French revolutionaries in Paris disagreed over whether to excuse or condemn the slave revolt

Evidence

The society’s correspondent in England, Thomas Clarkson, wrote a pamphlet refuting this idea; slave revolts, he noted, had existed in every slave society going back to Greece and Rome, long before there were abolitionists. The “real cause” of the insurrection, he insisted, was the “Slave Trade.” As long as it continued, revolts were inevitable, and far from being a reason to stop abolitionist efforts, they were a reason to “redouble” them. … If the white residents of Saint-Domingue had the right to reject “laws emanating from a legislator who was two thousand leagues away” and to proclaim independence, as he believed they did, the other groups in the colony also had, like all human beings, the right to resist oppression. The whites had made themselves “despotic masters of the mulattoes and tyrannical masters of the blacks,” and if the latter wished to “overthrow the cruel and shameful yoke under which they suffer, they are authorized to use any means available,” even “massacring their oppressors to the last.” — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 440

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the argument in ‘On Sacrifice’ and general themes of revolutionary violence justified as resistance to oppression.