The Revolution in Saint-Domingue and the Historicity of Liberty, 1791-1797

Fig. Anne-Louis Girodet Trioson, Portrait de C.(itoyen) Jean-Baptiste Belley, ex-représentant des colonies, oil-on-canvas (Château de Versailles, 1797). Dimensions: 159.5 x 112.8 cm cadre: 176.9 x 8.5cm.

Jack Francis Thomas DickensTrinity College, Cambridge

This work was originally submitted as an Undergraduate Dissertation for Part II of the Historical Tripos at the University of Cambridge in May 2018.

Image: The cover of Laurent Jean François Truguet’s Mémoire sur St. Domingue, 171AP/1, Dossier 16, 1796 - October 1798, Barras Directeur: Marine et colonies. 12 pièces. Archives Nationales, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine.

This photograph is my own.

Contents

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………………...1

Chapter One: Liberty in the Networks of the Late-Eighteenth-Century French Atlantic World……………....................................................................................................................................13

Chapter Two: Colour, Citizenship, and Liberty in the Revolutionary French Atlantic………………………………………………………………………………………………….27

Chapter Three: The Revolution in Saint-Domingue and the Historicity of Liberty……………………………………..............................................................................................40

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………………....53

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………………….54

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Introduction

‘It is in these circumstances that the French Revolution penetrates into the Colony of Saint-Domingue…I shall not recount here the bloody scenes which have desolated, for five years, this colony. Here, like in France, all the ills have come from the obstinate resistance of tyranny over the efforts (of the revolutionaries) and over the progress of liberty. Indeed! How should this struggle not have also been more violent in a country where it has had to tend to erasing all distinction between masters and slaves?’1

~ Laurent Jean François Truguet, Mémoire sur Saint-Domingue, (1795/1796).

This dissertation examines how historical time in the revolutionary French Atlantic was perceived,

understood, and expressed through the concept of ‘Liberty’. It does so by using a new document, the

Mémoire sur Saint-Domingue, written by the French Minister for the Navy and Colonies Laurent Jean

François Truguet in 1795/6 during his time in office (1795-97) under the Thermidorian Republic of 1795-

1799.2 The Mémoire has been preserved amongst the personal papers of Paul Barras – the chief political

actor within the Directory of these years. It is in the format of the Mémoire, an entirely regular procedure in

the tradition of French diplomatic and colonial administrative reportage.3 Yet it is more than this: a

handwritten document of fifty-six pages divided into three parts, Truguet’s Mémoire was created with an

immediacy of purpose at a critical moment in the history of French Atlantic revolution. Requested by Barras

at some point after Truguet took his post as Minister, and before the announcement of a new republican

commission to be sent to Saint-Domingue in late-January 1796, it outlines the struggle for liberty in Saint-

Domingue, providing information from which metropolitan administrators could develop policies to secure

the colony for the French republic. The central phenomenon which emerges, however, is what I call the

1 Laurent Jean François Truguet, Mémoire sur St Domingue, 171AP/1, Dossier 16, 1796 - October 1798, Barras Directeur: Marine et colonies. 12 pièces. Archives Nationales, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, Pièce II, p. 4: ‘C’est dans ces circonstances que la révolution français pénétra dans la Colonie de St. Domingue. Elle port, dans le coeur des opprimés, l’espoir d’obtenir un meilleur sort et suspendu, un moment, l’effet de leur haine. Combien il eut été facile alors aux Colons eux mêmes tourner, au profit de tous, un révolution inevitable et plus irrésistiblement vouluë encore par le fond des choses, au milieu des colonies mêmes, qu’au sein de la France! Je ne retracerai point ici les scènes sanglantes qui ont désolé, depouis cinq ans, cette colonie. Là, comme en france, tout les maux sont venus de la résistance obstinée de la tyrannie, aux efforts et aux progrès de la liberté. Hé ! combien cette lutte devoit encore être plus violente dans un Pays où elle devait tendre à effacer toute distinction entre des maîtres et des esclaves?’. 2 Truguet, Mémoire sur St Domingue, op cit. I will produce the French original in the footnotes here for the remainder of the dissertation. Unless stated otherwise, all translations are my own. I have stayed as close as possible to a literal translation of the document, but I have made some small changes where a literal translation would either be impossible or confusing. The text itself is written in haste and contains a number of older French spellings and simple misspellings as well as irregular or incomplete sentence structures. These are factors to note when reading the original transcript here. These are the result of remaining faithful to the original document, not a careless transcription. The original document is written in a variety of different hands with errors and corrections, making it likely that it was dictated to several different secretaries who wrote down Truguet’s words.3 For an examination of the genre of the diplomatic and administrative mémoire, see Cornel Zwierlein, Imperial Unknowns: The French and the British in the Mediterranean, 1650-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 9-12.

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‘historicity of liberty’, a terminological signifier for the way in which Truguet places himself in time using

‘liberty’ as a metonym for progress. This was fashioned by Truguet’s experiences within France, but it was

intensified by his observation of events taking place in Saint-Domingue. Ultimately, Truguet’s concept of

liberty was not free from the Eurocentric limitations of any universalist creed of the Enlightenment.4

Historians of French republicanism in Saint-Domingue have been aware of Truguet, but none have ever

analysed or cited the Mémoire.5 Such analysis allows us to shed further light upon another important actor,

alongside the likes of Léger Félicite Sonthonax, in the construction of a republican project in the Antilles.

Truguet, the son of a chef d’escadre, was born in 1752 and quickly followed his father into the French Royal

Navy, entering the gardes de la marine in 1765. After distinguishing himself under the ancien régime, he

embraced the republicanism of the French revolution after 1792. During this time, as his correspondence

with Sonthonax reveals, Truguet served as captain of a warship called the Fine in Saint-Domingue and

remained loyal to the republican commission there during the fateful summer of 1793.6 Like many servants

of the ancien régime and revolutionary republics, Truguet continued to administrate under Napoleon after

1799, although his disagreements with the regime led him to turn down the offer of serving once again as the

4 See: Laurent Dubois and Aurélien Berra, ‘“Citoyens et amis!”: Esclavage, citoyenneté et République dans les Antilles françaises à l’époque révolutionnaire’, Annales Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 58e Année, No. 2 (Mar. – Apr., 2003), p. 281-303, at p. 283-284; Doris L. Garraway, ‘“Légitime Défense”: Universalism and Nationalism in the Discourse of the Haitian Revolution’, in idem, Trees of Liberty: Cultural Legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2008), at p. 68-77; and Shanti Marie Singham, ‘Betwixt Cattle and Men: Jews, Blacks, and Women, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man’, ch. 3 in Dale Van Kley ed., The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights 1789 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1994), at. p. 114-153.5 Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848 (London and New York: Verso Publishing, 1998), p. 229; Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution & Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (Chapel Hill and London: North Carolina University Press, 2004), p. 351-2; Miranda Spieler, ‘The Legal Structure and Colonial Rule during the French Revolution’, The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 66 (Apr., 2009), p. 365-408, at p. 403-404.6 Robert Louis Stein, Léger Félicité Sonthonax: The Lost Sentinel of the Republic (London and Toronto: Associated University Press, 1985), p. 129. For Sonthonax’s career in Saint-Domingue, see: Marcel Dorigny, Les abolitions de l’esclavage: de L.F. Sonthonax à V. Schœlcher, 1793, 1794, 1848: actes du colloque international tenu à l’Université de Paris VIII les 3, 4, et 5 février 1994, organisé par l’Association pour l’étude de la colonisation européene; textes réunis et présentés par Marcel Dorigny (Saint-Denis: Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 1995); and idem, Léger-Félicité Sonthonax: la première abolition de l’esclavage: la Révolution française et la Révolution de Saint-Domingue/textes réunis et présentés par Marcel Dorigny (Saint-Denis: Société française d’histoire d’outre-mer; Paris: Association pour l’étude de la colonisation européene, 1997).

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Minister of the Navy.7 He then worked under the Restoration and the July monarchy before his death in

1839.8 The relative absence of biographical material for Truguet makes the Mémoire an important resource

for enhancing our knowledge of his role in colonial politics in these years, and of his approach to liberty as a

problem of space, time, and historicity.9

My understanding of ‘historicity’ in this dissertation builds upon the ‘heuristic tool’ of the ‘regime of

historicity’ outlined by François Hartog.10 For Hartog, this is a conceptual device which the historian can use

to reconstruct past temporalities by thinking about how an individual’s writings exhibit an explicit and

implicit ‘structuring’ of the relationships between past, present, and future.11 Hartog writes that this regime of

historicity can be used in two senses: in ‘a broad macro-historical sense, and sometimes in a narrow, micro-

historical one’.12 It is through the micro-historical case of Truguet’s Mémoire that I hope to access macro-

historical temporalities of the period. I use Hartog’s concept to illustrate how republicans, white and black,

placed recent events in response to the slave insurrection which occurred in Saint-Domingue in 1791-93. In

applying the regime of historicity to the perception and structuring of time in the eighteenth century this

dissertation follows in the footsteps of Daniel Brewer’s and Dan Edelstein’s recent surveys of the French

Enlightenment.13 Here, however, I use it to examine reconfigurations in the structuring of past, present, and

7 Martin Lyons, France Under the Directory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 164. 8 For the only source of collated biographical material on the life of Truguet, see M.C. Mullié, Biographie des Célébrités Militaires Des Armées De Terre et De Mer De 1789 à 1850 (Paris: Poignavant Et Compie, Éditeurs, Rue Neuve-De-L’Université, 1850) while he was involved with the university of Paris, the National Society of Lille, and the Northern Department of the Historical Institute. 9 There is a collection of maps created under Truguet’s direction while he was serving as an Adjacent Admiral to the French ambassador to Constantinople from 1784, and an outline of his career in a tome dedicated to famous French military and naval personnel created in 1850, a reference for which is provided in footnote 8 above. For examples of such cartographic works, see: Laurent Jean François Truguet, ‘Carte des Dardanelles/M. Truguet’ (1785), 1 carte, ms. col., Bibliothèque nationale de France, départment Cartes et plans, GE SH 18 PF 98 DIV3P8. 10 For Hartog’s outline of his concept of ‘regimes d’historicité’ see François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and the Experience of Time, translated by Saskia Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), and in particular ‘Presentism: Stopgap or New State’ at p. xiii-xxii, and ‘Introduction: Orders of Time and Regimes of Historicity’ at p. 1-20.11 Hartog, Regimes of Historicity, op cit., p. xvii; for the philosophical concept of ‘Geschichtlichkeit’, see Being and Time, trans. John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1967); this is different to the use of historicity in Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), at Ch. 2, ‘The Three Faces of Sans Souci: Glory and Silences in the Haitian Revolution’.12 Hartog, Regimes of Historicity, op cit., p. xvii.13 Daniel Brewer, The Enlightenment Past: Reconstructing Eighteenth-Century French Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment: A New Genealogy (Chicago: Chicago

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future under the stresses of late eighteenth-century revolution in an administrative document rather than the

philosophical works of the High Enlightenment.

However, Hartog’s device is incomplete insofar as it neglects the dimensions of language. Neither Brewer

nor Edelstein examine the linguistic means by which this historicity was constructed and expressed. Yet a

‘regime of historicity’, by Hartog’s own admission, is an anachronistic device used by the historian: it does

not simply exist as a phenomenon within texts. It is drawn out by the historian who necessarily examines the

languages in which contemporaries express themselves, their perceptions, and ideals. Historians attempting

to understand temporalities in the past must study experiences of time by drawing out the temporalised

meanings which contemporaries attached to words. This emphasis upon semantics is a crucial part of the

‘conceptual history’ of Reinhart Koselleck, an approach which, when used critically, can enhance our

understanding of temporalities through the shifting languages of contemporaries.14 I seek to give nuance to

the concept of historicity by drawing upon what has been identified as Koselleck’s insight that ‘the past,

whether it actually exists or can be decoded, can never be understood other than through present perspective

and narrated by contemporary language.’15 My analysis of the Mémoire is inspired by this approach,

decoding it within a mode of scholarship which maintains that there is, as Helge Jordheim has elucidated, a

link between the structure of historical language and the diachronic structures of history.16

One word which was endowed with temporal significance amongst French republicans and revolutionaries in

this period was ‘liberty’. This is because the ways in which individuals place their present is necessarily

University Press, 2010).14 ‘Conceptual history’, or Begriffsgeschichte, is best outlined in how Koselleck envisaged its application to the historical period of 1750-1850 in his magnum opus, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, Translated and with an Introduction by Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); however, the theoretical underpinnings were elaborated in various works such as Kritik un Krise (Suhrkamp taschenbuch wissenschaft, 1973); idem, Historik und Hermeneutik (C. Winter Universitätsverlag, 1987); idem, ‘Linguistic Change and the History of Events, The Journal of Modern History, 61 (1989): p. 649-66; and idem, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Presner, Kerstin Behnke, Jobst Welge (California: Stanford University Press, 2002).15 Alexander Blake Ewing, ‘Conceptions of Historical Time in the Thinking of Michael Oakeshott’, History of European Ideas (2016), 42:3, p. 412-429, at p. 417.16 See Helge Jordheim, ‘Does Conceptual History Really Need a Theory of Historical Times?’, Contributions to the History of Concepts 6, no. 2 (2011): 21–41; idem., ‘Thinking in Convergences – Koselleck’s Language, History, and Time’, Ideas in History 2, no. 3 (2007): 65-90; and Ewing, ‘Conceptions of Historical Time’, op cit., p. 419.

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influenced by the available languages of their context.17 Although the concept of ‘liberty’ had enjoyed a long

career extending backwards to before the eighteenth century, the word in revolutionary France became

particularly important as a signifier for progress.18 Liberty in this period was not only rhetorical and political

in nature, it was a temporalised phenomenon. It offered the means by which individuals within a

revolutionary French Atlantic could place themselves in a present undergoing dramatic change. It was

invaluable for describing the experience of movement away from a stagnant past of error and towards a more

enlightened future.19 Of course, liberty meant different things to different people within the French Atlantic

World.20 Its meaning was in flux as it was altered, translated, and contested across cultures, spaces, and

time.21 Nonetheless, across spaces, actors used ‘liberty’ to articulate their self-awareness as actors in

history.22 This echoes Peter Fritizche’s examination of the ways in which the drama taking place from 1789

led more and more people to read, write, and imagine themselves into contemporary events.23 For Truguet,

‘liberty’ was the constructive element through which he wrote the revolution in Saint-Domingue and himself

into time of Atlantic revolution which he believed to have begun in 1775-6 with the American cause.24

17 See: Koselleck, Futures Past, op cit., p. 222-223.18 Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 221.19 See: Baron d’Holbach, Système social, ou principes naturels de la morale et de la politique (1773; repr. Paris, 1994), 558-59. 20 See: Dubois, ‘“Citoyens et amis!”’, op cit., p. 293-300 and idem, ‘“Our Three Colors”: The King, the republic and the Political Culture of Slave Revolution in Saint-Domingue, Historical Reflections, Vol. 29, No. 1, Slavery and Citizenship in the Age of the Atlantic Revolutions (Spring 2003), p. 83-102, at p. 89-90. 21 Janet Polasky, Revolutions Without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015), p. 3; and Walter Johnson, ‘Possible Pasts: Some Speculations on Time, Temporality, and the History of Atlantic Slavery, American Studies, Vol. 45, No. 4, Time and the African American Experience (2000), p. 485-499.22 Peter Fritzsche, ‘Specters of History: On Nostalgia, Exile, and Modernity, The American Historical Review, Vol. 106, No. 5 (Dec, 2001), pp. 1587-1618, especailly at p. 1600-1602; for Bookman, see: Carolyn E Fick, ‘The Saint-Domingue Insurrection of 1791: A Socio-Political and Cultural Analysis,’ Journal of Caribbean History, 25 (1991): 4. 23 Peter Fritzsche, ‘Specters of History’ op cit., esp. at p. 1600-1602.24 See: Truguet, Mémoire Sur Saint-Domingue, op cit., Pièce III, p. 2: ‘La revolution d’amerique, avoit influé de diverses manieres sur La Colonie de St domingue: d’un coté ell avoit fait Esperer a quelques colons grand Planteurs que Les colonies a Sucre; Pourroient aussi, se detacher de leur metropole; Et En efet des 1780 Et avant même; ils commencerent a agir Pour y Parvenir’; but also see: idem, Pièce II, p. 3, and Piéce III, at p. 2, p. 4, and p. 6.

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This historicity emerged from the perceived acceleration of historical time, an experience associated with

another word whose semantics underwent significant change during this period: ‘revolution’.25 New ways of

applying republican languages of liberty to Saint-Domingue were conceivable in this period because

revolution itself ‘was revolutionized in 1789.’26 As Koselleck argued, the novelty of the French experience

combined with the philosophical ‘singularisation’ of history during the Enlightenment caused a

reconfiguration between ‘the horizon of expectations’ and ‘the space of experience.’27 The experience of

radical change in the latter opened up the possibilities of the former, leading to a devaluation of the past and

re-orientation towards an open future.28 In the French experience ‘revolution became a metahistorical

concept’ describing totalising rupture and transformation rather than a shift within a predictable political

cycle.29 The transformed semantics of ‘revolution’ were a crucial means by which liberty could also be used

to express a present of acceleration in the ‘rush to fill the interval’ between the present and a coming post-

revolutionary future through revolutionary action.30 The concept of revolution as linear time-acceleration

sharpened the futuristic thrust of the historicity of liberty, but it also contributed to a heightened

consciousness of history. This amounted to a ‘temporalisation’ during the late eighteenth century in which

‘Time is no longer the medium in which all histories take place; it gains a historical quality’, and ‘history no

longer occurs in, but through, time.’31 Yet, as Lynn Hunt has illustrated, such ‘temporalisation’ needs to be

more adequately contextualised using specific historical research, a complex task since ‘revolutionaries of

the 1790s only dimly glimpsed the process in which they found themselves engaged’.32 Through Truguet’s

25 See: Hannah Arendt’s classic discussion of the creation of the ‘modern revolution’ in On Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 2015 edition), p. 21-22. For an updated historical discussion of how, when, and why the meanings of the word ‘revolution’ changed in its semantic significance, see Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, op cit., p. 221. 26 Keith Michael Baker, ‘Revolutionizing Revolution’, in Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein eds., Scripting the Revolution: a historical approach to the comparative study of revolutions (California: Stanford University Press, 2015), p. 71.27 See: Koselleck, Futures Past, op cit., at ch. 14. 28 ibid., p. 37-41. 29 ibid., p. 50.30 Lynn Hunt, ‘Revolutionary Time and Regeneration’, Diciotesimo Secolo, anno I, 2016, p. 62-76, at p. 63-64 on the experience of acceleration and on p. 73-74 on the desire to contribute to this acceleration to ‘fill the void’ of the present. 31 ‘Temporalisation’ is Keith Tribe’s translation of Koselleck’s word, ‘Verzeitlichung’ – see Koselleck, Futures Past, op cit. p. 236.32 Lynn Hunt, ‘Revolutionary Time and Regeneration’, p. 65 and p. 72-73; and Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, op cit., p. 221: Hunt also points out that an analysis which descends into the historical archive reveals that semantic change did not occur immediately, but over time as the revolution continued and became more radical up to 1794.

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Mémoire, this dissertation sheds further light upon the experience of ‘temporalisation’ for those involved in

the management of revolutions in the French Antilles.

Highlighting revolutionary transformations in expectations, language, and concepts, this dissertation

challenges the notion that late-eighteenth-century revolution possessed a ‘script’ for action and

understanding as Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein have argued.33 Because revolutionaries were

‘extremely self-conscious’ of previous revolutions, they reason that these provided them with ‘revolutionary

scripts which offer frameworks for political action.’34 Yet the revolutions in France and Saint-Domingue

were so epoch-making precisely because they tore apart scripts through the unprecedented nature of the

change they affected.35 Unsurprisingly, Malick W. Ghachem is unable to find the existence of such a ‘script’

in the Haitian context, and reduces it to the uses of the Code Noir of 1685 during the early insurrection.36

Historiographically, this surely hollows the ‘script’ of all meaning, a necessary consequence of the fact that

contemporaries could not have been guided in their actions by history because recent events had devalued

and distanced the lessons of the past.37 Truguet’s Mémoire itself is a product of the very problem of how one

administratively manages the unprecedented when the past no longer offers a guide. The result was a

profound re-orientation away from the discredited scripts of the past towards attempts to script a new

future.38 Accordingly, we must establish different understandings of how contemporaries such as Truguet

conceived of what was occurring in Saint-Domingue.

33 See: Baker and Edelstein eds., Scripting the Revolution, op cit, ‘Introduction’, p. 1-22 in which Baker and Edelstien outline their understanding of the concept of a ‘script’ and its utility as a part of a comparative approach to historical revolutions. 34 Ibid., p. 2.35 E.J. Sieyès, Que’est-ce que le tiers état?, ed. Par E. Chamption, Au siège de la Société (de l’Histoire de la Révolution Française), Paris 1888, p. 79. 36 Malick W. Ghachem, ‘The Antislavery Script’, in Baker and Edelstein, op cit., p. 157-159. 37 Koselleck, Futures Past, op cit., p. 39.38 See: Koselleck, Futures Past, op cit., p. 39.

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Contemporaries perceived that Saint-Domingue was a context in which the contested meaning of liberty

came face-to-face with a unique situation structured around a system of colour hierarchy.39 Studies of

demographic data for Saint-Domingue by Julia Gaffield and Laurent Dubois illustrate this idiosyncrasy: in

1789, according to official figures, there were roughly 465,000 slaves in the colony, compared to 31,000

whites, and just 28,000 free mixed-race gens de couleur.40 Of course, these categories themselves are

indicative of the ideological position of the white colonial administrators who constructed them, and the

1770s and onwards witnessed an intensification of legal regulations to maintain the colour hierarchy. 41 This

extreme situation meant that, as Louis Sala-Molins and Susan Buck-Morss have emphasised, the revolution

in Saint-Domingue truly was ‘the crucible, the trial by fire for the ideals of the French Enlightenment.’42

The result of the eruption of the insurrection which took place in the French colony from 22-23 August 1791

was that its extremity forced those in the metropole fashioning future visions of liberty to take notice. 43

Overnight, the slaves arose from their plantations, breaking their chains, enacting retributions against their

masters, and setting fire to the sugar cane which had provided the economic backbone of the ‘pearl of the

Antilles’.44 Two years of civil conflict eventually forced the hand of French administrators in the colony and 39 See: Malick W. Ghachem, ‘Montesquieu in the Caribbean: The Colonial Enlightenment between “Code Noir” and “Code Civil”’, Historical Reflexions, Vol. 25, No. 2, Postmodernism and the French Enlightenment (Summer 1999), pp. 183-210; Sue Peabody ‘“There Are No slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Gene E. Ogle, ‘“The Eternal Power of Reason” and “The Superiority of Whites”: Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s Colonial Enlightenment’, French Colonial History, Vol. 3 Idea and Action in French Colonization (2003), p. 35-50; Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revoluion (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2005); Mélanie Lamotte, ‘Colour Prejudice in the French Atlantic World’, Ch. 9 in D’Maris Coffman, Adrian Leonard, and William O’Reilly eds., The Atlantic World (London: Routledge, 2014), p. 151-165.40 See: Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World, op cit. p. 19; Julia Gaffield, ‘Complexities of Imagining Haiti: A Study of National Constitutions, 1801-1807, Journal of Social History, vol. 41, No. 1 (Fall, 2007), p. 81-103, at p. 82. 41 See: Dubois, Avengers of the New World, op cit. p. 62-72; Sue Peabody, ‘“There Are No slaves in France”’, op cit. p. 7-8, p. 88, and 106-133; for the differences between legal regulation and contemporary understandings of creolisation, see Emma Spary, ‘Climate Change and Creolisation in French Natural History, 1750-1795’, ch. 7 in Nicolaas Rupke and Gerhard Lauer eds., Johann Friedrich Blumenbach: Race and Natural History, 1750-1850 (London: Routledge, 2018). 42 Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press), p. 42; and see: Louis Sala-Molins, Les misères des Lumières. Sous la raison l’outrage (Paris: Homnispheres, 2008) and idem, Le Code noir: Ou la calvaire de Canaan (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France – PUF, 2006). 43 See: Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, op cit., p. 2-8; and Ada Ferrer, ‘Talk About Haiti: The Archive and the Atlantic’s Haitian Revolution’, in Garraway ed., Trees of Liberty, op cit. at p. 22. 44 For the wealth of Saint-Domingue on the eve of the 1791 insurrection, see: Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint-Domingue Revolution From Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990); James E. McClellan, Colonialism and Science: Saint-Domingue in the Old Regime (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University,

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metropole, resulting in a general emancipation ratified by the French National Convention in February

1794.45 Soon afterwards, the demography and politics of the Island were transformed, and Toussaint

Louverture was propelled to the centre of events as the effective military leader of the Island. 46 Eventually,

leading black Generals such as Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe declared ‘Haiti’ to be an

independent state in 1804.47 What began as a contest between gens de couleur and white planters over the

extension of civil rights in 1789 ended with the formation of the first non-white post-colonial state.48 The

Haitian Revolution thus ‘ranks as perhaps the greatest political triumph of the Age of Revolution, and it

might even be said that it best embodies the promises of Enlightenment universalism.’49

However, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot has highlighted, the history of this revolution was written out of

predominant narratives of the past from the early nineteenth-century.50 Because of the threat it posed to

eighteenth-century slaveholding regimes and the power of the archive to perpetuate the perspectives of those

with literacy and cultural power, the Haitian Revolution has tended to be a forgotten episode in history.51

There is much to be said for Trouillot’s exposé – when it first appeared in 1995, before the revival of the

study of Haiti from the late-nineties, many accounts of the epoch-making Age of Revolutions excluded the

Haitian experience altogether.52 Where Trouillot’s argument is more problematic is as a model for the

immediate reception of the revolution during 1791-97. Trouillot writes that the Haitian Revolution offered a

1992), p. 63-74; Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World, op cit. p. 24. For the early events of the revolution, see Jeremy D. Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian Insurrection (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007). 45 For an account which argues for a combination of the crucial impact of both the rural the slave insurrection and the collapse and the crisis of urban authority and order, see Jeremy D. Popkin, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 46 See: Doris L. Garraway, ‘“Légitime Défense”, in idem, Trees of Liberty, op cit., at p. 68-77. 47 Julia Gaffield, ‘Complexities of Imagining Haiti’, op cit. 48 Malick W. Ghachem constructs a chronology with ‘three pivotal developments’ in idem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 16. 49 Laurent Dubois, ‘An Enslaved Enlightenment: Rethinking the Intellectual History of the French Atlantic’, Social History, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Feb., 2006), p. 1-14, at p. 2. 50 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past, op cit., p. 107. 51 Ibid., p. 72-107. 52 See: R.R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800 (Princeton Classics). Updated Edition. (New Jersey and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014). For the critique of Palmer from the perspective of the study of the Age of Revolutions in global context, see David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam eds., The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760-1840. (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), p. xvi-xvii.

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severe ‘challenge’ to ‘the ontological and political assumptions of the most radical writers of the

Enlightenment’. It was ‘a sequence for which not even the extreme political left in France or in England had

a conceptual frame of reference’, comprising of ‘“unthinkable” facts in the frameworks of Western

thought’.53 Yet, while Trouillot has been correct to emphasise such ‘silencing’ of the Haitian experience after

1804, he is wrong to argue that all responses to the slave insurrection in the 1790s constituted a denial of its

realities. This error arises because there are two premises beneath Trouillot’s argument which are

unsatisfactory. Firstly, Trouillot’s understanding of linguistic-conceptual frameworks is static, and assumes

that these were incapable of adaptation or the acquisition of new semantics to meet new circumstances.

Following from this is Trouillot’s argument that even the most radical republicans were incapable of thinking

about the revolutionaries in Saint-Domingue in ways which accorded them agency. Neither premise of

Trouillot’s understanding of silencing is entirely accurate for this period.

Framing the late eighteenth century as a period of changing expectations provides a corrective to Trouillot’s

thesis. While most of those who received the news from Saint-Domingue silenced part of what occurred

there from 1791-93, this could be due as much to the nature of contemporary communications networks as to

conceptual incapacities.54 Furthermore, Truguet’s Mémoire, and works arising in a similar Thermidorian

milieu included an amplification of some of the genuinely radical occurences in the French Antilles. 55 Such

accommodation and assimilation of revolution in Saint-Domingue within a vision of colonial reform was

possible precisely because of the ‘variety of visions from an era when anything seemed possible.’ 56 In this

context, language and conceptual frameworks were not static: the events occurring in Saint-Domingue were

53 Ibid., p. 82-83. 54 See: Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson’s emphasis upon ‘holes in the net’ in early modern networks in Globalization: A Short History, translated by Dona Geyer (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 49. 55 See: Talleyrand, Essai sur les avantages à retirer des colonies nouvelles dans les circonstances présentes (Paris, 1797), p. 3-4 and p. 13 ; and Ambroise Marie Arnould, Systême maritime et politique des européens, pendant le dix-huitième siècle; fondé sur leurs traités de paix, de commerce et de navigation (Paris, 1797), p. 286.56 Janet Polasky, Revolutoins without borders, op cit., p. 2 and p. 12; James A. Rawley with Stephen D. Behrendt, The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History, revised edition (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), p. 125-126; Jeremy D. Popkin, ‘Saint-Domingue, Slavery, and the Origins of the French Revolution’, ch. 7 in Thomas E. Kaiser and Dale K. Van Kley eds., From Deficit to Deluge: The Origins of the French Revolution (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2011), p. 231-235. Malick Ghachem, however, is more sceptical about Popkin’s argument in idem, The Antislavery Script, op cit., p. 155.

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indeed ‘unthinkable’ until they occurred, but this did not mean that all contemporaries were unable to adapt

old languages to express new experiences.

This expanding imagination arose within political and administrative contexts fashioned by late eighteenth-

century ‘networks’ of information, communication, and trade.57 Indeed, the ‘where’ of Enlightenment is

crucial for locating concepts as they moved through various media over space, being altered in the process. 58

This movement was increasingly global as ‘the increased mobility of commodities and ideas’ was facilitated

by ‘the unprecedented expansion of global trade, improved navigational techniques, and cultural and racial

mixing.’59 However, the global dimensions of thought which emerged from this situation were themselves

made possible by the material cultures of communication from which they were fashioned. 60 The

technologies of the period meant that networks were reliant upon paper and thus a relationship between

knowledge, ignorance, and trust.61 These features all formed the constitutive matrix of ‘a world into which

the colonies were integrated on many levels’ and in which ‘currents of Enlightenment thought were always

already shaped by the realities of the Americas’.62 These factors combined to make liberty a spatial-temporal

phenomenon within an age of ‘archaic globalisation’, a phenomenon confronted in Truguet’s Mémoire.63

57 Crucially this was a period itself in which the ‘commerce’ could itself signify not only a vast historical process but the micro-relations of sociability between human beings. David Hume’s, ‘Of Essay Writing’ drew attention to the importance not only of a commerce in trading goods, but in the worldly commerce of human ideas. See: David Hume, Essays Moral, Political and Literary, Eugene F. Miller ed. (Indeanapolis: Liberty Fund, 1994), p. 535; and in the Francophone context, see Montesquieu’s famous praise of commerce in Chapters I and II of Book XX of De l’Esprit des lois (1748), ‘Du Commerce’ and ‘De l’Esprit de Commerce’ in De l’Esprit des lois: Tome II (Éditions Garnier: Paris, 1973), p. 2-4.58 Charles W.J. Withers, Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically About the Age of Reason (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2007) esp. at p. 1-21 and p. 42-61.59 Felicity A. Nussbaum ed., The Global Eighteenth Century (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), p. 8.60 See: David Armitage, Foundations of Modern International Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); A.G. Hopkins ed., Globalization in World History (London: Pimlico, 2002); and Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 61 For paperwork administration in the context of the Napoleonic wars see Anders Engberg-Pedersen, Empire of Chance: The Napoleonic Wars and the Disorder of Things (Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 147; for the argument that ‘Empires are built upon ignorance’, see: Cornel Zwierlein, Imperial Unknowns, op cit. A recent historical discussion of the issue of ‘trust’ in the eighteenth-century Atlantic can be found in Xabier Lamikiz, Trade and Trust in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World: Spanish Merchants and Their Overseas Networks (The Royal Society: The Boydell Press, 2010), esp. at p. 1, p. 2-4, and p. 9-13. 62 Dubois, ‘An Enslaved Enlightenment’, p. 6-7. 63 C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (London: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 41-44.

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Chapter one examines these social, structural, and material networks which conditioned Truguet’s Mémoire.

It recaptures the ways in which it arose within a context in which liberty represented a problem of time and

space for politicians and administrators.64 Truguet himself, operating within networks of information, was

able to utilise the technological and cultural nature of these systems for political purposes and to chart a

future colonial strategy in Saint-Domingue.

Chapter two examines the political arguments of Truguet’s Mémoire to outline the politics of liberty in

metropolitan France. Here, Truguet’s sought to intervene within on-going metropolitan discussions

surrounding France’s colonial future. For Truguet, the consequences of slave emancipation in Saint-

Domingue could be consolidated within a more moral and economically productive republican colonial

order. Saint-Domingue would be both ‘free and French’, directed towards civil equality and obligated by

civic responsibilities.

Chapter three demonstrates how Truguet and others temporalised the revolution in Saint-Domingue,

something which will be made clearer below. It charts how Truguet placed the events which had taken place

there within a wider revolutionary present, using the concept and language of ‘liberty’ as a means of

expressing the experience of rupture with the past and orientation towards the future. A consequence of this

was a sense of urgency, one manifest in Truguet’s desire to hasten the advance of an anticipated future

horizon in which Saint-Domingue would be liberated and conscripted into modernity.65

64 Anthony Giddens’ concept of ‘space-time distanciation’, articulated in ‘Space, Time and Regionalisation’, ch. 12 in Social Relations and Spatial Structures, Derek Gregory and John Urry eds., (London: Palgrave, 1985); David Harvey’s theory of ‘space-time’ compression in idem, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Malden/MA, 2004); and Doreen Massey’s concept of ‘power geometry’, in ‘Power-geometry and a progressive sense of place’, ch. 4 in Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, George Robertston, Lisa Tickner eds., Mapping the Futures: local cultures, global change (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). These works are generally applied to 20th century phenomena, but I seek to explore them in a late eighteenth-century historical context. 65 See: Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, op cit., p. 221; and Lynn Hunt, ‘Revolutionary Time and Regeneration’, op cit., p. 70 and p. 73-74; and David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 11-14 and at ch. 4, ‘Toussaint’s Tragic Dilemma’.

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Chapter One

Liberty in the Networks of the Late-Eighteenth-Century French Atlantic World

This chapter examines the social, structural, and material networks which conditioned Truguet’s Mémoire. In

doing so, it hopes to recapture the ways in which Truguet’s Mémoire arose within a context in which liberty

presented a space-time phenomenon for political thinkers and administrators.66 In his reportage on the

military condition of various regions of Saint-Domingue Truguet constructed a ‘geography of liberty’ in

66 Giddens, ‘Space, Time, and Regionalisation’, op cit., Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, op cit., Massey, ‘Power-geometry and a progressive sense of place’, op cit.

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which to move over space was envisaged as moving backwards or forwards in time.67 However, in order to

bring this to attention, this chapter first highlights the nature of the networks of communication within which

news and knowledge about liberty circulated, forming a backdrop for Truguet’s Mémoire.68 As Jürgen

Habermas argued, the eighteenth-century ‘public sphere’ was constituted by sociability, information

circulation, and the commodification of news in mercantile structures.69 Truguet occupied a particular

position with these networks as what I call an ‘administrator-agent’: a vital operator within the system of

metropolitan administration, relaying information to decision-makers in a colonial empire run upon paper. 70

In this endeavour, Truguet was connected within a milieu of like-minded republican administrators seeking

to remedy colonial problems.71 Presenting his document as a memorandum containing authentic and up-to-

date knowledge about Saint-Domingue for the Directory, Truguet was also able to present his vision as the

foundations upon which to launch future military and administrative strategy in the colony.

The late eighteenth century was a period in which the increasing connectivity and inter-regionality of

networks of trade, information, and communication operated together to make an emerging global

imagination possible.72 As C.P. Courtney and Jenny Mander have highlighted, such an imagination was

heralded by the abbé Raynal’s vast collaborative Histoire Philosophique (1770), a work which took the

establishment of European colonies and commerce across the globe as its central subject matter. 73 In the

67 See Giddens’ theory of ‘structuration’ and ‘space-time distanciation’ in idem, ‘Space, Time and Regionalisation’, op cit. 68 This takes inspiration from Janet Polasky’s examination of ‘rumours’ circulating in the French Caribbean in Polasky, Revolutions without borders, op cit. at ch. 5, ‘Rumors of Freedom in the Caribbean: “We know not where it will end”’. 69 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 20-21. 70 Engberg-Pedersen, Empires of Chance, op cit., at ch. 5, ‘Paper Empires: Military Cartography and the Management of Space’, p. 146-184; Ben Kafka, ‘The Demon of Writing: Paperwork, Public Safety, and the Reign of Terror’, Representations, Vol. 98, No. 1 (Spring 2007), p. 1-24; John C. Rule and Ben S. Trotter eds., A World of Paper: Louis XIV, Colbert de Torcy, and the Rise of the Information State (Kingston, Ontario: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014). 71 Pernille Røge, Political Economy and the Reinvention of France’s Colonial System, 1756-1802 (Unpublished PhD Thesis from the University of Cambridge, 2009/approved: 2010), at ch. 5, ‘A Colonial System for the French Republic, 1789-1802’. 72 Nussbaum, The Global Eighteenth-Century, op cit., p. 1-3. 73 Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes, Tome I. Livres I-V, Édition Critique, Anthony Strugnell et al. eds. (Centre International d’Étude du

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opening book of this work, Raynal had remarked that the discovery of the New World and voyages to the

East Indies marked the beginning of a new historical ‘moment’ in which ‘men of countries most far away

from one another brought themselves closer by new connections and new needs.’74 Within this global space

of interactions there was a specific inter-regional locus of administration, communication, and commerce –

‘the French Atlantic World’, a space which was located within, and whose networks entangled with, a wider

Atlantic context.75 James McClellan, pointing to the integration between Paris and Saint-Domingue upon the

eve of the revolution, calculates that at any one point there were at least twenty special ships moving across

the Atlantic carrying mail back and forth between metropole and colony.76 In 1790, an edition of the

Almanach des colonies which was published in Paris could circulate throughout the colonies within a matter

of months, providing information about recent political events in France.77 We need to appreciate how

responses to the revolution

in Saint-Domingue were forged in this fledging global perspective.78 This was a period in which goods,

news, and people readily circulated within commercial, social, and political interactions, leading

contemporaries to imagine themselves within an age of globality in motion.79

XIIIe Siècle: Ferney/Voltaire, 2010). For the argument that the Histoire Philosophique was the first major history and survey of the world system, see: J.G.A Pocock, ‘Commerce, Settlement and History: A Reading of the Histoire des Deux Indes’, in Rebecca Starr ed., Articulating America: Fashioning a National Political Culture in Early America. Essays in Honor of J.R. Pole (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), at p. 15-44; and C.P. Courtney and Jenny Mander eds., Raynal’s Histoire Des Deux Indes: Colonialism, Networks, and Global Exchange. Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2015), p. 7-8. 74 ‘C’est à ce moment que les hommes des contrées plus éloignés se sont rapprochés par de nouveaux rapports & de nouveaux besoins.’ Abbé Raynal, Histoire Philosophique, Édition Critique, Strugnell et al eds., op cit., Livre Premier: Découvertes, guerres & conquêtes des Portugais dans les Indes Orientales. Introduction., p. 23 – my translation. On the question of which central theme, if any, is present abbé Raynal’s work, see: Sylvana Tomaselli, ‘On labelling Raynal’s Histoire: reflections on its genre and subject’, in Courtney and Mander, Raynal’s Histoire, op cit. 75 See: Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic history: concepts and countours (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005) or D’Maris Coffman, Adrian Leonard and William O’Reilly eds., The Atlantic World (Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2015), for a detailed outline of the complexities of the historiography on the matter of the parameters of what constituted the ‘Atlantic World’, which cannot be covered here. 76 James McClellan, Colonialism and Science, op cit., p. 81. 77 Francesco Antonio Moriello, The Atlantic Revolutions and the Movement of Information in the British and French Caribbean, c. 1763-1804 (Unpublished PhD Thesis from the University of Cambridge, August 2017), p. 226-227, and p. 233-4.78 David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Introduction: The Age of Revolutions, c.1760-1840 – Global Causation, Connection, and Comparison’, in their edited volume, The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, op cit., especially at p. xvi-xvii; also see ch. 2 of this volume by Lynn Hunt, ‘The French Revolution in Global Context’, as well as ch. 5 by David Geggus, ‘The Caribbean in the Age of Revolution’; Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt, and William Max Nelson eds., The French Revolution in Global Perspective (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 2013). 79 See: Michel-Rolph Trouillot, ‘Motion in the System: Coffee, Colour, and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue’, Review (Fernand Braudel Center) Vol. 5, No. 3 (Winter, 1982), p. 331-388; Paul Cheney, Revolutionary

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One crucial corollary of the contemporary awareness of global connectivity was that the concept of liberty

could travel in ways which both delighted and alarmed contemporaries.80 It was within an integrated French

Atlantic that Truguet wrote of the understanding of liberty spreading amongst the colonies after the

American Revolution as a part of ‘the progress of enlightenment in Europe and her communications in the

entire world’.81 In the Mémoire, Truguet outlines a genealogy whereby the slaves and gens de couleur first

learned of liberty from free black ‘sailors’ who had gained their freedom in the American War of

Independence in 1776-82 and whom ‘commerce attracted to the ports of the colony’, news of emancipation

edicts of the king of Portugal in Saint-Dominguan ‘gazettes’, as well as the dissemination of the works of

Rousseau, Voltaire, and Raynal.82 Indeed, the perception of the infectious nature of the message of liberty

was expressed in 1788-89 when Louis XVI ordered that every press in Saint-Domingue be dismantled ‘in

order to keep the flame of liberty from spreading to the colonies’.83 On Saint-Domingue itself, it was a part

of an attempt to prevent the spread of this wildfire that the official Gazette de Saint-Domingue run by the

colonial government intentionally delayed informing the public about revolt in the north of the island until

10 September 1791, when it was finally forced to acknowledge that the colony was beset by a co-ordinated

Commerce: Globalization and the French Monarchy (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2010); Lamikiz, Trade and Trust in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, op cit., and Emma Spary, ‘The Place of Coffee’, ch. 3 in idem, Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670-1760 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).80 Polasky, Revolutions without borders, op cit. 81 Truguet, Mémoire sur Saint-Domingue, Pièce II, p. 2: ‘le progrès des lumières en Europe et leur communication dans la monde entier’.82 Ibid., Pièce II, p. 2: ‘La Révolution d’Amérique avait inspiré…les esclaves avaient vû, dans cette grande secousse, l’affranchissement de beaucoup de leurs frères. L’example même des Espagnols qui admettaient sur leurs vaisseaux et au rang de leurs officiers des noirs et des gens de couleur ; L’Edit du roi de Portugal qui affranchissait les esclaves de toutes ses Colonies’; and ibid., Pièce III, p. 2-3: ‘La revolution d’amerique avoit influé de diverses manieres sur La Colonie de St domingue…les Esclaves de cette colonie ne voyoient dans cette revolution; que l’afranchissement de beaucoup de leurs freres de cette partie. Et le desir qu’ils avoient eux mêmes d’arriver à cet Etat, etoit d’autant plus Pressant pour eux; qu’ils voyoient souvent ces noirs affranchis; venir matelots sur les Batiments americains; que le commerce attiroit dans Les Ports de La colonie: ajoutés a cela l’Effet que dut Encore Produire sur ces hommes; l’Edit du roy de Portugal; qui affranchissoit tous Les Esclaves de ses colonies; Edit que fut inseré dans toutes les gazettes de La Colonie, Vers 1775.’ Truguet’s identification of black sailors as agents of the oral transmission of news about liberty across the Atlantic world can be explored with reference to W. Jeffrey Bolster’s study of this phenomenon in idem, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), esp. at p. 144.83 Savanna-la Mar Gazette, 9 September 1788, cited by Scott, The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution (Unpublished PhD thesis from Duke University, 1986), p. 159 and in Polasky, Revolutions without borders, op cit. p. 147.

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slave insurrection.84 Contemporaries knew that the concept of liberty could travel dynamically across space,

and with stunning consequences.

The extent of inter-regional connectivity in the French Atlantic and the revolutionary situations in both

colony and metropole persistently thwarted the intentions of those with political authority to inhibit the travel

of potentially explosive information.85 In 1792, Governor Blanchelande, the last administrator of Saint-

Domingue appointed before the revolution, urged his newly-appointed predecessors sailing to the Isle to

suspend the publication of all newspapers in the colony. This was necessary because political gazettes such

as L’Ami de la Liberté: Ennemi de License were ‘read with avidity by free people of colour’ and ‘Negro

slaves were subscribers to it’, clubbing together to purchase it and have it ‘read to them’.86 Nonetheless, the

revolution in Saint-Domingue altered the nature of the press and the public sphere upon the island, freeing up

new radical publications to meet an ever-expanding readership.87 The new commissioners, Légér Félicite

Sonthonax and Étienne Polverel, ignored Blanchelande’s warnings: using their experience in the

revolutionary journalism of Paris, they arrived in Saint-Domingue with their own printing presses and

circulated the April 1792 Decree of the Assemblée legislative guaranteeing rights to men of colour.88

Meanwhile, the grasp of the grands blancs over the press was broken: instead, new journals ‘steeped in

revolutionary ideology and content’ sprang up in major port towns such as Cap Français and Port-au-Prince,

providing a powerful weapon for the nouveaux

libres.89 Publications such as the Annales Patriotiques de Saint-Domingue contained manifestoes written by

individuals such as Toussaint Louverture.90 Print was weaponised to challenge various authorities in the

name of liberty and to transmit information about the cause of liberty in Saint-Domingue.

84 Moreillo, The Atlantic Revolutions and the Movement of Information, op cit., p. 165-167.85 Polasky, Revolutions without borders, op cit., p. 147; and David Geggus and David Barry Gaspar eds., A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997). 86 Blanchelande’s own words, cited in Polasky, Revolutions without borders, op cit. p. 164; and the Charribean Register, or Ancient and Original Dominica Gazette, 26 March 1791, cited in Scott, “The Common Wind”, p. 200. 87 Moriello, The Atlantic Revolutions and the Movement of Information, op cit., p. 160-177.88 Polasky, Revolutions without borders, op cit., p. 164.89 Moreillo, The Atlantic Revolutions and the Movement of Information, op cit. p. 174.90 Ibid., p. 170-177.

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Indeed, it is necessary to move beyond print culture and take account of the variety of means by which

information was communicated.91 This was what Robert Darnton has called an ‘early information society’ in

which news circulated between colony and metropole in journals, letters, pamphlets, and by word-of-

mouth.92 A letter from the Jacobin Club of Saint-Tropez to that of Angers from March 1791 tells us how they

had heard from several members of the club who were seamen, of the maltreatment of gens de couleur in

Saint-Domingue which they had seen on their voyages.93 As Julius Scott, Laurent Dubois, and Janet Polasky

emphasise, liberty and insurrection spread in the bottoms of ships and through plantation fields.94 Felix

Carteau observed that seamen in Saint-Domingue, ‘well fed on the incendiary slogans of the clubs’ in

France, transmitted tales in harbour taverns and on docks alongside slaves and gens de couleur, creating a

‘cauldron of insurrection.’95 Contemporaries observed that the speed of travel through oral communication

networks amongst black slaves was often quicker than official networks of communication.96 It took less than

two weeks for news of the August 1791 uprising in Saint-Domingue to be known to slaves in the plantations

of Jamaica.97 Slaves captured during the insurrection in Saint-Domingue, when interrogated about their

motivations, declared that ‘they wanted to enjoy the liberty they are entitled to by the Rights of Man’,

claiming that they had heard of the

storming of the Bastille and the Déclaration of 1789.98 The news of revolution and liberty did not travel in a

linear, direct path: it circulated between colony and metropole and amongst the wider Caribbean and

91 Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), at ch. 2, ‘“An Excess of Communication: The Capture of News in a Slave Society’. 92 Robert Darnton, ‘An Early Information Society: News and the Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris’, The American Historical Review, Vol. 105, No. 1 (Feb., 2000), p. 1-35, at p. 8. 93 Lettres des diverses sociétés des Amis de la Constitution (Paris, 1791), 2-4: Letter of the Society of Friends of the Constitution of Saint-Tropez to that of Angers, 30 March 1791, reproduced in David Geggus, The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History, (Indanapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2014), p. 50. 94 See: Scott, “The Common wind”, p. 203-205 and Polasky, Revolutions without borders, op cit., p. 145-146; and Dubois, Avengers of the New World, op cit., p. 22; Dubois also makes a case for the slaves in the plantation field being coordinated by black drivers acting as conduits of information and organisers of revolt.95 Cited in Scott, ‘The Common Wind,’ p. 170.96 Polasky, Revolutions without borders, op cit., p. 145-146.97 See the documents cited by David Geggus, ‘The Enigma of Jamaica in the 1790s: New Light on the Causes of Slave Rebellions’, William and Mary Quarterly, 44, No. 2 (Apr., 1987), p. 274-299, at p. 277. 98 Philadelphia General Advertiser, 10-11 October 1791, cited in Dubois, Avengers of the New World, op cit., p. 105. They also often claimed that the King of France or various African Kings had guaranteed their freedom.

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Atlantic, often through chains of oral communication which can be glimpsed only through fragments of

evidence.99

One concept which resonated profoundly amongst these networks was Louis Sébastien Mercier’s prophecy

of the ‘Black Spartacus’ from his utopian novel L’An 2440 (1770), a figure popularised by the abbé

Raynal.100 Diderot, in the 1774 edition of the Histoire Philosophique, had turned Mercier’s prophecy into a

sonorous invective.101 The purpose of Mercier’s and Diderot’s prophesying was to shock colonial planters

into gradualist reform and abolition, but they had no control over how their words and radical future-

orientation would be appropriated and re-interpreted in revolutionary contexts.102 The Histoire Philosophique

is a text which Truguet specifically mentions in his Mémoire, attributing it a role alongside the works of

Voltaire and Rousseau in spreading enlightenment to Saint-Domingue.103 It is likely that Truguet would have

read or at least known of the famous passages of Raynal’s text. As Darnton’s study of the livres

philosophiques of the Société Typologique de Neuchâtel has illustrated, this was one of the best-selling

clandestine works of pre-revolutionary France.104 Moreover, as Daniel Gordon has argued, it was a text with

‘synoptic power’, one

99 Polasky, Revolutions without borders, p. 145-146. 100 Mercier’s novel at this section is outlined and cited in Marcel Dorigny, 'Le mouvement abolitionniste français face à l'insurrection de Saint-Domingue ou la fin du mythe de l'abolition graduelle,' ch. 6 in Laënnec Hurbon ed., L'Insurrection des esclaves de Saint-Domingue (22-23 août 1791) (Paris, Editions Karthala, 2000), at p. 98-99. 101 ‘Où est-il ce grand homme, que la nature doit peut-être à l’honneur de l’espèce humaine? Où est-il, ce Spartacus nouveau, qui ne trouvera point de Crassus? Alors disparoîtra le code noir; & que le code blanc sera terrible, si le vainqueur ne consulte que le droit de repressailes!’ – See: Abbé Raynal, Histoire Philosophique et Politique Des établissemens & du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes, Tome Quatrieme, Livre Dixieme (La Haye: Gosse Fils, 1774), Tome IV, in the edition of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, G-28126, at Ch. XXXI, p. 234-235. (the pagination across different printed copies of the same given edition of the abbé Raynal’s work in this period can vary).102 On the purpose of Mercier, Diderot, and Raynal in using the image of the ‘black Spartacus’, see Dorigny, ‘Le mouvement abolitionniste français’, op cit., p. 100. 103 Truguet, Mémoire Sur Saint-Domingue, Pièce III, p. 3. 104 See Robert Darton, The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York & London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1995), p. 48-49, and p. 73-75; also see Courtney and Mander’s comments on the popularity and various editions of the Histoire Philosophique in France and across Europe in idem, Raynal’s Histoire, op cit., p. 3-4; also see: Giles Bancarel’s exploration of the networks and sources of Raynal himself in ibid, at p. 138-147; Gianluigi Goggi on booksellers peddling Raynal’s work deep within the countryside of the low countries in ibid, at p. 149-160; and Hans-Jürgen Lüsenbrink on the widely publicised controversy sparked by Thomas Paine’s response in the his Letter to the abbé Raynal in ibid., p. 235-247.

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which few would have read thoroughly, but which provided a frame of reference for many who were less

well-versed in the entirety of its contents.105 This text also formed a significant frame of reference for the

way in which Truguet approached the liberty of the revolutionaries in Saint-Domingue.106

Amongst former-slaves and gens de couleur Raynal’s prophesy provided a powerful model at a time of

widespread insurrection in Saint-Domingue and beyond.107 Contemporaries claimed that they had seen black

sailors carrying the works of Raynal, presumably provided by abolitionists sailing ships from Bordeaux. 108 In

1790 on the island of Marie Galante, one Bonhomme, a free man of colour, warned an Englishman that

blacks would ‘take power and replace the whites’, appealing to Raynal’s prediction that a black Spartacus

would arise to abolish slavery from below.109 In Saint-Domingue, Toussaint Louverture had possibly read the

famous passage and kept a bust of the abbé Raynal as a part of his self-presentation as the new Spartacus. 110

Jean-Baptiste Belley, a former slave born in Senegal who became the first black African deputy to take a seat

representing Saint-Domingue in the National Convention in 1793, also drew upon the prophecy in his

famous 1797 portrait by Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson.111 Raynal’s prophecy surged throughout the networks

of the revolutionary Atlantic, providing inspiration for revolutionary hommes de couleur seeking to

communicate their action and demands in the language and ideals of the metropole.

105 See Daniel Gordon, ‘Uncivilised civilisation: Raynal and the global public sphere’, in Courtney and Mander eds., Raynal’s Histoire, op cit. 106 In the opening section of his Mémoire, Truguet presents the revolutionaries in Saint-Domingue in the mode and register of Mercier, Diderot, and Raynal – see: Truguet, Pièce I, p. 3.107 Polasky, Revolutions without borders, op cit., p. 160 and p. 169; Yves Benot, ‘La chaîne des insurrections’ in Marcel Dorigny ed. Les abolitions de l’esclavage de K.F. Sonthonaz à V. Schœlcher (Paris: Presses Universitaires Vincennes, 1995); and Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, op cit. p. 90.108 Polasky, Revolutions without borders, op cit., p. 169 and David Geggus, ‘Print Culture and the Haitian Revolution: The Written and the Spoken Word’ in David S. Shields and Caroline Sloat et al. (eds.), Liberty! Egalité. Independencia: Print Culture, Enlightenment, and the Revolution in the Americas, 1776-1838 (Wocester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 2007), p. 85. For the example of how the transmission of Montesquieu and Raynal was perceived to be taking place in Guadeloupe in 1793, see Pierre-Claude Gerlain, Mémoire sur la Guadeloupe, cited in Anne Pérotin-Dumon, ‘Les Jacobins des Antilles ou l’esprit de liberté dans les Iles du Vent,’ Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 35 (1988), p. 286.109 This case is used by Anne Pérotin-Dumon in ‘The Emergence of Politics among Free-Coloureds and Slaves in Revolutoinary Guadeloupe’, Journal of Caribbean History, 25 (1991), p. 115. 110 See: Polasky, Revolutions without borders, p. 169; and Dubois, Avengers of the New World, op cit., p. 172 and p. 203.111 On Belley, see C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins (London: Penguin Books, 1963 – Second Edition), p. 113-114.

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However, while many networks exhibited a powerful degree of integration, this was also a period in which

information could be rendered uncertain by the limitations of available technologies of communication.112

One consistent challenge was the variability of time-lags in Atlantic travel due to the weather or the

interception of written messages and people during a period of war. 113 The Pingré-Flurieu expedition of

1769, for example, was trapped in port in Rochefort for two months due to unfavourable weather, before

taking nearly three months from February-May to arrive in Cap Français. Their return journey to France

varied again, lasting from 16 June-31 October.114 The outward voyage of ships from Middelburg in the Dutch

Republic to the Guianas took between two and three months.115 As Ian Steele has illustrated, contemporaries

in the eighteenth century had different expectations of the pace at which news travelled over space, meaning

that under normal conditions such variation was not perceived as unusual or inconvenient.116 However, the

acceleration of events caused by a revolutionary situation and delays caused by conflict with Britain from

1793 meant that news travelled too slowly for revolutionary times. Contemporaries in Paris or Cap Français

could only hear about crucial developments in their relative political situations months after they had

occurred.117 Victor Collot in Guadeloupe referred to this in May 1792 as ‘the cruel period of waiting and

anxiety’ separating news and events in a revolutionary age.118

These indeterminate travel times in the revolutionary Atlantic presented problems for political decision

makers who had to operate in a condition of ignorance and non-knowledge.119 When Sonthonax declared the

general emancipation in August 1793 in Cap Français, he did so with the awareness that the situation he

112 Osterhammel and Petersson emphasise the inconsistencies of early modern networks in idem, Globalization, op cit. p. 49. 113 Moreillo, The Atlantic Revolutions and the Movement of Information, op cit., p. 32, and p. 52-57. 114 McLellan, Colonialism and Science, op cit., p. 123-124. 115 Rawley with Beahrendt, The Transatlantic Slave Trade, op cit., p. 83; and on the variable travel-times of news ships moving between London and New York, see I.K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675-1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 299.116 I.K. Steele, ‘Time, Communications, and Society: The English Atlantic, 1702’, Journal of American Studies, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Apr., 1974), p. 1-21. 117 Polasky, Revolutions without borders, p. 163. 118 Cited in Polasky, Revolutions without borders, op cit., p. 169. This anxiety was compounded by the imperfect transportations within Saint-Domingue itself – see: McLellan, Colonialism and Science, op cit., p. 78-81.119 See: William O’Reilly, ‘Non-Knowledge and Decision Making: The Challenge for the Historian’, ch. 16 in Cornel Zwierlein ed., The Dark Side of Knowledge: Histories of Ignorance, 1400 to 1800 (Leiden/Boston: Brill Publishing).

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faced upon the ground required an immediate remedy which could not wait the several months it would take

to refer the question back to the metropole. Moreover, he did this while remaining conscious of his own

ignorance about how this would be received.120 As early as November 1792 he wrote to Polverel and Ailhaud

that ‘In the present state of things, one can’t take the time to debate principles, we must act, we must save the

colony, and this (emancipation) is the only means left to us.’121 After June 1793, the former-slaves and gens

de couleur who had helped him and Polverel defeat General François-Thomas Galbaud and the ‘white

patriots’ in Cap Français not only expected Sonthonax to follow through upon the promise of freedom, they

now formed the power-base for the republic in the colony.122 There were similar problems facing

metropolitan administrators such as Barras seeking information upon which to formulate a strategy for

restoring metropolitan administration to Saint-Domingue. Another consequence of this disjoint between

geographical spaces wrought by the non-correspondence of events and knowledge of those events was that to

move across the Atlantic also transported the individual to a different experiential space.123 The sequential

incoherence between colony and metropole and within the colony disorientated those trying to understand

history and place events in France and Saint-Domingue within a singularised narratological framework.124

The difficulties of establishing the nature of events in colony or metropole from either side of the Atlantic

was exacerbated further by the character of accounts coming out of Saint-Domingue from 1791. Oral

transmission also entailed the eruption of rumour and speculation, as Arlette Farge has shown within Paris

under the ancien régime.125 The result was that Frenchmen in the metropole were subjected to a great variety

of melodramatic and negative accounts about what was occurring in 1791-1793 and beyond. For example, a

description of the insurgents’ attack on the Gallifet plantation of the northern province presented to the

120 On this episode see: Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution, op cit., p. 180-184; idem, You Are All Free, op cit., p. 1-21; and Dubois, Avengers of the New World, op cit., p. 156-168.121 Cited in Popkin, “You Are All Free”, op cit., p. 112.122 Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution, op cit., p. 180-184; Dubois, Avengers of the New World, op cit., p. 156-168. 123 Giddens, ‘Space, Time and Regionalisation’, op cit.124 See: Jennifer L. Roberts, Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (California: University of California Press, 2014).125 Arlette Farge, Subversive Words: Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century France, Rosemary Morris trans. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994).

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National Assembly in November 1791 pictured an impaled white child carried aloft on the stake of black

slave rebels and described further horrors such as a white woman raped upon the body of her dead

husband.126 The eyewitness account of the Saint-Dominguan lawyer and local notable, Gros, who had been

taken captive in November-December

1791, and published a few months later, was particularly popular.127 The overwhelmingly sensational and

politicised nature of the information reaching France during the early years of the revolution in Saint-

Domingue made it difficult to separate fact from fiction, knowledge from non-knowledge.

This explains diverging responses to events in France, since a material culture of communication founded

upon trust is one which is equally disposed to scepticism.128 Before the news from Saint-Domingue was

disclosed in official administrative correspondence with France, it was relayed through various streams of

private correspondence in late October 1791.129 Jacques-Pierre Brissot, the leading member of France’s first

abolitionist group founded in 1788, La Société des Amis des Noirs, upon hearing such news, at first

expressed misbelief: in his speech before the Assemblée législative on 30 October, he stated that ‘the

implausibility of the details, the immense discrepancy in the number of revolting blacks, the silence of the

French agents, the refutations given by people who have received subsequent letters all cause us to dismiss

the exaggerated scenes that terror has spread’.130 It was not just previous experience which led Brissot to

question the slaves’ organisational capacity, he was also concerned about the corruption of information by

126 Cited in Polasky, Revolutions without borders, op cit., p. 155-156.127 The Historick Recital, of the Different Occurences in the Camps of Grande-Riviere (sic), Dondon, Sainte-Suzanne, and others, from the 26th of October, 1791, to the 24th of December, of the same year: By M. Gros, attorney syndic of Valiere, taken Prisoner by Johnny, examined and reproduced in Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution, op cit., particularly at p. 11 and p. 105-115. 128 See: László Kontler and Mark Somos eds., Trust and Happiness in the History of European Political Thought (Lieden and Boston: Brill Publishing, 2017), at ch.1 by Lázsló Kontler and Mark Somos, ‘Introduction: Trust, Happiness, and the History of European Political Thought’, p. 1-14.129 For the reception of the news of the insurrection, particularly those of Brissot and Marat, see: Florence Gauthier, ‘Comment la nouvelle de l’insurrection des esclaves de Saint-Domingue fut-elle reçue en France (1791-1793)?’, ch. 1 in Laennëc Hurbon, L’insurrection des esclaves de Saint-Domingue, p. 15-27, at p. 20-27; Marcel Dorigny, 'Le mouvement abolitionniste français' op cit., at p. 106-110.130 Brissot on 30 October 1791, cited in Polasky, Revolutions without borders, op cit., p. 15; Similar messages were echoed in the official journal of the Amis des noirs, Le Patriote français – see: Marcel Dorigny, ‘Le mouvement abolitionniste français’, op cit., at p. 106-107.

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colonial planters and counter-revolutionaries seeking to derail the programme of the Amis des Noirs.131 On

the other hand, Jean-Paul Marat in November 1791 saw the insurrection as a concerted and justified upheaval

by the slaves to throw off the yoke of slavery.132 Olympe de Gouges, upon learning of the atrocities, turned

against her earlier emancipationist sentiments.133 Individuals’ responses to the revolution also developed over

time and Claude Milscent, a colonial planter of Saint-Domingue who had come to France in 1790, found

himself campaigning for ‘general liberty’ with the Société des Amis des Noirs and the Jacobin Club. 134 The

confusion of competing information, accounts, and interests contributed to the failure of those in the

metropole during the early revolution to resolve upon an approach to the crisis in Saint-Domingue.

The culture and technology of eighteenth-century communication intersected to make colonial empires

reliant upon paper, knowledge, and trust. 135 Within networks in which information about Saint-Domingue

was rendered both uncertain and valuable by war and revolution, Truguet offered his Mémoire as an

authentic, up-to-date, and objective representation. He presented himself as virtuous and trustworthy, a

citizen acting in the name of the republic by filling the void of conscious ignorance with knowledge about

the state of Saint-Domingue.136 In the opening of the second section of his Mémoire, Truguet writes that ‘my

endeavour is to place, beneath his (i.e. Barras’s) eyes, the situation of all our Isles’.137 In the Resumé at the

end of the Mémoire, Truguet claims that ‘I have just placed before your eyes the actual current state (l’État

actuel) of the colony of Saint-Domingue. If, on one side it shows you losses and devastations; on the other 131 Brissot’s speech of 30 October, cited in ibid, p. 107.132 Jean-Paul Marat in the Ami du Peuple of 2 November 1791, cited by Guathier, ‘Comment la nouvelle de l’insurrection des esclaves de Saint-Domingue fut-elle reçue en France’, op cit., p. 21-22.133 Olympe de Gouges, Preface to Black Slavery, or the Happy Shipwreck (Paris, 1792), trans. Maryann De Julio, in Translating Slavery: Gender and Race in French Women’s Writing, 1783-1823, ed. Doris Y. Kadish and Françoise Massardier-Kenney (Kent, Ohio, 1994), p. 87-117.134 Gauthier, ‘Comment la nouvelle de l’insurrection des esclaves de Saint-Domingue fut-elle reçue en France’, p. 22.135 See: ibid; Kafka, ‘The Demon of Writing’, op cit., Engberg-Pedersen, Empire of Chance, op cit., p. 147; Zwierlein, Imperial Unknowns, op cit., p. 1-17; and Kontler and Somos, Trust and Happiness, op cit., p. 1-14. For sociological theories of trust in networks see: Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power (Chichester: Wiley and Sons, 1979), p. 4; Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthyness (New York: Sage, 2002), p. 5-6; Charles Tilly, Trust and Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 4-5.136 See: Marisa Linton, Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship, and Authenticity in the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 3 and Ch. 1, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Man of Virtue’; Zwierlein, Imperial Unknowns, op cit., p. 1-17.137 Truguet, Mémoire Sur Saint-Domingue, Pièce II, p. 1: ‘Mon devoir est de mettre, sous ses yeux, la situation de toutes nos Isles.’

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hand, it will present you with the consoling means with which to repair them.’138 Here Truguet was operating

as an ‘administrator-agent’, providing realist description of the ‘actual current state’ of Saint-Domingue as a

mental map ‘on which an amorphous future can be transformed into a limited set of virtual futures, the best

of which the commander can seek to actualize’.139 Amidst a climate of uncertainty, in which it was difficult

to separate authentic

knowledge from non-knowledge, Truguet’s Mémoire made a rhetorical claim to realism in his counter-

representation of the revolution in Saint-Domingue. In doing so, he presented his Mémoire as an objective

basis upon which a future administrative-military strategy could be created.

In terms of its characteristics and qualities, the Mémoire exhibits the features of the conditions under which it

was created. Truguet was aware that the situation which he had derived from his sources in Saint-Domingue

was morphing by the week.140 The writing of Truguet’s Mémoire betrays this sense of urgency: sentences

follow one another in quick succession, separated only by a semi-colon and which are often, grammatically-

speaking, missing a subject.141 This was the experience of temporal acceleration and compression made

material. His presentation of the state of the colony amplified knowledge of certain aspects of the

circumstances there whilst silencing others. Truguet acknowledged that atrocities had occurred since the

onset of the revolution in Saint-Domingue.142 However, throughout the Mémoire, he avoids providing details,

instead focusing blame upon the cruelty of the pre-revolutionary slaveholding regime. 143 If the revolution in

Saint-Domingue seemed violent, it was only because of the greater violence of the slaveholding system

138 Ibid., Pièce III, p. 26: ‘Je viens de mettre sous vos yeux l’Etat actuel de la colonie de St. Domingue. Si d’un coté (sic) il vous montre des pertes et des devastations; de l’autre il vous present les moyens consolans de les reparer.’ 139 Engberg-Pedersen, Empire of Chance, op cit., p. 159.140 One such correspondent on Saint-Domingue itself might have been Jean Villate, the military commander of Cap Français. See Truguet’s extended praise of ‘Citoyen Vallate’ in ibid., Pièce III, p. 20 and p. 21. 141 On contemporary literary and linguistic understandings and debates, see Edward Nye, Literary and Linguistic Theories in Eigtheenth-century France: From Nuances to Impertinence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). 142 Ibid, Piéce II, p. 1-2 : ‘Mais l'etat actuel de la colonie de St.  Domingue, sa situation allarmante au milieu des horreux de la guerre civile et de l'invasion étrangère, appellent au moins des mesures provisoires, des secoura promptes et des ressources quel conquer, pour y ramener la paix et en chasser l'ennemi exterieur.’143 See: ibid., Pièce II, p. 5 and Pièce III, p. 8.

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which it had overcome in the ‘fight for liberty’.144 When discussing the burning of greatest urban centre in

the Antilles, Cap Français, in June 1793, an event which had shocked the Atlantic World, Truguet employed

similar strategies.145 This episode had erupted there because northern Saint-Domingue was where slaves were

most tyrannised before 1791.146 Truguet’s counter-presentation thereby forged a creative interaction between

knowledge and non-knowledge based upon available information under conditions of urgency.

What emerged from contemporary travel, communication, and information was a comparative geographical

imagination of differentiated spaces in which the cause of revolution and liberty was either advanced or in

stagnation. In his reportage upon the situation in various ports and regions of Saint-Domingue, Truguet maps

a ‘geography of liberty’ in which various regions have progressed in their revolutionary condition, whilst

others remain in the grip of counter-revolution. For example, regions such as Le Cap, under the control of

‘Citoyen Villate’ are at the forefront of ‘the Cause of Liberty’. Truguet notes with approval that in Cap

Tiburon of ‘La Partie du Sud’ under General Rigaud, ‘it will be easy to organise the new regime’ because the

region had already experienced ‘fewer violent shocks’ and ‘was heavily populated with citoyens de couleur,

who will feel how much the regime of liberty will be to their advantage.’147 Meanwhile, the parish of Saint

144 Ibid., Pièce III, p. 8: je ne retracerai point icy toutes les crises sanglantes; qui ont en lieu dans les colonies, pendant La revolution; vos coeurs en sont deja assés dechirés; il me sufira seulemant de vous faire observer qu'a Saint domingue comme en france; tous les malheurs ne sont provenus que de la lutte de la liberté; contre l'Esclavage; et que les chocs qui sont resultés devoient etre d'autant plus violents dans les colonies; que la distance qui seperoit les partis; etoit incommensurables: mais come (sic) notre revolution, qui est fondée sur les Principes de Liberté et d'Egalité;- doit detruire les germes et les causes, qui ont produit les malheurs des colonies.’ 145 On this episode and its dramatic impact upon both eyewitnesses and those who heard about it second-hand across the Atlantic, see Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution, op cit., p. 180-222. 146 Truguet, Mémoire Sur Saint-Domingue, Pièce III, p. 22: ‘trois Parties de La colonie; celle qui a la plus soufferte et la plus eprouvée d'incendu et devastation. On ne doit en attribuer la cause; qu'a la grande opposition de ses habitans, a la jouissance des droits des hommes de couleur; Et à la maniere dure avec laquelle ils conduisoient leurs Esclaves; car ils y estoient infiniment plus mal traités que par tout ailleurs. En effet vous verrés la partie de l'ouest moins maltraitée, par ce qu'elle a moins mise d'opposition aux droits des citoyens de couleur Et que les noirs y estoient moins vexés qu'au nord. Enfin vous verrés la partie du Sud ayant la moins soufferte de toutes; par ce que les hommes de couleur et les noirs y ont eté moins tiranisée. Ainsi tout prouve que les malheurs des colonies; tiennent moins aux Effets de la revolution; qu'a ce qui l'avoit long temps avant precedée.’147 Ibid., Pièce III, p. 26: ‘La Partie du Sud. elle à La moins soufferte de toutes; car à L’Exception de La plaine du fonds dont il y a en quelques habitations Brulées; tout le reste n’a Eprouvé que quelques secousses plus ou moins  viles; en raison de la maniere dont les noirs et les citoyens de couleur avoient Eté traités avant La revolution. La Partie du Sud…au dessus en dessendent la cote, jusqu’au cap tiburon sera la plus facile a organiser d’apres le nouveau regime; par ce qu’elle à Eprouvés des chocs moins violens Et qu’elle est plus peuplée de citoyens de couleur, qui sentiront combien Le regime de La Liberté Leur sera avantageux.’

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Louis remained ‘the most relentless enemies of the republic and of general liberty.’148 Jérémie and Grandance

was ‘infected with counter-revolutionaries’ and ‘enemies of the general liberty’ who, following the

proclamation of the general emancipation, had ‘without cease’ maintained ‘men of colour’ and ‘blacks’

within a state of servitude; their success in stifling the travel of liberty was a consequence of the fact that

‘they are separated by the highest of mountains’ from the rest of Saint-Domingue.149 Truguet, in putting

forward his reportage as a foundation for future administrative-military action was seeking ‘the conquest of

space’, a ‘tearing down of all spatial barriers’ separating those areas which had come closer to realising a

state of liberty from those

caught within a state of servitude.150 The spatial comparison within the global imagination made it possible to

conceive of travel across space as travel backwards or forwards in time within a geography of liberty, one

which was also a geography of progress.151

Truguet’s Mémoire was a product of the circulation of information about liberty within a particular

information society. It was conditioned by a French Atlantic World in which the inconsistent speed at which

information travelled and the inconsistent nature of that information itself presented challenges of political

decision making at a time of revolution. The result of the nature of contemporary travel and communication

was that the individual moving across space often perceived drastic distanciations in time across given

geographical areas. Travel time across space created a sense of time travel through space. This was as a

‘geography of liberty’, a spatial imagination in which progress towards a future, liberated time was uneven,

and dependent upon the extent to which the cause of liberty had advanced or stagnated in different spaces.

Yet Truguet’s selective appropriation, utilisation, and re-circulation of information was also conditioned by

his engagement with debates unfolding within revolutionary France itself. To understand why this was the 148 Ibid., Pièce III, p. 17: ‘Saint Louis cette Paroisse contient beaucoup d’hatitations…ils sont Les Enemis les plus acharnés de La republique Et de La Liberté generalle’. 149 Ibid., Pièce III, p. 24-27: ‘infectés des Contrerevolutionnaires’, ‘que tous les proprietaires et grands d’habitations  ; sont en general les enemis surés’ de La Liberté’, ‘les propriet=aires enemis de La Liberté generale’, ‘Sans cesse ils repettoient aux hommes de couleur Et au noirs, qui’ils avoient pu Seduire ; que cette Liberté ne pouvoit tenir’, ‘dont ils sont separés Par de très hautes montagnes ; on leur a fait Entendre que La Liberté de Leurs freres n’Etoit Pas reconnue En France; Et qu’ils n’Etoient que des revoltes, dont on feroit bientôt justice.’ 150 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, op cit., p. vii. 151 Miranda Spieler, ‘The Legal Structures of Colonial Rule in the French Revolution’, op cit., p. 383.

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case, it is necessary now to dive into debates in Paris in which Truguet and others were seeking to chart

France’s colonial future. At the heart of Truguet’s political interventions into these metropolitan discussions

there lay Vincent Ogé’s prophetic question to the colonial lobby at the Club Massiac: ‘this Liberty, the

greatest, first good, is it not for all men?’152

Chapter Two

Colour, Citizenship, and Liberty in the Revolutionary French Atlantic

This chapter uses Truguet’s Mémoire to access political debates surrounding the issue of liberty in the

metropole during the period 1791-1797. This involves a shift away from what, in the French language, is

understood as ‘le politique’ and towards ‘la politique’, from administrative networks to political discourse.153

It seeks to outline what liberty looked like as a challenge of policy-making to actors in Truguet’s context. It

152 Vincent Ogé, Motion Faite Par M. Vincent OGÉ, jeune à l’Assemblée des Colons, Habitans de S.-Domingue, à l’Hôtel de Massiac, Place des Victoires (7 Septembre, 1789), p. 5: ‘Messieurs, cette Liberté, le plus grand, le premier des biens, est-elle faite pour tous les hommes? Je le crois. Faut-il la donner à tous les hommes? Je le crois encore.’153 Steven Englund, Napoleon: A Political Life. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 306-312.

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does so by using the statements and proposals of Truguet’s Mémoire to isolate how he believed liberty

should be realised in concrete political solutions to be applied to the situation in Saint-Domingue. Allowing

Truguet’s Mémoire to guide us through these debates, we can see how the French revolution radicalised a

number of eighteenth-century discourses surrounding how best to establish liberty in the context of the

colonies.154 Truguet’s Mémoire sought to equip like-minded republican politicians with the information

required to intervene within on-going metropolitan discussions surrounding France’s colonial future. The

Mémoire was characteristic of the metropolitan colonial visions of 1795-97, a period in which many

administrators and politicians were seeking to resolve political questions left unanswered by the revolution in

Saint-Domingue. Truguet was one individual engaging in this politics of colour, citizenship, and liberty in

the metropole in the belief that his suggestions could both consolidate emancipation and preserve Saint-

Domingue as a colony within a new republican colonial order under ‘the regime of liberty.’155

In 1791, the main representatives of the Société Amis des Noirs, the Comte de Mirabeau and La

Rochefoucauld, had failed to make headway in legislating for the liberty of the gens de couleur, let alone in

touching upon the question of slavery.156 The abolitionist vision of liberty had not yet shifted away from

Condorcet’s gradualist forestalling of emancipation to an undefined moment in the future. 157 However, from

154 For coverage of these debates, see: Shanti Marie Singham, ‘Betwixt Cattle and Men: Jews, Blacks, and Women, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man’, ch. 3 in Dale Van Kley ed., The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights 1789 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1995), at. p. 114-153; Jean-Daniel Piquet, L’emancipation des noirs dans la Révolution française (1789-1795) (Paris: Karthala, 2002); Røge, Political Economy and the Reinvention of France’s Colonial System, op cit., esp. at p. 155-159, and p. 164-180; Jeremy D. Popkin, ‘Saint-Domingue, Slavery, and the Origins of the French Revolution’, op cit., and David Geggus ed. and trans., The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History, op cit., p. 51-56; but also see Ghachem’s argument for Tocquevillian continuity between the Haitian Revolution and pre-revolutionary discourses in idem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution, op cit., at p. 3-4.155 The phrase ‘Régime de la Liberté’ is Truguet’s own, cited from Truguet, Mémoire sur St. Domingue, Pièce III, p. 8: ‘j’en a assés dit pour vous faire connoitre les veritables causes qui devoient embraser et detruire nos colonies: je dois maintenant vous dire, par quels moyens j’espere les ramener au degré de prosperité qu’elles doivent atteindre sous le regime de la Liberté.’ For historiography on the argumentation here, see: Røge, Political Economy and the Reinvetion of France’s Colonial System, op cit., p. 164-180; Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, op cit., esp. at p. 187-188 and p. 191. 156 See: Singham, Betwixt Men and Cattle, op cit. p. 131-134; Røge, Political Economy and the Reinvention of France’s Colonial System, op cit., p. 155-159 and Piquet, l’emancipation des noirs, op cit., p. 58-59. 157 See: Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, Réflexions sur l’esclavage des negroes. Par M. Schwartz…(pseud.) ([1781]; Paris, 1788), i, p. 17; Daniel P. Resnick, “The Société des Amis des Noirs and the Abolition of French Slavery,” French Historical Studies, 7 (Fall, 1972): p. 558-69; Serge Daget, “A Model of the French Abolitionist Movement and its Variations” in, Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher ed. Anti-Slavery, Religion,

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1792-94 the legal outline of a comprehensive extension of the principles of general liberty consistent with

the Déclaration of 1789 emerged. The initial priority of radical proponents of liberty such as Brissot,

Mirabeau, and Rochefoucauld was realised by the law of 4 April 1792 which finally recognised the political

equality of the gens de couleur and the white colonists, overhauling restrictions introduced by planter

interests in 1790-91.158 Yet it was only when news reached Paris in February 1794 of Sonthonax’s general

emancipation of August 1793 that the deadlock between abolitionists and anti-abolitionists was broken. It

was at this moment that the former were jolted into passing an immediate general abolition of the slave trade

combined with emancipation in all territories of the French empire. The law of 16 Pluiviôse, An II, was a

measure which not even the most radical proponents of anti-slavery had imagined until it occurred and it

transformed the political debate in the metropole.159 The occurrence of this event, emancipation, which had

until then only been imagined as possible in a vague future time, collapsed the separation between the

horizon of expectations and the space of experience. General liberty was now not only conceivable but

imminent.160 By the time Truguet’s Mémoire was composed in 1795-96 the situation in Saint-Domingue was

in urgent need of political management. The Republic was now obliged to implement a principle in the

colonies whose precise administrative consequences it required individuals such as Truguet, Sonthonax, and

Raimond to interpret.

The legislative activity of 1792-4 dismantled the legal structure of ‘colour prejudice’ which had emerged in

the eighteenth-century French Atlantic.161 As early as 1685, Article IX of the Code Noir had stated that

and Reform: Essays in Memory of Roger Anstey (Folkstone, 1980), p. 43-63; Seymour Drescher, “Two Variants of Anti-Slavery: Religious Organization and Social Mobilization in Britain and France, 1780-1870,” in Bolt and Drescher ed., Anti-Slavery, Religion, and Reform, op cit., p. 64-79; Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, op cit., p. 161-265; and David Geggus, “Racial Equality, Slavery, and Colonial Secession During the Constituent Assembly,” American Historical Review, 94b (1989): p. 1290-1308.158 Singham, Betwixt Cattle and Men, op cit., p. 134; Røge, Political Economy and the Reinvention of France’s Colonial System, op cit. p 159.159 Røge, Politican Economy and the Reinvention of France’s Colonial System, op cit. p. 157; for Marat see Gauthier, ‘l’insurrection des esclaves de Saint-Domingue’, op cit., p. 21-22; and Dubois, Avengers of the New World, op cit., p. 129.160 Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, op cit., p. 4, p. 177-183. 161 See: Mélanie Lamotte, ‘Colour Prejudice in the French Atlantic World’, Ch. 9 in D’Maris Coffman et al. eds., The Atlantic World, op cit. p. 152; but also Sue Peabody,‘“There Are No Slaves in France”, op cit., esp. at p. 7, p. 68-7, and p. 111-135; Stephen R. King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 2001).

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mulâtre children born of enslaved mothers or fathers were to remain enslaved. A decree issued in 1720 from

Martinique forced free people of colour to dress in ‘clothes of little value, without silk, gold-effect, and lace’

under threat of losing their freedom.162 A reform to the Code Noir for the Îles du vent proposed in 1758

empowered governors to prevent interracial marriages.163 The intensification of colour prejudice is one of the

central themes of Truguet’s account of pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue. In the Mémoire he believed it had

deepened from 1775, tracing his genealogy of the revolution back to ‘ordinances’ enacted ‘to suppress’ the

‘development towards equality’ of the hommes de couleur. Here Truguet outlined how such laws ‘forbade

them’ to wear ‘the same clothes as whites’, ‘to bear the European names, which they hold from their fathers’,

or ‘to marry the daughters of whites, upon pain of seeing their marriages broken and their children declared

bastards.’164 As Emma Spary has emphasised, this was not the scientific ‘racism’ of the nineteenth century; it

was legalistic prejudice which restricted the liberty of enslaved blacks and free men of colour within a

hierarchy of human difference. Beyond legal hierarchy, however, ‘creolisation’ was understood in a

Buffonian sense, in which the colour, characteristics, and physical nature of blacks and whites were prone to

alterations under the influences of climate and culture.165

‘Racial’ Judgments in the 1790s were based upon legal, climatological, cultural, and aesthetic, not

eugenicist, assumptions.166 Yet legal structures themselves were never fixed and nor did they reflect their

application or subversion as they travelled to the colonies.167 As Mélanie Lamotte and Stewart R. King have

highlighted respectively, social interaction and mobility persisted despite and within the prejudices of the

162 Lamotte, ‘Colour Prejudice in the French Atlantic World’, p. 162.163 ibid. 164 Truguet, Mémoire sur St. Domingue, Pièce III, p. 4 : ‘aussitôt les Loix Et des ordonnances furent faites Et données, pour Comprimer ce Premier Essor Vers L’Egalité; ces Loix Leur defendoit de se venir a La maniere Et des mêmes Etoffes que Les Blancs; elles Leur defendoient Encore de Prendre Et de porter, les noms Européens, quils tenoient de Leurs Peres; on les parvoient d’En Prendre dans L’idiome africain: Par ces mêmes Loix, il Leur Etoit Expressement defendre, de marrier Leurs filles a des blancs, sous Peine de Voir Les mariages cassés Et Les Enfants declaré Batards.’ 165 Lamotte, ‘Colour Prejudice in the French Atlantic World’, op cit. p. 152, which is complicated and given nuance by Emma Spary, ‘Climate Change and Creolisation’, op cit.166 ibid; and David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century (London: Reaktion Books, 2002). 167 Jennifer L. Roberts, Transporting Visions, op cit.

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law.168 The gens de couleur were in no way a coherent ‘class’: the category contained individuals from

varying backgrounds, with differing degrees of African ancestry, cultural ideals, and social relationships with

white colonists.169 Nonetheless, Trouillot, King, and Dubois have dated an intensification of legal

discrimination to a later period as a response to the increasing wealth and mobility of free gens de couleur.170

This thesis, positing the later-eighteenth-century ‘systematisation’ of colour hierarchy, is further

substantiated by the legislation within metropolitan France in the form of the 1777 Police des Noirs.171 It was

precisely because of the uncertainty presented by the fluid cultural and climatological nature of creolisation

that whites felt the need to reinforce the fixity of the legal structure.172 In their attempts to efface this system,

revolutionaries implementing the decrees of 1794 in Saint-Domingue believed that they were affecting a

break with the colonial past. Yet it was precisely the ingrained nature of this legal and economic system of

colour prejudice which made it so difficult to introduce the principle of liberty without also maintaining

much of the coercive economic structures of the ancien régime plantation system.173

For all the tensions within this republican project, Truguet and his contemporaries were unprecedented in the

scope of their commitment to the abstract ideal of liberty in colonial government. Our awareness of the

shortcomings of subsequent policy should not obscure the fact that during 1790s slave insurgents forced

republican administrators to give ‘new content to the abstract universality of the language of political rights,

expanding the scope of political culture as they demanded Republican citizenship and racial equality.’174 I

have not found any writings by Truguet on Saint-Domingue from before 1793-94 to compare with his

Mémoire. However, if we take members of Truguet’s network of like-minded republicans as a proxy guide, it

168 See: King, Free People of Colour in Pre-Revolutionary Saint-Domingue, op cit., p. xiv and p. xx; and Lamotte, ‘Colour Prejudice in the French Atlantic World’, p. 162-165. 169 King, Free People of Colour in Pre-Revolutionary Saint-Domingue, op cit., p. xiv-xx.170 See: Trouillot, ‘Motion in the System’, op cit., p. 352-354 and p. 359-60; King, Free People of Colour in Pre-Revolutionary Saint-Domingue, op cit., p. x; and Dubois, Avengers of the New World, op cit., p. 61-65 171 Dubois, Avengers of the New World, op cit., p. 62-72 and Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France”, op cit. p. 7-8, p. 88, and p. 106-133.172 Ogle, ‘Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s Colonial Enlightenment’, op cit. p. 40-44; and for contemporary metropolitan anxieties about Saint-Domingue in this respect see Doris L. Garraway, The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2005). 173 Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution, op cit., and Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, op cit. p. 191. 174 Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, op cit., p. 2, p. 7-8, p. 172.

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is clear that the events of 1793-94 forced contemporaries to expand the scope of their concepts of citizenship

and liberty when translating them into the revolutionary climate of Saint-Domingue. When the distinguished

member of the Amis des Noirs Étienne Clavière had addressed the National Assembly in July 1791, he had

described ‘the regime of liberty’ as a rejection of the mercantile Exlcusif combined with a vague

commitment to a gradual future abolition.175 In Saint-Domingue, Sonthonax had only passed a decree of

general emancipation when he had no other remaining strategic option.176 Raimond, in a pamphlet written in

1793 from Paris upon the eve of Sonthonax’s emancipation, implored the slaves of Saint-Domingue to return

to the plantations and await a gradual reform of slavery by the Republic.177

By 1795/96, the situation had changed dramatically, forcing the creative re-application of old republican

concepts and languages to the revolutionary Antilles. Recalling the ‘Black Spartacus’ of Raynal, Truguet no

longer saw the prophecy residing upon a distant future horizon but believed it to be realised in the present:

‘The oppressed of America have imitated the people of France’ and ‘reprised sword-in-hand the rights which

they hold by nature’. In an ironic wordplay Truguet stated that ‘the National Convention, by her decree of 16

Pluviôse has done nothing except sanction’ the ‘right of conquest’ of the slaves in their seizure of their

natural rights.178 His vision of republicanism in future Saint-Domingue was one which would ‘maintain all

citizens in the equality of rights that nature has given them, and which the constitution (of France) has

guaranteed to them.’179 This was an articulation of what Edelstein has described as a ‘natural republicanism’,

175 Cited in Røge, Political Economy and the Reinvention of France’s Colonial System, op cit., p. 154 and p. 160.176 Ibid., p. 188; Dubois, ‘Republican Antiracism and Racism’, op cit., p. 10; and Sarah Knott, ‘Narrating the Age of Revolution’, The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 73, No. 1 (January 2016), p. 3-36, at p. 26. 177 Julien Raimond, Réflexions sur les véritables causes des troubles et désastres des nos colonies…addresses à la Convention nationale (Paris, 1790), p. 19-21, p. 24-25, and p. 28-29; and see the coverage of this text by Dubois in idem., A Colony of Citizens, op cit., p 184-188.178 Truguet, Mémoire sur St. Domingue, Pièce 1, p. 3 : ‘Les opprimés d’amérique ont imité le peuple de France ils ont repris l’épée à la main les droits qu’ils tenoient de la nature, et la Convention nationale par son décret du 16. Pluviôse n’a fait que sanctionner’ ; and ibid, Pièce III, p. 8: ‘…maintenir tous les citoyens dans l’Egalité des droits, que la nature leur donne, et que la constitution leur garantit’. Polverel also echoed the prophecy of Raynal in light of recent events, in 1795 – see: Dubois and Berra, “Citoyens et amis!”, op cit., p. 288.179 Ibid, Pièce III, p. 8: ‘…maintenir tous les citoyens dans l’Egalité des droits, que la nature leur donne, et que la constitution leur garantit’. Polverel also echoed the prophecy of Raynal in light of recent events, in 1795 – see: Dubois and Berra, “Citoyens et amis!”, op cit., p. 288.

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but one whose principles were radically expanded to encompass all men in the French Empire.180 This would

be the guiding principle of what Truguet described as ‘the regime of liberty’ to be sent by fiat across the

waves of the Atlantic.181 His intervention, moreover, occurred at a time when the legacy of 1794 was still at

stake: it was not until 1 January 1798 that the Law of the constitutional organisation of the colonies

guaranteed the irreversibility of the decree of 4 February 1794. The expanding political imagination of

republicanism under the Directory should not be dismissed as merely ‘shoving the facts’ of 1791-93 ‘into the

proper order of discourse’.182

One crucial issue of contestation between those who sought to maintain a system of colour prejudice in the

legal definition of citizenship and their opponents was the extent to which liberty could be realised in

Antillean climes. In this debate, various participants debating colour, citizenship, and liberty, looked to

construct their argumentation through the work of Montesquieu.183 For although Montesquieu himself had

attacked both political slavery in France and the attempt to equate human physiognomy with slavery in Book

XV of L’Esprit des Lois (1748), in this very same oeuvre, at chapter seven, he had also conceded, in line

with his theory of climate, that slavery might be ‘less counter to reason’ in tropical climes. 184 Thus in the

1770s, while Henrion de Pansy defended the freedom of ‘nègres’ based upon his metropolitan reading of

Montesquieu, within Saint-Domingue an indigenous juristic tradition emerged in opposition.185 Here, Hilliard

180 Dan Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 11.181 Truguet, Mémoire sur St. Domingue, Pièce III, p. 8: ‘j’En y assés dit pour Vous faire connoitre les Veritables causes qui devoient Embraser Et detruire nos colonies: je dois maintenant vous dire, par quels moyens j’Espire Les ramener au degré de Prosperité qu’Elles doivent atteindre sous Le regime de La Liberté.’ 182 Trouillot, Silencing the Past, op cit. p. 91; for an indication also of the variety of republican positions beyond Truguet’s abolitionist position in this period, including pro-slavery republicanism, see K.M. Baker, ‘Political languages of the French Revolution’, ch. 22 in Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler eds., The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), at p. 638-639. 183 See: Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France”, op cit., p. 61-70 and p. 101-102; Spary, ‘Climate Change and Creolisation in French Natural History’, op cit., Malick W. Ghachem, ‘Montesquieu in the Caribbean, op cit., p. 183-210; and Gene E. Ogle, ‘Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s Colonial Enlightenment’, op cit., p. 35-50.184 Montesquieu, De l’Esprit des lois: Tome I (Éditions Garnier: Paris, 1973), at p. 267. 185 See: Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France”, op cit., p. 99-102 for her coverage of the uses of Montesquieu in his celebrated Mémoire pour un Nègre qui réclame sa Liberté (1770); and Ghachem, ‘Montesquieu in the Caribbean’, op cit. p. 194-195 for his reading of the Montesquieuan arguments of Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s Considérations sur l’état présent de la colonie française de Saint-Domingue (1776-1777); Ogle notes that while his work was influenced heavily by Montesquieu, it also drew upon Rousseau and Raynal, in idem, ‘Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s Colonial Enlightenment’, op cit.

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d’Auberteuil and Moreau de Saint-Méry constructed a grounding of slavery and exclusion founded upon ‘the

difference that exists between the climate of Saint-Domingue, the moeurs and undertaking of the colonists,

and the climate of…France.’186

Montesquieu’s legacy was not restricted to ‘the final decades of the Old Regime’ – rather, his competing

legacies fed into the debates of 1791-97.187 In May 1791, during the debates in the National Constituent

Assembly concerning the liberty of the gens de couleur and slaves, Moreau de Saint-Méry, Pétion de

Villeneuve, and Malouet had argued that ‘the colonies do not resemble France’ and ‘cannot have the same

internal regime or the same organisation’ against their detractors – the abbé Grégoire, Robespierre, and

Lafayette.188 Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Description de l’Isle de Saint-Domingue (1797), published during his

exile in Philadelphia, added Buffonian understandings of creolisation to this hypothesis, arguing that ‘the

negro is in a true state of degeneration compared to the civilized European’, a ‘condition’ meaning that

particular laws of slavery in Saint-Domingue were required to educate the slave and undo ‘the work of

centuries’.189 A pamphlet, published in Paris in 1797, summoned Montesquieu and Rousseau, expressing

beliefs which had been mounting amongst those hostile to republican administration in the colonies for

years.190 Attacking the ‘pride’ of the ‘legislator’ who believed that they could govern the colonies without

‘local knowledge’ or a sensitivity to its unique ‘moeurs’, the tract called for an immediate end to the law of

16 Pluviôse which had led to ‘the ruin of France, the burning of her colonies, and the massacre of her

habitans’.191 Such divergences illustrate the extent of contemporary divisions concerning whether liberty

could be translated into a universalised colonial policy.

186 Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Considérations sur l’état présent de la colonie françoise de Saint-Domingue (1776-1777), cited in Ghachem, ‘Montesquieu in the Caribbean’, op cit. p. 194.187 Ghachem, ‘Montesquieu in the Caribbean’, op cit., p. 187. 188 Cited in Geggus ed. and trans., The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History, op cit., p. 51-56. 189 Cited in Spary, ‘Climate Change and Creolisatoin in French Natural History’, op cit., p. 25. 190 Anonymous, De l’affranchissement des noirs, ou Observations sur la loi du 16 Pluviôse, an deuxième; et sur les moyens à prendre pour les rétablissement des Colonies, du Commerce et de la Marine (Paris, 1797).191 ibid., p. 2-3, p. 7-8, p. 12-15. The last citation is from p. 3: ‘Eh bien, ce législateur imprudent ou pervers, comme on le voudra, c’est la montagne conventionelle qui a tout osé, parce qu’ell ne doutoit de rien; aussi la ruine de la France, l’incendie de ses Colonies, le massacre de tous ses habitans, ne sont que trop visiblement son ouvrage.’ - my translation above.

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Truguet sought to consolidate and advance liberty in Saint-Domingue by engaging with the proponents of

particular legislation based upon the diversité de moeurs .192 Instead of capitulating to the proponents of

‘local knowledge’, he declared this to be no obstacle to the consolidation of ‘the regime of liberty’ in Saint-

Domingue. He knew that Saint-Domingue presented a unique and extreme location within which to

introduce republican laws: in the third part of his Mémoire, he aimed to give Barras ‘an idea of the mores of

the Black People…of the colonies’, calling him to observe how the ‘planters (grands)’ and their systems of

slavery ‘have been the misfortune of the colonies.’193 However, Truguet urged that this unique situation

required sensitive administrators to introduce general laws, not a compromised liberty. He urged that ‘It must

be that the delegués, in the colonies, know perfectly the Spirit, the mores, and the customs of the men to

whom they shall be sent. It must be that they know also the cultures of the lands and the ways to perfect

them.’194 By sending delegués to Saint-Domingue in spring 1796, the Directory believed that their concept of

liberty could make the transition into the French Antilles. This was a vision of ‘enlightenment on horseback’,

sending prophets of republicanism and foot-soldiers of liberty to bestow laws upon Saint-Domingue.195

Interacting with the question of moeurs, Truguet believed that the best way to introduce liberty into the

French colonies was for ‘enlightened’ administrators to act as ‘the legislator’ in the mode outlined by

Montesquieu and Rousseau, guiding a people to a state of liberty.196

192 See: Courtney, C.P. and Barber, G., ‘Montesquieu and the problem of “la diversité”’, in Enlightenment Essays in Memory of Robert Shackleton (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1988), p. 61-81.193 Truguet, Mémoire Sur Saint-Domingue, Piéce III, p. 8-9: ‘Pour vous donner une idée des meurs (sic. To be read as ‘mœurs’) du Peuple noir et rouge des colonies; je dois vous observer que quelques grands qu’aient Eté les malheurs des colonies.’ 194 Ibid., Pièce III, p. 10: ‘il faut que les délégués dans les colonies, connoissent parfaitement l’Esprit, les meurs (sic.), et les habitudes des hommes, vers lesquels ils seront Envoyés. Il faut qu’ils connoissent aussi les cultures du payïs et les moyens de les perfectionner.’ – my italics above. 195 Michael Broers, Politics and Religion in Napoleonic Italy: The War Against God, 1801-1814 (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. xi. 196 See: Montesquieu, De l’Esprit des Lois (1748), op cit., at Livre I, Chapitre III, p. 11-13; and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Contrat Social ou Principes du Droit Politique (Strasbourg: La Société Typographique, 1791), at Chapitre VII, ‘Du législateur’ and Chapitre VIII, ‘Du peuple’, at p. 67-79.

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This strikes at the heart of the ways in which the abstract commitment to an administrative philosophy of

general liberty was commuted into a more coercive political reality.197 The type of liberty which Truguet and

his colleagues introduced in Saint-Domingue was indeed ‘a circumscribed one’. 198 The future vision of a

republican colonial government advocated by Truguet intersected absolute civil equality under the law with

onerous civic obligations to be rendered in selfless service to the nation. In articulating the features of this

‘regime of liberty’, Truguet listed various priorities for the delegués, including the call both ‘to maintain all

citizens in the equality of rights’ and ‘to restore the people to agriculture’. Even as Truguet envisaged

exporting legal equality, he also employed what Ghachem has called a ‘strategic ethics’ whereby

emancipation was the hand-maid of ‘restoring order’, the drive ‘to conquer the colonial possessions of our

enemies’, and the regeneration of the colony ‘for the greatest advantage of the republic.’ 199 This matrix of

freedom, duty, and coercion at the basis the regime of liberty was echoed in Raimond’s 1793 pamphlet,

which had declared that, for emancipation to be realised, slaves must give themselves unto the ‘powerful and

generous nation’ of France through ‘submission to the laws, and to the order that must result from them.’ 200

Sonthonax declared in his emancipation decree that ‘Having become citizens by the will of the French

nation, you must also be zealous defenders of its decrees…Freedom has brought you from a state of

nothingness to one of existence. Show yourselves worthy of it.’201 Liberty was therefore an investment which

conscripted former slaves into the service of the Republic – it was, as Doris Garraway argues, presented as a

gift from a benevolent French nation which now expected a return from its new citizens.202

197 See: Michel Foucault, “Society Must be Defended”, Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76, Edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana and Translated by David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003); and Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Translated by Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Weidenfeld/Grove Press, 1991), p. 37. 198 Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, op cit., esp. at p. 187 and p. 198. 199 Truguet, Mémoire Sur Saint-Domingue, Pièce III, p. 9: ‘dans les mesures a prendre pour La colonie; on doit sur tout s’attacher à chasser les Enemis des parties de S t domingue; a ramener Le peuple a La culture des terres…a La faire fructifier pour Le plus grand avantage de La republique de conquerir enfin ou ruiner les possessions colonials de nos Enemis.’; for the outline of what Ghachem understands by the ‘strategic ethics’ of slavery and emancipation, see idem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution, op cit., p. 9 and p. 17-18. 200 Cited in Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, p. 185. 201 Cited in Garraway, ‘Universalism and Nationalism in the Discourse of the Haitian Revolution’, op cit. p. 71.202 Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, op cit., p. 177, p. 182-3, p. 186-8, p. 191; Garraway, ‘Universalism and Nationalism in the Discourse of the Haitian Revolution’, op cit., p. 68-77.

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This Franco-centric liberty provided two roles which the former slave could occupy in conformity with

administrators’ ideals of virtuous citizenship – either the soldier or the cultivateur of ‘the nation’ which had

granted them their liberty.203 While he was in Paris in 1794, facing charges brought against him by white

planters for his general emancipation, Sonthonax defended his actions in a manner which betrayed his

motives: the colony, he stated, ‘will be defended by an army of blacks…The Blacks are the true sans-culottes

of the colonies, they are the sole people who are capable of defending the land.’ 204 Defending the character of

the revolutionaries to Barras, Truguet consistently praised their citoyenneté, manifest in their dedication to

military service against the Republic’s enemies. Indeed, he argued, ‘every time that the law of 16 Pluiviôse

has been executed in good faith, the blacks have truly been shown worthy of Liberty by their attachment to

the Republic, and by their love for work’, as in ‘Port de Paix and L’isle de la Tortue, where we find men who

have sincerely wanted to execute the law.’205 In another part of the Mémoire, Truguet drew attention to those

‘eight to ten thousand black Frenchmen, under the orders of Jean François’ who had ‘armed themselves for

their Liberty’ and might be enticed to fight for the Republic against the Spanish crown. 206 This edge of

Truguet’s republicanism was animated by the baser motives of geopolitical utility rather than elevated

philosophies of natural rights.207

203 ibid., p. 198.204 Cited in Laurent Dubois and Aurélien Berra, ‘“Citoyens et amis!”, op cit., p. 294: ‘la République sera celui qui sera défendu par une armée des Noirs. (…) Les Noirs sont les véritables sans-culottes des colonies, ils sont le people, eux seuls sont capables de defender le pays.’ – my translation of the original cited by Dubois and Berra; C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins, op cit., and see Malick W. Ghachem on the use of analogies in idem, ‘“The Colonial Vendée,” in The World of the Haitian Revoltion, ed. David Geggus and Norman Fiering (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), p. 156-176.205 Truguet, Mémoire Sur Saint-Domingue, Pièce III, p. 27: ‘Vous aurés sans doute observoi dans Le raport que je viens de vous faire; que par tout ou la bonne foy avoit fait Executer La loi du 16 Pluviose, les noirs si montroient digne de La Liberté par leur attachement a La republique, Et par leur amour pour le travail; En Effet Voilà ce qu’ils sont au Port de Paix Et a L’isle de La Tortue; ou se trouvent des hommes qui ont voulu sincerement faire Executer La Loi.’ 206 Ibid., Pièce III, p. 12: ‘Environ huit a dix mille noirs francais, sous les ordres de jean francois; s’armerent pour Leur Liberté au Commencement de La revolution; ils furent attirés Ensuitte par le gouvernement Espagnol; dans La parties de L’isle qui Vient de de nous Etre cedér; il Sera facille de faire de ces hommes des troupes fidelles et utiles pour defendre et garder La Partie Espagnole.’ 207 For the description of his vision as ‘le regime republicain’, see ibid., Pièce II, p. 13.

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As for the majority of those who were granted their liberty in 1793-94, the republican regime forced them to

remain attached, as under slavery, to the plantation fields.208 Truguet, turning to ‘the regulations of

agriculture for the sugar and coffee plantations’, recommended the further extension and development of

‘that done by Sonthonax’ in ‘Saint-Domingue’ and others in ‘Guyanne’209, elevating ‘the state of the black

slave into that of a co-sharing cultivator’.210 The difficulties of emancipation had led Sonthonax and Polverel

to try and implement a system which, in a set of regulations of February 1794, both coerced and incentivised

plantation labour. Polverel offered cultivateurs the choice in their communities to work only four days a

week in return for a smaller salary, but this wage-decrease was punitively large for the labour which was still

to be performed.211 From July 1794, the collaborative work of Toussaint L’Ouverture, André Rigaud, and

various French administrators had re-introduced ex-masters to oversee the labour of their former slaves and

introduced new tenants such as gens de couleur military officers into abandoned plantations by 1796.212 This

system superseded that which Sonthonax and Polverel had established by this latter date, demonstrating that

the

information about the ‘current state’ of Saint-Domingue reaching Truguet was less than perfect. What he

envisioned correctly, however, was that ex-slaves were once again ‘to be mobilised and controlled from

above’ by an economic system of time-disciplined labour within the new republican order.213

To a certain extent these views chimed with some of the revolutionaries within Saint-Domingue: Vincent

Ogé, Julien Raimond, Étienne Laveaux, André Rigaud, and other gens de couleur who considered

208 Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, op cit., p. 7-8; Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti, op cit., p. 168-170; Mats Lundahl, ‘Toussaint L’Ouverture and the War Economy of Saint-Domingue, 1796-1802,’ Slavery and Abolition, VI (1985), p. 122-138; Judith Kafka, “Action, Reaction, and Interaction”: Slave Women in Resistance in the South of Saint-Domingue, 1793-94,” Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Comparative Studies, XVIII (1997), p. 48-72. 209 Perhaps a reference to the experimentations with gradual abolition conducted by Lafayette there – see: Røge, Political Economy and the Reinvention of France’s Colonial System, op cit., p. 150. 210 Truguet, Mémoire Sur Saint-Domingue, Pièce I, p. 10-11: ‘quant aux réglemens de culture pour les plantations en Sucre et en Caffé, je propeserai au Directoire d’adopter ceux faits par Sonthonax dans la partie du Nord de S t.. Domingue; déjà ils ont été mis en activité avec succès dans les autres Colonies et notamment à la Guyanne. Ces réglemens ont changé l’état du noir esclave en celui de Cultivateur co-partageant.’; and on the settlement introduced in Saint-Domingue after emancipation by Sonthonax and Polverel, see Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, op cit., p. 204-206; for that introduced by Hugues in Guadeloupe see idem, A Colony of Citizens, op cit., p. 206-213. 211 Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, op cit., p. 105. 212 ibid., p. 206.213 ibid., p. 198.

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themselves to be culturally and ancestrally European and who possessed land in Saint-Domingue, were

concordant with the views of Truguet.214 Ogé, upon returning from Paris, had attempted to style himself and

fellow gens de couleur as models of an active civic patriotism.215 Amongst the possessions which he took

back with him, as recorded by the prosecutor charged with questioning Ogé after his tentative uprising of

1791, were three uniforms with gold epaulettes and buttons bearing the arms of the city of Paris. As John D.

Garrigus explains, these were part of his self-fashioning as a model of the new revolutionary citoyenneté and

patriotism which fused citizenship, militia service, and republican liberty as a lived ideal. 216 Furthermore,

even an African-born former slave, Toussaint L’Ouverture, as in C.L.R. James’s tragic portrayal, found

himself torn between a commitment to emancipation and the affinity which he shared with elements of the

old, European colonial order – his Catholicism, his close relationship with his former master Bayon de

Libertat, and his belief in the necessity of the plantation system.217 Certain revolutionaries were in agreement

with white administrators’ fusion of civil equality and civic sacrifice.

However, the concrete political substance underpinning the rhetorical appeal to liberty made by members of

white political elites was in a profound tension with the type of liberty which recently emancipated slaves

had anticipated. This tension was symptomatic of the disjoint between the freemen which the former slaves

imagined themselves to be, and the duty-bound republican citizenship which their administrators attempted

to impose upon them. For them, ‘freedom’ entailed personal independence rather than civil conformity,

indicated by the fact that one of the most consistent demands of the slave revolutionaries was for more

leisure time to farm their own plots and fewer working days in the week. 218 The former slaves’ oral culture

makes it difficult to examine their more precise thoughts in Saint-Domingue itself, but if we examine those

214 John D. Garrigus, ‘“Thy coming fame, Ogé! Is sure”: New Evidence on Ogé’s 1790 Revolt and the Beginnings of the Haitian Revolution’, in John D. Garrigus ed., Assumed Identities: The Meanings of Race in the Atlantic World (Arlington: Texas A&M University Press, 2010).215 ibid., p. 27.216 ibid., p. 27-29.217 See: C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London: Penguin, 1963), esp at ch. XIII, ‘The War of Independence’; King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig, op cit. xxiii-xxiv; David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity, p. 11-14 and at ch. 4, ‘Toussaint’s Tragic Dilemma’. 218 Dubois, Avengers of the New World, op cit., p. 186-187 and p. 205; Johnson, ‘Possible Pasts’, op cit. p. 491-492.

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who rose against Hugues’ regime in Guadeloupe in 1797, we can catch a glimpse of what liberty looked like

for former slaves protesting coercive labour policies.219 He recorded them questioning, ‘If you are free, then

why do you work upon the land of the whites? Why is all the produce of your labour not held by

yourselves’.220 In the uses of the language of ‘liberty’ in the communication of political demands between

former slaves, elite administrators, and metropole, there resided vastly diverging concepts.

These tensions were symptomatic of the wider political milieu and project in which Truguet and his

Mémoire were engaged – he was exhorting Director Barras to intervene in a widespread Thermidorian

discussion charting France’s colonial future. Truguet’s concept of liberty was only one part of his vision of

the general regularisation of government across French territories.221 In the opening section of the Mémoire,

he stated that ‘The colonists, since they enjoy the advantages of the French constitution’ and ‘the exportation

of their commodities has become free, must be considered like one of the provinces of the Republic in

Europe, the Départments (de) l’intérieur, paying the impôt…contributing themselves to the requisitions that

we find in war.’222 Pernille Røge has demonstrated how this quest to redefine the colony, first articulated by

Physiocratic works such as La philosophie rurale (1763) of François Quesnay and the Marquis de Mirabeau,

was commuted through the Amis des Noirs into the period of the Directory.223 From 1795-1798, the Institut

National (Founded in October 1795), the newly-formed Société des Amis des Noirs et des Colonies (First

convened in 1797), the ministry of foreign affairs, and the ministry of the navy formed a policy-making

nexus which sought to tackle colonial questions left unresolved by France’s previous revolutionary

governments.224 Yet whereas Arnould, Talleyrand, and Charles Leclerc de Montlinot counselled a pivot away

from the Antilles towards Africa, Truguet’s Mémoire is unique in its focus upon Saint-Domingue as a locus

219 ibid., p. 308-311.220 Cited in Dubois, “Citoyens et amis!”, op cit., p. 299 – my translation of the original French cited here.221 For Truguet’s views on émigrés, see idem, Mémoire Sur St. Domingue, op cit., Pièce I, p. 8. 222 Ibid., Pièce I, p. 5: ‘Les Colonies depuis qu’on les fait jouir des avantages de la Constitution française, depuis que pendant la guerre l’exportation de leurs denrées est devenuë libre, doivent être considérés comme des provinces de La Répbulique en Europe, les Départmens de l’intérieur payent l’impôt…supportent les rèquisitions qu’on trouvent la guerre; n’est il pas naturel queles français des antilles qui ont tout gagné à la révolutoin, payent leur part de la Contribution générale.’ 223 Røge, Political Economy and the Reinvention of France’s Colonial System., op cit., p. 161. 224 ibid., p. 164-181.

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for colonial regeneration. Liberty in Saint-Domingue was a subordinate, but important, part of Truguet’s

wider investment in regenerating the French colonial mission.

The politics of liberty advanced by Truguet was a product of his Thermidorian circles: it attempted to make

real the republican ambition to reform France’s old colonial system at a point in time before the setbacks of

republican administration in the Antilles in 1797-99 and Napoleon’s reinstitution of slavery in 1802. For a

brief period, it seemed possible both to consolidate liberty and restore the economy of Saint-Domingue. It

was these two competing ambitions – the desire to found a republican environment in Saint-Domingue which

ordered the economy and society in favour of French geopolitical goals and which preserved the

commitment to the abstract principle of general liberty – which proved the undoing of ‘the regime of

liberty’.225 Administrators sent from the metropole and the former slaves of Saint-Domingue were talking

past one another, using the same language to elucidate vastly different concepts. Their contested visions of

what the future regime of liberty should entail failed to align and it was in this fatal misalignment in the

politics of liberty that the project of Truguet and others would eventually unravel, as ‘the metropolitan

project of revolution…confronted the limits of its own imagination in the Antilles.’226 Yet in the

Thermidorian optimism surrounding France’s colonial future in 1795/96 under which Truguet wrote his

Mémoire, this outcome did not seem to be inevitable. As we shall see, these years were animated by a

dramatic expansion not only of the imagination of republicanism, but also its horizon of expectations.227

Chapter Three

The Revolution in Saint-Domingue and the Historicity of Liberty

225 Dubois notes that Victor Hugues confronted with similar problems in Guadeloupe, repeatedly justified his regime’s restrictive labour policies and military conscription as ‘the price of liberty.’ See ibid, p. 183. 226 Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, op cit., p. 198. 227 Singham, Betwixt Cattle and Men, op cit., p. 153.

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When François-Thomas Galbaud, the governor-general sent to Saint-Domingue in February 1793 and

overthrown during the events of June, took his oath of office in front of troops assembled in Cairou, he

assured the commander of the free coloured soldiers present that, ‘my principles are known, I am a

republican.’ But, he added, ‘prejudices are the children of centuries,’ and their ‘total destruction cannot be

brought about overnight.’ In an attempt to allay Galbaud’s caution, which echoed that of Condorcet, a few

days later a delegation from the Sixth Battalion of the National Guard, a unit composed mainly of hommes

de couleur, assured him that ‘the visit we have the honour of paying you is that of a regenerated people who

have suffered, for many years, the weight of the most arbitrary despotism’. 228 In this episode, what was at

stake was not only republican concepts and language, but a negotiation of liberty grounded in the use of a

history of regeneration from a past of barbarism. It encapsulates the competing visions of republican

administrators and black revolutionaries who spoke with and past one another using French paradigms of

liberty and despotism as the languages of political communication.

This chapter demonstrates how contemporary understandings of liberty as a geographical and political

phenomenon in Saint-Domingue were powerfully influenced by the way in which liberty was used to order

and express experiences of time. The central phenomenon which emerges from Truguet’s Mémoire is the

‘historicity of liberty’.229 This signifies the way in which Truguet and his contemporaries placed events in

Saint-Domingue within a wider revolutionary present, using ‘liberty’ as a means of expressing contrasts

between a past in which the tyranny of despotism, colour prejudice, and plantation slavery had led to a

temporal stasis in contrast to a present of dynamic acceleration towards a liberated future.230 In perceiving

and ordering time in this way, republican administrators placed an emphasis upon the urgency of action. The

desire to bring a liberated, post-revolutionary future closer to the present and overcome geographical and

logistical boundaries combined to make Truguet anxious about the need for haste. Time was of the essence

because of the excitement about the prospect of accelerating towards visions of the regime of liberty and for 228 Cited in Jeremy D. Popkin, You are All Free, op cit., p. 162. 229 This is based upon my own reading of Hartog, Regimes of Historicity, op cit., at p. xv-xvii, p. 1, p. 9, and p. 15-17. 230 See: Jeremy D. Popkin, ‘Saint-Domingue, Slavery, and the Origins of the French Revolution’op cit., p. 231-235; Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, op cit., p. 221; and Lynn Hunt, ‘Revolutionary Time and Regeneration’, op cit., p. 70 and p. 73-74.

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fear of losing the opportunities of the present moment due to spatial, military, and political obstacles. 231 The

ideals, hopes, and fears animating this sense of urgency were specific to their context: the relationship

between past, present, and future in this experience of time and history was profoundly shaped by a Franco-

centric concept of liberty and a Eurocentric narrative of which phenomena constituted progress from error to

improvement, ignorance to enlightenment, and servitude to liberty. 232

Before exploring this historicity of liberty, it is necessary to further scrutinise terminology and methodology.

Hartog’s outline is frustratingly opaque, and neither Daniel Brewer nor Dan Edelstein provide any clear

outline of what they actually mean by using ‘historicity’ as opposed to ‘time’, ‘temporality’, or ‘history’. 233

Historicity, as I use it here, signifies the way in which time is understood through the placement of the

present within a structural relationship between the components of time as they are perceived to be

interacting.234 The present is conceived as it intersects an historical past, an unfolding present moment, and

an unknown future, and interaction between these categories of time is structured out of the ordering of

perceived interrelationships between them. Consequently, Hartog’s regime of historicity is a regimen in

which past, present, and future are in a fluid relationship of ‘always provisional or unstable equilibrium.’ 235

The ‘regime of historicity’ is therefore, as Hartog concedes, a consciously anachronistic ‘heuristic tool’: it

aids the investigation of the unstable but constant ordering of events which all contemporaries make through

implicit value-judgments about events and what these tell us about their perception of time. 236 It provides us

with a way of thinking about and accessing how individual and collective expressions of temporality (the

‘time-qualities’ of an era) are founded upon the way in which past, present, and future are implicitly

perceived to be interacting.237 ‘Historicity’ and ‘temporality’ are therefore co-dependent concepts, with the

231 See: Giddens, ‘Space, Time, and Regionalisation’ op cit., and Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, op cit., p. vii. 232 Scott, Conscripts of Modernity, op cit., at ch. 5, ‘The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment’; Garraway, ‘Universalism and Nationalism in the Discourse of the Haitian Revolution’, op cit., p. 68-79; Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, op cit., at p. 7, p. 172-3, p. 188, and p. 191.233 See: Daniel Brewer, The Enlightenment Past, op cit., Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment, op cit. 234 This is based upon my interpretation of Hartog’s remarks in Regimes of Historicity, op cit., p. xvi and p. 16-17. 235 Hartog, Regimes of Historicity, op cit., p. xv.236 ibid., p. xvi, p. 9, p. 15, and p. 16.237 On the implicit nature of the predominant ‘order of time’, see ibid., p. 1.

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former indicating the implicit ordering of events into time-categories, and the latter being the overall

expressed perception of the qualities of time – such as the experience of speed, direction, and movement –

which results. Understanding the semantics of language and conceptual frameworks is therefore crucial

because it is these which form the modalities through which these experiences are conceived, ordered, and

articulated.

‘Liberty’, its synonyms, and related concepts were temporally-charged in eighteenth-century France – they

formed a linguistic-conceptual means by which the idea of progress could be made tangible and measured in

contemporary language. Philosophes expressed the belief that they lived in a present emerging from darkness

to enlightenment by contrasting a future ideal of human liberation with an unfree past, employing antonyms

to liberty such as ‘chains’, ‘servitude’, and ‘slumber’. In doing so, they constructed metaphorical images to

attach to the past which articulated a perception of stasis, hindrance, and a lack of progressive events, a ‘cold

chronology’ of human history.238 A particularly optimistic contrast between an unfree past and an anticipated

future of liberation, employing temporally-loaded language, was clearly expressed in another one of the

STN’s illegal best-sellers, the Baron d’Holbach’s pre-revolutionary Système social (1773): ‘If error and

ignorance have forged the chains which bind the peoples, if prejudice perpetuates them, then one day

knowledge, reason, and truth can burst them asunder.’239 Such register was bequeathed by the French

enlightenment to the revolutionaries who radicalised and sharpened their contrast between chains and liberty

for an age of dramatic transformation. This was how one Catéchisme révolutionnaire, published in 1793

came to define ‘Revolution’ as ‘a violent passage from a state of slavery to a state of liberty.’240 In

eighteenth-century France, progress was perceived, measured, and described through the languages and

concepts associated with liberty and servitude.

238 See Knott’s use of Lévi-Strass’s contrast between ‘cold’ and ‘hot’ chronology in her analysis of narratives of the age of revolution in idem., Narrating the Age of Revolution, op cit., p. 6.239 ‘Si l’erreur et l’ignorance ont forgé les chaînes des peuples, si la préjugé les perpétue, la science et la raison, la vérité pourront un jour les briser.’, from the Système social, ou principes naturels de la morale et de la politique (1773; repr. Paris, 1994), 558-59 – my translation; Darnton, The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, op cit., p. 75. For a more negative usage of the metaphor of chains, see the opening of Rousseau, Du contrat social ou Principes du Droit Politique, op cit., p. 3: ‘L’homme est né libre, mais par-tout il est dans les fers.’240 Cited in Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Revolution, p. 1 – see the footnotes on this page for the full title of the catechism and the archival reference.

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Moreover, despite the stark contrast which Ghachem draws between contemporary understandings of

‘political’ slavery on the one hand, and the plantation slavery of the Caribbean on the other, there was

increasing conceptual conflation of the two at the end of the eighteenth century.241 This created the sense of a

sattelzeit, a time in which multiple plains of temporality co-existed and diverged in distanciated geographical

spaces.242 In Henrion de Pansey’s Mémoire pour un Nègre qui réclame sa Liberté (1770), written while he

was an avocat in Paris for slaves in France petitioning for their freedom, Henrion drew together

Montesquieu’s critique of political despotism with a denunciation of the institution of slavery in the French

colonies. He warned that the maintenance of the latter would infect the metropole, plunging France back into

her enslaved past.243 With the onset of revolutionary transformation in France itself, the temporal

distanciation between an advanced, liberated metropole and the enslaved countryside and colonies widened.

The Third Estate of Reims, in its cahier demands sent to the Estates General in May 1789, drew a

comparison between the historical servitude of Europe and contemporary chattel slavery in the French

Antilles, stating that ‘the Third Estate, which seven centuries ago, was in a condition of slavery almost equal

to that of the blacks nowadays, ought to take an interest in their situation.’ 244 There was an eighteenth-

century tradition in French thought of drawing comparisons between a past of despotism in France and a

present tyranny of colour prejudice in Saint-Domingue and the Antilles, where the chains were very real.245

To envisage the present as a time of movement and dramatic change, orientated towards the future, French

revolutionaries also utilised a tradition of casting light upon a deep past of barbarism at the foundations of

241 See: Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution, op cit., p. 1, and idem, The Antislavery Script, op cit., p. 163. 242 For Koselleck’s exploration of the notion of a ‘sattelzeit’, see Keith Tribe’s introduction in his translated edition of Koselleck, Futures Past, op cit., p. ix-xv. For examples, see: Victor Riqueti, Marquis de Mirabeau, L’Ami des hommes, ou Traité de la population. (3 vols. Avignon, 1756-1758), Vol. 3 (1758), p. 178 ; and Henrion de Pansey’s Mémoire pour un Nègre qui réclame sa Liberté (1770), (Paris, 1770). 243 Cited in Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France”, op cit., p. 99-102.244 Cited in Popkin, ‘Saint-Domingue and the Origins of the French Revolution’, op cit., p. 233.245 See: Rawley with Behrendt, The Transatlantic Slave Trade, op cit., p. 125.

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European colonialism.246 This is where the register, moral tone, and paradigms of history in eighteenth-

century critiques of colonialism in works of the Marquis de Mirabeau and the abbé Raynal resonated most

profoundly with Truguet and his contemporaries. Mirabeau, in his l’Ami des hommes (1756), had denounced

the annihilation of the tribes of Mississippi which served to ‘francicise the savages’ but ‘savigise the

French’.247 In the dramatic opening pages of his Mémoire, Truguet adopted this mode, recounting the origins

of European colonialism in Saint-Domingue up to the construction of the Atlantic slave trade. The Spanish

and French colonial settlers ‘subjected to their caprice, to their brutality, a good-natured and pacific

population.’ Truguet then paints a haunting image of the early colonists’ creation of a despotism of African

slavery upon the butchered native Antilleans: ‘the regime of the colonies has always been affected by the

barbarism and the baseness of soul of its first inhabitants; the Antilles had become the tomb of the African

population, and the colonial commodities came at the bloody expense of the blacks’. 248 It was in writing à la

Raynal that Truguet created a genealogy of past tyranny from which he could trace the emergence of the

present in its bold strides made towards liberty in Saint-Domingue.

There is every indication here that Truguet simply lifted the structure of the history of colonialism and the

establishment of the slave trade found in Tome IV of the second edition of Raynal’s Histoire Philosophique

and spliced it together with the account of the degenerative character of the first French settlers in the

Marquis de Mirabeau’s L’Ami des Hommes.249 The widespread readings of the former text have already been

emphasised above.250 The latter text is one that Truguet was certainly likely to have known, at least in part,

246 On this tradition in the writings of Diderot, Kant, and Herder, see Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 247 ‘…au-lieu de franciser les sauvages, ceux-ci ont sauvagisé les françois’, cited in Røge, Political Economy and the Reinvention of France’s Colonial System, op cit., p. 43. This is my translation of the work cited in its original French. 248 Truguet, Mémoire Sur Saint-Domingue, Pièce I, p. 2-3: ‘les nouvelles plantations furent longtems languissantes, et leur produit borné faute de bras pour les étendre; les Espagnoles avoient donné l'éxemplié d'aller chercher en affrique des Cultivateurs, les français limitérent, et telle était l'inconséquence des gouvernement d'Europe à l'égard de ses Colonies qu'eu les peuplant de malfaiteurs déportés pour des crimes, où soumettait à leur caprice, à leur brutalité une population debonnaire et paisible, comme si l'lon eût voulu récompenser la scéleratesse et l'immoralite par le sacrifice de l'innocence malheureuse. Aussi le régime des Colonies s'est-il toujours ressenti de la barbarie et de la bassesse d'ame de ses premiers habitans; les antilles étaient devenuës le tombeau de la population affricaine, et les denrées coloniales le prix du sang des noirs et des hommes de couleur.’249 See: Raynal, Histoire Philosophique (La Haye, 1774), op cit., and Victor Riqueti, Marquis de Mirabeau, L’Ami des hommes, ou Traité de la population. (3 vols. Avignon, 1756-1758), Vol. 3 (1758), p. 181-183. 250 See p. 18-19 above.

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since it was amongst the physiocratic sources of insipiration upon which La Société des Amis des Noirs drew

upon in their pamphlet literature. We know from Truguet’s correspondence and the Mémoire that he was

associated with some of the society’s prominent members such as Julien Raimond and Legér Felicité

Sonthonax.251 Furthermore, as Røge has outlined, these societies also used and circulated the more concise

discussions of particular issues relating to colonial slavery and its history which had been published in the

physiocratic journal, Ephémérides du citoyen (1765-72).252 Whether Truguet read these works of Raynal and

Mirabeau directly or whether he read summaries and condensed versions of their arguments in pamphlet and

journalistic literature, it is clear that the historical accounts and paradigms established by their texts

influenced his Mémoire. Truguet’s Mémoire essentially provides a condensed philosophical history in which

early European settlers in the New World after Columbus corrupted and slaughtered the natural virtuous and

peaceful native Caribs before erecting a barbarous trade in African slaves upon the ruin of the native

population. To envisage the present as a time of movement and dramatic change, orientated towards the

future, French republicans such as Truguet drew upon and dramatically re-purposed the tradition in

eighteenth-century French philosophical history of casting light upon a deep past of barbarism at the

foundations of European colonialism.253

However, just as important as the contrast with the deep past was the condition of Saint-Domingue upon the

eve of the revolution of 1791-93. In the decades following the outset of the American War of Independence,

dated by Truguet to 1775, Truguet presented a picture of Saint-Domingue as a colony fossilised within a

time of despotism, in which ‘the vanity of the colons’ and ‘the force of prejudice’ was constantly prevailing

over the metropole.254 To illustrate the seemingly unbreakable chains in which the colony was then bound,

251 See Truguet’s correspondence with Sonthonax regarding the commission to be sent to Saint-Domingue in 1796 in Robert Louis Stein, Léger Félicité Sonthonax, op cit., p. 129; for his reccomendations of Sonthonax and Raimond in the Mémoire Sur Saint-Domingue, see Pièce II, p. 5-16. 252 Røge, Political Economy and the Reinvention of France’s Colonial System, op cit., at p. 152 and p. 161. 253 On this tradition in the writings of Diderot, Kant, and Herder, see Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 254 Ibid., Piece III, p. 6: ‘Pour Eviter ce dechirement, La Cour de France Prit Le Seul Parti qui convenoit par un meilleur sort; les hommes que L’orgeuil des colons avoient Eloignés d’Eux; En consequence Le gouvernement donna des ordres Et des instructions a tous les commandant; Pour mieux traiter a L’avenir, Les hommes de couleur, Et pour les faire considerer a L’avenir comme les autres colons: mais La force du Prejugé et de L’habitude L’Emportent toujours; les hommes de couleur ne jouirent Pas Long temps; des Effets de ces recommendations…’

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Truguet refered to ‘ordinances’ for ‘the better treatment of the hommes de couleur’ as well as the 1784

Edicts of Louis XVI sent to Saint-Domingue which were aimed, ‘to considerably improve’ the ‘condition’ of

the of the slave ‘and prepare them for liberty’. These, he lamented, were not put into effect because of the

continual thwarting of them by the white colonial planters.255 In Pièce III of his Mémoire, Truguet charted

heroic attempts by black slaves to reject their enslavement, which only led the white planters, ‘to repress

these movements’ and ‘redouble the rigour of their cruelties’ up to the eve of revolution.256

Truguet’s account of Saint-Domingue on the eve of revolution is imbued with a sense of the forthcoming

insurrection. He traced the origins of the events of 1791-93 to the ‘grave condition’ in which ‘the absurd

resistance of the planters’ to ‘the progress of enlightenment in Europe’ left the black slaves and gens de

couleur. The latter in particular, he argued, possessed ‘the secret desire to conquer (their rights)’ and ‘the

hope of shaking off the unjust domination of their oppressors.’257 Indeed, Truguet went further, launching

into a polemical denunciation of the ‘selfish masters, these men slumbering between tyranny and pleasures’.

Here, the present-minded nature of Truguet’s bitter invective is revealed – it was clearly aimed at those

within Paris at the Club de Clichy and diasporic exiles who desired to return Saint-Domingue to its state

before the revolution, such as Moreau de Saint-Méry. He criticised the colonial habitans of the past before,

shifting into the present-tense, he attacked those ‘who repeat without cease that France is lost because she

had broken the chains of the human race.’258 Invoking what Hannah Spahn has identified as the

Enlightenment cliché of the ‘sleep of reason’, Truguet charged that ‘these men…after a long state of slumber

(assoupissement), did not perceive any of the causes that events announced around them’ and which would

255 Ibid., Pièce II, p. 4: ‘Un Edit fut d’abord donné, en 1784, pour améliorer considérablement le sort des esclaves mais il fut repoussé (par) des Colons’; and Pièce III, p. 7: ‘quand aux Esclaves; un Edit fut donné En 1784. Pour ameliorer Considerablement Leur sort, Et Les Preparer à La Liberté. Mais Comme ces Edits n’Eut aucun Effet; Par ce qu’il fut repoussé (par) des colons Et qeu le Conseil Supperieur du cap refusa de L’Enregistrer’; for detail upon the content of these decrees, see Dubois, Avengers of the New World, op cit. p. 31.256 Ibid, Pièce III, p. 5-6: ‘Pour repprimer ces mouvements, on redoubla de rigeur Et de cruatés’. 257 Truguet, Mémoire Sur Saint-Domingue, Pièce II, p. 2-3: ‘le progrès des lumiéres en Europe en leur communication dans le monde entier, tout, jusqu'à l'absurde résistance des planteurs a toute amélioration dans le sort de leur malheureuses victimes, tous nourrissait, dans le coeur des nègres et surtout des hommes de couleur libres (dont la triste condition differait fort peu de celle des esclaves) avec le sentiments de leurs droits, le desir secret d'en conquérir la jouissance et l'espoir de se soustraire à l'injuste domination de leurs oppressuers.’258 Ibid., Pièce III, p. 1: ‘ces maitres Egoistes, ces hommes assoupis entre la tirannie et les Plaisirs et qui repettent sans cesse que la france Est perdue; parce que’lle a brisé les fers du genre humain’.

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ultimately ‘annihilate them’.259 Here, the vision of liberty as an ideal destined to overcome the tyranny of

‘colonial aristocracy’ reveals something fundamental about how the republican administrator viewed human

history as a dialectical confrontation of moral absolutes whose outcome determines progress or stagnation.

The totalising revolutionary discourse of virtue permeates the perception of time itself.260

In the case of Saint-Domingue, the perceived effacement of the recent past of extreme slavery and colour

prejudice made for an even greater contrast with an imagined future of liberation. The density of radical,

unprecedented events created a powerful sense of rupture, movement, and acceleration. 261 The Mémoire

explicated these events by creating what Sarah Knott, using Lévi-Strauss’s terminology, has called a ‘hot

chronology’ of revolution, a narratological format in which events are invested with transformative

consequences for both present and future.262 For Truguet, the destruction of the old colonial system attained

through insurrection, the burning of Cap Français, and emancipation created a sense of rupture in which the

past was downgraded in favour of movement into a new period of regeneration. For Truguet, the ‘advances

of government’ which had taken place since had led to ‘results so fortunate that they will efface all of the

regrets of greedy men who could not view the splendour of the colonies except in the eternal misery of the

most ill-fated slaves who cultivated them.’263 Instead, ‘the revolution’ had saved the colony for ‘a day which

is not too far away’ when there would be many ‘true advantages’ greater than ‘those which we withdrew

259 Ibid., Pièce III, p. 1: ‘ces hommes dis-je, Pendant un Long assoupissement, n’apercevoient aucunes des causes, que les evenements annonceroient au tour d’eux; et qui devoient en les anéantissant…’; and see Hannah Spahn, Thomas Jefferson, Time, and History (Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2011), p. 95-100. 260 For opinions on the totalising nature of the French revolutionary ideology and discourses of virtue, see: François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Mona Ozouf, ‘War and Terror in French Revolutionary Discourse (1792-94)’, chapter in in Blanning, T.C.W. The Rise and Fall of the French Revolution (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Patrice Higonnet, Goodness beyond Virtue: Jacobins during the French Revolution, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Marisa Linton, Choosing Terror, op cit. 261 See: Giddens, ‘Space, Time and Regionalisation’, op cit., Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, op cit., p. vii; and for a coverage of such rupture, movement, and acceleration in the French context, see Baker, Inventing the Revolution, op cit., p. 221; and Hunt, ‘Revolutionary Time and Regeneration’, op cit., p. 63-64. 262 Knott, ‘Narrating the Age of Revolution’, op cit., p. 6. 263 Truguet, Mémoire Sur Saint-Domingue, Pièce III, p. 1: ‘quelques avances du gouvernement…oui! J’ose me promettre du Concours de ces choses, des resultats si heureux quils effaceront jusqu’au regrets de ces hommes avvides (sic); qui ne voyoient La splendeur des colonies; que dans l’Eternelle misere des trop malheureux Esclaves qui Les cultivoient.’

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from here under the old order’.264 Had the principles of the French revolution not permeated Saint-

Domingue, Truguet argued, then an insurrection would have occurred at any rate, but one less attuned to the

fruits of constitutional freedom. The achievement of liberty in the colonies resided in channelling the

destructive energies of the nouveaux libres into the constructive pursuit of liberty.265

These twin themes of rupture and acceleration, read into the temporal fabric of events, was echoed both by

individuals witnessing the events described first-hand in the colony, and other administrators within the

metropole seeking to define colonial policy. There is one account of the events of 1791-93 by the colonial

journalist H.D. de Saint-Maurice, editor of the official Moniteur générale de la partie française du Saint-

Domingue before the insurrection.266 Most probably written at some point from the mid-1790s, it

demonstrates the perception of rupture from an individual of the planter class who had their physical and

mental world turned upside down, forcing a pivot away from the past and towards a new imagined future

colony of civil and racial equality.267 In the words of Saint-Maurice,

‘The spell is broken, the time of error is past, it has disappeared forever… philosophes have spread enlightenment over the surface of the globe that neither superstition nor despotism can extinguish…No, the posterity of Rousseau and of Raynal will not groan in servitude any more. Tear off the fatal blindfold: the colony of Saint-Domingue will no longer be cultivated by the hands of slaves.’268

The explicit downgrading of the past accompanied by a pivot towards the unprecedented future here was

accompanied by attempts to channel the perception of movement and the restless energies which had been

264 Ibid., Pièce III, p. 2: ‘Et particulièrement St. Domingue; sufira pour sentir, que La revolution, loin d’avoir acceléré et aggravé tous les malheurs, qui L’ont accompagnes dans cette colonie ; n’a produit au Contraire que L’Effet d’une operation tranchante et douloureuse à La Verité; mais qui La sauvée, Pour En retirer un jour qui n’Est Pas Eloigné; des avantages bien Plus réels Et bien plus Solidement Etablis; que ne L’Etoient ceux qu’on En retiroit, sous L’ancien ordre de choses.’ 265 Ibid., Pièce III, p. 5: ‘Si La revolution ne les eut appellés; à jouir des droits que la nature donne à tous Les hommes: Et combien au Contraire, La justice nationale à attaché ces memes hommes a La france Et a tous Les francais; sur tout a Ceux qui n’ont jamais Partagés La Prejugé; sous lequel ils ont genir si Long temps.’ 266 See: Jeremy D. Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution, p. 184-208.267 ibid.268 ibid., p. 205-206.

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unleashed.269 Talleyrand, in his 1797 speech to the Institut National perhaps had the passions of men such as

Truguet in mind when he remarked upon the existence of ‘a general inquietude in spirits, a need of

movement…and an ambition in the ideas which tend ceaselessly to change and to destroy’ in those who

sought to project domestic regeneration onto the colonies. All of this, he added ‘is done in the name of

liberty.’ Invoking ‘Montesquieu’, Talleyrand stated that ‘a free government’ is ‘always agitated.’270 Thus,

Truguet’s own agitation captured the tone of a wider French Atlantic World caught up in the impatience and

sense of movement involved in the reconfiguration of temporality.

The sense of movement is articulated further through the theme of awakening as the prejudice of the past is

overcome by the actors of the revolution in Saint-Domingue themselves. This was an awakening in which

the slaves-turned-revolutionaries in Saint-Domingue were afforded considerable agency, even if their

entrance into the stage of history was signalled by their placement into a Franco-centric narrative. One

crucial result of the revolution in Saint-Domingue was a process by which ‘the classes of black slaves’ who

‘close to the same epoch’ had begun to perceive ‘the yoke of chains under which they were held’ awakened

both to ‘an awareness of ‘their forces’ and ‘the dignity of their being’. 271 ‘At last,’ Truguet stated, ‘they felt

themselves to be men’.272 This was typical of the late-eighteenth-century ‘philosophical narrative’ of

revolution identified by Sarah Knott. Truguet adopts his role as one of the ‘rational interpreters of mankind,

committed to mobile abstractions such as liberty or the revolutionary spirit’ in a didactic account which

‘moralised…political subjects’ and in which ‘generalisations about revolution and mankind reached for a

universalising philosophy.’273 The genus of revolution took place for Truguet in the bold actions of

269 See: Røge, Political Economy and the Reinvention of France’s Colonial System, op cit., p. 169.270 ‘…une inquietude générale dans les esprits, un besoin de mouvement, une disposition vague aux entreprises hasardeuses, et une ambition dans les idées, qui tend sans cesse à changer et à détruire…Cela est vrai, sur-tout quand la révolution s’est faite au nom de la liberté. « Un gouvernement libre, dit quelque part Montesquieu, c’est-à-dire, toujours agité, etc. »’ Cited in ibid – the above is my translation of the original French source cited by Røge on this page. 271 Truguet, Mémoire Sur Saint-Domingue, Pièce III, p. 5: ‘La classe des noirs esclaves a peu prés à La même Epoque, Commencoit a faire apercevoir, qu’elle souffroit impatiemment Le joug de fer sous Lequel elle Etoit tenue; elle dormoit aussi quelques marques du Sentiment de ses forces, Et de La dignité de son Etre’ 272 Truguet, Pièce III, p. 3: ‘enfin ils sentoient qui’ils etoient hommes.’ A more literal translation might be: ‘So, they felt that they were men.’ 273 Knott, ‘Narrating the Age of Revolution’, op cit., p. 10.

53

‘gatherings of black slaves’, maroons in the refuge of the mountains, and those who travelled to ‘far sea

shores’, spreading the flame of liberty.274 As Walter Johnson has argued, disobedience and revolt were ways

in which slaves rejected and contested the coercive work-time of the planation. 275 Truguet’s Mémoire

therefore adds context and contemporary testimony to Trouillot’s assertion that it is ‘in the minute

dysfunctions of the structure that men and women seize their opportunities and create history’, injecting

‘motion in the system.’276 Former slaves were written into a moment of dynamic awakening from servile

slumber.277

For Truguet and his republican contemporaries, this awakening was conceived within a process whereby

‘Liberty’ was envisaged not only as a personal condition or feature of a constitution – it acted in their

imagination as a disembodied agency in itself, guiding the transition from slavery to freedom. This was how

Truguet described the military victories of the revolutionaries in Saint-Domingue under generals such as

Villate and Toussaint L’Ouverture. The British had failed to take Saint-Domingue from French republican or

insurrectionist forces because ‘Liberty has neutralised and continues to neutralise once again all the efforts of

the British navy in the West Indies’.278 Drawing the revolution into comparison with its French counterpart,

Truguet outlines how ‘the French Revolution penetrated into the Colony of Saint-Domingue’ and ‘placed in

the heart of the oppressed the hope of obtaining a better fate’, to the extent that this ‘inevitable revolution’

was ‘desired even more irresistibly from the foundation of the colonies themselves’ than ‘in the heart of

France’. This reflected Truguet’s general argument that the extreme state of servitude in Saint-Domingue

made its struggle for liberty, and the progress resulting from that struggle, even more momentous and

274 Truguet, Mémoire Sur Saint-Domingue, Pièce III, p. 5: ‘à cette epouqe même, des mouvements de revolte se festoient aperçevoir, dans differents quartiers de La Colonie: des ateliers Entiers se debandoient; des rassemblements de noirs Esclaves, se festoient, sur les montagnes les plus Escarpies Et des Plus Eloignées des bords de mer  ; d’où il devenoit dificille de Les debusquer.’.275 See: Johnson, ‘Possible Pasts’, op cit., p. 491-492; Ira Berlin, ‘Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society on British North America’, The American Historical Review, Volume 85, Issue 1 (Feb., 1980), p. 44-47; Mark M. Smith, ‘Time, Slavery, and Plantation Capitalism in the Ante-Bellum American South’, Past & Present, Volume 150, Issue 1 (Feb., 1996), p. 142-168.276 Trouillot, ‘Motion in the System’, op cit., p. 383, but see also p. 349, p. 365-66, and p. 376. 277 See: Truguet, Mémoire Sur Saint-Dominge, Pièce III, p. 28-30. 278 Ibid., Pièce I, p. 3: ‘La Liberté à neutralisé et neutralise encore tous les efforts de la marine britannique aux indes Occidentales’.

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meaningful. For, as Truguet declared with his typical combination of bombastic optimism and revolutionary

idealism:

‘It is in these circumstances that the French Revolution penetrates into the Colony of Saint-Domingue…I shall not recount here the bloody scenes which have desolated, for five years, this colony. Here, like in France, all the ills have come from the obstinate resistance of tyranny over the efforts (of the revolutionaries) and over the progress of liberty. Indeed! How should this struggle not have also been more violent in a country where it has had to tend to erasing all distinction between masters and slaves?’279

Here ‘Liberty’ emerged like ‘Revolution’ as a signifier for a dynamic acceleration towards an unprecedented

future. It was imagined as a Kollektivsingular, an omnipresent force in history engaged in a violent struggle

whose ‘inevitable’ and ‘irresistible’ result is ‘the progress of liberty’.280

This destabilising of the foundations of centuries of colonial prejudice animated the republican administrator.

The disintegration of the past order opened up the future for the regeneration of the social contract in the

Antilles. Consequently, the future now had to be planned with urgency, collapsing the void between the

unstable present and the regime of liberty in a post-revolutionary utopian future. 281 This is why Truguet

expressed his proposal that the Directory nominate delegués to bring republican government to Saint-

Domingue in such insistent terms: ‘I consider this measure especially urgent, that it is the sole one which can

conserve for us our colonies.’282 This sense of urgency reflected the anxieties caused in the politics of the

Directory by the opponents of the legacy of the law of 16 Pluviôse who appeared to be re-gathering their

strength after the setbacks of 1792-94. The planter lobby at the Club Massiac, which had led the defensive

action which had resulted in the maintenance of the colour hierarchy in 1789-92, was reincarnated after the

279 Ibid., Pièce II, p. 4: ‘C’est dans ces circonstances que la révolution français pénétra dans la Colonie de St. Domingue. Elle port, dans le coeur des opprimés, l’espoir d’obtenir un meilleur sort et suspendu, un moment, l’effet de leur haine. Combien il eu été facile alors aux Colons eux mêmes tourner, au profit de tous, un révolution inevitable et plus irrésistiblement vouluë encore par le fond des choses, au milieu des colonies mêmes, qu’au sein de la France! Je ne retracerai point ici les scènes sanglantes qui ont désolé, depouis cinq ans, cette colonie. Là, comme en france, tout les maux sont venus de la résistance obstinée de la tyrannie, aux efforts et aux progrés de la liberté…combien cette lutte devoir encore être plus violente dans un Pays où elle devait tendre à effacer toute distinction entre des maîtres et des esclaves?’280 For the outline of the concept of the Kollektivsingular, or ‘collective singular’, see Koselleck, Futures Past, trans. Tribe, op cit., esp. at p. 33-34, p. 36, p. 50-53, p. 93, p. 195, p. 225-246, p. 271. 281 Hunt, ‘Revolutionary Time and Regeneration’, op cit. p. 73-74.282 Truguet, Mémoire Sur Saint-Domingue, Pièce III, p. 27: ‘Je considere cette mesure d’autant plus urgente, qu’elle est La Seule qui Puisse nous conserver cettes colonies.’

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coup of 9 Thermidor, Year II as the Club de Clichy. Represented by Viénot-Vaublanc, Barbé-Marbois,

Villaret de Joyeuse and Bourdon de l’Oise in Thermidorian Republic, the planter lobby nearly succeeded in

preventing the application of the Constitution of 1795 to the colonies.283 The spectre of reaction against

emancipation still

hovered menacingly above the unfolding politics of liberty in metropole and colony.284 Revolutionary

politics in Saint-Domingue and Paris interacted with one another to render the stakes of the politics of liberty

more acute, placing time pressure upon those who defended the legacy of 1794 to resolve the disorder and

crisis in Saint-Domingue.

Truguet’s future vision of liberty outlined a script for future policy which conscripted the revolutionaries in

Saint-Domingue into an idealised French republican future.285 However, this script was in danger of expiring

if the hinterlands of Saint-Domingue could not be quickly brought to a state of civil order by delegués such

as Raimond.286 The hommes de couleur had created a revolution, but ‘have been for too long a time without

laws, without constitution’ and therefore ‘have a thirst for justice and peace’. The ‘délégués of the Directory’

urgently needed to replace the ‘purely military government’ which was acting as the ‘destructor of all

industries’ by giving license to ‘brigandage and anarchy’.287 Since Polverel and Sonthonax had been forced

to answer charges brought against them in the metropole in 1794, Saint-Domingue had been governed by

competing groups of black and mulatto generals commanding the loyalty of contingents of former slaves,

such as Rigaud, Dieudonné, Villate, and Louverture.288 Truguet records their positions in the Mémoire, but he

could not have known about the confrontation between Villate and Louverture which was coming to a head

in January-March 1796 when Louverture successfully thwarted Villate’s attempt to imprison the republic’s

283 Røge, Political Economy and the Reinvention of France’s Colonial System, op cit., p. 166.284 Truguet, Mémoire Sur Saint-Domingue, Pièce II, p. 4 and Pièce III, p. 7. 285 Scott, Conscripts of Modernity, op cit., p. 19 and ch. 3, ‘Conscripts of Modernity’, at p. 98-131. 286 See: Truguet, Mémoire Sur Saint-Domingue, Pièce, at p. 11 and p. 14.287 Ibid., Pièce I, p. 9: ‘Les Colons sont depuis trop long tems sans loix, sans constitution pour qu’un pareil bienfait soit encore différé, ils ont soif de justice et de paix; il faut leur rendre l’un cet l’autre. Un gouvernement purement militaire et destructeur de toute industrie, il perpetuerait le brigandage et l’anarchie’. 288 Dubois, Avengers of the New World, op cit., p. 197-201.

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official governor, Étienne Laveaux.289 Further complicating this situation was the fluctuating geopolitics

caused by British occupation of areas of the Island from September 1793 and pockets of resistance in the

name of the Spanish crown.290 Truguet wrote that the ‘English’ presence on the ‘coasts of Saint-Domingue’

was ‘occupying all the friends of Liberty in combatting them’, sowing ‘disorder and division’. Therefore,

Truguet wrote, ‘it is pressing to send some frigates, relief in arms and munition’ which can ‘rally to

themselves all the friends of liberty who resist…the English.’291 Truguet was anxious to overcome political,

logistical, and temporal barriers to implementing administrative-military policies across the Atlantic.

Truguet temporalised the revolution in Saint-Domingue, constructing a historicity of liberty in which

languages, metaphors, and images of freedom and servitude offered a means of conceptually imagining and

ordering a time of unprecedented revolutionary change. The perceived collapse and effacement of traditional

orders based upon slavery and despotism in France and, more dramatically, in Saint-Domingue led Truguet

to envisage his present as an epoch in which the present was collapsing into an open-ended future saturated

with possibilities. Consequently, Truguet sought to script and plan ways of re-ordering this uncertain future

in the face of a profusion of challenges – military, administrative, political, and geopolitical – confronting the

republican administrator in the Atlantic World at a time of revolution. The desire to close the distanciations

separating free and unfree territories was combined with the compulsion to collapse the void between

revolutionary present and post-revolutionary future. Both impulses imbued time with an urgency expressed

in the call to implement administrative measures with speed to avoid missing fortuitous opportunities to

advance liberty in time and space. Through swift action in Thermidorian politics, Truguet hoped to advance

his vision of liberty in Saint-Domingue and thereby affect progress beyond the struggle against royalism and

aristocracy and into a republican order in the Antilles founded upon revolutionary fraternity.

289 Ibid., p. 200-201. 290 Ibid., p. 166-168. 291 Truguet, Mémoire Sur Saint-Domingue, Pièce II, p. 4-5 : ‘Je passe au véritable objet de ce rapport. Les Anglais ont abord les Côtes de St Domingue, il en occupent une partie; ils combattent pour y pénétrer: leur présence en occupant tous les amis de la Liberté pour les combattre, laisse aux ennemis de la République, le champ libre pour égarer le peuple, en tout les moyens de propager, au sein de L’Isle, le désordre et la division. En attendant, ansi que je l’ai dit plus haut, une expédition plus importante, il est pressant de faire passer, à St. Domingue, quelques frégattes, des secours en armes et munitions, et quelques bataillons aguerrir et disciplinér, qui puissent former un noyau d’armée au tour duquel pourront se rallier tout les amis de la Liberté qui résistent seuls en ce moment à l’Anglaterre.’ – my italics.

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Conclusion

In the concluding Resumé of his Mémoire, Truguet professed that ‘As for myself…I have no other desire

except to see all of the regions of the department with which I am charged prospering.’ 292 Truguet viewed the

revolutionaries in Saint-Domingue paternalistically, but he also embraced them fraternally as ‘friends’

caught within the wider struggle for liberty in the French Atlantic World. He wrote them into a continually

unfolding revolutionary story raging upon both sides of the Atlantic, reflecting that ‘in the colonies, as in

France…two parties’ had ‘for a long time battled amongst themselves. Here it was aristocracy, by various

means, and royalism against Liberty, Equality, and republicanism: in the colony, it was of white skin and

royalism against black skin and republican Equality.’293 In this conflict, the failure of revolutionary fraternity

would compromise the Constitution of 1795 and herald the eternal loss of the colonies. It was precisely

because this struggle exemplified the promise of the French Revolution that Truguet believed it to be the

testing ground upon which French liberty and republicanism would stand or fall. Truguet’s Mémoire thus

testifies to the profound extent to which the ‘temporalisation’ of the late eighteenth century seeped into

revolutionary republican administration.

Ultimately, the colonial vision of Truguet and his like-minded colleagues was not to be: already in 1797

there were signs that projects for emancipation and reform in the Antilles were flagging. In the summer of

that year, Truguet was replaced as minister by Georges-René Pléville-Lepelle, a firm advocate of restoring

the status quo in the colonies.294 After his coup of November 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte staffed the ministry

of the colonies with figures who had consistently defended slavery and planter interests in the early 1790s

292 Truguet, Mémoire Sur Saint-Domingue, Pièce III, p. 28: ‘Pour m’y qui ne Considère que Le devoir de La place que Vous m’avéz confié; qui n’a y d’autre desir, que de Voir Prosperer toutes Les Partis qui tiennent au department dont je suis chargé.’ 293 ibid. Piéce III, p. 28-29: ‘dans les colonies Comme En France deux Partis se sont long temps combattus. ici c’Etoit l’aristocratie...par chemins Et Le royalisme contre La Liberté L’Egalité Et le republicanisme: dans Les colonies c’Etoit l’aristocratie de La Peu blanche et Le royalisme; contre La Peu noir, Et L’Egalité republicain.’ 294 Røge, Political Economy and the Reinvention of France’s Colonial System, op cit., p. 166.

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such as François Barbé-Marbois, Pierre Malouet, and Moreau de Saint-Méry.295 In late 1799, Truguet wrote

several letters to the First Consul which denounced those attacking the legacy of 1793/4, but to no avail. 296

The Constitution of the Year VIII made the colonies separate territories to be governed by ‘special laws’. An

explanation provided by Bonaparte, Cambacérès, and Lebrun for this decision to the citizens of Saint-

Domingue declared that by ‘a new pact destined to affirm liberty’ the ‘French colonies will be ruled by

special laws’ which ‘derive from the nature of things and the difference of climates’, ‘mœurs’, and

‘cultures’.297 The decree of 30 Floréal Year X proclaimed slavery and the slave trade legally restored in

Saint-Domingue in accordance with the laws before 1789.298 As with many other experiments following in

the wake of 1789, the French republican project in the Antilles was brought to a close.

The nature of this dissertation has been suggestive; unfortunately, it is by no means conclusive. It has

examined the reception of the revolution in Saint-Domingue through Truguet’s Mémoire; it has not sought to

write the Haitians out of their own history. Quite the opposite, it draws attention to their tremendous

significance in forcing French republicans to respond to the epoch-changing events which they affected in

Saint-Domingue.299 I have sought neither to re-centre nor de-centre the experiences of the Haitian

revolutionaries, but to investigate how their struggle was received by French republicans seeking

revolutionary fraternity. Before the ‘silence’ after 1804, there existed in 1791-97 a moment in which

proponents of colonial reform could envisage a future Saint-Domingue which was both ‘free and French’.300

The failure of this project was symptomatic of the paradoxes and ‘constitutive ambiguities of enlightenment’

as well as the way in which attempts to conscript the revolutionaries in Saint-Domingue unravelled in the

295 Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, op cit., p. 351. 296 Ibid. 297 Aux citoyens de Saint-Domingue, 4 Nivôse an VIII (25 décembre 1799), cited in Pierre Branda and Thierry Lentz, Napoléon, l’esclavage, et les colonies (Paris: Fayard, 2006), p. 48-49: ‘Citoyens, une Constitution qui n’a pu se soutenir contre des violations multipliées est remplacée par un nouveau pacte destiné à affermir la liberté. L’article 91 porte que les colonies françaises seront régies par des lois spéciales. Cette disposition dérive de la nature des choses et de la différence des climats. Les habitans des colonies françaises situées en Amérique, en Asie, en Afrique ne peuvent être gouverné par la même loi. La différence des habitudes, des mœurs, des intérêts, la diversité du sol, des cultures, des productions exigent des modifications diverses…’298 Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, op cit., p. 365-373; Røge, Political Economy and the Reinvention of France’s Colonial System, op cit., p. 179-180.299 As Dubois argues in ‘“Citoyens et Amis!”’ op cit., at p. 302; Ghachem, The Antislavery Script, op cit. p. 15.300 Røge, the Reinvention of France’s Colonial System, op cit.

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face of its own contradictions.301 In this, as in so many of its hopes and expectations, Truguet’s Mémoire was

not exceptional. Yet this is the point: this is not a Treatise or Histoire Philosophique, but an administrative

memorandum which, in its own routine bureaucratic way, captures the spirit of an age when universal liberty

seemed possible and the future was rich with expectations.

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