Sun de Lys

From John Patrick Walsh’s excellent book “Free and French in the Caribbean”

Toussaint’s Constitution recognized French sovereignty, but it also granted him the power of governor for life, an investment of power that Bonaparte read as a sure step toward independence. A little more than a month after the coup of Brumaire [9 November 1799], by which Bonaparte took power from the Directory, the first Consul made his inaugural public address to the “Citizens of Saint-Domingue”: “If there are ill-intentioned men in the colony of Saint-Domingue, if there are those who maintain relations with enemy powers, brave black men, remember,” he declared, “that the French people alone recognize your liberty and the equality of your rights.”11 The proclamation, which spoke to a key consular constitutional revision that I discuss below, professed to uphold general liberty for blacks, yet was rendered fragile by the explicit warning it contained: surrounding slaveholding regimes pose a threat to your freedom. Furthermore the emphasis on sovereignty that one reads in the distance between “French people” and “your liberty” will have implications for Toussaint’s Constitution…Bonaparte commanded, “you will inform [Toussaint] of the enormity of the crime of which he has made himself guilty by bearing arms against the Republic; that we had considered him a rebel the instant he had published his constitution” (VIII:30). He had indicted Toussaint for the treasonous act of writing the Constitution de la colonie française de Saint Domingue.12

-pg 67b

That being said, I think Walsh is very right (from the segment you just quoted) in his analysis of the question of sovereignty, especially regarding Toussaint’s 1801 Constitution. One common “mistake” I see in “popular” redemptions of the Haitian revolution is to forcefully assume that Louverture was moving towards independence (while the documents we have at our disposition seem to suggest he entertained hopes [however ridiculous they might seem to us today] that Saint-Domingue could be something of a sovereign region under his control while remaining part of the French empire). 

Perhaps Toussaint and his advisors in the 1801 Constitution were only buying tine and Napoleon was “justified” in being alarmed by the state of affairs in Saint-Domingue. Yet, I can’t help to think that all this emphasis in the 1801 Constitution on the “French” character of Saint-Domingue (and liberty) was well-thought-out and designed to be there. It is possible that Toussaint, always concerned with guiding the colony’s economy back to its pre-1791 levels, wanted to remain in the French empire as a guarantee that French capital and new inventions facilitating agriculture would continue to flourish in Saint-Domingue. Toussaint was perhaps also afraid of the future of the colony in the event that it lost its French “protection.”

The book is also quite relevant for current issues as it asks and shows how receptive France was (and is) to the demands of its ignored citizens who like the Haitians and Martiniquais wanted the full demands of the Revolution to be realized.