In the white population they see this, the ideas of the French Revolution is really a chance to try and emulate what happened in North America a decade earlier. So the grumb on the whites taught great, we can free ourselves like the Americans in making more money. Some of the smaller white people and some of the less rich white people in the colony also saw it as a chance. The mixed race population who were, had their civil rights eroded during this period,. saw it as an opportunity to become enfranchised. And you... The 90% of the rest of the population saw it too.
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Haitian Revolution. In 1791 an uprising began in the French colonial territory of St Domingue. Partly a consequence of the French Revolution and partly a backlash against the brutality of slave owners, it turned into a complex struggle involving not just the residents of the island but French, English and Spanish forces. By 1804 the former slaves had won, establishing the first independent state in Latin America and the first nation to be created as a result of a successful slave rebellion. But the revolution also created one of the world's most impoverished societies, a legacy which Haiti has struggled to escape.
Contributors
Kate Hodgson, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in French at the University of Liverpool
Tim Lockley, Reader in American Studies at the University of Warwick
Karen Salt, Fellow in History in the School of Language and Literature at the University of Aberdeen
Producer: Luke Mulhall.