Léger-Félicité Sonthonax
Léger-Félicité Sonthonax | |
---|---|
Commissioner of Saint-Domingue (North) | |
In office 18 September 1792 – 24 August 1797 | |
Governor of Saint-Domingue | |
In office 2 January 1793 – 7 May 1793 | |
Preceded by | Vicomte de Rochambeau |
Succeeded by | François-Thomas Galbaud du Fort |
In office 11 May 1796 – 24 August 1797 | |
Preceded by | Étienne Maynaud de Bizefranc de Laveaux |
Succeeded by | Toussaint Louverture |
Deputy in the Council of Five Hundred | |
In office 14 October 1795 – 19 May 1799[1] | |
Constituency | Saint-Domingue |
Personal details | |
Born | Abolitionist | March 7, 1763
Léger-Félicité Sonthonax (7 March 1763 – 23 July 1813) was a French
Early life
Born in
Mission
In August 1791, a
In 1792, Sonthonax,
Their main goal was to maintain French control of Saint-Domingue and enforce the social equality recently granted to free gens de couleur by the French National Convention as part of the decree of 4 April 1792. The legislation re-established French control of Saint-Domingue, granted full citizenship and political equality to free male blacks and free male mulattoes, but did not emancipate the slaves. Instead, he was tasked to defeat slave rebellions and induce the slaves to return to the plantations. Sonthonax had initially decried the abolition of slavery to gain the support of the whites on the island. Upon his arrival, he found that some whites and free people of color were already cooperating against the slave rebels. He did exile many radical whites who would not accept free coloreds as equals and managed to contain the slave insurgency outside of the North.
Sonthonax and Polverel were sent to Saint-Domingue, as they proclaimed when they arrived, not to abolish slavery but to give to the free men, regardless of the color of their skin, equality of rights, granted to them by the decree of April 4, 1792. But ultimately, all slaves in the north province were granted freedom on August 29, 1793, by Sonthonax, and in the west and south provinces, from August 27 to 31 October, 1793, by Polverel.
Emancipation and conflict
In February 1793, France declared war on Great Britain, which presented a new problem for Sonthonax. All those he had alienated in trying to uphold the French Revolution in Saint-Domingue proceeded to try and flee to the British West Indies (primarily Jamaica), where the colonial authorities gave shelter to the French counter-revolutionary émigrés. The white population in the colony declined significantly until only 6,000 remained after June 1793.
On 20 June 1793 a failed attempt to take control of the capital by a new military governor sympathetic to whites,
It was during this time, and due to the new trend of conceding rights to blacks, that Toussaint Louverture began reforming his political philosophy to embrace France rather than Spain; however, he was cautious and awaited French ratification of emancipation before officially changing sides. On February 4, 1794, the French National Convention ratified this act, applying it to all French colonies, including
The enslaved population of Saint-Domingue did not flock to Sonthonax's side as he had anticipated, while white planters continued to resist him. They were joined by many of the free men of color who opposed the abolition of slavery in the colony, many of them being planters themselves. It was not until word of the ratification of emancipation by the French government arrived back in the colony that Toussaint Louverture and his corps of well-disciplined, battle-hardened former slaves came over to the French Republican side in early May 1794.
A change in the political winds back home caused Sonthonax to be recalled to France to defend his actions. Upon his arrival in the summer of 1794, he argued that the free people of colour, whom he had been originally sent to defend, were no longer loyal to France, and that the Republic should place its faith in the freed slaves. Vindicated, Sonthonax returned to Saint-Domingue a second time. The
Return to France
Toussaint, in the meantime, was consolidating his own position. The black general arranged for Sonthonax to leave Saint-Domingue as one of its elected representatives in 1797. When Sonthonax showed himself to be hesitant, Toussaint placed him under armed escort onto a ship bound for France on August 24. He died in his home town of Oyonnax on July 23, 1813, after sixteen years back in France.
Bibliography
- 1793 – Proclamation nous, Étienne Polverel & Léger Félicité Sonthonax, commissaires civils, que nation française voyé dans pays-ci, pour mettre l'ordre et la tranquillité tout par-tout
- 1793 – Proclamation. Au nom de la République. : Nous Léger-Félicité Sonthonax, commissaire civil de la République, délégué aux Iles françaises de l'Amérique sous le vent, pour y rétablir l'ordre & la tranquillité publique
- 1793 – Copies des lettres écrites au Ministre de la Marine, par le citoyen Santhonax, commissaire civil délégué à St Domingue, en date du Cap-Français, le 11 février 1793, l'an I de la République
- 1793 – Sonthonax, commissaire-civil de la République française à Saint-Domingue a la société des amis de la liberté & de l'égalité ...
- 1798 – Motion d'ordre faite par Sonthonax, sur la résolution du 27 thermidor dernier, relative aux domaines engagés
- 1799 – Sonthonax, représentant du peuple, à ses collègues du Corps législatif
Notes
- ^ "Léger, Félicité Sonthonax". Assemblée nationale (in French). Retrieved 13 June 2021.
- ISBN 0-8386-3218-1.
- ^ https://independent.academia.edu/HOELWA Hoel, La Révolution française, Saint-Domingue et l’esclavage
- ISBN 0-8160-3811-2.
- ^ a b "G.H.C. Bulletin 20 : Octobre 1990 Page 204". www.ghcaraibe.org. Retrieved 2017-02-26.
- ^ a b Poublan.
- ^ Popkin 2010, p. 156.
- ^ a b Klooster 2018, p. 109.
- ^ Dubois 2009, p. 144.
- ^ Hoel, La Révolution française, Saint-Domingue et l’esclavage
- ^ "Proclamation. In the Name of the Republic. We, Etienne Polverel and Léger-Félicité Sonthonax, Civil Officers of the Republic, Whom the French Nation Sent to this Country to Establish Law and Order". 1793-05-05. Retrieved 2017-02-21.
- ^ Abidor, Mitch (2004). "Sonthonax Broadside (1793)" (PDF). marxists.org.
- ^ https://independent.academia.edu/HOELWA Hoel, La Révolution française, Saint-Domingue et l’esclavage
- ^ https://independent.academia.edu/HOELWA Hoel, La Révolution française, Saint-Domingue et l’esclavage
- ^ "The Haitian Revolution, Part III". Archived from the original on 2007-07-03.
Sources
- Dubois, Laurent (2009), Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution, Harvard University Press, ISBN 978-0-674-03436-5, retrieved 31 October 2019
- Klooster, Wim (2018), Revolutions in the Atlantic World, New Edition: A Comparative History, NYU Press, ISBN 978-1-4798-8240-3, retrieved 2 November 2019
- Popkin, Jeremy D. (2010), Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian Insurrection, University of Chicago Press, ISBN 978-0-226-67585-5, retrieved 2 November 2019
- Poublan, Danièle, Esparbès, Jean Jacques d' (1720–1810) (in French), Centre de recherches historiques EHESS, retrieved 2019-11-02
External links
- The Louverture Project: Léger Félicité Sonthonax
- Sonthonax, Léger-Félicité. Motion d'ordre prononcée au Conseil des cinq-cents par Sonthonax, député de St. Domingue, sur le sort des colons restés fidèles à la République dans la séance du 12 Germinal, An VI, [s.l. ; s.n.], 1798. [1]
- Réveillère, Paul-Emile-Marie. Polvérel et Santhonax, Paris, Librairie militaire de L. Baudoin, 1891. [2]
- Castonnet des Fossés, Henri. La perte d'une colonie : la révolution de Saint-Domingue, Paris, A. Faivre, 1893. [3]
- Clausson L. J. et Millet, Thomas. Impostures de Sonthonax et Polverel dévoilées à la Convention nationale, [s.l. ; s.n.], 1794. [4]
Further reading
- Koekkoek, René (2020). "The Citizenship Experiment Contesting the Limits of Civic Equality and Participation in the Age of Revolutions" (PDF). Studies in the History of Political Thought. 15. Archived from the original (PDF) on 18 July 2021.