See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/322489025

“The Haitian Revolution in Atlantic Perspective.” In The Atlantic World

c.1450-c.1820, ed. Nicholas Canny, Philip Morgan, Oxford Handbooks series,
Oxford University Press, 2011. pp...

Chapter · January 2011

CITATIONS READS

0 3,235

1 author:

David Geggus
University of Florida
80 PUBLICATIONS   454 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Saint Domingue and the Haitian Revolution View project

All content following this page was uploaded by David Geggus on 14 January 2018.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Comp. by: PG2448 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001229748 Date:2/12/10
Time:18:45:53 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001229748.3D
OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 2/12/2010, SPi

chapter 31
.......................................................................................................

THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION

IN ATLANTIC PERSPECTIVE
.......................................................................................................

DAVID GEGGUS

Of all the Atlantic revolutions, the fifteen-year struggle that transformed French Saint-
Domingue into independent Haiti produced the greatest degree of social and economic
change, and most fully embodied the contemporary pursuit of freedom, equality, and
independence. Between 1789 and 1804, the Haitian Revolution unfolded as a succession
of major precedents: the winning of colonial representation in a metropolitan assem-
bly, the ending of racial discrimination, the first abolition of slavery in an important
slave society, and the creation of Latin America’s first independent state. Beginning as a
home-rule movement among wealthy white colonists, it rapidly drew in militant free
people of colour who demanded political rights and then set off the largest slave
uprising in the history of the Americas. Sandwiched between the colonial revolutions
of North and South America, and complexly intertwined with the coterminous revolu-
tion in France, Haiti’s revolution has rarely been grouped with these major conflicts
despite its claims to global significance.

AN ATLANTIC COLONY
..................................................................................................................

For much of the eighteenth century, Saint-Domingue was Europe’s main source of
tropical produce. At the height of its importance in the late 1780s, it was exporting more
than the United States, far more than Mexico or Brazil, and it was the largest single
market for the Atlantic slave trade. Saint-Domingue was never ‘the richest colony in
the world’, as some have claimed; the slaves who made up nearly 90 per cent of its
population possessed little and generated little demand for imports or infrastructure.
But it was a dynamo of the Atlantic economy. Besides accounting for one-third of
France’s overseas trade, it had commercial links through its free ports or through
smuggling with many parts of the Americas. The farm produce, fish, and lumber that
Comp. by: PG2448 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001229748 Date:2/12/10
Time:18:45:53 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001229748.3D
OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 2/12/2010, SPi

534 DAVID GEGGUS

its colonists purchased from Yankee skippers in 1790 amounted to one-tenth of US

exports. Most of Saint-Domingue’s livestock and currency came from neighbouring
Spanish colonies. It purchased slaves from British, Danish, and Portuguese, as well
French, merchants. Because France could absorb only a fraction of the colony’s
enormous output, its produce was sold from Scandinavia to the Middle East, in
England and New England, Louisiana and Mexico, and thus achieved far wider
distribution than usually was possible under mercantilist restrictions.
On the eve of the Revolution, about 1,500 vessels visited the colony each year, bringing
more than 1,500 passengers, perhaps 20,000 seamen, and 30,000 enslaved Africans.
Schooners and brigs making the two-week run from Philadelphia and New England,
and smaller vessels from Venezuela, Curaçao, and Cartagena, arrived more frequently
than the big merchantmen from France that usually took two months to cross the
Atlantic. On a fast ship, news could arrive from Europe in four weeks, and the latest
Paris fashions, it was said, took only a little longer to appear in Cap Français, Saint-
Domingue’s elegant main seaport. Colonists flocked to recent French plays and operas in
the colony’s six theatres; many participated in the network of international freemasonry;
a few intellectuals corresponded with learned societies in Europe and North America.
By 1790, the colony’s resident population consisted of about 30,000 whites, a similar
number of free people of colour, and close to half a million slaves. Most were migrants.
More than half the slaves had been born in Africa and roughly three-quarters of the
whites in France. Among local merchants, there was a scattering of cosmopolitan Jews
with transnational families. A few planters had Irish Catholic origins, and Italians were
prominent among the seafarers who thronged the colonial waterfront. The rest were
‘creole’, meaning locally born. Among the whites, creoles did not form a distinctive
group, but in the slave community, they constituted a sort of upper class and increas-
ingly monopolized the positions of slave driver, domestic servant, and artisan craftsman.
One in three adult slaves was creole. The most unusual feature of Saint-Domingue
society was the relative wealth and size of its free coloured sector. As elsewhere in the
Americas, it was victimized by discriminatory laws and extra-legal harassment, but it
included (along with indigent ex-slaves) many free-born and prosperous planters of
mixed racial descent, some of whom were educated in France. Insofar as a sense of creole
or American identity existed in Saint-Domingue, it was probably most developed
among the free people of colour, although they remained an extremely diverse group.
Saint-Domingue’s social structure was typical of Caribbean colonies. The free coloured
sector was proportionately larger than most, but small by Hispanic standards. Although
the slave population was almost as large as that of the US South, the colony was not densely
settled for a West Indian island. The imbalance between slave and free, and between white
and black, was extreme but not unique. The slave population grew at unusual speed on the
eve of the Revolution but so did that of some other colonies. The combination of extreme
demographic imbalance and rapid growth, however, was exceptional.1

1 David Geggus, ‘Saint Domingue on the Eve of Revolution’, in D. Geggus and N. Fiering (eds.), The
World of the Haitian Revolution (Bloomington, IN, 2009), 29–56.
Comp. by: PG2448 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001229748 Date:2/12/10
Time:18:45:53 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001229748.3D
OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 2/12/2010, SPi

THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION 535

A COMPLEX REVOLUTION
..................................................................................................................

The Haitian Revolution, like the French, was several revolutions in one. Because the
whites, free coloureds, and slaves each pursued their own separate struggles, the
Revolution had a social and political complexity not found in the mainland indepen-
dence movements. Whereas in France a briefly successful aristocratic revolt against the
monarchy opened the way for a bourgeois revolution propelled forward by peasant and
popular insurrections, in Saint-Domingue the actions and mutual apprehensions of
whites, free coloureds, and slaves stimulated and impeded by turns their respective
pursuits of autonomy, equality, and freedom. And just as events in Saint-Domingue
shaped the simultaneous revolution in France, the Haitian Revolution evolved from
beginning to end in constant interplay with the metropolitan revolution. How much it
was influenced by the French Revolution, rather than internal factors, is a central
question in its interpretation.
Both revolutions began with the bankrupt monarchy’s decision to call the States-
General in 1789, which opened up the prospect of sweeping change in public life.
Although the colonies were not invited to participate, wealthy planters organized
secretly to choose representatives, who, once in France, argued their way into seats in
the new National Assembly. As the absolute monarchy yielded to the democratic thrust
in France, planters, lawyers, and merchants formed regional assemblies in Saint-
Domingue’s three provinces and converted the militia into a national guard. The
royalist administration—till then all-powerful—could only acquiesce. In April 1790 a
colonial assembly met in the town of Saint-Marc that declared itself sovereign. It drew
up a constitution that entirely ignored the French National Assembly and accorded
very limited roles to the king, French merchants, and the royal governor. Its most
radical deputies supposedly discussed making the colony independent.2
The autonomist spirit of the propertied classes had deep roots. Saint-Domingue’s
planters had long envied their British counterparts their legislative assemblies and they
resented the mercantilist restrictions that hobbled their trade, especially as they
received neither the commercial advantages nor more effective naval protection en-
joyed by British colonists. In the 1720s and 1760s, colonists had rebelled against
metropolitan misrule, and in the 1780s they chafed against a new wave of reforms
that alienated a wide spectrum of white society. The fiscal question was less prominent
than in the other Atlantic revolutions; colonists paid little tax but they considered
themselves victims of a ‘ministerial despotism’ that ignored their needs. While claiming
loyalty to the French crown, some argued that their seventeenth-century forebears had
conquered the colony and offered it to France. To make the point, the Saint-Marc
Assembly opened with a small pageant in buccaneer costumes. The colonists also drew

2 Blanche Maurel, Cahiers de doléances de la colonie de Saint-Domingue (Paris, 1933); Gabriel Debien,
Les Colons de Saint-Domingue et la Révolution française: essai sur le Club Massiac (Paris, 1953).
Comp. by: PG2448 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001229748 Date:2/12/10
Time:18:45:53 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001229748.3D
OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 2/12/2010, SPi

536 DAVID GEGGUS

inspiration from the long conflict in France between aristocratic bodies and the royal
government. Like the metropolitan parlements, Saint-Domingue’s appeal courts,
known as conseils supérieurs, sometimes obstructed new legislation and acted as
spokesmen for popular discontent. Finally, the successful revolt of the United States
was an example that could not be ignored in the 1780s, when US seamen and merchants
were a constant presence in the colony’s main ports. The American Revolutionary War
had given Saint-Domingue a tempting experience of free trade that was soon curtailed,
and it helped drive the French state to the bankruptcy that began the Revolution. Its
ideological impact is hard to gauge but in 1791 the US constitution was published in
Cap Français.3
Saint-Domingue’s white settler revolution that unfolded in the years 1788–92 fits well
into R. R. Palmer’s model of an ‘aristocratic reaction’ leading to democratic revolution.4
The elite individuals who first sought to establish colonial self-government had socially
exclusive aspirations. In late 1789, however, the protests of white wage earners and
small proprietors inspired by the popular revolution in Paris compelled them to accept
an exceptionally broad white male franchise. This added a radical element to the
spectrum of local politics, which remained nonetheless an affair of factions and regions
more than of class. When a new colonial assembly was elected in August 1791, its radical
majority changed its name from ‘Colonial’ to ‘General’ Assembly and it quickly
assumed executive functions.5
It is unlikely that outright independence ever attracted many serious supporters.
Island colonies with tiny white populations were infinitely more vulnerable to naval
blockade, foreign invasion, and slave revolt than those of the mainland. However, a
British protectorate or takeover was an alternative that could appeal to several con-
stituencies: not just liberals and planters indebted to French merchants, but also
conservatives who opposed the French Revolution and its perceived threat to the
slave regime and white supremacy. Colonists made the first of several secret overtures
to the British government in September 1791, in the aftermath of massive rebellions by
slaves and free people of colour.6
The August rebellion of free men of colour in the centre and south of Saint-
Domingue had no connection with the simultaneous slave uprising in the Northern
Plain, although both grew out of a failed revolt in the north led the previous October by
the freeman Vincent Ogé. Ogé and his more militant successors demanded that the
colonial government accord them the equality with whites that the National Assembly
seemed implicitly to have promised in its 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man.

3 Charles Frostin, Les Révoltes blanches à Saint-Domingue (Paris, 1975); Gabriel Debien, Esprit colon et
esprit d’autonomie à Saint-Domingue au XVIII e siècle (Paris, 1954).
4 Robert R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 1959, 1964).
5 For participant histories written respectively from radical and conservative perspectives, see
Chotard, aîné, Précis de la Révolution de Saint-Domingue, depuis la fin de 1789, jusqu’au 18 juin 1794
(Philadelphia, PA, 1795), and Antoine Dalmas, Histoire de la révolution de Saint-Domingue (Paris, 1814).
6 David Patrick Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue,
1793–1798 (Oxford, 1982), 33–67.
Comp. by: PG2448 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001229748 Date:2/12/10
Time:18:45:53 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001229748.3D
OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 2/12/2010, SPi

THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION 537

Discrimination against free non-whites in Saint-Domingue had worsened in the

previous decades at the same time as their numbers and wealth grew rapidly. As they
made up close to half of the militia and most of the rural police, the situation was more
explosive than in other French colonies. The participation of a free coloured battalion
in the American Revolutionary War (as part of a French expeditionary force) boosted
their self-confidence, and in the 1780s some discreetly lobbied the colonial minister for
minor adjustments in the colour bar. Then the French Revolution changed everything.
Within days of the Declaration of Rights, free coloureds visiting or living in Paris
formed the Society of American Colonists to campaign for representation in the
National Assembly and for equal access to jobs and to public assemblies in the colonies.
Free men of colour in Saint-Domingue soon followed suit, petitioning local authorities
to be included in the political process as taxpaying men of property. The Friends of the
Blacks abolitionist society in Paris also took up their cause. The Revolution thus gave
free men of colour a forum and won them allies, but it also increased their opponents’
hostility. Before the Revolution, racial equality meant the right to become a doctor or
lawyer; after 1789 it meant access to political power. Moreover, the claim that conces-
sions to free non-whites would undermine the slave regime was much more compelling
now that abolition was on the agenda of the French Revolution. Pressured by the
colonial lobby, the National Assembly’s response to the race question, and to antislavery,
was embarrassed prevarication and dishonest manoeuvring. The government secretly
tried to prevent men of colour from crossing the Atlantic and it opened their mail.7
In Saint-Domingue, the predominant white response was intransigence and violent
repression. Many colonists were probably willing to co-opt the wealthiest and lightest-
complexioned men of colour with honorary white status, if they could control the
process, but the foregrounding of egalitarian ideology in the revolutionary crisis soon
ruled out such compromise measures. With racist poor whites gaining influence in
local politics, the moment for conciliation passed. In some regions, whites demanded
an oath of respect from men of colour, and there was a series of violent confrontations,
murders, and property seizures that culminated in Ogé’s rebellion in October 1790.
After some initial panic, Ogé’s gathering of 300 armed men in the northern moun-
tains was quickly dispersed. Despite the urging of more militant companions, he
refused to recruit slaves. Most free coloureds sought racial equality, not slave emanci-
pation. Many were slave owners. Yet some had relatives living in slavery, and all were
descended from slaves. Ogé himself had previously evoked an eventual ending of
slavery, and free coloured activists often called for the freeing of slaves of mixed racial
descent, probably to boost their own numbers. It was therefore difficult to separate the
race question from that of slavery. When news of Ogé’s capture and barbarous
execution finally shamed the National Assembly into granting political rights to a
limited number of free coloureds (15 May 1791), it threw Saint-Domingue into uproar.
The governor refused to implement the decree; some whites plotted secession, and the

7 John Garrigus, Before Haiti (New York, 2006); Yvan Debbasch, Couleur et liberté (Paris, 1967).
Comp. by: PG2448 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001229748 Date:2/12/10
Time:18:45:53 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001229748.3D
OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 2/12/2010, SPi

538 DAVID GEGGUS

free coloureds went into rebellion in the south and west regions where they were as
numerous as whites. The fighting was vicious, and the atrocities committed by both
sides made future reconciliation difficult. Yet, when the French government eventually
decreed racial equality (4 April 1792), most white colonists accepted the decision.
This was because they now confronted a more dangerous enemy, whom they were
unable to defeat without the military skills of the free men of colour. The slave uprising
that took over much of the North Province in the autumn of 1791 was the largest,
longest, and most destructive in the history of the Americas. In just the opening month,
hundreds of whites were killed and a thousand plantations were burned. The uprising
drew strength from the rapid growth of the slave population in the 1780s, and the long-
term evolution of the creole language and Vodou religion that knit together the diverse
cultures that composed it. Ogé’s rebellion helped prepare the way in perhaps two
respects. Free coloured militiamen, who helped police the plantations, were disarmed
in some districts in the rebellion’s wake, and a number of free black rebels who went
into hiding after their defeat later resurfaced in the slave insurgents’ ranks. Their role
was not critical, however. The August uprising’s main leaders were all black creole
slaves, notably coachmen and slave drivers. They took advantage of the way the French
Revolution had divided and distracted colonial society and weakened its government
and garrison. They mobilized support by exploiting false rumours of slavery’s abolition
by the king, which were becoming widespread in the Caribbean and probably were
distortions of news of French reforms and of the recent antislavery trend in Britain and
the United States.8
The slaves faced a deeply divided opposition. Free coloureds in the North Province
were split between those who fought against the slave uprising under white leadership;
those who temporarily cooperated with the insurgent slaves in separate units until
racial equality was conceded; and a smaller number of free blacks, like Toussaint
Louverture, who were or became integrated into the slaves’ army. White radicals and
conservatives each blamed the other, as well as free coloureds, for fomenting the slave
revolt. Although some insurgents used libertarian language, most of their leaders
presented themselves as opponents of the French Revolution and as loyal subjects of
the French king. It is possible they knew that, in the American Revolution, slaves who
had fought for the English king against their masters had been offered their freedom.
More certainly, they cast themselves as counter-revolutionaries so as to obtain aid from
the conservative Spanish in neighbouring Santo Domingo. Local and usually brief
insurrections broke out elsewhere in the colony, but the main uprising remained
confined to part of the North Province. There it remained impossible to suppress,

8 Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville, TN,
1990), 85–117; David Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington, IN, 2002), 11–13, 62, 84, 170;
Geggus, ‘Slavery, War, and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean, 1789–1815’, in D. B. Gaspar and
D. Geggus (eds.), A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington,
IN, 1997), 7–12.
Comp. by: PG2448 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001229748 Date:2/12/10
Time:18:45:53 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001229748.3D
OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 2/12/2010, SPi

THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION 539

because of the sheer numbers involved and because the whites had to fight simulta-
neously free coloureds in the west and south as well as slaves in the north.
By early 1793, free coloureds and whites had united in a tense alliance, and the 12,000
troops France sent to Saint-Domingue finally were making major advances. At that
point, however, the entrance of Britain and Spain into the French Revolutionary War
tipped the balance of power in Saint-Domingue. Drawing on its lengthy experience of
dealing with maroon communities in Spanish America, the Spanish government
successfully recruited most of the insurgent slaves with offers of freedom for themselves
and their families, and it sent forces across the Santo Domingo frontier. War with
England meant that France could no longer safely send troops across the Atlantic, and
the prospect of foreign intervention encouraged white colonists to rebel against the
authoritarian representatives of the new French Republic, commissaires Sonthonax and
Polverel. Imposing racial equality in the autumn of 1792, they had closed the colonial
assembly and assumed dictatorial powers. In the summer of 1793, they tried to outbid
the Spanish invaders by offering terms to the insurgent slaves and then, between
August and October, by abolishing slavery throughout Saint-Domingue in a desperate
bid to maintain French rule.9
This landmark decision emerged from the conjuncture of three developments. Most
immediate was the dire military situation confronting the republican officials. Yet slave
emancipation was not just a political calculation, for Sonthonax had been one of the
rare radicals to express abolitionist views early in the French Revolution and, although
he had no authority to end slavery, he was aware that support for abolitionism had
been growing in France. French libertarian ideology, therefore, was a second factor.10
The third, and most obvious, was the undefeated slave insurrection.
This raises the controversial question of the insurgents’ aims: whether they them-
selves had sought a complete elimination of slavery, or just their own freedom, or
merely their leaders’ freedom combined with some reform of slavery. The evidence is
mixed and unclear, because filtered through the passions of contemporary observers,
and complicated by fraudulent documentation. Expectations probably varied among
the tens of thousands in revolt and fluctuated according to military fortunes. Certainly
the principal leaders of the insurgents, Jean-François and Biassou, displayed little
commitment to a generalized abolition of slavery beyond freeing their own families
and principal followers. They twice attempted to negotiate a peace that would have
returned most of their followers to slavery; they rounded up women and children on
the plantations and sold them to their Spanish allies; and they refused to join the

9 David Geggus, ‘The Arming of Slaves during the Haitian Revolution’, in Philip Morgan and
Christopher Brown (eds.), The Arming of Slaves in World History: From Classical Times to the Modern
Age (New Haven, CT, 2006), 220–4; Robert Louis Stein, Léger-Félicité Sonthonax: The Lost Sentinel of the
Republic (Rutherford, NJ, 1985).
10 Jean-Daniel Piquet, L’Émancipation des noirs dans la Révolution française (1789–1795) (Paris, 2002),
219–94.
Comp. by: PG2448 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001229748 Date:2/12/10
Time:18:45:53 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001229748.3D
OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 2/12/2010, SPi

540 DAVID GEGGUS

French Republic after its adoption of freedom for all. They would maintain their
‘church and king’ rhetoric down to their deaths in the early nineteenth century.11
The emancipation decrees of Sonthonax and Polverel aligned the forces of black self-
liberation and French libertarian ideology but, at first, very few insurgents rallied to the
commissioners’ new regime of liberty and equality. Neither in Europe nor the Caribbean did
the French Republic look as though it could defeat its enemies, and most insurgents
continued to play the role of committed royalists. The civil commissioners and their free
coloured allies, therefore, raised armies among the ex-slaves to fight the original slave
insurgents and their Spanish allies, who were joined by British invaders in September
1793. Sonthonax’s initiative, however, did cause the number three insurgent leader, Tous-
saint Louverture, to discreetly adopt his own emancipationist discourse at the same time as
he captured much of northern Saint-Domingue for Spain. Competing with the republicans
as a liberator, Toussaint acted independently of his proslavery Spanish patrons, just as
Sonthonax had abolished slavery without permission from France. Until then, he had shared
Jean-François’s equivocal stance on slave emancipation. Yet he differed in that he personally
had not sold captives and, already a freedman, he was obviously not fighting for his own
freedom. It remains uncertain whether he was a pragmatic altruist and secret originator of
the slave uprising, or an opportunist who belatedly took his cue from Sonthonax.12
In February 1794, at the radical highpoint of the French Revolution, France’s legislature
welcomed the black, white, and brown deputies Sonthonax sent from Saint-Domingue and,
after lengthy debate, extended the abolition of slavery to all French colonies. The emanci-
pated slaves were declared citizens with full constitutional rights. Slave owners were not
compensated and slave emancipation was hailed as a new weapon of war to be wielded
against the colonies of Britain and Spain. It was the first time a sovereign state had abolished
slavery. Henceforth black militancy in the Caribbean was backed by the resources of a
major power. The Constitution of the Year III, drawn up in 1795, ended colonial status and
incorporated the ex-colonies into a unitary French state. The egalitarian promise of these
epoch-making reforms was never fully realized, however. Emancipation was extended to
only two other colonies, Guadeloupe and Guyane, and former slaves who did not serve as
soldiers were everywhere subjected to forced labour, so as to maintain plantation produc-
tion. Electoral arrangements for Saint-Domingue were held up in Paris until January 1798,
and the administration in Guadeloupe simply refused to hold elections.13

11 David Geggus, ‘Print Culture and the Haitian Revolution: The Written and the Spoken Word’,
Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 116/2 (October 2006), 297–314; Geggus, ‘Toussaint
Louverture et l’abolition de l’esclavage à Saint-Domingue’, in Liliane Chauleau (ed.), Les Abolitions dans
les Amériques (Fort de France, 2001), 109–16; Geggus, ‘The Exile of the 1791 Slave Leaders: Spain’s
Resettlement of its Black Auxiliary Troops’, Journal of Haitian Studies, 8/2 (2002), 52–67.
12 David Geggus, ‘Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution’, in R. William Weisberger (ed.),
Profiles of Revolutionaries in Atlantic History, 1750–1850 (New York, 2007), 115–35; Geggus, ‘Toussaint
Louverture avant et après le soulèvement de 1791’, in Franklin Midy (ed.), Mémoire de révolution
d’esclaves à Saint-Domingue (Montreal, 2006), 112–32.
13 Yves Benot, ‘Comment la Convention a-t-elle voté l’abolition de l’esclavage en l’An II?’, Annales
historiques de la Révolution française, 293–4 (1993), 349–61; Miranda Spieler, ‘The Structure of Colonial
Rule during the French Revolution’, William and Mary Quarterly, 66/2 (2009), 365–407; Laurent Dubois,
Comp. by: PG2448 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001229748 Date:2/12/10
Time:18:45:53 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001229748.3D
OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 2/12/2010, SPi

THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION 541

Even before the emancipation decree of 4 February 1794 was known in Saint-
Domingue, several insurgent leaders shifted their allegiance from the Spanish and
British invaders to the embattled republican administration. By far the most important
was Toussaint Louverture. His transfer of support was deviously slow but, once assured
that France had abolished slavery, he turned on the Spanish, their black allies, and the
English in quick succession and inflicted heavy defeats. The balance of power tipped
against the alliance of slave owners, foreign invaders, and their ex-slave mercenaries,
and French rule in Saint-Domingue was secured for another decade, but henceforth the
black revolution held centre stage.
Spain abandoned all of Hispaniola to the French Republic in 1795, but the British
continued to send troops to Saint-Domingue, where they occupied most of the west
and the tip of the southern peninsula until 1798. In collaboration with a mixture of
conservative royalist and radical autonomist whites and propertied free coloureds, they
kept the slave regime functioning with dwindling success. These years of continuous
warfare enabled Toussaint Louverture to forge a larger and stronger army. At least half
of his troops must have been African-born. His officers included a sprinkling of free
coloureds and whites but the most important were creole ex-slaves like Jean-Jacques
Dessalines. Toussaint’s skills proved to be political as well as military. He outma-
noeuvred a succession of white officials sent from France as well as rival generals
among the former slaves and free coloureds, now called anciens libres. In April 1796, he
was declared deputy governor after foiling an anciens libres plot against the French
governor, Étienne Laveaux. In 1797, Sonthonax made him commander-in-chief, but a
few months later Toussaint had Sonthonax deported on trumped-up charges.
After the British were expelled in 1798, the black general faced off against André
Rigaud, who had emerged as leader of the free coloureds. His power base was the south;
Toussaint controlled the north and west. Rigaud was a radical republican who had
favoured slave emancipation; most of his soldiers were former slaves, and he and
Toussaint had cooperated in fighting the British. Without a common enemy, however,
they soon turned on each other. The War of the South (1799–1800) was a power
struggle coloured by class and ethnic tensions. Although Rigaud and other anciens
libres commanders had flouted French rule just as much as had Toussaint, French
officialdom discreetly backed Rigaud for fear that Toussaint’s autonomy was develop-
ing into outright independence.
The ex-slave crushed the anciens libres in the south and those in his own army who
rebelled against him. Their leaders fled to France. In 1793, the free coloureds had
seemed set to dominate Saint-Domingue as the power behind French officials, but
the British occupation had divided them politically and geographically, just when slave
emancipation undermined their wealth and created a latent mass movement that the
ex-slave generals were best able to exploit. By 1800, the influence of the white colonists
had been long eclipsed. Most had emigrated or died in the local massacres that

A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel
Hill, NC, 2004).
Comp. by: PG2448 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001229748 Date:2/12/10
Time:18:45:53 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001229748.3D
OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 2/12/2010, SPi

542 DAVID GEGGUS

punctuated the Revolution’s history. Toussaint Louverture now governed the entire
colony.14
Toussaint maintained the forced labour system that Sonthonax had introduced,
which compelled ex-slaves who did not join the army to continue working on their
plantations in return for a share of the revenue. Most cultivateurs, as they were now
called, preferred to become independent peasants rather than profit-sharing serfs, but
protests were met with corporal punishment and military executions. Only plantation
agriculture and an export economy could finance the black army that guaranteed their
freedom. Toussaint and his fellow officers took over many estates whose owners had
emigrated, and they formed a new black landholding class, alongside the anciens libres
and surviving white planters. Toussaint encouraged refugee planters to return and
resume running their estates, and he consulted white advisers. Agriculture began to
revive. Admirers praised the new regime as a multi-racial experiment, imbued with the
humane and egalitarian values of republican France. Critics condemned a black
dictatorship that paid only lip-service to France and allowed generals to amass personal
fortunes while their unpaid troops exercised a petty tyranny over the rural masses.
Most disturbing for the French government was the independent foreign policy
Toussaint Louverture pursued while posing as a loyal servant of the state. In 1798–9 he
signed secret trade treaties and non-aggression pacts with Britain and the United States
despite their being at war with France. They had become Saint-Domingue’s main
trading partners and Toussaint depended on their supplies. He then expelled from
the colony French privateers that attacked their shipping. Preoccupied with war in
Europe, the Republic could do little, but at the end of 1799 France acquired its own
military strongman. Napoleon Bonaparte hoped to rebuild France’s colonial empire,
and he had no commitment to slave emancipation or racial equality. At first, it seems,
he was undecided whether to overthrow Toussaint Louverture or to enlist him in
France’s war effort. As soon as he came to power, Bonaparte placed the colonies outside
the French constitution, but this may have been to accommodate those colonies (like
Martinique and the Mascareignes) that had maintained slavery. It did not necessarily
mean that he intended to restore the pre-revolutionary status quo in all of them.15
Relations between Louverture and Bonaparte deteriorated in 1801 when the black
general annexed neighbouring Santo Domingo, contrary to French instructions, and
then promulgated his own constitution for Saint-Domingue to fill the legal void left by
Napoleon. Drawn up by white colonists with an autonomist background, Toussaint’s
constitution declared the ex-slave governor general for life with the right to name his
successor. It accorded France no role in the legislative process, and foreshadowed
Bonapartist militarism with its rubber-stamp political institutions. While maintaining

14 The best studies of Toussaint, written from left- and right-wing perspectives, are C. L. R. James,
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York, 1963), and Pierre
Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture: un révolutionnaire noir d’Ancien régime (Paris, 1989).
15 For opposing views, see Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture, 445–75, and Yves Benot, La Démence
coloniale sous Napoléon (Paris, 1992).
Comp. by: PG2448 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001229748 Date:2/12/10
Time:18:45:53 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001229748.3D
OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 2/12/2010, SPi

THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION 543

the forced labour system on the plantations, it declared all Saint-Domingue’s inhabi-
tants free and French, and was put into effect immediately. If Louverture was willing to
antagonize Bonaparte to this degree, some think he should have declared outright
independence and rallied the black population against France. Yet this would have
made French retaliation certain and might have caused the British and Americans to
blockade the island, fearful of the effect on their own slave populations of an indepen-
dent black state. Louverture wanted the substance of independence more than its
trappings and he gambled that France would accept Saint-Domingue’s evolution into
a de facto associated state or dominion.
Bonaparte, however, wanted French merchants to control Saint-Domingue’s trade,
and vengeful planters lobbied him to restore slavery. Britain’s naval superiority made it
too risky to send a large expedition to the Caribbean until peace negotiations cleared
the way, in the autumn of 1801, and the British signalled their approval of a French
reconquest of the colony. Although Toussaint had in 1799 secretly betrayed to the
British, as a goodwill gesture, a French attempt to raise a slave rebellion in Jamaica, his
regime was widely perceived as a potential threat to other slave colonies. The British
and American governments assisted Toussaint Louverture during the period 1798–1800
as a means of weakening their French enemy, but neither encouraged Toussaint to seek
independence, despite persistent allegations. For the British especially, it meant choos-
ing the lesser of two evils, and calculations changed once war ended. In the United States,
Thomas Jefferson’s replacement of John Adams as president brought to power a ministry
more concerned with the fears of southern slave owners than the interests of northern
merchants. In July 1801, Jefferson assured the French that he would embargo the black
regime. Thus encouraged, Bonaparte mounted a large expedition that landed in Saint-
Domingue in February 1802. France’s allies, the Spanish and Dutch, agreed to provide the
expedition with ships, cash, and supplies. All the major powers with Caribbean interests
were implicated in the French attempt to reconquer Saint-Domingue.16
Unlike his French, British, and Spanish predecessors, Bonaparte succeeded in
deploying a large military force during the colony’s healthy season. The French
commander, Victor-Emmanuel Leclerc, managed to co-opt several of the black gen-
erals, and he defused resistance among the rural masses by proclaiming slave emanci-
pation to be inviolable. Toussaint surrendered after three months of desperate fighting
and was soon deported to France. The tide turned against the French during the
summer, when it became clear that Bonaparte’s intention was indeed to restore slavery,
and when tropical fevers began to destroy his army. Popular resistance spread in the
countryside and the black generals who had collaborated with Leclerc progressively
deserted him. They were joined by anciens libres like Alexandre Pétion who had formed
part of Leclerc’s expedition but now realized that neither racial equality nor slave
emancipation could be guaranteed without colonial independence. By the spring of

16 Rayford W. Logan, The Diplomatic Relations of the United States with Haiti, 1776–1891 (Chapel
Hill, NC, 1941); Claude B. Auguste and Marcel B. Auguste, La Participation étrangère à l’expédition
française de Saint-Domingue (Quebec, 1980), 75–126.
Comp. by: PG2448 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001229748 Date:2/12/10
Time:18:45:53 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001229748.3D
OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 2/12/2010, SPi

544 DAVID GEGGUS

1803, the French were fighting the majority of the colonial population grouped under
the leadership of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the senior black general. Several autonomous
African leaders in the mountains fought a brief ‘war within the war’ against the black
creole generals, whose control they resented, but were successively eliminated.17
Although massacre, torture, and mutilation were common features of the Haitian
Revolution from its beginning, the war of independence of 1802–3 was exceptionally
brutal. Atrocities were widespread and the French military veered toward a strategy of
genocide. Expected to live off the land, as in its European campaigns, the army had
difficulty coping with its enemy’s scorched-earth tactics and its guerrilla combat. The
situation became hopeless for France once war with Britain resumed in May 1803. The
British blockaded French positions in Saint-Domingue and prevented further reinfor-
cements crossing the Atlantic. In Washington as well as London, fear of an aggressive
French imperialism ultimately trumped fear of a successful black revolution. President
Jefferson’s growing concern about French ambitions in Louisiana quickly dampened
his enthusiasm for the Leclerc expedition and, throughout the conflict, he allowed
North American merchants to trade with both the French and their black opponents.
After losing perhaps 40,000 soldiers in less than two years, the French army evacuated
the colony in late 1803.
Dessalines proclaimed independence on 1 January 1804 and adopted the Amerindian
name ‘Haiti’ as a symbolic erasure of the colonial past. Most of the few thousand whites
who chose to chance their luck in the new state were systematically massacred in the
following months. Dessalines hoped thereby to assuage a widespread desire for revenge
and to issue a warning against another French invasion. The country’s new elite was a
volatile mixture of anciens libres of mixed racial descent and former slaves who had
risen through the army. They and their descendants would compete for power
throughout the nineteenth century.

REPERCUSSIONS
..................................................................................................................

The Revolution’s international impact remains controversial because it was diverse and
ambiguous. It destroyed the main slave mart in the Americas but did little to reduce the
volume of the Atlantic slave trade; liberating half a million from bondage, it simulta-
neously encouraged the spread and intensification of slavery elsewhere. Dominguan
refugees developed coffee cultivation in Jamaica and Cuba, and sugar manufacture in
Louisiana along with francophone culture. Louisiana’s sale to the United States in 1803
was partly due to Napoleon’s defeat in Saint-Domingue. The triumph of black over
white alarmed slave owners across the Americas and emboldened their slaves. Events in

17 Claude B. Auguste and Marcel B. Auguste, L’Expédition Leclerc, 1801–1803 (Port-au-Prince, 1986).
Comp. by: PG2448 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001229748 Date:2/12/10
Time:18:45:53 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001229748.3D
OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 2/12/2010, SPi

THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION 545

Saint-Domingue or the hope of Haitian assistance inspired several conspiracies, revolts,

and assertions of black pride from Brazil to the USA.18
The heroics and violence of the Revolution fed contradictory attitudes to race, which
pro- and antislavery forces each used in their propaganda. Fear of slave revolt was
probably not a major influence on the abolition movement’s success. However, by
ending French commercial rivalry, the Revolution did make it easier for British
legislators to abandon the slave trade in 1807. The logistical assistance President Pétion
gave to Simón Bolívar in 1816 made a major contribution to ending slavery and colonial
rule in northern South America, but fear of Haiti’s example helped keep Cuba a colony
through the nineteenth century.

COMPARISONS
..................................................................................................................

Although modest in its geographic and demographic dimensions, the Haitian Revolu-
tion might be considered the most transformative of the Atlantic revolutions, partly
because of its relative cost and partly because of its multiple achievements: indepen-
dence, racial equality, and slave emancipation.
In the contemporary European revolutions, national independence was not an issue
except in the Austrian Netherlands. Nor were slavery or racial equality important
questions in Europe, although it is usually forgotten that blacks were enfranchised in
France and slavery was abolished there in September 1791 (quite independently of the
slave uprising in Saint-Domingue).19 Slavery was a favourite metaphor for revolution-
aries everywhere, but it was an omnipresent reality only in the Americas, where the
Haitian Revolution directly freed about one-sixth of the enslaved population and,
because of its repercussions on Guadeloupe and Guyane, it freed in total one in five
American slaves.20 The American Revolution undermined slavery in diverse ways but,
in comparison, it had a very limited impact on the institution, and none at all on race
relations. The Spanish American revolutions had a more substantial influence in both
areas. Yet, as they established a technical racial equality almost at their outset, they gave
rise to relatively little racial conflict, and their contribution to eradicating slavery
amounted to little more than a belated concession of gradual emancipation that was
in large measure a response to Haitian pressure.21

18 D. Geggus, ‘The Influence of the Haitian Revolution on Blacks in Latin America and the
Caribbean’, in Nancy Naro (ed.), Blacks, Coloureds and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Latin
America (London, 2003), 38–59; Geggus, ‘French Imperialism and the Louisiana Purchase’, in Paul
Hoffman (ed.), The Louisiana Purchase and its Peoples (Lafayette, LA, 2004), 25–34.
19 Jérôme Mavidal (ed.), Archives parlementaires de 1789 à 1860 (Paris, 1862), xxxi. 442.
20 Around 1790 nearly 1 in 4 American slaves lived in a French colony, but the emancipation decree of
February 1794 was not implemented in all of them.
21 Paul Verna, Petión y Bolívar: cuarenta años de relaciones haitiano-venezolanas (Caracas, 1969),
87–298; Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery (London, 1988), 348.
Comp. by: PG2448 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001229748 Date:2/12/10
Time:18:45:54 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001229748.3D
OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 2/12/2010, SPi

546 DAVID GEGGUS

The price of success in the struggle for freedom, equality, and independence was, in
relative and often absolute terms, far greater in the Haitian Revolution than in any of its
counterparts. Newly independent Haiti exported about a quarter as much as pre-
revolutionary Saint-Domingue. To judge from the Haitian census of 1805, the colonial
population fell by one-third during the Revolution, a decrease of 180,000 people, far
more than even Venezuela lost in twelve years of violent revolution. Some contempor-
aries thought the population had already declined that much by 1798. The number of
refugees is hard to estimate, as many exiles returned home and fled again, but as a
proportion of the total population their numbers were approximately twice as high as
those of the American Loyalists (or exiled Dutch Patriots) and almost ten times as high
as those of the French émigrés. The value of the property they abandoned—according
to the French government, 272 million dollars—was much higher than for any other
group of exiles. The three colonial powers, in attempting to suppress the Revolution,
lost close to 70,000 European soldiers and many thousands of seamen.22 It is nonethe-
less somewhat bogus to depict the Revolution as a transformation of the Americas’
‘wealthiest’ colony into its poorest state: the standard of living of most of its inhabitants
almost certainly improved, as the rapid growth of the ex-slave population suggests.
In view of its claims to international prominence, it is striking that the Haitian
Revolution was largely ignored in the seminal texts of the Atlantic turn, R. R. Palmer’s
Age of the Democratic Revolution and Jacques Godechot’s France and the Atlantic
Revolution of the Eighteenth Century. Whether an oversight or a calculated exclusion,
this raises the question of the conceptual unity of these revolutions ‘of the West’, as the
French and the American scholar called them. How much did they have in common?
The issue of causation offers probably the least fruitful line of approach. Palmer and
Godechot themselves disagreed: the former stressing ideas and politics; the latter,
demography and economics. The collapse of state power, essential to launching the
French, Haitian, and Spanish American revolutions, was absent in the case of the
American Revolution. A cycle of war, fiscal reform, institutional protest, and popular
resistance was visible everywhere between the 1760s and 1780s but only in France and
the Thirteen Colonies did it lead to revolution.
Godechot and Palmer probably felt that Haiti’s revolution would be out of place in
their grand narrative of liberal, republican democracy. Although the struggles of Saint-
Domingue’s white colonists and free people of colour might easily be incorporated into
their revolutionary paradigm, the black revolution whose origins lay in the slave
uprising of 1791 and which produced Haiti’s first heads of state fits less well because

22 Figures from Drouin de Bercy, De Saint-Domingue (Paris, 1814), appendix; James Leyburn, The
Haitian People (New Haven, CT, 1966), 33, 320; Service Historique de la Défense, Vincennes, Armée de
Terre, MS 592, ii. 15; John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–1826 (London, 1973), 221;
Palmer, Age of the Democratic Revolution, i. 188; Jacques Godechot, France and the Atlantic Revolution of
the Eighteenth Century, 1770–1799 (London, 1965), 60; État détaillé des liquidations opérées par la
commission . . . de l’indemnité de Saint-Domingue, 6 vols. (Paris, 1828–33); Geggus, ‘Slavery, War, and
Revolution in the Greater Caribbean’, 24–5.
Comp. by: PG2448 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001229748 Date:2/12/10
Time:18:45:54 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001229748.3D
OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 2/12/2010, SPi

THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION 547

of its authoritarian and later ‘ethno-national’ character.23 Such a judgement is at odds

with some modern scholarship that presents the slave revolution as a pursuit of
‘democratic ideals’ and ‘republican rights’ and claims for it an important role in the
creation of modern democracy.24 Its rhetoric, however, was overwhelmingly counter-
revolutionary and never republican. Insurgent slaves used citoyens as a smearword to
describe their opponents. The French Republic never really followed through in its
extension of citizenship to ex-slaves, and the few elections held in Saint-Domingue in
the 1790s, to name deputies to the French legislature, were very localized and, according
to critics, hardly free and fair.25 Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and
Henry Christophe, the main leaders who rose from slavery, were unashamedly dicta-
torial in their politics, as each of their constitutions makes clear. The country’s unique
declaration of independence justified secession as an act necessary to prevent the
restoration of slavery but otherwise made no mention of rights. The État d’Haïti
founded in 1804 was not a republic, although historians persist in calling it one.
Dessalines arrogated all power to himself and took the titles governor general and
then emperor. When his anciens libres opponents assassinated him in 1806 and drew
up a republican constitution, Henry Christophe created a secessionist northern state
that soon became a monarchy.
The Latin American revolutions also produced a few monarchs, and the French
Revolution similarly ended in military dictatorship, but Haiti was unique in its
blending of race and nationalism. Contrasting the complexions of the Haitians and
French, and stressing the latter’s cruelty and vulnerability to tropical disease, the
declaration of independence vowed ‘eternal hatred of France’ and called for vengeance
against those French who remained in the country. Most were massacred in the
following months. Dessalines’s constitution forbade landowning by ‘whites’ and man-
dated that all Haitians be designated ‘blacks’. Notwithstanding Simón Bolívar’s guerra
a muerte against metropolitan Spaniards, the nationalism of the Americas’ white
revolutionaries expressed little animosity toward the colonial rulers they much resem-
bled, but Haitian nationalism, forged in enslavement and an exceptionally vicious war,
was defined by race and born in bitterness.
Haiti’s revolution also differed from the other colonial revolutions in that indepen-
dence was not its central goal. Whereas the mainland revolutions more or less began
with a declaration of independence, in the Haitian Revolution it was the final act. The
concept of colonial independence had almost no support among France’s revolution-
aries, whose sense of national interest overrode their libertarianism. In Saint-Domingue,
most white and free coloured activists wanted self-rule rather than independence. The

23 D. Geggus, ‘The Caribbean in the Age of Revolution’, in David Armitage and Sanjay
Subramanyam (eds.), The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840 (New York, 2010),
244 n. 51; Leslie Manigat, Évolution et révolutions (Port-au-Prince, 2007), 88, 96.
24 Laurent Dubois, ‘An Enslaved Enlightenment: Rethinking the Intellectual History of the French
Atlantic’, Social History, 31 (2006), 11–12; Dubois, Avengers of the New World (Cambridge, 2004), 3;
Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, 2–7.
25 Histoire des désastres, 363–4; Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 205.
Comp. by: PG2448 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001229748 Date:2/12/10
Time:18:45:54 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001229748.3D
OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 2/12/2010, SPi

548 DAVID GEGGUS

wealthiest planters tended to live in France, and those in the Caribbean were greatly
outnumbered by slaves; they could not contemplate secession in the same way as their
Virginian or Venezuelan counterparts. The age-old tensions caused by metropolitan
control of trade never reached flashpoint during the Revolution, because the colonists in
France decided to bury the issue so as to build a proslavery alliance with French
merchants, while those in the colony were able to ignore mercantilist restrictions as
government authority declined.26 When they did seek to throw off French rule in 1791–4,
it was primarily to maintain slavery and white supremacy, and they sought, not
independence, but a British protectorate.
The place of independence among the goals of Saint-Domingue’s slaves is unclear.
One of the earliest documents to issue from the 1791 uprising summoned the French to
pick up their jewellery and leave the colony to the slaves, whose sweat and blood had
earned them title to the land. Common sense also might suggest that the slaves would
not have rebelled unless they expected to live afterwards free from the possibility of
French revenge.27 Such expectations, however, seem to have been quickly scaled back
and, as noted above, the leadership of the insurrection generally displayed a rather
limited commitment to the idea of general emancipation, let alone independence. Once
the French Republic abolished slavery, most former slaves found their interests best
served by remaining subjects of the French state, while most of the insurgents had
already opted for a career as mercenary troops of the king of Spain. Certainly, the polity
that Toussaint Louverture ruled by 1800 was a colony only in name; some contempor-
aries thought he would declare Saint-Domingue independent, and some Haitian
historians have argued this was only a matter of time. Yet Toussaint never took that
step, even when attacked by General Leclerc. It was Bonaparte’s attempt to restore
slavery and racial discrimination that finally led to independence.
The winning of independence benefited somewhat from British naval support in
1803—just as the US navy helped Toussaint defeat Rigaud in 1800—but foreign military
intervention in the Haitian Revolution was for the most part hostile, at least in intent.
Spain’s intervention may have revived the slave insurgency and indirectly led to
emancipation, but, like Britain’s intervention, it was intended to restore the status
quo. The Haitian Revolution differed in this respect from the mainland colonial
revolutions and resembled the French Revolution, in which foreign invaders also
unintentionally radicalized developments. Whereas the North Americans received
crucial assistance from the French state, as did Spanish Americans from the Haitian
government and various foreign sympathizers, Haiti’s revolutionaries, like those in
France, triumphed largely in spite of the outside world.
Foreign powers similarly took far longer to recognize Haiti’s independence than that
of the mainland colonies. None did so until 1825, when France imposed a large
indemnity as reparations for its colonists. The United States and the Vatican withheld

26 Debien, Les Colons de Saint-Domingue.

27 Geggus, ‘Print Culture’, 88–92; Yves Benot, ‘The Insurgents of 1791, their Leaders and the Concept
of Independence’, in Geggus and Fiering (eds.), The World of the Haitian Revolution, 153–71.
Comp. by: PG2448 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001229748 Date:2/12/10
Time:18:45:54 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001229748.3D
OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 2/12/2010, SPi

THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION 549

recognition until the 1860s. The country was never isolated, as sometimes claimed, but
the USA imposed a trade embargo between 1806 and 1810, and Haitian ships were
excluded from British colonies until the 1840s. Transformed into a peasant economy,
Haiti remained an important coffee exporter.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ardouin, Beaubrun, Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti (1853), 3 vols. (rev. edn. Port-au-Prince, 2005).
Benot, Yves, La Révolution française et la fin des colonies (Paris, 1987).
Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge,
MA, 2004).
Fischer, Sibylle, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of
Revolution (Durham, NC, 2004).
Garrigus, John D., Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (New York,
2006).
Geggus, David, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington, IN, 2002).
—— (ed.), The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia, SC, 2001).
—— and Norman Fiering (eds.), The World of the Haitian Revolution (Bloomington, IN,
2009).
Madiou, Thomas, Histoire d’Haïti, 8 vols. (rev. edn. Port-au-Prince, 1989–91).
Piquet, Jean-Daniel, L’Émancipation des noirs dans la Révolution française (1789–1795)
(Paris, 2002).

View publication stats