Imperialisms, Revolutions, and Resolutions in the Caribbean Amazon - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 105

had little economic importance and this uprising was nothing compared to the explosive
situations elsewhere in the Antilles. The insurrection was not entirely devoid of blood-
shed, embellished as it was with the torture and grisly killings of the ringleaders, but
it was hardly the violence-saturated revolt of Saint Domingue or Guadeloupe, and the
formalcomplaintsabouttherevolttendedtogrouseaboutblackinsolenceandindolence
rather than murderousness. 69 The revolt was expressed more through everyday resist-
ance—labor withdrawal from slavery into small-scale farming and local exchange net-
works of products like cacau. Indeed, colonial officials could fume and rage all they
liked that no one was picking the cotton or cooking the cane, but there was little they
could do.
There were other slave uprisings on the edge of the Caribbean: the Coro rebellion on
the Venezuelan coast, whose instigator had spent time in Curação, had been a leader of
insurgent runaways from that island, and knew the Haitian rebel leaders. There was the
bandolero resistance from the cattle estates and cacau groves in eastern Venezuela. 70
Elsewhere in Brazil, especially in slave-dense Bahia, rebellion unfolded constantly.
. . .
In 1794 France formally put an end to slavery in its colonies, at least for a time, but that
did not mean it wanted its colonies to be unprofitable. French Jacobins sent out a task-
master to oversee French Guiana—M. Cointet (a nephew of the revolutionary Danton),
who yearned to abolish access to black subsistence plots and get the citoyens back to
work on export crops as part of their patriotic duty. Cointet spent two years at his tropic-
al post, but the “peaceful revolution” seemed to only infuriate him. If citoyens could not
count on freedom through revolutionary means, it could be achieved through flight—a
stark difference between the islands and the mainland. 71
The French revolutionary state began to rethink its relation to its Wild Coast outpost,
recasting it as a penal colony. More than 190 “unsound” revolutionary deputies, along
with a few hundred other undesirables (royalists, priests, and a few regular convicts)
were exiled to French Guiana in 1797, after the coup of 18 Fructidor. Death from re-
current malarial fevers associated with the tropical prison were so certain that the place
became known as the Dry Guillotine (la Guillotine Sèche). 72 The memoirs of Fructidor
exilesreportedmortalitiesofmorethan90percentinthecommunitieswheretheypassed
their final days. They complained bitterly of the complete indifference of the local black
populationtoentreaties forlabor.Thecolonialadministrator apparentlyhadtoldtheloc-
al population that the exiles were royalists in favor of slavery, so perhaps the ex-slaves'
general diffidence was especially pronounced where the banished were concerned. 73
French Guiana remained the preferred venue for incarcerating political prisoners until
well into the twentieth century. The 1848 revolutionaries—more than twenty thousand