Religion, Slavery and Race in the Age of Revolutions: Catholicism from Colonial Saint-Domingue to Independent Haiti, c1700 to c1830

• Applicant: Dr. Miriam Franchina
• Subject Area: Early Modern History
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 416114503

This project asks what Catholicism meant for Africans and Afro-Creoles in the long 18th century, first during their enslavement in colonial Saint-Domingue and then as free citizens in early independent Haiti. The hypothesis is that adhesion to Catholicism represented for the enslaved a means to forge a common identity and navigate their lives and that by embracing it, they may have defied their nature of chattel. The potential of Catholicism as a versatile instrument of social integration, identity formation, and political mobilization is especially probed by focusing on the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). Our study of religion in the longue durée offers a finer-grained understanding of this pivotal event. To revise the long-standing assumption that Catholicism had been superficially embraced by the slaves, we uncover new sources in hitherto unexplored Church archives in Italy and France. We read sources overwhelmingly written by Europeans against the grain to reconstruct Africans’ and Afro-Creoles’ agency in appropriating Catholicism to open up spaces of autonomy and exploit tensions between clerical and state authorities. We add the study of little-used Spanish collections to show how revolutionary leaders leveraged their negotiations with Santo Domingo and rallied the rank and files. The latter’s religious experience is also gleaned from clerical reports, judiciary documents and revolutionary leaders’ correspondence. For the early independent era (circa 1804-1830s) we combine all the above-mentioned archives with a study of Haitian gazettes and treatises destined for a foreign audience to reveal how the promotion of Catholicism marked Haitian national self-fashioning and quest for international recognition. The project contends that embracing Catholicism was a powerful example of creative adaptation under the extreme circumstances of slavery and revolutionary turmoil. We add Saint-Domingue/Haiti to the growing map of revolutionary movements where religion played an important mobilizing and inspirational role, going against the outdated secularization paradigm.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants