French planters attacked emancipation and demanded forced labor from ex-slaves

Evidence

In writing these words, Louverture was seeking to “conjure away the storm” gathering across the Atlantic. The Saint-Domingue planters in Paris were on the offensive. In May the planter Viennot de Vaublanc, a representative in the newly elected Council of the Five Hundred, gave a strident speech attacking emancipation. Saint-Domingue, he proclaimed, was in a “shocking state of disorder” and under the control of a military government run by “ignorant and gross negroes” who were “incapable of distinguishing” liberty from “unrestrained license.” They had “abandoned agriculture”; their “cry” was that the country belonged to them and whites were no longer welcome there. The only solution was to force the ex-slaves to return to the plantations where they had lived “before the revolution.” — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 726

Categorization

• XREF: Planters in Paris counterattacking connects to the earlier theme of the Directory-era rollback and prefigures Napoleon’s later campaign against Louverture; the debates of the Council of the Five Hundred resonate with the mother country’s shifting metropolitan politics.