Review of "One Frenchman, Four Revolutions: General Ferrand and the Peoples of the Caribbean," by Fernando Pico

 Review of

One Frenchman, Four Revolutions: General Ferrand and the Peoples of the Caribbean, by Fernando Pico, ISBN 9781558765610

Four out of five stars

The war between European powers in America

 Marie-Louis Ferrand was a French military man with a long and varied career. He served as a privateer on the side of the colonies in the American Revolution, managed to serve as an officer in the French army before, during and after the French revolution and volunteered to go to what is now Haiti, then called  Saint Domingue, when Napoleon decided that he wanted to reconquer that nation. In 1793 the native Haitians revolted and became the first nation to officially abolish slavery. The significance of this event cannot be overstated and of course it had lengthy consequences.

 After Haiti was declared an independent country, Britain saw an opportunity and attempted to replace the French. In the years before 1793, Haiti was the economically most productive colony in the world, but at a terrible cost in the lives of slaves. So many died that it was necessary to constantly import new captives from Africa. In those years, approximately two-thirds of the enslaved population had been born in Africa.

 With the French revolution taking place in Europe, which largely took France out of the Caribbean, Britain and Spain, which controlled most of Latin America, moved to improve their positions. Once he took power in France and began conquering Europe, Napoleon set his sights on recovering lost possessions in the Western Hemisphere. Ferrand volunteered to be part of this expedition and he did very well with what he had, eventually losing his life in battle.

 The best characteristic of this book is it fills in an aspect of the situation in the Caribbean in the years between the American Revolution and the War of 1812. It was a time of rivalry between European powers and the growing strength of the United States. One of the most significant, yet rarely covered in the historical sense events was the slave revolt in Haiti that was the trigger for France attempting to recover its’ most valuable overseas possession. While the conflict in the Caribbean was a small part of the titanic struggle that was the Napoleonic Wars, it was significant due to the economic value of the colonies.

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