While reading the about the events of the Haitian Revolution, I began to immediately connect the events in Haiti to the events which transpired in France just a few years earlier. Starting in 1789, the French people, ranging from the wealthy nobility to the impoverished sans-culottes, rose up against their government and forced change in their political and social systems. This Revolution eventually spiraled out of control, yet it began as a desire to reform a corrupt and ineffective government, and a desire to rid the world of tyranny and suppression of human rights.
As in France, in Haiti there were many different groups of people, including slave owners, poor whites, free and achieved "colored people," and slaves, all with conflicting interests. Also as in France, in Haiti the oppressed groups, notably the free "colored people" and the slaves, fought, both peacefully and violently, against the tyranny of their government of the laws restricting fundamental human rights and liberties. Beginning a little earlier than the Haitian Revolution, the Revolution in France profoundly affected the political and social atmosphere
in France's colony in Haiti. The Haitian revolutionaries benefited greatly from the Enlightenment ideas of progress and freedom, the latter of which was consummated by the National Assembly in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. These ideas not only laid the groundwork for the French Revolution, but also manifested themselves in the Haitian Revolution, ideologically involved in events such as slave rebellions, emancipation of slaves, and even the eventual Haitian independence.
Not only did the ideas of the French Revolution affect Haiti, such as representation, and most importantly, legal equality, but the actual events that occurred directly impacted the sequence of events in Haiti. The National Assembly, created after the three Estates of the Estates General joined into one legislative body, and later the National Convention, were heavily responsible for the legal changes in Haiti. These legislatures granted equality to the free blacks and later even to all of the slaves. Without such change occurring in France, these important changes in Haiti could never have occurred.
Both the ideas of the Enlightenment and French Revolution and the events transpiring in France around 1790 had both a short-term effect in Haiti, causing legal changes and slave rebellion, and a long term effect, eventually leading the colony, then named Saint-Domingue, to break from mother France into an independent country.
