‘SERVANTS OF THIS GREAT KING’: SPAIN’S CONNECTION WITH HAITIAN SLAVE REBELS In the night of 21 August 1791 the inhabitants of Cap Français, in the North Province of Saint-Domingue (current Haiti), noticed fire around the city: the slaves that worked in sugar plantations had risen up in rebellion against their masters, killing most planters and putting sugarcane fields to fire, in order to destroy the two elements that had meant their endemic exploitation in the colony in the last century. Thus the Haitian revolution started: a historical process that meant the end of slavery, and the independence of the first black state in the history of humankind. Two years before, on 14 July 1789, French people had rebelled against the ancien régime waving the flag of liberty, equality, and fraternity. The French revolution meant the end of privileged society, absolute monarchy, and the ascent of bourgeoisie: the social class that controlled politics and economics in the country since then. Most bourgeois owned lands in the Caribbean and had achieved considerable wealth thanks to the benefits of slave trade and the sugar market, which Saint-Domingue had led since the mid-1750s. They had encouraged revolution in France to see their economic power materialised in the political scenario, but they wished to keep changes within Europe: the arrival of revolutionary ideas to the French colonies, specially Saint-Domingue, could mean the ascent of free-coloured people, and even of the slaves, to power, which was unacceptable at that moment. Despite their efforts, news of the Storming of the Bastille arrived in Saint- Domingue in September 1789 (Blanchelande, 1791: 2). Historical context was critical: Saint-Domingue’s leadership in the sugar market had implied massive imports of slave labour from Africa, so people of African ancestry grew much faster than white 1