Universal Rights Tested: Haiti and Spanish America

Enlightenment ideas about rights and liberty were taken up, and tested, beyond Europe; in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, the world's richest sugar colony, enslaved people rose in revolt in 1791. Under leaders such as Toussaint Louverture, they forced France to abolish slavery in 1794, and in 1804 Haiti declared independence as the first nation founded by formerly enslaved people. Haitian revolutionaries insisted that the universal language of rights must apply to them, exposing how European revolutionaries had often limited it.

In Spanish America, Creole elites read Montesquieu, Rousseau and Raynal. In Bogotá, Antonio Nariño secretly printed a Spanish translation of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1793 and was imprisoned for it. Simón Bolívar, tutored by Simón Rodríguez, an admirer of Rousseau, drew on Enlightenment ideas in his campaigns for independence. These movements show the Enlightenment's global reach and how others reshaped its ideas for their own struggles.