Un-Silencing the Past: Boisrond-Tonnerre, Vastey, and the Re

2 0 0 8 S A M L A C ON VE N TION
S TUDENT E SS AY P RIZE
UN-SILENCING THE PAST:
BOISROND-TONNERRE, VASTEY, AND
THE RE-WRITING
OF THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION1
MARLENE L. DAUT
UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME
It is by now rather well known in academic circles that the Haitian
Revolution has been “silenced” in academic scholarship and in popular history for the past two centuries. Michel-Rolph Trouillot was
among the first to point out the damning implications of these
silences when he insisted that the “silencing” of the Haitian
Revolution is only “a chapter within a narrative of global domination.”
It is “a part of the history of the West,” he says, “and it is likely to persist, even in attenuated form, as long as the history of the West is not
retold in ways that bring forward the perspective of the world”
(Silencing 107). Acknowledging that these silences exist has proved to
be extraordinarily important to any understanding of Haitian history,
literature, and/or society since, as Michel Foucault has indicated, the
key to controlling a people’s “dynamism” (“Film” 25) is to control its
memory and to “stifle” its history (“Film” 28).
The real world implication of these silences is that by erasing the
Haitian Revolution and imposing a different “framework” (Foucault,
“Film” 28) it is not just Haitian history, but the Haitian people themselves who have been erased. The quite remarkable stories of Vincent
Ogé, Toussaint L’Ouverture, André Rigaud, Jean-Jacques Dessalines,
Henri Christophe, and Alexandre Pétion, have been replaced in the
world’s memory by the more treacherous recent histories of people
known only by the names of Papa Doc, Baby Doc, and Aristide. As a
result, the country that was once known for its art, culture, and even
science (McClellan 4), and was once the very symbol of black nationalism, is now known only for what Joel Dreyfuss has called “the
phrase”—the “poorest country in the western hemisphere”—and for
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the brutal and legendary violence of the tonton makouts (Dreyfuss 1;
Braziel 128, 150).
If bringing forward the perspective of Haitians themselves is one
way in which to rectify the silences of the past and thereby create
and/or uncover a “counter-memory” (Foucault, Language 113-65),
then it is the last part of Trouillot’s statement that has continued to be
obscured by much of the scholarship on the Haitian Revolution. In
order to “bring forward the perspective of the world,” what is needed
remains a type of history or story-telling that takes more into account
than just “officially” documented narratives—normally, those produced by the colonizing culture—but also those histories, both written
and oral, that come from colonized and formerly colonized peoples.2
Though including Haitian authors within this discourse might seem
like common sense, the striking reality is that many Haitian writers
have been disregarded or dismissed by historians and literary critics
based upon their skin color, class, or political and/or ideological affiliations. Since every source is “an instance of inclusion” the other part
of which is exclusion (Trouillot 48), to dismiss Haitian authorship on
these grounds is to fail to recognize that no historian can escape the
charge of bias because the biases are inscribed into the sources
themselves.
An example of this kind of “inclusion” versus “exclusion”
(Trouillot 48) occurs in the work of the late historian David Nicholls.
In “‘A Work of Combat’” Nicholls points to the Haitian historians
Thomas Madiou and Beaubrun Ardouin’s tomes of the Haitian
Revolution, but is equally quick to point to their position as “mulattoes,” in effect, casting a shadow of doubt over their authority as historians by suggesting that they subscribe to what Nicholls has referred
to as “the mulatto legend of history” (16).3 Nicholls’ larger claim in his
vast body of work on Haiti is that independence in the country has
been continuously threatened by “deep divisions” based on “colour
distinctions” that have helped to create, if not encourage, the country’s
misery (Dessalines 7-8).
Nicholls’ highly influential argument is, in fact, just a mere echo of
the racialist thought concerning Haiti in the texts of nineteenth-century U.S. American and European writers. Nineteenth-century authors
who wrote about Haiti often promulgated or at the very least accepted this myth of “Haitian exceptionalism” (M. Trouillot, “Odd” 8) or
the idea that Haiti was a strange and disturbing country whose inhab-
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itants “were hardly sensible” of the prejudices and “defects” in their
literature (Harvey 223) and where “black Peter was exterminating
black Paul” (Carlyle). Charles Mackenzie, the former British consul to
Haiti, for example, openly contested Haitian authorship when he suggested that the Baron de Vastey’s writing on the abuses of the French
colonists toward their slaves before and during the Revolution were
“exaggeration[s] to which excited passions give birth” since he had
never “met with any person who could of his own knowledge declare
that such was a fact” (2:8). Mackenzie suggests that declarations made
by slaves or the revolutionists themselves were not enough to prove “a
fact” since they were based on “passions” rather than “reason.” In an
article entitled “Mulatto Literature” and published in the U.S.
American journal, The Albion, the author writes that the literature of
Haiti “is chiefly of a very light description, fitted rather for amusement
than for high culture” because the “negro is a pleasure-loving being”
and the “French-Haytian Mulatto,” the negro’s “brother,” was “sprung
from volatile sources.” According to this author racial mixing is what
makes Haitian literature the very “embodiment of volatility” (326).
The celebrated French abolitionist Victor Schoelcher, too, had something to say about racial prejudice in Haiti when he accused the Haitian
poet and playwright Pierre Faubert of having falsified the revolutionary history of the country to promote mulatto accomplishments in
order to maintain caste divisions (2:228).4
This wholesale belief in and at times promotion of antagonisms in
Haiti based on color prejudice was and remains an effort to exploit the
country’s government as simply one avenue towards better exploiting
the country’s resources.5 These statements by Schoelcher, Mackenzie,
Harvey, and our unnamed American author were not attempts to help
the Haitian government to improve the material situation of the
Haitian people nor did they reflect simple prejudices, rather they were
what we might call after Trouillot “shield[s] that masked the negative
contribution of the Western powers to the Haitian situation” (“Odd”
7). On the other hand, while Nicholls writes with sympathy and care
about Haitian history, because he attributes much of the country’s
political problems to color prejudice in Haiti among Haitians he
unwittingly ends up reinforcing the idea that at bottom it is the Haitian
people themselves (and particularly those of mixed-race) who are at
fault.
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As J. Michael Dash (1998) and Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1990), along
with Laënnec Hurbon and Brenda Gayle Plummer have pointed out,
stereotypes of Haiti and Haitians have real consequences. The idea
that Haitians are horribly corrupt and racially prejudiced has led to the
belief that they have no one to blame but themselves for their material condition. This last point is readily demonstrated by a headline in
the Miami Herald which read: “World’s Oldest Black Nation ‘Ruthlessly
Self-Destructive’” (qtd. in Dow 4). As Noam Chomsky has written in
another context, in order for the dominant power to “justify what it’s
doing” it has to become or remain “racist” and “blame the victim”
(qtd. in Farmer 217). An example of this kind of “blaming the victim”
comes from John R. Beard’s The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture (1853).
Beard wrote that color prejudice in nineteenth-century Haiti stemmed
from the days of the Haitian Revolution and had “retarded” Haiti’s
progress in the “arts” and “paved the way for a renewal of strife and
bloodshed” (144). In Beard’s work it is the Revolution itself and not
slavery and colonialism that have prevented the “arts” from developing in Haiti and have set the stage for racial antagonisms. Many nineteenth-century European and U.S. Americans authors, even with all of
their rallying cries against slavery and color prejudice, were actually a
part of the same system of hegemony that promoted color prejudice
and inequality which they decried in the Haitian government.6
The biases attached to Haitian authors, mulatto or black, would not
be worth mentioning if the designation had not produced an unfortunate lack of recognition for the writings of these authors. This lack of
recognition has resulted in both a “formula of erasure” and a “formula of banalization:” either they did not really write these narratives (a
charge often made against Toussaint [Désormeaux 135])7 or even if
they did, their narratives are not really that important (Silencing 96).8
The silencing of the past of the Revolution that Trouillot so eloquently describes is, therefore, merely a reflection of the silencing of the
histories of the past written by many of the revolutionary “actors”
themselves. For who can deny the existence of a colonial legend of the
past, a colonial legend of the past that was promulgated most notably
by ex-colonists and travel writers, including Bryan Edwards, Etienne
Déscourtilz, the colonist Gros, and Moreau de Saint-Méry, whose
texts have formed the basis for much of the early historiography of
the Haitian Revolution?9
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In an effort to consider what Vévé Clark has called the other side
of history” (241), in this essay I examine the ways in which two early
nineteenth-century Haitian historians, Louis-Félix Boisrond-Tonnerre
(1776-1806)10 and Pompée Valentin, the Baron de Vastey (17811820),11 created, responded to, and reshaped narratives about the
Haitian Revolution in order to ensure that in the words of the nineteenth-century Haitian novelist, Eméric Bergeaud (1818-1858), the
“truth would come out” (vii). I also uncover the ways in which these
Haitian authors used the Revolution to enter into larger debates about
slavery, color prejudice, and nation building. By turning to the rarely
considered stories told of the Revolution by two of Haiti’s earliest
writers, I place on display the manifold ways in which they attempted
to both unsilence the past and prevent the further silencing of it. I also
hope to unsilence the past of early Haitian letters by re-writing these
“lost” histories back into the francophone and Caribbean literary traditions, and ultimately, the wider literary tradition of the Atlantic
World. It is a re-writing rather than an integration because the works
of Boisrond-Tonnerre and Vastey were a part of the historiography of
the Haitian Revolution circulating in the Atlantic World until at least
the end of the U.S. Civil War.12
Through an examination of Boisrond Tonnerre’s Mémoire pour servir
à l’histoire d’Haïti first published in 1804 and the Baron de Vastey’s Le
Système colonial dévoilé published in 1814,13 I show how these early
Haitian authors took it upon themselves to ensure that the colonists
alone would not write Haiti’s history. This re-writing involved an
intense consideration of the power of the press to shape international opinion about Haiti. These authors also hoped to create the country’s own national “state memory” that would preserve the nation’s
collective “black memory” for future generations (Hanchard 48). In
other words, Boisrond-Tonnerre and Vastey were both “collectors and
manufacturers of collective memory” (Hanchard 47) since they hoped
to transmit information about a past in which they were actors to
those who were not.14
Through the creation of distinctly Haitian histories of the
Revolution, both Boisrond-Tonnerre and Vastey constructed a lieu de
mémoire or site of memory (Nora 7) that was desgined to legitimate the
authority of the state. These histories or political memoirs would
enable them to build upon the horrors of the past by turning the
Haitian Revolution into the nation’s origin story rather than a grue-
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some cautionary tale. These are stories of the Revolution that are not
told from the healthy distance of putative historical objectivity, but
rather from the intimacy that comes from living through tragic experiences. These lived-experiences, in turn, become the “evidence” that
buttress both authors claims to writing the truth in the vein of what
Joan Scott has called “the evidence of experience” (Scott 382).15
The literary critic Matthew Clavin has written, however that we
should approach the biographies and narratives of the Haitian
Revolution that circulated in the nineteenth-century Atlantic World
with caution. He argues that whether written by “British abolitionists
or French proslavery zealots, American merchants or Haitian politicians” (6),16 these narratives “fall into one of two ideological camps”
(2). He says that “[p]roslavery authors warned of a repetition of the
“‘horrors of St. Domingo’” while abolitionists proposed a “radically
different reading” in which they found slave holders and “white soldiers culpable [. . .] arguing that whites who brutally enslaved Africans
sowed the seeds of their own destruction” (2). Moreover, Clavin finds
that this desire to narrate the grotesque events of the Haitian
Revolution coincided with the rise of the “Gothic romance at the turn
of the nineteenth century” (4). Thus he argues that biographers,
chroniclers, and story-tellers of the Revolution “capitalized” on the
idea of these events as a “Gothic tale” in order to feed the desires of
the nineteenth century reading public for sensationalistic stories. He
indicates that these authors also used the events as a didactic tool to
either promote or encourage the end of slavery, urging their readers to
believe that they were performing an important public service (25).
While it is true that nineteenth-century Haitian writing on the
Revolution shares many of the elements of European and U.S.
American writing on the events—a stated “unwillingness to publish
their work” (Clavin 6), insistence on their impartiality (Clavin 8), desire
to authenticate the narrative by claiming personal experience (Clavin
10), and the gothic conventions of “indescribability,” “Gothic
scenery,” and “voyeurism” (Clavin 18)—I do not think that it is appropriate to suggest that Haitian authors wrote in this way merely to
entertain, instruct, or improve salability (Clavin 12). In other words,
while I agree that many U.S. American and European writers published
these kinds of works because “the market demanded them” and
because “the journey ‘delighted’ them” (Clavin 29), the same cannot
be said of Haitian authors without nuance or qualification. To say so
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is to discount the very serious post-colonial project of writing back to
the dominant discourse in which many early Haitian authors were
vibrant and vocal participants and of which they were also the creators. These early Haitian authors were engaged in a deliberate project
of nation building whereby they understood that the nation could not
have multiple and competing origin stories, but rather that the origin
had to be “fixed” (Brennan 51), and they believed that it had to be
“fixed” by Haitians themselves.
I offer, therefore, that a more appropriate register with which to
view these early Haitian narratives is that of the post-colonial. This is
particularly so because unlike their U.S. American and European counterparts Haitian authors were operating within a “global discursive
sphere” (Nesbitt 38) to which they did not have access. This lack of
access is illustrated by the sheer number of U.S. American and
European texts that were published on the Haitian Revolution compared to the relatively miniscule number of Haitian texts produced
and/or published. This disparity in publications is a fact that did not
go unnoticed by Vastey who observed that “[t]he majority of historians who have written about the colonies were whites, colonists even.”
Vastey goes on to suggests that “now that we have Haitian printing
presses [. . .] we can reveal the crimes of the colonists and respond to
the most absurd calumnies, invented by the prejudice and greed of our
oppressors” (95).17 For both Boisrond-Tonnerre and Vastey the
recording and subsequent publication of these histories constituted a
powerful reversal of power relations whereby Haitians could finally
force access into the “global discursive sphere” through print rather
than purely through violence. Vastey, in particular, believed that he
could speak for the former slaves and others who could not speak for
themselves and understood the collection of these facts as a part of a
serious and urgent undertaking whose goal was to “awaken the ashes
of the numerous victims whom [the French colonists had] precipitated into the tomb, and borrow their voices to unveil [. . .] heinous
crimes” to the public (Système 35).
Ever since its apparition in the late eighteenth-century, the Haitian
memoir has had as its principal aim the refutation of the popular
notion that the Haitian revolutionists,18 both slave and free, were the
perpetrators of violence and betrayal and the French planters and
colonists the unfortunate victims. The stated aim of the Haitian political memoir of the late eighteenth-century, as in its early nineteenth-
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century counterpart, was to refute the historical record being produced by European authors in the vein of what David Scott has
referred to as “vindicationism” (83). The notion that the insurgents
were barbarians who were simply out for white blood was incredibly
widespread among the French colonists of Saint-Domingue in the late
eighteenth-century. In 1792, for example, the governor general of
Saint-Domingue, Philibert François-Rouxel de Blanchelande, wrote of
the free people of color in the colonial journal, La Feuille du Jour :
Up until this point, I have used gentle and moderate tactics to
remind you of your duty; your conduct proves that I have presumed too much of you [. . .] Instead of embracing those who
once made all of France esteem you, and the entire colony
cherish you; What avenue have you taken? That of true
scoundrels, who dare everything, because they believe they
have everything to gain. (1-2)20
Blanchelande refers here and throughout his article to the numerous
insurrections of the free people of color against the colonists and the
royalists, admonishing them for “betraying” France in supposedly siding with the slaves. However, Blanchelande’s statement also attempts
to induce feelings of guilt on the part of the free people of color by
suggesting that France has only ever “cherished” and “esteemed”
them and that, as a result, it was the “duty” of the free people of color
to remain loyal.
Blanchelande’s public admonishment of the free people of color as
traitors of the French and responsible for the revolt of the slaves represents the government’s official position towards them, but also
reflects widespread public opinion in not only France but also in the
United States and the rest of the Americas. Laurent Dubois writes,
“Many of the accounts of the event [the insurrection of 1791] that
were soon produced and disseminated throughout the Americas and
Europe presented tales of savage and unthinkable atrocities committed by the slaves” (Dubois 110); while Jeremy Popkin tells us that
Descriptions of the insurrection in the local press followed a
rigid ideological formula [. . .] the white colonial orthodoxy
emphasized the cruelty and destructiveness of the insurgents
whose actions were categorized as crimes against the paternal
plantation owners. (Popkin 514)
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Gordon S. Brown notes that “American newspapers almost always
expressed sympathy for the colonists and horror at the revolt” (51).
Early Haitian authors had good reason to be concerned about these
narratives. The depiction of atrocities committed by slaves and other
persons of color against the white colonists persisted long after the
Revolution was over. In 1860 Charles K. Whipple, writing for The
Liberator, contested a certain Mr. Everett’s article that had been published in the Atlas and Daily Bee. Whipple’s article states that Mr.
Everett stood on the floor of Faneuil Hall and defended slavery by
declaring that blacks were brutes. Everett’s proof was an anecdote
from Haiti. He said that during the Haitian Revolution a man named
Gallifet had returned to his plantation one day to find that “all the
negroes [were] in arms on the side of the rebels, and (horrid to tell)
their standard was the body of a white infant which they had recently impaled on
a stake!” (January 20, 1860. 3.3: 10, italics in the original).21
The free people of color had at least a handful of newspapers after
1789 that principally responded to the kinds of accusations made by
Blanchelande and the other royalists against the free people of color
(Desquiron 24-25).22 In fact, Julien Raimond,23 whom Henock
Trouillot refers to as “the head of the free people of color,” often
acted as a “spokesperson,” particularly in Le Patriote français, when he
wrote speaking of the free people of color: “They live like strangers
in their own country [. . .].they are treated as slaves even in the midst
of their supposed liberty” (qtd. in H. Trouillot 88).24 Raimond’s comment is designed to create a rapprochement between the situation of the
hommes de couleur, free in name only, and the slaves by suggesting that
the former had been subjected to conditions that rendered them equal
in status to the latter.25 Yet Raimond’s comment also suggests that free
people of color were every bit as “French” as their colonial counterparts: it is “their own country.” Raimond’s contestation reflects both
the ambiguity and the ambivalence of the relationship of the free people of color toward the French colonists and the slaves—their
“blood,” so to speak, put them in the ranks of the latter, but their
“birth” put them in the ranks of the former.
The desire of the free people of color to combat colonial newspaper publications’ representations of the hommes de couleur as traitors
soon led to a desire to combat colonial travel narratives, memoirs, and
essays of the events of the Revolution. In 1793 Raimond published a
memoir entitled, Mémoire sur les causes des troubles et des désastres de la colonie
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de Saint-Domingue, in which he blamed “le préjugé de couleur” instituted by the white colonists as the principal cause of all the “political
crises that this colony has experienced” (5). In 1797 General André
Rigaud26 published his own memoir of the Revolution entitled,
Mémoire du Général de Brigade, André Rigaud, en réfutation des écrits calomnieux contre les citoyens de couleur de Saint-Domingue.27 In his memoir,
Rigaud refutes the notion that the free people of color refused to fight
for France when he writes, “Are the men of color the ones who have
betrayed their country? Have they invited enemies onto the territory
of the republic? Without a doubt, no. On the contrary, they fought
enemies (iij).28 Rigaud, like Raimond, sought to prove that the free people of color were willing to be loyal to France—“their country”—
only as long as they were treated on equal terms with the colonists; yet
believing that the Spanish would provide them with the rights that they
had been denied in France they saw no reason to maintain loyalty.
Raimond writes:
it was therefore natural that vexed men, who were tyrannized
and without any recourse, would throw themselves into the
first party that offered them protection, above all, when they
saw that party disposed to obey the decree which gave them
their rights. (26)29
Both the memoirs of Rigaud and Raimond utilize letters, newspaper
articles, and printed matter of all genres in order to prove their point,
but their most salient pieces of evidence remain their experiences of
these events.
What makes these political memoirs of the insurrection itself and
the events leading up to it, “true,” remains what Daniel Désormeaux
has referred to as, “the well-known historical dialectic of inserting
individual protest into the transmission of history as a principle of
truth” (134). Rigaud writes, “Maybe even this Memoir, traced by the
hand of truth, will serve to expose someone” (jv).30 Notably, Rigaud
claims that his memoir has been “traced by the hand of the truth,”
making him simply the instrument through which these truths become
known to the general public. While Raimond notes of his purpose,
“We are going to try to paint, without passion, without bile, without
hatred, and above all, without partiality, all the facts” (6).31 The apologies of both Rigaud and Raimond (Rigaud’s “maybe” and Raimond’s
“try”) underscore their recognition of the limitations of the political
memoir as a genre of historical discourse, and of their ability to under-
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take the task of writing it, but highlight the fact that in spite of these
limitations, the “facts” will come out.
Both Rigaud and Raimond question the very process by which their
texts came into being, offering lived experience and personal protest
as the utmost proof of the veracity of their accounts. Similarly,
Boisrond-Tonnerre writes in his memoir of the Revolution, “if the
colors are missing from my painting, it is because they are too strong
for my feeble pen” (Mémoire 14).32 While Vastey tells us, “my Haitian
pen will, without a doubt, lack eloquence, but it will be truthful; my
pictures will be without ornaments, but they will be striking [. . .]”
(39).33 Here both authors state that if certain aesthetic locutions
remain absent from their works it is because the truth has taken precedence over aesthetics. They will narrate “simply,” but truthfully.
Moreover, the putative absence of literary elements contributes to
their claim to truth. In other words, they have not embellished for the
sake of painting a better picture. For these authors, the purpose of a
political memoir was to “enlighten” their “compatriots” (Vastey viij)
and to speak truth to power, not to render beautiful or more easily
digestible certain facts or memories.
When Boisrond-Tonnerre published his historical work, Mémoire
pour servir à l’histoire d’Haïti, immediately following independence he
claimed that he was seeking to record his memories of the Haitian
Revolution for posterity’s sake. This brief history of the Haitian
Revolution written by the infamous secretary of Jean-Jacques
Dessalines and the author of the Acte d’Indépendance 34 was written by its
author to establish a version of Haitian history that could be considered official. To urge belief in his account of the events BoisrondTonnerre writes, “I must state, first of all, that there is not a single fact,
a single crime, or a single action mentioned in this work that does not
carry with it the mark of the utmost veracity” (13).35 BoisrondTonnerre’s history attempts to undermine dominant accounts of the
Haitian Revolution that even in defending the slaves’ rights to freedom
were filled with prejudices.36
Boisrond-Tonnerre argues that his task as a “memorialist”
(Désormeaux 131) is that of narrating not his individual memories of
the Revolution, but rather the collective facts that he had access to as
one of the revolutionists. Many travel writers and journalists claimed
that they had met Toussaint or Dessalines or had even been captured
by one of them, but none had their ear the way that Boisrond-
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Tonnerre did. Boisrond-Tonnerre implores the reader, therefore, to
believe that his narration of the events, as a member of Dessalines’
inner circle, constitutes the truth, a rhetorical move which forces us to
question the way in which the making of history is perhaps always tied
to lived-memory and strategies of revision in the post-colonial context. Though Boisrond-Tonnerre noticeably promotes the image of
Dessalines as the hero of the Revolution rather than Toussaint
L’Ouverture,37 one of his main purposes in writing this memoir was to
combat those narratives produced by colonial writers who often portrayed the slaves as idyllic figures and the revolutionists as monsters, or
represented the wars of independence as the unfortunate result of the
inherent barbarity of a conflict between the blacks and the sang-mélé.
In his 1799 adventure novel, Zoflora; ou la bonne négresse, the French
author, Jean-Baptiste Picquenard refers to Saint-Domingue before the
Revolution as “a new El Dorado” (vij). Picquenard goes on to describe
how the main character, Justin, feels about pre-revolutionary SaintDomingue in writing, “The old country of Haiti was for him the island
of felicity; or rather he believed he was making his entry into an
antique Eden” (48).38 Edouard Glissant says of this kind of colonial
writing:
There is something of an involuntary Parnassus in the novels
and pamphlets written by colonists of Santo Domingo and
Martinique: the same propensity to blot out the shudders of
life, that is, the turbulent realities of the Plantation, beneath
the conventional splendor of scenery. (70)
Glissant here suggests that colonial writers turned to describing the
splendor of the colonies precisely because they could not face the reality of the horrors of the plantation. In Le Système colonial dévoilé Vastey
also discusses European strategies for “blot[ting] out the shudders of
life” when he writes that the majority of European writers:
entered into the smallest of details on the production, the climate, the rural economy, but they took much care not to
reveal the crimes of their accomplices; very few had the
courage to speak the truth, and even in saying it, they looked
for ways to disguise or attenuate with their expressions, the
enormity of these crimes. (Système 39)39
In this passage Vastey like Glissant tells us that by “entering into
minute details” of all sorts colonial writers were effectively able to
conceal the crimes of colonialism.
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However, for Boisrond-Tonnerre, pre-revolutionary SaintDomingue was certainly not an “El Dorado” nor was it an “Eden,” or
a place whose flora and fauna needed to be meticulously studied,
recorded, and published, and neither was it the land of white slaughter described by some European and U.S. American writers. On the
contrary, Boisrond-Tonnerre describes the desecration of the land,
widespread bloodshed, rape, and murder of the hommes de couleur and
the slaves by the colonists themselves as the true “scenery” of the
colonial period. For him, nature is used only as a backdrop to describe
violence, economics simply to illustrate colonialism’s excesses, and the
French language and expressions are primarily used to expose barbarity rather than to conceal crimes.
Listen to Boisrond-Tonnerre who tells us the tale of “forests
turned into hanging grounds,” of “ships turned into jails,” of “hundreds of blacks and mulattos being led to their deaths daily” (70):
women and children were the prey of rapacious soldiers who,
with the utmost inhumanity, ripped their ears off simply to
obtain the earrings; a necklace, a handkerchief became the
price of saving one’s self from a gunshot, and if it so happened that a scared farmer got lost in the woods, he would
have been immediately shot or tied up and sent to Saint-Marc
to be put to death. (39)40
Boisrond-Tonnerre’s descriptions of the all the ways in which the
French tortured the Haitian people is designed to combat pernicious
details like the one offered by Etienne Déscourtilz in his Voyages d’un
naturaliste. Déscourtilz writes, “Pregnant women were impaled [by the
insurgents], others had their eyes gouged out with needles, and children were castrated with blunt scissors” (321). Boisrond-Tonnerre is
determined to counter this excess in narration when he elaborates on
some of the French colonial strategies for “disguising” and
“attenuat[ing] with their expressions the enormity of these crimes.”
Boisrond-Tonnerre writes:
To arrest, to drown, or to hang, all signified the same thing [to
the French]. Those barbarians had created a new vocabulary.
To them, drowning two hundred individuals was a national
glory; to hang someone, meant to obtain a promotion; to be
eaten by dogs, was simply to descend into the arena;41 to shoot
someone was to put him into a heavy sleep [. . .].What a horrible language! (75)42
48
Marlene L. Daut
Here, the secretary of Dessalines calls attention to the ways in which
the French used their own language in order to suppress the reality of
the horrors they were committing, whether it was through the description of scenery as in Picquenard or through the distortion of words.43
Boisrond-Tonnerre’s statements point to the idea that the history of
the Haitian Revolution was being disguised by the very language that
the French used to describe it. Instead of eschewing the French language on this very basis, however, Boisrond-Tonnerre uses this “horrible language” of the colonizer in order to curse at the French. This
is naturally reminiscent of Caliban’s statement in Shakespeare’s The
Tempest (1623) that his “profit” on learning English is that he “knows
how to curse” (1.2:366-7). Boisrond-Tonnerre’s famous statement—
“anathème au nom français,” or “anathema to the French”
(“Proclamation” 44)—signals the post-revolutionary Haitian desire to
discard all of the remnants of not simply French culture, but also to
erase the footprints left by the French language upon the Haitian mind
and thus upon Haitian history.
Boisrond-Tonnerre’s memoir serves not simply to curse at the
French but also to combat the pernicious representations of the
Revolution by French authors in offering an account of the events
from the Haitian perspective, incidentally, the perspective he considers
to be the only one capable of producing a truthful account of the
events. He writes, “One will not accuse this pen of vengeance, for it
will not be guided by partiality; all of the facts that this memoir contains must enter into the domain of history that will contribute to our
posterity. May it, being happier than we, only know of the French by
name, and only have to read the history of our dissentions and problems as if in a dream that its own happiness will erase!” (14).44 With
this statement Boisrond-Tonnerre suggests that the narratives of the
Revolution produced by the French—even those that seek to impartially narrate the events—are indeed “guided by partiality,” making
them of little use to the emerging nation-state. Boisrond-Tonnerre
expresses the belief that white authors, whatever their intentions, will
always either wittingly or intentionally betray their prejudices and sense
of superiority when dealing with black subjects like Dessalines.
One of Boisrond-Tonnère’s biggest fears is that the Haitian collective memory will become distorted if its only resources are provided
by the (white) European memory. Glissant writes of this fear of history in the post-colonial context, that “the truth is that their concern
South Atlantic Review
49
[the colonist’s literatures], its driving force and hidden design, is the
derangement of the memory” (71). Boisrond-Tonnerre attempts to
combat this “derangement of memory” and ultimately, history by creating his own narrative of the Haitian Revolution where Dessalines
emerges as a hero. This was an attempt to unsilence a past that was
already becoming distorted for the purposes of propaganda and
silenced because of its damning implications for the plantation economy and slavery in the New World.
In Boisrond-Tonnerre’s eyes producing a history of Haiti would not
simply revise earlier narratives, but would also prove that the nationstate of Haiti existed independently and should be viewed as a powerful country, capable of influencing foreign policy and opinion. In the
passage below Boisrond-Tonnerre talks of the best way in which to
persuade the nations of the world that it is the French who are the
criminals and the Haitian people the victims:
And what, said I to myself a thousand times before undertaking this work, this repertory of French crimes, what being
could add more veracity to the truths that I am recounting?
What sensitive soul, especially after having lived during the
storm of the revolution, will believe that the French had
improved upon their crimes in the most beautiful as in the
most unfortunate of their overseas possessions? How to persuade the nations of the world that the French contagion had
not yet won, that a tyrant who had usurped the throne of the
master, whose power was founded only upon liberty and
equality, who even set himself up as the restorer of civilization and religion, had decreed, in cold blood, the massacre of
a million men, who only wanted liberty and equality themselves; that they will defend against the entire universe?”
(15).45
By alluding to Napoleon’s duplicity in this passage Boisrond-Tonnerre
implicitly asks the nations of the world to believe his account of the
events on the strength of his testimony as a former revolutionist—
since he lived “during the storm of the Revolution—and to dismiss
French narratives since they are rife with contradictions: at the same
time that the French Revolutionists argued for liberty and equality they
committed unheard of atrocities against the Haitian people who were
fighting for the same principles. Boisrond-Tonnerre’s statement also
asks the nations of the world to beware of the “contagion” of French
50
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attempts at colonization, lest they become infected with this insidious
desire as well. More seriously, within the last phrase of the passage
quoted above there is an implicit threat to these so-called nations of
the world whom Boisrond-Tonnerre addresses. He writes that
Haitians “will defend themselves against the entire universe.” With this
statement he warns the world, at the same time that he implores their
understanding, that Haiti is a country that would rather fight to the
death than to see their liberties erased.
In the end, the most powerful re-writing undertaken by the Mémoire
is its appellation to the slaves of other countries. Boisrond-Tonnerre
writes, “And to you, the slaves of all countries, you will learn from this
great man [Dessalines], that every man naturally carries liberty in his
heart, and that the keys [to this liberty] are in his hands” (95).46 This
passage practically urges the slaves of other countries to revolt against
their masters when it suggests that every slave holds the “keys” to freedom “in his hands,” and that the history of Dessalines as a heroic revolutionary figure should serve as the prime example of this fact. The
story of the Haitian Revolution, in other words, should prove instructive to “the slaves of any country.”
This very subtle last paragraph in effect complicates Article 36 of
Dessalines’s constitution which mandated that Haiti would not interfere with the sovereignty of any other nation. The article states, “The
Emperor will never create any enterprise whose goal is conquest nor
will he disrupt the peace of any other country or the internal regime
of foreign colonies.” 47 By directing his text at multiple audiences,
Boisrond-Tonnerre effectively defends the events of the Haitian
Revolution, argues for the continued resistance of slaves, and revises
narratives of Saint-Domingue that either painted the slaves as bloodthirsty brigands or as idyllic and simple creatures. Moreover, as a state
official, Boisrond-Tonnerre inserts Haiti into the then contemporary
debate about slavery; namely, the role of the use of force by slaves
themselves.
Vastey, too, was interested in the “métier” of the historian, when in
Le Système coloniale dévoilé,” he writes, “It is not a novel that I am writing, it is an exposé of misfortunes, long sufferings and unheard of tortures” (39).48 Like Bergeaud who in his 1859 historical romance, Stella,
tells us that his work comprises a history of Haiti that “will only take
from the novel its form” (vii), Vastey importantly distinguishes his task
from that of the novelist. Vastey saw his task, much like Bergeaud and
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51
Boisrond-Tonnerre, as recording the true, as opposed to the exaggerated or fictitious, events of the colonial period in Haiti. In addressing
his readers (whom he describes in his introduction as “the Sovereigns
of Europe” and the “Tribunals of the Nations” [vii]),49 Vastey writes,
“my goal as a writer is not to aspire to the glory of being recognized
as a man of letters, but rather to be useful to my compatriots, to
enlighten them, and to unveil the truth to the Europeans (viij).50 Vastey
makes it clear in this passage that his text is also aimed at a double
audience: an internal Haitian audience, his compatriots, and a foreign
audience, European and U. S. American.
Vastey’s apology, however, also underscores his attitude toward fiction. Like Boisrond-Tonnerre’s Mémoire, this text will not elaborate
upon the beauty of the Haitian countryside or the idyllic nature of the
slave. Instead, this text seeks to demonstrate the evils of the colonial
system.51 Vastey says, “At last, the secret, full of horrors, is known: the
Colonial System is the domination of the Whites, It is the Massacre or
the Enslavement of Blacks.”52 With this statement, Vastey changes the
meaning of the word colonial from simply designating the overseas
possessions of any country, and describes it instead, as a system of
domination by “whites” who “massacre” and perpetuate “slavery”
with respect to “blacks.” Like Dessalines, who changed the name of
the country from Saint-Domingue to Haiti and who sought to change
the meaning of the designation “black” to describe every Haitian citizen, Vastey provides the reader with a new way of interpreting the
term colonial and its implications for the New World. In Black Orpheus,
Jean-Paul Sartre writes of post-colonial authors, “since the oppressor
is present in the very language they speak, they will speak this language
in order to destroy it” (303). Though Sartre here is indeed talking
about the poets of negritude including Césaire, Laleau, and Senghor,
his comment also helps to explain Vastey’s desire to redefine the term
“colonial” and “break [its] usual associations” (Sartre, Orpheus 303).
Vastey feels as if he is uncovering the real associations of a word
whose meaning had been “attenuated” into an expression that veiled
its significance. His purpose is thus to remove the shroud from the
term colonial and expose it as an inherently barbaric system of cruelty. As such, the Baron de Vastey’s narrative can be regarded as a founding document of what we now call post-colonial theory. Vastey’s text
argues for a complicated switch from the French language to English,53
decries the inhumanity of the slave system, calls for the abolishment
52
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of the slave trade, and also powerfully asks Europeans to question the
reality of their doctrines of natural human rights and the equality of
men. Vastey writes,
Posterity will never believe that in an age of enlightenment,
like ours, men who call themselves savants, philosophers,
would have wanted to make other men into brutes [. . .] solely in order to conserve the privilege of being able to oppress
a part of human kind. (31)54
For Vastey it was inconceivable that the French in particular could be
such ardent philosophers of the natural rights of man precisely as they
turned men and women into chattel through the system of slavery.
The text even posits that instead of bringing hatred and dissension to
Africa, the Europeans should have brought civilization and their
“lumières” or their knowledge. Vastey writes, “Instead of devastating
Africa by this infamous traffic of slavery, why didn’t the Europeans
turn their efforts towards bringing civilization to this huge part of
human kind?” (17).55
Vastey’s critique of Western rationalism prefigures in certain key
ways Aimé Césaire’s powerful and important Discourse on Colonialism
(1955), which also questions Western rationalism by asking us to consider what the word colonization means. Césaire asks, “what fundamentally, is colonization? To agree on what it is not: neither evangelization, nor a philanthropic enterprise, nor a desire to push back the
frontiers of ignorance, disease and tyranny, nor a project undertaken
for the greater glory of God, nor an attempt to extend the rule of law”
(10). Césaire answers his own question with his famous equation that
“colonization = ‘thingification’” (21) and argues that this system which
continued to be upheld by those who considered themselves to be the
advocates of human rights, represents one of the primary contradictions of Western civilization. Like Vastey, Césaire wants to “break” the
term colonialism of its associations with the transmission of civilization and instead define the term as the domination of one group of
people over another.
The point in establishing the connection between Vastey’s text and
that of Césaire, widely considered to be one of the founding documents of post-colonial thought, remains to show the ways in which
the contradictions of the nineteenth-century revolutionary Atlantic
world created the stage for the modern critique of colonialism that we
see in the early twentieth century. In other words, the critique of the
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53
idea that Western Europeans pronounced and exalted the rights of
man at precisely the time that they were depriving other human beings
of these same rights has roots in the nineteenth century that only
reached maturity in the twentieth. This is important because Césaire’s
text, like that of Vastey, is also born out of the politics of colonial
conflict. This “system of colonialism” is shown by both Vastey and
Césaire to be a system that destroys itself precisely because it cannot
contain its contradictions.56
However, unlike Césaire, Fanon, Boisrond-Tonnerre and other
early post-colonial thinkers, Vastey believed that what would ultimately destroy the regime of colonialism was not revolution at all, but the
invention of the printing press: the organ that would spread the
knowledge of European contradictions concerning the rights of man
and also provide Haitians with a forum to counter racist depictions of
Haiti and its revolution.57 In fact, Vastey credits the appearance of the
printing press in independent Haiti with the fact that he is even able to
write a document that can tell the truth about not only Haitian history but about the evils of the colonial system. Vastey writes:
What! said I to myself: in undertaking this work, the friends
of slavery, those eternal enemies of the human race, have
written thousands of volumes freely; they have made all the
presses in Europe groan for entire centuries in order to
reduce the black man below the brute; the small number of
our unfortunate class have had a difficult time to throw even
some small retorts against their numerous calumnies, having
been compromised by the confluence of all the circumstances
that smothered their voices. (Système 95)58
In this passage Vastey approaches Boisrond-Tonnerre’s veiled threat at
the end of his memoir. Vastey’s comment implicitly warns the world
that even if Haitians will not physically interfere with the sovereignty
of any other nation, that their words will circulate, no longer being
silenced by the “circumstances which smothered their voices.” The
suggestion seems to be that the “truths” which Vastey is transcribing
might reach the slaves.
By writing this narrative Vastey attempts to destabilize the narrative
and thus the power of Western history to shape the Haitian national
allegory. The most telling act of this destabilization comes at the end
of Vastey’s essay when he tells young Haitians to never forget these
tragedies that their forefathers suffered and to “remember” and “learn
54
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to defy and hate” the French. In a powerful reversal of Homi Bhabha’s
idea that historically citizens have needed to “forget a great many
things” (231) in order to remember the nation, here and elsewhere
Vastey reminds Haitians that they must always remember the crimes
of the French if they are to “remember” and ultimately preserve the
autonomy of the nation.
Contrary to Boisrond-Tonnerre, Vastey directly asks his compatriots to never forget in order to remember the nation. Vastey writes,
“Oh, you young Haitians who have had the good fortune to have been
born under the reign of laws and of liberty! You, who do not remember these times of horror and barbary; read this writing; never forget
the misfortunes of your fathers, and teach yourselves to always defy
and hate your enemies” (90).59 As Michael Hanchard reminds us:
the telling and retelling of stories is critical to the development of a collective memory [. . .] to remind those collectivities of the choices each generation must make, [. . .] accede or
quit, fight or negotiate, just as their forbears did. (51)
Vastey’s motto—“never forget”—is shared by survivors of the
Holocaust who also fear that to forget is to invite the possibility of
repetition and distortion.
Vastey fears to an even greater degree than did Boisrond-Tonnerre
the ability of what Linda Brooks refers to as “First World account[s]”
(204) to forever poison the world against the Haitian people and by
degrees peoples of African descent. He recognizes that when the
oppressed are not allowed to record their own history a kind of
“reprogramming” occurs, a “reprogramming” that shows people “not
what they were, but what they must remember having been” (“Film”
25). This remembering that Vastey wants—rather than a forgetting—
results from the idea that he wants to ensure that those who do not
have a lived-memory of the revolution, will be able to enter into the
Haitian collective memory of the event and thus their own national
identity simply by reading this narrative. Vastey contends that the
colonists and other Europeans have distorted Haiti’s history for their
own pernicious purposes and that Haitians must revise these narratives in order to preserve not simply their freedom, but also their dignity as human beings.60 Vastey’s “counter-discourse” (Bongie 81),
which established a meta print-culture, recognized the power of the
printed word to provide alternative narratives that would benefit
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55
Haitians. These narratives would provide for a national history that
would valorize, rather than demonize, the revolutionary figures. They
would also prepare Haitians to unsilence the past through print and
thus attain some measure of power.
In the end, I think that if we view early Haitian letters as a having
a transnational understanding of the power and circulation of print,
we can see how difficult and strained both Boisrond-Tonnerre and
Vastey were: both authors sought to record history, defend Haiti and
the black race, make friends with England and defame the French in
the hopes of changing international opinion about their country.
Instead of elitist, we should perhaps view these writers as cosmopolitan in their vision of the world. The world in which they lived was a
world that was wholly connected by not simply the Atlantic slave trade,
but by the transmission of ideas. It is no wonder, then, that these
wholly modern Haitian authors thought their texts might actually have
the power to prevent the past from being silenced.
The author would like to thank Glenn Hendler and Jean Jonassaint for reading and commenting on
an earlier version of this essay and Christine Gallant for encouraging and nominating this paper.
NOTES
Note: All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. Louis Félix BoisrondTonnerre’s name is sometimes spelled, Boisrond-Tonnère. However, I have adopted
the spelling used in the 1851 edition of his Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire d’Haïti.
2
In recent years numerous scholars have set about the task of re-writing the history
of the Haitian Revolution into the historiography of the Atlantic World, Atlantic slavery, the Age of Revolution, and even modernity itself, but rarely do they give sustained
ear to early Haitian writing and when they do it is often with strong caveats and reservations about the reliability of these sources. These caveats about Haitian writing are
only noteworthy because they are not used when talking about European or colonial
primary sources. On the other hand, while nineteenth-century Haitian authors have
happily found their way into several works of literary criticism since Joan Dayan’s
groundbreaking Haiti, History, and the Gods (1995), including Anna Brickhouse’s
Transamerican Literary Relations and the U.S. Public Sphere (2004); Chris Bongie’s
“‘Monotonies of History’: Baron de Vastey and the Mulatto Legend of Derek
Walcott’s Haitian Trilogy” (2005) and Daniel Désormeaux’s “The First of the (Black)
Memorialists” (2005), it has not been in the context of the literary history of the
Haitian Revolution.
3
In his article, “A Work of Combat: Mulatto Historians and the Haitian Past, 18471867,” David Nicholls writes that “a group of mulatto historians in the mid-nineteenth century developed an elaborate legend of the past which was calculated to
strengthen the position of the ruling class and to legitimate its ascendancy” and that
the origins of this legend go back to Pétion’s republic (16). Both Martin Munro and
Laurent Dubois have also cautioned that that we should avoid using skin color or race
to “generate explanations” (Dubois 5) since the Haitian Revolution was about
“demolishing myths of race not perpetuating them” (Munro 188).
1
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Marlene L. Daut
There are also examples of abolitionist writers who praised Vastey and his contemporaries for creating their own histories. See, for example, Alexandre Bonneau’s Haiti:
ses progrès, son avenir (1862) and a review of Le Système colonial dévoilé in The Port-Folio. 7.4
(April 1819): 315.
5
For some examples we can look to the United States’ repeated attempts to acquire
the Port of Môle St. Nicholas in the nineteenth century and the U.S. American
Occupation (1915-34), as well as the impounding of all Haitian government revenue
by the National City Bank of New York in 1914 (Bellegarde-Smith 271), or the IDB’s
(Inter-American Development Bank) blocking of aid to Haiti supposedly in order to
protest the “2000 electoral process” that brought former Haitian president JeanBertrand Aristide to power (Kidder 5).
6
White Europeans and U.S. Americans were not the only ones to buy into the problematic representations of Haitians as hopelessly prejudiced. The African American
abolitionist William Wells Brown, for example, influenced by John R. Beard, wrote of
the three mulatto generals, Rigaud, Pétion, and Boyer and their defection to the side
of the French: “These three were mulattoes, were haters of the blacks, and consequently had become the dupes and tools of Bonaparte” (20). Here, the defection to
the side of Bonaparte is explicitly and directly connected to the idea that these mulatto figures were treacherous and blinded by their own color prejudice precisely because
they were of mixed-race.
7
For a review of this debate see Daniel Désormeaux, “The First of the (Black)
Memorialists: Toussaint Louverture” (2005).
8
This silencing of the Haitian written historical record reflects Trouillot’s descriptions
of the historical reaction to the Haitian Revolution: “‘It’ did not really happen; it was
not that bad, or that important” (Silencing 96). For a helpful review of this practice by
literary critics see, Dash, J. Michael. “Nineteenth-Century Haiti and the Archipelago
of the Americas: Antenor Firmin’s Letters from St. Thomas” (2004) and “Haïti
Chimère: Revolutionary Universalism and its Caribbean Context” (2006). For an older
discussion of this problem see also, Hénock Trouillot, Les Origines sociales de la littérature haïtienne (1962).
9
In fact, Jeremy Popkin writes:
Because of its status as the only extensive first-hand account of the first
months of insurrection, [. . .] Gros’s account [. . .] was cited in the debates
of the Jacobin club in Cap François [. . .] and many of the novels and plays
about Saint-Domingue published in France during the revolution show its
influence. (515)
10
Boisrond-Tonnerre was born in Torbeck, Haiti in 1776 to Mathurin Boisrond, a carpenter. Boisrond-Tonnerre was given the surname “thunder” when lightening struck
next to his crib and he was not harmed. Boisrond-Tonnerre was educated in Paris until
1798 when he returned to Haiti. He eventually became the secretary to Jean-Jacques
Dessalines. He was imprisoned and killed in October of 1805 after the assassination
of Dessalines (Charles 35).
11
Vastey was the son of a Frenchman and free woman of color. He was born in a city
called Ennery in French Saint-Domingue in 1781. Vastey was the secretary to the King
Henri Christophe who rose to power in the north of Haiti in 1806 after the assassination of Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Vastey was also the tutor of Christophe’s sons and
had fought in Toussaint’s army (Griggs 181). Incidentally, he was also the second
cousin of the French novelist and playwright Alexandre Dumas (Nicholls, Royalist
107-8).
12
There were dozens of advertisements for Vastey’s works in North American newspapers, such as in the Essex Register on May 5, 1818; the Vermont Gazette on June 16,
1818; the North American Review on February 13, 1821; the Christian Observer in
December 1817; the Rhode Island American on February 13, 1821; the American Beacon
on December 22, 1820; the Boston Daily Advertiser on September 15, 1815; the
Alexandria Gazette on September 26, 1815; the Daily National Intelligencer on February
15, 1820; the Essex Patriot on August 18, 1821; the Baltimore Patriot on May 19, 1815;
4
South Atlantic Review
57
and the City of Washington Gazette on May 21, 1818. Vastey’s works were also reprinted in two German newspapers in 1820 and 1825, respectively (Schuller 40). The works
of Vastey and Boisrond-Tonnerre were also widely discussed and debated by early historians of the Revolution, including, Charles Mackenzie, Notes on Haiti; (1830) ;
William Harvey Woodis, Sketches of Hayti (1827); “Researches in Hayti” in The Museum
of Foreign Literature, Science and Art (March 1838); “History of Hayti,” in The Times and
Weekly Adviser (1822); Alexandre Bonneau’s Haïti: ses progrès, son avenir (1862), and
Jeremy Bentham’s Canada: Emancipate your Colonies! (1838).
13
The edition of Boisrond-Tonnerre’s text upon which this article is based is the 1851
publication edited by the Haitian historian Joseph St. Rémy. I have not been able to
find an original copy of the 1804 text in any libraries in the U.S., France or Haiti. This
caused me to momentarily question whether or not the memoir was published at all
before 1851. However, I recently found a listing of the memoir in the Catalogue of
the Harvard University library dating from 1830-31 in which the memoir’s publication
date is indeed listed as 1804.
14
Even though Michael Hanchard has written that “nation-state memory and black
memory are not coterminous” and are often at odds (46), in this case they do “overlap” (61). These authors are trying to keep “visible the actual” experiences of the
Haitian people and urge the creation of “one narrative about the nation’s origins” that
would instill pride in young Haitians who did not live through the Revolution.
15
In fact, Scott says that it is exactly the Other’s “appeal to experience as uncontestable
evidence [. . .] that weakens the critical thrust of histories of difference (382). Scott’s
logic helps to explain the critical hesitancy towards using these Haitian authors as primary sources.
16
The only early Haitian text which Clavin references is the English translation of the
Baron de Vastey’s An Essay on the Causes of the Revolution and the Civil Wars of Hayti
(1823; 1969): 12.
17
This fact was also noticed by a U.S. American author who reviewed
Le Système for The Port-Folio. The author writes,
of the cruelties pratised by the French in St. Domingo, Europe had, in a
great measure, till now, been totally ignorant. The mask has, however, been
withdrawn, by the liberty which the Haytians have given themselves, and
perhaps the most signal vengeance they can now take of their ancient
oppressors, is to give an impartial history. (ibid : 315)
[La plupart des historiens qui ont écrit sur les colonies étaient des blancs
même des colons [. . .] à present que nous avons des presses haytiennes [. . .]
nous pouvons dévoiler les crimes des colons et répondre aux calomnies les
plus absurdes, inventées par le préjugé et l’avarice de nos oppresseurs.]
18
Even though Daniel Désormeaux claims that Toussaint was the “first of the (black)
memorialists” (Désormeaux 131) and Jeremy Popkin suggests that “no memoirs
[were] written or dictated by ex-slaves from this period [the late eighteenth-century],
or even from the more literature mulatto group” (Popkin 512), if we take a more
expansive view and include the political memoir we have a few more sources. Julien
Raimond and André Rigaud, for example, both left memoirs. The first memoir of the
Revolution written by a Haitian seems to be Julien Raimond’s Mémoire sur les causes des
troubles et des désastres de la colonie de Saint-Domingue (1793), given first as a speech in
defense of the hommes de couleurs in 1791.
19
In “Politics and Autobiography: Political Memoir as Polygenre,” George Egerton
defines the political memoir as a “polygenre” that is not easily delineated because of
its polymorphous nature. Egerton writes, “the parameters marking political memoir
off from other genres or types of writing often appear indistinct as it appropriates
autobiography, biography, diary, history, political science, journalism, and pamphleteering, to name but its nearest literary neighbors” (223). The “indistinct” nature of
the political memoir is that which marks its differentiation from “professional historiography” in the eyes of many historians who still consider the genre of the memoir
to be history’s bastard cousin.
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20
“J’ai employé jusqu’ici la douceur et la modération pour vous ramener à votre devoir;
votre conduite me prouve que j’ai trop bien présumé de vous [. . .]. Au lieu d’embrasser ce parti qui vous eût fait estimer de toute la France, et chérir la Colonie; quelle voie
avez-vous prise? Celle de vrais scélérats, qui osent tout, parce qu’ils croient tout oser.”
21
According to Vastey, Gallifet was one of the cruelest of all the slaveholders (44).
22
See also Justin Emmanuel Castera, Brèf coup d’oeil sur les origines de la presse haïtienne
(1986).
23
Julien Raimond was the son of a French man named Pierre, who emigrated to SaintDomingue in the early eighteenth-century, and Marie Bagasse, the daughter of a
wealthy mulatto planter (Dubois 61).
24
“Ils vivent étrangers dans leur propre patrie [. . .] ils trouvent l’esclavage au sein
même de la liberté.”
25
Vastey devotes an entire section of Le Système colonial dévoilée (1814) to the chimera
of freedom enjoyed by the free people of color. Vastey writes,
we are now going to sketch the sad situation of those who one called, in
these times of horror, impudently, the freed. We will not make any distinction between these so-called free people [and the slaves], because even if
they didn’t have distinct masters, the white public was their master, and by all
counts, they suffered the same humiliations and the same infamies that the
slaves did; we will consider them as such. (74)
[nous allons esquisser maintenant la triste situation de ce qu’on appelait,
dans ces temps d’horreur, impudement les libres. Nous ne ferons aucune
distinction de ces soi-disant libres, car s’ils n’avaient point de maîtres distincts, le public blanc était leur maître; et sous tous les rapports, ils supportaient les mêmes humiliations et les même infamies que les eslcaves; nous les
considérerons comme tels.]
26
André Rigaud was a free-person of color who had been educated in Bordeaux. He
participated in the American Revolutionary War, most notably at the battle of
Savannah and soon became a general in the French army and eventually one of the
principal Haitian Revolutionists (Dubois 121).
27
These first person memoirs were designed to refute the first person memoirs of the
colonist Gros’s Isle de Saint-Domingue, province du Nord. Précis historique; qui expose dans le
plus grand jour les monoeuvres contre révolutionnairs employees contre St. Domingue; qui désigne et
fait connoître les principaux Agents de tous les massacres, incendies, vols et dévastations qui s’y sont
commis (1793), which quickly became the authoritative source on the first two years of
the insurrection (Popkin 515) and later, J.P. Garran-Coulon’s lengthy report on the
Saint-Domingue revolts: Rapport sur les troubles de Saint-Domingue (1797). Both works
blamed the free people of color and the slaves for the cruelty of the Revolution.
28
“Les hommes de couleur ont-ils trahi leur patrie? Ont-ils appelé les ennemis sur le
territoire de la république? [. . .]. Non, sans doute. Au contraire, ils les ont combattus.”
29
“il étoit donc naturel que des hommes véxés, tyrannisés et sans aucun appui, se jettassent dans le premier parti qui leur offroit protection, sur-tout lorsqu’ils voyoient ce
parti disposé à obéir au décret qui les régéneroit.”
30
“Peut-être même ce Mémoire, tracé par la main de la vérité, servira-t-il à en dévoiler quelqu’un.”
31
“Nous allons donc essayer de peindre, sans passion, sans fiel, sans haine, et sur-tout,
sans partialité, tous les faits.”
32
“si les couleurs manquent à mon tableau, c’est qu’elles sont trop fortes pour ma
faible plume.”
33
“ma plume haytienne manquera d’éloquence sans doute, mais elle sera véridique;
mes tableaux seront sans ornemens, mais ils seront frappans [. . .].”
34
In a recent presentation at the twentieth annual Haitian Studies Association
Conference Deborah Jenson provided evidence which suggests the possibility that it
was Dessalines and not Boisrond-Tonnerre who authored the Acte. Her findings will
be published in a forthcoming book entitled Beyond the Slave Narrative.
35
“Je dois prévenir qu’il n’est pas un fait, pas un crime, pas une action mentionnés dans
South Atlantic Review
59
cet ouvrage, qui ne porte avec soi le caractère de la plus grande véracité.”
36
For examples of this we can look to abolitionist texts like Harriet Martineau’s
romance of the Revolution, The Hour and the Man (1841), Jean Baptiste Picquenard’s
Zoflora; ou la bonne négresse (1801), or Wendell Phillips’ speech, “Toussaint L’Ouverture”
(1861).
37
In many ways, Dessalines was the Haitian Revolution’s most defamed participant.
Alfred Hunt writes:
Several [U.S. American] journals carried a story in which Dessalines was a
man of ‘wild and flighty mind’ who killed whites on sight. In this fictional
and emotional account, Dessalines captured Toussaint’s former master after
Toussaint had helped him escape. Toussaint pleaded for his former master’s
life, but Dessalines replied, ‘He must perish because he is white. His color
is his guilt.’ (91)
Deborah Jenson has noted that after Dessalines’s proclamation at Gonaïves was printed in France in the Journal des débats, the French journalist Benjamin Constant wrote,
“[t]here is something savage in this negro style that grips those of us who are accustomed to the forms and hypocrisy of the social world with a particular kind of terror”
(qtd. in Jenson 42). Yet perhaps the most telling sign that Dessalines' infamy has led
to a wholesale silencing of the full range of his contributions to the Revolution
remains the fact that the following statement of Robert Lawless's, written in 1992, is
still basically true today: “In contrast to Toussaint [and Christophe], no full and
authoritative biography of Dessalines yet exists, probably related to the fact that
Dessalines is forever associated with the slaughter of whites” (Lawless 41).
38
“la vieille Ohaïti était pour lui l’île de la félicité; ou plutôt il croyait faire son entrée
dans l’antique Eden.”
39
“sont entrés dans les plus petits détailles sur les productions, le climat, l’économie
rurale, mais ils se sont donnés bien de garde de dévoiler les crimes de leurs complices;
bien peu ont eu le courage de dire la vérité, et encore en la disant, ils ont cherché à la
déguiser et atténuer par leurs expressions, l’énormité de ces crimes.”
40
“les femmes [et] les enfants étaient en proie à la rapacité du soldat qui leur arrachait
avec la dernière inhumanité, les oreilles avec les boucles qu’elles y portaient; un collier,
un mouchoir devenait le prix d’un coup de fusil, et s’il arrivait qu’un cultivateur effrayé
s’enfonçât dans les bois, il était de suite fusillé ou lié et envoyé à Saint-Marc pour y être
mis à mort.”
41
For the meaning of this expression, see footnote 43 below.
42
“Arrêter, noyer ou pendre, signifiaient la même chose. Ces barbares avaient crée un
nouveau vocabulaire. Noyer deux cent individus, c’était un coup de filet national; pendre, c’était monter en grade; être dévoré par les chiens, c’était descendre dans l’arène;
fusiller, c’était laver la figure du plomb, et brûler enfin, c’était opérer chaudement! Quel
horrible langage!”
43
On this subject Laurent Dubois writes:
Fond of euphemisms for the horrors he was inflicting, Rochambeau referenced the practices of ancient Rome in calling the punishment of being
eaten alive by dogs ‘descending into the arena’, (Dubois 292)
Boisrond-Tonnerre makes an exact reference to one of Rochambeau’s euphemisms
above, in noting that this “new language” was designed to cover up in many ways the
barbaric behavior of the French colonists.
44
“On ne la taxera pas, cette plume, de vénalité, elle ne sera pas accusée d’être guidée
par la partialité; tous les faits que contiennent ces mémoires doivent entrer au domaine
de l’histoire que nous transmettons à notre postérité. Puisse-t-elle, plus heureuse que
nous, ne connaître des Français, que le nom et ne lire l’histoire de nos dissensions et
de nos fautes, que comme un songe que son bonheur efface!”
45
“Eh! quoi, me suis-je dit mille fois avant d’entreprendre cet ouvrage, le repertoire
des crimes des Français, quel être pourra ajouter fois aux vérités que je trace? quelle
âme sensible, même après avoir vécu dans les orages de la révolution, pensera que les
Français eussent à renchérir sur leurs crimes dans la plus belle comme dans la plus
60
Marlene L. Daut
infortunée de leurs possessions d’outre-mer? Comment persuader aux nations que la
contagion française n’a pas encore gagnées, qu’un tyran usurpateur du trône de son
maître, qui ne fonde sa puissance que sur la liberté et l’égalité, qui s’institue le restaurateur des moeurs et de la religion, ait décrété de sang-froid la massacre d’un million
d’hommes, qui ne veulent que la liberté et l’égalité; qu’ils défendront contre l’univers
entier?” (15)
46
“Et vous, esclaves de tous les pays, vous apprendrez par ce grand homme
[Dessalines], que l’homme porte naturellement dans son coeur la liberté, et qu’il en
tient les clés dans ses mains.”
47
“L’Empereur ne formera jamais aucune entreprise dans la vue de faire des conquêtes
ni de troubler la paix et le régime intérieur des colonies étrangères.”
48
“Ce n’est point un roman que j’écris, c’est l’exposé des malheurs, des longues souffrances et des supplices inouïs.”
49
Vastey’s works were widely read in both Europe and the United States as evidenced
by their inclusion in the library catalogues of Harvard Library (1830-31; 1834), the
Boston Athenaeum (1827), the Astor Library in New York (1851), the Bibliotheca
Americana in London (1865, 1867). There are also dozens of advertisements and
reviews of Vastey’s works in U.S. American and British newspapers, journals, indexes
and periodicals. Although Le Système Colonial dévoilé was never to my knowledge translated into English, his later works were translated into English and published in
London almost immediately upon publication.
50
“mon but en écrivant, n’est pas d’aspirer à la gloire d’être homme de lettres, mais
bien d’être utile à mes compatriotes, de les éclairer et de dévoiler la vérité aux
européens”
51
Though the first dozen or so pages of Vastey’s work reads like an historical essay
(Vastey describes the discovery of the island by the Spanish, the subsequent extermination of the Amer-Indian population, and the institution of colonial slavery by the
French), the rest of the narrative reads like a catalogue of abuses. He writes, “Je vais
réveiller les cendres des nombreuses victimes que vous avez précipités dans le
tombeau, et emprunter leurs voix pour dévoiler vos forfaits.”
52
In his Notes à M. le baron V.P. Malouet (1814) Vastey quotes Malouet as having written: “ ‘Le voilà donc connu ce secret plein d’horreur: la liberté des noirs, c’est leur
domination! C’est le massacre ou l’esclavage des blancs, c’est l’incendie de nos champs,
de nos cités’” (qtd. in 14). Vastey's statement in Le Système is thus an important reversal. “Le voilà donc connu ce secret plein d’horreur : Le Système Colonial, c’est la domination des
Blancs, c’est le Massacre ou l’Esclavage des Noirs.”
53
Vastey and Christophe both shared a reverence for England. Vastey claimed that it
was because England had produced a Clarkson and a Wilberforce (vi), but Vastey and
Christophe’s devotion to the British should also be seen in light of their wish to continue a profitable trade with the country.
54
“La postérité ne croira jamais que c’est dans un siècle de lumières, comme le nôtre,
que des hommes qui se disent des savants, des philosophes, ont voulu faire descendre
à la condition de la brute des hommes [. . .] uniquement pour conserver le privilège de
pouvoir opprimer une partie du genre humain.”
55
“Au lieu de désoler l’Afrique par cet infâme traffic, pourquoi les européens ne tournent point leurs efforts à civilizer cette grande partie du genre humain?”
56
Over a century later, Jean-Paul Sartre would describe colonialism as a “system” that
destroys itself as well. In his article, “Colonialism is a System,” Sartre writes, “the
colonists themselves have taught their adversaries; they have shown the hesitant that
no solution was possible other than force” (47).
57
The abbé Grégoire would share this opinion almost a decade later in De la Noblesse
de la peau (1820) where he writes:
Since [the U.S. American Revolution], ideas of liberty , having crossed the
Atlantic, have begun to circulate in Europe [. . .] the publication of a string
of good works capturing the attention of the public, proves the neccessity
South Atlantic Review
61
of urgent modifications in the colonial system and prefigures its downfall.
(74)
[Depuis lors les idées de liberté qui, traversant l’Atlantique, venaient circuler
en Europe [. . .] la publication d’une foule de bons ouvrages éveillant l’attention publique, prouvèrent la nécessité de modifications urgentes dans le
système colonial et présagèrent sa chute.]
58
“Quoi! me suis-je dit: en entreprenant cet ouvrage, les amis de l’esclavage, ces éternels ennemis du genre humain, ont écrit des milliers de volumes librement; ils ont fait
gémir toutes les presses de l’Europe, pendant des siècles entiers, pour calomnier et
ravaler l’homme noir au-dessous de la brute; le petit nombre d’écrivains de notre classe
infortunée ont eu peine à jeter quelques lueurs contre leurs nombreuses calomnies,
étant comprimés par le concours de toutes les circonstances qui étouffaient leurs
voix.”
59
“O vous jeune haytiens qui avez le bonheur de naître sous le règne des lois et de la
liberté! Vous qui ne connaissez pas ces temps d’horreurs et de barbaries; lisez ces
écrits; n’oubliez jamais les infortunes de vos pères, et apprenez à vous défier et à haïr
vos tyrants.”
60
Vastey’s view of the duty of Haitian authors was shared by his contemporary and
rival Jules Solime Milscent. Milscent published an article entitled, “Des devoirs du
journaliste” in the January 1818 edition of the first Haitian review, L’Abeille Haytienne,
in which he wrote:
The journalist’s job imposes certain demands upon him; he should not simply be the echo of news that comes from the four corners of the earth or
the simple copyist of government decrees. He is called to fulfill much more
distinguished functions; like a magistrate who ensures public security, the
maintenance of mores, the execution of the law, he denounces abuses,
spreads useful truths, solves disputes and is attached to the public good;
ardent defender of the people’s rights and zealous servant of the government, he must refute all venomous attacks launched against them by their
enemies to which their good character should not expose them.
[L’emploi d’un journaliste lui impose des devoirs; il ne doit pas être seulement l’écho des nouvelles qui viennent des quatres parties du monde ou le
simple copiste des décrets de son gouvernement. Il est appelé à des fonctions plus distinguées; tel qu’un Magistrat qui veille à la surété publique, au
maintien des moeurs, à l’exécution des lois, il dénonce les abus, propage d’utiles vérités, concilie les esprits et s’attache à la recherché du bien général;
défenseur libre des droits du peuple et serviteur zélé du gouvernement, il
doit repousser les traits envenimés que leur lance tout ennemi et auxquels
leur caractère ne leur permet d’opposer au souverain mépris.]
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