Louis XVI summoned the States General in the spring of 1789, and within four years France was at war with Britain. Except for a few months between 1801. and 1803, the state of war was to be continued until the Battle of Waterloo. Louis XVI was executed in January 1793, and the forty-five months between the convocation of the States General and his death are as crowded as any in French history, one plot succeeding another, one act of treason following another. The oath of the tennis court was followed by the night of August 4. One group of royalists intrigued against another. There were the Fouillants, there were the Girondists. There was Marat; there was Robespierre; there was war on the Belgian frontier; there were the Prussians at Verdun; there was Louis attempting to escape to Austria. If it was a confused story to the Chanceries of Europe, it was a still more confused story to the planters and officials of the French Antilles. They had no idea what was happening.
In France there had been a movement equivalent to, but very different from, Wilberforce’s society in London. The English movement had been entirely instigated by British Christians, but in France the movement was largely inspired by mulattoes from St Domingue, a class for which there was no equivalent in England. It was at their instigation that in 1788 the Société des Amis des Noirs was formed. It proposed to abolish not only the slave trade but slavery itself. It numbered among its members the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, Abbé Gregoire, Brissot, Lafayette. Mirabeau was not a member, but a warm sympathizer. These men were not inspired, as Wilberforce’s followers had been, by Christian feeling, but by the general feeling of humanity on which the revolutionary movement was based.
The States General opened its proceedings with a philosophical declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen, based on Rousseau’s social contract. The various ideas that it expressed have come to be accepted as axioms – law by general consent, the sovereign right of the nation, the equality and dignity of man; that all men born upon French soil were free. It was presented as the philosophical base on which the assembly would found the new constitution.
The news of its promulgation reached Port-au-Prince through the mouths of sailors. It caused an immediate and intense excitement. The petits blancs were exuberant. There were to be no rich, there were to be no poor. The land would no longer be the property of the few. There would be an end to the arrogance and insolence of the planters. All men would share equally in the soil’s abundance. The mulattoes welcomed with equal fervour this end of tyranny. A man was to be judged by his intrinsic quality and not by birth. ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ was to be the watchword of the New World. Into the sluggish minds of the black slaves the idea filtered slowly that soon they would be able to knock off work. Each party saw the dawn of liberty in a different light. The petits blancs saw themselves as the equal of the aristocrats, but did not picture the mulattoes as being equal to themselves. The mulattoes took freedom to mean a state of equality that did not include full-black Africans. To the slaves it was a question of working or not working. The stage was set, half for melodrama, half for harlequinade.
It was a tangled play.
History, watching from the stalls, with the perspective of a century and a half, can tell how scene followed upon scene. But the actual actors in the drama, hurried breathlessly from the wings, with their lines half learned, unaware of the role that they are playing; rushed back to the dressing room at the very instant they have begun to feel themselves at home upon the stage, then hurried back again, ignorant of what has been happening in their absence; the actors themselves know little of the play. They can only guess how great is their part in it, whether they are the play itself or merely the attendants who prepare an entrance, who divert the audience while the main characters are resting.
In Paris there was a government that changed its mind only less often than it changed its leaders; that sent out commissioners, then recalled them; that imprisoned colonial representatives as traitors; that one month passed an act abolishing slavery and the next repealed it. Les Amis des Noirs were demanding that white and brown and black should be placed on a basis of equality. There was the Club Massiac, composed largely of absentee planters, asserting that only on the old colour basis could the allegiance of the colonies be maintained; there was Robespierre thundering back that it was better to lose a colony than a principle. In London there were Clarkson and Wilberforce financing a mulatto insurrection. In St Domingue there were the planters terrified at the thought that everything they had believed in was to be taken from them – the constitution, the King of France, the tradition of colonial rule, the bar of colour. There were the revolutionary bureaucrats sent out from France, distrustful of everyone who sympathized with the old régime. There were the petits blancs, crafty and worthless, with nothing to lose, trusting that any commotion could be turned to their advantage. There were the mulattoes, uncertain with whom to side. There were the slaves, ignorant, misinformed and ready to revolt. It was a tangled play.
One name out of that chaotic period has left its mark oil history. A number of mulatto delegates had come from St Domingue to press their claims. One of these was a young mulatto called Vincent Ogé. His mother had a plantation near Cap Français. His father had been dead some while. His mother supported him. He had visited New England and been made a lieutenant-colonel in the army of one of the German electors through the influence of Les Amis des Noirs, He was disgusted on his arrival in Paris to learn that the assembly had denied that its assertion of liberty and equality applied to the colonies. He returned promptly to St Domingue and informed the governor in a letter that if the wrongs of the mulattoes were not redressed he would have to resort to arms.
It was a stupid little revolt; or rather, it seemed stupid because it was ineffectual. His small band of followers was routed, and he fled for safety to the Spanish section of the island. The Spaniards handed him over to the French. He was tried, found guilty and broken on the wheel.
This sentence, in view of the general standard of the times, brutal though it was, does not astonish us. Ogé was a traitor; the country was in an inflammable condition; an example was needed. Far worse things happened in England during Elizabeth’s reign. Ogé’s death, however, caused in Paris a violent reaction against the planters; a tragedy on his death was performed on the public stage, and Abbé Gregoire succeeded in getting passed by the assembly a motion that ‘the people of colour, resident in the French colonies, born of free parents, were entitled to as of right and should be allowed the enjoyment of all the privileges of French citizens and among those of being eligible to seats both in the parochial and colonial assemblies.’
Ogé is venerated today as the first of the martyrs. But it was a short-lived victory; as soon as a rebellion broke out in St Domingue, the French assembly rescinded its own law, and chaos followed. There was pillage, there was slaughter. The blacks marched into battle with the impaled body of a dead child as their standard. Houses were burned, sugar mills gutted; young women raped and disembowelled. White men were placed between planks and sawn in half. If a man was considered too tall his ankles were lopped away. If too short he was lengthened by a dislocation of his joints. Within two months, 2,000 whites were massacred, 180 sugar and 900 coffee plantations destroyed, and 1,200 Christian families were destitute. The revolt was put down with appropriate reprisals – 10,000 slaves were killed, 400 executed. But the spirit of revolt was in the land.
A commissioner came out from France, resolved to break the power of the planters. They were aristocrats in his opinion. He fancied that it was through the blacks that his interests could best be served. ‘It is with the real inhabitants of the country, the Africans,’ he wrote back to Paris, ‘that we will save for France the possession of St Domingue.’ The planters, in their desperation, offered their allegiance to the British.
When the wind is high, the lowest branches of a tree may touch the highest. In France, private soldiers were rising within a year’s space to the rank of general. In St Domingue it was by a released slave, a little old coachman called Toussaint l’Ouverture, that the invading armies of Spain and England were flung upon the coast in chaos; that the Spanish section of the island was annexed for France; that after ten years of civil war the island was restored to industry; that the Negroes, though technically free, were sent back to the fields to work under a system more rigorous than the old régime had known; that the white planters were encouraged to return to the management of their estates.
Situations not too dissimilar were being created in the other French islands. In Martinique, at the beginning of the French Revolution there was an outbreak of the slaves that considerably strengthened in London the arguments of the planter lobby and delayed the discussion of Wilberforce’s proposals for several sessions; it was suppressed, but the island remained in a highly disturbed condition. In 1792, when Britain was still at peace with France, Sir William Young, an Englishman with estates in the West Indies, paused at Martinique on a trip between Barbados and St Vincent. ‘All was calm,’ he wrote, ‘but it was such a calm as generally precedes a hurricane. The free mulattoes and gens de couleur, who are twice as numerous as the white inhabitants, are awaiting the results of the ascendant parties in old France. . . . The whites generally are friends of the old government. . . . Commerce has lost its activity. Credit has gone. There is money in plenty, but no trade. There were only nine small ships in the harbour,. . . trade being virtually extinguished there, but the embers of what it has been glimmer in the shops; the jewellers and silversmiths are as brilliant as any in London.’
On the outbreak of war between France and Britain in February 1793, the British government, in pursuance of its habitual policy, decided to recapture all of the West Indian islands which had been restored to France in 1763 and 1782. An attack on Tobago having been successful, and one on Martinique repulsed, a substantial expedition was commissioned to capture the entire French heritage in the eastern Caribbean. At the last moment the authorities in Whitehall reduced the size of the expedition because the intelligence department had been informed that the French colonists were so incensed against the Republican government in Paris that a British force would be most welcome, and that ‘a body of 800 regular troops would be more than sufficient to overcome all possible resistance’. This information was, in fact, correct. Martinique was captured with seventy-one men killed and 193 wounded; St Lucia was captured within fourteen hours of landing, and Guadeloupe, which was reputed to have a garrison of nearly six thousand men, cost the British only seventeen deaths and fifty walking wounded. Until this point, Whitehall’s estimate of her general’s requirements had been fully justified. But Whitehall had failed to realize that the mosquitoes of the mangrove swamps were more lethal than the bayonets of the French grenadiers. Sickness became a pestilence to which the British governor, General Dundas, succumbed. And at this point there appeared upon the scene one of the most remarkable of the men who have spread terror through the Caribbean.
Of less than medium height, with a corpulent torso that he encased in clothes that were too tight for it, with thick, stocky legs and a plebeian, sensual mouth, pitted by smallpox, abrupt in manner, jerky, with a Southern accent, Victor Hugues rarely looked anyone in the face, but when he did, his small grey eyes inspired either terror or repulsion. Born in Marseilles in 1752 in a small bakery shop, he ran away to sea when young and settled in St Domingue; conducting a surreptitious trade with Havana, shipping thither silk from Lyons by North American ships that had brought flour to the Antilles, he was in a prosperous situation when the revolution started, and he was made a member of the local assembly. His brother, however, was murdered by the slaves, and he lost all his money. But he did not lose his faith in the new ideas, and on his return to Paris addressed to the security authorities a denunciation of the Spaniards who had assisted emigrants and priests in St Domingue.
His letter ended, ‘If twenty years as a colonial, if local knowledge of foreign colonies and the continent of America, after twelve years of travel there and in the Spanish possessions, if this knowledge, citizen minister, can be of any use to the Republic, dispose of my fortune and my life. They are my country’s.’ And when the revolutionary tribunals were set up, the minister, remembering the patriot who had returned from many travels with an eloquent denunciation, made him a public prosecutor and appointed him to Brest. In one respect, Hugues was admirably fitted for the post. He had imposed on himself the first discipline required for the office of a leader of men. He had no friends.
His first victim was a mulatto, symbolically offered to placate the spirit of his brother, and he threw himself into his task with fanatical devotion. The commissioners were highly impressed. In their report they wrote, ‘At the fall of each head, patriotic songs and cries of Vive le tribunal paid a fitting tribute to the members who composed it. We take this opportunity of expressing our approval of Victor Hugues, an excellent Jacobin whose civic sense is distinguished in a high degree.’ Hugues’ skill and energy were rewarded with the governorship of Guadeloupe.
Just as the terror was about to end in France, he sailed late in April in 1794 to establish it in the Antilles. His expedition consisted of two frigates, a brig and five troop transports. His force of fifteen hundred men was composed of a company of artillery, two of infantry, and a battalion of Pyrenean rifles. But that was not all he carried; he had on board a printing press, which he considered as important an instrument of war as a battery of cannon, and he had three hundred posters printed of the Decree of the 16th Pluvios of the year 2, abolishing slavery. ‘All men domiciled in our colonies are declared to be French citizens without distinction of race and with an absolute equality of rights.’
No chaplains had joined his expedition. Columbus had had crosses painted on his sails, ‘a symbol,’ so Hugues said, ‘of the servitude about to be imposed.’ Instead of a cross, he carried a guillotine; he installed it, shrouded, in the bows, gaunt as a figure in a theorem, reduced to one horizontal and one vertical plane. As he approached land, he tore off the tarpaulin sheet, and the sunlight glittered on its steel blade.
No one in France had known for certain what had been happening in the Caribbean. Hugues found on his arrival that the island was held by the British with four thousand well-trained men, and with the population on their side. Hugues was under no obligation to attempt a forlorn hope. His orders read, ‘If it is impossible to disembark, go to the U.S.A., and return to France.’ To that he countered, ‘We set sail for Guadeloupe. We must not let ourselves be hindered because these vile satellites of despotism got there first. Let us land.’
He was heavily outnumbered, but he was resolute, intrepid and astute. He appreciated the situation speedily. His troops were fresh, but they would not be able for long to resist the debilitating August weather. He had learned that in the British camp more than half of the men were on the sick list; that there were not available enough men to guard the batteries; that the neighbouring islands had been drained of troops and that a body of French Royalists had been persuaded to perform military duties. Hugues, therefore, decided to arm as many blacks and mulattoes as he could muster. They were inured to the climate; they had nothing to lose; they flocked to his standard readily and he soon dragooned them into a standard of discipline adequate to the launching of an assault.
Strategically the British commander had selected his site soundly, on a commanding piece of ground flanked on one side by the sea and on the other by an impassable morass. About a mile to the rear was a narrow pass, the only approach to the camp, while in front was the River Sallé, on whose opposite bank stood the town of Point-à-Pitre. The British commander had, however, left out of his reckoning the evil exhalations of bad air that hovered above the swamp. Within a short time, several of his companies could not produce a single man fit for duty, and one whole regiment could not raise a corporal and three men to stand on guard at night. Hugues gloated and waited, then attacked. He loaded a large number of his troops into small vessels, which on a dark night eluded the British men-of-war. He drove in the outposts, thus cutting the communication between the British garrison and its shipping. His first attacks were beaten back with heavy losses, but he had an indefinite and expendable supply of reserves; the British grew shorter of supplies; finally they had no alternative to capitulation.
The terms which Hugues was prepared to accept on behalf of the British were generous enough, but he refused to allow the French Royalists to be treated as British subjects. He would not listen to the arguments put forward by the general’s representative. He walked back and forth, his hands clasped behind his back. He had said his last word. ‘Tell your general that I’ll capture your camp tomorrow and have him guillotined.’ The most he would concede was the sending away of twenty-five Royalist officers in a covered boat. The remainder, three hundred of them, were surrendered.
At this time the ruthlessness of Victor Hugues’ character was not properly appreciated by his enemies. To them he was a courageous and resourceful leader of troops, and the British commander no doubt imagined that the French Royalists would be treated as honourable captives, in terms of the traditions of civilized warfare. Subsequent events disabused him on that score.
The guillotine was set up on the field of battle, and in the space of an hour, fifty of the prisoners were beheaded. Hugues then grew impatient. At this rate his troops would be kept unprofitably occupied for five more hours. He therefore ordered that the remainder be fettered together and lined up on the edge of the trenches that they had recently defended. His irregular and half-trained troops were then instructed to fire at them. The first volley by unskilled soldiers killed some, wounded others and left many untouched. But the weight of the dead pulling on the chains dragged the dying as well as the unwounded into the trenches, into which the earth was immediately thrown. Hugues, having shown the world what it could expect of him, had the body of General Dundas dug up from its grave and thrown into the river, and he had bayoneted a number of British soldiers who were recovering in the hospital from wounds and sickness.
Hugues was now ready to proceed to the full rigours of the ‘terror’. In Paris he had been a friend of Robespierre; he prided himself on his nickname, ‘the Robespierre of the Isles’. The pupil’s little finger should be thicker than his master’s loins. He ordered the destruction of the church that had stood on the Morne du Governement, stigmatizing it as a symbol of idolatry. The priests in hiding were instructed to take an oath of loyalty to the constitution. The Morne was renamed de la Victoire. He established a series of travelling tribunals to bring to justice all those who had opposed the revolution. He coined the phrase, assermenté, for anyone who had taken an oath of allegiance either to Louis XVI or George III. As-tu prêté serment à l’imbécile George? he would demand. ‘The state,’ he would announce, ‘rewards the denunciator.’ In Brest he had had the guillotine placed near enough to the prison for its inmates to hear its action. He followed the same practice here. At the start it was mounted in the market place, but as the surface was unpaved, the blood did not run away but formed a red mud round the scaffold. Earth was flung over it, but the putrefying blood broke its crust, and flies swarmed round it to such an extent that the market place was deserted.
This did not suit Hugues at all. He wanted his executions to be public and applauded. He had the guillotine moved to the Place de la Victoire, near a river into which the blood could drain. The loyalists met their death in Pointe-à-Pitre as bravely as had their friends in Paris. Each morning there was a roll call of the victims. One of them who had a cold laughingly remarked that a better day could not have been chosen. ‘I’ll gladly be rid of my head.’ They sang hymns as they waited at the scaffold. The volume of sound diminished till there was only one voice left, then silence.
So that the whole island should learn its lesson, he had the guillotine sent on tour from village to village, pausing at taverns on the way, where the executioner was bribed to give exhibitions of how the mechanism worked: a large bass drum was carried round in the cart to give the occasion an air of festival.
Hugues interpreted his commission to involve the transference of all authority into his own hands. He curtailed the power of the army. He described the military as salaried republicans devoted to the safety of the state, whose authority did not extend outside their camp. He suppressed legality, killed the judges, and became himself the accuser, the jury and the judge. He forbade private commerce and became himself the trader. It was state socialism, with himself the state.
The slaves were free, but it is doubtful if they could appreciate the difference between their previous and their present position. Those who would not work were threatened with death. ‘The republic,’ he said, ‘in recognizing the rights you have inherited from nature did not absolve you of the need to support yourself. No pity will be given the man who does not work. He will be treated as a traitor.’
The work was as strictly regimented as it had been on the old plantations. At 5.30 each morning a bell would summon citizens and citizenesses to a meeting place appointed by the overseer. At 5.45 the chief intoned a couplet of the revolutionary hymn ending, ‘Long live the Republic’ The roll would be read and the citizens would start off for work, singing with that ‘simple and lively gaiety that characterizes a good child of La Patrie’. The overseer would then make a tour of the houses and see who was not at work. Every tenth day he sent in a report.
At eight o’clock, breakfast was taken on the grass, in the manner of the Parisian sansculottes. Work was resumed at 8.30 and continued until 11.30. There was an interval of two and a half hours, then a bell announced the end of the siesta. A roll call was taken and work continued until nightfall. During the harvest season they would work longer hours, ‘as good republicans’. Punishments were strict and they received no real pay. Distinctions of colour were retained; there were white, coloured, and black citizens. In the army, a black citizen could not rise above the rank of captain, and was never placed in a high administrative post.
In the meantime, the situation in Paris was changing rapidly. Within a few days of the destruction of the church on the Morne de la Victoire, a French ship arrived with newspapers announcing that religion was once again permitted: men without Gods were now designated as ‘abandoned monsters’. A little later the events of the 9th Thermidor and the fall of Robespierre were general knowledge.
France had ceased to be a convention and had become the Directoire, ‘delivered,’ in its own words, ‘from the yoke of those vile men who in the name of liberty sullied the name of France by their blood-stained brigandage’. But correspondence between France and Guadeloupe was intermittent; Marat was still being deified in Pointe-à-Pitre when his body was rotting in a ditch, and Hugues was in the habit of interpreting such orders as he received in the light of his own convenience; a constitution that might be fine for France could, he argued, be impossible in the colonies. Its implementation would result in the destruction Of the colonies. But he was a practical man; he recognized that the wind had changed, and he could console himself with the knowledge that, as far as Guadeloupe was concerned, he had carried out Robespierre’s instructions thoroughly. In 1790, Basse-Terre had 9,371 inhabitants, of whom 1,640 were white. Five years later there were 5,223 inhabitants, and of the 1,092 whites only 225 were male. Though he might have had qualms as to what might be the fate of ‘the Robespierre of the Isles’, he continued to behave as though he enjoyed the privileges of an independent emperor.
As soon as he got the plantations back to work, he felt himself free to enlarge the area of his parish. To Dominica, Martinique, St Lucia, Grenada, St Eustatius and St Martin, he sent revolutionary missionaries to explain the happenings in St Domingue and to encourage a rising against the English. ‘Spare no Englishmen,’ he ordered. In Martinique his missionaries were captured and shot, but he roused the Caribs of St Vincent to attack the English, and he prepared the ground for his invasions of the other islands.
Grenada in particular seemed to offer opportunities for his proselytizing zeal. For years the island had been shaken with disputes between the French and English. When England took possession of it in 1763, the French were allowed complete religious freedom, a privilege that was not accorded to the English, who bitterly resented the superior position of their fellow colonists; this resentment was exacerbated during the War of American Independence, when the French recovered the island and they themselves were subjected to innumerable hardships. The French had acted unwisely, for there was at this period no security of tenure in the Caribbean. Within four years the English had recovered the island and taken their revenge, confiscating all church lands from the French and depriving them of their political rights.
Once again the dispossessed party bided its time, and the French planters naturally learned with delight of Victor Hugues’ success in Guadeloupe. They besought his aid and he was quick to give it. He laid his plans carefully. He chose as his leader a French planter with coloured blood, called Julien Fédon. We know nothing of Fédon outside of the events of the next few months, except that he was as ruthless and brutal as Hugues himself. The plot was worked out in secret, and arms were smuggled to the conspirators. Two attacks were launched, one against a small town on the windward coast, called La Baye, the other against Gouyave. At La Baye the English residents were slaughtered – men, women and children – and the rebels fled with their booty to the hills. At Gouyave the residents were captured, carried to Fédon’s camp and put into stocks. Among the prisoners was the governor. Fédon gave him the alternatives of death or surrender of the island. The governor refused to surrender, but took the precaution of warning the acting governor that it had been threatened that if the camp was attacked by British troops, the prisoners would be shot.
The acting governor, just as the British general in Guadeloupe, did not believe that such a barbarity would be committed. But Fédon was a worthy disciple of Hugues. As soon as the assault was launched, the massacre of the prisoners started. Forty-eight were shot, and the attack was beaten off.
For a year the rebels were in control; and the crops and houses of every resident who did not share their views were burned. When at last the British returned in force, there remained very few of their compatriots to welcome them. The retribution that followed their return was thorough. Fédon himself escaped, though there is no record of his survival. It was believed that he was drowned in a canoe on his way to Trinidad. But nearly all the other leaders were captured; a number of them were shot and the rest deported to British Honduras.
Those fifteen months of civil war were to have a lasting effect upon Grenada. So few of the older planter families remained that it was not difficult to set up later a system of peasant proprietorship.
In the meantime, Hugues had a number of other irons in the fire. Trade in the Caribbean had been disorganized by the revolution, the war with Britain, and the confused political situation in St Domingue, and it occurred to Hugues that this might be an opportune moment to imitate and emulate the seventeenth-century buccaneers. He organized, therefore, a fleet of corsairs to prey upon foreign shipping. He employed small ships which were easy to manoeuvre, which could hide in secluded bays, make quick getaways, and which provided more awkward targets than larger, slower ships. They were especially effective against the British, whose gunners followed a different tactic from the French, firing not at the masts but at the timbers of the hulls, their aim being steadier as the mouths of their cannon descended with the waves.
St Bartholomew, which was owned by Sweden from 1784 to 1877, proved a useful neutral base, from which his corsairs operated so successfully that during Hugues’ period of power nearly six hundred ships were sacked. The harbour of Pointe-à-Pitre was filled with shipping, and sheds had to be built on the edge of the mangrove plantations that fringed the town. Pointe-à-Pitre became the richest town in the West Indies; once there had been a lack of currency, but now there were French louis, British guineas and Portuguese moidores.
Wild scenes attended the unloading of each cargo; and the people of the town adopted a curious comic-opera uniform – bare feet or shoeless stockings, braided dress coats, shirts trimmed with fur and ribbons at the collar, felt hats with brims half turned down, decorated with feathers dyed with the colours of the republic. Hugues ceased to read the newspapers and put on weight. He was more interested in commerce than the constitution, and the guillotine worked only one day in five. He regularly sent back to France a generous proportion of his plunder.
In this he showed sound common sense. The committee in Paris had learned of his massacres with concern. Yet his achievements on behalf of the republic were so considerable that in January 1796, it confirmed him in his role as an agent with full powers for eighteen months. Two months later he married a young Creole, and the extent to which he found his office profitable may be gauged from the fact that though he had arrived in the island penniless, he was able to make her a marriage settlement of one hundred thousand livres. He would have been able to make her a larger settlement if he had not been such an insatiable gambler, for not only had he control of the island’s commerce and had benefited from the confiscations of Royalist property, but he was a considerable shareholder in the piratical activities of the corsairs. He should have been an extremely wealthy man, but night after night he sat at the tables, losing with complete indifference the moneys that he had filched from his victims.
His fortunes might have prospered indefinitely had not hubris undermined his power. Incensed at the freedom with which the United States were selling arms and ammunitions to the British, in his opinion a base attempt to drive France and the Revolution out of the Caribbean, he urged the Refectory to declare war on the United States. The Refectory refusing, he increased the tempo of his raids on American shipping to such an extent that in July 1798, the USA declared war on France within American waters. It was called the Brigand’s War.
The outbreak of this war, which does not appear to have been announced in Guadeloupe, turned Paris against Hugues, and a replacement was sent out with instructions to dismantle the guillotine, the only one, it is believed, that ever crossed the Atlantic. Hugues, one of the most bloodthirsty of the Jacobins, was in private life a fond father and a tender spouse, and since his wife was pregnant, he refused to leave the island. He was, however, tricked on board a homebound ship and made a prisoner. From the bows of the ship he hurled imprecations at his successor.
His reluctance to leave the island, apart from his concern about his wife’s condition, is easily understandable. Most of the executives of the terror met a sudden and violent end, and Hugues must have had considerable doubts as to the reception that he would receive in Paris. To his surprise, however, he found himself still in official favour, and he was shortly posted to the governorship of Cayenne.
The news of his appointment caused consternation to the inhabitants of that obscure little colony, but Hugues was as adaptable as the vicar of Bray. Once again he travelled with a printing press, but this time its posters were assurances to the public that there would be no repetition of the sanguinary incidents that had been unfortunately necessary in Guadeloupe, and he installed in the bows of the ship, instead of a guillotine, a company of musicians, equipped with the latest songs from Paris, marches by Gossec, and country-dances for the fife and clarionet. He himself was decked in a quasi-military uniform, braided and embroidered, surmounted by a plumed helmet.
Cayenne, which had escaped the ferocities both of war and the Revolution, had provided a refuge for many exiles from less lucky islands, though it had been nicknamed ‘the dry guillotine’, since so many of these exiles died of fever. Hugues’ régime was paternalistic. He opened roads and irrigated fields. Paris was now at peace with the holy see. Monks and nuns returned and church bells chimed. Then, by the law of the 30th Floreal of the year 10, slavery was reinstated. Hugues shrugged. He was a politician; if the restoration of slavery was a political necessity, there was nothing he could do about it. He proceeded to restore slavery in Cayenne, as vigorously and ruthlessly as he had liquidated it in Guadeloupe.
He summoned the owners of nearby haciendas and the leaders of the militia to a secret meeting, and explained his plans. At dusk, the gates of the town were closed and the farms occupied by troops. At eight o’clock a gun was fired, and several hundred Negroes were herded into a small clearing. Hugues climbed on to a barrel, unrolled the parchment of the law, and by the light of torches sonorously delivered it. The former free citizens were informed that next day their former masters would be calling for them, to conduct them back to their old hutments.
A turbulent period followed. Many of the Negroes escaped in the darkness, hid in the hills, and poisoned the fish streams with mullion seed. There was a succession of grim atrocities. The freed men of colour were refused permission to return to France in fear lest their excessive number might transmit to European blood the same dark tinge that had spread through Spain after the Moorish invasion. In the guerrilla warfare that ensued, what was known as the Egyptian disease struck the island and affected Hugues’ eyesight. But order was eventually established.
The European war followed its course. The Dutch joined forces with Britain against the French and captured Cayenne. Hugues was tried in Paris by court-martial, but was acquitted with honour. Little is known about his final years. He had been a baker, trader, Mason, Anti-Mason, Jacobin, military hero, rebel, prisoner, agent of the directory, agent of the consulate; he was now absolved by the men who had killed the man who made him, and he remained in France. He had links with Fouché. He was in Paris when Napoleon’s régime collapsed. In 1814 an old comrade saw in the Palais Royal the fierce little dictator who once strode up and down his study in Guadeloupe, his hands behind his back, a cigar in his mouth, shouting,’ Spare no Englishman,’ soberly attired and wearing an enormous white cockade. ‘Once,’ his friend said, ‘you executed anyone wearing that.’ Hugues shrugged. ‘What would you? The Bourbons are our legitimate rulers.’
He died in the early 1820s, but the date and place of his death are uncertain. Some say he died in France, but according to the Spanish novelist, Alejo Carpentier, who made extensive researches for his novel, Explosion in a Cathedral, the gossip of Guadeloupe insists that he returned to his property in Guiana, where he died, slowly, painfully, and blind.
The present condition of the West Indian islands has been determined by what did or did not happen to them during this quarter century of war. Certain islands were scarcely affected, Barbados and the northern Leewards – Antigua, St Kitts, Nevis and Montserrat – owing their immunity to the direction of the northeast trade winds. It was difficult to attack against it. But St Lucia, Grenada and Guadeloupe felt the full impact of the Revolution; Martinique was captured twice and was a British island for fifteen years. This was to have a profound effect on her future history. Her landowners were not dispossessed, as those of Guadeloupe were. They could not return to France, so they lived on their estates in affluent isolation, nothing being done to interfere with the maintenance of the French way of life.
One of Britain’s great merits as a colonizing power has been her willingness to allow a defeated people to continue to conduct its affairs in exactly the same manner as it had before. The English have transported for themselves the life of the shires to Malaya, India and the Antilles, with their sport and clubs, their prejudices and their shibboleths, ignoring the customs of their neighbours, leaving well enough alone when that seemed practical and peaceful. In Canada Britain has maintained the French language, the French laws, the Catholic religion. Quebec today is not only bilingual; it is a French rather than a British city. During the Napoleonic Wars Britain captured Mauritius and the Seychelles Islands. The French way of life was maintained so uninterruptedly that not only were the grands blancs of the Seychelles considered more French than the French, but in the summer of 1940 they wondered whether they did not owe allegiance to Pétain’s government in Vichy rather than Churchill’s government in London.
In Martinique, during Napoleon’s revolutionary wars, though the Union Jack flew from the turrets of Saint-Pierre and Fort Royal, the big planters and the little whites continued to lead exactly the same life that they had when de Grasse sailed northward to the Dominica Channel. For the slaves the régime was unchanged. The resolutions that were passed and then rescinded in Paris had no effect on them. They continued to plant sugar cane, then cut it, feed it into the mills and scrape the thick scum from the boiling vats; they danced in the evenings and sang songs, cultivated their own gardens on their day of leisure; attended the white man’s services on Sunday but worshipped the dark gods of Africa in their hearts, and dreamed of freedom and revenge, wondering what truth there was in the stories that reached them from Guadeloupe. It was not unnatural that Napoleon, in the pause allowed him in 1801 by the Treaty of Amiens, took Martinique as the model for his new colonial enterprise.
Fifteen years later in St Helena, Napoleon was to describe this enterprise as the biggest mistake of his life, but it had a great deal to commend it. He had recently acquired New Orleans from the Spanish. He was at peace with Europe. He had sixty thousand troops that he would be glad to see out of France. If he were to reassert his authority in Guadeloupe and St Domingue he could form a colonial empire, moving in a circle from Martinique up the Mississippi, that would make France self-supporting and invulnerable. The situations in Guadeloupe and St Domingue were not dissimilar. In each case, contact with France had been largely severed by the difficulties of wartime communication. In each case there had been sanguinary massacres; in each case order of a kind had been restored, with the sugar mills turning and a certain number of white planters enjoying the fruits of their estates; in each case a black general was in command – in St Domingue, Toussaint l’Ouverture; in Guadeloupe, Pelage. It was reasonable for Napoleon to assume that without the distraction of a war in Europe he should be able, with his armies that had conquered Europe, to restore completely the authority of Paris, and had he succeeded he need never have developed his continental plans for Europe; he need never have launched his campaign across the Russian snows. He might have deferred his ambitions for the imperial laurels. Later he would have been faced, he or his successors, with a different set of problems. The United States would not have tolerated a European empire stretching along its western boundary and curtailing its own expansion. Sooner or later there must have been a war between France and the United States. So many things would have happened differently if Napoleon’s colonial enterprise had succeeded. It is one of the big ifs of history, and the enterprise so nearly did succeed.
It had been carefully thought out, with that simplicity which is so often the secret of success. Two expeditions were dispatched side by side across the Atlantic, the one to Guadeloupe, the other to St Domingue. They carried similar instructions. The black leaders were to be cajoled, flattered, confirmed in their ranks; then, when the French army and French rule had been established, the black leaders were to be returned to France, as prisoners if they had been obstinate, to serve in the French army had they been obedient. To Guadeloupe he sent Richepanse, to St Domingue his brother-in-law, Leclerc, ‘a fellow almost damned in a fair wife’.
The expedition to Guadeloupe succeeded admirably. It was far from being easy sailing for Richepanse. There was fighting, there were misunderstandings; a fort with three hundred men in it was blown sky high, but within a few days there was no resistance except for a few groups in the hills; Pelage was on his way back to France to serve in Napoleon’s army and to die in Spain. Slavery was restored, though the word ‘slave’ was not used. Only whites could be French citizens. The word ‘proprietor’ was substituted for the word ‘master’; ‘correctional discipline’ for ‘the whip’. A weekly wage was replaced by food, clothes and medical attention. Proprietors were reinstated. Coloured men and Negroes without a card of freedom had to return to their old properties. Chains and dungeons punished those who attempted to escape. All was, in fact, very much as it had been twenty years before, except that a great many white planters had been killed, with their heirs preferring to remain in Paris. Within a few months the island had been recaptured by the British, and a period of uncontentious prosperity began.
It was all to turn out very differently in St Domingue. Up to a point the plan succeeded well enough. Leclerc had been instructed to treat the black generals as Richepanse had. Toussaint was the equivalent for Pelage, and within a few weeks Toussaint had been tricked on board and sent back to France in chains. Toussaint is one of the great names in history. He was to inspire a sonnet by Wordsworth, a tragedy by Lamartine and a novel by Harriet Martineau. He was the son of an African chief; he had no white blood in his veins; he had been born on an estate in St Domingue. He had been trusted as a slave; he had been promoted early from the cane fields to be his master’s coachman. As far as a slave’s life can be congenial, his had been. He had not been ill-treated; he had had a comfortable house. He had felt loyalty for his master, and when the revolution broke out he had not only helped him to escape but sent after him to the United States a cargo of cotton and sugar. He had been born with a power to rule; he was a natural leader; as a general he outmanoeuvred the Spanish and the British, and as an administrator he restored order in the island. He was not disloyal to France. It was his intention that the island should enjoy something akin to dominion status, acknowledging the suzerainty and commercial monopoly of France. He was not a bloodthirsty revolutionary, and if Napoleon’s schemes had prospered in St Domingue, Toussaint might be no more than a footnote in history. The spotlight has fallen on him because he was captured through treachery, and died in prison without trial, and because the subsequent history of the island is so dramatic, with a drama that is still tangible today. He is famous, in fact, as a forerunner, as the man who prepared the road for Dessalines and Henri Christophe; he is famous because of them rather than of himself, and it was through Leclerc’s tactless handling of Dessalines and Henri Christophe that the campaign miscarried.
When Leclerc arrived, Toussaint l’Ouverture was in Port-au-Prince, and it was here that Leclerc lured him into captivity. But Henri Christophe was at Cap Français, as general of the north. And it was in his handling of Christophe that Leclerc was most at fault. Though the island was technically at peace and work was proceeding on the estates, there were brigands in the hills, and three separate forces were under arms; Leclerc might at one bold blow have taken Cap Français or he might by skilful diplomacy have outwitted the black generals. He delayed assault, however, and sent as an ambassador Lebrun, an ignorant, ill-bred popinjay who later, on a diplomatic visit to Jamaica, was so outrageous in his behaviour as to merit a reprimand from Nugent. It is hard to understand why Leclerc chose him as an aide-de-camp. Possibly Lebrun was handsome; possibly he was Pauline’s choice.
Christophe could have been won over. As it was, distrustful and offended by Lebrun’s tactlessness, he burned Cap Français and fled into the hills. By the time that he and the other generals had surrendered into the acceptance of commissions as French generals, Leclerc had lost half his men.
Even so, for the moment it looked as though the French had won. Toussaint had been shipped to France. Christophe and Dessalines were generals in the French army; according to Napoleon’s plan, they, too, should have been sent back. But fighting once begun is hard to stop; the hills were filled with untamed brigands. Leclerc could not risk the loss of his troops in guerrilla warfare. Bandits had to be set against bandits. Christophe and Dessalines were the only men that he could trust. He had to keep them on. ‘A little while,’ he thought, ‘a little longer. When the last brigand has been captured; then will I send Dessalines back to France.’
But the dice were loaded against Leclerc. Long before the last brigand had been brought in, yellow fever, decimating his men, had broken out along the coast, and before the epidemic was at an end the news had come from Guadeloupe that slavery had been re-established there.
It was the news from Guadeloupe that decided the St Domingue expedition, by uniting with a common dread not only the black but the mulatto forces. Until then the black forces of St Domingue had consisted of three armies: the mulattoes of the south, the centre under Dessalines, the north under Christophe. There had been no true combination. The generals had fought and acted independently of each other. Christophe had indeed made a separate peace with Leclerc. The news that slavery was re-established in Guadeloupe, with the certainty that it was the plan of the French to restore slavery in St Domingue, united the black forces. Christophe and Dessalines went back into the hills, and with them Pétion, the mulatto general who had been Dessalines’ chief opponent in the early war.
For the next three years Dessalines’ and St Domingue’s become one story.
Today Dessalines is Haiti’s hero. Streets and cigarettes are christened after him. His tomb is in the Champ de l’lndépendence. His statue faces the Chapel of Cap Haitien. In Port-au-Prince it brandishes a sword in face of the green-roofed houses and the dim outline of Gonâve. The visitor in Port-au-Prince will gaze wonderingly at that statue. He will scan the aristocratic, thin-lipped, straight-nosed face below the cockaded hat, and he will ask himself where in those bloodless features the signs of savagery are concealed. He may well ask himself. It was never for ungentle Dessalines that that mask was cut. It was ordered by a Central American president who was cast out of office before the statue could be delivered. His fall coincided with the arrival in Paris of a delegation from Haiti to commission a statue of Dessalines to celebrate the centenary of Haitian independence. As there was a statue going cheap, they took it. That was the way they did things in Haiti then. And, indeed, they might well have found a statue less symbolic of the tiger. As you sit at twilight on the veranda of the El Dorado, the outline of the cockaded hat and the thin curve of the brandished sword is dark and ominous against the scarlet sunset. They are the last things you see as the swift dusk settles on the Champ de Mars.
Today Dessalines’ many brutalities are forgiven and forgotten. There was much to forget and to forgive. In Haiti’s bloodstained story he is the most ruthless figure. He was a great fighter and he loved fighting. As long as he was fighting he did not much mind whom he fought. As long as he was killing he did not much mind whom he killed. In the intervals there were women. But women were a sideshow.
It is impossible to detect in his behaviour a consistent policy. During the two years of Toussaint’s pacific administration he drove his Negroes to work at the sword’s point. During his war with Leclerc he butchered, because they were white, every Frenchman whose property lay across his line of retreat. As a general in Leclerc’s army he was known as the butcher of the Negroes, and slaughtered with the liveliest ferocity a hundred blacks because a few French officers had been assaulted. The war he waged with the French when the news of French treachery in Guadeloupe was known is the bloodiest in history. Terrible things happened during those weeks when Leclerc, his body faint and his eyes bright with fever, wrote dispatch after desperate dispatch to France, and Pauline dangled her pretty toes over the palace wall, her eyes fixed broodingly on the green mangroves and the lilac outline of the hills, her ears avid for the caressing words of the young aide-de-camp beside her. Darker things were to happen after Leclerc had sunk to death, after Pauline had sailed away to a less ill-starred marriage, and the fierce Rochambeau was left in charge of the French army. On neither side was any quarter given; no refinement of torture was left unpractised. Rochambeau imported bloodhounds from Cuba. He prepared black dummies, their stomachs stuffed with food, with which he trained the bloodhounds to make always for the bellies of the blacks. The disembowelling of prisoners was the favourite Sunday afternoon amusement of the Creoles at Cap Français. Lady Nugent’s journal, in the intervals of deploring the moral lapses of the young Jamaicans, makes wistful reference to the atrocities that were being staged four hundred miles away, while her husband was complacently informing Lord Hobart that the French would be unable to hold out – which was to the good, he thought. ‘We shall have nothing to fear from the blacks,’ he wrote, ‘provided we resume our former commercial intercourse, thereby preventing them from raising a marine. There are still chiefs of Toussaint’s school. We should only have to play the same game as before between Toussaint and Rigaud to succeed as well in neutralising the power of the brigands.’
A few months later, England and France were again at war. With the outbreak of war, Rochambeau’s last hope had gone. He could get no reinforcements. He could get no supplies. The blacks were attacking him by land, the English were blockading him by sea. He made peace with Dessalines and, with the honours of war, delivered himself into English hands.
It is from this moment that Dessalines appears in his full stature. Over a distance of a century and a half one reads now with a brooding wonderment the story of the next two years. Say what you will of him, Dessalines was on the heroic scale. He was of the lineage of Tamburlaine. Though his speeches and proclamations were doubtless prepared by another hand, the voice of a conqueror rings through them. Each phrase is like the roll of musketry. There is the heroic gesture, a reckless arrogance of hate, in his tearing of the white from the tricolour and making the colours of his country red and blue; in his rechristening of St Domingue; in his wiping away of the last semblance of white rule in the new name, Haiti. He let Rochambeau go on Rochambeau’s own terms. He signed the papers that they brought him. He promised immunity to the white Creoles. They could go or stay as it pleased them. They would be safe, he promised. Why should he not promise if it served his purpose? A good many promises had been made in the last twenty years. Had any of them been kept? With Rochambeau safely imprisoned in Jamaica, he would decide what it was best for him to do.
He decided quickly. The French had scarcely sailed before he was thundering out his hatred of those that stayed, before he had issued orders that none of those who remained should be allowed to leave. As the weeks passed, his intention grew more clear. Edward Colbert, the English representative, was writing back to Nugent that he had little hope for their safety and that Dessalines was counting his own departure as the signal for commencing the work of death. He had wanted to intercede for them with Dessalines, but ‘as their destruction,’ he wrote, ‘was not openly avowed by him, I was apprehensive that I might accelerate what I was anxious to avoid.’ He reports Dessalines’ visit to the south. ‘In his present progress through the southern and western parts of the island he is accompanied by between three and four hundred followers, the greatest part of whom have the appearance of being extremely well qualified for every species of rapine and mischief.’
Colbert had prophesied correctly. Within a week of his return to Jamaica the process of slaughter had begun. Dessalines knew that as long as there was a Frenchman left in Haiti his position would be insecure. The total extermination of the French that he had planned was a task that he could entrust to no one else. From the south, through Jeremie and Aux Cayes, he marched north to Port-au-Prince.
‘Dessalines arrived here on Friday afternoon,’ records a letter found among Nugent’s correspondence. ‘Turned loose four hundred to five hundred bloodthirsty villains on the poor defenceless inhabitants. He gave a general order for a general massacre (strangers excepted).1 I had five in my house. It gave me great pain to be unable to save a single one of them. They were all informed against by black wenches. . . . The murderers are chosen by Dessalines. They accompany him from the south to the north. What havoc when they arrive at the Cap. The poor victims were slaughtered in the streets, in the square, on the seaside, stripped naked and carried out of the gates of Leogane and St Joseph and thrown in heaps. A few days, I fear, will breed a pestilence. . . . Had you seen with what avidity these wretches flew at a white man you would have been astonished.’
A few days later he was at the Cap. The massacre was carefully stage-managed. Guards were placed outside the house of every English and American. It was the French only who were to be killed. For a day and a night the narrow, cobble-paved streets echoed with groans and cries. Then, suddenly, Dessalines grew weary. It was a waste of time breaking into houses, searching cupboards, dragging people from under beds. He announced that he would give safety to all whites, provided that they came into the square to testify their allegiance to him. One by one the terrified creatures crept from their lairs into the open. Dessalines waited patiently beside his soldiers till the square was full. Then he tapped upon his snuffbox. It was the signal for his men to shoot.
Next day he issued the challenge of his own defence:
Quel est ce vil Haitien si peu digne de sa régénération qui ne crôit pas avoir accompli les décrets de I’ Eternel en exterminant ces tigres attérés de sang. S’il en est un, qu’il s’ éloigne la nature indigne de reprendre de notre sein, qu’il aille cacher sa honte loin de ces lieux, I’ air qu’on y respire ne fait point pour ces organes grossiers, c’est I’ air pur de la liberié auguste et triomphante. . . .2
In the constitution of Haiti was drafted the proud clause: Jamais aucun colon ni Européen ne mettra le pied sur cette en titre de maitre ou de pro-prietaire.3
But there was nothing to be feared any longer from Napoleon. He had cut his losses, disposing of New Orleans in the Louisiana Purchase. ‘This,’ he said, ‘confirms forever the power of the United States. I have given England a maritime rival who sooner or later will humble her pride.’
Four hundred miles away across the windward passage, Nugent, in his yellow-coloured residence in Spanish Town, addressed Dessalines, whom he described to Hobart as the brigand chief, as ‘Your Excellency’, and in the weary well-bred indifference of official English explained the terms on which Jamaica would be ready to trade with Haiti. Nugent had no doubt of what would happen. With a tired smile he listened to the accounts that came to him of Dessalines’ extravagance, of the splendour and corruption of the court, of the troops encouraged to supplement by plunder a daily ration of a herring and a half loaf. Dessalines might declare himself an emperor, but the country was on the edge of bankruptcy. Dessalines might assert that Haiti, brown and black, consisted of one brotherhood. He might offer his sister to Pétion in marriage. But no declaration would convince the mulatto that he was not the superior of the Negro. No declaration would persuade the Negro to trust another Negro. The Negro could be ruled, on occasion he could rule. But he was incapable of cooperation, of rule by cabinet. When the news of Dessalines’ murder was brought to Nugent – a murder, if not actually instigated, at least approved by Christophe – he was not surprised. He was not surprised six months later when history repeated itself; when the conflict of Rigaud and Toussaint, the conflict of brown and black that was to be the main issue in Haitian history for the next hundred years, had been resumed between Pétion and Christophe.
Christophe was Dessalines’ second-in-command. With terror he had watched the gradual disintegration of the country under Dessalines, the disorganization of the troops, the emptying of the treasury, the abandoned plantations. What would happen, he asked himself, when the French returned? Once the invaders had been flung back. But Leclerc had advanced on a country prosperous and prepared by Toussaint’s rule. What chance would a disorganized and impoverished country stand against Napoleon? Haiti must be made powerful and rich, proud of itself, respected by other nations. Dessalines stood in the way of Haiti.
Thus Christophe argued. He had no doubt of what was needed. He had no doubt of his own power to realize those needs. When, after Dessalines’ death, representatives of the various departments had met to draw up new constitutions, he was so sure that that convention would place him with unlimited powers at its head that he did not trouble to attend the meeting. He remained at the Cap with the quick-brained little mulatto who was to be raised to the dignity of rank under the title Pompey Baron de Vastey, planning the details of his campaign. He was the only man in Haiti who could save Haiti; he knew that.
He had counted, however, without two things. One was his own unpopularity; a year earlier Leclerc had written home that Christophe was so hated by the blacks that there was nothing to be feared from him. On that he had not counted, nor on Pétion.
Pétion was one of the few with intellect in Haiti. He was the son of a French artist and a mulattress. He was almost white; he had spent much of his time in Paris. He had served in the French army and had studied in the military schools. He was mild and sweet-natured, with a poetic mind. He brought with him to the convention one firm resolution: that he had not driven out the French tyranny to authorize another tyranny, and a black tyranny, in its place.
Patiently, tactfully, diplomatically, he argued clause by clause the constitution that was to defend the Haitians’ liberty and limit the power of their ruler. It was no easy task. Sometimes as he looked round at that black semicircle of surly, stupid faces, a feeling of discouragement came over him, a feeling of doubt. ‘This is not really what I meant,’ he thought. It was something quite other than this that he had planned. What was it that he had planned? He had forgotten. It was so long ago. When one was young one saw life in clear issues. Afterward things grew confused. You fought for people with whom you were only three parts in sympathy against people to whom with a quarter of yourself you still belonged. You could never enter wholeheartedly into any quarrel. There was always a part of you left outside. Just as in life he had never anywhere been quite himself. Not here in St Domingue, where his father had been ashamed of him; nor in Paris, where they had pretended to ignore his colouring. Not even in Paris among the young officers with whom he had joked and drunk, with the woman he had loved. Always between himself and them there had been the veil of difference, this quartering of savage blood. Never anywhere had he been quite himself. That was the thing that he had dreamed of, that was the thing he had fought for, a condition of society with which man could be in tune, in which he could be himself. It was for that that he was arguing now in this hot room, to these ignorant savages. It was this he dreamed of – a Utopia, where man could be off his guard.
But even as he argued, his faith weakened in the thing he argued for. They were not educated yet to democracy, these Negroes. Christophe would never accept these limitations to his power. Later, Christophe’s indignant repudiation of the constitution came as no surprise to him. It was with no surprise that he learned of Christophe’s angry mustering of men, of his forced march over the hills into the long, sun-parched, arid plain that stretches from Ennery to Saint-Marc.
Without surprise, but wearily, Pétion heard the news. Wearily and halfheartedly he gathered together the remnants of the army, marched out with it to the plain, to be flung back, wrecked and scattered; himself escaping with his life, and in the disguise of a peasant woman, upon the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. A few hours more and Christophe would be in the capital. Pétion, for one last effort, gathered his strength together; with the hatred of the brown for the black, with the hatred of brain for force, with the hatred of breeding for unsponsored vigour, he mobilized his troops, marched out with them into the plain and, employing fully for the last time all that France and his father’s blood had taught him, he broke and dismembered Christophe’s untutored powers; broke them, scattered them; then let them go.
His generals turned to him with amazement. What, was he about to let the tyrant free? Now, when he had him in his power, when the whole of Haiti was his for the plundering! Pétion shrugged his shoulders. That irresolution, that mulatto’s doubting of himself that stood always between him and real greatness, mingled a little, possibly, with the poet’s indifference, the poet’s sense of all things’ ultimate futility, made him stay his hand.
Let Christophe, he said, go north beyond the mountains; the south was safe.
So Christophe went north to crown himself a king, and Pétion, in Port-au-Prince, drew up a constitution; a republican constitution with himself as president, and in Spanish Town, four hundred miles away, the governor of Jamaica smiled.
It was less easy than Pétion had imagined. He needed money to strengthen his frontier against Christophe, to prepare his defence against the French. And Rigaud had come back from France. There was a year of civil war to empty the exchequer, an exchequer that it was impossible to fill unless the people worked. They would not work if they were not driven. He lacked the heart to drive them. In his way he loved them as they loved him; the simple people who laughed so readily, who would forgive you anything provided you could make them laugh. But to be loved was not enough when you were beset by enemies.
Pétion grew despondent. The doubting of himself – the mulatto’s doubting of himself – and the mulatto’s contempt and hatred of the black, mingled with the mulatto’s envy of the white, returned to him, making it easy for him to shrug his shoulders, to let things drift. Why worry? Why fight for a liberty that its possessors could not use? Let the blacks go back to savagery. Why try to inoculate them with a sense of mission?
There was a sneer on his lips as he listened to the tales of Christophe that his spies brought to him. So Christophe was making a great man of himself up there! He had a splendid court and many palaces and counts and dukes and barons. He had a gold currency. And English admirals called on him. Professors came out from England to establish schools. The country was rich and that meant that the people of the country were enslaved. He smiled when they told him of the palace of Sans Souci. The Negro’s love of vanity, he called it. They told him of the citadel above Milhot, of how the people of the plains struggled to carry bronze cannon up the slope. How when the slaves paused, panting at their load, Christophe would line them up and shoot every tenth man, with the remark, ‘You were too many. No doubt now you are fewer you will find it easier.’ Of how to prove his authority he would give his troops on the citadel the order to advance and watch file after file crash over the wall to death.
Pétion sneered at Christophe. What else could you expect from an illiterate nigger? How long did they imagine it would last? Tyranny had its own medicine.
He sneered, too, at the citadel. What was it, he asked, but an expression, as was all else that Christophe staged up there, of the Negro’s inordinate self-pride? What was the use of it, after all? It would be the easiest thing in the world to surround it, to starve it out. And as for all that gold stored there in its recesses, of what use would that be there? What could it buy but ransoms? Bullion was not wealth. One day he would take his troops up there to show what it was worth.
He never did.
Pétion was never to see the citadel, never to see the sun strike yellow on its curved prow from the road to Milhot. But with the mind’s clearer eye, the poet’s eye, he saw it, and seeing it foresaw how that proud ship would outlive the purpose it was built for, the imperial idea that it enthroned; how it would stand, derelict through the decades, to outlive ultimately even the quarrel, so eternal-seeming, of brown and black.
Today those pages of John Vandercook’s in Black Majesty that describe all that Christophe achieved within his brief fourteen years of power read like a fairy tale. You cannot believe that the book is history, that one man, and at that a Negro, could in so short a time have done so much. You have to go to the Cap itself to realize that.
Milhot, from Cap Haitien, is a half hour’s drive. It is a bad road through a green and lovely wilderness. You can scarcely believe that this bumpy track was once an even carriage drive, that these untended fields were orderly with care, that the crumbling stone gateways, half buried in the hedge, opened on carefully kept lawns, on verandaed houses, on aqueducts and sugar mills. Along the road passes an unending stream of women carrying, some of them on their heads, some of them on donkeys, bags of charcoal and sticks of sugar cane to market. They move slowly. The sun is hot. There is no hurry.
Milhot was once a pretty suburb of Cap Français. It is now a collection of squat, white-plastered nouses, the majority of them with cone-shaped corrugated iron roofs; looking down on them from the hills they seem like the bell tents of a military encampment. Nothing remains of the old Milhot except the ruins of Christophe’s palace, and of that only the façade and the terraces are left. Goats and lizards drowse under the trees where the King delivered judgment. The underground passage to La Ferrière is blocked. The outhouse walls are creeper-covered.
Christophe’s carriage drive to the citadel is little more than a mountain path. It is a hard two and a half hours’ climb by mule or pony. You pass little along the way: a thatch-roofed hut or two from whose doors natives will run out in the hope of selling you bananas, a gendarme returning from the citadel to duty, a Negro collecting coconuts. For a hundred years that road had been abandoned. The natives were frightened of the citadel. It was a symbol of tyranny. They could not be prevailed upon to go there. As the road mounts you have a feeling of nature returned into possession of its own. The lizards are larger and greener that dart across the road, the butterflies brighter and more numerous, the birds that dip into a richer foliage are wider-winged. For ninety minutes you climb in silence. Then, suddenly, at a bend of the road, you see high above you the citadel’s red-rusted prow.
Words cannot describe the citadel. In photographs it would look like any other ruin. A cinematograph, worked from a circling air-plane, would give no more than an impression of it. To appreciate its meaning you have to come to it as they that built it did, with the hot sun upon you, with your back damp against your shirt, with the fatigue of riding in your knees, with the infinitely varied landscape before your eyes, with the innumerable jungle sounds in your ears, and in your nostrils the innumerable jungle scents. Then you can walk along the grass-grown courtyards, the galleries with their guns that will never fire, the battlements through whose windows trees are sprouting; then you can realize the prodigious effort that the citadel’s building cost; you realize that nothing that has been said of it has been an exaggeration, that it is the most remarkable monument in the modern world.