The New World ‘sans-culottes’: French revolutionary ideology in Saint-Domingue

This chapter focuses on the Haitian Revolution and its brief moment of impact in France’s National Assembly. During the early portions of the Revolution, Haitian revolutionaries – former slaves – asserted their claims to the ‘rights of man’ in strong and direct ways, following up on their successful military action with petitions to the new government in France. For a moment in the midst of the two revolutions, the idea of the ‘rights of man’ reached across boundaries of race and geography, as the National Assembly voted to end slavery in Haiti and other colonies. These thin trans-Atlantic bonds did not last long, however, as the rights of man were overridden by racism, violence and, finally, the resumption of slavery. The flow of ideas back to the metropole was thus profoundly incomplete. The chapter illustrates, moreover, the dangers in interpreting the Haitian Revolution too strongly through these French terminologies. The Haitian revolutionaries who adopted the language of the rights of man were themselves few in number and unrepresentative. A far larger portion of the Haitian population identified much more strongly with a different kind of universal practice, one lacking its own theoretical canon: the process of marronage, of running away from enslaving and domineering social structures to live on their own terms in any way possible.