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Décret de la Convention Nationale du 19e jour de Ventose, an second de la République Française, une & indivisible, qui ordonne l'arrestation des membres de l'Assemblée Coloniale & de celle de Saint-Marc.

Nantes, Malassis, 1794.

8°, 2, [2 blank] pp.

Unbound.

Rare revolutionary decree ordering the arrest of “all colonists who were members of the Assembly of Saint-Marc, and of that later known as the Colonial Assembly … and the members of the Club de Massiac and of the Colonies, currently in France,” together with the seizure of their papers. Issued at the height of the Haitian Revolution, only weeks after the National Convention ratified the abolition of slavery (4 February 1794), it marks the definitive rupture between the French Republic and the colonial planter elite. The Assembly of Saint-Marc and the Colonial Assembly had embodied white colonial autonomy, while the Club de Massiac—founded in Paris in 1789 by wealthy planters from Saint-Domingue and the Lesser Antilles under the leadership of the marquis de Gouy d’Arsy—was the principal lobby working to preserve slavery and block the application of the Rights of Man in the colonies.

As the slave uprising of 1791 developed into a revolutionary war that destroyed the old colonial order, these networks came to be viewed by the Convention as counter-revolutionary and complicit with foreign enemies. The present decree reflects that political reversal: former colonial leaders are transformed into suspects, targeted for arrest and confiscation of their papers. It stands as a powerful printed document of the dismantling of planter power and of the revolutionary redefinition of Saint-Domingue, on the road from general emancipation to the creation of independent Haiti in 1804.

Condition: good, untrimmed copy.