152 Book Reviews

One Frenchman, Four Revolutions: General Ferrand and the Peoples of the . Fernando Picó. Princeton NJ: Markus Wiener, 2011. viii + 160 pp. (Paper US$ 24.95)

From 1804 to 1808, the French General Louis Ferrand presided over a slave- holding regime in (modern ) that bor- dered the new emancipationist nation of . In One Frenchman, Four Revolutions, Fernando Picó uses Ferrand’s career and governance in Santo Domingo as a lens through which to better understand a dynamic late eigh- teenth- and early nineteenth-century Caribbean and Atlantic world of slave revolution, political upheaval, and re-enslavement. This pioneering work provides an important overview of a remarkably understudied episode in Caribbean history and also proposes several promising avenues for future research. It is written in an engaging style and draws upon a rich source base to offer important new insights. In the opening chapter, Picó offers a concise and useful analysis of the importance of the Caribbean in eighteenth-century Atlantic geopolitics. The next chapter details the advent and course of the great slave revolution in Saint-Domingue during 1789-1804. In this informative account, Picó per- suasively summarizes one of the most complex episodes in world history in a manner that will appeal to both specialists and students. The account nonetheless contains a few minor flaws, such as Picó’s assertion that the French Civil Commissioners and architects of general emancipation in French Saint-Domingue, Léger-Félicité Sonthonax and Étienne Polverel, were sent by Paris to the island after the commencement of the Franco- Spanish-British war of 1793-95, when in fact they arrived on the island several months earlier—a crucial distinction given the importance of the relationship between the military situation on the island and the evolu- tion of the Commissioners’ public stance on . Moreover, he claims that Sonthonax’s watershed 29 August 1793 general emancipation decree stipulated “the emancipation of all slaves in Saint-Domingue” when in fact it only applied to slaves in the Northern Province (p. 25). Chapter 3 provides a brief biography of Ferrand, highlighting his par- ticipation in the North American and French Revolutions and in the disas- trous expedition of re-conquest that deployed to in late 1801 and early 1802. In his discussion of Ferrand’s flight from Saint- Domingue/Haiti in 1803 and his establishment as the leader of a fledgling

© 2013 Graham Nessler DOI: 10.1163/22134360-12340016 This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

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French regime in Santo Domingo, Picó seeks to explain one key reason for Ferrand’s hatred of Haiti that would drive many of his policies. The Ferrand regime indeed continually engaged in conflicts with the nation on its western border, and Picó’s discussion of Ferrand’s 1805 battles against the forces of Jean-Jacques Dessalines is especially convincingly argued and well documented. In this chapter, Picó skillfully explains the mili- tary policies of the Ferrand regime within the contexts of the collapse of French rule and slavery in Haiti and the shifting geopolitics of the broader Caribbean and Atlantic. He does an admirable job of conveying that the Ferrand regime cannot be properly understood without reference to these contexts. Chapter 4 presents an overview of the institutions, economy, and demog- raphy of Santo Domingo under Ferrand. Though this chapter achieves an impressive balance of breadth and attention to detail, it could have been even stronger had it explained some matters more fully. For instance, Picó asserts that a “strong proportion of slaves” emigrated from Santo Domingo after 1795 without offering a breakdown by provenance within the colony or (intended) destination (pp. 49-50). The racial terms used in the Ferrand government’s 1808 census also require more analysis than is given here (pp. 62-63). Nonetheless, Picó’s discussions of the establishment of a legal system that incorporated both French and Spanish elements and the sale of “slaves” from vessels that were captured or shipwrecked off Dominican coasts point to two important topics for future research; my own article in this journal (Nessler 2012) engages with the latter topic. Chapters 5 and 6, which detail the fall of the Ferrand regime in 1808-9, constitute the book’s strongest section. Picó situates the expulsion of the French from Santo Domingo within the broader contexts of the Peninsu- lar War, the Franco-British rivalry, and Haiti’s internal conflict. The quoted excerpts usefully convey a sense of different parties’ perspectives on the conflict, while the transimperial analysis complements the scholarship of Ada Ferrer, Matt Childs, David Geggus, and others who have closely examined the effects of the on colonialism and slavery elsewhere in the hemisphere, including in the Spanish American indepen- dence wars. These chapters should inspire research that further examines the interrelationships between the French and Spanish imperial crises of the Haitian revolutionary era and the significance of the Ferrand episode for independence movements elsewhere in .

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This informative volume could be usefully assigned to undergraduates in a Caribbean or Latin American history course, and as a reference it deserves a spot on the bookshelves of historians of the Caribbean. Its bibliography is fairly extensive, though it is missing some important newer scholarship on Saint-Domingue/Haiti and the Haitian Revolution by Laurent Dubois, John Garrigus, and other authors. Furthermore, its organization by coun- try can hinder the reader’s ability to quickly find a specific reference or to easily ascertain the presence of a specific author. Overall, the book repre- sents a valuable contribution to the literature on Dominican, Haitian, and Caribbean history and should serve to foment further scholarship on a vital chapter in these histories.

Graham Nessler Department of History, Texas A & M University-Commerce Commerce TX 75429, U.S.A. [email protected]

Reference

Nessler, Graham, 2012. “The Shame of the Nation”: The Force of Re-enslavement and the Law of “Slavery” under the Regime of Jean-Louis Ferrand in Santo Domingo, 1804-1809. New West Indian Guide 86(1&2):5-28.

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