Religion, Slavery and Race in the Age of Revolutions: Catholicism from Colonial Saint-Domingue to Independent Haiti, c1700 to c1830
Final Report Abstract
This project examined what Catholicism meant to Africans and Afro-descendants in the long eighteenth century, during their enslavement in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, and as free citizens in early independent Haiti. Catholicism has been treated as a "space of correlation" in which Africans and Afro-descendants bridged socio-cultural differences, constantly re-negotiating their status within colonial society and then in Haiti. It is argued that adherence to Catholicism provided a means for enslaved people to forge a common identity and navigate their lives, and that by embracing it, they defied their legal status as chattel. The potential of Catholicism for creating a sense of common identity has been studied especially for the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), a series of political and military events in Saint-Domingue that brought about the legal equality of free people of color (1792); the world’s first abolition of slavery (locally in 1793, in all French colonies in 1794; in Haiti in 1804); and the independence of the island, renamed Haiti (1804). The project has shed new light on the intellectual expediency and political agency of the most numerous yet elusive revolutionary actors: the enslaved population. Furthermore, religion has been identified as a versatile instrument of social integration, identity formation, and political mobilization during early Haitian independence, as the country stood for an unprecedented example of Black state governance based on the nonnegotiable principle of racial equality and the abolition of slavery. The project has uncovered previously neglected sources to address a long-standing historiographical problem: how to reconstruct the voices of the enslaved, given their general illiteracy and thus the paucity of primary sources produced directly by them. By locating new archival repositories in the religious archives of missionary orders and central Roman curial institutions, and by identifying new documents in traditional archives (French colonial records and French national archives), the project added nuance to the notion of African agency and contributed to the emerging scholarship on Atlantic Africans as agents of global catholicization.
Publications
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Atlantic ripples in the Mediterranean: Early nineteenth-century patriotic readings of Haiti in the Italian peninsula. Atlantic Studies, 18(2), 172-192.
Franchina, Miriam
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From Slave to Royal Vassal: Jean-François’s Negotiation Strategies in the Haitian Revolution. Slavery & Abolition, 42(4), 777-802.
Franchina, Miriam
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“Effacés du nombre des Chrétiens: Reading Enslaved Agency through the Sacrament of Confession in the 18th- Century French Caribbean,” Cristianesimo nella Storia, 3 (2021), 855-898.
Franchina, Miriam
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“Italians Crossing the Caribbean: Two Case Studies,” Age of Revolutions, Dec. 2021.
Franchina, Miriam
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“Only when French generals will give their daughters in marriage to the Nègres”: Jean-François Petecou and the Other Path to Haitian Freedom,” Age of Revolutions, May 2021.
Franchina, Miriam
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Restorers of the Divine Law. Apocalypse Now, 261-281. Routledge.
Ballériaux, Catherine & Tricoire, Damien
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A transatlantic battle of the robes: French priests in the Haitian Revolution. French History, 37(1), 17-35.
Franchina, Miriam
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Beyond the (Holy) Shroud: A glimpse into Afro-Catholicism during the Haitian Revolution. Atlantic Studies, 21(4), 530-566.
Franchina, Miriam
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“Revolutionary Royalty: Remembering Queen Marie-Louise of Haiti in Pisa”, Age of Revolutions.
Franchina, Miriam
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Introduction: Catholicism and Antislavery: Connecting Histories in the Atlantic World. Slavery & Abolition, 46(1), 1-9.
Tricoire, Damien & Franchina, Miriam
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Natural Rights in the Early Modern Atlantic World: Religion and the Emergence of Antislavery in Enlightenment France. Slavery & Abolition, 46(1), 59-83.
Tricoire, Damien
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Visions of an Ancient Ethiopian Church and the Africanization of Catholic History in José Antonio Aponte’s Afro-Cuban Codex. Slavery & Abolition, 46(1), 149-171.
Ojeda, Jorge Pavez
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‘A Very Thorny’ Question: Debates on Slavery between Capuchin Missionaries and the Roman Holy Office in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Slavery & Abolition, 46(1), 35-58.
Fattori, Maria Teresa
