Insurgents during the Battle of Santo Domingo. By Jan Suchodolski. 1845. Polish Army Museum, Warsaw • WIKIMEDIA COMMONS Slaves did not always wait to be granted freedom:in Santo Domingo, they freed themselves. At the end of the 18 th century, this western half of the island of Hispaniola was the most prosperous of the French colonies and had 500,000 slaves out of 600,000 inhabitants. The French Revolution created a climate of tension there between settlers, “free of color” – former slaves freed sometimes for several generations and some of whom became rich – and slaves. The atmosphere becomes electric, and "maroon niggers" (slaves who have fled the plantations to take refuge in the forest) trigger a vast insurrection on the night of August 22 to 23, 1791 to obtain the abolition of slavery. Dozens of plantations are devastated, and whites are massacred by the hundreds. The leader François Toussaint François Toussaint, a "free of color" owning a plantation and a few slaves, quickly took the lead of the insurgents. His talent for finding the breach in battles soon earned him the nickname "the Overture". The Republic sends an expeditionary force to subdue the rebels. But the Commissioner of the Republic Sonthonax, quickly aware that the situation could not be rectified and also a member of the Society of Friends of the Blacks, chose to proclaim the emancipation of all the slaves of Saint-Domingue in August 1793. The white planters then decide to appeal to Great Britain, which sends troops there with the aim of seizing the island. Toussaint Louverture, who had now joined the French revolutionaries and had been made a general, took the lead in resisting the British. He defeated them definitively in 1798 and became the strong man of the island. In 1801, he proclaimed its autonomy and declared himself governor general for life. This is too much for First Consul Bonaparte, who sends 30,000 men to crush what now looks like a revolt against the metropolis. Toussaint Louverture is captured in an ambush, but the French troops fail to prevail against an insurrection radicalized by the news of the restoration of slavery (which however does not concern Saint-Domingue). The French must soon abandon their colony, and the first "Black Republic" proclaimed its independence on 1 st January 1804. It will henceforth be called Haiti, the name that the island of Hispaniola bore before its discovery by Europeans.
