The Turn Away from French Universalism

Abstract

In late January 1794 a remarkable delegation of three Saint-Domingue deputies arrived in Paris: Louis Dufay, a French-born white planter; Jean-Baptiste Belley, a formerly enslaved black army officer; and Jean-Baptiste Mills, a free coloured man. Despite considerable opposition from the white planter lobby, the ‘tricolor’ delegation secured seats in the National Convention as representatives of Saint-Domingue’s Northern Province. After a powerful speech by Dufay on February 3, the Montagnard-dominated National Convention declared the following day that ‘the slavery of negroes is abolished in all colonies; consequently, it decrees that all men living in the colonies, without distinction of colour, are French citizens and enjoy all the rights guaranteed by the constitution’. The decree was undeniably a major feat: for the first time a national representative body of a major slave-holding Atlantic empire officially decreed the abolition of slavery. Celebrations in the Notre Dame (that had been turned into a ‘Temple of Reason’) and elsewhere in France were accompanied with speeches that were multiracial and universal, at least in spirit. In the following months and years, on more than one occasion, voices in France could be heard praising Saint-Domingue’s black citizens as capable and courageous, and being worthy of their French citizenship.1 Yet the momentous expansion of citizenship within the French colonial empire was also short-lived, politically fragile, and ideologically muddled.2 While the revolutionary momentum of the early 1790s had inspired many radical egalitarian revolutionaries to imagine models of equal imperial citizenship within a single constitutional order, the decree of 16 pluviôse an ii (February 4, 1794) abolishing slavery and assigning French citizenship to black slaves within the French empire was neither a direct result nor a straightforward victory of a universalist ideology proclaiming liberté and égalité.3 At the time of the voting