Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (16 page)

“by the second generation, the color is entirely washed away.” In a 1791

pamphlet Moreau described Julien Raimond as “mulatto,” and Raimond

retorted that he was the “legitimate son and the grandson of European fa-

thers and landowners in Saint-Domingue.” “Can Moreau de St. Méry . . .

count back to his ancestors,” he asked, “without covering himself with the

ignominy befitting a man who scorns and betrays the class from which he

springs?” Raimond was suggesting that the man who had created an elabo-

rate racial system meant to identify the nuances of descent, and who had

become one of the most eloquent defenders of white privilege in Saint-

Domingue, was a fugitive from his own African ancestors.24

Had they looked in on him in the 1780s, Moreau’s ancestors would have

found him living in the center of Paris as he carried out his research on

the law and history of Saint-Domingue, an active participant in the world

of Enlightenment science and culture. His masonic connections gained

him an appointment as the secretary of a new museum (later the Musée de

Paris, and eventually the Musée de l’Homme) intended to showcase and

encourage debate and discussion of new discoveries in the natural sci-

ences, geography, history, and art. In a speech at the museum, Moreau

celebrated a dream that many Enlightenment intellectuals shared, that

through reason the wrongs men had created by “deifying” themselves

could be resolved. He did not mention what some intellectuals at the

time considered to be one of humankind’s greatest injustices: slavery. But

i n h e r i ta n c e

71

Moreau regularly came in contact with one man who was very concerned

with ending the barbaric institution: the marquis de Condorcet, who in

1781 had published an antislavery essay. Moreau shared a friendship with

Condorcet, and fact they had much in common. Moreau was concerned

with improving the condition of slaves, and Condorcet believed that slav-

ery could be outlawed only through a gradual process that would start by

lessening the hardships of slaves’ lives. Genteel discussions of slavery be-

tween intellectuals, however, would soon become difficult. With the onset

of the Revolution, the stage for such debate expanded dramatically, and

the two men soon found themselves on opposite sides in a vicious politi-

cal battle.25

Condorcet was part of a broad Enlightenment current of anti-

slavery thought that found its expression in the works of
philosophes
from Montesquieu to Voltaire and Rousseau, in numerous novels and plays

whose heroes were rebelling slaves, and in the prophesies of rebellion

issued by Mercier and Raynal. Paris had also seen attacks against slavery

in the legal realm, where, during the 1760s and 1770s, several hundred

slaves successfully sued for their freedom. These advances did not go un-

punished; in the 1780s royal administrators passed draconian legislation

against people of African descent living in Paris, forcing them to carry an

early form of passport under threat of deportation and criminalizing inter-

racial relationships. Indeed, Enlightenment antislavery had many contra-

dictions. Those who accepted the immorality of slavery also often accepted

racist ideas about Africans, and many writers accepted that slavery was

wrong in principle but was a necessary evil whose benefits ultimately out-

weighed its disadvantages, both for Europeans and Africans “saved” from

“barbarism.” Still, by the end of the eighteenth century, a number of the

intellectuals and professionals who would become the new Revolution’s

elite were sincerely committed to attacking slavery.26

In 1788 the journalist Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville, who had come

into contact with the antislavery movement in England and the United

States, founded the abolitionist Société des Amis des Noirs in Paris. Like

its British counterparts, the society advocated abolition of the slave trade

followed by the gradual elimination of slavery in the Americas. Although

abolitionism in France never developed into a popular movement as it did

in Britain and the United States, the society came to boast a number of in-

fluential members: Condorcet, the marquis de Lafayette, the comte de

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av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d

Mirabeau, and eventually the Abbé Grégoire. In the Revolution they

would find an ideal setting for promulgating their views on slavery.27

Late in 1788 Louis XVI called for the election of representatives to the

Estates General, an ancient consultative body, to help him resolve the ur-

gent budget crisis the kingdom was facing in part because of the support it

had lent to the American Revolution. There were three “estates” in the

body—the aristocracy, the clergy, and the “Third Estate,” meant to repre-

sent the remaining majority of the population. Like most professionals and

intellectuals, Moreau was taken up in the elections, and was chosen as the

president of Paris’ electoral assembly. For those like him tied to the slave

colonies of the Caribbean, the onset of Revolution was ripe with possibility

but also with danger. In the Revolution the colonies might find redress

against the despotic policies imposed on them. But there was also a chance

that they would find the very foundation of their livelihood challenged,

even destroyed.28

The Société des Amis des Noirs jumped at the opportunity presented

by the calling of the Estates General to further its antislavery cause. An essay by Condorcet was sent to each of the hundreds of districts electing

deputies. It expressed hope that the French nation would turn its atten-

tion to the slave trade and work to end its “crimes of violence,” to improve

the lives of slaves condemned “to work without end and without hope, ex-

posed to the arbitrary punishments of their masters, deprived of all social

and natural rights, and reduced to the condition of domestic animals.”

The actions of the society had some effect. Forty-nine of the
cahiers de

doléances
—lists of grievances that the king had invited the people to submit—included attacks of one kind or another on the slave trade or slav-

ery. Brissot and the Société des Amis des Noirs also encouraged Jacques

Necker, the liberal minister of the king who (though his family’s wealth was

tied to the Caribbean colonies) was critical of the slave trade, to eliminate subsidies provided by the French state to slave traders. In the speech that

opened the Estates General in June 1789, Necker asked the body to look

with compassion on the plight of African slaves, “men like us in their

thoughts and above all in their capacity to suffer,” who were piled up in the hulls of ships and sent across the Atlantic.29

It was a promising beginning for the abolitionists. But the society met its

match in a powerful group committed to defending colonial slavery. In July

1788 a group of French planters gathered in Paris. Invoking grievances

i n h e r i ta n c e

73

dating from the conflict with royal government during the mid-1780s, they

decided to lobby for reforms and demanded the formation of a colonial as-

sembly for Saint-Domingue. Some suggested that the colonies should also

request representation in the Estates General. A few perceptive partici-

pants pointed out the dangerous implications of such a request: if deputies

from the colonies were invited to participate in the creation of national

policies, they would put the colonies under the control of the Estates Gen-

eral, where antislavery forces would likely find voice. Nevertheless, the

group decided to press for national representation. The demand was re-

buffed by administrators in Paris and in Saint-Domingue, but in the colony

groups of planters organized in secret and elected deputies. In almost all

cases free men of color, even those who were wealthy property owners,

were barred from participating. And the
cahiers de doléances
produced by the Saint-Domingue delegates explicitly opposed the integration of property-owning free people of color into the political life of the colony.30

When the Estates General finally gathered at Versailles in June 1789,

seventeen delegates from Saint-Domingue showed up uninvited. Brissot

argued they had been illegitimately elected and should not be allowed in

the assembly. The delegation demanded admittance, warning that other-

wise France would have to resolve the problem of “colonial representa-

tion” with “arms in its hands” as England had a few decades before.

Granted “provisional” admittance, but denied the right to vote, the planter

delegates took advantage of a crisis. The Estates General had traditionally

voted by order, which meant that on any issue the aristocracy and the

clergy could outvote the Third Estate, even though the latter had twice as

many delegates. The members of the Third Estate therefore argued that

the voting should take place by head rather than by order. In the face of

the royal government’s intransigence, on June 20 most of the members of

the Third Estate, along with a few aristocrats and clergy, declared that

they were the true representatives of the people of France, naming them-

selves a National Assembly. It was the beginning of the French Revolu-

tion, and nine of the Saint-Domingue delegates—including the marquis de

Rouvray—were there. They asked for the right to be united “provisionally”

to this new assembly, and took the same oath as the other delegates. Their

presence at this event gained them the sympathy of many of their com-

rades.31

Although many supported the full admittance of the Saint-Domingue

delegates, a controversy exploded over exactly how many should be al-

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av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d

lowed to sit in the assembly. The colonial delegates requested a number of

seats based on the total population of the colony. Several metropolitan del-

egates pointed out the irony of this request, most forcefully Mirabeau.

“The free blacks are proprietors and taxpayers, and yet they have not been

allowed to vote,” he noted. “And as for the slaves, either they are men or

they are not; if the colonists consider them men, let them free them and

make them eligible for seats; if the contrary is the case, have we, in appor-

tioning deputies according to the population of France, taken into consid-

eration the number of our horses and mules?”32

It was a powerful statement about the limits of democracy in the colo-

nies, and the hypocrisy of the white delegates who purported to represent

a population they held in subjugation. But the colonial delegates and many

others in the National Assembly had little desire to open up a discussion on

the morality of slavery. A compromise granting six seats to Saint-Domingue

(two for each province) was quickly reached and the broader issues shunted

aside. It was the beginning of a pattern that would dominate debates over

colonial policy for nearly two years. During the night of August 4, as repre-

sentatives from the aristocracy and the clergy stepped forward to give

up the privileges that separated them from other citizens, one delegate

brought up the question of the ultimate form of privilege—the owning

of slaves—but his intervention garnered little enthusiasm. The planters

were busy outside the assembly, too, showing up in force at the Comédie

Française to heckle a performance of a play by Olympe de Gouges, a lead-

ing activist for the rights of women, which attacked slavery and celebrated

the possibility of solidarity between French whites and colonial slaves. The

play closed after three nights.33

Many representatives in the National Assembly were tacitly committed

to maintaining slavery, and abolitionist voices were isolated. Representa-

tives from port towns like Nantes and Bordeaux, which profited from the

monopoly regulations governing colonial trade, had important differences

with planter representatives. But when faced with a common threat, they

banded together. The planter-merchant alliance was crafted and main-

tained by the Club Massiac, which gathered a broad range of plantation

owners from Saint-Domingue, some proprietors of coffee and indigo plan-

tations, others wealthy absentee owners of sugar plantations. The marquis

de Gallifet, owner of some of the most prosperous sugar plantations in

the Northern Province, was its first president, though he soon resigned

the post, apparently because of a stuttering problem. Like the Société

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75

des Amis des Noirs, the Club Massiac funded the publication of pam-

phlets—including one written by the marquis de Rouvray called
L’Etat des

nègres
—and also managed to get its views expressed in certain revolutionary newspapers. The planter club developed close connections with paral-

lel merchant political clubs in the port towns. Although in principle the

Club Massiac was for colonial landowners only, one of its key members was

Moreau. With his “folders of laws, his boxes of colonial history, he was the

living law code, the historian, almost the legislator of the colony,” and his connections helped the group enjoy considerable power.34