Miranda Frances Spieler

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Miranda Frances Spieler | The Legal Structure of Colonial Rule during the French Revolution | The William and Mary Quarterly, 66.2 | The History Cooperative

The Legal Structure of Colonial Rule during the French Revolution

DURING the French Revolution, law was a chief instrument for demolishing the monarchy and erecting a new regime on its ruins. For legislators that enterprise began with the redefinition of individuals and of the land they lived on. Through new rights declarations and constitutions, legislators defined and empowered the citizenry. They abolished the provinces and redivided the country into new legal zones to uproot regional identities, to efface the past, and to erect a framework for new institutions. Yet law during the 1790s also withheld political rights from many. It organized the proscription of imagined and actual enemies of state. Revolutionary law was the making and the unmaking of the citizenry.

The legal status of colonial territory and of the people who lived there, too, underwent dramatic change during the revolutionary decade (Table I). A continuous feature of the empire as a legal space during this period was its formal peculiarity as a zone where constitutions did not apply. Historians have tended to emphasize the emergence of a transatlantic republican regime defined by inclusiveness after the 1794 emancipation of the slaves. Yet legal developments that preceded the decree, others that occurred afterward, and unnoted characteristics of the decree itself make it necessary to rethink that story.

Table I The Colonies and French Revolutionary Political History

Constituent Assembly (June 17, 1789–Sept. 30, 1791)
July 4, 1789	Admission of Saint Domingue deputies
Aug. 26, 1789	Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen
Mar. 8, 1790	Colonial assemblies acquire right to initiate legislation over internal matters
May 15, 1791	Assembly grants political rights to some men of color in the colonies
Aug. 22, 1791	Slave insurrection in Saint Domingue begins
Sept. 3, 1791	The new French constitution is adopted
Sept. 24, 1791	By constitutional addendum, colonial assemblies acquire the right to determine the status of persons, free and unfree
Sept. 28, 1791	Assembly affirms free-soil principle on domestic territory

Legislative Assembly (Oct. 1, 1791–Sept. 20, 1792)
Mar. 28, 1792	Decree enfranchising free men of color and sending civil commissioners to Saint Domingue (approved April 4 by the king)
June 15, 1792	Decree enlarging powers of Saint Domingue commissioners

Convention (Sept. 21, 1792–Oct. 26, 1795)
June 2, 1793	Insurrection of Paris sections against the Convention; fall of the Girondins
June 24, 1793	New constitution approved that does not mention the colonies
Aug. 29, 1793	Sonthonax abolishes slavery in the northern province of Saint Domingue
Oct. 10, 1793	Convention declares the government revolutionary until the peace
Feb. 4, 1794	Abolition of slavery by the Convention
Apr. 11–12, 1794	Committee of Public Safety orders arrest of Saint Domingue commissioners, instructs navy to apply emancipation decree
July 27, 1794	Fall of Robespierre
Aug. 22, 1795	Convention adopts 1795 Constitution defining the colonies as part of the republic

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