From the start of the French and Haitian revolutions, Spanish officials had decried the instability of the present, indeed of history itself. In the early 1790s, Cuban planter Francisco Arango lamented, “I have awakened and seen that all my work was built in mid-air.…the peace and tranquility of my compatriots…hanging by a thread.” Colonial governors pondered the “novel character that distinguished the present epoch from all previous ones” and worried about governing under circumstances that “of necessity change the rules prescribed in other very different times.” These men and others like them well understood that it was in moments such as these that they were at their most vulnerable, their world most susceptible to being undone. Political observers, and later historians, have also appreciated that basic truth. From comparative work on the history and sociology of revolutions to studies of slave rebellions across the New World, scholars have long argued that divisions at the top are key in opening up the spaces that would-be revolutionaries occupy and then expand – if not forever – then for a time. The tumult of the French Revolution in metropolitan France certainly proved to be one of those turning points for colonial Saint-Domingue, and everyone at the time knew it.

In 1808, a parallel moment arrived for Spain and its American territories. That year Napoleon’s forces occupied Spain, and with the Spanish royal family captive in France, Napoleon installed his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne. In cities and towns across the Spanish peninsula, the population dramatically resisted the imposition. They refused to recognize the “intruder” king, and they proclaimed their loyalty to Fernando VII. Provincial juntas emerged to rule in the absence of a rightful king, and rebellion and war against France broke out not only in Madrid, but from the French border on the north to Andalucía in the south.