Colonial planters believed the slave revolt was orchestrated by French abolitionists and revolutionaries

Evidence

Another account claimed, similarly, that there were whites leading the insurgents “with blackened faces,” and who “were discovered by their hair.” One priest captured among the rebels confessed, probably prodded by the fear that he would be executed (as he indeed soon was), that he had been “sent over with four more from France” in order to “teach negroes to revolt.” An even more extreme version of this paranoia was expressed in a September letter claiming that “fifty new emissaries were coming” to the colony “to raise insurrections among the slaves.” It accused Julien Raimond of “making numerous levies of rogues and ragamuffins in the streets of Paris,” and attacked Robespierre and Condorcet, “members of the National Assembly,” as “dangerous enemies to the colonies.” … A decree was passed in response, ordering that “every emigrant from France should be sent back to the mother country, at the expense of the colony,” unless they possessed property on the island or were related to someone who did. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 352

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reading-list item on moral panics over an external enemy, and to theme of blaming outsiders for internal unrest.
• QUESTION: Was Julien Raimond actually recruiting in Paris, or purely scapegoated here?