Girodet, Jean-Baptiste Belley, 1798.
"From this place and from this day forth commences a new era in the world's history and you can all say that you were present at its birth." - Goethe
Revolutionary Saint-Domingue under Touissant L'ouverture remains one of the world's great marvels -
(1) The first large-scale successful slave revolt in modern times.
(2) Formerly called 'Ayiti' by the natives, the island's population was effectively decimated within a generation of Columbus landing by a combination of novel European diseases and the forced imposition of encomienda labour camps engineered to dig gold from their own soil to finance further exploration of the New World. When that didn't work Columbus and his successors were happy to swathe them in chains and sell them off as slaves in the Old World. The revolutionaries re-named the island Haiti in honour of the exploited indigenous Tainos peoples, practically wiped out by the Spanish colonists and all but forgotten by everyone else.
(3) Fought a long ferocious battle against a massive 60,000 strong British expeditionary force dispatched by Pitt and Dundas with the sole intent of re-imposing slavery on the island. 100,000 former slaves mostly of African origin died to protect the revolution and preserve those freedoms vouchsafed to them by the Jacobin French National Assembly in 1794 - the first European colonial power inspired by Enlightenment ideals to unequivocally abolish slavery throughout its territories.
(4) After Touissant's separatist constitution of 1802 which give the island de facto independence from France, Napoleon dispatched a 20,000 strong force to re-assimilate the island and again re-impose slavery. This too, incredibly, was beaten back and again at great loss but not before Touissant was captured, brought back to France in chains and left to rot in one of Napoleon's dungeons.
(5) It's very survival as an independent Republic was an achievement in itself. America was largely indifferent when not overtly hostile owing to it's own large slave population and it's desire to contain the contagion of notions of liberty and equality spreading among it's native African exploited labour force. Threatening further invasion, post-Napoleonic royalist France in turn demanded and received massive reparations annuities to compensate displaced French sugar planters; a repayment schedule which crippled the country economically for the first sixty years of its independence. Continuing hostility, sanctions and opportunistic meddling from the major powers in fact ensured a rapid turnover of successive dictatorships in the ensuing years and largely if not wholly explains the endemic structural poverty that exists there today.
(6) However, all those who died protecting the early gains of the revolution did not do so in vain; they accelerated the process already in foot to have the institution of slavery abolished once and for all. Wilbeforce and Clarkson after twenty years of lobbying finally got their slave trade abolition Bill passed through both Houses of the British Parliament in 1807 but whatever about the arguments from moral legitimacy they were inclined to focus upon it was in the end the economic unfeasibility of maintaining the institution which sapped support from the West Indies planter lobby.
As long as Haiti stood as an independent black Republic its example would destabilise the safety and profitability of slavery everywhere. No-one, in other words, did more to end the slave trade than the former slaves themselves. Frankly, I can't see any other small country with a higher achievement than that.
A pity then that most of the world's historians lost interest with Haiti once their sugar plantations went up in flames unless some nefarious scheme was afoot to have them re-assimilated along with the slavery that sustained them. Dessalines indeed displayed not a smidgeon of the enlightened stance of 'accommodation' that Touissant pragmatically developed towards the whites and such was the savagery in which he (perfectly understandably in my view, given the precedences involved) proceeded to evacuate them it is indeed surprising to find any brave souls of European extraction at all on the island in it's immediate aftermath.
This was the most tragic aspect of the whole affair in my opinion; the fact that there was all the time imminent scope for dialogue. Napoleon was given ample opportunity to forge links under respectable terms with the Touissant regime but chose instead to have the whole isle re-enslaved. Much like Pitt before him in fact who dispatched a massive expeditionary force to have slavery re-established though this time under British jurisdiction and at the behest of the French planters - all the while paying lip service to abolitionists back home such as Clarkson and Wilbeforce that he was intent on supporting them in Parliament. Haiti's struggle for independence unfortunately became embroiled in the European conflict and such were the riches involved that one imperial power was loathe to relinguish what it had whilst the other coveted what it could never obtain.
In the end, tens of thousands of Haitians of African descent lost their lives fighting off successive British and French campaigns - an appalling carnage by any yardstick with casualties on the British side so mind-numbing that it was no longer conceivable to withhold serious opposition to calls for the eradication of the trade. It simply became economically unfeasible - a rebellion which couldn't be put down in the world's most lucrative plantation colony; who could finance or insure such a calamity were it to occur in the neighbouring islands with this glaring example of rebellion trumpeting it's victory to the whole globe? Who would ever invest so heavily in such a project again? The wonder is that it still took another couple of years for the British Parliament to finally push the Abolition Act through.
The brutality of this struggle and the contemptuous manner with which Touissant was treated both in French negotiations, where he was hoodwinked, and in prison were he was left to rot and starve by that exemplary soldier of liberty, Napoleon, eliminated whatever shred of sympathy or hopes for amicable future 'parlé' which Dessalines may have nurtured. At any event, he was always the hardliner and his revised Constitution excluded the possibility of 'white' citizenship with an amending article which permitted the retention of certain, but very few, French of required skills.
These are the two most quoted works I've found in relation to the specific problem of 'colour' and how forceful an issue it became in post-independence Haitian politics. Nicholl's work in particular is regarded as groundbreaking, really setting the bar for all future serious treatments. HIs later revised version is published after Trouillot's work came out and addresses a number of specific issues that the latter's work had raised in relation to his own thesis. Both have been criticised for over-emphasising the role of mulatto & ethnic based exclusivism in general over and above other perhaps more salient factors such as internal class structure or outside interference in the form of threatened trade embargos (from the French who demanded & secured crippling reparations fro the destruction of 'their property') or from hostile neighbours such as the United States whose own slave population had to be careful shielded from any 'negative' repercussions.
Questia doesn't have either of these works on their database but it does have dozens of pertinent journal articles relating to the specific question of how race was defined and managed as a political tool by early Haitian legislators. Nicholl's work touches on all these questions pretty comprehensively.
See for instance;
Complexities of Imagining Haiti: A Study of National Constitutions, 1801-1807; Journal of Social History, Vol. 41, 2007
Haiti, Rising Flames from Burning Ashes: Haiti the Phoenix; Journal of Haitian Studies, Vol. 12, 2006
Light at the End of the Road: Thomas Jefferson's Endorsement of Free Haiti in His Final Years; Journal of Haitian Studies, Vol. 15, 2009
Also worth adding for consideration is the philosophe Raynal's 'Histoire Philosophique ...' or 'A Hiistory of the Two Indies' printed with the assistance of his colleagues among the French encyclopedistes. If this wasn't the first sustained, most lucid and devastating assault on European colonialism it was certainly the most widely read and influential up until that time.
As an example, former slave Jean Baptiste Belley (born in Senegal) became the first person of African descent to sit in the Jacobin French National Convention (he was a leader among the Haitian rebels) and spoke prior to the historic vote in 1794 by that Assembly to abolish slavery throughout all its dominions (the first of any European colonial power to do so).
During his time in France he stirred much interest and presumably had many offers to have his portrait painted. He opted to pose beside a bust of Raynal with Girodet commissioned for the task (see above).
No comments:
Post a Comment