On 10 July 1820 the English abolitionist Thomas Clarkson wrote a thirty-one-page letter to the King of Haiti, Henry Christophe, in which he provided a detailed account of his recent trip to France at the behest of the King. He had gone there, in the words of his mission statement, to discover ‘the bases upon which a solid and durable peace may be built’ between Haiti and its former colonial master.1 Clarkson’s letter to the King was one of dozens that had been exchanged between the two men since the initiation of their correspondence in 1815. Over the course of the intervening five years, Clarkson had become a veritable ‘good-will ambassador for Christophe’ (Griggs, 71), promoting his cause in Britain and singing his praises to foreign leaders such as the Emperor of Russia, Alexander I.2 By 1820, as the mission to Paris attests, this ‘ambassadorial’ status had gained an official dimension, the Englishman having been ‘authorized’ to make overtures to the French government on Christophe’s behalf, ‘leaving to the discretion of Mr. Thomas Clarkson the choice of the means and avenue of approach’ (Griggs and Prator, 175). Given that the King’s ‘sine qua non condition’ for any negotiations with the ‘King of France and Navarre’ was that he ‘recognize Haiti… as a free, sovereign, and independent state; that he deal with Haiti as such; and that on his own behalf and in the name of his heirs and successors he renounce all claims to political, property, and territorial rights over Haiti or any part thereof’, and that Christophe had ruled out from the start ‘any indemnification of the ex-colonists’ (175), Clarkson and the influential abolitionists such as William Wilberforce and James Stephen with whom he consulted in the days leading up to his trip to France recognized the ‘hopeless’ nature of the treaty that Christophe was pursuing. Clarkson thus informed the King, in a letter of 28 April written days before he left for France, that he had chosen to travel there ‘not as a public agent but in his own individual capacity’, with the goal of ascertaining ‘the particular disposition and state of France as they relate to Hayti’ (198). Notwithstanding his realistic assessment of the situation, Clarkson ended this letter with the buoyant assertion that ‘I shall go as a private individual but shall take my Diplomatic Papers with me in case of an unexpected turn’ (199).
Christophe and Clarkson’s transatlantic correspondence brings together two figures of massive importance in the history of slavery and its abolition. On the one hand, Clarkson, ‘arguably the great Founding Father of all abolitionism’ (Davis, 2006, 189), a man who ‘made antislavery causes his purpose in life’ (C. Brown, 436), from the publication of his first Essay on Slavery in 1786 and the founding of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade the following year, to the successful abolition of the slave trade (1807) and slavery (1833) in the British colonies, and on through to his opening address at the 1840 World Antislavery Convention, which he chaired with ‘the zeal of a venerable old man in the cause of freedom and our race’, as the African American abolitionist Alexander Crummell put it in his 1846 eulogy for this ‘illustrious friend of Africa and her children’ (31, 32). On the other hand, Christophe, the revolutionary hero, one of Toussaint Louverture’s closest and most trusted associates from 1794 onward, second-in-command to the first leader of independent Haiti, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and, upon the latter’s death in 1806, President and (as of 1811) King of the northern half of Haiti, a man whose ‘wide-ranging and ambitious efforts aimed at creating a sustainable postemancipation state deserve more attention than historians have usually given them’ (Dubois, 2012, 64).3 However, for our purposes, Clarkson’s lengthy letter of 10 July is primarily of interest not because of its pairing of heroic figures who have established a name for themselves in the annals of world history, nor for its exhaustive assessment of Franco-Haitian relations, but because of the prominent role played in its concluding pages by a third, far lesser known figure, whose media(tory) role emerges as a subject of intensive commentary—and, as we will see, projection—on Clarkson’s part. That third party is, of course, Baron de Vastey, Christophe’s chief publicist (and, by this point, Chancellor of the Realm), who had over the past several years gained a reputation in Britain as Haiti’s ‘most distinguished political writer’, someone whose work ‘abounds with deep and original views’, to quote an 1820 assessment of his Réflexions politiques (‘History’, 73). Clarkson’s repeated appeals to Vastey in his letter provide the central focus for this opening section of my Introduction, because they allow me to elaborate on the general portrait of Vastey as a scribe that I sketched out in my Preface: that is to say, as a writer whose subject-position can only with the greatest of difficulty be conceived of apart from the sovereign power it serves. The extended treatment offered here of Clarkson’s letter is further justified by the fact that the published version of it has been so extensively pruned that the obsessiveness of the English abolitionist’s appeals to Vastey cannot be gauged without recourse to the original document.4
Clarkson’s 1820 letter concludes with a list of eight things the King ought to do should he prefer to make no treaty with France and ‘abide by the consequences’. Six pages are devoted to expanding upon the penultimate of Clarkson’s eight suggestions, namely: ‘I would recommend it to your Majesty to avail yourself of the able and respectable talents of the Baron de Vastey by asking him to undertake a small literary work’ (175v–176r). Clarkson begins by noting that during a trip to France five years before he had ‘had the mortification to hear your Majesty’s Government ridiculed and your private character stigmatized’. During the just-completed journey, by contrast, he had ‘the satisfaction of observing that a considerable change had taken place in the public opinion on that subject, but particularly as to your character as an Individual. You are now no longer the cruel monster, which the ex-colonists had represented you to be. This happy change’, he continues, ‘has been effected by your Majesty’s friends who have circulated (both by means of books and conversation) many facts relative to your political regulations, of which almost all had been before ignorant’. The purpose of the ‘small literary work’ to be undertaken by Vastey (with whom Clarkson had, as we will see, entered into personal correspondence the year before) would thus be to give further publicity to the regime’s aims and accomplishments, so that ‘the French Nation should become better acquainted with your Majesty’s true character, or that they should be still more enlightened on this subject’, in order that it ‘should rise in estimation till those prejudices are finally done away, which have hitherto supposed people of colour to be incapable either of knowledge or virtue’ (176r). Placing the same trust in Vastey’s ability to make his readers ‘see’ and ‘recognize’ Christophe in a proper light as did the regime itself,5 Clarkson’s then-and-now narrative invokes a faith in what we might call (transcending) representation that is central to abolitionist discourse, which through the power of ‘books and conversation’ aims to effect a quasi-ontological transformation (‘You are no longer…’) of the misrepresented object (‘slave’, ‘negro’…) of its humanitarian rescue mission. In this case, Christophe is transformed from the monster he is represented as being and the prejudices this trope engenders to the real person of colour he is, a man in possession of a ‘true character’ that can be revealed by means of facts and their circulation in the public sphere. In the case of Christophe, of course, the binary terms of this ‘enlightenment’ project cannot but seem, at best, highly problematic to us, given the epistemological impasse in which contemporaries of Clarkson,6 no less than historians of today,7 found and find themselves when trying to assess the ‘true character’ of Christophe and of those, such as Vastey, who served under him.
These broader questions of representation form an inescapable backdrop to any (re)assessment of the seemingly disheartening realities of post/revolutionary Haiti.8 Leaving such questions aside for the moment, however, we can return to the details of Clarkson’s letter, which quickly shifts attention away from the problem of representation to the enactment of it, with some very specific suggestions for the form that Vastey’s ‘small literary work’ should take:
You may be assured that the nearer your Majesty, and the Haytian Government, and the Haytian People are considered to approach to a level with the enlightened Princes, Governments, and Nations of Europe, the less obstruction you will find to being nationalized, or to being received among the acknowledged Governments of the world. I would advise therefore, that the Baron de Vastey should directly compose a little work of about 40 or 50 pages only for this purpose; for the shorter the work the better, provided it comprehended all the necessary facts. The following are my ideas upon the subject.
The work might be entitled ‘A few observations on the Government of the North Western part of Hayti from its infancy to the present time’. The Baron would probably find a better title than this before he finished it.
The Baron might begin by stating, that so many calumnies had been spread relative to this Government, that it seemed necessary to give to the European world some authentic documents to refute them. (176r–v)
What is remarkable about these opening suggestions regarding the best way for Christophe, his government, and his people, to become ‘nationalized’ is simply the level of detail to which Clarkson descends. Providing Vastey, through the mediating figure of the King, with exact instructions regarding the page length of the ‘little work’, its title, and how it ought to begin, Clarkson is practically dictating the terms of composition, while at the same time acknowledging the possibility that these terms might be improved upon by his Haitian counterpart, notably in relation to the title, with its overly precise geographical specifications and its benignly infantilizing vision of the Christophean regime.
Clarkson’s abolitionist dictation, once started, proves hard to stop. After suggesting how A few observations ought to begin, he then proceeds, in the next five paragraphs (176v–178r), to map out various points that Vastey should make in order to clinch the argument Clarkson wants him to pursue. This argument requires him to ‘paint in true colours the disorganized state of society as it was’ when Christophe came to power (176v), and contrast it with ‘the present state of the inhabitants of Hayti’ by enumerating the various reforms undertaken since that time, such as ‘the number of Professors you had introduced into your Dominions and of which sort; the Schools you had formed by degrees, and in what places, and in short every act done by your Majesty to improve the condition of your subjects, whether in Justice, Agriculture, the Arts, Literature, or Religion’ (177r). One need only cite the first few words of the opening sentence of each of these paragraphs to get a sense of the well marked path that Vastey is being called upon to follow when describing the regime’s passage from a state of infancy to its present (progressing toward) enlightened state: ‘He might then describe the political state of Hayti, as it was when your Majesty was proclaimed King…’; ‘He should then proceed to state that…’; ‘The Baron would have here a fine opportunity of observing that…’; ‘The Baron should then begin with…’; ‘After having done this he should say…’
In the last of these prescriptive paragraphs, Clarkson is particularly concerned, given the common sentiment among those with whom he consulted in France that Christophe’s ‘was no Government, it was a mere Despotism’ (177v), that stress be laid on the King’s efforts at educating his people and on his willingness ‘to extend political privileges by degrees as you found them fit for such a blessing’ (178r). When he himself stressed this point, Clarkson notes, it ‘made a considerable impression on the minds of those, with whom I conversed, in your Majesty’s favour. I should advise, therefore’, he continues, ‘that the Baron de Vastey should say a few words on this subject in the little work now mentioned’. Vastey, Clarkson suggests, ‘might state that the system of education which your Majesty was giving to your subjects was intended as a foundation on which to build with safety a political constitution which should embrace the rational liberty and happiness of all your people. I am sure’, he concludes, ‘that an avowal, like this, would please many of your Majesty’s friends and disarm many of your enemies’ (178r), revealingly, if doubtless unintentionally, drawing attention to the fine line between truth and persuasion with his pragmatic appeal to pleasing friends and disarming enemies.
As if that detailed outline of the book’s structure were somehow not enough, Clarkson then immediately circles back to the big picture, offering new strictures on its overall form and content, as well as an explicit rationale for the choice of Vastey as the work’s author:
Permit me to say a few words more concerning this little work, which, though little, I consider to be of great importance.
In the first place it must be written by the Baron de Vastey. No one of your Majesty’s friends in England could write it, because all the documents are in Hayti; and no person could write it, who had not witnessed the whole process of the improvement which has taken place in your Dominions, or who had not seen the wonderful change, which has been produced from the beginning of your Majesty’s reign to the present time.
Secondly, it should contain a plain statement of facts, without any extravagant embellishment from the flowery powers of oratory.
Thirdly, it should be written in the most modest manner, and with the greatest temperance.
Fourthly, nothing should be mentioned in it concerning Protestantism or any intended change of religion. Nothing of a political nature should appear in it. No reflection should be made upon France: indeed it would be better not to mention France at all, except in a respectful manner. (178r–v)
Clarkson begins by insisting upon Vastey’s privileged status as a witness, a native mediator possessed of a first-hand knowledge/vision of Christophe’s Haiti and who is thus in a position to make his readers see ‘the wonderful change’ between its infancy and its present condition in a way that Clarkson cannot—even though the English abolitionist has devoted so many pages to showing the Haitian witness what this change is and how best to represent it!
Clarkson’s final three points offer an implicit reading of (and in the case of the last two, warning about) Vastey’s established textual practice, and can thus be usefully read in relation to his work as a whole, and to Le système colonial dévoilé in particular. The first directive, in which Clarkson advises Vastey (via Christophe) to stick to ‘a plain statement of facts’ and to avoid ‘the flowery powers of oratory’, corresponds very well to Vastey’s own assertions in Colonial System regarding the unsuitability of rhetorical flourishes and stylistic embellishments when describing the horrors of slavery and the consequent need to restrict oneself to ‘reporting the facts’ (1814b, 40). If an avoidance of flowery embellishment characterizes all of Vastey’s work, the same cannot be said for his relation to intemperate language: one has only to read the call to arms with which Colonial System concludes, with its apocalyptic vision of sharpened Haitian bayonets and pierced French bellies (96), to get a sense of the distance that Vastey had to come (or would have to come) in order to meet the modest demands of Clarkson’s abolitionist discourse. The strictures regarding any discussion of Protestantism aside,9 the final directive offers even more of a challenge to Vastey in its insistence that nothing of a ‘political nature’ appear in the projected book (as if any discussion of Haiti could be divorced from politics), and its emphasis on the need to omit any but the most respectful references to France: as Clarkson well knew, France was the Gordian knot that Vastey’s books never ceased trying to cut, with a discursive violence that, while certainly present in Colonial System (the last sentence of which ends with a reference to ‘the myriad crimes of the French in Haiti’ (97)), seems, if anything, to have gained in strength over the course of his career as Christophe’s publicist.
After these stipulations, Clarkson then concludes his account of A few observations with one last paragraph in which he offers practical advice regarding how to go about publishing and circulating it.10 What I hope has emerged from my purposely detailed rendering of Clarkson’s obsessively precise instructions is a clear sense of the institutional framework within which Vastey’s oeuvre was produced—or, in other words, a clear sense of the scribal conditions that (as argued in the Preface) must be the starting point for any appraisal of him as a writer. At the side of power, rather than to the side of men of state such as Christophe (see Bongie, 2008, 32–33), the scribe, in transmitting his message, is subject to all sorts of stifling compromises and complicities; his acts of mediation are subject to a painfully evident lack of room for manoeuvre. What sort of ‘literary work’ can possibly emerge from these scribal conditions? That is the difficult question that Vastey’s publications pose any reader today, and which makes them a challenge to read in relation to other Afro-diasporic writing in which ‘the structural dependence that subjects literary practices to political authority’ is altogether less obvious (Casanova, 199), or even, we might like to imagine, entirely absent.11
What is especially interesting about the scribal dynamics on display in Clarkson’s letter is that the double labour Vastey is called upon to perform—working on behalf of the ‘nationalization’ of Christophe’s regime as well as serving the global needs of the abolitionist movement— creates a triangulated relation, which complicates the standard binary pairing of sovereign and scribe. Of course, that pairing, and the strict division of labour it implies, was never as uncomplicated as one might imagine: Deborah Jenson has argued, for instance, that ‘the first leaders of the blacks in Haiti’, Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, cannot be read simply in terms of a power/writing binary of the sort more readily attributed to the ‘formalized’ scribal relation between Christophe and Vastey: the documents associated with these first leaders, Jenson maintains, must also be read as, in part, produced by them; they ‘exemplify, in themselves, both political power and the most tenuous but determined approaches to the magical sphere of literary and mediatic persuasion’ (6). If, at the dawn of the independence era, the mediatic work of Toussaint and Dessalines (partially) collapses the distinction between sovereign and scribe, some fifteen years later the efforts of the post/revolutionary state at making itself heard and gaining recognition for itself can be said, on the evidence of Clarkson’s letter, to have generated the reverse scenario, an expansion in the number of players and a consequent blurring of the lines between them. Who is the sovereign and who is the scribe here in this triangulated relation?
Most obviously, of course, Christophe remains the sovereign, at the head of the triangle, with his ‘agent’ Clarkson and his secretary Vastey occupying the scribal base (along with any number of other Christophean scribes such as Baron de Dupuy or Chevalier de Prézeau). And yet the three-way relationship can also be read not so much as a triangle but as a chain of command extending from the metropolitan centre to the post/colonial periphery, given the fact that Clarkson is dictating the terms of the book to his addressee, Christophe, who will in turn pass them along to Vastey, who must take both authorities into account. This second reading nicely coincides with any suspicions we might have about the congruence between abolitionist and colonial discourse, but it scarcely takes into account the level of desire infusing Clarkson’s excessively detailed and repetitive advice; the projected book requires an all too evident projection of himself onto Vastey, the man who has witnessed that which Clarkson can only longingly imagine. In a third reading, then, it is the lateral relation between the Haitian scribe and his English double that is of central importance, rather than the sovereign power that makes these relations possible.
The psychologically fraught nature of this lateral relation is clear enough: there is great potential for rivalry and envy (which can also extend, of course, in a vertical direction from the scribal base to the sovereign vertex). However, there is also the potential for new forms of collegiality, a conversation of equals in the republic of letters, engaging with one another on their own terms rather than those of the sovereign in whose shadow they serve. We get a sense of what this more ‘autonomous’ relation between the men might involve in the shards of their personal correspondence, which consists of two letters of Vastey’s to be found in Clarkson’s papers, most notably one dated 29 November 1819 that is of vital importance for any consideration of Vastey because it supplies us with so much of the scarce personal information we have concerning him (Griggs and Prator, 178–82; fols. 122–127).12
Accompanying this letter to Clarkson was a copy of Vastey’s recently published history of the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath, the 1819 Essai, along with a number of other unidentified works that, Vastey suggests, ‘will be useful to you in the course of your negotiations each time you wish to find arguments and review the facts’ (179). Rather than simply explain how the book will help Clarkson understand the Haitian Revolution and, especially, the post/revolutionary division of Haiti into the northern kingdom and the southern republic, Vastey prefaces that explanation with more personal comments bearing on his reasons for writing the Essai:
Exasperated at seeing in the journals of the South and in those of France, their faithful echoes, the calumnies which the enemies of Haiti and the King endlessly repeat concerning his government and his person, I decided to tell the truth in the matter [je me suis décidé à les réfuter]. This led me into the writing of a whole volume on the origin and cause of our civil dissensions. I was able to devote only two months to the composition of this work and furthermore I was ill most of the time, so you will undoubtedly find it full of imperfections. Though I did not have at my disposal enough time to do it properly, I nevertheless flatter myself that, with all its flaws, this book will cast a great deal of light on our wars. (178–79; 122v–123r)
As we saw in the preceding Biographical Sketch, this autobiographical commentary about the origins of Vastey’s book is accompanied, at the very end of the letter, by key facts regarding his own origins (his place and date of birth), as well as details about his wife and two daughters, and about his personal relation to the revolutionary leaders Toussaint and Dessalines (181–82).
In this ‘friendly interchange of confidences’ (181), we thus witness a twinned emphasis on text and self that goes well beyond the letter’s scribal purpose of preparing Clarkson for his diplomatic mission: we see (the possibility of) Vastey emerging as an author in his own right/write, speaking as someone who has gained enough, or almost enough, cultural capital to distinguish his work from the cause that it serves and to call it his own, to lay claim to it as something truly ‘literary’, in the particular sense according to which we now commonly understand the word—a historically uncommon understanding that clearly has yet to inform Clarkson’s (to us) puzzling identification of his (and Vastey’s) A few observations as a ‘small literary work’, and his various other references in the correspondence with Christophe to Vastey’s ‘literary labours’ (Griggs and Prator, 186).13 Speaking as Clarkson’s transatlantic confidant rather than Christophe’s secretary, Vastey seems here to be on the cusp, as it were, of author(iz)ing himself, of escaping the (to us) deathly confinement of his scribal role and speaking as a sovereign self, in an ‘authorial voice’ of the sort we have come to recognize and valorize, a voice ‘strongly associated with individual genius, solitary writing, and specifically authorial access to print culture’ ( Jenson, 5). It is this unshackling of Vastey from the scribal role to which he is so closely bound that is the ineluctable horizon for anyone hoping to salvage him for posterity, to reintroduce Vastey to a contemporary audience as a figure of more than purely historical interest, a figure of (literary) value. It is this very horizon which Aimé Césaire gestured toward at the end of La tragédie du roi Christophe, when he gave his theatricalized Vastey the final word, allowing him to speak, for the first time, in a language that is not direct and transparent, miraculously arming him, in a grandiloquent closing elegy for the dead Christophe, with an elevated form of speech reminiscent of nothing so much as the dense and hermetic language of Césaire’s own lyric poetry.14
Desirable as this horizon might have been for Vastey, and might still be (for us), it would remain, and remains, precisely that. An altogether more literal death awaited this scribe, who would never have the chance to write, and re-title, his (and Clarkson’s) A few observations much less the opportunity to assert his autonomy by not writing it. By the time the thirty-one-page letter arrived in Haiti, ‘Christophe was no longer alive, and as Clarkson remarks in his autobiography, “my labours for him and the people of Hayti were all in vain”’ (Griggs, 73). That August, Christophe suffered a paralytic stroke and his weakened condition ‘emboldened members of his regime who were increasingly unhappy with his rule, and within a few months, several officers organized a conspiracy’ (Dubois, 2012, 85). On 8 October, faced with open mutiny, unable because of his debilitated condition to lead a response against the conspirators, Christophe committed suicide. By the time Boyer and the southern army arrived in Cap-Henry on 22 October, seizing the opportunity to reunify the country (which was hardly the outcome desired by those northerners who rose up against the King with the purpose of supplanting him), Vastey had been dead for three or four days, summarily executed by the leaders of the revolt. As we saw in the Biographical Sketch, the details of Vastey’s execution, much less the exact reasons for it, will remain forever shrouded in doubt, but this brutal conclusion to the life of our Haitian scribe, not yet forty, is hardly surprising, given that he was the primary spokesperson for the Christophean regime, and someone increasingly central to the actual governing of the kingdom. Vastey died, while lesser scribes escaped to serve new masters, such as the former Comte de Rosiers, Juste Chanlatte, who made a smooth transition from one sovereign to the next, ‘glorifying the memory of the enemy [Pétion] of his defunct king, with the goal of toadying up to Boyer and his collaborators’ (H. Trouillot, 1962, 63–64).
In the words of historian David Geggus, Christophe’s downfall was ‘a double blow for the British abolitionists, effectively ending their direct links with Haiti and greatly undermining its propaganda value for the anti-slavery cause’ (1985, 126). Clarkson, ever (in the words of one of Vastey’s letters to him) ‘the sincere friend of humanity and the zealous champion of the unfortunate Africans and the Haitians, their descendants’ (Griggs and Prator, 136), did what he could to help out the exiled Queen and Christophe’s two daughters, ‘hospitably receiv[ing] them as house guests for nearly a year’ when they arrived in England in 1821 (Griggs, 79). On 16 December 1820, prompted by ‘some intelligence which I have this day received’, the other leading figure of the abolitionist movement in Britain, Wilberforce,15 who had himself been in communication with Christophe since 1814, having just learned of the coup and still unsure as to who had taken charge of the kingdom, directly petitioned ‘the head of the Haytian Government’, whoever he might be, on behalf of Vastey. ‘It is currently reported’, Wilberforce wrote, ‘that M. de Vastey has been imprisoned by the new Government of Hayti, and that it is intended to punish him capitally’.
I am utterly ignorant of the crimes of which M. de Vastey may have been guilty, and therefore it is not for me to presume to form any opinion on the punishment to be inflicted on him. But it cannot be wrong, nor can it, I trust, be in any degree likely to offend, if, taking, as I must ever do, a deep interest in all that concerns the character and fortunes of all the descendants of the African race, I feel desirous of enforcing on you the important truth, that the eyes of all the civilised world are anxiously directed towards you; and that the course which the Haytians shall pursue in their present critical circumstances, may tend powerfully to gladden or to depress the hearts of those who, like myself, have long been their partisans and advocates. (Wilberforce, 1840, 392)
Wilberforce’s main point is to ‘enforce’ the idea that any breach in the rule of law in Haiti will damage the public image of blacks the world over, confirming the prejudices of those who cite ‘the violence and cruelty with which they were disposed to act towards each other in those contentions which too commonly take place in political society’ as one of the ‘proofs of their inferiority’; hence, Wilberforce advises, ‘the importance of letting the principles of your proceedings be manifest to the world’, and of ‘let[ting] even guilty men enjoy the benefit of a fair and impartial trial’ (392–93). But the fact that his comments are made specifically on behalf of Vastey speaks volumes to the latter’s emerging reputation as someone whose value to the abolitionist cause could be conceived of apart from the institutional relation to Christophe upon which it had been founded, and interestingly anticipates the special emphasis in our own age of ‘humanitarian reason’ on the figure of the writer as particularly vulnerable to censorship and persecution.
Its cautious, supplicatory tone notwithstanding, Wilberforce’s letter— in its enforcement of truth and its appeal to the overseeing power of ‘the eyes of all the civilised world’ (a scopic power so far-reaching it would appear not to need the sort of mediation that Clarkson required of Vastey)— undoubtedly evinces the hierarchical dynamics that were an inescapable part of abolitionist discourse then, as well as the ‘tension between inequality and solidarity, between a relation of domination and a relation of assistance’ that is ‘constitutive of all humanitarian government’ in the present (Fassin, 3). The particular domination of British abolitionism in post/revolutionary Haiti had, however, as Geggus notes, come to an end with the death of Christophe: the new regime, obviously, was not in a position to take Wilberforce’s belated advice with regard to Vastey, and the Englishman’s broader offer of ‘all the assistance in my power’ (394) was a gift the new head of the Haitian government had no interest in accepting, given the frequency with which the reviled Christophe had received it in the past, and the longstanding Francophilic leanings of the rulers of the southern republic.
Vastey’s own repeated acceptance of this transatlantic gift, and his consequent entanglement in an abolitionist relation of domination and assistance, mirrors at the international level his scribal relation to power at the national level, while also offering, as we saw, the unrealized possibility of somehow transcending it and gaining entry to the world republic of letters. To examine Vastey’s scribal links to Clarkson in particular, and British abolitionism in general, as I have done in this opening section of the Introduction, is inevitably to confront the problem of what it means for the colonized (or formerly colonized) subject to be in this particular relation to abolitionism and its humanitarian discourse: should that relation be a source of concern or of (muted) optimism? Should we take a moral(izing) distance from it, by exposing what Marcus Wood has, glossing Fanon, dismissed as ‘the benign lie of the emancipation moment’ (2010, 29); by emphasizing the ‘complicated and compromised history that in reality surrounded the reluctant and flawed British approach to emancipation’ (262); by deploring ‘the controlling mechanisms of emancipation propaganda’ (160), as well as the starring role played in (the memory of) that mythic enterprise by ‘moral “big daddies”’ such as Clarkson and Wilberforce (16)? Or—as Paul Gilroy has recently argued in his advocacy of modes of ‘heteropathic identification’ that might (despite all sorts of institutional complications and compromises) ‘open up possibilities for change achieved through social and political mobilisation’ grounded in ‘the idea of universal humanity’ (66, 65, 72)—are such blanket critiques of abolitionist assistance (and, by extension, all forms of humanitarian government) perversely deaf to the promise of abolitionism and of other kindred appeals ‘against racism and injustice in humanity’s name’ that, for Gilroy, can and must be made in the spirit of ‘the new humanism’ argued for by Fanon (69)? (A very different Fanon from the one invoked by Wood in his critique of the ‘moral pollution and aesthetic contamination’ generated by the myth of the ‘gift of freedom’…16)
Notwithstanding his scribal commitment to ‘Misters Clarkson, Wilberforce, Stephen, and in general all the virtuous philanthropists of the great and magnanimous British nation, who have devoted their talents and their labours, their days and their nights, for the happiness and perfection of the human species’ (1816c, 56), Vastey was well aware of the possible limits of their (and his own) position, as we can see from a toast that he delivered at the Café des étrangers in Cap-Henry on 24 August 1816, during a banquet given for prominent Haitians by the town’s foreign merchants as part of a week-long celebration of the Queen’s birthday.17 Lifting his glass, Vastey drank, ‘To the gratitude that we owe the virtuous Philanthropists who have defended our Cause with as much ardour as disinterestedness; if their Wishes and their Efforts prove unavailing, then let us make use of our Swords, to cleave the Body of the Enemies of Humanity, and preserve the Rights that we derive from God, Nature, and Justice!’ (1816d, 42) Vastey’s double-edged toast reckons with the possibility that philanthropy, and the humanitarian assistance it offers, might prove unavailing (impuissant), and that it might thus need to be supplemented by another, more powerful and uncompromising response to racism and injustice, one that models itself, intemperately, upon the memory of the Haitian Revolution and its world-historical struggle between the friends and enemies of universal emancipation.
In its doubled appeal to the seemingly very different imperatives of philanthropic virtue and revolutionary violence, of institutional patience and emancipatory action, Vastey’s toast perfectly exemplifies a post/revolutionary sensibility, in which the presence of the revolutionary past continues to haunt a dramatically transformed present and its visions of the future. So perfectly, indeed, that we could readily dismiss the toast as little more than a rhetorical flourish on Vastey’s part, a rote invocation of insurrectionary language that might have given his mixed audience at the Café des étrangers a jolt but that could not have been seriously meant at a time—over thirteen years removed from the declaration of national independence—when a future for Christophe’s Haiti and the cause of antislavery so evidently appeared to depend upon gaining international recognition of its independence, with the help of the regime’s abolitionist friends and a more concerted media campaign on its behalf, of which the translations of Vastey would form no small part.18 And no doubt there would be some truth to this reading. But if we look not forward to the final years of the regime—when, in the words of another Christophean scribe, hopes for ‘the complete liberation of our country and the definitive enfranchisement of this Kingdom’ seemed to rest with philanthropists abroad (Chanlatte, 1819, 15–16)—but double back to the summer and autumn of 1814, just two short years before Vastey gave that toast, then the lived intensity of his post/revolutionary appeal to revolutionary violence becomes rather more appreciable, for it was during this time that l’an IIème of independence seemed as if it might realistically be on the point of reverting to Year Zero, with the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy and the threat of a new invasion of the former Saint-Domingue by its ex-colonial masters. It is this moment of absolute urgency to which Vastey is responding with Le système colonial dévoilé, the one major text of his that would not be translated into English.19 While the lack of this translation can doubtless be attributed to the fact that the book’s publication preceded by several years the mounting of the aforementioned media campaign in English, one might also venture that there is something dangerously ‘intemperate’ about this particular work, which can be accounted for by the situation of urgency in which it was produced, and which distinguishes it from the three later works of his that were translated into English. In order to prepare the ground for reading what is arguably Vastey’s most powerfully rendered denunciation of slavery and the colonial system, it will thus be necessary to supply a contextualizing account of the months leading up to the publication of Colonial System in October 1814.
At an earlier juncture in his lengthy letter of 10 July 1820, Clarkson had occasion to remind Christophe that in 1814, ‘soon after the restoration of the Bourbons, and when Monsieur Malouet was the Minister of the Marine and Colonies, it was determined to reduce Hayti to a slave colony by force of arms, but the Treaty of Vienna, and other circumstances put a stop to these proceedings’ (168v). This one sentence of Clarkson’s about France’s, and specifically Malouet’s, efforts after the fall of Napoleon to destroy the independent nation of ‘Hayti’ and restore the slave colony of ‘Saint-Domingue’ contains, in nuce, the sordidly predictable story of colonial (re)conquest that I will be expanding upon in this second section of the Introduction in order to set the scene for Vastey’s emergence into print in October of that momentous year.
Between 1804 and 1814, following upon the final defeat in November 1803 of Napoleon’s forces in French Saint-Domingue,20 ‘relations between Haiti and France were almost totally broken off’ (Brière, 52). Toward the end of that period, however, with Napoleon’s fortunes flagging in Europe after the Russian campaign of 1812 and recent defeats in Germany (October 1813), and with the signing of a European peace treaty and perhaps even the collapse of the Napoleonic regime apparently in the offing, both Christophe and Pétion sensed that this relatively quiescent state of affairs was not likely to last much longer, and that it might be time to take the initiative in securing the future of Haiti (or, more exactly, the two Haitis). In his polemical writings of 1815 directed against the southern republic, Vastey repeatedly accused Pétion of sending secret agents to France in the final months of 1813 and negotiating a treaty with Napoleon that would have resulted in a restoration of French rule (see, e.g., 1815b, 72; 1815c, 14). Notwithstanding Vastey’s sarcastic invectives at the expense of those ‘amphibian-like’ agents of Pétion’s and their ‘perfidious’ mission across the seas (1815b, 74), Napoleon’s changing fortunes also induced Christophe to send his own secret agents to France in March 1814, not, certainly, to negotiate a return to French rule but to sound out the conditions for French recognition of Haiti’s independence. These two agents were none other than Vastey and his fellow scribe, Prézeau. The two men would get as far as London, by which time (early April) the French Emperor had abdicated, and the Bourbon monarchy had been restored to the throne in the person of Louis XVIII.21
The Kings of France and Haiti had a common enemy in Napoleon, so the Christophean regime had at least some hope, in the spring and summer of 1814, that the defeat of the man who in 1802 had attempted to reimpose slavery in Saint-Domingue might open the door to official recognition of Haitian independence. As Vastey recalled in a pamphlet entitled À mes concitoyens, published in January 1815: ‘We saw with satisfaction the fall of this oppressor of the world, and the reestablishment of the House of Bourbon on the throne of its ancestors; we had reason to hope that his Majesty Louis XVIII—schooled in misfortune and adversity, and having long resided in England, in the midst of such an enlightened people—would have adopted their philanthropic principles!’ (1815a, 3) In a Proclamation of 15 August, and then again in his important Manifesto of 18 September, Henry Christophe gave voice to this hopeful expectation: ‘We hope that [Napoleon’s] fall will give peace and repose to the world; we hope that the return of those liberal and restorative principles guiding the European powers will lead them to recognize the independence of a people whose only wish is the enjoyment of peace and commerce, the goal of all civilized nations’ (1814, 14), going on to add that it was ‘not presumptuous’ to suppose that Louis, ‘following the impulse of the philanthropic spirit that his family had previously exhibited’, would ‘recognize the independence of Hayti’ and thereby effect ‘not only an act of justice, but a reparation of the evils we have suffered under the French government’ (16). Already, though, Christophe was sounding a note of worry that the ‘caste’ of ex-colonists, the ‘enemies of humankind’, would once again, as they had with Napoleon in 1802, ‘employ all their usual methods to drag the French cabinet into a new enterprise against us’ (9). In language that ‘harkens back to the style of the French Revolution, Year Two [the Jacobin era]’ (Benot, 1992, 175), Christophe’s Manifesto concludes with a powerful affirmation of his refusal ever to capitulate to the French, and a promise that ‘we will bury ourselves under the ruins of our country rather than suffer an attack on our political rights’ (18).
Christophe’s fears regarding the influence of the ex-colonists would prove well founded. In À mes concitoyens, after describing the hopes generated by the fall of Napoleon, Vastey immediately went on to lament: ‘Vain hope! No sooner had this monarch mounted the throne of his forefathers than the ex-colonists of Saint-Domingue surrounded him, plaguing him with their clamorous demands’ (3). Letters, reports, and projects concerning the conquest and reestablishment of Saint-Domingue would flood the offices of the Ministry of the Marine and Colonies in the months following upon the allied occupation of Paris at the end of March. In the earliest such letter to be found in the Ministry’s files, written on 6 April (the very day that Napoleon abdicated and the French Senate voted to recognize Louis XVIII as King of France), we find a former secretary of Toussaint Louverture’s, René Guybre, congratulating the King’s nephew, the Duc d’Angoulême, on the defeat of the ‘usurper’ and on ‘the happy return to France of the Empire of the Lily and of its legitimate prince’. Guybre sees the return of the Bourbons as clearing the way for a quick restoration of French rule in Saint-Domingue, especially if negotiators were to focus their efforts on Pétion, ‘more capable [than Christophe] of feeling how essential it is for him, as for his class, to gain the safety that his legitimate prince offers’.22 For the clamouring mass of ex-colonists who believed that peace in Europe had ‘reopened the route to Saint-Domingue’,23 this distinction between a pliable Pétion and an inflexible Christophe would prove a constant theme of both their private communications with the Ministry and their published works—a fact that the Christophean regime was quick to pick up on and use to good effect in the so-called guerre des plumes that erupted between the two Haitis the next year, a media war that would, to anticipate matters, occupy much of Vastey’s time: ‘Read all the foreign gazettes’, he urged his public in the Spring of 1815, ‘read the reports of the Charaults and the Berquins—all the writings of the French ex-colonists affirm that Pétion is devoted to France’ (1815c, 13).
Vastey concludes his lament in À mes concitoyens by noting that hope of a positive resolution to the problem of Haitian independence had been rendered all the vainer by the fact that Louis XVIII immediately placed an ex-colonist in charge of the Ministry: the ‘shameless’ septuagenarian Pierre Victor Malouet (3), who on 13 May was officially introduced as the King’s Minister of the Marine. In the words of another Christophean scribe, the choice of ‘such a monster’ could ‘only excite our indignation’, given his longstanding commitment to ‘slavery and the destruction of our kind’ (Prézeau, 26–27); it sent a clear signal to the ex-colonists, and to the ex-colonized, that recovering Saint-Domingue was near the very top of the new government’s political agenda. As one former colonist wrote to him from Bordeaux shortly after his appointment, Malouet was the perfect man for the job: ‘You’re a landowner in Saint-Domingue, you’ve resided there, you’ve served in varying capacities as an administrator in the colonies, who can know them better than you?’24 Malouet did indeed ‘know’ the colonies very well: in 1767, in his late twenties, he had come to Saint-Domingue as a colonial administrator, spending seven years there while marrying into a Creole family and becoming the owner of several flourishing plantations in the north; he also served in French Guiana, and in 1788, after a long stint working for the Ministry of the Marine in Toulon, he left for Paris, devoting himself over the next several years to the double task of preserving the monarchy and combating abolitionism (albeit, as we will see, in the name of an ostensibly ‘reformist’, juste milieu politics that, while insisting upon slavery as the fundamental base of colonial society, nonetheless acknowledged the need for ‘ameliorations’ in master–slave relations). As an exile in London, he served during Britain’s partial occupation of Saint-Domingue from 1793 to 1798 as official representative of the colony’s anti-republican planters, who had thrown their lot in with the British; and when the British left Saint-Domingue, he then turned to Napoleon as the next best hope for putting an end to the ‘democratic delirium’ that had resulted in a lowly black man like Toussaint Louverture rising to a position of supreme power in the colony (1802, 4.12). By 1814, in his seventies, Malouet had become his own best hope for restoring and ‘reforming’ the old colonial order.25 In a letter of 12 July he described himself as ‘entirely occupied at the moment in getting this important colony to submit to His Majesty and assuring France of the immense advantages that come with its possession, but without’, he added, ‘having to resort to the use of force in order to attain this goal’, since His Majesty’s intention was to take such drastic measures ‘against St. Domingue only if it were to prove indispensable in getting the colony to submit’.26 By gentle persuasion or military might, in the summer of 1814 Malouet was committed to plotting an end to Haitian independence and instituting a new and ‘improved’ version of what he himself had long ago dubbed ‘the colonial system’.
Opening out, as it does, onto a globally resonant vision of what Sartre, in his 1956 essay ‘Colonialism is a System’, would term ‘the infernal cycle of colonialism’ (2006, 51), Vastey’s unveiling of ‘the colonial system’ in his 1814 book extends well beyond a critical encounter with Malouet, his ideas, and his language. However, given that Malouet’s particular usage of the phrase is what generated the emergence of Vastey’s broader critique of colonialism, a brief review of the ex-colonist’s deployment of it is in order here. Malouet laid claim to the phrase in his 1802 preface to a hitherto unpublished work of his from 1775 on Saint-Domingue.27 In this preface, he insisted that his ideas from the 1770s for reforming the colonial administration were still of great value in 1802; they continued to offer a viable blueprint for the ‘new era that is beginning’, inaugurated by Napoleon’s decision to wrest control of Saint-Domingue from Toussaint (4.76). Looking forward to ‘the restoration’ that would come after the conquest (4.47), and relieved at the thought that ‘colonists of our blood’ would no longer run the risk of having their throats slit or of being subjugated by the blacks—for ‘that is the plan of the leaders of the African caste, the horrible but necessary result of the equality of rights’ (4.32–33)—Malouet traced the recent troubles of Saint-Domingue to the ‘absurd’ revolutionary idea that metropolitan centre and colonial periphery could be governed according to the same legislation:
Experience teaches us that the doctrine and principle of liberty and equality, transplanted to the Antilles, can produce nothing there except devastation, massacres, and conflagrations. What the founders of a society composed of masters and slaves thus needed to do was protect it from any political influences capable of inducing the slaves to slit the throats of their masters; and that is precisely why this society should not have been subject to [devoit être affranchie de] any legislation in the founding people’s own land that proscribes slavery.
That principle being the fundamental base of what I call the colonial system, I insist on it, as an obvious fact, and I parry in advance any and all reasoning and arguments that one might wish to marshal in order to evade it. (4.14)
Colonial society in the Antilles depends for its very existence upon ‘its base, which is slavery’ (4.15). This, for Malouet, is the practical state of affairs that needs to be taken into account by even the most enlightened administrator, and that is rendered all the more practicable by the ‘natural’ docility of the enslaved: ‘One must not’, Malouet noted, ‘consider negroes as a people aspiring to independence and collectively engaged in finding the means to secure it. This species of men is, on the contrary, naturally disposed to obedience’ (4.56). But, he cautioned, the colonial system, in order to be a system and not merely an instantiation of what he elsewhere calls ‘colonial despotism’ (5.19), nonetheless has to be carefully regulated, which requires finding a juste milieu between ‘unlimited slavery’ and ‘proclaimed freedom’ that colonial administrators in the past had often proved unable or unwilling to enforce (4.21). Master–slave relations are the ‘fundamental combination’ upon which colonial society depends, and hence should not be meddled with, but that does not mean they cannot be rectified (4.19): ‘the authority of the master must be respected’, for instance, ‘but his fantasies, his anger, must be curbed’ (4.23). The colonial system must be restored and reformed, resulting in ‘a servitude better ordered than the old version’ (4.83–84); even certain shifts in terminology might facilitate this happy result, such as substituting the term non libre for the word esclave (4.23; ‘Since the word slave represents to us a man enchained, let the label of not free be substituted for it’).28
In a direct commentary on this fine distinction of Malouet’s, Vastey sensibly responded: ‘What does the name matter, if the fact exists?’ (1814b, 7) Vastey would joust with Malouet for the entirety of his career as a Christophean scribe, beginning in October 1814—in the twenty-four-page companion piece to Colonial System, the Notes à M. le Baron de V. P. Malouet, where he offered a close reading of some of the most objectionable assertions in Malouet’s 1802 Introduction—and ending with his last book, where he reminded readers that ‘the foundations of the colonial system rest on slavery and colour prejudices with a view to preserving the supremacy of whiteness, which the ex-colonists guard so jealously’ (1819, 4). What differentiates Colonial System from Vastey’s other works in this regard is that the explicit critique of Malouet is supplemented by a parodic appropriation of his language, a strategy that is most evident in the book’s paratexts: its title, obviously, but also, and especially, its unattributed epigraph, ‘Here it is, revealed, this secret full of horror. The Colonial System: White Domination, Blacks Massacred or Enslaved’ (‘Le voilà donc connu ce secret plein d’horreur: Le Système Colonial, c’est la Domination des Blancs, c’est le Massacre ou l’Esclavage des Noirs’; see Figure 2). As an initial point of entry for Colonial System, this epigraph can be read on its own terms, as a simple if provocative summary of the book’s contents, rendered all the more emphatic by the typographical doubling of italic and roman script and the reliance on a Gothic vocabulary of secrecy and horror, of the sort that had become such a staple of both proand antislavery representations of the Haitian Revolution.
The epigraph becomes immeasurably more interesting, however, once we realize that it is an allusion to and distortion of one of the more lurid moments in Malouet’s 1802 Introduction. Midway through the Introduction, interrupting an extremely dry account of the need for fiscal reform in the colony, Malouet’s language becomes suddenly energized as his thoughts turn to the recent cessation of hostilities between France and Britain, and the ongoing resistance of Toussaint Louverture to General Leclerc’s forces, which had arrived in the colony in early February of that year with the intent of ‘demolishing Louverture’s power and severely restricting the access of the former slaves to political power’ (Dubois, 2004, 259). ‘As I write, peace is proclaimed, and yet’, Malouet fumed, ‘in the torrid zone French blood is still flowing. A black man, a mule driver grown old in slavery, disputes the sovereignty of Saint-Domingue with the peace-making hero of Europe’ (4.46). This muletier (Malouet does not deign to refer to Toussaint by name) ‘permitted whites to live in a state of degradation while they were under his orders, but he slits their throats as soon as the French Government tries to reassume its place in the colony’. Malouet then continues: ‘Here it is, revealed, this secret full of horror. Liberty for the blacks: Domination for them! Whites massacred or enslaved. Fields and cities burned to the ground’ (4.46; ‘Le voilà donc connu ce secret plein d’horreur: la liberté des noirs, c’est leur domination! c’est le massacre ou l’esclavage des blancs, c’est l’incendie de nos champs, de nos cités’). This passage, which concludes with Malouet affirming that ‘these blacks have evidently forfeited their liberty: let them return to the yoke!’ (4.47), is straightforwardly refuted by Vastey in his Notes (1814a, 13–15), but the refutation of Malouet in the epigraph to Colonial System is of another, more literary order. As an example of ‘parodic (re)citation’ (Bongie, 1998, 290), it both reverses and reiterates colonial discourse in a manner that clearly anticipates the sort of counter-discursive work performed by later postcolonial writing. Simple reversals of black and white—of the sort associated, say, with the poetics of Negritude—are foregrounded in the epigraph, but are clearly not the whole story. For instance, the fact that the epigraph offers not a spontaneous deployment of Gothic language but a self-conscious reiteration of Malouet’s eager recourse to it opens a space for critical reflection on the process of ‘making history Gothic’ that was so typical of proslavery accounts of the ‘horrors of Saint-Domingue’, and on how that process served the reactionary purpose of ‘reinforc[ing] the construction of the revolution as unthinkable’ (Clavin, 2007, 29); it also creates a space for confronting the question—a pressing one, given Vastey’s own evident commitment to unveiling secrets full of horror—of whether ‘a Gothic language of antislavery’ truly challenges, or subtly reinforces, that purpose (Cleves, 143). Throughout Colonial System, Vastey’s parodic relation to Malouet incites these sort of difficult, if productive, reflections—as when in his opening address to the King, to cite one last paratextual example, he identifies Christophe as the Haitian leader who finally uprooted ‘the ancient tree of slavery and colonial despotism’, thus perversely merging the revolutionary language of Dessalines (‘ancient tree of slavery’) and the ‘reformist’ language of Malouet (‘colonial despotism’).29 What are we to make of this monstrous hybrid, and the textual practice that can yoke together two such very opposed voices?
In my essay contribution to this volume (Chapter 3, below), I address some of the interpretive challenges posed by the textual hybridity of Colonial System, focusing in particular on forms of intertextual appropriation made possible by acts of reading (and listening). At this point, however, we need to return to the summer of 1814 and resume our chronological narrative about Restorationist plans for reopening the ‘route to Saint-Domingue’. While virtually every ex-colonist who wrote to the Ministry of the Marine concerning Saint-Domingue during that time (and/or flooded the book market with plans and reports on the subject) was agreed on the desirability of this restoration, they differed as to the ease or difficulty of achieving it. For some, such as the Creole Jean-Jacques de la Martellière, ‘the means of restoring the colony of Saint-Domingue and the Colonial system’ (to cite the title of the thirty-six-page report he submitted to Malouet on 8 June) were well within France’s reach. If France were not in a position to subdue Saint-Domingue on its own, then ‘all the other colonial powers ought to join forces with France to launch a crusade against an anti-colonial society [former une croisade contre une société anti-colonial] whose very existence, let us be frank, is a disgrace to all colonial governments’. However, he continues, this is happily not the case, because ‘France will need to use only a small part of its forces to reestablish its authority and the empire of its laws over the colony; she merely has to want to do so. One should not exaggerate the difficulties involved in subduing the insurgents and restoring the plantations of St. Domingue’.30 Others, by contrast, stressed ‘the great difficulties that will have to be overcome if we are to retake it’.31 As one fourteen-year resident of the colony, a certain Morin, put it: ‘The attempt made after the peace of Amiens [in 1802] to secure its conquest will no doubt be a lesson to the current Government, which must not blind itself to the fact that the unfavourable result of that campaign has added to the difficulties of any new one that would reunite France with the finest of its colonies’.32 Adding to these difficulties, Morin subsequently noted, was the absolute intransigence of Christophe, ‘whom it is impossible to win over’ (5), ‘the negro in command of the Province of the North, and the negroes commanding under him, having no interest in the establishment of a colonial system that would take away their authority’ (9). Thus, he concluded, ‘there is only one means to regain the colony without destroying it, and that is to treat with Pétion’ (8), which will be possible only if the condition of the hommes de couleur is ‘ameliorated’ and ‘concessions are made that will attach them to the colonial system’ (8).
Malouet himself advised Louis XVIII that regaining Saint-Domingue would be neither as easy nor as difficult as people were making it out to be. ‘The restoration of St. Domingue, considered by some to be impossible and by others as a very simple matter, is neither the one nor the other, it seems to me’, he wrote in June.33 He expressed optimism that ‘it would be possible to keep the class of cultivators in a state of slavery (under a gentle regimen)’, but cautioned—with his usual sensitivity to terminological niceties—that ‘the word itself must be suppressed at all costs: this class must be attached to the glebe [like serfs], and produce the same results only in a different guise’. In order to ascertain whether the use of force would be required to bring about this restoration of French rule, the first step was ‘to send secret agents out to St. Domingue to assess the current state of that colony’, Malouet argued in a letter of 24 June to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, whose help he sought in facilitating such a mission (which already had royal approval).34 The three men selected for the mission (Dauxion Lavaysse, Franco de Medina, Draverman) were given secret instructions by Malouet on how to conduct themselves,35 which contained, among other things, repeated assertions regarding the necessity of reimposing slavery in ‘the colony of Saint Domingue’,36 and of creating a new five-caste racial hierarchy there,37 as well as assurances that the King had already given the order to prepare an armed expedition should the present negotiations not bear fruit, and that no one should doubt that ‘if the King of France wanted to bring all his forces to bear on a handful of his rebel subjects who make up scarcely one one-hundredth of the population of his dominions… he would break them, even if it meant having to exterminate them’ (qtd. Vastey, 1819, suppl. 53).
Malouet’s secret agents left Paris on 30 June, travelling first to England, and arriving in Jamaica almost two months later, on 26 August. From there, Lavaysse, in his capacity as ‘Principal agent of His Excellence the Minister of the Marine and Colonies’, sent a letter of introduction to Pétion on 6 September, and to Christophe on 1 October. The letter to Christophe, ‘a strange mixture of stupid flattery, and still more stupid intimidation’, as one British commentator put it a few years later (Barskett, 366),38 predictably generated ‘a feeling of the greatest indignation’ when it was read out to Christophe and his privy council and it became clear that France was offering not independence and a reparation of injustices but ‘a tissue of insults, fanfaronades, and lies’ (Vastey, 1819, 208). Christophe convoked a General Council of the Nation on 21 October, and had Lavaysse’s letter read out to them. In his 1819 Essai, Vastey provides a powerful account of what it was like to be in that room and watch the electrifying effect the letter’s contents had on its listeners:
Among the members [of the council] there were some who had worn the chains of the French, who had been branded by them, whose mutilated limbs still bore the mark of them, attesting to their long and cruel sufferings, and to the barbarism of our tyrants. Others remembered having watched fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, relatives or friends being hanged, burned, drowned, or eaten by dogs. And it was to these old warriors, their bodies covered in noble scars, who had watched the sanguinary hordes of the Leclercs and the Rochambeaus flee before them, that this proposal was being made: that they once again submit to the yoke of those odious tyrants, that they choose between slavery and death! On the instant, all the hatred and the desire for vengeance that had been lulled by the passage of time reawakened with an incredible strength and vigour. (1819, 212–13)
I have quoted at some length Vastey’s account of this scene from October 1814 because it exemplifies the dynamics of collective memory that are at the heart of Colonial System (as Marlene Daut shows in her contribution to this volume). The visceral memories on display here are what produced this book, published that same month of October 1814, and they are what the book is itself intent on producing: awakened memories that cannot be simply cordoned off from the present but that make themselves felt on the body, avec une force et une énergie incroyables. This representing of the colonial past and its horrors draws fully-fledged citizens exercising their civic duty as membres of a national council (back) into a disturbing identification with their membres mutilés, the parts of their enslaved bodies that were tortured by the French; but it also has the energizing effect of reproducing a vision of these same masterful colonists in retreat, fleeing those whom they once fed to the dogs. Notwithstanding, or precisely because of, the traumatic memories of subjection it provokes, the reading of Lavaysse’s letter to the representatives of the national body reawakens the active vision of a revolutionary future: ‘The members of the council rose spontaneously, and swore on the point of their swords, in the name of the Haytian people, that they would rather be exterminated down to the last than renounce their liberty and independence by submitting to France!’ (213)
Oblivious to the hostile reception of his letter in Christophe’s kingdom, Lavaysse left Kingston for the southern republic on 17 October, at the invitation of Pétion, and arrived in Port-au-Prince on the 24th, where he was again overcome with fever, delaying the start of negotiations with Pétion and his chief aides Inginac and Boyer until 8 November. By all accounts, their discussions in the ensuing two weeks were cordial, but the mood changed dramatically on the 20th when envoys from Christophe arrived in Port-au-Prince with freshly printed copies of the General Council of the Nation’s resolution to live free or die, as well as, and much more importantly, copies of Malouet’s secret instructions to his agents, in which were plainly stated France’s intention of regaining sovereignty over ‘Saint-Domingue’ and of restoring some form of slavery in the colony. How had Christophe gained hold of those instructions? Shortly after the meeting of the Council, another of Malouet’s agents, Franco de Medina, had been arrested on 11 November while reconnoitring Christophe’s territory; the secret instructions had been found on his person and, upon subsequent interrogation (17 November), he had expanded on France’s ongoing plans to retake the colony with Pétion’s help. As per the King’s policy that ‘all documents received from abroad by His Majesty’s cabinet having to do with the French government be made public by means of the printing press’ (Vastey, 1816a, 1), the instructions were immediately published and rushed to Port-au-Prince.
We will never know Pétion’s true motives for ‘temporizing with Lavaysse’ (Griggs, 59), and leaving the Frenchman with the impression when he first met with the President and his top aides that ‘they seemed disposed to recognize the sovereignty of France, on condition that she not send any garrisons’,39 but it is certain that the ‘making public’ of these secret instructions forced Pétion’s hand, leading him to suspend negotiations and reassure his fellow citizens of his unwavering commitment to Haitian independence (first in an assembly of generals and magistrates on 27 November and then in a public Proclamation on 3 December). At the same time, it also led him to confirm, for the first time publicly, a central component of those abruptly terminated negotiations, namely, his willingness to pay an indemnity to France for its lost property, ‘to submit to pecuniary sacrifices’ as a sign of the republic’s favourable disposition with regard to its former colonial master (a point to which I will return at the end of this section). Pétion and Lavaysse parted on good terms in early December. Even in February 1815, writing from London, the latter was sanguine about the future state of negotiations with the southern republic, especially if the ‘absurd’ idea of restoring slavery in the colony were to be abandoned, but warned that nothing could be expected from Christophe: ‘Permit me to say it, Your Excellency, even had a Grégoire or a Wilberforce been sent to speak to Christophe in France’s interest, their efforts would have had no effect on that madman’.40
As it happens, Vastey played a central role in the Medina affair. Whether it is true or not—as a former British consul to Haiti, Charles Mackenzie, claimed in 1830—that ‘by the intrigues and treachery of Vastey, it was discovered that he [Medina] was possessed of documents calculated to promote dissension’ (2.84; see also Madiou, 5.259), Vastey certainly made his presence felt at the Te Deum ceremony organized by Christophe on 17 November in Cap-Henry to celebrate the French spy’s capture. In a packed church, with Medina himself in attendance standing on a stool for all to see, thanks were given and the secret instructions were then read out to the crowd, along with the minutes of the meeting of the General Council of the Nation. After Chevalier Prézeau’s reading of the minutes, it was Vastey’s turn to speak. First he read from his colleague Prézeau’s just-published Réfutation de la lettre du général français Dauxion-Lavaysse, and then from his own Notes à M. le Baron de V. P. Malouet. As the more incendiary comments of Lavaysse and Malouet were read, and refuted, the crowd became increasingly agitated, and officers were seen reaching for the hilt of their swords at each offensive passage. As reported in the Gazette royale of 20 November, Medina’s legs began to shake, he started gasping for air, and eventually fell to his knees. But,
when he heard the thundering words of Monsieur the Baron de Vastey— ‘Friends! let nothing stop the anger you feel upon hearing those words “Slave” and “Master”; the tocsin of liberty has sounded! […] Hasten to arms, let your torches be lit, let the carnage begin, and vengeance be taken!’—Franco, believing that he saw thousands of bayonets pointed toward his chest, and seized with fright, took a decided turn for the worse. Vinegar and a cordial were required to restore him from his useful terror. What a pity that his two colleagues, Dauxion Lavaysse and Draverman, could not be by his side; what a lovely trio they would have made! And you, you debilitated wretch [et vous vieux cacochyme], who allowed your retainers to play the dangerous role of spy, o Malouet! what a delightful figure you would have made in the company of these ambassadors of yours. (2–3)
One can scarcely imagine a more dramatic counterpoint to Clarkson’s Vastey, modestly working behind the scenes to produce a few observations for the edification of a foreign audience.41 Here, in an equally but differently scribal performance, orality supplements writing, and the ‘powers of oratory’, flowery or otherwise, produce an immediate effect on Vastey’s friends (and the one enemy among them), a vernacular audience moved by his written words despite the fact that the community to which it belongs ‘remained overwhelmingly illiterate and indebted to oral forms of communication’.42
It is altogether possible that the journal article in the Gazette was written by Vastey himself. Regardless of its provenance, what the author of this blistering apostrophe to the vieux cacochyme did not know, but would soon find out, is that he had been addressing not the absent but the dead. Malouet had in fact died over two months before, on 7 September, but news of his death would only reach Cap-Henry a week or two after the Te Deum ceremony. One of Vastey’s fellow scribes, Baron de Dupuy, began a work of his published in December by noting that he had just learned of Malouet’s death: ‘It is, in truth, a very great loss for the ex-colonists, especially as he was perhaps the person in France most attached to the colonial system and the most zealous champion of the slave trade. His death’, Dupuy added,
must have thrown the partisans of slavery, the votaries of the slave trade into horrible convulsions; how they must have plotted, what strings they must have pulled, to replace that Minister with another ex-colonist of the same religion, the same tenacity, and whose despicable prejudices might ensure that this same system, with its plan for ending the independence of Hayti, will be followed to the letter. (1814a, 1–2)43
In another book that rolled off the printing press of Pierre Roux in December,44 the King’s Foreign Minister, Julien Prévost (the Comte, and later Duc, de Limonade), likewise noted, in its concluding paragraphs, that news of Malouet’s death had only just reached him, and went on to remark that it was a pity ‘this fiercest and most formidable of adversaries did not have the opportunity to learn about the sterile outcome of the mission of his three spies; but his spirit lives on in the soul of the ex-colonists’ (1814, 36). Malouet’s spirit did indeed outlive him, for, despite an official disavowal of the secret instructions and the bungling manner in which the mission had been conducted, plans for a military expedition were being actively pursued at the time Lavaysse finally returned to Paris at the end of February.
The unsuccessful nature of the secret mission to Haiti ‘would have made the projected military enterprise, decided upon in February 1815, an inevitability, had the return of Napoleon not upset all those plans’ (Benot, 1992, 175). Napoleon’s return from Elba in March ‘put an end to [French] plans for the conquest of Haiti’ (Griggs, 59), and during his Hundred Days of power the restored Emperor further complicated the situation by abolishing the slave trade in France, effectively forcing the Bourbon monarchy’s hand in this matter when it was restored for a second time, in June 1815. In the two Haitis, meanwhile, the stark differences between Pétion’s friendly temporizing with Lavaysse and Christophe’s intransigent treatment of Medina provided the grounds for polemical exchanges between the rival regimes that year: the so-called guerre des plumes that generated Vastey’s next five publications (1815a, 1815b, 1815c, 1816a, 1816b) after the two inaugural texts from October 1814. Notwithstanding these bitter exchanges, the dramatic events of November prompted a growing commitment on the part of both governments to overlook internal differences in the case of an actual attack on their territories. The French government, to be sure, ‘persisted in its efforts to persuade and cajole its former subjects into submission’ (Nicholls, 1979, 48), but as the head of a second, rather more diplomatic, mission to Haiti that was sent out in 1816 reported to Louis XVIII upon his return to France, ever since the revelation of Malouet’s secret instructions ‘the leaders can think of nothing but separating from France, they have redoubled their efforts at filling everybody’s head with the idea of independence, and in Christophe’s territory as in Pétion’s they are all fanaticized by that word’.45 It was becoming clear to an ever-growing number of government officials, and even to some of the less obtuse ex-colonists, that the dream of restoring French sovereignty over the former colony would have to be nuanced. Over the next several years, arguments in favour of direct military action became less and less frequent: even a diehard like General Étienne Desfourneaux, a veteran of the Leclerc expedition, when arguing in 1817 for ‘the restoration of a vast and flourishing colony’ and laying out the ‘general principles for a new colonial system’,46 felt compelled to spend much of his time refuting ‘the partisans of a calamitous emancipation’ (5), who were willing to renounce French sovereignty in return for the payment of indemnities. ‘The idea of emancipating Saint-Domingue’, Desfourneaux fulminated, ‘and of being paid indemnities in return, as the reward for this huge concession, is an exorbitant idea [une conception extravagante] of the false friends of the Blacks’, which would have the deleterious effect of ‘legitimizing revolt, ceding the property of French subjects to savage hordes’, and allowing ‘insurgent Negroes to take their place among the American powers’ while according the French government ‘no other compensation than that of an illusory and humiliating promise’ (28).
As Desfourneaux’s livid reaction to this conception extravagante makes clear, Pétion’s idea of indemnities (which, in a typical erasure of Haitian agency, Desfourneaux attributes to French philanthropists) was gaining in momentum as the tumultuous decade drew to a close. By 1820, Clarkson could respond in the negative, and with the greatest of certainty, to Christophe’s question, ‘Will France ever fit out an expedition expressly for the purpose of conquering Hayti?’ ‘The universal answer to this in France’, Clarkson wrote in his 10 July letter to the King, ‘is—No—any French Ministers collecting an armament solely French, and solely for such a purpose, would be considered to be mad, or like persons who should attempt to jump from the Earth to the Moon’ (164v). Rather than shooting for the moon, in its search for colonies France would henceforth begin looking elsewhere and, in the case of Algeria, much closer to home: as one historian has recently argued, ‘the conquest of Algeria, in its initial stage’, from the late 1820s to the seizure of Algiers on 5 July 1830 and the subsequent appointment of Bertrand Clauzel (who served under Leclerc and Rochambeau in the Saint-Domingue expedition of 1802–03) as first governor of French North Africa, may ‘be construed as an attempt to provide France with a substitute for the riches of Saint-Domingue rather than a new colonial departure’ (Todd, 169–70). When Frantz Fanon arrived in Algeria in 1953, he would encounter there a flourishing avatar of the same old colonial system that had been developed across the Atlantic in Saint-Domingue: in this regard, there can be nothing surprising about the many powerful affinities between Vastey’s and Fanon’s systemic critiques of colonial governance.
If such forms of direct governance seemed less and less viable for the insurgent state(s) of Haiti, its former rulers were beginning to lay the foundations for alternative, neo-colonial forms of indirect rule there, based on the strategy of securing both economic and cultural control over an ostensibly independent nation. Indemnities, and the fiscal debt they entailed, were a means to the first end. For an idea of what the second, cultural, form of control might entail, we can listen to the words of one Frenchman writing in 1818 who had recently visited ‘the republic of Haiti’ and was optimistic that, once France recognized the ‘impossibility’ of reconquering the former colony and accepted the idea of the republic’s independence (and its offer of indemnities), it could get down to the business of negotiating with Pétion on more equal terms, help the republic defeat Christophe’s ‘ferocious and barbaric’ government, and lay the foundations for mutually beneficial commercial treaties and cultural relations in the future. ‘Let us say it one more time’, he wrote:
French blood runs in the veins of the hommes de couleur; with them, the natural sentiment that consanguinity inspires is far from extinguished. It manifests itself so often, and on so many different sorts of occasions, that it can be looked upon as a disposition rendering them favourable in advance to a treaty that benefits them as much as it does France. Besides the ties of blood that draw them to this treaty, the hommes de couleur must prefer— doubtless would prefer—to retain an attachment to France because of its status as the leading nation of Europe in matters of civilization and when it comes to territorial and industrial resources [tenir à la France comme la première nation de l’Europe sous les rapports de la civilisation et des ressources territoriales et industrielles].47
Here, with this conciliatory appeal to consanguinité and civilisation, the ground is being prepared for a new, seemingly more consensual, form of relations between the colonial centre and the post/colonial periphery, where a rhetorical premium is placed on cultural affinities and resources over economic and political domination.
Writing in 1818, the author of this appeal was clearly unable to detach his insights into neo-colonial hegemony from a racialized logic of blood ties (les liens du sang) and to look forward to the day when ‘consanguinity’ might be invoked on cultural grounds alone. In describing the very different positions adopted at this time with regard to France by Pétion and his successor Boyer’s government, on the one hand, and Christophe’s, on the other, it is still extremely difficult to avoid becoming reentangled in a version of this same logic, as witness the plausible but at the same time troubling claim of one recent historian that ‘while the former slave Christophe had always had his eyes turned toward England, for Boyer and the mulatto elite that were in charge of the Republic, the choice of France as model and as a power allied to Haiti was conceivable if the danger of colonial reconquest had been definitively ruled out’ (Brière, 89; my italics). Does Christophe, proud citizen of the French Republic from 1793 to 1802, have to be understood as a ‘former slave’, his eyes ‘always’ turned to Britain, in order to explain why it was that he forbade Clarkson even to name ‘the subject of indemnification’ during any negotiations the latter might have with the French (Griggs and Prator, 198), despite the abolitionist’s advice to the contrary?48 And is it really necessary to identify Boyer with the ‘mulatto elite’ in order to understand his willingness to choose France as model and pay the price she asked for recognition of Haitian independence? (How) can we sidestep this sort of essentializing logic (even in its diluted, seemingly de-racialized culturalist form) when attempting to account for the very different positions adopted by the two Haitian leaders and their respective publicists?
However one chooses to represent this choice of a rapprochement with France, it is certain that the collapse of Christophe’s kingdom in October 1820 greatly facilitated it: ‘the death of Christophe and the reunion under Boyer of the entire French part of Saint-Domingue offers new opportunities’, a special commission headed by the Duc de Richelieu concluded in meetings held in January 1821, urging secret negotiations to find out ‘what indemnities Boyer could grant the colonists’, and looking forward to the signing of a commercial treaty that would (as was the case with Britain and the United States) ‘recognize independence without it being necessary to confirm it expressly’.49 ‘Without the counterbalancing presence of someone like Christophe’, writes historian Laurent Dubois, ‘Boyer in a way represented just what French officials and writers had for years hoped to find in Haiti: a pliant and cooperative elite, ready to work with France to create a new form of external control’ (2012, 103). Even with Christophe out of the picture, though, this work proved slow, and the recognition of Haitian independence would not come about for another four years, and under conditions much less favourable than Pétion in 1814 or Boyer in 1821 could ever have imagined. In 1825, the new French King, Charles X, issued a royal ordinance that unilaterally imposed an onerous indemnity of 150 million francs on Haiti as the price for (conditional) recognition of its independence, and had the ordinance sent to Port-au-Prince accompanied by a squadron of fourteen gunboats with orders to impose a naval blockade on the country should Boyer not accept it.50 With Boyer’s acceptance of the French ultimatum, helpful as it may have been in promoting the internal consolidation of his regime, ‘Haiti suddenly became a debtor nation, an unlucky pioneer of the woes of postcolonial economic dependence’ (Dubois, 2012, 102). The indemnity of 1825, one Haitian economist notes, turned out to be a weight on the nation ‘that smothered all possibility of growth for the economy’; the acceptance of the royal ordinance proved ‘a solution of despair’ (Péan, 165, 168). In this one respect, at least, it can be said with certainty that the Christophean regime offered Haiti other solutions, and hope for a different sort of future.
With regard to Haiti’s emerging status as ‘the first testing ground of neocolonialism’ (M.-R. Trouillot, 1990a, 57), Vastey would show an admirable prescience, both at the economic level, as the first writer to attack the idea of indemnities, and at a cultural level, as an equally astringent critic of France’s seductive rhetoric of civilization and consanguinity. As early as January 1815, in a close reading of Pétion’s Proclamation of 3 December 1814 (in which the offer of indemnification that had been made to Lavaysse was unveiled to the public), Vastey had inveighed against the proposed arrangement: ‘You are offering pecuniary sacrifices to impose silence on your persecutors! Haytians made tributaries to ex-colonists! Can you contemplate this prospect without shuddering in horror! Who is the Haytian vile enough to want to pay his portion of this shameful tribute!’ (1815a, 11) From that moment on, Vastey never ceased attacking the scandalous idea of Haitians ‘paying a tribute to France and to the ex-colonists’ (1819, ix), and thereby sacrificing the fruit of their labours for the benefit of ‘those who murdered [Vincent] Ogé and Toussaint, those who are our most mortal enemies, our most ruthless persecutors’ (1815a, 12). In his very last works such attacks would be supplemented by a growing awareness of the ongoing shift in tactics from colonial coercion to neo-colonial consent, and the consequent emphasis on a civilizing mission that could be conducted regardless of whether Haiti were an old colony or a young nation in need of tutelage. The French, he wrote in his 1817 Réflexions politiques, are ‘no longer adopting the features of a dreadful monster threatening to exterminate our race down to the last child but rather those of a siren whose melodious voice and seductive forms are inviting us to throw ourselves into their arms’ (iv). In his 1819 Essai, an irony-laced description of a kinder, gentler world in which ‘France no longer has to make a conquest of Saint Domingue, but will instead dedicate itself to the task of nurturing civilization and morals there, and a new order of things more in accordance with nature, justice, and humanity’, is followed with the acerbic comment: ‘as if we were ignorant of the fact that a people can be conquered just as well, and even better, by means of civilization, persuasion, and seduction, rather than by force of arms’ (253).51 Notwithstanding such precocious insights into forms of neo-colonial governance that would become all too familiar to the global south in the second half of the twentieth century, Vastey continued to struggle in the last years of his life, as he had in the past, on behalf of an independence that would be not nominal, not fictitious, but real, and recognized as such; to be ‘free and independent in the face of the universe, and in the fullest extent and signification of those words’, remained, he would affirm in the concluding pages of his last book, ‘our sine qua non’ (1819, 380, 384).
The argument was, to be sure, getting much harder to make, and as we saw in the first section of this Introduction, had come to be entangled in a growing number of scribal compromises and complicities that might well be seen as signalling the absence of the very independence being argued for. Although by no means free from such entanglements, Colonial System looks out, and back, upon a very different world from the disheartening neo-colonial order that comes into view in Vastey’s later works (just as it did in those of Fanon some 150 years later): a world in which the revolutionary struggle between the friends and enemies of universal emancipation could still be imagined as taking place (again) and eventuating in the (re)birth, and continued growth, of a truly free and independent nation, rather than its repeated smothering at the hands of those who claim to be nurturing it in the name of la civilisation. The challenge of reading Colonial System and belatedly navigating the unsettling terrain of its post/revolutionary world resides, one might suggest, neither in cynically dismissing the imaginative possibilities Vastey’s book offers, nor in freighting its ardent (re)invocations of anticolonial struggle with an equally problematic nostalgia—reasonable as such cynicism or comforting as such nostalgia might seem to us in view of our own neo-colonial horizons—but, rather, in remaining open to the unlikely task with which its now seemingly ‘lost cause’ charges us, that of ‘unearth[ing] the hidden potentiality (the utopian emancipatory potential) which was betrayed in the actuality of revolution and in its final outcome’ (Žižek, 84). The task, that is (to put it in rather more accessible, if less philosophically exact, terms), of approaching the Haitian Revolution and its troubling aftermath not (simply) in terms of success or failure, fidelity or betrayal, but (also) as unfinalized sites of potential, as ‘a reminder of what is possible: if it happened once, perhaps it can happen again’ (Dubois, 2012, 370).
In terms of its contents, Le système colonial dévoilé can be readily summarized. For two centuries, indeed, a summarizing, content-oriented approach to all of Vastey’s publications has been so dominant that it might well appear the only way to read him. From the very first mention of Colonial System in print, in his colleague Baron de Dupuy’s Deuxième lettre… à M. H. Henry, we get a sense of how this dominant reading works. In December 1814, Dupuy published two epistolary refutations of a pamphlet entitled Considérations offertes aux habitans d’Hayti sur leur situation actuelle et sur le sort présumé qui les attend: supposedly authored by a Monsieur ‘H. Henry’, the pamphlet had been drawn up in Jamaica upon Dauxion Lavaysse’s arrival there, and then circulated in Haiti, according to Vastey, ‘with the intention of preparing the ground’ for the French mission (1819, 206). Disputing the pseudonymous Henry’s irenic portrait of colonial Saint-Domingue, Dupuy notes that he has no room in the context of a mere letter ‘to enlarge upon the types of cruelty [les genres de cruautés] that were practised upon agricultural workers during the ten-year period allotted for their existence’, and so refers his proslavery correspondent ‘to a work that has just come out, entitled The Colonial System Unveiled, by Monsieur the Baron de Vastey, where you will find an extremely detailed account [où vous puiserez des détails très-cironstanciés] of the atrocious and inhuman manner in which the ex-colonists treated my fellow citizens at that time’ (1814a, 7). Vastey’s book is, for Dupuy, essentially a resource to be drawn upon, a place where one can go to get detailed evidence of humanitarian abuses under colonial rule.
Dupuy’s instrumental account of his fellow scribe’s book epitomizes the content-oriented approach to which Vastey’s work so ‘naturally’ lends itself—an approach that, not surprisingly, also dominates the few reviews of Colonial System published in his lifetime. In an 1816 review in The Scots Magazine, and Edinburgh Literary Miscellany, for instance, we are told that: ‘The object of the author throughout this volume is to prove the injustice and inhumanity of the colonial system as practised by Europeans; to expose the atrocities of negro slavery; to vindicate the intellectual and moral character of the native of Africa, and confute the doctrine, by which they are represented as an inferior race to the European’ (‘Specimens’, 809). A subsequent review of Colonial System in The Antijacobin Review from November 1818 (which would be partially reproduced in April 1819 in the Philadelphia-based journal The Port Folio), provides a similar assessment of the book, albeit with an additional emphasis on its language that points toward the possibility of a form-oriented reading of the ‘publication of this Haytian Nobleman’. The ‘object of [this book]’, the reviewer states,
is to lay before his countrymen a number of important facts, which, though possessing the authority of foreign historians, or the credibility of eye and ear witnesses in Hayti, had not till now been given to Haytians in the language of one of themselves. After dwelling on the distinction of the aboriginal Haytians, the origin of slavery, and the monstrosities in the traffic in human blood; the Baron de Vastey proceeds to an enumeration of the cruelties which the French inflicted on his unfortunate countrymen. (‘Système’, 1818, 243; ‘State’, 1819, 315)
As the transatlantic consensus makes clear, the ‘object’ of Vastey’s first book could not have been more apparent to his first readers, and they were by no means wrong in their assessment of its contents, as readers of this bicentenary translation will find out for themselves once they have read its stunningly detailed critique of ‘the injustice and inhumanity of the colonial system’.
First-time readers of the text today will no doubt be as struck by the incendiary contents of Colonial System as were readers and reviewers in the 1810s and will be equally struck by the fact that these contents remarkably anticipate so many of the central themes and concerns of twentieth-century anticolonial thought (Césaire, Fanon, Sartre…). Such readings are an essential starting point for any appreciation of Vastey’s pathbreaking critique of the colonial system. However, the approach first adopted by Dupuy and then replicated by any number of historians and literary critics over the past two centuries who have touched upon his work has its limits, for it loses sight of the challenges that Colonial System poses at the level of form—or, more exactly, it runs the risk of reinscribing the conventional wisdom that texts of this type elicit few, if any, such challenges and therefore cannot provoke the sort of hermeneutic inquiry that characterizes, and legitimizes, the study of ‘Literature’.
Drawing out the formal complexity of Colonial System (and attending to the ways in which this textual complexity itself refracts the lived complexity of the post/revolutionary times in which Vastey wrote) is thus a vital part of any recuperative project such as the one we are engaged in here. Assessing the form(s) taken by Vastey’s text is inseparable from taking note of the form(s) it does not take, most importantly (at this specific juncture in literary history) that of the slave narrative, a newly canonical genre that has over the past several decades come to satisfy, in its powerful enactment of ‘literacy as self-exposure’, what Srinivas Aravamudan calls the humanist desire to ‘demonstrate literature as the sign of humanity’ (1999, 271, 270).52 As Deborah Jenson has lately argued in her invaluable analysis of early Haitian textual production, Beyond the Slave Narrative, if we take the slave narrative (of which there are no easily recognizable examples in French) as the ‘gold standard of literary testimony from the socioracial substrata of Western colonialism’, then we will remain blind to the existence of other genres ‘that were produced, through complex and mediated processes by French colonial slaves, former slaves, and their descendants in the early postcolonial period’ (3). In line with ‘newer work in African-American and black Atlantic research’ that is equally committed ‘to destabiliz[ing] theories and methodologies that have privileged the slave narrative at the expense of less unified elements of the early African diasporan literary field’, Jenson thus suggests that we must ‘think outside the box of the dominant genre of early Afro-diasporic literature in the Anglophone world’ if we are to recognize, let alone meet, the formal challenges offered by the ‘heteroclite corpus’ of post/revolutionary Haitian writing (3, 1).
As one example of how ‘going beyond’ the slave narrative facilitates a formal reassessment of Vastey’s work, we can cite Laurie Maffly-Kipp’s recent efforts at reading him in relation to what she calls the ‘communal narrative genre’, which unlike the centripetal slave narrative refers ‘to a community beyond the self, be it defined by African descent, Christian communion, or, most commonly, both; and a more or less explicit linear chronology that situates the community in a wider history’ (8). This centrifugal mode of narrating African Americans ‘as parts of larger collective entities’ was so ubiquitous in nineteenth-century Afro-diasporic writing that one is left to wonder, she muses, ‘why the genre of the slave narrative has endured in scholarly memory as the representative “black voice” of this era’ (62). Dealing solely with Vastey’s ‘most widely circulated work’ (57), the 1817 translation of his Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères, Maffly-Kipp argues that Reflexions on the Blacks and Whites was an early and influential example of the communal narrative genre. With its ‘adroit blend of contemporary intellectual currents in biblical interpretation, ethnography, and the natural sciences’ (58), it ‘exhibited all the discursive elements that would animate the works of later and better-known black authors, writers [such as David Walker and Hosea Easton] whose works would become the foundation of black abolitionist rhetoric’ (62). Testifying to the growing awareness in African American studies of Vastey’s surprisingly prominent, if subsequently forgotten, status as an intellectual role model in black Atlantic print culture in the decades leading up to the Civil War,53 Maffly-Kipp’s genre-based reading of Vastey’s Réflexions remains, to be sure, very dependent upon a straightforward enumeration of its ‘paradigmatic themes’ (virtually all of which had been first rehearsed in the differently structured Colonial System). Nevertheless, an essential step forward has been taken here with Maffly-Kipp’s insistence that the meaning of the ‘discursive elements’ animating Vastey’s text cannot be fully understood or appreciated without a sensitivity to their formal status as combinatory (‘blended’) parts of a generic whole.
Each of the essays in this bicentenary edition of Vastey’s Colonial System likewise attempts to arrive at some formal understanding of a text that, when set alongside the gold standard of the slave narrative, may well seem a curiously, and even disappointingly, formless instance of ‘literary testimony from the socioracial substrate of Western colonialism’. As with Maffly-Kipp’s intervention, the most prominent tool for formal analysis in these essays is the concept of genre: all four contributors in one way or another are dedicated to showing how Colonial System adopts and adapts, revises and resists, generic conventions that were available to it at that time, and even anticipates new forms of expression that would gain recognition only in the following century. In ‘Monstrous Testimony: Baron de Vastey and the Politics of Black Memory’, for instance, Marlene Daut reads Colonial System as ‘an important precursor to the Latin American testimonio’, which emerged ‘as a tool against colonial oppression in Latin America in the 1960s’. ‘As a kind of proto-testimonio’, Daut argues, ‘Colonial System stands in opposition to the more commercial, alienating, and complicit literary genres of Vastey’s own era’, namely, ‘sentimental abolitionist narratives and gothic romances’. In ‘Abolition, Sentiment, and the Problem of Agency in Le système colonial dévoilé’, Doris Garraway also explores Vastey’s engagement with the sentimental genre of ‘antislavery polemic’, placing more emphasis than Daut on the way in which his text ‘ced[es] to contemporary literary conventions’, but ultimately stressing the manner in which his ‘genre-defying’ work resists those conventions by adopting ‘a decidedly unsentimental style that cultivates a new politics of feeling and a widening of the space for antislavery agency’. Vastey’s alternately passive-sentimental and active-radical text becomes the productively ambiguous site, for Garraway, of a ‘straddling’ discourse that, notwithstanding or precisely because of its contradictions, makes it ‘the most politically radical antislavery tract of its time’. In my own essay, ‘Memories of Development: Le système colonial dévoilé and the Performance of Literacy’, I pursue a version of the same contradictory, passive-active reading of Vastey’s text as does Garraway, but with specific reference to another hegemonic genre of the time, the Bildungsroman. In its shifting deployment of textual sources, from an ‘immature’ (overly deferent, often to the point of plagiaristic) reliance on these sources in the first of its two chapters to a ‘mature’ assimilation of them in the second, Colonial System ‘exemplif[ies] the transitional Bildungsroman movement from readerly subjection to self-regulation’; however, at the same time as the text mirrors the Bildungsroman in its progressively more accomplished use of source materials, it also ‘chaf[es] against the performance of development’ that this ‘“reformist rather than revolutionary”’ genre requires, resulting in a profoundly conflicted, double-voiced conclusion that ‘both affirms and distances itself from the evolutionary attainments of Bildung’. In his closing reflections, finally, Nick Nesbitt reiterates and expands upon his recent analysis of Vastey’s work in relation to the genre (or better, meta-genre) of critique, specifying some of the ways in which Colonial System is ‘the founding major work’ of what he calls ‘Caribbean Critique’ (2013, 175), a tradition of thought ‘inaugurated’ by Vastey, and that ‘will culminate in texts such as Césaire’s Discours sur le colonialisme and Fanon’s Les damnés de la terre’ (189).
The diverse range of formal readings put forward in these supplementary essays testifies to what Maffly-Kipp nicely refers to as the ‘textual mobility’ of Vastey’s writing (61). His work, especially Colonial System, is difficult to pin down, as witness the proliferation in these essays of words like ‘hybrid’ and ‘polyvalent’—or, in a somewhat different register, ‘contradictory’ and ‘paradoxical’—to describe the multiplicity of formal and ideological trajectories that constitute it. There are any number of other such words that might be used to signal the elusive mobility of this text, but in closing I would like to suggest the pertinence of one word in particular, namely protean, ‘taking or existing in various shapes, variable in form; characterized by variability or variation; variously manifested or expressed; changing, varying’ (OED). The appropriateness of this word resides, for me, in the fact that Vastey himself uses the classical figure of Proteus in a number of his publications to highlight the unprincipled conduct and language of his enemies: be it the archi-protée Pétion, ‘ceaselessly transforming himself into every imaginable form’ (1815b, 59; see also 1815b, 2; 1815c, 11), the secret agents and mercenary scribes who do Pétion’s bidding (1815b, 74), or the newly accommodating, neo-colonizing Frenchmen that we encountered at the end of the previous section who, like a ‘new Proteus, present themselves to us in every imaginable form, no longer adopting the features of a dreadful monster threatening to exterminate our race down to the last child but rather those of a siren whose melodious voice and seductive forms are inviting us to throw ourselves into their arms’ (1817b, iv). To speak appreciatively of Vastey’s ‘protean text’ is thus to turn his own language against itself, to appropriate and revalorize a word that his opponents in the South were quick to identify and mock as one of his preferred ‘epithets for master criminals’ (Sabourin, 1815, 8). In thus turning upon Vastey’s own words, my goal is to draw attention to the ways in which his own words so often turn upon him; it is to accentuate the multiple turnings of Colonial System and the resultant complexities of form that have been so consistently overlooked, over the course of the past two centuries, by all those who would reduce the unsettling variability of his work to a single (propagandistic, publicistic…) content-laden message, be it in order to praise the messenger, or (as has most often been the case) to bury him.
To lay such stress on ‘complexity’ here at the end of my Introduction is, of course, to run the danger of simply reinscribing the type of ‘emancipatory’ reading of Vastey-as-author that my repeated insistence on the scribal dimension of his work is meant to contest. To recall the words of my Preface, instead of giving him his due as a scribe, doesn’t an emphasis on Vastey’s formal complexity risk subjecting him ‘to our own understandable, if historically conditioned, desire for “autonomous” literary and cultural production’? In urging readers to approach Colonial System with an eye to this complexity, am I not promoting the ‘ideologically loaded understanding’ of ‘literary work’ that marginalized Vastey in the first place, and legitimizing the idea that we should grant him keys to the ‘republic of letters’ for having actually, appearances to the contrary, met the demands of this particular form of understanding? When attempting to recuperate a neglected author such as Vastey, there is no way around these sort of invidious questions; they are part and parcel of the exclusionary/inclusionary logic of canon expansion and reformation, be that canon defined in terms of literary, cultural, or historical criteria of ‘greatness’. But, in the case of the literary canon, one can at the very least remind ourselves that the complexity (formal or otherwise) demanded of the ‘authors’ who gain entry to it is not a good thing in and of itself, and that is another reason why the choice of the highly ambiguous epithet ‘protean’ to describe Vastey’s work strikes me as a particularly apt one, for it has the advantage of not simply erasing the negative connotations that he himself attaches to the word in his straightforward unveiling of Pétion and the neo-colonizing enemies of Haiti. The shape-shifting figure of Proteus reminds us, in a way that similar-minded literary-critical buzzwords such as ‘dialogic’ or ‘pluriversal’ might not, that whatever complexity we find in Le système colonial dévoilé could just as readily trouble as redeem it, and, even more importantly, that what we recognize as ‘complex’ (or, for that matter, ‘simple’) in his writing has as much, and perhaps everything, to do with us as it does with the elusive ‘object’ of our recognition.
1 Clarkson’s instructions were issued on 20 November 1819 by the King’s Foreign Minister, the Duc de Limonade, and are included in Earl Leslie Griggs and Clifford H. Prator’s invaluable edition of the Christophe– Clarkson correspondence (Griggs and Prator, 1952, 173–77).
2 At the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818, Clarkson took the liberty of showing Alexander a letter of Christophe’s. As Clarkson later wrote to Christophe, the Emperor ‘confessed it had given him new ideas both with respect to Hayti and to your Government. He had been taught by the French and German newspapers (and he had no other source of information) that Hayti was inhabited by a people little better than savages. He now saw them in a very different light. The letter, which I had shewn him, was a letter of genius and talent. It contained wise, virtuous, and liberal sentiments. It would have done honour to the most civilized Cabinets of Europe’ (letter of 30 October 1818; Griggs and Prator, 121–22).
3 For useful introductory accounts of the Christophean regime, see Cheesman, Dubois (2012, 52–88), Griggs (38–80), and M. Hector (2009). Hubert Cole’s 1967 monograph remains the most authoritative scholarly record of Christophe’s life and accomplishments.
4 Clarkson’s Haitian papers are housed at the British Library (Add. MS 41266); the thirty-one-page letter is to be found on the double-sided folios 164–179 of this collection of papers (with the section devoted to Vastey on fols. 175v–179r). As with all of Clarkson’s letters, Griggs and Prator heavily edited the 10 July letter (200–07), suppressing a great many of the details of Clarkson’s representation of, and plans for, Vastey—on the by no means uncompelling grounds that, as Griggs points out in his Preface to the correspondence, Clarkson’s letters ‘are repetitious and laborious’. Some 60 per cent of the material from this letter that I quote in the following four paragraphs (and over 80 per cent of the material in the two indented passages) is not included in the published version. The nineteenth-century Haitian historian Thomas Madiou included an extensive French translation of this letter, with the entire discussion of Vastey, in an unpublished volume of his massive Histoire d’Haïti that eventually saw the light of day in 1988 (6.66–82).
5 On 3 September 1819, for instance, the King’s Foreign Minister, Limonade, sent Clarkson ‘a work just published by Baron Vastey’, in which, he suggested, ‘you will find [vous y verrez] authentic details concerning the history of our country, and a study of the character of the King. You will find successfully refuted, I believe, the calumnies referring to his person which the enemies of the African race have delighted in spreading. In short, I believe that you will discover [vous y verrez] new reasons for esteeming him ever more highly. You will see in His Majesty a man frank, upright, patriotic, loving his fellow men and his country, incapable of ever betraying his people [Vous reconnaîtrez dans Sa Majesté un homme franc, probe, patriote, ami de ses semblables, de son pays, incapable dans aucune cironstance de manquer à ce qu’elle doit à son pays, à ses concitoyens, à lui-même]’ (Griggs and Prator, 153; fol. 86).
6 In his 1819 Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la Révolution de Saint-Domingue, to take but one example, General Pamphile de Lacroix (who played a prominent role in the 1802–03 campaign to restore Saint-Domingue to French rule and became closely acquainted with Christophe at the time) noted that he was unwilling to venture any affirmations regarding the truth about the Haitian monarch (‘je n’oserai point affirmer aujourd’hui ce qu’est Christophe’): ‘I’ve seen people, arrived from Port-au-Prince [the capital of Pétion’s republic], who have told me horror stories about him; I’ve seen others, arrived from the Cape [Christophe’s capital], who have represented him to me in the way I imagined him. Respectable people, whom I hold in esteem, have told me time and again that they’ve known him for years, from the inside, as a good father, a good husband, someone with a graciousness of manners that simply does not tally with the tales that are told about his acts of cruelty’ (2.265–66).
7 See the discussion in my Preface regarding Sibylle Fischer’s comments, in Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, about how even scholarly defenders of Christophe ‘appear to be at a loss when it comes to assessing his legacy’.
8 Such epistemological questions have always, of course, been central to accounts of (what are now, from the affirmative perspective of the burgeoning field of Haitian Revolutionary Studies) the more heartening realities of the revolution itself. The historian Matthew Clavin has pointed out, for instance, that memories of the Haitian Revolution were ‘both numerous and contradictory’ in the decades that followed upon it, resulting in ‘the emergence of two competing narratives that promised to tell the true story of the events that took place in Haiti’: the first being ‘the horrific Haitian Revolution’, and the second being ‘the heroic Haitian Revolution’ (2010, 11–12). The difficulty of reconciling these ‘conflicting versions of the same event’, he concludes, means that ‘we will never know the real history of the Haitian Revolution’, for all that we can engage in such empirical tasks as charting the various ways in which this ‘enigmatic’ symbol ‘resonated in both American and Atlantic public culture throughout the first half of the nineteenth century’ (13).
9 Christophe, as Clarkson and Wilberforce were well aware, was much attracted to the ‘plan of establishing Protestantism and the English language’ in Haiti (Cole, 239), as a way of ‘eradicat[ing] the last vestiges of French culture’ (Griggs, 61). In his 1819 Essai, Vastey stressed the central role of English in the nation-wide system of education developed by Christophe in the final years of his reign: if a ‘change in religion’ is ‘the most powerful means for transforming the manners and character of a nation’, then the second most powerful means is ‘to change languages’ (329). This policy was actively pursued between 1816 and 1820 as part of Christophe’s ambitious educational reforms, which were looked upon at the time as one of the regime’s crowning achievements, and continue to impress historians today as a profoundly innovative feature of the monarchy’s ‘developmentalist’ agenda (see, e.g., M. Hector, 2009, 255).
10 Clarkson advises that ‘about 100 copies of this little work should be sent to England’, then be taken to Paris by ‘some one of your Majesty’s friends’ and distributed personally ‘to the most distinguished of the Peers and Deputies’, with a few copies reserved for ‘the most illustrious Potentates of Europe’. One copy was to be reserved for the editor of the Revue encyclopédique (launched in January 1819 as ‘the rallying point for a whole group of liberals opposed to the regime of the Restoration’; Benot, 2005, 273), with an eye to convincing him ‘to reprint it in that celebrated work, which is read in France, Italy, and Germany, and Poland, Prussia, and parts of the Russian Empire’ (178v). Were this little work ‘to produce an effect’, then efforts should be made ‘to reprint it in France and to give it a wider circulation’, although, Clarkson cautions, ‘the censeurs of the French are so very vigilant and so very rigid and severe, that it would not be allowed to be circulated if there was anything in it the least offensive to the French Government’ (178v–179r). Clarkson’s comments are precious in terms of helping us understand just how difficult it was for Vastey’s work to circulate in France during his lifetime. An anonymously written eleven-page report on his Réflexions politiques that was produced for the Ministry of the Marine in 1819 gives a good sense of the difficulties his views posed French officials. Summarizing Vastey’s account of ‘the conduct of the French with regard to Hayti after the enfranchisement of that island’, the author of the report notes: ‘The expression of animosity and hatred toward the old metropole is taken to the utmost level of exaggeration. What the author calls the crimes of our governments and the barbarity of their agents, of the entire nation, and above all of the ex-colonists, are displayed there in the most odious of lights’ (Archives nationales [Paris], Colonies, CC9A 51).
11 In Friends and Enemies: The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature, I argued that, ‘far from transcending the scribal relation to power, the work of the “real” intellectual or the “great” writer uncannily doubles the power relation that it appears to contest but with which it continues to engage’ (2008, 33). ‘Mere’ scribes and ‘great’ writers must, for the purposes of staking out the clear boundaries of an ‘autonomous’ republic of letters, be rigorously distinguished from one another, in acts of critical scapegoating that help solidify our sense of what ‘Literature’ is. As I there argue (221–53), Derek Walcott’s dismissive representations of Vastey in The Haitian Trilogy provide a textbook example of the ways in which the ‘true artist’ attempts to exorcize his ghostly scribal double.
12 The other, much briefer letter of Vastey’s to Clarkson is dated 24 March 1819 (Griggs and Prator, 136–37; fols. 65–66), and was accompanied by a copy of Vastey’s Réflexions politiques and a number of state documents concerning public instruction in Christophe’s kingdom. Both of these letters refer to Clarkson’s own correspondence with Vastey, which unfortunately has not survived.
13 It is this less ideologically loaded understanding as to what constitutes ‘literary work’ that allowed for a more favourable reception of early Haitian textual production at this time than would be possible even a few decades later, by which point the meta-narrative of ‘literary emancipation’ (as discussed in my Preface) had taken firm hold on the cultural imagination of critics and writers alike. The following excerpt from an enthusiastic 1820 account of Haitian ‘literature’ is exemplary with respect to this more open understanding: ‘When we consider how short a period has elapsed since the Haytians established their independence, and that the attention of their governors must principally be directed to supplying the necessities of the state, we cannot behold, without admiration, the rapid advances which they have made, not merely in the useful arts, but in literature. The love of liberty and independence pervades all their literary compositions, especially the addresses of their chieftains, Dessalines and Christophe’ (‘History’, 72).
14 For a more extended reading along these lines of the ending of Césaire’s play, see Bongie (2008, 253 n. 18).
15 For an informative discussion of how Clarkson and Wilberforce have been ‘perceived and remembered in quite different ways’ (33) both in their own lifetime and today, and of the tendency to view them ‘as rivals rather than as allies or coadjutors’ (43), see Oldfield (33–55).
16 The opposition between Wood and Gilroy that I have just put into play is intended to convey a sense of the two diametrically opposed normative conclusions that the abolitionist (and now, humanitarian) problematic has tended to generate. As such, it consolidates, albeit for heuristic purposes, the ‘false binaries’ on which ‘for too long’, as Christopher Brown has argued in Moral Capital, ‘assessments of abolitionist initiatives have foundered’: ‘the organizers and their constituencies were either selfless or self-interested; they were either humanitarians or hypocrites’ (459). ‘The motives that shape political behavior’, Brown cautions, ‘are rarely so simple’.
17 For an English-language summary of Vastey’s extensive account of the twelve-day festival, see Comhaire.
18 This transatlantic English-language media campaign took shape in the summer of 1816 with Marcus Rainsford’s translation of one of Vastey’s ‘minor’ works directed against Pétion (Vastey, 1816a; see Youngquist and Pierrot, xxxiii) and, most importantly, the London publication of Haytian Papers, a collection of ‘Haytian State Papers, in conjunction with some extracts from their ordinary Publications’ that was assembled and translated by the African American Prince Saunders (1816, i), who had been sent out to Haiti late in the previous year ‘at the suggestion of the English abolitionists’ (Griggs, 45; see also Cole, 229; White, 528), and had returned to London as the King’s agent to deliver letters to Clarkson and other abolitionists and, in the words of Christophe, ‘bring back with him the teachers whom I requested Mr. Wilberforce to procure for me, and who are to instruct our youth according to the approved English educational system’ (Griggs and Prator, 92). It is worth noting that Saunders felt compelled to begin Haytian Papers by countering rumours that ‘those official documents which have occasionally appeared in this country, are not written by black Haytians themselves; but that they are either written by Europeans in this country, or by some who, they say, are employed for that purpose in the public offices at Hayti’. ‘[F]or the entire refutation of this gross misrepresentation’, Saunders continues, ‘I upon my honour declare, that there is not a single white European at present employed in writing at any of the public offices; and that all the public documents are written by those of the King’s Secretaries whose names they bear, and that they are all black men, or men of colour’ (iii).
19 Brief excerpts of Colonial System were published in translation as part of an extended overview of the book that came out in The Scots Magazine, and Edinburgh Literary Miscellany for November 1816, where the Baron de Vartey [sic] is praised for having produced ‘the most elaborate and able’ of ‘several specimens from the infant press of Hayti’ (‘Specimens’, 808). These translated excerpts add up to almost 1,500 words, a little under 5 per cent of the actual book.
20 As Deborah Jenson has compellingly argued, it is vital to keep in mind that until 1809 French forces were still occupying Spanish Saint-Domingue (Santo Domingo), and that ‘the lingering French colonial presence on the island of Hispaniola was all too real a factor in what one might call Haiti’s failure to thrive’ (307).
21 Vastey’s role in this secret mission, of which there is no trace in the published record, is described in a letter dated 31 December 1814, addressed to the French Ministry of the Marine by Philippe Auguste Laffon de Ladebat (1758–1840), a former Saint-Domingue planter living in Jamaica (AN, CC9A 53): ‘[Christophe] sent, in the month of March, two ambassadors (chevalier Prézeau and chevalier Vasté [sic], two mulattoes), to propose some sort of treaty with Bonaparte should he have made peace with England and the other European powers. These ambassadors, having arrived right at the moment of the restoration of the King, would have proceeded on to Paris had they not been stopped by [the King’s agent in London, Jean-Gabriel] Peltier, who sent them back to Saint-Domingue’ (15). For a detailed account of the émigré Peltier’s decade-long (1807–c.1816) role as Christophe’s ‘chargé d’affaires’ in Britain, see Maspero-Clerc (201–44).
22 AN, CC9A 47, Guybre to the Duc d’Angoulême, 6 April 1814. In fairness to Guybre, it should be noted that, as an intimate of Toussaint’s, he atypically laid the entire blame for the loss of Saint-Domingue on Napoleon’s decision to send his brother-in-law Leclerc there with ‘an army of thoroughgoing brigands, who, in committing every imaginable crime, plunged that unhappy country back into a state of utter chaos’. Under Toussaint, the colony ‘would have prospered’—a sentiment that was hardly shared, Guybre’s assertions to the contrary, by ‘all the landowners who lived in Saint-Domingue during [Toussaint’s] time’.
23 AN, CC9A 47, B. Fabre to Malouet, 17 July 1814.
24 AN, CC9A 47, Richepère to Malouet, 22 May 1814.
25 For a detailed account of Malouet’s ‘juste milieu’ colonial politics, focused on his activities in London in the 1790s, see Griffiths (197–227).
26 AN, CC9A 48, Malouet, letter of 12 July 1814.
27 Casual occurrences of this phrase can be traced back to the earliest years of the French Revolution, although Malouet was the first to develop it as a formal concept. Perhaps the most interesting prior usage of it for our purposes occurs in a 1798 speech delivered in the Council of Five Hundred by Étienne Mentor, the black deputy for Saint-Domingue, in which he attacked a new piece of legislation discriminating against blacks and people of colour: ‘Organ of my fellow citizens, I deemed it a matter of urgency to unveil for you the intrigues employed by the partisans of the old colonial system [de vous dévoiler les intrigues employées par les partisans de l’ancien systême colonial] in order that they might deceive the Executive Directory with regard to my unfortunate compatriots from the Antilles’ (É. Mentor, 1; my italics). For further details on Mentor, who would go on to become one of Dessalines’s most trusted advisors during his short-lived Empire, see G. Mentor.
28 Further along in his 1802 Introduction, Malouet invokes this same subtle distinction in a rather different manner, aggressively insisting that anyone who took part in the revolt should be ‘proclaimed a slave’ and severely disciplined, whereas ‘I would declare the negroes who remained on the plantations or who voluntarily returned there not free subjects [sujets non libres]’ (4.54–55). It is worth drawing attention to the emptiness of Malouet’s taxonomical niceties and the hypocrisy of his repeated search for less offensive ways of saying esclave (e.g., non libre, travailleur obligé, etc.), given that at least one recent commentator has taken those niceties very seriously indeed, and argued that an earlier 1789 proposal of Malouet’s to replace ‘slave’ with ‘serf’ and ‘fief’ was ‘partly symbolic, but also partly substantive. The master’s authority over the slave, implicitly restricted under the regime of the Code Noir, was here reduced as a matter of explicit principle’ (Ghachem, 227). This same commentator blithely assures us that the sincerity of this and other such ‘prudential arguments’ cannot be doubted, whereas ‘what Malouet in his heart of hearts really thought about the institution of slavery, by contrast, is simply off limits to the historian’ (165).
29 For a more detailed account of this parodic (re)citation of Dessalines and Malouet, see the footnote apparatus of my translation (n. 3).
30 AN, CC9A 47, J. de la Martellière, Des moyens de restauration de la colonie de Saint-Domingue, et du Sistême colonial, 3.
31 AN, CC9A 47, B. Fabre to Malouet, 17 July 1814.
32 AN, CC9A 47, Morin, Réflexions sur Saint-Domingue (report submitted to the Ministry of the Marine on 25 October 1814), 1.
33 AN, CC9A 48, Malouet to Louis XVIII, [10] June 1814.
34 AN, CC9A 48, Malouet to Prince de Bénévent (Talleyrand), 24 June 1814. For a thorough overview of the 1814 mission to Saint-Domingue, see Brière (57–72).
35 On Christophe’s orders, Malouet’s instructions would be published in November, immediately after their discovery (see Copies, 1814); they were subsequently reprinted in a number of Christophean publications, including Vastey’s 1819 Essai, where they are one of fifteen supplementary documents included at the end of the book (suppl. 50–60).
36 Malouet wrote, for instance, that if the Haitian leaders, especially Pétion, are ‘as educated and as enlightened as they are said to be’, then ‘they will not fail to see that if the great mass of blacks is not returned to a state of slavery, and kept in it, or at least in a state of submission similar to the one in which they were before the troubles [i.e., before 1791], then there can be neither tranquillity nor prosperity for the colony, and no safety for themselves’ (qtd. Vastey, 1819, suppl. 52).
37 This official hierarchy was to have extended downward from the ‘white caste’ (including a few prominent ‘honourary’ whites, such as Pétion) to the ‘black slave’, with ‘three intermediary castes’ in between (light-skinned people of colour; a darker-skinned caste ‘composed of shades between mulatto and black’; and free blacks). The detailed (thirty-six-page) commentary on these instructions that was published in December 1814 by Christophe’s Foreign Minister, Limonade, features an exemplary refutation of this ‘Machiavellian reckoning of tints and distinctions’ (18; ‘Quel machiavélisme dans le calcul de ces teintes et de ces distinctions!’) and a proud assertion of the uniform ‘blackness’ of all Haitians (16; ‘Nous sommes tous noirs…’).
38 Lavaysse would subsequently claim that he was incapacitated by yellow fever at the time, and that the letters to Pétion and Christophe had actually been written by his secretary, the ex-colonist Laffon de Ladebat (who had been added to the mission in a private capacity soon after the agents’ arrival in Jamaica), and that Ladebat did so ‘with ideas, principles, and a style that are not mine’. AN, CC9A 53, Précis de ma négotiation à Saint-Domingue (26 March 1815), 1.
39 AN, CC9A 53, Précis de ma négotiation à Saint-Domingue (26 March 1815), 3.
40 AN, CC9A 49, Lavaysse [to the Minister of the Marine], 28 February 1815.
41 Needless to say, this episode lends itself to a more sinister reading. The mid-nineteenth-century Haitian historian Beaubrun Ardouin, for instance, refers to it as ‘an abominable theatrical representation in a church’, and to the treatment of Medina as an instance of ‘moral torture’ (8.112–13). The fact that Ardouin adds a coffin to the scene, despite the absence of any such Gothic paraphernalia in the Gazette royale article (Ardouin cites his source as a ‘text printed at the Cape’), should give a good idea of the ideological biases that shaped all of his ‘legendary’ renderings of Christophe as ‘cruel and arbitrary’ (and of Pétion as ‘the paragon of virtue—honest, courageous, mild and moderate’; see Nicholls, 1979, 98).
42 I am borrowing here from Peter Hinks’s account of how ‘black oral culture’ (193) structures David Walker’s 1829 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, a book that, in its violent critique of ‘the inhuman system of slavery’ (5), is in so many respects the African American counterpart to Vastey’s Colonial System. Although print culture saturates Vastey’s work, far more than it does Walker’s, Vastey’s performance in the Cap-Henry church forces us to think about a possible oral dimension to that work, and raises the question of how a book like Colonial System (which is so evidently haunted by voices at a thematic level) might have ‘spoken’ even to the multitude of Haitians who would not have had unmediated access to it.
43 Malouet’s successor at the Ministry of the Marine, the Comte de Beugnot (1761–1835), while committed to restoring French rule in Saint-Domingue, was not, it should be noted, an ex-colonist.
44 For an account of Roux, as well as a list of titles he printed in Saint-Domingue between 1794 and 1816, see Tardieu. Roux oversaw the printing of all of Vastey’s books and pamphlets, with the exception of the last two (1817b, 1819), which were published by the Imprimerie royale at Christophe’s palace of Sans-Souci.
45 AN, CC9A 50, Charles Esmangart, Rapport de M. Esmangart au retour de sa mission (27 January 1817), 3. In his indignant response to the mission, Christophe cannily identified the (emptiness of the) new French emphasis on diplomacy over force of arms: ‘It is no longer death or slavery that they propose, for that would cost them too much and it cannot be enforced; instead, they use palliatives to arrive at the same goal’ (1816, 9).
46 AN, CC9A 50, Desfourneaux, Mémoire au Roi; sur la Colonie de Saint-Domingue (May 1817), 3, 11.
47 AN, CC9A 50, A. Rouzeau (du Loiret), De la République d’Hayti, Ile de St. Domingue, considérée dans l’ensemble de son organisation, ses forces, ses moyens physiques et moraux, sa culture, son commerce, son esprit public, et le caractère de ses habitans, 31. A version of this report, in which Rouzeau boldly argued for a ‘general emancipation’ of all France’s colonies as the prelude to new forms of economic and cultural exchange, was published in 1818 as De la République d’Haïti, Ile de Saint-Domingue, considérée sous ses différents rapports, ses forces, ses moyens physiques et moraux, et le caractère national de ses habitants.
48 ‘It is my sincere advice to you’, Clarkson wrote Christophe on 7 September 1819, ‘to accept such an indemnification in exchange for the acknowledgement of your Independence’, going on to add, however, that he took it for granted ‘that the indemnification will be reasonable and moderate, and such as you can pay without any great sacrifice, either at once or by installments in a course of years’ (Griggs and Prator, 155). In a gloss on this comment, the editors of the Christophe–Clarkson correspondence note that the King ‘readily accepted most of Clarkson’s recommendations, [so] it is significant that he was adamant on this important point and refused to consider indemnification in any form whatsoever’.
49 AN, CC9A 52, Résumé des conférences qui ont eu lieu au Conseil du Ministre en Janvier 1821, 1, 11, 12. For details on the special commission, see Manigat (261–77).
50 For a detailed account of the 1825 ordinance, see Brière (107–32). In 2003, Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide would infuriate the French by demanding the restitution of the billions of dollars (in today’s currency) that, over the course of the nineteenth century, Haiti paid out to France as a direct result of the ordinance—a demand that was tactfully waived by his successor just over a month after the coup d’état that ousted Aristide in late February 2004 (see Bongie, 2008, 48–49, 178–79).
51 René Philoctète, a prominent Haitian writer associated with the Spiralist movement, emphasized this aspect of Vastey’s work in his little-known but fascinating play entitled Monsieur de Vastey (1975), which portrays Vastey in typical Spiralist fashion as an ambiguous, indeed impermeable, ‘shifty/shifting’ character (see Glover, 31–35), whose many identities spiral unpredictably between such roles as tyrannical buffoon, incisive intellectual, careerist politician, and loyal patriot. It is the intellectual visionary and wordsmith who delivers the following sarcastic (and pointedly anachronistic) diatribe in response to the looming ‘annexation of the North’ (the play takes place in the days before the fall of Christophe), which will open up new opportunities for those wanting to profit from the country: ‘The colonial system has been unveiled for a long time now. Those fellows are on the look-out for another form of colonization. They’re cunning. They’ll come up with something […] To be sure, they’ll hide their political machinations under the cover of innocent-sounding words: francophilia, for instance. Or even better! The Franco-everywhere! Chinotherapy! Americanitis! Germanococcus! And, many years from now, it will be the turn of Canadianosis. Like thrombosis, cirrhosis, tuberculosis, arteriosclerosis, avitaminosis. The entire clinic, in a word!’ (64)
52 For an expanded account of how ‘the requirements of a “literary humanism” newly sensitized to the importance of colonial history are ably fulfilled’ by the (ostensibly) autobiographical model of the slave narrative, notably Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, see Bongie (2008, 235–36).
53 Lengthy extracts from Reflexions on the Blacks and Whites were published in the first African American newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, in 1828 (12 December, 293–94) and, under the title ‘Africa’, in 1829 (7 February, 349–50; 14 February, 357). Several paragraphs from Colonial System were subsequently translated in the November 1835 issue of the American Anti-Slavery Society’s Anti-Slavery Record (vol. 1, 129–30), under the title ‘Which of the Races is Descended from Cain’, and these paragraphs were in turn reprinted in Robert Benjamin Lewis’s ambitious 1836 compilation Light and Truth; collected from the Bible and Ancient and Modern History, containing the Universal History of the Colored and the Indian Race, from the Creation of the World to the Present Time (326–27), which pointedly identified Vastey as ‘an African, and once, we believe, a slave’ (326). Commenting on the excerpt from Colonial System in Lewis, where Vastey mocks the ‘learned authors and skilful anatomists’ who would class him with ‘the race of the Ourang-Outangs’, historian Mia Bay concludes, ‘Vastey’s outrage was echoed throughout the nineteenth century by American blacks who, above all, spoke out on the subject of race to resist the terrible insult thrown up against them by those who sought to cast their race as a lesser species’ (37). For examples of the recent interest in Vastey’s reception in antebellum black America, in addition to Maffly-Kipp (55–61), see Bacon (151–52, 158–61), Dain (125–26), Fanning (70–71), and S. Hall (33–34).