155 Revolution and Free-Colored Equality in The

Revolution and Free-Colored Equality in the Îles du Vent (Lesser Antilles), 1789- 1794 William S. Cormack, University of Guelph The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, adopted by the deputies of the French National Assembly on 26 August 1789, proclaimed that, “Men are born free and equal in rights.”1 In practice, however, the Assembly did not apply the Declaration’s principles to France’s Caribbean colonies which continued black slavery and excluded the gens de couleur, a heterogeneous class of free blacks and mulattos, from the benefits of citizenship.2 Despite lobbying by wealthy gens de couleur, metropolitan legislators feared that recognizing free-colored equality would undermine slavery and thus jeopardize the system of commodity production and overseas commerce which was so important to the French economy. When the Legislative Assembly overcame this reluctance on 28 March 1792 and declared that free men of color must be treated as equal citizens, its deputies hoped that Saint-Domingue’s gens de couleur, many of whom owned slaves themselves, would assist colonial authorities there in suppressing the slave revolt which had begun the previous August.3 Despite the new law French colonists in the Caribbean, particularly the poor whites or petits Blancs, were even more reluctant than metropolitan deputies to consider free men of color their 1 “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 26 August 1789” in A Documentary Survey of the French Revolution, ed. John Hall Stewart (Toronto: Macmillan, 1951), 113- 15. 2 “Décret concernant la formation et la compétence des Assemblées Coloniales, 8 mars 1790” in Jules-François Saintoyant, La Colonisation française pendant la Révolution (1789- 1799) (Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 1930), I, 380-1. See also 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 (Standford: Standford University Press, 1994), 114-53. 3Armand Guy Kersaint, “Discussion of Troubles in the Colonies, 2 March 1792” in The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 1996), 112-15. See also “Décret accordant les droits politiques aux hommes de couleur et noirs libres et prévoyant des envois de secours à Saint- Domingue, 28 mars 1792” in Saintoyant, I, 407-9. 155 156 Cormack equals because this threatened the strict racial hierarchy on which colonial society was based. The French Revolution nonetheless represented an opportunity for free people of color not only in Saint-Domingue but also in the Îles du Vent, the smaller islands in the Eastern Caribbean, of which the most important French colonies were Martinique and Guadeloupe. Recent scholarship has emphasized the independent agency of both slaves and gens de couleur in the Îles du Vent, but there has been less consensus on the extent to which demands for equal rights overlapped with the struggle for freedom. If the demands of free people of color in these colonies before 1789 seemed negligible compared to those of Saint- Domingue, Léo Élisabeth argued that was only because of their smaller numbers: they were aware of the ideological debates in metropolitan France over slavery and recognized the connection to their own status. After Martinique and Guadeloupe learned of the revolution’s outbreak in France, gens de couleur supported the colonies’ planter “aristocrats” in their political struggle against the petit Blanc “patriots.” This alliance resulted from autonomy rather than passivity, according to Élisabeth, and free-colored support for slavery was not unconditional. The gens de couleur abandoned planter royalists at the end of 1792 when the new Republic offered a surer guarantee of equality. Free people of color made different political choices, however, and Élisabeth insisted that these were determined more by circumstances than by whether they owned slaves.4 Concentrating on Guadeloupe, Anne Pérotin-Dumon offered a similar analysis of free-colored action and political consciousness. The planter’s social conservatism and the declining access to cheap new land generated frustration among gens de couleur, but the revolution offered new opportunities to make claims on Guadeloupe’s constituted authorities. If some free coloreds supported planters against the patriots in hopes of integrating with whites, Pérotin-Dumon argued that others appealed to slaves to overthrow white domination.5 Laurent Dubois went even further and contended that the actions of black and colored insurgents in the French colonies transformed the abstract language of universal rights. While he agreed that Guadeloupe’s gens de couleur took advantage of conflict among whites to press for racial equality, he emphasized the significance of the slave revolt at Trois-Rivières in April 1793. Dubois argued that the rebels, who 4Léo Élisabeth, “Gens du couleur et révolution dans les Îles du Vent (1789-janvier 1793),” Revue Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer LXXVI, no. 282-283 (1989), 75-96, and “La République dans les Îles du Vent (décembre 1792-avril 1794),” Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française, Nos. 293-294 (1993): 373-408. 5Anne Pérotin-Dumon, “Free Coloreds and Slaves in Revolutionary Guadeloupe: Politics and Political Consciousness,” in The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion, eds. Robert L. Paquette & Stanley L. Engerman (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 259-79. Proceedings of the Western Society for French History Revolution and Free-Colored Equality 157 described themselves as “citizens” and claimed they had killed masters who had tried to arm them against the patriots, forcibly integrated themselves into the Republic. After this episode, free people of color favored a radical broadening of citizenship that foreshadowed the abolition of slavery in 1794.6 In contrast to this interpretation, Frédéric Régent argued that the revolution did not radically transform society in Guadeloupe. The colony’s gens de couleur were less militant than those of Saint-Domingue before 1789 not only because of limited numbers, but because of the strength of their client relations to white planters. In the context of complex and enduring racial hierarchy, Régent suggested that it was those who had been free before 1789 who became fully integrated into republican society. If some sided with white radicals in 1793, most colored republicans also wanted to maintain slavery.7 This disagreement on the extent of free-colored willingness to extend rights to black slaves indicates the ambiguity of the relationship between the French Revolution and the gens de couleur. In this context, local revolutionary politics in the Îles du Vent complicated white responses to the demand for free- colored equality after 1789. If white colonists resisted racial equality, at moments of crisis they saw free men of color as potential allies in their ruthless factional struggles to control the colonies. Martinique’s planter elite made common cause with gens de couleur against petit Blanc patriots in 1790, while refusing to accept their legal equality, and in 1792 sought their backing for a revolt against metropolitan authority. Representatives of the French Republic defeated this revolt in part by appealing to free men of color whose adherence became crucial to the new republican regimes in the Îles du Vent. Factional strife continued, however, and in 1793-94 Guadeloupe’s radicals undermined free-colored support for the new governor by challenging his commitment to racial equality. Examination of these crises suggests that while white colonists in Martinique and Guadeloupe qualified or even abandoned their opposition to free-colored equality in the heat of revolutionary conflict, their alliances with the gens de couleur were always intended to help control the servile labor force and maintain the slave system. The gens de couleur were an intermediate group within colonial society who stood between the mass of black slaves and the white minority. The designation included freed slaves as well as the offspring of black slaves and white masters, although in the Îles du Vent the term mulatre, or mulatto, was used interchangeably with gens de couleur. Racial ambiguity was further 6Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), esp. 23-29, 93-104, 124-54. 7Frédéric Régent, Esclavage, métissage, liberté: La Révolution française en Guadeloupe, 1789-1802 (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2004), esp. 11-20, 223-4, 238-47, 254-6. Volume 39 (2011) 158 Cormack complicated by different patterns of manumission.8 Beyond differences in origin, the free people of color were a socially and economically heterogenous group: some lived on the margins of colonial society as subsistence farmers or poor laborers, while others owned property and slaves. The free-colored population rose during the eighteenth century and by 1789 there were approximately 5,235 gens de couleur in Martinique and 3,149 in Guadeloupe, constituting five and three per cent respectively of the colonies’ total populations.9 While the free- colored percentage of Saint-Domingue’s population was much higher, colonial administration in the Îles du Vent nonetheless sought to control manumission in order to limit the numbers of gens de couleur. A broad range of racially restrictive legislation reflected not only concern about numbers, but also the expanding free-colored role in the colonial economy.10 At the same time, free men of color were the mainstay of the colonial militia which rounded up runaway slaves and protected the colonies against slave revolt.11 Yet white colonists expected gens de couleur to accept and to acknowledge their racial inferiority.12 On the eve of the French Revolution they were increasingly unwilling to do so. In 1789 Julien Raimond and Vincent Ogé came to Paris to demand equality for themselves and other colored planters from Saint- Domingue.

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