The richest colony on Earth
French Saint-Domingue produced, by the late 1780s, about half the world’s sugar and coffee, on the labour of some half a million enslaved Africans worked to death at rates that required constant new imports — two-thirds of the enslaved were African-born at the revolution’s outbreak. Above them: free people of colour (some prosperous and slave-owning, all legally humiliated) and a white population split between planters and poor. Into this structure the French Revolution’s language of rights arrived like a spark in a powder magazine.
The revolution
The rising began in the northern plain in August 1791 — launched, by tradition, at the vodou ceremony of Bois Caïman — and became the most complex war of the age: enslaved insurgents, free-coloured forces, French republicans and royalists, and invading Spanish and British armies (Britain lost tens of thousands of troops, mostly to yellow fever) in shifting combinations. Out of it rose Toussaint Louverture, formerly enslaved, a general and statesman of European reputation, who by 1801 governed the whole island under a constitution abolishing slavery forever — nominally French, effectively his.
Napoleon answered in 1802 with the largest expedition France had ever sent across the Atlantic, under his brother-in-law Leclerc, with secret orders to restore slavery. Toussaint was seized at parley and shipped to die in a French Alpine fortress (April 1803) — “In overthrowing me,” he warned, “you have cut down only the trunk of the tree of liberty; it will spring back from the roots, for they are numerous and deep.” Yellow fever devoured the expedition; news that slavery had been restored in Guadeloupe fused all factions; and Jean-Jacques Dessalines destroyed the French remnant at Vertières (November 1803). On 1 January 1804 he proclaimed independent Haiti — the Taíno name reclaimed — the first Black republic, born of the only slave revolt in recorded history to end slavery and found a state.
The price exacted
The powers quarantined the precedent: recognition was withheld for decades (the United States until 1862), and in 1825 France, warships offshore, extorted an indemnity of 150 million francs — compensation to former slaveholders for their lost “property” — later reduced to 90 million but financed by loans whose service consumed Haitian revenues into the twentieth century (final associated payments in 1947). The revolution’s other consequences ran continent-wide: Napoleon, his American ambitions burned out in Saint-Domingue, sold Louisiana; Bolívar rebuilt his liberation campaigns from Haitian ports with Haitian arms, on the condition — kept — that he free the enslaved in the lands he liberated.