Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (79 page)

The head of the mulatto emancipationist group in Paris, Julien Raimond, was drawn into angry encounters with Montagnard and procolonist opponents at meetings of the Convention’s colonial committee and persisted in backing Brissot and Sonthonax long after it was safe to do so. Raimond was arrested on 27 September 1793. In January 1794, when Sonthonax dispatched Jean-Baptiste Belley (ca. 1746–1805), the
commander of the “free blacks” who had led the defense of Government House during the Cap-Français fighting of 20–21 June and been seriously wounded fighting for the Revolution, together with two other representatives (one white), to France to submit petitions to the Convention requesting endorsement of the emancipation decrees and recognition of the revolutionary mixed-race regime on Saint-Domingue, they met with a distinctly frosty reception. The two Saint-Domingue delegates other than Belley were imprisoned also.

In September 1793, Belley, a freed former slave born in Senegal, became the first black deputy in the French National Assembly, another landmark in world history. During 1793–94, Belley battled tenaciously on behalf of black rights but faced considerable opposition.
⁴⁴
The impressive portrait of him, placed alongside a bust of Raynal (see
figure 10
), painted later, in 1797, by the revolutionary artist Anne-Louis Girodet (1767–1824), who consciously sought to make France’s first black deputy look formidable and yet “beautiful,” became the most celebrated picture linking the Revolution with black emancipation. A disciple of David, Girodet was an ardent republican already famous in his own right, in 1793, for his defiantly republican behavior in papal Rome where he was then living as a student at the French Academy. The provocative sensationalism of the Belley portrait, and what later became his wider, more general challenge to David’s neoclassicism, prompting some modern art historians to label Girodet a “herald of romanticism,” eventually led to a bitter quarrel with David, who once later described Girodet as a “lunatic.” An explosive personality, he sought to employ art to liberate emotion from neoclassicism’s straitjacket, mankind from prejudice, and blacks from slavery.

Amicable relations between the white colonists and the Robespierriste faction based on populist patriotisme and common aversion to Brissotins did not last, though, beyond the end of 1793. By January 1794, with the Martinique whites openly colluding with the British, and those of Saint-Domingue virtually in open alliance with Britain and Spain, colonist collusion with monarchy, aristocracy, and clergy became too overt even for the Montagne to stomach. With most of the French Caribbean either in revolt or British hands, the Robespierriste Convention in Paris saw little alternative but to disregard Amar and the white colonial lobby and, if somewhat halfheartedly, embrace Brissotin general emancipation of the slaves and blacks after all. This transition was largely pushed through by Danton, who launched into another of his rousing speeches. It was his circle who in effect engineered the
world’s first general edict of emancipation of the slaves, dated 4 February 1794.
⁴⁵

Figure 10. The black deputy Jean-Baptiste Belley (ca. 1746–1805) beside the bust of Raynal. Anne Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson (1767–1824), portrait of Jean-Baptiste Belley, 1797, oil on canvas. Inv. MV4616. Photo: Gérard Blot. Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles, France. © RMN–Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

The Montagne embraced black emancipation in early 1794, but not to the extent of dropping pursuit of the Caribbean Brissotins. By the time the orders recalling the commissaires who had freed the slaves reached Saint-Domingue, however, the Haitian Revolution proper was in motion. On Saint-Domingue, ironically, the battered remnant of Sonthonax’s authority was temporarily resuscitated in May 1794 by none other than Toussaint-Louverture, who now entertained second thoughts about the wisdom of combating the Revolution allied to Spain and Britain, reactionary powers obviously intent on restoring slavery. Especially after the arrival of more Spanish troops from Cuba and Puerto Rico, he realized that religion or no religion, fighting France was simply not in his interest. Performing a sudden volte-face, he publicly disavowed the “enemies of the Republic and the human race,” throwing his lot and four thousand men behind Sonthonax.
⁴⁶
In May 1794, Toussaint-Louverture had apparently not yet studied the February 1794 emancipation decree. He knew about it, and the earlier Saint-Domingue emancipation decrees, only in vague terms. But as he himself reports in a surviving letter, he
had
studied their wording by June 1794 when he proclaimed the February decree happy news “for all the friends of humanity,” and expressed a sudden interest in the progress of French arms in Europe.
⁴⁷
Recurrent use of universalist Brissotin revolutionary language in his letters to French commanders, a style originating in the
Histoire philosophique
, has prompted the suggestion that he might have read parts of the
Histoire philosophique
. This point remains uncertain but, in any case, Toussaint-Louverture regularly employed Brissotin universalist rhetoric drawn from la philosophie moderne from the summer of 1794.
⁴⁸

The decree of February 1794, however significant in the abstract, had little immediate effect since the Saint-Domingue slaves had already been freed, and the British prevented implementation on the other major French islands by occupying Martinique in March and Sainte-Lucie and Guadeloupe in April 1794. Formal abolition followed directly only in Cayenne (French Guiana) where it was proclaimed amid fanfares on 14 June 1794, a few weeks before Robespierre’s downfall. Remarkably, there was little resistance or protest. Under the terms of the emancipation decree, the newly created “citizens” were obliged to register with their nearest municipality to obtain certificates of citizenship
and draw up contracts with their former owners, choosing whether to work henceforth for wages or on a sharecropping basis. Under regulations imposed by the colonial assembly, Cayenne’s freed slaves were not supposed to move from where they had been previously domiciled to seek a new home or employment without the consent of proprietor and municipality. In effect, they were not entirely freed and did not always much benefit.
⁴⁹
But they were no longer slaves.

Montagnard pursuit of the Brissotins was unrelenting. In June 1794, peremptory orders were dispatched from Paris for the seizure of Sonthonax and Povérel above every other priority. Eventually, the two principal agents of the Revolution on Saint-Domingue were captured by pro-Robespierre forces at Jacmel and returned to France where they were imprisoned. The emancipators of Saint-Domingue’s free blacks and slaves were saved from the guillotine only because they had evaded the Montagne for so long. Shortly after their return, a week after Thermidor, the two Brissotin commissaires were released.

The French began recovering lost ground in the Caribbean after Thermidor, in the late summer of 1794. A leader of the La Rochelle Jacobin Club, appointed civil commissioner for Guadaloupe with responsibility to emancipate the slaves, Victor Hugues (1762–1826), a tradesman with previous experience in Saint-Domingue, arrived in the Caribbean with a small fleet and 1,200 troops. Facing far superior British forces, he succeeded in reoccupying part of Guadaloupe and waging a tenacious mini–revolutionary war from this enclave with black support. By October 1794, Hugues had beaten the 3,000-strong British army with their allies, the royalist plantation-owners helped by some local free blacks; the British commander was obliged to surrender his remaining troops, thirty-eight cannon, some free blacks, and 800 counterrevolutionary émigrés before sailing away. Several French noble émigrés were executed on Guadeloupe using a guillotine Hugues had specially brought from France. Guadaloupe’s slaves were all freed under the 1794 emancipation edict; however, this same Hugues was later instrumental, from 1800, as governor of French Guiana under Napoleon, in the process of reenslaving the freed slaves of the French Caribbean.
⁵⁰

The Caribbean Revolution, much underestimated and ignored, even by French writers, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries because it challenged European imperial sway and primarily assisted blacks, in fact rapidly developed into an event of profound global significance. Having liberated the slaves and crushed royalism in Guadeloupe, Hugues proceeded to organize a highly effective privateer fleet
financed partly by the Republic and partly by private investors. Over the next four years, this fleet captured considerable numbers of British, Spanish, and American vessels. Hugues also dispatched expeditions that succeeded in bringing the whole Franco-Dutch island of Saint Martin under French rule (from 1795 until 1801) and seizing the Dutch island of Saint Eustatius. The struggle spread to the former French islands of Grenada and Saint Vincent, occupied by Britain since the 1760s, where French republican propaganda and standards inscribed “Liberté, Égalité ou la Mort” helped inspire insurrections of slaves and free blacks, led on Grenada by a legendary mulatto landowner, Julien Fédon.
⁵¹
During 1795, the Revolution also regained lost ground on Saint-Domingue and came close to conquering the key Dutch island of Curaçao, as well as establishing a foothold on the nearby Venezuelan mainland at Coro.

The French invasion of the Dutch Republic in 1795, and overthrow of the Orangist regime there, massively aggravated the already bitter rifts between the pro-British Orangists and anti-British democrats raging on all six Dutch Caribbean islands, as well as in the Guianas, most of which was then in Dutch possession. Curaçao became the focus of furious strife, and while neither side, Orangists or republican Patriots, favored emancipating the slaves, the latter, as French allies, could not prevent revolutionary papers and propaganda, or Guadeloupe privateers, from pervading the island. The major slave and free black revolts that subsequently erupted on Curaçao and at Coro in 1795 were among the biggest in the Caribbean arena during the revolutionary era and were clearly inspired in considerable part, as contemporary reports and correpondence indicate, by developments in Guadeloupe, the Guianas, Grenada, Saint-Domingue, and France.
⁵²

The Coro slave and free black revolt began on 10 May 1795 on a plantation in the sierra above Coro and spread rapidly to neighboring plantations. Besides blacks, local Indians joined in. Plantation houses were pillaged and some whites killed. On 12 May, a large force of rebels under their leader, José Leonardo Chirinos, a local
zambo
(son of a slave and an Indian woman), a free black married to a slave woman, descended on the town. Chirinos could read and write and while accompanying a Spanish merchant on several Caribbean business trips, had gathered information about both the French and Haitian Revolutions.
⁵³
He was defeated by the armed militia assembled by the local white populace. During the subsequent pursuit of the rebels, a considerable number were caught and brutally executed.

The gains of the French and Dutch Patriots in the Caribbean in 1795 caused extraordinary apprehension in London and Madrid. So alarming did the combination of black slave emancipation and resurgent French and Dutch democratic-revolutionary arms, privateering, and rhetoric in the Caribbean seem to British ministers that it resulted in a major British counteroffensive that developed during 1796 into one of the largest military expeditions ever to cross the Atlantic, comprising nearly 100 ships and 30,000 troops. These joined the appreciable British force, already operating in the Caribbean, which was striving to overwhelm the Revolution in the islands, reverse the tide on Saint-Domingue, and halt black emancipation. Yet despite huge overall naval and military superiority and committing massive resources, this counteroffensive, apart from recovering Grenada and Saint Vincent and eventually occupying Curaçao (in 1800), proved broadly a failure. While the French dispatched far smaller expeditions to Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue, these sufficed to hold the line. Yellow fever and malaria exacted an appalling toll. Altogether, it is estimated that approximately 40,000 British troops and sailors died or disappeared, through fighting, disease, and desertion, while combating the Revolution in the Lesser Antilles and Saint-Domingue from 1796 to 1800; many of the sick and wounded expired in Jamaica. In particular, the British offensive failed to recover Guadeloupe, the main focus of the French privateers and naval power, while draining off significant British (as well as French) resources from the struggle in Saint-Domingue, thereby enabling the black insurgents there to consolidate. Although black and mulatto representatives continued to sit in the French National Assembly from 1794 to 1799, by late 1797 Toussaint-Louverture had become virtually sole ruler of the French-speaking part of the island, the New World’s first free black state.