Seminar Reading: Week 20

Saint-Domingue and Haitian Revolution I

Weeks 20, 21 and 22 are devoted to the Haitian Revolution.

France's empire shrank significantly after its defeat in the Seven Years War (1756-1763). The little that remained to it, and especially the slave colony of Saint Domingue (Haiti today), generated enormous wealth but also extreme human suffering. Over the eighteenth century, more than a million Blacks were taken by French traders in Africa and sold into slavery in America. By the 1780s, the French slave trade exceeded that of the British and Portuguese, and in 1790 alone, they shipped more than 54000 to the West Indies. Nearly 15% died on the 'Middle Passage' across the Atlantic. Conditions once they arrived were horrific. Slaves lived on average for only 7-10 years. Owners found it more efficient to work them to death and replace them with new ones than to provide for them in old age.

There were a number of free blacks, some of mixed race, on Saint Domingue, and some were even slave owners themselves. When the Revolution struck, tensions arose over whether they should have political rights. Racial tensions between non-slaves soon spread to the slaves and led to widespread revolts. After some of these escaped slaves came to the rescue of Republican armies in battles with Counterrevolutionary forces, Republicans announced their freedom in the summer of 1793. In February 1794, the National Convention in Paris formally declared the abolition of slavery. But tensions on the island continued as governing officials tried to persuade the ex-slaves to return to the plantations to work. Napoleon sent armies to Saint Domingue to re-enslave Blacks, but his efforts triggered an uprising that culminated in the massacre of nearly all whites and the liberation of the colony, renamed Haiti, in 1804.

The Haitian Revolution haunted slave societies across the Americas, especially the United States. As the first successful racial liberation movement of the modern era, it inspired many decolonisation movements of the twentieth century.

Core primary readings

*L. Mason & T. Rizzo, FRDC, Documents 4, 23, 27

* Grievance ListLink opens in a new window of Free Blacks and Mulattos in 1789.

Viefville des Essarts, On the Emancipation of the NegroesLink opens in a new window (1790).

Core secondary readings

J. Popkin, A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution, intro and chapters 1 & 2.

C. Fick, 'Slavery and Slave Society' in The Making of Haiti: The Saint-Domingue Revolution from Below (1994). Digital copy.

Questions

1. Analyse Toussaint Louverture's letter to General Laveaux. What does it reveal about the nature of freedom and rights?

2. How did understandings of race and the laws governing slavery figure in the political struggles over Saint Domingue?

3. Was the question of Saint Domingue peripheral or central to the French Revolution?

4. Drawing on the primary sources, how would you characterise the relationship between French Revolutionary ideals and colonialism?

Background, overview

M. Covo, ‘Race, Slavery, and Colonies in the French Revolution’ in Andress (ed.), OHFR, pp. 290-307.

F. Régent, ‘Slavery and the Colonies’ in CFR, pp. 397-418.

Further primary sources

Primary Documents on Saint-Domingue and the Haitian Revolution

Laurent Dubois and David Garrigus, Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804 (2017) Library, digital.
David Geggus, The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History (2014). Library, digital.
See the collection on Haiti, in French and English, at the John Carter Brown LibraryLink opens in a new window.
J. Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian Uprising (2007). Library, hardcopy and digital.

Department of History