Caribbean slave profits financed the very French bourgeoisie who launched the Revolution

Evidence

The livelihood of as many as a million of the 25 million inhabitants of France depended directly on the colonial trade. The slave colonies of the Caribbean were an engine for economic and social change in metropolitan France. The historian Jean Jaurès pointed out the “sad irony” that the fortunes created in Nantes and Bordeaux during the eighteenth century were a crucial part of the struggle for “human emancipation” that erupted in the French Revolution. Many among the bourgeoisie who were frustrated with the limits placed on them by the Old Regime system were wealthy thanks to the sugar and coffee produced by slaves in the Caribbean. In 1789, 15 percent of the 1,000 members of the National Assembly owned colonial property, and many others were probably tied to colonial commerce. The slaves of Saint- Domingue who had helped lay the foundation for the French Revolution would ultimately make it their own, and even surpass it, in their own struggle for liberty. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 83

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors the paradox in the reader’s Sacrifice interests and general Atlantic-worlds history: the colonial economy seeded the metropolitan movement that would later destabilize the colony itself.
• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘sad irony’ — the same capital that financed French emancipation underwrote Caribbean slavery, which then produced a revolution that surpassed its own source — is a dense, generative knot worth sitting with.