The Republican Imagination and Race: The Case of the Haitian Revolution

Abstract

The Saint-Domingue Revolution led to the proclamation, on 1 January 1804, of both Haitian independence and the Republic of Haiti. ‘Haiti, the first black Republic’¹ was the opening act of a revolution characterized by extreme violence and inter-ethnic massacre. However, the calls for equality that accompanied the Revolution did not go away in the American tropical zone with its system fashioned on slavery and plantations. Given the context and contradictions of its formation, the new state and its republican form were always going to be ambiguous and short-lived. The great Haitian historian of the nineteenth century, Thomas Madiou, not only described these contradictions and the wide range of repercussions they led to in the short term. He also described the rather picturesque relationship between those contradictions and the ‘ceremony of independence’ in general.