Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution, and: A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (review)

In these two books, published almost simultaneously in 2004, Laurent Dubois tells the story of the French Atlantic world in the Age of Revolution. Moving adroitly between metropolitan France and the colonies of Saint-Domingue and Guadeloupe, Dubois recounts with exceptional power the story of the encounter between republican ideals and the institutions of slavery and colonialism. This is an inherently fascinating tale, and one rich in significance for our understanding of the history and legacies of slavery and racism, revolution and enlightenment, and democracy and human rights.

Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution is a masterful retelling of upheavals that transformed Saint-Domingue, the most prosperous colony of its time, into Haiti, an independent nation ruled by men of color, many of them formerly enslaved. Though this is a story that has been told before, Dubois's new synthesis has unusual depth and originality. He leads the reader into Saint-Domingue with fresh eyes, walking us through local cemeteries or helping us see the world's first large balloon fly over the densest and richest sugar cane in the world. In the process, he paints a vivid picture of the fissures in colonial society that would deepen and ultimately erupt after the start of revolution in France in 1789. When he moves to his discussion of the revolution itself, he lightly and expertly engages important historiographical questions, such as the place of voudou, maronnage, and transculturation in the slave revolution. But these interventions, while thoughtful and persuasive, are brief; throughout, the emphasis is clearly on the gripping narrative of revolution.

Dubois recounts the manner in which enslaved men and women of the colony rose up in August of 1791, and over the next three years did effective battle against their masters and the French colonial state. By October 1793, their successes, and the context of imperial war, led local French officials to abolish slavery throughout the colony, a move that was ratified by the French National Convention in February 1794. It was after French recognition of emancipation that the emerging leader of the slave revolution, Toussaint Louverture, embraced the French Republic, defeated the Spanish and British, and ultimately governed Saint-Domingue as an integral and equal territory of France. As Dubois shows, one of the greatest challenges confronting Louverture in this period was one that would haunt leaders of almost every major post-emancipation society over much of the nineteenth century: how to reconcile the freedom of laborers with the exigencies of plantation agriculture. In this, Louverture failed, instituting increasingly draconian measures to stem the rebellion of free cultivators. In 1802, after Napoleon's disastrous attempt to re-impose slavery and after Louverture's arrest and deportation to France, rebellion again became widespread, as the army and people of Saint-Domingue rose up to expel the French and declare independence.

A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, beautifully written and exhaustively researched, focuses on the eastern Caribbean colony of Guadeloupe in this same period and tells a story that is much less known than that of Saint-Domingue. Dubois begins with an exploration of a 1793 slave insurrection in Trois-Rivières, where slaves took for themselves the banner and language of the French Republic to rise up, destroy a handful of plantations and kill 22 whites, whom they accused of a massive royalist conspiracy. Confronted by a group of anxious white colonists, the slave rebels greeted them openly, identifying themselves as "citizens and friends." With an alliance between slaves and the French Republic...