The Other French Revolution : The Radical Republic in the Caribbean

The 1795 Caribbean uprising against British rule was forgotten for centuries, until now. Paul Friedland shines vivid light on the collective struggle of African, European, and Indigenous subjects—free and enslaved—in the Windward Islands. Their republican project, brutally repressed, offers a compelling new lens on the Age of Revolutions.

A new history of the Age of Revolutions, from a Caribbean perspective. The Other French Revolution uncovers the Caribbean uprising that shocked the world before vanishing from memory. This revolution initially drew the attention of every major imperial power. Then, for centuries, only fragmented accounts of events in Grenada, Saint Vincent, Guadeloupe, and Saint Lucia persisted, while the full story of regionwide revolution was lost to time. Paul Friedland restores the larger whole, detailing how the radically new vision of a world without tyranny and slavery swept through the Windward Islands between 1794 and 1796. At the heart of The Other French Revolution is a vivid narrative of political imagination and collective struggle. African, European, and Indigenous participants, both free and enslaved, mobilized around the ideal of universal republicanism. Their hopes, shaped by local realities and emerging from dialogue with revolutionaries in France, were then crushed by a ruthless British campaign, abetted by French counter-revolutionaries. Determined not only to restore colonial rule but also to bury all memory of the uprising, the military response was merciless, marked by re-enslavement, exile, imprisonment, and execution. As many as a hundred thousand people may have died between the revolution’s beginnings and its bloody end. The very intensity of the repression underscores the scale and significance of the movement the colonizers sought to erase. Bringing light to a forgotten story of people who crossed the deepest divides to pursue a vision of humanity and liberty far ahead of its time, Friedland offers a fresh and compelling account of the Age of Revolutions.