ABSTRACT
In the year 1791, a group of slaves and former slaves defied the limitations attributed to their condition and organized the most successful slave revolt of all time. The tumultuous tale of the Haitian Revolution underlines how the diverse social groups of the colony of Saint-Domingue seized the context of the French Revolution in order to voice their long-lived desperate claims: the white colonists’ demand for political autonomy, the longing for French citizenship by the free men of color, and the struggle of slaves for general liberty. Meanwhile, the French government strove to guarantee its sovereignty in the colony; the negotiations of power with the different social-racial groupings of Saint-Domingue and the persistence of the slave insurrections led to the pioneering abolition of slavery in 1794.
