The American Revolution of 1776 proclaimed that all men have “inalienable rights,” but the revolutionaries did not draw what seems to us the logical conclusion from this statement: that slavery and racial discrimination cannot be justified. The creation of the United States led instead to the expansion of African-American slavery in the southern states. It took the Civil War of 1861-65 to bring about emancipation.
Just when the American constitution was going into effect in 1789, a revolution broke out in France. Like the American revolutionaries, the French immediately proclaimed that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” But did this apply to the slaves in France’s overseas colonies? The question was an important one. Even though France’s colonies looked small on the map, the three Caribbean colonies of Saint Domingue (today’s Republic of Haiti), Guadeloupe and Martinique contained almost as many slaves as the thirteen much larger American states (about 700,000). Saint Domingue was the richest European colony in the world. It was the main source of the sugar and coffee that had become indispensable to “civilized” life in Europe.
The French slave colonies had a very different social structure from the slave states of the American South. The white population in the largest colony, Saint Domingue, numbered only 30,000 in 1789. In the United States, non-whites were almost always put in the same class as black slaves, but in the French colonies, many whites had emancipated their mixed-race children, creating a class of “free coloreds” that numbered 28,000 by 1789. The free coloreds were often well educated and prosperous; members of this group owned about 1/3 of the slaves in the colony. They also made up most of the island’s militia, responsible for keeping the slaves under control.
Black slaves heavily outnumbered both the whites and the free coloreds, however: there were 465,000 of them in Saint Domingue by 1789. About half of the slaves had been born in Africa. Slaves were imported from many regions in West Africa. They brought some traditions and beliefs with them, but they had to adapt to a very different environment in the Caribbean. Newly arrived slaves had to learn a common language, creole, a dialect of French. Out of elements of African religions and Christianity they evolved a unique set of beliefs, vodou, which gave them a sense of identity.
Many early supporters of the French Revolution were uncomfortably aware of the role that slavery played in France’s colonies. Some of them formed a group called the Société des Amis des Noirs (“Society of the Friends of Blacks”), which discussed plans for gradual abolition of slavery, the ending of the slave trade, and the granting of rights to educated free colored men from the colonies.
Like white plantation-owners in the American South, slaveowners in the French colonies participated actively in the French Revolution. They demanded liberty for themselves: above all, the liberty to decide how their slaves and the free people of color in their colonies should be treated. The slaves were their hard-earned property, they argued, and a fair-minded government could not even consider taking them away. If the French National Assembly took up the issue of slavery, the colonial plantation-owners threatened to imitate their neighbors to the north and launch a movement for independence, or else to turn their colonies over to the British, France’s traditional enemies. The slaveowners also violently denounced the Société des Amis des Noirs, accusing it of stirring up the slaves and the free colored populations in the colonies.
The French revolutionaries, many of whom had money invested in the colonial economy, took these issues seriously. A well-funded lobbying group backed by the plantation-owners, the Club Massiac, spread pro-slavery propaganda and convinced the National Assembly to guarantee that no changes would be made in the slave system without the consent of the whites in the colonies. Initially, representatives of the colonial free colored population, many of whom owned slaves themselves, had hoped that the whites might be willing to reach an agreement with them and form a common front against the slaves. Most colonial whites, however, feared that granting political rights to people who were partly descended from slaves would undermine racial hierarchy and lead eventually to the abolition of the slave system.