1789-00-00: (The French Revolution Begins, the Upheaval That Would Shatter the Ideological Foundations of Colonial Slavery by Declaring the Rights of Man Whi…

1789-00-00: (The French Revolution Begins, the Upheaval That Would Shatter the Ideological Foundations of Colonial Slavery by Declaring the Rights of Man While Simultaneously Exposing the Hypocrisy of a Republic That Counted Human Beings as Property): In 1789, the French Revolution erupted, overthrowing the Bourbon monarchy and declaring the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The revolution’s rhetoric of liberty, equality, and fraternity would reverberate across the Atlantic with consequences that the revolutionaries in Paris neither intended nor desired. In Saint-Domingue, the wealthy mulatto class, men like Vincent Ogé who owned property and enslaved people themselves, heard in the Declaration of the Rights of Man a promise of political inclusion for free men of color. The enslaved population heard something more radical: that the entire ideological architecture of slavery had been declared illegitimate by the colonizer’s own philosophers. The French Revolution did not cause the Haitian Revolution, but it shattered the moral authority of the system that held the colony together. When the National Assembly debated the rights of colonial subjects, it was debating whether the principles it had proclaimed were universal or merely French. The enslaved population of Saint-Domingue would answer that question with fire.