The Haitian Revolution was the hemisphere’s largest slave rebellion and devastated Napoleon’s finances.

Evidence

In the 1790s, another successful revolution occurred, one that terrified rather than inspired the nation’s leaders: enslaved people in the colony of Saint-Domingue—which was the most lucrative colony in the world at the time and later became known as Haiti—rose up and overthrew their French enslavers in the largest and most successful rebellion of enslaved people in the history of the Western Hemisphere. What would become known as the Haitian Revolution financially devastated Napoleon and, amid a sea of slave colonies, established the first free Black republic in the Americas. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 119