Fire in the house

This chapter explains how the ceremony at Bwa Kayiman—the Vodou ceremony of August 22, 1791, that set the Haitian revolution into motion—was able to come about. The ruling class of powerful landowners and French commissioners was theoretically unified; the class of free people—whether white, mixed race or black—was supposed to be in their fold so that their profiteering would churn on undisturbed. The revolution exploded when the ruling class could no longer balance competing interests and when the lower classes refused to participate in the conspiracy any longer. Trouillot traces the roots of discontent in Saint-Domingue to the class struggles between the French aristocracy, bourgeoisie and workers in eighteenth century enlightenment France. He also sheds light on the reverberations that French class conflicts had in Saint-Domingue. In the late 1780s, the local landowners began clamoring for free market control over where their products could be sold. France had exclusive purchasing privileges over the colony’s output. By 1790, this major rift emerged between French commissioners and the local landowners. At the same time, a deep rupture appeared between whites and free people of mixed race when racist whites rejected Ogé and Chavannes’s demands of greater equality for mixed race people. Instead of cultivating their coalition with mixed race people, the ruling class sent 1,500 white soldiers and 3,000 black recruits to crush the movement of the people of mixed race. The ruling class’s traditional coalition was severed in various places. The leaders of the enslaved population saw the power they had when properly armed; they detected the conflict among the whites and the whites versus mixed race people; and they received and transmitted the exciting news of equality proclaimed by the rising French revolutionaries. Underneath this political quicksand, the enslaved population had established the cornerstones of an indigenous culture: farming, Vodou religion and the Creole language. The small plots that enslaved people were encouraged to cultivate for food and the small income they generated created a passion for agrarian independence. Vodou gave enslaved people the conviction they needed to fight, as well as a means of organization and cultural preservation. The Creole language provided a foundation for a common culture. The chapter closes with an analysis of the maroon culture of runaways and rebels and why it was unable to secure widespread independence. Finally, it introduces the geographic and demographic realities that favored an uprising in the northern plains of Haiti.