Reading about the history of unpleasantness I ran across this claim about Napoleon’s crackdown on the slave rebellion in Haiti:
“Allegdly on Napoleon’s orders, sulphur was extracted from Haitian volcanoes and burned to produce poisonous sulphur dioxide, which was then used to gas black Haitians in the holds of ships - more than 100,000 of them, according to records.”
That link gives a few further details, but it is from the Daily Fail and further Googling only leads me back to the source of the claim; the book by Claude Ribbe.
How plausible is it that in the early years of the 19th century gas was used for mass executions? It would pre-date its use in the US by more than a century.
Start with locating the population of Haiti in that time and estimating what percentage of that population 100,000 men would have been. See if the numbers make any sense at all.
France had a lot more knowledge and experience with this sort of thing long before the U.S. did. They had a lot of experience with various sulfur compounds dating back to the 16th and 17th centuries where they were used more as incendiary devices. The fact that many of these compounds also produced toxic clouds was of secondary importance, but was well known.
The Strasbourg Agreement of 1675 between France and the Holy Roman Empire included a provision against chemical warfare via toxic fumes, if that helps to put France’s knowledge and experience before Napoleon’s time into perspective.
While Napoleon’s army certainly had the knowledge and means to do what is described in Haiti, I have no comment about whether or not it actually happened (or if it did happen, if it actually happened on that large of a scale). All I know is that it was technically plausible.
ETA: The use of chlorine gas was considered during the U.S. Civil War, but was rejected by the generals in charge. The knowledge of chemical warfare in the U.S. predated its actual use by quite a bit.
Well, since it’s technically possible the French could have used chemical weapons in that way, I’d look for evidence of mass graves from that time period. I did a quick Google search, but the only mass graves on Haiti were fairly recent…nothing from that time period that I could see. The thing is, 100,000 bodies is a hell of a lot to dispose of. If they supposedly did this on ships, you are talking a whole fleet of ships, so even if you assumed they burned or scuttled the ships after doing the deed (and if they were going to do that, why bother with chemical weapons?), there would be some evidence of something on that scale.
This isn’t to say the French didn’t do some atrocious things during the revolt, but I’m a bit skeptical of something on this scale (or even an order of magnitude less)…just doesn’t seem plausible.
Couldn’t you just dump the bodies at sea? Though you’d think there’d be accounts from people about all of the corpses washing ashore. I had a SE Asian studies professor who told that during the multiple waves of Vietnamese "boat people", and the hundreds of thousands of deaths at sea that resulted, it was common for partial and whole corpses to wash ashore up and down the Malay Peninsula.
If the currents around Hispaniola were strong enough, I can see the bodies never washing ashore in the Caribbean, and becoming a minor mystery wherever they turned up. So for me, the lack of mass grave accounts in early 1800s Haiti doesn’t by itself make the idea of mass gassing slaves impossible.
We’d be talking about 100k pretty much in a very compressed time frame (I assume), as opposed to over a period of time and vast distances across open ocean (such as the Vietnamese boat people example). I don’t know if you COULD dump 100,000 bodies at sea in the Caribbean islands and not have a major health issue, let alone attract notice. That number of bodies is hard to even grasp.
According to this page there were around 465,000 slaves in Haiti (then Saint Domingue) in 1789, just before the period in question. I can’t find many reliable sources for casualties in the Haitian Revolution though, Wikipedia gives a rough 100,000 civilian casualties but with a [citation needed]. Maybe the French didn’t think it worthwhile to record slave deaths.
Interesting, I had no idea chemical warfare regulations went back that far. Wiki states that during the period we’re talking about it was in plentiful supply with much exported from Sicily, but would it be something the French authorities would ‘waste’ for lack of a better term, when the rope or sabre were in plentiful supply?
I’m just trying to imagine the logistics of “processing” that many people. You cram a couple of hundred people into a confined space an pump the area full of SO2. Then you have to ventilate the place, and someone has to carry two or three hundred bodies of relatively large men from A to B for disposal. If this is on a ship, I can’t imagine B being anything but over the side. On a ship, how and where do you create a gas chamber without risk of leakage or breakout. At least on land you can use bricks and mortar to seal things up.
As for casualties, IIRC about half a million slaves (with high “turnover” rates, so a lot of native Africans) I think about 25,000 French and an equal number of mulattoes. Any French population caught were apparently slaughtered completely. 100,000 with a “high turnover” for half a million slaves suggests that number of deaths would happen anyway in two or three years.
Also, I find it a little hard to believe that French navy captains would have been thrilled to turn their warships into exterminatoria. Not to mention the practical difficulties md2000 raises.
They would have been slaves rounded up on land and held on land, unless the French had a huge armada with mostly empty holds. Moving that many prisoners from pens or cells to ships simply to execute them would be an incredibly difficult futile act. Simpler to kill them on land in stronger, higher capacity rock and brick prisons. Or just lock them crammed into a room and stop bringing water, the whole lot dead in hours.
I always wondered why any authority, any time, any place, when engaging in mass atrocities, would actually want to keep records of such, for all of history to see.