Religion and the Atlantic World: The Case of Saint-Domingue and French Guiana

Abstract

Religion played significant roles in the French Atlantic in the Revolutionary Era. While scholars have studied religion in continental France during the French Revolution, authors have given little, if any, attention to religion in the Caribbean and Atlantic contexts. France’s Caribbean colonies experienced the French Revolution both similar to and unique from the metropole. French colonial populations encountered revolutionary ideas about religion within an Atlantic context. The free and enslaved populations of the French Caribbean engaged in a revolutionary dialogue with France through religious ideas and actions. My chapter examines this Atlantic exchange through the lens of Catholicism in two strikingly different French Caribbean colonies: Saint-Domingue and Guiana. Saint-Domingue, France’s most prized sugar-producing slave colony, offers a perspective on religion during the French and Haitian Revolutions. On the other hand, French Guiana, with a small but diverse population of French colonists, slaves of African descent, and indigenous peoples, struggled to attract colonization on a larger scale. During the French Revolution, Guiana became a penal colony and the Revolution’s first deportees to and from Guiana were refractory priests. Comparing Saint-Domingue and French Guiana provides a varied understanding of religion in the revolutionary French Atlantic; whereas the religieux advanced the revolution in Saint-Domingue, they were its victims in French Guiana.