Chapter 10: The Atlantic Explosion

In 1793, in the French city of Paris, a neighborhood shoemaker named Jacques Roux rose in a sectional assembly — one of forty-eight such assemblies operating across the capital — and delivered a speech that no king, no legislature, and very few revolutionaries wanted to hear. "Liberty," he said, "is nothing but a vain phantom when one class of men can starve another with impunity."

Roux was an enragé, a radical priest who had administered last rites to Louis XVI on the scaffold. He spoke in the Gravilliers section, one of the poorest in Paris, where two-thirds of the deputies were tradesmen and shopkeepers — not the bourgeois elite who dominated the National Convention, but the sans-culottes: the people who wore long trousers instead of aristocratic knee breeches, who owned no property but claimed a republic.

These forty-eight sections were something new under the sun. Created by decree in 1790 to replace the old sixty districts, each contained a civil committee of elected members, a revolutionary committee, a National Guard battalion, and local judges. They sent delegates to the Paris Commune, which governed the city. When the Republic was proclaimed in September 1792, the sections declared themselves in permanent session — neighborhood democracy operating at maximum intensity.

More than two-thirds of the deputies serving in 1793 and 1794 were tradesmen and shopkeepers. They demanded direct democracy without intermediaries. They presented petitions. They organized insurrections. They debated policy. And they issued certificats de civisme — certificates of civic reliability without which no citizen could hold public employment. The same committees that debated freedom also compiled lists of suspects. The same assemblies that extended participation to all male adults — and in some cases to women — also issued arrest warrants.

Democracy and terror were not separate phases of the French Revolution. They were concurrent dimensions of the same experiment.

Between 1775 and 1804, three revolutions detonated across the Atlantic world, and the shockwave from each altered the trajectory of the others. The American, the French, the Haitian — interconnected by participants, ideas, debts, and consequences, each claiming the same Enlightenment vocabulary of rights, citizens, and constitutions, each discovering a different limit to how far those words could reach.

The conventional story starts with America and moves to France, with Haiti as an afterthought — the revolution the textbooks forgot. This chapter reverses the order of emphasis, because the Haitian Revolution, more than any other, tested whether Enlightenment principles meant what they said. If "all men are created equal" was a universal truth rather than a rhetorical gesture, then the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue had a better claim to revolution than anyone in Philadelphia or Paris. They knew it. They acted on it. And the Atlantic world spent two centuries trying to make them pay.

Start, though, with the American Revolution — but not with the founders.

On November 7, 1775, Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, offered freedom to any enslaved person who escaped a rebel owner and joined British forces. Within a month, three hundred Black men had enlisted in Dunmore's Royal Ethiopian Regiment. Their uniforms carried two words sewn across the chest: Liberty to Slaves.

The regiment grew to eight hundred before disease destroyed it — smallpox and typhoid fever killed more than battle ever did. But Dunmore's Proclamation, and the Philipsburg Proclamation that followed in 1779, opened a door that the Revolution's architects had deliberately bricked shut. Estimates suggest that between eighty thousand and a hundred thousand enslaved people fled to British lines during the war — the largest mass self-emancipation in American history before the Civil War.

The choices were agonizing. The British offered freedom now, concretely, to anyone who could reach their camps. The Patriot leaders — Washington, Jefferson, the men who wrote that all men were created equal — were themselves slaveholders who offered no equivalent. Some free people of color supported American independence, hoping it would lead to universal emancipation. Most who chose the British side did so on the most rational grounds available: the British were the ones actually offering liberty.

When the war ended, three thousand Black Loyalists were evacuated to Nova Scotia, their names recorded in the "Book of Negroes" — a document compiled to verify their claims to freedom before the British honored their promise and the Americans demanded their "property" back. The land they received in Nova Scotia was poor. The discrimination they faced was severe. But they were free — which was more than the Revolution's rhetoric had delivered.

For Indigenous nations, the calculus was different and the outcome uniformly catastrophic. The Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy initially called the conflict a "family affair" and tried to remain neutral. The pressures of war shattered the centuries-old Confederacy: Cayuga, Mohawk, Onondaga, and Seneca sided with the British; Oneida and Tuscarora largely supported the Americans. In 1779, Washington authorized General John Sullivan's punitive expedition — Congress's directive was "the total destruction and devastation of their settlements." Sullivan's troops destroyed forty Iroquois villages and a hundred sixty thousand bushels of corn. The Six Nations' population decreased by approximately half. For the Americans, Washington was the father of the country. For most Iroquois, he was Conotocarious — the Town Destroyer.

The Treaty of Paris in 1783 ceded Indigenous lands to the United States without any Indigenous participation. Britain gave away territory it did not own and had no authority to transfer. Both sides — the side that won and the side that lost — disposed of nations that had inhabited the continent for millennia as though they were furniture.

Then there were the poor whites who had fought the Revolution and came home to find they could not pay their debts. Daniel Shays, a former Continental Army captain, led farmers in western Massachusetts in an armed uprising in 1786. A farmer known as Plough Jogger testified: "I have been greatly abused, have been obliged to do more than my part in the war... The great men are going to get all we have and I think it is time for us to rise and put a stop to it." Thousands of independent farmers feared becoming tenant farmers on their own land — the very condition of feudal dependence they had fought the Revolution to escape.

Shays' Rebellion convinced the men who would write the Constitution that a stronger central government was needed to keep popular passions in check. The Revolution's coherence gap was present at the founding: a republic built on "all men are created equal" that maintained chattel slavery, dispossessed Indigenous nations, and imprisoned its own veterans for debt.

Across the Atlantic, France was running the same experiment at higher volume and faster speed.

The sections of Paris — those forty-eight neighborhood assemblies — were the most ambitious democratic experiment in European history. But the infrastructure that enabled participation also enabled surveillance. The comités de surveillance, established by decree in March 1793, were charged initially with censusing foreigners and issuing certificates of civic reliability. The Law of Suspects in September 1793 expanded their powers to drawing up lists of suspects and issuing arrest warrants. By Year II, they were one of three organs of local power in every commune, alongside the municipality and the popular society.

Members of these committees were remarkably diligent — some traveling more than a dozen kilometers round trip from rural hamlets to attend sessions. They discovered and studied laws. They handled complaints and denunciations. They functioned, in the words of one historian, as a "school of civisme and apprenticeship in politics." They also served as the capillary network through which the Terror reached into every household.

When the government limited sectional assemblies to two five-hour meetings per week in September 1793, the sans-culottes responded by forming sectional popular societies that met on the nights the sections were dark — grassroots resistance to centralization, organized within the revolution's own institutional framework. The tension between Jacobin centralization and sans-culotte direct democracy was the French Revolution's internal civil war, and the centralizers won. The sections were definitively suppressed after Thermidor.

The Revolutionary Tribunal, reorganized in March 1793 under the public prosecutor Antoine Fouquier-Tinville, processed political crimes with industrial efficiency. After the Law of 22 Prairial in June 1794 eliminated defense counsel, limited trials to three days, and restricted verdicts to acquittal or death, the rate of executions accelerated sharply. The Paris tribunal sent over twenty-seven hundred people to the guillotine.

The sections represent what happens when a feedback loop operates at maximum intensity with no mechanism for processing the signal it detects. The system was responsive — it detected incoherence constantly — but every piece of feedback became a potential accusation. The lesson is not that feedback is dangerous. It is that feedback without deliberation produces instability that eventually consumes the system that created it.

While Paris debated and executed, Saint-Domingue burned.

The Haitian Revolution — which lasted from 1791 to 1804 and produced the first free Black republic in history — was the event that the other Atlantic revolutions wanted to forget. It applied Enlightenment principles more consistently than France or America ever did, and it was punished more severely than either could imagine.

Toussaint Louverture, the military genius who consolidated rebel forces and defeated both Spanish and British interventions, attempted to square a circle that no one has solved since. His 1801 Constitution permanently abolished slavery — "There cannot exist slaves on this territory, servitude is therein forever abolished. All men are born, live and die free and French" — while simultaneously mandating forced agricultural labor. Article 3 declared all men free. Article 14 declared the colony "essentially agricultural" and forbade any interruption in cultivation. Article 15 described each plantation as a "manufactory" and each cultivator as "a member of the family and a shareholder in its revenues."

The contradiction was not hypocrisy. It was the structural impossibility of building a free society from a plantation economy while surrounded by hostile slave powers. Every post-revolutionary Haitian leader — Toussaint, Dessalines, Christophe — confronted the same question: how do you maintain an economy built on coerced labor after abolishing coerced labor? Every one, to varying degrees, reimposed compulsion.

When Toussaint's nephew General Moyse, who championed the interests of lower-class Black farmers who had fought the revolution for land rather than the right to remain plantation workers, led a rebellion in October 1801, Toussaint had him executed. The feedback loop between the revolutionary government and its most radical constituency was severed by the revolution's own leader.

Napoleon's response to Toussaint's constitution was not negotiation but invasion. General Leclerc arrived with twenty thousand to forty thousand troops and orders to reimpose French control — and, covertly, to restore slavery. Toussaint was captured by treachery in June 1802 and shipped to the Fort de Joux in the French Jura, where he died on April 7, 1803. But the revolution survived him. Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared independence on January 1, 1804.

After Dessalines' assassination in 1806, Haiti split into two states that represented fundamentally different answers to the plantation problem.

In the north, Henri Christophe crowned himself King Henri I, created an elaborate nobility of princes, dukes, counts, and barons, and built the Citadelle Laferrière — the largest fortress in the Western Hemisphere, constructed at the cost of up to twenty thousand lives through corvée labor. His kingdom maintained large state-controlled plantations with organized coerced labor, producing higher economic output than the south. He established schools, enrolled over ten thousand students by 1819, and promulgated the Code Henry — a comprehensive legal code that impressed the Black American abolitionist Prince Saunders enough to publish English translations. He was unpopular, autocratic, and dead by his own hand during a revolt by his own officers in 1820.

In the south and west, Alexandre Pétion distributed state-owned land to individuals in small parcels, lowering prices so that almost anyone could afford to own land. He earned the nickname Papa Bon-Coeur — good-hearted father. The land redistribution reduced export commodity production and state revenue, but it gave formerly enslaved people what they had actually fought for: their own ground. When Simón Bolívar arrived in 1815 seeking support for South American independence, Pétion gave him rifles, munitions, supplies, a printing press, and hundreds of Haitian soldiers — on one condition: that Bolívar abolish slavery in the republic he sought to found.

Christophe's kingdom was productive and authoritarian. Pétion's republic was equitable and economically fragile. Neither resolved the fundamental tension. But Pétion came closest to passing the test we keep applying: did the revolution change the value system, or just the personnel? Distributing land to the people rather than concentrating it in the state or the officer class was a genuine change in the architecture of power — even if the hostile international environment ensured it would be punished.

The punishment was precise.

On July 3, 1825, fourteen French warships equipped with 528 cannons arrived at Port-au-Prince. Baron de Mackau presented France's terms under King Charles X's royal ordinance: Haiti must pay 150 million gold francs in five annual installments, plus a fifty percent discount on French import duties. In exchange, France would grant diplomatic recognition — would acknowledge, twenty-one years after the fact, that the first free Black republic existed.

President Boyer signed on July 11. Haiti could not pay the first installment from its own resources and was forced to borrow from French banks. The first payment — twenty-four million gold francs — was transported across Paris from the vaults of one French institution to the coffers of another. The banks profited from both sides of the transaction.

The indemnity was reduced in 1838 to sixty million francs. The final direct payment to France was made in 1883. But because of additional loans taken to service the debt — including from American Citibank — the final payment to creditors was not made until 1947. Haiti was still paying for its independence during World War II.

A 2022 New York Times investigation tracked every payment. Total: approximately $560 million in today's dollars. Had that money been retained and invested domestically, economists estimate it could have added more than $21 billion to Haiti's economy. A 2025 UN report confirmed that Haiti effectively paid for its freedom twice — once through revolution and once through financial extraction.

The indemnity was counter-revolution by finance. France could not re-enslave Haiti militarily — Napoleon had tried and failed catastrophically. So it accomplished a form of economic re-enslavement, forcing the first free Black republic to pay its former enslavers for the privilege of its own freedom. When armies fail, banks succeed.

Revolution traveled through people, not just ideas.

Saint-Domingue refugees physically carried revolutionary consciousness to Virginia, Louisiana, Cuba, and Charleston. Gabriel, an enslaved blacksmith near Richmond, organized a conspiracy in 1800 aware that the French Revolution had helped trigger the great slave revolt in Haiti. His motto was "Death or Liberty." The German Coast Uprising of 1811 — the largest slave revolt in US history, involving two hundred to five hundred enslaved people marching on New Orleans — erupted in a Louisiana saturated with Saint-Domingue refugees. In Cuba in 1812, José Antonio Aponte kept a book of drawings containing portraits of Toussaint Louverture, Dessalines, and Christophe — images used to inspire conspirators. In Charleston in 1822, Denmark Vesey modeled his planned uprising on Haiti and intended, if successful, to sail there before retaliation came. The "French Negroes" — enslaved people brought to Charleston by refugees fleeing the Haitian Revolution — spread eyewitness accounts that, in the words of white authorities, "spread rapidly."

The pattern of influence is documented across at least five specific revolts and three continents. This is not speculative inference. It is evidenced through trial records, refugee population data, and diplomatic correspondence. The Atlantic revolutions were connected through the physical movement of migrants, refugees, and sailors. Information technology, in 1800, was human beings.

The Haitian Revolution's influence operated through both hope and fear. It emboldened the enslaved while terrifying slaveholders, who responded with increasingly harsh repressive measures. The revolution reshaped governance on both sides of the slave system — proving, for those who needed proof, that the principles proclaimed in Philadelphia and Paris were either universal or meaningless, and that the distinction was not academic but existential.

The three Atlantic revolutions, taken together, established the modern grammar of revolution: rights, constitution, citizen, nation. They also established the modern tragedy: the distance between revolutionary ideals and post-revolutionary reality.

America proclaimed equality and built a slave republic. France proclaimed universal rights and produced the Terror. Haiti applied Enlightenment principles more consistently than either and was economically strangled for it.

The coherence gap was present in all three — but only Haiti's was imposed from the outside. America's contradiction between freedom and slavery was internal, structural, and would require a civil war to partially address. France's contradiction between democracy and terror was procedural — a feedback system operating without the deliberative infrastructure to process what it detected. Haiti's contradiction between freedom and forced labor was imposed by the impossible economics of building a free society from plantation ruins while the entire Atlantic world conspired to make it fail.

Each revolution deposited a lesson. America showed that you can design governance from first principles — and that the principles you choose to exclude will haunt the design for centuries. France showed that revolutionary participation without revolutionary organization produces a system that devours itself. Haiti showed that the most radical application of universal principles will be punished by the international order those principles threaten — and that punishment can last longer than the revolution itself.

The Atlantic exploded between 1775 and 1804. The fragments are still landing.