"The Price of Liberty": Victor Hugues and the Administration of Freedom in Guadeloupe, 1794-1798

Abstract

I N 1793, a new flag appeared on both sides of the Atlantic. On top of the red, white, and blue of the French Republican tricolor stood armed men: one white, one mulatto, and one black. In Saint Domingue, Bramante Lazzary, a leader of slave insurgents who had recently allied himself with the Republic, wrote: There are no more slaves in St. Domingue, all men of all are free and equal.... Our flag makes clear that our liberty depends on colors: black, mulatto, and white: we are fighting for these colors. At about the same time in Paris, a delegation of free coloreds headed by the iio-year-old Jeanne Odo carried a similar flag into the National Convention. The figures on it wore liberty caps and carried pikes, and a motto read, Notre union fera notre force (Our union will be our strength). 1 This flag represented both the possibilities and limitations of the policies of emancipation and equality that transformed the French empire during the I790s. It symbolized both an assertion of a common Republican mission, which sought the elimination of racial hierarchies and the transformation of slaves into citizens and soldiers, and a re-inscription of racial difference. In I796, in the colony of Guadeloupe, the three colors of the flag came to represent racial categories used in creating a series of censuses of unprece-