Comme des bêtes

de Pierre Serna

The French Revolution created, on the ruins of the Ancien Régime, a new political community composed of equal citizens. Hence, what place should occupy the animals, so numerous in the towns and the countryside? Did they also have rights? Could we continue to domesticate them and eat them? Were they "sub-citizens" to be protected or a resource to be exploited for the nation? In a profoundly innovative book, the fruit of many years of work, Pierre Serna shows the political importance of animals in the Revolution. As the Paris police tried to limit their dangers, the menagerie of the Jardin des Plains menagerie wanted to make it a civic, pedagogical and republican spectacle, while agronomists and scientists embarked on ambitious reforms of breeding. Mostly, The question of animality is at the heart of revolutionary debates. There will be radical advocacy for the vegetarian diet, sometimes utopian projects of animal citizenship, but also the emergence of scholarly racism, which instrumentalises discoveries on great apes in order to better animate black slaves, and to oppose them emancipation.--Translation of page 4 of cover by Fayard: http://www.fayard.fr/comme-des-betes-9782213682549