Metropolitan equivocation on free-colored rights planted the seeds of colonial conflict.

Evidence

The Colonial Committee had avoided a fight in the National Assembly by not providing clear instructions on the matter of the free-coloreds. It hoped that the planters would “take advantage of the imprecision” of the instructions to refuse the demands of the free people of color, demands that they “did not dare refuse themselves.” It was a cynical and cowardly political compromise, and in it were embedded the seeds of a brutal conflict. The National Assembly had abandoned the free people of color, leaving them “facing their enemies” in the colonies. “It was in Saint-Domingue that everything would be decided.” — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 296

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The structure of the claim — that refusing to resolve a question of who qualifies as a citizen in the metropole forces it to be decided violently in the colony — invites sustained reflection on how imperial equivocation externalizes conflict.