Haiti became a sovereign state on January 1, 1804, when Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a freed slave who became an officer in the French army before turning against it, proclaimed the independence of Saint-Domingue, the French colony which occupies the part western part of the island of Hispaniola (the eastern part being the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo, present-day Santo Domingo).
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The first black state in the Americas, which reverted to its pre-Columbian name after several centuries of slavery and the slave trade, then completed thirteen years of civil war. It was in fact on the night of August 22 to 23, 1791 that thousands of slaves seized the colonists’ plantations after the “Bois-Caïman ceremony”, where the insurgents, mixing voodoo and African rites, but also aspirations to emancipation from the very young French Revolution, decided to rise up against their masters. The sugar mills were destroyed and a thousand planters were massacred, even though testimonies speak of the clemency of former slaves, particularly women, who would have helped the settler families in their escape.
In France, the trauma is measured by the violence which swept across the island. For those, the majority, who deny all freedom to slaves, it is first of all an economic system based on “white gold”, sugar cane, but also coffee and indigo, harvested by around 500,000 slaves. , which risks collapsing in the most prosperous Caribbean island. Opposite them, the small group of the Society of Friends of Blacks, where we find Abbé Grégoire and Condorcet, once again makes itself the voice of abolitionism and places the responsibility for these tragic events on the maintenance of discrimination by a Constituent Assembly which allowed itself to be convinced by the powerful planters’ lobby.
Colonial society was itself very divided due to the hierarchy of the population according to skin color. Civil status documents are extremely meticulous in tracking down “impure blood”. If a “quarteron”, the best known of these sub-divisions, corresponds to 1/4 of a black ancestor, i.e. a grandparent, the mixed race corresponds to 1/8th, the Mamluk to 1/16th, up to the mixed blood , at 1/64… More prosaically, the planters, around 30,000 whites, cherish the dream of autonomy, even of this independence from the metropolis that the young United States was able to wrest from the British crown. The “free people of color”, or mulattoes, estimated at 40,000 individuals who may themselves be slave owners but do not enjoy any civil rights, focus their fight on “equality of the skin”. A certain number of them will also revolt against the colonists, taking the lead of their armed slaves, to whom they promise freedom in the event of victory… without accepting the principle of general emancipation.
Fear of contagion
The Haitian insurrection is causing a real shock wave in the other Caribbean islands, where planters fear the contagion effect. All are asking their metropolis, London or Madrid, for fresh troops to contain the “enemy within”. In the South of the United States, cotton planters tried to convince themselves that such a revolt could not take place in their country, their slaves being, they believed, better treated. In Cuba, landowners are torn between fear of contagion and satisfaction at seeing the sugar production of their main competitor collapse. Their first instinct was to relaunch the slave trade to increase sugar cane production. As for the British, they considered the moment opportune to seize the West Indian colonies. They allied themselves with the Spanish troops of Santo Domingo, composed largely of armed slaves, renamed “black auxiliaries” and insurgents from the plantations of the future Haiti, to seize the majority of the French enclave.
Overwhelmed by the events and the destruction of the main port of the colony, but also anxious to make new allies, the commissioners of the Convention Sonthonax and Polverel decided on their own to abolish slavery in 1793. Convinced, the The freedman Toussaint Louverture, who had fought until now alongside the Spanish, agreed to take charge of the French armies. In 1798, he dislodged the British. In 1801, he seized the Spanish part, Hispaniola, and provided the reunited colony with a Constitution, before proclaiming himself governor for life, a bad habit that all his successors adopted.
In Paris, the resurgence of the colonial lobby resulted in the restoration of slavery through “special laws”, while First Consul Bonaparte planned to establish a French colonial empire in America, including Louisiana, which he had just to acquire from Spain, will have to constitute the epicenter. In 1802, General Leclerc, Bonaparte’s brother-in-law, accompanied by the mulatto generals Rigaud, Pétion and Boyer, landed on the island with 20,000 men to regain control. Overwhelmed, Toussaint Louverture quickly surrendered. Arrested despite his promises, he was deported to Fort Joux (Jura), where he died in 1803, a year before the proclamation of the independence of his beloved island.
The fighting is not over yet, it is even increasing in brutality, with the use of fighting dogs and the increase in lynchings and drownings. They raise fears of an extermination of all black people who had known freedom, to better replace them with African slaves. The Haitian troops, led by the mulatto general Jean-Jacques Dessalines, nevertheless ended up winning at the battle of Vertières, on November 18, 1803. The decimated French troops of General de Rochambeau were able to negotiate their departure from the island. All French people will soon be driven out. Bonaparte renounces his American dream and decides to sell Louisiana to the United States, while Martinique and Guadeloupe continue to be governed by slavery.
Mulattoes vs. Blacks
The new State pays dearly for its independence, as the environment is so hostile to it. American President Thomas Jefferson, sensitive to the arguments of the planters of Virginia, his native land, imposed a blockade on competitor Haiti, which would not be recognized by Washington until the start of the Civil War, in 1861. The former colonists dreamed of a reconquest. In 1825, Charles X sent an expedition to demand from the Haitian authorities the repayment of a debt supposed to compensate the planters’ losses. But the island first became in the eyes of the French the symbol of the anti-slavery struggle, which Lamartine and Victor Schoelcher celebrated in their biography of Toussaint Louverture.
In Haiti, once the settlers were expelled, their properties were distributed in batches to former slaves and independence soldiers. A new elite of mulatto owners takes the place of the white elite. But another elite, a minority, black and from the revolutionary army, also demands prebends. Both develop their own ideology: the “mulatto theory” which claims power for “the most competent”, that is to say the mulattoes… and the “blackist theory”, which claims power for the most many, black people…
These two groups share a common Francophonie, when the majority of the population, peasant and black, speaks Creole and practices Voodoo. Both successively came to power through coups, often favored by the United States, France and Great Britain. A group of black peasants, the embryo of the middle class, tried to break this inevitability during the “piquet insurrection” in 1843, directed against the mulatto president Jean-Pierre Boyer, who wanted to attach black peasants to their land and impose on them a production quota. On the contrary, the insurgents are demanding the redistribution of land from large estates and the election of a black president. Failing to see their demands fulfilled, they obtained the departure of Boyer, strongly encouraged by the army, while the eastern part of the island, taking advantage of the disorder, proclaimed the independence of Saint-Domingue.
Foreigners, Americans, English, Germans and Syrians, control foreign trade. Lacking industry, the country imports all its manufactured products. Political instability added to economic dependence, the United States invoked chaos and the protection of American interests to set foot on the island in 1915. They would brutally occupy it until 1934.
While certain members of the mulatto elite collaborated with the occupier, a nationalist reaction, bringing together blacks and mulattoes, emerged. The “cacos”, middle-class peasants under the leadership of Charles Péralte, led armed resistance for a year, soon repressed by the marines. This defeat will further fuel the claim to the African origins and “negritude” of Haitians, particularly within the new elite formed by an urban middle class, resolutely hostile to the American occupation. This brought François Duvalier, known as “Papa Doc”, to power in 1957. President for life, he remained in power until 1971, supported by the “national security volunteers”, the sinister Tontons Macoutes. His son “Baby Doc” succeeds him. The latter’s marriage to a woman from the old mulatto elite resurrected an old concern among “blackist” politicians, but it was the people who obtained the dismissal of Jean-Claude Duvalier, during violent demonstrations in 1986.
The great writer Jacques Stephen Alexis, who was assassinated in 1961 by the Duvalierist dictatorship, summed up the destiny of Haiti in one sentence: “Nothing had fundamentally changed in the world, only the words, the formulas, the forms of domination had varied.”
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