Slave Emancipation and the Limits of Citizenship during the French Revolution

Laurent Dubois

How does a slave become a citizen? During the early 1790s, slave insurgents in the French Caribbean appropriated an emerging Republican language of rights, expanded the meaning of citizenship, and brought about the 1794 abolition of slavery. The administrations that oversaw the transformation from slavery to freedom, notably that of Victor Hugues in Guadeloupe from 1794 to 1798, drew on the gradualist abolitionist thinking of the eighteenth century to limit the rights of the ex-slaves. An examination of Hugues' regime elucidates the functioning of a "Republican racism," which forced the "new citizens" to serve the nation as plantation workers or as soldiers and argued that their history as slaves made full citizenship impossible.

[WP #97032]