Instruments of Culture: Refashioning the French Empire between the French and Haitian Revolutions

This dissertation explores how different clubs, assemblies, and groups—on both sides of the Atlantic—discussed how empire should regenerate for the benefit of France, roughly between 1787-1793. I argue that there was a late enlightenment project of adapting the French Empire to an enlightened world, breaking away from the remnants of the Old Regime. There were several competing arguments about what “regeneration” meant for France. These arguments are the common thread among the chapters that focus on the following clubs, assemblies, and groups: the Cercle des Philadelphes, the Society of the Friends of the Blacks, the Massiac Club, the French Party of Saint-Domingue, the free people of color, the Civil Commissioners, and the Royal Governors in Colonial Haiti. It is important to look at these transatlantic organizations to understand this period because of how complex and complicated this early phase of the Haitian Revolution was. As a French historian writing about Haiti, I view the French Revolution (1789-1799) and the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) as two separate events. This project’s intervention in scholarship puts all of these revolutionary actors into conversation for the first time. This project also explores the history of emotions and their ties to political behaviors. This in turn allows us to understand the amount of power there was in angry and fearful propaganda on the public sphere. This project reveals how strong tensions were between metropole and colony as well as racial tensions between French whites, free people of color lobbying for their own rights, and against the enslaved in insurrection. It also shows that the French on both sides of the Atlantic did not handle the empire well during the French Revolution. While many glorify the French Revolution’s call for universal rights of man, this dissertation shows how the application of those ideas and Enlightenment tenets on the empire was a failure