Sweet Liberty: The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique (review)

For the past twenty years scholars have been paying increasing attention to the Haitian Revolution, which is now seen as a pivotal event in the history of the Atlantic basin. The struggle over how to define French citizenship in the Antilles, and Haiti’s 1804 rejection of France, had an impact on the Americas and Europe that historians are only now beginning to appreciate. Unlike Guadeloupe, where emancipation was proclaimed in 1794 and a multiracial force resisted the reimposition of slavery in 1802, Martinique stood largely outside these events. The British held the island from 1794 to 1802 and again from 1809 to 1814, welcomed by conservative planters. Rebecca Schloss’s Sweet Liberty is the first detailed English-language study of the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution in the French Atlantic. It covers the years 1802 to 1848 in six chapters that roughly correspond to changing regimes of the Napoleonic and British empires, and the Bourbon and Orleanist monarchies. ‘Sweetness’ and ‘liberty’ are the context for the book rather than its focus. By the 1830s price competition from beet sugar had sapped colonial fortunes, and in May 1848 enslaved Martiniquans claimed freedom before the new emancipation law crossed the Atlantic. Others have analysed these events; Schloss’s volume describes how Martinique’s planters tried to maintain control of colonial society in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution. Using government archives, the records of the Sisters of Saint-Joseph, and the extraordinary diary of the planter Pierre Dessalles, she describes how elite families struggled with each other, metropolitan administrators, and subalterns to protect their social position. The main contribution of Sweet Liberty is to demonstrate how the Haitian Revolution made ‘whiteness’ a key element of French identity, in the Antilles above all. By 1802 Martinique’s landed families were keenly aware of the subversive potential of the colony’s free population of colour. They increasingly suspected its members of crimes once associated with enslaved people: poisoning conspiracies and sexual attacks on white women. Although many male planters had their own free coloured children, after 1802 they feared that the poverty of white artisans and employees threatened the image of white superiority. Elites paid new attention to the administration of primary schools, foundling homes, and orphanages, because these institutions could lift impoverished whites and prevent racial mixing. Gender is central to Schloss’s analysis, and she shows the important economic roles that Martinique’s elite and working-class women played, including maintaining transatlantic networks. Yet their lives were constrained by the need to avoid even the appearance of sexual contact with men of colour. Schloss also examines colonists’ efforts in France to forestall political reforms, and the attempts of Martinique’s free people of colour in Paris and in the colony to gain equality. This includes a December 1833 rebellion that metropolitan administrators eventually pardoned because of evidence that the island’s elite had denied men of colour their legal rights. Sweet Liberty is an important addition to the emerging literature on the French Atlantic and on the racial politics within French colonialism.