Abstract
Scholars, politicians and priests have long noted and often deplored the low rates of formal, state-sanctioned marriage in Haiti. Although the institution of slavery undermined the legal status of marriage between slaves in colonial Saint-Domingue, monarchical agents and the Code Noir nonetheless inveighed against immorality and enjoined marriage.1 French republicans, Napoleon’s generals, Haitian heads of state and revolutionary general Toussaint Louverture himself all invoked the virtues of marriage. Nonetheless, over the centuries social realities have accorded poorly, if at all, with legal codes and moral prescriptions. Church marriage is still typical only of the light-skinned elite. Far more customary in Haiti today are modes of structuring bonds of family and affective life outside the purview of state and church. According to various estimates, extra-legal relationships known as plasaj constitute between 60 and 85 per cent of conjugal unions. For most women today, unions are multiple, serial or both; 30 to 60 per cent of all Haitian families are headed by women.2
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Notes
The Code Noir, the royal edict of 1685 designed to regulate the legal status of slaves in the French empire, underwent numerous modifications over the decades. The classic work is by Louis Sala-Molins, Le code noir, ou le calvaire de Canaan (Paris, 1987). Sue Peabody explores the transformations of French law regarding race and liberty in ‘There Are No Slaves in France’: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (Oxford, 1996).
Stephen J. Williams et al., ‘Conjugal Unions among Rural Haitian Women’, Journal of Marriage and the Family 37/4 (1975): 1022–1031, 1026. Estimates vary, but scholars agree that extra-legal relationships predominate. Carolle Charles notes that ‘more than 40 per cent of conjugal relations are not legally sanctioned’ (‘Gender and Politics in Contemporary Haiti: The Duvalierist State, Transnationalism, and the Emergence of a New Feminism, 1980–1990’, Feminist Studies 21/1 [1995]: 135–164, 142). Mirlande Manigat places the rate of legal marriage nationally at 15 per cent; see her Être femme en Haïti hier et aujourd’hui: Le regard des Constitutions, des Lois et de la société (Port-au-Prince, 2002), 147.
The term nouveaux libres was used to distinguish those people freed by the emancipation decrees, while anciens libres referred to those who had achieved freedom prior to the Revolution; gens de couleur referred to people of mixed African and European descent. See David P. Geggus, ‘Slavery, War, and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean, 1789–1815’, in A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean, ed. David Barry Gaspar and David P. Geggus (Bloomington, 1997), 1–50; Carolyn Fick, ‘The French Revolution in Saint Domingue: A Triumph or Failure?’ in ibid. 51–77.
On slavery, marriage and emancipation, see Elizabeth Colwill, ‘Fêtes de l’hymen, fêtes de la liberté: Marriage, Manhood and Emancipation in Revolutionary Saint-Domingue, 1793’, in The World of the Haitian Revolution, ed. David P. Geggus and Norman Fiering (Indianapolis, 2009), 125–155;
Myriam Cottias, ‘Free but Minor: Slave Women, Respectability, and Social Antagonism in the French Antilles, 1830–90’, in Women and Slavery, ed. Gwyn Campbell et al., 2 vols (Athens, OH, 2008), vol. 2, 186–206;
Ariette Gautier, ‘Traite et politiques démographiques esclavagistes’, Population (Fr. edn) 41/6 (1986): 1005–1024; idem, Les soeurs de Solitude: la condition féminine dans l’esclavage aux Antilles du XVIIe au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1985); idem, ‘Les esclaves femmes du nouveau monde: étude comparative’, Revue haitienne d’histoire et de géographie 76/210 (2002): 28–47; idem, ‘Les familles esclaves aux Antilles françaises, 1635–1848’, Population (French edn) 55/6 (2000): 975–1001;
John D. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (New York, 2006); idem, ‘“To Establish a Community of Property”: Marriage and Race before and during the Haitian Revolution’, Journal of the History of the Family 12/2 (2007): 142–152.
On race and family romance in pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue, see Doris Garraway, ‘Race, Reproduction and Family Romance in Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Description … de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 38/2 (2005): 227–246;
John D. Garrigus, ‘Redrawing the Colour Line: Gender and the Social Construction of Race in Pre-Revolutionary Haiti’, Journal of Caribbean History 30 (1996): 28–50. On gender and the early Haitian state, see idem, ‘Race, Gender, and Virtue in Haiti’s Failed Foundational Fiction: La Mulâtre comme il y a peu de blanches (1803)’, in The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, ed. Sue Peabody and Tyler Stoval (Durham, NC, 2003), 73–94.
For gendered narratives of slavery, revolution and independence, see Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley, 1995).
Archives Nationales, Paris (hereafter AN), Dxxv/9/90, doc. 12, Polvérel, Sonthonax, Proclamation, Haut-du-Cap, 21 June 1793; David P. Geggus, ‘The Arming of Slaves in the Haitian Revolution’, and Laurent Dubois, ‘Citizen Soldiers: Emancipation and Military Service in the Revolutionary French Caribbean’, both in Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age, ed. Christopher Leslie Brown and Philip D. Morgan (New Haven, 2006), 209–232 and 233–254, respectively; Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2004), 134–142.
On militarism and citizenship, see Mimi Sheller, ‘Sword-Bearing Citizens: Militarism and Manhood in Nineteenth-Century Haiti’, Plantation Society in the Americas 4 (1997): 233–278.
On gender and emancipation, see Pamela Scully and Diana Paton (eds), Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World (Durham, NC, 2005), in particular the chapter by Sue Peabody, ‘Négresse, Mulâtresse, Citoyenne: Gender and Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1650–1848’, 56–78.
Robert Louis Stein, Léger Félicité Sonthonax: The Lost Sentinel of the Republic (Rutherford, NJ, 1985), 86–87; Peabody, ‘Négresse’, 64.
Garrigus, Before Haiti, 198–201; Dominique Rogers, ‘Les libres de couleur dans les capitales de Saint-Domingue: fortune, mentalités et intégration à la fin de l’Ancien Régime (1776–1789)’, doctoral thesis (University of Bordeaux III, 1999), 557–559, 545.
On the contradictory marital provisions of the Code Noir, see Lucien Peytraud, L’esclavage aux Antilles françaises avant 1789: d’après des documents inédits des archives coloniales (1897; repr. Pointe-à-Pitre, 1973), 197–206; Sala-Molins, Le code noir, 106–117.
Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti (Knoxville, 1990); idem, ‘Emancipation in Haiti: From Plantation Labour to Peasant Proprietorship’, in After Slavery: Emancipation and its Discontents, ed. Howard Temperley (London, 2000), 11–40, 19–21.
See also Judith Kafka, ‘Action, Reaction, and Interaction: Slave Women in Resistance in the South of Saint-Domingue, 1793–94’, Slavery and Abolition 18/2 (1997): 48–72.
On French colonial policy, see Bernard Gainot, ‘The Constitutionalization of General Freedom under the Directory’, in The Abolitions of Slavery: From Léger Félicité Sonthonax to Victor Schoelcher, 1793, 1794, 1848, ed. Marcel Dorigny (New York, 2003), 180–196.
For divergent assessments of Toussaint, see Claude Moïse, Le projet national de Toussaint Louverture et la constitution de 1801 (Montreal, 2001), 131–141;
Pierre Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture: un révolutionnaire noir dAncien Régime (Paris, 1989);
Odette Roy Fombrun, Toussaint Louverture: tacticien de genie, la Constitution indépendantiste de 1801 (Port-au-Prince, 2001);
and Madison Smartt Bell, Toussaint Louverture: A Biography (New York, 2007). On the legal history and practice of marriage in independent Haiti, see Manigat, Être femme en Haïti, 143–208.
David P. Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793–1798 (Oxford, 1982).
The law of 20 September 1792 that prescribed the form to be followed in the laicized État Civil is reprinted in Marcel Garaud and Romuald Szramkiewicz, La Révolution française et la famille (Paris, 1978), 203–212.
David P. Geggus confirms that in colonial Saint-Domingue, ‘it is clear that only a small fraction of slave couples were married in church’; see idem, ‘Slave and Free Colored Women in Saint Domingue’, in More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, ed. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine (Bloomington, 1996), 259–78, 264; also Bernard Moitt, Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635–1848 (Bloomington, 2001), 80–89. Ariette Gautier presents evidence of falling rates of marriage in the French Caribbean by the eighteenth century in Soeurs, 79–90; idem, ‘Les familles esclaves’; idem, ‘Les esclaves femmes aux Antilles françaises, 1635–1848’, Historical Reflections/Reflexions historiques 10/3 (1983): 409–433, 420–421. On resistance to marriage by the enslaved, see idem, ‘Les esclaves femmes’, 35; idem, ‘Les familles esclaves’, 988–989. On marital practice among free people of colour, see Garrigus, Before Haiti; Rogers, ‘Les libres de couleur’, esp. 544–589.
Myriam Cottias’s study of Trois-Îlets in Martinique reveals that ‘of women who gave birth to children outside of marriage, 68 per cent remained unmarried’; see Cottias, ‘Free but Minor’, 198. Jacques Houdaille, in ‘La fécondité des anciens esclaves à Saint-Domingue (1794–1801)’, Population 28/6 (1973): 1208–1210, relies on nearly 1000 marriage acts in the civil registers of Port-au-Prince, Fort-Dauphin, Jacmel, et Cayes du Fond between 1794 and 1801—modest numbers relative to the ex-slave population. Using civil registers from Port-au-Prince, Jacques Cauna discovers low rates of marriage among freedpeople immediately following Haitian independence; see his ‘Les registres d’état civil anciens des Archives Nationales d’Haïti (période colonial et premiers temps de l’Indépendance)’, Revue de la société haitienne d’histoire et de géographie 46/162 (1989): 1–34.
Geggus, ‘Slave and Free Colored Women’; John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (Cambridge, UK, 1998), 317; idem, The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil War and Transition, 1641–1718 (Madison, 1983), 31.
Karen McCarthy Brown, ‘Afro-Caribbean Healing: A Haitian Case Study’, in Healing Cultures: Art and Religion as Curative Practices in the Caribbean and Its Diaspora, ed. Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (New York, 2001), 43–68, 45.
Paul Christopher Johnson, ‘Joining the African Diaspora: Migration and Diasporic Religious Culture among the Garífuna in Honduras and New York’, in Women and Religion in the African Diaspora, ed. R. Marie Griffith and Barbara Dianne Savage (Baltimore, 2006), 37–59, 38.
Terry Rey, ‘Kongolese Catholic Influences on Haitian Popular Catholicism’, in Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora, ed. Linda M. Heywood (Cambridge, UK, 2002), 265–285.
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© 2010 Elizabeth Colwill
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Colwill, E. (2010). Freedwomen’s Familial Politics: Marriage, War and Rites of Registry in Post-Emancipation Saint-Domingue. In: Hagemann, K., Mettele, G., Rendall, J. (eds) Gender, War and Politics. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230283046_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230283046_4
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