9

War and Revolution in the Caribbean

For thirteen years, from 1791 to 1804, France’s Caribbean islands were in an almost constant state of turmoil and revolutionary insurrection, instigated in part by the political upheavals in France. But the revolution here took a very different course from that in Paris or the French provinces. Of course, people in the Caribbean followed events in France with interest and concern as ships from Nantes and Bordeaux arrived with letters, newspapers, and pamphlets carrying the latest information. People read them avidly, and they passed on what they read, whether through snatches of conversation among French sailors in quayside bars or by whispered messages passed between slaves as they worked the sugar cane.¹ But the root causes of revolt were much more deep-seated, owing far more to the harsh reality of life on the plantations and the everyday indignities of enslavement. As Haitian historians emphasized at a conference in 1989 to mark the bicentenary of the French Revolution, the contrasts between France and Haiti were too important to be overlooked.² Haitians were well aware that ‘it was not Paris that rewarded us by abolishing slavery, it was the rising of Haitians against servitude that led to it being renounced over there by the Convention. Just as it was not the Consul – Napoleon – who dictated an original political solution to Toussaint; rather it was Toussaint, the black man, who forced Bonaparte to follow that line.’³ In short, this was Haiti’s moment, not that of the colonial motherland. Haitians, not Frenchmen, were the principal actors in the revolution that engulfed Saint-Domingue, though they learned from the French and their revolutionary ideas, just as they in turn by their actions affected the course of France’s revolution at home.

Haiti, after all, lay far from Paris’s hemisphere. And though many of its inhabitants were immigrants to the Caribbean—Frenchmen crossing the Atlantic in quest of riches or adventure, or Africans condemned to the hell of the Middle Passage and a life in slavery—their experiences were transformed by the conditions they found there. The Caribbean was a different world, more closely drawn towards the eastern seaboard of the United States than it could ever be to Europe. Here there were other sorts of conflicts from those that coloured French, or, indeed, European life. Two predominated. One was the colonial rivalry between Britain, France, and Spain that was such a major part of life in the eighteenth-century Americas. The other was the perennial struggle within Saint-Domingue and each of the Caribbean colonies between three main social groups, ‘the slaves seeking freedom, free coloureds fighting racial discrimination, and colonial elites seeking greater autonomy or independence’.⁴ And since 1783 they had before them the example of the United States, whose revolution had brought a colonial people their independence. These were the issues, more than anything that happened in France, which defined the revolution in the French Caribbean.

In 1789, the white colonists had seemed in total control, the only group to enjoy privileges and political rights. But they were not united among themselves, with something of a class division forming between the great landowners on the one hand and the small-scale plantation farmers on the other. Each group pursued its own narrow self-interest. The grands blancs wanted greater political autonomy, but also looked to maintain their position as a social elite, whereas the petits blancs were more concerned to strengthen the privileges that fell to them through the colour of their skin. Some argued for greater independence from France while hoping for a social revolution within the white population of the island. They opposed any concessions to the free people of colour, favouring the creation of what Robert Stein has characterized as a ‘popular, racist state’. He cites one petit blanc as saying that Saint-Domingue had three enemies: ‘the philanthropists who supported the free men of colour and the slaves, the ministers who ruled the colony from Paris, and the aristocrats who dominated colonial society’.⁵ With so much accumulated bitterness, it is little wonder that the petits blancs were among the most committed opponents of the revolutionary ideas that emanated from France. Here the issue of race could not be ignored, as it so often was in the National Assembly.

Identity in the Caribbean was largely defined by race. The French Revolution here was largely about race, the rejection by its non-white inhabitants of the limits on their freedom resulting from discrimination, combined with the demand that the freedoms guaranteed by the French Declaration of the Rights of Man should apply to them, too. Discrimination was not new in France’s colonies, of course, but was now more politicized and aroused greater resentment. Curiously, perhaps, it was not the slaves who were the principal victims of colonial policy in the last years of the Ancien Régime. Indeed, their condition may even have seen some improvement as a result of reforms to the Code noir in the 1780s, which forbade slave masters from killing or mutilating their slaves and from striking them with a rod.⁶ Rather, it was free blacks and men of mixed race who complained that they were the targets of a new, repressive policy which denied their rights in law and defended the privileged position of the whites. Having established their free status and enjoyed the liberties that this gave, they found themselves increasingly the victims of prejudice, both legal and social, with qualities that gave them a disturbingly feminized identity. White writers attributed vices to those of African descent—they were supposedly effeminate, narcissistic, and emotional—which cut them off from white society, excluded them from elite positions, and restricted their opportunities of advancement.⁷

Those born to mixed-race families posed a particular problem for the authorities because of their role in colonial society. In Guadeloupe a census taken in 1789 listed 3,044 free people of colour along with 13,466 whites and more than 85,000 slaves: here their role was relatively modest.⁸ But in Saint-Domingue they were almost as numerous as the white population, with around 28,000 people listed as gens de couleur libres compared to 30,000 white colonists. Earlier in the century they had enjoyed legal equality with whites under the terms of France’s Code noir, but this equality had been progressively chipped away since the mid-1760s, with laws restricting the numbers of manumissions and forbidding entry into certain professions.⁹ To add to the sense of confusion, as Frédéric Régent has shown, not all mulattoes were free, and not all slaves were black. While all those arriving from Africa were, of course, enslaved, they were not the majority of the slave population. By the eve of the Revolution, three out of four slaves had been born in the Caribbean and one in eight was of mixed race. The rules of categorization were complex, and a man’s status was ultimately defined by colour, by his birthplace (whether he was a creole born in Guadeloupe or a black man from West Africa), and by the degree of métissage in the case of those born to white masters. As a result, the term gens de couleur had no single meaning that was accepted by all. Some, indeed, used it indiscriminately to describe all those who did not belong to the white race.¹⁰

Legal restrictions were imposed for one reason only: to ensure the maintenance of a white dominance that was based on skin colour. As a result, in 1789 the issue of race was openly discussed; it could no longer be concealed or hidden from public gaze. Race had been turned into a key political issue in the colonies, and free people of colour were no longer prepared to suffer in silence. They were determined to be engaged in the political process, or, in John Garrigus’ words, ‘to enter the colonial public’.¹¹ For the more aspirational of them that meant achieving complete equality with whites, equality in law, in access to the professions, in property-ownership, and in political representation. It did not necessarily turn them into radicals, however, since in other respects they might have quite conservative aspirations. An early pamphlet, the first to be written by a man of colour, spoke of a society where whites and mulattoes would be grouped together as a single class of free men, where mulatto slaves were to be freed at birth, but where those born black were destined for slavery. It was a specious argument, based on the claim that those of mixed race belonged to America, a continent where slavery was unknown, whereas ‘the colour of the blacks indicates their origin in Africa’ and condemns them to be slaves.¹² In short, they were less concerned to abolish privilege than to acquire it, to join the white colonists as Saint-Domingue’s ruling class.¹³ They had no interest in other forms of equality and strongly opposed extending civic rights to slaves.

Race was a three-sided issue in the French Caribbean, where whites, blacks, and mulattoes had different identities, and different demands. The slaves were not widely thought of as having the potential to be citizens; indeed, the language used to describe them was demeaning and disparaging, comparing them to animals rather than human beings. In contrast, those of mixed race were vociferous in demanding rights for themselves, and they had representatives in Paris who pressed their interests in the National Assembly. They were often wealthy men whose lifestyle differed little from that of the whites, and a substantial number of them owned slaves in their own right. In the new political context of 1789, they tended to take a maximalist view of what was due to them. Hence, when the Assembly passed its decrees on colonial governance in 1790 they interpreted these, far more widely than the texts actually suggested, as a mandate for greater freedom. And when the white colonists, quite predictably, chose to ignore the new law and continued to exclude the mulattoes from any form of political participation, conflict became inevitable between the men of colour and the colonial authorities, a conflict that was pursued in the name of the Revolution’s own core values. As the wife of one of the colony’s deputies in Paris wrote, all the mulattoes ‘are determined to give their last drop of blood to uphold the decrees and defend their rights’.¹⁴

The aspirations of the mulatto leaders had implications that extended far beyond their own community. How, in particular, would the black population react? Many felt that the very sight of free men of colour winning full civil rights would constitute a provocation and encourage the huge slave population of the island to rise in order to seize rights for themselves, which in turn undermined what the planters saw as their property rights. Relations between whites and mulattoes deteriorated during the first months of the Revolution, with a series of violent attacks on plantations owned by mulattoes and with free men of colour volunteering to join citizen militias to protect their lives and properties from white lynch mobs. Then, in October 1790, the French National Assembly supported the claims of the free coloured population, spreading further alarm among the white colonists. So when Vincent Ogé, one of the coloured representatives in Paris, landed back in Saint-Domingue after stopping off in London to receive the blessing and funding of Thomas Clarkson and in Charleston to buy arms for a future conflict, the colonists were in no mood for concessions.¹⁵ Ogé demanded that news of the Assembly’s decrees be disseminated and that the people of colour be informed of their newly gained rights. And he held out the threat that, if his demands went unheeded, the coloured population would ally with black leaders to overthrow the white elites and destroy their privileges.

An armed clash was not long delayed. But Ogé was a better political agitator than a soldier: he managed to raise only a small force of a few hundred militiamen, which the whites had little difficulty in defeating. Many of the rebels were taken prisoner, and Ogé and his principal collaborator, a mulatto coffee-planter called Jean-Baptiste Chavannes, were extradited, on the instructions of the governor-general, Philippe-François Rouxel de Blanchelande, from the Spanish part of the island to face trial in Le Cap. The retribution that followed was ferocious and exemplary. Ogé and Chavannes were condemned to death and horribly tortured before being broken on the wheel in the public square at Le Cap, and nineteen of their followers were sentenced to hang.¹⁶ As news of the executions spread across the colony, the mulattoes responded with anger, an anger that was combined with the realization that they now had nothing to gain from cooperating with the whites. Any thought of compromise seemed pointless, and they increasingly turned to violence in defence of their cause. In the South Province, an armed band of more than 600 men of colour beat off the white force that was sent against them. Racial violence had been unleashed as political positions hardened on all sides.

If the violence was temporarily contained by military action, its root causes had not been resolved and continued to divide the population. Julien Raimond, who represented the people of colour in Paris and put their views to the Assembly, warned in early 1792 of the new dangers the colony faced, not least the danger that extreme revolutionaries, driven by idealism, would spread dissension among the slaves. The men of colour were now free to enjoy their liberties, he argued, but what did that signify when their lives were endangered by slave violence? The problem, he believed, lay in the Assembly itself, in the enthusiasm of so many of its members, in allowing the heart to rule the head. Deputies, he claimed, were wilfully seeking to cause a slave revolt. ‘We see it happening, but we are forced to keep our mouths shut…men are drunk with liberty!’¹⁷ Raimond was convinced that there could be no comparison between the claims of the free coloureds and those of the black population. Their case, he insisted, was based not in abstract ideology but on the sterling contribution they make to the colony’s welfare. ‘The free men of colour are land owners in the colonies, they pay their taxes; these qualities give them the right to be heard at a moment when troubles are tearing apart the colony and threatening it with imminent ruin.’ To deny them representation was to deny them natural justice. For, said Raimond, ‘the citizens of colour form more than half the free population of the colony; they own half the land and a third of the men who cultivate it; and they do not share in the huge debts incurred by the white colonists’.¹⁸ Their claim for full citizenship was based on merit. And if the National Assembly did not understand this, it was because ‘it was too occupied with the interior of the kingdom to be able to think of us’.¹⁹

In the following year, in a submission to the Convention, Raimond went further, accusing the white colonists of having twisted the revolutionary message for their own ends. ‘The white colonists have stolen for themselves the benefits of the Revolution, when at most they formed one-twelfth of the population of the colonies: so it was evident that the revolution would be frustrated by the eleven-twelfths to whom it brought no benefit.’ Here he was thinking, as others were beginning to think, beyond the mulatto community. He was talking of the black majority, who formed nine-tenths of the population, and urged that they, too, must benefit from the revolution. ‘We should let them participate in this revolution,’ he wrote, ‘by bringing about a considerable improvement to their lot.’ By doing so, he argued, the slaves could be won over to the revolutionary side, and they would not be susceptible to the lure of counter-revolution.²⁰ It was a significant change of direction which presaged future alliances in the struggle for Haiti.

The Assembly’s decree granting rights to people of colour did nothing to reduce racial tensions on the island; rather it embittered relations between the whites and the revolutionary leaders in Paris and hastened the resort to armed force. In 1791, the French government sent its first troops to quell revolts on Saint-Domingue, but the numbers they despatched were never sufficient to maintain order on the island. Later in the year, they sent the second battalions of fourteen line infantry regiments and seven battalions of National Guards, together with a small number of dragoons, though these were soon withdrawn to France. In 1792 a further 6,000 men followed, but again these soon proved inadequate to the task of separating the different ethnic groups, with the consequence that successive governors turned to troops drawn from the non-white communities on the island, from the mulattoes in the first instance, then from freed slaves, incorporated into units known as Légions de l’Égalité. With war declared in Europe, troops could no longer be spared in France, and necessity dictated that they mobilize a mass army on the island. By the time Spanish and British forces invaded in 1793, the French army in Saint-Domingue consisted primarily of native soldiers, an army of 50,000 men led by a small number of officers drawn from Europe.²¹ It was a situation that was unique in the French Republic.

The colonists had enjoyed an uncertain relationship with the Revolution during its early stages. They looked to win greater commercial autonomy from France and urged Paris to pursue a policy of economic liberalism that would free them to trade with their American neighbours. At the same time, they remained overwhelmingly opposed to any idea of human rights that would give equality to other racial groups, and particularly to slaves. It was in this spirit that the Colonial Assembly on the island, dominated by white planters, forbade the publication in Saint-Domingue of the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789, in defiance of the law and of the government in Paris. It is difficult to blame them for being afraid, as they knew they would be hopelessly outnumbered in any conflict. There were nearly half a million black slaves on the island compared to only 30,000 white planters; plantation discipline was notoriously harsh; and during the century of Saint-Domingue’s existence as a French colony there had been a long history of slave risings and attacks on plantations. Runaway slaves roamed the island or hid in the luxuriant undergrowth of upland areas. Some fled for a few days to escape punishment or register discontent at their working conditions, with the majority returning to life on their plantation. But there was also a long-established tradition in the Caribbean of marronnage—there is really no equivalent term in English—that was deeply engrained in Saint-Domingue and which alarmed the plantation owners. Slaves would defy their masters by running away for good, with no intention of returning to slavery; they took refuge in the farthest corners of the island; and they lived an independent life in armed bands of self-liberated slaves which troubled the colonial administration and threatened violence against any slave-owner who tried to recapture them. Maroons were seen as desperadoes prepared to rob and kill to maintain their liberty, and maroon bands were associated in the colons’ minds with voodoo ceremonies and blood sacrifices.²² During the Revolution they assumed a political dimension, too, as marronnage became a form of protest among the Africans and an expression of their hatred for slavery and the plantation system.

In the febrile atmosphere of the 1790s, many colons feared the worst. Instances of nocturnal banditry were blown out of proportion, and implausible claims made about the number of maroons roaming the island. Indeed, there is evidence that the number of runaways may have been declining during the last decade of the Ancien Régime. But that did not prevent the spread of panic when news of slave attacks and plantation burnings reached the cities. The young patriot Albert Simon, now earning his living as a musician in Port-au-Prince, wrote in 1791 that the city had been reduced to a state of alarm. Rumours flew around uncontrollably, especially about events in France; violence lurked on all sides; and there were repeated reports of slave risings. In these circumstances, business could not flourish; for eight months, Simon claimed, he had been unable to make any money as the city emptied, and people fled to the mountains or bought a berth on a ship to France or to New England. Debts were left unpaid as creditors abandoned their homes in panic.²³

Whereas in 1789 the white colonists’ reactions to the Revolution were divided, in the years that followed the race issue served to unite them against any radical change. It also hardened attitudes among the non-white population, and not least those of mixed race. So, when the French government voted free men of colour the privileges of citizenship in 1791, the mulattoes responded with dismay, condemning the measure as falling woefully short of the ideals of liberty and equality that had been promised by the Revolutionary leaders. The decree applied not to all free people of colour, but only to those whose parents had also been free. It left many disappointed. Even those who were free experienced little material improvement as a result of the decree. Racial prejudice did not disappear overnight; nor did the workplace segregation of the pre-revolutionary years, when certain posts had been, de facto, reserved for whites. They still felt materially and socially disadvantaged. There were few men of mixed race among the great plantation owners or the wholesale merchants who worked for the export market. Colonial administrators were still white, often men who had come directly from France. Judges were white; indeed, the law was overwhelmingly a white preserve; and here the Revolution changed nothing. Those professions which were truly mixed, or where the men of colour dominated the labour market, remained largely the same, and it was principally in agriculture, in local commerce and textile manufacturing, in the building trades, and in shipping that they could seriously compete.²⁴ It was this lack of opportunity which the mulattoes sought to combat when, once they were granted civil rights, they bought habitations and challenged the white planters on their home ground, leaving them feeling increasingly threatened. A conflict of interest had been opened up which served to exacerbate racial tensions on the island throughout the 1790s.

The worst fears that had been voiced in Nantes and Bordeaux in the early months of the Revolution were soon realized on the plantations of Saint-Domingue as the colony was rapidly engulfed in riot and violence. That violence took several different forms as the different groups rebelled against the grant of civil rights to the free coloured population. The white colons were the first to revolt. When news of the decree of 15 May 1791 reached the colony, virtually the entire white population of the island declared their opposition to the measure and refused to countenance its implementation. Most provocatively, they refused to allow free men of colour to exercise their civic rights by participating in their assemblies, with some white slave-owners even arming their black slaves in a bid to repress the free coloureds’ protests. The French governor, Blanchelande, prevaricated, and felt that he had no choice but to inform the government in Paris that, should they instruct him to enforce the law, humiliation would ensue. Reluctantly, the deputies reversed their order, leaving the civil rights of people of colour to the discretion of the whites. Confusion was only made worse by the arrival from Paris of France’s first civil commissioners, Sonthonax and Polverel, to oversee the implementation of the new law, and they were horrified to find how much real power had slipped from French control. The unfortunate Blanchelande was accused of treachery and royalist sympathies, recalled to Paris in 1792, sent before the revolutionary tribunal, and guillotined. Though there is little doubt that he did sympathize with the royalist cause, the problems he faced were not all of his own making. In the hateful atmosphere of Saint-Domingue the colonial administration was powerless; indeed, in Carolyn Fick’s estimation, ‘power belonged to any group or party strong enough to seize it, or, more pertinently, to obtain it through political deceit and manipulation’.²⁵

It was at this time, too, that the third of the island’s racial groups, the black slaves, entered the fray, when, on 22 August 1792, a huge slave insurrection broke out, directed against both individual slave-owners and the whole system of slavery in the North Province. It would spread rapidly across the country and would mark the start of an insurgency that would last until well into 1793, setting plantations ablaze and destroying much of the wealth and infrastructure of the island. The insurrection was clearly planned. We know that on 14 August, a meeting of slaves drawn from the best-educated and most trusted slaves on more than 100 plantations took place on the Lenormand de Mézy estate, where they took the decision to rebel. We also know of a secret meeting of the rebels eight days later at Bois Caïman, some five miles from Cap Français, to agree their tactics. This meeting undoubtedly took the form of a war council where the insurgents strengthened their resolve. They would, they agreed, first attack their own plantations, then burn others round about. In a ritualistic ceremony that may have had its roots in voodoo or West African religious ceremonies, the rebels administered a blood oath and sacrificed a pig in preparation for war. We have few reliable details of what happened, and accounts became exaggerated in the telling. But they sent shock-waves through the white community, for whom the insurgents were primitive and barbaric, an image they repeated over and over again in reports and petitions to Paris and to commercial associates back in France.²⁶ The first histories of the insurrection, which were written from a strongly anti-revolutionary standpoint, often repeated these claims, blaming the black insurgents and the Jacobin legislators in equal measure. An anonymous work of 1795, for instance, published in Paris under the title Histoire des désastres de Saint-Domingue, compared the atrocities committed on the island to the massacres of supposed counter-revolutionaries in mainland France, in the Vendée, Lyon, or the Vaucluse, as a result of which, it claimed, people could no longer be expected to react with the same emotion, or show the same feeling and empathy, to the ‘long series of misfortunes’ suffered by France’s colonists.²⁷

The violence the planters suffered was often extreme, both in Saint-Domingue and in Guadeloupe, where a series of slave revolts in 1793—at Bailiff and Trois-Rivières in April and at Sainte-Anne in August²⁸—drove many French settlers off their habitations and into exile on other islands of the Petites Antilles. Charles-Gabriel Gondrecourt was one who suffered mightily at rebel hands. The owner of a sugar plantation in Trois-Rivières, on the south coast of Basse-Terre, he fled in April when the rebels attacked, returning only to find his property devastated and his family massacred.²⁹ Gondrecourt believed he had been deliberately targeted: his wife and children had been murdered, his farm animals butchered, and thirty-eight of his slaves either killed or led away by the assailants.³⁰ He returned to a sickening sight. But he would have been wrong to dismiss the slaves as primitive or ill-informed. They knew far more of the political situation on the island than most of their masters acknowledged. They understood that their enemies were deeply disunited: they knew of the tensions among the whites; they had observed the struggle between them and people of colour; and, of course, they were hugely aware—and often deeply resentful—of their lowly position at the bottom of Haitian society. They had their own culture, and increasingly their own leaders, and it is significant that these leaders were able to take full advantage of the weaknesses of the plantation owners to attract support as they passed from village to village, burning, destroying, and killing as they went. There was a strong element of revenge in these killings. Planters and estate managers who had earned their hatred during years of whippings and humiliations now risked being specially targeted. But there was also evidence of wanton cruelty, involving indiscriminate violence and affecting men who had considered themselves good masters. Often it was absentee owners who had had little contact with their slaves or involvement in the management of their estates who were targeted, learning at home in France that their Caribbean properties had been laid waste and burned.

A rare (and somewhat literary) personal testimony was left by a young, unnamed Creole who had been in France to complete his education and who, fortuitously, returned to his family’s plantation on the day before the insurrection broke out. Identifying totally with the white planters, he joined the forces that were sent out against the rebels, and within days was aghast to learn that his own plantation was one of those that had been torched. When he arrived on the scene, he found everything reduced to ashes, the water mill, the aqueduct, even the homes of the plantation slaves. The sheer violence of the destruction he has witnessed leads him to reflect and to question. ‘Why’, he asks, was there ‘such fury in the devastation?’. And he adds: ‘It could not be out of hatred for us personally—we were complete strangers. We had been in France from our earliest years, and then the revolt broke out the day after our return, and so we were never allowed to live among them.’³¹

Support for the insurgents varied widely from place to place, with some slaves killing with an almost joyous abandon, while others stayed back to protect their masters and their families. One planter, François Carteaux, acknowledging his good fortune that his slaves offered him protection, was nevertheless puzzled. ‘I no longer had the whip to command them,’ he wrote after his return to France; ‘my rights over them had almost no further basis. With a word they could have refused to work and left me. Why is it that neither my work team, nor many others in the area, ever took this decision?’³² While Carteaux does not attempt to answer his own question, he implies that there might be some emotional bond, a sense of underlying loyalty that explained the slaves’ conduct. He would also like to imply—and this was a favoured theme in colons’ accounts—that it showed slavery to have been a less exploitative system than the abolitionists pretended, and to justify his own conduct as a planter. He does not stop to consider whether the slaves had perhaps just acted out of self-interest, assessing the risks of rebellion and the terrible retribution that might follow.

The insurrection spread with alarming speed, taking many of the plantation owners by surprise and finding their managers unprepared. From an original core of 1,000 or 1,500 men, the insurgents gained support as they passed from plantation to plantation, and by the end of November they may have been 80,000 strong. Frantic pleas for help were sent to other sugar islands, to Jamaica, Cuba, and Santo Domingo, as well as to the southern United States, but to little avail, and, with the city of Le Cap in flames, the colonial authorities were forced to turn to free blacks and mulattoes to help fight the insurgents and salvage something of the local economy. The level of destruction throughout the Northern Province was quite devastating, with sugar and coffee plantations consigned to fire, and slave-owners taken prisoner, shot, or forced to flee. An early estimate put the loss in the productive value of sugar at nearly 40 million livres, as all the plantations within fifty miles of Le Cap were reduced to ashes. The countryside, and with it the island’s economy, lay in ruins.³³ The extent of the destruction, coupled with the viciousness of many of the attacks, showed the extent of the underlying hatred of the oppressed, and the colons were no more restrained in their treatment of non-whites when they fell into their clutches. Nor were French sailors on naval vessels in dock at Le Cap, who, taking their lead from the new, hard-line French governor, François-Thomas Galbaud, would prove themselves willing accomplices. Any blacks who were captured faced summary execution; some were tortured before being thrown into the sea to drown. Across the island, atrocity was met with atrocity. At Jérémie, for instance, white colons seized free men of colour and imprisoned them in the hold of a ship, where they callously infected them with smallpox, with the consequence that around two-thirds of them died.³⁴ It was a war in which no mercy was shown on either side, a dirty war that left a bitter legacy of hatred and intolerance.

If race defined the revolution in the Caribbean, war brought it to a head, a war that had its roots in the dynastic wars of the eighteenth century, fought by the European colonial powers of Britain, France, and Spain in pursuit of economic and political advantage. The war in the Caribbean was not just about the balance of power between European states; it was about resources, autonomy, and the claims and counterclaims of different sections of the population. In February 1793, France declared war on Britain, and then on Spain, which had immediate consequences for France’s colonies in the Caribbean. By the end of that year, British troops had invaded the western part of the island, while Spain, now in an alliance with the slaves in their revolt against the colons, threatened the eastern part. In the months that followed, the leaders of the slave revolt showed that they were skilled at playing off the various European armies, while the colons remained resistant to any thought of compromise with the mutineers and further alienated the revolutionary government in Paris. Matters came to a head in the summer of 1793, when France’s civil commissioners, Sonthonax and Polverel, freed the black population from slavery, and the colons realized that they could hope for little from France, instead pinning their hopes on Spain and Britain to defend their lives and property. In this spirit, some among them signed an accord with the British Governor of Jamaica, which offered them the protection of Britain and its military garrison. The news of their initiative was received by the French authorities, both in Paris and in Philadelphia, with unconcealed disgust; they saw it as a deliberate act of defiance and an act of treason.³⁵

Figures are sparse and often unreliable, but it has been estimated that between September 1793 and May 1794, around 4,500 whites chose to return to their homes in the occupied zone.³⁶ Under attack from the black population of the island, they were prepared to swear loyalty to George III and to entrust their future to Britain, which occupied the northern part of the island for four years from 1794 to 1798, in return for a promise of security. This, of course, further alienated the revolutionary government back in France, which vilified them as counter-revolutionaries and royalists, and as enemies of the French people. But for those whose plantations had escaped the ravages of the insurrection, Britain offered more than military protection. Thanks to the occupier, the plantation owners again had an outlet for their crop, with access to British and American commercial networks and to Hamburg as a centre for redistribution across Europe.³⁷ They could continue to make profits in these years by turning to merchants and shippers from outside France, and by breaking long-established contracts with French merchants and French ports. But the extent of Britain’s aid was not unlimited, and the occupation did nothing to resolve the underlying racial tensions that beset the colonists.³⁸

In the rest of the island, where French rule was maintained, a social and political revolution had taken place, and the French found themselves increasingly reliant on their allies in the free-coloured community as they struggled to maintain control. They faced opposition from two sides: from the white colonists on the one hand, who sought greater autonomy, and the black insurgents on the other, insurgents who by 1794 had their own political leaders and had learned to play off the various European powers when they saw advantage in doing so. Foremost among them was François-Dominique Toussaint, a former slave who had been granted his freedom back in 1776. Toussaint, who had been educated in Saint-Domingue by the Jesuits, was a man of great political and diplomatic skill as well as military talent, and, though he had not played a major part in the earlier violence, he now emerged as a military and political leader of the first rank.³⁹ In 1793 he took the name by which he is known to history, Toussaint Louverture.⁴⁰

One of his first actions, amidst the chaos of that year, was to take up arms against the French on the side of Spain. He did so not out of any love for Spain or for the slave societies that Spain maintained in Santo Domingo and Cuba. Rather, like the other rebel leaders Jean-François and Biassou, he hoped that a Spanish alliance would further the cause of his own people. The Spaniards had offered freedom, land, and various civil privileges to slaves who fought for them and to their families, and this some months before the French commissioners made any offer of freedom of their own. Toussaint would appear to have waited for France’s response before choosing sides, but when that response came he judged it insufficient. First, the French commissioners freed slaves who agreed to fight for the republic in French units. Only later did they extend the promise of freedom to others in the black population. Besides, these were emergency measures applicable only to Saint-Domingue or to particular provinces of the island; they did not represent a change in national policy towards slavery. Only in the spring of 1794 did the government in Paris adopt a decisive stance, when it found itself forced to choose between the interests of the colons and the rights of black slaves. On 4 February the National Convention voted to abolish slavery—not the slave trade, not the status of a minority of the black population, but slavery as a legal condition. France was the first slave-owning country in the world to take such a momentous step. The world would now take notice.

Toussaint could feel with some satisfaction that he and his black supporters had forced the deputies’ hand. Whether it was this precise moment that won him to the French cause is a matter of conjecture: he did not explain his apparent alienation from Spain, and there are hints that he may also have resented his treatment at Spanish hands. But, for whatever reason, in the spring of 1794 Toussaint abandoned Spain and pegged his colours to the cause of France, changing the face of the war in the Caribbean. France, which had seemed on the point of losing Saint-Domingue to English and Spanish attacks, was back in charge of her colony. David Geggus assesses the multiple effects of Toussaint’s volte-face. ‘In a brief campaign,’ he argues, ‘Spain’s hopes of conquest were smashed and French rule in Saint-Domingue was saved. England’s chances of seizing the richest prize in the Caribbean practically vanished, and the cause of black emancipation gained a champion whose talents were to ensure its eventual triumph against all attempts to restore slavery in la perle des Antilles.’⁴¹ Toussaint placed himself and his 4,000 troops under the command of the French general Laveaux and accepted French rule in the colony. And though this did not guarantee a French victory in the war—the Royal Navy was still in a position to enforce a blockade of the colony—Toussaint was now able to keep both British and Spanish forces at bay.

Abolishing slavery and winning black support had become key tactics in the war, as France’s allies in the black and free-coloured communities, Toussaint and André Rigaud, freed slaves on the territories they controlled and fought with units of black troops. This both boosted recruitment and won support from civil society at a time when slavery still operated in British-held areas of Saint-Domingue. It undoubtedly helped the French cause. By 1795, Spain had withdrawn from the war, and by the Treaty of Basle ceded the eastern part of the island to France. In turn, the British were pushed back and contained, though the British occupation, which was maintained at great cost in human life, lasted until the withdrawal of the last troops in 1798.⁴² The British maintained the institution of slavery in the zones they controlled; but with their departure slavery was abolished across the whole of Saint-Domingue. Elsewhere in the Caribbean, the war had also swung in France’s favour: the French had retaken Guadeloupe, leaving the British with only one of France’s former sugar islands, Martinique.

But relations between Toussaint and Paris were not always easy, and under the Directory he acted increasingly as an independent ruler in Saint-Domingue and less as the representative of France. In his negotiations with the French Republic, he was prepared to recognize the overall authority of France as long as the limits of that authority were clearly defined. He conceived of it not as direct rule, but as a form of administrative supervision, leaving him in control of the internal and external affairs of the island and guaranteeing the liberty of the black population. This was a pragmatic compromise, what Pierre Pluchon has termed ‘a disguised independence’, and it largely suited both sides: French ownership of the island may have been something of a fiction; but by maintaining this fiction, peace could be preserved and military intervention averted, at least in the short term.⁴³ Toussaint demonstrated his diplomatic skills during this period in his negotiations with Paris and his dealings with the British authorities. But already his policies contained the shoots of future conflict. His increasingly authoritarian treatment of his rivals and opponents drew criticism from republicans, not least his decision to expel the French commissioner, Sonthonax, from the island. In the meantime, inter-community relations rapidly worsened. The colons who had once seen him as the saviour of France’s interests on the island increasingly denounced him as vainglorious, temperamental, and unpredictable in his dealings with others. In 1800 he installed his court in Le Cap and, on his own authority and in defiance of instructions from Paris, sent an army to annex the former Spanish territory of Santo Domingo.⁴⁴ His soldiers spread havoc and consternation among the inhabitants as they advanced, and panicked protests flooded in to the offices of government in Paris.

Any chance of securing a long-term settlement in Saint-Domingue was shattered when, after the coup d’état of 18 Brumaire, it became clear that the new First Consul had no interest in sustaining abolition and no principled objection to the institution of slavery. His concern was maintaining France’s colonial empire, and securing the wealth that might once again flow from it. So, in 1800, while promising to maintain liberty in those colonies where slaves had been freed, he also vowed to resist abolition elsewhere, including in Santo Domingo and in France’s colonies in the Indian Ocean. But black leaders in territories where slavery had been abolished—like Saint-Domingue and Guadeloupe—wanted further reassurance. From Le Cap Julien Raimond wrote to Bonaparte in August 1800, asking for confirmation that their freedom would be guaranteed and also that measures would be taken to abolish slavery in France’s other colonies. He got no reply.⁴⁵ Indeed, there is evidence that in both the East and West Indies, Napoleon’s policy was geared to gaining the support of the white planters by overturning some of the reforms of the republican years. The reputation which he built in other policy areas as a modernizer building on the reforms of the revolutionary era had little resonance in the colonies, where he dreamt of restoring the colonial glory of the eighteenth century. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the restoration of French control over Saint-Domingue would be the central plank of that policy.

Events moved quickly to a head after Toussaint in 1801 proclaimed a constitution for the colony, a document which acknowledged Saint-Domingue as a part of France’s overseas empire and which largely mirrored the current French constitution, but which he issued on his own authority, without referring it to Paris. Crucially, the document forbade all forms of racial discrimination and ruled that slavery was abolished forever. The only distinctions that were permitted were those based on ‘virtues’ and ‘talents’. The administration of the colony was passed to a governor, who would rule on behalf of France, and it fixed the governor’s term as five years. But there was one exception. For the present, to avoid any ambiguity, ‘the Constitution appoints as governor citizen Toussaint Louverture, general in chief of the army of Saint-Domingue, and, in recognition of the important services he has rendered to the colony, in the most critical circumstances of the revolution, and at the express will of the grateful inhabitants, the reins of power should be given to him for the rest of his glorious life’. To guarantee continuity, he was also given the right, in secret, to name his successor, a privilege which further underlined his autonomy from metropolitan control.⁴⁶ Toussaint was laying down his own terms and conditions, creating a personal fiefdom in Haiti. For France, and for Napoleon in particular, it was a challenge that was surely a step too far.

The French response was military confrontation. The government had come under growing pressure from both white and free coloured leaders to contain Toussaint, whom they denounced for his high-handedness and his resort to violence. Planters, in particular, some of whom had returned to Saint-Domingue and had witnessed the state of their former estates, expressed anguish at the scale of destruction and the loss of fertile lands that had been carefully amassed and ploughed over generations. One such planter, Michel-Étienne Descourtilz, recorded his observations on Leclerc’s expedition and on the state of his former plantation, in his Voyages d’un naturaliste, published in Paris in 1809. Here he tells of the bloodshed he encountered and relates his captivity at the hands of Toussaint’s soldiers, though, like many such narratives, his account is surely embellished. More interesting are his thoughts on the working of the plantations under Toussaint’s regime and the destruction of rich cotton fields and banana groves by those he condemns as ‘Negro anarchists’. Where his family estate had once produced 400,000 pounds of cotton every year, it was now reduced to barely 50,000, and lands that previously sustained 980 field workers—then slaves—now had only 120 free labourers. Despite the prohibitions issued by Toussaint’s government, many of them had subdivided the land into tiny garden plots on which they spent all their time. ‘I saw a few cultivators,’ he recounts, ‘and a couple of animals scattered around in the immense field called the garden, the men working with hoes, the animals grazing on weeds that the lack of ploughing had allowed to grow in what had once been such well-tended land.’⁴⁷

Napoleon, of course, aimed at more than mere containment, and in 1801 the moment seemed ripe to rebuild French colonial strength in the Atlantic. In the previous year, France had regained Louisiana from Spain, and Napoleon dreamt of reconquering some of the colonies Britain had seized in the Caribbean, with the aim of re-establishing France as the major force in the Gulf of Mexico it had once been. He planned not just to re-establish political control in Saint-Domingue, but to turn it once again into an economic powerhouse for the French economy, and that meant recreating the prosperous plantation system of the Ancien Régime. Sugar and coffee could only be farmed, he believed, with black slave labour. Hence he had no desire to abolish slavery in Martinique or other territories that had been ruled by the British, and he soon determined that Saint-Domingue, too, could not flourish without slavery. This meant ending the independence of action to which Toussaint had become accustomed—a dangerous political step. Napoleon, however, was in no mood for compromise: he wanted a prosperous colony, farmed to modern European standards, and using African field labour. Friction seemed unavoidable.

Almost as soon as peace was signed with Britain at Amiens, Napoleon despatched an expeditionary force to Saint-Domingue to restore French colonial rule. It was placed under the command of Victor-Emmanuel Leclerc, a young general in whom he had faith: Leclerc had served with him in Italy and was his brother-in-law, having married his sister Pauline. Leclerc had left France in 1801 with around 20,000 troops, many of them seasoned soldiers from earlier campaigns; and at around the same time Napoleon sent a much smaller force to Guadeloupe under General Antoine Richepanse. Both had the dual mission of retaking control and restoring the slave economy in territories where blacks had enjoyed a new breath of freedom, and he knew that news of the troops’ arrival would have an incendiary effect.⁴⁸ The generals were warned that they must preserve the greatest secrecy about their intentions, lest they enflame opinion. For this reason it was left to them to choose the most propitious moment to publish the decree restoring slavery.⁴⁹ But if Napoleon really believed that the missions could be conducted in secrecy, he was deluding himself. Toussaint was alerted to Napoleon’s intentions by newspaper reports, and he hastened to strengthen his defences. Meanwhile, rumours that the slave system was about to be re-imposed spread like wildfire among the blacks of Saint-Domingue, leading to fierce armed resistance. In vain did Leclerc point to the military cost and appeal to the Minister for the Navy, Decrès, not to re-impose slavery if he wanted to advance the military campaign. For he now had to fight popular fears as well as military force. ‘All the blacks are persuaded,’ he wrote in August 1802, ‘by the letters that have come from France, by the law re-establishing the slave trade, and by the decrees of General Richepanse restoring slavery in Guadeloupe, that we want to enslave them again, and I can only get them to disarm by long and stubborn fighting. These men simply do not want to surrender.’⁵⁰ He knew he could not win. Paris had given him neither the men nor the material resources that he would require to destroy their resolve.

Though the expedition was to end in disaster, the first signs were not unpromising for the French as a number of Toussaint’s units in the remoter areas surrendered or agreed to join Leclerc’s army. In the cities, however, rebel resistance was more determined, and bands of insurgents defied the French by burning houses, businesses, and surrounding plantations before retreating to the hills and conducting a bitter guerrilla campaign against the invader. The two principal cities, Le Cap and Port-au-Prince, were reduced to ashes. In the countryside beyond, both sides fought with savage ferocity in a war characterized by tit-for-tat killing and intermittent racial massacres. Everywhere that white planters had stayed or returned to their plantations, they risked being slaughtered by the insurgents, killings carried out, very often, by the very men who had been their former slaves. The wrongs of lifetimes spent in slavery, the whippings and systematic humiliations suffered at the hands of their masters, injected bitterness and hatred into relations between the various ethnic groups.

Of course, contemporary accounts tend to associate barbarism and atrocity with the black population. ‘The negroes or brigands show no mercy to the whites who fall into their hands,’ wrote an army doctor from Le Cap in mid-insurrection: ‘they gouge out their eyes…and sometimes, in their more humane moments, they bleed them as we bleed pigs.’⁵¹ These accounts were always written by white observers or by planters who had escaped to the towns. But it is important to recognize that atrocities were not limited to one side, and that the French were also guilty of crimes of brutality and inhumanity, especially in the final months of the conflict when the French commander, Rochambeau, realized that the war was lost and unleashed a policy of terror on the island. There were tales of captured black soldiers being herded on to ships in the harbour and gassed in their holds; of summary executions of prisoners which the generals did nothing to disavow; of men being tossed overboard and drowned; of others having bloodhounds set upon them to tear their flesh from their bodies.⁵² Atrocity begat atrocity as the war grew more bloody, the thirst for vengeance more unquenchable. Toussaint himself was taken as a prisoner to France and left to die in a prison in the Jura. His successor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who had led resistance in Port-au-Prince and inflicted a major defeat on the French in the battle of Vertières, near Le Cap, took violence to its logical extreme, ordering the extermination of all whites on the island. For them, survival was the most they could hope for. The defeat of Napoleon’s ill-fated expedition also marked the end of any substantial French presence on Haiti.

Dessalines’ victory on the battlefield came as a bitter blow to French pride at a time when Napoleon’s armies were establishing a reputation for their invincibility in Europe. At the same time, the tactics of the rebels in the mountains sapped their spirit after months of guerrilla fighting. But, as Toussaint himself realized, a war against Europeans in the climate of the Caribbean would not be won by arms and tactics alone, and the French defeat in this campaign owed as much to fevers and disease as it did to military science. Yellow fever had been feared by colonists and ships’ crews throughout the century, and it now hit the French as it had afflicted the British and Spaniards before them. The Haitians knew the vagaries of their climate and they fully understood the damage that the arrival of the hot season could do to Europeans’ health. Indeed, Toussaint saw the climate as a legitimate weapon in the war, slowing his march and delaying his engagement with the French in the knowledge that the fever season would not be long delayed. Within three months of Leclerc’s arrival in Saint-Domingue, he reported to Paris that he had fewer than 12,000 fit soldiers of the 20,000 who had accompanied him from France. By 6 June that number had fallen to only 10,000 still in arms: in the previous three months, he wrote, he had lost 1,200, 1,800, and 2,000 men, with the ravages of the war adding to the impact of the hot season. Each month, he reported that the crisis became more desperate. The men’s symptoms varied—light headaches, followed by stomach pains and shivering for some; a sudden debilitating attack for others: but of those who went down with the fever, no more than a fifth survived. Le Cap, which had once been the source of such prosperity for Europeans, was now little more than a graveyard. Three generals or brigadier-generals were among the victims; in one case, all his secretaries had died with him. Nor was the hecatomb restricted to the military. Leclerc draws attention to the fate of seven merchants who had come out from Bordeaux to settle in Le Cap, all of whom had died within a single week.⁵³ As for Leclerc himself, he would not see France again; within weeks he had joined the long list of victims of yellow fever.

For Haitians and people of African descent across the Americas, the events of these fifteen years provided a beacon of hope, and Toussaint went on to become a Caribbean icon. But for the white colons, and for the merchants of France’s west-coast ports who supplied them, his legacy was rather different, as they came to terms, often slowly and reluctantly, with the fact that Saint-Domingue was now lost and that France’s Caribbean empire could never be recreated. Napoleon’s sale of Louisiana to the United States in 1803—the price was 50 million francs and a cancellation of debts worth a further 18 million francs—acknowledged a change in his priorities and signalled a withdrawal from the American hemisphere. Any further military intervention in Saint-Domingue now seemed fruitless, and though some former colonists did devise plans to invade the island, they could not escape the difficulties that any invading force would face when it landed. In a plan to reconquer Haiti penned in 1806, one former colonist, Cuizeau, warned that the French must be careful to respect the social distinctions that existed in Haitian society and take care not to cause offence, since misunderstandings and imagined slights would lose them public support. They must also be prepared to fight a special kind of war. It was not just a question of numbers, he insisted—though, as Dessalines had called up the entire male population between the ages of sixteen and fifty, the numerical odds would be overwhelming. It was also about the approach they should adopt. The enemy might not be great tacticians, he argued, but they were familiar with the topography of Haiti and would adjust their tactics to reflect the landscape. The French must be prepared to face guerrilla fighters who would take full advantage of natural hiding places to ambush the invader. No force that came unprepared for such conditions could hope to defeat them.⁵⁴

For good reason, it may be thought, no such invasion was mounted, and the former colons, now scattered across the Atlantic world, were left to dream of what might have been. The defeat of Leclerc’s expedition was to be a turning-point for the white population of the island, as the failure to restore French rule and the slaughter that followed signalled the end of the French colonial presence on Saint-Domingue. In November 1803, Dessalines and Rochambeau signed a treaty coordinating the evacuation of the French army from Le Cap and purporting to guarantee the safety of the troops and of any civilians who wished to leave. The Haitian leaders followed up ten days later by proclaiming Haitian independence under the authority of ‘the Black People and Men of Colour of St. Domingo’, a phrase that calmly evaded the question of where any remaining white colonists would stand under the new regime. Slavery was abolished, they declared, and its abolition would be upheld by any means, by violence where necessary.⁵⁵ And while it is true that a few colons did struggle on in post-independence Haiti—indeed, one of the signatories of the act of independence was a white Creole, Nicolas Pierre Mallet, a planter from the south coast of the island who had led his former slaves against the French army⁵⁶—they constituted only a tiny proportion of the thousands of Frenchmen who had left France before 1791 to start a new life on the plantations or in the mercantile district of Le Cap. The vast majority fled, some taking their slaves with them into exile and few believing that they would ever return. Most of their material possessions were abandoned, and their homes and plantations left untilled and unprotected. For many it was a choice between life and death as they scrambled on to small boats in coastal creeks or bought themselves passages on the few merchant vessels still plying a passage to Europe or to other Caribbean islands. Those who had not already been driven out by fires and slave uprisings during the revolutionary decade felt that their time in Saint-Domingue was now over and that, if they valued their lives and considered the future of their families, they had no choice but to leave. In the new republic of Haiti, they were no longer welcome.

In Guadeloupe, Napoleonic policy was no less reactionary, his determination to re-impose French rule no less stringent. The revolutionary years had seen slavery abolished and French revolutionary ideas proclaimed, but the island had also been ruled by royalists and had endured invasion by the British in a decade marked by continued violence and periodic insurrection as rival factions and racial groups fought one another for power. The arrival from France of Victor Hugues in 1794 marked the high point of republicanism in Guadeloupe, as he celebrated republican festivals, imposed a policy of dechristianization, and announced the abolition of slavery in the colony. But his was a regime of a highly authoritarian and personal kind, and he soon fell out with the Directory in Paris, refusing to impose the Constitution of the Year III and maintaining a kind of neo-Jacobinism on the island.⁵⁷ The consequence was yet another victory for political conservatism, as the Directory sent a new representative to Guadeloupe in 1798—Desfourneaux—to replace Victor Hugues and impose its own orthodoxy. The French provided troops to repress insurrections against him, most notably by métis who were distrustful of France’s intentions towards them. Then, in 1802, a French force under Richepanse disembarked on the island, disarming the rebel soldiers and putting down the insurrection. Order was rapidly restored, and the leader of the revolt, Louis Delgrès, was killed along with up to 1,000 of the rebels. In the aftermath of the insurrection a conservative polity was restored, republicans were sent into exile, and royalists were allowed to return to the plantations they had abandoned. In 1803, slavery was instituted, in accordance with Napoleon’s wishes. Those blacks who had gained their freedom since 1789 lost it again, and free status was reserved for those who could prove that they or their families had already been free before the Revolution. People of colour arguable suffered the greatest loss of status. The elite who had taken part in the rebellion were exiled or decimated, while the others found themselves stripped of their rights and their citizenship.⁵⁸ The freedoms which they had won back in the heady days of the Revolution were now but a distant memory. To make matters worse, in 1810, British forces once again took possession of the island.⁵⁹ Guadeloupe’s future, like that of France’s other colonial possessions, would be decided by war and by the peace negotiations that followed at Vienna.

¹ For a discussion of the spread of revolutionary ideas across the Atlantic world, see Janet Polasky, Revolutions without Borders: the Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).

² Colloque ‘Haïti et la Révolution Française: filiations, ruptures, nouvelles dimensions’, Port-au-Prince, 5–8 December 1989.

³ Michel Hector, ‘Colloque de Port-au-Prince, 5–8 décembre 1989’, Revue de la Société haïtienne d’histoire et de géographie, 46/166 (1990), 16.

⁴ David Geggus, ‘Slavery, War and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean, 1789–1815’, in David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus (eds), A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 5.

⁵ Robert Louis Stein, Léger Félicité Sonthonax: The Lost Sentinel of the Republic (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1985), 33.

⁶ Carolyn E. Fick, ‘The French Revolution in Saint-Domingue: a Triumph or a Failure?’, in Gaspar and Geggus (eds), A Turbulent Time, 61.

⁷ John D. Garrigus, ‘“Sons of the Same Father”: Gender, Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue, 1760–92’, in Christine Adams, Jack R. Censer and Lisa Jane Graham (eds), Visions and Revisions of Eighteenth-century France (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1997), 137–8.

⁸ Françoise Koest, La Révolution à la Guadeloupe, 1789–96: dossier des Archives Départementales (Basse-Terre, 1982), 1^ère partie, ‘La Guadeloupe en 1789’, document 8.

⁹ Jeremy Popkin, A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution, 24.

¹⁰ Frédéric Régent, Esclavage, métissage, liberté: la Révolution Française en Guadeloupe, 1789–1802 (Paris: Grasset, 2004), 15.

¹¹ John D. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 234.

¹² Précis des gémissements des sang-mêlés dans les colonies françaises, par J.M.C. Américain, Sang-mêlé (Paris, 1789), 7.

¹³ David Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 162.

¹⁴ Letter from Mme Larchevesque-Thibaud to her husband, 5 November 1790, in Jeremy Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian Insurrection (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 45.

¹⁵ Robert Debs Heinl and Nancy Gordon Heinl, Written in Blood: The Story of the Haitian People, 1492–1995 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2005), 37.

¹⁶ Popkin, Concise History, 32.

¹⁷ Julien Raimond, Véritable origine des troubles de Saint-Domingue (Paris, 1792), 3.

¹⁸ Ibid., 4.

¹⁹ Ibid., 7.

²⁰ Julien Raimond, Réflexions sur les véritables causes des troubles et des désastres de nos colonies, notamment sur ceux de Saint-Domingue (Paris, 1793), 5–6.

²¹ Marcel Auguste, ‘L’armée française de Saint-Domingue: dernière armée de la Révolution’, Jahrbuch für Geschichte von Staat, Wirtschaft une Gesellschaft Lateinamerikas, 28 (1991), 87–92.

²² David Geggus, ‘Marronage, Vodou and the Slave Revolt of 1791’, in Geggus (ed.), Haitian Revolutionary Studies, 69–80.

²³ Jacques de Cauna and Richard Beckerich, ‘La Révolution à Saint-Domingue vue par un Patriote’, Revue de la Société haïtienne d’histoire et de géographie, 46/161 (1988), 31–2.

²⁴ Frédéric Régent, La France et ses esclaves, de la colonisation aux abolitions, 1620–1848 (Paris: Grasset, 2007), 204–6.

²⁵ Fick, The Making of Haiti, 122.

²⁶ David Geggus, ‘The Bois Caïman Ceremony’, in Geggus (ed.), Haitian Revolutionary Studies, 81–92.

²⁷ Anon., Histoire des désastres de Saint-Domingue (Paris: chez Garnery, 1795), 27.

²⁸ Françoise Koest, La Révolution à la Guadeloupe, 1789–96, introduction.

²⁹ AD Guadeloupe, 2E 3–7, Etude Jaille, minute from the procureur-syndic of Trois-Rivières, 14 June 1793.

³⁰ AD Guadeloupe, 2E, Fonds de notaires, dossier 41, Elizabeth-Jeanne-Guillaume Desvergers, épouse Charles-Gabriel Gondrecourt.

³¹ Althea de Puech Parham (ed.), ‘Mon Odyssée’ (anonymous manuscript memoir, Puech Parham Papers, Historic New Orleans Collection); for an abridged version see Althea de Puech Parham (ed.), My Odyssey: Experiences of a Young Refugee from Two Revolutions (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959). For an excellent discussion of the text, see Jeremy Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution, 59–92.

³² François Carteaux, quoted in Jeremy Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution, 177.

³³ Fick, The Making of Haiti, 105.

³⁴ Popkin, Concise History, 46.

³⁵ Laurent Letertre, ‘Le consulat de Philadelphie et la question de Saint-Domingue, 1793–1803’ (mémoire de maîtrise, Université de Nantes, 2000), 13–14.

³⁶ David Geggus, Slavery, War and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint-Domingue, 1793–98 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 228.

³⁷ Guy Saupin, ‘La gestion des plantations antillaises durant les guerres révolutionnaires: l’alternative des États-Unis et de l’Europe du Nord’, in Anne de Mathan, Pierrick Pourchasse, and Philippe Jarnoux (eds), La mer, la guerre et les affaires: Enjeux et réalités maritimes de la Révolution Française (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2017), 271.

³⁸ Manuel Covo, ‘Commerce, empire et révolutions dans le monde atlantique: la colonie française de Saint-Domingue entre métropole et États-Unis, 1778–1804’ (thèse de doctorat, EHESS, 2013), 58.

³⁹ Toussaint has inspired many biographers and disciples. They include Caribbean radicals like C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins (London: Penguin, 2001). For an overview, see Charles Forsdick and Christian Høgsbjerg (eds), The Black Jacobins Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

⁴⁰ There is no agreed explanation for this choice of name, though it has been suggested, by the Encyclopedia Britannica among others, that it may be linked to his mastery of guerrilla tactics in war.

⁴¹ David Geggus, ‘The “volte-face” of Toussaint Louverture’, in Geggus (ed.), Haitian Revolutionary Studies, 119.

⁴² Geggus, Slavery, War and Revolution, 388–9.

⁴³ Pierre Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture: un révolutionnaire noir d’Ancien Régime (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 199, 374.

⁴⁴ Pierre Branda and Thierry Lentz, Napoléon, l’esclavage et les colonies (Paris: Fayard, 2006), 80.

⁴⁵ Yves Benot, La démence coloniale sous Napoléon (Paris: La Découverte, 1992), 35.

⁴⁶ Constitution of the French colony of Saint-Domingue, proclaimed on 8 July 1801, reprinted in Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture, 573–87.

⁴⁷ Michel-Étienne Descourtilz, ‘Voyages d’un naturaliste’ (3 vols., Paris, 1809), here vol. 2, 94–7, in Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution, 275–6.

⁴⁸ Popkin, Concise History, 120–2.

⁴⁹ Branda and Lentz, Napoléon, l’esclavage et les colonies, 128.

⁵⁰ Letter from Leclerc to Decrès, 6 August 1802, in Paul Roussier (ed.), Lettres du général Leclerc, commandant-en-chef de l’Armée de Saint-Domingue en 1802 (Paris: Société de l’histoire des colonies françaises, 1937), 199–201.

⁵¹ Officier de santé Guilmot and adjudant-commandant Dembowski, Journal et voyage à Saint-Domingue, 1802 (Paris: Librairie historique F. Teissèdre, 1997), 66.

⁵² Bernard Gainot, ‘«Sur le fond de cruelle inhumanité: les politiques du massacre dans la Révolution de Haïti’, La Révolution française. Cahiers de l’Institut de la Révolution française, 3 (2011), «Les massacres aux temps des Révolutions», 1–16.

⁵³ Letter from Leclerc to Decrès, 6 June 1802, in Roussier (ed.), Lettres du général Leclerc, 154–5.

⁵⁴ National Library of Jamaica, MST 161, Cuizeau, ‘Plan pour la conquête de Saint-Domingue, 1806’, 6–9.

⁵⁵ David Armitage and Julia Gaffield, ‘Introduction: The Haitian Declaration of Independence in an Atlantic Context’, in Julia Gaffield (ed.), The Haitian Declaration of Independence: Creation, Context and Legacy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016), 5.

⁵⁶ David Geggus, ‘Haiti’s Declaration of Independence’, ibid., 26–7.

⁵⁷ Régent, Esclavage, métissage, liberté: la Révolution Française en Guadeloupe, 368–9.

⁵⁸ Ibid, 436–8.

⁵⁹ Anne Pérotin-Dumon, Être patriote sous les tropiques (Basse-Terre: Société d’histoire de la Guadeloupe, 1985), 330.