The French Revolution in Spanish-America

With some reflections on Manfred Kossok as Marxist historian of bourgeois revolutions

Michael Zeuske, Universitt zu Kln/ Global South Studies Center (GSSC)

Abolition of slavery was the key to Spanish American Independence. 1

This was Apontes present; this was Apontes place.2

In a former life, I was, until 1992, a member of the Research Center for the Comparative History of
Bourgeois Revolutions (Vergleichende Geschichte brgerlicher Revolutionen) at Leipzig. While there,
I was a strong defender of the thesis of the French Revolution as a Leitrevolution (this concept is not
very easy to translate. It means something like leitmotiv) in a period of bourgeois revolutions from
1789 until 1848 (a version of Hobsbawms Age of Revolutions).3 Like Manfred Kossok (1930-
1993), my academic advisor, I saw the French Revolution (1789-1795, and its later history until 1815)
and the Independencia wars (1808/10-1825 and their later history until more or less 1830) relatively
directly and closely linked. At that time, I was working on the elite Creole revolutionaries, like Simn
Bolvar, Francisco de Miranda, and other leaders of the Independencia (or independencias) the
anticolonial wars against the colonial metropolis, Spain, from 1810 to 1825 4), who were then viewed
as the hegemonic group of a revolutionary process which separated the continental Spanish-
Americas from the imperial center, Spain. I did this work under use of Marxian concept of heroic

1
Thomas, Hugh, The Slave Trade. The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440 - 1870, (London and
Basingstoke, 1997), 576. Slavery and slave trade were really the key to social revolution, in Spanish America as
well. The problem is that there was abolition of the slave trade, but only unfinished abolitions of slavery in the
Independencia of Colombia and Venezuela; see: Chust, Manuel, De esclavos, encomenderos y mitayos. El
anticolonialismo en las Cortes de Cdiz, Mexican Studies/ Estudios Mexicanos Vol 11, 2 (Summer 1995), pp.
179-202; and: Chust; Frasquet, Ivana, Tiempos de revolucin. Comprender las independencias iberoamericanas,
(Madrid: Fundacin MAPFRE y Santillana Ediciones, 2013); for the role of Blacks in the independence of
Mexico see: Vincent, Ted, The Blacks Who Freed Mexico, The Journal of Negro History Vol. LXXXIX, no. 3
(summer 1994), S. 257-276.
I would like to thank Javier Lavia (Universitat de Barcelona), Alejandro E. Gmez (Universit de Lille 3) and
Clment Thibaud (Universit de Nantes) for sharing materials and ideas with me, as well as Dale Tomich and
Jonathan DeVore for sharing ideas and improving the text in English.
2
Ferrer, Ada, A Black Kingdom of This World. History and Revolution in Havana, 1812, in: Ferrer, Freedoms
Mirror. Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 271-328.
3
The bulk of the comparative works of Walter Markov and Manfred Kossok appeared between the 1960s and the
1980s. Fontana, Josep, El grupo de Leipzig y la historia comparada de las revoluciones burguesas. in: Manfred
Kossok, Albert Soboul, Gerhard Brendler, Jrgen Kbler, Max Zeuske, Wolfgang Kttler, Las revoluciones
burguesas. Problemas tericos. Prologue by Josep Fontana (Barcelona: Editorial Crtica/ Grijalbo, 1983), pp. 7-
10. For a critique of the whole concept of the Age of revolutions, from the perspective of the Portuguese-
Brazilian Empire, see Gabriel Paquette, Portugal and the Luso-Atlantic World in the Age of Revolutions, in:
Histria Vol. 32: 1, So Paulo (jan/jun 2013), 175-189; also see Jean-Frdric Schaub, Rvolutions sans
rvolutionnaires? Acteurs ordinaires et crises politiques sous lAncien Rgime (note critique), Annales.
Histoire, Sciences Sociales Vol. 55: 3 (mai-juin 2000), 645-653.
4
Manfred Kossok, was under the influence of national revolutions with military leadership in the 1950s and
1960s one of the first to write about the dialectics between war and revolution. See: Manfred Kossok and
Michael Zeuske, El factor militar en la Independencia. La dialectica entre guerra y revolucin en el perodo
1810-1830, Les Rvolutions Ibriques et Ibro-Americaines l'aube du XIXe sicle. Actes du colloque de
Bordeaux 2-4 Juillet 1989 (Collection de la Maison des Pays Ibriques, 49), Paris 1991, 395-414; Clment
Thibaud, Guerre et rvolution au cours des Indpendances hispano-amricaines, Rivista Storica Italiana, n
122: 2 (2010), 649-681.
 2

illusion.5 As a good student of Manfred Kossok (I hope), I always paid close attention to the diaries
of Alexander von Humboldt, which were seen as the best explication of the objective conditions of
the Independencia as a revolution in a global process guided and closely linked by and to the French
revolution.6
Humboldt himself had close contact with the enlightened elites of Spanish America, but he
was also an extremely sharp and critical observer as well as an analyst of demography, cultural
conflicts, economies, class hierarchies and social as well as historical and economic problems.
However, there was a doubly broken perspective about Humboldt. Let me say first, that Alexander von
Humboldt was a clear supporter of the French revolution until 1792. After that year, although against
the excesses of the revolution (like the vast majority of European intellectuals), he remained a strong
believer in humanism and human rights, proclaimed by the French Revolution, as well as a clear
analyst. He knew what a revolution is. Among his closest colleagues were many French scientists.
Humboldt travelled to Spanish America in 1799, using his connections with Spanish enlightened
intellectuals and court elites (most of them part of group of afrancesados lit. frenchified or turned-
French in the times before and during French revolution and the French oocupation of Spain 1808-
1814). In Spanish America, he met only few afrancesados, but men educated in an inner Hispanic
American system of colegios, universities, knowledge and learning. That seems to be - even today -
one of the basic problems of the broken perspective, mentioned above. The main group of men inside
Spanish America educated in universities or schools of Spanish America or Spain, could have modern
ideas, but could not have either strong ties to any kind of modern ideas from outside of Spain (and
the European parts of that monarchy) or French or American ideas of modernity. Similarly, the
urban plebian groups, who formulated their political agendas without knowing much about France,

5
Zeuske, Historia social precedente, historicismo marxista y el carcter de ciclo de las revoluciones. La obra de
Manfred Kossok, in Lluis Roura and first name? Chust eds., La Ilusin heroica. Colonialismo, revolucin,
independencias en la obra de Manfred Kossok, (Castell de la Plana: Publicacions de la Universitat Jaume I,
2010) Colleci Amrica, 20, pp. 63-97; see also first name? Chust and Jos Antonio Serrano, (eds.), Debates
sobre las independencias iberoamericanas, (Frankfurt am Main/ Madrid: Iberoamericana/ Vervuert, 2007),
Estudios AHILA de Historia Latinoamericana No. 3.
6
Manfred Kossok, Alexander von Humboldt und der historische Ort der Unabhngigkeitsrevolution
Lateinamerikas, in Alexander von Humboldt. Wirkendes Vorbild fr Fortschritt und Befreiung der Menschheit.
Festschrift aus Anlass seines 200. Geburtstages. (Ed. im Auftrage der Kommission fr die A.-v.-Humboldt-
Ehrungen 1969 der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik von der Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu
Berlin, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag 1969), 1-26; Manfred Kossok, Alexander von Humboldt als
Geschichtsschreiber Lateinamerikas, in Michael Zeuske and Schrter, Bernd, eds., Alexander von Humboldt
und das neue Geschichtsbild von Lateinamerika, (Leipzig: Leipziger Universittsverlag, 1992), 18-37; Margot
Faak, Einleitung. Die Tagebcher Humboldts, in Humboldt, Lateinamerika am Vorabend der
Unabhngigkeitsrevolution. Eine Anthologie von Impressionen und Urteilen aus den Reisetagebchern. Margot
Faak, editor and introduction. With an introduction by Manfred Kossok. (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag 1982),
Beitrge zur Alexander-von-Humboldt-Forschung, Vol. 5, 21-50; Manfred Kossok, Vorwort. Alexander von
Humboldt und das historische Schicksal Lateinamerikas, ibid., 11-19; Margot Faak, Alexander von Humboldts
amerikanische Reisejournale Eine bersicht, (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002), Berliner Manuskripte zur
Alexander-von-Humboldt-Forschung; Vol. 25; Ulrike Leitner, Los diarios de Alexander von Humboldt: Un
mosaico de su conocimiento cientfico, in Mariano Cuesta Domingo and Sandra Rebok, eds., Alexander von
Humboldt. Estancia en Espaa y viaje americano, (Madrid: Real Sociedad Geogrfica/CSIC, 2008), 163-176.
 3

Humboldt often referred to this latter group with the pbel (or Mulatten-Pbel). Pbel (rabble)
is a mutilation of the French word peuple and in German, it is extremely pejorative. 7
In his travels through Spanish America Humboldt moved from Venezuela and Western Cuba
(1799 beginnings of 1801), though the booming new agricultural zones of Spanish empire that also
had booming slaveries, to Cartagena and the more conservative centers of the viceroyalties (Bogot
an intellectual center of high rank), Lima a rather boring place for him 8 and New Spain (first of all
because of silver mining), and Mxico City (the scientific center of first rank in Spanish America), all
the while producing and circulating mobile and virtual knowledge about nature, geography, plants,
society, economy, demography, history, arts, etc. His observations, written down in his diaries, are full
of race and class conflicts, social and economic problems of Indians, Blacks, slaves, rebellions,
exploitation, injustice, oppression by monks and the church, by colonial bureaucrats, and whatever
else one might hope for from a critical observer and analyst. Manfred Kossok was one of the first
historians who drew attention to this field (Humboldts observation and critical analyses, not so much
Humboldt's attitude to the revolution as such).9 That is why the first edition of Humboldts diaries,
published in 1982, was entitled Latin America on Eve of the Revolution of Independence
[Lateinamerika am Vorabend der Unabhngigkeitsrevolution].10 The problem is that if one reads
Humboldts texts closely then it is clear that, based on his observations, he doesnt feel that he is
bearing witness to at any kind of eve, and during his travels he never believed in any possible
revolution in Spanish America, led by the local elites, and influenced or not by another revolution.
Therefore, he did not speculate about any direct link of the Spanish American elites with the French
Revolution. Humboldt writes in 1803 as a general observation about Colonies: Les Gouvernements
europens ont si bien russi de rpandre la haine et la dsunion dans les Colonies quon ny connait
pas les plaisiers de la socit De cette position nat une confusion dides et des sentiments
inconcevables, une tendance rvolutionnaire gnrale. Mais ce dsir se borne chasser les Europens

7
Federica Morelli, Genevive Verdo, and lodie Richard, Entre Npoles y Amrica. Ilustracin y cultura
jurdica en el mundo hispnico (siglos XVIII y XIX), (Bogot: Carreta-Institut Francais d'tudes Andins, 2012);
see: Pablo Martnez, The intellectual origins of Spanish American Revolutions: a working proposal (online:
https://www.academia.edu/9566931/The_intellectual_origins_of_Spanish_American_Revolutions_a_working_pr
oposal (01. Dezember 2014)); Daniel Morn, La historiografa de la revolucin. La participacin plebeya
durante las guerras de independencia en el Per y el Ro de la Plata, Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos [On line],
Dbats, Put on line le 30 May 2011, consulted 14 March 2015. URL: http://nuevomundo.revues.org/61404 ; DOI
: 10.4000/nuevomundo.61404.
8
David Sobrevilla, La visin crtica de Humboldt de la sociedad peruana, Acta Heradiana. Revista de la
Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, segunda poca, Vol. 32 (abril-septiembre 2002), 17-34; Teodoro
Hampe Martnez, Humboldt: sus contactos latinoamericanos durante el proceso de la independencia, ibid., 35-
45; Teodoro Hampe Martnez, Humboldt y el mar peruano. Una exploracin de su travesa de Lima a Guayaquil
(1802/1803), in: Humboldt im Netz (HiN) VIII, 15 (2007), pp. 13-22 (online: http://www.uni-
potsdam.de/u/romanistik/humboldt/hin/pdf/hin15/hin15_komplett.pdf (14. September 2014)).
9
Manfred Kossok, Alexander von Humboldt und der historische Ort der Unabhngigkeitsrevolution
Lateinamerikas, 1-26.
10
Humboldt, Lateinamerika am Vorabend der Unabhngigkeitsrevolution. Eine Anthologie von Impressionen
und Urteilen aus den Reisetagebchern. Ed. and Introd. by Margot Faak. With an introd. by Manfred Kossok.
(Berlin: Akademie-Verlag 1982), Beitrge zur Alexander-von-Humboldt-Forschung Vol. 5; Humboldt, Briefe
aus Amerika 1799-1804, Ulrike Moheit, (ed.), (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993), Beitrge zur Alexander-von-
Humboldt-Forschung Vol. 16.
 4

et se faire aprs la guerre entre eux [The European governments have succeeded so well at spreading
hate and disunity in the colonies that, there, one knows none of the pleasures of society . . . From this
situation is born a confusion of ideas and inconceivable sentiments, a general revolutionary tendency.
But this idea to chase aways the Europeans and to later make war amongst themselves.].11
There are three points to be made here: first, Humboldt travelled trough Spanish America
1799-1804, writing his diaries, after the French Revolution, but from eleven to six years before the
outbreak of the Independencia; second, he had very good internal information about Creole and
Spanish elites, and little or nothing about revolutionary sentiments and plans of other social groups
(pardos, slaves, maroons, Indians, free blacks, poor whites (blancos de orilla, canarios), etc.12) apart
from any hear-say; third, Humboldts reception was, and is still, above all, centered in the Anglophone
world and was dominated by his published works. Humboldt started to publish, using and re-writing
the material from his diaries, in 1809. The publication process lasted until 1831, that is, after the
beginnings of the Independencia (1808) and 5 years after his return to Europe.13 The new elite of the
Latin American republics used his published works after independencia to construct their
revolutionary movement as strongly influenced by the French revolution, one could almost say in
ideological mimicry as a French revolution in Venezuela. 14
I was shocked when, after 1993, I read Humboldts diaries from a new Atlantic, as well as a
from belowperspective. The French (European) Revolution, as well as the slave revolution of Saint-
Domingue, are practically absent in the written texts. One could speak, using the work and concepts of
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, not so much of an unthinkable revolution but of an unwriteable15 revolution
(European, as radical revolution), based on an unthinkable revolution (Caribbean, as a radical,
racialized revolution against slavery, the slave trade, and colonialism, as well against the contemporary
superpowers England, Spain and France, and after 1802, against all whites). 16
For the local elites and the masses in Spanish America, Europe was far; the revolution in
France was also far. The colonial elites tried to isolate all their influences. For them the real
revolution was the Saint-Domingue Revolution of 1791-1803, a revolution of former Black slaves,
Black Caribs, Creoles and free people of color in the most dense slavery region of their world the
11
Humboldt, Colonies [Guayaquil, Jan. 4 Feb. 17, 1803], in: Humboldt, Vorabend, 63-
64 (Doc. No. 1). Original from the diary.
12
Manuel Hernndez Gonzlez, El primer estallido de la violencia gubernamental: la
sangrienta represin de la Rebelin de la Sbana del Teque, in: Hernndez Gonzlez, La
guerra a muerte. Bolvar y la campaa admirable (1813-1814), (Santa Cruz de Tenerife:
Ediciones IDEA, 2014), 13-36.
13
The most important works on the Americas are The Essay on New Spain; the Relation
historique (a spatial relation along the landscapes of East Venezuela (Cuman and its
hinterland), Caracas and the plantation platforms of Valles del Tuy and Aragua, the
passage through the cattle-frontier of the Orinoco-plains (llanos), and fluvial world of the
Orinoco, and the Essay on Cuba.
14
Michael Zeuske, Simn Bolvar. History and Myth, (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2012).
15
I'm sure that Humboldt scored spoken information that he has not written down even in his diaries.
16
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, An Unthinkable History: The Haitian Revolution as a Non-Event, in: Trouillot,
Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 70-107; see also:
Geggus, David, The Caribbean in the Age of Revolution, in Armitage, David; Subramanyam, Sanjay (eds.),
The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760-1840, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, S. 83-100.
 5

greater Caribbean.17 The colonial authorities of the Spanish empire as well as the Creole elites all
wanted some modernization and more autonomy, but they feared a possible rebellion or revolution of
the Indians (first of all in Per18) and colored castes (also called pardos in the colonial argot19). That
is why they declared all conspiracies and rebellions as French or as revolution. That was their fear
- the miedo a la revolucin made so famous by the title of Miquel Izards book.20 That is why they
knew all about the revolution in Saint-Domingue (and intended, together with the Spanish elites of the
metropolis, to suppress it militarily). 21 However, they preferred to silence all information about it and
treat this revolution as unthinkable and unworkable. So most mentions of France in Humboldts diaries
have to do either with the great movement of the enlightenment and the sciences, where for Humboldt
France held the first rank worldwide, or with contemporary developments, let us call it Weltpolitik
(global politics), that is, Napoleon after 1799 (the year Humboldt arrived in South America). All this is
also on the level of the individual, on actors level. On this level Humboldt, who himself had been in
Paris during the revolution22, deals with persons - travelers, Frenchmen living and working in Spanish
America, artisans, artists, doctors, scientists (many of them revolutionaries), but also (many) loyal
French officers, merchants, etc. I will trace these groups systematically, based on the works of
Alejandro E. Gmez and Clment Thibaud, and a new work by Javier Lavia as well. 23
17
Nicols Rey, Quand la rvolution, aux Amriques, tait ngre: Carabes noirs, negros franceses, et autres
oublis de lhistoire, (Paris: Karthala, 2005); Marixa Lasso, Race and Nation in Caribbean Gran Colombia,
Cartagena, 1810-1832, in: Hispanic American Historical Review (HAHR) 111:2 (April 2006), 336-361.
18
Mariselle Melndez, Fear as a Political Construct: Imagining the Revolution and the Nation in Peruvian
Newspapers, American Antiquarian Society (2007), 261-275.
19
Frdrique Langue, Les identits fractales. Honneur et couleur dans la socit vnzulienne du XVIIIe
sicle, in: Caravelle 65, Toulouse (1995), 23-37; Frdrique Langue, La culpa o la vida. El miedo al esclavo a
finales del siglo XVIII venezolano, Procesos Histricos: Revista de Historia y Ciencias Sociales, No. 22,
Mrida (jul.-dic. 2012), 19-41; Luis Felipe Pellicer, Entre el honor y la pasin, (Caracas: Universidad Central de
Venezuela, 2005).
20
Miguel Izard, El miedo a la revolucin. La lucha por la libertad en Venezuela (1777-1830), prologue Sergio
Bag, (Madrid: Editorial Tecnos, 1979); see also: Ins Quintero, La Conjura de los Mantuanos. ltimo acto de
fidelidad a la monarqua espaola. Caracas 1808, (Caracas: Universidad Catlica Andrs Bello, 2002); David
Gonzlez Cruz, (ed.), Extranjeros y enemigos en Iberoamerica: la visin del otro. Del Imperio Espaol a la
Guerra de Independencia, (Madrid: Slex, 2010).
21
Alain Yacou, La stratgie espagnole dradication de Saint-Domingue franais, 1790-1804, in: Paul Butel
and Bernard Lavall, (coords.), LEspace Carabe. Thtre et Enjeu des Luttes Impriales (XVIe - XIXe Sicle),
(Bordeaux: Maison des Pays Ibriques, 1996), Collection de la Maison des Pays Ibriques, 70, 277-293.; Ada
Ferrer is analysing this complicated relationship, see Ferrer, Noticias de Haiti en Cuba, in: Revista de Indias
(Madrid) Vol. 63, no. 229 (2003), 675-694; Mara Dolores Gonzalez-Ripoll Navarro, Consuelo Naranjo Orovio,
Ada Ferrer, Gloria Garcia, Josef Opartn, (eds.), El rumor de Haiti en Cuba. Temor, raza y rebeldia, 1789-1844,
(Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas [CSIC], 2005); Ferrer, Talk about Haiti: The Archive
and the Atlantics Haitian Revolution, in Doris L. Garraway, (ed.), Tree of liberty: cultural legacies of the
Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic world, (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 21-
40.
22
End of June-6th of July 1790 that means he did a kind of tourism; and after this his most intimate friend was
Franois Arago (Francesc Joan Domnec Arag), a Jacobin in his youth, see: Petra Werner, Humboldt und
Arango Freundschaft und Anregung, in Jrgen Hamel, Eberhard Knobloch, and Herbert Pieper, (eds.),
Alexander von Humboldt in Berlin. Sein Einflu auf die Entwicklung der Wissenschaften. Beitrge zu einem
Symposium, (Augsburg: Erwin Raumer Verlag, 2003), 89-106.
23
Along withthe works already cited, see: Gmez, APENAS UNA PARTE DE NEGRO. Valores socio-raciales
y accionar poltico de las lites de 'color quebrado' en Jamaica, Venezuela, y las Antillas Francesas (siglos XVIII
y XIX), in: Revista de Indias Vol. LXXV, no. 263 (2015), S. 65-92. Javier Lavia, Venezuela en tiempos de
revolucin, Boletn Americanista Ao LX, 2, no. 61 (2010), 111-131; see also: Juan Marchena Fernndez, El
da que los negros cantaron la marsellesa: el fracaso del liberalismo espaol en Amrica, 1790-1823,, Historia
 6

Before doing this, I will briefly analyze how Humboldt saw the tragedy of colonial
enlightenment (based above all on French literature and, more concretely, in pamphlets and the so-
called political catechisms. Only the higher elite had direct access to French works or newspapers 24),
and how this reinforced his rejection of a Creole revolution of the elites in Spanish America before
1818. After 1993, under the influence of the work of Rebecca J. Scott 25, I shifted the emphasis of my
work to slaves as actors and the so-called subaltern voices. I was doing a great deal of fieldwork
about the microhistories of slaves and slaveries in Spanish America, first in the Caribbean, especially
in Cuba, and later in the Atlantic space and in Africa as well. This work resulted in new perspectives, a
more broader Atlantic view and a shift away from elites to subalterns (a very ugly word, but I will use
it because of its prominence in post-colonial studies) and a wider perspective from below.
Slavery and slaves (often called afro-descendientes in Spanish texts) are key elements for
understanding the Independencia as type of unfinished or superficial social revolution in relation to
the destruction of big structures of colonialism, caste-hierarchies (the basis of racism) and slavery. 26
They were incorporated into the construction of new states (republics and empires) and new nations.
Jeremy Adelman reminded the historians who wrote thousands of books about the political,
documentary or military history of the Independencia, or hagiographical works as well, that slavery
and the slave trade were basic causes of Independencia. 27

Caribe, Vol. II, 7 (2002), 53-75 (Universidad del Atlntico Colombia) (online:
http://www.redalyc.org/pdf/937/93720705.pdf (Aug. 17, 2014)); Jos A. Piqueras Arenas, (ed.), Las Antillas en
la era de las luces y la revolucin, (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2005); Jos M. Valds, Crisis Atlntica. Autonoma e
independencia en la crisis de la monarqua hispana, (Madrid: Fundacin Carolina, CEHI; Marcial Pons, 2006);
Chust (coord.), 1808. La eclosin juntera en el mundo hispano, (Mxico, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Econmica;
Comex, 2007); Chust and Frasquet (eds.), Los colores de las independencias iberoamericanas. Liberalismo,
etnia y raza, (Madrid: CSIC, 2009) (Coleccin Amrica); Chust (ed.), Las independencias iberoamericanas en
su laberinto. Controversias, cuestiones, interpretaciones, (Valencia: Publicaciones de la Universitat de Valencia,
2010); Jos Luis Belmonte Postigo, El color de los fusiles. Las milicias de pardos en Santiago de Cuba en los
albores de la revolucin haitiana, in Chust and Juan Marchena, (eds.), Las armas de la nacin. Independencia y
ciudadana en Hispanoamrica (1750-1850), (Madrid-Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2007), 37-
52.
24
Barbara Potthast, Entre revolucin y continuidad colonial. Catecismos polticos y ciudadana en Paraguay,
1810-1870, in Garca Jordn, Pilar (ed.), La articulacin del Estado en Amrica latina: la construccin social,
econmica, poltica y simblica de la nacin, siglos XIX-XX, (Barcelona: Universidad de Barcelona, 2013), 107
123; for slavery and enlightenment in the British Atlantic (Barbados, Jamaica, and Virginia), see: Justin
Roberts, Slavery and the Enlightenment in the British Atlantic, 1750-1807, (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2013).
25
Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba. The Transition to Free Labor, 1860-1899 (Princeton, N.Y.:
Princeton University Press, 1985) (Reprint: Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000).
26
Michael Zeuske, Miranda, Bolvar y las construcciones de la independencia: Un ensayo de interpretacin,
in Toms Straka, Andrs, Agustn Snchez, Michael Zeuske, (comps.), Las independencias de Iberoamrica,
(Caracas: Fundacin Empresa Polar, UCAB, FKA; Universidad Michoacana de San Nicols de Hidalgo, 2011),
279-326; Zeuske, Simn Bolvar. History and Myth, (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2012).
27
Adelman, Jeremy, Capitalism and Slavery on Imperial Hinterlands, in: Adelman, Sovereignty and
Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic, (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), 56-100; Lavia,
Michael Zeuske, Failures of Atlantization: First Slaveries in Venezuela and Nueva Granada, Review: A
Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center, Binghamton University XXXI, no. 3 (2008), 297-343. (Special issue
edited by Dale Tomich and Michael Zeuske, eds., The Second Slavery: Mass Slavery, World-Economy, and
Comparative Microhistories, Part II); see also: Lavia, La participacin de pardos y negros en el proceso de
1808 en Venezuela, in: Pedro Prez Herrero and Alfredo vila, (eds.), Las experiencias de 1808 en
Iberoamrica, (Mxico/ Alcal de Henares: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Alcal de Henares,
2008), 165 -181; Lasso, Myths of Harmony. Race and Republicanism during the Age of Revolution, Colombia,
 7

Let us now return to Humboldts account and the question of any echoes or influences of the
French revolution in Spanish America. As has already been discussed, in Humboldts diaries these
echoes have to do with fear and with a phenomenon that a contemporary cultural historian has called
the tragedy of colonial enlightenment.28 Nevertheless, we should not misinterpret the word
tragedy and thereby banish the Revolution itself from the orcus of history. One can also speak of an
enormous politicization of equality in the times before and during the various revolutions that
suggested both temporal and spatial connections (the American revolution 1776-1783; the French
revolution 1789-1795; the Haitian revolution 1791-1804; Independencia 1808-1830). 29
Humboldt arrived in America in August1799 (Cuman, Eastern Venezuela), eight years after
the beginning of the slave revolution in Saint-Domingue. He moved through an Atlantic in
revolution, as an enemy of the Jacobin phase of the French revolution and an enemy of slavery in the
Greater Caribbean and in the entire world. 30 Humboldt must have had some knowledge of the
revolution in Saint-Domingue (as did Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel and others 31) before his arrival,
but as a social scientist, he was more interested in processes occurring over the longue dure rather
than in short term political events (because before the end of 1803 nobody outside of the island
believed in a victory of the Black Jacobins of Haiti). The best short conceptualization of the Haitian
revolution comes from Dale Tomich: What began in 1791 as a conflict between white and free

1795-1831, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007; Lasso, Los grupos afro-descendientes y la
independencia: un nuevo paradigma historiogrfico?, in Clment Thibaud, Gabriel Entin, Alejandro E. Gmez,
Federica Morelli, (dir.), L'Atlantique rvolutionnaire. Une perspective ibro-amricaine, (Paris: Les Persides,
2013), 359-378; Hugues Snchez Meja and Adriana Santos Delgado, La presencia de indios, negros, mulatos y
zambos en la historiografa sobre la independencia del Caribe Colombiano 1770-1830
(online:www.academia.edu/7923932/La_presencia_de_indios_negros_mulatos_y_zambos_en_la_historiografia_
sobre_la_independencia_del_Caribe_Colombiano_1770-1830 (Aug. 16, 2014)); Alejandro Gmez, Las
independencias de Caracas y Cartagena de Indias a la luz de Saint-Domingue, 1788-1815, Rivista Storica
Italiana Vol.CXXII, No.2 (2010),708-734.
28
David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity. The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, (Durham & London: Duke
University Press, 2004).
29
Clment Thibaud, Un Nouveau Monde rpublicain. Les premiers Etats sans roi dans lAtlantique hispanique,
Mordelles: Les Persides (forthcoming); Clment Thibaud, Nuovi cittadini di colore? Libert per privilegio e
uguaglianza civile in Terraferma durante la rivoluzione, Quaderni storici (september 2015) (forthcoming). The
consequences of such politicization go even further than the Atlantic world; Paul E. Lovejoy refers to the Jihads
(starting in 1804) in the interior of Western Africa and the historical Sudan as part of the era of Atlantic
revolutions (1776-1848/49), leading many enslaved of the struggles to the Atlantic world, see: Paul E. Lovejoy,
Jihad na frica Ocidental durante a Era das Revolues: em direo a um dilogo com Eric Hobsbawm e
Eugene Genovese, Topoi. Revista de Histria Vol. 15, n. 28 (jan./jun. 2014), 22-67. Disponvel em:
www.revistatopoi.org
30
Julius Scott, Crisscrossing Empires: Ships, Sailors and Resistance in the Lesser Antilles in the Eighteenth
Century, in: The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion, Robert L.Paquette and Stanley
W.Engerman, eds. (Gainesville: Univ. of Florida Press, 1996), 128-143; Yves Bnot, Linternationale
abolitionniste et lesquisse dune civilisation atlantique, Dix-huitime sicle 33 (2001), 265279; Wim Klooster,
Revolution in the Atlantic World. A Comparative History, (New York and London: New York University Press,
2009); Laurent Dubois, An Atlantic Revolution, in: French Historical Studies 32:4 (Fall 2009), 655-661; Jos
Damio Rodrigues, (coord.), O Atlntico Revolucionrio: circulao de ideias e de elites no final do Antigo
Regime, (Ponta Delgada: CHAM, 2012); Thibaud; Entin; Morelli; Gmez; (dir.), L'Atlantique rvolutionnaire.
Une perspective ibro-amricaine , passim.
31
Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel and Haiti, Critical Inquiry 26 (Summer 2000), 821-865; Sybille Fischer,
Modernity Disavowed. Haiti and the Culture of Slavery in Age of Revolution, (Durham: Duke University Press,
2004); Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel und Haiti, (Berlin: Suhrkamp 2011); Ada Ferrer, Haiti, Free Soil, and
Antislavery in the Revolutionary Atlantic, The American Historical Review Vol. 117: 1 ((Feb. 2012), 40-66.
 8

colored elites over citizenship and the colonys status in the new French republic was transformed into
a revolutionary struggle against colonialism and slavery by mass slave resistance. 32 Precisely in
relation to big structural changes and the process of studies about society and slavery, Humboldt
defined himself as a historian of America [Historiker von Amerika]. From our current perspective,
his self-portrait reflects a politicization of history during his voyage. Humboldt opens the section on
slavery on the Political Essay on the Island of Cuba (1826) with these words: As an historian of
America, I wanted to clarify facts and specify ideas by means of comparisons and statistical data. 33
In real time, 1800, Humboldt was travelling through the landscapes of plantations and mass
slavery in Venezuela (the hinterland of Cuman, the Aragua and Tuy Valleys, Barlovento 34). This
chapter of his diaries presents one of the most vibrant analyses of plantation economies and mass
slavery and of what we may call, in the sense mentioned above, the negative echoes of the French
revolution (and its prehistory in the French enlightenment) in a slave society. 35 Recalling
Humboldts own disillusion, his opinion about Fernando Pealver (1765-1837) is paradigmatic for the
behavior of elite slaveholders. Pealver later became one of most important advisers to Bolvar (and
the only person Bolvar treated in familiar terms). Humboldt writes: The Portuguese [ 36] thought that
a white republic should be founded at a time when, undoubtly, the French republic allows slavery once
again [37]. In a white republic not even the free people of color [mulatos; pardos] would be granted
32
Tomich, Econocide? From Abolition to Emancipation in the British and French Caribbean in Stefan Palmi
and Francisco A. Scarano (eds.), The Caribbean. A History of the Region and Its Peoples, (Chicago and London:
The University of Chicago Press, 2011), 310.
33
Alexander von Humboldt, Essai Politique sur l`Ile de Cuba, avec une carte et un supplment qui renferme des
considrations sur la population, la richesse territoriale et le commerce de l`Archipel des Antilles et de
Colombia, 2 vols., (Paris, Librairie Gide et fils, 1826), II, 305; the newest edition is: Vera M. Kutzinski and
Ottmar Ette, (eds.), Humboldt, Alexander von, Political Essay on the Island of Cuba. A Critical Edition,
(Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2011).
34
Humboldt was unable to visualize these slavery-landscapes himself; so he sent the German painter Ferdinand
Bellermann 44 years later to produce images of them. See: Sigrid Achenbach, Ferdinand Bellermann (1814-
1868) in Venezuela, in: Achenbach, Kunst um Humboldt. Reisestudien aus Mittel- und Sdamerika von
Rugendas, Bellermann und Hildebrandt im Berliner Kupferstichkabinett, (Mnchen: Hirmer, 2009), 133-210,
esp. 161-164.
35
Humboldt, Von Caracas an den See von Valencia und nach Puerto Cabello (8.2. 5.3. 1800), Humboldt,
Reise durch Venezuela. Auswahl aus den amerikanischen Reisetagebchern. Ed. and introd. Faak. (Berlin:
Akademie Verlag, 2000). Beitrge zur Alexander-von-Humboldt-Forschung, Bd. 12, 185-222. During the
Independencia beginning in 1812, there were in Barlovento, the eastern part of this plantation zone, massive
slave rebellions that were harshly suppressed by the republicans, whose leaders were often slave-owners in the
same region. [The city Ocumare del Tuy] fell into anarchy, the castes [i.e. slaves and free Blacks], given over to
pillage and drunkenness, regroupeded (...) [in various places] and already began to defend equality and freedom,
burned parish registers in which people were registered by caste, made fly to the whites [] In the meantime
two thousand five hundred men were dead, cf.: Narciso Coll y Prat, Memoriales sobre la Independencia de
Venezuela, (Caracas: Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1960),181. For deeper background, also for the fears of
contact of the Coro rebellion and the Haiti revolution, see: Lucas Guillermo Castillo Lara, La candente disputa
por la supremacia entre los negros criollos y los loangos o de Curazao, in Castillo Lara, Apuntes para la
historia colonial de Barlovento, (Caracas: Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1981), Biblioteca de la Academia
Nacional de la Historia, No. 151, 479-499 and Castillo Lara, Rebeliones y guerra de colores en Barlovento,
ibid., 595-665.
36
The Pealver-family was of Portuguese descent (which is often linked to slave trade).
37
In a later passage of his diaries, Humboldt mentions directly echoes of the French revolution, linking them
to slavery and slave trade (in the form of deep disillusion): Voil donc le fruit de tant de sang rpandu aux
Indes, voil cette esprance dont se flattaient les gens de bien que les Franais suivant embrasser la Cause de
lhuma[nit] proposeraient dans la paix gnrale aux autres puissances [reference to the congress and the peace-
treaty of Amiens (1802/03) MZ] un plan [de] diminuer et abolir peu peu lesclavage [in a side note Humboldt
 9

rights, slaves would serve their masters on their knees, those [the whites] would sell their children
[]. This is the product of the American Enlightenment. Unearth your Encyclopedia and your Raynal,
shameless men.38 Humboldt was an enemy of racism.
Humboldt feared that this political objective, a white republic (i.e., more slavery and more
power for the white Creole elite, achieved by reducing the status of the free people of color) would be
the main result of a future rebellion against Spain. He deepened this rejection of a white republic,
focusing on the United States: In North America, white men have established for themselves a
republic and have left intact the most infamous laws of slavery ... So do the noble South Americans
want to found a republic for themselves. It is a draw, then, when one speaks of the misery of the
colored races [the pardos].39
Humboldt wrote not only about Fernando Pealver, but also about the Ibarra family (a man
from this family was later one of Bolvars adjutants), the Ribas (or Rivas) family, who later presented
themselves as Jacobins), later the young Simn Bolvar, and, indirectly, about Francisco de Miranda.
They were some of the most important representatives of the Creoles autonomist movement and
afterwards the Spanish American independence movements. 40 Moreover, as I have already
mentioned, Humboldts diaries included the longer prehistory of the French in Spanish America. In
April 1801, when Humboldt and Bonpland were travelling from Cartagena to Bogot, they met the
French doctor Luis (Louis) de Rieux (from Carcassonne), Physician to the Viceroy of Nueva Granada.
He travelled with them for weeks. Humboldt writes in his journal: Our companion to S Fe [Bogot]
were the doctor D [on] Luis de Rieux and his amiable son from Carcassone, a young mulatto lady,
who served as the fathers [de Rieux] as Matresse ... De Rieux, formerly physician to the Bis[hop]
Gngora [41] was accused as a state criminal and, at night from his home in Onda [Honda] fettered and
taken / dragged to Carthagena [because he had printed the French Declaration of the Rights of Man
and Citizen, i,e., the French constitution of 1791 -MZ]. 42 After long years of incarceration in Spain
and a flight [he escaped from prison?], he was absolved and returned to Nueva Granada (today
Colombia). When Humboldt and Bonplan visited De Rieux in Honda, Humboldt notes: It is
outrageous to me that the immoral De Rieux (the same, the one imprisoned for years for his

refers directly to the French revolution, marked with *.] *Les loix que les Danois avaient donnes longtemps
avant la rvolution franaise, les propositions que Pitt certainement de laveu de sa Cour fit en 1800 pour la
diminution de lesclavage donnaient des esprances trs fondes . Humboldt finishes: Que nexcite-t-on pas
lautorit du pape pour les pays Catholiques ? in Humboldt, Esclavage [on board a ship, leaving Guayaquil
for Acapulco, March 4, 1803], Humboldt, Vorabend, 249-254 (Doc. No. 168).
38
Humboldt, Von Caracas an den See von Valencia und nach Puerto Cabello (8.2. 5.3. 1800), 208.
39
Humboldt, Sklaven, Cuman, fall 1800, in Humboldt, Vorabend, 244-247 (Doc. No. 164).
40
Zeuske, Alexander von Humboldt y la comparacin de las esclavitudes en las Amricas, Humboldt im Netz
(HiN), VI, 11, Potsdam (2005), 65 - 89. URL
www.unipotsdam.de/u/romanistik/humboldt/hin/hin11/inh_zeuske.htm; Zeuske, Comparando el Caribe:
Alexander von Humboldt, Saint-Domingue y los comienzos de la comparacin de la esclavitud en las Amricas,
Estudios AfroAsiticos, 26, 2 Rio de Janeiro (2004), 381-416; Zeuske, Humboldt, esclavitud, autonomismo y
emancipacin en las Amricas, 1791-1825, in Mariano Cuesta Domingo and Sandra Rebok, (coords.),
Alexander von Humboldt. Estancia en Espaa y viaje americano, (Madrid, Real Sociedad Geogrfica/CSIC,
2008), 257-277.
41
He was also physician to the Viceroy Ezpeleta.
42
Humboldt, Vorabend, 109-110 (Doc. No. 45).
 10

revolutionary sentiments, the same who then spoke of slave freedom, and, as long as it was useful to
him, played the French citizen) with cold blood let the negroes of the Aegyptiaca [name of a
plantation] fall on their knees before him. That miserable human scum who plays the philosopher in
Europe.43 This is one moment of the tragedy of (European) enlightenment in colonial slave societies.
To conclude this part about slavery, human rights and revolution, the key to social change in
the Atlantic parts of the colonies, I will cite a note of Humboldts, written as his ship passed the most
western point of Jamaica. Looking to the Blue Mountains, Alexander Humboldt wrote: In Europe,
you go out to the countryside to enjoy quiet pleasures. Here you can hear rattling chains -- and one
speaks of the happiness of Jamaica, of the splendor of St. Domingue. Who is, who was happy there ...
Everything unnatural disappears in the world, and it is not natural that a pair of rocky islands produce
so much [In Europa geht man aufs Land, um stille Freuden zu genieen. Hier hrt man Ketten
rasseln und spricht vom Glk von Jamaica, vom Glanz von S. Domingue. Wer ist, wer war da
glklich Alles unnatrliche verschwindet in der Welt, und es ist nicht natrlich, da ein Paar
Felseninseln so viel hervorbringen].44
At the end of his travels through Spanish America, Humboldt stayed some weeks in Havana
(from March 19 to April 29, 1804, his second visit to the city). There he heard what the elites said to
one another about the proclamation of Independent Haiti (1804). On this occasion Saint-Domingue
and slavery are central to his discourses and, again, there is nothing about French Revolution. In
addition, he noted everything in his diaries. However, this part, Havana 1804, remained unpublished
until today.45

Actors and transferts culturels of the French Revolution:

French in Spanish America and (some) Spanish-Americans (espaoles) in France

Let me first highlight the immediate prehistory of the breakdown of the Spanish empire in 1808-1810.
Monarchies around France had more or less willingly accepted the Enlightenment. In accordance with
the new trends, they had, in many cases, started the modernization of the State, as well as of their
colonies, as in the case of Spains so-called reformas borbnicas (Bourbon reforms).46 After the first
43
Ibid., 258 (Doc. No. 174).
44
Humboldt, Sklaven [on board of a ship, leaving Venezuela for Cuba, december 6, 1800], in: Ibid., pp. 247-
248 (Doc. No. 165).
45
These parts of Humboldts writings remain in Krakw (Poland): Humboldt, Diary of 1804, in: Biblioteka
Jagielloska Krakw, Oddzia Rkopisw, Al. v. Humboldt Nachla 3; see: Zeuske, Arango y
Humboldt/Humboldt y Arango. Ensayos cientficos sobre la esclavitud, in: Mara Dolores Gonzlez-Ripoll, and
Izaskun lvarez Cuartero, (eds.), Francisco de Arango y la invencin de la Cuba azucarera, (Salamanca:
Ediciones de la Universidad de Salamanca, 2009) Aquilafuente, 158, 245-260; Zeuske, Alexander von
Humboldt in Cuba, 1800/01 and 1804: traces of an enigma, Studies in Travel Writing 15, 4 (December 2011),
347-358 (Spanish version: Zeuske, Humboldt en Cuba, 1800/1801 y 1804 - Huellas de un enigma, in:
http://www.uni-potsdam.de/u/romanistik/humboldt/hin/hin20/zeuske.htm (26. April 2010)).
46
For the Kossokian perspective on the relation between the way of reform and the way of revolution in
global contexts, see: Kossok, Revolutionrer und reformerischer Weg beim bergang zwischen Feudalismus
und Kapitalismus [1986], in: Kossok, Ausgewhlte Schriften [Selected Writings], 3 vols., Matthias Middell,
(ed.), (Leipzig: Leipziger Universittsverlag, 2000); Vol. III: Zwischen Reform und Revolution: bergnge von
der Universal- zur Globalgeschichte, Matthias Middell and Katharina Middell, (eds.), pp. 67-94; for a modern-
day perspective on these way of reforms, see: Paquette, After Brazil: Portuguese Debates on Empire, c. 1820-
1850, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 11, 2 (Fall 2010), 135; Paquette, Imperial Portugal in the
 11

phase of the revolution in France (around 1793), they began to impede the movement of everything
coming out of that country. All the kingdoms, if they were not conquered by French troops, imposed
restrictions upon any French citizens who wanted to cross the borders in order to prevent the entry of
revolutionary agents. This was connected to a veritable anti-revolutionary fever and a kind of veritable
paranoia that, in the Caribbean, resulted in a kind of cordon sanitaire around the French colonies. In
the case of Spain, the measures taken in the metropolis also applied in the colonies, as a series of laws
were decreed to prevent the passage of the revolution to the American territories. However, it is
often overlooked that different territories of this colonial empire had different histories of contact with
French territories. The harbor cities of the Caribbean, including Nueva Orleans (New Orleans as part
of La Luisiana, a Spanish colony from 1764/65 until 1804/05), Veracruz, Omoa (today Honduras), and
Cartagena de Indias/ Panam (by then viceroyalty of Nueva Granada) had the most direct contacts
with Saint Domingue. But the territories with most intense contacts were the Spanish colonies of Santo
Domingo (part of the same island as French Saint-Domingue the former La Hispaniola, the first and
oldest Spanish territory in the New World), Cuba, Puerto Rico, and tierra firme (the Caribbean parts of
the Northern coast of South America, then the Capitaincy General of Venezuela and the Caribbean
parts of the viceroyalty of Nueva Granada [today Colombia and Panama]). This tierra firme was also
called Costa de Caracas by non-Hispanic seamen.
I will begin not with Santo Domingo, but with the space that was most densely linked to the
Caribbean as a whole (by slavery, the slave trade, contraband trade/ smuggling, piracy, cimarronaje
(maroonage), Indian territoriality, and hidden movements of all kinds). 47

a) Venezuela - baseline of the Caribbean.

Venezuela did not exist at the time of the French Revolution. Formally, since the late Bourbon
reforms, the Captaincy General of Caracas or Venezuela, with its center in Caracas, had military and
political control of several peripheral provinces along the conflicted edge of the Spanish empire. Javier
Lavia states that foreign control of the traders, merchants, and many liberal professions such as
doctors, artisans, artists, as well as the control of seamen, fishers, runaway slaves, Indians, corsairs and
smugglers had always been an obsession of Spanish immigration policy. Although the Laws of the
Indies were emphatic about such control and forbade the residence of foreigners in America, the truth

Age of Atlantic Revolutions: The Luso-Brazilian World, c. 1770-1850, (Cambridge: CUP, 2013); Paquette, The
reform of the Spanish empire in the age of Enlightenment, in: Jess Astigarra, (ed.), The Spanish Enlightenment
Revisited, (Oxford: OUP, 2015), Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, S. ??-??; see also his essay on
the differences between the Spanish reformism and reformism in the Portuguese-Brazilian empire: Gabriel
Paquette, Portugal and the Luso-Atlantic World in the Age of Revolutions, in: Histria 32: 1, So Paulo
(jan/jun 2013), 175-189.
47
Gmez, La caribeanidad revolucionaria de la costa de Caracas. Una visin prospectiva (1793-1815), in
Vronique Hbrard, and Genevive Verdo, (eds.), Las independencias hispanoamericanas, (Madrid: Casa de
Velzquez, 2013), Collection de la Casa de Velzquez; 137), 35-48.
 12

is that there was significant international settlement. Their stay in America could even be legal, and
could be registered (as the so-called naturalizados) or settled without any disclosure requirement. 48
The extremely large Caribbean and Atlantic coasts of what are now Venezuela and Colombia
played an important role as a kind of sounding board when the French revolution started. 49 These
immense coasts were also the baseline of the American mediterrane, and very near to the colonies of
other South American and Caribbean powers (first of all Curaao, which had an important slave
rebellion in the tradition of Saint-Domingue during the conflicts of France and Great Britain 50 and
Suriname, but also Essequibo, Martinique, and Guadeloupe; and, from 1797 onwards, British Trinidad
and Tobago). During the 1780s, the governors gave the tenientes de justcia (local judges) orders to
detain foreigners for any suspicious behavior. With the events in France, the Captain General of
Caracas decided to expel all foreigners (the majority from French islands) so as to avoid the
introduction of revolutionary propaganda. Execution of the order was left in the hands of the above-
mentioned local judges or lieutenants of justice, who did not always act correctly (some of them also
took canarios, i.e., immigrants from the Spanish Canary Islands, for foreigners). 51
After Louis XVIs death by guillotine and the declaration of war between Spain and France in
1793, suspicions in the colonies raged even more strongly against the French. The colonial authorities
decided to arrest anyone believed to show sympathy for the French system. The authorities sought
precise knowledge of any foreigners in the colony, especially controlling the French and ordering the
expulsion of all French citizens considered harmful. The monitoring of these citizens was quite
effective, but it also led to a witch-hunt and paranoia throughout the territories. Many of the
accusations were inaccurate. In 1792, a supporter of the revolution was detained and sent to Spain.
At first, the authorities thought he was Italian, but he was in fact Spanish and his name was Fernando
Ribas (possibly a member of the great Ribas family). He was accused of having had seditious
conversations and of having traveled to Europe and both Americas. For these reasons, the Captain
General considered him a dangerous and destabilizing element. 52 In April 1793, the local authorities
48
Lavia, Venezuela en tiempos de revolucin, 111-131. About prisoners as foreigners
and foreigners and revolution in general, see: Frdrique Langue, Extranjeros y
revolucin, un binomio subversivo en la era de las independencias iberoamericanas?,
Naveg@mrica. Revista electrnica editada por la Asociacin Espaola de Americanistas
13 (2014), 1-12 (online: http://revistas.um.es/navegamerica (July 28, 2015)).
49
Rojas, Reinaldo, Rebeliones de esclavos negros en Venezuela antes y despus de
1789 (online: http://dspace.uah.es/dspace/bitstream/handle/10017/5837/Rebeliones
%20de%20Esclavos%20Negros%20en%20Venezuela%20Antes%20y%20Despu%C3%A9s
%20de%201789.pdf?sequence=1 (01. Sept. 2015)).
50
Gerd Oostindie, Slave resistance, colour lines, and the impact of the French and
Haitian revolutions in Curaao, in: Wim Klooster and Gert Oostindie (eds.), Curaao in
the age of revolutions, 1795-1800, (Leyden: KITLV Press, 2011), 11-12.
51
William J. Callahan Jr., La propaganda, la sedicin y la revolucin francesa en la capitana
general de Venezuela, 1786-1796, Boletn Histrico 14, Caracas (1967), 177-205;
Hernndez Gonzlez, Los canarios en la Venezuela colonial: 1670-1810, (La Laguna:
Centro de la Cultura Popular Canaria, 1999); Ferrer, Ada, La socit esclavagiste cubaine
et la rvolution hatienne, Annales. Histoire, Sciences sociales, 58e anne, no 2 (mars-
avril 2003), 333-356.
52
William J. Callahan Jr., La propaganda, la sedicin y la revolucin francesa en la capitana general de
Venezuela, 1786-1796, 181.
 13

stopped a French doctor at Guanare, who, they said, had promoted regicide. The proclamations of the
French Convention sparked further fears of French revolutionary influence.
The conclusion that can be drawn given that the number of foreign revolutionaries
detained by the new system were few, and that, except for feelings of joy about the situation in France
and talk about the progress of the French Revolution is that there was no other change to what
otherwise remained normal conditions in the Spanish colonies. The French Revolution clearly had no
influence. In addition, there were few cases of confiscated literature, newspapers, and propaganda
material. Further, the two revolutionary events, the rebellion in Coro 1795, and a plot in Maracaibo
1799, often linked the French revolution because its relations with French (and Dutch) Caribbean, had
nothing to do with either France or the French revolution: Despite the fact that both movements had
links with the French Caribbean ... in neither of them was any Republican project developed to replace
the Old Spanish colonial regime.53
Only the conspiracy of 1797, traditionally called conspiracy of Manuel Gual and Jos Mara
Espaa,54 provides an example of an indirect, but strong textual link to the political discourses of the
French revolution (namely, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and some
revolutionary songs) that were adapted by radical Spanish liberales. The leaders made a Republican
proposal, which displayed an exceptional variety of political influences other than French and British
(from Trinidad). Alejandro Gmez states: This was due to several factors, including the diversity that
existed between the conspirators (Spaniards who had previously led a Jacobin conspiracy in Madrid in
1795, as well as free white Creoles and local men of color), and they had direct links with Franco-
Antillean revolutionaries, mainly in Guadeloupe.55 Clment Thibaud does not see these links to
53
Gmez, La caribeanidad revolucionaria de la costa de Caracas. Una visin prospectiva (1793-1815),: 41;
see also: Lavia, Indios y negros sublevados en Coro, in: G. Dalla Corte, P. Garca Jordan, J. Lavia, L.
G.Luna, R. Piqueras, J.L. Ruiz-Peinado, M.Tous, Poder Local Poder Global en Amrica Latina, (Barcelona:
Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2008), 97-112; Langue, Extranjeros y revolucin, un
binomio subversivo en la era de las independencias iberoamericanas?, 1-12.
54
This traditional name of the conspiracy conceals the fact that that there were pardos as leaders and some free
Blacks among the conspirators. I agree with Alejandro Gmez that this important conspiracy should be called
Conspiracy of La Guaira 1797. In a personal communication (August 2014) Alejandro Gmez comments
about the pardo-leader and the participation of colored people: Narciso Del Valle (died La Guaira, 1799), pardo
militia sergeant and revolutionary, he was among the ringleaders of a republican conspiracy unveiled in the port
city of La Guaira (on the northern coast of the Captaincy General of Venezuela) in July 1797, for which he was
tried and executed on June 1799. That was indubitably the most radical conspiracy organized in the Spanish
Atlantic before the period of independence. Of Jacobin inspiration, the conspirators intended to replace the
colonial government with a republic in which socio-racial distinctions and slavery were abolished. Initially led
by local Whites and some Spanish prisoners who had been dispatched from Spain (where they were arrested for
having organized a similar revolutionary plot), the egalitarian aims of movement made it win the support of four
sergeants of the Pardo Militia, and at least three black soldiers. Among these the figure of Narciso del Valle, who
ended up being one of the most active leaders of the revolutionary movement, stands out.
55
Gmez, La caribeanidad revolucionaria de la costa de Caracas. Una visin prospectiva (1793-1815), 41-
42; see also: Pedro Grases, La conspiracin de Gual y Espaa y el ideario de la Independencia, (Caracas:
Ministerio de Educacin, 1978 [first edition 1949]); Ramn Aizpura Aguirre, La Conspiracin por dentro: un
anlisis de las declaraciones de la conspiracin de La Guaira de 1797, in: Juan Carlos Rey, Rogelio Prez
Perdomo, Aizpura Aguirre, Adriana Hernndez, (eds.), Gual y Espaa. La Independencia frustrada, (Caracas:
Fundacin Empresas Polar, 2008) Coleccin Bicentenario de la Independencia, 213-344; Carmen L. Michelena,
Luces revolucionarias: De la rebelin de Madrid (1795) a la rebelin de La Guaira (1797), (Caracas: CELARG,
2010). Alejandro Gmez demonstrates also convincingly that the historical construction of the Independencia as
a revolution (1811) takes the conspiracy of 1791 as a starting point: These ties can be seen in the physical
 14

revolutionaries in Guadeloupe. For him, the political goal of the authorities in Guadeloupe (French)
and Trinidad (British) in supporting the conspiracy was the destabilization of the Spanish mainland
(Tierra firme).56
The biggest fear for both the colonial bureaucrats and the oligarchic elites (the mantuanos) of
Venezuela caused by the events in Saint-Domingue was its effects on the pardos. A Junta, held in
1793, estimated that there were already 100,000 slaves and more than 450,000 freed blacks and
mulattos (pardos) in the territory (while only less than 0,5% of the population belonged to the
mantuanos57). This report shows the true fear of the notables of Caracas: the pardocracia (the rule of
pardos), with the possibility of organizing politically around the notion of equality espoused by the
French Revolution.58 That is why they tried to declare all forms of conspiracy, unrest and rebellion to
be French (and revolutionary). The pardos were the majority in the militia (in a relation 10 pardos
to every 1 white). This fear also appeared when the Crown issued the Real Gracias al Sacar (Royal
Decree of Grace to take) in 1795, whereby rich pardos could buy purity of blood in exchange for a
stipulated fee (there are only very few examples where they really bought whiteness). 59 What
concerned notable Creoles and the Captain General of Venezuela was the rupture of the social
hierarchy that had been imposed in the colony since the beginning of colonization, and that pardos
were finally being recognized as vecinos (urban settlers with full rights). The fears of Captain General
Pedro Carbonell and the Junta of Caracas, composed of notable residents of the city, were not
unfounded, as indeed there was a certain proclivity by groups of color to seek equality with whites
(generally spoken: by force (revolution like in Haiti) or by law (Bourbon reforms). But French
revolutionary influence was not necessary for these tensions to develop. In fact, the Revolution could
derail the aspirations of wealthy pardos. They were the only ones who wanted to achieve equality with
whites, but at no point were they willing to share equality with popular groups of color, much less with
slaves or ex-slaves.60

presence of some of those involved [in1797] in Caracas in 1811 (such as Picornell and Corts); in evoking what
the events of 1811 had to do with the Madrid conspiracy of San Blas [written by] presumably [Juan Germn]
Roscio; and in some public acts of protest (such as the release of prisoners); ibid., 47.
56
Thibaud, Circulations rpublicaines et politisation en Cte-Ferme (1791-1808)
(Chapitre 2), in Thibaud, Un Nouveau Monde rpublicain (forthcoming).
57
Frdrique Langue, Origenes y desarrollo de una lite regional. Aristocracia y cacao en la provincia de
Caracas, in Langue, Aristocratas, honor y subversin en la Venezuela del siglo XVIII,( Caracas: Italgrfica;
Academia de la Historia, 2000), Biblioteca de la Academia de la Historia, 252, 46-93.
58
Brito Figueroa describes the complex of revolutionary ideas as ideario democrtico (democratic ideals),
which spread in these lands by written and oral means. He shows the traditions of social rebellions in
Colonial Venezuela, that were present first of all in the vast areas of the territory dominated by negros
cimarrones (maroons), organized in cumbes and palenques, as well as in the llanos (the Venezuelan prairies).
See Federico Brito Figueroa, Venezuela colonial: las rebeliones de esclavos y la Revolucin Francesa, in
Caravelle. Cahiers du monde hispanique et luso-brsilien, 54 (1990), 272-273; See also, Langue, La
pardocratie ou litinraire dune classe dangereuse dans la Venezuela des XVIIIe et XIXe sicles, Caravelle
67, Toulouse (1997), 57-72; See also: Langue, La pardocracia o la trayectoria de una clase peligrosa en la
Venezuela de los siglos XVIII y XIX, El Taller de la Historia, 5, 5, Cartagena de Indias (2013), 105 123.
59
Twinam, Ann, Public lives, private secrets: gender, honor, sexuality, and illegitimacy in colonial Spanish
America, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.
60
Thibaud, Coup ttes, brl cazes peurs et dsirs dHati dans lAmrique de Bolivar: Rvolutions dans
laire carabe, Annales HSS 58, 2 (2003), 305331; Lavia, Venezuela en tiempos de revolucin, 111-131.
 15

That is why the Captain General of Venezuela rejected groups of men from other places that had
contact with the French Caribbean first of all, the black and colored allies of the Spanish troops in
Santo Domingo (who set a bad example for their own pardos), but also war prisoners from Santo
Domingo (which the Spanish colonial authorities of the empire routinely banished to peripheral
fortresses like Puerto Cabello in Venezuela), and deserters from the French forces.
I will now proceed spatially, taking the revolution in Saint-Domingue (August 1791) as a
starting point.

b) Santo Domingo: fighting the French and an effort to correct history by using the rebellious multres
and ex-slaves

The nearest territory to Saint-Domingue by land (with an unclear frontier) was the Spanish
colony of Santo Domingo, today the Dominican Republic. For one hundred years, the French colony
was an extremely dynamic plantation colony, while Spanish Santo Domingo manifest a kind of slow-
motion colonialism with many free colored farmers, some big cattle ranches with enslaved cowboys, a
strong and informal smuggling economy, as well as thriving urban sector that included some powerful
white families. The Spanish in the Caribbean still saw the French as intruders; the old familiar
Spanish name for the (now) French part of Hispaniola was Guarico.
The most important point is that with the declaration of war between revolutionary France and
Spain, Spanish neutrality in Santo Domingo came to an end and through veiled efforts they began to
integrate black rebels in the Spanish army as tropas auxiliares.61 With this dramatic change of position
by the Spaniards, as Javier Lavia writes, the situation became untenable for the French Republicans
(the most well known being Lger-Felicit Sonthonax and tienne Polverel 62). The French
commissioners were gradually losing what little support they had in the field. These developments
weakened Republican power in the French part of the island, which was practically reduced to the
cities, while on the border with Santo Domingo groups of auxiliary and Spanish troops were able to
carry out raids. In the northern parts of Saint-Domingue the English entered the territory. Between the
61
For French ex-slaves in the Spanish armed forces, see: Jorge Victoria Ojeda, La aventura imperial de
Espaa en la revolucin haitiana. Impulso y dispersin de los negros auxiliares: el caso de San Fernando Ak,
Yucatn, Secuencia 49 (2001), 70-85; Victoria Ojeda, Tras los sueos de libertad: las tropas auxiliares de Jean
Franois al fin de la guerra en Santo Domingo, 1793-1795, in Salvador Broseta Perales, Mara del Carmen
Corona Marzol, Manuel Chust Calero, et al., Las Ciudades y la Guerra, 1750-1898. Actas del I Congreso
internacional Nueva Espaa y las Antillas, (Castelln: Publicaciones de la Universidad Jaume I, 2002), 509-524;
Jorge Victoria Ojeda, Jean Franois y Biassou: Dos lderes olvidados del la historia de la revolucin haitiana (y
de Espaa), Carribbean Studies 34, 2 (July December 2006), 163-204; Nicols Rey, Les chefs de la
Rvolution hatienne en exil, de Saint-Domingue lAmrique centrale, in Giulia Bonacci, et al. (sous la
direction de), La Rvolution hatienne au-del de ses frontires, Paris: Karthala, 2006, 123-139; Nicols Rey,
Carabes noirs et negros franceses (Antilles/ Amrique Centrale). Le periple des Noirs rvolutionnaires,
Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos,5 (2005), mis en ligne le 17 fvrier 2006 (29. Juni 2006), in
http://nuevomundo.revues.org/document211.html (06. July 2006); Ada Ferrer, An Unlikely Alliance: Cuba,
Santo Domingo, and the Black Auxiliaries, Ferrer, Freedoms Mirror , 83-145.
62
Robert L. Stein, Lger Felicit Sonthonax: The Lost Sentinel of the Republic, (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson
Univ Press, 1985); Robert Stein, The Abolition of Slavery in the North, West, and South of Saint-Domingue,
The Americas 41 (1985), 48-55.
 16

Spanish and the English forces, groups of former slaves and other rebels coalesced and took control of
the interior of the colony (many of the bands were troops of African soldiers). 63
Meanwhile, in Europe, the 1795 Treaty of Basel (which ceded the Spanish part of Hispaniola
to France) put an end to the war between Spain and France, and started the intense circulation of
French texts and materials in the Caribbean and in tierra firme as well.64 In 1797, after a series of large
and complicated wars, Toussaint Louverture and his generals had overthrown the other groups and
powers, and tried to organize a new state, a new society, and a new economy. 65
Napoleons coming to power and peace with Spain revived the interest of France in the
colonial world. The French tried to reconquer the West Indies, especially Saint-Domingue (as a
keystone of a renewed French colonial territory in the Americas, between Louisiana and Cayenne),
assignung the mission to General Leclerc, but the resistance of former slaves and the scourge of
malaria defeated the campaign in 1803.66 The independence of the ex-French colony caused a huge
contingent of French royalists, revolutionary soldiers, former allies of the Spanish or English, and
deserters rampant in the Caribbean to look for a place to stay or to settle. They were, as we know from
the earlier history of tierra firme, suspected by the Spanish colonial authorities who now more than
ever saw every Frenchman as a danger to the stability of the empire. 67 Humboldt mentions some of
them at Cartagena de Indias: We spent [] six very uncomfortable days in a very miserable inn. In it
were S[aint] Domingues refugee officers, filled with wrath against Toussaint, the general of the
Blacks.68
The refugees from the French part of Hispaniola headed for various European colonies waiting
for the situation to be resolved favorably in their interests. Initially, they did not think of this as exile,
63
Lavia, Venezuela en tiempos de revolucin, 111-131; see also: Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution: The
British Occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793-1798, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982); Geggus, Slavery, War,
and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean, 1789-1815, in David Barry Gaspar and David P. Geggus (eds.), A
Turbulent Time. The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean, (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press 1997), 1-5; Geggus, The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 2001; Geggus, The Influence of the Haitian Revolution on Blacks in Latin
America and the Caribbean, in: Nancy Priscilla Naro, (ed.), Blacks, Coloureds and National Identity in
Nineteenth-Century Latin America, (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 2003), 38-59; Geggus, The
Sounds and Echoes of Freedom: the Impact of the Haitian Revolution in Latin America, in Darin Davis, (ed.),
Beyond Slavery: the Multifaceted Legacy of Africans in Latin America, (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006),
19-36; John K., Thornton, African Soldiers in the Haitian Revolution, in Laurent Dubois and Julius S. Scott,
(eds.), Origins of the Black Atlantic, (New York: Routledge Press, 2009), 195-213.
64
Fernando Carrera Montero, Las complejas relaciones de Espaa con La Espaola: El Caribe hispano frente a
Santo Domingo y Saint Domingue 1789-1803, (Santo Domingo: Fundacin Garca Arvalo, 2004); Thibaud,
Circulations rpublicaines et politisation en Cte-Ferme (1791-1808), in Thibaud, Un
Nouveau Monde rpublicain (Chapitre 2forthcoming).
65
Mats Lundahl, Toussaint LOuverture and the War Economy of Saint-Domingue, 1796-1802,, Slavery &
Abolition VI (1985), pp. 122-138; Dubois, War and Revolution, in Dubois, A Colony of Citizens. Revolution &
Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804, (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North
Carolina Press, 2004), 222-248.
66
Marcel Dorigny and Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, (sous la direction de), La France et les Amriques au temps de
Jefferson et de Miranda, (Paris: Socit des tudes robespierristes, 2001); Philippe R. Girard, Napolon
Bonaparte and the Emancipation Issue in Saint-Domingue, 1799-1804, in : French Historical Studies 32 :4 (Fall
2009), 587-618.
67
Lavia, Venezuela en tiempos de revolucin,, 111-131.
68
Humboldt, Reise auf dem Ro Magdalena, durch die Anden und durch Mexico. Aus den Reisetagebchern, ed.
Faak, (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1986/1990), I, p. 58.
 17

since they could return to the colony and choose to maintain their properties there. Events, however,
made what had originally been a refuge become, in many cases, a permanent residence for the French
emigrs. At first, the emigrants headed for nearby areas in the Caribbean, in what they considered an
escape. A considerable group of them first moved to the Spanish ex-colony of Santo Domingo (that is,
to the city of Santo Domingo69), since crossing the border was a move to save their lives. There they
may have met ex-slaves from Saint-Domingue, who were now military allies of the Spanish. When in
1801 the troops of Toussaint also occupied the Spanish part of La Hispaniola, declaring the abolition
of slavery, they fled once again to another territory.70 A second group went to Jamaica, hoping that the
British war against revolutionary France could also reconquer the colony of Saint-Domingue and re-
establish the old colonial order. In Venezuela, as we know, they were not welcomed. After a brief
hiatus in these areas, many of the exiles moved to Cuba, where they established their permanent
residence and boosted crop production in both sugar and coffee. Finally, another group decided to
retire to the United States following the Louisiana Purchase, where they settled permanently (this
group grew greatly after the expulsion of all French from the Spanish territories in 1809, as seen
below).71

c) Cuba and Puerto Rico: Haiti as an icon of terror and a motor for the development of Second
Slavery

Here I will only mention the number of French migrants (emigrs) to Spanish Cuba and their formal
expulsion in 1809 when the Junta Central, allied to Great Britain, decreed the expulsion of all French
emigrs from Spanish-American territories. Between 1791 and 1803, the waves of emigrs incuded
those who entered and remained in Santiago.72 Alain Yacou recounted that, between June 1803 and
January 31, 1804 alone, 18,213 people from Saint-Domingue had reached Santiago de Cuba (a census
in 1808 of Santiago de Cuba listed about 7,500 French, 22% of the urban population, of whom only
28% were actually born in France). It seems that the total that came from Santo Domingo to Cuba
reached 30,000 men, women and children (many of them former slaves), of which two-thirds came in
69
Santo Domingo itself has had a extremely complicated status, because, since the Treaty of 1795 between
Spain and France, it was formally a French colony, see: Fernando Pic, One Frenchman, Four Revolutions:
General Ferrand and the Peoples of the Caribbean, (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2011).
70
Popkin, Jeremy D., 'You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010).
71
Lavia, Venezuela en tiempos de revolucin, 111-131.
72
Olga Portuondo Ziga, Santiago de Cuba desde su fundacin hasta la Guerra de los Diez Aos, (Santiago de
Cuba: Editorial Oriente, 1996), 111; see also: Bohumil Badura, Los Franceses en Santiago de Cuba a mediados
del ao de 1808,, Ibero-Americana Pragensia 5 (1971), 157-160; Gabriel Debien, Les rfugis de Saint-
Domingue expulss de La Havane en 1809, Anuario de Estudios Americanos 35 (1978), 555-610 ; Yacou,
Lexpulsion des Franais de Saint-Domingue rfugis dans la rgion orientale de lle de Cuba, 1808-1810,
Caravelle. Cahiers du Monde Hispanique et Luso-Brsilien 39, (Le Mirail: Universit de Toulouse, 1982), 49-
64; Paul Lachance, The 1809 Immigration of Saint-Domingue Refugees to New Orleans: Reception, Integration
and Impact,, Louisiana History XXIX/2 (Spring 1988), 114124 ; Yacou, Santiago de Cuba a la hora de la
revolucin de Santo Domingo (1790-1804), Del Caribe, Santiago de Cuba, 26 (1997), 73-80; Mara Elena
Orozco, Juan Bautista Vaillant y la ciudad de Santiago de Cuba (1788-1795), Santiago 79, (Santiago de Cuba,
Julio-Dic. de 1999), 93-111; Portuondo Ziga, La inmigracin negra de Saint-Domingue en la jurisdiccin de
Cuba (1798-1809), in: Portuondo Ziga, Entre Esclavos y libres de Cuba colonial, (Santiago de Cuba:
Editorial Oriente, 2003), 58-97.
 18

1803.73 In 1809, after the expulsion-decree from Santiago, a total of 8,870 people left. Most went to
Louisiana.74
But in Cuba, it was not only a question of French migration in and French migration out. With
the islands extremely rich soils and with the astute oligarchic elite of Havana, many of the French
former managers of Saint-Domingue habitations (plantations) stayed on the island, hired by Cuban
plantation owners (hacendados) to quickly develop and intensify the export of tropical agriculture
crops through mass slavery. In the East (oriente) and near Matanzas, the slaves were employed
primarily on coffee plantations (many of the plantations (cafetales), above all in Oriente, were French
properties); in the West, in the so-called Cuba grande, on great sugar estates (ingenios). However, the
protagonists of the historically accurate comparisons and transfers (travels) reacted immediately to the
revolution in Saint-Domingue. Francisco de Arango y Parreo (1765-1837), the Adam Smith of
Americas plantation economy who met Humboldt in Havana,75 wrote in 1808: On November 20,
1791, the news about the Guarico [old Spanish name for Le Cap] insurrection reached Madrid. 76 On
that same day, Arango wrote to the King: how is the sugar production situation in Saint-Domingue;
how is it in Cuba; what must change?77 As a member of the Cuban elite, Arango played a central role
in politics. In his famous Discurso sobre la agricultura de la Habana y medios de fomentarla (1792),
Arango insisted in using comparisons to fabricate a myth about the goodness of Latin American
slavery (this myth was adopted by Frank Tannenbaum in the middle of the twentieth century):
The fate of our free and slaves is more comfortable and happy than that of the French [in
Saint-Domingue]. Their numbers are fewer than those of the whites, and in addition, the
respectable garrison in Havana must contain them. My greatest misgivings [about security
before a slave revolt] are for the future, for the time when the fortune of the island grows, and
five hundred or six hundred thousand Africans are on its soil. From today I speak for the
future, and I want our precautions to start at this very moment. 78

In August 1790, a bando (regulation) was issued that prohibited bringing slaves from the
French islands to Cuba. In 1793/1794 the rumor was spread that all esclavos franceses (French

73
Jos Morales, The Hispaniola diaspora, 1791-1850: Puerto Rico, Cuba, Louisiana and other host societies,
Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Connecticut, 1986; Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International [1990];
Rebecca J.Scott and Jean-Michel Hbrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation,
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).
74
Portuondo Ziga, Santiago de Cuba, 118; see also: Robert L.Paquette, Revolutionary Saint Domingue in the
Making of Territorial Louisiana,, in Gaspar and Geggus (eds.), A Turbulent Time, 204-225; Alejandro Gmez,
Fidelidad bajo el viento: revolucin y contrarrevolucin en las Antillas Francesas en la experiencia de algunos
oficiales franceses emigrados a tierra firme (1790-1795), (Mxico: siglo XXI editores, 2004); Alejandro Gmez,
Le spectre de la Rvolution noire: l'impact de la Rvolution hatienne dans le Monde atlantique, 1790-1886,
(Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013).
75
Tomich, The Wealth of the Empire: Francisco de Arango y Parreo, Political Economy, and the Second
Slavery in Cuba, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 1 (2003), 4-28;
76
Francisco Arango y Parreo, Obras de D. Francisco de Arango y Parreo, 2 vols., (La Habana: Publicaciones
de la Direccin de Cultura del Ministerio de Educacin, 1952), I, 55.
77
Ibid., I, 111.
78
Ibid., I, 148-149. For background see: Matt D., Childs, The Present Time Is Very Delicate. Cuban Slavery
and the Changing Atlantic World, 1750-1850, in Childs, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and Struggle
against Atlantic Slavery, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 21-45; Ferrer, Freedoms
Mirror. Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution passim.
 19

slaves - as slaves from the French colonies in Cuba were called) were to be set free because of the
French Abolition decrees and by a new bando from the Spanish king.
One amo (master) of these French slaves, Fernando Rodrguez, complained that one of his
slaves had demanded his freedom with the following words:
that the Blacks of the colony of French Cap [Le Cap Franais] were all free because they had
acquired freedom [que los Negros de la Colonia del cabo francs todos eran libres, porque ellos se
habian adquiridos la libertad.]79 Rodrguez then had the slave thrown into prison. The following day,
he organized a meeting of amos of the negros franceses and had placed a sign around the neck of the
slave who had demanded his freedom. The inscription was, This is the fruit of imaginary freedom of
the French Negroes: in virtue is true freedom [Este es el fruto de la imaginada libertad de los Negros
franceses: en la virtud se halla la verdadera libertad]. 80 The circulars prohibiting the purchase of
slaves from Saint-Domingue and other contact zones of the large Caribbean rebellion were issued
frequently, demonstrating their limited efficacy in the face of a deeply rooted tradition among the
slaveholders, especially from Jamaica and Saint-Domingue, of smuggling rebellious slaves and
maroons to Cuba and selling them there.81 In 1796, a Bando of Captain General Luis de las Casas
again forbade any further introduction of slaves that were are not bozal negroes from the coast of
Africa [Negros bozales procedentes de la costa de Africa]. 82 No slaves from the French colonies
were admitted to Cuban ports, and, if they were picked up somewhere else, they had to be taken out of
the country again, subject to penalty. However, all colonial officials recognized, given the mass exodus
of Saint-Domingue, the difficulty in enforcing such orders.
The General Captain Someruelos sent Arango in 1803 on an observation mission to the north
of Saint-Domingue during the war. Arango wrote in his report on the parte francesa 1803: The pen
falls from my hands when I try to start the sad painting that currently can be done about that what was
very recently the most flourishing and richest colony worldwide. 83 Arango describes the terrible
atrocities of the French against the rebellious blacks. He suggested not recognizing the independence
of Saint-Domingue, but supporting the French in their attempt to suppress the revolution. Of the terror
of the French, mostly Jacobin, officers and troops, Arango asks under the question What is the fate or
destiny of the negroes who are taken captive? He writes: All die and it has happened since the end
of the time of General Leclerc [the leader of the expedition. He died in 1803 of yellow fever - MZ].
The gentlest death for those unfortunates is to be shot or killed, and it is not the worst, when they were

79
Archivo Nacional de Cuba, La Habana (ANC), Junta de Fomento de la Isla de Cuba (JF), leg. 72, no. 2774
(Noviembre 13 de 1795): Relativo las precauciones y seguridad en orden los negros en gral., y en particular
los introducidos de las colonias estranjeras, f. 30v.
80
Ibid., f. 31r.
81
Belmonte Postigo, La esclavitud en Santiago de Cuba, 1780-1803. Espacios de poder y negociacin en un
contexto de expansin y crisis, Sevilla: Universidad Pablo de Olavide, 2007 (tesis de doctorado), p. 394, see:
Archivo General de Indias, Sevilla (AGI), Cuba 1434: Carta del Gobernador de Cuba al Capitn General de la
Isla, Santiago de Cuba, 18 de agosto de 1790.
82
AGI, Estado 4, N 3: Bando del Capitn General de la Isla de Cuba D. Luis de las Casas, La Habana, 25 de febrero
de 1796.
83
Arango, Comisin de Arango en Santo Domingo, in: Arango, Obras, I, 348.
 20

back to back to be thrown into the sea always two by two. What shocked me, comes from the mouth of
the Chief of Brigade Nerau, commander of the guard of General-in-chief that he had a captive black
woman thrown to the dogs in the night before and another [message stating] that that morning he had
surprised troupe of twelve rebels, whose leader was passed to the [French] troops, which had asked for
him alive, in order to tear out his eyes. 84 Although the intellectuals and writers of the master cultures
of the Caribbean disseminated a rather different account of this event, this white terror of the
Jacobin officers was known to contemporaries, and, despite the tepid protests (some by Arango), it
was generally accepted as a remedy against the insurgent Negro. The insurgents responded in turn
with a massacre of the whites. That is why in his 1804 diary (Havana) Humboldt annotated one of the
few direct references to the ongoing conflict in Haiti: Le Terrorisme regnait en 1803 aux Colonies. 85
But the most interesting reality was that Creole oligarchic spokesmen, like Arango, developed
the image of the black terror as a synonym for revolution in general, using this icon of fear as an
acceleration propellant, almost like a rocket engine, toward the development of the Second Slavery in
Cuba and Puerto Rico (mass slavery and technological modernity on sugar estates with intense
Atlantic slaving). The most important result of the slave revolution, and the secret model of an
extremely modern (and antislavery) Haiti in the Spanish Islands of the Caribbean, was an extremely
strong counter-revolution in the form of economic modernity and reformism in Cuba and Puerto
Rico.86 The Spanish king feared the loss of Cuba so much that, after the restauration of absolutism in
the metropolis 1814, his gift to the Creole oligarchy was full capitalist property rights and the right
to take the forests of the island.87 However, they had to accept Spanish governors as military dictators.
Another extremely important dimension (1760-1850), not only spatial, Jane Landers highlights
from the perspective of the southern coastlines of North America (the Northern frontier of the
84
Ibid., 363.
85
Humboldt, Diary of 1804, p. 10, Biblioteka Jagielloska Krakw, Oddzia Rkopisw, Al. v. Humboldt
Nachla 3; see also: Alejandro Gmez, Le spectre de la Rvolution noire: l'impact de la Rvolution hatienne
dans le Monde atlantique , 1790-1886, (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013); in general, including
the paradigmatic acting of Victor Hugues, see: Eichmann, Flavio, Weder Freiheit noch Gleichheit. Terror und
Abolition auf Guadeloupe 1794-1801, in: Mittelweg 36:4 (2015), S. 64-85.
86
Sergio Guerra Vilaboy, Frustracin in Guerra Vilaboy, Jugar con fuego. Guerra social y
utopa en la independencia de Amrica Latina, (La Habana: Editorial Casa de las
Amricas, 2010), 223-262. For the other modernity of Haiti between 1804 and 1850 see
Carolyn Fick, Revolutionary Saint-Domingue and the Emerging Atlantic: Paradigms of
Sovereignty, in Tomich and Zeuske (eds.), The Second Slavery: Mass Slavery, World-
Economy, and Comparative Microhistories, Vol. 2, (Binghamton: Binghamton University,
2009) (special issue of Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center, Binghamton
University XXXI, 2 & 3, 2008), Bd. 1, 121-144; Fischer, Bolvar in Haiti: Republicanism in
the Revolutionary Atlantic, in Carla Calarg, Raphael Dalleo, Luis Duno-Gottberg, and
Clevis Headley (eds.), Haiti and the Americas, (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2013), 25-53; Ferrer, Revolutions Disavowal: Cuba and a Counterrevolution of Slavery,
Ferrer, Fredoms Mirror , 146-188.
87
Zeuske, Schwarze Karibik. Sklaven, Sklavereikulturen und Emanzipation, (Zrich:
Rotpunktverlag, 2004); Zeuske, The Second Slavery: Modernity, mobility, and identity of
captives in Nineteenth-Century Cuba and the Atlantic World,, in Lavia and Zeuske
(eds.), The Second Slavery. Mass Slaveries and Modernity in the Americas and in the
Atlantic Basin, (Berlin; Muenster; New York: LIT Verlag, 2014) Sklaverei und
Postemanzipation/ Slavery and Postemancipation/ Esclavitud y postemancipacin; Vol. 6,
113-142.
 21

Caribbean) in the direction of Saint-Domingue / Haiti (formally until 1804 part of the Spanish
empire): colored and black Atlantic creoles, militiamen and maroons decided in their struggle for
abolition, social change and social standing for alliances with monarchical powers. 88 To say it in the
words of an essay about a book by Jane Landers: why in time of revolutions that touted a rhetoric of
freedom, Atlantic Creolesenslaved or recently freedso frequently sided with European
monarchies rather than with revolutionaries.? 89
Now I will examine other groups of French in the Caribbean. These groups seldom had, or
would not be able to find, a fixed spatial settlement.

d) All over the Spanish Caribbean and Spanish America: Deserters, prisoners of all kind, as well as
revolutionary agents.

Loyalist deserters, disruptive officers and revolutionary corsairs

In 1790, France sent troops to the colonies to enforce the colonial compact. In principle, the planters and
settlers of Saint-Domingue, Martinique, Guadeloupe (and, in some distance, Cayenne) saw the military
reinforcements as the salvation of their property, which was threatened by radical groups in general. The
majority of officers and sailors in the reinforcements were loyal to the Crown, and opposed both
autonomist attempts by settlers and social change by the revolutionaries. The soldiers and younger officers
were often Jacobins. However, the repression carried out by the French army and navy did not solve the
problems of the West Indies. In January 1793, Charles-Joseph Mascarne, Chevalier de Rivire, the
division chief of the Leeward Islands, and some higher officers had to abruptly withdraw from the islands
as the Jacobins threatened to sink the fleet.90 The colonists from Martinique, where the revolution was also
in the air, did not accept the royalist presence as a majority of them attempted to achieve self-government,
and thus decided to support the Jacobins. This forced the withdrawal of troops and officers who remained
loyal to the Crown. Royalist French army officers fled to Trinidad, where they hoped to receive protection
from the Spanish Crown. For them, the Spanish monarch was primarily Bourbon, and, according to them,
the family pact that was signed in 1762 was still in force. These soldiers were well received by the
Spanish military authorities, as they provided a good understanding of the situation in the French colonies.
This was necessary for fighting the colonial war. The Spanish crown accepted the French troops oath of
allegiance to the king and the Spanish army enlisted them with the same rank they had in the French
military. The Spanish commander wanted to send them to the border with Santo Domingo, where the

88
Jane G. Landers, Rebellion and Royalism in Spanish Florida: The French Revolution on
Spains Northern Colonial Frontier, in Daviv B. Gaspar; Geggus, A Turbulent Time. The
French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press 1997), 163-170; Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions
(Cambridge; London: Harvard University Press, 2010).
89
Kathryn Joy McKnight, Breaking through National Boundaries: Afro-Creoles, Revolutions, and Nation-
Formation in the US and the Caribbean, in A Contracorriente Vol. 8:1 (Fall 2010), 558-568.
90
Lavia, Venezuela en tiempos de revolucin, 111-131; see also: Anne Protin-Dumon,
Les Jacobins des Antilles ou lesprit de la libert dans les Iles-du-Vent, Revue d'histoire
moderne et contemporaine 35:2 (June 1988), 275-304; Gmez, Fidelidad bajo el viento ,
passim.
 22

Spanish had opened a front. This led to heavy conflict. The governor of Santo Domingo (who was also
Captain General) did not accept this proposal. As we know, he counted several black units among his
troops in the struggle against the French, and he considered the alliance with former slaves more
important than anything that the royalist officers could offer. In fact, the Spanish, in collaboration with the
black auxiliary troops under Toussaint, had begun an offensive on the French side of the island and had
regained some territory. This occurred between 1793 and 1795, and was the military background for the
abolition of slavery by the French commissioners in Saint-Domingue (French abolition itself led Toussaint
to change sides from the Spanish to the French). 91 The Spanish ordered the transfer of the French officers
to Caracas where they awaited their final destination. However, the new destination never seemed to
arrive. One high French officer sent a letter to the Captain General of Caracas in which he complained of
the inaction to which they had been subjected. He asked to be sent to another part of America or to Spain
where they could combat the revolution in Europe. The reasons for such inaction on the part of the
Spanish included: first, the lack of money, a secular problem of the Royal Treasury in the colonies. The
treasury could not afford the extraordinary expenses represented by French military services. Second, the
counter-revolutionary fever that affected colonial authorities. This fever, as we know, led them to see
grave dangers in all things French, and the royalist officers were not free of suspicion. This delirium
especially affected the Captain General of Caracas.92 After innumerable conflicts and suspicions, the
solution came from the Court. A royal order, seeing the impossibility of occupying the royalist migrants in
Caribbean fronts, would handle the officers in Europe. Carbonell met the French royalists in La Guaira
and dispatched them to Cdiz on different dates. However, if emigrants and French military were a
problem for the Captain General in Caracas, the biggest headache was generated by the French military
prisoners who were captured in Santo Domingo.

Prisoners of war in the Spanish Caribbean: the most complicated problem

The war against France in the colonies had favorable results for the Spanish colonial army, at least for the
first few months. The collaboration of Saint Domingue slaves and their enlistment in the Spanish army led
to some victories, which resulted in the occupation of some territories of the French part of the island. The
victories resulted in a considerable number of French prisoners (of all kinds, including blacks loyal to
their ex-masters). They could not be held in the Spanish part of the island due to a lack of security. The
governor of Santo Domingo feared that the French presence on the island would cause a similar disaster
that had been suffered on the French part. Naturally, the most dangerous prisoners were soldiers of the
French army, revolutionaries, often even Jacobins, and all addicted to the Republic. With this in the

91
Geggus, From His Most Catholic Majesty to the Godless Republique: the volte-face of Toussaint
Louverture and the ending of slavery in Saint Domingue, Revue franaise d'Outre-Mer LXV, 241 (1978), 481-
499.
92
ngel Sanz Tapia, Los militares emigrados y los prisioneros franceses en Venezuela durante la guerra contra
la revolucin: un aspecto fundamental de la poca de la pre-emancipacin, (Caracas: I.P.G.H./ Comisin
de Historia, 1977); Lavia, Venezuela en tiempos de revolucin, 111-131.
 23

background, it is easy to understand why no colonial governor was at ease with prisoners of this kind in
his territory.93

The governor of Santo Domingo had an easy excuse to expel the French in his jurisdiction. The
war in his territory caused enough problems without adding the further insecurity and problems that
French prisoners could bring to their territory. Therefore, he proposed that prisoners captured in the war
were to be transferred to Puerto Cabello (the strongest fortress on the Venezuelan coast), and from there to
Havana94 or Spain for added security. A majority of the prisoners were taken first to Venezuela. However,
the circumstances of the war prevented the transfer of these prisoners from Venezuela to other prisons,
despite repeated protests by both Pedro Carbonell, Captain General of Caracas, and the Junta of Caracas.
After the first shipment of prisoners from Santo Domingo followed several longer groups of prisoners,
causing angry protests from Carbonell, who was already, as we know, in a counter-revolutionary fever.
The governor of Santo Domingo justified sending prisoners to Puerto Cabello because of the difficult
situation on his island, and because of problems relating to revolutionary propaganda that the prisoners in
that area could cause.95

As already mentioned, the lack of resources in the royal treasury had to be added to the war
conditions in Santo Domingo. It was for this reason that Joaqun Garca, Captain General of Santo
Domingo, felt obliged to send the prisoners to Venezuela. The governor of the island distinguished
between two groups of prisoners: (mostly white) patriots, cause of all the revolutionary disorder, and
blacks. The patriots came from the expeditionary forces of the metropolis, and were regarded as
propagandists of the revolution. The blacks, although they were the ones who made the revolution and
achieved independence, were not considered dangerous by the Captain General of Santo Domingo. In
sending black prisoners to Venezuela, he proposed that they be sold as slaves. The problem for the
Venezuelan (and Cuban and Puertorican) elites was that because of their pardos , seaman and slaves
they feared these blacks even more than the patriots.

The attitude of the Captain General of Santo Domingo is understandable, given that the Spanish
army had a body of ex-slaves from Saint-Domingue who fought against the French on the island.
However, the tolerance of Joaqun Garca toward blacks was not shared by Pedro Carbonell in Venezuela.
Carbonell saw in the French blacks the greatest danger to the security of the Captaincy of Venezuela, as
they sought the abolition of slavery and the end of colonial rule. Naturally, the Captain General of
Venezuela refused that blacks be sold in the Captaincy as slaves (as Cuban elites did). He assumed that
in all these provinces there will be those who buy, or even get for nothing at home, some of these slaves,

93
Lavia, Venezuela en tiempos de revolucin, 111-131.
94
The Captain General of Cuba flatly refused the entry of French prisoners because of the problems they could
cause. See: Naranjo Orovio, Consuelo, La amenaza haitiana, un miedo interesado: poder y fomento de la
poblacin blanca en Cuba, in Gonzalez-Ripoll Navarro; Orovio Naranjo; Ada Ferrer; Gloria Garcia; Josef
Opartn (eds.), El rumor de Haiti en Cuba ..., 83-178; Ada Ferrer, Cuba en la sombra de Hait: Noticias,
sociedad y esclavitud,, in ibid., 179-231; Ferrer, An Excess of Communication: The Capture of News in a
Slave Society, Ferrer, Freedoms Mirror , 44-82.
95
Lavia, Venezuela en tiempos de revolucin, 111-131.
 24

because nobody wants to take a pernicious seducer into their family who is embroiled with a maximum of
insubordination and freedom.96

The influence of French prisoners and blacks was felt, as the Caracas authorities stated, among
the most disadvantaged groups in society. In fact, these groups offered active resistance to the domination
of the Creoles, and had openly confronted the complicity between the metropolis and the creoles, but
without resorting to the slogans of the French revolutionaries. Although the impact of the revolution in
Haiti breached the monolithic block of American slave societies, it should be emphasized that the French
revolution did not have a direct ideological influence but was rather a stimulus against the inertia of
colonial society. The ambiguity comes from the use of the word freedom by marginal groups, which
Creoles had frenchified because of their fear of revolution in general and especially a revolution of the
pardos.

The impact of the French presence in the Captaincy of Venezuela led the colonial authorities to
detect (subversive) conversations and rumors among the colored population, free and slave, and among
the inmates of La Guaira. The Junta instructed its members tofind out the true state of opinions among
slaves and free people of broken color [and] mixed descent.97 The only manifestation of (French)
revolutionary influence among the population of free colored and slave Venezuela was brought before the
Junta of November 2, 1793, and referred to conversations that some informants had heard among blacks.98
After long and extremely complicated conflicts between different sectors of the colonial bureaucracy
involving the Captain General, Intendant, and the military officers both inside and outside of Venezuela
(and above all the commander-in-chief of the Royal navy), the Venezuelans had to accept some hundreds
of prisoners from Santo Domingo. Given the pressures and reasons of the Captain General of the Navy,
they had to yield, and nearly 1000 prisoners were jailed in La Guaira, the harbor of Caracas. This
happened despite the insistence by the Junta of Caracas about the danger posed to these countries and
throughout the mainland [of] the contagious and execrable opinions that have perverted and ruined France
and its colonies, these ideas have upset the whole social order, and the most sacred principles of religion
and state. [This danger consists in the fact that,] as stated, the prisoners still bear the harmful doctrinal
system of French regicide and their disheveled freedom and equality, and also some who embrace plain
irreligion and pursue the temple and altar with the criminal effort to disseminate such detestable ideas.99

As Javier Lavia emphasizes, there was only a single vestige that allows us to detect a possible
influence of the French revolutionaries in the Captaincy of Venezuela. Lavia traces what he sees as a
direct French influence the Conspiracy of La Guaira in 1797 that was said to be inspired by the

96
Archivo General de Indias, Sevilla, Seccin Estado, leg 58: Informe de la Junta de Caracas (november 9,
1793), cf.: Lavia, Venezuela en tiempos de revolucin, 118.
97
Ibid.: Informe de la Junta de Caracas (november 2, 1793), cf.: Lavia, Venezuela en tiempos de revolucin,
119-120
98
Ibid., 119-120.
99
Ibid., Informe de la Junta de Caracas (November 13, 1793), cf. Lavia, Venezuela en
tiempos de revolucin, 117-120.
 25

example of the French prisoners.100 As we know, Narciso del Valle and Jos Mara Espaa were
executed in 1799 and Manuel Gual died from poisoning in Trinidad (island) in October, 1800 (San
Jos de Orua). Other works analyze more traces of French ideas, materials, texts, and
revolutionaries.101 However, if we think of it it spatially, La Guaira, the most important harbor of
colonial Venezuela, or the Costa de Caracas, was a crucial point of cultural transfer (transferts
culturels) and circulation between the mainland and the Caribbean Sea not so much in ideological
sense, but in terms of the real mobility (willing or unwilling) of people, goods, information and
materials.102 The Caribbean, as part of the Atlantic in revolution, deserves special consideration.
Many years ago Julius Scott began to analyze the revolutionary role of seaman and their networks.
They had their own ideas and programs of revolution. But we do not really know to what extent they
brought French revolutionary elements to the Caribbean through their Maritime radicalism. 103
Looking from the mainland and at the national territories (with their respective historiographies), we
cannot understand seas like the Caribbean and oceans like the Atlantic as revolutionary spaces in their
own right. Many of the French in the Caribbean were corsairs and pirates, and many of the humble
French deserters, as well as some prisoners and maroons, fled to them. Rebellion on sea, led by French
corsairs and revolutionaries (some of them slavers in the meantime), communicated the revolutions at
land.104 Moreover, we have come full circle - we are back in Venezuela as a baseline of the Caribbean,
not only on the land side, but also on the sea side.

Humboldt rarely mentions these rumors, conflicts, rebellions, and conspiracies directly,
whether at land and never at sea, not because he was unaware or was under pressure to keep quiet
about them (which was the case for imperial officials), but because he considered that it was more
important to end slavery through reformist measures. Humboldt was perfectly well aware of some
oral communication networks, including those in Venezuela; the monks on missions, whether
Capuchins or foreigners, told him many things. When he noted for first time the name Gual, he
writes Wal, because he had not seen the name written, only heard it, possibly uttered in a very low

100
Aizpura Aguirre, La Conspiracin por dentro: un anlisis de las declaraciones de la
conspiracin de La Guaira de 1797, 213-344; Gmez, Entre rsistance, piraterie et
rpublicanisme. Mouvements insurrectionnels dinspiration rvolutionnaire franco-
antillaise sur la Cte de Caracas, 1794 1800, in: Travaux et recherches de lUMLV,
No.11 (Janvier 2006), S. 91-120; Lavia, Venezuela en tiempos de revolucin, 111-131.
101
Cristina Soriano, Rumors of Change: Repercussions of Caribbean Turmoil and Social
Conflicts in Venezuela (17901810), (New York: New York University, 2011); Edgardo Prez
Morales, Itineraries of Freedom. Revolutionary Travels and Slave Emancipation in
Colombia and the Greater Caribbean. 1789-1830, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan,
2013).
102
Thibaud, Circulations rpublicaines et politisation en Cte-Ferme (1791-1808),
(Chapitre 2), in Thibaud, Un Nouveau Monde rpublicain (forthcoming).
103
Nyklas Frykman, Clare Anderson, Lex Heerma van Voss, and Marcus Rediker, Mutiny
and Maritime Radicalism in the Age of Revolution. An Introduction, International Review
of Social History 58 (2013), 1-14. (Special Issue: Mutiny and Maritime Radicalism in the
Age of Revolution: A Global Survey. Ed. Anderson; Frykman; Voss and Rediker).
104
Still one of the best works: Carlos Vidales, Corsarios y piratas de la Revolucin Francesa en las aguas de la
emancipacin hispanoamericana, in: Caravelle. Cahiers du monde hispanique et luso-brsilien, 54 (1990), 247-
262.
 26

voice.105 Humboldt notes about an old Irishmen, Gaspar Juliac y Marmin, in Puerto Cabello: They
found in the papers of a plotter (his son-in-law who fled to France), that [Jos Mara] Espaa wanted
to change the [Caracas] province administration after the great tragedy. 106 Humboldt refers to the
1797 conspiracy and to the sad death of Jos Mara Espaa. When Humboldt complains about the
injustice of the judicial system during the fall of 1799 in Cuman, he also mentions that The history
of the revolution [Revolutionsgeschichte - that refers again to the 1797 conspiracy of La Guaira] in
Caracas demonstrated the greatest violence, the arbitrariness of justice. 107 On March 9 or 10, 1800,
when visiting Villa de Cura to the south of Lake Valencia, he finds the Peraza sisters, whose brother
was prisoner in Havana, involved in this same Revolutionsgeschichte. 108 As evidenced in his
published diaries, Humboldt developed his rhizomatic writings about rebellions, conspiracies,
slaves, slavery, and Saint-Domingue.

Elite individuals, France and French revolution

I will not mention here in extenso the well-known examples, over-researched and presented as
hagiographic examples of the influence of the French revolution on elite individuals in Spanish
America, such as Francisco de Miranda and Simn Bolvar (Bolvar more/ Miranda less). Both had
and have deep importance for the elitist discourses about the Independencia (both then and now; there
is also a strong popular discourse and imagination about Simn Bolvar).
Miranda was a French general at the time of the Gironde, and from 1784 until 1806/1810
(with an interruption in the Caribbean, trying in 1806 to intervene manu military in Venezuela with
help of the Americans, British, and Haitians) he lived through all the vicissitudes of the French
revolution and Napoleonic policies, as well as British policies. With his French (European)
experiences, he failed grandiosely at the beginnings of the Venezuelan independence wars and racial
conflicts. Nevertheless, in some sense, he had a global biography. 109 This biography shows the failures
of liberal elites before the problems of slavery and racism, as well as racialized conflicts in plantation
societies.110 The results was that his pupil Bolvar (who had also been in France, 1804-1806) knew that
he had to be - to death or life - a military Jacobin (without talking much about it), and to use open and

105
Al. de Humboldt, Essai politique sur le Royaume de La Nouvelle-Espagne. (Paris: F. Schoell, 1811), t. IV, t. VI,
cap. XIV, p. 270.
106
Humboldt, Reise durch Venezuela, 211.
107
Humboldt, Justiz, in Humboldt, Vorabend , 108 (Doc. No. 44).
108
Humboldt, Vorabend , 278 (Doc. No. 201).
109
Knowing that Miranda had some French officers as close military advisers, it might be useful to connect his
life history with the results of more or less hagiographic literature about these French in the Indepedencia, see:
Paul Verna, Tres franceses en la historia de Venezuela, (Caracas: Monte vila, 1973); Sergio Elias Ortiz,
Franceses en la independencia de la Gran Colombia, (Bogot: Editorial ABC, 1971) (Academia Colombiana de
la Historia/ Biblioteca Eduardo Santos, Vol. 1) (2nd edition); see also about French in non-Bolivarian sectors of
the independencia-leadership: Verna, Monsieur Bideau, el mulato francs que fue el segundo organizador de la
Expedicin de Chacachacare, (Caracas: Fundacin John Boulton, 1968).
110
Marchena Fernndez, El da que los negros cantaron la marsellesa: el fracaso del liberalismo espaol en
Amrica, 1790-1823, 53-75.
 27

mass violence (guerra a muerte war to the death and playing strategically with the idea of an
Antillean slave revolution111) in order to maintain control over the movement.
In Bolvars case, it is very interesting to read his own opinions about French influences. He
only very seldom mentions to the French revolution (however, this revolution is there in his works),
but he liked to write sentences like these, mentioning his enlightened readings: Locke, Condillac,
Buffon, Dalambert, Helvetius, Montesquieu, Mably, Filangieri, Lalande, Rousseau, Voltaire, Rollin,
Berthot, and all the old classics of antiquity, and philosophers, historians, orators and poets; and all the
modern classics of Spain, France, Italy and much of the English. [Locke, Condillac, Buffon,
Dalambert, Helvetius, Montesquieu, Mably, Filangieri, Lalande, Rousseau, Voltaire, Rollin, Berthot y
todos los clsicos de la antigedad, as filsofos, historiadores, oradores y poetas; y todos los clsicos
modernos de Espaa, Francia, Italia y gran parte de los ingleses.]. 112 In the real life of ideas and
concepts, Bolvar, with his intention to be the founder of a Repblica Bolvar, was more interested in
Benjamin Constant and Jeremy Benthams theories on liberalism, utilitarism and different types of
freedom.
I cannot trace here the broader influences of the French revolution on the Independencia with
the internationalization of the wars led by Bolvar (beginning in 1816-1817). There are some examples
of personalities who were greatly influenced by French culture (like the admiral Luis Brion, born to
Walloon parents at Curaao,113 or French officers and travelers; in their memoirs, one can hear
reverberations of the French revolution).114

Conclusion. Not one French revolution, but different revolutions and many French revolutionaries

111
Demetrio Ramos, Bolvar y su experiencia antillana. Una etapa decisiva para su lnea poltica, (Caracas:
Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1990), passim; see the careful reconstruction of Southern Haiti as a Caribbean
portal of revolution and migrations: Fischer, Bolvar in Haiti: Republicanism in the Revolutionary Atlantic, 25-
53.
112
Simn Bolvar from Arequipa, May 20, 1825 to Francisco de Paula Santander, in: Simn Bolvar, Obras
Completas, 3 vols., (Caracas: Libera Piango, s.a. [1959]), II, 139. Not word on a German and John Locke is
not number one in this ranking. I have written much about Miranda and Bolvar, so I mention only the most
important books: Zeuske, Francisco de Miranda und die Entdeckung Europas. Eine Biographie,
(Hamburg/Mnster: Lit-Verlag 1995) (books.google.de/books); Zeuske, Francisco de Miranda y la modernidad
en Amrica, (Madrid: Fundacin Mapfre Tavera; Secretara de Cooperacin Iberoamricana, 2004) (Viejos
documentos, Nuevas lecturas; Velhos Documentos, Novas Leituras); Zeuske, Von Bolvar zu Chvez. Die
Geschichte Venezuelas, (Zrich: Rotpunktverlag, 2008); Zeuske, Simn Bolvar. History and Myth, Princeton:
Markus Wiener Publishers, 2012; see also the work of Marcel Dorigny and others: Dorigny; Rossignol (sous la
direction de), La France et les Amriques au temps de Jefferson et de Miranda , passim; Bnot; Dorigny
(dirs..), Rtablissement de lesclavage dans les colonies franaises. Aux orgines de Hati, (Paris: Maisonneuve &
Larose, 2003).
113
Manuel Daz Ugueto, Luis Brion, almirante de la libertad, (Caracas: El Nacional, 2009) (Coleccin Ares);
see also: Klooster, Curaao as a Transit Center to the Spanish Main and the French West Indies, in Gerd
Oostindie and Jessica V. Roitman, (eds.), Dutch Atlantic Connections, 16801800. Linking Empires, Bridging
Borders, Leiden/ Boston: Brill, 2014 (Atlantic World. Europe, africa and the americas, 15001830. Ed. by
Benjamin Schmidt and Klooster; Vol. 29), 25-51.
114
Jeanine Potelet, Introduccin, in Alberto Filippi, (dir.), Bolvar y Europa en las crnicas, el pensamiento
poltico y la historiografa, 3 vols., (Caracas: Ediciones de la Presidencia, 1986-1996), I, 209-213, and
Documentos, in: ibid., 215-287 and Filippi, Legitimidad, instituciones jurdico-polticas y formas de gobierno
en la polmica entre monrquicos y republicanos de Gran Colombia y de Francia (1828-1831), Ibid., 288-360.
 28

I have concentrated here on the cultural history of transferts culturels, circulations and on the
social history of migrations, first of all (but not only) in their socio-racial dimensions and in the
conflicts between Creole oligarchies and other groups or classes of the population of Spanish
America.115 The truth is that much of the conflict in the colonial and slave societies examined here was
already in motion when the French migrations (including slaves and ex-slaves from Saint-
Domingue) made them more visible and audible. In chronological order, the Spanish-American
revolutions as part of world or global history and in relation to the latter, the visualization and
audibility (that is, in terms of cultural history, the contemporary construction of imaginaries, fears,
rhetoric and so) would not be possible without the French revolution in Europe.
Although Manfred Kossok wrote relatively late on slavery (and abolition through revolution)
itself, the dispositive for the greater narratives of colonialism, slavery/ exploitation in spaces outside
from Europe, were already in his earlier works. 116 I think that his concepts as a historian, based on a
creative Marxism, unveiled two extremely important points related to French revolution: the
contradictions of Jacobin radicalism and the problem of an unfinished revolution first of all in
slave societies.
For further research we have to change levels away from national histories, more micro, for
personal life histories of these persons as actors harboring many dimensions (I mention only the
importance of French artisans, such as clockmakers, taylors, cooks, artists, mapmakers, scientists,
experts in colonial agriculture and tropical wars, and doctors/ pharmacists, and prisoners of all kind),
and more macro, for truly Atlantic or global narratives (not as prolongations of national or imperial
histories).117
In the Caribbean and in Spanish America, the only revolutions as compact macro-events
immediately before the Independencia were the revolutions in Saint-Domingue/Haiti and Guadeloupe.

115
One of the most important efforts to conceptualize LAmerique Latine face la Rvolution Franaise was
the above mentioned volume of the French revue Caravelle 1990, introduced by Franois-Xavier Guerra, see:
Franois-Xavier Guerra, LAmerique latine face la Rvolution franaise, Caravelle. Cahiers du monde
hispanique et luso-brsilien, 54 (1990), 7-20; see also: Brito Figueroa, Venezuela colonial: las rebeliones de
esclavos y la Revolucin Francesa. Ibid., 263-289 and: Matthias Rhrig Assuno, Ladhsion populaire aux
projets rvolutionnaires dans les socits esclvagistes: la cas du Venezuela et du Brsil (1780-1840), Ibid., 291-
213; see the debate over Guerras paradigm of the Revolucin hispana: Mdofilo Medina Pineda, En el
Bicentenario: consideraciones en torno al paradigma de Franois-Xavier Guerra sobre las revoluciones
hispnicas (In the Bicentenary: Considerations about Franois-Xavier Guerras Paradigm on the Hispanic
Revolutions), originally in: Anuario colombiano de historia social y de la cultura, 37, 1, Bogot (2010), 149-
188. (See the debate online: Francois-Xavier Guerra y las revoluciones hispnicas. Una controversia
reciente, coordinado por Luis Alberto Romero (CONICET/UBA), under:
http://historiapolitica.com/dossiers/fxguerra/ (September 07, 2014)). I agree with Medfilo Medina, when he
says about the concept of cultural history represented by F.-X. Guerra: impacta la exclusin de lo social-racial,
as como de las dimensiones econmica, militar y demogrfica [what is striking, is the exclusion of the social-
racial, as well as the economic, military and demographic dimensions] - ibid., 169).
116
Kossok, Mgen die Kolonien verderben! 1789 und die koloniale Frage, Kossok, Ausgewhlte Schriften
, III, 231-246.
117
Thibaud; Entin; Gmez; Morelli (dir.), L'Atlantique rvolutionnaire. Une perspective ibro-amricaine ,
passim; Dubois; Scott (eds.), Origins of the Black Atlantic, New York: Routledge Press, 2009; David Armitage
and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds.), The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760-1840, (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Pic, The Atlantic Revolution and Its Caribbean Scenarios, in Pic, One
Frenchman, Four Revolutions , 1-15.
 29

There was not one French revolution in the French colonies of the Caribbean, but a specific revolution
in each colony. The history of Guadeloupe, as Anne Perotin-Dumon, Laurent Dubois and Alejandro
Gmez are bringing to light,118 unveils a revolutionary process that was nearly as influential as the
revolution in Haiti, and which, because of the re-installation of the colonial Ancien rgime (including
slavery) in 1802, has been categorized by Alain Yacou as a confiscated revolution (only for further
thougt: in the period 1818-1821, the revolutionary elites of Gran Colombia also re-install slavery
under the name of manumission).119 Martinique is another case. On this island, slavery was not
abolished in 1794, because the British had conquered it. With some exceptions, these histories, and
conflicts in their connection to Venezuela, have remained somewhat overlooked by historians of the
Caribbean and of the period before the Independencia. The historiography of the Caribbean in times of
the French revolution is still dominated by the studies about Saint-Domingue and the chronology of
the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804).
The French (European) revolution had only an indirect importance first, in the refugee-
waves of French emigrates and prisoners, not only loyal French officers, fleeing to Spanish territories
and searching for a place to stay (especially after the final defeat of the French troops in Saint-
Domingue in 1803).120
Second, as I mentioned already, the ideas of France and even revolution were very present
in Napoleonic politics (first of all among many radical soldiers and officers - many of whom
subsequently became prisoners of war), culminating in the occupation of Spain and the usurpation of
the throne in Madrid (1808). But it was also very present in the military conflicts between the British
and French (and others) in the Caribbean, including corsairs, slave traders (negreros) and pirates. It
was precisely these events that triggered the revolution 121 among the Creole elites, which started as a

118
Protin-Dumon, Les Jacobins des Antilles ou lesprit de la libert dans les Iles-du-Vent. 275-304; Michel
L.Martin, Yacou (dirs..), De la Rvolution franaise aux revolutions creoles et ngres, (Paris: Editions
Caribennes, 1989); Dubois, Les esclaves de la Rpublique: lhistoire oublie de la premire mancipation,
1789-1794, (Paris: Calmann-Lvy, 1998); Dubois, A Colony of Citizens , passim; Gmez, Fidelidad bajo el
viento , passim; Dubois and John Garrigus (eds.), Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804: A History in
Documents, (New York: Bedford Press, 2006). Also more indirectly, for example in the local and regional uses of
French inspired political concepts (like citoyen-ciudano); see: Prez Morales, Ciudadanos itinerantes y redes de
revolucin en Colombia y el Gran Caribe, 1812-1823, in: Jorge Giraldo Ramrez, (ed.), Cdiz y los procesos
polticos Iberoamericanos, (Medelln: Universidad EAFIT, 2013), 159-177.
119
Yacou, Una revolucin confiscada: la isla de Guadalupe de 1789 a 1803, in Piqueras Arenas (ed.), Las
Antillas en la era de las luces y la revolucin , 43-66; Zeuske, Una revolucin con esclavos y con Bolvar.
Un ensayo de interpretacin, Memorias. Revista Digital de Historia y Arqueologa desde el Caribe Vol. 8, nm.
14 (Junio 2011), 5-47 (online: http://rcientificas.uninorte.edu.co/index.php/memorias/article/view/2006/1288);
Zeuske, The Bolvars Fortune, Zeuske, Simn Bolvar. History and Myth , 55-67.
120
Contrary to a widely held view in the past about the direct influence of the French Revolution in American
independence, my opinion is that it was much focused on Saint-Domingue in the early days, and very limited in
the Hispanic world. I think it affects were the constitutional phase 1789-1791, the Bill of Rights and diffusion
through policy and constitutional principles based on Rousseau, which were already well known in America,
circulating among the enlightened elites. However, I think much greater weight was on the contractual model of
English and American Revolution (USA). The promoters of freedom and representative government organization
that leads to independence had very much in mind the principles of Locke, English representative practice and
moderation, as well as (US-) American texts Jos Antonio Piqueras, personal communication (August 2014);
see his book: Piqueras Arenas, Bicentenarios de libertad. La fragua de la poltica en Espaa y las Amricas,
(Barcelona: Ediciones Pennsula, 2010).
121
Juan Garrido Rovira, La Revolucin de 1810. Bicentenario del 19 de Abril de 1810, (Caracas: Universidad
 30

conservative rebellion for more autonomy from the metropolitan elites (with an compromise to
legalize rich pardos as citizens122), as local wars between local elites (Caracas-Coro), and as a
preventive movement against more democratic and radical groups (pardos - free people of color, urban
plebeians, seamen, artisans, slaves, llaneros, poor whites (from the Canary islands) on which the
Haitian revolution had a great influence, above all on the pardo populations in the Greater
Caribbean).123 This is one of the last dimensions of the work of Manfred Kossok I wish to mention: he
was one of first to discuss the jacobinism extra muros in Latin America (for example in the case of
Bolvar).124
The third point is that the American anti-colonial revolution (1776-1783) had already been
concluded for over a generation, but it was also so much nearer than the French revolution in Europe,
although this revolution on a very peripheral edge of the Atlantic world did not change much in the
social order and it did not abolish slavery and slave trade. 125
By then the greater and much more important America was Spanish Amrica. Thats why
Francisco de Arango y Parreo used the concept of Nuestra Amrica (Our America) to set it against
what in 1811 he saw as the two greatest dangers for the Spanish elites (the Creole elites called
themselves espaoles): the terribles riesgos de la vecindad del negro Rey Enrique Cristbal [Henri
Christophe] y de los Estados Unidos [terrible risks from the vicinity of the black King Henri
Christophe and the United States].126

Montevila, 2009).
122
Gmez, Las revoluciones blanqueadoras: elites mulatas haitianas y pardos benemritos venezolanos, y su
aspiracin a la igualdad, 1789-1812, in Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos, Coloquios, 2005, [on line], Puesto en
lnea el 19 mars 2005. URL: www.nuevomundo.revues.org/index868.html (sept. 23, 2009).
123
Lavia, La participacin de pardos y negros en el proceso de 1808 en Venezuela, 165 -181; Lasso, Los
grupos afro-descendientes y la independencia: un nuevo paradigma historiogrfico?, 359-378.
124
Kossok, Das Salz der Revolution Jakobinismus in Lateinamerika. Versuch einer Positionsbestimmung,
[The Salt of the Revolution Jacobinism in Latin America. An Essay], in Kurt Holzapfel and Middell (eds.), Die
Franzsische Revolution 1789 Geschichte und Wirkung, (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1989), 231-262.
125
The changes were much more informal and in a longue dure-perspective, see: Manuel Covo, Baltimore and
the French Atlantic: empires, commerce, and identity in a revolutionary age, 1783-1798, in David Pretel and
Adrian Leonard, (eds.), The Caribbean and the Atlantic World Economy: Circuits of Trade, Money and
Knowledge, 1650-1914, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015 (Cambridge Imperial and Post-
Colonial Studies Series), 61-75.
126
Representacin de la Ciudad de la Habana a las Cortes, el 20 de julio de 1811, con motivo de las
proposiciones hechas por D. Jos Miguel Guridi Alcocer y D. Agustn de Argelles, sobre el trfico y esclavitud
de los negros; extendida por el Alfrez Mayor de la Ciudad, D. Francisco de Arango, por encargo del
Ayuntamiento, Consulado y Sociedad Patritica de la Habana, in: Arango y Parreo, Obras, II, pp. 145-189,
here p. 173.