The Civilizational Limits of Citizenship

Abstract

The 1792 issue of the Historiesch schouwtooneel van ‘s waerelds lotgevallen (Historical Theatre of the World’s Vicissitudes), a respected Dutch spectatorial magazine on international affairs, enthusiastically welcomed the French Legislative’s Assembly’s decision of 15 May 1791 to extend full citizenship to free men of colour born of free parents.1 Once the decree had reached SaintDomingue, the Historiesch schouwtooneel reported, ‘all classes of free inhabitants’ gathered to celebrate the ‘federation-feast’ of July 14. ‘Whites, Mulattoes, free negroes, National Guards, troops of the line’, all joined together to rescue the northern district from the ‘insurgent negroes’ whom the magazine depicted as ‘rebels’. While the magazine cheered ‘the much-needed reconciliation of whites and people of colour’, the extension of citizenship to black rebels seemed out of the question.2 The image of Saint-Dominguan whites and free people of colour brotherly celebrating July 14th, however, was soon substituted for ‘scenes of destruction, murder, arsons, in one word, civil war’, as the Batavian Revolution’s most influential writer and founding father Pieter Paulus put it in his famous 1793 Treatise on Equality.3 The leading Orangist publicist Adriaan Kluit, an outspoken ideological opponent of Paulus and a fierce critic of his compatriot admirers of French revolutionary ideas, similarly wrote of the islands’ ‘catastrophic and miserable state’.4 Kluit imputed the catastrophe of Saint-Domingue to French ‘foolishness’. They had ‘introduced there [Saint-Domingue] mistaken doctrines of liberty [...] and principles under the guise of lovely appearances’, he fulminated, ‘and endeavoured to let impracticable maxims of a reckless Patriotism