possessions. In 1776, the Anglo-American Thirteen Colonies and the American Revolution successfully gained their independence in 1783, with the help of both the Spanish Empire and Louis XVI's French monarchy. Louis XVI was toppled in the French Revolution of 1789, with the aristocrats and the king himself losing his head in revolutionary violence. The rise of military strongman Napoleon Bonaparte brought some order within France, but the turmoil there set the stage for the black slave revolt in the French sugar colony of Saint-Domingue (Haiti) in 1791. The Haitian Revolution obliterated the slavocracy and gained independence for Haiti in 1804. Political and economic instability Tensions in New Spain were growing after the mid-eighteenth-century Bourbon reforms. With the reforms the crown sought to increase the power of the Spanish state, decrease the power of the Catholic church, rationalize and tighten control over the royal bureaucracy by placing peninsular-born officials rather than American-born, and increase revenues to the crown by a series of measures that undermined the economic position of American-born elites. The reforms were an attempt to revive the political and economic fortunes of the Spanish empire, but many historians see the reforms as accelerating the breakdown of its unity. This involved often removing large quantities of wealth that had been obtained in Mexico, before exporting to other parts of the empire to fund the many wars the Spanish were fighting. The crown removed privileges (fuero eclesiástico) from ecclesiastics that had a disproportionate impact on American-born priests, who filled the ranks of the lower clergy in New Spain. A number of parish priests, most famously Miguel Hidalgo and José María Morelos, subsequently became involved in the insurgency for independence. When the crown expelled the Jesuits from Spain and the overseas empire in 1767, it had a major impact on elites in New Spain, whose Jesuit sons were sent into exile, and cultural institutions, especially universities and colleges where they taught were affected. In New Spain there were riots in protest of their expulsion. Colonial rule was not based on outright coercion, until the early nineteenth century, since the crown did not have sufficient personnel and firepower to enforce its rule. Rather, the crown's hegemony and legitimacy to rule was accepted and ruled through institutions acting as mediators between competing groups, many organized as corporate entities. These were ecclesiastics, mining entrepreneurs, elite merchants, as well as indigenous communities. The crown's creation of