Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [6]
The success of the American Revolution as a tax revolt found at least a few admiring eyes among the proprietors of French Saint Domingue. France imposed a trade monopoly (called the exclusif) on all goods produced in the colony, as well as on most goods purchased there. Saint Domingue's producers of sugar, coffee, cotton, and indigo could have traded much more advantageously in a free market that admitted Britain, the newborn United States, and all the large and small European colonies of the surrounding islands. Between 1776 and 1789, an American-style revolutionary spirit breathed among the grands blancs of Saint Domingue, but it would soon be overtaken by other and much more drastic events.
The French Revolution, which erupted in the heart of the homeland rather than in some distant colony, was from the start a genuine class revolution. The lower echelons of French society—what became known as the Third Estate—were determined to reverse or annihilate the old orders of precedence, privilege, and power that emanated from the throne, the aristocracy, and the clergy, and within the first two years of their movement they went a very long way toward doing just that. The French Revolution proclaimed “Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood” as natural human rights, and while it was generally, tacitly understood that only white men were invited to enjoy them, this assumption was openly challenged, at the seat of the French home government, by representatives of Saint Domingue's gens de couleur.
In the colony of Saint Domingue, response to the outbreak of the French Revolution split predictably along class lines. The grands blancs were apt to be royalist and reactionary, while the petits blancs embraced the revolution and were quick to form Jacobin political clubs in the style of those popular in Paris. Some in the grand blancpaity fantasized about making the colony a protectorate of royalist Britain, or even making it an independent redoubt of the ancien regime and a refuge for emigre noblemen fleeing revolutionary France. The quarrel between these two tiny white factions grew so intense that they forgot all about the slumbering forces in the much larger population that surrounded them on every side.
In the first phases of the French Revolution there was absolutely no thought of letting the colony go or of changing anything significant about the way it operated. At this time Saint Domingue was the single richest European colony in the whole Western Hemisphere. Port-au-Prince, the capital and seat of government, was a relatively modest settlement, but Cap Francais, the cultural capital on the north coast, was the size of eighteenth-century Boston, with a beauty and grandeur that made it known as the “Jewel of the Antilles.” The sugar and coffee of Saint Domingue had not only enriched the colony's own planters, but vastly increased the prosperity of the French nation as a whole. Moreover, as revolutionary France saw its home economy disrupted and as it found itself at war with practically all the surrounding European powers, Saint Domingue was almost the only element in the whole national economy that still produced income and generally functioned as it was supposed to. Therefore the slave system in the colony, along with its systematic discrimination against colored and black freedmen, was considered to be a necessary, if evil, exception to the libertarian and egalitarian ideology which drove the revolution at home.
The French capital, meanwhile, had taken measures to discourage an independence movement. Children of colonists were required to seek their higher education in France, so that their ties to the homeland would be tightened during their formative years. The administration of Saint Domingue was divided between a military