Insurgent leaders framed their rising as defending the king of France

Evidence

But insurgent leaders more commonly called on the authority of the king of France himself. This was the case of a remarkable free-colored man who took on the name Romaine la Rivière (also known as Romaine-laprophetesse), who emerged as a leader in the Southern Province of Saint- Domingue in late 1791. Having established himself in an abandoned church, he conducted mass before an upside-down cross and claimed to be “inspired by the Holy Spirit and in direct communication with the Virgin Mary, his godmother, who answered his solicitations in writing.” He repeatedly told slaves that the king had already freed them, but that their masters were refusing the decision, using this assertion to encourage them to join his armed band. Romaine la Rivière was remarkable for the strength of the claims he made on both the earthly and heavenly powers, but he was not unique. When Boukman was killed in mid-November, insurgents lamented that he had been “killed for the most just of causes, the defense of his king.” The insurgent leader Jean-François, “the supreme chief of the African army,” wore a gray and yellow uniform decorated with a “cross of Saint-Louis,” an aristocratic military order. His guards’ uniforms were decorated with the royal fleur-de-lis. He and the leaders he fought with called themselves generals and officers of the “army of the king.” — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 365

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors later revolutionary dynamics where the enslaved invoked royal protection against local masters, echoing British offers of emancipation during the American Revolution and similar “king as protector” patterns elsewhere.
• DEEPTHINKING: A dense counterpoint to the republican-rights framing from the prior paragraphs: the 1791 insurrection was overwhelmingly legitimized not by revolutionary republicanism but by loyalty to a king imagined as already favoring freedom, overturning comfortable assumptions about the slave revolt being a straightforward product of French revolutionary ideology.