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Unauthorized elections to the Estates General of 1789 were held in the French colony of Saint-Domingue in 1789, coinciding with the elections in the rest of French territories. After being denied representation in the Estates General and the right to establish their own elected assembly within the colony, groups of planters organized in secret and elected 17 deputies. Upon arrival in Versailles, these deputies were granted "provisional" admittance as members of the Third Estate but were denied the right to vote.
Despite technically meeting the requirements to parcipate in the elections, free men of color were denied the right to vote in almost all the cases. The cahiers de doléances produced by the delegates explicitly opposed the integration of property-owning free men of color into the political life of the colony. The elected deputies were members of the Massiac Club, an alliance between planters and merchants dedicated to maintaining the system of slavery in the colony on the basis of laissez-faire economics. The club believed that the colonialists had the right to free commerce, which included the use of slaves. Its first president was Marquis de Gallifet, owner of some of the most prosperous sugar plantations in the Northern Province of the colony, though he soon resigned the post, apparently because of a stuttering problem.
Nine of the deputies were present at the Tennis Court Oath and were absorbed “provisionally” into the new National Assembly. However, their number of seats was reduced to six (two per province) from a proposed 20 after failing to argue that slaves should be included in the population count.
Background
editThe outcome of the Seven Years' War reduced French colonial possessions to an almost insignificant amount, especially compared to the possessions of its rivals. The war, fought over colonial issues, forced the French Crown to incur substantial debt, contributing to the financial crisis that eventually led to the king calling for an Estates General.[1] Ironically, it was also a time of unprecedented prosperity, particularly in Saint-Domingue.[1][2] With France's cession of its North American territories to the British, the Caribbean became the primary destination for Frenchmen seeking fortune in the Americas.[2] Above all, investment in Saint-Domingue's sugar, coffee, and cotton plantations surged, nearly doubling the slave population from 1763 to 1789. By 1789, there were around 700,000 slaves in the French Caribbean colonies, equal to the slave population in the entire United States.[1] By the time of the French Revolution, the colony made as much sugar as Jamaica, Cuba, and Brazil combined, and accounted for half of the world's coffee supply.[3] The wealth generated by these colonies contributed significantly to the confidence and political participation of France's aristocratic and bourgeois elites in Metropolitan France.[4]
Colonial issues were also central to intellectual and political debates of the period. Similar to the colonists in Britain's North American colonies, French colonists grew increasingly resentful of metropolitan rule following the Seven Years' War, particularly policies like the exclusif, which restricted trade to only the mother country. This discontent culminated in a major revolt in Saint-Domingue's western and southern provinces in 1768. This revolt, lead by the Council of Port-au-Prince, paralyzed the colony’s government for a full year. Later, concerns about the growing number of blacks arriving in France led to the 1777 Police des noirs edict, which aimed to prevent the development of a population of African descent in metropolitan France; thus injecting the issue of race into French political discourse. The influential "Histoire des deux Indes," first published in 1770, questioned whether liberty in Europe could survive if “despotism” flourished unchecked overseas. In the decades leading up to the Revolution, abstract denunciations of slavery were prevalent in French political discourse. Critics of arbitrary royal and ministerial authority warned that if the king’s subjects did not assert their rights, they would be no better than slaves. Meanwhile, some defenders of absolutism argued that the aristocratic parlements sought powers that would make them the masters of the rest of the population. In pre-revolutionary rhetoric, slavery was thus portrayed as the worst of evils. However, this broad application of the concept to conditions in France obscured the specific issue of colonial slavery. Obsessed with preventing themselves from being subjected to metaphorical chains, French pamphleteers seemed oblivious to the real chains binding the black population in the colonies. Nevertheless, the stigma attached to the word "slavery" drove defenders of colonial interests to avoid mentioning it whenever possible.[5]
While white colonists grew increasingly frustrated with metropolitan France’s oversight and economic restrictions, leaders among the free people of color, inspired by the American Revolutionary War, dispatched Julien Raimond as an emissary to advocate for the abolition of racial distinctions between whites and free people of color, many of whom had served in the French forces during the war, gaining some sympathy in Versailles. This development alarmed white slave owners, who perceived ministerial control as a threat to the established racial hierarchy and the institution of slavery on the island.[6]
Following reports of small slave uprisings in the plantations of the colony, reform-minded administrators in the Colonial Ministry in Paris issued royal edicts in 1784 and 1785 respectively. These edicts, intended to curb the autonomy of plantation managers to protect the economic interests of absentee proprietors and metropolitan merchants in their constant quarrels with estate managers and debtors, and to restrict the mistreatment of slaves, further outraged the colonial white population. When the Conseil supérieur du Cap français refused to register the ordinance, it ignited a conflict between the local administrators and Versailles, leading to the French government abolishing the rebellious court in January 1787.[7][8] Its powers were then transferred to Port-au-Prince.[8] This act, which foreshadowed attempts to abolish parlements in France, positioned colonists as victims of ministerial despotism, priming the colonies for unrest.[7]
In the same year, while Martinique and Guadeloupe were granted the right to establish colonial assemblies, Saint-Domingue was excluded from this privilege.[8]
In response to the abolition of the Conseil supérieur du Cap, a dispatch of a delegation headed by the well-known expert on colonial affairs, Moreau de Saint-Méry, was sent to France in the spring of 1788, where he contacted some of the wealthy absentee plantation owners residing in the capital. Prior to this, proposals were already circulating to grant the whites of Saint-Domingue control over their own affairs, such as the Essai sur l’administration des colonies (Essay on the Administration of the Colonies), which was reviewed in the Journal de Paris and the Mercure de France in March 1788.[9]
In February 1788, Jacques-Pierre Brissot founded the Société des Amis des Noirs. Like its British counterpart, the society advocated for the abolition of the slave trade and the gradual elimination of slavery in the Americas. Although abolitionism in France never developed into a popular movement as it did in Britain and the United States, the group included several future revolutionaries, such as Lafayette, Mirabeau, and eventually Abbé Grégoire. Its primary goal was to mobilize public opinion to influence government policy through existing institutions. Despite its cautious tactics, the group's extensive publicity campaign attracted significant attention. However, domestic crises, such as the attempts to abolish the parlements, often diverted focus from colonial issues.[10][11]
Campaign
editThe decision to call for an election of representatives to the Estates General, an ancient consultative body that hadn't been called in hundreds of years, on July 5 1788, presented an opportunity for both the Amis des Noirs and the plantation owners of Saint-Domingue. The Amis des Noirs sent an essay by Marquis de Condorcet to each of the hundreds of districts electing deputies. It expressed hope that the French nation would turn its attention to the slave trade and work to end its “crimes of violence,” to improve the lives of slaves condemned “to work without end and without hope, exposed to the arbitrary punishments of their masters, deprived of all social and natural rights, and reduced to the condition of domestic animals.” The society's efforts had a tangible impact, as 49 of the cahiers de doléances (lists of grievances that the king had invited each of the voting assemblies to create) contained criticisms of the slave trade or slavery. The Amis des Noirs also lobbied Jacques Necker, the king's liberal minister, to remove state subsidies for slave traders. Despite his family's wealth being connected to the Caribbean colonies, Necker opposed the slave trade. In his speech opening the Estates General in June 1789, Necker urged the assembly to consider the suffering of African slaves, describing them as "men like us in their thoughts and above all in their capacity to suffer," who were cruelly transported across the Atlantic in ship hulls.[9][12]
In opposition to the Amis des noris, the Colonial Committee, a group of French planters, began to meet in Paris in July 1788. This initiative was led by Marquis Louis-Marthe Gouy d’Arsy, an ambitious absentee proprietor who had never visited Saint-Domingue but would dominate the committee's proceedings throughout its campaign. In its letter to the king, the group expressed their grievances about the abolition of the Conseil supérieur du Cap and requested representation in the Estates General, laying out the arguments the colonists would press until the final resolution of the issue by the National Assembly on July 4, 1789. The committee's letter to the king was a revised version of an earlier draft from April, which had included a staunch defense of the slave owners' absolute authority over their slaves. It is likely that this version was abandoned to avoid swaying public opinion against their cause.[13]
Like the Amis des noirs, the Colonial Committee initially petitioned the king and his ministers. In particular, they sought to persuade César-Henri, comte de La Luzerne, the minister responsible for the colonies, to support their demand for deputies to the Estates-General. However, Gouy d’Arsy and his colleagues also realized the importance of influencing public opinion. To this end, they decided to conceal the true grounds of their complaints and instead limited their demands to call for justice and the colony’s representation in the Estates-General. By doing so, they aimed to align themselves with the rights-based rhetoric used by opponents of slavery and other "patriots" demanding representative government in France. In demanding the right to establish a colonial assembly and to send deputies to the Estates-General, the colonists explicitly associated themselves with the French provinces defying royal authority and forming their own estates during the summer of 1788. Recognizing the importance of newspapers, the group also began to hire pens to counteract their anti-slavery opinions as they lacked any writing talent. Jacques-Vincent Delacroix, a well-known pamphleteer, wrote their first pamphlet, Voeu patriotique d’un Américain sur la prochaine assemblée des Etats-généraux (The Patriotic Desire of an American for the Upcoming Assembly of the Estates-General). Later, they also tried to hire Count Mirabeau at a time when, desperate for money and determined to find some way to get himself elected to the upcoming assembly, he was pursuing a number of unsuccessful schemes that preceded his campaign for a seat in the Third Estate delegation from Provence. Although Mirabeau had previously circulated British anti-slavery tracts in his journal, Analyse des papiers anglois, he did not immediately reject the idea of defending the colonists. However, realizing that he would need to become a slave owner to represent them in the Estates-General, he likely decided to sever his ties with the group.[14]
In the same meeting that Mirabeau was offered to represent the colonists in the Estates General, on October 25, the group debated colonial administrator Pierre-Victor Malouet’s desire to publish a pamphlet openly defending slavery. They decided to advise Malouet to hold off until the Estates-General had convened and granted representation to the colonies. Malouet replied by stressing the urgency of countering Condorcet’s pamphlet. He also advised the group to avoid raising colonial grievances that would be poorly received in France, specifically recommending that they refrain from criticizing the exclusif.[15]
Some Saint-Domingue planters were apprehensive about seeking seats in the Estates-General, fearing that an assembly where they held only a minority voice might make decisions detrimental to their interests and bring the colonies under the control of the Estates-General, where anti-slavery forces could gain influence[16] or make decisions without regard for their interest. In response, Gouy d’Arsy emphasized his view of the Estates-General as “the reunion of all the provinces” and argued that “it would be absurd to think that the provinces would only come together to deprive each other of what they each have so much interest in preserving." Consequently, the group decided to continue their efforts for national representation.[17]
In late summer and fall of 1788, white colonists who supported Saint-Domingue's representation in the Estates-General began preparations to elect deputies, despite lacking authorization from the royal administration. Meanwhile, the Colonial Committee continued to lobby royal ministers and other influential figures. Marie-Charles du Chilleau, the colony’s governor-general, met with the committee in France but informed them that the Estates-General did not concern Saint-Domingue. On September 4, 1788, La Luzerne reported to the king that he doubted whether the Colonial Committee truly represented the views of most whites in the colony. He also noted that no other European country had granted its colonies such a privilege. His clinching argument was that if the king decided the question on his own, he would be usurping the powers of the Estates General. Consequently, on September 11, 1788, the royal council decided that the colonies would not be invited to send deputies to the upcoming Estates General as there was a lack of precedent. In response, the group prepared a petition emphasizing the economic importance of the colonies to France, arguing that "a kingdom like France cannot do without colonies, and their abandonment would be the greatest of all political misfortunes." Despite their efforts, the royal administration remained steadfast in its refusal to act in their favor and forbade the Nobles from considering the matter.[18]
Election
editWith no other options left, the pro-representation faction within Saint-Domingue proceeded with its unauthorized plan and secretly elected deputies. In nearly all cases, free men of color, even those meeting the property requirements, were denied the right to vote. The cahiers de doléances produced by the delegates explicitly opposed the integration of property-owning free men of color into the political life of the colony. Some nominees, like Gouy, were absentee proprietors, while others were residents of the colony. By the beginning of April, the colonial delegates were en route to France.[19][16]
The elected deputies were members of the Massiac Club, an alliance between planters and merchants[20] dedicated to maintaining the system of slavery in the colony on the basis of laissez-faire economics. The club believed that the colonialists had the right to free commerce, which included the use of slaves.[21] Its first president was Marquis de Gallifet, owner of some of the most prosperous sugar plantations in the Northern Province of the colony, though he soon resigned the post, apparently because of a stuttering problem.[20]
References
edit- ^ a b c Kley 2011, p. 220–221.
- ^ a b DUBOIS 2009, p. 20.
- ^ DUBOIS 2009, p. 21.
- ^ Kley 2011, p. 221.
- ^ Kley 2011, p. 221–222.
- ^ Kley 2011, p. 222–223.
- ^ a b Kley 2011, p. 223.
- ^ a b c DUBOIS 2009, p. 31.
- ^ a b Kley 2011, p. 225.
- ^ Kley 2011, p. 223–225.
- ^ DUBOIS 2009, p. 72–73.
- ^ DUBOIS 2009, p. 73.
- ^ Kley 2011, p. 226–227.
- ^ Kley 2011, p. 227–229.
- ^ Kley 2011, p. 229.
- ^ a b DUBOIS 2009, p. 74.
- ^ Kley 2011, p. 229–230.
- ^ Kley 2011, p. 230–231.
- ^ Kley 2011, p. 231.
- ^ a b DUBOIS 2009, p. 75.
- ^ bdegail (2016-05-05). "The Club Massiac". A Colony in Crisis: The Saint-Domingue Grain Shortage of 1789. Retrieved 2024-06-07.
Works cited
edit- Kley, Dale Van; Kaiser, Thomas (2011). From Deficit to Deluge: The Origins of the French Revolution. Stanford University Press. ISBN 9780804772815.
- DUBOIS, Laurent (2009). Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674034365.