Dilemmas of emancipation: From the Saint Domingue insurrections of 1791 to the emerging Haitian State

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 46, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 1-15

  Fick, Carolyn E ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 54749154497     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/1998.46.1     Document Type: Article

References (36)

1. See Michel-Rolph Trouillot, 'From Planters' Journals to Academia: The Haitian Revolution as Unthinkable History', Journal of Caribbean History 25: 1 + 2, 1991, pp. 81-85.
2. Trouillot, 'Planters' Journals', p. 85.
3. As with most historical events involving a fundamental transformation of society, it is with hindsight that we are able to understand and analyze them as a revolution. Even among historians of the twentieth century, however, the acceptance of the Haitian events as revolution has been late in coming. See Trouillot, 'Planters' Journals', pp. 82, 88, 92-96.
4. The remarkable absence in French revolutionary historiography of any treatment of the Haitian revolution more worthy than a passing reference or a footnote about the 'disturbances in Saint Domingue' or the 'slave uprising in the colony' is dealt with critically by Yves Bénot in La Révolution française et la fin des colonies, Paris: La Découverte, 1988.
5. On the split among the planters and the white ruling elite in the colony see especially C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins [1938] 3rd edn London: Allison and Busby, 1980, pp. 59-84.
6. See also Charles Frostin, Les révoltes blanches à Saint-Domingue au XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, Paris: Ecole, 1975.
7. On the position of the absentee planters in particular see Gabriel Debien, Les colons de Saint-Domingue et la révolution: essai sur le Club Massiac, Paris: Armand Colon, 1953.
8. For clarification on when and where the two events took place, and on their relationship to the revolt that broke out on the 22nd, see David Geggus, 'The Bois-Caïman Ceremony', Journal of Caribbean History 25: 1 + 2, 1991, pp. 45-52.
9. See Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990, pp. 92-94 and 260-66.
10. David Geggus, however, questions the historical validity of Boukman's speech: he invokes the absence of written contemporaneous evidence and claims that it was fashioned after the revolution by historians in the nineteenth century: see 'Bois-Caïman', pp. 48-49,
11. and his 'Haitian Voodoo in the Eighteenth Century: Language, Culture, Resistance', Jahrbuch für Geschichte von Staat, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Lateinamerikas, Böhlau Verlag: Köln, Weimar, Wien, 1991, pp. 46, 49. At any rate Boukman's speech has become firmly entrenched in the mythology that has evolved concerning the Bois-Caïman event and its relation to the revolution, and as such continues to occupy a central place in the collective historical consciousness of most Haitians.
12. For the distinction between liberation from an oppressed condition and the western bourgeois concept of political liberty as an ideology involving the universal principles of individual rights, see Jacky Dahomay, 'L'esclave et le droit: les légitimations d'une insurrection', in Les abolitions de l'esclavage: de L. F. Sonthonax à V. Schoelcher, ed. Marcel Dorigny, Actes du colloque international organisé par l'Association pour l'étude de la colonisation européenne; programme: La route de l'esclave, Paris, 3-5 fév. 1994, Presses Universitaires de Vincennes/Editions UNESCO, 1995, pp. 44-45.
13. The full text of the letter is cited in Thomas Madiou, Histoire d'Haiti, 2 vols [1847], Port-au-Prince: Fardin, 1981, vol. 1, pp. 109-10.
14. It is also cited in full in Pamphilde de Lacroix, Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de la révolution de Saint-Domingue, 2 vols 2d edn, Paris: Pillet aîné, 1820, vol. 1, pp. 102-04;
15. and it is contextually summarized in Pauléus Sannon, Histoire de Toussaint Louverture, 3 vols, Port-au-Prince: Héraux, 1920, vol. 1, p. 99.
16. On the role of Jean-François as leader of the revolutionary struggle and chief negotiator, see the critical comments of C. L. R. James, Black Jacobins, pp. 103-08.
17. Fick, Making of Haiti, p. 115.
18. Fick, p. 116-17.
19. Cited in Fick, p. 114 from the original manuscript version of the account in AN, DXXV 46, 439. Journal rédigé par M. Gros. Entry for 17 Nov. 1791.
20. Cited in Fick, p. 114.
21. Still fighting under the banner of Spain in 1793, Toussaint gradually began to chart the independent course that would lead him to break with Spain (in early June 1794) and would also allow him to distinguish his leadership of the struggle for general emancipation from that of the French civil commissioner, Léger Félicité Sonthonax, who proclaimed slavery abolished in the North on 29 August 1793. Toussaint simultaneously issued his proclamation of 29 August from Camp Turel: Brothers and friends. I am Toussaint Louverture. . . . I want Liberty and Equality to reign in Saint-Domingue. I am working to bring these about. Unite with us . . . and fight with us for the same cause. (The full text of the proclamation is cited in Sannon, Toussaint, vol. 1, p. 139,
22. and in Victor Schoelcher, Vie de Toussaint Louverture, Paris: Ollendorf, 1889, p. 94.) Toussaint did not join the French republican side until months after the National Convention ratified abolition by its law of 4 February 1794.
23. Hilary Beckles, 'Divided to the Vein: The Problem of Race, Colour and Class Conflict in Haitian Nation-Building, 1804-1820', in Caribbean Freedom, eds Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd, Princeton: Markus Weiner; London: James Curry; Kingston, Ja: Ian Randle, 1996, p. 494.
24. For the progression toward general emancipation in the context of the colony-wide slave insurrections, counter-revolutionary agitation, Spanish-held territories in the North, and an impending British invasion from the western extremities, see Fick, Making of Haiti, pp. 157-68;
25. and for interplay between these events and the radical abolitionist philosophy of Sonthonax, see her 'The French Revolution in Saint Domingue: A Triumph or a Failure?' in A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean, eds David B. Gaspar and David P. Geggus, Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1997, pp. 65-67.
26. For the pivotal role of Sonthonax in bringing about general emancipation, see Robert Stein's book, Léger Félicité Sonthonax: A Lost Sentinel of the Republic, Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1985.
27. On the Port-Salut conspiracy of January 1791 and the dynamics of the Platons rebellion later in 1792 in the South Province, see Fick, Making of Haiti, chap. 6.
28. Cited in Fick, p. 156. The notion of pays as the region where they had settled and to which they now belonged is certainly more appropriate here than any concept - at this stage - of independent nationhood. National independence resulted, with no possible political alternative, from Bonaparte's attempt in 1802 to restore slavery and the former colonial regime, and from the ensuing war of independence led by the indigenous Haitian forces.
29. The attitudes and aspirations of the ex-slaves after abolition are based on material presented in Fick, Making of Haiti, pp. 168-78.
30. In this vein, Haitian historian, Claude Moïse, has suggested that [f]rom the revolt of August 1791 under the direction of Boukman to the establishing of Toussaint Louverture's regime in 1801, one can trace the itinerary of a people struggling for freedom, and through this struggle one sees the new interest groups confronting each other for the conquest of hegemonic positions in the construction of the new state. . . . [while] the nation, the peasant masses, takes shape underneath and outside of these partisan struggles. In Constitutions et luttes de pouvoir en Haïti, 2 vols, Montréal: CIDIHCA, 1988, vol. 1, p. 18 (my translation).
31. Mats Lundahl, 'Toussaint L'Ouverture and the War Economy of Saint-Domingue, 1796-1802', in Caribbean Freedom (see note 15), p. 4.
32. Compiled from Lundahl, pp. 4, 9.
33. Lundahl, pp. 4, 9 respectively.
34. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, State Against Nation, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990, p. 44.
35. In the judgement of C. L. R. James on this point (Black Jacobins p. 287), Toussaint had destroyed his own left-wing: . . . as his power grew . . . he ignored the black labourers, bewildered them at the very moment that he needed them most, and to bewilder the masses is to strike the deadliest of all blows at the revolution.
36. Trouillot, State Against Nation, p. 45.