Leclerc expedition arrives as France moves to reassert control

Under pressure from the uprising and the struggle to retain the colony, Sonthonax proclaimed freedom for enslaved people in the northern province. The decree was a decisive local abolition, won in a...

Commissioner Étienne Polverel issued emancipation measures covering the colony’s western and southern provinces, completing the local abolition begun in the north. Proclamations differed in timing and...

The Convention abolished slavery in all French colonies and declared formerly enslaved people citizens. Saint-Domingue’s mass uprising and the local emancipation decrees had made the old order...

Under the treaty ending Spain’s war with France, Spain ceded its eastern colony of Santo Domingo to France. This diplomatic transfer brought the whole island under nominal French sovereignty, but...

The constitution promulgated under Toussaint Louverture declared that slavery could not exist in Saint-Domingue and made the ban permanent. It granted Louverture governorship for life and gave the...

Napoleon’s law maintained slavery in colonies returned to France where the 1794 abolition had not been implemented. Its wording did not itself reinstate slavery in Saint-Domingue, where abolition...

After negotiations and military reversals, French forces arrested Louverture and sent him to France, where he was imprisoned at Fort de Joux. His removal did not end resistance. Reports of French...

Louverture died at Fort de Joux after being deported and imprisoned by the French state. His death became a symbol of the violence used to destroy Haitian autonomy. The revolution continued under...

Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s forces defeated the French army at Vertières, the last major battle of the expedition. The victory made restoration of French colonial authority and slavery militarily...

Jean-Jacques Dessalines proclaimed independence at Gonaïves and named the country Haiti, drawing on the Indigenous name Ayiti. The declaration explicitly rejected the prospect of re-enslavement and...