What were pros and cons of French rule in Haiti?

Answer 1

French buccaneers established a settlement on the island of Tortuga in 1625. They survived by pirating Spanish ships and hunting wild cattle. Although the Spanish destroyed the buccaneers' settlements several times, on each occasion they returned. The first official settlement on Tortuga was established in 1659 under the commission of King Louis XIV.

In 1664, the newly established French West India Company took control over the colony, and France formally claimed control of the western portion of the island of Hispaniola. In 1670 they established the first permanent French settlement on the mainland of Hispaniola, Cap François (later Cap Français, now Cap-Haïtien). Under the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick, Spain officially ceded the western third of Hispaniola to France. France named its new colony Saint-Domingue. By that time, planters outnumbered buccaneers and, with the encouragement of Louis XIV, they had begun to grow tobacco, indigo, cotton and cacao on the fertile northern plain, thus prompting the importation of African slaves. Slave insurrections were frequent and some slaves escaped to the mountains where they were met with what would be one of the last generations of Taíno natives. A Taíno chief, Chief Anacaona fathered a line of children with an African woman. After the last Taíno died, the full-blooded Arawakan population on the island was extinct.

Up until the Seven Years' War, the plantations of Saint-Domingue gradually expanded, with sugar and, later, coffee becoming important export crops. After the war, which disrupted maritime commerce, the colony underwent rapid expansion. In 1767, it exported 72 million pounds of raw sugar and 51 million pounds of refined sugar, one million pounds of indigo, and two million pounds of cotton.[1] Saint-Domingue became known as the "Pearl of the Antilles" — one of the richest colonies in the 18th century French empire. By the 1780s, Saint-Domingue produced about 40 percent of all the sugar and 60 percent of all the coffee consumed in Europe. This single colony, roughly the size of Maryland or Belgium, produced more sugar and coffee than all of Britain's West Indian colonies combined.

During this period, an estimated 790,000 African slaves were brought to work on sugarcane and coffee plantations (accounting in 1783-1791 for a third of the entire Atlantic slave trade), though inability to maintain slave numbers without constant resupply from Africa meant that at its end the population numbered only about 500,000, ruled by some 32,000 Whites. Between 1764 and 1771, the average importation of slaves varied between 10,000-15,000, by 1786 about 28,000 and, from 1787 onward, the colony received more than 40,000 slaves a year.[2] At all times, a majority of slaves in the colony were African-born, as the brutal conditions of slavery prevented the population from experiencing growth through natural increase[1]. African culture thus remained strong among slaves to the end of French rule, in particular the folk-religion of Vodou, which commingled Catholic liturgy and ritual with the beliefs and practices of Guinea, Congo and Dahomey.[3] Slave traders scoured the Atlantic coast of Africa, and the slaves who arrived came from hundreds of different tribes, their languages often incommensurable. The majority were Guineans from the Gold Coast and the Slave Coast, followed by Bantus from the Congo and Angola. Least common and most prized were the Senegalese and Tuareg, while the Aradas of Dahomey were almost equally prized.

To regularize slavery, in 1681 Louis XVI enacted the code noir, which accorded certain human rights to slaves and responsibilities to the master, who was obliged to feed, clothe and provide for the general well-being of their slaves. The code noir also sanctioned corporal punishment, allowing masters to employ brutal methods to instill in their slaves the necessary docilitiy, while ignoring provisions intended to regulate the administation of punishments. A passage from Henri Christophe's personal secretary, who lived more than half his life as a slave, describes the crimes perpetrated against the slaves of Saint-Domingue by their French masters:

"Have they not hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars? Have they not forced them to eat ****? And, having flayed them with the lash, have they not cast them alive to be devoured by worms, or onto anthills, or lashed them to stakes in the swamp to be devoured by mosquitoes? Have they not thrown them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup? Have they not put men and women inside barrels studded with spikes and rolled them down mountainsides into the abyss? Have they not consigned these miserable blacks to man eating-dogs until the latter, sated by human flesh, left the mangled victims to be finished off with bayonet and poniard?"[4]

Thousands of slaves found freedom by fleeing into the mountains, forming communities of maroons and raiding isolated plantations. The most famous was Mackandal, a one-armed slave, originally from Guinea, who escaped in 1751. A Vodou Houngan (priest), he united many of the different maroon bands, and spent the next six years staging successful raids and evading capture by the French, reputedly killing over 6,000 people, while preaching a fanatic vision of the destruction of white civilization in St. Domingue. In 1758, after a failed plot to poison the drinking water of the plantation owners, he was captured and burned alive at the public square in Cap-Français.

Saint-Domingue also had the largest and wealthiest free population of color in the Caribbean, a group also known as the gens de couleur. The royal census of 1789 counted roughly 25,000 such persons. Typically they were the descendants of the enslaved women that French colonists took as mistresses. Though many free people of color were former slaves, most members of this class appear not to have been free Africans, but rather people of mixed European and African ancestry, or mulattoes. As their numbers grew, they became subject to discriminatory legislation. Statutes forbade gens de couleur from taking up certain professions, marrying whites, wearing European clothing, carrying swords or firearms in public, or attending social functions where whites were present. However, these regulations did not restrict their purchase of land, and many accumulated substantial holdings and became slave-owners. By 1789, they owned one-third of the plantation property and one-quarter of the slaves of Saint-Domingue.[5] Central to the rise of the gens de couleur planter class was the growing importance of coffee, which thrived on the marginal hillside plots to which they had been regulated. The largest concentration of gens de couleur was in the southern peninsula, the last region of the colony to be settled, owing to its distance from Atlantic shipping lanes and its formidable terrain, with the highest mountain range in the Caribbean. In the parish of Jérémie they formed the majority of the population.