You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (review)

Jeremy Popkin's You Are All Free is an important addition to the historiography on the Haitian Revolution. Best known as an historian of the French Revolution, Popkin recreates a revolutionary journée in Saint-Domingue that is quite like the toppling of the Bastille. On June 20 and 21, 1793 chaotic street fighting and a devastating fire destroyed the city of Cap Français, killing at least 3,000 people and driving 10,000 more into exile in the United States. This was a turning point with enormous consequences for the Atlantic world.

Haitians traditionally celebrate May 18 and November 18, 1803, key dates in the war against France, and Independence Day, January 1, 1804. Another Haitian "Bastille Day" might be August 14, 1791, when hundreds of slaves met to plan the uprising that broke out eight nights later. But Popkin's choice is canny. The events of June 20, 1793 provoked Saint-Domingue's French Revolutionary commissioners to issue the first of a series of emancipation decrees. By the end of October they proclaimed the end of slavery in the colony. And on February 4, 1794, the National Convention in Paris extended abolition to all French territories.

Popkin's decision to make June 20, 1793 the central event of his narrative brings extraordinary focus to the book. The "Haitian Revolution" was in fact three very different transformations: from 1790 to 1792 Saint-Domingue's large free population of color won full French citizenship; the great slave uprising of 1791 ultimately led to general emancipation in 1794; and from 1802 to 1804 black and mulatto soldiers forced the French army to evacuate the colony. Contemporary accounts of these events are spread across archives in half-a-dozen countries. To digest this material nearly all historians depend heavily on the conclusions of earlier scholars, as well as archival research.

Popkin has a strong grasp on this historiography. But his book's core chapters are based almost exclusively on his own reading of French Revolutionary archives. He can do this because he is writing about events in one city from September 1792 to February 1794, tumultuous months whose metropolitan history he already knows exceedingly well. The resulting work is original, powerfully argued and written in an accessible style.

You Are All Free makes three important points. First, it was not inevitable that the French Revolution would lead to the end of slavery. Popkin provides a new portrait of Galbaud, the French governor whose feud with the commissioners Sonthonax and Polverel led him to storm the city on June 20. He argues that Galbaud was a committed revolutionary who nearly won his battle on two separate occasions. Only chance allowed Sonthonax and Polverel to claim victory and issue their first limited emancipation decree, which they saw as a pragmatic response to Galbaud's violence. In the months that followed they gradually expanded emancipation while requiring ex-slaves to stay on their plantations, to protect ancien régime-style colonial profits.

Second, France's 1794 abolition of slavery was a truly Atlantic event. French diplomats in the United States delayed colonial refugees from sailing to France, where they would likely have turned the Revolution against the commissioners. And they expedited the voyage of the pro-emancipation delegates who convinced the Convention to ratify the commissioners' actions. Popkin points out that the Parisian deputies had already voted to recall Sonthonax and Polverel for destroying the colonial economy but on February 4 they abolished slavery with no apparent concern for sugar and coffee exports.

Third, it was not slavery or counter-revolution but race that ultimately turned revolutionaries against each other in Saint-Domingue. This thesis brings attention to three social groups. Galbaud's attack was possible because hundreds of French sailors from ships in the port supported him. Popkin describes them as motivated by anger at the city's free people of color, who were now defending their rights and...