A racist revolutionary : the literary career of Jean-François Dubroca as a propagandist of the French Consulate, 1800-1804

Jean-François Dubroca, polygrapher during the Napoleonic years, is only known to us today as the author of the first biographies, featuring heavily racist traits, of Toussaint Louverture (1802) and Jean-Jacques Dessalines (1804). This might come as a surprise as, throughout his previous years, Dubroca had been a relentless revolutionary: in 1792, when the monarchy fell, he defrocked and sided with the Republicans; during the Terror he was close to the dechristianisation; after Thermidor, he was among the promoters of the theophilanthropic cult; and, on the eve of Brumaire, he was part of the Portique Républicain, a circle of democratic writers. His biographies of Louverture and Dessalines thus represent a dark example of the involution of republican political culture in the years of the Consulate. This article therefore examines the works of Dubroca during the very first years of the 19th century—among which we find one of the first biographies of Bonaparte and a report on the importance of the return of Louisiana to French rule—and aims to shed light on the conditions and motivations that facilitated such a dérapage. There is no doubt that his support for the American policy of Bonaparte forced him to denounce the immorality of the English, openly accused of inciting the slaves of Santo Domingo as a strategy to take advantage of the wealth of the island. It was an attack that would announce the beginnings of a war of civilisation. The victorious resistance of the blacks against the French troops pushed Dubroca to disfigure the civilising work of the revolution into a coercive attitude meant for those who refused it. The path for a new colonialism had been laid.