The Transformation of the World (115 page)

The American Declaration of Independence offered the architects of French foreign policy a chance to take their revenge on the old rival. In 1778, on conditions seemingly favorable to the Americans, the French king and American antiroyalists agreed on a strategically motivated alliance against Britain that involved the first recognition of the rebels by a European power; Spain joined the alliance the following year. This European support helped the Americans out of difficulties at decisive moments in their struggle, especially when the French navy briefly gained control of the North Atlantic in 1781 and cut off British troops in America.

The Treaty of Paris in 1783, a major setback for Britain only twenty years after the triumph of 1763, strengthened the French position in the world. But it was a Pyrrhic victory, given that the price for the victory of the American allies and some rather token successes at sea against the world's premier navy was impending bankruptcy of the French state. Any other crisis—it happened to be France's lamentable failure to assist the Dutch against Prusso-British interference in 1787—would have cast a rude light on this desperate financial situation. It may not have been the deepest cause of the French Revolution, but in terms of
l'histoire événementielle
there was hardly a stronger impulse for the series of challenges that now faced the monarchy. Since the tax system offered no scope for rapid increases in revenue, and since the dynasty was too weak to cancel its debts out of hand, it found itself compelled to consult the notables of the kingdom. Instead of pragmatically clearing up the crisis, however, these now demanded that the consultation process should be formalized through the calling of the Estates-General, a representative body that had last met in 1614.

The result was a spiral of mounting demands on the Crown, which soon merged with other confrontational tendencies: clique struggles at court, unrest among the rural population in the provinces and the urban poor in the capital, conflicts between nobles and nonnobles within the upper classes. From the moment when the government, acting out of weakness, signaled its willingness to introduce reforms, new divisions appeared within an opposition that had originally been directed less against the system of rule as such than against its managerial deficiencies under Louis XVI. Faced with imminent changes and an uncertain future, groups and individuals made every effort to ensure that their own interests were respected, and in this jockeying for position it was not long before the monarchy's incapacity for reform was exposed.

Historians continue to argue about the precise role of foreign and colonial policy in the period from the outbreak of the revolution in 1789 to the beginning of the military contest with various European powers in April 1792.
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One thing is clear: once the actual and symbolic weakening of France's external position in
1788–89 had crucially contributed to the collapse of the ancien régime, a correction of that position had to be an important objective for the new political forces that took the stage, especially as they expressed themselves in an ever sharper rhetoric of nationalism. The revolutionary wars and the later military expansion under Napoleon was therefore entirely in accordance with the logic of the long-standing global rivalry with Great Britain.

When did the French Revolution begin, and when did it end? There was not a single tumultuous process such as that which marked the American Revolution, stretching from the Stamp Act crisis of 1765 to the great revolutionary step of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. One might date the onset of the terminal crisis of the ancien régime to that same year, 1776, when the French foreign minister Vergennes, brushing aside the warnings of the great Turgot who had fallen from power in May, forced through his fateful policy of intervention in North America.
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But one might also begin in 1783, when the consequences of that policy were already showing. Revolutionary violence, comparable to the American events of 1765, first broke out in 1789. The revolutionary point of no return was reached on June 17, when the Third Estate of the Estates-General constituted itself as the National Assembly, and when the king and his government lost what power remained in their hands. Already for contemporaries, it was the extraordinary acceleration of unprecedented events, most visible in Versailles and Paris, that gave the French Revolution its novel character. Such space-time compression had seldom happened before, even in North America after 1765.

It is not possible to describe here the further course of the revolution within France—the various stages at which options were closed (a parliamentary monarchy, for example, in summer 1792) and new horizons opened up.
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When the revolution
ended
was and remains controversial. Its “hot” phase of heightened revolutionary violence began in August 1792 and lasted almost exactly two years until the fall of Robespierre at the end of July 1794. But political conditions became reasonably stable only when the Directorate took over the government in November 1795 and the new Constitution de l'An III was adopted in August of the same year. Did the revolution end with the seizure of power by General Bonaparte on November 9 (18 Brumaire), 1799, with the temporary external peace sealed by the Treaty of Amiens between Britain and France in March 1802, or with the downfall of Napoleon in April 1814? In a world-historical perspective, there is most to be said for the last of these dates. The impact of the French Revolution was slow to unfold, and it was the Napoleonic armies that first carried it out to the wider world, from Egypt to Poland and Spain.

Haiti

In 1804, the year when Bonaparte was crowned Emperor Napoleon, Jean-Jacques Dessalines proclaimed himself Emperor Jacques I in what had previously been France's richest colony. So ended, for once unambiguously, a revolutionary process that had been closely linked to the French and run almost in parallel
to it. The revolution in the colony of Saint-Domingue, which occupied the western half of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola and almost coincided with the territory of what is now the Republic of Haiti, should be understood as a direct consequence of the revolution in France. Even before things came to a worldwide ideological civil war between revolutionaries and their enemies, as the Anglo-Irish politician and writer Edmund Burke had predicted, and indeed helped to bring about, through his
Reflections on the Revolution in France
, the events in Paris ignited a revolutionary process in the faraway Caribbean that would, in terms of violence between 1791 and 1804, overshadow anything seen in the American or French Revolution.
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Since its history is less well known, a brief sketch will be in order here.

The social point of departure in the sugar-producing colony was quite different from that in North America or France. In the 1780s, Saint-Domingue had a prototypical slave society consisting of three classes: a large majority of black slaves (roughly 465,000 in 1789), very many of whom had been born in Africa; a white ruling elite of 31,000 plantation owners, bailiffs, and colonial functionaries; and between them about 28,000
gens de couleur
with the status of free people, including some who were quite well off and even owned plantations with slaves.
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Within this triangle three revolutions were acted out simultaneously: (1) a preemptive rebellion by conservative planters against the new antislavery regime in Paris; (2) a veritable uprising by the largest slave population outside the United States and Brazil; and (3) an attempt by the
gens de couleur
to break the dominance of whites in a society shot through with racial discrimination. No other land in the arc of Atlantic revolution had accumulated so much socially explosive material.

What was at stake in Saint-Domingue were not so much constitutional issues or the enforcement of legal principles as a sheer struggle for survival in an extremely brutalized society. Of all the great revolutions of the age, Haiti's was the one that can most clearly be described as social, in both its causes and its results. The American Revolution did not create a completely new type of society or eradicate any of the classes that had made up the colonial order; indeed, there are good reasons to claim that the social change during the period of the so-called “market revolution” (c. 1815 to 1848) went deeper than any that occurred after 1765.
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The social effects of the French Revolution were more considerable: above all, the abolition of aristocratic privileges, the liberation of the peasantry from feudal constraints, the elimination of the church as a key social factor (with large landholdings, for example), and, mainly during the Napoleonic period, the creation of legal and administrative frameworks for bourgeois-capitalist economic forms. In neither of the two “great revolutions,” however, was a whole social system destroyed along with a political order. That did happen in Haiti. The slaves emerged victorious from a long series of massacres and civil wars, and the colonial caste system gave way to an egalitarian society of free African American small farmers.

This drama unfolded in genuinely international context. In France, Enlightenment champions of universal human rights pushed for liberation of the colonial slaves, while the question was posed from the beginning of the revolution as to how colonial Frenchmen and—most controversially—the
gens de couleur
should share in the democratization of French politics. A process of participation got under way in Saint-Domingue as early as February 1790, with elections among the whites for a colonial representative assembly.
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Earlier still, in October 1789, a delegation of the
gens de couleur
had addressed the National Assembly in Paris. There was direct interaction between events in France and on the Caribbean island, although communication problems ruled out direct coordination. When three commissioners representing the National Assembly arrived in Saint-Domingue in November 1791 to ensure orderly implementation of the new (though contradictory) policy decided in Paris, they did not yet know that a great slave uprising had broken out that August and been put down only with greatest difficulty.
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A symbolic watershed was reached in April 1792, when the National Assembly in Paris declared that white citizens,
gens de couleur,
and free blacks should enjoy political equality. This did not yet mean emancipation of the slaves, but it did establish for the first time the basic principle that civil rights did not depend on skin color. The various revolutionary groupings in Paris, however, had no intention of allowing their most valuable colony to go its own way. Under the leadership of a former slave, François Dominique Toussaint Louverture (or L'Ouverture, 1743–1803), who had risen in the service of the French government, revolutionary struggle was linked in a complicated way with cautious moves toward independence. France might possibly have tolerated an independent Haiti if it had received guarantees that the island would continue to play its role in the transatlantic French mercantile system. Toussaint Louverture, appointed governor of Saint-Domingue in 1797, appears to have realized that a complete economic break was inadvisable. He also skillfully maneuvered between France and the two counterrevolutionary interventionist powers: Spain (which possessed the other half of Hispaniola) and Britain. In 1798 the British gave up a costly attempt to conquer the island.
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Then Napoleon wound up the experiment, rescinding the 1794 decree of the Convention Nationale that had abolished slavery throughout France's colonial possessions; once he had become first consul in April 1802 and signed a peace treaty with Britain, he sent a military expedition to the Caribbean to put an end to Toussaint Louverture's autonomy project. The governor was arrested and died soon afterward in captivity. Yet it proved impossible to reintroduce slavery in Saint-Domingue: the blacks defended themselves and, in an unusually destructive guerrilla campaign, inflicted a crushing defeat on the French army in 1803. On January 1, 1804, the independent state of Haiti was proclaimed. Only in 1825 did France recognize it and effectively abandon any possibility of reconquering it through violence. In the teeth of opposition from the two strongest military
powers of the age, Britain and France, the majority of the population on the island had abolished the institution of slavery dating back three hundred years. But revolution and war had also caused devastation on such a scale that it proved extremely difficult to build a liberated and prosperous new society.

Events in Haiti did not trigger a chain reaction. The spectacle of revolutionary self-emancipation would not be repeated in any other slave society in the nineteenth century. In France, the signal from the Caribbean came as a warning against too much pliability on the slavery issue; the country that had proclaimed total emancipation in 1794 did not free the rest of its slaves until 1848—fifteen years after Britain, which had resolutely fought against the revolution, did so. In all slave societies, nowhere more than the Southern states of the United States, paintings were commissioned to hang on walls as a reminder of the apocalyptic “Negro revolt” that would break out if the slaves were offered the least compromise. Until the Civil War, more than half a century after the denouement on Hispaniola, propagandists in the Southern states recalled that the French abolitionists (the Amis des Noirs) had opened the Pandora's box of slave rebellion. For their part, US abolitionists pointed out that only the ending of slavery could prevent the impending evil.
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Unlike the revolutions in North America and France, Haiti's did not occur in a society with a pronounced culture of writing and printing. Eyewitness accounts do exist, but not many, and there are only a few clearly formulated programmatic statements. Even some of the goals of Toussaint Louverture, a man with many sides, can only be deduced from his actions. Recent historians have shown great ingenuity in evaluating these sources and added an altogether new facet to the Age of Revolutions.
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But for a long time the discursive paucity was one reason why Haiti was not taken seriously in histories of revolution; it seemed to emit no universalizable political message over and above a call for the liberation of slaves throughout the world. That is not untrue. But it must also be recognized that the revolution in the French Caribbean shared from the beginning in the Atlantic discourse of liberty. Both the British-American and the French critique of absolutism placed great emphasis on the image of shaking off the yoke of slavery.