Haiti’s echoing victory

Like many former slaves and leaders of the Haitian Revolution, King Henri Christophe was obsessed with safeguarding the hard-won liberty of Haiti’s former slaves and ensuring the country’s new independence from France. To protect these precious freedoms, he had some 20,000 former slaves work for 15 years to build Citadelle Laferriere, a huge stone fortress that sits at the summit of a mountain, its jutting, enormous prow of a facade facing the sea on Haiti’s north coast. Though untold thousands died in its construction during the early 1800s, it gave Henri what he -- and Haiti -- needed. From the Citadel’s unobstructed vantage point, King Henri could easily see any massing of French troops. With enough warning, his men, he knew, could repulse any French attack. They had done so many times before.

Never permit the French to come again to Haiti: This was the watchword of the newly independent colony. Nou pa vle blan, the Haitians had declared. “We don’t want whites.” Although the Citadelle is now abandoned, it still stands as a timeless and impressive monument to Haitian independence. If a visitor is willing to climb on foot in the heat or hire an exhausted donkey to take him up the steep ascent, he can see the northern plain and the coast from King Henri’s point of view, a vast staging ground for onslaughts against the new country. In Haitian Creole today, the word blan simply means “foreigner.”

It seems painful timing, then, that “Avengers of the New World,” Laurent Dubois’ stern and brilliant new book on the Haitian Revolution, should be published at the very moment when French soldiers once again -- for the first time since Haiti declared its independence in 1804 -- are patrolling Haitian soil. Of course, this time the French, American and other troops came from the air and could not be stopped by such ancient fortifications as the Citadel -- or by Haitian pride. Indeed, many Haitians welcomed them and paved the way for their arrival.

After reading Dubois’ book, it becomes clear how foreign interference became a commonplace in Haitian politics and why, even during the revolution, such intrusions into their political affairs were sometimes permitted even by the greatest of the rebel leaders. At the time, the world’s major powers were fighting over the right to buy Haitian sugar and coffee. (As the colonial power there, France had a monopoly on Haitian goods.) They were also fighting over the right to sell their own wares in Haiti, which -- because almost all its arable land was used as a workhouse to produce exclusively for France -- was a huge importer both of necessities and luxuries. Pirate ships of all nations plied the waters off the island, stealing rich booty in acts of virtual war. Today, Haiti remains a net importer of necessities such as rice and clothing.

At the end of the 18th century, the very practical Haitian rebels took advantage of the factions at play on the international scene and tried to manipulate the dominant nations to their own advantage. Thus you find Toussaint L’Ouverture, who masterminded the Haitian victory, one day making secret accords with the British, then cozying up to the Spanish and eventually fighting for the revolutionary French.

Though Haiti today may seem like some stranded African island lost in the Caribbean, in fact its history is closely intertwined with our own and with that of the development of the hemisphere, as Dubois makes plain, if obliquely. Haiti’s population was the first to respond in depth to the cry of the French Revolution. Because of the demographics of the colony, Haiti’s initial rebellion, which began among white planters, was not successful. The revolt triumphed only when it expanded, encouraged by French revolutionary thinkers and a few radical colonial administrators, into the huge slave population, whose pitiless and unprecedented bravery provided an example that would later fire the imaginations of freedom seekers in the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa.

When the Haitian slaves finally routed the French and Napoleon’s army fled, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, another former slave and the general whom L’Ouverture (captured by the French) had left behind to finish up the war, justified the massacres of whites. “These implacable enemies of the rights of man have been punished for their crimes,” he proclaimed shortly after his victory. “Yes, we have paid these true cannibals back crime for crime, war for war, outrage for outrage. I have saved my country. I have avenged America.”

Dessalines’ use of the words “true cannibals,” Dubois tells us, throws racist accusations back into the faces of the white planters, who thought nothing of shoving gunpowder up the rectums of their slaves and igniting it, nor of punishing laxness by burying slaves up to their necks and then setting angry insects upon them. They raped, beat, flayed, maimed and dismembered their human chattel for more than a century. The Haitian Revolution, in all its ugliness and brutality, was the response of the oppressed, indentured and enslaved to their unjust condition. And it is this whirling and chaotic world that Dubois so vividly brings to life in “Avengers of the New World” and so accurately deconstructs.

Unfortunately for L’Ouverture, the rebelling slaves got caught between the French Revolution and the terrible Napoleon. Dubois describes this in an exuberance of character, from the romantic yet canny Sonthonax, the revolutionary commissioner in Haiti who was, if anything, more revolutionary than the rebelling slaves, to Napoleon, who on his deathbed “explained that he should have ‘recognized Toussaint’ and governed the colony through him, rather than sending his forces against him.” Along the way, Dubois introduces writers, mistresses, Creole planters, French revolutionary legislators and, interestingly, L’Ouverture’s own slave.

In the end, like many Haitian leaders, L’Ouverture placed too much trust in his white allies and was betrayed by the French, who, with characteristic courtoisie, offered him dinner and took him prisoner, sending this incredible and majestic figure packing to exile and death in a French dungeon, “his body thrown into an unmarked grave near the prison.” There is no more exemplary story of relations between colonizer and colonized, master and slave, emperor and empire, than the story of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution.

Yet founding fathers are a rare breed. In their own day, they can easily be overlooked or misinterpreted; the Nazarene carpenter comes to mind. Usually, though, the founder of a creed or a nation or a politics or an ideology eventually is recognized. Not so with L’Ouverture. Although (or possibly because) he brought the concept of racial equality to the Americas and was the foremost leader of the world’s first properly nationalist struggle, L’Ouverture is most often remembered by the Western world as an interesting case, a slave general wearing a three-cornered hat with a feather in it, a sword by his side. He is seen as impossibly pretentious, grandiose or extreme. But this man, exiled and imprisoned before his final triumph was accomplished, is really the patriarch of the post-colonial Americas. Dubois renders him in movingly human terms, relating the great liberator’s moments of exultant happiness, his periods of depression, his soaring arrogance, even giving us -- in an unusual story of hair clippings and ribbons and billets-doux -- some idea of the general’s rather complicated love life.

Dubois starts this book about war with chapters about love, death, books and graveyards. His discussions of interracial love affairs and the attitudes of slaves both toward death among slaves and toward death among masters are riveting and eloquent. Indeed, Dubois’ literary sensibility informs the book from start to finish, so that at its beginning as well as at its end, the reader feels as if the story must be fiction, yet it is not.

He opens with the story of the French lawyer Louis-Mederic Moreau de Saint-Mery, who wrote an important three-volume set of books in the 18th century detailing the French part of colonial Saint-Domingue, the island that current-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic share. Moreau fled from revolutionary France, where there was a warrant out for his arrest, and was lucky to escape with his life. Moreau despised the fact that no one who ran Saint-Domingue knew anything about the place (something one could safely say about so many of the foreigners who have meddled in Haitian affairs over the years). Dubois mentions in passing that “masters in Saint-Domingue ... responded to any attempt to interfere with their power over slaves with violent hostility and stubborn resistance.” As so often in the book, what Dubois describes from colonial days has its echo today, for this phrase in particular seems pointedly to describe the Haitian elite’s attitude now toward the enfranchisement of the less-privileged population.

L’Ouverture’s war has had repercussions in world history that he certainly could not have predicted. Without Toussaint and his victory, the United States could never have become what it is today. In defeating France and establishing Haiti as a nation, the self-styled Armee Indigene (ironically made up largely of men who had been born in Africa) destroyed Napoleon’s American ambitions and made it inevitable that the huge Louisiana territory would become available to the United States.

Thomas Jefferson -- no stranger to slave-holding himself -- was quick to seize the strategic opportunity, turning what only a short time before had been England’s colonial outpost into a future continental superpower. Ending slavery in Haiti, Toussaint nonetheless made possible the addition of hundreds of thousands of new Louisiana acres for slaves in the United States to cultivate. Slavery in the United States endured for 58 more years after the Haitians broke their bonds. Fitting that the rich and mighty U.S., which holds most of the world’s people of color in a kind of political and economic thrall, should to a great degree owe its global preeminence to a centuries-old black slave revolution.

Because of its singular status, post-revolutionary Haiti became a pariah nation, shunned by the colonial powers who still held slaves. Britain, the United States and France refused to trade with the new African American nation. And in 1825, the Haitian government of President Jean-Pierre Boyer agreed to pay France 60 million francs in war reparations (for lost plantations and profit), perhaps the only time in recorded history that a victor has ponied up reparations to the vanquished. France sent its demand for money via 12 warships that sat in the Port-au-Prince harbor, waiting for a reply.

It took the Haitians until 1947 to repay the debt, during which time the country sank deeper and deeper into the poverty and misery for which it is now infamous. One item on the bicentennial agenda of the recently deposed president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was a demand for restitution to Haiti of that money, estimated today at $20 billion. No wonder French diplomats in Haiti were the first openly to demand that Aristide step down.

Dubois’ book -- in which each chapter contains at least half a dozen stories that burst with new ideas and wittily described characters -- covers much the same ground as another classic on the subject, C.L.R. James’ “The Black Jacobins.” Many of the revealing stories in the two books are essentially the same. For example, there is the fabled story of the trained dogs brought by the French to set upon the slave armies and the exhibition put on for the planters of Cap Francais to demonstrate the dogs’ hunger for black flesh. A mincing crowd dressed in colonial finery witnessed the savagery, but the contrarian dogs evinced no interest in the young black servant who was brought in for their delectation.

Disgusted with this unsatisfactory display, the French officer who was the young man’s master descended into the arena and sliced open the youth’s stomach. Only then, at the scent of blood and viscera, did the dogs attack. In the telling, James’ version crackles with irony and anger, whereas Dubois’ version is deadpan and also sizzles. James leaves the dogs after noting that they proved “useless in battle,” but Dubois follows them just a bit further and tells us that these dogs, in battle, reverted to natural canine behavior and hunted down whomever was fleeing the front, often enough the French. In the end, Dubois concludes, some of the French troops ended up as dinner for the dogs, and many of the dogs in their turn ended up as dinner for starving French troops: Cotes de chien, a la Creole. Invariably, when the two versions of the story are compared, James is presenting an argument, Dubois, a world.

In every way, down to the last detail, this was a terrible and ferocious war. James, a great writer and thinker, wanted to fight his ideological battles in each paragraph; the outraged stamp of the indignant Marxist is emblazoned across every page. Dubois’ narrative is less ideological, as befits our times. It is certainly more humane in its attitudes. Dubois would never write, as James did, that “the massacre of the whites was a tragedy; not for the whites.... These old slave-owners ... began their old cruelties again; for these there is no need to waste one tear or one drop of ink ... [but] Haiti suffered terribly from the resulting isolation ... and the unfortunate country, ruined economically, its population lacking in social culture, had its inevitable difficulties doubled by this massacre.” Unlike James, Dubois paints everyone, villain and hero alike, with the brush of humanity.

Dubois calls Haiti a nation “founded on ashes,” and he has written splendidly about the fires, both political and cultural, that lit up the land during the days of revolution and that are still, in a sense, burning today. Yet one cannot help but notice the unpleasant tone of glee and triumph in certain non-Haitian writings about the catastrophes in modern-day Haiti, as if even today, there is a belief that the Haitian slaves of 1789 should be, and have been, punished for their revolt. Haiti today is invariably characterized in news stories as “the poorest nation in the hemisphere,” though there are many other ways to telegraph its peculiarities. The Western world seems in some sense still to be rooting for the destruction of the upstart. But thanks to historians like James and Dubois, Toussaint and Dessalines and Christophe remain vivid and meaningful in our memories.

As Dubois writes: “Through writings, through conversations, through rumors and nightmares and dreams, those who died for and lived through the Haitian Revolution became a part of every society in the Atlantic world ... founders in a long struggle for dignity and freedom that remains incomplete.” *

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From Avengers of the New World

Years later Bonaparte would look back with regret on the decisions he had made regarding Saint-Domingue. On his deathbed he explained that he should have “recognized Toussaint” and governed the colony through him, rather than sending his forces against him. But these were the mutterings of a dying man, haunted perhaps by the specters of the tens of thousands of French troops who had gone to their deaths in Saint-Domingue, or else by that of one general who died in a cold and dank prison high in the mountains of France.