Montesquieu famously opposed slavery in The Spirit of the Laws, published in 1748, but his opposition to the institution did not mean he believed in racial equality. He asserted that those who live near the equator have “distended or relaxed fiber endings” and “no curiosity, no noble enterprise, no generous sentiment.” Two years later, in an unpublished note, he described the free Black people living in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue as “so naturally lazy that those who are free do nothing.”[17] Saint-Domingue would, of course, become the Republic of Haiti in 1804, the only
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