Victor Hugues

From Freepedia

Victor Hugues is best known as the French Revolutionary who governed Guadeloupe from 1794 to 1798, emancipating the island's slaves under orders from France's National Convention.

Hugues was born in Marseilles and was a colonist in Saint-Domingue in the late 1780s and early 1790s. He returned to France and became a official in La Rochelle through his activity in the local Jacobin club. After the emancipation decrees of Sonthonax and Étienne Polverel in Saint-Domingue, the National Convention declared the end of slavery in all French territories in February 1794, and named Hugues civil commissioner to Guadeloupe.

The island was under British control when he arrived in the Caribbean, as planters and other conservative whites had called in France's imperial rival as a way of rejecting Revolutionary events. But by rallying slaves and free people of color, Hugues was able to retake the island.

He ruled for four years, before being recalled to France. During that time he purged the island of counter-revolutionaries, using a guillotine brought from France. And he also worked to create a viable post-slavery regime in which the islands farms and plantations still functioned. Hugues is perhaps best known for authorizing privateers to attack shipping through the Caribbean, which brought great wealth to the island but also was part of the tensions between France and the United States known as the Quasi-War in U.S. history. With an army composed of white, mulatto and ex-slave soldiers, Hugues worked to export the revolution to neighboring islands, including Dominica.