He organized a coup against the parliament and created a new consular regime, which he dominated. Bonaparte staffed his Colonial Ministry with men who had been devoted defenders of slavery and proponents of colonial autonomy a decade before. Among them was Moreau de St. Méry, who had recently returned to Paris from exile in Philadelphia.22
In the early 1790s Moreau and his allies had advocated the formation of “particular laws” for the colonies as a way to prevent the granting of rights to free-coloreds, and the possibility of a reform or elimination of slavery. They had failed to stop the application of the universalist principles of the Revolution in Saint-Domingue; their political ideology had been roundly defeated in 1794. In 1800, however, after years of criticizing emancipation, the planters and their supporters had their revenge. Bonaparte’s new constitution decreed that because of the difference in the “nature of things and the climate,” the colonies were to be governed by “special laws.” Indeed, given differences in “habits, customs, interests,” as well as the “diversity” of agriculture and production, there were to be different laws applied to the different colonies of France in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. It was a profound shift away from the colonial policy envisioned by Etienne Laveaux a few years before: the colonies would no longer have representatives in Paris, as they had during the previous years of Revolution. Continental France and her colonies, united under a single legal order for years, were again separated. It was a victory for an old tradition of creole legal thinking embodied in the work of Moreau, although it was a far cry from what many planters had hoped for at the beginning of the revolution: the “special laws” would not be shaped by the residents of the colony, but instead decreed by the metropolitan government.23
Bonaparte understood that in the Caribbean the return of the policy of “particular laws” would be seen by many as a looming threat to liberty itself. And so, as they announced their new policy, the consuls also declared to the people of Saint-Domingue that “the sacred principles of the liberty and equality of the blacks will never suffer, among you, any attack or modification.” The “brave blacks” should remember that “the French people are the only ones who recognize your right to liberty and equality.” In case they forgot, Bonaparte ordered that this statement should be written “in letters of gold” on the flags of all the military units in SaintDomingue. Louverture, who was confirmed by Bonaparte in his rank of “general-in-chief” of Saint-Domingue, refused to follow this order when he received it several months later. He probably noted that the consul’s declaration promised only that liberty and equality would not be touched “among you,” that is, in Saint-Domingue; aware of the implications of the idea of “particular laws,” he was also probably aware of the opening the new policy allowed for the acceptance of slavery in some parts of the empire. “It is not a circumstantial liberty conceded only to us that we want,” he apparently said; “it is the absolute acceptance of the principle that no man, whether born red [i.e., mulatto], black, or white, can be the property of another.”24
Louverture recognized the opportunity created by these new circumstances and seized on it to propose his own laws for Saint-Domingue. On February 4, 1801—the seventh anniversary of the abolition of slavery by the National Convention—he announced the convocation of a “Constituent Assembly” that would draft a constitution for Saint-Domingue. The time had come to “lay the foundations” for the colony’s “prosperity” by creating “laws appropriate for our habits, our traditions, our climate, our industry.” He used the language of difference deployed by the French government, but with a different intent. Where it had once served to assert white supremacy in the colony despite the universalist promises of the Revolution, Louverture now used it to justify the creation of a body of law that sanctified and solidified a new regime in which men of African descent were in command. Instead of waiting for Bonaparte to send his own laws, he decided to make his own.25