The French National Convention ratified this decision in 1794 and applied it to the entire French empire and they also granted civil and political rights to all non-whites in the colonies. In 1791, enslaved people in the northern part of the French colony of Saint Domingue rose up in rebellion and began the event that we know today as the “Haitian Revolution.” Without any other choice, the French commissioners in the colony declared the abolition of slavery in 1793. free people and I began to see the parallels and similarities that Armitage emphasizes between “civil war” and “revolution” since they are part of the same genealogy.

But the story is not quite as simple as slaves v. Because slaves were not citizens in Saint Domingue, my first instinct was to exclude the Haitian Revolution from the category of civil war. By narrowing the definition, Sidney was able to confine the period of civil wars to the Roman Empire and therefore provide evidence of the instability caused by monarchy. Sidney, Armitage reveals, sought to exclude wars involving slaves and free non-citizens from the category of “civil war” in order to refute Robert Filmer’s defense of monarchy. My immediate question when I began reading was “can slaves be part of a civil war?” It seems as though Algernon Sidney beat me to it in the 17 th century. “When tracing the genealogy of the modern script of revolution,” Armitage argues, “we should seriously consider the hypothesis that civil war was the original genus of which revolution was only a late-evolving species.” Ever since our first meeting, I’ve been thinking about how we can situate Haiti in Armitage’s argument I think it does fit, but the case needs a bit of special attention. For our first meeting, participants of the seminar read a chapter by David Armitage, “ Every Great Revolution is a Civil War,” forthcoming in Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein, eds., Scripting Revolutions (Stanford, 2014).

David armitage civil wars