US history textbooks need to denormalize the incredibly wrong argument that the French Revolution inspired rebellions among enslaved populations—particularly in Haiti (Saint-Domingue).

It didn’t. At least, not in the simplistic, cause-and-effect way in which this story is usually presented.

When the French Revolution took place and the free people of color of Saint-Domingue—particularly the wealthier gens de couleur—began to gain or demand legal rights that placed some of them in legal proximity to the colony’s lesser whites, the result was not immediate racial solidarity. Instead, it helped trigger a violent struggle (a civil war) among the colony’s white and free-colored elites over citizenship, political rights, property, and status.

Meanwhile, thousands of enslaved Black Africans and Haiti-born enslaved people took the opportunity to launch a long-planned and coordinated rebellion in the colony’s north in August 1791.

They were not simply inspired by the French Revolution. They did not rise because they had suddenly read the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and decided to reproduce the French Revolution in the Caribbean. The revolt emerged from the conditions of slavery itself, from networks among the enslaved, from African religious and cultural traditions, from previous acts of resistance, and from plans that had been developing among enslaved people before the uprising exploded.

That the masters were killing each other presented the enslaved population with a great tactical opportunity. Hitting them when they were divided. They did. And they went after the masters—not simply the white French.

That distinction couldn’t be more important. The plantation system was the target. The uprising was a revolution against slavery and the social order that sustained it. The fact that the enslaved population was overwhelmingly African-born or of African descent does not make their revolution an extension of a European political movement. It makes it a revolution produced by the particular conditions of Saint-Domingue.

Did some mulatos, free Blacks, and formerly enslaved Blacks later organize, recruit, command, and transform the masses of Black rebels into a formidable fighting force? Yep. Did some of them, at various points, carry the flag and language of the French Revolution and claim the rights and principles proclaimed by revolutionary France? Absolutely.

But that came after the enslaved population had revolted on its own. And the political alignments changed as the revolution changed.

Free people of color and other actors in Saint-Domingue increasingly embraced aspects of French revolutionary ideology for their own reasons—because some genuinely believed in its claims to equality and citizenship, because those principles could be deployed against white colonial privilege, and because political and military survival required alliances in an extraordinarily complicated civil and international war.

Most importantly, the relationship between the Black rebels and the French Revolution changed dramatically after revolutionary France abolished slavery in 1794. At that point, Black leaders and soldiers could plausibly claim that the French Republic’s proclaimed universalism had become a weapon that could be used against slavery and against the European powers seeking to destroy the revolutionary order.

But even then, the story does not become a simple French-to-Haitian transmission of revolutionary ideas.

The French Revolution abolished slavery in the French colonies in 1794 partly because of revolutionary ideals and partly because of the brutal strategic realities of war. Saint-Domingue was a battlefield in a much larger international conflict involving France, Britain, Spain, royalists, colonial elites, free people of color, and competing Black armies. The French Republic needed the formerly enslaved population to fight for the colony and for the Republic.

And eventually, the same revolution that proclaimed universal rights produced Napoleon Bonaparte.

Napoleon attempted to reassert French control over Saint-Domingue, restore colonial authority, and ultimately undermine the political and military autonomy that Black revolutionaries had achieved. The Black armies that had helped keep Saint-Domingue within the revolutionary French camp had become too powerful and too independent to be comfortably tolerated by a France increasingly moving away from the radicalism of the 1790s.

That history matters because when we make the original simplistic statement—“the French Revolution inspired the Haitian Revolution”—we do more than simplify chronology. We get rid of the meaning of the Haitian Revolution itself. We also deny the agency of hundreds of thousands of enslaved people and effectively attribute their liberation to the French Revolution.

Think about the implication.

A population of enslaved people who had been resisting, organizing, negotiating, rebelling, surviving, and creating communities under one of the most brutal plantation regimes in the Atlantic world suddenly becomes passive historical material waiting for Europeans to give them the intellectual tools to revolt.

That is not a particularly sophisticated way of writing the history of slavery. It is, ironically, a way of writing enslaved people out of their own revolution. And this is where we see a broader problem in American history textbooks and scholarship.

We repeatedly distort the history of the French and Haitian Revolutions in order to create a convenient comparison with the American Revolution. Sometimes the older version of this comparison was used to make the United States look exceptionally democratic: the Americans created liberty, while the French descended into chaos, and the Haitians represented something else altogether.

Now, in some contemporary scholarship and teaching, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. The United States is presented as uniquely hypocritical, uniquely racist, or uniquely contradictory by constructing simplistic analogies between the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions. The argument often becomes: France proclaimed universal rights; Haiti actually destroyed slavery; therefore the American Revolution was simply a fraudulent revolution undertaken by slaveholders.

There are legitimate and important criticisms to make about the American Revolution. Plenty of them. There are enormous contradictions between American declarations of liberty and the persistence of slavery, racial exclusion, and unequal citizenship. But we do not need to flatten French, Haitian, and American history into caricatures to make those arguments. In fact, doing so weakens them.

The French Revolution, the American Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution were related to one another because they occurred within an interconnected Atlantic world. Ideas, people, commodities, armies, news, rumors, and political concepts crossed the Atlantic. But connection is not the same thing as causation, and influence is not the same thing as inspiration.

The Haitian Revolution was not simply a French Revolution transplanted to the Caribbean. It was a revolution produced by the particular history of Saint-Domingue: plantation slavery, African migration and cultural continuities, colonial violence, racial hierarchy, class conflict, free people of color, maroon communities, imperial warfare, and the political struggles of enslaved people themselves.

We see this distortion of the French and Haitian Revolutions particularly in American textbooks and monographs seeking to compare the French and American Revolutions and, ultimately, to make broader arguments about the attitudes of French and American revolutionaries toward race. I’ve found this reductionist and incorrect argument particularly often in works dealing with Latinx and African American history, as well as ethnic and racial history in the United States.

Ironically-the decolonizers of academia cannot resist doing exactly what they accuse earlier historians of doing: reducing societies outside the United States to something exotic, unknown, and hidden—and then caricaturizing those societies so that their histories can be used to make arguments and serve prescribed narratives about the United States.

The old version of this habit sometimes used other countries and cultures to make “America” look exceptional and great. The newer version sometimes uses them to make America look like the worst thing that ever existed. Neither approach is good history- neither produces knowledge. Both serve ideologically compromised agendas. Neither should have a place in academia.

Both begin with the United States as the central object of explanation and then selectively mine the histories of other societies for analogies, contrasts, and moral lessons!

That is not really decolonizing history. It is simply another form of historical reductionism.

If we want to understand Haiti, let’s understand Haiti. If we want to understand France, let’s understand France. And if we want to understand the United States, let’s understand the United States. Then we can put these histories into conversation with one another without pretending that one revolution was simply the intellectual parent of another.

History becomes much more interesting—and much more accurate—and overall, more useful in helping us understand who we are- when we allow historical actors to be complicated, contradictory, strategic, and, most importantly, agents of their own history.

And that’s truly decolonizing- when we don’t suppress voices that do not align with the narrative “we like”, when we don’t caricaturize others or selectively mine their experiences to validate our talking points and agendas.

That’s the job of the scholar. Anything else is another form of colonization and intellectual dishonesty.

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Continue reading: El Nuevo Colonialismo de la Academia Diasporriqueña; A Rehash of Old School Colonialism