Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment

135 Pages·2008·58.607 MB·English

by  Nick Nesbitt

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 VII
Introduction 1
1 Saint-Domingue and the Singularization of
Enlightenment 9
2 The Idea of 1804 41
University of Virginia Press 3 Penser la Revolution Ha"itienne 81
© 2008 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia
All rights reserved 4 Beyond Jacobinism: Hegemony and Universalism in
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper the Haitian Revolution 129
First published 2008 5 Toussaint Louverture, the Moun andeyo, and the
987654321 Transcendental Conditions of Political Autonomy 153
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Conclusion: Remembering 1804 179
Nesbitt, Nick, 1969-
Appendix: Chronology of the Haitian Revolution
Universal emancipation: the Haitian Revolution and the radical E.lightenment /
(1791-1804) 199
Nick Nesbitt.
p. cm. - (New World Studies) Notes 207
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8139-2802-9 (cloth: alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-8139-2803-6 (phk.: Works Cited 241
alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-8139-2776-3 (e-book)
1. Haiti-History-Revolution, 1791-1804. 2. Liberty. 3. Enlightenment- Index 257
Influence. I. Title.
~(.., CF1923.N47 20os:::>
972.94'03-dc22
2008022937
Acknowledgments
IN A PROJECT ranging over five years and innumerable sites
of research and discussion, more debts have been incurred than I can pos-
sibly 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 pro-
gressively 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 commu-
nity 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 munifi-
cent 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 Mod-
ern 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 phi-
Universal Emancipation
losophie 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 Brett-
schneider have kept faith in this book in its long gestation, and helped
immeasurably in its progress. I also wish to extend my thanks and grati-
tude to the two anonymous readers whose perceptive comments and sug-
gestions 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.
Introduction
THE HUMAN right to be free from enslavement inspired the
eighteenth-century Age of Revolution, which spoke widely of the injus-
tices 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 in-
dependence 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 slavery-
free 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 inven-
tion 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 3 Introduction
given, not even as an object of cognition or imagination, and which, affirm the constituent power and rights of all human subjects. Haiti was
therefore, strictly speaking, could not be known," in other words, a free- in this sense the first nation to realize the full political implications of
dom of active creation (1986, 151 ). Though individuals had on occasion the Spinozian critique of constituted authority and the call for a society
imagined universal rights as a pure abstraction, no society had ever been in which all human subjects retain their self-moving constituent power
constructed in accord with the axiom of universal emancipation. The con- (natura natttrans). The former slaves of Saint-Domingue were conscious
struction of a society without slavery, one of a universal and unqualified participants in this Radical Enlightenment, directly influenced by French
human right to freedom, properly stands as Haiti's unique contribution thinkers such as Diderot (via Raynal's Histoire des trois Indes) and the
to humanity. Jacobin articulation of the undivided "Rights of Man," while further
Though in this sense the Haitian Revolution constituted a drastic leap radicalizing in turn an Enlightenment that refused to address Africans as
forward beyond other contemporary political structures, it stands in an- full subjects of human rights.
other light as the culminating, most progressive event of the Age of En- If my project here has been to draw together some of the diverse his-
lightenment. If recent historical revisionism has effectively demolished torical and intellectual threads that were woven into what we now call
the prejudice that there was either a single movement identifiable as the the Haitian Revolution, it seems unquestionable that the most immediate
"Enlightenment" or that such a movement was the product of a single factor in turning what began as one more in a long series of New World
nation (that is, France, England, or the Netherlands), better understand- slave revolts for better working conditions into a struggle for the univer-
ing of the political philosophy of the Haitian Revolution should help to sal abolition of slavery was the publication of the French Declaration
undo what remains perhaps the last shibboleth of Enlightenment Studies: des droits de l'homme et du citoyen in August 1789. Though I will argue
that, as Tzvetan Todorov claimed in his exhibition notes to a 2006 exhi- that other components-from the thirteenth-century Mande Declara-
bition at the Bibliotheque de France, "The thought of the Enlightenment tion of Universal Human Rights ("Charte du Mande") to Vodun and the
was the work of Europe" (11). Even so insightful a historian of ideas as Catholicism Toussaint Louverture imbibed from his Jesuit benefactors in
Jonathan Israel maintains a similar faith in a "single European Enlight- the decades before 1791-contributed to this process, the testimony of
enment" (140).1 Instead, this book will explore the many ways in which the rebel slaves themselves unequivocally supports such a conclusion.
the Haitian Revolution, an ocean away from Europe, both was inspired In July 1792, to cite only the most explicit example, they wrote to the
by Radical Enlightenment ideas and, in turn, fundamentally transformed General Assembly of Saint-Domingue of "the fortunate revolution which
this transnational, world-systemic historical process. has taken place in the Motherland, which has opened for us the road
The declaration of Haitian independence in 1804 can in a certain which our courage and labor will enable us to ascend, to arrive at the
sense be understood as the political climax of what Israel has called the temple of Liberty, like those brave Frenchmen who are our models and
"radical" (as opposed to a "moderate") Enlightenment. The latter was whom all the universe is contemplating" (Bell 2007, 39-40). Though one
typified by politically conservative thinkers such Fontenelle, Newton, should no doubt read such a statement as bearing some degree of·flattery
Locke, Leibniz, and Wolff, all of whom pursued the Cartesian deriva- aimed at placating its metropolitan destinataires, there would no doubt
tion of knowledge solely from mathematic-based human reason, while have been better ways to ingratiate themselves, had they chosen to, with
simultaneously attempting to avoid critique of the established political the grands blancs plantation owners in Paris who wished to maintain
and religious orders of the day. the slave-based labor system underwriting their wealth. Refusing such
In contrast, a long tradition of transnational radical thought-extending compromises, and less than a year after it had begun, these supposedly
across Europe from Van den Enden and Spinoza in the 1760s to thinkers ignorant former slaves had unequivocally transformed their revolt into a
including Radicati, Mandeville, La Mettrie, and Diderot-constructed revolution unique in world history.
a critique of human knowledge and society that affirmed the indivisibil- Similarly, Toussaint Louverture described to the increasingly proslav-
ity and inalienability of sovereignty. It was not, however, until 1804- ery French Directory in 1797 how "the French Revolution ... changed
following upon the Jacobinist initiative-that an entire nation constituted my destiny as it changed that of the whole world" (cited in Bell 2007,
itself in consonance with such a critique, structuring a society so as to 59). No mere imitation of the events in France, the Haitian Revolution