A colony of citizens: revolution and slave emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804

Abstract

In A Colony of Citizens, Laurent Dubois has given us a fascinating account of the revolution in Guadeloupe.The history of the abortive abolition of slavery in Guadeloupe has attracted some attention in French scholarly circles, thanks to the recently passed 2002 bicentennial of the re-imposition of slavery there.[1]To the extent that students of Latin America in the English-speaking world have noticed the revolutions in the French West Indies at all, the tendency has been to pay attention to the striking example of Saint-Domingue and assume that conditions in other colonies paralleled those found in the "pearl of the Antilles."Laurent Dubois's work provides needed contrast to our easy over-generalization.For Guadeloupe was not Saint-Domingue.First, of course, the outcome was different --Saint-Domingue's slaves became Haiti's citizens, peasant farmers, and sometime laborers in the first black republic.Meanwhile, Guadeloupe's slaves, after a brief, shining moment as "new citizens" of France, went back to slavery until 1848.Saint-Domingue's white rulers were slaughtered or driven out of the colony, to spend their declining years playing up their victimization at the hands of barbarous slave rebels and pressuring the French government for reimbursement for their lost "property."Guadeloupe's white ruling class forced the slaves back into their chains, returned to plantation farming, and to prosperity, for a while.And Saint-Domingue's intermediate class of free people of color, after vacillating between pressing for equal treatment within the plantation system and support for the black revolutionaries, generally took their place at the head of the rebel armies and entered the era of independence as a new ruling class.Guadeloupean free coloreds participated in the struggles for equal rights, first for their own class, then for all people of African descent.Ultimately, though, they were defeated and ended up being oppressed even more brutally than before the revolution.

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