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property holders—the North American equivalent of Saint Domingue's class of
grands blancs.
Those whom the French system recognized as
gens de couleur
were in the North American colonies considered to be (for legal purposes at least)as black as any African, and most of them were slaves. Slavery was not an issue in the American Revolution, many of whose political and military leaders, like Jefferson and Washington, came from Virginias slave-holding planter class.
    Though it almost immediately started evolving into a democratizing force which would be vastly influential all over the world, the American Revolution (never mind the liberation ideology it proclaimed) began for all practical purposes as a tax revolt. This revolution had no intention to disrupt any aspect of the existing colonial class structure. Its motive was to break free of the severe economic constraints imposed by the relationship of the North American colonies to their parent country, Great Britain.
    The success of the American Revolution as a tax revolt found at least a few admiring eyes among the proprietors of French Saint Domingue. France imposed a trade monopoly (called the
exclusif)
on all goods produced in the colony, as well as on most goods purchased there. Saint Domingue's producers of sugar, coffee, cotton, and indigo could have traded much more advantageously in a free market that admitted Britain, the newborn United States, and all the large and small European colonies of the surrounding islands. Between 1776 and 1789, an American-style revolutionary spirit breathed among the
grands blancs
of Saint Domingue, but it would soon be overtaken by other and much more drastic events.
    The French Revolution, which erupted in the heart of the homeland rather than in some distant colony, was from the start a genuine class revolution. The lower echelons of French society—what became known as the Third Estate—were determined to reverse or annihilate the old orders of precedence, privilege, and power that emanated from the throne, the aristocracy, and the clergy, and within the first two years of their movement they went a very long way toward doing just that. The French Revolution proclaimed “Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood” as natural human rights, and while it was generally, tacitly understood that only white men were invited to enjoy them, this assumption was openly challenged, at the seat of the French home government, by representatives of Saint Domingue's
gens de couleur.
    In the colony of Saint Domingue, response to the outbreak of theFrench Revolution split predictably along class lines. The
grands blancs
were apt to be royalist and reactionary, while the
petits blancs
embraced the revolution and were quick to form Jacobin political clubs in the style of those popular in Paris. Some in the
grand blancpaity
fantasized about making the colony a protectorate of royalist Britain, or even making it an independent redoubt of the ancien regime and a refuge for emigre noblemen fleeing revolutionary France. The quarrel between these two tiny white factions grew so intense that they forgot all about the slumbering forces in the much larger population that surrounded them on every side.
    In the first phases of the French Revolution there was absolutely no thought of letting the colony go or of changing anything significant about the way it operated. At this time Saint Domingue was the single richest European colony in the whole Western Hemisphere. Port-au-Prince, the capital and seat of government, was a relatively modest settlement, but Cap Francais, the cultural capital on the north coast, was the size of eighteenth-century Boston, with a beauty and grandeur that made it known as the “Jewel of the Antilles.” The sugar and coffee of Saint Domingue had not only enriched the colony's own planters, but vastly increased the prosperity of the French nation as a whole. Moreover, as revolutionary France saw its home economy disrupted and as it found