Writing in 1802 about the outbreak of the 1791 slave revolt in the French colony of Saint-Domingu... more Writing in 1802 about the outbreak of the 1791 slave revolt in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, planter Félix Carteau identified “the execrable Abbé de Lahaye, curé of Dondon, the most ardent apostle of freedom for the Blacks,” as one of the “known fomenters of their revolt.” This portrait of the Abbé de Lahaye as a committed abolitionist who played a generative role in the Haitian Revolution exemplifies the many passing references to him in colonial-era sources and later historical accounts, as well as works of fiction such as Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (1949). Given the Abbé’s discursive centrality to representations of the Haitian Revolution, surprisingly little scholarly attention has been paid to this notorious figure. Exploring a range of archival documents, this article charts French-born Guillaume Sylvestre de Lahaye’s life from 1787 to 1791, detailing his prominent role in late colonial Saint-Domingue as a man of letters and a politician: first, by examining his contributions to transatlantic botany, notably in his never-published Florindie (1789), focusing on unexpectedly (given his reputation) negative representations of enslaved Africans sprinkled throughout that 600-page manuscript; second, by documenting his (hitherto unchronicled) role as president of the Dondon parish committee in 1789–1790, where he pursued a “revolutionary” policy of equal rights for all white settlers in the colony, while insisting on the need to discipline both the slave and free colored populations. The material unearthed in this article problematizes legendary representations of the Abbé as an “apostle of freedom,” forcing us, as discussed in the coda, to reconsider the humanitarian sentiments he went on to express in the summer of 1793, when, as author of an anonymously published journal entitled Lettres sentimentales sur la Révolution de Saint-Domingue, he helped prepare the way for the 29 August abolition of slavery in Saint-Domingue.
In the two decades following the Haitian Declaration of Independence in 1804, a wide array of Fre... more In the two decades following the Haitian Declaration of Independence in 1804, a wide array of French writers from across the political spectrum returned, with obsessive frequency , to the subject of Saint-Domingue/Haiti in an attempt to grapple with the effects of 'traumatic' loss through discursive revisitings of the forever lost imperial object. Reflecting on the (largely disavowed) centrality of Haiti to an understanding of Romantic-era French cultural production, this article situates Victor Hugo's 1826 novel about the Haitian Revolution, Bug-Jargal, as the culminating expression of those melan-cholic narratives lamenting the loss of France's precious 'pearl of the Antilles'. It does so, specifically, by discussing the plagiaristic relation of key passages in Hugo's novel to a hitherto unidentified source, Philippe-Albert de Lattre's Campagnes des Français a ` Saint-Domingue (1805). The youthful Hugo's word-for-word reliance on this earlier account of the Haitian Revolution can, to be sure, simply be written off as yet another piece of evidence for the artistic 'immaturity' of Bug-Jargal. A very different argument will be mounted here, however: this mimetic reliance of Hugo's novel on a text that mourns the loss of Saint-Domingue, denies the legitimacy of Haitian independence, and consolidates the hierarchies of racial science, needs to be read as exemplifying — in its purest, most 'mature' form — a collective practice of retelling colonial stories that is characteristic of what Paul Gilroy has dubbed 'postimperial melancholia', and that is arguably one of the constitutive features of the literary habitus in Restoration France.
This article, published in the 2015 French issue of MLN (130.4: 807-35), provides the first subst... more This article, published in the 2015 French issue of MLN (130.4: 807-35), provides the first substantive account of Juste Chanlatte’s Le cri de la nature, a virtually unknown but pioneering work of Haitian literature published in 1810 as a direct response to abbé Grégoire’s 1808 De la littérature des Nègres. Focusing in particular on Chanlatte’s experimental approach to the representation of “race,” which both builds on and unsettles the abolitionist discourse of Grégoire, the article concludes with a comparative analysis of Le cri de la nature and a symptomatically edited version of it that was published in Paris in 1824 by a Frenchman named Auguste-Jean-Baptiste Bouvet de Cressé under the very different title of Histoire de la catastrophe de Saint-Domingue.
Writing in 1802 about the outbreak of the 1791 slave revolt in the French colony of Saint-Domingu... more Writing in 1802 about the outbreak of the 1791 slave revolt in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, planter Félix Carteau identified “the execrable Abbé de Lahaye, curé of Dondon, the most ardent apostle of freedom for the Blacks,” as one of the “known fomenters of their revolt.” This portrait of the Abbé de Lahaye as a committed abolitionist who played a generative role in the Haitian Revolution exemplifies the many passing references to him in colonial-era sources and later historical accounts, as well as works of fiction such as Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (1949). Given the Abbé’s discursive centrality to representations of the Haitian Revolution, surprisingly little scholarly attention has been paid to this notorious figure. Exploring a range of archival documents, this article charts French-born Guillaume Sylvestre de Lahaye’s life from 1787 to 1791, detailing his prominent role in late colonial Saint-Domingue as a man of letters and a politician: first, by examining his contributions to transatlantic botany, notably in his never-published Florindie (1789), focusing on unexpectedly (given his reputation) negative representations of enslaved Africans sprinkled throughout that 600-page manuscript; second, by documenting his (hitherto unchronicled) role as president of the Dondon parish committee in 1789–1790, where he pursued a “revolutionary” policy of equal rights for all white settlers in the colony, while insisting on the need to discipline both the slave and free colored populations. The material unearthed in this article problematizes legendary representations of the Abbé as an “apostle of freedom,” forcing us, as discussed in the coda, to reconsider the humanitarian sentiments he went on to express in the summer of 1793, when, as author of an anonymously published journal entitled Lettres sentimentales sur la Révolution de Saint-Domingue, he helped prepare the way for the 29 August abolition of slavery in Saint-Domingue.
In the two decades following the Haitian Declaration of Independence in 1804, a wide array of Fre... more In the two decades following the Haitian Declaration of Independence in 1804, a wide array of French writers from across the political spectrum returned, with obsessive frequency , to the subject of Saint-Domingue/Haiti in an attempt to grapple with the effects of 'traumatic' loss through discursive revisitings of the forever lost imperial object. Reflecting on the (largely disavowed) centrality of Haiti to an understanding of Romantic-era French cultural production, this article situates Victor Hugo's 1826 novel about the Haitian Revolution, Bug-Jargal, as the culminating expression of those melan-cholic narratives lamenting the loss of France's precious 'pearl of the Antilles'. It does so, specifically, by discussing the plagiaristic relation of key passages in Hugo's novel to a hitherto unidentified source, Philippe-Albert de Lattre's Campagnes des Français a ` Saint-Domingue (1805). The youthful Hugo's word-for-word reliance on this earlier account of the Haitian Revolution can, to be sure, simply be written off as yet another piece of evidence for the artistic 'immaturity' of Bug-Jargal. A very different argument will be mounted here, however: this mimetic reliance of Hugo's novel on a text that mourns the loss of Saint-Domingue, denies the legitimacy of Haitian independence, and consolidates the hierarchies of racial science, needs to be read as exemplifying — in its purest, most 'mature' form — a collective practice of retelling colonial stories that is characteristic of what Paul Gilroy has dubbed 'postimperial melancholia', and that is arguably one of the constitutive features of the literary habitus in Restoration France.
This article, published in the 2015 French issue of MLN (130.4: 807-35), provides the first subst... more This article, published in the 2015 French issue of MLN (130.4: 807-35), provides the first substantive account of Juste Chanlatte’s Le cri de la nature, a virtually unknown but pioneering work of Haitian literature published in 1810 as a direct response to abbé Grégoire’s 1808 De la littérature des Nègres. Focusing in particular on Chanlatte’s experimental approach to the representation of “race,” which both builds on and unsettles the abolitionist discourse of Grégoire, the article concludes with a comparative analysis of Le cri de la nature and a symptomatically edited version of it that was published in Paris in 1824 by a Frenchman named Auguste-Jean-Baptiste Bouvet de Cressé under the very different title of Histoire de la catastrophe de Saint-Domingue.
The complete version of my review article dedicated to Terry Rey’s The Priest and the Prophetess:... more The complete version of my review article dedicated to Terry Rey’s The Priest and the Prophetess: Abbé Ouvière, Romaine Rivière, and the Revolutionary Atlantic World
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), excerpts from which have been published by H-Haiti ( https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=51034 ), is now available by request only. For my own published account of Ouvière's role as a journalist in the early days of the Haitian Revolution, see "Zoïle's Pilgrimage: Abbé Ouvière's Journal du Port-au-Prince (1791) and the Struggle for Free Colored Rights in Revolutionary Saint-Domingue" in Atlantic Studies (posted April 2022: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/JDPT2Z34F4XJUJWXPHVI/full?target=10.1080/14788810.2022.2064186 ).
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Papers by Chris Bongie
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), excerpts from which have been published by H-Haiti ( https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=51034 ), is now available by request only. For my own published account of Ouvière's role as a journalist in the early days of the Haitian Revolution, see "Zoïle's Pilgrimage: Abbé Ouvière's Journal du Port-au-Prince (1791) and the Struggle for Free Colored Rights in Revolutionary Saint-Domingue" in Atlantic Studies (posted April 2022: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/JDPT2Z34F4XJUJWXPHVI/full?target=10.1080/14788810.2022.2064186 ).