Haitian Revolution (1789–1804)

by

David Geggus

• LAST MODIFIED: 20 August 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791279-0256

Introduction

The revolution of 1789–1803 in the French colony of Saint-Domingue exhibited two contrasting types of armed conflict. Uprisings in 1791 by the enslaved and free colored sectors of colonial society gave rise to a long spate of irregular warfare often fought in mountainous and forested terrain. Unprecedented in their scale and outcome, these insurrections led in the period 1791–1793 to the abolition of slavery and of legalized racial inequality, and thereafter evolved into struggles for local autonomy and, in 1803, national independence. At the same time, Saint-Domingue was drawn into the French Revolutionary War and became a participant (and the major prize) in the last of the colonial wars of the Old Regime, in which the armies and navies of European powers had long fought one another for American territory. Both the revolutionary, internal conflict and the traditional, imperial conflict profoundly affected each other’s development, and they came to overlap a good deal in fighting styles and personnel. The revolution in Saint-Domingue is most easily understood as the pursuit of three political goals (freedom, equality, independence) by three social groups (the enslaved, free people of color, white colonists). It began as a struggle for self-government within the white community (1789–1791). This period saw very little armed conflict, although some soldiers mutinied or played political roles. The term Saint-Domingue Revolution, long favored by French writers, acknowledges the event’s multi-class nature and that national independence emerged only belatedly as a central issue. The Anglophone term “Haitian Revolution” and its coupling with the year 1791 is a fairly recent phenomenon; it stresses the primacy of the revolution of the enslaved and its links to the creation of the Haitian state in 1804. The global significance of Haiti’s revolution derives partly from its achievements (its precedence in the histories of antiracism, antislavery, and decolonization) but also because of where it took place. Europe’s main source of tropical produce, Saint-Domingue was a dynamo of the Atlantic economy, a major source of French government revenue, and an important stimulus to the growth of France’s navy.

Late-Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue

Pluchon 1991 and Gainot 2015 are modern imperial histories that give limited space to Saint-Domingue but situate the colony within the first French empire. Garrigus 2006 is essential reading on the colony’s unusually large and prosperous free colored community. Frostin 1975 surveys radical politics among white colonists during the pre-revolutionary period. Although dated, Debien 2000 remains the most substantial work on slavery. Geggus 2013 examines the social tensions in the colony prior to the outbreak of the French Revolution.

• Debien, Gabriel. Les esclaves des Antilles françaises (XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles). Gourbeyre, Guadeloupe: Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe, 2000.

  Originally published in 1974 by the dean of French Caribbean historians, this volume contains twenty chapters dealing with African origins, occupations and work regimes, food, housing, clothing, mechanization, health, demography, manumission, maroonage, and other topics.

• Frostin, Charles. Les révoltes blanches á Saint-Dominque aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: Haïti avant 1789. Paris: L’École, 1975.

  Emphasizes the autonomist impulse that he thought a permanent, rather than intermittent, feature in the white community.

• Gainot, Bernard. L’Empire colonial français: De Richelieu à Napoléon. Paris: Armand Colin, 2015.

  DOI: 10.3917/arco.gaino.2015.01

  A brief overview of France’s first colonial empire, adopting a different perspective than Pluchon 1991.

• Garrigus, John D. Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue. Americas in the Early Modern Atlantic World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

  DOI: 10.1057/9781403984432

  Combines socioeconomic and cultural analysis in explaining the growth of the free colored population and the discrimination it encountered after 1760. The narrative continues through the revolution.

• Geggus, David P. “Saint-Domingue on the Eve of Revolution.” In Haitian History: New Perspectives. Edited by Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, 72–89. New York: Routledge, 2013.

  Assesses the evidence regarding stress and stability in colonial society, questioning the inevitability of the Haitian Revolution.

• Pluchon, Pierre. Histoire de la colonisation française: Le premier empire colonial, des origines à la Restauration. Paris: Fayard, 1991.

  A lengthy and engaged nationalist account of French colonialism by a Saint-Domingue specialist.