Saint-Domingue, Rights, and Empire

Between 1789 and 1804 black slaves and free men of colour transformed the French plantation colony of Saint-Domingue into the independent state of Haiti. What initially began as an attempt of white French planters seeking representation in the newly summoned Estates General and wealthy so-called gens de couleur (free men of colour) demanding an end to racial discrimination, turned into a full-blown revolution when a massive slave insurrection broke out in the summer of 1791. A bloody civil war racked the island for more than a decade. With French, Spanish, and English armies invading the island and thousands of refugees fleeing to other Caribbean islands and North America, the revolutionary events in Saint-Domingue soon acquired international dimensions. News of the island’s ‘disaster’ travelled far and wide. What was perhaps most amazing to observers at the time, apart from the reported scenes of violence and atrocities of civil war, was the interaction between metropolitan France and her colony’s inhabitants. In 1792, after some hesitant and contradictory measures, the French Legislative Assembly granted free men of colour full citizenship; two years later, on February 4, 1794, the National Convention ratified the emancipation of slaves into citizens of the French Republic. Ten years later, despite Napoleon Bonaparte’s attempt to re-establish control over the colony and restore slavery by sending a massive military expedition force, an army of black and coloured revolutionaries founded the first black independent state in America.1 The succession of revolutionary events that has come to be known as the Haitian Revolution sent shockwaves throughout the Atlantic world. In the