Abstract
This introduction demonstrates how Vastey’s usage of deconstructive reversals and vindicationism to attack the philosophical foundations of slavery, colonialism, and racism continues a tradition of pamphleteering evident in French Saint-Domingue on the eve of the Revolution. The author argues that it is important to recognize the characteristics of writing by people of color from French Saint-Domingue written and published before formal Haitian independence because these early Haitian texts—produced largely by free people of color in revolutionary Saint-Domingue—contributed to the later development of Haitian anti-slavery writing by official members of the Haitian state like Baron de Vastey.
Tout le monde crie contre la révolution, et tout le monde en a profité.
–Baron de Vastey, Réflexions politiques
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Notes
- 1.
In his 1787 Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Human Species. Cugoano , whose work Vastey would have known about due to his familiarity with the Abbé Grégoire’s De la littérature des nègres, had written something similar when he asked, “Is it not strange to think, that they who ought to be considered as the most learned and civilized people in the world, that they should carry on a traffic of the most barbarous cruelty and injustice, and that many think slavery, robbery and murder no crime?” (112).
- 2.
The first printing presses arrived in the colony in 1763, but the flourishing of writing produced by free people of color does not appear to have begun before the early 1790s.
- 3.
Raimond also authored what may very well be the first work of critical race theory by a writer of African descent with his Observations sur l’origine et les progrès [sic] du préjugé des colons blancs contre les citoyens de couleur (1791). His other publications include, Réflexions sur les véritables causes des troubles et des désastres de nos colonies, notamment sur ceux de Saint-Domingue; avec les moyens à employer pour préserver cette colonie d’une ruine totale (1793); and Lettres de J. Raimond, à ses frères les hommes de couleur. En comparaison des originaux de sa correspondance, avec les extraits perfides qu’en ont fait MM. Page et Bruelly, dans un libelle intitulé: Developpement des causes, des troubles, et des désastres des Colonies françaises (1794).
- 4.
The colonist Gros , for example, who had been taken as a prisoner by Jeannot , claimed that “evidently…the slaves have been excited to revolt by the mulattoes” (qtd. in Ardouin 1: 50).
- 5.
For a complete list of these publication see, also Justin Emmanuel Castera, Brèf coup d’oeil sur les origines de la presse haïtienne (1986).
- 6.
In the Social Contract Rousseau famously refers not to chattel slavery, but to a figurative slavery that “for Rousseau as for Montesquieu” was a “metaphor for the debased condition of man in society in general, that is to say in Europe” (Miller 69, italics in original). And as Elizabeth Colwill has written:
“French and colonial commentators, journalists, deputies, missionaries and pamphleteers defined civilization—and by extension the new citizenry—against an astonishing parade of transgressive bodies. In political pamphlets, ‘seductive’ financiers, ‘immodest’ clerics, ‘infamous courtesans’, ‘vile prostitutes’, unnatural nuns, sinful celibates, and lusty ‘nègres’ illustrated the state of savagery produced by centuries of real and metaphorical slavery” (Colwill 200).
- 7.
This appears to have also been the case with Vincent Ogé who led an ambiguous, but failed revolt of the free people of color in October 1790, resulting in his execution. I wrote at length about the conflict between Ogé’s attempt to at first preserve his property interests in slavery and achieve equal rights for free men of color in Tropics of Haiti (557–559).
- 8.
I refer here and throughout this monograph to the 1853 version established by Joseph Saint-Rémy because that is the version with which nineteenth-century readers would have been familiar. For more on the literary history of his document, see, Desormeaux’s introduction to the Mémoires, p. 19.
- 9.
Jeremy Popkin has written, for instance, 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). However, if we include the political memoirs of Raimond , Rigaud , and Louverture we have a few more sources.
- 10.
Article 12 is actually much more complicated than it might initially seem. For, Article 13 subsequently clarifies that the interdiction against “white” property ownership does not extend to “white” people already living in the empire, and in fact, Article 14 essentially outlawed the recognition of color difference, making it so that even “white” Haitians had to be considered “black” as well. The property exclusion therefore only applied to foreigners. To this day, the generic word for man in Haitian Kreyòl is nèg, derived from the French word nègre, and the word for foreigner is blan, derived from the French word blanc. Therefore, all Haitians had to be recognized as black and all foreigners as white, regardless of skin tone or phenotype.
- 11.
Le Cri de la conscience (1815); Le Cri de la patrie (1815); À mes concitoyens! (1815); Réflexions adressées aux Haytiens de partie de l’ouest et du sud, sur l’horrible assassinat du Général Delvare , commis au Port-au-Prince, dans la nuit du 25 décembre, 1815, par les ordres de Pétion (1816); and Communication officielle de trois lettres de Catineau Laroche, ex-colon, agent de Pétion (1816).
- 12.
According to Karen Racine , “Christophe’s state of the union address of 1 January 1816 specifically had identified public instruction as the state’s ‘prime duty’ and declared that his administration was seeking learned professors from abroad to undertake the eduction of youth” (215). Subsequently, Christophe with the help of abolitionists like Thomas Clarkson, Prince Saunders , and Zachary Macaulay adopted Joseph Lancaster’s “monitorial method of education which promised to educate large numbers of children quickly and inexpensively” by “[o]lder pupils who had mastered a certain amount of basic literacy” (Racine 217).
- 13.
In 1810 Juste Chanlatte published a work entitled, Le Cri de la nature, ou, Hommage haytien au très-vénérable abbé H. Grégoire, auteur d'un ouvrage nouveau, intitulé De la littérature des Nègres, ou, Recherches sur leurs facultés individuelles, leurs qualités morales et leur littérature; suivies de notices sur la vie et les ouvrages des Négres qui se sont distingués dans les sciences, les lettres et les arts.
- 14.
At this time, there are no known traditional first-person slave narratives from Saint-Domingue or from any of the other French colonies, (Miller 35; Reinhardt 5–7). What writing from enslaved Africans we do have exists in letters. While Deborah Jenson has found implicit literary value in these documents (see, Beyond the Slave Narrative), Christopher L. Miller has drawn a different conclusion in writing, “as compelling and moving as they are, [these letters] cannot compete with the comprehensive value of the slave narratives published in the United States in the nineteenth century” (36). It is not just the French Caribbean that has been perceived as a space devoid of first-person slave narratives. Aljoe has written, “To date, not a single self-written slave narrative has been discovered in the Caribbean. Every single West Indian narrative is a collaborative text, drawing on more than one voice” (14).
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Daut, M.L. (2017). Introduction: Baron de Vastey in Haitian (Revolutionary) Context. In: Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism. The New Urban Atlantic. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47067-6_1
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