"Genocidal Imaginigs" In The Haitian Revolution

By Marlene L. Daut

“What will you do with this population? For what could it be beneficial? The 110,000 affranchis will intensify the plague that desolates you, for have you not forgotten that this is the caste that wrought havoc on everything. Besides, do you believe that two such disparate peoples could fraternize and live together? For my part, I believe it to be impossible.”

–Jean Barré Saint Venant, Des Colonies Modernes sous la Zone Torride, et particulièrement de celle de Saint-Domingue (1802)

Many French colonists from Saint-Domingue, like Barré de Saint-Venant, not only believed that the so-called “affranchis” were responsible for a “racial” insurrection in the colony, but they also meditated on whether or not it was appropriate for “blacks” and “whites” to live together, ostensibly because they were different “peoples.”[1] These musings appear to have led some “white” colonists to form opinions about what should be done with people of color (including the enslaved), in general, and people of “mixed race,” in particular.

The Marquise de Rouvray, the wife of a famous French colonist and military leader, penned a remarkably detailed outline for the total “destruction or deportation” of the free people of color in a letter to her daughter in August of 1793. She wrote that a massacre of the “white” population of Saint-Domingue was generally unavoidable unless

We succeed in creating another way of doing things which will entail the destruction or the deportation of all free men and women of color, after having marked them on both cheeks with the letter “L” for Libre, so that they will never be tempted to come back to Saint-Domingue.

These deportations, according to de Rouvray, should remain in effect ex post facto: “those who were born subsequently” would, at the age of “seven years old,” be branded and deported. “If we held firm to this rule,” the Marquise writes, “we would be able to rebuild our properties in Saint-Domingue.” Her plans continue as she proposes sterilization:

One other measure may perhaps be more final than the one that I just described, which would be to render male and female children of color unable to reproduce […] the men would be too weak to try anything against the whites and the women would no longer serve the latter. In the end, my dear girl, if we do not crush this caste, there will be no salvation for Saint-Domingue.[2]

In 1792, the colonist Barillon also made the case for “crush[ing]” “mulattoes” by proposing their “extermination” or “at least their deportation to the island of Ascension […] providing them with food for one year […] and giving them for a bishop that troublemaker Grégoire, and for a mayor that coward Brissot.” Wary that some might disapprove of his primary suggestion of exterminating the “mulattoes” by way of the “bayonette,” Barillon concludes that “the first point is the deportation of the mulattoes, and the confiscation of their property in compensation [for the property] of the whites that were burned.”[3] According to Garran de Coulon, a group of sailors had also threatened to “exterminate that execrable race of mulattoes. This is the expression used in a recitation signed by these sailors themselves.”[4]

The number of times that exterminating the entire population of “mulattoes,” free people of color, and eventually all “negroes” is alluded to in writing about the Haitian Revolution is astounding. This is likely what led André Rigaud to lament in his 1797 memoir, “There exists (and this is not at all in doubt), there exists a faction that tends to want the total destruction of all the citizens of color in Saint-Domingue.”[5] Such horrifying tendencies on the part of ordinary citizens, as well as public officials, mariners, and travel writers vis-à-vis people of color, suggests that readings of the Haitian Revolution as a “racial” revolution not only supported the ends of transatlantic slavery, but could also be used to urge the implementation of modern policies of eugenics and what has euphemistically been called “ethnic cleansing.” Indeed, revolutionary Saint-Domingue was a world in which the idea of “race war” was so well accepted that a language that reeked of genocidal imaginings was fairly ubiquitous.[6]

Evidence abounds pointing to French generals Leclerc and Rochambeau as having used genocidal tactics, namely mass drowning, in their attempt to defeat the Haitian revolutionists.[7] But as the comments from de Rouvray and Barillon suggest, many people in Saint-Domingue who lacked the resources and power to attempt actual “racial” extermination had no trouble imagining ways in which it might be carried out. These kinds of genocidal imaginings are directly related to early nineteenth-century French political theories, and in some cases, actual policies, concerning how France could best re-conquer its former colony.

In De Saint-Domingue: de ses guerres, de ses révolutions, de ses ressources et des moyens à prendre pour y rétablir la paix et l’industrie (1814), the former French colonist Drouin de Bercy spent ten pages describing how “ambush,” starvation, and “terror” should be “the order of the day” to “reestablish” Saint-Domingue.[8] Averring that popular opinion in France held that “the colony will never be tranquil if we do not destroy every last one of [the people of color],” he proposed that “all the leaders above the rank of corporal must disappear,” “all of the black women […] who were mistresses and prostitutes […] should be subject to the disposition of the government which will send them wherever seems fit,” and as for the “mulatto caste, as the most dangerous, the most restless, the cause and soul of all the insurrections of the negroes, they should be treated, if it is even possible, with more severity than the blacks” (169–71). Drouin de Bercy concluded by unequivocally proposing that after this “purge[…]” the colony could be easily repopulated:

When the island has been completely conquered and purged of all of those who could cause trouble […] the government, one year afterward […] could send on its behalf ten old ships, provisionally armed, to traffic in Africa for as long as it sees fit in order to re-introduce blacks into Saint-Domingue. (171)

Pierre Victor Malouet’s instructions to the three French agents (Dravermann, Medina, and Lavaysse) sent to the West Indies by him in 1814 in order to spy on both Haitian governments, were inflected with this same language of extermination. Instruction number six reads: “Purge the island of all the blacks whom it would be inappropriate to admit among the free and whom it would be dangerous to leave among those who are engaged on the plantations.”[9] Even though neither Drouin de Bercy nor Malouet’s specific plans to destroy independent Haiti and restore slavery would ever be imposed, ongoing international intervention in Haiti does remind us that the gap between genocidal imaginings and the implementation of conditions that have the effect of ending life can be small, something that we will not want to forget in our own Age of Revolutions, when U.S. politicians and ordinary citizens alike publicly imagine extermination.

Marlene L. Daut (@fictionsofHaiti) is Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies and Director of the Graduate Certificate Program in Africana Studies at Claremont Graduate University. She is currently compiling the first anthology of fictional writings about the Haitian Revolution. For more information visit her website: haitianrevolutionaryfictions.com

Title image: Kimathi Donkor, Bacchus and Ariadne, Caribbean Passion: Haiti, 1804 series, 2004

[1] Around 1770 the French government began systematically referring to free people of color as “affranchis,” meaning the freed, “as a way of saying that they were all ex-slaves, even those who were born free.” See, John Garrigus, Before Haiti. New York: Palgrave Macmillan (2006): 167.

[2] Rpt. in Laurent François Le Noir de Rouvray. Une correspondance familiale au temps des troubles de Saint-Domingue. Paris: Larose (1959): 102-103.

[3] Rpt. in J.P. Garran de Coulon, Rapports sur les troubles de Saint-Domingue. Paris: Imprimerie nationale, (1797–99) : 3:36-37.

[4] Qtd. in Garran de Coulon (3:440).

[5] André Rigaud, Mémoire du Général de Brigade André Rigaud. Aux Cayes: L’Imprimerie de Lemery (1797): iii-iv.

[6] Even though the word genocide did not exist in the era of the Haitian Revolution, genocidal acts far predate its mid-twentieth-century definition, which includes “deliberately inflicting on [a] group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” http://legal.un.org/avl/ha/cppcg/cppcg.html

[7] See one eye-witness account in “Picture of St. Domingo.” The Literary Magazine and American (1804): 1: 446–50.

[8] L.M.C.A. Drouin de Bercy, De Saint-Domingue. Paris: Chocquet (1814): 53-63.

[9] Rpt. in Vastey, “Appendix,” Essai sur les causes de la révolution et des guerres civiles d’Hayti. Sans-Souci: L’Imprimerie Royale (1819) : 58-69.

Further Reading:

Marlene L. Daut, Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World. Liverpool UP, 2015.

Sara Johnson, The Fear of French Negroes: Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolutionary Americas. U of California P, 2012.

Claude Ribbe, Le Crime de Napoléon. Édition Privé, 2005.


courtesy : https://ageofrevolutions.com/2016/01/25/genocidal-imaginings-in-the-era-of-the-haitian-revolution/

Keep them coming T-KOUT.
The best works in HAITIAN HISTORY ,these days,are being written in the U.S.

I am reading the most recent BIOGRAPHY of TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE ,by PHILIPPE GIRARD.
I thought I knew most there is to know about TOUSSAINT.I was mistaken.

This is a review of that BOOK ,by PAUL BERMAN ,the well known CRITIC and writer.
His conclusion about TOUSSAINT surprised me.BERMAN (a white man) concluded that TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE was superior in every way to his contemporaries like NAPOLEON and THOMAS JEFFERSON:



A Biography Reveals Surprising Sides to Haiti’s Slave Liberator


By PAUL BERMAN DEC. 9, 2016


 

TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE
A Revolutionary Life
By Philippe Girard
Illustrated. 340 pp. Basic Books. $29.99.

Any number of books have been written over the centuries about the leader of the Haitian slave revolution, but “Toussaint Louverture,” by Philippe Girard, is only the second in English to draw deeply on the original documents. The book is superb, though perhaps not in every way. And the greatest of its virtues is to stand knowledgeably and disputatiously in the shadow of its predecessor, the first of the extensively researched books in English, which was “The Black Jacobins,” from 1938, by C.L.R. James, the West Indian Marxist. “The Black Jacobins” was more than superb. It was a masterpiece. But 1938 was long ago.

James wanted to show that oppressed people are capable of taking their destiny into their own hands, given the right circumstances. On the sugar and coffee plantations of France’s Saint-Domingue colony — which eventually renamed itself Haiti — the African slaves were oppressed in the extreme. And yet once the French Revolution had broken out and the gospel of the Rights of Man had radiated to all corners of the universe, and once the European powers had fallen anew into interimperialist war, the extremely oppressed saw their opportunity. They found a leader in L’Ouverture. They found allies among the rebelling working people of France (in James’s interpretation). And beginning in 1791, they started the only successful slave revolution in the history of the world.

James saw in this something larger yet — a remote early stage of the anticolonial revolution in Africa, which, as he predicted, was going to break out in the years after he wrote his book. And he saw the beginnings of the black revolution in still other parts of the world. His “Black Jacobins” was in those respects a revolutionary tract aimed at the future, and not just an inquiry into the past. It was a literary achievement too — one of the very few works in English (Edmund Wilson’s contemporaneous “To the Finland Station” is another) to reflect the influence of Jules Michelet, the most thrilling of the 19th-century historians of the French Revolution. Michelet was a master of moral condemnation, and C.L.R. James, likewise.

But all of this is what Philippe Girard wants to avoid. Girard does not wish to contribute to a revolutionary program, not in a 1930s version, nor in any of our versions from today. He is a professor at McNeese State University in Louisiana, and his intention is merely to reveal the experiences and motivations of L’Ouverture himself. This has led him to dig into a great many more antique documents from France and Haiti than were available to James, and quite a few more documents than came under examination by a more recent biographer, Madison Smartt Bell. New facts turn up by the spadeful in his book. Old falsities crumble into dust. Now and then he climbs atop his heap of discoveries and judiciously grants himself license to conjure out of his own imagination scenes that surely must have taken place, even if the documentary evidence is lacking.
Continue reading the main story  



He tells us that L’Ouverture’s father, Hippolyte, was an aristocrat of the Allada kingdom of West Africa, who was captured with his family by the hostile Dahomey Empire circa 1740 and sold into slavery to the Europeans. He imagines the scene of Hippolyte and the family being stripped of their clothes and branded. L’Ouverture’s “father, whose tattoos and scarifications were a sign of pride, because they indicated his rank as an Allada aristocrat, now bore a shameful mark of his servile status on his burning skin. So did his wife and crying children. They were led onto a shallop, which battled the frightful surf all the way to a European ship waiting offshore.” Girard thinks he may have identified the ship in question, the Hermione. And with brush strokes of this sort, he paints a psychological portrait of L’Ouverture himself.

James railed against various of L’Ouverture’s detractors who attributed to him a merely personal ambition. But Girard thinks that a desire for what had been taken from his father — a “craving for social status” — was, in fact, the most constant of L’Ouverture’s motivations. L’Ouverture wanted to be recognized by the slave-owning white planters and by the French. He wanted “to benefit financially.” Yet I wonder if, in making these points, Girard hasn’t underplayed a different and nobler set of motivations, which James emphasized and documented by quoting lengthy and ardent passages from L’Ouverture’s correspondence on Enlightenment and French revolutionary themes, together with passages showing how zealous he was to rebut slanders against the black race.

On one matter Girard leaves no doubt, which is that L’Ouverture sometimes put his well-known talent for deceit to ruthless purposes. There was a moment in 1799 when, seeing an opportunity to curry favor with the British Empire and the hostile Americans, he treacherously betrayed an antislavery conspiracy in Jamaica — a coldblooded act if ever there was one, even if it served the narrow interest of the emancipated slaves in Saint-Domingue. Maybe L’Ouverture’s antislavery principles were more flexible than James could ever have suspected. L’Ouverture was himself a slave owner at one point (as his father had probably been in the Allada kingdom, Girard tells us), which is a fact that emerged only in 1977.
 

It is a little shocking to learn from Girard that at an early point in the revolution, when the antislavery cause seemed on the verge of collapse, L’Ouverture broached the idea of betraying his own emancipated followers by leading them back into bondage, in the hope of getting official protection for himself and one of his comrades. Ultimately he restored the slave trade in Saint-Domingue, after having abolished it — restored it because the plantations needed laborers, though he intended to free the newly purchased Africans after they had toiled for a number of years. Meanwhile he promulgated a labor code that in practice was only marginally better than slavery, even if it maintained the principle of emancipation.

L’Ouverture was not, in short, an “abolitionist saint.” He was a man of his time. L’Ouverture’s “equivocation was representative of an age that had to reconcile Enlightenment principles and the labor requirements of plantations. Like three other great figures of the Age of Revolutions — Thomas Jefferson, Simón Bolívar and Napoleon — he had conflicted views on the delicate matter of human bondage.” At least L’Ouverture brought a greater lucidity to his conflicted views than did Jefferson or Napoleon. He knew that his goal was double: to preserve Saint-Domingue’s prospects for wealth, and, even so, to uphold the abolitionist idea.

He wanted the emancipated slaves to be able to profit in the future from the achievements of the advanced French civilization. With that purpose in mind, he intimated that, under his leadership, revolutionary Saint-Domingue was going to remain formally attached to metropolitan France. He also wanted to ensure that metropolitan France would never be able to reinstate slavery. And with that additional purpose in mind, he stipulated that formal attachment should allow for a considerable autonomy. To benefit from Europe without risking destruction at the hands of the Europeans — that was his idea.

He built the first Western-style modern black army in order to achieve this attractive and nuanced goal. His army defeated or fended off one adversary after another — the sometimes genocidal-minded white planters, the Saint-Domingue mulattoes, various black insurgents, the Spanish Empire and the British imperialists. Napoleon dispatched two-thirds of the French Navy with a large army to crush the revolution, and L’Ouverture set the stage for the defeat of that army too. Only, in the course of doing so, he ended up under arrest. Napoleon sent him to his death in a French prison, which led the freedmen of Saint-Domingue to do what L’Ouverture had always warned them against, namely, to initiate a general massacre of the whites and to declare a total rupture with France: tragic misfortunes for the future of Haiti.
L’Ouverture’s triumphs proved to be in these ways less than total. And yet what hero in history has ever achieved everything? Napoleon, his archenemy, declined to grant him even a modicum of respect. Jefferson slighted him. L’Ouverture nonetheless showed himself to be those men’s superior, philosophically, politically and militarily — a point made by C.L.R. James that survives mostly intact in Philippe Girard’s sophisticated and anti-mythological biography.

L’Ouverture’s triumphs proved to be in these ways less than total. And yet what hero in history has ever achieved everything? Napoleon, his archenemy, declined to grant him even a modicum of respect. Jefferson slighted him.[u] L’Ouverture nonetheless showed himself to be those men’s superior, philosophically, politically and militarily — a point made by C.L.R. James that survives mostly intact in Philippe Girard’s sophisticated and anti-mythological biography[/b]

Pour traduire le dernier paragraphe ecrit par un homme de la trempe de PAUL BERMAN.Ce qui est pour le moins remarquable:

Les triomphes de LOUVERTURE etaient moins que "total".Encore quel HERO HISTORIQUE a tout acheve?
NAPOLEON son ARCHENEMI ne lui avait pas donne un minimum de respect,JEFFERSON le meprisait.LOUVERTURE s'etait montre etre superieur a ces hommes PHILOSOPHIQUEMENT,POLITIQUEMENT ET MILITAIREMENT...

http://nytimes.com/2016/12/09/books/review/a-biography-reveals-surprising-sides-to-haitis-slave-liberator.html?_r=0

Wi ,BYOGRAFI TOUSSAINT an ,ke PWOFESE PHILIPPE GIRARD ekri an ,gen anpil ENFOMASYON byen dokimante .ENFOMASYON tankou le "DIREKTWA" an FRANS te di misye voye TWOUP lan JAMAYIK pou ede ESKLAV JAMAYIKEN yo ,libere TET yo ,e prepare TWOUP li yo pou yon ENVAZYON SID ETAZINI an pou LIBERASYON ESKLAV AMERIKEN yo.
FRANSE yo te ap mete PRESYON sou MISYE pou l fe sa ;men sa te vin BWE LWIL apre KOUDETA NAPOLEON kont DIREKTWA a ,an FRANS.
Pou nou repale de PHILIPPE GIRARD.Misye se yon GWADLOUPEYEN.Mwen pa konnen si misye se yon MILAT ou byen yon "BEKE",paske lan FOTO misye ,li sanble ak yon "BEKE"

MISYE te lan "SYANS PO" an FRANS ,pou LISANS li .Li fe METRIZ ak DOKTORA l OZETAZINI.TEZ DOKTORA l ,se "THE EAGLE AND THE ROOSTER" ki vle di "EG lan kont KOK KALITE an" .KOK KALITE an se ARISTID.
Misye ekri yon ATIK an FRANSE tou ke m ap chache.Li lan CV misye.Misye ap mande ki LANG TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE te pale.Eske li te konn degaje l an FRANSE ou byen li te pale selman  sel LANG ki te pale lan KOLONI SENDOMENG lan ki se KREYOL.
“Quelle langue parlait Toussaint Louverture ? Le mémoire du Fort de Joux et les origines du kreyòl haïtien,” Annales 68:1 (Jan. 2013


http://mcneese.edu/f/c/583a9762/Girard_CV_Feb_2013.pdf