est cet ordre révolutionnaire qui substituer le règne de la loi au règne du favoritisme, mettra à la raison l'insolence jusqu'ici munie des ennemis du Peuple’ [the order that I ask you to respect and make respected is that revolutionary order that substitutes the rule of law for the rule of favoritism, which will subordinate to the order of reason the insolence that has thus far armed the enemies of the People] (cited at Hale 1978: 254).