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

Beginning with the undeniable observation that the French revolution reverberated throughout the Atlantic world, this ambitious book quickly moves to a more radical claim. Dubois argues that slaves fighting for, and claiming, freedom and citizenship rights in the French Caribbean actually changed the concept of universalism often attributed to European enlightenment theorists.

Remarkable in its scope, the book offers a vivid, detailed account of seventeen years of revolution, civil war, and counterrevolution in late eighteenth-century Guadeloupe even as it sets those events in the larger French imperial context. Dubois demonstrates in no uncertain terms that the political narrative of the revolution in France is incomplete without attention to imperialist dimensions in the Caribbean. Hence, he moves between Europe and the Caribbean, following armies, generals, correspondence, rumors, and ideas as they circulated within the French empire. Through an extensive use of archives in Guadeloupe, French Guyana, Paris, and Aix-en-Provence, as well as a variety of sources including memoirs, notarial archives, novels, and contemporary accounts, Dubois pieces together moments of high diplomatic history and renders concretely the fates of a number of slaves and former slaves as they struggled for freedom.

The use of a wide array of source material, one of the book's strengths, produces a degree of methodological tension. Dubois evinces both a desire to craft a tight narrative and an impulse to delve into the kind of social history that tends to privilege the synchronic over the diachronic. In the end, the inclination toward a political narrative prevails, at the expense of a certain depth of analysis. Yet this is hardly a drawback, as the events themselves are gripping. Not only did slaves and former slaves take the initiative in fighting for their freedom; many ended up defending the Republic, under siege not just in the Caribbean as elites struggled to retain control, but in France itself as counterrevolutionaries grew dominant. A brief interlude of hard-won emancipation was shot through with contradictions, restrictions, and exclusionary racism. The book ends with the tragic and violent reinstatement of slavery in Guadeloupe, which as Dubois points out, is unprecedented and unrepeated in history. Any one of these episodes could be a book in itself; this impressive work takes on all three.

The principal claim, that slaves' struggles shifted the terms of universalism, raises questions. As Dubois himself suggests, even this version of universalism, supposedly transformed to a more radically egalitarian one, fell short in practice. The declarations of emancipation were accompanied by efforts to restrict the freedoms of former slaves. Dubois ignores extensive debates about the uneven nature of "universalism"—such as critiques of the enlightenment and critiques of liberal theory and practice—which underscore the ways in which the notion of universalism is, and was, contentious. Some engagement with these complex debates might have enriched his discussions and clarified precisely how events in the Caribbean changed notions of democracy, equality, and freedom, or, rather, how they impinged on concepts that were continually in flux.