8
The merchant response to reform in 1789 had initially been largely positive, with many joining with other leading members of the Third Estate to demand political rights and the abolition of privilege. But already there were clouds on the horizon, not least the future of the slave trade itself. The Declaration of the Rights of Man was seized upon by abolitionists, bolstered by the presence in the Assembly of prominent members of the Amis des Noirs, as the weapon they needed to attack the very institution of slavery, and their demands served to spread anxiety in merchant circles. Among their concerns was the close link that had been established between several of the leaders of the anti-slavery movement with abolitionist circles in the United States; for Brissot, Clavière, Bergasse, and others, the struggle to abolish the slave trade was part of something broader, a move to introduce ‘American liberty’ into France.1 As a result of their activity, the issue of slavery, which had been of pressing concern only to a small minority, an elite of philosophical thinkers, risked becoming a central plank of the Revolution itself. Slavery, and more crucially the slave trade, became the topic of animated and often acrimonious debates, with merchant opinion divided, and battle lines drawn between what they saw as two unpalatable extremes—the abolitionist claims of the Amis des Noirs on the one hand, and the demands of the planters on the other, concerned above all to maintain the profits of slavery and to exercise as much freedom as they could over their commercial transactions, liberating themselves from what they increasingly saw as the tyranny of France. In Saint-Domingue there were reports of rioting by elements within the Creole community. The future of the colony was causing friction among whites, too.
The merchant communities of the leading Atlantic ports sent deputations to lobby in Paris for what they identified as their political and economic interests, often setting up correspondence committees to advise their deputies and to establish common policies with other ports. The central importance of the various chambers of commerce in representing their merchant communities (or of committees of merchants where, as in Le Havre, no chamber had yet been constituted) soon became apparent. Organization was all-important if the merchants were to succeed in gathering support for their cause. They circulated documents between ports in the first instance. They then extended their campaign to neighbouring towns and cities to gather support from industrialists and shopkeepers. And they developed a third sphere of mobilization in the National Assembly.2 In Bordeaux, as early as August 1789 the city’s Chamber of commerce formed a committee of its members to instruct their deputies in Paris.3 Interestingly, some of the larger merchants in the port chose to serve on the committee, a sure sign of the significance which commercial houses attached to the Chamber’s work. And Bordeaux’s deputies would in turn figure among the most prominent speakers on colonial questions in the Assembly’s debates.
But what was their purpose, and against whom were they campaigning? Few of their members were radical in a political sense, putting the defence of their commercial interests above more ideological considerations. But they felt isolated from events over which they had no control. They were, first and foremost, anxious for news of developments in other ports and in the Caribbean at a moment when the colons were agitating to end the Exclusif, or what remained of it after the Peace of Paris in 1763, and claiming the right to trade directly with countries other than France. This was, perhaps, the most important change: in a few short months it had become clear that there were real differences between their objectives and those of French merchants, and it could no longer be assumed that they were pursuing the same economic goals. But there was one goal that they did continue to share, and that was a commitment to the institution of slavery, from which both, in their different ways, profited.4 They feared losing out to the abolitionists, to what the Bordeaux chamber called the ‘incendiary doctrine of the Amis des Noirs’ as it pleaded with other chambers of commerce to ‘unite their efforts to prevent the bitter blow with which our national commerce is threatened’. And they sought financial backing from the government to prevent economic stagnation, asking that bonuses be paid for every ship leaving on a slave voyage.5 In the short term, at least, their fears seemed exaggerated. Slaving was not immediately banned, the first months of the Revolution counting among the boom years as slave ships continued to leave from the Gironde and the Loire estuaries until 1793. Slavery and human rights could, it seemed, co-exist in relative harmony, and on 8 March 1790, following a major debate on the colonies, the Assembly decreed that the revolutionary principles of Liberty and Equality should not be applied to slaves in France’s overseas possessions. The Assembly would leave the planters to their own devices.6
News of the vote was eagerly awaited in the Atlantic port cities ,and was all the more welcome when it was transmitted to them by a man they trusted, Jean-Baptiste Nairac, who had sent slave voyages out from La Rochelle and was, in every sense, one of their own. Nairac had been sent by the Chamber of commerce of La Rochelle to act as an observer at the meetings of the Estates-General, and subsequently at the National Assembly; from there he reported back regularly on the deputies’ comments on the slave trade and on the dangers which the Revolution posed to its continued prosperity. The speeches of those opposed to the trade—not least the crusading tones of Mirabeau in favour of abolition—were read with anxiety by the merchants of the Atlantic ports. On 6 March, two days before the decree was passed, Nairac had already sensed a change in the deputies’ mood, and could report from Paris that the majority had finally moved towards the maintenance of the trade and were of a mind to legislate on the subject. So, he wrote, ‘I can today announce to you with certainty or something close to certainty that these major interests will be treated, as I have never ceased to hope that they would, in a reasonable manner and one that conforms to the interests of commerce.’7 Three days later, by way of a courier to Nantes, he wrote to them again, this time little short of exultant. He expressed the hope that mercantile interests would be satisfied by the decree, which, in his view, maintained all their rights. His only regret concerned the tone of the decree, as he noted that its language was affected by the new political correctness of the day. The issue of the slave trade was not properly contextualized, he said, adding that ‘we must pardon those enthusiasts for liberty, who, after establishing its general principles, did not wish to attack them openly’.8 Perhaps so; but the substantive issue seemed resolved. The French Atlantic remained open for business.
But still the planters were not satisfied, and they repeatedly tried to recruit the merchant communities of the French Atlantic ports to offer more forthright support, with the chambers of commerce their key points of contact. From the earliest months of the Revolution they flooded the chambers with pamphlets, printed speeches, and other forms of propaganda, insisting on their commonality of interest and calling on them to offer moral, economic, and (in extreme instances) military support. They understood the threat which the ideals of the Revolution posed to the colonies and their slave economy; and they lambasted the Amis des Noirs for what they saw as a false and dangerous philanthropy that would destroy their way of life and, with it, France’s position in the world. When France extended civil rights to free men of colour in 1791, the planters argued that their entire social system was under threat. And when slaves did revolt, burning plantations and forcing thousands of colons to flee, they regarded this as proof that they had been right from the start, attacking what they saw as misplaced and craven liberal morality for the damage inflicted on the colonies. In Saint-Domingue they suspected that the slaves were helped by sympathizers in the white and mulatto communities, expressing surprise at the degree of organization and suggesting that the plotters’ aim had been to capture and burn Le Cap itself.9 In France and in French communities in the United States and across the Caribbean, they placed blame for the violence squarely on the shoulders of the Amis, arguing that it was they, through their support for free people of colour, who had encouraged and enflamed the slave rebellion.
One forceful exponent of this view was Bernard-Barnabé O’Shiell, who owned a plantation in southern Saint-Domingue and whose family had become rich through the slave trade. From exile in Philadelphia, he wrote about the injustices that had been thrust upon the colons, insisting that the gens de couleur were the ‘direct and immediate force of the slave revolt’.10 Another refugee from Saint-Domingue, the Marquis de Rouvray, agreed, and he had no doubt where the blame should lie. Some years later, writing to his daughter from exile in Philadelphia, he pointed the finger at the Amis des Noirs and reminded her of the pamphlets which he had penned back in the first months of the Revolution. ‘It was in the month of June 1789 that I wrote that the sect of the Amis des Noirs contemplated the destruction of all thrones, all forms of government, all religions, of the globe.’ Their warped ideas of philanthropy, he believed, were, more than any other element, responsible for the ills that had overtaken the colony in the intervening years.11
That, of course, was a planter’s view of events, a view forged in a world dominated by slavery and the plantation economy and exacerbated by what he and his fellow-colons had endured. In their eyes, the liberalism of the French Revolution was a false god that threatened both their economic prosperity and their position of racial superiority in Saint-Domingue. They saw it as the delusion of Parisian intellectuals who had no experience of colonial life, and they looked to the Atlantic ports of France for allies in their struggle.
But the merchants of France’s west coast ports would be difficult to convince, and in 1790 and 1791 Bordeaux’s Chamber of commerce pointedly sought other opinions, often from ships’ captains returning home from the islands, that could provide an independent view of the violence in Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue. They took such reports seriously, and when fresh news arrived of troubles in the islands, a call would go out to the principal merchants in the port to assemble in the Chamber to assimilate its significance.12 They feared that the Creoles were seeking to exploit their proximity to the United States and to maximize their own profits by selling their produce on the open market; and they knew of the reputation of the Caribbean for smuggling and contraband. In this regard, they saw a clear conflict of interest between the freebooting islanders on the one hand and the merchants, importers and shipping agents of France’s Atlantic ports on the other.
But how did the chambers of commerce of the Atlantic ports interpret their interests in the early months of the Revolution? The discussions of the Bordeaux Chamber in 1789 and 1790 suggest that the two issues that dominated their agenda were a persistent unease that the government might abolish the slave trade and a shortage of hard currency that was harming liquidity and making trading conditions more difficult.13 These were not uniquely commercial issues: as they explained in an address to their deputies in the Assembly, any damage inflicted on commerce would have social ramifications, too, since it would both affect public finances and spread misery and unemployment among the population at large. The suspension of shipping in the port would, they insisted, ‘have knock-on effects on all classes of citizens’, and this would in turn present a risk of tumult and disorder.14 They feared such disorder not only because they had witnessed in Paris the violence that could result, but also because they felt the anger of the city’s workers turning against themselves, an anger that was fuelled by unemployment and by allegations of grain-hoarding and price-fixing.15 These allegations were, they protested, unfounded, but they were creating class conflict in the city that would lead to insurrection. The merchants liked to see themselves as the guardians of the social well-being of their fellow-citizens, and they staked their claim to speak in the name of the community at large. Trade, they believed, lay at the heart of the city’s economic and cultural life, and if trade were to decline these risked withering and dying. They felt a responsibility to the wider community which they had no intention of betraying.
Defending Bordeaux’s interests could mean rejecting pleas for assistance from elsewhere. And so, when in 1791 the Chamber debated a plea from the planters of Martinique to intervene following violence on the island, the merchants held back from making any statement that could enflame opinion. In an address on trade and the colonies, the Chamber eschewed any language that might be seen as political or partisan, any hint of favouring one side against the other, instead observing what they termed ‘the most impartial neutrality’. Even if it was clear to many of those present that one side was more to blame, they realized that it was not in Bordeaux’s interest to get involved in what was a matter for Martinique. ‘Commerce could not act as an interested party,’ noted the Chamber, ‘far less should it presume to pass judgement.’16 Its role should be limited to maintaining prosperity and, through prosperity, to contributing to social harmony at home. For this reason they refused to support the planters’ plea to be recognized as a province of France or to establish a degree of autonomy from the metropole. Provinces enjoyed rights and traditions, and for this reason alone, in the merchants’ view, any such claim must be resisted. The fact that some colonists had been born there, or that they had emigrated there to make a new life freed from the constraints of French laws and privileges, should make no difference, and the different chambers all insisted that Saint-Domingue and the other Caribbean islands were, and could only be, colonies whose role and duty were to serve the interests of France and contribute to its prosperity. The public exchange with the planters’ lobby could often be bitter. In the Year III, for instance, a French merchant in Philadelphia expressed his disdain for the planters and for what he saw as their overblown political pretensions. Their claims to autonomy, he believed, had little basis in fact or in law, and he declared, somewhat dismissively, that ‘the colonies are possessions, inalienable possessions, if you like, but they are nothing other than that. Their relations with the metropole are founded quite simply on trade.’17
The relations between the planters and the revolutionaries had never been easy. From the very beginning of the Revolution, the concerns of the colons had been clear, with many fearful of reform and some prepared to align themselves openly with the cause of monarchy and political counter-revolution to defend their interests. Others seemed ready to engage with the new revolutionary state. Some of their representatives, who were in Paris in 1788, offered to help draw up a new constitution for the islands; but the white planters in Saint-Domingue were not consulted directly, and there was resentment that it would be France, and not Saint-Domingue, that would take the final decision on matters that uniquely concerned them. Elections to the Estates-General were hastily called on the initiative of a Committee of the Colons, but with no legitimation as they had not been called by the King. In all, thirty-one deputies were chosen, sixteen of them planters living on their habitations, the other fifteen plantation owners resident in France. But the elections were greeted with hostility and widespread indifference. The colons understood, as Gabriel Debien explains, that even if the deputies loyally represented their grievances in Paris, their very participation in the system meant that all initiative relating to Saint-Domingue would henceforth lie with the French government, and that their space for independent action would be severely curtailed. They would be treated as a colony, without the powers of a province. More seriously, amid the calls for political reform and for the cause of human rights, their slave-holding lifestyle was directly threatened. Within two months they reacted by setting up a club to press for their interests, the interests of the white colons, in opposition, should it prove necessary, to the claims of the French merchant community. Battle lines were being drawn, and the Club Massiac, which would champion the interests of the West Indian planters in France and would spearhead reaction to colonial reforms, was born.18
Central to these interests, of course, was the maintenance of slave labour on the plantations and of the slave trade that provided it. The language of human rights which the Revolution promoted did not promise well, and the planter lobby was soon persuaded that abolitionists in France would stop at nothing—even the loss of France’s colonial possessions—to salve their liberal conscience on the question. A pamphlet published in Paris in June 1789 took the attack to the abolitionists, branding them as ideologues of the most harmful kind, the ‘defenders of the blacks’ who could justly have labelled themselves ‘persecutors of the whites’. The anonymous author scoffs at their belief that slavery was ‘a revolting form of usurpation’, or that it was ‘the greatest evil that could exist on earth’.19 It was, he argued, the wrong starting point for debate. The deputies should consider what was being put at risk by their ideas: not only their prosperity but France’s entire colonial project, a project which Britain was keen to destroy. The pamphlet concluded that, while no one would claim that the slave economy was perfect, its abolition would destroy many livelihoods and that, if any other labour system could be found to produce the same results, then, and only then, could slavery be safely abolished. The French should not be expected to solve the world’s problems alone. ‘Slavery is an evil’, it conceded, but an evil that was born in Africa; ‘it exists, and it is not the colons who are responsible for it’. In time-honoured style, it down-played the cruelty of slavery as it was practised in the Americas and painted an idealized picture of simple but healthy living on plantations overseen by kindly and paternalistic planters. While conceding that slavery might be vicious in principle, it insisted that it need not be vicious in practice.20
Besides, by 1791 they were facing a new crisis with reports of slave violence and a rejection of governmental authority that both jeopardized French control of the island and spread panic among merchants in France. Addressing the National Assembly, a delegation from Le Havre insisted that it was not just their own losses that concerned them; it was the future of France itself. ‘They are afraid when they see the sources of national prosperity wither,’ they explained, ‘when they see the prosperity of the State, the raw materials that fuel manufacturing, the foodstuffs needed to sustain the poor all vanishing along with their fortune.’21 The majority firmly believed that, in some form, the institution of slavery must be maintained. In another address to the National Assembly, the merchants of Bordeaux made what had become the customary defence of the slave trade, declaring themselves fearful of the misery that abolition would mean for France. Slavery was, of course, to be abhorred, yet there were compelling social reasons to maintain it, ‘considerations of public and general interest’ that must overrule ‘ideas formed by the heart’. The merchants, too, insisted that slavery was the key to the whole colonial system that lay at the heart of France’s economic growth. And they went on to question, in the customary language of the anti-abolition lobby, claims that slavery had brought misery to millions of Africans. Those people had been enslaved in Africa, where they had been rescued from death in war; if they were condemned to hard work in America, their fate was not so different from that of the paid labourer in Europe; and if some slaves were abused by cruel masters, they were surely a minority. Besides, slavery was the basis of a whole social system, and humanitarian arguments could be advanced in its defence. There was no natural state to which the slaves could be returned. ‘It would be a mistake,’ the merchants insisted, ‘to see Africa as a part of the world where men enjoyed the plenitude of their rights.’ By bringing Africans to the New World, French slavers might even have saved them from certain misery and early death.22
But the merchants had little wish to identify too strongly with the interests of the colons, for their principal concerns lay elsewhere. Alongside their expressed fear of popular insurrection went that, traditional in merchant communities, of involvement in yet another war. Their commerce and their profits had suffered badly in the wars of the eighteenth century, and merchants were only too keenly aware of the danger which another naval war with England represented. Did revolution make war more likely? From the outset this question was being asked, and, despite the insistence of the revolutionaries that they would never initiate war against other peoples, there was reason for circumspection. In July 1790, in response to demands for an enhanced armaments programme, they expressed alarm lest the move be misinterpreted and actually cause a new war. They saw such a programme as menacing, as a hostile or belligerent act. They were, they said, as patriotic as any other group, but they admitted to having concerns about the increased tension between states. ‘We fear,’ they said, ‘that a first hostile act, even if it were to be disavowed by the Nation and its representatives, might compromise our possessions, our peace of mind, and our fortunes.’23 Memories of losses incurred in the Seven Years’ War and the War of American Independence were too raw, and for many too painful, to forget, and it was not in the interests of the merchant community to put their hard-fought prosperity at jeopardy.
In short, the merchant communities were apprehensive from the outset, fearing that in implementing its ideals, the Revolution might unleash forces that it could not control and upset the racial balance on which the colonial economy depended. They listened to the arguments on both sides, to the Amis des Noirs as well as the Club Massiac; and they received address after address from the owners of habitations in Saint-Domingue soliciting their support and asking them to intervene with the government in Paris. But too often the intervention they sought meant sending troops to the Caribbean and the use of military force to defend the plantations, especially after violence broke out and the colons and their families faced physical dangers. The chambers of commerce were faced with a dilemma. Did they urge military intervention to reinstate a social and ethnic order on which their trade seemed to depend? Did they make sacrifices in support of planters who had expressed the desire to distance themselves from the mother country and end all trading monopolies with France? Or did they take a very different risk, that by alienating the colonists they would further drive a wedge between them and Paris?
It was clear to many in the French port cities that their interests and those of the colonists did not always coincide, and that, despite their French origins and the strong links that many of them maintained with France, the Creoles had become a people apart, driven by quite different priorities from their continental cousins.24 Their loyalty to France and its government could not be taken for granted. In an address of August 1791, a group calling themselves the ‘merchants and ships’ captains of Le Havre’ informed the government of the new depths of anger that they had witnessed in Le Cap. Some colonists were even talking of welcoming the British into Saint-Domingue as they held Paris responsible for the social and political degradation they had suffered. They insisted that the revolutionary ideals espoused by the National Assembly constituted ‘a perfidious and bloodthirsty doctrine’ that would snuff out the last embers of colonial prosperity and would result in economic ruin.25 Such was their outrage that the two communities, French and Creole, could no longer be seen as sharing common interests, and that calls for independence from France were becoming more insistent. A political crisis, warned the merchants, was looming.
The primary source of conflict between the revolutionaries and the white population of the Antilles in the summer of 1791 was no longer the vague threat of what the National Assembly might do at some unspecified date in the future. It was a specific measure, the decree of 15 May granting full civil rights to free men of colour, including the right to stand for election to the colonial assemblies, a measure which, as we have seen, resulted in a much sharper division between free and enslaved, between whites and mulattoes on the one hand and black Africans on the other. It resulted in something of a social revolution in the Antilles, with mulattoes rushing to take advantage of their new freedoms, buying property, investing in plantations, and becoming slave-owners in their turn. For the white colons, this had another effect: in a society where rights largely coincided with ethnicity, the reform resulted in a perceived loss of status, depriving them of a privilege that had been theirs alone. Most hated the change, and warned of the danger that it would incite further demands and violence, even that it would prove to be a staging-post towards the liberation of the Caribbean’s black slaves. In response, petitions from Nantes, Dunkirk, Saint-Malo, and Bordeaux warned of the disaster that threatened, bringing the end of the colonial system as well as of the slave economy. But merchant opinion in the port cities was not unanimous on this point; indeed, for some, granting civil rights to free men of colour was a question of simple justice and a safety-valve against future violence. In Bordeaux, merchants spoke out for as well as against the decree, earning the congratulations of the Amis des Noirs for their selflessness. On 10 July the Amis congratulated the city for its magnanimity, and for putting the rights of man above base self-interest. The mayor had written to other cities and to the committees that had been formed in the colonies in support of the decree, in defiance of what the Amis called ‘the notorious calculations of the traders in human flesh and the colons’. Nothing, they insisted, could be ‘more touching’ or ‘better reasoned’ than the case that had been set out.26 But it won few friends in the colonies.
What angered many of the planters most was the attack on their authority which the decree of 15 May implied. They had not been consulted on the wording of the decree, and they felt bitter that their knowledge of the situation on the ground, on the plantations and in the sugar fields, should have counted for nothing. The letters sent by the Marquise de Rouvray to her daughter express something of the bitterness felt by leading members of the planter community at the indifference shown towards them by the radicals in the Assembly. Like her husband a royalist with counter-revolutionary instincts, she resented being left out of the discussion almost as much as she feared the implications of the measure itself. ‘It is not the decree itself that is most shocking’, she insisted, so much as ‘the violation of our right to pronounce on that class of men who will now engage the Assembly in terrible consequences’. Unfortunately, she observed, there were currently very few proprietors on their estates; most were in France, leaving agents and factors in charge. And they were the people whose interest and experience made them the best judges.27 Their silence merely left the way open for the demagogues of the Amis des Noirs who had, she believed, the deliberate aim of causing trouble, ‘because it is in periods of popular violence that these people commit their crimes’.28
There was, however, from the planters’ perspective, one saving grace. The National Assembly had already decided, as an article of the constitution, ‘that no law would be passed on matters concerning the inhabitants of the colonies except when they had asked for it in due form and in precisely-worded terms’. And therein lay their salvation. On this the mercantile communities of the Atlantic ports were largely agreed. The merchants of Nantes, for instance, warned that the decree of 15 May, though ‘sublime in the eyes of philosophy, and dictated by the love of humanity’, would have had fateful consequences ‘but for the fact that it would be impossible to carry it into law in the colonies’.29 This clearly was the cause of great relief, since it indicated that the powers of the government in colonial matters were not unlimited. In Bordeaux the merchants noted approvingly that the Assembly’s decree had specifically recognized that no law could be passed in Paris on the legal status of slaves except where it was requested to do so by the colonial assemblies themselves.30 For many in the French merchant community, this was a crucial safety-valve, since the colons’ conservatism on questions of slavery could surely be assumed. They found it quite natural that the colonists should demand protection from some of the government’s more radical measures, and they accepted that the law of France could not adequately provide for their needs. When a conflict of interests arose, as in this case, the merchants of the Atlantic ports seemed to assume that it was their duty to speak up on the colonists’ behalf, often adopting a paternalistic tone that reflected their one-sided vision of metropolitan-colonial relations, and implying that, as a result of their regular commercial exchanges with the islands, they were uniquely placed to represent them in the affairs of the nation.31
It was a bold claim, and one that came under concentrated attack from supporters of abolition. They, too, recognized the importance of the Assembly’s concession and feared that it would dilute the reforming purpose of the legislation by maintaining the ethnic and juridical superiority of the white planters. In a strongly worded pamphlet, Brissot turned his fire on Antoine Barnave, one of the early revolutionary leaders and an outspoken opponent of extending citizenship to non-whites. In granting decision-making powers to the colonial assemblies, argued Brissot, he had violated the principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, to which he had been so deeply committed back in 1789. For what it meant was that the Assembly would never try to impose a measure that had not the approval of the white population. ‘Colonies’ here meant ‘whites’. ‘And what do the whites want?’ he demanded rhetorically, before going on to tease out his own meaning: ‘That the men of colour should not be active citizens; as a consequence, you are stripping the men of colour of their rights, whether you do so formally or by the uncertainty into which you cast them.’ Either way, it meant an inversion of the liberal progress which the early Revolution had so consistently championed.32 And it left those of mixed blood defenceless against the despotism of the white colonists. What future was there for them other than through violence? For ‘they are victims handed over to their oppressors, unless, taking advantage of their right to resist oppression, they take up arms against the whites and force them to give them justice’.33 The abbé Grégoire pressed home the point. ‘Would you dare to imply that only whites are born and live free and equal in rights?’ he challenged Barnave. ‘Would you seek to relativize this morality, which applies equally to all regions of the world and to all historical periods?’34
What followed would be a crisis every bit as serious as the colons had predicted, with a succession of riots and insurrections, arson attacks on plantations, and murders of plantation managers.35 Saint-Domingue in the summer months of 1791 staged the first successful slave rising in the French Caribbean, though there had been earlier attempts at insurrection in Martinique, Guadeloupe, St Lucia, and French Guyana as well as in various parts of Saint-Domingue itself.36 Trade plummeted, and commercial anxiety was soon reflected in a new burst of addresses and pamphlets from the merchant cities of the Atlantic and Channel coasts. Some tried to be emollient, appealing to the moderation and reasonableness of the deputies and praising the new constitution that had been drawn up for the islands. It was, declared the Chamber of commerce in Dunkirk, right that civil liberties should be granted to gens de couleur, though the hostility with which the decree had been received in the islands, and the extreme violence that had greeted it, gave them cause for thought. ‘All the news that we are getting from Saint-Domingue confirm that the colony is in a state of great ferment,’ it declared: ‘minds are embittered, troubles at their peak, trade with France exposed to the most extreme reverses, and public finances threatened at their very source.’ These were, added the merchants emphatically, ‘the sad consequences that result from those prejudices which reason and sane philosophy no doubt reprove, but which have established a line of demarcation that cannot be suddenly rescinded without risking the gravest dangers’.37 Their colleagues in Saint-Malo were less diplomatic. The only possible beneficiaries of the decree, they insisted, would be Great Britain and her empire, with France necessarily the loser.38 It was a note of despair which would be repeated at every juncture in the crisis, the allegation that Britain not only was benefiting from French misfortunes but also was manipulating the situation for her own ends. In his Traité d’économie politique et de commerce des colonies, published in 1801, Pierre-François Page noted that Britain made no attempt to hide her imperialist aspirations or her hunger to seize France’s colonies. With Britain, he claims, it is ‘what she calls her prosperity’—he defines this as ‘the capacity to appropriate all the riches of the world’—that allows her to ‘demoralize men, corrupt governments and overthrow nations’.39
Suspicions of British motives extended to every aspect of colonial policy, with some concluding that the British had deliberately sought to undermine order In France’s colonies by encouraging slave unrest. By the autumn of 1791, reports of violence on the plantations were legion, some involving arson, the wanton destruction of property and the killing of plantation owners and their families. In most instances, news of slave insurrections came to the west-coast ports not by way of the Assembly but directly, from ships’ captains and their crews on their return from the islands, some of whom brought alarming tales of massacres and orgies of violence. In Nantes in 1791, for instance, some of the first reports of the slave insurrection came from the captain of a slave ship, the Trois Frères, which had left Saint-Louis on 29 September and arrived into Nantes on 12 November; his account was lurid and horrifying, but he was not an eye-witness and was merely passing on—possibly in an exaggerated form—rumours that he had picked up while in the Antilles. On another occasion, the captain of Le Courier du Cap changed course and diverted to Nantes so that he could inform his fellow-townsmen of the terrible things he had heard. On both occasions the reports spread panic, though the accounts were, of course, unverified.40 Merchants were prudent by nature, seeking verification where they could, and they expressed relief when the initial reports were denied. But the slave revolts were more than local incidents; taken together they posed a threat to the entire colonial system, and the chambers of commerce shared in the general sense of crisis.
As the weeks passed and the scale of the disaster became clear, reports of murder, kidnapping, and plantation-burning alarmed the entire merchant community, especially those whose relatives had settled in Saint-Domingue or whose companies had employees and agents in the islands. The communities on the two sides of the Atlantic were too entangled, and family interests were too entrenched, for the slave insurrection to pass unheeded. As the violence escalated, moreover, the colons appealed directly to the outside world for assistance, to their nearest neighbours in Cuba, Jamaica, and the eastern seaboard of the United States, but also to their relatives and their commercial contacts in France. They felt outraged at being abandoned to their fate, insisting that the insurrection must be quelled and asking for food, weapons, and troops to be sent from the metropole. Some appealed directly to the merchants of the Atlantic ports. One colon, Delaville, explained that the island economy now lay in ruins, so that ‘all we now think of is defending ourselves; the choice is between victory and death’. Another, Guillaud, addressed his woes directly to the people of Nantes, those he claimed as his fellow-citizens. ‘Will you, brave and generous Nantais, whose courage is the equal of your worth, leave your brothers to be massacred, to have their throats slit, your brothers who have suffered for so long?’ Rather plaintively, he reminded them of the colons’ deep-seated loyalty to France. ‘They are entirely devoted to you and are fighting as much for you as they are for themselves.’41
In response, the slave ports sent a further deputation to Paris to lobby the Assembly. There they also met deputies sent from Saint-Domingue, who, understandably, presented a highly alarmist picture of the misery that had befallen their colony and its inhabitants, the picture of ‘horrors of a kind of which history knows no example’. On the plain of Le Cap, they reported that all buildings ‘without exception’ had been razed to the ground; that no trace remained of the 224 sugar factories that had stood there, and that some 1,600–1,800 coffee plantations had been ravaged. If the violence had temporarily calmed, no one dared to hope that it was over, and few believed that the ambitions of the men of colour were now sated. Here the colons gave vent to the full range of their racial prejudices and nightmares, claiming that their woes all stemmed from the moment when rights and racial distinctions on the island became blurred. ‘The conduct of many of them has always been suspect’, they declared; ‘their plan was to have all the whites murdered in a single night so that they could become the masters of the colony’; and they were convinced that the mulattoes had only offered protection to their masters because they assumed the revolt was over and hoped to save their own skins. The white population still feared the mulattoes, believing that many were traitors to France who were waiting for their moment to rise again, spreading sedition in a bid to subvert the rest of the population. By diffusing such alarmist images, the deputies hoped both to raise money for the colonists and to persuade the assembly to take the exceptional steps that they believed were necessary to defend the colonial interest.42
These exceptional measures almost always involved the use of military force, calls for which became more frequent and sustained after the slave revolts in 1791 and 1792. With opinion in the Atlantic ports radicalized by news of these insurrections, some of their deputies, like Jean-Baptiste Mosneron from Nantes, pressed for French troops to be sent to the islands to defend the planters, but the motion was lost as a majority in the National Assembly now favoured the cause of abolition.43 Besides, which army should they send, and for what purpose? In the Assembly, as in municipal councils, clubs, and popular societies across the West, there was increasing distrust of the aristocratic army officers inherited from the Ancien Régime, many of whom had aligned with the monarchy and who might, it was widely assumed, sympathize with the slave-owners. Their preference was to send out units of the National Guard, which would be more alert to questions of liberty and human rights and less liable than regular units to be contaminated by what Bordeaux’s Club National referred to as ‘aristocratic gangrene’.44 This was not a view restricted to the republican left, and the more moderate club in the city, the Amis de la Constitution, agreed. Bordeaux was the first port to offer to send troops to Saint-Domingue, opening a register where those willing to ‘go to America to support the decree of 15 May on the men of colour’ could volunteer for the voyage.45 Soon other ports followed, citing Bordeaux’s initiative as a sign of patriotism and self-sacrifice. For sending troops to Saint-Domingue was no longer seen as a way of helping the colons; rather they were lending support to the French authorities on the island in a measure that enjoyed the full support of the mulattoes, anxious to secure the benefits of the legislation passed in their favour. On 19 June, indeed, it was the spokesman of the mulatto population, Julien Raimond, who demanded that France despatch 6,000 volunteers to Saint-Domingue to reinforce their position.46 His plea did not go unheeded. It was one of Bordeaux’s deputies, Guadet, who in October urged the Assembly to send troops to the island, adding that the people of Bordeaux would gladly contribute a battalion of National Guards to aid the cause, even though it meant sending them 1,800 miles from home.47 Opinion in the slaving ports had shifted significantly. It was no longer united in opposing reform, but had evolved since 1789 in line with the Revolution’s policy towards the colonies. By this time it enjoyed the full support of the politicians—most frequently linked to the Girondins—who led the municipal councils, clubs, and sections of the West.
In April 1792, the new Legislative Assembly took incisive action, sending 6,000 troops to Saint-Domingue to support the work of the civil commissioners it had sent to the island, Étienne Polverel and Léger-Félicité Sonthonax. Both were committed revolutionaries who had denounced the institution of slavery; and though their official instructions were to restore peace and put down the slave insurrection, they had little sympathy with the colons and adopted a different agenda, advancing the cause of the mulattoes, offering concessions to the black slaves, and antagonizing many of the white settlers, not least among the petits blancs. In Saint-Domingue they found themselves facing two very different challenges: a domestic challenge from the new French governor, General François [can you avoid dividing and hyphenating ‘François’?]-Thomas Galbaud, himself a slave-owner, who was supported by the crews of naval ships in the harbour at Le Cap; and a foreign challenge when France declared war on Spain and the Spanish appealed for the support of the black insurgents in Saint-Domingue. Faced with this double danger, the commissioners responded by outbidding the Spaniards, calling on the thousands of adult males among the slave population of Le Cap to take up arms, in return for which they would be granted their freedom. Though this fell well short of full emancipation, it was a turning-point in French colonial policy. But it proved insufficient to win the loyalty of the wider black population. On 29 August 1793, the commissioners finally took the momentous step of ending slavery on Saint-Domingue, effectively ruling that the Declaration of the Rights of Man now applied to the colonies.48 To enslaved populations across the Americas this sent an empowering message, and an exhilarating one. Not only had a European power abandoned the institution of slavery, but slaves, Africans like themselves, had the capability to liberate themselves from bondage.
For many of the white colons, however, already shocked and demoralized, this was the final betrayal. They had seen plantations burned, families killed, and livelihoods destroyed by the slave insurrections in Saint-Domingue. They felt that they had no choice but to leave, a few returning to France, but many seeking refuge in other slave societies across the Americas, some fleeing to neighbouring Caribbean islands, others to the United States. The exodus which had begun as a trickle of desperate planters and merchants in the early months of the Revolution rapidly turned into a flood.
Some returned to France, but reluctantly and apprehensively, to a France convulsed by revolutionary forces they distrusted and did not properly understand. The first returnees came in the autumn of 1791 as they fled from their plantations and burned-out homes, the women and children often crowding on to the first ships to sail from the islands to Nantes or Bordeaux. All the ports that had engaged in colonial trade received their quota of refugees: Bordeaux, Marseille, La Rochelle, Le Havre, and especially Nantes, the city that had seen so many emigrants leave France to make their fortune. Most came on French merchant ships on their return voyage from the Caribbean, others, especially those who had initially fled to the United States, on American or British ships, in some cases after long and tortuous voyages through foreign ports. Or else they were caught up in the war, some spending long months in captivity. Bailly, for instance, who came originally from the Loir-et-Cher, fled the flames of Le Cap to Philadelphia, where many of his fellow colons took ship for France. But he preferred to return to Saint-Domingue, and in Port-au-Prince he was imprisoned by the British.49 It was only after his escape that he finally found a ship to take him to Nantes. The vacillating fortunes of the war in the Caribbean only made his fate more uncertain and his escape more confused and entangled.
Those who returned to France were often penniless, having lost everything that they possessed in the rioting; they had no credit with merchants and bankers in France, and they were being repatriated to stave off disaster. Not all were refugees. Some were planters who had set up home in France before the Revolution and were now returning from their colonial possessions; others returned to join parents, children, or extended families. But many had nowhere to go, an indiscriminate mixture of victims of the insurrection, planters and petits blancs, clerks and soldiers, artisans and shopkeepers, mulattoes and whites, many lost and bewildered, seeking shelter with strangers and working out how to make a living now that they had no land and no slaves. Those with families in France might pass quickly through the port cities on their journey home. Those without often stayed, in or near the Atlantic ports, making little attempt to integrate into the local community, their eyes still firmly turned towards the ocean and the world they had lost. During the revolutionary years these ‘Americans’ would become a familiar sight on the streets and around the docks of all France’s Atlantic ports. In Nantes alone, the bureau de secours set up to distribute aid to the destitute processed applications for some 1,500 refugees during the revolutionary decade.50 This did not guarantee them a warm reception from the population of the host cities.
The number of letters and petitions from Le Cap and Port-au-Prince diminished as their white residents left and official communication with the islands declined. Besides, there was soon no agency in the French ports through which planters could communicate with the merchant community. After 1790, when the French chambers of commerce were abolished, such news as was received often came through individual trading houses and families. And their tone varied enormously. Some of the letters were cries for help from planters as they saw their lands and their livelihoods destroyed. Others tried to reassure relatives in France or to emphasize such positives as remained. The correspondence of Pierre Letestu with his son-in-law, Elie Lefebvre, provides a good example of a calm, gently optimistic commentary on the events around them. Letestu had worked in many different aspects of the Atlantic trade: he is variously described as an armateur, capitaine de navire, and planteur, as well as a négociant in Honfleur. He now lived in France, corresponding actively with those of his friends who were still resident in the Caribbean. He clearly wanted to believe that plantation life could be resumed following the violence of the previous year. In September 1792, for instance, in response to news of the troubles on Saint-Domingue, he tried to be reassuring, suggesting that they were fortunate, and that the plantation they owned in the south of the island had been spared the worst of the ravages in the north. If supplies of coffee had been looted on the plantation, he remarked, the slaves had not revolted and they were now preparing to bring in the new harvest. ‘You can still console yourself that amidst this general misery you are among the least badly treated.’ His correspondent recognized that the troubles might not be over, and that there could be further disturbances as the full fallout from revolutionary ideas of liberty and equality was understood. But his tone remained positive, the words those of a man who was still thinking to a future in Saint-Domingue and expressing a deeply held patriotism, a determination that the war in Europe was there to be won, and that France must now concentrate on beating the Prussians.51 The years that followed might be difficult, but they did not quench his optimism. By January 1796, indeed, it is clear that he felt sufficiently safe to go back himself to see the extent of the damage; it was, of course, a journey fraught with dangers after the massacres that had swept his and surrounding plantations.52 But, again, it emphasized the degree of commitment that many Frenchmen still felt to the island and their belief that France could still play a significant role in the Caribbean.
For many, their flight in the face of slave insurrections was intended as a temporary displacement, not a permanent dislocation. They were frightened and angered by the losses they had suffered and by the savagery of the attacks on their families and those of others. They declared themselves shocked by the extent of the racial hatred they had encountered, and by the legacy of bitterness it had left behind. Some, indeed, admitted to new levels of fear, fear of being attacked and targeted, their families massacred. And they talked of the spectre of uncontrolled slave violence which was such a persistent theme in race relations in the United States, and especially in the antebellum South.53 But they were not deterred from life in the colonies, nor disabused of the need for a slave economy. Besides, those who had spent a lifetime in Guadeloupe or Saint-Domingue found it difficult to forget the world they had left behind, and—as paintings and sketches of the period show only too clearly—they were haunted by the rich colours and texture of island life.54 The tropical landscape of the Caribbean islands, the luxuriant vegetation, and the gentle pace of life in the plantation houses, all left indelible memories and aroused feelings of affection and nostalgia. If they sought shelter along the eastern seaboard of the United States, or in Cuba or Jamaica, it was often with the intention of making a rapid return once the political climate improved. That optimism would only dissolve with time, and for many of those forced to flee their homes in Le Cap or Jérémie in the aftermath of the murders and arson attacks, there would be no return. They would make their lives in the Americas, in a world dominated by trade and shipping, coffee and sugar cane, a world that identified them as American and where ties with France became increasingly tenuous. For some, indeed, the leaving of Saint-Domingue was only the start of a series of migrations back and forth across the Atlantic world, whether as planters, merchants, shipping agents or crewmen, soldiers or adventurers. In the best of cases they transferred their enterprise and acumen elsewhere, building up huge fortunes and investing in the expansion of America. In the worst, they might find themselves reduced to penury, stripped of all resource and thrown on the mercy of church charities and French communities in the lands where they sought refuge. For them the Saint-Domingue revolution marked the beginning of new challenges, and of a new life of uncertainty.
1 Marcel Dorigny and Bernard Gainot (eds), La Société des Amis des Noirs, 1788–99. Contribution à l’histoire de l’abolition de l’esclavage (Paris: Editions UNESCO, 1998), 26.
2 Lucie Maquerlot, ‘Les résistances au Havre de la Constituante à la Convention’, Cahiers de l’histoire et des mémoires de la traite négrière, de l’esclavage et de leurs abolitions en Normandie, 2 (2009), 23.
3 AD Gironde, 8J 703, Adresses, pamphlets sur le commerce et les colonies, 1790–3.
4 Maquerlot, ‘Les résistances au Havre’, 16.
5 Éric Saugéra, Bordeaux port négrier, 17e–19e siècles (Paris: Karthala, 1995), 115.
6 Le Moniteur, debate of 8 March 1790.
7 Jean-Michel Deveau, Le commerce rochelais face à la Révolution: correspondance de Jean-Baptiste Nairac, 1789–90 (La Rochelle: Rumeur des âges, 1989), 202.
8 Ibid., 203.
9 Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint- Domingue Revolution from below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 102.
10 Ashli White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 81.
11 Malcolm McIntosh and Bernard Weber (eds), Une correspondance familiale au temps des troubles de Saint-Domingue: lettres du marquis et de la marquise de Rouvray à leur fille, Saint-Domingue—Etats-Unis, 1791–96 (Paris: Société de l’histoire des colonies françaises, 1959), 109; White, Encountering Revolution, 81.
12 AD Gironde, C 4438, Chambre de Commerce de Guienne, registre de délibérations, 1791, folio 6.
13 AD Gironde, C 4259, Chambre de Commerce de Guienne, registre de délibérations, 1789, folio 51.
14 AD Gironde, C4266, ‘A MM les Députés de Bordeaux à l’Assemblée Nationale’, 28 August 1791, folio 212.
15 AD Gironde, C4438, Chambre de Commerce de Guienne, registre de délibérations, 1791, folio 4.
16 AD Gironde, C 4438, Chambre de Commerce de Guienne, ‘Réponse aux nouvelles de troubles à Martinique’, 10 September 1791.
17 Manuel Covo, ‘Commerce, empire et révolutions dans le monde atlantique: la colonie française de Saint-Domingue entre métropole et Etats-Unis, ca. 1778 – ca. 1804’ (thèse de doctorat, EHESS, 2013), 657.
18 Gabriel Debien, Les colons de Saint-Domingue et la Révolution: essai sur le Club Massiac (Paris: Armand Colin, 1953), 64–6.
19 Anon, Réclamations et observations des colons sur l’idée de l’abolition de la traite et de l’affranchissement des nègres (Paris, 1789), 6.
20 Ibid., passim.
21 Address from citizens of Le Havre, 8 December 1791, Archives Parlementaires de 1787 à 1860: recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des chambres françaises, vol. 35, 660.
22 AD Gironde, Fonds Bigot, 8J 703, ‘Adresse des négociants de Bordeaux à l’Assemblée Nationale relative à la proposition d’abolir la traite des Nègres’ (n.d.).
23 AD Gironde, 8J 703, Fonds Bigot, Chambre de Commerce de Guienne, address by merchants of Bordeaux to National Assembly, 13 July 1790.
24 Pierre de Vaissière, Saint-Domingue: La société et la vie créoles sous l’ancien régime, 1629–1789 (Paris: Perrin, 1909), passim.
25 AD Loire-Atlantique, 1 ET A 28, ‘Adresse à l’Assemblée Nationale, jointe à une lettre du Havre du 30 août 1791.
26 Saugera, Bordeaux port négrier, 113.
27 McIntosh and Weber, Une correspondance familiale au temps des troubles de Saint-Domingue, 16.
28 Ibid., 20.
29 AD Loire-Atlantique, 1 ET A 28, ‘Pétition à l’Assemblée Nationale par les citoyens commerçants de Nantes’, 20 May 1791.
30 AD Loire-Atlantique, 1 ET A 28, ‘Adresse du Département de la Gironde à l’Assemblée Coloniale’, 24 May 1791.
31 AD Loire-Atlantique, 1 ET A 28, ‘Pétition du commerce de Nantes à l’Assemblée Nationale’, 26 February 1791.
32 Lettre de J.-P. Brissot à M. Barnave, sur ses rapports concernant les colonies, les décrets qui les ont suivis, leurs conséquences fatales (Paris, 1790), 4–5.
33 Ibid., 6.
34 Abbé Grégoire, Lettre aux Philanthropes, sur les malheurs, les droits et les réclamations des gens de couleur de Saint-Domingue et des autres îles françaises de l’Amérique (Paris, 1790), 7.
35 For details of the violence that broke out in France’s colonies, see Chapter 9.
36 Yves Bénot, ‘The chain of slave insurrections in the Caribbean, 1789–91’, in Dorigny (ed), The Abolitions of Slavery, 147–8.
37 AD Loire-Atlantique, 1 ET A 28, ‘Adresse du commerce de Dunkerque à l’Assemblée Nationale’, 12 September 1791.
38 AD Loire-Atlantique, 1 ET A 28, ‘Pétition des citoyens commerçants de Saint-Malo, à l’Assemblée Nationale, attachée à une lettre du 20 septembre 1791, en réponse au décret du 15 mai’.
39 Pierre-François Page, Traité d’économie politique et de commerce des colonies (Paris, an IX), ix.
40 AD Loire-Atlantique, 1 ET A 28, ‘Lettre du commerce de Nantes aux commissaires envoyés à Paris’, 15 November 1791.
41 Armel de Wismes, Nantes et le temps des négriers (Paris: Éditions France-Empire, 1992), 165.
42 AD Loire-Atlantique, 1 ET A 28, letter from deputies from the delegation sent to Paris to the Chamber of commerce of Nantes, 23 November 1791.
43 Steve Chaigneau, ‘Un exemple de mobilité sociale dans le monde de l’armement nantais du dix-huitième siècle’ (D.E.S., Université de Nantes, 1967), 116.
44 AD Gironde, 8J 703, response of the Club National of Bordeaux to the decree on slavery, 21 May 1791.
45 Maquerlot, ‘Les résistances au Havre’, 47.
46 Ibid., 47.
47 Guadet, speech to the Legislative Assembly, 30 October 1791, Archives Parlementaires, 34, 528.
48 Jeremy D. Popkin, A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 48–59.
49 Marcel Grandière, ‘Les réfugiés et les déportés des Antilles à Nantes sous la Révolution’, Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe, 33–4 (1977), 13.
50 Grandière, ‘Les réfugiés et les déportés des Antilles à Nantes’, 4–7.
51 AD Calvados, F 5545, Fonds Letestu, letter from Pierre Letestu to Élie Lefebvre, 29 September 1792.
52 AD Calvados, F 5545, Fonds Letestu, letter from Élie Lefebvre to Madame Letestu, 19 nivôse 4 (9 January 1796).
53 François Furstenberg, In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery and the Making of a Nation (London: Penguin, 2006), 169–70.
54 Musée d’Aquitaine, Regards sur les Antilles: Collection Marcel Chatillon (Bordeaux: Musée d’Aquitaine, 1999).