Perhaps the most radical part of their proclamations was the granting not just of liberty but also of citizenship to the slaves. The new order was, in principle, to be based on uncompromising equality. Race was to have no l i b e r t y ’ s l a n d 165 place within it. This, too, was a dramatic challenge, not only to the pathologically stratified society of Saint-Domingue, but to the forms of democracy that reigned in the Americas and in Europe. The promise of 1793—a transracial citizenship in which ex-slaves and ex-masters would live together as political equals—was a great step forward, indeed in many ways out of its time.

Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ …, loc. 236