From his view, all justifications for human bondage, be they scientific, religious, or economic, are disallowed by humankind’s defining principle: liberty. To drive home this last point, Jaucourt proclaims memorably that he would prefer that the European colonies in the Caribbean “be destroyed” rather than allow such a horrific practice to continue.69 These ideas, which Jaucourt synthesized from a variety of sources, became the foundation of even more incisive and violent condemnations of the slave trade, some of them put forward by Diderot himself years later.
