Historia Crítica

Hist. Crit. | eISSN 1900-6152 | ISSN 0121-1617

“News that Spread along the Coast”: “French” Revolutionary Agents and Ideas in Spanish Louisiana in the 1790s

No. 98 (2025-10-27)
  • Pablo Hernández Sau
    Universidad Pablo de Olavide
    ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7132-8228
  • Cosme Jesús Gómez Carrasco
    Universidad de Murcia
    ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9272-5177
https://doi.org/10.7440/histcrit98.2025.06

Abstract

Objective/context: Between 1793 and 1795, free Black man Charles Joseph de l’Ange claimed to have heard about “French” ideas and even to have been incited by a planter and another colonial soldier to support them and rally the free and enslaved Black population of the German Coast to rebel against the Spanish authorities. This article explores how these ideas circulated in Spanish Louisiana during the 1790s, particularly through the interrogations initiated by the Spanish administration. Methodology: Based on these sources, the study examines the suspected agents, discourses, and communication methods involved in persecuting individuals and ideas sympathetic to the developing French revolutionary ideology. The study combines social and cultural history perspectives to offer a comparative and regionally nuanced interpretation of how revolutionary ideas spread in Louisiana. Originality: Cases like that of De l’Ange highlight the surveillance and persecution faced by racialized people, Creoles, and soldiers in the colony. It also emphasizes the significance of regional conditions, along with the networks and forms of oral transmission and adaptation of revolutionary ideas and news from France and Haiti. Conclusions: Within this framework, this article 
explores who communicated these ideas and news, how they circulated, and how they were reinterpreted 
in the northernmost Spanish colony in the Americas. From a perspective that integrates local, regional, and 
imperial levels, the article provides a more complex and detailed understanding of the meaning and scope of 
the so-called “French ideas” in the Hispanic world at the end of the eighteenth century.

Keywords: Atlantic Revolutions, revolutionary suspicions, anti-slavery revolts, counter-revolt police, Spanish Louisiana

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