Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [43]
If there are any answers, they lie in the state of extreme desperation among Saint Domingue's grands blancs at this time. Most of the upper strata of the colonial military and government consisted of French aristocracy. The world of the ancien regime was swiftly disintegrating in France, whence the nobles were racing into exile. Blanchelande and his cohort envisioned that the colony might become a refuge for the ancien regime—a notion compatible with the fledgling independence move-ment that existed among Saint Domingue's planter and mercantile classes, as well as with the idea of accepting an English protectorate there. But if any of these schemes were to come to fruition, the expansion of the French Revolution into the colony would absolutely have to be stopped.
From this point of view, the idea of instigating an essentially bogus slave insurrection could be made to resemble an acceptable risk. The conspiracy, if it did exist, was taking its cues from events in France of the previous two years, where what had become known as “the Paris mob” was launched at various royalist targets—the Bastille, Versailles, and so on—by a few manipulating hands well hidden behind the scenes. The royalist conspirators of Saint Domingue knew or supposed that these popular manifestations in Paris were not nearly so spontaneous as they were meant to appear.
So perhaps they really did believe that they could let the genie of mass slave revolt out of the bottle and then, when they chose to, put it back in. If so, they learned within twenty-four hours just how wrong they had been. Tousard, setting out at the head of his regiment to defend Limbe, was obliged to rush back to stop Jeannot from sacking Cap Francais. Clouds of smoke from the burning cane fields on the plain had darkened the sky over the Jewel of the Antilles; before long the bedraggled survivors from the plantations began to drift in. If the black leaders of the slave revolt had ever been taking orders from royalist whites, on August 22, 1791, they definitively stopped doing so.
However, during the weeks and months that followed, vestiges of the royalist conspiracy did persist. Even in October 1791 the insurgent blacks seemed to cling to the idea that a deal was to be struck with their masters involving three free days a week and abolition of the whip. The otherwise mystifying royalist bent of so many of the rebel bands can also be explained in these terms.
Whether it really existed or not, the idea of a royalist conspiracy was adopted by Governor Blanchelande's political enemies—most notably by Leger Felicite Sonthonax, who ordered Blanchelande's deportation on these grounds. Later on, when it had become clear that the increasingly bitter conflict between Toussaint Louverture and Sonthonax would leave only one man standing, Sonthonax leveled the same accusation at Toussaint: “By the impulsion of the same emigres* who surround him today, he organized in 1791 the revolt of the Blacks and the massacre of the White proprietors.”27
Former governor Blanchelande was shipped to France under suspicion of “having wanted to operate the counter-revolution”28 —the centerpiece of the desired operation was the slave insurrection of 1791. The same writer, the Marquis de Rouvray, saw Blanchelande as an “imbecile,” the puppet of an “assembly of fools and intriguers.”29 Blanchelande's accusers could always reiterate the evidence derived from the eyewitnesses who survived the camps around Grande Riviere: “that these rebels had nothing but white flags, white cockades; that their device was Vive Louis XVI, Roi de France et de Navarre; that their war crywas Men of the King; that they told themselves they were under arms to reestablish the king on his throne, the nobility and the clergy in their privileges.”30
Blanchelande was convicted of treason, and sent to the guillotine on April 11, 1793. A few years later, the French general Kerverseau renewed the accusation against Toussaint Louverture: “Shaped by long slavery to the merry-go-round of flattery and dissimulation,