Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment 0813928028, 9780813928029

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Universal Emancipation THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION AND THE RADICAL ENLIGHTENMENT

Nick Nesbitt

NEW WORLD STUDIES

A. James Arnold, Editor J. Michael Dash, David T. Habcrly, and Roberto Marquez,

Associate Editors Joan Dayan, Dell H. Hymes, Vera M. Kurzinski, Candace Slater, and Iris M. Zavala, Advisory Editors

New World Studies

A. James Arnold, editor

University of Virginia Press Charlottesville and London

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

VII

1

1 Saint-Domingue and the Singularization of

Enlightenment

University of Virginia Press

© 2008 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia All rights reserved

2 The Idea of 1804

41

3 Penser la Revolution Ha"itienne

81

4 Beyond Jacobinism: Hegemony and Universalism in

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

the Haitian Revolution

First published 2008

5 Toussaint Louverture, the Moun andeyo, and the Transcendental Conditions of Political Autonomy

987654321 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Conclusion: Remembering 1804

Nesbitt, Nick, 1969Universal emancipation: the Haitian Revolution and the radical E.lightenment / Nick Nesbitt. p. cm.

9

- (New World Studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8139-2802-9 (cloth: alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-8139-2803-6 (phk.: alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-8139-2776-3 (e-book) 1. Haiti-History-Revolution, 1791-1804. 2. Liberty. 3. EnlightenmentInfluence. I. Title. ~(..,CF1923.N47 20os:::> 972.94'03-dc22 2008022937

129 153 179

Appendix: Chronology of the Haitian Revolution

(1791-1804)

199

Notes

207

Works Cited

241

Index

257

Acknowledgments

IN A PROJECT ranging over five years and innumerable sites of research and discussion, more debts have been incurred than I can possibly hope to acknowledge here. This book began through an invitation from Deborah Jenson to contribute to the volume of Yale French Studies she edited. In the ensuing years, her research, criticism, and collegiality have been a major inspiration in giving this project the form it has progressively taken on. At Cornell University, a fellowship at the Society for the Humanities and the Department of Romance Languages offered a nurturing home for this work in its incipient versions. There, I benefited from the congenial criticism of Bret de Bary, Susan Buck-Morss, Jacques Coursil, Richard Klein, Mitchell Greenberg, and Barry Maxwell, who took the time to welcome me into their inspiring community. My good friends and colleagues at Miami University submitted much of this material to the incisive critical spirit of the wonderful community that is our Department of French and Italian. Their understanding and generosity as I improvised in the face of life's hurdles during these years has left me with a sense of gratitude and debt that these pages can only hint at. While at Indiana University, I found exciting and munificent interlocutors in Jeff Isaac, Aurelian Craiutu, Jerome Brillaud, Eileen Julien, Doyle Stevick, Oana Panaite, Bill Rasch, and Sarah Knott, while at the European College of Liberal Arts in Berlin, Costica Bradatan and David Durst contributed substantially to the betterment of this work. At the University of Aberdeen, my new colleagues at the Centre for Modern Thought and the School of Language and Literature, and Alberto Moreiras, Chris Fynsk, and Michael Syrotinsky in particular, cultivated this research in its final stages. Other colleagues and friends who generously gave time and attention to this work include Laurent Dubois, Kaiama Glover, Pim Higgenson,

viii Acknowledgments Lydie Moudileno, Martin Munro, Donald Moerdijk, Daniel Maximin, Charles Forsdick, Chris Boogie, Valerie Loichot, Madison Bell, Edwidge Danticat, Peter Hallward, Richard Watts, Marcel Dorigny, Jeremy Popkin, Dawn Fulton, Abiola Irele, and Alec Hargreaves. At the College de philosophie and Tulane University, Jean-Godefroy Bidima has continued to be an inspiration and tireless interlocutor in developing our shared vision of a Black Atlantic Critical Theory. At the University of Virginia Press, A. James Arnold and Cathie Brettschneider have kept faith in this book in its long gestation, and helped immeasurably in its progress. I also wish to extend my thanks and gratitude to the two anonymous readers whose perceptive comments and suggestions were enormously helpful in revising my manuscript. I would like to thank Yale French Studies for granting generous permission to reprint material that appeared in the article "The Idea of 1804" ( 107 [Spring 2005]: 6-38), and Lexington Press for permission to reprint portions of my contribution to Memory, Empire and Postcolonialism: Legacies of French Colonialism (ed. Alec Hargreaves, 2005, 37-50). Earlier versions of material incorporated herein appeared as well in Critique, Carribean(s) on the Move-Archipielagos literarios de/ Caribe, Small Axe, and Research in African Literatures. Finally, this book would never have been possible without the care, critique, and sustenance of Eva Cermanova.

Universal Emancipation

Introduction

THE HUMAN right to be free from enslavement inspired the eighteenth-century Age of Revolution, which spoke widely of the injustices of "slavery" and "servitude," while, paradoxically, chattel slavery was maintained and defended as an actual social institution throughout the Atlantic world. On January 1, 1804, however, the former slaves of the French colony of Saint-Domingue took the decisive step of universally abolishing slavery unconditionally and immediately upon achieving independence as the new nation of Haiti. Acting decades in advance of the North Atlantic powers, they turned the abstract assertion of a human right to freedom for all citizens into historical fact and created a slaveryfree society, without discrimination other than that one be human and present within the borders of this new state. This book will explore the implications of this fundamental event of modern human history, the invention of universal emancipation (as opposed to, say, the emancipation of white, male, adult property owners). Living in a different time, our concerns are inevitably different from those of earlier historians of the Haitian Revolution such as Victor Schoelcher and C. L. R. James; yet my claim is that the Haitian Revolution continues to be, as it was for these distinguished predecessors, of vital importance in thinking about the urgent problems of social justice, human rights, imperialism, torture, and above all what Hannah Arendt identified as the eternal and preeminent problem of political thought: human freedom and its relation to the sociopolitical structures we choose to give to our communities. In Saint-Domingue this struggle for freedom took the form not of the defense of personal choice, thought, or an inner freedom in an unfree world but specifically of what Arendt would describe as "the freedom to call something into being which did not exist before, which was not

2

Introduction

given, not even as an object of cognition or imagination, and which, therefore, strictly speaking, could not be known," in other words, a freedom of active creation (1986, 151 ). Though individuals had on occasion imagined universal rights as a pure abstraction, no society had ever been constructed in accord with the axiom of universal emancipation. The construction of a society without slavery, one of a universal and unqualified human right to freedom, properly stands as Haiti's unique contribution to humanity. Though in this sense the Haitian Revolution constituted a drastic leap forward beyond other contemporary political structures, it stands in another light as the culminating, most progressive event of the Age of Enlightenment. If recent historical revisionism has effectively demolished the prejudice that there was either a single movement identifiable as the "Enlightenment" or that such a movement was the product of a single nation (that is, France, England, or the Netherlands), better understanding of the political philosophy of the Haitian Revolution should help to undo what remains perhaps the last shibboleth of Enlightenment Studies: that, as Tzvetan Todorov claimed in his exhibition notes to a 2006 exhibition at the Bibliotheque de France, "The thought of the Enlightenment was the work of Europe" (11). Even so insightful a historian of ideas as Jonathan Israel maintains a similar faith in a "single European Enlightenment" (140). 1 Instead, this book will explore the many ways in which the Haitian Revolution, an ocean away from Europe, both was inspired by Radical Enlightenment ideas and, in turn, fundamentally transformed this transnational, world-systemic historical process. The declaration of Haitian independence in 1804 can in a certain sense be understood as the political climax of what Israel has called the "radical" (as opposed to a "moderate") Enlightenment. The latter was typified by politically conservative thinkers such Fontenelle, Newton, Locke, Leibniz, and Wolff, all of whom pursued the Cartesian derivation of knowledge solely from mathematic-based human reason, while simultaneously attempting to avoid critique of the established political and religious orders of the day. In contrast, a long tradition of transnational radical thought-extending across Europe from Van den Enden and Spinoza in the 1760s to thinkers including Radicati, Mandeville, La Mettrie, and Diderot-constructed a critique of human knowledge and society that affirmed the indivisibility and inalienability of sovereignty. It was not, however, until 1804following upon the Jacobinist initiative-that an entire nation constituted itself in consonance with such a critique, structuring a society so as to

3

Introduction

affirm the constituent power and rights of all human subjects. Haiti was in this sense the first nation to realize the full political implications of the Spinozian critique of constituted authority and the call for a society in which all human subjects retain their self-moving constituent power (natura natttrans). The former slaves of Saint-Domingue were conscious participants in this Radical Enlightenment, directly influenced by French thinkers such as Diderot (via Raynal's Histoire des trois Indes) and the Jacobin articulation of the undivided "Rights of Man," while further radicalizing in turn an Enlightenment that refused to address Africans as full subjects of human rights. If my project here has been to draw together some of the diverse historical and intellectual threads that were woven into what we now call the Haitian Revolution, it seems unquestionable that the most immediate factor in turning what began as one more in a long series of New World slave revolts for better working conditions into a struggle for the universal abolition of slavery was the publication of the French Declaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen in August 1789. Though I will argue that other components-from the thirteenth-century Mande Declaration of Universal Human Rights ("Charte du Mande") to Vodun and the Catholicism Toussaint Louverture imbibed from his Jesuit benefactors in the decades before 1791-contributed to this process, the testimony of the rebel slaves themselves unequivocally supports such a conclusion. In July 1792, to cite only the most explicit example, they wrote to the General Assembly of Saint-Domingue of "the fortunate revolution which has taken place in the Motherland, which has opened for us the road which our courage and labor will enable us to ascend, to arrive at the temple of Liberty, like those brave Frenchmen who are our models and whom all the universe is contemplating" (Bell 2007, 39-40). Though one should no doubt read such a statement as bearing some degree of·flattery aimed at placating its metropolitan destinataires, there would no doubt have been better ways to ingratiate themselves, had they chosen to, with the grands blancs plantation owners in Paris who wished to maintain the slave-based labor system underwriting their wealth. Refusing such compromises, and less than a year after it had begun, these supposedly ignorant former slaves had unequivocally transformed their revolt into a revolution unique in world history. Similarly, Toussaint Louverture described to the increasingly proslavery French Directory in 1797 how "the French Revolution ... changed my destiny as it changed that of the whole world" (cited in Bell 2007, 59). No mere imitation of the events in France, the Haitian Revolution