Jeremy D. Popkin

A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution


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spent on their care, in order to accumulate as much money as possible for themselves, in hope of either buying their own plantations or of returning to France with their profits.

      In the colony’s main city, Cap Français, the white population recreated the features of modern European life. Le Cap, as it was commonly called, had a rectangular grid of streets, much easier to navigate than the crooked alleyways of Paris. A large and imposing building housed the colonial administration. The city, with a population of around 18,000 in 1789, was built largely of stone. In addition to its 1,500-seat theater, it boasted separate hospitals for men and women, elegant public squares, and a large barracks complex for the military garrison that protected the colonists from foreign invasion and the threat of a slave uprising. Le Cap’s whites considered themselves full participants in the Enlightenment culture of France. The city had bookstores, Masonic lodges, and in 1784 it became the third community in the western hemisphere, after Philadelphia and Boston, to have a learned society, the Cercle des Philadelphes. Saint-Domingue’s other cities were less impressive. Port-au-Prince, in the west, was the official capital, even though its population was smaller than Le Cap’s. Most of its buildings were made out of wood and its streets were still unpaved at the time of the revolution. The smaller ports scattered along the colony’s coastline served primarily as places where ships could anchor to take on the produce from local plantations.

      The Free People of Color

      Enslaved urban blacks tolerated their situation because they hoped to join the population of free people of color. This third racial category among the colony’s population had begun to develop soon after enslaved blacks were imported to the island. Many, but not all, of the free people of color were the offspring of sexual relationships between white masters and enslaved black women: throughout the colony’s history, there had always been many more white men than white women willing to leave Europe for the rigors of colonial life. White men routinely exploited enslaved black women for their sexual pleasure. Although the relationships between white men and women of African descent were profoundly unequal, white men often granted freedom to women who bore themchildren; the Code Noir explicitly authorized this practice. White women often resented their husbands’ involvement with women of color; in 1791, a French official had to intervene when a jealous white wife physically attacked an enslaved woman in whom she decided her husband was taking too much interest.8

      As their numbers and wealth increased – by 1789 official statistics showed 28,000 free people of color in Saint-Domingue, almost as many as the 30,000 whites – members of this group increasingly resented laws that condemned them to second-class status. In 1685, the Code Noir had specified that freed blacks had “the same rights, privileges, and liberties enjoyed by persons born free,” and throughout the early part of the eighteenth century, there was little discrimination against them and their descendants in the colonies. From the 1760s onward, however, official policy and white colonists’ attitudes became increasingly prejudicial toward the free people of color. The French government calculated that maintaining a clear separation between whites and non-whites would prevent the colony’s free population from uniting to resist metropolitan authority. A series of laws attempted to limit new manumissions and banned free people of color from entering a long list of professions, including medicine and law, or from wearing fancy clothing and jewelry. Notaries drawing up legal documents had to use specific terms to identify them, and they were forbidden to use the family names of their white ancestors. In practice, many of these laws were often ignored, but free men of color were excluded from all government posts and from commanding military units. When the French Revolution broke out, they would be quick to seize on its promises of liberty and equality to demand the abolition of these restrictions.

      Critics and Defenders of Slavery