A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution. Jeremy D. Popkin
a black leader would soon “raise the sacred banner of liberty” and lead a movement to destroy the institution.9 Raynal’s book circulated freely in Saint-Domingue; it is often claimed that Toussaint Louverture had read it. Raynal himself had connections with royal administrators in charge of the colonies, and colonists feared that his ideas might influence official policy. Other critics challenged colonial policy on economic grounds, arguing that the cost of defending and administering overseas territories outweighed the profits they produced.
The French government’s actions during the decades before the revolution were confused and often contradictory. While some officials hoped to reduce the cruelty of slavery, others were more concerned about the possibility of blacks entering France itself. A 1777 edict, the police des noirs, expressed fears about racial mixing and set up a registration system meant to exclude blacks from the metropole.10 In Saint-Domingue itself, royal officials imposed new restrictions on the free population of color. The American Revolution added to the ferment under way in the New World. The conflict interrupted Saint-Domingue’s trade with Europe and its supply of new captives from Africa, reminding the colonists of their vulnerability to disruptions resulting from France’s foreign policy. White planters were alarmed when the French administration recruited free men of color to join a military expedition sent to besiege British forces in Savannah, Georgia, in 1779. Among the participants in this unsuccessful campaign were André Rigaud, who would later become Toussaint Louverture’s most important political rival, and a number of other figures who would play important roles in the events of the Haitian Revolution.
With the end of the American war in 1783, Saint-Domingue’s seemingly irresistible economic rise resumed. To make up for the cutoff of imported captives during the war, planters purchased record numbers of new African laborers, and a new wave of whites arrived from France. A decree in August 1784 opened Saint-Domingue’s major ports to trade with the newly independent United States. Eagerly welcomed by the colonists, this breach of the exclusif was bitterly opposed by French merchant interests. Although they appreciated the new trade law, the colonists were jolted when the French government issued ordinances on 3 December 1784 and 23 December 1785 intended to mitigate some of the worst abuses of the slave system. Masters and plantation managers were required to keep accurate records of the food and clothing provided to their slaves, and the provisions of the Code Noir allowing enslaved blacks to complain about mistreatment were restated. The colonists reacted violently to what they denounced as an example of metropolitan “despotism.” “This edict violates the sacred rights of property, and puts a dagger in the hands of the slaves, by giving control over their discipline and their regime to someone other than their masters,” one of them wrote.11 To silence this opposition, in January 1787 the French government shut down the Conseil supérieur, the main law court in Cap Français, and merged it with the court in Port-au-Prince. This measure further angered the white colonists, some of whom were ready to call for a revolt like the movement in 1768–9.
By the beginning of 1787, the French government’s attempt to deal with its growing financial problems had started the chain of events that would lead to a full-fledged revolution two years later. Saint-Domingue’s white colonists followed the stages of the pre-revolutionary crisis of 1787 and 1788 closely, and tried to calculate how to turn it to their own advantage. At the same time, they realized that they faced a new danger. In Paris in February 1788, a group of French reformers led by a well-known pamphleteer, Jacques-Pierre Brissot, founded the Society of the Friends of the Blacks. Inspired by the British campaign to abolish the slave trade, the Friends of the Blacks denounced slavery as a violation of natural rights. Its members, who included a number of wealthy aristocrats with properties in the colonies, shared the general European prejudice that blacks were the products of a primitive civilization. The society’s manifestoes called for a gradual phasing out of slavery that, its members claimed, would do no damage to the interests of slaveowners. Despite the moderation of its program, the Society of the Friends of the Blacks clearly underlined the contradiction between the ideals of liberty and equality that the self-proclaimed “patriot” movement in France was demanding and the realities of colonial life. The fact that the French government tolerated the society’s public meetings made the white colonists even more determined to defend their own interests.
Saint-Domingue and the French Revolution
When Louis XVI’s ministers announced, in the summer of 1788, that they were going to summon an elected assembly, the Estates General, to deal with the monarchy’s financial crisis, white landowners in Saint-Domingue immediately began a campaign to obtain seats for themselves. Their spokesmen cast the colonists as victims of an arbitrary government that imposed rules on them without consultation and favored metropolitan merchants over plantation-owners. Recognizing that the enthusiasm for liberty that was sweeping France made an overt defense of slavery risky, they emphasized the economic importance of the colonies and accused the Society of the Friends of the Blacks of promoting impractical utopian ideas. The Friends of the Blacks tried to persuade local electoral assemblies in France to include calls for the reform or abolition of slavery in the cahiers, or lists of grievances that they drew up in the first months of 1789. Few of the cahiers actually mentioned slavery, but those that did clearly identified the institution as a violation of natural rights and Christian values. On 17 June 1789, when the deputies of the Third Estate, the representatives of France’s commoners, took the radical step of challenging the king and the country’s privileged groups, the clergy and the nobility, by proclaiming themselves the National Assembly, the would-be representatives of the white colonists supported them. Some colonists threw themselves into the metropolitan revolutionary movement. Moreau de Saint-Méry, one of the main leaders of protests against the royal administration’s actions in Saint-Domingue, presided over the Paris city council on the afternoon of 14 July 1789, the day the Bastille was stormed.12
Although many members of the new National Assembly voiced objections to slavery, on 4 July 1789 the deputies voted to give Saint-Domingue six seats, thereby acknowledging the colonies as an integral part of the new national community. By this time, some Saint-Domingue colonists had begun to realize the danger that the new national legislature, in which they were only a small minority, might pass laws that would endanger the institution of slavery, but their protests were ignored by other colonial property-owners who were eager to become deputies. Given that as many as 150 of the 1,200 National Assembly deputies had a direct economic interest in the colonies, it seemed unlikely that that body would do anything to jeopardize the islands’ prosperity. The situation changed after the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, which pushed the French revolutionary movement in a radical direction. Three weeks later, on 4 August 1789, the National Assembly voted to abolish all the special privileges that defined social hierarchy in France. One deputy called for the assembly to consider abolishing slavery as well, although his motion was ignored. On 26 August 1789, however, the assembly passed its famous Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, whose first article proclaimed that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” Honoré Mirabeau, one of the most prominent revolutionary spokesmen and a member of the Society of Friends of the Blacks, insisted in his newspaper that the clear meaning of the Declaration was that “there are not, and cannot be, either in France or in any country under French laws, any other men than free men, men equal to one another.”13 The assembly did not listen to Mirabeau, instead deciding that the question of whether the Declaration of Rights applied to the colonies would be settled at a later date. Slaveowners in the colonies understood the danger, however. In Saint-Domingue, the local authorities prohibited the circulation of any newspapers from France because of the subversive ideas they might spread. A short-lived slave uprising in Martinique in August 1789 stoked the white colonists’ fears about the impact of news from France.
While Saint-Domingue’s white colonists tried to exploit the French revolutionary crisis to gain autonomy for themselves without endangering slavery, members of the colony’s free population of color saw the new principles of 1789 as an opportunity to claim political rights for themselves. Already in 1784 a wealthy free man of color, Julien Raimond, had gone to France to lobby on behalf of his group; he had received some encouragement from royal officials who saw his group as more loyal to France than the whites. When whites excluded free