A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean

Abstract

This anthology contains nine rigorous and compelling studies of the impact of the interrelated French and Saint-Domingue Revolutions on colonies within and encircling the Caribbean. It begins with David Patrick Geggus’s survey of 62 slave rebellions and conspiracies throughout the region between 1789 and 1815. He estimates that only 40 to 50 percent were directly linked to the ideological inspiration or political effects of the French Revolution. From the French perspective, historiographically as well as contemporaneously, as Carolyn Fick remarks in the second chapter, the abolition of slavery in Saint-Domingue in 1794 was hardly a central issue in the bourgeois revolution. In fact, help from the abolitionist civil commissioner Léger Félicité Sonthanax, as well as the “self-determined, massive slave rebellion” in 1791 (p. 69)—following two years of demands by white planters for representation and greater autonomy and by free persons of color for full equality (for themselves, not slaves)—had unwittingly exposed the tensions and contradictions of the caste and racial structure. Michael Duffy’s article explains why Great Britain failed to capitalize on French troubles to seize all the colonies of its rivals: the loss of half of the 89,000 soldiers it sent to the Caribbean between 1793 and 1801 and the effect of emancipation in the French colonies on the nature of the war in this theater. A case in point is the small, former French colony of Saint-Lucia. David Gaspar analyzes the slave insurgency there against British occupation.Four chapters discuss the revolutionary era in Spanish colonies. Geggus warns against exaggerating the influence of events in Saint-Domingue on two lesser-known slave rebellions, in Cuba in 1795 and in Santo Domingo in 1796. Jane Landers traces the career of General Jorge Biassou, a leader of the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue as caudillo of the Black Auxiliaries of Carlos IV, who was later transported to Saint Augustine, where he and black guerrilla forces under his command helped Spain resist American incursions. Kimberly Hanger and Robert Paquette contribute essays on Spanish and American Louisiana. Hanger juxtaposes the appeal of the principles of the French Revolution to Pierre Bailly, a free pardo militia officer sent to prison in Cuba in 1796 by Governor Carondelet, with the loyalties of most Louisiana free persons of color to their white kin and the Spanish government. Paquette demonstrates the “interconnectedness” of the defeat of the Leclerc expedition in Saint-Domingue and Napoleon’s sale of Louisiana to the United States in 1803 and suggests the possible influence of the Saint-Domingue revolution on the largest slave revolt in American history, in lower Louisiana in 1811. In the last chapter, Roger Buckley shows how enlistment of African slaves in the West India Regiments led to recognition of the right of slaves to testify in British military courts in 1809, an imperial interference in colonial affairs that prefigured Parliament’s imposition of emancipation in 1834. Uniformly excellent, the essays in A Turbulent Time combine larger perspective with insightful analysis of sources like court cases and government investigations of conspiracies, giving some idea of how the revolutionary era was experienced at the level of particular individuals of all races, classes, and conditions.Julius Scott’s metaphor of a “common wind” suggests the spread of revolutionary ideas among popular classes, as does Paquette’s counterinference from John Calhoun’s doubt that more than half of ignorant American blacks had ever heard of the French revolution: “More than half of [Louisiana’s] slaves had heard of the Saint-Domingue revolution” (p. 220). A revolutionary period is one in which structures of authority and social control weaken. The obedience of subordinate classes can no longer be taken for granted. Elites perceive the threat from below, often to the point of paranoia. In general, the texts provide abundant evidence of such a crisis in the Caribbean at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, naturally varying in intensity and scope from colony to colony and over time. Nevertheless, most of the contributors call into question the simplistic notion of a contagion of ideology and play down the importance of libertarian ideals from the French Revolution in the slave revolts of the era. They stress alternative explanations: the inherently explosive social structure of plantation societies themselves, the worldview and military capabilities of slaves recently imported from Africa, ethnic differences between African and Creole blacks, local traditions of resistance among white colonials and free persons of color as well as slaves, the role of the nascent abolitionist movement in France and England, and above all extraordinary opportunities opened up by war between imperial powers. While the editors claim that the reverberations of the French Revolution through all the colonies, whatever empire they belonged to, served as a force of integration in the Circumcaribbean, it is equally plausible that the very different character, strength, and resolution of popular movements in specific colonies further fragmented the region.