On 27 May 1797, the 8th of Prairial according to the new Republican calendar, François-Noël Babeuf, sometimes called “Gracchus” Babeuf, was executed by guillotine. A death sentence had been passed by the Therimdorians the day before. At the time of his death, Babeuf stood at the head of a clandestine organization that was attempting to undo the Thermidorian reaction, to return to the days of the Jacobin Terror, and to use the weapons built by Maximilien Robespierre and his allies to establish the first truly egalitarian society on earth in the form of a simple, agrarian communism. Babeuf’s plan, the so-called “Conspiracy of Equals” failed, and he died under the guillotine blade. However, many of the other members of the Conspiracy survived, as did their principle writings, and the Conspiracy of Equals would live on: first, in 1830 during the July Revolution; then again, in 1839 in the Blanquist coup, once more in 1848 in the February Revolution; and at last in 1871 in the formation of the Paris Commune. Babeuf’s shadow could be seen outside of France in the 1825 Decembrist Revolt of Russia. He was much admired by Karl Marx himself, it was through the living conspirators of the Society of Equals that the Society’s legacy has been passed down, even to this day.

What was the Society of Equals? What did they want? Where did they come from? The last children of the Jacobin political club, the Society cannot be understood without placing it in its context: the counter-revolutionary coup of Thermidor.

The French Revolution and Thermidor

The French Revolution began in 1789 with the public bankruptcy of the state. King Louis XVI’s ministers tried to raise money through various new taxes, but conflict erupted between the nobility and the royal administration over the right to levy new taxes. France was then divided into a patchwork of uneven territorial administrations. Its people were divided into three “feudal” orders or “estates”: the First Estate was the clergy, comprising roughly one-half of one percent of the population; the Second Estate was the nobility, roughly one percent; and the remaining 98.5% of the French population, the Third Estate, the commoners.

In 1789, after years of wrangling with King Louis and his ministers, the Second Estate forced the king to call the Estates General, a medieval decision-making body that the jurists and lawyers claimed was the only authority in France that could approve new taxes. Leading up to the Estates General, the crown permitted every region and estate in French society to submit a list of grievances. These cahiers de doléances were drawn up in every village, hamlet, city, and town, and for the first time the common people of France felt they might have a say in their government. To the surprise and horror of the First Estate, the Third Estate was united in its broadest grievance: that the Estates General should not vote by estate (such that the First and Second Estates could overrule the Third), but by head — and that the Third Estate should receive double the number of deputies than the other two Estates, for it was the Third Estate that made the country.

In the words of the Abbé Sieyès: “What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it hitherto been afforded in the political order? Nothing. What does it desire to be? Something.”

When Louis threatened, or appeared to threaten through his ineptitude, to double the Third Estate’s deputies but to force the Estates to vote “by order” (that is, one estate, one vote), the Revolution truly began. Angry Third Estate deputies, locked out of their meeting room, convened in an indoor tennis court at Versailles and swore the famous Tennis Court Oath not to be parted until the country had a new constitution. For some, this meant a constitutional monarchy to replace the old “absolute” monarchy of the Valois and Bourbon kings, but to others, notably the Breton Club (which would soon become the Jacobin Club), this meant a republic.

Through many twists and turns of revolutionary history, the Jacobins became ascendent after the so-called Girondins dragged the young republic into war with Austria. King Louis, attempting to evade the revolution and flee his role as “father of the Nation,” gave in to his wife Marie Antoinette, and fled toward the Austrian border so he could return at the head of an army. He was captured in the town of Varennes, having been recognized by his distinctive nose through the eyes of an astute postmaster who had long seen the king’s profile on the stamps, seals, and coins of the realm. After the Flight to Varennes, the Republic was born. Louis was tried as a traitor and executed, stripped even of his name, and called “Citizen Capet” before the guillotine.

During this “second revolution” of 1792-93 when the monarchy became a republic, the city of Paris and its urban working class drove the reforms. Essentially every country in Europe attacked France, at first in response to the revolutionary government’s warlike posturing and invasion of Austria, but soon to combat the spreading virulence of anti-monarchism. The “sans culottes” or urban working class and the women of Paris demanded radical action to destroy old feudal rights, property rights, and so forth, while also demanding the government protect the economic lives of the people — by, for example, enacting maximum prices on grain to prevent hoarding.

For a time thereafter, the Jacobin Club and its guiding genius Maximilien Robespierre sought to advance the revolution forward at a steady pace along a narrow line of virtue. The wartime conditions and erupting counter-revolutions caused the Convention to convene a special executive body with plenary powers: the Committee of Public Safety. It was from this Committee that Robespierre crafted and executed the so-called Terror, and while sitting on this Committee that he justified its use.

[I]n order to lay the foundations of democracy among us and to consolidate it, in order to arrive at the peaceful reign of constitutional laws, we must finish the war of liberty against tyranny and safely cross through the storms of the revolution: that is the goal of the revolutionary system which you have put in order. You should therefore still base your conduct upon the stormy circumstances in which the republic finds itself; and the plan of your administration should be the result of the spirit of revolutionary government, combined with the general principles of democracy….

Since the soul of the Republic is virtue, equality, and since your goal is to found, to consolidate the Republic, it follows that the first rule of your political conduct ought to relate all your efforts at maintaining equality and developing virtue….

If the mainspring of popular government in peacetime is virtue, amid revolution it is at the same time both virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is nothing but justice: prompt, severe, inflexible. It is therefore an emanation of  virtue. It is less a special principle than a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country’s most pressing needs.

It has been said that terror was the mainspring of despotic government. Does your government, then, resemble a despotism? Yes, as the sword which glitters in the hands of liberty’s heroes resembles the one with which tyranny’s lackeys are armed. Let the despot govern his brutalized subjects by terror; he is right to do this, as a despot. Subdue liberty’s enemies by terror, and you will be right, as founders of the Republic. The government of the revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny. Is force made only to protect crime? And is it not to strike the heads of the proud that lightning is destined?…

Social protection is due only to peaceful citizens; there are no citizens in the Republic but the republicans. The royalists, the conspirators, are, in its eyes, only strangers or, rather, enemies….

Tyranny kills; liberty argues. And the code made by the conspirators themselves is the law by which they are judged.

Maximilien Robespierre, On the Principles of Public Morality, Speech to the National Assembly of 5 February 1794

The republicans created a new calendar, new ten-day weeks, new rationalized months of thirty days each, and feasts of virtue. They renamed the streets of Paris to remove the names of saints. They set about changing the very geography in which they lived.

And yet, counter-revolutionary forces were at work behind the scenes. Some radical Jacobins sought to enrich themselves during the chaos. Conservative, “whites” (white was the color of the Bourbon monarchy) and slave-holding plantation owners from the French colonies, linked hands and joined together to protect themselves. When the radical Jacobins announced a new wave of investigations into financial impropriety among the politicians of the National Convention, a plan was drafted to destroy the radical leadership.

On 27 July 1794, what was 9 Thermidor II under the new calendar, Maximilien Robespierre and Louis Antoine de Saint-Just were murdered by counter-revolutionary opponents in the National Convention. The Jacobin revolution was over, killed by the bourgeois forces of counter-revolution that had once supported it. After Thermidor, the coup plotters established the anti-democratic Directory. Political repression was the norm, elections were regularly annulled, and a small clique of powerful politicians took over the country.

In the late 18th century, Paris was the engine of revolutionary sentiment and the center of progressive thought in the whole decaying kingdom. It was the second-largest city in Europe only outsized by London, and contained some 600,000 people. The vast majority of the city was inhabited by the working poor. There were 40,000 domestic servants working for petit-bourgeois families of which only about 5% were born in Paris; the rest came to the city from the provinces of the kingdom, looking for work. The city was replete with small handicrafts, and was dominated by the guilds. Unskilled labor was paid at a rate of roughly thirty sous a day; most families had to set all their members to work, including the children. Women made approximately 15 sous a day. The primary diet of the Parisian working poor was bread: two four-pound loafs, the average comestible intake of a family of two with two children, cost roughly eighteen sous throughout most of the 18th century and sometimes doubled or tripled in price during bad harvests.

In addition to the vast numbers of the working poor, Paris is estimated to have hosted approximately 13,000 to 14,000 on royal assistance and between 150,000 and 200,000 totally indigent persons at the beginning of the 18th century, with this number swelling as the period went on. By 1789, years of bad harvests and warfare had driven hundreds of thousands of new working poor into the city center and its extramural faubourgs. These urban poor were the engine of the revolution, and it was to them, the sans culottes, that Babeuf and the Equals now turned. Throughout the Revolution, whenever radical policy stalled or the conservative noble elements had attempted to regain control, they were always checked by the convention of a huge mass of protestors in Paris. In 1789, during the early stages of the Revolution, the city of Paris not only tore down the Bastille and executed its governor, they killed their own mayor and paraded his head through the streets, then established what became known as the Insurrectionary Commune of Paris — an elective assembly in the city that was far more radical than the National Assembly, and which often summoned mobs to threaten the Assembly when it attempted to renege on its more radical policies.

But France was more than Paris, and the Directory had eschewed the politics of the radical insurrectionary commune. In fact, they suppressed it, targeting radical deputies and paying the so-called Muscadins, bourgeois “gilded youth” dressed in expensive finery and armed with clubs, to roam the streets beating sans culotte patrols and suppressing the radical commune.

Babeuf came onto the public stage after the Thermidorians outlawed political clubs. He sought to revive the old Republic of Virtue championed by Robespierre and the radical Jacobins, and through his agitation he created the Society of Equals: a conspiracy with the goal of overthrowing not only the Thermidor government, but of abolishing all private property in France.

Early Communism and the Conspiracy

Where the radical Jacobins of Robespierre’s stripe represented the propertied interests of the petit-bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie and Thermidor was a liberal-noble reaction, the sans culottes and Babeuf were anti-propertarian proletarians: proto-Communists. Babeuf was not interested in the mere redistribution of some of the land of France; he advocated for, and convinced others in the Society of Equals of, the necessity for the redistribution of the fruits of the land. That is, the collective ownership of all land and the distribution-by-need of its products.

François-Noël Babeuf was a petit-bourgeois lawyer of the ancien régime, specializing in the feudal land law, keeping records of what peasants owed in rent and fees to the nobility, and working as a clerk for the nobles. He supported the revolution and the radical Jacobins. When Robespierre was sent to the guillotine and the National Convention was replaced by the dictatorial right-leaning Directory, he opened his own press and began to publish for the people.

The Conspiracy was formed in November 1795 and was directed by eight men, including Babeuf: Philippe Buonarroti, Augustin Alexandre Darthé, Sylvain Maréchal (who drafted the Manifesto of Equals), Félix Lepeletier, Pierre-Antoine Antonelle, Debon, and Georges Grisel. Jean Antoine Rossignol, the revolutionary general, was in charge of managing the Conspiracy’s agents. The leading members of the Conspiracy met in the prisons of Paris, having been jailed by the Thermidorians. They made their rallying cry “Insurrection, revolt, and the Constitution of 1793!” — the constitution which had promised the most egalitarian society to that point ever designed or dreamt of.

Babeuf put it this way in his newspaper, the Tribun du Peuple: “I have distinguished two diametrically opposed parties: I understand well enough that both want a republic, but one party wants it to be bourgeois and aristocratic, the other party for it to be a popular and democratic republic.” It was this popular and democratic republic that the Conspiracy of Equals was devoted. The Tribun du Peuple of 30th November 1794 included the paragraph: “the only way is to establish common administration, abolish private property, put each man to work according to his talents and the industry he knows, oblige him to hand over the fruits of his labour to the common stock, and establish a simple administration of distribution”. He wrote that the “French Revolution was just the harbinger of another much greater revolution, a far more important one: the last.”

Maréchal’s manifesto, which was meant to guide the Equals, was truly radical and truly Communist in its scope:

PEOPLE OF FRANCE!

For fifteen centuries you lived as slaves and, consequently, unhappy. For the last six years you barely breathe, waiting for independence, freedom, and equality.

…

The Agrarian law, or the partitioning of the land, was the spontaneous demand of some unprincipled soldiers, of some towns moved more by their instinct than by reason. We lean towards something more sublime and more just: the common good or the community of property! No more individual property in land: the land belongs to no one. We demand, we want, the common enjoyment of the fruits of the land: the fruits belong to all.

We declare that we can no longer put up with the fact that the great majority work and sweat for the smallest of minorities.

Long enough, and for too long, less than a million individuals have disposed of that which belongs to 20 million of their kind, their equals.

Let it at last end, this great scandal that our descendants will never believe existed! Disappear at last, revolting distinctions between rich and poor, great and small, masters and servants, rulers and ruled.

Sylvain Marechal, The Manifesto of Equals

Organizing the Conspiracy

The Equals met in the Paris prisons, held there by the Thermidorians for publishing seditious materials or for sedition itself. The Equals formed a revolutionary party in March 1796 and created an insurrection committee. In every arrondissement of Paris, the committee maintained agents. These distributed pamphlets, created clubs in private homes, collected funds, recorded hiding-places, drew up lists of sympathizers, and organized citizens. They reported directly to the insurrectionary committee about how much force the Conspiracy had, and where.

Unlike the loosely organized political clubs (the Jacobins, the various reactionary clubs, the Club Massaic, even the Pantheon Club), the Conspiracy of Equals divided into committees tasked with individual mandates. There was a military committee, which organized the armed wing of the Conspiracy, the “familial clubs” which organized on the ground level. The Conspiracy of the Equals was the very first insurrectionary communist party ever organized as a political organization.

The Conspiracy grew in leaps and bounds as the economic crisis of the Thermidorian Directory intensified. In the 40th issue of the Tribun, Babeuf praised the September Massacres of 1792 and demanded a more complete 2 September to annihilate the Directory itself, which he said was made up of “starvers, bloodsuckers, tyrants, hangmen, rogues, and mountebanks.”

Lack of ideological unity laid the groundwork for the Equals’ failure. The leading members of the Equals were not all committed Communists or proto-Communists. Babeuf and Maréchal alone were committed to the abolition of private property. The other Equals, some of whom had been rich nobles before the Revolution, balked at the more radical proposals in the manifesto. By the time of May 1797, Babeuf and Maréchal were disgusted with their former compatriots. Babeuf did not attend their last meeting; he said these “democrats lacked strength or means,” that is, they were insufficiently revolutionary.

One of the members of the insurrectionary committee, Georges Grisel, was a paid agent of the Directory. He turned over the Conspiracy and, on 2 May 1796, the Directory disarmed the Paris police legion because it had been “seduced by the Babouviste faction.” The Directory’s spy agency, the bureau central, knew that the uprising was set for 11 May 1796 and the Equals planned to unite with the remnants of the Jacobin Club. They had been receiving reports from Grisel for some time, and so acted before the Conspiracy could. On 10 May, Babeuf was arrested, along with many of his associates. Sylvaine Marèchal was never apprehended. The conspirators were tried over the next two months and most were executed. The former Jacobins were mostly acquitted and permitted to return to political service.

Aftermath: The Revolution to Come

Marèchal carried on the revolutionary tradition; the English word “communism” was coined by the English socialist Goodwyn Barmby after he spoke with living Babouvistes in the 1830s or 1840s. Those members of the Conspiracy who were not killed, and those who read Babeuf but did not act, would go on to influence French and revolutionary history in Europe. Most triumphantly, the heirs of Babeuf were deeply involved in the creation of the second insurrectionary commune of Paris, the 1871 Commune, from which Marx drew his most instructive lessons about the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Indeed, Babeuf’s personal files remain preserved not only in the National Archives of Paris, but in the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Party Central Committee of the former Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The Conspiracy of Equals, although it was a failure, would serve as the century-long wellspring of revolutionary fervor from which the scientific socialists of the 19th century would draw. It is through the clandestine organization of militants that Marxist-Leninsts have achieved revolutionary success not only in Europe, but in all corners of the globe. There is no doubt that Lenin’s formulation in his works on the structure of the revolutionary organization (What Is to Be Done? and One Step Forward, Two Steps Back come to mind) draw from the well first sunk by the socialist martyr François-Noël Babeuf.

On September 15, the calculating Biden White House delayed the hour of the forthcoming strike of U.S. railway unions. While the desiccated puppet Biden himself pays lip-service to the unions, his regime systematically undermines them. The latest outrage forces a 30-day “cooling down” period on the unions ready to strike by requiring them to consider an offer from Biden’s handlers that doesn’t come close to meeting even a single one of the rail workers demands.

One-hundred forty-five years ago, in July of 1877, the city of St. Louis was held by the authority of a revolutionary commune. The Commune of St. Louis began with a rail strike like the one Biden’s masters are afraid of tonight.

It began, as revolutions often do, with a depression.

In 1873 the world-capitalist economy was struck with stagnation and contraction. This depression was kicked off by the Panic of ’73. A series of bank failures in Austria soon spread to the rest of the economy. Credit sharply contracted. Loans defaulted. Banks closed.

Industrial production in the U.S., which had been previously growing at a rate of three times each year, slowed to 1.7 times yearly during the period of 1873-1890. There was a 10% decline in total manufacturing output from the U.S., most of the sectors affected being consumer goods, iron, and construction.

On July 14, 1877, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad cut wages for its workers for the third time that year. The railroad workers had no unions, but they spontaneously broke out into strike.

The strike started that day, with B&O railroad workers in Martinsburg, West Virginia. They blockaded the town, a critical rail juncture, and prevented all rail traffic from rolling through, demanding that the wage cut be revoked.

The governor of West Virginia dispatched the National Guard to clear the lines and resume rail service, but the guardsmen refused to fire on the strikers. At the same time, the B&O workers in Maryland took up the strike and closed the railroad center at Cumberland.

Albany, Syracuse, and Buffalo New York, all major railyards, closed. The strike spread from the B&O to other lines. In Pittsburgh, the Pennsylvania railroad baron Thomas Alexander Scott recommended the strikers be given a “rifle diet.”

On July 21, the Pennsylvania National Guard bayonetted strikers and then opened fire, killing 20 railroad workers. The strikers did not disperse; rather, they retaliated, trapping the guardsmen in a roundhouse and razing 39 buildings.

Striking railroad workers in Pennsylvania burned 104 locomotives and 1,245 freight and passenger cars. The Pennsylvania National Guard fought their way out of the roundhouse, shooting and killing over 20 people as they cut their way out of the railyard.

This was the background of the strike action in St. Louis. As the country seized in strikes and transport actions, the Workingman’s Party (the first Marxist party in the U.S.) and the Knights of Labor gathered in St. Louis. On July 22, one day after the massacre in the Pennsylvania railyards, train workers held a secret meeting to call for an increase in wages and determined to strike, their numbers stiffened by members of the Workingmen’s Party. They then held a public outdoor meeting, which was steered by that 200 members of that party.

That night, they held a third meeting, and the rail workers adopted a resolution (written by the Workingmen’s Party representatives) that read:

WHEREAS, the United States government has allied itself on the side of capital and against labor; therefore,

RESOLVED, That we, the workingmen’s party of the United States, heartily sympathize with the employees of all the railroads in the country who are attempting to secure just and equitable reward for their labor.

RESOLVED, That we will stand by them in this most righteous struggle of labor against robbery and oppression, through good and evil report, to the end of the struggle.

The demand was put to the bosses, who rejected it immediately.

The strike began at midnight in East St. Louis. Within hours of the announcement, the strikers controlled the city uncontested. They formed an executive committee, comprised of at least 47 people, although all their identities are not recorded and therefore not known. The committee, which met in Turner’s Hall, was elected by the striking workers.

St. Louis was the home of many radical Germans, who had been fleeing from the newly-constituted Germany for years to avoid the compulsory military service instituted under Prussian authority. Roughly 600 of the Workingmen’s Party’s 1,000 members in St. Louis were German socialists.

Missouri was also a former slave state. Two-thirds of Black persons in the state lived in St. Louis (26,387) in 1870, most of whom were either employed as domestic servants or as laborers, with a heavy influence along the levees and among the steamships. By 1877, the Ku Klux Klan had begun a campaign of lynch-terror in the state, and racism was stoked among the workers because the Black laborers were often used as strikebreakers.

In the morning of July 23, having more or less complete control of East St. Louis and with no police on the street to oppose them, the Executive Committee elected by the strikers issued General Order No. 1: no railroad traffic other than passenger trains and mail would be permitted to pass. The committee then appointed the mayor of East St. Louis, John Bowman, arbitrator of the labor dispute. He helped the committee select special constables to guard the property of the railroads from damage. Already, even in its nascent stage, we can see the Executive Committee’s unfortunate attention to the needs and wants of the capitalists.

The Chicago & Alton company tried to start a freight train that morning, but it was stopped and turned back to the yard. The Union Railway & Transit Company removed their wage decrease, but the Transit workers continued to strike in solidarity with their brothers, stiffened by the militants in their ranks.

City officials wired frightened messages. Some warned that this was a repetition of the Paris Commune of ’71.

On the second day of the strike, July 24, the strikers expanded their blockade to include passenger trains. A train was decoupled from its passenger cars and only permitted transit when the locomotive was bare.

At 11:00 AM that morning, twenty-five strikers led by an Ohio and Mississippi Railway engineer seized two Missouri Pacific Railroad locomotives, took Missouri and Pacific engine shops, and tried to persuade the workers there to cease work. They refused.

As unrest increased, 3,000-4,000 people gathered at the depot. It was announced by the city authorities that six companies of infantry were marching to put an end to the blockade and clear the rail lines. For the first time since the strike began, police went out onto the streets and tried to disperse the crowd.

At 4:00 PM that afternoon, flatcars from other striking yards near the city arrived, loaded with more strikers. The word had gotten out that St. Louis was the hub of a powerful solidarity movement across all railway lines.

At 6:00 PM, six companies arrived from Fort Leavenworth. Their commander stated that he had “been ordered here with general instructions to protect the property of the United States,” but he declined to take any action other than to hole up in the army barracks and wait.

That night, Communist leaders held meetings throughout the city. Processions marched through the streets. The city government, paralyzed by the fear that they were not heavily armed enough to act, did nothing. The police remained “inert.”

On July 25, 1877, at 9 AM, the Communists gathered a crowd in a downtown marketplace. There, they convinced wire manufacturers to join the strike. At 10 AM they marched to Turner Hall where the Executive Committee was meeting. At a meeting that morning, a Black worker is said to have asked, “Will you stand with us, regardless of our color?” The crowd shouted back at him “We will!”

Across the river, the Workingmen’s delegates anticipated violence, though the strike remained peaceful in East St. Louis. One speaker across the river in downtown St. Louis said, “The workingmen now intend to assert their rights, even if the result is the shedding of blood…. They are ready to take up arms at any moment.” But the party did not arm the laborers. They were never given the weapons they needed to defend their gains.

An air of solidarity prevailed throughout East St. Louis. The Workingman’s Party declared that all work within the city would soon come to a halt. All would join the strike.

On the morning of July 26, a mass meeting of coopers agreed to cease work. Smelter and clay workers joined the strike. 35% of the striking workers were U.S. born; 29% were German; 18% were Irish; 12% were English or Welsh. A full 12% of the striking workers were Black.

The strike was controlled by its Executive Committee — it issued orders, demands, and instructions. The most prominent members of the committee were not themselves workers but were clerks, a student organizer, a doctor, a drug and bleach maker, a newspaper seller, and a boot fitter. There were many petit-bourgeois men on the committee, which perhaps accounts for its sensitivity to protecting small businesses and private property.

On the evening of Wednesday, July 26, in Carondelet, six miles south of the city center, iron workers arrived at the Martindale Zinc Works to call on its workers to join the strike. The foreman of the works struck a striker with a crowbar. When the police tried to intervene, the strikers drove them off with rocks.

The ironworkers took control of the zinc works and there they unfurled the red flag of the International. By the end of the day, there was not a single manufactory in operation. The strike had shut down the entire city. It was all in the hands of the Workingmen’s Party.

That evening, there was another mass meeting at Lucas Market of over 10,000 people. Peter Lofgreen, a Workingmen’s delegate, harangued the crowd and told them that if the managers could not restore their pay, it was time for the management of the railroads to be in the hands of the workers. Full nationalization would be one of the demands made by the Executive Committee.

Thomas Curtis declared that the demands of St. Louis must go all the way to the president of the United States. This, he said, was “not a strike – but a social revolution!”

On Thursday, barbers, wagon-makers, painters, blacksmiths, and mills closed, with only a few remaining open by order of the Executive Committee to make bread to feed the city. The National Stockyards were permitted to slaughter some few animals to keep the people fed. The mayor met with the Executive Committee repeatedly, begging for more shops to be opened, and the committee haltingly tried to oblige the business interests.

In Carondelet, 18 metal workers were organized into a makeshift police force that patrolled the streets. In East St. Louis, the railway workers had a parade with a brass band and banners that said “We Want a Peaceful Revolution” and “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.”

That’s when the Executive Committee made its worst decision. At the dawn of the 27th, they caved to pressure by the petit-bourgeoisie and the mayor, who feared the Black labor solidarity and the marches, the mass meetings, the red flag of the International. They issued an order to calm the wealthy. This order stated that “in order to avoid riot, we have determined no large procession will take place until our organization is so complete as to positively assure the citizens of St. Louis a perfect maintenance of order.”

When a group of Black workers asked to join the party, the Executive Committee replied that “we want nothing to do with them.”

While shop-owners were begging the committee to stop the marches, reaction was not asleep. Merchants were raising $20,000 (close to $1 million today) behind closed doors to arm the militia that would eventually attack and destroy the Commune. The St. Louis Gun Club supplied shotguns. 1,500 rifles and 2 cannon were sent by the governor from the state armory. 11,000 volunteers were mustered into service.

On July 27, the governor sent a missive demanding the disbandment of the Executive Committee and all its strike committees. The Workingmen’s Party replied, “Nothing short of compliance to the [just demand for wages] will arrest this tidal wave of revolution.”

The papers were now referring to St. Louis as the “St. Louis Commune.”

At 3:00 PM on Friday July 27, municipal and federal forces arrived downtown. Police cavalry led the way, riding abreast to cover the entire width of the street. They were soon followed by foot police with rifles, the militia that had been arranged by the petit-bourgeois shop owners, and two cannon from the armory. The Workingmen’s Party, having failed to provide the strikers with weapons, had no way to resist them.

Half a block behind the city police came federal U.S. troops, marching with fixed bayonets. The cavalry plunged into the crowd outside Turner’s Hall where the Executive Committee met. One of the officers shouted, “Ride ’em down! Ride ’em down! They have no business here!”

The committee tried to broker an agreement with the city fathers. Those delegates they sent to the meeting were arrested. Within hours, several others had been taken from their hiding places and joined the detainees. 73 rank-and-file workers were arrested during the police surge.

The Executive Committee had failed to protect the revolution from counter-revolution. It had rejected the all-important aid of Black workers that made the seizure of the city possible, spat on the right of self-determination for the former slaves. The remaining members of the committee were now isolated. The strikers were at the mercy of the police.

From July 22 until August 1, the strike committee had controlled the city. It had failed, utterly, to establish the necessary self-defense required for the revolution. It had dealt with the mayor and business interests as allies – cold allies, but allies none-the-less. When the time came, those “allies” turned on the committee and the strike; every request from the businesses and the city fathers was little more than a delaying tactic.

The committee failed to expropriate the property of the dangerous and deadly foes of the revolution: because to them, they were not foes. Indeed, in the face of Black labor solidarity, the committee preferred its white shopkeepers to Black laborers.

What if they had not suspended the mass meetings? What if they had armed the workers? What if they had not broken up the solidarity of Black, white, and immigrant labor and instead expanded their demands to include those of the Black toilers? What if indeed. We cannot know what if, merely study their failings at a moment when power was in the hands of the people and their leaders refused to act.

We must learn the lessons taught by history, and overcome them. We must stand for the freedom of all, not the wages of a few. We must be prepared when the conditions for the next St. Louis commune arrive.

“PEOPLE HERE ARE DRUNK WITH LIBERTY…. The peril is great and it is imminent…. ARREST SUSPICIOUS PERSONS. SEIZE WRITINGS IN WHICH EVEN THE WORD FREEDOM APPEARS. Redouble your guard over your plantations, towns, and villages. Everywhere win over the free people of color. BE SUSPICIOUS OF THOSE WHO ARRIVE FROM EUROPE.”

—Letter of 12 August 1789 from Paris, by Saint-Domingue’s deputies

“[T]hey are inexcusable in my eyes for having wanted to set themselves up as despotic masters of the mulattoes, and as tyrannical masters of the blacks…. To shake off the cruel and shameful yoke under which they groan, they are authorized to employ all possible means, even death, even if they are reduced to slaughtering their oppressors to the last.”

—Jean-Paul Marat, L’Amis du peuple, No. 624 (12 Dec. 1791)

On the 22 of August in 1791, after months of planning and secret Sunday meetings, a slave named Boukman led a revolt through the North Province of Saint-Domingue. The rebels, armed with torches, guns, sabers, and makeshift weapons, set fire to the plantations and burned the fields. They freed slaves as they marched. Their army grew with ready-made revolutionaries. Black slaves flocked to their cause. Although Boukman would not survive the revolution, what he and others had begun would be the first and only successful slave-revolution of the new world.

“Your houses, Monsieur le Marquis, are nothing but ashes, your belongings have disappeared, your administrator is no more. The insurrection has spread its devastation and carnage onto your properties,” wrote the plantation owner Millot in a letter to his neighbor, the absentee landlord the marquis de Gallifet.

The bourgeoisie of newly-revolutionary France had won political rights from the ancien regime. The free colored men of the French colony tried to enforce a law passed in France that would grant them the same. Despite the fact that the National Assembly of France had issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789—and despite powerful progressive forces in France who championed them—the rights it guaranteed were not extended to women or free Black men. The Declaration of the Rights of Women was stillborn in the National Assembly and a 1790 uprising of “free colored persons” (gens de couleur) to secure their rights  in the French colony of Saint-Domingue had been crushed. Its leader, Vincent Ogé, executed by the Colonial Assembly of Saint-Domingue.

At the beginning of the French Revolution, the planters of Saint-Domingue allied with their one-time foes, the merchants of Nantes and Bordeaux in France. Though the planters typically found themselves at the mercy of the merchants (due to the royal licenses, called the exclusif, which gave the merchants and merchant-houses monopolies on the importation of goods from the French colonies), they suddenly shared a common interest: the protection of the slave trade. The colonial production of coffee, indigo, and above all else sugar was reliant on the importation of Afrikan slaves. Slaves were worked to death on Saint-Domingue, and they made both planters and merchants rich. With the outbreak of the Revolution, that trade was suddenly threatened by French “radical Republicanism” which promised freedom and equality for all men. The planters and merchants formed the Club Massaic, a political club with the express purpose of  maintaining the racialized class system of Saint-Domingue.

Opposing the Club Massaic in France was the Société de amis des Noirs, a group of radical abolitionists, who demanded the immediate freedom of all the kingdom’s slaves. Radical republicanism was the enemy of the King, of the nobility, of the colonial planters, and of the merchants of Bordeaux, Nantes, and La Rochelle.

In August of 1791, Black slaves held secret meetings near Gallifet plantation and swore to fight “a war to the death against the whites.” On August 22nd, rumors of a revolution terrorized the planters. They summoned a judge from the biggest city on the island, Le Cap Française, and when he arrived, the slaves rose up. Boukman, one of the early leaders of the rebellion, led nearly 2,000 slaves across the province.

On one plantation the rebels took “the refiner’s apprentice, dragged him to the front of the dwelling-house, and there hewed him into pieces with their cutlasses: his screams brought out the overseer, whom they instantly shot. The rebels now found their way to the apartment of the refiner and massacred him in his bed.” They then began attacking surrounding plantations. 

The slaves burned the hated cane fields. They torched the despised refineries and the sugar machinery that often crushed, mutilated, and mangled their arms. The conspiracy of revolt stretched across the entire northern plain of Saint-Domingue. Once the revolt was underway, the rebels destroyed “not only the cane fields, but also the manufacturing installations, sugar mills, tools and other farm equipment, storage bins, and slave quarters; in short, every material manifestation of their existence under slavery and its means of exploitation.”

By August 27, the insurgents were “reckoned 10,000 strong, divided into 3 armies, of whom 700 or 800 are on horseback, and tolerably well armed.” As in France, Saint-Domingue burned in the fire of revolution.

Class Composition of Saint-Domingue

Saint-Domingue had few members of the noble class; the French colonial nobility were absentee landlords who relied on agents and managers. Standing above the pre-revolutionary class hierarchy were the colonial secretaries, governors who were appointed by the king himself to oversee the island. The colonial secretaries had their seat in Le Cap Française, at Le Gouvernement, the house of the administration. Behind this was the military barracks, housing a thousand or more soldiers. The city was home to a large prison and several hospitals, twenty-five bakeries, and a slaughterhouse. It had its own municipal water system, fountains, and public squares. Le Cap’s 1,400 houses were built of stone and some had gardens. The city was called “the Paris of our island.”

The highest-ranked class on Saint-Domingue was that of the “grand blancs,” the big French planters who owned the majority of the land and the plantations. In 1700 there were 18 plantations in the whole colony, but by 1790 there were about 8,000 and Saint-Domingue produced roughly one half of all sugar consumed in Europe. Most of these plantations had been started by Frenchmen who took out loans from one of the merchant houses back in France. Those planters who prospered became members of the wealthy planter class, the grand blancs; those who failed turned over their plantations to the merchant houses in Bordeaux, Nantes, and La Rochell.

The plantation system was developed primarily for the export of sugar. Sugar production is labor-intensive. The mills were expensive and often deadly to their operators. When Saint-Domingue came into French hands in the 17th century, the plantations were worked by Afrikan slaves alongside white indentured laborers. In 1687, whites outnumbered Afrikan slaves on the island, 4,411 to 3,358. By 1700, the slave population was 9,082 and the white population had decreased by a few hundred. By the middle of the 18th century there were 150,000 slaves and fewer than 14,000 whites. In 1789 the official figures counted 465,000 slaves, 31,000 whites, and 28,000 free colored persons. At the end of the 18th century, more than 35,000 Afrikan slaves were brought to the island each year on the Middle Passage.

Later, the French built plantations for both indigo and coffee. Three-quarters of sugar and coffee sent to France was re-exported to other countries in Europe, with the difference in the price as it came into Bordeaux and Nantes and the price sold to Europe pocketed by the great merchant concerns in those cities. As many as 25 million French people depended on the Saint-Domingue trade. Nantes and Bordeaux flourished off of this trade. They became important centers of revolutionary activity and many of the bourgeoisie who fought for greater freedom for their class, for a political voice in the Kingdom of France, were only able to do so because they had grown fat on the trade of sugar and coffee.

On plantations with absentee landlords like those held by nobles or the merchant-houses, the chief agent was the procureur, who had power of attorney. These agents hired gérants, managers, but rarely visited the plantations themselves. The managers often exploited the slaves for their own gain, skimming commodities or money for themselves. The biggest plantations had économes, overseers, hired by managers and owners, who monitored the slaves in the fields and tracked the plantation’s slave population. These were all white or free colored men.

There was also a population of white urban craftsmen, and, increasingly as the 18th century went on, a growing class of poor or unemployed white persons who migrated into the colony with the hope that they might make themselves wealthy planters and plantation owners. Poor whites (petit blancs) were directed by the white planter class to vent much of their class-anger at the free colored people, many of whom were moderately wealthy or who owned slaves and small plantations of their own. This helped alleviate generalized class struggle in the colony.

Free colored persons (gens de couleur), were a legally recognized racial caste. Membership in this caste was initially small; in the early 18th century, many people of mixed Afrikan descent were legally classified as white, By the 1760s, new racial laws and measurements recategorized many of these persons and determined them to be “colored” — by blood quantum. In 1764, a royal decree forbade persons categorized in this fashion from practicing medicine, surgery, or pharmacy. The next year, another decree excluded them from working as lawyers or in the offices of notaries. A 1773 law made it illegal for them to take the names of their masters or white relatives. A 1779 regulation made it illegal for free people of color to “affect the dress, hairstyles, styles, or bearing of whites.” By the time of the Revolution, free colored people were subject to many laws discriminating against them on the basis of “race.” (There were many legal categories of “color” based on blood quantum.)

Still, wealthy free colored persons sent their children to be educated in France. White men married free colored women — however, in the 1750s and ‘60s some of those who had done so were removed as administrators and military officers. Poor whites or those arriving in the colony seeking to make their fortune were confronted with well-established free colored persons; in a naked maneuver designed to secure a cross-class alliance, the wealthy white planters assisted these poor whites by agitating for that legislation which deprived free colored persons of political, social, and economic rights.

Below the free colored people were the ranks of the Black slaves. The top of the slave hierarchy was marked by the slave driver. Drivers (or overseers) were in charge of the field slaves and often tasked with whipping those who where chosen for punishment. They had better food, clothes, and housing than field hands, and sometimes acted as collaborators with the masters and managers. Yet, a French manual for plantation masters advised them to watch their drivers carefully, as they were the most rebellious slaves on the plantation — and not without good reason. They had the most freedom out of all the slaves, and often gathered on Sundays to discuss matters with drivers from neighboring plantations. These men were the organizers of the revolt in 1791, doing most of the planning work at these Sunday meetings.

The horrors of the middle passage are well-documented. Over 100,000 slaves died during transport. 685,000 slaves were brought into Saint-Domingue from 1700-1793. Saint-Domingue accounted for between 8 and 11 million slaves overall, perhaps 10 percent of the entire Atlantic slave trade. Each year, 5 to 6 percent of the slaves died, an enormous fatality rate. Without a constant stream of new slaves from Afrika, the colony would exhaust its exploited Black workforce by literally working them to death in a matter of years.

The slaves on the sugar plantations were subject to the worst conditions on the entire island. Sugar refining was brutal and dangerous, and consumed the lives of the slaves on the plantations. Thus, the slave population was divided between the sugar slaves and the coffee and indigo slaves; these groups were further divided into drivers, artisans (barrel makers, sugarboilers, and so on), and field hands. Enslaved women were excluded from the high-status work. They worked as domestics or field-hands, and were also used as “breeding stock” — subject to rape, assault, and sexual exploitation by masters, managers, and overseers. Slaves were permitted to maintain personal garden plots, the produce of which they ate or sought permission to go to market on Sundays to sell.

Class Forces at Work

The tensions in the colony of Saint-Domingue on the eve of the Revolution ran thusly: 

1. White planters, “grand blancs”. By and large supporting the bourgeois Revolution in France, the planters generally joined with Club Massaic and the merchants of Bordeaux, Nantes, etc. They were opposed to the expansion of rights for free people of color, and violently opposed to any degree of liberation for the slaves. However, once the Revolution was underway, the planters would increasingly struggle against the current of radical republicanism that began to threaten the privileges of the big merchant houses.
2. White artisans and “petit blancs”. White artisans were positioned to become allies of the planters through their shared desire to maintain slavery, but they were less independence-minded and tended to be more loyal to France. Poor whites were non-revolutionary, but more or less allied with the white planters through a combined hatred of the racialized people of color, particularly those who had a higher class-status.
3. The free people of color. Opposed to the freeing of Black slaves, the free people of color also supported the Revolution in France and saw the position of Club Massaic as hypocritical while distancing themselves from the more radical abolitionist positions. Essentially, the free people of color on the island were agitating for expanded political rights and the right to assimilate into white French society. The free people of color were mostly concentrated in the west and the south; there they were armed and well-organized.
4. Black slaves. The enslaved population was divided into strata of its own: urban slaves, domestic slaves, drivers, and field slaves.
   1. Urban and domestic slaves. About 100,000 of the 500,000 slaves in Saint-Domingue were cooks, personal servants, artisans, etc. As a class, they were not inclined to join any movement, relying on the status of their masters to protect them.
   2. Drivers and field slaves. The 400,000 slaves who worked the fields or who directly administered the plantations were subject to the most brutal and inhumane treatment; these were the slaves that would become the engine of the revolution in Saint-Domingue, led by the drivers who organized the uprising.
5. The Maroons. There were a not-insignificant number of Afrikan slaves who escaped into the central mountains or the surrounding territories and became outlaws, raiders, and so forth. These so-called Maroons were often hardened warriors. There were also, among the slaves, those who had just recently been transported (stolen) from Afrika, many of whom had been taken in warfare. Regardless of their station or class as slaves, these slaves, “most of whom can barely say two words of French but in their country where accustomed to fighting wars,” taught the Saint-Domingue revolution tactics the French regulars were unable to match.

Setting the Stage for the Revolution

The initial conflict in Saint-Domingue was between the free people of color and the white population. As Revolution swept through France and the National Assembly became more radical, opening a split between the bourgeoisie and the French aristocracy, the upper strata of the free people of color in Saint-Domingue began to agitate for commensurate political rights as those that were being extended to the citizens of France.

Vincent Ogé, a free colored man who was in France when the Revolution broke out, appeared before the National Assembly with Julien Raimond to represent the free men of color on Saint-Domingue. They presented a petition which warned that “there still exists in one province of this Empire a race of men debased and degraded; a class of citizens consigned to contempt, to all the humiliation of slavery… [Though] born citizens and free” they were “slaves in the land of liberty.”

They tried to win over the planters at Club Massiac. They presented a plan for rights to be granted to “quadroons” (someone with one quarter Afrikan or Indigenous descent) born of legitimate parents with at least two generations of freedom. Ogé privately gave the club a separate plan — one which started by granting rights to free colored persons, but which would abolish slavery little by little. Club Massaic listened, but promised them nothing. As a result, they allied themselves with the Société des amis des Noirs. They presented a cahier des doléances to the National Assembly calling for “equality for all non-whites and freedom for mulatto slaves.”

Although many of the planters and merchants supported limited political rights for the free colored people, the call for full equality roused Club Massaic. The club took action against the delegates to protect the institution of slavery. The planter Tanguy de la Boissière published a pamphlet in 1789 arguing that the “pivot” of the “constitution, legislation, and regime of Saint-Domingue” must be “everything for the planter… There can be in Saint-Domingue only slaves and masters.” In March of 1790, the National Assembly proposed a law that the constitution of France would not be applied to the colonies. The law that was passed by the National Assembly stated that “all people” who were property owners over twenty-five would participate in the elections for the colonial assembly. The abolitionists in the National Assembly knew what was happening: the ambiguous language meant the French National Assembly at home was leaving the question for the colonial assembly of Saint-Domingue abroad — an assembly in which every representative was a planter and slave-owner.

That July, Ogé left France with a shipload of guns. In October of 1790, he landed in Saint-Domingue and armed hundreds of free colored men in the hope that he could enforce the law. He marched on and seized the town of Grande-Rivière, then sent letters to the Revolutionary Provincial Assembly in Le Cap demanding it apply the National Assembly decree granting all free citizens political rights. His uprising, however, was crushed by troops dispatched from Le Cap. He was tortured and executed.

By the following August, the North Province was in flames — not for the political rights of the free colored people, but for the freedom of the Black slaves. A rebel who was caught and executed was found to have “in one of his pockets pamphlets printed in France, filled with commonplaces about the Rights of Man and the Sacred Revolution; in his vest pocket was a large packet of tinder and phosphate and lime. On his chest he had a sack full of hair, herbs, and bits of bone, which they call a fetish.” The objective and subjective conditions for revolution had combined; the Black slaves of Saint-Domingue had developed a revolutionary consciousness.

In early August of 1791, before Boukman and the revolt marched through the cane, the free colored people organized a mass political assembly at Mirebalais. They selected delegates to the National Assembly of France, but were ordered by the governor to disband when the revolt broke out in the North Province. The angry free colored people took up arms. 

In the Western Province, the free colored people sought allies and took in a contingent of rebel slaves and dubbed them the Swiss — like the Swiss mercenaries in service to the King of France. The free colored rebels promised the Swiss they would be granted freedom for their service. By September 1791, the so-called Confederation of free colored people and Black slaves burned out and destroyed a contingent of troops from Port-au-Prince. A wealthy white planter proposed a solution: make peace with the free colored people. This betrayed the white class-alliance between planters and “petits blancs,” but it brought the free colored persons within the Confederate alliance to the table.

The Black “Swiss” rebels marched with their allies into Port-au-Prince. Behind closed doors, the white planters and free colored leadership agreed to deport the slaves rather than free them. An attempt was made to sell them in Belize, but when that failed they were simply abandoned on Jamaica. The British took them back to Saint-Domingue where they were executed by the French soldiery for their loyalty.

The attempted peace treaty also broke down. When a free colored soldier was insulted by a white soldier they began to fight. An angry white crowd lynched the Confederate, Scapin, and the free-colored soldiers opened fire on the white “patriots.” The outnumbered free-colored soldiers retreated from the town, but the whites followed them, murdering free-colored citizens in their homes or the street, and inadvertently setting fire to Port-au-Prince and reducing it to ashes.

The New France

In France, the Revolution was growing more radical. The King had been forced to sign the short-lived 1791 constitution, making the National Assembly the chief legislative body of the Kingdom and transforming France, with a pen stroke, into a constitutional monarchy. Civil commissioners were dispatched from the Assembly to Saint-Domingue, where they arrived in November; they carried a decree from the National Assembly stating that the “laws concerning the state of unfree persons and the political status of men of color and free blacks” would be established by the colonial assembly, overturning their previous promise for political rights.

The National Assembly had also declared a general amnesty for “acts of revolution.” Those who “returned to order” would not be charged with crimes for the violence or sedition they had committed.

Jean-François and Georges Biassou, the two victorious generals of the slave rebellion in the North Province, demanded the inclusion of the slaves in the amnesty. The planters refused, even as the commissioners realized there was no military solution that could destroy the growing power of the slave rebellion. Louis de Tousard, a veteran of the American Revolution, and a French officer, warned Jean-François and Biassou “Do not believe that the whites, and especially the members of an assembly of representatives from the colony, would lower themselves so far as to receive conditions dictated and demanded of them by their rebel slaves.”

Jean-François and Biassou replied to the commissioners, the planters, and Tousard, that “[o]ne hundred thousand men are in arms… Eighty percent of the population” of the north was rising. The leadership of this Black revolution was “entirely dependent on the general will” of the insurgents. Still, even Jean-François and Biassou, the rebel slave-generals, did not foresee abolition, merely reformed slavery. The rebel camps made it clear in no uncertain terms that they would not disband. There was no negotiation that would bring them back to the plantation. They would have general abolition of slavery, or they would, as Marat would say in December, be reduced to “slaughtering their oppressors to the last.”

After nearly a year of open rebellion, property damage, massacres of both Black slaves and white planters, on April 4, 1792, the National Assembly of France declared that “the hommes de couleur and the nègres libres must enjoy, along with the white colons, equality of political rights.” Did this free the slaves? No. It conscripted the free persons of color to fight the slaves. It reduced the complex racial hierarchy of Saint-Domingue to a simple one: on the one hand there were the free, and on the other the enslaved, and among the free there were no racial distinctions under the law.

In October 1792, news arrived in Saint-Domingue that the king had been suspended during an August uprising in Paris. The French Revolution entered yet another phase: one of radical republicanism in which a new assembly, based on universal male suffrage, was elected: the National Convention. France was now a republic. The colonial commissioners, Léger Félicité Sonthonax and Etienne Polverel were given extraordinary powers to suppress enemies of the republic by the National Convention.

In January of 1793, Louis XVI was executed. Spain and Britain joined Austria and declared war on France. As the other European powers threatened Saint-Domingue, the republic sent a new governor, François-Thomas Galbaud du Fort, who was a Port-au-Prince property owner. He immediately got into a dispute with the colonial commissioners; Sonthonax had him imprisoned. In response, the white sailors and French soldiers attacked Le Cap and the commissioners.

Sonthonax and Polverel issued a new decree: all “black warriors” who would “fight for the Republic” would be free. Any slave who fought in their defense would be “equal to all free men” and receive “all the rights belonging to French citizens.” But so, too, did the Spanish offer to free those who would fight on their behalf and capture the colony for the crown of Spain.

It was on August 29, 1793, that Sonthonax issued a decree abolishing slavery in the Northern Province. In the west and south, Polverel followed suit. Not only did the commissioners free them, the slaves were granted citizenship by the decrees.

From late 1793 until mid-1794, the British launched their invasion of Saint-Domingue. At the same time, the Spanish, from the Hispaniola side of the island, had recruited a number of free people of color, including the general Toussaint L’Ouverture. On 6 May 1794, after the Spanish crown refused to honor its promise to begin the abolition of slavery, L’Ouverture went over to the French and ambushed the Spanish as they emerged from attending mass at San Raphael. Toussaint’s Spanish-backed rebel army defected to Republican France and succeeded in pushing the Spanish out. The unifying colony now presented a threat to Britain in her rear: a slave revolt in Jamaica. L’Ouverture and the revolutionary general Rigaud together defeated the British and secured the island. An officer corps of free colored men was emerging, leading armies of liberated slaves.

Pan-Afrikanism and the Caribbean

The revolution flickered and was snuffed out in France, devolving in the Thermidorian Reaction, the execution of Robespierre and the radical Jacobins, the instatement of the White Terror, and ended in the creation of the Directorate, which was continually at war with all of Europe. After suffering abysmal military defeats, the Directorate was overthrown in the 18th Brumaire coup of Napoleon on 9 November 1799.

The revolutionary forces in Saint-Domingue, having secured the island and stilled the bloodletting among rival generals, declared their sovereignty from the French Consulate. In response, Napoleon dispatched an expeditionary force to Saint-Domingue to restore it to France, to profitability, and most of all, to slavery. Toussaint was defeated on 25 April 1802 and taken in chains to France. Rebel troops were executed by sulfur dioxide gas in the holds of General Rochambeau’s ships, shot en masse by firing squad, hanged, and drowned in bags.

The French troops, devastated by yellow fever and fighting, were reinforced by a Polish Legion who, seeing in the bravery of the slaves an echo of the plight of divided Poland, defected to join General Dessalines and would eventually be given citizenship and recognized as black under the Haitian constitution. The island revolted against the reimposition of slavery. The island revolts continued throughout 1802, and became a general war in October, when General Dessalines repudiated the peace and led the entire island once more against the forces of Consulate France toward independence.

Dessalines, in large part thanks to the British war on France preventing Napoleon from reinforcing the island, defeated the French armies and, on 1 January 1804, declared Saint-Domingue to be free and independent, rechristening it Haiti after its Arawak name.

In February of 1806 the young United States Congress adopted an embargo bill and continuously subject the Republic of Haiti to embargo until 1810 and did not trade with the republic until the 1820s. The U.S. did not recognize Haiti until 1862, after the southern states seceded. In 1825, the Haitian Republic was forced to pay 150 million francs to ex-slaveholders. Haiti eventually paid off its debt in 1947 — which bankrupted the country and forced it to take a loan from the imperialist French banks. In 1922, the U.S. seized all of Haiti’s customs houses, institutions, banks, and the national treasury.

This theft of wealth annihilated the productive capacity of the Haitian economy throughout the 19th and 20th century and has subjected the republic to a continuous cycle of debt, poverty, and invasion. In 2003, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was removed in a coup d’etat that was self-admittedly orchestrated by France because he called for reparations. The coup general who replaced him, Gerard Latortue, withdrew the demand. It remains one of the poorest countries in the Americas and nearly its entire government operating budget comes from the Venezuelan oil alliance Petrocaribe.

On 7 July 2021, the president of Haiti, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated in the wake of his effort to combat U.S.-backed drug smuggling and trafficking (with roots in the 1986 Service d’Intelligence National, a CIA cutout that moved drugs through Haiti). Since that date, Haiti has had no president.

The U.S. settler-republic refused to aid Haiti because of the slaves they harbored in their own bosom. Despite the shared Enlightenment roots of the U.S. war for independence, the French Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution, the U.S. sided with the Kingdom of France when it came to money and the fear of a slave uprising. The strength of the colonialist states in the west is such that if any of the imperialized nations attempts to break free from the U.S.-led capitalist world-market, if it attempts to shake the chains of imperialism and neo-colonialism, it marks itself out, just as the Republic of Haiti did, as a target.

However, each of these imperialized countries contains one or more New Afrikan nations; it is these descendents of the horrors of chattel slavery who have the power to shatter the imperialist chain. By banding together and rising all at once across the west, by threatening the monopoly capitalists not only in the peripheral colonies but also in the semi-colonies of the U.S. and Canada, the thinly-spread imperialist armies will be divided, unable to concentrate, unable to crush the rising state after state. It is through western Pan-Afrikanism that Haiti will be free of its debts and its status as a neocolony. It is through western Pan-Afrikanism that the Black Belt, the U.S. region of New Afrika, will throw off its capitalist, vampiric, rulers.

Walter Rodney wrote that, for “the vast majority of New World blacks, phrases such as ‘the reserve army of labour’, ‘labour reservoir’ and ‘last hired first fired’ adequately sum up the position. The reference to the black community in the US as an internal colony has many justifications, not least of which is the remarkable fact that black labour within America has virtually the same relation to whites in terms of skills as does continental African labour with regards to Europe and white America.”

“Imperialism,” he says, “has used racism in its own interest, but it turns out to be a double-edged blade, and that very unity that is engendered among black people — the unity of common conditions and common exploitation and oppression — is being turned around as a weapon to be used against imperialism.“

The lesson of Haiti is thus: we rise together when we rise, or we are cut down and crushed one by one, not only New Afrika, but the proletariat of the so-called New World.