A Colonial Media Revolution: The Press in Saint-Domingue, 1789-1793

Like metropolitan France, the Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue experienced a media revolution during the first four years of the French Revolution.¹ In 1789, there was only one newspaper on the island, the officially licensed Affiches américaines, with two editions, one in the colony's capital, Port-au-Prince, and the other in its commercial center, Cap Français. By the time of the destruction of Cap Français, the colony's major city in June 1793, more than a dozen different newspapers had been founded in the colony, making it the second site in the New World, after Britain's North American colonies, to experience the phenomenon of a revolutionary press. Not only were there more newspapers, but their content and language were radically different from those of the Affiches. Like the newspapers created in France in 1789, those in Saint-Domingue denounced the vestiges of royal power and called on the colony's white citizens to demand the right to govern themselves. By helping to break down traditional authority, the press played an essential if unintentional role in making the revolts against white rule by Saint-Domingue's free people of color and its slave population possible.

Like their counterparts in metropolitan France, the journalists in revolutionary Saint-Domingue posed as champions of freedom, especially freedom of expression. In the statement of principles he published in the second issue of his Courrier politique et littéraire du Cap-Français in March 1790, Louis François Roger Armand Gatereau wrote that it might be necessary to veil the truth in other countries, "but among a free people, among a people that has recognized that it needs to give itself laws, among the French people, truth shows itself without fear, because it is sure to be received with enthusiasm." It was from "the cabinets of its philosophers" that truth had emerged, and it had "prepare[d] today's revolution, by penetrating all hearts. And so I will always speak it with courage, regardless of what may happen to me."² In January 1791, a Port-au-Prince paper, the Gazette de Saint-Domingue, began its prospectus by asserting that "free peoples have lots of journals and gazettes."³ In November 1791, Henry Dubois de Saint-Maurice, editor of the Moniteur général de la partie française de Saint-Domingue, proclaimed that "freedom of the press is, for a regenerated people, the most effective protection of the rights it has reclaimed." Saint-Domingue, "this superb portion of the empire … should also have its share of this means so favorable to the propagation and the communication of enlightenment by which a new people has such a constant need to be surrounded."⁴

The paradox of the revolutionary press in Saint-Domingue is that the journalists who exalted the principle of freedom for themselves also recognized that they operated in a society whose continuing existence depended on the denial of freedom to the vast majority of its population. In the same declaration of principles in which he identified himself with the philosophes and the French Revolution, Gatereau acknowledged the specificity of colonial society. In France, he wrote, "One has the right to write anything that is not forbidden by the law. Here freedom of the press has limits, but I know the sacred ark, and I will not profane it."⁵ Using equally euphemistic language, Dubois de Saint-Maurice wrote, "Local conditions, circumstances, [and] events should also dictate measures against the abuse that the born enemies of general tranquility … may make of a thing that is good in itself."⁶ The concerns that underlay these exercises in euphemism were made explicit by the editor of the Gazette de Saint-Domingue, who promised that "any citizen with a known address will be … free to have us publish his opinion on any subject, on any event that may occur, with the exception of those concerning the two secondary classes of the colonial population, with respect to which the authors of the Gazette de Saint-Domingue will impose on themselves the most absolute...