Academic literature on the topic 'Aristocratie – France – Histoire'

This chapter presents a wealth of new archival evidence on nobles’ actions and attitudes during the French Revolution. Various forms of property and evidence of ownership were destroyed or removed from nobles’ possession, which threatened nobles’ capacity to transmit economic, cultural, and symbolic capital to the next generation. Letters, wills, receipts, account books, certificates, passports, and petitions reveal how the effects of multiple decrees played out in personal and familial histories. For the nobility the rapid evolution of legislation meant that the consequences of any one revolutionary law became entangled with the consequences of another. Documentation of noblewomen’s experiences brings fresh insights and understanding to issues often over-looked in historical writing weighted toward aristocratic male military and political involvement.

This chapter opens with Sonthonax’s decree of 1793 that emancipated the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue. French revolutionary Léger Félicité Sonthonax brought a Civil Commission to Saint-Domingue in 1792 along with 6,000 soldiers. Their mission was to convince white landowners to form a coalition with mulatto landowners in order to crush the rebellion of enslaved people and preserve the colonial system. This delegation was fraught with contradictions as it was a microcosm of the conflict that had engulfed France: the struggle between aristocrats (the king, military leaders and Church leaders, and powerful landowners) and the bourgeoisie (businessmen and factory owners). Saint-Domingue’s social fissures were complex, with six major groups vying for power: the partisans of the new French government; the aristocrats; the freedmen, mixed race and black; the small whites; the leaders of the rebel slaves; and the masses of enslaved people. Trouillot explores the quicksand of shifting alliances and feuding rivalries during this early period of the Haitian Revolution. The white aristocrats refused to ally with the landowning and slave-holding mulatto and black freedmen. The new French government formed a coalition with the freedmen. The small whites resisted and were crushed by the new French government troops. The aristocrats turned to England and Spain for military assistance against the new French government, and these nations invaded and occupied parts of Saint-Domingue. To gain the upper hand, Sonthonax emancipated enslaved people willing to fight with the new French government in June 1793. Days afterward 10,000 French colonists fled the colony by ship. Sonthonax attempted to recruit the leaders of the rebel slaves; however, they were already fighting in the Spanish army and enjoying their freedom—some were even trafficking slaves. By emancipating the enslaved population in August of 1793, Sonthonax lost the support of the slave-owning aristocrats and freedmen, who were the principle power holders, and he was unable to recruit the leaders of the rebel slaves who saw no advantage in collaborating with an army that was losing ground. Having lost control of the traditional alliances, Sonthonax had overcorrected and found himself leaning upon those who had nothing to lose, the enslaved population.