21890: Esser: Haitian inspiration (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

Radical Philosophy
http://www.radicalphilosophy.com

Issue 123
January/February 2004

Commentaries

Haitian inspiration: On the bicentenary of Haiti's independence
by Peter Hallward

Two hundred years ago this month (January 2004), the French colony of
Saint-Domingue on the island of Hispaniola became the independent
nation of Haiti. Few transformations in world history have been more
momentous, few required more sacrifice or promised more hope. And few
have been more thoroughly forgotten by those who would have us
believe that this history has since come to a desirable end with the
eclipse of struggles for socialism, national liberation and
meaningful independence in the developing world.

Of the three great revolutions that began in the final decades of the
eighteenth century - American, French and Haitian - only the third
forced the unconditional application of the principle that inspired
each one: affirmation of the natural, inalienable rights of all human
beings. Only in Haiti was the declaration of human freedom
universally consistent. Only in Haiti was this declaration sustained
at all costs, in direct opposition to the social order and economic
logic of the day. Only in Haiti were the consequences of this
declaration - the end of slavery, of colonialism, of racial
inequality – upheld in terms that directly embraced the world as a
whole. And of these three revolutions, it is Haiti's that has the
most to teach those seeking to uphold these consequences in the world
today.

Recognized as a French territory from the late seventeenth century,
by the 1780s Saint-Domingue had become far and away the most
profitable colony in the world, the jewel in the French imperial crown
and the basis for much of the new prosperity of its growing
commercial bourgeoisie. 'On the eve of the American Revolution', Paul
Farmer notes, 'Saint-Domingue – roughly the size of the modern state
of Maryland – generated more revenue than all thirteen North American
colonies combined'; on the eve of the French Revolution it had become
the world's single largest producer of coffee and the source for
around 75 per cent of its sugar. 1 This exceptional productivity was
the result of an exceptionally cruel plantation economy, one built on
the labour of slaves who were worked to death so quickly that even
rapid expansion of the slave trade over these same years was unable
to keep up with demand. Mortality levels were such that during the
1780s the colony absorbed around 40,000 new slaves a year. By 1789,
Eric Williams suggests, this 'pearl of the Caribbean' had become, for
the vast majority of its inhabitants, 'the worst hell on earth'. 2

Rapid growth put significant strains on the colony's social structure.
Coercive power was divided between three increasingly antagonistic
groups – the white plantation-owning elite, the representatives of
French imperial power on the island, and an ever more prosperous but
politically powerless group of mulattos and former slaves. With the
outbreak of the French Revolution tensions between these factions of
the colonial ruling class broke out in open conflict, and when a
massive slave rebellion began in August 1791 the regime was unable to
cope. Sent to restore order, the French commissioner Sonthonax was
soon confronted by a rebellion of the white planters seeking greater
independence from republican France and withdrawal of the civic
rights recently granted to the island's mulattos. Sonthonax only
managed to suppress this rebellion by offering permanent freedom to
the slave armies who still controlled the countryside, in exchange
for their support. Over the next few years, the army of emancipated
slaves led by Toussaint L'Ouverture slowly gained control of the
colony. In a series of brilliant military campaigns, Toussaint
defeated the planters, the Spanish, the British and his own rivals
among the black and mulatto armies. By the turn of the century he had
become the effective ruler of Saint-Domingue. Unwilling to break with
France itself, however, Toussaint allowed himself to be taken
prisoner by the expeditionary force that Napoleon sent in 1801 to
restore colonial slavery. Napoleon's troops were successful in
Guadeloupe but failed in Saint-Domingue. Toussaint's army reassembled
under Jean-Jacques Dessalines and by the time the war of independence
was over Napoleon, like Pitt before him, had lost 50,000 troops. The
last of the French were expelled in November 1803.

Apart from the extraordinary impact of the historical sequence
itself, why should anyone with an interest in radical philosophy take
an interest, today, in the making of Haitian independence? Haiti is
invariably described as the 'poorest country in the Western
hemisphere'. It routinely features as an object lesson in failed
economic development and unfinished 'modernization', as deprived of
the benefits associated with representative democracy, modern civil
society and stable foreign investment. Almost as regularly, it is
presented as the referent of explicitly racist hogwash about Voodoo
or AIDS. Why take an interest in the revolution which led to the
creation of such a country? Here are some of the more obvious reasons.

1. If the French Revolution stands as the great political event of
modern times, the Haitian revolution must figure as the single most
decisive sequence of this event. The French colonies were the one
place in which the 'universal' principles of liberty and equality
affirmed by 1789 were truly tested: they were that exceptional place
in which these principles might fail to apply. No question served to
clarify political differences within the Revolutionary Assemblies as
sharply as the colonial question, and, as Florence Gauthier has
shown, no question played a more important role in the reactionary
transition from the Jacobin prescription of natural rights to the
Thermidorian affirmation of social rights – the prescriptions of
order, property and prosperity. The Haitian revolution continued,
moreover, where the French Revolution left off: just before Napoleon
tried to restore slavery in the western half of Hispaniola, Toussaint
abolished it in the eastern half. And in so far as our political
present retains an essentially Thermidorian configuration, the logic
used by the French colonial lobby to justify the preservation of
slavery says something about the logic at issue in today's global
division of labour as well. Pierre Victor Malouet, speaking on behalf
of the planters in the Assembly's 1791 debate, knew that the
universal declaration of human rights was incompatible with the
existence of colonies, and so urged his patriotic countrymen to
preserve the exceptional status of their colonies. 'It's not a matter
of pondering whether the institution of slavery can be defended in
terms of principle and right', said Malouet; 'no man endowed with
sense and morality would profess such a doctrine. It's a matter,
instead, of knowing whether it is possible to change this institution
in our colonies, without a terrifying accumulation of crimes and
calamities.' 3 The basic principle persists to this day. The rules
that apply to 'us' cannot reasonably be made to apply to 'them'
without jeopardizing the stability of our investments, without
risking global recession, terror or worse.

2. The achievement of Haitian independence reminds us that politics
need not always proceed as 'the art of the possible'. Haitian
independence brought to an end one of the most profoundly improbable
sequences in all of world history. Contemporary observers were
uniformly astounded. As Robin Blackburn observes, Toussaint's forces
broke the chain of colonial slavery at 'what had been, in 1789, its
strongest link'. 4 They overcame the most crushing form of
ideological prejudice ever faced by a resistance movement and
defeated in turn the armies of the most powerful imperialist nations
on earth. Their example further provided perhaps the single greatest
inspiration for subsequent African and Latin American liberation
movements: Haiti provided crucial support to (a notably ungrateful)
Simón Bolívar in his struggle against Spain, and in the first decades
of the nineteenth century helped motivate rebellions against slavery
in Cuba, Jamaica, Brazil and the USA, just as it would later inspire
those working for an end to colonialism in Africa.

3. The Haitian revolution is a particularly dramatic example of the
way in which historical 'necessity' emerges only retrospectively.
Those who refrain from action until the full strategic import of the
moment becomes clear will never act. With hindsight, it is obvious
that in the circumstances of the late eighteenth century only the
achievement of national independence could ever guarantee the lasting
abolition of slavery in Haiti. Nevertheless, it took Dessalines ten
years to reach this conclusion, and it is one that Toussaint himself
was apparently never willing to accept. Toussaint's eventual
determination to placate the French, to preserve the essential
structure of the plantation economy, to accommodate the white
planters, cost him much of his popular support in the final campaign
against France: the man who did most to achieve liberation of the
slaves was unable to do what was required to preserve this
achievement. Similarly, although the slave uprising that sparked the
whole sequence was carefully planned and thoroughly prepared by the
structural conditions of the plantation economy itself, its full
consequences remained obscure long after the event. None of the
leaders involved in the uprising deliberately set out to achieve the
abolition of slavery. Pursuit of abolition was virtually imposed upon
them by the planters' refusal to accept anything other than the
quasi-suicidal surrender of their armies. The actual decision to
abolish slavery was then forced on a reluctant Sonthonax as a result
of intractable divisions among the Saint-Domingue elite.

4. Although the process was contingent and unpredictable, the
achievement of Haitian freedom and independence was forced through
direct action, without mediation of 'recognition', 'negotiation' or
'communication'. Enlightened arguments against slavery were hardly
uncommon in the eighteenth century. Montesquieu poured scorn on its
racial and religious 'justifications', the Encyclopèdie labelled the
colonial slave trade a crime against humanity, Rousseau identified
slavery with a denial of humanity pure and simple. The mostly
Girondin Sociètè des Amis des Noirs supported a 'carefully prepared
freedom for the slaves' within a reformed colonial system. There's a
world of difference, however, between the assertion of such fine
principles and active solidarity with an actual slave uprising.
Brissot, founder of the Sociètè, called for the repression of the
slaves' uprising as soon as it began. As C.L.R. James points out,
impassioned moral outbursts about the evils of exploitation 'neither
then nor now have carried weight', for when the basis of their
authority is in question those in power yield only to irresistible
pressure.5 The moderates who worked to improve conditions in
Saint-Domingue through official legislative channels achieved
virtually nothing during three years of indecisive wrangling, and the
Jacobins' eventual acceptance of an end to slavery came a full two
and a half years after the 1791 revolt. Unlike the slaves, who lacked
any official representation, the island's mulattos were weakened as
much by their futile efforts to solicit recognition from France as
they were by their reckless determination to pursue their claims in
isolation, without black support. (As for Tocqueville, the darling of
those reactionary historians of the French Revolution who have
recently gone to some trouble to erase the question of slavery and
the colonies from this history altogether 6 – for all his well-known
aversion to slavery, he was to echo the colonial lobby almost to the
letter when in the 1830s and 1840s he came to advocate the 'total
domination' of Algeria through 'devastation of the country' and the
enforcement of apartheid-style forms of social control.) Among the
French philosophes, only Diderot and Raynal, after Mercier, were
willing to tell the nations of Europe, in words that may have
inspired Toussaint himself, that 'your slaves are not in need of your
generosity or of your councils, in order to break the sacrilegious
yoke which oppresses them.  A courageous chief only is wanted [who]
will come forth and raise the sacred standard of liberty.'

5. The Haitian revolution is a powerful illustration of the way in
which any actively universal prescription is simultaneously an
exceptional and divisive revaluation of a hitherto unrepresentable or
'untouchable' aspect of its situation. Every truly universal
principle, as Alain Badiou suggests, 'appears at first as the decision
of an undecidable or the valorization of something without value' and
its consequent application will ensure that the group or capacity
that has so far been 'minimally existent' in the situation comes to
acquire a maximal intensity. 7 On the eve of 1791, what virtually all
the participants in the debate over slavery accepted, including the
future slave leaders themselves, was the impossibility of an
independent nation peopled by free citizens of African descent. The
achievement of this independence must stand as one of the most
categorical blows against racism that has ever been struck. Rarely
has race been so clearly understood for what it is – in no sense a
source of conflict or difference, but merely an empty signifier
harnessed to an economy of plunder and exploitation. Early Haitian
writers understood perfectly well the point made more recently by
Wallerstein and Balibar, among others, that theories of racial
inequality were concocted by white colonists so as to legitimate
slavery and the pursuit of European interests. The first constitution
of Haiti (1805) broke abruptly with the whole question of race by
identifying all Haitians, regardless of the colour of their skin, as
black – a characterization that included, among others, a substantial
number of German and Polish troops who had joined in the fight against
Napoleon. David Nicholls demonstrates that throughout the nineteenth
century, though they showed little interest in the contemporary state
of African culture per se, 'Haitian writers, mulatto and black,
conservative and Marxist, were practically unanimous in portraying
Haiti as a symbol of African regeneration and of racial equality.
Mulatto intellectuals from the elite, who in appearance could well
have been taken for Europeans, proudly regarded themselves as
Africans, as members of the black race.' 8 And, as Nicholls goes on
to show, nothing has undercut Haitian independence in the
post-revolutionary period more than the resurgence of colour
prejudice and the re-differentiation of Haitians in terms of either
coloured or black.

6. Haiti's revolution is a reminder that such divisive universality
can only be sustained by a revolutionary subject. Haitian
independence was the conclusion of the only successful slave uprising
that has ever taken place. It isn't difficult to list the various
conjunctural reasons for this success, including the large numbers
and concentration of slaves in the colony, the economic and cultural
factors which tied them together, the brutality with which most of
them were treated, the relative freedom of movement enjoyed by the
slaves' 'managerial' elite, the intensity of economic and political
divisions among the ruling class, rivalries among the imperialist
powers, the inspiration provided by the revolutions in America and
France, the quality of Toussaint's leadership, and so on. One factor
above all, however, accounts for the outcome of what became one of
the first modern instances of total war: the people's determination to
resist a return to slavery under any circumstances. This is the great
constant of the entire revolutionary sequence, and it is this that
lends an overall direction to the otherwise convoluted series of its
leaders' tactical manoeuvrings. As Carolyn Fick has established, when
Dessalines, Christophe and the other black generals finally broke with
the French in 1802, it was the constancy of their troops that enabled
their eventual decision. 'The masses had resisted the French from the
very beginning, in spite of, and not because of, their leadership.
They had shouldered the whole burden and paid the price of resistance
all along, and it was they who had now made possible the political
and military reintegration of the leaders in the collective
struggle.' 9 Haiti's revolutionaries thereby refused today's logic of
'democratic intervention' avant la lettre. The recent introduction of
democracy to Iraq is only the latest of a long sequence of
international attempts to impose self-serving political arrangements
upon a people whose participation in the process is only tolerable if
it remains utterly passive and obedient; the people of Haiti, by
contrast, were determined to remain the subjects rather than the
objects of their own liberation. And by doing so, they likewise
challenged that category of absolute passivity, that quasi-human
'remainder' revived, in a certain sense, by Giorgio Agamben's recent
work on bare life and the Muselmänner. Whereas 'before the revolution
many a slave had to be whipped before he could be got to move from
where he sat', James notes, these same 'subhumans' then went on to
fight 'one of the greatest revolutionary battles in history'. 10

7. In stark contrast to today's democratic consensus, Haitian history
from Toussaint and Dessalines to Prèval and Aristide features the
consistent articulation of popular political mobilization and
authoritarian leadership. Needless to say, the fortunes of the former
have often suffered from the excesses of the latter. It is no less
obvious, however, that arguments in favour of 'democratic reform' and
a judicious 'separation of powers' have very largely been made by
members of Haiti's tiny propertied elite, along with their
international sponsors. Precisely these kinds of argument have served
to paralyse Aristide's presidency from the moment he first took office.
The basic pattern was already set with the reaction to Dessalines'
own brief rule: in his several years as (an undeniably bloodthirsty
and autocratic) emperor, Dessalines introduced taxes on trade that
were unpopular with the elite, took steps to dissolve prejudice
between coloureds and blacks, and began to move towards a more
equitable distribution of land. 'Negroes and mulattos', he announced,
'we have fought against the whites; the properties which we have
conquered by the spilling of our blood belong to us all; I intend
that they be divided with equity.' 11 Soon afterwards, in October
1806, the mulatto elite had Dessalines assassinated, and were
subsequently careful to protect their commercial privileges by
imposing strict limits on presidential power. Dessalines' true
successor, as James implies, is Fidel Castro. On the other hand,
repeated attempts (begun by Toussaint himself) to restore the old
plantation economy by authoritarian means foundered on the resolve of
the emancipated slaves never to return to their former life. The main
goal of most participants in the war of independence was direct
control over their own livelihood and land. Haiti's first constitution
was careful to block foreign ownership of Haitian property, and by
the 1820s many of Haiti's ex-slaves had succeeded in becoming peasant
proprietors. The ongoing effort to retain at least some degree of
economic autonomy is one of several factors that help explain the
exceptionally aggressive economic policies subsequently imposed on
the island, first by American occupation (1915–34) and later by the
IMF-brokered structural adjustment plans which have effectively
continued that occupation by other means. Much of the power of
James's celebrated account of the Haitian revolution stems from the
fact that it is oriented squarely towards what were, for him, the
ongoing struggles for African liberation and global socialism. Today,
things may not seem quite so clear-cut. Today's variants on slavery
are somewhat less stark than those of 1788, and their justification
usually involves arguments more subtle than reference to the colour
of one's skin. Some things haven't changed, however. Haiti's
revolution proceeded in direct opposition to the great colonial
powers of the day, and when after Thermidor even revolutionary France
returned to the colonial fold, Haiti alone carried on the struggle to
affirm the rights of universal humanity against the predatory
imperatives of property. Aristide's greatest crime in the eyes of the
'international community' was surely to have continued this struggle.
Thermidorians of every age have tried to present an orderly, pacified
picture of historical change as the consolidation of property,
prosperity and security. Haiti's revolution testifies to the power of
another conception of history and the possibility of a different
political future.

Notes
 1. Paul Farmer, The Uses of Haiti, Common Courage Press, Monroe ME,
1994, p. 63.
 2. Eric Williams, From Columbus to Castro: The History of the
Caribbean 1492–1969, Andrè Deutsch, London, 1970, p. 245. The
standard account of the Haitian revolution remains, with good reason,
C.L.R. James's The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San
Domingo Revolution, Penguin, London, 2001; originally published 1938.
 3. Florence Gauthier, Triomphe et mort du droit naturel en
Rèvolution 1789–1795–1802, PUF, Paris, 2000, pp. 174–7.  4. Robin
Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, Verso, London, 1989, p.
258.
 5. James, The Black Jacobins, p. 19.
 6. Saint-Domingue isn't even mentioned in Simon Schama's bestselling
Citizens (Knopf, 1989) or Keith Baker's Inventing the French
Revolution (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990), while
François Furet and Mona Ozouf were unable to find room in their
1,100-page Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Harvard
University Press, Cambridge MA, 1989) for an entry on Toussaint
L'Ouverture; the entry on 'Slavery' in their index refers only to
America's revolution, not Haiti's.
 7. Alain Badiou, 'Huit Thèses sur l'universel', in Jelica Sumic,
ed., Universel, singulier, sujet, Kimè, Paris, 2000, pp. 14–15;
Badiou, La Commune de Paris: Une dèclaration politique sur la
politique, Les Confèrences du Rouge-Gorge, Paris, 2003, pp. 27–8.
 8. Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier, Rutgers University Press,
New Brunswick, 1996, p. 5. As Nicholls points out, the term blanc in
Haitian creole connotes a foreigner of any colour, and can be applied
to black Haitians themselves if they look and sound like people from
France.
 9. Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution
from Below, University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 1990, p. 228.
 10. James, 'Revolution and the Negro' (1939), in Scott McLemee and
Paul Le Blanc, eds, C.L.R. James and Revolutionary Marxism: Selected
Writings of C.L.R. James 1939–1949, Humanities Press, Atlantic
Highlands NJ, 1994, p. 79.
 11. Dessalines, quoted in Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier, p.
38.I am grateful to Bob Corbett for his trenchant response to an
earlier version of this article.