William S. Cormack - Patriots, Royalists, and Terrorists in the West Indies: The French Revolution in Martinique and Guadeloupe, 1789-1802

In September 1789, two months after crowds stormed the Bastille in Paris, merchant ships from Bordeaux arrived at the colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe in the eastern Caribbean bringing news of the French Revolution. The effect of this news, and of the tricolour cockades worn by the ships passengers and crews as symbols of revolutionary liberty and national sovereignty, was dramatic. The colonial governors efforts to prevent the wearing of such cockades sparked riots in the ports of Saint-Pierre in Martinique and Pointe--Pitre in Guadeloupe, and these riots began a protracted and convoluted revolutionary struggle in the Lesser Antilles or, as French contemporaries referred to them, the les du Vent or the Windward Islands. While smaller than the colony of Saint-Domingue, their sugar and coffee production made the Windward Islands valuable components of Frances commercial economy. This production depended on slave labour, and the black slaves who worked the plantations vastly outnumbered the free population, which was itself divided along racial, economic, and social fault lines. The grievances and agency of the colonial population shaped the ensuing struggle but so did metropolitan influences. This study provides a history of the French Revolution in Martinique and Guadeloupe.

The arrival of news, ideas, and language from France provided a script for revolutionary action in the Windward Islands, a script that was revised periodically by new metropolitan communications. Rumours of emancipation sparked an abortive slave revolt in Martinique at the end of August 1789 and revealed the depth of white fears regarding the fragility of the slave system. Revolutionary symbols and rhetoric encouraged white resistance to colonial elites and provided new political identities: petit-Blanc, or poor white, and merchant supporters of the revolution called themselves patriots, while referring to the governors as despots and to their planter enemies as aristocrats. Travellers accounts and newspaper reports, as well as official announcements, undermined royal authority in the colonies and provoked local claims to national or popular authority. While planters used existing colonial assemblies to arrogate legislative authority, defying metropolitan regulation of trade, a popular committee in Saint-Pierre claimed to speak for the people and denied the legitimacy of both the colonial assembly and the governor general. The colonial revolution, however, was deeply ambiguous. White colonists demanded freedom for themselves but also wanted the maintenance of black slavery. White insistence on strict racial hierarchy poisoned debates on citizenship for the gens de couleur, the colonies free people of colour, whose aspirations for equality were clear before 1789. Planters sought greater colonial autonomy yet backed governors against popular challenges to the islands elites.

The revolutions ambiguity in the Windward Islands continued after 1789, as did competition between rival claims to legitimate authority. A bitter factional struggle escalated to civil war in 1790, and the representatives from France sent to end the conflict failed to reconcile the two sides or to impose principles of the liberal revolution. In 1792 planter-controlled colonial assemblies in Martinique and Guadeloupe rebelled against metropolitan authority under the banner of the old monarchy. A single frigate captain defeated this counter-revolution by both undermining its legitimacy and by promising equality to free people of colour, all the while reassuring masters that the French Republic would not threaten slavery. The tensions and contradictions within the republican regimes subsequently established in Martinique and Guadeloupe diminished the colonies ability to resist British conquest in 1794. In the context of international war, new agents of metropolitan France regained control of Guadeloupe and delivered the most radical of revolutionary scripts: the abolition of slavery and the Jacobin Terror. Yet racial and political ambiguity also characterized this radical regime. At the same time, planters in Martinique collaborated with the British occupation to maintain slavery and to isolate the colony from all notions of liberty and equality.