Marat justified slave revolt by invoking a universal right to resist oppression

Evidence

In Paris the revolutionary firebrand Jean-Paul Marat presented a different kind of defense for the revolt. 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

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: Connects to the wider question of how French revolutionaries applied universal rights rhetoric to colonial subjects.

Related

• French revolutionaries in Paris disagreed over whether to excuse or condemn the slave revolt (similarity 0.85)
• White planters blamed abolitionists, not slavery, for inciting the revolt. (similarity 0.85)
• The Haitian Revolution proved the Declaration of Rights applied universally (similarity 0.83)
• Initial slave insurgents sought freedom within the French empire, not independence (similarity 0.80)
• Louverture reasoned that defending freedom was a universal right colonists would die to uphold (similarity 0.80)
• Planters saw the Declaration of the Rights of Man as a threat to slavery. (similarity 0.79)
• Insurrection could now win enslaved people an officially sanctioned freedom (similarity 0.79)
• Insurgent leaders escalated their demands from emancipation to general liberty by 1792 (similarity 0.79)
• The Haitian Revolution proved revolutionary rights could not be quarantined to Europe (similarity 0.79)
• Planters treated universalist rights talk as a contagion threatening slavery (similarity 0.78)
• Planters used abolitionists’ rhetoric to discredit their free-colored allies as revolt instigators (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Some slave insurgents grounded their revolt claims in the Rights of Man #corroborates (0.80)
• Slave insurgents invoked the Declaration of Rights to demand general emancipation and wages. #expands (0.75)
• Plantation slaves claimed a right to protest mistreatment by their masters #expands (0.60)