Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (77 page)

Urging the slave trade’s immediate end, on 1 February 1790 the Amis des Noirs submitted a fresh petition to the Assembly, signed by Brissot. The Assembly must suppress the slave trade, a “vile commerce” that totally contradicted the Revolution’s principles, and especially the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Among other beneficial effects for Africa, Europe, and the Americas alike, French Caribbean slave-owners, once prevented from replenishing their stock of slaves, would be forced to better feed, house, and treat their blacks.
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At the same time, the Assembly must move to secure for the free blacks and mulattoes of Martinique, Guadeloupe, Saint-Domingue, and Cayenne (French Guiana) rights equal to those of the whites, including political representation with their own deputies in the National Assembly.
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Already, from late August and through the autumn of 1789, a small group of mulattoes in Paris, around thirty initially, under their leader, Julien Raimond (1744–1801), an educated and eloquent mulatto afterward suspected by royalists of colluding with Brissot and Condorcet to excite black insurgency against the white slave-owners in Saint-Domingue, were encouraged by the Assembly’s republican deputies to organize. Mirabeau, Grégoire, and, outside the Assembly, Brissot and Condorcet, exhorted them loudly to invoke the
droits de l’humanité
.
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Through 1790–91, black emancipation remained one of the foremost and most passionately promoted causes of the Revolution but continued to be obdurately opposed by modérantisme, liberal monarchism, and the colonial interest. If the Société de 1789, founded by Mirabeau, included such advocates of black emancipation as Condorcet, Brissot, Carra, and Lavoisier, it also included allies of the Club Massiac and the colonial status quo, such as Moreau de Saint-Méry, Bailly, and Le Chapelier.
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Unfamiliar with the actual Caribbean, Brissot, Condorcet, and their organization were continually accused by moderates of being led by the “devouring zeal of their
philosophie théorique
” to embrace disastrously impractical policies.
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A particularly violent antiemancipationist pamphlet, entitled
Découverte d’une conspiration contre les interêts de la France
, squarely blamed recent disturbances in
Martinique and Guadeloupe on the Société des Amis des Noirs, its author predicting not just Caribbean mayhem, should they succeed, but the complete collapse of France’s dyeing, textile, and luxury industries and merchant marine. The revolutionaries of the Société are here depicted as a diabolical “conspiracy” concocted by the British to secure “la destruction de la France.” Attempting to free the French Caribbean blacks would allegedly blight all French prosperity, fortunes, and hopes, the Caribbean being the cornerstone of the French Atlantic economy.

Without her colonies, France would be deprived of 1,500 ships and the employment of those whose professions and crafts depended on colonial trade, estimated by this tract at five million people. Should the “conspiracy” succeed, France’s commerce and industries would disintegrate and her entire consumption of sugar, coffee, cotton, tobacco, and indigo would in future need to be purchased from Britain. This violently antiphilosophique tract urged readers to consult a recent text entitled
Essai sur les Illuminés
“proving” that behind the Amis des Noirs lurked a clandestine sect, the Illuminati, whose speciality was proclaiming ideals that looked pure and uplifting but really constituted an insidious plot to annihilate empire, religion, and authority. Mascarading “under the veil of humanity and liberty,” and the “modest and specious title of Société des Amis des Noirs,” the Illuminati sought to plunge the “entire universe into combustion.” Who were these “criminal visionaries, conspiring against the human race,” this “horrible société” spreading revolution everywhere except England? Three in particular were denounced, two of whom, Duroveray and Clavière, were actually not French but Genevans, banished from Geneva in 1782 for democratic conspiracy. But the principal culprit was certainly Brissot, “son of a Chartres confectionist,” who, like the others, had sojourned in England and even been “recommended” to the prime minister, Pitt, by that dangerous philosophical dogmatist Price.

Not content with sending emissaries to the colonies to incite blacks to massacre the whites, the Amis des Noirs relentlessly strove to abolish the vital slave trade. They also incited the effrontery of the Paris mulattoes, ex-slaves mostly banished by their masters for insolent intractability, and encouraged them to petition the Assembly to be declared “the equals of the whites in the Caribbean.” The pamphlet concludes with a table listing the Paris Société’s approximately one hundred registered members, among them five foreign associates, including William Short, secretary of the United States Embassy, and eight corresponding members outside Paris. Besides the “odious” Brissot, this tract noted the
prominence in the Société of Condorcet, Sieyès, Mirabeau, Alexandre de Lameth, the Marquis de Saint-Lambert, Lavoisier the chemist, and the educationalist Lanthenas.
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A prompt reply, entitled “
Il est encores des Aristocrates
…” styled the Amis des Noirs as a small opinion-forming group inspired by the highest motives that neither worked for Britain nor threatened anyone. Their latest open meeting was attended by only around two hundred people.
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The “infamous author” of the
Découverte d’une conspiration
apparently believed flaying the friends of liberty demonstrated “patriotism.” If the French nobility were a disreputable bunch, the Caribbean planters were a thousand times worse, being a group who mercilessly oppressed their slaves, discriminated against “free blacks,” and deceived the public. Only whites owning at least twenty-five blacks were admitted to the island assemblies. They treated both their slaves and the free blacks, estimated by some at well over twenty thousand, like animals. The free blacks, argued this tract, were just as numerous as the whites in the French colonies, yet they were not admitted to positions of responsibility or dignity, even though often braver, cleverer, and more useful to the patrie than the mostly indolent whites. Opposition to Les Amis des Noirs was nothing but a “vile pillar” of the most “horrible aristocratie.”
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Between May and September 1791 ensued a fierce five-month debate in the National Assembly over whether the Assembly’s colonial committee should be permitted, as Barnave and his associates wanted, to relegate all matters relating to the status and conditions of the free blacks in the colonies to the white-dominated colonial assemblies. In May 1791, owing to the efforts of the Société, the Brissotins, and the mulatto circle around Raimond, the National Assembly provisionally agreed that free blacks in the colonies should be given voting rights where they met the property qualifications. But the colonial assemblies flatly refused to accept this.
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The calculated effect of Barnave’s and the “moderate” royalist policies was to exclude the blacks from their political rights under the Declaration, from every public office, from expressing their views, and from every opportunity for upward mobility. Grégoire, Pétion, and Destutt de Tracy led the philosophique denunciation of the schemes of Barnave and the friends of the white planters in the Assembly. The free blacks of Saint-Domingue, declared Destutt de Tracy in his major speech on the subject of 23 September 1791, if released “by us from oppression, will be our natural allies; it is neither just nor
politique
to abandon them.”
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To justify landed oligarchy and slavery in the Assembly, and bolster their strong monarchist preferences, white planters’ spokesmen regularly employed Montesquieu’s relativism of climate and conditions as a counterrationale to radical claims that slavery was unjustifiable. Montesquieu was by no means a defender of slavery as such but, typically of the moderate Enlightenment, he did defend the necessity of black slavery in certain practical circumstances. Montesquieu was not an abolitionist because he believed the practicalities stood in the way. Especially, Montesquieu’s statement in book 7 of part 3 of the
L’Esprit des Lois
that “there are countries where the heat debilitates the body, and so weakens resolve that men are not brought to arduous labour except through fear of punishment: there black slavery seems less shocking to our reason” proved useful to the colonists’ apologists. Among those who most utilized Montesquieu in this manner was Médéric-Louis Moreau de Saint-Méry (1750–1819), lawyer, leader of the Club Massiac, and author of several books on the Caribbean who served as an energetic deputy for Martinique in the Assembly.
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In the Caribbean, where whites could not easily work the fields, slavery, argued the planters’ representatives, was “natural” and indispensable. Meanwhile, if the Caribbean revolution began as a cultural war in Paris, it quickly translated into rising tension punctuated by disturbances in the colonies. Certainly, the National Assembly’s Comité des Colonies, formed in March 1790, was dominated by constitutional monarchists and friends of the white colonists, for the moment ensuring the planters a solid hegemony. The white colonial assembly meeting at Cap-Français, the main town of Saint-Domingue, France’s foremost Caribbean colony, stubbornly rejected all concessions to the “free blacks,”
gens de couleurs—
mulattoes who were in some cases substantial property owners and owners of slaves themselves—slaves, and the Assembly’s Left democrats alike. There was practically no support among whites or blacks in the Caribbean for the radical philosophique tendency or republicanism. Several new, staunchly monarchist newspapers appeared in Saint-Domingue’s towns. But how solid in reality was a white planter ascendancy underpinned by modérantisme, royalism, Locke, and Montesquieu in the French revolutionary context of 1790–91? It was impossible, even on the most conservative reading of the August 1789 enactments and the Rights of Man, to prevent growing friction between the Revolution’s core values and Caribbean reality. A grand banquet organized at Port-Royal (today Fort-de-France) on Martinique, on 28 September 1789, to celebrate adoption of the
tricolor cockade as the Revolution’s symbol, was scandalously disrupted by white officers attempting, against the governor’s orders, to prevent free blacks from participating.
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White resistance to black emancipation in the French Caribbean held firm for three years (1789–92), but did so only because liberal monarchists retained the upper hand during that period in France. Supporters of white hegemony in the Caribbean faced a much stronger challenge once the Feuillant revolution in France, and with it constitutional monarchism, Montesquieu’s prestige, and modérantisme, faltered.

Black emancipation remained massively controversial through the early Revolution but, until 1792, Brissot, Condorcet, and the Left republicans possessed insufficient clout in the Assembly to foment more than a general tension and restlessness throughout the greater Caribbean. While modérantisme and constitutional monarchy remained dominant, the white colonists’ interests suffered no head-on legislative attack. They were aided by the fact that free blacks in the colonies were deeply divided among themselves, most of the wealthier fringe of
gens de couleur
supporting the “aristocrates” owning the plantations. Moderates and monarchists could not, though, prevent a spreading insurgency among a minority of free blacks. A first rising on Saint-Domingue, near Cap-Français, involving a few hundred free blacks demanding equality of rights, erupted in October 1790. Among its leaders was Vincent Ogé (1757–91), a wealthy quadroon (one-quarter black) who knew and admired Lafayette and was cultivated by Brissot, had spent years in Bordeaux and then Paris but found himself refused admission to the Club Massiac and the white planter elite in France. Resentment and self-aggrandizing ambition inspired him to foment insurrection on Saint-Domingue after arriving back there from France in October 1790. The rising was quickly crushed by the colonial authorities. Captured, Ogé was publicly displayed in Cap-Français’s main square and, as a deterrent to the rest of the mixed bloods and free blacks, horrifically broken on the wheel and executed.
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But this was no deterrent, argued Brissot’s
Patriote français
: rather, it showed that the National Assembly should concede the “[propertied] mulattoes what they are demanding and what is just, the rights of active citizens [under the 1791 Constitution].”
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A new and larger insurgency in Saint-Domingue followed in August 1791, while in November 1791, clashes between whites and free blacks spread to Port-au-Prince, leading to a conflagration on 21 November that burned down most of the town. Each side blamed the unrest on the other. White colonists and the Club Massiac, led by Malouet, attributed
the disaster and the wider black unrest in the Caribbean to the activities and propaganda of the Brissotin republicans; the revolutionary democrats blamed it on the blinkered, reactionary, and uncompromising attitude of the white colonists encouraged by Malouet, Barnave, and both the liberal and strict constitutional monarchists.
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A sure sign of the depth of change wrought by the Revolution culturally and psychologically by late 1791 was the dramatic expansion and arming of the white militias and progressive tightening of security measures in all the French colonies. In April 1792, Saint-Domingue’s colonial assembly permanently closed its visitors’ gallery to hinder awareness of the radically novel terms in which Caribbean affairs were being discussed in the French press and Assembly.
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