2

Jean-Baptiste Belley and French Republicanism

On 3 February 1794, or 15 Pluviôse of Year II in the republican calendar, as the National Convention in Paris was going about its daily business, a delegate announced that three men were seeking admission as representatives for the northern province of Saint-Domingue, a French colony in the West Indies. Their election had been duly verified, and their credentials were in order. The decision to admit them was made quickly. This procedure may have been routine, but the three delegates who soon after walked into the hall were not: Louis-Pierre Dufaÿ was white, Jean-Baptiste Mills was biracial, and Jean-Baptiste Belley was black.

The assembly, which had been expecting them, was ecstatic. Just before the announced men came in, a jubilant representative had exclaimed that the old “aristocracy of the skin” had finally expired: “Liberty triumphs, equality is consecrated.”1 Georges Danton, the famous revolutionary, had expressed outrage at the treatment the three men had received from whites, who had tried to prevent them from reaching France. After the three deputies entered, another representative declared that the Convention had long desired to have men of color in their midst, and he asked that these men receive a “fraternal accolade” from the president (Ray, 19:387). The president proceeded to embrace the men, and all rejoiced. The next day, in an unprecedented move, and to loud clapping and shouts of celebration, the Convention abolished slavery in all of France’s territories.

What brought Belley, a former slave, to be present at this historic moment? His life and his writings show that he became increasingly attached to France and that he was ready to serve what he considered his country, even to fight and die for it. It is this readiness to serve that, combined with the upheavals that took place in Saint-Domingue in the last decade of the eighteenth century, led to his election. But his attachment to France was also much more than the endorsement of a national identity. To him, France after the Revolution represented progressive cosmopolitan ideals he adhered to, as the only nation in the world seemingly committed to multiracial democracy and republican citizenship. He saw in the French Republic the true promise of universal equality, over against the parochialism of racist, power-hungry white colons, as well as, later on in the decade, the racial nationalism of independentist black leaders. He was proud of his blackness, but his vision was inclusive and egalitarian. To some extent, the French Revolution contained, and acted on, this vision. Belley’s formidable career, punctuated by crisscrossings of the Atlantic, reveals the mind of a patriot, a revolutionary, and a cosmopolitan all in one.

Being Black in Saint-Domingue

According to the declaration he signed as a deputy to the Convention, Belley was born in Gorée, a small island off the coast of Dakar, Senegal, in 1746.2 Since he adds in a marginal notation that he has lived in Cap-Français, currently Le Cap, a town on the northern coast of Saint-Domingue, for forty-six years, we know he was brought to the island as an infant. His rise to the status of representative means that, by the time he arrived in Paris, he had accumulated an exceptional knowledge of the various racial and social strata that defined the colony, and that he had made clear political choices. It also testifies to the complex and unique politics of race, class, and slavery that dominated life in the French colony in the second half of the eighteenth century.

•

At the time Belley disembarked on the island, Saint-Domingue was France’s richest and most valuable colony, and most of this wealth was created by slaves. Unlike the other Caribbean islands that belonged to the French colonial empire, Saint-Domingue had become French a bit haphazardly. The other islands, which included Guadeloupe and Martinique and were part of the Lesser Antilles, extending from the north to southeast of the Caribbean Sea, had been the target of systematic settlement by the French government since 1635. Saint-Domingue, the western part of Spanish-occupied Hispaniola, had been officially granted to the French at the Treaty of Rijswijk in 1697, after years of incursions by pirates from the island of Tortuga just northwest of the island, and the subsequent increasing presence of French settlers. Half a century later, it was on its way to becoming the world’s first producer of sugar and coffee. Toward the end of the century, it would be studded with roughly six hundred sugar plantations in the coastal plains and three thousand coffee plantations in the mountainous interior, the rest being taken up by indigo and cotton. When he arrived, Belley became one of roughly 150,000 enslaved blacks, most of whom provided the work on these plantations. By the end of the century, the slave population had grown to 500,000. Historians estimate that about 685,000 slaves were brought from Africa in the eighteenth century alone.3

How harshly the slaves were treated can be gathered from these statistics. Half the slaves died within a few years of their arrival. “They are always dying” (Dubois, 40), one woman complained. Slaves who worked on plantations had a harsh life, whether it be a sugar or a coffee or an indigo plantation. If they were field slaves, they did hard and often dangerous physical labor, especially when it came time to harvest and process the crops. Enslaved women often suffered sexual exploitation. In 1685, Louis XIV had issued the Code noir, or the black code, a compilation of sixty articles that regulated the lives of slaves in the colonies and of blacks in general. While it spelled out various deprivations and harsh punishments that slaves were subject to, it also clearly stated a number of duties incumbent on the masters, such as the allocation of food or of free days. By the second half of the eighteenth century, though, the protective sentiment underlying the Code noir had little to show for it. Some of the practices it had encouraged remained in place, such as free time on Saturdays and Sundays, which most slaves used to cultivate their own plots or to sell their wares at markets. But these were just pockets of independence in an otherwise ruthless and violent system.

Belley lived in Le Cap all his life, first as a slave and then free, and so unlike plantation slaves, he was part of a bustling, cosmopolitan environment. Le Cap was the largest city in the colony and an economic and cultural center. Situated in the large, fertile northern plain mostly dedicated to the cultivation of sugarcane, it functioned as a big marketplace surrounded by established plantations. It was also the major port of the island, much easier to reach from Europe than the other ports along the west coast, and the dock always bustled with hundreds of arriving or departing visitors, sailors, soldiers, stevedores. With most houses built from stone, and many of its fifty-six streets paved, a contemporary commentator called it “the Paris of our island” (Dubois, 24). It had a huge government compound covering a city block, a large hospital, a parish church with an impressive colonnaded façade, several squares with elaborate public fountains, and a large compound of army barracks. Though it was not the official capital—that was Port-au-Prince, in the western province—it was the seat of the governor, the intendant, and the navy commissioner, as well as of the Conseil supérieur, a very active upper court. There was a theater, which had three performances a week during the season, and a newspaper. There also seems to have been no strict policy of housing discrimination, even if whites and blacks were mostly concentrated in specific areas of the city.4 In 1789, the population of Le Cap was about 5,450 whites, 3,400 free people of color, and 10,000 slaves.5 Belley had plenty of opportunities to interact with members of all groups, in what was at the time a unique multiracial environment.6

As an urban slave, he was probably better treated than field slaves. He may also have benefited from positive prejudices about Africans from Senegal. Médéric Louis Elie Moreau de Saint-Méry, author of a major contemporary description of the colony, gives voice to those prejudices when he says: “The Senegalese . . . are tall and well made, slender, ebony black. . . . In his moral stance, the Senegalese also has the marks of a certain superiority. He is a cultivator, intelligent, good, faithful, even in love, grateful, an excellent domestic servant.”7 In a tight urban environment, moreover, slaves were more likely to be scrutinized as revealing of their masters’ status. They were also more likely to learn skilled trades and become masons, carpenters, mechanics. Louis Mercier says of the urban slave: “He is everywhere: at market, in the stores, in the streets, on the quais; he drives the coaches, he fills the barrels of sugar and coffee, and rolls them; he is in the holds or on the wharfs; the canoes are driven by him; he is a coachman, excites the passion of the horses in the city and in the country; Le Cap brims with his words, often noisy and incomprehensible to the uninitiated.”8

Since he was literate and well informed about revolutionary ideas, one can assume that Belley took advantage of various accesses to French culture available in the city or that he was at least aware of them. In 1784, the theater put on Pierre Beaumarchais’s comedy Le mariage de Figaro, well known for its ridiculing of the aristocracy and its symbolic empowerment of the middle class. In its most famous line, Figaro asks Count Almaviva what he has done to earn all his privileges and answers the question himself: “You took the trouble to get born, and no more.” Belley may have seen the play, since by that time, the spacious theater hall reserved ten boxes for free people of color—three for blacks, and the rest for people of mixed race, this division being the result of light-skinned daughters’ demands, according to Moreau de Saint-Méry.9 There was also a reading culture in Saint-Domingue; newspapers advertising sales of belongings mentioned sometimes considerable amounts of books.10 Bookstore catalogues show that there was interest in classics, theater, history, contemporary literature, and scientific treatises. Specific authors mentioned in those ads include Jean de la Fontaine, author of didactic fables; Boileau, a sharp literary critic; Molière, a playwright famous for mocking human foibles; and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a major theoretician of social equality. Bookstores at the time looked very much like drugstores with books in them, carrying items like creams, powder, vinegar, tobacco, toothpaste, and perfume, which made exposure to books for a young black man easier. Le Cap also had three cabinets littéraires, which functioned as libraries and offered access to the latest newspapers and magazines from France. While it is unlikely that Belley was able or allowed to patronize them, they contributed to the introduction of new ideas into the colony.

And these new ideas did spread. In 1787, a traveling wax show had likenesses of Voltaire and Rousseau in addition to those of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, giving us a hint as to the popularity of those writers.11 While they are both associated with the intellectual revolution of the Enlightenment, they actually embodied two slightly different branches of it. Voltaire used his sharp wit to advocate freedom and tolerance; his concern was with individual rights over against the stifling influence of tradition and religion. Rousseau, while also concerned with individual freedom, focused on the best ways for people to live socially and politically. In The Social Contract, published in 1762, he argued for the republic as a political model, which he saw as a unified, collective body kept in motion by the general will. Like many thinkers of his day, Rousseau was steeped in the study of Greek and Roman classics; he drew from his admiration for classic republicanism, which emphasizes a devotion to civic virtue and active citizenship. Even if Belley had not been exposed to those ideas before then, he would catch up quickly in the year before he left for France.

Living in Le Cap, Belley also had the opportunity to learn much about the lives of the slaves who lived on the neighboring plantations. These slaves regularly came to the city to sell their food or artifacts or to attend church. As many as fifteen hundred slaves converged on the place de Clugny on any given Sunday, selling their products to nonwhites.12 Mass was mostly a social occasion, as Christian religious feeling in Saint-Domingue does not seem to have been very strong. Jean-Baptiste Labat, a French clergyman and travel writer who preached in Le Cap in 1701, was struck by how the assembly seemed to consider Mass a sort of spectacle: “They conversed, laughed, and had a good time.”13 Various visitors in the course of the eighteenth century commented on the lack of moral values in the colony and directly related it to poor religious practice and overall indifference about matters religious.14 Still, slaves in the northern plains, less isolated than in the mountains, were more likely to attend church, partly because, during the first half of the century, they had been the focus of Jesuit attention. Father Boutin, for example, learned several African languages and started the practice of the messe des nègres, a Mass specifically designed for slaves. Because some Jesuits also showed concern for the way slaves were treated, and occasionally protested and took action, Christianity among slaves around Le Cap was not necessarily associated with acquiescence. In 1762 the Conseil supérieur criticized the Jesuits’ work, arguing that it encouraged slaves to meet independently and develop their own form of religious leadership.15 Being in contact with slaves from the surrounding plantations must have opened Belley to the ideas and aspirations of some of the most exploited people on the island.

In an essay published in Paris in 1795, Belley asserts that he has been free for about thirty years, having won his freedom “through hard work and sweat.”16 We do not know exactly how it happened, but it means that, by the end of his teen years, he joined the contingent of free people of color who lived in Saint-Domingue. As in all other slave colonies, blacks and whites had had sexual relationships since the beginning of the settlement. Still, Saint-Domingue was exceptional for the size and civic status of its free black population. In 1789, it had roughly 28,000 free people of color—of whom two-thirds were of mixed race—31,000 whites, and 465,000 slaves. Free people of color formed a significant contingent in the colony—numerically, socially, and economically. Becoming part of this group, especially in the major city of Le Cap, must have led to a dramatic transformation in Belley’s outlook on his own life and possibilities. It also got him entangled in the politics of race and class associated with that group, just at a time when tensions were beginning to rise.17

Interestingly, for the greater part of the seventeenth century, laws regarding free people of color seem to have targeted social status rather than race. Until 1680, in fact, mixed-race children were declared automatically free, arguably as a form of punishment to white fathers. Only later did the rule of partus sequitur ventrem predominate. Borrowed from Roman civil law, it held that the slave status of the child should follow that of the mother. The reasons for this change were mostly of an economic or of a moral nature, as partisans bemoaned the loss of property or argued that the old system encouraged enslaved women to seduce white men. A number of other laws passed in the second half of the seventeenth century are similarly not racially based. A law about absolving whites from taxes was quickly reinterpreted as applying to all people who were born free, whatever their skin color. Another measure condemning people who harbored slaves to enslavement was similarly clarified as applying only to people who were not born free. In all these cases, the inspiration was Roman law, which focused on freedom status rather than any racial or ethnic consideration.18 Throughout the seventeenth century, mixed-race people in the French colonies were considered “more like Europeans than Africans” (Elisabeth, 139), and their allegiance to whites rather than to slaves was assumed.

The Code noir confirmed this. Article 9 stated that any white man who had illegitimate children with an enslaved woman had to pay a heavy fine; if he was their owner, he would lose both the mother and the children; if he married his slave, however, she and the children would be free. While most free blacks were born out of wedlock, the law condoned—and possibly encouraged—interracial marriage. The Code noir also declared that any master at least twenty years of age was allowed to free his slaves without any justification, and it prescribed that any slave who was the sole legatee of his or her master, or executor of his will, or his children’s guardian, be set free. All freedmen had the same “rights, privileges, and immunities” as persons who were born free. One article demanded that former slaves show “particular respect” to their former masters, and there was heavier punishment for theft or sheltering of a fugitive slave. Otherwise, there were no stated restrictions on their civic or political freedoms.19

This group, free blacks, grew in economic status. Unlike in any other colony of the New World, here was a group of free people of color who rivaled the whites in numbers and whose wealth seemed to be growing. Many of them were small landowners and lived in the countryside; others were urban business entrepreneurs; others were employees, artisans, tradesmen. Some of them were quite wealthy, and together they owned about 30 percent of the slaves in Saint-Domingue.20 As shown by Dominique Rogers, they also benefited from major civil rights, such as the right to marry, the right to draw up contracts, and the right to bequeath and to inherit property, and they often won court cases to defend those rights. Over the course of the eighteenth century, as the colony’s reputation grew, and especially after the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 made travel safe again, more and more men came from the metropole to try their luck. Everywhere they went, they ran into competition from free people of color.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, then, royal and colonial administrators decided that the power of this group had to be curtailed, but it is hard to disentangle the motivations behind the various discriminatory decrees they promulgated. The decrees seem mostly aimed at depriving of economic power a group that the whites saw as threatening competition and that was feared to be sympathetic to slaves. To the extent that they aimed to associate whiteness with superiority and control, they did contribute to installing a racist order. Still, the nature of this racism is often hard to pinpoint. The 1724 version of the Code noir, which was specifically designed for Louisiana, suddenly proscribed all marriages between blacks and whites. This law was not followed in the islands, where such marriages had existed for a long time, but the notion of mésalliance meant that a white person marrying a black person lost his or her social standing. The Code noir was gradually reinterpreted. For example, the article stating that a free black owed respect to his former master was gradually extended to the idea that all free people of color owed respect to all whites.21 A 1764 royal decree forbade people of African descent from practicing medicine, surgery, or pharmacy. A 1773 law forbade free people of color from adopting the names of whites. A 1779 sumptuary law made it illegal for people of color to dress like whites. Some people, white and black, objected to these policies, arguing that they created racial division and undermined the interests of the colony, and some of them resisted them. Indeed, free blacks usually had connections to whites, either through direct blood ties or through common interests. Many children of white fathers received assistance from them. Many whites sensed that free blacks were attached to their social and economic status and that, in the face of an increasingly vocal abolitionism, they could be strong allies in the fight to maintain slavery. So it seems that in practice, ideas about and behaviors toward free people of color varied widely.22

Being from Senegal, Belley had deeply black skin, and while free full-blooded blacks were not unusual—there were about ten thousand of them in the colony, as we saw—one wonders about his status among free people of color and within Saint-Domingue’s society as a whole. It is hard to determine what role shade of skin color played in social relations. Many multiracial families included both wholly African and mixed-race people, and people originally from Africa could have strong ties with whites. Some white colons even argued that, since they had pure blood, Africans were superior to people of mixed race.23 Some Africans were quite wealthy, while some mixed-race people were poor.24 For many years, the colonial census used the category “free mulattoes and negroes” to register all free blacks. In the 1782 census, this group was split into two categories, “free people of color” and “free negroes,” but the primary motivation seems to have been a desire to count as “people of color” people who until then had been seen as white or whose racial origin had simply not been mentioned in official documents.25 So to some extent, degrees of blackness did not influence relationships.

But in other ways, they did. Many mixed-race people considered their closeness to whiteness a positive attribute, and some of them would try to take advantage of it in the struggle for civil rights. So they often tried to keep their distance from full-blooded blacks, whose skin color symbolized enslavement and degradation. Nonmixed blacks, on the other hand, developed forms of in-group solidarity that contributed to the sense of a separate identity. They were called nègres, after all, as distinguished from mulâtres. A list of about fifty documents cosigned by Belley shows that blacks formed a sort of large family, with members attending each other’s weddings, baptisms, and funerals. In a 1777 document, Belley is described as a perruquier—a wigmaker. It is probably through this popular line of work that he became financially independent. Also listed are people like Pierre Augustin, a wealthy landowner who had also started out as a perruquier.26 The list also includes several instances of black slaveowners marrying their own slaves. Within this community, then, bonds were anchored in race rather than social status.

It is hard to know exactly what kind of relationships existed between a black slaveowner and his or her own slaves. They probably covered a range from the exploitative to the protective. In the declaration he signed in 1795, Belley wrote that he used to be “the owner in Saint-Domingue of thinking property” but that “thanks to the just and beneficial decree of 16 pluviôse,” that was no longer the case.27 So apparently Belley was able to exploit all the openings made available by a society in flux, including owning slaves. How many slaves, what kind of work they performed for him, to what extent they benefited from the urban context and from Belley’s own personal history as a slave—all that remains unknown. What we know is that, when the time came to elect deputies who would represent the slaves’ desire for freedom in Paris, he was among those chosen.

In many ways, Belley does not seem to have let his blackness stand in his way. While many free people of color benefited from inherited assets, he belonged to that rare category of men and women who managed to buy their freedom through hard work. Such people existed, but they often lived in poor conditions, unless they managed to become artisans or to establish a small commerce. His literacy also seems exceptional in a society that routinely denied free people of color access to schools and where hiring tutors was the best, but an expensive, solution.28 It is quite possible that his owner provided him with instruction, fostering his self-esteem, and, if white, giving him an insight into the value of interracial collaboration. Indeed, Belley’s African birth may have helped him make connections with whites, many of whom disliked members of the mixed-race caste for moral or economic reasons.

But his owner may have been a free person of color. It appears that free people of color were more likely to buy African-born slaves and to give them training in order to increase their value. In the city, white master tradesmen were often paid to train slaves. Domestic slaves also often helped in the master’s business. Stewart R. King mentions the example of a man who rented the services of a washerwoman not to wash his clothes but to assist him in his business of hair care and wigmaking. Joseph, a free black living in Le Cap, identified himself as a journeyman goldsmith, indicating he belonged to a fraternity of French journeymen; he probably joined while studying his trade in France. Pierre Augustin, already mentioned, a free black probably born in Africa and brought to the colony very young, was trained by his master as a wigmaker in Le Cap and became quite wealthy. Clearly, the city offered Belley plenty of examples of how to become skilled and independent, even as a black man born in Africa.29

•

It may be no surprise that, in his attempt to navigate the increasingly suffocating racial terrain, Belley decided to become a member of the colony’s armed forces. In the second half of the eighteenth century, most of the militiamen and police on the island were free men of color. This situation had developed for a number of reasons. It was hard to attract metropolitan soldiers to the colony, and if they came, they were often subject to diseases. If they stayed, they often tried to find more lucrative occupations in civilian life. Similarly, local whites rarely found the armed forces a good way to raise their social status, and many of them resisted enlistment. As a consequence, free men of color were relied on to fill the ranks of the maréchaussée, or rural mounted police, the militia, and the regular armed forces. For slaves, moreover, these occupations often meant manumission. The tasks of the maréchaussée consisted in policing and generally upholding the law, with a major focus on patrolling the countryside to search for runaway slaves, fugitive soldiers, and other lawbreakers. By the middle of the century, all members of the maréchaussée were free men of color, including the brigadiers, the noncommissioned officers at the head of each unit. Members of the militia were at first predominantly white, but after several white rebellions, the ratio changed: in 1789, black militia units numbered 104 out of 156. Their main functions in peacetime related to internal security and garrison duty. As for the armed forces, there were regular white regiments stationed on the island, but free men of color were enlisted for special conflicts such as the Seven Years’ War and the American War of Independence. Some of them did serve in the regular army. As Stewart King points out, “The life of a professional soldier in the eighteenth century was hard, but it was not without its rewards in the form of a certain dignity, stability, and regular pay” (74). Belley would be one of them.30

As has been the case in many cultures throughout the centuries, participation in the military provided an opportunity to create a symbolism of citizenship. So blacks in the military could be a source of inspiration. One famous character, whom Belley probably knew, came to represent this. Captain Vincent Ollivier became famous for his military deeds. Originally a slave, he participated in the siege of Cartagena, a city on the northern coast of what is now Colombia, that took place in April 1697. This expedition was under the leadership of Bernard Desjean, Baron de Pointis, a French admiral who, in March, had made a layover in Saint-Domingue in order to request assistance from the governor. Ollivier became part of a fleet that included 2,300 sailors, 2,000 soldiers—including 110 free blacks—and 650 buccaneers who broke through Spanish defenses and looted the city. He was captured on his way back and ransomed by the Dutch to France, where he was presented to Louis XIV. He then fought in Germany with Louis-Hector, Marquis de Villars, during the War of Spanish Succession. Back in Saint-Domingue, he was named captain general of the black militias in the district of Le Cap. From then on known to all as “Captain Vincent,” he was widely respected and received in all circles, including at the governor’s table. According to Moreau de Saint-Méry, his wisdom and sharp memory made his conversation “always interesting.” His striking appearance in his old age, black skin contrasting with white hair, made an effect that “commanded respect.”31

Ironically, though, while the armed forces provided an avenue for enhanced status, they were also an area where racial segregation and subordination gradually solidified. It seems that originally, militias were simply made up of free men, black and white alike. Then gradually, as they realized that they had little chance for advancement, free men of color demanded their own militias. For a while, these militias provided opportunities for high positions, since the chain of command was made up of black officers. Captain Vincent is one example. Etienne Auba is another: after fighting in the siege of Cartagena, he too was freed, and he was named captain of the black militia of Fort-Dauphin, in the northeast of Saint-Domingue.32 Many others served as captains of their companies. Militias were eliminated at the end of the Seven Years’ War, but when a royal order put out in 1768 reestablished compulsory militia service, it seemed to take for granted that the militia units would be divided along racial lines. The royal order divided the colony into twelve areas, and each area was to form several militia units, made of either infantry or horse-riding dragoons. Each infantry militia unit was commanded by a captain, a lieutenant, and a second lieutenant; it was composed of at least two sergeants, eight corporals, forty fusiliers, and a drummer. Now, though, all officers of black companies had to be white; only officers of a lower rank could be black, “to promote emulation.” The trend toward increased discrimination was thus alive and well in the military.33

But the armed forces kept their appeal, and for Belley, they were an opportunity to increase his social status and make connections. In 1768, he was twenty-two years old, and so he was enlisted in the militia. The fact that every member of the infantry militia received a shotgun and a bayonet, two pounds of powder, and six pounds of bullets must have given this athletic young man some satisfaction. By joining the militia—there were five black companies in Le Cap by 1777—he also became part of an active network that King calls the “military leadership group.” It is clear that nonmixed blacks who were part of the military world—whether it be the militia, the maréchaussée, or the regular armed forces—developed relationships that were made even stronger by their racial connection. Like blacks in general, blacks associated with the military not only knew each other but formed a sort of pseudo-kin family that provided support and also participated in many of the other members’ important life events. They acted as godfathers at baptisms, witnesses at marriage ceremonies, mourners at funerals, and cosigners of manumissions and other economic transactions. These practices, much more common in the military group than in the planter elite group, highlight a sense of solidarity that was separate from both the white and the mixed-race world.

As we saw, Belley participated in at least fifty of these family acts, often along with fellow military men such as Joseph dit Cezar, bandmaster in the Le Cap militia; Louis La Rondière, sergeant in the Le Cap militia; and Pierre Augustin, the wigmaker turned wealthy landowner. In 1781, he attended the funeral of Jean-Baptiste Magny dit Malic, a sergeant and the son of a free black couple in Le Cap, who had become wealthy and well respected. So Belley had plenty of opportunity to develop relationships with this world of proud black masculinity. As Jean-Louis Donnadieu puts it, Belley “knows a lot of people, is in high demand, elicits confidence”; he is “a man of influence, probably respected and listened to.”34

The year before his death, another man of influence, Captain Vincent, could be seen telling his war stories to the young black men who were enlisting to go fight in the American War of Independence, and Belley was most probably among them.35 In the course of spring 1779, Vice Admiral Charles Hector, Count d’Estaing, who had been fighting the British in the Caribbean and in the American colonies with little luck, was recruiting as many forces as possible in the islands. He arrived in Le Cap at the end of July, just after retaking Grenada, and two weeks later, when he set sail toward Charleston, South Carolina, to help the American rebels, his force included 545 free blacks, who formed the Chasseurs Volontaires.36 This light-infantry unit, which had been created for the first time during the Seven Years’ War in order to defend the colony, had been re-formed by an order from the governor, the Comte d’Argout.37 The order opened with the statement that the king had “complete confidence in the attachment and the faithfulness of his free subjects, people of color, in Saint-Domingue.”38 It went on to describe its composition and stated that pay, ration, and treatment would be the same as those of white companies. King surmises that the main motivation for free blacks to join the Chasseurs Volontaires must have been patriotism, as pay was low, and there was also little hope of making lasting connections with white officers who might have actual local influence.39 So if he participated in the campaign, Belley may have found among his peers and his leaders a strengthening of the patriotism that would sustain him for the rest of his life.40 And as we will see, this was a patriotism that was very much anchored in ideas of manly courage and civic virtue.41

Laurent-François Le Noir, Marquess de Rouvray, the commanding officer of the Chasseurs, clearly had a high opinion of the free black soldiers, and his confidence may have contributed to their sense of patriotic pride. He hoped that they would say to themselves: “I must make the whites blush for the scorn they have heaped on me in my civil status, and for the injustices and tyrannies they have continually exercised over me with impunity. I must prove to them that as a soldier I am capable of at least as much honor and courage and of even more loyalty” (Garrigus, “Catalyst or Catastrophe?,” 117). Born about forty miles south of Paris, Rouvray would make his way up in the military hierarchy, being promoted to colonel in 1768 and to field marshal in 1788. He and his wife, who was from Martinique, had settled in Saint-Domingue, where they had bought a sugarcane plantation and a coffee plantation. In the next few years, Rouvray would stand out as a great believer in the rights of free blacks, or at least in the necessity of these rights for the good of the colony. As a delegate to the first revolutionary assembly in 1789, he would cosign a letter that, while alerting constituents about the dangers of the new craze for liberty in Paris, advised them to treat free blacks with justice and respect.42

Rouvray represented many of the social and racial contradictions that Belley must have observed in whites he came in contact with. While in Paris, as the Revolution had just broken out, he would write a pamphlet warning against how newfangled ideas of natural liberty spelled disaster and destruction for the colonies and for France. His argument in the piece is not fundamentally racial, though: some people like to defend the idea of natural rights, he says, “as if an empire, a government, a marine, and colonies were states of pure nature.”43 To him, abolitionists should not be allowed any influence, since they “have little knowledge of big questions concerning the administration, commerce, politics and balance of empires.”44 His concerns are primarily economic and geopolitical, as he is convinced that French abolitionists are part of a vast British conspiracy to destroy France and its empire. On the other hand, Rouvray would never give up on his belief in the decency and the patriotism of free blacks. Soon after a major slave uprising started in Saint-Domingue in August 1791, he stood up in the Assembly held in Le Cap and urged his audience to enlist them, praising their endurance and commitment to the colony. To Rouvray, those qualities made them deserving of equal rights. In the letters he wrote his daughter in the following years, while he fumes against the Revolution, abolition, and the ideas of republicanism and democracy, and while in her own letters his wife makes statements about free blacks that almost smack of genocide, he still defends them. In June 1792, he writes that he “cannot praise them too much,” and that the recent law giving them political equality “will play an important role in saving us.”45 These ideas must have been felt by the men under him.

Besides their communication with Rouvray, the free blacks were also under the leadership of a man, d’Estaing, who seemed to value them as equals. His printed orders for this expedition promised that “‘people of color’ would ‘be treated at all times like the whites,’” as they aspired “to the same honor” and would “exhibit the same bravery” (Lawrence, 65). This language hints at d’Estaing’s admiration for the virtues of ancient Rome. Like many of his generation, d’Estaing found inspiration in the values of the Roman republic, with its focus on civic virtue, patriotism, and courage. A few years later, he would write a play called Les Thermopyles: Tragédie de circonstance, about the famous battle between the Greeks and the Persians. The play presents Leonidas, king of the Spartans, as the quintessential patriotic hero, ready to die in order to protect his people and his state. D’Estaing himself would be sympathetic to the Revolution, though like many, he would be guillotined on the suspicion that his commitment was only partial. In any case, during the battle of Savannah, he seemed to think of the free blacks as men whose bravery equaled that of Greek and Roman soldiers.

And these men did have a chance to prove their bravery. The battle of Savannah was a real bloodbath, in which about one thousand men were killed or wounded.46 It started with a two-week siege, during which the allies dug trenches and the British efficiently reinforced the city. As soon as they noticed the trenches, the British made a sortie with six hundred strong, but the French troops, among whom were the Chasseurs Volontaires, pushed them back with bayonets; as a result, forty men were killed.47 When the assault finally took place on 9 October, the Chasseurs Volontaires were part of the troops that created a diversion to the east of the main assault.48 Finally, after the battle, they were charged with defending the retreating army from the enemy. The free men of color most definitely came out of the whole episode with a good reputation. In a letter to the minister of the marine, Rouvray made it clear that they had “distinguished themselves by their heroics in this fight” (S. King, 66).49

On the other hand, they had many reasons to be bitter about the whole enterprise. Like many others, they must have questioned the wisdom of some of the decisions made. Because the campaign lasted much longer than expected, living conditions for the force became extremely hard, as soldiers and sailors alike dealt with heat, cold, hunger, and illness. The assault through a swampy area, which some of the vice admiral’s advisors had argued against, could not put a dent in the British defenses, which had benefited from the work of a highly qualified engineer, as well as from the arrival of Lieutenant Colonel John Maitland and his contingent from Beaufort, who had managed to trick the allies and reach the city through the eastern swamps. It may not be surprising that, by the time of the retreat, when d’Estaing refused to embark at Charleston for fear of more desertion by the many discontented troops, Rouvray was alerting him about “the ‘spirit of insubordination’ in the Negro corps he commanded” (Lawrence, 129).

The aftermath of the Savannah expedition also reminded the Chasseurs of their subordinate status and of the need to resist it. One unit escorted the wounded to Charleston and was still there during the British siege of the city in the spring of 1780.50 Some units were taken to various Caribbean islands, such as Grenada and St Lucia, to reinforce local garrisons, while others were taken to France. While the latter appeared at the court and were “commended for their valor,” it took an intervention from Rouvray to remind the government that these men were independent citizens who yearned to return to their civilian lives.51

And the authorities needed reminding. In March 1780, the governor put out orders to form a new unit called the Chasseurs Royaux. This time, though, the service was not voluntary; black men from each parish were being conscripted into regular service. Reactions came fast. Not only did very few men enlist, but white officers also complained. Jacques Mesnier, captain of a mixed-race militia at Le Cap, reminded the governor that “I command . . . only free men, who have the ability to choose the company in which they will do their service” (Garrigus, “Catalyst or Catastrophe?,” 120–21). After the king made it clear that he didn’t approve of the governor’s measure, the project was tabled. The episode was a foretaste of the complex alliances that would be made and unmade during the Haitian and the French Revolutions.

The Savannah campaign must have contributed to Belley’s ideological development. The values of freedom, patriotism, and civic virtue had now been placed in a context of international and interracial collaboration, even as he was constantly reminded that he served at the whims of white officials. As he came back to his tightly bound black community in Le Cap, the sense of racial and social fluidity had expanded. Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall has shown that embracing the principle of universalism in France’s late eighteenth century often entailed promoting homogeneity or homogenization at the same time.52 If Belley was moving toward a universal vision, it could not so easily be contained.

An Age of Revolution

When the French Revolution rippled into the colony, Belley plunged into it. Already before 1789, he was probably exposed to abolitionist ideas, both homegrown and imported. His personal and professional contacts with the free community, including during the Savannah campaign, made him part of a group increasingly bent on vindicating its political rights. Once the events started, the general animation about what was going on in Paris must have added to his sense of impending change. Indeed, in many ways, his connections with the various strata of Saint-Domingue gave him the knowledge and the convictions he would exploit as a cosmopolitan. The fact that each social group had its own fractures and dissident voices shows that, to some extent, race and class remained fluid concepts in the French colonial world, and it is this fluidity that made Belley’s new universalism possible. While every social group was bent on defending its own interests, he would develop a language of universalist inclusion.

•

When they heard that, in August 1788, Louis XVI, facing empty royal coffers, had decided to convene the Estates-General and called for the election of representatives, some white colons reacted almost immediately and in a predictable way. They organized and elected deputies, in a process that was far from orthodox, and barred free people of color from participating. The election process also entailed putting together so-called cahiers de doléances, lists of complaints to be addressed by the future political body. In their cahiers de doléances, the white colons of Saint-Domingue took care to exclude people of color from political life. When on 20 June 1789 the representatives famously assembled in a tennis court hall in the city of Versailles, about ten miles from Paris, swore that they would stick together as a national Assembly that represented the people, nine white Saint-Domingue delegates were present and took the oath.53 And so the very moment that signaled the beginning of the French Revolution also saw an attempt by white colonial power to assert its own freedom to maintain an order based on discrimination and enslavement. This very peculiar notion of freedom augured the ways in which, in the coming years, the meaning of the Revolution would gradually split and multiply.

The white colons present in Paris were not necessarily unified, though. Several colons who had just arrived in Paris from Saint-Domingue and were unhappy about the voting process that had taken place in the colony started gathering in order to define their own priorities. They feared that the deputation—soon reduced to six in the Assembly—would undermine the colony’s interests by making these too dependent on the will of the metropole; more particularly, they feared that the Assembly would constantly raise the issue of slavery.54 They also wanted to be in control of lobbying for the main item on their agenda, the independent creation of three colonial assemblies in Saint-Domingue that would have policing and legislative powers. So they decided to form a club. The first official meeting of what would soon be known as the Club Massiac, which would defend the interests of white plantation owners big and small, took place on 20 August. In September, in collaboration with the deputies, they obtained the king’s approval for an election process that would determine the formation of assemblies in the colonies. In their minds, the white planters had achieved considerable autonomy in the colony’s legislative decisions.55

The white colons’ desire to become more independent from the metropole was certainly not lessened by the portentous events that took place in Paris in that summer of 1789. The process of electing representatives and putting together cahiers de doléances had given the French a taste for democracy. The king realized that his power was eroding when, against his wishes, the three separate orders of the Estates-General—the nobles, the clergy, and the Third Estate—finally met as one national Assembly on 27 June. In the next weeks, the people of Paris noticed that royal troops were increasing their presence in the city, and tension grew. When on 12 July the news spread that the king had just removed Jacques Necker, his finance minister, widely seen as someone who was working for the common people, huge crowds assembled in various parts of the city to express their discontent. Some invaded the opera, some started tearing apart the wall that circled the city and whose customs posts symbolized high prices, and others looted a commercial depot. The royal troops retreated, and the people started forming militias. The next day, they set about finding munitions. The day after, on 14 July, close to one thousand people found themselves in front of the Bastille, an old prison where 250 barrels of powder had been consigned. Negotiations with the governor of the prison quickly foundered, the fortress was taken, and the governor was beheaded. When the king visited the city a few days later, his status as a leader had dramatically changed, and for a fleeting moment, the people felt they were in control of their fate.

While these events looked like spontaneous democracy in the streets, the National Assembly soon worked on making it a political reality. On 4 August, it abolished all feudal rights. Throughout the night, aristocrats surpassed each other in proposing reforms, such as a universal income tax and the abolition of feudal dues and tasks. It was, as an observer put it, “a moment of patriotic drunkenness” (Schama, Citizens, 439). In the next month, the Assembly put together the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, one of the founding documents of liberal democracy. It was based on the idea that human beings have a certain number of inalienable, natural rights. They are born and remain free and equal. They are presumed innocent until declared guilty, have freedom of opinion and freedom of speech, and enjoy equality before the law. Over the course of a few months, France had fundamentally reshaped its identity.

If they seemed both a boon and a threat to the members of the Club Massiac, these events were encouraging to another group that was in Paris to defend its rights: the free people of color. On 29 August 1789, only nine days after the first meeting of the Club Massiac, about thirty of them met in the office of Etienne Louis Hector Dejoly, a white attorney, whom they had chosen as their spokesperson. The main goal was to prepare their own cahier de doléances. On 9 September, Dejoly and a few members paid a visit to the Club Massiac, during which he read a memorandum asking for more rights for free people of color. After it became clear that the club would not budge, the people of color decided to prepare a visit to the Assembly. They now called themselves Société des Colons Américains, a clear statement of equality with the white planters. On 22 October 1789, a delegation of these men stood in the National Assembly, as their spokesman read aloud their address. It starts with a dramatic statement: “There still exists in one of the lands of this empire a species of men scorned and degraded, a class of citizens doomed to rejection, to all the humiliations of slavery: in a word, Frenchmen who groan under the yoke of oppression.” Throughout the address, the emphasis is on the fact that free blacks who were born “citizens and free” (Dubois and Garrigus, 68) are treated as second-class citizens, with no right of representation and many forms of social and economic exclusion. They evoke recent revolutionary events, including the Declaration of Rights, “those inalienable rights based on nature and the social contract” (69), to demand justice from the Assembly. While they used the metaphor of slavery, the free people of color did not touch on that issue. All their arguments were based on the idea that they were free French citizens, and as such, they deserved political rights and representation in the Assembly.

What was the relationship between mixed-race men and full-blooded blacks in Paris at this point? Interestingly, the cahier left with the president of the Assembly on 22 October included the names of nonmixed blacks. The presence of these names implied that the demands of these people were equally valid. In an underhanded way, the free people of color were also making a statement about racism.56 Still, the address referred to people who were born free. Moreover, a complaint sent by nonmixed blacks to the Assembly and included in the minutes of 28 November hints that the two groups were at odds. “The negro comes from pure blood,” it starts dramatically; “the mulatto, on the other hand, comes from mixed blood; it is a mixture of white and black, a bastardized species.” Therefore, it continues, “it is as obvious that the negro is above the mulatto as that pure gold is above tainted gold.” In the social order, then, blacks should be classed above mulattoes, and they should certainly be represented at the Assembly. They are even confident that the white deputies of Saint-Domingue, their “natural protectors,” will not suffer “an exclusion that would be injurious to the purity of their origin.”57 It then becomes clear that the blacks are furious about a gift of six million livres that the mulattoes made to the nation without including them. “More generous than their children,” they propose to give twelve million (Mavidal and Laurent, 10:329). This amazing document is one of the few clear statements of racial, social, and economic rivalry between the two groups.

From this moment on, any discussion of black rights in the Assembly was prevented by the white colons. Not all of them agreed with this strategy. In a letter dated 3 November, Fleuriau de Touchelongue, who speaks for the branch of the Club Massiac in La Rochelle, a major French port, states that whites cannot afford to refuse what they are being asked. To him, the request is “so perfectly right in the eyes of reason, of humanity, and of any creole not completely blinded by his own interests, that it cannot be questioned for even one minute.”58 Jean Barré de Saint-Venant, who had spent thirty years in Saint-Domingue, argued that “it is time to forget our prejudices; the survival of our colonies depends on it. . . . I think that the free people of color and even the blacks who have some property must be allowed to vote on taxes and on the law that rules them.”59 But these were lonely voices. When the Credentials Committee finally decided in favor of the free people of color, who like the whites had done some lobbying, both the white deputies and the club members put pressure on the committee’s chair; twice he tried to present the report to the Assembly, and twice he was prevented.60 The white colons were satisfied.61

This defeat for the people of color augured more than two years of legislative failures in the Assembly. In March 1790, the Assembly created a Comité des colonies, made up of twelve members, most of whom were in favor of slavery. On 8 March, the committee proposed a law that allowed the colonies to create their own assemblies, whose members would be elected by “citizens.” When the Comte de Mirabeau, a man of principle and a famous orator, tried to raise the question of who these “citizens” were, he was shouted down, and the decree passed. When the final text was proposed to the Assembly on 28 March, the term “citizens” had been replaced with property-owning “persons.” The Abbé Grégoire, who would become known for his defense of the rights of blacks, abolition, and universal suffrage, asked that people of color be explicitly mentioned. But his proposal was turned down, and so the Assembly basically left the colonies—and hence the white colons—to their own devices. A 12 October consideration stated that “no laws on the state of persons will be decided for the colonies, except on the explicit and formal request of their colonial assemblies.”62 It seemed that, as far as the colonies were concerned, the revolution only applied to whites.

Meanwhile, in Saint-Domingue, the politics of race and class created shifting alliances. After poor whites made their grievances heard, elections for a general Assembly granted the vote to all whites who had been in the colony for at least a year. Free blacks also demanded inclusion in local assemblies; several times they were met with violence and destruction. When the recently formed General Assembly in Saint-Marc, in the western province of Saint-Domingue, received the 28 March instruction, it renewed itself without letting free blacks vote. It also asserted its independence from metropolitan regulations and opened all the ports to foreign trade. The governor marched on the Assembly, with the aid of white and black troops. Eighty-five representatives leapt on a ship, the Léopard, and headed to France to air their grievances. In the fall of 1790, Vincent Ogé, a free man of color and a wealthy merchant from Le Cap, and a number of free men of color organized a rebellion in Grande-Rivière, a town to the east of Le Cap. He and his fellow conspirators fled to Santo Domingo, the Spanish section of the island, were extradited, and were broken on the wheel on 6 February 1791, after which their heads were displayed on pikes. While Ogé had been fighting for his own class, his story resonated throughout the colony. It also resonated in Paris, where people aired an increasing dislike for the white colons. When on 15 May 1791 the Assembly finally passed a timid law granting political rights to people of color who had been born of free parents, whites in the colony were enraged and refused to apply the decree.63

In August 1791, a massive slave insurrection started in the northern province. Well-organized slaves went on a rampage, burning houses and fields, destroying machinery, and killing whites. They were unable to take Le Cap but managed to take control of much of the northern plain. By the end of September, all the plantations within fifty miles of Le Cap had been destroyed, and the number of rebels had reached at least twenty thousand.64 They resisted many attacks by troops, which included free blacks. Meanwhile, in the western and southern provinces, clashes between whites and free blacks continued, with each side enrolling slaves in its fight. In order to put a stop to the fighting, some agreements were signed, but very soon the provinces reverted to chaos. In France, the National Assembly was dissolved after it put together a constitution, and a new round of voting led to a legislative Assembly, which now functioned within a constitutional monarchy. On 4 April 1792, the Assembly finally voted to extend citizenship to all free people of color. In June, it sent three commissioners to Saint-Domingue, as well as troops. The objective was to apply this latest decree, neutralize the slave revolt, and restore slavery.

•

How closely was Belley, and were free blacks in Le Cap, following all these events? News of what was happening in Paris reached the city, in spite of efforts to control the flow of information. By May 1788 copies of a French paper that included articles criticizing the slave trade and discussing the abolitionist movement in England had reached the colony. It created a “great sensation.” Similarly, news arrived of the activities of the Société des Amis des Noirs, or Society of the Friends of the Blacks, an abolitionist society founded in 1788. The colons did try to prevent the spread of new ideas. The Club Massiac wrote to various port towns in France, asking them to prevent blacks from leaving the country. Letters for slaves or free blacks were checked on arrival. But overall, people could not be prevented from loudly discussing revolutionary events as they were happening. When the slave insurrection started, refugees started pouring into Le Cap. Very soon the city was in a panic. Slaves were publicly executed, wounded soldiers could be seen carried to the hospital, and the noise of gunshots and cannons was constantly in the background. Whether they wanted to or not, blacks and whites in Le Cap were caught up in what would become known as the Haitian Revolution.65

The situation must have been difficult for Belley and for free blacks in general. The argument of free people of color for political rights had been based on the fact that they were free. At this point, they had not officially been linking their situation to that of slaves—on the contrary, the argument had been that political freedom for free blacks would cement their relationship with whites. But the revolt made slaves’ demands impossible to ignore. Little is certain about how the slaves organized and how they developed their ideals, and different historians have pointed to different origins. The possibilities range from long-brewing ideas of resistance to sudden inspiration from events in Paris.66 François, who testified after being arrested, says that the insurrection “had been planned for a long time.” He does add that, at a big gathering of slave delegates that took place on 14 August, papers were read “by a mulatto or quarteroon . . . who announced that the King and the National Assembly had accorded them three days of freedom per week; that the white planters were opposed to this and that they must await the arrival of troops who would come to enforce the execution of this decree” (Fick, 261). When a rebel was captured a few weeks after the insurrection began, officials searched his pockets, and they found “pamphlets printed in France, filled with commonplaces about the Rights of Man and the Sacred Revolution” (Dubois, 102). Several captured slaves talked of “liberty” and “the rights of man” (105). It seems that events in France had at least partly been an inspiration, as French institutions, including the king, were seen as allies against the white planters. For the free blacks in Le Cap who were called upon to participate in the repression of the rebellion, though, these commonalities had to be swept aside, willingly or not. The rebels tried several times to take the upper part of the city, and they were killed en masse. Some people of color joined the rebels out of desperation—because their property had been destroyed, or they had been condemned in absentia for their role in the Ogé uprising. Free blacks found themselves having choices to make.

It does seem that some nonmixed blacks developed a close connection to the rebels, and one wonders about the role of race in establishing those connections. Reports from witnesses indicate that mixed-race joiners were not always trusted.67 On the other hand, some blacks were coordinating the rebellion with slaves in Le Cap. In early September, the governor, Vicomte de Blanchelande, wrote: “We had successively discovered and continue daily to discover plots that prove that the revolt is combined between the slaves of the city and those of the plains” (Fick, 102). Shortly after the rebellion started, Jean-Baptiste Cap, a free black, was sentenced to be broken on the wheel after it was revealed that he was a major leader of the rebellion, and the authorities managed to capture him just outside the city. After interrogation, they learned that “in the night of the 25^th [August] all the negroes in the plain were to attack the city in different parts; to be seconded by the negroes in the city, who were to set fire to it in several parts at once.” Indeed, “in every workshop in the city there were negroes concerned in the plot” (103). Rebels in the eastern part of the northern plain also received help from free blacks. Interestingly, mixed-race men usually occupied inferior positions; in the Grande-Rivière area, for example, southeast of Le Cap, the vast majority of command posts were in the hands of nonmixed blacks. In November, the rebels took Ouinaminthe, an area near the Spanish border, under the military leadership of Jean-Baptiste Marc, a free black, with the help of Cézar, who had recently been emancipated. Both had feigned alliance with the government forces, received military supplies, and then turned back on the district.68 Another free black was also participating in the rebellion in a leadership role. His name was Toussaint Bréda, the future Louverture.

Even as the northern province saw this participation by some free blacks in the slaves’ rebellion, the other two provinces experienced comparatively more violent clashes between free people of color and free whites—and here again, political motivations varied. In the West, rich white planters were willing to forge alliances with free people of color; what mattered to them was that they retained economic power. It was the propertyless whites in Port-au-Prince who resisted. The South, with a frontier-like culture, did not have many rich whites to act as a buffer between people of color and propertyless whites. In both cases, though, the free people of color used the concepts of the Revolution, and the various laws passed by the Assembly, to argue for their civic and political rights. Over against the whites’ flirting with political autonomy, they drew their force from the ideologies that came from the metropole. In fact, among their leaders were several men who had been educated in France. At the same time, however, a lot of these men owned property and slaves. They were not fighting for abolition and would not necessarily welcome it when it came.

Through his personal history, as well as his racial, social, and economic status, Belley occupied a unique position. While he did not join the slave rebellion, he had a slave past and strong ties to his black community. His ideological position was different from someone like Ogé, himself a unique figure among free men of color. Wealthy mixed-race men were not in principle opposed to abolition as a long-term strategy. When Thomas Clarkson, a famous British abolitionist, met with six men of color in Paris in the fall of 1789, he was at first anxious about their dedication to the cause. Hearing that they hoped for an eventual abolition of slavery brought him some relief, though the reasons he heard had mostly to do with a hoped-for improvement of relationships between blacks and whites.69 The men were wearing a National Guard uniform, an emblem of citizenship in revolutionary Paris, and one of them, probably Ogé, was wearing what looked like a cross of Saint-Louis, a high military honor. As John D. Garrigus argues, while in Paris, Ogé seems to have added a civic, military form of patriotism to the more liberal forms that were more typical of free men of color and that focused on the freedom to vote and to conduct business without impediments—themes he heavily emphasized in his address to the Club Massiac in September 1789.70 So it seems that Ogé was straddling several ideological worlds. As we will see, Belley embraced civic republicanism fully and was committed to immediate abolition.

It came sooner than expected, in a process that would propel him onto the national stage. On 18 September 1792, three commissioners landed in Saint-Domingue: Léger Félicité Sonthonax, Etienne Polverel, and Jean Antoine Ailhaud. They had been charged by the Assembly with, “among other things, the maintenance of order and public tranquillity,” and to achieve these ends, they had been given “all the necessary powers, such as suspending or even dissolving the colonial assemblies now in existence, controlling the public force, and taking all measures necessary to insure the execution of the said Law of April 4” (Stein, 43). Through this law, the Legislative Assembly had given civil and political rights to all free people of color, in a first step toward universalizing the principles of its young constitution, in spite of a clause that stipulated it did not apply to the colonies. A few days after the commissioners landed in Le Cap, the Legislative Assembly was replaced by the National Convention, and France was declared a republic. While these events were immediately caused by an uprising that had taken place in August, they also seemed to be the natural path of the Revolution and the result of an increasingly intense attachment to an ideology that, as we have seen, had made its resurgence in the eighteenth century: republicanism. This ideology now came to the colony through Sonthonax, a man who would have a dramatic impact on Belley’s life and thought.

Sonthonax was a lawyer who had moved from the provinces to Paris, and when the Revolution started, he embraced it. It became “a moral crusade” for him, and the republic would mean “the rejuvenation of humanity itself” (Stein, 20). He quickly started writing for Révolutions de Paris, a radical journal with an antiroyalist, egalitarian mission. He also became a member of the Jacobin club, one of several political clubs that emerged during the Revolution. The Jacobin club started as a discussion group for deputies during the early days of the National Assembly and became progressively more radical, even as the number of its members grew and many branches were set up throughout the country. Over the course of 1791, it expelled or lost the more moderate members, such as deputies who, in September, voted for a law abrogating the 15 May decree that gave some rights to free men of color. Some of the famous men who remained were Maximilien Robespierre, who would become a symbol of violent radicalism; Jérôme Pétion, a radical lawyer who would become mayor of Paris; the Abbé Grégoire; and Jacques Pierre Brissot de Warville, founder of the Société des Amis des Noirs. Sonthonax attended meetings regularly and became a member of the correspondence committee.

He became known for his focus on colonial issues, and his writings reveal that he approached them from a revolutionary and republican standpoint. In an article published in September 1790, he starts by asserting, like Rousseau, that liberty and tranquility are incompatible: “Do not think that a free state is one where one can taste the pleasures of luxury, where one becomes elated with the pleasures of sensual delights.”71 With this opening, he places the abolitionist fight within the context of a typical republican call for continued vigilance by citizens to eschew the seductions of luxury and to fight enslavement by despots. He then proceeds to analyze the year’s events in the colonies. He contrasts the autonomous decisions made by the General Assembly in Saint-Marc with those of the northern assembly, which “has managed to maintain among the colons a spirit of attachment to the mother country.”72 To him, patriotism and revolution go hand in hand, and isolationists are working against the spread of liberty. He ends the essay with a prophetic declaration:

As far as the slave trade and slavery are concerned, the governments of Europe may well try to resist the cries of philosophy, the principles of universal liberty that are budding and growing among nations. Let them learn that one never exposes the people to the truth in vain. That once the impulse is given, one will have to give way to the torrent that must sweep away the old abuses, and that a new order of things will rise. . . . Yes! We dare to predict it with confidence: a time will come—and the day is not far off—when we will see an African, with frizzy hair, without any other recommendation than his common sense and his virtue, come to participate in lawmaking in the midst of our national assemblies.73

This was a bold statement, at a time when a majority in the Assembly were still willing to accommodate white colons, and an amazingly prophetic one.

Clearly, Sonthonax had absorbed the focus on stoicism and patriotism associated with republicanism. Many of the men who played a role in the Revolution, including Sonthonax, had studied the classics in school. At the Collège Louis-le-Grand, a famous secondary school on the Left Bank attended by Robespierre, teachers told their pupils to “admire the simplicity, frugality, austerity, courage and patriotism of the heroes of the Roman Republic” (Schama, Citizens, 170). It was a spartan ideal, and it was strongly linked to a stoical and muscular form of masculinity. While it suffused the culture, it received a striking embodiment in one of Jacques-Louis David’s most famous paintings, The Oath of the Horatii, which he painted in 1784. The painting draws on a Roman legend, in which three brothers of the Horatius family decide to fight three brothers of the Curiatius family in order to spare the population of the two cities they belong to. Their father stands in the middle of the painting holding up swords, and in the left part of the painting, the brothers are shown taking the oath with their arms extended. The painting speaks to the ideas of masculine courage and sacrifice for the common good that are typical of republicanism. The grieving women on the right side represent a world of female sentiment, but they also feed into the republican ideal if we know that one of them, who is betrothed to a Curiatius, will be killed by her returning brother. David would be a friend of Robespierre and a member of the Jacobin club. At this point, he seemed to be bringing out into the open values that had been latent in the culture, and the painting made a splash.74

During his first few months in Saint-Domingue, Sonthonax applied this republican ideal of freedom and civic virtue to all free people in the colony. When he realized that the whites were not willing to work with him, and that for them, revolution meant freedom from metropolitan tyranny, and especially from its moves toward racial equality, he decided to take steps to promote equal citizenship. In October, he and Polverel dissolved the various colonial assemblies and created the Intermediary Commission, six of whose members were to be chosen by the Colonial Assembly before it was dissolved, and six by the two commissioners. As a result, the commission was composed of six whites and six men of color. They also rewrote the laws regarding municipal elections to include free people of color. At the end of that month, Sonthonax organized a huge assembly on the Champ de Mars, a large public space on the west side of the city, during which the armed forces and the local governments swore allegiance to France, after which Polverel left for the western province and Ailhaud for the southern one, in order to establish a metropolitan presence throughout the colony. A few days later, Sonthonax wrote to the Convention: “Count always on an indefatigable zeal, on an invincible courage, on a boundless devotion to the interests of France and the cause of the Revolution” (Stein, 55). As his relationship to the whites soured, he decided to promote a few nonwhites to officer status in the regular forces. On 1 December, he assembled all the troops on the Champ de Mars again, and except for the Régiment du Cap, which had refused to have a nonwhite as an officer, they all swore allegiance to the law of 4 April.75 All the steps Sonthonax was taking were meant to create the egalitarian, patriotic republic he aspired to.

It is unclear at what point Belley came in close contact with Sonthonax. In an account of the deputies’ trip to France, it is said he was serving as an officer in a white line regiment, and he says he had been serving France for more than twenty-five years.76 Most probably, he was a member of law enforcement when Sonthonax arrived and was then promoted to officer in the regular troops. In a letter to Joseph Georges Boisson, another black deputy in Paris, from February 1798, he asks him to “say many good things to our friend Sonthonax,”77 a clear indication that they had developed a strong relationship. So if it hadn’t been completely developed by the time Sonthonax arrived, Belley’s republican worldview certainly received a boost from the commissioner. Indeed, soon after he arrived in Le Cap, most free people of color living there gave Sonthonax their total support. In December, whites, led by a rumor that free men of color were preparing to kill them, led an attack against the barracks of the Sixth Regiment, the regiment of free men of color. These men defended Sonthonax and then retreated to the outskirts of the city. In the next few days, he arrested the leaders of the attack and deported them. On 16 December, he rewarded the free blacks by creating six compagnies franches, each composed of fifty free blacks. Soon after, the colony received the news that France had been declared a republic. For Belley and all free blacks in Le Cap, Sonthonax was clearly a symbol of republican ardor and equal citizenship.78

Sonthonax’s actions over the course of 1793 confirmed this, and Belley would play a part in them. In March, he joined Polverel in the western province, and they moved against Port-au-Prince, which was resisting their authority and condemning the Revolution. After the city surrendered, they created the Legion of Equality, dominated by nonwhites, and they reorganized the National Guard, placing nonwhites in positions of command. On 7 May, Thomas François Galbaud, the new governor of Saint-Domingue, arrived in Le Cap. Seeing hope in him, counterrevolutionaries flocked to the city while Sonthonax was away. When they heard that Galbaud was openly criticizing them, calling them dictators and playing down the idea of racial equality, Sonthonax and Polverel decided to come back to the northern province. After more threatening talk by Galbaud, they dismissed him and sent him back to France to account for himself in front of the Convention. Once again, it seemed as if the Revolution was gaining ground.

But the reaction became more dramatic—and tragic—than the commissioners had anticipated. They put Galbaud on board the Normandy, one of the military vessels moored in Le Cap’s harbor. These vessels, though, were packed with sailors who had lived in the colony for a while and who often sympathized with the white counterrevolutionaries. On those ships were also a number of whites who were being deported as a consequence of the Port-au-Prince conflict. Galbaud and his brother managed to take control of most of the ships, and on the afternoon of 20 June, they attacked the town, two thousand strong. The commissioners had no time to organize a defense, but several troops lined up to defend the government buildings, including line regiments and men of color commanded by Belley. The assailants retreated, but the next day they came back and captured the arsenal, and the commissioners fled to the outskirts of the city. After someone opened the prisons and hundreds of imprisoned slaves were released, a sort of guerrilla war started, and as a result, most of the city was burned to the ground. The commissioners made a declaration: they would grant freedom to all the slaves who would fight for the republic. Several thousand insurgents then flocked into town, and many whites fled, as well as many of their slaves. When the commissioners came back, the scale of the destruction was shocking, but the republic had gained many new black citizens.79

On 29 August, Sonthonax proclaimed general abolition in the northern province. Though not a member of the Société des Amis des Noirs, he had long been an abolitionist and well acquainted with Brissot, whom he knew through the Jacobin club, and who had recommended him for the post of commissioner. In February 1793, he had written to the Convention, urging it to “fix the lot of the slaves” (Stein, 83) as soon as possible. That same month, Britain and Spain declared war on France, and in its answer to Sonthonax, the Convention gave the commissioners virtually unlimited powers. On 5 May, the commissioners issued a proclamation dealing with treatment of the slaves. While the decree still contained a few harsh measures, such as whipping and even death, it clearly sympathized with the slaves and placed the rebellion within the context of slave mistreatment. On 21 June, as promised, Sonthonax gave freedom to all the blacks who had fought for the republic. At the end of August, finally, a few days after he received a petition from an assembly of fifteen thousand people, he issued a proclamation, which he read aloud to a huge assembled crowd. “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights,” he said solemnly, finally making public the first principle of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen; “that, citizens, is the gospel of France.” After proclaiming general abolition, he made the following clear: “Never forget . . . that of all the whites in the universe, only the French of Europe are your friends” (Stein, 89). All those present—and Belley among them—heard that the universal principles leading to liberty and citizenship were deeply bound up with the ideals of the French Republic. Patriotism and republicanism went hand in hand. For days, festivals and ceremonies were held both in Le Cap and throughout the northern province.

In the western province, Polverel, who had come back by the end of July, issued a decree that was both more conservative and more progressive than Sonthonax’s. He freed all the slaves who did not belong to loyal citizens. This means that abolition was not universal, but those who were freed became the owners of the abandoned plantations. Because Polverel’s republicanism included a concern for the rights of property, he left the “loyal” planters alone, but in all other cases, he inaugurated a groundbreaking plan of land redistribution. The freedmen were also declared French citizens and would enjoy all the rights of citizenship. By October, he decreed general emancipation for the whole colony, and his plan of redistribution was never put into practice. But it does show the extent to which the notion of equality could be radicalized. Indeed, his final plan did include measures that gave workers a degree of control over their labor, such as participation in workplace elections. The commissioners had definitely given the colony—and France—a taste of what republicanism could look like.80

•

Belley soon had a chance to see republicanism in action and to be a part of it. Shortly after his declaration, Sonthonax finally decided to direct local assemblies in the northern province to choose representatives who would elect deputies to the Convention. On 23 September, a meeting took place in the government building of Le Cap in order to proceed with the election of the deputies. After someone remarked that several electors had not arrived yet, the assembly decided to push the meeting back to the next morning, and after two envoys came back with the commissioner’s written permission, the meeting was adjourned. The next morning, the remaining electors had finally arrived, and the voting could proceed. Someone suggested that, since the meeting was an important one for the public good, the doors be left open. All agreed, and the doors were opened. The assembly then chose a president, a secretary, and three verifiers. The representatives then proceeded with the election of six deputies and three substitutes. The first deputy to be elected with an absolute majority was “citizen Belley.” Five more deputies followed: Louis-Pierre Dufaÿ, white; Joseph Georges Boisson, black; Pierre-Nicolas Garnot, white; Jean-Baptiste Mills, of mixed race; and Réchin, black. After the vote, each of the four deputies present took an individual oath, promising “to be faithful to the French Republic, to obey all the laws of France, already decreed and to be decreed, and to use their power to maintain Liberty and Equality.”81 Because Réchin would be unable to leave Port-de-Paix, which was encircled by British ships, he would be replaced by Etienne Bussière Laforest, of mixed race. But Boisson would be detained, and so when Belley stepped into the Convention in February 1794, he was the only full-blooded black of the delegation.

But before that moment could happen, the deputies had to make the trip to France, and the adventures they had on their way there were a sore reminder that many people were hostile to what they represented. In a letter written to their constituents on 14 December, while stationed in New York, they described what had happened. As soon as they boarded the ship, Le Citoyen de Marseilles, they were subjected to disdainful behavior and insults from the passengers. These were whites in exile from Le Cap as a result of the events of the past few months, as well as Captain Planche, who colluded with them. After the ship dropped anchor in the Delaware River, on 6 November, men who had been deported from Saint-Domingue came on board from a French privateer and started insulting the deputies and what they represented. Sailors shouted that the deputation should be hung or shot. Others concurred: “I’ll be the executioner!” When they moored before Philadelphia the next day, the deputies learned that French migrants living in the city had boarded an American ship and had insulted and mistreated Garnot, who was aboard. They asked to be allowed to leave, but the captain refused. The next morning, Dufaÿ jumped into a rowboat full of soldiers and the captain had to let him go, but as soon as he disembarked, he was assailed by several Frenchmen who insulted him and threatened him; they were about to jump on him when a woman intervened and bravely resisted them, and he managed to escape.82

Belley was a special target. Most of these whites had left Saint-Domingue after the June battle in Le Cap, which had left the city in flames, and their resentment was still raw, especially against a black man. A group of them boarded the ship, and the captain took them to Belley and Boisson. They beat Boisson, and then “they went to Belley, grabbed his sword, beat him, searched him, stole his watch, his money, his papers, all the belongings that were in his room, and insulted him.”83 They were particularly sore about the fact that Belley “dared to serve in a line regiment as an officer, and to command whites.”84 Belley answered that “he only saw in his position his duties toward France, that he had served her for twenty-five years, and that anyway, if one was able to save and defend whites, there was no reason one could not command them.”85 Hearing this, they fell upon him, and one of them approached him with a dagger in his hand, asking him to remove his cocarde, saying that a black man should not be allowed to wear it. The cocarde was a round piece of cloth featuring three colors in concentric circles—red, white, and blue—that had become the symbol of one’s loyalty to the principles of the Revolution. Belley answered “that he would not remove it, and that they could strike him.”86 One of them pulled off his cocarde, but he answered proudly: “You won’t remove the one that I’m wearing in my heart.”87 After this, they ransacked Dufaÿ’s room and took Boisson hostage.

This is the first time we hear Belley speak, and the voice is stunning. Here is a man whose skin color in Saint-Domingue had for so long been associated with slavery and degradation, who was a slave until his late teens, who had to work hard in order to free himself, and who now declared his undying devotion to, and love for, his country. But this is a country symbolized by the tricolor cocarde, and so to him, France signified a revolutionary universalism that had not been attained elsewhere and that had been reinforced for him by the entrance into the colony of a few enlightened and devoted commissioners. Belley’s own devotion was also anchored in his military life, which put him in the heart of republican ideology. The pride and patriotism we hear in his responses to the white assailants show that he managed to glean from his environment the ideas and values that best suited his desires and personality. By doing this, he became one of the most potent spokespersons for the French Revolution.

Aware of his special status within the deputation, Belley added his own individual letter to his black constituents. He tells them that, in other circumstances, he would have been ready to die, but he withstood all the humiliations from those “villainous deported colons” because “I was suffering for my brothers: I had to sacrifice all to the success of our mission.”88 He urges them to join the commissioners in “combatting all the enemies of the Republic”: “Remember that only France recognizes liberty; that the British and the Spaniards, in coalition with aristocratic or royalist colons, want to throw you back into debasement and slavery, and that you promised me to all die rather than let the northern province be invaded.” Finally, he enjoins them to live in peace with the French who stayed, and to obey and protect the commissioners: “My co-citizens, imitate the French who are fighting for their freedom, and who not only know how to die, but also know how to vanquish.”89 The man who speaks in this letter has clearly absorbed the ideals of republicanism and urges all to suffer for them. He was now on his way to the beloved country that symbolized them.

Being Black in France

As a black person in Paris in 1794, Belley was bound to encounter a variety of racial attitudes. As in many other European nations, racial thought was in turmoil, but in France, recent events made it even more complex. Like the Dutch and the British, the French in previous centuries had often looked at Africans in positive ways. The eighteenth century saw the slow growth throughout Europe of the kind of biological racism one more commonly associates with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the same time, though, the universalism that characterized the Enlightenment and the egalitarian principles of the French Revolution were at the root of the friendly embrace Belley received on the floor of the Convention. More than any other country, it seemed as if the nation stood on the cusp of a new age. But it could easily be swung in a different direction.

•

The French had only sporadic contact with Africans during the Middle Ages, and the few contacts they had seem to have elicited respect and even admiration. There is the famous story of Ismeria, a black woman from the Sudan who, sometime in the twelfth century, saved three French knights’ lives while they were held in captivity in Cairo as a result of the Crusades. She converted to Catholicism, married Robert d’Eppes, one of the crusaders, and came to live in France. At her death, the knights had a shrine built in her honor, and several French kings, including François I, Henri III, Louis XIII, and Louis XIV, are known to have gone to Liesse, a town in the north of France, to pay their respects to the “Black Madonna.” Thousands of people still make the pilgrimage every year.90

The early modern period saw a more regular presence of blacks in France, and they seem to have been received without prejudice. François I, who ruled in the first half of the sixteenth century and spearheaded French exploration in the New World, was known to have a black mistress.91 In his early-twentieth-century history of foreigners in France, Jules Mathorez seems proud to assert that French captains liked to liberate Spanish slaves, highlighting the “benevolent way in which they were received in France,” where they were “free and independent.”92 Such is the case of Poix-Blanc, an African liberated from the Spaniards, who had been taken to Dieppe, a port in Normandy, received some instruction, and converted to Christianity. He was said to have fought bravely during the siege of Dieppe in 1567, “his sword in his hand, always leading the defenders, whom he would encourage both by his words and by his example.” Guillaume and Jean Daval, writing in the seventeenth century, continue with the sadder part of his story, of how his master agreed to bring him to justice when the hateful leader of the city, Sigongne, felt offended by some remarks he had made; before the master, surprised by the harshness of the persecution, could do anything, Sigongne had the African hung publicly; the master’s subsequent financial demise was attributed by many to “divine vengeance, as he had too quickly brought to justice, and consequently led to his death, the poor negro.”93 As the century went on, more and more blacks came into the country, as indicated by baptisms listed in church registries, in towns situated not just on the Atlantic coast but in the interior. A street in Orléans, a city about eighty miles south of Paris, still bears the name “Rue des Africains”; a “collège des Africains” apparently stood on that street.94

The next century does not seem to have changed racial attitudes significantly. In 1644, the Count d’Avaux, a French diplomat who was in Münster, Germany, for the lengthy negotiations that would end with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, apparently made quite a splash when, one day during the week before Easter, he filled the cathedral with a retinue of 140 blacks. When they entered the cathedral and saw the scene, according to the count’s agent Saint-Romain, the three Spanish ambassadors looked horrified and left, a bit confused, through another door.95 We do not know how the blacks were gathered or what happened to them afterward, but the author of the anecdote clearly aims to flatter his subject by implying a connection between French and Africans that other Europeans did not have.

Over the course of the seventeenth century, the French seem to have become accustomed to the presence of blacks in their midst, a number of whom even became famous. Various black children were baptized and educated in aristocratic households, and others worked as domestics. One woman became famous as “the Mooress of Moret.” Rumor had it that this woman was the queen’s or the king’s illegitimate daughter. She spent most of her life in the convent of Moret, near Paris, and received a pension from the king. Members of the royal family and entourage visited her often. This woman’s origins have never been verified, but the rumors certainly did catch on.96

The French were particularly taken with Africans of royal blood. In the spring of 1635, a man named Zaga-Christ, supposedly the son of a former king of Ethiopia, made a much-awaited entrance in Paris. Of course, Ethiopia, with its history of Christianity and the never-ending rumors of the presence of Prester John, a legendary Christian ruler, exercised a particular fascination on French minds. But Zaga-Christ himself made quite an impression. Two contemporary accounts tell of the adventures that took him through the desert, to Egypt, to Jerusalem, and to Rome, where he met the French ambassador, who brought him back to France, supposedly so that the French king could help him regain his throne. But soon after his arrival, Zaga-Christ became renowned for being “a valiant champion in the games of Venus”97 and for using his skills with aristocratic women as a source of income. He died in 1638, in the residence of no less than the Cardinal de Richelieu.

Some Africans also found themselves in France in a diplomatic capacity, and as such, they were received grandly. A much-publicized event was the arrival in late 1670 of Matteo Lopez, ambassador of the king of Ardres, or Allada, in what is currently Benin but was then called the Slave Coast. Since the visit was meant to seal the newly minted commercial relationship between the two kingdoms, Lopez was received with the highest honors. In Jean-Baptiste Labat’s account, he was an older man, but still vigorous, with lively eyes and an agreeable appearance. He was accompanied by three wives, three sons, and several servants. During the layover in Martinique, he was received “with all possible magnificence,” and in Dieppe, “with honor.” In Paris, he was welcomed with two coaches and six horses and was lodged at a luxurious hotel. He had an audience with Louis XIV on 19 December at the Château des Tuileries, and when he and his family arrived, in coaches sent by the king and the queen, several battalions were standing there to receive them. Inside, the stairs leading to the king were lined with the archers of the Grand Prévôt, or chief of the king’s police, who was “superbly dressed.” The Marquess de Rochefort then led the ambassador and his family through two rows of guards and then through a large crowd of “people of quality.” The king was covered with diamonds.98 While this grand reception was in many ways an acknowledgment of how much French commerce depended on the Africans’ willingness to trade with them, it certainly implied a view of Africans as equal partners, deserving of grand ceremonies.

Two other areas on the African coast that were courted by the French sent various representatives, and each time, it is their political identity that seemed to play a prominent role in the way they were perceived, even if racial difference was never forgotten. Two ambassadors sent by the king of Eguafo, an area on the coast of what is now Ghana, arrived in Paris in April 1672. In a letter, an administrator mentions “two blacks, people of quality.” The king was away, but they were taken to Paris, “to let them see the royal houses and fill them with the grandeur of this nation,” and were then sent back home with presents “for their king and for them, and to assure him of His Majesty’s protection and friendship . . . and in order to establish trade with the French in his country.”99 A more durable memory was left by Aniaba, sent as a teenager by the king of Issiny, in what is now Ivory Coast, and who stayed in France for more than ten years. Both kingdoms thought of him as a good investment in their commercial relationship, but once in France, he became an icon who seamlessly seemed to merge racial difference, cultural assimilation, and political value. He received an education, converted, was baptized in 1691 by the famous theologian Bossuet, met with Louis XIV, and soon took part in the leisurely activities of aristocratic life. He also became a lieutenant in the king’s regiment and overall gained such trust and admiration that when he left, he was counted on to take over the throne of Issiny.100 The fact that a fictionalized treatment of his life published in 1740 marries him off to a white woman gives a sense of France’s racial context at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

•

French attitudes toward blacks then went through a clear, if gradual, change over the course of the eighteenth century. By the time Belley arrived in the country, the French were still prone to lionizing exceptional blacks, and the revolutionary discourses of equality and fraternity certainly helped shape racial attitudes, providing the long tradition of open-mindedness just described with an ideological foundation. At the same time, a desire to legislate the black presence in the country, combined with the rise of scientific thought and its push toward racial classification, had led to the first formal and explicit statements of French racism, though they did not go uncontested. More than other European countries, France showed extremes, both positive and negative, in attitudes toward blacks.

Shelby T. McCloy’s statement in the introduction to his 1961 study that “France is commonly known throughout the world for friendliness toward the Negro” (3) may be an indirect comment on his own American context, but it is also the result of a reputation that France partly acquired through its visible embrace of a number of blacks throughout history. In the last decades of the eighteenth century, for example, three black men became known for their distinctive careers. Guillaume Guillon Lethière, born in Guadeloupe to a French official and an enslaved mother, was a painter famous for his works in the neoclassical style, often competing with Jacques-Louis David, the most prominent painter of the time. He would later be director of the French Academy in Rome, a member of the Legion of Honor, and a professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.101 Chevalier de Saint-Georges, also born in Guadeloupe, became famous as a classical composer and an accomplished violinist. He was also a superior swordsman and was named colonel of an all-black regiment. Alexandre Dumas, born in Saint-Domingue, father of the famous author of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, became a general in the French army and played an important role during the revolutionary wars. Each of them experienced some forms of rejection because of his race, but the predominant context seems to have been one of acceptance and meritocracy. Unlike Capitein’s, their blackness seems to have been embraced rather than erased.

On the other hand, the eighteenth century also saw many French individuals bringing Africans to France as students, servants, or slaves, and while these immigrants added a note of multiracialism to French society, they also contributed to an association of blacks with a dependent status or with the working class. Young Africans also tended to be appreciated for their exotic appeal. Mathorez mentions businessmen from Nantes noticing that young blacks were popular and how “together with parrots and sometimes monkeys, they are part of the family.” At one point, one of them asks his agents to bring him women with well-shaped breasts: “He wants black Venuses.” At the court, “everybody wanted to have his negro.”102 Probably the most famous black-skinned child, though of Bengali origin, was Zamor, servant to the Countess du Barry, Louis XV’s official mistress. Her biographers introduce him as her “pet negro child, something of a human chimera, there to bring serving plates with refreshments, hold the parasol, and roll over on the rugs.”103 The Knight de Boufflers, who was named governor of Senegal in 1785, is known for bringing back several African children, one of whom he gave to Madame de Sabran, his future wife, and another to Marie Antoinette.

Interestingly, these servants were not necessarily made to lose their independent spirit. Zamor would testify against Du Barry during the Revolution, in a trial that sent her to the guillotine. Mercure, servant and messenger to Abraham Gradis, a rich shipowner from Bordeaux, once rode his horse so proudly and so fast through the streets of Paris that he ran over the Count de Choiseul-Praslin, future minister of the navy. The count, full of bruises and subjected to a bleeding, “complained.”104

In parallel with this phenomenon of inclusion through work, study, or exoticization, a discourse of discrimination and exclusion also developed, first aimed at slaves. One main issue in the course of the century was the legal status of slaves brought to France by their owners. An early case had taken place in 1571, when a Norman slave merchant had arrived in Bordeaux with a cargo of slaves and had tried to sell them; he was arrested and the slaves were declared free.105 In the eighteenth century, however, a number of measures were taken to accommodate colons. In October 1716, a royal edict allowed colons to bring slaves to France for purposes of religious or skilled trades instruction; these slaves were not allowed to demand their freedom on the ground that they had set foot in France, as such a possibility would cause colons “considerable loss” (Boulle, 248). Still, any administrative error led to automatic freedom. A much stricter edict was put out in December 1738. It starts by stating a concern that slaves brought to France are developing a “spirit of independence” and that those who stay are sometimes becoming “dangerous” (251). As a consequence, it limits the amount of time they can stay in France, as well as the types of cases in which they can go free. But because these edicts were not ratified by the Parlement of Paris, France’s highest court, they were not considered official law, and when over 150 slaves sued for their freedom over the next decades, most of them won their suits.106 At this point, then, the principle of freedom underscoring the 1571 decision trumped the desire on the part of the government to protect the economic well-being of its colonies.

This situation led to a new royal edict, promulgated in August 1777, which struck quite a different tone and stands out through its reliance on racial vocabulary. The new law, called a declaration “concerning the policing of blacks,” consistently referred to “black domestics.” Its main tenet was to prohibit entry to all people of color. Blacks who accompanied their owners for the voyage had to be detained in one of the dépôts set up in each major French port. Moreover, every black person living in France had to go to the authorities and make a declaration containing his or her personal information, such as name, age, profession, and birthplace. The next year, an edict forbade interracial marriage. These measures seem surprising considering the fairly open-minded racial context described above. To Sue Peabody, the phenomenon makes sense in that the rise of the “notion of freedom” (8) naturally gave way to two antithetical responses: the protection and expansion of that freedom for all individuals and the reinforcement of social hierarchy as a reaction. Looked at from a more pragmatic angle, the edict can also be interpreted as not primarily racial in intent. Clearly, the crown’s major concern was still that “every day those men most necessary for the cultivation of land in the Colonies are staying away.”107 And the courts’ refusal to recognize the status of “slave” in France made recourse to another kind of vocabulary necessary. Indeed, it is clear that the drafters did not want free blacks to leave and infect the colonies with their spirit of independence. Even the proscription of interracial marriage was presented as temporary, until the status of the people involved was cleared up.108 On the other hand, in the letter that he sent around for comments in order to draft the law, Antoine de Sartine, secretary of state for the navy, mentions that the blacks “get more numerous in the kingdom, the colors are mixing, our blood is deteriorating.”109 The fact that all the French courts agreed to register the law shows that there was no serious query of this way of thinking.

It is also noteworthy that by then, racial theories had become more formalized, at least in certain milieus. Some governmental figures were wielding the vocabulary of “races” and “bloods.” As early as 1716, the mayor of Nantes, when asked whether colons could be allowed to bring their slaves to France, wrote that blacks are “naturally inclined to stealing, sex, laziness, and treason. . . . Generally speaking, they belong in servitude.”110 As Pierre H. Boulle notes, though, he had a liberal attitude toward marriage, and his need to justify slavery might indicate a few pangs of conscience. In a 1763 letter, the Duke de Choiseul, secretary of the navy, vented his fears about blacks’ “communication with whites, which results in a mixed blood that increases every day.”111 In a 1776 report to a committee on legislation, Guillaume Poncet de la Grave, crown prosecutor at the admiralty court in Paris, complained about blacks’ “marriages with Europeans,” so that “the colors mix” and “the blood is altered” (McCloy, 46). According to McCloy, none of this new ideology seems to have spread to the French populace, and “mixed couples seem to have faced no hostile public” (53). Moreover, the royal edicts were not applied systematically. Overall, then, a racial discourse was present in social and political life, but its extent and its depth are hard to measure.

In the world of philosophical and scientific writing, in any case, new forms of racial thinking were clearly emerging. Throughout the century, more systematic attempts to account for physical differences between humans led to a number of theories that seemed to underpin the idea of black inferiority. While these ideas did not necessarily reach a wide public, they established a foundation for racist thought that would be built on in the next centuries. The French were major contributors to this attempt at systematized knowledge.112

In 1739, the members of the Académie Royale des Sciences of Bordeaux announced a prize for the best essay that would explain the origin of blackness; sixteen submitted essays offer a glimpse of the big ideas that would constitute French racial thought in the rest of the century.113 One main source of consensus is monogenism, or the idea that human beings belong to one race and therefore have the same origin. Arguments for monogenism in the essays range from the Scriptures to the ability of people of different races to have offspring. The main explanation for differences in skin color is climate: the authors argue that, somehow, it was the hot African climate that caused whites to develop black skin over time. This explanation, which would remain the most popular, clearly assumes that humans were originally white. This assumption would stay in place and be accompanied by the notion that Africans “degenerated” from the original human group. The question posed by the Académie already presumed that much: “what was the physical cause of blackness and African hair, and what was the cause of their degeneration?” (Curran, 81).

A few years later, the naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Count de Buffon, started publishing his own conclusions, and most of them accord with those found in the essays submitted to the Bordeaux academy. He too is a monogenist, and he attributes differences in skin pigmentation to geographical conditions. The fact that blacks and whites can reproduce shows that “all humans derive from the same stock and are of the same family” (Curran, 106). It is the accident of history, the moving across geographical space through the centuries, that has created differences among people. As Andrew S. Curran points out, referring to Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus’s ranking of human races, “Buffon’s understanding of humankind was implicitly horizontal whereas Linnaeus’s understanding of the genus Homo was vertical and hierarchical” (107). Still, Buffon does present the passage from white to black as a degeneration and does not shy away from judgments about Africans’ social, moral, and intellectual makeup. The result, much like the travel accounts he drew much of his information from, is a mixed discourse, one that combines environmental determinism and essentialized traits, sameness and difference.

Once Buffon had opened the door to essential difference, scientists and philosophers focused on the specifics of blackness and came up with theories that reinforced the idea of fundamentally different bodies. Pierre Barrère, a naturalist who had lived in French Guiana and had supposedly dissected African cadavers there, posited that Africans had black bile. Johann Friedrich Meckel, a German anatomist whose work was read in France but was, as we saw, criticized by Petrus Camper, argued that blacks had darker brains. Claude-Nicolas Le Cat, a surgeon who had performed dissections at the hospital of Rouen, argued for the existence of “an elemental African fluid” (Curran, 125) that darkened Africans’ nerves and fluids, including sperm. To Jean-Baptiste-Claude Delisle de Sales, a philosopher, the different brain had led to “a general ‘inertia of the mind that differs little from stupidity’” (129). It is clear that these writers and scientists were slowly building a case for fundamental differences between the races and that this case was meant to serve a hierarchical view of moral and cognitive abilities.

Among the philosophes, though, we once again find a hodgepodge of egalitarian and racist views. Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, is famous for a passage in The Spirit of the Laws, first published in 1748, in which he ridicules racist justifications for slavery: “Those concerned are black from head to toe, and they have such flat noses that it is almost impossible to feel sorry for them. One cannot get into one’s mind that god, who is a very wise being, should have put a soul, above all a good soul, in a body that was entirely black” (250). Even before the onset of racial theory, Montesquieu was reminding his readers of the dangers of straying from universalist and egalitarian principles. In other parts of the book, though, he develops a climate-based theory of human behavior that comes uncomfortably close to proslavery arguments, as it associates colder climates with qualities such as knowledge and courage and warmer ones with lack of curiosity or of spirit of enterprise. Commentators on Montesquieu are still divided when it comes to the specifics of his positions on race and slavery. Voltaire was much more clear. He rejected monogenism; his theory that human beings belong to essentially separate species was already set in stone in his 1734 Traité de philosophie. While he did not condone slavery, his belief in blacks’ natural inferiority was grist to the proslavery mill. Denis Diderot, on the other hand, was closer to Buffon in his contributions to the Encyclopédie, in that he eschewed classificatory impulses and emphasized monogenism and a dynamic view of human varieties.

Had he been aware of the details of these debates before he arrived in Paris, Belley could still not clearly have predicted how he would be received. In the decades before his arrival, attitudes toward blacks were contradictory, and theories about racial difference were battling it out. Monogenesis prevailed, but polygenesis seemed on the rise. And as we will see, antislavery advocates, inspired by the universalist ideas of the Enlightenment and the Revolution, spread new images of blacks not just as human but as brothers and equal members of the republic.

Blacks, the Revolution, and Abolition

The deputies’ first two days at the Convention were a dramatic step in the history of the French Revolution. After their entrance was announced, on 3 February 1794, Simon Camboulas declared freedom triumphant and equality consecrated: “A black, a yellow, and a white are going to be seated among you, representing the free citizens of Saint-Domingue.”114 Two other representatives, including Georges Danton, the famous revolutionary, spoke out, and then the three deputies entered. As they were proceeding to take their place on the Montagne, the area that seated the Jacobins, so called because they were the highest benches on the ten-tier amphitheater, they were greeted with repeated applause and a “fraternal embrace” from the president.115 The next day, Dufaÿ made a long speech apprising the Convention of what had been happening in the colony. He was repeatedly interrupted by applause, and as soon as he was done, several members remarked that the new republican constitution, which had been approved in September 1793, said nothing about slavery, and it was time to remedy this inexplicable oversight. Jean-François Delacroix, a Jacobin, exclaimed that a longer discussion of this issue would dishonor the assembly and asked that the abolition of slavery be proclaimed immediately. Another confirmed: “It is time for us to rise to the level of the principles of liberty and equality.”116 And he added: “People of color, just like us, wanted to break their chains; we broke ours, refusing to submit to any master; let us give them the same blessing.”117 All then rose to approve the following declaration: “The national Convention decrees that slavery is abolished in the whole territory of the republic; therefore, all men without distinction of color can enjoy the rights of French citizens.”118 The three deputies were then embraced by their colleagues among applause and shouts of Vive la République! Vive la Convention! Vive la Montagne!

It had been a unique, historical, almost magical moment. While the British Parliament had recently passed a few restrictions on the slave trade with much hemming and hawing, and northern American states were passing gradual abolitionist laws that would not free some of their people until well into the nineteenth century, France had removed centuries-old shackles in one clean cut and had declared former slaves French citizens. Clapping and shouting were certainly in order.

Another appearance at the Convention on 3 February coincidentally helped put these events directly in a revolutionary context. According to the Moniteur universel, a newspaper that reproduced legislative debates, the deputies did not enter right away. After they were announced, the representatives suddenly heard military music, and a group of “citizens” marched in, carrying big cauldrons of saltpeter, an essential ingredient in gunpowder. The whole room applauded, and several speeches were made, in which the saltpeter was presented as the new gold of the republic, the symbol of a new freedom and its universal reign. The immediate context was war with England, which had awakened a new martial spirit. A few months earlier, the Convention had proceeded to a levée en masse, a general conscription of all able-bodied men. It also provided huge resources for arms, food, and clothing. Factories put out cannons and balls, while church bells were melted for their metal. As Simon Schama notes, “By the spring of 1794, three thousand workers were producing seven hundred guns a day and, according to Bertrand Barère, six thousand workshops were busy making gunpowder” (Citizens, 765). The wider context was a republican belief in the duty to export the Revolution and exterminate all the tyrants. So the president of the Convention told the citizens before him: “It is with gold that those monsters had fastened your chains, corrupted your ways, perverted the morals of nations; it is with powder and iron that we will purge the earth of those brigands, and feed the glorious tree of liberty with their blood.”119 The entrance of the three deputies from Saint-Domingue seemed a natural embodiment of this projected extension of freedom through the world by any means necessary.

In many ways, this moment also symbolized the state of the French Revolution in the first months of 1794. Since France had been declared a republic on 21 September 1792, its government had become increasingly radical. The Revolutionary Tribunal and the Committee of Public Safety were set up to enforce the new law, initiating a period known as the Terror. The Jacobins, whose figurehead was Maximilien Robespierre, and who were supported by the Parisian working class, represented a strict republicanism, devoted to social egalitarianism and bent on eradicating what deviated from their own view of patriotic virtue. In June 1793, the Girondin leaders, seen as too moderate, were expelled from the Convention. In July, the murder of Jacobin Jean-Paul Marat by Charlotte Corday, a Girondin, became a rallying point for radical republicans. In September, the Convention passed the Law of Suspects, which enabled it to condemn anybody deemed counterrevolutionary. In the next months, thousands of people were executed, both in Paris and in the provinces. On 31 October, twenty-two Girondins were guillotined. The next year, on 27 March 1794, twenty Hébertistes, who formed a populist faction, also went to the guillotine. On 5 April, Danton himself was executed. In its radical break with the past, the immediate and enthusiastic abolition of slavery on 4 February could also be seen as the positive expression of this ever-expanding zeal for a pure, perfect form of republicanism.

•

Indeed, the case can be made that the growth of French abolitionism was tied to an increased devotion to republicanism and that the great decision commonly referred to as 16 Pluviôse was primarily anchored in this ideology. As we have seen, the language of republicanism that Belley was exposed to throughout his life did not just entail the embrace of freedom and political representation. It was also specifically anchored in classical republicanism, an ideal that combined notions of liberty and civic virtue, over against the excesses of self-interest, commercialism, and apathy. As Keith Michael Baker argues, “Classical republicanism found recurrent expression in prerevolutionary France,” and it was “a critical ingredient in contemporary political debates” (36). It also inflected abolitionist debates. French abolitionism was shaped in the course of the eighteenth century, first through texts that argued against slavery using Enlightenment notions of human rights and universalism. Human nature is the same all over the world, the argument went, and this commonality cannot be erased by cultural difference or economic interest. Enslaving human beings is a fundamental negation of our belonging to one single human family and of the rights members of this family are entitled to. A number of abolitionist texts took a different route and argued from a liberal economic perspective that free labor was much more profitable than slave labor. In fact, many arguments anchored in human rights added this one for good measure. In the last decades of the century, though, the tone changed and became more radical. Several texts envisioned the rise of a black revolutionary who would destroy slavery and the whole colonial system, equating abolitionism with a fight for political liberty and a radical transformation of society. Combined with other political interventions, and with the news of the freedom that the slaves themselves had obtained in Saint-Domingue and that had been made official in Sonthonax’s declaration, this discourse contributed to shaping the minds of the men who enthusiastically declared the end of slavery in 1794. For this reason, it is worth taking a closer look at those texts.

Some of the most famous writers of the French Enlightenment spoke out against slavery from a human rights perspective, often in the indirect or ironic way typical of eighteenth-century critical discourse. In his already discussed satirical chapter from The Spirit of the Laws, “On the Slavery of Negroes,” Montesquieu makes fun not only of racism but also of various arguments used to defend slavery. “Sugar would be too expensive if the plant producing it were not cultivated by slaves,” he says, turning the economic argument into a small-minded defense of luxurious pleasures. He also attacks cultural prejudice: “A proof that Negroes do not have common sense is that they make more of a glass necklace than of one of gold, which is of such great consequence among nations having a police.”120 Finally, he turns to the religious argument: “It is impossible for us to assume that these people are men because if we assumed they were men one would begin to believe that we ourselves were not Christians” (250). A similarly broad attack against slavery takes place in a famous scene from Voltaire’s satirical tale Candide (1759). On his way to Surinam—in this case, a town—Candide runs into a black man whose left leg and right hand are missing. Asked what happened to him, the man explains that he is a slave and that his hand was cut off because he lost a finger in the sugar mill, and his leg, because he tried to run away. “It is at this price that you eat sugar in Europe” (51), he concludes. With these barbs against slavery’s attack on human rights and human dignity, Montesquieu and Voltaire offered no abolitionist programs, but they anchored antislavery thought in a humanist approach.

The Encyclopédie, a multivolume “reasoned dictionary” published between 1751 and 1772, also contributed to a philosophical critique of slavery. The entry on slavery, written by prolific contributor Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt, replicated Montesquieu’s critique and even, as Jean Ehrard shows, radicalized it.121 The entry opens with a definition of slavery as “the establishment of a right founded on force, which makes one man as much the property of another man, that this man is the absolute master of his life, his belongings, and his freedom.” While this sentence almost reproduces the opening sentence of Montesquieu’s chapter on slavery, it adds the notion of “force” and the notion of “freedom,” negating from the start any possible interpretation of slavery as voluntary or acceptable. Jaucourt starts the development of his argument by stating that “all men are born free.”122 He then paints a picture of the growth of slavery through the centuries, underlining the mildness of the Greek and early Roman systems, in which slaves received an education and enjoyed a degree of professional independence. But the empire devised cruel laws, through which the slaves’ lives were completely dependent on the masters; the Franks, a Germanic tribe that invaded France, were not much more lenient. It took the growth of Christianity to soften customs, and in 1315, Louis X declared that, since all men are born free, the serfs should be free. As Ehrard points out, the article suggests a “philosophy of history,” according to which European culture has been gradually progressing toward abolition.123 The implication is that slavery has no place in contemporary life. It is “an affront to man’s liberty,” it is “contrary to natural and civil law,” and it is “unnecessary.”124

Since the anchor of his argument is freedom, Jaucourt spends some time defining and discussing it and, in so doing, offers a powerful analysis of the right to freedom. Freedom is “linked so closely with man’s preservation that it can only be separated from him by what also destroys his conservation and his life.” Anyone who tries to make him submissive is “in a state of war” with him, since what he does is “a manifest attempt on his life.” “From the moment that a man wants me to submit to him unwillingly,” Jaucourt says, trying to place himself in this situation, “I’m allowed to think that, if he succeeds, he will treat me according to his whims, and will not hesitate to kill me when it fancies him.” Therefore, “freedom is what can be called the rampart of my conservation, and the foundation of everything else that belongs to me.” Having defended freedom as a natural right, Jaucourt moves to defend it as a civil right. A law accepting slavery is always and in all cases against the slave, and such a law cannot exist because it goes against all fundamental principles of society. Slaves by definition live in a state that is outside of the law; the only law pertaining to them is that of the master, and that’s the law of the strongest. Finally, slavery goes against any form of government, whether a monarchy, a democracy, or an aristocracy. Ultimately, everything should contribute to “leaving to man the dignity that is natural to him.”125 Jaucourt used an argument anchored in liberal individualism, devoted to the fundamental right to human freedom and based on an erasing of racial difference.

On the eve of the Revolution, the human rights approach was made most visible by the Société des Amis des Noirs. Founded by Brissot and Etienne Clavière in February 1788, it originally focused on the abolition of the slave trade, in keeping with its British model, the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, which had been founded in London the year before. But the ultimate goal was the abolition of slavery and an economic restructuring of the colonies. In a speech held at the first meeting, Brissot first underlined the universal human need for freedom, as well as “the prodigious influence of liberty on the development of human reason, and on the establishment of universal peace.” He insists that enlightenment and moral growth of the masses—“la masse entière de la Nation” (“Adresse,” 8)—can only happen when people are free, not under slavery or despotism. He does use economic arguments, referring to the work of Pierre Poivre, who argued that free cultivation of sugar in the east is much more productive, and arguing that an Africa that does not trade in slaves will be more peaceful and commercially inclined. But he makes it clear that the société’s main concern is “humanity, the public good” without losing sight of the national interest. The Société’s role is thus to inform the public and the government of the conditions of the slaves and to lobby the ministers and even the king “until it has obtained the liberty of our brothers.”126 Though the society remained small, its members kept the issue public by issuing pamphlets, newspaper articles, and translations of British abolitionist writings.

A number of abolitionists did rely on purely economic arguments, and according to Madeleine Dobie, this type of argument became the dominant one in the second half of the eighteenth century. This was the case among the so-called physiocrats, whose economic theory emphasized self-interest and laissez-faire. Over against the until then dominant theory of mercantilism, anchored in monopoly, the hoarding of bullion, and a positive trade balance, the new theory emphasized “the production, circulation, and consumption of goods” (203) as the source of a nation’s wealth. Several abolitionists argued that slavery prevented the application of these principles. In a 1771 essay, for example, Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours starts by asserting that slavery is morally unjustifiable, even if economically advantageous. Even if abolition raised the price of sugar, “we shouldn’t hesitate, we should resign ourselves to paying more for sugar, or even to doing without, rather than violate the rights of humanity so cruelly.”127 But he then proceeds to show in detail how slavery and the slave trade are both less profitable than commonly thought. Dobie concludes that this approach “had limitations” (250) because it “detracted from the urgency of the cause” by “translating what should have been a categorical imperative into a field of calculation” (251). So while this approach no doubt had some impact, it was only one factor among others in the decision of 16 Pluviôse.

A move toward a less theoretical, more gut-wrenching illustration of blacks’ desire for freedom took place in the second half of the century and appeared in fictional images of rebellious slaves that often carried a republican message. This message emphasized equality as well as freedom, and it did not necessarily ask readers to forget about racial difference but rather asked that blackness, and the bodies of blacks, be respected and even admired. An early yet powerful figure is Moses Bom Saam, a probably fictional rebellion leader whose speech the Abbé Prévost featured in his review Le pour et contre in 1735. As Prévost points out in his introduction, the text is his translation from a speech that appeared in a British magazine.128 Moses starts by telling his companions that, even though he has been free for many years, he has not ceased to suffer because he had to witness the plight of his brothers. Unlike whites, who live “in luxury and softness,” he has used these years to educate himself and has realized that whites are not, as they claim, superior by nature. Indeed—and here the statement is stronger than the English original—they are actually inferior, with their “sickly and disgusting whiteness,” compared to blacks’ “noble and majestic color,” as well as strength and virility. After stating that they have the same freedoms and the same rights as whites, he urges them to flee to the mountains and start a new society. They are not strong enough yet to take over the island, but at least they will be independent. In Prévost’s version, Moses envisions a community based on equality: “Let us take possession of this vast highland that from now on we will share, and let us divide it between ourselves without preference and without jealousy”—a definitely more egalitarian statement than the English original, in which he says: “Let us divide, and appropriate, the Highlands” (22).129 They will form a strong state and will be feared and respected by the whites. The speech is not just about slavery; it is also about the politics of a good society.

The 1774 multiauthored edition of Guillaume Thomas François Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes contains a famous passage about slave rebellion that has a similar republican tenor. After describing the Middle Passage and suggesting reforms to the horrible conditions of slave life, the author, Denis Diderot, declares he will not debase himself by “justifying through politics what morality abhors.” He has focused on reforms as a temporary measure, but while waiting for “big revolutions,” he asserts that the nation needs to “rise higher.” He then critiques slavery by focusing on freedom as a human right but also on fighting for freedom as completely legitimate: “I hold from nature the right to defend myself.” After giving graphic descriptions of what this right entails and attacking rationalizations of slavery one after another, he exclaims: “Let us break the chains of so many victims of our cupidity, even if we have to renounce a commerce that only has injustice at its core, and luxury as its object.” The slaves have already started acting, and all they need is a courageous leader: “Where is this great man, whom nature perhaps owes the honor of the human race? Where is he, this new Spartacus, who will find no Crassus? Then the code noir will disappear, and how terrible the code blanc will be, if the victor is only out for vengeance.”130 Reference to the Roman icon Spartacus once again places slave rebellion within a republican framework, and the warning implies that it is still time to create a more equal society.

The inspiration for this passage, which was not in the 1770 edition, may have been a novel by Louis-Sébastien Mercier, L’an 2440: Rêve s’il en fut jamais (1770), a utopian novel in which the narrator dreams that he wakes up in the year 2440 and is led around Paris by a friendly guide. Everything he sees testifies to a society that values the individual but also, although it is still ruled by a king, functions more like a republic, with a senate and various states. This king often walks the streets of Paris, for example, and sometimes spends the night at an artisan’s house. All the citizens have equal rights, and while it does not have complete economic equality, the nation tries to minimize differences between rich and poor. The focus is on talent and virtue rather than on self-interest and luxury. At one point, the narrator sees, on a beautiful pedestal, the statue of “a negro, his head naked, his arm stretched out, his eye proud, his attitude noble and imposing.” At his feet can be read: “To the avenger of the new world!” The narrator’s guide explains how this man’s courage and “virtuous vengeance” were rewarded. The slaves, suddenly transformed into heroes, killed all their European tyrants; using iron, poison, and fire, they made the soil of the Americas soak up their blood. Standing in front of the statue, the narrator and his guide celebrate the fact that these strong men managed to “reestablish the balance that the iniquity of ferocious ambition had managed to destroy.”131 Rebellion is necessary, the author implies, in order to repair the breaches created by an excessive focus on self-interest and to create the ideal republic of the future.

It may not be surprising that the first full-fledged story of a rebelling slave, Ziméo (1769), was written by Jean-François de Saint-Lambert. A poet and a military officer who had ties with famous writers such as Voltaire, Diderot, and Raynal, Saint-Lambert developed ideas very much in keeping with the universalist humanism of the Enlightenment. At the same time, his writings show an engagement with classical republicanism, partly inspired by his study of the Greeks and the Romans. His famous pastoral poem, The Seasons, typically praises lives spent tending the earth and enjoying simple pleasures. His article on “luxury” for the Encyclopédie displays a republican interest in the subject. After stating that a desire for luxury has moved all societies for centuries, he remarks that it is now being particularly praised by politicians “who speak about it more as merchants or salesmen than as philosophers or men of state.” He then rebuts various defenses of luxury, praising Holland for its frugality and simplicity and showing that luxurious nations are not richer, more powerful, more virtuous, or more devoted to science and art. He does refute those who say that luxury leads to inequality, urbanization, and lack of patriotic courage. And he tackles the commonly held opinion that luxury has led to the rise and fall of nations and empires. True, in nascent societies, in which “personal interest” is subservient to “general interest,” “patriotic spirit” and “virtues” flourish; as societies grow, while science and art develop, so do luxury and corruption. But corruption is less a consequence of luxury than of tyranny. Ultimately, luxury is only one factor among many in the rise and fall of nations. Still, Saint-Lambert spends much time arguing that, while it can be an incentive to industry and commerce, luxury is a cause of downfall when it is not made subservient “to the spirit of community, to the good of the community.” Luxury is only laudable when the government works for “the common good.”132 Saint-Lambert shows both a liberal concern for economic incentives and a republican preoccupation with the excesses of self-interest.

While it may have been influenced by Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), the tragic story of an African prince enslaved in the West Indies, Ziméo focuses more on the revolt and shows the author’s interest in economic and political implications. In a later essay on how to improve the conditions of blacks in the colonies, Saint-Lambert uses two arguments to promote the equality of whites and free blacks. One is that it will increase consumption, which has been undermined by discriminatory legislation such as sumptuary laws. The other is that, as he envisions it, colonial society does not have a marked social hierarchy among its free people, and a common devotion to agricultural productivity will quickly erase all forms of racism among them. Once again, he is preoccupied with both economic progress and the creation of an equalized citizenship.133 In laying out his plan for abolition, he states that the goal is to transform slaves into “citizens,”134 by first introducing them to social and moral values. While his plan focuses on reform rather than immediate abolition, he clearly envisions a colony of free and virtuous citizens. Against possible economic doubts, he suggests that Africa itself should start cultivating cotton and sugar—a popular idea among abolitionists at the time, both in England and France. This mix of social, political, and economic concerns already informs Ziméo.

The story of Ziméo clearly condones rebellion. Told by George Filmer, a fictional American Quaker visiting Jamaica, it starts when Filmer is awakened at dawn by Paul Wilmouth, a Quaker friend at whose plantation he is staying. Wilmouth, who represents a kind master who has earned his slaves’ affection, warns him that a rebellion has started; they decide to gather the slaves and arm them. “If I’ve been a hard master to you,” Wilmouth tells them, “kill me, because I deserve it.” After receiving confirmation that they will stay with him—some slaves stab their arms to show their loyalty—they decide to defend the plantation. This plebiscite, which momentarily turns the plantation into a minirepublic, contrasts with Filmer’s description of the plain below him the next morning: a cloud of dark smoke is slowly rising above the shining sea, the flowers, and the pastures; animals are quietly grazing a short distance away from a scene of human massacre, as blacks are butchering whites under the flowering trees. In the end, after being welcomed and hosted by Wilmouth, the rebels, led by Ziméo, leave for the mountains, ready to live independently as a maroon community. Both in its plot and in its settings, the tale points to the political and economic benefits of small, egalitarian communities. Even the paternalistic model represented by Wilmouth has less appeal than the group of maroons. The tale ends with a tearful scene in which Ziméo and his friends ask the whites to follow them into the mountains. The narrator is looking forward to visiting them and to enjoying once again “the virtues, the great common sense, and the friendship” of Ziméo and his friends.135

Ziméo represents a republican leader. He is as beautiful and well proportioned as a Greek statue and seems born to command others. At the same time, and unlike Oroonoko, he is not princely. Though he was the heir of a prince in Benin, he was sent among the peasants for his education. A wise man taught him the value of working the earth, as well as the importance of justice. The love story Ziméo is associated with and the happy reunion with the beloved he had lost after the Middle Passage help convey the author’s point that human beings have fundamentally similar emotions and that it is the system of slavery that demoralizes many Africans. But this is more than a story about human rights. It equates slavery with tyranny and presents the rebels as a community linked by solidarity and courage. By contrast, the Europeans are symbolized by one scene during the Middle Passage, when the wind dies down, the ship and the sea remain almost surreally immobile for days, and the crew resorts to cannibalism. Ziméo and his friends are the opposite image of this episode; they represent a movement forward—from the plains to Wilmouth’s plantation to the mountains—and a call for a society based on freedom and virtue. Most likely this story, which had been reprinted many times since it appeared in the same volume as the highly popular Seasons, left an imprint on French thought about slavery on the eve of the Revolution.

So did Joseph Lavallée’s Le nègre comme il y a peu de blancs, published in 1789, immediately turned into a play, and reedited in 1791 and 1795. Throughout its complex web of adventures and coincidences, the novel presents blacks as particularly noble and whites as in need of moral regeneration: in Africa, “there is no concept equivalent to the fatal me” and no desire for the “pleasures of luxury.”136 Many scenes of interracial mutual embrace help project a future of multiracial affection and brotherhood. The novel also promotes abolition, albeit as a carefully managed process. When Itanoko, the African narrator, inherits a plantation in Saint-Domingue, he frees the slaves, but they remain, guided by affectionate and egalitarian rules. While Itanoko is still the owner, he calls the enterprise “my small republic,” emphasizing its combined achievement of equality, virtue, and personal fulfillment.137 He grows old peacefully in France, with his children and his biracial wife, a sign that a multiracial nation is possible. Lavallée’s book, together with the other texts just discussed, contributed to a print culture that associated republicanism with abolition and interracial collaboration. As we will see, this print culture was an ideal preparation for the interventions made by Belley and by other blacks.

•

After the Revolution started, various forces and individuals contributed to a movement toward abolition in fits and starts that, while it did not lead to any significant legislation until 16 Pluviôse, kept the issue alive. During its two years of existence, as we have seen, the Constituent Assembly only legislated on the rights of free people of color, an issue that, while seemingly secondary, unleashed passions because it forced the representatives to argue on whether civic status or race was the primary criterion in conferring citizenship. But the issue of the slave trade also came up regularly. In his speech during the grand opening session of the Estates-General, on 5 May 1789, Jacques Necker, the finance minister, declared that bonuses to slave traders had to be reduced by half. While this modest measure was mentioned quickly, the audience must have been struck when they heard the word “humanity” suddenly pop up from a recital of facts and figures.138 Much later in this long speech, Necker did come back to the issue, bemoaning that “men similar to us in their thinking and especially in the sad ability to suffer” were now a “barbarian object of traffic.”139 The Société des Amis des Noirs wrote him a month later, both to thank him and to ask for a stronger stance about the trade.140

On 21 January 1790, Brissot gave an address to the Assembly. After reminding his listeners that they have been working for the rights and freedom of the French people, he makes it clear that he is not requesting the immediate abolition of slavery, which would be nefarious for the former slaves. But he asks for the immediate abolition of the slave trade, “those markets in human flesh,” which is fomenting war and murder in Africa, and leads to the horrors of the Middle Passage, which he describes in detail.141 He then argues that abolition would be advantageous to the slaves, the colons, and the nation. With this strategy, Brissot was hoping to replicate the efforts that were taking place in Britain, which had led to a report by the Privy Council and a review by the House of Commons. Not until the question of the free men of color was settled, on 4 April 1792, did the Assembly seriously tackle the slave trade again. On 10 April, a motion was brought up and sent to a committee.142 Finally, on 27 July 1793, a letter from Dominique Joseph Garat, minister of the interior, was read aloud; it asked that the Convention take action regarding bonuses to slave traders. The Abbé Grégoire then spoke: “Until when, citizens, will you allow this odious commerce? Until when will you give encouragement to a traffic that dishonors the human race? Live up to what you’ve always been, and don’t allow any more Frenchmen to go and fetch men, who are the same as us except for their color, in their native country, and to transport them to a foreign soil, where they are treated like beasts.”143 The assembly immediately decided to eliminate bonuses and called for a report in view of abolishing the slave trade.

The issue of slavery was also repeatedly brought up in speeches and publications. As early as July 1789, when a delegation of white colons was requesting twenty representatives at the States-General, Mirabeau asked if someone could explain to him “what principle one follows for the proportional representation of the colonies.” “Are the colonies claiming to count their slaves and free men of color as men or as workhorses?” he asked. If the colons don’t want to free their slaves, “we ask them to note that, when we decided proportional representation for the people of France, we didn’t take into consideration our number of horses or mules.”144 On 25 February 1790, one month after Brissot’s speech at the Assembly, an alarmed delegation representing Bordeaux, a thriving port, warned that “the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery would lead to the loss of our colonies”; a delegation representing “the manufactures and the commerce of France” then expressed its anxiety about abolition, arguing in detail that the slave trade and slavery were necessary in order to maintain this grand commercial nation.145 A few days later, the question of the status of the colonies was sent to a colonial committee that, as we know, would give the colonies much leeway in their political decisions. The question of free men of color would then become the main preoccupation, but voices concerned about slavery continued to be heard. Until February 1794, various publications also maintained the pressure. A number of essays tried to offer pragmatic solutions. Most of them proposed gradualist schemes of abolition, or even plans for the slaves to buy themselves, on the condition that they start receiving salaries. One suggested land redistribution.146 And as we saw, Sonthonax published fiery and prophetic articles in Révolutions de Paris. As Yves Benot puts it, some people will say: “So what? What does that prove? Since nothing was done, these are just words. But these words . . . did have an influence on people’s minds, did prepare them to accept and support the 1794 abolition decree.”147

Influence also came from the people of color themselves, but there were differences of approach in this group. Their most active spokesman, Julien Raimond, started with timid demands and slowly evolved in an abolitionist direction with arguments anchored in the notion of freedom. Raimond was a wealthy mixed-race plantation owner from the southern province of Saint-Domingue who owned slaves. His original concern was with the status of free people of color only. After he arrived in France in 1784, he sent several manuscripts to the Naval Ministry, in which he argued that free people of color were good citizens, that they supported slavery, and that the recent racist laws were unfair. He even proposed that these laws be eliminated for only a minority among the free blacks—the ones who were light skinned.148 The minister, Anne-César de La Luzerne, wrote back, but nothing came of it.149 Late in July 1789, as the Revolution was ongoing, and following some pressure from La Luzerne, Raimond paid a courtesy call to the Club Massiac.150 Once again, he was only pleading for the rights of men of color who had been free for two generations. Still, he quickly became the bugbear of the white colons, especially after he started working with the group around Dejoly, which was lobbying for civil rights for all free people.151 He was part of the group that addressed the Assembly on 22 October 1789, and on 23 November, he cosigned a long letter to the Credentials Committee pleading for representation in the Assembly.152 In both cases, the concern seemed to be about the civic status of free men only.

Looking more closely at those texts, one can see that the ones Raimond had a hand in do contain references to slavery.153 Two earlier texts show the impact the Revolution had on him. Shortly after the first item of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen—“All men are born and remain free and equal in rights”—was approved by the assembly on 21 August 1789, he wrote a “complaint” addressed to the Assembly that required the same rights for men of color, “in the name of the sacred rights of Humanity.”154 He equates the despotism that the Assembly has just erased with the sufferings of the free men of color in the colonies. He requests justice for all free citizens, as a natural extension of the revolutionary measures that have already been passed. He concludes another text, which focuses on his demands for free people of color, by first reemphasizing that the rights of man prescribe that all free men belong to the same group. “And if unfortunately there exists,” he continues, “under French domination, a country where one thinks that slavery has to stay in place a little longer,” then the only distinction should be between enslaved and free. And it should remain so “until the nation takes strong measures to bring the slaves back to freedom.”155 The 23 November letter contains a similar message buried under the elaborate plea for voting rights. The authors point out that, if the colony, unlike France, never had a “distinction d’ordre”—a distinction based on social class—it did have a “distinction de classes”—a division into groups. And in order to prove that the criterion for this division was race, they argue: “First they didn’t shame away from classing off, and reducing to the status of workhorses, thousands of individuals who are now doomed to groan under the weight of slavery. Then, they created a big difference between free citizens of color and their descendants, however remote, and the white colons.”156 While it was not arguing for abolition, the text implied that the issue of free people of color was only one piece of the colonial puzzle.

Indeed, black pressure, including Raimond’s, provoked debates in the Assembly in which the questions of the role of race in the colonies and the more general principles of justice and human rights were kept alive. The question of political rights for free men of color was explored by the Credentials Committee, which, after meeting eleven times, came to the conclusion that it should have two deputies in the Assembly.157 But as we have seen, the report never made it to the Assembly; decrees passed in 1790 kept colonial voting rights vague under the terms “citizens” or “people”; in October, a consideration gave legislative freedom to the colonies. In May 1791, the Assembly discussed the consideration passionately and at length over several days, after a committee, which had received numerous petitions from blacks—and whites—presented its findings.158 The fiery discussion flung men such as Grégoire, radical reformer Jérôme Pétion de Villeneuve, and Robespierre, who all appealed to ideas of justice and human rights, against men such as Moreau de Saint-Méry and Louis-Marthe Gouy d’Arcy, representatives of the colons, who raised the specter of the loss of the colonies, and it showed that sympathy for free people of color was growing. Raimond attended these sessions, and he was probably in contact with some of the speakers; on 12 May, a short letter was read aloud, in which he offered to contribute to the debate. On 13 May, the question of slavery finally popped up, when the Abbé Maury dramatically announced that the real issue that had been left unmentioned in all the debates was slavery. Now that the issue was on the table, it had to be dealt with. It was proposed that all initiatives about slavery be left to the colonies. “Perish the colonies,” Robespierre famously said, in order to prevent a rewriting of the decree that would have included the word “slaves.”159 By the end of that session, the Assembly had added a clause that had not been part of the original debate—that the colonies were free to legislate about “nonfree” persons—but could still not agree on the section about free people of color.

The next day, Raimond spoke at the tribune. In this speech, he argues that the free people of color are both essential to the colony and not a threat. He first emphasizes the size of their group, pointing out that it is even bigger than officially recorded. He then describes in detail how people of color contribute to the public good, helping to prevent slave rebellion through participating in the militia, working as coastguards, and fighting in wars. He specifically refers to the battle of Savannah. He then points out that the petits blancs, or whites who are not landowners, are much more of a threat to the white colons than the people of color. He evokes the image of a poor white fisherman whose only possessions are a cabin, a canoe, and a few nets, and who in times of war, is ready to collude with any enemy or pirate who comes along. Free people of color do not resent the colons; on the contrary, they have a “well-known attachment to the whites.”160 Why would men with property want to shake up the colony? The petits blancs are really the ones who are making trouble. They are the ones who killed Ferrand de Baudière, an elderly white man who had helped men of color write a petition. They are the ones who have nothing and are full of resentment against propertied men, white or black. And so while Raimond is clearly not tackling slavery, he is trying to shift the debate from race to class. Free men of color and whites have the same interests, he implies; they should understand each other, in spite of racial difference.

On 15 May, another letter from Raimond was read aloud in the Assembly. It was brief and sounded like an ultimatum. Raymond asked that, if they were not given the rights they were entitled to, the citizens of color be allowed to leave the “ground that has been steeped in the blood of our brothers”161 and to emigrate from the colony, taking their fortune with them, without harassment. The letter made a strong impression, as loud clapping could be heard from the left side of the Assembly and from the tribunes. Everything now seemed to go very fast. Someone proposed an amendment that gave voting rights to free men of color who had been born of free parents—the idea had been floated a few times during the debate. Robespierre expressed his disagreement with this dishonorable splitting of liberty. In the end, though, the amendment passed. It was the first victory ever for free men of color, and Raimond had played an undeniable role through his appeals to freedom and equal rights.

Raimond and other blacks also kept spreading ideas in the background. The manuscripts he sent to the Naval Ministry were examined by Saint-Lambert, the author of Ziméo, when, as a member of a comité de législation set up before the Revolution, he wrote a memoir on colonial policy. While Raimond’s ideas at this point were still timid, Saint-Lambert’s recommendations are clear: there are only two kinds of men in the colonies, free and enslaved; all free men should have the same rights, and one needs to prepare for abolition of the enslaved.162 After he arrived in Paris in July 1789, Raimond quickly developed relationships with men such as Brissot and Grégoire, although it is not quite clear when he met them personally for the first time. Gabriel Debien suggests that it is Brissot who introduced the men of color to Dejoly in October.163 Brissot already broached the question of their voting rights in the 9 October issue of his review, Le patriote françois. Even more striking is that he does so by quoting a passage from Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Voeux d’un solitaire, published the month before, in which the author argued that free blacks should be allowed to “deliberate about the interests concerning their metropole” and that this would “prepare the abolition of slavery in the colonies.”164 So it seems that the issue of slavery was very early on a topic of conversation in certain circles. Raimond probably met Grégoire at the Assembly on 22 October, when Dejoly presented their requests. From then on, Grégoire became an incessant defender of their cause and of abolition in general.

The blacks also made contacts with groups that seemed likely to support their arguments. On 24 November 1789, five men of color, including Raimond and Ogé, became members of the Société des Amis des Noirs. After Dejoly, who accompanied them, made a speech, the members decided that the society would include the defense of their rights among its objectives. On 11 December, the members discussed the possibility of putting pressure on the president of the Assembly about the issues of abolition and voting rights for free blacks. Raimond intervened, arguing that “making two requests at the same time could undermine both.”165 It is possible that he did not want his own issue to be connected to that of the slaves, but he may also have been thinking strategically. After deliberation, the group decided to go for abolition. On 1 and 11 February 1790, Dejoly and a group of thirty men of color addressed the general assembly of the Paris commune, or city hall, asking the members to work on their behalf. On the second day, Brissot took over and talked about abolition.166 But because of a speech from a representative of the white colons, who argued, rather disingenuously, that the men of color could not act as a separate party because such distinctions had been abolished, Dejoly withdrew the petition.

Finally, from thousands of miles away, it was the slaves themselves who put pressure on France. The Assembly heard of the insurrection in Saint-Domingue on 27 October 1991. A letter read aloud reminded all that “the crisis in the colony is . . . a national crisis.”167 Two days later, an article in Révolutions de Paris celebrated the rebellion and “the independence of five hundred thousand blacks.” “There is no hesitating,” it continues; “the laws of justice come before those of commercial convenience, and our interests come after those of the human race that have been violated for so long.”168 The author then launches into a passionate defense of the rebellion, equating it with the French Revolution. Pushing aside all economic arguments, he ends by imagining a scene in which French commissioners arrive in the colony and side with the rebels. Other journals would make similar calls in the next few years. In a long speech he gave at the Convention on 1 December, Brissot attributed the troubles of Saint-Domingue to white prejudice and violence and to the whites’ desire to separate from the revolutionary motherland. “The heart of a black,” he exclaimed to loud clapping, “also beats for liberty.”169

•

From then until 16 Pluviôse, blacks in Paris continued their pressure through their writings, their acts, or their presence, but now their contributions emphasized their growing republicanism. Early in 1792, Raimond wrote an address to the Legislative Assembly. In it, he argues that if the Assembly chooses to give free men of color their full political rights, they will “preserve the colonies, maintain calm, contain the slaves.”170 But this quietist message is laced with republican feeling; as he keeps emphasizing the free blacks’ patriotism and devotion to the mother country, he represents Ogé’s rebellion as a natural demand for the realization of the decree’s promise, and he presents the whites as separatists who want to transform free blacks into “pure machines” (Véritable origine, 27). Indeed, he presents the deputies of the white colons as agents of the “counter-revolution” (43) and the free men of color as the real inheritors of the Revolution.

On 4 April 1792, the Assembly finally gave full political rights to free men of color; by the end of summer 1792, as France was turning into a republic and was also at war with Prussia and Austria, blacks made it clear they were ready to fight for it. War with Britain would break out a few months later, and this military context would give the movement toward abolition a nudge. On 7 September, Raimond led a large delegation of men of color in front of the Assembly. Declaring that they were ready to spill their blood for the fatherland, he asked for authorization to organize a legion—a mixed unit of light troops. The request did not come totally out of the blue: the atmosphere in the country was one of urgent rallying against the enemy, and since the beginning of the year, the government had been planning the creation of several legions. More nimble than traditional line regiments, legions could do reconnaissance missions, spy on the enemy, intercept convoys, try some bold action, and overall, force the enemy to stay on its guard.171 Moreover, black troops in the French army were not unheard of. A few decades earlier, the marshal of Saxony, a famous military leader, had a company of cavalry made up of about a hundred men, about eighty of whom were black. Nothing indicates that they were treated differently from white soldiers.172 The black soldiers standing in front of the Assembly had reason to hope this would also apply to them.

The event was a display of French citizenship. “If nature,” Raimond stated, “inexhaustible in its combinations, outwardly differentiates us from the French, on the other hand, it has made us perfectly similar, by giving us, as it did them, a heart burning to fight the enemies of the State.” The president, Marie-Jean Hérault de Séchelles, known as a radical republican, used the opportunity for grand statements: virtue was independent from color; their service was not just to France but to the human race; the love of liberty and equality was no doubt stronger for those who had suffered through the shackles of servitude. He concluded that “it is impossible that France does not soon become the capital of the free world and the tomb of all the thrones in the universe.”173 One deputy ventured to ask if the men of color should really be separated from regular French soldiers. Another argued that this separation made them more visible and gave them more opportunity to display their public virtue. Enthusiasm was palpable in the room.

The next day, the assembly approved the creation of the Légion nationale du midi, or National Legion of the South, which would be made up of eight hundred foot and two hundred mounted troops.174 On 6 December, it was referred to as the Légion des Américains,175 and it would soon become known as the Légion de Saint-George, after the famous composer who took its command. Bernard Gainot estimates that the size of the black community had been overestimated and that recruitment did not go over two hundred men, who thus formed a cavalry unit. Their profiles show a diversity of men, both full-blooded blacks and men of mixed race, some former slaves, many with a military background, either in the colonies or in France.176 The legion would end up being split into several units: one was sent to fight the counterrevolutionary resistance in the Vendée, another went to the West Indies, and another fought in the north of the country. Alexandre Dumas, father of the future novelist, distinguished himself.177 Raimond was too old to fight, but as a resident of the Tuileries neighborhood, he participated in that section of the militia, and he donated money to help in the Vendée, a bloody struggle that lasted several years.178

In the meantime, as the political atmosphere in Paris was radicalizing, blacks started turning their attention to slavery. On 17 May 1793, Julien Labuissonnière, a black man from Martinique, put his signature, together with seventeen others, to an “address” to the Convention and to all political clubs. In it, he asks the French, who risked so much for “the sacred rights of man,” to listen to “the cries of a million slaves.” Using metaphors of degeneration and rebirth, he first depicts tyranny as a tree that slowly grows and covers everything with its shadow; a wise government can cut it at the root, and humanity will flourish. He then speaks in the name of the slaves: “We see the beauty of a sunrise, we feel the softness of the zephyr, we harvest for men who haven’t sown, we gather treasures that we can’t enjoy, we serve without hope for freedom.” But now, thanks to France’s new commitment to liberty, equality, and the rights of man, the slaves will be enlightened, and they will “fertilize the rich earth.” A man is like a plant that can only grow in good conditions; without freedom, this land will remain sterile. The laws of the Revolution will “regenerate the destinies of men” because they should also apply to the slaves. Why should there be a difference in rights “between men who are equal”? He then asks for immediate abolition in all the colonies of the republic.179 With his metaphor of regeneration, Labuissonnière was clearly appealing to republican feelings.

Abolition was then dramatically brought up in the Convention on 4 June, when a delegation of free blacks asked if they could parade in front of the assembly. The same group had visited the Jacobin club the previous day and had been well received.180 The leader reminded the deputies that they belonged to a great nation that had been called upon to spread freedom in the world, and he laid an abolitionist petition on the desk—it was Labuissonnière’s.181 Five of the signatories, probably also present that day, were members of the American company, a unit of the Légion des Américains, come to Paris to question their proposed reassignment to the colonies.182 The group then marched to the sound of military music, bearing a tricolor flag that featured three men—a white, a mulatto, and a black—armed with a pike that bore a liberty bonnet. An inscription read: “Our union will be our force.” With this flag, the blacks had ingeniously conflated devotion to the republic and the universalism of the Revolution; it was also an eerie anticipation of the three-man delegation that would walk into the room the next February.183 Among the group was a black woman who was 114 years old, who marched holding the arms of two petitioners. Her name was Jeanne Odo, the leader informed them, and she was born in Port-au-Prince. The whole assembly stood up, and the president gave her the fraternal embrace. Grégoire spoke, first reminiscing that a few years ago, an older man from the Jura, a region in eastern France, had also stood before the Assembly in order to thank its members for breaking feudal bonds. Then all the deputies stood up to honor old age. Grégoire then made his point: “There still exists an aristocracy, that of the skin.” “I hope,” he continued, “that the national Convention will apply the principles of equality to our brothers in the colonies . . . and that very soon you will be presented with a report that will recommend freedom for the blacks.”184 While the petition was sent to die in a committee, the whole episode seems like a rehearsal for 16 Pluviôse.

The next day, as Benot puts it, Labuissonnière “didn’t go to sleep.” He wrote a flier in which he addresses the sans-culottes, or radical working-class revolutionaries, in combative language. Yesterday, he says, their black brothers paid a visit to their deputies, and said: “Give us liberty, or give us death.” Such was their cry of pain, but then the assembly “pulled the veil of oblivion over the wounds we were showing them” and relegated the petition to the darkness of a committee. He urges the real republicans to help them in this fight, to come and “plant with us the tree of liberty,” promising that the slaves will be forever grateful.185 On 8 June, a black delegation was received by the commune of Paris. The delegates then proceeded to the Champ de Mars to take a civic oath in front of the “altar to the fatherland,” which had been erected for the Feast of the Federation, an event that took place on 14 July 1790 to commemorate the fall of the Bastille. Back at the town hall, they read an address in which they asked for “liberty for America,” and they were assured that they would receive help.186 The president then put a crown on Jeanne Odo’s head. A few days later, the commune of Paris, which had promised the blacks a banner, decided that it would feature, on one side, a white, a black, and a mulatto, with the inscription “Men of color, you will be free” and, on the other, Liberty and Equality holding a globe, with the words “Universal liberty and equality.”187 But they heard that Labuissonnière had been arrested, in a process that remains murky. Whatever the reasons, it is clear that, as blacks made an increasingly vocal show of their attachment to republican liberty, the white colons increased their efforts against them in the background. Raimond would be arrested in September.

In the end, the first great abolition of slavery happened thanks to a speech—the one Dufaÿ made in front of the Convention—that derived its power not just from ideology but from its emphasis on black agency. In this long speech, which apparently swayed all the members of the Convention, Dufaÿ first devotes much time to defending the decisions made by Sonthonax and Polverel. He presents Galbaud, the governor who stoked the conflict that led to the burning of Le Cap, as a traitor, a counterrevolutionary bent on serving “the pride of whites”—especially all the whites who wanted to “shake off the yoke of France”—and on giving the colony to Spain or England. Then he shows how the men of color, who are “the people, the true sans-culottes in the colonies,” immediately rallied around the commissioners: “They defended your colleagues with the greatest courage, they fought like heroes.” Then, when they realized that the commissioners had been forced to retreat and that the men of color were fighting for their lives, the slaves decided to join the fray—first the city slaves, then the rebelling slaves who came running from the plains and the mountains. They fought bravely, but in return, they asked for freedom—“they even added: the Rights of Man.”188 The blacks had the upper hand; they knew they were needed and had the commissioners in their power. So freedom had to be promised, as the only way to preserve the colony was to free all the slaves.

Ultimately, Dufaÿ argues that the blacks are the true republican patriots. Their desire for liberty is anchored in their love of France, the “mother country.” When they decided to defend Le Cap, they were fighting for France and for the freedom and the equality that, to them, it represents. When they demanded freedom for their wives, they argued that they would join the fold of the republic: “They share our feelings; while we fight for France, they will instill them into our children; they will work to feed the warriors.”189 Children, being of their blood, could not remain slaves either. And so Dufaÿ paints the picture of valiant republican families, inspired by public virtue, and completely devoted to France, while the British and the Spaniards were waiting in the shadows and beckoning to them. In these conditions, Dufaÿ argues, the cause of humanity was joined to the cause of France, and the commissioners made a glorious decision. While he adds that it came with a strict regulation of labor conditions, the image that emerges is one of discipline and contentment. The idea is that freedom will make the colony flourish again.

And so Dufaÿ presents the events in Saint-Domingue as a natural extension of the ideals of French revolutionary republicanism, and he presents himself as one of the channels that helped ideas flow from the metropole to the colony. He tells of his frequent conversations with the slaves, in which he would recount the portentous events happening in the metropole. He had always carried the “germs of liberty and equality” in his heart, but in Paris, he learned from the Revolution and from popular societies: “I only saw in the revolution that took place in Saint-Domingue the realization of my wishes for the human race.” Now he could finally “see all the men equal and embrace them as brothers.” He stands before the deputies, proud to relay these men’s “devotion to the republic, one and indivisible: Europeans, creoles, Africans, don’t know any other color, any other name than that of Frenchman.” He urges them: “Please create a new world once again.”190 The assembly was ready to do just that.

•

If the achievement of 16 Pluviôse was a total loss for the white colons, it seems that for the rest of the country, it was cause for celebration. That evening, the three deputies were warmly received at the Jacobin club. Each of them made a speech and received the fraternal embrace from the president. They then presented the assembly with a tricolor flag bearing a white, a black, and a mulatto, a sure sign that they had established contacts with the black community in the capital.191 On 11 February, they were welcomed at the Paris commune, with applause from the room and embraces from the president. Mills declared that, as the delegate of black constituents, he expressed “the most ardent feelings for liberty.” Belley then spoke: “I was a slave since my childhood.” With these opening words, he dramatically conveyed the meaning of abolition, for an audience that had rarely been in direct contact with slavery. “In the course of my life,” he continued, “I have felt deserving of being French, and my blood has been spilled for the French Republic.” He promises that the tricolor flag will always “fly on our shores and in our mountains.”192 With these words, he was inserting himself in this historical and ideological moment, as one of its most stellar representatives. On 18 February, a huge celebration took place at the “Temple of Reason,” as Notre-Dame had been renamed. Hundreds of people attended, including sans-culottes, popular societies, and deputies from the Convention. The three deputies from Saint-Domingue made quite an impression.193 Pierre Gaspard Chaumette, representing the commune, gave a grand speech celebrating the advent of reason and justice over tyranny and the search for pleasure and luxury. After showing that slavery is the opposite of civic and personal virtue, that it has brought down empires throughout history, that it offends the laws of nature and civilization, he invites his audience to celebrate because “SLAVERY IS ABOLISHED.”194 His concluding shout, “VIVE L’ÉGALITÉ! VIVE LA LIBERTÉ!” would resonate throughout the country in the next few months, as hundreds of congratulations would be sent to the Convention, and at least twenty towns would celebrate revolution and abolition as synonymous and forever linked. The message was clear: blacks were the real republicans, and they had helped complete the work of the Revolution.195

Republican and Cosmopolitan

In 1797, an unusual painting was exhibited at the Elysée hotel, a beautiful neoclassical building situated in the heart of the city. It was titled Portrait of a Negro; the painter was Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson. The next year, the portrait was exhibited at the Salon, an internationally known exhibition that took place in the Louvre, and this time it was titled Portrait of C. Belley, Former Representative of the Colonies. The C stood for Citizen. The painting is about five by four feet, and it shows a tall, handsome, middle-aged black man who looks rather formidable. His dark blue coat opens at the neck to leave room for a thick white neckpiece, which contrasts with the smooth black skin of his face. It is also held together at the waist by an elaborate tricolor sash. In his left hand, Belley holds a hat with a tricolor cocarde; his right elbow leans comfortably against a plinth, which bears the white marble head of an older man, and the inscription “G. T. Raynal.” Belley looks upward and to the right, so we can see his salt-and-pepper, frizzy hair and a gold earring. He looks both masculine and elegant, both sensual and intelligent.

It is unclear whether Belley commissioned the painting or Girodet approached him, but in any case, it shows an ideal that Belley was striving for. He seems to be the living embodiment of what the Revolution signified for him. He comes across as a man of both thought and action, proud to be French, eager to serve. He has traveled to France to remind her that her national identity now embraces all races, and he can now stand leisurely, without humility or gratitude, besides a bust of Raynal, widely seen as an abolitionist and a defender of the rights of blacks. At the same time, though, the painter does not want the white viewer to forget Belley’s racial difference. Unlike abolitionist imagery, which often asks the viewer to forget about racial difference for the sake of empathic identification, Belley’s blackness is highlighted and made alive. His attitude, moreover, is one of relaxed independence, as he is lounging by a marble bust he at the same time seems to ignore. As Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby argues, the portrait “enhances our sense of the personal autonomy and psychological independence of a specific black man precisely because it insists, with extraordinary intensity and detail, upon his irreducible distinctness” (Extremities, 49). In this sense, the portrait expresses Belley’s political philosophy: a universalism that is anchored in national identity, a cosmopolitanism that does not preclude racial pride. The past three years had seen him acting it out—and finding many allies and enemies along the way.

Belley found enemies because, of course, as soon as the abolition decree was pronounced, many people started working against it, and Belley played a role in countering them, both by his presence and by taking part in the conversations, sometimes belligerently. He spoke at least twice in front of the Convention. On 23 August 1794, he published an essay directed against two white colons who had agitated against Sonthonax and Polverel and who had also tried to make the lives of the deputies from Saint-Domingue miserable. In 1795, he published an essay against another white colon. He also put his signature to various statements issued by the deputation. In all these contributions, it is clear that Belley has absorbed the ideas and the vocabulary of French republicanism, particularly the emphasis on patriotism and unconditional devotion to the republic that marked its second phase. At the same time, he is always careful to place his arguments within the larger context of universal freedom and equality. The voice that comes across is that of a French revolutionary, a republican, and a black cosmopolitan all at once.

•

Ever since they had arrived in France in July 1792, after their election as commissaries by the Colonial Assembly in Le Cap, the white plantation owners Pierre-François Page and Augustin-Jean Brulley had devoted their energy to lobbying government, defending white colons, undermining Sonthonax and Polverel, and, after they arrived, harassing the three deputies.196 Having to deal with the Convention, a new, more radical assembly with no representatives for white colonial interests, they tried to ally themselves with the Jacobins by appealing to their shared hate for the Girondins, also called Brissotins because the group had originally grown under Brissot’s leadership. They knew that emphasizing the friendship between Brissot and Sonthonax was a good strategy. As a result, in the fall of 1792, the Jacobin club expelled Sonthonax and Polverel.197 On 15 March 1793, ten days after the Convention issued a decree that gave more powers to the two commissioners in Saint-Domingue, Page and Brulley were part of a delegation of white colons who submitted a petition to the Convention, warning that the decree would turn them into dictators who were not to be trusted.198 On 19 March, they protested again, and the Convention suspended the decree. On 29 April, the criminal tribunal acquitted an ex-governor of Saint-Domingue after hearing witnesses who declared that Sonthonax and Polverel were “counterrevolutionary agents belonging to a faction led by Brissot.”199 Finally, on 16 July 1793, a letter from the colons was read aloud to the Convention. It accused the commissioners of sowing anarchy on the island and of planning to welcome the British and the Spaniards into the colony; the colons, “bound by interest and affection to the metropole,” were asking for help.200 The Convention, seemingly convinced by this war of attrition, and still dealing with the recent death of Marat, proceeded to vote on a decree of accusation against the commissioners, recalling them to France for a trial. “These commissioners are the agents and creatures of people like Brissot, like Clavière,” declared Jacques Nicolas Billaud-Varenne, a future member of the Committee of Public Safety and one of the architects of the Reign of Terror.201

After the news of the burning of Le Cap reached France in August 1793, Page and Brulley used all the means in their political repertoire to spread their version of the story, which was an indictment of Sonthonax and Polverel. They swayed Jean Bon Saint-André, minister of the navy, who presented a report to the Convention that was very critical of the commissioners: they had ordered “the murder of whites,” and they were planning to “either usurp the sovereign power on the island or give it to the enemy.”202 He asks that the arrest decree decided in July be executed, and the Convention agrees. In the next few months, Page and Brulley had many meetings with Jean-Pierre-André Amar, member of the Committee of General Security, and they persuaded him to arrest Julien Raimond. When the Girondins were executed in October, it looked like the only voices that had kept abolitionism alive had been silenced. In January, Page and Brulley felt confident enough to provide the War Ministry with a list of “counterrevolutionaries” (Popkin, 352), asking that they be arrested. While overall, probably preoccupied with what they considered more urgent issues, the Convention seemed to show little enthusiasm for Page and Brulley’s shenanigans, it did agree to all the proposals that came before them bearing the mark of the white colons. Abolitionism, though kept alive by interventions such as the black parade in the Convention on 4 June, was being undermined from the other side, and it is likely that things would have run their course if the three deputies from Saint-Domingue had not arrived and shaken things up.

On the day that Belley and his fellow deputies finally made it to Paris, Page and Brulley asked Amar to arrest them. After they gave him a written request signed by other colons, whom they had misled about the nature of the deputation, Amar agreed.203 The next day, before the arrest could be executed, the three deputies testified before the Committee of Public Safety and made a strong impression. A few days later, four policemen visited them, and after they interrogated Dufaÿ and Mills, the deputies were arrested and imprisoned. On 31 January, Dufaÿ and Mills wrote a letter to the Convention from the prison, complaining about their treatment, as they had been left without beds or heat, and swearing their fidelity to the motherland and to the republic. “There is in this horrible affair,” they concluded, “a hatred of France, a hatred of equality, and racial prejudice, because this deputation has two men of color, and there are more in the deputation that is on its way here.”204 It is not clear why Belley did not sign the letter. On 2 February, however, Page and Brulley heard from Barère, a member of the Committee of Public Safety, that the committee was very angry about the arrest of the deputies, whom they had released. “Everybody knows,” he declared, “that the whites are the aristocrats in this colony, and that blacks and men of color are the patriots.”205 The next day, Page and Brulley heard that the deputies had been seated in the Convention. They sent a letter of protest, in which they said that Belley was not even French but came from “an African Bambara nation,”206 but this attempt at intervention had no effect. The Convention had clearly sided with the deputies. Still, the fact that they had been imprisoned was a sign that there was no complete unity on the question of slavery.

Indeed, the enthusiasm and acclamations that marked the abolition of slavery on 4 February may have masked voices that were reticent or critical. As Yves Benot has shown, official accounts of the event give hints that that may have been the case. After the wording of the decree was agreed on, a few members argued that the word “slavery” was a “stain” on such a noble text, and it should be removed. It took an intervention from Grégoire, the same person who, during the debates on the 28 March 1790 law had argued that it should refer specifically to free men of color unless the colony interpret it narrowly, to plead for keeping the word “slavery” in the decree: “otherwise one would claim once again that you meant something else.”207 Moreover, the fact that Delacroix closed the discussion indicates that some members had asked to send the proposal to a committee, a sure way to bury it. The next day, after the president read the minutes, one representative came back to the question of the use of the word “slavery”; the proposal was again put down, this time by several representatives, including Dufaÿ. Ultimately, it was the original text that was published, but the discussion had made a few cracks appear in the surface of unanimity.208

Aware of these velleities, Belley intervened and made his voice heard. On 8 February, a group of people of color living in Paris came before the Convention in order to offer thanks for the decree. César Télémaque, who a few years later would be mayor of Le Cap and play a role in the Haitian Revolution, stated that they had come to congratulate the deputies for the service they had rendered to equality “by adopting among you our brothers.”209 This wise decree would make them forget two centuries of suffering and hardships, as well as the hated word “colon.” It was the true legacy of the Revolution and augured universal happiness. Moved, the president answered that France now only knew free men: “Your rights have been given back to you, because you should never have lost them.”210 A few minutes later, Belley stood up, walked to the tribune, and addressed the assembly. “I am sure you don’t expect from me brilliant eloquence,” he started bluntly, both reminding them of his racial difference, which was plain to see, and acknowledging the possibility of racial prejudice among his colleagues. He went on: “I will speak according to my heart; and naked truth shall be my whole talent.”211 Just as he had done when answering his white attackers in Philadelphia, Belley was emphasizing his emotional connection to the nation. He is both black and a child of the republic speaking to his brothers, he implied, and his straightforwardness is a token of his affection, as well as of his republican virtue. In a few strokes, Belley established himself as the one element in the assembly that gave their patriotism a larger meaning—that made its members consciously see racial difference and embrace it. “The tribune of the Convention is now really the tribune of Equality,” wrote Le Journal de Paris, “since a black citizen, deputy of Saint-Domingue, has finally spoken at it for the first time. His name is Jean-Baptiste Belley.”212

As a good republican, Belley then went for the jugular. He reminded the assembly of all the vexations he and his two colleagues had suffered at the hands of Page and Brulley. Implicitly presenting them as traitors, he accused them of undermining the colony—a dangerous accusation considering that, the year before, a governor had been executed for the same reason. After all, he continued, “It is they who managed to have us thrown in prison, my colleagues and myself, when we arrived.”213 As a consequence, he asked “that these dangerous schemers be arrested.”214 Though the Convention did not act right away, Belley had made it clear that he would use his position as a deputy to undermine white colonial power. Accusations at the time were often a stepping-stone to the guillotine, and he knew that Sonthonax and Polverel, who were still in Saint-Domingue, would have to come home to be tried. He may also have had a thought for Brissot, who had been executed in October. The only way to maintain liberty and equality, he knew, was to hold the pressure on the Convention and keep reminding the delegates that a multiracial nation requires constant vigilance. More important, he made it clear to the deputies that he, and not the colons, represented the true republican revolutionaries.

In the next few months, the deputies engaged in a public exchange of accusations with Page and Brulley; the attacks were personal, but the broader context was the meaning of the Revolution and the question of who were its true inheritors. On 24 February, the deputies wrote a letter to the Committee of Public Safety, in which they emphasized that Page and Brulley were not official representatives of the colony, since they had been chosen by a colonial assembly that excluded people of color, even though the law of 4 April 1792 had already been passed. Moreover, they were sent “to the tyrant only, with a specific order to treat with him exclusively, and to bypass any national assembly.”215 Unlike these royalist usurpers, the implication was that the three deputies had been elected in a democratic process that reflected the goals of the Revolution. They asked that the colons’ papers be seized and that all the counterrevolutionaries, such as the members of the separatist Saint-Marc assembly, be arrested. On 7 March, Page and Brulley were arrested. Two days later, the Convention issued a decree ordering the arrest of counterrevolutionary colons—most of the white colons living in Paris—and the seizure of all their papers.216 Clearly, the Convention adhered to the philosophy expounded by the deputies, which entailed that real devotion to abolition meant not just the passing of a decree but a continued dedication to its defense.

As the colons kept putting out accusatory letters, even from prison, Belley made an important contribution to these public exchanges. On 23 August, he published an essay “to his colleagues” of the Convention. Once again, he starts the essay by stating that he has no eloquence: “I am one of those men of nature whom the wisdom and the principles of the French nation have snatched from the yoke of despotism.” Again holding up the image of a black man who speaks from the heart, he emphasizes the fusion of his love of liberty and his national feelings. But this love of liberty is not just personal or passive. Because he also feels the need to defend the dignity of his constituents, he attacks Page and Brulley as enemies of the republic, as men who have always rejected what came from the motherland, as men sold out to Louis XVI. The only reason they came to France was to submit to the king a decree from the Colonial Assembly that declared slavery inviolable—an assembly that, moreover, “had refused to admit citizens of color and blacks, who at the time were not considered persons.” Once in France, they fought anybody who wanted to bring the Revolution to the colonies and install “liberty and equality among all men without distinction.” It is clear, Belley says, that these men were aiming at separation and federalism so that the colony could be left to its own devices. These men were “against national assemblies and the convention, Jacobins, the civil commissioners, and everything else that came from France.”217 He knows that this accusation of separatism conveys the image of a white clique turning away from universalist principles in order to keep their privileges. Once again, patriotism is equated with principles of racial equality.

He then adjusts his critique to the immediate political context. He connects the colons to the Terror by pointing out that the famous conspiration des prisons, or prison conspiracy, through which the Revolutionary Tribunal “purged” the prisons of hundreds of prisoners, bypassed them. Obviously Antoine Fouquier-Thinville, the public prosecutor who sent so many people to the guillotine, was their “intimate friend.” No doubt Belley is aware that this connection can hurt them, since by the time he is writing, Robespierre has been executed following the so-called Thermidorian reaction that took place on 27 July, Fouquier-Thinville has been arrested, and the new mood is critical of the Terror. Page and Brulley displayed the mind-set of the Terror, he implies, when they asked the Convention that Sonthonax and Polverel “be declared outlaws, and this without being heard, and on their own special denunciation.” Belley then turns the legal table against them, arguing that they are not valid delegates, and they do not know anything about what happened in the colony, since they have been in France since 1792. He points out that Sonthonax and Polverel have been honest enough to come back to France and face their accusers and submit themselves to the law, something Page and Brulley would most certainly not have done. So—and this is the climax of the piece—he asks that the men be judged on the basis of the documents that “attest to their crime and their treachery.” Placing himself within an attachment to the legal realm, Belley knows how to use the revolutionary language appropriate for this more bureaucratic time period. At the same time, he is aware that his readers know he is black, and he keeps emphasizing that his enemies have “a profound hate for liberty and equality.”218 In this contribution, Belley shows that, more than the specific characteristics of the French Revolution he is espousing, it is the wider, more universal principles of freedom and equality that he wants to serve.

The day before this essay was published, he had made a similar case in the Convention. That day, a group of white colons had appeared before the assembly, led by Louis François René Verneuil, a former plantation owner who had been expelled by Sonthonax during the December 1792 troubles, and who would be one of the official accusers of Sonthonax and Polverel in front of the colonial commission set up to untangle what happened in Saint-Domingue.219 In his speech, Verneuil presents the white colons as patriots, arguing that they are the ones who have been “oppressed, assassinated.” Sonthonax and Polverel are the cause of all the horrors that took place in the colony, and their sole goal was to amass as much gold as possible. And yet they are walking around free, while the colons are in prison! He asks that Page and Brulley be released and that their testimony be heard against that of the commissioners. The Convention decided that such a procedure was fair and immediately decreed the release of the colons. At this point, Belley intervened: “You must know that the colonies are lost. Who lost them? Is it the colons? Is it their agents? Yes.” To him, releasing the colons had nothing to do with justice: “Page and Brulley are villains. Justice and fairness are certainly in order, but not indulgence for men covered with crimes.” Once again, he knew that as a black man—and the report of the debate refers to him as “BELLEY, man of color”—he brought a particular meaning to the notions of “justice” and “crime.”220 In the next few months, Page and Brulley would print several responses, but a year later, Sonthonax and Polverel would be vindicated by the colonial commission.

•

In the next few years, Belley settled into his life as a deputy in Paris, and together with his colleagues, kept applying pressure to make sure that the republic would live up to its ideals. By summer 1794, the other two deputies from Saint-Domingue had arrived. Born in France, Nicolas-Pierre Garnot, white, had lived in the colony for twenty years as a plantation owner. A biographer describes him as a kind slaveowner who freed his slaves as soon as the troubles started. Back in France, he became reacquainted with old friends, including Jacques-Alexis Thuriot de la Rosière, a radical republican, as well as Alexandre Dumas, by now a famous general. He could feel the political winds were turning. When he asked Thuriot if he should pay a visit to all-powerful Robespierre, Thuriot answered: “Avoid that by all means. The bugger doesn’t have a month to live!”221 The other deputy, Joseph Georges Boisson, black, was born in Le Cap. Together, the five deputies fended off more attacks from Page and Brulley, who, in June 1795, were still penning screeds arguing that the deputies were illegitimate and colluding with England. In a now more sedate political climate, they also attacked them as friends of Robespierre and Thuriot and as “executioners of the colons, exterminators of their families, destroyers of their property.”222 In their own statement, the deputies argued that the colons wanted to “make people of color worry about their rights, and blacks about their status and their freedom, in order to pull them away from France.”223 Equality and freedom were still tightly linked to patriotism.

Toward the end of 1794, Belley defended these same principles vehemently against another white colon, Benoît-Louis Gouly, representative of Isle de France, the French island colony in the Indian Ocean that had been the setting of Paul et Virginie. In the months after 16 Pluviôse, the Convention’s main task regarding the colonies was to decide on the measures to take in order to apply the decree. After a series of long and passionate discussions in February 1795, it would decide to send representatives to the colonies. In the meantime, Gouly applied constant pressure on various committees in order to slow down the process, and on 27 November 1794, he published a long pamphlet expounding his views. The pamphlet was strikingly conservative compared to the pragmatism he had exhibited until then.224 He starts by emphasizing the vital role played by the colonies in French commerce and prosperity. But he then reassures colons that this connection does not mean political oversight: “The Nation is not gathered today to make laws for the universe; it will only be concerned with France”; in order to maintain the colonies and make them flourish, the representatives “will educate themselves about the character of the colons and of the foreigners who live there, the influence of the climate, the nature of property, the means to preserve it.” Later on, he asserts that there can be two constitutions in the same empire, since “the constitution and the laws are relative to people, land, and things.”225 Gouly is energetically endorsing the traditional white colons’ defense of particularism for the colonies, rejecting the universalism that had led to 16 Pluviôse in the first place.

More shocking is his description of blacks in the colonies, which can be seen as an early example of full-blown biological racism. He starts by saying that the white colons are not against freedom and political rights, but these should be determined by the “individual faculties” of the people in question. Rejecting the blanket assertion of freedom and equality derived from the republican perspective, he uses this notion of individualism in order to paint a devastating portrait of blacks. He starts by asserting physical difference, “in the color of his skin, in the habits of his body, in the shape of his members, in the form of his head, in the shape and arrangement of the various parts of his face.” He then launches into an accumulation of negative statements about blacks’ faculties, stating that blacks act and don’t think, have no deep feelings of joy or pain, have no shame or desire, hate work, have no constancy in love, have no memory or concept of the future, have no talent of invention. He concludes: “Thus is the African whom today you affectionately call your brother, your friend, but who will never be your equal.” To him, republicanism applies in France, where “the character, the genius, the intellectual faculties of the French are the same,” but cannot work in a multiracial and multicultural society.226 Political principles cannot be universal.

Belley published his answer shortly thereafter, and while he rebuts Gouly’s racist assertions, his main concern is to maintain that republican principles are universal. He reasserts his attachment to the French Republic precisely because it stands for those principles. What Gouly writes contradicts “the sacred rights of man” and “the sublime morality of our constitution.” Who are these tyrants, he asks, who are rejecting the laws of the republic? Clearly they are white colons who want to maintain slavery, arguing that the laws of the colonies should be independent from those of France. If all the deputies asked for their own special laws, what would happen to the “indivisible Republic”? To him, the unity of the republic symbolizes the universality of its principles. Then he asks: “Who is not full of indignation and of pity when they read the bizarre portrait that Gouly draws of blacks?” He asks his reader to think of the conditions in which slaves live and to realize that slaves are not degraded by nature but by slavery itself. He asks: “Do you believe, citizen colleagues, that nature is unjust, that it has, as the colons affirm, made men to be the slaves of others?”227 Using himself as an example, he says he was born in Africa, and gained his liberty thanks to his hard work. Slaves are not brutes; they are thankful to France and ready to fight for it. He then asks that the decree of 16 Pluviôse be sent to the colonies as soon as possible. Through this last published writing, Belley reasserted his principles: a belief in human rights without negating difference, a universalism anchored in republican nationalism.

Gouly quickly published a response that, while its tone is often conciliatory, confirms Belley’s attacks. He keeps calling the slaves “foreigners,” denying the very attachment to France that motivates Belley. He says he does not want to repeal the decree of 16 Pluviôse, “only to regulate its application, taking into account the place, the things, and the different races of men,” thereby confirming that he is asking for a particular status for the colonies. He evokes the loss of the colonies. He asserts that he is fighting for the blacks’ well-being, but he also states that he was not sent to France to represent “a race of foreign men to the detriment of the indigenous race.”228 The whole argument speaks to a vision that is opposite to Belley’s, in its particularism, racism, and lack of egalitarianism. On 29 November, Dufaÿ spoke in front of the Convention, officially to complain that Gouly’s pamphlet had been published in its name. He then launches into a critique, arguing that Gouly’s views are “anti-social, anti-republican, anti-political,” and “contrary to the unity, the indivisibility of the republic.”229 If the colonies are left to their own devices, he continues, they will be in the hands of white plantation owners, but if they belong to the people, as national sovereignty would have it, then they belong to the blacks. He then praises the decree of 16 Pluviôse, which has been translated into several languages, and has been acclaimed everywhere. The universal tide of liberty cannot be turned back. He asks that the Convention declare it does not approve of the pamphlet, and after a discussion reiterating the rights of all men, white and black, the Convention approved Dufaÿ’s proposal.

Belley continued his work as a deputy for the next few years, even as France’s political structure was changing. From November 1795, the government was organized as a bicameral legislature, composed of a Council of Elders and a Council of 500 and led by a five-member Directory. While more conservative than its predecessor and often derided as the unexciting tail end of the Revolution, this government continued the fight against racial inequality; it kept the abolition of slavery enshrined in its constitution, and it significantly increased the number of black deputies seated in the legislature. Belley now sat on the Council of 500; also reelected were four of the other Saint-Domingue deputies who had been with him since 1794: Boisson, Dufaÿ, Garnot, and Laforest. In 1796, six new deputies were added to the delegation: Etienne Laveaux, Martin Noël Brothier, and Sonthonax, white; Pierre Thomany, black; Louis François Boisrond and François Pétiniaud, of mixed race. After elections in the spring of 1797, two more black deputies arrived: Etienne Mentor sat on the Council of 500, Jean-Louis Annecy on the Council of Elders. Together the black deputies would form an active group, on both the political and the social scene. But by May 1797, Belley was done with his work as a deputy. On 5 March, the Council of 500 had proceeded to a sort of raffle for former Convention members, and Belley had picked the note that said: “Member of the Council of 500 until this coming May.”230 Soon, though, he would have a different sort of job to do.

•

Saint-Domingue had gone through major changes since Belley left in 1793. In the course of 1794, a new black military leader had emerged; his name was Toussaint Louverture. Over the next few years, Louverture retook the northern and the western provinces from the Spaniards and the British, respectively. Even as he gained ground, he tried to bring the plantation economy back. After he drove the British out of Mirebalais, an important position in the western province, he was named commander in chief of the French forces in the colony. He then grew increasingly powerful, sending Sonthonax, who had come as part of a new commission, back home, and initiating negotiations with the British. So the French government decided to send another commissioner, Gabriel Hédouville, in order to reassert French authority. Hédouville arrived in Le Cap in March 1798. Accompanying him was Belley.

General Hédouville was known for his taming of the Vendée rebellion, and one may wonder why Belley chose to be part of this expedition against Louverture. It probably had to do with what he had been hearing about Louverture in Paris and may have been confirmed by Sonthonax if they had a chance to meet before his departure. Sonthonax had recently come back from Saint-Domingue, where he had been sent as part of a third commission in order to confirm the abolition of slavery, set up color-blind institutions, and work on reestablishing prosperity under new labor conditions. The choice of Sonthonax had been obvious; he was the first emancipator, he had been vindicated, and many former slaves loved and respected him. According to Madiou, when he disembarked in Saint-Domingue in May 1796, blacks had flocked to him, showing signs of their love.231 As soon as he arrived, Sonthonax tried to “establish a viable, peaceful, and prosperous multi-racial society” (Stein, 135), leasing plantations, setting up schools, trying to get rid of the British in the western province. But establishing civilian control over the military leaders proved difficult, and in summer 1797, Louverture asked him to leave. The source of the conflict is unclear—after all, Sonthonax had promoted Louverture just a few months earlier. Sonthonax alleged that Louverture wanted to become the sole ruler of Saint-Domingue. This version of events must have riled Belley.

Indeed, like Sonthonax, Belley thought of French republican control as the best way to preserve liberty in Saint-Domingue and to spread it far and wide. Writing from the port of Brest on 4 February 1798, as he was awaiting departure, he was thinking about Sonthonax, who that very same day was testifying before the Council of 500 to respond to criticism from conservatives and royalists, whose influence was growing. The symbolism of the date was pregnant. “I am convinced,” he writes Boisson, “that he will have been heard with some interest in his justification, and that he will prove easily that he has only been slandered by the enemies of liberty.”232 And indeed, in his speech, Sonthonax reminded his listeners that “emancipation was the Convention’s most glorious act.” He then described his mission as successful, but one remaining problem was Louverture, who “was guilty of being led by counter-revolutionaries into supporting independence” (Stein, 180). For Sonthonax, as for Belley, independence meant an inevitable retreat from the values of liberty and equality represented by France. Sonthonax made his philosophy public again the next year, on the same date, when in a speech, he said that slavery and the slave trade still flourished, and he urged his audience to fight for complete black freedom “so that, eventually, France’s example would spread to the rest of the world” (Necheles, 162). Belley, who had returned to France a month before and was no doubt among the audience, must have approved wholeheartedly.

What Belley writes of Louverture confirms that he had no admiration for the man. Writing from Le Cap on 17 August, he tells Boisson that he, Hédouville, and a few others had landed in Santo Domingo in April and then made their way west: “We found the whole northern province in a surprising state of poverty.” He continues: “Toussaint Louverture was in Gonaïves when we arrived. He didn’t hurry to join us since, after waiting for fifteen days, the commissioner wrote to ask him to come since he didn’t want to do anything without consulting with him.” Louverture deigned to arrive five weeks later. There were galas, and he received presents from the Directory. “Would you believe, my friend,” Belley asks Boisson, “that I didn’t manage to have a single private conversation with him?” Still, Louverture was very much aware of Belley’s role and presence. Belley had been led to believe that he would be in charge of the gendarmerie, or police force, in the whole colony. But Louverture “persuaded the commissioner to only give me the commandment of the northern province, out of fear, he said, that it would give me too much influence.” Hédouville agreed, though he feared slighting Belley. Belley remained stoic and true to his principles, hoping that the commissioner would now “start to distinguish the friends of tranquility from those who are full of intrigue and ambition.”233 And so Belley places himself clearly within the republican tradition of civic virtue, in order to distinguish himself from what he considers localized and self-interested. He may have felt vindicated: the mission only lasted a few months, as toward the end of October, Hédouville, Belley, and most of the officers who had come on the mission boarded a ship in the harbor of Le Cap, fleeing from thousands of troops under Louverture’s command.234

•

After he returned to Paris, Belley continued to work with his colleagues. More than ever, this work now consisted in preserving the rights that had already been granted and promoting the idea of these rights as widely as possible, especially since an upsurge in royalism, foiled by a coup later in the year, showed that those rights could not be taken for granted. In January 1798, an important law had been passed. It confirmed an earlier law, passed the previous October, that officially declared the colonies French departments.235 It also stated that blacks born elsewhere “are not considered foreigners; they enjoy the same rights as an individual born on French territory,”236 provided they have an occupation. The law also provided for public instruction in the colonies. As soon as he came back, Belley joined the revamped Société des Amis des Noirs et des Colonies. Re-created in late 1797, the Société now had two main objectives: making sure that general liberty would not be revoked and keeping the colonies within the republic.237 Belley managed to attend only two meetings, but it is clear that he was considered an important member, since at the second of these meetings, he introduced Dufaÿ. A black man sponsoring a white man—here was an example of the kind of equal treatment he had been fighting for. The Société also inherited from its predecessor an international consciousness. Several members read foreign works or had relationships with foreign abolitionists, particularly British. An important member was now Carl Bernhard Wadtsröm, a Swedish abolitionist who advocated the creation of colonies based on the abolition of slavery and the promotion of free commerce. So Belley was part of social circles that aimed to promote the internationalization of liberty.

He was also part of a black cosmopolitan community that fought for the same republican ideals. He seems to have had most in common with Pierre Thomany and Etienne Mentor. Thomany was quite active, both in the Société and in the legislature. He attended almost all the meetings of the Société and was its president for a while. On 4 February 1799, he gave a speech in the Council of 500 celebrating abolition. In it, he praises the Convention’s decision, which dared to make philosophical principle trump commercial considerations so that Africans and their descendants could enjoy the freedom that was their due. As a result, the republic gained new children, ready to defend it against its enemies. He invites his audience to observe the new happiness of the freedmen’s families. He urges them to envision the most moving portrait: “It is the spectacle of two million men to whom today’s most beautiful celebration brings the highest joy; who, now looking at heaven, now at the shore that brings the vessels of the liberating nation, merge thanks to the divinity with feelings of gratitude toward their generous benefactors.”238 He then proposes that 16 Pluviôse be made a national holiday in the colonies, a symbol of the equivalency of love of freedom and national feeling.

Thomany was also a member of a legislative committee put together to evaluate the claims of former slave traders, and as such, he had the chance to defend the principle of equality against commerce. Ever since the decision of 16 Pluviôse, slave traders had inundated the government with petitions, asking that they be compensated for the debts still owed them by merchants or colons. Their argument was that the law of abolition should not be retroactive. But the committee argued that the slave trade was an unusual commercial transaction and that any debt connected to it disappeared once the law was passed. On 15 October 1798, the committee presented its conclusions: “All debts derived from the sale of slaves are now moot and abolished. It is forbidden for tribunals, either on the continent of the Republic, or in its islands and colonies, to pronounce any condemnation in this respect, and all judgments passed but not yet executed will be considered invalid.”239 This was a strong statement of principle, and it showed that the spirit of the Revolution was still alive and well among some legislators.

Etienne Mentor, though younger than his colleagues, often spoke in front of the legislature, emphasizing the values of universal equality and fraternity he saw embodied in the French Republic, and considering his personal history, this is not surprising. Born in Martinique, where his father was a blacksmith and a member of the National Guard, he was captain of a Chasseurs unit in Guadeloupe. When the island was taken by the British in 1794, they deported him, and after arriving in Brest, he was placed in the Arras battalion. From there he made his way to Paris, but he soon after embarked for Saint-Domingue to accompany the third commission led by Sonthonax. Once there, Sonthonax, praising Mentor’s “zeal, patriotism, and talents,” promoted him to chef de bataillon. In May 1797, Mentor was named adjutant general; commander in chief Louverture praised his “zeal and talents” in a letter to Sonthonax. Soon he was elected deputy and went back to Paris. After his term ended, he had his title of adjutant general confirmed by the Directory and asked to be assigned to the Army of the West. He needed work: “Without any means of existence, with a wife, a child, and a sister, he hasn’t deserved this fate, and his dedication to the republican government remains steadfast,” he wrote to the government.240 In the end, he was sent back to Saint-Domingue, though he warned the authorities that he had publicly spoken against Louverture, and he did not want to undermine the success of the operation. He was sent anyway, but not without rescuing a sailor who had fallen into a stormy sea and being hospitalized as a result. Much about this man seemed to be a materialization of the principles he espoused.241

Like Belley, in his speeches he applied his republican principles to several levels, using the concept of brotherhood to refer to his black constituents, to his French compatriots, and to human beings all over the world. The blacks of Saint-Domingue, he said in May 1798, who have found “a fatherland, protectors, brothers” in France, swear attachment to it, and there is now universal hope, as “the link of the same interests, the same feelings, is starting to unite Europe to America, to Africa, to Asia.” He ends the speech with a dig at “those who, motivated by personal ambition, could become traitors to the Republic.”242 Since he has just referred to black republicans, it is clear he means Louverture, and his placing of civic virtue above personal ambition mirrors Belley’s. On 15 October of that year, he spoke in support of the committee that had evaluated the claims of former slave traders. The main idea that emerges from his speech is that those claims belong to a dark past that has now been revoked. “Those days are over,” he says, “when the French used to have slaves; now he can only have equals and brothers.” The petitioners “should not dishonor humanity by reviving memories that are as painful as humiliating for the unfortunate Africans and their descendants.” These tyrants “should try to make us forget their wrongs instead of reminding us of them through a request that is as strange as it is unjust.”243 To Mentor, the equality of men and of their rights has now been established, and the march of progress, whether in time or space, is irrevocable. The next year, he would appear listed by a conservative “someone” as a neo-Jacobin and compared to Hébert, the radical republican, and to Robespierre.244

These black men were linked in other ways. For many of them, experience in the military was an important contributor to their notion of French citizenship, their cosmopolitanism, and their sense of racial solidarity. As we saw, Mentor was adjutant general in Saint-Domingue before he was elected. As a deputy, he supported the petitions of two men, Isaac Bazonga and Charles Soubise, who had been officers in the Légion des Américains and were asking the government for reinstatement in the military. An official document describes each of these men as uneducated and immoral,245 but Mentor praised Soubise’s “patriotism, good behavior, courage,”246 and Thomany also signed Bazonga’s petition. Bazonga had been born in Africa, enslaved in the West Indies, was an officer in France, and was obviously down and out after his service ended. The deputies’ support may simply have been a form of racial solidarity; it may also have been the result of a broader vision, a desire for a racially integrated France that would symbolize the social transformation brought about by millions of Atlantic crossings. On 23 June 1799, Mentor spoke out about the treatment of two companies of men of color who had been made prisoner by the British in the West Indies and deported and were now confined on a small island on the French west coast in miserable living conditions. What Mentor mostly condemns, though, is their segregation from the regular army, since these men were “isolated from their European comrades in arms.” Their sequestration reeked of the Ancien Régime and was contrary to the principles of the republic. They had been “relegated” to a corner of land, “far from their brothers in arms.” He asks his colleagues to end “an exile that degrades them, that isolates them from other Frenchmen.”247 Once again, the military context provides the substance for a republican, transatlantic, multiracial equality.

If we are to judge from their letters, these men were also a tightly knit group of friends; they knew each other’s families, and they helped each other become what Bernard Gainot calls “a social group in full ascension.”248 On 11 February 1798, while he was in Brest waiting to embark for Saint-Domingue, Belley wrote Boisson, asking him to keep him informed of all that will happen in the capital concerning the colonies. He then wishes him good health, “as well as your dear Adelle, to whom I’m asking you to say a thousand nice things.” He then tells him he has just received a letter from Thomany, who tells him about the death of his grandson, Roy: “You can imagine how painful that is for me.” He also sends greetings to “our brothers,” including Mentor, as well as to their wives. He signs: “I am your friend, Belley.” When he writes him from Saint-Domingue, he tells him that he has seen Boisson’s mother and sister. In another letter, he says: “No, my friend, I don’t expect you to see me as a father. You can be certain that I am your friend and that I will seize every opportunity to prove it to you.”249 In spite of their deputies’ salaries, most of these men seem to have scrambled for a living, and they offered each other support. Belley was trying to help Boisson obtain a military commission. Boisson apparently liked the good life and owed people money, including Thomany. Thomany himself wrote that he was “embarrassed.” Once back in Saint-Domingue, Belley himself said he had not been paid, and had to rely on friends.250 Clearly, besides the interracial, republican feelings, there was also the sense that one could turn to one’s black community for various forms of solidarity.

Another way in which these families created bonds is through the education of their children. We know through Belley’s official declaration that he was not married.251 But he had a son, whom he brought to France with him. In his dramatic speech on 16 Pluviôse, Dufaÿ had described the way Belley had been assailed by white colons on the ship docked at Philadelphia. Detailing their doings to the Convention, he told how they tried to pull off his cocarde and then “stole his watch, his money, all his belongings, even those of his child.”252 In Paris, this son attended a boarding school called the National Institution of the Colonies, which was a perfect example of what Gainot calls “republican integration.” Created by the government to educate the children of colonial leaders, it occupied the space of a former college on the Left Bank and was directed by an abbey. The school opened in September 1798, and by 1800, thanks to the January 1798 law, which directed the colonies to send children every year to be educated in France, it counted almost eighty students. Louverture’s sons, Isaac and Placide, attended, as well as Thomany’s and those of Sonthonax and his mixed-race partner. White children also attended, including the sons of Brissot.253 The school would turn into a symbol of the new times when it had to close its doors as the new century began.

On 18 Brumaire of year VIII, or 9 November 1799, a coup d’état brought General Napoleon Bonaparte to power. By this time, Louverture controlled the whole island of Hispaniola. Soon Napoleon promoted a constitution that allowed the colonies their particular laws, abandoning the universalism that had been the hallmark of the Revolution. In July 1801, Louverture himself promulgated a constitution for Saint-Domingue; while it proclaimed freedom from slavery and racial hierarchy, it also contained strict labor laws that, among others, severely limited workers’ freedom of movement. It also had a dictatorial streak and helped Louverture turn the colony into a police state. In January 1802, a fleet of fifty ships, carrying twenty-two thousand soldiers and twenty thousand sailors, arrived in sight of the island. Leading it was General Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc, Napoleon’s brother-in-law, charged with wresting power from Louverture. Soon it was all-out war. In June, Louverture was arrested, together with his wife and sons, who had come back with Leclerc, and all were taken to France. When Napoleon had signed a decree the month before reestablishing slavery in some colonies and allowing the slave trade, it was clear that the metropole had taken a sharp turn backward.

Leclerc found himself increasingly on the losing side, as thousands of his men died of yellow fever, and many blacks fighting with him switched sides and joined the rebels. His solution: genocide. “We must destroy all the blacks of the mountains—men and women—and spare only children under twelve years of age,” he wrote Napoleon in October. “We must destroy half of those in the plains,” he continued, “and must not leave a single colored person in the colony who has worn an epaulette” (Dubois, 291–92). Leclerc himself soon died of yellow fever, and he was replaced by the Viscount de Rochambeau, who gleefully continued his reign of terror. These practices led the rebels to unite, and by November 1803, Rochambeau surrendered to their leader, Jean-Jacques Dessalines. France had lost its republican symbolism by now, and on 1 January 1804, Dessalines declared an independent Haiti.

Belley was caught up in this new onslaught of imperialistic and racial violence. When in December 1799 he was asked his opinion about the best way forward for Saint-Domingue, he advocated strong military action, in keeping with his principled opposition to independence.254 So he came with Leclerc. But he was suddenly slated for deportation a few months later, purportedly because he made “anti-European remarks.”255 It is possible that Leclerc decided he did not want strong black leaders around, since he sent many others along with him. The difference is that, after he disembarked in Brest in June 1802, Belley was sent to Belle-Ile, a small island off the coast of Brittany. He died there, in the military hospital, on 6 August 1805. He left a testament, which ceded his few belongings to his half brother, Joseph Domingue, “so that they could in part be given to his family in Saint-Domingue.”256 Joseph was twenty years younger and, like Belley, a military man and a patriot. A little more than a month later, he came from Rochefort, a coastal town about three hundred miles south, to gather a few clothes, shoes, silverware, and jewels—a few valuables left over by a man who had lived his life for an ideal.