6 - To Restore Order and Tranquility

Summary

The granting of full political equality to the gens de couleur and the arrival of a new civil commission, consisting of Sonthonax, Polverel, and Ailhaud, marked the end of the first stage of the Haitian Revolution. The next stage would feature the emancipation of the slaves of Saint-Domingue in 1793 and 1794. Running through both of these developments was the profound impact of the August 1791 slave revolt. Accordingly, this chapter begins with a discussion of the role of law in the political culture of the insurgency during its formative stage, from late 1791 to the middle of 1792 (prior to the arrival of Sonthonax and Polverel in September 1792). The second part of the chapter turns to the proclamations of Sonthonax and Polverel in 1793, which paved the way for the National Convention’s decision to abolish slavery in all of the French colonies in February 1794.

As a republican government took shape in Paris and sought to extend its power into the colonies in connection with the struggle over racial equality, the republic would assume an initially hostile stance toward the slave insurgency. In short order, that hostility gave way to a stance of pragmatic accommodation, as the policies of revolutionary administrators, originating in the metropole, devolved into the same search for local stability that had underwritten the gains of free blacks and people of color in April 1792. Two of the principal leaders of the insurgency in the north, Jean-François Papillon and Georges Biassou, were critical players in the pursuit of an arrangement that would meet the needs of revolutionary administrators and insurgent slaves somewhere in between the poles of their respective positions. Their stance evolved over time, but in the course of articulating it, Jean-François and Biassou invoked notions of legality and legitimacy that derived from another complicated mixture of Old Regime and revolutionary standards: a different fusion of the Code Noir and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Past experiences of planter brutality and visions of future racial equality mixed uncomfortably in the documents that testify to these negotiations. Although the available evidence is extremely limited, it appears that Jean-François and Biassou drew on both of these images in response to the pressures placed on them by their followers in the insurgent camps.