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The Nation and the Deserving Refugees: Granting Relief to the Saint-Dominguans in France, 1793-1802

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2026

Sibylle Fourcaud
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Abstract

In 1793, during the Haitian Revolution, the burning of Cap-Français led to the flight of thousands of people across the Atlantic World, many of whom ended up in French port cities. The French government decided to grant them financial relief, in the form of monthly amounts of money. However, the administrative category “colons de Saint-Domingue réfugiés en France,” depending on the period considered, did not encompass the same populations. This contribution examines how the requirements for relief evolved between 1793 and 1802, when Napoleon sent the Leclerc expedition to reassert his domination over Saint-Domingue. It shows the passage from legislation that granted relief to all the displaced imperial populations, including former slaves, to a more restrictive law focusing on property owners only during the Directory (1795–1799), and then to a racialised relief prioritising white owners at the end of the Consulate (1802). These restrictions were linked to the sacralisation of private property during the French Revolution, but were also symptomatic of the permanence of a colonial relation between Saint-Domingue and its metropole, leading to the creation of an “imperial nation” in which white owners were considered full citizens, whereas people of colour were relegated to the margins of the empire.

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Itinerario , First View , pp. 1 - 16
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An anonymous Saint-Domingue colonist from Nantes complained during the Directory (1795–1799) about how the French government treated him and his fellow exiles. He wrote:

Jealous, however, of showing their attachment to the metropole, many hurried back to France, while others, who had formed advantageous settlements or believed in the re-establishment of the colony, sent addresses in which their feelings were developed too precisely to be exposed to the slightest suspicion. We approach this beloved country, which rejects us with barbarity, prisons, vexations of all kinds, that’s what it offers us in return for the most sincere attachment.Footnote 1

The author complained that planters choosing to settle in the United States, as well as those choosing to set sail for metropolitan France, faced the threat of the French government categorizing them as émigrés, despite their efforts to be labelled as refugees. These tensions illuminate the difficulties of the revolutionary government in defining the status of imperial exiles within the nation, due to their constant mobility, albeit the same government was disbursing some relief funds to “refugees” and “deportees” from the colonies living on metropolitan soil.Footnote 2

Scholars traditionally identify the beginning of the Saint-Domingue revolution with the slave insurrection of August 1791 in the northern part of the French colony and the end with Haiti’s declaration of independence in 1804. Footnote 3 This revolution, inscribed in the era of the Age of Revolutions,Footnote 4 led to the exodus of thousands of inhabitants of the island during the last decade of the eighteenth century. They sought refuge both across the Atlantic World and in metropolitan France.

The burning of the seaport of Cap-Français in June 1793 caused the first major wave of refugees out of Saint-Domingue and towards the Atlantic French shores.Footnote 5 This migration prompted the French government to provide financial relief to those arriving in the metropole. Apportioned through a monthly allowance, this assistance policy lasted until Napoleon Bonaparte launched a military expedition to reassert his control over Saint-Domingue in 1802. The French government renewed the relief after the independence of Haiti in 1804, but the implications were no longer the same, as it was now uncertain whether the French could reconquer Saint-Domingue. This renewed relief induced a different type of policy than during the revolutionary era, when the administration expected the refugees to return home. Therefore, this article only concentrates on the revolutionary relief policy, from 1793 to its suppression in 1802.

Studies on the Haitian Revolution and the flight of Saint-Domingue colonists throughout the Atlantic World have largely neglected to examine those colonists who sought refuge in metropolitan France.Footnote 6 The doctoral thesis of Darrell Meadows has provided the first global overview of the assistance granted to Saint-Domingue colonists by France.Footnote 7 He estimates that the number of Saint-Dominguans passing through metropolitan France between 1793 and 1802 reached ten thousand.Footnote 8 Nevertheless, it is very difficult to number them, as they were constantly on the move and were not systematically registered in assistance files. In his study, Meadows used the term “exiles” to designate the Saint-Dominguans, arguing that “this term captures better than the term refugee the political nature of this migration stream.”Footnote 9 Scholars agree that the massive number of migrations during the Age of Revolutions represented a shift in the motives of exile, with people fleeing now predominantly for political reasons and less on religious grounds.Footnote 10 But Meadows’ linguistic choice masks the variety of terms by which administrators and political actors in France categorized Saint-Dominguans.

In fact, very few historians have yet paid attention to the shifting labels used by the French authorities to designate Saint-Dominguans who fled the colony, particularly in connection to the financial relief granted to them.Footnote 11 Most authors studying Saint-Dominguans in the United States simply call them “refugees” without analysing the discourse of the French government at the time.Footnote 12 This article examines the labels used by administrative and political authorities in France to categorise Saint-Dominguans leaving the colony between 1793 and 1802. Given that the revolution of Saint-Domingue occurred while France itself was in a period of major political upheavals, the use of different labels is indicative of the priorities of the successive political regimes.Footnote 13 Even if a “compassionate law” for exiles was crafted as soon as the seventeenth century and was well used in the British Empire at the end of the eighteenth century, compassion towards forcefully displaced people was always restricted to confessional belonging or political affiliation.Footnote 14 Moreover, in the context of the French Revolution, the label refugee was not only a broad and universalised category associated with pity and compassion; it had a political meaning.Footnote 15

Jan Jansen notes that “flight and exile were integral parts of the reformation of political communities in the Age of Revolutions.”Footnote 16 Labels used to designate Saint-Dominguans in France testify to this reshaping. Historian David Bell, who studied the building of French nationalism during the eighteenth century, argues that there was only a “weak colonial influence on the metropolitan Revolution,” and that “it was precisely the relative weakness of the French imperial formation in 1789 that allowed the revolutionaries to forge an intensely powerful vision of the nation-state.”Footnote 17 His point has been challenged by scholars of the “new imperial history” field, who claim that colonies and metropole should be considered as a single object of study in the historical analysis of empires, and not artificially separated.Footnote 18 Josep Fradera shows that the relationship between the metropole and its colonies lay at the heart of the construction of the revolutionary nation.Footnote 19

The various uses of the term refugee, which is at the same time a political category mirroring the one of émigré and an administrative category associated with rights to assistance, illustrate the attempts and hesitations of French rulers on how to integrate colonial populations in the national body of citizens. They also demonstrate which parts of these colonial populations were deemed valuable members of the nation and entitled to assistance. The first relief laws passed in 1794 demonstrated the will to integrate all the displaced imperial populations, considered “internal refugees,” into the French nation. But the Directory gradually focused mostly on the figure of the white planter, leading to a racialisation of the category of “refugee” and its restriction to property owners in the relief policy.Footnote 20 This shift was linked to the building of the imperial nation, in which colonies were reasserted as economic dependencies of the metropole and submitted to a social and racial order monitored by white planters.

Helping “Internal Refugees”

It was the torching of Cap-Français in June 1793 that initiated political debates in metropolitan France on how to help people who fled Saint-Domingue. A law had been enacted in 1792 to help Saint-Domingue colonists’ children who were in boarding schools in metropolitan France and whose parents could not pay the pension anymore, following the slaves’ insurrection in 1791. However, the law only provisioned the payment of three months’ pension and was not renewed until November 1794.Footnote 21 Apart from a few emergency decrees, the first official legislation granting relief to Saint-Dominguans was the law of 27 Vendémiaire year III (October 18, 1794). This law created two administrative categories associated with a legal right to assistance: “refugees” and “deportees.” Legislators grouped under these labels various populations: “Citizens who are refugees from departments invaded by brigands and other enemies of the Republic; those from the Windward and Leeward Islands, those who have been deported, and Corsicans, as well as those from all French establishments below or beyond the Cape of Good Hope, either in Africa or Asia, are entitled to assistance.”Footnote 22

The law encompassed not only all refugees and deportees from the colonies but also Corsicans and Vendéens, thus grouping all the “national” refugees. Historians who have worked on refugees in France during the Revolution have mostly focused on foreign refugees, examining them through the prism of nationality and asylum.Footnote 23 They all point to the fact that refugees faced growing suspicion from the Terror (1793–1794) onwards, though the 1793 Constitution granted asylum to “foreigners banished from their homeland for the cause of freedom.”Footnote 24 But Virginie Martin has recently resolved this apparent contradiction by showing that the Constitution hardly granted asylum and assistance to foreign refugees and that the only ones who were granted relief were “those whose territory was ‘liberated’ by French armies before being ‘reunited’ with the territory of the Republic and who, as such, were assimilated to French citizens.”Footnote 25 The law of 27 Vendémiaire supports Martin’s claim, as it only encompassed French refugees who, as citizens, could claim assistance. Consequently, it acknowledged that imperial refugees belonged to the nation, as Vendéens or Corsicans.

Moreover, the law emphasised the place of origin of refugees rather than their nationality, as the determinant for who could be granted relief. Notably, it restricted assistance to “internal refugees” who were displaced from one territory of the French Republic to another.Footnote 26 At that time, nationality derived from citizenship, which itself was established on the spatial criterion of living on French territory.Footnote 27 No clear distinction existed between “nationals” and “foreigners,” but from a spatial point of view Saint-Dominguans were considered French citizens and entitled to assistance as such.Footnote 28 Envisioning the law in terms of space also allows connecting the question of relief to the “respatialisation” of France during the revolutionary era. Megan Maruschke has characterised this respatialisation as a territorialisation of the metropole in the empire, leading to the birth of the imperial nation-state as a new spatial format after a decade during which governments hesitated on the status of the colonies in the construction of the revolutionary nation.Footnote 29 From a spatial point of view, the law of 27 Vendémiaire envisioned the metropole and the colonies as part of the same national territory. This confirms the theory of Josep Fradera, for which failing to mention the colonies in the 1793 Constitution implied that it was an “imperial constitution” that made no juridical distinction between the metropole and the colonies.Footnote 30

Envisioning the scope of the law as a question of space further helps to understand how it mirrored the contemporaneous legislation on émigrés. Émigrés were deprived of their rights as citizens and even sentenced to civil death as they decided to leave the territory of the Republic.Footnote 31 Refugees, on the contrary, were considered citizens worthy of assistance as their trajectory took place on the territory of the Republic. Being categorised as a refugee therefore equated to being considered a patriot and valuable member of the nation who deserved assistance. Greg Burgess has asserted that “the terms ‘refugee’ and ‘patriot’ were common and interchangeable; both described the victims of France’s enemies.”Footnote 32 Someone labelled as a refugee or as a deportee was automatically considered a patriot in both the political discourse and the administration of relief, without having to prove it.Footnote 33 This was important for Saint-Dominguans as internal conflicts opposed them since 1789 and particularly since the burning of Cap-Français, and political changes had submitted some of them to arrest and imprisonment.Footnote 34 By casting them all as “refugees” or “deportees” entitled to assistance, the government chose not to side with one specific colonial faction in the wake of big parliamentary hearings on the responsibilities in the events in Saint-Domingue in 1792–1793.Footnote 35

Who Can Be Considered a Refugee?

The law of 27 Vendémiaire was nonetheless silent about which parts of the Saint-Domingue population should be considered refugees and therefore granted assistance, as this category was poorly defined and therefore open to administrative interpretations.Footnote 36 Consequently, the question was more about which parts of the Saint-Dominguans were eligible for assistance, and thus considered worthy members of the nation who should have a right to governmental help. This led to the construction of what became the two main criteria necessary to be entitled to assistance throughout the revolutionary period. First, one had to be destitute to receive financial relief.Footnote 37 One may think that “structural poor,” who include elderly and disabled people, widows, and children would be the first recipients of relief.Footnote 38 But revolutionaries saw families as the basic unit of society, which lay at the foundation of the social and political order.Footnote 39 This unit was embodied by its head, the “man of the family,” an active citizen taking care of the “dependents” of his household.Footnote 40 This vision had consequences for the organisation of relief: if the allowances were individual, the head of the family was the only recipient of relief for the whole household, his wife and children being considered “under family domination.”Footnote 41 This way of administering refugees as individuals within families disadvantaged women and children as they received lower monthly allowances than men, even if they were heads of families.Footnote 42

The second criterion which gained prominence for admission to relief was property-owning. A new law, issued on 7 Nivôse year III (27 December 1794), asserted that Saint-Domingue colonists living in France before the Revolution, and who had their properties devastated by the “enemies of the Republic,” could be equated to refugees and added to the beneficiaries of the law of 27 Vendémiaire.Footnote 43 This law can be understood less as a concession to planters than as a commitment to protecting private property. Indeed, the Revolution created a “great demarcation”: “the separation, in theory and in practice, of the sphere of private property and the sphere of public authority.”Footnote 44 This encompassed the abolition of former seigneurial rights, and the transfer of the task of protecting property, now individualised and formalised as a natural right, to the state.Footnote 45 Moreover, the Thermidorian Convention (1794–1795) grounded “the independence and virtue of the citizenry in a two-pronged foundation of property and education,” which explains the commitment of revolutionary administrators to help property owners.Footnote 46 The main consequence of the law was the birth of a new administrative category called the propriétaire colon, used by local authorities alongside the categories of “refugees” and “deportees.”

While property owners were being turned into a separate category of relief-deserving members of the nation equal to refugees, administrators questioned the extent to which formerly enslaved people also deserved relief. No racial differentiation was inscribed in the law of 27 Vendémiaire, but Aubert Jollin, a member of the relief office in Nantes, wondered in Brumaire year III (November 1794) if he was to include in the relief distribution “negroes or other coloured people in the service of those who brought them to France.”Footnote 47 Slavery had been abolished in the colonies in February 1794, and as soon as October 1791, a law prohibited racial differentiation in metropolitan France by stating both that “every individual is free as soon as he enters France,” and that “every man, of whatever colour, enjoys in France all the rights of a citizen, if he has the qualities prescribed by the Constitution for exercising them.”Footnote 48 Jollin’s questioning was thus illegal, but it was based on two motives. First, Jollin did not envision formerly enslaved servants as independent citizens, as was the case for all the domestic servants in the metropole who were denied suffrage during most of the Revolution because of their dependent status.Footnote 49 Therefore, Jollin considered that if former slaves were to receive assistance, they should be granted the same financial amount as children, as they were dependent members of a household. Second, his way of designating former slaves derived directly from the formulation of the 1777 Déclaration pour la police des noirs, which banned not only enslaved people, but also “blacks, mulattoes and other coloured people” from entering metropolitan territory.Footnote 50 Arguably, the two considerations of race and dependency were linked in Jollin’s hesitation to grant relief to formerly enslaved people still working as domestic servants. In practice, some former slaves were granted relief, but they formed a category whose deservingness was considered dubious by the administration, despite the legislation granting them – at least passive – citizenship.Footnote 51 During the Directory, they were progressively rendered invisible in political debates about Saint-Domingue refugees, who tended to be associated more and more with an archetypal vision of the planter.

Émigrés or réfugiés? Debating Belonging to the Nation

Two interrelated reasons led legislators to equate Saint-Domingue refugees to planters during the Directory. The first was the arrival of new right-wing and pro-planter deputies in the legislature.Footnote 52 The second was the question of the status of Saint-Dominguans who had sought refuge in the United States. The neutrality of this country during the war opposing France and Britain from 1793 to 1802, and the number of planters taking residence there during the revolutionary decade prompted an intense legislative debate during the spring and summer of 1797 on whether they were to be considered réfugiés or émigrés. In other words, were they valuable members of the French nation as patriot property owners, or were they counterrevolutionaries who should be deprived of their property?Footnote 53 These hesitations on the status of planters in the United States demonstrate the difficulties that French metropolitan authorities faced when seeking to categorize colonial mobilities: imperial circulations across the Atlantic did not match their spatial-political scheme associating citizenship and nationality with presence on the territory of the Republic.

The word émigré appeared during the Revolution, and designated “the French who, without permission, have left France since the Revolution, and who have not returned within the time allowed by the law.”Footnote 54 Property was a central question in the émigré legislation, as the government could seize an émigré’s estate and sell it.Footnote 55 That is undoubtedly why, as soon as 25 August 1792, a law was passed to deal with “property owned by émigrés in the colonies.”Footnote 56 However, after the Terror, the émigré law of 25 Brumaire Year III (15 November 1794) omitted the colonies, leaving the task of dealing with colonial emigration to the legislative committees of Legislation and of the Navy and the Colonies.Footnote 57 As the Directory emerged in 1795, a decision had yet to be taken. The colonies were now officially considered an integral part of the Republic, leading – at least in theory – to what Bernard Gainot has called “republican isonomy.”Footnote 58 Thus, the émigré legislation should apply to colonies even more now that a new “imperial constitution” made colonies administrative departments, and the Executive Directory called for such an application.Footnote 59 But their appeals reached a dead end in the legislature, as several factions clashed over the question of colonial emigration.Footnote 60 Deputies who wanted to protect Saint-Domingue colonists in the United States began to use the category of “refugee” as the legal counterpart of the émigré category. This reflected similar strategies adopted by allies of metropolitan émigrés in and outside the legislature.Footnote 61

Indeed, as soon as 1795, several public personalities came to defend metropolitan émigrés by qualifying them as “refugees.” Pierre Louis Roederer (1754–1835), for instance, based the distinction between émigrés and réfugiés on the intent that motivated an individual to flee.Footnote 62 He called to refer to people who fled involuntarily to escape death and find safety as refugees. Refugees could thus be distinguished from real émigrés who had fought in foreign armies against the Republic.Footnote 63 A similar plea was made for Saint-Domingue colonists staying in the United States. In his discourse of Germinal year V (March–April 1797) at the Council of Five Hundred, député Michel Mathieu Lecointe-Puyraveau (1764–1827) sought to help the majority of Saint-Dominguans escape the label émigrés by defining the reverse categories of “deportees” and “refugees.” Lecointe began by explaining the situation: “Two opinions have been expressed about the refugees: one presents them as unfortunate people whom the French government should welcome under its aegis and support with all its might; the other proscribes them: they are émigrés and deserve only the punishment reserved for those who betray la patrie!” Footnote 64 He concluded his argumentation by asserting that “deported colonists or refugees are, in the eyes of the law, as if they had never left the colony, since they only left by force.”Footnote 65 He thus tried to present Saint-Dominguans as innocent victims of unforeseen political events, emphasising their lack of political intent in leaving the colony. For him, as involuntary migrants obliged to flee the colony to save their lives, Saint-Domingue colonists could not be cast as émigrés.

To strengthen his plea in favour of the Dominguans, Lecointe inscribed it in the constitutional frame: “They are French, inhabitants of an integral part of the Republic; any revolutionary offence is absolved for them as for us, until 4 Brumaire of the year 4. If one were to assert the contrary, one would be laying the basis for a particular regime for the colonies, and it is from the efforts towards this particular regime that all their misfortunes have come.”Footnote 66 Lecointe thus used “republican isonomy” – which was important for neo-Jacobins who wanted to guarantee the constitutionalising of the abolition of slavery – to justify the consideration of all Saint-Dominguans as refugees and valuable members of the nation. But republican isonomy was also conversely used to apply the same severity towards Saint-Dominguans as it was for metropolitan émigrés.Footnote 67 Moreover, Lecointe deliberately ignored the fact that the amnesty of Brumaire year IV excluded émigrés.

The republican coup of Fructidor year V (September 1797) prompted a renewed severity in the treatment of émigrés and would-be returnees to France.Footnote 68 But for the Saint-Dominguans in the United States, the outcome was different. Although the Fructidorian coup had purged pro-planter advocates from the legislature, the new law of 12 Nivôse year VI (1 January 1798), which set the rules for the application of the émigré legislation in the colonies, allowed most of the Saint-Domingue colonists living in the United States to escape being labelled as émigrés. It stated that “deportees from the colonies will not be entered on the lists of colonial émigrés,” and that “refugees from Saint-Domingue at the time of the fire of Le Cap, and from all the colonies in circumstances where extraordinary events could threaten their lives, will not be considered as émigrés, if they prove, by authentic certificates, that, within a month after their departure from the colony, they have withdrawn to French territory, or to a neutral or allied country, and that they have lived there constantly until the time of their claim.”Footnote 69 Indulging the Saint-Domingue colonists living in the United States was partly due to the burning of Cap-Français, which all legislators saw as a sufficiently life-threatening event to justify the flight of its inhabitants. Even Etienne Lavaux (1751–1828),Footnote 70 known for his ardent opposition to planters, recognised that those who had left after the burning of Cap-Français could only be considered refugees fleeing for their lives.Footnote 71 French rulers thus had a hard time deciding how to integrate these colonists on the move into the nation, but ended up casting them mostly as refugees, i.e., victims of unfortunate events who could still be considered valuable and patriotic members of the nation.Footnote 72

But the enforcement of the émigré legislation through the law of 12 Nivôse year VI had one unintended consequence: it shed light on the colonial properties confiscated by the government, some of which were owned not by dubious patriots living in the United States, but by Saint-Dominguans in the metropole. This, along with a consensus on reestablishing a colonial plantation system in Saint-Domingue, reinforced the equation of refugees and planters in legislator discourses, making the latter progressively the only category of refugees deemed worthy of the nation’s help.

Restricting Assistance to Property Owners

The Directory helped to consolidate property-owning as a criterion for relief and to equate property owners to refugees. The interest that legislators took in planters during this period was first due to planters petitioning legislative chambers.Footnote 73 Legislators may have been sensitive to these petitions mentioning lost property, as property owners were considered the guarantors of the social and political order under the Directory and were therefore highly valued.Footnote 74 They were also deemed to guarantee the social and economic order in the colonies, as a petition from colonists in Bordeaux asserted in December 1798: “The repatriation of Saint-Domingue colonists, in terms of the prosperity of the colony, can only be considered advantageous, since it is a certainty that the property administered by their owners yields infinitely more than that whose management is entrusted to foreign hands.”Footnote 75

Property owners were needed in the colonies, given that legislators never ceased to envision Saint-Domingue as a plantation economy, either with or without slavery. According to historian François-Joseph Ruggiu, one of the characteristics of the “construction of coloniality” in the eighteenth century was “the specific supervision of trade, aimed at building the dependence of the overseas territories on the metropole.”Footnote 76 The “colonial relation” between Saint-Domingue and metropolitan France was maintained in the economic realm, as “production of tropical export commodities by coerced labour remained the dominant social vision for Saint-Domingue.”Footnote 77 Even as the colonies were theoretically equal to metropolitan departments through “republican isonomy,” the economic dependency of Saint-Domingue towards the metropole, based on the plantation economy and the colonial Exclusif, was never questioned.Footnote 78 This made the planters essential to ensure political and economic order.

The focus on planters was reinforced when legislators realised that some of the confiscated properties in Saint-Domingue were owned by colonists who were not émigrés, as they took refuge in the metropole.Footnote 79 Even pro-abolition deputies showed compassion for the planters whose properties were being seized. In 1798, Etienne MentorFootnote 80 called the government to “take prompt and effective measures to assist owners whose income is being used by government agents in the colonies, particularly in Saint-Domingue.”Footnote 81 Legislators focused on the question of confiscated properties because of the sacralisation of private property by the revolutionary governments, which started with the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789.Footnote 82 This led to the birth of what Thomas Piketty has called the “proprietarist ideology.” For him, “absolute respect for the property rights acquired in the past provided a new transcendence to avoid widespread chaos and fill the void left by the end of trifunctional ideology.”Footnote 83 Consequently, an émigré could be deprived of his properties, as they were no longer considered a member of the nation, but to trample on a patriot refugee’s property rights was to challenge the pillars on which the revolutionary political and social order was based. In their petitions, planters did not forget to remind the legislators of these rights, speaking of “property, the right to which is sacred and inviolable.” They also further stressed that “they are all French citizens, they all have the same rights.”Footnote 84 Here, they appealed again to republican isonomy to demand that their property rights be respected.

The property seizing question was the reason why the project for a new law, aimed at improving “assistance for deportees, refugees and property owners,” targeted mostly the latter. It was presented by député Antoine Rollin (1740–1814) to the Council of Five Hundred on 3 Nivôse VII (23 December 1798). Rollin asserted:

The industrious class […] will cheerfully forget all its troubles, if you put them in a position to set up workshops again, and if you provide them with work; this respectable class, that is the real nerve of the State, is content with little, and knows no artificial needs. But these numerous families of landowners, […] who had no other skill than that of managing rich dwellings over which they saw the flames spread; These men who, every year, loaded numerous ships with the produce of America, whose returns brought abundance to the heart of the metropole; these men are today destitute, and most of them are covered in tatters; there are some, however, whose possessions are once again being cultivated on behalf of the nation.Footnote 85

Rollin therefore insisted not only on confiscated properties but also on the economic role of planters in the plantation system. He also stressed the difference between craftsmen and planters, the latter being considered the only “deserving poor” because of their status as “shamefaced poor,” i.e., “high-born and productive individuals temporarily brought low by event beyond their control.”Footnote 86 Rollin therefore prioritised planters in his legal project, dividing future beneficiaries of assistance into several categories. The first encompassed property owners who could prove that their properties were leased on behalf of the Republic. The second were property owners “whose properties have been set on fire or are in the hands of the enemy.” The third class included “refugees and deportees from the colonies, who existed only through the product of a profession or employment.” The amount of assistance was intended to run along a degressive scale for each of these classes.Footnote 87 Rollin’s project thus proposed a strong hierarchy for beneficiaries, with property owners enjoying a privileged status as the most deserving and valuable members of society. This was a significant shift in the seven years that had passed since the burning of Le Cap in 1793.

The law issued on 28 Germinal year VII (17 April 1799) did not retain all of Rollin’s propositions, but stated: “Refugees will prove, by attestations from their correspondents or fellow citizens, that they had properties in the colonies from which they have ceased to receive income in France since the hostilities at sea, or that they exercised a lucrative profession there before the revolution.”Footnote 88 Being labelled as a refugee was now almost equivalent to being a property owner in the law. The administrators only distinguished owners from non-owners in the lists of relief beneficiaries, no longer verifying if the would-be beneficiaries were refugees if they held properties.Footnote 89

Given that assistance was now also refused to domestic servants, it must have been especially difficult for formerly enslaved people to access relief. Moreover, as the Frenchness of people of colour was regularly called into question by some legislators from 1795 onwards, the law could have been used to exclude them from assistance.Footnote 90 But some of them succeeded in securing their admission to relief by playing with the labels. This was the case of Marie Zaïre, formerly enslaved to Jean Ravesies, a planter from Bordeaux. Although she came to the metropole with her master in 1791, before France’s war with Britain, she succeeded in passing herself off as a deportee, therefore escaping the requirement of property-owning necessary to obtain relief as a refugee.Footnote 91 Moreover, authorities continued to help destitute refugees at a local level.Footnote 92 It thus seems that assistance targeted property owners more in theory than in practice.

Nevertheless, the law of 28 Germinal confirms Darrell Meadows’s argument, that a “pro-colonial consensus” had formed during the Directory, when all political actors began to equate “refugees” with “planters” and ended in theoretically restricting assistance to property-owning colonists only. Footnote 93 By doing so, the Directory was preparing the administrative tools that the Consulate would use a few years later. As Miranda Spieler has underlined: “Revolutionaries furnished Bonaparte with a template for colonial rules that he raised to the status of a new norm.”Footnote 94

The Racialisation of Relief

The coup of 18 Brumaire year VIII (9 November 1799) was closely followed by the Constitution of year VIII, which Josep Fradera called “the first truly colonial and neo-imperial document of its kind since the Revolution.”Footnote 95 It reinstated a separation between the metropole and the colonies, the latter being governed not by the Constitution, but by special laws. From the colonies, it could be seen as a return to the Old Regime, but as Megan Maruschke notes, the new constitution instead marked “the production of a new format for empire […] with the nation-state at its core.”Footnote 96 The First Consul quickly began to listen favourably to a renewed and reinforced colonial lobby.Footnote 97 Bonaparte possibly envisioned the reestablishment of slavery as soon as the end of 1799,Footnote 98 and it would be reinstated in all French colonies but Saint-Domingue between May and the summer of 1802.Footnote 99

As Toussaint Louverture (1743–1803) issued his own constitution in Saint-Domingue in 1801, Bonaparte decided to launch a military expedition to reassert metropolitan domination over the colony.Footnote 100 According to Darrell Meadows, “planters helped to push this colonial agenda.”Footnote 101 Many of them, at least, gave their opinion about the future of Saint-Domingue through pamphlets published or sent to the government.Footnote 102 They also asked to be repatriated back to Saint-Domingue, which many legislators described as the final aim of the relief policy. Footnote 103 During the Directory, fear of counterrevolutionaries being amongst the repatriated planters, as well as continued unrest in Saint-Domingue and war against Britain convinced the government to wait for “general peace” before sending Saint-Dominguans home.Footnote 104 During the Consulate, however, the Ministry of the Navy and the Colonies’ bureau des colonies began the preparations to repatriate colonists back to Saint Domingue, alongside planning the imminent military expedition to the island that began in December 1801.Footnote 105

A set of undated notes probably written around the spring 1802 by Jean Baptiste Guillemain de Vaivre (1736–1818), former intendant général des colonies in the 1780s and now director of the bureau des colonies, reveal a global project aiming at reimposing Saint-Domingue’s coloniality and dealing with the refugees and deportees.Footnote 106 A report sent to the three consuls stressed “the advantages of a prompt return of the master to his habitation”; while a note probably written shortly afterwards stated that administrators should “first give preference to white owners and their families.” Footnote 107 On 16 Messidor year X (16 July 1802), two decrees were issued. The first suppressed assistance, while the second granted free repatriation to “white men who own property in [Saint-Domingue] and who are currently refugees in France.”Footnote 108 On 16 Fructidor (3 September 1802), another decree stipulated: “the re-establishment of order in Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe and their dependencies, the interests of crops and national trade depending mainly on the presence of owners on their property, the said white owners are obliged to go there as soon as possible.”Footnote 109

The importance of planters to reestablish colonial rule was now inscribed in law, and the decrees reinstated racial differentiation. Only white planters were now considered valuable for the future of the colonies and were therefore the only ones who could be repatriated by the government, mostly if they were men because they could enrol in the military expedition. Women and children were not given priority for repatriation, and they were offered no further assistance after the cessation of relief.Footnote 110

Planters of colour were held in suspicion, Guillemain de Vaivre expressing doubts on their very existence in his notes: “It will be necessary to distinguish amongst the people of colour those who are really known to have properties, given that the greatest number are certainly people sans feu et sans aveu,Footnote 111 even dangerous, to whom in the principles of the time one was only too willing to give preference over the others.”Footnote 112 What can be observed here was a clear racialisation of the Saint-Domingue refugees and deportees. The status of the planter became the first determinant to be qualified as a valuable individual for the reestablishment of the plantation economy in Saint-Domingue, and it was mixed with racial prejudice leading to doubts on the legitimacy of property owned by people of colour.

As for deportees and refugees of colour who did not own property, Guillemain de Vaivre declared that they “have multiplied to an excessive extent, either in the capital or in the main commercial towns.” He thus advocated that “severe police measures will have to be taken, either to force them to earn their living by some form of work, or to concentrate them in a given place, in order to keep them always with a modest subsistence under the eyes and the hand of the government.”Footnote 113 People of colour were no longer qualified as refugees deserving of assistance and were now ascribed with a racial label. This project echoed the decree of 13 Messidor year X (13 July 1802), which forbade “any black, mulatto or other coloured person, of either sex, who is not in service, to enter the continental territory of the Republic in the future, under any cause or pretext whatsoever, unless they are in possession of a special authorisation.”Footnote 114 What was inscribed in this policy was a renewal of the Police des noirs, which had been enforced in 1777 but later abrogated in 1791.Footnote 115

The decree of 13 Messidor is often studied on its own, but when examined alongside the projects of Guillemain de Vaivre, it reveals that it was linked to the decrees suppressing relief and offering to repatriate white property-owning colonists. Indeed, it was part of a much larger thinking on empire, the separation between the metropole and the colonies, and the populations considered full members of the nation or, on the contrary, relegated to the colonial margins. The racial differentiation operated by the decrees echoed the separation between the metropole and the colonies in the Constitution of year VIII. With the decree of 13 Messidor, people of colour were forbidden to set foot on metropolitan soil, and for those who were already there, a policy of confining them to one place was at least considered, if not finally enforced. People of colour were no longer part of the nation-state. Rather they were members of its “imperial extensions,”Footnote 116 under the rule of special laws and banned from the rights granted to whites within the nation-state.Footnote 117

Conclusion: The “Victims” of the Haitian Revolution

Thus, through the course of the French Revolution, the use of the term refugee as an administrative category and political label testified to the difficulties of revolutionary rulers to situate colonial displaced populations within the spatial frame of the French nation. Starting with a decision to grant assistance to all “internal refugees,” the government then hesitated to consider planters who took refuge in the United States as loyal members of the nation, as their circulations did not fit the French spatial scheme of citizenship and nationality. In both situations, the term refugee was used to define patriot members of the nation who had legal rights to assistance. But while evaluating the status of Saint-Dominguans as a whole, French rulers also instated differentiations between Saint-Dominguans themselves: some were more French and deemed more worthy of assistance than others. While women and children were disadvantaged as “dependents” from a household, former slaves’ status as citizens was considered dubious, and they had difficulties accessing relief. On the contrary, property owners were constantly favoured and, beginning with the Directory, were progressively equated with the label refugee and considered the only Dominguans deserving of relief, in a context of sacralisation of private property and attempts to maintain the “colonial relation” with Saint-Domingue through the continuation of the plantation system. The Consulate completed the shift of the definition of “refugees” by racializing the category. This decision was one of the symptoms of the birth of the “imperial nation,” in which white property owners were considered worthy citizens of the nation-state, whereas people categorised de couleur were relegated to the colonial margins.

Unsurprisingly, when the relief policy was renewed in the fall of 1803, just before the independence of Haiti, prefects were instructed to grant relief to white property owners only.Footnote 118 They were now considered the sole victims of the Haitian Revolution and the only true refugees. Footnote 119 Other people, such as petty craftsmen or people of colour, were rendered invisible as they were definitively excluded from the “refugee” category associated with a right to assistance. White property owners were given relief throughout the nineteenth century, regardless of the political regime. Even the 1825 ordinance that granted planters an indemnity paid by Haiti did not put an end to financial assistance provided to them by the French state, which only stopped with the death of its two last beneficiaries in 1911.Footnote 120

Acknowledgements

“This publication is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 849189).“

References

1 Municipal archives of Nantes (hereafter AMN), Nantes, I242, file 6, anonymous draft letter to the “citizen editor,” unknown date (probably 1797).

2 This article is part of my PhD research project conducted at Sciences Po Paris and entitled “Les ayants droit de l’empire: une histoire politique et administrative des secours aux Domingois réfugiés en France (1793–1911).”

3 However, the first events of the French Revolution had already impacted Saint-Domingue’s political life and the first violent events had already occurred, such as Vincent Ogé’s insurrection and subsequent execution in 1790–1791. Manuel Covo, “One and Indivisible? Federation, Federalism, and Colonialism in the Early French and Haitian Revolutions,” French Historical Studies 44:3 (2021), 399–427; John D. Garrigus, “Vincent Ogé ‘Jeune’ (1757–91): Social Class and Free Colored Mobilization on the Eve of the Haitian Revolution,” The Americas 68:1 (2011), 33–62.

4 The Age of Revolutions, identified by scholars as a specific era, takes place between the 1770s and the 1820s. Jan C. Jansen, “Flucht und Exil im Zeitalter der Revolutionen,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 44:4 (2018), 495–525, 495. On this concept, see the introduction of the special issue.

5 Ashli White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 11.

6 On the contrary, studies on Saint-Domingue colonists in other Atlantic places are numerous. On the United States, see for instance White, Encountering Revolution; Margaret Wilson Gillikin, “Saint Dominguan Refugees in Charleston, South Carolina, 1791–1822: Assimilation and Accommodation in a Slave Society” (PhD diss., University of South Carolina, 2014); Frances Sergeant Childs, French Refugee Life in the United States, 1790–1800 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1940); On New Orleans specifically: Nathalie Dessens, From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans: Migration and Influences (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007); On Cuba: Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Agnès Renault, D’une île rebelle à une île fidèle. Les Français de Santiago de Cuba (1791–1825) (Rouen: PURH, 2012); On Jamaica: Jacques de Cauna, “La diaspora des colons de Saint-Domingue et le monde créole: le cas de la Jamaïque,” Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer 81:304 (1994), 333–59; Philip Wright and Gabriel Debien, Les colons de Saint-Domingue passés à la Jamaïque: 1792–1835 (Basse-Terre: Société d’histoire de la Guadeloupe : Archives départementales, 1975).

7 Darrell Meadows, “The Planters of Saint-Domingue, 1750–1804: Migration and Exile in the French Revolutionary Atlantic” (PhD diss., Carnegie Mellon University, 2004). Meadows also dedicates one chapter to relief funds disbursed for Saint-Domingue colonists in Jamaica and the United States. Other studies are Jennifer J. Pierce, “Discourses of the Dispossessed: Saint-Domingue Colonists on Race, Revolution and Empire, 1789–1825” (PhD diss., Florida State University, 2005); And more recently: Mary Lewis, “Legacies of French Slave-Ownership, or the Long Decolonization of Saint-Domingue,” History Workshop Journal 83:1 (2017), 151–75.

8 Meadows, “The Planters of Saint-Domingue,” 3.

9 Ibid., 15.

10 Jérôme Elie, “Histories of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies,” in The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, ed. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 23–35, 28; See also Jansen, “Flucht und Exil,” 495–96; 502; Delphine Diaz, En exil: les réfugiés en Europe, de la fin du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours (Paris: Gallimard, 2021), 34.

11 One exception is White, Encountering Revolution, chap. 3.

12 Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, “Refugiés or Émigrés? Early Modern French Migrations to British North America and the United States (c. 1680–c. 1820),” Itinerario 30:2 (2006), 12–32; Allan Potofsky, “The ‘Non-Aligned Status’ of French Emigrés and Refugees in Philadelphia, 1793–1798,” Transatlantica 2 (2006); Pierce, “Discourses of the Dispossessed”; Childs, French Refugee Life in the United States.

13 Delphine Diaz and Alexandre Dupont, “

14 Naïma Ghermani, Le droit des exilés: Généalogie du droit d’asile au XVIIe siècle (Paris: PUF, 2023), 15–23; Caroline Shaw, Britannia’s Embrace: Modern Humanitarianism and the Imperial Origins of Refugee Relief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 22–31.

15 The term refugee had commonly referred to the Huguenots since the late seventeenth century. Phil Orchard, “The Dawn of International Refugee Protection: States, Tacit Cooperation and Non-Extradition,” Journal of Refugee Studies 30:2 (2017), 282–300; Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, “Refugiés or Émigrés?,” 20; Other displaced populations were called refugees in the second half of the eighteenth century, and the term became universalised as political mobilities dramatically increased throughout the Age of Revolutions. Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011); Jean-François Mouhot, Les réfugiés acadiens en France (1758–1785): l’impossible réintégration? (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2012); Jansen, “Flucht und Exil,” 502‑3.

16 Jansen, “Flucht und Exil,” 510.

17 David A. Bell, “Revolutionary France as Nation-State and as Imperial Formation: The Need to Make Distinctions,” H-France Salon (2021), https://h-france.net/h-france-salon-volume-13-2021/. David Bell’s work on the building of the French nation includes The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); “Nations et empires dans la culture politique européenne des Lumières au début du XIXe siècle,” in L’Empire Napoléonien, une Expérience Européenne?, ed. François Antoine, Jean-Pierre Jessenne, Annie Jourdan, and Hervé Leuwers (Paris: Armand Colin, 2014), 21–28.

18 Manuel Covo and Megan Maruschke, “The French Revolution as an Imperial Revolution,” French Historical Studies 44:3 (2021), 371–97; Lauren R. Clay, “Liberty, Equality, Slavery: Debating the Slave Trade in Revolutionary France,” American Historical Review 128:1 (2023), 89–119; Josep Maria Fradera, The Imperial Nation: Citizens and Subjects in the British, French, Spanish, and American Empires (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018); Jeremy Adelman, “An Age of Imperial Revolutions,” American Historical Review 113:2 (2008), 319–40.

19 Fradera, The Imperial Nation, 8, 62.

20 The concept of racialisation “conveys the idea that race is an unstable and contested social construct that needs to be constantly re-instantiated and re-enacted”; race was “a political resource that was used not only to justify but also to operate the slave system.” Cécile Vidal, Caribbean New Orleans: Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society (Williamsburg, Va.: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2019), 27, 29.

21 Laws of 18 May 1792 and 26 Brumaire year III (16 November 1794). Jean-Baptiste Duvergier, Collection complète des lois, décrets, ordonnances, règlements, et avis du Conseil d’Etat, 37 vols. (Paris: A. Guyot, 1824), 4:201–2, 7:424.

22 National archives (hereafter AN), Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, F/12/2716.

23 Sophie Wahnich, L’impossible citoyen: l’étranger dans le discours de la Révolution française (Paris: Albin Michel, 2010); Michael Rapport, Nationality and Citizenship in Revolutionary France: the Treatment of Foreigners, 1789–1799 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000); Greg Burgess, Refuge in the Land of Liberty: France and Its Refugees, from the Revolution to the End of Asylum, 1787–1939 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

24 Delphine Diaz, Un asile pour tous les peuples? Exilés et réfugiés étrangers dans la France du premier XIXe siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 2014), 7.

25 Virginie Martin, “L’introuvable ‘droit d’Asile’: l’Article 120 de la Constitution de 1793,” in Exil, asile: du droit aux pratiques (XVIe–XIXe siècle), ed. Gilles Bertrand, Catherine Brice, and Mario Infelise (Rome: Publications de l’École française de Rome, 2022), 95–126.

26 Sari Nauman, “Conditional Hospitality Toward Internal Refugees: Sweden During the Great Northern War, 1700–1721,” in Baltic Hospitality from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century: Receiving Strangers in Northeastern Europe, ed. Sari Nauman, Wojtek Jezierski, Christina Reimann, and Leif Runefelt (Cham: Springer International, 2022), 221–45.

27 Matthias Middell and Megan Maruschke, The French Revolution as a Moment of Respatialization (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), 189.

28 Michel Pertué, “La police des étrangers sous la Révolution française,” in Police et Migrants: France 1667–1939, ed. Marie-Claude Blanc-Chaléard et al. (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2001), 63–74.

29 Maruschke, “The French Revolution and the New Spatial Format for Empire,” 521.

30 Fradera, The Imperial Nation, 62. However, the 1793 Constitution was never applied, as it was suspended because of the war.

31 Hannah Callaway, “Révolutionner la propriété: la confiscation des biens des émigrés à Paris et le problème de la propriété dans la Révolution française” (PhD. diss., Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2015), 79; See also Mary Ashburn Miller, “The Impossible Émigré: Moving People and Moving Borders in the Annexed Territories of Revolutionary France,” in French Emigrants in Revolutionised Europe: Connected Histories and Memories, ed. Laure Philip and Juliette Reboul (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019), 29–45; For a classical study on emigration, see Donald M. Greer, The Incidence of the Emigration During the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951).

32 Burgess, Refuge in the Land of Liberty, 26.

33 The law of 27 Vendémiaire year III doesn’t require any civic certificate to be granted assistance. AN, F/12/2716.

34 On arrestations of Saint-Dominguans during the Terror, see Jeremy D. Popkin, “The French Revolution’s Other Island,” in The World of the Haitian Revolution, ed. David Patrick Geggus and Norman Fiering (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 199–222; On the internal conflicts in Saint-Domingue and the battle of Cap-Français, see Jeremy D. Popkin, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), chap. 6 and 7.

35 For instance, the label “deportee” was used to designate Saint-Dominguans deported on political grounds by the island’s civil commissioners Léger-Félicité Sonthonax (1763–1813) and Étienne Polverel (1738–1795) between 1792 and 1794. But it also referred to people from Martinique, Guadeloupe, or Saint-Domingue who were deported by the English after their invasion of parts of these three islands in 1794, and whose loyalty was less dubious than that of the first “deportees.” On the parliamentary hearings called the “Affaire des colonies,” see Jeremy D. Popkin, “Thermidor, Slavery, and the ‘Affaire des Colonies,’” French Historical Studies 38:1 (2015), 61–82.

36 Jansen, “Flucht und Exil,” 524; Diaz, Un asile pour tous les peuples, chap. 1.

37 AMN, I242, file 6, Letter from the Commission of Public Assistance to the administrators of the Nantes district, 4 Pluviôse year III (January 23, 1795).

38 Laurence Fontaine, Vivre pauvre: quelques enseignements tirés de l’Europe des Lumières (Paris: Gallimard, 2022), 16.

39 Suzanne Desan, “Reconstituting the Social after the Terror: Family, Property and the Law in Popular Politics,” Past & Present 164 (1999), 81–121.

40 Anne Verjus, Le bon mari: une histoire politique des hommes et des femmes à l’époque révolutionnaire (Paris: Fayard, 2010); Jennifer Heuer, The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789–1830 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005).

41 Verjus, Le bon mari, 34.

42 AN, F/12/2716, Laws of 27 Vendémiaire year III (18 October 1794) and 17 Frimaire year V (7 December 1796). F/15/3510, Correspondence between the Commission of Public Assistance and the National Treasury on the case of a Saint-Dominguan widow, November 1794.

43 Duvergier, Collection complète des lois, 7:463.

44 Rafe Blaufarb, The Great Demarcation: the French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 19.

45 Thomas Piketty, Capital et idéologie (Paris: Seuil, 2019), 164, 179.

46 Andrew Jainchill, “The Constitution of the Year III and the Persistence of Classical Republicanism,” French Historical Studies 26:3 (2003), 417.

47 AMN, I242, file 6, “Observations relatives à l’exécution de la loi du 27 Vendémiaire sur les secours des réfugiés, par Aubert Jollin, notable membre du bureau”, 23 Brumaire year III (13 November 1794).

48 Departmental archives of the Gironde (hereafter ADG), Bordeaux, 61J10, Law of the 16 October 1791. I thank Sue Peabody for drawing my attention to this legislation.

49 Raffaella Sarti, “From Slaves and Servants to Citizens? Regulating Dependency, Race, and Gender in Revolutionary France and the French West Indies,” International Review of Social History 67:1 (2021), 13.

50 Pierre H. Boulle, “La Construction du Concept de Race dans la France d’Ancien Régime,” Outre-mers 89:336–7 (2002), 173.

51 On the access to citizenship by former slaves after 1794, see Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 282. On the difficulties of former slaves to obtain relief in the French metropole, see for instance, AN, F/15/3377, file of Constance, “girl of colour,” domestic servant of citoyenne Masseau.

52 Pierce, “Discourses of the Dispossessed,” 275.

53 White, Encountering Revolution, 113.

54 Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 5th edition, 1798, “émigrer.” For a general overview on emigration, see Karine Rance, “L’historiographie de l’émigration,” in Les noblesses françaises dans l’Europe de la Révolution, ed. Philippe Bourdin (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2010), 355–68; For an overview on the uses of the term émigré as a political category, see Juliette Reboul, French Emigration to Great Britain in Response to the French Revolution (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), chap. 1.

55 Callaway, “Révolutionner la Propriété,” 79–80.

56 Duvergier, Collection complète des lois, 5:415–7.

57 Mercure universel, 28 October 1794.

58 Bernard Gainot, “La Constitutionnalisation de la liberté générale sous le Directoire,” in Les abolitions de l’esclavage: de L.F. Sonthonax à V. Schœlcher, 1793, 1794, 1848: actes du colloque international tenu à l’université de Paris VIII les 3, 4 et 5 février 1994, ed. Marcel Dorigny (Saint-Denis: Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 1995). Some scholars have challenged this vision by showing that there was no republican isonomy in practice. Miranda Frances Spieler, “The Legal Structure of Colonial Rule during the French Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 66:2 (2009), 365–408.

59 Fradera, The Imperial Nation, 62.

60 Pierce, “Discourses of the Dispossessed,” 312–9.

61 Friedemann Pestel has shown the complexity of legally distinguishing between émigrés and réfugiés by analysing emigration through the prism of refugee historiography. Friedemann Pestel, “Who Were the French Émigrés? On the Relation between Émigré and Refugee Studies,” Age of Revolutions, 29 May 2023, https://ageofrevolutions.com/2023/05/29/who-were-the-french-emigres-on-the-relation-between-emigre-and-refugee-studies/.

62 Kelly Elizabeth Summers, “The Great Return: Reintegrating Émigrés in Revolutionary France, 1789–1802,” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2015), 178–9.

63 Pierre-Louis Roederer, Des Fugitifs Français et des Emigrés, Paris, 28 Thermidor year III (15 August 1795), quoted in Summers, “The Great Return,” 211.

64 Rapport Fait par Lecointe-Puiraveau, au Nom de la Commission des Colonies Occidentales, sur les Déportés et Réfugiés de Saint-Domingue, Soit en France, Soit en Continent Américain, Séance du 4 Germinal an V (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, March–April 1797).

65 Ibid.

66 Ibid.

67 “So what difference is there between the continental émigré and the colonial émigré? Aren’t they both enemies of their patrie?” Archives nationales d’outre-mer (hereafter ANOM), Aix-en-Provence, CC9A14, Report from the ministry of the Navy to the Executive Directory, 13 Floréal year V (2 May 1797).

68 Summers, “The Great Return,” 222–3.

69 Duvergier, Collection complète des lois, 10:175–82.

70 Etienne Lavaux arrived in Saint-Domingue in 1792 and was appointed interim governor of the colony in 1793. An ally of Toussaint Louverture, he defended his policies in the Council of Elders when elected in 1796. Bernard Gainot, “Le général Laveaux, gouverneur de Saint Domingue, député néo-Jacobin,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 278:1 (1989), 433–54.

71 Gazette nationale ou le Moniteur Universel, 1 October 1797.

72 French consulates in the United States were nonetheless ordered to confirm the patriotism of Saint-Domingue colonists residing there, albeit with inconsistent and changing criteria. See Manuel Covo, Entrepôt of Revolutions: Saint-Domingue, Commercial Sovereignty, and the French-American Alliance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 207.

73 Meadows, “The Planters of Saint-Domingue,” 229.

74 Jean-Luc Chappey, “Du peuple enfant au peuple malheureux. Questions sur les mutations des dominations sociales et politiques entre la république thermidorienne et l’Empire,” La Révolution française. Cahiers de l’Institut d’histoire de la Révolution française 9 (2015), 2, 5.

75 AN, AF/III/134, Petition from colonists in Bordeaux, 17 Frimaire year VII (7 December 1798).

76 François-Joseph Ruggiu, “Des nouvelles France aux colonies. Une approche comparée de l’histoire impériale de la France de l’époque moderne,” Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos [online] (2018) 14‑15.

77 Paul Cheney, Cul de Sac: Patrimony, Capitalism, and Slavery in French Saint-Domingue (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 10; See also Pierre Force, Wealth and Disaster: Atlantic Migrations from a Pyrenean Town in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 124.

78 After declaring general emancipation in Saint-Domingue in August 1793, Sonthonax established a system of forced labour for freed slaves, to maintain the plantation economy. Toussaint Louverture adopted the same strategy at the turn of the nineteenth century. Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 185–8; Cheney, Cul de Sac, 182–6; Sudhir Hazareesingh, Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), 366–72.

79 Confiscations began with the enforcement of the first law against colonial émigrés, at the end of 1792. Cheney, Cul de Sac, 182.

80 Etienne Mentor was a député de couleur of Martinique. Bernard Gainot, Les officiers de couleur dans les armées de la République et de l’Empire (1792–1815): de l’esclavage à la condition militaire dans les Antilles françaises (Paris: Karthala, 2007), 98–9.

81 Motion d’ordre prononcée en faveur des colons patriotes déportés par les Anglais et des réfugiés de Saint-Domingue, par Mentor. Séance du 11 Thermidor an 6 [29 July 1798] (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1798).

82 Piketty, Capital et idéologie, 152–3.

83 Piketty, Capital et idéologie, 155.

84 AN, AF/III/134, Petition of colonists in Bordeaux, 17 Frimaire year VII (7 December 1798).

85 Rapport fait par Rollin, au nom de la Commission de Marine, sur les secours à accorder aux réfugiés, déportés, et propriétaires de la Corse et des colonies. Séance du 3 Nivôse an 7 [23 December 1798] (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, January–February 1799).

86 Meadows, “The Planters of Saint-Domingue,” 201; On shamefaced poor, see also Robert Castel, Les métamorphoses de la question sociale: une chronique du salariat (Paris: Fayard, 1995), 101; André Gueslin, Gens pauvres, pauvres gens: dans la France du XIXe siècle (Paris: Aubier, 1997), 70.

87 Rapport Fait par Rollin.

88 AN, F/12/2716.

89 AN, F/15/3434, Circulaire of 1 Prairial year VII (20 May 1799).

90 See Florence Gauthier, Triomphe et mort de la révolution des droits de l’homme et du citoyen: 1789–1795–1802 (Paris: Syllepse, 2014), 315.

91 She managed to receive assistance at least until year IX (1800–1801). AN, F/15/3426, assistance file of Marie Zaïre.

92 ADG, 4M908, Letter from the prefect of Gironde to the mayor of Bordeaux, 19 Vendémiaire year X (11 October 1801).

93 Meadows, “The Planters of Saint-Domingue,” 204.

94 Spieler, “The Legal Structure of Colonial Rule,” 408.

95 Fradera, The Imperial Nation, 98.

96 Maruschke, “The French Revolution and the New Spatial Format for Empire,” 521.

97 Thomas Pronier, “L’implicite et l’explicite dans la politique de Napoléon,” in Rétablissement de l’esclavage dans les colonies françaises (1802): ruptures et continuités de la politique coloniale française (1800–1830), ed. Yves Bénot and Marcel Dorigny (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2003), 63–4.

98 Pronier, “L’implicite et l’explicite dans la politique de Napoléon,” 59.

99 Jean-François Niort and Jérémy Richard, “De la Constitution de l’an VIII au rétablissement de l’esclavage (1802) et à l’application du Code civil dans les colonies françaises (1805): le retour d’un droit colonial réactionnaire sous le régime napoléonien,” in Les colonies, la Révolution française, la loi, ed. Jean-François Niort, Frédéric Régent and Pierre Serna (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2014), 169.

100 Hazareesingh, Black Spartacus, chap. 9–10.

101 Meadows, “The Planters of Saint-Domingue,” 319.

102 Baptiste Biancardini, “L’opinion coloniale et la question de la relance de Saint-Domingue 1795–1802,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 382:4 (2015), 63–80.

103 AN, AF/III/134, Petition from colonists in Bordeaux, 17 Frimaire year VII (7 December 1798); Rapport Fait par Lecointe-Puiraveau.

104 ANOM, CC9A14, Message from the Executive Directory to the Council of Five Hundred, 19 Floréal year V (3 May 1797).

105 Pronier, “L’implicite et l’explicite dans la politique de Napoléon,” 61; Yves Bénot, La démence coloniale sous Napoléon (Paris: La Découverte, 1992).

106 Sylviane Llinares and Jörg Ulbert, eds., La liasse et la plume: Les bureaux du secrétariat d’État de la Marine (1669–1792), (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2017).

107 ANOM, CC9C5, Report to the consuls and notes on the project of decrees, Spring 1802.

108 Duvergier, Collection complète des lois, 13:486–7.

109 Ibid, 13: 532.

110 ANOM, CC9 C5, Project of decree, Spring 1802.

111 This expression could be translated as “without a home and anyone who could testify for their character.” The expression sans aveu is generally used to qualify vagrants. Vincent Denis, Une histoire de l’identité: France, 1715–1815 (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2008), 396.

112 ANOM, CC9C5, Report to the consuls, Spring 1802.

113 Ibid.

114 Duvergier, Collection complète des lois, 13:485.

115 Sue Peabody, There Are No Slaves in France: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Pierre Henri Boulle, Race et esclavage dans la France de l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Perrin, 2007).

116 Maruschke, “The French Revolution and the New Spatial Format for Empire,” 522.

117 Fradera, The Imperial Nation, 22–3.

118 ADG, 4M908, Circulaire from the minister of the Interior to prefects, 5 Ventôse year XII (25 February 1804).

119 Alejandro Enrique Gomez, “Images de l’apocalypse des planteurs,” L’Ordinaire des Amériques, 215 (2013).

120 AN, F/12/8336.