Like metropolitan France, the Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue experienced a media revolution during the first four years of the French Revolution.Footnote 1 In 1789, there was only one newspaper on the island, the officially licensed Affiches américaines, with two editions, one in the colony's capital, Port-au-Prince, and the other in its commercial center, Cap Français. By the time of the destruction of Cap Français, the colony's major city in June 1793, more than a dozen different newspapers had been founded in the colony, making it the second site in the New World, after Britain's North American colonies, to experience the phenomenon of a revolutionary press. Not only were there more newspapers, but their content and language were radically different from those of the Affiches. Like the newspapers created in France in 1789, those in Saint-Domingue denounced the vestiges of royal power and called on the colony's white citizens to demand the right to govern themselves. By helping to break down traditional authority, the press played an essential if unintentional role in making the revolts against white rule by Saint-Domingue's free people of color and its slave population possible.
Like their counterparts in metropolitan France, the journalists in revolutionary Saint-Domingue posed as champions of freedom, especially freedom of expression. In the statement of principles he published in the second issue of his Courrier politique et littéraire du Cap-Français in March 1790, Louis François Roger Armand Gatereau wrote that it might be necessary to veil the truth in other countries, “but among a free people, among a people that has recognized that it needs to give itself laws, among the French people, truth shows itself without fear, because it is sure to be received with enthusiasm.” It was from “the cabinets of its philosophers” that truth had emerged, and it had “prepare[d] today's revolution, by penetrating all hearts. And so I will always speak it with courage, regardless of what may happen to me.”Footnote 2 In January 1791, a Port-au-Prince paper, the Gazette de Saint-Domingue, began its prospectus by asserting that “free peoples have lots of journals and gazettes.”Footnote 3 In November 1791, Henry Dubois de Saint-Maurice, editor of the Moniteur général de la partie française de Saint-Domingue, proclaimed that “freedom of the press is, for a regenerated people, the most effective protection of the rights it has reclaimed.” Saint-Domingue, “this superb portion of the empire . . . should also have its share of this means so favorable to the propagation and the communication of enlightenment by which a new people has such a constant need to be surrounded.”Footnote 4
The paradox of the revolutionary press in Saint-Domingue is that the journalists who exalted the principle of freedom for themselves also recognized that they operated in a society whose continuing existence depended on the denial of freedom to the vast majority of its population. In the same declaration of principles in which he identified himself with the philosophes and the French Revolution, Gatereau acknowledged the specificity of colonial society. In France, he wrote, “One has the right to write anything that is not forbidden by the law. Here freedom of the press has limits, but I know the sacred ark, and I will not profane it.”Footnote 5 Using equally euphemistic language, Dubois de Saint-Maurice wrote, “Local conditions, circumstances, [and] events should also dictate measures against the abuse that the born enemies of general tranquility . . . may make of a thing that is good in itself.”Footnote 6 The concerns that underlay these exercises in euphemism were made explicit by the editor of the Gazette de Saint-Domingue, who promised that “any citizen with a known address will be . . . free to have us publish his opinion on any subject, on any event that may occur, with the exception of those concerning the two secondary classes of the colonial population, with respect to which the authors of the Gazette de Saint-Domingue will impose on themselves the most absolute silence.”Footnote 7 In other words, newspapers in the colony, in which black slaves outnumbered whites by a ratio of 12 to 1, and in which the “intermediate class” of free people of color was almost equal in numbers to the whites, committed themselves not to discuss slavery or racial discrimination.
The revolutionary journalists in Saint-Domingue were not simply bowing to political realities in acknowledging the limits on press freedom in a slave society. They knew full well that they were running enterprises that helped maintain slavery. Among the practical information he promised to include in his paper, Dubois de Saint-Maurice listed “the price of merchandise, the Negroes in the jail, lost animals, the arrival and departure of ships and persons, death notices, in other words, anything that is of interest for the colony.”Footnote 8 Notices regarding “Negroes in the jail,” a standard feature of colonial newspapers throughout the Americas, were intended to help owners reclaim runaway slaves who had been caught. Théodore-Charles Mozard, the publisher of the Gazette de Saint-Domingue, used his own paper to try to recover his slave Hector: “He knows how to read and write, having stayed in France for a long time,” Mozard noted.Footnote 9 None of the newspapers published in Saint-Domingue from 1789 to 1793 challenged the institution of slavery on which the colony was based, and few of them even raised questions about limits to the rights of the island's free population of color, a major issue in France and its colonies in the early years of the Revolution. Including the newspapers of Saint-Domingue in our broader picture of the press during the French Revolution demonstrates the truth of what media historian Tony Ballantyne has recognized as a paradox: “Print in non-European and colonized societies poses a profound challenge for work that sees printing as essentially European, or that uses Europe as the normative case for understanding the impact of print.”Footnote 10 The case of revolutionary Saint-Domingue shows that freedom of the press did not always mean an expansion of freedom for all members of society.
The “media revolution” in Saint-Domingue after 1789 built on foundations laid during the last decades of the Old Regime. In contrast to the Spanish and the British colonizers, who introduced printing presses to their American colonies early on, the French, along with the Dutch and the Portuguese, were reluctant to bring the printer's art to the New World.Footnote 11 Printers were allowed to establish themselves only in Saint-Domingue, Martinique, and Guadeloupe in 1764, as part of the reforms following the Seven Years' War. One of the first productions of the printing operation set up in Saint-Domingue in that year was the Affiches américaines, modeled after the Affiches that were springing up in the same period in many other French provincial cities.Footnote 12 Closely supervised by colonial officials, Affiches américaines was in no sense a challenge to authority. Its role was to publicize official edicts and commercial news, and to provide an outlet for the literary talents of members of the white population.
The Affiches américaines differed from similar periodicals published in Europe because of the role it played in the maintenance of slavery. In 1789, even as the paper was informing readers about the movement for liberty in France, notices about slave sales and runaways routinely filled two or more of each issue's pages. These notices would continue to be featured in Saint-Domingue newspapers until the very day that the French civil commissioners Léger-Félicité Sonthonax and Etienne Polverel issued the island's first emancipation edict on June 20, 1793. Even the Ami de l'egalité, an outspokenly radical newspaper published in Port-au-Prince to support the French revolutionary government's policy to eliminate the distinctions between whites and free people of color, carried advertisements for the sale of slaves.Footnote 13 Modern historians, notably the Haitian scholar Jean Fouchard, have mined these notices for demographic information about the slave population, but at the time, they were one of the technologies by which a small white minority was able to keep a much larger black population under its control.Footnote 14
The two editions of the Affiches américaines remained the only periodicals published in Saint-Domingue up to the end of 1789, but several rival printers had established themselves in the colony before the French Revolution broke out. Although the trade had been allowed to develop only after 1764, the printers who settled in Cap Français and Port-au-Prince were technically proficient. In a collection of revolutionary-era pamphlets published in Saint-Domingue (now in the John Carter Brown Library), an antiquarian bookseller noted that the work done by the island's printers was “far above the standards of British colonies of the period.”Footnote 15 Prior to the Revolution, Saint-Domingue's printers had limited themselves to work for the government and job printing for local merchants, but they quickly adapted themselves to the new climate created by the news from France and the breakdown of royal authority on the island, adding newspapers to their offerings.
A Colonial Revolutionary Press
Between 1789 and mid 1793, when most of the white population, including the island's printers, fled, effectively ending Saint-Domingue's “media revolution,” the colony was inundated with political literature, including not only locally printed newspapers but also dozens of political pamphlets and a flood of proclamations from rival political authorities. Among those authorities were the beleaguered officials of the French government, the two civil commissions dispatched by the metropolitan revolutionary assemblies in 1791 and 1792, and the various local assemblies created by rebellious white colonists. Compared to the situation in metropolitan France, the arena of public debate created by these publications was peculiar in a number of respects. In the first place, it deliberately excluded the vast majority of the colony's population: none of this literature was addressed to the 500,000 slaves, all but a few of whom were not only illiterate but also unable to understand the sophisticated French in which colonial political debate was carried on. The island's 28,000 free people of color, who in 1789 were almost equal in number to the 30,000 whites and often had some education, had greater access to these publications. They had less opportunity to see their words published, however; only a few isolated items by authors from this group made it into the newspapers.Footnote 16 Even the question of whether they constituted a legitimate audience for revolutionary political literature was disputed. In July 1792, the metropolitan government imposed the law of April 4, 1792, granting equality to free people of color on the colonies. The Moniteur général de la partie française de Saint-Domingue had to deny accusations that it had refused to accept subscriptions from them, an indication of how controversial the issue was.Footnote 17
The political publications of the revolutionary period not only limited themselves to addressing a minority of the colonial population, but they were also strictly constrained as to the news they could cover. The press was extremely restrained in its references to the greatest local news stories of the period, such as Ogé’s October 1790 rebellion, an attempt to claim rights for free men of color. Greater still was the constraint on publishing reports of the massive slave uprising in Saint-Domingue's North Province that began on the night of August 22–23, 1791. Whereas newspapers in the United States and France gave detailed accounts of these events, those published in Saint-Domingue itself imposed a virtual blackout on them; it would be impossible to reconstruct the story of the Haitian Revolution from these sources. The journalists and the local authorities were anxious not to undermine the white population's morale and to avoid spreading reports that might encourage insurgent movements. They also worried that bad publicity would deter merchants from sending vitally needed supplies to the colony and from purchasing the sugar and coffee that plantations in unaffected parts of the island continued to produce. Explaining to its readers why it had decided not to recapitulate the events of the past 12 months in its New Year's Day issue for 1793, the Moniteur général expressed the wish “that the first pages . . ., instead of afflicting your hearts with so many painful memories, will raise hopes for success and the end of so much suffering.”Footnote 18
Largely silent about the uprisings in the colony, the Saint-Domingue newspapers also provided only erratic information about events in metropolitan France. At the outset of the French Revolution, local authorities had banned the circulation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, with its inflammatory assertion that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” In fact, however, news about the revolution reached Saint-Domingue without much restriction. In May 1789, the Affiches américaines published the text of the “instructions” sent by the duc d'Orléans to his representatives who participated in the drafting of cahiers de doléances for the Estates-General. The instructions included a draft of a 16-article declaration of rights whose first article read, “Individual liberty will be guaranteed to all the French,” and in November 1789, the paper actually published a partial version of the official Declaration of Rights, albeit omitting those articles that “do not seem suitable for a country organized the way Saint-Domingue is.” But the editors praised those that promised to “guarantee forever all those who live under the government of the French empire from the tyrannical abuses of arbitrary power.”Footnote 19
The main obstacle to comprehensive reporting about French events in the Saint-Domingue press was not censorship but rather the irregular rhythm of communications with the metropole. Although ships arrived frequently in the colony, they did not come on a predictable schedule. Ships brought a random assortment of private letters, newspapers, and other publications, all of them several months out of date by the time they arrived. Newspaper editors in Saint-Domingue were, of course, among those most interested in events in France, but they suffered from a pattern of feast and famine: they might go several weeks or months without any fresh dispatches from the other side of the Atlantic and then be swamped by the arrival of a thick packet of copies of the Paris Moniteur universel and other papers, from which they had to select what seemed to them the most important news.
What the newspapers published in Saint-Domingue were able to offer their readers was news of the political struggles among the white population of the colony, and of the explosive controversy about the granting of rights to the free population of color.Footnote 20 The revolution that began in France offered white colonists the opportunity to protest against the arbitrary authority of an administration headed by a royal governor and an intendant appointed by Versailles. It also encouraged colonists to fight against the exclusif, the mercantilist regulation that required them to buy and sell only through French metropolitan merchants. When the royal government proposed modest measures to limit the worst abuses of slavery in 1784 and 1785, colonists escalated their resistance against subordination to metropolitan authority. Furthermore, the French government's edict opening some of Saint-Domingue's ports to direct trade with the United States in 1784 whetted their appetite for more economic freedom. In 1787, efforts by Versailles to stifle colonial protests by abolishing Cap Français's Conseil supérieur, the colonial equivalent of a provincial parlement, set off a Caribbean version of the “pre-revolution” that was unfolding in the metropole.Footnote 21 Until 1789, however, colonial agitators were compelled to organize clandestinely, without the benefit of press publicity.
News of the storming of the Bastille in Paris, published as two dramatic letters in a special edition of the Affiches américaines on September 18, 1789, set off a colonial version of the “municipal revolution” that had swept the French provinces in the summer of 1789. By the end of October 1789, white colonists had forced royal intendant François Barbé-Marbois to flee to France, an event the paper announced without commentary on October 28, 1789. White colonists set up their own municipal and provincial assemblies and issued calls for the election of a colonial assembly. These bodies clashed almost immediately, not only with the royal administration but with each another. In such circumstances, access to a press that would publicize political claims became a necessity.
Running a Colonial Newspaper
Over the next three years, more than a dozen newspapers appeared in Saint-Domingue.Footnote 22 From early 1790 to June 1793, both Port-au-Prince and Cap Français usually had at least one newspaper and often two or three rival publications. Newspapers also appeared for the first time in two smaller cities, Cayes, the administrative center of the colony's isolated South Province, and Saint-Marc on the west coast.Footnote 23 Whereas the pre-revolutionary Affiches had appeared only twice a week, several of the Revolution-era publications were dailies. The print shops from which the papers in the two major cities emanated grew into large-scale publishing operations. In Port-au-Prince, as his daughter later recalled, the printer Mozard “joined to the editing of the paper and the printing of government documents a substantial bookstore and stationery shop.”Footnote 24 In February 1791, when an internal dispute divided the editors of Mozard's Gazette de Saint-Domingue, its printers and compositors put out a notice explaining the situation: it was signed by 13 individuals, a sizeable work force. At the time of its destruction in June 1793, the Batilliot shop in Cap Français, which put out the Moniteur général de la partie française de Saint-Domingue and sometimes other papers as well, had four presses and employed 12 workers.Footnote 25 When the printer of the Moniteur colonial in Cap Français died in August 1791, his print shop and the property of the paper were offered for sale for 6,000 livres.Footnote 26
In their format, the newspapers printed in Saint-Domingue resembled publications from the same period in metropolitan France. The larger and more substantial papers, such as the Moniteur général, printed four-page editions, with two columns on each page. Smaller papers and polemical publications like the Ami de l'égalité and the Lettres de Junius adopted an octavo format like that used for pamphlets. The organization of news in the Saint-Domingue papers was less predictable than that of most French papers, whose readers could usually count on finding foreign news, the proceedings of the revolutionary assemblies, and editorial comment in the same places in every issue. Editors in Saint-Domingue, dependent on the irregular arrival of news from France and frequently faced with unexpected developments in the colony and imperatives to publish official proclamations, shuffled items around depending on circumstances. Well into 1790, the Affiches américaines continued its traditional practice of publishing advertising on its front page and burying news items inside, but the new papers founded during the Revolution put their news first, with advertisements on the last pages of each edition.
Subscriptions to Saint-Domingue newspapers were expensive, reflecting the fact that printing equipment, paper and other materials had to be imported from France. The Courrier politique et littéraire du Cap-Français, which put out only one 16-page issue per week, charged readers in the city 66 livres for a year's subscription, and those living elsewhere in the colony paid 82 and a half livres. The bi-weekly Gazette des Cayes also charged 66 livres per year in late 1792. A year's subscription to the daily Moniteur général, launched in November 1791, was 99 livres a year in Le Cap and 124 livres by mail, twice the cost of a daily Paris paper.Footnote 27 Surviving sources give no hint of the size of the press runs of any of these papers. The break-even point for a newspaper in provincial France during the Revolution may have been as low as 200 copies, and conditions in Saint-Domingue were probably similar.Footnote 28 The papers that lasted for more than a few issues usually published both advertisements and official government announcements, for which they were paid, so subscription sales were not their only source of income. Although the Saint-Domingue newspapers were published primarily in the colony's two main cities, Cap Français and Port-au-Prince, they had subscribers all over the island, as references to problems with the postal service indicate, but they seem to have had little audience outside the colony. French newspapers did not cite them as sources; the colonial news published in the metropole generally came from either private letters or official correspondence.Footnote 29
Like their colleagues in revolutionary France, the journalists in Saint-Domingue were a varied lot. Mozard, the rebellious son of a well-connected minor official at the court of Louis XV, was one of many ambitious young men who arrived during the colony's boom years before the Revolution in the hope of making his fortune. Initially hired to edit the Affiches américaines, he eventually acquired ownership of its print shop. Closely connected with the colonial government and its intellectual elite—he was a member of the Cercle des Philadelphes, Saint-Domingue's learned academy—Mozard also owned land and slaves and was a fully integrated member of colonial society.Footnote 30 Louis Gatereau was also born in France, and claimed to have come to Saint-Domingue by way of the smaller Caribbean island of Dominica.Footnote 31 The abbé Félix Ouvière, who briefly edited the Gazette de Saint-Domingue in 1791, had arrived from France only a few months earlier.Footnote 32 Dubois de Saint-Maurice, editor of the Moniteur général in Cap Français, was born in Lyon but referred to himself as “helvétique,” and once told his readers that he had lived for six years in Turkey, where he had seen “white slaves with black masters.” He claimed to be convinced that “the man who looks at everything with a little philosophy, pays no attention to skin color, which is nothing but a caprice of nature.”Footnote 33 These comments suggest that Dubois de Saint-Maurice had less of a personal commitment to the defense of colonial prejudices than some of his colleagues. Jean-Baptiste Picquenard was even less rooted in the colony, arriving in Saint-Domingue in 1789. He eagerly attached himself to the radical French civil commissioners Sonthonax and Polverel when they set out to implement the metropolitan government's policy of granting equality to free people of color in late 1792.Footnote 34 Claude-Corentin Tanguy-Laboissière, on the other hand, was a landowner and local official from the South Province and a violent opponent of the civil commissioners.
A journalist's career in revolutionary Saint-Domingue was not for the faint of heart. Newspaper editors came under attack from both political militants of opposing camps and government officials, and they suffered along with the rest of the population in the explosions of violence that devastated the colony's two major cities. In July 1790, Gatereau, the editor of the Courrier politique, protested against harassment from Cap Français's municipal officials, who supported the movement for autonomy for the colony that he opposed. He was eventually expelled from the colony on orders of the Assembly of the North Province.Footnote 35 When the Ami de l'egalité angered the dominant white faction in Port-au-Prince at the end of 1792 by supporting the rights of free people of color, its printer was thrown in jail and its editor had to flee the city.Footnote 36 Tanguy-Laboissière and Picquenard, two journalists of completely different political coloration, both found themselves deported from the colony by French officials in 1793. Mozard lost his print shop and his paper in the fire that swept the center of Port-au-Prince as a result of fighting between whites and free men of color on November 19, 1791. Dubois de Saint Maurice's Moniteur général disappeared abruptly after the destruction of Cap Français on June 20, 1793.
The Press and Colonial Politics
Despite the difficult conditions under which they had to work and the many limitations on what they could safely print, the journalists of Saint-Domingue did have a significant impact on the colony's politics in the years from 1789 to 1793. From the beginning of the Revolution, the newspapers in Saint-Domingue were intimately involved in the tumultuous conflicts between the newly created local political institutions in the colony and the colonial officials who struggled to maintain a semblance of metropolitan authority over France's most valuable overseas possession. Like the revolutionaries in Britain's North American colonies 15 years earlier, Saint-Domingue's whites took the opportunity presented by the French Revolution not only to claim an increased measure of home rule but also to fight each other for the right to rule at home. Editors were under heavy pressure to support the faction that dominated in the city where they operated, but the frequent shifts in local balances of power often required papers to make sudden changes of course.
In 1790, the main conflict among whites involved the question of how far to push their demands for self-government. The first colonial assembly, known as the Assembly of Saint-Marc because it met in the port city on the west coast in the spring of 1790, was dominated by hotheads who wanted virtual independence from the metropole. It was opposed by the wealthy planters and merchants of Saint-Domingue's North Province, whose institutional stronghold was the provincial assembly of Cap Français. They, in turn, were at loggerheads with that city's municipal council. These tensions were reflected in the opposing opinions expressed in the Affiches américaines in Port-au-Prince and Gatereau's Courrier politique in Cap Français. In May 1790, the Affiches américaines endorsed the controversial colonial constitution passed by the Assembly of Saint-Marc, commenting that it would “destroy the calumnious and contemptible rumors that the ill-intentioned have spread, in attributing to it plans for the unlimited freedom of commerce, for independence, and for rupture with France.”Footnote 37 Gatereau's paper reflected the hostility of the North Province assembly to its rival. The paper warned that the actions of the Assembly of Saint-Marc to abolish the exclusif and open the island to free trade would ruin both the colonial and the metropolitan economy and insisted that the population would never accept the assembly's apparent intention to turn itself into “a sovereign power . . . without our consent.” As a showdown loomed between the deputies in Saint-Marc and the royal governor Louis-Antoine Thomassin de Peinier, the paper announced that it would suspend coverage of the assembly's debates “until it retreats within the limits of its duties.” This aggressive policy dragged the paper into a confrontation with the Cap Français municipality, which took the side of the colonial assembly. Gatereau announced that he would defy the municipality, despite its “claims to have the right to condemn a work and punish its author.”Footnote 38
Governor Peinier's dispersal of the Assembly of Saint-Marc, some 85 of whose deputies fled to France on board the mutinous warship Léopard at the end of July 1790, was a setback for the supporters of colonial independence. Peinier's successor, Philibert-François Rouxel de Blanchelande, who arrived in Saint-Domingue in October 1790, was initially able to exert greater authority. At the beginning of 1791, for example, the Gazette de Saint-Domingue in Port-au-Prince published a steady string of articles condemning the now defunct colonial assembly and praising Colonel Thomas-Antoine Mauduit, the determined commander of the royal troops in the island who had carried out the military operation against its supporters. The paper's tone changed abruptly with the issue of March 5, 1791, however. On the previous day, newly arrived soldiers and sailors from France, won over by local agitators, had mutinied and massacred Mauduit under the eyes of Governor Blanchelande, who abruptly fled the city. The newspaper, which had published a poem lauding Mauduit barely two weeks earlier and had faithfully reproduced Blanchelande's various proclamations, now referred to March 4, 1791, as “this beautiful day” and made itself into a spokesman for the municipality of Port-au-Prince, whose proclamation to the rest of the colony proposed that “we draw a curtain over this unfortunate accident, so that we can tell you about the happy consequences that have followed from it.”Footnote 39
The difficulties of keeping a newspaper alive in the midst of the political conflicts that beset revolutionary Saint-Domingue are abundantly illustrated by the career of the colony's most substantial publication, the Moniteur général de la partie française de Saint-Domingue, which appeared in Cap Français from November 1791 to June 1793. The Moniteur began daily publication three months after the outbreak of the great slave insurrection in the North Province, and its first issue featured a lengthy poem denouncing the cruelty of the insurgents, but this was the longest mention it ever made of the mortal conflict threatening the colony. Instead, its pages were filled with proclamations from Governor Blanchelande and, above all, with coverage of the debates in the second colonial assembly, which had convened just prior to the outbreak of the rebellion. In addition, the paper frequently referred to the First Civil Commission, whose members arrived in the island in November 1791 with a mission to reconcile the conflicting parties among the whites and found themselves forced to confront the unexpected slave insurrection in the north and the nearly simultaneous outbreak of fighting between whites and free men of color in parts of the West and South provinces. In the fall of 1792, the paper had to adjust itself to the presence of the Second Civil Commission, dispatched with much greater powers than its predecessor and charged to enforce a metropolitan policy of granting full civil and political equality to the colony's free people of color. Then, in the spring of 1793, it had to deal with the arrival of a new and energetic governor who quickly came into conflict with the commissioners. The paper's survival depended on its ability to change its tone whenever the balance of power in Cap Français shifted.
For most of its first year of existence, the Moniteur treated the colonial assembly as the colony's dominant political institution, making its debates the core of its content. It was following the lead of the assembly's main rival, the royally appointed governor Blanchelande, who tried to avoid any confrontation with the colonists after he had to abandon Port-au-Prince in the wake of the murder of Mauduit in March 1791. Privately, Blanchelande nursed grievances against the newspapers for supporting his enemies; in the self-justificatory memoir he wrote in June 1791, he complained about “the scribblers [who] inspired the suspicions of individuals against the government . . . by the most absurd calumnies,” and in September 1792, he urged his successors, the members of the Second Civil Commission, to ban the press entirely.Footnote 40
The three members of the First Civil Commission probably would have liked to use the Moniteur to publicize their decisions, but the paper was reluctant to support their challenge to the colonial assembly's rigid positions on maintaining racial hierarchy within the free population and refusing any concessions to the slaves. Instead, the commissioners had to engage local printers to put out their proclamations in the form of pamphlets. The assembly did debate whether the commissioners should be given any assistance in circulating their numerous proclamations, but it is not clear that they were able to get them distributed very widely.Footnote 41
The fact that the Moniteur général gave the colonial assembly such extensive coverage reinforced the notion that it had more legitimacy than the governor or the Civil Commission, but it did not mean that relations between the newspaper and the deputies were cordial. For the first few months of its existence, the Moniteur général waited a week before printing its summaries of the assembly debates, which meant that the public could not immediately react to them. On January 14, 1792, however, the paper announced that it would henceforth give an account of the debates as they occurred. The assembly's majority took exception to this decision and tried to restrict the newspaper to summarizing what was said without identifying the speakers who said it. The paper responded by printing excerpts from a speech by one assembly member, M. de Pons, making the case that full publicity was essential to representative government. “Is there anything . . . less forthright, less honest, than to speak in public for the small, very small number of citizens in the assembly's gallery, and to hide oneself from all those who are prevented from watching the sessions by the lack of room, the defense of the country, or a distant place or residence?” De Pons demanded.Footnote 42 Tensions in the city, besieged by the black insurgents since August 1791, drove the editor to promise that he would not publish anything that “could increase and perpetuate the disorder that afflicts the colony and of which our art is perhaps one of the causes,” and added that “we don't want to see the ruinous destruction inflicted on many other printers happen to our presses.”Footnote 43
At critical moments, discretion drove the Moniteur général to silence about some of the assembly's major actions. On May 23, 1792, when some deputies accused Blanchelande of counterrevolutionary intentions, the editor cautiously told readers that there had been a very interesting discussion, but that he would not summarize it, since its content “could offend the different schools of thought, from which there would follow the trouble that we have so much interest in avoiding.” In fact, passions in Cap Français rose to such a pitch that a mob broke into the governor's house during the night and forced him to come to the assembly and offer his resignation, an offer he withdrew the following day. The newspaper reported these tumultuous events with a delay of several days, and in such a roundabout manner that readers would have been hard put to follow them.Footnote 44
The nature of the paper's coverage of Saint-Domingue politics began to change in the summer of 1792. By this time, two of the three members of the First Civil Commission had returned to France, but the remaining member, Philippe-Rose Roume, had made a radical shift in policy. He allied himself with the leader of the free people of color in Saint-Domingue's West Province, Pierre Pinchinat, and supported the Council of Peace and Union in Saint-Marc, a mixed-race body created by Pinchinat as a rival to the all-white colonial assembly.Footnote 45 Roume managed to put new heart into Governor Blanchelande, who joined him in a military campaign against the diehard white radicals of Port-au-Prince. On July 17, 1792, the Moniteur général printed the proclamation the two men had issued there on July 3, 1792, announcing their victory and their determination to enforce the French legislative assembly's law of April 4, 1792, granting full equality to the free population of color. By this time, the colony knew that the law of April 4, 1792, had also provided for the dispatch of a Second Civil Commission, accompanied by a large body of troops. The colonial assembly's days were clearly numbered.
By the time the Second Civil Commission, headed by Sonthonax and Polverel, landed in Cap Français in mid-September 1792, the Moniteur général was prepared to abandon its uneasy partnership with the colonial assembly and give pride of place in its columns to the new power-holders. The paper became one of the main vehicles through which the commissioners publicized their policies. For two chaotic months, their actions had to share space with reports on the public sessions of a club, the Société des amis de la Convention nationale, which brought together white colonists who proclaimed themselves republicans and radicalized soldiers from the French army to oppose their common enemies: the remaining officials of the Old Regime and the veteran officers of the old colonial garrison, who were accused of royalist sympathies.
The Moniteur général’s rival, the Journal politique, served as a mouthpiece for Colonel Joseph Cambefort, the commander of the permanent garrison.Footnote 46 However, the Moniteur aligned itself with Cambefort's enemies and rejoiced when the supposed royalists were forced to agree to return to France on October 19, 1792, and the Journal politique abandoned publication.Footnote 47 Just six weeks later, however, on December 2, 1792, the shaky coalition between the commission and the white “patriots” fell apart, as Sonthonax, left alone in Cap Français after Polverel departed for the West Province, allied himself with the free men of color and ordered the deportation of a number of white activists. The Moniteur adapted to this new situation by faithfully reproducing Sonthonax's proclamations and publicizing the activities of the mixed-race commission intermédiaire he appointed to replace the colonial assembly as the colony's legislature.
Whenever Sonthonax was absent from the city, however, as he was repeatedly in the early months of 1793, the Moniteur opened its columns to his critics. In February 1793, the paper began to publish letters from Claude-Corentin Tanguy-Laboissière, a radical white plantation-owner who had earlier edited the Gazette des Cayes in the South Province and later been appointed one of that province's representatives on the commission intermédiaire. Tanguy-Laboissière pressed for the election of a new colonial assembly to replace Sonthonax's appointed commission. After Sonthonax left to join Polverel in the West and launch an offensive against the fractious whites in Saint-Marc and Port-au-Prince, the paper began publishing documents from the city's municipal council denouncing the commission intermédiaire, a clear sign of white restiveness. On April 1, 1793, the paper printed a bombshell taken from one of the Paris newspapers, in the form of a letter that Sonthonax had written to the National Convention in France on December 6, 1792, at the height of his confrontation with the white opponents of the law of April 4, 1792. In the letter, he denounced the entire white population of the city as “enemies of the law.” A notice in the paper on April 2, 1793, announced that the paper's editor had been arrested and forced to make amends for the publication by putting out a second edition of the previous day's paper without the inflammatory letter.
After being forced back into line with the policies of Sonthonax at the beginning of April, the paper suddenly veered in another direction when a new military governor, François-Thomas Galbaud, arrived unexpectedly in Cap Français in early May. Sonthonax was still away, leaving Galbaud free to set his own course. Although Galbaud had impeccable Jacobin credentials and was not an overt counterrevolutionary, he owned a plantation in the colony, which made pro-slavery colonists hope that he would be more sympathetic to them than the civil commissioners had been.Footnote 48 “The citizen governor inspires the utmost confidence among the unhappy plantation-owners of the North Province,” the Moniteur reported on May 11, 1793. Meanwhile, the civil commissioners were taking steps that had just the opposite effect on white opinion. On May 26, the Moniteur devoted three-and-a-half of its four pages to a commission decree they had issued three weeks earlier restating Louis XIV's Code Noir of 1685, the basic law governing the treatment of slaves in the colony. Slaveowners were already upset at this public reminder of the limits that the law set on their power over their slaves, but what truly stunned readers of the newspaper was that the decree was published in Creole, so that it could be read aloud to the blacks in a language they could understand. Aside from a few lines of humorous verse by whites, this was the first time any of Saint-Domingue's newspapers had ever published a document in Creole.Footnote 49
Although the commissioners' decree completed their breach with the colony's white slaveholders, the paper continued to praise Galbaud's efforts to restore the soldiers' morale and to obtain vital supplies for the civilian population in the besieged city of Le Cap. Then, on June 11, 1793, the Moniteur reported the return of Sonthonax and Polverel from their campaign in the West and South provinces. The two immediately confronted Galbaud, who surprised everyone by meekly agreeing to surrender his position and return to France. With dizzying speed, the newspaper changed its line once again, publishing the commissioners' denunciations of the same actions of Galbaud that it had endorsed a week earlier and announcing that a banquet hosted by Sonthonax and Polverel had produced a “mixture of colors and of the different classes of citizens and citizenesses [forming] a happy unity over which presided harmony and equality.”Footnote 50 This upbeat story appeared on the morning of June 20, 1793.
Later that same day, Galbaud and the sailors of the French warships in Cap Français harbor stormed ashore to assault the commissioners and their supporters, beginning four days of fighting that ended with the destruction of the city and the end of the Moniteur général.Footnote 51 In the manuscript account of these events appended to the two known complete copies of the newspaper, Dubois de Saint-Maurice demonstrated one more time his ability to change his political stance depending on circumstances. The events of the first day and a half of the crisis are described from the point of view of someone accompanying Galbaud. At that point, however, Dubois de Saint-Maurice apparently decided that the attack on Sonthonax and Polverel was doomed. The rest of the story is reported from inside the commissioners' camp.Footnote 52
Racial Hierarchy and the Press
As they maneuvered between the rival white political groups in the colony, journalists in revolutionary Saint-Domingue also had to take extreme care in their treatment of the question of racial equality among free people. This topic was much more controversial than the issue of slavery, about which there was a clear consensus until the night of June 20, 1793, when Sonthonax and Polverel, desperate for allies to help them fight off Galbaud and the sailors, offered freedom to any blacks who would join their cause. No whites in Saint-Domingue, and certainly none of its journalists, had even hinted at the possibility of emancipation. The newspapers were unanimous in their condemnation of metropolitan “philanthropists” who lamented the cruelty of slavery and hoped to at least limit its abuses. The first issue of the Moniteur général led off with an “Ode to Philanthropy,” cataloguing the horrors unleashed in the colony by the slave uprising that had begun three months earlier. A March 1792 issue printed a poem denouncing the metropolitan reformer Henri Grégoire and his “fraternal escort,” including Jacques-Pierre Brissot, founder of the Société des Amis des Noirs.Footnote 53 The Ami de l'egalité, the commissioners' semi-official organ in Port-au-Prince in the last weeks before the crisis of June 20, 1793, insisted that the French revolutionary government would never decree immediate abolition, since it “knew that the first use that a slave makes of his freedom is to immolate the man who kept him in chains . . . and that freedom in the hands of THESE would be as dangerous as a dagger in the hands of a child.”Footnote 54
The issue of slavery united the journalists and their audience, but the question of rights for the free population of color was deeply divisive. Theoretically promised equality with whites in the Code Noir of 1685, they had been subjected to a steadily growing number of legal restrictions, starting at the end of the Seven Years' War. At the same time, many of them were gaining increased wealth and education.Footnote 55 After 1789, free colored leaders had seized on the French Revolution's promise of equality to demand the end of the discrimination imposed on them in the French colonies. From the perspective of the metropole, the idea of granting equality to the free people of color appeared both morally just and eminently sensible. Since many of them, including their most prominent Parisian spokesman Julien Raymond, a wealthy plantation owner from the South Province, themselves owned slaves, the result of equality would be a united front of free people—white and colored— to defend against any unrest among the servile population. In France, the campaign for rights for the free men of color was vociferously supported by a renegade white plantation owner named Claude Milscent, whose Créole patriote, founded in 1792, became one of the major pro-revolutionary papers.Footnote 56 Most white colonists, however, clung to the notion that the defense of slavery required the maintenance of an absolute barrier between anyone of African descent and the whites. Any modifications to the legislation governing free people of color, the white colonists argued, would have to be made by their own elected representatives, not by the metropolitan government.
At the start of the Revolution, newspapers could be fairly outspoken in opposing concessions to free men of color. When several whites wearing uniforms killed a “free negro” in Le Cap in May 1790, Gatereau's Courrier politique tried to strike a balanced position: “The free people of color should stay within the limits that social institutions have, everywhere and at all times, prescribed for freedmen, but no one should consider himself authorized to dispose of their lives as one disposes of that of an insect or a piece of game.”Footnote 57 When the Baron de Beauvois, a member of the First Colonial Assembly, published an incendiary pamphlet comparing blacks to orangutans and calling for drastic measures against free people of color, the paper disavowed his views, but the editor again exhorted the free people of color to remember their place. “Enjoy among yourselves the pleasures that nothing can deprive you of, those of a father, a spouse, and friendship; keep your distance from crazy hopes of overturning, through imaginary forces, the political edifice that reason and experience have erected.”Footnote 58 Gatereau was not alone in insisting that the free people of color needed to know their place. In May 1791, the Gazette de Saint-Domingue printed a reader's letter complaining that the paper had printed an advertisement in which the qualification “sieur,” legally reserved for whites, had been applied to three “mulattoes.” “You frequently make such errors, which have a shocking effect on the eyes and ears of those who read your paper,” the reader complained. The editor apologized and promised not to repeat the offense.Footnote 59
The abortive insurrection launched in October 1790 by Vincent Ogé, a wealthy free man of color freshly returned from revolutionary France, found no support in the Saint-Domingue press. The only mentions of it were in denunciations by the authorities and a humiliating “speech of Castaing, free mulatto” calling on members of his group to “deplore together the error that led a number of us to declare ourselves against our fathers and brothers and against public peace.”Footnote 60 When free men of color in the colony's West Province started an armed insurrection in August 1791, however, the white authorities and the press had to tread more carefully. The whites could not afford a total break with the free population of color at a time when the slave uprising was devastating the North Province. On September 21, 1791, the Gazette de Saint-Domingue published the text of the “concordat” or treaty imposed on the whites in the West by the victorious free men of color. Readers all over the colony could read the promise that “there shall not be any differences between [free people of color] and white citizens, other than those due to merit and virtue.” The paper even printed a letter from the free-colored leader Pinchinat protesting errors he had found in the printed version of the concordat—a rare instance of the free population of color being given a voice in the press.Footnote 61
Although the concordats were endorsed by some of the wealthy white plantation-owners in the West Province, they were violently resisted by the majority of the white population and by the second colonial assembly. Because they regularly summarized the denunciations of free people of color delivered in the assembly, newspapers like the Journal politique and the Moniteur général served to transmit a highly one-sided view of this issue throughout the early months of 1792. The arrival of news of the French legislative assembly's decree of April 4, 1792, which reached Cap Français at the end of May, forced both the colonial assembly and the newspapers to change their tune. Full equality between the two groups of free men was now the law, and the colonial assembly, knowing that a new civil commission accompanied by a large military force was on its way from France, did not dare defy it openly. In private, whites like Jean Girard, the brother of the well-known Philadelphia merchant Stephen Girard, continued to refer to the free men of color as “the infamous caste of incendiaries and assassins,” but such language could no longer be published. Footnote 62 On July 21, 1792, the Moniteur général regaled its readers with a report on an interracial banquet held the previous day, under the headline, “Prejudices Vanquished.” Two days later, the paper insisted that it had always been eager to have free people of color as subscribers.
From this point onward, the Moniteur général was consistent in supporting the policy of integration, whether out of conviction or under pressure from the commissioners Sonthonax and Polverel. In April 1793, Dubois de Saint-Maurice engaged in an interesting exercise in linguistic casuistry in response to a reader who had criticized his use of the phrase “citizens formerly called whites.” “I have already announced . . . that I was free of all prejudices, and that, without stopping to notice the tints that nature has given to men, I would only judge them on their virtues. . . . In consequence, I blamed the expression that has often been used, ‘the citizens formerly called ”of color,“’ because one cannot deny what is obvious,” he wrote. “It was thus to stop the use of this false manner of expression that I also said, ‘the citizens formerly called whites;’ because in talking collectively about the free individuals who form the population of the republic, one should use no other term than that of citizens.”Footnote 63 We cannot know whether Dubois de Saint-Maurice sincerely accepted the new order, but he certainly understood that the survival of his newspaper depended on conforming to the policy imposed by the metropole and the civil commissioners Sonthonax and Polverel.
Whether the newspapers in Saint-Domingue could have contributed to a genuine change in colonial attitudes about race was never put to the test. The destruction of Cap Français in the fighting provoked by Galbaud's assault on June 20, 1793, put an end to the “media revolution” that had begun in the colony in 1789. The last newspaper published in Port-au-Prince, the Ami de l'egalité, had already ceased publication before the June crisis; the fire that consumed Le Cap destroyed Batilliot's print shop and those of his colleagues. The civil commissioners did manage to rescue a printing press from the flames, on which they oversaw the production of a few issues of Affiches américaines in July 1793 and an issue of the Ami de l'egalité in August. These seem to have been the last newspapers printed in French-controlled territory in Saint-Domingue until 1796.
In the fall of 1793, the British occupied the west coast of the island, and the Courier de S.-Marc put out some issues under their protection. Not until the arrival of the Third Civil Commission from France in 1796 was there a small-scale revival of the Saint-Domingue press, this time tightly controlled by the authorities. Meanwhile, white colonists who took refuge in the United States and France after the burning of Le Cap created an émigré press that kept alive the spirit of the Saint-Domingue newspapers of 1789 to 1793. In Philadelphia in 1793, Tanguy-Laboissière revived his Journal des révolutions de la partie française de Saint-Domingue. Gatereau created the Radoteur there in 1793 and, in 1796, the Courrier politique de la France et de ses colonies. In Paris in 1796–97, exiled colonists determined to undo the abolition of slavery enacted by the National Convention in 1794, issued the Journal historique et politique de la marine et des colonies.
Conclusion
The story of the press in Saint-Domingue demonstrates that the colony participated fully in the print culture of the Atlantic world's revolutionary era. Under the old regime, Saint-Domingue had already acquired the material basis for a “press revolution,” and the breakdown of government authority in 1789 allowed entrepreneurial printers and journalists to create newspapers that were as sophisticated as those in metropolitan France. The newspapers were a thorn in the side of the representatives of the metropolitan government and they had an ambivalent relationship with the two colonial assemblies and the other bodies created by the white colonists. Once the civil commissioners sent from France—Roume and then his successors Sonthonax and Polverel—embraced a policy of alliance with the movement of the free people of color, however, newspapers were forced to conform.
The collapse of white colonial society and the flight of most of the white population in the summer of 1793 may have opened the way for “the most concrete expression of the idea that the rights proclaimed in France's 1789 Declaration . . . were indeed universal,” as Laurent Dubois has argued, but it put an end to the colony's independent newspapers and the freedom of the press they had embodied.Footnote 64 The Saint-Domingue press had helped the island's white population resist metropolitan rule, and sometimes gave lip service to the idea of equality among the free population of the colony, but in fact continued to help sustain the system of slavery until its abrupt disintegration. In the new, black-dominated society that began to take shape after 1793, such newspapers could hardly be a symbol of freedom. Toussaint Louverture's colonial constitution of 1801 provided for a system of press censorship.Footnote 65 Jean-Jacques Dessalines's constitution of 1805 omitted any mention of press freedom. In Haiti, where the abolition of slavery and the struggle against racism in a white-dominated world would form the essence of freedom, liberty of the press would long remain a secondary concern.
