The Color Barrier: Race in Haiti

The Haitian revolution ended in a very interesting way in my opinion. With their leader, Toussaint L’ouverture, dead after being imprisoned, former general under Toussaint, Jean-Jacques Dessalines leads a bloody purge of the white French from the island. I find this interesting that such a drastic outcome would come from this revolution. From the beginning of the revolution, race was not an important factor in the fighting of the revolution. But for such a bloody end to come from the revolution caught me off guard. In the beginning this revolution seemed to me to mostly be a conflict of ideas, not of color. The plantation owners and the wealthy wanted to keep control over their own economy, which was run through the power of the black slaves. But the plantation owners were not all white, some were free black who had been born free or even bought their freedom. As the movie stated, at the time of the slave revolt, Toussaint was running a plantation of his own, utilizing slave labor. So the idea of color had not yet seemed to become the main component of the revolution. After the free blacks had begun fighting the whites of the island, the slaves were still considered separate from the free black cause, even when the slaves joined the fight. It did not seem like an issue of color up until the Dessaline’s purge of the white French. This turning point seems to me to be when race suddenly became the big issue of the revolution.

The Common Man: Savagery Hidden behind Revolution

The French Revolution was a time of great change for the common man. The common people are often thought of as the catalyst and the driving force of the French Revolution, seen as the wronged people who were fighting for their inherent rights. But was this struggle for their inherent rights enough to justify the means by which they fought for them? The common man of the French Revolution were known of for their acts of savagery and violence. When storming the Bastille the people of Paris were said to have hacked the warden of the prison into pieces, then stuck his head on a pike and paraded it around the city streets. When the fish-mongers wives stormed the palace of Versailles they killed royal guards and chased after Marie Antoinette with the intent to slaughter her, if not for the intervention of General Lafayette, their own leader. When their demands for the king to reside in Paris till their rewriting of the constitution was finished, the common French then celebrated raucously and insulted the royal family as they paraded them to Paris in a procession led by the heads of two french officials, stuck on pikes. Their revolutionary spirit and outcry for rights was undoubtedly not at fault, but do you believe that their quest for rights was enough to justify their savage means of attaining said rights?

The Conciliatory Propositions

Before the actual start of the Revolutionary War, the colonists were taxed in multiple accounts by the English. The colonists saw these taxes as a breach of their rights as citizens of the British Empire, which they still viewed themselves as. The colonists problems with these taxes was not the taxes themselves, but the fact that the colonists did not have a representative in Parliament to speak about these taxes on their behalf. The colonists outrage at their lack of representation in Parliament led to multiple boycotts and protests. The English saw that this cycle of taxing the colonists and the colonists boycotting the taxed materials was not working in their favor, so in the winter of 1774, Lord North came up with "The Conciliatory Propositions". "The Conciliatory Propositions" was a document that proposed to the colonists that they tax themselves upon Parliaments request, essentially satisfying both parties. But the Propositions did not reach the Colonists until after the first shots of war had been fired at Lexington and Concord. Lord North's Proposition did not matter at that point, rendering the venture pointless. I thought that this was a crucial point in the history of the war. These Propositions seemed that they satisfied the needs of both the colonists and the English, while at the same time maintaining English rule over the colonies and preventing bloodshed. I'm not saying that this was the best option in the long run, but at the time this probably would have made a whole lot of difference if it had reached the colonists on time. My question to you is: If the colonists had received "The Conciliatory Propositions" before the events at Lexington and Concord, do you think the colonists would have reconsidered going to war with the English?

Voltaire

During lasts nights reading on the Enlightenment and it's great thinkers, I found one part particularly interesting. Though Voltaire held the idea's and politics of England in high regard, he still viewed a monarchy as the best form of government. This idea just seemed so contradictory to me. I know that politics and philosophy are two different things, but in respecting the ideas of a society wouldn't you also respect the government of said society that allowed these ideas to flourish. Voltaire's explanation for his view also made me think. He stated that the reason that he preferred a monarchy is because human beings are so rarely capable of ruling themselves. So, the reason Voltaire prefers a monarchy is because he views these monarchs as the few that are fit to rule? But these monarchs were chosen from powerful families, who gained their power through force at some point in time. Isn't this contradictory to Voltaire's own statement that knowledge is to be valued over brute force? Please share your ideas.