The Haitian Revolution is a story of extreme violence, hope, and human rights.
Learn how slaves in Saint-Domingue fought against brutal conditions and multiple European powers to establish the first free black-led nation in the world.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the Haitian Revolution.
[00:00:26] It is one of the most interesting and important revolutions in world history, and brings together colonialism, slavery, the French, the Spanish, the British, the Americans, Napoleon, sugar, extreme violence, revenge, human rights, and more.
[00:00:42] As a warning, today’s episode is longer than usual, but it’s an important one, so I hope you’ll enjoy it.
[00:00:49] OK then, let’s not waste a minute, and talk about The Haitian Revolution.
[00:00:56] If you have some knowledge of English poets, you will have heard of William Wordsworth.
[00:01:03] He was the father of the English Romantic movement and is probably most famous for writing poems about the English countryside.
[00:01:12] But in 1803 he turned his attention to another subject in a poem titled Toussaint L'Ouverture.
[00:01:23] The poem started with the line “Toussaint, the most unhappy Man of Men!”, and continued to pay tribute to its subject.
[00:01:34] Wordsworth never met or knew the man he dedicated the poem to, and the two men couldn’t have been more different.
[00:01:45] William Wordsworth was born in England, enjoyed a privileged life, studied at Cambridge University, and died at home, surrounded by his family, at the ripe old age of 80.
[00:01:59] Toussaint L’Ouverture was born on a slave plantation in Saint-Domingue, in modern-day Haiti, and died at the age of 59 in chains in a freezing French prison, just months after Wordsworth’s poem.
[00:02:15] The fact that this Romantic English poet dedicated a poem to him gives you some idea of the global impact of Toussaint L’Ouverture.
[00:02:26] And we can see this poignantly in the last few verses, as Wordsworth wrote about how L’Ouverture would be remembered by generations to come.
[00:02:37] There’s not a breathing of the common wind
[00:02:40] That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
[00:02:44] Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
[00:02:47] And love, and Man’s unconquerable mind.
[00:02:52] In other words, what you have done will be remembered forever.
[00:02:57] So, what exactly is the story of Toussaint L’Ouverture?
[00:03:02] Well, to understand his story, and the story of the Haitian Revolution, we need to go back several hundred years.
[00:03:11] In the middle of the Caribbean lies its second-largest island, Hispaniola.
[00:03:18] The indigenous inhabitants of the island were the Taíno people, but the name for the island, Hispaniola, gives you a clue as to who they were greeted by on December 6th, 1492: Christopher Columbus and the Spanish.
[00:03:36] The Spanish were initially quite interested in the island, and its potential as a source of gold, but their interest soon waned after it became clear that greater riches could be found on the mainland, in Central and South America.
[00:03:54] The island turned into a sort of trading and piracy outpost, a place where Caribbean pirates would go to sell their stolen goods or stock up on food.
[00:04:07] The Western part of the island in particular was left practically abandoned.
[00:04:13] And, lest we forget, the native Taíno population had been pretty much wiped out by a combination of forced labour and diseases brought in by the Spanish.
[00:04:26] Fast forward to 1697 and the Spanish agreed to hand over the Western part of the island to the French, who renamed it Saint-Domingue.
[00:04:37] And the French did not neglect it.
[00:04:40] They turned it into a huge colonial outpost with masses of plantations, producing sugar, coffee, cotton, indigo and cacao.
[00:04:51] It was a particularly important centre for sugar production, and soon this western part of Hispaniola, the now French colony of Saint-Domingue, was producing 40% of all of the sugar consumed in Europe.
[00:05:06] And as you might expect, it was not the native French who were toiling away in the plantations.
[00:05:13] This gruelling work was being done by the hundreds of thousands of African slaves who had been brought to the island with the sole purpose of working in the plantations until they dropped dead of exhaustion, disease, or malnutrition.
[00:05:30] And drop dead they did.
[00:05:33] Most slaves in Saint-Domingue didn’t live past their 21st birthday, and slaves who arrived on the island typically wouldn’t last more than 2 or 3 years.
[00:05:46] It's hard to overstate quite how brutal this regime was, but the fact that it was considered a waste for slave owners to spend any time caring for their slaves because it was cheaper to buy a new one to replace a dead one, well this gives you an idea of the level of inhumanity on the island.
[00:06:08] It was a brutal system, but to portray it simply as French whites as slave owners and African slaves toiling on the plantations is a simplification.
[00:06:21] There were really four main groups of people on the island, and as we will see, they all had different goals and different perspectives.
[00:06:32] At the top of the tree were the slave-owning whites, the so-called “big whites”, or grand blancs in French. These were the people who owned the plantations, the people who profited from the slave labour. Some of them lived on the island, while others lived back in France and simply collected the money from the plantations.
[00:06:56] Below them were the “small whites”, or “petit blancs”. These were the French people who had come to the island to work; they did managerial or administrative work, or they would work on the plantations as field managers. They didn’t own plantations, but they were still considered superior to the slaves, given their skin colour.
[00:07:22] Below them again, but in some respects their equal, were the “gens de couleur libres”, the “free people of colour” in English.
[00:07:31] These were people who were of mixed race, typically children of a French father and a slave mother, or people who at some point in their family history had slave ancestry.
[00:07:47] There were few French women in Saint-Domingue, and unfortunately, this meant that rape and sexual assault by the whites on slaves were common.
[00:07:57] And if this resulted in a child, the white plantation owner would typically free or even marry the female slave, and she and her children would become free.
[00:08:09] Importantly, this class, the “gens de couleur libres”, were free; they could even own plantations and keep slaves themselves, but they were not granted rights like the ability to vote or hold political office.
[00:08:24] And right at the bottom of the pile were the most unfortunate of the lot, the slaves, who had absolutely no rights at all, they were property and lived in the most abominable of conditions.
[00:08:38] So you have this unusual system of these different groups of people, all of whom interfacing with each other to a certain extent, all of whose interests will complicate matters as this story develops.
[00:08:52] And just in terms of numbers, the grand and petit blancs, the whites essentially, were in a serious minority; they made up about 8% of the population.
[00:09:04] The mixed-race population was around 5%, and the remaining just under 90% were the African slaves.
[00:09:14] And these slaves were almost all African, they were born in Africa, transported to Haiti, lived for a short period and died there.
[00:09:25] At the time of the Haitian Revolution, so the late 18th century, practically all of the slaves were born in Africa for the simple but awful reason that the life expectancy of a slave in Haiti was so short that they had to be constantly replaced.
[00:09:42] And to give you an idea of the number of people we’re talking about here, there were around 500,000 slaves and fewer than 50,000 whites.
[00:09:53] Now, these conditions created a dangerous powder keg, a bonfire ready to explode in flames at the drop of a match.
[00:10:02] You had a tiny minority that controlled a majority and subjected it to the most terrible of conditions based on skin colour alone. And what’s more, you had these two other groups, the petit blancs and the gens de couleur libres, the small whites and the mixed-race population, who were stuck in between the grand blancs and the slaves, and they despised each other.
[00:10:30] That might well have been enough to trigger a revolution, but these conditions were not so different to those that existed in other slave-owning countries.
[00:10:41] What pushed things over the edge, the final spark that lit the fire, in fact came from across the seas, in France.
[00:10:51] The French Revolution started in 1789 and continued on and off for 10 years.
[00:10:59] One of the main ideas of the revolution was freedom and equality for all men, and indeed on August 26th, 1789, The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen set out clearly what these rights were.
[00:11:17] There were 17 in total, and the first one set the tone: “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.”
[00:11:33] It is a simple idea. It might have been controversial at the time, but it was easy for anyone to understand what it meant.
[00:11:43] And this revolutionary idea of equality and freedom, and news of the French Revolution, spread quickly.
[00:11:52] It didn’t take long for word of it to arrive in Saint-Domingue, which, let’s remember, was a French colony.
[00:12:00] And it was received in different ways by the four principal groups on the island.
[00:12:07] For the slaves, clearly it was a message of hope. Slavery was incompatible with “men remaining free”, so surely this must mean that their freedom would soon be declared?
[00:12:21] For the gens de couleur libres, the free mixed-race population, it was encouraging news because it would mean that they could do things like vote and stand in elections, which their skin colour did not allow them to do. But it was also slightly concerning, as much of this mixed-race population owned slaves, so if slavery was abolished, this would result in a major loss of earnings.
[00:12:49] For the petit-blancs and to an even greater extent the grand blancs, it was a frightening prospect. The entire society of Saint-Domingue was structured on men not being free and equal, on the blood, sweat and tears of African slaves, and if suddenly these people were declared equal, well the good times would be over for the white population.
[00:13:13] And they presumably knew that liberating the black slave population would not be as simple as declaring their freedom and everyone shaking hands and being friends again; the whites had subjected the slaves to the most horrendous treatment over hundreds of years.
[00:13:30] The treatment of the slaves by their white masters in Saint-Domingue was particularly brutal even by slavery standards.
[00:13:38] Punishments were awful, arms and legs chopped off, whippings were common, control was maintained by an atmosphere of constant fear.
[00:13:49] The slaves would surely want revenge.
[00:13:53] Even the idea that the black slaves could think that one day they might be free was a scary one. The whites were grossly outnumbered, by more than 10 to 1, and they feared the potential for an uprising if there was even the whiff of freedom, the slightest sense that freedom was possible.
[00:14:13] The white slave owners, the grand-blancs, hadn’t previously believed that the slaves were even capable of rising up en masse. They understood that there would always be a few that would try to run away or fight back, but they would be publicly executed as an example to others. They didn’t believe that the slaves were capable of organising themselves.
[00:14:37] For starters, there really weren’t many examples of wide-scale slave rebellions. Secondly, they believed that the slaves were mentally incapable of organising themselves.
[00:14:50] Slavery requires you to believe that one person is inferior to another by dint of their race, and the whites believed that the African slaves were just not capable of organising themselves, that they lacked the mental capacity to do so.
[00:15:08] As you will see, they were grossly mistaken, and they vastly underestimated the people they thought years of slavery and abuse had turned into docile, incapable subhumans.
[00:15:21] The first act of rebellion came not from the slaves, though, but from a gens de couleur libres, a mixed-race citizen of Saint-Domingue.
[00:15:31] A man called Vincent Ogé had been born in Saint-Domingue, and he was a member of the colonial elite. He was a rich and powerful man, but he was mixed race, which automatically disqualified him from certain rights.
[00:15:48] He was actually in France at the time of the revolution, and he petitioned the new Assembly General in France to allow mixed-race people the same rights as white people. The Assembly General granted this, passing it into law.
[00:16:04] But when he returned to Saint-Domingue in 1790, he found that the governor general simply ignored it, he said “nope”.
[00:16:15] Vincent Ogé enlisted a group of mixed-race soldiers, and they rose up in protest.
[00:16:23] Now, it’s important to underline that what Ogé was requesting wasn’t the abolition of slavery or equal rights for slaves or independence from France. He was a plantation owner himself, he owned slaves.
[00:16:37] All he wanted was the same rights as white people for people like him, mixed race people, not the abolition of slavery or improved rights for slaves.
[00:16:48] And, not of course that it should matter, but Ogé was much more white than he was black.
[00:16:54] His father was a white Frenchman, his mother was mixed race, so she was half white and half black, and if you look at a portrait of him, he was inseparable from any other white French aristocrat.
[00:17:09] But this really gives you a sense of quite how much race underpinned everything in Saint-Domingue. There were detailed measurements of how black someone was, and if you were anything less than 100% white, you didn’t have the same rights as the white population.
[00:17:27] Now, back to Ogé.
[00:17:30] Although what he was asking for, and indeed what had been approved by the French Assembly General, might not have seemed like such a big thing, it was rejected by the colonial administration, and his uprising was swiftly put down.
[00:17:47] A month after he rose up, he was captured, and then in February of the following year, February 1791, he was brutally publicly executed by being broken on the wheel, all of his bones agonisingly broken before his head was chopped off and put on a pike for all to see.
[00:18:09] If the white colonial administrators thought this would be sufficient to quash the uprising, they would be wrong.
[00:18:18] Six months later, on the evening of the 21st of August of 1791, everything would change in Saint-Domingue. There was a secret voodoo ceremony led by a slave and religious leader called Dutty Boukman. During the ceremony, he called for a full-out rebellion against the plantation owners. And as he made this plea, there was a tropical storm, thunder and lightning filling the sky.
[00:18:49] This was seen as a sign to take action, that change was afoot.
[00:18:56] Slaves rose up, slaughtering their colonial masters in their beds. They set fire to the sugar plantations, burning the crops and destroying the sugar plants that they had been forced to harvest, day in, day out.
[00:19:12] Saint-Domingue was a small place, and fires could be seen all over the island. Smoke and screams filled the air, as slaves in their thousands rose up against their former oppressors.
[00:19:26] Within a couple of weeks, more than 100,000 slaves had joined in the revolt, and the island was split into areas controlled by the slaves and small patches to which the whites had retreated.
[00:19:41] And when they met, the violence was extreme, on both sides.
[00:19:46] Men, women and children were killed in the most awful of ways.
[00:19:52] The slaves, perfectly understandably, were out for blood after being so hideously mistreated by their white colonial masters.
[00:20:01] And the whites had always been extremely violent towards the slave population, and were even more so now that they had risen up.
[00:20:12] But risen up against what, exactly?
[00:20:16] It's here that it gets a little complicated, and again we must remember the different groups and their different interests.
[00:20:24] What did the slaves want?
[00:20:26] Well, they wanted to be free, and they believed that the Declaration of the Rights Of Man had declared them to be free. They weren’t demanding independence from France, they weren’t demanding that the white population leave the island, all they wanted was not to be enslaved.
[00:20:44] And what did the grand-blancs, the slave owners, want?
[00:20:48] Well, they didn’t want the end of slavery, because it was a vastly profitable enterprise for them. Similarly, the gens de couleur libres, the free people of colour, they weren’t opposed to slavery per se, but they wanted the right to vote.
[00:21:05] And the petit-blancs, the professional white class, certainly didn’t want the end of slavery nor did they want the gens de couleur libres, the mixed-race people, to be granted the right to vote.
[00:21:19] And there was also this curious relationship between Saint-Domingue and France.
[00:21:26] Saint-Domingue was part of France, but the different groups of the colony looked at France in different ways.
[00:21:34] Initially, most of the slaves looked at France in a similar way to Vincent Ogé, as a potential saviour. France had declared itself to be a republic that respected the universal rights of man, and the idea that no one man was superior to another based on the colour of his skin.
[00:21:55] The grand blancs, on the other hand, looked to France as a dangerous republic. The revolution had resulted in this dangerous declaration and it looked like France was going to give mixed-race citizens the right to vote.
[00:22:10] This was a dangerous stepping stone, and there were powerful voices among the colonial population that sought to declare independence from France, turning Saint-Domingue into an independent country.
[00:22:25] And then, as if things weren’t complicated enough already, in 1793 France declared war on Great Britain.
[00:22:35] Now, why is this relevant to the Haitian Revolution?
[00:22:38] Well, firstly it meant that France’s military resources were stretched. They were now fighting a full-on war in Europe, which was expensive and labour-intensive.
[00:22:51] It also presented an opportunity for the British, who found an unlikely ally in the white French, the grand-blancs, of Saint-Domingue.
[00:23:01] The grand-blancs wrote to the British and requested them to come and declare sovereignty over Saint-Domingue, essentially turning this French colony into a British colony.
[00:23:13] The reason for this was not a military one, but because they thought that the British were less likely to abolish slavery.
[00:23:23] It seemed like a good deal for the British. They would take control of a lucrative trading outpost, the so-called “jewel of the Caribbean”, it would result in a large loss of revenue for France, and if they could put down the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue it would also reduce the probability of a similar slave revolt in British slave-powered colonies.
[00:23:46] Britain went along with this, and sent troops to Saint-Domingue, but it was a disaster.
[00:23:54] The British troops couldn’t handle it, and died in their thousands, primarily from tropical diseases, not in combat with the rebel slaves.
[00:24:04] But to make matters even more complicated, the Spanish also declared war on France.
[00:24:12] And let’s remember that the eastern side of the island of Hispaniola was still under Spanish control.
[00:24:19] So, let’s pause and take stock for a minute.
[00:24:24] There are the British and the Spanish who are at war with France in Europe, and are both fighting with and fighting against France in the Caribbean, in Hispaniola.
[00:24:36] We have the grand-blancs, the plantation owners, who are French but have attempted to ally with the British, because they believe they are more likely to put down the rebellion.
[00:24:47] We have the slaves who are in control of most of the island, seeking the abolishment of slavery. And at this point, the slaves are not particularly organised. Their advantage is in number; they outnumber the whites by a factor of 10 to 1, but they don’t have a particularly coherent vision or strategy.
[00:25:10] Nor do they have one single leader, a force to rally behind. There are some leaders of the movement, but they all want slightly different things, they aren’t able to unite every slave in Saint-Domingue.
[00:25:25] But it’s here that we need to meet, again, a man who will give them one.
[00:25:31] Toussaint L’Ouverture, the subject of the Wordsworth poem at the start of the episode.
[00:25:37] Importantly, Toussaint L’Ouverture was not a slave at the time of the revolution.
[00:25:43] He was born into slavery, both his parents had been sold into slavery and been transported from West Africa, but Toussaint was born on a plantation in Saint-Domingue, he was born a slave.
[00:25:58] However, he showed intelligence and skill from an early age, and was freed, most probably in his early 30s, so he became a gens de coleur libres, a free person of colour.
[00:26:11] And he did what many free people of colour did if they had the means.
[00:26:16] He managed a plantation, and was a slave owner himself.
[00:26:22] In the early days of the revolution, the early years in fact, Toussaint L’Ouverture played quite a canny game, he didn’t try to put himself forward as a leader, and instead supported several other people who were jostling for power.
[00:26:39] But by the mid-1790s, so almost five years into the revolution, he started to emerge as a key military leader. He was sharp, charismatic, and an adept military commander. In fact, his surname, “L’Ouverture”, which means “opening” in French, is believed to have come from his ability to find openings in his enemies’ lines.
[00:27:07] But if you were thinking that, now under the promising leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the timeline of the Haitian revolution was going to get simpler, I am afraid I have some bad news for you.
[00:27:20] L’Ouverture was a skilled diplomat, but this meant a ping-pong-esque flipping from one side to the other in terms of who the slaves were allied with.
[00:27:31] First it was the Spanish, because they provided military support against the French colonial administration.
[00:27:38] Then, in May of 1794, he switched allegiance to the French Republic, to France.
[00:27:46] The key reason for this switch was that the Republic of France had, in February of 1794, done what the slave population of Saint-Domingue were fighting for: they had formally announced the abolition of slavery.
[00:28:02] And, let’s remember, Saint-Domingue was part of France, so with one stroke of the pen, the half a million slaves of Saint-Domingue suddenly became, theoretically at least, free citizens of France.
[00:28:17] By switching allegiance from Spain to France he was allying himself with the home country, with freedom and with the emancipation of the slaves of Saint-Domingue.
[00:28:30] Now, he was fighting the Spanish and the British.
[00:28:35] Fortunately for L’Ouverture, the Spanish were not so interested in Saint-Domingue, and a peace treaty was signed in July of 1795.
[00:28:45] And as for the British, yes Saint-Domingue was still of interest, but there were more important wars to be fighting back in Europe, and by August of 1798, after repeated losses to L’Ouverture’s by now well-drilled forces, the British cut their losses and left Saint-Domingue for good.
[00:29:07] But if you were thinking that that was it, no no, there is more.
[00:29:12] In 1799, a then 30-year-old Frenchman called Napoleon Bonaparte declared himself to be First Consul of France, essentially the leader of the country, and passed a new constitution declaring that French colonies–such as Saint-Domingue–would be subject to special new laws.
[00:29:34] He assured L’Ouverture that this wouldn’t mean the reintroduction of slavery, but not everyone bought this, not everyone believed him.
[00:29:45] L’Ouverture then took steps to consolidate his power in Saint-Domingue. He invaded the eastern half of the island, the Spanish bit, in January of 1801. There was practically no Spanish resistance, and L’Ouverture immediately declared it to be part of France, meaning that he was now in control of the entire island of Hispaniola.
[00:30:09] And later on that year, in July of 1801, he appointed a new assembly and announced a new constitution.
[00:30:18] In this he declared himself to be not just governor-general of the island, but governor-general for life with special power to appoint a successor.
[00:30:29] This was a clear affront to central power, to Napoleon.
[00:30:36] Although L’Ouverture professed his loyalty to France and to Napoleon, Napoleon proceeded to send 20,000 French soldiers to take control of the island and restore it fully under French control.
[00:30:51] The idea was for this to be a show of force, and for negotiations to be peaceful. After all, this was France against France, in theory, L’Ouverture had professed his loyalty to Napoleon and to France, so a diplomatic resolution should have been possible.
[00:31:10] It was not to be.
[00:31:12] A French general ordered his troops to attack a major port, and what resulted were months of violent guerilla fighting, side-switching, trickery, and more.
[00:31:24] And when two of his key lieutenants defected to France, L’Ouverture handed himself over to the French. Or rather, he negotiated a settlement in which he acknowledged the authority of the French generals, and received assurances that he and his generals would be given amnesty.
[00:31:44] Unfortunately, they weren’t.
[00:31:46] In the summer of 1802, L’Ouverture was deported to France and imprisoned in a mountain fortress in eastern France.
[00:31:55] He didn’t last long, and within a year he would be dead.
[00:31:59] But what of Saint-Domingue?
[00:32:01] The fighting continued, and the cruelty and viciousness of the punishments ratcheted up a notch.
[00:32:09] Whenever the French managed to capture some Saint-Domingue forces, they would execute them en masse. Sometimes it would be by firing squad, sometimes it would be by tying them in a bag and throwing them into the sea, they even started locking them in the hulls of ships and killing them with poisonous sulphur gas.
[00:32:32] But the residents of Saint-Domingue had one thing on their side, something that had been extremely helpful in the fight against the British: tropical diseases, and in particular, yellow fever.
[00:32:46] It was killing the French in their dozens, and before long the French were down to only a few thousand troops.
[00:32:55] And the violence increased to almost unimaginable levels.
[00:33:00] The French imported a reported 15,000 attack dogs from Jamaica, dogs that had been trained specifically to attack black people.
[00:33:11] On his deathbed, the French military commander Charles Leclerc gave an order for all black people on the island to be killed, and there was the most atrocious violence.
[00:33:24] The rebels, naturally, responded with similar violence, publicly executing any Frenchman they got their hands on, chopping them up and putting their heads on sticks.
[00:33:36] By the autumn of 1803 it was clear that this was an unwinnable fight for the French, and on the evening of November 30th, 1803, they retreated from the island.
[00:33:50] And on January 1st, 1804, the general in charge of the rebels, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, officially declared Saint-Domingue to be an independent country, named not Saint-Domingue, but Haiti.
[00:34:06] It was, as you may know, the first free black-led nation in the world, and to this day is the only country to successfully come from a slave rebellion.
[00:34:19] The story of Haiti since then, as you may know, is not so rosy.
[00:34:24] And indeed our next episode is going to be on the various reasons that Haiti has remained in such an economically precarious position.
[00:34:33] But as to the story of the revolution of Haiti, it is nothing less than inspiring.
[00:34:39] It cost tens of thousands of lives, many of which were lost in acts of unspeakable violence, it involved treachery and side swapping and was of course all centred around the grisly question of the morality and legality of the business of slavery.
[00:34:57] But the slaves emerged victorious, a new country was established, and an example was set to free and enslaved people around the world.
[00:35:11] OK then, that is it for today's episode on The Haitian Revolution.
[00:35:15] I know it was a lot longer than normal, but it could have been 10 times longer and we still would have missed out on some important parts. But I hope that it gave you some useful background, and you might now feel inspired to explore this fascinating story in greater detail yourself.
[00:35:33] We will be dealing with post-revolutionary Haiti in detail in the next episode, and trying to answer the question of why Haiti has failed to live up to the promises and hope of the revolution.
[00:35:44] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:35:48] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the Haitian Revolution.
[00:00:26] It is one of the most interesting and important revolutions in world history, and brings together colonialism, slavery, the French, the Spanish, the British, the Americans, Napoleon, sugar, extreme violence, revenge, human rights, and more.
[00:00:42] As a warning, today’s episode is longer than usual, but it’s an important one, so I hope you’ll enjoy it.
[00:00:49] OK then, let’s not waste a minute, and talk about The Haitian Revolution.
[00:00:56] If you have some knowledge of English poets, you will have heard of William Wordsworth.
[00:01:03] He was the father of the English Romantic movement and is probably most famous for writing poems about the English countryside.
[00:01:12] But in 1803 he turned his attention to another subject in a poem titled Toussaint L'Ouverture.
[00:01:23] The poem started with the line “Toussaint, the most unhappy Man of Men!”, and continued to pay tribute to its subject.
[00:01:34] Wordsworth never met or knew the man he dedicated the poem to, and the two men couldn’t have been more different.
[00:01:45] William Wordsworth was born in England, enjoyed a privileged life, studied at Cambridge University, and died at home, surrounded by his family, at the ripe old age of 80.
[00:01:59] Toussaint L’Ouverture was born on a slave plantation in Saint-Domingue, in modern-day Haiti, and died at the age of 59 in chains in a freezing French prison, just months after Wordsworth’s poem.
[00:02:15] The fact that this Romantic English poet dedicated a poem to him gives you some idea of the global impact of Toussaint L’Ouverture.
[00:02:26] And we can see this poignantly in the last few verses, as Wordsworth wrote about how L’Ouverture would be remembered by generations to come.
[00:02:37] There’s not a breathing of the common wind
[00:02:40] That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
[00:02:44] Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
[00:02:47] And love, and Man’s unconquerable mind.
[00:02:52] In other words, what you have done will be remembered forever.
[00:02:57] So, what exactly is the story of Toussaint L’Ouverture?
[00:03:02] Well, to understand his story, and the story of the Haitian Revolution, we need to go back several hundred years.
[00:03:11] In the middle of the Caribbean lies its second-largest island, Hispaniola.
[00:03:18] The indigenous inhabitants of the island were the Taíno people, but the name for the island, Hispaniola, gives you a clue as to who they were greeted by on December 6th, 1492: Christopher Columbus and the Spanish.
[00:03:36] The Spanish were initially quite interested in the island, and its potential as a source of gold, but their interest soon waned after it became clear that greater riches could be found on the mainland, in Central and South America.
[00:03:54] The island turned into a sort of trading and piracy outpost, a place where Caribbean pirates would go to sell their stolen goods or stock up on food.
[00:04:07] The Western part of the island in particular was left practically abandoned.
[00:04:13] And, lest we forget, the native Taíno population had been pretty much wiped out by a combination of forced labour and diseases brought in by the Spanish.
[00:04:26] Fast forward to 1697 and the Spanish agreed to hand over the Western part of the island to the French, who renamed it Saint-Domingue.
[00:04:37] And the French did not neglect it.
[00:04:40] They turned it into a huge colonial outpost with masses of plantations, producing sugar, coffee, cotton, indigo and cacao.
[00:04:51] It was a particularly important centre for sugar production, and soon this western part of Hispaniola, the now French colony of Saint-Domingue, was producing 40% of all of the sugar consumed in Europe.
[00:05:06] And as you might expect, it was not the native French who were toiling away in the plantations.
[00:05:13] This gruelling work was being done by the hundreds of thousands of African slaves who had been brought to the island with the sole purpose of working in the plantations until they dropped dead of exhaustion, disease, or malnutrition.
[00:05:30] And drop dead they did.
[00:05:33] Most slaves in Saint-Domingue didn’t live past their 21st birthday, and slaves who arrived on the island typically wouldn’t last more than 2 or 3 years.
[00:05:46] It's hard to overstate quite how brutal this regime was, but the fact that it was considered a waste for slave owners to spend any time caring for their slaves because it was cheaper to buy a new one to replace a dead one, well this gives you an idea of the level of inhumanity on the island.
[00:06:08] It was a brutal system, but to portray it simply as French whites as slave owners and African slaves toiling on the plantations is a simplification.
[00:06:21] There were really four main groups of people on the island, and as we will see, they all had different goals and different perspectives.
[00:06:32] At the top of the tree were the slave-owning whites, the so-called “big whites”, or grand blancs in French. These were the people who owned the plantations, the people who profited from the slave labour. Some of them lived on the island, while others lived back in France and simply collected the money from the plantations.
[00:06:56] Below them were the “small whites”, or “petit blancs”. These were the French people who had come to the island to work; they did managerial or administrative work, or they would work on the plantations as field managers. They didn’t own plantations, but they were still considered superior to the slaves, given their skin colour.
[00:07:22] Below them again, but in some respects their equal, were the “gens de couleur libres”, the “free people of colour” in English.
[00:07:31] These were people who were of mixed race, typically children of a French father and a slave mother, or people who at some point in their family history had slave ancestry.
[00:07:47] There were few French women in Saint-Domingue, and unfortunately, this meant that rape and sexual assault by the whites on slaves were common.
[00:07:57] And if this resulted in a child, the white plantation owner would typically free or even marry the female slave, and she and her children would become free.
[00:08:09] Importantly, this class, the “gens de couleur libres”, were free; they could even own plantations and keep slaves themselves, but they were not granted rights like the ability to vote or hold political office.
[00:08:24] And right at the bottom of the pile were the most unfortunate of the lot, the slaves, who had absolutely no rights at all, they were property and lived in the most abominable of conditions.
[00:08:38] So you have this unusual system of these different groups of people, all of whom interfacing with each other to a certain extent, all of whose interests will complicate matters as this story develops.
[00:08:52] And just in terms of numbers, the grand and petit blancs, the whites essentially, were in a serious minority; they made up about 8% of the population.
[00:09:04] The mixed-race population was around 5%, and the remaining just under 90% were the African slaves.
[00:09:14] And these slaves were almost all African, they were born in Africa, transported to Haiti, lived for a short period and died there.
[00:09:25] At the time of the Haitian Revolution, so the late 18th century, practically all of the slaves were born in Africa for the simple but awful reason that the life expectancy of a slave in Haiti was so short that they had to be constantly replaced.
[00:09:42] And to give you an idea of the number of people we’re talking about here, there were around 500,000 slaves and fewer than 50,000 whites.
[00:09:53] Now, these conditions created a dangerous powder keg, a bonfire ready to explode in flames at the drop of a match.
[00:10:02] You had a tiny minority that controlled a majority and subjected it to the most terrible of conditions based on skin colour alone. And what’s more, you had these two other groups, the petit blancs and the gens de couleur libres, the small whites and the mixed-race population, who were stuck in between the grand blancs and the slaves, and they despised each other.
[00:10:30] That might well have been enough to trigger a revolution, but these conditions were not so different to those that existed in other slave-owning countries.
[00:10:41] What pushed things over the edge, the final spark that lit the fire, in fact came from across the seas, in France.
[00:10:51] The French Revolution started in 1789 and continued on and off for 10 years.
[00:10:59] One of the main ideas of the revolution was freedom and equality for all men, and indeed on August 26th, 1789, The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen set out clearly what these rights were.
[00:11:17] There were 17 in total, and the first one set the tone: “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.”
[00:11:33] It is a simple idea. It might have been controversial at the time, but it was easy for anyone to understand what it meant.
[00:11:43] And this revolutionary idea of equality and freedom, and news of the French Revolution, spread quickly.
[00:11:52] It didn’t take long for word of it to arrive in Saint-Domingue, which, let’s remember, was a French colony.
[00:12:00] And it was received in different ways by the four principal groups on the island.
[00:12:07] For the slaves, clearly it was a message of hope. Slavery was incompatible with “men remaining free”, so surely this must mean that their freedom would soon be declared?
[00:12:21] For the gens de couleur libres, the free mixed-race population, it was encouraging news because it would mean that they could do things like vote and stand in elections, which their skin colour did not allow them to do. But it was also slightly concerning, as much of this mixed-race population owned slaves, so if slavery was abolished, this would result in a major loss of earnings.
[00:12:49] For the petit-blancs and to an even greater extent the grand blancs, it was a frightening prospect. The entire society of Saint-Domingue was structured on men not being free and equal, on the blood, sweat and tears of African slaves, and if suddenly these people were declared equal, well the good times would be over for the white population.
[00:13:13] And they presumably knew that liberating the black slave population would not be as simple as declaring their freedom and everyone shaking hands and being friends again; the whites had subjected the slaves to the most horrendous treatment over hundreds of years.
[00:13:30] The treatment of the slaves by their white masters in Saint-Domingue was particularly brutal even by slavery standards.
[00:13:38] Punishments were awful, arms and legs chopped off, whippings were common, control was maintained by an atmosphere of constant fear.
[00:13:49] The slaves would surely want revenge.
[00:13:53] Even the idea that the black slaves could think that one day they might be free was a scary one. The whites were grossly outnumbered, by more than 10 to 1, and they feared the potential for an uprising if there was even the whiff of freedom, the slightest sense that freedom was possible.
[00:14:13] The white slave owners, the grand-blancs, hadn’t previously believed that the slaves were even capable of rising up en masse. They understood that there would always be a few that would try to run away or fight back, but they would be publicly executed as an example to others. They didn’t believe that the slaves were capable of organising themselves.
[00:14:37] For starters, there really weren’t many examples of wide-scale slave rebellions. Secondly, they believed that the slaves were mentally incapable of organising themselves.
[00:14:50] Slavery requires you to believe that one person is inferior to another by dint of their race, and the whites believed that the African slaves were just not capable of organising themselves, that they lacked the mental capacity to do so.
[00:15:08] As you will see, they were grossly mistaken, and they vastly underestimated the people they thought years of slavery and abuse had turned into docile, incapable subhumans.
[00:15:21] The first act of rebellion came not from the slaves, though, but from a gens de couleur libres, a mixed-race citizen of Saint-Domingue.
[00:15:31] A man called Vincent Ogé had been born in Saint-Domingue, and he was a member of the colonial elite. He was a rich and powerful man, but he was mixed race, which automatically disqualified him from certain rights.
[00:15:48] He was actually in France at the time of the revolution, and he petitioned the new Assembly General in France to allow mixed-race people the same rights as white people. The Assembly General granted this, passing it into law.
[00:16:04] But when he returned to Saint-Domingue in 1790, he found that the governor general simply ignored it, he said “nope”.
[00:16:15] Vincent Ogé enlisted a group of mixed-race soldiers, and they rose up in protest.
[00:16:23] Now, it’s important to underline that what Ogé was requesting wasn’t the abolition of slavery or equal rights for slaves or independence from France. He was a plantation owner himself, he owned slaves.
[00:16:37] All he wanted was the same rights as white people for people like him, mixed race people, not the abolition of slavery or improved rights for slaves.
[00:16:48] And, not of course that it should matter, but Ogé was much more white than he was black.
[00:16:54] His father was a white Frenchman, his mother was mixed race, so she was half white and half black, and if you look at a portrait of him, he was inseparable from any other white French aristocrat.
[00:17:09] But this really gives you a sense of quite how much race underpinned everything in Saint-Domingue. There were detailed measurements of how black someone was, and if you were anything less than 100% white, you didn’t have the same rights as the white population.
[00:17:27] Now, back to Ogé.
[00:17:30] Although what he was asking for, and indeed what had been approved by the French Assembly General, might not have seemed like such a big thing, it was rejected by the colonial administration, and his uprising was swiftly put down.
[00:17:47] A month after he rose up, he was captured, and then in February of the following year, February 1791, he was brutally publicly executed by being broken on the wheel, all of his bones agonisingly broken before his head was chopped off and put on a pike for all to see.
[00:18:09] If the white colonial administrators thought this would be sufficient to quash the uprising, they would be wrong.
[00:18:18] Six months later, on the evening of the 21st of August of 1791, everything would change in Saint-Domingue. There was a secret voodoo ceremony led by a slave and religious leader called Dutty Boukman. During the ceremony, he called for a full-out rebellion against the plantation owners. And as he made this plea, there was a tropical storm, thunder and lightning filling the sky.
[00:18:49] This was seen as a sign to take action, that change was afoot.
[00:18:56] Slaves rose up, slaughtering their colonial masters in their beds. They set fire to the sugar plantations, burning the crops and destroying the sugar plants that they had been forced to harvest, day in, day out.
[00:19:12] Saint-Domingue was a small place, and fires could be seen all over the island. Smoke and screams filled the air, as slaves in their thousands rose up against their former oppressors.
[00:19:26] Within a couple of weeks, more than 100,000 slaves had joined in the revolt, and the island was split into areas controlled by the slaves and small patches to which the whites had retreated.
[00:19:41] And when they met, the violence was extreme, on both sides.
[00:19:46] Men, women and children were killed in the most awful of ways.
[00:19:52] The slaves, perfectly understandably, were out for blood after being so hideously mistreated by their white colonial masters.
[00:20:01] And the whites had always been extremely violent towards the slave population, and were even more so now that they had risen up.
[00:20:12] But risen up against what, exactly?
[00:20:16] It's here that it gets a little complicated, and again we must remember the different groups and their different interests.
[00:20:24] What did the slaves want?
[00:20:26] Well, they wanted to be free, and they believed that the Declaration of the Rights Of Man had declared them to be free. They weren’t demanding independence from France, they weren’t demanding that the white population leave the island, all they wanted was not to be enslaved.
[00:20:44] And what did the grand-blancs, the slave owners, want?
[00:20:48] Well, they didn’t want the end of slavery, because it was a vastly profitable enterprise for them. Similarly, the gens de couleur libres, the free people of colour, they weren’t opposed to slavery per se, but they wanted the right to vote.
[00:21:05] And the petit-blancs, the professional white class, certainly didn’t want the end of slavery nor did they want the gens de couleur libres, the mixed-race people, to be granted the right to vote.
[00:21:19] And there was also this curious relationship between Saint-Domingue and France.
[00:21:26] Saint-Domingue was part of France, but the different groups of the colony looked at France in different ways.
[00:21:34] Initially, most of the slaves looked at France in a similar way to Vincent Ogé, as a potential saviour. France had declared itself to be a republic that respected the universal rights of man, and the idea that no one man was superior to another based on the colour of his skin.
[00:21:55] The grand blancs, on the other hand, looked to France as a dangerous republic. The revolution had resulted in this dangerous declaration and it looked like France was going to give mixed-race citizens the right to vote.
[00:22:10] This was a dangerous stepping stone, and there were powerful voices among the colonial population that sought to declare independence from France, turning Saint-Domingue into an independent country.
[00:22:25] And then, as if things weren’t complicated enough already, in 1793 France declared war on Great Britain.
[00:22:35] Now, why is this relevant to the Haitian Revolution?
[00:22:38] Well, firstly it meant that France’s military resources were stretched. They were now fighting a full-on war in Europe, which was expensive and labour-intensive.
[00:22:51] It also presented an opportunity for the British, who found an unlikely ally in the white French, the grand-blancs, of Saint-Domingue.
[00:23:01] The grand-blancs wrote to the British and requested them to come and declare sovereignty over Saint-Domingue, essentially turning this French colony into a British colony.
[00:23:13] The reason for this was not a military one, but because they thought that the British were less likely to abolish slavery.
[00:23:23] It seemed like a good deal for the British. They would take control of a lucrative trading outpost, the so-called “jewel of the Caribbean”, it would result in a large loss of revenue for France, and if they could put down the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue it would also reduce the probability of a similar slave revolt in British slave-powered colonies.
[00:23:46] Britain went along with this, and sent troops to Saint-Domingue, but it was a disaster.
[00:23:54] The British troops couldn’t handle it, and died in their thousands, primarily from tropical diseases, not in combat with the rebel slaves.
[00:24:04] But to make matters even more complicated, the Spanish also declared war on France.
[00:24:12] And let’s remember that the eastern side of the island of Hispaniola was still under Spanish control.
[00:24:19] So, let’s pause and take stock for a minute.
[00:24:24] There are the British and the Spanish who are at war with France in Europe, and are both fighting with and fighting against France in the Caribbean, in Hispaniola.
[00:24:36] We have the grand-blancs, the plantation owners, who are French but have attempted to ally with the British, because they believe they are more likely to put down the rebellion.
[00:24:47] We have the slaves who are in control of most of the island, seeking the abolishment of slavery. And at this point, the slaves are not particularly organised. Their advantage is in number; they outnumber the whites by a factor of 10 to 1, but they don’t have a particularly coherent vision or strategy.
[00:25:10] Nor do they have one single leader, a force to rally behind. There are some leaders of the movement, but they all want slightly different things, they aren’t able to unite every slave in Saint-Domingue.
[00:25:25] But it’s here that we need to meet, again, a man who will give them one.
[00:25:31] Toussaint L’Ouverture, the subject of the Wordsworth poem at the start of the episode.
[00:25:37] Importantly, Toussaint L’Ouverture was not a slave at the time of the revolution.
[00:25:43] He was born into slavery, both his parents had been sold into slavery and been transported from West Africa, but Toussaint was born on a plantation in Saint-Domingue, he was born a slave.
[00:25:58] However, he showed intelligence and skill from an early age, and was freed, most probably in his early 30s, so he became a gens de coleur libres, a free person of colour.
[00:26:11] And he did what many free people of colour did if they had the means.
[00:26:16] He managed a plantation, and was a slave owner himself.
[00:26:22] In the early days of the revolution, the early years in fact, Toussaint L’Ouverture played quite a canny game, he didn’t try to put himself forward as a leader, and instead supported several other people who were jostling for power.
[00:26:39] But by the mid-1790s, so almost five years into the revolution, he started to emerge as a key military leader. He was sharp, charismatic, and an adept military commander. In fact, his surname, “L’Ouverture”, which means “opening” in French, is believed to have come from his ability to find openings in his enemies’ lines.
[00:27:07] But if you were thinking that, now under the promising leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the timeline of the Haitian revolution was going to get simpler, I am afraid I have some bad news for you.
[00:27:20] L’Ouverture was a skilled diplomat, but this meant a ping-pong-esque flipping from one side to the other in terms of who the slaves were allied with.
[00:27:31] First it was the Spanish, because they provided military support against the French colonial administration.
[00:27:38] Then, in May of 1794, he switched allegiance to the French Republic, to France.
[00:27:46] The key reason for this switch was that the Republic of France had, in February of 1794, done what the slave population of Saint-Domingue were fighting for: they had formally announced the abolition of slavery.
[00:28:02] And, let’s remember, Saint-Domingue was part of France, so with one stroke of the pen, the half a million slaves of Saint-Domingue suddenly became, theoretically at least, free citizens of France.
[00:28:17] By switching allegiance from Spain to France he was allying himself with the home country, with freedom and with the emancipation of the slaves of Saint-Domingue.
[00:28:30] Now, he was fighting the Spanish and the British.
[00:28:35] Fortunately for L’Ouverture, the Spanish were not so interested in Saint-Domingue, and a peace treaty was signed in July of 1795.
[00:28:45] And as for the British, yes Saint-Domingue was still of interest, but there were more important wars to be fighting back in Europe, and by August of 1798, after repeated losses to L’Ouverture’s by now well-drilled forces, the British cut their losses and left Saint-Domingue for good.
[00:29:07] But if you were thinking that that was it, no no, there is more.
[00:29:12] In 1799, a then 30-year-old Frenchman called Napoleon Bonaparte declared himself to be First Consul of France, essentially the leader of the country, and passed a new constitution declaring that French colonies–such as Saint-Domingue–would be subject to special new laws.
[00:29:34] He assured L’Ouverture that this wouldn’t mean the reintroduction of slavery, but not everyone bought this, not everyone believed him.
[00:29:45] L’Ouverture then took steps to consolidate his power in Saint-Domingue. He invaded the eastern half of the island, the Spanish bit, in January of 1801. There was practically no Spanish resistance, and L’Ouverture immediately declared it to be part of France, meaning that he was now in control of the entire island of Hispaniola.
[00:30:09] And later on that year, in July of 1801, he appointed a new assembly and announced a new constitution.
[00:30:18] In this he declared himself to be not just governor-general of the island, but governor-general for life with special power to appoint a successor.
[00:30:29] This was a clear affront to central power, to Napoleon.
[00:30:36] Although L’Ouverture professed his loyalty to France and to Napoleon, Napoleon proceeded to send 20,000 French soldiers to take control of the island and restore it fully under French control.
[00:30:51] The idea was for this to be a show of force, and for negotiations to be peaceful. After all, this was France against France, in theory, L’Ouverture had professed his loyalty to Napoleon and to France, so a diplomatic resolution should have been possible.
[00:31:10] It was not to be.
[00:31:12] A French general ordered his troops to attack a major port, and what resulted were months of violent guerilla fighting, side-switching, trickery, and more.
[00:31:24] And when two of his key lieutenants defected to France, L’Ouverture handed himself over to the French. Or rather, he negotiated a settlement in which he acknowledged the authority of the French generals, and received assurances that he and his generals would be given amnesty.
[00:31:44] Unfortunately, they weren’t.
[00:31:46] In the summer of 1802, L’Ouverture was deported to France and imprisoned in a mountain fortress in eastern France.
[00:31:55] He didn’t last long, and within a year he would be dead.
[00:31:59] But what of Saint-Domingue?
[00:32:01] The fighting continued, and the cruelty and viciousness of the punishments ratcheted up a notch.
[00:32:09] Whenever the French managed to capture some Saint-Domingue forces, they would execute them en masse. Sometimes it would be by firing squad, sometimes it would be by tying them in a bag and throwing them into the sea, they even started locking them in the hulls of ships and killing them with poisonous sulphur gas.
[00:32:32] But the residents of Saint-Domingue had one thing on their side, something that had been extremely helpful in the fight against the British: tropical diseases, and in particular, yellow fever.
[00:32:46] It was killing the French in their dozens, and before long the French were down to only a few thousand troops.
[00:32:55] And the violence increased to almost unimaginable levels.
[00:33:00] The French imported a reported 15,000 attack dogs from Jamaica, dogs that had been trained specifically to attack black people.
[00:33:11] On his deathbed, the French military commander Charles Leclerc gave an order for all black people on the island to be killed, and there was the most atrocious violence.
[00:33:24] The rebels, naturally, responded with similar violence, publicly executing any Frenchman they got their hands on, chopping them up and putting their heads on sticks.
[00:33:36] By the autumn of 1803 it was clear that this was an unwinnable fight for the French, and on the evening of November 30th, 1803, they retreated from the island.
[00:33:50] And on January 1st, 1804, the general in charge of the rebels, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, officially declared Saint-Domingue to be an independent country, named not Saint-Domingue, but Haiti.
[00:34:06] It was, as you may know, the first free black-led nation in the world, and to this day is the only country to successfully come from a slave rebellion.
[00:34:19] The story of Haiti since then, as you may know, is not so rosy.
[00:34:24] And indeed our next episode is going to be on the various reasons that Haiti has remained in such an economically precarious position.
[00:34:33] But as to the story of the revolution of Haiti, it is nothing less than inspiring.
[00:34:39] It cost tens of thousands of lives, many of which were lost in acts of unspeakable violence, it involved treachery and side swapping and was of course all centred around the grisly question of the morality and legality of the business of slavery.
[00:34:57] But the slaves emerged victorious, a new country was established, and an example was set to free and enslaved people around the world.
[00:35:11] OK then, that is it for today's episode on The Haitian Revolution.
[00:35:15] I know it was a lot longer than normal, but it could have been 10 times longer and we still would have missed out on some important parts. But I hope that it gave you some useful background, and you might now feel inspired to explore this fascinating story in greater detail yourself.
[00:35:33] We will be dealing with post-revolutionary Haiti in detail in the next episode, and trying to answer the question of why Haiti has failed to live up to the promises and hope of the revolution.
[00:35:44] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:35:48] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the Haitian Revolution.
[00:00:26] It is one of the most interesting and important revolutions in world history, and brings together colonialism, slavery, the French, the Spanish, the British, the Americans, Napoleon, sugar, extreme violence, revenge, human rights, and more.
[00:00:42] As a warning, today’s episode is longer than usual, but it’s an important one, so I hope you’ll enjoy it.
[00:00:49] OK then, let’s not waste a minute, and talk about The Haitian Revolution.
[00:00:56] If you have some knowledge of English poets, you will have heard of William Wordsworth.
[00:01:03] He was the father of the English Romantic movement and is probably most famous for writing poems about the English countryside.
[00:01:12] But in 1803 he turned his attention to another subject in a poem titled Toussaint L'Ouverture.
[00:01:23] The poem started with the line “Toussaint, the most unhappy Man of Men!”, and continued to pay tribute to its subject.
[00:01:34] Wordsworth never met or knew the man he dedicated the poem to, and the two men couldn’t have been more different.
[00:01:45] William Wordsworth was born in England, enjoyed a privileged life, studied at Cambridge University, and died at home, surrounded by his family, at the ripe old age of 80.
[00:01:59] Toussaint L’Ouverture was born on a slave plantation in Saint-Domingue, in modern-day Haiti, and died at the age of 59 in chains in a freezing French prison, just months after Wordsworth’s poem.
[00:02:15] The fact that this Romantic English poet dedicated a poem to him gives you some idea of the global impact of Toussaint L’Ouverture.
[00:02:26] And we can see this poignantly in the last few verses, as Wordsworth wrote about how L’Ouverture would be remembered by generations to come.
[00:02:37] There’s not a breathing of the common wind
[00:02:40] That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
[00:02:44] Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
[00:02:47] And love, and Man’s unconquerable mind.
[00:02:52] In other words, what you have done will be remembered forever.
[00:02:57] So, what exactly is the story of Toussaint L’Ouverture?
[00:03:02] Well, to understand his story, and the story of the Haitian Revolution, we need to go back several hundred years.
[00:03:11] In the middle of the Caribbean lies its second-largest island, Hispaniola.
[00:03:18] The indigenous inhabitants of the island were the Taíno people, but the name for the island, Hispaniola, gives you a clue as to who they were greeted by on December 6th, 1492: Christopher Columbus and the Spanish.
[00:03:36] The Spanish were initially quite interested in the island, and its potential as a source of gold, but their interest soon waned after it became clear that greater riches could be found on the mainland, in Central and South America.
[00:03:54] The island turned into a sort of trading and piracy outpost, a place where Caribbean pirates would go to sell their stolen goods or stock up on food.
[00:04:07] The Western part of the island in particular was left practically abandoned.
[00:04:13] And, lest we forget, the native Taíno population had been pretty much wiped out by a combination of forced labour and diseases brought in by the Spanish.
[00:04:26] Fast forward to 1697 and the Spanish agreed to hand over the Western part of the island to the French, who renamed it Saint-Domingue.
[00:04:37] And the French did not neglect it.
[00:04:40] They turned it into a huge colonial outpost with masses of plantations, producing sugar, coffee, cotton, indigo and cacao.
[00:04:51] It was a particularly important centre for sugar production, and soon this western part of Hispaniola, the now French colony of Saint-Domingue, was producing 40% of all of the sugar consumed in Europe.
[00:05:06] And as you might expect, it was not the native French who were toiling away in the plantations.
[00:05:13] This gruelling work was being done by the hundreds of thousands of African slaves who had been brought to the island with the sole purpose of working in the plantations until they dropped dead of exhaustion, disease, or malnutrition.
[00:05:30] And drop dead they did.
[00:05:33] Most slaves in Saint-Domingue didn’t live past their 21st birthday, and slaves who arrived on the island typically wouldn’t last more than 2 or 3 years.
[00:05:46] It's hard to overstate quite how brutal this regime was, but the fact that it was considered a waste for slave owners to spend any time caring for their slaves because it was cheaper to buy a new one to replace a dead one, well this gives you an idea of the level of inhumanity on the island.
[00:06:08] It was a brutal system, but to portray it simply as French whites as slave owners and African slaves toiling on the plantations is a simplification.
[00:06:21] There were really four main groups of people on the island, and as we will see, they all had different goals and different perspectives.
[00:06:32] At the top of the tree were the slave-owning whites, the so-called “big whites”, or grand blancs in French. These were the people who owned the plantations, the people who profited from the slave labour. Some of them lived on the island, while others lived back in France and simply collected the money from the plantations.
[00:06:56] Below them were the “small whites”, or “petit blancs”. These were the French people who had come to the island to work; they did managerial or administrative work, or they would work on the plantations as field managers. They didn’t own plantations, but they were still considered superior to the slaves, given their skin colour.
[00:07:22] Below them again, but in some respects their equal, were the “gens de couleur libres”, the “free people of colour” in English.
[00:07:31] These were people who were of mixed race, typically children of a French father and a slave mother, or people who at some point in their family history had slave ancestry.
[00:07:47] There were few French women in Saint-Domingue, and unfortunately, this meant that rape and sexual assault by the whites on slaves were common.
[00:07:57] And if this resulted in a child, the white plantation owner would typically free or even marry the female slave, and she and her children would become free.
[00:08:09] Importantly, this class, the “gens de couleur libres”, were free; they could even own plantations and keep slaves themselves, but they were not granted rights like the ability to vote or hold political office.
[00:08:24] And right at the bottom of the pile were the most unfortunate of the lot, the slaves, who had absolutely no rights at all, they were property and lived in the most abominable of conditions.
[00:08:38] So you have this unusual system of these different groups of people, all of whom interfacing with each other to a certain extent, all of whose interests will complicate matters as this story develops.
[00:08:52] And just in terms of numbers, the grand and petit blancs, the whites essentially, were in a serious minority; they made up about 8% of the population.
[00:09:04] The mixed-race population was around 5%, and the remaining just under 90% were the African slaves.
[00:09:14] And these slaves were almost all African, they were born in Africa, transported to Haiti, lived for a short period and died there.
[00:09:25] At the time of the Haitian Revolution, so the late 18th century, practically all of the slaves were born in Africa for the simple but awful reason that the life expectancy of a slave in Haiti was so short that they had to be constantly replaced.
[00:09:42] And to give you an idea of the number of people we’re talking about here, there were around 500,000 slaves and fewer than 50,000 whites.
[00:09:53] Now, these conditions created a dangerous powder keg, a bonfire ready to explode in flames at the drop of a match.
[00:10:02] You had a tiny minority that controlled a majority and subjected it to the most terrible of conditions based on skin colour alone. And what’s more, you had these two other groups, the petit blancs and the gens de couleur libres, the small whites and the mixed-race population, who were stuck in between the grand blancs and the slaves, and they despised each other.
[00:10:30] That might well have been enough to trigger a revolution, but these conditions were not so different to those that existed in other slave-owning countries.
[00:10:41] What pushed things over the edge, the final spark that lit the fire, in fact came from across the seas, in France.
[00:10:51] The French Revolution started in 1789 and continued on and off for 10 years.
[00:10:59] One of the main ideas of the revolution was freedom and equality for all men, and indeed on August 26th, 1789, The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen set out clearly what these rights were.
[00:11:17] There were 17 in total, and the first one set the tone: “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.”
[00:11:33] It is a simple idea. It might have been controversial at the time, but it was easy for anyone to understand what it meant.
[00:11:43] And this revolutionary idea of equality and freedom, and news of the French Revolution, spread quickly.
[00:11:52] It didn’t take long for word of it to arrive in Saint-Domingue, which, let’s remember, was a French colony.
[00:12:00] And it was received in different ways by the four principal groups on the island.
[00:12:07] For the slaves, clearly it was a message of hope. Slavery was incompatible with “men remaining free”, so surely this must mean that their freedom would soon be declared?
[00:12:21] For the gens de couleur libres, the free mixed-race population, it was encouraging news because it would mean that they could do things like vote and stand in elections, which their skin colour did not allow them to do. But it was also slightly concerning, as much of this mixed-race population owned slaves, so if slavery was abolished, this would result in a major loss of earnings.
[00:12:49] For the petit-blancs and to an even greater extent the grand blancs, it was a frightening prospect. The entire society of Saint-Domingue was structured on men not being free and equal, on the blood, sweat and tears of African slaves, and if suddenly these people were declared equal, well the good times would be over for the white population.
[00:13:13] And they presumably knew that liberating the black slave population would not be as simple as declaring their freedom and everyone shaking hands and being friends again; the whites had subjected the slaves to the most horrendous treatment over hundreds of years.
[00:13:30] The treatment of the slaves by their white masters in Saint-Domingue was particularly brutal even by slavery standards.
[00:13:38] Punishments were awful, arms and legs chopped off, whippings were common, control was maintained by an atmosphere of constant fear.
[00:13:49] The slaves would surely want revenge.
[00:13:53] Even the idea that the black slaves could think that one day they might be free was a scary one. The whites were grossly outnumbered, by more than 10 to 1, and they feared the potential for an uprising if there was even the whiff of freedom, the slightest sense that freedom was possible.
[00:14:13] The white slave owners, the grand-blancs, hadn’t previously believed that the slaves were even capable of rising up en masse. They understood that there would always be a few that would try to run away or fight back, but they would be publicly executed as an example to others. They didn’t believe that the slaves were capable of organising themselves.
[00:14:37] For starters, there really weren’t many examples of wide-scale slave rebellions. Secondly, they believed that the slaves were mentally incapable of organising themselves.
[00:14:50] Slavery requires you to believe that one person is inferior to another by dint of their race, and the whites believed that the African slaves were just not capable of organising themselves, that they lacked the mental capacity to do so.
[00:15:08] As you will see, they were grossly mistaken, and they vastly underestimated the people they thought years of slavery and abuse had turned into docile, incapable subhumans.
[00:15:21] The first act of rebellion came not from the slaves, though, but from a gens de couleur libres, a mixed-race citizen of Saint-Domingue.
[00:15:31] A man called Vincent Ogé had been born in Saint-Domingue, and he was a member of the colonial elite. He was a rich and powerful man, but he was mixed race, which automatically disqualified him from certain rights.
[00:15:48] He was actually in France at the time of the revolution, and he petitioned the new Assembly General in France to allow mixed-race people the same rights as white people. The Assembly General granted this, passing it into law.
[00:16:04] But when he returned to Saint-Domingue in 1790, he found that the governor general simply ignored it, he said “nope”.
[00:16:15] Vincent Ogé enlisted a group of mixed-race soldiers, and they rose up in protest.
[00:16:23] Now, it’s important to underline that what Ogé was requesting wasn’t the abolition of slavery or equal rights for slaves or independence from France. He was a plantation owner himself, he owned slaves.
[00:16:37] All he wanted was the same rights as white people for people like him, mixed race people, not the abolition of slavery or improved rights for slaves.
[00:16:48] And, not of course that it should matter, but Ogé was much more white than he was black.
[00:16:54] His father was a white Frenchman, his mother was mixed race, so she was half white and half black, and if you look at a portrait of him, he was inseparable from any other white French aristocrat.
[00:17:09] But this really gives you a sense of quite how much race underpinned everything in Saint-Domingue. There were detailed measurements of how black someone was, and if you were anything less than 100% white, you didn’t have the same rights as the white population.
[00:17:27] Now, back to Ogé.
[00:17:30] Although what he was asking for, and indeed what had been approved by the French Assembly General, might not have seemed like such a big thing, it was rejected by the colonial administration, and his uprising was swiftly put down.
[00:17:47] A month after he rose up, he was captured, and then in February of the following year, February 1791, he was brutally publicly executed by being broken on the wheel, all of his bones agonisingly broken before his head was chopped off and put on a pike for all to see.
[00:18:09] If the white colonial administrators thought this would be sufficient to quash the uprising, they would be wrong.
[00:18:18] Six months later, on the evening of the 21st of August of 1791, everything would change in Saint-Domingue. There was a secret voodoo ceremony led by a slave and religious leader called Dutty Boukman. During the ceremony, he called for a full-out rebellion against the plantation owners. And as he made this plea, there was a tropical storm, thunder and lightning filling the sky.
[00:18:49] This was seen as a sign to take action, that change was afoot.
[00:18:56] Slaves rose up, slaughtering their colonial masters in their beds. They set fire to the sugar plantations, burning the crops and destroying the sugar plants that they had been forced to harvest, day in, day out.
[00:19:12] Saint-Domingue was a small place, and fires could be seen all over the island. Smoke and screams filled the air, as slaves in their thousands rose up against their former oppressors.
[00:19:26] Within a couple of weeks, more than 100,000 slaves had joined in the revolt, and the island was split into areas controlled by the slaves and small patches to which the whites had retreated.
[00:19:41] And when they met, the violence was extreme, on both sides.
[00:19:46] Men, women and children were killed in the most awful of ways.
[00:19:52] The slaves, perfectly understandably, were out for blood after being so hideously mistreated by their white colonial masters.
[00:20:01] And the whites had always been extremely violent towards the slave population, and were even more so now that they had risen up.
[00:20:12] But risen up against what, exactly?
[00:20:16] It's here that it gets a little complicated, and again we must remember the different groups and their different interests.
[00:20:24] What did the slaves want?
[00:20:26] Well, they wanted to be free, and they believed that the Declaration of the Rights Of Man had declared them to be free. They weren’t demanding independence from France, they weren’t demanding that the white population leave the island, all they wanted was not to be enslaved.
[00:20:44] And what did the grand-blancs, the slave owners, want?
[00:20:48] Well, they didn’t want the end of slavery, because it was a vastly profitable enterprise for them. Similarly, the gens de couleur libres, the free people of colour, they weren’t opposed to slavery per se, but they wanted the right to vote.
[00:21:05] And the petit-blancs, the professional white class, certainly didn’t want the end of slavery nor did they want the gens de couleur libres, the mixed-race people, to be granted the right to vote.
[00:21:19] And there was also this curious relationship between Saint-Domingue and France.
[00:21:26] Saint-Domingue was part of France, but the different groups of the colony looked at France in different ways.
[00:21:34] Initially, most of the slaves looked at France in a similar way to Vincent Ogé, as a potential saviour. France had declared itself to be a republic that respected the universal rights of man, and the idea that no one man was superior to another based on the colour of his skin.
[00:21:55] The grand blancs, on the other hand, looked to France as a dangerous republic. The revolution had resulted in this dangerous declaration and it looked like France was going to give mixed-race citizens the right to vote.
[00:22:10] This was a dangerous stepping stone, and there were powerful voices among the colonial population that sought to declare independence from France, turning Saint-Domingue into an independent country.
[00:22:25] And then, as if things weren’t complicated enough already, in 1793 France declared war on Great Britain.
[00:22:35] Now, why is this relevant to the Haitian Revolution?
[00:22:38] Well, firstly it meant that France’s military resources were stretched. They were now fighting a full-on war in Europe, which was expensive and labour-intensive.
[00:22:51] It also presented an opportunity for the British, who found an unlikely ally in the white French, the grand-blancs, of Saint-Domingue.
[00:23:01] The grand-blancs wrote to the British and requested them to come and declare sovereignty over Saint-Domingue, essentially turning this French colony into a British colony.
[00:23:13] The reason for this was not a military one, but because they thought that the British were less likely to abolish slavery.
[00:23:23] It seemed like a good deal for the British. They would take control of a lucrative trading outpost, the so-called “jewel of the Caribbean”, it would result in a large loss of revenue for France, and if they could put down the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue it would also reduce the probability of a similar slave revolt in British slave-powered colonies.
[00:23:46] Britain went along with this, and sent troops to Saint-Domingue, but it was a disaster.
[00:23:54] The British troops couldn’t handle it, and died in their thousands, primarily from tropical diseases, not in combat with the rebel slaves.
[00:24:04] But to make matters even more complicated, the Spanish also declared war on France.
[00:24:12] And let’s remember that the eastern side of the island of Hispaniola was still under Spanish control.
[00:24:19] So, let’s pause and take stock for a minute.
[00:24:24] There are the British and the Spanish who are at war with France in Europe, and are both fighting with and fighting against France in the Caribbean, in Hispaniola.
[00:24:36] We have the grand-blancs, the plantation owners, who are French but have attempted to ally with the British, because they believe they are more likely to put down the rebellion.
[00:24:47] We have the slaves who are in control of most of the island, seeking the abolishment of slavery. And at this point, the slaves are not particularly organised. Their advantage is in number; they outnumber the whites by a factor of 10 to 1, but they don’t have a particularly coherent vision or strategy.
[00:25:10] Nor do they have one single leader, a force to rally behind. There are some leaders of the movement, but they all want slightly different things, they aren’t able to unite every slave in Saint-Domingue.
[00:25:25] But it’s here that we need to meet, again, a man who will give them one.
[00:25:31] Toussaint L’Ouverture, the subject of the Wordsworth poem at the start of the episode.
[00:25:37] Importantly, Toussaint L’Ouverture was not a slave at the time of the revolution.
[00:25:43] He was born into slavery, both his parents had been sold into slavery and been transported from West Africa, but Toussaint was born on a plantation in Saint-Domingue, he was born a slave.
[00:25:58] However, he showed intelligence and skill from an early age, and was freed, most probably in his early 30s, so he became a gens de coleur libres, a free person of colour.
[00:26:11] And he did what many free people of colour did if they had the means.
[00:26:16] He managed a plantation, and was a slave owner himself.
[00:26:22] In the early days of the revolution, the early years in fact, Toussaint L’Ouverture played quite a canny game, he didn’t try to put himself forward as a leader, and instead supported several other people who were jostling for power.
[00:26:39] But by the mid-1790s, so almost five years into the revolution, he started to emerge as a key military leader. He was sharp, charismatic, and an adept military commander. In fact, his surname, “L’Ouverture”, which means “opening” in French, is believed to have come from his ability to find openings in his enemies’ lines.
[00:27:07] But if you were thinking that, now under the promising leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the timeline of the Haitian revolution was going to get simpler, I am afraid I have some bad news for you.
[00:27:20] L’Ouverture was a skilled diplomat, but this meant a ping-pong-esque flipping from one side to the other in terms of who the slaves were allied with.
[00:27:31] First it was the Spanish, because they provided military support against the French colonial administration.
[00:27:38] Then, in May of 1794, he switched allegiance to the French Republic, to France.
[00:27:46] The key reason for this switch was that the Republic of France had, in February of 1794, done what the slave population of Saint-Domingue were fighting for: they had formally announced the abolition of slavery.
[00:28:02] And, let’s remember, Saint-Domingue was part of France, so with one stroke of the pen, the half a million slaves of Saint-Domingue suddenly became, theoretically at least, free citizens of France.
[00:28:17] By switching allegiance from Spain to France he was allying himself with the home country, with freedom and with the emancipation of the slaves of Saint-Domingue.
[00:28:30] Now, he was fighting the Spanish and the British.
[00:28:35] Fortunately for L’Ouverture, the Spanish were not so interested in Saint-Domingue, and a peace treaty was signed in July of 1795.
[00:28:45] And as for the British, yes Saint-Domingue was still of interest, but there were more important wars to be fighting back in Europe, and by August of 1798, after repeated losses to L’Ouverture’s by now well-drilled forces, the British cut their losses and left Saint-Domingue for good.
[00:29:07] But if you were thinking that that was it, no no, there is more.
[00:29:12] In 1799, a then 30-year-old Frenchman called Napoleon Bonaparte declared himself to be First Consul of France, essentially the leader of the country, and passed a new constitution declaring that French colonies–such as Saint-Domingue–would be subject to special new laws.
[00:29:34] He assured L’Ouverture that this wouldn’t mean the reintroduction of slavery, but not everyone bought this, not everyone believed him.
[00:29:45] L’Ouverture then took steps to consolidate his power in Saint-Domingue. He invaded the eastern half of the island, the Spanish bit, in January of 1801. There was practically no Spanish resistance, and L’Ouverture immediately declared it to be part of France, meaning that he was now in control of the entire island of Hispaniola.
[00:30:09] And later on that year, in July of 1801, he appointed a new assembly and announced a new constitution.
[00:30:18] In this he declared himself to be not just governor-general of the island, but governor-general for life with special power to appoint a successor.
[00:30:29] This was a clear affront to central power, to Napoleon.
[00:30:36] Although L’Ouverture professed his loyalty to France and to Napoleon, Napoleon proceeded to send 20,000 French soldiers to take control of the island and restore it fully under French control.
[00:30:51] The idea was for this to be a show of force, and for negotiations to be peaceful. After all, this was France against France, in theory, L’Ouverture had professed his loyalty to Napoleon and to France, so a diplomatic resolution should have been possible.
[00:31:10] It was not to be.
[00:31:12] A French general ordered his troops to attack a major port, and what resulted were months of violent guerilla fighting, side-switching, trickery, and more.
[00:31:24] And when two of his key lieutenants defected to France, L’Ouverture handed himself over to the French. Or rather, he negotiated a settlement in which he acknowledged the authority of the French generals, and received assurances that he and his generals would be given amnesty.
[00:31:44] Unfortunately, they weren’t.
[00:31:46] In the summer of 1802, L’Ouverture was deported to France and imprisoned in a mountain fortress in eastern France.
[00:31:55] He didn’t last long, and within a year he would be dead.
[00:31:59] But what of Saint-Domingue?
[00:32:01] The fighting continued, and the cruelty and viciousness of the punishments ratcheted up a notch.
[00:32:09] Whenever the French managed to capture some Saint-Domingue forces, they would execute them en masse. Sometimes it would be by firing squad, sometimes it would be by tying them in a bag and throwing them into the sea, they even started locking them in the hulls of ships and killing them with poisonous sulphur gas.
[00:32:32] But the residents of Saint-Domingue had one thing on their side, something that had been extremely helpful in the fight against the British: tropical diseases, and in particular, yellow fever.
[00:32:46] It was killing the French in their dozens, and before long the French were down to only a few thousand troops.
[00:32:55] And the violence increased to almost unimaginable levels.
[00:33:00] The French imported a reported 15,000 attack dogs from Jamaica, dogs that had been trained specifically to attack black people.
[00:33:11] On his deathbed, the French military commander Charles Leclerc gave an order for all black people on the island to be killed, and there was the most atrocious violence.
[00:33:24] The rebels, naturally, responded with similar violence, publicly executing any Frenchman they got their hands on, chopping them up and putting their heads on sticks.
[00:33:36] By the autumn of 1803 it was clear that this was an unwinnable fight for the French, and on the evening of November 30th, 1803, they retreated from the island.
[00:33:50] And on January 1st, 1804, the general in charge of the rebels, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, officially declared Saint-Domingue to be an independent country, named not Saint-Domingue, but Haiti.
[00:34:06] It was, as you may know, the first free black-led nation in the world, and to this day is the only country to successfully come from a slave rebellion.
[00:34:19] The story of Haiti since then, as you may know, is not so rosy.
[00:34:24] And indeed our next episode is going to be on the various reasons that Haiti has remained in such an economically precarious position.
[00:34:33] But as to the story of the revolution of Haiti, it is nothing less than inspiring.
[00:34:39] It cost tens of thousands of lives, many of which were lost in acts of unspeakable violence, it involved treachery and side swapping and was of course all centred around the grisly question of the morality and legality of the business of slavery.
[00:34:57] But the slaves emerged victorious, a new country was established, and an example was set to free and enslaved people around the world.
[00:35:11] OK then, that is it for today's episode on The Haitian Revolution.
[00:35:15] I know it was a lot longer than normal, but it could have been 10 times longer and we still would have missed out on some important parts. But I hope that it gave you some useful background, and you might now feel inspired to explore this fascinating story in greater detail yourself.
[00:35:33] We will be dealing with post-revolutionary Haiti in detail in the next episode, and trying to answer the question of why Haiti has failed to live up to the promises and hope of the revolution.
[00:35:44] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:35:48] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
