“What is a Revolution?” asked a Revolutionary Catechism published in year two of the French Republican calendar (1793–1794). Came the answer: “It is a violent passage from a state of slavery to a state of liberty.” The Jacobin ideology encapsulated in this formulation was no less heartfelt or effective for its metaphorical character. The use of the word slavery to evoke the oppressions of a despotic form of government was common to classical republicans of both the American and French revolutions. Yet the late eighteenth century also witnessed a more literal example of the catechistic definition of a revolution.

On a strict construction of the catechism, the Haitian Revolution of 1789–1804 was the quintessential revolution of the “Age of Revolutions.” Even today, it stands as the only instance of a victorious war of slave liberation on a national scale. In 1804, the leaders of the formerly enslaved population of Saint-Domingue announced the independence of Haiti, ending more than a century of French colonial rule in the Caribbean territory and creating the first independent black state. The Haitian Revolution forever transformed New World slavery and the Atlantic world more generally, providing the single most important inspiration for slave resistance and abolitionism in the modern era. Moreover, by driving Napoleon to abandon his dream of restoring the French Caribbean empire and to sell Louisiana to the United States in 1803, the Haitian Revolution initiated a long-term shift in the geopolitical orientation of the French empire. It also greatly facilitated the westward expansion and rise of the cotton-plantation economy of the United States, with consequences that can be most clearly seen in the events of the American Civil War. Indeed, the distinctive imprint of Haitian revolutionary ideology can be seen as far down as the litigation that produced the Supreme Court’s 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. The notion of “public rights” that Homer Plessy embraced in that case to challenge (unsuccessfully) Louisiana’s railway-car segregation law was the outgrowth of an Atlantic tradition of anticaste activism engendered by free people of color who emigrated from Saint-Domingue to Louisiana during and after the Haitian Revolution.