Nationals and Liberals, 1904/1906

This chapter traces the continued civil war in Haiti that manifested itself along these newly formed post-1869 divides: between Liberals and Nationals in politics, divergent approaches to education and cultural policy, and new approaches to commemorating Haiti’s foundational 1804/1806 division at the turn of the new century. Yet these new divides are not invented out of whole cloth: they draw heavily upon Haitian history while responding to ever-changing Atlantic currents of thought. That is, the post-1869 divides are marked by both the divides that shaped Haiti’s first fifty years of civil war and the ideological debates that marked the nineteenth-century Atlantic world—specifically, France’s Third Republican debates on nationhood and imperial republicanism and the rise of a new US hemispheric imperialism at the turn of the century. Thus, the divides between government forms that had driven the first fifty years of Haitian civil war gave way to a new set of factions that reactivated and adapted these earlier divisions.

Haiti’s National Revolution

This chapter considers the National Revolution in 1920s and ‘30s Haiti under the US occupation. The first two sections excavate the heritage of Haiti’s occupation-era far-right nationalism by analyzing the little-studied literary magazine Stella (Cap-Haïtien, 1926–1930). It highlights the poetry and prose works published in the magazine, which the writers situated within the longer Haitian tradition of nationalist, Dessalinean intellectual production: that in order for the nation to heal and achieve unity, it was necessary to plumb the depths of Haiti’s original fractures, its deepest wounds. Yet if the Stella writers placed themselves within an intellectual heritage, they also saw themselves forging a new, radical path for the post-occupation future. A final section argues that Stella’s nationalist writers once again evoked the fracture of 1804/1806—not to mend Haiti’s foundational fractures, but to definitively reject the liberalism of 1806.

The Myth of the Universal Haitian Republic, or Deux Nations dans la Nation

This chapter focuses on unity, or laconcorde—a crucial republican concept linked to fraternité—and its function in Boyer’s unified republican island state (over which he served as president for life from 1822 to 1843) and the realities of disunity and division within it. The chapter begins by unearthing the tension between territorial concorde and internal strife to reveal the limits and possibilities of Boyer’s unified island state, which it argues are based in the myth of the universal Haitian republic. Central to Boyer’s attempts to create territorial concorde is Beaubrun Ardouin’s little-studied Géographie de l’Ile d’Haïti (1832), which is analyzed in a second section. A final section contrasts Ardouin’s social scientific, imperial island strategy with the attempt to represent and create internal concorde among the island’s diverse populations in the liberal newspapers Le Républicain and L’Union. These newspapers focused on addressing and even ameliorating internal divisions within Haiti by attempting to narrate a more capacious and inclusive Haitian republic through an early example of the cultural nationalist movement known as indigénisme.

Dessalines’s Empire of Liberty

This chapter traces the print culture of the immediate post-independence period leading up to Dessalines’s assassination on October 17, 1806, recasting Haiti’s earliest post-independence writing within the context of political and ideological divisions that shaped the period. Under Dessalineanism, individual rights and liberties had to be sacrificed to the greater cause of sovereign statehood. The republicans disagreed: they sought to found a state according to liberal Enlightenment ideals, embracing the revolutionary language of individual liberties and radical democracy that characterized France’s short-lived First Republic. They wanted to talk about virtue, talents, the rights of man, laws and a constitution, citizens and sharing of power, but were outnumbered and overpowered by the Dessalinean faction—until 1806, when they would revolt against the “tyrannie” of Dessalines’s arbitrary rule and found the Republic of Haiti. It begins by focusing on how Dessalineans consolidated and codified Haitian anticolonial independence through writing, which asserted itself externally as an anticolonial weapon and internally as a force of unity against the enemy within. Next, it considers the republican opposition’s mobilization of the language, ideals, and symbolism of French republicanism to overthrow Dessalines’s empire and their subsequent disavowal of this foundational act of parricide-regicide.

Civil War, Guerre de Plume

This chapter is the first of two that trace the distinctive cultures of writing in the North and South that emerged during this civil war period. The chapter analyzes the print culture of the civil war by comparing each government’s press operations, then focuses on a particularly fraught moment in the North/South civil war with the French Restoration government’s threat to retake the former colony. The chapter makes the case for a specific Christophean form that emerged during this period, the “refutation pamphlet,” based in the disassembling, unweaving, or piercing through of a political opponent’s text—deployed first against the French Restoration government, and then against Pétion’s southern republic. This Christophean writing stands in stark contrast to the southern liberal republican writing discussed in chapter 3, which celebrated literary writing as a direct expression of the liberal mind and heart, and was central to the task of illustrating and performing the successes of the liberal republican model. Taken together, these two chapters reveal Haitian writing during the civil war to be mutually constituted—in tension and in opposition—between a performative, polemical notion of writing in the Christophean sphere, and the emergent “literary” sense of writing in Pétion’s republican sphere.

Introduction

This introduction lays the conceptual and theoretical groundwork for the book by engaging Haitian studies, Francophone literary studies, postcolonial studies, and studies of Black radicalism. It also provides a historical overview of the post-independence period in Haiti.

Epilogue

The epilogue presents the curious case of the two Christophean societies: one in Cap-Haïtien in 1954, and the other in Paris in 1965. It argues that the critiques of Haiti’s revolutionary and post-independence leaders among mid-twentieth-century Caribbean intellectuals is a reaction primarily to the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti. It argues that scholars must revisit the Dessalinean heritage of radical postcolonial critique, extracting it from its weaponization by the Duvalier dictatorship, in order to posit a place for Haiti in the twenty-first century.

The Second Empire of Haiti and the Exiled Republic

This chapter analyzes two concepts of “civilization”—the Western, dominant notion and its critique—at work and in tension between imperial Haiti and the republic-in-exile. Among exiled republicans, a refined, nonviolent notion of “civilization” and “culture” sought to cultivate and rehabilitate Haiti’s image in France. In imperial Haiti, on the other hand, Soulouque staked a challenge to the exclusionary, racialized notion of “civilization” itself through an active cultivation of popular religion and culture. A first section analyzes the role of visual and popular culture in Soulouque’s empire as part of the Dessalinean heritage of citation, iteration, and critique of the concept of Western civilization or “modernity.” Next, it consider the parallel—but opposite—effort among exiled republicans to allegorize and retell the story of the founding of the Haitian republic precisely according to the dominant norm of Western civilization, establishing Haiti’s parentage with the French Revolution and the liberal Enlightenment values of 1789. Ultimately, the chapter reveals that the form of the Haitian state and the heritage of 1804 were still highly contested well into the mid-nineteenth century.

Southern Republic of Letters

This chapter analyzes the emergence of a decidedly modern “literary” sensibility in southern writing during the latter half of the civil war period (1814–1820) that reflects the transformations of the republican state in Haiti under Pétion. A first part establishes the contours of Pétion’s “new” republicanism, which he elaborated within the Atlantic world transformations of the mid-1810s. Next, it analyzes the new republican publications that resulted from the North/South paper war, paying specific attention to southern writers’ efforts to define their intellectual production according to the emergent concepts of literature and criticism. In a second part, the chapter traces how this nascent notion of literary writing, forged in the crucible of civil war, gained hegemony under Jean-Pierre Boyer’s reunified republican state after the fall of Henry Christophe in 1820. Here, it performs a close analysis of the southern republican writer Hérard Dumesle’s Voyage dans le Nord d’Hayti, ou Révélations des lieux et des monuments historiques (1824), arguing that his piece of early domestic Haitian travel writing fixes the terms of the previous paper war between North and South from the position of southern republican hegemony.