The introduction to the book describes the main claims in Theater, War, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Empire. Readers are introduced to major terms in the book, including the military–theatrical complex, military–theatrical experiences, and the national–military phenomenon. The book’s arguments are discussed in the context of France’s evoling geopolitical goals from 1765 to 1794 and with the help of several critical approaches, including Theater and Performance Studies, Gender Studies, and the cultural history of the French military. The end of the Introduction lays out the structure of the book and posits several key questions that the study hopes to answer.

This conclusion returns to Saint-Domingue, which by the 1790s was rife with Jacobin sentiment, rebellions of enslaved Black laborers and free people of color, and intra-military disaccord. Provided are several short case studies of soldier violence and political action, which offer several limitations and conclusions to the eighteenth-century military–theatrical complex. Unlike the expansive national–military theatrical phenomenon in metropolitan France, the continued commitment to inequality and segregation in Saint-Domingue led to the disintegration of its white-centric theatrical institutions and practices – an important step in what would become the Haitian Revolution.

This chapter explores the connections between the French port of La Rochelle and Atlantic Africa during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. La Rochelle’s slave-trading activities had multiple dimensions. The city’s merchants loaded their vessels traveling to the Atlantic coasts of Africa with a variety of commodities and luxury products. The chapter shows how these material items shaped the commercial, social, and cultural exchanges between La Rochelle’s merchants and Loango coast local. Through this broad picture, the chapter seeks to examine the positions of La Rochelle’s agents Jean-Amable Lessenne, Le Montyon’s ship captain, as well as Daniel Garesché, the rich owner of the ship Le Montyon who gave Mfuka Andris Pukuta the silver kimpaba as a gift following the Cabinda conflict in 1775. An examination of these wealthy men’s activities allows us to situate La Rochelle’s position in relation to other ports involved in the trade of enslaved Africans, as well as to envision the links between the French port and the Loango coast, and even more specifically its connections with the West Central African ports of Malembo and Cabinda, where the Mfuka Andris Pukuta was established.

Jacques Pierre Brissot founded the Society of the Friends of the Blacks in Paris in early 1788. Although primarily operational in Paris, the society was very much an Atlantic organization. Through superficial examinations of the efforts of the Friends of the Blacks, scholars have categorized the French movement as based solely in the printed word and engagement through revolutionary assemblies. Taken in isolation from other Atlantic philanthropic activity, the movement appears diminutive, sporadic, and ineffectual. Yet, France granted rights to free people of color and abolished slavery – lasting from 1794 to 1802 – before England, the United States, and other countries deeply entangled in the Atlantic struggle over the status of peoples of African descent. The French movement was not a failure; it was part of a longer process of abolition. While late eighteenth-century efforts did not bring about the permanent end to slavery in the French Caribbean – something only achieved in 1848 – those like Brissot advocated for peoples of African descent during the French Revolution, laying the groundwork for the later success of the nineteenth-century abolitionists.

There was not one unified revolutionary process in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, but several revolutions, each with its own rhythm and logic. In the last years of the eighteenth century, each population group asserted itself by opposing the others. The masters of the colony, the White settlers, wanted to be able to govern themselves, until they became practically independent. At first, they clashed with the property-owning men of color, who demanded civil equality for all free men. The revolt of the plantation slaves of the North Plain reshuffled the cards: general liberty and the reality of republican universalism were crucial starting in 1793. If the revolution upset the conditions and status of the whole population, it also took different forms, according to the pre-revolutionary social structures. Moreover, colonial revolutions are always in interaction with the phases of the revolution in the metropole. That interaction took the form of reaction by the white colonists bent on maintaining slavery and free people of color eager to preserve revolutionary achievements. It also took the form of harmony, in which case the search for equality before the law was offered as a step towards a new citizenship.

The conclusion to Part II returns to the cultural aspirations expressed by colonists earlier in the decade by analyzing a debate over the viability of an academic society on the island published in the Affiches in 1769. Two White colonists took diametrically opposed positions on the question before a White author, who assumed the identity of the enslaved “Toussaint,” sharply satirized the debate. In the course of absurd boasts about his intellectual prowess, “Toussaint” countered the arguments in favor of establishing an intellectual society. His exaggerated rusticity traced unambiguously the charmed circle of a White public of allegedly rational citizens and their elegant White wives, which was simultaneously conjured and addressed by the periodicals of Saint-Domingue. In the context of hardening racial barriers in the colony, “Toussaint” held the line between a White public that could participate in informed debate and refined amusements and the Black masses who (his burlesque suggested) innately lacked the capacity to do the same.

Both the Affiches Américaines and the Journal de Saint-Domingue encouraged White male colonists to consider themselves “enlightened” “American” citizens devoted to advancing the public good through reasonable means. This chapter focuses on the Affiches, which flourished into the revolutionary decade of the 1790s. It situates its founding in the rise of similar metropolitan publications while showing how the colonial context informed its objectives. Like metropolitan editors, its founder Jean Monceaux was confident in the power of communication to inform and of discussion to enlighten; brought metropolitan ideas and news into the colonies; created forums for debate within it; and believed that a press served its public by furthering the collective good. Constrained by official censorship, the Affiches nevertheless expressed colonial discontent with the postwar order by publishing extensively on the British Stamp Act Crisis. In the process, it exposed readers to a robust assertion of colonial “rights” in the face of metropolitan “tyranny” and implicitly connected Saint-Domingue’s political troubles with that of British North America and the Brittany Affair in France.

During its short publishing life, the Iris Américaine proposed a complement to the enlightened White male American citizen promoted by Saint-Domingue’s other two periodicals, the Affiches Américaines and the Journal de Saint-Domingue. After summarizing the contributions of the Affiches and the Journal to the island’s cultural life and discussing the importance of “taste” in French cultural life, the chapter documents how the Iris honored the age-old dictum “to instruct and delight” by publishing a mix of diverting poetry, short stories, and nonfiction essays. Yet its content, however light, had the serious intent of tutoring White women in good taste—both for their own good and to civilize their men by transforming unruly passions into refined pleasures. While these objectives were framed in a metropolitan terms, they assumed special urgency in a society infamous for racial brutality and “disordered” sexuality. Thus, the Iris spoke to deep social anxieties and threatening realities: the failure to establish a stable, White population; the ubiquitous concubinage of enslaved Black women and free women of color; the consequent increase in the number of mixed-race people; and the fact that White colonists were vastly outnumbered by enslaved Black people.

The Journal de Saint-Domingue joined the Affiches Américaines in encouraging White male colonists to consider themselves members of an “enlightened” and distinctively “American” citizenry devoted to reason and the common good. While acknowledging metropolitan precedents for a general-interest publication, its editors trumpeted their publication’s novelty, claimed all of “America” as their journalistic jurisdiction, and stated their intention to generate original content, not just reprint metropolitan articles. The monthly Journal fostered the creation of American “taste” by publishing reviews and critiquing poetry by colonists. With strong ties to the local Chambres d’Agriculture and strong support from planter subscribers, it also published extensively on agriculture (Chapter 11). With the Affiches, it created a forum where colonists could appropriate the intellectually respectable terms of “political economy,” combining them with a robust rhetoric of citizenship to respond to criticism from merchants and metropolitan chambers of commerce; debate the reimposition of the trade restrictions of the Exclusif and proposed limitations on sugar refining; and seek to redefine the colony-metropole relationship.

During the 1760s, the Affiches Américaines and the Journal de Saint-Domingue created a lively public forum to address colonial agricultural concerns that metropolitan learned societies largely ignored. Colonists enthusiastically embraced the same rhetoric of emulation and civic-mindedness as their counterparts in France while vigorously asserting intellectual authority based in practice. They sought to improve the cultivation of older but challenging crops, such as indigo and cotton, and to introduce new crops that would enhance the colony’s profitability, provide gainful employment for their society’s poorer members, and occupy unexploited ecological niches. To assess proposed innovations, they staged trials witnessed by expert practitioners; circulated information through manuscripts; and wrote up public answers to questions posed by the Affiches. This chapter also shows the limitations of local improvisations to solve agricultural problems as competing claims to intellectual authority based in experience created rifts between groups of colonists, colonists and the editors of their periodicals, and colonists and elite metropolitan institutions.

Part II, “Creating Enlightened Citizens: The Periodicals of Saint-Domingue in the 1760s,” begins at the end of the Seven Years War. An era of deep colonial discontent, many colonists were also confident that their colony had turned the page on an earlier tumultuous history to enter a future of civilized amenities and cultural achievement. Part II explores their cultural aspirations through the colony’s new periodicals: the long-running Affiches Américaines and its ephemeral siblings, the Journal de Saint-Domingue and the Iris Américaine. Together they advanced a coherent, gendered Enlightenment project that urged readers to identify themselves as French and American, patriots and citizens, and connected those identities with the Enlightenment practices of civil discourse and civilized taste. The introduction considers the meaning of Habermas’s “public sphere” in a slave society of hardening racial barriers; it concludes by briefly sketching the political, social, and economic situation of the colony at war’s end and the tensions between planters and merchants, colonists and royal governance that generated controversy and crisis in the postwar years.

The goals of this book have been to recover a distinctive “Caribbean Enlightenment” and to show how it contributes to our understandings of eighteenth-century French and British Caribbean societies and the Enlightenment as a cosmopolitan movement. Largely focused on Saint-Domingue and Jamaica, it has explored four important Enlightenment themes in Caribbean contexts: natural history and intellectual friendship; the press and the public sphere; histories of the book and reading; and the agricultural Enlightenment. It identifies many White male colonists who embraced Enlightenment practices and, in the process, asserted a colonial identity that rejected metropolitan notions of Caribbean degeneracy and philistinism, redrew the line between free and unfree, and validated on a cultural basis the power to enslave. The Conclusion suggests future lines of research, such as the comparative vigor of the Enlightenment in French and British colonies and the relationship between the enslaved and free people of color to Enlightenment intellectual culture. Remarking how rapidly White colonists accustomed themselves to their brutal and lucrative slave societies, the Conclusion invites us to consider the consequences of globalization and the moral implications and real-world consequences of political economy in the twenty-first as well as the eighteenth century.

No powerful legal imagining accompanied the colonial ventures of the French old regime, with exploitation of New World resources initiated and controlled by state officials. But operations were badly resourced and conducted by private adventurers and representatives of noble families interested in influence back home. Profits from colonial expansion were to be shared between Paris and powerful interests in the French maritime provinces. Although the Atlantic settlements were legally imagined as overseas parts of the realm, governed by the customs of Paris, in practice, metropolitan control remained weak. Profits from the most lucrative colony, Saint-Domingue, were received from chattel slavery legally organised under the Code noir (1685). Few French lawyers or intellectuals discussed slavery; the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) remained silent about it. The slave revolution of 1791 was largely autonomous, eventually pushing the National Assembly to issue an emancipation decree. After the failure of Napoleon’s effort to recapture the island, Haiti declared independence in 1804. But the first decolonised state remained an international pariah.

“Shadows of Haiti” examines echoes of the Haitian Revolution in three texts from the extended Caribbean:Victor Séjour’s “Le Mulâtre,”, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab, and Charles Chesnutt’s Paul Marchand F.M.C.After an overview of world-systems theory and an introduction to the historical context in which each of these texts is situated, this chapter compares the ways in which the potentially violent revolt of a mixed-race heterosexual male protagonist is neutered or silenced by the conventions of sentiment. Haunting all three texts is the dark shadow of the violent revolt in Saint-Domingue, enmeshed with the consequences of deadly family secrets related to race and violence. In “Le Mulâtre” and Sab, the male protagonist dies. In Paul Marchand F.M.C, however, the hero survives but is silenced and forced into exile in France.

During the final decades of the 1600s, French and Spanish residents in Hispaniola had developed a deeply ambivalent yet fluid relationship that ranged from the open violence to collaboration in their daily dealings. By the end of the century, however, Spanish residents on the island, especially in the north, came to rely on French merchants and settlers, who provided Hispaniola residents with a certain level of economic prosperity that legal (and illegal) Spanish traders operating in Santo Domingo could only provide at much higher prices and limited quantities. This rise of the intercolonial trade between both sides of the island happened as the efforts of the Spanish crown to eliminate French settlements from Hispaniola also increased. The participation of Spanish local residents in the war effort allowed them to manipulate the Spanish offensive and foil the imperial objective of consolidating Spanish control over all of Hispaniola, thus choosing the commercial benefits of accommodation to the neighboring French presence, despite the risks, instead of a safe reunification under Spanish control that would once again commercially isolate them.