by Alec Waugh
Of less than medium height, with a corpulent torso that he encased in clothes that were too tight for it, with thick, stocky legs and a plebeian, sensual mouth, pitted by smallpox, abrupt in manner, jerky, with a Southern accent, Victor Hugues rarely looked anyone in the face, but when he did, his small grey eyes inspired either terror or repulsion. Born in Marseilles in 1752 in a small bakery shop, he ran away to sea when young and settled in St Domingue; conducting a surreptitious trade with Havana, shipping thither silk from Lyons by North American ships that had brought flour to the Antilles, he was in a prosperous situation when the revolution started, and he was made a member of the local assembly. His brother, however, was murdered by the slaves, and he lost all his money. But he did not lose his faith in the new ideas, and on his return to Paris addressed to the security authorities a denunciation of the Spaniards who had assisted emigrants and priests in St Domingue.
His letter ended, ‘If twenty years as a colonial, if local knowledge of foreign colonies and the continent of America, after twelve years of travel there and in the Spanish possessions, if this knowledge, citizen minister, can be of any use to the Republic, dispose of my fortune and my life. They are my country’s.’ And when the revolutionary tribunals were set up, the minister, remembering the patriot who had returned from many travels with an eloquent denunciation, made him a public prosecutor and appointed him to Brest. In one respect, Hugues was admirably fitted for the post. He had imposed on himself the first discipline required for the office of a leader of men. He had no friends.
His first victim was a mulatto, symbolically offered to placate the spirit of his brother, and he threw himself into his task with fanatical devotion. The commissioners were highly impressed. In their report they wrote, ‘At the fall of each head, patriotic songs and cries of Vive le tribunal paid a fitting tribute to the members who composed it. We take this opportunity of expressing our approval of Victor Hugues, an excellent Jacobin whose civic sense is distinguished in a high degree.’ Hugues’ skill and energy were rewarded with the governorship of Guadeloupe.
Just as the terror was about to end in France, he sailed late in April in 1794 to establish it in the Antilles. His expedition consisted of two frigates, a brig and five troop transports. His force of fifteen hundred men was composed of a company of artillery, two of infantry, and a battalion of Pyrenean rifles. But that was not all he carried; he had on board a printing press, which he considered as important an instrument of war as a battery of cannon, and he had three hundred posters printed of the Decree of the 16th Pluvios of the year 2, abolishing slavery. ‘All men domiciled in our colonies are declared to be French citizens without distinction of race and with an absolute equality of rights.’
No chaplains had joined his expedition. Columbus had had crosses painted on his sails, ‘a symbol,’ so Hugues said, ‘of the servitude about to be imposed.’ Instead of a cross, he carried a guillotine; he installed it, shrouded, in the bows, gaunt as a figure in a theorem, reduced to one horizontal and one vertical plane. As he approached land, he tore off the tarpaulin sheet, and the sunlight glittered on its steel blade.
No one in France had known for certain what had been happening in the Caribbean. Hugues found on his arrival that the island was held by the British with four thousand well-trained men, and with the population on their side. Hugues was under no obligation to attempt a forlorn hope. His orders read, ‘If it is impossible to disembark, go to the U.S.A., and return to France.’ To that he countered, ‘We set sail for Guadeloupe. We must not let ourselves be hindered because these vile satellites of despotism got there first. Let us land.’
He was heavily outnumbered, but he was resolute, intrepid and astute. He appreciated the situation speedily. His troops were fresh, but they would not be able for long to resist the debilitating August weather. He had learned that in the British camp more than half of the men were on the sick list; that there were not available enough men to guard the batteries; that the neighbouring islands had been drained of troops and that a body of French Royalists had been persuaded to perform military duties. Hugues, therefore, decided to arm as many blacks and mulattoes as he could muster. They were inured to the climate; they had nothing to lose; they flocked to his standard readily and he soon dragooned them into a standard of discipline adequate to the launching of an assault.
Strategically the British commander had selected his site soundly, on a commanding piece of ground flanked on one side by the sea and on the other by an impassable morass. About a mile to the rear was a narrow pass, the only approach to the camp, while in front was the River Sallé, on whose opposite bank stood the town of Point-à-Pitre. The British commander had, however, left out of his reckoning the evil exhalations of bad air that hovered above the swamp. Within a short time, several of his companies could not produce a single man fit for duty, and one whole regiment could not raise a corporal and three men to stand on guard at night. Hugues gloated and waited, then attacked. He loaded a large number of his troops into small vessels, which on a dark night eluded the British men-of-war. He drove in the outposts, thus cutting the communication between the British garrison and its shipping. His first attacks were beaten back with heavy losses, but he had an indefinite and expendable supply of reserves; the British grew shorter of supplies; finally they had no alternative to capitulation.
The terms which Hugues was prepared to accept on behalf of the British were generous enough, but he refused to allow the French Royalists to be treated as British subjects. He would not listen to the arguments put forward by the general’s representative. He walked back and forth, his hands clasped behind his back. He had said his last word. ‘Tell your general that I’ll capture your camp tomorrow and have him guillotined.’ The most he would concede was the sending away of twenty-five Royalist officers in a covered boat. The remainder, three hundred of them, were surrendered.
At this time the ruthlessness of Victor Hugues’ character was not properly appreciated by his enemies. To them he was a courageous and resourceful leader of troops, and the British commander no doubt imagined that the French Royalists would be treated as honourable captives, in terms of the traditions of civilized warfare. Subsequent events disabused him on that score.
The guillotine was set up on the field of battle, and in the space of an hour, fifty of the prisoners were beheaded. Hugues then grew impatient. At this rate his troops would be kept unprofitably occupied for five more hours. He therefore ordered that the remainder be fettered together and lined up on the edge of the trenches that they had recently defended. His irregular and half-trained troops were then instructed to fire at them. The first volley by unskilled soldiers killed some, wounded others and left many untouched. But the weight of the dead pulling on the chains dragged the dying as well as the unwounded into the trenches, into which the earth was immediately thrown. Hugues, having shown the world what it could expect of him, had the body of General Dundas dug up from its grave and thrown into the river, and he had bayoneted a number of British soldiers who were recovering in the hospital from wounds and sickness.
Hugues was now ready to proceed to the full rigours of the ‘terror’. In Paris he had been a friend of Robespierre; he prided himself on his nickname, ‘the Robespierre of the Isles’. The pupil’s little finger should be thicker than his master’s loins. He ordered the destruction of the church that had stood on the Morne du Governement, stigmatizing it as a symbol of idolatry. The priests in hiding were instructed to take an oath of loyalty to the constitution. The Morne was renamed de la Victoire. He established a series of travelling tribunals to bring to justice all those who had opposed the revolution. He coined the phrase, assermenté, for anyone who had taken an oath of allegiance either to Louis XVI or George III. As-tu prêté serment à l’imbécile George? he would demand. ‘The state,’ he would announce, ‘rewards the denunciator.’ In Brest he had had the guillotine placed near enough to the prison for its inmates to hear its action. He followed the same practice here. At the sta
rt it was mounted in the market place, but as the surface was unpaved, the blood did not run away but formed a red mud round the scaffold. Earth was flung over it, but the putrefying blood broke its crust, and flies swarmed round it to such an extent that the market place was deserted.
This did not suit Hugues at all. He wanted his executions to be public and applauded. He had the guillotine moved to the Place de la Victoire, near a river into which the blood could drain. The loyalists met their death in Pointe-à-Pitre as bravely as had their friends in Paris. Each morning there was a roll call of the victims. One of them who had a cold laughingly remarked that a better day could not have been chosen. ‘I’ll gladly be rid of my head.’ They sang hymns as they waited at the scaffold. The volume of sound diminished till there was only one voice left, then silence.
So that the whole island should learn its lesson, he had the guillotine sent on tour from village to village, pausing at taverns on the way, where the executioner was bribed to give exhibitions of how the mechanism worked: a large bass drum was carried round in the cart to give the occasion an air of festival.
Hugues interpreted his commission to involve the transference of all authority into his own hands. He curtailed the power of the army. He described the military as salaried republicans devoted to the safety of the state, whose authority did not extend outside their camp. He suppressed legality, killed the judges, and became himself the accuser, the jury and the judge. He forbade private commerce and became himself the trader. It was state socialism, with himself the state.
The slaves were free, but it is doubtful if they could appreciate the difference between their previous and their present position. Those who would not work were threatened with death. ‘The republic,’ he said, ‘in recognizing the rights you have inherited from nature did not absolve you of the need to support yourself. No pity will be given the man who does not work. He will be treated as a traitor.’
The work was as strictly regimented as it had been on the old plantations. At 5.30 each morning a bell would summon citizens and citizenesses to a meeting place appointed by the overseer. At 5.45 the chief intoned a couplet of the revolutionary hymn ending, ‘Long live the Republic’ The roll would be read and the citizens would start off for work, singing with that ‘simple and lively gaiety that characterizes a good child of La Patrie’. The overseer would then make a tour of the houses and see who was not at work. Every tenth day he sent in a report.
At eight o’clock, breakfast was taken on the grass, in the manner of the Parisian sansculottes. Work was resumed at 8.30 and continued until 11.30. There was an interval of two and a half hours, then a bell announced the end of the siesta. A roll call was taken and work continued until nightfall. During the harvest season they would work longer hours, ‘as good republicans’. Punishments were strict and they received no real pay. Distinctions of colour were retained; there were white, coloured, and black citizens. In the army, a black citizen could not rise above the rank of captain, and was never placed in a high administrative post.
In the meantime, the situation in Paris was changing rapidly. Within a few days of the destruction of the church on the Morne de la Victoire, a French ship arrived with newspapers announcing that religion was once again permitted: men without Gods were now designated as ‘abandoned monsters’. A little later the events of the 9th Thermidor and the fall of Robespierre were general knowledge.
France had ceased to be a convention and had become the Directoire, ‘delivered,’ in its own words, ‘from the yoke of those vile men who in the name of liberty sullied the name of France by their blood-stained brigandage’. But correspondence between France and Guadeloupe was intermittent; Marat was still being deified in Pointe-à-Pitre when his body was rotting in a ditch, and Hugues was in the habit of interpreting such orders as he received in the light of his own convenience; a constitution that might be fine for France could, he argued, be impossible in the colonies. Its implementation would result in the destruction Of the colonies. But he was a practical man; he recognized that the wind had changed, and he could console himself with the knowledge that, as far as Guadeloupe was concerned, he had carried out Robespierre’s instructions thoroughly. In 1790, Basse-Terre had 9,371 inhabitants, of whom 1,640 were white. Five years later there were 5,223 inhabitants, and of the 1,092 whites only 225 were male. Though he might have had qualms as to what might be the fate of ‘the Robespierre of the Isles’, he continued to behave as though he enjoyed the privileges of an independent emperor.
As soon as he got the plantations back to work, he felt himself free to enlarge the area of his parish. To Dominica, Martinique, St Lucia, Grenada, St Eustatius and St Martin, he sent revolutionary missionaries to explain the happenings in St Domingue and to encourage a rising against the English. ‘Spare no Englishmen,’ he ordered. In Martinique his missionaries were captured and shot, but he roused the Caribs of St Vincent to attack the English, and he prepared the ground for his invasions of the other islands.
Grenada in particular seemed to offer opportunities for his proselytizing zeal. For years the island had been shaken with disputes between the French and English. When England took possession of it in 1763, the French were allowed complete religious freedom, a privilege that was not accorded to the English, who bitterly resented the superior position of their fellow colonists; this resentment was exacerbated during the War of American Independence, when the French recovered the island and they themselves were subjected to innumerable hardships. The French had acted unwisely, for there was at this period no security of tenure in the Caribbean. Within four years the English had recovered the island and taken their revenge, confiscating all church lands from the French and depriving them of their political rights.
Once again the dispossessed party bided its time, and the French planters naturally learned with delight of Victor Hugues’ success in Guadeloupe. They besought his aid and he was quick to give it. He laid his plans carefully. He chose as his leader a French planter with coloured blood, called Julien Fédon. We know nothing of Fédon outside of the events of the next few months, except that he was as ruthless and brutal as Hugues himself. The plot was worked out in secret, and arms were smuggled to the conspirators. Two attacks were launched, one against a small town on the windward coast, called La Baye, the other against Gouyave. At La Baye the English residents were slaughtered – men, women and children – and the rebels fled with their booty to the hills. At Gouyave the residents were captured, carried to Fédon’s camp and put into stocks. Among the prisoners was the governor. Fédon gave him the alternatives of death or surrender of the island. The governor refused to surrender, but took the precaution of warning the acting governor that it had been threatened that if the camp was attacked by British troops, the prisoners would be shot.
The acting governor, just as the British general in Guadeloupe, did not believe that such a barbarity would be committed. But Fédon was a worthy disciple of Hugues. As soon as the assault was launched, the massacre of the prisoners started. Forty-eight were shot, and the attack was beaten off.
For a year the rebels were in control; and the crops and houses of every resident who did not share their views were burned. When at last the British returned in force, there remained very few of their compatriots to welcome them. The retribution that followed their return was thorough. Fédon himself escaped, though there is no record of his survival. It was believed that he was drowned in a canoe on his way to Trinidad. But nearly all the other leaders were captured; a number of them were shot and the rest deported to British Honduras.
Those fifteen months of civil war were to have a lasting effect upon Grenada. So few of the older planter families remained that it was not difficult to set up later a system of peasant proprietorship.
In the meantime, Hugues had a number of other irons in the fire. Trade in the Caribbean had been disorganized by the revolution, the war with Britain, and the confused political situation in St Domingue, and it occurred to Hugues that this might be an o
pportune moment to imitate and emulate the seventeenth-century buccaneers. He organized, therefore, a fleet of corsairs to prey upon foreign shipping. He employed small ships which were easy to manoeuvre, which could hide in secluded bays, make quick getaways, and which provided more awkward targets than larger, slower ships. They were especially effective against the British, whose gunners followed a different tactic from the French, firing not at the masts but at the timbers of the hulls, their aim being steadier as the mouths of their cannon descended with the waves.
St Bartholomew, which was owned by Sweden from 1784 to 1877, proved a useful neutral base, from which his corsairs operated so successfully that during Hugues’ period of power nearly six hundred ships were sacked. The harbour of Pointe-à-Pitre was filled with shipping, and sheds had to be built on the edge of the mangrove plantations that fringed the town. Pointe-à-Pitre became the richest town in the West Indies; once there had been a lack of currency, but now there were French louis, British guineas and Portuguese moidores.
