All events · Empire, Clearance and Removal
The Haitian Revolution, the War of Extermination and the Expulsion of the French
1791–1804 · Americas
Displacement
Territory Seized
Mass Killing
Displaced
50,000
Roughly 25,000-30,000 white colonists and a comparable number of free people of colour left Saint-Domingue between 1791 and 1804, going to Cuba, Jamaica, the United States and France; port and refugee registers in Santiago de Cuba, Charleston, Philadelphia and New Orleans provide partial counts, and around 9,000-10,000 of those first sheltering in Cuba were re-expelled to Louisiana in 1809, a movement documented in Spanish and American customs records. The colony's enslaved population, about 500,000 in 1789 by French colonial censuses, was not displaced abroad but was transformed by the revolution.
Share of the population affected
9.0%
of the total population of the French colony of Saint-Domingue on the eve of the revolution, 1789
Killed
3,000–5,000
direct killing
Territory
27,750 km²
Saint-Domingue, the wealthiest colony in the Caribbean, became the independent state of Haiti on 1 January 1804; its 27,750 km2 passed out of French control and plantation property was confiscated.
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What happened
The rising of enslaved people in the northern plain of Saint-Domingue in August 1791 began a thirteen-year war that ended slavery in the colony and produced the second independent state in the Americas. Napoleon's expedition of 1802 under Leclerc, and after his death under Rochambeau, attempted to restore slavery and conducted what French officers themselves described as a war of extermination, including mass drownings and the use of dogs against prisoners; the insurgents responded in kind. After independence was declared on 1 January 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines ordered the killing of the remaining French population, and between February and April 1804 an estimated 3,000-5,000 people were killed, with priests, foreign nationals and skilled workers largely exempted. Tens of thousands of colonists and free people of colour had already fled to Cuba, Jamaica, the United States and France, reshaping the population of New Orleans and other port cities. The atlas covered the Caribbean's Indigenous collapse and the slave trade but not the revolution that ended slavery there.
Parties
Enslaved insurgents overthrew the plantation regime of Saint-Domingue; French forces under Leclerc and Rochambeau waged a campaign of extermination; after independence Dessalines ordered the killing or expulsion of the remaining French
Disputed
The characterisation of the 1804 killings, described by some historians as a genocide of the colony's white population and by others as the terminal act of a war in which the French had themselves pursued extermination; and the size of the toll, which contemporary accounts by survivors and by the Haitian state differ over.
The denominator
Colonial returns for 1789 give roughly 500,000 enslaved people, about 30,000 whites and about 28,000 free people of colour, a total usually stated as around 520,000-560,000; the enslaved count is generally regarded as an undercount because planters under-declared for tax.
The affected figure counts mainly the colony's white and French population, killed or expelled, together with French expeditionary troops who were never part of the colonial population; measured against the whole colony it looks small, while it represents most of a resident group of only some 30,000.
Where the baseline comes from
On the death toll
The range covers those killed in the 1804 massacre of the remaining French population, estimated from survivor accounts and contemporary correspondence; no register was kept. The revolution as a whole is generally estimated to have caused well over 150,000 deaths among the formerly enslaved population and some 50,000 among French troops and colonists, most from disease, but these totals are reconstructions from military returns and colonial censuses rather than counts.
Documented forms of violence
Mass KillingSummary ExecutionDestruction of Property
French officers' own dispatches under Rochambeau and the proclamations and correspondence of Dessalines document the mass drownings, executions and the 1804 killings.
Movements mapped
- Colonists and free people of colour fleeing to Santiago de Cuba
- Refugees expelled from Cuba to New Orleans, 18099,000
Countries touched, on present-day borders
Haiti, Cuba, United States of America
Sources
This entry rests only on reference, press or open-edited sources. Treat its figures as indicative and follow the links before relying on them.