1802-08-07: (France Reestablishes Slavery in Haiti, the Betrayal That Reunites Black and Mulatto Revolutionaries Against the French and Transforms a Colonial…

1802-08-07: (France Reestablishes Slavery in Haiti, the Betrayal That Reunites Black and Mulatto Revolutionaries Against the French and Transforms a Colonial War Into a War of Total Liberation): On August 7, 1802, France officially reestablished slavery in Saint-Domingue. News had already reached Haiti that France had reimposed the institution in Guadeloupe, but the formal decree removed any remaining ambiguity. The betrayal accomplished what years of fighting had not: it reunited Black and mulatto revolutionaries who had been at each other’s throats for a decade. The war was no longer about political control or factional advantage. It was about survival. Every formerly enslaved person on the island now understood that French victory meant re-enslavement, and that understanding made them impossible to defeat. The reimposition of slavery was Napoleon’s greatest strategic blunder in the Caribbean, the act that transformed a war he was winning into a war he could not.