Gendered Freedom: Citoyennes and War in the Revolutionary French Caribbean

Abstract

In the 1790s, slave revolutionaries transformed the societies of Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe, and Martinique in the French Caribbean, confront ing and overcoming slavery and creating a new order based on emancipation and political participation for all colonial citizens. By successfully organizing a resilient insurrectionary force in Saint-Domingue in 1791, these revolutionaries created a crisis and gave themselves a political platform from which they demanded reform first and eventually outright emancipation. The decrees of emancipation issued in 1793 in Saint-Domingue, which were ratified in Paris in 1794, effectively channelled mass slave insurrection into a new national policy, one with enormous political and military consequences. Former slaves became soldiers of the French Republic, fighting simultaneously for the tricolour and for liberty from slavery.