Th e French Revolution in Global Perspective The French Revolution in Global Perspective Edited by SUZANNE DESAN, LYNN HUNT, and WILLIAM MAX NELSON CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca & London An abridged version of chapter 11, “Every Revolution Is a War of Independence,” by Pierre Serna, trans. Alexis Pernsteiner, was published as “Toute révolution est guerre d’indépendance,” in Jean-Luc Chappey et al., Pour quoi faire la revolution? (Marseille: Editiones Agone, 2012), 19–49. Copyright © 2013 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2013 by Cornell University Press First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2013 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Th e French Revolution in global perspective / edited by Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt, and William Max Nelson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-5096-9 (cloth: alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8014-7868-0 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. France—History—Revolution, 1789–1799—Congresses. 2. France—Foreign relations—1789–1815—Congresses. 3. Globalization—Political aspects—France—History— 18th century—Congresses. I. Desan, Suzanne, 1957– II. Hunt, Lynn, 1945– III. Nelson, William Max, 1976– DC157.F74 2013 944.04—dc23 2012033632 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fi bers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Paperback printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt, and William Max Nelson Part I. Origins 1 Th e Global Underground: Smuggling, Rebellion, and the Origins of the French Revolution 15 Michael Kwass 2 Th e Global Financial Origins of 1789 32 Lynn Hunt 3 Th e Fall from Eden: Th e Free-Trade Origins of the French Revolution 44 Charles Walton 4 1685 and the French Revolution 57 Andrew Jainchill Part II. “Internal” Dynamics 5 Colonizing France: Revolutionary Regeneration and the First French Empire 73 William Max Nelson v vi Contents 6 Foreigners, Cosmopolitanism, and French Revolutionary Universalism 86 Suzanne Desan 7 Feminism and Abolitionism: Transatlantic Trajectories 101 Denise Z. Davidson Part III. Consequences 8 Egypt in the French Revolution 115 Ian Coller 9 Abolition and Reenslavement in the Caribbean: Th e Revolution in French Guiana 132 Miranda Spieler 10 Th e French Revolutionary Wars and the Making of American Empire, 1783–1796 148 Rafe Blaufarb Part IV. Coda 11 Every Revolution Is a War of Independence 165 Pierre Serna, translated by Alexis Pernsteiner Notes 183 List of Contributors 225 Index 229 Acknowledgments Most of the chapters in this volume were fi rst presented as conference papers at the 2011 meeting of the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era in Tallahassee, Florida. We would like to thank Rafe Blaufarb and the organizers of the meeting for accepting our panel proposal and providing us an ideal venue to discuss and develop the project. We would also like to thank John Ackerman and Cornell University Press for being so supportive of this project from the beginning and helping us turn the conference papers into an edited volume. We had the good fortune of receiving exceptionally good feedback, criticism, and advice from the Press’s anonymous readers. William Nelson would like to thank the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin where he was a fellow during the development of this volume. Th e French Revolution in Global Perspective Introduction Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt, and William Max Nelson Th e French Revolution had an undeniable global impact. As the early nineteenth-century German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel wrote, it was “World-Historical,” meaning that it changed the history of the entire world.1 Th e French Revolution galvanized and divided populations across Europe and the Americas, transformed the map of Europe through the creation of “sister republics,” and led to slave revolution in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) and the fi rst abolition of slavery in 1793–94. Its continuing wars upset the status quo in Egypt and other parts of Africa, India, and ultimately even places as distant as Java. Yet, despite the recent interest in global or transnational history, the Revolution in France itself has been analyzed in largely national terms. It might have reshaped the world outside France, but its own causes and processes have been explained by reference to French factors. Th is volume aims to show how global factors shaped the French Revolution in France and helped make it “world-historical.” We begin, then, with a paradox. From 1789 onward, participants, observers, and commentators alike considered the French Revolution a global event, yet they almost never sought global causes for it. In 1790, for example, the Anglo- Irish politician and writer Edmund Burke claimed: “All circumstances taken together, the French Revolution is the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world.” 2 Th e most infl uential interpreters of the French Revolution in the nineteenth century, Karl Marx and Alexis de Tocqueville, likewise recognized the global signifi cance of the French Revolution. For Marx, the Revolution of 1789 marked a decisive shift in the class struggles that shaped every society: the capitalist bourgeoisie overthrew the aristocracy and with it feudal society, inaugurating the confl icts between manufacturers and workers that would characterize modern society.3 Tocqueville considered the French 1 2 Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt, and William Max Nelson Revolution a pivotal moment in the modern destruction of aristocracy and its replacement with unstable and potentially despotic forms of democracy. 4 Yet all of its interpreters sought the causes of the French Revolution itself in developments within France. Th is was particularly surprising of Tocqueville, since he was deeply involved in the colonial politics of his day and believed that “the physiognomy of governments can be best detected in their colonies.” In Th e Old Régime and the French Revolution , he claimed that “the administrative centralization of the old régime can be best judged in Canada,” and while his interpretation of the French Revolution revolved around the issue of administrative centralization, he relegated this observation to a note at the end of the book. 5 More recently, historians have focused in new ways on the international dimensions of the French Revolution. Many scholars have asked how the French Revolution had an impact abroad and how various peoples—in the Caribbean, in the Americas, in Europe—interacted with the French Revolution to forge their own revolutionary traditions.6 For example, rebel slaves in the Caribbean fused revolutionary ideology with West African military expertise and Caribbean cultural practices to demand emancipation. Already in 1789, local offi cials in Martinique received an anonymous threat signed “we the Negroes [nous, Nègres]” that declared: “We know that we are free and that you accept that rebellious people resist the orders of the King. We will die for this liberty; we want it and we mean to gain it at whatever price.”7 Analysis of the diff usion, appropriation, and transformation of French revolutionary culture has contributed powerfully to our understanding of the revolutionary era, but it has only just begun to provoke questions about the impact of these international movements in France. Two diff erent models have been used in recent years to connect the French Revolution to broader developments: the Atlantic world and the global imperial crisis of the eighteenth century. Historians who emphasize shared developments in the Atlantic world have drawn attention to the circulation of ideas, goods, and people around the Atlantic Ocean. It is no exaggeration to say that scholarship on the French colonies, especially Saint-Domingue, the richest slave colony in the Caribbean, has reframed the fi eld of French revolutionary studies. 8 Th e Caribbean colonies provided an important source of revenue for France, exports from them (sugar, coff ee, cotton, indigo, tobacco) stimulated new consumer demands in France, and the great slave revolt of 1791 in Saint-Domingue not only led to the abolition of slavery and the eventual establishment of the fi rst state founded by former slaves (Haiti) but also transformed France’s foreign policy and imperial designs. Th e slave trade, the slave economy, and slave rebellions during the French Revolution had hardly fi gured in accounts of the French Revolution in the past. Now they cannot be Introduction 3 ignored. France’s economy, social structure, culture, and politics were shaped by its participation in the wider Atlantic world. Th e emphasis on the colonies, slavery, and circulation within the Atlantic world expanded in transformative ways on the notion of “Atlantic Revolutions,” which was fi rst developed in the 1950s by R. R. Palmer and Jacques Godechot. Palmer and Godechot argued that the French Revolution should be seen as part of a broader Atlantic movement that included the American Revolution, British radicalism, and the Dutch, Belgian, Swiss, and even Polish revolts as well as the French Revolution. 9 Many historians in France rejected this “Atlantic thesis”; some denounced what they saw as an eff ort to use history in an ideological way to prop up the Atlantic Alliance of the Cold War (a charge Palmer and Godechot vehemently denied), while others disliked the very idea that other, lesser revolts could be compared to the French Revolution.