French authorities tried to stop slaves from carrying revolutionary ideas back to the colonies.

Evidence

Already in July 1789, several slave women who had arrived in a French port from Saint-Domingue had been detained and sent back to the colonies by port authorities concerned about what they might learn in continental France and communicate back to the colony. In August one member of the Club Massiac proposed that all “blacks or mulattoes” arriving from Europe be banned from entering Saint-Domingue, and in September the club wrote to merchants in the port towns asking them to prevent individuals of African descent from embarking for the colonies. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 268

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader literature on how the French Revolution’s ideas traveled to the Caribbean through people and print — parallels other Atlantic-revolution histories like Laurent Dubois’s own ‘A Colony of Citizens’.