5.5 The French Revolution's Effects

Saint-Domingue was France's richest colony, with about half a million enslaved people, plus white planters and free people of color. When news of the Revolution's Declaration of Rights arrived, free people of color demanded equal rights, and in August 1791 enslaved people in the northern plain rose in a massive revolt.

Toussaint Louverture, a formerly enslaved man who had gained his freedom before the revolution, became the main leader. French commissioners freed enslaved people in the colony in 1793, and the National Convention abolished slavery in all French colonies in 1794. Toussaint then fought for France, defeated British and Spanish invaders and became governor of the colony.

In 1802 Napoleon sent an army to restore French control, and he restored slavery in other French colonies. The French captured Toussaint, who died in a French prison in 1803. But yellow fever and fierce resistance destroyed the French army. Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared independence on January 1, 1804. Haiti was the first nation created by a successful revolt of enslaved people and the second independent state in the Americas.

Women took active part: they marched on Versailles in 1789, joined political clubs and petitioned. But the Declaration of the Rights of Man left women out of political rights. Olympe de Gouges answered with the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen (1791), arguing that women have the same natural rights as men. She was executed in 1793, the same year the Jacobins banned women's political clubs, including the Society of Republican Revolutionary Women.

In England, Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) argued that women needed equal education to become rational citizens. The Revolution did legalize divorce and gave daughters equal inheritance rights, though Napoleon later rolled back many gains.

Nationalism is the belief that people who share a language, culture and history form a nation that deserves loyalty and its own state. The levée en masse, the song La Marseillaise and revolutionary festivals taught French people to see themselves as citizens of one nation. Mass citizen armies were hugely powerful.

French armies set up sister republics in the Netherlands, Switzerland and Italy, abolished feudal dues and spread revolutionary laws. In occupied lands this brought both reforms and resentment of French domination, so it also stirred nationalism against France (see 5.6).

Edmund Burke, an Irish-born British politician, wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). He argued that society is a partnership across generations, that traditions and institutions hold accumulated wisdom, and that tearing them down in the name of abstract rights leads to chaos and tyranny. Writing before the Terror, he seemed to predict it. His work became a founding text of conservatism, the belief in preserving tradition and changing gradually. Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (1791) answered Burke in defense of the Revolution.

Governments across Europe feared revolution spreading. Britain suspended habeas corpus in 1794 and cracked down on radical societies, and monarchs joined coalitions against France.