Robin Blackburn

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Robin Blackburn | Haiti, Slavery, and the Age of the Democratic Revolution | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.4 | The History Cooperative

Haiti, Slavery, and the Age of the Democratic Revolution

IN the sequence of revolutions that remade the Atlantic world from 1776 to 1825, the Haitian Revolution is rarely given its due, yet without it there is much that cannot be accounted for. The revolutions—American, French, Haitian, and Spanish-American—should be seen as interconnected, with each helping to radicalize the next. The American Revolution launched an idea of popular sovereignty that, together with the cost of the war, helped to provoke the downfall of the French monarchy. The French Revolution, dramatic as was its influence on the Old World, also became a fundamental event in the New World because it was eventually to challenge slavery as well as royal power. This challenge did not come from the French National Constituent Assembly's resounding "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens 1789," since neither the assembly nor its successor, the National Convention, moved on its own initiative to confront slavery in the French plantation colonies. Indeed the issue was not to be addressed for another five years, by which time the French Caribbean colonies were engulfed in slave revolts and threatened by British occupation.

The first major breach in the hugely important systems of slavery in the Americas was opened not by English or American abolitionists but by Jacobin revolutionaries and the black peasantry of Saint Domingue (later Haiti). This fact has not been a comfortable one for the traditional national historiography in the United States or Britain and has become awkward even in France as the Jacobin period has been viewed with increasing distaste and embarrassment. In 1959 R. R. Palmer published a brilliant and influential study of the age of the democratic revolution, giving detailed attention to the American and French revolutions and lesser upheavals in the Low Countries, Switzerland, and elsewhere yet entirely neglecting the struggles that led to the proclamation of the Haitian republic.¹ The notion of an age of the democratic revolution was problematic because it imparted a ready-made, seemingly predestined character to political acts that sought to exclude some while freeing others and that were often contradictory, provoking counterrevolution as well as democracy. Ignoring the Haitian Revolution made matters much worse, eliminating an event that pitted momentous progressive and reactionary impulses against one another. To ignore Haiti was also to diminish all the other revolutions.

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