| Sumario: | This article reintegrates religion into the history of French Enlightenment abolitionism, thereby reconstructing its fundamental influence on shaping a movement that is commonly perceived as secular. It makes two main points. First, the roots of antislavery thought were religious: it emerged from the encounters between canon law and scholasticism on the one hand, and Catholic missions, on the other. Antislavery resulted from a bottom-up process in the Atlantic world: it was initiated by missionaries providing spiritual care to enslaved people and then passed on to their superiors, leading to the earliest questioning of Atlantic slavery in Europe. Second, most French Enlightenment philosophers not only adopted ideas of religious origin but interwove their philosophy with a religious worldview. In placing natural law above human-made law, they aimed at realizing divine order on earth. The article insists on the physiocratic radicalization of Catholic natural law doctrines and underlines also strong Protestant influences on French Enlightenment abolitionism. This article thus reveals important continuities between the Enlightenment and earlier religious discourses in the Atlantic world.
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