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He used the slogans of the French Revolution to mobilize the Black soldiers, fighting under the flag of the Spanish king, for battle against the revolutionary France of the period. Neither of the authorized representatives, Polvérel and Sonthonax, who had been dispatched from France to restore order in the colony’s affairs, were able or willing to intervene; on the contrary, they declared the abolition of slavery. But they weren’t exactly authorized to do so, and the Convention in Paris still couldn’t bring itself to decide on the matter. In the meantime, Toussaint L’Ouverture’s troops made further substantial territorial gains for Spain. It was only six months later – in January 1794 and under Jacobin hegemony in the National Convention – that the abolition of slavery was declared in all the colonies. In May, news of the ratification of the decree reached Toussaint L’Ouverture. He immediately decided to turn his back on the Spaniards, switched his allegiance to the Republic, won back all the conquered territories, this time for France, and captured the Spanish, and later the English, counter-revolutionary positions. From that day forward, the conquest of territory was no longer about mere tactics; it was about a revolutionary strategy. For Toussaint L’Ouverture, the liberation struggle was now an integral part of the French Revolution, and the victory for France a component of the liberation struggle. This example is a reminder of the history of a struggle, which to this day is largely absent from the historiography of eighteenth-century revolutions: the history of an anti-colonial, revolutionary liberation and of political subjectivation, for which the mere fact of ‘speaking for oneself’ is simply not enough.2 In this paper, it will be suggested that the question of universalism be posed the other way round, as it were. Why was it always assumed, in the way the revolution in San Domingo/Haiti has traditionally been perceived, that both the revolution and revolutionary discourse radiated outwards from France and reached the Caribbean islands, rather than the reverse? Why is universalist criticism always predicated on the assumption that universalism’s perspective goes from the hegemonic centre to the fringes? And why are marginalized positions in common perception and historiography denied the perspective on the whole?
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