One War Debt, Three Revolutions

The Seven Years War ended in 1763, and everybody who fought it won something and owed somebody money.

Britain won North America and India and doubled its national debt, which produced a reasonable-sounding thought: the colonies had been defended at enormous expense and should contribute to the cost. The Stamp Act followed in 1765.

France lost, and then spent the next decade looking for a way to reverse the result, which it found by financing and eventually joining the American war. That intervention was a strategic success and a fiscal catastrophe. By 1788 debt service was consuming roughly half of French state revenue, the crown could not borrow further, and Louis XVI was obliged to summon the Estates-General for the first time in 175 years, because raising new taxes required a body that could consent to them.

And the Haitian revolution begins inside the French crisis, in the richest colony in the world, which was producing perhaps 40% of Europe's sugar and 60% of its coffee with a population that was around 90% enslaved.

One war debt, three revolutions. This is the single most reliable engine of constitutional change in the early modern world, and it is worth stating as a mechanism rather than as a coincidence: a state that must borrow to fight must tax to repay, and a state that must tax must ask, and the moment of asking is the moment at which the question of who governs gets reopened. The English civil war starts in that room. So does the American revolution, and so does the French.

Note that winning does not help. Britain and France both won the Seven Years War, in the sense of achieving their war aims against Spain and Austria respectively, and both had constitutional crises because of it.

So much for the money. The ideas were also real, and they did something the money could not.

The American colonists' complaint was not that taxes were high (colonial tax burdens were remarkably low, including by comparison with Britain) but that a parliament in which they were not represented had no right to levy them at all. That is a claim about consent and jurisdiction, and reading "no taxation without representation" as a complaint about the rate misses the entire argument.

The French went considerably further. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, in August 1789, opens by asserting that men are born and remain free and equal in rights.

The trouble with a universal claim is that you cannot make it selectively without somebody noticing. Within two years Olympe de Gouges had published a Declaration of the Rights of Woman, testing the word "man" and getting the answer the assembly preferred. Free people of colour in Saint-Domingue cited the text against the colonial assembly. And the enslaved, who were not stupid and were not uninformed, drew the conclusion that the Declaration's authors had spent a great deal of energy avoiding.

Which is why Haiti is the most radical of the three by a considerable distance, and the one least often taught.

The American revolution left slavery intact and expanding. The French abolished it in 1794, under pressure from events in the Caribbean rather than from principle, and Napoleon restored it in 1802. The Haitian revolution was made by the enslaved themselves, defeated Spanish, British and eventually French expeditionary forces (Napoleon's brother-in-law died there along with most of his army) and produced the second independent state in the Americas and the first anywhere to abolish slavery permanently and irreversibly.

It was also the most thoroughly punished. France recognised Haitian independence in 1825 in exchange for an indemnity of 150 million francs, compensation to the former slaveholders for their lost property, backed by the threat of a fleet. Haiti paid, and paid, and finished paying the resulting debts in 1947. A country that won its freedom was charged for it, over more than a century, and the sum was a substantial fraction of its national income throughout.

The last thing to take from this set is about the Terror, because it is usually explained badly.

The standard account has revolutions inevitably devouring their children, as a kind of psychological law. The dates argue otherwise. The Terror belongs to 1793 and 1794, with foreign armies on French soil, civil war in the Vendée, federalist revolts in Lyon, Marseille and Bordeaux, and a currency collapsing. Emergency powers were adopted against threats that genuinely existed, and then acquired their own institutional momentum and constituencies, and were turned on the previous round of revolutionaries.

That is a pattern rather than a law, and the distinction matters. The American revolution had no Terror, in part because after Yorktown there was no invasion to fear and no internal war to fight. Revolutions conducted under siege radicalise; revolutions left alone mostly do not. Which suggests that the most important variable is not the temperament of the revolutionaries but whether anybody is shooting at them.