Upon the outbreak of the French Revolution, Saint-Domingue almost immediately experienced a sharp uptick in servile unrest.
DLIVE PAINT THE TOWN RED FREE
the colony was never free from poisonings and disturbances.” In 1785, one royal officer wrote that “we are walking on barrels of powder,” echoing the words of a royal governor one century prior: “We have in the negroes most dangerous enemies.” Soon, “sparks from the edicts of Revolutionary France were soon to fall upon those powder-barrels.” His “army” planned to poison the water supply and exterminate the whites while they were “in convulsions.” The conspiracy was discovered in the nick of time and its leader was executed, “yet even in death he left behind a legacy of unrest.
The most disturbing of such occurred around 1750, when Makandal, claiming to be “the Black Messiah,” amassed a formidable following. In the background of San Domingan life, there lowered a dark shadow, of which men thought much even when they spoke little.” Since 1679, there had been numerous insurrectionary conspiracies of varying levels of success. For, if the slave feared the master, the master also feared the slave. The whites certainly entertained no illusions about the native ferocity of their blacks, however, for “the base of slave societies is fear. Many of these men had served in the French armed forces or been educated in France, and all of them had thirstily imbibed the egalitarian liqueur issuing from Paris.īy the time that the insurrection erupted in 1791, a free population of fewer than fifty thousand whites exercised a tenuous dominion over half a million blacks at the time, of course, most of the planters of Saint-Domingue had only a dim perception that they sat atop such a roiling volcano. The leaders of the insurrection were the colored bourgeoisie, the privileged intermediate class between the planters and the enslaved. Just as with the ongoing color revolution in the United States, those responsible came not from the masses, but from above. In the following discussion, we would do well to remember that the blacks of Saint-Domingue did not initiate their insurrection in a vacuum in fact, the “Haitian Revolution” is best understood as an extension of the French Revolution, and was part and parcel thereof.
The planters of the antebellum American South carefully observed and understood its significance, and the death of white Saint-Domingue loomed large over their efforts to keep their blacks in check, just as it must inform our efforts to do the very same. The terrible birth of Haiti as a mangled, stillborn phoenix from a river of white blood stands as our greatest example of the infernal designs that our dispossessors hold for us: of white genocide in action. The monumental significance of the fall of Saint-Domingue, the crown jewel of the French colonial empire, and its ensuant descent into the African savagery of Haiti cannot be overstated. Pierre-Jean Boquet, The Burning of Cap Français, 1791.
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