Goods Worthy of a Free People: Sugar, Commerce, and Consumer Rights in the French Revolution

Abstract

At the end of the eighteenth century, the French island colony of Saint Domingue was the largest producer of sugar in the world. Powered by a brutal system of plantation slavery, the colony pumped wealth into France, boosted trade, and fueled consumption across France and Europe by providing a cheap and abundant supply of sugar and coffee. French urban dwellers from up and down the social scale became habitual consumers of these colonial commodities, and integrated them into their social, domestic, and working lives. In the summer of 1791, however, a massive uprising of enslaved laborers rocked the sugar-producing island colony. The rebellion—which marked the beginning of the Haitian Revolution—sent the plantation system crashing down and the French sugar market into disarray. This dissertation uses sugar to investigate the economic, political, and social impact of the Haitian Revolution on revolutionary France. It traces the consequences of the massive slave uprising on the island colony to the metropole, where the price of sugar skyrocketed and consequently prompted a series of consumer riots in the capital. Analyzing these riots in addition to debates around sugar consumption and economic policy, this dissertation shows how the sugar crisis fueled contestation and competing claims between consumers, merchants, and authorities. Through sugar, revolutionaries debated larger questions about the purpose of the Revolution, the rights of citizens, and their vision for society in a post-Old-Regime political order. Historians typically analyze the Haitian Revolution in the context of political and philosophical thought around slavery, race, colonialism, and citizenship. This dissertation broadens our understanding of the Haitian Revolution’s important but little-examined economic impact on France and the French Revolution, and a second layer of social, political, and cultural-intellectual ramifications. This dissertation also contributes to the history of consumption in the French Revolution. Scholars tend to approach consumption in this period as a symbolic practice rooted in material culture and directed from the top down. In contrast, this dissertation uses sugar to explore how consumers politicized the act of consumption itself and channeled their notion of citizenship through their identities as consumers