The "trap" of representation: sovereignty, slavery and the road to the Haitian Revolution

Historical Reflections

Volumn 29, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 123-144

  Ghachem, Malick W ^a,b  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b HARVARD LAW SCHOOL   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60949697928     PISSN: 03157997     EISSN: 19392419     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (52)

1. Cited in Gabriel Debien, Un Colon sur sa plantation (Dakar, 1959), p. 130
2. For the argument that the Haitian Revolution was driven essentially by local slave resistance, and by the practice of marronage specifically, see Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint-Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville, 1990), pp. 1-10
3. See also Michel Rolph-Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, 1995), who is less concerned than Fick's book with untangling chains of causation
4. For the idea of "revolutionary monism" see Pierre Rosanvallon, La Démocratie inachevée: histoire de la souveraineté du people en France (Paris, 2000), pp. 65, 70. In a discussion of the Terror, Rosanvallon writes that "the difficulty of thinking about sovereignty in a complex and plural manner is also rooted in what seems an insurmountable revolutionary monism" (65)
5. In the spirit of Tocqueville's Old Regime and the French Revolution, this pamphlet argues that the Haitian Revolution was the "natural consequence of the perfect analogy" between colonies and metropole that its author sets out to describe. See also Raymond F. Betts, Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory, 1890-1914 (New York, 1961), pp. 10-32
6. and D. K. Fieldhouse, The Colonial Empires: A Comparative Survey from the Eighteenth Century (London 1966), pp. 46-48
7. For a discussion of the British West Indian variation on this theme, see Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, 2000), pp. xi, xvi, 34-57
8. Malick W. Ghachem, "Montesquieu in the Caribbean: The Colonial Enlightenment between Code Noir and Code Civil" in Postmodernism and the Enlightenment: New Perspectives on Eighteenth-Century French Intellectual History, ed. Daniel Gordon (New York, 2001), pp. 7-30
9. Jacques-Antoine Creuze-Latouche, Journal des États généraux et du début de l'Assemblée nationale (18 mai-29 juillet 1789) (Paris, 1946), pp. 75, 63-64
10. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca, NY, 1975), p. 109
11. "Adresse des députés de la colonie de St. Domingue par laquelle ils demandent d'être admis aux états géné raux, 8 juin 1789," in Beatrice Hyslop, ed., A Guide to the General Cahiers of 1789, with the Text of Unedited Cahiers (New York, 1936), p. 418
12. For a more extensive discussion of this question, see Jean Tarrade, "Les colonies et les principes de 1789: les Assemblées révolutionnaires face au problème de l'esclavage" in La Révolution française et les colonies, ed. Jean Tarrade (Paris, 1989), pp. 10-12
13. "Adresse des députés de la colonie de St. Domingue," p. 419
14. Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848 (London, 1988), p. 172
15. Aux colons de Saint-Domingue (N.p., 1789), pp. 16, 14, 15-16, 17, 19, 20
16. That relatively few cahiers de doléances contained abolitionist proposals was not, apparently, a source of reassurance: Tarrade, "Les colonies et les principes de 1789," p. 18
17. Lettre des députés de Saint-Domingue, à messieurs les rédacteurs du Journal de Paris (N.p., [1789]), pp. 5, 7-8
18. Saint-Domingue was divided into these three provinces for administrative purposes under the Old Regime
19. Debien, Un Colon sur sa plantation, p. 130
20. The "desperation" is noted by Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, p. 109
21. For the objections of some members of the Third, see Creuze-Latouche, Journal des Etats généraux, p. 75 at note 2
22. Journal des débats et des décrets, ou récit de ce qui s'est passé aux séances de l'Assemblée Nationale depuis le 17 juin 1789, jusqu'au premier Septembre de la même année (Paris, 1791), p. 67
23. Journal des débats, pp. 93-94
24. The Club was named after its meeting place, the Hôtel Massiac, where the marquis de Massiac resided. He was an absentee owner of plantations in all three parts of Saint-Domingue
25. Tarrade, "Les colonies et les principes de 1789," p. 17
26. Gabriel Debien, Les Colons de Saint-Domingue et la Révolution: Essai sur le Club Massiac (août 1789 - août 1792) (Paris, 1953), pp. 74-81
27. "Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen" in Lynn Hunt, ed. and trans., The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History (Boston, 1996), p. 78. It should be noted that Article 1 also provided that "social distinctions may be based only on common utility."
28. Keith M. Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, UK, 264)
29. See also the parallel discussion of the American case in Jack N. Rakove, Declaring Rights: A Brief History with Documents (Boston, 1998), pp. 113-117, 143-145
30. The distinction between internal and external legislation produced by this campaign drew directly from the rhetoric of local custom so central to colonial legal thought since the end of the Seven Years' War. Here too, questions of sovereignty and assimilation interacted with specific developments in the debate over slavery to produce an understanding that Saint-Domingue, while retaining the characteristics of a province, would remain exempt from some of the most radical aspects of France's emerging constitutional culture. On this distinction, and for a comparison of its French colonial and British North American versions, see Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France, c. 1500 - c. 1800 (New Haven, CT, 1995), pp. 143-146
31. For the British North American variation and its permutations during the American Revolution, see Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enl. ed. (Cambridge, MA, 1992), pp. 209-29
32. Hunt, ed. The French Revolution and Human Rights, p. 109
33. Speech of Antoine Barnave to the National Assembly, 8 March 1790 in M. E. Laurent and M. J. Davidal, eds., Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860 (Paris, 1881) [hereafter Archives parlementaires], 12:71-72
34. I cite here the accurate but partial translation of this speech in Hunt, The French Revolution and Human Rights, pp. 109, 111
35. Archives parlementaires
36. Archives parlementaires, 12:72-73
37. See Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, pp. 179-180
38. Archives parlementaires, 12:73
39. The majority of deputies to the National Assembly drew their reasoning from Montesquieu's understanding of the relationship between law and climate when it came to pronouncing on the status of slaves and gens de couleur in the colonies. Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, Les Citoyennetés en Révolution (1789-1794) (Paris, 1992), pp. 198-201
40. Monique Pouliquen, ed., Doléances des peuples coloniaux à l'Assemblée nationale constituante, 1789-1790 (Paris, 1989), pp. 29, 30
41. Décret de l'Assemblée Générale de la partie Françoise de Saint-Domingue, rendu à l'unanimité, en sa séance du 28 Mai 1790 (N.p., 1790)
42. Développement du Décret, pp. 2, 3
43. Pouliquen, Doléances des peuples coloniaux, pp. 40, 41. Emphasis added
44. The petitioners themselves were not necessarily slaveholders. Indeed, many of the Parisian gens de couleur were former servants brought by white colonists to France and who then remained in violation of a 1777 royal declaration. Others may have been the offspring of white colonists, sent by their parents to study, work or live in the metropole. See Sue Peabody, "There Are No Slaves in France": The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Regime (Oxford, 1996), pp. 75-85
45. David Geggus, "Racial Equality, Slavery, and Colonial Succession during (he Constituent Assembly," American Historical Review 94 (1989): 1296, 1298 at note 51, 1303, 1307
46. Debien, Les Colons de Saint-Domingue et la Révolution, pp. 160-161
47. See also Fick, The Making of Haiti, pp. 82-84, 130-131
48. nd ed. rev. (New York, 1963), pp. 75-76
49. Grandmaison, Les Citoyennetés en Révolution, pp. 226-229
50. Shanti Marie Singham, "Betwixt Cattle and Men: Jews, Blacks, and Women, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man" in The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789, ed. Dale Van Kley (Stanford, 1994), p. 134
51. and Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, p. 143. May 15, 1791 also witnessed the Assembly's adoption by acclamation of a decree explicitly prohibiting metropolitan interference with the slave regime, adecree that had prompted Robespierre's famous "Perish the colonies!" intervention of May 14
52. J.J. Demun, Observations sur les colonies françaises, dans leurs rapports actuels avec la France (Paris], 1792), pp. 12, 16-17. The pamphlet is dated 21 November 1792