Patriots, Royalists, and Terrorists in the West Indies: The French Revolution in Martinique and Guadeloupe by William S. Cormack

Abstract

Reviewed by: Patriots, Royalists, and Terrorists in the West Indies: The French Revolution in Martinique and Guadeloupe by William S. Cormack Deirdre T. Lyons Cormack, William S. – Patriots, Royalists, and Terrorists in the West Indies: The French Revolution in Martinique and Guadeloupe. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. 400 p. While much scholarship on the French Revolution in the Caribbean has concentrated on Saint-Domingue, Patriots, Royalists, and Terrorists in the West Indies examines the political and social turmoil that erupted in Martinique and Guadeloupe from c. 1789–1802. William Cormack argues that the revolutionary conflicts in the Windward Islands were shaped as much by the “realities of race and slavery” as they were “inspired by the political drama unfolding in France” (p. 262). By exploring Martinique and Guadeloupe as central sites of revolutionary upheaval and transformation, Cormack highlights the ways in which they “should be seen as part of the larger story of the French Revolution” (p. 263). Through an analysis of administrative reports, official correspondence, and the records of colonial councils, the book’s eight chapters offer a chronological account of the French Revolution in Martinique and Guadeloupe. Cormack makes a compelling case for how metropolitan rumors, discourse, signs, symbols, and communications (the “revolutionary script”) shaped social and political upheaval in the Windward Islands. This approach expands our understanding of how the civil wars, slave uprisings, and inter-island conflicts that exploded in the Caribbean from 1789 to 1802 emerged from the ways in which colonial populations experienced, understood, and contested the French Revolution (p. 3). Different factions of the colonial population (which Cormack classifies as “patriots,” “royalists,” or “terrorists”) seized on the revolutionary script from the metropole, which they applied to their specific circumstances—generating “competing claims to speak for the nation” (p. 263). Patriots, Royalists, and Terrorists in the West Indies thus argues that even as events in France furnished colonial actors with a continuously evolving “script for revolutionary action,” it was local political, social, and economic [End Page 696] contingencies that shaped how these populations grappled with revolutionary transformation (p. 3). Cormack predominantly focuses on the White populations of the Windward Islands—composed of grand blancs (colonial administrators, planters, and elite merchants), as well as petits blancs (soldiers, sailors, clerks, tradesmen, and poor Whites)—and examines their role in exacerbating revolutionary conflict. While Cormack gives less attention to free people of colour and enslaved persons, which constituted the majority of the colonial population, his examination of factional fighting between grands blancs and petits blancs offers insight into how this discord rendered Martinique and Guadeloupe vulnerable to crises of political legitimacy, civil wars, invasions, and rebellions in which free people of colour and enslaved persons played central roles. The book’s chapters correspond to different phases of the Revolution in the Windward Islands. Chapter 1 offers a particularly rich account of Martinique and Guadeloupe on the eve of the Revolution and argues that, despite serving as integral “sources of tremendous national wealth,” France’s control of the Windward Islands was “neither secure nor stable,” as social and political order were weakened by bitter internal social divisions (p. 12). Economic disparity between the grands blancs and petits blancs, as well as the increasing demands of free people of colour for social and political equality, all compounded tensions among the free population. Combined with the fact that over 80% of the population were enslaved Africans or people of African descent, these dynamics all converged to make “the Windward Islands a powder keg” by 1789 (p. 13). The outbreak of the Revolution in the metropole exposed these internal divisions in Martinique and Guadeloupe, as “the communication of new political forms, radical concepts, and subversive language from France” ignited local conflicts (p. 38). Newly formed colonial assemblies seized the opportunity to demand greater local autonomy, planters challenged the authority of colonial administrators and mercantile restrictions, free people of colour demanded civil rights, and enslaved persons tried to seize freedom. The outbreak of the Revolution thus provided the framework for these groups to contest or reaffirm racial, economic, and social hierarchies in Martinique and Guadeloupe. The next five chapters trace successive phases of the Revolution in the Windward Islands between...