A transatlantic battle of the robes: French priests in the Haitian Revolution

Abstract

Abstract In line with reconsiderations of the importance of religion in the Age of Revolutions, this article reconstructs how French priests competed to gain control of the Church in revolutionary Saint-Domingue and navigated the ever-changing political landscapes triggered by the Haitian and French Revolutions. Priests in the Haitian Revolution were also priests in the French Revolution: divided in their visions of a Church—Gallican and constitutional, or in communion with Rome—and active on both sides of the Atlantic. Priests’ motives for cooperating with the enslaved insurgents between 1791 and 1793, and with the free cultivateurs thereafter, are here contextualized within the ongoing frictions between Rome and Paris. Their experiences offer a fruitful means to gauge the entanglements between the French and Haitian Revolution, and suggest how some Haitian revolutionaries—Louverture and King Christophe, for instance—turned to Rome as an alternative to France as a source of political legitimacy.