A Wilderness So Immense (25 page)

The next day at Versailles, the due de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt informed Louis XVI of the fall of the Bastille.

“Is it a revolt?” the king asked.

“No, Sire,” Liancourt replied, “it is a revolution.”

At first, circumstances allowed Liancourt and responsible moderates like Lafayette and Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau, some hope of a peaceful resolution to the nation’s political crisis—replacing Bourbon absolutism with a constitutional monarchy on the English model admired by philosophes like Voltaire and Montesquieu. At every critical moment, however, the revolution seemed to grow more violent and more radical. The freshly severed head of the commandant of the Bastille, bobbing on a pike high above the crowd that carried it triumphantly through the streets of Paris, inaugurated a gory ritual of blood lust—butchery only sanitized by the ruthless efficiency of an ingenious mechanical device invented by Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin.
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Two days after the fall of the Bastille, Louis XVI donned a simple morning coat and left Versailles for Paris in a plain coach drawn by eight black horses. The marquis de Lafayette and the National Guard, awash with red, white, and blue cockades, greeted the king at the edge of the city and escorted him to the Hotel de Ville, where Louis XVI spoke a few inaudible words of conciliation, accepted a tricolor cockade from the mayor, and pinned it to his hat. Throngs shouted
“Vive le roi”
and
“Vive la nation”
at the auspicious ceremony, and many who were present honestly
hoped for constitutional reform and the rights of man and citizens. The revolution, however, marched to the cadence of a more violent crowd, hearkening to legislators who believed they must “destroy everything; yes, destroy everything; then everything is to be recreated.” The revolution spoke of constitutional reform, the rights of man and citizen, and ideals of equality and fraternity, but it followed the crowds who carried bloody heads on pikes, cheered each time the blade of the guillotine fell, and sang “Ca Ira”:

As the marquis de Ferrieres feared it would, the French Revolution offered “a banner of blood … to all parts of Europe.”
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Few events in modern history unleashed as many strong passions as the French Revolution. “Considering that we are divided from [France] but by a slender dyke of about twenty-four miles,” the British statesman Edmund Burke (an admirer of the American Revolution a decade earlier) gave thanks in his
Reflections on the Revolution in France
(November 1790) that his countrymen were “not the converts of Rousseau” and “not the disciples of Voltaire,” and especially that “atheists are not our preachers; madmen are not our lawgivers.” Safe on the far side of the Atlantic, Americans from Maine to Georgia were initially united in joy at the creation of a sister republic—happy for the citizens of France who had sent them Lafayette, the king’s legions, and a fleet to help win American independence.
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Then came shocking news of the execution of Louis XVI on January 21, 1793, and the mad efficiency of Dr. Guillotin’s invention in the hands of Maximilien de Robespierre and the Jacobin party. Forty thousand people were executed during their Reign of Terror, when Robespierre
headed the bloodthirsty Committee of Public Safety from April 1793 through July 1794. Whether the crime was treason, petty theft, or insufficient enthusiasm for Jacobin opinions, practice made perfect. In October 1793 Paris executioners beheaded twenty-two Girondin leaders (former allies of the Jacobin party) in thirty-six minutes. Two months later, executioners in Lyon lopped off thirty-two heads in twenty-five minutes. A week after that residents of rue Lafont complained that blood from the scaffold at Place des Terreaux, where the executioners dispatched twelve heads in five minutes, was flooding the drainage ditches near their homes.
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After 1793 the French Revolution became an equal-opportunity calamity, more divisive than any domestic issue in American politics. For twenty-five years—from the Bastille to Waterloo—its wild oscillations offered everyone something to fear: violence, repression, and cowardice, tyranny and anarchy, mobs and dictators, atheists and demagogues, imperialism, civil war, and world war. Like the reflection in a fun-house mirror, the French Revolution distorted the beauties and blemishes that Americans saw in one another, polarizing Federalists and Republicans, who voiced their opinions in blindingly passionate rhetoric. “Behold France,” warned a Massachusetts Federalist, “an open hell, still ringing with agonies and blasphemies, still smoking with sufferings and crimes, in which we see … perhaps our future state.” Look at England, came the Jeffersonian reply, the corrupt tyrant of the seas, driven into perpetual debt by its war machine, trampling the liberties of citizens and neighbors alike. At issue in the French Revolution, Jefferson proclaimed from the safety of his study, was nothing less than “the liberty of the whole earth … but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth devastated.”
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The French hailstorm of July 1788 may have dissipated in the foothills of the Pyrenees, but seen from Madrid those rugged mountains offered scant defense against the tempest of revolution. Carlos Ill’s trusted minister, José Moñino y Redondo, count of Floridablanca, who had devoted his career to enlightened administrative, economic, and cultural reform, recoiled in horror at the first news of revolution to the north. Reform programs were shelved and he slammed the door on revolutionary ideas with ironclad censorship. His measures established a cordon sanitaire at the Pyrenees that kept revolutionary tracts and pamphlets out of Spain, but no diplomatic tools could reverse the tide of revolution.
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Carlos IV next called in his father’s ambassador to France, Pedro
Pablo Abarca de Bolea, count of Aranda, who was known for his sympathy for French rationalism. A friend to Voltaire and d’Alembert, a grand master of the Spanish Freemasons, and a prime mover in the expulsion of the Jesuits, Aranda did all he could to mitigate the circumstances of Louis XVI—but the new republican government paid no heed to counsels of moderation from the Spanish Bourbons. Aranda’s young successor, the queen’s favorite and lover, Manuel Godoy, tried the machinery of negotiation one more time, greased by generous bribes to members of the French legislature, but again to no avail. In 1792 the Republic of France had declared war on Austria, and now a collision with Bourbon Spain had become inevitable.
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On February 1 and March 7, 1793, France declared war against Great Britain and Spain respectively. Spain responded with a counter-declaration of war against France on March 23. Within two weeks “their Britannic and Most Catholic Majesties,” traditional enemies since 1585, were negotiating a military alliance against France, signed on May 25. At first the war went well for Godoy. Spanish armies drove far into France, while Austria advanced from the north. Then the tide turned. By the spring of 1795 French armies had punished the Spanish in a series of resounding victories, captured Bilbao and Vitoria in the Basque country, and were marching into Castille. Godoy sued for peace.
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“We need peace,” Godoy whispered to his chief negotiator, “whatever the price.” Ignoring Spain’s treaty obligations to Great Britain, Godoy signed the Treaty of Basle in the nick of time on July 22, 1795. “The French armies,” said one Spanish observer, “would soon have paid a visit to Carlos at Madrid if his favorite minister, with more address than he ever discovered in his subsequent management of political affairs, had not concluded and ratified the peace of Basle.” Spain, for the moment, was safe. Graced by his thankful patrons with the title of Prince of the Peace, Godoy boasted that his “glorious treaty did not cost Spain a single tree of her soil.” Godoy gave some thought to bartering away Louisiana in exchange for peace, but he held back, and in the end Spain lost only its brief alliance with Great Britain and the Caribbean colony of Santo Domingo (the eastern part of Hispaniola, now the Dominican Republic) in exchange for the return of territory captured by France south of the Pyrenees.
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As a result of the Treaty of Basle, France in 1795 gained nominal possession of the entire island of Hispaniola. An island the size of Ireland, about
fifty miles east of Cuba, Hispaniola was divided by a nearly impassable range of mountains into the tropical plantation colony of St. Domingue (now Haiti) and the arid colony of Santo Domingo, where cattle ranchers and subsistence farmers predominated. Visited by Columbus in 1492, the native Arawak tribe of Hispaniola had been quickly exterminated by European diseases and exploitation, and equally quickly replaced with African slaves. “I do not know if coffee and sugar are essential to the happiness of Europe,” a Frenchman wrote in 1773,

French sugar planters regarded St. Domingue as the finest colony in the world. When the Bastille fell in Paris, trade with St. Domingue engaged seven hundred fifty French ships, employed twenty-four thousand sailors, and was valued at £11 million a year. France consumed one third of the island’s exports, and the rest were processed in France and shipped abroad by a workforce estimated at several million Frenchmen.
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As an economic entity, St. Domingue thrived by importing slaves from Africa and working them to death in order to supply Europe’s insatiable demand for sugar, coffee, and cocoa. St. Domingue imported thirty thousand African slaves a year, expendable replacement parts for the grim machinery of its sugar plantations. Each year, French merchants invested about 8.5 million livres to organize an average of three hundred African slaving expeditions. Nearly half of the French slaving fleet sailed from Nantes, “the City of Slavers.” Most of the rest sailed from Bordeaux, La Rochelle, or Le Havre—but British and American traders smuggled slaves into St. Domingue as well.
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So lucrative were the island’s exports that, in addition to clothing and manufactured goods, St. Domingue’s large plantation owners found it cost-effective to import such basic necessities as food, firewood, and barrel staves rather than divert land or labor from the production of sugar, coffee, and cocoa. As a society, St. Domingue presented a grim caricature of eighteenth-century America: half a million slaves (two thirds of them African-born), thirty thousand mulattoes (including some of the island’s wealthiest plantation owners and slaveholders), and thirty thousand whites, either very rich (the
grands blancs)
or very poor (the
petit blancs)
—all inclined to hate and fear one another.
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Liberty, equality, and fraternity were inherently hostile to the institution of slavery, and in 1791 the revolutionary banner of blood brought the world’s most perfect plantation economy a great slave revolt that lasted a dozen years. “In its spectacle of disintegration,” the Haitian Revolution pitted “grand blanc against petit blanc, white against mulatto, mulatto against black.” The Haitian Revolution was more vicious and bloody—and more frightening to its American neighbors, especially to slaveholders in Louisiana and the American south—than the Reign of Terror in France. Refugees scrambled with their slaves to Baltimore, Charleston, New Orleans, Cuba, or Jamaica at the beginning of the Haitian Revolution, bearing tales of incredible horror: men and women hacked to death with cane knives, pregnant mulatto women cut open and their unborn children thrown into fires, and severed heads mounted on pikes at every burned plantation.
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The extraordinary violence of the Haitian Revolution was rooted in the gruesome history of what once had been the perfect French colony. “I have reached the stage of believing firmly,” a French colonial governor had informed the minister of marine and colonies, “that one must treat the Negroes as one treats beasts.” The governor’s standard would have seemed progressive on St. Domingue, where domestic animals were never subjected to the punishments routinely inflicted on human beings. Long before the revolution, barbarity and sadism were commonplace on the island (as was often the case where vastly outnumbered slaveholders lived in constant fear, sleeping with loaded pistols under their pillows while gangs of hopeless slaves were crushed by the relentless demands of tropical agriculture).
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As regulated by the French Code Noir, a disciplinary whipping was not to exceed thirty-nine lashes (or later, fifty) with a whip of woven cord. But planters of St. Domingue who preferred the cowhide
rigoise
or the
lianes
(made of stiff island reeds supple as whalebone) seldom kept count. Slaves were whipped to death, and the everyday vocabulary of plantation discipline on St. Domingue described a brutal range of punishments: “The four post,” in which the slave’s hands and feet were tied to posts on the ground; “the hammock,” in which the slave was suspended by four limbs; and “the torture of the ladder.” Mutilations were common, and other outrageous punishments seemed torn from the pages of medieval martyrologies. Slaves were burned alive, roasted to death on grills over slow coals, scalded with wax or boiling cane sugar, or stuffed with gunpowder and ignited—a practice common enough to have its own vicious phrase: “to burn a little powder in the arse of a nigger.”
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