Paris cancels its May decree after being told blacks are orangutans

The colonial assembly moved from Leogane to Cap-Francais and resolved that Paris had no right to legislate on the internal race question, arguing that colonial production was the real currency in the debate and that a bankrupt revolutionary France could not afford to lose it. A judge at Cap-Francais told the chamber that mixed-race colonists were degenerates and that black people were a species of ape, and that money spent on slaves had not been spent to create citizens. The argument worked. The National Assembly in Paris rescinded the May decree. Within days a mass rising broke out in the Northern Department under Boukman and Jean Francois, with roughly twenty thousand insurgents, two thousand whites killed and heavier losses among the enslaved. The rescission is the hinge: metropolitan retreat on a narrow reform removed the last legal channel and left force as the only remaining instrument.

Girard's conclusion turns a linguistic profile into a political verdict. Born to Arada parents in a French Caribbean colony, Toussaint lived at the intersection of African, American and European worlds but did not weigh them equally. By pushing Ewe-Fon into the background, Girard argues, he buries pan-African interpretations of his career. Unlike the autonomist planters of the eighteenth century or Haitian nationalists today, he did not use Kreyol to assert creole pride, which cuts against readings of him as a proto-independentist. The language he preferred in writing, and often in speech, was the one he associated with social advancement: French, the language of a colonial system he never got out of. Girard characterises his French as laborious and almost ashamed, the French of a provincial arriving in the capital full of ambition and trying to hide his accent. Where this account departs from the standard one: Argues against both the pan-African and the proto-independentist readings of Toussaint, on the evidence of his linguistic choices rather than his politics.

Geggus tracks the speed of the news rather than its influence. By September 1791 enslaved people in Jamaica were singing songs about the events in the neighbouring French colony, and blacks in Havana were believed to be sacrificing pigs in honour of the insurgents. When Louverture occupied Spanish Santo Domingo in early 1801 the enslaved in the hills above Coro in western Venezuela were praising him in song within weeks. A year after independence, alleged conspirators in Trinidad were reported to be parodying the mass with words about eating white men's flesh and remembering Saint-Domingue. He also corrects a widely repeated quotation about black power dissolving white authority, which has been dated to a visit to Rio in 1792 but actually comes from 1806 and refers to the whole hemisphere.

Mocombe dates the rising itself to the twenty-second, writing that the black population of the north entered into rebellion, killing the whites and mulattoes they encountered and setting the colony's plantations alight. The eight day gap between the ceremony and the rising is deliberate in his account, since it makes the oath an act of organisation with named leaders rather than a spontaneous outburst. He lists the men the priestess had designated as commanders, including Biassou, Jeannot Bullet, Boukman Dutty, Jean Francois and Macaya. The rising took place while the whites and the free people of colour were still fighting each other over participation in colonial government and over equality of opportunity, which for Mocombe is the point: the two struggles were different in kind, and the maroons entered a war that the others had already begun for different reasons.