The Colonial System Unveiled 9781781380314, 9781781383049, 9781781389706

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THE COLONIAL SYSTEM UNVEILED

The Colonial System Unveiled by Baron de Vastey translated and edited by Chris Bongie

First published 2014 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU This paperback version published 2016 Copyright © 2014 Chris Bongie The right of Chris Bongie to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-78138-031-4 cased 978-1-78138-304-9 limp eISBN 978-1-78138-970-6 Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster Printed and bound in Poland by BooksFactory.co.uk.

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements Preface: Baron de Vastey and Post/Revolutionary Haiti Jean Louis Vastey (1781–1820): A Biographical Sketch Introduction   I (1820): Death of a Scribe  II (1814): The Colonial System Restored III (1814–2014): Reading the Protean Text Notes to Introduction The Colonial System Unveiled Notes to The Colonial System Unveiled Supplementary Essays 1 Monstrous Testimony: Baron de Vastey and the Politics of Black Memory Marlene Daut 2 Abolition, Sentiment, and the Problem of Agency in Le système colonial dévoilé Doris Garraway

3 Memories of Development: Le système colonial dévoilé and the Performance of Literacy Chris Bongie 4 Afterword: Vastey and the System of Colonial Violence Nick Nesbitt Bibliography Index

Figures

1 2 3 4 5

Vastey Coat of Arms Le système colonial dévoilé (1814), title-page Le système colonial dévoilé (1814), first page Le système colonial dévoilé (1814), pp. 2–3 Le système colonial dévoilé (1814), pp. 66–67

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I would like to thank my fellow contributors, who have been an integral part of this enterprise from its inception in 2009: Doris Garraway; Nick Nesbitt; and Marlene Daut, whose infectious enthusiasm for Vastey was an inspiration, and whose liberal dissemination of information about his family origins were of immense help to me in sketching out my own biographical portrait of him. I would equally like to signal the vital role played by Deborah Jenson: I am deeply appreciative of her amazingly generous offer to organize and host the two-day workshop on Vastey that was held in December 2011 in the Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University; the lively roundtable sessions in the Haiti Lab over the course of those two days were of immeasurable value in giving shape and direction to this project. Along with Deborah, I would like to acknowledge Laurent Dubois for his role in helping run the workshop, as well as everyone else who participated in it, including Audé Dieudé, Julia Gaffield, Christina Mobley, and, especially, Jean Casimir and Cary Hector for their encouragement. During my sabbatical year in 2012–13, I was invited to present material on Vastey at a number of venues in Canada and England, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank the people who extended those invitations: Jonathan Burgess ( Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto); Charles Forsdick (Centre for the Study of International Slavery, University of Liverpool); Toby Garfitt (Magdalen College, Oxford), as well as Maria del Pilar Blanco and Jane Hiddleston for helping arrange the visit; and Jeremy Lane (University of Nottingham). Among the specialists who have fielded various Haiti-related queries over the past several years, I would especially like to single out John Garrigus, David Geggus, Grégory Pierrot, Alyssa

Sepinwall, and Paul Youngquist for their helpful replies. The editorial team at Liverpool University Press was the very model of precision and efficiency, as usual; LUP Director Anthony Cond has now guided two of my books into print, and I am supremely grateful for his unwavering enthusiasm and support for this project. Vastey’s coat of arms is reproduced here courtesy of the Royal College of Arms, London: along with archivist Lynsey Darby, who took care of the administrative details, I would like to thank the Richmond Herald, Clive Cheesman, for showing me the manuscript of the ‘Armorial général du royaume d’Hayti’ (MS JP.177) and engaging in a marathon discussion of all things Christophean. Permission to reproduce several pages from (William Wilberforce’s copy of) Le système colonial dévoilé was granted by the Foyle Special Collections Library at King’s College, London, and I would particularly like to thank librarian Stephanie Breen for her help in securing the high-resolution images. As she did ten years ago for my translation of Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal, Leah Gordon has once again graciously permitted me to use a photograph from her ‘Kanaval’ series as the cover image for this book: an enigmatic, provoking meditation on the politics of (un)veiling and (mis)recognition, Leah’s ‘Fantom’ situates us in an unsettling relation with the black and white ghosts of slavery, luring us into any number of patently inadequate (exoticizing, historicizing, anthropologizing…) forms of understanding the elusive object of our gaze without ever presuming to reveal the subject at hand. Lastly, a word of gratitude and of love to my family on Saltspring and in Delhi, in Cape Town and Kingston (Ontario): to Laurence Bongie, for helping me situate Vastey on the Hume–Sade continuum; to Bratati and S. K. Pande, for calling me beta; to Amrita and Adi, for making their absence felt. And, of course, to Ishita Pande, for always being there, and reminding me time and again of what it is to know for sure that ‘one is one, another is another’… An extraordinary scholar and teacher, a wonderful and beloved mother, Elizabeth (‘Bettye’) Bongie almost saw the Vastey project through to the end. This book is dedicated to her memory.

PREFACE

Baron de Vastey and Post/Revolutionary Haiti

On 1 January 1804, the former French colony of Saint-Domingue became the newly independent state of Haiti. Some twelve years of revolutionary struggle had led to this declaration of independence, the culminating moment of ‘the only successful slave revolt in history’, as the Caribbean scholar C. L. R. James admiringly characterized the events of 1791–1803 in his The Black Jacobins (vii), first published in 1938 and still ‘easily the most influential general study’ of the Haitian Revolution (Geggus, 2002, 31). For James, the revolutionary transformation of colonial Saint-Domingue into postcolonial Haiti, and of former slaves into ‘a people able to organise themselves and defeat the most powerful European nations of their day’ (vii), stood as the very model for a successful struggle against imperial (and capitalist) rule across the globe in the twentieth century, and especially for those of his comrades in Africa who were only then starting out on the ‘long and difficult road’ leading to a place and a time when the ignorant dreams of ‘the imperialists envisag[ing] an eternity of African exploitation’ would be decisively interrupted, as they had been in 1804 by ‘the men, women and children who drove out the French’ (316, 314, 294). With his insistence, in The Black Jacobins, ‘that the story he had to tell was deeply relevant for the world in which he lived’ (Dubois, 2004, 2), James showed a rare willingness to situate the Haitian Revolution at the front and centre of world history, to draw it out from the tenebrous margins and respectfully listen to an event of global significance that had long been, and

would continue to be, ignored or trivialized ‘in written history outside of Haiti’, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot argued in his influential analysis of ‘the general silence that Western historiography has produced around the Haitian Revolution’ (1995, 96, 97). For Trouillot, writing in 1995, this ‘silencing of the revolution’, which ‘also fit the relegation to an historical backburner of the three themes to which it was linked: racism, slavery, and colonialism’ (98), was a historiographical fact that had yet to be effectively addressed: the ‘popular reedition’ of The Black Jacobins in 1963 had, admittedly, facilitated the emergence of an ‘international counter-discourse’ that ‘fed on the historiography produced in Haiti since the nineteenth century’ and that would be ‘revitalized in the 1980s’ by a handful of historians who ‘insisted on the central role of the Haitian Revolution in the collapse of the entire system of slavery’, but, Trouillot cautioned, even at the close of the twentieth century, ‘the impact of this counter-discourse remains limited’ (104–05). In the twenty years since Trouillot made those forceful claims about the enduring ‘silence that surrounds the Haitian Revolution’, the situation has changed dramatically, with a veritable explosion of interest in ‘what happened in Haiti between 1791 and 1804’ and how it ‘contradicted much of what happened elsewhere in the world before and since’ (106–07). The revolutionary sequence of events that led to the Haitian declaration of independence is now being claimed across a range of academic disciplines as an event of world-historical importance, one that exceeded the limits of the American and French Revolutions in its ‘affirmation of the natural, inalienable rights of all human beings’ (Hallward, 11), and that thereby ‘rescued the idea of universal human history from the uses to which white domination has put it’ (Buck-Morss, 74). The former slaves’ decisive victory over their French masters is being newly heralded by philosophers and historians, literary and cultural critics, postcolonial and francophone theorists, practitioners of American Studies, of Afro-diasporic and transatlantic studies, to name but a few of the disciplinary sites that are being reshaped by a growing awareness of the centrality of antislavery revolutions in general, and the Haitian Revolution in particular, to any understanding of our ineluctably colonial past and of our ever more globalized (and neo-colonial) present.

The emerging interdisciplinary field of Haitian Revolutionary Studies thus constitutes a significant and sustained intervention in the centuries-long silencing of its world-historical object of study. However, despite the new attention being paid to the Haitian Revolution, its immediate aftermath remains in the historiographical shadows, offering as it does a seemingly disappointing vista that fails to match the transformative expectations raised by ‘the idea of 1804’ (Nesbitt, 2005). Only months after the revolutionary forces led by Jean-Jacques Dessalines had defeated Napoleon’s army and declared their independence, many of the remaining French in the country were rounded up and massacred as a potential fifth column; soon thereafter Dessalines transformed the newly independent nation into an Empire (hardly the form of government most conducive to the flourishing of the natural, inalienable rights of one and all). Within two years the Emperor was himself dead, victim of a conspiracy organized by Alexandre Pétion and Étienne Gérin, ‘two of the mixed-race generals Dessalines had relied on to drive the French out of the South Province’ (Popkin, 2012, 145). In the months following upon Dessalines’s assassination on 17 October 1806, ‘one and indivisible’ Haiti split into two rival governments, neither of which could be said to stand in an exemplary relation to the revolutionary values of freedom and equality: the State of Haiti to the North, led by Dessalines’s second-in-command, Henry Christophe, who would be proclaimed King in an 1811 constitutional amendment; and the Republic of Haiti to the South, led by Pétion, who would be consecrated as President-for-life by the Constitution of 1816. Between 1806 and 1820, Haiti would find itself in a state of on-and-off civil war (mostly off after 1812), which would end only with the fall of Christophe in 1820 and the reunification of the country under the rule of Jean-Pierre Boyer, who had succeeded Pétion upon the latter’s death in 1818. During this entire time, the declared independence of Haiti had been looked upon by the rest of the world as an aberrant, unrecognizable fiction. Only in 1825 would this independence be formally acknowledged, when the French provisionally ‘granted’ it to the men, women, and children who had defeated them twenty years before, ‘unilaterally imposing heavy indemnities on the black republic as the price for France’s official recognition of Haiti’s independence’ (Bongie, 2008, 46). The sequence of events leading from the emancipatory moment of 1804 to the ignominious manumission of 1825 would appear to offer little more

than yet another discouraging example of what happens to revolutionary politics when the universal, in order to become operational, gets incarnated in ‘a “concrete universal”—a nation, a leader’—and merges with ‘particular hegemonies’ (Debray, 128). It is no doubt tempting, in the face of this confounding merger of the universal and the particular, to speak in general terms of ‘the futile Haitian uprising’ (Chatterjee, 54), or to linger over troubling specifics such as the 1804 massacres and claim that they ‘instantly gave Haiti a sulfurous reputation that it has, to a large extent, yet to shake’ (Girard, 2011, 323). It is the guiding assumption of this book, however, that we would do better to think about what came after the Haitian Revolution not (simply) in terms of a rupture or ‘fall’ from grace, but (also) as a frustratingly yet productively ambiguous continuation of the revolutionary project. This continuation that is always also a discontinuation is precisely what I am gesturing toward with the slash in ‘post/revolutionary’. If we turn our gaze away from what has been lost, and engage in the often disheartening but critically necessary work of examining the processes through which the reality of universal emancipation dissolves into (and haunts) ‘particular hegemonies’, then Haiti’s revolutionary aftermath becomes a site of tremendously great interest, even though (or precisely because) it stands in such a problematic, dis/continuous relation to the emancipatory process from which it emerged. When considering the Haiti(s) of Christophe and Pétion, no definitive conclusion can be drawn, no founding consensus can be reached, of the sort that underwrites the burgeoning field of Haitian Revolutionary Studies with its understandably affirmative emphasis on ‘the universal truth of human emancipation unleashed in the events of 1791–1804’ (Nesbitt, 2008, 80). Speaking of Christophe’s kingdom, for instance, one prominent contributor to this field has rightly noted that ‘even scholars who defend Christophe’s program of self-improvement and hard work appear to be at a loss when it comes to assessing his legacy’ (Fischer, 2004, 246). To engage with post/revolutionary Haiti is to be, and to recognize oneself as being, ‘at a loss’, to take this inconclusive condition as the point of departure for both scholarly and partisan assessment of ‘the first post-slavery nation in the modern world’, and to move forward with a self-critical awareness that ‘there are obvious and important counterpoints and disjunctures in any story about either the power of Haitian antislavery or the limits of Haitian freedom’ (Ferrer, 65).

Nowhere is this haunting dis/continuity more in evidence than in the formation of the Haitian literary field during the years 1804 to 1825. The emergence of a national literature in Haiti is notably dependent upon the consolidation of the post/revolutionary state (or, as of the end of 1806, the rival states of Christophe and Pétion). Early Haitian literature, while proudly cultivating the memory of universal emancipation and reiterating its promise, deferentially answered the particular needs of the regime(s) in power and committed itself to ‘concrete’ polemics (Christophe v. Pétion, ‘black’ v. ‘coloured’, nouveaux libres v. anciens libres, North v. South, ‘constitutional’ monarchy v. ‘democratic’ republic, etc.) that appear to betray this memory and that promise. It is a literature that is all too evidently in a ‘scribal relation to power’ (Bongie, 2008, 33): it is the product of scribes, writers whose intellectual and creative production cannot be thought apart from the institutional framework within and by means of which it was conceived. The manifestly scribal identity of these writers has caused them to be sorely neglected by literary critics—understandably so, given the latter’s disciplinary investment in an ‘ideology of the aesthetic in which (good) Art becomes the supposed antidote to (bad) factionalism’ (91). Gaining ascendancy precisely in the opening decades of the nineteenth century, this ideology can envision Haiti’s post/revolutionary corpus as nothing more than the obligatory but distasteful point of departure in an appealing meta-narrative of ‘literary emancipation’, in which, little by little, ‘literature succeeded in freeing itself from the hold of the political and national authorities that originally it helped to establish and legitimize’ (Casanova, 37). Only if we tactically renounce this ideology and the comforting stories that it tells us about ‘(good) Art’ does it become possible to re-envision the work of early Haitian writers, no less than the governmental practices of the post/revolutionary state, in a way that does not blindly defer to a moralizing rhetoric of negative evaluation (failed regimes, failed texts), but that prepares for the difficult work of giving them their due, and of doing so precisely by not subjecting them to our own understandable, if historically conditioned, desire for ‘autonomous’ literary and cultural production. Without a doubt, the most prominent Haitian man of letters to emerge in this period was Baron de Vastey (1781–1820), chief publicist and ideologue for the Christophean regime, the King’s ‘most efficient and most devoted

collaborator’ (H. Trouillot, 1972, 84), ‘the most representative spokesman of the new Haiti’ (G. Lewis, 254). One early twentieth-century traveller to Haiti, contemplating the ruins of Christophe’s kingdom, suggested that ‘were it not for the Baron de Vastey we should have to be content with incredible legends, and with our own interpretation of scanty facts, while the inner thoughts of the King would remain mysterious’ (Niles, 276–77). The appraisal, for all its hyperbole, nicely conveys the prominent mediatory position this ‘coloured’ scribe (the legitimate son of a French father and a free woman of colour) occupied in relation to his ‘black’ sovereign. What this exoticizing appraisal cannot convey, to be sure, is the richness of Vastey’s anticolonial vision, which is nowhere more evident than in his astonishingly prescient invocation of a decolonizing world in which ‘five hundred million black, yellow, and brown men, spread across the surface of the globe, are claiming the rights and privileges that they received from the author of nature!’ (1816c, 14) It is this visionary anticipation of the insights of twentieth-century anticolonialism, combined with his closeness to political power, that no doubt helps explain why twentieth-century authors such as Derek Walcott and Aimé Césaire were so viscerally drawn to the figure of Vastey in their attempts at giving poetic expression to post/revolutionary Haiti in plays such as, respectively, Henri Christophe (1950) and La tragédie du roi Christophe (1963). Between 1814 and 1819 Vastey published nine books under his own name, and several others from this period can be readily attributed to him on internal evidence (for overviews of Vastey’s oeuvre, see Bongie, 2008, 111–18 and 227–37, as well as the entries for him in the Bibliography of the present volume). Along with a number of what can be identified, if only for the sake of analytic convenience, as ‘minor’ works, dating from 1815–16 and in large part directed against Christophe’s rival Pétion, Vastey published four ‘major’ interventions. Of these, three would be quickly translated into English as part of a well-conducted media campaign in Britain on behalf of the Christophean regime: Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères (1816; trans. 1817, Reflexions on the Blacks and Whites), Réflexions politiques sur quelques ouvrages et journaux français, concernant Hayti (1817; trans. 1818, Political Remarks on Some French Works and Newspapers, Concerning Hayti), and Essai sur les causes de la révolution et des guerres civiles d’Hayti (1819; trans. 1820/1823, An Essay on the Causes of the Revolution and Civil Wars of Hayti). Vastey’s work, whether in

translation or (less frequently) in the original French, would be broadly disseminated on both sides of the Atlantic in the late 1810s, and almost invariably applauded by Anglo-American commentators as offering admirable ‘specimens of native black genius’ (‘History’, 74), and helping to sate, in the words of one of Vastey’s translators, ‘the lively interest which every specimen of Haytian Literature is calculated to excite in the generous bosoms of British and American Philanthropists’ (Vastey, 1817a, 11). The one major work of Vastey’s that was not translated during his lifetime was his first, Le système colonial dévoilé, published in October 1814. In its ninety-seven pages, Vastey introduced virtually all of the cultural, political, and historical concerns that would be developed at greater length in his later publications, and that—inasmuch as they anticipate so many of the central concerns of twentieth-century anticolonial and postcolonial thought —do not simply meet but significantly challenge the expectations of the philanthropists who took such a ‘lively interest’ in Vastey’s work during his lifetime. In The Colonial System Unveiled, we first encounter the proud affirmations of black identity and of the African origins of civilization that would be expanded upon in his 1816 Réflexions, which so often reads like a Négritude manifesto avant la lettre, provoking one recent mainstream historian to identify Vastey as, if not ‘the first black supremacist—then the first writer, at any rate, to try to rewrite cultural history with an aim to remove what he saw as a white bias’ (P. Johnson, 320). It is in Colonial System, moreover, with its close readings of Euro-American racial science and colonial legal texts, that we first encounter Vastey’s ‘quite unparalleled, for the time, attention to the ways in which European writers exercise control over the colonial world through textual acts of representation’ (Bongie, 2008, 229), a prescient sensitivity to the workings of colonial discourse that finds its most focused expression in the 1817 Réflexions politiques, where Vastey engages in a detailed refutation, one might even say deconstruction, of French representations of Haiti. And it is in this first book of his, above all, that one gets a sense of Vastey’s nascently ‘third-worldist’ vision of the Haitian Revolution as an emancipatory site of anticolonial struggle, a ‘national war’ in which ‘the French were on one side and the natives [indigènes] on the other’, to cite the decidedly Fanonian characterization of the final stages of the revolution that Vastey provides in his last book, the

1819 Essai, which he himself characterized as the first attempt to produce ‘a general history [of Haiti] written by a native [indigène] of the country’ (37, 1). Furthermore, it is in this trailblazing intervention that Vastey introduces, and most memorably develops, the concept that is at the heart of all his writings, and that is featured in its title: ‘the colonial system’. The book’s title not only ‘invites a comparison with Fanon’—as was pointed out some two decades ago by the historian David Nicholls (1991, 108), author of what was until very recently the only scholarly article devoted to Vastey—but even more obviously anticipates the adamantine insights of Aimé Césaire and Jean-Paul Sartre into the systemic nature of colonial and neo-colonial domination in such works from the 1950s as Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism and Sartre’s ‘Colonialism is a System’. Vastey’s Colonial System can legitimately be considered the first systemic critique of colonialism ever written, certainly from the perspective of a colonized subject. This critique is rendered all the more powerful, moreover, because it is supplemented by, and indeed inseparable from, one of the most movingly detailed invocations of slavery and its atrocities to be found in the entire canon of antislavery literature. In what is certainly the most original and striking section of Colonial System (1814b, 40–61), Vastey provides a detailed inventory of the names of well over a hundred ex-colonists and the horrifying crimes they perpetrated against their human property; the names of these perpetrators rise phantom-like from the pages of his book, pursued by the ghosts of those they slaughtered, the ‘shades of the dead’ (les mânes) whom Vastey exhumes and interrogates in order that their silenced stories might be heard (35). Even his own white grandfather is entered into this list of perpetrators, and his current whereabouts on the other side of the Atlantic specified, that the ghosts of slavery might all the more easily catch up with the old man, a certain Pierre Dumas, former resident of Marmelade, ‘and at present a property owner in France, at Marcilly-sur-Seine in the department of Marne’ (70–71). For all these reasons, the translation for an English-language audience of this neglected document in the history of the struggle against colonialism and slavery is long overdue. That no one has ever undertaken the task of translating this seminal work and reintroducing it to a contemporary audience is all the more surprising given the massive amount of salvage work that has been performed in relation to colonial-era Afro-diasporic

writers over the past several decades. The absence until now of any such translation and, more generally, the still pervasive ‘silences surrounding Vastey’s work’ (Daut, 2012b, 51), can be attributed in large part, as I have already suggested, to the impossibility of disentangling Vastey from his ‘scribal relation to power’: from, that is, his hegemonic subject-position as a self-styled publiciste for Christophe (1817b, xxiii)—a position that is nowhere more evident than when he proudly confirms that the 108 pages of his 1815 anti-Pétion diatribe, Le cri de la conscience, were written at the express command of the King’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Comte de Limonade (1816a, 4–5). Notwithstanding the wide and approving reception of Vastey in radical antislavery circles in his own time, and the fact that he anticipates, in so many ways, the anticolonial politics (and poetics) of a Césaire, a Sartre, a Fanon, Vastey is a figure who resists being translated into, and marketed as, an essentially free-floating (Afro-diasporic, Black Atlantic…) author, of the sort who can satisfy our understandable desire for ‘autonomous’ cultural production that has been ‘freed from its former condition of political dependency’ (Casanova, 37). Rather than attempt such a difficult, and misleading, act of translation, the wager of the salvage work being performed here is that Vastey is well worth considering on his own terms, and that attending to these scribal terms might allow us, in Deborah Jenson’s words, ‘to articulate a literary life of postcolonialism that falls between the cracks of the Euro-American modern ideal of the autonomous literary author—a status inaccessible to the marginalized literary producers of the early postcolonial state—and the “nostalgic culturalism” that is a hallmark of contemporary literary recreations of early postcoloniality’ (6). Neither a recognizable author nor a producer of ‘authentically’ Haitian culture, Vastey as scribe exemplifies the discomfiting, interstitial forms of ‘literary life’ that flourished in post/revolutionary Haiti. This wager of looking ‘between the cracks’, in order to engage with what flourished there rather than lament what is lacking, is one best made collectively. For that reason, in order the more effectively to (re)introduce Vastey to English-language audiences, this bicentenary translation and critical edition of Colonial System includes newly commissioned essays written by scholars who are at the forefront of a resurgence of interest in him: Marlene Daut, Doris Garraway, and Nick Nesbitt, whose published work on Vastey (Daut, 2012a, 2012b; Garraway, 2012; Nesbitt, 2013, 173–91)

provocatively disrupts the ‘formulas of silence’ to which he has been subjected by literary critics and historians alike, throwing new light on his little-known life, recuperating his important but forgotten role in the transatlantic abolitionist public sphere, and insisting upon the stylistic and conceptual complexities of an oeuvre that has consistently been addressed, if at all, in terms of its ‘limitations’ (Dash, 1994, 531). These three interventions—along with the introductory materials at the front of this volume and my own close reading of Colonial System at the back—should, if our wager is met, provide a compelling impetus for the further study of Vastey in particular, and post/revolutionary Haiti in general, as an unsettling supplement to the burgeoning field of Haitian Revolutionary Studies (returning to my point of departure in this Preface) and its principled insistence on treating the revolutionary sequence 1791–1804 as ‘the most accomplished political event of the Age of Enlightenment’ (Nesbitt, 2008, 12). Given the conspicuously Anglo-American provenance of a good deal of the work currently being produced in this emerging interdisciplinary field of study (see Sepinwall, 2009, 2013), it is our hope, finally, that translating Vastey’s work into English will complement and help promote ongoing efforts to render him more visible in his own language and his own country, be it through the production of French-language critical editions that would establish his corpus as one of ‘the foundational texts of our francophone literatures of the South’ ( Jonaissant, 201), or through the dissemination of popular editions of his work in Haiti itself, a project that was initiated last year by the Société haïtienne d’histoire, de géographie et de géologie with its publication of a paperback version of Le système colonial dévoilé (Vastey, 2013). As the President of the Société, historian Michel Hector, notes in the Preface to this reedition, there has been in Haiti a ‘persistent silence maintained around this book and the other works of Baron de Vastey’. Notwithstanding occasional surges of interest in him over the past two centuries—one of the country’s most eminent literary historians during the American Occupation, for instance, went so far as to affirm that a knowledge of Haitian history was incomplete without studying Vastey (Vaval, 1933, 129; ‘On ne connaît point l’histoire d’Haïti si l’on n’a pas fréquenté chez Vastey’)—he has remained for the most part a largely repressed figure in his native land (rather than, as elsewhere in the world, a simply forgotten one), for reasons that I will

expand upon in the opening paragraphs of the Biographical Sketch that follows directly upon this Preface. It remains an open question as to how much, if at all, this situation will change with the first publication of a work by Vastey in Haiti since his brutal murder almost two centuries ago, but clearly there is a willingness on the part of at least some individuals and institutions to give new consideration to the anticolonial vision of Vastey and its categorical opposition to ‘all concession, all compromise that would have permitted the old metropolitan power to maintain any sort of influence on the development of the new nation’ (M. Hector, 2013, 16). Indeed, as Jean Casimir suggests, in an essay first published in October 2012 in the Haitian daily Le nouvelliste and included in the reedition of Système, revisiting the work of ‘the most important ideologue’ of the nation’s independence and listening to its ‘unconditional condemnation of colonialism’ may be especially illuminating at this very juncture in history, given the ‘increasingly less informal trusteeship being imposed upon the Republic of Haiti’ (2013, 17): the interminable ‘stabilization’ efforts of a UN mission established in the aftermath of the 2004 coup; the predatory advances of disaster capitalism in the wake of the 2010 earthquake; the neoliberal commandments of a ‘militarized, privatized, NGO-ized foreign aid apparatus’ (Schuller and Morales, 7), to name but a few of the forms this trusteeship and its assault on Haitian sovereignty has lately taken in that vanguard country ‘where people broke the chains of imperial domination not at their weakest but at their strongest link’, and where they continue ‘to pay the sort of price that anyone familiar with these chains would expect’ (Hallward, xxxiv). Whether in its French original or the English of this bicentenary translation, Vastey’s Colonial System—despite its scribal complicities and post/revolutionary particularities, or precisely because of them—stands revealed today as a pioneering testament to the overbearing weight of those chains, and a timely reminder of the still haunting possibility of their breaking.

Jean Louis Vastey (1781–1820): A Biographical Sketch

The writings published by Baron de Vastey between 1814 and 1820, the year of his death, are ‘manifestly the work of a sophisticated and perceptive defender of his nation’s independence’ (Nicholls, 1991, 121). All of these publications, which only a few years ago could legitimately be described as ‘practically unavailable in the original French’ ( Jonaissant, 2009, 202), can now be consulted on the Internet by anyone interested in pursuing a firsthand encounter with Vastey’s work. His manifestly ‘sophisticated and perceptive’ ideas aside, however, what do we know of the actual life of this ardent defender of Haitian independence? Surprisingly (and disappointingly) little, it must be said, although ongoing archival research being conducted on both sides of the Atlantic is now beginning to lay the foundations for a decidedly more positive response to that biographical question. The little information that was previously available concerning Vastey’s life derived from four main print sources, the first of these being the rare moments of autobiographical disclosure in his published writings, which are notoriously chary in this regard. Second, there is a brief but informationpacked paragraph concerning his life in a letter dated 29 November 1819, one of two surviving letters Vastey wrote to the English abolitionist Thomas Clarkson that were published (in translation) in 1952 as part of the Clarkson–Christophe correspondence (Griggs and Prator, 178–82). Third, we have a number of first-hand accounts produced by foreign visitors to the kingdom of Hayti who happened to have met Vastey in the last years of Christophe’s reign and made passing comments about him, in letters (some

of which were also included as part of the Clarkson– Christophe correspondence) and books published mostly in the decade following upon his death. Finally, we have a variety of rumours and innuendoes circulated in the late 1810s and early 1820s by rival publicists for the Pétion-Boyer regime such as Noël Colombel and Hérard Dumesle, bitter enemies of Christophe who had a stake in maligning Vastey, and whose unflattering accounts of him greatly impacted how he would be represented in the work of subsequent Haitian historians, starting with the ‘three monumental histories’ (Geggus, 2002, 31) produced in the 1840s and 1850s by Thomas Madiou, Beaubrun Ardouin, and Joseph Saint-Rémy. As historian Hénock Trouillot, one of Vastey’s few defenders in Haiti, once pointed out: When you get right down to it, Christophe’s fault, and that of his party, was they disappeared too soon, in other words, before the future historians of his most relentless adversaries, Pétion and Boyer; which is why, when it comes to their judgements of his regime, you have to take into account their hatred of the Monarch and the exaggerations that result from it. (1972, 9)

On the basis of such scattered and for the most part unforthcoming or unreliable evidence, it is extremely difficult to tell a satisfyingly complete story about Vastey’s life, especially given that the relatively few selfrepresentations to be found in his oeuvre often seem more like rhetorical acts of self-fashioning than straightforward factual pronouncements. As stated, however, new information regarding Vastey is beginning to surface, which promises greatly to expand, and perhaps even revolutionize, our biographical understanding of him. My fellow contributor to this volume, Marlene Daut, has identified a number of unexpected sides to his story (2012b), which will be discussed below, and our sense of Vastey’s life journey is surely going to change significantly with the long-awaited publication of archival documents discovered some years ago by the Norman genealogist Laurent Quevilly, consisting in a cache of letters exchanged between the French and Saint-Domingue branches of the Vastey family (see the website listed under Quevilly in the Bibliography). Self-consciously provisional, given this evolving state of affairs, the biographical sketch of Vastey that I offer in the following pages will nonetheless at the very least provide readers with a helpful bridge between the broad-strokes portrait of him in my

Preface and the much fuller engagement with his ideas and their historical context in the Introduction. Symbolic of the uncertainties surrounding the details of Vastey’s life is the fact that, despite hard evidence to the contrary, his date of birth has been variously cited as 1781 or… 1735! In the aforementioned 1819 letter to Clarkson, Vastey provides very precise information regarding his place of birth and his age: ‘I was born’, he informs the English abolitionist, ‘at Ennery, a parish in the interior of the country, in 1781, which means that I am now thirty-nine years old or almost so’ (Griggs and Prator, 181). Despite the fact that this information has been available since the letter’s publication in 1952, the belief that he was born in 1735 and thus died ‘at the age of 85’ has proved a remarkably resilient piece of misinformation, ever since its consecration in Duraciné Vaval’s Histoire de la littérature haïtienne (1933, 129) and Auguste Viatte’s even more influential Histoire littéraire de l’Amérique française (1954, 336); it has been repeated, for instance, in several generations of Haitian school manuals (e.g., Bérrou and Pompilus, 1975, 1.73; Charles, 1998, 25) and European anthologies of francophone literature (e.g., Viatte, 1971, 317; Corzani, 20), and has yet to be expunged from a variety of websites purporting to convey ‘true knowledge’ regarding Vastey’s date of birth. Confirming Vastey’s own account of the details of his birth is his baptismal certificate, recently discovered by Marlene Daut (see Daut, 2012b, 36). Dated 29 March 1788, this certificate cites Vastey’s date of birth as 21 January 1781 and identifies him as the ‘legitimate son’ of Jean Vastey and Marie Françoise Élisabeth Dumas. The certificate also reveals that Vastey’s given name was Jean Louis, which explains the fact that the title page of his Notes à M. le baron de V. P. Malouet (published in October 1814, the same month as Le système colonial dévoilé) identifies the author as ‘le Baron de J. L. Vastey’. Before Daut’s discovery, the initials ‘J. L.’ could only be written off as ‘a simple mistake’ (Cheesman, 168), given the longstanding, neverquestioned identification of the baron with the name ‘Pompée Valentin Vastey’. In fact, there is not, to my knowledge, a single document dating from 1814 to 1820 that associates ‘Baron de Vastey’ with the names ‘Pompée’ or ‘Valentin’. This is not to say, of course, that they did not belong to him, either as additional names not recorded on his baptismal certificate or as a pen-name adopted at some early point in his life; it does, however,

deepen the mystery surrounding that evocative conjunction of the classical name Pompée (often given to slaves, as we see from its single occurrence in Colonial System (1814b, 68)) and the family name Valentin (one of his French father Jean’s middle names). Historian David Nicholls once attempted to resolve this mystery by linking the name Pompée to the fact that Vastey’s ‘mother belonged to the class of gens de couleur and Pompée was therefore a victim of white discrimination and prejudice’, something that ‘even his name suggests’, because the free coloureds ‘were forbidden to take European christian names and frequently chose a classical name for their child’ (1991, 109). Vastey’s status as a legitimate son of Jean Vastey and the fact that his given name was ‘Jean Louis’ clearly rules out this suggestive explanation. In his pioneering article on Vastey, Nicholls also picked up on the intriguing detail, often highlighted in the invariably laconic accounts of Vastey’s life to be found in literary histories of Haiti, that his mother was the ‘sister of Cessette Dumas’ (109), the slave who gave birth to the revolutionary general and rival of Napoleon, Thomas Alexandre Dumas, himself the father of the novelist Alexandre Dumas. That Baron de Vastey was the general’s cousin, and at one remove from the even better known author of The Count of Monte Cristo, is a story sanctioned by family memory: late in life, Vastey’s grandson, the poet Oswald Durand, affirmed in print that ‘my ancestor, Baron de Vastey, was the first cousin of General Dumas’ (1905, 404). It is not clear, however, that the latest genealogical research being conducted by Quevilly and others in France and Haiti into the Vastey and Dumas families supports this long-standing tradition, or the related narrative concerning Vastey’s eventual wife, yet another Dumas who is said to have been a relative of the famous general. Such stories, regardless of their grounding in reality, not only raise the question of what we do know concerning Vastey’s family history, but also draw attention to the severely curtailed representation of it in his published work. There can be no doubt regarding Durand’s assertion that Vastey’s father, Jean Valentin, was ‘a Frenchman from Jumièges, near Rouen’ (404), though whether he left Normandy for Saint-Domingue in 1769, as Durand further claims, remains unverified. Vastey’s mother, Marie Françoise Élisabeth (whom Durand refers to, in embarrassingly jocular terms, as ‘l’ancêtre, la négresse aux puissantes mamelles’), was reputedly a member of

the free coloured elite of the colony’s South Province, where ‘the rate of interracial marriage’ remained near ‘20 percent of all religious marriages’ between the 1760s and 1780s (Garrigus, 2006, 178); her association with the southern city of Jérémie is part and parcel of the story linking her to Cessette Dumas and the latter’s illustrious son (who most certainly did originate from Jérémie; see Reiss, 34–46). Some of the many questions surrounding this marriage between a fortune-seeking Frenchman and a presumably affluent woman of colour will no doubt soon have firm answers as a result of ongoing archival research (for instance, their marriage certificate, dated 3 July 1777, has only just been uncovered). What is of most interest for us here, however, is the way in which this family history is (not) represented in Vastey’s own writings. There is absolutely no mention of a white father anywhere in these works, and the only explicit mention of his ‘mother’ refers to her as an unnamed ‘African’ (1816c, 31), facilitating the broader identification with blackness that is evident in such assertions of Vastey’s as ‘we are issued from African blood, we have nothing in common with the French’ (1817b, 15). (As Daut has recently verified, however, the heartfelt apostrophe in Colonial System to his ‘friend’, Élisabeth Mimi, natural daughter of the planter Dumas (1814b, 70– 71), is in fact a tribute to his mother, whose name is recorded as such on her and Jean’s marriage certificate; see Daut’s essay in the present volume for further details regarding this exciting discovery.) A fundamental part of the untold, and as yet untellable, story about Jean Louis Vastey is how this lightskinned (and reputedly red-haired) man, the fils légitime of a French planter, was able to (re)construct himself in his writings as a self-identified ‘African’ whose physical and moral faculties had been as ‘overwhelmed under the load of slavery’ as those of his darker-skinned brethren (1817b, 91)—to such an extent that some contemporary readers believed him to be a ‘self-taught slave’ (‘Past and Present’, 454), while even today, all evidence to the contrary, he is still occasionally identified as a ‘mulatto slave’ (Arthur and Dash, 29) or simply an ‘ex-’ or ‘former’ slave (e.g., Bay, 37; Hall, 33; S. Johnson, 21). Vastey’s 1819 letter to Clarkson passes immediately from details regarding his place and date of birth to the year 1796, and his first encounter with the revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture (whose base of operations at the time was precisely in Ennery, some thirty miles to the

southwest of the northern city of Cap-Français). ‘At the age of fifteen’, Vastey informs Clarkson, ‘I entered the service of my country under the command of General Toussaint of glorious memory; later I served under Emperor Dessalines and the present King, my august sovereign’ (Griggs and Prator, 181–82). In some of his lesser-known works, such as the 1815 Cri de la conscience, we find a version of this same narrative: ‘We have served and fought under governor Toussaint, under His Majesty the Emperor, and under the King, just as we hope, if still alive, to serve his dynasty, always with the same zeal and unchanging fidelity’ (63–64). This ‘unchanging’ narrative, however, might well be concealing a more complicated story, traces of which have been recently recuperated by Marlene Daut, who has speculated, for instance, that Vastey may have been living in France between 1790 and 1794 (2012b, 37), spending some of his formative years in the area of Normandy where his father’s relatives lived, as well as in Paris. Vastey’s enemies, such as Pétion’s chief publicist Colombel, certainly did their best to promote a version of this transatlantic narrative when they claimed that he was indeed in Paris in the early 1790s, not only taking ‘an active part in the massacre of 2 and 3 September [1792]’, but becoming a ‘favourite of [ Jean-Baptiste] Carrier’ and forming part of that Jacobin commissioner’s ‘clique of cannibals’ during the October 1793 massacres at Nantes—biographical details that Colombel claimed to have gleaned from Vastey himself (1819, 10–12). Implausible as such stories about a boy not yet in his teens might be, they nevertheless raise the question of what the youthful Vastey’s experience of the early years of the French Revolution might have been like, presuming he was indeed in France at the time—a rumour, it should be added, that is not limited to Colombel alone (the Englishman Harvey, for instance, noted in his 1827 book on Haiti that Vastey ‘was said to have been educated at Paris about the time of the French revolution’; 221). If he was indeed in France at this time then, all talk of Carrier and his cannibals aside, Vastey would surely have had some connections with the Jacobin milieu through his family in Normandy, his first cousin Pierre Jean Valentin Vastey, for instance, having played a significant enough role in local politics in 1793–94 for one nineteenthcentury historian to describe him as ‘the very personification of the Terror’ (Romain, 95). What makes such speculation particularly interesting is that it draws attention to the social positioning of the Vastey family as part of a

newly empowered rural elite who occupied the role of ‘cultural mediators’ (to cite a useful analysis of Pierre Vastey’s activities on behalf of the Jacobins), forming a point of ‘contact between the dominant and dominated classes, and by this very fact between the cultures of these two worlds’ (Goujard, 179), neither fully with nor against the masses for whom they were newly positioned to speak. In the case of Jean Louis Vastey, at least, the in-betweenness that one can readily ascribe to him by virtue of his status as a member of Saint-Domingue’s ‘coloured’ population can, in other words, be usefully supplemented by considering the ways in which his mediatory, dominant-dominated view of the world was overdetermined by other, nonracialized subject-positions that might have been available to him. Whether Vastey returned to Saint-Domingue in the middle of the decade or never left the colony, there is no reason not to believe that he was indeed there in 1796, and made his first contact with Toussaint and the black general’s republican forces at that time. That Vastey was (back) in Paris in the later part of the decade, attempting to live the life of a young man of letters in the closing years of the century, is the provocative working hypothesis developed in a recent article by Marlene Daut, which provides ample evidence that a ‘Pompée Valentin Vastey’ was ‘publishing poetry in the leading French journals in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’ (2012b, 37), starting in the years 1798–1802 (with some renewed activity in 1807–09 and 1814). Daut has identified almost forty poems by this Vastey, including one celebrating the poet’s Norman ancestry, as well as ‘dozens of advertisements’ (38) for three books of poetry—among them, the intriguingly entitled Anaïde et Alcidore, poème érotique en quatre chants —that were supposedly published in 1799 and 1800 but of which no copies appear to have survived. As Daut also shows, explicit connections were eventually made between the author of this neoclassical poetry and the Haitian statesman, starting with a bibliographical entry from 1839 in the tenth volume of Joseph-Marie Quérard’s La France Littéraire that identifies ‘le baron Pompée Valentin de Vastey’ as ‘at first a man of letters [littérateur] in Paris, and later Chancellor of the King of Haiti’ (65; qtd. Daut, 2012b, 38), information that would be regurgitated in at least one subsequent account referring to ‘the negro Valentin Vastey, later a Haitian minister’ (Bièvre, 1910, 326; qtd. Daut, 2012b, 38). This connection is startling, although a cautionary note must nonetheless be struck, given the afore-mentioned lack,

during Baron de Vastey’s lifetime, of any explicit identification of him with the names ‘Pompée Valentin’. Should this hypothesis hold true, it would certainly force us to read Vastey differently, especially those places in his work where he presents himself as a self-taught insulaire ‘not versed in letters’ (1819, 158), ‘who never had any masters other than his books, any stimulants other than his hatred for tyrants’ (1816c, 5)—a self-portrait that greatly facilitated the positive reception of his work in the transatlantic abolitionist public sphere, both in his own lifetime and in the decades after his death. If ‘Pompée Valentin Vastey’ was indeed the future Baron de Vastey, then it is not surprising that the former’s poetic output in Paris broke off in 1802, for the latter claims to have been in Saint-Domingue that memorable year when Napoleon sent General Leclerc and over 20,000 French soldiers to invade the colony in an effort at regaining control of it from Toussaint Louverture and restoring white rule. In what is quite possibly the most important autobiographical moment in his entire oeuvre, tucked away in one of his least known works (a January 1815 pamphlet entitled À mes concitoyens), Vastey describes a conversion experience that he underwent at this time which is fundamental for understanding the future trajectory of his work and his unwavering allegiance to the ‘black’ leaders of independent Haiti, Dessalines, and Christophe. In this pamphlet, addressed to his fellow ‘Haytians of colour’ in Pétion’s southern republic, Vastey reminds them that the ‘coloured’ population has always been ‘the necessary instrument’ used by the enemies of Haiti to destroy the country, and warns them that what happened in 1802 must not happen again in 1815. Upon Leclerc’s arrival, Vastey reminds his readers, it was the Haitians of colour who were ‘the first and the most eager of those who surrendered to the French’, and their reward for having ‘served the French faithfully and even having fought tooth and nail for them’ was that by the end of the year they were being ‘thrown into floating prisons that went by the name of snuff-boats [étouffoirs]’, and ‘suffocated, drowned or hanged, bayonetted, etc.’ (1815a, 17–18). ‘I who am speaking to you’, Vastey continues, was myself at that time one of those necessary instruments. To avoid the death that our executioners were preparing for me, I fled into the woods to seek my safety. And there in the midst of my maternal ancestors, did I not find fathers, mothers, brothers, friends, who greeted me with transports of joy and the purest friendship? Can I ever forget that moment

when I rushed into the arms of my brethren whom I had the misfortune to have fought against! What remorse I felt when, instead of the reproaches I was expecting, they took me into their midst with a truly paternal tenderness, forgetting my ingratitude or rather my error! From that moment on, I swore an oath never to detach my cause from that of my fellow-kind, and I will go to the grave with those sentiments. (18)

Much remains unclear in this account of the genocidal punishments meted out in the autumn of 1802 by the French against soldiers who had served them loyally that year: notably, the question of whether Vastey was one of a number of gens de couleur, such as Alexandre Pétion, who arrived with Leclerc’s fleet in early February to oust Toussaint, or whether he was already on the ground and among the many who, led by Toussaint, initially resisted Leclerc and then, like Christophe and Dessalines, surrendered to the French and for several months helped them fight the growing mass of insurgents led by Maroon chiefs such as Sans-Souci and Petit-Noël, before rejoining the resistance in October, by which point Toussaint had been exiled to France and plans for reimposing slavery in the colony had become terrifyingly clear to one and all. What is evident, however, beyond any and all rhetorical posturing, is that this redemptive experience of a return to le sein de ma souche maternelle is what would undergird Vastey’s fervently held and oft-stated belief that ‘in a population composed of fourteen-fifteenths blacks and onefifteenth coloureds, the reins of government should be, preferably, placed in the hands of a black rather than a man of colour’ (1819, 128); it also, perhaps, explains his lifelong anger at Pétion, whom (in double-like fashion) he would represent as having undergone an almost identical experience of reintegration with the black masses (1815c, 4), and yet who came to very different conclusions regarding the desirability of majority rule in independent Haiti. The earliest trace of Vastey in post-independence Haiti occurs in a decidedly sensationalistic nineteenth-century memoir (which would be published only in 2006) that situates him in Port-au-Prince in April 1804, at the time of Dessalines’s massacre of the former colony’s remaining white population (Mollien, 2.23). By the end of that year, Vastey had become a bureaucrat in Dessalines’s government where he worked in the Ministry of Finance under André Vernet, a prominent general of colour whom he would have first met as a child in Ennery. The endemic corruption of the Dessalinian regime surely touched him, for there are plentiful anecdotes in

nineteenth-century history books about Vastey enriching himself at this time by charging petitioners for the privilege of procuring Vernet’s signature on a variety of documents (see, e.g., Ardouin, 6.164, 240; Madiou, 3.202), which recent, more sympathetic chroniclers of Dessalines’s short-lived Empire have seen no reason to dispute (see, e.g., Dupont, 275; Péan, 94; but also H. Trouillot, 1966, 21, for a more sceptical treatment of these ‘slanderous’ claims). After Dessalines’s assassination and the division of Haiti into two rival states, Vastey would appear to have followed Christophe and his mentor Vernet to the North in 1807, which was also the year he married (in his 1819 letter to Clarkson, Vastey informs the English abolitionist that ‘I have been married for twelve years’; Griggs and Prator, 182). By his own account, Vastey worked ‘for seven years as principal Secretary of the Prince of Gonaïves [Vernet] at the department of Finance and the Interior’ (1819, 202), until the latter’s death in December 1812. During these early years of Christophe’s regime, Vastey would appear to have kept a very low profile, in contrast to the notoriety that he gained as Vernet’s secretary under Dessalines. There is little trace of his activities in the Ministry of Finance, nor of whatever other work he undoubtedly, if anonymously, performed for the government at this time (the nineteenthcentury historian Saint-Rémy suggests, for instance, that Vastey had a hand in writing the 1811 address in which Christophe explained his decision to transform Haiti into a monarchy (280)). Vastey himself notes, in his 1819 Essai, that he served as one of the secretaries for the legislative commission that was convened on 31 July 1811 some two months after the coronation of Henry Christophe (163), and which after over a year of deliberations produced the magisterial Code Henry, ‘an extensive corpus of laws… which totaled nearly eight hundred pages and legislated seemingly all aspects of life in [Christophe’s] kingdom’ (Dubois, 2012, 65). Emblematic of this low profile is the fact that Vastey was a late addition to the ranks of the newly created Haitian aristocracy: he was not one of the eighty-seven hereditary princes, counts, dukes, barons, and knights originally ennobled by Christophe in 1811 (Cheesman, 9), and would only be named baron of the realm over two years later. (For the coat of arms conferred upon him at this time, bearing the motto ‘Sincerity, Frankness’, see Figure 1.) Oral legend has it that Vastey came to the King’s special attention in 1813 during the inauguration of the Citadelle Henry when Christophe, having listened to

him deliver a toast in the King’s honour, ‘touched by Vastey’s eloquence, rose from his seat and said to the orator: “I see that God created you to aid and serve me”’ (Leconte, 366–67). From that point on, the names of Christophe and Vastey, of sovereign and scribe, would be indissolubly linked to one another. One of the first results of Vastey’s newly elevated status was that he was sent on a secret mission in March 1814 to open negotiations with Napoleon for recognition of Haiti’s independence, only to find, when he arrived in London, that the Emperor had abdicated and the Bourbons were returned to the throne, with every intention, it turned out, of restoring French rule over the lost colony of Saint-Domingue. (This series of events will be detailed at length in the second section of my Introduction in order to provide the historical backdrop for understanding Vastey’s entry into print in October 1814—or re-entry, if the emerging information regarding his early literary career in France should prove correct.)

Figure 1    Vastey Coat of Arms That month saw the double publication of Colonial System (‘par le baron de Vastey’) and the brief Notes à M. le baron de V. P. Malouet (‘par M. le Baron de J.

L. Vastey’). Between 1814 and 1819 Vastey would publish over ten books and pamphlets (while doubtless also contributing a great many unsigned contributions to government publications such as the Gazette royale). What I identified in the Preface as his ‘minor’ works, all published in 1815–16, were explicitly addressed to his concitoyens in the southern republic, and largely devoted (to cite his retrospective description of Cri de la conscience) to the task of assembling evidence ‘that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt General Pétion’s monstrous betrayal of the Haytian people’ (1816a, 5); not surprisingly, these contributions to a nascent local public sphere generated equally polemical responses from the enemies of Christophe, who took to representing Vastey as the ‘contemptible valet of the most bloodthirsty of men’ (Colombel, 1819, 39). Like Colonial System, the three other ‘major’ works of Vastey’s that I listed in the Preface (1816c, 1817b, 1819) addressed a wider range of readers, and it was these texts, especially the 1816 Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères, that allowed Vastey to carve out a distinctive place for himself in the abolitionist public sphere on both sides of the Atlantic, especially once they were translated into English. Daut has charted Vastey’s transatlantic reception in Britain and the United States (2012a), and both the first section of my Introduction and Doris Garraway’s essay (Chapter 2, below) provide in-depth accounts of the extent to which Vastey’s work fits within (and yet at the same time contests) the parameters of abolitionist discourse. Such discourse was not, of course, limited to the Anglo-American world in which Vastey’s works circulated most extensively. As part of the ‘para-diplomatic’ relations that the Christophean regime maintained with Prussia, for instance, Vastey corresponded with the German academic Friedrich Wilhelm Gubitz (C. Hector, 2011), and excerpts from his 1819 Essai were translated into German the following year, contributing to a thenprevalent liberal view that ‘the intellectual products of the Haitians clearly prove what has long been doubted: that the blacks are not in the least inferior to the whites with respect to their mental faculties’ (Hüne, 1820, 2.368; qtd. Schüller, 29). To cite another European example, Haiti’s liberation from the shackles of French rule may well have resonated with ‘the situation of the Italian peninsula in its struggle against Austria’ (Cordié, 1954, 360), making Vastey’s work of particular interest to the Swiss economist Simonde de Sismondi and the liberal circles he frequented in both Hapsburg Italy and Restoration France (see Cordié, 1957).

During this same period, Vastey carried out a great many administrative functions for Christophe, serving as the King’s secretary as well as tutor to the Prince Royal, while continuing to play a key role in the Ministry of Finance (indeed, one historian identifies him as the Minister of Finance at this time; H. Trouillot, 1972, 154), and spearheading the regime’s extraordinary efforts at bringing universal education to Haiti, perhaps the single most impressive reform initiated by Christophe (significantly enough, this institutional network of schools and academies would be immediately abolished by his successor Boyer; see Cole, 274–75). Vastey was eventually promoted to Chancellor of the Realm in 1819, and by the summer of 1820 he was undoubtedly one of the most powerful people in the kingdom. If we are to believe the reminiscences of the English traveller W. W. Harvey, in these final years of his life Vastey also found time to engage in writing of a more ‘literary’ nature by authoring a play, ‘the object of which was to represent the more remarkable and meritorious parts of Christophe’s life’ (222); with typical condescension, Harvey concludes that ‘whatever were the abilities or acquirements of the author, this piece showed that he was totally unqualified to write dramatic poetry’, ‘its language [being] greatly inferior to the author’s former production’ (222–23). The end of Vastey’s life coincided with the rapid collapse of the Christophean regime in the first week of October 1820. The King had been bed-ridden since August, when he suffered a paralytic stroke; emboldened by this fact, on 2 October a regiment of soldiers mutinied in Saint-Marc, the southernmost town of the kingdom, which in turn precipitated a makeshift military revolt in the capital Cap-Henry on 6 October, led by members of the Haitian nobility who had for some time been conspiring to overthrow Christophe and take power for themselves. Forty-eight hours later, Christophe was dead, having committed suicide rather than, as Vastey had urged, abdicate in favour of his son. The next day, in the company of his former pupil the Prince Royal, Vastey left the palace of Sans-Souci and turned himself over to the mercy of Jean-Pierre Richard, the former Duc de la Marmelade, and the other leaders of the improvised coup d’état. No mercy was shown. Vastey would suffer the same fate as had his friend Louis Félix Boisrond-Tonnerre in 1806, when Dessalines’s light-skinned secretary was murdered in the days following upon the Emperor’s assassination. Denied a burial, Vastey was ‘contemptuously tipped into a disused well’

(Cole, 274)—at least that is where one eyewitness, the Austrian naturalist Karl Ritter, later claimed to have seen it (1836, 62; qtd. ‘Carl Ritter’s’, 93). By most accounts, Vastey was executed eleven days after Christophe’s suicide, on 19 October, just days before President Boyer’s troops entered Cap-Henry and effected the reunification of Haiti, thereby thwarting the ambitions of Richard and the other rebel leaders. George Clarke, who had been hired on a seven-year contract by Thomas Clarkson and appointed as a professor at the Royal Academy in Cap-Henry, supplied an invaluable first-hand account of the retribution exacted against the most loyal members of Christophe’s entourage, in a letter to the English abolitionist dated 4 November: at midnight on the 18th, he recounts, the King’s two sons, along with several other nobles, were bayoneted in the prison yard. This was at midnight, at about 200 yards from the college. I was so oppressed by fear that I was unable to sleep, and was walking about my chamber with the windows open. The shrieks I heard made me shudder, though I was at that time ignorant of the cause. On the 19th at the same hour, the Baron de Vastey and six other nobles suffered in the same manner. (Griggs and Prator, 211)

Clarke’s representation of this ‘cold-blooded, useless murder’ emphasizes the subjective effect it had on him (it ‘excited a sickening sensation which has scarcely left me’), but later renderings of Vastey’s death provide more ‘objective’, if wildly differing, accounts of the manner in which he suffered. In a manuscript first published in the 1850s, purportedly written by one of Christophe’s physicians, Dr Jabez Sheen Birt, who had come to loathe the King and threw his lot in with Richard and the other rebels, we are told that ‘the fiend Vastey died a miserable coward, as he had lived a tyrannical villain. I never knew a man more generally detested. The rest died bravely. This people is naturally brave’ (‘Last Days’, 803). By contrast, the nineteenth-century Haitian historian Thomas Madiou— whose voluminous tomes are full of negative representations of Vastey as a ‘deeply corrupt and malicious’ man (3.202), who ‘often caused harm for harm’s sake, without obtaining any immediate advantage from doing so’ (5.240)—took care, when describing the decapitation of those who had been ‘the too zealous servants of Christophe’, to point out that ‘Vastey died heroically, with the greatest calm’ (6.129). These contradictory representations of Vastey’s death as cowardly or heroic can be taken as emblematic of the profound

uncertainty that attaches to virtually every aspect of his life—an uncertainty that is not merely empirically based but ideologically charged, as Marlene Daut demonstrates in her contribution to this volume, the first half of which provides a detailed overview of the disparate ways in which Vastey’s life and writings have been (mis) represented, and racialized, over the course of the past two centuries. Vastey was survived by his wife and his two daughters, Aricie and Malvina (also known as Améthyste), the first of whom would give birth to Oswald Durand (1840–1906), ‘Haiti’s national bard’ in the second half of the nineteenth century (Dash, 1998, 47). As a particularly egregious example of the sort of (mis)information that has circulated regarding Vastey’s life, we can cite in closing one last problematic representation of him, to be found in a book published in 1828 by the English traveller James Franklin entitled The Present State of Hayti. In a chapter devoted to chronicling the rise and fall of the Christophean regime, Franklin briefly praises Christophe’s secretary as ‘a man of strong natural understanding’, and then proceeds to inform his readers that ‘De Vastey is now living at the Cape in retirement, and is exceedingly attentive to the English residents, for whom he has a very high respect and veneration. He is a black’ (198). Unlike so many of the statements that have circulated regarding Vastey’s shadowy life, this one can be confidently rejected as utterly false, although the grounds upon which it was based (perhaps a conflation of our Vastey with his younger brother Innocent Léo?) must remain forever unknown. However, even this fantastical claim has a certain use-value, for the unexpected afterlife that Franklin attributes to Vastey nicely provokes the question of what sort of afterlife Christophe’s scribe can expect today, now that renewed attention is being drawn to his long-neglected oeuvre, and to Colonial System in particular. What ‘is now living’ in Vastey’s work for those of us who read it today? What has survived the passage between his post/revolutionary time and ours? Moreover, given Franklin’s emphasis on this posthumous Vastey’s location ‘at the Cape’ and his ‘attentive’ engagement with the town’s English residents, how might the location and the language of his new readers affect our sense of him today? To read Colonial System (as I do) in Canada rather than Haiti, to read it in English translation (as you will) rather than in the original French: what difference will such displacements make to how he survives for us, foreign residents of the text rather than its

concitoyens? And, lastly, Franklin’s insistence that Vastey ‘is a black’ confronts us with the invidious question of whether and how his survival can be detached from the claims of ‘race’—in this case, claims about ‘black’ identity that Vastey himself ceaselessly critiqued in his pioneering attacks on Euro-American racial science but that he nonetheless also insisted upon when attempting to imagine a national community for all Haitians as well as forms of Afro-diasporic solidarity that could help unite at least some of the wretched of the earth in the ongoing quest for universal emancipation. For anyone charged with the difficult task of conveying the true facts regarding Jean Louis Vastey’s as yet elusive life story, it is at the very least a heartening thought that even the most erroneous of claims have the potential to provoke the most useful of questions.

INTRODUCTION

I (1820) Death of a Scribe

On 10 July 1820 the English abolitionist Thomas Clarkson wrote a thirtyone-page letter to the King of Haiti, Henry Christophe, in which he provided a detailed account of his recent trip to France at the behest of the King. He had gone there, in the words of his mission statement, to discover ‘the bases upon which a solid and durable peace may be built’ between Haiti and its former colonial master.1 Clarkson’s letter to the King was one of dozens that had been exchanged between the two men since the initiation of their correspondence in 1815. Over the course of the intervening five years, Clarkson had become a veritable ‘good-will ambassador for Christophe’ (Griggs, 71), promoting his cause in Britain and singing his praises to foreign leaders such as the Emperor of Russia, Alexander I.2 By 1820, as the mission to Paris attests, this ‘ambassadorial’ status had gained an official dimension, the Englishman having been ‘authorized’ to make overtures to the French government on Christophe’s behalf, ‘leaving to the discretion of Mr. Thomas Clarkson the choice of the means and avenue of approach’ (Griggs and Prator, 175). Given that the King’s ‘sine qua non condition’ for any negotiations with the ‘King of France and Navarre’ was that he ‘recognize Haiti… as a free, sovereign, and independent state; that he deal with Haiti as such; and that on his own behalf and in the name of his heirs and successors he renounce all claims to political, property, and

territorial rights over Haiti or any part thereof ’, and that Christophe had ruled out from the start ‘any indemnification of the ex-colonists’ (175), Clarkson and the influential abolitionists such as William Wilberforce and James Stephen with whom he consulted in the days leading up to his trip to France recognized the ‘hopeless’ nature of the treaty that Christophe was pursuing. Clarkson thus informed the King, in a letter of 28 April written days before he left for France, that he had chosen to travel there ‘not as a public agent but in his own individual capacity’, with the goal of ascertaining ‘the particular disposition and state of France as they relate to Hayti’ (198). Notwithstanding his realistic assessment of the situation, Clarkson ended this letter with the buoyant assertion that ‘I shall go as a private individual but shall take my Diplomatic Papers with me in case of an unexpected turn’ (199). Christophe and Clarkson’s transatlantic correspondence brings together two figures of massive importance in the history of slavery and its abolition. On the one hand, Clarkson, ‘arguably the great Founding Father of all abolitionism’ (Davis, 2006, 189), a man who ‘made antislavery causes his purpose in life’ (C. Brown, 436), from the publication of his first Essay on Slavery in 1786 and the founding of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade the following year, to the successful abolition of the slave trade (1807) and slavery (1833) in the British colonies, and on through to his opening address at the 1840 World Antislavery Convention, which he chaired with ‘the zeal of a venerable old man in the cause of freedom and our race’, as the African American abolitionist Alexander Crummell put it in his 1846 eulogy for this ‘illustrious friend of Africa and her children’ (31, 32). On the other hand, Christophe, the revolutionary hero, one of Toussaint Louverture’s closest and most trusted associates from 1794 onward, second-in-command to the first leader of independent Haiti, JeanJacques Dessalines, and, upon the latter’s death in 1806, President and (as of 1811) King of the northern half of Haiti, a man whose ‘wide-ranging and ambitious efforts aimed at creating a sustainable postemancipation state deserve more attention than historians have usually given them’ (Dubois, 2012, 64).3 However, for our purposes, Clarkson’s lengthy letter of 10 July is primarily of interest not because of its pairing of heroic figures who have established a name for themselves in the annals of world history, nor for its

exhaustive assessment of Franco-Haitian relations, but because of the prominent role played in its concluding pages by a third, far lesser known figure, whose media(tory) role emerges as a subject of intensive commentary —and, as we will see, projection—on Clarkson’s part. That third party is, of course, Baron de Vastey, Christophe’s chief publicist (and, by this point, Chancellor of the Realm), who had over the past several years gained a reputation in Britain as Haiti’s ‘most distinguished political writer’, someone whose work ‘abounds with deep and original views’, to quote an 1820 assessment of his Réflexions politiques (‘History’, 73). Clarkson’s repeated appeals to Vastey in his letter provide the central focus for this opening section of my Introduction, because they allow me to elaborate on the general portrait of Vastey as a scribe that I sketched out in my Preface: that is to say, as a writer whose subject-position can only with the greatest of difficulty be conceived of apart from the sovereign power it serves. The extended treatment offered here of Clarkson’s letter is further justified by the fact that the published version of it has been so extensively pruned that the obsessiveness of the English abolitionist’s appeals to Vastey cannot be gauged without recourse to the original document.4 Clarkson’s 1820 letter concludes with a list of eight things the King ought to do should he prefer to make no treaty with France and ‘abide by the consequences’. Six pages are devoted to expanding upon the penultimate of Clarkson’s eight suggestions, namely: ‘I would recommend it to your Majesty to avail yourself of the able and respectable talents of the Baron de Vastey by asking him to undertake a small literary work’ (175v–176r). Clarkson begins by noting that during a trip to France five years before he had ‘had the mortification to hear your Majesty’s Government ridiculed and your private character stigmatized’. During the just-completed journey, by contrast, he had ‘the satisfaction of observing that a considerable change had taken place in the public opinion on that subject, but particularly as to your character as an Individual. You are now no longer the cruel monster, which the ex-colonists had represented you to be. This happy change’, he continues, ‘has been effected by your Majesty’s friends who have circulated (both by means of books and conversation) many facts relative to your political regulations, of which almost all had been before ignorant’. The purpose of the ‘small literary work’ to be undertaken by Vastey (with whom

Clarkson had, as we will see, entered into personal correspondence the year before) would thus be to give further publicity to the regime’s aims and accomplishments, so that ‘the French Nation should become better acquainted with your Majesty’s true character, or that they should be still more enlightened on this subject’, in order that it ‘should rise in estimation till those prejudices are finally done away, which have hitherto supposed people of colour to be incapable either of knowledge or virtue’ (176r). Placing the same trust in Vastey’s ability to make his readers ‘see’ and ‘recognize’ Christophe in a proper light as did the regime itself,5 Clarkson’s then-and-now narrative invokes a faith in what we might call (transcending) representation that is central to abolitionist discourse, which through the power of ‘books and conversation’ aims to effect a quasi-ontological transformation (‘You are no longer…’) of the misrepresented object (‘slave’, ‘negro’…) of its humanitarian rescue mission. In this case, Christophe is transformed from the monster he is represented as being and the prejudices this trope engenders to the real person of colour he is, a man in possession of a ‘true character’ that can be revealed by means of facts and their circulation in the public sphere. In the case of Christophe, of course, the binary terms of this ‘enlightenment’ project cannot but seem, at best, highly problematic to us, given the epistemological impasse in which contemporaries of Clarkson,6 no less than historians of today,7 found and find themselves when trying to assess the ‘true character’ of Christophe and of those, such as Vastey, who served under him. These broader questions of representation form an inescapable backdrop to any (re)assessment of the seemingly disheartening realities of post/revolutionary Haiti.8 Leaving such questions aside for the moment, however, we can return to the details of Clarkson’s letter, which quickly shifts attention away from the problem of representation to the enactment of it, with some very specific suggestions for the form that Vastey’s ‘small literary work’ should take: You may be assured that the nearer your Majesty, and the Haytian Government, and the Haytian People are considered to approach to a level with the enlightened Princes, Governments, and Nations of Europe, the less obstruction you will find to being nationalized, or to being received among the acknowledged Governments of the world. I would advise therefore, that the Baron de Vastey should directly compose a little work of

about 40 or 50 pages only for this purpose; for the shorter the work the better, provided it comprehended all the necessary facts. The following are my ideas upon the subject. The work might be entitled ‘A few observations on the Government of the North Western part of Hayti from its infancy to the present time’. The Baron would probably find a better title than this before he finished it. The Baron might begin by stating, that so many calumnies had been spread relative to this Government, that it seemed necessary to give to the European world some authentic documents to refute them. (176r–v)

What is remarkable about these opening suggestions regarding the best way for Christophe, his government, and his people, to become ‘nationalized’ is simply the level of detail to which Clarkson descends. Providing Vastey, through the mediating figure of the King, with exact instructions regarding the page length of the ‘little work’, its title, and how it ought to begin, Clarkson is practically dictating the terms of composition, while at the same time acknowledging the possibility that these terms might be improved upon by his Haitian counterpart, notably in relation to the title, with its overly precise geographical specifications and its benignly infantilizing vision of the Christophean regime. Clarkson’s abolitionist dictation, once started, proves hard to stop. After suggesting how A few observations ought to begin, he then proceeds, in the next five paragraphs (176v–178r), to map out various points that Vastey should make in order to clinch the argument Clarkson wants him to pursue. This argument requires him to ‘paint in true colours the disorganized state of society as it was’ when Christophe came to power (176v), and contrast it with ‘the present state of the inhabitants of Hayti’ by enumerating the various reforms undertaken since that time, such as ‘the number of Professors you had introduced into your Dominions and of which sort; the Schools you had formed by degrees, and in what places, and in short every act done by your Majesty to improve the condition of your subjects, whether in Justice, Agriculture, the Arts, Literature, or Religion’ (177r). One need only cite the first few words of the opening sentence of each of these paragraphs to get a sense of the well marked path that Vastey is being called upon to follow when describing the regime’s passage from a state of infancy to its present (progressing toward) enlightened state: ‘He might then describe the political state of Hayti, as it was when your Majesty was proclaimed King…’; ‘He should then proceed to state that…’; ‘The Baron would have here a fine

opportunity of observing that…’; ‘The Baron should then begin with…’; ‘After having done this he should say…’ In the last of these prescriptive paragraphs, Clarkson is particularly concerned, given the common sentiment among those with whom he consulted in France that Christophe’s ‘was no Government, it was a mere Despotism’ (177v), that stress be laid on the King’s efforts at educating his people and on his willingness ‘to extend political privileges by degrees as you found them fit for such a blessing’ (178r). When he himself stressed this point, Clarkson notes, it ‘made a considerable impression on the minds of those, with whom I conversed, in your Majesty’s favour. I should advise, therefore’, he continues, ‘that the Baron de Vastey should say a few words on this subject in the little work now mentioned’. Vastey, Clarkson suggests, ‘might state that the system of education which your Majesty was giving to your subjects was intended as a foundation on which to build with safety a political constitution which should embrace the rational liberty and happiness of all your people. I am sure’, he concludes, ‘that an avowal, like this, would please many of your Majesty’s friends and disarm many of your enemies’ (178r), revealingly, if doubtless unintentionally, drawing attention to the fine line between truth and persuasion with his pragmatic appeal to pleasing friends and disarming enemies. As if that detailed outline of the book’s structure were somehow not enough, Clarkson then immediately circles back to the big picture, offering new strictures on its overall form and content, as well as an explicit rationale for the choice of Vastey as the work’s author: Permit me to say a few words more concerning this little work, which, though little, I consider to be of great importance. In the first place it must be written by the Baron de Vastey. No one of your Majesty’s friends in England could write it, because all the documents are in Hayti; and no person could write it, who had not witnessed the whole process of the improvement which has taken place in your Dominions, or who had not seen the wonderful change, which has been produced from the beginning of your Majesty’s reign to the present time. Secondly, it should contain a plain statement of facts, without any extravagant embellishment from the flowery powers of oratory. Thirdly, it should be written in the most modest manner, and with the greatest temperance. Fourthly, nothing should be mentioned in it concerning Protestantism or any intended change of religion. Nothing of a political nature should appear in it. No reflection should be

made upon France: indeed it would be better not to mention France at all, except in a respectful manner. (178r–v)

Clarkson begins by insisting upon Vastey’s privileged status as a witness, a native mediator possessed of a first-hand knowledge/vision of Christophe’s Haiti and who is thus in a position to make his readers see ‘the wonderful change’ between its infancy and its present condition in a way that Clarkson cannot—even though the English abolitionist has devoted so many pages to showing the Haitian witness what this change is and how best to represent it! Clarkson’s final three points offer an implicit reading of (and in the case of the last two, warning about) Vastey’s established textual practice, and can thus be usefully read in relation to his work as a whole, and to Le système colonial dévoilé in particular. The first directive, in which Clarkson advises Vastey (via Christophe) to stick to ‘a plain statement of facts’ and to avoid ‘the flowery powers of oratory’, corresponds very well to Vastey’s own assertions in Colonial System regarding the unsuitability of rhetorical flourishes and stylistic embellishments when describing the horrors of slavery and the consequent need to restrict oneself to ‘reporting the facts’ (1814b, 40). If an avoidance of flowery embellishment characterizes all of Vastey’s work, the same cannot be said for his relation to intemperate language: one has only to read the call to arms with which Colonial System concludes, with its apocalyptic vision of sharpened Haitian bayonets and pierced French bellies (96), to get a sense of the distance that Vastey had to come (or would have to come) in order to meet the modest demands of Clarkson’s abolitionist discourse. The strictures regarding any discussion of Protestantism aside,9 the final directive offers even more of a challenge to Vastey in its insistence that nothing of a ‘political nature’ appear in the projected book (as if any discussion of Haiti could be divorced from politics), and its emphasis on the need to omit any but the most respectful references to France: as Clarkson well knew, France was the Gordian knot that Vastey’s books never ceased trying to cut, with a discursive violence that, while certainly present in Colonial System (the last sentence of which ends with a reference to ‘the myriad crimes of the French in Haiti’ (97)), seems, if anything, to have gained in strength over the course of his career as Christophe’s publicist.

After these stipulations, Clarkson then concludes his account of A few observations with one last paragraph in which he offers practical advice regarding how to go about publishing and circulating it.10 What I hope has emerged from my purposely detailed rendering of Clarkson’s obsessively precise instructions is a clear sense of the institutional framework within which Vastey’s oeuvre was produced—or, in other words, a clear sense of the scribal conditions that (as argued in the Preface) must be the starting point for any appraisal of him as a writer. At the side of power, rather than to the side of men of state such as Christophe (see Bongie, 2008, 32–33), the scribe, in transmitting his message, is subject to all sorts of stifling compromises and complicities; his acts of mediation are subject to a painfully evident lack of room for manoeuvre. What sort of ‘literary work’ can possibly emerge from these scribal conditions? That is the difficult question that Vastey’s publications pose any reader today, and which makes them a challenge to read in relation to other Afro-diasporic writing in which ‘the structural dependence that subjects literary practices to political authority’ is altogether less obvious (Casanova, 199), or even, we might like to imagine, entirely absent.11 What is especially interesting about the scribal dynamics on display in Clarkson’s letter is that the double labour Vastey is called upon to perform —working on behalf of the ‘nationalization’ of Christophe’s regime as well as serving the global needs of the abolitionist movement— creates a triangulated relation, which complicates the standard binary pairing of sovereign and scribe. Of course, that pairing, and the strict division of labour it implies, was never as uncomplicated as one might imagine: Deborah Jenson has argued, for instance, that ‘the first leaders of the blacks in Haiti’, Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, cannot be read simply in terms of a power/writing binary of the sort more readily attributed to the ‘formalized’ scribal relation between Christophe and Vastey: the documents associated with these first leaders, Jenson maintains, must also be read as, in part, produced by them; they ‘exemplify, in themselves, both political power and the most tenuous but determined approaches to the magical sphere of literary and mediatic persuasion’ (6). If, at the dawn of the independence era, the mediatic work of Toussaint and Dessalines (partially) collapses the distinction between sovereign and scribe,

some fifteen years later the efforts of the post/revolutionary state at making itself heard and gaining recognition for itself can be said, on the evidence of Clarkson’s letter, to have generated the reverse scenario, an expansion in the number of players and a consequent blurring of the lines between them. Who is the sovereign and who is the scribe here in this triangulated relation? Most obviously, of course, Christophe remains the sovereign, at the head of the triangle, with his ‘agent’ Clarkson and his secretary Vastey occupying the scribal base (along with any number of other Christophean scribes such as Baron de Dupuy or Chevalier de Prézeau). And yet the three-way relationship can also be read not so much as a triangle but as a chain of command extending from the metropolitan centre to the post/colonial periphery, given the fact that Clarkson is dictating the terms of the book to his addressee, Christophe, who will in turn pass them along to Vastey, who must take both authorities into account. This second reading nicely coincides with any suspicions we might have about the congruence between abolitionist and colonial discourse, but it scarcely takes into account the level of desire infusing Clarkson’s excessively detailed and repetitive advice; the projected book requires an all too evident projection of himself onto Vastey, the man who has witnessed that which Clarkson can only longingly imagine. In a third reading, then, it is the lateral relation between the Haitian scribe and his English double that is of central importance, rather than the sovereign power that makes these relations possible. The psychologically fraught nature of this lateral relation is clear enough: there is great potential for rivalry and envy (which can also extend, of course, in a vertical direction from the scribal base to the sovereign vertex). However, there is also the potential for new forms of collegiality, a conversation of equals in the republic of letters, engaging with one another on their own terms rather than those of the sovereign in whose shadow they serve. We get a sense of what this more ‘autonomous’ relation between the men might involve in the shards of their personal correspondence, which consists of two letters of Vastey’s to be found in Clarkson’s papers, most notably one dated 29 November 1819 that is of vital importance for any consideration of Vastey because it supplies us with so much of the scarce personal information we have concerning him (Griggs and Prator, 178–82; fols. 122–127).12

Accompanying this letter to Clarkson was a copy of Vastey’s recently published history of the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath, the 1819 Essai, along with a number of other unidentified works that, Vastey suggests, ‘will be useful to you in the course of your negotiations each time you wish to find arguments and review the facts’ (179). Rather than simply explain how the book will help Clarkson understand the Haitian Revolution and, especially, the post/revolutionary division of Haiti into the northern kingdom and the southern republic, Vastey prefaces that explanation with more personal comments bearing on his reasons for writing the Essai: Exasperated at seeing in the journals of the South and in those of France, their faithful echoes, the calumnies which the enemies of Haiti and the King endlessly repeat concerning his government and his person, I decided to tell the truth in the matter [je me suis décidé à les réfuter]. This led me into the writing of a whole volume on the origin and cause of our civil dissensions. I was able to devote only two months to the composition of this work and furthermore I was ill most of the time, so you will undoubtedly find it full of imperfections. Though I did not have at my disposal enough time to do it properly, I nevertheless flatter myself that, with all its flaws, this book will cast a great deal of light on our wars. (178–79; 122v–123r)

As we saw in the preceding Biographical Sketch, this autobiographical commentary about the origins of Vastey’s book is accompanied, at the very end of the letter, by key facts regarding his own origins (his place and date of birth), as well as details about his wife and two daughters, and about his personal relation to the revolutionary leaders Toussaint and Dessalines (181–82). In this ‘friendly interchange of confidences’ (181), we thus witness a twinned emphasis on text and self that goes well beyond the letter’s scribal purpose of preparing Clarkson for his diplomatic mission: we see (the possibility of) Vastey emerging as an author in his own right/write, speaking as someone who has gained enough, or almost enough, cultural capital to distinguish his work from the cause that it serves and to call it his own, to lay claim to it as something truly ‘literary’, in the particular sense according to which we now commonly understand the word—a historically uncommon understanding that clearly has yet to inform Clarkson’s (to us) puzzling identification of his (and Vastey’s) A few observations as a ‘small literary work’, and his various other references in the correspondence with Christophe to Vastey’s ‘literary labours’ (Griggs and Prator, 186).13 Speaking as Clarkson’s

transatlantic confidant rather than Christophe’s secretary, Vastey seems here to be on the cusp, as it were, of author(iz)ing himself, of escaping the (to us) deathly confinement of his scribal role and speaking as a sovereign self, in an ‘authorial voice’ of the sort we have come to recognize and valorize, a voice ‘strongly associated with individual genius, solitary writing, and specifically authorial access to print culture’ ( Jenson, 5). It is this unshackling of Vastey from the scribal role to which he is so closely bound that is the ineluctable horizon for anyone hoping to salvage him for posterity, to reintroduce Vastey to a contemporary audience as a figure of more than purely historical interest, a figure of (literary) value. It is this very horizon which Aimé Césaire gestured toward at the end of La tragédie du roi Christophe, when he gave his theatricalized Vastey the final word, allowing him to speak, for the first time, in a language that is not direct and transparent, miraculously arming him, in a grandiloquent closing elegy for the dead Christophe, with an elevated form of speech reminiscent of nothing so much as the dense and hermetic language of Césaire’s own lyric poetry.14 Desirable as this horizon might have been for Vastey, and might still be (for us), it would remain, and remains, precisely that. An altogether more literal death awaited this scribe, who would never have the chance to write, and re-title, his (and Clarkson’s) A few observations much less the opportunity to assert his autonomy by not writing it. By the time the thirty-one-page letter arrived in Haiti, ‘Christophe was no longer alive, and as Clarkson remarks in his autobiography, “my labours for him and the people of Hayti were all in vain”’ (Griggs, 73). That August, Christophe suffered a paralytic stroke and his weakened condition ‘emboldened members of his regime who were increasingly unhappy with his rule, and within a few months, several officers organized a conspiracy’ (Dubois, 2012, 85). On 8 October, faced with open mutiny, unable because of his debilitated condition to lead a response against the conspirators, Christophe committed suicide. By the time Boyer and the southern army arrived in Cap-Henry on 22 October, seizing the opportunity to reunify the country (which was hardly the outcome desired by those northerners who rose up against the King with the purpose of supplanting him), Vastey had been dead for three or four days, summarily executed by the leaders of the revolt. As we saw in the Biographical Sketch, the details of Vastey’s execution, much less the exact

reasons for it, will remain forever shrouded in doubt, but this brutal conclusion to the life of our Haitian scribe, not yet forty, is hardly surprising, given that he was the primary spokesperson for the Christophean regime, and someone increasingly central to the actual governing of the kingdom. Vastey died, while lesser scribes escaped to serve new masters, such as the former Comte de Rosiers, Juste Chanlatte, who made a smooth transition from one sovereign to the next, ‘glorifying the memory of the enemy [Pétion] of his defunct king, with the goal of toadying up to Boyer and his collaborators’ (H. Trouillot, 1962, 63–64). In the words of historian David Geggus, Christophe’s downfall was ‘a double blow for the British abolitionists, effectively ending their direct links with Haiti and greatly undermining its propaganda value for the antislavery cause’ (1985, 126). Clarkson, ever (in the words of one of Vastey’s letters to him) ‘the sincere friend of humanity and the zealous champion of the unfortunate Africans and the Haitians, their descendants’ (Griggs and Prator, 136), did what he could to help out the exiled Queen and Christophe’s two daughters, ‘hospitably receiv[ing] them as house guests for nearly a year’ when they arrived in England in 1821 (Griggs, 79). On 16 December 1820, prompted by ‘some intelligence which I have this day received’, the other leading figure of the abolitionist movement in Britain, Wilberforce,15 who had himself been in communication with Christophe since 1814, having just learned of the coup and still unsure as to who had taken charge of the kingdom, directly petitioned ‘the head of the Haytian Government’, whoever he might be, on behalf of Vastey. ‘It is currently reported’, Wilberforce wrote, ‘that M. de Vastey has been imprisoned by the new Government of Hayti, and that it is intended to punish him capitally’. I am utterly ignorant of the crimes of which M. de Vastey may have been guilty, and therefore it is not for me to presume to form any opinion on the punishment to be inflicted on him. But it cannot be wrong, nor can it, I trust, be in any degree likely to offend, if, taking, as I must ever do, a deep interest in all that concerns the character and fortunes of all the descendants of the African race, I feel desirous of enforcing on you the important truth, that the eyes of all the civilised world are anxiously directed towards you; and that the course which the Haytians shall pursue in their present critical circumstances, may tend powerfully to gladden or to depress the hearts of those who, like myself, have long been their partisans and advocates. (Wilberforce, 1840, 392)

Wilberforce’s main point is to ‘enforce’ the idea that any breach in the rule of law in Haiti will damage the public image of blacks the world over, confirming the prejudices of those who cite ‘the violence and cruelty with which they were disposed to act towards each other in those contentions which too commonly take place in political society’ as one of the ‘proofs of their inferiority’; hence, Wilberforce advises, ‘the importance of letting the principles of your proceedings be manifest to the world’, and of ‘let[ting] even guilty men enjoy the benefit of a fair and impartial trial’ (392–93). But the fact that his comments are made specifically on behalf of Vastey speaks volumes to the latter’s emerging reputation as someone whose value to the abolitionist cause could be conceived of apart from the institutional relation to Christophe upon which it had been founded, and interestingly anticipates the special emphasis in our own age of ‘humanitarian reason’ on the figure of the writer as particularly vulnerable to censorship and persecution. Its cautious, supplicatory tone notwithstanding, Wilberforce’s letter— in its enforcement of truth and its appeal to the overseeing power of ‘the eyes of all the civilised world’ (a scopic power so far-reaching it would appear not to need the sort of mediation that Clarkson required of Vastey)— undoubtedly evinces the hierarchical dynamics that were an inescapable part of abolitionist discourse then, as well as the ‘tension between inequality and solidarity, between a relation of domination and a relation of assistance’ that is ‘constitutive of all humanitarian government’ in the present (Fassin, 3). The particular domination of British abolitionism in post/revolutionary Haiti had, however, as Geggus notes, come to an end with the death of Christophe: the new regime, obviously, was not in a position to take Wilberforce’s belated advice with regard to Vastey, and the Englishman’s broader offer of ‘all the assistance in my power’ (394) was a gift the new head of the Haitian government had no interest in accepting, given the frequency with which the reviled Christophe had received it in the past, and the longstanding Francophilic leanings of the rulers of the southern republic. Vastey’s own repeated acceptance of this transatlantic gift, and his consequent entanglement in an abolitionist relation of domination and assistance, mirrors at the international level his scribal relation to power at the national level, while also offering, as we saw, the unrealized possibility of somehow transcending it and gaining entry to the world republic of letters.

To examine Vastey’s scribal links to Clarkson in particular, and British abolitionism in general, as I have done in this opening section of the Introduction, is inevitably to confront the problem of what it means for the colonized (or formerly colonized) subject to be in this particular relation to abolitionism and its humanitarian discourse: should that relation be a source of concern or of (muted) optimism? Should we take a moral(izing) distance from it, by exposing what Marcus Wood has, glossing Fanon, dismissed as ‘the benign lie of the emancipation moment’ (2010, 29); by emphasizing the ‘complicated and compromised history that in reality surrounded the reluctant and flawed British approach to emancipation’ (262); by deploring ‘the controlling mechanisms of emancipation propaganda’ (160), as well as the starring role played in (the memory of) that mythic enterprise by ‘moral “big daddies”’ such as Clarkson and Wilberforce (16)? Or—as Paul Gilroy has recently argued in his advocacy of modes of ‘heteropathic identification’ that might (despite all sorts of institutional complications and compromises) ‘open up possibilities for change achieved through social and political mobilisation’ grounded in ‘the idea of universal humanity’ (66, 65, 72)—are such blanket critiques of abolitionist assistance (and, by extension, all forms of humanitarian government) perversely deaf to the promise of abolitionism and of other kindred appeals ‘against racism and injustice in humanity’s name’ that, for Gilroy, can and must be made in the spirit of ‘the new humanism’ argued for by Fanon (69)? (A very different Fanon from the one invoked by Wood in his critique of the ‘moral pollution and aesthetic contamination’ generated by the myth of the ‘gift of freedom’…16) Notwithstanding his scribal commitment to ‘Misters Clarkson, Wilberforce, Stephen, and in general all the virtuous philanthropists of the great and magnanimous British nation, who have devoted their talents and their labours, their days and their nights, for the happiness and perfection of the human species’ (1816c, 56), Vastey was well aware of the possible limits of their (and his own) position, as we can see from a toast that he delivered at the Café des étrangers in Cap-Henry on 24 August 1816, during a banquet given for prominent Haitians by the town’s foreign merchants as part of a week-long celebration of the Queen’s birthday.17 Lifting his glass, Vastey drank, ‘To the gratitude that we owe the virtuous Philanthropists who have defended our

Cause with as much ardour as disinterestedness; if their Wishes and their Efforts prove unavailing, then let us make use of our Swords, to cleave the Body of the Enemies of Humanity, and preserve the Rights that we derive from God, Nature, and Justice!’ (1816d, 42) Vastey’s double-edged toast reckons with the possibility that philanthropy, and the humanitarian assistance it offers, might prove unavailing (impuissant), and that it might thus need to be supplemented by another, more powerful and uncompromising response to racism and injustice, one that models itself, intemperately, upon the memory of the Haitian Revolution and its world-historical struggle between the friends and enemies of universal emancipation. In its doubled appeal to the seemingly very different imperatives of philanthropic virtue and revolutionary violence, of institutional patience and emancipatory action, Vastey’s toast perfectly exemplifies a post/revolutionary sensibility, in which the presence of the revolutionary past continues to haunt a dramatically transformed present and its visions of the future. So perfectly, indeed, that we could readily dismiss the toast as little more than a rhetorical flourish on Vastey’s part, a rote invocation of insurrectionary language that might have given his mixed audience at the Café des étrangers a jolt but that could not have been seriously meant at a time —over thirteen years removed from the declaration of national independence—when a future for Christophe’s Haiti and the cause of antislavery so evidently appeared to depend upon gaining international recognition of its independence, with the help of the regime’s abolitionist friends and a more concerted media campaign on its behalf, of which the translations of Vastey would form no small part.18 And no doubt there would be some truth to this reading. But if we look not forward to the final years of the regime—when, in the words of another Christophean scribe, hopes for ‘the complete liberation of our country and the definitive enfranchisement of this Kingdom’ seemed to rest with philanthropists abroad (Chanlatte, 1819, 15–16)—but double back to the summer and autumn of 1814, just two short years before Vastey gave that toast, then the lived intensity of his post/revolutionary appeal to revolutionary violence becomes rather more appreciable, for it was during this time that l’an IIème of independence seemed as if it might realistically be on the point of reverting to Year Zero, with the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy and

the threat of a new invasion of the former Saint-Domingue by its ex-colonial masters. It is this moment of absolute urgency to which Vastey is responding with Le système colonial dévoilé, the one major text of his that would not be translated into English.19 While the lack of this translation can doubtless be attributed to the fact that the book’s publication preceded by several years the mounting of the aforementioned media campaign in English, one might also venture that there is something dangerously ‘intemperate’ about this particular work, which can be accounted for by the situation of urgency in which it was produced, and which distinguishes it from the three later works of his that were translated into English. In order to prepare the ground for reading what is arguably Vastey’s most powerfully rendered denunciation of slavery and the colonial system, it will thus be necessary to supply a contextualizing account of the months leading up to the publication of Colonial System in October 1814.

II (1814) The Colonial System Restored

At an earlier juncture in his lengthy letter of 10 July 1820, Clarkson had occasion to remind Christophe that in 1814, ‘soon after the restoration of the Bourbons, and when Monsieur Malouet was the Minister of the Marine and Colonies, it was determined to reduce Hayti to a slave colony by force of arms, but the Treaty of Vienna, and other circumstances put a stop to these proceedings’ (168v). This one sentence of Clarkson’s about France’s, and specifically Malouet’s, efforts after the fall of Napoleon to destroy the independent nation of ‘Hayti’ and restore the slave colony of ‘SaintDomingue’ contains, in nuce, the sordidly predictable story of colonial (re)conquest that I will be expanding upon in this second section of the Introduction in order to set the scene for Vastey’s emergence into print in October of that momentous year. Between 1804 and 1814, following upon the final defeat in November 1803 of Napoleon’s forces in French Saint-Domingue,20 ‘relations between Haiti and France were almost totally broken off’ (Brière, 52). Toward the end of that period, however, with Napoleon’s fortunes flagging in Europe after the Russian campaign of 1812 and recent defeats in Germany (October 1813), and with the signing of a European peace treaty and perhaps even the collapse of the Napoleonic regime apparently in the offing, both Christophe and Pétion sensed that this relatively quiescent state of

affairs was not likely to last much longer, and that it might be time to take the initiative in securing the future of Haiti (or, more exactly, the two Haitis). In his polemical writings of 1815 directed against the southern republic, Vastey repeatedly accused Pétion of sending secret agents to France in the final months of 1813 and negotiating a treaty with Napoleon that would have resulted in a restoration of French rule (see, e.g., 1815b, 72; 1815c, 14). Notwithstanding Vastey’s sarcastic invectives at the expense of those ‘amphibian-like’ agents of Pétion’s and their ‘perfidious’ mission across the seas (1815b, 74), Napoleon’s changing fortunes also induced Christophe to send his own secret agents to France in March 1814, not, certainly, to negotiate a return to French rule but to sound out the conditions for French recognition of Haiti’s independence. These two agents were none other than Vastey and his fellow scribe, Prézeau. The two men would get as far as London, by which time (early April) the French Emperor had abdicated, and the Bourbon monarchy had been restored to the throne in the person of Louis XVIII.21 The Kings of France and Haiti had a common enemy in Napoleon, so the Christophean regime had at least some hope, in the spring and summer of 1814, that the defeat of the man who in 1802 had attempted to reimpose slavery in Saint-Domingue might open the door to official recognition of Haitian independence. As Vastey recalled in a pamphlet entitled À mes concitoyens, published in January 1815: ‘We saw with satisfaction the fall of this oppressor of the world, and the reestablishment of the House of Bourbon on the throne of its ancestors; we had reason to hope that his Majesty Louis XVIII—schooled in misfortune and adversity, and having long resided in England, in the midst of such an enlightened people—would have adopted their philanthropic principles!’ (1815a, 3) In a Proclamation of 15 August, and then again in his important Manifesto of 18 September, Henry Christophe gave voice to this hopeful expectation: ‘We hope that [Napoleon’s] fall will give peace and repose to the world; we hope that the return of those liberal and restorative principles guiding the European powers will lead them to recognize the independence of a people whose only wish is the enjoyment of peace and commerce, the goal of all civilized nations’ (1814, 14), going on to add that it was ‘not presumptuous’ to suppose that Louis, ‘following the impulse of the philanthropic spirit that his

family had previously exhibited’, would ‘recognize the independence of Hayti’ and thereby effect ‘not only an act of justice, but a reparation of the evils we have suffered under the French government’ (16). Already, though, Christophe was sounding a note of worry that the ‘caste’ of ex-colonists, the ‘enemies of humankind’, would once again, as they had with Napoleon in 1802, ‘employ all their usual methods to drag the French cabinet into a new enterprise against us’ (9). In language that ‘harkens back to the style of the French Revolution, Year Two [the Jacobin era]’ (Benot, 1992, 175), Christophe’s Manifesto concludes with a powerful affirmation of his refusal ever to capitulate to the French, and a promise that ‘we will bury ourselves under the ruins of our country rather than suffer an attack on our political rights’ (18). Christophe’s fears regarding the influence of the ex-colonists would prove well founded. In À mes concitoyens, after describing the hopes generated by the fall of Napoleon, Vastey immediately went on to lament: ‘Vain hope! No sooner had this monarch mounted the throne of his forefathers than the excolonists of Saint-Domingue surrounded him, plaguing him with their clamorous demands’ (3). Letters, reports, and projects concerning the conquest and reestablishment of Saint-Domingue would flood the offices of the Ministry of the Marine and Colonies in the months following upon the allied occupation of Paris at the end of March. In the earliest such letter to be found in the Ministry’s files, written on 6 April (the very day that Napoleon abdicated and the French Senate voted to recognize Louis XVIII as King of France), we find a former secretary of Toussaint Louverture’s, René Guybre, congratulating the King’s nephew, the Duc d’Angoulême, on the defeat of the ‘usurper’ and on ‘the happy return to France of the Empire of the Lily and of its legitimate prince’. Guybre sees the return of the Bourbons as clearing the way for a quick restoration of French rule in SaintDomingue, especially if negotiators were to focus their efforts on Pétion, ‘more capable [than Christophe] of feeling how essential it is for him, as for his class, to gain the safety that his legitimate prince offers’.22 For the clamouring mass of ex-colonists who believed that peace in Europe had ‘reopened the route to Saint-Domingue’,23 this distinction between a pliable Pétion and an inflexible Christophe would prove a constant theme of both their private communications with the Ministry and their published works—

a fact that the Christophean regime was quick to pick up on and use to good effect in the so-called guerre des plumes that erupted between the two Haitis the next year, a media war that would, to anticipate matters, occupy much of Vastey’s time: ‘Read all the foreign gazettes’, he urged his public in the Spring of 1815, ‘read the reports of the Charaults and the Berquins—all the writings of the French ex-colonists affirm that Pétion is devoted to France’ (1815c, 13). Vastey concludes his lament in À mes concitoyens by noting that hope of a positive resolution to the problem of Haitian independence had been rendered all the vainer by the fact that Louis XVIII immediately placed an ex-colonist in charge of the Ministry: the ‘shameless’ septuagenarian Pierre Victor Malouet (3), who on 13 May was officially introduced as the King’s Minister of the Marine. In the words of another Christophean scribe, the choice of ‘such a monster’ could ‘only excite our indignation’, given his longstanding commitment to ‘slavery and the destruction of our kind’ (Prézeau, 26–27); it sent a clear signal to the ex-colonists, and to the excolonized, that recovering Saint-Domingue was near the very top of the new government’s political agenda. As one former colonist wrote to him from Bordeaux shortly after his appointment, Malouet was the perfect man for the job: ‘You’re a landowner in Saint-Domingue, you’ve resided there, you’ve served in varying capacities as an administrator in the colonies, who can know them better than you?’24 Malouet did indeed ‘know’ the colonies very well: in 1767, in his late twenties, he had come to Saint-Domingue as a colonial administrator, spending seven years there while marrying into a Creole family and becoming the owner of several flourishing plantations in the north; he also served in French Guiana, and in 1788, after a long stint working for the Ministry of the Marine in Toulon, he left for Paris, devoting himself over the next several years to the double task of preserving the monarchy and combating abolitionism (albeit, as we will see, in the name of an ostensibly ‘reformist’, juste milieu politics that, while insisting upon slavery as the fundamental base of colonial society, nonetheless acknowledged the need for ‘ameliorations’ in master–slave relations). As an exile in London, he served during Britain’s partial occupation of Saint-Domingue from 1793 to 1798 as official representative of the colony’s anti-republican planters, who had thrown their lot in with the British; and when the British left Saint-

Domingue, he then turned to Napoleon as the next best hope for putting an end to the ‘democratic delirium’ that had resulted in a lowly black man like Toussaint Louverture rising to a position of supreme power in the colony (1802, 4.12). By 1814, in his seventies, Malouet had become his own best hope for restoring and ‘reforming’ the old colonial order.25 In a letter of 12 July he described himself as ‘entirely occupied at the moment in getting this important colony to submit to His Majesty and assuring France of the immense advantages that come with its possession, but without’, he added, ‘having to resort to the use of force in order to attain this goal’, since His Majesty’s intention was to take such drastic measures ‘against St. Domingue only if it were to prove indispensable in getting the colony to submit’.26 By gentle persuasion or military might, in the summer of 1814 Malouet was committed to plotting an end to Haitian independence and instituting a new and ‘improved’ version of what he himself had long ago dubbed ‘the colonial system’. Opening out, as it does, onto a globally resonant vision of what Sartre, in his 1956 essay ‘Colonialism is a System’, would term ‘the infernal cycle of colonialism’ (2006, 51), Vastey’s unveiling of ‘the colonial system’ in his 1814 book extends well beyond a critical encounter with Malouet, his ideas, and his language. However, given that Malouet’s particular usage of the phrase is what generated the emergence of Vastey’s broader critique of colonialism, a brief review of the ex-colonist’s deployment of it is in order here. Malouet laid claim to the phrase in his 1802 preface to a hitherto unpublished work of his from 1775 on Saint-Domingue.27 In this preface, he insisted that his ideas from the 1770s for reforming the colonial administration were still of great value in 1802; they continued to offer a viable blueprint for the ‘new era that is beginning’, inaugurated by Napoleon’s decision to wrest control of Saint-Domingue from Toussaint (4.76). Looking forward to ‘the restoration’ that would come after the conquest (4.47), and relieved at the thought that ‘colonists of our blood’ would no longer run the risk of having their throats slit or of being subjugated by the blacks—for ‘that is the plan of the leaders of the African caste, the horrible but necessary result of the equality of rights’ (4.32–33)— Malouet traced the recent troubles of Saint-Domingue to the ‘absurd’

revolutionary idea that metropolitan centre and colonial periphery could be governed according to the same legislation: Experience teaches us that the doctrine and principle of liberty and equality, transplanted to the Antilles, can produce nothing there except devastation, massacres, and conflagrations. What the founders of a society composed of masters and slaves thus needed to do was protect it from any political influences capable of inducing the slaves to slit the throats of their masters; and that is precisely why this society should not have been subject to [devoit être affranchie de] any legislation in the founding people’s own land that proscribes slavery. That principle being the fundamental base of what I call the colonial system, I insist on it, as an obvious fact, and I parry in advance any and all reasoning and arguments that one might wish to marshal in order to evade it. (4.14)

Colonial society in the Antilles depends for its very existence upon ‘its base, which is slavery’ (4.15). This, for Malouet, is the practical state of affairs that needs to be taken into account by even the most enlightened administrator, and that is rendered all the more practicable by the ‘natural’ docility of the enslaved: ‘One must not’, Malouet noted, ‘consider negroes as a people aspiring to independence and collectively engaged in finding the means to secure it. This species of men is, on the contrary, naturally disposed to obedience’ (4.56). But, he cautioned, the colonial system, in order to be a system and not merely an instantiation of what he elsewhere calls ‘colonial despotism’ (5.19), nonetheless has to be carefully regulated, which requires finding a juste milieu between ‘unlimited slavery’ and ‘proclaimed freedom’ that colonial administrators in the past had often proved unable or unwilling to enforce (4.21). Master–slave relations are the ‘fundamental combination’ upon which colonial society depends, and hence should not be meddled with, but that does not mean they cannot be rectified (4.19): ‘the authority of the master must be respected’, for instance, ‘but his fantasies, his anger, must be curbed’ (4.23). The colonial system must be restored and reformed, resulting in ‘a servitude better ordered than the old version’ (4.83–84); even certain shifts in terminology might facilitate this happy result, such as substituting the term non libre for the word esclave (4.23; ‘Since the word slave represents to us a man enchained, let the label of not free be substituted for it’).28 In a direct commentary on this fine distinction of Malouet’s, Vastey sensibly responded: ‘What does the name matter, if the fact exists?’ (1814b, 7) Vastey would joust with Malouet for the entirety of his career as a

Christophean scribe, beginning in October 1814—in the twenty-four-page companion piece to Colonial System, the Notes à M. le Baron de V. P. Malouet, where he offered a close reading of some of the most objectionable assertions in Malouet’s 1802 Introduction—and ending with his last book, where he reminded readers that ‘the foundations of the colonial system rest on slavery and colour prejudices with a view to preserving the supremacy of whiteness, which the ex-colonists guard so jealously’ (1819, 4). What differentiates Colonial System from Vastey’s other works in this regard is that the explicit critique of Malouet is supplemented by a parodic appropriation of his language, a strategy that is most evident in the book’s paratexts: its title, obviously, but also, and especially, its unattributed epigraph, ‘Here it is, revealed, this secret full of horror. The Colonial System: White Domination, Blacks Massacred or Enslaved’ (‘Le voilà donc connu ce secret plein d’horreur: Le Système Colonial, c’est la Domination des Blancs, c’est le Massacre ou l’Esclavage des Noirs’; see Figure 2). As an initial point of entry for Colonial System, this epigraph can be read on its own terms, as a simple if provocative summary of the book’s contents, rendered all the more emphatic by the typographical doubling of italic and roman script and the reliance on a Gothic vocabulary of secrecy and horror, of the sort that had become such a staple of both proand antislavery representations of the Haitian Revolution. The epigraph becomes immeasurably more interesting, however, once we realize that it is an allusion to and distortion of one of the more lurid moments in Malouet’s 1802 Introduction. Midway through the Introduction, interrupting an extremely dry account of the need for fiscal reform in the colony, Malouet’s language becomes suddenly energized as his thoughts turn to the recent cessation of hostilities between France and Britain, and the ongoing resistance of Toussaint Louverture to General Leclerc’s forces, which had arrived in the colony in early February of that year with the intent of ‘demolishing Louverture’s power and severely restricting the access of the former slaves to political power’ (Dubois, 2004, 259). ‘As I write, peace is proclaimed, and yet’, Malouet fumed, ‘in the torrid zone French blood is still flowing. A black man, a mule driver grown old in slavery, disputes the sovereignty of Saint-Domingue with the peacemaking hero of Europe’ (4.46). This muletier (Malouet does not deign to refer to Toussaint by name) ‘permitted whites to live in a state of degradation while they were under his orders, but he slits their throats as soon as the

French Government tries to reassume its place in the colony’. Malouet then continues: ‘Here it is, revealed, this secret full of horror. Liberty for the blacks: Domination for them! Whites massacred or enslaved. Fields and cities burned to the ground’ (4.46; ‘Le voilà donc connu ce secret plein d’horreur: la liberté des noirs, c’est leur domination! c’est le massacre ou l’esclavage des blancs, c’est l’incendie de nos champs, de nos cités’). This passage, which concludes with Malouet affirming that ‘these blacks have evidently forfeited their liberty: let them return to the yoke!’ (4.47), is straightforwardly refuted by Vastey in his Notes (1814a, 13–15), but the refutation of Malouet in the epigraph to Colonial System is of another, more literary order. As an example of ‘parodic (re)citation’ (Bongie, 1998, 290), it both reverses and reiterates colonial discourse in a manner that clearly anticipates the sort of counterdiscursive work performed by later postcolonial writing. Simple reversals of black and white—of the sort associated, say, with the poetics of Negritude— are foregrounded in the epigraph, but are clearly not the whole story. For instance, the fact that the epigraph offers not a spontaneous deployment of Gothic language but a self-conscious reiteration of Malouet’s eager recourse to it opens a space for critical reflection on the process of ‘making history Gothic’ that was so typical of proslavery accounts of the ‘horrors of SaintDomingue’, and on how that process served the reactionary purpose of ‘reinforc[ing] the construction of the revolution as unthinkable’ (Clavin, 2007, 29); it also creates a space for confronting the question—a pressing one, given Vastey’s own evident commitment to unveiling secrets full of horror—of whether ‘a Gothic language of antislavery’ truly challenges, or subtly reinforces, that purpose (Cleves, 143). Throughout Colonial System, Vastey’s parodic relation to Malouet incites these sort of difficult, if productive, reflections—as when in his opening address to the King, to cite one last paratextual example, he identifies Christophe as the Haitian leader who finally uprooted ‘the ancient tree of slavery and colonial despotism’, thus perversely merging the revolutionary language of Dessalines (‘ancient tree of slavery’) and the ‘reformist’ language of Malouet (‘colonial despotism’).29 What are we to make of this monstrous hybrid, and the textual practice that can yoke together two such very opposed voices?

Figure 2    Le système colonial dévoilé (1814), title-page

In my essay contribution to this volume (Chapter 3, below), I address some of the interpretive challenges posed by the textual hybridity of Colonial System, focusing in particular on forms of intertextual appropriation made possible by acts of reading (and listening). At this point, however, we need to return to the summer of 1814 and resume our chronological narrative about Restorationist plans for reopening the ‘route to Saint-Domingue’. While virtually every ex-colonist who wrote to the Ministry of the Marine concerning Saint-Domingue during that time (and/or flooded the book market with plans and reports on the subject) was agreed on the desirability of this restoration, they differed as to the ease or difficulty of achieving it. For some, such as the Creole Jean-Jacques de la Martellière, ‘the means of restoring the colony of Saint-Domingue and the Colonial system’ (to cite the title of the thirty-six-page report he submitted to Malouet on 8 June) were well within France’s reach. If France were not in a position to subdue SaintDomingue on its own, then ‘all the other colonial powers ought to join

forces with France to launch a crusade against an anti-colonial society [former une croisade contre une société anti-colonial] whose very existence, let us be frank, is a disgrace to all colonial governments’. However, he continues, this is happily not the case, because ‘France will need to use only a small part of its forces to reestablish its authority and the empire of its laws over the colony; she merely has to want to do so. One should not exaggerate the difficulties involved in subduing the insurgents and restoring the plantations of St. Domingue’.30 Others, by contrast, stressed ‘the great difficulties that will have to be overcome if we are to retake it’.31 As one fourteen-year resident of the colony, a certain Morin, put it: ‘The attempt made after the peace of Amiens [in 1802] to secure its conquest will no doubt be a lesson to the current Government, which must not blind itself to the fact that the unfavourable result of that campaign has added to the difficulties of any new one that would reunite France with the finest of its colonies’.32 Adding to these difficulties, Morin subsequently noted, was the absolute intransigence of Christophe, ‘whom it is impossible to win over’ (5), ‘the negro in command of the Province of the North, and the negroes commanding under him, having no interest in the establishment of a colonial system that would take away their authority’ (9). Thus, he concluded, ‘there is only one means to regain the colony without destroying it, and that is to treat with Pétion’ (8), which will be possible only if the condition of the hommes de couleur is ‘ameliorated’ and ‘concessions are made that will attach them to the colonial system’ (8). Malouet himself advised Louis XVIII that regaining Saint-Domingue would be neither as easy nor as difficult as people were making it out to be. ‘The restoration of St. Domingue, considered by some to be impossible and by others as a very simple matter, is neither the one nor the other, it seems to me’, he wrote in June.33 He expressed optimism that ‘it would be possible to keep the class of cultivators in a state of slavery (under a gentle regimen)’, but cautioned—with his usual sensitivity to terminological niceties—that ‘the word itself must be suppressed at all costs: this class must be attached to the glebe [like serfs], and produce the same results only in a different guise’. In order to ascertain whether the use of force would be required to bring about this restoration of French rule, the first step was ‘to send secret agents out to St. Domingue to assess the current state of that colony’, Malouet

argued in a letter of 24 June to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, whose help he sought in facilitating such a mission (which already had royal approval).34 The three men selected for the mission (Dauxion Lavaysse, Franco de Medina, Draverman) were given secret instructions by Malouet on how to conduct themselves,35 which contained, among other things, repeated assertions regarding the necessity of reimposing slavery in ‘the colony of Saint Domingue’,36 and of creating a new five-caste racial hierarchy there,37 as well as assurances that the King had already given the order to prepare an armed expedition should the present negotiations not bear fruit, and that no one should doubt that ‘if the King of France wanted to bring all his forces to bear on a handful of his rebel subjects who make up scarcely one one-hundredth of the population of his dominions… he would break them, even if it meant having to exterminate them’ (qtd. Vastey, 1819, suppl. 53). Malouet’s secret agents left Paris on 30 June, travelling first to England, and arriving in Jamaica almost two months later, on 26 August. From there, Lavaysse, in his capacity as ‘Principal agent of His Excellence the Minister of the Marine and Colonies’, sent a letter of introduction to Pétion on 6 September, and to Christophe on 1 October. The letter to Christophe, ‘a strange mixture of stupid flattery, and still more stupid intimidation’, as one British commentator put it a few years later (Barskett, 366),38 predictably generated ‘a feeling of the greatest indignation’ when it was read out to Christophe and his privy council and it became clear that France was offering not independence and a reparation of injustices but ‘a tissue of insults, fanfaronades, and lies’ (Vastey, 1819, 208). Christophe convoked a General Council of the Nation on 21 October, and had Lavaysse’s letter read out to them. In his 1819 Essai, Vastey provides a powerful account of what it was like to be in that room and watch the electrifying effect the letter’s contents had on its listeners: Among the members [of the council] there were some who had worn the chains of the French, who had been branded by them, whose mutilated limbs still bore the mark of them, attesting to their long and cruel sufferings, and to the barbarism of our tyrants. Others remembered having watched fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, relatives or friends being hanged, burned, drowned, or eaten by dogs. And it was to these old warriors, their bodies covered in noble scars, who had watched the sanguinary hordes of the Leclercs and the Rochambeaus flee before them, that this proposal was being made: that they once again submit to the yoke of those odious tyrants, that they choose between slavery and death! On

the instant, all the hatred and the desire for vengeance that had been lulled by the passage of time reawakened with an incredible strength and vigour. (1819, 212–13)

I have quoted at some length Vastey’s account of this scene from October 1814 because it exemplifies the dynamics of collective memory that are at the heart of Colonial System (as Marlene Daut shows in her contribution to this volume). The visceral memories on display here are what produced this book, published that same month of October 1814, and they are what the book is itself intent on producing: awakened memories that cannot be simply cordoned off from the present but that make themselves felt on the body, avec une force et une énergie incroyables. This representing of the colonial past and its horrors draws fully-fledged citizens exercising their civic duty as membres of a national council (back) into a disturbing identification with their membres mutilés, the parts of their enslaved bodies that were tortured by the French; but it also has the energizing effect of reproducing a vision of these same masterful colonists in retreat, fleeing those whom they once fed to the dogs. Notwithstanding, or precisely because of, the traumatic memories of subjection it provokes, the reading of Lavaysse’s letter to the representatives of the national body reawakens the active vision of a revolutionary future: ‘The members of the council rose spontaneously, and swore on the point of their swords, in the name of the Haytian people, that they would rather be exterminated down to the last than renounce their liberty and independence by submitting to France!’ (213) Oblivious to the hostile reception of his letter in Christophe’s kingdom, Lavaysse left Kingston for the southern republic on 17 October, at the invitation of Pétion, and arrived in Port-au-Prince on the 24th, where he was again overcome with fever, delaying the start of negotiations with Pétion and his chief aides Inginac and Boyer until 8 November. By all accounts, their discussions in the ensuing two weeks were cordial, but the mood changed dramatically on the 20th when envoys from Christophe arrived in Port-au-Prince with freshly printed copies of the General Council of the Nation’s resolution to live free or die, as well as, and much more importantly, copies of Malouet’s secret instructions to his agents, in which were plainly stated France’s intention of regaining sovereignty over ‘SaintDomingue’ and of restoring some form of slavery in the colony. How had Christophe gained hold of those instructions? Shortly after the meeting of

the Council, another of Malouet’s agents, Franco de Medina, had been arrested on 11 November while reconnoitring Christophe’s territory; the secret instructions had been found on his person and, upon subsequent interrogation (17 November), he had expanded on France’s ongoing plans to retake the colony with Pétion’s help. As per the King’s policy that ‘all documents received from abroad by His Majesty’s cabinet having to do with the French government be made public by means of the printing press’ (Vastey, 1816a, 1), the instructions were immediately published and rushed to Port-au-Prince. We will never know Pétion’s true motives for ‘temporizing with Lavaysse’ (Griggs, 59), and leaving the Frenchman with the impression when he first met with the President and his top aides that ‘they seemed disposed to recognize the sovereignty of France, on condition that she not send any garrisons’,39 but it is certain that the ‘making public’ of these secret instructions forced Pétion’s hand, leading him to suspend negotiations and reassure his fellow citizens of his unwavering commitment to Haitian independence (first in an assembly of generals and magistrates on 27 November and then in a public Proclamation on 3 December). At the same time, it also led him to confirm, for the first time publicly, a central component of those abruptly terminated negotiations, namely, his willingness to pay an indemnity to France for its lost property, ‘to submit to pecuniary sacrifices’ as a sign of the republic’s favourable disposition with regard to its former colonial master (a point to which I will return at the end of this section). Pétion and Lavaysse parted on good terms in early December. Even in February 1815, writing from London, the latter was sanguine about the future state of negotiations with the southern republic, especially if the ‘absurd’ idea of restoring slavery in the colony were to be abandoned, but warned that nothing could be expected from Christophe: ‘Permit me to say it, Your Excellency, even had a Grégoire or a Wilberforce been sent to speak to Christophe in France’s interest, their efforts would have had no effect on that madman’.40 As it happens, Vastey played a central role in the Medina affair. Whether it is true or not—as a former British consul to Haiti, Charles Mackenzie, claimed in 1830—that ‘by the intrigues and treachery of Vastey, it was discovered that he [Medina] was possessed of documents calculated to

promote dissension’ (2.84; see also Madiou, 5.259), Vastey certainly made his presence felt at the Te Deum ceremony organized by Christophe on 17 November in Cap-Henry to celebrate the French spy’s capture. In a packed church, with Medina himself in attendance standing on a stool for all to see, thanks were given and the secret instructions were then read out to the crowd, along with the minutes of the meeting of the General Council of the Nation. After Chevalier Prézeau’s reading of the minutes, it was Vastey’s turn to speak. First he read from his colleague Prézeau’s just-published Réfutation de la lettre du général français Dauxion-Lavaysse, and then from his own Notes à M. le Baron de V. P. Malouet. As the more incendiary comments of Lavaysse and Malouet were read, and refuted, the crowd became increasingly agitated, and officers were seen reaching for the hilt of their swords at each offensive passage. As reported in the Gazette royale of 20 November, Medina’s legs began to shake, he started gasping for air, and eventually fell to his knees. But, when he heard the thundering words of Monsieur the Baron de Vastey— ‘Friends! let nothing stop the anger you feel upon hearing those words “Slave” and “Master”; the tocsin of liberty has sounded! […] Hasten to arms, let your torches be lit, let the carnage begin, and vengeance be taken!’—Franco, believing that he saw thousands of bayonets pointed toward his chest, and seized with fright, took a decided turn for the worse. Vinegar and a cordial were required to restore him from his useful terror. What a pity that his two colleagues, Dauxion Lavaysse and Draverman, could not be by his side; what a lovely trio they would have made! And you, you debilitated wretch [et vous vieux cacochyme], who allowed your retainers to play the dangerous role of spy, o Malouet! what a delightful figure you would have made in the company of these ambassadors of yours. (2–3)

One can scarcely imagine a more dramatic counterpoint to Clarkson’s Vastey, modestly working behind the scenes to produce a few observations for the edification of a foreign audience.41 Here, in an equally but differently scribal performance, orality supplements writing, and the ‘powers of oratory’, flowery or otherwise, produce an immediate effect on Vastey’s friends (and the one enemy among them), a vernacular audience moved by his written words despite the fact that the community to which it belongs ‘remained overwhelmingly illiterate and indebted to oral forms of communication’.42 It is altogether possible that the journal article in the Gazette was written by Vastey himself. Regardless of its provenance, what the author of this

blistering apostrophe to the vieux cacochyme did not know, but would soon find out, is that he had been addressing not the absent but the dead. Malouet had in fact died over two months before, on 7 September, but news of his death would only reach Cap-Henry a week or two after the Te Deum ceremony. One of Vastey’s fellow scribes, Baron de Dupuy, began a work of his published in December by noting that he had just learned of Malouet’s death: ‘It is, in truth, a very great loss for the ex-colonists, especially as he was perhaps the person in France most attached to the colonial system and the most zealous champion of the slave trade. His death’, Dupuy added, must have thrown the partisans of slavery, the votaries of the slave trade into horrible convulsions; how they must have plotted, what strings they must have pulled, to replace that Minister with another ex-colonist of the same religion, the same tenacity, and whose despicable prejudices might ensure that this same system, with its plan for ending the independence of Hayti, will be followed to the letter. (1814a, 1–2)43

In another book that rolled off the printing press of Pierre Roux in December,44 the King’s Foreign Minister, Julien Prévost (the Comte, and later Duc, de Limonade), likewise noted, in its concluding paragraphs, that news of Malouet’s death had only just reached him, and went on to remark that it was a pity ‘this fiercest and most formidable of adversaries did not have the opportunity to learn about the sterile outcome of the mission of his three spies; but his spirit lives on in the soul of the ex-colonists’ (1814, 36). Malouet’s spirit did indeed outlive him, for, despite an official disavowal of the secret instructions and the bungling manner in which the mission had been conducted, plans for a military expedition were being actively pursued at the time Lavaysse finally returned to Paris at the end of February. The unsuccessful nature of the secret mission to Haiti ‘would have made the projected military enterprise, decided upon in February 1815, an inevitability, had the return of Napoleon not upset all those plans’ (Benot, 1992, 175). Napoleon’s return from Elba in March ‘put an end to [French] plans for the conquest of Haiti’ (Griggs, 59), and during his Hundred Days of power the restored Emperor further complicated the situation by abolishing the slave trade in France, effectively forcing the Bourbon monarchy’s hand in this matter when it was restored for a second time, in June 1815. In the two Haitis, meanwhile, the stark differences between Pétion’s friendly temporizing with Lavaysse and Christophe’s intransigent

treatment of Medina provided the grounds for polemical exchanges between the rival regimes that year: the so-called guerre des plumes that generated Vastey’s next five publications (1815a, 1815b, 1815c, 1816a, 1816b) after the two inaugural texts from October 1814. Notwithstanding these bitter exchanges, the dramatic events of November prompted a growing commitment on the part of both governments to overlook internal differences in the case of an actual attack on their territories. The French government, to be sure, ‘persisted in its efforts to persuade and cajole its former subjects into submission’ (Nicholls, 1979, 48), but as the head of a second, rather more diplomatic, mission to Haiti that was sent out in 1816 reported to Louis XVIII upon his return to France, ever since the revelation of Malouet’s secret instructions ‘the leaders can think of nothing but separating from France, they have redoubled their efforts at filling everybody’s head with the idea of independence, and in Christophe’s territory as in Pétion’s they are all fanaticized by that word’.45 It was becoming clear to an ever-growing number of government officials, and even to some of the less obtuse ex-colonists, that the dream of restoring French sovereignty over the former colony would have to be nuanced. Over the next several years, arguments in favour of direct military action became less and less frequent: even a diehard like General Étienne Desfourneaux, a veteran of the Leclerc expedition, when arguing in 1817 for ‘the restoration of a vast and flourishing colony’ and laying out the ‘general principles for a new colonial system’,46 felt compelled to spend much of his time refuting ‘the partisans of a calamitous emancipation’ (5), who were willing to renounce French sovereignty in return for the payment of indemnities. ‘The idea of emancipating Saint-Domingue’, Desfourneaux fulminated, ‘and of being paid indemnities in return, as the reward for this huge concession, is an exorbitant idea [une conception extravagante] of the false friends of the Blacks’, which would have the deleterious effect of ‘legitimizing revolt, ceding the property of French subjects to savage hordes’, and allowing ‘insurgent Negroes to take their place among the American powers’ while according the French government ‘no other compensation than that of an illusory and humiliating promise’ (28). As Desfourneaux’s livid reaction to this conception extravagante makes clear, Pétion’s idea of indemnities (which, in a typical erasure of Haitian agency,

Desfourneaux attributes to French philanthropists) was gaining in momentum as the tumultuous decade drew to a close. By 1820, Clarkson could respond in the negative, and with the greatest of certainty, to Christophe’s question, ‘Will France ever fit out an expedition expressly for the purpose of conquering Hayti?’ ‘The universal answer to this in France’, Clarkson wrote in his 10 July letter to the King, ‘is—No—any French Ministers collecting an armament solely French, and solely for such a purpose, would be considered to be mad, or like persons who should attempt to jump from the Earth to the Moon’ (164v). Rather than shooting for the moon, in its search for colonies France would henceforth begin looking elsewhere and, in the case of Algeria, much closer to home: as one historian has recently argued, ‘the conquest of Algeria, in its initial stage’, from the late 1820s to the seizure of Algiers on 5 July 1830 and the subsequent appointment of Bertrand Clauzel (who served under Leclerc and Rochambeau in the SaintDomingue expedition of 1802–03) as first governor of French North Africa, may ‘be construed as an attempt to provide France with a substitute for the riches of Saint-Domingue rather than a new colonial departure’ (Todd, 169–70). When Frantz Fanon arrived in Algeria in 1953, he would encounter there a flourishing avatar of the same old colonial system that had been developed across the Atlantic in Saint-Domingue: in this regard, there can be nothing surprising about the many powerful affinities between Vastey’s and Fanon’s systemic critiques of colonial governance. If such forms of direct governance seemed less and less viable for the insurgent state(s) of Haiti, its former rulers were beginning to lay the foundations for alternative, neo-colonial forms of indirect rule there, based on the strategy of securing both economic and cultural control over an ostensibly independent nation. Indemnities, and the fiscal debt they entailed, were a means to the first end. For an idea of what the second, cultural, form of control might entail, we can listen to the words of one Frenchman writing in 1818 who had recently visited ‘the republic of Haiti’ and was optimistic that, once France recognized the ‘impossibility’ of reconquering the former colony and accepted the idea of the republic’s independence (and its offer of indemnities), it could get down to the business of negotiating with Pétion on more equal terms, help the republic defeat Christophe’s ‘ferocious and barbaric’ government, and lay the foundations

for mutually beneficial commercial treaties and cultural relations in the future. ‘Let us say it one more time’, he wrote: French blood runs in the veins of the hommes de couleur; with them, the natural sentiment that consanguinity inspires is far from extinguished. It manifests itself so often, and on so many different sorts of occasions, that it can be looked upon as a disposition rendering them favourable in advance to a treaty that benefits them as much as it does France. Besides the ties of blood that draw them to this treaty, the hommes de couleur must prefer— doubtless would prefer—to retain an attachment to France because of its status as the leading nation of Europe in matters of civilization and when it comes to territorial and industrial resources [tenir à la France comme la première nation de l’Europe sous les rapports de la civilisation et des ressources territoriales et industrielles].47

Here, with this conciliatory appeal to consanguinité and civilisation, the ground is being prepared for a new, seemingly more consensual, form of relations between the colonial centre and the post/colonial periphery, where a rhetorical premium is placed on cultural affinities and resources over economic and political domination. Writing in 1818, the author of this appeal was clearly unable to detach his insights into neo-colonial hegemony from a racialized logic of blood ties (les liens du sang) and to look forward to the day when ‘consanguinity’ might be invoked on cultural grounds alone. In describing the very different positions adopted at this time with regard to France by Pétion and his successor Boyer’s government, on the one hand, and Christophe’s, on the other, it is still extremely difficult to avoid becoming reentangled in a version of this same logic, as witness the plausible but at the same time troubling claim of one recent historian that ‘while the former slave Christophe had always had his eyes turned toward England, for Boyer and the mulatto elite that were in charge of the Republic, the choice of France as model and as a power allied to Haiti was conceivable if the danger of colonial reconquest had been definitively ruled out’ (Brière, 89; my italics). Does Christophe, proud citizen of the French Republic from 1793 to 1802, have to be understood as a ‘former slave’, his eyes ‘always’ turned to Britain, in order to explain why it was that he forbade Clarkson even to name ‘the subject of indemnification’ during any negotiations the latter might have with the French (Griggs and Prator, 198), despite the abolitionist’s advice to the contrary?48 And is it really necessary to identify Boyer with the ‘mulatto elite’ in order to understand his willingness to choose France as model and pay the price she

asked for recognition of Haitian independence? (How) can we sidestep this sort of essentializing logic (even in its diluted, seemingly de-racialized culturalist form) when attempting to account for the very different positions adopted by the two Haitian leaders and their respective publicists? However one chooses to represent this choice of a rapprochement with France, it is certain that the collapse of Christophe’s kingdom in October 1820 greatly facilitated it: ‘the death of Christophe and the reunion under Boyer of the entire French part of Saint-Domingue offers new opportunities’, a special commission headed by the Duc de Richelieu concluded in meetings held in January 1821, urging secret negotiations to find out ‘what indemnities Boyer could grant the colonists’, and looking forward to the signing of a commercial treaty that would (as was the case with Britain and the United States) ‘recognize independence without it being necessary to confirm it expressly’.49 ‘Without the counterbalancing presence of someone like Christophe’, writes historian Laurent Dubois, ‘Boyer in a way represented just what French officials and writers had for years hoped to find in Haiti: a pliant and cooperative elite, ready to work with France to create a new form of external control’ (2012, 103). Even with Christophe out of the picture, though, this work proved slow, and the recognition of Haitian independence would not come about for another four years, and under conditions much less favourable than Pétion in 1814 or Boyer in 1821 could ever have imagined. In 1825, the new French King, Charles X, issued a royal ordinance that unilaterally imposed an onerous indemnity of 150 million francs on Haiti as the price for (conditional) recognition of its independence, and had the ordinance sent to Port-auPrince accompanied by a squadron of fourteen gunboats with orders to impose a naval blockade on the country should Boyer not accept it.50 With Boyer’s acceptance of the French ultimatum, helpful as it may have been in promoting the internal consolidation of his regime, ‘Haiti suddenly became a debtor nation, an unlucky pioneer of the woes of postcolonial economic dependence’ (Dubois, 2012, 102). The indemnity of 1825, one Haitian economist notes, turned out to be a weight on the nation ‘that smothered all possibility of growth for the economy’; the acceptance of the royal ordinance proved ‘a solution of despair’ (Péan, 165, 168). In this one

respect, at least, it can be said with certainty that the Christophean regime offered Haiti other solutions, and hope for a different sort of future. With regard to Haiti’s emerging status as ‘the first testing ground of neocolonialism’ (M.-R. Trouillot, 1990a, 57), Vastey would show an admirable prescience, both at the economic level, as the first writer to attack the idea of indemnities, and at a cultural level, as an equally astringent critic of France’s seductive rhetoric of civilization and consanguinity. As early as January 1815, in a close reading of Pétion’s Proclamation of 3 December 1814 (in which the offer of indemnification that had been made to Lavaysse was unveiled to the public), Vastey had inveighed against the proposed arrangement: ‘You are offering pecuniary sacrifices to impose silence on your persecutors! Haytians made tributaries to ex-colonists! Can you contemplate this prospect without shuddering in horror! Who is the Haytian vile enough to want to pay his portion of this shameful tribute!’ (1815a, 11) From that moment on, Vastey never ceased attacking the scandalous idea of Haitians ‘paying a tribute to France and to the ex-colonists’ (1819, ix), and thereby sacrificing the fruit of their labours for the benefit of ‘those who murdered [Vincent] Ogé and Toussaint, those who are our most mortal enemies, our most ruthless persecutors’ (1815a, 12). In his very last works such attacks would be supplemented by a growing awareness of the ongoing shift in tactics from colonial coercion to neo-colonial consent, and the consequent emphasis on a civilizing mission that could be conducted regardless of whether Haiti were an old colony or a young nation in need of tutelage. The French, he wrote in his 1817 Réflexions politiques, are ‘no longer adopting the features of a dreadful monster threatening to exterminate our race down to the last child but rather those of a siren whose melodious voice and seductive forms are inviting us to throw ourselves into their arms’ (iv). In his 1819 Essai, an irony-laced description of a kinder, gentler world in which ‘France no longer has to make a conquest of Saint Domingue, but will instead dedicate itself to the task of nurturing civilization and morals there, and a new order of things more in accordance with nature, justice, and humanity’, is followed with the acerbic comment: ‘as if we were ignorant of the fact that a people can be conquered just as well, and even better, by means of civilization, persuasion, and seduction, rather than by force of arms’ (253).51 Notwithstanding such precocious insights into forms

of neo-colonial governance that would become all too familiar to the global south in the second half of the twentieth century, Vastey continued to struggle in the last years of his life, as he had in the past, on behalf of an independence that would be not nominal, not fictitious, but real, and recognized as such; to be ‘free and independent in the face of the universe, and in the fullest extent and signification of those words’, remained, he would affirm in the concluding pages of his last book, ‘our sine qua non’ (1819, 380, 384). The argument was, to be sure, getting much harder to make, and as we saw in the first section of this Introduction, had come to be entangled in a growing number of scribal compromises and complicities that might well be seen as signalling the absence of the very independence being argued for. Although by no means free from such entanglements, Colonial System looks out, and back, upon a very different world from the disheartening neocolonial order that comes into view in Vastey’s later works (just as it did in those of Fanon some 150 years later): a world in which the revolutionary struggle between the friends and enemies of universal emancipation could still be imagined as taking place (again) and eventuating in the (re)birth, and continued growth, of a truly free and independent nation, rather than its repeated smothering at the hands of those who claim to be nurturing it in the name of la civilisation. The challenge of reading Colonial System and belatedly navigating the unsettling terrain of its post/revolutionary world resides, one might suggest, neither in cynically dismissing the imaginative possibilities Vastey’s book offers, nor in freighting its ardent (re)invocations of anticolonial struggle with an equally problematic nostalgia—reasonable as such cynicism or comforting as such nostalgia might seem to us in view of our own neo-colonial horizons—but, rather, in remaining open to the unlikely task with which its now seemingly ‘lost cause’ charges us, that of ‘unearth[ing] the hidden potentiality (the utopian emancipatory potential) which was betrayed in the actuality of revolution and in its final outcome’ (Žižek, 84). The task, that is (to put it in rather more accessible, if less philosophically exact, terms), of approaching the Haitian Revolution and its troubling aftermath not (simply) in terms of success or failure, fidelity or betrayal, but (also) as unfinalized sites of potential, as ‘a reminder of what is possible: if it happened once, perhaps it can happen again’ (Dubois, 2012, 370).

III (1814–2014) Reading the Protean Text

In terms of its contents, Le système colonial dévoilé can be readily summarized. For two centuries, indeed, a summarizing, content-oriented approach to all of Vastey’s publications has been so dominant that it might well appear the only way to read him. From the very first mention of Colonial System in print, in his colleague Baron de Dupuy’s Deuxième lettre… à M. H. Henry, we get a sense of how this dominant reading works. In December 1814, Dupuy published two epistolary refutations of a pamphlet entitled Considérations offertes aux habitans d’Hayti sur leur situation actuelle et sur le sort présumé qui les attend: supposedly authored by a Monsieur ‘H. Henry’, the pamphlet had been drawn up in Jamaica upon Dauxion Lavaysse’s arrival there, and then circulated in Haiti, according to Vastey, ‘with the intention of preparing the ground’ for the French mission (1819, 206). Disputing the pseudonymous Henry’s irenic portrait of colonial Saint-Domingue, Dupuy notes that he has no room in the context of a mere letter ‘to enlarge upon the types of cruelty [les genres de cruautés] that were practised upon agricultural workers during the ten-year period allotted for their existence’, and so refers his proslavery correspondent ‘to a work that has just come out, entitled The Colonial System Unveiled, by Monsieur the Baron de Vastey, where you will find an extremely detailed account [où vous puiserez des détails très-cironstanciés] of the atrocious and inhuman manner in which the ex-colonists treated my fellow citizens at

that time’ (1814a, 7). Vastey’s book is, for Dupuy, essentially a resource to be drawn upon, a place where one can go to get detailed evidence of humanitarian abuses under colonial rule. Dupuy’s instrumental account of his fellow scribe’s book epitomizes the content-oriented approach to which Vastey’s work so ‘naturally’ lends itself —an approach that, not surprisingly, also dominates the few reviews of Colonial System published in his lifetime. In an 1816 review in The Scots Magazine, and Edinburgh Literary Miscellany, for instance, we are told that: ‘The object of the author throughout this volume is to prove the injustice and inhumanity of the colonial system as practised by Europeans; to expose the atrocities of negro slavery; to vindicate the intellectual and moral character of the native of Africa, and confute the doctrine, by which they are represented as an inferior race to the European’ (‘Specimens’, 809). A subsequent review of Colonial System in The Antijacobin Review from November 1818 (which would be partially reproduced in April 1819 in the Philadelphia-based journal The Port Folio), provides a similar assessment of the book, albeit with an additional emphasis on its language that points toward the possibility of a form-oriented reading of the ‘publication of this Haytian Nobleman’. The ‘object of [this book]’, the reviewer states, is to lay before his countrymen a number of important facts, which, though possessing the authority of foreign historians, or the credibility of eye and ear witnesses in Hayti, had not till now been given to Haytians in the language of one of themselves. After dwelling on the distinction of the aboriginal Haytians, the origin of slavery, and the monstrosities in the traffic in human blood; the Baron de Vastey proceeds to an enumeration of the cruelties which the French inflicted on his unfortunate countrymen. (‘Système’, 1818, 243; ‘State’, 1819, 315)

As the transatlantic consensus makes clear, the ‘object’ of Vastey’s first book could not have been more apparent to his first readers, and they were by no means wrong in their assessment of its contents, as readers of this bicentenary translation will find out for themselves once they have read its stunningly detailed critique of ‘the injustice and inhumanity of the colonial system’. First-time readers of the text today will no doubt be as struck by the incendiary contents of Colonial System as were readers and reviewers in the 1810s and will be equally struck by the fact that these contents remarkably anticipate so many of the central themes and concerns of twentieth-century

anticolonial thought (Césaire, Fanon, Sartre…). Such readings are an essential starting point for any appreciation of Vastey’s pathbreaking critique of the colonial system. However, the approach first adopted by Dupuy and then replicated by any number of historians and literary critics over the past two centuries who have touched upon his work has its limits, for it loses sight of the challenges that Colonial System poses at the level of form—or, more exactly, it runs the risk of reinscribing the conventional wisdom that texts of this type elicit few, if any, such challenges and therefore cannot provoke the sort of hermeneutic inquiry that characterizes, and legitimizes, the study of ‘Literature’. Drawing out the formal complexity of Colonial System (and attending to the ways in which this textual complexity itself refracts the lived complexity of the post/revolutionary times in which Vastey wrote) is thus a vital part of any recuperative project such as the one we are engaged in here. Assessing the form(s) taken by Vastey’s text is inseparable from taking note of the form(s) it does not take, most importantly (at this specific juncture in literary history) that of the slave narrative, a newly canonical genre that has over the past several decades come to satisfy, in its powerful enactment of ‘literacy as self-exposure’, what Srinivas Aravamudan calls the humanist desire to ‘demonstrate literature as the sign of humanity’ (1999, 271, 270).52 As Deborah Jenson has lately argued in her invaluable analysis of early Haitian textual production, Beyond the Slave Narrative, if we take the slave narrative (of which there are no easily recognizable examples in French) as the ‘gold standard of literary testimony from the socioracial substrata of Western colonialism’, then we will remain blind to the existence of other genres ‘that were produced, through complex and mediated processes by French colonial slaves, former slaves, and their descendants in the early postcolonial period’ (3). In line with ‘newer work in African-American and black Atlantic research’ that is equally committed ‘to destabiliz[ing] theories and methodologies that have privileged the slave narrative at the expense of less unified elements of the early African diasporan literary field’, Jenson thus suggests that we must ‘think outside the box of the dominant genre of early Afro-diasporic literature in the Anglophone world’ if we are to recognize, let alone meet, the formal challenges offered by the ‘heteroclite corpus’ of post/revolutionary Haitian writing (3, 1).

As one example of how ‘going beyond’ the slave narrative facilitates a formal reassessment of Vastey’s work, we can cite Laurie Maffly-Kipp’s recent efforts at reading him in relation to what she calls the ‘communal narrative genre’, which unlike the centripetal slave narrative refers ‘to a community beyond the self, be it defined by African descent, Christian communion, or, most commonly, both; and a more or less explicit linear chronology that situates the community in a wider history’ (8). This centrifugal mode of narrating African Americans ‘as parts of larger collective entities’ was so ubiquitous in nineteenth-century Afro-diasporic writing that one is left to wonder, she muses, ‘why the genre of the slave narrative has endured in scholarly memory as the representative “black voice” of this era’ (62). Dealing solely with Vastey’s ‘most widely circulated work’ (57), the 1817 translation of his Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères, Maffly-Kipp argues that Reflexions on the Blacks and Whites was an early and influential example of the communal narrative genre. With its ‘adroit blend of contemporary intellectual currents in biblical interpretation, ethnography, and the natural sciences’ (58), it ‘exhibited all the discursive elements that would animate the works of later and better-known black authors, writers [such as David Walker and Hosea Easton] whose works would become the foundation of black abolitionist rhetoric’ (62). Testifying to the growing awareness in African American studies of Vastey’s surprisingly prominent, if subsequently forgotten, status as an intellectual role model in black Atlantic print culture in the decades leading up to the Civil War,53 Maffly-Kipp’s genre-based reading of Vastey’s Réflexions remains, to be sure, very dependent upon a straightforward enumeration of its ‘paradigmatic themes’ (virtually all of which had been first rehearsed in the differently structured Colonial System). Nevertheless, an essential step forward has been taken here with Maffly-Kipp’s insistence that the meaning of the ‘discursive elements’ animating Vastey’s text cannot be fully understood or appreciated without a sensitivity to their formal status as combinatory (‘blended’) parts of a generic whole. Each of the essays in this bicentenary edition of Vastey’s Colonial System likewise attempts to arrive at some formal understanding of a text that, when set alongside the gold standard of the slave narrative, may well seem a curiously, and even disappointingly, formless instance of ‘literary testimony

from the socioracial substrate of Western colonialism’. As with MafflyKipp’s intervention, the most prominent tool for formal analysis in these essays is the concept of genre: all four contributors in one way or another are dedicated to showing how Colonial System adopts and adapts, revises and resists, generic conventions that were available to it at that time, and even anticipates new forms of expression that would gain recognition only in the following century. In ‘Monstrous Testimony: Baron de Vastey and the Politics of Black Memory’, for instance, Marlene Daut reads Colonial System as ‘an important precursor to the Latin American testimonio’, which emerged ‘as a tool against colonial oppression in Latin America in the 1960s’. ‘As a kind of proto-testimonio’, Daut argues, ‘Colonial System stands in opposition to the more commercial, alienating, and complicit literary genres of Vastey’s own era’, namely, ‘sentimental abolitionist narratives and gothic romances’. In ‘Abolition, Sentiment, and the Problem of Agency in Le système colonial dévoilé’, Doris Garraway also explores Vastey’s engagement with the sentimental genre of ‘antislavery polemic’, placing more emphasis than Daut on the way in which his text ‘ced[es] to contemporary literary conventions’, but ultimately stressing the manner in which his ‘genredefying’ work resists those conventions by adopting ‘a decidedly unsentimental style that cultivates a new politics of feeling and a widening of the space for antislavery agency’. Vastey’s alternately passive-sentimental and active-radical text becomes the productively ambiguous site, for Garraway, of a ‘straddling’ discourse that, notwithstanding or precisely because of its contradictions, makes it ‘the most politically radical antislavery tract of its time’. In my own essay, ‘Memories of Development: Le système colonial dévoilé and the Performance of Literacy’, I pursue a version of the same contradictory, passive-active reading of Vastey’s text as does Garraway, but with specific reference to another hegemonic genre of the time, the Bildungsroman. In its shifting deployment of textual sources, from an ‘immature’ (overly deferent, often to the point of plagiaristic) reliance on these sources in the first of its two chapters to a ‘mature’ assimilation of them in the second, Colonial System ‘exemplif[ies] the transitional Bildungsroman movement from readerly subjection to self-regulation’; however, at the same time as the text mirrors the Bildungsroman in its progressively more accomplished use of source materials, it also ‘chaf[es] against the performance of development’ that this ‘“reformist rather than

revolutionary”’ genre requires, resulting in a profoundly conflicted, doublevoiced conclusion that ‘both affirms and distances itself from the evolutionary attainments of Bildung’. In his closing reflections, finally, Nick Nesbitt reiterates and expands upon his recent analysis of Vastey’s work in relation to the genre (or better, meta-genre) of critique, specifying some of the ways in which Colonial System is ‘the founding major work’ of what he calls ‘Caribbean Critique’ (2013, 175), a tradition of thought ‘inaugurated’ by Vastey, and that ‘will culminate in texts such as Césaire’s Discours sur le colonialisme and Fanon’s Les damnés de la terre’ (189). The diverse range of formal readings put forward in these supplementary essays testifies to what Maffly-Kipp nicely refers to as the ‘textual mobility’ of Vastey’s writing (61). His work, especially Colonial System, is difficult to pin down, as witness the proliferation in these essays of words like ‘hybrid’ and ‘polyvalent’—or, in a somewhat different register, ‘contradictory’ and ‘paradoxical’—to describe the multiplicity of formal and ideological trajectories that constitute it. There are any number of other such words that might be used to signal the elusive mobility of this text, but in closing I would like to suggest the pertinence of one word in particular, namely protean, ‘taking or existing in various shapes, variable in form; characterized by variability or variation; variously manifested or expressed; changing, varying’ (OED). The appropriateness of this word resides, for me, in the fact that Vastey himself uses the classical figure of Proteus in a number of his publications to highlight the unprincipled conduct and language of his enemies: be it the archi-protée Pétion, ‘ceaselessly transforming himself into every imaginable form’ (1815b, 59; see also 1815b, 2; 1815c, 11), the secret agents and mercenary scribes who do Pétion’s bidding (1815b, 74), or the newly accommodating, neo-colonizing Frenchmen that we encountered at the end of the previous section who, like a ‘new Proteus, present themselves to us in every imaginable form, no longer adopting the features of a dreadful monster threatening to exterminate our race down to the last child but rather those of a siren whose melodious voice and seductive forms are inviting us to throw ourselves into their arms’ (1817b, iv). To speak appreciatively of Vastey’s ‘protean text’ is thus to turn his own language against itself, to appropriate and revalorize a word that his opponents in the South were quick to identify and mock as one of his preferred ‘epithets for master criminals’ (Sabourin, 1815, 8). In thus turning upon Vastey’s own

words, my goal is to draw attention to the ways in which his own words so often turn upon him; it is to accentuate the multiple turnings of Colonial System and the resultant complexities of form that have been so consistently overlooked, over the course of the past two centuries, by all those who would reduce the unsettling variability of his work to a single (propagandistic, publicistic…) content-laden message, be it in order to praise the messenger, or (as has most often been the case) to bury him. To lay such stress on ‘complexity’ here at the end of my Introduction is, of course, to run the danger of simply reinscribing the type of ‘emancipatory’ reading of Vastey-as-author that my repeated insistence on the scribal dimension of his work is meant to contest. To recall the words of my Preface, instead of giving him his due as a scribe, doesn’t an emphasis on Vastey’s formal complexity risk subjecting him ‘to our own understandable, if historically conditioned, desire for “autonomous” literary and cultural production’? In urging readers to approach Colonial System with an eye to this complexity, am I not promoting the ‘ideologically loaded understanding’ of ‘literary work’ that marginalized Vastey in the first place, and legitimizing the idea that we should grant him keys to the ‘republic of letters’ for having actually, appearances to the contrary, met the demands of this particular form of understanding? When attempting to recuperate a neglected author such as Vastey, there is no way around these sort of invidious questions; they are part and parcel of the exclusionary/inclusionary logic of canon expansion and reformation, be that canon defined in terms of literary, cultural, or historical criteria of ‘greatness’. But, in the case of the literary canon, one can at the very least remind ourselves that the complexity (formal or otherwise) demanded of the ‘authors’ who gain entry to it is not a good thing in and of itself, and that is another reason why the choice of the highly ambiguous epithet ‘protean’ to describe Vastey’s work strikes me as a particularly apt one, for it has the advantage of not simply erasing the negative connotations that he himself attaches to the word in his straightforward unveiling of Pétion and the neo-colonizing enemies of Haiti. The shape-shifting figure of Proteus reminds us, in a way that similarminded literary-critical buzzwords such as ‘dialogic’ or ‘pluriversal’ might not, that whatever complexity we find in Le système colonial dévoilé could just as readily trouble as redeem it, and, even more importantly, that what we recognize as ‘complex’ (or, for that matter, ‘simple’) in his writing has as

much, and perhaps everything, to do with us as it does with the elusive ‘object’ of our recognition.

Notes to Introduction

1 Clarkson’s instructions were issued on 20 November 1819 by the King’s Foreign Minister, the Duc de Limonade, and are included in Earl Leslie Griggs and Clifford H. Prator’s invaluable edition of the Christophe– Clarkson correspondence (Griggs and Prator, 1952, 173–77). 2 At the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818, Clarkson took the liberty of showing Alexander a letter of Christophe’s. As Clarkson later wrote to Christophe, the Emperor ‘confessed it had given him new ideas both with respect to Hayti and to your Government. He had been taught by the French and German newspapers (and he had no other source of information) that Hayti was inhabited by a people little better than savages. He now saw them in a very different light. The letter, which I had shewn him, was a letter of genius and talent. It contained wise, virtuous, and liberal sentiments. It would have done honour to the most civilized Cabinets of Europe’ (letter of 30 October 1818; Griggs and Prator, 121–22). 3 For useful introductory accounts of the Christophean regime, see Cheesman, Dubois (2012, 52–88), Griggs (38–80), and M. Hector (2009). Hubert Cole’s 1967 monograph remains the most authoritative scholarly record of Christophe’s life and accomplishments. 4 Clarkson’s Haitian papers are housed at the British Library (Add. MS 41266); the thirty-one-page letter is to be found on the double-sided folios 164–179 of this collection of papers (with the section devoted to Vastey on fols. 175v–179r). As with all of Clarkson’s letters, Griggs and Prator heavily edited the 10 July letter (200–07), suppressing a great many of the details of Clarkson’s representation of, and plans for, Vastey—on the by no means uncompelling grounds that, as Griggs points out in his Preface to the correspondence, Clarkson’s letters ‘are repetitious and laborious’. Some 60 per cent of the material from this letter that I quote in the following four paragraphs (and over 80 per cent of the material in the two indented passages) is not included in the published version. The nineteenth-century Haitian historian Thomas Madiou included an extensive French translation of this letter, with the entire discussion of Vastey, in an unpublished volume of his massive Histoire d’Haïti that eventually saw the light of day in 1988 (6.66–82). 5 On 3 September 1819, for instance, the King’s Foreign Minister, Limonade, sent Clarkson ‘a work just published by Baron Vastey’, in which, he suggested, ‘you will find [vous y verrez] authentic details concerning the history of our country, and a study of the

character of the King. You will find successfully refuted, I believe, the calumnies referring to his person which the enemies of the African race have delighted in spreading. In short, I believe that you will discover [vous y verrez] new reasons for esteeming him ever more highly. You will see in His Majesty a man frank, upright, patriotic, loving his fellow men and his country, incapable of ever betraying his people [Vous reconnaîtrez dans Sa Majesté un homme franc, probe, patriote, ami de ses semblables, de son pays, incapable dans aucune cironstance de manquer à ce qu’elle doit à son pays, à ses concitoyens, à lui-même]’ (Griggs and Prator, 153; fol. 86). 6 In his 1819 Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la Révolution de Saint-Domingue, to take but one example, General Pamphile de Lacroix (who played a prominent role in the 1802–03 campaign to restore Saint-Domingue to French rule and became closely acquainted with Christophe at the time) noted that he was unwilling to venture any affirmations regarding the truth about the Haitian monarch (‘je n’oserai point affirmer aujourd’hui ce qu’est Christophe’): ‘I’ve seen people, arrived from Port-au-Prince [the capital of Pétion’s republic], who have told me horror stories about him; I’ve seen others, arrived from the Cape [Christophe’s capital], who have represented him to me in the way I imagined him. Respectable people, whom I hold in esteem, have told me time and again that they’ve known him for years, from the inside, as a good father, a good husband, someone with a graciousness of manners that simply does not tally with the tales that are told about his acts of cruelty’ (2.265–66). 7 See the discussion in my Preface regarding Sibylle Fischer’s comments, in Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, about how even scholarly defenders of Christophe ‘appear to be at a loss when it comes to assessing his legacy’. 8 Such epistemological questions have always, of course, been central to accounts of (what are now, from the affirmative perspective of the burgeoning field of Haitian Revolutionary Studies) the more heartening realities of the revolution itself. The historian Matthew Clavin has pointed out, for instance, that memories of the Haitian Revolution were ‘both numerous and contradictory’ in the decades that followed upon it, resulting in ‘the emergence of two competing narratives that promised to tell the true story of the events that took place in Haiti’: the first being ‘the horrific Haitian Revolution’, and the second being ‘the heroic Haitian Revolution’ (2010, 11–12). The difficulty of reconciling these ‘conflicting versions of the same event’, he concludes, means that ‘we will never know the real history of the Haitian Revolution’, for all that we can engage in such empirical tasks as charting the various ways in which this ‘enigmatic’ symbol ‘resonated in both American and Atlantic public culture throughout the first half of the nineteenth century’ (13). 9 Christophe, as Clarkson and Wilberforce were well aware, was much attracted to the ‘plan of establishing Protestantism and the English language’ in Haiti (Cole, 239), as a way of ‘eradicat[ing] the last vestiges of French culture’ (Griggs, 61). In his 1819 Essai, Vastey stressed the central role of English in the nation-wide system of education developed by Christophe in the final years of his reign: if a ‘change in religion’ is ‘the most powerful means for transforming the manners and character of a nation’, then the second most powerful means is ‘to change languages’ (329). This policy was actively pursued between 1816 and 1820 as part of Christophe’s ambitious educational reforms, which were looked upon at the time as one of the regime’s crowning achievements, and continue to impress

historians today as a profoundly innovative feature of the monarchy’s ‘developmentalist’ agenda (see, e.g., M. Hector, 2009, 255). 10 Clarkson advises that ‘about 100 copies of this little work should be sent to England’, then be taken to Paris by ‘some one of your Majesty’s friends’ and distributed personally ‘to the most distinguished of the Peers and Deputies’, with a few copies reserved for ‘the most illustrious Potentates of Europe’. One copy was to be reserved for the editor of the Revue encyclopédique (launched in January 1819 as ‘the rallying point for a whole group of liberals opposed to the regime of the Restoration’; Benot, 2005, 273), with an eye to convincing him ‘to reprint it in that celebrated work, which is read in France, Italy, and Germany, and Poland, Prussia, and parts of the Russian Empire’ (178v). Were this little work ‘to produce an effect’, then efforts should be made ‘to reprint it in France and to give it a wider circulation’, although, Clarkson cautions, ‘the censeurs of the French are so very vigilant and so very rigid and severe, that it would not be allowed to be circulated if there was anything in it the least offensive to the French Government’ (178v–179r). Clarkson’s comments are precious in terms of helping us understand just how difficult it was for Vastey’s work to circulate in France during his lifetime. An anonymously written eleven-page report on his Réflexions politiques that was produced for the Ministry of the Marine in 1819 gives a good sense of the difficulties his views posed French officials. Summarizing Vastey’s account of ‘the conduct of the French with regard to Hayti after the enfranchisement of that island’, the author of the report notes: ‘The expression of animosity and hatred toward the old metropole is taken to the utmost level of exaggeration. What the author calls the crimes of our governments and the barbarity of their agents, of the entire nation, and above all of the ex-colonists, are displayed there in the most odious of lights’ (Archives nationales [Paris], Colonies, CC9A 51). 11 In Friends and Enemies: The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature, I argued that, ‘far from transcending the scribal relation to power, the work of the “real” intellectual or the “great” writer uncannily doubles the power relation that it appears to contest but with which it continues to engage’ (2008, 33). ‘Mere’ scribes and ‘great’ writers must, for the purposes of staking out the clear boundaries of an ‘autonomous’ republic of letters, be rigorously distinguished from one another, in acts of critical scapegoating that help solidify our sense of what ‘Literature’ is. As I there argue (221–53), Derek Walcott’s dismissive representations of Vastey in The Haitian Trilogy provide a textbook example of the ways in which the ‘true artist’ attempts to exorcize his ghostly scribal double. 12 The other, much briefer letter of Vastey’s to Clarkson is dated 24 March 1819 (Griggs and Prator, 136–37; fols. 65–66), and was accompanied by a copy of Vastey’s Réflexions politiques and a number of state documents concerning public instruction in Christophe’s kingdom. Both of these letters refer to Clarkson’s own correspondence with Vastey, which unfortunately has not survived. 13 It is this less ideologically loaded understanding as to what constitutes ‘literary work’ that allowed for a more favourable reception of early Haitian textual production at this time than would be possible even a few decades later, by which point the meta-narrative of ‘literary emancipation’ (as discussed in my Preface) had taken firm hold on the cultural imagination of critics and writers alike. The following excerpt from an enthusiastic 1820

account of Haitian ‘literature’ is exemplary with respect to this more open understanding: ‘When we consider how short a period has elapsed since the Haytians established their independence, and that the attention of their governors must principally be directed to supplying the necessities of the state, we cannot behold, without admiration, the rapid advances which they have made, not merely in the useful arts, but in literature. The love of liberty and independence pervades all their literary compositions, especially the addresses of their chieftains, Dessalines and Christophe’ (‘History’, 72). 14 For a more extended reading along these lines of the ending of Césaire’s play, see Bongie (2008, 253 n. 18). 15 For an informative discussion of how Clarkson and Wilberforce have been ‘perceived and remembered in quite different ways’ (33) both in their own lifetime and today, and of the tendency to view them ‘as rivals rather than as allies or coadjutors’ (43), see Oldfield (33–55). 16 The opposition between Wood and Gilroy that I have just put into play is intended to convey a sense of the two diametrically opposed normative conclusions that the abolitionist (and now, humanitarian) problematic has tended to generate. As such, it consolidates, albeit for heuristic purposes, the ‘false binaries’ on which ‘for too long’, as Christopher Brown has argued in Moral Capital, ‘assessments of abolitionist initiatives have foundered’: ‘the organizers and their constituencies were either selfless or self-interested; they were either humanitarians or hypocrites’ (459). ‘The motives that shape political behavior’, Brown cautions, ‘are rarely so simple’. 17 For an English-language summary of Vastey’s extensive account of the twelve-day festival, see Comhaire. 18 This transatlantic English-language media campaign took shape in the summer of 1816 with Marcus Rainsford’s translation of one of Vastey’s ‘minor’ works directed against Pétion (Vastey, 1816a; see Youngquist and Pierrot, xxxiii) and, most importantly, the London publication of Haytian Papers, a collection of ‘Haytian State Papers, in conjunction with some extracts from their ordinary Publications’ that was assembled and translated by the African American Prince Saunders (1816, i), who had been sent out to Haiti late in the previous year ‘at the suggestion of the English abolitionists’ (Griggs, 45; see also Cole, 229; White, 528), and had returned to London as the King’s agent to deliver letters to Clarkson and other abolitionists and, in the words of Christophe, ‘bring back with him the teachers whom I requested Mr. Wilberforce to procure for me, and who are to instruct our youth according to the approved English educational system’ (Griggs and Prator, 92). It is worth noting that Saunders felt compelled to begin Haytian Papers by countering rumours that ‘those official documents which have occasionally appeared in this country, are not written by black Haytians themselves; but that they are either written by Europeans in this country, or by some who, they say, are employed for that purpose in the public offices at Hayti’. ‘[F]or the entire refutation of this gross misrepresentation’, Saunders continues, ‘I upon my honour declare, that there is not a single white European at present employed in writing at any of the public offices; and that all the public documents are written by those of the King’s Secretaries whose names they bear, and that they are all black men, or men of colour’ (iii).

19 Brief excerpts of Colonial System were published in translation as part of an extended overview of the book that came out in The Scots Magazine, and Edinburgh Literary Miscellany for November 1816, where the Baron de Vartey [sic] is praised for having produced ‘the most elaborate and able’ of ‘several specimens from the infant press of Hayti’ (‘Specimens’, 808). These translated excerpts add up to almost 1,500 words, a little under 5 per cent of the actual book. 20 As Deborah Jenson has compellingly argued, it is vital to keep in mind that until 1809 French forces were still occupying Spanish Saint-Domingue (Santo Domingo), and that ‘the lingering French colonial presence on the island of Hispaniola was all too real a factor in what one might call Haiti’s failure to thrive’ (307). 21 Vastey’s role in this secret mission, of which there is no trace in the published record, is described in a letter dated 31 December 1814, addressed to the French Ministry of the Marine by Philippe Auguste Laffon de Ladebat (1758–1840), a former Saint-Domingue planter living in Jamaica (AN, CC9A 53): ‘[Christophe] sent, in the month of March, two ambassadors (chevalier Prézeau and chevalier Vasté [sic], two mulattoes), to propose some sort of treaty with Bonaparte should he have made peace with England and the other European powers. These ambassadors, having arrived right at the moment of the restoration of the King, would have proceeded on to Paris had they not been stopped by [the King’s agent in London, Jean-Gabriel] Peltier, who sent them back to SaintDomingue’ (15). For a detailed account of the émigré Peltier’s decade-long (1807–c.1816) role as Christophe’s ‘chargé d’affaires’ in Britain, see Maspero-Clerc (201–44). 22 AN, CC9A 47, Guybre to the Duc d’Angoulême, 6 April 1814. In fairness to Guybre, it should be noted that, as an intimate of Toussaint’s, he atypically laid the entire blame for the loss of Saint-Domingue on Napoleon’s decision to send his brother-in-law Leclerc there with ‘an army of thoroughgoing brigands, who, in committing every imaginable crime, plunged that unhappy country back into a state of utter chaos’. Under Toussaint, the colony ‘would have prospered’—a sentiment that was hardly shared, Guybre’s assertions to the contrary, by ‘all the landowners who lived in Saint-Domingue during [Toussaint’s] time’. 23 AN, CC9A 47, B. Fabre to Malouet, 17 July 1814. 24 AN, CC9A 47, Richepère to Malouet, 22 May 1814. 25 For a detailed account of Malouet’s ‘juste milieu’ colonial politics, focused on his activities in London in the 1790s, see Griffiths (197–227). 26 AN, CC9A 48, Malouet, letter of 12 July 1814. 27 Casual occurrences of this phrase can be traced back to the earliest years of the French Revolution, although Malouet was the first to develop it as a formal concept. Perhaps the most interesting prior usage of it for our purposes occurs in a 1798 speech delivered in the Council of Five Hundred by Étienne Mentor, the black deputy for Saint-Domingue, in which he attacked a new piece of legislation discriminating against blacks and people of colour: ‘Organ of my fellow citizens, I deemed it a matter of urgency to unveil for you the intrigues employed by the partisans of the old colonial system [de vous dévoiler les intrigues employées par les partisans de l’ancien systême colonial] in order that they might deceive the É

Executive Directory with regard to my unfortunate compatriots from the Antilles’ (É. Mentor, 1; my italics). For further details on Mentor, who would go on to become one of Dessalines’s most trusted advisors during his short-lived Empire, see G. Mentor. 28 Further along in his 1802 Introduction, Malouet invokes this same subtle distinction in a rather different manner, aggressively insisting that anyone who took part in the revolt should be ‘proclaimed a slave’ and severely disciplined, whereas ‘I would declare the negroes who remained on the plantations or who voluntarily returned there not free subjects [sujets non libres]’ (4.54–55). It is worth drawing attention to the emptiness of Malouet’s taxonomical niceties and the hypocrisy of his repeated search for less offensive ways of saying esclave (e.g., non libre, travailleur obligé, etc.), given that at least one recent commentator has taken those niceties very seriously indeed, and argued that an earlier 1789 proposal of Malouet’s to replace ‘slave’ with ‘serf ’ and ‘fief ’ was ‘partly symbolic, but also partly substantive. The master’s authority over the slave, implicitly restricted under the regime of the Code Noir, was here reduced as a matter of explicit principle’ (Ghachem, 227). This same commentator blithely assures us that the sincerity of this and other such ‘prudential arguments’ cannot be doubted, whereas ‘what Malouet in his heart of hearts really thought about the institution of slavery, by contrast, is simply off limits to the historian’ (165). 29 For a more detailed account of this parodic (re)citation of Dessalines and Malouet, see the footnote apparatus of my translation (n. 3). 30 AN, CC9A 47, J. de la Martellière, Des moyens de restauration de la colonie de Saint-Domingue, et du Sistême colonial, 3. 31 AN, CC9A 47, B. Fabre to Malouet, 17 July 1814. 32 AN, CC9A 47, Morin, Réflexions sur Saint-Domingue (report submitted to the Ministry of the Marine on 25 October 1814), 1. 33 AN, CC9A 48, Malouet to Louis XVIII, [10] June 1814. 34 AN, CC9A 48, Malouet to Prince de Bénévent (Talleyrand), 24 June 1814. For a thorough overview of the 1814 mission to Saint-Domingue, see Brière (57–72). 35 On Christophe’s orders, Malouet’s instructions would be published in November, immediately after their discovery (see Copies, 1814); they were subsequently reprinted in a number of Christophean publications, including Vastey’s 1819 Essai, where they are one of fifteen supplementary documents included at the end of the book (suppl. 50–60). 36 Malouet wrote, for instance, that if the Haitian leaders, especially Pétion, are ‘as educated and as enlightened as they are said to be’, then ‘they will not fail to see that if the great mass of blacks is not returned to a state of slavery, and kept in it, or at least in a state of submission similar to the one in which they were before the troubles [i.e., before 1791], then there can be neither tranquillity nor prosperity for the colony, and no safety for themselves’ (qtd. Vastey, 1819, suppl. 52). 37 This official hierarchy was to have extended downward from the ‘white caste’ (including a few prominent ‘honourary’ whites, such as Pétion) to the ‘black slave’, with ‘three intermediary castes’ in between (light-skinned people of colour; a darker-skinned caste ‘composed of shades between mulatto and black’; and free blacks). The detailed (thirty-six-page) commentary on these instructions that was published in December 1814 by

Christophe’s Foreign Minister, Limonade, features an exemplary refutation of this ‘Machiavellian reckoning of tints and distinctions’ (18; ‘Quel machiavélisme dans le calcul de ces teintes et de ces distinctions!’) and a proud assertion of the uniform ‘blackness’ of all Haitians (16; ‘Nous sommes tous noirs…’). 38 Lavaysse would subsequently claim that he was incapacitated by yellow fever at the time, and that the letters to Pétion and Christophe had actually been written by his secretary, the ex-colonist Laffon de Ladebat (who had been added to the mission in a private capacity soon after the agents’ arrival in Jamaica), and that Ladebat did so ‘with ideas, principles, and a style that are not mine’. AN, CC9A 53, Précis de ma négotiation à SaintDomingue (26 March 1815), 1. 39 AN, CC9A 53, Précis de ma négotiation à Saint-Domingue (26 March 1815), 3. 40 AN, CC9A 49, Lavaysse [to the Minister of the Marine], 28 February 1815. 41 Needless to say, this episode lends itself to a more sinister reading. The mid-nineteenthcentury Haitian historian Beaubrun Ardouin, for instance, refers to it as ‘an abominable theatrical representation in a church’, and to the treatment of Medina as an instance of ‘moral torture’ (8.112–13). The fact that Ardouin adds a coffin to the scene, despite the absence of any such Gothic paraphernalia in the Gazette royale article (Ardouin cites his source as a ‘text printed at the Cape’), should give a good idea of the ideological biases that shaped all of his ‘legendary’ renderings of Christophe as ‘cruel and arbitrary’ (and of Pétion as ‘the paragon of virtue—honest, courageous, mild and moderate’; see Nicholls, 1979, 98). 42 I am borrowing here from Peter Hinks’s account of how ‘black oral culture’ (193) structures David Walker’s 1829 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, a book that, in its violent critique of ‘the inhuman system of slavery’ (5), is in so many respects the African American counterpart to Vastey’s Colonial System. Although print culture saturates Vastey’s work, far more than it does Walker’s, Vastey’s performance in the Cap-Henry church forces us to think about a possible oral dimension to that work, and raises the question of how a book like Colonial System (which is so evidently haunted by voices at a thematic level) might have ‘spoken’ even to the multitude of Haitians who would not have had unmediated access to it. 43 Malouet’s successor at the Ministry of the Marine, the Comte de Beugnot (1761– 1835), while committed to restoring French rule in Saint-Domingue, was not, it should be noted, an ex-colonist. 44 For an account of Roux, as well as a list of titles he printed in Saint-Domingue between 1794 and 1816, see Tardieu. Roux oversaw the printing of all of Vastey’s books and pamphlets, with the exception of the last two (1817b, 1819), which were published by the Imprimerie royale at Christophe’s palace of Sans-Souci. 45 AN, CC9A 50, Charles Esmangart, Rapport de M. Esmangart au retour de sa mission (27 January 1817), 3. In his indignant response to the mission, Christophe cannily identified the (emptiness of the) new French emphasis on diplomacy over force of arms: ‘It is no longer death or slavery that they propose, for that would cost them too much and it cannot be enforced; instead, they use palliatives to arrive at the same goal’ (1816, 9).

46 AN, CC9A 50, Desfourneaux, Mémoire au Roi; sur la Colonie de Saint-Domingue (May 1817), 3, 11. 47 AN, CC9A 50, A. Rouzeau (du Loiret), De la République d’Hayti, Ile de St. Domingue, considérée dans l’ensemble de son organisation, ses forces, ses moyens physiques et moraux, sa culture, son commerce, son esprit public, et le caractère de ses habitans, 31. A version of this report, in which Rouzeau boldly argued for a ‘general emancipation’ of all France’s colonies as the prelude to new forms of economic and cultural exchange, was published in 1818 as De la République d’Haïti, Ile de Saint-Domingue, considérée sous ses différents rapports, ses forces, ses moyens physiques et moraux, et le caractère national de ses habitants. 48 ‘It is my sincere advice to you’, Clarkson wrote Christophe on 7 September 1819, ‘to accept such an indemnification in exchange for the acknowledgement of your Independence’, going on to add, however, that he took it for granted ‘that the indemnification will be reasonable and moderate, and such as you can pay without any great sacrifice, either at once or by installments in a course of years’ (Griggs and Prator, 155). In a gloss on this comment, the editors of the Christophe–Clarkson correspondence note that the King ‘readily accepted most of Clarkson’s recommendations, [so] it is significant that he was adamant on this important point and refused to consider indemnification in any form whatsoever’. 49 AN, CC9A 52, Résumé des conférences qui ont eu lieu au Conseil du Ministre en Janvier 1821, 1, 11, 12. For details on the special commission, see Manigat (261–77). 50 For a detailed account of the 1825 ordinance, see Brière (107–32). In 2003, Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide would infuriate the French by demanding the restitution of the billions of dollars (in today’s currency) that, over the course of the nineteenth century, Haiti paid out to France as a direct result of the ordinance—a demand that was tactfully waived by his successor just over a month after the coup d’état that ousted Aristide in late February 2004 (see Bongie, 2008, 48–49, 178–79). 51 René Philoctète, a prominent Haitian writer associated with the Spiralist movement, emphasized this aspect of Vastey’s work in his little-known but fascinating play entitled Monsieur de Vastey (1975), which portrays Vastey in typical Spiralist fashion as an ambiguous, indeed impermeable, ‘shifty/shifting’ character (see Glover, 31–35), whose many identities spiral unpredictably between such roles as tyrannical buffoon, incisive intellectual, careerist politician, and loyal patriot. It is the intellectual visionary and wordsmith who delivers the following sarcastic (and pointedly anachronistic) diatribe in response to the looming ‘annexation of the North’ (the play takes place in the days before the fall of Christophe), which will open up new opportunities for those wanting to profit from the country: ‘The colonial system has been unveiled for a long time now. Those fellows are on the look-out for another form of colonization. They’re cunning. They’ll come up with something […] To be sure, they’ll hide their political machinations under the cover of innocent-sounding words: francophilia, for instance. Or even better! The Franco-everywhere! Chinotherapy! Americanitis! Germanococcus! And, many years from now, it will be the turn of Canadianosis. Like thrombosis, cirrhosis, tuberculosis, arteriosclerosis, avitaminosis. The entire clinic, in a word!’ (64)

52 For an expanded account of how ‘the requirements of a “literary humanism” newly sensitized to the importance of colonial history are ably fulfilled’ by the (ostensibly) autobiographical model of the slave narrative, notably Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, see Bongie (2008, 235–36). 53 Lengthy extracts from Reflexions on the Blacks and Whites were published in the first African American newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, in 1828 (12 December, 293–94) and, under the title ‘Africa’, in 1829 (7 February, 349–50; 14 February, 357). Several paragraphs from Colonial System were subsequently translated in the November 1835 issue of the American Anti-Slavery Society’s Anti-Slavery Record (vol. 1, 129–30), under the title ‘Which of the Races is Descended from Cain’, and these paragraphs were in turn reprinted in Robert Benjamin Lewis’s ambitious 1836 compilation Light and Truth; collected from the Bible and Ancient and Modern History, containing the Universal History of the Colored and the Indian Race, from the Creation of the World to the Present Time (326–27), which pointedly identified Vastey as ‘an African, and once, we believe, a slave’ (326). Commenting on the excerpt from Colonial System in Lewis, where Vastey mocks the ‘learned authors and skilful anatomists’ who would class him with ‘the race of the Ourang-Outangs’, historian Mia Bay concludes, ‘Vastey’s outrage was echoed throughout the nineteenth century by American blacks who, above all, spoke out on the subject of race to resist the terrible insult thrown up against them by those who sought to cast their race as a lesser species’ (37). For examples of the recent interest in Vastey’s reception in antebellum black America, in addition to Maffly-Kipp (55–61), see Bacon (151–52, 158–61), Dain (125–26), Fanning (70–71), and S. Hall (33–34).

THE COLONIAL SYSTEM UNVEILED by Baron de Vastey

Here it is, revealed, this secret full of horror. The Colonial System: White Domination, Blacks Massacred or Enslaved.1

TO THE KING,2 SIRE, May you receive this tribute, which I have the honour of offering YOUR MAJESTY. It is the product of a soul truly Haytian, the purest impulse of that soul. I have been driven to publish this work by a burning desire, the desire of contributing to the happiness of my fellow-kind, of being of use to my compatriots and earning the approbation of YOUR MAJESTY. I will consider myself fortunate if the goal I set myself has been attained! SIRE, permit me to say it, your MAJESTY is the only Sovereign, the only black Prince, in a word the only man of our colour, who can speak up and make his voice prevail among the Sovereigns of Europe and at the Tribunal of Nations in pleading the cause of our oppressed Brethren. Destined by Divine Providence to bring the regeneration of the Haytian People to fruition, and to have them take their seat among the ranks of independent Peoples, YOUR MAJESTY is one of the first Founders of liberty, the noblest and most ardent defender of the rights of man. You were among the first of the Haytian heroes to take an axe to the ancient Tree of Slavery and colonial Despotism,3 and after having played such a vital role in toppling it, YOUR MAJESTY is the one who has destroyed every last root of it. You are the one who has infused our souls with the energy and noble daring that spurs us onward. YOUR MAJESTY has inspired this work of mine; may you deign to accept the tribute. I am with the deepest respect,

SIRE,

OF YOUR MAJESTY,

the most-humble, most-obedient, most-faithful

servant and subject,

Baron DE VASTEY.

INTRODUCTION The complexion of the world is changing, a revolution benefiting the greater part of mankind is coming about, or so we hope. Everything points toward that outcome: the momentous events that have just transpired in Europe; the peace treaty signed by the Powers; a new order of things, a system of reparations meant to strengthen the bonds uniting people the world over.4 Among the victorious Powers of Europe, the magnanimous Emperor Alexander is particularly distinguishing himself by dint of his humanity, his liberal outlook, his moderation, his generosity. Surrounded by glory, in the midst of his conquests, he shines with an unequalled splendour, which the course of human events can never dim.5 The great and magnanimous British Nation, having reached the highest point of glory any people on earth has ever attained, is bringing a salutary influence to bear on the European congress through its wise administration, its enlightened counsels, and the brave exploits of its fleets and armies. O unparalleled turn of fortune! O unexpected revolution! Humanity triumphs and the stage is set for the regeneration of a greater part of mankind. At the European congress, for the first time since the world began, we see the great and pressing question of permanently abolishing the Slave Trade under discussion; for the first time, in outlawing that abominable and inhuman traffic, the majority of the Sovereigns of Europe are casting a look of liberation on the people of Africa. One power alone (and who could believe it?) insists on maintaining this shameful traffic for another five years: France.6 The French, erstwhile democrats, philanthropists, propagators of liberty and equality, ardent defenders of the rights of man, and now, today, rabid votaries of the slave trade, enemies and persecutors of mankind. O delirium! O inconceivable disgrace!

Noble and generous England! To you it falls to heal the most horrendous, the most terrible wound ever to afflict humanity; to you it falls, now, to bring about the regeneration of half the inhabitants of this globe, by conveying the light of knowledge and civilization to the hearts of our African brethren. May you restore peace and happiness to that part of the world; may you rekindle a sense of morality and sociability in that immense multitude, who await but some favourable encouragement to commence a new career of virtue, flourishing and joyful. Only a great and enlightened Nation could lay claim to that peerless glory; that immortal honour was reserved by the supreme Arbiter of the universe for the magnanimous British Nation and for the glorious reign of the Prince Regent!7 These are the circumstances, so propitious for the Haytian people, in which our august Monarch has published his Manifesto, where the rights of his people and the justice of his cause are laid out in plain view for the Sovereigns of Europe and for the entire universe, and where the legitimacy of our independence is vindicated at the tribunal of Nations.8 These are the circumstances, so auspicious for the black man, in which I —as a friend to my fellow-kind, to my king and country—feel the need, the very compulsion, to unveil the barbaric Colonial System that has weighed us down for centuries. I will consider myself fortunate if these slight writings of mine can be of use to my fellow-kind and contribute to the happiness of my compatriots. The work I have undertaken has been done in haste, that it might appear at an opportune time. As such, it will doubtless lack something of the method and the polish that comprise the beauty of most such works, and in any case, it should come as no surprise if these writings of mine—those of a Haytian, raised on a mountain peak surrounded by forests—abound with literary infelicities. Aspiring to the glory that comes from being a man of letters is not the reason I write; my goal is to be of use to my compatriots, to enlighten them, and to unveil the truth to Europeans.

THE COLONIAL SYSTEM UNVEILED Destruction of the first Haytians. Origin of the Slave Trade. Monstrosity of this Traffic. When Europeans came to the new world, their first steps were accompanied by crimes on a grand scale, massacres, the destruction of empires, the obliteration of entire nations from the ranks of the living. Convulsed by the ambition for riches, in thrall to the cruel passion of avarice, they committed all manner of crimes out of a thirst for gold; this sordid passion is what drove the Spaniards to bring the lives of the unfortunate emperors of Mexico and Peru to such an ignominious end.* 9 It is on account of this passion that the brave and noble-hearted Guatimozin, worthy of a better fate, was thrust onto red-hot coals and left to die. For its sake, the valiant cacique Hatuey was fastened to a stake and burned alive.† 10 And for its sake, the hapless Indians were exterminated, and America decimated. What am I saying! This passion is the reason why the original population of my own native land has been annihilated! Why look any further afield for examples of savagery and destruction. O land of mine, is there any other on this planet whose soil has been more soaked in human blood? Is there a land whose ill-fated inhabitants have experienced greater misfortunes? Everywhere I step, everywhere I look, I see shards, vases, utensils, figurines, the forms of which bear the imprint and the traces of art’s infancy. In more remote and solitary locations, in the caves of inaccessible mountains, I come across skeletons still intact, human bones scattered about and blanched over time, and I tremble.

As my thoughts pause over these sad remains, these shards bearing witness to the life of a people who no longer exist, my heart is moved, I shed tears of pity and compassion for the wretched fate of those first inhabitants of the island! A thousand rending memories lay siege to my heart; a multitude of reflections crowd upon me, one after another in quick succession. So, there were men here before us! They no longer exist, here are their pitiable remains! They were destroyed! What had they done to suffer such a calamitous fate? Did some race of exterminating men happen upon them? Had they no weapons, those unhappy souls? Could they not defend themselves? At this thought, I seize hold of my own weapons and thank the heavens for having placed in our hands the instrument of our deliverance and our preservation. O precious force of arms! Without you what would have become of my country, my compatriots, my kinsfolk, my friends? From that moment on, I looked upon those weapons of mine as the greatest of all possessions. Sons of the mountain, dwellers of the forests, cherish these weapons of yours, these precious tools for preserving your rights. Never abandon them, pass them on to your children along with the love of liberty and independence, and a hatred for tyrants, as the finest legacy you can bequeath them. Unable, however, to avert my thoughts from this vision of the first Haytians and their misfortunes, I open the history book,11 and read with interest the following passage: ‘At the coming of the Spaniards, the island of Hayti was divided, more or less in its entirety, into five kingdoms or principalities, which were absolutely independent of one another. A few other lords, far less powerful than the caciques, but who were beholden to no man, occupied the remainder of the island. The first of the five kingdoms was called Maguá, or kingdom of the Plain; it occupied la Vega Real, as it has since been called, a plain of eighty leagues in length and of as much as ten in breadth. This district was near the famed mines of Cibao, of which I will have more to say; gold dust was to be found everywhere in the beds of its numerous rivers, according to the eyewitness account of Las Casas.12 The sovereign resided in a place where the Spaniards later built a city of much renown, to which they gave the name La Concepción de la Vega.

The second kingdom was that of Marién. The same author affirms that it was larger and more fertile than Portugal. This cacique’s domain encompassed the northern coast in its entirety, from Cape Saint Nicolas to the river known today under the name of Monte Christi, as well as the entire plain of Cap-Français, and it was there at the Cape that he had established his capital. The third bore the name of Maguana, and was the most powerful on the island. A little time before the arrival of the Europeans, a Carib named Caonabó, an adventurer of great spirit and courage, succeeded in gaining the people’s esteem; soon thereafter, through his daring and his triumphs, he secured dominion over a region that included the rich province of Cibao and almost the entire length of the Artibonite, the largest river on the island. His customary place of residence was in the town of Maguana, from which the name of the kingdom derived. The Spaniards established a city there, which no longer exists; it occupied the area that the French now refer to as the savannah of San Ouan. The fourth is Xaraguá, which was the most populous kingdom, and the largest, since it extended over the entire west coast of the island and over much of the southerly coast. Its capital occupied more or less the same place as the town of Cul-de-Sac does today. This vast domain seems to have been peopled by men who were better built than the other natives of the island, and who had a certain refinement of manners, a less constrained existence, a more eloquent tongue; these characteristics had earned it an altogether special reputation. Anacaona, the sister of Behechio, had wed Caonabó; upon the latter’s death, this cacique, who had been living at her brother’s, inherited his kingdom, the prince not having been able to produce a son by any of his thirty-two wives.* 13 The fifth kingdom, that of Higuey, occupied the entire eastern part of the island, and was bounded, on the north coast, by the Yaque river, and by the Ozama river on the south.14 Goacanarico, King of Marién, who, as I have said,15 had established his abode four leagues further to the east in the port of Cap-Français (today CapHenry), charmed with all that he had heard tell about the newcomers, sent greetings to the admiral and, accompanied by several objects made from refined gold, a request that he repair to the royal residence. Soon, the king

himself went out in a canoe, presented Columbus with more gold, and undertook to have as much of it as he could wish for brought from Cibao. Soon thereafter,16 he and his men had to defend themselves against a numerous army of Indians who were outraged by the conduct of the Spaniards, their violent manners, their debaucheries, the burdensome tributes they imposed on all the natives of the island, and especially by the fate of Caonabó, who had been deported to Spain after being unexpectedly placed under arrest and clamped in irons.* 17 The enslavement of the West Indians and the destruction of that unfortunate people dates from the death of Columbus.18 The governor, unfaithful to the character of gentleness and moderation that he had received from nature, and more unfaithful still to the instructions he had brought with him, once again took to tormenting the original inhabitants, burying them in the mines that he forced them to work and, as a general rule, making no distinction between them and the lowest of animals. On this land of misfortune, many a battle had to be waged, and much blood shed. These outrageous acts of barbarism, so long endured by the unfortunate Indians, soon enough bore their sad fruit.19 Already by 1507 no more than sixty thousand of the Spanish island’s old inhabitants remained, which is to say a twentieth part of the number that, according to the lowest estimates, had been present fifteen years before. As this was far below what was required to satisfy the avarice of the grantees, Ovando had the temerity to propose that all the inhabitants of the Lucayos islands, the first that Columbus had discovered, be transported to the colony. By way of ensuring Ferdinand’s consent to the proposal, the king was given to understand that this was the only means of facilitating the conversion of these idolaters, since it was not possible to settle missionaries permanently on all those little islands. Ferdinand, always favourably disposed to the administration of the governor, and won over by the latest rationale presented to him, had no sooner given his consent to the forced migration than work was under way to fit out the ships and go in search of recruits on those islands of misfortune. It is impossible to imagine the deceitful stratagems that were devised for the purpose of making these poor islanders bow their necks to the yoke of tyranny. Most of these involved assuring them that they were simply being

conveyed to a land of delights, the very land inhabited by the souls of their kinsfolk and their departed friends, who were inviting them, through the good offices of the new arrivals, to come and join them on the instant. Forty thousand of these poor souls proved gullible enough to let themselves be seduced by those stirring promises, but once they reached the Spanish island, and saw they had been shamefully deceived, their distress was such that a great many of them perished of it, while others did whatever they could to escape and regain their tranquil huts. Imagine the surprise of a Spanish vessel when it came across a band of them fifty leagues out to sea in a pirogue, with gourds full of fresh water hanging all around it. They were on the point of reaching their native land, only to be swept up by the ship and plunged once again into the horrors of slavery. Meanwhile,20 the number of Indians was diminishing daily as a result of the ill-usage to which they were subject, so finding new workers for the exploitation of the mines became an urgent consideration. It was with this intention that a settler from the colony made a raid on Guadeloupe, but the savages he came across there were on their guard, and he was unable to capture any of them. Other such attempts having met with no better results, the decision was made to resort to blacks from Africa, and so began, at one and the same time, the prosperity of the Spanish island and the enslavement of those downtrodden people, a single one of whom could do more work than six Indians. From that moment on, the original inhabitants of the islands were even more ill-treated in this respect; barbarism reached such an extreme that, little by little, this unfortunate race diminished very perceptibly in size, and was almost entirely exterminated’.* 21 What! I exclaimed, drawing my reading to a close. It has been three hundred years now since these abominations were committed, solely for the purpose of amassing gold, and things are no different in our own day. We see the same results: for the sake of producing sugar and coffee our oppressors defiled themselves with similar atrocities; for the sake of satisfying the greed and sensuality of the colonists we were treated in an inhuman fashion, just as those unfortunate Indians were. So this is the calamitous origin of the slave trade! It was so that we could be substituted for them, condemned like them to hard labour, torture, contempt, and death, that the

Europeans embarked upon this unspeakable traffic. One crime leads to another, always: for the human heart, such is the predictable course of events. The barbaric invention of the Trade was a fitting accomplishment for the men who tortured and persecuted those luckless Indians; only they could have invented that abominable traffic. Inured to crimes, accustomed to lashing and mauling men with their whips, to wallowing in the blood and the tears of the Indians, they alone could have invented such a monstrosity. Those who invented it are the ones that madman Deslozières is talking about, as quoted by the virtuous abbé Grégoire,* 22 when he assures us, word for word, that the inventor of the Trade merits altars; that through slavery one makes men worthy of heaven and earth.23 Let us respond to the monster who found it in himself to utter such a blasphemy, by sketching a portrait of the Trade. Colonists,24 and you despicable votaries of this heinous traffic, listen carefully to what I am about to say! Posterity will be amazed that a system so horrific, which is based on violence and theft, on pillaging and lying, on the most sordid and impure forms of vice, should have found zealous apologists among the enlightened nations of Europe. In order to cover up their crimes and justify slavery, they malign the unhappy Africans; they even have the impudence to claim the people there would slit the throats of their prisoners if they were unable to sell them. You barbarians, why do they make war among themselves, why do they take prisoners? To supply you with slaves, isn’t that so? Cease this infamous traffic of yours, and Africa will enjoy repose and happiness. In almost every author who has written on this subject, we read that as long as one does not press them for slaves, they are at peace with one another.25 The abhorrent deeds spawned by this abominable commerce thus originate with the traffickers, and with them alone. What are the methods they deploy to obtain slaves? Kidnapping, abduction. Pitting one sovereign against another, they instigate wars by offering duplicitous and Machiavellian counsel. It is at their prompting that these sovereigns impose a despotic yoke upon their unfortunate subjects. It is through these atrocious means that they procure slaves, and yet still they have the temerity to vilify the unhappy victims they oppress, after having seduced them and plunged them into an abyss of evils. No, there is

not a single crime or abomination of which these dealers in human flesh do not bear the stain. It would take many a volume to relate them all.†26 The objects of their crimes are paid for with cowries (a type of shell), articles of glass or hardware, and other such trifles, along with strong liquor, arms and munitions. Stripped of all clothing, the unfortunate Africans acquired in the manner we have just described are immediately branded with a red-hot iron, either on the arm or the shoulder, and then thrown into the slave ship, which is what Europeans call the vessels that engage in this infamous traffic. ‘They are constructed in such manner that a strong wooden partition, called the barricado, runs athwart the quarterdeck or main deck. The side of the partition facing the front of the ship is smooth, without the least crack or fissure, so as to prevent the wretched blacks from enlarging any openings with their nails; to the top of this dividing wall, there are as many small cannons and guns as the partition can bear, loaded at all times, and which are shot off every evening in order to keep the blacks in a state of fear. All the women and children are kept on the side of the dividing wall facing the back of the ship, while the men are on the front side, able neither to see the women nor join with them; as a further restraint, the men are always bound together in pairs, with chains that are inspected daily. For each of the rows in which they are placed when they come on deck to take the air or have their meal, there is yet another chain, drawn between their legs so that they can neither stand up nor make the slightest movement without permission’.27 Try and imagine the deplorable situation of five to six hundred unfortunates in this state, laden with chains, kidnapped by means of violence, deceit, theft, and a thousand other equally shameful methods. Consumed with grief, their hearts filled with bitterness and despair, never more will they see the land that gave them birth, never again will they see their kinsfolk, their friends. All the bonds that could attach them to life are broken, destroyed forever. The hope that sustains man in the face of adversity no longer exists in their hearts; they face the prospect of every imaginable misery, a future of dread. Inhuman treatment, unwholesome food, scarcely enough water to quench their thirst. So much misery heaped all at once upon these unhappy

victims, in the service of cupidity and avarice, will result in the death of half of them before they even reach America. The captain of one slave ship was seen throwing them by the hundreds into the sea. Another of these monsters, disturbed by the cries of the child of a negro woman, tore it away from its mother’s bosom and threw it into the waves; the incessant groans of the poor mother annoyed him still more, and if she did not experience a similar fate, it was only because this slave trader hoped to profit by her sale.* 28 From the beginning of the Trade through to the present day, 20 million of its unfortunate children have been torn away from Africa’s bosom in the manner we have just described; its coasts, formerly so populous, have become deserted. The human mine has been exhausted; the slaves are now drawn from the interior of the country. Of the vast quantity of victims exported from those unhappy climes, there are scarcely two million left in America; eighteen million of our compatriots have thus fallen under the tyrant’s scythe. The Trade! How many crimes that one word contains! What horrors and abominations reside in that one expression! Instead of laying Africa to waste through this infamous traffic, why do Europeans not turn their minds to civilizing that considerable portion of humankind? Must cruel avarice extinguish in their hearts the sentiments of humanity and liberality that ought to make them gravitate toward our brothers? Must they, in pursuit of vile profits and odious policies, cover themselves with eternal opprobrium by lording it over the unhappy Africans with a hand of iron, when it would have been so easy for them to acquire immortal glory by bursting their chains? O shame! Those who consult the annals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a time so extraordinarily full of great events, will read there that the pursuit of vile profits, which degrades and debases mankind, won out over liberality, humanity, and even over the love of glory itself, which has such power over man’s heart! To civilize Africa, by bringing the sciences and arts to it, by making agriculture and commerce prosper there: that glorious enterprise is worthy of a magnanimous and enlightened nation. It is worthy, in sum, of the great nation of Britain, which will add this grand undertaking to the growing list of its claims to glory and to the gratitude of humankind.

Already, on the coast of Sierra Leone, the society of the friends of the blacks at London has commenced that immortal enterprise which exceeds all human praise.29 The English philanthropists will have the glory of having taken upon themselves and put into execution what the apostles of Christianity had attempted and planned in vain. Virtuous philanthropists, the Divinity reserved this precedent for the world, while for you, guided by the torch of philosophy, was reserved the task of civilizing one of the four parts of the globe and returning it to peace and happiness once again. It will be your glory to have brought about this great revolution through your gentle words and the influence of humanity alone, without having persecuted and massacred innocent people. Happy Sierra Leone! Colony founded in the pursuit of humanity and virtue, may you receive the prayers of Haytians for your prosperity, for your glory and that of your illustrious founders; may you one day be equal in riches, and above all in virtuous citizens, to that place of renown from which you will proudly trace your origins! We fervently hope so, and our prayers will be granted; history presents us with notable examples of a similar sort. The Phoenicians were the founders of Thebes in Beotia, and of Carthage on the coast of Africa; the Greeks had colonies in Asia Minor, the Romans in Gaul. These founding peoples were not the oppressors of their colonies; on the contrary, they brought with them the light of knowledge, the arts, commerce, and navigation. Before founding these colonies, they themselves had received those same gifts from Egypt: Danaus and Cecrops brought Egyptian agriculture, learning, and arts to Greece.30 These daughters of heaven did no more than sojourn in those happy lands: they crossed over to Italy, and from there moved on to Gaul; now they reside on the happy banks of the Thames, where they will probably remain for a long time. Perhaps one day the North will return the gifts it received from the South; then those goddesses will take wing and return to their homeland of old, where they will revive the wondrous marvels that draw the admiring gaze of travellers and that still bear witness, the lapse of centuries notwithstanding, to the glory of ancient Egypt and its learning. Our cruel enemies will still allege that civilizing Africa is impossible; they will argue that those wild savages will massacre the missionaries and that, in

any case, the African having no aptitude for knowledge, it would be a fruitless undertaking, so much wasted effort. Wretched sophists! Who will credit your miserable arguments? How can you lie to yourselves like this? Do you actually, in good faith, believe what you say? Unrighteous man, or demon, whoever you might be! Gaul, German, Saxon, take up your history book, read the story of your origins, observe the customs of your ancestors, look upon what you were and what you are today. Tell me now, how do those savages from Africa compare to the Gauls, whom Tacitus and Caesar have described to us as clothed in the skin of animals, with long beards and dishevelled hair, feasting on the spoils of the hunt, armed with clubs and arrows? Idolatrous druids. Human sacrifices. Children burned in wicker baskets, offered as a holocaust to their god Teutates.31 People who deified mistletoe, who mercilessly cut the throats of any strangers unlucky enough to have been shipwrecked on their shores, and did the same to their prisoners of war. People who roamed about the forests, wandering from one region to the next. Although you were whites, you were savages, more barbaric, more cruel and superstitious than the inhabitants of Africa. But there is no need for us to look so far back for proofs of your absurdity, or rather of your egregious bad faith. You always talk about how the blacks are sunk in profound ignorance. You speak incessantly about their savagery and the superstitions that hold sway over them. You go even further, claiming that these are the black man’s inherent vices, but not the white man’s. Yet cast your gaze toward the residents of Lapland, New Zembla, Kamchatka, Greenland. Have you ever seen anything more savage than those ichthyophagous peoples, vegetating in a state approximating that of the brute beast, pell-mell, without manners or laws? And yet they are whites. Why do you have nothing to say about them? Why not subject them to the Trade, why not go and kidnap them, out of charity, the same as you do with the blacks of Africa? Why not tear them away from their native lands, so that you can turn them into slaves fit for cultivating your American colonies? And by this method lead them to civilization through work, as the learned Barré de Saint-Venant has instructed you in his writings.32 And yet your feeling heart recoils at the thought. How could one tear those hapless whites away from their homeland and their family in order to plunge them into bondage, to lash them with the whip, to torture them with labours that are

beyond their strength in a scorching climate like that of America? But since you prefer barbarians from the torrid Zone to barbarians of the glacial Zone, why not take your choice of whites from the temperate Zone who are, to say the least, as good as Africans when it comes to barbarism? Why not purchase Mingrelians, who kill their newly born infants when they lack the means to feed them, as well as sick people without hope of a cure? The Dagestans, the Circassians, the Tartars of Bessarabia, the Nagays, the Mongals, etc.: they are no better than the Mingrelians. These peoples are thieving, fierce, treacherous, cruel, drunkenly, lewd, and superstitious, and they carry on an extensive commerce in slaves.33 Why not buy some? Your markets will be abundantly provided for. There are any number of bastardized, degenerate peoples of white race from which you can pick: species of men who are sunk in the most complete ignorance; others who are coarse and cruel, plunged in barbarism, selling one another, and yet you make no mention of them. You vilify us, you degrade us, and you even have the audacity to place us in the same rank as animals, denying us any intellectual faculties; even now you impugn the very victims whom you once tortured. But the time is drawing near when the torch of truth shall dissipate the profound darkness in which avarice and falsehood enveloped Africa. The veil of error shall be rent; the dealers in human flesh and the loathsome colonists, with their contemptible arguments and their infamous traffic, shall return to the mire which they ought never to have left. It is a certain fact that the peoples of white race whom we have just mentioned by way of example will have greater difficulty arriving at a state of civilization than those of Africa. How is one to civilize the savages of Labrador, Greenland, the Samoyeds? To this day, despite the attempts that have been made, it has proved impossible to civilize a single one of those savages. Accustomed to the life of our first patriarchs, those nomadic people the Tartars, wandering from one region to the next, will be slow to abandon their way of life and devote themselves to the cultivation of the earth, or to shutting themselves up in cities and engaging in commerce, etc. It would be easier to civilize the Hottentots and the Caffres of Africa than any of those peoples. By contrast, in most of the nations along the coast of Africa, we see a great propensity for civilization. The Mandingos are civil, hospitable,

hard-working cultivators, with a talent for the sciences; the Feloops, the Yolofs, the Fulah, who all live along the banks of the Gambia, have more or less the same character as the Mandingos and are well advanced in civilization. ‘I little expected’, says Mungo Park,34 ‘to find, in their palavers,* professional advocates who appear and plead for plaintiff or defendant, much in the same manner as counsel in the law-courts of Europe. These negro advocates are Mohammedans; they affect to have made the laws of the prophet their peculiar study; and if I may judge from their harangues, which I frequently attended, they equal the ablest pleaders in Europe when it comes to the art of chicanery’.35 To ground their judgement, judges pass sentence in accordance with the Koran; and when it is not found sufficiently explicit, says the same traveller, ‘recourse is had to a commentary called Al Sharra, containing a complete and methodical exposition of the Islamic laws, both civil and criminal’. All travellers concur in saying that Africa only awaits the moment when a salutary revolution shall change the complexion of things on this continent, allowing the sciences and arts to blossom there. For every fierce deed with which one might wish to reproach them, we could cite a thousand others that give proof of sensibility, of generosity, of all the qualities that are natural to Africans. A Dane, having renounced the atrocities that Europeans have so often committed in those unhappy climes, had established a reputation for goodness, and the blacks reposed such confidence in his integrity that they would come from the distance of a hundred leagues to see him.36 A sovereign from a distant country sent his daughter to him with presents of gold and slaves, that he might obtain a grandson from Schilderop, which was the name of this European, so much revered along the entire coast of Nigritia. O virtue! (exclaims the immortal Raynal), thou dost still exist in the hearts of those miserable people, who are condemned to live among tigers or to groan under the tyranny of man! They yet have hearts able to feel the delightful attractions of benevolent humanity! Just and magnanimous Dane! What monarch ever received an homage so pure and so glorious as that which thy nation hath seen thee enjoy! And where did these things take place? On a sea, on a land, which has been forever tainted by three

centuries of an infamous traffic, of crimes and misfortunes, of men exchanged for arms, of children sold by their fathers. We have not tears sufficient to grieve such horrors, and these tears of ours are unavailing! The same author relates that an English ship, which was trading in Guinea in the year 1752, was obliged to leave its surgeon behind because his bad state of health prevented him from continuing at sea.37 Murray was still there, endeavouring to recover his health, when a Dutch vessel drew near the coast; some blacks who out of curiosity had come on board were placed in irons, and the ship quickly sails off with its prey. Incensed at so base a treachery, those who had an interest in the unfortunate men instantly run to Cudjoe, who stops them at his door and asks them what they are looking for. The white man who is with you, they exclaimed. He should be put to death, because his brethren have kidnapped ours. The Europeans who have carried off our countrymen are barbarians, responds the generous host; kill them whenever you find them. But he who lodges with me is a good man, he is my friend; my house is his fortress, I am his soldier, and I will defend him. To get at him, you shall have to knock me down. O my friends, who would ever enter my doors, if I had suffered my abode to be stained with the blood of an innocent man? This speech appeased the rage of the blacks and they withdrew. We could cite other such examples of noble-minded conduct that took place in Africa and the colonies, but let us follow Mungo Park in his African travels. This traveller, who penetrated eleven hundred English miles in a direct line into the interior of that vast country, was in a good position to study the manners and the character of the blacks; he relates a number of incidents that would do honour to the most civilized peoples. In the account of his travels, it can be readily perceived that Africans are not as barbaric and as removed from civilization as our enemies would have one believe. Mungo Park was told there were cruel, man-eating peoples in Africa, but since he never saw them, one cannot give any credence to those assertions. In the countries he traversed, he saw unquestionable evidence that the people living there are far advanced in civilization. In the kingdom of Woolli, he says, the towns are situated in the valleys; they are surrounded by tracts of cultivated land, the produce of which is sufficient to supply the wants of the inhabitants. The government there is monarchical and paternal, and the authority of aged men is greatly

respected. The people there are hospitable: this traveller says that he was always well received by the inhabitants and that the fatigues of the day were generally alleviated by an agreeable night, passed at the home of thoughtful and considerate hosts.* 38 Filial piety is one of the virtues of Africans, who have the greatest respect for those who gave them birth: ‘Strike me, but do not curse my mother is a common expression among them’.39 One cannot fail to be moved when reading about the arrival of the African blacksmith at his place of residence. ‘At the door of the blacksmith’s dwelling’, says that same traveller, ‘we dismounted and fired our muskets; this negro greeted his relations with a great deal of tenderness. Amidst these transports, the blacksmith’s mother was led forth; she was blind and very aged, and leaned upon a staff as she walked. Every one made way for her; and she stretched out her hand to bid her returning son welcome; she stroked his hands, face, and arms with great care’. She was wild with joy, the purest and most tender joy (adds Mungo Park), who gazed upon this touching scene with the greatest delight.40 Those Europeans who utter falsehoods regarding Africans in order to justify their infamous traffic do the exact same thing when speaking of the sovereigns from that part of the world, by portraying them to us as despots who tyrannize their subjects. I base this assertion on the account that Mungo Park himself gives. ‘Through a crowd of curious people’, he says, ‘I went the next day to the audience of the King of Kasson. I found him sitting upon a mat, in a large hut; he appeared to be a man of about sixty years of age; his success in war, and the mildness of his governance, had much endeared him to all his subjects’.41 So he was a man of virtue this King of Kasson? So his subjects lived happily under his paternal governance? So not all African sovereigns are cruel despots who tyrannize their subjects? There are good ones among them, worthy of reigning over those hospitable peoples. O whites, that must truly be the case, since you are the ones who are saying it! Our traveller was kindly received by Jatta, the King of Woolli, who gave him leave to pass through his dominions, and provided him with a great store of provisions for his journey as well as a guide to conduct him to the frontier of his kingdom.42 He found Almami, the monarch of Bondou, giving an audience while seated under a tree out in the country; this king deigned

to receive him with distinction.43 The sovereign of Kaarta had a lodging procured for him, and gave orders that he not be molested by the crowd of curious onlookers who had never before seen a white person in those districts. Good order and police prevailed throughout his dominions. Let us listen to Mungo Park: ‘A little before sunset the king sent for me. I followed his messenger. On entering the court in which the prince was sitting I was astonished at the number of his attendants, and at the good order that prevailed among them. They were all seated—the men on the king’s right hand, and the women and children on the left, leaving a passage between them for me. The king, whose name was Daisy Koorabarri, was not to be distinguished from his subjects in point of dress; a bank of earth about two feet high, upon which was spread a leopard’s skin, constituted his throne. I seated myself upon the ground before him, relating the various causes of my journey, and soliciting his protection’.44 That monarch gave him a cordial welcome and offered him good advice relative to his journey; three of his sons, along with two hundred horsemen, kindly accompanied Mungo Park a little of the way. Mansong, King of Bambarra, refused him entry to Sego, its capital, but sent a present of five thousand cowries to him by way of a messenger.45 It is worth noting that those who showed the least consideration for this traveller were the most knowledgeable Africans. The Moors, from whom he experienced some ill-usage, are in effect the most educated, the majority of them being literate. I presume that these people, acquainted with the perversity of the whites, detest them and have every reason to drive them out of their country, as do those from Morocco, Fez, and Algiers—in short, from everywhere along the immense coast that Europeans refer to as Barbary because the people there make slaves of whites. I know many a country that would merit this epithet, for reasons that are, at the very least, just as well grounded. This reflection leads me naturally enough to another, which is no less distressing for humanity: the Africans who treat whites inhumanly are nonetheless respected. The European powers make commercial treaties with the Barbary States; they send ambassadors there, and presents, while at the same time ruthlessly tearing asunder the unfortunate inhabitants of that

other portion of Africa, who are obliging enough to let themselves be put in chains without exterminating their tormentors. Europeans, what lessons are you conveying to the wicked, and what examples are you providing for the good? What peculiar tactics! Pandering to those who reduce your brethren to a state of captivity, and plunging into the most abject slavery those who welcome you with kindness and humanity! How can admiration and amity be denied those sovereigns, cited by Mungo Park, who govern their subjects with the kindness and spirit of justice of our first patriarchs? Who would not be moved upon seeing the native virtues of those noble Africans? How can esteem and amity be denied that noble blacksmith, or the faithful Demba, or Karfa and the friendly care he bestowed upon Mungo Park? How can one not love that noble mother whose son had been wounded by a musket shot and who walked ahead of him, disconsolate, praising his good qualities? He never told a lie, she cried out, and all the spectators joined in lamenting his fate.46 How can one not admire the generosity of that old female slave who gives her dinner to our traveller, and who hurries away before he can thank her?47 I seem still to hear the sweet and plaintive voice of those hospitable women who give him welcome when he is ready to drop from hunger and fatigue, and who create an impromptu song with him as its subject. Here it is: ‘The winds roared, and the rains fell—. The poor white man, faint and weary, came and sat under our tree—. He has no mother to bring him milk; no wife to grind his corn—. Chorus—. Let us pity the white man; no mother has he, etc. etc.’48 You whites, our calumniators, answer us! Were a forlorn black man to leave his country to go and travel in your distant climes, would he be welcomed with as much benevolence and generosity by the sovereigns who govern you as the sovereigns of Africa offered that bereft white man, Mungo Park? Would town or countryside of yours receive him in the same openhanded way as those hospitable peoples received your compatriot? Would he come upon a poor white woman offering her dinner to allay his hunger? Would he come upon the refuge of a cottage sheltering him from inclement weather? Would he hear the sweet and plaintive voice of compassionate women consoling him for his hardships, for the absence of his mother and his wife? You whites, governed by the rule of law, answer us frankly: what sort of welcome would this black traveller receive from you and yours?

And yet these are the men you have been tormenting and persecuting for centuries now. In order to justify your atrocities and your wrongful actions, you have invented every imaginable slanderous and absurd claim. Posterity will never credit the fact that, in an enlightened century like ours, some men who call themselves scholars and philosophers have endeavoured to reduce other men to the condition of brute beasts, by denying there is but one original type of the human race,49 and that they have done so solely for the sake of maintaining the abominable privilege of oppressing one portion of humankind. Even as I write this down, I cannot stop myself from laughing at the thought of all those absurdities, and of the thousands of volumes that have been written on such a topic. Learned writers and clever anatomists have spent their lives arguing over facts that are as clear as daylight, while others have spent them dissecting the bodies of humans and animals in order to prove that I, who am now writing, belong to the race of OurangOutangs. Still laughing (for who would not laugh at such nonsense), I ask myself: Are we still living in those times of ignorance and superstition when Copernicus and Galileo were looked upon as heretics and sorcerers? Or are we indeed living in this enlightened age that has given birth to so many persons of genius who have brought fame to their homeland through their immortal works? What! In an enlightened age such as this, egregious sophists saddled with prejudices have endeavoured, by means of the most puerile arguments and the most ridiculous tales, to reduce the black man to a material being and nothing more. Edward Long adduces, as a proof of our moral inferiority, that our lice are black, and that we eat wild cats.50 Hannemann maintains that the colour of blacks originates in the curse that Noah pronounced against Ham; others affirm that our colour and our reprobation can be traced back to Cain, for killing his brother Abel.51 I have strong reasons for believing that it is actually the whites who are of the race of Cain, for I find in them that primitive hatred, that spirit of envy and arrogance, and that passion for riches of which scripture speaks, and which led him to sacrifice his brother; it is this same spirit that animates those who traffic in human flesh and feeds their predilection for persecuting us as the descendants of Abel.

Meckel the Elder thinks that the colour of blacks is owing to the dark colour of their brain; but other great anatomists find the brain of whites to be of the same colour.52 Barrère and Winslow believe that the bile of blacks is of a darker colour than that of Europeans; but Sömmerring finds it to be of a yellowish green.53 Doctor Rush would have it that our colour is the result of an hereditary leprosy; he bases his assertion on the chemical experiment made by Beddoes, who whitened the hand of an African by immersing it in oxygenated muriatic acid.54 I am not of Doctor Rush’s opinion (much as we esteem him); I think, on the contrary, that leprosy is hereditary in those of a white colour. I base this assertion on the historical record, unless the whiteness of the Hebrews is something you wish to dispute with me; and, what is more, although I am not a chemist, I do know the secret of how to blacken a white man, through a simple immersion process. I will pass over in silence the large and small brains, which give a man more or less genius, as well as the facial angles of 90 to 100 degrees, which account for the beauty of European heads. If I were a physician (like Camper, who relates all these fine details to us) I would be curious to know if my head forms an angle of 42 degrees, like the head of an ape, or of 70 degrees, like those of Africans, that is to say like mine.55 I almost forgot to mention the frizzled woolly hair that is another one of the causes of our moral inferiority. And Jedidiah Morse, who finds the mark of whites’ superiority imprinted on their foreheads.56 And a certain Baron de Beauvois, who would have it that negroes and mulattoes, not being of the same species as the white, can no more lay claim to natural rights than can the Ourang-Outang, and who thus concludes that Saint-Domingue belongs to the white species.57 And what can one say about a Barré Saint-Venant, whose absurdities inspire in us as much pity as his crimes do horror? This monster, steeped in our blood, takes upon himself the role of prophet and avers that black people, incapable as they are of taking a single step toward civilization, will be ‘in twenty thousand years what they were twenty thousand years ago: the disgrace and misfortune of the human species’.58 In the face of such absurdities, what can one say in return? It must be so. Three cheers for science! I will never run out of items to report when it comes to the diverse opinions that our enemies have ventured in order to settle a question that is

not a question. One must be truly blinded by arrogance and prejudice to allow oneself to put forward claims that are so erroneous, and so utterly lacking in common sense. As if defending such a bad cause were not enough, did one then have to prop it up with such worthless arguments? With errors and blindness God smites the arrogant and the impious, who would stand in the way of his designs by debasing what he created; but there is, scripture states, no wisdom, nor understanding, nor counsel against the Lord,59 and it is themselves whom they have debased. If our enemies had been more religious, they would have been less given to subtle distinctions and malicious reasoning, and would have been possessed of a great deal more sense, a sound judgement and, especially, a good and tender heart, of the sort that leads all men, at all times and in all places, to follow this fundamental maxim: Do not do unto others what thou wouldst not wish be done unto thyself. If their hearts had been filled with that spirit of religion, that feeling of humanity, they would have opened the great book of nature and, upon seeing the immense variety of what the All Powerful has wrought, they would easily have found the solution to the question they wished resolved. They would have read there, imprinted in indelible characters, these words from scripture: All children of the heavenly father, all mortal beings, spring from the same family.60 The impious anatomist, smitten by those divine words, would have laid down his scalpel, and would not have wasted his time dissecting men, animals, and birds, or probing their brains and reticular membranes for the origin and cause of the colour of their skin, their fur, their feathers, etc. But we have been fully avenged on those human traffickers, thanks to the immortal and generous Wilberforce,61 the virtuous Grégoire, philanthropists all the world over, the brave and loyal British nation, and our good friends, those wise and virtuous Quakers, our zealous protectors and ardent defenders of the rights of humanity.

Of the Colonial Regime, or the Horrors of Slavery! Europeans who are not acquainted with this horrific system, who cannot even imagine it, you men of feeling, do not weep too soon over this tableau,

these slight sketches of the Trade and its horrors! Do not exhaust your sensibility. Hold back your sighs and your tears: you have seen and heard nothing yet! Listen to my account of the colonial regime, and try and imagine, if you can, the monsters who could enact cruelties of this order. Colonists, those of you who still draw breath, listen to me! I shall awaken the remains of the numerous victims you thrust into the grave, and borrow their voices so that I might unveil your foul deeds. I shall exhume those poor wretches you buried alive. I shall consult the shades of the dead, those unfortunate compatriots of mine you threw alive into a fiery furnace; those you ordered be put on a spit, roasted, impaled, or subjected to a thousand other forms of torture invented by the powers of hell! In tracing the outline of these horrors, I do not hope to soften your hearts, for, as we know only too well, those hearts are more hardened than bronze and steel. We know that your depraved souls are inaccessible to remorse and pity; we are familiar with your odious and ruthless character, as inflexible in your views as in your acts of vengeance; we know that you will never change. If, on this score, I have nothing to hope from you, I can at the very least make you tremble by unveiling your misdeeds and recording your names on these pages, so that they might be held in abhorrence by your contemporaries and by generations to come. We have seen the manner in which our unhappy compatriots found their way to the ports of America. Those who were able to withstand the grief and the disease, the hardships and the torments of the crossing, are immediately shaved, combed, bathed, and rubbed with palm oil. The ones suffering from diseases of the skin are especially subject to this deceitful treatment; to repress the symptoms, they are even given mercury, which eventually takes a dreadful toll on them. Thus prepared, the victims were led out for the colonist to choose from, like a wretched herd of cattle to be bought and sold and slaughtered at pleasure. Once selected, they were immediately conducted to the plantations, where they were henceforth obliged to vegetate in the midst of torments, in a state of debasement and misery, yearning after the past; as for the future, theirs was a prospect of sorrows without end, and so it was that a great many of them took their own lives, thereby putting an end to their long and painful suffering.

They were branded once again, these poor wretches, with a red-hot iron, the name of their barbaric master stamped on their breast. They were housed in quarters that were cramped and unwholesome, and which could barely protect them from inclement weather or from the chill at night and the humidity, which pose such a danger in our part of the world. They slept on the ground, on mats or animal hides, or sometimes on cots made out of four forked posts and a wood riddle. A few gourds and calabashes were their only household possessions. A small plot of land, in the most barren of spots, was given to the slave and cultivated during the time when, exhausted from his labours and worn down by the heat, he ought to have been resting his weary bones; it was barely enough to supply him with the roots that were his only sustenance. A few ells of coarse cloth each year were all he was given for clothing, and very often they received nothing at all.* 62 Degraded to a condition below that of domestic animals, our precarious life subject to the whims of a barbaric master, half-covered with miserable rags and tatters, gnawed by hunger, bent under the whip of a ruthless slave driver, we worked the land, watering it with our sweat and our blood, all to gratify the colonist’s arrogant sensuality and his avarice.63 Apologist of the colonial system, you who never tire of vilifying the blacks, this is the ‘happiness’ that we are said to enjoy. You above all, Barré SaintVenant and the despicable votaries of your cause, you dare to paint an imaginary picture of the blissful condition of the black man transported to the colonies, and to assert that you have done him an essential service by tearing him away from those savage regions of the world so that he can enjoy the comforts of civilization and the benefits of your paternal administration! It suits you very nicely, you and your kind, to affect the language of humanity: you who, as resident manager of the Duplaa plantation, revived every imaginable kind of torture, buried men up to the neck, threw them into the sugar-boiler along with the cane-trash, cut off the tongues, ears, or legs of your victims, bound them alive to corpses that were already rotted, pinned their legs against their backs so that the blood stops circulating and the legs swell up, becoming paralysed, while putrefaction sets in.64 After all of this, you have the gall to maintain that the slaves’ lot is preferable to that of day-labourers in Europe.65 I can anticipate your

response: you will reply to me, with your usual arguments and bad faith, that such acts of cruelty rarely happened; you will go on to tell me that since time immemorial there have been monsters who have defiled themselves with misdeeds of this sort, and that just because Barré Saint-Venant is one such monster, I should not conclude from this that all colonists are indiscriminately monsters. Yes, they all are, more or less; they all committed such horrors, participated in them and contributed to them. In any case, the number of colonists who acted in a decent and human fashion is so small that it is not worth making them an exception to the general rule. Most of the historians who have written about the colonies were whites, indeed colonists. They have entered into the greatest detail regarding crops, climate, the rural economy, but they have been careful not to rend the veil from the crimes of their accomplices. Precious few have had the courage to speak the truth, and even when speaking it they have sought to disguise it, to diminish the enormity of those crimes through their manner of expression. Thus, out of cowardice and self-interest, these writers have cast a veil over the outrageous crimes of the colonists. For centuries the voice of my unfortunate compatriots could not make itself heard beyond these shores, while here, in this theatre of oppression, they were being silenced by the ascendancy and unanimity of our tormentors. ‘The erudition of the colonists’, says the virtuous abbé Grégoire, ‘abounds with passages cited in support of servitude; none are better acquainted than they with the tactics of despotism’.66 The time has finally arrived when the truth must come to light. I, who am neither a white man nor a colonist, may not possess the same erudition, but I will not be lacking when it comes to citing examples. My Haytian pen will be lacking in eloquence, no doubt, but it will be truthful. The scenes I describe will be without embellishments, but they will be striking. The words I use will not always be the proper ones, perhaps, but what does that matter? I will be heard and understood by the feeling and impartial European, and the brutal colonist will shake and tremble upon seeing his foul deeds brought to light. This is not a novel I am writing. It is an exposé of the ordeals, the protracted suffering, and unparalleled acts of torture that an ill-fated people have experienced for centuries. My blood runs cold in my veins, my heart is overcome with sadness: the task I have set myself is one for which I have no

aptitude. I lack the forms of expression to undertake it. What manner of pen would be required to describe crimes hitherto unknown to humankind? When depicting all these many horrors, what form of expression can I possibly employ? I know of none. The flowers of rhetoric and embellishments of style are suitable for describing scenes that do not put a man to shame, but when it comes to such a lugubrious topic, when it comes to descending into a cesspool of crimes, they are useless. I will limit myself to reporting. The facts I am going to recount bear the stamp of truth. They are a matter of common knowledge. I collected them from the survivors of families whose kinsfolk experienced the acts of torture I am going to try and sketch here, as well as from those unlucky enough to have lived through them. These witnesses are unimpeachable. As evidence in support of their acts of witnessing, they have shown me limbs mutilated by iron or roasted by fire. I have obtained these facts from a great many notable and credible people. Moreover, I am providing the names of the colonists who perpetrated these crimes, and I defy any of them to contradict me.67 Poncet, settler, owner of a sugar plantation at Trou, had transformed his house into a veritable prison. No one could approach it without shuddering in horror. All one ever heard in that place was the clattering of chains; every one of his house slaves and his natural children was loaded down with them. All one ever heard there was the cracking of the whip and the cry of the poor souls being subjected to those acts of torture. This monster had all his house slaves castrated, along with one of his quadroon offspring. After committing incest with his natural daughter, he had her put to a most excruciating death, along with her mother, by placing boiling wax in their ears and leaving it to melt. This inhuman barbarian was strangled by his son and the house slaves, provoked into taking their just revenge. They were broken alive on the wheel for that murder, which would never have taken place had Poncet not gone unpunished for committing such a shameful outrage against nature. The repressive laws were not made for the colonists, and especially not for the big planters; everything was permitted them.* 68 Corbierre, settler, resident in the same parish, would have his blacks bled and use their blood to clarify the sugar. For a trivial offence, he would have them burned alive. Nothing gives better proof of the savagery of this

monster than the following incident: an ox of his died one day from an epizootic disease; wishing to exact some revenge for this unavoidable loss on the unlucky person who was in charge of his animals, he had a large grave dug and buried both ox and cattle keeper in it. Vosanges, settler, resident of La Mine, went one better than Corbierre: he had two of his luckless blacks chained together during their confinement; when one of them dies, the barbaric Vosanges has a grave dug and in one stroke buries the two victims in it. Darech had them burned alive on the slightest pretext; Déville had them beaten with rods; when it came to cruelty, Voyare did them one better, for he had their genitals beaten and then removed. Lombard, one of the magistrates for the Superior Council of the Cape, entertained himself by cutting off the ears of his unfortunate blacks; having reduced them to this cruel state, he would then burst into a fit of unrestrained laughter. Courtin, a seneschal, occupied his spare hours by having them flogged to death and hanged. Larchevesque-Thibaud, attorney for the Superior Council of the Cape, had bought a Martiniquan quadroon by the name of Sophie for the sum of one hundred Portuguese gold coins from a Mistress Lorsan, with the purpose of using Sophie as a wet-nurse for his child. Having already nursed one of his children, she was nursing a second, when Madame LarchevesqueThibaud became suspicious of this woman, jealously assuming that she was involved with her husband. As proof to the contrary, she insisted that Larchevesque-Thibaud take a pistol and shoot the poor woman; the obliging husband carried out the orders of his fury of a wife. The bullet hit Sophie in the hand as she was trying to ward off the shot, at which point Madame Larchevesque grabbed hold of the woman and shut her up in a closet, where she was clapped in irons, but only after the wife had cut off all her hair and both her ears with a pair of scissors. She threw the severed parts into a chamberpot. Then she had the branding-irons brought to a red heat and insisted that Larchevesque-Thibaud brand the poor woman on each side of her buttocks and on the face, which he did without hesitating. The woman was allowed to languish in this state for a long period of time before her tormentors finally decided to send her off to be sold in Charleston by an individual named Polony, a doctor at the Cape. It proved impossible to sell her there, on account of the mutilations that so disfigured

her. This incident, a matter of common knowledge in Cap-Henry, is recorded in Garran-Coulon’s report on the colonies.69 Pourcheresse from Vertières, one of the magistrates for the Superior Council of the Cape, and Charrier owned small provision grounds at Hautdu-Cap. Every day they would send their blacks off to town to sell vegetables, and regardless of whether the goods were sold or not, they had to bring back the entire sum, in hard cash, for whatever vegetables they had been given to sell or else the notorious punishment of the four posts awaited them. They were so cruel toward their slaves that they forbade them to wear any clothing, even if it was bought at their own expense; they forced those poor blacks to go naked, with nothing more than a little rag about the waist, or what in this country is called a tanga. The luckless blacks of Gallifet and Montalibor met their death in the most appalling forms of torture, under the whip, in dank and miry dungeons where the victims perished because their bodies were continually submerged in water. Gallifet was in the habit of having his slaves hamstrung. After the harrowing punishment of the four posts, Odeluc, Gallifet’s agent, would have brine, red pepper, and other caustic ingredients poured over the bleeding bodies of his victims.70 How to describe the crime perpetrated by the infamous settler Chapuiset, owner of a sugar plantation in Plaine-du-Nord? In characterizing this monster, what epithet can one bestow on him? This modern Phalaris,71 lacking a brazen bull, had the belly of a mule slit open (when epizootic diseases were ravaging his plantation), and had the unfortunate person in charge of his animals sewn into it, alive. The cries and struggles of that poor wretch, as his suffocating body writhed about in the belly of the animal, delighted this monster, and when he was certain that the victim had breathed his last, he had them buried together, man and beast. Whenever a child died, Latour Duroc, settler, resident of Bas-Limbé, would put the disconsolate mother in an iron collar until such time as she produced a new one. He had a black woman confined in an underground dungeon that was a foot deep in water, despite the fact that he had fathered three children with the woman, whose only crime was to have offended him. His children’s entreaties, their tears, their prayers failed to move him; he showed no mercy and would not relent. The disconsolate mother died of

starvation and want. I obtained word of this barbaric deed from a trustworthy source, Sieur Vilton, who resided for a long-time at Limbé, on the plantation of Blain de Villeneuve, where he had every opportunity to gauge the cruelty of the colonists. Jouaneau, settler, resident of Grande Rivière, had one of his blacks nailed by the ears to a wall. When the suffering of the man thus tortured had been sufficiently prolonged, he took a razor and cut off the ears, shaving them close to the skull; after they had been roasted on his orders, he forced the poor wretch to eat his own ears. De Cockburne, knight of the order of Saint-Louis, settler, resident of Maribaroux and Marmelade, would bury men in a standing posture up to the neck, leaving nothing more than the head sticking out of the hole. The head thus positioned, he would entertain himself by playing at bowls with it. The avenues leading to the plantation-house of this cruel man were lined on both sides with different human body parts, which had been hacked into pieces on his orders: here, you would come across the legs; then the arms; a little further along, the head; and finally, facing the main residence, the trunk of the body, mutilated and impaled on a stake, served as a spectacle for the amusement of this barbarian. Cockburne lived at the Cape for a long period of time. One day, while he was sitting in front of the door to his house there, a black man walks past him, whistling; he gets up and in cold blood runs his sword through the man’s body. He often impaled his luckless subjects in this manner. Baron de Stanislas Latortue, the present King’s Attorney General and a man of recognized integrity, has assured me that Cockburne was positively the most vicious and odious of all the whites he had ever known, along with Chevalier d’Héricourt, who committed similar atrocities. Dubreuil, slave ship captain, resident at the Cape, was ruthless with one of his negresses. She would be carved up on his orders and then, once she was covered in blood, he would have boiling oil poured over her wounds. His twin brother, also a ship’s captain, had a negress who was his mistress flayed alive in a fit of jealousy. Bichot, master-builder, resident of Port-de-Paix, in an outburst of jealousy tore away the privates of his black mistress with a razor, and then had boiling oil spread over that part of her body.

Souverbie and Sausse, residents of Port-de-Paix, were cruel men; on their orders, many an unfortunate black died under the whip or was left to rot in dungeons. Dubuisson, settler, resident of Saint-Louis, had his blacks flogged to death, and frequently had them buried alive, as was notably the case with the unfortunate Jean-Baptiste. Cabot, Legros, Labadie, settlers, residents of Borgne, committed the same crimes as Dubuisson, flogging people to death and burying them alive. Ducasse and Fournié, also residents of Borgne, and Dubosc, agent for the Odeluc plantation in Champagne, likewise had people flogged, burned, and buried alive. Dubosc had them eat from calabashes filled with human excrement, and strung them up by the ankles. Bradarac, settler, resident of Port Margot, had trained his dogs to maul any horses that entered his domain, and he often had his mastiffs practise on human victims. With one shot of his musket, he killed a black fisherman simply for having tried to fish outside the gate of his property. Cocherel, settler, resident of the plains of Gonaïves, notorious for the massacre of blacks that he carried out in the early days of the revolution, had already made a reputation for himself during the colonial regime through his acts of cruelty. He would have his subjects flogged to death. His mulatto coach driver, Charles, was the particular object of his cruelty: after having had him struck on the buttocks with a hundred lashes, he forced the bleeding man to mount on his horse and drive his carriage. Because this poor fellow was a musician, on another such occasion, after having had him thrashed he jokingly forced him to play the violin—as punishment, so he said, for having danced without the accompaniment of that instrument. Magnan, settler, resident of the plains of Gonaïves, a cruel, hard-hearted man, had his slave quarters closed round by a very high wall; there was only one door leading out of this pen, and he was its turn-key. No sooner was their day’s work done than his unhappy cultivators once again returned to this prison; no sooner did they leave it than they were once again inside it. He had them flogged to death as well. Belcouche’s nephew had them burned alive, and buried in the same manner. He had a mulatto by the name of Jacquet flogged to death so that he could take possession of the man’s wife.

Michau, settler, resident of Ennery, had blacks of his placed in a bread oven while still alive. That cochineal breeder Brulley, the notorious deputy from Saint-Domingue whose nopal plantation was situated in the same quarter,72 had them ruthlessly flogged to death and burned alive. Périsse, settler, resident of La Croix on the plains of Gonaïves, had been given the name of Master Wooden Legs by his blacks. His ruthless habit of cutting a leg off at the knees, for the slightest infraction, and putting a wooden leg in its place earned him that sobriquet. Desdunes the elder, settler, resident of the Artibonite, had forty-five blacks burned alive: men, women, and children, one after the other. DesdunesLachicotte, Poincy and Rossignol—in short, the entire loathsome family— committed every imaginable act of cruelty; they would march about at night, armed with harpoons, and if they came upon any blacks in the slave quarters who didn’t belong there they would be skewered with a harpoon and then drowned. Remoussin, the son-in-law of Desdunes, performed the same acts of cruelty. The luckless Nicole, nurse of his children, was burned alive on his orders. Boisbel, another son-in-law of Desdunes, had the nurse of his children flogged to death. Truth be told, I would have found it hard to believe that this one family committed so many crimes in the Artibonite, were it not for the fact that all these deeds, which I learned about while I was myself in the region, had been further confirmed by Monsieur Jean-Baptiste Juge, a former plantation owner in the Artibonite, the present Comte de Terre-Neuve and Minister of Justice, who was good enough to pass on to me a wealth of notes regarding the crimes of the colonists, and particularly those committed in the beautiful and rich plain of the Artibonite. A relative of those Desdunes, a certain naturalist by the name of Descourtilz who, in several volumes of his, has circulated a host of lies and slanders on the subject of Hayti,73 would have been better advised to report on the virtues of his family and their acts of humanity. As it happens, a colonist from the Artibonite, by the name of Dumontellier, has produced a memoir in which the crimes of the Desdunes are unveiled. Here is an extract from it that we have copied out. I urge readers to keep in mind that these are the words of a colonist:

‘It is needful’, he says, ‘to inform the reader that Sieur Desdunes would have gladly welcomed having a cohort to protect him, less as a defence against attacks from the men of colour than as an aid in staving off the dread in his soul, which was in constant fear of the ghosts of the numerous victims that had been sacrificed to his rage and by his own hand on groundless suspicions. Wherever he looked, he thought he saw those errant shades of the dead, sad result of his lustful passion, inciting the vengeance of their fathers, their brothers, their children, all those who still retain the memory of their tortured kinsfolk. This harrowing idea made him wish for the protection of a retinue capable of restraining those slaves and their wrath’.* 74 But let us return to the crimes of the colonists. Mondoga would flog to death any of his blacks suspected of casting spells. He had his mistress buried alive. His neighbour, Poirier de Bocalar, would place his blacks in an iron collar, with muzzles in their mouths so that they died of starvation; when they were in this state, the only thing he gave them to eat was human excrement. On the orders of Rivière, a magistrate, heads would be cut off and thrown into the Artibonite River; those who came under his authority would be given a severe thrashing, regardless of whether they were slaves or free. Lameau the younger, settler, resident of La Saline, drowned a poor wretch of a woman in the Artibonite River who refused to satisfy his brutal lust. Preval, in order to give an exhibition of his skill as a marksman, obligingly killed his coach driver with one shot of his pistol. On the Dessolier plantation, in the vicinity of Saint-Marc, Lefèvre would have blacks buried up to the neck, leaving only their head above ground, which he would then use for target practice. He had holes dug to the size of pregnant women’s bellies, so that he could have them flogged at his leisure. Latoison-Laboulle, settler, resident of Saint-Marc and Croix-desBouquets, took barbarism and cruelty to such an extreme that the old and the infirm who no longer had the strength or the energy to work became the particular object of his rage: sometimes he would have their fingernails torn off or he would thrust them into fiery furnaces along with the cane-trash. For a single cane stalk, planted and watered with the sweat of their brow, he would extract two teeth from whatever poor wretch had broken it open in

order to quench his thirst, and four if it was a second offence. He would make them eat from calabashes filled with human excrement. Saintard, settler, owner of a sugar plantation at Arcahaye, had a staggering number of blacks put to death. Jarosay the elder cut off the tongues of his house slaves so that he could be served in silence. Drouet, settler, resident of La Montagne, would have blacks crushed in his coffee mill if he felt they weren’t picking the beans quickly enough, or else he would have them drowned in coffee basins. Gerbaud, settler, resident of the hill back of Montrouis, used to have two enormous mastiffs follow him around, and in the early days of the revolution he entertained himself by letting these mastiffs gorge on children, in order, so he said, to terrify the blacks and dissuade them from taking part in the insurrections. The notorious Caradeux the elder,75 settler, resident of Cul-de-Sac, dealt with trivial offences in the most atrocious manner. On his orders, two hundred lashes would be administered to his blacks. As often as not, he deemed this too moderate a punishment, and then he would have a hole dug in which the object of his punishment was left standing, with only the head sticking out; after the hole was filled with earth and trampled down, the condemned man was left in this state to die from hunger while suffering the most excruciating torment. With one kick of his foot, this rank villain killed Demoiselle de Roche Blanche (his wife and niece) because she had been generous enough to try and intercede with him on behalf of a man he was going to dispose of in his usual manner; this crime had no effect on the fate of the unfortunate victim, who was sacrificed all the same. His acts of cruelty decimated his plantation, and for several years there was no one to work it, for the traders were no longer willing to supply him with anybody. A man of impetuous character, he would set upon those traders, kicking them and attacking them with chairs when they came asking to be paid, something that often had to be done over pistol shots; that is what brought about his duel with Lacombe the younger, a Port-au-Prince trader. All of this is a matter of public notoriety. The law had no hold over this man, he was a big plantation owner, he had the right to do whatever he chose. Bauduy, retired magistrate for the Superior Council of Port-au-Prince, resident of the district of Bellevue, one afternoon had his confectioner

flogged to death for having offered him sweetmeats that were, according to him, poorly made. Nicolas the elder, settler, resident of Port-au-Prince, was in the habit of going about in the company of a child of eleven or twelve who followed him on foot, holding up the tail of his horse. One day this child, exhausted by the length of the journey and no longer able to stand on his feet, let drop the horse’s tail and collapsed on the road. Upon his return, the barbaric Nicolas had him placed in a large kettle and boiled over a brisk fire: such was the form of torture this villain invented in order to punish a poor, innocent child for an involuntary offence. He would cut off the tongues and ears of his blacks. In fine, his cruelty was so notorious that he was forbidden, by a decree of council, from purchasing any more blacks. Saint-Victor’s acts of cruelty decimated the Boutin plantation. Commanne the younger, who managed the Poix-la-Générale plantation at Arcahaye, likewise succeeded in decimating that plantation. Baron Delugé, settler, resident of Montrouis, who was nicknamed the good white man, and who generally passed as such, had one of his blacks thrashed to death; the heart of this poor wretch was still beating when he had the man buried under his personal supervision. He was indeed a good white man; judge from this good white man and his act of humanity what the rest of them were like. Bernard Pemerle, from the plains of Les Cayes, had griddles of the sort used in making cassava bread brought to a red heat, and then made his blacks sit on top of them, leaving those unfortunates to roast on the burning iron. This same form of torture was used by Champloi, settler, resident of Ravine du Sud, and Périgni, settler, resident of the plains of Les Cayes, when putting their blacks to death. Carouge, overseer of the Codere sugar plantation at four leagues distance from Les Cayes, ordered that his master sugar boiler be crushed under the great wheel of the mill, on the pretext that the man was spoiling the sugar. A certain Mistress Jean-Bart had one of her house slaves flogged to death; in the process, strips of flesh were torn from the girl’s body, and after that she had it strewn with gunpowder. When one of her negresses had the misfortune to lose a child, another such lady, Bailly from the Cape, ordered that a wooden one be made for her,

and that it be attached to the poor mother’s neck by an iron chain until such time as she produced another child. This punishment actually came as a relief to the woman, since her mistress had gained a reputation for hurling people into her lime kiln at Carenage while they were still alive. Madame Sarthe, settler, resident of the Cul-de-Sac plain, was accustomed to handing out four or five hundred lashes to the blacks who were unlucky enough to be under her command. One of her servants was flogged to death for having conversed with a white man who had come to see her. Another fury of a woman, by the name of Siouaret Ducoudrai, would administer two to three hundred lashes, after which she would take newly melted sealing wax and slowly pour it over the wound, one drop at a time. If Madame Cotte knew of any black women who had taken up with men having the power to deliver them from slavery, she would have them whipped until they were dead. On days of rest and relaxation, such as Sundays and feast days, Madame Momance, settler, resident of Léogane, would summon her gang of slaves and give them a severe thrashing, under the pretext of punishing witchcraft and sorcery; several died as a result of this ruthless treatment. Never has there been such a tigress as the woman whose name I am about to utter: Madame Charette, settler, resident of Saint-Louis. On her orders, iron masks had been crafted that could be closed shut with padlocks, for which she alone had the keys. If she wanted to torture one of her unfortunate subjects, she would place a mask on him: his head thus fastened, the poor wretch could move it only with the greatest of difficulty; he could drink or eat only with the permission of this infernal woman, who would leave her victim to die of hunger or thirst. Her son having succeeded in seducing one of her servants, she invented the following form of torture in response, which was carried out under her supervision: first, she had nails driven into a large cask, across its entire circumference, so that the interior of the cask was one circle of spikes. Once this operation was accomplished, she summoned the doomed girl along with all of her fellow servants; she took a razor, and cut off the ears of the victim, whom she was about to subject to the most excruciating form of torture. Despite the servant’s condition (she was pregnant by the son of this infernal woman), which ought to have softened even the most ferocious of hearts, and despite her entreaties and her tears, Madame Charette had the other servants, those who were the

most closely attached to the victim, seize hold of her and throw her in the cask, which was immediately sealed off at the head and bottom. She then ordered that it be rolled to the top of a very high hill, again by those same servants; when they got there, she had them release the cask, and it hurtled down into the abyss. There, at the bottom, she had the cask staved in and the girl, still breathing, was dragged out of it, to be thrown on the fire and burned alive. Right next to this tigress is where we should place Venault de Charmilly, settler, owner of a sugar plantation at Cavaillon. These two monsters, male and female, would have made quite the couple had they been matched together, as they ought: the most loathsome couple that ever saw the light of day. Although a full unveiling of this man’s shameful conduct must await another day, I will here analyse this swindler’s crimes in order to give some idea of his moral character. Venault de Charmilly had his blacks burned alive; he had them thrown into the sugar-boiler along with the cane-trash, and he personally assisted at these appalling executions. For a slight infraction, he would inflict the harshest of punishments. When he called out for someone, and that person had the misfortune not to have heard him, he would grab hold of the poor wretch and tear off his ears with a pair of tongs; if you responded badly to a question of his then he tore out your tongue; if you were accused of having pilfered something to eat then he tore out your teeth, again with the tongs, his favourite instrument when it came to torturing and mutilating his luckless subjects. Venault de Charmilly, please inform us, what crime did your poor coach driver Jean-Philippe commit? What did he do to you to deserve such an inhuman treatment? Vilifier of the blacks, doubtless you believed that your crimes, like those of all the other colonists, your accomplices, would have been buried in oblivion. You did believe it, for otherwise even someone as brazen as we know you to be never would have dared paint your imaginary picture of the happiness that, so you say, we enjoyed under the colonial regime. You never would have had the audacity to undertake a so-called refutation of the work of Mr Bryan Edwards,76 who has written more truly and more knowledgeably on the subject of SaintDomingue, during the brief time he resided on that island, than ever you could, even with the benefit of a century of residence and assiduous study.77 But let

us return to the crime you committed on the person of the poor black man, Jean-Philippe, your coach driver. As you read over this passage, summon up your forces and wallow once again in the blood of that poor wretch, who at your orders was placed in your horses’ feeding trough and pounded until his crushed body was nothing more than a mass of shreds and tatters. Before averting your eyes from this horrendous spectacle, be so good as to inform us of the nature of his crime. What was the cause of such an appalling act of torture? And now be so good as to inform us: who are happier, the peasants of Europe or the blacks, those miserable subjects of yours whom you treated in so disgraceful a manner?* 78 Mistress Delorme, settler, resident of Ravine Blanche, Cavaillon, is another lady worthy of occupying a place right next to this Charmilly. She had her house slaves tied to the four posts and torn asunder, after which she would have them laid face up on a plank, where they would be pinned down with nails. Rambault, settler, resident of Cavaillon, had them pounded in the trough of his coffee mill; he flogged them to death, and poured hot ash or brine over their wounds. Lartigue, settler, resident of Cavaillon, had the four limbs of his house slave Joseph sawn off, and then he had the man buried alive. Lestaille, settler, resident of Cavaillon, had them pounded in his coffee mill; for a slight infraction, he would tear off ears and teeth, and he would have them strung up by the heels. Gournaud, owner of a sugar plantation at Cavaillon, had them burned alive in furnaces along with the cane-trash; he also had them drowned with fifty-pound weights or with stones attached to their necks. Grandié, owner of a sugar plantation at Cavaillon, had her house slaves Baptise and Zabeth thrashed to death for having offended her, after which she had their bodies taken and hurled into a cauldron of boiling sugar. Delmas, settler, resident of Cavaillon, chained his blacks to a stake that was exposed to all the elements, and he buried them alive. Antoine, his head cart-driver, suffered this calamitous fate. Rousseau Lagaudraie, owner of a coffee plantation at Ravine Blanche, Cavaillon, had his blacks put in chains and left them in this miserable state to be gorged on by his dogs.

Lopinau, settler, resident of Voldrogue, Jérémie, had his blacks thrashed to death, and he roasted them in his baker’s oven. Bellance, settler, resident of Plymouth, chained them up and buried them alive; he thrashed them to death and rubbed lemon, pepper, salt, etc., on their bloody wounds. Mistress Clément, settler, resident of Fond Rouge, Jérémie, had them thrashed to death; she had them burned in fiery furnaces; she had hot ashes or pepper rubbed on their wounds. Farouge, from Fond Rouge, had them burned alive, after having kept them chained to a stake for a long period of time. Jouvence, his neighbour, committed the same acts of cruelty. Mistress le Roi had them clubbed to death. Mistress Lamestière acted likewise. Guilgaud, settler, resident of the plains of Les Cayes, at Fond Vert, neglected none of the niceties when it came to cruelty. He had his blacks chained to the stake; he opened up large wounds on their bodies, and then left them to be fed upon by worms. The whip never stopped cracking on his downtrodden blacks. Gelin, owner of a sugar plantation at Jérémie, had them thrown into cauldrons of boiling sugar. Naud, at Fond Rouge, chained his blacks to a stake and left them there to die, exposed to the rain and the heat. Petit Gas and Bocalin, settlers, residents of Jérémie, chained up their blacks and left them to perish. Chevalier Lafite, settler, resident of La Seringue, Jérémie, had one of his house slaves pounded in a coffee mill. His blacks died under the whip. Tauzias, settler, resident of Fond Rouge and Plymouth, had his blacks roasted on cassava griddles, and he had them buried alive. Those last two worthies were, I believe, the ones who went to pay their compliments to his majesty Louis XVIII, and to ask that he restore the colonies. Let them return here, once more to pound and burn and bury their blacks; we are awaiting them. Dezormeaux, settler, resident of Trou Bonbon, had a permanent gibbet set up at his plantation, from which he hanged people at his pleasure. Contenssans, at Cap-Rouge, Jacmel, burned his blacks and he hanged them; he had them flogged, ruthlessly.

Cagnette and Pradel, settlers from that same place, had them strung up by the heels. Saligné, Bégeste, Féraux committed, in a word, the same acts of cruelty as Cagnette and Pradel. Baudoin, Duluc, Megnier, Rabond, settlers, residents of Jacmel, had them thrashed to death; on the orders of these men, red hot branding-irons were applied to their wounds. Lantagnac and Lachaudière, settlers, residents of Anse-à-Veau, had several of their luckless blacks hanged and burned alive; others would die from a whipping or the harrowing punishment of the four posts. Remi Gourdette, Bonhomme Gourdette, Clery, Martel, Barthe, Périgné, all of them likewise from Anse-à-Veau, committed the same acts of cruelty. Langlade, settler, resident of Anse-à-Veau, invented his own special form of torture, which I have yet to come across in the extensive nomenclature of crimes committed by the colonists. Whoever he wanted to subject to this torture was first laid hold of and given two or three hundred lashes, after which he would have the man placed inside a hive of ants, where the poor wretch died a most excruciating death, devoured by the bites of those insects. The Lainé brothers, Honoré and Arnauld, would each have their blacks burned alive, and they had them flogged to death as well; the two Lainé brothers also left them to die of starvation. Welch, settler, resident of Torbeck, together with his white manager Dehais, committed the following crime: Dehais often complained that Welch’s gang of slaves was given over to magic and sorcery. When one of his natural children died, he insisted that it was the gang’s macandals who had committed this alleged crime,79 and Welch and Dehais set off to the place where the entire gang was at work hoeing land. Having no way of knowing for certain who in the gang was responsible for killing Dehais’s child, they coolly selected twelve of these men and women at random; the gang was then ordered to dig a pit, wide and deep, on that very spot. The twelve hapless victims were ordered into the pit and made to go down on their knees. First, quicklime was thrown on them, then the pit was filled up with earth. And so it was that twelve human victims were buried alive for an alleged crime.

We are going to report one last fact that will serve to characterize the colonists’ soul in a single stroke. Mistress Langlois was the owner of a sugar plantation in the plain of Les Cayes. One day, her overseer, as part of the report he was making on the day’s activities at the plantation, said to her: ‘Madame, bad luck would have it tonight that a poor negress, who was feeding cane into the mill, was unlucky enough to get her arm caught in it. I had no choice but to chop the arm off right then and there, to save the rest of her body, which would have passed through it as well’. Seated on her chair, Mistress Langlois listened coolly to the overseer, and then answered him: ‘Gracious me, that wouldn’t have been such a disaster when all’s said and done, if it weren’t that her body might have spoiled my cane-juice’. No, it is impossible for me to keep on describing such atrocities. What courage and what strength of spirit it would require to write down the innumerable misdeeds of the colonists during the colonial regime. It would take me entire volumes. The slight account I have just given of the atrocities of which we have been the victims will suffice to give an idea of the colonists’ character. The wives of these monsters proved equally proficient in the commission of such deeds: when it comes to debauched and indecent conduct, several of those furies—the shame and dishonour of their sex— equalled and even surpassed the men, committing the most abominable excesses, the most unimaginable crimes and unparalleled acts of cruelty. To France’s shame, not a single one of the monsters we have just cited has suffered the penalty that his foul deeds merit; not a single one has experienced even the slightest punishment for his crimes. Colonists, those of you who still draw breath, cite me a single one of your kind whose guilty head was struck down by the sword of the law. I defy you to prove me wrong. History offers us no example of an aggregation of men resembling the colonists of Saint-Domingue in their criminality. Every nation has had its share of rank villains, to the great misfortune of humankind; but no other epoch or people has witnessed a rabble of this order, composed of forty to fifty thousand cut-throats, every single one of them a Nero, a Mezentius, a Phalaris, etc., and their women Messalinas and Fredegunds, etc.80 If, however, we think back to the impure origin of these colonists, one is readily

persuaded that they could not have turned out any differently from what they were, and what they will always be: men descended from the dregs of the people, guilty of all manner of crimes; adventurers escaped from the gallows; vagrants; indentured servants; etc. From such men, only monstrous results could ensue. Fleeing a homeland that with horror drove them from its bosom, vomited forth onto these shores the better to hide their shame and, above all, to make their fortune at whatever cost, these villains employed the most illicit and criminal means imaginable to achieve their goal. A long way from the metropole, whose laws were a dead letter (forever evaded and unenforced by administrators who were in their pay and under their influence), these arrogant colonists, accustomed to the despotism of the colonial regime, recognized no higher authority, nothing higher than the laws they held in contempt and the magistrates who were in their pocket. They committed every imaginable type of crime with the assurance of impunity, and oppressed the island’s population in the most appalling manner. Louis XIV attempted in vain, through his royal ordinances, to place restrictions on the cruel and dissolute conduct of the colonists by ameliorating the lot of the free people of colour and the slaves.81 His good intentions had no effect and the regulations were never enforced; in the beginning they were evaded, and soon thereafter they became a dead letter. And so it was that on each plantation there existed a white despot, who had the barbaric right of life and death over the unfortunate blacks in his keep. Turning this atrocious privilege to account, death hovered over our heads as over those of the lowliest animals; and when they wanted to deal it out to us, the only thing that gave them any pause was the question of which form of punishment to choose. On all their plantations, the big planters had built dungeons of many different shapes and sizes, which were fitted out for the different types of torture they wished to inflict on their victims. These dungeons contained cells that were exactly proportioned to the height and breadth of the victim who was to be confined in it, such that the victim would die standing, without being able to change posture. In other dungeons (those of Desdunes were built in this manner) the walls were lined with iron rings, such that the man fastened to them would have each of his

limbs as well as his neck clamped to the wall; in this desperate situation, a sharp wooden stake was the only point of support on which the poor wretch could rest his buttocks and relieve himself of the weight of his body. In the furthest recess of that particular dungeon was a small hermetically sealed cell, where the victim could suffocate to death in a few short hours. Other dungeons were built in dank and miry locations (such were those of Gallifet, Montalibor, Milot, Latour Duroc, and almost all of the plantations belonging to the big planters),* where the victims died a watery death, killed by the cold and the damp which cut off the circulation of the blood. In addition to these ghastly dungeons, the colonists in their savagery devised a thousand varied instruments of torture: iron bars; enormous iron collars with long prongs sticking out; thumb-screws; manacles; fetters; iron masks; chains; etc. Why! Why in heaven’s name was all this apparatus of death and torture reserved for innocent victims, who would fall to their knees at the slightest sign!!!… And last of all, the terrifying punishment of the four posts, which was always at the ready on plantations, in cities and towns: the four limbs of the victim were fastened to the posts, and the middle of the body was held in place by an iron hoop, which prevented it from moving. Others would have the condemned slave stretched out on a ladder, and bound tight to it, while two drivers (who would be relieved by a fresh pair, when the first two tired) lashed the body, a hundred times over, tore it asunder, while the victim groaned in misery, called out for help, did whatever the pain prompted, whatever might incite the pity of a barbaric master. Alas! These unavailing cries would melt into air, they would merge with the sound of the whip that echoed through our mountains. The colonist in all his atrocity, unmoved, deaf to these cries, as unyielding as the powers of hell, gazed long and hard upon this horrifying spectacle! Far from being touched with pity, he would look on as new forms of torment were prepared, at his command, to stifle the cries of the victim: he would put a gag in the mouth, or a redhot ember. To glut his frenzied rage the tormentor had his choice of caustic and burning matter—brine, salt, pepper, hot ash, boiling oil or lard, sealing wax, gunpowder—that he could spread over the bleeding body, and his ingredient of choice would mingle with the poor wretch’s blood, causing him to suffer inexpressible pain; at other times, he would have irons brought to a red heat, which were then applied to the martyr’s body.

Strokes of the whip and groans replaced the crowing of the cock, says Wimpffen, who wrote about Saint-Domingue during the revolution, and he spoke the truth.82 It passes belief that a white man with the name of Lataille [the Thrasher] openly advertised the fact that he was in the business of giving blacks a thrashing, at a modest salary of four bits for every hundred strokes of the whip, and ended up making a brilliant fortune. And yet this is a fact known throughout Cap-Henry, where he carried on that shameful profession. The poor soul who had neither the courage nor the fortitude to endure the cruel punishments that, for the slightest offence, were going to be inflicted on him would escape into the forests to avoid such torments; his barbaric master, furious at seeing his prey escape, would pursue him there, in those places that offered the slave a refuge from tyranny. This is the origin of those notorious man-hunts, when maroons were pursued and destroyed as if they were ferocious beasts; if a dozen or so were destroyed then the hunt was considered a success. It often happened that, if there were no maroons to be found, those vile hunters would kill the unlucky slaves they had brought along with them to the forests, in order to collect the bounty the government awarded for each maroon’s head.* 83 And so it was that the unhappy slaves were put on a par with the lowliest animals. In the public records, entered on the very same line, one finds slaves, horses, cattle, mules, hogs, etc., all one and the same thing: a man was sold with pigs, it made no difference. As proof of these assertions, we provide a word-for-word transcription of a decision of the Council of the Cape, which we have drawn from Moreau de Saint-Méry’s compilation.† 84 We read in this same collection that with one shot of his musket an enraged white man by the name of Sauzeau, the overseer of Sieur de Beaujeau’s plantation in Quartier Morin, killed a black man from this plantation by the name of Pompée; as this Sauzeau was nothing more than a lowly overseer, he was prosecuted for the crime and banished from the colony, but it was only for appearance’ sake, because the sentence of exile was never carried out.85 Around this same time, a black man was caught throwing rocks at the dog of a white man named Sommereau; he was dragged off, placed in custody,

and sentenced to be flogged in all the usual public places and crossroads, for having dared strike the dog of a white man.86 O admirable justice! When a white man kills a black man he is banished! When a black man beats a dog he is treated as a criminal and torn open by the torturer’s whip! Haytian women were at the mercy of these lewd men, who abused them in the most horrific manner imaginable. I shudder when I think of the number of doomed victims sacrificed to these jealous rages: on a mere suspicion, they would be whipped or flayed alive; those who put up any resistance to the lustful passion of these men would be made to suffer the most excruciating torment before dying. The woman might be married, or living with a black man, or she might be an innocent young girl still under her mother’s wing: the colonist in his immorality made no distinction, he stopped at nothing. This arrogant master violated all of nature’s laws, ruthlessly and without remorse; death was the punishment for anyone who attempted to place an obstacle between the master and his passions by daring to cry out. Men saw their wives dragged away, and they could only watch in silence; mothers saw their daughters ripped from their arms, and they could not say a word of complaint to anyone in the face of such excessive brutality and injustice. Rather than give medicine or healthier food to a slave who had neither the strength nor the temperament to endure heavy labour, they would load him down with it, regardless of how weak or how ill he was. Blood streamed from his body under the repeated strokes of the whip; death or suicide was not long in coming, putting an end to his painful existence, and the barbaric colonist, having lost his prey, then became the victim of his own rage. Some of these colonists were greedy enough and cruel enough to feel aggrieved at the sight of pregnant women, because during their pregnancies and during the time they spent nursing their children these women were not able to work like the other cultivators—a state of affairs that was, according to their abominable calculations, contrary to their interests. Others made calculations that were of exactly the opposite sort, but no less sordid: they saw that the propagation of slaves in their gangs was in their interest, so they tortured any mothers who had the misfortune to lose their children. Thus were all natural feelings, all sentiments of humanity, stifled in the colonists’

soul by a feeling that was stronger: a feeling of what was in their own interest, a feeling of greed. No consideration was shown for pregnant women, they were forced to do the very same work as the other cultivators, and when their pregnant state prevented them from doing it, they would be flogged ruthlessly, mercilessly. Their predicament would have melted a monster’s heart, but not those of the colonists! A certain number of these brigands took to enforcing the despicable law of the Spartans on their plantations: children who were unhealthy or who suffered from a weak constitution were hurled into a ravine or buried alive. Dumas, settler, resident of Marmelade, and at present a property owner in France at Marcilly-sur-Seine in the department of Marne, ordered that a certain child with a weak constitution, fresh out of the womb, be thrown into a lime kiln. Moved with compassion, Élisabeth Mimi, his natural daughter, threw herself at the feet of her barbaric father and begged that he give her the child, promising to take care of it herself, to nurture it on goat’s milk and thereby allow the mother to keep on working. Dumas, influenced more by this last reason than by humane considerations, granted her this request. Laurent, which is the name of that child, is now forty-five years old, the father of a large family, an excellent plantation manager, a steadfast tiller of the Haytian soil. Mimi, virtuous and good, you are no longer with us! But you rejoice in the bosom of eternal bliss, as a reward for your noble actions. Your friend here consecrates your name and your virtues, as an object of veneration and friendship for all kind and tender-hearted souls.87 The rate at which a country’s population grows depends on how it is governed; this holds true for all countries. The population will decrease or increase depending on whether it is tyrannized by the law, or protected by it. The colonists fell decidedly short when it came to imitating the injunctions of Roman law, or that fine precept of the religion of the Magi, which encouraged the Persians to go forth and multiply: ‘Making a child, planting a new plot of land, and building a house are three actions agreeable to God’.88 Those harsh, cruel despots did exactly the opposite, which is the reason why, despite the fact that each year twenty thousand blacks were brought into the country, the population of Hayti scarcely grew at all. How, I ask you, could the population grow in the midst of the most horrendous form of tyranny that ever existed?

You who belittle the blacks, is it any wonder now if our moral and physical faculties were held in check by slavery so harsh? What liberal sentiments could germinate in hearts that were watered with endless contempt! Could a life passed in grievous misery and never-ending torments give birth to the most gratifying moral affections, religion, humanity, virtue —those sentiments that are the source of happiness for civilized men? Is it any wonder if we were prone to suicide and poisoning? If our women extinguished the tender feelings of motherhood in their hearts and, out of a cruel pity, put an end to the beloved and sorrowful fruit of their embraces? Indeed, how can life be endured when it has reached the lowest stage of degradation and wretchedness? When death must be suffered a thousand times over, in the cruellest of torments, when one has been reduced to that deplorable condition, without hope of escape, is it not a glaring act of cowardice to welcome life? And why give birth to those poor creatures who would be condemned for their entire life to drag out a fragile existence in shame and ignominy, in torment, in one long succession of unending pain? To extinguish a life so hateful, was that really such a crime? It was an act of compassion, humanity!!!… Abominable colonists, authors of our every ill, you have the gall to vilify us and reproach us for the foul deeds that you yourselves committed. If you had been in our place, and we in yours, we could very well have drawn a comparison that would have been far from flattering to you: you would perhaps have had all our vices, and not a single one of our virtues! If these crimes for which you so impudently reproach us came naturally to us, why is it that ever since we reclaimed our rights and rid our land of your poisonous influence we witness no more suicides, no poisonings, no abortions? Why, despite the bloody wars that we have had to endure and our grievous misfortunes, does our countryside abound with dazzling youth? Why do these fields that once were watered with our sweat and our tears resound with cries of rejoicing, why are they so fertile, so rife with bounteous harvests? Why have days of happiness followed upon days of suffering, as a new era, radiant with glory and prosperity, dawns on the Haytian people? Because these are the fruits of liberty—that heavenly possession, the greatest of goods and the source of all others. In no way do these gifts resemble the rotten harvest of slavery, the most horrendous wound ever suffered by humanity. And yet, hard as it is to believe, those cruel and barbaric masters

lived in our midst in perfect safety. Without fear of revolt, one white man, alone, in the most remote mountains, in the thick of the forest, was able to govern and torture a hundred blacks in accordance with his every whim, even though we could have clubbed those tyrants to death with our hoes; but the chains of servitude prevented us from raising our gaze and seeing beyond our deplorable condition. One could travel day and night, unarmed, throughout the entire colony, without fear of thieves. The unfortunate maroons did no harm to anyone. Living in the woods, feeding on roots, in a state of nakedness and anxious anticipation, he would watch from his place of retreat as they passed by, the rich planter who persecuted him or the pedlar loaded down with wares, without ever trying to take his revenge or seize hold of the merchandise. Here would be an appropriate moment for me to recount a host of heroic deeds and interesting anecdotes from the time of our harsh captivity, which would have served to contrast the generosity and gratitude characteristic of the blacks with the cruelty, avarice, and ingratitude of the whites, and to make those who belittle us blush with shame at their slanders. But time presses. From every quarter we hear the cries of our fellow citizens: our tyrants are coming, to arms! We must hasten on, abridging the task we set for ourselves, that we might lay down the pen and take up the sword against our tyrants. We have given some idea of the deplorable fate of those who were once called slaves. We are now going to sketch the sad fortunes of those who were, in that time of horrors, brazenly referred to as the ‘free’ population. We will not make any fine distinction between these so-called ‘free’ people and the slaves, for although they belonged to no particular master, the white public was their master. In all respects, they endured the same humiliations and the same disgraceful treatment as the slaves, and we will consider them as such. For the colonial regime as for the era of liberty that came after it, we will designate the people of Hayti by the generic name of Haytians. What a multitude of absurd precautions were taken by those mercenary governors and administrators in order to keep a hold on the sceptre of colonial despotism and maintain the sway of prejudice; in order to prevent the ‘free’ population from rising above the lowly sphere in which they were mired; in order to enslave them all the better. What absurd decrees and regulations they issued, such as forcing these people to select names drawn

from the African idiom or taken from local expressions, from the names of animals or plants, etc. Hence the origin of all those baroque names, Zombi, Bembara, Makaque, Bois-Rouge, Caïman, Sapotille, etc., which had to be reported to the register-office, where the clerk would, for a small fee, and in exchange for real names and surnames, write them down in his book of records.* 89 Deprived of the enjoyment of their civil rights, lacking protection, lacking support, treated with the utmost contempt, their precarious life was subject to the whims of whatever white man happened to come along. They were not allowed to fill any public office or position of trust, nor work at any occupation or profession to which even the slightest prestige attached: those were all exclusively reserved for the whites. They were not allowed to be priests, or lawyers, or doctors, or surgeons, or apothecaries, or schoolmasters: they were forbidden to occupy those posts. Even with the professions and trades that they were allowed to practise, they could not be masters, only assistants: the master barber’s boy, or the tailor’s, the builder’s, etc. Shame and stigma followed them everywhere they went. Even in churches, where the sanctity of the place ought to inspire men with feelings of charity and humility, arrogant distinctions kept them far from the altar.* What am I saying! O summit of human vanity! This arrogance accompanied the whites even to the grave: they had to have a special place of their own in the cemetery. They were obliged to participate in all kinds of forced labour, and to serve for three years in the rural police force, at the expiration of which they then had to serve in the militias of their district or province; they were obliged to cover a distance of fifteen or twenty leagues distance to convey an order or a letter to a white man, and the least disobedience, the merest comment regarding these vexing duties, was treated as a capital offence. For JeanBaptiste, a free black man, such was the unhappy consequence of not having instantly obeyed Barré Saint-Venant, manager of the Duplaa plantation at the time, and of having made perfectly valid objections to his demand. After that rank villain arrested him and falsely accused him, he was condemned, by a decision of the Council of the Cape, to be put in an iron collar for two hours, at Clugny market in this same city of the Cape, and made to bear the following sign: Negro guilty of insolence toward whites; and then to be flogged, branded, and attached to the public chain-gang, to serve thereon for three years.† 90

The same thing happened to Mongin from Marmelade, who was condemned at the instigation of Gautier, a white planter, to be put in an iron collar and attached to a stake to be driven into the ground for this purpose at the market square of this city, known as Clugny market, and to remain there every day from seven to nine in the morning, and made to bear a sign, on both his front and back, with these words writ in large letters: Free mulatto who raised his hand against a white man; and then to be attached to the public chain-gang, to serve thereon for a period of three years.91 Our readers can readily confirm the truth of these incidents, which are recorded in Moreau de Saint-Méry’s collection of colonial laws and constitutions; that colonist can hardly be suspected of having any partiality toward us. The reader will find in those pages a host of similar deeds. Even the women were subjected to this sort of ignominious treatment, which forced a number of them to escape to the Spanish part of the island. They had to stand there and let themselves be insulted, abused, and beaten by white women, without being able to respond to their outrageous assaults. A white man could strike a so-called ‘free’ man with impunity, he could batter him, he could even kill him. He would escape with no more than a fine, which in any case he never paid, while the poor wretch who had responded to such indignities by rendering blow for blow would have his wrist cut off, or he’d be hanged without mercy if the white man happened to have been wounded in the dispute.* 92 The theatres were to all intents and purposes closed to them: the uppermost tier was the only place they were allowed to sit. They might possess an immense fortune, a good education, a spotless reputation, none of that counted for anything; the sailor, the pedlar, the overseer, every imaginable sort of lout and ne’er-do-well, the dregs, the scum of the earth, they were all free to occupy the best seats in the house, simply because they were white. The same held true for social gatherings: even if they were paragons of excellence, they would never be invited to the main table; there was no escape from that little place apart, which would be set up for them immediately upon arrival, in a corner of the gallery or else in the quarters where the house slaves ordinarily ate—the very same places where the white masters’ coloured children would eat (they too were never invited to the main table), as well as their housekeepers.

On a thoroughfare, in the street, inside a house, they were obliged to bend their knees before those arrogant creatures who, desirous of maintaining their supremacy, made a point of scrutinizing all their movements; even their most innocent actions were interpreted as worthy of punishment. Woe to him among them who happened to be on a thoroughfare and, at the sound of a carriage and the cracking of its whip, didn’t stop dead in his tracks, remove his hat, and stay there, frozen, in humble silence, until the big planter had passed by. Woe to him who, while walking in the street and finding himself in a direct line with an oncoming colonist, or passing in front of that man’s door as he was taking the air, didn’t step out of the way with the greatest haste and move to the other side.* Woe to him who had cause to enter that man’s house and was so bold as to say or do something that angered him; woe to the poor worker or artisan who went there to ask for his salary, the reward for his sweat and labour: in a flash, he’d be beaten with a cane, beaten with a sword across his body, beaten with a chair, beaten with a whip, and this was the only form of recompense for the man bold enough to have committed such a dark deed. Woe to him whose little property bordered on that of a big planter; woe to him and his successors. The sacred rights of property, long possession, authentic titles, none of those things could prevent him, sooner or later, from being stripped of it by his covetous and powerful neighbour, and being himself persecuted and having his livestock attacked. Eventually, everything around him would fall prey to the predations of the colonist, who was so unyielding in the pursuit of his criminal intentions that the unfortunate man —grown weary of having such a neighbour and no longer able to endure the constant harassment—had no option but to sell him the heritage of his forefathers for next to nothing and to go elsewhere, transporting his family and the spirits of hearth and home to some barren spot at a far remove from the planters. There, despoiled, impoverished, heart-sick, working an unproductive soil, at least he will live peacefully, and still count himself lucky to have got rid of his loathsome neighbour; a wise man, having sacrificed his fortune to gain peace of mind, he will have escaped the miserable fate of Paul Carenan. † 93 We could relate a thousand similar incidents. Owning a small property, enjoying a certain prosperity: these were not the only things that gave umbrage to those jealous, imperious colonists and stuck in their

gullet. Their arrogant prerogatives extended over even the smallest matters, the most minor of details, such as objects of luxury and clothing, which were nonetheless what sustained the commerce of the metropole. Ordinances forbade the men to dress like the white men, and women were forbidden to dress like the white women.* 94 If their manner of dress was ever so slightly distinctive, and the cloth of a certain quality, why then, they were trying to rival the whites. If their bearing was noble, and they cut an elegant figure, why then, it was the height of audacity, a frightful scandal, it was bursting the bounds of simplicity, decency, and respect, those essential attributes of their condition. Nothing was more shocking for the colonists, with their uncouth demeanour and their slovenly dress, than the gracefulness, the seemliness, and the agreeable manners that come naturally to Haytians; the majority of those colonists (who, as we have already pointed out, sprang from the dregs of society and attained their fortune through crimes or mere happenstance) still retained traces of their squalid origins in their manner of speaking and acting. This was especially true for the white women, who were even more tainted with prejudice. The majority of them being foul-mouthed jades or wretched creatures escaped from Bicêtre,95 who were brought to our shores as a result of their shameful conduct, these vicious and arrogant women could not look upon the adornments and beauty, the elegant forms and inexpressible charms of our incomparable Haytian women, without a feeling of bitter dejection and fatal resentment. For men of such arrogance, and especially for women so vain and presumptuous, this humiliating contrast was always a source of concern, and the government was ever anxious to pander to it, as witness the ordinances passed in this regard, which one cannot read without smiling in pity. Today, we cannot help but laugh at such puerilities, and yet they nevertheless provide telling evidence of the physical and moral inferiority of this breed of person: the colonist who, on no grounds at all, wants to lay claim to a supposed superiority over us. Really! I exclaimed to myself. Governors and administrators, charged with the responsibility of managing a colony as important as SaintDomingue, had nothing more important to do than busy themselves with such frivolities and gratify the unbridled passions of the colonists. Really!

When there was so much else they could have tasked themselves with? Such as carrying out judicious reforms, for instance, and all sorts of projects of improvement. Or enforcing the provisions of the Code Noir and the Edict of 1784,96 which improved conditions for the freed and the enslaved—laws that were trampled underfoot by the colonists and, yes, by the administrators themselves! Or putting an end to the unparalleled cruelties that were being committed on all the plantations, from one end of the island to the other. Or establishing agricultural regulations that would improve conditions for those working the land and thereby increase the colony’s revenues. Or humbling the arrogance of colonial despotism and restoring a sense of morals, obedience, and religion in that mob of cut-throats. Far from busying themselves with such vital affairs, what did they actually do, those mercenary administrators? In the colonists’ pay and under the white women’s influence, they indulged their passions, flattered their whims; they aggravated the misery that was being unrelentingly heaped upon us, instead of diminishing it; they betrayed the trust of their sovereign and the interests of the metropole by transmitting false information about this country and not allowing the laws to be enforced. If it were not for the vices of that administration, the revolution would never have taken place and we would still be under the colonists’ yoke. Ah! Let us give thanks for their injustices, since these are what caused us to break the chains of tyranny forever! I have read the book by Hilliard d’Auberteuil, because I was interested in finding out the reasons why the colonists put him in a dungeon and left him to rot.97 It was certainly not on account of having written the following passage: ‘Interest and safety demand that we hold the black race in so much contempt that anyone who descends from it, as far as the sixth generation, remains marked with an indelible stain’. Rather, it was on account of having had more humanity than those vile colonists; it was for having drawn the French ministry’s attention to at least some of the atrocities and abuses that predominated in Saint-Domingue at that time; it was for having dared to state, when speaking of blacks, that ‘the Edict of 1685, which determines the punishments that their masters can inflict upon them, established a sort of proportion between the offence and the penalty, but that fact in no way prevents negroes from dying in chains or being flogged to death on a daily basis, or from being beaten, suffocated, burned with no due procedure’. So that explains

the unfortunate Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s death. But what is altogether more surprising is that a book like the one under discussion here, which could have saved those miserable colonists—given its ideas regarding how to improve and alleviate the wretched condition of the blacks and the so-called ‘free’ people—and which was actually presented to the Minister of the Marine, approved by him, and printed with royal approbation and by licence of the King, should then be suppressed as a dangerous book, by royal ordinance, and that its author should be condemned to die an ignominious death.* 98 This confirms us even more in the opinion we have formed, that the government of our former metropole has consistently let itself be fooled by those arrogant colonists, who are inured to every imaginable crime, and that it has committed gross errors in order to gratify the passions which have always been the motive cause of the latter’s conduct. So long as there exists a single individual belonging to this impious caste, he will always do what he can to deceive and mislead European opinion regarding us. Ex-colonists of Saint-Domingue, you should re-read Hilliard d’Auberteuil. You would reckon yourselves very happy indeed, were you in a position to follow the advice he gave you back then! Will or whim was all that governed the conduct of these ex-colonists in their exercise of sovereign power. These arrogant creatures lived in the midst of abundance and riches, leading a sensual, libidinous existence; they passed their lives under the shelter of the abominable prejudice they had created. Prejudice, barbaric spirit! How powerful is your empire over the hearts of men: you are what leads them to misjudge their brothers, to hate them, to persecute them; you are what animated the savage colonists and drove them to the cruelties they inflicted on us; you are what inspired in them the ghastly delirium that led them to outrage both heaven and nature alike! Given over to the most crapulous forms of debauchery, there is not a single crime with which the colonists have not sullied themselves; they even disrespected the rights of nature in relation to their natural daughters. One cannot possibly imagine the orgies and wild excesses that were indulged in during the feasts and nocturnal debauches they gave for one another’s benefit.

Lucky fellows! Through the yield of our back-breaking labour, they grew fat with our blood and our sweat. Lucky indeed! Those imperious despots kept us in abject, ignominious bondage and, ever vigilant with respect to anything they thought might restrict their arrogant prerogatives, they devoted all their energies to promoting whatever could extend and consolidate the power of colonial despotism. Such was the government of the ex-colonists of Saint-Domingue before the revolution of 1789; such were their morals, and such was their character. The impartial observer should now have a fair idea of those frightful times and of the deplorable situation in which we were engulfed. O you, young Haytians, who possess the good fortune to have been born under the rule of law and liberty! You who are not familiar with those times of horror and barbarism, read what has been written. Never forget the misfortunes of your fathers, and learn to distrust your tyrants! Learn to hate them! Is it any wonder, in light of this, that Barré Saint-Venant pines after a time when belief in the superiority of whites had not yet been destroyed? That Félix Carteau, author of Evenings in Bermuda, takes the unalterable supremacy of the whites as axiomatic, identifying it as the palladium of our species?99 That Berquin Duvallon would like to perpetuate the happy prejudice that makes one scorn the negro as a slave by nature?100 Armed with such blasphemies, says the virtuous abbé Grégoire, they shamelessly demand that new fetters be forged for Africans.101 Another of those monsters, whom we presume to be Valentin de Cullion, former lawyer and ex-colonist of Saint-Domingue, thinks that negroes were brought into this world only for the purpose of being enslaved; he goes so far as to claim that they themselves would vote for slavery, and pines after a time when the shadow of the white man was enough to make the black man obey.102 The despicable Malouet, among the cruellest of our persecutors, applauds such sentiments, exclaiming: That is how things once were, how they no longer are, but how they once again must be, only revived this time with more art than violence.* 103 Haytians, do your hearts not rise up in anger at the language of these colonists, at the memories of these oppressors whom we have vanquished in so many battles? Do you not feel the blood boiling in your veins? What! When bayonets were crossed, we put our cruel enemies to flight; we laid to

rest that supposed superiority of the white man, and yet their shadow could still. . . . . . . . No, no, that time is gone. It will never return. Should we be annihilated, down to the very last one of us, this would still be preferable to bowing our heads under the despotic yoke that once oppressed us. Never will we tremble before the forces of our enemies, be they ever so great in number. We will battle with their shadows! Did three hundred Spartans tremble at Thermopylæ?104 When the numberless forces of the Persians invaded Greece to rob it of its liberty, they died on the field of honour, their weapons in their hand; faces turned toward their enemies, they fell, but they were avenged on the plains of Plataea and of Marathon, and liberty triumphed over its numerous enemies. Thus will some among us take our last step on the path of glory, but they will be avenged; liberty and independence will be triumphant, always and ever! Haytians! Regardless of what Malouet says, neither his perfidious art nor violence will ever get the better of us. Could we be deceived by our most implacable enemies? Could we fail to recognize the hand of our tormentors, those who for centuries have tortured and mutilated our fathers? Could we fail to recognize their frightful scheme? The work of the colonists is there for all to see! The pleasure they get from our internal divisions.105 Their hope of perpetuating those divisions, and their efforts at doing so. The joy painted on their faces and stirring their hearts when they hear an account of our misfortunes. The care they take to aggravate those misfortunes by creating suspicion and spreading lies. The news they invent, full of bloody—and imagined—battles, and in which they take real delight in parading pile upon pile of Haytians butchered by Haytians. Can we fail, in all this, to recognize our true and implacable enemies, the sole authors of our every misfortune? Ah! My Haytian compatriots, my brothers, my friends, let us rally against our common enemies; let us form but one bundle of our weapons; let us rally round this great man, this guardian spirit whom the divinity placed on earth for the salvation of Haytians; let us rally round the great Henry, this good father, whose every care and solicitude is for the happiness of the Haytian family, all of whom are his children. He alone will guide the vessel of liberty and independence into port. Who could doubt it? From the correspondence of his name with that of the cacique Henry, who rescued the remnants of the first Haytians from shipwreck; from those extraordinary

marks of distinction, his genius, his energy, the deep knowledge that he has of the world and the human heart: from signs such as these, let there be no doubt, it is he whom the All Powerful has singled out as the restorer and liberator of his people. Is he not the one, Haytians, who founded institutions for your benefit and who gave you the laws that ensure your present happiness, and that will accompany you into the future? Is it not the genius of this great man that has raised monuments for the glory of the nation, drawing the admiration of the world upon you? Is he not the one who raised that renowned citadel on the peak of La Ferrière, unique in the new world by virtue of its immense fortifications, and unequalled in the old world on account of its unassailable location?106 These gifts, these monuments, are the proof of his tender solicitude, of the care he takes for your happiness and for that of your families and your children; they ensure that your liberty and your independence will be defended against the attacks of those who would dare interfere with them! Is it not this hero who, refusing to tread the common path, has left upon the Haytian nation the imprint of the noble character and the generous sentiments that distinguish the free man; who infuses it with energy; and who will always be the dread and terror of tyrants? Over the course of twenty-five years of combat, struggle, and accomplishment, is he not the one who, working alongside the Haytian heroes, took an axe to the ancient tree of prejudice and slavery? Is he not the one, finally, who eradicated its last roots by making the shadow of the white man disappear? Haytians! For so many immortal accomplishments, for so many services rendered, for so many gifts bestowed, we will never be ungrateful! No! Let other peoples dishonour themselves and be guilty of that shameful crime, if they so wish. But for us, may gratitude and thankfulness always be our share; may these virtues always be graven on our hearts, and may they never be effaced. Regenerator and benefactor of the Haytian people, glory be forever rendered to Henry 1st! Glory to him and his descendants; may his dynasty reign over us eternally! Haytians! May these cries of gratitude be always with us. On our days of festivity, at the tables where we dine, in the bosom of our families, may these

cries be the symbol of our joy and rejoicing; and in the heat of battle, may they be the signal of victory, and its surest pledge! Immortal protector of the liberty of the press, and of the arts and sciences, glory be ever rendered to you by the Haytians! O my august Sovereign! Permit me to join my feeble strains to the acclamations of my fellow citizens. The formidable royal protection that Your Majesty accords to the realm of letters is what allows me the freedom to sketch the crimes of our implacable enemies, for all the world to see! How is it possible! I asked myself, when embarking on this work. The friends of slavery, those eternal enemies of humankind, have been free to write thousands of volumes; for centuries now, they have made the printing presses of Europe groan under the weight of their calumnies and their attempts at degrading the black man below the level of a brute beast. It has been difficult for the small number of writers from our unfortunate class to cast even a few glimmers of light on these numerous slanders, constrained as they have been by all the circumstances that together worked to stifle their voices. Today, however, the divinity has favoured us with his generous gifts, rendering us free and independent, governed by a generous prince who protects the realm of letters; at present, we have Haytian presses of our own, and we can unveil the crimes of the colonists and respond to even the most absurd lies invented by the prejudice and avarice of our oppressors. At this very instant, in public documents and private letters, we see that mob of villains once again stirring about, trying to inflict new miseries upon our beleaguered country. If, under such circumstances, we did not take pen to paper, then we would indeed be as unworthy of the title ‘man’ as our enemies claim we are. Why wouldn’t we write back against our contemptible detractors, I ask you? Why wouldn’t we unveil the crimes of those dealers in human flesh and those loathsome colonists? Why wouldn’t we refute their wretched arguments? What! For centuries they have had the right to make base and slanderous assertions about us, and now, at the very moment when there is light to be shed and vengeance to be taken…? Great heavens! You say we don’t have the right to answer them back! And why? Because we might offend white people in general. What wretched sophisms, what absurd puerilities! What! Just because the pedlars of human flesh and the colonists have vilified and persecuted the blacks, does it follow from this that all whites are our enemies? Why would we be any less generous than they

have been? Most Europeans think well of us; we have firm and zealous protectors among them. How could we not love and cherish the immortal Wilberforce and the virtuous abbé Grégoire? Whatever their nationality, we blacks hold those venerable philanthropists close to our hearts; ingratitude has never been one of our failings. We write, so as to vindicate our indestructible and eternal rights, and on behalf of the most just of all causes. We write so as to have the same advantages that civilized peoples enjoy. We write so as to deliver ourselves from the oppression of our tormentors. Who is the white man with so little generosity, no matter what nation he belongs to, that he would not applaud the noble design that inspires us? Who would not join with us in expressing those same wishes? Englishman, Frenchman, German, Russian, white man, from all the regions of the earth: who is the one among you that could be so ungenerous and so bereft of the feelings of justice and humanity, graven by divinity on every heart, as not to shudder when reading the account of what we have been subject to for centuries, the persecutions and the horrors of which we are the unhappy victims? Who is the one among you that could be so ungenerous as not to feel compassion for our misfortunes and applaud the justice of our cause and the resolution we have taken, dreadful as it is, to be exterminated—every one of us, our women, our children—rather than submit ourselves to tyranny? The only ones who will not applaud this magnanimous resolution are the shameful colonists, the abominable traffickers in human flesh and their partisans. It will drive them to a frenzy, and that is precisely what we want. For them to die of their impotent rage would be the fulfilment of our most ardent wishes! It is against them that we are directing these writings of ours. And it is for them, and for those who support them, that we are sharpening the bayonets that are going to pierce their bellies!!!

End of Part One P.S. In the second part of this work, we will give a historical outline of the principal events that have taken place in Hayti from the dawn of the Revolution to the glorious reign of His Majesty Henry 1st. Pressed by

circumstances, we have hastened the publication of this first part; in the second part, which is to appear shortly, we will catalogue the myriad crimes of the French in Hayti.107

Notes to The Colonial System Unveiled 1 Vastey’s epigraph is a parodic (re)citation of a passage from the 1802 Introduction to the fourth volume of Pierre Victor Malouet’s Collection de mémoires sur les colonies, et particulièrement sur Saint-Domingue (4.46), where the Saint-Domingue plantation owner and ‘reformist’ politician laments the effects of ‘black domination’ under Toussaint Louverture. For more on Malouet (1740–1814), and Vastey’s rewriting of this passage, see Section II of my Introduction. 2 Colonial System is the only one of Vastey’s books to feature a formal dedication to his Sovereign, Henry Christophe (1767–1820), although his 1817 Réflexions politiques begins with a similar dedication to Christophe’s heir, Victor Henry (1804–1820), whom Vastey tutored for most of the Prince Royal’s tragically curtailed life. Vastey’s most extended portrait of the King is to be found in the 1819 Essai, where he confirms that Christophe was born on the British island of Grenada and was fifty-one years of age at the time of writing (158–59). Here is not the place to detail the eventful life of Christophe, whom even the most sympathetic of historians would describe as, at best, an ‘enlightened despot’ (Manigat, 293– 97), but given Vastey’s central role, and intellectual investment, in the Christophean regime it is worth emphasizing that ‘the popular notion of the “tragedy” of Christophe—the vision of him as a cruel ruler who effectively reenslaved the population of Haiti—… oversimplifies a much more complex reality’ (Dubois, 2012, 68). 3 Jean-Jacques Dessalines, in one of his most famous speeches—the ‘I have avenged America’ proclamation of 28 April 1804—claimed to have uprooted ‘the ancient tree of slavery and prejudice’ (l’arbre antique de l’esclavage et des préjugés). As Deborah Jenson has noted, his phrase ‘the ancient tree of slavery’ self-consciously ‘redeploys the classical “tree of liberty” metaphor’ first used by French revolutionaries and then appropriated by Toussaint Louverture when, upon being deported from France in 1802, ‘he proclaimed, “In overthrowing me, they have uprooted in Saint-Domingue only the trunk of the tree of the liberty of the blacks; it will grow back because its roots are deep and numerous”’ (90). Identifying Christophe in these terms thus establishes a legitimate line of succession from Toussaint to Dessalines to Christophe. By substituting the phrase ‘colonial despotism’ for Dessalines’s ‘prejudice’, however, Vastey makes another sort of rhetorical move, because it is a phrase that can be traced back to a text he knew well, Malouet’s 1788 ‘Mémoire sur l’esclavage des nègres’, where Louis XVIII’s future Minister of the Marine and Colonies

used it as part of his critique of excessive violence on the plantations (1802, 5.19). Yoking together Dessalines and Malouet creates a monstrous post/colonial hybrid, where revolutionary language and (ostensibly reformist) colonial discourse meet to strong, if unreadable, effect. 4 The ‘momentous events’ to which Vastey is here referring are Napoleon’s abdication as Emperor in April and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy under Louis XVIII. On 30 May 1814, a treaty was signed by France and the victorious allies: among other things, the Treaty of Paris called for high-level diplomatic meetings to be held in Vienna to carve out a ‘new order’ for Europe (the Congress of Vienna would meet from September 1814 to June 1815). Despite the Christophean regime’s expressed certitude that the Congress would ‘set the seal on the wishes of all philanthropists, the friends of justice and humanity’ (Dupuy, 1814b, 6), the fate of Haiti was not explicitly addressed in the final agreement; to make matters worse, ‘the French signed an additional secret agreement with Britain specifically regarding Haiti’ in which the British promised, in return for trading privileges there, ‘that they would not interfere if the French attacked their former colony’ (Dubois, 2012, 76). 5 Alexander I (1777–1825) was looked upon by British abolitionists ‘as their best hope for international action to ban the slave trade’ (Wilson, 150): in 1814, for instance, James Stephen would dedicate his new edition of The History of Toussaint L’Ouverture to the Russian Emperor, ‘under a persuasion that its subject will excite new interest when the obdurate resolution of France to renew her Slave Trade excites the afflicting expectation of another attempt to reduce St. Domingo to its former state of slavery’ (viii). In an April 1818 letter to Thomas Clarkson, Henry Christophe referred to Alexander as ‘an illustrious and magnanimous champion of the Cause of the oppressed Africans and their descendants’ (Griggs and Prator, 105), and he would soon thereafter enter into a correspondence with the liberal-minded Emperor through the mediation of Clarkson. 6 Reminding Christophe of France’s insistence, in 1814, on this five-year grace period for continuing the slave trade, Thomas Clarkson noted, in a letter of 26 August 1818, that public reaction to this shameful concession had been swift and decisive in Britain: ‘The reservation seemed so horrible and unjust that the whole English Nation rose up to express their public abhorrence of it. 1,370 petitions which were signed by 1,350,000 individuals were presented to the English Parliament […] praying that this wicked part of the Treaty with France might be done away’. As a consequence, France eventually ‘agreed to give up this article of the Treaty’ (Griggs and Prator, 111) weeks after the final defeat of Napoleon (who had complicated matters for the restored Bourbons by himself abolishing the slave trade in France during his brief return to power in 1815). At the time of writing, Clarkson believed that ‘the Abolition of the Slave Trade may be considered as solid and substantial on the part of France’ (112); however, as it turned out, France would remain, behind Portugal, ‘the second largest slave-trading European nation of the 1820s’ (Todd, 167). 7 With King George III permanently incapacitated, his son, the future George IV (1762– 1830), ruled over Britain as Regent from 1811 to 1820. The hardly progressive Hanoverian ruler is cited here as a synecdoche for Great Britain, which was much cultivated by the Christophean regime on both ideological grounds (as, in Vastey’s words, ‘a nation that preferred renouncing its own interests so that it could force the European powers to abandon the slave trade, that shameful and inhuman traffic’ (1815a, 14)) and pragmatic

grounds (as ‘a protection against French attempts at reconquest’ (Nicholls, 1979, 52)). From the very inception of his regime in 1807, Christophe had been ‘indefatigable in seeking opportunities to form links with the British Government in the hope of winning recognition as the legitimate ruler of Haiti’ (Cole, 160–61), and he would eventually go so far as to declare his intention ‘to endeavour to bring the English language into general use, in hopes that it will in time supersede the French as the vernacular language of the people at large’ (Barskett, 383). 8 The King’s Manifesto was published on 18 September 1814, with the stated purpose of ‘making our voice heard, that we might vindicate the legitimacy of our independence at the tribunal of nations’ (Christophe, 1814, 2). Within months, this document would be translated into English (see the Foreign Intelligence section of The European Magazine, and London Review, vol. 66 (December 1814): 547–51), to good effect in terms of positively influencing British perceptions of Christophe’s kingdom ‘in the later 1810s, [when] Christophe’s cause in Haiti became the vogue among London’s reformists’ (Racine, 133– 34). One British commentator in 1818 approvingly referred to it as a document that ‘in eloquence and argument, will bear a comparison with the most celebrated state papers of the most eloquent and enlightened nations of the world’ (Barskett, 365). Although most probably written by Christophe’s Foreign Minister Julien Prévost (Comte de Limonade), the document has also, on occasion, been attributed to Vastey (see, e.g., Vaval, 129). 9 As I discuss in Chapter 3, below (pp. 250–53), Vastey’s simultaneously precise and vague footnote reference to the mestizo historian Garcilaso Inca de la Vega (1539–1616) is actually a verbatim citation of a footnote from Book XXVI, Chapter 22 of Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois (1748). Montesquieu, it turns out, is referring to Book I, Chapter 37 of the second part of Garcilaso’s Comentarios reales de los Incas, the Historia General del Peru (1617), which would be translated into French by Jean Baudouin as Histoire des guerres civiles des Espagnols dans les Indes écrite en espagnol in 1650. (Montesquieu owned the two-volume 1658 edition of this translation.) In his 1816 Réflexions, Vastey would engage more explicitly with ‘the immortal Montesquieu’ and his notoriously malleable account(s) of slavery in De l’esprit des lois (1816c, 26–29, 37, 52, 55). 10 Guatimozin, also known as Cuauhtémoc, was the last Aztec emperor; he was put to death by the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés in 1525, thirteen years after the execution of the Taino cacique Hatuey. The account of Hatuey in Vastey’s footnote is taken verbatim from the Introduction to S. J. Ducœurjoly’s 1802 Manuel des habitans de SaintDomingue (1.lix–lxi; ‘Article III: État de la Colonie de l’Île Espagnole après la mort de Colomb, et jusqu’en 1519’). For more details on Vastey’s relation to Ducœurjoly’s colonial primer, see following note and Chapter 3, below (pp. 253–57). 11 For good reason, Vastey suppresses any details regarding the history book that he has opened, and from which he quotes extensively in the opening pages of Colonial System. All the material within quotation marks is taken from the 208-page Introduction to Ducœurjoly’s Manuel des habitans de Saint-Domingue, a book published in 1802 for prospective French emigrants to Saint-Domingue in the wake of the Leclerc expedition. The anonymous author of this Introduction, perhaps its publisher André Lenoir, draws on a variety of well-known sources for his account of the discovery and conquest of the island of Haïti, notably Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix’s 1730 Histoire de l’isle espagnol ou de

Saint-Domingue. Much of the material quoted by Vastey would, in turn, be incorporated practically verbatim in Michel-Placide Justin’s widely read 1826 Histoire politique et statistique de l’île d’Hayti, Saint-Domingue. 12 Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566), who arrived in Hispaniola in 1502, provided this eyewitness account in his Brevísima relacíon de la destrucción de las Indias (1552; first translated into French in 1579 as Tyrannies et cruautés des Espagnols perpétrées ès Indes occidentales). Las Casas occupied an ambiguous place in the history of transatlantic slavery at the time Vastey wrote: on the one hand, he had devoted much of his life to protecting the native population from colonial abuses, and it is for this reason that Christophe’s Foreign Minister, Comte de Limonade, addresses abbé Grégoire as ‘a new Las Casas’, ‘the defender of the cause of liberty and unfortunate people’, in an 1814 letter to the French abolitionist (qtd. Sepinwall, 2005, 183). And yet, in the mid-1510s, when Las Casas first assumed this role of ‘Defender and Apostle to the Indians’, he had also argued for the importation of slave labour from Africa as a way of ameliorating the situation of the indigenous population. This argument was one that he later regretted but that was seized upon by a number of later critics: be it by those on the proslavery side, such as Bryan Edwards; or by antislavery advocates such as the African American David Walker, who in 1829 wrote scathingly about ‘that very very notoriously avaricious Catholic priest or preacher’ and his proposal ‘to import the Africans from the Portuguese settlement in Africa, to dig up gold and silver, and work their plantations for them’ (37–38). Vastey was well aware of the controversy surrounding Las Casas’s role in the importation of African slaves to the Americas, because his most frequently cited point of reference in Colonial System, abbé Grégoire’s De la littérature des Nègres, features a (misguided, as it turns out) refutation of the idea that Las Casas ‘voted for the slavery of negroes’ (1808, 76). 13 The account in Vastey’s footnote of the capture and execution of the Taino princess Anacaona (1474–1504) by the brutal Spanish governor of Hispaniola, Nicolás de Ovando (1460–1518; governor 1502–09), is taken verbatim from Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue (2.444–45). Born and raised in Martinique, Moreau de Saint-Méry (1750–1819) established himself in the 1770s as a prominent lawyer in Saint-Domingue, helped found the colony’s learned society (the Cercle des Philadelphes) in the 1780s, and was one of the principal spokespersons for the proslavery lobby in Paris in the early years of the French Revolution; in 1793, he was forced to leave France for the United States (Philadelphia), where his Description, an encyclopaedic font of information on colonial SaintDomingue, was published in 1797–98. For more on Moreau, see n. 68. 14 Here ends the first of six excerpts from the Introduction to Ducœurjoly’s Manuel that Vastey has stitched together into one block quotation. The description of the five kingdoms is taken from the section ‘Article Premier: Tableau de Saint-Domingue avant l’arrivée des Espagnols’ (1.xx–xxii). 15 Beginning of second excerpt from Ducœurjoly’s Manuel (1.xxxii; ‘Article II: Arrivée des Espagnols à St.-Domingue. § I. Premier Voyage de Colomb’). The parenthetical reference in this sentence to ‘Cape Henry’ is Vastey’s addition: the former Cap-Français was renamed Cap-Henry in 1810; upon Henry Christophe’s death in 1820, it would be given its present name of Cap-Haïtien.

16 Beginning of third excerpt from Ducœurjoly’s Manuel (1.xl; ‘Article II: Arrivée des Espagnols à St.-Domingue. § II. Second Voyage de Colomb’). The phrase ‘soon thereafter’ is Vastey’s addition, linking the previous episode from Columbus’s first voyage (1492–93) to this one from his second (1493–96). 17 Toussaint Louverture was kidnapped by General Leclerc in June 1802 and exiled to France, where he languished as a prisoner in Fort de Joux in the Jura mountains until his death in April 1803. This is not the place to provide details regarding the man who ‘can fairly be called the highest-achieving African-American hero of all time’ (Bell, 3), but it is worth noting how Vastey, in his capacity as spokesperson for the Christophean regime, chose to represent Toussaint (whom he claimed to have served under, starting in 1796). Although Toussaint’s story ‘renders him worthy of occupying a place beside the heroes of antiquity’ (1817b, 4), Vastey cautions, he was—‘his virtues, his genius, and his talents for governing’ notwithstanding—‘still imbued with the prejudices of the Ancien Régime and the fanaticism inculcated in him by priests, and was unable to throw off altogether that odious yoke. He had maintained a particular predilection for our tyrants; imposed on and dominated by them in all his actions, they led him from one error to another, and eventually dragged him down… Had he not been the unhappy victim of his credulity, under his rule we would have always languished ingloriously under the ignominious yoke of the French, in a condition approximating the prejudices and slavery of old’ (1816d, 60). For Vastey, Toussaint’s Constitution of 1801, which rendered Saint-Domingue almost independent from France, went too far and yet not far enough: ‘one must be dependent or independent, one or the other, and General Toussaint, in making himself half-independent of France, exposed himself to its vengeance, without having given himself the means to resist it’ (1819, 18). 18 Beginning of fourth excerpt from Ducœurjoly’s Manuel (1.lii; ‘Article III: État de la Colonie de l’Île Espagnole après la mort de Colomb, et jusqu’en 1519’). Columbus died in 1506. The ‘governor’ referred to in the next sentence is Nicolás de Ovando. 19 Beginning of fifth excerpt from Ducœurjoly’s Manuel (1.lv–lvii; ‘Article III’). 20 Beginning of sixth excerpt from Ducœurjoly’s Manuel (1.lviii; ‘Article III’). 21 The quotation in this lengthy footnote is again taken from the Introduction to Ducœurjoly’s Manuel (1.lxvi–lxix; ‘Article IV: Situation de la Colonie, depuis 1519, jusqu’à l’arrivée des Français’). I have corrected Vastey’s mistranscription (‘1553’) of the date of the peace treaty Henri signed with the Spanish. In his De la littérature des Nègres, abbé Grégoire noted that in terms of bravery, ‘Toussaint is comparable to the cacique Henri, whose life one can read about in Charlevoix’ (102). For Vastey, as he makes clear at the end of Colonial System (1814b, 92), an even more appropriate point of comparison would have been his sovereign Henry Christophe, especially given ‘the correspondence of his name with that of the cacique Henry’. This connection between the two Henrys had already been established by the King’s Foreign Minister, Comte de Limonade (1811, xxvii–xxviii), who quotes Ducœurjoly’s account of the heroic cacique at even greater length than does Vastey (xv–xxi) and supplies a footnote reference to the Manuel (xxi). 22 Henri-Baptiste Grégoire’s 1808 De la littérature des Nègres, ou Recherches sur leurs facultés intellectuelles, leurs qualités morales et leur littérature (English trans. 1810) is a repeated point of reference for Vastey in Colonial System (as I show at some length in Chapter 3, below (pp.

259–60, 265–66)). In this pioneering book, Grégoire (1750–1831)—‘the most steadfast of revolutionary France’s opponents of racism and slavery’ (Popkin, 2012, 128)—attacks those who, in questioning the intellectual and moral capacity of blacks and denying the fundamental unity of the human species, support a doctrine ‘as absurd as it is abominable’ (1808, 275). A good sense of this book’s lasting reputation can be gained from the fact that one of the fathers of twentieth-century Negritude, Aimé Césaire, when inaugurating the place de l’abbé Grégoire in Fort-de-France in 1950, stated that he wished he could read its concluding pages ‘to every colonialist, every racist, every lyncher of Negroes, every burner of Jews’ (2007, 17). In 1814, Christophe attempted to establish the same sort of relationship with Grégoire as he would with the English abolitionists Clarkson and Wilberforce, but the republican Grégoire rebuffed those attempts because he ‘could not see past Christophe’s royalism’ (Sepinwall, 2005, 184); Vastey would eventually confide to Clarkson that Grégoire, ‘praiseworthy as he is in many ways, has allowed himself to fall into grievous injustices toward us’ (Griggs and Prator, 179; letter of 29 November 1819). Notwithstanding Grégoire’s ‘principled’ dislike of the Christophean regime, he did admit that there were ‘enlightened men and good writers’ in the northern kingdom, and not just in Pétion and Boyer’s republic to the south: ‘I have the proof of it’, he stated in 1819, ‘in the various works which have reached me from that part of Haiti, and above all in the latest published by Monsieur de Vastey, Réflexions politiques, which shows a remarkable ability [un talent très distingué]’ (2000, 151). The Haitian historian Hénock Trouillot claims that Vastey met Grégoire ‘during the course of a voyage to London’ (1972, 72), but provides no evidence to back up that intriguing claim. 23 The italicized phrase combines two quotations that are taken verbatim from Grégoire (1808, 59–60), as is the characterization of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s French brother-in-law, Louis Narcisse Baudry-Deslozières (1751–1841), as a madman (insensé). Baudry-Deslozières played a prominent role in Saint-Domingue between his arrival there in 1776 and his departure in 1792 (see Chastenet-Desterre). In his 1802 Les égaremens du nigrophilisme, he called for the reestablishment of slavery and the slave trade in the colony, on the grounds that ‘it is only once he leaves Africa that the Negro gains some small resemblance to the human species’ (144). The inventor of the slave trade ‘merits altars’ (22), according to Baudry-Deslozières, because it was henceforth in the interest of those inveterate cannibals, the Africans, to sell their fellow men rather than eat them; ‘colonial slavery’ rescued countless ignorant and superstitious souls from ‘real slavery’ and thereby made them ‘worthy of heaven and earth’ (110). 24 The original edition of Colonial System includes a brief list of ‘Errata’ at the end, which concludes with the general injunction: ‘Read always ex-Colonists of Saint-Domingue, in place of Colonists of Saint-Domingue’ (97). Unlike this ideologically charged erratum, the ten other corrections Vastey supplies are very specific (choice of tenses, spelling of names, etc.) and have been incorporated into the present translation. 25 The italicized phrase is taken from Ducœurjoly’s Manuel (1.4). In turn, the proslavery Ducœurjoly lifted it from La cause des esclaves nègres et des habitans de la Guinée (1.217), a book published in 1789 by the abolitionist Benjamin Sigismund Frossard—an associate of the recently (1788) founded Société des Amis des Noirs—that ‘provided the most complete published “interdisciplinary” arguments in French against human bondage of his era’

(Curran, 202–03). A copy of Frossard’s book was found in the homme de couleur Vincent Ogé’s baggage when he was captured after leading a failed revolt in October 1790 that is often looked upon as an opening salvo of the Haitian Revolution (Garrigus, 2010, 37). 26 The episode in the footnote is taken verbatim from François Le Vaillant’s 1790 Voyage de M. Le Vaillant dans l’Intérieur de l’Afrique (1.302–03; not 303–04 as reported in Vastey’s footnote). As Mary Louise Pratt notes, Le Vaillant (1753–1824) was ‘a white creole from the Caribbean [born in Dutch Guiana], a product of the contact zone’ (90). The passage’s mixture of factual reporting and sentimental rhetoric typifies his work: ‘Though generous in botanical, zoological and ethnographic information, Le Vaillant’s travel book is saturated with Rousseauian sensibilité. Like Mungo Park, whom he surely influenced, Le Vaillant produced an explicitly experiential, narcissistic narrative structured around human dramas of which he is the protagonist’ (89). 27 The quoted passage is taken from Ducœurjoly’s Manuel (1.10–11). In turn, Ducœurjoly lifted this description of a slave ship, almost verbatim, from Voyages en Guinée et dans les îles caraïbes en Amérique (281), a 1793 translation of German writer Paul Erdmann Isert’s 1788 Reise nach Guinea und den Caribäischen Inseln in Columbia. Isert (1756–89) was, in the words of a recent translator of this book into English, ‘an admirer of Rousseau’s philosophy [who] was eager to point out the corrupting influence of European civilisation on the Blacks’ (Winsnes, 6). 28 As Vastey’s own footnote confirms, the two examples in this paragraph are from abbé Grégoire (1808, 49–50); the entire paragraph, from ‘disturbed by the cries...’ onward, is practically verbatim. 29 Free blacks were first settled in the West African territory of Sierra Leone in 1787, as part of a commercial and philanthropic venture spearheaded by the British abolitionist Granville Sharp. Governed between 1791 and 1808 by the Sierra Leone Company, the territory was taken over by the Crown as a British protectorate in 1808, the same year that abbé Grégoire provided a glowing account of the ‘nascent colony’ in his De la littérature des Nègres (167–73). For an overview of the ways in which ‘the Sierra Leone settlement occupies a crucial though often overlooked place in the development of the antislavery movement in Britain’, see C. Brown (259–330); and for the ‘tangle of motivations’ that went into its making (‘scientific curiosity, religious fervor, revolutionary utopianism, and the search for profit’), see Land and Schocket. For a thorough investigation of the paradoxical implications of Vastey’s investment in ‘a civilizing mission for Europe that would place much of the non-European world under its tutelage’, see Garraway (2012, 15). 30 Cecrops was the legendary first king of Athens who, in the words of Jean-Baptiste Ladvocat’s popular Dictionnaire historique portatif (first published 1752), ‘civilized the people of Attica toward 1582 BC’ (337); Danaus, reputedly the brother of the Pharaoh Ramses, was said to have taken over the kingdom of Argos later that same century. In his 1816 Réflexions, Vastey returns to the topic of the Egyptian colonization of Greece, drawing ironic analogies between Egypt/Europe and Greece/Africa: Cecrops and other colonizing Egyptians, we are told, instead of enslaving whites and trying to convince ‘the ignorant Greeks’ of their ‘physical and moral inferiority, taught them to imitate them in the social arts [l’art de la société], and even, before long, to surpass them!’ (1816c, 34–35)

31 Teutates was, according to Diderot’s Encyclopédie, ‘the name used by the Celts when worshipping God, known to the Greeks and the Romans under the name of Mercury’ (1765, vol. 16, ‘Theutat’). This image is taken up again in Vastey’s 1816 Réflexions where, discussing ‘Gaulish superstitions’, he cites the druids who ‘sacrificed human victims to Esus and Teutates’ (1816c, 42), and then advises ex-colonists such as Mazères and Palisot de Beauvois that ‘if they were to study the history of their ancestors, from which we have drawn these facts, they would cease to be astonished at the superstitious and barbaric ignorance of the Africans’ (45). 32 Vastey is here paraphrasing a statement made in Des colonies modernes sous la zone torride, et particulièrement de celle de Saint-Domingue (1802) by Jean Barré de Saint-Venant (1737–1810), ‘a highly successful manager and owner of sugar plantations’ who was one of the more prominent members of the Cercle des Philadelphes in Cap-Français, a colonial scientific society founded in 1784 (McClellan, 247–48). In this statement, directly addressing Napoleon (that ‘extraordinary man’, whom he identifies as a fellow enemy of the ‘liberty and equality of negroes’), Barré emphasizes their common belief ‘that work is the source of all prosperity, and that in places where nature does not render it imperative, she has portioned out to those nations that have already been civilized through work the important task of leading to civilization those dull-witted, lazy beings [ces êtres stupides et paresseux] who languish in a state of affliction for having disregarded the highest of orders, namely, that all created things be worked upon and shaped to man’s use, in order that his understanding be perfected, and that he be led to recognize and adore the author of so many blessings’ (161– 62). (Barré published Des colonies modernes under the name ‘Barré Saint-Venant’, and Vastey tellingly drops the aristocratic particule in his five subsequent references to this ex-colonist.) 33 Vastey most probably derived his description of the Mingrelians from one of the many editions of Jean-Baptiste Ladvocat’s (Vosgien’s) Dictionnaire géographique portatif (first published 1746), to judge from the adjectives used to describe these natives of the southern Caucasus (349; ‘Mingrélie’). The subsequent characterization of the Mandingos, which can be traced back to Jean-Baptiste Labat’s 1728 Nouvelle relation de l’Afrique occidentale (3.371–72), is also taken from Ladvocat’s Dictionnaire (324; ‘Mandingues’). 34 Scottish explorer Mungo Park (1771–1805) was the author of the highly popular Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, published in 1799 under the auspices of the African Association, which was founded in 1788 with the goal of ‘improv[ing] the knowledge of African geography and markets’ (Marsters, 9). Like many antislavery advocates of the time, Vastey draws on Park’s lively representations of West African culture for evidence of African civilization and humanity, because they so evidently affirm ‘plausible worlds of African agency and experience’ (Pratt, 84), while at the same time avoiding those parts of the Travels that fit less comfortably with his agenda, such as Park’s stated opinion that ‘in the present unenlightened state of their [the natives’] minds’ the effect of a discontinuance of the slave trade ‘would neither be so extensive or beneficial, as many wise and worthy persons fondly expect’ (2000, 263). Vastey returns to a discussion of Park in his 1816 Réflexions (61–73), where, as part of his refutation of the work of the ex-colonist Mazères, he asks ‘the many readers of Mungo Park’ whether they can see any relation between the Africans found in Park’s narrative and ‘those stupid, ferocious, and barbaric Africans depicted by Mazères’ (1816c, 71).

35 Vastey is quoting here from Voyage dans l’intérieur de l’Afrique, fait en 1795, 1796, et 1797 (1799), Jean Henri Castéra’s two-volume translation of the second edition of Park’s Travels. (The quotation is exact, except that Vastey substitutes ‘Europe’ for Park/Castéra’s ‘Great Britain’/‘Grande-Bretagne’). My subsequent references to Park will provide the chapter number from the English edition, and the relevant page number from the French translation: thus, II/1.29 for this quotation and, for the quotation about the Koran in the following paragraph, II/1.28. Any mistranscriptions on Vastey’s part of African names (e.g., Jatta instead of Jalta) have been corrected. 36 With the exception of the first sentence, the entirety of this paragraph is taken verbatim from the Histoire philosophique et politique des établissemens et du commerce des européens dans les deux Indes by abbé Guillaume-Thomas Raynal (1713–96). An encyclopaedic account of the history of European colonialism, the Histoire des deux Indes was published in three different editions in 1770, 1774, and 1780, all of which, but especially the last, benefited from the contributions of Denis Diderot, whose increasingly radical views helped make the third edition a classic example of what Sankar Muthu has appropriately dubbed ‘Enlightenment anti-imperialism’; it was a touchstone for key figures in the Haitian Revolution, most notably Toussaint Louverture, who was said to have ‘“revered the memory” of Raynal, whom he considered his “precursor”’ (Dubois, 2004, 203). The account of the Dane Schilderop was introduced in the second edition, but Vastey is undoubtedly quoting from one of the many printings of the 1780 version, where it is to be found in the twentieth chapter (‘Quels sont les peuples qui achètent les esclaves’) of Book XI (1780, 3.167–68), which was largely written by Raynal’s collaborator Jean-Joseph Pechméja, as well as by Diderot. My own translation of this passage is based on J. O. Justamond’s 1783 English translation of Raynal (5.253–54). 37 This second example from Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes is taken verbatim from the twenty-second chapter (‘Misérable condition des esclaves en Amérique’) of Book XI (1780, 3.173; 1783, 5.261–62). 38 Mungo Park, Travels/Voyage, III/1.51 (for the geographical description of the kingdom of Woolli); and III/1.68 (for the description of its people). 39 Park, Travels/Voyage, IV/1.71. 40 Park, Travels/Voyage, VI/1.128–29. 41 Park, Travels/Voyage, VII/1.134–35. 42 Park, Travels/Voyage, III/1.54–55. 43 Park, Travels/Voyage, IV/1.81. 44 Park, Travels/Voyage, VII/1.149–50. 45 Park, Travels/Voyage, XV/1.316. 46 Park, Travels/Voyage, VIII/1.161–62. Park’s ‘faithful boy’ Demba, referred to in the previous sentence, is enslaved by the dastardly Moors in chapter XIII and never seen again; the ‘benevolent Negro’ Karfa Taura hosts a fever-ridden Park in chapter XIX, and leads the slave coffle in the company of which Park returns to the coast in the concluding chapters of his Travels (XXIV–XXVI). 47 Park, Travels/Voyage, V/1.108–09.

48 Park, Travels/Voyage, XV/1.314. 49 The phrase ‘l’unité de type primitif dans la race humaine’ is taken from Grégoire’s De la littérature des Nègres, where he notes that all the many scholars he has spoken to, with but one exception, ‘admit to there being one original type of the human race’ (33). In his 1816 Réflexions, Vastey expands at length on his critique of what would decades later come to be known as the polygenesis argument (see Young, esp. 45–50): Vastey there argues that, in rejecting the idea of a type primitif, ‘our detractors’ are guilty of ‘trying to reduce the black man to a material being and nothing more [matérialiser l’homme noir] through appeals to the diversity of human races, contradicting the story of creation, and giving themselves licence to treat us like the lowliest of animals because of the supposed inferiority of our species’ (1816c, 5–6). 50 The English plantation owner Edward Long (1734–1813), who lived in Jamaica from 1757 to 1769, was the author of a three-volume History of Jamaica published in 1774, the notorious racism of which ‘registers the beginning of a paradigm shift’, laying the groundwork ‘for a deeper and less changeable notion of national and racial differences than was previously fashionable’ (Wheeler, 217; for more on Long’s ‘epistemology of whiteness’, see Dayan, 2011, 116–24). Long’s comments about black lice and wild cats are made in his History of Jamaica (2.353, 2.420), but Vastey has gleaned them from Grégoire (1808, 13–14, 42). 51 Johann Ludwig Hannemann (1640–1724) was a German professor of medicine, author of the 1677 Curiosum scrutinium nigredinis posterorum Cham i.e. Aethiopum (A curious inquiry into the blackness of the descendants of Cham). Vastey takes this detail about the ‘curse of Ham’ from Grégoire (1808, 14). Grégoire does not, however, make any reference to Cain in De la littérature des Nègres. Vastey’s ironic counter-identification of whites with the race of Cain nicely anticipates David Walker’s disgust, fifteen years later, with white Americans who ‘tell us that we are the seed of Cain, and that God put a dark stain upon us, that we might be known as their slaves!!! Now, I ask those avaricious and ignorant wretches, who act more like the seed of Cain, by murdering[,] the whites or the blacks?’ (63) 52 Johann Friedrich Meckel, the Elder (1724–1774) was a German anatomist, author of a ‘ground-breaking dissection study of African cadavers in the 1755 Mémoires de l’Académie royale des sciences et des belles lettres de Berlin’; his ‘new “discoveries”’, such as the darker, bluish brains of Africans, ‘had a huge impact on nascent race science’ (Curran, 124). As with all the racial science practitioners mentioned in this paragraph, this detail is taken from the opening chapter of Grégoire’s De la littérature des Nègres (15, verbatim). 53 Pierre Barrère (1690–1755) was a French anatomist, whose 1741 Dissertation sur la cause physique de la couleur des nègres, de la qualité de leurs cheveux, et de la dégénération de l’un et de l’autre drew upon his ‘dissection studies of African cadavers in Guyana’; ‘Barrère’s text ushered in a new era, one in which anatomical research was claiming the ability to put forward an allencompassing explanation of the nègre’s fundamental difference’ (Curran, 122). Jacob Winslow (1669–1760) was a Danish anatomist, author of the 1732 Exposition anatomique de la structure du corps humain. Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring (1755–1830) was a German anatomist, author of the 1785 Über die körperliche Verschiedenheit des Negers vom Europäer (On the bodily difference of the Black from the European). Vastey’s sentence is taken verbatim from

Grégoire (1808, 15); Grégoire, in turn, based his discussion of Barrère and Winslow on Edward Long’s account in History of Jamaica (2.351). 54 Benjamin Rush (1746–1813), one of the signatories of the American Declaration of Independence, a physician and an abolitionist, came to these conclusions in his 1799 article ‘Observations intended to favour a supposition that the Black Color (as it is called) of the Negroes is derived from the Leprosy’ (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 4.289– 97), where Rush cites the English chemist Thomas Beddoes (1760–1808) in support of his argument. Vastey’s sentence is taken, practically verbatim, from Grégoire (1808, 20). 55 Petrus Camper (1722–1789) was a Dutch anatomist whose ideas are cited at length in Grégoire (1808, 22–23). Camper’s facial angle theory, published posthumously in 1791 as Dissertation physique de Mr. Pierre Camper, sur les différences réelles que présentent les traits du visage chez les hommes de différents pays et de différents âges, established an aesthetic hierarchy—famously visualized in a comparative facial chart—descending from the Apollo Belvedere to the white man to the black man and thence to the orangutan. Although Camper ‘insisted on the unity of mankind’, later ‘scientific racists… went on reproducing his images as irrefutable proof of a white supremacy that Camper himself had never embraced’ (Painter, 66, 67). 56 The comment about Jedidiah Morse is also based on Grégoire (1808, 30), who provides a very incomplete (and it would appear untrackable) footnote reference to the views of the New England geographer and Presbyterian minister Morse, a ‘rabid antiJacobin’ and fervent antislavery advocate (Cleves, 106). 57 Ambroise-Marie-François-Joseph Palisot de Beauvois (1752–1820) was a French naturalist who arrived in Saint-Domingue in 1788. In 1790, he published there a work entitled Idées sommaires sur quelques règlemens à faire à l’assemblée coloniale that would quickly become notorious in revolutionary France for its argument that whites were the only pure species of mankind, followed in a descending scale by native Indians, negroes, orangutans, and gibbons (see Milscent, 13–15; Garran-Coulon, 2.22–25). Palisot de Beauvois was ‘one of the first authors to assert unequivocally that blacks were an inherently inferior species of humanity, “different from the white race, physically and morally”, their “faculties […] so to speak, nonexistent”’ (Popkin, 2007, 25). Vastey, whose discussion here is taken more or less verbatim from Grégoire (1808, 31), returns to the subject of this infamous attempt ‘to place us in the ranks of the ourang-outangs’ in his 1816 Réflexions (40). 58 The quotation from Barré de Saint-Venant and the phrase immediately preceding it are taken from Grégoire (1808, 174); Grégoire is quoting from Barré’s 1802 Des colonies modernes (119). 59 Proverbs 21:30. The preceding statement in italics about God smiting the arrogant and the impious would appear to be an attempt on Vastey’s part at sounding biblical, rather than an actual quotation from the Bible. 60 The italicized line of ‘scripture’ (écriture) is in fact a quotation from abbé Grégoire’s De la littérature des Nègres (74). For a commentary on Vastey’s use of Grégoire here, see Chapter 3, below (p. 260). 61 William Wilberforce (1759–1833) was the leading parliamentary critic of the transatlantic slave trade during a twenty-year struggle that culminated in the passage of the

Abolition Bill of 1807, and a major source of inspiration for the Emancipation Act that would be passed only a month after his death in 1833. Like all the major British abolitionists, Wilberforce, a conservative-minded Evangelical, was a firm supporter of Henry Christophe, who began a correspondence with him in 1814 (Griggs, 62); for the remainder of Christophe’s reign, Wilberforce ‘served Christophe principally in bringing Haiti to the attention of influential persons and in providing qualified teachers, physicians, and farmers for service in the island’ (67). On Wilberforce’s keen awareness of Vastey’s work and its importance to the abolitionist cause, see section I of my Introduction (pp. 39– 40) and Chapter 1 by Marlene Daut, below (pp. 205–06). 62 The quotation is from the section ‘Des esclaves’ in Malouet’s Essai sur l’administration de St.-Domingue, which was first submitted to a legislative committee at Versailles in 1775 and then published in 1785 as the work of his friend abbé Raynal, before being reclaimed by Malouet in 1802 as the fourth volume of his Collection de mémoires. Passages such as this (4.116), in which Malouet isolates ‘for critical analysis the extreme forms of behavior toward which slavery tended in Saint-Domingue’, have been charitably interpreted by a recent historian as exemplifying a ‘reformist, strategic vision of a world without slavery, at least as familiarly constituted’, and serving as ‘a critical way station on the road to more radical understandings of the disadvantages and injustices of chattel bondage’ (Ghachem, 165–66). 63 This paragraph closely replicates a passage from the first chapter of Le cri de la nature, a ‘Haytian homage to abbé Grégoire’ that had been published four years before by Vastey’s fellow scribe, Juste Chanlatte (1810, 20). The description in the next paragraph of the French colonist Jean Barré de Saint-Venant (see n. 32)—from ‘You above all…’ to ‘daylabourers in Europe’—is also taken more or less verbatim from Chanlatte’s book (14–15), which in 1824 would, in slightly amended form, be republished in Paris by a sympathetic Frenchman under the title Histoire de la catastrophe de Saint-Domingue (see Bouvet de Cressé, 21, 13–15, for the passages in question). 64 In order to understand the full implications of Vastey’s counter-representations of physical and symbolic violence in colonial Saint-Domingue, it is worth comparing his/Chanlatte’s description of Barré de Saint-Venant with the overwhelmingly positive representations of this French colonist’s ‘enlightened’ approach to plantation management that were widely available in print at the time. For instance, in Histoire des désastres de SaintDomingue (1795)—an influential account of the early years of the Haitian Revolution, the author of which has recently been identified as the Cape lawyer François Laplace (see Benzaken, 2009)—Barré is praised for ‘the learning and talent’ with which he developed ‘the magnificent Duplaa plantation’, his technical innovations and administrative labours having transformed it into ‘an object worthy of admiration, which leaves the astonished traveller with a sense of the grandeur of the colony of Saint-Domingue’ (79). For BaudryDeslozières (see n. 23), Barré was ‘one of the most knowledgeable and most humane plantation administrators’, who ‘did not stint on the price of slaves or on any of the expenses necessary for their maintenance’ (1803, 2.29). Even abbé Grégoire, while disagreeing with the former colonist’s dismissive characterizations of blacks, made a point of expressing his ‘esteem’ for the man in De la littérature des Nègres (174). For a further

negative characterization on Vastey’s part of Barré de Saint-Venant, and possible problems with it, see n. 90. 65 Vastey (via Chanlatte) is referring to passages in Barré de Saint-Venant’s Des colonies modernes (1802) such as the following: ‘It was no misfortune for the negro to be taken away from the horrors of Africa and transformed into a labourer in our colonies; for his condition in Africa was truly lamentable, whereas what he experienced in our colonies would have led him to civilization and happiness, had the nations of Europe known the true principles of governing those regions. The existence he led in our colonies was, indeed, preferable to that of poor people in Europe, and could have been ameliorated even further’ (34). For an overview of Des colonies modernes, see Thésée and Debien (152–55). 66 Grégoire (1808, 56). 67 Here begins Vastey’s extended inventory of white settlers (habitants) who tortured slaves. For obvious logistical reasons, I have provided references only in the case of a few especially notorious colonists, whose brutality or ideological commitment to slavery has earned them a lasting place in transatlantic print culture. 68 The two 1776 legal decisions (arrêts) in the note are taken verbatim from Moreau de Saint-Méry’s exhaustive compilation of colonial legislation Loix et constitutions des colonies françoises de l’Amérique sous le vent, which was published in six volumes between 1784 and 1790 (5.741, 744). Scathingly referred to in 1790 by the founder of the Société des Amis des Noirs, Jacques-Pierre Brissot, as ‘a monument of barbarism’ (qtd. Taillemite, xxiii), Moreau’s Loix remains ‘an indispensable resource for the study of the colonial Old Regime’ (Ghachem, 27). In the second decision, the words in square brackets have been restored from Moreau’s original, Vastey having evidently skipped over them by accident when transcribing the passage. 69 Vastey is referring here to the four-volume Rapport sur les troubles de Saint-Domingue (1797–99), an ‘“official history” published by the left-of-centre deputy Jean-Philippe Garran-Coulon [1748–1816]’ (Geggus, 2002, 44). Garran-Coulon was viewed by the French colonists as a ‘hot-headed negrophile’ (Beauvois, 37; ‘cet exalté Mélanantropophile’), and Vastey would have appreciated his claim, made early on in first volume of the report, that ‘the delirium of the cruellest tyrants was nothing in comparison with that of the slave masters; everyone who travelled there, everyone who wrote about it, had facts to report that would make one’s hair stand on end’ (1.25). Garran-Coulon went on to add, however, in contrast with Vastey, that he would not recount any such horrors because descriptions (tableaux) of that sort ‘have the disadvantage of getting too close to the very spectacle of those egregious crimes, on account of the liveliness of their expression: little by little, they serve to deaden the precious sensibility that often, even more effectively than does reason itself, commits us to virtue through the sway of moral sentiments [par l’attrait des affections morales]’ (1.24–25). For a commentary on Vastey’s use of the Rapport’s indirect account (4.34–35) of the uxorious misdeeds of the Cape attorney and politician Jean-Baptiste Larchevesque-Thibaud (1745–1817), a vocal advocate for white privilege in the early years of the Revolution, see Chapter 3, below (pp. 262–63). 70 As C. L. R. James noted in The Black Jacobins, ‘the slaves on the Gallifet plantation were so well treated that “happy as the Negroes of Gallifet” was a slave proverb. Yet by a phenomenon noticed in all revolutions it was they who led the way’ on 22 August 1791

when the slave insurrection broke out on the northern plains of Saint-Domingue (68; see also Dubois, 2004, 92). For a discussion of Vastey’s counter-representation of the supposedly beneficent Gallifet and his overseer Odeluc, see Chapter 1 by Marlene Daut, below (pp. 195–96). 71 Phalaris was a sixth-century bc Greek tyrant renowned for shutting up his victims in a brazen bull and roasting them alive. His name was a common term of abuse in post/revolutionary Haiti: writing in 1819, for instance, one French commentator noted that the scribes of the Haitian republic ‘represent[ed] Christophe as a Phalaris, which was the habitual designation lavished on him in their journals and pamphlets’ (Lacroix, 2.265; see, e.g., Colombel, 1818, 18). For an account of legal inquiries that were undertaken in relation to the excessive brutality of Chapuiset (or Chapuzet), based on the 1775 deposition of a slave of his named Thomas who testified that the plantation agent (procureur) ‘had a prior record of murdering slaves he claimed were responsible for causing the death of animals on the [de l’Isle Adam] plantation’, see Ghachem (141–43). 72 The plantation owners Augustin-Jean Brulley and Pierre-François Page were ‘the chief colonial lobbyists in Paris’ during the years 1792–94 (Popkin, 2010, 261): in their personages, historian Jeremy Popkin has recently argued, we ‘encounter genuine evil’, as they ‘strove cold-bloodedly to send anyone who challenged the slavery system to the guillotine’ (384–85). Page’s views on slavery eventually evolved before his death at the age of forty in 1805 (Benot, 1992, 51–53), but Brulley’s opinions remained what they were, and in 1814 the sexagenarian ex-colonist was still stirring the proslavery pot with pamphlets like Propositions pour rentrer en possession de la partie française de Saint-Domingue. Brulley’s efforts at establishing a nopal plantation in Ennery (Vastey’s birthplace) in the late 1780s are praised by Moreau de Saint-Méry in his Description… de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue (1.274) and thoroughly contextualized by the historian James McClellan in his important study of colonial science in Saint-Domingue (152–56). (The nopal is a species of cactus on which the dye-producing cochineal insect lives.) 73 Michel-Étienne Descourtilz (1775–1835), ‘a physician-botanist-ethnographer whose in-laws, the Rossignol family, were property owners in Saint-Domingue’ ( Jenson, 231), arrived in the colony in 1799 and spent four eventful years there. The final two volumes of his three-volume Voyages d’un naturaliste (1809)—‘the first extended published account of the white confrontation with the Haitian insurrection after the withdrawal of French troops from the island [in 1803]’ (Popkin, 2007, 270)—mix together extended accounts of the flora and fauna of Saint-Domingue with a wealth of anecdotes concerning Descourtilz’s personal encounters with historical figures such as Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, in whose camp he was held captive in the early months of 1802. For a recent overview of the Voyages, and a translation into English of some of its more memorable sections, see Popkin (2007, 270–312). 74 The mémoire by Pierre Dumontellier referred to in Vastey’s footnote, Réponse au mémoire du sieur Rossignol Desdunes, ancien maire de Saint-Marc, par le sieur Du Montellier, ancien major du camp de La Saline, was published in Port-au-Prince, most probably in 1792. In this bizarre narrative—written by a confederate of Borel and Praloto, leaders of the autonomy-minded ‘Patriot party’ in the West Province, which was dominated by ‘the unruly and virulently racist petits blancs of Port-au-Prince’ (Geggus, 2001, 237)—Dumontellier spends a great deal

of time excoriating Rossignol Desdunes for having been so ungrateful as to renounce his earlier allegiance to the Patriots, who had generously sheltered him in a moment of crisis. Dumontellier’s passing reference to Rossignol Desdunes’ cruelty (which is by no means characteristic of the mémoire as a whole) would be seized upon by Garran-Coulon in his Rapport sur les troubles de Saint-Domingue (see n. 69) as evidence that the vaunted humanité des colons had not put an end to the atrocious punishments meted out against slaves (4.33): ‘the white colonists themselves’, Garran notes, before quoting (and italicizing parts of) the passage from Dumontellier, ‘have supplied with regard [to these punishments] the most unequivocal indictments, and in a public manner [avec une publicité] that scarcely permits calling into question the foundation on which they rest’ (34). 75 The wealthy plantation owner Jean-Baptiste de Caradeux (1742–1810), nicknamed ‘Caradeux the Cruel’, played an important role in the early years of the Haitian Revolution as a leader of the ‘Patriots’ (see previous n.), before emigrating to South Carolina in July 1792. As his nickname suggests, he was notorious for the brutal treatment of his slaves: most famously, ‘the barbaric Caradeux’ is said to have decapitated fifty or so slaves and lined the fences of his plantation with ‘their bloody heads’ (Garran-Coulon, 4.34), a story so well known that it would feature prominently in Victor Hugo’s lightly veiled portrayal of Caradeux as ‘Citizen-General C***’ in Bug-Jargal, his 1826 novel about the Haitian Revolution (see Hugo, 2004). Historian David Geggus has provided a detailed portrait of Caradeux that tries to separate the legend of ‘the sadistic planter’ from the man, concluding that ‘question marks remain’ over this negative image, no less than over the positive image of him to be found in a family memoir written by his grandson (2001, 241); for a commentary on this even-handed approach to the question of Caradeux’s sadism in particular, and planter brutality in general, see Chapter 3, below (n. 12). 76 Bryan Edwards (1743–1800) sailed to Jamaica at the age of sixteen, and became a wealthy planter there. In the last decade of his life, having moved back to his native England, he published a popular History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (1793), and as a Member of Parliament vigorously defended the slave trade against Wilberforce and the abolitionists. He had been part of a Jamaican delegation that visited Saint-Domingue only a month after the outbreak of the slave insurrection in the Northern Province on 22 August 1791, and this first-hand experience informed the Historical Survey of the French Colony in the Island of St. Domingo that he published in 1797. Edwards’s book on Saint-Domingue was hugely influential: ‘as an eyewitness and the most prominent historian of the West Indies, his account became the standard proslavery interpretation of the Haitian Revolution throughout the antebellum period’ (Rugemer, 43). One of Vastey’s main sources, Grégoire’s De la littérature des Nègres, makes a point of noting that in his Historical Survey ‘Bryan Edwards depicted the Negroes as tygers, and accused them of having butchered prisoners, pregnant women, babies’ (52–53), so Vastey’s complimentary assessment of him here is somewhat surprising, but can presumably be ascribed to the fact of their sharing a common enemy in the French colonist Venault de Charmilly (see following n.). 77 During Britain’s five-year (1793–98) attempt at wresting Saint-Domingue from the French, Pierre François Venault de Charmilly (d.1815) served as the chief liaison between autonomy-minded anti-republican French planters and the British government, both on the

ground in Saint-Domingue and later in London. In July 1797, this tireless advocate of British rule in Saint-Domingue published a lengthy, point-by-point ‘refutation’ of Bryan Edwards’s Historical Survey of the colony (see previous n.), in both French (Lettre à M. Bryan Edwards) and English (Answer by Way of Letter, to Bryan Edwards). Edwards’s book, which had come out in March of that year, was guilty, from Venault’s perspective, of ‘publiciz[ing] the shortcomings of British policy and endeavour[ing] to show the hopelessness of trying to conquer the colony with the means the Government possessed’ (Geggus, 1982b, 212); Venault’s response to Edwards was ‘a last-ditch attempt to change British policy on SaintDomingue’, as well as ‘a defence of his own reputation’, Edwards having cast Venault’s conduct with the British in a questionable light (214). Of particular interest to Vastey, in his Answer/Lettre Venault also chastized Edwards for emphasizing the supposed misfortunes of ‘Mulattoes’ in pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue, and failing to recognize that ‘almost all the atrocious acts which have been committed at St. Domingo since the Revolution, have been advised, commanded, and still more frequently executed, by the Mulattoes’ (1797a, 44/1797b, 57)—proof positive, for Venault, of the ‘barbarous and ferocious character’ (44/57) of a ‘race [that] is cowardly, cruel, and too full of prejudices to succeed in any attempt’ (39/51). 78 The sentence in Vastey’s footnote is a direct quotation from Venault de Charmilly’s Lettre à M. Bryan Edwards (1797b, 45; not 54 as reported in the note). For another example of the invidious comparison between the condition of New World slaves and that of Old World peasants, which was a staple of proslavery discourse at this time, see n. 65. 79 One of the selling points of Ducœurjoly’s Manuel des habitans de Saint-Domingue (see n. 11) was that it contained ‘the first Vocabulary of the Creole language; that is to say, of SaintDomingue’s natural idiom, composed of a mixture of different terms arising from the daily commerce of peoples from all parts of Europe, and blended together in a mix of all the dialects of Africa’ (1.vi). In his Creole glossary, Ducœurjoly defines the term macandal as follows: ‘This was the name of the leader of a Negro band who, through his knowledge of poisonous plants, wreaked untold havoc; he had passed along what he knew, and wanted it used for the destruction of white people. Since that time, everything that seems out of the ordinary [surnaturel]… is macandal. The principal name for poisoners is macandal’ (2.330). As one of the few obvious traces of Saint-Domingue’s ‘natural idiom’ in Vastey’s writings, his use here of the word ‘macandal’ raises important, if unanswerable, questions regarding our author’s relation to the Creole language. 80 Nero, first-century Roman emperor; Mezentius, mythological Etruscan king; Phalaris, Greek tyrant (see n. 71); Messalina, first-century Roman empress; Fredegund, sixth-century Frankish queen. Likening the white settlers to these infamously sadistic rulers from Europe’s distant past is a move that Vastey would have been familiar with from reading Grégoire’s De la littérature des Nègres, where a certain Colonel Quarrel, whose proposal to bring attack dogs back from Cuba to use against rebellious Maroons was approved by the Jamaican colonial assembly in 1795, is described as a man whose loathsome name ‘ought to be listed alongside those of Phalaris, Mezentius, Nero, etc.’ (52). As for Messalina and Fredegund, problematic as Vastey’s recourse to such historical analogies undoubtedly is, his noticeable insistence on the systemic rather than anomalous role of settler women in perpetrating colonial violence nonetheless has the salutary effect of troubling the historiographical

silence that, even today, ‘surrounds white women’s contributions to the basic nature of slavery, its maintenance, and, especially, one of its central tendencies, the maiming and destruction of black life’ (Glymph, 28). 81 The Code Noir, issued by Louis XIV in 1685 to regulate master–slave relations in the French colonies, has been typically portrayed as ‘the most barbaric product of the Enlightenment’ (Dayan, 1995, 201), ‘the worst refinement in wickedness, the most glacial technicality in the commerce of human flesh and in genocide’ (Louis Sala-Molins, qtd. Dayan, 202). Recently, in an effort at complicating ‘the teleological notion of the “abolition of slavery”’, one prominent contributor to Haitian Revolutionary Studies has argued that the Code Noir should also be ‘seen as a bridge between the colonial Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution’ (Ghachem, 257, 220): ‘colonial slave law’, he insists, ‘was not merely the rhetorical veneer of a hypocritical effort to cast the exploitations and brutalities of life under slavery in a more generous and humane light’ (12); rather, ‘the role of the law of slavery in Haiti’s long-term, eighteenth-century transformation’ highlights ‘how the outer boundaries of an oppressive legal system… can be refashioned, over time and through the combined efforts of often conflicting groups and individuals, into a source of emancipation’ (5). Vastey’s emphasis on the ‘good intentions’ of these regulations shows his willingness to take the ameliorative potential of colonial slave law seriously rather than simply denounce it, but his insistence that Louis XIV’s regulations were ‘never enforced’ and became a ‘dead letter’ (‘tombèrent en désuétude’) runs counter to any revisionist optimism regarding the law’s supposedly ‘transformative’ and ‘emancipatory’ role in colonial Saint-Domingue. 82 Alexandre de Wimpffen (1748–1819) was, in the words of C. L. R. James, ‘an exceptionally observant and able traveller’ (10), whose epistolary account of his stay in Saint-Domingue from 1788 to 1790 provides a vivid portrait of the colony on the eve of revolution. Believing slavery to be ‘an odious thing’ (1797a, 1.65), Wimpffen provided abolitionist writers with many a bracing anecdote to support their cause, such as his experience, reported by James, of dining ‘with a woman, beautiful, rich and very much admired, who had had a careless cook thrown into the oven’ (42); however, he was also critical of abolitionists for failing to recognize the ‘dreadful truth’ that the ‘colonies, as presently constituted, cannot exist without slavery’ and that one must thus ‘either maintain slavery or renounce the colonies’ (1.66). Vastey’s reference to Wimpffen, and the assertion that he wrote ‘during the revolution’, is derived from Grégoire’s discussion of the French writer (1808, 53), rather than from Wimpffen’s actual account of the ‘infernal melody’ of slavery (1.129). 83 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions, Decision of 10 June 1734 (3.399). 84 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions, Decision of 11 July 1781 (6.144–45). This example is briefly referenced in Grégoire’s De la littérature des Nègres, as an example of one colonial law among many that presupposed an equivalency between slaves and brute beasts, in this case by ‘bringing together on the very same line Negroes and pigs’ (32). The details included in parentheses (‘the two negroes… washed away’) are taken from a clarificatory footnote of Moreau’s that Vastey has interpolated into the actual arrêt. 85 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions, Decision of 6 May 1746 (3.847). Vastey’s several mistranscriptions (Sozeau, Boujeau, Pompé) have been corrected.

86 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions, Decision of 27 April 1784 (6.492). Vastey’s mistranscription (Sommereux) has been corrected. 87 As Marlene Daut has shown, on the basis of new archival evidence, this virtuous natural daughter of the settler Dumas is none other than Vastey’s own mother; see Chapter 1, below (p. 180). 88 Vastey culls this quotation from Considérations sur l’état présent de la colonie française de SaintDomingue by Michel René Hilliard d’Auberteuil (1751–89). ‘The single most controversial work of Saint-Domingue’s Old Regime’ (Ogle, 36), Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s Considérations was published in 1776–77 and then censored by the French government in late 1777, its attacks on the status quo in Saint-Domingue having pleased neither colonial planters nor administrators there, notwithstanding the fact that his efforts at reforming plantation slavery were made in the spirit of someone who ‘condemned the institution of slavery in principle, while justifying it in practice’ (Dobie, 222; for a brief overview of his ‘reformist’ agenda, see Ghachem, 247–51). Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s invocation of the Religion des Mages occurs in a passage where he argues for the need to maintain the white population of SaintDomingue not through immigration but by encouraging local whites to adopt this ancient precept (2.44; ‘il faut se borner à encourager la population intérieure, & faire beaucoup de Créoles’). 89 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions, Regulation of 24 June/16 July 1773 (5.448– 50). 90 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions, Decision of 31 January 1782 (6.225). In his footnote, Vastey mistakenly refers his readers to volume 5 rather than volume 6 of Moreau’s compilation for the account of Jean-Baptiste’s punishment. Whereas I have corrected other small errors Vastey made when referring to or transcribing passages from Moreau’s Loix, I have let this one stand because it is so closely tied to what is almost certainly a glaring mistake, or misrepresentation, on Vastey’s part with regard to the well-known plantation manager and (as of 1781) owner Jean Barré de Saint Venant (see n. 32). In the 1782 decision, Jean-Baptiste’s punishment is said to ‘be due to his having acted intemperately upon the person of Sieur Barré Duvivier [pour avoir commis des excès sur la personne de sieur Barré Duvivier], manager of the Duplaa plantation in the Quartier Morin’. Barré de Saint-Venant had indeed served as gérant of the Duplaa plantation in the 1770s, and was still very much involved in running it at the time of the legal decision, but Vastey here seems to be confusing the famous Barré with another, far lesser known one (whom I have thus far been unable to track). 91 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions, Decision of 22 October 1783 (6.373). Vastey’s mistranscription (Gauthier) has been corrected. 92 Vastey’s footnote is an exact quotation from Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s Considérations (1.145). From Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s ameliorist perspective, slaves deserved the right, if not to defend themselves physically against white people, then at least to defend themselves legally against flagrant abuses: they should be ‘subjected to a civil law, which cannot be altered, rather than to the law of the master, which is nothing other than his will’ (1.143; qtd. Ghachem, 148). 93 The decision of 7 February 1770 cited in the second half of Vastey’s footnote is from Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions (5.290). John Garrigus has recently analysed the

Carenan case (2006, 83–84), which supports his broader argument that after 1769 a ‘new color line’ was set in place in Saint-Domingue that unified its French population ‘by changing the definition of “whiteness” to depend on biological, rather than social characteristics’ (311). ‘This relatively new concept of white purity’, Garrigus argues, formed the basis for ‘the fierce refusal of Saint-Domingue’s colonists in 1791 to recognize free people of color as citizens, a rejection that led indirectly to the great slave revolt in August of that year’ (311). 94 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions, Regulation of 9 February 1779 (5.855–56). 95 The multi-purpose institution at Bicêtre, just outside Paris, served many functions: prison for criminals, asylum for lunatics, workhouse for the poor, and (until the 1790s) hospital for syphilitic women. In Edward Planta’s popular tour guide, A New Picture of Paris, first published in 1814, the building is described as ‘now appropriated to the reception of loose and idle characters, women of the town, and, in short, to criminals of every description’ (180). 96 Vastey is referring here to a royal ordinance issued on 3 December 1784, when, ‘almost exactly a century after Louis XIV promulgated the Code Noir, the monarchy finally took decisive steps to overhaul [it]’, in a series of measures that ‘represented the culmination of the same prudential anxiety about planter brutality and its potential to incite a slave revolution that had characterized the thinking of administrators and judges in Saint-Domingue for decades’ (Ghachem, 156, 157). For an overview of the ordinance, which ‘triggered a predictable uproar in Saint-Domingue’ (160), see Ghachem (156–62). 97 The two passages that Vastey goes on to quote in this paragraph are from Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s Considérations (2.73, 1.144). The first of these passages is also quoted by Grégoire (1808, 57), which is where Vastey found the detail about Hilliard d’Auberteuil being left to rot in a dungeon (one of a number of competing versions regarding his mysterious death; see Ogle, 49 n. 24). 98 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions, Decision of 17 December 1777 (5.805–06). 99 Vastey’s account of the ex-colonist Jean-Félix Carteau’s 1802 Soirées bermudiennes is taken verbatim from Grégoire (1808, 57–58). Grégoire is citing a passage in which Carteau identifies the laws prohibiting any black or coloured person from hitting a white person as ‘the Palladium of our species, for it ensured the security of our persons’ (60), although he immediately goes on to admit that ‘the unalterable supremacy of the white species was a fictitious force [ une force fictive]’, like the immortality of the soul: ‘True or false, one must believe in it; some illusions are necessary ones, indispensable for general happiness’ (60). For recently translated autobiographical extracts from Soirées bermudiennes, see Popkin (2007, 175–77, 228–32). 100 Again, Vastey is quoting here from Grégoire (1808, 58; practically verbatim), who is in turn quoting from the 1802 Voyage à la Louisiane, et sur le continent de l’Amérique septentrionale, fait dans les années 1794 à 1798, the title-page of which lists its author as B*** D***. In identifying the Creole Pierre-Louis Berquin Duvallon as the author, Vastey perpetuates Grégoire’s own erroneous speculation regarding the authorship of this book (1808, 72), which was actually written by Baudry-Deslozières (see n. 23). The passage from the Voyage cited by Grégoire is part of Baudry-Deslozières’s remarks about the native inhabitants of Louisiana: ‘He [le sauvage] believes the white to be superior to him, but he believes the negro

to be well below him. He is correct, as it happens, but regardless of that, one should be sure to nurture this happy prejudice, which makes him scorn the negro as being a slave by nature. One should foster this pride in him, so that he does not join up with the negro and always returns maroon slaves to their masters’ (191). Berquin, who also published a Louisiana travelogue, entitled Vue de la colonie espagnole du Mississipi, ou des provinces de Louisiane et Floride occidentale (1803), was a repeated target of Vastey and other Christophean scribes (see, e.g., Limonade, 1814, 21) because of his multiple publications in 1814 urging the restoration of French rule in Saint-Domingue. 101 Grégoire (1808, 58; verbatim). 102 François Valentin de Cullion, plantation owner in the south of Saint-Domingue and prominent figure on the political scene in the early years of the Haitian Revolution, published in 1802 (under the initials V. D. C.) a two-volume Examen de l’esclavage en général which argued that slavery is ‘the natural condition of negroes’ and that there is ‘nothing to be expected from such an inferior race of men’ (2.296, 295). Vastey’s description is taken verbatim from Grégoire’s paraphrase of the contents of this book (1808, 58–59), although he does add to Grégoire’s account by supplying the author’s full name. Grégoire’s paraphrase refers primarily to a passage in which the author speaks of ‘stupid negroes, formed from birth for servitude, both by nature and by example, who would obey even the shadow of the white man’ (2.45). 103 Malouet (1802, 4.139). Vastey is quoting from an 1802 footnote that Malouet added to his 1775 Essai sur l’administration de St.-Domingue (see n. 62). 104 In 480 BC, the Persians launched a second invasion of Greece, their first invasion having ended in defeat ten years before at the Battle of Marathon. Although the Persians won a hard-fought victory at Thermopylae, the battle is remembered for the heroic resistance of King Leonidas and his 300 Spartans, which has gone down in history as an inspirational model for an outmanned force defending itself against all odds. The following year, the Persian invasion was ended with their defeat at the Battle of Plataea. Following Vastey’s lead, in 1841 the black abolitionist James McCune Smith delivered a famous lecture on the Haitian Revolution, in which he likened Toussaint Louverture to Leonidas and Leclerc’s 1802 expeditionary force to the Persians: ‘Like Leonidas at Thermopylae, or the Bruce at Bannockburn, Toussaint determined to defend from thraldom his sea-girt isle, made sacred to liberty by the baptism of blood’ (25; for a commentary on this line, see Clavin, 2010, 37–38). Although Smith almost certainly did not derive this analogy from Vastey, like so many of his fellow antebellum African American writers and orators he was familiar with the Haitian writer, who is referenced in one of the lecture’s footnotes (4–5). 105 This is the solitary reference in Colonial System to the division of post-independence Haiti into the rival states of Christophe’s northern kingdom and Pétion’s southern republic, which ‘were in a situation of more or less intermittent war with one another from 1807 to 1812’ (Benot, 1992, 125), and would remain in a state of ‘armed truce’ for the duration of Christophe’s reign (Griggs, 42). As a typical example of the ex-colonists’ emphasis on Haiti’s ‘internal divisions’, and one with which Vastey would have been familiar, we can cite the following passage from an 1810 refutation of Grégoire’s De la littérature des Nègres entitled Cri des colons: ‘The conquest of St. Domingue will not be as difficult as some people in France believe; already considerably diminished, the number of negro warriors is growing

weaker with every passing day on account of the repeated clashes between the mulattoes of the South and the negroes of the North’ (Tussac, 258). 106 The largest fortress ever built in the Americas, la Citadelle Henry was at the time, and remains, the iconic creation of the Christophean regime; it was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1982. At its inauguration in 1813, Vastey delivered a speech in which he compared the Citadel with the architectural productions of Egypt (Leconte, 367; H. Trouillot, 1972, 6), anticipating his later, widely disseminated Afrocentric characterization of the King’s palace of Sans Souci and the Royal Church—‘two buildings constructed by the descendants of Africans’—as ‘evidence we have conserved the taste and the genius for architecture of our ancestors, those who covered Ethiopia, Egypt, Carthage, and the Spain of old with their monuments’ (1819, 201). 107 Vastey’s 1819 Essai, which chronicles (briefly) the main events of the Haitian Revolution and (in great detail) the post/revolutionary years from 1804 to 1819, provides the closest match in his subsequent publications to the ‘second part’ of Colonial System promised in this post scriptum. The myriad crimes of the French in Haiti are most memorably evoked in his 1816 Réflexions, which contains a stirring account of the atrocities committed during their attempted restoration of slavery in 1802–03 (1816c, 94–103). * Garcilaso de la Vega, page 108. † Nothing gives a better idea of the thirst for gold that convulsed the Spaniards, nor of the incredible efforts they made to get hold of it at any price, than the advice offered to his peers by Hatuey, one of the caciques of the island of Cuba. These lords having gathered for the purpose of devising ways to prevent the Spaniards from descending upon their island, as they seemed on the point of doing, Hatuey says to them, ‘All your precautions will be for nought if you do not first attempt to propitiate the god of the Spaniards. I know him, this most powerful of all gods; I know the way to win him over, and I am going to teach it to you’. Forthwith he asks that a basket containing gold be brought to him and, displaying it to the caciques, he says, ‘Here it is, the god of the Spaniards, let us make a festival in its honour, so that it will look upon us with favour’. That very instant, they all gather round the basket, to smoke, sing, dance, eventually falling into an exhausted stupor. The next morning, Hatuey assembles the caciques, and says to them, ‘I have given much thought on the matter of which I spoke to you. My mind is not yet at ease; I do not think we will be safe as long as the god of the Spaniards is still among us. Wherever they find it, there they remain, the better to lay hold of it. There is no use hiding it; they have a marvellous gift for discovering it. Were you to swallow this god, they would tear us open in order to lay hands on it. The only place I know of where they will surely not go in search of it is the bottom of the sea. That is where it must be placed. Once this god is no longer in our midst, they will leave us in peace, for it alone is what draws them away from their own homes’. The advice seems admirable; the caciques gather all their gold, cast it into the sea, a good distance from the shore, and return with the happy conviction that along with this precious metal they have drowned their every source of anxiety.

Despite this precaution, a troop of Spaniards descend on the island of Cuba, and their leader Velasquez, apparently familiar with the character of Hatuey, orders that he be burned alive. He was fastened to the fatal stake, when a friar yet again urged him to embrace the Christian faith and secure the happiness of paradise for himself. Are there Spaniards in that region of bliss of which you speak to me? the cacique bluntly inquired. Yes there are, replied the missionary, but only the good ones. The best of them is worthless, rejoined Hatuey, and I have no wish to go to a place where I might encounter even a single one of them. Then he perished in the midst of the flames. * Behechio had a sister named Anacaona who went to live at her brother’s, after the death of her husband Caonabó, cacique of Maguana. Endowed with a genius superior to that of her sex, and to that of the inhabitants of the island of Saint-Domingue for that matter, Anacaona had developed a fond attachment for the Spaniards, and she instilled it in her brother. When he died childless, toward the beginning of the sixteenth century, he left the kingdom to Anacaona. At this same time, Ovando had just been sent out by the Court of Spain as governor of the island. The Alcalde Roldan had been in revolt since 1497, and the new commander had him shipped off to Europe, along with his principal accomplices; but there remained in Xaraguá partisans of Roldan who, gaining in temerity because they had been spared, felt entitled to engage in all manner of conduct toward Anacaona, whose favourable dispositions they succeeded in alienating. They then had the idea of going to Ovando and accusing her of harbouring treacherous designs against the Spaniards. Ovando, without entirely crediting this accusation, announced that he would go and receive due tribute from Anacaona. And so he did, marching from Santo Domingo to the city of Xaraguá along with 300 foot soldiers and seventy horsemen. The queen, accompanied by 300 subordinate caciques and throngs of people, went forth to welcome the Spanish chief, whom she conducted to her palace, where each day she lavished upon him marks of her devotion. The commander invited her, in turn, to a Spanish feast, persuading her to bring along her entire court. She was in a vast room, surrounded by all the nobles; a multitude of people lined the avenues and the square where the feast was to be held. The Spaniards arrived, with the commander at the head of the horsemen. Once the foot soldiers had taken up their posts, positioning themselves so that all points of entry were secured, the horsemen took out their swords and, when Ovando made the agreed upon signal by placing a hand on his cross of Alcantara, the massacre began. The horsemen entered the room, seized hold of Anacaona, carried her off, bound the caciques to stakes, and set the palace on fire. Dragged off to Santo Domingo, Anacaona was there declared a conspirator, sentenced to be hanged, and executed. This heinous deed, which over the next six months would be followed by the slaughter of a vast number of Indians from Xaraguá, has found its apologists among a few Spanish writers, who maintain that Anacaona really did wish to take up arms. But what man could be so ignominious as to think that this motive, even were it true, excuses a massacre in which neither women nor children nor the elderly were spared. This act was deemed so horrific in Spain that Queen Isabella swore a solemn oath to punish Ovando for it and, on her deathbed, asked King Ferdinand to recall him from Saint-Domingue.

* Poor soul! He suffered the same unhappy fate as Toussaint Louverture. * The story of the cacique Henri is of interest to us in so many respects, that we cannot resist providing our readers with this extract concerning him: ‘In 1519, that is to say, twenty-seven years after its discovery, the first of Spain’s possessions was in mortal danger, and was very nearly buried in its own ruins. Having found a leader worthy of commanding them, a handful of the beleaguered natives took up arms—sad remnant of the more than one million individuals present on the island at the arrival of the Europeans and who had been thrust under the yoke by two or three hundred Spaniards. For thirteen years, they held out so well against the exertions of those tyrants that Castilian pride was finally obliged to come to terms with the revolters, and to accord them, within the Spanish island itself, an independent sovereignty. Here is an account, rapidly drawn but interesting, of how that revolution came about. In the city of Saint-Jean de la Maguana, a young Spaniard named Valençuela had just inherited, upon the death of his father, a department of Indians led by a Christian cacique who had been raised in a convent of Franciscan monks and bore the name of Henri. While serving Valençuela’s father, the young Indian, who had been very well treated by his master, patiently endured his fate. However, after the death of the father, he was handed over to the son and treated in a shameful manner; he made complaints to all the authorities, but having received justice from no quarter, he resolved to dispense it himself. He escapes, rallies other malcontents, and retreats into the mountains of Baoruco; entrenched there, armed with weapons he had taken care to procure for himself, he lies in wait for the Spaniards. He did not have long to wait. Soon Valençuela arrives at the head of twelve soldiers, who were ordered to arrest the cacique. Go in peace, says Henri, return from whence you came, for I tell you that not a one of my brave followers will ever work under your command. Hearing this, the enraged Spaniard once again orders that they seize the Indian, who leaves two soldiers lying dead at his feet, wounds three more, and puts the rest to flight, ordering that they not be pursued. To Valençuela, who is trembling with fear, he says, Go hence, give thanks to God that I have let you live, and do not be so foolish as to return here ever again. New and more sizable contingents of men were sent out against Henri, but in vain. He always defeated them, and in very short order he found himself at the head of a quite considerable army of Indians who had streamed in from all quarters, armed with the spoils of those they vanquished and perfectly familiar with all the niceties of European tactics. When a missionary who had been sent out to him urged that he lay down arms and return to the capital, where he would be given a most favourable treatment, the conqueror responded: “But it is entirely up to the Spaniards if they wish to bring an end to a war that, for my part, is limited to defending myself against tyrants who begrudge me my liberty and my life. Even though I feel well situated at this moment to avenge the blood of my father and that of my forefathers, who were burned alive at Xaraguá, as well as all the harm that has been done to me personally, I will not go back on my resolution to commit no act of hostility that is not forced upon me. I want nothing more than to stay on in these mountains. For the life of me, I will never understand on what grounds one could force me to submit to men whose claims of possession can be sustained only through murder and violence. As for the supposed assurances I have been given, of a milder treatment or even of

my outright liberty, I would be the most imprudent of men were I to trust the word of those who, from the day they arrived here, have not kept a single one of their promises”. Over the next thirteen years, every bid on the part of the Spaniards to subdue Henri resulted in nothing more than an uninterrupted series of defeats, the swelling of his ranks, and their acquiring of weapons gathered up from the battlefield. Finally, in 1533, the council of Madrid, tiring of a war that was detrimental to the honour of the crown, extremely costly, and infinitely prejudicial to the prosperity of the colony, bestowed upon Barrio Nuevo the title of General and dispatched him to the Spanish island with orders to pursue this affair with the utmost rigour, if he was unable in his capacity as imperial commissioner to put an end to it through an advantageous and honourable treaty’. * De la littérature des Nègres, page 59. † A band of colonists having destroyed a Caffre village, a young child about twelve years of age escaped and concealed himself in a hole, where he was unfortunately discovered by a man belonging to the detachment of colonists. This man, wishing to make a slave of the boy, carried him off to the camp; but the commander, who found the boy to his liking, declared his intention of taking him for himself. The first man obstinately refused to give up his prize. Both sides grew warm, and the commander, bursting with anger and out of his mind, runs toward the innocent victim, crying out to his adversary: ‘If I cannot have him, he shall not be thine’. Upon which, he discharges his musket against the breast of the young child, who dropped down dead on the spot. I learned also that, in order to entertain themselves, these villains often placed their prisoners at a certain distance and vied with each other for the prize of best marksman. I should never have done, were I to relate all the revolting cruelties which they daily commit upon those unhappy savages, who are without protection or support; but private considerations and other very powerful motives oblige me to be silent. Besides, what avails the voice of one feeling individual raised against despotism and force? (See Le Vaillant, pages 303 and 304.) * De la littérature des Nègres, abbé Grégoire, page 50. * Public place where they assemble. (Voyage of Mungo Park, Chapter II.) * Voyage of Mungo Park, Chapter III. * As my pen might well be taxed with partiality by the colonists, I have copied out the following note from one of our fiercest enemies, a colonist who certainly cannot be suspected of partiality in our regard. ‘Six ells of coarse cloth each year are provided for his clothing. A plot of land, worked by the negro at a time when he ought to have been resting, supplies him with his means of subsistence. The rest of the time, his sweat and labour belong to the master, who can enforce punishment without the law having any power to pursue and punish him in turn; hence their despair, the acts of revenge, poisoning, arson. Such are the relations of the master to the slave’. (Malouet, volume IV, page 116.) O Malouet, the power of truth extracts this confession from you! You admit that all those crimes for which you upbraid the blacks can be traced back to the colonists. You admit this, and yet you still have the gall to vilify us! * Decision of the Council of the Cape, which condemns the so-named Sannon, quadroon, and the so-named Guillaume, negro, murderers of Sieur Poncet, settler at Jaquezy and their master, to make honourable amends, to have their hands cut off, and to be broken alive on

the wheel, their dead bodies afterwards to be displayed on the wheels at the crossroads of the Poncet plantation on the road from Trou to Jaquezy (where the execution will take place); stays proceedings against their co-accused until after the execution; and orders that the decision be printed, published, and posted up, at the Cape as well as at Fort Dauphin and the town of Trou. Dated 14 October 1776. Decision of the Council of the Cape, condemning slaves who murdered their master. Dated 20 November 1776. Having examined the special proceedings established and conducted by the tribunal of Fort Dauphin, etc., the court has determined to rule further on the so-named, etc., all slaves from the plantation of the late Poncet; emending in light of the resulting cases, the court condemns the so-named Saintonge, negro driver, and the so-named Boussole, negro mill worker and coachman, to be broken alive on the wheel; condemns the so-named Sannite, known as Gogo, quadroon, to be hanged by the public executioner and left to strangle, until death results, on a gibbet that will be erected to this effect on the said public square at Fort Dauphin. In accordance with the more extensive conclusions of the royal attorney general, the court orders that the so-named Sannite, [known as Gogo, shall be observed and visited by Lemoine and Cortial, sworn midwives of the city, received by the court and charged thereby with visiting the said Sannite] Gogo in the presence of the first royal doctor and surgeon of the said city of the Cape, who are charged with drawing up a report certifying the condition of the said Sannite Gogo, and determining whether she is pregnant; should she prove pregnant, the court orders that the execution of her sentence be suspended until after the birth of the child and that she be kept in the city’s prison until this time, and it further orders that the sacrament of baptism be administered to her before the execution. It sentences Paul and Étienne, recently landed negroes, to be present at the aforementioned executions, with a rope about their necks, and then to be branded with a hot iron, stamped on the right shoulder by the public executioner with the letters G. A. L., and attached to the royal chain gang, to serve thereon in perpetuity; and it remands, as prisoners, the negroes Saintonge, Boussole, Paul, and Étienne, and the so-named quadroon Sannite, known as Gogo, to the tribunal of Fort Dauphin, so that the sentences delivered in the present decision can be carried into execution. It orders that the present decision be printed and posted up in the usual crossroads and public places of this city, as well as of Fort Dauphin, the town of Trou, and wherever need be, etc. * See the report of Sieur Dumontellier, written in response to that of Sieur Rossignol Desdunes, page 10 (in Garran-Coulon, page 34). * I leave to the feeling reader the comparison of the peasant with the Negro. (Venault de Charmilly, Lettre à M. Bryan Edwards, page 54.) * The remains of these ghastly dungeons, which were demolished by order of Government, can still be found on those plantations; anyone who doubts the truth of this account can come and see them for himself. * Decision of the Council of the Cape, awarding a sum of 1,000 livres to five whites employed on the Carbon plantation, at Bois de Lance, to be drawn from the funds for reimbursement of damaged slaves, for having destroyed a band of negro maroons led by the so-named Polydor and Joseph. (Moreau de Saint-Méry, volume III, page 399.)

†

Decision of the Council of the Cape, finding an overseer answerable for the loss of a cart and two negroes, which he made use of for his own purposes, without the consent of the present owner. Dated 11 July 1781. In the case of Bonnefond and Pinaudier, appellants, v. Couturier, respondent, Pigeot de Louisbourg serving as lawyer for the appellants and Moreau de Saint-Méry for the respondent: their hearing having been held on the 7th and 9th of this month, as well as on the present day, and taking everything into consideration, the Court herewith renders null and void the appeal and the sentence being appealed; emending, the Court condemns the party of Moreau de Saint-Méry to pay that of Pigeot de Louisbourg the sum of 10,000 livres for the two negroes, the four mules, and the cart, which the said party of Moreau de Saint-Méry wrongfully made use of, without the owners’ knowledge and for his own personal business (the two negroes and the four mules drowned crossing the river at Jacquezy when it was flooding, and the cart was washed away); as well as the interest of the said sum, reckoned from the date of the original claim; with the option, should the said party of Moreau de Saint-Méry prefer, of paying in accordance with a valuation to be made of the said two negroes, four mules, and cart by experts acquainted with the said objects, and who will be agreed upon by the parties, in the presence of Monsieur de Pourcheresse de Vertières, magistrate, whom the Court herewith appoints to this effect, the party of Moreau de Saint-Méry being required to choose this option within a fortnight, starting from the day that notification of the present order is given, the option being otherwise withdrawn. Ruling with respect to the seizures and sequestrations made at the request of the parties of Pigeot de Louisbourg, of negroes, pigs, and other objects, if such there be, belonging to the party of Moreau de Saint-Méry, the Court declares these good and valid, and orders that the said negroes, pigs, and other objects be sold, at the request of the parties of Pigeot de Louisbourg: the negro to be sold at the bar of the royal courthouse at Fort Dauphin, in the usual manner, and the pigs and other objects to be sold by the first authorized notary, taking into account the offers made by the parties of Pigeot de Louisbourg, who is to apprise the party of Moreau de Saint-Méry of their value, which will be deducted and put toward the above-mentioned verdicts pronounced against them; first, toward the interest and costs, and secondly toward the principle. The Court orders that the penalty be remanded to the parties of Pigeot de Louisbourg, and condemns that of Moreau de Saint-Méry to pay all costs related to the principal causes of the appeal and the claim. *

Regulation concerning the Free People of Colour. Dated 24 June and 16 July 1773. LOUIS-FLORENT, Chevalier de VALLIÈRE, etc. JEAN-FRANÇOIS-VINCENT, Chevalier, Seigneur de MONTARCHER, etc. Two abuses have been introduced into the Colony, which affect in equal measure both the legal status of persons and their properties, as pertains to the order of succession. The mulattoes and other free-born people of colour almost always take the surname of their putative fathers, despite it being of white origin; moreover, manumitted slaves likewise take the surname of the masters who gave them their liberty. This double abuse gives rise to real disorder. The usurping of an originally white name can put into question the legal status of persons, throw the order of succession into confusion and, ultimately, destroy the insurmountable barrier that public opinion has placed between the whites and the people of colour, and that the government in its wisdom upholds. To remedy the abuses that might

arise as a consequence, we, by virtue of the powers confided in us by His Majesty, herewith order the following: Art. 1. All free and unmarried negresses, mulatresses, quadroons, and octoroons who have their children baptized will be required to give them, in addition to their baptismal name, a surname drawn from the African idiom, or from their trade and colour, but which can never be that of any white family in the colony; the penalty for not doing so being a fine of one thousand livres, with the requirement to pay all damages and compensation owed the family whose surname has been usurped. 2. We enjoin all priests, curates, and other servants of the parish to enforce the above article in a full and thorough manner by entering the provided surname in the baptismal certificate; the penalty for not doing so being the suspension of their salaries for a first lapse, and a greater penalty for any subsequent ones. 3. Every master, of whatever quality, condition, or colour, who seeks the government’s permission to free one of his slaves will in future be obliged, through the request he submits to this effect, to give the said slave, in addition to his name, a surname of some sort, in accordance with what is stipulated in the first article of the present regulation; should this be lacking, the said permission will not be granted, regardless of how compelling the motives for freeing the said slave might be. 4. We most expressly enjoin any master who obtains permission to free his slave to enter in the act of manumission that he draws up, in addition to the name of the said slave, the same surname used in the document granting him that permission; the penalty for not doing so being the nullification of the said act of manumission, a fine of one thousand livres, with the requirement to pay all damages and compensation owed the family whose surname has been usurped. 5. We most expressly forbid negroes, mulattoes, quadroons, and octoroons, be they freeborn or manumitted, who up until now have been usurping white surnames, from bearing them in the future. We enjoin them, as a consequence, to take another surname of their choice, and within three months of the publication of the present regulation to declare it at the record-office of the jurisdiction in which they are domiciled, these declarations then to be entered in a register kept for this purpose by the clerks; imprisonment being the penalty for anyone acting in contravention of this article. 6. We likewise most expressly prohibit clerks, notaries, agents, and bailiffs from receiving or executing, in the exercise of their functions, any act in which negroes and free or manumitted people of colour venture to take the surname either of their putative fathers or of their white masters. We enjoin them on the contrary to apprise the King’s agents or their deputies of any such attempt, for future reference; and in order that the said priests, clerks, notaries, agents, and bailiffs be sufficiently informed when judging as to the real surname of any negroes or people of colour, be they free-born or manumitted, who might wish them to draw up a contract, we authorize them to require the presentation of baptismal acts and acts of manumission, as well as a copy of the declaration they made at the record-office of their jurisdiction. 7. It is our wish, lastly, that the regulations of 12 July 1727, 15 June 1736, and 14 November 1755, which also bear on the precautions to be taken with regard to public acts that concern the people of colour, be executed according to their form and tenor.

May it please the Officers of the Councils to instruct those in their jurisdictions to enforce the present regulation. Given at Port-au-Prince, etc. * At Jérémie one Maundy Thursday, Haytian women were driven out of the church at the instigation of white women. The women only returned to the church at the behest of the English general who was in command of the city, and who took this occasion to remark that all mortals are equal before God and that it was time people stopped making these puerile distinctions in the churches. † Moreau de Saint-Méry, volume V, page 225. * The negro slaves, and even the freedmen of the colony, are threatened with death if they dare to defend themselves against a white man, even after he has struck them. (Hilliard d’Auberteuil, volume I, page 145.) * See the incident reported on page 113, involving Cockburne. † This unfortunate individual was the neighbour of a big planter named Denis de Carenan who, in order to take control of his property, had him declared a slave through a decision of the Council of Port-au-Prince. One fact worth remarking upon, and which perfectly characterizes the way that justice was meted out in those days, is that this very same planter was the person who had sold the property in the first place. In order to get it back, and renege on a contract he had entered into forty years before, he came up with the despicable strategy of challenging Paul Carenan’s status as a free man; he had him declared a slave, his person was confiscated to the use of the King, and the property was restored to Denis de Carenan. We even have good reason to presume, given the correspondence between their names, that Paul Carenan must have been a son or relative of this vile man, Denis de Carenan, and yet even so, kinship had no effect on those monsters! Here is the decision that the Council rendered; we could adduce and substantiate a thousand similar examples. Decision of the Council of Port-au-Prince, confiscating to the use of the King a Mulatto posing as Free. Dated 7 February 1770. In the case of the so-named Paul, known as Carenan, mulatto posing as free, the appellant; and of Marie-Jeanne Delaunay, wife of the said Carenan, acting on her behalf and that of her children, v. our attorney general, espousing the cause of his deputy at Petit Goave; and Denis de Carenan, the respondent: ruling with respect to the appeal the Court herewith renders null and void the appeal and the sentence being appealed. Evoking the principal cause, and ruling thereon, the Court herewith declares the mulatto Paul, known as Carenan, to be a slave, and to be confiscated to our use; it also declares null and void all acts that will have been entered into between the said mulatto Paul and Denis de Carenan; and in consequence, it orders that the latter remain in possession of whatever goods were sold by him to the said mulatto Paul. Pronouncing on the requests pertaining to the intervention, as concerns that of the said Carenan, the court declares him not receivable in the said intervention, and as concerns that of Marie-Jeanne Delaunay and her children, admits them as interveners and directs them, that a ruling on their intervention be rendered, to seek redress as they see fit for all costs incurred in the matter. *

Provisional Regulation of the Administrators-General concerning the Ostentation of the People of Colour. Dated 9 February 1779.

ROBERT, Comte d’ARGOUT, etc. JEAN-BAPTISTE GUILLEMIN DE VAIVRE, etc.

The extreme ostentation of dress and finery indulged in by the people of colour of both sexes, be they free-born or manumitted, having attracted the attention of magistrates and public alike, as well as our own, it has become necessary to place provisional restrictions on it, while awaiting the definitive regulation on this subject that will be issued if the simple admonition which we believe, for the moment, is all that is required for this class of the King’s subjects—who are worthy of the government’s protection when they contain themselves within the bounds of simplicity, decency, and respect, those essential attributes of their condition—does not itself provoke on their part, and of their own accord, a return to the principles of modesty that a number of them seem to have forgotten. The moral interest, being superior to all other interests, will always prevent us from giving undue consideration to the poorly informed arguments that certain merchants might, in the name of commerce, make in this regard; however, we also believe that a happy medium can and must be found, which would reconcile those different interests by authorizing a moderate use of such attire while prohibiting anything that could be seen as excessive or even bordering on the excessive. It is above all incumbent on the forces of order that they be vigilant with regard to any assimilation of the people of colour to white people—in their manner of attire, in the lessening of distance between the one class and the other in their form of dress, in the dazzling and costly ornaments, in the arrogance that sometimes results from this and the scandal that always accompanies it—and that they deploy every means of restraint available to them, using their own good judgement to guard against being either overly meticulous in their investigations or, even more dangerously, slackening in them. For these reasons, and by virtue of the powers invested in us by His Majesty, we herewith order, provisionally, the following: Art. 1. We enjoin all people of colour of both sexes, be they free-born or manumitted, to show the greatest respect not only to their former masters, patrons, and well-wishers, and to the widows or children of these men, but to all whites in general as well, on pain of being specially prosecuted, should occasion arise, and punished according to the rigour of the law, which may extend to the loss of liberty should the infraction merit it. 2. We most expressly forbid them from wearing any outfits, head-dresses, ornaments, and the like, in such manner as would promote a reprehensible likeness between their way of dressing and that of white men or white women. We order them to preserve all the marks of dress that have, up to the present day, given a distinctive character to their apparel, subject to the penalties set down in the following article. 3. And lastly, we likewise forbid them to wear upon their person any objects of luxury, which are incompatible with their simple condition and origins, under pain of immediate imprisonment of the person and confiscation of the said objects of luxury, either by the police or else by the local officers familiar with the facts in question, without excluding the possibility of greater penalties in case of relapse or disobedience, which we leave to the discretion of the said judges, barring appeal to a higher court. Let it please the Officers of the Superior Councils of the Cape and of Port-au-Prince to register the present ordinance, and to instruct those in their respective jurisdictions to enforce it; and let the same be registered at the record-office of the Intendant, printed, read, made public, and posted up wherever need be.

Given at the Cape, etc. *

Decree of the Council of State, banning a work entitled: Considerations of the Present State of the French Colony of Saint-Domingue. Dated 17 December 1777. The King having been advised in council of the dissemination of a book in two volumes entitled Considerations on the Present State of the French Colony of Saint-Domingue; and His Majesty having been informed that this work had created a sensation in the colonies of America, the decision was made to look more closely into the matter. His Majesty, having recognized that, independently of whatever else the book might contain of a reprehensible nature, the author had allowed himself to attack the administrators in charge of Saint-Domingue by levelling serious charges that were contrary to the truth, has deemed it wise and just to prevent the circulation of the said work, out of respect for the memory of the Comte d’Ennery, Governor of Saint-Domingue, who so justly merited the esteem and regrets of His Majesty and of those living in that colony, and as a public mark of his Majesty’s justice and of his satisfaction with the conduct of the colony’s Intendant, Sieur de Vaivre, who at present is still filling his duties with equal amounts of zeal and integrity. The report having been heard, the King in his council, by notice of the Keeper of the Seals, herewith orders that the work entitled Considerations on the Present State of the French Colony of Saint-Domingue be now and in the future suppressed, and in so doing herewith revokes the privilege accorded to Prault, printer, and by him ceded to Grangé, who printed the said work, and that the privilege be returned by them for cancellation. His Majesty very expressly forbids the said printers, and all others, to sell, retail, or reprint the said work, under pain of punishment by the law, and he enjoins those who possess copies of it to return them to the record-office of the King’s council; His Majesty equally enjoins the Lieutenant-general of police and Intendants and Commissioners in the provinces to enforce, each according to his rights, the present decree. Given this day, at the Council of State, etc. Signed, AMELOT. * Volume IV, Chapter XI, Collection de mémoires sur Saint-Domingue.

SUPPLEMENTARY ESSAYS

1 Monstrous Testimony: Baron de Vastey and the Politics of Black Memory Marlene Daut In January 1821, only months after the death of King Henry Christophe and the reunification of Haiti under President Jean-Pierre Boyer, Caleb Cushing provided a lengthy, much reprinted and referenced article in the North American Review that enthusiastically surveyed a number of publications from Haiti, including several by one of Christophe’s own secretaries, Baron de Vastey.1 The goal of placing these works from Haiti before his readers, the future US Attorney General wrote, was to highlight the ‘intrinsic merit’ of a body of literature, ‘written by the descendants of negroes’, that could provide ‘some means of judging of the intellectual dignity, which a population of blacks may hope to reach, in the most favourable circumstances’ (C. Cushing, 112). Drawing on a vocabulary of ‘regeneration’ that dates back to the eighteenth century, Cushing zeroed in on the writings of Vastey as ‘very favourable specimens of the native mental force of a Haytian’ (112): ‘wrought into the[ir] style’, he enthused, are ‘the vehemence of a once oppressed, but now victorious soldier, the fire of an emancipated slave, the vigorous pride of a regenerate African’, all of which ‘amply atone for their few trifling defects in arrangement and composition’ (114). Cushing’s description of Vastey as a ‘regenerate African’ plays down his earlier uncertainty about the meaning of Vastey’s mixed racial identity. In a footnote that follows Cushing’s first mention of Vastey’s ‘colour’, the author

owns that he is not sure of Vastey’s exact racial status, describing him as ‘a yellow man, either a mulatto or mestizo; it has not been in our power to ascertain which’ (113). He is quick to add that while Vastey’s ‘colour gave him some little advantage over pure blacks during the continuance of the colonial government’, it was but a ‘brief and slight’ one, and therefore ‘we may consider him as a person who has escaped from the lowest moral and intellectual degradation, by the force of his own powers and in opposition to the whole strength of unpropitious circumstances’ (113–14). Cushing’s later and continuous emphasis on Vastey as an ‘African’ or a ‘negro’ whose accomplishments should not be tied to any ‘advantage’ in connection with his lighter skin colour anxiously attempts to connect the works of Vastey (who was phenotypically white, according to some contemporary observers) to a singular genealogy of blackness rather than to a more complicated one that includes whiteness. Like many others who reviewed Vastey’s works in the early nineteenth-century Atlantic World, Cushing appears to have found the idea that Vastey was a ‘self-educated’ African (112) immediately functional because of the celebratory tale he could construct about Haitians’ capacities for literacy, learning, and, in short, ‘civilization’: a tale about ‘the regeneration of Hayti’ (129) that depended upon a refutation of ‘mulatto exceptionalism’ or ‘the idea that blacks displayed admirable traits because of their “Anglo-Saxon [or, more broadly, European] blood”’ (Gilmore, 59–60). In other words, Cushing’s ambivalence about the implications of whiteness in broader debates regarding what he calls ‘the capacity of blacks for improvement’ after the degradations of slavery (131) reflects specific anxieties present in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century pseudoscientific debates about race whose participants sought to determine whether miscegenation could be linked to regeneration or degeneration of the African ‘race’. On 17 February 1821, the Philadelphia weekly the Literary Gazette published an overview of Cushing’s account ‘of the present condition of Haiti’. Noting that ‘the Baron de Vastey, the Alpha and Omega of Haytian intellect and literature, has furnished the principal materials’ for that account (‘North American’, 102), and using what James McClellan would call ‘vaguely “scientific”’ statements about race (7), the author builds on the details about Vastey’s ‘racial’ identity provided by Cushing: ‘It is not unimportant to mention that this coloured philosopher is “a yellow man

either a mulatto or mestizo”, and therefore not quite so high in the scale of humanity as the unmixed African race’ (102). Such a reference to the ‘scale of humanity’ is reflective of a taxonomical line of thought initiated with the Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus’ division of humanity into four distinct groups (Africanus, Americanus, Asiaticus, and Europeanus) in his 1735 Systema naturae, which would be refined by subsequent naturalists such as Johann Friedrich Blumenbach to establish a more explicitly hierarchical system of classifying human beings. For Blumenbach, there were not four but ‘five racial types’: ‘Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, and Malay’. According to Michael Yudell, ‘Blumenbach’s addition posited the Caucasian as the ideal, or mean race, and on either side of that mean were racial extremes; the Mongolian and Ethiopian on one side and the American and Malay on the other. Both divergences from the Caucasian ideal were considered inferior’ (16). Such racial taxonomies and the hierarchies they prescribed were absolutely central to debates about whether or not miscegenation would cause blacks to ascend on the ‘scale of humanity’—a theory which supported the idea of ‘mulatto exceptionalism’—or would cause them to descend further on the scale—a view espoused, for instance, by one of Vastey’s primary interlocutors, Moreau de Saint-Méry, whose famously elaborate racial taxonomies in Description… de la partie française de Saint-Domingue (1797–98) were grounded in ‘a discourse of degeneration’ that ‘supposes a degree of sterility in persons of mixed race as they approach white, following from both physiological and moral causes’ (Garraway, 2005, 267, 268; see Moreau, 1797–98, 1.76–78). The addition to Cushing’s statement, then, by the writer for the Literary Gazette links Vastey’s mixed-racial identity to the idea of mulatto degeneration, which ‘in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century’, according to Werner Sollors, ‘had so much political, scientistic, and general intellectual support that it may be called the “dominant opinion” of the period’ (132). Taken together, these two racially charged portraits of Vastey, which paint him as variously ‘negro’ or ‘mulatto’, regenerate or degenerate, and therefore representative of hope or of despair about Haiti (and equally about humanity), recall the language of ‘monstrous hybridity’ made popular in enlightenment debates about race. The seeds for the trope of monstrous hybridity were first sown in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century travel writing where ambivalent

descriptions of racial mixing were espoused by people like the Dominican missionary Jean-Baptiste Labat, who arrived in Saint-Domingue in 1701 (Garrigus, 2006, 21). In his Nouveau voyage aux isles de l’Amérique (1722), Labat identified ‘the mulatto’ as a ‘child born of a black mother and a white father’ (or, in very rare cases, of a black father and a white mother), and argued that this libertinage of whites with negresses is the source of an infinity of crimes. The colour of children who are born of this mixture is both white and black and produces a kind of blackish-brown tint [participe du blanc et du noir, et produit une espèce de bistre]… The Mulattoes are ordinarily well-made, of a good height, vigorous, strong, adroit, industrious, courageous, and daring beyond imagination; they have a lot of vivacity, but they are addicted to their pleasures, flighty, sly, mean, and capable of the greatest crimes. (2.120–21)

Labat continues by telling us that by the ‘third generation’ of intermixture we would only be able to distinguish a mixed-race person by looking at the haziness of their eyes (127–28; ‘le blanc des yeux qui paraîtra toujours un peu battu’), but that such a person’s descendants could return to full blackness within ‘three generations’. Labat’s interest in the long-term effects of miscegenation reflects the fact that, as Claude Blanckaert has written, ‘the question of human crossbreeding’ provoked ‘a kind of critical secular interest’ during the Enlightenment as naturalists and proto-anthropologists asked the questions: ‘Are métis viable or not? Do they inherit the best “qualities” from their parents, or are they a vehicle of degeneration?’ (43) Labat’s characterization of people of mixed race as an incongruous mixture of positive and negative qualities provides a double answer to these questions, and in thus representing the simultaneously regenerative and degenerative dimensions of their existence links his writing not only to what would become one of the most central concerns in pseudo-scientific debates about racial miscegenation, but to one of the central tropes of the Haitian Revolution: monstrous hybridity. Whether representing miscegenation as degenerative, regenerative, or a combination thereof, the trope of monstrous hybridity responds to and attempts to regulate incongruity (the problems posed by an assemblage of traits perceived as clashing, disconsonant, and incompatible) and unknowability (the problems involved in identifying phenotypically ambiguous people of colour as either white or black). In the context of the

Haitian Revolution, it was the supposedly unnatural marriage of whiteness and blackness that made the person of mixed race (being neither fully the one nor the other) a monster to be feared, suspected, and reproached. Vastey provides a dramatic example of the ways in which vengeful people of colour and their incongruous combination of physical and moral traits were blamed for the loss of the colony when, in a pamphlet that he penned only months after Colonial System, he cites a passage from Drouin de Bercy’s 1814 De Saint-Domingue in which the French colonist and planter details his plans for restoring Saint-Domingue to France and precluding the generation of further monstrous hybrids. The comments of Drouin de Bercy, who considered the ‘mulatto caste’ of Saint-Domingue to be ‘the most dangerous, the most restless, the cause and soul of all the insurrections of the negroes’ (1814, 171), are so revealing with respect to those who held that miscegenation was responsible for the ‘degradation’ of both whiteness and blackness as well as for the parricidal vengeance and ‘perfidy’ of the Haitian Revolution that they are worth quoting at length: In the islands there exists a particular caste, an impure mixture of whites and blacks, known as mulattoes [mélange impur du blanc et du noir, et connue sous le nom de mulâtres]. Nature, frightened with horror at the sight of this monster, has imprinted on that being, in ineffaceable characters, the traits of ferocity, joined together with those of the most egregious perfidy. Jealous of the whites with whom he could never be equal, the mulatto becomes inflamed at the sight of the blacks who gave him life. Vile scum of nature, he only sees in these two colours compelling evidence of his own degradation and the everlasting reproach of his existence. In a word, the mulatto carries the features and the vices of whites and blacks, without having any of their virtues. This caste, which goes against all of nature, awful testament to the debasement of whites [monument affreux de l’avilissement des blancs], will disappear if the government approves of the measures that I propose. (qtd. 1815a, 18–19)2

In the immediate context of the Haitian Revolution, the same language of ‘monstrous hybridity’, exemplified by Drouin de Bercy’s horrifying plans for the ‘total conquest’ of the former colony, which involved ‘purging it of everything that could in the future disrupt its domestic tranquillity’ (1814, 171), provided a vocabulary for questions about whose side of the Revolution people of mixed race would belong to, the side of their figurative and literal white fathers or that of their black slave mothers? And, perhaps, even more pressingly for the colonists, it provided a vocabulary for casting suspicion on people of mixed race who, having links to both the white

colonists and the black slaves, were viewed by many contemporaries of the Haitian Revolution as opportunists who had merely, like chameleons, changed colours and therefore putative revolutionary allegiances as it suited them. Drouin de Bercy furthers the anxious separatist agenda that undergirds much of the pseudo-scientific debate about racial hybridity when he seeks to convince his readers that people of mixed race were the dangerous enemies not only of the white colonists, but also of the blacks ‘who gave them life’ and the very sight of whom ‘inflamed’ their passions. The idea that ‘mulattoes’ possessed an innate hatred for ‘pure blacks’ and vice versa persisted throughout the nineteenth century and is intimately connected to assessments of post-independence Haiti. Even as Cushing praises Vastey’s works as those of a ‘regenerate African’, he questions whether the recent reunification of the northern and southern regions of Haiti under Boyer will endure, on the grounds that ‘the total difference in their past modes of life, of education, and of government, is a powerful obstacle to the consolidation of the blacks and mulattoes under a republican chief; but a more insurmountable impediment is the hatred which the two casts [sic] have generally entertained for each other since the very beginning of their struggle for independence’ (133). In a nineteenth-century world in which many writers erroneously believed, as is demonstrated by Cushing’s comments, in a post-independence Haiti that was strictly divided along colour lines—‘mulattoes’ in the south with Pétion and ‘blacks’ in the north with Christophe—a public figure like Baron de Vastey, a slaveholder’s near ‘white’ son who ‘was fanatically devoted to Christophe’ (Griggs, 44), upset the kinds of racial distinctions that would have confirmed not only these false ideas about Haiti, but stereotypical ideas about race. Like nineteenthcentury journalists, travel writers, and functionaries who offered vastly different and at times even monstrous portraits of him, many contemporary historians, too, have not known how to properly ‘race’ Vastey and his works, or even whether or not he had ever been a slave (see Daut, 2012b, 49 n. 15). The inability properly to ‘race’ Vastey and therefore properly to know his works reflects an anxiety about the connection between racial identity and intellectual thought exemplified throughout contemporaneous and later nineteenth-century descriptions of the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath in the Atlantic World. The very terms of distinction— ‘mulatto’, ‘negro’, and in at least one case ‘white’—to be found in the wildly different

nineteenth-century biographical representations of Vastey that I examine in the following section of this essay are markers of that anxiety, which naturalists and other taxonomists attempted to overcome by creating distinct and unchanging categories of human beings that they thought could always, in the end, reveal racial and therefore political loyalties. Similarly, the genredefining vocabulary that has placed Vastey on the margins of Haitian literary studies and historiography emerged not simply to classify texts but to control the ways that we might interpret them. Thus, if in the following section I outline how the three conflicting ways of reading Vastey’s ‘race’ in the nineteenth century (mulatto, black, and white) have, in the twentieth century, contributed to the dismissal of his remarkable contributions to Haitian revolutionary historiography, in the final section, by offering a vocabulary of hybridity inspired by the Latin American genre of testimonio as an alternative way to read Le système colonial dévoilé, I hope to refocus emphasis on Vastey’s rhetorical evasion of dominant narratives of the Haitian Revolution rather than on his representation within them. Ultimately, the confused, anxious, uncertain, and indeed monstrous, portraits and readings of the author of Colonial System that are described in this article might, upon further discovery, end up telling us far more about the hopes, fears, and desires of their authors and the particular eras in which they wrote than they tell us anything at all about the mysterious life and works of Baron de Vastey. The case of Vastey is one of the most fascinating examples of the ways in which racial ambiguity in the context of the Haitian Revolution came to symbolize a broader inability to generate unequivocal (and indeed racial) explanations for political and personal loyalties. He rarely made direct reference to his ancestry or personal life in his prose works, except to say that he was the child of an Africaine and therefore felt himself to be very ‘African’ (1816c, 31; ‘ayant reçu le jour d’une africaine, je me crois trèsidentifié avec les africains’). However, in a rare autobiographical inscription from the 1815 pamphlet À mes concitoyens, Vastey detailed why in the months after the kidnapping of Toussaint Louverture in June 1802—at a time when Leclerc began to advocate ‘a genocidal policy aimed at killing virtually the entire black population’, even those who had been fighting on the side of

France (Girard, 2008, para. 36)—he suddenly took up the cause of the former slaves against the French: [P]our éviter la mort que nos bourreaux me préparait, j’ai fui dans les bois pour chercher mon salut. N’ai-je pas trouvé dans le sein de ma souche maternelle, pères, mères, frères, amis qui m’ont accueillis avec des transports de joie et de la plus pure amitié? Puis-je oublier cet instant où je me précipitai dans les bras de mes frères que j’avais malheureusement combattus! Quel remords n’éprouvai-je pas quan[d] au lieu des reproches que je croyais recevoir, oubliant mon ingratitude ou plutôt mon erreur, ils m’accueillirent dans leur sein avec une tendresse vraiment paternelle! Dès ce moment je prononçai le serment de ne jamais détacher ma cause de celle de mes semblables, et je périrai dans ces sentimens. (1815a, 18)3

Here, Vastey clearly states that he aligned himself with his ‘maternal roots’ because of the ‘paternal’ protection and tenderness that he experienced from those he had once combated. Yet, in a lurid twentieth-century contrast to Vastey’s own striking self-representation as one of the duped free people of colour who initially fought for France and General Leclerc in 1802, John Vandercook, who penned a fictionalized biography of Henry Christophe in 1928, implies that Vastey’s seemingly incongruous allegiance to the blacks was due to the fact that he hated his white father. Noting that he ‘could “almost pass for a white man”’ and that his skin ‘was the color of old parchment’, Vandercook describes Vastey as the ‘bastard son of a white father whose memory he scorned and a mulatto mother he had forgotten’ (114). Vandercook’s assumptions about Vastey’s official relationship to his parents is contradicted by the fact that he is listed on his baptismal certificate as the ‘fils légitime’ of his father, Jean Vastey and his mother, a free woman of colour, Marie Françoise Élisabeth Dumas, known colloquially as Élisabeth ‘Mimi’, according to her marriage certificate.4 Vandercook’s assumption that Vastey had forgotten his mother is sharply called into question by the fact that he makes a moving reference in Colonial System to Élisabeth Mimi, ‘fille naturelle’ of ‘Dumas, settler, resident of Marmelade, and at present a property owner in France’ (1814b, 70), albeit without explicitly noting that she was his mother. After describing how ‘Mimi’ saved an infant slave named Laurent from being thrown into a lime kiln by her own father (thus, Vastey’s grandfather) and raised him as her own child so that the slave mother could return to work, Vastey writes:

‘Mimi, virtuous and good, you are no longer with us! But you rejoice in the bosom of eternal bliss, as a reward for your noble actions. Your friend here consecrates your name and your virtues, as an object of veneration and friendship for all kind and tender-hearted souls’ (70–71). Vandercook’s emphasis on Vastey’s supposed bastard mulatto status and his suggestion that Vastey held his parents in mutual disapprobation—to say nothing of his reference to Vastey as ‘the “white nigger”’ who ‘loved the blacks with a fierce, consuming love’ and ‘hated all whites with a double fury’ (114)—is thus not simply mistaken but deeply prejudiced in its echoing of enlightenment attempts to produce sweeping racial taxonomies that could categorize, explain, and therefore know everything. Vandercook’s facile concatenation of Vastey’s political motives to a narrative of mulatto vengeance is merely a corollary to early nineteenth-century descriptions of Vastey whose authors sought to explain away what they viewed as the monstrous testimony of Colonial System by deploying the trope of monstrous hybridity. The early nineteenth-century travellers to Haiti who mention Vastey attempt to account for his racial identity and his political loyalties in a variety of ways. In these works, Vastey is variously described as a man of mixed race whose hybridity was related to his desire to seek vengeance against whites, or alternatively as a negro whose efforts at writing, laudable though they may have been, were simple examples of mimicry that could never rise to the level of European writing, or even as a seemingly white man whose real racial identity as a ‘mulatto’ was exposed by his savage personality. What all these superficially different descriptions have in common, however, is a reliance on the language of monstrous hybridity. William Woodis Harvey, a Methodist preacher who was sent to northern Haiti by the Methodist Church to encourage Protestantism throughout the kingdom (Findlay and Holdsworth, 266), described Vastey in his Sketches of Hayti (1827) as a ‘mulatto’ whose ‘fierceness’, ‘duplicity’, and ‘meanness’ rendered him ‘at once despicable and odious’, and who entertained a hatred ‘towards whites of all nations [that] rendered him sometimes an object of terror’ (223). Harvey directly connects his assessment of Vastey’s vengeful personality to the trope of monstrous hybridity when he writes:

Had the character of Vastey been as consistent, as his abilities were respectable, he would have deserved our admiration; but this unhappily was not the case… [O]n one occasion, he was heard calmly to declare that if he were allowed to follow his own wishes, he would massacre every white man in the Island. The monster who had wantonly imbrued his hands in the blood of his nurse,—for with this horrid crime was he charged,—and who, during the struggle for liberty, had coolly assisted in the massacre of thousands was alone capable of conceiving, and had he been permitted, of executing, so dreadful a purpose. In short, he was the very counterpart of Dessalines,—an assemblage of all that was mean, and savage, and diabolical. (Harvey, 223–24)

Harvey not only paints Vastey as the very embodiment of the monstrous hybrid who is filled with mulatto vengeance to the point that he would kill his own nurse, but ties this fantasmic monstrosity to Vastey’s own writing. For Harvey it is the mutability of Vastey’s character (demonstrated by his uncanny similarity to Dessalines), coupled with an ‘assemblage’ of ‘diabolical’ personality traits, that make his abilities as an author less ‘respectable’. Moreover, according to Harvey, Vastey’s actual ‘countenance’ was a ‘correct index to the dark passions, and sometimes to the villainous purposes, of his soul’, which ‘often revealed their workings, when he was most desirous of concealing them’ (224). Harvey’s description of Vastey’s facial expressions as ultimately revelatory distinctly coincides with the idea that people of mixed race were imprinted with indelible physical traits that might, through close observation, betray their connection to blackness. For Harvey, Vastey’s facial expressions fail to conceal his monstrous personality much the same way that for Labat the ‘haziness’ of the eyes signals the socalled mulatto’s connection to the African ‘race’. Harvey specifically demonstrates the anxieties provoked by both the instability of Vastey’s racial identity and the spectre of monstrous hybridity when he warns his readers that though Vastey was ‘represented to be a kind and affectionate husband’, ‘the savage himself is often found capable of the strongest conjugal affection’ (225). Anxieties about miscegenation here operate in a space that marks Vastey’s hybridity as a threatening attempt to conceal his innate black savagery (after all, he is the ‘counterpart’ of Dessalines). Harvey consoles himself, in the end, by implying that though Vastey’s interior savagery might have been temporarily concealed by exterior signs of kindness and affection, the native ‘savage’ in him, the ‘insidious character he bore’, could be readily ‘discovered in his countenance and conversation’ (226).

The kind of beliefs about miscegenation found in Harvey’s writings concerning the inability of ‘mulatto’ subjects to contain their interior and ‘savage’ blackness under exteriors of ‘kind and affectionate’ whiteness is made most apparent when Vastey is assumed to be a white man. In the diaries of Frances Williams-Wynn, written over the first four decades of the century and edited by Abraham Hayward in 1864 (seven years after her death), Williams-Wynn recorded her observations not of ‘the writer’s daily life’, but of the ‘conversations and compositions which attracted her attention in the course of her daily intercourse with the most cultivated people and her assiduous study of curious books and manuscripts’ (Hayward, v, vi). An author whom Williams-Wynn refers to only as Mr. Courtenay penned one of these ‘curious’ manuscripts. In it, Courtenay claims to have spent time in Christophe’s palace in the company of Admiral Home Popham,5 and mentions having known Vastey, whom he refers to as a ‘clever, gentlemanly white man, educated in France’; he writes, ‘I became acquainted with him and liked him much, though many of his countrymen assured me he was a perfect savage in disposition’ (qtd. Williams-Wynn, 177). After Williams-Wynn’s rendition of Courtenay’s statement, Hayward intervenes with an editorial footnote clarifying that Vastey was actually a ‘mulatto, and one of the most remarkable of the race’ (177). The editor’s intervention is supposed to contradict what Courtenay feels and knows using his own common sense—that Vastey is a ‘white man’ whom he likes very much, even though others characterize him as a common ‘savage’. The conflicting statements about Vastey made by the editor and Courtenay (by way of Williams-Wynn) distinctly reflect fears that were prevalent in the nineteenth-century Atlantic World about the consequences of racial miscegenation and the inability properly to know a person’s loyalties, personality, or, ultimately, the merit of his or her works, based on perceived notions of race. Vastey’s identity as a white man bewilders Courtenay exactly because Vastey’s appearance of whiteness, his French education, and his likeability do not match up with the identification of him as a ‘savage’. The editor, then, appearing to sense Courtenay’s own anxiety over such incongruity provides the common-sense explanation that unwittingly links Vastey’s savagery to the black ‘race’ (thus absolving ‘pure’ whiteness) and his

‘remarkable’ achievements to miscegenation (thus playing down ‘pure’ blackness). The widely cited Englishman James Franklin, too, has something to say about Vastey’s race in connection with his intellectual abilities, but he attributes Vastey’s unreliability as a historian neither to the fact that he was a ‘mulatto’, nor to an idea of the baron as ‘white’, but, in a third racialized scenario, to the fact that he was a ‘negro’. In The Present State of Hayti (1828), Franklin, who viewed Haiti as ‘a lasting monument of what may be expected from injudicious emancipation’ (409), describes Vastey as a ‘warm advocate for the genius and talents of his countrymen’ (213). However, Franklin adopts the same scepticism about the merits of Vastey’s writing (or at least the only text of Vastey’s he appears to have read, the 1816 Réflexions) that he maintains with respect to positive representations of Haiti as regenerated or ‘improved’.6 Basing himself solely on Réflexions and its representations of revolutionary violence, Franklin says that Vastey is ‘no authority’ on the cruelties of planters in Saint-Domingue ‘before the rebellion’ (92, emphasis in original), since ‘we have nothing from him but allegations and assertions, without proof to support them’ (91). ‘It is true’, Franklin admits, that Vastey ‘puts forward some statements of cruelties inflicted on his negro brethren, but those were subsequent, even by his own account, to the revolt and to the emancipation’. Thus, Vastey is guilty of having ‘forgotten that the first acts of cruelty and indiscriminate murder, were committed by his very brethren’ (91–92). Franklin’s only explanation for what to him were such obvious exaggerations and misrepresentations is: ‘Vastey being a negro, it is natural that he should exhibit the worst side of the picture, without noticing its better one’ (91). Even if Franklin’s statement of racial determinism is meant primarily to underscore the exaggerated effects of racial partisanship, the fact that he believes his own status as a (white) European traveller makes him innately objective, authoritative, and therefore capable of explaining everything about Vastey, Haiti, and ultimately, race, ties his works to the kind of ‘narrative authority to represent the “Rest”’ found not only in European travel writing (Smethurst, 1), but in pseudo-scientific debates circulating in the Atlantic World. By couching authoritative statements about race in works that were largely about classifying plants and studying geographical differences, naturalist travel

writers bestowed upon themselves what the historian Pierre H. Boulle refers to as ‘the aura of unimpeachable scientific authority’ (224). Franklin uses this same self-prescribed authority to represent when he asserts that Vastey, in his Réflexions, had vastly overstated the case for the regeneration of Haiti in trumpeting the fact that ‘we write and we print. Even in our infancy our nation has already had writers and poets who have defended its cause and celebrated its glory’ (1816c, 85). Franklin claims, on the contrary, that the catalogue of Haitian writers and poets numbers only three writers, including Vastey, and merely one poet ( Juste Chanlatte), whom he characterizes as the composer of plays ‘teeming with fulsome compliments to the monarch’s virtue’ and ‘sonnets to the peerless beauty of the queen’. Franklin finishes his cynical assessment of Vastey’s claims for literary regeneration by stating that ‘unless the Baron de Vastey can adduce other proofs of Haytian capacities’, he must remain sceptical since ‘at present but little of that improvement manifests itself which has been the subject of so much praise and admiration’. ‘That the people of Hayti should improve’, he writes, ‘I confess I wish may be realized, but at this moment it is very distant from it’ (215). Franklin uses Vastey and his works to make a broader claim about Haitian, and by implication ‘negro’, incapacities for objectivity, historical writing, poetry, art, regeneration, and, in essence, civilization.7 By contrast, abolitionists, both in the 1820s and in ensuing decades, often celebrated Vastey as the very proof of black humanity and therefore ‘regeneration’, citing his work as ‘prov[ing] how capable a black writer is of emulating his white brethren even on the score of literature’.8 In fact, many abolitionist writers used Vastey’s works, as did Cushing, to muse upon the very idea that a black man writing was a shockingly remarkable phenomenon that nonetheless refuted claims of inherent African inferiority and affirmed the belief that blacks and especially Haitians were capable of ‘civilization’. For example, the English translation of Vastey’s 1816 Réflexions, Reflexions on the Blacks and Whites (1817), demonstrates the remarkable interest of abolitionists in the ways in which Vastey and his writings could be used as a functional part of both transatlantic antislavery thought and pseudo-scientific racial debates.9 Citing Ignatius Sancho and Phillis Wheatley as among the relatively few earlier instances of ‘African genius’ (9), the publisher of the translation says that Reflexions is important evidence of what ‘Africans’ or

‘Negroes’ might be capable of when ‘unrestrained by those shackles which have hitherto depressed the minds, no less than the limbs, of the unfortunate natives of Africa’ (10), and he concludes that Vastey’s Reflexions is ‘perhaps the first work by a Negro, in which the energies of the mind have been powerfully excited and have found a proper scope for action’ (10). This last claim would be explicitly cited in a number of publications on both sides of the Atlantic,10 and elaborated upon in many others. The Virginian abolitionist John Wright, for instance, made use of Vastey’s works as a part of his argument for immediate emancipation of slaves in the United States. In his 1820 Refutation of the sophisms, gross misrepresentations, and erroneous quotations contained in ‘An American’s’ ‘Letter to the Edinburgh reviewers’ Wright quotes several passages from ‘that able negro writer, the Baron de Vastey’ (33), and then comments with amazement: ‘These are the arguments used by a Haytian, a negro!’ Vastey’s writing, he concludes, might well convince naysayers that ‘there is at least one of the negro race whose abilities and eloquence as a writer are in no way inferior’ (35).11 Wright uses Vastey’s very own words to argue that Africans, and particularly Haitians, had reached a sufficient level of ‘civilization’ to disprove theories of inferiority. The way in which these kinds of arguments were framed— Vastey’s work are or aren’t proof of a whole host of ideas about race—reveals an anxiety about the legacy of the Haitian Revolution and its larger connection to pseudo-scientific debates about race circulating in the nineteenth-century Atlantic World. An additional mention of Vastey in 1844 right after the revolution that put an end to Jean-Pierre Boyer’s decades-long (1818–43) presidency, inserts Vastey once again directly into such racial debates, but also raises important questions about literary genre. Edward Binns, a medical doctor and abolitionist, was the author of Prodromus towards a Philosophical Inquiry into the Intellectual Powers of the Negro, a tract that was published in three instalments in Simmond’s Colonial Magazine and Foreign Miscellany and then later that year as a separate pamphlet.12 Although Binns participated more formally in scientific debates about race than many of the writers hitherto examined, it is not the ‘scientific’ dimension of his account of the ‘intellectual powers of the negro’ that primarily interests me here, but the way in which his uneasy comparison of Vastey to European writers showcases the inadequacy of

generic literary categories fully to capture or explain that which might appear to be different, notably in the following passage: As an historian, when compared with Europeans, he cannot be ranked in the first class; but as a chronicler of events and occurrences, he is inferior to few writers. His work is more of a memoir than a history, and, doubtless, the facts that he relates are well founded, however highly colored. Viewed simply as an African, his learning and talents are highly respectable; and if we except some few faults of diction, and some acerbity of temper, we cannot refuse him the meed of literary homage. (Binns, 39–40)

Binns’s views here demonstrate the specific cultural, historical, and scientific valence that Vastey’s works had in a nineteenth-century Atlantic World that put him on par with today’s better-known writers from the early African diaspora, Phillis Wheatley and Ignatius Sancho. Yet Binns’s unfavourable comparison of Vastey to ‘first class’ European historians also sounds curiously similar to Thomas Jefferson’s remarks about Sancho in Notes on the State of Virginia: ‘Upon the whole, though we admit him to the first place among those of his own colour who have presented themselves to the public judgment, yet when we compare him with the writers of the race among whom he lived… we are compelled to enrol him at the bottom of the column’ (141). Furthermore, Binns’s assessment of Vastey as a (mere) ‘chronicler’, and of his work as resembling ‘more of a memoir than a history’, recalls Jefferson’s famous phrase about Wheatley’s poetry: ‘Religion, indeed, has produced a Phillis Wheatley; but it could not produce a poet’ (140). As Bruce Dain has written of this passage: ‘Jefferson had to dismiss a Wheatley’ since ‘one instance of substantial black reason or imagination would upset his whole scheme’ (34), which was ultimately designed to deny to blacks a ‘fundamental humanity’ (35).13 With respect to Vastey, it is not only Binns’s own inherent biases that are exposed (Vastey’s facts are ‘well-founded’, but ‘highly colored’ from Binns’s point of view, and while his ‘talents are highly respectable’, Vastey’s commitment is interpreted as ‘acerbity of temper’), but the uneven grounds on which the very comparison was posed. The comparison between black or African writing and white or European writing relies upon a vocabulary (something Europeans call ‘history’ is inherently better than something else they call a ‘chronicle’) that is always already overdetermined by fantasies of true ‘history’ as unencumbered by political commitments and disengaged from

its author’s own life. Furthermore, the idea that a ‘chronicle’ or ‘memoir’, if those terms are even adequate to describe Vastey’s work (and even Binns is not sure that they are), does not reach the lofty level of ‘history’ is a completely subjective value judgement that relies upon arbitrary definitions of historical story-telling as linear, rational, and objective, rather than diversionary, expressive, and embattled. The seemingly categorical yet equivocal, ambivalent yet unrelenting, pronouncements about race and genre made by Binns, and by many of the other nineteenth-century writers who referenced Vastey, most likely cover up what Ann Laura Stoler has called in the context of colonial discourse ‘epistemic anxieties’ that register the ‘uncommon sense of events and things’ (19). The instability of Vastey’s racial and textual identity contained the power to upset the ‘common-sense’ order that eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury pseudo-scientific debates about race sought to instil. If, as Michael Omi and Howard Winant write, race as ‘common sense’ is ‘a way of comprehending, explaining and acting in the world’ (60), then the inability properly to ‘race’ Vastey surfaces in confusions over how to understand, classify, and, in essence, use him and his works. This nineteenth-century confusion over how to comprehend Vastey’s political writings, and the questions about genre that such confusion invites, is intimately connected to the way that his works have been read in both literary criticism and recent historiography of the Haitian Revolution in the twentieth century. The nineteenth-century problem of how to read Vastey in terms of race and genre is distinctly linked to our contemporary difficulty over how to read Vastey politically. Such a quandary in contemporary Haitian historiography most often takes the form of identifying Vastey as, in the words of historian David Nicholls, the ‘official ideologist and apologist of the kingdom’ (1979, 43). When conceived of as a ‘royalist’ or an ‘ideologist’ (and thus on the side of state power) rather than a ‘black Jacobin’ or a freefloating intellectual (and thus on the side of the masses), Vastey’s existence has been troubling for those who would want to draw the same kinds of strong lines in accounting for his intellectual identity that proponents of pseudo-scientific debates about race hoped to draw in accounting for his racial identity. At first, in his 1979 From Dessalines to Duvalier, Nicholls appears baffled by Vastey’s position as an intellectual revolutionary of mixed race who celebrated a black king’s ascendance to the throne, and he

represents Vastey as an embodiment of the broader racial and political paradoxes of a post-independence Haiti that was itself a monstrous hybrid to observers at the time precisely because it was part republic and part monarchy. In a later 1991 article, however, Nicholls substantially refined his earlier portrait of Vastey, but the quandary remained, as can be seen from his famous question: ‘Into which category does Vastey fall: true radical— pointing to a firm foundation for a new national identity—or opportunistic spokesman of a new, self-serving elite?’ Nicholls avoids entirely answering his own question when he responds, ‘as might be expected (in the case of a Haitian intellectual) the answer is complex’ (1991, 108). Although not providing a definitive answer to a question that surely does not have one may appear to leave room for the kind of epistemological uncertainty that would allow for us to consider Vastey in light of multiple frames of political, authorial, and racial identity, Nicholls’s parenthetical aside— that the answer should be ‘complex’ only, or perhaps specifically, in the case of Haiti —belies a belief in what Michel-Rolph Trouillot has referred to as ‘Haitian exceptionalism’, or the idea that Haiti is so strange that it is beyond comparison to other nations (1990b, 8). In other words, Nicholls’s appeal to complexity is made for the sake of painting Haiti and Haitians (especially, Vastey) as exceptional rather than as complex in the mundane and obvious sort of way characteristic of every other nation and its citizens. In the end, the question that Nicholls seems to be asking is to whose side of the struggle against oppression did Vastey really belong: the side of the masses, on whose behalf he argues in Colonial System; or the side of the monarchical state power, on whose behalf many scholars believe that virtually all of his writings are composed? The populism of Vastey’s Colonial System appears, in fact, to have been overshadowed, in his day and in our own, by the spirited and paternalistic defence of monarchy maintained in many of his writings, including Colonial System, which begins with a dedicatory epistle to the King. Chris Bongie writes that Vastey has probably been overlooked because in his works there is a ‘complicity with political power’ that is ‘discomfiting’ (2008, 235), since ‘we in the humanities have been trained to recognize and valorize… “authentic” cultural producers whose philosophic or aesthetic ordering of the world might be imagined as taking place not at the side, but to the side, of men of state such as Christophe and Pétion’ (32–33). Given that Vastey

was both at the side of state power and to the side of larger state powers, I wonder if refraining from, in the words of Aiwha Ong, ‘limiting publicsphere activities to “rational” critiques of the state or those critiques that are “free” of the state’s penetrations’, might allow us ‘to consider the various regimes of cultural normativity that have different relations to state power’ (159). It is not so much the acknowledgement of the very real ties between Vastey’s work and the government of Christophe that should make us suspicious that ‘Haitian exceptionalism’ might be preventing us from reading the populist dimensions of Vastey’s works. Instead, what ultimately makes historically anachronistic the idea that Vastey’s connection to Christophe means that he was not a true intellectual or even one of the founders of the Haitian historiographical tradition, is that it is hard to imagine using the term state-sanctioned publicity to describe the complex relationship between state power and revolutionary thought found in the writings of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Condorcet, or Mirabeau. The ‘tension’ apparent in Vastey’s works between what Michael Hanchard refers to as ‘state memory’ and ‘black memory’ (or, more generally, ‘collective memory’ (62)), which begins in part as an opposition between ‘statist’ and ‘nonstatist’ forms of history (49), is not something we should ignore, disavow, or condemn; rather, it requires a study of its own. While ‘state memory’ is often codified by scholars as a kind of violence because it usually emphasizes ‘the role of forgetting’ for the sake of ‘national unity’ (46), ‘black memory’ or ‘collective memory’ has been praised for helping to ‘keep alive the histories and peoples repressed or denied by the state’ (46). Yet, as Hanchard points out, ‘state memory’ and ‘black memory’, though they are not coterminous, are often not easily distinguishable either. He writes, ‘While it has become chic in some circles to write and speak of diaspora populations—Africa, African descended, or otherwise—as communities defined by their traversal of boundaries, their seemingly borderless character, these same populations are nevertheless informed in some very critical and fundamental ways by the forces and consequences of nationalism’ (62). While Hanchard does not go so far as to suggest that ‘state memory’ and ‘black memory’ could ever exist without opposition to one another—indeed, he emphasizes, ‘black memories and national memories do overlap, but they are not one and the same’ (62)—the case of Baron de Vastey provides a fascinating example of a situation where these two forms

of memory not only ‘overlap’, but simultaneously collide, coexist, and collaborate. Thus, although I myself am indebted to earlier scholars for their studies on both Vastey and the Haitian Revolution, they too often appear to view a coherently defined radical intellectual sphere as clearly disengaged from, or even undermining, a clearly defined conservative political sphere. If ‘hybrid’ authors like Vastey and their hybrid texts are hard to read apart from the state power that both seemingly authorizes their existence and against which their texts appear to protest, this is at least partially related to the way that contemporary scholars, like their nineteenth-century corollaries, have been confused about how to read Vastey’s race, colonial status, and devotion to Christophe. It is also at least partially the result of the fact that the ‘norms and values’ of European literature have been ‘equated with universal forms of thought’ (Parry, 18) to such an extent that it is difficult to recognize the overtly political and ideological nature of early Haitian publications as anything other than state-sanctioned propaganda. If we were to adopt with respect to Vastey the more complicated (but not necessarily less unencumbered) view of black memory, as both statist and non-statist, that I propose in the following section, how might it transform our understandings of his contributions to black Atlantic history? Vastey’s works have often been judged according to aesthetic, critical, and racial values which deny that the writing of history, not to mention the creation of art, could ever have an official relationship to state power without being pernicious. In order to understand the importance of these works, however, perhaps we need to consider alternative vocabularies that do not rely upon already established, sanctified, and fully approved genres of the western literary canon. As a first gesture, I would offer, then, that the language used by John Beverley to describe testimonio as a form of protest against the violence of modernity, ‘a revulsion for fiction and for the fictive as such’ (99), can be useful to us in understanding early Haitian prose works and their seeming refusal to adopt or conform to established literary forms. Rather than simply being coeval with the sentimental and gothic literary traditions of the Atlantic World in which he lived, Vastey’s brutal account of slave punishments and tortures in Colonial System emerges as a hybrid text that is both a state-sanctioned version of Haitian colonial history and a

methodologically novel use of collective black slave memory to create a ‘history from below’. Thus, it is important to consider Vastey’s Colonial System on its own terms rather than subordinating it to a literary genealogy that foregrounds sentimental and gothic discourses. Limiting Vastey to such traditions would mark him as merely a ‘cosmopolitan’, restricting what Srinivas Aravamudan would call his tropicopolitanism to the confines of some larger ‘metanarrative’ (Aravamudan, 10), not of nationalism as in Aravamudan’s formulation, but of a kind of transatlanticism that paradoxically erases difference for the sake of inclusion and thereby instead promotes sameness. In the final analysis, Vastey’s desire to publish a Haitian-produced account of collective atrocities in colonial SaintDomingue stems not from a desire to scare, please, or evoke pity from his readers but instead from his wish to provide an indictment of the French colonists that, like a testimony given in a courtroom, could actually have significant legal ramifications. Though the opening of Colonial System reads like a historical essay (we learn about the discovery of the island by the Spanish, the subsequent extermination of the Amerindian populations, and the institution of colonial slavery by the French), the subsequent text is a testimony or catalogue of abuses whose aim is simultaneously to expose colonialism as a system of barbarity and cruelty and to register the ‘secret’ histories of former colonists for public opprobrium and ostensible punishment. The epigraph of Colonial System reads: ‘Here it is, revealed, this secret full of horror. The Colonial System: White Domination, Blacks Massacred or Enslaved’. Vastey writes that he conducted numerous interviews of ex-slaves and suggests that it is their ‘borrowed voices’ which provide the source for his revelation of ‘this secret full of horror’. ‘For centuries’, he tells us, ‘the voice of my unfortunate compatriots could not make itself heard beyond these shores’ (39), but now, with the help of his ‘Haytian pen’, the truth about the many ‘crimes’ of colonialism will finally be told and ‘the brutal colonist will shake and tremble upon seeing his foul deeds brought to light’ (39). Vastey’s notion of borrowing voices from former slaves and the dead, and of using them as témoins (40), makes Colonial System an important precursor to the Latin American testimonio, a hard-to-describe genre that was nonetheless famously defined by George Yúdice in 1991 as an ‘authentic narrative, told by a witness who is moved to narrate by the urgency of a situation’ (17). For

John Beverley, one of the best-known analysts of the genre, the emergence of testimonio as a tool against colonial oppression in Latin America in the 1960s served to put into question the ‘existing institution of literature as an ideological apparatus of alienation and domination at the same time that it constitutes itself as a new form of literature’ (40).14 In other words, testimonio, as stories of the oppressed by the oppressed, emerged exactly because, historically, most novels, epic poems, and romances had been written by people who were at the very least unwittingly complicit in a world-system that made possible the traumatic and marvellous events described in testimonio. As a kind of proto-testimonio, Colonial System stands in opposition to the more commercial, alienating, and complicit literary genres of Vastey’s own era, namely the sentimental abolitionist narratives and gothic romances that became popular at the turn of the nineteenth century and that were designed to ‘satisfy readers’ demands for sensationalistic descriptions of unimaginable acts of violence’ (Clavin, 2007, 25), at once titillating, scaring, delighting, and horrifying them (and ultimately profiting the authors). Unlike, for example, Leonora Sansay’s simultaneously gothic and sentimental Secret History; or the Horrors of Santo Domingo (1808), which uses as a narrative strategy the incongruity of the ‘life of pleasure’ pursued by the white Creoles of Saint-Domingue and the horrific violence of the raging insurrection (Sansay, 80), Vastey’s text proposes to disclose the ‘secret history’ of slavery and colonialism without recourse to sentimental romance or gothic voyeurism. Colonial System, in fact, evades the voyeuristic use of slavery as a tragic but entertaining fiction that ‘invites us to enjoy, not to think’ (Wood, 2000, 238), and it does so exactly because the events recounted by Vastey are not tied together by any unified or sequential sense of time, location, or biography. Often the reader of Colonial System simply gets a brief recitation of an atrocious event committed by a particular colonist followed by a list of other colonists who committed similar crimes. In other words, Vastey avoids using the literary devices of personification, drama, climax, and intrigue to create suffering characters like the tragic mulatto/a or even the kinds of slave narratives to be found in the African American literary tradition that detail the individual lives of escaped or rebellious slaves, for whom readers might feel affinity and, in the end, sympathy. In Gothic America, Theresa Goddu says that Harriet Jacobs’s

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) represents a diversion from the sentimental abolitionist texts of her day since it ‘specifically indicts northern readers [in the United States] for their voyeuristic pleasure in and appropriation of the slave’s suffering’ (151). Yet even Incidents ends on an incongruously hopeful and triumphant note that invites the reader to rejoice when Brent exclaims, ‘Reader, my story ends with freedom… I and my children are now free! We are as free from the power of slaveholders as are the white people of the north; and though that, according to my ideas, is not saying a great deal, it is a vast improvement in my condition’ (259). Vastey’s text resists caving in to the reader’s need for even a quasi-heroic ending by simply cataloguing slave death after slave death and torturous event after torturous event, all the while making sure to name at every turn the specific colonists who are guilty of these crimes. In the Introduction to Colonial System Vastey states that his goal in recording or chronicling in this fashion, as opposed to fictionalizing, the violent history reported in his book is not ‘aspiring to the glory that comes from being a man of letters’, but conveying information and being useful (viii). He explains his ardent commitment to the slaves therefore as a rejection of the genre of fiction itself: ‘This is not a novel I am writing. It is an exposé of the ordeals, the protracted suffering, and unparalleled acts of torture’ endured by his people (39). Vastey even suggests that fiction might never be able to provide an adequate medium to describe the violence of colonial slavery: ‘The flowers of rhetoric and embellishments of style are suitable for describing scenes that do not put a man to shame, but when it comes to such a lugubrious topic, when it comes to descending into a cesspool of crimes, they are useless. I will limit myself to reporting [Je ne ferai que raconter]’ (40). In his explanation of how testimonio works, Beverley suggests that ‘there are experiences in the world today that would be betrayed or misrepresented’ by certain forms of literature since ‘there has been a complicity between the rise of “literature” as a secular institution and the development of forms of colonialist and imperialist oppression’ (29). His reasoning may help us understand Vastey’s desire to compose a testimony of colonialism and slavery that rejects fiction, and ultimately the pleasures of narrative in general, as a technique for telling the story of trauma. Like the collaborative authors of testimonios, which Beverley characterizes as an ‘extraliterary or even an antiliterary form of discourse’ (42), in the

immediate aftermath of independence many early Haitian authors like Vastey and Louis Félix Boisrond-Tonnerre repudiated travel writing, the novel, and poetry precisely due to what they saw as their potential to disguise the atrocities of colonialism with ornate words. Vastey notices the colonial tendency to obfuscate with language when he writes that French colonists and travel writers had entered into ‘the greatest detail regarding crops, climate, the rural economy, but they have been careful not to rend the veil from the crimes of their accomplices. Precious few’, he adds, ‘have had the courage to speak the truth, and even when speaking it they have sought to disguise it, to diminish the enormity of those crimes through their manner of expression [atténuer par leurs expressions, l’énormité de ces crimes]’ (38– 39). If fiction and its ‘manner of expression’ is merely another way to attenuate the ‘cesspool’ (cloaque) of colonialism, then—like the eponymous heroine of Émeric Bergeaud’s 1859 historical romance of the Haitian Revolution, Stella, who asks the two duelling brothers, Romulus and Rémus, ‘What could pity do for you? … You evidently attach too much esteem to a sterile sentiment’ (43)—Vastey’s testimony must reject the rhetoric of sentimental abolitionism and what Marcus Wood calls ‘the promiscuous emotional dynamics of sentimental empathy’ (2002, 13). By reporting events rather than fictionalizing them, Vastey evades the pitfalls of what Amy Dru Stanley has called, in the context of Victorian America, the ‘cult of feeling’ (Stanley, 22). The ‘cult of feeling’ in abolitionist discourse was problematic precisely because, as Lynn Festa has written, ‘the sentimental text enables the reader to pay the tribute of a tear and thus to dismiss his culpable participation in the broader system’ (199). An example of Vastey’s rejection of such a strategic and hollow use of the ‘sentimental text’ and its ‘cult of feeling’ can be found in Colonial System. Vastey writes, ‘Europeans who are not acquainted with this horrific system, who cannot even imagine it, you men of feeling, do not weep too soon over this tableau… Hold back your sighs and tears: you have seen and heard nothing yet!’ (35) Although Vastey permits himself to ‘shed tears of pity and compassion’ (3) as he describes the extermination of the indigenous population of Hispaniola in a kind of vanishing Indian narrative, abolitionist sympathy and sentimental tears ultimately prove of no real use for understanding the horrors of slavery and colonialism. Throughout his text,

therefore, Vastey does not ask his readers to ‘weep’ or to perform acts of sympathy for the slaves by sighing and shedding tears. On the contrary, drawing on the description of the miserable state of the African slave trade described in Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes (3rd ed., 1780), Vastey directly inserts into Colonial System Raynal’s own opposition to sentimental tears: ‘We have not tears sufficient to grieve such horrors, and these tears of ours are unavailing!’ (qtd. 24) Vastey later explains the purpose of his rejection of sentimentality when, specifically addressing the ex-colonists, he writes: ‘In tracing the outline of these horrors, I do not hope to soften your hearts, for, as we know only too well, those hearts are more hardened than bronze and steel. We know that your depraved souls are inaccessible to remorse and pity… we know that you will never change’ (35). What Vastey does want visà-vis the ex-colonists is for their crimes to enter into the public sphere in a highly visible way that recalls the courtroom as spectacle. One of the many goals of Colonial System is to put on public trial the cruelty of the French colonists and in the end the entire colonial system. The very act of referring to the planters’ actions as ‘crimes’ reveals Vastey’s own attitude toward the events he recounts: these are true crimes that deserved to be punished by the law. Vastey laments, in fact, that ‘not a single one of the[se] monsters… has suffered the penalty that his foul deeds merit; not a single one has experienced even the slightest punishment for his crimes’ (62). Since the French government will never properly punish the former slaveholders, the only hope he has, writes Vastey, is to commit the names of the guilty colonists to paper ‘so that they might be held in abhorrence by your contemporaries and by generations to come’ (35); to solicit, in short, the negative judgement of public opinion. Vastey publicly admonishes the former slaveholder Venault de Charmilly, for example, when he exposes the planter’s practice of burning his slaves alive as well as his torture of a particular slave named Jean-Phillippe: ‘Vilifier of the blacks, doubtless you believed that your crimes, like those of all the other colonists, your accomplices, would have been buried in oblivion [auraient été ensevelis dans le néant]’ (56). Vastey’s wish to shame the former French colonists of Saint-Domingue extended, as we have seen, even to his own grandfather—a ‘property owner’ currently living in France in Marcilly-sur-Seine according to Vastey—whom he calls ‘barbarous’ for condemning to death a weakly newborn child presumably so that the baby’s mother could return to work

more quickly (70–71). It is precisely the relentless cataloguing and naming of the perpetrators of such monstrous offences, an attempt to keep them from being ‘buried in oblivion’, that lends a truthful rather than a gothic effect to Vastey’s narrative. In fact, Beverley contends that testimonio is different from other forms of oral history because of both its legal quality and what he calls the ‘truth effect’ (33) generated by the speaker. The ‘truth effect’ of Vastey’s narrative was generated to such an extent that Colonial System actually furnished information that abolitionists used against the former French colonists. For example, the author of an article entitled ‘The Namesakes’, from the Baltimore Patriot (19 May 1815; 2) provided a translated version of a long passage from ‘the colonial system unveiled, by the baron de Vastey’, which describes the horrific crimes of the settler de Cockburne: ‘Among all the inhabitants of St. Domingo, few were more notorious for cruelty than was M. de Cockburne… He was in the habit of burying his slaves upright, leaving their heads out, at which he amused himself with rolling cannon balls!’ This article was given national distribution when it was subsequently republished in the Baltimore-based Niles Weekly Register, providing immediate circulation of the ‘truth effect’ within a year of Colonial System’s original date of publication.15 The ‘truth effect’ that Vastey hoped to produce was not merely transitory, but was continuing to operate nearly fifty years after publication of Colonial System. On 12 December 1859, the abolitionist Charles K. Whipple, in a letter to the Boston Atlas and Daily Bee entitled ‘Falsehood in Support of Slavery’ (which was eventually reprinted in his colleague William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator, 20 January 1860 (10)), remarked that former Massachusetts governor and senator Edward Everett’s claim in a speech delivered a few days before at Faneuil Hall that the slaves of SaintDomingue had been ‘heureux comme un nègre de Gallifet’ had to be ignorant or disingenuous since ‘I have before me a pamphlet of 96 pages… written by Baron de Vastey, entitled—“Le Système Colonial Devoilé [sic]” (The Colonial System Unveiled)’. Vastey, Whipple writes, ‘understands the importance of giving details, and he specifies the names and the individual acts of some of those planters and agents who were most distinguished, at the time of the insurrection, for hideous and atrocious cruelty to their slaves’, including those of Gallifet, whose ‘kindness and liberality’ had been

influentially celebrated by Bryan Edwards over sixty years before in his widely referenced Historical Survey of the French Colony of St Domingo (1797, 69). Whipple uses Vastey’s testimony to prove that the ‘proverbial’ statement ‘heureux comme un nègre de Gallifet’ was ironic at best, and a total falsehood at worst, contrary to what Everett, via Edwards, would have his audience believe. He quotes Vastey’s portraits of Gallifet (who ‘“was accustomed to cut the ham-strings of his slaves”’), as well as his description of the Gallifet plantation’s dungeons (‘“where the victims perished lying in water, by a cold and dampness which suppressed the circulation of the blood”’) in order to clarify the true ‘meaning of the fearfully sarcastic proverbial expression—“as happy as a slave of Gallifet!”’ The Gallifet family, like the de Cockburnes, was thus indicted on a grand scale since not only did Colonial System circulate broadly in the Atlantic World, but Whipple’s letter was reproduced or referenced in several nineteenth-century publications in addition to The Liberator, such as James Redpath’s 1860 Echoes of Harper’s Ferry (254–56; see also Harper’s Weekly, 28 September 1861 (610)). By publicly exposing the names and cruelties of individual planters, Vastey succeeds in forcing what we might call a memory ‘from below’ into a global public sphere that was dominated by those who were the very generators of memories from above.16 In Colonial System Vastey claims to have even consulted the memories of dead slaves whose testimony quite literally came ‘from below’. He writes: Colonists, those of you who still draw breath, listen to me! I shall awaken the remains [les cendres] of the numerous victims you thrust into the grave, and borrow their voices so that I might unveil your foul deeds. I shall exhume those poor wretches you buried alive. I shall consult the shades of the dead, those unfortunate compatriots of mine you threw alive into a fiery furnace [Je vais interroger les mânes de mes infortunés compatriotes que vous avez jeté en vie dans des fours ardens]; those you ordered be put on a spit, roasted, impaled, or subjected to a thousand other forms of torture invented by the powers of hell! (35)

Vastey’s interest in the dead as témoins demonstrates, and indeed shows us how we can surpass, what Marcus Wood has called ‘the testimonial limits of slavery’ (2002, 8). In its very hybrid form Colonial System poses a broad challenge to the idea that, in Wood’s words, ‘the experience of the slaves is, in a very real sense, lost to the conventional resources of historical reconstruction’ (9). Wood writes, ‘when black authors decide to go back into the history of slavery, they still usually find themselves dependent on white

sources, white propagandas, white journalisms, white theory as a starting point’ (9).17 However, Vastey’s Colonial System lies both inside and outside of ‘the conventional resources of historical reconstruction’, since he draws on the works of authors as various as Moreau de Saint-Méry, Baron de Wimpffen, Raynal, and Grégoire, but the vast majority of the colonial crimes he recounts have come to him directly through the disquieting testimony of deceased and former slaves as well as their living ancestors whose veracity and integrity should not be doubted for a moment. He writes: ‘The facts I am going to recount bear the stamp of truth… I collected them from the survivors of families whose kinsfolk experienced the acts of torture I am going to try and sketch here, as well as from those unlucky enough to have lived through them. These witnesses are unimpeachable [Ces témoins sont irrécusables]’ (40). In Vastey’s works, therefore, collective slave testimonies are part of a larger alternative epistemology that places less emphasis on individual biography or narration as in the African American slave narrative, and more on how collective memory from below might provide a deeper explanation of the history of slavery and colonialism.18 Vastey’s text sets up an alternative way of knowing about the history of slavery that does not rely solely upon the kinds of documentation nor the kinds of personal experience valued in the genre of the immensely popular and marketable slave narrative. By interrogating ashes and tombs, Vastey instead interprets the past through examining the lives of what Benedict Anderson has called ‘anonymous dead people’. Speaking of the French historian Jules Michelet’s claim ‘to speak on behalf of large numbers of anonymous dead people’ and of his insistence, ‘with poignant authority, that he could say what they “really” meant and “really” wanted, since they themselves “did not understand”’, Anderson says that they were ‘probably unprecedented’ in 1842; and he further writes that from this point onwards the ‘silence of the dead was no obstacle to the exhumation of their deepest desires’ (202). ‘In this vein’, Anderson continues, ‘more and more “secondgeneration” nationalists, in the Americas and elsewhere, learned to speak “for” dead people… This reversed ventriloquism helped to open the way for a selfconscious indigenismo, especially in the southern Americas’ (203). However, Vastey had already adopted such a hermeneutic by 1814, making

Michelet less the progenitor of indigenous history than one of its beneficiaries. Indeed, in Cri de la conscience Vastey warns his readers that the dead do not always stay that way since their interminable memories live on through the people who are the very embodiments of history. He writes, ‘generations may die, but the people live on, and history encourages the memory of men’s actions’ (1815b, 91; ‘les générations meurent, mais les peuples vivent, et l’histoire perpétue la mémoire des actions des hommes’). While Michelet’s intervention in the field was ‘unprecedented’ from a European standpoint, Vastey had earlier dismantled ‘enlightenment’ historiography that focused upon logic and reason to explain the past, focusing instead upon collective memory from below as well as the body and its physical pain. Because of that need in legal testimony to provide verifiable evidence, Vastey supplements the voices of the dead with the bodies of the living. He writes that, ‘as evidence in support of their acts of witnessing [à l’appui de leurs témoignages]’, the victims of these tortures showed him ‘limbs mutilated by iron or roasted by fire. I have obtained these facts’, he adds, ‘from a great many notable and credible people’ (40). Disembodied evidence in the form of ashes and voices is here doubled by the living body, which becomes the very repository of empirical evidence. The maimed and scorched limbs of former slaves presented by Vastey, as Diana Fuss has written of the corpse poem, ‘remind us that even the most abject body has a story to tell’ (21). In a sense these tortured bodies say more than Vastey or their owners ever could. The living body succeeds where language fails since, as Elaine Scarry has written, physical pain cannot be objectified: ‘physical pain—unlike any other state of consciousness—has no referential content. It is not of or for anything. It is precisely because it takes no object that it, more than any other phenomenon, resists objectification in language’ (5). By simply testifying to the existence of these bodies which were still experiencing the lingering physical effects of slavery, rather than trying to represent the pain of the bodies themselves, Vastey recognizes that he will never be able fully to disclose the ‘secret history’ of slavery. In other words, while we might be able adequately to describe the way that bodies look while in pain, we could never fully represent the way that the pain itself feels, which ultimately suggests that slavery might be susceptible to representation as well, but not the way that the pain of it feels.

While for Vastey there is no available vocabulary that could adequately represent the physical pains of slavery, verbally expressing the myriad kinds of torture perpetrated by the colonists presents different communicative obstacles. When recounting a tale involving a certain dame Langlois, who coolly remarks—upon hearing from her overseer that he had to chop off a female slave’s arm to prevent her entire body from passing through the sugar mill—that it ‘wouldn’t have been such a disaster when all’s said and done, if it weren’t that her body might have spoiled my cane-juice’ (61), Vastey says that this episode pushes the limits of his task as a compiler or recorder. He writes, ‘No, it is impossible for me to keep on describing such atrocities. What courage and what strength of spirit it would require to write down the innumerable misdeeds of the colonists during the colonial regime. It would take me entire volumes’ (61–62). Vastey, however, does continue to relate these events, but periodically stops himself to let us know that if his language is failing him it is because the tortures that he is describing are inexpressible (66; ‘au dessus de toute expression’). Vastey had earlier lamented his very incapacity, and more importantly, his unwillingness, to describe slavery in writing: ‘What manner of pen would be required to describe crimes hitherto unknown to humankind? When depicting all these many horrors, what form of expression can I possibly employ? I know of none’ (40). Part of Colonial System’s circumvention of the gothic tradition of ‘indescribability’ (Clavin, 2007, 18) is its author’s resolve no longer even to look for turns of phrase that could describe the crimes of slavery. This is not only because for Vastey continuously describing ‘des crimes jusqu’alors inconnus aux humains’ holds the distinct possibility of lessening rather than increasing their horror by sheer desensitization, but because his vocabulary does not even contain ‘expressions’ or idioms appropriate for capturing the horror of these crimes. Many scholars and artists, in the wake of Adorno, have written about the challenges of communicating traumatic events like the holocaust and lynching in verbal terms. Geoffrey Hartman has written that what complicates the relationship between literature and trauma is ‘our wish to achieve a perfect verbal marker by way of language, a successful verbal fixative of the real’: an ‘orphic quest or communication-compulsion [that]… is always disappointed, always revived’ (541). This disappointed ‘quest’ for markers of the ‘real’ emerges most clearly in Colonial System when Vastey

avoids using the French noun for rape, viol. The most immediate literal cognate of viol in English, violation (also related to violence), underscores the frustrating inappropriateness of any single term to capture the fundamental horrors of rape, which is not merely violence and violation, but also powerlessness and objectification. Although Vastey does use the verb violer to describe the colonist’s violation of ‘all of nature’s laws’ (69; ‘ce maître orgueilleux, violait sans pitié, sans remords, toutes les lois de la nature’), he is not solely talking about sexual assault here, which once again underscores the inadequateness of the French verb violer to signify rape, since as a verb the word rather innocuously (when compared to ‘rape’) could refer to violating a law or a simple rule or anything else for that matter. Vastey’s frustrated search for a more specific language for rape that could avoid playing down its seriousness and/or turning the act into pornography is all too apparent when, alluding to incest, he vaguely tells us that the colonists were guilty of ‘the most crapulous forms of debauchery’ and ‘even disrespected the rights of nature in relation to their natural daughters’ (89); while in another passage he writes, ‘Haytian women were at the mercy of these lewd men, who abused them in the most horrific manner imaginable. I shudder when I think of the number of hapless victims sacrificed to these jealous rages: on a mere suspicion, they would be whipped or flayed alive’ (68–69). The horror is communicated to the reader by the physiological reaction of Vastey’s own body rather than any forcefulness of language. The trauma is so terrible that it makes him ‘shudder’ even to think about it. This is yet another subversion of the gothic convention described by Matthew Clavin where the author hopes to produce a physical reaction in the reader to communicate the horror (2007, 17). Here, the physical reaction is Vastey’s own and in some ways it captures an embodied idea of the horror of rape that cannot be expressed by verbal language alone. Furthermore, Vastey’s unwillingness to specify any of the names of these rape victims or their perpetrators, as opposed to his usual practice in Colonial System, emphasizes the wholly inevitable and inadequate ‘orphic quest’ of testifying to the act of rape, a form of communication that often re-victimizes the victim by forcing him or her very publicly (and pornographically) to re-live the trauma over and over again. The idea that the many traumas of slavery could not ever (and perhaps should not ever) be fully communicated by spoken or written language was

perhaps best expressed in the nineteenth century by the black American abolitionist William Wells Brown, who in 1847, anticipating Gayatri Spivak, said in a lecture to the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem: ‘I may try to represent to you Slavery as it is… we may all represent it as we think it is; and yet we shall all fail to represent the real condition of the Slave… Slavery has never been represented; Slavery never can be represented… The Slave cannot speak for himself ’ (108). As Keith M. Botelho has written, ‘The quandary Brown faced was not how to represent slavery, but how to effectively represent slavery as it is. His turn to drama and performance protests minstrelsy, white benevolence, and perceived notions of racial superiority’ (194). Yet, even in his novel Clotel; or the President’s Daughter (1853), a hybrid text that makes use of oral history, newspaper stories, and elements of the slave narrative, Brown, like many black writers of his time, is forced to cater to the demands of a literary marketplace that valued sentimentality and near-white heroines. As Paul Gilmore has written, ‘In attempting to “speak for” the slaves still in bondage, the former slave entered into public debates over race and slavery. But to do so he had to cast off the markers of both his past enslavement and his racial difference and take up the language and figures articulated by the dominant culture’ (45–46). While Brown may have felt constrained by the ‘dominant culture’ in his fictional texts, the genre of the oration allowed him to rely upon a different epistemology, one that was perhaps less exploitative, to communicate the suffering of slaves. Brown tells his audience, ‘When I begin to talk of Slavery, the sighs and the groans of three millions of my countrymen come to me upon the wings of every wind; and it causes me to feel sad, even when I think I am making a successful effort in representing the condition of the Slave’ (110). Vastey, too, freed from the alienation and domination of the demands of the literary market place, speaks of slavery as a system that produces millions of testimonial ‘groans’ (gémissements). Vastey writes that in Saint-Domingue the ‘groans’ and ‘unavailing cries’ of the slaves ‘would melt into air, they would merge with the sound of the whip that echoed through our mountains’ (65). These sounds of slavery or testimonial groans, from which it is practically impossible to derive enjoyment, will be transmitted across the oceans by the Haitian printing press, which is, in Vastey’s estimation, the best revenge that post-independence Haitians can take against the colonists.

Vastey recognizes that the colonists have done their own groaning over the years when he writes that ‘the friends of slavery, those eternal enemies of humankind, have been free to write thousands of volumes; for centuries now, they have made the printing presses of Europe groan under the weight of their calumnies and their attempts at degrading the black man below the level of a brute beast’ (94). Vastey goes on to add, however, that whereas Haitian history had once been written by white colonists alone, ‘at present, we have Haytian presses of our own, and we can unveil the crimes of the colonists and respond to even the most absurd lies invented by the prejudice and avarice of our oppressors’ (95). By releasing the ‘stifled’ voices and guttural ‘groans’ of former slaves and confronting the colonists with the ‘unimpeachable’ testimony of their scarred bodies, Vastey contests the memory factory of colonialism, and in essence requires his readers to confront the everyday brutality and dehumanization attendant in the colonial system itself. Vastey’s relentless insistence on cataloguing the many abuses of slavery and naming the perpetrators of these individual crimes collectively and individually indicts the slaveholders while also refusing to give the reader the kind of satisfaction or even mourning that one might experience from a death described in a novel or a poem. Vastey does not let us feel as if the individual slaves whom dame Delorme nailed alive to a wooden board could have experienced any joy before their deaths (57), nor does he let us feel that death is a symbol for eternal rest and peace. Instead, Vastey’s compilation of corpse after corpse paints slavery as what Orlando Patterson has referred to as a ‘social death’ (8) or, alternatively, what Giorgio Agamben has called ‘bare life’.19 In his Réflexions politiques, Vastey writes that at the moment of the Haitian Revolution, the slaves had been ‘civilly dead’ (‘les haytiens étaient ce qu’on appelle mort civilement’): ‘they inhabited this earth as if they did not really inhabit it; they lived as if they were not really living’ (1817, 49–50). Such an explanation of slave life had already been expressed in Colonial System: Is it any wonder if we were prone to suicide and poisoning? If our women extinguished the tender feelings of motherhood in their hearts and, out of a cruel pity, put an end to the beloved and sorrowful fruit of their embraces? Indeed, how can life be endured when it has reached the lowest stage of degradation and wretchedness? When death must be suffered a thousand times over, in the cruellest of torments, when one has been reduced to that

deplorable condition, without hope of escape, is it not a glaring act of cowardice to welcome life? And why give birth to those poor creatures who would be condemned for their entire life to drag out a fragile existence in shame and ignominy, in torment, in one long succession of unending pain? To extinguish a life so hateful, was that really such a crime? It was an act of compassion, humanity!!! (71–72)

Death is life for the slave since the slave socially dies a thousand times before his physical death, a reversal of Shakespeare’s famous phrase in Julius Caesar that it is ‘cowards’ who ‘die many times before their deaths, the valiant never taste of death but once’ (II.ii.32–33). Standard notions of life and death and their intrinsic meaning cannot be used to describe the condition of the slave who lies outside of such definitions of heroism and valour. Vastey writes, ‘What liberal sentiments could germinate in hearts that were watered with endless contempt! Could a life passed in grievous misery and neverending torments give birth to the most gratifying moral affections, religion, humanity, virtue—those sentiments that are the source of happiness for civilized men?’ (71) Compassion for one’s fellow beings, when characterized as the total protection of human life, refers only to the world of the socially alive and cannot be retrofitted to describe the slave’s experiences since snuffing out the life of a newborn baby destined only for slavery is characterized by Vastey as ordinary compassion and humanity, rather than extraordinary barbarity and cruelty.20 A slave’s life, then, has such little meaning that the reader is denied the platitude that even the most abject human life has an ultimate purpose and is therefore worth living. Vastey’s images of slave torture, burnings, live burials, infanticide, rape, and suicide perform, in the end, what Fuss might call a ‘radical’ subversion of the ‘more serene romantic portraits of corpses slumbering in the grave’ that characterize the genre of the elegy (10). In Colonial System, slave corpses are ‘abject’ precisely because they lie ‘beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable’ (Kristeva, 1). Yet, because Haitians who serve the lwa or gods do not believe that the dead are ‘soulless’, the souls or spirits of these slaves who died unquiet deaths still remain to be accessed and probed. As Joan Dayan has written, ‘the landscape of Haiti is filled not only with the spirits of the dead seeking rest and recognition but with other corporeal spirits who recall the terrors of slavery and the monstrous, institutionalized magic of turning humans into pieces of prized and sexualized matter’ (1995, 264). Vastey’s evocation of the voices and bodies of slavery’s mutilated

victims marks their almost total abjection, but like an ancestral spirit who mounts his corporeal horse in the Haitian religious tradition of sèvi lwa (or serving the gods), Vastey’s testimony brings them to life once again.21 In Cri de la conscience, the dead suddenly appear not to mourn or to complain, but to celebrate the victories of the Haitian Revolution. Vastey writes: We have avenged the spirits of our brave companions who died gloriously for liberty and independence; the ghosts of our fathers, our mothers, our sisters, who were victims of the French, have arisen from the ashes of the pyres, from the depths of the seas, from the intestines of rapacious dogs, to applaud us and chant with us, vengeance! vengeance! (10)

Vastey’s celebration of both discursive and physical vengeance may seem a far cry from (and may paradoxically appear to confirm) the kinds of deeply personal and parricidal mulatto vengeance narratives attributed to monstrous hybrids by the likes of Drouin de Bercy in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution. Yet Vastey’s brand of vengeance was not motivated by the kinds of monstrous racial thinking attributed to people of mixed race in the work of Drouin de Bercy. In fact, at least one of Vastey’s early reviewers acknowledged the fact that the vengeance for which Vastey advocated had nothing to do with the supposedly innate barbarity of ‘Africans’ or the propensity for ‘mulattoes’ to want to kill their white fathers; instead, it had everything to do with the kind of justice and ‘imprescriptible right’ to resist oppression ostensibly advocated by the radical enlightenment thinkers who authored the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (Article 2). The following account of Colonial System published in The Antijacobin Review in 1818 acknowledges the complicated relationship of the Haitian Revolution to vengeance: of the cruelties practised by the French in St. Domingo, Europe had, in a great measure, till now, been totally ignorant. The mask has, however, been withdrawn, by the liberty which the Haytians have given themselves, and perhaps the most signal vengeance they can now take of their ancient oppressors, is to give an impartial history. In reading over the tract before us we have doubted whether we were in the society of men or of wild beasts; but a little reflection easily convinced us that the brutes of the field could not act as the monsters we have been placed in company with. (‘Système’, 243)

Unlike many of the writers examined in the preceding section of this essay who characterized Vastey and his writing as monstrous not only because he upset their notions about race and human identity but because he

advocated and defended the violence of the slaves against their masters, here, Vastey’s writing causes the author of this article not only to doubt that blacks are ‘wild beasts’, but to perform exactly the kind of subversion of categories that Colonial System urges when he asserts that it is the colonists who are ‘the monsters’. What Vastey has ultimately succeeded in accomplishing, then, is to have convinced many of those in the Atlantic World who read his writings that the Haitian brand of ‘vengeance’ during the revolution (and Vastey’s daring exposé of the monstrosity of the colonists afterwards) was wholly justified and even occasioned by the greater violence of colonialism. In his 1816 Réflexions, a text which in its refutation of the arguments of the former colonist Mazères represents Vastey’s most direct engagement with pseudo-scientific debates about race, Vastey’s sadness over the fact that he feels forced to use his words as weapons overtakes him. He writes, ‘if at this time I am experiencing intense regret, it is because I have been reduced to using my pen in order to redress these bloody outrages, and because I have not been able to find other arguments that would convince him [Mazères] even better than words that our kind [espèce] is not inferior to his’ (1816c, 5). ‘I have been tempted twenty times to throw away my pen’, Vastey later writes, ‘I feel humiliated, I am a man, I feel it to be so in all of my being, I possess all of the faculties, I have thought, reason, strength, I have every sense of my sublime existence, and yet I find myself obliged to refute puerile arguments, absurd sophisms, just to prove to men like me, that I am their equal [leur semblable]’ (15). The dejected pathos inherent in these statements, far from conveying that Vastey’s writing was motivated by the same wild transports of a thirst for white blood described in the trope of monstrous hybridity or in the narrative of mulatto vengeance, suggests instead that he, like the Haitian revolutionists, was motivated by aggressive, but wholly justified, self-defence. This sense of the morose coupled with the petulant defiance to be found in Vastey’s discursive defences of Haiti and the African race represents a crucial anticipation of the damaging psychological effects of what W. E. B. Du Bois would come to describe as double consciousness in the early twentieth century. For, the post-independence world in which Vastey lived, much like that of the post-Civil War United States, was one in which ‘the problem of the color-line’ (3) was so pervasive that everything people of African descent

in the public sphere did or did not do could be used as evidence in pseudoscientific debates about race. Such an idea is fully demonstrated by the British abolitionist William Wilberforce’s plea for Vastey’s life after news of the death of Christophe had reached Europe. Addressing himself to whoever had taken charge of the northern part of Haiti, Wilberforce urged ‘mercy’ for Vastey on the very grounds of those debates about race: ‘Often it has been confidently affirmed by those who would support the old prejudices… that one of the proofs of [African] inferiority was the violence and cruelty with which they have been disposed to act towards each other’ (392–93). ‘An occasion has lately arisen among you’, he continues, ‘for verifying or refuting the charge of which I have been speaking’ by ‘letting the principles of your proceedings be manifest to the world’ and allowing ‘even guilty men [to] enjoy the benefit of a fair and impartial trial’ (393). The effect of knowing that one was always being watched and judged by a derisive world—what Du Bois would call ‘two-ness’ or the ‘sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity’ (8)—was keenly perceived by many nineteenth-century Haitian writers who would make it their raison d’être to combat the lugubrious image of Haiti being produced in the western European and US literary and historical imaginations. The mid-nineteenth-century Haitian historian, Beaubrun Ardouin, best summed up the national importance of such a discursive struggle, perhaps, when he wrote: ‘The future of a people often depends upon the manner in which their past is presented to them. If they bear a false judgement about their own history [les faits de leurs annales], about the principles that have guided their predecessors, their politicians, they will be influenced by this error in spite of themselves, and they will run the risk of deviating from the path they must follow in order to arrive at their prosperity’ (4.132). The eventual murder of Vastey without the kind of global transparency for which Wilberforce argued, therefore, is not most unfortunate because it may have appeared to confirm ideas of Haitian, and by degrees African, ‘inferiority’ but, rather, because in Vastey’s death was lost a countryman who understood and was perhaps better able to argue than any other writer of his era precisely how colonial racism had developed into a form of Haitian exceptionalism whose proponents strategically placed Haiti on the margins of both history and humanity, and whose

pronouncements had the capacity, or so many Haitian writers believed, to distort forever their country’s image in the minds of Haitians themselves. In the end, any reading of a text is an effort to centre it, in terms of theory, aesthetics, history, biography, or genre, which naturally requires focusing on some elements while leaving others out. The multiply centred reading that I offer here, like the multiple sites of Vastey’s epistemology, is by no means free of these constraints. In fact, I realize that I have offered my own portrait of the artist, if you will, a portrait that praises Vastey for being populist and resistant, but that has very little to say about the proliferation of descriptions made by nineteenth-century observers of Vastey’s role in the brutality of the Christophean regime. Yet, by focusing attention for a moment away from the dominant idea of Vastey as a propagandist for a brutal regime or a mere ideologue (and thus potentially the discursive, and physical, arm of violence against the Haitian people themselves), what I hope I have done is to open up a conversation about the other sorts of Vastey that we might be able to discover through his writings. In other words, the sort of Vastey for which I here advocate is the one whom we read rather than dismiss, and whom we contemplate rather than condemn. Allowing for Vastey’s complexity and instability might indeed allow us to move beyond the interpretive limits of genre itself and the ever-present obstacles that attempting to know with any kind of certainty presents for the historian, literary or otherwise. Vastey’s life and his works defy, circumvent, and evade the very racial and political categories that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pseudo-scientific debates about race (and the genre-defining vocabulary they inspired) sought to clarify and indeed create.

Notes 1 In his invaluable Index to the North American Review, William Cushing lists Caleb Cushing as the author of this anonymous article (124). For further confirmation of Cushing’s authorship and contextual discussion of the article, see Belohlavek (10). 2 Vastey is quoting from a review of De Saint-Domingue published on 10 October 1814 in Jean-Gabriel Peltier’s London-based journal L’ambigu (415.64); for the original passage, see Drouin de Bercy (1814, 124–25). Peltier was employed at the time as Christophe’s agent in Britain: Chateaubriand described Peltier in his Mémoires as the ‘ambassador for the negro King Christophe… at the court of George III’ (qtd. Burrows, 33). In an earlier article (30

September 1814), Peltier had characterized Drouin de Bercy as someone whose ‘projects of vengeance’ envisioned ‘the almost total destruction of the current population of SaintDomingue as the only means of salvation’ for the former colony (414.757). 3 For an English translation of this passage, and further contextualization of it, see the Biographical Sketch, above (p. 18). 4 The marriage of Vastey’s parents is registered in the notarial records for the parish of Marmelade, with a date of 3 July 1777. The document is housed at the Archives nationales d’outre-mer in Aix-en-Provence, 85MIOM/66 (Fr Anom 1DPPC2424). Vastey’s father, ‘Jean Vastey’, according to the acte, is described as having originated from Rouen (in Normandy); his parents are listed as Pierre Vastey and Marianne Duval. Vastey’s mother, Élizabeth ‘Mimy’ or ‘Élisabeth dite Mimi’, is described on the document as a ‘carteronne [sic] libre… fille mineure et naturelle de Marie Catherine, mulâtresse libre’ (‘free quadroon, a minor, natural daughter of the free mulatress Marie Catherine’). Following the custom of the colony for children of colour who were born to white fathers to whom their mothers were not married, Mimi’s father, Pierre Dumas, is listed on the document only as a witness. 5 This detail allows us to identify the author as George W. C. Courtenay, who was a lieutenant on the Iphigenia when that vessel took Popham ‘on a courtesy visit to Cap-Henry in May 1819’ (Cole, 253); Courtenay would later serve as Britain’s ‘Consul General at Hayti from 1832 to 1842’ (O’Byrne, 234). 6 In the book’s Preface, Franklin claims that ‘the short delineation here attempted will, in all probability, suffice to shew that the accounts which have been given at different times of Hayti and its inhabitants have been much too highly coloured by the zealous advocates of negro independence’ (vii). ‘Experience’, the author continues, ‘has convinced him that the representations so generally received of the improvement which it has made are greatly exaggerated, and he is not without the hope that the following sheets will convey more correct information on the subject, and thus prove useful to the merchant, if not interesting to the general reader’ (viii). 7 The ‘vaguely “scientific”’ ideas espoused by Franklin would find more formal expression in the texts of mid-nineteenth-century racial thinkers like Thomas Carlyle and Comte de Gobineau, who argued that Haitians had squandered both their liberty and the resources of what had once been one of the most lucrative colonies in the world. Representative of such sentiments is the US proslavery apologist George Fitzhugh’s claim, in Sociology for the South (1854), that the whole island had degenerated into ‘a state of savage anarchy which invites and would justify another conquest and reduction of the inhabitants to that state of slavery for which alone they are fitted, and from which they so wickedly escaped’ (277). 8 Ironically, this enthusiastic assessment is made in an editor’s footnote (372) to the 1820 English translation of Jean-François Dauxion Lavaysse’s Voyage aux îles de Trinidad, originally published in 1813, the year before Lavaysse led Malouet’s secret mission to Haiti (described at length in the second section of the Introduction to the present volume). 9 The translator of Reflexions on the Blacks and Whites, listed only as W. H. M. B., dedicates the translation ‘to the philanthropists of every country’ (3), while the publisher adds that the translator is ‘an Englishman, of a liberal profession, resident in the Island’ (5).

10 See, for instance, reprints of this statement in The Liverpool Mercury, 15 May 1818 (‘Hayti’); The City of Washington Gazette, 21 May 1818 (‘From a Late English Paper’); The Philanthropist, 20 March 1819 (‘From a Late English Paper’). 11 Abolitionist writers often strategically compared Vastey’s works with those of proslavery advocates. One British journalist in 1820, identifying Vastey as the ‘most distinguished political writer’ in Haiti, stated that he had bested his nemesis the colonist Malouet with ‘equal vehemence and vigour’, and that ‘in point of style, energy of thought, and powerful eloquence the black is infinitely superior’ (‘History’, 73). In his An Excursion through the United States and Canada (1824), William Newnham Blane, commenting on the views of the Virginian John Taylor (an influential political thinker and associate of Jefferson’s; see Sheldon and Hill), remarks that ‘I have seen a work written by a native of St. Domingo, the Baron de Vastey, which both in style, composition, and just and proper feeling, so far surpasses the writings of Col. Taylor, that most persons would suppose, that the Colonel, (always of course excepting his transcendent merit in being of a whitish colour,) had a much greater affinity to the baboon than the Haytian’ (219). 12 Binns is probably most remembered today for his 1846 The Anatomy of Sleep, which at least one expert in the field has called ‘“the capstone of the prescientific era” of sleep research’ (Wilse B. Webb, qtd. Finger, 244). 13 In a conciliatory letter to the abbé Grégoire dated 25 February 1809, Jefferson thanked the French priest for sending him a copy of his De la littérature des Nègres and seemingly acknowledged the epistemic anxieties present in his earlier assessment of black writing in Notes on the State of Virginia, stressing the ‘hopeful advances’ that they are making ‘towards their re-establishment on an equal footing with the other colors of the human family’. According to Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, however, a few months after Jefferson penned this letter to Grégoire, he wrote another one to a mutual friend of theirs in which he ‘depicted Grégoire as simple-minded’, ‘commented that he had given the Frenchman a “soft answer”’, and ‘implied that whatever achievements had been reached by those chronicled in De la littérature, it was only because they had some white blood’ (Sepinwall, 2005, 174). For a recent account of the racial dimensions of Jefferson’s Notes in relation to the Haitian Revolution, see Iannini (219–51). 14 The official rules of the annual literary contest held by the Casa de las Américas, which added testimonio as one of their categories in 1970, show the fluidity of testimonio, even as they try to provide a strict definition of it. The rules state, ‘Testimonios must document some aspect of Latin American or Caribbean reality from a direct source. A direct source is understood as knowledge of the facts by the author or his or her compilation of narratives or evidence obtained from the individuals involved or qualified witnesses’. The rules also state that the author must produce ‘reliable documentation, written or graphic’ (qtd. Beverley, 98 n. 6). There has been a lot of debate in recent years over whether or not testimonio is, in fact, anti-literary by people like Linda Brooks and David Stoll, but it is not necessary to enter into that debate here. Instead, we might more fruitfully ask if testimonio provides a solution to the incapacity of Western discourse (and really any discourse at all) to provide an adequate vocabulary for traumatic events. If we read testimonio instead, like Stoll and Brooks, as simply one of many kinds of (now canonized) fiction, are we doing violence

to a form of writing that cannot be understood using established literary genres? When we try to classify these works in relation to existing genres, what might we be missing? 15 See Niles’ Weekly Register, Supplement to vol. 8 (March–October 1815), 172. The author of the original article clearly believed that the de Cockburnes who were famous for their cruelty in Saint-Domingue were the same de Cockburnes then living in Baltimore and ‘lately rendered illustrious by feats of arms on our shores’. ‘The similarity of the two namesakes’, the author notes sardonically, ‘removes all doubt of the relationship subsisting between them, and we shall make the extract [from Vastey] with the simple remark, that in few families are there two such worthy characters’. 16 I am influenced here by George Rudé’s concept of ‘history from below’ as the history of the oppressed, but I suggest that Colonial System offers us a history produced from the oppressed. For history from below, see the articles collected in Krantz, and, in the context of the Haitian Revolution, Carolyn Fick’s The Making of Haiti. 17 Wendell Phillips also lamented the problem of relying upon ‘white sources’ in his famous 1861 speech, ‘Toussaint L’Ouverture’: ‘I am about to tell you the story of a negro who has left hardly one written line. I am to glean it from the reluctant testimony of Britons, Frenchmen, Spaniards,— men who despised him as a negro and a slave, and hated him because he had beaten them in many a battle. All the materials for his biography are from the lips of his enemies’ (476). 18 Vastey’s decision not to reveal that the story of Élisabeth ‘Mimi’ was that of his own mother is perhaps the best example of his preference for collective memory from below rather than individual autobiography. By withholding this intimately personal revelation, his mother’s heroic and benevolent actions in saving the slave infant Laurent from certain death become merely another piece of evidence in the trial of the colonial system told to him by witnesses of the events themselves (in this case his mother and/or the former slave Laurent), rather than a sentimental ploy for readerly identification. 19 There has been much debate in the historiography of slave-holding societies about whether slavery in fact constituted a ‘social death’ for slaves. Yet even if slaves created communities and complex systems of communication and resistance as well as diverse, alternative webs of kinship, all of which calls into question whether slavery actually constituted a social death, the many texts about slavery produced in the nineteenth-century Atlantic World often portray slavery as ultimately reducing human life down to the mere biology of ‘bare life’. The emptiness of ‘bare life’ is lucidly and eloquently captured in Ewa Ziarek’s words as ‘damaged life, stripped of its political significance’. For challenges to Patterson’s argument, see Morgan, Turner, Cooper, and V. Brown. For readings of Agamben’s idea of ‘bare life’ in the context of twentieth-century Haiti, see Fischer (2007), and for a reading of Patterson and Agamben together, see Ziarek. 20 While Marcus Wood says that Toni Morrison in Beloved was able to develop a novel out of a ‘genuine case of slave mother infanticide’ (2002, 10), for Vastey such infanticide was not fantastic, as it is portrayed in Morrison’s novel. Instead, like the other events that Vastey describes in Colonial System, infant killing, suicide, and abortions were an utterly ordinary part of the depredations of Atlantic slavery. It is the ordinariness rather than the extraordinariness of such events that makes them horrific.

21 The practice that I describe above is often referred to as Vodou but, as Kate Ramsey notes in The Spirits and the Law, ‘In Haiti the word Vodou has traditionally referred to a particular mode of dance and drumming, and has generally not been figured as an inclusive term for the entire range of spiritual and healing practices… For many practitioners, the encompassing term is not Vodou, but rather Ginen, a powerful moral philosophy and ethical code valorizing ancestral African ways of serving the spirits and living in the world’ (7).

2 Abolition, Sentiment, and the Problem of Agency in Le système colonial dévoilé* Doris Garraway In the opening pages of Le système colonial dévoilé, Baron de Vastey explains his motivations for publishing the first systematic critique of the ideology of French colonialism by an author of African descent. Heralding the convening of European sovereigns for the Congress of Vienna as a ‘momentous event’ in which, for the first time in history, the abolition of the slave trade was an explicit object of deliberation, Vastey situates his work as the complement to Henry Christophe’s Manifeste du roi, published just one month prior, in September 1814. However, whereas Christophe sought to defend Haiti’s revolutionary birth and its continued rights to sovereignty, Vastey announces the intention to ‘unveil the barbaric Colonial System’ for Europeans and Haitians alike (1814b, vii). The ‘truth’ to be unveiled, what Vastey equates with the colonial system as a whole, is slavery itself, described as ‘the most horrendous, the most terrible wound ever to afflict humanity’ (vi). Beginning with a chapter on the Spanish colonization and enslavement of indigenous populations and the advent of the slave trade, Vastey goes on in a second chapter to enumerate, in excruciatingly denuded prose, a litany of atrocities committed against slaves in Saint-Domingue on the part of their masters. In arguing so forcefully against the crime of slavery, his text therefore makes a direct intervention in the literature of abolitionism. That Vastey would write an explicitly antislavery tract at this moment may, at first glance, seem fitting given the ideological climate of the post-

Napoleonic European world and Christophe’s specific political objectives in the wake of the 1814 Dauxion Lavaysse mission to Haiti. Although the Atlantic World powers remained generally hostile to the notion of an independent black state, the abolitionist movement had gained important victories in England, culminating in the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807. While Britain continued to pursue universal abolition of the trade to suit its own economic interests and the growing public demand, transnational activism on the issue spiked when the prospect of peace after the Napoleonic wars inspired hope for an international treaty.1 Especially encouraging to many observers were the favourable views of the Russian Emperor Alexander I toward abolition of the trade (Reich, 129–30), which probably inspired Vastey’s praise of him as ‘distinguish[ed]… by dint of his humanity, his liberal outlook, his moderation, his generosity’ (v). What stood in the way, however, were French ambitions to reconquer Haiti. The May 1814 Treaty of Paris contained an unprecedented clause abolishing the international slave trade, but, as Vastey laments in his Introduction, it also contained a special dispensation allowing France to carry on the trade for an additional five years: ‘One power alone (and who could believe it?) insists on maintaining this shameful traffic for another five years: France. The French, erstwhile democrats, philanthropists, propagators of liberty and equality, ardent defenders of the rights of man, and now, today, rabid votaries of the slave trade, enemies and persecutors of mankind.’ (v).2 The menacing discourse of the Lavaysse mission, which sought to facilitate, on behalf of the Bourbon monarchy, the return of ‘Saint-Domingue’ to French control, slavery, and racial apartheid, would later confirm Haiti’s worst fears that France sought access to the slave trade in order to repopulate the former colony with new African imports. Lavaysse’s threatening letter to Christophe of 1 October 1814 already represented a symbolic violation of Haitian sovereignty and indicated in no uncertain terms France’s plans to retake Haiti by force if not by informal diplomacy.3 While abolitionists in Britain and France organized a new propaganda campaign in order to discourage the French from acting on this plan, Christophe’s administration charted its own public relations strategy.4 Following the publication of the Manifeste du roi, the secretaries of King Christophe progressively refuted every document produced by the Lavaysse mission, including, in October

1814, the mission’s opening salvo to Christophe (see Prézeau). Vastey, for his part, challenged the broader theory and practice of racial slavery in SaintDomingue in Le système colonial dévoilé and in Notes à M. le baron de V. P. Malouet, both of which were also published that month. Of these, Colonial System is unique, constituting both an explicitly abolitionist tract and an indirect defence of Haitian sovereignty. By representing the Haitian people as passionate humanitarians committed to a crusade against slavery and the slave trade, Vastey aligned Haiti with the noble cause of English philanthropists and tied Restoration France to the most horrific colonial crimes of Saint-Domingue. At the same time, he provided an overwhelming dossier of evidence to support the universal abolition of the slave trade. Yet, as any student of the Haitian Revolution knows, Haiti and abolitionism were not always such comfortable bedfellows. On the contrary, while proslavery interests immediately attributed the 1791 slave insurrection to abolitionist influence, antislavery activists struggled to exploit the revolution for their own cause, but rarely in terms that validated the rights of the Haitian nation to both liberty and self-determination. By the early 1790s the antislavery movement in both England and France had been virtually silenced by accusations on the part of the proslavery lobby that abolitionists were to blame for the violent revolt in Saint-Domingue.5 Despite the inaccuracy of this assessment, in the wake of the revolution many abolitionists themselves sympathized with the view, widely held by slaveholders, that ‘slave emancipation in any form would lead to economic ruin and the indiscriminate massacre of white populations’ (Davis, 2001, 5). In France, the poet Olympe de Gouges, author of the controversial abolition-themed play L’esclavage des noirs, famously condemned the Haitian Revolution in her Preface to the first edition of 1792. ‘By imitating the tyrants so cruelly’, she wrote, directly addressing slaves and free people of colour, ‘you justify them… Men were not made for chains, but you prove that they are necessary’ (Gouges, 32). Ten years later, François-René de Chateaubriand expressed a similar sentiment when he wrote, ‘Who would now dare to plead the blacks’ cause after the crimes they have committed?’ (qtd. Popkin, 2007, 17). While Napoleon’s censorship of antislavery propaganda brought French abolitionist activity to a virtual standstill,6 abolitionists in Britain focused on the dual, if paradoxical, strategy of both

denying any involvement in the uprising and arguing that it proved once and for all the incontrovertible threat posed by the slave trade and the deplorable conditions of West Indian slaves to the preservation of the British colonies.7 Similarly, when the British abolitionist movement reconstituted itself following the independence of Haiti, it justified reform by playing up fears that the Haitian example threatened the peace and prosperity of the British Caribbean. The important point was not that an independent black state itself would seek to threaten its neighbours militarily—according to David Geggus, few abolitionists believed this, and Henry Brougham went so far as to consider newly independent Haiti to be ‘bound for anarchy and stagnation’ and thus unable to pose a threat to its neighbours (Geggus, 1985, 115)—but that an independent Haiti would encourage slaves in neighbouring islands to revolt. Thus James Stephen and Henry Brougham based their arguments for abolition in part on the necessity to remove the motive for slave insurrection (Geggus, 1982a, 143). British activists consequently presented the suppression of the slave trade together with reforms to the existing slave laws as a dual strategy through which to preserve British colonialism. This point raises the problem of the ultimate aims of British abolitionists, the closest thing Haiti had to ‘friends’ in the contemporary world, with respect to the ideology of the early Haitian state. In seeking ultimately to preserve the West Indian colonies, the views publicly espoused by virtually every prominent early nineteenth-century British abolitionist on the question of emancipation were fundamentally at odds with the principle of black resistance and the revolutionary emancipationism out of which the Haitian state emerged. True to their name, few mainstream abolitionists supported the violent overthrow of masters by slaves; ‘abolition’ referred, rather, to the emancipation of slaves by the master or the state through legislative action.8 David Geggus puts it succinctly when he writes that ‘among abolitionists, with the exception of a few fringe figures, the black rebels found apologists rather than supporters’ (Geggus, 1982a, 149). It is telling that in 1793 and 1794 William Wilberforce supported the British occupation of French Caribbean islands including Saint-Domingue, knowing that its aim was to suppress the slave insurrection there. As Robin Blackburn notes, ‘[Wilberforce] had never supported slave resistance or

rebellion, or any plans for the expropriation of slave-owners’ (149–50). Although both Wilberforce and Clarkson would later involve themselves directly in advising and aiding the kingdom of Henry Christophe, this did not equate with support for slave revolution. Perhaps more surprising for the modern reader, however, is that in the early nineteenth century most British abolitionists still did not even officially endorse the general abolition of slavery (as opposed to the slave trade); arguing, as did many slaveholders, that slaves were not ready for freedom, mainstream abolitionists focused on abolishing the slave trade and reforming British slave law in hopes that this would facilitate emancipation at a later date. In this respect, they were still working within the framework of the conservative policy established by the first British abolitionist organization, the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade of 1787.9 Emancipation was controversial even in 1815, when the London-based African Institution, the successor of the former Society, made clear that it expected freedom to come eventually from slave owners, not the state (Williams, 182). Whether the power to emancipate rested with masters or legislators, everyone seemed to agree that under no circumstances were slaves to claim their own liberty. Hence the discourse of the ‘gift’ of freedom and the image of the kneeling, grateful slave popularized by abolitionists throughout the nineteenth-century Atlantic World.10 As Marcus Wood has eloquently pointed out, such liberation fantasies painted emancipation as an ‘unforced donation from the empowered possessors of freedom to the unfree and disempowered slave’: ‘From the viewpoint of the giver the slave has no choice about the terms of this gift, about when, where, or how it is imposed, or about whether to accept it or not’ (2010, 2). We find in Gouges’s 1792 Preface a similar insistence on whites as the subjects and blacks as the passive recipients, rather than the righteous takers and defenders, of a freedom still to come: ‘Oh! How you pain those who wanted to prepare you, through moderate means, for a kinder condition… The true philosophy of Enlightened man leads him to seize [arracher] his fellow man from the midst of a horrible primitive situation [i.e., Africa]…’ (35). One could scarcely imagine a discourse more contrary to the ethos of the independent state of Haiti, where Jean-Jacques Dessalines famously claimed, following the recriminatory killing of former colonists, to have ‘saved his country’ and

‘avenged America’ (qtd. Dubois, 2004, 301), and where Henry Christophe publicly advocated a scorched-earth policy in order to preserve it in the event of another French-led war of extermination. More insidious for Vastey, however, than the real philosophical differences between abolitionists and Haitians on the desirability and means of emancipation was the extent to which the transnational discursive field of antislavery functioned to constrain what could and could not be said about slavery, as well as how it could be said. This was due not only to the prevalence of certain established antislavery arguments in the public sphere and the ideological needs of a primarily European, bourgeois readership, but also to the prevalence of a literary modality—sentimentality—which had the potential to reinforce the abolitionist power asymmetry between whites as the agents of benevolence and blacks as suffering and violated objects of pity. The dominant style of the British novel of the late eighteenth century, sentimentalism touched all literary genres in Britain and France and became the mode of choice for writing about colonized populations, slaves, the disenfranchised, and the poor (Ellis, 2–3; Festa, 1–2, 9–10). Rooted in theories of sympathy developed by mid-eighteenth-century political and moral philosophers as diverse as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith, and favoured by the ideological needs of a rising commercial middle class, sentimentality was central to the mobilization of humanitarian campaigns designed to relieve the suffering of slaves.11 As such, it became a staple in British antislavery writing from the 1780s forwards. Yet the very reasons for the success of the sentimental mode—its exploitation of the most shocking scenes of black victimhood combined with arguments for black humanity as occasions for an affective identification on the part of the white reader—have led critics to question its ability to challenge the power relations structuring slavery at the material and symbolic levels. For sentimentality not only requires the figural possession of the slave’s suffering by empathetic readers who are called upon to imagine themselves in the slave’s place and who possess the sole agency to end this suffering; it also offers the reader an opportunity for enjoyment through both the voyeuristic witnessing of the horror of slavery and the experience of sensibility that such horror may arouse (see Carey, 29–30; Halttunen). For Saidiya Hartman, the result is a form of obscenity at the core of sentimental spectatorship, what

she describes as ‘the desire of whites to slip into blackness and experience the suffering of slaves first hand’ (25). ‘Only more obscene than the brutality unleashed at the whipping post’, she writes, ‘is the demand that this suffering be materialized and evidenced by the display of the tortured body or endless recitations of the ghastly and the terrible’ (4). That Vastey would contribute to a genre—antislavery polemic—that habitually trafficked in the display of the brutalized black body in the interests of inciting white humanitarian agency, and do so in an effort to validate Haitian claims to legitimate self-defence and the right of sovereignty, gives rise to a fascinating paradox. This paradox arguably accounts for much of the apparent incoherence in Colonial System, from the coexistence of several dissonant styles of writing to the explicit invocation of a number of incompatible audiences— the sovereigns at the Congress of Vienna, proslavery ex-colonists, sentimental Europeans, European philanthropists, Haitian patriots (northern or southern), and Haitians of the south who were unconvinced of Christophe’s legitimacy. In what follows, however, I read this complexity as a marker of a unique event in the history of the modern literature of antislavery— the first instance of a transnational abolitionist text written by an avowedly African-descended author from the standpoint of what I call an abolitionist state. Though at times ceding to contemporary literary conventions such as sentimentality and slave narrative so as to court a readership, Vastey struggles to find a register through which to relay the shocking and the terrible in a manner that neither reinforces the spectacular nature of slavery nor leaves emancipatory agency solely in the hands of Europeans, which would amount to a disavowal of Haiti’s very claim to independence. As I will show, while empowering the reader to feel and to act in the interest of slaves, and by supplying a rich archive of European cruelty, Vastey makes clear in his arguments and, crucially, through his formal and stylistic choices, that Haitians themselves have a right and a duty to combat the atrocities of slavery, whether by the sword or by the pen. By placing the text in relation to contemporary British, French, and Black Atlantic discourses on slavery and abolition, I read Vastey’s Colonial System as both a radicalization of the contemporary antislavery tract and a transformation of the slave narrative into a form of public diplomacy defending the agency of an abolitionist state.

I begin by examining Vastey’s engagement with the reigning humanitarian ideology of sentimentalism. I argue that his use of sentimental rhetoric together with techniques of slave narrative serves to appeal to an audience of sympathetic readers by portraying the author—and, by extension, the Haitian people—as a credible object of sentimental attachment. Although this strategy involves a degree of desubjectification as Vastey cedes authority to others—notably European ‘philanthropists’— for defending the cause of abolition, the originality of his work resides in those moments in which he departs radically from conventions of sentimentality, European abolitionism, and eighteenth-century slave narrative in order to document and condemn the crimes of the colonial system. Significantly, in ascribing criminality to slaveholders and in providing testimonial evidence to establish their guilt, Vastey moves the discourse of abolition from questions of morality, abstract legality, and economics to those of culpability and justice. Especially fascinating is his impassive manner of recounting dozens and dozens of atrocities committed by ex-colonists in SaintDomingue as in a legal deposition without pathos or emotion, which contrasts with his otherwise emphatic and emotionally incendiary writing style, drawing on the tradition of Haitian revolutionary eloquence. These diverse modes, I argue, serve both to buttress European antislavery and reorient the dynamics of feeling aroused by the antislavery tract, thus reinvesting agency in Haitians as the legitimate avengers of the colonial system. What is more, Vastey’s self-referential writing style constitutes a revealing meditation on the importance of writing itself for people of African descent and an implicit recognition of the problematic condition of the ‘black’ author in the nineteenth-century transatlantic public sphere. In order to assess the uses to which Vastey put sentimentality and the imperatives that this discourse imposed upon him, it is useful to recall its role in the antislavery pamphlet literature of the late eighteenth century. The greatest exponent of contemporary antislavery, who later pursued a lengthy correspondence with Christophe, was Thomas Clarkson, author of the best-selling An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, particularly the African, first published in 1786. According to Brycchan Carey, Clarkson essentially reiterated the established arguments of his immediate predecessor James Ramsay, author of Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of

African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies (1784) who had himself drawn on the work of John Wesley, Granville Sharp, and Anthony Benezet (Carey, 110, 130). If Clarkson’s popularity quickly surpassed that of Ramsay, however, it was due to his stylistic innovations, notably his use of sentimentalism, which vastly increased the emotional appeal of his text for the British public. As Carey notes, Clarkson makes two primary sentimental arguments—‘that equality of feeling proves the equal status of all human beings’, and that ‘sympathy is a key motivating factor in human decision-making’ (132). In the first section of the treatise, which deals with the prevalence of slavery throughout world history, Clarkson mounts an argument against any presumption of the usefulness or justice of slavery through a defence of the equal capacity for feeling and suffering shared by slaves and his readers. For Clarkson, this shared repertoire of pleasure and pain renders slaves fully human and worthy of sympathy, thus nullifying any argument in favour of slavery based on historical precedent: ‘when we reflect that the people, thus reduced to a state of servitude, have had the same feelings with ourselves; when we reflect that they have had the same propensities to pleasure, and the same aversions from pain, another argument seems immediately to arise in opposition to the former, deduced from our own feelings and that divine sympathy, which nature has implanted in our breasts…’ (1786, 2). Here, Clarkson justifies the humanity of blacks on the basis of their ability to feel as whites do, and in turn predicates white humanity on its capacity to demonstrate ‘divine sympathy’ toward suffering blacks. In order to be human it is not enough to feel for oneself; one must feel for the suffering of another. This relationship is further developed in the third part of Clarkson’s treatise, which examines the treatment undergone by slaves upon capture and after reaching the Americas. Clarkson assigns the narration to a fictional native informant, a highly emotive ‘melancholy African’ (118). In a passage reminiscent of a satirical dialogue, the weepy African denounces Christian indifference before the suffering of his kidnapped brethren: ‘Have you not heard me sigh while we have been talking? Do you not see the tears that now trickle down my cheeks? and yet these hardened Christians are unable to be moved at all; nay, they will scourge them amidst their groans, and even smile, while they are torturing them to death’. When the African marvels at how Christians in Britain can suffer the ‘dismal cries’ of a

desolated Africa with indifference, the narrator replies that the English have simply not been able to hear them: ‘If they could reach the generous Englishman at home, they would pierce his heart, as they have already pierced your own. He would sympathize with you in your distress. He would be enraged at the conduct of his countrymen, and resist their tyranny’ (127). A not so subtle advertisement for the value of Clarkson’s own narrative in publicizing the cruelty of slavery, this passage functions more importantly as a lesson in the transformative power of sympathy, which confers on the reader both moral authority and the agency to alleviate suffering through benevolent action. The reader’s sentimental attachment to the victim is matched by his or her rage for the perpetrator, figured as lacking the fundamental human trait of pity. Likewise, the power of benevolent action and the pleasure of sentimental identification reside squarely with the reader. The surge in philanthropic activism in Britain at the end of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth was fostered by and in turn contributed to the rise of such literary displays of sentimental feeling and their associated calls to action (Ellis, 17). Yet even without action, sentimentality had the power to satisfy the troubled moral conscience of an expanding empire. In aligning the reader with the innocence of the victim and insisting on his simple ignorance of the plight of Africans, sentimentalism relieved any lingering guilt the reader may have harboured as a passive bystander to slavery or a self-interested consumer of its products. Furthermore, by insisting on the moral superiority of the ‘man of feeling’ and, as Lynn Festa writes, ‘convert[ing] scenes of violence and exploitation into occasions for benevolence and pity’ (2), sentimental literature offered a fantasy of resistance against the increasingly nefarious human toll of European imperialism and global commerce. This does not mean, however, that sentimentalism was politically impotent. Given that pity had become an essential proof of humanity alongside other traits such as intelligence, society, and the ability to self-govern, sentimentalism countered proslavery myths of the unfeeling slave whose insensitivity to pain and incapacity for tender feelings and emotional attachment proved his fundamental inhumanity.12 As Vastey himself put it, ‘For every fierce deed with which one might wish to reproach them, we could cite a thousand

others that give proof of sensibility, of generosity, of all the qualities that are natural to Africans’ (23). Prevalent in abolitionist-themed texts in Britain and France, sentimentality was the dominant mode of French antislavery classics such as Saint-Lambert’s Ziméo (1769), Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes (3rd ed., 1780), Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virgine (1788), Olympe de Gouges’s Zamor et Mirza (1788), and Madame de Staël’s Mirza (1795).13 For Baron de Vastey, writing in Haiti, sentimentality offered first and foremost a valuable symbolic tool through which to secure a readership by demonstrating the author’s humanity and credibility as a surrogate for the sympathetic reader, advocating for the victims of slavery. We find in the first chapter of his text several expressions of the narrator’s sentimental rapture, shedding of tears, and nostalgia for a bygone past prior to the scourge of colonialism and slavery. In the opening pages of this chapter on the genocidal prehistory of African slavery in the Caribbean—what he calls ‘the destruction of the first Haytians’— Vastey depicts himself not only as a historian and reader of published authorities on the Spanish conquest of the New World, but also as a native informant and Rousseauian ‘promeneur solitaire’. Walking alone amidst the archaeological remains of the indigenous peoples he claims as ancestral Haytians, Vastey’s narrator is the quintessential man of feeling whose sympathy with the victims of the European ‘thirst for gold’ is matched by a romantic sense of nostalgia for their lost civilization: Everywhere I step, everywhere I look, I see shards, vases, utensils, figurines, the forms of which bear the imprint and the traces of art’s infancy. In more remote and solitary locations, in the caves of inaccessible mountains, I come across skeletons still intact, human bones scattered about and blanched over time, and I tremble. As my thoughts pause over these sad remains, these shards bearing witness to the life of a people who no longer exist, my heart is moved, I shed tears of pity and compassion for the wretched fate of those first inhabitants of the island! A thousand rending memories lay siege to my heart; a multitude of reflections crowd upon me, one after another in quick succession. So, there were men here before us! They no longer exist, here are their pitiable remains! They were destroyed! (3–4)

In Vastey’s melancholic reverie, the found archaeological and human remains inspire a fantasized ‘memory’ of the indigenous ‘Haytian’ victims who can no longer testify to their own destruction. What matters most, however, is the observer’s own subjective feeling and display of affect in

response to the sublime realization of their loss. Revived in the narrator’s imagination, the indigenous population becomes an object of sympathy, the supposed ‘infancy’ of their art serving to enhance their innocence and worthiness of pity. In shedding tears of compassion for the pitiful fate of the first Haitians, the narrator demonstrates his own capacity for sentimental feeling and models for the reader an appropriate emotional response to suffering, past or present. Thus according to the logic of sentimentality, Vastey’s sympathy proves his membership in the human community and qualifies him for the role of sentimental surrogate and object for the European reader. At the same time, Vastey deploys the trope of sentiment in his construction of the Africans whom he defends and the ideal European readers for whom he writes, so as to establish a moral equivalence between them. In refuting colonists’ attacks on slave humanity, Vastey foregrounds what he contends is Africans’ uncommon capacity for sympathy, even toward whites. Paraphrasing at length Mungo Park’s recently published travel narrative to Africa, he relates moving scenes of black filial attachment, human sensibility, and generosity toward strangers, demanding who would not be moved upon seeing the native virtues of those noble Africans? … I seem still to hear the sweet and plaintive voice of those hospitable women who give [our traveller] welcome when he is ready to drop from hunger and fatigue, and who create an impromptu song with him as its subject… ‘The poor white man, faint and weary, came and sat under our tree—. He has no mother to bring him milk; no wife to grind his corn… Let us pity the white man; no mother has he, etc. etc.’ (29)

Vastey in turn appeals to sentimental readers (lecteurs sensibles), whom he opposes to the evil ex-colonists, to ‘hear’ his words. In the opening pages of his second chapter, ‘On the Colonial Regime, or the Horrors of Slavery’, Vastey repeatedly addresses l’européen sensible, expressing his belief that ‘I will be heard and understood by the feeling and impartial European’ (39; ‘Je serai entendu, compris, par l’européen sensible et impartial’) and, like Clarkson, links the innocence and impartiality of the sentimental reader to a state of ignorance about the horrors of slavery: ‘Europeans who are not acquainted with this horrific system, who cannot even imagine it, you men of feeling [hommes sensibles], do not weep too soon over this tableau, these slight sketches of the Trade and its horrors!’  (35) In emphasizing the

ignorance of the hommes sensibles, Vastey gestures toward their innocence and virtue. By contrast, the unfeeling colonists are named ‘monsters’ whose hardened hearts can be moved neither by the greatest human suffering, nor by Vastey’s rendering of it: ‘I do not hope to soften your hearts… We know that your depraved souls are inaccessible to remorse and pity’ (35). Lacking the quality of sympathy, they are outside the human. These appeals to sensibility and Vastey’s assumption of a sentimental persona come, however, at a significant cost, insofar as Vastey must also flatter the lecteur sensible as having the power and moral authority to eliminate the suffering of slaves by joining the abolitionist cause. This requires at times representing Haitians as passively at the mercy of the reader’s pity, a position which is in direct contradiction with the goals of defending Haitian claims to sovereignty and redefining abolition as revolutionary emancipationism. Hence a striking incoherence in the text at the level of ideology, audience, and style. Vastey’s habit of conferring agency for humanitarian progress on European philanthropy is the first strategy by which he seduces his European readership. Even prior to invoking sentimentality, Vastey consistently lauds European ‘philanthropy’ as the agent of positive change in the world. His Introduction implicitly addresses sovereigns at the Congress of Vienna and frames his text as a direct response to European advances on abolition and British contributions toward the civilization of Africa. What is more, throughout the first chapter of the work Vastey reserves the term ‘revolution’ for the impact, real and hoped for, of European philanthropy on the institution of slavery, rather than the righteous resistance of slaves themselves. In the opening sentence of the Introduction, for instance, he hails the defeat of Napoleon and the ensuing Peace of Paris as contributing to one such revolution: ‘[A] revolution benefiting the greater part of humankind [une révolution salutaire dans une grande partie du genre humain] is coming about, or so we hope. Everything points toward that outcome: the momentous events that have just transpired in Europe; the peace treaty signed by the Powers…’ (v). Pointing out that, for the first time in history, the European sovereigns were considering formally abolishing the slave trade, Vastey exclaims: ‘O unparalleled turn of fortune! O unexpected revolution [O révolution inattendue]! Humanity triumphs and the stage is set for the regeneration of a greater part of mankind’ (vi). Vastey later expands on the revolutionary effect of humanitarian action by

proposing that Europe dedicate itself to civilizing rather than desolating Africa. In a move that reveals the strategic significance of British influence for Christophe, Vastey assigns this role to ‘the great nation of Britain’, which ‘will add this grand undertaking to the growing list of its claims to glory and to the gratitude of humankind’ (18). In highlighting the resettlement colony of Sierra Leone as the kind of divinely inspired, beneficial colonization project Europe should pursue in Africa, Vastey praises its English philanthropist supporters: ‘It will be your glory to have brought about this great revolution [cette grande révolution] through your gentle words and the influence of humanity alone, without having persecuted and massacred innocent people’ (18). To a revolution-weary Atlantic World, Vastey therefore redefines revolution as selfless humanitarian action inspired by sentiment (often identified as Christian) and enlightened thought. It is carried out not by soldiers or armed slaves, but by educated European men of feeling and faith. What is particularly striking in this enthusiasm for ‘revolutionary’ philanthropic action is the way in which European abolitionists at times stand in for Haitians, Africans, and even for Vastey himself in vindicating their cause. Following a long tirade against the scientific racism of European anatomists immune to the spirit of ‘religion and humanity’, Vastey concludes his first chapter by claiming that ‘we’ (presumably Haitians, or perhaps people of African descent) have already been ‘fully avenged’ by European ‘philanthropists’. He thus expresses gratitude to ‘the immortal and generous Wilberforce, the virtuous Grégoire, philanthropists all the world over, the brave and loyal British nation, and our good friends, those wise and virtuous Quakers, our zealous protectors and ardent defenders of the rights of humanity’ (34). While stealthily aligning abolitionists with Haitian interests, Vastey here acknowledges the two best-known abolitionists in England and France as part of an international network of learned men, originated by Quakers and led primarily by Britain but including sympathizers in Europe and the New World. This gesture of deference may be understood as a rhetorical strategy of captatio benevolentiae, through which the author ensures the good will of the reader. In their writings, many abolitionists developed an elaborate practice of paying homage to those who had come before them in defending the antislavery cause in order to establish credibility as knowledgeable, yet humble, additions to a community

of esteemed predecessors. By identifying an established intellectual lineage, they also justified the legitimacy of their ideas. This gesture was an especially prominent feature in the works of Clarkson and Grégoire.14 While the former devoted the Preface of his Essay to a laudatory account of a long line of antislavery thinkers and activists dating back to Las Casas, the latter’s dedication to De la littérature des Nègres, a text cited widely by Vastey, comprises a list of literally hundreds of ‘courageous men who have pleaded the cause of the unhappy blacks and mulattoes [malheureux Noirs et Sang-mêlés]’ (v), categorized by nationality. However, Vastey’s adoption of this discourse carried far greater political risk given that the self-image of the mainstream abolitionist movement depended on the existence of a ‘malheureux Noir’ whose salvation required the benevolence of Europeans. In order to signal membership in the abolitionist community and argue for its continued international activism, Vastey had momentarily to disavow both the agency of Haitians in avenging themselves through military struggle, and his own vociferous defence of black humanity and the Haitian right of selfdetermination, which is everywhere else apparent in the text and exceeds anything the ‘abolitionists’ had hitherto been willing to advance.15 This point underscores both the uniqueness and the inherent ambiguity of Vastey’s position as an advocate of ‘abolition’ writing from the standpoint of an abolitionist state—that is, one whose freedom owed to its successful military struggle against the forces of both slavery and colonialism. On the one hand, because of Haiti’s diplomatic isolation and state of nonrecognition, Vastey finds himself in the counterintuitive position of arguing for the legitimacy of the Haitian state in terms of its ideological opposite, abolitionism. This means litigating after the fact the justice of the Haitian Revolution by refuting proslavery ideologues and relaying evidence of past horrors of slavery in Saint-Domingue. It also requires engaging with a larger international antislavery discourse that reserves for whites the moral authority and legitimate political agency to enact change. Vastey contributes most explicitly to abolitionist thought through his engagement, in the first chapter, with several antislavery arguments popularized by Clarkson, Grégoire, and others. Refuting the widely held view of blacks as inherently inferior to whites, Vastey contends that African violence and kidnapping are an effect rather than a cause of Europe’s never-ending demand for captives:

‘Cease this infamous traffic of yours, and Africa will enjoy repose and happiness’ (14). Later, Vastey asserts that Blacks could never develop their moral or intellectual faculties under conditions of slavery (71). Calling for the civilization of Africa rather than its enslavement, Vastey cites examples of already-existing civilization in Africa, drawing on Mungo Park. Examples abound of peaceful and nondespotic African monarchies, African hospitality, and filial piety (25–26). Vastey furthermore defends the African capacity for civilization by comparing it favourably to that of Europeans, whose former state of savagery he deems far worse (20). Citing examples of present-day white savagery in ‘Lapland, New Zembla, Kamchatka, Greenland’, he writes: ‘Have you ever seen anything more savage than those ichthyophagous peoples, vegetating in a state approximating that of the brute beast, pell-mell, without manners or laws?’ Going on to propose that slavers prey on whites instead of Africans, Vastey exposes a double standard attributable to racial prejudice: ‘And yet your feeling heart recoils at the thought [of turning them into slaves]. How could one tear those hapless whites away from their homeland and their family in order to plunge them into bondage, to lash them with the whip, to torture them with labours that are beyond their strength, in a scorching climate like that of America?’ (21) Of course, what distinguishes Vastey’s antislavery thought from that of the authors he cites is his particular racial and national perspective. While in the first chapter of Colonial System Vastey speaks as a man of feeling, a Christian, and a member of a cosmopolitan republic of letters, he periodically dons at least three other identities. He is at once the faithful servant and mouthpiece of the northern Haitian monarch, a simple ‘Haytian’, and a ‘black man’ (vii). These identities involve an embrace of African ancestry (he identifies as an African (32)) and even an implicit claim to have been himself enslaved, thus raising the question of the relationship of his text to slave narrative. His sudden and rather conspicuous switch from the third person singular ‘slave’ to the first-person plural pronoun ‘we’ in his account of enslaved Africans arriving in Saint-Domingue certainly suggests an attempt to identify as a member of the formerly enslaved collectivity: ‘Degraded to a condition below that of domestic animals, our precarious life subject to the whims of a barbaric master, … gnawed by hunger, bent under the whip of a ruthless slave driver, we worked the land, watering it with our sweat and our blood’ (37). Here the narrator rescinds his earlier persona as man of letters and

reduces himself to the strictly corporeal, as bare, biological life and mere matter in the eyes of the slavemaster, whose suffering ironically places a claim on the land. His subsequent account of the abuses suffered by the former free people of colour builds on this appropriation of the position of the enslaved, as Vastey maintains, not unproblematically, that the condition of both groups was the same: ‘We  will not make any fine distinction between these so-called “free” people and the slaves, for although they belonged to no particular master, the white public was their master. In all respects, they endured the same humiliations and the same disgraceful treatment as the slaves, and we will consider them as such’ (74). He goes on to fulminate against various discriminations against free people of colour on issues ranging from naming to dress to land use. In assimilating free people of colour with slaves, Vastey thus places himself in a nascent, fledgling tradition of black writing directed against the ‘thousands of volumes’ that the ‘friends of slavery’ have published in order to ‘degrad[e] the black man below the level of a brute beast’ (94): ‘It has been difficult for the small number of writers from our unfortunate class to cast even a few glimmers of light on these numerous slanders, constrained as they have been by all the circumstances that together worked to stifle their voices [par le concours de toutes les circonstances qui étouffaient leurs voix]’ (94–95). Yet, while struggling like previous black writers to make himself heard, Vastey departs significantly from this tradition on the level of the style and radicalism of his message in defence of both emancipation and the legitimacy of an abolitionist state. Late eighteenth-century Afro-British writing spanned many genres, from poetry, treatise, and letters to autobiography, and although this work was often subsequently exploited by abolitionists, it was not necessarily explicitly committed to the antislavery cause.16 While eighteenth-century black writers made reference to the conditions of slavery in which they lived, they were far less interested in documenting atrocities than nineteenth-century United States-based writers such as Frederick Douglass, and they rarely denounced the institution of slavery as a whole or called for abolition, much less slave resistance (Potkay, 1–2). The autobiographical works of Britton Hammon (1760), Ukawsaw Gronniosaw (1770), and Olaudah Equiano (1789) may be read as captivity and/or conversion narratives insofar as they account for the subject’s

enslavement and salvation, the latter being understood more as a form of spiritual rebirth and ‘liberation’ in the Christian faith than as actual emancipation from slavery. Among these, only Equiano dedicated his work to the abolitionist cause.17 The poems of Phillis Wheatley are known for their ironic, yet subtly subversive rhetorical embrace of slavery as a means of spiritual salvation.18 The Letters of Ignatius Sancho (1782) fashion the author as a cultivated man of sentiment and taste in the image of his correspondent and model, Laurence Sterne. While all of these writers exhibited a profound resistance to slavery in their self-representation, formal strategies, figurative language (in the case of Wheatley), and in the very act of writing itself, the most radical Afro-British writer on the level of explicit content was Ottobah Cugoano. His 1787 treatise Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of Slavery notably endorsed total abolition and the immediate emancipation of slaves. It was also one of the few Afro-British publications to have been translated into French by the time of Vastey’s Colonial System (as Réflexions sur la traite et l’esclavage des Nègres, in 1788). Yet, like Wheatley, Cugoano maintained that his enslavement was ultimately for his benefit because it afforded him a knowledge of God, and he equivocated on the moral legitimacy of slave revolution.19 Vastey does not directly cite any ‘black’ writers, but he does cite Grégoire, whose De la littérature des Nègres included brief biographical notes with occasional excerpts from a number of Afro-British writers including Wheatley, Sancho, Cugoano, and Equiano. Although we can identify a shared abolitionist culture, Christian sensibility, and Enlightenment literacy linking Vastey and earlier black writers, Vastey’s work clearly charts a new trajectory and arguably constitutes the most radical antislavery tract of the contemporary Atlantic World. The key to this radicalism is found largely in the second chapter of the work, ‘On the Colonial Regime, or the Horrors of Slavery’, which provides an unprecedentedly candid account of the cruelty of colonists in SaintDomingue. In defining these acts as crimes and attacking proslavery apologists for seeking to ‘cast a veil’ over them (39), Vastey declares his plan to ‘exhume those poor wretches you buried alive’ and to ‘consult the shades of the dead, those unfortunate compatriots of mine you threw alive into a fiery furnace; those you ordered be put on a spit, roasted, impaled’ (35). What follows from this figurative revival of the victims is perhaps the most

exhaustive inventory of atrocities ever recorded in the archive of antislavery polemic. It is filled with dozens of chilling accounts of torture, murder, incest, rape, mutilation, impalement, live burial, and burning death, to name just a few. Such material provides ample ammunition for Vastey’s claims regarding the colonists’ irredeemable vice and monstrous nature. Yet, Vastey’s act of unveiling and judgement effects at the same time a dramatic abandonment of the sentimentalist mode and its dominant ethos of pity and benevolence, and the adoption of a decidedly unsentimental style that cultivates a new politics of feeling and a widening of the space for antislavery agency. Rather than emphasizing the victim’s pain and sensibility, thus encouraging the reader’s sympathetic identification with the suffering object, Vastey focuses only on the actions of the offender. The goal, I contend, is to inspire feelings of loathing and vengeance in his readership, and furthermore, to promote the cause of Haitian independene and its international recognition. Vastey previews this stylistic shift when he confesses his own speechlessness before the enormity of colonial violence. Speaking almost as a victim of trauma who can neither fully assimilate to consciousness nor wholly narrate the traumatic event (Caruth, 153), he writes: This is not a novel I am writing. It is an exposé of the ordeals, the protracted suffering, and unparalleled acts of torture that an ill-fated people have experienced for centuries. My blood runs cold in my veins, my heart is overcome with sadness: the task I have set myself is one for which I have no aptitude. I lack the forms of expression to undertake it. What manner of pen would be required to describe crimes hitherto unknown to humankind? When depicting all these many horrors, what form of expression can I possibly employ? I know of none. (39–40)

It is precisely the extent of the suffering that renders it resistant to aesthetic representation; at the same time, its very inexpressibility is proof of the depth of feeling in the witness, who seems to lose all his senses before the senseless acts of cruelty. Drawing upon both his Haitian identity— supposedly without the erudition or eloquence of his French-educated readers—and his ethical commitment to relaying the naked truth of colonialism, Vastey refuses ‘the flowers of rhetoric’ suitable only ‘for describing scenes that do not put a man to shame’: ‘[W]hen it comes to such a lugubrious topic, when it comes to descending into a cesspool of crimes, they are useless. I will limit myself to reporting [Je ne ferai que raconter]’ (40).

For Vastey, this denuded style will be a sign of authenticity: ‘My Haytian pen will be lacking in eloquence, no doubt, but it will be truthful’ (39). Vastey’s telling of colonial abuses is nonetheless striking from a stylistic perspective, as it unfolds as a series of blunt sentences in which the former colonist occupies the role of subject and the slave victim that of object of the crime recounted. Especially significant is Vastey’s will to name the perpetrators; each crime is attributed to an individual identified by name, occupation, and social standing. If there is a narrative thread linking these instances, it is because the named perpetrators emerge as a community of offenders bound by social and familial ties, geographical proximity, and comparisons of the relative cruelty of their methods. Of the horrors of the Gallifet plantation, the epicentre of the 1791 slave insurrection that led to Haitian independence, Vastey writes: ‘The luckless blacks of Gallifet and Montalibor met their death in the most appalling forms of torture, under the whip, in dank and miry dungeons where the victims perished because their bodies were continually submerged in water’ (44). Pointing out the enormity of the crimes of a certain Desdunes family, he continues, Desdunes the elder, settler, resident of the Artibonite, had forty-five blacks burned alive: men, women, and children, one after the other… Remoussin, the son-in-law of Desdunes, performed the same acts of cruelty. The luckless Nicole, nurse of his children, was burned alive on his orders. Boisbel, another son-in-law of Desdunes, had the nurse of his children flogged to death. (48–49)

With little variation, this repetitive style continues for over twenty pages, thus creating the effect of a solemn litany of atrocities. It is difficult to overstate the unprecedented nature of Vastey’s archive of cruelty in the context of earlier writings on old regime slavery and contemporary abolitionist-themed works. On the one hand, in documenting in detail so many specific instances of violence against slaves, Vastey’s account fills in what was largely missing from eighteenth-century French colonial narratives. While the most reform-minded writers such as Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Baron de Wimpffen, abbé Raynal, and even Pierre Victor Malouet in his younger days discussed the problem of cruelty, they often did so in general, anonymous terms that simply reified the brutalized corporeality and subjective incapacity of the victims, with few accounts of actual incidents witnessed by or relayed directly to the author. One notable

exception was the case of Nicolas Lejeune, who in 1788 was tried and ultimately exonerated for having torched the feet and legs of two woman slaves who were found chained in a cell, their burnt limbs decomposing.20 Lejeune’s case was actually investigated by the colonial justice system and thus generated a significant paper trial; otherwise, the printed narrative record carries few individual instances of atrocity. One rare example is a passage in Wimpffen’s Voyage à Saint-Domingue dans les années 1788, 1789, et 1790 in which the author describes at some length the case of a rich Creole woman who ordered her black cook to be thrown into a fiery oven for having ruined a pastry (1797a, 2.10). Openly abolitionist texts invested more heavily in portrayals of cruel masters, particularly during the Atlantic crossing. One of the most popular vignettes of the cruelty of the slave trade in transatlantic abolitionist discourse appeared in John Newton’s 1788 Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade, and concerned the case of a slave ship captain who, unnerved by an infant’s sobbing, grabbed the baby from its mother’s breast and threw it overboard. The story was picked up by Grégoire in his De la littérature des Négres, together with another notorious account of a captain who, lacking provisions, threw hundreds of captives wantonly into the sea (49–50). Both episodes are also cited by Vastey (17). Yet what is significant about Vastey’s account is not only that he relayed so many graphic instances of individual slaveholder cruelty, but the manner in which he did so—largely without feeling. The detached attitude of the narrator creates an effect of irony as he zeroes in on grotesque slaveholder violence without mincing words or editorializing: Saintard, settler, owner of a sugar plantation at Arcahaye, had a staggering number of blacks put to death. Jarosay the elder cut off the tongues of his house slaves so that he could be served in silence. Drouet, settler, resident of La Montagne, would have blacks crushed in his coffee mill if he felt they weren’t picking the beans quickly enough, or else he would have them drowned in coffee basins. (51)

Rather than showcasing the speaker’s or victim’s sensibility, what comes to the fore is the shocking distortion of feeling among slavemasters. Vastey writes of a certain Lombard, identified as a magistrate in Cap-Français, who ‘entertained himself by cutting off the ears of his unfortunate blacks; having reduced them to this cruel state, he would then burst into a fit of

unrestrained laughter’ (43). De Cockburne, a ‘knight of the order of SaintLouis’, habitually buried men alive and played at bowls with their heads. His plantation was an amusement park of brutality: ‘The avenues leading to the plantation-house of this cruel man were lined on both sides with different human body parts, which had been hacked into pieces on his orders… [F]acing the main residence, the trunk of the body, mutilated and impaled on a stake, served as a spectacle for the amusement of this barbarian’ (46). Vastey’s impassive narrative stance presents a stark contrast to texts by British and French abolitionists and Afro-British writers who commented on the generalized cruelty of slave life in terms of what may be called, after Haltunnen and Hartman, spectacular sentimentalism.21 Even Cugoano, one of the least sentimental antislavery writers, centres his account of the separation of newly arrived slaves in the colonies on the victims’ sensibility and emotional experience of suffering: Here daughters are clinging to their mothers, and mothers to their daughters, bedewing each others [sic] naked breasts with tears; here fathers, mothers, and children, locked in each others arms, are begging never to be separated; here the husband will be pleading for his wife, and the wife praying for her children, and entreating, enough to melt the most obdurate heart, not to be torn from them, and taken away from her husband. (95)

In the passage, the corporeal, embodied nature of the slave expresses his or her sentimental state insofar as the physicality of clinging, holding on, and shedding tears expresses not brute strength or violence but rather his or her capacity for feeling. Yet, Vastey’s resistance to sentimentalism is not surprising given the critiques of the sentimentalist exploitation of suffering that date back to the eighteenth century. As Karen Halttunen has noted, sentimental art made a spectacle of human agony by titillating readers with an almost sadistic voyeurism, what she calls the ‘pornography of pain’ (308–09). The pain of others is exploited both for the horror and for the sweeter feeling of sympathetic identification that provides tender-hearted readers with a confirmation of their own virtue. Edmund Burke’s 1756 A Philosophical Enquiry was an important source for an early analysis of the enjoyment of representations of pain or suffering. For Burke, this enjoyment derives in part from the subject’s relief at not being in such torment, quite the opposite of sympathetic identification (see Carey, 29–30).22 Even in Equiano’s 1789

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavas Vassa, the African. Written by Himself, one of the earliest slave narratives, the author evinces frustration at the degree to which slave tortures have been repeated for sensational effect. Declining to elaborate further on ‘those many instances of oppression, extortion and cruelty, to which I have been a witness in the West Indies’, he complains, not without irony, that ‘the punishments of the slaves, on every trifling occasion, are so frequent, and so well known, together with the different instruments with which they are tortured, that it cannot any longer afford novelty to recite them; and they are too shocking to yield delight either to the writer or the reader’ (113). Vastey himself exhibits scepticism toward sentimentalism when in the opening sentences of the second chapter, in the very same passage in which he appeals to sentimental readers, he mockingly asks them to hold back their tears until his catalogue of slaveholder cruelty is fully revealed— ‘[D]o not weep too soon over this tableau, these slight sketches of the Trade and its horrors! Do not exhaust your sensibility. Hold back your sighs and your tears: you have seen and heard nothing yet!’ (35) Here Vastey appears to ridicule sentimental readers for searching for ever greater heights of emotional ecstasy. By focusing in the second chapter almost exclusively on the perpetrator’s objective doings, and by naming the accused, Vastey thus eschews sentimental excess in favour of an almost numbing insistence on acts and their authors. In this sense, his exposure of the ‘colonial system’ has more in common with a legal deposition, the purpose of which is to contribute to the process of discovery around a crime committed. Testimony documenting slave abuse was critical to the parliamentary hearings leading up to the British abolition of the slave trade. Some of the depositions submitted in the form of letters were collected in a pamphlet entitled The Horrors of the Negro Slavery Existing in our West Indian Islands comprising documents presented to the House of Commons in 1805.23 What we find there is a similarly dispassionate recounting of facts by eyewitness observers. Yet, what most likens Vastey’s text to the status of legal testimony is his focus on the identity of the accused. More so than the crimes themselves, what matters is the revelation of the names of the perpetrators. Again speaking to former colonists, Vastey announces the affective intent behind his testimony against

particular individuals. Rather than attempting to soften the hearts of colonists whose souls are ‘inaccessible to remorse and pity’ and whose lack of feeling places them outside of humanity, Vastey wishes only to inflict shame: ‘I can at the very least make you tremble, by unveiling your misdeeds and recording your names on these pages, so that they might be held in abhorrence by your contemporaries and by generations to come’ (35). Later he adds: ‘I will be heard and understood by the feeling and impartial European, and the brutal colonist will shake and tremble upon seeing his foul deeds brought to light’ (39). In putting colonists on trial before the men of feeling and inspiring revulsion in the latter, Vastey deploys shaming as a form of punishment, one that will persist as long as his work commands a readership. Vastey’s emphasis on shaming is entirely consistent with the trope of unveiling when we consider that shame follows from the experience of being seen; it therefore ‘attends being observed and judged’ (Deonna, 48–49). Theologian and ethicist Stephen Pattison points out the close, often etymological relation between shame and notions of covering and concealing, thus suggesting the possible link between the sense of shame and the desire to be hidden from sight (40). This connection elucidates Vastey’s choice of the metaphors of veiling and unveiling through which to mount a critique of proslavery writings by a range of authors such as Barré de Saint-Venant, Félix Carteau, Berquin Duvallon, and Malouet. Commenting on the discourse of essential black savagery proffered by these colonial apologists, Vastey concludes that most were careful not to rend the veil from the crimes of their accomplices. Precious few have had the courage to speak the truth, and even when speaking it they have sought to disguise it, to diminish the enormity of those crimes through their manner of expression. Thus, out of cowardice and self-interest, these writers have cast a veil over the outrageous crimes of the colonists. (39)

What is interesting is that the casting of the veil not only throws suspicion upon the writer as implicated in the crime, it becomes almost morally equivalent to abetting the crime, since it renders that crime unactionable. As an example, Vastey cites proslavery justifications of slavery as a humanitarian, enlightened institution that ultimately benefits slaves. In the opening pages of the work, Vastey frames the purpose of his writing as the refutation of the claim by Deslozières, cited in Grégoire, that ‘through slavery

one makes men worthy of heaven and earth’ (13). Later attacking the ‘apologists of the colonial system’, Vastey writes, you dare to paint an imaginary picture of the blissful condition of the black man transported to the colonies, and to assert that you have done him an essential service by tearing him away from those savage regions of the world so that he can enjoy the comforts of civilization and the benefits of your paternal administration! It suits you very nicely, you and your kind, to affect the language of humanity. (38–39)

Here, in defining ex-colonists as false humanitarians hypocritically adopting the veil of paternalism, Vastey identifies the criteria necessary for effective shaming, notably the existence of shared moral norms between the wrongdoer and the community (see D. M. Kahan, qtd. Deonna, 193). Yet, the colonial veil was not merely an ideological conceit, it was quite literally a suppression of key forms of evidence, as names were deliberately withheld in colonial accounts of the cruelty of slaveholders even by critics of slavery. By covering up the names these writers suppressed precisely what would have made these incidents actionable as crimes. Perhaps the most striking example is the above-mentioned case of cruelty described by Baron de Wimpffen in which a furious mistress has her slave thrown into a flaming oven. What we find in Wimpffen’s own rather sentimental account is the author’s intentional veiling of the perpetrator’s identity, though perhaps not without compunction, when he speaks of her as ‘this horrible Megæra, whose name I suppress out of respect to her family; this infernal fiend [cette Tysiphone] whom public execration ought to drive with every mark of abhorrence from society’ (1797b, 216; 1797a, 2.10). Here, Wimpffen substitutes other names—mythological and profane—for the perpetrator’s hidden real name in an effort to heap upon her the retribution that his own act of veiling in fact renders impossible. This incident is followed by another case of a master who orders the excessive flogging of a slave for not following instructions. Again, Wimpffen both suppresses the name and draws attention to this omission by providing other markers of identity. Shocked that the colonist was in fact ‘one of the first organs of the law, the official protector of innocence’, Wimpffen exclaims: ‘Heavens! if a pitiful respect for decorum [de misérables raisons de bienséance] forbids me to devote the name of this monster to eternal infamy, let me at least be permitted to hope that Divine Justice will hear the cries of the sufferer, and sooner or

later accumulate on the tyrant’s head, all the weight of its vengeance!’ (1797b, 218; 1797a, 2.12) Here again, Wimpffen appeals to the divine to deliver the justice that his cover-up proscribes, a justice that is all the more pressing given that colonial jurists are at the forefront of the criminality. By contrast, Vastey literally corrects and completes the colonial record by putting names and faces on the anonymous acts or broadly defined cruelties that may have otherwise only titillated readers with sublime horrors. Especially compelling is his naming of the perpetrator of one of the more notorious colonial scandals after Lejeune’s 1788 case. In his Voyage d’un Suisse dans différentes colonies d’Amérique pendant la dernière guerre (1785), Swiss travel writer Justin Girod-Chantrans described the story of a case of incest in which a master used violence in order to seduce his illegitimate mixed-race daughter, only to be strangled in bed by her brothers, also his mixed-race sons, who were later put to death with the daughter (158–59). Vastey’s very first example of colonial cruelty makes reference to a similar incident but attaches a name to the story: ‘Poncet, habitant sucrier au Trou’. Describing the infernal conditions in Poncet’s home and his castration of his domestics, Vastey recounts a crime of incest and murder: After committing incest with his natural daughter, he had her put to a most excruciating death, along with her mother, by placing boiling wax in their ears and leaving it to melt. This inhuman barbarian was strangled by his son and the house slaves, provoked into taking their just revenge. They were broken alive on the wheel for that murder. (40–41).

Vastey’s accused derive from all echelons of colonial society, including the elite: wealthy planters, colonial magistrates, councilmen, lawyers for the colonial courts, noblemen, slave ship captains, and political figures such as Augustin-Jean Brulley, the chief colonial lobbyist in Paris in the early 1790s and author in 1814 of Propositions pour rentrer en possession de la partie française de Saint-Domingue. White women come in for special criticism as being maniacally jealous and sadistic, surpassing their husbands in ‘debauched and indecent conduct [en débauche, en impudicité]’ (62). Vastey displays such confidence in the accuracy of his allegations that he almost dares his colonial readership to prove him wrong: ‘I am providing the names of the colonists who perpetrated these crimes, and I defy any of them to contradict me’ (40). Although the vast majority of his examples are undocumented, those that are refer to a number of sources including oral history, eyewitness

or victim accounts, Moreau de Saint-Méry’s compendium of colonial court judgements, and manuscript and published sources. Regarding the oral testimony, Vastey vouches for the truth of his facts by saying that they are ‘a matter of common knowledge [ils sont notoires]’ and that he ‘collected them from the survivors of families whose kinsfolk experienced the acts of torture I am going to try and sketch here’ (40). The witnesses, he continues, are ‘unimpeachable’, because they suffered these tortures and still wear the scars: ‘As evidence in support of their acts of witnessing, they have shown me limbs mutilated by iron or roasted by fire. I have obtained these facts from a great many notable and credible people’. Among his written sources are colonial texts by Garran-Coulon and Wimpffen, and the mémoire of an excolonist named Dumontellier. Despite his occasional effort to provide sources, however, there is no way to confirm his accusations and many may strike the modern reader as exaggerated or apocryphal. What is more, despite his refusal of sentimental aesthetics, by focusing on individual atrocities he nonetheless reifies spectacular violence and frames his critique of slavery primarily as a revulsion before its excesses. Still, his style renders this chapter the most effective exhibit in an elaborate historical, legal, and ethical argument against French colonialism in Saint-Domingue. Turning against former colonists the same arguments of congenital moral vice and debauchery used against blacks and mixed-race people under colonialism in order to explain their brutality, Vastey concludes: ‘History offers us no example of an aggregation of men resembling the colonists of SaintDomingue in their criminality’ (62).24 Yet, if naming and shaming work to instil revulsion against colonial slaveholders on the part of the lecteur sensible, they are just as strategic as a means by which to inspire continued resistance on the part of Haitians so as to avenge these unpunished crimes and prevent Haiti’s return to slavery under the ideological veil of the colonial system. Vastey moves seamlessly from a demand that colonists be shamed to one of justice for the dead, and it is here where his Haitian readership comes to the fore. Far from being directed only to philanthropists and colonists, as some of his expressions suggest, Vastey’s work also addresses a Haitian readership whom he occasionally assimilates with blacks more generally: ‘These are the circumstances, so auspicious for the black man, in which I—as a friend to

my fellow-kind [ami de mes semblables], to my king and country— feel the need, the very compulsion, to unveil the barbaric Colonial System that has weighed us down for centuries’ (vii). Following the exposition of colonial crimes, the address dramatically shifts in the final pages of the text toward Haitians, when Vastey speaks directly to his countrymen: ‘O you, young Haytians, who possess the good fortune to have been born under the rule of law and liberty! You who are not familiar with those times of horror and barbarism, read what has been written. Never forget the misfortunes of your fathers, and learn to distrust your tyrants! Learn to hate them!’ (90) Here Vastey’s writing stands in for the lived experience of colonial slavery itself in motivating young Haitians to rise up again in defence of Haitian freedom and independence. Most of the last ten pages are an extended call to arms, with numerous emphatic apostrophes to ‘Haytiens!’ Redirecting his sentimental affect toward the demands of justice, Vastey models for Haitians the appropriate emotional response to the memory of colonial atrocities and the discourse of colonial nostalgia: ‘Haytians, do your hearts not rise up in anger at the language of these colonists, at the memories of these oppressors whom we have vanquished in so many battles? Do you not feel the blood boiling in your veins?’ (91) Righteous indignation is expressed as originating in the sensitive heart and pulsating through the veins. In addressing his countrymen as readers of Colonial System, however, Vastey both reinvests agency in Haitians and connects with the rhetorical strategies and thematic content of Haitian Revolutionary writing dating back to at least Dessalines. Justice for the dead is obtainable not by the European spectator, but by Haitians—surviving victims and descendants of the dead. Even in the opening pages of the work, where Vastey inserts his sentimental authorial persona, we find a rather sharp digression in which he passionately praises the weapons that delivered present-day Haitians from extermination, the fate of the island’s precolonial inhabitants: Had they no weapons, those unhappy souls? Could they not defend themselves? At this thought, I seize hold of my own weapons and thank the heavens for having placed in our hands the instrument of our deliverance and our preservation. O precious force of arms! Without you what would have become of my country, my compatriots, my kinsfolk, my friends? (4)

Here Vastey relates Haitian militarism to sensibility insofar as only violence will enable the bonds of love and friendship to endure. Later, Vastey invokes the 1804 Declaration of Independence in order to inspire Haitians to righteous vengeance against their former oppressors. Thus in the final pages Vastey reprises the rhetoric through which Dessalines had raised the spectre of a continued French presence and cultural influence, which would threaten Haitian sovereignty: When bayonets were crossed, we put our cruel enemies to flight; we laid to rest that supposed superiority of the white man, and yet their shadow could still. . . . . . . . No, no, that time is gone. It will never return. Should we be annihilated, down to the very last one of us, this would still be preferable to bowing our heads under the despotic yoke that once oppressed us. (91)

This passage, in which Vastey both heralds the past bravery of Haitians in defeating the French and demands a renewed commitment to the definitive expulsion of the French and their despotic system of slavery, calls to mind the opening of the Declaration, which reads: ‘It is not enough to have expelled the barbarians who have bloodied our land for two centuries… We must, with one last act of national authority, forever ensure liberty’s reign in the country of our birth… In the end we must live independent or die’ (qtd. Dubois and Garrigus, 188). Vastey’s text realizes the implicit prophecy in the earlier Declaration of Independence, which, far from declaring an end to revolution and the advent of sovereign independence, presaged the urgent continuation of revolutionary violence until the French presence as well as any remaining French colonial ambition in regards to Haiti was forever destroyed. Vastey goes on to forecast, through classical allusions to the Greco-Persian wars, the return of a French expeditionary army, which will be vanquished by Haitian arms: ‘Thus will some among us take our last step on the path of glory, but they will be avenged; liberty and independence will be triumphant, always and ever!’ (91) Although Vastey here explicitly addresses Haitians, his text, like Dessalines’s, is otherwise directed toward Europeans, more specifically the French. As such, these passages must also be read as a rhetorical performance meant to convey Haitian resolve and thus thwart French neocolonial designs. What is more, it is when defending Haitian liberty that Vastey engages in a dialogue with the latest French colonial ideology

proffered by Malouet and others who exploit Haitian political divisions between the northern and southern states, casting scorn on ‘[t]he news they invent, full of bloody—and imagined—battles, and in which they take real delight in parading pile upon pile of Haytians butchered by Haytians’ (92). His ideological critique doubles as a call to arms, as he implores Haitians: ‘Can we fail, in all this [invented news], to recognize our true and implacable enemies, the sole authors of our every misfortune?’ (92) Vastey elsewhere expresses impatience to join in the battle: ‘From every quarter we hear the cries of our fellow citizens: our tyrants are coming, to arms! We must hasten on, abridging the task we set for ourselves, that we might lay down the pen and take up the sword against our tyrants’ (74). The reader, of course, seizes the irony here; Vastey has already joined the battle by so eloquently instigating it. In rallying the troops, Vastey responds to French propaganda with some propaganda of his own, notably an argument for the unification of resistant Haitians around King Christophe, the figurehead of Haitian agency against French colonial crimes. This rhetoric is devoted both to Europeans and to Haitians of the southern republic. Christophe appears everywhere in the text as a legitimate soldier king and abolitionist military hero with roots in the Haitian Revolution itself. Linked also to ‘the cacique Henry’ (92), leader of the 1519 indigenous revolt against the Spanish, he is hailed, furthermore, as a divinely inspired and enlightened king, father, and saviour of Haitians, the only one who can ensure Haitian liberty and independence: ‘[L]et us rally round the great Henry, this good father, whose every care and solicitude is for the happiness of the Haytian family, all of whom are his children. He alone will guide the vessel of liberty and independence into port’ (92). Vastey goes on to survey Christophe’s cultural achievements, notably the creation of laws and institutions through which both to govern and form the Haitian people, lifting them up from their former state of slavery. It is thus in the passages on Christophe and Haitian independence where Vastey’s text diverges most dramatically from the genres of sentimental abolitionist tract or slave narrative; here the antislavery treatise is transformed into a radical defence of the agency and legitimacy of an abolitionist state, in which the antihero of abolitionism—the resistant slave —becomes both subject and author of his own history. Vastey’s own role as writer in this narrative of Haitian agency should not be overlooked, and it is

in fact foregrounded through references to Christophe’s magnanimity in generously supporting the printing arts and to the urgency of the very task of writing as a means of defending Haitian sovereignty and legitimacy on the world stage. ‘At present,’ he writes, we have Haytian presses of our own, and we can unveil the crimes of the colonists and respond to even the most absurd lies… If, under such circumstances, we did not take pen to paper, then we would indeed be as unworthy of the title ‘man’ as our enemies claim we are [Si dans de telles circonstances nous n’écrivions point, nous serions en effet indigne de la qualité d’homme, que nos ennemis nous contestent]. (95)

If writing constitutes the evidence of humanity for a people under siege literally and figuratively, the writer himself emerges alongside the soldier king as the privileged agent who alone can lift the veil, refute neo-colonial calumny, and give voice to the Haitian right to sovereignty. The metaphors of veiling and unveiling recur as figures for the act of writing itself, for if the colonial system is ‘based on violence and theft, on pillaging and lying’ (13), it is fundamentally enabled by duplicitous language and textuality. In exploring the relation between discourse and power, Vastey stands as an early precedent for the colonial discourse analysis of Aimé Césaire’s Discours sur le colonialisme (1950/1955) and Frantz Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs (1952), for whom decolonization required first and foremost the disalienation of the black via the deconstruction of colonial ideology. Yet, one of the central problems for Vastey in launching an effective critique of proslavery ideas was to do so in a manner that would explode European assumptions with regard to black writing in the contemporary Atlantic World. The abolitionist and proslavery establishments had already taken an interest in the works of African-descended writers, particularly those of former slaves, but they used them mainly as exhibits to demonstrate the relative intellectual capacity of blacks. That is, writing by blacks was typically considered merely as proof (or, for proslavery apologists, lack thereof) of the author’s ability to think rather than as texts to be read and engaged with in a relationship of equality. While Thomas Jefferson’s critique of Phillis Wheatley is notorious, the few pages of Grégoire’s De la littérature des Nègres that are actually dedicated to ‘black’ writers demonstrate the problem of their reception: what matters is more the fact that they have written than their ideas themselves.25 In the rare instances in which Grégoire offers some

analysis or qualitative judgement, it is negative or framed in the language of sympathy. For example, Cugoano is ‘a talent without culture’ who writes without method (218), and the poems of Phillis Wheatley are preceded by an apology to the reader: ‘in judging the productions of a nineteen-year-old black female slave [une Négresse esclave], to show indulgence is an act of justice; besides, the translation is perhaps but a bad copy of a good original’ (263). The implication, supported by the apparently liberal argument that slavery deterred the progress and capacities of the ‘black mind’, is that contemporary black intellectual production will necessarily be inferior to that of whites. This is not far from the standpoint of more conservative elements who judged any text published by a person of African descent to be inauthentic or ghost-written by a white. What is fascinating, then, is the way in which Vastey deflects, by his very writing style, the European assumption of black intellectual inequality. While his citations are extensive, his arguments substantial, and his evidence ample, Vastey’s text is marked first and foremost by its inflammatory tone, emotional emphasis, and use of irony, sarcasm, and insult. While at first Vastey appears to assume his designated role as the apologetic, selfdeprecating, sentimental Haitian showing due deference to the eloquence of white literate culture,26 he otherwise mocks any such pretension by stylistically obliterating all codes of deference and any basis for a hierarchical relation between himself and his readers. Using colourful terms and a directly confrontational style that many in his sentimental readership might find scandalous, Vastey dedicates much of the text to excoriating the ‘brigands’, ‘tyrants’, ‘torturers’, ‘villains’, and ‘monsters’, ‘soiled with our blood’, who have imposed their tyranny on Africans through the slave trade and colonial slavery. In veering toward irony and humour, he demonstrates emotional detachment and, at times, sarcasm, thus conveying contempt and disgust. Appalled that anyone would spend his life arguing against the evidence of black humanity, Vastey turns Eurocentric racialist fantasies against their originators by quipping that he knows how to blacken a white (32). Deriding white racism, he expresses joy at colonial brutality, without which Haiti would never have ‘br[oken] the chains of tyranny forever’ (85). Elsewhere he denounces whites’ colonial pretensions to truth as sophistry (31) and discredits their notions of justice and humanity by tying them to the

worst excesses of libertinage and incest in the colony (89). He goes on at length about the variety of racially white nations that are more conveniently located with respect to Europe than those in Africa but still sufficiently ‘bastardized’ and ‘degenerate’ to be enslaved, and by this means led to la civilisation (21). We find long passages in which Vastey makes a direct apostrophe to the ex-colonists as vous; speaking to them as in real time, he makes a frontal attack in the incendiary terms of irony and parody. In these respects, Vastey thus models, through his stylistic choices, the equality that his discourse otherwise vehemently defends. This strategy was not, however, completely innocent, insofar as Vastey in this text appears as the sole mouthpiece, indispensable warrior, and hero of the epic Haitian struggle for independence and recognition, a point that is suggested in the text’s final lines when Vastey implicitly compares his writing to the blade of a bayonet: ‘It is against them [the shameful colonists] that we are directing these writings of ours. And it is for them, and for those who support them, that we are sharpening the bayonets that are going to pierce their bellies!!!’ (96) Given the numerous parallels suggested in the text between writing and warfare, ideological critique and the liberation of Haitians, the question arises as to the relationship of the writer to the sovereign for whom he writes. Especially revealing in this regard is Vastey’s dedicatory epistle to the King, which precedes the text proper and appears to establish a relationship of both mutual dependence and deference: SIRE, permit me to say it, your majesty is the only Sovereign, the only black Prince, in a

word the only man of our colour, who can speak up and make his voice prevail among the Sovereigns of Europe and at the Tribunal of Nations in pleading the cause of our oppressed Brethren. Destined by Divine Providence to bring the regeneration of the Haytian People to fruition, and to have them take their seat among the ranks of independent Peoples, your majesty is one of the first Founders of liberty, the noblest and most ardent defender of the rights of man… You are the one who has infused our souls with the energy and noble daring that spurs us onward [qui a imprimé dans nos âmes cette énergie, cette noble audace qui nous animent]. (iii–iv)

Vastey’s performative language attempts to bring into being the desired recognition and influence of the King’s sovereignty. Insofar as it is Vastey’s pen that conveys the illiterate Christophe’s voice, however, Vastey in effect pleads for his own writing to be read and received. But, lest the author’s scriptural prowess elevate him over the monarch’s power of voice, the

metaphor of ‘imprinting’ casts Christophe as a writer and as an almost supernatural force who recreates his people and inspires them to be noble in his image. Vastey’s many publics—European and Haitian—are simultaneously addressed here through the portrayal of Christophe as a natural, divinely appointed sovereign commanding both recognition abroad and submission at home. As such, Vastey’s text may be read as a form of public diplomacy, understood as an effort on the part of a state to communicate directly with foreign publics in order to influence opinion and defend their interests (I. Hall, 252–54). In a final appeal to the white reader’s sense of justice and sensibility, Vastey makes these interests explicit: We write, so as to vindicate our indestructible and eternal rights, and on behalf of the most just of all causes. We write so as to have the same advantages that civilized peoples enjoy. We write so as to deliver ourselves from the oppression of our tormentors. Who is the white man with so little generosity, no matter what nation he belongs to, that he would not applaud the noble design that inspires us? Who would not join with us in expressing these same wishes? (96)

As we have seen, Baron de Vastey’s Le système colonial dévoilé is a genre-defying work that advances what was still a radical argument in European abolitionist circles—that slaves have the right to resist the tyranny of their masters and, in so doing, establish and defend an independent state. That this argument was made in a text that straddled the styles of sentimentalism, legal deposition, memoir, political propaganda, and public diplomacy, and was addressed to several highly incompatible publics in vastly different national, geopolitical, and social circumstances—l’européen sensible, ‘philanthropists’, sovereigns, former colonial slaveholders, and Haitians of all political leanings—only adds to its generic and rhetorical complexity and to the reader’s difficulty in making sense of it. I would argue that what accounts for the nature of the text’s inconsistencies and divergent rhetorical and political strategies is the impossible or nonexistent discursive subject position that Vastey, and Haiti as a whole, was forced to assume in the international public sphere of 1814. As much or more as it unveils the crimes of the colonial system or Haiti’s contemporary political needs, therefore, Vastey’s Colonial System tells the story of the effort of Haitians to find a voice on the world stage and to overturn the assumption of inequality that denied them both public recognition and sovereignty. In the situation of

non-recognition in which Haiti found itself, the defence of Haitian sovereignty could not simply be limited to the language of state realpolitik, as in Christophe’s 1814 manifesto—it had to engage with contemporary discourses of abolitionism, the Enlightenment, human rights, and international law in order to justify the existence of an abolitionist state. In short, Haitians had to make a public diplomatic appeal in the idiom of the emergent public sphere, which was already saturated by pro- and antislavery propaganda. Insofar as these discourses were shaped by sentimentality, racial and class bias, and other ideological pressures that forced the symbolic subjugation of blacks to Europeans, even in freedom, Vastey was forced to straddle seemingly incompatible subject positions between agency and passivity, subject and object, public and private. Yet, as I have argued, in the interstices of these tensions what emerges is, nonetheless, the most politically radical antislavery tract of its time, one that defied European assumptions about Haiti, black humanity, and the status of the black writer in the Atlantic World.

Notes * I would like acknowledge a few scholars and writers whose work, while not cited here, has been an inspiration to me in my study of the Baron de Vastey and, more broadly, the regime of Henry Christophe: Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Sybille Fischer, and Lyonel Trouillot. 1 On the history of British abolitionism from the 1780s to the early nineteenth century, see Temperley, Blackburn, Walvin, and Turley. 2 For the Treaty itself, see http://napoleononline.ca/wpcontent/uploads/2011/03/Treaty-of-Paris-1814.pdf. For an illuminating reading of the 1814 Peace of Paris in the context of Haitian diplomatic isolation, see Coradin (62–66). On British machinations to achieve total abolition of the trade at the Congress of Vienna, see Reich. 3 On the Dauxion Lavaysse mission, see Coradin (67–84) and Madiou (5.244–283). For Vastey’s version of events, see his 1819 Essai sur les causes de la révolution et des guerres civiles d’Hayti (204–24). 4 The allowance given to France to practise the slave trade in the Treaty of Paris provoked public outcry first in Britain. British abolitionists, supported by a broad coalition of political interests, mounted an effective domestic opposition to the ratification of the treaty and organized delegations to France to instigate opposition to further French involvement in the trade (see Geggus (1985, especially 117–21) and Blackburn (319–21)).

5 As David Geggus has shown, the official planter explanation for the 1791 insurrection blaming abolitionist activity was presented in the form of a speech to the French National Assembly and later printed as a pamphlet. It was translated and published in England as A Particular Account of the Commencement and Progress of the Insurrection of the Negroes of St. Domingo (1792), and went through four editions. On the polemic that this pamphlet inspired in Britain, see Geggus (1982a, 125–26). On British accusations that abolitionist agitation incited the slaves to rebel, see also Turley (175–76) and Temperley (5). On the decline of the Société des Amis des Noirs in the wake of the insurrection, see Cohen (182–84) and Jennings (2–8). Scholars point out that British antislavery activity was dramatically curtailed following reports of massacres by black troops in 1793–94 (see Geggus, 1982a, 128). 6 The notable exceptions to the silence on abolition were the abbé Grégoire and Madame de Staël. On Grégoire’s writing in this period, see Benot (1992, 256–66). On his involvement in the international abolitionist movement and his later contacts with Haitian leaders, see Sepinwall (2005, 181–98). 7 Thomas Clarkson’s 1792 The True State of the Case respecting the Insurrection at St. Domingo was published as the official response of the London Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade to planter accusations of abolitionist involvement in the 1791 insurrection. On the ideological positions taken in this work and its production, see Geggus (1982a, 126) and Turley (176). 8 David Geggus cites two notable exceptions: both William Roscoe and Percival Stockdale, two of the more radical, and marginal, abolitionists, openly defended the violent actions of slaves in pursuit of freedom (1982a, 127). 9 The pursuit of abolition of the slave trade over slavery itself dates back to the origins of organized British ‘antislavery’ with the establishment of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787. Although Granville Sharp, a co-founding member, had urged that the society dedicate itself to the general abolition of slavery, the group opted to take on the slave trade as a more manageable, and less controversial, first step. The abolition of slavery became an explicit aim of the recomposed British Anti-Slavery Society in 1823. On the history of British abolitionism, see Blackburn (130–160, 293–330, 419–72), Temperley, and Turley. 10 The medallion carrying the image of the kneeling slave and the inscription ‘Am I Not a Man and a Brother?’ was designed by Josiah Wedgwood in 1787 for the London Abolition Society. It instantly became the emblem of the abolitionist movement as well as a massproduced commercial sensation, appearing on dishes and jewellery, and it was later exported to France (see Parsons). 11 On the philosophical origins of sensibility, see Ellis (9–17), Festa (14–66), and Halttunen. On the elevation of the ‘man of feeling’ in eighteenth-century British liberalism and its relation to abolitionism, see Davis (1999, 46). 12 In De la littérature des Nègres (1808), abbé Grégoire went to great lengths to argue for what he called the ‘moral qualities’ of Africans, including their ‘supreme degree’ of ‘filial and paternal tenderness’, their ‘natural goodness’, and their charity toward the poor (107– 28).

13 On the use of the sentimental register in French antislavery literature, see Dobie (254– 86), Reinhardt (76–85), and Hoffmann (82–98). 14 In identifying the captatio benevolentiae, I am indebted to Brycchan Carey’s discussion, in British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Antislavery (131), of the rhetorical significance of a specific apology that appears in the Preface to Clarkson’s Essay. Carey interprets Clarkson’s request for the reader’s forgiveness of stylistic foibles resulting from the hasty translation of his volume from Latin to English as an instance of captatio benevolentiae, thus as a means of ingratiating himself to the public. I am using the concept as a means by which to understand a larger phenomenon: that is, how prominent abolitionists’ formal praise, in their prefatory texts, of a tradition of antislavery writing served to demonstrate appropriate modesty and secure the good will, trust, and attention of their readers. 15 Vastey adopts a similar deference in his Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères, in which he occasionally justifies his intervention as a contribution to the efforts of European sages and an act of gratitude: ‘so do I hope that the philanthropists of the present day will find in Haiti a support for their powerful lever, by means of which they may raise the whole moral world in opposition to the enemies of the human race’ (1816c, 4). His writing otherwise belies this passive stance. 16 On Afro-British writing in the eighteenth century, see Carretta, Potkay, and Sandiford, as well as the essays collected in Carretta and Gould. 17 Equiano addressed his book to the House of Lords and the House of Commons in Great Britain, which were beginning debate on the abolition of the slave trade, and most British abolitionist intellectuals were subscribers to the original edition. The book became a central exhibit in the abolitionist cause. On Equiano’s connection to the antislavery movements, see Costanzo (42–43) and Sandiford (118). 18 See, for example, ‘On Being Brought from Africa to America’, in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (13). 19 For Cugoano, just retaliation involves doing the necessary to keep the ‘punishers’, or the captives who retaliate against their oppressors, from harm, and to ‘deliver the oppressed and the captive’. Anything more, particularly anything that involves reproducing the same forms of oppression and visiting them on the formerly dominant group, is unjustifiable. Cugoano classifies ‘revolutions’ in general in the category of ‘severe retaliations… and dreadful overthrows’ (75). 20 For a rich account of the Lejeune affair in relation to colonial legal history, see Ghachem (167–210). 21 Helpful sources on the spectacular dimension of suffering for the sentimental witness are Haltunnen (308–09) and S. Hartman (22). 22 For Haltunnen, Burke’s theory of the sublime also provides insight into the growing appeal of sensational scenes of torture, sexual violation, and murder found in late eighteenth-century English fiction (309, 311). 23 It is this work that publicized the shocking revelation that in the British colonies, ‘the life of a Negro slave is estimated at the cheap rate of eleven pounds four shillings sterling’ (2). 24 On the metaphor of congenital vice used against free people of colour in SaintDomingue, see Garraway (2005, 194–292).

25 Scholars of Phillis Wheatley perennially comment on Thomas Jefferson’s disparaging reading of her work in his Notes on the State of Virginia. For an illuminating discussion of this in the context of Grégoire’s conversation with Jefferson, see Brickhouse (98–100). 26 Vastey writes, ‘I, who am neither a white man nor a colonist, may not possess the same erudition, but I will not be lacking when it comes to citing examples. My Haytian pen will be lacking in eloquence, no doubt, but it will be truthful. The scenes I describe will be without embellishments, but they will be striking. The words I use will not always be the proper ones, perhaps, but what does that matter?’ (39)

3 Memories of Development: Le Système colonial dévoilé and the Performance of Literacy Chris Bongie Mr. Jefferson’s very severe remarks on us have been so extensively argued upon by men whose attainments in literature, I shall never be able to reach, that I would not have meddled with it, were it not to solicit each of my brethren, who has the spirit of a man, to buy a copy of Mr. Jefferson’s ‘Notes on Virginia’, and put it in the hand of his son. For let no one of us suppose that the refutations which have been written by our white friends are enough—they are whites—we are blacks. We, and the world wish to see the charges of Mr. Jefferson refuted by the blacks themselves, according to their chance; for we must remember that what the whites have written respecting this subject, is other men’s labours, and did not emanate from the blacks. I know well, that there are some talents and learning among the coloured people of this country, which we have not a chance to develope, in consequence of oppression; but our oppression ought not to hinder us from acquiring all we can. For we will have a chance to develope them by and by. David Walker, Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829)

I take as the starting point for my reading of Le système colonial dévoilé the obvious but scarcely commented upon fact that it is a text formally divided into two (unequal) halves: an opening section entitled Destruction of the first HAYTIANS. Origin of the Slave Trade. Monstrosity of this Traffic and a second, much longer one entitled Of the Colonial Regime, or the Horrors of Slavery! The binary structure of Colonial System provides a natural starting point for a consideration of its formal qualities, all the more so given that, with one exception,1 none of Vastey’s other texts features any sort of formal division into titled sections or numbered chapters.

In a glowing 1818 article on Colonial System published in (significantly enough) The Antijacobin Review, the author implicitly signalled this binary structure when, in describing the book’s contents, he chose simply to paraphrase its two section titles: ‘After dwelling on the distinction of the aboriginal Haytians, the origin of slavery, and the monstrosities in the traffic in human blood; the baron proceeds to an enumeration of the cruelties which the French inflicted on his unfortunate countrymen’ (‘Système’, 243; my italics). Rather than providing an arbitrarily ordered list of the book’s themes, of the sort one finds in other reviews of it,2 the author of this article insists that the book’s contents be situated in a temporal relation to one another. The before/after connection he establishes is the most rudimentary form of emplotment, a purely linear one, as evidenced by the verb proceeds. But what if (and here is the speculative kernel of my argument) one were to substitute for it the verb progresses? In that case, we would be faced with a far more dynamic narrative procedure, in which the passage from the first to the second ‘chapter’ marked a development of some sort, a progressive advancement from one stage to the next. It is precisely this developmental reading of Colonial System that I want to pursue by mapping the very different ways in which Vastey’s source materials are deployed in the two parts of this book: maladroitly at first, with a seemingly undue deference to his written materials (which extends to plagiarizing them at a good many points), and then with greater authority (which derives from supplementing his written sources with oral testimony). The two-part structure of Colonial System, in short, is the formal, heuristic device that allows Vastey to tell, obliquely, a story about himself by telling the story of his (still-ongoing) apprenticeship in reading. In using words like apprenticeship and development, of course, I am invoking the (ostensibly) progressive language of the Bildungsroman, that ‘genre of demarginalization’, as Joseph Slaughter calls it (in his groundbreaking analysis of its ‘consubstantial and mutually reinforcing’ relation to human rights law)—a genre that first emerged in the eighteenth century and even today ‘retains its historic social function as the predominant formal literary technology in which social outsiders narrate affirmative claims for inclusion in a regime of rights and responsibilities’ (134, 4, 27). Despite the fact that Vastey is not, to state the obvious, writing a

novel and, more to the point, that we are time and again frustrated in our natural(ized) desire for the sort of autobiographical, self-centred narrative through which we might be able to discern his (developing) humanity, Colonial System can be usefully read in relation to the plot trajectory of this demarginalizing, socially incorporative genre: it tells the same transitional story about human development, its advantages and constraints, as does the Bildungsroman, but traces this ‘movement of the subject from pure subjection to self-regulation’ (9), at a metonymic remove from the actual subject, through an emplotment of the subject’s (developing) reading practices. As Slaughter notes, ‘an apprenticeship in reading is a constitutive feature of the Bildungsroman’s plot’, and one that has become especially evident in ‘contemporary postcolonial (and metropolitan minority) Bildungsromane’, which, unlike most canonical nineteenth-century Bildungsromane, ‘rarely take literacy for granted’ but instead ‘tend to foreground the process of learning to read and write as a significant part of the curriculum vitae of modern personality development and to make it a primary topos of the novelistic genre’ (286). Explicit references to reading and ‘the transfer of literary technology’ it makes possible are quite plentiful in Colonial System, anticipating, in a manner that is itself impressively novel, the sort of concerns about the acquisition of literacy that will be narrativized in many a postcolonial Bildungsroman; what is even more interesting about this text, however, is the way in which those explicit concerns (mastering literacy as content) are already implicitly narrativized at the level of form, in the text’s dynamic use of textual sources to figure forth the progression from a state of readerly subjection to one of an ambivalently emancipatory self-regulation. As the footnote apparatus of this bicentenary edition bears witness, there are plentiful instances to draw on when examining Vastey’s use of textual sources in Colonial System and the way in which the deployment of those sources lends itself to a developmental reading of the sort I have just outlined. In the pages that follow, I touch upon a number of these, but my analysis hinges on two pivotal junctures in the text that, taken together, best exemplify the transitional Bildungsroman movement from readerly subjection to self-regulation, the first of these being the opening paragraph of the first chapter and the two footnotes that are attached to it. The beginning of Colonial System in many respects stands out from the rest of the book, most notably in its eloquent emphasis on an autobiographical

‘I’ that is otherwise only sporadically present in the pages to follow. Reflecting upon the extinction of the original population of his native land (‘terre de mon pays’; 1814b, 3), this ‘I’ gives an account of himself roaming the Haitian countryside, coming across shards of the indigenous past and even, in remote caves, discovering ‘skeletons still intact, human bones scattered about and blanched over time’ (3; ‘je découvre en frémissant des squelettes encore tout entier, des ossemens humains épars et blanchis par le temps’ (my italics))—the landscape here taking on a symbolic resonance, as the entry into the enclosed space of the caverne doubles the mental journey back into the past. A poetics of memory, jointly autobiographical and cultural, is thus introduced in the lengthy opening paragraph, setting the tone for the later invocation of the ‘shades of the dead’ (les mânes) that will preface the extended inventory of tortured slaves in the middle of the text. Creating an interesting parallel between Vastey’s own ‘discovery’ (‘je découvre’) of Haiti’s first peoples and Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of the New World over three centuries before (9, 10), to say nothing of the voracious Spaniards’ ‘marvellous gift for discovering gold’ (2), Vastey’s opening scene is a promising one from a formal point of view. It is surely no coincidence that one reviewer at the time singled out this passage, which ‘brings before our eyes the shocking and bloody picture of an entire people exterminated, of whom ruins and tombs are the only vestiges’, as a ‘beautiful and touching apostrophe’ (‘History’, 73) and paid it (along with one later example from Colonial System) the ultimate compliment of affirming that ‘no translation can give the English reader an adequate idea of the force and beauty of these passages’ (74).3 This vividly narrated and rhetorically charged autobiographical opening, however, is only half of the story being told in the beginning of Colonial System, for it is doubled by two footnotes that take up significantly more space in the original edition than the body of the text (see Figures 3 and 4). These two footnotes are themselves in stark contrast with one another: the first occupies but a single line on page 1, whereas the second takes up fortysix lines in total—thirty-seven on page 2 (which is to say all but two of the lines on that page), and an additional nine on page 3. What are we to make of this visual imbalance, which cannot help but strike any reader of the original text? These doublings of textual space are, I would argue, the first

signs pointing in the direction of another reading, an allegory of the subject reading, if you will, that contrasts with the confidently enunciated ‘I’ of the opening paragraph and the stirring, and overtly phallic, appeal to ‘the precious force of arms’ (‘O armes précieuses!’) with which it concludes.4 The first of these two footnotes could not be simpler, or more unhelpful, notwithstanding the exact pagination it provides: ‘Garcilaso de la Vega, page 108’. As a footnote reference illuminating the sordid passion for gold that ‘drove the Spaniards to bring the lives of the unfortunate emperors of Mexico and Peru to such an ignominious end’ (1), it leaves a lot to be desired. For some informed readers in 1814, the name of Garcilaso might have sufficed at least to refer them back to his Comentarios reales de los Incas (1609/1617), and its detailed rendering of the Andean world before and after the Spanish conquest of Peru; it might even have conjured up for some the idea of a writer situated between worlds, Garcilaso el Inca—Spanish on his father’s side, Indian on his mother’s. For most readers today, this double subject-position of the mestizo historian is an inescapable part of what the Inca’s name refers to: Garcilaso as a teller of hybrid histories, locating himself ‘both at the authentic root of American civilization and at the modernizing vanguard of European culture’ (Sommer, 408), and thereby becoming ‘the first writer to attempt to incorporate indigenous elements into a Western discourse, in effect transforming the way a European audience conceived of Inca history and culture’ (Zamora, 3). This is the sort of history-telling that, we cannot help imagining, would surely have resonated with a writer of similarly mixed origins like Vastey: a borderline history, of the sort Haitian critic Jean Casimir posits when he places Vastey in relation to Latin Americanist Walter Mignolo’s ‘reflections on borderthinking and how those evolving at the margins of contrasting worldviews can access universal or, better still, pluriversal vision’ (2011, 27).

Figure 3    Le système colonial dévoilé (1814), first page

But it turns out that Vastey’s relation to Garcilaso is actually far more mediated than the one we might like to imagine on the basis of this unforthcoming footnote, which is, in fact, a practically verbatim citation of a note in Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois (1748), specifically Book 26, Chapter 22, where the French philosophe laments the ‘unhappy fate’ of the last Incan emperor, Atahuallpa, whom the Spaniards in 1533 wrongly judged, and executed, ‘not according to the political and civil laws of his country, but according to those of their own’. In a footnote attached to this claim, Montesquieu states simply: ‘See the Ynca Garcilaso de la Vega, p. 108’ (235). After the necessary research has been done into exactly which editions of Garcilaso were owned by Montesquieu, the philosophe’s footnote can be traced back to the Inca’s own account of the trial and execution of Atahuallpa (a second cousin of his) in Book 1, Chapter 37 of the second part of the Comentarios reales de los Incas, the Historia General del Peru (1617). So what is absent from Vastey’s seemingly innocuous, if nonetheless conspicuous,

opening footnote is any sense of his mediated relation to the sort of hybrid history Garcilaso is writing. The mediated nature of this relation does not make it any less interesting or productive, but it certainly complicates a reading of Vastey that might wish to see him the way the footnote on page 1 encourages us to see him; for Vastey, and those who wish to recuperate his work today, the path back (or forward) to a mestizo history capable of ‘invert[ing] the process of conquest in its discursive dimension’ (Zamora, 3) will not be as straightforward as one might wish. That is one important lesson to draw from a close reading of this first footnote.

Figure 4    Le système colonial dévoilé (1814), pp. 2–3 However, the most obvious point to be made with regard to this footnote is that it signals an immature, to say nothing of plagiaristic, relation on Vastey’s part to his source materials. Even by the looser evidentiary

standards of the age when it comes to footnote documentation, it is a flubbed opportunity, but it is precisely this sort of clumsy performance that helps convey a Bildungsroman-like sense of ‘progression’ in Vastey’s reading practices over the course of Colonial System. The Garcilaso footnote is an awkward beginning, a moment of bibliographical ineptitude that testifies to the author’s confusion regarding how to proceed (or, rather, how to progress). The second footnote, albeit in a completely different way, conveys a similar scene of subjection in relation to his source materials. This note elaborates at great length on the Spaniards’ thirst for gold, by describing a particular episode in the life of the Cuban cacique Hatuey as well as his death at their hands. Reading it, one knows very well that the material for this narrative must have ‘come from somewhere’, a Spanish or French history book, Las Casas, Charlevoix, or some such well-known source, but where exactly? No clue is given in the actual footnote, and the fact that it features no quotation marks leads one to assume that we are dealing with Vastey’s own paraphrase of an unnamed source. However, with a little digging, we again find that we are dealing with a verbatim quotation, and not from one of the expected, authoritative sources, but from a historical précis published in the most unlikely of places, given the strong anticolonial politics of Vastey’s text: namely, the ex-colonist S. J. Ducœurjoly’s 1802 Manuel des habitans de SaintDomingue, a primer written for potential French ‘emigrants’ to SaintDomingue at a time when it looked as if Napoleon’s invasion of the island would lead to a successful reimposition of slavery and planter rule in the colony. The account of Hatuey is taken from the over 200-page Introduction to Ducœurjoly’s book, penned by an unidentified author who begins his account of ‘the History of Saint-Domingue from its discovery by Columbus to the present day’ by celebrating General Leclerc’s recent ‘pacification of the richest of the Antilles’ (1.iii), and then looking forward to the coming time when ‘the former Planters, forgetting the disasters of war and the misfortunes of revolution, are going to return the land to its old prosperity’, while other citizens ‘are going to cross the seas to a becalmed Colony, in search of a ready path to fortune that seems out of their reach in Europe’ (iii–iv). While Vastey’s unacknowledged use here of Ducœurjoly’s Manuel signals the same sort of awkward relation to his reading materials that we witnessed in the first undeveloped footnote, only this time in an excessive mode that

threatens to overwhelm the body of the text, it also raises larger questions about his reliance on (the wrong sort of) colonial sources and, even more broadly, on the extent to which any representation of the destruction wrought by Europeans when they came to the New World can emancipate itself from the more ‘authentic’ source materials out of which the author of Ducœurjoly’s Introduction constructed the narrative that gets re-cited in Vastey’s footnote.5 It is this same question that the reader is forced to confront in the body of the text after its forceful opening apostrophe draws to a close, at which point the text takes a fundamental turn (for the worse) that no reader can fail to notice. Having advised the ‘sons of the mountain’ and ‘dwellers of the forests’ to cherish their weapons, ‘these precious tools for preserving your rights’, and to ‘pass them on to your children along with the love of liberty and independence, and a hatred for tyrants, as the finest legacy you can bequeath them’, the narrator then explicitly introduces the theme of reading that is already implicitly present in the footnotes: Cependant mon idée ne pouvant se détourner sur le tableau des infortunes des premiers haytiens, j’ouvre l’histoire, et je lis avec intérêt le passage suivant: » L’île d’Hayti, à l’apparition des espagnols, était divisée presque toute entière en cinq royaumes ou principautés, absolument indépendantes les uns des autres. (4) (For the English translation, see p. 87: ‘Unable, however, to avert my thoughts… independent of one another’.)

The shift marked by the guillemet (») introduces a quotation from the unnamed history book that does not end with this one sentence about preColumbian Hayti, of course, but extends for another six and a half pages in the original edition, finally breaking off on page 11. Thus, approximately 85 per cent of the material from these opening pages (which in turn makes up over 10 per cent of the entire text) is directly attributable to someone other than Vastey! What form of authorship is this, we cannot help asking, as we witness the first-person narrator disappear into his sources, in a gesture of self-effacement that is both jarring and disappointing? What sort of ‘opening’ onto the Haitian past does this lengthy repetition of the words of others offer us? This question is one we are all the more likely to ask when we learn that this extended quotation is, again, lifted from the anonymous Introduction to Ducœurjoly’s Manuel rather than some more respectable source such as Las Casas (or, better yet, someone with the cultural

credentials of a Garcilaso el Inca!), which could well explain why Vastey has suppressed any details regarding the identity of the history book from which he is quoting. In my argument, the early dominance of these source materials signals the first stage in an apprenticeship in reading that provides Colonial System with its underlying ‘plot’, as the text gradually moves toward a less deferent and more transparent treatment of such materials. While readily explained by the apprentice reader’s shame in relation to what he knows is an inappropriate source, written for the very people he and his fellow Haitians fought against in 1802, the lack of details regarding the history book does, to be sure, nonetheless also draw attention to the singular pretensions of Western history-telling, its sense of itself as l’histoire, rather than les histoires; even the most abject and derivative history book can, in this respect, stand in for a history that needs to be opened up to plural readings. And certainly, if one attends even more closely to Vastey’s lengthy quotation from Ducœurjoly’s Manuel, one can glimpse some such opening, because what passes for a single block quotation turns out to be six separate passages from the anonymous Introduction (covering almost forty pages of text) that have been stitched together, and by no means seamlessly. If the quotation as a whole testifies to a state of subjection in relation to Vastey’s reading material, its stitched together quality signals the possibility of a more active form of reading that knowingly reshapes the original by picking and choosing from it, while not changing a word. We can get a sense of what this active reading might entail by looking at the first detail from the Introduction that is excluded from the block quotation. In the original, after listing the five kingdoms into which ‘the island of Hayti’ was divided before the arrival of the Spaniards, the author goes on to note that the inhabitants of the fifth kingdom were the most seasoned warriors on the island when it came to defending themselves against ‘the attacks of the Caribs, their neighbours’. He then continues: One shudders to think what the reasons were that continually brought the Caribs to these shores. To lay hold of prisoners, massacred men, devoured entrails, and cured flesh; male children, deprived of their organs of generation, conscientiously fattened, roaming like wild beasts in well enclosed pens, reserved for feast days; girls and women, destined for breeding; the old and the infirm, burdened with the yoke of slavery. What an appalling tableau!

At the sight of such horrors, one might perhaps be tempted to cease believing that the discovery of this Island by the Europeans was the event that dealt the most fatal blow to their happiness. Be that as it may… (xxii–xxiii)

This unflattering portrait of the indigenous people, obviously, could have no place in Vastey’s text except as an explicit object of critique, of the sort he will later on in the first chapter direct toward the proponents of ‘scientific’ racism. But the absence of this passage from the block quotation and, more generally, the constructed (as opposed to merely replicated) nature of this quotation, is a critical gesture, albeit a virtually unreadable one. As Colonial System progresses, such gestures will become far easier to read, but already we get a sense here from Vastey’s construction work of what a (developing) mastery of critical reading practices might involve; his recombination of textual elements and the critical recognition it evinces is heartening evidence of what Joseph Slaughter would call ‘a postliteracy (or postcolonial literacy)—an ability not only to recognize and recombine letters but also to recognize the sociocultural inflections of literacy and the historical conditions in which it is prescribed, practiced, and prized as the primary means of initiation into (and exclusion from) modern society’ (288). The (constructed) block quotation ends with an account of the Spanish decision to import African slaves to Hispaniola as a response to the rapid diminishment of the indigenous population. After l’histoire breaks off, the autobiographical ‘I’ makes its long-awaited reappearance (albeit one that is overshadowed, in terms of visual presentation, by a monstrously long footnote attached to the end of the block quotation that provides one last verbatim extract from the Introduction to Ducœurjoly’s Manuel and occupies three pages of the original text (10–12)). We are immediately presented with Vastey’s outraged reaction to what he has just learned about the origins of the slave trade: ‘What! I exclaimed, drawing my reading to a close. It has been three hundred years now since these abominations were committed, solely for the purpose of amassing gold, and things are no different in our own day’ (11–12). The ‘I’ quite literally finds a voice in this opening sentence of the paragraph, with its movement from silent reading to oral exclamation (‘Hé quoi, m’écriais-je, en terminant cette lecture’; my italics), and its closing sentence reinforces this movement when, after stating his intention to sketch a portrait of the slave trade, he warns the former

colonists and supporters of the trade to listen carefully to what he is about to say (13; ‘colons et vous infâmes sectateurs de ce trafic abominable, prêtezmoi une oreille attentive!’). This attention to voicing and listening, as a supplement to and even substitute for reading, will take on great thematic significance in the second chapter of Colonial System, but in the pages that come directly after this warning the emphasis continues to be placed on (a more effective display of his) reading. In sketching his portrait of the slave trade and those it targets, Vastey focuses in the remainder of the first chapter of the book on four main concerns: the brutal realities of the trade itself (13–18); ‘la civilisation de l’Afrique’, in the double sense of bringing civilization to Africa and recognizing it (and Egypt in particular) as the cradle of civilization (18–23); daily life in present-day Africa, as seen through the sympathetic filter of European travel literature, and specifically the writings of Mungo Park (23– 30); and theories of black inferiority, as articulated by practitioners of racial ‘science’ and refuted by ‘ardent defenders of the rights of humanity’ such as abbé Grégoire (30–34). The text’s transatlantic passage here from America to Africa, and across the centuries, is characterized by an evident expansion in the number of Vastey’s source materials, as becomes clear right from the start when, to buttress his claim that were it not for the transatlantic slave trade Africa would ‘enjoy repose and happiness’, he asserts: ‘In almost every author who has written on this subject, we read that as long as one does not press them for slaves, they are at peace with one another’ (14; ‘Nous lisons dans presque tous les auteurs qui ont écrit sur ce sujet, que tant qu’on ne leur demande point d’esclaves, ils sont en paix’). This statement exemplifies the text’s movement at this stage from one central authority to a number of potentially competing authorities whose views have to be collated by the reading subject, if he is to develop his own views on the matter at hand. To be sure, if one inquires further into the provenance of the vaguely sourced claim, its seeming authority with regard to what ‘presque tous les auteurs’ have written on the subject can be readily depreciated,6 but we nonetheless encounter here and in the immediately ensuing pages a real opening up of the text to a diversity of sources that the apprentice writer needs to incorporate in order to develop his subject effectively, and to develop as a subject. Two named sources in particular emerge here as authoritative guides for how to

proceed, Mungo Park and abbé Grégoire, as can be seen from the fact that of the five footnotes in this part of the text (13–34), four involve specific citations from the French translation of Park’s 1799 Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (23, 26) and Grégoire’s 1808 De la littérature des Nègres (13, 17). A detailed analysis of how Vastey’s (developing) postcolonial literacy allows him to recognize and recombine particular elements from Park and Grégoire is beyond the scope of this essay. What I do need to establish here, however, is the particular dynamic linking the section devoted to Park and the following section based on the work of Grégoire, which forms the conclusion of the first chapter of Colonial System. In terms of a deployment of source materials, the relation between Park and Grégoire is not one of progression, but of a momentary return to the sort of problematic and overly deferent handling of those materials that we encountered earlier. Vastey’s account of Park is a confident presentation of the Scottish explorer’s widely read book of African travels, which selectively draws on it for evidence of the manners and the character of the blacks ‘that would do honour to the most civilized peoples’ (25), in a fashion that is easily as accomplished as, say, the similar-minded quotation-dependent presentation of Park’s Travels offered by William Wilberforce in that same month of October 1814 in a pamphlet addressed to the French Foreign Minister Talleyrand, urging France to give up the slave trade (82–88). To be sure, the account of Park provided by Vastey is a partial one, which includes evidence useful for his own critique of the slave trade while avoiding any mention of other evidence in the Travels that might be—and as Vastey knew full well, was being—cited by advocates of the slave trade (such as the ubiquitous references to African enslavement of Africans, or what Park called the ‘system of slavery which prevails in Africa’, and which, he argued, was ‘a system of no modern date… [that] probably had its origin in the remote ages of antiquity’ (1799, 297)). Park’s Travels was a book that readily and repeatedly lent itself to being ‘used by both sides of the debate’ in the opening decades of the nineteenth century (Marsters, 14),7 so there is nothing surprising or ‘shameful’ about the partiality of Vastey’s reading of Park; that it is manifestly his reading is the vital point to register here. By contrast, when we turn to his concluding enumeration of the ‘puerile

arguments’ that have been made and the ‘ridiculous tales’ that have been told by ‘learned writers and clever anatomists’ in their desire ‘to reduce the black man to a material being and nothing more’ (31; ‘matérialiser l’homme noir’), Vastey’s problematic reliance on another man’s labours, as David Walker would put it,8 is all too apparent—at least to anyone who has read Grégoire’s De la littérature des Nègres, from which every one of the dozen or so names cited has, without acknowledgment, been taken. A full sense of Vastey’s indebtedness to Grégoire can be gained by looking at the notes that bear on this section of the text in the footnote apparatus of my translation (see nn. 49–60). However, that discomfiting indebtedness, which extends in places to plagiarizing Grégoire, can be more efficiently conveyed here by examining one passage in particular from the concluding paragraph of the first chapter of Colonial System, where Vastey accuses the ‘enemies’ of the blacks of being poor readers, who have failed to open ‘the great book of nature’: S’ils avaient eu le cœur plein de cet esprit de religion et d’humanité, ils auraient ouverts le grand livre de la nature, et en voyant cette variété immense des œuvres du Tout-Puissant, ils auraient trouvé, sans peine, la solution de la question qu’ils avaient à résoudre; ils y auraient lu, en caractères ineffaçables, ces paroles de l’écriture: Tous les enfans du père céleste, tous les mortels se r’attachent par leur origine à la même famille. (34) (For the English translation, see p. 105: ‘If their hearts… the same family’.)

This passage echoes an earlier one in which Vastey advised those who ignorantly allege that civilizing Africa is impossible to take up their history books and read the story of their own less-than-civilized origins (20; ‘prends l’histoire, lis ton origine’). Taken together, they constitute an effectively ironic redeployment of the colonial logic that stigmatizes illiteracy and relegates illiterate peoples to ‘“an earlier state of affairs” in humanity’s progress narrative’ (Slaughter, 279); Vastey may only have opened l’histoire at the beginning of Colonial System, but in at least opening it he has already shown himself to be well ahead of his people’s detractors on the road to development. For our purposes, though, it is the ‘paroles de l’écriture’ at the end of the passage that are of primary interest because of what they tell us about Vastey’s relation to Grégoire. One can only assume that by ‘ces paroles de l’écriture’ Vastey means ‘these words from scripture’, especially given the fact that only a few paragraphs before he had introduced a line

from Proverbs with similar language (‘il n’y a, dit l’écriture, ni prudence, ni conseil, contre le Seigneur’; 33–34). It is not God, however, who wrote these ‘divine words’ about all children of the heavenly father springing from the same family, but abbé Grégoire.9 For Vastey, as for other Christophean scribes,10 the words of the ‘virtuous Grégoire’ threaten to become Holy Writ, an authoritative source that cannot be ‘meddled with’ (to recall the language David Walker uses to characterize his own contestatory reading of Thomas Jefferson). This is not to say that Vastey’s sardonic refutation of a dozen or so ‘learned writers and clever anatomists’ adds nothing to Grégoire’s account of them, far from it. But that refutation remains based almost entirely on another man’s labours, another man’s reading (and even, in the case of the several unacknowledged quotations, another man’s writing). How far along the path of readerly Bildung have we actually come by the end of the first chapter of Colonial System? The final line of that chapter forces this question out into the open, with its fulsome praise of the work of white philanthropists and the British nation: ‘we have been fully avenged on those human traffickers, thanks to the immortal and generous Wilberforce, the virtuous Grégoire’, etc. (34; ‘nous avons été pleinement vengés, de ces vendeurs d’hommes, par l’immortel et généreux Wilberforce, par le vertueux Grégoire…’; my italics). This reduction of the collective Haitian subject (nous) to the passive object of ‘other men’s labours’ is the existential and ideological impasse that, at the level of form, the text’s two-part structure registers, in the deferent ending of the first chapter, and yet also overcomes, in the movement from the first to the second. It is here that the text comes into its own, as Vastey moves from book memories of indigenous America and distant Africa to the lived memories of slavery in colonial Saint-Domingue, which find their most notable expression in an extended, and shockingly detailed, inventory of the acts of torture committed against slaves by individual colonists who are cited by name (40; ‘je cite nommément les colons auteurs de ces crimes’). Prepared for in the opening pages of the second part (35–40), and taking up over twenty pages of the original text (40–61), this inventory is authorized not by the sort of written sources upon which Vastey depended in the first chapter of Colonial System but by a new form of citation that relies chiefly upon what he has heard.11 This transfer of authority from written to oral

sources is what enables his text to develop, to go beyond the overly deferent use of reference material in the first part. The maturation process signalled by the passage from the first to the second part of Colonial System matches the transitional logic of the Bildungsroman, but does so, ironically, by reversing one of the genre’s primary assumptions: for where the Bildungsroman ‘typically depicts “the passage from orality to writing”—from the communal catechistical spaces of oral social training to a writing and reading room of one’s own’ (Slaughter, 284), Colonial System develops precisely by passing from writing to orality as the source of textual authority. Toward the end of his Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères, Vastey returns briefly to an account of the tortures carried out by the French during the Haitian Revolution, and significantly identifies himself as an ‘ocular and auricular witness of the facts that I am reporting’ (1816c, 97; my italics). His emphasis on the oral dimension of the act of witnessing not only stands in opposition to the assumed authority of written testimony, but in a provocatively supplementary relation to the visual dimension that is ordinarily associated with that act. It is this oral testimony that largely generates and empowers Vastey’s detailed accounts of torture in the second chapter of Colonial System, which respond so forcibly to the still urgent imperative that, in the words of a prominent antislavery critic in our own time, we ‘listen to the voices of those who live fragile lives, give notice of those “presences”, those forgotten names, those effaced destinies, their specks of words, in order to trace out a community of presence’ (Vergès, 153). Listening to stories about slavery from those who suffered through it demands that one make oneself heard in turn, relaying in writing the spoken words of those who live, or lived, such fragile lives. This imperative of making oneself heard dominates the opening pages of the second chapter of Colonial System, where Vastey lays the foundation for his inventory of atrocities perpetrated by former colonists on their human property: addressing men of sensibility (‘hommes sensibles’) at the very beginning of this chapter, he urges them to ‘listen’ to his account of the colonial regime ‘and try and imagine, if you can, the monsters who could enact cruelties of this order’ (35; my italics). He then directs the same auricular imperative to any surviving colonists who might chance upon his book: ‘Colonists, those of you who still draw breath, listen to me [écoutez moi]! I shall awaken the remains of the numerous victims you thrust into the

grave, and borrow their voices [emprunter leur voix] so that I might unveil your foul deeds’ (35). This borrowing of voices, so different from the derivative borrowing of textual sources that characterized much of the first chapter of Colonial System, provides the text with a thematic consistency it lacked, up until this point; it makes possible what we might, following Vincent Brown’s analysis of the ‘mortuary politics’ of Jamaican slave society, regard as an auricular (and oracular) form of necromancy, ‘the conjuration and manipulation of the dead for the purpose of shaping actions and events’ (V. Brown, 130). ‘For centuries’, Vastey notes, just before launching into his inventory, ‘the voice of my unfortunate compatriots could not make itself heard [se faire entendre] beyond these shores, while here, in this theatre of oppression, they were being silenced [étouffés] by the ascendancy and unanimity of our tormentors’ (39). In making this silenced voice heard, in registering and relaying it, the second chapter of Vastey’s Colonial System takes a big step (perhaps even, one might imagine, an emancipatory leap) forward in relation to the awkward apprenticeship in reading that generated what came before it. References to published sources are few and far between in this part of the text, but one such reference can be usefully examined here in order to get a sense of the newly empowered narrative voice that emerges in the second chapter. One of the first items in his inventory chronicles the sadistic treatment of ‘a Martiniquan quadroon’ named Sophie by the jealous wife of the attorney Jean-Baptiste Gabriel Larchevesque-Thibaud, one of the most vociferous colonists when it came to defending white privilege in CapFrançais during the early years of the Haitian Revolution. After detailing how the wife made her husband take a gun to Sophie to prove that he was not sexually involved with her, and then herself cut off the slave’s ears, ordered her compliant husband to brand the woman ‘on each side of her buttocks and on the face’, and eventually sent her off to be sold in South Carolina, Vastey concludes by noting that ‘this incident, a matter of common knowledge in Cap-Henry, is recorded in Garran-Coulon’s report on the colonies’ (43–44). If we turn to this report—the official government account of the ‘troubles in Saint-Domingue’ that was published in four volumes between 1797 and 1799 by the Jacobin deputy Jean-Philippe Garran-Coulon—we find the incident recorded early on in the fourth volume, at a moment when Garran-Coulon is reminding his readers that

‘atrocious punishments’ continued to be meted out to slaves in the early years of the revolutionary troubles, notwithstanding what he ironically refers to as the much vaunted ‘humanity of the colonists’ (4.33): Various other documents establish that another colonist forced a quadroon, who had nursed his children but who had become the object of his wife’s jealousy, to endure severe acts of cruelty, and then, in order to get rid of her, sent her away to the United States, where she could not be sold on account of the fact that she had been branded (1). (1) See the declarations of lawyer Comeau, from 18 January 1793, and several others, in the papers of Larchevesque-Thibaud, item 70 et seq., and the inventory of Polverel and Sonthonax, 79 et seq. Letter of Polony to Larchevesque-Thibaud, dated Charlestown, 30 June 1792. (4.34–35)

Garran-Coulon’s account is obviously far less expansive than Vastey’s, which supplies many humanizing details with regard to Larchevesque-Thibaud’s slave: a name, Sophie; a place of origin, Martinique; the specifics of the grandes cruautés she had to endure at the hands of her masters, including a brief moment of agency in which she tries to ward off the shot with her hand before being finally transformed into the passive object of Madame Larchevesque-Thibaud’s furious efforts at reducing her supposed rival to a mere conglomeration of disposable and brandable body parts. None of these details find their way into Garran-Coulon’s summary account, although his footnote does provide other details absent from Vastey, such as an approximate sense of when this incident happened, along with precise references to itemized archival documents—just the sort of ‘collateral evidence’ that the sceptical reader might wish for when assessing the veracity of Vastey’s narrative.12 In this particular instance, Vastey defers to such a reader by connecting the common knowledge of the people of CapHenry with the book knowledge of a sympathetic French writer, but the guiding assumption of Vastey’s inventory of tortured slaves is that there is no necessity for any such deference, and that common knowledge, knowledge that is to be heard in the commons, can and should be retrieved from the silenced margins to which colonial historians had relegated it. After Larchevesque-Thibaud, well over one hundred named perpetrators follow in Vastey’s atrocity exhibition before he breaks off his inventory, realizing that it would take him ‘entire volumes’ to complete the task (61– 62; ‘j’enflerais des volumes’). Ironically, the new form of expression he has

discovered for himself in this middle section of the text leads to a vision of potential formlessness, which he averts by shifting from specific accounts of settler violence to a more general portrait of slavery in Saint Domingue (62– 74). The momentum of the text does not abate here, though; the portrait contains a number of stirring passages, and it is one such passage that I want to introduce here, the most powerful of all, Vastey’s description of the instruments of torture used by the colonists. I do so for two reasons: first, on its own terms, the passage in question gives the fullest expression to the text’s empowering ethical insistence on listening to subaltern voices; second, in terms of my own argument, this passage and the paragraph that follows it form the second of the pivotal junctures in the text through which we can trace the subject’s transitional Bildungsroman movement toward selfregulation. In the sentences leading up to this passage, Vastey has introduced the topic of ‘the thousand varied instruments of torture’ devised by the colonists, and listed a number of them. His account concludes with the following description: Enfin le terrible quatre piquet qui était toujours prêt sur les habitations, dans les villes et bourgs; la victime y était attachée par les quatre membres, et saisie au milieu du corps par un cercle qui l’empêchait de pouvoir se remuer; d’autres faisaient étendre le patient sur une échelle bien assujetti par des liens, tandis que deux commandeurs qui se relevaient par deux autres quand ils étaient fatigués, déchiraient et mettaient en lambeaux sous les coups du fouet cent fois répétés, le corps de l’infortunée, qui poussait des gémissemens lamentables, en appelant à son secours, tout ce que les tourmens pouvaient lui suggérer pour apitoyer son barbare maître; helas! ses cris superflus se perdaient dans les airs et se confondaient avec le bruit du fouet qui faisait retentir les échos de nos montagnes; le colon atroce, tranquille, sourd à ses cris, inexorable comme l’enfer, considérait ce spectacle horrible! bien loin de s’apitoyer, il fait préparer sous ses yeux des tourmens nouveaux pour étouffer les cris de la victime; il lui mettait un baillon dans la bouche ou un tison ardent, et pour assouvir le délire de sa rage, on lui apporte de la saumure, du piment, du sel, du poivre, de la cendre chaude, de l’huile ou de la mantègue bouillante, de la cire à cacheter, de la poudre à feu; et suivant le choix du bourreau, l’on répandait sur le corps ensanglanté de l’infortuné, ces ingrédiens ou ces matières enflammés, qui se confondaient avec son sang, et lui faisait souffrir un tourment au-dessus de toute expression; d’autre fois, il faisait rougir des fers ardens, qui étaient appliqués sur le corps du martyr. (65–66; my italics) (For the English translation, see p. 125: ‘And last of all… the martyr’s body’.)

In the dynamic unfolding of this page-long sentence,13 we witness a circular movement away from and back toward passive subjection, in which the slave’s body is first ‘fastened’, ‘held in place’, ‘stretched out’, ‘bound tight’, ‘lashed’, ‘torn asunder’, and then, at the end, covered with caustic matter or branded with irons. Between these two scenes of subjection, a single moment of agency makes itself heard when the victim groans in misery (poussait des gémissemens); from that point on, auricular language dominates the middle part of the sentence (as my italicization of sound-related phrases shows). The colonist’s violence is made possible only by remaining ‘deaf ’ to the sounds of slavery, only by rendering the cries of those whom he enslaves superfluous, only by stifling the voices of those whom he subjects to torture. The world of the colonist functions according to a visual economy, what Nicholas Mirzoeff has called the ‘regime of oversight’ (51), ‘a combination of violent enforcement and visualized surveillance that sustained the new colonial order of things’ (49–50), and that allowed the master to gaze upon the ‘horrifying spectacle’ of torture without flinching, with eagerness even, as he watched new forms of torment being prepared at his command and sous ses yeux. In its resonant evocation of the soundscape of slavery, and its emphasis on an (as yet ‘superfluous’) aural/oral supplement to the scopic regime of settler colonialism, this is a rich passage that merits further close reading; however, for our purposes, it is the contrast between this passage and the paragraph immediately following upon it that is of primary interest. No sooner has the long sentence ended than the new paragraph begins with an immediate turn (back) to a written source and the sort of deferent recitation that characterized the first chapter of Colonial System: ‘Strokes of the whip and groans replaced the crowing of the cock, says Wimpffen, who wrote about Saint-Domingue during the revolution, and he spoke the truth’ (66; ‘Les coups de fouet et les gémissemens remplaçaient le chant du coq, dit Wimphen, qui écrivait sur Saint-Domingue pendant la révolution, et il disait la vérité’). The expenditure of literary capital here on Vastey’s part is by no means an inappropriate one, given the way in which Baron de Wimpffen’s comment resonates with his own harrowing portrayal of the sounds, and silences, of slavery. But our relation to the quotation changes once we realize that, yet again, Vastey is here relying upon abbé Grégoire’s reading, rather

than his own. For, very plainly, Vastey’s relation to Baron de Wimpffen’s 1797 epistolary travelogue Voyage à Saint-Domingue pendant les années 1788, 1789, et 1790 is entirely mediated by Grégoire’s passing reference to it in De la littérature des Nègres, which is as follows: ‘Wimpffen, who wrote during the revolution, declares that in Saint-Domingue strokes of the whip and groans replaced the crowing of the cock’ (53; ‘Wimphen, qui écrivoit pendant la révolution, déclare qu’à Saint-Domingue les coups de fouet et les gémissemens remplaçoient le chant du coq’). The exact correspondences between Vastey’s and Grégoire’s texts make it clear that the original, far more verbose,14 version of this statement in Letter 12 of the Baron’s Voyage is not a point of reference for Vastey. This surreptitiously deferent (re)turn to Grégoire, coming directly after such a powerful passage, constitutes the second critical juncture upon which my argument about the formal development of the text hinges: we have here a structural counterpart to the shift at the beginning of Colonial System from the promising autobiographical opening to the disappointing block quotation from Ducœurjoly’s Introduction. Here, the shift is by no means as dramatic and absolute, and that is to be expected, given the progress the text has made in relation to its awkward, untutored beginnings. Indeed, the unacknowledged appropriation of Grégoire quoting Wimpffen is immediately followed, in the very same sentence, by an appeal to yet another ‘fact known throughout Cap-Henry’, this one having to do with the existence of a white man named Lataille who ‘openly advertised the fact that he was in the business of giving blacks a thrashing [de tailler les malheureux noirs] for a modest salary’—the pun on Lataille/tailler (one of the few such bits of wordplay in the text) being a trace, one suspects, of the originating oral performances through which this piece of common knowledge would have circulated about town. An interesting if ungainly hybrid sentence results, half-Grégoire-masked-as-Wimpffen and half-Lataille, half-book knowledge and half-common knowledge. It is a sentence, in other words, that opens up the possibility, on the far distant horizon, of a fully mastered mestizo style that draws on the power of both the written and the oral in order to access, in Mignolo’s words, ‘universal or, better still, pluriversal vision’.

Although this is certainly a story we would like to tell about Vastey, it is not the story that the text is, obliquely, telling about him through its emplotment of the subject’s reading practices. The crowing of Grégoire/Wimpffen’s cock may herald a new hybrid poetics, but in relation to the overarching ‘plot’ of Colonial System, its primary function is to signal a new stage in the subject’s development with regard to his source materials. Empowering as it may have been, the transfer of authority from written to oral sources could only ever be a stage in the development narrative, a dialectical moment in the maturation process, since in and of itself it cannot resolve the problem that was the text’s original point of departure, the problem of literacy and the need for (developing) mastery of it. The crowing of the cock marks the renewed centrality of written sources (and the reading of them) to the text, which is evidenced by the proliferation of footnotes from this point on. Significantly, the two paragraphs immediately following upon the (re)turn to Grégoire each conclude with a footnote reference to the same written source—the Creole writer Moreau de Saint-Méry’s formidable six-volume compilation of colonial laws and decrees dating from the sixteenth century to 1785, Loix et constitutions des colonies françoises de l’Amérique sous le vent (1784–90)—that corroborates the point Vastey is making in the body of the text (66, 67; see Figure 5). In the second of these paragraphs, moreover, Vastey for the first and only time establishes a direct connection between these two levels of the text, explicitly drawing attention to the contents of the footnote as backing up his claim that slaves in colonial SaintDomingue ‘were put on a par with the lowliest animals’: ‘As proof of these assertions’, he notes, ‘we provide a word-for-word transcription of [nous transcrivons mot à mot] a decision of the Council of the Cape, which we have drawn from Moreau de Saint-Méry’s compilation’. The footnote’s lengthy transcription from volume 6 of Loix et constitutions is indeed word-for-word, and effectively supports Vastey’s point that when it came to disputes over lost property, negroes mules and ox-carts were ‘all one and the same thing’ for the disputants in this 1781 case (who included, ironically enough, the compiler Moreau himself, serving as lawyer for the defendant).

Figure 5    Le système colonial dévoilé (1814), pp. 66–67 Vastey’s culling of material from Moreau de Saint-Méry’s compilation continues in subsequent paragraphs (the next one begins, for instance: ‘We read in this same collection that…’; 68), but it is only when he completes his general summary of the world of the slaves in pre-revolutionary SaintDomingue and proceeds to a description of the condition of the so-called ‘free’ people of colour at this time (74–85) that Moreau’s work begins to take on its full significance in relation to the narrative of development that is being obliquely told in Colonial System. In terms of sheer word count, approximately 50 per cent of this section of the text is taken up with footnotes, which in turn primarily consist of three extensive notes citing, verbatim from Moreau, ridiculous rules and regulations that were applied to individual libres or to the class as a whole. This reliance on footnotes from Moreau creates a visual imbalance, mirroring the proliferation of unsourced

footnotes at the beginning of the text, that no reader can ignore and that is an important part of the ‘story’ being told through Vastey’s ever-developing use of source materials.15 The overshadowing presence of Moreau and his compilation of colonial laws in the final third of the text, and especially in his account of the libres, can be viewed both positively and negatively. In terms of the narrative of development we have been tracking, it signals an important moment in the colonial subject’s maturation process: Vastey’s demonstrated ability to range across the thousands of pages of this compilation, to pick and choose in lawyer-like fashion the legal precedents that will be most helpful to him in arguing his case, is the sign of a growing ‘maturity’ in relation to his source materials, a far cry from the deferent regurgitation that characterized his early footnotes. In demonstrating the egregious mistreatment of the libres, his use of evidence from Moreau’s compilation is all the more effective because, as Vastey himself points out, the compiler is not someone like Grégoire who could be accused of slanting the evidence in their favour. After relating a number of punishments meted out to the libres (be they ‘black’ or ‘mulatto’), Vastey notes that ‘our readers can readily confirm the truth of these incidents’ (79; ‘nos lecteurs pourront se convaincre de la vérité de ces faits’) by themselves consulting the compilation of Moreau, a colonist who, he adds, ‘can hardly be suspected of having any partiality toward us’ (79)—not just because of his generic identity as a ‘colonist’, but because he played such a prominent role in the early years of the French Revolution as a spokesperson in Paris for the colonial lobby, adamantly defending slavery and virulently opposing any extension of rights for the libres (see Gauthier, 259–76). And yet, at the same time, compared with what came before, compared with the apparent break-through signalled by the transition from the first chapter of Colonial System to the second, there is clearly something unsatisfying about this extreme reliance on case histories at the expense of common knowledge; we feel a certain entangling constraint here in the word-for-word transcription of colonial laws, a new sort of deference reminiscent of the initial state of subjection away from which the text has progressed. What we feel, in other words, is the ambivalently, even paradoxically, emancipatory narrative structure of the Bildungsroman, in

which the process of apprenticeship, the realization of one’s developmental potential, culminates in an expression and determination of the self that proves inseparable from the regulation of it. The two-part division of the text makes the possibility of growth and development visible at a structural level, but a division of that sort is not, it must now be said, true to the transitional logic of the Bildungsroman, which involves not an abrupt conversion from one state to another but a gradual, quasi-organic evolution. Bildung, as Joseph Slaughter writes, is a ‘trope of amplification and expansion rather than of substitution’ (115), and it is precisely this amplification and expansion that is emphasized in the final third of the text (the second half, that is, of the second chapter). As a ‘genre of demarginalization’, the Bildungsroman tells a story about the individual, but it is a story of ‘socialized individualism’ (116), in which the development of the subject is confirmed by its (willing) incorporation over time into ‘the objective, conventional world of law and society’ (254), aptly symbolized here by the ‘laws and constitutions’ of Moreau’s compilation and, more broadly, by the literacy through which they become readable. Bildung requires accommodation: it is, in Slaughter’s words, ‘a delicate business of adapting sociocultural forms for oneself and adapting to their established formal constraints’ (118). Although the genre ‘emerged from the context of revolution’, it is ‘reformist, rather than revolutionary’: as a ‘discursive regime of reformation’, its ‘reproductive mechanics’ and ‘social preservationist impulses’ seek to ‘replace revolution with evolution’, ‘to obviate violence as a legitimate mode of collective self-determination’ by sacralizing, and naturalizing, ‘the free and full development of human personality’ (115). In a word, it upholds the ‘world of law and society’, even while recognizing the desirability of reforming that world according to its own ideal image of itself. In a telling moment from the brief section on colonial governance (86–90) that follows his account of the ‘free’ people of colour, Vastey notes with a bemused irony that had colonial administrators in Saint-Domingue over the course of the eighteenth century, instead of ‘gratifying the unbridled passions of the colonists’, actually devoted their efforts to enforcing, and ameliorating, ‘the provisions of the Code Noir and the Edict of 1784, which improved conditions for the freed and the enslaved’, then ‘the revolution would never have taken place and we would still be under the colonists’ yoke’ (86). Here, Vastey shows only too well that

he understands the mixed message of reform and development: that improvements happen, slowly but surely, yet the yoke is, as a result, never lifted; that ‘legal and moral progress travel through complicated, unintended, and lengthy byways’ from which ‘some kind of justice eventually flow[s]’ (Ghachem, 26, 27), just not the kind of justice that might result in systemic change. Vastey’s attitude toward this ‘free and full’ development is ultimately a deeply divided one, as can be seen in the text’s double-voiced conclusion (90–96), which both affirms and distances itself from the evolutionary attainments of Bildung. On the one hand, Vastey openly, indeed exuberantly, thematizes the mastery of literacy that has provided Colonial System with its underlying narrative structure, by drawing attention to the technologytransfer that has made possible the production of his own book and others like it: ‘at present, we have Haytian presses of our own’, he points out, and thus ‘we can unveil [nous pouvons dévoiler] the crimes of the colonists and respond to even the most absurd lies invented by the prejudice and avarice of our oppressors’ (95; my italics). In these concluding pages, the individual reader and writer, je, is incorporated into a collective subject, nous, whose identity is determined through its (developing) capacity to read and to pass on what it has read to others— be it to a national audience, those ‘young Haytians, who possess the good fortune to have been born under the rule of law and of liberty’ and who are urged to read the same materials with which Vastey has been educating himself (90; ‘lisez ces écrits…!’); or to an international one, the open-minded ‘Englishman, Frenchman, German, Russian, white man, from all the regions of the earth’ who will shudder in sympathy ‘when reading the account [en lisant le récit] of what we have been subjected to for centuries’ (96). This affirmative emphasis on the value of literary (or at least literate) production and consumption is an appropriate, reasonable ending to the story of development that Vastey’s text has been telling: the (still developing) subject is here incorporated into the nation, and the nation is in turn enfolded into a beneficent new world order, epitomized by the global public sphere, which no longer coincides or colludes with a colonial system that has been once and for all unveiled. And yet, Vastey knows very well that to unveil the colonial system is not to destroy it, and that no matter how much he reads or writes, or tutors others to do so, the threat of its resurgence remains a clear and present

danger: first and foremost, in the form of a looming French invasion of its former colony in the closing months of 1814, but also, in the longer term, of a new world order that may not be as beneficent as one would hope, and that may prove unable or unwilling to deliver on the promise of recognition it holds forth to those who patiently follow the path of development. The idealist ending is thus doubled by another, far from consensual one that invokes a very different conception of self-determination from what the reformist genre of the Bildungsroman requires. When Vastey solicits ‘young Haytians’ to read the toxic prose of the colonial writers he has himself read (or, at least, has read about in the pages of ‘the virtuous abbé Grégoire’), and thereby familiarize themselves ‘with those times of horror and barbarism’, he urges that they ‘never forget the misfortunes of your fathers, and learn to distrust your tyrants! Learn to hate them!’ (90) This appeal to ‘hatred’ can have no place in the civil(ized) world of ‘dialogue and social interaction’ promoted by the Bildungsroman (Slaughter, 268); its discursive violence can only register, from a developmental perspective, as an expression of ‘immaturity’, a form of affective illiteracy, a sign—all too predictable, alas!— that the (developing) subject’s lessons have not been properly learnt. Regardless of where the reader stands in relation to that ‘mature’ assessment of anticolonial violence, this second, dissensual voice is undeniably there to be heard in the final pages of Colonial System, chafing against the performance of development that the first, affirmative voice has agreed upon, searching for other means of self-expression that might better address the situation of urgency facing the nation in 1814, at a time when, as it was put earlier, ‘from every quarter we hear the cries of our fellow citizens: our tyrants are coming, to arms!’—a time that presses in on the subject, audibly, forcing him, or rather us, to ‘hasten on, abridging the task we set for ourselves, that we might lay down the pen and take up the sword against our tyrants’ (73–74; my italics; ‘Nous nous hâtons d’abréger la tâche que nous nous étions imposée, pour déposer la plume, et nous saisir de l’épée contre nos tyrans’).16 The dissensual voice, like its consensual double, here incorporates itself into a firstperson plural community, but the story it wants to tell is not the prosaic one of Bildung, of socialized individuals who have found one another through the irenic medium of print culture, but the epic story of ‘collective self-determination in which a body politic is founded

on extreme acts of violence and a singular sense of national duty’ that arises in consequence of oppression (Slaughter, 268). It is this epic possibility that makes itself felt in the closing lines of Colonial System, which so distressingly (from a developmental perspective) put an end to the text by abruptly substituting the épée for the plume in their attack on the former colonists: ‘It is against them that we are directing these writings of ours. And it is for them, and for those who support them, that we are sharpening the bayonets that are going to pierce their bellies!!!’ (96; ‘C’est contre eux que nous dirigeons ces écrits; c’est aussi pour eux et leurs adhérens, que nous aiguisons les bayonnettes qui doivent leur percer le flanc!!!’) Writing here, at the very end, is left behind, unreasonably (from a certain perspective) abandoned, replaced in a revolutionary fashion with the bayonets that will pierce the bellies of those who refuse to recognize that the subject has already developed, that he has no need of further development, that the story of development is a constraining fiction rather than the real-life trajectory that the progressive narrative of Vastey’s text made it appear as. The dissensual voice gets the last word of Colonial System, cutting off, quite literally, any possibility of (evolutionary) growth that the text had been promising in its unfolding story of demarginalization. This voice offers a different, revolutionary promise, based upon the belief, as it were, that the ‘End of Part One’ (‘Fin de la première Partie’), which follows directly upon the distressing (to us) vision of the colonist’s pierced belly, might lead once again, as it had in 1804, to a revolutionary erasure of the colonial system, ‘the kind of tabula rasa which from the outset defines any decolonization’ (Fanon, 1).17 Such a definitive ending, such an emancipatory conversion experience, is not, of course, any more ‘realistic’ today than it was in 1814. There cannot be an end to writing, and the self-development that it evinces (for us). The extreme act of violence with which Colonial System threatens to conclude, so troublingly (or, from another perspective, enticingly) ‘immature’ in its rejection of the voice of moderation and mediation, the voice of Bildung, is supplemented by one last doubling turn of the text in the form of a brief post scriptum that hastily reaffirms a promise of development which the final line had seemed to question. There will be a ‘second part of this work’, we are assured, which will expand upon rather than erase the first, by providing us

with ‘a historical outline of the principal events’ of the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath, and a description of ‘the myriad crimes of the French in Hayti’ (97). The alternately accommodating and meddlesome story Vastey has begun telling, about himself and his people, is not over, whatever the dissensual voice that has so aggressively put a stop to it might say. There will be another chance to develop the story by and by, to pursue those ‘attainments in literature’ that are the richly ambiguous promise this story offers to whichever marginalized subjects have the good, if not necessarily common, sense to lay down their revolutionary swords and take up a reforming pen that might, at some future point, provide reasonable grounds for their being recognized. Like Vastey’s text, this essay requires a post scriptum of its own, for, detailed as my account of Colonial System has been, it is noticeably incomplete: in pursuing a literary reading of Vastey’s spectral invocation of the Bildungsroman genre, I have purposely left out any discussion of the scribal context in which the book was produced, and which is inscribed within it at multiple points. In accounting for the double-voiced ending, for instance, I have said not a word about the text’s effusive praise of Henry Christophe, who is such a dominant presence in the concluding pages that one contemporary reviewer ended his summary of the book’s contents by noting ‘the author now passes to a warm panegyric on the reigning sovereign, which concludes the work’ (‘Specimens’, 811); even the brief post scriptum makes prominent reference to ‘the glorious reign of His Majesty Henry 1st’ (97). And, of course, I have made no mention of what comes before the ‘beginning’ of the text, before page 1: namely, its prominently displayed paratexts—the opening address to the King (iii–iv), and the Introduction, with its appreciative words of praise for both Christophe and the leaders of the Allied Powers in Europe (v–viii). These paratextual materials cannot simply be omitted from any structural consideration of Colonial System of the sort we have been undertaking, especially given the fact that the return to Christophe at the end, within the text proper, creates an evident if unstable framing device for the work as a whole. The initial paratexts double the text, and reframe it, transforming its ‘first steps’ into a ‘second part’. The story of development that we have witnessed unfolding, from the opening encounter with aboriginal remains in the cavern of the past to the present-tense double embrace of the plume and

the épée at the end, cannot be thought apart from what comes before it (and what finds its heterogeneous way into the text at its end). In a word, the Bildungsroman’s narrative of ‘self-sponsorship’, and the ‘sovereign, undivided human personality’ toward which that genre aspires (Slaughter, 215), is inseparable from state sponsorship and the benign oversight of an ‘august Sovereign’, ‘the good father’ who has made the son’s textual apprenticeship possible. The relation between these two parts of the text is, however, exceedingly difficult to articulate. The natural tendency, when reading ‘those books which Vastey wrote under the eye of the King’ (as one commentator in the 1930s so nicely put it), is to ignore the ‘fulsome allusions’ to Christophe and other sovereign powers, treating them as merely ‘incidental’ (Niles, 277), and to focus on what is essential (to us), as I have focused here on questions of genre and intertextuality, standard fare for a literary critic. Or, alternatively, the ubiquitous shadow cast over Vastey by Christophe can be cited (and this has certainly been the conventional approach taken toward him by literary critics and historians alike) as a good reason simply to continue marginalizing him, to reduce Colonial System to a ‘litany of atrocity stories, which indicts a large proportion of Saint-Domingue’s famous names’ with the sole intent of ‘galvaniz[ing] international opinion against French plans to reconquer the former colony’, and which is, as such, ‘easy to dismiss as a propaganda piece’ from the pen of a functionary who ‘was charged with the state’s public relations’ (Geggus, 2001, 240). By way of destabilizing this either/or reading, I would like, in closing, briefly to suggest a formal approach to Colonial System capable of addressing the scribal dimension that was bracketed out of my literary reading, one that takes into account the fact that Vastey is working on behalf of the state, charged with its publicité, and that he is not simply addressing some vaguely defined bourgeois public sphere but also wishes to be heard by specific, influence-wielding individuals and at the tribunal of nations. In order to make this closing gesture, I draw on anthropologist Erica Caple James’s recent study of humanitarian interventions in contemporary Haiti, and the ‘political economy of trauma’ they have generated, in order to align Vastey’s Colonial System with the brokered form of what she calls the ‘trauma portfolio’. Focusing in particular on the transition from ‘the necropolitical repression perpetrated during and after the Duvalier dictatorships and after the 1991

ouster of Aristide’ to the period immediately following upon ‘the 1994 “restoration of democracy”’, which saw an exponential growth of the aid apparatus in Haiti (86), James introduces the concept of bureaucraft (modelled on witchcraft) to address ‘the spectrum of benevolent and malevolent practices that contributed to the political economy of trauma’ in postdictatorship Haiti (31). These bureaucratic discourses and practices were an essential motor of a newly hegemonic ‘compassion economy’ that established itself in the place of a once dominant ‘terror economy’, replacing the latter’s ‘technologies of torture’ with its own truth-eliciting ‘technologies of trauma’ (86).18 Starting in 1994, James argues, the ‘opaque and sometimes secret crafts of activists, bureaucrats, and other humanitarian and development experts’ (33) were employed, in a way that was simultaneously benevolent and malevolent, ‘to reframe and transform the experience of suffering, thereby generating social, political, legal, economic, symbolic, and even spiritual power and capital for the recipient of aid’, as well as for the provider of aid (28). In a ‘compassionate’ world where ‘aid is filtered through the narrow lens of recognition of the other based on injury or vulnerable status’ (293), the bureaucraft of humanitarian intervention required, in other words, that those who had suffered under the various dictatorships exchange their sense of themselves as militan (i.e., as active opponents of those regimes’ terror apparatus) for a more marketable representation of themselves as viktim.19 This exchange of one identity for another depends upon ‘the performance of trauma narratives’, which ‘has become a necessary transaction in order for sufferers to participate in local, national, and international compassion economies’ (29). The existence of these narratives is in and of itself not enough, however, to effect this ‘work of conversion’ (33). In order for them to circulate in the humanitarian market, in order for them to gain currency, they must first assume the form of what James calls the ‘trauma portfolio’, ‘the aggregate of paraphernalia compiled to document and authenticate the experience of individual, family, or collective sufferers’ (33). It is these portfolios, if convincingly assembled, that allow the narratives themselves to be heard by the people who ‘count’—or, better, to be audited by the ‘readers’ of those portfolios, since ‘technologies of trauma are mechanisms of “audit cultures”… in which diversified trauma portfolios are the indicators of an

agent’s or agency’s authenticity and accountability in the overall political economy’ (34). These questions of authenticity and accountability, which are the central preoccupation of the ‘rituals of verification’ that constitute the auditing process (Power, 1997), extend beyond the individual viktim from whom the narratives originate to include those who have facilitated their circulation by serving as intermediaries between the beneficiaries of humanitarian aid and its donors. James calls these intermediaries ‘trauma brokers’, who ‘might be individual speculators in the local realm with access to actors or institutions in the humanitarian assemblage, or they might be institutions such as the Human Rights Fund or other victim assistance projects that used their collection of trauma portfolios to solicit funding from bilateral or multilateral donors’ (34). These trauma brokers—or what we might, from a slightly different angle, also refer to as ‘memory promoters’20 —occupy the neither-nor middle ground through which ‘the suffering of viktim makes the journey from singularity (unmediated distress or misery) to commodity (the trauma portfolio)’ (36). In light of James’s analysis, Vastey’s Colonial System readily lends itself to being read as anticipating the formal demands of the trauma portfolio. This is quite evident with respect to the collection of individual trauma narratives that are assembled in the middle section of the text, but such a reading is equally applicable to the text in its entirety, viewed as a heteroclite assemblage that provides not only the required evidence but the context necessary for understanding that evidence, for getting it ‘heard’ (audited) at a distance. Vastey’s writing becomes, in this reading, a form of brokerage, a speculative act of mediation provisionally connecting him to those in ‘need’ of aid and those who might provide it. On the one hand, it links him to, but also differentiates him from, those whom he is representing, and for whom he serves as, in James’s words, a ‘gatekeeper’ (33), honouring the memory of the dead and the struggles of those still living, while translating the dehumanizing violence of slavery and (especially) the enabling violence of revolution into a form that can be recognized. On the other hand, it gains him access to a network of potential ‘patrons’ who might ‘aid’ his fellow citizens by helping alleviate their ongoing state of ensekerite (‘insecurity’), that is, their lived experience of ‘vulnerability, anxiety, and a heightened sense of risk at a sensory level’ (8), which in 1814 derived in no small part from the continued

lack of international recognition of Haitian independence and the consequent threat of invasion and restoration of the French terror apparatus. These patrons would include foreign states such as Britain or Russia; prominent players in civil society such as the Anglo-American abolitionists; or simply anonymous participants in the (elite) transatlantic public sphere whose sympathy might someday cash out in more efficacious expenditures of material and moral capital. There could, of course, have been no access to these external auditors were it not for the internal patronage of Henry Christophe: the gatekeeping function of mediating between (and speculating on) the recipients of aid and its targeted donors could scarcely, at this time, be detached from the emergent institutions of the Haitian nation state, placing undeniable limits on the form(s) that Vastey’s trauma portfolio could take, and on the range of explanations that could be used to account for the individual and collective suffering that it so compellingly brokers. To approach Haiti in the years after independence as, in anthropologist Michael M. J. Fischer’s words, a ‘post-trauma polity’ (qtd. E. C. James, 19), subject to the same sort of ‘professional bureaucratic discourses and practices that… are employed to reframe and transform the experience of suffering’ (28) in our own global(ized) ‘compassion economy’ is, it must be stressed, no mere loose analogy or anachronistic imposition. It is a genealogical reading of the social logic that governs our own present, ‘the humanitarian moment in contemporary history’ (Fassin, 2012, 13). As Didier Fassin has argued, in Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present, the ‘politics of precarious lives’ generating recently constituted forms of humanitarian government ‘has a history’, or what he calls a ‘dual temporality’: a ‘first, long-term temporality’, dating back to the eighteenth century and an ‘initial crystallization of moral sentiments in politics’ of which the abolitionist movement, ‘in spite of its contradictions’, is often presented as ‘the epitome’ (4); and a ‘second, short-term temporality’ for which the first provides ‘the genealogical framework’ (5), and which is shaped by the ‘new moral economy, centred on humanitarian reason [that] came into being during the last decades of the twentieth century’ (7). The same ‘double-binds’ (E. C. James, 17) that characterize the beneficent/maleficent bureaucraft of humanitarian government in the present are already recognizable in the work of an on-the-ground ‘aid

worker’ like Vastey, whose Colonial System, for all that it ‘facilitates a kind of rehumanization of the viktim through the translation of suffering’ (35), cannot, as a trauma portfolio ‘aggregated for political and economic purposes’, escape the fate of its narrative(s) being ‘commoditized and subject to the humanitarian market, effectively rendering viktim mere bodies or even tools for others’ personal, institutional, or governmental security’ (35– 36), and nor can it escape the ‘cycles of valuation’ to which this market subjects such texts (288), as witness the high value of Vastey’s work (and, more broadly, ‘Hayti’ itself) in the transatlantic public sphere in the late 1810s and the collapse of that particular market in the decade following upon Christophe’s death. One could pursue many such genealogical parallels that demonstrate how Colonial System, when read as a trauma portfolio, anticipates and helps us understand our own humanitarian moment ‘in which particular attention is focused on suffering and misfortune’, and address the central questions this moment poses, such as ‘what, ultimately, is gained, and what lost, when we use the terms of suffering to speak of inequality… [and] more generally when we mobilize compassion rather than justice’ (Fassin, 7, 8). If such a reading is legitimated by the ‘dual temporality’ of humanitarianism, however, the question remains of how to articulate the two readings I have performed over the course of this essay, the two stories I have told about the formal possibilities on offer in Colonial System: a primarily literary story about the performance of development, a story about culture and cultivation reliant on the idea of a self-sponsoring author and involving a complex ‘text’; and another, patently scribal story about the performance of suffering, a story about compassion and bureaucracy reliant on the practices of statesponsored agents and involving a brokered commodity. Without presuming to answer that question, I would suggest that the undoubted power of Colonial System stems from the dynamic and unpredictable (con)fusion of these two performances, which arguably distinguishes this first work of his from those he would go on to write, testifying as they do to a more secure sense on Vastey’s part of what was required of him as a writer—be it a virulent anti-Pétion polemic (as in the many pamphlets published in 1815 and 1816), a sophisticated refutation of French colonial discourse (the 1817 Réflexions politiques), a partisan history of the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath (the 1819 Essai sur les causes da la

révolution et des guerres civiles d’Hayti), or even the smoother reiteration of Colonial System that we find in his most widely disseminated work, the 1816 Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères. Here, at the outset of his all-too-brief career as a writer, Vastey remains unsure of exactly what he is called upon to perform, which story he most needs to tell; he gives expression, as it were, to a state of ensekerite with regard to his status as author or scribe and the question of how these two seemingly contradictory identities might be articulated.21 Insecurely attached to both of these writerly identities, Colonial System gives uncertain expression to their problematic articulation, and, in so doing, might I suggest, provocatively unsettles our own expectations as (developed) readers, forcing us to ask questions that put our own ‘personal and institutional security’ (E. C. James, 34) at risk. Which story are we reading (for)? Which script do we want Vastey to perform? And what else might he be telling us that we, his new patrons, have yet to recognize?

Notes 1 The 400-plus pages of the 1819 Essai sur les causes de la révolution et des guerres civiles d’Hayti are divided into six chapters of widely diverging length; for a reading of the Essai’s uneven chapter structure, see Bongie (2008, 232). 2 See, e.g., ‘Specimens’ (809), which is discussed in section III of my Introduction alongside The Antijacobin Review article. 3 Taken from a lengthy article in the March 1820 issue of the Tory-oriented British Review entitled ‘History, Literature, and Present State of Hayti’, these comments are not, it should be noted, based on Vastey’s actual text, but on an important two-part survey of Haitian literature published in 1819 by Antoine Métral in the just-launched liberal-minded Revue encyclopédique, where he singled out these two ‘beautiful’ passages for literary notice, praising the opening description in particular for its ‘magic and touching eloquence’ (1.533). The British Review author misidentifies these two extracts as being from the 1817 Réflexions politiques, replicating Métral’s own curious conflation of the two texts: speaking of Le système de colonisation [sic], Métral states that ‘the work from which I have drawn these [two] proofs of a black writer’s ability [l’ouvrage où j’ai puisé ces preuves du génie d’un écrivain noir] is a refutation of the system of colonization proposed in a bulky tome by M. Leborgne de Boigne’ (534). In the second part of the article, Métral did provide the right title for Le système colonial dévoilé, and correctly distinguished between it and the 1817 text (3.145). 4 In his article on Haitian literature, Métral noted with admiration that ‘the eloquence of the Africans is manly [mâle] and original’, whereas ‘their poetry is nothing more than a pale imitation of French poetry’ (3.132). This distinction between mâle originality and pâle mimesis (so often echoed by subsequent literary critics; see, e.g., Dash, 1981, 4–5) should

remind us not only of the gendered logic structuring the field of literary production at this time in both France and Haiti, but also of the dangers of reinscribing that logic when attempting to bring Vastey (back) into the Afro-diasporic canon. As with the once equally neglected African American David Walker (as witness his exclusionary appeal, in my epigraph, to ‘each of my brethren, who has the spirit of a man’), the vital enterprise of recuperating Vastey for a new generation of readers needs to be undertaken with a tempering sensitivity to the many ways in which a work like Colonial System reinforces what Saidiya Hartman has critiqued as ‘the implicit masculinism of citizenship’ (154). In relation to this critique, see also Mimi Sheller’s discussion of ‘the masculinist foundations of citizenship in nineteenth-century Haiti’ (174). 5 The anonymous author of Ducœurjoly’s Introduction is almost as indebted to what he calls the ‘original Historians’ (xxiii) as Vastey is to him. Much of his account of Hatuey, for instance, is taken word-for-word from Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix’s 1730 Histoire de l’isle espagnol ou de Saint-Domingue, which in turn repeats (in translation) much of what Bartolomé de Las Casas said in his 1552 Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. 6 This appeal to multiple author(itie)s in fact relies on a quotation from the one author(ity) toward which an excessive deference was shown in the book’s opening pages: the italicized passage comes from Ducœurjoly, not the anonymous Introduction this time but the opening pages of the Manuel itself (1.4), where Ducœurjoly provides a matter-of-fact enumeration of ‘the means most generally employed to procure the negroes that are needed to work the land in the Colony’. In a further twist, the proslavery Ducœurjoly himself plagiarized this passage and much of the material surrounding it from Benjamin Frossard’s influential 1789 abolitionist treatise La cause des esclaves nègres et des habitans de la Guinée (cf. Frossard, 1.216–17 and Ducœurjoly, 1.3–4), which, in its scathing (and in part first-hand) account of ‘numerous examples of European barbarism’ in Africa (1.192) and its insistence that ‘slavery is not the customary state for the peoples of Guinea’ (1.193), would have served as a far more appropriate source for Vastey. 7 For instance, in the 1802 Introduction to Volume 4 of his Collection de mémoires sur les colonies, a text that Vastey cites a number of times in Colonial System and that gives the book its title (as we saw in section II of my Introduction), Malouet cites Park’s narrative as conclusive evidence for the desirability of maintaining the transatlantic slave trade: ‘It has been established by multiple observations—notably those of Mungo Park, who has recently travelled en philosophe through the interior of Africa—that to buy slaves in that part of the world is to preserve them from a certain death, or a treatment worse than death’ (73). Wilberforce responded to Malouet’s claim with incredulity, asserting that ‘there is nothing resembling this in the voyages of Mister Park, and anyone who has read his book must recognize that the picture he has drawn of the condition of Africans in their own country leaves an absolutely contrary impression’ (1814, 61). A portion of Vastey’s Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères (1816c, 61–73) is taken up with an extensive refutation of the ex-colonist Mazères’s Malouet-like insistence that Park’s book supported his own dismissive view of Africans as ‘stupid, ferocious, and barbarous’ (71; see Mazères, 1815). 8 See the epigraph to my essay, taken from Walker’s 1829 Appeal (2000, 17), a pioneering African American text lauded by no less a figure than W. E. B. Du Bois ‘as “that tremendous indictment of slavery” that represented the first “program of organized

opposition to the action and attitude of the dominant white group”’ in the United States (Hinks, 115); on the affinities between Vastey and Walker, see n. 42 of my Introduction to the present volume. 9 In De la littérature des Nègres, Grégoire exclaims: ‘The accusers [of the Negroes] play the role of both judge and executioner, and yet they call themselves Christians! They have tried many a time to distort the sacred writings [dénaturer les livres saints], in order to find therein a justification for colonial slavery, even though what one actually reads there is that all children of the heavenly father, all mortal beings, spring from the same family. Religion admits of no distinction…’ (74). 10 Christophe’s Foreign Secretary, Comte de Limonade, also cites this same phrase in his Le machiavélisme du Cabinet français (1814, 31). As Limonade noted in a letter of 10 June 1814 to Grégoire, De la littérature des Nègres was an abiding object of Christophe’s meditations: the King ‘had “ordered from London fifty copies”, and wanted “the most interesting passages to be inserted in the newspapers to introduce them to the Haitian people, particularly to the inhabitants of the countryside”’ (Sepinwall, 2005, 183). 11 In a delicious moment of irony, Vastey introduces this new, orally based concept of citation with yet another (this time fully acknowledged) quotation from abbé Grégoire— indeed, a quotation from Grégoire about quotations! Just before launching into his inventory, Vastey writes: ‘“The erudition of the colonists”, says the virtuous abbé Grégoire, “abounds with passages cited in support of servitude [est riche de citations en faveur de la servitude]; none are better acquainted than they with the tactics of despotism”’. Vastey then memorably asserts, ‘I, who am neither a white man nor a colonist, may not possess the same erudition, but I will not be lacking when it comes to citing examples [je ne manquerai pas de citations]’ (39). The authoritative quotation from Grégoire, in other words, prepares the ground for an erasure of that very authority, in the turn from writing to orality as a more authoritative source for Vastey’s text. 12 The author of the 1818 Antijacobin Review article on Colonial System, who approvingly quotes a number of passages from this section of the text, makes a point of including among the descriptions of torture one of the rare instances in which Vastey indicts a colonist on the basis of a published source (a narrative written by the colonist Dumontellier, which was in turn quoted in Garran-Coulon’s report; see n. 13 in the footnote apparatus of my translation). He introduces Vastey’s account of the many crimes of the Desdunes family in the following terms: ‘It is good to have some collateral evidence for such appalling reports, and we therefore now quote a relation of facts, which are supported by such collateral evidence’ (245). It is precisely the relative lack of any such evidence that causes historian David Geggus to treat Vastey’s account of another sadistic colonist, Caradeux, with a meticulous scepticism that borders on disbelief (2001, 240–41). Geggus’s scepticism is not generated solely by a hierarchical distinction between written and oral memories, it should be noted, because he seems quite willing to entertain the notion that Thomas Madiou, ‘the father of Haitian history’, who ‘collected oral testimony for his Histoire d’Haïti (1847–1848) in the decade after 1835’, might have come across some valuable evidence regarding Caradeux, even though ‘the local memory he recounted referred to events already a halfcentury old’ (241). For Geggus, Madiou’s relation to the historical facts seems altogether more credible than Vastey’s reliance on local memory and oral testimony for the simple (if

circular, and readily deconstructible) reason that ‘he was not a propagandist like Vastey’ (241). 13 In my own translation of this passage, I elected to interrupt Vastey’s sentence at multiple points for the sake of clarity of content, reluctantly sacrificing an important formal dimension of the text (as is also the case with the hybrid sentence that follows upon this one, which I go on to discuss in the next two paragraphs). 14 Here is Wimpffen’s original: ‘The cracking of whips, the smothered cries, and the indistinct groans of the negroes, who never see the day break but to curse it; who are never recalled to a feeling of their existence, but by sufferings—this, Sir, is what takes place of the crowing of the early cock’ (1797b, 1.98; ‘Les claquemens de fouets, les cris étouffés, les gémissemens sourds des nègres, qui ne voyent naître le jour que pour le maudire, qui ne sont rappellés au sentiment de leur existence que par des sensations douloureuses; voilà ce qui remplace le chant du coq matinal’ (1797a, 1.129)). 15 The narrative of subjection, resistance, and compliance that I have been reading through Vastey’s deployment of source materials in Colonial System can actually be summarized solely with reference to his use(s) of Moreau de Saint-Méry. In the overly deferent beginning of the text, the one extended and unsourced footnote not taken from the Introduction to Ducœurjoly’s Manuel, the story of the ignoble murder of the Taino princess Anacaona (6–7), turns out to have been lifted verbatim from volume 2 of Moreau’s 1797– 98 Description… de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue. And the very first item in the inventory of atrocities committed by masters against slaves concludes with a footnote reference to a legal decision found in Moreau’s Loix et constitutions, although with no comment from Vastey on its provenance (41–42); in this instance, unlike the later cluster of footnotes from that compilation, there is an almost total disconnect between, on the one hand, what Vastey has told us about the incestuous activities of the settler Poncet and the motives of the slaves who killed him and, on the other hand, the legalese-heavy details in the note about the punishments inflicted on the apparently motiveless assassins of sieur Poncet. This footnote, in other words, serves the authorizing function of showing the sort of punishments that were inflicted on ‘guilty’ slaves, but is itself de-authorized by virtue of its evident failure to address any of the details that Vastey has revealed in the body of the text. This ironic dissonance (similar to what we described in relation to the citation of GarranCoulon’s official government document) is missing from the straightforwardly compliant use of Loix et constitutions as ‘collateral evidence’ in the seven footnote references to Moreau’s compilation that take up so much textual space in the final third of Colonial System. 16 Significantly, this first intrusion into the text of the present-tense situation of urgency in which Colonial System is being written occurs precisely at the point where the text moves from a general discussion of slavery to the footnote-saturated discussion of the ‘free’ people of colour, in which, as we saw, the patient word-for-word transcription of colonial legislation stands as a positive sign of Vastey’s ‘mature’, self-regulating relation to his source materials. The formal achievement of everything that follows this intrusion is thus subject to an ironic reappraisal, given its status as a mere ‘abridgement’ of what would otherwise have been more fully developed. 17 Vastey’s plume/épée opposition anticipates a ‘relationship between writing and action’ that would become central to the twentieth-century ‘anticolonial project’—an antithetical

relationship based on ‘the ideas that writing can serve to bring awareness to injustice, that it can present alternatives to dominant colonial narratives, but that ultimately writing cannot live up to physical action in the struggle to decolonize’ (Dalleo, 54). In his groundbreaking account of the staggered emergence of a Caribbean public sphere from the days of plantation slavery to the present, Raphael Dalleo shows this same opposition being voiced by mid-nineteenth-century Cuban poets such as Miguel Teurbe Tolón, whose ‘La pluma y la espada’ ends by affirming ‘I put you down, Pen, to embrace you, Sword’ (qtd. 54; ‘Te dejo, Pluma, por ceñirte Espada’). 18 James defines compassion economies as ‘the finite flows of beneficent material resources, knowledge and expertise, technologies, therapies, and other forms of exchange circulating between the aid apparatus and its clients and between the aid apparatus and its donors’ (85). 19 James uses the Haitian Creole form here ‘to denaturalize the concept of victimization as it is understood in a Western, liberal context’ (20), and preserve some sense of agency for those called upon to perform ‘the identity of “victims” or “survivors”’ (33): ‘these subjugated actors’, she reminds us, ‘may use the very categories by which their identities become essentialized as tools of resistance or means of garnering power, even in the most dire circumstances’ (25). 20 See Bilbija and Payne (10–12). It is interesting to think about post/revolutionary scribal production in early-nineteenth-century Haiti in relation to the burgeoning ‘memory market’ in a number of Latin American countries that emerged from brutal dictatorships in the 1980s and 1990s—a market charged with the fraught task of accounting for violence (to cite the title of Kenija Bilbija and Leigh A. Payne’s edited collection on this topic). This market involves transactions between ‘memory-makers’ who ‘supply the memory goods’ (3)—i.e., the ‘products created out of the memory of terror’ (5)—and ‘memory promoters’ (or patrons) who ‘target the goods and the buyers’ (3). Although ‘memory entrepreneurship’ in Latin America can be divided into benign and malign forms associated with, on the one hand, the memory emprendedor, ‘who develops a memory enterprise or venture that could be a public and social project’ and, on the other hand, the memory empresario, who ‘would tend to create a memory business (empresa) for financial profit’ and thereby exacerbates the dangers involved in ‘the commercialization of the memory of atrocity’ (11), such sharp binary distinctions hardly take into account the entanglements of a cultural process that, like James’s bureaucraft, consists precisely in the simultaneous functioning of its benevolent and malevolent sides. 21 The word ‘scribal’, as I have used it in this essay and in my Introduction, as well as in the book where the concept was first introduced (Bongie, 2008), has a double valence. Understood narrowly, it is the simple counterpoint to ‘literary’ and thus (according to the dictates of the ‘ideology of Literature’) signals a ‘bad’ dependent form of writing, the very opposite of its ‘good’ autonomous double. Understood more broadly, however, the ‘scribal’ is what makes that sort of invidious binary distinction possible in the first place. It is not the opposite of the ‘literary’ but the institutional ground out of which the distinction develops, a formative site of articulation in which the ‘difference’ between the great ‘artist’ and the dutiful ‘hack’ has yet to be established; to envision the ‘scribal’ in this broader sense requires that one think those two seemingly antithetical identities, and the practices associated with

them, not apart from one another (as the ‘ideology of Literature’ demands) but together (difficult as this thought must be for anyone invested in the specific forms of differentiation this particular ideology makes possible).

4 Afterword: Vastey and the System of Colonial Violence Nick Nesbitt The essays collected in this volume, along with Chris Bongie’s introductory materials, notes, and translation, radically extend our understanding of Vastey’s Le système colonial dévoilé. Taken together, these texts imply a series of further questions, a number of which I would like to address in what follows. If Colonial System, as Bongie writes in his Introduction, can ‘be considered the first systemic critique of colonialism ever written’ (p. 7),1 how, in the absence of their explicit exposition, are we to understand Vastey’s use of such concepts as colonialism, system, and critique? How might we extend the related affirmation, made repeatedly throughout this collection, that Vastey’s Colonial System anticipates the insights of anticolonial thinkers like Aimé Césaire, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Frantz Fanon? How does Vastey structure his critique of the principal phenomenon at issue in Colonial System: namely, violence (both in its colonial and revolutionary variants)? Here, in the wake of the preceding essays, I wish briefly to suggest some further elements for reflection on Vastey’s intervention and invention of a postcolonial, emancipationist critique, in which I will focus on: 1. his critique of the colonial system; 2. his further articulation of this critique as a critique of violence; 3. his original contribution to the genre of what I have elsewhere called ‘Caribbean critique’; and 4. some elements of comparison between Vastey and other key figures in this critical tradition, including Césaire, Sartre, and Fanon.

Colonialism is a System… While Vastey’s Colonial System clearly constitutes ‘the first systemic critique of colonialism ever written’, just what Vastey means by ‘colonial system’ is never clearly stated in his text. As Bongie makes clear, Colonial System is emphatically written as a counter-discourse to the ex-colonist Malouet’s proslavery defence of what the latter called ‘the colonial system’ (pp. 46–51). The guiding ‘principle’ of this system, Malouet explicitly tells his readers, is the negation and quarantine of ‘the doctrine and principle of liberty and equality’ in ‘a society composed of masters and slaves’ (qtd. p. 47): in other words, the principled and violent defence of the order of racial hierarchy in a society of masters and slaves, against the political, existential threat of a society structured upon the countervailing principle of equality. The nature of this hierarchical colonial system, as Vastey’s text strives to demonstrate, is violence of the most horrifying kind and degree. ‘Posterity will be amazed’, Vastey writes, ‘that a system so horrific, which is based on violence and theft, on pillaging and lying, on the most sordid and impure forms of vice, should have found zealous apologists among the enlightened nations of Europe’ (p. 93). Vastey’s singular intervention into this debate is to describe colonialism as a general system of acts of violence, acts for which those human actors are to be held accountable, for perhaps the first time, as both Marlene Daut and Doris Garraway argue in their contributions to this volume. As Garraway writes, by focusing almost exclusively on the perpetrator’s objective doings, and by naming the accused, Vastey… eschews sentimental excess in favour of an almost numbing insistence on acts and their authors. In this sense, his exposure of the ‘colonial system’ has more in common with a legal deposition, the purpose of which is to contribute to the process of discovery around a crime committed. (pp. 231–32)

Vastey’s critique of colonialism as a system of acts made by responsible human agents—and this is a point I will return to in my conclusion— is thus radically humanist. To state that colonialism, in the abstract, is a system, and even a system of human acts, was doubtless an insight to be gained from a careful reading of a text such as Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes.

Vastey’s reconceptualization of colonialism as a system pushes beyond the encyclopaedic, predominantly descriptive approach of Raynal, however, to conceive of this system critically, as generalized acts of violence. As a humanist critique of colonial violence, Colonial System thus announces the analogous anticolonial humanisms of Césaire, Sartre, and Fanon alike. Consubstantial with this assertion that the colonial system is one of generalized violence (of masters against slaves, whites against blacks, French against Africans) is the status of Colonial System as a work of critique, which proceeds by what Vastey calls the ‘unveiling’ of an unjust system or situation. The proper mode of Vastey’s critique is not simply to mention, or even describe in detail, the various forms of violence of plantation slavery in Saint-Domingue, something eighteenth-century European authors such as Wimpffen had already begun. Though Vastey continues this process of enumeration beyond what any of his abolitionist or reformist predecessors had attempted, his most original and provocative rhetorical move is actually to name the names of those he accuses, and thus to render them accountable for their actions in the absence of any such accountability in a (French) court of law.2 Vastey, writes Marlene Daut, puts ‘on public trial the cruelty of the French colonists and in the end the entire colonial system… Since the French government will never properly punish the former slaveholders, the only hope he has… is to commit the names of the guilty colonists to paper’ (p. 194). Truth, in turn, is to be rendered via this act of nomination: ‘The facts I am going to recount bear the stamp of truth… I have obtained these facts from a great many notable and credible people. Moreover, I am providing the names of the colonists who perpetrated these crimes, and I defy any of them to contradict me’ (p. 109). Vastey here seems to distinguish between two registers: the first of mere facts, those acts of violence and savagery that he will enumerate, all of which actually happened, but which in and of themselves are not true. The truth, instead, may become evident when these acts are first of all attributed to named individuals within a general and persuasive critique (Daut refers in this vein to what she calls Vastey’s ‘truth effect’ (p. 195)). Revealed in the light of such a critique, these acts will no longer be allowed to remain the ‘unfortunate’ by-products of a ‘necessary’ system.

Vastey’s critique, in what Garraway and Daut both insightfully describe as a refusal (in varying degrees) of the pathos of abolitionist sentimentality for the dry, even mechanical enumeration of these acts of violence, articulates the outlines of a general, ideological system of human actions. This system is ideological precisely in the sense that, until Vastey, the colonial system—while having its various critics and reformers such as Brissot and les Amis des Noirs, as well as its defenders such as Malouet himself —presented acts of violence of the sort Vastey describes as the more or less unfortunate side effects of a necessary state of affairs (French colonialism as an economic or political necessity). Vastey, echoing Robespierre (‘Périssent les colonies plutôt qu’un principe!’) and the Diderot of Raynal’s Histoire, puts to judgement this unquestioned state of necessity: reaffirming its just end in the independence of Haiti, but also, beyond anything argued before him, calling for the condemnation, by eternal shame if not court of law, of the individuals responsible for this system of general injustice. This in turn indicates the fullest sense of Vastey’s critical ‘unveiling’: to reveal precisely what is hidden by empirical ‘reality’ itself, hidden by colonialism understood as the normal, necessary state of France’s affairs; to reveal the utter untruth of this system that uniformly covers up, when its proponents are not outright justifying, its attendant forms of violence.

… to Which the Black Jacobin State is the Solution Vastey’s Colonial System at once urges the destruction of a system of general violence, while offering a positive image of the political system that should rightfully replace it. Vastey’s text, despite the clearly inegalitarian nature of Christophe’s monarchy,3 deserves to be considered a fundamental moment in what I have elsewhere described as a Black Jacobin tradition in the Francophone Caribbean world (Nesbitt, 2013). If Jacobinism names the French metropolitan struggle, from 1792 to 1794, to implement a politics of popular sovereignty oriented by the general principle of justice as equality, Black Jacobinism, in turn, identifies the perimetric critique and radicalization of this politics by figures such as Toussaint and Dessalines, to affirm without compromise that no such politics is imaginable if humans remain eligible for slavery. Black Jacobinism in Saint-Domingue/Haiti

maintains a number of characteristics through its various and complex iterations from 1793 (the date of Toussaint’s first public intervention) through the 1990s (in the post-Duvalier years of Aristide and Lavalas). 1. Black Jacobinism refers political interventions to universal truth statements: most importantly in the years of the Haitian Revolution, the absolute ineligibility of all human beings for enslavement, or what Vastey calls unhesitatingly in Colonial System the ‘rights of man’ (pp. 82, 83) and ‘our indestructible and eternal rights’ (p. 145). Such statements, articulated and inscribed in documents such as Toussaint’s 1801 Constitution and the 1804 Declaration of Independence, hold an external, even eternal measure of truth up to an untrue world of colonial enslavement and violence. The Atlantic World of 1814 is in this sense a radically untrue world, a world that continued, after 1804, to be structured around the legitimate extension and operation of the system of plantation slavery. 2. Black Jacobinism operates via specific, militant interventions into a dominant state of affairs. Like 1789 in France, the uprising on the northern plains of Saint-Domingue in August 1791 was the sudden flashing up of an opening, l’ouverture, of a new and fundamentally different world. If the event of that initial revolt appeared chaotic and incomprehensible, above all from the perspective of the colonial system itself, its consequences remained to be developed and followed through in the clearing of a new world, a world without slavery, a world that had to be experimentally reordered and reinvented in a general context of slavery-based nation states. The pure negativity of an initial refusal of slavery and the plantation system in 1791 gradually, in the course of over a decade, becomes the positive necessity of an independent abolitionist state: a necessity still unclear to Toussaint when he writes his constitution of 1801 that reaffirms the colonial status of Saint-Domingue, but which is finally and irrefutably recognized by all those who align to defeat the French forces following his capture in 1802. The Haitian Revolution intervened in a previously undecidable situation: after 1789 and the declaration that ‘tous les hommes naissent et demeurent égaux en droits’, who in the French colonies was to be considered subject to the category hommes? Mulattoes? Free blacks? African slaves themselves? Like all of the decisive moments of the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath, Vastey’s Colonial System constitutes an intervention that takes sides and decides in a conflictridden situation. Thus the essential nature of the momentous choice Vastey makes in 1802, a choice that would determine every dimension of the future course of his life, when, realizing the injustice and duplicity of the French military intervention, he chooses sides and joins up with the revolutionary former-slaves, transforming himself in the process from the bi-racial offspring of a French father and African mother to become ‘black’ like all other Haitians, irrespective of their racial phenotype (see pp. 18, 179). 3. Black Jacobinism, like French Jacobinism, has repeatedly named a political alliance between leftist, radical enlightenment intellectuals (whether lawyers like Robespierre, devotees of Raynal/Diderot like Toussaint, poet-intellectuals like Césaire, or a priest such as Aristide) and a mass population (of sans culottes, former slaves, Haitians casting off the Duvalier regime after 1986) struggling for popular sovereignty. The Black Jacobin tradition refuses all anarchist insistence on a stateless egalitarianism to insist that the state itself, once it has reinvented itself upon the bedrock of popular sovereignty (as the absolute, non-

negotiable freedom of all Haitians from slavery, whether in Christophe’s kingdom or Pétion’s republic) constitutes the proper guarantor of this freedom in the face of a world seeking to reinstitute by all means available slavery and colonialist violence.4 4. Black Jacobinism, like the brief Jacobin moment in France, necessarily takes the form of a political experiment in a situation of utter novelty. As a first, initial invention of the postcolonial abolitionist state, in the face of constant and repeated attempts to destroy or at least hobble and undermine Haitian independence, Haitian Black Jacobinism was forced to experiment with the political forms that would sustain its autonomy (including forced plantation labour). Black Jacobin politics names the experimentation of a thought, bringing together the idea and political practice in a situation of uncertainty. Once the plantations have been burned to the ground, the question remains, what is freedom? Black Jacobin politics in the time of Christophe and Vastey names this experimental articulation of the unity of thought (as the idea of justice as equality) and the constitution of a body (as the Haitian community of free citizens). The politics of universal emancipation, once it exists, constitutes a site of thought to the highest degree, an abstraction from the injustice of a prior world. Toussaint’s 1801 Constitution, with its initial iteration of a postslavery regime, Dessalines’s 1805 Constitution with its affirmation that all Haitians should henceforth bear the attribute black, or Pétion’s 1816 constitutional defence of Haitian free soil are various examples of this experimental bringing together of the idea of universal emancipation and the actually existing abolitionist state.

One might argue that many if not all of the figures of this tradition, from Toussaint and Christophe to Césaire and Aristide, were forced to negotiate the troubled relation between the peuple—whether masses of freed slaves after 1791, French Overseas citizens after 1946, or Haitian citizens after the fall of Duvalier—and the state, the latter taken in the Jacobin and Black Jacobin traditions alike to stand as the guarantor of a true popular sovereignty. If the history of this fraught relation between popular sovereignty and the state in the Francophone Caribbean lies beyond the scope of this commentary, it is at least clear that Christophe’s monarchy, while understandably unacceptable as a formal political structure to a French Jacobin like Grégoire in comparison to Pétion’s republic, constituted a similarly tentative, experimental, yet ultimately principled and unwavering attempt to sustain the sovereign freedom of all its citizens via the sovereignty of the only abolitionist state(s) in existence in 1814. Vastey’s politics of principle consists of three dimensions.5 It is above all a political intervention into a situation, a rebuttal to the imminent threat of reinvasion Haiti faced in 1814 and the vehement defence of it mounted by figures such as Malouet. Its political content, reiterated above all in the Introduction and closing pages of Colonial System, affirms the absolute

necessity and rightfulness of Haiti’s continued existence as an independent, abolitionist, and postcolonial state. Secondly, Vastey articulates this political imperative in relation to the singular history he tells for perhaps the first time. Colonial System articulates a history of what I referred to above as the facts of colonial violence as well as of the truths of the injustice of that system and its necessary replacement by an independent Haiti. This is a history at every moment allied to the attribution of proper names, whether those of the perpetrators of colonial violence or of the figures who rightfully ended that system (Toussaint, Christophe), along with the abolitionist allies (Wilberforce) and nation states that supported this process (England). Finally, Vastey’s politics of principle proceeds as a process of subjectivation. Colonial System, in naming those guilty for the crimes of colonial violence, interpellates them as subject to the rights of man, and to the measure of justice as equality (no human has the right to perpetrate such acts of violence upon another). Furthermore, however, Vastey’s text seeks to constitute its community of Haitian readers as a body politic driven to resist impending French recolonization and reimposition of slavery by any and all means available. To this end, Colonial System stands as the founding text of a global post- and anticolonial community, a transnational community that would have to await its constitution in the decades of twentieth-century decolonization.

Vastey’s Critique of Violence For Vastey, plantation violence was the site of ultimate horror, violence in its most terrible forms, given historical form and standing as a regime, upheld by the rule of codified law, both before and after 1789, regularized and standardized, rationalized and reified. Colonial System initiates a critique of this colonial violence that will be carried through by C. L. R. James, Aimé Cesaire, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Frantz Fanon. Vastey remains throughout his writings absolutely committed to an unyielding defence of the Haitian people’s rightful destruction of plantation slavery. ‘In order to destroy this System so deeply enrooted by time and prejudice, there were but two methods’, Vastey writes in his 1819 Essai sur les causes de la révolution et des guerres civiles d’Hayti: ‘Either gradually, by the will of the oppressors and with

the passage of time, or else despite them, through violent upheavals that would necessarily entail a struggle fraught with crime, blood, and destruction, spread across multiple years, between oppressed and oppressors. This is what occurred: the unyielding nature, the injustices, and the tyranny of the ex-colonists produced this terrible struggle that has continued to our day’ (5–6). Vastey’s principled critique of violence is in fact even more complex than this sketch implies. Two forms of violence are readily distinguishable in Colonial System: the unjust violence of the colonial plantation and slavery, and the just, necessarily violent struggle to institute a post-slavery state in the midst of a reactionary, slave-holding Atlantic World. In the face of the immediate threat of reinvasion by France, Vastey asserts the absolute justice of Haitian resistance: I seize hold of my own weapons and thank the heavens for having placed in our hands the instrument of our deliverance and our preservation. O precious force of arms! Without you what would have become of my country, my compatriots, my kinsfolk, my friends? From that moment on, I looked upon those weapons of mine as the greatest of all possessions. Sons of the mountains, dwellers of the forests, cherish these weapons of yours, these precious tools for preserving your rights. Never abandon them, pass them on to your children along with the love of liberty and independence, and a hatred for tyrants, as the finest legacy you can bequeath them. (p. 87)

As in Walter Benjamin’s influential ‘Critique of Violence’, Vastey clearly distinguishes between the injustice of a political order that monopolizes and wields lawful forms of violence over its subjects, on the one hand, and the rightful violence that seeks to destroy such an unjust regime of constituted law. Vastey’s critique of violence, however, offers a further level of distinction that Benjamin’s text never explores. In ‘Critique of Violence’, Benjamin makes an absolute distinction between two forms of violence, ‘mythic’ and ‘divine’, or, less obscurely, ‘law-making’ and ‘law-breaking’ modes of action. For Benjamin, mythic, law-making violence is always the unjust law of the state, over and against individuals, while law-breaking, divine violence names the revolutionary action of the masses that shatters the laws of kings and masters. Unlike Benjamin’s relatively simple binary distinction, Vastey’s critique maintains four variables in the process of distinguishing just from unjust violence. States themselves can be unjust or just, while violence in turn can

either affirm or negate the just or the unjust state, as the case may be. The single criterion of judgement remains the norm of a slavery-free existence, but as is not the case in Benjamin’s analysis, the Jacobin and Black Jacobin traditions maintain that a just, democratic state can serve to support the goal of popular sovereignty.6 This division allows for a more complex analysis of situations of violence in relation to the question of justice and injustice. Two forms of state can be identified: 1. a state that supports the colonial slave system (like the French ancien régime or Napoleon’s in 1802) is unjust and deserves to be overthrown; 2. in contrast, a state that supports universal emancipation—such as the Jacobins in February 1794, the Thermidorian regime that followed, Haiti itself after 1804, or even, potentially, England—has the absolute right to defend itself against counterrevolution.7 Given this priority of the abolitionist state’s right to existence, Vastey can logically distinguish as well between: 3. the illegitimacy of plantation violence in a system that justifies slavery; versus 4. the (implicit) legitimacy of Christophe’s violence against his subjects (forcing them to build the Citadel Laferrière, say, or to work the plantations to provide export crops). Vastey’s repeated invocations of the law similarly depend upon this distinction between the just and unjust state: under a slaveholding regime of colonial violence, the law is ineffective, a ‘dead letter’ (p. 124). Vastey’s naming of names, his public sphere prosecution of those guilty of these crimes, implies in turn a future state of affairs when the law of the state, and not merely the scribe’s pen, will hold the guilty accountable. While the 1814 Colonial System focuses its descriptions on the horrors of the slave regime, his 1816 Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères supplements this with descriptions of the violence of the revolution itself. Its concluding section brings that work in its final pages to an apocalyptic finish: We saw our fellow citizens, our friends, our relatives, men, women, children, old and young, with distinction of neither age nor sex, tortured by these monsters: some expired in the fire’s flames, others attached to the gallows were fodder for birds of prey, still others were given up to the dogs to be devoured while the luckiest perished before the blows of daggers and bayonets. (1816c, 95)

Vastey recounts the evacuation of black soldiers who had fought for the French, along with their wives and children, and who upon boarding the ships they believed would carry them to safety were clamped in irons: ‘each

night these barbarians brought a few hundred of them to the bridge, where they were tied, gagged, and thrown into sacks, often with children’, whereupon they were ‘stabbed through the sacks and thrown into the sea’ (96). Vastey describes an auto-da-fé in Cap-Français organized by the French General Michel Marie Claparède, a veteran of Napoleon’s Army of the Rhine who was a member of Leclerc’s expedition: Claparède orders the pyre to be lighted. The fire catches immediately, and the victims’ feet are set aflame. Already we imagine they are crying out, that they must be writhing in their horrible torments. But no! What Stoic courage! What rare intrepidity! Immobile, not even their feet move, their gaze fixed ahead, they endure their execution and the fire that devours them. Quickly enveloped in flames, their bodies melt, the fat flowing onto the pyre, a thick smoke rising with the smell of grilled flesh… A feeling of hatred and vengeance arises in the heart of the distraught Haytian [dans le cœur de l’haytien consterné]. (98–99)

Vastey’s critique of violence culminates in the final pages of Colonial System in its various calls to defend Haiti, to sustain its defeat of the many forms of colonial violence he has described: ‘From every quarter we hear the cries of our fellow citizens: our tyrants are coming, to arms! We must hasten on… that we might lay down the pen and take up the sword against our tyrants’ (p. 130); ‘Should we be annihilated, down to the very last one of us, this would still be preferable to bowing our heads under the despotic yoke that once oppressed us. Never will we tremble before the forces of our enemies, be they ever so great in number’ (p. 142). Many of Vastey’s writings in defence of Christophe’s abolitionist state remain subject to what I have elsewhere called the contradictions of his scribal predicament, which forced him to silence his support for Haiti as militant antislavery state in the Atlantic World and to support instead the goal of an open and critical (but ultimately unthreatening) public sphere (2013, 173–191). Colonial System, however, pushes this militant stance to the fore in the face of the looming, very immediate threat of French reinvasion, affirming, as would Césaire, Sartre, and Fanon in his wake, the absolute necessity and rightfulness of anticolonial violence to sustain—in the case of Haiti—the continued existence of the postcolonial abolitionist state.8

Discourses on Colonialism

Colonial System prefigures the Black Jacobinism of Aimé Césaire not so much via Césaire’s actual representation of Vastey in La tragédie du roi Christophe as in three dimensions of Césaire’s own political and rhetorical practice. Like all figures of the Black Jacobin tradition, Césaire saw the democratic, egalitarian state positively as a vector for the defence of the sovereignty of all. This is among the principal conclusions to be drawn from his drafting and support of the 1946 law that ‘departmentalized’ a number of France’s overseas colonies, transforming their colonized subjects into citizens of the Fourth Republic. For Vastey and Césaire alike, the state offered the potential for implementing and sustaining as a historical reality the promise of abolition and decolonization. What Césaire called ‘Departmentalization’ named the struggle to increase the popular sovereignty of the inhabitants of France’s colonies to the maximum degree possible. For Césaire, this implied the transformation of colonial subjects into full citizens of the Fourth Republic, fully subject to its rights and laws. Departmentalization as originally conceived in 1946 was of course not fully implemented by the French state until the 1990s, and this backtracking progressively led Césaire to affirm instead the political ‘autonomy’ of Martinique, and, by the 1970s, even led him to articulate an explicitly Fanonian defence of the necessity of colonial violence in the face of the state’s refusal to decolonize (see Nesbitt, 2013, 103–17). That said, the Departmentalization process has been argued by critics such as Gary Wilder (2009) and myself to constitute a viable and singular form of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to this commitment to the emancipationist state, Vastey and Césaire implemented a similar rhetorical manipulation and revoicing of their sources, a similarity quite striking in Colonial System’s dense network of citations articulating a range of sources including Moreau de Saint-Méry, Grégoire, Wimpffen, Raynal/Diderot’s Histoire des deux Indes, GarranCoulon, and Mungo Park. Similarly, Césaire would put his vast erudition on display in texts such as the Discours sur le colonialisme (1950/1955) and his 1956 speech ‘Culture and Colonization’, in order to pillory with his powerful invective the many prophets of racial inequality and African barbarity. Unlike Césaire, however, Vastey, writing from peripheral Haiti, lacking major research libraries, various intellectual communities of debate and

discussion, and, above all, time, was forced between 1814 and 1820, in the face of what Bongie shows in his Introduction to be the very real threat of Haiti’s recolonization and resubjection to slavery, to improvise as best he could, with the relatively few sources he had at hand, a substantial and original critique of colonialism and slavery as global systems.9 Marx had the British Museum Reading Room, a European community of socialist thinkers, and, above all, half a century to construct a systemic and scientific critique of capitalism in the three volumes of Capital. Césaire had the library of the French Assembly, the Bibliothèque nationale, and his connections and encounters with colleagues through organizations such as the PCF (Parti communiste français) and Présence Africaine. While Vastey clearly intuits a determining structure beneath the blinding immediacy of colonized experience, he is obliged to rely on a handful of sources (most notably, as Bongie shows in his essay, Grégoire’s De la littérature des Nègres), as well as on his first-hand experience—of slavery and colonial violence, of the Haitian Revolution, and of French neo-colonialism after 1804—and oral interviews with surviving Haitian witnesses of the period, to construct a postcolonial critical apparatus that might ultimately be called an ideological war machine rather than a scientific critique. Finally, and despite all such limitations that Vastey confronted from 1814 to 1820, the most compelling correspondence between Vastey and Césaire is undoubtedly the degree to which each developed powerful, even incendiary, anticolonial rhetorics of critique and castigation. Readers of this volume should now be familiar with the power and originality of Vastey’s rhetoric. Césaire’s gift for anticolonial invective, in turn, culminated in those extraordinary paragraphs of the Discourse on Colonialism, in which he, like Vastey before him, condemned the universal responsibility of all those in whose name colonial violence and dehumanization are perpetrated: Therefore, comrade, you will hold as enemies—loftily, lucidly, consistently—not only sadistic governors and greedy bankers, not only prefects who torture and colonists who flog, not only corrupt, checklicking politicians and subservient judges, but likewise and for the same reason, venomous journalists, goitrous academics, wreathed in dollars and stupidity, ethnographers who go in for metaphysics, presumptuous Belgian theologians, chattering intellectuals born stinking out of the thigh of Nietzsche, the paternalists, the embracers, the corrupters, the back-slappers, the lovers of exoticism, the dividers, the agrarian sociologists, the hoodwinkers, the hoaxers, the hot-air artists, the humbugs, and in general, all those who, performing their functions in the sordid division of labor for the defense of Western

bourgeois society, try in diverse ways and by infamous diversions to split up the forces of Progress—even if it means denying the very possibility of Progress—all of them tools of capitalism, all of them, openly or secretly, supporters of plundering colonialism, all of them responsible, all hateful, all slave-traders, all henceforth answerable for the violence of revolutionary action [tous redevables désormais de l’agressivité révolutionnaire]. (2000, 54–55; my italics)

Like Césaire here, Vastey argues in Colonial System that there are no ‘good’ colonialists or slave owners; if the system is wrong, all those who support its perpetuation are in the wrong. He powerfully condemns the ‘bad faith’ of apologists who underlined the putative ‘rarity’ of the violent acts he enumerates: ‘[Y]ou will go on to tell me that since time immemorial there have been monsters who have defiled themselves with misdeeds of this sort, and that… I should not conclude from this that all colonists are indiscriminately monsters. Yes, they all are, more or less; they all committed such horrors, participated in them and contributed to them’ (p. 108). Vastey’s logic is perfectly identical to that of Césaire (as well as of Sartre10) a century and a half later. In similar fashion, Césaire’s tirade continues, unabated, to its monstrous, cataclysmic dénouement: And sweep out all the obscurers, all the inventors of subterfuges, the charlatans and tricksters, the dealers in gobbledygook [les manieurs de charabia]. And do not seek to know whether personally these gentlemen are in good or bad faith, whether personally they have good or bad intentions. Whether personally—that is, in the private conscience of Peter or Paul— they are or are not colonialists, because the essential thing is that their highly problematical subjective good faith is entirely irrelevant to the objective social implications of the evil work they perform as watchdogs of colonialism. (2000, 55)

Like Vastey’s Colonial System, Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism asserts in these lines the universal responsibility of colonialists and the state that supports them for the violence of colonialism, such that absolutely anyone can (and must) interrogate and ruthlessly critique their own complicity in such a disaster, and, in turn, work for the destruction of colonialism as an objective system.

Colonialism is a Structure

Sartre’s brief article ‘Colonialism is a System’, if only through its title, stands as the most obvious inheritor to the anticolonial critique of Colonial System Unveiled. I have underscored above the fundamental similarity between Vastey’s critique of an unjust ideological system and his entirely humanistic and even proto-Sartrean attribution of the freedom of responsibility, decision, and action to human individuals as named, singular subjects. A close reading of Sartre’s article, however, reveals its surprising distance from the ‘humanism’ for which he would soon be taxed by the Althusserian structuralists. For Sartre’s argument in this article appears eminently structuralist in attributing priority to the pre-existent (Sartre in his jargon would say ‘practico-inert’) determinacy of a social structure that creates and determines the human subjects of colonialism. Sartre writes that the French Republic ‘fabricates “natives”’ and that it ‘creates masses but prevents them from becoming a conscious proletariat by mystifying them with the caricature of their own ideology’ (48). Whatever we may make of this rudimentary sketch of the French colonial system in Algeria, Sartre’s protostructuralism allows us to distinguish between the critique of an ideological system and the responsible, free human agents that compose it, and the critique of a determining social structure, characterized, as Althusser and his students would soon argue in Lire le Capital (1965), not by the empirical forms of its ideological iterations, but by its mode of production, an understanding of which is attainable only by the articulation, analysis, and critique of that underlying mode of production itself (on the model of Marx’s analysis of capitalism). Sartre’s text thus points beyond the humanism of both Vastey’s Colonial System as well as Sartre’s own assertions of the general responsibility of the French, of all those who participate in and support, whether actively or passively, an unjust system, toward a properly ‘structuralist’ critique of colonialism as the mode of production of colonial violence. While neither Vastey nor Césaire nor Sartre carried through such a critique of the structure of colonial violence, it is the incisive destruction of the ideological system of colonialism, begun by Vastey in 1814, sustained and developed through the twentieth century by figures such as Césaire, Sartre, and Fanon, that remains the lasting accomplishment of this stirring, protean text, Le système colonial dévoilé.

Notes 1 All subsequent page references, unless otherwise stated, refer to the present volume. I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge an omission in the chapter on Vastey in my book Caribbean Critique (2013, 173–91), which cited a number of passages from Chris Bongie’s translation of Colonial System without attribution (see, notably, 178, 186). I extend here my sincere apologies for this oversight. 2 In this assertion of general responsibility for those who participate in a system of violence, Vastey clearly prefigures Sartre’s articles condemning the Algerian war and the use of torture by the French military including the 1956 speech ‘Colonialism is a System’, his 1957 piece ‘You are Wonderful’, and ‘We are All Murderers’ and ‘A Victory’ from the following year (see Sartre, 36–55, 63–88). In the face of what Sartre calls the ‘war crimes’ revealed in publications such as Des rappelés témoignent and Henri Alleg’s La question, the crucial aspect of Sartre’s argument in these texts is not simply to denounce the use of torture or colonial exploitation. Sartre’s ethical project extends much further, to convince his readers of their total responsibility for the torture being done in their name in Algeria (Nesbitt, 2013, 251–52). 3 For a balanced and insightful discussion of the relative, and relatively compromised, commitments to egalitarianism of both Christophe’s monarchy and Alexandre Pétion’s republic during this period, see the second chapter of Laurent Dubois’s Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (2012, 52–88). ‘The two regimes’, Dubois concludes, ‘resembled each other to a surprising extent when it came to their vision of the state itself. While Pétion ruled over a nominal republic that had the trappings of a democratic order and Christophe created a monarchy, both systems revolved around a famous general who anchored his power in a handpicked governing coalition. Both regimes were largely politically exclusive, creating and maintaining a relatively small group of leadership elites while doing little to provide for democratic participation by a larger segment of the population’ (87). 4 Ada Ferrer describes Pétion’s uncompromising defence of Haitian antislavery as a transnational politics of principle in light of his 1816 Constitution, its radicalization of the European free soil tradition, and the political use to which it was put when, as in the case Ferrer describes, Caribbean slaves did in fact escape to Haitian soil. Pétion, Ferrer writes, ‘made free soil not only his legal principle to be invoked and argued in specific cases, as it was in Europe, but in fact a general and inviolable principle written into the supreme law of the land’ (50). 5 On this Caribbean ‘politics of principle’ more generally, see Nesbitt (2013, especially 14–19). 6 I wish to stress that I am calling Christophe’s Haitian state circa 1814 ‘democratic’ only in the baseline sense of a state in which all humans retain their absolute sovereignty from slavery. Upon this foundation of universal popular sovereignty, Christophe’s monarchy— and Vastey as its spokesperson—reaffirms the rightful hierarchal division of society as well as the necessity of forced plantation labour in the name of the survival of the former. Dubois makes the point that, despite the increasingly autocratic nature of Pétion’s republic, it did at least implement in 1816 a ‘significant advance for democratic government’: the

creation of a Chamber of Deputies in which ‘the deputies were elected by universal male suffrage’ (2012, 61). 7 Vastey thus follows figures such as Robespierre and Saint-Just, in their defence of the right of the ( Jacobin) state to resist by force counter-revolution, as well as more theoretical, public sphere defences of this same absolute right to resistance on the part of the republican state by thinkers such as Kant and the young Fichte. While Kant has, since the midnineteenth century, generally been thought of as a fundamentally conservative political thinker, in the final years of his life following the French Revolution he was in fact widely considered the most formidable theoretical defender of not only the French Revolution but, though it may today seem implausible, its most radical, Jacobin phase. I argue elsewhere that it is Kant’s philosophical defence of the Jacobin French Revolution that, among other resources, made the Haitian Revolution eminently ‘thinkable’ in its own time (2013, 50– 59). 8 Though an analysis of the complex relation between Vastey and Fanon lies beyond the scope of this commentary, it is obvious that Fanon’s ‘De la violence’ constitutes the most far-reaching and articulated formulation of this critique of colonial, and defence of anticolonial, violence that Vastey initiates in Colonial System. I analyse Fanon’s critique of violence as a situated logic of absolute necessity in singular, incommensurable situations in chapter 8 of Caribbean Critique, ‘Revolutionary Inhumanism: Fanon’s On Violence’ (192–215). 9 This and the following two paragraphs reprise and extend material first introduced in Caribbean Critique (177, 246–47). 10 In ‘Colonialism is a System’ Sartre writes: ‘It is not true that there are some good colons and others who are wicked. There are colons and that is it’ (38).

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Index

Abolitionism ref1, ref2, ref3n16, ref4, ref5, ref6n11, ref7, ref8, ref9 abolitionist discourse ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 abolitionist public sphere, transatlantic/global ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14 see also Haiti Adorno, Theodor ref1 Agamben, Giorgio ref1, ref2n19 Alexander I, Czar of Russia ref1, ref2n2, ref3, ref4n5, ref5 Alleg, Henri ref1n2 Althusser, Louis ref1 Anacaona (Taino cacica) ref1, ref2n13, ref3n15 Anderson, Benedict ref1 Angoulême, Louis-Antoine, Duc d’ ref1 Antijacobin Review, The ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n2, ref5n12 Aravamudan, Srinivas ref1, ref2 Ardouin, Beaubrun ref1, ref2n41, ref3 Aristide, Jean-Bertrand ref1n50, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Arthur, Charles ref1 Atahuallpa (Inca emperor) ref1 Barré de Saint-Venant, Jean Système, references to in ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Système, Vastey’s use of in ref1n32, ref2n58, ref3nn63–5, ref4n90, ref5 Barré Duvivier (colonist) ref1n90 Barrère, Pierre ref1, ref2n53 Barskett, James ref1, ref2nn7–8 Baudouin, Jean ref1n9 Baudry-Deslozières, Louis Narcisse ref1, ref2n23, ref3n64, ref4n100, ref5 Bay, Mia ref1n53 Beauvois, Palisot, Baron de ref1, ref2n31, ref3n57, ref4n69 Beddoes, Thomas ref1, ref2n54 Bell, Madison Smartt ref1n17

Benezet, Anthony ref1 Benjamin, Walter ref1 Benot, Yves ref1, ref2, ref3n10, ref4n105 Bergeaud, Émeric ref1 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, J. H. ref1 Berquin Duvallon, Pierre-Louis ref1, ref2, ref3n100, ref4 Beugnot, Jacques-Claude, Comte de ref1n43 Beverley, John ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Bièvre, Gabriel Mareschal de ref1 Bilbija, Kenija ref1n20 Binns, Edward ref1, ref2n12 Birt, Jabez Sheen ref1 Blackburn, Robin ref1 Blanckaert, Claude ref1 Blane, William Newnham ref1n11 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, ref1 Boisrond-Tonnerre, Louis Félix ref1, ref2 Bongie, Chris ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6n11, ref7n52, ref8, ref9n21, ref10, ref11 Borel, Claude-Isaac ref1n74 Botelho, Keith M. ref1 Boulle, Pierre H. ref1 Bouvet de Cressé, A. J. B. ref1n63 Boyer, Jean-Pierre ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8n22, ref9, ref10, ref11 Brière, Jean-François ref1, ref2 Brissot, Jacques-Pierre ref1n68, ref2 Brooks, Linda ref1n14 Brougham, Henry ref1 Brown, Christopher Leslie ref1, ref2n16, ref3n29 Brown, Vincent ref1 Brown, William Wells ref1 Brulley, Augustin-Jean ref1, ref2n72, ref3 Buck-Morss, Susan ref1 Burke, Edmund ref1, ref2n22 Camper, Petrus ref1, ref2n55 Caonabó (Taino cacique) ref1, ref2 Caradeux, Jean-Baptiste de ref1, ref2n75, ref3n12 Carenan, Paul ref1, ref2n93 Carey, Brycchan ref1, ref2n14 Carlyle, Thomas ref1n7 Carrier, Jean-Baptiste ref1 Carteau, Jean-Félix ref1, ref2n99, ref3 Casanova, Pascale ref1, ref2, ref3 Casimir, Jean ref1, ref2 Césaire, Aimé ref1, ref2, ref3n22, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10

Discours sur le colonialisme ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Tragédie du roi Christophe, La ref1, ref2, ref3n14, ref4 Chanlatte, Juste ref1, ref2, ref3nn63–5, ref4 Chapuiset (colonist) ref1, ref2n71 Charault, J. R. ref1 Charles X, King of France ref1 Charlevoix, Pierre-François-Xavier de ref1n11, ref2n21, ref3, ref4n5 Chateaubriand, Francois-René, Vicomte de ref1n2, ref2 Chatterjee, Partha ref1 Cheesman, Clive ref1, ref2 Christophe, Henry, King of Hayti ref1, ref2n3, ref3n2 Black Jacobin tradition, relation to ref1 Citadelle Henry, construction of ref1, ref2n106, ref3 Déclaration du Roi (1816) ref1n45 educational reforms ref1, ref2, ref3n9, ref4n12, ref5n18, ref6n61 France, hostile relations with ref1, ref2, ref3n21, ref4n35, ref5n38, ref6, ref7 Manifeste du Roi (1814) ref1, ref2, ref3n8, ref4, ref5 legacy, difficulties of assessing his ref1, ref2, ref3n7 media campaigns ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n10, ref6n18, ref7n8, ref8n10 monarchy, creation of (1811) ref1, ref2 recognition of Haitian independence, efforts at securing ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6n18, ref7n21, ref8n45, ref9nn7–8, ref10 representations of, nineteenth-century ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5nn5–6, ref6n13, ref7n41, ref8n71 suicide of (1820) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6n51, ref7n15, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 Système, references to in ref1, ref2 Système, Vastey’s use of in ref1, ref2nn2–3, ref3n21, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 see also Clarkson, Thomas; Pétion, Alexandre; Vastey, Jean Louis Christophe, Jacques-Victor-Henry, Prince Royal ref1, ref2, ref3n2 Christophe, Marie-Louise, Queen of Hayti ref1 Claparède, Michel Marie ref1 Clarke, George ref1 Clarkson, Thomas ref1n5, ref2n7 Christophe, correspondence with ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8nn1–2, ref9n4, ref10n10, ref11n18, ref12n48, ref13nn5–6, ref14 Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1786) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n14 Vastey, correspondence with ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7n12, ref8n22 Vastey, representations of ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n4 Wilberforce, associated with ref1, ref2, ref3n9, ref4n15, ref5n18, ref6n22, ref7 Clauzel, Bertrand ref1 Clavin, Matthew J. ref1, ref2n8, ref3, ref4, ref5 Cleves, Rachel Hope ref1, ref2n56 Cockburne (colonist) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n15, ref6 Cole, Hubert ref1, ref2n3, ref3n9, ref4n7, ref5n5 Colombel, Noël ref1, ref2, ref3

‘colonial system’, genealogy of ref1, ref2, ref3n27 Columbus, Christopher ref1, ref2, ref3n16, ref4n18, ref5, ref6 Condorcet, Nicolas de ref1 Copernicus, Nicolaus ref1 Cortés, Hernan ref1n10 Courtenay, George W. C. ref1, ref2n5 Crummell, Alexander ref1 Cugoano, Ottobah ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n19 Cullion, François Valentin de ref1, ref2n102 Curran, Andrew S. ref1n25, ref2nn52–3 Cushing, Caleb ( The North American Review) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n1 Cushing, William ref1n1 Dain, Bruce ref1 Dalleo, Raphael ref1n17 Dash, J. Michael ref1, ref2, ref3 Daut, Marlene ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10n87, ref11, ref12 Davis, David Brion ref1, ref2 Dayan, Joan (Colin) ref1n50, ref2n81, ref3 Debray, Régis ref1 Deonna, Julien A. ref1 Descourtilz, Michel-Étienne ref1, ref2n73 Desfourneaux, Étienne ref1 Dessalines, Jean-Jacques ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n13, ref6n27, ref7n73, ref8, ref9, ref10 Vastey’s (personal and discursive) relation to ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n29, ref6n3, ref7, ref8 Diderot, Denis ref1n31, ref2n36, ref3, ref4, ref5 Dobie, Madeleine ref1n88 Douglass, Frederick ref1 Draverman (French agent) ref1, ref2 Drouin de Bercy, L. M. C. A. ref1, ref2, ref3n2 Du Bois, W. E. B. ref1, ref2n8 Dubois, Laurent ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8n2, ref9n4, ref10n36, ref11n3, ref12n6 Ducœurjoly, S. J. ( Manuel des habitans de Saint-Domingue) Système, (unacknowledged) quotations in ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Système, Vastey’s use of in ref1nn10–1, ref2nn14–6, ref3nn18–21, ref4n25, ref5n27, ref6n79, ref7, ref8, ref9nn5–6, ref10n15 Dumas, Alexandre ref1 Dumas, Cessette ref1 Dumas, Marie Françoise Élisabeth ‘Mimi’ (mother of Vastey) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n87, ref5, ref6n4, ref7n18 Dumas, Pierre (maternal grandfather of Vastey) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n87, ref5, ref6, ref7n4 Dumas, Thomas Alexandre ref1 Dumesle, Hérard ref1

Dumontellier, Pierre ref1, ref2n74, ref3, ref4n12 Dupuy, Alexis, Baron de ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n4 Durand, Oswald (grandson of Vastey) ref1, ref2 Duval, Marianne (paternal grandmother of Vastey) ref1n4 Duvalier, Jean-Claude ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Easton, Hosea ref1 Edwards, Bryan ref1, ref2n12, ref3nn76–7, ref4 Equiano, Olaudah ref1n52, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n17 Everett, Edward ref1 Fanon, Frantz ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16n8 Fassin, Didier ref1, ref2 Ferrer, Ada ref1, ref2n4 Festa, Lynn ref1, ref2 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb ref1n7 Fischer, Michael M. J. ref1 Fischer, Sybille ref1, ref2n7 Fitzhugh, George ref1n7 Franklin, Benjamin ref1 Franklin, James ref1, ref2, ref3nn6–7 Frossard, Benjamin Sigismund ref1n25, ref2n6 Fuss, Diana ref1, ref2 Galilei, Galileo ref1 Gallifet, Marquis de ref1, ref2, ref3n70, ref4, ref5 Garcilaso de la Vega, El Inca ref1, ref2n9, ref3, ref4 Garran-Coulon, Jean-Philippe Système, references to in ref1, ref2 Système, Vastey’s use of in ref1n69, ref2nn74–5, ref3, ref4, ref5n12, ref6n15, ref7 Garraway, Doris ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n29, ref5, ref6, ref7 Garrigus, John, ref1, ref2n93 Garrison, William Lloyd ref1 Gautimozin (Cuauhtémoc, Aztec emperor) ref1, ref2n10 Gazette royale d’Hayti ref1, ref2, ref3n41 Geggus, David P. ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n69, ref6nn74–5, ref7n77, ref8, ref9n5, ref10n8, ref11, ref12n12 George III, King of Britain ref1n7, ref2n2 George IV, King of Britain ref1, ref2n7 Gérin, Étienne ref1 Ghachem, Malick W. ref1n28, ref2n62, ref3n68, ref4n71, ref5n81, ref6n96, ref7 Gilmore, Paul ref1, ref2 Gilroy, Paul ref1, ref2n16 Girard, Philippe R. ref1, ref2

Girod-Chantrans, Justin ref1 Glover, Kaiama ref1n51 Glymph, Thavolia ref1n80 Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, Comte de ref1n7 Goddu, Theresa ref1 Gouges, Olympe de ref1, ref2, ref3 Goujard, Philippe ref1 Grégoire, Henri-Baptiste, Abbé ref1, ref2n63, ref3n105, ref4n13, ref5n6, ref6n25, ref7n10, ref8 De la littérature des Nègres (1808) as main point of reference for Vastey ref1n22 Système, details from De la littérature des Nègres not directly used in Vastey’s ref1n12, ref2n21, ref3n29, ref4n64, ref5, ref6n12 Système, references to in Vastey’s ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Système, Vastey’s use of in (as identified in footnote apparatus) ref1n23, ref2n28, ref3nn49–60, ref4n76, ref5n80, ref6n82, ref7n84, ref8n97, ref9nn99–102 Système, Vastey’s use of in (as identified in supplementary essays) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10n9, ref11n11, ref12, ref13 Griggs, Earl Leslie ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6n1, ref7n4, ref8n9, ref9n18, ref10n48, ref11n61, ref12n105, ref13 Gronniosaw, Ukawsaw ref1 Gubitz, Friedrich Wilhelm ref1 Guybre, René ref1, ref2n22 Haiti abolitionist state, as ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 humanitarian intervention, as site of ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 indemnities paid for recognition of independence ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n48 neo-colonialism, subject to ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 post/revolutionary state, as ref1, ref2, 10, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11n71, ref12n107, ref13n20 see also Vastey, Jean Louis Haiti (Saint-Domingue), history of 1791 (outbreak of slave revolt) ref1, ref2n70, ref3n76, ref4n93, ref5, ref6, ref7n5, ref8n7, ref9 1802–3 (French invasion) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n6, ref6n3, ref7n17, ref8n73, ref9n104, ref10n107, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14; see also Leclerc, General; Louverture, Toussaint; Napoleon I 1804 (Declaration of Independence) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 1804–6 (Empire) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n27, ref6n3, ref7, ref8; see also Dessalines, Jean-Jacques 1807–20 (division into two states) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n20, ref5n105; see also Boyer, Jean-Pierre; Christophe, Henry; Pétion, Alexandre; post/revolutionary 1814 (planned restoration of slavery, Louis XVIII) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n4, ref6, ref7n2 1820 (reunification) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

1825 (provisional French recognition of independence) ref1, ref2, ref3n50 Haitian Revolutionary Studies ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n8, ref5n81 Hallward, Peter ref1, ref2 Haltunnen, Karen ref1, ref2nn21–2 Hammon, Britton ref1 Hanchard, Michael ref1 Hannemann, Johann Ludwig ref1, ref2n51 Hartman, Geoffrey ref1 Hartman, Saidiya ref1, ref2, ref3n21, ref4n4 Harvey, William Woodis ref1, ref2, ref3 Hatuey (Taino cacique) ref1, ref2n10, ref3, ref4n5 Hayward, Abraham ref1 Hector, Michel ref1, ref2n9 Henri (Taino cacique) ref1, ref2, ref3n21, ref4 Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Michel René ref1, ref2, ref3n88, ref4n92, ref5n97, ref6 Hinks, Peter ref1n42, ref2n8 Hugo, Victor, ref1n75 Hüne, Albert ref1 ‘ideology of Literature’ ref1, ref2, ref3n11, ref4n13, ref5, ref6n21 Inginac, Joseph Balthazar ref1 Isert, Paul Erdmann ref1n27 Jacobs, Harriet ref1 James, C. L. R. ref1, ref2n70, ref3n82, ref4 James, Erica Caple ref1, ref2nn18–20 Jefferson, Thomas ref1, ref2, ref3n11, ref4n13, ref5, ref6n25, ref7, ref8 Jenson, Deborah ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n20, ref6n3, ref7n73 Johnson, Paul ref1 Jonaissant, Jean ref1, ref2 Juge, Jean-Baptiste (Comte de Terre-Neuve) ref1 Justamond, J. O. ref1n36 Justin, Michel-Placide ref1n11 Kant, Immanuel ref1n7 Kristeva, Julia ref1 Labat, Jean-Baptiste ref1n33, ref2, ref3 Lacroix, Pamphile de ref1n6, ref2n71 Ladvocat, Jean-Baptiste ref1n30, ref2n33 Laffon de Ladebat, Philippe Auguste ref1n21, ref2n38 Land, Isaac ref1n29 Laplace, François ref1n64 Larchevesque-Thibaud, Jean-Baptiste ref1, ref2n69, ref3 Las Casas, Bartolomé de ref1, ref2n12, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6n5 Lataille (colonist) ref1, ref2

Lavaysse, Jean-François Dauxion ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n38, ref5n8, ref6, ref7n3 Le Vaillant, François ref1, ref2n26 Leborgne de Boigne, C. P. J. ref1n3 Leclerc, Victor Emmanuel, General ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6n22, ref7n11, ref8n17, ref9n104, ref10, ref11, ref12 Leconte, Vergniaud ref1 Lejeune, Nicolas ref1, ref2, ref3n20 Lenoir, André ref1n11 Lewis, Gordon K. ref1 Lewis, Robert Benjamin ref1n53 Limonade, Julien Prévost, Comte de ref1, ref2, ref3n1, ref4n5, ref5n37, ref6n8, ref7n12, ref8n21, ref9n10 Linnaeus, Carolus ref1 Literary Gazette, The ref1 Long, Edward ref1, ref2n50, ref3n53 Louis XIV, King of France ref1, ref2n81, ref3n96 Louis XVIII, King of France ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5nn3–4 Louverture, François-Dominique-Toussaint ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n22, ref6n3, ref7n21, ref8n36, ref9n73, ref10n104, ref11n17, ref12 Malouet’s references to ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n1 Vastey’s references to ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6n17, ref7 Macandal, François ref1n79 McClellan, James E. ref1n32, ref2n72, ref3 Mackenzie, Charles ref1 Madiou, Thomas ref1, ref2, ref3n4, ref4n12 Maffly-Kipp, Laurie ref1, ref2, ref3n53 Malouet, Pierre Victor ref1 ‘colonial system’, definition of ref1, ref2n27, ref3, ref4, ref5 French Minister of the Marine (1814) ref1. ref2, ref3, ref4nn35–6, ref5n43, ref6n8 slavery, ‘reformist’ approach to ref1n25, ref2n28, ref3n62, ref4n11, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8n7 Système, references to in Vastey’s ref1, ref2 Système, Vastey’s use of in ref1, ref2n29, ref3n1, ref4n3, ref5n103, ref6, ref7n7 see also Louverture, Toussaint Manigat, Leslie F. ref1n2 Marie Catherine (maternal grandmother of Vastey) ref1n4 Marsters, Kate Ferguson ref1n34, ref2 Martellière, Jean-Jacques de la ref1 Marx, Karl ref1, ref2 Mazères (colonist) ref1n31, ref2n34, ref3, ref4n7 Meckel, Johann Friedrich, the Elder ref1, ref2n52 Medina, Franco de ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n41 Mentor, Étienne ref1n27 Métral, Antoine ref1nn3–4 Michelet Jules ref1 Mignolo, Walter ref1, ref2

Mirabeau, H. G. R., Comte de ref1 Mirzoeff, Nicholas ref1 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de ref1n9, ref2 Morales, Pablo ref1 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Médéric Louis Élie ref1n13, ref2n23, ref3n72 Système, references to in ref1, ref2, ref3 Système, Vastey’s use of in ref1n13, ref2n68, ref3nn83–6, ref4nn89–91, ref5nn93–4, ref6n98, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11n15, ref12 Morin (colonist) ref1 Morrison, Toni ref1n20 Morse, Jedidiah ref1, ref2n56 Muthu, Sankar ref1n36 Napoleon I, Emperor of France ref1, ref2, ref3n21, ref4n32, ref5, abdication(s) (1814–5) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n4, ref5n6, ref6, ref7 failed invasion of Saint-Domingue (1802–3) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6n22, ref7, ref8, ref9 Nesbitt, Nick ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n5 Newton, John ref1 Nicholls, David ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n41, ref6n7, ref7 Niles, Blair ref1, ref2 O’Byrne, William R. ref1n5 Odeluc (colonist) ref1, ref2, ref3n70 Ogé, Vincent ref1, ref2n25 Ogle, Gene E. ref1n88 Omi, Michael ref1 Ong, Aiwha ref1 Ovando, Nicolás de ref1, ref2, ref3n13, ref4n18 Page, Pierre-François ref1n72 Painter, Nell Irvin ref1n55 Park, Mungo (Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa) ref1n26, ref2n7 Système, references to in Vastey’s ref1, ref2 Système, Vastey’s use of in ref1nn34–5, ref2nn38–48, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Parry, Benita ref1 Patterson, Orlando ref1, ref2n19 Pattison, Stephen ref1 Payne, Leigh A. ref1n20 Péan, Leslie ref1 Pechméja, Jean-Joseph ref1n36 Peltier, Jean-Gabriel ref1n21, ref2n2 Pétion, Alexandre ref1, ref2n4 Christophe, as rival of ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9n41, ref10n105, ref11, ref12, ref13n3, ref14n6

French preference for over Christophe ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6nn36–8, ref7n22, ref8 indemnities for France, as proponent of ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Vastey’s negative representations of ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10n18, ref11 Phillips, Wendell ref1n17 Philoctète, René ref1n51 Planta, Edward ref1n95 Poncet (colonist) ref1, ref2, ref3n15 Popham, Home Riggs ref1, ref2n5 Popkin, Jeremy D. ref1, ref2n22, ref3n57, ref4nn72–3 Port Folio, The ref1 post/revolutionary (definition of) ref1, ref2 see also Haiti Power, Michael ref1 Praloto (colonist) ref1n74 Prator, Clifford H. ref1n1, ref2n4, ref3n48 Pratt, Mary Louise ref1n26, ref2n34 Prézeau, Sylvain, Chevalier de ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n21 Prieur, Petit-Noël ref1 Quarrel, William Dawes ref1n80 Quérard, Joseph-Marie ref1 Quevilly, Laurent ref1, ref2 Racine, Karen ref1n8 Rainsford, Marcus ref1n18 Ramsay, James ref1 Ramsey, Kate ref1n21 Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas, Abbé ref1, ref2nn36–7, ref3n62, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 Redpath, James ref1 Revue encyclopédique ref1n10, ref2n3 Richard, Jean-Pierre (Duc de la Marmelade) ref1, ref2 Richelieu, Armand-Emmanuel du Plessis, Duc de ref1 Richepère (colonist) ref1 Ritter, Karl ref1 Robespierre, Maximilien ref1, ref2, ref3n7 Rochambeau, Donatien-Marie-Joseph de ref1, ref2 Romain, Casimir ref1 Roscoe, William ref1n8 Rossignol Desdunes (colonist) ref1, ref2, ref3n74 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques ref1nn26–7, ref2, ref3 Roux, Pierre ref1, ref2n44 Rouzeau, A. ref1, ref2n47

Rudé, George ref1n16 Rugemer, Edward Bartlett ref1n76 Rush, Benjamin ref1, ref2n54 Sabourin, André ref1 Saint-Just, Louis-Antoine ref1n7 Saint-Lambert, Jean-François de ref1 Saint-Rémy, Joseph ref1, ref2 Sala-Molins, Louis ref1n81 Sancho, Ignatius ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Sansay, Leonora ref1 Sans-Souci, Jean-Baptiste ref1 Sartre, Jean-Paul ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10n2, ref11n10 Saunders, Prince ref1n18 Scarry, Elaine ref1 Schocket, Andrew M. ref1n29 Schuller, Mark ref1 Scots Magazine, and Edinburgh Literary Miscellany ref1, ref2n19 Scribes (definition of) ref1, ref2, ref3n11, ref4n21 see also Système; Vastey, Jean Louis Sepinwall, Alyssa Goldstein ref1n22, ref2n13, ref3n10 Shakespeare, William ref1 Sharp, Granville ref1n29, ref2, ref3n9 Sheller, Mimi ref1n4 Sismondi, Simonde de ref1 Slaughter, Joseph ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Smethurst, Paul ref1 Smith, Adam ref1 Smith, James McCune ref1n104 Sollors, Werner ref1 Sommer, Doris ref1 Sömmerring, Samuel Thomas von ref1, ref2n53 Spivak, Gayatri ref1 Staël, Germaine de ref1, ref2n6 Stanley, Amy Dru ref1 Stephen, James ref1, ref2, ref3n5, ref4 Sterne, Laurence ref1 Stockdale, Percival ref1n8 Stoler, Ann Laura ref1 Stoll, David ref1n14 Système colonial dévoilé, Le antislavery tract, as ref1, ref2, ref3 Bildungsroman, compared with ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 family members represented in ref1, ref2, ref3n87, ref4, ref5, ref6n18 form v. content, reading for ref1

gender relations in ref1n80, ref2, ref3, ref4n4 historical context for (1814) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 intertextuality and the performance of literacy in ref1 legal deposition, similarity to ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 memory, role of ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n18, ref5, ref6, ref7n12, ref8n20 naming/shaming of white colonists ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 orality, emphasis on ref1n42, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8nn11–2 overview of ref1 parody, use of ref1, ref2n29, ref3n1, ref4 protean text, as ref1, ref2 public diplomacy, as act of ref1, ref2 reviews and reprints, nineteenth-century ref1, ref2n19, ref3n53, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9n3, ref10n12 scribal dimension of ref1, ref2 sentimentalism, (refusal of) ref1, ref2, ref3n18, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 style, unembellished ref1, ref2, ref3n20, ref4, ref5n26 systemic critique of colonialism, as ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 testimonio, as ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n14 trauma portfolio, as ref1–ref2 ‘truth effect’ in ref3, ref4 veil, metaphor of ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 see also Barré de Saint-Venant, Jean; Ducœurjoly, S. J.; Garran-Coulon, Jean-Philippe; Grégoire, Henri; Malouet, Pierre Victor; Moreau de Saint-Méry, M. L. E.; Park, Mungo; Wilberforce, William Système colonial dévoilé, Le, structural components of America, history of Spanish conquest of (pp. 87–92) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n15 colonial governance before revolution, critique of (pp. 138–41) ref1n81, ref2 concluding address, emphasis on anticolonial resistance in (pp.  141–5) ref1, ref2n21, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6n17, ref7 concluding address, emphasis on public sphere in (pp. 141–5) ref1, ref2n21, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 dedicatory epistle to the King (p. ref1) ref2, ref3n29, ref4n2, ref5, ref6, ref7 division into two chapters ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 ending of first chapter, racial science and philanthropy in (pp.  103–5) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 epigraph (p. ref1) ref2, ref3n1, ref4 errata in original edition ref1n24 footnotes ref1, ref2, ref3n15 free people of colour, colonial oppression of (pp. 130–8) ref1, ref2, ref3n16 Introduction (pp. 83–4) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 inventory of colonial atrocities (pp.  109–23) ref1, ref2n67, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8n15, ref9 opening of first chapter, autobiographical (pp. 85–7) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 opening of second chapter, methodological/historiographical (pp.  106–9) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8

post scriptum (p. ref1) ref2n107, ref3 slave trade and Africa, portrait of (pp. 92–103) ref1, ref2n29, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 slaves, colonial oppression of (pp. 123–30) ref1, ref2 Talleyrand, Charles-Maurice de ref1 Taylor, John ref1n11 Todd, David ref1, ref2n6 Tolón, Miguel Teurbe ref1n17 Toussaint Louverture, see Louverture, François-Dominique-Toussaint Trouillot, Hénock ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6n22 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph ref1, ref2, ref3 Tussac, François Richard de ref1n105 Vandercook, John W. ref1 Vastey, Aricie (daughter) ref1, ref2 Vastey, Malvina ‘Améthyste’ (daughter) ref1, ref2 Vastey, Innocent Léo (brother) ref1 Vastey, Jean Valentin (father) ref1, ref2, ref3n4 Vastey, Jean Louis, Baron de À mes concitoyens (1815a) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n7, ref5 African American print culture, influence on antebellum ref1, ref2n42, ref3n53, ref4n104 anticolonial writers, as precursor of twentieth-century ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 autobiographical representations ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 black identity and African culture, affirmations of ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n30, ref5n106, ref6, ref7n7 Christophe, as publicist/secretary/agent for ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9n21, ref10, ref11, ref12 Communication officielle de trois lettres de Catineau Laroche (1816a) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n18 Cri de la conscience (1815b), Le ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Cri de la patrie (1815c), Le ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 date of birth, confusion surrounding his ref1, ref2, ref3 Essai sur les causes de la révolution et des guerres civiles d’Hayti (1819) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11n9, ref12n35, ref13n44, ref14n2, ref15n17, ref16nn106–7, ref17n3, ref18, ref19n1, ref20 Haiti, reputation in ref1, ref2, ref3 ‘major’/‘minor’ works, distinction between ref1, ref2 monstrous hybridity, racialized representations of his ref1, ref2, ref3 murder of (1820) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 name, uncertainty regarding his ref1, ref2 neo-colonialism, as critic of French ref1, ref2 Notes à M. le Baron de V. P. Malouet (1814a) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 overview of his life and work ref1, ref2

Réflexions politiques (1817b) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8n10, ref9n12, ref10n44, ref11n2, ref12n17, ref13n22, ref14, ref15, ref16n3 Reflexions on the Blacks and Whites (1817a) ref1, ref2, ref3n53, ref4, ref5n9 Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères (1816c) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8n9, ref9nn30–1, ref10n34, ref11n49, ref12n57, ref13n107, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17n15, ref18, ref19, ref20n7, ref21 Relation de la fête de S. M. la Reine d’Hayti (1816d) ref1, ref2n17 scribal identity of ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9n20 transatlantic reception of ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7nn3–4 violence, relation to (colonial and revolutionary) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 see also Christophe, Henri; Clarkson, Thomas; Dessalines, Jean-Jacques; Louverture, Toussaint; Pétion, Alexandre; Système; Wilberforce, William Vastey, Pierre (paternal grandfather) ref1n4 Vastey, Pierre Jean Valentin (cousin) ref1 Vaval, Duraciné ref1, ref2 Venault de Charmilly, Pierre-François ref1, ref2nn76–8, ref3 Vergès, Françoise ref1 Vernet, André ref1 Viatte, Auguste ref1 Walcott, Derek ref1, ref2n11 Walker, David ref1, ref2n42, ref3n12, ref4n51, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8n4, ref9n8 Webb, Wilse B. ref1n12 Wedgwood, Josiah ref1n10 Wesley, John ref1 Wheatley, Phillis ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n25 Wheeler, Roxann ref1n50 Whipple, Charles K. ref1 Wilberforce, William ref1, ref2n61, ref3n76, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7n7, ref8 Système, references to in Vastey’s ref1, ref2 Vastey, representations of ref1, ref2 see also Clarkson, Thomas Wilder, Gary ref1 Williams-Wynn, Frances ref1 Wilson, Ellen Gibson ref1n5 Wimpffen, Alexandre-Stanislas, Baron de ref1, ref2, ref3 Système, reference to in Vastey’s ref1 Système, Vastey’s use of in ref1n82, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n14, ref6 Winant, Howard ref1 Winslow, Jacob ref1, ref2n53 Winsnes, Selena ref1n27 Wood, Marcus ref1, ref2n16, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6n20, ref7 Wright, John ref1 Yudell, Michael ref1

Yúdice, George ref1 Zamora, Margarita ref1 Ziarek, Ewa ref1n19 Žižek, Slavoj ref1