Ten years of revolution had transformed former slaves’ political consciousness permanently

Evidence

The “distinctions of political freedom or restraint known in Europe,” he noted “shrink to nothing, when compared with the unspeakable difference between the terms ‘slave and free,’ in the colonies.” It would be as impossible to submit the people of Saint-Domingue to slavery as it was “to renew in a philosopher the superstitions of the nursery.” There had been not only a “revolution” in their habits, but a dramatic transformation in their “ideas.” The French general Pamphile de Lacroix would write in a similar vein that the great failure of Bonaparte and his advisers, most of them former planters, had been failing to see that the blacks were not “as they had left them,” and underestimating the profound political consequences of “ten years of revolution” in Saint-Domingue. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 915

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that colonial slavery’s binary of slave-versus-free overwhelms all European distinctions of political restraint, and that ten years of revolution permanently changed the people’s ideas, is a dense, paradigm-shifting observation about what revolution actually transforms.