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NUMBER 107

Yak
Frency
Studies

The Haiti Issue:


1804 and
Nineteenth-Century
French Studies

DEBORAH JENSON

NICK NESBITT
CHRISTOPHER L. MILLER

6
39

CHRIS BONGIE

70

DORIS Y. KADISH

108

DANIEL DES ORMEAUX

131

ALBERT VALDMAN

146

DEBORAH JENSON

162

Editor's Preface: Nineteeth-Century


postcolonialits at the Bicentennial ^
of the Haitian Independence
The Idea of 1804
Forget Haiti: Baron Roger and the New
Africa
"Monotonies of History": Baron Vastey
and the Mulatto Legend of Derek
Walcott's Haitian Trilogy
Haiti and Abolitionism in 1825: The
Example of Sophie Doin
The First of the (Black) Memorialists:
Toussaint Louverture
Haitian Creole at the Dawn of
Independence
From the Kidnapping(s) of the Louvertures
to the Alleged Kidnapping of Aristide:
Legacies of Slavery in the Post/Colonial
World

Yale French Studies


Deborah Jenson, Special editor for this issue
Alyson Waters, Managing editor
Editorial board: Edwin Duval (Chair), Ora Avni,
R. Howard Bloch, Mark Burde, Marina Davies,
Thomas Kavanagh, Christopher L. Miller, Donia
Mounsef, Jean-Jacques Poucel, J. Ryan Poynter,
Julia Prest
Editorial assistant: Brian J. Reilly
Editorial office: 82-90 Wall Street, Room 308
Mailing address: P.O. Box 208251, New Haven,
Connecticut 06520-8251
Sales and subscription office:
Yale University Press, P.O. Box 209040
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Published twice annually by Yale University Press
Copyright 2005 by Yale University
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part,
in any form (beyond that copying permitted by
Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and
except by reviewers for the public press) without
written permission from the publisher.
Designed by James J. Johnson and set in Trump
Medieval Roman by The Composing Room of
Michigan, Inc. Printed in the United States of
America by the Vail-Ballou Press, Binghamton, N.Y.
ISSN 044-0078
ISBN for this issue 0-300-10811-7

DEBORAH JENSON

Editor's Preface: Nineteenth-Century


postcolonialits at the Bicentennial of
the Haitian Independence

In 1804, when the first successful New World revolution by slaves


transformed the French colony of Saint-Domingue into the indepen
dent nation of Haiti, the histories and ambitions of France and Haiti
were profoundly entangled. Chronologically, the revolution in SaintDomingue had occurred almost in tandem with the French Revolution,1
and was referred to as "the French Revolution in Saint-DomiAgue" by
some colonists.2. The ethnographer Moreau de Saint-Mry contextual
ized it as a metropolitan revolution,3 its meaning necessarily changing
en route to the colonies. Translated to Haiti, the terms libert, galit,
and fraternit had an ironic echo. As C.L.R. fames argued in The Black
Jacobins, the power of the bourgeoisie to contribute to the French Rev
olution had been founded to a shocking degree on the economics of the
slave trade.4 The French Revolution's black twin threatened to desta
bilize some individual identities as well: Napoleon Bonaparte experi
enced his first major defeat at the hands of the followers of the "black
1. "Haiti's revolution was intimately bound up with the revolution in France of
1789-1804, whose dates it shares." David Patrick Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Stud
ies (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2002], 1.
2. A striking example of this tendency to view the Haitian Revolution as a reloca
tion of the French Revolution can he found in the August 1793 proposal for a newspaper
to be called "The Journal of the French Revolution at St. Domingo." Anonymous, Pro
posals for Printing a Journal of the Revolutions in the French Part of St. Domingo 10
(1793): 5.
3. "Their mtropole carried out a revolution whose impact was felt to the ends of
the earth." M.L.E. Moreau de Saint-Mry, Description topographique, physique, civile,
politique et historique de la partie franaise de l'isle Saint-Domingue, 2 vols. (Philadel
phia: 1797-1798) 1:65. This and all other translations are mine unless otherwise noted.
4. "The slave trade and slavery were the economic basis of the French Revolution."
C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revo
lution (New York, Vintage Books, 1989), 47.
YFS 107, The Haiti Issue, ed. Deborah Jenson, 2005 by Yale University.

2 Yale French Studies

Napoleon/'5 the former slave Toussaint Louverture. Geopolitical rela


tionships were altered irrevocably: Napoleon sold the Louisiana Terri
tory to the fledgling government of the United States6 to make up for
his losses in Saint-Domingue, the colony that had provided the lion's
share of France's foreign trade revenues. Throughout the rest of the
nineteenth-century and into the twentieth, French imperialism would
develop against the confounding backdrop of its most profitable
colony's 1804 postcolonialits.7
The Haiti Issue is the first publication8 to invite scholars to make
and break paradigms of specifically nineteenth-century French post/
colonialism in relation to the Haitian Independence. The Haitian Rev
olution poses provocative questions of how to differentiate the am
biguous aftermaths of colonialism in the nineteenth, twentieth, and
twenty-first centuries. Nineteenth-century French studies has never
been a domain particularly marked by post/colonial theory, and the out
come of the Haitian Revolution may hold the key to the mystery of that
noninscription: whereas the former French colony of Saint-Domingue
5. Chateaubriand referred to Toussaint as "the black Napoleon, imitated and killed
by the white Napoleon." Mmoires doutre-tombe, ed. Maurice Levaillant et Georges
Moulinier (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 2:764.
6. See Paul Lachance, "Repercussions of the Haitian Revolution in Louisiana" in The
Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, ed. David P. Geggus (Columbia,
South Carolina: The University o South Carolina University Press, 2001), 209-30.
7. At the risk of terminology preciosity, two terms are employed here to describe
different valences of the aftermath of colonialism in Haiti. I use postcolonialits" to
connote at least the impulse to establish historical neutrality in describing the often
problematic sequellae to colonialism, as well as the multiplicity of those sequellae. An
analogy would be the pluralistic neutrality aspired to by "fminits" as an alternative to
the more ideologically idealistic "feminism." I use the term "post/colonialism" to sig
nal what Chris Bongie calls "the intimate (dis)connection of the colonial and the post
colonial, which are both, after all, the products of a fully global modernity. " See Bongie,
Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1998), 109.
8. "Slavery in the Francophone World," the conference organized by Doris Kadish
to precede the 1997 Nineteenth-Century French Studies colloquium at the University of
Georgia, was a groundbreaking gathering of nineteenth-century scholars to explore colo
nial issues. The publication resulting from the meeting, Slavery in the Caribbean Fran
cophone World, ed. Doris Kadish (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2002), is or
ganized around a nineteenth-century chronology, but is devoted more specifically to
slavery than to broader interconnections between France and the Caribbean. In 2004,
Haitian bicentennial conferences and symposia pertinent to nineteenth-century French
studies, too numerous to list comprehensively, have been held at sites including New
York University, Cornell University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Queens Col
lege of the City University of New York, the University of Massachusetts-Boston, North
western University, and the University of California-Los Angeles, not to mention dozens
of community and arts organizations around the United States.

DEBORAH JENSON

was post/colonial in the nineteenth-century, nineteenth-century


France was not. In France, post/colonialism was an idea whose time had
not yet come, even as, on January 1,1804, the leaders of the new nation
renamed "Ayti" after the aboriginal Taino Indian word for "highlands,"
declaring their independence9 with what can legitimately be called a
post/colonial revision of identity. The text reproduced on the cover of
this issue documents the Haitian adoption of a traumatic "indigenous"
identification that preceded ngritude as an anticolonial identity poli
tics. The new Haitian leaders were not, of course, indigenous,- instead,
like the vanished Taino population of the island of Hispaniola, they ex
emplified lost indigeneity, or the subsuming of indigeneity into colonial
mtissage. This traumatic identification with indigeneity symbolized
the dislocation of populations from aboriginal cultures as a defining
event in identity for those subjugated by European colonialism, in an
era of New World imperialism extending from Columbus to Napoleon.
In order to facilitate reading of the original, I have preserved the doc
ument's idiosyncrasies of orthography, syntax, punctuation, and so on
in my transcription, but less so in the translation that follows it:
Libert
ou lamort
arme indigenne
Aujourdhuy, 1 er Janvier 1804. Le General en chef de l'arme indi
gene, accompagn des generaux + chefs de l'arme, convoqus l'effet
de prendre les mesures qui doivent tendre au bonheur du pays:
Aprs avoir fait connaitre aux gnraux assembls les vritables in
tentions d'assurer a jamais aux indignes d'ayti un gouvernement sta
ble, objet de la plus vive solicitude, ce qu'il a fait par un discours, qui
tend faire connaitre aux puissances Etrangres la ferme resolution de
rendre le pays independent et de jouir d'une libert consacr par le sang
du people de cette isle,- aprs avoir recueilli les avis, il a demand que
chacun des generaux assembles pronconent le serment de renoncer
jamais la France, de mourir plutt que de vivre sous la domination.
Fait aux Gonaves le 1 er janvier 1804 Stlepremier jour del'indpendance d'ayti. Sign J.J. Desalines general en chef, cristophe, Petition,
(etc.)10
9.
There were actually several documents that served as declarations of indepen
dence, most notably a first proclamation made on November 29, 1803, and two docu
ments consecrating the ceremonies and speeches of January 1,1804, all of which are tran
scribed by Thomas Madiou in Histoire dHati (Port-au-Prince, Haiti: Jh. Courtois, 1848),
3:99-121.
10.
Statement documenting the Haitian Independence by Dessalines and other army
officers, Archives nationales, AF/m/210.

4 Yale French Studies


Liberty
or Death
The Indigenous Army
Today, January 1,1804. The General in Chief of the indigenous army,
accompanied by the generals and leaders of the army, met to carry out
measures tending to the well being of the country:
After having conveyed in a speech to the assembled generals his true
intention to insure, as a top priority, a stable government for the in
digenous people of Haiti forever, and communicating to Foreign pow
ers the firm resolution to make the country independent and to benefit
from the freedom that had been consecrated by the blood of the people
of this isle; after having polled opinions, he asked each of the assembled
generals to pronounce an oath to renounce France forever, and to die
rather than live under domination.
Prepared in Gonaives on the 1st of January 1804 & the first day of the
independence of Hayti. Signed J.J. Desalines general in chief, cristophe,
Pethion, [etc.)

The nineteenth-century French "post/colonialism" studied in this


issue is a matter of the contact of various kindsintellectual, eco
nomic, political, literary, familialthat linked the French metro
politan and colonial or previously colonial zones. Unlike the terms
francophonie (which issued from the nationalist zeal of the late
nineteenth-century imperialist adventure and suggests a French lin
guistic universalism capable of replacing multiple noncolonial, local
bases for identity), and "postcolonialism" without a slash (which sug
gests an end to imperialism that it is always too early to celebrate), what
I will call "contact studies" simply positions what is "French" in its re
lationship of constitutive contact with others. Such constitutive con
tact is inherent to the history of any century-based or genre-based area
of French studies,- the nineteenth-century relationship to Haiti is sim
ply a particularly significant example of what Mary Louise Pratt has de
fined as a "contact zone."11 The contributors to this issue demonstrate
how much is left out in the nineteenth-century French sphere by not
taking that contact into account. This issue charts many reasons not
to "Forget Haiti," to quote Christopher L. Miller in his article on the
transition from colonialism in Saint-Domingue to the colonialism of 11
11.
Mary Louise Pratt summarizes "contact zones" as "places where cultures that
have been on historically separate trajectories intersect or come into contact with each
other and establish a society, often in contexts of colonialism," in "Apocalypse in the
Andes: Contact Zones and the Struggle for Interpretative Power, " En cuentros 15 (March
1996): 1. For an extensive development of the idea, see Pratt's Imperial Eyes: Travel Writ
ing and Transcultmation (New York: Routledge, 1992).

DEBORAH JENSON

the African interior. These catalysts for remembering Haiti include


nineteenth-century feminist abolitionist literature (Doris Kadish),
Creole linguistics and literature (Albert Valdman), Haitian postcolo
nial epistemologies of race and their representation in plays by Derek
Walcott (Chris Bongie), and the Haitian Revolutionary leader Tous
saint Louverture as memoir writer (Daniel Desormeaux)
In the Spring of 2004, at the same time that what Nick Nesbitt pro
poses here as "The Idea of 1804" was undergoing a burst of redefinition
in relation to the bicentennial of the Haitian Independence, Haiti be
came a burning issue in the global media and imagination once again,
through the startling events leading up to and following the end of the
government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. In the case of the current vol
ume, what had initially appeared to be an infelicity of timingits post
bicentennial publication in the Spring of 2005ultimately allowed
several contributors to touch on these extraordinary events, including
the final essay, which considers the philosophical and historical un
derpinnings of Aristide's analogies between Revolutionary and Bicen
tennial kidnappings (Jenson).
This volume is dedicated to the Haitians of the past, present, and
future.

NICK NESBITT

The Idea of 1804


Penser la pense revient le plus souvent se retirer dans un lieu sans
dimension o l'ide seule de la pense s'obstine. Mais la pense
s'espace rellement au monde. Elle informe limaginaire des
peuples,.. . dans lesquels se ralise son risque.
douard Glissant, Potique de la relation

It is only today, two hundred years after its conclusion on January 1,


1804, that we are able to hear the radical message of the Haitian Revo
lution. Two of the processes that came to distinguish the twentieth
century were invented in Haiti: decolonization and neocolonialism.
Haiti was the first to demonstrate that the colonized can take hold of
their own historical destiny and enter the stage of worldhistory as auto
nomous actors, and not merely passive, enslaved subjects. Less happily,
newly independent Haiti also demonstrated to the world the first; nstance of what would later be called neocolonialism, as ruling elites
(both mulatto and black) united with the military and a merchant class
to create an instable balance of power. This depended upon the skim
ming of surplus profits from tertiary imports and a corresponding sys
tematic underdevelopment of local productive forces, all at the expense
of the excluded majority, a process that Fanon would first identify in
Les damns de la terre and one that Michel-Rolph Trouillot has bril
liantly analyzed in Haiti: State Against Nation.1 Both the unfinished
project of decolonization and the actuality of neocolonial imperialism
imply that attention to the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath is of
most pressing concern if we are to understand the origins and classic
forms of these problems that continue to confront our twenty-first cen
tury.
However important these problems may remain, I wish to argue
here that thel791-1804 Revolution contains a further, more radical di
mension that is only now becoming apparent, after the failure of so1.
SeeMichel-RolphTrouillot,Ha2';5toteAginsNion. The Origins and Legacy
of Duvalierism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990).
YFS 107, The Haiti Issue, ed. Deborah Jenson, 2005 by Yale University.

NICK NESBITT

cialism and the looming degeneration of liberal democracies into citi


zen surveillance machines. We have seen two hundred years of politi
cal populism that has lead to totalitarianism and genocide, to fascist
and so-called "socialist" states that sacrificed the process of democra
tization and the autonomy of human subjects to industrial "productionisni;"2 two hundred years of nationalist states that merely sacri
ficed their citizens tout court in genocidal hysteria. At the same time,
Western liberal democracies have fostered a culture of consumption to
compensate for popular disenfranchisement, as oligarchies of the elite
make their own decisions regarding war, the environment, and social
justice in the name of those they are supposed to represent. After the
collapse of socialism and the rise of neo-nationalisms, as we confront
reactionary Western political elites that eagerly sacrifice the rights of
their subjects for the chimera of impregnable fortress-states, the asser
tion of the universal rights of autonomous subjects are suddenly a most
pressing and basic concern. A positive idea of human rights, understood
as the capacity of individuals and collectivities to exert control over
their existence and development has suddenly taken precedence as we
catapult headlong into what Ulrich Beck has called a postnational "sec
ond'' modernity.3 This positive notion of human rights today moves
beyond the merely negative safeguards that were called human rights
in the English and American traditions. It is only after the political and
human disasters of the last century that we have begun to move toward
the idea of a universal right of all human beings to freedom as the pos
itive capacity for self-determination on a global, and not merely lcal,
scale.
This universal idea was first put forward two hundred years ago in
the Haitian Revolution. It initiated the world's first radical democracy
of transnational scope. Haiti told the world a message few in 1804 could
hear: freedom did not mean leaving landowners alone to enjoy their
property, human or otherwise. It moved beyond mere national and civil
rights, those of the "citoyen" of 1776 and 1789, to press the universal
claims of the rights of "Man."4 Haiti presented freedom to the world as
an absolutely true logic, one that must be made, in turn, universal re2. See Georg Lukcs, The Process of Democratization, trans.Susanne Bernhardt and
Norman Levine (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991).
3. Ulrich Beck, Pouvoir et contre-pouvoir lre del mondialisation, trans. Aurlie
Duthoo (Paris: Flammarion, 2003).
4. Franklin Knight, "The Haitian Revolution and the Idea of Human Rights" (Pub
lic lecture, Cornel) University, April 17, 2004).

8 Yale French Studies


ality: no humans can be enslaved. Freedom can only exist when we cre
ate a global society whose structures and laws allow for the full and
unimpeded development of our possibilities as living individuals. This
idea was truly unthinkable in a world grounded and dependent on the
enslavement of a portion of the human population. The idea of the Hai
tian Revolution was so scandalous that enormous efforts were made to
silence it, to falsify it, to demonize, in short to reduce Haiti as both idea
and reality to no more than the "poorest country in the Western Hemi
sphere." Haiti was immediately quarantined and pauperized in the
forced dysfunction of a postcolonial state undermined and hamstrung
by the terrified slave-holding powers that then controlled the globe.
In hindsight, however, as we look back across two hundred years of
Haitian independence at a succession of despotic regimes, political dys
function, systemic economic underdevelopment, and terrifying social
injustice, one might question the utility of a revolution that paved
the way for these historical (under-) developments. Perhaps all those
timorous French Enlightenment thinkers, from Condorcet to l'Abb
Grgoire and others were right: a too rapid freedom granted to slaves
"unprepared" for liberty could only lead to chaos.5 It was in SaintDomingue, not Paris, that violence reached unimagined heights of bru
tality on both sides, that an entire society was literally reduced to ashes
in the name of a single imperative: universal emancipation. In the face
of this categorical imperative, nothing else mattered, not property, not
happiness, or any other good. Because of this total revolution, hundreds
of thousands of Haitians avoided the vicious reprisals that fell upon
blacks in Guadeloupe when Napoleon reinstated slavery there in 1802.
Moreover, this gain is quantifiable: they avoided precisely forty-six
years of enslavement ( 1802-1848). Who else but those concerned could
judge what this progress was worth: The slaves of Saint-Domingue,
who knew slavery first-hand, decided for themselves that, faced with
its imminent reimposition, nothing else mattered, that they would
never return to slavery.
Reading recent critical studies of globalization like Michael Hardt
5. As in Condorcet's 1781 text Rflexions sur l'esclavage des negres, where the
philosopher-mathematician argues quite "rationally" for a gradual elimination of slav
ery over the course of one or two generations. Jean-Antoine-Nicolas, Marquis de Con
dorcet, Rflexions sur lesclavage des ngres (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2000), 38, 44. For
a strong critique of the limitations of Enlightenment Universalism in light of the prob
lem of slavery, see Louis Sala-Molins, tes misres des Lumires: Sous la raison, l'outrage
[Paris; Laffont, 1992).

NICK NESBITT

and Antonio Negri's Empire, I found myself thinking when I was in


Haiti recently that such accounts of the radical constituent subjectiv
ities of the multitude always seem to describe eminently first-world
sites and events.6 Any contemporary attempt to understand universal
emancipation needs to include, perhaps even to begin from, a site like
Haiti, which both invented this process and has demonstrated over the
last two centuries the insufficiency of any project that would consider
the "Third World"-as does Empirethrough mere cursory references
to a few canonical theoretical texts (those of Edward Said and Gayatri
Spivak, for example). While there is no reason one should expect such
authors to have anything to say about postcolonial experience, the uni
versal scope of their pretensions justifies pointing out the parochialism
of their logic.
If we are witnessing today something like the constitution of a
global mass-democratic movement in sites such as Seattle, Genova,
Porto Alegre, Paris, and New York, these events confront an already
constituted state of (relative) law and order. While the Haitian Revolu
tion demonstrates the radical efficacy of constituent power, no less
does attention to Haitian history demonstrate its radical insufficiency.
In the first world, it's easy to condemn all representative govern
mentsin their varying degrees of, or lack of, representation of popu
lar sovereigntyas operating an unjust alienation of constituent
power. In this view, all rule of law is subjugation to an abstract univer
sal; all mediation, all representation is always already alienation. The
neo-Schmittian trashing of a despised "parliamentarism" and mere
"opinion, " of the United Nations and the call for human rights, seems
all too easy from sites like Washington or Paris (witness Alain Badiou's
Ethics).7 No constituted power, but only the direct expression of the
constituent will of the multitudes is just for Hardt and Negri. The au
thors never question the degree to which constituted power might ac
tually both oppress, and paradoxically enable the constituent power of
the multitude to emerge in its multiple singular forms. To what degree,
for example, might freedom of the press, intellectual inquiry, and a
global public sphere have enabled the critical and analytical virtuosity
and insights of Empire7.8
6. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2000) .
7. Alain Badiou, L'thique: Essai, sur la conscience du mal (Paris: Nous, 2003),
8. Given his treatment in the hands of Italian justice since the 1970s, one readily
understands Negri's vilification of constituted power, but that doesn't make his analysis

10 Yale French Studies

What can such a one-sided vision of the rule of law as always already
(rather than potentially) evil mean for a place like Haiti (or Rwanda, or
the Congo . . .), where the rule of law hardly can be said to exist at all,
where law is not the complex relation of an individual to a universally
valid norm, but is instead no more than the direct expression of violent
domination (whoever has the machine guns and torture chambers is
right)? Contemporary Haiti is the apotheosis of the deformalization
and derationalization of law into a permanent state of emergency and
the arbitrary and unpredictable wielding of raw power.9 Again and
again, the history of Haiti demonstrates the radical insurgency of un
free subjects against the forces of violence and domination, but the fact
that Haiti is the greatest historical instantiation of the insurgency
Hardt and Negri rightly celebrate has never been enough to ensure that
those subjects can realize their full human potential as autonomous,
creative subjects, that after their insurgency they will not be taken out
of their beds at night and assassinated or thrown into jail without re
course to justice. Why must Haitians again and again assert their radi
cal insurgency against "constituted power" in the face of a seemingly
unending and total state of crisis? Only a critical analysis of the multi
ple, ambiguous, and contradictory forms of constituted power in that
nation over the past two centuries, rather than its absolute vilification,
could begin to supply an answer. In the two centuries since its founda
tion, the history of Haiti has become the development and perfection
of a system of total exploitation by a tiny elite and the most absolute
lack of popular sovereignty and governmental mediation imaginable.
While one must resist any fetishization of the rule of law, which must
always remain subordinate to the process of democratization, and
which must always coexist alongside the possibility of civil disobedi
ence, the rule of law nonetheless remains a necessary element in the
of it any less partial. See Negri on Negri: In Conversation with Anne Dufourmentelle
(New York: Routledge, 2004).
9.
This process was theorized by Carl Schmitt and implemented by the National So
cialists. Schmitt's classic (and analytically brilliant) attacks on rational law, parliamen
tarism, and "lifeless" universalism occur in works such as The Crisis of Parliamentary
Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985) and The Concept of the Political (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1976). See William Scheuermann's study of
Schmitt's Frankfurt School critics Otto Kirchheimer and Franz Neumann for a defense
of rationalized universalistic law as an unfinished project of modernity. Between the
Norm and the Exception: The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1994). For an overview of Schmitt's thought, see Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy:
An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (New York: Verso, 2000).

NICK NESBITT

11

democratization.10 11

process of
In contrast with its glaring absence in
contemporary Haiti, in 1804, in a veritable Benjaminian "flash . . .
never [to be] seen again, " the progress of universal human emancipa
tion became a localized, concrete reality that denied the brutal rule of
arbitrary force and subjugation, abolishing slavery immediately and
unconditionally, and inventing and launching the global process of de
colonization that continues unfinished today.11
It is only because the human mind can conceive of the universal,
without ever entirely grasping it, that we have progressed toward, for
example, a universal ban on slavery. This is not to claim that there has
been progress in an absolute sense. Such a claim would be hollow and
meaningless in the face of the many historical failures and ideological
manipulations of the idea of human rights. Jacques Mourgeon's brief yet
dense study Les droits de lhomme offers an overview of the historical
development and instantiation of human rights, attacking in particular
the idea that there has been any absolute progress in their implementa
tion since 1789.12If, as he claims (and he cites no statistics), since 1945
the number of underdeveloped countries has increased from 77 to 133,
the number of individuals living beneath the poverty line, hunger, in
fant mortality, and illiteracy have all increased (50), if massive cases of
genocide have continued unabated, if all this and more is true, is one
then justified in concluding that "the problem is no longer one of
knowing whether here or there one can find rights emerging from the
void . . ., but if in all cases the power brought to bear by and enlarged by
their claim does not use their justifications to rein them in" (53)?13 Such
a conclusion conflates what I think are two separate issues: the (always
partial and contingent) advancement of human rights in any specific
10. Franz Neumann forcefully argues this point in his article "The Concept of Polit
ical Freedom," in The Democratic and the Authoritarian State: Essays in Political and
Legal Theory [Glencoe, IL: 1957). See also Between the Norm and the Exception, 196-97.
11. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 255.
12. Jacques Mourgeon, Les droits de lhomme (Paris: PUF, 2002). Further references
to this and all other texts cited more than once will be made parenthetically in the text.
13. This and all other translations from the French are my own, unless otherwise noted.
Viewing human rights from the standpoint of a jurist, Mourgeon claims that the utility of
human rights exists only when they gain obligatory force from their inclusion in a consti
tution (Les droits de lhomme, 68). Such a claim ignores precisely the decisive intervention
of the slaves involved in the Haitian Revolution. The slave with a copy of the Declaration
of the Rights of Man in his shirt pocket, like Toussaint Louverture before 1801, had no con
stitution to enforce his claims, yet these claims nonetheless brought about enormous his
torical change. See Alth Parham, My Odyssey: Experiences of a Young Refugee from Two
Revolutions. By a Creole of Saint Domingue (Louisiana State University Press, 1959), 34.

12

Yale French Studies

case and the critique of subsequent new and different forms of their de
nial that arise with historical events. It passes over the fact that many
historical changes have occurred precisely because the claims of human
rights were pressed and imperfectly advanced, and the relative (and still
incomplete) decrease in human enslavement since the eighteenth cen
tury offers us perhaps the least ambiguous case of this advancement.
Given the suffering it engendered and its historical aftereffects in
an (economically and juridically) impoverished country, does the Hai
tian Revolution demonstrate historical progress in social justice?14
Kant asked the same question about the French Revolution in his 1798
text "Contest of the Faculties," and responded that it was precisely not
the contingent violence and incompletion of the Terror, all the failings
and shortcomings of such an event that should retain our attention.
Rather, Kant claimed, the progress brought about by the French Revo
lution lies in its construction of a universal idea of freedom, an idea that
negated the local, communitarian politics of race, ethnicity, and nation
to interpellate all those innately endowed with the capacity to under
stand its logic. Kant asks the question "Is the human race continually
improving?" and in offering a positive answer to this question, Kant
presumes precisely what remains first to be demonstrated: that hu
manity actually exists as an immanent totality. Instead, Haiti and the
case of slavery as an attempt at radical de-humanization posit human
ity as no more than an immanent possibility to be conquered: amid the
violence and destruction of enslavement and war, humanity remains
only an idea of which we can conceive, and thus produce historically
(we can become human).15
Kant maintains that one can in fact obtain a "prophetic" vision of
human history "if the prophet himself occasions and produces the
events he predicts" ( 177). He finds just such an event in the French Rev
olution: for all its violence and bloodshed, its "misery and atrocities,"
it has aroused a "sympathy" that proves "a moral disposition within
the human race" (177). The Haitian revolutionaries who had labored as
slaves, making cane grow in the fields and transforming it into sugar
and rum, knew all about labor, and "producing an event [one] predicts. "
Farming is perhaps the prototypical event in the history of humans'
14. An earlier version of the following five paragraphs appeared in Nick Nesbitt,
"Troping Toussaint," Research in African Literatures 35/2 Spring 2004|.
15. Immanuel Kant, "The Contest of the Faculties" in Kant: Pohtical Writings, trans.
H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970, 1991], 176-90.

NICK NESBITT

13

domination of nature, mastering its unpredictability through the imag


inative power of human reason to conceive of a nonexistent project (to
avoid starvation by growing food in the coming season) and to imple
ment that project. The violence of the slave-holding plantation system,
of course, transformed this bucolic vision into a living hell. In response
to this attempt at dehumanization, Haitian slaves, certain in their own
humanity, conceived of another project and worked to "produce" that
event: universal emancipation from slave labor.
A seemingly unrelated moment in the history of philosophy dra
matically underscores the momentous implications of the Haitian
Revolution as a "production" of universal human autonomy. In the
middle of the 1929 debate between Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cas
sirer in Davos, Switzerland, a student in the audience addresses to Cas
sirer a question at once disarmingly direct and charming in its nave ex
pression of hope that a substantial answer might follow: "What path
toward infinity does man possess?" he asks. "And how can man par
ticipate in infinity?"16 Rather than banishing any concrete answer to
these questions as the mere dreams of a young spirit-seer, the neo-Kantian philosopher Cassirer gives a remarkably concise response that syn
thesizes in a few lines the vision of what it means to be human that lies
at the root of modern experience:
There exists no other path than the mediation of form. For this is the
function of form: in transforming his existence into form, that is to say
by transforming necessarily all that is in him of the order of the lived
into an objective form, whatever it may be, in which he objectivtes
himself, man doubtless does not liberate himself from the finitude of
his point of departure, . . .but, in emerging from finitude, he causes this
finitude to overcome itself in something new. This is what makes up
an immanent infinity. (41 )

This vision of human experience as the production of a simultaneously


immanent, yet infinite truth via the process of production is perhaps
the defining characteristic of Western modernity and its subject, homo
fabei. The insight of Giambatista Vico that humans can only have ac
cess to truth by exercising their freedom to create, knowingly trans
forming the world through the fabrication of objects first conceived via
their faculty of productive imagination, is here brought into explicit re
lation to our capacity to know the infinite and universal. And nowhere
16.
Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger, Dbat sur le kantisme et la philosophie
(Paris: ditions Beauchesne, 1972).

14 Yale French Studies

does this truth of Modernity, understood as the construction of an im


manent infinity, receive more strildng form than in the experience of
New World slavery that culminates in the 1804 Declaration of Haitian
Independence.17
The novelty of the Haitian Revolution and Independence stands in
dialectical relation to the traditions it critiqued and perfected. Haiti
uniquely demonstrates the complex interdependence of human rights
and preexisting symbolic constructs (such as ideas, social forms and
customs, and positive law), rather than the simple priority of the for
mer over the latter.18 For the concept of human rights is fust that, a con
cept; it does not preexist its formulations in the human mind and its
consequent objectifications. Human autonomy is no hidden reserve; it
cannot be saved up and it cannot be separated from its expression. It
only exists in the event of its objectification, as Cassirer maintained.
To become free, a human subject must enter into and transform a pre
existing social order. On the other hand, for the participants in the Hai
tian Revolution to assert the universal, nonnegotiable status of human
autonomy, they must already have acceded to what their enslavers
would deny them: subjectivity and a consciousness of their universal
rights as humans. In other words, they have already become autono
mous participants in a global human discursive community reflecting
on human rights, a community that preexisted their birth, subjects
demonstrating precisely the process of majoration that Kant called " en
lightenment." They were able actively to construct their right to au
tonomy precisely because they were able to represent to themselves the
discrepancy between a received symbolic object (the Dclaration des
droits de lhomme et du citoyen of 1789) and their own continued en
slavement by the architects of that declaration, and to move to over
come that discrepancy.
THE HISTORICIZATION OF FREEDOM
The Haitian Revolution implemented a radically new conception of
freedom that arose in the Enlightenment to receive perhaps its fullest
17. As well as its negation: the ecological catastrophe that is the destruction of Haiti's
indigenous forest testifies to the obvious need to critique any production-model of hu
man experience,- it is this ongoing critique, rather than any univocal affirmation of
progress, that constitutes a dialectic of enlightenment.
18. For a discussion of this interdependence, see Jrgen Habermas, Postscript to Be
tween Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy,
trans. William Rehg (Cambridge: MIT, 1998 ), 456.

NICK NESBITT

15

realization on a small Caribbean island many thousands of kilometers


from Paris. This concrete, universal notion of freedom may have arisen
first in Diderot's Encyclopdie, in articles such as droit naturel, popu
lation, and esclavage. There, the authors of the Encyclopdie attacked
slavery by means of an abstract, universal criterion: if all humans are
characterized by their ability to reason, and the essence of this univer
sal capacity is our free will, le libre arbitre, it is then impossible for any
humans to alienate this freedom to a master, for to do so would make
them into animals, a logical impossibility. For the authors of the En
cyclopdie, all humans are inalienably human in their possession of
free will. The logic of this argument, in its universal abstraction and re
fusal to consider contingent, qualifying, and discriminatory questions
of history, culture, or race when considering slavery (i.e., are slaves ac
tually ready to be free? Are they racially unqualified for freedom? ), took
the immeasurable step of universally disqualifying slavery through the
advancement of reason as enlightenment.
As such, however, this argument against slavery remained highly
vulnerable to the devastating critique Rousseau would level at the En
cyclopdies broader project of enlightenment. The Enlightenment cri
tique of slavery relied upon the weak force of a purely abstract, logical
argument. It may well be that slavery is a logical impossibility, but the
Encyclopdie as a project of abstract, rational enlightenment can only
proceed with the weak hope that as people read its critique, slavery will
magically disappear, that enlightened reason would make real existing
slavery disappear as it speaks the word, the magical incantation, that
would conjure its disappearance. If slavery is a logical impossibility, we
are still confronted with its real existence after the appearance of the
Encyclopdie.19
It is here, amid the contradiction between enlightened reason and
really existing society that Rousseau inserts his radical invention of a
historicized, existential freedom.20 We know that slavery is both logi
cally and morally wrong, yet it exists in the present world, so, as he puts
it in another context in the Contrat social, "we will force [ourselves]
to be free." With these famously ambiguous and problematic words,
Rousseau puts forth a radically novel notion of freedom and human be1P. See Mark Hulliung, The Autocritique of the Enlightenment: Rousseau and the
Philosophes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).
20.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Le contrat social in Oeuvres politiques (Paris: Bordas

1989).

16 Yale French Studies


ing: freedom is not, as Diderot and other Enlightenment philosophes
had argued, a natural and eternal essence of what it means tobe human,
but rather a historical and contingent human possibility.21 Human
freedom and perfectibility are indeed inalienable, says Rousseau, but
only as universally immanent possibilities awaiting their historical de
velopment in a just society (The Autocritique of Enlightenment, 6768). Only a revolution would end actual existing slavery in a world
grown dependent upon the colonial production of wealth via slave la
bor. Humans are quite visibly and everywhere enchained and unfree in
the actually existing world, Rousseau observed, and in contrast to
the slavish alienation of modern society, a natural existence might well
be preferable. But Rousseau was no defender of a return to nature; he
repeatedly pointed out its impossibility and futility. Instead, writing
in 1762, a generation before the French and Haitian Revolutions,
Rousseau observed the antinomy between the unfreedom he saw
everywhere around him and the human freedom of which he could con
ceive, and his radical intervention was to imagine a social structure, a
state and rule of law in which the latent and universal possibility of hu
man freedom could become actualized. Le contrat social presents hu
mans as radically historical beings, beings whose existence precedes
their essence, beings who universally possessed the potential to be
come free in a social world that would develop this potentiality. Recall
the famous words of Le contrat social:
This passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a re
markable change in man, replacing the role of instinct in his conduct
by justice. . . . Even though he deprives himself in this state of several
advantages proffered by nature, he now gains such great new ones, his
faculties are exercised and developed, his ideas extended, his feelings
ennobled, ... to such a point that ... he should bless the happy mo
ment that wrenched him forever away [from nature], and which made
him, a stupid and limited animal, into an intelligent being and a man.
(

261)

21.
Rousseau's critique of Grotius and Diderot is not a critique of natural rights per
se, but rather the unmasking of their manipulation of a logical category (the "natural")
as mere ideology (the domination of the weak by the strong called the "natural right to
property" or the defense of monarchy the right to "security"). Although Rousseau docs
ground his understanding of human nature via the "natural' qualities of self-preserva
tion and pity, understood as universal human attributes, this human nature can only be
more than a logical possibility in the modern world if it is developed as "political right, "
as the subtitle to the Contrat social puts it, since the state of nature is forever lost to us.
Cited in The Autocritique of the Enlightenment, 68.

NICK NESBITT

17

To become fully human, that is to say, to become free, is for Rousseau


a project, not a pre-established essence, in which humans abandon an
inferior natural existence for a freedom realizable only in a free society.
Rousseau's is air exchange "of natural independence for liberty" [Le
contrat social, 73). Rousseau's conception of a freedom not of the re
gressive state of nature, but rather a superior, latent human capacity to
be developed in a just society found its first concrete objectification in
the 1789 Dclaration des droits de homme et du citoyen.
Haitians, however, did not simply reproduce the 1789 Dclaration
by transplanting this foreign bird to tropical climes,- they demonstrated
human freedom precisely in their unique transformation of this em
pirical object. The violent experience of enslavement allowed Haitians
to transform the immanent meaning of the universal declaration of
1789, and it was their singular experience that made the Haitian Rev
olution the greatest political event of the age of enlightenment. While
the American and French revolutionaries, following John Locke, spoke
endlessly of "slavery," few understood this critique to include all citi
zens, unequivocally.22 The American revolutionaries in particular
were often more concerned with enlightenment as a passage from "bar
barism" to "civility" and mastery of gentlemanly social behavior than
with the problem of (positive) freedom.23 The American Revolution
was primarily a revolution for equality (of nonslaves) (232-33), where
liberty meant merely the negative freedom from unjust taxation and
military conscription.
If the English, French, and American bourgeois revolutions all
served to create the structural conditions for the protection of individ
ual liberties of economic choice, the particularity of the Haitian Revo
lution was to redress the imbalance they had introduced between
equality and liberty, in favor of the latter. The Haitian constitutions of
1801 and 1804 invented the concept of a postracial society, one in
which anyone, regardless of skin color or national origin, would be
called "black." Though Article 4 of the 1793 Revolutionary Constitu
tion granted citizenship to any adult foreigner who resided in Metro22. See John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (New York: Mentor 1965, reprint
of Cambridge UP, 1960 edition).
23. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vin
tage Books, 1991 ), 192-98. Wood points out, however, that if the patrician American rev
olutionaries failed to abolish slavery, their egalitarianism created the social conditions
in which it immediately became a glaring and impossible-to-ignore contradiction that
lead inexorably to the civil war and Abolition 186).

18 Yale French Studies


politan France for a year,24 the French Revolution had instituted an assimilationist version of nationalism that predicated social unity upon
the erasure (rather than tolerance) of communitarian difference and
only banned slavery under duress in 1794. On the other hand, the Amer
ican Revolution could only base its pluralist conception of social to
tality upon the continuing enslavement of a portion of its population.
The Haitian Revolution, informed as it was by the direct experience
of slavery, could not simply take over unchanged the liberal model of
society imported from England and North America: not simply because
of the formal emphasis placed upon individual (negative) liberties at
the expense of universal freedom, but because the liberal model further
presupposes individuals as free autonomous subjects who merely need
to be left alone to go about their business, a view that Marx would later
critique as the self-serving ideology of a dominant social class. The for
mer slaves who drove the Haitian Revolution to its culmination in a
novel constitution knew from experience that all humans are not free;
they took human autonomy not as an a priori given, but strove to en
act it as a social, human accomplishment, an ongoing construction that
was itself only instantiated in the process of giving form to an emanci
pated society. The simple exigencies of experience led them to the same
conclusions Marx would theorize a half-century later: human auton
omy can only be conquered by a community as an inter-subjective
process; by herself, an individual can only return to an (inferior) state
of nature (marooning).
COLONIALIST CONTRADICTIONS
If one accepted the notion that African slaves were human, the pro
mulgation of the Dclaration in 1791 necessarily engendered an enor
mous contradiction between the universal norm of freedom and the
fact of actually existing slavery in France's colonies. All those bene
fiting from the slave-holding systemincluding not only whites, but
also mulattoes and even free blacksstudiously avoided invoking the
cause of human rights in their fight for representation. Most often in
the early years of the Revolution, when the National Assembly was
still trying to maintain slavery in the face of the first slave and mulatto
revolts, the Dclaration remained a white elephant never mentioned
by anyone in the voluminous debates. To do so would immediately
24. Between Facts and Norms, 509.

NICK NESBITT

19

have drawn the speaker, no matter what his position, into enormous
logical contradictions. This becomes evident in one of the few ex
changes on Saint-Domingue before 1793 where les droits de l'homme
are in fact evoked. A decree of the Assemble gnrale de la partie
franaise de Saint-Domingue on March 28, 1790 attempts to set forth
the basis of the colony's right to make its laws independently of the
Mtropole [in essence, to maintain the slave-holding plantation sys
tem). The colonial Assembly affirms this right based on its nonidentity
with France: Saint-Domingue is "too little known by France, from
which it is vastly separated" and is marked by "the difference of cli
mate, of the kind of population, of social morays and habits" (4). Fur
thermore, however, the decree argues that to deny this distinction be
tween the Mtropole and its colony would undermine the very basis of
the Constitution and its Dclaration: "The national Assembly could
not decree laws concerning the regime internal to Saint-Domingue
without contradicting principles that it had consecrated in its very first
decrees, notably in its declaration of the rights of man" (4). The colo
nial Assembly thus defends its local hegemony based on a universal no
tion of human rights, but in order precisely to maintain the exclusion
of others (slaves) from those rights.
Those whites, mulattoes, and free blacks who did wish to transform
the colonial system immediately grasped such contradictions, but re
fused to take the fateful step (universal emancipation) that would move
beyond them, continuing to call only for the extension of civil rights to
nonslaves. In a letter and decree of December 8, 1791, a group of sol
diers and commissioners in Croix-des-Bouquets (among them Ption)
called for the extension "of political rights in favor of persons of color,
based on the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen"
(250).25 In a letter of December 14, the members of this rebel army of
"white and colored citizens" wrote to the Civil Commissioners sent to
Saint-Domingue by the National Assembly to attack "the so-called
General Assembly" because it failed to represent the (supposed) ma
jority of the "French people of Saint-Domingue": mulattoes and free
blacks (244). While calling for the extension of universal constitutional
rights to include themselves, they refused to see that the partiality of
their own claimexcluding as it does slavesinvalidates the logical
25.
Letter of December 21, 1791: "Rponse des Commisaires nationaux civils, aux
personnes runies la Croix-des-Bouquets" in Troisime suite des pices justificatives
relatives aux troubles de Saint-Domingue. No. 166. (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale!

20 Yale Fiench Studies

ground of their argument: "The law obligates only those who have con
sented to it.. .. All people should be represented. This is a constitu
tional principle fully recognized by the National Assembly. People of
color and free blacks should thus have their own representatives in the
Colonial Assembly" 244).
The Republican Commissioners Mirbeck, Roume, and Saint-Lger
respond point by point to these demands, and their "logical" rebuttal
covers the naked power and domination of authority with the "voice
of reason" (251). While they admit that the Dclaration "contains the
exposition of eternal truths, which are no less evident in Constantino
ple and in Hindoustan than in France, . . . nevertheless, one sees slav
ery with the Turks, . . . Indians are divided by castes, and Israel was di
vided into tribes." Certainly, France is lucky to have recognized the
universality of rights: "Happy is the nation that, like France, finds it
self mature enough to affix the foundation of its constitution to the
rights of man and citizen." Alas, they sigh, these rights are wonderful
in theory, but a colony is
Separated from the center of the Empire by the vast Ocean, ... popu
lated by whites, blacks, freed persons, by slaves and by the admixture
of whites and blacks,-.. ,bythenatureofitspopulation,[it]necessitates
a local constitution in relation to the state of existence of slaves, and
the political state of those who already enjoy civil rights, and who de
mand a citizen's activities. (253)

The logic is brutally, cynically simple: because there are slaves in


Saint-Domingue, there needs to be a local constitution to address and
maintain that "state" of things. "Such is the law. . . . Will you say that
the Declaration silences a decree that contradicts it? " (255). The claim
of "universal" rights is only valid for Metropolitan France. Following
this logic, slavery would not be a historical creation of French colonists
and the government supporting them, but instead a natural destiny in
those lands where Revolution has not (yet) historicized the social
world. In any case, those who defend the slave-holding status quo have
force on their side, and can thus freely forgo logical rigor. Only the un
compromising actions of Haiti's slaves could import the universal
claims of the Dclaration in the face of such inertia.
THE IDEA OF 1804
Twenty years ago, in an essay commemorating the Bicentennial of the
French Revolution originally entitled "The Idea of 1789," Jrgen Ha-

NICK NESBITT

21

bermas had to argue for the continued relevance of an event that, after
intensive investigation over the course of two centuries, seemed in
creasingly irrelevant as the generation of May '68 settled into the com
fort of Mitterandisme.26 If my aim here is similar, it is for the opposite
reason: we know comparatively little of the Haitian Revolution, de
spite the fact that it has never receded from public consciousness
throughout the African Diaspora. It has remained actively "silenced"
and largely "unthinkable" in Western discourse, as Michel-Rolph
Trouillot has argued, since the moment it began to unfold in 1791.2-7 A
search of the Cornell library database on the historiography of the
French Revolution reveals over three hundred and fifty Library of Con
gress subject headings alone, and well over 7,000 individual volumes.
A similar search for Haiti reveals twelve subject headings and a grand
total of 235 volumes (many of them duplicates) on the events of 17911804.
In France, this silencing of history is even more striking. Walking
from bookstore to bookstore on the rue des coles a month before the
Bicentennial of Haitian Independence, I could find not a single work on
the Haitian Revolution in stock in any of the famous stores that line
that street (Gibert, Compagnie, etc.) until I reached the niche post
colonial bookseller L'Harmattan, where I finally found three dusty vol
umes: one from 1960 (Csaire), and the other two reprints from the
nineteenth century (Schoelcher, Lacroix).28 What are the causes of the
Revolution and how did it proceed? Compared with the plethora of
written documents that have driven French Revolutionary scholarship
for two centuries, much of this period will remain forever unknown to
scholars.29
Writing in 1988, Habermas renews Kant's identification of the
world-historical importance of the French Revolution in the idea it put
forward: "There seems to be only one remaining candidate for an affir
mative answer to the question concerning the relevance of the French

26. "Popular Sovereignty as Procedure," in Between Facts and Norms, 463-90.


27. See Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of His
tory (Boston: Beacon, 1995), Ch. 3.
2,8. Of course, scholarly work on the Haitian Revolution exists in France,- my point
is that to find it, one must undertake the laborious work of searching it out in the depths
of the Bibliothque and Archives Nationales.
29.
David Geggus's incredibly useful study Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloom
ington: Indiana University Press, 2002) reveals how many archives still remain unex
plored, pointing to years of future research.

22 Yale. French Studies


Revolution: the ideas [of. . .] democracy and human rights [that] form
the universalist core of the constitutional state that emerged from the
American and French Revolutions" (1998: 465). Despite, in fact pre
cisely because of, Habermas's all-too-common oversight (and Haiti?),
I think it is worth pursuing the question of the idea of the Haitian Rev
olution: does Haiti have anything to teach us about what Foucault
called in his 1983 encomium to enlightenment "the concept of the uni
versal that must be kept present and held in mind as that which must
be thought," or was it merely a poor imitation of its French and North
American cousins?30 The hegemony of a Euro-American dominated
historiography would lead us to view the Haitian Revolution as a mere
tropical echo of its better-known French and American cousins.31 In
stead, when confronting the question of emancipation, these earlier
events appear distinctly parochial and limited: the Haitian Revolution
is the greatest event of the age of Enlightenment because it was the first
to implement, without compromise, not the freedom of a certain class
or race, nor the civil rights of "constitutional state," but the program
of universal emancipation that we today call human rights.32
From 1791 to 1804, the Haitian Revolutionariesnot just Tous
saint, but, as Carolyn Fick has demonstrated, the whole multitude of
Haitian slavesfought to institute an emancipatory social structure
that would allow for the free development of all human beings. If the
1789 Declaration of Human Rights remained an abstraction that ig
nored the rights of women and slaves, its universal prescription was
rightly understood by enslaved Haitians to interpellate them as sub
jects to a politics of emancipation. In Haiti in 1791, the abstract uni
versal concept of emancipation became a more concrete universal, as
hundreds of thousands of former slaves invented and instituted the
global movement of decolonization that had remained a mere idea in
post-1789 Paris. "Philosophy," as the Abb Grgoire put the matter in
a letter of June 8, 1791 to the mulattoes and free blacks of Saint-

30. Michel Foucault, "Qu'est-ce que les Lumires?" In Dits Et crits II, 1976-198&
(Paris: Gallimard Quarto, 2001!, 1506.
31. The work of the historian Yves Bnot is one of the few rebuttals to this scholarly
silence, a silence all the more striking when one considers the number of studies of asim
ilar watershed event in French colonial history, the Algerian War.
32. As such, it was of course not free of its own contradictions, the most glaring be
ing the reimposition of forced labor by Toussaint and, subsequently, Christophe, as well
as the Revolution's failure fully to enfranchise women, whose freedom remained the
merely negative one not to be enslaved.

NICK NESBITT

23

Domingue, "is broadening its horizons in the New World. . . . One day
the sun will shed its light on no one but free men among you; the rays
of the star that spreads light will fall no more on irons and slaves."33
In a few short years, the ideology and events of the French Revolu
tion transformed the world of the slaves of Saint Domingue, who be
came through their own exertions both citizens of France and subjects
of a global culture of the Enlightenment, as C.L.R. James first recog
nized. Toussaint Louverture was the articulate voice of this transforrrfation. Again and again, Toussaint grounds his and his colleagues' ac
tions on the universal rights put forward in 1789. "The liberty that the
[French] republicans offer us you say is false," he writes at the moment
he abandons his alliance with the Spanish in 1794. Once the French re
public had abolished slavery, there could be no ambiguity possible: "We
are republicans and, in consequence, free by natural right. It can only
be Kings whose very name expresses what is most vile and low, who
dared to arrogate the right of reducing to slavery men made like them
selves, whom nature had made free."34 In 1798, as the Directory aban
doned the advances of the Revolution and prepared the way for Na
poleon, Toussaint wrote to them of "the oath that we renew, to bury
ourselves under the ruins of a country revived by liberty rather than
suffer the return of slavery" (Black Jacobins, 195).
Toussaint asserts that the reimposition of slavery is not a matter of
local concern for a small Caribbean community of Africans at the
boundaries of the known world. Rather, he enjoins the Directory to
"not allow our brothers, our friends, to be sacrificed to men who wish
to reign over the ruins of the human species." While we can no longer
share the unqualified certainty of the Enlightenment that a concrete
"human species" underwrites any absolute notion of progress, this crit
ical spirit should not blind us to the fact that such a universal notion
did in fact drive historical progress in the 1790s toward the universal
abolition of slavery. The Declaration of the Rights of Man had become
a reality for the slaves of Saint-Domingue, and Toussaint affirms un
ambiguously that its universal prescription of a right to freedom based
on reason ("principle"), is the grounds of their actions:

33. Abb Grgoire, "Lettre aux citoyens de couleur et ngres libres de SaintDomingue" (Paris: Imprimerie du patriote Franois, place du Thtre Italien, 1791), 10,
12.

34. Cited in C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louvertuie and the San
Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1989), 155.

24 Yale French Studies


Do [the forces of reaction] think that men who have been able to enjoy
the blessing of liberty will calmly see it snatched away? ... If they had
a thousand lives, they would sacrifice them all rather than be forced into
slavery again. But no, the same hand which has broken our chains will
not enslave us anew. Prance will not revoke her principles... .But if, to
re-establish slavery in Saint Domingue, this was done, then I declare to
you it would be to attempt the impossible: we have known how to face
dangers to obtain our liberty, we shall know how to brave death to main
tain it... . [I] renew, my hand in yours, the oath I have made, to cease
to live . . . before the god of liberty is profaned and sullied by the liberticides, before they can snatch from my hands that sword, those arms,
which France confided in me for the defense of its rights and those of
humanity, for the triumph of liberty and equality. (Cited in Black Ja
cobins, 195-97)

These Enlightenment ideas did not spring miraculously into Toussaint's mind. Fluent in both Creole and French, he actively dictated and
rewrote all of his letters with a team of French secretaries until they
forged them into the prose of the Enlightenment. Nor was Toussaint
the passive pawn of his French secretaries. Deborah Jenson has shown
how he actively managed public perception of the events in SaintDomingue as a veritable "spin doctor" of the age of Enlightenment.35
Toussaint subscribed to French papers such as the Monitem, and in
terviews with him appeared there in turn throughout the second half
of the 1790s ("Spin Doctor?" 5). The contemporary account of one
French witness (himself a white plantation owner hostile to Toussaint)
is particularly re vealing as to how this largely illiterate former slave ac
tively transformed himself into one of the most famous public figures
of his time: "I saw him in few words verbally lay out the summary of
his addresses [to his secretaries], rework the poorly conceived, poorly
executed sentences; confront several secretaries presenting their work
by turns; redo the ineffective sections; transpose parts to place them to
better effect; making himself worthy, all in all, of the natural genius
foretold by Raynal."36 While one of the great figures of the Enlighten
ment, as C.L.R. James points out, unlike any of the great theorists of
liberty of his time (Paine, Jefferson, Raynal, Robespierre, Danton), Tous
saint had lived the formative years of his life as a slave, and this expe
rience allowed him, alone in the 1790s, "to defend the freedom of the
35. Deborah Jenson, "Toussaint Louverture, Spin Doctor?: The Haitian Revolution
in the French Media" (Unpublished article, 2003).
36. Cited in "Spin Doctor?" 8.

NICK NESBITT

25

blacks without reservation" (Black Jacobins, 198). Toussaint was not


passively parroting ideas that had been imported from France and
forced upon him. Before Toussaint, the Rights of Man were, with rare,
tentative exceptions, not understood to extend to African slaves. In the
face of th is aggressive partiality, Toussaint used the public sphere of the
Enlightenment with tactical genius to redefine the notion of universal
right. What then are the grounds of Toussaint's claim to universality?
Rather than holding the Haitian Revolution to some contemporary,
external definition of the universal, we can address it within its own
historical horizon. Various cultural materials undoubtedly contributed
to the Haitian conceptualization of the universal. That Vodou and
other elements of African or Taino cultures surviving in 1791 did so
seems to me most likely, but even to begin to offer a sufficient demon
stration of this lies beyond the scope of this article. In the case of Tous
saint and other Catholic participants in the Revolution, a devout
Christian faith may have served as an initial template: the Christianity
of Saint Paul allows for only one principle to define its possible range
of subjects: that one be a human being. "Slaves, women, people of all
professions and of all nationalities, all [are to] be admitted, with nei
ther restriction nor privilege."37 Yet this ahistorical, transcendental
truth of the Christian faith was used to justify, as the conversion of
"savages," the brutally exclusionary operations of colonialism and, in
directly, slavery itself. Only a radical fidelity to the lived experience of
slavery, to an experience so brutal and dehumanizing that it simply
could not await divine retribution and the afterlife, could motivate the
transformation of this transcendental abstraction into the immanent
universalism of human rights.
The primary factor in the passage from localized, personal, or com
munitarian ameliorative justice to an unqualified immanent and rev
olutionary universalism was most likely the Enlightenment thought
embodied in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. This Enlightenment
universalism could be simply defined as any truth claim operating via
categories of reason independently of any experience.38 Not that any of
37. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: La fondation de luniversalisme (Paris: PUF, 1997), 14.
38. This is stated most clearly in the first version o Kant's Introduction to the Cri
tique of Pure Reason: We apprehend "true universality [wahre Allgemeinheit]," Kant
tells us, through "universal cognitions [allgemeine Erkenntnisse}." These "must be clear
and certain for themselves, independently of experience. . . . For if one removes from our
experiences everything that belongs to the senses, there still remain certain original con
cepts and the judgments generated from them, which must have arisen entirely a priori,

26 Yale French Studies


the actors of the Haitian Revolution had read Kant, presumably; rather,
bringing Kant's formulation to bear upon one of the Enlightenment's
key historical events reveals its historical singularity. The plantation
was structured, through various forms of violence, in the vain attempt
to obliterate every intimation of universality from the slaves' mental
life, indeed, to keep them from thinking at all. This it could never ac
complish, of course. But empirical experience of the plantation told the
slaves of Saint-Domingue that they were subhuman, devoid of free will
and reason, subject only to the will of an external master. One could
say that in this world, experience told them absolutely nothing about
a universal right to freedom.
In a sense, the Declaration of the Rights of Man appeared from be
yond any empirical experience offered by daily life in Saint-Domingue
(arriving suddenly, on board vessels from another world). It addressed
itself not to the slaves' experience (in a world where slavery was a legal
and daily fact of life), but to their faculty of reason, a faculty that could
recognize the universality of its truth independently of all experience.
Instead of admitting to the particular "fact of nature" that made up
their daily experience (the slave-masters' attempt to reduce them to
sheer animality), in their revolution they strove to act in accord with
reason, to, as Kant famously put the matter, "act in such a way that
[they could] wish [their] maxim to become a universal law": that slav
ery be abolished, universally and without exception. More precisely,
slavery had meant the attempt to reduce humans to mere means (of the
mechanical, bestial production of sugar). Instead, they sought to "treat
humanity always as an end [as constituted by free individuals], but
never as a means only."
To claim that the notion of a "universal reason" is a "European" cat
egory that does violence to other forms of human thought in branding
them "mythical, " as does Paget Henry in his critique of Habermas, is

independently of experience, because they make one able to say more about the objects
that appear to the senses than mere experience would teach . . . and make assertions that
contain true universality and strict necessity" (127-28). As I will argue in the remainder
of this paragraph, this last sentence could stand as an abstract formulation of precisely
what occurs in Haiti, where emancipation is forced to occur as a "strict necessity" whose
truth is independent of all (prior) experience. Whether Kant is actually correct about the
existence of pure a priori judgments (and I don't believe that he is) is beside the point for
the historical interpretation I am putting forward here. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure
Reason, trans. Paul Geyer and Alan W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997).

NICK NESBITT

27

not false.39 Rather, in too quickly judging the Enlightenment supposi


tion of reason as a universal attribute of humanity to be mere violent
imposition, it remains blind to the singularity of an event such as the
Haitian Revolution.40 In affirming their own reasonableness, by con
ceiving of themselves as rational subjects of a universal imperative to
abolish slavery, the slaves of Haiti transformed the European under
standing of reason,- by no means did they passively acquiesce to its def
initions. The Declaration of the Rights of Man was not "intended" to
apply to Africans, anymore than was the American Declaration of In
dependence.41 After the first major defeat of Napoleon by his equal in
strategic and rhetorical genius, by someone far his superior in ethical
comportment and insight, that is to say by Toussaint Louverture, the
concept of reason could no longer exclude the African Diaspora to the
same degree.42 By this measure, these African slaves, and not the pro
colonialist French Assembly, were the reasonable beings who recog
nized themselves in the universal abstraction of the Rights of Man and
acted to transform the very concept of "reasonable being" accordingly.
The concrete historical existence of universals such as the 1789 Dc
laration revealed the partiality and incompletion of the actual French
Revolution and state it underwrote. Until 1791, slave rebellions had re
mained merely local, rather than universal, events. In 1791, the slaves
of Saint-Domingue may already have "had their own program" calling
for the amelioration of working conditions rather than "an abstractly
couched 'freedom'" (Silencing the Past, 103). Furthermore, Fick has
demonstrated that such autonomous demands, which owed little or
nothing to Jacobinism, persisted as an important factor in the success39. Paget Henry, Caliban's Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy (New
York: Routledge, 2000|.
40. This is even truer for a book such as Emmanuel Ezc's Race and the Enlighten
ment (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1997). To think that by presenting the racist writings of
Linn, Kant, Herder, Jefferson, Hegel, and Cuvier onehas addressed the topic of "race and
the Enlightenment" seems to me not false (these thinkers obviously made racist state
ments and judgments) but an extremely partial half-truth. It does not even cast Africans
as passive victims of Enlightenment thought (by, say, investigating what the actual con
sequences of these racist statements might have been); instead it completely and utterly
silences them, erasing them from any participation in the Enlightenment whatsoever.
41. In Emancipation(s), Ernesto Laclau describes the process of a historicization of
the universal (New York: Verso, 1996). In Haiti, this process of "widening the spheres of
[uni versalism's] application" (34 ) transformed both the Revolutionary world and the very
concept of the universal itself.
42. Which is not to say Europeans and North Americans did not try desperately to do
so by branding the Haitians "barbaric" while conveniently ignoring the depravity of both
slavery itself and the horrifying terrorist tactics of General Rochambeau.

28 Yale French Studies

ful drive to independence. Trouillot is undoubtedly right to observe


that "the claims of the revolution were too radical to be formulated in
advance of its deeds" (Silencing the Past, 88), but between 1791 and
1804, the revolutionaries of Saint-Domingue undertook a conscious re
ception and reformulation of the Enlightenment's defense of the uni
versal right of all humans to freely construct their own destiny. It was
the former slaves of Saint-Domingue alone who grasped that this nec
essarily implied the universal abolition of slavery.
GLOBALIZING THE ENLIGHTENMENT:
THE PUBLIC SPHERE OF DISCOURSE
The Abb Grgoire, like Condorcet, had defended the need to end slav
ery gradually, and commentators such as Louis Sala-Molins have
rightly taken them to task for this restriction.43 Similarly, Joan Dayan
describes "how the making of enlightenment man led to the demoli
tion of the unenlightened brute [under the Code noir], how the think
ing mind's destructive proclivities dominated a passive nature or
servile body."44 Such a description, for all its justice, neglects the de
gree to which those bodies were able to refuse "passivity" and "servil
ity." Ill the end, one could reply to Sala-Molins, it mattered little
whether Grgoire and Condorcet thought slavery should be abolished
gradually or immediately. It was their ethical idealism that was unam
biguous, and it was heard in Haiti. This process, what Srinivas Aravumudan has called "Tropicalizing the Enlightenment," was not one of
mere passive mimicry, but instead one in which the slaves of Haiti ac
tively restructured contemporary debate on universal human rights.45

43. In his preface to Misres des Lumires, Sala-Molins rightly asserts that "to read
the texts of the Enlightenment without them [the 'negro' slaves], is to .. . limit univer
sal philanthropy to the universality of my own neighborhood" (15) and calls on readers
to "read the texts of the Enlightenment while situating themselves on the side of the
black slaves" (17). The bulk of his text is preoccupied precisely, however, with the white
European thinkers of the Enlightenment; although Sala-Molins ventriloquizes the black
slaves, he tends to reduce them to the role of reactive victims, "those who must. . . suf
fer in their bodies and souls" (26). Louis Sala-Molins, Les misres des Lumires: Sous la
raison, l'outrage (Paris: Laffont, 1992). While he intentionally remains within the same
francocentric perspective as Sala-Molins, Yves Benot offers a compelling critique of Sala
Molins's failure to examine the historico-economic structure underlying the Enlighten
ment eri tique of slavery (105). Benot, La Rvolution franaise et la fin des colonies, 17891794 (Paris: ditions La Dcouverte, [1987], 2004).
44. Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods. (Berkely: University of California
Press, 1995), 204.
45. In this sense, 1 think that Aravamudan's argument, in its focus on what he calls

NICK NESBITT

29

And yet, little attention has been paid to Haitian participation in


this global discursive sphere. Not only, I think, because its traces are so
hard for historians to find, but because attention to the role of ideas in
the Revolution has been perceived as implying an inferior position of
passive reception, when in fact we thus miss precisely the degree to
which this revolution constitutes one of the primary events of modern
history. Pick's The Haitian Revolution from Below gives a perfect ex
ample of this. As she mounts her compelling case for a Revolution as
driven by the Haitian masses, and not its nominal leaders, she quotes
from the diary of a young plantation owner named Parham. Returning
from France to his plantation in 1791, he captures an anonymous rebel
slave. Pick quotes from the diary at length, yet she passes over in si
lence what to me is its most astounding aspect. The slave "met death
without fear or complaint. We found in one of his pockets pamphlets
printed in France, filled with commonplaces about the Rights of Man
and the Sacred Revolution." The planter disdains these pamphlets as
mere "commonplaces," while they are not even noticed by Fick. Yet
such random traces are the only testimony we have to the role the con
cept of universal human rights played in the Haitian Revolution, and
to the active, original role Haitians played in the globalization and re
alization of an Enlightenment that started an ocean away in the elite
salons and revolutionary clubs of Paris.46
The determining factor that turned these events into what Eugene
Genovese has identified as "the call for a new . . . more advanced soci
ety"47 was, perhaps, the mere "idea" of a universal right to autonomy,
an idea developed in Saint-Domingue via the slaves' active participa"tropicopolitan . . . metaliteracy," does not go far enough in demonstrating the slaves'
active participation in a transnational dialogue on universal (and not merely "tropical")
human rights. Instead, the author's more limited project is imaginatively to reconstruct
the way the reception of Raynal's Histoire des deux Indes may have "refutfed] and ex
tended] Western Enlightenment assumptions" as it was read in "a context outside its
European purview." Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolilans: Colonialism and Agency,
1688-1804 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).
46. Even Carolyn Fick's more recent article "The French Revolution in Saint
Domingue: A Triumph of a Failure" in A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and
the Greater Caribbean, cd. David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus [Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1997]) distinctly discounts the power of ideas as "relatively be
nign [philosophy]" 52). The article nonetheless complexifies our understanding of the
idea of freedom in revolutionary Saint-Domingue, articulating the vast range of impli
cations that the single term "freedom" bore depending on one's position in that society
54, 57).
47. From Rebellion to Revolution. 82.

30 Yale French Studies

tion in a global discursive community that pre-existed and informed


their own subjectivity, yet one that they utterly transformed.48 By no
means, however, am I claiming this idea to be the sole or even prepon
derant cause of the Revolution. Any inquiry into the causes of the Hai
tian Revolution must necessarily remain a partial and unfinished in
vestigation. Geggus lists a few of the many causes of the Revolution in
Saint-Domingue in Haitian Revolutionary Studies: the "grouping [of
slaves] in large units . . ., the involvement of the ruling class in war or
internal struggles . . ., economic depression . . ., urbanization . . .,
high concentrations of the recently enslaved . . . , maroon activity . , .
[and] emancipationist rumors" (59-62). My point is rather that Geg
gus, like Fick, thus distinctly underplays the admittedly "perplexing
problem" of the influence of ideas on the Revolution because it is so
hard for a historian to quantify.
If Yves Benot begins his outstanding study La Rvolution franaise
et la fin des colonies with precisely the question I wish to ask of the
Haitian Revolution"What can an ideology accomplish?" (7)he is
ultimately unable to provide a substantial answer for Saint-Domingue
itself because his inquiry tends to focus on the production of ideas in
Metropolitan France, while the revolutionary Haitian slaves are im
plicitly understood as mere actors.49 On the one hand, "The Revolu
tion in France is the carrier of the ideals of liberty and equality for the
entire world, thus for the slaves themselves," while the slaves, in this
view, "impose" the 1794 Abolition not through an active reformula
tion of an ethical doctrine, but through the (implicitly preconscious)
"act" of soulvement (19, 8). While the aim of his book is indeed to
move beyond this initial rhetorical abstraction"[wouldn't] revolu
tionary ideals have played any role ? " he nonetheless remains almost
entirely focused on events in France. Indeed, "it would be difficult to
abstract the debate on ideas pursued in those years, through the press,

48. To claim as I am that the slaves of Saint-Domingue were participants in this


transnational public sphere does not of course imply that they were equal participants
in an ideal instance of Habermasian communicative rationality. For their contribution
to the debate to be heard, they had to resort to violence, but they were nonetheless heard
loud and clear, by Sonthonax in 1793 and the French Assembly in 1794. On the distor
tion of communicative rationality in situations of colonial violence, see Caliban's Rea
son, 179.
49. Benot explicitly rejects any denigration of the slave's capacity for reflection as "la
vision des colons" {La Rvolution franaise et la fin des colonies, 139); I wish merely to
point out that his book is little concerned with the surviving traces of this autonomous
thought.

NICK NESBITT

31

brochures, books, which certainly made use of formulations inherited


.from the Enlightenment, but ceaselessly considered them under a new
light" (9). Beyond a few tantalizing glimpses ( 138-40), however, Benot
never demonstrates this process of reflection to have taken place
among the slaves of Saint-Domingue themselves.
The former slaves of Haiti were in fact active participants in a
transnational, though largely oral, discourse on human rights.
In the oral cultures of the Caribbean, [Julius Scott observes,] local rulers
were no more able to control the rapid spread of information than they
were able to control the movements of the ships or the masterless peo
ple with which this information traveled. The books, newspapers, and
letters which arrived with the ships were not the only avenues for the
flow of information and news in Afro-America. While written docu
ments always had a vital place, black cultural traditions that favored
speech and white laws that restricted literacy gave a continuing pri
macy to other channels of communication. ... In cultures where peo
ple depended upon direct human contact for information, news spread
quickly and became part of a shared public discourse.50

Though the oral traces of this cultureunlike those preserved in pub


lications of the Metropolitan revolutionary societiesare lost to us
save for a few random traces, the "public sphere" of the Enlightenment
must nonetheless be understood to have extended far beyond the sa
lons of literate bourgeois European society where Habermas first iden- tified it.51 The public sphere, in Habermas's usage, refers to a specific
social space that appeared in the Enlightenment, one separate both
from the family and private life on the one hand, and from organized
politics on the other. It is a "public of privte people making use of their
reason" 51). In this space, members of society could come together to
discuss issues of mutual interest without the constraints and limita
tions of political life, and were thus free to critique actual existing po
litical power.
What Habermas isolated and bracketed as the so-called "plebian
public sphere," distinct from the "liberal" sphere he chose to investi
gate ( The Public Spheie, xviii), was in Saint-Domingue neither separate
nor fully subordinate to the dominant one. Habermas's analytical bent,
50. Julius S. Scott, The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication
in the Era of the Haitian Revolution (Ph. D. Dissertation, Duke University, 1986), 115.
51. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into
a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991),

32 Yale French Studies


which hopes to isolate and defne a category (the "bourgeois") in purity
from all "plebian" contamination, reproduces on the level of scholarly
analysis, in 1962, the actual socio-historical exclusion of slaves from
the discussion of universal rights in the age of enlightenment. Simply
put, contra Habermas, it is impossible to understand the public dis
cussion of universal human rights in the period of the French Revolu
tion without analyzing how the enslaved "plebian sphere" forced
members of the Metropolitan "bourgeois" republican sphere to reori
ent their debate, and subsequently to actually abolish slavery in 1794.52
This "plebian sphere" explicitly and precisely did not "remain ori
ented toward the intentions of the bourgeois public sphere" as Haber
mas claims occurred for the French "plebeians. " Instead, Haitian slaves
joined the discussion on universal freedom without an invitation,
while drawing conclusions and insights that were directly antithetical
to those of all other constituencies in both France and Saint-Domingue.
They reoriented debate and refused to allow the question of emancipa
tion to be sidelined by the interests of those who dominated them.53
As Seyla Benhabib puts the matter (discussing the bourgeois public
sphere's exclusion of women and their concerns from public debate),
the Haitian slaves demonstrated that
the struggle over what gets included in the public agenda is itself a strug
gle for justice and freedom. . . . All struggles against oppression in the
modern world begin by redefining what had previously been considered
private, nonpublic, and nonpolitical issues as matters of public concern,
as issues of justice, as sites of power that need discursive legitimation.54

Through the slaves' forced incursion into this discussion, an enlarged


public sphere was formed that cut across all levels of society. Their in
cursion into the bourgeois democratic public sphere forced the discus
sion on universal freedom to include other, nonbourgeois publics .5S
52. I have undoubtedly made a similar exclusion in not addressing a possible Vodou
or other "African" contribution to a Haitian universalism, and I look forward to the pos
sible transformation of my argument in this direction.
53. See Black Jacobins, 116, and Csaire's Toussaint Louverture: La Rvolution
franaise el le problme colonial (Paris: Prsence africaine, 1959], 171-90, on the sup
pression of the question of slavery in the revolutionary Assembly.
54. Seyla Benhabib, "Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition,
and Jiirgen Habermas," in Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1992!, 79, 84.
55. Nancy Fraser, in "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique |
of Actually Existing Democracy," in Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT,

NICK NESBITT

33

Habermas s dismissal of the "plebian" public sphere echoes the elit


ism of the Hegel whose very conception of the public sphere he cri
tiques. Hegel's 1820 Philosophy of Right offers an unambiguous and
strikingly original defense of the Haitian Revolution, understood by
him to demonstrate the universal right of slaves to overthrow the sys
tem that enchains them.56 Hegel's text is perhaps the sole exception to
Michel-Rolph Trouillot's observation that "the Haitian Revolution
was unthinkable" until into the twentieth century (Silencing the Past,
82). In his ideal image of the State, however, Hegel defends the need for
a strong bureaucratic class to orient its decisions, simultaneously den
igrating the capacity of the masses, informed by the strong functioning
of a public sphere of discussion, to sustain this function. While he de
fends and celebrates freedom of the press and public discussion [Phi
losophy of Right, 315), public opinion for Hegel can never be any more
than that, mere opinion, "the place o particular and irresponsible opin
ions, all the more irresponsible and particular because they are less var
ied."57 In contrast to Kant's defense of the public sphere as the guaran
tee of a free society, Hegel criticizes this claim as mere ideology (in
anticipation of Marx), and discounts its inherent progressive potential
that Habermas will seek to recover (though only for the "bourgeois"
public): "The public sphere demoted [by Hegel] to a 'means of educa
tion' counted no longer as a principle of enlightenment and as a sphere
in which reason realized itself. The public sphere served only to inte
grate subjective opinions into the objectivity assumed by the spirit in
1992), describes how other, nonbourgeois publics (primarily women for Fraser) forced
their way into the public sphere, or, conversely, created alternative, nonbourgeois
sphereswhat she terms "subaltern counterpublics"that gave them access to dis
cussion of political questions of common interest: "Virtually from the beginning, coun
terpublics contested the exclusionary norms of the bourgeois public, elaborating alter
native styles of political behavior and alternative norms of public speech" (116). Fraser
rehearses the argument that the function of this new public sphere was in fact ideologi
cally repressive, insofar as "this new mode of political domination, like the older one, se
cures the ability of one stratum of society to rule the rest" ( 11 7). The case of public dis
course on universal rights in Saint-Domingue is interesting precisely because it is one
case in which exactly the opposite occurred: the public use of reason by private individ
uals (slaves) led to their emancipation. Unlike Fraser, I am arguing that Saint-Domingue
was an active participant in a single, variegated transnational public sphere, not a mere
segregated "counterpublic."
56. I analyze Hegel's defense of the Haitian Revolution in 57 of the Philosophy of
Right in "TropingToussaint."
57. Eric Weil, Hegel et ltat: Cinq conferences (Paris: Vrin, [1950] 2002), 69. See
G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right , trans. H. B. Nisbet, ed. Allen Wood
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

34 Yale French Studies

the form of the state" (Transformation of the Public Sphere, 120). Sim
ilarly, one might say of Habermas himself that his analytical excision
of the plebian sphere, while initially paying lip service to the possibil
ity that it might have functioned as a realm "of enlightenment," "de
motes" it to function, silently, as the mere subjective corroboration of
the bourgeois public sphere.
If Habermas merely silences and ignores the "plebian" sphere,
Hegel's analysis is infected by his view that the "rabble" [Pbel] in mod
ern society remains subject to the mere "contingencies of public opin
ion, with its ignorance and perverseness, its false information and its
errors of judgment" (Philosophy of Right, 317). Public opinion, for
Hegel, remains forever cut off from participation in universal truth, a
truth accessible in this view only for a scientifically trained bureau
cratic elite. Ineluctably, "the people [ein Volk] is deceived by itself.'1
This is precisely where the Haitian Revolution he analyzes elsewhere
so insightfully (but as a mere imperfect moment in the march to uni
versal freedom) stands as a radical demonstration that, in SaintDomingue, all members of society (insofar as slavery and the planta
tion determined social life in Saint-Domingue in its totality) were
actually and already (singular, antagonistic) participants in the under
standing and realization of a universal truth. Those slaves that en
lightenment thinkers thought unfit to grasp the universal concept of
freedom actually and explicitly demonstrated their understanding
when they acted to make the Dclaration des droits de lhomme live
up to its own universal claims.
When news of the French Assembly's declaration first spread to the
colonies, these putatively inhuman slaves were able immediately to
ask exactly the right question: Who is the subject of these "universal"
human rights? If the answer"We are!"was obvious, if not to their
"owners," to them and to us, they simultaneously perceived the con
tradiction between this insight and their own suffering and juridical
and social exclusion. The news of the French Revolution came to SaintDomingue in part via the huge influx of French sailors constantly
arriving there, bringing news from Europe as interpreted from those
sailors' predominantly exploited, proletarian standpoint. In 1789 alone,
"710 vessels brought 18,460 mariners to the booming French colony"
(Common Wind, 50). This nomadic community constituted a quasi"enslaved" underclass formed by the violence of subaltern life on
board seagoing vessels, one of violent conscription, utter subordina-

NICK NESBITT

35

tion, and strict, often arbitrary discipline.58 Sailors on shore in Port-auPrince outnumbered both the white and free colored citizenry.59 These
sailors, often remaining on the island for weeks and months, interacted
extensively with the petit blanc and urban slave population of SaintDomingue as they set up stalls on the wharves to barter goods they had
brought from overseas (Dsciiption topographique, 315).
Of course, news also arrived in the form of print. One British trav
eler describes the feverish excitement that greeted the unloading of a
mailbag in a West Indian port:
On the packet making the harbour it caused a crowd not unlike what
you may have seen at a sailing or rowing match upon the Thames. Each
wishing to be first, and all eager to learn the reports, the vessel was be
set on every quarter before she could come to anchor, and the whole bay
became an animated scene of crowded ships and moving boats. Many
who could not go to the packet as she entered the harbour, repaired on
shore to be ready, there, to meet the news. The people of town, also,
thronged the beach in anxious multitudes. All was busy expectation.
Impatience scarcely allowed the bags to reach the office. (Cited in
Common Wind, 129)

In addition to such overseas sources of information, newspapers


printed in the French West Indies sprung up. These forums solely de
voted to reprinting news of the Revolution and the debates of the
Assembly thus multiplied the effective distribution of information ex
ponentially.
The Baron de Wimpffen's observations of the colony in 1789, for all
their paternalistic condescension, document that the idea of universal
emancipation circulated among a population of slaves possessing a
highly developed (oral) public sphere of discussion: "One has to hear
with what warmth and what volubility, and at the same tint e with what
precision of ideas and accuracy of judgment, this creature, heavy and
taciturn all day, now squatting before his fire, tells stories, talks, ges
ticulates, argues, passes opinion, approves or condemns both his mas
ter and everyone who surrounds him."60 The rapid expansion of the
58. Scott describes the profound level of identification British sailors shared with the
African slaves they brought to the new world jCommon Wind, 137-42).
59. Moreau de St. Mry, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique, et
historique de la partie franaise delisle Saint-Domingue (Paris: Socit de l'histoire des
colonies franaises, 1958), 1053.
60. Cited in Black Jacobins, 18.

36 Yale French Studies


plantation economy in Saint-Domingue in the years before 1789 led
owners to purchase slavesoften the most rebelliousfrom neigh
boring Anglophone islands (Common Wind, 80); presumably these
slaves, among them Mackandal, Boukman, and Henri Christophe,
brought with them stories of the successful revolution that had over
thrown English rule to establish the United States of America. Julius
Scott describes how a network of itinerant free black and mulatto mer
chants and privileged urban slaves spread news of the French Revolu
tion and its ideals from the urban centers of Saint-Domingue to its plan
tations (Common Wind, 45-46). In the neighborhood of Cap Franais
called Petite Guine because of the large number of free blacks living
there, a Freemason's lodge "known by the name of Friendship" brought
together citizens of all classes in the Masonic promotion of equality
(Description topographique, 427).
For all the paucity of historical documentation of this oral public
sphere, we know, as Yves Benot reminds us, that the mulatto citizen
Dodo-Laplaine was found guilty in 1791 of having "read the Declara
tion of the Rights of Man" to a group of slaves (Rvolution franaise
139). How many other times did similar acts escape the notice of au
thorities? In fact, the Baron de Wimpffen observed in 1790 that the
colonists constantly discussed the Revolution and the Rights of Man
in the presence of their slaves (Black Jacobins, 82). In a speech of De
cember 1791 to the Assembly, "On the troubles in the colonies," a de
fender of the planters' interests named Dumorier describes the gener
alized circulation of antislavery discourse in 1790: "[Writings] advising
the insurection of blacks and the massacre of Whites, circulated in the
workshops, were read there, and in nocturnal assemblies, by Black su
pervisors [Ngres commandeurs], by th e very people who were the lead
ers of the great insurrection."61 In 1792, an Inquiry into the Causes of
the Insurrection of the Negroes in the Island of St. Domingo directly
attributes the first slave revolt to the contradiction between the con-

61.
Dumorier, "Sur les troubles des colonies, Et l'unique moyen d'assurer la tran
quillit, la prosprit et la fidlit des ces dpendances de l'Empire" (Paris: Didot Jeune,
1791), 31. Because of their desire to inflame public opinion against the abolitionists, such
comments certainly need to be read critically, and Benot dismisses such attacks on the
Amis des noirs as "grotesque" (Rvolution franaise et la fin des colonies, 138). Ironi
cally, though, it is often the defenders of slavery and the plantation order who tell us the
most about the circulation of such discourse, since abolitionists sought to blame the
colonists' violence and blindness, rather than the ideas of the Revolution, for the unrest
in Saint-Domingue.

NICK NESBITT

37

tent of the Dclaration and the Assembly's refusal to extend its bene
fits to the slaves in its colonies.62
We know that when Sonthonax declared the abolition of slavery on
August 29,1793, the first article of his decree stipulated that "The Dec
laration of the Rights of Man and Citizen will be printed, published,
and displayed wherever need be."63 Though we will never know how
many Af ro-Haitians read these postings or had someone else read them,
enough testimony remains to be certain that the declaration was dis
cussed, analyzed, critiqued, and internalized by the hundreds of thou
sands of members of this public sphere. No censure of revolutionary
texts even attempted to limit their flow into Saint-Domingue until De
cember of 1789 [Rvolution franaise, 138). The Metropolitan planter's
Club Massiac had only limited success in preventing free blacks and
mulattoes from traveling to Saint-Domingue, and despite futile at
tempts to secure the ports to the flow of printed and oral information,
news of the Revolution fueled wild rumors of the abolition of slavery
that spread throughout the island's nervous plantocracy during the fall
of 1789 jCommon Wind, 66-69). Perhaps, then, the October 31, 1789
issue of the influential paper Les Rvolutions de Paris also made its way
there, where planters, mulattoes, and blacks alike could read: "Philos
ophy calls the blacks to liberty every day; from the first word that it pro
nounced in their favor, their freedom became necessary, ft's a fruit of
the tree, it must by rights fall when it is ripe" (cited in Rvolution
franaise, 128).
Joan Dayan describes a public realm of theater that came to exist
under Toussaint Louverture by the late 1790s, a now-official public
sphere "adapted ... to the social and political transformations of the
colony" [Haiti, History and the Gods, 186). To what degree did this of
ficially sanctioned public sphere further the discussion of human rights
in the years leading up to the final defeat of the French in 1802-1804?
Such fragmentary evidence of the existence and functioning of a pub
lic sphere that cut across all classes of society in Saint-Domingue con
tradicts, at the very height of the Enlightenment, the contention that
the bourgeois public sphere was limited to a literate elite. Haitian
62. "All decrees of the Assembly . . . uniformly purport, that all regulations [on slav
ery] should originate with the Planters themselves. After having declared that all man
kind were born equal, . . . they sanctioned a decree that gave the lie to the first principles
of their constitution. " Inquiry into the Causes of the Insurrection of the Negroes in the
Island of St. Doming (London:J. Johnson, 1792], 2.
63. Toussaint Louverture: La Rvolution franaise et le problme colonial, 213.

38

Yale French Studies

slaves forced their way into this discussion from 1789 on and thor
oughly radicalized the terms of the debate.
As a radical extension of the process of enlightenmentunderstood
as the uncoerced public use of human reasonthe Haitian Revolution
was both a grandiose success and failure. While I have argued that it en
acted a globalization and reconceptualization of the concept of univer
sal human right, its ultimate limitation lay in the historical conditions
of that process. Since Haitian slaves could only participate in this
global discursive sphere by asserting their rights through vi olence, they
ultimately remained trapped with the logic of the very will to power
that the public use of intersubjective, communicative reason in the En
lightenment hoped to overcome. The paradox of the Haitian Revolu
tion is that the slaves of Saint-Domingue could only participate in the
Enlightenment attempt to restrain social antagonism by means of hu
man reason through recourse to absolute violence. While this paradox
came to haunt the Revolution before it was even completed, it should
not blind us to the substantive contribution of the Haitian Revolution
to the progress of human enlightenment and emancipation.
The Haitian invention of decolonization and universal emancipa
tion was a momentous rupture in being, one that obliterated the slave
holding logic of eighteenth-century global capital. It was an effect of
a concrete universal articulated in a highly specific historical and ex
istential situation; it pursued the construction of immanent human
possibilities that remain largely unfulfilled today. The fidelity to the
universal truth of human emancipation unleashed in the events of
1791-1804a promise that remains to be fulfilled amid the violence
andpolitico-economic dysfunction that is contemporary Haitibegan
the difficult construction of an unqualified and universal freedom first
concretized not in Philadelphia in 1776, nor Paris in 1789, but in the
new state of Haiti on January 1, 1804.

CHRISTOPHER L. MILLER

Forget Haiti:
Baron Roger and the New Africa*
The Haitian Revolution was indeed a turning point in history. Like
the Hiroshima bomb, its meaning could be rationalized or repressed
but never really forgotten.
David Brion Davis1

Cultural memory is a topic that has been much discussed in recent


years, butwhat about forgetting? How does one forget? The persistence
of representations of the Haitian Revolution in French literature and in
the nineteenth-century debates over the abolition of slavery, even
many years after the revolution, showed that France was having a hard
time forgetting its former colony and letting it go. Schemes for retak
ing Saint-Domingue (as it was still known) were an "obsession.'"2 Nar
ratives of the "crime, tortures, and devastations" of the revolution
perpetuated a one-sided view of France as purely a victim in the Hai
tian Revolution, and "grim memories" of that revolution "constantly
haunted" the planters of the remaining slave islands.3 Around the At
lantic, images of the upheaval "hovered over the antislavery debates
'This essay is based on a paper delivered at the conference "Les Antilles littraires:
reprsentation des Antilles, de la trai te et de l'esclavage chez les crivains et les voyageurs
du XIXe sicle," Pointe--Pitre, Guadeloupe, March 20-21,1998. This is an abridged ver
sion of an essay that will appear in full in a forthcoming book, tentatively entitled The
French Atlantic Triangle: Literature of the Slave Linde. All translations from the French
are my own unless otherwise indicated.
1. David Brion Davis, "Impact of the French and Haitian Revolutions," in David. P.
Geggus, ed., The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 2001), 3.
2. lean-Pierre Dozon, Frres et sujets: la France et l'Afrique en perspective (Paris:
Flammarion, 2003), 69. See also Yves Bnoi,Lt; dmence coloniale sous Napolon (Paris:
La Dcouverte, 1992!, 117-2S.
3. Lon-Franois Hoffmann, Le ngre romantique: personnage littraire et obses
sion collective (Paris: Payot, 1973!, 135; Melvin D. Kennedy, "The Bissette Affair and the
French Colonial Question," Journal of Negro History 45/1 (January 1960): 2.
YFS 107, The Haiti Issue, ed. Deborah Jenson, 2005 by Yale University.

39

40 Yale French Studies

like a bloodstained ghost."4 The memoir of the Saint-Janvier sisters'


harrowing experiences and escape from the revolution was typical.5
The hurried and traumatized allusions to Haiti in Madame de Duras's
Omika can be seen as a moment of involuntary memory (and as a ges
ture of attempted forgetting), while Hugo's Bug-Jargal reflects the per
sistence of the images of violence and loss. Even two decades later, on
the eve of abolition, the memory of Haiti would be brought back as a
specter: "Let us look back and remember the horrible disasters which
took away from France forever its most beautiful, most flourishing,
most productive colony . . . Saint-Domingue."6 Franoise Vergs ac
curately diagnoses the cause of this mnemopsychosis: "The Haitian
Revolution, its violence, and its excesses allow Europe to justify its role
as ruler of the world."7 Haiti will thus be forgotten only when its sym
bolic use value is exhausted, and, incidentally, after its literal "debt"
to France (150 million francs of "indemnity") is paid.8 In other words,
Haiti is required to pay that ruinous sum in order to end French
schemes of reinvasion and re-enslavement. Haiti buys the right to be
forgotten by France. Sure enough, following the emancipation law,
"the wave of French publications about Haiti came to an end in 1826,"
and, with few exceptions, "interest in the country declined."9 Exactly
4. Davis, "Impact," 5.
5. Histoire de Mesdemoiselles de Saint-Janvier. . . par Mademoiselle de P. . . .
(Paris: J. J. Biaise, 1812).
6. Henri Pain, "De la ncessit de l'mancipation consentie par les colons pour
viter un nouveau Saint-Domingue" ( 1847), quoted in Dune abolition lautre: antholo
gie raisonne de textes consacrs lu seconde abolition de l'esclavage dans les colonies
franaises, ed. Myriam Cottias (Marseille: Agone, 1998), 4, emphasis added. See also "Du
souvenir de Saint-Domingue & de la ncessit de l'esclavage," in the same volume, 27.
7. Franoise Vergs, Abolir l'esclavage, une utopie coloniale: les ambiguts dune
politique humanitaire (Paris: Albin Michel, 2001 ), 116.
8. These were the conditions imposed on Haiti for its "emancipation" (recognition)
by Charles X in 1825; by paying this amount (using loans from France!) the Haitian gov
ernment thought it was erasing any risk of a new French invasion and take-over. (150 mil
lion francs was the equivalent of the budget of France for one year.) The indemnity was
later renegotiated down to 90 million. This creation of what we wonldnow call third-world
debt was well ahead of its time; it crippled the Haitian economy. See Franois Blancpain,
"L'Ordonnance de 1825 et la question de l'indemnit," in Rtablissement de lesclavage
dans les colonies franaises: 1802, ed. Yves Benot andMarcel Dorigny (Paris: Maisonneuve
& Larose, 2003), 221-29, and Gusti Klara Gaillard-Pourchet, "Aspects politiques et com
merciaux de l'indemnisation hatienne," in Rtablissement de lesclavage, 233.
9. David Geggus, "Haiti and the Abolitionists: Opinion, Propaganda, and Interna
tional Politics in Britain and France, 1804-1838," in Abolition and its Aftermath: The
Historical Context, 1790-1916, ed. David Richardson (London: Frank Cass, 1985), 128.
Among the notable exceptions would be Lamartine's play Toussaint-Louverture (1850).

CHRISTOPHER L. MILLER

41

two hundred years later, after the coup d'tat of March 2004 ended the
presidency of Jean-Bertrand Aristidewho had demanded reparations
(or restitution) from France for the nineteenth-century payments Haiti
had made, Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie became the first
French minister to visit Haiti since independence. The new Haitian
leader, Grard Latortue, dropped the "ridiculous" demand for pay
back.10
The novel that I will analyze in this essay, Baron Roger's Keldor,
histoire africaine (1828), suggests, I think, a strategy for forgetting Haiti
and for dominating (a part of) the world (Africa). Everyone knows that
the only way to get a persistent tune out of your head is to hum another
one in its place; Roger's Keldor methodically substitutes Africa for
Haiti in hopes that France can change its colonial tune: end the slave
trade, abolish slavery, forget the Antilles, and turn Africa into a pro
ductive "garden."
Colonial Saint-Domingue would prove hard to forget; it had been
essential to the French Atlantic economy. As the recipient and con
sumer of the largest share of enslaved Africans, Saint-Domingue be
came the most productive colony ever known. The simplicity of the
triangular Atlantic system was just as the Abb Raynal described it in
the title to Book XI of his Histoire des deux Indes: "Europeans go to
Africa to buy farm laborers [cultivateurs] for the West Indies." The fa
mous triangular trade brought European products and cowry shells to
the coast of Africa, where captives were bargained for; those who sur
vived the Middle Passage were sold for a profit and provided labor that
made further profits. In the French islands of the Caribbean, slaves were
not sold for cash, however. Instead, colonial products (denres colo
niales) such as sugar, cotton, indigo, and coffee were loaded into the
slave ship, even though one ship could hold only one third the value of
the humans that had been sold; other ships had to carry the balance
of the profits back to France. The returns from the initial investment
in the slave trade were compounded by the continuing productions of
10.
Joseph Guylcr Delva, "French Defense Minister Visits Troops in Haiti/' Reuters,
April 15, 2004 (info@intemsion2000.com); and Joseph Guyler Delva, "Haiti Drops $22
Billion Claim Upon France," Reuters, April 19, 2004 (info@intervision2000.com). See
also "Dominique de Villepin Port-au-Prince," Le monde, March 27, 2004; Elaine Sciolino, "About-Face in France: Government's Out, Then It's In," The New York Times,
March 31, 2004. On the call for reparations see Dionne Jackson Miller, "Aristide's Call
for Reparations From France Unlikely to Die," Inter Press Service News Agency
(http://ipsnews.org), March 12, 2004.

42 Yale French Studies


slave labor; deaths on the plantations fueled the slave trade, which in
turn, as we shall see, fueled wars in Africa.11 The enslavement of sub
altern Africans raised the living standard of elites in Europe, in Africa,
and in the islands, thereby fueling desire for further investment in the
slave trade and slave labor.11 12 Thus the French Atlantic economy per
petuated itself. But for the Africans stuck in the French islands of the
Caribbean there would be no return to Africa. The triangle was predi
cated on the presence of Africans in these islands as well as their ab
sence in the mtropole, where there were "no slaves."13 Out of sight in
France, slavery was out of mindeven as the slave labor of SaintDomingue in particular, according to the Creole observer from SaintDomingue Moreau de Saint-Mry, "built in the Kingdom cities which
astound by their magnificence."14
The Haitian Revolution of course brought most of that to an end.
The French Atlantic slave system would limp along until the final abo
lition of slavery in 1848, but it would never be the same as it was at its
peak in the late eighteenth century. Hugo described what was at stake
in the Haitian Revolution: "a struggle of giants, with three worlds in
volved, Europe and Africa as the combatants and America as the bat
tlefield." 15 As the revolution evolved into Haitian independence, it be
came clear that the French Atlantic was forever altered. This new
opening of the question of the Atlantic brought to the fore objections
that had been raised about the wisdom of the entire triangular system
almost from its inception. Was it really necessary to transport enslaved
Africans all the way across the ocean?
As early as the seventeenth century, the extravagance of the At
lantic system was questioned. Louis Moreau de Chambonneau wrote
11. On the French slave trade, see: Olivier Ptr-Grenouilleau, La traite des noirs
(Paris: PUF, 1998); Serge Dagct, La traite des noirs: Bastilles ngrires et vellits aboli
tionnistes (Rennes: ditions Ouest-France, 1990), and Robert Harms, The Diligent: A
Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
12. On this point as it pertains to Africa, seeBoubacarBany, Senegambia and the At
lantic Slave Trade, translated from the French by Ayi Kwei Armah (Cambridge: Cam
bridge University Press, 1998), 115-16. Further references to this work will be abbrevi
ated SAST.
13. See Sue Peabody, "There are No Slaves in France": The Political Culture of Race
and Slavery in the Ancien Rgime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
14. Mdric Louis Elie Moreau de Saint-Mry, Fragment sur les moeurs de SaintDomingue (n.p., n.p., n.d.), 14. Microfiche LI113-1 at the Bibliothque Nationale de
France.
15. Hugo, preface to 1832 edition of Bug-Jargal (Fort-de-France: Dsormeaux, 1979),
132.

CHRISTOPHER L. MILLER

43

in 1677 that Senegal could produce tobacco, indigo, sugar canein


other words, the colonial products of the Antilles.16 In 1762, the Abbe
Roubaud put forth the idea that Africans should be left at home to cul
tivate sugar cane there.17 The physiocrats, who were in favor of colo
nialism, argued for the establishment of plantations in Africa based on
free labor, so that "we shall have perfected [Africans'] ways of life and
ours."18 A number of different French voices argued, from the middle
of the eighteenth century forward, in favor of a rehabilitated image of
Africa that often emphasized its fertility and readiness for coloniza
tion.19 Lafayette proposed conquering North Africa and establishing
free-labor plantations that could make the Antilles obsolete.20 The
eighteenth-century abolitionist Louis-Sbastien Mercier wrote in his
novel Lan 2440, which is set in a utopian future: "You shouldn't have
taken so much trouble, expenditure, and cruelty in order to have sugar.
It would have been sufficient not to degrade men whom nature had
placed next to sugar canes, in their home country."21 In 1795, Con
dorcet, another abolitionist, argued in favor of planting sugar in Africa
as the leading edge of a civilizing mission.22 The Socit des Amis des
Noirs et des Colonies ( 1796) argued that the abolition of the slave trade
should facilitate the opening up of Africa to salutary European com
merce.23 Madame de Stal, in her short story Miiza (1795), described
16. William B. Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans: White Response to
Blacks, 1530-1880 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980]: 158. An overview of
the linkage between abolitionism and the colonization of Africa is found in Cohen's
book, 164-66.
17. AbbRoubaud, Histoire gnrale del'Asie, cielAfrique, et delAmrique, quoted
in Cohen, The French Encounter, 164.
18. Du Pont de Nemours, writing in Les Ephmrides du citoyen (1771), quoted in
Cohen, The French Encounter. 164.
19. Michle Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au sicle des Lumires (Paris: Flam
marion, 1977), 46-49.
20. Franois Manchuelle, "Le rle des Antillais dans l'apparition du nationalisme
culturel en Afrique noire francophone," Cahiers d'tudes africaines 32/3 (1992): 377.
21. Louis-Sbastien Mercier, LAn 2440: rve s'il en fut jamais (Paris: France Adel,
1977 [177]), 2.
22. Cohen, The French Encounter, 165.
23. This was the second abolitionist "Socit des Amis des Noirs." It argued that, "In
their native lands, the Africans are unaware of all the advantage they can draw from their
soil and their climate for their own use and that of others." Quoted in Alyssa Goldstein
Sepinwall, Regenerating the World: The Abb Grgoire, the French Revolution, and the
Making of Modern Universalism. forthcoming from the University of California Press.
I am grateful to Professor Sepinwall for her assistance. See also Marcel Dorigny, "La So
cit des Amis des Noirs et les projets de colonisation en Afrique," Annales historiques
de la Rvolution franaise 3/4 (1993): 421-29.

44 Yale French Studies

plantations in Senegal that would equal those of Saint-Domingue, us


ing free and "happy" labor.24 According to these observers, colonies in
Africa, without slavery, were the answer. Implicit in all these observa
tions was the idea that Europe should change its approach to the At
lantic economy: instead of bringing the workers (African slaves) to the
work (in the Americas), it should bring the work (plantations) to the
workers (in Africa). This should be done in a spirit of utopian, egalitar
ian agrarianism. The radical alteration of the triangular Atlantic econ
omy is implicit in this wish expressed in Mirza: "May free commerce
be established between the two parts of the world"between Europe
and Africa bilaterally, America as the third term havingbeen forgotten.
[Mirza, 162; emphasis added).
So when Roger proposed, enacted, and "novelized" (in Keldor) an
abolitionist scheme for growing colonial products in Africa, he was far
from original; he was giving new substance to an old idea and a "com
mon abolitionist argument."25 It is the different forms that Roger gave
to this premiseon the ground and on paperthat give him a unique
place in history and in literary history.
ROGER, AFRICANISTE
Jacques-Franois Roger is an intriguing figure. Born in 1787, the son of
a lawyer, he studied law himself, but, with an impulse that was very
rare in his times, he sought out "extraordinary things" by requesting a
position in the colonies.26 Through his good connections, he was made
the first civilian governor of Senegal in 1821. Roger was "terribly am
bitious" and "eager for accolades," with a taste for intrigue, according
to the historian Georges Flardy; Roger succeeded in getting himself the
title of baron in 1824 (Hardy, 124). He ended his term as governor in
.1826 and was elected deputy from the dpartement of the Loiret. This
"ambitious parvenu of the Restoration" leveraged himself socially and

24. Madame de Stal, "Mirza ou lettre d'un voyageur," in Oeuvres de jeunesse (Paris:
Desjonqures, 1997), 162.
25. Vincent Carretta, Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the En
glish-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century (Lexington: The University Press of
Kentucky, 1996), 296, n. 62. Olaudah Equiano himself supported the opening of Africa to
European, post-slave-trade commerce; in this narrative he looks back on his homeland
with "an evaluating, entrepreneurial eye" (Geraldine Murphy, "Olaudah Equiano, Acci
dental Tourist," Eighteenth-Century Studies 27/4 (Summer 1994]: 557).
26. Georges Hardy, La mise en valeur du Sngal, 1817-1854 (Paris: Payot, 1921),
117.

CHRISTOPHER L. MILLER

45

Africa.27

politically at home through his work in


But his legacy is not
mere vanity; his engagement with Africa was genuine and effective. In
retrospect he appears as the prototype of a new species of French ad
ministrator in Africa with a brilliant future, the proto-anthropologist.
He was succeeded by a whole tradition, associated with names like
Faidherbe in the late nineteenth century, and Maurice Delafosse, M. f.
Clozel, and Georges Hardy in the twentieth.28 What characterizes this
particular phenotype of administrator is "interest" in Africaa term
that Roger uses often. The notion of intrt is in fact full of ambigu
ity-connoting both engagement with the world and exploitation of
itand will require examination here.
Roger's appointment as governor was a fact of the Bourbon Restora
tion in France and of Louis XVIII in particular. Turning back the hands
of time was the order of the day. But the restoration was an unsettled
period as far as the issues of slavery, the slave trade, and colonialism
were concerned. Seeking retrogression, the Restoration saw progress
toward abolition in spite of royal diffidence and planters' objections.
British pressure, brought home by the (Protestant, elite) Socit de la
Morale Chrtienne, was working to suppress the French slave trade.
And yet the treaties that put an end to the Napoleonic wars, by giving
back France's colonies around the Atlantic (Gore and Saint Louis in
Senegal and Martinique and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean), recreated
the conditions of possibility of the triangular trade, itself predicated on
the buying, transporting, and selling of enslaved Africans. France was
thus drawn in two opposite directions: forward toward abolition and
backward toward the Atlantic slave trade that had been so active in the
eighteenth century. While he banned it on paper, Louis XVIII did little
to suppress the slave trade, which did not fail to resuscitate itself and
flourish in illegality.29 During the period when Roger, an abolitionist,
was governor of Senegal, approximately 680 captives were exported
27. G. Wesley Johnson, Naissance du Sngal contemporain (Paris: Karthala, 1991),
67. On Roger see also Jean-Pierre Biondi, Saint-Louis du Sngal: mmoires d'un mtis
sage (Paris: Denol, 1987), 82-90.
28. On Faidherbe, see Jean-Loup Amselle, Vers un multiculturalisme franais: l'em
pire de la coutume (Paris: Aubier, 1996), 117-50. On Delafosse and Clozel, see Schwarz,
Colonialistes, 9-11. Dozon makes asimilar argument about Roger as the person who in
augurates the "administrateur-ethnologue," Frres et sujets, 73.
29. Paule Brasseur cites the sequence of laws passed to enforce the 1815 ban on the
slave trade, in 1817 and 1818; but the application of those laws was less than effective;
see Brasseur "Le Sngal et sa lente intgration au mouvement abolitionniste," in Bnot
and Dorigny, eds., Rtablissement de lesclavage, 377.

46

Yale French Studies

from Senegal each yearthus upwards of 3400 during Roger's term,


perhaps more.30 This is not a huge number within the larger scheme of
the Atlantic slave trade, but it is certainly significant, especially for
those enslaved.
One thing, however, could not be restored: Saint-Domingue.
Thoughts of taking Haiti back and re-enslaving its population were
ended in 1825 by the ''emancipation" law. Haitian independence was
thereby officially recognized by the French state (while Roger was still
governor of Senegal). In order to better understand Roger's preoccupa
tions of 1828, it is important to see how proximate these events and
concerns were. The recognition of Haiti was hotly contested in 1825;
it provoked furor among French conservatives. At the beginning of the
Restoration in 1814, colonists had wondered how much could be re
storedcould the old Saint-Domingue not be brought back? Peace in
Europe provoked thoughts of reconquering what had been the richest
island in the world, the jewel of the French Atlantic economy. The
economist Sismondi, among others, denounced that idea as folly in
1814; it was time to look forward to other models.31 But if the central
element, Saint-Domingue, could not be restored, what model of At
lantic economy could France contemplate? What could the Atlantic be
without Saint-Domingue? Roger had an answer, the answer foreshad
owed by all those who had questioned the Atlantic triangle almost from
its beginnings: forget Saint-Domingue, forget Haiti; turn to Africa.
Roger arrived in Senegal with enormous curiosity about the place
and interest in its inhabitants. What made him different from his mis
sionary, slave-trading, and military predecessors was his new type of
respect for and interest in the people he encountered. As a European,
he was far ahead of his time in allowing for the possibility of culture
and history among Africans. In Senegal, Roger set about asking ques
tions, "taking every opportunity to inform himself" (Hardy, 123). The
results of his inquiries were two remarkable books published in 1828
and a linguistic-philosophical study that appeared a year later. Fables
sngalaises reflects one of the first attempts to "harvest" African oral

30. The figure 680 is Philip Curtin's, an average covering the years 1821 to 1830; cited
in Brasseur, "Le Sngal," 385, n47. Boubacar Barry gives a figure of "at least. . . 1,000a
year between 1814 and 1831 (S.AST, 139). Barry has vehemently contested Curtin's over
all statistics on the slave trade.
31. See Marcel Dorigny, "Sismondi et les colonies: un maillon entre Lumires et
thoriciens du XiXe sicle? " in Bnot and Dorigny, eds., Rtablissement de l'esclavage,
475.

CHRISTOPHER L. MILLER

47

French.32

arts, poems that Roger transcribed and translated into


In spite
of the violence done to African poetry by Roger's florid versifications,
and in spite of some offensive opinions he offers here and there, this
work occupies an important place in the history of African literature, as
a forerunner of many such encounters between the oral and the written.
The work that concerns me here is the other literary product of
Roger's experience in Senegal, the novel entitled Keldor, histoire
africaine. Using an African mouthpiece in ways that I will examine,
Roger created this text as a treatise garbed in narrative form, comple
mented by voluminous footnotes. The plan that emerges without sub
tlety maps out a new form of French colonialism in Africa, based on an
agricultural economy using indentured laborers. It quickly becomes
apparent that Keldor is a brochure advertising something that Roger
actually established in Senegal: a "garden" where the "colonial prod
ucts" of the islandssugar, cotton, indigo, coffeecould be grown by
"free" (sic) laborers. Keldor has been dismissed by some historians as
mere expansionist propaganda, and it is that.33 But in its generic com
plexities and its narrative strategies, Keldor is more than that: it is a
unique marker of the transition from the old colonialism of islands and
slaves to a new colonialism of the African interior.
It is important to remember that Roger was not merely an observer
in Senegal; he was a governor who created facts on the ground. Fie
sought to realize the abolitionists' Africa. Roger abhorred the slave
trade and slavery, and, as we will see, he represented Haiti as a dystopia.
In Keldor he denounced slavery as "the institution that is the most
opposed to the laws of nature and reason."34 As governor, in 1822 he
established a colony called Richard-Toll (tol meaning garden in
Wolof ), the showpiece of Roger's new model, based on "des grandes cul
tures! des grandes cultures!"the new source of "honor and profit" in
32. Baron Jacques-Franois Roger, Fa bles sngalaises, recueillies delOulofet mises
en vers fianais . . . {Paris: Nepveu, 1828). See also his Recherches linguistiques sur la
langue ouolofe suivi dun vocabulaire abrg franais-ouolof (Paris: Librairie Orientale
Dondey-Dupr, 1829).
33. See Cohen, The French Encounter, 279. Lon Fanoudh-Siefer offers a balanced as
sessment of Keldor in Le mythe du ngre et de l'Afrique noire dans la littrature
franaise [de 1800 la 2e Guerre mondiale) (Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1968), 29-33. See also
Kusum Aggarwal, "Les perspectives africanistes dans l'oeuvre du baron Roger," in Lit
tratures et colonies, ed. Jean-Franois Durand and Jean Svry (Paris: Kailash Editions,
2003), 183-208.
34. Roger, Keldor, histoire africaine (Paris: A. Nepveu, 182,8), 225. Henceforth ab
breviated K.

48 Yale French Studies


Africa.35 In fact his actions in Africa were part of a larger plan initiated
from the moment France regained Senegal [on paper in 1814 and on the
ground in 1817) under Governor Schmaltz, and put in place in 1819:
there would be a "series of plantation schemes in an effort to save the
colony of Senegal, now reduced to living without its principal business,
slave trading."36
As an abolitionist with a flair for public relations, Roger was at pains
to break with the appearance and the vocabulary of the slave societies
of the West Indies. Thus there would be no "plantations" in his Sene
gal, only "gardens"; no one was to use the words "slave" or "captive"
in reference to his engags temps, indentured laborers.37 How much
difference the politically correct vocabulary made to those workers is
questionable. Roger recruited his workers from four principal sources:
"men of color" deported from Martinique; captives redeemed from the
slave trade in Africa and subsequently indentured for fourteen years;
former slaves from Saint Louis du Sngal; and free laborers "on loan."
The system of indenture soon resulted in a new trade not unlike the
slave trade; engags were bought and sold.38 He supported only man
ual education for the Senegalese.39 Roger said that his policy resulted
from equal portions of practicality and "humanity," and he issued rosy
reports on the complete success of his "fine establishment."40 His ex
periments in agriculture were extensive. Convinced of his own success,
Roger resigned, citing health reasons, in 1826. He continued to insist
that Richard-Toll had "succeeded as much as could have been hoped,"
and that it was "the realization on a small scale of a great idea."41 But
a government commission found otherwise: that Senegal "has only
35. Roger, quoted in Hardy, La mise en valeur, 155. The first meaning of the French
word culture listed in the Petit Robert is "the act of cultivating the earth," and by ex
tension (in the plural) "cultivated lands."
36. SAST, 137. See the comprehensive treatment of this subject in Boubacar Barry, Le
Royaume du Waalo: le Sngal avant la conqute (Paris: Maspero, 1972), 237-64. Ac
cording to Dozon, the whole plan was originally conceived by Baron Portal, director and
then minister of the colonies (Frres et sujets, 70-71).
37. Hardy, 146, 233; Barry, Le Royaume du Waalo, 253-55. See also Franois Zuccarelli, "Le rgime des engags temps au Sngal (1817-1848)," Cahiers dtudes
africaines 2/3 (1962): 420-61.
38. Barry, Le Royaume du Waalo, 254; Martin Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule in
French West Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 24.
39. Johnson, Naissance du Sngal contemporain, 175.
40. Quoted in Hardy, 150,232.
41. Roger, quoted in Abb David Boilat, Esquisses sngalaises (Paris: Karthala, 1984
[1853]), 340,341.

CHRISTOPHER L. MILLER

49

the appearance of fertility"; that Richard-Toll was something of a


Potemkin village; that Roger's whole experiment was a "novel that pro
moted the elevation of Baron Roger and which cost France two or three
million."42 Richard-Toll was abandoned in 1829at the end of the
Restorationand Roger's dream died.43 The failure of this scheme,
writes Boubacar Barry, "revealed the depth of the depression into which
French commerce had slumped in its search for new ways of adjusting
to the abolition of the slave trade" [SAST, 141). It would be some time
before French colonialism found the crop on which it would stake its
claim in Senegal: peanuts.
Looking back, the question about Roger's scheme revolves around
issues of labor. To what extent did he attempt genuinely to break with
the New World plantation regime; to what extent did he merely move
it across the Atlantic, cloaked in euphemismsin an attempt to cre
ate "a second Antille" (if not a "second France")?44 His recourse to in
dentured laborthat is, "an indirect way of prolonging slaving prac
tices," in a context where labor had been depleted by three centuries of
the slave trade45invites skepticism. It seems a fitting symbol of the
gradual and partial abolitionism that was typical of the period. Aboli
tion of the slave tradeand not of slavery itself, not yet'was the con
cern of abolitionists in France during the Restoration. Slavery itself
was, as the Duc de Broglie put it in a speech in 1822, " an evil from which
we shall have to avert our eyes, with a moan, for many more years."46
(It was only in 1829 that the main abolitionist society in France, the So
cit de Morale Chrtienne, added the abolition of slavery itself to its
agenda, which had included abolition of the slave trade since 1822.47)
42. Quoted in Hardy, 236, emphasis added; see also 246, where one of Roger's suc
cessors as governor, Brou, is quoted describing the experiment as a false "utopie" and as
"un spirituel et sduisant roman."
43. See Barry, SAST, 138-39.
44. "Une seconde Antille" is from Barry, Le Royaume du Waalo, 245. The pirrase
"une seconde France" is Hardy's paraphrase of Roger's idea, La mise en valeur, 127.
45. Barry, SAST, 139; see also Barry, Waalo, 255.
46. DucdeBroglie, Discoursprononcpar Mie Duc de Broglie la Chambre des Pairs
le 28 mars 1822 sur la traite des ngres (Paris: Socit del Morale Chrtienne, 1822], 7.
On abolitionism in the Restoration, see Laurence C. Jennings, French Anti-Slavery: The
Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in France, 1802-1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000]; Serge Daget, "L'abolition de la traite des noirs en France de 1814
1831," Cahiers d'tudes africaines 41/1 (1971): 14-58; and Yvan Debbasch, "Posie et
traite: l'opinion franaise sur le commerce ngrier au dbut du XIXe sicle," Revue
franaise dhistoire dOutre-Mer 48 (1961): 311-52.
47. Nelly Schmidt, Abolitionnistes de l'esclavage et rformateurs des colonies,

50 Yale French Studies


Abolition in the 1820's was a primarily a maritime issue: it was neces
sary to change the Atlantic, weaning it of the slave trade, and that is
what Roger thought he was doing. Even if he did this by perpetuating
exploitative labor, bringing new forms of servitude to Africa, with re
course to slavery in everything but the name (and we have to suspect
that that was the case), Roger would no doubt have argued that his
scheme nonetheless represented a complete break with the Atlantic
slave trade and therefore constituted real progress.
Those Martinican workers brought to Senegal represent an impor
tant anomaly, one of the rare exceptions to the one-way nature of the
French Atlantic triangle, for these men "returned" to Africa. Captives
enslaved in the French West Indies had virtually no chance of seeing
Africa again; Africa was cut off in everything but the imagination.
Those 200 free "men of color" were deported from Martinique for po
litical reasons; they constituted in fact "the greater part of the free black
elite of the island."48 Their crime consisted of publishing demands not
only for abolition but also for political enfranchisement. Their leader
was Cyril-Auguste Bissette, an intriguing, proto-postcolonial figure
and an appropriate guardian angel for this exceptional transmigra
tion.49
KELDOR BETWEEN HISTORY AND FICTION
The investigating commission's characterization of Roger's agricul
tural experiment as a "novel" is intriguing. His decision to promote his
ideas for colonization in a novel, Keldor, throws that novel into a
strange relation to history, suspended between fact and fiction.
Two other dimensions of the novel's discourse are perhaps more
complex: its narrative structure, which anticipates certain aspects of
the colonial and Francophone literatures of the twentieth century,- and
what we would now call its anthropological relativism, expressed as
both a concern for accuracy and a posture of advocacy with regard to

1820-1851: analyse et documents Paris: Karthala, 2000), 37; see Jennings, French AntiSlavery, 13.
48. Manchuelle, "Le rle des Antillais," 379. Melvin Kennedy says that the depor
tees were a group of 260 merchants "The Bissette Affair," 51.
49. Dozon rightly emphasizes the "unprecedented" nature of this "return" (Frres et
sujets, 76). On Bissette, see Chris Bongie, Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of
Post!Colonial Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 19981, 262-87.

CHRISTOPHER L. MILLER

51

African culture. Jomard, an enthusiastic reviewer for the journal of the '
Socit de Gographie saw in Roger's novel not only a fine exemplifica
tion of what the new science of geography could be, that is, something
with "newer and more accurate colors" than the old "arid geography of
nomenclature." He also was pleased that Roger dared to write against
the grain of dominant thought by providing "facts" that could help "re
spond to the detractors of the blacks. " On this point the reviewer is both
perspicacious and prescient: he argues that the "philosophical minds"
of the day are increasingly "inclined to deduce from the differences
among races not only an inferiority of intelligence and of the faculties,
but also a sort of social incapability." It is true that scientific racism, as
wc would call it, was on the increase; the rise of physical anthropology
and the perception of "inequality" among "races" seemed to go hand in
hand.50 Roger dissented. To argue against slavery and the slave trade in
1828 was to be part of a certain small, elite movement; but to go further
and militate against all prejudice based on skin color, in 1828, was a
far lonelier position, with very few allies (possibly including Claire de
Duras). It is certainly a far cry from Mrime's Tamango, which history
has made the most canonical text on the French slave trade.
Jomard showed little curiosity, however, about the literary form
that Roger had taken the trouble to concoct: "for this work is novelistic in form only." And although Jomard said he had discussed the work
with Roger directly, he apparently failed to ask one of the most perti
nent questions: Did this Keldor person really exist?51 Roger himself
does nothing to bolster the reader's belief in Keldor's existence: no
mention of how Roger met him, nothing.
Keldor is a "triangular" text, representing and reflecting on all
three sides of the French Atlantic system that the slave trade made pos
sible, and calling for a reform if not an abandonment of the triangle it
self. Roger wants to represent the West Indies and their plantations as
corrupted by slavery and damned; and his new Africawith its "gar
dens" and its "Negro workers flocking willingly from all the sur
rounding countries" (K 201)as the alternative. This willingness of
Africans to participate is of course key to Roger's plan; without it, he is
50. See Cohen's chapter on "Scientific Racism" in The French Encounter, 210-62.
51. [Edme-Franois] Jomard, "Analyse de l'ouvrage intitul Keldor, histoire afri
caine, par M. le baron Roger," Bulletin de la socit de gographie 58 (February, 1828):
62,63,64.

52 Yale French Studies

little better than a slave-driver. So it is not surprising to see him use a


literary device that is closely analogous to his labor practices in Sene
gal: he builds his entire novel on the (apparently fictive) collaboration
of one African subject: his "indentured" narrator, Keldor.
The novel is presented, following convention, as through the voice
of an authentic participantas testimony. In his introduction, Roger
writes:
I decided to write this story, which is not without interest, in French. I
could have and perhaps should have assumed the role of historian, thus
not staging Keldor so directly as the narrator of his adventures. But his
story [rcit] had made such a vivid impression on me that I feared sac
rificing, through an intermediary, something of its color, its force, and
its truth. It seemed preferable to confine my own role to that of a sort
of translator. [K, xv]
The title page thus presents Keldor as a narrative that has been
"recorded" or "taken down" (recueilli), reflecting a transformation
from oral to written in a direct, face-to-face encounter. Roger's gesture
echoes eighteenth-century concerns with bolstering the authenticity
and verisimilitude of the novel by presenting it as actual "found" dis
course. But readers of twentieth-century African literature will also
recognize this tactic: the writer claims to erase himself in the presence
of an oral source such as a griot. In the introduction to Matre de la pa
role, Camara Laye bills himself as "the modest transcriber and trans
lator" of the griot Babou Cond; in Soundjata ou lpope mandingue,
Djibril Tamsir Niane repeats the formula coined by Baron Roger: "1 am
only a translator."52 The extensions of this type of encounter in an
thropology are well known: the authority of the ethnography depends
on the performance of the speaking subject, the native informant. The
main text of Keldor is supposed to represent the unmediatedmerely
transcribed and translatedvoice of this African subject. A few critics
who have written about Keldor have not hesitated to denounce the
set-up as a sham and Keldor as visibly a literary figment of Roger's
imagination.53 Yet the historian David Robinson cites Keldor as one
52. Camara Laye, Le matre de la parole: kouma laflkouma (Paris: Plon, 1976], 29;
Djibril Tamsir Niane, Soundjata ou lpope mandingue (Paris: Prsence Africaine,
1960], 7.
53. See Hoffmann, Le ngre romantique, 182, andFanoudh-Siefer, Le mythe du n
gre et lAfrique noire dans la littrature franaise (de 1800 la 2e guerre mondiale),

30.

CHRISTOPHER L. MILLER

53

of a handful of "important accounts" of the Cayor campaign led by the


Almamy Abdul Kader Kane; he treats the text as if it were an authen
tic, transcribed oral history. Boubacar Barry, of the Cheikh Anta Diop
University of Dakar, also cites Keldor as an accurate historical ac
count.54 In the absence of any documentary evidence, we cannot know
if Roger's interlocutor "Keldor" ever existed, nor exactly how this nar
rative came to be.55 But there does not appear to be anything in the story
of Keldor's life that could not have happened.
It is important to take stock of Roger's gesture in a wider context.
By making an African "speak" this narrative of enslavement, of the
Middle Passage, of slavery and revolt in the West Indies, and of return
to Africa, Roger created a simulacrum of the exact thing that does not
exist in the French Atlantic: a slave narrative written in French.56 His
Keldor is a sort of French Atlantic Equiano. Questions that have been
raised recently about the actual origins of Olaudah Equiano can only
serve to enfold Keldoi within the same analytical field as Equiano's
famous Nanative, with similar questions of authenticity.57
From the beginning of his introduction, Roger appeals to the "cu
riosity" of the European reader, raising the curtain on what he hopes
will be a new area of "interest":
Senegal is little known, and the few notions that we have about this
country are inaccurate or false. Senegal has, however, to the highest de
gree, everything that can prove to be of interest or advantageous [tout
ce qui peut intresser]. Nothing there looks like anything in our Eu
rope. . . . Everything there makes an impression of deep originality on
the observer, who moves from surprise to surprise. [K, v-vi)
Africa is "a vast domain open to the curiosity of all, to the meditations
of the philosopher" (K, xiv). Declaring Africa to be both open (or blank)
and full of interesting things, Roger invites an influx of interests. His
appeal is thus framed as a bringing of French attention to Africa, with
54. Robinson cites the novel as "Baron J. Roger, ed. and col., Keldor, histoire
africaine (Paris, 1829)," in "The Islamic Revolution," 206, n. 53. See Barry, Le Royaume
du Waalo, 384, and SAST, 104.
55. The name Oledor exists in Senegal.
56. A section of my forthcoming book on the French Atlantic triangle will address
the question of why there is no "Francophone Equiano." See Lydie Moudileno, "Retrou
ver la parole perdue: Edouard Glissant et le rcit d'esclave reconstitu," The Romanic
Review90/1 (1999): 83-91.
57. See Vincent Carretta, "Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassal New Light on an
Eighteenth- Century Question of Identity, " Slavery and Abolition 20/3 (December 1999 );
96-105.

54 Yah French Studies


the potential for extracting, as we will see, products from his "garden."
The economy of "interest" is thus from the beginning something that
moves from France to Africa, but with the potential to extract a profit.
To be interested is to bring your attention to bear on something outside
yourself,- but to be interested [intress] is also "to seek above all one's
personal advantage ... [to be] greedy" [Petit Robert). Roger combines
the two.
Keldor has a composite structure. Roger's eleven-page introduc
tion is followed by the main narrative200 pages divided into eight
"books"much of it in the first person from Keldor's point of view.
But the main text is riddled with notes, which take up 66 pages at the
end of the book; some of the endnotes themselves have footnotes. In
the endnotes, a rival narrator, the Baron himself, expatiates, doubling
Keldor's testimony with informative annotations, definitions, obser
vations, and emphatic verifications. But the discursive authority of the
notes surpasses that of the main text. It is as if there were a one-way
mirror between the two narrators: Roger "hears" and comments on
Keldor's narration, but Keldor of course has no awareness of Roger.
By defining couscous, describing what a baobab looks like, character
izing the Serer people, and explaining the horrors of the Middle Passage,
Roger exercises knowledge that encompasses and transcends Keldor's
first-person account. All the while, Roger insists on two things: the ve
racity of Keldor's story and the relativism with which Roger wants it
to be understood. Thus "everything [here] is of a rigorous truthfulness"
(K, 217, n. 18) and must be interpreted by comparison to Europe, for
Africa belongs within the same human sphere of values:
This narrative [of a war in Africa] is of the most exact truthfulness. The
facts are historical... . They would be admired if they were dressed in
Greek or Latin names. But, for a long time to come, many people will
have trouble getting used to seeing black figures create history. But we
will have to come around to it. (K, 232, n. 1 )
Roger is nearly prophetic in foretelling the difficulties that the idea
of African history would face in the West more than a century later. De
scribing the practice of war in Africa, he says: "Things take place just
as they would in Europe in similar circumstances. These Negroes are
almost as turbulent, as mad, and sometimes as cruel as if they had white
faces" [K, 206, n. 2). But Roger's defense and illustration of African
cultures and peoples is made in the name of a mission civilisatrice
that does not yet bear the name: Africa is worthyof being colonized.

CHRISTOPHER L MILLER

55

As early as his fifth note, Roger describes the kind of project he is pro
moting:
At Saint-Louis-du-Sngal... colonization has been experimented:
more than forty plantations [sic] have been started; useful crops that are
fit for the climate have been introduced. This territory already has all
the earmarks of a great outpost [tablissement], with great success,
which interests not only France, but also the sciences and all of hu
manity. Now it is up to enlightened public opinion, to capital, and to
the powerful industry of Europe to do the rest. Then culture, commerce,
and civilization will soon conquer the interior of Africa. (K, 210, n. 5,
emphasis added)
Reading the novel as it presents itself, then, this footnote gives the so
lution to a problem that has not yet been fully posed to the reader: the
problem of slavery and the slave trade. Roger's note lays down the tele
ology of the narrative that follows, and Keldor's story has only to con
firm that truth.
KELDOR AND ATLANTIC REVOLUTIONS
Keldor opens in the wake of an African war that took place in 1796 and
thus in the wider Atlantic context, at the time of both the French and
the Haitian revolutions. But West Africa, the Senegambia in particular,
was having its own revolution: a Muslim theocratic revolution, which
is the setting for the first parts of this novel. In both Haiti and West
Africa, these revolutions were of course related to the slave trade. Al
though certainly a minority in comparison to Africans from Kongo or
Dahomey, Africans from the Senegambia who, like Keldor, were vet
erans of the Muslim Revolution in West Africa could certainly have
been among the slaves who rose up and fought in the Haitian Revolu
tion.58 And both of these black revolutions were simultaneous with
and connected to the French Revolution, with its complex and unre
solved attitudes toward colonialism.
As the narrative of Keldor opens, the Almamy (from the word
58.
According to John Thornton, "60 to 70 percent of the adult slaves listed on in
ventories [in Saint-Domingue] in the late 1780's and 1790's were Africa born" and came
"overwhelmingly" from the Lower Guinea coast region and the Angola coast area, in
cluding the Kongo kingdom. Thornton argues that African veterans of wars in Africa
"may prove to be the key that unlocks the mystery of the success" of the Haitian Revo
lution. Thornton, "African Soldiers in the Haitian Revolution," The Journal of Carib
bean History 25/1 and 2 (1991|: 59, 74; on the Senegalese in Haiti, see 72.

56

Yale French Studies

"imam") of the Fouta-Toro; a zealous Muslim who sought to impose


the Sharia in all his domains, is about to lead a holy war against the
Darnel of Cayor, whom he found to be deficient in religion. One of the
Darnel's crimes was selling Muslims to Christians as slaves (K, 6). Thus
the slave trade and the Atlantic are, realistically, implicated in a war in
the interior of Africa in this period. In Roger's version of events, the Is
lamic militancy of the Fouta-Toro is associated with resistance to the
Atlantic slave trade, while the older African belief system of the Darnel
of Cayor (who, surrounded by griots, wears gris-gris and drinks brandy)
is depicted as complicit with the trade (see K, 8-12).
Juxtaposing Roger's narrative to recent historians' versions of the
same events produces little friction. This is not surprising, since, as we
saw earlier, at least two of these historians use Keldor as a non-fictional source. Boubacar Barry praises Keldor as an "excellent account
[tmoignage\ of the revolution . . . [which] shows well the religious fer
vor of the Futa. . . ,"59 Barry's chapter on "Muslim Revolutions in the
Eighteenth Century" in Senegambia and the Atlantic. Slave Trade pro
vides a fuller sense of the context that Roger evokes: the theocratic Almamy Abdul Kader Kane was part of the wider revolution that was
sweeping through this region, in opposition to the secular ceddo
regimes, represented by the Darnel, Amari Ndeela, of Cayor. The Mus
lim revolution, we should note, was in part a result of Atlantic events:
"a reaction against the generalized violence and chaos caused by the
slave trade" [SAST, 96).60 Born out of resistance to the slave trade, this
revolution nonetheless sometimes produced states which, "once con
solidated, . . . made slave trading their exclusive business . . [SAST,
98, 99). The reader of Keldor could be forgiven for getting the impres
sion that the war represented in its pages pitted a simply pro-slave-trade
state (the Darnel's Cayor) against a simply anti-slave-trade group (the
Almamy's Fouta-Toro). In fact the situation was less clearly demar
cated; the Almamy had no objection to the enslavement of non-Mus59. Barry, Le Royaume du Waalo, 384. See also Barry, SAST, 104. The precise context
of the war described in Keldor is analyzed by Barry in SAST, 102-106. See also David
Wallace Robinson, "Abdul Bokar Kan and the History of Futa-Toro, 1853-1891," PhD
dissertation, Columbia University (1971), 37-38 and Robinson, "The Islamic Revolu
tion in Futa Toro," International Journal of African Historical Studies 8/2 (1975): 185221.

60. See Mamadou Diouf, Histoire du Sngal: le modle islamo-wolof et ses p


riphries (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2001), 101, and Ly Djibril, "The Bases of Hu
manitarian Thought in the Pulaar Society of Mauritania and Senegal, " The International
Review of the Red Cross 325 (December 31, 1998): 643-53.

CHRISTOPHER L. MILLER

57

lims.61

Roger papers that over, so that admiration for Africans might


be increased, and so that his story will be more closely aligned with Eu
ropean ideas of abolitionism.
When Keldor is introduced as narrator at the beginning of book
two, he tells us that he was "no more than fourteen" years old at that
time (thus born around 1782), living in a village of the Fouta-Toro [K,
22). Unlike his fellow African protagonists of the French Restoration
Hugo's Bug-Jargal, Mrime's Tamango, Keldor is not a prince or a
king but a commoner: son of a "marabout who was zealous but uned
ucated" [K, 22). His father has aspirations of upward mobility for the
son, hoping he will become "one of the leaders of the land," to whom
"consideration, respect, influence, power, [and] benefits of all kinds"
will flow [K, 23, 22). (In this, Keldor is clearly an alter ego of JacquesFranois Roger, the son of a lawyer who rises to be a governor, a baron,
and a deputy.) The young Keldor marches off to war with the Almamy's forces. His progress across the country provides Roger with
ample opportunity to display before the reader's eyes a catalogue of the
flora, fauna, and folkways of Senegal, in his notes, all of which "prove
the resources of the vegetation" and cry out for " well-organized farms"
(231).
But the Darnel of Cayor, using a scorched-earth policy, defeats and
enslaves his starry-eyed enemy. The captives are lined up as the Darnel
passes by and coolly decides whom to give away and whom to keep (59).
The Aimamy himself makes a passionate speech warning the Darnel
not to sell Muslims to Christians; the Darnel is unmoved and declares
that "few of my prisoners will see their native country again" 62, 64).
The stage is thus set for this narrative of the African interior to Join the
Atlantic and its narratives:
We were all reduced to slavery, to be sold to Europeans. When the slave
traders of Saint-Louis, Core, and Rufisque learned that a war was about
to break out between Cayor and Futa-Toro, they were delighted, for
whoever should be the winner, the result could only be captives, and
the slave trade could only gain from it. . . . As soon as our disasters were
known, slave-trading agents visited the African prince to make new
deals, to take advantage of the situation, and to oversee the delivery of
slaves that were already due. . . . What was, therefore, in these unhappy
times, the role played by these white men following black armies? See61.
Robinson explains, "The new regime did not oppose the enslavement of nonMuslims." "The Islamic Revolution," 201.

58 Yale French Studies


ing them, how could we not think of hawks and vultures, behind a cloud
of grasshoppers; of hyenas and jackals devouring bodies on a battlefield
or on the path of voyagers lost in the desert? (66-67)
With this passage in particular, Keldor joins abolitionist literature. As
in Equiano's narrative, the impending separation from the native coun
try, and the known impossibility of return, weigh heavily on Keldor's
mind as he awaits "rough slavery in a distant, unknown country, with
no hope of seeing our dear homeland [pays] again" (69). Equiano had writ
ten: "The blacks who brought me on board [the ship] went off, and left
me abandoned to despair. I now saw myself deprived of all chance of re
turning to my native country. "62 But Roger's revision of the Atlantic tri
angle, as we shall see, allowed for that which was impossible for those
enslaved in the French West Indies: return to the native land ("revoir
mon pays natal," 84). Both Equiano and Roger foreshadow the theme of
return that Aim Csaire will take up in the twentieth century.
The scene of separation from Africa and from loved ones, and the
theme of the impossible return, were key in abolitionist literature.
When Kariallah, the beloved of Keldor's friend Niokhor, cries, "Sepa
rate us? Never! Never! It is impossible!" (70), and when Keldor evokes
"the sweet fatherland [patrie] that I would never see again" (74), they
are echoing the rhetoric of the famous 1823 poetry contest organized
by the Acadmie Franaise on the theme of the abolition of the slave
trade.63 Among the other precursor texts is Mungo Park's story of
Nealee, an African woman who "perished, and was probably devoured
by wild beasts" after she failed to cooperate with her captors.64 The
story of Nealee was picked up by Thomas Clarkson and became em
blematic of abolitionist discourse.
As Franoise Vergs rightly says, the key emotional trope of aboli
tionist rhetoric is pity.65 Roger heightens the pathos of his novel as
62. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2001): 39, emphasis added.
63. On these poems see Hoffmann, Le ngre romantique, 155-63; and my Blank
Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985),
125-27.
64. Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (New York: Arno Press,
1971), 332.
65. Vergs, "The Age of Love and Pity: Slavery and the Politics of Reparation," lec
ture at Yale University, January 23, 2002. Vergs argues persuasively that humanitarian
movements including abolitionism have deployed pity as a motivating tool; but pity oc
cludes perception of the conditions on which an institution like slavery is built, making
those conditions ahistorical.

CHRISTOPHER L. MILLER

59

the moment of separation from Africa approaches: Keldor's friend


Niokhor kills his beloved Kariallah rather than let her face enslave
ment on foreign shores. As she expires on her blind grandfather's lap,
the old man has a vision that outlines the rest of the novel:
Children, calm your despair, and dry your tears. My eyes, which are
closed off to the world around me, miraculously see into the future. . . .
The time is approaching when the inhabitants of this part of Africa will
get some respite. Like the sages of the Fouta-Toro, who prohibited the
slave trade in their domain, the peoples of Europe, belatedly ashamed
of their cruelties, will soon renounce their practice of' devastating our
lands with the slave trade. What do I see? In a country across the oceans,
slaves, you will shake off the yoke, and in an unbelievable miracle,
whites will be enslaved to blacks! (80)

The Haitian Revolution, which Keldor will witness, is thus foretold.


But as the old man's vision continues, it shifts quickly back to Africa,
where the "population will multiply" and "industry" will flourish. In
this passage, Roger neatly welds the familiar rhetoric of abolitionism,
cited above, to his new plan for Africa. Here one sees in precise and
condensed form the hinge between the old colonialism and the new
one:
Now where am I? These must be the beloved shores of our Senegal!
What change has taken place here? Who has raised these solid, elegant
houses next to our old huts? Whence these fine and useful crops that
nature had refused to us? ... It is no illusion; I see them. Here are free
men, flocking from the interior of the country, cultivating, producing

the same crops [denres] as those African slaves who had been ripped
out of Africa. Blessed be the prince who works such marvels in the in
terests of humanity ! May the French prosper! May God and His prophet
look kindly on their noble enterprise! (80-81, emphasis added!

The old man's vision thus provides, from the mouth of an African, com
plete sanction for Roger's plans as governor. The calls for an end to the
inefficiency and brutality of the triangular trade are answered. As book
three concludes, the old man further predicts Keldor's return to Sene
gal to fulfill the prophecy. The rest of the novel is therefore predeter
mined, and the hero has only to go through his paces around the At
lantic. This device serves to accentuate the unnecessary nature of the
horrors that the narrator is about to recountthe Middle Passage and
the brutality of slavery in the islands; we have already been told that
these things are obsolete.

60 Yale French Studies

HISPANIOLA: UTOPIA AND DYSTOPIA


What, then, can Roger say about these other shores of the Atlantic,
which, unlike Senegal, he does not know through personal experience?
In 1828, his depiction of the Middle Passage [la traverse) was neither
original nor widely familiar: Wilberforce and Clarkson had been trans
lated into French, and their documentation of the slave trade was used
by French abolitionists. Reflecting English leadership in abolitionism,
Roger cites reports made to the House of Commons [K, 242, n. 5) and a
French translation of Alexander Falconbridge's Account of the Slave
Trade on the Coast of Africa of 1788 [K, 246, n. 9).66 Roger uses many
of the same sources that were perused by, for example, Mrime for his
depiction of the slave trade in Tamango (1829): Mungo Park, the Abb
Proyart, the botanist Michel Adanson, and the ubiquitous Father Labat
whom Roger reproaches for his failure to condemn the slave trade [K,
235-36, n. 7]). When writing about Africa, Roger has the advantage of
direct experience and asks his reader, in the endnotes, to take his word
as an eyewitness (for example, 240, n. 1). But that ends at the water's
edge.
Perhaps for lack of any reliable information about the actual life of
captives and slaves, Roger immediately steers his enslaved protagonist
into the sphere of the whites. Keldor becomes the prototypical house
slave. This process begins from the first time the slave traders cast their
eyes on Keldor, mere seconds before he is to enter the hold of the ship
with three hundred fellow captives. His ethnic physiognomy saves
him: "When it was my turn to go down into that foul dungeon [the en
trepont] ... [a] mulatto of Gore, who I believe was employed as a bro
ker, said to the Europeans who were shoving me, 'This boy is not Peul;
you have less to fear from him. Judging by his physiognomy . . (88).
Based on this ethno-logic (which Roger critiques as inaccurate, 241, n.
3), Keldor becomes a valet to a lieutenant, and "thus I escaped the

66.
WilberforcewaspublishedinFrench, with a preface by Madame de Stal, in 1814;
Clarkson's The Cres of Africa was translated in 1821. Alexander Falconbridge, An Ac
count of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa (London: J. Phillips, 1788); the passage
that Roger quotes is on pp. 24-25; I have not located the French translation that Roger
seems to be citing. On British dominance in abolitionism, see Debbasch, "Posie et
traite," and Serge Daget, "France, Suppression of the Illegal Slave Trade, and England,
1817-1850," in The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Origins and Effects in Europe,
Africa, and the Americas, ed. David Eltis and James Walvin (Madison: University of Wis
consin Press, 1981), 194.

CHRISTOPHER L. MILLER

61

unimaginable tortures that my fellows in misfortune endured during


the crossing" (89). Keldor therefore bears witness to the suffering of
the captives, while remaining unscathed himself; he sees and reports
on "these wretches laid out on planks, compressed and stuck one
against the other, almost deprived of the air necessary for breath
ing. . ."(90-91). Have the most despised beasts been treated with such
barbarism? he asks (92). Keldor's friend Niokhor throws himself into
the sea, and "his example was followed by many of our compatriots"
(97). Illnesses break out, and the lieutenant is blinded by ophthalmia;
Keldor showers him with devoted attention, and the "master" (as he
now calls him) seems to "take an interest" in his slave (100). Keldor's
upward mobility will be driven by his "curiosity," the motor of his in
telligence, which will lead him to marvel at, for example, the science
of navigation. This fills him with enthusiasm for "the civilization of
the Europeans" (101).
The other captives are less enthralled. As the crossing nears its end,
they revolt, and a general massacre ensues. Keldor saves his master
by hiding him. When the rebellion is over, in spectacular confirmation
of his status as a sort of house slave, Keldor and seven Europeans are
left on the deck, while sixty surviving captives are confined in the
hold (104-105). And in a twist on the theme that was popularized in
Mrime's Tamango one year laterthe theme of revolted slaves
adrift, unable to steer the ship they have takenKeldor and his seven
Europeans are all "equally incapable of steering to port this ship, al
most abandoned to the winds and the waves" (104-105, emphasis
added). If the antihero Tamango's inability to navigate the Esprance
was a derogatory allegory of the Haitian Revolution and a powerful
metaphor for political chaos in general,67 what are we to make of this
in Keldor2. Not much, for, as book five begins, the blind lieutenant
emerges to supervise the safe passage of the ship into the Spanish port
of Santo-Domingo: thus European know-how quickly regains suprem
acy. Keldor is delighted by everything he sees and looks forward to a
"smiling" future (107) . . . until he is sold by his dear master to a Span
ish planter. The lieutenant is going home to France, and as he explains
to a tearful Keldor, the triangle is not open on all sides to Africans: "It
is impossible, Keldor; it is not permitted to bring slaves into Europe"
(

110) .

67.
See Khama-Bassili Tolo, L'intertextualit chez Mrime: l'tude des sauvages
(Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, 1998), 234-39.

62 Yale French Studies


If Roger's Keldor sets himself apart from the fate of his compatri
ots and therefore offers a skewed, perhaps hybrid, view of the slave trade
(from an African captive who remains above deck), the novel effects an
other displacement of perspective once land is reached. For this French
writer docs not situate the American phase of his narrative in SaintDomingue /Haiti, but rather in the Spanish part of the same island, His
paniola. This may appear to be a curious, self-defeating strategy on the
part of a novelist who has made it clear that he wants to establish Haiti
and its revolution as a negative model, the better to throw his new
Africa into relief. But by moving Keldor to a Spanish colony, he was
able, as we will see, to display Spanish practices of slavery as a model
and as a reproach to the French planters. Then, by situating the story
in the Spanish part of the island during the Haitian Revolution and dur
ing Toussaint's seizure of it, Roger was able to address the revolution
directly.
Keldor thus becomes the literal house slave of a Spanish planter,
Don Pryras, again because of his handsome appearance (113). Again
Keldor's situation places him in the middle between masters and
slaves: his position is "bearable," even "pleasant"; his chains are
"light" and he can be happy (129). This allows Roger to chime in with
an endnote that holds Spanish slavery up for relative admiration: after
having been "so cruel and so atrocious" to the indigenous peoples of
America, the Spaniards, "through an inconceivable twist of the human
mind, proved to be the softest of masters with regard to Africans."Their
laws pertaining to slavery are a "model" that others should have fol
lowed. Roger here makes plain his belief that slavery can be "modified,
rectified" (253, n. 1 )perhaps without absolute abolition, perhaps in
the form of indenture. In one of his endnotes, Roger makes it clear that
resistance to the European slave trade is one thing, but actual abolition
of slavery is another; the latter must be gradual, and is best when earned
by each individual slave (see K, 238-39). Roger will become an immediatist abolitionist only later.
Don Pryras and his family are "sweet, benevolent, and naturally
human," and the master himself is "what one calls a philosopher."
"Unity, peace, and order" rule his house (127). He runs his plantation
in an enlightened and efficient way, so "everything was in the only
place it belonged, and every individual in his natural line of work."
Slaves are well cared for and even encouraged to buy themselves out of
slavery (132). This "little republic" of slaves and masters is thus close
to utopian, with strong echoes of Roger's vision of Senegal. In one pas-

CHRISTOPHER L. MILLER

63

sage Roger transparently evokes the image of himself ensconced at an


idealized version of Richard-Toll:
I don't believe that any social position provides purer or surer joy than
that known by the enlightened, sensible proprietor living as a wise man
anda friend of humanity on a vast colonial domain, surrounded by three
or four hundred individuals who depend on him entirely and whose hap
piness it is his ineffable pleasure ... to ensure. ( 132)

A nearly feudal sense of propriety and order pervades these passages, in


which one senses the authoritarian side of abolitionist discourse, con
cerned with the enlightened control of forces that might be unleashed
by emancipation.68 The Pryras plantation is less a referential com
ment on Spanish slavery than it is a prescriptive vision of Roger's
African utopia.69
These opinions and descriptions of the Pyrras plantation stand in
contrast to other passages in the novel and the broader depiction of is
land life, where one sees a blistering, uncompromising condemnation
of slavery. Traveling through the countryside, Keldor sees the abuses
to which other slaves are subjected: "I saw thousands of slaves fertiliz
ing foreign soil with the sweat of their brows, with no hope for any por
tion of the rich products they drew out of it" (125, emphasis added). If
they were to do the same work, with the same crops, on their native soil,
Roger implies, and if they received a share of the fruits of their labor, the
problem would be solved. This passage builds into a tirade against Eu
ropean slavery in the Americas, and borrows rhetoric from one of the
most famous phrases of anti-slavery discourse-Voltaire's Candide: "It
is at this price that you eat sugar in Europe"which Roger echoes:
It is at this execrable price that you consent to buy unnatural pleasures,
a soft life, superfluous products. . . . These products [denres] of the
tropics, these liquors that you savor, do you know why they often poi
son you? It's because in them you are drinking the sweat, the tears, and
the blood of your fellow men. . . . Your enlightenment? It is the light of
a devouring forest fire. (127-28)

This rhetoric collapses the distance and the absence that were fun
damental to the organization of the Atlantic triangle: slaves and their
68. Cf. Vergs, Abolir l'esclavage, 118.
69. The utopian dimensions of abolitionist thought are explored at length by Vergs
in Abolir l'esclavage. Dozon rightly points out the traces o Fouirism and Saint-Simonism in Roger's experimental and utopian thinking (Frres et sujets, 73).

64 Yale French Studies

suffering were invisible to French people, out of sight and out of mind.
Voltaire's phrase, and Roger's after it, destroys that structure of bonne
conscience. And Roger goes beyond standard abolitionist phrases here:
by placing blame on European civilization itself, comparing its en
lightenment to a destructive flame, Roger anticipates the rhetoric of
twentieth-century nationalism.70
The Americas cannot be the abolitionist utopia that Roger has in
mind; that belongs back in Africa. So melodramatic events work to ex
pulse Keldor from the Pryras plantation. He joins the army of Tous
saint Louverture, which has invaded the Spanish part of the island, and
Keldor joins the Haitian Revolution, in progress. By hitching his story
to the Haitian Revolution at this point in its progress, Roger connects
with a Toussaint who was at the height of his powers and ambitions,
not only "the supreme authority," but "the only authority in the
colony" at that point (late 1800 and early 1801).71 Even Napoleon had
to briefly recognize Toussaint's power by naming him captain-general
(then rescinding the decision).72 Within Keldor, the figure of Tous
saint resonates across the Atlantic with that of the visionary African
Almamy and his Muslim revolution in Senegal. But he also, curiously,
bears some resemblance to Roger himself. Toussaint, like Roger, was
an abolitionist, but a social conservative who kept the plantation sys
tem intact "at all costs" and sought out white colonists as economic
partners; his labor regime was almost as despised as slavery itself by his
compatriots. (Toussaint had been freed before 1776 and reportedly had
owned a dozen slaves himself.73) If Toussaint's rural masses were "con
demned to remain as 'salaried' workers under a 'slave-type' plantation
regime," if his rural code "emptied [the workers'] freedom of any prac
tical substantive meaning," the situation sounds a lot like Roger's
scheme for African "gardens" and indentured labor.74 Toussaint's rep
resentation, in his memoirs, of Saint-Domingue under his command
70. Cf. RenMaran, preface to Batouala: vritable rom an ngre (Paris: Albin Michel,
1965 [1921)]: "Tu btis ton royaume sur des cadavres" (11).
71. Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint-Domingue Revolution from Be
low (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 206.
72. David Patrick Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2002), 223.
73. Pierre Pluchon, introduction to Pamphile de Lacroix, La Rvolution de Hati
(Paris: Karthala, 1995), 17. This book includes the entire text of Lacroix's Mmoires pout
servir l'histoire de la rvolution de Saint-Domingue (1819). On Toussaint's manumis
sion, see Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, 230, n. 30.
74. Fisk, The Making of Haiti, 207, 213, 250, 214.

CHRISTOPHER L. MILLER

65

sounds a lot like Roger's depictions of his Senegal: "The colony . . . en


joyed the greatest tranquility, [and] agriculture and commerce flour
ished; the island had achieved a level of splendor that it had never
known before, and all of this was, if I may say so, my doing."75 What
Toussaint and Roger shared, then, was a general commitment to black
freedom (in circumscribed forms), together with a continuing belief in
the plantation system. The affinity is completed if one believes Victor
Schoelcher's assertion that Toussaint dreamed of colonizing Africa in
the name of France.76
None of that is mentioned in Keldor, of course; the affinities be
tween Roger and Toussaint remain unstated. Toussaint, already a hero
of English Romantic literature thanks to Wordsworth ("To Toussaint
Louverture," sonnet, 1803), remains in the wings in Roger's novel and
has no speaking role. The French public was not ready for Toussaint to
join the ranks of idealized black heroes like Oroonoko, Bug-fargal, or
Keldor (that would have to wait for Lamartine's Toussaint Louverture
in 1850).77
Keldor is swept up in the fervor of an all-black regiment marching
to the cries of libert! galit! (168). But once they have reached Le Cap
Franais, rumors of Leclerc's invasion and the restoration of slavery be
gin to circulate. Roger represents Toussaint as giving the order "to burn
everything in the path of the French, to leave nothing to them but ru
ins and dead bodies" (171). Roger's mouthpiece Keldor is horrified, and
repulsed by the joy that his companions take in watching the fire from
the surrounding hills. European women and children are tortured and
killed, and Keldor ends his infatuation with the Haitian Revolution in
these terms: "Liberty! Liberty! Is it only at this price that man may par
take of your benefits? " ( 172) ,78 Thus the groundwork is laid for the pro
tagonist to turn elsewhere in his quest for utopia, to look back across
the Atlantic and to stage his return.
First he must slog through the rest of the revolution in Christophe's
army. One day, the sight of white servants waiting on black officers
75. Toussaint L'Ouverture, Mmoires du Gnral Toussaint-LOuverture crits par
lui-mme (Port-au-Prince: Blizaire, 1951 [1853]), 29. See Daniel Desormeaux's welcome
study o the memoirs in this volume.
76. Victor Schoelcher, Vie de Toussaint Louverture (Paris: Karthala, 1982), 401.
77. See Hoffmann's interesting remarks on Lamartine's play, in Le ngre romantique,
211-13.
78. Cf. Claire de Duras, Ourika: The Original French Text (New York; MLA, 1994),
20.

66

Yale French Studies

produces "a total revolution" in Keldor's head (178). Back in Senegal,


the old man's vision had predicted this: "whites . . . enslaved to
blacks," the world turned upside down. He experiences "involuntary"
memories of Africa and begins to thinkprefiguring Csaireof the
impossible, of "returning to my native land" (mon pays natal) 17879). Keldor finds that his loved ones are all dead. Thus personally and
politically, there is nothing left for him in the islands. War and aboli
tion have produced chaos in their wake. Encountering men from Sene
gal who are planning their return to "the fields of Senegal" ( 191 ), Kel
dor joins them, thus fulfilling the old man's prophecy. "The thoughts
and emotions of Africa prevailed over those of Saint-Domingue" (191).
But it is not just any Africa to which this group wishes to return; it is
an Africa of "fields" that can be cultivated, the Africa of Roger's gar
dens.79 The sacred nature of "native soil" is the supreme value.
The terms with which Roger/Keldor sums up the experience of the
West Indies are revelatory: "Shores of the Antilles, lands of servitude,
of which I had had such an awful idea, where slavery had made me the
happiest of men, . , . Iwillnotleaveyouwithouttenderness!" 192, em
phasis added). If the institution of slavery as it was practiced in the West
Indies has clearly been shown in Keldor to have considerable faults,
and if the West Indies as a whole are left in smoldering mins, certain
forms of servitude have not been ruled out by anything that Roger has
written. Indentured labor remains distinctly permissible. How else can
the native soil be made to turn a profit?
Every element in this novel has been calculated to come out at the
precise end-point that Roger has planned; everything leads to RichardToll in Senegal in the year 1822; everything supports his scheme for
plantations. The chronology of Keldor's life has been plotted so that
he returns to Africa still young enough to be a happy laborer Roger does
the math on this in a note, 259-60, n. 5) just as Richard-Toll is being
organized. The statements about slavery throughout the novel have
left plenty of room for indentured servitude as a desirable form of labor.
The last book of Keldor hastily inserts the protagonist into Roger's
utopia, which fulfills the old man's vision pronounced at the beginning
of the novel. Keldor finds that his family has been dispersed by Moor
ish invasions, so he seeks protection "in the environs of the farms

79.
In one of his endnotes, Roger assures us that two such expeditions, repatriatin
Africans from Havana to Africa, took place, in 1819 and 1822 (263, 5n).

CHRISTOPHER L. MILLER

67

started by the French" (199). "Solid houses . . . which put our thatched,
mud huts to shame," "a center of industry and civilization whose use
ful influence will gradually spread throughout this entire part of
Africa" (200). Roger's revision of the Atlantic triangle is completed in
these final passages, as the voices of Keldor and Roger finally converge:
I have seen these colonial farms, worked by the hands of free men! Sene
gal and Saint-Domingue together refute the prejudice that said that
such projects were impossible (11). Here are working Negroes who have
flocked voluntarily from all the surrounding countries ... to hire out
their time and their strengths! They are all thinking of one thing:
the products manufactured in France that they can take home with
them. . . . And what an indescribable pleasure it is to recognize here,
already naturalized, almost all the useful and lovely plants that I had
seen in the Antilles! . . .Hail to the garden of Richard-Toll! . . .May this
advantageous [intressante] and noble enterprise prosper! Lord! Hear
my fervent wish: protect these projects, these efforts which pure and
philanthropic intentions alone have inspired! Let these territories, fi
nally delivered from the homicidal exactions of the slave trade, take
their place among civilized nations . . . and let Europe gloriously expi
ate her crimes against Africa! (201-203, emphasis added)

The rhetoric is practically self-contradictory here: the scheme is pure


and philanthropic, but it also happens to be advantageous; a coinci
dence that will be useful for the future of "enlightened" colonialism.
Roger's expiation for the crime against humanity (as we now call it) of
the slave trade consists of a profit-making scheme that places Africans
in a new form of exploitation on their native soil. In the note numbered
11, Roger indignantly catalogues efforts made by slave-holding col
onies to sabotage the "free-labor" experimentin Senegal. For him, SaintDomingue/Haiti on the one hand and liis Senegal on the other stand
as the twins pillars of an argument against slavery. "Forget Haiti" and
"forget slavery" is the clear message; we will enter into a new re
lation with Africa, with no sacrifice of colonial products (Keldor just
told us he saw them growing in Senegal). His Africa will be intressante
in the sense of advantageous. France and Africa will find themselves in
a new, bilateral ahgnment, to the advantage of France. The coloniza
tion of Africa, Roger tells us at the end, will be "built on a basis that is
entirely different from that of the colonies of the Antilles" because
Senegal will he filled with "free and numerous consumers . . . eager for
our products" (269, n. 12, emphasis added). This is all quite modern,

68 Yale French Studies

and eerily prophetic of the future of French colonialism and postcolo


nialism in Africa, with France and its colonics or former colonies
united in one economy.
In the short run, things did not work out at all as Roger wanted in
Senegal: for all his prescience, his plan for literally transplanting the
economy of the slave islands to Africa failed. Its basis was not, in fact,
"entirely different," not different enough: the crops of the islands did
not actually flourish in Senegal's soil, and genuinely free laborers sim
ply did not show up. Roger's strategy for forgetting Haiti and forgetting
slavery was undone by his failure to jettison the plantation system as
a whole and the indentured labor on which it had been originally
founded. France will have to pass through 1848 (the final abolition of
slavery), and 1885 (the Congress of Berlin, which opened the path for
deep colonization of Africa). Then and only then, as the nineteenth cen
tury concludes and the twentieth begins, France will indeed, as Roger
predicted, "open a path for herself into the interior of Africa" (270, n.
12) and forge a new bilateral relationship with the continent. "La
Franafrique" will be the result.80 And Haiti will be long since forgot
ten, surrendered to American domination and subject to the "silenc
ing" of history.81
Roger's brand of "interest"with all the ambiguities that we have
seen in Iris usage of the termmay be his most lasting legacy. It is
within a complex web of interests that "the colonization of Senegal"
(tellingly, these are the last words of Roger's last endnote), and of Africa,
will be founded.
EPILOGUE

To give Roger his due, we should leave him with full credit for his de
votion to the abolition of slavery. This canbe seen in another encounter
with the Baron, eight years after the publication of Keldor. In 1836 the
Revue des colonies, published by the Martinican gadfly Cyril-Auguste
Bissettewhose deported disciples had been among Roger's laborers
at Richard-Tollpublished a transcription of a recent debate in the SO. * * * * *
SO. See Franois-Xavier Verschave, La Franafrique: le plus long scandale de la
Rpublique (Paris: Stock, 1998); Baadikko Mammadu, Franafrique, l'chec: l'Afrique
postcoloniale en question (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2001); and Dozon's comments on "La
Franafrique" in Frres et sujets, 339-48.
81. Michel-Rolph Trouillot eloquently describes this process in his Silencing the
Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).

CHRISTOPHER L. MILLER

69

Chambre des Dputs. And here we find Roger's voice among the par
ticipants. This reappearance of Roger thus reflects a curious reversal of
the racial roles normally assigned to the oral and the written; now the
European voice is being printed by the (part) African, Bissette. Roger
was a founding member of the Socit franaise pour l'abolition de
l'esclavage in 1834. During a period when abolition was making little
headway, as the Chambre de Dputs was debating the status of the
colonies, the Baron forced its attention to a more urgent matter. If we
are going to discuss the colonies, he argued, "it is a duty for the friends
of humanity ... to bring your attention back to the great question of
the abolition of slavery. . . . Gentlemen, I wish only that our silence not
be construed as an abandonment of the sacred cause to which we have
devoted ourselves." He demanded a response from the minister of the
colonies, in the "interest of the black slaves" as well as "of course" that
of the French planters.82 Roger's persistent "interest" in the abolition
of slavery would have to wait twelve more years to be realized.

82. "Discussion du projet de loi portant demande d'un crdit extraordinaire de


326,200 Fr. pour le service des colonies," Revue des colonies 2/9 (March 1836): 404-405.
See Patricia Motylewski, La socit franaise pour labolition de l'esclavage (Paris:
L'Harmattan, 1998), 47. By the 1840's, Roger would become an immediatist abolitionist
( Jennings, French Anti-Slavery, 60).

CHRIS BONGIE

"Monotonies of History": Baron de


Vastey and the Mulatto Legend of
Derek Walcott's Haitian Trilogy
And so to Haiti now our theme is turned.
How shall we live, till these ghosts bid us live?
Derek Walcott, The Haitian Trilogy

In 2002, Derek Walcott gathered together three hard-to-find or unpub


lished plays of hisHenri Christophe, Drums and Colours, and The
Haitian Earthand published them as The Haitian Trilogy.1 Walcott's
dedication of the Trilogy to his twin brother Roderick, who had died the
previous year, while attaching a purely personal meaning to the text,
also introduces issues of memory and doubling that are thematically
vital to it. Walcott had worked closely with his brother on the first play
of the Trilogy, Henri Christopheindeed, it was Roderick who in 1949
initially suggested to his brother that the Haitian Revolution "might
be the subject of a longer play in verse" (DWCL, 76). The commemo
rative nod to his twin brother calls forth the ghosts of past perfor
mances of these plays, all of which in one way or another hark back to
what now, from our vantage point, might well seem like a "heroic" era
of literary and political decolonization. Henri Christophe, first per
formed in 1950 and then again in seminal productions in London (1952)
and Jamaica (1954), is representative not only of Walcott's beginnings
as a writer, but of "the start of modern West Indian drama" [DWCL, 79).
Drums and Colours is even more directly linked to the energies of de
colonization, since it wasto quote its original subtitle"an epic
1.
Derek Walcott, The Haitian Trilogy (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,
Henri Christophe was published in Barbados in 1950, at the twenty-year-old author's ex
pense; Drums and Colours: An Epic Drama came out in Caribbean Quarterly in 1961;
performed in 1984, TheHaytian Earth (as it was originally titled) was, according to Bruce
King, one of fifteen unpublished plays of Walcott's for which, in 2000, scripts existed
(Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life [Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000], 668) [henceforth DWCL],
YFS 107, The Haiti Issue, ed. Deborah Jenson, 2005 by Yale University.

70

CHRIS BONGIE

71

drama commissioned for the opening of the first federal parliament of


the West Indies, April 23rd 1958." Written in celebration of the open
ing of the West Indies Federation, the play as we read it now is neces
sarily haunted by the political hopes and dreams that surrounded its
original performance. The Haitian Earth, finally, was performed in
1984 in a recently (1979) independent St. Lucia as part of the com
memoration of the sesquicentenary of the abolition of slavery; hand
somely sponsored by the government, it too conjures up the ghost of a
collaboration between the individual artist and the decolonized state
that might once have been thought to lead, in Fanon's words, to the con
solidation of a "national culture." In short, to read these plays at the
beginning of the twenty-first century is to register not merely the ab
sence of their original performances, but that of the seemingly more
"heroic" conditions in which those performances took place. One ef
fect of resurrecting these old plays at the beginning of the new millen
nium is thus to highlight that now familiar historical passage, and
move it away from the apparent clarity and direction of literary and po
litical decolonization to the murkier depths (or surfaces) and indirec
tions of post/colonial time, in which there can be no "pure avenging
angel speaking the truth of a radical historicity and pure oppositionality."2
This disjunction between the decolonizing context of past perfor
mances and the post/colonial time in which those performances have
been given new life, or after-life, ironically mirrors the melancholic
double vision of Haitian history put forward in the actual plays, espe
cially the two dealing exclusively with that history, Henri Christophe
and The Haitian Earth. This melancholy stems from Walcott's insis
tence on the ways in which the violent energies that resulted in the de
feat of the French colonists and the creation of an independent Haiti in
1804 led not forward into a more egalitarian future but back into a rep
etition of the same old injustices, only perpetrated this time by the
would-be founders and fathers of the black Haitian nationnotably,
Dessalines and Christophe. The young Walcott's decision in Henri
2.
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 26. As always,
by "post/colonial " I ref er to that ambiguous condition in which the colonial and the post
colonial "appear uneasily as one, joined together and yet also divided in a relation of
(dis(continuity," distinguishing this from "postcolonial" ("an historical marker," refer
encing ideas and texts produced in the second half of the twentieth century). See my Is
lands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1998), 12-13.

72 Yale French Studies


Christophe to focus on the aftermath of Haitian independence, and to
show the ways in which the emancipation of Haiti failed to result in
its liberation,3 provided a dramatic counter-balance to the revolution
ary hopes and dreams that were fuelling the decolonization movement
in mid-century, and which had found such eloquent expression in
C. L. R. James's 1938 account of the Haitian Revolution, The Black
Jacobins. As Paul Breslin has pointed out with regard to Henri Chris
tophe, Walcott's "postrevolutionary tristesse contrasts with James's
revolutionary fervor."4 This melancholy, which at the time would
have served as a cautionary admonition against the high expecta
tions being raised by the imminent prospect of decolonization, now
lends itself to being read as a "prescient" commentary on the inade
quacies of the decolonization movement as a whole and its failure to
anticipate the notorious ambiguities of the post/colonial condition. A
second obvious effect of repackaging these three existing plays as parts
of one greater work is thus to countermine the nostalgia for more
"heroic" times that, as we have seen, is one likely consequence of sal
vaging these old texts for a new audience. The melancholic emphasis
in these plays on what in Omeros Walcott calls the "fever of History,"5
on cyclical patterns of violence and revenge that are supposedly unaf
fected by any mere changing of the guard from colony to decolonized
nation-state, doublessupplementing and contestingthe first form
of melancholy, the desire for a History that might have led beyond
emancipation to liberation.
Leaving that (melancholic) desire for liberation to the side, strate
gically preserved from the critical interrogation that it cannot ulti
mately sustain, I will be offering in this article a critique of Walcott's
reliance in the Trilogy on the second form of melancholy, on a vision
of History, and Haitian history in particular, as tragic repetition. This
3. GlossingMarx, Hardt and Negri define emancipation as "the entry of new nations
and peoples into the imperial society of control, with its new hierarchies and segmenta
tions; liberation, in contrast, means the destruction of boundaries and patterns of forced
migration, the reappropriation of space, and the power of the multitude to determine the
global circulation and mixture of individuals and populations." Michael Hardt and An
tonio Negro, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 363.
4. Paul Breslin, Nobodys Nation: Reading Derek Walcott (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2001), 76.
5. Omeros (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 102. For a particularly as
tute account o Walcott's notorious quarrel with history, see Ian Gregory Strachan, Par
adise and Plantation: Tourism and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean (Charlottes
ville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 192-223.

CHRIS BON GIB

73

vision certainly has its appeal, especially during this bicentennial year
of Haiti's independence, as the country suffers through yet another ci vil
war and yet another "humanitarian" intervention (read coup dtat) on
the part of its former colonial and neocolonial overlords. Bruce King
has summed up that appeal in his positive appraisal of Drums and
Colours as a work of "skeptical humanism." The lesson of that play,
according to King, is that "History teaches that all races and nations
are alike, that revenge is wrong, that empires and personal life end in
failure and tragedy" (DWCL, 138). This skepticism is, for a critic like
King, the sure sign of an aesthetic and intellectual maturity: "the best
writers of the independence generation," he goes on to explain, "were
skeptical, partly because they were products of Modernism and dis
trusted political rhetoric, but also because their experience of life
and themselves had already warned them" (my emphasis). Although a
writer like James provides ample evidence of the existence of another
Modernism, one better equipped to extractbe it misguidedly or not
some rather less tragic meaning from "the most successful emancipa
tory movement of modern times, the anticolonial struggle,"6 it may
well be that there is an integral link bet ween what passes for the "best"
writing among critics who, like King, still care to discriminate between
texts according to aesthetic criteria and the sort of all-embracing skep
ticism with regard to historical and political change that infuses Wal
cott's oeuvre from its very outset. Whether one agrees with King's as
sessment of what constitutes the "best" in Caribbean writing, his
characterization of the skeptical outlook of Drums and Colours (which
is, ironically enough, the only one of the three plays that evidences any
optimism with regard to historical progress) certainly seems an apt de
scription for the Trilogy as a whole.
And yet, "prescient" as Walcott's emphasis on what one character
in Henri Christophe refers to as the "monotonies of history" appears,
there is also something deeply reductionist about it. One might well
ask, "If that's all there is to say about History, and about Haiti, then
why bother saying it (much less saying it again several decades later) ? "
We get a sense of this reductionism in the provocatively brief preface
to the Trilogy that, apart from the simple act of yoking the three plays
together, constitutes Walcott's sole new contribution. The cursory
tone of this "Foreword" comes across most dramatically in the third of
6. Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003),

74 Yale French Studies

its four short paragraphs, where Walcott provides an astoundingly tac


iturn summation of the Haitian Revolution. Here is that paragraph, in
its entirety:
The Haitian revolution, as sordidly tyrannical as so many of its subse
quent regimes tragically became, was an upheaval, a necessary rejec
tion of the debasements endured under a civilized empire, that achieved
independence. The revolution is as central to the plays as it is to the his
tory of the island, (vii-viii)
The revolution is grudgingly acknowledged as a "necessary" upheaval,
and yet the predominant emphasis is on its "sordidly tyrannical" na
ture. It is not merely the post-revolutionary regimes of Dessalines and
Christophe, the ostensible targets of the plays themselves, that are in
dicted here, hut the revolutionary events that made those regimes pos
sible. The most that can be said of this revolution, it would appear, is
that it "achieved independence." The understated nature of this state
ment is extremely telling, as is the startling banality of the claim that
"the revolution is . . . central" to the history of the island. In short,
these plays remain for Walcott, in their recycled form, what they have
always been: a scathing indictment of the supposedly ineluctable "cor
ruption of slaves into tyrants," to cite his description of Henri Chris
tophe in the 1970 essay "What the Twilight Says."7 They are a corrob
oration of the fact that, at least as long as the forces of History hold
sway over it, "Haiti will," as one of his characters puts it, "never be
normal" (57). The terseness of the "Foreword" and the blandness of
its claims evidently testify to Walcott's longstanding disengagement
from, his disinterest in and contestation of, History itself. Less evi
dently, however, the poverty of Walcott's vision of the Haitian Revo
lution and its aftermath can be traced not simply to Walcott's dismis
sive critique of "the fever of History," but to specific ideological biases
that inform his representations of Haitian history in the three plays
biases that become newly visible when they are joined together as part
of a self-styled Trilogy. These plays, I will argue, provide a sounding
board for distant but nonetheless audible echoes of what one of the fore
most historians of Haiti, the late David Nicholls, dubbed the "mulatto
legend": a mid-nineteenth-century representational strategy through
which Haiti's revolutionary past was used "as a weapon in the contro7.
Walcott, What the Twilight Says: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1998], 12 (henceforth WTS],

CHRIS BONG1E

75

versies of the present," as a way of explaining and justifying "the pre


dominant position enjoyed by the mulatto elite" in Haiti.8
In order to make this argument, I will focus on Walcott's represen
tation of one particular character in the Trilogy, King Henri Christophe's secretary, Baron Vastey, who plays an important role in Henri
Christophe and recurs, in significantly diminished form, in its postindependence double, The Haitian Earth. I will examine Walcott's rep
resentations of Vastey in the final section of this article, but in order to
consider his role in the Trilogy, it will be necessary first to say some
words about the "real" Vastey |1781-1820). In the following section, I
will thus provide a concise overview of the life and writings of this his
torically neglected intellectual, whom Michael Dash has described as
"the most important ideological figure in early Haitian history."9 This
overview will serve, in its own right, as the tentative beginnings of an
effort at giving more than passing comment to an important if prob
lematic outrider of the Black Atlantic tradition. In its specific discus
sion of the role of scapegoating and literacy in Vastey's oeuvre, it will
also provide a foundation for my argument in the final section, where
I suggest that Walcott's shifting representations of the figure of Vastey
in Henri Christophe and The Haitian Earth tell us a good deal more
about the Haitian Revolutionor, rather, about Walcott's ideologi
cally charged representation of that revolution in the service of his
"skeptical humanism"than does his brief and unforthcoming "For
ward" to the Trilogy.
According to David Nicholls, who has written the only article-length
account of Vastey's ideas, Vastey was born in 1781 in the northern town
of Ennery, the legitimate child of a Frenchman and his colored wife.10
He is said to have fought under Toussaint, served as secretary for the
first ruler of independent Haiti, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and then filled
the same function for Dessalines's successor, Christophe, who took
control of the North of Haiti in 1807, and was crowned King of that half
8. Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour and National Indepen
dence in Haiti. 3rd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1996), 89 [henceforth FDD].
9. f. Michael Dash, Literature and Ideology in Haiti, 1915-1961 (London: Macmil
lan, 1981), 4 [henceforth LI],
10.
See Nicholls, "Pompe Valentin Vastey: Royalist and Revolutionary," Jahrbuch
fur Geschichtevon Staat, Wirtschaft undGesellschaftLateinamerikas29/8 (1991): 10723 [henceforth "PW"); as well as FDD 43-46. Nicholls's source for this biographical in
formation is not archival but, to judge by his footnotes, derived from an early twentiethcentury Haitian journal.

76 Yale French Studies


of the former Saint-Domingue in 1811. Vastey began publishing pam
phlets and books in 1814, many of them directed against Christophe's
arch-rival, the president of the southern republic, Alexandre Ption.
Tutor to Henri Christophe's eldest son, a Baron of the realm and its prin
cipal ideologue, Vastey is said to have been murdered only days after
Christophe, in October 1820. After this, the two Haitis were formally
reunited, with Ption's chosen successor, Jean-Pierre Boyer, taking
control of the entire countryan act that confirmed once and for all
the nation-wide hegemony of a mulattocracy that would, with brief in
terruptions, rule the country for the rest of the century.
Since nineteenth-century Haiti, as a geopolitical and cultural phe
nomenon, was largely the invention of the inheritors of Ption, the mu
latto elite, it is hardly surprising that the reputation of Vasteya light
skinned intellectual who insisted on the need for Haiti to be ruled by a
black kingwas given a highly negative slant over the course of the
century. As we will see in the following section, Walcott's represen
tation of Vastey contains trace-elements of this negative portrayal, be
ing genealogically attached to the mulatto legend perpetrated by Beaubrun Ardouin and other nineteenth-century Haitian intellectuals.11
Whether Vastey was the conniving, corrupt figure one finds described
in many Haitian history books is not a question that can be decided
with any finality, but, as Nicholls points out, we do have his published
writings, "which are manifestly the work of a sophisticated and per
ceptive defender of his nation's independence" ("PW," 121). Along
with a number of pamphlets, Vastey published four major works: Le
systme colonial dvoil (1814), Rflexions sur une lettre de Mazres
(1816), Rflexions politiques sur quelques ouvrages et journaux fran
ais, concernant Hayti (1817), and Essai sur les causes del rvolution
et des guerres civiles d'Hayti (1819).11 12 Several of these books quickly
11. According to Ardouin, "one of the principal ideologists of the mulatto elite" (FDD
39), Vastey "was an educated man, but of a corruption that was only equalled by Iris mal
ice" ( quoted in FDD 167). One finds such insinuations repeated in twentieth-century his
tories of Haiti, such as the Heinls' sensationalist Written in Blood: The Story of the Hai
tian People, 1492-1971 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1978), where Vastey is referred
to as Christophe's "arrogant Minister of Finance" (162), whose first concern when au
diting government accounts for Dessalines had been "the sack of goldpieces he received
before pronouncing all in order" (13 7|. The Heinls also assert, against all evidence, that
Vastey "lived half his life as a slave" (26).
12. In chronological order, here is a list of the texts by Vastey that will be cited in this
article, along with the abbreviations by which I will refer to them in the text: Le systme
colonial dvoil [SCD] 1814 Notes M. le Baron de V. P. Malouet (Notes) 1814; Le cri de

CHRIS BONGIE

77

found their way into English as part of the "Haiti fever" that gripped
abolitionist circles during that decade,-13 as the publisher of the English
translation of Rflexions sur une lettre de Mazres dramatically put it,
Vastey's
is perhaps the first work by a Negro, in which the energies of the mind
have been powerfully excited and have found a proper scope for action,
where sentiments favourable to freedom and independence could be
avowed without the immediate terror of the scourge, the axe, or the gib
bet, and where in fact this long oppressed race have been suffered to say
a word in their own defence.14
Regardless of the dubious provenance of this claim, it is certainly
the case that many of the moves one associates with twentieth-century
anticolonial thinkers are already to be found in Vastey's writings. When
it is mentioned at all, his work has thus invariably been characterized
in passing by historians and critics as "third-worldist,"15 and, more
specifically, linked to Ngritude and Fanon.16 As Dash states, in
Vastey's work one finds a great many "sentiments which could easily
belong to any militant ngritude writer of the mid-twentieth-century "
[LI, 4). Assertions of Haiti's African identity crop up frequently in his
writings. Regardless of the darkness or lightness of their skins, Haitians
are all "children of Africa" (Cri, 27), forming part of a "we" that is "of
African descent, and that has nothing in common with the French" [RP,
15). Notwithstanding the evident pride in this marginalized cultural
la patrie, ou les intrts de tous las Haytiens (Cri) n.d. (1815?),- Rflexions sur une lettre
de Mazres. . .sur les Noirs et les Blancs.. . [Maz) 1816; Rflexions addresses auxHaytiens de la partie de lOuest et du Sud, sur lhorrible Assassinat du Gnral Delvare . . .
IR AHI n.d. [1816]; K flexions politiques sur quelques ouvrages et journaux franais, con
cernant Hayti {RP) 1817; Essai sur les causes de la rvolution et des guerres civiles
d'Hayti {Essai) 1819. (All but the last two were published in Cap Henry by the King's
printer, P. Roux; the last two were printed at the Imprimerie Royale situated on the
grounds of Christophe's palace, Sans Souci.) Unless noted otherwise, all translations
from the French are mine.
13. See Karen Racine, "Britannia's Bold Brother. British Cultural Influence in Haiti
During the Reign of Henry Christophe (1811-1820), " Journal of Caribbean History 33/
1-2(1999): 130.
14. Reflexions on the Blacks and Whites: Remarks upon a letter addressed by M.
Mazeres.. .toJ.C. L. Sismonde de Sismondi. . . (London: J. Hatchard, 1817), 10.
15. Rgis Antoine, La tragdie du roi Christophe d'Aim Csaire (Paris: Bordas, 1984),
16.
16. The "issues dealt with by the nineteenth-century Haitian, in [Systme colonial
dvoil] and in his other works, are remarkably close to the preoccupations of the twen
tieth-century Martiniquean" (Nicholls, "PW;" 108).

78 Yale French Studies


identityAfrica is frequently represented as " the cradle of the sciences
and the arts" (Maz, 32)17Vastey was also well aware, in David Hallward's words, that "the celebration of a specified cultural or historical
particularity provides no adequate ground for any emancipatory polit
ical claim per se."18 Thus the Africanist rhetoric of origins is repeat
edly buttressed by appeals to "universal" ideals, ideals that have their
origin in Enlightenment thinking ("les lumires") but that Vastey in
sists must be extended to "five hundred million black, yellow, and
brown [basan) men, spread across the surface of the globe, who are
claiming the rights and privileges that they received from the author of
nature!" [Maz, 14).
As Nicholls suggests, "it is in his critique of the colonial system and
the dangers of neocolonialism . . . that Vastey's originality and signifi
cance emerge most clearly" ("PW," 115). Like Fanon, Vastey offers a
comprehensive critique of colonialism as a system, one based on "vio
lence, theft, pillage, treacheryin short, the foulest, vilest of depravi
ties" (SC, 13). There can be no distinguishing between good and bad
Frenchmen, good and bad masters; the systematic nature of colonial ex
ploitation in Saint-Domingue negates this possibility. The colonists
were all monsters, "more or less; they all committed, participated in,
and contributed to those horrors,- besides, the number of colonists who
acted decently and humanly is so small that it is not worth making
them an exception to the general rule" [SC, 38). He draws out the mon
strosity of this system in one of the most moving parts of his oeuvre,
the lengthy section in Systme colonial dvoil 40-62) devoted to eye
witness accounts of the atrocities perpetrated by individual, named
colonists, an act of tmoignage (40) that he prefaces with the statement,
"I shall awaken the remains of the numerous victims that you [the
French] plunged into the grave, and borrow their voices to unmask your
heinous crimes" (35). And Vastey is no less scathing in his relentless
17. Time and again Vastey notes the Egyptian origins of Greek culture, and he cites
Christophe's palace, Sans Souci, and the Royal Church as examples of how "we have con
served the taste and the genius for architecture of our ancestors, those who covered
Ethiopia, Egypt, Carthage, and the Spain of old with their monuments" (Essai 201). As
Nicholls notes, though, Vastey also holds an "equivocal attitude towards Africa" (FDD
43), inasmuch as he asserts that whatever the continent's past grandeur, the slave trade
has ravaged it to such an extent that it is now in need of "civilizing," and expresses the
hope that "the north will give back to the south [midi] the gifts it received from it" [CS

19).
18. Peter I-Iallward, Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the
Specific (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 40.

CHRIS BONGIE

79

warnings about the dangers of French neocolonialism, a particularly


sensitive issue in the 1810s because France had yet to acknowledge the
independence of Haiti and was engaged in many covert efforts to regain
control of it. Speaking, for instance, of France's emphasis on its sup
posed civilizing mission, Vastey points out, in what is surely one of the
earliest formulations of the modus operandi of neocolonialism, that
"we arc not so ignorant as not to know that peoples are conquered just
as effectively, and even more so, by civilization, persuasion, and se
duction, as by the force of arms!" [Essai, 253).19
Doubtless the most interesting aspect of Vastey's systematic cri
tique to us today, in an age when the rhetoric of decolonization and the
claims of ngritude seem less compelling than they once did, is its in
sistent emphasis on the ways in which colonial discourse works and on
the need for a counter-discourse to put in its place. Long before C. L. R.
James, and decades before the founding fathers of Haitian historiogra
phy put pen to paper, Vastey was arguing in remarkably modern terms
for the necessity of "writing back" against the Empire. For instance, he
begins his final book, the Essai, with the claim that "Haiti lacks a gen
eral history written by a native [indigne] of the country" 11 ); all we pos
sess, he notes, are the works of Europeans, who have taken the facts and
"truncated them in a strange fashion" (1-2). Under slavery, this process
of editing resulted in a stream of books in which white writers con
tentedly entered into details regarding "crops, climate, rural economy,
but made certain not to lay bare the crimes of their accomplices" (SC,
38-39). His awareness of the distorting and occluding mechanisms of
colonial and neocolonial discourse, "that system of duplicity and lies"
[Essai, 248), results in a quite unparalleled, for the time, attention to
the ways in which European writers exercise control over the colonial
world through textual acts of representation. The lengthy close read
ings he devotes to the likes of Edward Long and the French colonial
minister Baron Malouet, alongside his repeated demolition of the
"philosophical" and "scientific" ideas about race (e.g., claims about the
polygenetic origins of mankind) that are produced by Europeans sim
ply to "preserve the atrocious privilege of being able to oppress one part
19.
Notwithstanding the systematic nature of his critique of colonialism and neo
colonialism, it must be stressed that Vastey greatly diluted the strength of his critique
by limiting it, in the nineteenth-century context, to the reviled French,- for reasons of
both realpolitik and, it would appear, honest belief, he repeatedly exempted "the brave
and loyal British nation" (SC 9) from his account of the colonial system, and argued for
the benefits of having British missionaries and educators work in Haiti.

80 Yale French Studies

of mankind" [SC, 31), testify to a textualist emphasis that, as Robert


Young has pointed out, has been at the heart of postcolonial studies, for
better and for worse, since the publication of Edward Said's Oriental
ism.20
Vastey's critique of colonial discourse entailed the production of a
counter-discourse, a new practice of history-telling founded on the for
merly colonized people's right to "write a few pages for our just and le
gitimate defense" [RP, xii). The trope of reversal constitutes the most
obvious rhetorical move in Vastey's counter-discourse: it is the French
colonists who are "cannibals" [RP, 2), they who play the role of white
Cain to the black Abel [SC, 32), they who descend from "sordid origins"
(SC, 83). It is the Haitian, and not the French, Revolution that repre
sents a triumph of mankind: "the revolution raised us up and gave us a
place among civilized nations, whereas it has debased and degraded
you, causing you to fall to the level of the most barbarous peoples"
[Notes, 22). In places, indeed, this logic of reversals suggests an entire
cultural aesthetic: "Each people has its prejudices,- we find the color
black to be more beautiful than the color white; our Haitian painters
paint the deity and the angels black, while the evil spirits and devils are
painted white" (Maz, 22).
This emphasis on reversals is supplemented by an occasional voic
ing of the desire for a new language, for "new denominations" that
would not merely reverse but displace the old language. This displace
ment is exemplified for Vastey by the decision in 1804 to replace the
colonial name of Saint-Domingue by the Arawak name Hayti [Essai,
43-44). Vastey himself repeatedly apologizes for the deficiencies of his
own language, its failure to access this necessary new language. He
stresses the limitations that come with being a mere "political writer"
[Essai, 50), a publiciste [RP, xxiii), and notes that the situation of ur
gency in which the recently decolonized nation still finds itself gravi
tates against the emergence of an indigenous literary culture, a "more
stable foundation" for the nation being required before a properly Hai
tian writing can emerge [RP, xxi-xxii). Notwithstanding this emphasis
on his own deficiencies as a writer, though, he does occasionally make
of necessity a virtue and suggest that his straightforward prose is not
just something to be apologized for but to be built upon. It exemplifies
a "Haitian turn" (tournure haytienne) that productively inflects the
20.
See Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell,
2001|, 383-94.

CHRIS BONGIE

81

French language and makes it accessible to his indigenous audience.21


"My Haitian pen," Vastey states in Systme colonial dvoil, "will be
lacking in eloquence, no doubt, but it will be truthful; my descriptions
will be unadorned [sans ornemens], but they will be striking" (39). And,
indeed, there is much that is striking in Vastey's unadorned prose,- as
Michael Dash plausibly argues, it "has a much truer and more authen
tic ring" than the more self-consciously literary productions published
in Haiti at the time [LI, 4).
What I have described in the previous paragraphs are the aspects of
Vastey's oeuvre that we most readily recognize and valorize, that we
"know" how to read: the straightforward anticolonial arguments, the
assertions of black identity, the precociously textualist emphasis on
colonial discourse and the need for counter-discursive alternatives to
it. And yet these aspects of Vastey's work take up only a portion of it,
and an increasingly smaller portion as the decade progresses. Much of
what he wrote is, in an important sense, virtually unreadable for us to
day because of its preoccupation with the historical minutiae of a par
ticularly murky moment in Haitian history. Embroiled in a war of
words that served as textual double for the on-going civil war between
the two HaitisChristophe's Kingdom and the Southern Republic of
Ption, "a traitor sold to the French" [Essai, 336), and supposedly eager
to restore the island to its former colonial overlordsthe brunt of
Vastey's work documents and embodies a period in Haitian history that
cannot easily be reappropriated for the celebratory purposes of post
colonial criticism. Unlike the stirring story of Haitian independence
narrated by C. L. R. James, who drew a direct line from the dawning in
1804 of what Vastey called the "radiant sun of independence" [Essai,
38) to the heroic era of twentieth-century decolonization and panAfricanism, and who passed over in complete silence the troubling in
ternal divisions that shaped the first two decades of Haiti's indepen
dence, Vastey is compelled to foreground and enact a very different
narrative. Although he draws from the Haitian Revolution more or less
21.
Vastey's intended audience varies from text to text: sometimes he addresses spe
cific class fractions, such as the colored population in the South; at other times, his words
are ambivalently directed toward both Europe and home, as when he explains to the for
eign reader that since he is writing for the "mass of my fellow citizens, " "a still new peo
ple, who have not lived long enough in civilization to possess a knowledge of literature
[lettres], I am thus obliged, in political writings intended to enlighten the people, to make
myself accessible to the mass of my compatriots, to repeat myself, to make myself clear
and intelligible to their understanding, and to give, if I can express myself in this way, to
my grammatical construction a Haitian turn" (Essai 222).

82 Yale French Studies


the same ecumenical message about the need for racial reconciliation
as would James,22 the greater part of Vastey's work forces us to confront
the inadequacy of that message, the ways in which its clear anticolo
nial meaning gets blurred and, in the Derridean sense, disseminated in
a post/colonial context.
Vastey's first substantial publications date, from 1814, a time when,
because of the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy that year, the ex
ternal threat to Haiti was greater than it had been since the declaration
of independence from France ten years before. The years 1814-15 saw
a number of French attempts at negotiating their way back into a posi
tion of power in the former Saint-Domingue. Whereas Ption's Repub
lic initially was open to the possibility of a return to French rule,
Christophe rejected this out of hand. Vastey's writings from this time
are completely shaped by that situation of urgency, which gives him
license to address his fellow Haitians in dramatic terms-"Prepare
yourselves for a war of extermination! It is worthy of you to cease to
exist rather than to cease being Free and Independent!" [Notes, 4).
What Vastey calls the "national war" [Essai, 256), the war of the nation
against any and all external threats, generates the anticolonial, Fanonian dimension of his oeuvre, which dominates in the early publications
and remains something that the postcolonial critic can readily recog
nize and, up to a point, valorize. The "national war" unifies, then, and
produces some of the most readable (for us) portions of his work, but
from the beginning this war is doubled, as he repeatedly lamented, by
the specter of "civil war." The clearly identifiable external threat is
mirrored by a less easily locatable internal threat, casting the unity of
the nation into doubt and rendering the lucid imperatives of anticolo
nial struggle altogether more opaque. It is this internal threat that will
become the increasingly obsessive focus of Vastey's writings, espe
cially once the external threat from France dissipates after 1815. This
passage from the clarity of Haiti's anticolonial struggles to the murky
complexities that are generated by its divided and divisive post/colo22.
After years of internecine strife, once it became clear in 1802 that Napoleon
wanted to reinstitute slavery, "we arrived at a point when we were fighting for our real,
true interests; we were no longer instruments being moved about for our own destruc
tion, in support of a cause that was foreign to us. For the first time we were waging a na
tional war, we were fighting for our rights, for freedom, for independence, for our home
land, for ourselves, in order to extract ourselves from the deathly, tyrannical grip of our
torturers. The French were on one side, the natives [indignes] on the other,- hatred and
the desire for vengeance inflamed our courage; the love of the homeland and of freedom
guided our every step!" (37)

CHRIS BONGIE

83

nial condition is readable in the glaringly asymmetrical structure of his


last book, the Essai sur les causes de la rvolution et des guerres civiles
dHayti. As its double title suggests, this work deals with two quite dif
ferent topics: the five concise, structured chapters with which it begins
deal with the Revolution and Dessalines's short-lived Empire; these are
followed by a sixth chapter, "De la Monarchie et de la Rpublique
d'Hayti, " that extends, in a seemingly chaotic and overly detailed ac
count of the internal divisions of Haiti after 1807, for over two hundred
and fifty pages. The question that the formlessness of this "chapter"
forces upon us is a version of the same question that the greater part of
his writing poses: how do we begin to make sense of and find a value
for this predominant dimension of his oeuvre, the dizzying array of his
torical minutiae that deal with the on-going rivalry between the North
and the South of Haiti?
Vastey's own attempt at making sense of this situation, it would ap
pear, was to transpose the scapegoating mechanism at work in his an
ticolonial critiques of the French and their colonial discourse to the in
ternal politics of the two.Haitis. The rhetoric used against the French
ends up doing double duty in his accounts of Ption's Republic. In
Rflexions politiques, for instance, he identified the French as "the sole
cause [les seuls auteurs] of all our ills" (33), and the devious neocolo
nial representations of Haiti in French writers as the work of a "new
Proteus" (iv). And so, when speaking of Ption, Vastey will, in order to
show "how a people of brothers, united by the same interests, was cru
elly lured into self-division through the intrigues and the inordinate
ambition of one man alone" [Essai, 82), deploy identical language and
tactics, in the service of the very same logic of differentiation, as he did
with the French. Vastey writes, "Ption is the sole cause [seul est
lauteur] of the civil war; he alone has been the treacherous schemer;
he alone is guilty; on him alone fall the hatred and the censure of all
Haitians" [Cri, 2). Ption is the "arch-Proteus" [Cri, 11), and the "lo
gomachy" of his "amphibological prose" [Essai, 338, 224) lends itself
to exactly the same sort of close reading techniques as were applied to
colonial writers.
The positive act of anticolonial national differentiation doubles
back upon itself in a violent act of differentiation within the post/colo
nial nation. This dimension of Vastey's work attempts to purge the na
tion of its internal divisions, and to make sense of them, through the
identification and expulsion of a scapegoat figure, Ption. He is a "mon
ster of dissimulations" [Cri, 5), a "Moloch-like demon of discord" [Cri,

84 Yale French Studies

10), a figure of dirt and disorder. Ption is "filthy [ordurier] in his pri
vate life" [Essai, 68]), a mimic man ("more French than even the
whitest of Frenchmen"), a "Haitian Brutus" reduced to "aping" Chris
tophe [Cr, 15,17). Vastey's pamphlet Cri dla patrie, undoubtedly his
most concerted attack on Ption, concludes with an explicit appeal to
the language of scapegoating, advising Haitians in the South to "chase
him far from you; anathematize him like a monster, like one struck
with the plague, for he will transmit contagion and death to you!" (29).
Lacking an external threat, the community, confronted with the real
ity of its own violence, must ritually expel the scapegoat, who is both
different and the same, "neither too foreign nor too familiar . . . differ
ent enough to dread and loathe, yet enough of a mirror-image to be a
credible point of displacement for one's sins."23 The parts of Vastey's
work that we find difficult to read today are one long attempt at differ
entiating Christophe from Ption (without reducing that difference to
a matter of race, black versus mulatto), at legitimizing the former and
demonizing the latter, separating the dirty from the clean, and im
proper from proper mimeticism (Christophe, by turning Haiti into a
kingdom, with Princes, Barons, Counts, and so on, was simply "fol
lowing the footsteps of our forefathers, imitating all that the world has
produced in the way of wisdom and greatness" [Essai, 153]). Ption's
death in 1818 changes nothing. In Vastey's last book, from 1819, the
place of Ption is taken by his successor, Boyer, but even more obvi
ously by the Republic's own publicists, pamphleteers like Colombel
and Milcent who were themselves intent upon anathematizing in print
their Northern double, Vastey.
Tragedy, as Vastey knew,24 and as Ren Girard has taught us, is a
form of cultural expression that, through the re-enactment of sacrifi
cial violence, provides its audience with a sense of imaginary closure,
a belief in a collective identity that is achieved through the expulsion
of what seems Other but is actually uncannily the Same. Of course,
without a final act, a dnouement that "reaches its end," tragedy
threatens to degenerate into exactly what it was meant to guard
against. Rather than putting an imaginary end to the violence of Haiti's
civil wars, the repetitive, shapeless, directionless mass of Vastey's writ23. Eagleton, Sweet Violence, 279.
24. "Ption dares to call the results of his maneuvers and intrigues with the French
a comedy; I confidently predict that it is in fact a veritable tragedy, of which he is the
principal actor, the dnouement is reaching its end, we are at the fifth act, already count
less arms are raised to punish him for his vile treachery!" [Cri 19).

CHRIS BON GIE

85

ings runs the risk of simply exemplifying and prolonging that violence.
What can we learn from a violence that cannot "reach its end"? This is
the question that the "unreadable" parts of Vastey's oeuvre force us to
consider. For Haitians, who have suffered through two hundred years
of the violence of civil war masquerading as national "independence,"
it remains a burning question, as the recrudescence of this violence in
Haiti's bicentennial year bears terrible witness, with the minions of the
so-called Convergence dmocratiquehatingiorpower with Aristide's
equally thuggish chimres in a conflict aptly characterized as the strug
gle between "two rotten buttocks in a torn pair of trousers."25
And, at least if we are to believe Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's
claims in Empire that we are all living in a time of "omni-crisis," this
burning question takes us far beyond the streets of Port-au-Prince and
Cap-Hatien. The global(ized) time of "omni-crisis" is one in which
the history of imperialist, interimperialist, and antiimperialist wars is
over. The end of that history has ushered in the reign of peace. Or really,
we have entered the era of minor and internal conflicts. Every imperial
war is a civil war, a police actionfrom Los Angeles and Granada [sic]
to Mogadishu and Sarajevo. (189)

In this context of global(ized) civil war, of internal conflicts without ap


parent issue, we have perhaps as much or more to learn from Vastey's
"unreadable" account of the tragically unaccountable internal divi
sions of postindependence Haiti as we do from the more immediately
appealing, "readable" claims that I pointed to in the earlier parts of this
section. For my purposes, however, the vital point to retain from this
brief discussion of the role of scapegoating in Vastey's writings is that
there is essentially no difference between his own insistence on
Ption's "crimes of ambition" [Essai, 118) and Walcott's negative rep
resentations of Christophe's kingdom, whichas we will seesimply
reverse this scapegoating logic, transforming what for Vastey was a con
stitutional monarchy ruled over by a benign and rational monarch into
a place of darkness created by the monstrous ambition of an imitationking who can only transmit contagion and death to his people.
Given that Vastey is the first Haitian writer of any note, and given
the ways in which, as I have shown, his work anticipates and mirrors
many of our own preoccupations with colonialism and its aftermaths,
25.
Haiti Support Group press release, 24 February 2004 (quoting the Workers' Strug
gle (Batay Ouvriye] organization).

86 Yale French Studies


it might be reasonable to suppose that his work is due for a revival.26
He would seem to be a suitable candidate for the process of historical
salvaging that has led, for instance, to the resurgence of interest in
Equiano, whose "renewed popularity," as Srinivas Aravamudan has
pointed out, is related "to the contemporary search for postcolonial and
minority literature that instantiates the multicultural moment."27
Notwithstanding the uneven division of his work between accessible
anticolonial claims and the seemingly inaccessible emphasis on the
minutiae of Haiti's postindependence history, nor any number of ideo
logically "disappointing" aspects to his work, such as the limits of his
understanding of gender,28 his political conservatism and anti-Jacobinism, his obliviousness to the excesses of Christophe's regime,29
some renewal of interest in Vastey could well be expected in the com
ing years.
Without denying that a salvage operation of this sort might happen,
I need to cite one reason why it will, at the very least, be an extremely
difficult thing to accomplish. This reason has to do with the problem
of Vastey's literacy and its uncomfortable complicity with political
powera point that will be of great relevance to my analysis of Wal
cott's plays. The dimensions of this problem can be gathered from Aravamudan's critical account of the whys and wherefores surrounding
the recent resurgence of interest in Equiano, and the "selective hu
manization" to which it testifies (238). In Tropicopolitans, Aravamu
dan sets up a contrast between Equiano's Interesting Narrative and the
letters of some black settlers in Sierra Leone, forcing us to think about
the relation between "the inclusion and imminent canonization of
26. Such a revival was abortively attempted during the black power years, when the
Negro Universities Press republished the 1823 English translation of his Essai, An Essay
on the Causes of the Revolution and Civil Wars ofHayti (1969). It might feasibly be at
tempted now under the less exclusive banner of, say, Black Atlantic, hemispheric, or even
(as I suggested in the previous paragraph) globalization studies.
27. Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 235.
28. On this point, see Wigmoore Francis, "Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Perspectives on Women in the Discourses of Radical Black Caribbean Men," Small
Axe 7/1 (2003): 123-29.
29. Remarking on the building of the Citadelle and Sans Souci, one British com
mentator in the 1820s pointed out that Christophe "compelled blacks and browns, young
and old, boys and girls, of all ages and denominations of citizens, to perform that labour
which ought to have been performed by brutes," adding that "but on this subject. . . De
Vasteyf. . . is] silent." James Franklin, The Present State ofHayti .. . (London: John Mur
ray, 1828),215.

CHRIS BON GIE

87

Equiano into literature and the exclusion and continuing marginaliza


tion of the barely literate Sierre Leoneans" (238). Whereas the former
"makes the transition from literacy to literature .. . the latter instance
of literacy remains functional, local, and ephemeral" (238); the one sat
isfies the demands of the "aesthetics of literariness," while the other
cannot escape the "pragmatics of literacy" (264). The requirements of
a "literary humanism" newly sensitized to the importance of colonial
history are ably filled by Equiano, whose life and work this humanism
"fetishizes" (254), confusing his "literacy, and indeed his literariness,"
with "the larger question of anticolonial agency" (22). This fetishizing
emphasis on Equiano causes us to lose sight of other forms of agency
that, if they find written expression, do so in such a way that their writ
ing simply "dissolves back into its context, which is one of practice"
(238). The prominence of Equiano signals the humanist desire to
"demonstrate literature as the sign of humanity" (270); it is dramatic
evidence of the manner in which "humanism seizes on literacy as self
exposure and makes it a foundational act on which it builds an aes
thetic edifice" (271).
Now, if this is the mechanism through which the salvaging of Black
Atlantic writers is accomplished, then Vastey is a most unlikely can
didate: not simply because of the relative dearth of autobiographical
sentiments in his accounts of slavery and Haitian history, but because,
unlike either the highly individualized Equiano or the barely literate
Sierra Leoneans, Vastey's entire oeuvre is inseparable from its status as
publicit, state-sanctioned writing. As such it reminds us, in Aravamudan's words, that literacy "can also represent a cynical ploy for mas
tery, the tyranny of the Mandarins, or the trahison des clercs" (271). To
what extent can the aesthetic mastery that "literary humanism" cele
brates he divorced from this other, less appealing mastery that is un
comfortably situated somewhere between Aravamudan's two anti
thetical narratives: between a pragmatics of literacy (dissolving back
into its practice, like the letters of the Sierra Leoneans, yet lacking their
"innocent" relation to power) and the aesthetics of literariness through
which Equiano has become newly readable for us (and which Vastey's
work so disturbingly resembles, andyet with which it so obviously fails
to coincide)?
In Henri Christophe, Walcott will anxiously confront these two
forms of masterful literacy and their possible relation, attempting to
dissociate his identity-in-formation as a literary artist from the trou
bling mirror of that identity which the character of Vastey embodies.

88 Yale French Studies


It is the possibility of this dissociation that the real-life Vastey puts into
question when, responding to the former colonist Mazres's claim that
black people will never he anything more than "big children, " he cites
the accomplishments of Christophe's kingdom as evidence to the con
trary, remarking upon how "these 'big children' have had the nerve to
construct citadels, build palaces, write almanachs, to produce black
writers, poets, ministers and men of state" (Maz, 109, my emphasis).
What Vastey suggests here is the epistemic complicity of writers, po
ets, and men of statetheir alliance in one common projectand this
alliance is precisely the thing of darkness that "literary humanism"
must refuse to acknowledge as its own. It is this refusal, this insistence
on separating the poet from the man of state, that will be acted out in
Walcott's scapegoating of Vastey.
At the end of his article on Vastey, Nicholls notes that Christophe's
secretary was "a highly paradoxical figure" ("PVV," 120). It is impossi
ble, he argued, to decide into which category Vastey falls, "true radi
calpointing to a firm foundation for a new national identityor op
portunistic spokesman of a new, self-serving elite." If Walcott's portrait
of Vastey retains significant traces of this paradoxical complexity, its
dominant tendency will be to erase it, along with any uncomfortable
resemblance between his own and Vastey's literacy. It is in an attempt
at restoring a "paradoxical complexity" to the figure of Derek Walcott
that I will be playing him off against Vastey, suggesting that the liter
ary and postcolonial canon's categorical identification of him as a "true
artistpointing to a firm foundation for a new hybrid poetics and iden
tity," needs to be supplemented, doubled, by a troubling awareness of
the ways in which this artistry is inseparable from a ploy for mastery
a ploy for mastery that may well be as characteristic of great writers and
poets as it is of the "treacherous" clerisy from which, over the course
of the past two centuries, they have so assiduously attempted to differ
entiate themselves.
As Paul Farmer notes in his book The Uses of Haiti, a scathing indict
ment of U.S. policies toward Haiti, first published in 1994 with a stir
ring introduction by Noam Chomsky, for many centuries now "Haiti
has been depicted as a singular and isolated place where strange, often
bad, things happen."30 Walcott's representations of postindependence
30.
214.

Paul Farmer, Uses of Haiti, 2nd ed. (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2003],

CHRIS BONGIE

89

Haiti are assuredly complicit with that time-honored depiction. As


Farmer immediately goes on to point out, however, "bad things cer
tainly happen, and frequently, in Haitibut rarely in isolation from an
international social and economic system of which Haiti is a part" (214).
Farmer's analysis provides us with a vital point of view from which to
question Walcott's representations of the aftermath of the Haitian Rev
olution. Since the Haitian section of Drums and Colours, and the first
two-thirds of The Haitian Earth deal with pre-independence SaintDomingue, Walcott has, inevitably, included some consideration of the
role of the French colonists and, especially, of the French forces sent by
Napoleon in 1802 to reinstitute slavery. But once the "necessary up
heaval" has ousted the "civilized empire" from the island, Dessalines
and Christophe's Haiti is represented as being completely detached
from the neocolonial "international social and economic system" that
Vastey devoted so much of his work to exposing and decrying.
Walcott portrays Dessalines and Christophe as acting from a self
generated hubris. These would-be fathers of the nation may have been
shaped to their moral detriment by the injustices of the colonial past
(Walcott's plays certainly admit that), but their actions are in no way
represented as responses to the contemporary systemic pressures that
might explain why these kings acted as they did, why their postinde
pendence bleeding of the peasantry took the particular forms it did.
Walcott's decision to isolate Dessalines and Christophe from any and
all systemic considerations evidently derives from the conventions of
the tragic genre that, as a youth, he chose to imitate when writing Henri
Christophe. This mimesis of tragic scapegoating, however, soon turned
into a fixed view of the world, one that continues to inform the later
plays, despite their drift away from any formal imitation of tragedy.
Walcott's emphasis on the individual corruption of slaves into tyrants
becomes an excuse for not performing the sort of history Farmer calls
for. It sanctions the kind of readings with which the skeptical human
ist is all too pleased, as when Bruce King notes, that "Henri Christophe
is less a celebration of the Haitian revolt against France than a study in
why it went wrong, why its black heroes and the first black anticolo
nial revolt produced tyranny and even greater hardship for the blacks"
(my emphasis).31
The above comments, to be sure, must appear to some readers as an
31.
Bruce King, Derek Walcott and West Indian Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1995), 94.

90 Yale French Studies


intolerably vulgar critique of literature: "You can't expect an 'artist'
like Walcott to grapple with the sort of social, economic, and historic
nuances that interest a radical like Noam Chomsky!" For those read
ers, such a historically grounded critique is unfair to Walcott because,
after all, if one takes his many refutations of the "sigh of History" se
riously, such nuances are simply irrelevant to his agenda as a writer. As
he states in a recent interview, "I just avoid the political solution of
art,"32 and it would be a needless exercise simply to chasten him for
not taking into account what he is manifestly proud of avoiding. But
the critique is needed, in the case of these plays at least, and not sim
ply for the obvious reason that they are historical plays (in a way that,
say, Dream on Monkey Mountain is not), albeit historical plays that ob
sessively draw our attention to the "monotonies of history." It is also
warranted because the obvious aim of the plays, which is achieved
through tragic scapegoating and appeals to the skeptical humanist in
all of us, is inseparable from a much more ideologically specific narra
tive about postindependence Haiti that cannot be as easily defended
from critical interrogation as the defenders of Walcott the "artist"
the visionary advocate of "real faith, mapless, Historyless," {WTS,
83)might wish. Nowhere is this ideologically positioned, histori
cally nuanced narrative more evident than in Walcott's treatment of
Ption's Southern Republic in the plays.
The target of so many of Baron Vastey's polemics, Ption is a mar
ginal but structurally, and ideologically, necessary presence in Henri
Christophe and The Haitian Earth. As Henri Christophe draws to a
close, with Christophe's kingdom on the verge of collapse, Ption is
represented as the "power" who will supplant Christophe. Vastey, the
king's sole remaining companion, notes that:
. . . Ption is coming waving a new constitution.
Ragged herds follow. Oh, if he knew, or they,
How they were marching tall into the grave, murders, fevers,
And what responsibility the crown tightens. (100)
Physically paralyzed and having resolved to take his own life rather
than be captured, Christophe soon after exclaims: "Ption is powerful.
They are coming. / They are coming, Vastey" (102). This exclamation
leads directly into a key speech of Walcott's Vastey:
32.
Natasha Saj and George Handley, "Sharing in the Exhilaration: An Interview
with Derek Walcott," Ariel32/2 (2001 ): 132.

CHRIS BONGIE

91

Hither a new king, and another archbishop,


Monotonies of history .. .
We are finished, Majesty,
We were a tragedy of success. (103, Walcott's ellipsis)
Ption is thus figured as the inheritor of Christophe's "dark monarchy, "
whether to play the Fortinbras-like role of restorer of order in a posttragic world or, more likely, given what we have already witnessed in
the play, to become himself in turn the victim of History and its mo
notonous succession of hubristic rulers.
However one is to feel about the coming of Ption at the end of Henri
Christophe, the natural assumption of any reader not acquainted with
postindependence Haitian history must be that he was still alive at the
time of Christophe's death in 1820. Ption, of course, had been dead
since 1818, his place taken by Boyer. What seems a minor anachronism,
I would argue, has major implications for assessing Walcott's under
standing of Haitian history, especially if one adds to that anachronism
the fact that Ption in this play comes across as some sort of rebel leader
with no state of his own to rule. The reader gets little or no sense from
the play that Ption did indeed know "what responsibility the crown
tightens," having ruled, in an increasingly autocratic fashion, the
Southern Republic from 1807 to the day he died, eventually renounc
ing the facade of republicanism and becoming its president-for-life. The
anachronism is to be explained by Walcott's desire to represent the
postrevolutionary condition in terms of a monotonously linear suc
cession of rulers,33 while his related desire to oppose a "good" republi
canism to a "bad" monarchism accounts for his failure to clarify what
exactly Ption was doing during Christophe's reign. These simplifying
moves evade the complexities of the double rule to which the former
Saint-Domingue was subject in the decade following Dessalines's as
sassination in 1806. There will be nothing "new" about the constitu
tion "Ption" brings to Christophe's former kingdom, simply more of
the same old policies that had governed the South over the previous
decade. These policies, perhaps more benevolent and liberal in certain
33.
We also see this desire at work in the anachronism with which Henri Christophe
begins: Dessalines and Christophe are, in an independent Haiti, still awaiting word of
the fate of Toussaint,- the announcement of his death will initiate the struggle over the
succession that occupies the opening scenes of Act One. Of course, in historical time,
what intervenes between the death of Toussaint and the birth of Dessalines's Republic,
then Empire, is the defeat of the French in the Fall of 1803; Walcott's elision of what pro
vides the culminating moment of James's Black Jacobins could not be more telling.

92 Yale French Studies

respects, were also decidedly more complicit with French neocolo


nialism, as evidenced by the events of 1814-15 against which Vastey
fulminated and that would turn out to be a dress rehearsal for the
Franco-Haitian accord of 1825. In that year, Haiti's independence was
"recognized" by France in return for accepting the imposition of harsh
indemnitiesa treaty that, as Farmer puts it, "led to decades of French
domination of Haitian finance, and had a catastrophic effect on the new
nation's delicate economy" (67), and that would have confirmed the
real-life Vastey's warning in 1819 that "Ption is dead, but his plan and
his projects live on" [Essai, 363). For reasons having to do with both the
tragic convention of scapegoating and the philosophical demands of his
emerging "skeptical humanism, " the young Walcott wanted to impose
a linear pattern on postindependence Haitian history, disregarding
the fractiousindeed fractalrelations between Christophe's and
Ption's coeval rival states.
Although it is a strong claim, I would argue that Walcott's decision
to situate Ption on the margins of History, placing the entire focus on
a scapegoating critique of Christophe's "oppressive" monarchical am
bitions, colludes with what Nicholls has identified as the "mulatto leg
end" that played such an important ideological role in the work of the
founding fathers of Haitian historiography, mid-nineteenth-century
writers such as the Ardouin brothers and Saint-Rmy. According to this
legend, in Nicholls's words, "Dessalines is portrayed as despotic, bar
barous and ignorant; Christophe was also despotic and prejudiced
against the coloureds. Ption, on the other hand, was everything
that is virtuous: liberal, humane, democratic, mild, civilised, honest,
as was Boyer, his lineal successor" [FDD, 91). Ption was said to have
"founded a liberal and democratic republic," whereas Christophe "was
the embodiment of all that was worst in the Haitian political tradition"
(98). If Walcott's shadowy Ption is certainly not "the heroic figur&par
excellence" required by the mulatto legend, it is nonetheless fair to say
that Walcott plays into, and perversely echoes, this legend through his
obsessive focus on Christophe's "autocratic" nature and the way in
which he makes it seem as if Christophe's actions were entirely self
generated rather than a considered response to the complex "interna
tional social and economic system" in which Haiti, or rather the two
Haitis, found itself (themselves) in the years following independence.
In theory at least, as Vastey's writings convincingly suggest, the choice
of a constitutional monarchy might well have provided a better foun
dation for an independent Haitian state than the Francophile "repub-

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93

lie'' of Ption, whose ostensibly more "enlightened" policies paved the


way, among other things, for neocolonial domination and the harden
ing of racial lines dividing mulatto elite and black majority. But
Christophe's imitation kingdom, a decided anomaly in postcolonial
modes of governance, provided an easy scapegoat for the young play
wright intent upon writing himself into English literary history by
means of an imitation tragedy. In its evasion of any representation of
Ption's "republic," Henri Christophe diverts its audience from think
ing another, less dramatic but more typically postcolonial tragedy, that
might have gone under the title Ption.
Given that Walcott was careful in The Haitian Earth to correct
some of the more obvious, indeed nonsensical, historical anachro
nisms of Drums and Colours,34 it is at one level very surprising that he
failed to address the anachronistic nature of his portrayal of the fall of
Christophe in this later play. The story of Christophe's fall in The Hai
tian Earth is, it should be noted, a mere addendum to the main action
of this play, the focus of which is primarily on the animalistic brutal
ity of Dessalines (and, in a nod to the "sordid tyranny" of the Revolu
tion itself, on the ways this brutality was anticipated in the bloodbaths
perpetrated by Toussaint before independence, notably his "slaughter"
of Rigaud's mulatto army). The entire second act of Henri Christophe,
which dealt with the rise and fall of Christophe's kingdom, is reduced
to a two-scene (eight-page) postscript. This undeveloped postscript is
obviously only there to reinforce Walcott's thesis about the "monoto
nies of history": namely, that Christophe will double Dessalines, who
doubled Toussaint, in his desire to be king, and that kings are bad. The
tail-end nature of these scenes makes them, from a formal point of
view, unsuccessful, to say the least; they are exemplary of the many
"choppy scenes [in the Trilogy that| are too short for dramatic coher
ence."35 The fact that Ption is still present at the structurally flawed
tail-end of The Haitian Earth, waiting to inherit Christophe's "dark
34. In this second play of the Trilogy, notably, Walcott conflates 1791 (the outbreak
of the slave revolt) and 1802 (the arrival of Napoleon's forces, led by Leclerc). That the
play abounds with historical errors could be justified by the fact that this entire play is,
as the Prologue makes clear, Caribbean history as re-told by carnival maskers. Lacking
the sort of meta-theatrical frame of Drums and Colours, the first and third plays of the
Trilogy, by contrast, can only with the greatest of difficulty sustain this charitable, "carnivalized" reading.
35. Cynthia Haven, Review of The Haitian Trilogy, in San Francisco Chronicle (19
May 2002). The extremely episodic, choppy nature of this play can partly be attributed
to the fact that it was originally intended as a screenplay.

94 Yale French Studies

monarchy/' only goes to show just how important the ideological vi


sion that resulted in Henri Christophe's distortions of Haitian history
was to Walcott: it was not the adventitious result of being a teenager
with a perhaps shaky grasp of the relevant dates, but the ineluctable by
product of a desire to represent History as a monotonous tragedy, and
those who, like Christophe, would be the representatives of that His
tory as the problem rather than simply a part of it.
In The Haitian Earth Walcott maintains the anachronistic fiction
of Ption coming to replace Christophe, but with two significant dif
ferences. First, and most obviously, the Walcott of 1984 has found it
rhetorically necessary to provide a positive counter-balance to the
tragic focus on post-revolutionary Haiti's hubristic rulers. Throughout
the play, and especially at its conclusion, the monotonous story of His
tory is interwoven with an alternative story about the "people," who
are manifestly good, the long-suffering victims of the likes of Dessalines and Christophe.36 The "people" are embodied by the attractive,
good-hearted mulatress, Yette, and her black husband, Pompey, the
"sweat and salt of the earth. " Previously raped by Dessalines, Yette be
comes the focal point of the final two scenes, in which she is arrested
for sticking pins into the leg of a doll version of Christophe, chanting
all the while the mantra "No more kings. No more kings. No more
kings" (428). Christophe, whose paralysis, we are led to assume, was
caused by Yette's actions, has her arrested and executed, but not before
the play closes with some pointedly inspirational moments, such as
Yette breaking into song ('Haiti, Haiti, I shall love you. / I shall join
the Haitian earth, " etc. [433, Walcott's italics]), and Pompey launching
into a long monologue about the deleterious effects of the endless suc
cession of kings to which Haiti has been subject since the expulsion of
the French ("My country and your kingdom, Majesty. One long, long
night. Is kings who do us that" [431]). In this rhetorically attractive ap
peal to the "people," Walcott assertively transforms the closural logic
of his play, shifting it away from Henri Christophe's emphasis on the
"cease of majesty" toward the suffering bodies of Yette and Pompey,
who at the end buries his love "in the Haitian earth, " after singing a lit36.
This same recourse to the opposition between the "people" and their rulers is to
be found, with the names changed, in Vastey, as when he states that "the Haytian peo
ple cannot be guilty of the crimes of Rigaud and Ption; Haytians of both colors have been
equally deceived, and have even been the victims of the passions of those two factionists" [Essai 123].

CHRIS BONGIE

95

tie song with the Chorus and Peasants in which he asserts that "They
cannot take oui faith from us, / We, who suffered many things, / All
the soldiers, guns, and drummers, / All the emperors and kings" (434,
Walcott's italics).
If, as Walcott states in the first sentence of his taciturn Foreword,
"the writing of these plays spans an arc of nearly forty years, " then the
sanctioned reading of that arc would unquestionably he to see in Wal
cott's turn toward the "people" an evolution in his thinking and in
his poetic craft: from the at times oppressive mimeticism of Henri
Christophe, and its "high Elizabethan Jacobean style," to the more
"original" style and approach of The Haitian Earth. It is this evolution
ary reading of the "arc," predictably enough, that the back cover blurb
for the Trilogy encourages, by informing us that in these plays Walcott
"carved ... a sounding room for his own maturing voice"; on this read
ing, the Trilogy as a whole can be made sense of autobiographically, as
charting the emergence of the "real" Walcott, master of his literary craft
andas an added bonus"right-on" spokesperson for the wretched of
the earth, from the ashes of his adolescent play and its pointedly
mimetic excesses. And yet we cannot, I think, be satisfied with this
stark, and stock, opposition between "immature" and "mature" writer,
any more than we can with the appealing distinction between Christophc's "kingdom" and Pompey's "country." The evolutionary reading
of these plays is troubled, falters badly, not onlyin an argument that
others will be better prepared to make than Ibecause of the obvious
gender biases that inform Walcott's counter-foundational fiction about
the Haitian people (I am thinking here of the revealing way in which the
unity of the "country" is allegorized in terms of a union between a mu
latto prostitute and the good-hearted black man whose love redeems
her37), but by the second significant difference between the first and the
last play of the Trilogy. This second difference becomes especially visi
ble in Walcott's seemingly needless emphasis on the same historical
anachronism with which Henri Christophe endsan anachronism that
is, if anything, reinforced in The Haitian Earth.
The soldier who has witnessed Yette's act of sticking pins in her lit
tle Christophe-surrogate informs the king that "She prayed for victory
37.
An extremely relevant point of reference here is Elaine Savory's 1986 critique of
the "macho" overtones of Walcott's work from the late seventies and early eighties; see
"Value Judgements on Art and the Question of Macho Attitude: The Case of Derek Wal
cott," Journal of Commonwealth Studies 21/1 (1986!: 109-19.

96 Yale French Studies

for General Rigaud, / The enemy of our Emperor Henri Christophe"


(429). Christophe then turns to her and asks,
Didn't you remember I was your King?
Perhaps you cannot believe in a black king!
You prayed for this mulatto. But of course.
You and he are the same people.
Did you see victory for Ption? Eh?
For you and all the mulattos, eh? Multresse? (429)

In this exchange, the anachronistic vision of Hemi Christophe is dou


bled. Now it is not just one dead rival of Christophe's who is treated as
if he were alive but a second, Rigaud, himself a bitter rival of both
Toussaint and Ption, and who died in 1811, one year after leading a
short-lived secession of the South of Haiti from Ption's Republic.
What is going on here? Is the soldier merely stating what Christophe
wants to hear? (We know he is not entirely in control of the facts, since
he refers to Christophe as "Emperor.") Are Christophe's words to be un
derstood as part of some monomaniacal hallucination in which thepast
and the present have become jumbled up with one another? The char
itable reader of Walcott might well make some such case. What can't
be denied, however, is that the representation of Christophe here de
ploys yet another prime ingredient of the mulatto legend, which was
not especially evident in Henri Christophe: namely, the king's sup
posed "prejudice . .. against the coloureds" (Nicholls, FDD, 91). If
Yette's love for Pompey stands as ample proof that Christophe is wrong
about her loyalty to her own "people," and that she has overcome her
earlier "dislike" for black people (339), this exchange not only adds a
new layer to Christophe's character, but reinforces the insistence
throughout this last play of the Trilogy on Ption's mulatto "differ
ence" from Haiti's black emperors and kings. (Dessalines had, for in
stance, earlier spoken of "Ption and his mulatto army" [419]). In fact,
this play, extending the preoccupation with black/mulatto difference
that first surfaced in the Haitian episode of Drums and Colours, focuses
obsessively on that difference as a way of conveying the "sordid
tyranny" of the Revolution and its aftermath.
This opposition is a convenient, and by no means entirely false, ex
planation for the internecine violence that characterized Haitian his
tory both before and after 1804, the civil wars between Rigaud and
Toussaint, and those between Ption and Christophe. But we would do
well to keep in mind Nicholls's claim, speaking specifically of the ri-

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97

valry between Christophe's kingdom and Ption's republic, that "in


discussing the conflicts between contending groups in Haiti, histori
ans have frequently over-simplified the divisions in terms of colour and
failed to note the importance of regional and class factors" ("PW/'
110). This is, put bluntly, exactly what Walcott does in both Diums and
Colours and Haitian Earth. Nicholls argues, by contrast, that "the
struggle between the two states was not basically caused by colour dif
ferences" [FDD, 56); nor was it "the result of a struggle between eco
nomic classes" (as in the struggle between Toussaint and Rigaud), or "a
dispute resulting from differing conceptions of government, though it
was on this level that most of the propaganda was put forth," "the dif
ference between the kingdom and the republic, with respect to polity,
[being] by no means as great as the ideologists of either side suggested"
(57). According to Nicholls, it was simply a "struggle which stemmed
from regional and personal loyalties," not between two social classes
but "between two cliques within a single class" (60). In this sense it
was a "contest between two self-seeking elites," rather than the opposi
tion between "democracy and aristocracy" or "liberal democracy and
despotic autocracy" that purveyors of the mulatto legend in subse
quent decades would make it out to be (60). The hardening of class and
color lines, Nicholls asserts, would only take place after the reunifica
tion of Haiti, under Boyer's regime.
These sorts of subtle distinctions, absent from Walcott's black and
yellow portrait of postindependence Haiti in The Haitian Earth, are to
be found throughout the oeuvre of the real-life Vastey. To take but one
example: in Rflexions politiques, he notes that one result of the fact
that the North-West has always been commanded by black generals and
the South-West by generals of color "is that European writers, who do
not possess a strong understanding of the locales, have fallen into great
errors. To hear them tell it, they believe the blacks exclusively inhabit
the North-West, and that the South-West is only inhabited by men of
color." Whereas in fact, all over Haiti one finds more or less the same
mix of 85%, blacks 15% colored, this "mixture having always been in
existence, and it could not be otherwise, since nature itself establishes
links between families and promotes the crossing of races" ( 124-25). In
Haiti's civil wars, people have, he goes on to point out, fought on one
side or the other "according to the territory in which they are situated,
rather than to an individual's opinions or his color." In short, the epi
thets of ngres du Nord and multres du Sud are to be avoided not only
because they give a false idea of Haitian demographics, but because all

98 Yale French Studies

Haitians share the same country and the same (African) origin (158). In
Haitian Earth Walcott makes much the same claim about the unity of
the Haitian people, the need to transcend the North-Negro/South-mulatto divide that Vastey identifies as a colonial (mis)representation of
Haitian realities, but he does so by taking the division as realas well
as, it should be added, by repeatedly associating the figure of the mu
latto with mixed (Euro-African) racial and cultural origins, something
Vastey pointedly refused to do. The final play of the Trilogy veritably
feasts upon the words "black" and "mulatto," offering them up as a de
finitive "solution" to the mystery of Haiti's civil wars: this is the ver
sion of History that both Drums and Colours and The Haitian Earth
convey, translating what was in reality a much more fluid and complex
state of affairs into a fixed opposition. In an indirect manner, this re
sponded to Walcott's own anxieties in the 1950s and 1960s about his
"mulatto" identity (well chronicled in the much anthologized poem "A
Far Cry from Africa") and his related distaste for what he contemptu
ously referred to in his 1974 essay "The Muse of History" as the "new
magnifiers of Africa, " the "glorif iers of the tom-tom" ( WTS, 42,44). Wal
cott fails to resist the dichotomization of history that Vastey in his own
work constantly argued against. Indeed, his fictional Vastey, as we will
now see, in the closing twist of my argument, becomesin the transi
tion from the first to the last play of the Trilogya sacrificial victim of
this hardening of racial lines in Walcott's understanding and represen
tation of the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath.
Walcott's representation of Vastey suffers a major sea-change in the
transition from Henri Christophe, where he plays a prominent role, to
The Haitian Earth, where he is emphatically marginalized. In the first
play, Vastey is, significantly, not identified as either a black or a mu
latto. He plays the role of lago to Christophe's Desdemona-less Othello,
a character of motiveless malignancy. His first appearance in the play
emphasizes the Machiavellian dimension to his character. He advises
Christophe, who is infuriated at Dessalines for having seized power im
mediately after news of Toussaint's death reached Haiti, to play "the
"chessboard of history . . . with duplicity, / Until you are King by the
hand of history" (28)a bit of conniving advice that the more forth
right Christophe rejects. Vastey is Christophe's duplicitous propagan
dist, a willing tool of power, whom Christophe describes as the only
person who understands his "nigger search for fame" (65-66). Cynical
and mercenary ("1 am tired of war; I want a little money. / But I'd make
war to get money" [30]), Vastey takes center-stage in Part Two of the

CHRIS BONGIE

99

play, much of which is taken up with the machinations through which,


for inscrutable reasons,38 he brings about the death of Christophe's
archbishop Brelle. Brelle's murder (an event that, in historical time,
took place in 1817) is in the play followed a few days later by Chris
tophe's paralysis and suicide (which took place in 1820). In a dramati
cally improbable volte-face, in large part due, no doubt, to the teenage
author's still tentative mastery of his dramatic craft, Vastey is over
come with guilt (whether due to sincere repentance or cowardice re
mains questionable), and is captured by Ption's forces at the very mo
ment that Christophe puts an end to his own life. The off-stage murder
of Vastey at the end of the play doubles that of Christophe's on-stage
suicide, which in turn doubles the assassination of Dessalines with
which Part One ended. While neither Dessalines nor Christophe seem
to regret their decision to become kings, Vastey shows a more peni
tent understanding of their mutual hubris, voicing insights into the
"tragedy of success" and the "monotonies of history" thathe wouldappear to share with his author, Walcott.
And that is precisely the point: insights that he shares with Walcott.
If in Aim Csaire's later play La tragdie du roi Christophe (1963),
Christophe manifestly functions as the author's problematic double,39
in Walcott's play it is Vastey who comes closest to filling this role, serv
ing as a sounding-board for the young Walcott in his attempts at think
ing about the relation between the writer and the state, between the lit
erate colonial subject and the anti- or postcolonial representations that
his literacy might make possible. This ambivalent identification is able
to make itself heard, barely, alongside the clamorous assumptions and
38. The only possible motive for Vastey's vindictive actions might be the color of
Brelle's skin: Vastey disdainfully refers to Brelle's "obvious love for clear complexions, /
His pride in Ption, his dislike / Of being repeatedly contradicted" (81-82).
39. As Nick Nesbitt has recently pointed out, the figure of Christophe serves as an
authorial double for Csaire, one in whom the absolutist pretensions of Csaire's own
earlier poetics and politics come to a head: see Voicing Memory: History and Subjectiv
ity in French Caribbean literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003),
127-44. Christophe is the dominant, and eminently singular, protagonist of Csaire's
play, and the other characters, including Vastey, play subordinate roles. Csaire's Vastey
does figure prominently at tire end of the play, however, and indeed gets its last word. Be
fore his suicide, Csaire's Christophe deliriously asserts that Vastey will take command
of his kingdom and addresses him in terms that attempt to rewrite his racially mixed ori
gins into a triumphant assertion of Ngritude, transforming him from a "little griffe"
a "variety of Haitian mtis," as Csaire's footnote tells ustoa "Negro" ("I baptize you,
I name you, I crown you ngre..." {La Tragdie du Roi Christophe [Paris: Prsence
africaine, 1963] 150). Only at this point, after having been baptized a "Negro," does C-

100 Yale French Studies


demands of the scapegoating mechanism that has already been set into
motion in his portrayal of historical characters like Christophe and
Vasteyand which will in later works flower into a scapegoating of
"the fever of History" itself. The largely dismissive portrait in Henri
Christophe of Vastey as degraded writer and mimic man"secretary;
afterwards a baron," as he is described in the Cast of Charactersis
haunted by the ghostly presence of another more complicated, and complicitous, reading of him: in that reading, Vastey stands in for the pub
lic intellectual that the young Walcott might well have envisioned him
self becoming, but that he eventually rejected as antithetical to the
responsibilities of the conscientious, and resolutely private, "artist. " By
the time Walcott got around to theorizing explicitly his aesthetic credo
in "mature" essays like "The Muse of History," the "corruption" of the
public intellectualthe "treason of clerks . . . the treason of the intel
lectuals" (WTS, 55)is a potential within himself that he will have
erased from view, at least in his polemical essays and his less success
ful poetry and plays. In later life, Walcott would be fond of quoting
Yeats's claim that "the quarrel with others is rhetoric, and the quarrel
with ourselves is poetry."40 From that perspective it can be argued that
there is a certain poetry in Henri Christophe and a good deal of rhetoric
in the later play, where Walcott has almost entirely absented himself
from the text as a possible target of criticism, shunting a cultural inter
mediary like Vastey to the margins of the stage and leaving it open for
the simple conflict between corrupt kings and long-suffering people.
The (dis)identification in Henri Christophe with Vastey and his lit
eracy is specifically played out in two mirroring scenes of reading in
Part Two of the play: the first, a negatively charged scene where Vastey,
in Machiavellian fashion, manipulates written words for his own in
scrutable purposes; the second, a positive one in which Vastey is seen
saire's Vastey cease being a faceless functionary and assume a central position. Where be
fore his language had been direct and transparent, he concludes the play with a grandil
oquent elegy for the dead Christophe, speaking the dense, hermetic language of Csaire's
lyric poetry. The sacrifice of Christophe (of the author's "absolutist" desire for political
and poetic authority) thus frees Csaire to speak through another voice, an elegiac voice
that will not assume real political power but that has, precisely by virtue of its new dis
tance from that power, become the authentic medium through which the power of lit
erature can speak. The power of Christophe's swotd and of Vastey's pen are not doubled,
as in Walcott's Hemi Christophs, but joined together in a line of succession that offers
an "innocent" alternative to the conquering army of Ption's successor, Boyer.
40. Saj and Handley, "Sharing," 134.

CHRIS BONGIE 101

to have initiated his king into the world of literature (indeed, into world
literature). The first scene builds on negative representations of writ
ing in Part One, such as when Vastey, who is talcing dictation from
Christophe, asks the then-Commissioner of Internal Affairs under
Dessalines to look at the "copy" of a document he is to sign, and
Christophe, after noting "You know I cannot read," inquires whether
it is intact: "I hope you have not obscured plain fact / in a smoke of
Latin expressions?" (31). Ashamed of the fact that he is up to his neck
in paper, Christophe then imagines himself "bleed[ing] ink, so many
papers, white men's ways" (32). Writing is here associated with the un
original world of the copy, a deceptive power to conceal reality, the
"smoke" of dead languages, a black fall into a white world. This nega
tive vision of writing and reading is brought to a head in the account of
Brelle's downfall in Part Two, which Vastey manages to bring about by
exploiting the illiteracy of Christophe and his entourage: having given
an attendant two letters bearing "the postmark of the south," and hav
ing made sure that he cannot read (78), Vastey orders him to put the let
ters in Brelle's vestments when the archbishop is not looking. Vastey
then suggests to Christophe (in an alliterative language that has, from
the outset, signaled his rhetorical, manipulative relation to language)
that the archbishop is "perhaps plotting piety with Ption "(81) and ad
vises that Christophe have Brelle's vestments searched. After finding
the forged letters, the king does entertain the possibility that he is be
ing tricked by Vastey ("1 cannot read it. But what if it is / A trick of
Vastey's" [85]), but nonetheless ends up murdering the sanctimonious
archbishop for his supposed treason.
If the power to manipulate reality through reading and writing is
thus, in this penultimate episode of the play, brought to the fore, in that
same episode we get a glimpse of another literacy, one that makes pos
sible not a negative manipulation of reality but a positive understand
ing of it, indeed a poetic understanding. Having handed over the two
letters to the attendant, Vastey awaits Christophe in the throne room.
The king enters, commenting on the sound of church music that is
coming from an adjacent room:
When I hear madrigals, requiems,
It is so much like constructing citadels, chteaux,
Or, sometimes, Vastey, in the labyrinth brain,
The theme runs out its threads likewho was itTheseus,
That book you read me, descending down the spirals of the ear . .. (79)

102 Yale French Studies


This passage stresses an opposition of prime thematic importance to
Walcott's rendering of Christophe: it activates the contrast between the
architectural clarity of his vertically ascending visionhis ambitious
dreams of constructing a country and monuments worthy of itand
the downward spiral that has resulted from his hubristic attempts at
giving substance to that vision.
But the vital point to register here is that this understanding of the
labyrinthine dimension of Christophe's existence has only been made
possible for Christophe and for Walcott's audience through Vastey's act
of reading (which doubles the young Walcott's own readings of Greek
myth and Western literature). The book Vastey read Christophe en
hances our understanding of the king: we can now see him as a Theseus
without a thread to lead him from the labyrinth of his dark monarchy
back into the light. This cross-cultural -way of "seeing" the Caribbean,
made possible by Vastey/Walcott's literacy, will eventually become the
trademark of Walcott's writing, the foundation upon which muchvaunted works like Omeros will be built and for which they will be ef
fusively praised. This passage thus anticipates a (postcolonial) writing
that will redeem the act of reading from the negative associations we
have discussed, but it also insinuatesas its inseparability from a prob
lematic character like Vastey suggeststhat such writing will never
be entirely "innocent" of its origins, never entirely divorced from the
(colonial) conditions that made the reading upon which it was founded
possible in the first place. Vastey himself, at the end, having seen the
error of his Machiavellian ways, laments: "There are broken statues /
On my tongue, dead stale civilizations / Breeding in my brain" (99).
The price of being able to readto read the figure of Theseus in(to) that
of Christophe, for instanceis to suffer the weight of these broken s tat
es on one's tongue. To be sure, we find echoes of this lament in Wal
cott's later poetry,41 but precious few admissions of the guilt to which
a repentant (or simply terrified) Vastey falls prey ("Oh, Henri, we are
guilty; admit, admit, it's time" [102]).
Vastey's role is greatly diminished in The Haitian Earth, as part of
what might charitably be interpreted as Walcott's attempt at a more
polyphonic rendering of revolutionary and postrevolutionary Haiti. Pie
41.
In Omeros, the narrator asks "When would my head shake off its echoes like a
horse / shaking off a wreath of flies? When would it stop / the echo in the throat, insist
ing, 'Omeros'; / when would 1 enter that light beyond metaphor?" (271). For my com
mentary on these lines, see Islands and Exiles, 427.

CHRIS BONGIE

103

is briefly present in an early scene (occurring in the months before the


slave revolt of August 1791), but is represented not in singular terms,
as in Henri Christophe, but simply as part of a group of mulattoes (as
stated previously, it is only in this play from the 1980s that Vastey's in
ter-racial identity is made explicit). In this scene, significantly enough,
he is pointedly differentiated from Christophe, who expresses his con
tempt for Vastey and his fellow mulattoes, labeling his future secretary
"Aphilosophical monkey, / Always pronouncing big words /Imported
on the last boat" (318); the two men almost come to blows at this point.
Christophe's contempt for Vastey and the other mulattoes allows Wal
cott to dissolve what had, in Henri Christophe, been the intense dou
bling of the literate, post/colonial intellectual and the man who would
be History ("I am the history of which you speak, " Christophe reminds
Vastey early on in Henri Christophe [28]). The ambivalence of the
young Walcott's representation of literacy and literature in his early
play, filtered through the figure of Vastey, proves too dangerously selfimplicating for the "mature" Walcott, and in this last play of the Tril
ogy he does all he can to reduce and even erase those tensions.42 Wal
cott divests himself of his prior investment in a "guilty" cultural
intermediary such as the complicitous Vastey, thereby solidifying the
straightforward binary opposition between "corrupt" kings and oppressed-but-bursting-into-song people upon which the play depends. It
is perhaps for this very reason that Walcott can now afford to impose
upon Vastey the precise racial label that his former alter ego lacked in
Henri Christophe: the label of "mulatto" that would, in 1950, have in
eluctably drawn Walcottwho at that time was still very much posi
tioned in, and identified with, "an English-speaking high-brown lite
in a society in which education, colour, position, property, propriety,
and family counted" (King, DWCL, 13)even further into a mirror re
lationship with the problematic likes of Vastey. In Haitian Earth,
42.
A more obvious approach to Walcott's shifting modes of identification in the Tril
ogy, his anxious play with historical alter egos, would examine the dramatically trans
formed role of the mulatto Anton in the passage from Drums and Colours to The Hai
tian Earth. The 1958 Anton, a sympathetic figure, killed for no good reason by the black
insurgents, is an obvious double of Walcott himself: his statement that "I am myself a
division. / By the fact that I am half African and half French, / I must become both spec
tator and victim" (226-27) dearly echoes Walcott's famous claim in "A Far Cry from
Africa" that he is poisoned by the blood of both his African and European ancestors. The
1984 Anton, by contrast, is a far less sympathetic figure, and one, significantly enough,
who ends up renouncing his ambition to he a writer and goes off to fight in the "yellow
army" against the insurgent blacks.

104 Yale French Studies


Vastey can now be represented as nothing more than one among a group
of more or less indistinguishable colored mimic men, a far cry from the
singular "mulatto of style" that Walcott had succeeded in fashioning
himself as in the decade following the publication of Henri Christophe.
This distancing of Walcott from the public intellectual who had earlier
served as his problematic double is further emphasized by Vastey's vir
tual absence from the second, final act of the play, in which he is given
only one line.
If the reduced role of Vastey in Haitian Earth signals Walcott's dis
tancing of himself from his erstwhile double, traces of that prior in
vestment can nonetheless still be found in his new, greatly diminished
representation of Vastey. The significant number of small but telling
slips and doublings that accompany this representation can be read as
signs that the ghost of (himself as) Vastey still haunts Walcott. From
Vastey's first introduction in the play, for instance, the stage directions
make it difficult for us to distinguish him as a character:
Auberge de la Couronne. Laughter; drunken citizens, proprietor.
Christophe, as a waiter, serving drinks to a table of mulattos sitting
apart. A student, vastey baron. (313)
As becomes fairly clear in the subsequent dialogue, there are three mulattoes sitting at the table; the lack of a comma separating Vastey from
the Baron is, no doubt, at one level simply a typo, but it also testifies to
a symptomatic confusion in the text. Not only does the lack of a comma
draw the words "Vastey" and "Baron" together in a way that antici
pates the historical emergence of Baron de Vastey, but it also serves to
assimilate Vastey to the only Baron listed in the Cast of Characters, a
white Baron who has already made an appearance in the play and who
is explicitly modelled on the French writer Baron de Wimpffen (author
of a book critical of slavery in colonial Saint-Domingue). There is ulti
mately little doubt that the Baron, in this episode, is neither Vastey nor
the white Baron, the "visitor to Haiti" referred to in the Cast of Char
acters, but another, unnamed mulatto. (After slapping him in the face,
Christophe exclaims "Wipe your nose, Baron. One day you will all
have / To make up your minds if you're white or black" [320]). Vastey's
troublingly elusive identity, vacillating between the white Baron, the
mulatto Baron, and the Baron that he himself will in the future become
betrays, to say the least, some doubt on Walcott's part as to who Vastey
is and how he is to function in this play.
The confusing proliferation of Barons in Act 1 is, in turn, matched

CHRIS BONGIE

105

by the double appearance of Vastey's Christian name, Pompey, later on


in the play. It is surely no coincidence that the problematic figure of lit
eracy, Pompey de Vastey, is doubled in this play by the populist figure
of the noble black peasant, Pompey (who first appeared in Drums and
Colours, "a play with no hero, except Pompey, the parody calypsoldier,
the common person" [King, DWCL, 141]). In the doubling of these two
Pompeys, we see the trace of Walcott's former ambivalent identifica
tion with Vastey resurfacing in the apparently straightforward appeal
to his noble black populist hero. It is this doubling that Walcott gratu
itously, perhaps unconsciously, draws our attention to at the moment
when Vastey returns, in Act Two, to deliver his one innocuous line. Em
peror Dessalines, introducing his entourage to the former peasant
Pompey, announces the arrival of "My Minister of Agriculture, Citi
zen General Henri Christophe, his secretary Baron Citizen Pompey,
Valentin Vastey. Vastey" (410). This excessive emphasis on Vastey's
name(s), which has absolutely no meaning in terms of the actual dia
logue and its relation to the plot is the most salient reminder of the now
almost entirely submerged importance of Vastey to Walcott. Dessalines's gratuitous doubling of the name Vastey points toward the dou
ble role that he played in Henri Christophe, the role of ghostly al ter-ego
that has been denied him in the black and white (and yellow) world of
The Haitian Earth.
To chart the changing role of Vastey in Walcott's Haitian Trilogy is
necessarily to forego any dramatically conclusive commentary. His
role ends with a whimper, not a bang. One is reduced to seizing upon
the errant placement of a comma, the curious but quite possibly inad
vertent doubling of a name. Just as the real-life Vastey's work descended
from the lucid, epic discussion of colonial horror and anticolonial re
sistance to the shadowy, prosaic insistence upon what can only seem,
from our perspective, as post/colonial quibbles, needless in-fighting
between two Haitis that ought to have been one, so, too, my own analy
sis of Walcott's Trilogy has self-consciously descended from bracing
general claims about the ways in which his work is implicated in the
mulatto legend to a close reading that seems almost too close, that
could be seen as striking an almost ludicrously anti-climactic note. To
end on this note is to end at a far cry from the dramatic, indeed apoca
lyptic, monologue of Christophe's with which Henri Christophe closes
("And after that. . . / Oblivion and silence" [107]), or from the inspir
ing apostrophes that the people's representative, Pompey, directs to
ward the dead body of the murdered Yette in the last lines of The Hai-

106 Yale French Studies


tian Earth ("You will be a country woman with a basket / Walking
down a red road in the high mountains"). And yet might it not be pre
cisely at this undramatic, micro-level of analysis that the "monotonies
of history" can be uncertainly transformed into something else, some
thing almost indistinguishably other that eludes the comfortable un
derstandings that accompany any and all "big pictures?"
Whether or not I have erred in thus clinching my interpretation
with details that may seem to border on the trivial, it is certainly the
caseas evidenced by the brevity of his Forewordthat Walcott has
given us few clues as to the "big picture" that these three little plays,
these "broken statues" now pieced together into one new whole, are
meant to convey. Roland Barthes once remarked that "only writing has
occasion to dispel the bad faith attached to every language unaware of
its own existence."43 I have attempted to suggest that over and above
the "proof" of creative maturation that, to judge from the back cover,
is one important message that Walcott or his publishers wished to con
vey in yoking these three texts together,44 there is another, less com
forting meaning that comes into view when reading the Trilogy, as op
posed to the three plays on their own. Inasmuch as this new meaning
emerges only through a thinking of them, together, the author of the
Trilogy can indeed be said, in Barthes's sense, to have written a great
deal, and in writing to have revealed, in good faith, the bad faith that
has been a constant of his "skeptical humanist" representations of His
tory, his cynical disengagement from social movements that he would
appear to be incapable of seeing as anything more than "necessary up
heavals." The Trilogy stands as a monument to the civil war that, in
the name of "art," Walcott has been waging for a very long time now
against the complicities and compromises that are the inevitable, "mo
notonous" by-product of all historical endeavor and to which the art43. Roland Barthes, "From Science to Literature," in The Rustle of Language, trans.
Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 8.
44. For reasons of space, I have omitted any discussion here of what I feel to be the
most obvious meaning of, and rationale for, the publication of Walcott's "new" text,
which has less to do with the value of the plays themselves than with the increasing mar
ketability of postcolonial literature. The marketability of the Trilogy relies not upon any
further writing, any supplementary attempt on the author's part at fathoming (and throw
ing into question) the assumptions that originally led to the creation of these plays, hut
simply upon the distinction (in Bourdieu's sense of the word) attaching to postcolonial
ism's "celebrity authors," part and parcel of what Graham Huggan calls the "commodi
fying processes through which [postcolonialism's] critical discourses, like its literary
products, are disseminated and consumed" (The Post-Colonial Exotic: Marketing the
Margins [London: Routledge, 2001], 18).

CHRIS BONGIE

107

less Vastey's forgotten oeuvre so compellingly and confusingly testi


fies. The Trilogy as a whole allows us to see Walcott's (lack of a) pro
gression from the adolescent vision to which he gave such dramatic ex
pression in Henri Christophe. It encourages us to redefine the arc that
these three plays purportedly describe as more akin to a circle, one that
repeatedly doubles back to a ghostly historical figure who, were he not
so thoroughly disfigured, might well be thought to bear an uncommon
resemblance to the man who bid this scapegoat die so that he, the leg
endary artist, might live.

DORIS Y. KADISH

Haiti and Abolitionism in 1825:


The Example of Sophie Doin

Slavery and abolition gained newfound prominence as popular sub


jects in the 1820s after having been suppressed through censorship for
the nearly two decades since Haiti had gained its independence from
Prance in 1804. Incidents contributing to the renewed interest in these
subjects include the abolition of the slave trade at the Congress of
Vienna in 1814; the scandal surrounding the sinking of the Mduse off
the coast of Africa in 1816; the resumption of abolitionist activity by
the Socit de la morale chrtienne in 1821; the publication of Thomas
Clarkson's Cries of Africa in 1822, which brought graphic, empirical
evidence of the abuses of the slave trade; and the choice of abolition
by the Acadmie franaise as the subject of the poetry prize in 1823.
An important catalyst sparking enthusiasm specifically for the subject
of Haiti was Charl es X's recognition of that country's independence in
1825, which then opened the door for recognition by other countries,
who had been loath to incur the displeasure of France. The price that
Haiti paid for the acknowledgment of its legitimacy as a nation was
exorbitant reparations earmarked to repay former colonists for their
lost property. Those reparations proved ruinous to Haiti's economy
and were not paid off for nearly a century.1 French writers at the time,
however, saw Charles X's act as a humanitarian gesture that would
make Haiti a symbol of hope for oppressed people worldwide and a first
step in bringing about the end to France's failure to deal with its ille
gal slave trade and with the inhuman treatment of slaves in the re1.
Before having been driven into exile on February 29, 2004, the president of Haiti,
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, demanded repayment for those reparations of $22 billion dollars.
His successor, the U.S.-backed leader Gerard Latortue, has dropped those demands,
which he has called ridiculous.
YFS 107, The Haiti Issue, ed. Deborah Jenson, 2005 by Yale University.

108

DORIS Y. RADISH

109

maining French colonies. The literary record for 1825 contains nu


merous encomiums for Charles X along with various other works ex
pressing sympathy for Haiti or concern for the welfare of enslaved
blacks elsewhere.2
A representative example of these works may be found in the writ
ings of a little-known abolitionist writer, Sophie Doin, born in 1800.
Although no personal ties linked her to Haiti or the French colonies,
the fate of those places and their inhabitants clearly concerned her
throughout the 1820s, when the recognition of Haitian independence
surfaced as an urgent issue in France. Subsequent literary, journalistic,
and autobiographical writings she published up to the time of her death
in 1846 focused on the plight of the working poor and the social bene
fits of a non-doctrinaire, ecumenically conceived Christian religion.
Sharing her abolitionist convictions with her husband William Tell
Doin, a Protestant doctor and writer, Doin informed herself about the
activities of the abolitionist Socit de la morale chrtienne, whose
publicationsnewspapers, letters, and English brochures about slav
eryshe refers to in her own writings. In one of the many footnotes
from her didactic novel La famille noire, she admonishes her reader to
consult "all that has been published in England, an admirable nation,
one must agree, when it comes to generous sacrifices and philanthropic
associations" (Doin, 54).
Sophie Doin's proclaimed goal was to extend the reach of the elitist
French abolitionist movement to the common people, an objective that
had met with greater success in England than in France. At the begin
ning of La famille noire, Doin explains that her purpose is to "instill in
a 11 ranks of society a feeling of horror for the slave trade" by conveying
information about the misfortunes to which Africans have been sub
jected for centuries. She goes on to claim that "no work has yet made
known to the masses in our country the true position of blacks,-1 do
that here"; and she specifies that, by using the "light form" of litera-

2.
See Benot Joachim, "L'indemnit coloniale de Saint-Domingue etla question des
rapatris," Revue historique 246 (1971): 359-76; Lydia Polgreen, "200 Years After
Napoleon, Haiti Finds Little to Celebrate," New York Times, January 2, 2004, 3; Yvan
Debbasch, "Posie et traite: l'opinion franaise sur le commerce ngrier au dbut du XIXe
sicle," Revue franaise dhistoire doutre-mer 48 (1961 ): 311-52; Lon Franois Hoff
mann, Le Ngre romantique: personnage littraire et obsession collective (Paris: Payot,
1973); Doris Y. Kadish, "Prsentation," in Sophie Doin, La famille noire, ou la Traite et
lesclavage, suivie de trois nouvelles blanches et noires (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2002), ixxxxv.

110 Yale French Studies

ture, she will assure that "truth will shine through for all classes."3
Looking closely at the plot and characters in three worksthe novel
La famille noire and two short stories, Blanche et noir and Noire et
blancthis essay examines how Sophie Doin placed Haiti at the cen
ter of a new vision of abolitionism that gave a voice to both persons of
color and women. The importance of doing so for both groups cannot
be emphasized enough. At stake for blacks was nothing less than their
very humanity: a recognition that they were feeling, thinking human
beings endowed with the same moral and intellectual capacities as
whites. For women, the stakes were similarly high. Historians such as
Karen Offen and James Smith Allen have observed that, unlike English
or American feminists in the nineteenth century, who sought political
rights, women in France defined equality largely through writing as a
gesture of autonomy. For women of Dorn's generation, social cohesion
required complementary roles for men and women: public and politi
cal for men, moral and intellectual for women.4 To claim, as I do here,
that Doin deserves consideration for having exercised the moral and in
tellectual authority of female authorship is not to say that she thereby
stands as a first-rank author, feminist, or figure in the abolitionist
movement of the 1820s. But by wielding her authority as a writer at the
particular historical moment when she wrote, when the French public
was still largely indifferent toward and uninformed about the horrific
conditions of the slave trade and slavery, she did enter the fray in at
tempting to affect how the French viewed Haiti and abolitionist causes.
Works such as hers functioned to affirm the rightness of the Restora
tion's recognition of Haiti and build confidence in the black republic's
future. Doin is also worthy of study as representative of the many mi
nor women writers who similarly wrote about blacks in the 1820s. For
too long scholars have looked at the treatment of blacks in this period
through the prism of a few famous authors such as Claire de Duras and
Victor Hugo, whose perspectives are then assumed to be the only or
most representative ones. Study of an admittedly minor author like
Sophie Doin has the potential to illuminate a broader range of attitudes
toward Haiti and blacks held by writers of her time.
This essay also looks at a number of other, nonliterary authors to
3. Doin, La famille noire, 6. All translations are mine.
4. Karen Offen, European Feminisms 1700-1950: A Political History (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2000), 90-91; James Smith Allen, Poignant Relations: Three
Modern French Women (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 178-80.

DORIS Y. KADISH

111

whom Doin refers in the footnotes of La famille noire. Other than


Clarkson, Doin also referred to the writer, publisher, and former naval
officer Bouvet de Cress, who published Lhistoire de la catastrophe de
Saint-Domingue in 1824, and the black writer, Juste Chanlatte, the sec
retary of the Haitian king Henry Christophe, who is identified as the
author of the major portion of the text that bears Bouvet de Cress's
name.5 My aim in following up on these nonliterary sources provided
in Doin's footnotes is not to track down the "objective" story of Haiti
or slavery. Objective fact did not stand in opposition to literature for
abolitionists. Doin does not look to Clarkson or Bouvet de Cress as
white, male, Europeans endowed with an intellectual superiority de
nied to her as a woman or Chanlatte as a black. Nor do Clarkson or
Bouvet de Cress conceive of authority or knowledge in such a man
ner. Rather, Doin reconfigures mastery, as did those authors them
selves, as deriving from sources that were both literary and nonliterary,
black and white, masculine and feminine, European and Haitian. Her
writing thereby expresses in literary form the very freedom from re
pressive forms of domination that Haiti as a locus of freedom and black
empowerment embodied in the nineteenth century.
Doin's focus on Haiti is most apparent in her short storiesBlanche et
noir and Noire et blancand in the closing pages of her novel La famille
noire. Although Blanche et noir does not name Haiti until the last para
graph of the story, from the start the revolutionary events the story re
counts point clearly to that country as its setting. Moreover, the future
viability and value of the new nation is central to the plot, which fo
cuses on the way in which the slave Domingo gains his freedom and
lives happily ever after in a free and prosperous independent Haiti. Or
phaned at a young age, Domingo grows up with Pauline, the daughter
of his kindly white mistress, Mme. de Hauteville, who educates him
alongside her own child. Domingo revels in his love for Pauline despite
his enslaved condition. However, as signs of the approaching revolu
tion loom, M. de Hauteville, a haughty, prejudiced plantation owner,
arranges the marriage of Domingo's beloved Pauline to Lopold, whom
she respects but does not love. At this time, Hauteville also becomes
5.
Auguste Jean Baptiste Bouvet de Cress, Histoire de la catastrophe de SaintDomingue (Paris: Librairie de Peytieux, 1824). Bouvet de Cress identifies the author in
a footnote as "M. J. C., an orator, historian and poet, and one of the most distinguished
writers of the New World",- the writer identifies himself in the Author's preface as J...E
CH
E.

112 Yale French Studies


suspicious of Domingo, who has in fact become increasingly commit
ted to the cause of freedom spreading through the island. Domingo de
cides to flee, promising Pauline on the night of his departure to protect
her and those she loves from the furor of the rebels. At a point in the
ensuing battles when Hauteville, defending the property of the white
plantation owners, faces certain death, Domingo comes to the rescue.
Although Hauteville is unable to survive the injuries sustained in bat
tle, he expresses his thankfulness to Domingo on his death bed: "You
deserved to be white" (Doin, 93). Pauline's expression of gratitude is
even greater. Instead of marrying Lopold and returning with him to
France, she chooses a solitary forest retreat in Haiti with Domingo as
her husband. There, years later, her black neighbors, who admire the
mixed couple's happiness and devotion to one another, ironically echo
the words of M. de Hauteville when they observe that "she deserved to
be black" (Doin, 94). The existence of harmonious relations between
blacks and whites is the condition that Doin envisions in the years to
come for Haiti. Noire et blanc similarly prefigures a happy outcome for
Haiti. The story begins with the revolutionary events:
A whirlwind of flames rose over the city of Le Cap. Human blood
foamed in the streets. Everywhere torrents of vengeance paid for mur
der with murder, torture with torture. The independence of blacks had
just been proclaimed, and degraded creatures, brutish slaves flocked
from everywhere, with hatred in their hearts and weapons in their
hands, asking that barbarous masters account for having destroyed their
intelligence and crushed their freedom. (Doin, 97)
In the midst of this scene of disorder, Nelzi rescues her white master,
Charles de Mricourt, thereby setting in motion a drama about relations
between blacks and whites that corresponds closely to the drama of
dealings between Haiti and France in the years leading up to the recog
nition of Haitian independence in 1825. Like those two countries, in the
years following the traumatic events in Haiti, Nelzi and Charles, who
live together in exile in America, experience but do not fully realize the
depth of the lasting affective and moral bonds that unite them. A turn
ing point in their personal relationship occurs, however, that parallels
the public events of 1825. Charles is summoned to return to France
where his uncle's fortune awaits him, under the condition that he marry
his cousin Mile. Darbois. As with Restoration France, so too with
Charles and Nelzi, the freedom and equality that form the legacy of rev-

DORIS Y. RADISH

113

olution are put in doubt. Ultimately, however, French society proves ca


pable of tolerance and justice. Although Charles comes close to suc
cumbing to the class expectations placed upon him and abandoning the
woman to whom he owes his life, a benevolent Frenchwoman, Mme. de
Senneterre, intervenes to bring the couple back together and enable a re
pentant Charles to see the error of his ways. Charles's public recogni
tion of his love for Nelzi emblematizes France's public recognition of
Haiti's independence and the lasting bonds of friendship, filiation, mu
tual interest, and loyalty that unite the two countries.
The future of Haiti is similarly bright in La famille noile, which pre
sents Phnor, a brave and compassionate young African, who has lived
through the horror of seeing his compatriots and family members en
slaved. Devoted to his mother, he surrenders himself to slave traders,
believing that he is sacrificing his freedom for hers. Indifferent to his
sacrifice, however, the whites capture and mistreat her, prompting
Nala, a complete stranger who shares Phnor's compassionate nature,
to offer herself in exchange for his mother's freedom, thereby demon
strating her profound respect for the value of motherhood. Although
her sacrifice too is in vain, the two young Africans, now slaves, fall in
love, marry, and bear a son. When Nala spurns her master, who has
tried to seduce her, she and her son are sold and sent away, causing
Phnor to fall into a mood of deep despair. Merville, a French aboli
tionist traveler who meets the despondent Phnor, vows to help him
recover his lost family. The two men set off in search of Nala, glimps
ing from afar "beautiful Haiti . . . land of justice and freedom" (Doin,
62-63), that has risen above its past under slavery and achieved the re
spect due to a free nation. Merville explains that God has forgiven the
Haitian people for the ferocity and violence of the slave revolts leading
up to independence in 1804 "because he undoubtedly felt that the
whites alone should be held accountable for a rage that their cruelty
had nurtured for so long." He emphasizes the agency exercised by
blacks who "discovered heroes in the midst of ignominy. These heroes
gave them strength, led them to glory and broke their claims." He goes
on to explain how they declared themselves independent and created a
country, where "a wise leader now presides . . . over a regenerated black
people. Wisdom, talent, and genius illuminate all its efforts and assure
the glory and prosperity of happy Haiti. Time and perseverence have
strengthened its progress and its power,- the republic no longer has en
emies. . . . Haiti, land of justice and freedom, you will bear the burden

114 Yale French Studies

of slavery no longer" (Doin, 62~63).6 The two travelers ultimately dis


cover Nala on another island where slavery still prevails. But at the
very moment when she rushes forward to embrace her long lost hus
band, her cruel master strikes her with a fatal blow. Heartbroken,
Phnor dies of grief, leaving behind a son whom Merville raises and ed
ucates as his own. No longer willing to remain on the island that wit
nessed Nala's tragic death, Merville chooses to live in Haiti, where the
boy is able to receive "the treasures of the most rigorous and distin
guished education" (Doin, 67). The seeds planted in his young mind
bear fruit. Merville leaves Haiti when the boy reaches manhood and
can himself assume the responsibilities of educating and leading his
people.
Doin's works assign important roles to women that, although not
equivalent to those played by men, indicate the moral and intellectual
significance, if not superiority, she attributed to women and the degree
to which their authority is envisioned as central to the future of Haiti.
In Blanche et noir two women exemplify feminine authority. As the
name Hauteville implies, Mme. de Hauteville is endowed with the
lofty intellectual mission of educating the black child Domingo, whose
later accomplishments depend in part on her. Continuing along the
path traced by her mother, Pauline plays the exemplary moral role of
rising above common prejudices of color in choosing Domingo as her
husband. Her moral authority can perhaps best be appreciated if we
choose to compare her to Virginie, the heroine of the best known treat
ment of colonial relationships at the time, Bernardin de Saint Pierre's
Paul et Virginie. Pauline's name recalls that of Virginie's beloved Paul;
and the slave Domingue in Bernardin's novel reappears as Domingo in
Doin's work. Salient differences can be noted, however. In contrast
with Paul and Virginie, who attempt, ineffectually, to help a mistreated
runaway slave they encounter on their island, Pauline acts in a mean
ingful way to combat prejudice and racism. Also, instead of sacrificing
herself to an outmoded notion of feminine virtue, like Virginie, Pauline
asserts her will to live and to choose her partner, who happens to be a
6.
After Henry Christophe became paralyzed on August 15,1820, his control of the
northern part of Haiti waned and insurgents increasingly gained the upper hand, con
spiring to unite the part controlled by Christophe with the southern part under the con
trol of the mulatto President Boyer. On October 8, Christophe took his own life, after
which Boyer declared himself president of a united Haiti on October 28. He is the "wise"
leader to whom Doin refers, despite the fact that he showed no interest in the kind of sup
port for education and social improvement for blacks that Christophe emphasized.

DOIUS Y. KADISH

115

black man. She thus stands as a model of the will to liberate herself,
nonviolently, from the racist conventions of her society, to achieve a
humanity free of prejudice and based on love, and to participate in the
founding of a new multiracial Haitian society.
In Noire et blanc, Doin attributes feminine authority to black and
white women alike. Nelzi is not a mere passive recipient of Charles's
love and gratitude for having rescued him at the time of the revolution.
Like Boyer, whom Doin implicitly praises in La famille noire, Nelzi
fights to forge and cement her ties with France in the person of her
beloved Charles. Moreover, like the enlightened Haiti that Phnor's
son also emblematizes, Nelzi is an apt and eager student, to whom
Charles is able to teach the natural sciences, arts, religion, and other
subjects that will make her an equal intellectual partner in the future.
Mme. de Senneterre, like Mme. de Hauteville, Pauline, and Merville,
is a model of tolerance and compassion. Not content merely to embody
benevolent attitudes, she actively exerts her influence in French soci
ety in order to assist a black woman and to combat social inequality
and injustice in France.
In La famille noire, Phnor's wife Nala shoulders a heavy narrative
and symbolic burden. Her initial sacrifice in the futile but noble at
tempt to save Phnor's mother sets the tone for her moral exemplarity
and her profound devotion to the ideal of motherhood. Subsequently
she works diligently, acts intelligently, and faces with courage and de
termination the task of surviving under often insufferable conditions.
In keeping with her irreproachable character, she is granted the exalted
charge of bringing forth Phnor's son, the symbol of the future of Haiti.
As the maternal source and creator of this son, she thus shares in the
authority exercised in other ways by the four other main narrative
agents: the fictional white abolitionist author, the white male aboli
tionist Merville, Phnor, and his son. The importance of Nala's Afri
can origin cannot be overlooked. Prefiguring the early twentieth-cen
tury notion of ngritude, Doin posits Africa as the ultimate source from
which Haitian identity derives.
Along with shared authority between men and women, Doin's writ
ing develops to a significant extent the notion of authority shared be
tween whites and blacks. In Blanche et noir, Domingo, the black pro
tagonist, exerts moral authority through his conduct, both with blacks,
as a participant in their fight for freedom, and whites, as the rescuer of
Pauline's father. His actions thus go against two common pro-slavery
views: first, that whites were responsible for giving blacks their free-

116 Yale French Studies


dom; and, second, that all blacks were savage and cruel in their treat
ment of whites during the uprisings. Still another widespread miscon
ception that Domingo serves to counter is that blacks were incapable
of intelligent thought and meaningful discourse. The opening sentence
of Blanche et noir is significant. Its very first words evoke Haiti as a
"land of freedom." But freedom is not a mere gift that Domingo has re
ceived. Doin emphasizes the political agency of her black protagonist,
who helped to gain that freedom, by making him an active narrative
participant and highlighting his voice: "Land of freedom, I salute you;
finally I am a free man, I am free! O sun . . . may your salutary rays
warm our glorious country, may they make it fertile, with the help of
God and our independent arms" (Doin, 85). Although "the help of God"
is acknowledged, it is put on an equal level with the force of "our in
dependent arms." After this opening section of the story, Doin estab
lishes the kind of narrative partnership characteristic of her writing,
with an omniscient narrator taking over the task of telling the story of
how Domingo acquired his liberation from enslavement.
Noire et blanc presents two individuals of different races, each con
tributing to the common good of their partnership, as abolitionists
envisioned Haiti and France cooperating in the future. Nelzi demon
strates the heroism of the successful Haitian revolution in her coura
geous rescue of Charles, whereas he embodies the civilizing factors of
education and religion that Doin sees as the positive legacy of the
French colonizing mission. At the close of the novel, Charles and Nelzi
will presumably marry. But the prospect of their physical union is not
what matters to Doin. Although she does not explicitly rule out the
possibility of mixed race children, as Duras does in Ourika, she chooses
not to dwell within the pages of Noire et blanc on interracial marriage
as a means of bringing forward a next generation of mixed race children.
As the title of this story and Blanche et noir both indicate, black and
white ultimately remain distinct and separate. But the separation in no
way implies hostility or indifference. On the contrary, by locating
shared authority between whites and blacks within the innermost
space of the family unit, Noire et blanc articulates the primacy of racial
equality, commitment, and loyalty as the bases of the future moral and
political ties between France and Haiti.
Shared black and white authority is developed even further in La
famille noire. A privileged authorial voice makes statements at the be
ginning of the novel such as the following: "This book is not a novel, it
is the scrupulously faithful story of the crimes that the slave trade and

DORIS Y. RADISH

117

the enslavement of blacks caused and continue to perpetuate to this


day" (Doin, 5). That voice, identifiable as that of a white abolitionist
having access to a wide range of historical and political sources, later
disappears, replaced by the closely related white, abolitionist voice of
Merville. But with his entry into the story, there is a shift from a mono
logic to a dialogic narrative structure. Merville, unlike the omniscient
authorial voice in the beginning, does not himself display his command
of issues relating to slavery; instead, through long discussions with
Phnor, he shares his information and learns from his African inter
locutor, whose direct experience bears equal if not greater weight than
Merville's purely second-hand knowledge as a European. And in the fu
ture, we learn, it is the voice of Phnor's son who "will honor his new
country by his talents, who will illustrate it by his eloquence, and, in
works filled with energy and truth, will enlighten the world and con
sole his afflicted brothers" (Doin, 67). The white abolitionist Merville,
a stand-in for Doin herself, thus continues the pattern of sharing au
thority with Phnor by extending it to Phnor's son, Merville's black
pupil. Merville may have provided for the young man's education, as
abolitionists aimed at facilitating the successful future of Haiti; but
when the boy comes of age, as Haiti has in 1825, whites need to bow
out as a sign that they fully recognize the intellectual as well as the po
litical independence of blacks. At the end of La famille noire, the abo
litionist effort will be fought on two fronts: by Phnor's son, a black
writer in Haiti, and by Merville, a white abolitionist in France. Doin's
novel thus actively promotes a strong component of black authority.
Significantly, the son, whose lack of a name suggests the nonspecific,
allegorical role that he is called upon to play, is presented as an author.
The future of Haiti, for Doin, must ultimately lie to a significant ex
tent in black hands.
The abolitionist nature of Doin's shared authority can be illumi
nated through comparison to the notion of authority in the painting
Oath of the Ancestors (1822) by the Guadeloupian artist Guillaume
Guillon-Lethire, a little-known painting that Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
has recently analyzed in the pages of Yale French Studies.7 The paint
ing, which depicts two leaders of the Haitian revolution and founders
of the nationthe mulatto officer Alexandre Ption and the black
7.
My analysis of this painting is based on Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby's "Revolution
ary Sons, White Fathers, and Creole Difference: Guillaume Guillon-Lethire's Oath of
the Ancestors [1822)/' Yale French Studies 101 (2001): 201-26.

118 Yale French Studies


slave leader Jean-Jacques Dessalinesharks back to Haiti's revolu
tionary past. (See Figure 1.) Its subject matter represents a departure
in the artistic career of Lethire. A member of the elite class of per
sons of color living in France, he was a successful, respected painter
during the Restoration, holding prestigious appointments as director
of the Academy in Rome, member of the Legion of Honor, and pro
fessor at the cole des Beaux-Arts. Unlike Doin, who was wealthy but
marginalized by her Protestant religion and female gender, Lethire
belonged to the fashionable salon culture during the Restoration in
which hostile feelings about the slave uprisings in Haiti were the or
der of the day. Those feelings, famously expressed by the black hero
ine of Claire de Duras's Ourika"Until then, I had been distressed at
belonging to a prescribed race; now I was ashamed of belonging to a
race of barbarians and murderers"were commonplace in Duras's
salon among conservatives like Chateaubriand, who declared: "who
would still dare to plead the cause of blacks after the crimes they have
committed?"8
Lethire clearly does not share the hostility toward the past ac
tions of Haitian blacks that Duras and Chateaubriand expressed.
Drawing on his positive feelings toward Haiti's revolutionary past
dating back to the French Revolution, and his commitment to the
Haitian cause at that time, Lethire chose to paint this work and have
it personally delivered, covertly, to the Haitian people by his son. He
thus anticipated the Restoration government's act of recognizing
Haiti's legitimacy three years later and paid tribute to its heroic past:
"Oath of the Ancestors was therefore a surreptitious revolutionary
picture made in honor of another revolution won at France's expense.
In this painting Lethire aligned himself with , . . the black and mu
latto men who rebelled as soldiers. . . . Lethire's painting bravely re
fuses to repress the warthe conflictthat brought Haiti into exis
tence" (Grigsby, 212).
Nevertheless, significant limits are apparent in Lethire's alle
giance to Haiti's revolutionary past. Despite Lethire's race and the
Haitian audience for whom his work was destined, ultimately he sub
ordinated both the black and mulatto figures in the dark foreground
of the painting to the white God who hovers over and sheds light on
them:
S. Doris Y. Kadish and Franoise Massardier-Kenney, cited in Translating Slavery
(Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1994), 203, 42.

DORIS Y. RADISH

Figure 1. Guillaume Guillon-Lethire, Oath of the Ancestors, 1822.


Photo: Grard Blot. Photo credit: Runion des muses nationaux/
Art Resource, NY. National Museum, Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

119

120 Yale French Studies


(t)his clandestine, indeed rebellious, act by a man of color sadly rein
scribed the ultimate authority of the white patriarch. . . . Recognition
is a gift, not an accomplishment; recognition represents benevolence
toward a subordinate rather than surrender to a victor. Moreover, the
Haitian revolution, this picture implies, remains incomplete without
the recognition of the white French father. (Grigsby, 216)

Visually privileging the mulatto figure of Ption over the black figure
of Dessalines, the painting indicates a diagonal line descending from
God the father toward Ption, not toward Dessalines (Grigsby, 221).
That privileging corresponds to the sense of privilege that in real life
the painter enjoyed and can be related to his persistent attempt to ob
tain legitimacy from his white father.
Matters are far different in the abolitionist rendering of similar dra
matic scenes involving men of two races that occur in the final pages
of two of Doin's works. At the end of Blanche et noir, Lopold and
Domingo stand before Pauline, presenting her with the choice between
returning to France with a white man or living in Haiti with a black
man. As Lopold promises to join with her "on the steps of the altar"
(Doin, 94), Pauline interrupts him to announce her choice to remain in
Haiti. Instead of bowing to the white, religious authority evoked in
Lethire's painting, Domingo, in the closing scene of Blanche et noir,
"remained bowed for a long time before his divinity" (Doin, 94), his
wife Pauline. It is Pauline with whom he is living happily, twelve years
later, at the end of the story, "when the republic of Haiti was gloriously
established on solid ground" (Doin, 94). The degree to which both black
men and white women are empowered in this scene contrasts sharply
with the privileging of the white father and his elite mulatto son in
Oath of the Ancestors.
In La famille noire, the beach scene occurs when Merville's ship
leaves Haiti. As Phnor's son kneels, with arms outstretched, in affec
tion toward his protector, both men look upward toward the sun shin
ing down benevolently upon them. "My God! exclaimed the Black, pro
tect my father! My God! spoke Merville, grant your benediction to this
regenerated being! Watch over his destiny and the destiny of Haiti!"
The last sentence of the novel"And you, Haiti ! may your splendor be
not only a brilliant meteor, but an immortal beacon of salvation and
freedom!"is followed by a lengthy footnote praising the Christian
king who, by recognizing Haiti's independence, sanctifies the regener
ation of this oppressed race of men. It ends, "May his protective hand
stretch out equally over all Blacks who still suffer!" (Doin, 68). As in

DORIS Y. RADISH

121

Oath of the Ancestors, two men of different races appear beneath the
benevolent eye of a God whose transcendent powers parallel those posjsessed on earth by the white patriarchal figures of fathers and kings.
Lethire's and Doin's works are ultimately very dissimilar, however.
Lethire aspires to be recognized by and be a part of the patriarchal sysi tern he evokes. Doin, in contrast, calls into question its oppression of
the downtrodden. Although she respectfully acknowledges the powers
of God and the white king, she places greater emphasis on human
agency, and especially the shared strength that educated black Haitians
and enlightened white Europeans can derive from relationships of re
spect and reciprocity.
Ironically, the Lethire family history comes closer to the novelist's
vision than to that of the painter. Lethire's son Lucien, who brought
Oath of the Ancestors to Haiti in 1822, chose to define himself as a
"man of color" and to remain in Haiti, where he married a Haitian
woman (Grigsby, 224). Like Domingo and Phnor's son, Lucien Lethi
re, whose death occurred several years after his return to Haiti, had
faith in the future of the former French colony. Like Pauline he made a
conscious choice to pick an uncertain but hopeful future in Haiti over
a secure and established life in France. And like Phnor's son, he pre
sumably believed that the place for the educated man of color was on
Haitian, not on French soil. Those choices, whether real or fictional,
are indicative of how much the kind of black agency that abolitionists
sought to promote differed from the recognition passively received
from white fathers that Oath of the Ancestors implies.
The first of the published sources that Doin refers to in the footnotes
of La famille noire that I wish to discuss is Lhistoire de la catastrophe
de Saint-Domingue, a work that embodies a similar notion of shared
authority as that which occurs in Doin's texts. The structure of Bouvet
de Cress's work recalls that of literary works like Ourika in which a
white European provides prefatory remarks followed by a story in the
voice of a black; in the case of Ourika, a white doctor's words are fol
lowed by those of the ailing black woman whom he is attempting to
cure. Similarly, in Lhistoire de la catastrophe de Saint-Domingue,
Bouvet de Cress introduces the author of the work he is publishing,
who, as noted earlier, can be identified as a black writer in the entourage
of Henry Christophe, Juste Chanlatte.
Why Bouvet de Cress chooses to identify Chanlatte only in a foot
note and only as "M. J. C.," or why Chanlatte opts to identify himself

122 Yale French Studies

in the author's preface only as CH..................E" is unclear. One recalls


Doin's reticence in naming Phnor's son, as if in both cases the act of
black authorship needs to be protected from the white enmity that a
too public declaration might incur. Hostility on the part of former
white colonists would have been especially strong in 1824 when
Bouvet de Cress's work was published, and when hope for blocking the
recognition of Haiti's independence was still being fueled by ultracon
servative political forces. It is undoubtedly to placate such unsympa
thetic French readers that the opening sentences of the author's pref
ace hasten to make clear that references to Frenchmen, colonists, and
Europeans in this work do not refer to "those whose honorable traces
marked their passage on the island of Saint-Domingue" (Bouvet de
Cress, i). To draw on examples from Doin's literary texts one could say
that M. de Hauteville and Nala's cruel master, not Mme. de Hauteville
and Merville, are the whites who are targeted in Lhistoire de la catas
trophe de Saint-Domingue. "Catastrophe" in the title refers to what
happened to whites after the French left, for which the Haitian leaders,
according to Chanlatte, were not at fault: indeed, he claims that Chris
tophe did all he could to protect white property owners in Haiti (Bou
vet de Cress, 77). Elsewhere in the book, acknowledgment is given to
all those whites who fought for the black cause, especially Englishmen
like the "immortal Wilberforce": "We will always look upon these
benevolent creatures, who devoted their night hours and their writings
to the amelioration of the fate of mankind, as divinities" (Bouvet de
Cress, 89-90). One is struck by the similarity between Chanlatte's
designation of benevolent whites as divinities and Domingo's similar
language in describing his feelings for that exemplar of tolerance and
good will, Pauline.
Chanlatte provides an eye-witness, first-hand account, which he
chooses to present in the collective voice of all formerly enslaved
Haitians: "Go speak to the unhappy victims whom you have con
demned to the torments of hell; here is what they say through my
mouth: 'What good things have you done for us? What gratitude do we
owe you? Rather, what well justified injustices are we not entitled to
reproach you with?'" (Bouvet de Cress, 15-16). What follows is page
upon page of arguments against whites' claims to have acted in a civi
lized way toward blacks and to occupy a moral and intellectual high
ground. The litany of horrors perpetrated by whites that Chanlatte pro
vides serves as the basis for his conclusion, which Doin makes hers as
well: that the violence that occurred during the Haitian revolution has

DORIS Y. KADISH

123

as its root cause the culpable conduct of whites: "On whom should the
blame fall, the responsibility for these disasters, if not on those who
provoked them?" (Bouvet de Cress, 82-83). In contrast with the fre
quently quoted condemnation of the revolutionary events that Duras
enunciates in Ourika, or the implied reprobation Hugo expresses by
emphasizing the ferocity of the black rebels in Bug-Jargal, Chanlatte
points to the mistreatment of slaves as the salient feature of Haiti's
tragic past.
The emphasis on intellectual achievement as the solution to Haiti's
future is another common thread in the writings of Doin and the author
of Lhistoire de la catastrophe- de Saint-Domingue. But whereas Doin
only touches on black intelligence by giving Domingo voice and agency
in Blanche et noir, by bringing out Nelzi's intellectual capacities in
Noire et blanc, and by designating Phnor's son as a future writer at the
end of La famille noire, Chanlatte dwells on this subject at great length
in his work, providing a long catalogue of the arguments upon which
Doin and other abolitionists could draw in making the case for Haiti's
promise for the future. His plea to the French to provide "zealous teach
ers" (Bouvet de Cress, 10) to guide Haitians on the path to enlighten
ment announces the pedagogical function assumed by Merville. His
praise for those new Haitians who succeed in manifesting "sparks of
genius and erudition" (Bouvet de Cress, 19-20) recalls Phnor's son.
And, most importantly, his faith in the intellectual and artistic future
of Haiti, like Doin's, is unshakable: indeed, he envisions the moment
when true civilization and creativity will stem less from Europe than
from "the virgin energy, joined with the merit of experience and in
struction" of the New World (Bouvet de Cress, 29).
Bouvet de Cress's role in promoting acceptance of Haiti comple
ments Chanlatte's. By coordinating the publication of the work, pol
ishing the writing, and writing a series of lengthy footnotes, he explains
that his purpose is "to teach our political dreamers who count money
for everything and the blood of their compatriots for nothing that it is
physically impossible and morally stupid to take back Saint-Domingue
through the force of arms and thus pointlessly expose the French army
to danger again in this torrid climate" (Bouvet de Cress, vi-vii). He
also states that he is fulfilling a promise made some twenty years ear
lier to "the youngest of the sons of Toussaint Louverture, my friend, on
an island in the western ocean" (Bouvet de Cress, 70). It is highly prob
able that in his capacity as official printer for the navy, Bouvet de Cress
had close familiarity with colonial affairs; and thus it is not surprising

124 Yale French Studies


that he had formed bonds of friendship with Toussaint Louverture. Fol
lowing Chanlatte's account, Bouvet de Cress presents correspondence
from general Leclerc, Napoleon's brother-in-law, who basely betrayed
Toussaint, along with letters to Henry Christophe and others proving
the deception that the French practiced toward Haiti. He thereby bol
sters the case that abolitionists were eager to make against further po
litical or military action against Haiti and in favor of diplomatic ties
and commercial development between the two countries.
The fact of the black authorship of Lhistoire de la catastrophe de
Saint-Domingue clearly matters to Doin, for in a footnote she recom
mends that readers consult this "admirable book by a black" (Doin, 20).
What is more, one is struck by the degree to which the style, tone,
themes, and arguments of La famille noire resemble those found in
Chanlatte's writing. As noted above, her justification for the violence
that occurred during the Haitian revolution echoes his, as does the cen
tral place she assigns to arguments in favor of the humanity and intel
ligence of blacks. Of course many of the similar features of the two
works occur throughout the body of abolitionist writing of the time.
But justifying Haiti for the writers in question had little to do with orig
inality. It had to do with disseminating information, especially that
derived from reliable sources and from first-hand accounts such as
Chanlatte's. Doin's role in this affair could be described as that of an in
termediary, someone who could reach out to the French people, in
cluding women, translating abolitionist writings into touching stories.
Interestingly, Bouvet de Cress makes a point of saying in his preface
that women should not read the work he is publishing: "they would be
too painfully affected,- there would be too much danger for them even
in glancing at this long series of crimes against humanity" (Bouvet de
Cress, vi). This sentence suggests the role that an enlightened media
tor such as Doin could have seen herself called upon to perform. As a
woman and a writer, she would be an appropriate choice to produce
stories bringing the abolitionist program suitably to the attention of
women readers.
The other writer to whom Doin makes extensive reference in La
famille noire is Thomas Clarkson. Although his reputation has often
been eclipsed by that of Wilberforce, whose parliamentary advocacy of
the cause of abolitionism was more visible, Clarkson devoted his en
tire life to that cause, publishing works about the subject as early as
1 786 and traveling extensively to interview witnesses and procure
other kinds of empirical information. Well known in France, where he

DORIS Y. RADISH

125

played a role in initiating the first abolitionist society in France, the So


cit des amis des noirs founded in 1788, Clarkson worked actively dur
ing the Restoration. Louis XVIII actually encouraged him to try to in
form the French public of the horrors of the slave trade. Realizing how
powerful colonial interests were in France and how ignorant the pub
lic was of the facts, the king conveyed to Clarkson through Wellington
that "he would welcome a 'current of popular feeling' which would al
low him to ban the trade."9 Disseminating Clarkson's writings, as Doin
does in La famille noire, was a high priority in French abolitionist cir
cles.
Shared authority of the kind found in the writings of Doin and
Bouvet de Cress clearly pertains to the writing of this celebrated En
glish abolitionist. Cries of Africa, published in 1822, followed a fiveyear correspondence between Clarkson and King Henry Christophe, in
which the English writer played the role of friend, foreign policy advi
sor, and good-will ambassador. Impressed with Christophe's positive
accomplishmentsinstituting a new code of law, breaking up large
plantations, developing irrigation, disciplining the army, promoting
education, among othersClarkson formed a relationship with Chris
tophe that was built on strong trust and led to Clarkson's intense in
volvement in Haitian affairs. For example, Clarkson intervened to en
list the support for Haiti from the emperor of Russia by showing him a
copy of one of Christophe's letters. It produced the desired effect:
He had been taught by the French and German newspapers .. . that
Hayti was inhabited by a people little better than savages. He now saw
them in a very different light. The letter which I had shown him was a
letter of genius and talent. It contained wise, virtuous, and liberal sen
timents. It would have done honour to the most civilized Cabinets of
Europe. To see, said his Imperial Majesty, a person rising up in the midst
of slavery and founding a free Empire was of itself a surprising thing, but
to see him, in the midst of ignorance and darkness, founding it on the
pillars of education under Christian auspices was more surprising and
truly delightful.10

This example of Clarkson and Christophe's relationship recalls the col


laborative partnerships of Phnor and Merville, or Bouvet de Cress and
9.
Ellen Gibson Wilson, Thomas Clarkson: A Biography (London: Macmillan,
1968), 127-28.
10.
Henry Christophe, Henry Christophe &> Thomas Clarkson; a Correspondence, ed.
Earl Leslie Griggs and Clifford H. Prator (New York: Greenwood Press, 19681,121-22.

126 Yale French Studies


Chanlatte. And although Haiti is not directly mentioned in Cries of
Africa, it is clear that its future weighed heavily on Clarkson when he
wrote that book in 1822. After Henry Christophes death in 1820 and
the brutal execution of his sons at the hands of his enemies, Clarkson
helped orchestrate the removal of Queen Marie-Louise Christophe and
her two daughters to England, where they were house guests of Clark
son and his wife for nearly a year (Christophe, 78-79). It is Mrs. Clark
son who, with the help of a young French refugee, Benjamin Laroche,
translated Cries of Africa (Wilson, 157-58).
It is interesting to observe the ways in which Clarkson promoted
black agency and developed the kind of shared authority in Cries of
Africa that inspired Doin and other abolitionists. From the start, he
quotes extensively from the account of how Africans are enslaved that
is provided in Mungo Park's Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa
published in 1799. Park's trip, which began in 1795 and ended two years
later, was sponsored by the Association for Promoting the Discovery of
the Interior Districts of Africa, which had been formed in 1788 by men
of wealth with the goal of improving knowledge of African geography
and markets and, by peaceable means, bringing civilization to what
were considered barbarian nations. Subscribers were from both sides of
the slavery debate. Although Park devotes an entire chapter to the in
stitution of slavery in Africa, and was often appalled by what he saw,
he can hardly be said to make an argument for doing away with it as a
practice. Indeed, he considers it so pervasive in Africa that European ef
forts would probably do little to affect its continued practice. Leaving
such reservations about the possible benefits of the English antislavery
movement aside, Clarkson draws on those parts of Park's work that had
the greatest potential for furthering the abolitionist cause, such as hu
man interest stories. What Clarkson saw as uniquely valuable in those
stories was their potential for giving a voice to Africans and thus pro
ducing first-hand testimony to the ill effects of slavery on real individ
ual lives. Peter Kitson observes that Cries of Africa owed much of its
originality to Clarkson's willingness to let Africans speak, thus going
beyond "the sentimental ventriloquism of William Cooper's and Han
nah Moore's abolitionist verse."11 Drawing upon Travels in the Inte
rior Districts of Africa for both facts and narrative material, Clarkson's
work functions in relation to Park's as Doin's does to both his and Bou-

11.
Peter J. Kitson, "'Bales of Living Anguish': Representations of Race and the Slave
in Romantic Writing/' ELH 67/2 (2000): 522.

DORIS Y. RADISH

127

vet de Cress's. Advancing the abolitionist cause required translating


relevant material into a form that was effective and appealing to large
audiences of uninformed readers.
One especially touching episode, which appears in both Travels in
the Interior Districts of Africa and Cries of Africa and then finds its way
into La famille noire, provides an apt illustration of the strategies at
work in abolitionist literature. Park describes Nealee, a young girl be
ing led to the coast in a procession of slaves, who is too weak and suf
fering to keep up with the others. Having refused food and drink, com
plained of extreme pain in her legs, and suffered an attack by a swarm
of bees as well as numerous beatings, Nealee is left by the leaders of the
group in a deserted place, "where undoubtedly she soon perished, and
was probably devoured by wild beasts."12 This is the episode that
Clarkson includes in Cries of Africa, with reference to Park as his
source.13 In Doin's novel, the reference is to Clarkson, and the episode
is changed, perhaps to make it less shocking for women readers, al
though the name Nala that Doin gives to her character would have
clearly signaled Clarkson's or Parks's versions of this story to certain
informed readers (Doin, 40-41). In all three versions, the episode fo
cuses on a young African girl who is uprooted and made to suffer and
who expresses the wish that her tormentors just kill her rather than
force her to go on. The difference is the black agency that Doin attri
butes to Nala: first she chooses to sacrifice herself for Phnor's
mother,- and later she revives and is able to rally Phnor's will to live.
Doin takes Clarkson's strategy of giving a voice to black subjects a few
steps further by transforming Nealee, a mere victim, into a Nala who
possesses both a voice and a will of her own.
For both Park and Clarkson, writing about women was a key to
achieving a popular appeal; and thus, along with instances of victims
such as Nealee they, like Doin, acknowledged women's authority in
matters of race and slavery. Park claims that charity and solicitude
were constants in the character of African women: "I do not recall a sin
gle instance of hardheartedness toward me in the women" (Park, 240).
An arresting example of women's agency occurs in Chapter 15 of Trav12. Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, ed. Kate Ferguson Marsters (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 286.
13. Thomas Clarkson, The Cries of Africa to the Inhabitants of Europe (London: Har
vey and Darton, 1822), 21-23. In the same year, the same publisher published the French
translation of this work, Cri des Africains contre les Europens, leurs oppresseurs (Lon
don: Harvey and Darton, 1822).

128 Yale French Studies


els in the Interior Districts of Africa, a touching scene in which African
women take pity on Park, a lost and starving traveler, and offer to feed
and lodge him. As he lies down to sleep, the women continue their work
of spinning cotton and compose a song about him, which begins: "The
winds roared, and the rains fell.The poor white man, faint and weary,
came and sat under our tree.He has no mother to bring him milk; no
wife to grind his corn. Let us pity the white man . . ."(Park, 196).Clark
son repeats this episode as well (Clarkson, The Cries of Africa, 12-13).
What is more, Park chooses to include as a postscript a poem that this
episode in his book inspired, entitled "A Negro Song" and penned by
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, who presumably read Park's book
before it reached the final stage of publication. She also had a composer
put her poem to music. Park observes that he is honored by this poetic
and musical production, "in both parts of which the plaintive simplic
ity of the original is preserved and improved" (Park, 196). I find Park's
comment about literature's ability to "improve" his first-hand account
revealing. It suggests that literature was viewed as possessing an au
thority that complemented rather than competed with eye-witness tes
timony because it could touch people in ways that objective accounts
were unable to do. That "A Negro Song" has both a feminine subject
and author supports my argument about the centrality of women to the
abolitionist cause. Georgiana, like Doin, could make a contribution
that was recognized as valuable and unique.
Other practices emerge when one looks at the way in which Clark
son's work was translated into French.14 The change in the title alone
is revealing: Cries of Africa to the Inhabitants of Europe becomes the
far more aggressive and polemic Cri des Africains contre les Europens,
leurs oppresseurs [Cries of Africans against Europeans, their oppres
sors]. Whereas the preface in English is addressed "To the Benevolent
Reader," the French text reads merely "Prface de l'auteur" [Preface of
the Author]; and the more personal "you" to address the "benevolent
reader" disappears. In these and many other cases, it would appear that
the English text strikes a note of appealing to the good will of a public
more receptive to the message of abolition than in France. The French
text, in contrast, adopts a somewhat confrontational stance, adding
14. French translations of The Cries of Africans drawn from the published transla
tion Cri des Africains appear in quotation marks. My English translations that appear in
brackets are intended either to translate words added in the French translation or to show
the extent to which it departs from the original English text. I also provide a translation
in brackets of a passage from Doin's La famille noire.

DORIS Y. RADISH

129

phrases like "ce commerce odieux" [this odious trade] that do not ap
pear in the original version (Cri des Africains, 6). There are also fre
quent uses of a more emotive language in the French translation, pre
sumably better suited to the stylistic expectations of French readers at
the time, and especially, perhaps, to humanitarian-minded women.
Significantly, although the text of Georgiana's poem does not appear in
either the original or translated versions of Clarkson's text, Cri des
Africains does include a complete poem in a footnote entitled "Ro
mance," which the translator presents as "an imitation of the poem
that Mungo Park recites through the mouth of his hostesses" (Cxi des
Africains, 14-15). As an example of the emotive language used in the
French translation of Clarkson's work one finds "Ask any man in Eu
rope . . .whether he does not consider war as one of the greatest plagues
with which the human race can be visited" (Clarkson, The Cries of
Africa, 4) translated as "Ah! quel est l'Europen qui. . . n'a pas dit dans
son coeur que la guerre est le plus grand des flaux qui puissent affliger
la malheureuse humanit " [Ah! what European has not said in his heart
that war is the greatest plague that can afflict suffering humanity]
(Clarkson, Cri des Africains, 4). Doin's text, relying not on the original
but on the translation of Clarkson's text, echoes this tone, with the ad
dition of myriad rhetorical flourishes including repetitions, exclama
tions, antitheses, and any other stylistic tool capable of touching the
heartstrings of the sensitive reader. For example, "Quelle pouvantable
effronterie! Eh! quel fruit doivent tirer de tant de meurtres, d'infamies
et de cruauts les Europens insatiables?" (Doin, 14). [What astonish
ing insolence! Ah! what benefit can the insatiable Europeans draw from
so much murder, infamy, and cruelty?] Interestingly, this is one of the
passages in Cri des Africains to which Doin refers the reader. The com
bination of a reference to an objective source and this flowery language
may seem incongruous to us today; but for Doin it was undoubtedly
just another instance of drawing on multiple strategies to achieve a
common goal and of refusing to see the literary and nonliterary as di
chotomous forms of writing.
Sophie Doin positioned Haiti at the center of an abolitionism that gave
a voice to both persons of color and women. She accomplished this task
in various ways. They include providing first-hand accounts, telling
touching stories, identifying black authors, mediating between edu
cated and popular audiences, putting graphic material into a form suit
able for women, and modifying texts through translation for different

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audiences. Her writing provided authority to Haiti as a nation, but in a


nonauthoritarian way that entailed sharing information and relying on
a multiplicity of sources and voices. As noted at the start of this essay,
Sophie Doin may not be well known as a prominent abolitionist, al
though frequent references to her in works against the slave trade in
the beginning of the nineteenth century indicate her importance
among literary abolitionists of her time (Debbasch, 316-51). Most im
portantly, however, the strategies she deployed in Blanche et noir,
Noire et blanc, and La famille noire are significant, both in their own
right, and in their congruence with similar strategies used by writers
who were abolitionist leaders such as Thomas Clarkson. And to the ex
tent that her writing illuminates the literary, political, and intellectual
history of France in the 1820s, as I hope to have shown here that it does,
she deserves to emerge from the almost total obscurity to which liter
ary history has condemned her for so many years.

DANIEL DESORMEAUX

The First of the (Black) Memorialists:


Toussaint Louverture
For Magdala J.

The first black general of the French army, Toussaint Louverture, who
died in captivity in 1803, at Fort de Joux, is, like many great lords and
army generals, an "author" of authentic memoirs. It is this work, rarely
commented on, poorly read, but often cited and contested for two
centuries, that a former Haitian lawyer exiled in Paris, Joseph SaintRmy (1815-1858|, took on the task of publishing in Paris in 1853 with
the bookseller-editor Pagnerre. Saint-Rmy was a former republican
mayor, an editor of Lamartine's works, and a political opponent of Louis
Bonaparte, who had previously brought to the attention of the same
Parisian audience a biography of Toussaint Louverture and an edition
of the memoirs of Louis Boisrond-Tonnerre (1776-1806).1 One could
easily critique Toussaint Louverture for having positioned himself as
the first of the Blacks, but it would be difficult to contest the fact that
he was, even before the publication of Boisrond-Tonnerre's memoirs,
the first of the black memorialists, in the specific sense that the prac
tice of memoir writing has acquired through centuries of French his
tory.2
Marc Fumaroli's analysis of memoir writing in early modern France
offers a useful lexicographical foundation for contextualizing Tous1. See Joseph Saint-Rmy, Vie da Tbussaint-lJ Ouverture (Paris: Moquet, Librairiediteur, 1850), and Louis Boisrond-Tonnerre, Mmoires pour servir lhistoire d'Hati
(Paris: Saint-Denis, Prvt and Drouard, 1851).
2. Boisrond-Tonnerre was the author of the act of the Haitian independence, secre
tary and advisor to the emperor Jean-Jacques Dessalines. See Boisrond-Tonnerre, M
moires pom servir lhistoire dHati (reprint) (Port-au-Prince: ditions Fardin, 1981),
vi-vii. Joseph Saint-Rmy (1813-1856) was the biographer of the generals of the Haitian
revolution and editor of Boisrond-Tonnerre's (1851) and Toussaint Louverture's ( 1853 ) re
spective memoirs under the Second Empire.
YFS 107, The Haiti Issue, ed. Deborah Jenson, 2005 by Yale University.

131

132

Yale French Studies

saint Louverture's nineteenth-century Mmoires. Fumaroli draws at


tention to the formal distinctions made in Furetire's 1694 Dic
tionnaire universel between memoirs and history, and history and
historiography. The Dictionnaire universel also pointed to profound
differences between the written testimonies of great lords, great mili
tary leaders, and the official history of the monarch. These same
generic differences apply to Toussaint's Mmoires in the face of the of
ficial history of a kind of absolute monarch, incarnated here by
Napoleon Bonaparte.
If we are to believe the article on "History" in Pierre Larousse's
1866-76 Grand dictionnaire, the nineteenth century is "the century
of history." That is to say, it is the century in which the historian prac
tices a discipline independent of political factors by establishing him
self as a scholar who need not work in obedience to a monarchical
power, as was the case under the ancien rgime. And yet in the same
dictionary, the author of the article on "Memoirs" concedes that France
is a country of memoirs more than of histories. He calls to mind a pas
sage from the Gnie du Christianisme in which Chateaubriand notes
the ousting of history by the practice of memoir writing: "'Why do we
have mainly memoirs instead of history, and why are these memoirs
generally excellent?'"3 In effect, Chateaubriandlong before the pub
lication of his Mmoires dOutre-Tombe between 1849-1850, in the
century of great historians (Guizot, Michelet, Thiers, Thierry, Blanc)
and historical novels (Dumas, Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, Scott, Vigny)
explained that this practice constituted a sort of seizing of liberty, as
opposed to history, which required a degree of restraint, even a certain
amount of erasure. According to Chateaubriand, the memorialist "is
not obliged to renounce his passions, from which he can only extricate
himself with great difficulty."4 Elsewhere, Larousse reminds us that in
the seventeenth century, the historiographers of France were the his
toriographers of the king.
This clarification serves as a clever reminder to the reader, living
under the censure of the Second Empire, of the existence of a funda
mental difference between the "modern" historian and the "old" his
toriographer, which is to say between the man of science and a servant
3. Cited in the article "Mmoire, " Grand dictionnaire universel du XlX sicle, vol.
XI (Paris: Administration du Grand dictionnaire universel, 1874), 3.
4. Franois de Chateaubriand, Gnie du Christianisme (Paris: Mignaret, An XI1803), 86. (Translators' note: this and all other translations are ours unless otherwise in
dicated.)

DANIEL DESORMEAUX

133

of the state, between an official function for knowledge and a free field
of knowledge. Certain critics have remarked that this compromised po
sition of historiography in effect causes the witnesses and above all the
actors in the great events of French monarchical history to regard his
toriography negatively, as a genre incapable of impartiality. Hence the
alternative of memoirs.
THE WORD "MMOIRE"
The noun "mmoire," in its masculine and feminine usages, signifies
numerous different things in French. Among the meanings of the
feminine term cited in the 1874 Grand dictionnaire universel are the
"reputation one leaves after one's death, " and "Gratitude, resentment,
memory of what was well or poorly received." hi jurisprudence, the
memoir involves "Rehabilitating a person's memory, annulling a
defamatory judgment against him." A curateur la mmoire was "A
person charged with defending the memory of a deceased individual."
The meanings of the masculine term include "The documents with
which one writes history," and "A written account of the events that
occurred during a man's lifetime, and in which the author played a role
or of which he was a witness. " In the juridical domain one speaks of de
fense memoirs, that all parties to a lawsuit must sign before they are
presented to a judge. Fumaroli notes that the works of ancien rgime
memorialists constitute "memoirs" in the juridical sense, since they
involved calculating the enormous debt that the writer felt he owed the
state. Also, war memoirs from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
indirectly evoke the unreimbursable nature of the debts contracted
during the momentous negotiations and military campaigns waged
victoriously under a monarch's banner. The model of writing adopted
by the memorialists of the ancien rgime and by Toussaint Louverture
himself seems influenced by all these meanings.
TOUSSAINT, MEMORIALIST?
My intention here is not to claim just any symbolic status for the
posthumous work that is incontestably, as we will sec, by Toussaint
Louverture, but to situate the memorialist's initiative in the history of
a literary genre that was considered from the beginning of the eigh
teenth century in Europe to be "specifically French."5 To contextual5. See the crucial, erudite work of Marc Fumaroli on the history of the genre, no-

134 Yale French Studies


ize Toussaint's Mmoires precisely in the developments of the ancien
rgime in France and in the margins of the international political up
heavals occurring at the end of the eighteenth century, for example the
colonial revolts in Saint-Domingue, is to emphasize the distinct ways
in which he followed the example of the great memorialists of France's
former nobility. It was in this context that Toussaint, powerless in his
captivity and faced with the crumbling of his military glory at the dawn
of the apotheosis of Napoleon Bonaparte, imitated the example of those
who had spent the last moments of their lives in transmitting the truth
of their contribution to history on to posterity, and thus broached the
question of the French and Haitian Revolutions. Toussaint's M
moires, from their opening sentences, are inscribed in the model of the
army general who, fallen from his pedestal, vainly addresses his supe
rior in order to justify himself:
It is my duty to give the French government an exact account of my con
duct, and so I will recount the facts with all the frank navet of a for
mer military man, adding the reflections that come to me naturally. I
will tell the truth, even when to do so is to go against myself. The colony
of Saint-Domingue of which I was the leader enjoyed the greatest tran
quility and the flourishing of agriculture and commerce. The island had
reached a degree of splendor never seen before, and all that, I dare to say,
was my doing.6
Toussaint was employing the well-known historical dialectic of in
serting individual protest into the transmission of history as a princi
ple of truth. In order to grasp the full scope of Toussaint's diplomatic
gesture in his Mmoires, it would be necessary to reconstruct the ca
pacity for literary assimilation of this former slave who reputedly had
learned to discern the stakes of history by assiduously reading the
works of Raynal, illustrious biographies, and military memoirs.
Before proceeding any further, we must first begin by settling the
false "literary" problem that surrounds the authenticity of the posthu
mous memoirs of Toussaint Louverture and prevents us from calculat
ing their importance from all angles. Saint-Rmy, in his preface, does
tably in his book la diplomatie de lesprit: de Montaigne La Fontaine Paris: Hermann
Editors, 1994), 188-89, and Pierre Nora, "Les mmoires d'tat: de Commynes de
Gaulle" in Les lieux de mmoire, ed. Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1985!, vol. 2, 355-400.
6.
Toussaint Louverture, Mmoires du gnral Toussaint LOuverture: crits par
lui-mme pouvant servir l'histoire de sa vie, ed. Joseph Saint-Rmv Paris: Pagnerre,
1853), 29. Further references to this and all other texts cited more than once will be made
parenthetically in the text.

DANIEL DESORMEAUX

135

not hide the fact that Toussaint's Mmoires, without being inauthentic,
proceed from a sort of translation from oral to written French that was
the work of Martial, a mulatto officer in the army of Saint-Domingue
who was also in captivity at Fort de Joux. He does not give us a precise
account of the state of the text written by Toussaint. Litcrarily, Tous
saint's Mmoires were not particularly ambitious, and when SaintRmy came up against occasional problems of rhetoric, he avoided mak
ing changes to the original text, in order to preserve its authenticity:
Today, I could in my turn have furthered the work of Martial Besse, and,
by digging down into my own scholastic memories, have found some
turns of phrase to decorate the Mmoires that I am publishing. Isn't this
how people proceed with respect to the crowd of contemporary mem
oirs with which the bookstores are inundated every day? But I thought
that in a work destined, so to speak, to catch the literary merit of an old
negro in flagrante delicto even though this negro had never had a hu
manities educationit would be better to maintain the integrity of the
text, even to the detriment of my own patriotic amour propre. (19-20)

To doubt the originality of Toussaint's Mmoires, which is to say


the identity of the person who wrote them, inevitably implies a calling
into question of the truth value of its content. To say that Toussaint is
not the author of his Mmoires because he did not write them himself
would be tantamount to considering all his official correspondence
apocryphal because he dictated it.
Toussaint Louverture dictated his letters in Creole or in French. His nu
merous secretaries translated or transcribed his thinldng. Thus, it is the
degree of training of his secretaries that determined the spelling of this
or that letter.7

Through a sort of imitative execution, the true "author" of mem


oirs is not the one who writes, corrects, and gathers the documents
from archives on behalf of an illustrious man, but the one about whom
the heroic acts are retold. If the biography of a man belongs not to him
self but rather to his biographer, at any rate it is his in all its truth. For
a considerable historical period, the nobility of the sword, including
great army generals, avoided personally taking up the pen to write
about themselves for fear of passing for an "author, " a term which kept
its degrading connotations until the reign of Louis XIV. Thus to have
7.
See Grard M. Laurent, Toussaint Louverture travers sa correspondance (17941798) (Madrid [No publisher], 1953), 11.

136 Yale French Studies

one's memoirs written by someone else, or to write them oneself,


amounted to the same thing: traditionally only the authenticity of the
appropriated exploits mattered. It is possible that the dictation of Toussaint's memoirs and his extensive military correspondence), may have
been due in part to his lack of mastery of the French language, but that
does not contradict the position I am setting forth here, namely that
the dictation constitutes a way of restoring the po wer of words to the
man of action. It is as if the heroic action (the object and the very pre
text for the writing of memoirs) already spoke for itself, and the writ
ing served only as a vague renewal, effectively a repetition without any
other status than that of vouching for history.
Let us keep in mind that the originality of memoirs as a sort of led
ger of accounts is not based on the same criteria as a strictly auto
biographical or fictitious work. Thus, Athnais-Marguerite Mialaret
(1826-1899), the second wife of the historian Jules Michelet, felt jus
tified in slipping the following comment into her husband's work
Lloiseau:
[She is speaking of her father, whom she refers to in Loiseau as a secre
tary to Toussaint, and in Mmoires dune enfant as a former tutor of
Toussaint's children.]8 Brought by business to Saint-Domingue, he
found himself in the great crisis of Toussaint-Louverture's reign. This
extraordinary man, who had been a slave until the age of fifty, who felt
and guessed everything, did not know how to write or formulate his
thoughts. He was far more qualified withrespect to great acts than great
words. He needed a hand, a pen, and more: a young and bold heart to
give heroic language to the hero, words for the situation. Would Tous
saint, at his age, have come up with this noble address: the first of the
blacks to the first of the whites ? I would beg to doubt it. Or at least if he
came up with it, it was my father who wrote it.9
Toussaint Louverture's Memoirs are thus "by" him like all the nu
merous memoirs, biographies, and illustrious lives that were published
from the medieval period through the mid-nineteenth century. These
narratives were sometimes ordered by the heroes themselves or by
their entourage. Kings, Louis XVI for example, didn't write about their
lives as monarchs but entrusted this role to many talented writers of
their kingdoms. The memoirs of Bndicte Louis de Pontis (15838. See Athenas Michelet, Mmoires d'une enfant (Paris: Mercure de France, 2004).
9. )ules Michelet, "L'oiseau" in uvres compltes XVII (1855-1857) (Paris: Flam
marion, 1986), 52.

DANIEL DESORMEAUX

137

1670), a war marshal who served under three kingsHenri IV, Louis
XIII, and Louis XIVare the work of Thomas du Foss, based on the
recollections gathered by a former officer. The posthumous memoirs
of the Duke of Nevers are more of a collection of heteroclite docu
ments, gathered and published after a forty year wait by Martin le Roy
de Gomberville.10 11 Yet another example would be the memoirs of a cer
tain Gaspard de Saulx, Lord of Tavannes, which had been compiled by
his son Jean de Saulx in 1657. If Isaac Louverture, Toussaint's legitimate
son, also attempted this type of direct succession of paternal memory,
his "memoirs," which are published as an appendix to Antoine Mtral's
1825 Histoire de lexpdition de Saint-Domingue,11 do not have the in
trepid tone, the degree of exaltation, or the warrior's brilliance that
characterize the memoirs of true historical actors. In this regard one
can say that Toussaint Louverture's Mmoires, published thirty years
after those of his son, could have suffered as a result of this temporal
lapse to the degree that Isaac Louverture's rather timorous contribu
tion would have seemed to lead the reader to a trivial familial biogra
phy rather than an illustrious life, or at least to a genealogical legend
that contained none of the stuff of historical protestation.
In Toussaint's Mmoires, the upstanding ancien rgime military
man seems torn between two models: chivalrous heroism (the model
of spectacular action that would speak for itself ), and an acute sense of
honor (the aristocratic model in which the desire to write his illustri
ous life and increase his renown has become a spiritual quest).12 On the
one hand, like every good memorialist who feels betrayed by the state,
Toussaint does not hesitate to settle his "accounts" with the French
government:
If I wanted to count all the services I have rendered to the Government,
I would need several volumes and I would never finish, and [instead] as
compensation for all my service I was arbitrarily arrested in SaintDomingue like a criminal, garrotted, led on board without regard for my
rank and for what I have done, without any proper care. Is that the re-

10. See Fumaroli, "Les mmoires au carrefour des genres en prose," in La diplomatie
del'espiit, 187-88.
11. See the "Mmoires et notes d'Isaac Louverture" in Antoine Mtrai, Histoire de
lexpdition des franais Saint-Domingue: sous le consulat de Napolon Bonaparte,
1802-1803, reprint (Paris: Karthala, 1985).
12. See Philippe Aris, "Pourquoi crit-on des Mmoires?" in Nomi Hepp and
Jacques Hennequin, Les valeurs chez les mmorialistes franais du XVIH sicle avant
la Fronde (Paris: ditions Klincksieck, 1979), 12-20.

138 Yale French Studies


ward for all my work? Should my conduct have led me to expect such
treatment? I had established a fortune considerably earlierat the out
set of the Revolution I had about six hundred and forty-eight thousand
francswhich I used up serving my country. (98)

But on the other hand, the first black memorialist of the French
army will go beyond these claims. Following the example of French
aristocratic memoirs, which as Fumaroli has shown were strongly in
fluenced by Saint Augustine, Toussaint recognizes at a certain moment
that it is no longer enough to have carried out great exploits to be as
sured of posthumous glory. This is represented in the memorialist's re
signed choice to finally turn his back on the monarch's -justice (Napo
leon's justice) in order to submit himself to providential justice:
Because I am black and ignorant, I should not be counted among the sol
diers of the Republic, or have merit, or justice, and if I do not have them
in this world, I will have them in the other,- I know that my enemies
[were] sought out and paid in all areas of the colony to find or make up
lies about me; but man proposes and God disposes. 88)

Thus the memorialist's virulent words are constantly traversed by


an ascetic will to replace political vanity and vainglorious ambition
with submission to divine will. To the very end of his appeal, Toussaint
never dreamed of a brutal "revolution" against a regime in relation to
which he would then be an outlaw. The fact that Toussaint at times de
manded the "right to make a complaint," a right clearly unrecognized
by the modern state,13 relates to his adherence to the aristocratic ide
ology of the memoir genre. Pierre Pluchon, historian and biographer of
Toussaint, remarks:
The first black genera l in French history is an heir of the ancien rgime
in every facet of his personality. He is neither a product nor a disciple of
the French Revolution, in relation to which he feels profoundly foreign,
a feeling that he would not hide in his daily life or in his great under
takings.14

Toussaint's Mmoires are those of a protesting but not a revolu


tionary spirit. This political work appeals to the same providential jus
tice to which great lords wished to have recourse. If only on this one
13. See Pierre Barbris for a brief explanation of this subject in his edition of Fromentin's novel, Dominique (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1987), n. 2, 292.
14. Pierre Pluchon, Toussaint Louvertuie: un rvolutionnaire d'Ancien Rgime
(Paris: Fayard, 1989), 554.

DANIEL DESORMEAUX

139

point, Toussaint appears completely eclipsed by the culture of violent


rupture that he would leave in his wake. To say that Toussaint Louverture is the author of his memoirs is to recognize the spiritual speci
ficity of his memoirs as a testimonial of virtue. The authenticity of
memoirs does not reside in the choice of the right words but in the right
ness of the testimony. The entire weight and the unique character of
this exercise that should be situated between a form of asceticism and
an autobiographical gesture rest on the veracity of the great deeds
claimed by the witness.
TOUSSAINT AND DUMAS: ON THE
NOBILITY OF SPIRIT
Philippe Aris notes that the practice of memoir writing was associated
from its origins with the idea of monumento.; it was a matter of con
structing a (written ) memorial that would resist the passage of time and
thus serve as an indestructible tomb. A monument that prevents the
fall into oblivion renders renown immortal. Thus the term "memoria"
signals, according to Aris, two fundamental ideas: "the idea of history
and the idea of renown."15 If the early French aristocracy that aspired
to immortal renown did not take the trouble to write down its exploits,
it is because the spoken word seemed adequate to represent great
chivalrous campaigns. It is as if the written word of the memoir genre,
in its concern for sincerity, constituted the final phase of action still to
be "told" as the memorialist's truth, and a great last gesture in itself.
Toussaint's military memoirs should be conceptualized as a self-mon
umentalizing action following the memorialist's renunciation of a
more direct pursuit of justice, indeed of a revolt against power.
Admittedly, in 1803 Toussaint was more concerned with revealing
his major role in history than with the hope of regaining his liberty. It
is certain that the man of action, who had gone to war and led several
armies, had realized at a certain point that it would be necessary to take
up the pen if others were to keep talking about him,- that it was not
enough that the heroic events of which he boasted had taken place. In
this sense, Toussaint's initiative very much resembles that of General
Dumas. For General Dumas, around 1806, presented himself in the let
ters he sent to Napoleon or Napoleon's generals, as a soldier who can
15.
Hepp and Hennequin, Les valeurs chez les mmorialistes franais du XVIIe si
cle avant la Fronde, 13-14,

140 Yale French Studies


accept any calamity but the belittling of his heroic war role. This ex
plains the vehemence with which these two black generals, Dumas and
Toussaint, rise up in their military writings against those who accuse
them of cowardice, egoism, and dishonesty. When Toussaint Louverture (in captivity at Fort de Joux) or General Dumas (having just
emerged from his own captivity in Italy) address their "memoirs" in
letter form to the attention of the General Consul who had already po
sitioned himself as a monarch, their action was firmly anchored in the
military tradition of letters of protestation. This was a form of recourse,
only rarely written, to a narrative with the purpose of repairing one's
honor. To understand what made Toussaint Louverture or General Du
mas vainly send long requests, all of a troubling similarity, to Bona
parte, is to grasp the deeper meaning of a gesture that surpassed that of
simply writing to one's military superior.
Another little-known memorialist, Alexandre Dumas, the son of
General Dumas, knew something of this when in 1851 he took up his
father's correspondence and published all the letters, all the official re
ports, all the testimony that other generals had furnished regarding his
father during the Napoleonic campaigns, in the first two hundred pages
of his own memoirs, which he entitled Mes mmoires. In effect, all the
documents from the archives of General Dumas that he reproduced in
his own work constituted a bona fide memoir in the financial sense of
the term. The son's memoirs, in 1851, were a symbolic collection of the
debts of the First Empire during the Second. The hero of the Italian wars
had calculated, down to the last centime, the personal expenses he had
incurred during the Egyptian campaign, the price of the blood he had
spilled on the battlefield, the "stubborn" defense of the 27 Nivse, the
defeat of the Austrians at Marengo, Tyrol, the Cairo insurrection, other
exploits as the leader of the Republican armies, and finally the backlog
of the outstanding balance owed to him by his government, which is to
say the General Consul, despite these numerous military exploits.
Here is how General Dumas, after having listed all his favors to Bona
parte, concluded his letter to the Minister of War:
Now I am the most senior officer of my rank; as the companion of the
General Consul in almost all the Italian and Egyptian wars, no one par
ticipated more than I did in his triumphs and the glory of our military,his letters, which I possess, prove the law of his estime when they are
not attesting to the faith of his friendship. You yourself, upon my return
from the Neopolitan prisons, showered me with signs of your deep in
terest; and yet now I seem to be undergoing some form of censure! Cit-

DANIEL DESORMEAUX

141

izen Minister, I had no reason to expect this; I beg you, consequently, to


share this letter with the Chief Consul, and to tell him that I expect
from his former friendship new employment orders. Honor has always
guided my steps; sincerity and loyalty are the foundation of my charac
ter, and injustice is for me the cruelest torture.16

Like Toussaint's Mmoires, General Dumas's military correspondence


is also a memoir of protest in the most concrete sense of the term, since
the documents published by Alexandre Dumas in Mes mmoires con
stitute the remembering of France's debts toward his father.
Why publish Toussaint's Mmoires, whose existence had long been
noted, at a much later date than his son Isaac's "memoirs"? Toussaint's
memoirs came to light at the very moment of the ascension of Louis
Napoleon, which is to say less than three years after the spectacular
publication of Chateaubriand's Mmoires doutre-tombe, Lamartine's
Toussaint Louverture (published and performed in 1850], and almost
simultaneously with Dumas's Mes mmoires. The least that one can
say is that all of these works show little benevolence toward Bonaparte
or his regime. These publications definitely emerged in a republican
and anti-Napoleonic environment. One must likewise note that the
first editor of Toussaint Louverture's work, Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre
(1834-1867), was not just anyone. He was a former member of the gov
ernment of the Second Republic (that of Lamartine, who, by a strange
coincidence, had just had his Toussaint staged in the theater), and he
had defended the cause of the people in his numerous publications. Like
Lamartine, he also had scores to settle with the Second Empire.17
It is plausible that Lamartine not only had his drama about Tous
saint produced, but that he was also behind the entire campaign to re
habilitate the black French general, after the fall of the Second Repub
lic and the rise of Bonapartism. Indeed, his dramatic work, like the
politics of Toussaint's Mmoires, is inscribed in the logic of historical
dues. Lamartine remarked that his work had been written since 1840:
"In a few weeks of leisure in the countryside, I wrote not the tragedy,
not the drama, but the dramatic and popular poem of Toussaint Lou
verture."18 In his preface, he admits to having relied widely on a work
16. Alexandre Dumas, Mes mmoires (Paris: Laffont, 1989), 135.
17. See "Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre," Grand dictionnaire universel du XlX sicle,
vol. XII (Paris: Administration du Grand dictionnaire universel, 1874), 25-26.
! 8. "Three days after the February revolution, I signed on the freedom of blacks, the
abolition of slavery, and the promise of indemnity for colonists." Lamartine, Toussaint
Louverture (Paris: Michel Lvy Frres, 1870), vii.

142 Yale French Studies


written by General Ramet for Toussaint Louverture's biography. How
ever, in elaborating the play, the poet must have had in mind a secret
revindication of Toussaint, as he says: "History and France owe belated
reparations after the ostracization of the hero of the blacks" (xiii). We
know what followed. On February 27, 1848, France's Second Republic
ratified the abolition of slavery. It was Lamartine, poet and Minister of
Foreign Affairs for the provisional government, now "a statesman im
provised by a people" (vii), as he put it so well, who historically put an
end to slavery in the French colonies.
If the nineteenth century can be regarded as the history century, it
also at times represents the century on the outskirts of history. That is
to say, it involved a constant revision of regimes every thirty years or
so, with an attendant falsification of a common past that had been be
lieved to be irrefutable. Alexandre Dumas's novels and autobiographi
cal works, notably his memoirs, are steeped in historical conjecture
(which leads the reader to become unsure about events admitted as his
torical facts j.
Before Dumas's or even Toussaint's work, there was already during
the Restoration, in the wake of the Hundred Days, and even at the end
of the Second Republic, a wave of publications of memoirs concerning
the reign and fall of Napoleon. These were works by former generals
such as those who helped to constitute the historical foundation of Du
mas's memoirs and Lamartine's historical drama. What do such works
represent? They are nostalgic reworkings of the emperor's reign, cer
tainly, but also a settling of scores with his regime. These military
memoirs give an idea of the political mood of France during the poli
tical equivocations of Louis-Philippe and of the campaign of the
Napoleonic party. We know that this situation led to the taking of
power by Louis Napoleon, who in declaring himself Emperor would try
to revive France's illusions concerning a return to the splendor of the
first Empire. Thus the minor history of the contestations of the regime
of Louis Napoleon would take place in the form of constant reminders
to the new emperor of the misdoings of the former, fallen emperor. It is
plausible to theorize that we owe to the contested regime of Napoleon
IIIcontested right down to the legitimacy of his relation to Napoleon
Bonapartethe sudden infatuation with Toussaint Louverture, who
incarnated both the anti-Napoleonic resistance and a political sin of
which the former regime would never be washed clean.
But eveiything indicates that Saint-Rmy, who wrote the preface to
the Mmoires du gnral Toussaint Louverture in 1853, had never

DANIEL DESORMEAUX

143

heard that the publication of such a work probably revealed an edito


rial strategy to topple the myth of Napoleon and embarrass Louis Bona
parte's regime. At the beginning of his preface, he introduces himself
as a "lawyer in the imperial courts of the West and the South. " Rapidly,
his "historical and critical study" takes on the form of an opening to a
trial in which the l awyer presents his arguments before his client's tes
timony. We see that Saint-Rmy, from Les Cayes, Haiti, questions
rather than accuses European civilization of shackling the develop
ment of Africa. The preface is not an innocent contribution, but an an
thropological case for the black race against racist discourses:
Now, are those who reproach blacks for the barbarous state of affairs in
their countries forgetting that they themselves systematically provided
the upkeep for the evil necessary to the commercial success of the slave
trade, and that the horrific colonial regime never gave us anything but
labor and indigence, terror and torture? Are they forgetting that their
politics necessitated that we be forever plunged into the shadows of ig
norance? (Mmoires 10)

It becomes difficult to put forth the idea that the one who should
have introduced Toussaint Louverture's memoirs perfectly grasped the
symbolic sense and historical stakes of this particular genre. SaintRmy was not a historian and even less a politician. He was rather a
precursor to Antnor Firmin and Paulus Sanon, jumping from physi
ology to anatomy, by way of ecology and logic. Through this positivist
posture, Saint-Rmy sought to fight racist discourse on its own terms.
This approach is symptomatic of the scientific aspirations of an entire
field of Haitian thought that was dedicated to countering the racist an
thropology of the nineteenth-century:
Initially positioning their arguments against the backdrop of Genesis,
where all is doubt and confusion, the colonists went on to invoke sci
ence against the black race. Let them now tell us: On what investiga
tions did they found their criteria? What Negro skulls did they palpate,
measure, weigh? (11)

But the comparison he establishes between the colonial outlook and


the scientific evaluation of racial data, between Toussaint's despotic
image and the dialectic of absolute power, was made mostly to the
detriment of Toussaint's historical thinking, which he should, in prin
ciple, have defended. It is in this way that he would portray Toussaint
in an execrable light. He described Toussaint as one despot among
many others, as a statesman who would "exaggerate crime as well as

144 Yale French Studies


virtue" (18). The logic of Saint-Rmy's argumentation involved recog
nition of the apparent contradictions in Toussaint's personality in or
der to better exploit the success of the great man as proof of the uni
versality of human virtues. In other words: "We will see in his memoirs
that no talent is beyond the Negro's grasp: be it war, legislation, elo
quence, L'Ouverture had it all" (18).
Saint-Rmy had already defined his role in editing the work of Tous
saint in his Vie de Toussaint LOuverture, published in 1850:
The sole desire to be useful to my country will always animate my
work. The further one is from one's country, the more deeply one feels
its reversals of fortune, as well as its glory. I will continue thus to tear
up the shroud of forgetfulness that covers our most famous historical
figures. I will continue this pious mission during my exile, as painful
and difficult as it is unmerited, and which must have slipped the mem
ory of Emperor Faustin, for those who know him say that he has a great
and noble heart. (26-27)

The memoirs of Toussaint Louverture are in part a serious pretext for


their author to recall his exile to the magnanimity of the Haitian em
peror. The entire strategy that guides Saint-Rmy is to get back into the
good graces of a Haitian monarch, of another Second Empire. Thus the
author addressed himself not so much to a Parisian readership but to
his own compatriots, whom he expected to impress through patriotic
pathos and a virulent discourse against the science of race. But neither
the scientific aim of the preface nor the pathetic effect which runs
through the reasoning of Saint-Rmy are compatible with the histori
cal thought of Toussaint Louverture.
The mismatched words of Saint-Rmy are grafted in parasitic fash
ion to the spiritual quest of the warrior who believes that he is leaving
his memoirs (monumenta) behind him as others proudly leave their
tombs, which is to say as written tombs that will serve history, unveil
glorious pasts, great military memories. Saint-Rmy, in attempting to
rehabilitate Toussaint at the time of the publication of the Mmoires,
ends up speaking only of himself, thereby deforming the concrete
meaning of his final work. He describes the discovery of Toussaint's
memoirs in a more than romantic manner, at times adopting a tone that
makes us believe that he is living a mystical adventure:
The existence of these Mmoires was first mentioned by the venerable
abbot Grgoire, the Bishop of Blois, in his curious and interesting work
called De la littrature des ngres. In 1845 the journal La Presse pub-

DANIEL DESORMEAUX

145

lishedafew fragments of it, at which point some people seemed to doubt


their authenticity. But recently, through the benevolent intervention of
Mr. Fleutolot, a member of the Universit de France, I was able to ob
tain from General Desfournaux a copy of the Mmoires that he had in
his possession. Later, ... I finally came across the original manuscript
in the General Archives of France. I read avidly and with religious at
tention these pages all written by the hand of the First of the Blacks.
Mmoires, 18-19)

TOUSSAINT'S TOMB
Undertaken in mourning and historical displacement, the Mmoires
are never a banal autobiography in which the author simply speaks of
his life. All memorialists, in writing their memoirs, seek to inscribe
their place in history and to commit a political act. Toussaint is no ex
ception. His real tomb may have been destroyed, rebuilt, it may even
have disappeared for good. He still retains this memorable tomb. Even
though it is infrequently visited, it is unforgettable, ineffaceable. Toussaint's political will resides symbolically in his Mmoires. But it is not
a will in the common sense of a list of goods passed down to ungrate
ful heirs. It is above all a moral lesson, exemplary last words addressed
to posterity, a hidden model of an illustrious life, an exercise in justifi
catory reflection on times gone by, a requisition against the history that
remains to be carried out. It is his only real tomb. These are his words
that he engraved, like an epitaph, with the dignity of a man of action
who has nothing else with which to fight against despair. Toussaint
Louverture remains probably the only Haitian statesman who left
"true" memoirs. Or at least, this late reader of illustrious lives is the
only one who was conscious of his place in history. One finds no moral
fuzziness in his Mmoires, but the spectacular actions of a military
man. As long as those who succeed him do not have the superstitious
feeling that they can be seriously judged by posterity, and thus by his
tory, we will never again know an epic phase in the construction of this
new country. For no nation can be built legitimately on a self-sufficient
faith in the present. Only a rational and enthusiastic belief in the fu
ture, as in the history of the past, can prevent social stagnation, and to
an even greater degree, nonchalance and shameless exploitation in the
political sphere.
Translated by Deborah Jenson and Molly Krueger Enz

ALBERT VALDMAN

Haitian Creole at the Dawn


of Independence

INTRODUCTION
In his novel, Master of the Crossroads, which depicts social interac
tions in Northern Haiti on the eve of independence, Madison Smartt
Bell attempts to recreate the linguistic context of the revolutionary
struggle by interspersing short dialogues in what he assumes to be the
Creole spoken at that time. However, as the examples below show, de
spite the orthographic variants (indicated in boldface characters}1 his
forms illustrate the standard norm of the present day language, namely,
the speech of monolingual speakers from the Port-au-Prince area
(SHC)2:

1. Bell's Creole approximates Standard Haitian Creole. It deviates from that variety
by errors of forms, e.g. *zaviio (the asterisk marks erroneous forms| instead of zaviion,
*chaval instead of chwal or cheval and, particularly, spelling variants which are due to
the fact that he intended to follow the orthographic conventions of colonial texts, e.g.
noir instead of nwar (assuming Bell wishes to show a pronounced r|, batt instead of
bat, main instead of men. See Master of the Crossroads (New York: Pantheon Books,
2000), 732. Except for 'anou for annou and the acute accent over the e's, the first sen
tence shows correct use of the officialized SHC spelling, termed IPN (Institut Pda
gogique National). Adherence to IPN spelling would yield: Annou ale chache manje. By
and large that spelling makes use of French orthographic conventions, e.g. nasal vowels
are represented by sequences vowel + n and /u/ is spelled ou. Exceptions are the consis
tent use of k for /k/, gfor /e/ instead of , en for the nasal vowel /e/, wfor/w/ and y for
1)1.1 will be using the IPN spelling for constructed or cited present-day form, as well as
for fieldwork data, Otherwise, I will reproduce cited form with the original spelling
whose mirroring of pronunciation varies greatly.
2. The unmodified term Creole refers to an unspecified variety of the language. Spe
cific varieties will be abbreviated as follows: SHC = Standard Haitian Creole,- NHC
the Creole spoken in northern Haiti, especially the Cape Haitian region; LAC = Lesser
Antilles Creole; SDC = the language in use during the colonial and immediate post-in
dependence periods.
YFS 107, The Haiti Issue, ed. Deborah Jenson, 2005 by Yale University.

146

ALBEKT VA1DMAN

1H/

anou al chach manj (71 )

Let's go get food.

Yo pral batt l'anglais. (171)

They went to fight the English.

Se chaval-ou? (235)

It's your horse?

M'gagne zaviro nan main moin. (235) I have the rudder in my hand.
These sentences are meant to provide a realistic image of the lan
guage spoken in the northern plains where the slave revolt that
spawned Haitian independence took place. They fail to do so, however,
because of significant differences between what I term SaintDomingue Creole (SDC) and the present-day standard variety.
In the first part of the article, I will provide samples from first-hand
sources from the late colonial and early independence period that in my
opinion better reflect the speech of Saint-Domingue plantocratie soci
ety, at least that found in the north of the colony. In the second part, I
will attempt to recreate the linguistic situation of colonial society by
broadening my sources to include particularly relevant data from an
tebellum Louisiana.
EARLY CREOLE TEXTS
The distinguished Haitian linguist Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain to whom
we owe the first solid description of SHC guardedly placed the birth of
the language off the northwest coast of Hispaniola, on Tortuga Island, a
den for Dutch, English, and French pirates who preyed upon the Span
ish galleons loaded with the gold and silver of the Incas and Aztecs that
sailed through the Windward Passage between Cuba and Hispaniola.
Creole was born, she declared, when an African slave tried to speak
French with his freebooter master and mutual accommodation ensued.3
This somewhat romantic view of the genesis of Creoles is reduc
tionist in several ways. First, language contact is not a one-on-one af
fair, but involves the interaction of whole social groups. If pirates
owned slaves, it was not primarily as cheap labor but as captured chat
tel to be sold. Second, the agro-industrial sugar plantations required an
extensive infrastructure that could not be improvised in the pirate
stronghold of Tortuga Island, nor in the buccaneer establishments
across the Windward Passage on the coast of Hispaniola where pairs of
Europeans (matelots), sometimes aided by a white bondsman (engag)
3.
See Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain, Le crole hatien: morphologie et syntaxe (Portau-Prince: by the author; Wetteren: DeMeester, 1936), ISO.

148 Yale French Studies


or an African slave, cured meat (boucaner) for eventual sale to pirates.
Third, Saint-Domingue was a relatively late colony. Its establishment
was preceded by the colonization of Saint-Kitts (Saint-Christophe)
around 1630, and of Martinique and Guadeloupe. The first colonists on
Tortuga were French settlers who had been evicted from Saint-Kitts by
the English, with whom they had shared the island. In all probability it
was on Saint-Kitts that the initial French-based Creole of the Caribbean
originated. From that focal pointat least in the form of a model, if not
as a fully constituted languageit was transported to later-founded
French colonies in the Caribbean.
The first documentation of a French-based Caribbean Creole is an
intriguing manuscript discovered serendipitously in 19854 containing
a Creole adaptation of the Passion of Jesus Christ, "La Passion de Notre
Seigneur selon Saint-Jean en langage ngre."5 Guy Hazal-Massieux,
who had first access to the manuscript and devoted several years to elu
cidating its origin, placed it between 1750 and 1760 and assumed that
it was authored by a Jesuit missionary priest or group of missionaries
whose identity remains problematic. The Passion exhibits structural
features that made it difficult to place geographically:
Pendant o t qu'a pal comme a, ton camarade dans mitn o tous la
t dis faire mac avec pres jouifs pour quimber Jesi ba o tous.
While they were speaking in this way, a comrade among them decided
[said] to make a deal with the Jewish priests to seize Jesus and to beat
all of them [the apostles].6
Zottes tini Ame Noire oui, pou touy Make Zottes!
You (pi.) really have a black soul to kill your master.
Zottes va pal li comme a . . .
You (pi.) are going to speak to him thus . . .
4. This manuscript was discovered by Franois Moineau, a professor at the Univer
sity of Dijon. It was folded in a hook he had purchased from a bookseller. Moureau sent
it to the eminent French Creolist Robert Chaudenson, who entrusted its analysis to the
late Guy Hazal-Massieux, his Guadeloupe-born colleague.
5. See Hazal-Massieux, "La Passion de Notre Seigneur scion Saint Jean en langage
ngre" in Les croles: problme de descrlption et de gense, ed. Ilazal-Massieux, 166252 (Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l'Universit de Provence, 1996); Dominique Fat
tier "'La passion de Notre Seigneur selon St Jean en langage ngre'": une scripta crole?"
tudes croles 19/2 (1996): 9-30; Lambert-Flix Prudent, "La Passion de Notre Seigneur
selon St Jean en langage ngre," ludes croles 21/2 ( 1998): 11-35.
6. My English translation is adapted from the French one prepared by HazalMassieux (Prudent 1998) LAC.

ALBERT VALDMAN

149

These excerpts show typical features of Lesser Antilles Creoles


(LAC): the progressive verb marker ka (as versus SHC a p / p ) and tini
"to have" (as versus HC gengnen). The second-person plural pronoun
zottes occurs widely in the Lesser Antilles as well,7 but it is also noted
in Haiti by Comhaire-Sylvain. They also evidence features character
istic of HC: va as a future verb marker (as vs. k for LAC) and the postposed plural definite article combination i'o . . . la, occurring in SHC as
the combination la yo (as vs. LAC preposed s + post-posed la, e.g. s
bfla, "the cows").
Particularly notable, however, is the apparent free variation in the
marking of possession. In the Passion, the structure N + pronoun, re
flecting the current Haitian standard, alternates with the combination
N + a + pronoun, which is a stereotypical feature of Northern Haitian
Creole (NHC):
vente nou
corps Mo
sang a mo
mti a li
Jesip bouche Li

avia Pi tit a vous,- piti avia Mama

our belly
my body
my blood
his trade
Jesus remained quiet
(kept his mouth quiet)
here is your child; child,
vous
here is your mother

Written representations of contemporary Creole speech would not


emerge until the late Saint-Domingue colonial period. In some con
temporary observers' remarks about early stages of French-based Cre
oles there are allusions to coexisting varieties situated on a continuum
ranging from that most distant from French, le gros crole, to that
which more closely approximates its lexifier language, le crole de sa
lon.8 The few available texts from the late Saint-Domingue colonial pe
riod do not reflect this distinction. The range of genres represented is
too narrow; these texts consist of travelers' accounts,9 light verse
7. See Maurice Barbotin, Dictionnaire du crole de Marie-Galante (Hamburg: Hel
mut Buske, 1995), 231; Jones E. Mondsir and Lawrence D. Carrington, Dictionary of
Saint-Lucian Creole (Berlin, New York: Mouton De Gruyter, 1992), 1621,
8. See MervynC. Alleyne, "Acculturation and the Cultural Matrix of Creolization,"
in Pidginization and Creolization of Languages: Proceedings of a Conference Held at the
University of the West Indies. Mona, Jamaica, April 1968, ed. D. Hymes, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1971), 169-86.
9. See Justin Girod-Chantrans, Voyagedun Suisse dans diffrentes colonies d'Am
rique pendant la dernire guerre (London and Paris: chez Poinat, 1786), 416.

150 Yale French Studies


(.Idylles et chansons ou essais de posie crole),10 11 official proclama
tions ostensibly translated from French originals,11 and S.}. Ducoeurjoly's remarkable guide for future plantation owners that contains a
glossary and practical dialogues dealing with communicative situa
tions these would encounter.121 will focus on the possessive structure
to show that the textual evidence demonstrates conclusively that Bell
erroneously assumed a similarity between SHC and SDC.
Girod-Chantrans, a Swiss visitor of the French Caribbean colonies
and Louisiana, provided a sample of what he termed "franais abtardi"
(bastardized French) that he presumably heard in Saint-Domingue.
Moi tois la case toi; moi tait aprs prparer cassave moi.13
Me was in your cabin, me was preparing my cassava.

In the oft reproduced song "Lisette quitt laplaine, " which I cite in
two versions, contained in Moreau de Saint-Mry14 and Ducoeurjoly,
respectively, the structure N + a + pronoun occurs systematically.
Moreau de Saint-Mry

Ducurjoly

Lisette quitt la plaine


Mon perdi bonher mou
Gi moin sembl fontaine
Dipi mon pas mir ton

Lisette quitt la plaine


Mo perdi bonheur mou
Zyeu mo sembl fontaine
Danpi mo pas mir to

Lisette left the plantation


I lost my happiness
My eyes were like fountains
Ever since I have not looked at you.

10. See Anon., Idylles et chansons: ou, essais de posie crole, par un habitant
dHayti (Philadelphia: Edwards, 1811). Reproduced in Edward L, Tinker, "Gombo Cornes
to Philadelphia," in Proceedings of the American Antiquarians Society 67 1957): 4976. For an earlier anthology and a fuller citation of "Lisette quitt laplaine," see Deborah
Jenson, "Mimetic Mastery and Colonial Mimicry in the First Franco-Antillean Creole
Anthology," The Yale Journal of Criticism, 17/1 (2004): 83-106.
11. Serge Denis, "Notre crole" in Nos Antilles (Orlans: G. Luzeray, 1935): 378.
12. S. J. Ducurjoly, Manuel des habitants de Saint-Dominique suivi du premier vo
cabulaire franais-crole (Paris: Lenoir, 2 vols., 1802).
13. Moreau harshly chides the Swiss traveler for his pidiginizing representation of SDC.
14. Frdric Moreau de Saint-Mry, in Description topographique, physique, civile,
politique et historique de la partie franaise de l'Ile Saint-Domingue (Philadelphia:
"chez l'auteur"; Paris: Dupont, 2 vols., 1797-1798 [nouvelle dition entirement revue
et complte sur le manuscrit, Paris: Socit de l'histoire des colonies franaises, 1958]),
places the creation of this song in the late 1750s and attributes its authorship to a certain
Duvivier de la Mahautiere, who at the time of his death was a member of the Port-auPrince council (1565).

ALBERT VALDMAN

151

The same systematicness in the targeted construction is reflected


in a proclamation in the name of the first consul signed by the chief of
the expeditionary corps, General Leclerc, dated pluvise, an dix (1802)
whose object was to persuade the liberated slaves to return to toil in the
plantations as "free workers":
Lire Proclamation primi consul Bonaparte voyez pou zottes. Zotes
voir que li vl ngues rest libre, Li pas vl t libert yo que yo gagn
en combatant, et que li va mainteni li de tout pouvoir li. Li va mainteni commerce & culture, parce que zote doit conn que sans a colonieci pas cable prospr. a li prom zote li va rempli li, fidellement; c'est
yon crime si zote te dout de a li prom zote dans Proclamation li.
Read the proclamation that First Consul Bonaparte sent for you. You
will see that he wants the Negroes to remain free. He does not want to
take away the liberty that they won while fighting, and he will main
tain it with all his might. He will maintain trade and cultivation be
cause you must know that without that this colony cannot prosper.
What he promises you, he will fulfill it faithfully. It's a crime to doubt
what he promises in his proclamation.

But the text that most closely reflects speech is a postcolonial oneact play authored by Chris tophe's secretary and court poet, Juste Chanlatte, Comte de Rosiers, to celebrate a visit by the king to Cape Hai
tian, Lentre du Roi dans sa capitale en janvier 1818.15 Chanlatte
displays remarkable linguistic virtuosity by portraying various social
categories with different speech varieties: bourgeois and noble charac
ters are made to speak French, a British officer a foreigner's broken
French, and the two main protagonists, the maid Marguerite and the
tinsmith Valentin, Creole. In the extract below, Valentin describes the
song he intends to compose in honor of Christophe to his lover, Mar
guerite, and then responds to Marguerite's reproaches:
Toujours comme a to faire mo reproches qui ebir coeur mo. Avia
dij to forg dans tte to mille chimres, milles imaginations qui pas
gangn ni queue ni tte. Eh! Comment mo capable bli Marguerite,
belle pitit fille cilala qui ha mo coeur li aqu main li? non, cher zami
mo, a pas possibe, mo va aim to toujours.
You are always making these reproaches that break my heart. And now
you are forging a thousand wild dreams, a thousand wild notions that
15. Juste Chanlatte, Comte de Rosiers, P entre du Roi en sa capitale en janvier 1818
(Cap Hatien, imprimerie royale de Sans-Souci, 1818).

152 Yale French Studies


are without foundation. Really! How can I forget Marguerite, that beau
tiful little girl who gave me her heart and her hand? No, my dear friend,
it's not possible, I will always love you.

The various texts from the late colonial period cited above demon
strate clearly that about a century after the establishment of the pearl
of the Antilles, Creole was far from constituting a mongrelized ren
dition of French, a pidgin. It had become a fully constituted and rulegoverned language with its own autonomous grammar. Indeed, that
conclusion emerges from the most thorough description of SaintDomingue by the self-labeled Creole, Moreau de Saint-Mry, despite
his use of the term "jargon":
This jargon is extremely precious, such that intonation expresses most
of the meaning. It also has its own genius (may you permit this word to
a Creole who believes that he does not use it in vain), and what is cer
tain is that the European, however much he is used to it, however long
he may have resided in the islands, never masters its fine points. (85)

Was Moreau de Saint-Mry suggesting that only those who acquired


the language natively mastered the subtleties of its structure and the
complex pragmatic and cultural rules for its effective use? It could be
argued that external visitors and even Creole observers, untrained in
linguistic description and influenced by either their condescending
prejudices toward SDC or their referral to French models, failed to rep
resent the language used by the majority of the population, the Creole
slaves and the newly arrived African bossais. Also, although the cited
texts show a relative uniformity, there are variants that perhaps reflect
differences in the scribes' descriptive acumen, or the variation inher
ent in a language evolving in constant contact with French and used by
many speakers, both European and African slaves, who were in the
process of acquiring it as a second language. For example, Moreau de
Saint-Mry's version of Lisette quitt laplaine appears closer to the
Creole pole than that of Ducurjoly: the first-person singular subject
pronoun, which shows a nasal mon, versus mo, and the front un
rounded vowel in Bonhr versus Bonheur. Even in the Chanlatte play,
by far the most authentic representation of SDC, there are significant
differences that reflect a constant movement along the gros crole to
French continuum, for example, the absence of the preposition a in
zami mo and the unmodified form capable that differs from cable in
the Bonaparte proclamation, more closely reflecting SHC kap/kab/ka.

ALBERT VALDMAN

153

Altogether, though, there is no reason to depreciate the keen lin


guistic awareness of the authors and scribes of these early texts and to
doubt that the latter provide a reliable view of SDC, the direct ances
tor of NHC. This is the case particularly of the Chanlatte play, among
others, which shows the emphatic construction involving reduplica
tion of the verb that represents a signal feature of current Haitian vari
eties: "n'a pas pitit compos li va compos dans tte li" (it's not a lit
tle composition that he will compose in his head. ) Many of the features
of colonial Creole, some of which reflect closer approximation to
French than do corresponding traits of SHC, can be found today among
Cape-Haitian-area monolingual speakers. However, given the diglossic nature of the colonial linguistic situation that I will discuss in the
next section, it is probable that the Creole depicted in the SaintDomingue texts and the Chanlatte play more closely reflects a variety
of the language closer to the French pole than that spoken by Creole
field slaves and the newly arrived bossais.
THE LINGUISTIC SITUATION IN THE COLONIAL
PLANTOCRATIC SOCIETY
One distinctive feature of the plantocratie linguistic situation in the
French colonies, as opposed to the English ones, for example, was the
acquisition and use of Creole by the dominant European group. There
are numerous statements by contemporaries that indicate its general
ized use among the Creoles. Moreau de Saint-Mry characterizes it as
the general vernacular of Saint-Domingue: "It is in that language . . .
that Creoles [of all colors] like to converse among themselves and the
Negroes don't use any other among themselves" (85).
The Swiss Girod-Chantrans was scandalized upon hearing the
daughters of the best families of the colony use in ordinary conversa
tion what he considered to be an uncouth jargon invented for the use
of the blacks. The nostalgic anonymous Saint-Domingue refugee who,
in Philadelphia, edited the song and light verse compendium, Idylles
et chansons ou essais de posie crole, stressed that the language was
spoken by blacks, Creoles, and most of the inhabitants of the Caribbean
islands. That a mastery of Creole serves as a symbol of colonial, versus
metropolitan, identity is suggested by Moreau de Saint-Mry's asser
tion (cited above) that it could never be acquired fully by outsiders. The
generalized use of Creole as the colonial vernacular is reflected in its

154 Yale French Studies


retention as the home language by present-day white speakers in
Louisiana and Saint-Bart.16
Whereas Bell's characterization of SDC is approximate, his depic
tion of linguistic interactions wherein whites and freed persons of color
switch back and forth from Creole to French paints an accurate picture.
He also appropriately portrays white children expressing themselves in
Creole with their peers, and even with adults. In one instance he de
scribes the white plantation owner, insisting that her daughter use
French. Arguably, the best description of linguistic interactions in
French plantocratie society appears in Albert Mercier's novel Lhabi
tation Saint-Ybars, ou matres et esclaves en Louisiane (1881).17 Al
though the setting of that novel is antebellum Louisiana, it is fully ap
plicable to the Saint-Domingue colonial context. In the following scene
a Frenchman, newly arrived in New Orleans in 1848, is puzzled by what
is taking place in a shop. He inquires of a black passerby.
"Madam, please, what is that?"
"Vou pa oua don, Michi," Don't you see] she answered, "ce ng pou
vende." [These Negroes are for sale.] She realized that she was not be
ing understood; she then surmised that she was dealing with a foreigner,
and she added in good French: These are Negroes for sale, Sir.

In the same setting, the plantation owner Saint-Ybars converses


with a blacksmith, a Creole slave, whom he is considering purchasing.
He addresses him in French, which the slave understands but to which
he responds in Creole:
"Are you the one who is a blacksmith?" asked Saint-Ybars.
"Oui, maite, cmouin," [Yes, master, it's me] saidFergus, "moincng
crol; mo pa ng pacotille, moin" [I'm a Creole negro; I'm not a bossal
negro]; "pa gagnin ain forgeron dan tou la ville, ki capab'forg ain fer a
choil pli vite pac moin" [There isn't a blacksmith in the entire town
who can forge a horseshoe faster than I].18
16. See Louis-Jean Calvet ami Robert Chaudenson, Saint-Barthlemy: une nigme lin
guistique (Paris: Diffusion Didier Erudition [CIRELFA-Agence de la Francophonie]], 165;
Thomas A. Klingler, Ifl Could Turn My Tongue Like That: The Creole Language of Pointe
Coupee Parish, Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 627.
17. See Albert Mercier, Lhabitation Saint-Ybars, ou matres et esclaves en Louisiane
(New Orleans: Imprimerie Franco-Amricaine, 1881), 234.
18. The characteristic comparative construction of Caribbean Creoles is the use of
the verb "to pass" rather than the preposition "than." This reflects no doubt an African
influence.

ALBERT VALDMAN

155

Particularly noteworthy is the following three-way exchange in


which participate Saint-Ybars, his teen-age daughter, and a female house
slave whose light skin and non-Negroid features the author stresses. The
slave, who is trying to coax the young girl to persuade her father to pur
chase her, addresses the youngster in Creole but switches to French in re
sponding to the father's French comment. Note that the use of Creole is
accompanied by the deferential second-person singular formal pronoun:
"Comme vou bel! [How beautiful you are]" said the slave sweetly,
"vous gagnin ain ti lair si tan comifo! .. . couri vite di vou popa acht
moin" [You have such a distinguished appearance! . . . Hurry and tell
your father to buy me],
"My daughter would like to have you serve her. . .. Would you like to
come with us?"

Diglossia, rather than bilingualism, best describes the linguistic


situation of colonial Saint-Domingue and that of the other French plan
tocratie colonies. Diglossia is a near-universal situation in which
different languages or varieties of the same language function complementarily. One language or linguistic variety, the high one, is used for
formal discourse and administrative and educational functions, and an
other, the low one, serves as the vernacular, the speech used for home
and hearth and for everyday social interactions. As was the case in
Saint-Domingue, and as is still the case in Haiti today, only the domi
nant members of the community mastered both languages and were
genuinely bilingual.19 The majority of the population is monolingual
in the low language since its access to the high language is restricted.
19.
As presented here, this diglossic situation is somewhat reductionist. Newly ar
rived whites were of course excluded from diglossic situations unless they had acquired
SDC. In addition, not all whites were French speakers and the linguistic competence of
French speakers themselves ranged from Standard French to vernacular forms (franais
populate), regional varieties and dialects {patois), and regional languages, such as Occi
tan dialects. Thus, as pointed out above, the target offered to monolingual speakers of
SDC and bossais was highly variable indeed. This fact is too often not considered by Oreolists who take Standard French rather than vernacular and regional varieties of the lan
guage as the terminus a quo of French-based Creoles. See Albert Valdman, Le crole:
structure, statut et origine (Paris: Klincksieck, 1978), 403; Robert Chaudenson, Des les,
des hommes, des langues: langues croles, cultures croles (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1992),
309. Finally, as is pointed out in Valdman, "On the Socio-historical Context in the De
velopment of Louisiana and Saint-Domingue Creoles" (Journal of French Language Stud
ies 2 [1992]: 75-96), this generalization is somewhat reductionist because it considers
each French colony as a single monolithic entity. In fact there existed significant differ
ences in economic development and demographics within each individual colony.

156 Yale French Studies

One of the consequences of a diglossic situation is a hierarchical rela


tionship between the two languages or linguistic varieties. The high
one enjoys prestige and becomes the target that all speakers strive to
reach; the low one is depreciated, particularly as is the case in the
French/Creole relationship where the low language is intimately as
sociated with the servile population.
Chanlatte's keen sense for the depiction of the linguistic situation
of postcolonial Haiti extends to the sociolinguistic sphere as well. First,
as pointed out above, there is a parallel between the social status of the
characters of his play and the language variety attributed to them: the
nobles and bourgeois speak French and the two plebian characters, Mar
guerite and Valentin, SDC.20 But Chanlatte also artfully adumbrates
their situating themselves within the diglossic situation. They clearly
recognize the higher prestige of French and its obligatory use in formal
situations. When Valentin offers Marguerite one of the songs he has
composed to honor King Christophe but which presumably she is to
sing she expresses her surprise by exclaiming: "Mais li pas en crile!"
(But it's not in Creole!). This response suggests that her competence in
the high language is limited. But, no doubt to flatter her, Valentin in his
reply compliments her mastery of French, most likely very approximate
inreality: "Cpou toute monde conn quand Marguerite vl, lipalpas
Madame la Sintaxe. " (It is so everyone will know that when Marguerite
wants to, she speaks better than Mrs. Syntax herself). Both characters
signify their recognitionand acceptanceof the hierarchical rela
tionship between their own speech and that of the dominant classes of
the newly independent country. The song offered to Marguerite, the first
of two Valentin has composed, is represented in "good" French. It is not
quite clear in the play that it is indeed Valentin who has created the song,
for the tinsmith himself sings another which, to stress its author's lim
ited competence in the prestige language, Chanlatte represents in a ver
nacular French imitating the dialect of Molire's peasants in Dom Juan.
Bon Dieu! queu jour! ah! queu spectacle! God! What a day! What a
show!
Et queu plaisir dlicieux!
And what deliciousplea
sure!
20.
There is one rare instance of code switching in the speech of the bourgeois host:
"Comment, diable! Valentin, je ne te croyais pas comme a tout d'un coup, nie (ni) en
songeant toutes belies qualits aqu (avec) toutes bienfaits io." [What the devil! Valen
tine, I didn't know you had suddenly become like this,-1 hadn't dreamed of these delightful
qualities and their positive effects.]

ALBERT VALDMAN

157

For our eyes like a miracle


So beautiful, good, gracious.
We are going to see,
Our Monarch and our
Queen
Le biau pitit Dauphin, ses surs itou. The pretty little heir appar
ent, His sisters too.

A nos yeux c comm'un miracle


Tant ils sont biaux, bons, gracieux.
J'allons voir not'Monarque,
not'Monarque et not'Reine

Before he sings this composition for some of the bourgeois characters


of the play, the host of the ceremony for the king, and the hostess and
a caf owner and his wife, Valentin apologizes for the poor quality of
his French. The caf owner patronizes the tinsmith by qualifying
Valentin's effort as fine (pas mal):
Valentin: Malgr toute monde aprs craire mo c gnoun bte, cause
mo pas gagne gnou bouche qui douce, ni gnoun langue qui dore, a pas
empch mo trouv dans tte mo gnoun pitit compliment qui capa
ble faire fortune p'tte bien. (Although everyone is thinking that I'm a
stupid person, because I don't have a sweet mouth, or a golden tongue,
that does not prevent me from finding in my head a nice little praising
poem that might have success).
Le limonadier: Not bad, Valentin, not bad.

The expressions bouche qui douce and langue qui doie evoke the
term used today to label the more prestigious variety of SHC used by
the bilingual elite, kreyl swa "silky Creole."
AFRICAN LANGUAGES IN COLONIAL
SAINT-DOMINGUE
The nonpreservation of African languages in Haiti constitutes a puz
zling aspect of plantocratie society from a linguistic point of view. In
Saint-Domingue, the slaves constituted the overwhelming majority of
the populationmore than 90 percent of the some 500,000 inhabitants
at the end of colonial rule. The high death rate and low birth rate in the
servile population required constant importation of new slaves. As is
demonstrated by current immigration patterns in the United States,
the constant renewal of an immigrant group helps to preserve the func
tional use of its language and guarantees its maintenance. The constant
resupplying of new slaves, the bossais, should have helped maintain the
African languages as a means of communication and expression within
subgroups of the slave population.
The formation of maroon communities also would seem to have

158 Yale French Studies


created a favorable environment for the maintenance of the escaping
slaves' native tongues. But, with the exception of the Coromantin ma
roon kingdom in Jamaica where Twi was the primary everyday lan
guage, Creole languages served as the general vernacular in all Euro
pean plantation colonies. It seems that as a rule the maroon groups did
not intend to create African communities in the New World. The Bam
bara insurgents who allied themselves with Amerindians to wipe out
the French settlement in Point Coupee, Louisiana, planned to seize
control of the colony, enslave the other servile groups, and substitute
black for white power.21 Presumably, they would have maintained
Creole as the language of communication along with other colonial in
stitutions, just as the leaders of the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue
reestablished the colonial plantation system and maintained French,
the prestige language of the former colony, as the language of adminis
tration and education.
It is generally held that plantation owners carefully separated slaves
from the same ethnic group in order to prevent revolts. Although this
policy was recommended by the trading companies and colonial offi
cials, it proved to be counterproductive and was not followed by plan
tation managers. For members of the same work gangs (ateliers)es
pecially those entrusted with cultivation and work in sugar mills (the
grands ateliers)to work effectively together, they needed to com
municate. For that reason, plantation managers strove for homogene
ity in the work force and selected slaves from the same nation. In ad
dition, there developed stereotypical notions about characteristics of
the members of various nations and their suitability for certain tasks:
the "Senegals" and Minas made good domestics, the Aradas excelled in
agriculture, and the "Congos" were hard working and docile.
No doubt African languages were used in Saint-Domingue as long
as the slave trade continued. There exists plentiful evidence attesting
to the use of these languages among the slaves. Father Labat relates that
he learned what he terms Arada (undoubtedly a dialect of Ewe; in order
to communicate with bossal slaves.22 Finally, Marcel d'Ans describes
how in 1812 Ption had soldiers (Ibos, Congos, Aradas) stationed on the

21. See Gwendolyn M. Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of


Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univer
sity Press, 1992), 433.
22. See R. P. Jean-Baptiste Labat, Nouveau voyage aux isles de l'Amrique (Paris:
J. B. Delespine, 1743 [reprinted in 1972 by ditions des horizons carabes]).

ALBERT VALDMAN

159

ramparts of Port-au-Prince address the besieging soldiers of Christophe


in African languages to urge them to join him.23
African languages were maintained also because their use was an
integral part of the seasoning process, the progressive acculturation
and socialization of the bossal slaves. Following a custom that was part
of slavery in Africa, these slaves were entrusted to the care of older, acculturated slaves who, among other things, transmitted the rudiments
of religion in a shared African language. Gabriel Debien cites a direc
tive sent by a certain Stanislas Foche to the managers of absentee
owner plantations that he administered in which he stresses the im
portance of nurturing in the seasoning process, which, according to
him, lasts a full year.24
According to Gabriel Manessy, the acquisition of Creole rather than
the preservation of African languages with the continued use of a
pidginized version of French had its cultural roots in the nature of slav
ery in Africa.25 The late Africanist points out that many of the slaves ex
ported to plantation colonies had already experienced slavery as governed
by African norms. Upon being removed from their own group either by
force or transaction, slaves lost their original social status and expected
to be socialized into the dominant group. In particular, they had to learn
the language of their masters, just as the child learns to speak, and they
expected to be entrusted into the care of an older slave whom they re
spected as they would their father. The seasoning the plantation slaves
would undergo after the sea voyage mirrored the socialization into a new
African group, as did some of the practices of the slave trade: the shaving
of the head, nudity, a new set of clothing, baptism, and a new name.
CONCLUSION
Some creolists, for example Dany Bebel-Gisler,26 argue that Europeanbased Creole, together with other cultural phenomena such as dancing,
23. See Andr-Marcel d'Ans, "Essai de socio-linguistique historique partir d'un t
moignage indit sur l'emploi des langues, notamment africaines en Hati au cours de la
guerre de libration et des premires annes de l'indpendance," Etudes croles 19/1
1996): 110-134.
24. See Gabriel Debien, tudes antillaises, XVIIe sicle (Paris: A. Colin, 1956), 186.
25. See Gabriel Manessy, "Rflexions sur les contraintes anthropologiques de la
crolisation. De l'improbabilit du mtissage linguistique dans les croles atlantiques
exognes," tudes croles 19/1 (1996): 61-71.
26. See Dany Bbel-Gisler, La langue crole force jugule Paris: L'Harmattan, 1976),
256.

160 Yale French Studies


represents apocket of the slaves' resistance against total acculturation.
Mervyn Alleyne attributes this resistance to the field slaves who, un
like their house slave brethren, enjoyed little social intercourse with
Europeans. For him, there developed among field slaves and those who
identified with them, a group consciousness expressing itself by "pos
itive refusals to become totally acculturated to the European way." In
the linguistic domain, these refusals could take the form of the preser
vation of African languages or the development of a variety of Creole
distinct from that used by the whites. As I believe I have shown in this
article, both of these claims are subject to doubt, at least during the late
colonial period. Except for terms associated with voodoo and a small
set of lexical items, there is little evidence today of the survival of
African languages among field slaves for an extensive period of time.
As I have indicated above, the languages that the bossal slaves brought
with them from Africa did have communicative function in the sea
soning process of these slaves, and they must have been used among
slaves from the same ethnic groups until such time as they acquired the
colony's vernacular, SDC.
More problematic is the issue raised by Alleyne, namely, that the
field slave spoke a Creole distinct from that of the rest of the population.
It could be argued that the written texts discussed in Section 2, because
they have been produced by Europeans, croles de couleur like Chanlatte, or those slaves that interacted directly with these two dominant
groups, reflected the so-called crole de salon that was targeted on Stan
dard French and tended, therefore, to be heavily "Frenchified," just as
kreyol swa is today. Thus, we would not expect to extrapolate from writ
ten texts the gros crole tha t served as symbol of identity among the field
slaves of the colonial period and the travailleurs agricoles of the postin
dependence era whose lifestyle differed little from that of the slave of
the preceding period. The only alternative is to compare the SDC, as ev
idenced by surviving written texts, to present-day Haitian Creole.
It turns out that some of the phonological and grammatical features
of SDC are attested in NHC. One such feature, which constitutes a
salient difference between that variety and SHC, is the possessive
construction Noun + + Pronoun. Compare SHC papa m/mwen, "my
father"; s m/mwen, "my sister"; do m/mwen, "my back"; and liv
mwen, "my book" to NHC pupa a m/mwen, sr a mwen, do a mwen,
and liv a mwen, respectively.27 Also, the final r and the front rounded
27. See Valdman, "L'influence de la norme mergente du crole hatien sur les va-

ALBERT VALDMAN

161

vowel (e.g., fa, "juice"; zyeu, "eyekem, "heart"), absent from the
speech of monolingual SHC, are widely attested in NHC. In some
sense, NHC serves as a reservoir for older forms that have disappeared
from SHC, some of which reflect SDC.
There are, however, some profound structural and lexical differ
ences between SDC and both varieties of Haitian Creole that suggest
either that major changes occurred in the course of the century that fol
lowed independence, or that there indeed existed a variety of Creole
spoken by the monolingual field slaves.28 The most important of these
is the loss of case distinction in the pronominal system, as opposed to
the SDC distinction between a subject form and one that serves as both
object and isolation form, for example, SDC mo and mo or moin ver
sus m/mwen for Haitian Creole.29 Also, in NHC the third-person sin
gular pronoun is i/y, e.g. i di, "he/she says"; papay (papa a i), "his, her
father. " Could some of these differences represent survivals of the pu
tative gros crole or are they the result of linguistic change? Finally, a
question that has not been discussed in the literature is whether dur
ing the colonial period there were dialect differences between the Cre
ole of the north and those of the other parts of Saint-Domingue. The
absence of texts that can be traced specifically to these latter regions
makes it impossible to answer that interesting question.

rits vernaculaires rgionales," in Variation et. francophonie: mlanges, ed. Aidan


Coveney, Marie-Anne Hintze, and Carol Sanders (in homage to Gertrud Aub-Bushcher),
37-51 (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2004).
28. There exists only one complete description of NHC: Grard Etienne, Le crole du
nord d'Hati: tude des niveaux de structure. (Doctoral dissertation, Universit de Stras
bourg, 1974), and one major corpus, M. P. Hyppolite, Contes dramatiques hatiens, Vols.
1 and 2 (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie de l'tat, 1951-1956), 197.
29. Hyppolite notes the special first-person singular subject pronoun form an.

DEBORAH JENSON

From the Kidnapping! s) of the


Louvertures to the Alleged
Kidnapping of Aristide: Legacies of
Slavery in the Post/Colonial World
A re te abitrerement san montandre, ni me dire pour quoi, an pa re
toute msavaire, pier toute ma famille, an general, saisire m pa pi,
et les garde, man bar qu, man voyer nu comme ver de ter, re pan dre
de calomni les piusa tros cer mon conte, da pr c la, je sui an voyer
dant les fon du ca chau, ns ce pa coupe la janbre dun quie quin et loui
dire march, ns ce pa coup la langue et loui dire parl, ns ce pas an
ter un homme vivant?
Arresting me arbitrarily, without hearing me out or telling me why,
taking all my possessions, pillaging my whole family in general,
seizing my papers and keeping them, putting me on board a ship,
sending me off naked as an earthworm, spreading the most atrocious
lies about me, and after that, I am sent to the depths of this dungeon,
isn't this like cutting off someone's leg and saying "walk," isn't this
like cutting out someone's tongue and saying "talk," isn't this burying
a man alive?]
Toussaint Louverture, handwritten autobiographical fragment
found wrapped in his headscarf,1 along with letters to Napoleon
Bonaparte, at the time of his death at the Fort de Joux in France in
April 1803. (Toussaint had been forbidden by Napoleon to write or
keep papers from October 1802 onward. This document is similar
to a paragraph in Toussaint's memoirs and has been incorporated in
its entirety in twentieth-century versions of the memoirs.)
(See figure 1 )

1.
On the 13 Prairial An XI, the Ministry of War notified the First Consul of docu
ments found in Toussaint Louverture's jail cell at Fort de Joux after his death. The note
read "I have the honor of sending you the papers we found on Toussaint Louverture after
his death in the folds of a handkerchief that covered his head." Archives nationales AF
IV 1213,22. All translations from Creole (spelled Kreyl in Haiti), French, and Toussaint
Louverture's idiosyncratic French are mine unless indicated otherwise.
YFS 107, The Haiti Issue, ed. Deborah Jenson, 2005 by Yale University.
162

DEBORAH JENSON

163

BICENTENNIAL KIDNAPPINGS
January 2004 was supposed to have inaugurated a year of celebration
and commemoration of the 1804 Independence of Haiti and its global
legacies of self-emancipation and nineteenth-century decolonization.
Instead; by the Fall of 2003 the crisis in Haitia crisis of economics,
politics, and human rightshad developed to the point that in the days
leading up to January 1, leaders of most CARICOM (Caribbean Com
munity) nations and of all non-Caribbean nations except South Africa,
had pulled out of the proposed celebrations. Not just business elites but
a preponderance of Haitian intellectuals of all political colors (includ
ing many members of the Haitian diaspora) had called for boycotting
bicentennial events to protest perceived corruption and ineffectiveness
in the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide.2 When South African
President Mbeki did arrive for the bicentennial, equipped with a naval
vessel, ambulances, and a small army of body guards, he was scathingly
chastised by the press in South Africa for conflating the populist legacy
of Aristide with that of Nelson Mandela. There were reports, never de
cisively confirmed or disproved, that the helicopter of Mbeke's advance
guard was fired upon as it moved toward the commemoration site in
Gonaives,3 the port city where the Independence had been proclaimed
in 1804.
Gonaives entered the spotlight again on February 5 when a group of
former Aristide supporters, radicalized by what they believed had been
the government-sponsored assassination of their leader, Amiot M
tayer, in September 2003, took over the police station with murderous
force and declared the city "liberated." This was the continuation of a
2. The Haitian Studies Association in the U.S. issued a nonpartisan "Declaration of
Principle on the Human Rights Situation in Haiti" in December 2003, involving a refusal
to hold its annual conference in Haiti until abuses were rectified. See Kathleen M. Balutanksy and Marie-Jos N'Zengou-Tayo, "Decrying Repression in Haiti," January 8,2004
(http://www.haitipoIicy.org). Many Haitian writers and artists, including Franktienne,
Gary Victor, Lannec Hurbon, Dany Laferrire, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot boycotted
all official celebrations of the Haitian Independence, stating that "In the face of this slide
toward totalitarianism, we, artists, writers, intellectuals, and educators, declare: that we
refuse to associate ourselves with official celebrations through which the government
seeks in vain to legitimize itself. This refusal to associate ourselves with the government
is not an opposition to Haitian unity, but on the contrary a defense of it." See "Des in
tellectuels ct artistes hatiens sc dmarquent du bicentennairc d'Haiti," Agence Alterpresse (http://www.medialternatif.org), October 1, 2003.
3. See "Haitians Shoot at Mbeki's Chopper," BBC News (http://news.bbc.co.uk),
January 2,2004.

164

.213, 25.

1. Toussaint Louverture, handwritten autobiographical fragment. Archives nationales de Paris,

DEBORAH J E N S O N

165

sporadic local rebellion that had opened the gates of Gonaives' prison
in August 2002, releasing into its ranks the likes of Joseph Jean-Bap
tiste, better known as Jean Tatoune, who had been a leader of the sin
ister paramilitary organization "Fraph" after the overthrow of Aris
tide's first government in 1991 and a key participant in the 1994
Raboteau massacre in Gonaives.
What was unanticipated by most observersconceivably by the
Mtayer contingent of the local Gonaives group itselfwas the speedy
arrival over the border from the Dominican Republic of new anti-Aris
tide forces, equipped with armored vehicles and other military equip
ment. These contingents were led by a handful of men with earlier
U.S.-funded paramilitary training,4 some of whom, notably Louis Jodel
Chamblain, had striking records of murder, corruption, and drug traf
ficking from the .1991 to 1994 military junta5 and even back to the fi
nal years of the dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier.6 Although these
"rebels" appeared to materialize spontaneously and were welcomed by
some segments of the Haitian population, in subsequent weeks Sena
tor Dodd called for an investigation into claims that they had been re
ceiving training and funding in the Dominican Republic from the U.S.based International Republican Institute.7
This was the beginning of a bicentennial "rebellion" that quickly
threatened to tip Haiti into outright civil war. The international com
munity raised the alarm, and CARICOM, working in tandem with the
United States, France, and Canada, was authorized to mediate a power
sharing arrangement among the differing suitors to power in Haiti's
political future. CARICOM failed to reach an accord with Haitian po
litical opposition groups distinct from the rebels, including the Demo
cratic Convergence and the Group of 184, who refused any solution in
volving Aristide. Aristide negotiated, but also issued statements that
4. "For instance, it is widely known that the leadership of the so-called Haitian
rebels, Guy Philippe, Emanuel Constant, and Jodel Chamblain, were all trained at the
U.S.-held Manta airbase in Ecuador." J. Damu, "Why Haiti? Why Now7?" The Final Call,
March 15, 2004.
5. See Jim Defede, "Rights Abusers Going Free from Haitian Prisons," The Miami
Herald, March 4, 2004.
6. "Among their leaders were some notorious names, such as Chamblain, who ran
death squads in the last years of Jean-Claude 'Baby Doc' Duvalier's dictatorship in the
late 1980s." Michael Christie, "Rights Dilemma as Mass Killers Win Haiti Revolt,"
Reuters (http://www.reuters.com), March 1, 2004.
7. See Ron Howell, "Probing U.S. Ties to Haiti Coup," Newsday, March 17, 2004.

166 Yale French Studies


he was "ready to die"8 rather than yield to pressures not to serve out
his elected term. With the rebels massed outside of Port-au-Prince and
well-armed gangs of Aristide backers, known as "chimres," clashing
with forces of political opposition within the capital, a calamitous
armed confrontation seemed imminent.
Instead, in the dark hours of the morning of February 29, President
Aristide was reported to have resigned in mysterious circumstances,
and to have left the country under American military escort for an un
known destination. By March 1, the plane carrying Aristide and his
American-born wife Mildred had landed in the former French colony
of the Central African Republic, and members of the Congressional
Black Caucus in the U.S., notably Maxine Waters and Charles Rangel,
were calling the resignation a coup orchestrated by Roger Noriega and
the State Department.9 (Aristide had become affiliated with Waters and
Rangel, who were his paid lobbyists rather than casual associates,10 11
during his 1991-1994 sojourn in the U.S.) Aristide was phoning them,
they said, and the news was not good. Jesse Jackson thrust the phone,
with Aristide on the other end, out to journalists. "I was forced to
leave,"11 the Haitian leader said. In an address to the Haitian people
broadcast on Telehaiti in Haiti, Aristide formulated a sort of descrip
tive maxim: his departure had been "a modern way to have a modern
kidnapping."12 Later he nuanced the description further as "a geo-po8. George Gedda, "Americans Urged to Evacuate Haiti," Associated Press (http://
www.ap.org), February 20, 2004.
9. See "Rep Maxine Waters: Aristide Says 'I Was Kidnapped,'" Democracy Now
(http://www.democracynow.org), March 1, 2004. Some observers had called the rebel
lion in Haiti a coup weeks prior to Aristide's departure from Haiti. On February 24,
Matthew Rothschild wrote "What we're witnessing now in Haiti is the second coup
against Jean-Bertrand Aristide," going on to explain that "Rightwing ideologues in the
Bush Administration have done all they can to undermine Aristide. The Latin America
team features Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega, his deputy Daniel Fisk, and
White House Advisor Otto Reich. All three were 'protgs of ex-Senator Helms,' notes
the Council on Hemispheric Affairs. 'It was this group of zealots and hardliners who, off
the record, let it be known to all concerned that the Bush Administration would coun
tenance regime change in Haiti.'" See "Haiti's Second Coup," The Progressive, February
25,2004.
10. See Steve Miller, "7.3 Million to Hazel Ross Robinson, Wife of Randall Robinson,
Ron Dellums and Ira Kurzban to Speak on Behalf of Aristide in the US," The Washing
ton Times, March 6,2004.
11. See "Aristide: 'I Was Forced to Leave,"' The Associated Press (http://www.ap.org),
March 1, 2004.
12. Peter Slevin and Scott Wilson, "Aristide's Departure: The U.S. Account," The
Washington Post, March 3, 2004.

DEBORAH JENSON

167

litical kidnapping, terrorism disguised as diplomacy."13 (A common


witticism has since emerged to describe the confluence of kidnapping
and coup: a coupnapping.) But at least in Haiti, no quote was as influ
ential as Aristide's adaptation to his own plight of the memorable line
pronounced by the famous Revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture
on the occasion of the latter's kidnapping by the French government in
June 1802. Toussaint had said, in Gonaives where he was embarked for
his exile and imprisonment in France, "In overthrowing me, they have
uprooted in Saint-Domingue only the trunk of the tree of the liberty of
the blacks; it will grow back because its roots are deep and numer
ous." 14 (The metaphor of the "tree of liberty" harkened back to the cel
ebration in Revolutionary Saint-Domingue of the anniversary of the
French abolition of slavery around a large tree, "L'arbre de la libert. "15 )
Aristide began by citing Toussaint and then, situating himself in "the
shadow of Toussaint L'Ouverture, the genius of the race, " he hybridized
the original: "I declare in overthrowing me they have uprooted the
trunk of the tree of peace, but it will grow back because the roots are
Louverturian."16
Suddenly Aristide's self-promoting bicentennial billboards in Portau-Prince, adorned with back-to-back images of himself and Toussaint,
proclaiming "Two Men, Two Centuries, The Same Vision,"17 took on
13. "Aristide Details Last Moments in Haiti, Calls for Stop to Bloodshed in First Ad
dress to Haitian People from Exile," Commentary, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Pacifica News
Service (http://news.pacifxcnews.org), March 5,2004.
14. There are many accounts of the scene in which this quote was produced, includ
ing the following narrative by Pamphile de Lacroix: "He addressed these memorable
words to the division chief Savary, commander of the vessel: 'In overthrowing me, they
have only knocked over in Saint-Domingue the trunk of the tree of the liberty of the
blacks; it will grow back by the roots, for they are deep and numerous.'" Mmoires pour
servir l'histoire de Saint-Domingue, vol. Il (Paris: Pillet an, 1819), 203.
15. Agent Roume, "Discours," 16 Pluvise An 7 (Port-Rpublicain: Gauchet et Co.,
1798), 1.
16. Joxirnalistic accounts vary slightly in the wording of the tree of peace quote. In
fact, Aristide first quoted Toussaint Louverture and then adapted that quote. His state
ment was translated simultaneously into English by an intermediary whose voice ob
scures Aristide's French speech in the audio transcript. For the translated transcript of
the address, see "Aristide Details Last Moments in Haiti, Calls for Stop to Bloodshed in
First Address to Haitian People from Exile."
17. "Throughout the capital, billboards and banners cast Aristide as the historical
equal of Haiti's father of independence, slave-revolt leader Toussaint Louverture. 'Two
men, two centuries, the same vision,' read a huge placard with the president's beam
ing countenance on one side and a drawing of Louverture on the other." Carol J.
Williams, "Reality Puts Damper On Haiti's Bicentennial Party," Seattle Times, Janu
ary 2, 2004.

168 Yale French Studies


new meaning. Commemoration of the Independence had slipped, at
least in the startlingly Hollywood-ready script furnished by Aristide,
into reenactment of Revolutionary tensions. In that pre-Independence
period alluded to by Aristide, Napoleonic France was locked in combat
with the former slaves of its most prosperous colony. If Aristide's al
leged kidnapping was the twin of Toussaint's Revolutionary kidnap
ping, then perhaps George W. Bush, suddenly united through opposi
tion to Aristide in a Franco-American "odd couple" with French
President Jacques Chirac, was the twin of Napoleon. And if the chrono
logical double of February 2004 was June 1802, then perhaps a true dou
ble of the Haitian Independence was still a couple years in the future.
Followers of Aristide in the slums of Port-au-Prince eagerly personal
ized Aristide's Louverturian identification. A young inhabitant of Cit
Soleil named Junior Louis-Jeune declared to a journalist, " 'Aristide has
said if you cut down the tree, the roots remain. We're the roots.'"18
The sense of a sequel to the Haiti interventions of the administra
tion of George Bush the elder during Aristide's first regime led Haiti ex
pert Robert Maguire to borrow from Yogi Berra in describing to a con
gressional committee the parallelism between the current difficulties
and "the kind of murder and mayhem that characterized the country
between 1991 and 1994" as "dj vu all over again."19 (The dj vu ex
tended to the fact that at the time of the 1991 coup against Aristide, not
only was George Bush in the White House, but Noriega was in the State
Department in charge of Haiti policy, Dick Cheney was Secretary of
Defense, and Colin Powell was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.)
Kofi Annan editorialized in the Wall St. Journal that the U.N., for its
part, had "been there, and done that,"20 in Haiti in 1994 but was nev
ertheless in it again for "the long haul" (leaving readers to wonder
whether "been there, done that" signaled the irony of returning no mat
ter how many times foreign interventions might destabilize conditions
in Haiti). Many Haitians no doubt saw increasingly nefarious analogies
between such apparent opposites as democracy and dictatorship, fair
and rigged elections, resignation and coup d'etat.
18. Ian James, "Loyalists are Root of Aristide Movement," Associated Press (http://
www.ap.org), March 16, 2004.
19. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on International Relations,
Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, Hearing: The Situation of Haiti, Statement
of Robert Maguire, Ph.D., March 3, 2004, 108th Congress Second Session (http://wwwc
.house.gov/international relations/whhearl08.htm).
20. Kofi Annan, "In Haiti for the Long Haul," Wall St. journal, March 16, 2004.

DEBORAH: JENSON 169

The violence of Haitian paramilitary repressions is called "dechoukay" or "uprooting" in kreyl, and in the early months of 2004,
few could argue that the tree of peace was not being shaken within an
inch of its life in Haiti. Kidnapping itself became a common form of
crime in the even more economically desperate aftermath of the regime
change.21
Aristide's allegations of kidnapping, whatever their ultimate truth
or falsity, made history. Creole linguist Bryant Freeman called Aris
tide's highly disputed February 28 Creole resignation letter "one of the
three most important historic documents in the history of Haiti."22
(The other two are, in Freeman's estimation, the 1793 proclamation by
French Commissioner Sonthonax abolishing slavery in the colony of
Saint-Dominguethe first French abolition of slaveryand a treach
erous 1801 proclamation issued by Napoleon in both Creole and
French, urging the former slaves to welcome the Napoleonic army with
open arms.) Aristide's letter is written in free verse, characteristic of
the evangelical rhythms of much of his public address. Here is the mid
dle paragraph, followed by my translation:
Asw a, 28 Fevriye 2004, mwen toujou deside
Respekte e f respekt Konstitisyon an.
Konstitisyon an se garanti lavi ak lap.
Konstitisyon an pa dwe nwave nan san Pp
Ayisyen.
Se pou sa, si asw a se demisyon m ki pou evite
Yon beny san,
M aksepte ale ak espwa va gen lavi e non lanmo.23

21. The new kidnappings are primarily of members of the Haitian elite by members
of the Haitian underclass. A journalist who investigated this phenomenon concluded
that kidnapping originally had become a political "industry" under Aristide himself, as
a means of quelling dissent. "Under Mr. Aristide, corrupt police and gang members
linked to the deposed leader were also involved in the kidnapping industry. They would
target specific members of wealthy families in retaliation for political slights. But the
current incidents are what security experts call 'fast-food kidnapping' or 'kidnapping
lite.'" Maria Jimenez, "Abductions on the Rise in Haiti as Poor Grow Desperate," The
Globe and Mail, April 1, 2004.
22. Jennifer Byrd, "KU Prof Asked to Translate Aristide's Statement," Lawrence Jour
nal-World, March 11, 2004. A photograph of Aristide's actual letter is available in "Aris
tide's Resignation Letter," CNN (http://edition.cnn.com), March 2, 2004.
23. A transcribed version of Aristide's original letter in kreyl is posted on Ann Pale,
"Graphic of Original Aristide Resignation Letter Available Online" (http://haitifor
ever.com/forum/viewtopic.php?=783), March 6, 2004.

170 Yale Fiench Studies


Tonight, February 28, 2004,1 am still decided
To respect the Constitution and to make it respected.
The Constitution is the guarantor of life and peace.
The Constitution must not drown in the blood of the Haitian
People.
That is why, if tonight it is my resignation that can avoid
A bloodbath,
I accept to go with the hope that there will be life and not death.

In the translation initially provided to the press, the U.S. embassy in


Haiti conveniently left out the term "si" [if ] in the ambiguous sentence
concerning his resignation. Through this conditionality, Aristide ap
pears to reserve a slippery linguistic spacetemporally grounded in
the evening of February 28, "si asw a"for further determination of
the situation prior to a decision. The embassy translation instead di
vided it into two positive declarations: "For that reason, tonight I am
resigning in order to avoid a bloodbath. I accept to leave, with the hope
that there will be life and not death."24
Of course, the history made by Aristide's allegation of kidnapping
did not stop with the ambiguous pathos of the linguistic artifacts of the
events in question. Once Aristide had been spirited to Africa and de
posited at the squat concrete "Renaissance Palace" of the leader of the
Central African Republic, General Franois Boziz, the question im
mediately arose of what to do with him next. Aristide claimed to his
American associates that he was being held prisoner, a claim that the
White House denied with the same firm "Nonsense" it had used to re
but the kidnapping charges. In contrast, a French spokeswoman, De
fense Minister Mich elle Alliot-Marie (who would later become thefirst
French minister to visit Haiti in two hundred years) was oblique as to
whether Aristide was free or not.25
One of Aristide's lawyers, Ira Kurzban, quickly announced a plan to
bring lawsuits against the governments of the U.S. and France. The
principle that politics makes strange bedfellows was evident through
out this turmoil: the lawsuit being prepared against France26 named,
24. The U.S. Embassy translation is quoted in "Aristide's Resignation Letter," CNN
(http://edition.cnn.comj, March 2, 2004.
25. '"At present, I would say he is being protected rather than imprisoned,' French
Defense Minister Michle Alliot-Marie told Europe 1 radio." See "Aristide Pressed on
Next Moves," CNN (http://edition.cnn.com), March 2, 2004.
26. See Paolo A. Paranagua, "Jean-Bertrand Aristide portera plainte contre les tatsUnis et la France," Le monda, March 11, 2004.

DEBORAH JENSON

171

ironically enough, Vronique de Villepin-Albanel, who is the sister of


that same Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin who had been the
arch diplomatic foe of the U.S. in the time leading up to the Iraq war
the previous spring, and Rgis Debray, a radical intellectual and Latin
American and Caribbean scholar who had once fought at the side of Che
Guevara in Bolivia.27 In the Central African Republic, representatives
complained that Aristide's cell phone allegations and lawsuit projects
were putting them in a delicate international diplomatic position,28
just when they were picking up the pieces after the French-sanctioned
coup that had brought Boziz to power a year earlier.
A week later, an American delegation including Representative
Waters, former Transafrica president Randall Robinson, and Hazel RossRobinson, accompanied by "Democracy Now" radio hostess Amy
Goodman, surprised the world by chartering a plane and flying to Ban
gui to take back the Aristides and escort them to a temporary haven in
Jamaica where they could reunite with their young daughters (who
prior to the events of February 29 had been sent to the U.S. for safety).
For a few hours it appeared that Boziz would refuse to allow Aristide
to go, in effect kidnapping him all over again, but after a flurry of phone
calls between Bangui, Washington, and Paris, a warm farewell was ex
tended.29 Eventually the party was in the air, phoning home to Pacifica
Radio's "Democracy Now" as they went, declaring that the journey
was in the spirit of the Haitian Revolution.
On the ground in the Caribbean, Haiti's new interim Prime Minis
ter, Gerard Latortue, taking a far less benign view of Aristide's renewed
proximity to home, suspended relations with Jamaica and with CARICOM. Jamaican Prime Minister P. J. Patterson riposted that the abrupt
removal of Caribbean leaders from power was no laughing matter, and
that although CARICOM had been entrusted with the diplomatic ne27. For contextualization of Debray's activities in Haiti prior to Aristide's departure
from Haiti, see "On Anniversary of Dessalines [sic] Death, Restitution Remains Burning
Issue," Haiti Progrs, October 22, 2003. Debray had published a committee report to Do
minique de Villepin in which he concluded, conveniently for the government of France,
that the Haitian lawsuit (whichhe calls "the Haitian request" I to recover the nineteenthcentury reparation payments made by Haiti to France, had "no legal basis." In Haiti and
Prance: Report to Dominique de Villepin, Minister of Foreign Affairs (Paris: La table
ronde, 2004), 23.
28. "Aristide's behavior caused Bangui considerable diplomatic embarrassment, and
the government said the former Haitian leader should stop making such claims." Daniel
Balint-Kurti, "In Apparent Reversal, Bangui Offers Aristide Permanent Asylum," Asso
ciated Press (http://www.ap.org), March 4, 2004.
29. See "Aristide leaves for Jamaica," The Jamaica Observer, March 15, 2004.

172 Yale French Studies

gotiations in Haiti, strangely enough it had not been consulted at all


during the critical period leading up to Aristide's sudden departure.
CARICOM subsequently refused to recognize the Latortue govern
ment as legitimate, and called for a U.N. investigation of the circum
stances of Aristide's fall from power, an investigation that was vetoed
by the U.S. and France. In South Africa, Mbeki came under fire when it
emerged that he had sent covert military support to Aristide that would
have arrived in the first days of March.30 This second controversial
episode in relation to Haiti led to nearly simultaneous reports and re
tractions of reports that South Africa had offered asylum to Aristide and
that he had accepted it.31
Prime Minister Latortue chose, as a first symbolic act of "unity" in
post-Aristide Haiti, to fly by American military helicopter to his native
city of Gonaives, where he hailed the rebels as freedom fighters and
shared a podium with a leader of the OAS and convicted murderer
Tatoune. Buteur Mtayer, the brother of slain gang leader Amiot M
tayer, displayed his own belief in the local roots of Aristide's political
demise when he boasted to reporters during Latortue's visit, "Our plan
is to keep working with the government, (but) if the government can
not work with us, we will overthrow it."32
In the U.S., announcements related to a series of arrests of former
Aristide associates, including political aide Oriel Jean, Haitian Na
tional Police leader Rudy Thersassan, and former senator Fourel
Celestin, gradually shed light on the rumors that had swirled in the
immediate aftermath of February 29 that the U.S. was preparing drug
charges against Aristide. The February 25 sentencing of Haitian drug
trafficker Beaudoin "Jacques" Ktant, who had testified in Miami that
Aristide had accepted millions of dollars in bribes for the passage of
drugs through Haiti, may have been a critical factor in catalyzing antiAristide forces in the American government to push for his immediate
30. Apparently Mbeki had sent "a shipment of 150 R-l rifles, 5,000 bullets, 200
smoke grenades, and 200 bullet-proof vests." Such supplies seem unlikely to have sig
nificantly influenced Aids tide's chances of staying in power, but the show of military sup
port raised opposition in South Africa because Mbeki was accused of failing to inform
parliament and therefore of violating a constitutional interdiction against covert mili
tary action. See "Haiti Arms Row Rocks South Africa," BBC News (http://news.bbc.
co.uk), March 15, 2004.
31. See Andrew Meldrum, "Aristide to Settle in South Africa," The Guardian, March
26, 2004.
32. "Haiti's interim leader visits cradle of rebellion, praises gang leader," Paisley
Dodds, Associated Press (http://www.ap.org), March 21,2004.

DEBORAH JENSON

173

removal. On May 16, as Aristide prepared to leave for temporary asy


lum in South Airica, the New York Times reported that an indictment
of Aristide "might be 'a couple of months away.'"33 At the same time,
South Africa made it clear that its offer was of temporary asylum, is
sued with the expectation that Aristide would return to fulfill his des
tiny in Haiti once the political situation had stabilized.
This unfolding bicentennial history prompted a global outpouring
of leftist media critiques of the United States' and France's role in Haiti.
Haiti in 2004 had become the stage for a large-scale fight for historical
meaning, not just in regard to the fate of Aristide's government, but in
regard to the general problem of political autonomy in economically
challenged and ideologically challenging nations.
On the famous "Bob Corbett" Haiti email list,34 this sudden vindi
cation of Aristide through the indirect mechanism of his adversaries'
alleged wrongdoings led to some complaints about the Haiti heyday of
"rent-a-radicals." Yet the leftist critique of the events coincided with a
broader phenomenon of anti-interventionist sentiment in Haiti. Prior
to February 29, the widespread critique of Aristide among cultural play
ers in Haiti and the Haitian diaspora had been a democratic prerogative.
In most cases35 it signaled no consent to or complicity with projects of
armed rebellion, the highly pressured collapse of a government, the re
turn to the political scene of ghouls from repressive eras of Haiti's past,
and submission to foreign military troops. Political protest prior to
Aristide's departure had not been a veiled plea to lay down the burden
of Haitian sovereignty.
Aristide's charges of kidnapping, regardless of the ultimate findings
of investigations, lawsuits, scholarly inquiry, elections, and other at
tempts to resolve responsibility for the events of February 29 will thus
continue to resonate as a symbolic kidnapping of political process in a
former colony inhabited by the descendants of self-emancipated slaves.
The mimetic backdrop of the Haitian Revolution and the Haitian In
dependence1804 in 2004load this allegation of bicentennial kid33. Lydia Polgreen and Tim Weiner, "Drug Traffickers Find Haiti a Hospitable Port,"
The New York Times, May 16, 2004.
34. The email address for this interdisciplinary Haiti list is corbetre@webster.edu.
35. There is evidence that the political opposition had received funding from agen
cies such as the International Republican Institute that may also have funded the rebels.
This does not necessarily indicate that there was awareness within the larger groups af
filiated with the political opposition of an unfolding scenario in which democratic op
position would be linked with an armed rebellion.

174 Yale French Studies

napping with the historical weight of a centuries-old struggle for black


freedom and equality in the Western hemisphere. And like the roots of
Toussaint's fabled "tree of liberty/' the foundations of kidnapping as a
form of colonial violence are numerous and deep.
HAITIAN REVOLUTIONARY KIDNAPPINGS
Just as Aristide's charges of kidnapping beg a "flashback" to the Hai
tian Revolutionary era, kidnappings in the Louverture family require
contextualization within the previous two centuries of the colonial
slave trade. Kidnapping (a term that translates as "enlvement" or
"ravissement" in French) was the traumatic starting point of eventual
crolit or hybridized identity for the African diaspora in the Carib
bean. It figures in virtually all family histories related to the New World
angle of the triangular slave trade, and was a fundamental mechanism
of the large-scale transnational movement of populations in the colo
nial era. Aristide's story simply involves an odd reversal of the direc
tionality of colonial kidnapping. The "modern kidnapping" that he al
leges was a kidnapping back to Africa rather than from it, symbolic of
an attempt to put black power back in the continental Pandora's box
from whence it came.
The drama of kidnapping into enslavement was 'well documented
from the early Caribbean colonial period. J.-B. Labat, in his famous late
seventeenth-/early eighteenth-century Caribbean travel narrative,
cited four categories of Africans forcibly brought to the New World
as slaves. The first three categories represented a minor proportion of
slaves: wrongdoers, prisoners seized in local wars, and the personal
slaves of princes who decided to or were compelled by necessity to sell
them. The fourth category, far and away the largest, consisted of those
who were randomly kidnapped for their human commercial value:
"those whom they steal away, either by order or with the consent of
princes, or by certain thieves, called merchants, who kidnap everything
they can catch in the way of men, women, and children, and take them
to a ship or a merchant's establishment, where they are marked with
hot irons and put into chains for security."36 Labat was in no way alone
in his contemporaneous recognition of the linkage between kidnapping
and slavery,- among the many texts that protest kidnapping in the At-

36.
J.-B. Labat, Voyage aux isles (Chronique aventureuse des Carabes, 1693-1705)
(Paris: ditions Phbus, 1993), 222.

DEBORAH JENSON

175

lantic slave trade are Willem Bosman's Kidnapped, Enslaved, and Sold
Away, and John Newton's Kidnapping and Retaliation.37
The kidnappings that haunted the family history of the Louvertures
are both exemplary and exceptional. Toussaint's father, said to be de
scended from Arada chieftains, had been sold to slave traders in his cap
tivity as a prisoner of war, rather than randomly kidnapped. Toussaint
himself was a Creole slave, meaning that he belonged to the relatively
privileged category of those born in the colonies. The motif of kidnap
ping in the Louverture family therefore first crops up in some lesserknown episodes involving Toussaint's two elder sons, Placide (whose
paternity has often been disputed but also effectively defended)38 and
Isaac Louverture.
Born in 1781 and 1782 respectively. Placide and Isaac were sent in
1796, at the expense of the Directory in recognition of Toussaint's mil
itary service, to the cole de Liancourt in Rochechouart, France, a
school for military orphans and the sons of colonists; in 1798, the Lou
verture boys were transferred to the Collge de la Marche in Paris. The
Directory gave responsibility for their formal and personal education
to the abbot Coisnon, with whom Toussaint corresponded regularly,
with considerable warmth and respect. Coisnon in turn corresponded
with the president of the Executive Council of the Directory, forward
ing Toussaint's letters and reporting on the progress of his children.39
This relationship between the Louvertures, Coisnon, and the French
government shifted dramatically with the coming to power of Napo
leon Bonaparte.
Tensions between Napoleon and Toussaint concerning the Louver
ture children begin to come to light in the curious story of a kidnapping
plot uncovered by the French police in 1800. Historian David Geggus
summarizes this plot by a Creole migr in London, Pierre-Victor Malouet, involving another celebrated black military leader from SaintDomingue, Jean Kina, who was then in London:
37. These texts are anthologized in The Atlantic Slave Trade, ed. David Northrup
(Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1994).
38. No records suggest that Toussaint himself ever made a distinction between
Placide and the other children of his marriage with Suzanne Simon Baptiste. See Alfred
Nemours, Histoire de la descendance et de la famille de Toussaint Louverture (Port-auPrince: Imprimerie de Ttat, 1941).
39. In a letter dated 9 Nivse An 7, addressed to the president of the Executive Coun
cil of the Directory, Coisnon assessed the Louverture boys' academic strengths and noted
that he "hastened to send on to him" a recent letter from Toussaint. Archives nationales,
F7 6266.

176 Yah French Studies


Toussaint's children were at school in Paris, effectively hostages of the
French government. If they could be kidnapped, Malouet reasoned,
Toussaint might be willing to sever his links with France. The British
government, he admitted, would never approve such a plan, but, he
added, if the children could be got to Dover, he was sure their kidnap
per would be rewarded and they would be handed over to Jean Kina and
sent to Jamaica.40

The episode may not have been quite as chimerical as it seems, how
ever. As early as 1804, a biography of Toussaint stated that he and Gen
eral Maitland had agreed to try to remove the boys from an educational
arrangement in which they were effectively hostages. It is not clear
whether the following quote refers to Malouet's plan specifically or to
some other dialogue between Toussaint and the English regarding the
status of his sons:
One other express engagement of a most interesting nature, [that] Gen
eral Maitland concluded with Tousant, . . . was, that he promised, if
possible, to enveigle [sic] his two sons from those who had charge of
their education, he went to Hamburgh [sic] for that purpose, and en
deavoured to perfect his intentions by deputation, in vain: this disap
pointment became a source of anxiety for their parent, still he was sat
isfied with the attempt: had it succeeded, Tousant [sic] no doubt would
have proclaimed the independence of that colony... these children
were a barrier thereto.41

The French police later intentionally "confused" the plot referred


to by Malouet in the letter they had intercepted with a straightfor
wardly announced request by Toussaint to repatriate one of his sons.
Historians including Nemours have accepted the logic of police letters
linking Malouet's plot to a subsequent "kidnapping plot" by two men
from Saint-Domingue named Huin and d'Hbcourt who came to
France to bring at least one of the Louverture boys back to their father.
In order to connect the two episodes, the police had to overlook a let
ter from Toussaint to Napoleon. In that letter, Toussaint explained that
he had sent his emissary Huin to France to take custody of one of his
sons and travel back with him to Saint-Domingue. This letter is pre
served in the French National Archives:
40. David Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2002), 146.
41. Anonymous, The Life and Military Achievements of Tousant Loverture [sic] (Bal
timore: No publisher, 1804), 40.

DEBORAH JENSON

177

My two children, who are at the National Institute, have written to me


to request permission to return to Saint-Domingue, to the bosom of
their own family. My intention is not to bring back both at once, but
one of the two. I have a third son, younger than the two in France, whom
I would like to send there, to receive some education. The son who will
remain in France will be his younger brother's mentor, and the one who
will return to Saint-Domingue will give me and his tender-hearted
mother joy and consolation. I beg you, Citizen Consul, to give one of
my sons the opportunity to return to me, either in the company of gen
eral Michel, or in the company of adjudant general Huin. ... I depend
on your care and paternal tenderness.42

Contrary to Toussaint's wishes, when Huin, accompanied by d'Hbcourt, arrived in Bordeaux, he was placed under strict police surveil
lance as a potential kidnapper and denied all access to the Louverture
boys. Police correspondence initially indicated that the abbot Coisnon
had communicated Toussaint's request for the repatriation of his son,
but in later correspondence, Coisnon denied that there had been such
a request, and specified that he would guard the boys from any contact
with potential kidnappers.43 In effect, under the guise of protecting the
boys from kidnappers, the French government had become the kid
napper of the young Louvertures.
The status of the boys as hostages was again confirmed when
Placide was taken out of school to accompany a French military expe
dition led by the admiral Gantheaume in 1800-1801. The expedition
was supposed to be headed for Saint-Dominguea destination that the
presence of the son of Toussaint Louverture would have confirmed to
observers.44 According to Isaac Louverture in his 1818 memoir, Plac de
had been used on this trip, against his will, as a military decoy. Isaac ex
plained that Placide had been on admiral Gantheaume's vessel as "aidede-camp to general Sahuguet, with the firm belief that he was going to
Saint-Domingue, whereas, without suspecting it, he was actually be
ing used to mask the true goal of a naval expedition bringing reinforce
ments to the army in Egypt. "4S The French police itself had noted in an
42. Letter from Toussaint Louverture to General Bonaparte, First Consul of the
French Republic, 10 Messidor, An VIII, Archives nationales, F7 6266.
43. An unsigned report entitled "Les enfants de Toussaint Louverture" on stationery
from the Ministry of the General Police, 15 Vendmiare An X, Archives nationales, F7
6266, noted that Coisnon had received orders from Toussaint to return his children to
him, but then concluded "This fact is absolutely false."
44. See "Les enfants de Toussaint Louverture," op. cit.
45. Isaac Louverture, Mmoires dIsaac Louverture in Histoire de l'expdition des

178 Yale French Studies

1801 report that Saint-Domingue was merely a "simulated destina


tion" for this trip.
Were the boys sent to France as hostages from the start? Originally,
Toussaint had been willing to place his sons in the role of guarantors of
his good faith in order to stabilize his relations with the French after
his deportations of the French agents Sonthonax and Hdouville, but
he seemed to assume that this would be to the benefit of all concerned.
In the late 1790s Toussaint had been something of a darling of the
French media, surprisingly amply represented through his own (dic
tated) letters and interviews, and he did not hesitate to exploit the idea
of a paternal bond between France and Saint-Domingue concerning the
care of his sons. In April of 1799, the Ancien moniteur printed a letter
in which he referred to his difficulties with the agents sent by France
with metaphors of stormy horizons and clear dawns. This segues into
a touching paternal recommendation of his sons to the care of his sec
retary, now in France, who seems to merge in Toussaint's rhetoric with
France itself:
See my children as often as you can, give me news of them: you know
how much I love them, how tender my attachment is for them. Give
them the counsel and advice that they should expect from a friend of
their father; let them be hard-working, and commit to making them
selves worthy, through their diligence, of the care and kind attentions
of the mother country; through such behavior they will deserve a re
doubling of my attachment to them.46

Isaac Louverture shared his father's idealism concerning the custo


dial role of France as a substitute father in his life. Fie showed his de
votion to Napoleon in a poem he composed for the Consul in 1801,
called "For the Day of Peace," which begins:
O toi dont la valeur commande la victoire,
Et dont les grands desseins ont mrit la gloire,
Jeune et vaillant hros, l'clat de la grandeur,
Du beau jour qui nous luit, augmente la Splendeur.47

fianais Saint-Domingue by Antoine Mtrai (Paris: Karthala, 1985), 228. The simu
lated destination" of Saint-Domingue on this expedition was confirmed in the police re
port of 15 Vendmiaire, An X, op. cit.
46. The Ancien moniteur, April 1799,639.
47. This poem is published in Joseph Borom's well-documented article "Louanges
de Napoleon Bonaparte par un fils de Toussaint Louverture," Revue de linstitut Napo
lon 133 (1977): 169.

DEBORAH JENSON

179

O thou whose valor commands victory,


And whose great designs merit glory,
Young and valiant hero, the brilliant grandeur
Of the shining day that illuminates us, augments your splendor.

France decided to wage war against Saint-Domingue in late 1801.


Toussaint's well-publicized expression of fusion between his own
parental tenderness and that of the mre-patrie set the stage for an in
ternational outcry when Napoleon sent both Isaac and Placide on the
1802 military expedition to gain leverage over their father. As Isaac re
counts the events in his memoirs, Napoleon personally had outlined a
plan for the boys to sail ahead of the expedition and convince their fa
ther of the Consul's honorable intentions [Histoire de lexpdition des
franais Saint-Domingue, 229-30). Instead, Placide and Isaac were
sent directly with Napoleon's brother-in-law, general Leclerc, on the
Jean-Jacques, arriving with the rest of the massive and obviously hos
tile force.
Under Coisnon's escort, the boys were sent to their father to per
suade him of the Consul's good faith and to deliver a forcefully worded
letter from Napoleon. As Mtrai described the scene in 1818, "SaintDomingue's destiny, the liberty of the blacks, a new people, all de
pended in that moment on a father's heart" (58). Toussaint balked.
Coisnon, according to Mtrai, was astonished by "the inflexibility of
this father, and he believed he would touch him by alarming his pater
nal heart; if you do not become obedient to the Consul, he said firmly,
you will never see your children again" (59). Toussaint reportedly an
swered "Take my children" (60).
The boys ultimately were released to their father's care anyway, but
the scene of their jeopardy was inscribed immediately in historical ac
counts. The 1803 British abolitionist tract Buonaparte in the West In
dies; or, the History of Toussaint ouverture, the African H ero described
the scene with anti-Napoleonic relish: "To take these youths from their
studies, and send them out to catch their father, as you would catch a
bird, by stripping her nest, and baiting a trap-catch with her young ones,
seemed no doubt a bright thought to the Corsican."48 Napoleon would
never be able to convince numerous significant participants in the Eu
ropean intellectual domain that he had not destroyed a man who incar
nated the virtue of the human attachment to liberty as something more
48.
Anonymous, Buonaparte in the West Indies: or, the History of Toussaint Louverture the African Hero (London: J. Hatchard, 1803) 2:4-5.

180

Yale French Studies

precious than a beloved child. The children's passage to Saint-Domingue


on the Jean-Jacques coincided with this Rousseauist symbolism.
The events of the final kidnapping of Toussaint himself, along with
his whole family, began to unfurl on June 6, 1802. Toussaint had nego
tiated his personal retreat from political power at the beginning of May,
but subsequently became resistant to French political conditions. Al
though Aim Csaire insinuated that Toussaint had sacrificed himself
to the French for the good of Saint-Domingue,49 Toussaint himself in
sisted that he had been taken by force, as recorded in the narrative ex
cerpted at the beginning of this article. According to the historian
Pierre Pluchon, it was because Toussaint was intent on lodging com
plaints with the French concerning the conditions of his retirement
that he unwisely accepted an invitation to the home of general Brunet
on the Habitation Georges.50 As he entered the house, French soldiers
emerged from the adjacent rooms to surround him, and once he was
thus taken hostage, his military escort outside was disarmed.
The kidnapped Toussaint was taken to the port of Gonaives and em
barked on the ship Le Crole, from which he made the famous tree of
liberty statement. The ship proceeded to the Cap, where he was trans
ferred to the ironically named vessel Le Hros and joined by his wife,
his two elder sons, his younger son St. Jean, a niece, Louise Chancy, a
family friend, Victoire Thusac (who was briefly identified by French po
lice as Placide's fiance, but subsequently as someone with no relation
whatsoever to the Louverture family), and a maid, Justine.
Toussaint did not have a cell phone or a Maxine Waters in Congress
or an Amy Goodman of Democracy Now to aid in the dissemination of
this story. In the time period leading up to the kidnapping, Napoleonic
censorship had set in, and Toussaint's side of the story was no longer
represented in the French newspapers. Not until June 23 (news gener
ally took about a month to reach France from Saint-Domingue) was it
even announced that he had surrendered. The kidnapping itself was
never reported as such in the summer of 1802 papers. On July 19, in an
item buried among other faits divers, the Gazette de Fiance simply
noted that "The vessels the Argonaut, the Hero, the Mont-Blanc, and
the frigate the Precious, under the command of Counter-Admiral
49. "Ce rle de martyre, Toussaint l'accepta" [Toussaint accepted this role as mar
tyr). Aim Csaire, Toussaint Louverture: La Rvolution franaise et le problme colo
nial (Paris: Prsence Africaine, 1981!, 313.
50. Pierre Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture: un rvolutionnaire noir dancien rgime
(Paris: Fayard, 19891, 497-98.

DEBORAH JENSON

181

Magon, entered, on the 18th of this month, the harbor of Brest. Tous
saint Louverture was on board the vessel the Hero with his family."51
The passage on the Hero was Toussaint's last time spent with his
family (including Placide, who had insisted on accompanying him into
prison, but whose filial piety was rewarded not with his father's com
panionship but with a cell in the prison of Belle-Isle). Toussaint was
sent on alone to the imposingly somber Fort de Joux in the Jura. Prob
ably the earliest French account to qualify Toussaint's departure as a
kidnapping was a letter from the hapless Leclerc, who was losing
ground militarily every day, to Napoleon on June 11 1802: "Toussaint
is kidnapped. It is a great step, but the blacks are arm ed and I need forces
to disarm them."52 On August 25 he reiterated this point, with a tone
of desperation rather than triumph: "It is not enough to have kidnapped
Toussaint, here there are two thousand leaders to kidnap" (217).
Toussaint hoped to change Napoleon's mind and secure his release
by dictating his Mmoires, which he gave to the general Caffarelli, aidede-camp to Napoleon, during his visit of September 16,1802. Caffarelli
noted that this memoir had been "dictated before my arrival at the Fort
de Joux to a secretary of the sub-prefecture."53 Toussaint apparently no
longer had access at that point to a secretary, as he requested that Caf
farelli insert one text written in his own hand.54 This passage still ex
ists at the end of one copy of the Mmoires, written with the same
purely phonetic orthography found in all Toussaint's handwritten
texts, from an early letter written to a French agent to these final writ
ings.55 Caffarelli reported that on his visit of September 27, he found
the prisoner "trembling with cold, and sick, he was suffering greatly,
he found it difficult to speak" (Histoire de la captivit et de la mort de
Toussaint Louverture, 242). At this same meeting Caffarelli returned
51. Gazette de France, July 19, 1802.
52. Letter by Leclerc to Napoleon, June 11,1802, in Paul Roussier, ed., Lettres du gen
eral Leclerc (Paris: Librairie Ernest Leroux, 1937), 171.
53. General Nemours, Toussaint Louverture fonde Saint-Domingue la libert et
lgalit (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie du Collge Vertires, 1945), 90.
54. "Toussaint Louverture au Fort de Joux (1802), Journal du general Caffarelli" in
the Nouvelle revue retrospective 94 (10 April 1902): 4. A photograph as well as a tran
scription of this text can be found in the Lettres du General Leclerc, ed. Paul Roussier
(Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1937), 349-50.
55. See the handwritten letter o invective from Toussaint to Sonthonax, 24 of the
month noted by Toussaint with what seems to be the abbreviation for "Rpublique,"
"Rep.," An VI, Archives nationales, AF III 210, 36. This letter confirms that Toussaint's
final texts were consistent, not only in spelling but also in rhetoric and imagery, with his
earlier writing.

182 Yale French Studies


Toussaint's Mmoires with a few discouraging remarks: "I told him
coldly that I had not seen anything of interest, that this text had taught
me nothing, and I asked him for more positive and true avowals than
those I had read and heard thus far" (242).
In September and October, Toussaint wrote several letters in his
own hand, and these documents are precious records of his unmediated
voice and of his despairing contemplation of the problematic "human
ity" of his captors. From the "cachte du for Gout" [dungeon of the Fort
Gout], Toussaint wrote to "Caffarli," "Je vous pri de rafraichire la
mmoire de premire Consul a mon negard. . .. Vous mavet asur que
le premiere Consul et eu min et plus guste que personne" [I beg you to
refresh the First Consul's memory with respect to me. . . . You have as
sured me that the First Consul is human and more just than anyone].56
To his wife, Suzanne, Toussaint wrote in September, "J'ai t malade
an narrivant ici, mais le commandant de cet place qui et un homme
umain ma port toute les cecours possible. . . . vous sav mon namitier
pour ma famille et mon nattachement pour une femme que )e chris,
pour quoi mav vous pa donn de vos nouvel" [I was sick upon my ar
rival here, but the commander of this place who is a human man gave
me all possible help. . . .You know my friendship for my family and my
attachment to a wife I cherish, why haven't you sent me your news]
(Toussaint Louverture fonde Saint-Domingue la libert, 92). To
Napoleon, Toussaint wrote "Je vous pri au nom de dieu, au nom de lhumanite de jai t un coudeuille favarable sur ma reclamation. ... Je ne
sui pas instruire, je sui ignorent, mai mon pre qui et aveugle presantement, ma montre les chemien de la vertu" [I beg you in the name of
God in the name of humanity to look favorably upon my request. . . .
I am not an educated man, I am ignorant, but my father who is blind
at present has shown me the paths of virtue].57 In deciding all these ques
tions of the "eu min," the "umain," and of "lhumanite," Toussaint
could only conclude that God had suffered a malady of vision.
On November 6 of 1802, one of the commanders of the Fort de Joux,
Bailie, reported to the Minister of the Marines and the Colonies that he
had orders "that this prisoner must not write anything more to the Gov
ernment" (Toussaint Louverture fonde Saint-Domingue la libert,
89). Baille recounts on November 14 that he therefore approached the
56. Toussaint Louverture, letter to Napoleon with a postscriptum to Caffarelli, 17
Vendmiaire, An XI, Archives nationales F 7 6266,24.
57. Letter from Toussaint Louverture to Napoleon, op. cit.

DEBORAH JENSON

183

prisoner and took away " all the written and blank papers existing in his
room. . . . He seemed deeply affected by the removal [l'enlvement] of
these papers" (89). After this final literary enlvement, we hear no more
from this great leader of the blacks. Toussaint Louverture was found
dead in his cold dungeon in April 1803, wearing in a headscarf his final
attempts to tell his story.
KIDNAPPING AS TROPE
Srinivas Aravamudan has argued that the Haitian Revolution involved
a "tropicalization" of the Enlightenment. This movement of ideas from
Europe to the tropics is evident, he asserts, in "reading lessons'' based
not so much on the verifiable consumption of literal texts as on "mo
bile dramatizations of the abstract process of literacy"58 such as the
general renown of the abb Raynal's paradigm of a "new Spartacus."
Kidnapping presents a more violent "mobile dramatization" of intercultural movement. And kidnapping as intercultural movement is ar
guably at the very foundations of what we associate with the idea of
"civilization," as the name "Europe" itself comes from a mythological
scene of a sort of Europeanization by kidnapping.
The name "Europe" derives from the myth that the Phoenician
princess Europa, wandering along a beach, was persuaded by Zeus, dis
guised as a snowy white bull, to ride upon his back. The ride turned into
an abduction/ravishmcnt, as Zeus carried the princess across the
Mediterranean to Crete, where she became the mother of Minos, Lord
of Crete. Norman Davies points out that among the connotations of
Europa's ride is the movement of knowledge and reading practices from
East to West, locating the cultural identity of Europe in a sort of kid
napping, ravishment, and familial merger of crosscultural influences:
"Zeus was surely transferring the fruits of the older Asian civilizations
of the East to the new island colonies of the Aegean," writes Davies.
"Europa's ride provides the mythical link between Ancient Egypt and
Ancient Greece. Europa's brother, Cadmus, who roamed the world in
search of her, . . . was credited with bringing the art of writing to
Greece."59 On a mythological level, the origins of European civiliza
tion lie not in a founding nationalist scene, but in an involuntary hy58. Srinivas Aravamudan, Ttopicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), 289.
59. Norman Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 1996), xvi.

] 84 Yale French Studies


bridiza tion that evokes the tension between force and exchange in colo
nialism.
Davies's reading of the Europa myth casts kidnapping in an oddly
constructive light. But what would a tropicalization of that myth look
likeToussaint's ride, or Isaac and Placide's rides? Can we trace the
path of a Haitian Europa, descended from abducted Africans, ravished
from the scene of the slave revolution and brought to France, trans
porting the symbolic power of the self-emancipation of the oppressed
to Europe?
Despite current research on Haitilike that represented in this vol
umethat is devoted to uncovering the powerful legacy of the trans
ported knowledge of revolutionary slave agency to France, we know
that no Haitian Europa, kidnapped back to France, became a Europastyle "progenitrix" (Davies, xv) of a new branch of civilization. Mythol
ogization of the abduction of a Haitian Europa would necessitate more
pointed consideration of the tragic cost of violent displacement and
forced exile.
One of the members of Toussaint's kidnapped entourage on the
Hero was his niece Louise Chancy, who later married Isaac Louverture.
Like Placide, Isaac and Louise lived a life of house arrest and penury un
der Napoleon, and then of restricted movement and penury under sub
sequent regimes. Although Louise ultimately made one brief trip to
Haiti, to settle an inheritance claim, neither son of Toussaint Louver
ture would ever succeed in setting foot on Haitian soil again, despite
numerous applications for travel papers. Rivalry and misunderstand
ing between Isaac and Placide festered, and in 1821 Isaac and Louise
sued to prevent Placide from continuing to use the Louverture name
because they believed his lighter skin was evidence that he was not
Toussaint's son. When they won the case, Isaac thanked his lawyers in
Latin.60 Isaac and Louise had no children. Although Placide had one
daughter with his French wife, the Louverture familial line faded into
the provincial French petite bourgeoisie and never reconnected with
the destiny of Haiti.61
Isaac and Placide's revolutionary heritage arguably had been kid
napped somewhere along the route of their alienating, manipulative,
60. T.-R. Marboutin, "Notes historiques sur l'expdition de Leclerc Saint-Domingue
et sur la famille Louverture," Revue de l'Agenais 42. (1915): S5.
61. See the detailed discussion of the lives of the surviving Louverture family mem
bers in France in Nemours, Histoiie de la descendance et del famille de Toussaint Lou
verture, op. cit.

DEBORAH JENSON

185

nonconsensual "rides." Toussaint's tree of liberty speech on the eve of


his deportation had symbolized his kidnapping as the felling of a tree
whose roots would nevertheless remain vital; but in the context of the
potential revolutionary future of his own children, kidnapping was, ef
fectively, an uprooting. (Toussaint's metaphor was in fact biologically
far-fetched; few mature trees regrow when cut off at the trunk.) Not
only were Isaac and Placide prevented from having any influence on
Haiti's postcolonial destiny, but Isaac demonstrated an "alienated"
mentality in his suit against Placide and also in his critique of Lamar
tine's play Toussaint Louverture. Isaac asked Lamartine not to bring his
play to the stage because it contained some famous lines attributed to
his father that oppose black and white: "I am surprised that Lamartine
has reiterated with confidence the most absurd and ridiculous things
that have been attributed to my father: The first of the blacks to the
first of the whites. White kernels and black kernels.1'62 Isaac also felt
that his own character was presented as overly pro-black: "I would not
wish, when my name makes its way around the world in the verse of
an illustrious poet, for it to be believed that I like no persons other than
those of my own color."
In contrast to the profound counter-developmental force of the
Louvertures' revolutionary uprooting by kidnapping, Aristide's claims
concerning his post/colonial "ride" paradoxically highlight the very
rootedness of kidnapping as a legacy of colonial slavery, in two do
mains. One domain is that of the political and economic relationships
between former slaveholding powers and the descendants of slaves. It
is difficult to imagine a similarly ambiguous or hostile deportation of
a democratically elected leader in the context of any country that had
been in the category of "masters" in the colonial past. The other do
main is that of traumatic diasporan subjectivity. Aristide continues to
try to make this traumatic subjectivity into a "reading lesson" for a
post/colonial politics of the oppressed, in which an ongoing political
role for the displaced "president" is implicated by the exemplary event
of the alleged kidnapping. His first gesture upon arrival in South Africa
was to issue a statement forging a political legacy out of the analogy be
tween his kidnapping and the kidnapping of Toussaint Louverture, and
the kidnapping of Toussaint Louverture and the earlier kidnappings of
Africans. I close with Aristide's statement, which resonates with Tous
saint's description of his kidnapping with which I began:
62. Isaac Louverture, Letter to La Guienae, Bordeaux, May 21, 1850.

186 Yale French Studies


In the decade before the Revolution, French ships had transported over
224,000 slaves from Africa; . . .
Two hundred years later, we also remember the Father of that Rev
olution, Toussaint Louverture, who was arrested and sent to Europe.
Today, instead of Europe, we are welcomed in Africa, our mother
continent, our temporary home until we are back in Haiti.63

63.
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, "Statement by President Jean-Bertrand Aristide," Black
World Today, May 31, 2004.

Contributors

is the author of two books published with Stanford


University Press: Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism,
and the Fin de Sicle (1991) and Islands and Exiles: The Creole
Identities of Post/Colonial Literature (1998). He has recently
(2004) published with Broadview Press a translation/critical
edition of Victor Hugo's 1826 novel about the Haitian Revolu
tion, Bug-Jargal, and is currently working on an edition of an
other French novel about Haiti, Jean-Baptiste Picquenard's
Adonis, ou Le bon ngre (1798), for Harmattan's Autrement
mmes series. He is a Full Professor and Queen's National
Scholar in the Department of English at Queen's University,
Ontario.
Daniel Des ormeaux, Assistant Professor of French and Caribbean
literary history at the University of Kentucky, is the author of
La figure du bibliomane: histoire du livre et stratgie littraire
au XlX sicle (2001). He has published numerous articles on
the history of the book, of reading, and of ideas in France in the
nineteenth-century in publications including Lesprit crateur,
Romanic Review, and Romantisme. He is currently complet
ing a collection of articles on literary history in the Mmoires
of Alexandre Dumas, as well as further research on the M
moires of Toussaint Louverture and other documents linked to
the Haitian Revolution.
Deborah Jenson is Associate Professor of French at the Univer
sity of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of a book on nine
teenth-century French literature and culture, Trauma and Its
Representations: The Social Life of Mimesis in Post-Revolu
tionary France [Johns Hopkins, 2001), and editor and co-trans-

Chris Bongie

YFS 107, The Haiti Issue, ed. Deborah Jenson, 2005 by Yale University.

187

188 Yale French Studies

lator of Hlne Cixous's Coming to Writing and Other Essays


(Harvard, 1992). She is completing a monograph on France and Haiti
in the post/colonial nineteenth-century, and has written articles on
early Creole poetry, diasporan consciousness in Saint-Domingue,
and Haitian "bovarysme."
Doris Y. Radish is Professor of French and Women's Studies at the Uni
versity of Georgia. In addition to her extensive writings on nine
teenth- and twentieth-century French novels, she has published nu
merous books, articles, and translations related to French slavery.
They include Translatmg Slavery ( 1994), Slavery in the Caribbean
Francophone World (2000), and Sophie Doin: La famille noire,
suivie de trois nouvelles blanches et noires 2002).
Christopher L. Miller is Frederick Clifford Ford Professor of African
American Studies and French at Yale. He is author of Blank Dark
ness: Africanist Discourse in French (1985), Theories of Africans:
Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa ( 1990), and Na
tionalists and Nomads: Essays on Francophone African Literature
and Culture (1998), all published by the University of Chicago
Press. He is currently engaged in a study of the French Atlantic tri
angle and the literature and culture of the slave trade.
Nick Nesbitt is an Associate Professor of French at Miami Univer
sity, Ohio. His book Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in
French Caribbean Literature was published by the University of
Virginia Press (New World Studies) in 2003. He is currently com
pleting a book on the Haitian Revolution and the Enlightenment.
Albert Valdman is Emeritus Rudy Professor of French/Italian and
Linguistics and continuing director of the Creole Institute at Indi
ana University. His research interests range from second language
acquisition, with focus on French instruction, to overseas varieties
of French and French-based Creoles. In the latter area his major pub
lications are Le franais hors de France, Le crole: structure, statut
et origine, several bilingual dictionaries for Haitian Creole and A
Dictionary of Louisiana Creole. Currently, he is directing projects
aimed at producing a dictionary of Louisiana Cajun French and a
bilingual Creole-French/French-Crcole school dictionary in sup
port of the reform educational program in Haiti.

I
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1 Critical Bibliography of Existentialism
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