Hegel and Haiti

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 26, Issue 4, 2000, Pages 821-865

  Buck Morss, Susan ^a  

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EID: 8744315247     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/448993     Document Type: Article

References (95)

1. quot;For eighteenth-century thinkers who contemplated the subject, slavery stood as the central metaphor for all the forces that debased the human spirit" (David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 [Ithaca, N.Y., 1975], p. 263; hereafter abbreviated PSAR)
2. See Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York, 1987); hereafter abbreviated ER. The question for this newly enriched nation was "how to create a moral order within a terrestrial paradise" (p. 125)
3. Although see Allison Blakeley, Blacks in the Dutch World: The Evolution of Racial Imagery in a Modern Society (Bloomington, Ind., 1993), which gives visual evidence of blacks in Holland in this era
4. Britain extorted the asiento from Spain at the time of the Treaty of Utrecht (1713). "Much of the wealth of Bristol and Liverpool in the following decades was to be built upon the slave trade" (R. R. Palmer and Joel Col ton, A History of the Modern World, 3d ed. [New York, 19G9], p. 171)
5. Hobbes considered the "elemental struggle between two enemies" to be "the natural condition which made slavery necessary as a social institution" (David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture [New York, 1966], p. 120; hereafter abbreviated PSWC). Here Hobbes followed the earlier theorists, Samuel Pufendorf and Hugo Grotius; the latter's book War and Peace (1853) included proslavery views and the argument that slavery was legally acceptable
6. Peter Hulme, "The Spontaneous Hand of Nature: Savagery, Colonialism, and the Enlightenment," in The Enlightenment and Its Shadows, ed. Hulme and Ludmilla Jordanova (London, 1990), p. 24. Hulme is mainly concerned with Hobbes's depiction of "savages" indigenous to the colonies
7. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, 1960), §1, p. 141
8. Locke was involved in the development of colonial policies through his patron, the Earl of Shaftesbury, and was a strong defender of the enterprise. He authored the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, sitting on its Council of Trade and Plantations as secretary from 1673-75. The Carolina constitutions stated: "'every freeman of Carolina, shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves'" {PSIVC, p. 118)
9. quot;In Locke's view, the origin of slavery, like the origin of liberty and property, was entirely outside the social contract" (PSWC, p. 119). Locke's philosophical argument tempered the universality of equality in the state of nature with the necessity of consent before a social contract could be undertaken, thereby excluding, explicitly, children and idiots from the contract, and by inference others who were uneducated or uneducable
10. See Uday S. Mehta, "Liberal Strategies of Exclusion," Politics and Society 18 (Dec. 1990): 427-53
11. See Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modem History (New York, 1985)
12. See Ralph Davis, The Rise of the Atlantic Economies (Ithaca, N.Y., 1973), p. 257
13. Athens, Ga., 1987], pp. 21-23)
14. For the presence in Britain of slaves in the eighteenth century, see also F. O. Shyllon, Black Slaves in Britain (New York, 1974), and Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1992)
15. Louis Sala-Molins says one-third of the commercial activity in France depended on the institution of slavery; see Louis Sala-Molins, Le Code Noir, ou le calvaire de Canaan (Paris, 1987), p. 244; hereafter abbreviated CN. More conservative estimates put the figure at 20 percent
16. It was Montesquieu who brought slavery into the Enlightenment discussion and set the tone. While condemning the institution philosophically, he justified "Negro" slavery on pragmatic, climatic, and blatantly racist grounds ("flat noses," "black from head to foot," and lacking in "common sense"). He concluded: "Weak minds exaggerate too much the injustice done to Africans" by colonial slavery (Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, in Selected Political Writings, trans. and ed. Melvin Richter [Indianapolis, 1990], p. 204)
17. See C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2d ed. (1938; New York, 1963), pp. 24-25. Michel-Rolph Trouillot has cautioned against too sanguine a reading of this passage, however, which was contextualized as a warning to Europeans, rather than an appeal to the slaves themselves: "It was not a clear prediction of a Louverture-type character, as some would want with hindsight.... The most radical stance is in the unmistakable reference to a single human species" (Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History [Boston, 1995], p. 85)
18. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, in The Basic Political Writings, trans. and ed. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis, 1988), bk. 1, chap. 1, p. 141
19. Rather, Rousseau's examples are from ancient times, for example, Braidas of Sparta against the satrap of Persepolis! See Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, in The Basic Political Writings, p. 72
20. See William B. Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans: White Response to Blacks, 1530-1880 (Bloomington, Ind., 1980). In 1764 the French government prohibited entry of blacks into the metropolis. In 1777 the law was modified to lift some of the restrictions, allowing colonial slaves to accompany their masters
21. Winthrop D.Jordan, While over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968), p. 289. Their enemies, the British Tories, seized upon this: " Ήow is it,' asked Samuel Johnson, 'that we hear the loudesl yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?'" (PSWC, p. 3)
22. quot;The plant of liberty is of so tender a Nature, that it cannot thrive long in the neighborhood of slavery" (Benjamin Rush [1773], quoted in PSAR, p. 283)
23. If the American Revolution could not solve the problem of slavery, it at least led to a perception of the problem. Nor was the desire for consistency a matter of empty rhetoric. It appeared in the antislavery resolutions of New England town meetings, in the Vermont constitution of 1777, in individual wills that manumitted slaves, in Rhode Island's law of 1774 that prohibited future importation of slaves, and in Pennsylvania's gradual emancipation act of 1780, adopted, according to a preamble written by Thomas Paine, "in grateful commemoration of our own happy deliverance" from British occupation. [PSAR, pp. 285-86]
24. see Alex Dupuy, Haiti in the World Economy: Class, Race, and Underdevelopment since 1700 (Boulder, Colo., 1989), p. 34-within the context of the radicalization of the French Revolution, Boukman's uprising changed Europeans' perception of slave revolts-no longer one of a long series of slave rebellions, but an extension of the European Revolution: "News of the summer of 1791 had focused on the flight to Varennes and capture of the French royal family and on the revolt of the slaves in Santo Domingo" (Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1789-1820) [New Haven, Conn., 1983], p. 93)
25. Slavery was abolished by Polverel and Sonthonax in August 1793, acting independently of orders from Paris. The role of both men has been neglected by scholars, another case of scholarly blindness that, to use Trouillot's felicitous term (n. 25), "silences the past." See the recent symposium, Léger-Félicité Sonthonax: La Premiere Abolition de Vesclavage: La Révolution franςaise el la Révolution deSaint-Domingue, ed. Marcel Dorigny (Saint-Denis, 1997), which begins to redress this situation; in particular, see Roland Desné, "Sonthonax vu par les dictionnaires," pp. 113-20, which traces the almost total disappearance of Sonthonax's name from the bibliographical encyclopedias of France in the course of the twentieth century
26. see David Patrick Geggus, "The British Occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793-98" (Ph.D. diss., York University, England, 1978), p. 363
27. Geggus notes: "The part played by Haiti in the anti-slavery movement's sudden resurgence in 1804 seems to have been entirely ignored in the scholarly literature. Yet its importance was apparently considerable" (Geggus, "Haiti and the Abolitionists: Opinion, Propaganda, and International Politics in Britain and France, 1804-1838," Abolition and Its Aftermath: The Historical Context, 1790-1916, ed. David Richardson [London, 1985], p. 116; hereafter abbreviated "HA"). Again, here is a case of scholarly blindness that silences the past
28. see Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848 (London, 1988), p. 233; hereafter abbreviated OCS. In 1802, the Code Noir was reestablished in Martinique and Guadeloupe (although nothing was said about Saint-Domingue)
29. Louverture had allied himself earlier with the King of Spain, setting up military operations and working in the eastern half of the island, which was a Spanish colony; but once he learned that the French Assembly had abolished slavery, he joined with Sonthonax against the British and was loyal to the French Republic until his arrest. (This change of alliances, which has been a point of controversy, is analyzed by Geggus, "'From His Most Catholic Majesty to the Godless République': The 'Volte-Face' of Toussaint Louverture and the End of Slavery in Saint Domingue," Revue française d'histoire d'outre mer 65, no. 241 [1978]: 488-89.)
30. To aid him in drawing up a constitution, Toussaint summoned an assembly of six men (including the Bordeaux-raised lawyer Julien Raimond, see below): The Constitution is Toussaint LΌuverture from the first line to the last, and in it he enshrined his principles of government. Slavery was forever abolished. Every man, whatever his colour, was admissible to all employments, and there was to exist no other distinction than that of virtues and talents, and no other superiority than that which the law gives in the exercise of a public function. He incorporated in the Constitution an article which preserved their rights to all proprietors absent from the colony "for whatever reason" except if they were on the list of emigres proscribed in France. For the rest, Toussaint concentrated all power in his own hands. [BJ, p. 263] Toussaint's regime anticipated dominion status. France missed this chance to establish a policy of enlightened imperialism
31. Geggus, "Slavery, War, and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean," in A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean, ed. David Barry Gaspar and Geggus (Bloomington, Ind., 1997), p. 22
32. Writing under a pseudonym in a Boston newspaper in support of the SaintDomingue revolution, Abraham Bishop "remarked that the American revolutionaries who had taught the world to echo the cry 'Liberty or Death!' did not say 'all white men are free, but all men are free'" (David Brion Davis, Revolutions: Reflections on American Equality and Foreign Liberations [Cambridge, Mass., 1990], p. 50)
33. Was the French Revolution a "'mere reform of abuses,'" as Napoleon claimed the English considered it, or did it constitute "'a complete social rebirth,'" as he was to say on his deathbed (Paulson, Representations of Revolution, p. 51)? At the end of his life, Napoleon regretted his treatment of Toussaint-Louverture
34. Friedrich Ruof, Johann Wilhelm von Archenholtz: Ein deutscher Schriftsteller zur Zeit der Französischen Revolution und Napoleons (1741-1812) (1915
35. The Amis des Noirs (founded in 1788) were important in setting the stage for this discussion. Although not great in numbers, they were influential as writers and pamphleteers (Condorcet, Brissot, Mirabeau, the Abbé Grégoire), whose work deplored the conditions of the colonial slaves. Marcus Rainsford wrote in 1805 that as a result of their circulated writings, negro slaves "were the prominent subjects of conversation and regret in half the towns of Europe"; as they, with "unhappy eloquence" depicted "the miseries of slavery," and "were certainly the cause of bringing into action, on a broad basis, that spirit of revolt which only sleeps in the enslaved African, or his descendent" (Marcus Rainsford, An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti [London, 1805], p. 107). The position of the Amis des Noirs was to endorse only gradual emancipation, until 1791, when they endorsed rights for free blacks and mulattoes; by the time of the actual abolition of slavery (1794) they had ceased to exist, victims of Robespierre's purges. Abolition had come to be identified with Robespierre's enemies the Girondins: "The Girondins were accused of having secretly fomented the colonial upheavals to the advantage of England and of supporting abolition in order to ruin France's empire.... Robespierre himself was conspicuously absent during the February 4 session [of the Convention, which voted unanimously to abolish slavery] and did not sign the decree" (Carolyn E. Fick, "The French Revolution in Saint Domingue: A Triumph or a Failure?" in A Turbulent Time, p. 68
36. compare Yves Bénot, "Comment la Convention a-t-elle voté l'abolition de l'esclavage en l'an II?" in Révolutions awx colonies, ed. Michel Vovelle [Paris, 1993], pp. 13-25)
37. Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz, introduction to "Zur neuesten Geschichte von St. Domingo," Minerva 4 (Nov. 1804): 340. This was Archenholz's editorial introduction to the article (pp. 341-45), which was critical of the revolution's violence and skeptical of the viability of the "negro-state."
38. See "Historische Nachrichten von den letzten Unruhen in Saint Domingo: Aus verschiedenen Quellen gezogen," Minerva 1 (Feb. 1792): 296-319. The article favored mulatto rights, the position of Brissot, and the Amis des Noirs
39. see David Brion Davis, Revolutions, pp. 49-54. War correspondents also sent reports back regularly to Polish newspapers, as a Polish regiment was part of the military force under General Leclerc sent by Napoleon to reestablish slavery in Saint-Domingue
40. See Jan Pachonski and Reuel K. Wilson, Poland's Caribbean Tragedy: A Study of Polish Legions in the Haitian War of Independence, 1802-1803 (New York, 1986)
41. The sonnet was "probably written in France in August 1802" (Geggus, "British Opinion and the Emergence of Haiti, 1791-1805," ed. Slavery and British Society, 1776-1846, ed. James Walvin [Baton Rouge, La., 1982], p. 140). Wordsworth was born the same year as Hegel (1770); both were in their early thirties at this time. William Blake also incorporated the Haitian revolution into his poetry
42. Archenholz declared the "'strictest neutrality'" (strengste Unparteilichkeit) to be his "'first duty'" (JWA, p. 40)
43. But see Karin Schüller, Die Deutsche Rezeption haitianischer Geschichte in der ersten Hälfte des 19.Jahrhunderts, ein Beitrag zum deulschen Bild vom Schwarzen (Cologne, 1992), pp. 248-61, which includes a summary of the Minerva articles on Saint-Domingue as well as a discussion of the accounts of the Haitian Revolution in other German journals and books, including the very influential German translation of Rainsford (pp. 103-8). Schüller's book was brought to my attention by Geggus after the writing of this paper, and I have added references to it in the notes when appropriate
44. Hegel wrote to Schelling from Bern, Christmas Eve, 1794: "Quite by accident I spoke a few days ago with the author of the letters signed Ό.' in Archenholz's Minerva. You are no doubt acquainted with them. The author, purportedly an Englishman, is in fact a Silesian named Oeslner . . . still a young man, but one sees that he has toiled much" (G. W. F. Hegel, letter to Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, 24 Dec. 1794, Hegel: The Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler [Bloomington, Ind., 1984], p. 28). Ruof (writing in 1915) does not mention Hegel as a reader of Minerva. The German publication of Hegel's letters was not available to him
45. see Hegel, Briefe von und an Hegel, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister, 5 vols. in 4 (Hamburg, 1969-81). Jacques d'Hont, however, begins his book with a chapter on the influence of Minerva on Hegel (and Schelling), which he describes as "total" (globale) (Jacques d'Hont, Hegel Secret: Recherches sur les sources cachées de la pensée de Hegel [Paris, 1968], pp. 7-43
46. hereafter abbreviated HS). Note that d'Hont makes no mention of the articles on Saint-Domingue that appeared in Minerva's pages (his point is a different one; see n. 105). Konrad Engelbert Oelsner, more radically republican than Archenholz, was an (anti-Robespierre) Girondist; his hero was the Abbé Sieyès. See his history of the French Revolution (based on his eyewitness reports) Luzifer oder gereinìgte Beiträge zur Geschkhte der Franzõsischen Revolution, ed. Jörn Garber (1797; Kronberg/Taunus, 1997)
47. George Armstrong Kelly, "Notes on Hegel's 'Lordship and Bondage,'" in Hegel's Dialectic of Desire and Recognition: Texts and Commentary, ed. John O'Neill (Albany, N.Y., 1996), p. 260
48. hereafter abbreviated "N." Kelly insists that Hegel's writings have to be considered within "Hegel's own time," but it is a time of thought ("N," p. 272). He considers therefore the philosophical differences between Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel: Fichte's thematic was the more general one of mutual recognition (a theme Hegel had treated earlier), whereas in the master-slave dialectic "Hegel is defending a doctrine of original equality that is curiously and dangerously denied by Fichte" ("N," p. 269). Many interpreters choose to discuss Hegel on this point
49. See Judith N. Shklar, "Self-Sufficient Man: Dominion and Bondage," in Hegel's Dialectic of Desire and Recognition, pp. 289-303, and Otto Pöggeler, Hegels Idee einer Phänomenologiedes Geisles, 2d ed. (1973
50. Karl Rosenkranz, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels Leben (1844
51. See Rainsford, An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti, chap. 2
52. Hegel, System der Sittlichkeit, ed. Georg Lasson (1893
53. hereafter abbreviated SS; quoted in Henry S. Harris, "The Concept of Recognition in Hegel'sJena Manuscripts," in HegelStudien/Beiheft 20: Hegel in Jena, ed. Dieter Henrich and Klaus Düsing (Bonn, 1990), p. 234
54. hereafter abbreviated "CR." Harris comments: The concept of legal personality emerges hand in hand with the institution of money as the "indifference" of (i.e., the universal expression for) property. This world of formal recognition is then differentiated into masters and servants by the extent of their possessions (i.e. ultimately in terms of money). ["CR," p. 233] It is the System der Sittlichkeit that first registers Hegel's reading of Adam Smith and also the unequal relationship of lord (Herr) and servant (Knecht) that is "established along with the inequality of the power of life" (SS, p. 34)-although these two themes do not yet come together. Hegel is concerned with the exchange of "surplus" as a "system of needs" that is "empirically unending"-that "borderless" commerce by which a people is "dissolved" (that is, returns to a "state of nature"?) (SS, pp. 82, 84-5). The fact that in the exchange of private property "things have equality with other things" becomes the basis of legal right but only through contract as the "binding middle term." It is impossible to say of life, as one can say of other things, that the individual "possesses" it; hence the connection of "lordship" [Herrschaft] and "bondage" [Knechtschaft] is one of "relationlessness"
55. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York, 1967), p. 234
56. I am suggesting that the arguments of several black scholars, which they believed to be in opposition to Hegel, are in fact close to Hegel's original intent. See, for example, Paul Gilroy, who reads Frederick Douglass (who was U.S. ambassador to Haiti in 1889) as providing an alternative to what he understands to be Hegel's "allegory" of the master and slave: "Douglass's version is quite different. For him, the slave actively prefers the possibility of death to the continuing condition of inhumanity on which plantation slavery depends" (Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness [Cambridge, Mass., 1993], p. 63)
57. see Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), pp. 98-101
58. Compare Hegel's statement in 1798: "Institutions, constitutions, and laws, which no longer harmonize with the opinions of mankind and from which the spirit has departed, cannot be artificially kept alive" (quoted in G. P. Gooch, Germany and the French Revolution [New York, 1920], p. 297). Note that Napoleon's attempt to reestablish the obsolete Code Noir would precisely not be a world-historical act; Haiti was at this moment on the side of world history, not Napoleonic France. Similarly, in the case of Germany: "Thus it was in the war with the French Republic that Germany found by its own experience that it was no longer a state," that consciousness was only attained through a struggle of resistance against the invading French army (quoted in Williams, Hegel's Ethics of Recognition, p. 346)
59. Hegel held to this insistence on the slave's responsibility. In the Philosophy of Right (1821): "If a man is a slave, his own will is responsible for his slavery, just as it is its will which is responsible if a people is subjugated. Hence the wrong of slavery lies at the door not simply of enslavers or conquerors but of the slaves and the conquered themselves" (Hegel, Hegel's "Philosophy of Right," trans. T. M. Knox [London, 1967], p. 239, addition to §57)
60. This term is from Alexandre Kojève,Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the "Phenomenology of Spirit," trans. James H. Nichols, Jr., ed. Raymond Queneau and Allan Bloom (Ithaca, N.Y., 1969). Queneau assembled notes of the lectures and published them in French in 1947
61. As far as I know, Tavarès is the sole exception, although many writers about African slavery have brought Hegel's master-slave dialectic to bear on their concerns. See, for example, the conclusion to PSAR, p. 560, which suggests that we "indulge in a bit of fantasy" by interpreting Hegel's master-slave dialectic through an imagined dialogue between Napoleon and Tbussaint-Louverture
62. See the numerous accounts of W. E. B. Du Bois's writings on slavery that read these texts in relation to those of Hegel; for example, see Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (New York, 1984)
63. Shamoon Zamir, Dark Voices: W. E. B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888-1903 (Chicago, 1995)
64. and David Levering Lewis, introduction to W. E. B. Du Bois, IK E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. Lewis (New York, 1995)
65. See also Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York, 1968), which uses European philosophy as a weapon against European (white) hegemony, interpreting the master-slave dialectic both socially (using Marx) and psychoanalytically (using Freud) in order to theorize the necessity of violent struggle by Third World nations to overcome colonial status and to reject the hypocritical humanism of Europe, attaining equal recognition in terms of their own cultural values. Martinique-born Fanon would perhaps have been the closest to seeing the connection between Hegel and Haiti, but it was not his concern
66. Alex Honneth is representative here when he concludes that Marx's social reading of mutual recognition in Hegel is "highly problematic" in its coupling of the romanticists' expressive anthropology (labor), the Feuerbachean concept of love, and English national economy (Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. Joel Anderson [Cambridge, 1995], p. 147). Note that Ludwig Siep's interpretation stresses Hegel's move away from Hobbes with the master-slave dialectic, a reading that in fact bolsters the case that I am making here
67. See Ludwig Siep, Anerkennung als Prinzip der praktische Philosophic: Untersuchungen zur HegebJenaer"PhilosophiedesCeistes" (Freiburg, 1979)
68. see also Siep's influential article "The Struggle for Recognition: Hegel's Dispute with Hobbes in the Jena Writings," trans. Charles Dudas, in Hegel's Dialectic of Desire and Recognition, pp. 273-88. Current discussions of the master-slave dialectic (Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler) confront Kojève's reading with Nietzsche's account of master and slave, thereby changing the social significance of the debate. Nietzsche criticizes as slave mentality those who submit to the state and its laws, the institutions that Hegel affirmed as the embodiment of mutual recognition, and hence concrete freedom
69. See Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 vols. (Homewood, 111., 1979), bk. 4, chap. 7, pp. 105B75, for discussions of colonial slavery and the slave trade
70. Experts who disagree in other ways (for example, Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit" trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman [Evanston, 111., 1974], and Michael Forster, Hegel's Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit [Chicago, 1998]) are in accord on this point
71. See also Manfried Riedel, Between Tradition and Revolution: The Hegelian Transformation of Political Philosophy, trans. Walter Wright (New York, 1984)
72. Compare Schelling's comment: "Who wants to bury himself in the dust of antiquity when the movement of his own time at every turn sweeps him up and carries him onward?" (Schelling, letter to Hegel, 5 Jan. 1795, Hegel, p. 29). At the time of the French Revolution, the ancients were a discourse of the present, not a means of relegating the present to the past. Aristotle walked among the living as a contemporary
73. see Pöggeler, Hegels Idee einer Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 193. Haering's observations are compatible with the argument I am making here
74. see Norbert Waszek, The Scottish Enlightenment and Hegel's Account of "Civil Society" (Boston, 1988). We also need research not only on Minerva but on other German journals, and books as well, that discussed events in SaintDomingue. See Schüller's paradigmatic work, Deutsche Rezeption haitianischer Geschichte in der ersten Hälfte des 19.Jahτhunderts
75. The sections immediately following "Lordship and Bondage," those titled "Stoicism," "Scepticism," and "The Unhappy Consciousness," can be thought to refer, not to different stages of history (as Rozenkranz argued in Hegels Leben, p. 205), but rather to different modalities of thinking about the existing reality of slavery. As for the long section critiquing physiognomy and phrenology (see Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, pp. 338-72), Tavarès, who first broke the silence on Hegel and Haiti, finds it striking that commentators on Hegel "have never inscribed [this] critique ... within the colonial debate" (Tavarès, "Hegel et l'abbé Grégoire," p. 168). Although the editors of both German and English editions of The Phenomenology of Mind do say that Hegel, while eschewing names, was referring to the work of the anatomist Franz Joseph Gall and the physiognomist Johann Kaspar Lavater, nonetheless, they make no reference to the racism inherent in these men's theories. Against Gall's comparative anatomy of crania, Hegel states, " 'the spirit is not a bone,'" and as a consequence, argues Tavarès, not about the color of skin (ibid., p. 167)
76. Near the summary of the master-slave relation in The Philosophical Propaedeutic, Hegel places in parentheses: "'History of Robinson Crusoe and Friday'" (Hegel, The Philosophical Propaedeutic, trans. A. V. Miller, ed. Michael George and Andrew Vincent [Oxford, 1986], p. 62)
77. See the gloss of this comment in Paolo Guietti, "A Reading of Hegel's Master/ Slave Relationship: Robinson Crusoe and Friday," Owl of Minerva 25 (Fall 1993): pp. 48-60
78. See Rainsford, "Toussaint-Louverture. Eine historische Schilderung für die Nachwelt," Minerva 56 (1805): 276-98, 392-408
79. Local French Masonic lodges were known to include blacks, Moslems, Jews, and women, although at Bordeaux the loge anglaise excluded Jews and actors; see J. M. Roberts, The Mythology of the Secret Societies (London, 1972), p. 51. Masonic "lodges throughout France were the only places where French people, whatever their rank, trade or religion, met on an equal footing animated by a spirit of unity. Instead of the old spirit of class that formerly had bound together all the noblemen of France, Freemasonry organized a good-fellowship which included all ranks and races" (Bernard Faÿ, Revolution and Freemasonry, 1680-1800 [Boston, 1935], p. 224)
80. Etienne de Polverel's name is connected with two lodges, L'Amitié and LΉarmonie sous Directoire Écossais, in Bordeaux. Sonthonax was not a mason (but he was a member of the Amis des Noirs). Polverel had written two days before abolition: For a long time the African race has suffered the calumny of it being said that without slavery its members would never be accustomed to work. Let me attempt to contradict this prejudice, no less absurd than that of an aristocracy of color. . . . There will be none but brothers, Republicans, enemies of every type of tyranny-monarchy, nobility, or priesthood. [Jacques de Cauna, "Polverel et Sonthonax, deux voies pour l'abolition de l'esclavage," in Léger-Félicité Sonthonax, pp. 51-52] This emphasis on the virtue of labor was a masonic value, manifested in the central allegorical importance of the "mason" craft
81. Bordeaux in precisely these years (1802-4) briefly overtook Nantes as leader in the triangular trade of slaves and sugar. See Éric Saugera, Bordeaux, port négrìer (Karthala, 1995)
82. De Cauna, "Polverel et Sonthonax," p. 49. From Sonthonax's declaration: "'All negroes and those of mixed blood presently in slavery are declared free to enjoy all rights attached to the title of French citizen'" (Dorigny, "Léger-Félicité Sonthonax et la première abolition de l'esclavage," p. 3)
83. Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley, 1995), p. 151
84. On Barlow's work for this book, see Hugh Honour, From the American Revolution to World War I, vol. 4 of The Image of the Black in Western Art, ed. Ladislas Bugner (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), p. 95
85. See d'Hont, Hegel el les Français (Hildesheim, 1998). At the end of The Philosophy of History, Hegel could still speak of the French Revolution as "a glorious mental dawn." And yet he criticized the Terror as "the most fearful tyranny. It exercises its power without legal formalities, and the punishment it inflicts is equally simple-Death. This tyranny could not last; for all inclinations, all interests, reason itself revolted against this terribly consistent Liberty which in its concentrated intensity exhibited so fanatical a shape" (Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree [1858
86. In the outline to the Logic of 1830, Hegel remarked summarily that the "genuine reason why there are no longer any slaves in Christian Europe is to be sought in nothing but the principle of Christianity itself. The Christian religion is the religion of absolute freedom, and only for Christians does man count as such, man in his infinity and universality. What the slave lacks is the recognition of his personality; but the principle of personality is Universality" (Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic (with the Zusätze), trans. and ed. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris [Indianapolis, 1991], pp. 240-41). He seems to mean Protestantism here (what in his lectures on the philosophy of history he calls the modern or Germanic world). Hegel was consistently critical of the hierarchical dependencies fostered by Catholicism (the "Roman" world); he could not have welcomed France's Concordat with the Vatican in 1801. And, indeed, he may
87. Compare Hegel, Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister, 5th once again improved edition (Hamburg, 1955), p. 225
88. hereafter abbreviated VG. Sibree's translation follows Karl Hegel's edition; Hoffmeister follows that of Georg Lasson. I am noting comparatively the German and English editions for reasons explained in note 125. Hoffmeister's edition continues here: In all African kingdoms with which Europeans have become acquainted, slavery is indigenous.... It is the basis of slavery in general that a person does not yet have consciousness of his freedom and thereby becomes an object, something worthless. The lesson we derive from this, and which alone interests us is that the state of nature [that is, before the establishment of a vemünftiger Staat] is one of injustice. [VG, pp. 225-26]
89. see "Hegels Exzerpte aus der 'Edinburgh Review' 1817-1819," ed. Waszek, Hegel-Studien 1-2 (1979): 78-116. And he read the British Morning Chronicle in the 1820s
90. see M. J. Petry, "Hegel and 'The Morning Chronicle,'" Hegel-Studien 11 (1976): 14-15. Although the preserved excerpts do not deal with Haiti, it is clear that Hegel was exposed to this new stage in the Haiti debate at a time when "the liberal Edinburgh Review contrasted the cruel tyranny of Christophe with the virtuous, constitutional rule of Pétion" ("HA," p. 122). Haiti was also again topical in Minerva again, which in 1819 published in German translation large sections of General Pamphile de Lacroix's "unbiased" history of Haiti's revolution and postrevolutionary governments
91. see Schüller, Deutsche Rezeption haitianischer Geschichte in der erslen Hälfte des 19.Jahrhunderts, p. 256
92. Developments in Haiti were in advance of Europe in making evident the inadequacies of political equality that did not address economic inequality. The documents granting freedom to slaves in Saint-Domingue in 1794 have been criticized as being empty-handed, as they did not challenge the property rights of the large landowners, whereas the small gardens that had been allowed to slaves to cultivate were deemed no longer necessary: Although "'no one has the right to require you to work a single day against your wishes,'" the land belongs rightly to those who inherited or bought it, so the ex-slaves needed to work, as "'the only means for your supplying [your] wants is the produce of the land'" (Jean Fouchard, The Haitian Maroons: Liberty or Death, trans. A. Faulkner Watts [New York, 1981], pp. 359-60). It was in effect Sonthonax's system of land policy (maintenance of large estates where military discipline governed the laborers) that was adapted by Toussaint several years later and generalized by Dessalines's successor in the north, Christophe, whereas Polverel's unrealized proposal for distributing land to its cultivators would later be implemented in part in Pétion's republican system
93. The first two editions of the lectures on the philosophy of history (1837 and 1840), edited by E. Gans and Karl Hegel, did not include all of the empirical material on world cultures, in what was then consequently a slim volume. Georg Lasson was the first to include comprehensively the empirical material in his three, ever more complete editions (1917, 1920, and 1930). Lasson commented in his editorial notes on the incompetence and even unscrupulousness of the earlier editors: "'It is astounding how much important material was simply totally left out by the editors [Gans and Karl Hegel-the latter being the basis of the Sibree English translation],'" in violation of the rigorous principles of critical philology (VG, p. 274). Yet Lasson admits that he himself doubted whether to include all of the ethnological information that exists in Hegel's lecture notebooks, "'when so much of it must appear out of date,'" specifically "'the spiritual essence of the inhabitants of Africa'" (VG, p. 277). Note that the material on Africa that appears in the Lasson (and Hoffmeister) editions is as an appendix ("Anhang: Die Alte West-Afrika"), whereas it is incorporated into the introduction in the edition of Karl Hegel (and Sibree's translation), where it is reduced from twenty-one pages to eight. The latest edition of Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of history (1996) includes three separate variants. The editors conclude that, for all the controversy among the editors, so long as no definitive "full" or "main" text can be ascertained, the interpretation of Hegel's philosophy of history "must remain scientifically unsatisfying" (Hegel, Vorlesangen über die Philosophic der Weltgeschichte, ed. Iking, Karl Brehmer, and Hoo Nam Seelmann [Hamburg, 1996], p. 530)
94. see Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Sinnlichkeit und Herrschaft: Zur Konuplualisierung der inneren Natur bei Hegel und Freud (Königstein/Taunus, 1980), pp. 46-47
95. Dayan notes that some Germans and white women married to blacks were also allowed to stay). Pachonski and Wilson report that "freemasonry had numerous adherents in the 114th [Polish] Demibrigade and was at the same time ... well rooted among San Domingo's population" (Pachonski and Wilson, Poland's Caribbean Tragedy, p. 309; see also pp. 138, 283)