French writers of the Enlightenment wrote abundantly about the evils of Spanish colonization in the Americas, with a specific focus on the extermination and enslavement of native Americans (what follows is mostly based on Gómez, 2005 and Villaverde, 2019). Their main sources were the books that had disseminated the black legend of the Spanish conquest since the 16th century, notably Bartolomé de las Casas' Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1542-1552, translated in French in 1578) (complete with gruesome illustrations by Theodor de Bry), Girolamo Benzoni's Historia del Mondo Nuovo (1565, translated in French in 1579), and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega's Comentarios Reales de los Incas (1609, translated in French in 1633). Enlightenment writers also relied on more recent sources, notably memoirs by travellers and missionaries, but they remained primarily influenced by the anti-Spanish propaganda that had developed in France, England, and the Netherlands during the previous century, notably at the time of the Eighty Years' War, after Spanish troops had also committed atrocities in Europe.

However, one century later, Spain was no longer seen as a dangerous superpower: the entry for Spain in Diderot and D'Alembert Encylopédie (1755) tells that it had "fallen into decadence from which it will have difficulty in recovering" and called it "little powerful outside, poor and weak inside". Now that Spain was defanged, Enlightenment thinkers used the dark stories of the black legend to advance their own political agendas. Spain, seen as the country of Inquisition and the perpetrator of colonial massacres, was shown as inhuman, religiously fanatic, intolerant, and absolutist: it was the perfect opposite of Enlightenment ideals.

Enlightenment writers used the tragedy of the native Americans in treaties of political philosophy, in history books, and in plays, poems, and novels, where they reinvented the historical characters found in the chronicles - Christopher Columbus, Pizarro, Las Casas, and more or less fictional Mexican or Incan princes and Caribbean caciques. Sometimes, America was only an abstract and exotic background, like in Rousseau's early play La découverte du Nouveau Monde (1740), which takes place in Guanahaní (Bahamas) and features Columbus caught in a love triangle with beautiful native girls. However, though Rousseau had not yet written about the State of Nature, he already confronted his relatively polite Savages with less polite Europeans. Columbus and his troops sang:

Let us spread terror and havoc in these places

In many books by Enlightenment writers dealing with the Americas, the harsh criticism of 15th-17th century Spain allowed barely veiled attacks on contemporary French/European social and religious policies, and a few of these books were published outside France, sometimes anonymously. These were militant works, dealing with caricatural or idealized American characters and events, whose relation to the reality of the conquest of the Americas was superficial. It was easy to blame the Spanish - their government, their character - for the abominations that had taken place during the conquest. By condemning those horrors, the Enlightenment authors were able to convey their ideals of a fair and tolerant society, devoid of the religious fanaticism and absolutism that had (according to them) made those crimes possible. And to some extent, this was a first step towards the denunciation of colonisation and slavery practiced by other European nations, including France.

The number of victims cited by Las Casas - 12 millions of native Americans - was widely quoted, for instance by Voltaire in his Essay sur l’Histoire générale, et sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations (1759) and by the Dutch (and later French) scholar Cornelius de Pauw in Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains (1771). The latter insisted on the fact that massacres had been committed by all colonial powers, not just Spain:

Las Casas says that the Castilians massacred twelve million: there is probably some exaggeration in this calculation; but there will be more, if we count what the French, the English, the Portuguese & the Dutch together have slaughtered from Cape Hoorn to the Bay of Wager. In North America, about one-thirteenth of the natural people have been destroyed: none have been left in the West Indies, and almost none in the Caribbean and the Lucayas. In Peru, Mexico & Brazil two thirds of the natives have been exterminated.

In the entry for Population of the Encyclopédie (1765), D'Arminville used the Spanish conquest to indict colonisation:

If the country we want to seize is populated, it belongs to those who occupy it. Why steal it from them? What right did the Spaniards have to exterminate the inhabitants of such a large part of the earth? What right do we have to drive nations from the space they occupy on this globe, the enjoyment of which they share with us?

However, as notes Bénot (2003), the Colony entry (written in 1753 before the Seven Years' War, unlike the Population entry written after the war) is favourable to colonisation and written from the perspective of the colonizer ("it was necessary to conquer these lands and chase off its previous inhabitants to import new ones"). French Enlightenment writers were a land of contrast: some supported the statu quo, others wanted to reform it progressively, and others advocated taking it down by violent means.

Louis-Sébastien Mercier, in his speculative fantasy L'An 2440 (1771) imagined a monument built 670 years in the future that represented nations as statues of repentent women asking mankind for forgiveness for their past crimes. France, England, Holland, Germany, and Poland had all terrible things to atone for, but Spain was something else:

Spain, even more guilty than her sisters, groaned for having covered the new continent with thirty-five million corpses, for having pursued the deplorable remains of a thousand nations into the depths of the forests and into the holes of the rocks, for having accustomed animals, less ferocious than themselves, to drink human blood [this was a direct reference to the de Bry picture cited above].

In a footnote, Mercier adds: "Europeans in the New world, this is a book that must be written!". In another footnote, he says that the Spaniards "slit the throat" of 20 million people - why this figure is lower than the one on the previous page is unclear. In any case, Mercier concluded that Spain, unlike the other nations, would never be forgiven. The statue representing Spain is made of blood-veined marble, and "this frightening colour was ineffaceable, like the memory of the crimes." For Mercier, there was no statute of limitations for genocide (neither of these concepts existed yet in their modern form of course)!

But not far from the statues of European nations pleading for forgiveness rises that of a superheroic Black man called the Vengeur du Nouveau Monde - the Avenger of the New World -, who had liberated the Americas by shedding the blood of tyrannical Europeans.

French, Spanish, English, Dutch, Portuguese, all fell prey to iron, poison and flame. The land of America drank greedily of this blood which it had long been waiting for, and the bones of their ancestors whose throats had been cowardly slit seemed to rise and to shudder with joy.

-> PART 2