Colonial Factions and Pamphlet Warfare: Writing Histories of Saint-Domingue and France during the Thermidorian Reaction, 1794-1795

Abstract

Two Paris‐based factions offered the reading public competing histories of the French and Haitian Revolutions as they vied to settle old scores and secure influence over future imperial policy in Thermidorian France. One, a colonial faction, sought to restore as much as possible of Saint‐Domingue's pre–slave rebellion structure and identity; the other was more mixed but consisted of individuals who were reconciled to working with the emancipated Black majority in the colony to secure the French republic's strategic and economic interests. The two groups disseminated printed pamphlets offering starkly different visions of the upheaval in France's prized Caribbean colony, as well as opposing interpretations of how revolutionary events in Saint‐Domingue and the metropole had been enmeshed since 1789. What both factions shared was a belief in the political significance of controlling this narrative and an emphasis on the shared nature of Saint‐Domingue and France's recent history: a dual revolution spanning the Atlantic.