Victor Schœlcher (; 22 July 1804 – 25 December 1893) was a French abolitionist, writer, politician and journalist, best known for his leading role in the abolition of slavery in France in 1848, during the Second Republic. Early life Schœlcher was born in Paris on 22 July 1804. His father, Marc Schœlcher (1766–1832), from Fessenheim in Alsace, was the owner of a porcelain factory. His mother, Victoire Jacob (1767–1839), from Meaux in Seine-et-Marne, was a laundry maid in Paris at the time of their marriage. He was baptized in Saint-Laurent Church on 9 September 1804. He enrolled in the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in 1818, but left one year later and began working at the family's porcelain factory in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis. In his teenage years Schœlcher became an opponent of the Bourbon monarchy while frequenting the literary and political salons of Paris. In 1820, at the age of 16, he joined Freemasonry, being initiated into the Parisian lodge Les Amis de la Vérité (Grand Orient de France), which was at the time very strongly politicized, not to say openly revolutionary. He later moved to another Parisian lodge, La Clémente Amitié. Abolitionism In 1828, Schœlcher was sent by his father on an eighteen months-long trip in America, as a business representative of the family's enterprise. While in the continent he visited Mexico, Cuba, and the southern United States. During this trip he learned much about slavery and began his career as an abolitionist writer, and returning to France in 1830 he published his first writing in the Revue de Paris, an article titled Des noirs ("Of the blacks"), in which he proposed a gradual abolition of slavery. Schœlcher inherited the family business on his father's death in 1832, but sold it on order to dedicate himself to his abolitionist work. In the following years he traveled through Europe, and in 1840 went to the West Indies to further study slavery and the results of its abolition in the British colonies. Next he went to Egypt, Greece and Turkey, where he studied Muslim slavery, and finally to West Africa, traveling through Senegal and Gambia between September 1847 and January 1848. With the knowledge on slavery acquired in his travels, Schœlcher became an advocate for the immediate emancipation of slaves, no longer supporting a gradual process. He published this ideas in Des colonies françaises: Abolition immédiate de l'esclavage ("Of the French colonies: