The Haitian Revolution

The overlooked uprising of Saint-Domingue during the revolutionary era

Feb 11, 2025

By producing sugar and coffee on an unprecedented scale, with its 800 plantations and more than half a million slaves at the end of the eighteenth-century, “French Saint Domingue was the envy of all Europe, the jewel of the Antilles, the Eden of the Western World.”1 Nestled in the Caribbean near Cuba and Jamaica, the small colony shared the island of Hispaniola with a Spanish possession. In the footsteps of its metropole, Saint-Domingue underwent its own revolution by the end of the century. A successful slave revolt that all but confirmed the political turmoil, characteristic of the era, was not exclusive to America and France. In the wealthiest French colony—which eventually renamed itself Haiti following its 1804 independence—the 1780s brought waves of revolutionary ideas of liberty that spread across the Atlantic as seamlessly as merchandise ships. Aside from the world of political philosophy, the American War for Independence since 1776 brought its share of unintended consequences that further degraded the already difficult physical conditions of local populations. With the increases in food prices, starvation periods became more prevalent in the West Indies. In retrospect, it became a contributing factor of the unrest to come.

Contrary to popular belief, major slave uprisings are not an inevitability in history. In Saint-Domingue, the ethnic makeup and racial relationships on the island had a similarly complicated history which did not guarantee such an outcome. Even freedom itself was somewhat difficult to define, with slaves moving in and out of plantations, into semi-autonomous mountainous regions, or working as artisans in port cities.2 Blacks gradually freed themselves from indentured work, and their numbers increased more than a hundredfold between 1681 and 1789, from around 200 to more than 30,000.3 Under the French rules of the Code Noir, in effect since the 1680s, it guarded against the excesses of masters and demanded that freed slaves respect their former masters. And with the revised 1770s legislation, the Code extended its rules to all whites. In a society composed of whites, blacks, and mulattoes, the access to property was not limited to whites only. But elite white colonists persistently insisted that an intermediate racial class was necessary to highlight the social gap with the slaves. In short, racial relations were not a simple affair.

From a geopolitical standpoint, Saint-Domingue did not consider itself a colony, but rather a French province. Thus, the landowning elite expected to be represented during the French Estates General of 1789. “They considered themselves to be the true “inhabitants, the only ones apt to direct colonial politics,” blaming the absentee planters for all of Saint Domingue’s maladies: marronage, social instability, the absence of a public spirit, and weak resistance to the mother country’s alleged selfishness.”4 Tensions grew as the colony wanted France to lift all restrictions on imports and exports for Saint-Domingue. From 1788, the Society of the Friends of the Blacks lobbied the authorities in France to reduce the excesses of slavery and even extend newly acquired rights to non-whites. This position, however, was not shared by most members of the Assembly, who persisted in suggesting that any change in the slave trade, or slavery itself, would disrupt the economy of the colonies and its positive impact on France. In addition, just before the revolutionary era, “slaves formed the main form of investment in Saint-Domingue,”5 as they represented three times the value of the infrastructure in the colony.

During this critical period, a latent fear was prevalent in France that news of the Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man would travel too easily to the colonies and influence the minds of slaves. As stories and rumors of revolution and emancipation proclamations from France streamed into the Western colonies, slaves slowly organized and requested rights of their own. Slaves were deprived of basic goods, “but regularly nourished by word of insurrections for freedom around the Atlantic, proved potent.”6 On stories from across the Atlantic, Janet L. Polasky provides a compelling image when she writes that “rumors of liberty granted abroad coursed through markets, dances, and horseraces.”7 And by 1790, unrest became not only frequent in Saint-Domingue but also in Guadeloupe and Martinique as well. “The rumor was as powerful in Saint-Domingue as the Great Fear had been in motivating peasants in France.”8 Even if Louis XVI took measures to shut down the press in Saint-Domingue to prevent the dissemination of revolutionary ideas in the colony, word of mouth from sailors and merchants proved to be very effective.

In the spring of 1790, the decree from the National Assembly providing additional autonomy to the colony finally arrived in Saint-Domingue. Free blacks demanded to be integrated into the electing process, equivalent to whites. The long distance from the debating center meant that nuances regarding slaves' emancipation were commonly misinterpreted in the colony once the news arrived. For example, the distinctions between free people of color born from free parents and other blacks, encountered challenges in Paris, due to a lack of detail in the colony. These regular communication difficulties “were exacerbated by the lack of reliable news and cross-cutting allegiances of empire, race, and class.”9

Eventually, on “August 22, 1791, the largest slave uprising in the history of the New World”10 was launched in the northern part of Saint-Domingue. Over a thousand Frenchmen were killed, hundreds of plantations were burned, and the news rapidly reached France. Then, in early 1792, pressed by the revolt abroad, a new law emerged from the National Convention giving free men of color civil rights. It was also decided to send commissioners to Saint-Domingue with significant powers to execute the new decrees in the colony. The two commissioners, Léger-Félicité Sonthonax and Étienne Polverel, both lawyers by profession and Jacobin sympathizers, despised slavery. What transpired on the island after their arrival could be best described as a battle between royalists and abolitionists. The former group, mostly composed of plantation owners and whites, were wary of freeing so rapidly a significant portion of the population that could react with vengeance to decades of oppression. The latter group, intellectual revolutionaries of the Jacobin clubs, convinced of the moral superiority of their cause, rushed to offer slaves freedom, regardless of the short-term upheaval it generated.

In June 1793, the two commissioners, with the support of black troops, successfully pushed back the attempt of the newly appointed Governor François-Thomas Galbaud to reclaim control of the colony. A year later, in July 1794, Louis Dufay, a Parisian Jacobin who defended the abolition of slavery ever since 1789, pronounced a speech in favor of emancipation, stating that male slaves who fought France had merited their freedom. The French Constitution of 1795 even went as far as making colonies territories of France with the same constitutional protections. With this unstable situation in Saint-Domingue, three imperial powers in the region got entangled in a fight to obtain the loyalty of former slaves and free mulattoes on the island. Spain, Britain and France all tried to reclaim some authority over this territory—Britain from their Jamaican base, and Spain from the eastern part of the island. As for neighboring Cuban planters, “though nervous about the news of slave rebellion, (...) readily grasped its immediate consequence: a market with higher prices for sugar, temporarily absent its main supplier. And with that boon in mind, they prepared to act.”11

Toussaint Louverture, born a slave, after leaving his Spanish sponsors and joining the French republican ranks by April 1794, was ultimately responsible for a significant military force that ousted the British by 1798. With the moral and material support from France, Louverture obtained several promotions over the years and built up a multiracial army. “Louverture had read the passage written by the philosopher Denis Diderot in the Abbé Raynal’s History of Two Worlds that predicted a black Spartacus would rise to avenge the enslavement of Africans in the Caribbean.”12 In July 1801, based on French revolutionary constitutionalism, a local constitution was established abolishing slavery, permitting the freedom of commerce, and made Saint-Domingue a society based on equality.13

But under Napoleon Bonaparte's new regime in France, slavery was to be restored in the colonies, and troops were sent to Saint-Domingue to re-establish the old plantation model. In 1802-1803, under the command of General Charles-Victor-Emmanuel Leclerc, tens of thousands of blacks and mixed-race individuals were killed in horrific fashion by Napoleon's soldiers; however, in the end, the resistance prevailed and inflicted over fifty thousand losses on Leclerc's forces. Once independence was proclaimed on New Year's Day 1804, the name Haiti was given to the new state, in remembrance of precolonial times.

Violence continued however, with a sense of revenge, when Jean-Jacques Dessalines demanded that every Frenchman be killed to prevent any chance of return of the old colonial ways. “Let us frighten all those would dare to steal our freedom; let us start with the French!” Dessalines said.14 By September of that same year, Jean-Jacques had proclaimed himself Emperor of Haiti, almost to spite the new leader Napoleon in France. Regardless, ruling over this newly independent state turned out to be quite tricky, if the plantation economy was to be continued. Citizens were separated between military and urban craftsmen, with the remaining population being pushed towards the plantations.

In conclusion, “the Haitian Revolution is the only successful large-scale and generalized slave revolt known in history.”15 and demonstrated to other slave economies of the Western hemisphere their vulnerabilities moving forward. The revolt in Saint-Domingue accelerated debates over emancipation in revolutionary France and beyond around the Atlantic basin. Though great powers in Europe and the emerging United States changed their outlook on the future of slavery during the Haitian Revolution, neighboring Cuba quickly transformed its own economy into more slave-intensive plantations and took advantage of the declining sugar industry in Haiti.16 As summarized by Robin Blackburn, “the survival of Haiti had implications for the future of slavery in the Americas and tested and tempered the outlook of the abolition movement.”17

The Haitian Revolution

The overlooked uprising of Saint-Domingue during the revolutionary era

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