By Sibylle Fourcaud

This article is part of our series entitled “Exiled: Identity and Identification,” which explores the semantic evolution of exile and the lived experiences of people seeking refuge across the Atlantic World during the long nineteenth century. It was presented originally at the conference “Who is a Refugee? Concepts of Exile, Refuge and Asylum, c.1750-1850”, which took place on 30 June – 1 July 2022 at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany.

This publication is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 849189).

In 1793, the burning of Cap-Français, the most important port city in Saint-Domingue, led to the flight of thousands of people across the Atlantic. The second major wave of refugees occurred after the failure of the French expeditionary force to reconquer Saint-Domingue, leading to the declaration of independence of Haiti on 1 January 1804. Upon their arrival on metropolitan shores, refugees were granted assistance, of which they were considered deserving by all political actors from 1793 to 1831. But did this long-term consensus build on a stable vision of the assisted population labelled as “refugees”?

The progressive simplification of the administrative labels used to designate Saint-Domingue colonists accompanied significant changes in the population considered worthy of assistance. These changes made this population correspond more and more with an archetypal view of Saint-Domingue colonists, which rendered a significant part of the Saint-Domingue refugees invisible through their expulsion from the entitlement to assistance. The administrative category “colons de Saint-Domingue réfugiés en France” was thus a political construction, depending on the imperial policies implemented by the metropolitan government, and partially influenced by the colonists’ petitions.

The motives for the flight of inhabitants of Saint-Domingue could be very diverse depending on their social and racial status, and their political opinions[1]. This led to a variety of particular situations when refugees arrived in the metropole, which the French administrators tried to classify under the categories “déportés” and “réfugiés” in the first law granting them assistance, passed on the 27Vendémiaire year III (18 October 1794)[2]. But while implementing the law, local administrations were confronted with several cases whose eligibility was considered inconclusive, including people who came to metropolitan France before 1793; others who arrived before 1791 but had their properties ruined, and enslaved people who accompanied their masters.[3] This listing reveals two interrelated difficulties faced by local administrators : the need to determine who could be referred to as a “refugee” and who would be eligible for assistance. These difficulties led to the formulation of what became the two main criteria necessary to receive assistance: indigence and property ownership.[4] Absentee owners were soon admitted to assistance, blurring the distinction with refugees. As a result, administrators and legislators tended to associate Saint-Domingue colonists more and more with an archetypal view of white planters left destitute by the revolution and thus considered as “shamefaced poor”[5], even though assistance was granted to all refugees and deportees and without any racial criterion.[6]

Property owners would be further taken into consideration during the Directory (1795-1799). On the one hand, the abolition of slavery, pronounced by the National Convention on the 16 Pluviôse year II (4 February 1794), was confirmed by the Directory as the Constitution of year III put an end to the colonial exception.[7] On the other hand, this political regime favored property owners in general. Legislative debates were influenced by a new colonial lobby composed of colonial administrators and former planters[8], the latter protesting against the sequestration of their plantations and associating “their entitlement to government assistance with their rights as property owners and their status as dispossessed colonial planters”[9]. The sequestration question and the abrogation of the colonial exception shed light on colonial émigrés. Which colonists were to be categorized as such? This question spawned a significant parliamentary debate during which the categories of “déportés” and “réfugiés” were precisely defined to separate them from the émigrés. In doing so, the legislators aimed at favoring non-émigré white property-owners[10]. Indeed, in the law of 28 Germinal year VII (17 April 1799) , property-owning, coupled with destitution, became the main criterion to be considered deserving of assistance.[11] What was at work with this law was a slow shift from indigence to property as the principal criterion to be entitled to relief.

The failure of the Leclerc expedition in 1803 provoked a new flight of the population that had returned to Saint-Domingue. Financial relief was reinstated, but prefects were then instructed to give assistance to white property owners only, whether they were refugees or had always lived in France, but who could prove that the revenues from their colonial properties were their only source of income. They should exclude from assistance all “people of color”, along with all non-property owners.[12] This definitive change of criteria to be entitled to assistance rendered many Saint-Domingue refugees invisible, as the case of Modeste Barbier reveals. This widow of a goldsmith tried to draw the attention of the administrators to the fate of non-property-owning refugees in 1809, but she received no answer to her letter[13]. As for the property owners “of color”, some managed to receive assistance, as the administrators admitted it in the 1820s, but those who succeeded in doing so were not categorized as “de couleur” in their assistance files[14]. Thus, these new restrictions completed the shift in the categorization of Saint-Domingue colonists started under the Directory. Still called “colons réfugiés de Saint-Domingue” at the end of the First Empire (1804-1815), the population then encompassed in this administrative category corresponded almost perfectly with the archetypal view of Saint-Domingue colonists as dispossessed white planters, seen by the Napoleonic regime as the real victims of the revolution of Saint-Domingue.[15]

The Restauration’s government did not change the criteria for eligibility to relief, thereby maintaining the legacy of the First Empire on that matter. For the government, Saint-Domingue colonists were entitled to receive assistance because their plantation products had enriched France throughout the eighteenth century. While governing the empire in an Old Regime manner and still believing they could reconquer Haiti, it is coherent that the Restauration’s government focused on a part of the refugee population who held a high social rank before the Revolution, and whose properties were perceived as the origin and fuel of the metropolitan commercial dynamism during the eighteenth century.[16] The archetypal view of Saint-Domingue colonists as wealthy white planters who were the victims of the revolution was thus consolidated. It was further reinforced by planters’ petitioning and publishing, especially in the context of the negotiation of an indemnity in exchange for the recognition of the Haitian independence – which was granted in 1825.[17] As for the assistance, the administrators decided to maintain it for the first generation of descendants of Saint-Domingue colonists, thus giving birth to the transferability practice. This explains how assistance lasted until 1911, when the last two beneficiaries died. [18]

Thus, after 1825, the administrative category “colons de Saint-Domingue réfugiés en France” no longer only included refugees or deportees, but also comprised absentee planters and collateral heirs who had never lived in Saint-Domingue; émigrés who came back to France sometimes as late as during the Restauration; and children of Saint-Domingue colonists, born well after the French Revolution, who had obtained transferability. As for non-owner refugees and the majority of “people of color,” they had been rendered invisible and forgotten. This administrative category was thus clearly a political construction that changed over time since the original events, and in relation to the evolution of geopolitical contexts and domestic political regimes. The archetypal view of Saint-Domingue colonists as dispossessed white planters progressively became the only image that came to mind when thinking of Saint-Domingue colonists, in the eyes of both metropolitan administrators and public opinion, as well as observers on the international stage.[19]

---

Sibylle Fourcaud is a PhD. student at Sciences Po Paris since September 2020. Her project aims to uncover the administrative and imperial logics at work in the assistance given to Saint-Domingue colonists who took refuge in the metropole, from 1793 to 1911.

Title Image: “Vue de l’incendie de la ville du Cap-Français. Arrivée le 21 juin 1793”. Gravure coloriée de Jean-Baptiste Chapuy d’après J. L. Boquet, 1795. Musée d’Aquitaine, Bordeaux.

Further Reading:

Agnès, Benoît. L’appel au pouvoir : les pétitions aux Parlements en France et au Royaume-Uni, 1814-1848. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2018.

Beauvois, Frédérique. Indemniser les planteurs pour abolir l’esclavage ? Entre économie, éthique et politique : une étude des débats parlementaires britanniques et français, 1788-1848, dans une perspective comparée. Paris: Dalloz, 2013.

Bénot, Yves. La démence coloniale sous Napoléon. Paris: La Découverte, 1992.

Brière, Jean-François. Haïti et la France : 1804-1848 : le rêve brisé. Paris: Karthala, 2008.

Dorigny, Marcel, Jean-Marie Théodat, Gusti-Klara Gaillard-Pourchet, and Jean-Claude Bruffaerts. Haïti-France, les chaînes de la dette: le rapport Mackau (1825). Paris: Hémisphères éditions, 2021.

Elie, Jérôme, Gil Loescher, Katy Long, Nando Sigona, et Jérôme Elie. “Histories of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies”; in The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, ed. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Gil Loescher, Katy Long, and Nando Sigona. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Gomez, Alejandro. Le spectre de la révolution noire : l’impact de la révolution haïtienne dans le monde atlantique, 1790-1886. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2013.

Endnotes:

[1] Delphine Diaz, “Comparer les mobilités contraintes”, Hypothèses 17, no.1 (2014): 151.

[2] Archives nationales (hereafter AN), F/12/2716

[3] Archives municipales (hereafter AM) de Nantes, I242, file 6.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Darrell Meadows, “The Planters of Saint-Domingue, 1750-1804: Migration and Exile in the French Revolutionary Atlantic” (PhD. diss., Carnegie Mellon University, 2004).

[6] Journal des débats et des décrets, 27 November 1796

[7] Miranda Frances Spieler, “The Legal Structure of Colonial Rule during the French Revolution”, The William and Mary Quarterly 66, no. 2 (2009): 365‑408.

[8] Jean-Luc Chappey, “Du peuple enfant au peuple malheureux. Questions sur les mutations des dominations sociales et politiques entre la république thermidorienne et l’Empire”, La Révolution française. Cahiers de l’Institut d’histoire de la Révolution française, no. 9 (2015); Meadows, “The Planters of Saint-Domingue”, 239; Jennifer Pierce, “Discourses of the dispossessed : Saint-Domingue colonists on race, revolution and empire, 1789-1825“ (PhD. diss., Florida State University, 2005), 281.

[9] Meadows, “The Planters of Saint-Domingue”, 256; Baptiste Biancardini, “L’opinion coloniale et la question de la relance de Saint-Domingue 1795-1802”, Annales historiques de la Révolution française, no. 4 (2015): 63‑80.

[10] Rapport fait par Lecointe-Puiraveau, séance du 4 Germinal an V, Imprimerie nationale.

[11] AN, F/12/2716

[12] Archives départementales (hereafter AD) de Gironde, 4M908

[13] AD Loire-Atlantique, 6M784

[14] ANOM, CC9C5 et COL/B/263

[15] Pierce, “Discourses of the dispossessed”, 128.

[16] David Todd, “A French Imperial Meridian, 1814–1870”, Past & Present 210, no. 1 (2011): 155‑86; Pierre Force, Wealth and disaster: Atlantic migrations from a Pyrenean town in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). AN, F/12/2716

[17] Mary Lewis, “Legacies of French Slave-Ownership, or the Long Decolonization of Saint-Domingue”, History Workshop Journal 83, no. 1 (2017): 151‑75.

[18] AN, F/12/2716 and F/12/8336; ANOM, CC9C5.

[19] Alejandro Enrique Gomez, “Images de l’apocalypse des planteurs”, L’Ordinaire des Amériques, no. 215 (2013).