Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution

Success at a price

This year sees the 200th anniversary of the independence of Haiti, after the only successful revolt by slaves in world history. At the start of 2004, the then President of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, wanted to celebrate the event by demanding more than $21 billion in "reparations" from France, which had been the colonial power in the country. Haiti's political opposition wanted to commemorate the anniversary by getting rid of President Aristide.

The opposition were the winners of this particular battle. Aristide was forced from power at the end of February. French, American and other troops were deployed to keep the peace. At the beginning of this month, the United Nations began to take over the restoration of institutional rule, but its special representative Reginald Dumas has already said that the UN will probably need to stay for twenty years, because the task will be no less than "to create a state".

In this timely, painstaking narrative of the circumstances surrounding the original Haitian revolution and struggle for independence, Laurent Dubois offers valuable suggestions as to why the slaves' success did not lead to the construction of a viable state. Despite the freeing of almost half a million black slaves, the victory was won, Professor Dubois concludes, at the cost of "a nation founded on ashes". After at least 100,000 people died in the revolution, Haiti's chances of establishing a democracy were "run up against autocratic and militaristic political traditions, and the social and racial conflicts of the revolutionary years would continue unabated".

Dubois begins his book with an overview of how Haiti became a French colony, and the growth of the plantation economy, based on sugar cane, tobacco and coffee (half of the world's entire supply), that made it the most profitable European colony in the eighteenth century. The Haitian population was already widely split: the white plantation owners and officials on one side, the slaves on the other. The latter were brought from many different regions of Africa, and deliberately dispersed again in the colony in order to try to keep them subdued despite their vastly greater numbers. But as the eighteenth century progressed, there were also increasing tensions in the metropolis. Rousseau and other Enlightenment figures challenged the basic assumptions of slavery, and affirmed every person's right to be regarded as equal before the law. The Haitian planters immediately saw this as a threat to their way of life and their profits, and sought on the one hand to prevent such subversive ideas from propagating in the colony, on the other to try to convince those fighting for power in metropolitan France that equality should not spread as far as the plantations.

The main part of Dubois's thoroughly researched narrative concerns the fifteen years between the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789 and the successful expulsion of the French and the declaration of Haitian independence in 1804. He uses personal testimony and public record to detail the debates raging in France and Haiti, as well as outlining the fluctuating fortunes of the armies of freed slaves as they fought against, not only the French, but the British and the Spanish in their efforts to secure freedom.

Dubois prefers to describe the forces in play rather than make heroes of the revolutionary leaders, from Boukman and the 1791 insurrection begun at Bois Caiman to the revolutionary generals Toussaint L'Ouverture and Dessalines. This can lead to a lack of emphasis that tends to flatten the contours of the narrative, but it does not mean that the author is afraid of reaching definite conclusions, as with his final judgement on Toussaint: "(He) had turned himself into a dictator, and the colony he ruled over into a society based on social hierarchy, forced labour, and violent repression". Dubois's is a laudable attempt to avoid "exoticizing" Haiti, by insisting on dealing with the events surrounding the slave revolt as mainstream history and as part of metropolitan debates. But this approach can make Dubois play down some of the particularities of the Haitian situation. For example, the value of voodoo, not only as a cultural expression of the slaves' roots in Africa, but as a means of helping them achieve their freedom by providing the positive sense of social cohesion denied to them almost everywhere else, is more than merely picturesque.

The international community simply denied the new country's existence. It was not until 1825 that France recognized Haiti — after exacting crippling indemnities — and it was only forty years afterwards that the United States, in the middle of its own Civil War, opened relations with it. Haiti was regarded as a pariah state, and dropped out of all the debates that were shaping nation states in the mid-nineteenth century. Although in an epilogue Dubois makes a case for Haiti inspiring arguments for and against slavery, the new republic was abandoned on the margins of history for much of the next two centuries, capturing attention only when violence and institutional collapse brought it into the news. Laurent Dubois's patient study offers a valuable glimpse into the complexities of the creation of modern Haiti that supplants the usual commonplaces on this "first black republic".

Nick Caistor is the author of Mexico City: A cultural and literary companion (2000)

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