French revolutionaries dismissed African republicans as incapable of understanding freedom.

Evidence

For the majority of the population of the island who were African-born, the form and content of kingship were probably defined by the traditions of their homelands. Garran-Coulon attributed the royalism of the insurgents in part to their “ignorance,” since “in Africa as well as in Saint- Domingue, they knew only royal government.” The Republican commissioner Légér Félicité Sonthonax similarly wrote in late 1793 that “the most stupid of Africans” could understand the “simple” idea of a king, while “even the most sophisticated of them” could not “conceive of the idea of a republic.” Such interpretations and oppositions were of course misleading. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 370

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to The Defeat of the Spanish Armada’s treatment of how contemporaries rationalize enemies’ political capacity, and to postcolonial readings of liberal republicanism’s exclusions.