Editing History of Haiti (section)

==French Saint-Domingue (1625–1789)==
{{Main|Saint-Domingue}}

=== Early French Saint-Domingue (1625–1711) ===
{{Expand section|date=September 2022}}
The [[Kingdom of France|French]] built a settlement on the west coast of [[Hispaniola]], which was known as 'the most fertile part of the [[West Indies]]'.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Parker |first=Matthew |url=http://archive.org/details/sugarbaronsfamil0000park_a8m5 |title=Sugar barons : family, corruption, empire and war |publisher=Hutchinson |year=2011 |isbn=978-0-09-192583-3 |location=London |pages=131 |language=en}}</ref>

===The Pearl of the Antilles (1711–1789)===
[[File:D072- une sucrerie à saint-domingue - Liv3-Ch16.png|thumb|upright=1.5|A [[sugar mill]] in Haiti (''L'Homme et la Terre'' by [[Élisée Reclus]], 1830–1905)]]
[[File:Cap_Français_-_Gravure_ancienne_-_1728.jpg|thumb|Engraving of [[Cap-Français]] in 1728]]

In 1711, the city of [[Cap-Français]] was formally established by [[Louis XIV]] and took over as capital of the colony from [[Port-de-Paix]]. In 1726, the city of [[Les Cayes]] was founded on the Southern coast; it became the biggest settlement in the south. In 1749, the city of [[Port-au-Prince]] was established on the west coast, which in 1770 took over as the capital of the colony from Cap-Français; however that same year the [[1770 Port-au-Prince earthquake]] and [[tsunami]] destroyed the city, killing 200 people immediately, and 30,000 later from famine and disease brought on by the natural disaster. This was the second major earthquake to hit Saint-Domingue as it followed the [[1751 Port-au-Prince earthquake]], which had left only a single stone-built building standing in the town.

Prior to the [[Seven Years' War]] (1756–1763), the economy of [[Saint-Domingue]] gradually expanded, with sugar and, later, coffee becoming important export crops. After the war, which disrupted maritime commerce, the colony underwent rapid expansion. In 1767 it exported 72 million pounds of [[raw sugar]] and 51 million pounds of refined sugar, one million pounds of indigo, and two million pounds of cotton.<ref>{{cite book |first=CLR |last=James |title=The Black Jacobins |url=https://archive.org/details/blackjacobinstou00jame |url-access=registration |publisher=Vintage Books |place=New York |year=1963 |page=[https://archive.org/details/blackjacobinstou00jame/page/45 45]|isbn=978-0-679-72467-4 }}</ref> Saint-Domingue became known as the "Pearl of the [[Antilles]]" – the richest colony in the 18th-century [[French colonial empire|French empire]]. By the 1780s, Saint-Domingue produced about 40 percent of all the sugar and 60 percent of all the coffee consumed in Europe. This single colony, roughly the size of [[Hawaii]] or [[Belgium]], produced more [[sugar]] and [[coffee]] than all of [[British West Indies|Britain's West Indian colonies]] combined.

In the second half of the 1780s, Saint-Domingue accounted for a third of the entire [[Atlantic slave trade]]. The population of the [[African slaves]] imported for these plantations is estimated to have been 790,000.  Between 1764 and 1771, the average importation of slaves varied between 10,000 and 15,000, by 1786 about 28,000, and, from 1787 onward, the colony received more than 40,000 West African slaves a year. However, the inability to maintain slave numbers without constant resupply from [[Central Africa|Central]] and [[West Africa]] meant the slave population, by 1789, totaled 500,000. This was ruled over by a white population that, by 1789, numbered only 32,000.<ref>{{cite book |first=CLR |last=James |title=The Black Jacobins |page=55}}</ref> At all times, a majority of slaves in the colony were African-born, as the brutal conditions of slavery prevented the population from experiencing growth through natural increase.<ref>{{Cite web |date=2006-06-17 |title=Slavery, Slavery History and American Slavery |url=http://www.africanaonline.com/slavery_colonial_era.htm |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060617033237/http://www.africanaonline.com/slavery_colonial_era.htm |archive-date=2006-06-17  |url-status=usurped |access-date=2022-08-21 }}</ref> African culture thus remained strong among slaves to the end of French rule, in particular the folk-religion of [[Haitian Vodou|Vodou]], which commingled Catholic liturgy and ritual with the beliefs and practices of [[Guinea (region)|Guinea]], [[Congo Basin|Congo]] and [[Benin]].<ref>Vodou is a Dahomean word meaning 'god' or 'spirit</ref>

[[File:Citadelle Laferrière Aerial View.jpg|thumb|left|250px|[[Citadelle Laferrière]], built by [[Henri Christophe]], is the largest [[fortress]] in the Americas.]]
To govern slavery, in 1685 [[Louis XIV of France|Louis XIV]] enacted the ''[[Code Noir]]'', which accorded certain human rights to slaves and responsibilities to the master, who was obliged to feed, clothe, and provide for the general well-being of their slaves. The ''code noir'' also sanctioned corporal punishment, allowing masters to employ brutal methods to instill in their slaves the necessary docility while ignoring provisions intended to regulate the administration of punishments. A passage from [[Henri Christophe]]'s personal secretary, who lived more than half his life as a slave, describes the crimes perpetrated against the slaves of Saint-Domingue by their French masters:

{{blockquote|
Have they not hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars? Have they not forced them to eat excrement? And, having flayed them with the lash, have they not cast them alive to be devoured by worms, or onto anthills, or lashed them to stakes in the swamp to be devoured by mosquitoes? Have they not thrown them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup? Have they not put men and women inside barrels studded with spikes and rolled them down mountainsides into the abyss? Have they not consigned these miserable blacks to man-eating dogs until the latter, sated by human flesh, left the mangled victims to be finished off with bayonet and poniard?"<ref>{{cite book |first=Robert |last=Heinl |title=Written in Blood: The Story of the Haitian People, 1492–1995 |url=https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780761802303 |url-access=registration |publisher=[[University Press of America]] |location=Lantham, Maryland |year=1996}}</ref>}}

Thousands of slaves found freedom by fleeing from their masters, forming communities of [[Haitian Maroon|maroons]], and raiding isolated plantations. The most famous was [[François Mackandal|Mackandal]], a one-armed slave, originally from [[Guinea (region)|Guinea]], who escaped in 1751. A [[Haitian Vodou|Vodou]] Houngan (priest), he united many of the different maroon bands. He spent the next six years staging successful raids and evading capture by the French, reputedly killing over 6,000 people while preaching a fanatic vision of the destruction of white civilization in St. Domingue. In 1758, after a failed plot to poison the drinking water of the plantation owners, he was captured and burned alive at the public square in Cap-Français.

Saint-Domingue also had the largest and wealthiest [[free people of color|free population of color]] in the [[History of the Caribbean|Caribbean]], the ''[[gens de couleur]]'' (French, "people of color"). The mixed-race community in Saint-Domingue numbered 25,000 in 1789. First-generation ''gens de couleur'' were typically the offspring of a male, French slaveowner, and an African slave chosen as a concubine. In the French colonies, the semi-official institution of "[[plaçage]]" defined this practice. By this system, the children were free people and could inherit property, thus originating a class of "mulattos" with property and some with wealthy fathers. This class occupied a middle status between African slaves and French colonists. Africans who attained freedom also enjoyed status as ''gens de couleur.''

As the numbers of ''gens de couleur'' grew, the French rulers enacted discriminatory laws. Statutes forbade ''gens de couleur'' from taking up certain professions, marrying whites, wearing European clothing, carrying swords or firearms in public, or attending social functions where whites were present. However, these regulations did not restrict their purchase of land, and many accumulated substantial holdings and became slave owners themselves. By 1789, they owned one third of the plantation property and one quarter of the slaves of [[Saint-Domingue]].<ref>{{cite book |publisher=GMU |url=http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/chap8a.html |title=Revolution |chapter=8 |page=1 |access-date=14 September 2006 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20111105214459/http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/chap8a.html |archive-date=5 November 2011 |url-status=dead}}</ref> Central to the rise of the ''gens de couleur'' planter class was the growing importance of [[coffee]], which thrived on the marginal hillside plots to which they were often relegated. The largest concentration of ''gens de couleur'' was in the southern peninsula, the last region of the colony to be settled, owing to its distance from Atlantic shipping lanes and its formidable terrain, with the highest mountain range in the Caribbean.