Position:Home>History> Why (How) did the French revolution infuence the Haitian revolution?

- in the beginning of the french revolution, in 1789 (august), french deputies of the National assembly wrote the Declaration of the human Rights!. these deputies came from the parts of the metropolitean france, noone came from the islands (like Saint-Domingue = Ha?ti)!.
- but this was a "universal" declaration, not only for ppl of france but for every human --> french deputies, conviced by some of them (they joined with other ppl in the "société des amis des Noirs" = friends of black ppl society), voted to extend the declaration to every parts of france, even the islands (but they had no deputies)!.
- in the islands, most of the white and coloured owners were reluctant : they didnt want to give freedom to the slaves ; but they finally had to, abt 1792!.
- revolution ideas were welcomed by a large part of the slaves, even if they couldnt realy enjoy it : liberty, equality, property, resistance to opression!.
- after 1802, when napoleon wanted to reintroduce the slavery in the islands, there was an haitian revolution, that is not only a revolts of slaves who want to be free, but is also a movement inspired by the ideas of the revolution :
+ liberty : it's obvious the freed slaves didnt want to be brought back to slavery!.
+ equality : they wanted the equality between black, coloured and white ppl : but they failed, and after the victory, white ppl had to leave!.
+ property : they wanted to share the great properties to make every person a man with his farm!.
+ resistance to oppression : it's very important, bcs that makes their movement not an illegal one, but a legitime one : they were right to fight against the napoleonian power that tried to bring them in slavery back!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

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The Haitian Revolution

FRANKLIN W!. KNIGHT

The Haitian Revolution represents the most thorough case study of revolutionary change anywhere in the history of the modern world!.1 In ten years of sustained internal and international warfare, a colony populated predominantly by plantation slaves overthrew both its colonial status and its economic system and established a new political state of entirely free individuals—with some ex-slaves constituting the new political authority!. As only the second state to declare its independence in the Americas, Haiti had no viable administrative models to follow!. The British North Americans who declared their independence in 1776 left slavery intact, and theirs was more a political revolution than a social and economic one!. The success of Haiti against all odds made social revolutions a sensitive issue among the leaders of political revolt elsewhere in the Americas during the final years of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century!.2 Yet the genesis of the Haitian Revolution cannot be separated from the wider concomitant events of the later eighteenth-century Atlantic world!. Indeed, the period between 1750 and 1850 represented an age of spontaneous, interrelated revolutions, and events in Saint Domingue/Haiti constitute an integral—though often overlooked—part of the history of that larger sphere!.3 These multi-faceted revolutions combined to alter the way individuals and groups saw themselves and their place in the world!.4 But, even more, the intellectual changes of the period instilled in some political leaders a confidence (not new in the eighteenth century, but far more generalized than before) that creation and creativity were not exclusively divine or accidental attributes, and that both general societies and individual conditions could be rationally engineered!.5

If the origins of the revolution in Saint Domingue lie in the broader changes of the Atlantic world during the eighteenth century, the immediate precipitants must be found in the French Revolution!.15 The symbiotic relationship between the two were extremely strong and will be discussed later, but both resulted from the construction of a newly integrated Atlantic community in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries!. 5
The broader movements of empire building in the Atlantic world produced the dynamic catalyst for change that fomented political independence in the United States between 1776 and 1783!. Even before that, ideas of the Enlightenment had agitated the political structures on both sides of the Atlantic, overtly challenging the traditional mercantilist notions of imperial administration and appropriating and legitimating the unorthodox free trading of previously defined interlopers and smugglers!.16 The Enlightenment proposed a rational basis for reorganizing state, society, and nation!. 17 The leading thinkers promoted and popularized new ideas of individual and collective liberty, of political rights, and of class equality—and even, to a certain extent, of social democracy—that eventually included some unconventional thoughts about slavery!.18 But their concepts of the state remained rooted in the traditional western European social experience, which did not accommodate itself easily to the current reality of the tropical American world, as Peggy Liss shows in her insightful study Atlantic Empires!.19Www@QuestionHome@Com

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