Black Jacobins talks about free, propertied Haitian blacks petitioning for political rights on the basis that "'Protestants, comedians, Jews, the relations of criminals’, all had received their political rights from the Assembly. Yet Mulattoes were still excluded." What does comedian mean here?

by maximum_horkheimer

"On January 30th, 1790, the Mulattoes, sponsored by the Friends of the Negro, petitioned again. ‘Protestants, comedians, Jews, the relations of criminals’, all had received their political rights from the Assembly. Yet Mulattoes were still excluded. The Assembly turned a deaf ear"

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What did it mean to be a French comedian in 1790? Why is this a group that would need to be granted political or civil rights?

Erinaceous

I suspect it's a 'false friend'. Comedian/comedienne, en francais, means actor. It's a common malapropism even in contemporary French to English usage. Actors were seen as morally wrong by the church and excommunicated and were forbidden burial on sacred grounds (basically every cemetery in France).

see Schnusenberg, Christine Catharina (1988). The relationship between the Church and the theatre: exemplified by selected writings of the Church fathers and by liturgical texts until Amalarius of Metz, 775-852 A.D. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.