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One Frenchman, Four Revolutions: General Ferrand and the Peoples of the
Caribbean. Fernando Picó. Princeton NJ: Markus Wiener, 2011. viii + 160 pp.
(Paper US$ 24.95)
From 1804 to 1808, the French General Louis Ferrand presided over a slaveholding regime in Santo Domingo (modern Dominican Republic) that bordered the new emancipationist nation of Haiti. In One Frenchman, Four
Revolutions, Fernando Picó uses Ferrand’s career and governance in Santo
Domingo as a lens through which to better understand a dynamic late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Caribbean and Atlantic world of slave
revolution, political upheaval, and re-enslavement. This pioneering work
provides an important overview of a remarkably understudied episode in
Caribbean history and also proposes several promising avenues for future
research. It is written in an engaging style and draws upon a rich source
base to offer important new insights.
In the opening chapter, Picó offers a concise and useful analysis of the
importance of the Caribbean in eighteenth-century Atlantic geopolitics.
The next chapter details the advent and course of the great slave revolution
in Saint-Domingue during 1789-1804. In this informative account, Picó persuasively summarizes one of the most complex episodes in world history
in a manner that will appeal to both specialists and students. The account
nonetheless contains a few minor flaws, such as Picó’s assertion that the
French Civil Commissioners and architects of general emancipation in
French Saint-Domingue, Léger-Félicité Sonthonax and Étienne Polverel,
were sent by Paris to the island after the commencement of the FrancoSpanish-British war of 1793-95, when in fact they arrived on the island
several months earlier—a crucial distinction given the importance of the
relationship between the military situation on the island and the evolution of the Commissioners’ public stance on slavery. Moreover, he claims
that Sonthonax’s watershed 29 August 1793 general emancipation decree
stipulated “the emancipation of all slaves in Saint-Domingue” when in fact
it only applied to slaves in the Northern Province (p. 25).
Chapter 3 provides a brief biography of Ferrand, highlighting his participation in the North American and French Revolutions and in the disastrous expedition of re-conquest that Napoleon deployed to Hispaniola in
late 1801 and early 1802. In his discussion of Ferrand’s flight from SaintDomingue/Haiti in 1803 and his establishment as the leader of a fledgling
© 2013 Graham Nessler
DOI: 10.1163/22134360-12340016
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0
Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
Book Reviews
153
French regime in Santo Domingo, Picó seeks to explain one key reason
for Ferrand’s hatred of Haiti that would drive many of his policies. The
Ferrand regime indeed continually engaged in conflicts with the nation on
its western border, and Picó’s discussion of Ferrand’s 1805 battles against
the forces of Jean-Jacques Dessalines is especially convincingly argued
and well documented. In this chapter, Picó skillfully explains the military policies of the Ferrand regime within the contexts of the collapse of
French rule and slavery in Haiti and the shifting geopolitics of the broader
Caribbean and Atlantic. He does an admirable job of conveying that the
Ferrand regime cannot be properly understood without reference to these
contexts.
Chapter 4 presents an overview of the institutions, economy, and demography of Santo Domingo under Ferrand. Though this chapter achieves an
impressive balance of breadth and attention to detail, it could have been
even stronger had it explained some matters more fully. For instance, Picó
asserts that a “strong proportion of slaves” emigrated from Santo Domingo
after 1795 without offering a breakdown by provenance within the colony
or (intended) destination (pp. 49-50). The racial terms used in the Ferrand
government’s 1808 census also require more analysis than is given here
(pp. 62-63). Nonetheless, Picó’s discussions of the establishment of a legal
system that incorporated both French and Spanish elements and the sale
of “slaves” from vessels that were captured or shipwrecked off Dominican
coasts point to two important topics for future research; my own article in
this journal (Nessler 2012) engages with the latter topic.
Chapters 5 and 6, which detail the fall of the Ferrand regime in 1808-9,
constitute the book’s strongest section. Picó situates the expulsion of the
French from Santo Domingo within the broader contexts of the Peninsular War, the Franco-British rivalry, and Haiti’s internal conflict. The quoted
excerpts usefully convey a sense of different parties’ perspectives on the
conflict, while the transimperial analysis complements the scholarship
of Ada Ferrer, Matt Childs, David Geggus, and others who have closely
examined the effects of the Haitian Revolution on colonialism and slavery
elsewhere in the hemisphere, including in the Spanish American independence wars. These chapters should inspire research that further examines
the interrelationships between the French and Spanish imperial crises of
the Haitian revolutionary era and the significance of the Ferrand episode
for independence movements elsewhere in Latin America.
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Book Reviews
This informative volume could be usefully assigned to undergraduates in
a Caribbean or Latin American history course, and as a reference it deserves
a spot on the bookshelves of historians of the Caribbean. Its bibliography
is fairly extensive, though it is missing some important newer scholarship
on Saint-Domingue/Haiti and the Haitian Revolution by Laurent Dubois,
John Garrigus, and other authors. Furthermore, its organization by country can hinder the reader’s ability to quickly find a specific reference or to
easily ascertain the presence of a specific author. Overall, the book represents a valuable contribution to the literature on Dominican, Haitian, and
Caribbean history and should serve to foment further scholarship on a vital
chapter in these histories.
Graham Nessler
Department of History, Texas A & M University-Commerce
Commerce TX 75429, U.S.A.
[email protected]
Reference
Nessler, Graham, 2012. “The Shame of the Nation”: The Force of Re-enslavement and the Law
of “Slavery” under the Regime of Jean-Louis Ferrand in Santo Domingo, 1804-1809. New
West Indian Guide 86(1&2):5-28.