Vincent OGé Jeune (1757-91): Social Class and Free Colored Mobilization on the Eve of the Haitian Revolution

2011 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
John D. Garrigus

Vincent Ogé jeune (the younger) was one of the wealthiest free men of color in Saint-Domingue, but his behavior in the year before the Haitian revolution (1791-1804) was a puzzling anomaly. Returning to the colony from Paris in October 1790, Ogé quickly emerged at the head of a group of free colored militiamen demanding voting rights. Colonists labeled this a “revolt” and four months later they executed Ogé and three of his colleagues, breaking their bodies bone by bone in a public square and mounting their severed heads on posts.

2011 ◽  
Vol 68 (01) ◽  
pp. 33-62
Author(s):  
John D. Garrigus

Vincent Ogé jeune (the younger) was one of the wealthiest free men of color in Saint-Domingue, but his behavior in the year before the Haitian revolution (1791-1804) was a puzzling anomaly. Returning to the colony from Paris in October 1790, Ogé quickly emerged at the head of a group of free colored militiamen demanding voting rights. Colonists labeled this a “revolt” and four months later they executed Ogé and three of his colleagues, breaking their bodies bone by bone in a public square and mounting their severed heads on posts.


Author(s):  
David Geggus

Set within a larger analysis of class relations in the Haitian Revolution, this is a microhistory that intersects with several important themes in the revolution: rumor, atrocity, the arming of slaves, race relations, and the origins and wealth of the free colored population. It is an empirical investigation of an obscure rebellion by free men of color in the Grande Anse region in 1791. Although the rebellion is obscure, it is associated with an atrocity story that has long resonated in discussion of the revolution. Formerly the least-known segment of Caribbean society, research has shed much new light on free people of color in recent decades, but much remains to be clarified. In certain ways, they are the key to understanding the Haitian Revolution, because of their anomalous position in Saint Domingue society and the way their activism precipitated its unraveling. The Grande Anse region had a unique experience of the revolution in that white supremacy and slavery were maintained there longer than in any other part of the colony. Based primarily on unexploited or little-known sources the article demonstrates the range and depth of research that remains possible and suggests that a regional focus is best way to advance current scholarship on the Haitian Revolution.


Slave No More ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 164-196
Author(s):  
Aline Helg

This chapter explores the shock waves caused by the Haitian Revolution and the massive slave insurrection that took both the Americas and Europe by surprise. Despite the rarity of large-scale revolts after 1794, the Saint Domingue insurrection did have a lasting impact on the slaves. The greatest lesson they retained from Haiti was that the institution of slavery was neither unchangeable nor invincible. Amid the troubled backdrop of the age of revolutions, many attentively followed the legal changes upsetting their owners, like the Spanish Códigno Negro, the French abolition of slavery, gradual emancipation laws in the northern United States, and the ban of the slave trade by Great Britain and the United States. Furthermore, after 1794, protests during which slaves claimed freedom they believed to have been decreed by the king or the government, but hidden by their masters, multiplied.


2019 ◽  
pp. 177-195
Author(s):  
Michelle Burnham

This chapter reads the dynamics of gender and racial violence in Leonora Sansay’s 1808 novel Secret History in transoceanic context. Even as the French Atlantic triangle generated enormous wealth through enormous exploitation, encounters and events in the transnational Pacific were laying bare the unequal terms and coercive relations that underpinned such triangles and the circuits that spun around them. Set in Saint Domingue during the Haitian Revolution, the novel situates the violence of both marital and plantation intimacies within the turning global circuits of sexual-economic drive and their production of disproportion and inequality. By presenting French European and French creole desire in terms of a sexualized colonialism and a pornographic capitalism, Secret History exposes the rotations of capitalist drive as a violent obscenity, and revolution as its violent offspring.


Author(s):  
Terry Rey

Entitled “Abbé Ouvière,” Chapter 3 seeks to answer three questions: (1) Who was Abbé Ouvière? (2) Why did he wind up in Saint-Domingue? (3) How and why did he become a principal in the early stage of the Haitian Revolution? Born into a family of meager means in Aix-en-Provence in 1762, Ouvière received a benefice as an adolescent by which he became an abbé and a secular priest. This afforded him an excellent education in both theology and medicine, enabling Ouvière to involve himself politically, as a Catholic priest, in the Haitian Revolution, and culturally, as a scientist and physician, in the intellectual life of early Republican America. The chapter reveals the means by which Abbé Ouvière would become a trusted adviser to the free colored Confederate Army, which was preparing to wage war to secure the full civil rights of free blacks and mulattoes as French citizens.


2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-104
Author(s):  
Herbert Uerlings

Abstract ›Recognition‹ is one of the key concepts of Interculturality. It is, however, a highly controversial concept. Whereas scholars like Honneth, Taylor and Habermas emphasize ›social integration via recognition‹, others, especially post-colonialists and poststrucuturalists, think of ›submission via recognition‹. The current discussion focuses on Hegel who was the first to think of ›recognition‹ as a basic principle of personal identity, social order and global history. The article deals with a significant current debate about the meaning of the Haitian Revolution in Hegel’s philosophy. What, in Hegel’s work, is the meaning of the Revolution or the ›fight for recognition‹ led by African slaves in Saint-Domingue? What is the relationship between Hegel’s philosophy and globalization? It will be shown that, for systematic reasons, Hegel could neither ignore nor accept the Haitian Revolution. This ought to have implications for current debates on ›recognition‹ and interculturality. In this context Alexander Kluge’s fragment of prose Jeden Morgen liest Hegel Zeitung (Every morning Hegel reads the papers) (2012) will be analyzed as a critical literary response to Hegel.


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