A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution. Jeremy D. Popkin

A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution - Jeremy D. Popkin


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the American novelist Madison Smartt Bell, whose trilogy of dramatic novels about the Haitian Revolution, All Souls’ Rising (1995), Master of the Crossroads (2000), and The Stone That the Builder Refused (2004), was one of my own introductions to this history, the importance of the events of 1791 to 1804 is easy to understand.

      Reconstructing the history of the Haitian Revolution is a complicated challenge. Participants in the American and French revolutions belonged to civilizations familiar with the written word; they left behind voluminous records from which historians can reconstruct their ideas and actions. The vast majority of the blacks who participated in the Haitian uprising were illiterate; the documents from which we have to piece together what happened between 1791 and 1804 come almost exclusively from whites, almost all of whom were hostile to the movement. The documents that we do have – French official records, letters from white colonists, newspaper articles published in the United States, memoirs by survivors of the revolutionary period – tell us much about the events of the period, but there are many questions about the Haitian Revolution that historians will never be able to fully answer. What did the ordinary members of the black population think they were fighting for? How did they view Toussaint Louverture and the other leaders of the movement, who did, in some cases, leave letters and other documents behind? What was the role of the blacks’ vodou religious beliefs in shaping the insurrection? What influence, if any, did the free population of color exert over the insurgents? Historians disagree on the responses to these and many other questions about the events leading up to Haitian independence; the best we can do is propose answers based on the fragmentary and often one-sided evidence we do possess, knowing that some essential aspects of the past will always escape us.

      Gros was certainly a partisan witness, who left no doubt about his desire to see the rebellious blacks forced back into submission. Does this mean that we can dismiss everything he says? Even some of the most surprising details he gives, such as his claim that one of the white colonial military leaders fighting the blacks wrote a letter saying that he was prepared to sacrifice the prisoners rather than make any concessions to the insurgents, are confirmed by other documents. He gives a nuanced portrait of Jean-François, saying that he showed “a degree of good sense, a fund of humanity, and a ray of genius, far superior to any sentiment that might have been expected from his kind,” although we must bear in mind the fact that one of the reasons he praised the black leader was that Jean-François proved willing to listen to Gros’s advice.22 On the other hand, Gros unfairly accused the white officials of being counterrevolutionary conspirators who set out deliberately to destroy the colony. In short, there is much to be learned from Gros’s account, both about the black insurrection and about white attitudes, but his story has to be read with his own very obvious prejudices in mind and the assertions it makes have to be carefully compared with those in other sources.

      For Haitians themselves, the story of their ancestors’ struggle for freedom has great symbolic importance, and its heroes remain sources of inspiration to a population facing what often seem like insurmountable challenges. This account, constrained by the guidelines of modern historical research, may strike some readers as less vivid than the colorful scenes of revolutionary events painted by many of Haiti’s talented contemporary artists. Reconciling the living historical memory of the Haitian Revolution with the results of modern historical research is not a simple task. Nevertheless, historians’ attempts to understand the events of the revolutionary period as the outcome of the actions of the men and women who participated in them have their own value, even if the historical record is not complete enough to answer all our questions. The aim of this book is, then, to provide students and general readers with a concise overview of the generally accepted historical facts about the Haitian Revolution, drawing on the scholarship of historians from Haiti itself as well as the research of those in the United States, Europe, and other countries who have contributed to the subject.

      The


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