A colony of citizens: Revolution and slave emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1789-1802

This dissertation combines history, anthropology, and literary criticism in analyzing how, at the end of the eighteenth century, the Republican political culture of Europe and the Americas was transformed through the actions of the slaves-turned-citizens of the French Caribbean. Slave insurgents gave new content to the abstract universality of the language of rights, expanding the imagination of political culture through a transcultural and trans-Atlantic struggle for liberty and citizenship. As a result, a new colonial order arose in which the same laws were applied in the metropole and colony. In the wake of emancipation, ex-slaves, ex-masters, and Republican administrators struggled over the meaning of freedom and the possibilities of citizenship. In Guadeloupe, the commissioner Victor Hugues combined emancipation with the development of new forms of labor coercion and racial exclusion, establishing a form of what I call "Republican racism" which excluded ex-slaves from full access to rights on the basis of their supposed lack of capacity for citizenship. The "new citizens," however, mobilized their rights in ways that transformed the Caribbean, and they fought for the Republican principles of equality when France abandoned them in the early 1800s.;The dissertation is made up of fourteen chapters divided into three parts: "Prophesy, Revolt and Emancipation, 1789-1794," "The Meaning of Citizenship, 1794-1798," and "The Boundaries of the Republic, 1798-1802." At the heart of the dissertation is a study of two communities in Guadeloupe--Basse-Terre and Trois-Rivieres--whose history provides anchor for a broader Atlantic history that explores developments throughout the Antilles and in Europe from a perspective rooted in the Caribbean. It brings together sources from archives and libraries in France, England, and Guadeloupe, including notary and 'etat civil records, administrative correspondence, political pamphlets, and memoirs. It also weaves together stories from the archives with readings of the novels by a variety of Caribbean writers and an account of the ways the practice of Vodou in Paris carries the history of slavery and revolution to the French Republic of the late twentieth-century.