You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery

by Jeremy D. Popkin

• ISBN13: 9780521517225
• ISBN10: 0521517222
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-08-30
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The abolitions of slavery in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue in 1793 and in revolutionary France in 1794 were the first dramatic blows against an institution that had shaped the Atlantic world for three centuries and affected the lives of millions of people. Based on extensive archival research, You Are All Free provides the first complete account of the dramatic events that led to these epochal decrees, and also to the destruction of Cap Fran#xE7;ais, the richest city in the French Caribbean, and to the first refugee crisis in the United States. Taking issue with earlier accounts that claim that Saint-Domingue's slaves freed themselves, or that French revolutionaries abolished slavery as part of a general campaign for universal human rights, the book shows that abolition was the result of complex and often paradoxical political struggles on both sides of the Atlantic that have frequently been misunderstood by earlier scholars.

Table of Contents

Introduction: the journée of 20 June 1793 in Cap Français and the abolition of slavery

A colony in revolution

Municipal revolution in a colonial city

French Jacobins and Saint-Domingue colonists

Creating revolutionary government in the tropics

A model republican general

The powderkeg explodes

Freedom and fire

The road to general emancipation

Saint-Domingue in the United States

The decree of 16 Pluviôse An II

Conclusion

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