A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (review)

The French Revolution may be the domain of dix-huitièmistes, even if its legacies are fair game for nineteenth-century French studies. But the Caribbean Age of Revolution has one foot firmly planted in the nineteenth-century, with such critical events as the explosive May 1802 conflict in Guadeloupe between the forces of the mulatto leader Louis Delgrès and the Napoleonic army, and the January 1804 independence of Saint-Domingue (Haiti), previously under French colonial rule. There are several ways to organize the import of these events in relation to existing academic specializations. Scholars including Srinivas Aravamudan have viewed the Revolutionary nineteenth-century Caribbean as part of the "long eighteenth-century," a "tropicopolitan" extension and contestation of the Enlightenment. Sibylle Fischer has argued in Modernity Disavowed that the Haitian Revolution was a decisive but "disavowed" foundation of modernity, an approach that frames the closing of the eighteenth-century as the beginning of a two hundred year plus epistemological adventure. Laurent Dubois, in A Colony of Citizens, makes what may be the most decisive argument for the incorporation of the Revolutionary Caribbean into the historical canon of nineteenth-century French studies: he claims that the French Revolution did not become the phenomenon we know it as until the final unfolding of Revolutionary contestations in the Caribbean. "Central aspects of the universalism presented by imperial powers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (as well as in the world order of the twenty-first) as products of Europe's intellectual heritage in fact originated in the colonial Caribbean."

Dubois's œuvre is astonishingly weighty for such a young scholar. In 2004, the bicentennial of the Haitian Independence, he published not only the volume under review here, but Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution with Harvard University Press. In 2006 he published with John Garrigus a history of documents from the Caribbean Age of Revolution, and a co-edited book with John Garrigus and Lynn Hunt on slave revolution and human rights. A Colony of Citizens focuses primarily on Guadeloupe and Martinique ( – although it still incorporates valuable information on the Haitian Revolution) and presents a complex challenge to existing Revolutionary paradigms; it is also very helpful as an historical introduction to late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century events foregrounded in twentieth-century Francophone fiction by Daniel Maximin, Maryse Condé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and others. Dubois's Caribbean historiography is grounded in an eclectic range of historical documents. This methodology gives his work an impressive degree of specificity on the participation of the colonized ( – more so, notably, than in works by kindred French historians such as Louis Sala-Molins and Michèle Duchet). But his work also dialogues with paradigms in anthropological and literary fields; as he says, A Colony of Citizens brings together "history, anthropology, and literary criticism."

The opening section of the book shows that slave insurgency in the Revolutionary period was profoundly imbued with a Republican discourse of rights. Dubois traces the social and textual mechanisms through which slaves and free gens de couleur came to view themselves as citizens even before they were granted citizenship by the National Convention in 1794. He then explains the "social cartography" of the French lesser Antilles, giving readers a nuanced and accessible history of diverse social units from groups of maroons (escaped slaves) to families in which slave owners found ways to free their common-law wives. He analyzes the paths through which information about the French Revolution reached and was processed and received by Caribbean communities. From here Dubois segues into the fascinating history of Revolutionary conflict and anti-slavery insurrection in Guadeloupe, culminating with the reimposition of slavery by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802.

A Colony of Citizens indirectly provides a blueprint for the incorporation into nineteenth-century French studies of marginalized Francophone voices such as that of Louis Delgrès, in tandem with twentieth...