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Afterword: Vastey and the System of Colonial Violence

Nick Nesbitt

The essays collected in this volume, along with Chris Bongie’s introductory materials, notes, and translation, radically extend our understanding of Vastey’s Le système colonial dévoilé. Taken together, these texts imply a series of further questions, a number of which I would like to address in what follows. If Colonial System, as Bongie writes in his Introduction, can ‘be considered the first systemic critique of colonialism ever written’ (p. 7),1 how, in the absence of their explicit exposition, are we to understand Vastey’s use of such concepts as colonialism, system, and critique? How might we extend the related affirmation, made repeatedly throughout this collection, that Vastey’s Colonial System anticipates the insights of anticolonial thinkers like Aimé Césaire, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Frantz Fanon? How does Vastey structure his critique of the principal phenomenon at issue in Colonial System: namely, violence (both in its colonial and revolutionary variants)? Here, in the wake of the preceding essays, I wish briefly to suggest some further elements for reflection on Vastey’s intervention and invention of a postcolonial, emancipationist critique, in which I will focus on: 1. his critique of the colonial system; 2. his further articulation of this critique as a critique of violence; 3. his original contribution to the genre of what I have elsewhere called ‘Caribbean critique’; and 4. some elements of comparison between Vastey and other key figures in this critical tradition, including Césaire, Sartre, and Fanon.

Colonialism is a System…

While Vastey’s Colonial System clearly constitutes ‘the first systemic critique of colonialism ever written’, just what Vastey means by ‘colonial system’ is never clearly stated in his text. As Bongie makes clear, Colonial System is emphatically written as a counter-discourse to the ex-colonist Malouet’s proslavery defence of what the latter called ‘the colonial system’ (pp. 46–51). The guiding ‘principle’ of this system, Malouet explicitly tells his readers, is the negation and quarantine of ‘the doctrine and principle of liberty and equality’ in ‘a society composed of masters and slaves’ (qtd. p. 47): in other words, the principled and violent defence of the order of racial hierarchy in a society of masters and slaves, against the political, existential threat of a society structured upon the countervailing principle of equality. The nature of this hierarchical colonial system, as Vastey’s text strives to demonstrate, is violence of the most horrifying kind and degree. ‘Posterity will be amazed’, Vastey writes, ‘that a system so horrific, which is based on violence and theft, on pillaging and lying, on the most sordid and impure forms of vice, should have found zealous apologists among the enlightened nations of Europe’ (p. 93).

Vastey’s singular intervention into this debate is to describe colonialism as a general system of acts of violence, acts for which those human actors are to be held accountable, for perhaps the first time, as both Marlene Daut and Doris Garraway argue in their contributions to this volume. As Garraway writes, by focusing

almost exclusively on the perpetrator’s objective doings, and by naming the accused, Vastey… eschews sentimental excess in favour of an almost numbing insistence on acts and their authors.

In this sense, his exposure of the ‘colonial system’ has more in common with a legal deposition, the purpose of which is to contribute to the process of discovery around a crime committed. (pp. 231–32)

Vastey’s critique of colonialism as a system of acts made by responsible human agents—and this is a point I will return to in my conclusion— is thus radically humanist. To state that colonialism, in the abstract, is a system, and even a system of human acts, was doubtless an insight to be gained from a careful reading of a text such as Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes. Vastey’s reconceptualization of colonialism as a system pushes beyond the encyclopaedic, predominantly descriptive approach of Raynal, however, to conceive of this system critically, as generalized acts of violence. As a humanist critique of colonial violence, Colonial System thus announces the analogous anticolonial humanisms of Césaire, Sartre, and Fanon alike.

Consubstantial with this assertion that the colonial system is one of generalized violence (of masters against slaves, whites against blacks, French against Africans) is the status of Colonial System as a work of critique, which proceeds by what Vastey calls the ‘unveiling’ of an unjust system or situation. The proper mode of Vastey’s critique is not simply to mention, or even describe in detail, the various forms of violence of plantation slavery in Saint-Domingue, something eighteenth-century European authors such as Wimpffen had already begun. Though Vastey continues this process of enumeration beyond what any of his abolitionist or reformist predecessors had attempted, his most original and provocative rhetorical move is actually to name the names of those he accuses, and thus to render them accountable for their actions in the absence of any such accountability in a (French) court of law.2 Vastey, writes Marlene Daut, puts ‘on public trial the cruelty of the French colonists and in the end the entire colonial system… Since the French government will never properly punish the former slaveholders, the only hope he has… is to commit the names of the guilty colonists to paper’ (p. 194). Truth, in turn, is to be rendered via this act of nomination: ‘The facts I am going to recount bear the stamp of truth… I have obtained these facts from a great many notable and credible people. Moreover, I am providing the names of the colonists who perpetrated these crimes, and I defy any of them to contradict me’ (p. 109). Vastey here seems to distinguish between two registers: the first of mere facts, those acts of violence and savagery that he will enumerate, all of which actually happened, but which in and of themselves are not true. The truth, instead, may become evident when these acts are first of all attributed to named individuals within a general and persuasive critique (Daut refers in this vein to what she calls Vastey’s ‘truth effect’ (p. 195)). Revealed in the light of such a critique, these acts will no longer be allowed to remain the ‘unfortunate’ by-products of a ‘necessary’ system.

Vastey’s critique, in what Garraway and Daut both insightfully describe as a refusal (in varying degrees) of the pathos of abolitionist sentimentality for the dry, even mechanical enumeration of these acts of violence, articulates the outlines of a general, ideological system of human actions. This system is ideological precisely in the sense that, until Vastey, the colonial system—while having its various critics and reformers such as Brissot and les Amis des Noirs, as well as its defenders such as Malouet himself—presented acts of violence of the sort Vastey describes as the more or less unfortunate side effects of a necessary state of affairs (French colonialism as an economic or political necessity). Vastey, echoing Robespierre (‘Périssent les colonies plutôt qu’un principe!’) and the Diderot of Raynal’s Histoire, puts to judgement this unquestioned state of necessity: reaffirming its just end in the independence of Haiti, but also, beyond anything argued before him, calling for the condemnation, by eternal shame if not court of law, of the individuals responsible for this system of general injustice. This in turn indicates the fullest sense of Vastey’s critical ‘unveiling’: to reveal precisely what is hidden by empirical ‘reality’ itself, hidden by colonialism understood as the normal, necessary state of France’s affairs; to reveal the utter untruth of this system that uniformly covers up, when its proponents are not outright justifying, its attendant forms of violence.

… to Which the Black Jacobin State is the Solution

Vastey’s Colonial System at once urges the destruction of a system of general violence, while offering a positive image of the political system that should rightfully replace it. Vastey’s text, despite the clearly inegalitarian nature of Christophe’s monarchy,3 deserves to be considered a fundamental moment in what I have elsewhere described as a Black Jacobin tradition in the Francophone Caribbean world (Nesbitt, 2013). If Jacobinism names the French metropolitan struggle, from 1792 to 1794, to implement a politics of popular sovereignty oriented by the general principle of justice as equality, Black Jacobinism, in turn, identifies the perimetric critique and radicalization of this politics by figures such as Toussaint and Dessalines, to affirm without compromise that no such politics is imaginable if humans remain eligible for slavery. Black Jacobinism in Saint-Domingue/Haiti maintains a number of characteristics through its various and complex iterations from 1793 (the date of Toussaint’s first public intervention) through the 1990s (in the post-Duvalier years of Aristide and Lavalas).

1. Black Jacobinism refers political interventions to universal truth statements: most importantly in the years of the Haitian Revolution, the absolute ineligibility of all human beings for enslavement, or what Vastey calls unhesitatingly in Colonial System the ‘rights of man’ (pp. 82, 83) and ‘our indestructible and eternal rights’ (p. 145). Such statements, articulated and inscribed in documents such as Toussaint’s 1801 Constitution and the 1804 Declaration of Independence, hold an external, even eternal measure of truth up to an untrue world of colonial enslavement and violence. The Atlantic World of 1814 is in this sense a radically untrue world, a world that continued, after 1804, to be structured around the legitimate extension and operation of the system of plantation slavery.

2. Black Jacobinism operates via specific, militant interventions into a dominant state of affairs. Like 1789 in France, the uprising on the northern plains of Saint-Domingue in August 1791 was the sudden flashing up of an opening, l’ouverture, of a new and fundamentally different world. If the event of that initial revolt appeared chaotic and incomprehensible, above all from the perspective of the colonial system itself, its consequences remained to be developed and followed through in the clearing of a new world, a world without slavery, a world that had to be experimentally reordered and reinvented in a general context of slavery-based nation states. The pure negativity of an initial refusal of slavery and the plantation system in 1791 gradually, in the course of over a decade, becomes the positive necessity of an independent abolitionist state: a necessity still unclear to Toussaint when he writes his constitution of 1801 that reaffirms the colonial status of Saint-Domingue, but which is finally and irrefutably recognized by all those who align to defeat the French forces following his capture in 1802. The Haitian Revolution intervened in a previously undecidable situation: after 1789 and the declaration that ‘tous les hommes naissent et demeurent égaux en droits’, who in the French colonies was to be considered subject to the category hommes? Mulattoes? Free blacks? African slaves themselves? Like all of the decisive moments of the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath, Vastey’s Colonial System constitutes an intervention that takes sides and decides in a conflict-ridden situation. Thus the essential nature of the momentous choice Vastey makes in 1802, a choice that would determine every dimension of the future course of his life, when, realizing the injustice and duplicity of the French military intervention, he chooses sides and joins up with the revolutionary former-slaves, transforming himself in the process from the bi-racial offspring of a French father and African mother to become ‘black’ like all other Haitians, irrespective of their racial phenotype (see pp. 18, 179).

3. Black Jacobinism, like French Jacobinism, has repeatedly named a political alliance between leftist, radical enlightenment intellectuals (whether lawyers like Robespierre, devotees of Raynal/Diderot like Toussaint, poet-intellectuals like Césaire, or a priest such as Aristide) and a mass population (of sans culottes, former slaves, Haitians casting off the Duvalier regime after 1986) struggling for popular sovereignty. The Black Jacobin tradition refuses all anarchist insistence on a stateless egalitarianism to insist that the state itself, once it has reinvented itself upon the bedrock of popular sovereignty (as the absolute, non-negotiable freedom of all Haitians from slavery, whether in Christophe’s kingdom or Pétion’s republic) constitutes the proper guarantor of this freedom in the face of a world seeking to reinstitute by all means available slavery and colonialist violence.4

4. Black Jacobinism, like the brief Jacobin moment in France, necessarily takes the form of a political experiment in a situation of utter novelty. As a first, initial invention of the postcolonial abolitionist state, in the face of constant and repeated attempts to destroy or at least hobble and undermine Haitian independence, Haitian Black Jacobinism was forced to experiment with the political forms that would sustain its autonomy (including forced plantation labour). Black Jacobin politics names the experimentation of a thought, bringing together the idea and political practice in a situation of uncertainty. Once the plantations have been burned to the ground, the question remains, what is freedom? Black Jacobin politics in the time of Christophe and Vastey names this experimental articulation of the unity of thought (as the idea of justice as equality) and the constitution of a body (as the Haitian community of free citizens). The politics of universal emancipation, once it exists, constitutes a site of thought to the highest degree, an abstraction from the injustice of a prior world. Toussaint’s 1801 Constitution, with its initial iteration of a postslavery regime, Dessalines’s 1805 Constitution with its affirmation that all Haitians should henceforth bear the attribute black, or Pétion’s 1816 constitutional defence of Haitian free soil are various examples of this experimental bringing together of the idea of universal emancipation and the actually existing abolitionist state.

One might argue that many if not all of the figures of this tradition, from Toussaint and Christophe to Césaire and Aristide, were forced to negotiate the troubled relation between the peuple—whether masses of freed slaves after 1791, French Overseas citizens after 1946, or Haitian citizens after the fall of Duvalier—and the state, the latter taken in the Jacobin and Black Jacobin traditions alike to stand as the guarantor of a true popular sovereignty. If the history of this fraught relation between popular sovereignty and the state in the Francophone Caribbean lies beyond the scope of this commentary, it is at least clear that Christophe’s monarchy, while understandably unacceptable as a formal political structure to a French Jacobin like Grégoire in comparison to Pétion’s republic, constituted a similarly tentative, experimental, yet ultimately principled and unwavering attempt to sustain the sovereign freedom of all its citizens via the sovereignty of the only abolitionist state(s) in existence in 1814.

Vastey’s politics of principle consists of three dimensions.5 It is above all a political intervention into a situation, a rebuttal to the imminent threat of reinvasion Haiti faced in 1814 and the vehement defence of it mounted by figures such as Malouet. Its political content, reiterated above all in the Introduction and closing pages of Colonial System, affirms the absolute necessity and rightfulness of Haiti’s continued existence as an independent, abolitionist, and postcolonial state. Secondly, Vastey articulates this political imperative in relation to the singular history he tells for perhaps the first time. Colonial System articulates a history of what I referred to above as the facts of colonial violence as well as of the truths of the injustice of that system and its necessary replacement by an independent Haiti. This is a history at every moment allied to the attribution of proper names, whether those of the perpetrators of colonial violence or of the figures who rightfully ended that system (Toussaint, Christophe), along with the abolitionist allies (Wilberforce) and nation states that supported this process (England).

Finally, Vastey’s politics of principle proceeds as a process of subjectivation. Colonial System, in naming those guilty for the crimes of colonial violence, interpellates them as subject to the rights of man, and to the measure of justice as equality (no human has the right to perpetrate such acts of violence upon another). Furthermore, however, Vastey’s text seeks to constitute its community of Haitian readers as a body politic driven to resist impending French recolonization and reimposition of slavery by any and all means available. To this end, Colonial System stands as the founding text of a global post- and anticolonial community, a transnational community that would have to await its constitution in the decades of twentieth-century decolonization.

Vastey’s Critique of Violence

For Vastey, plantation violence was the site of ultimate horror, violence in its most terrible forms, given historical form and standing as a regime, upheld by the rule of codified law, both before and after 1789, regularized and standardized, rationalized and reified. Colonial System initiates a critique of this colonial violence that will be carried through by C. L. R. James, Aimé Cesaire, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Frantz Fanon. Vastey remains throughout his writings absolutely committed to an unyielding defence of the Haitian people’s rightful destruction of plantation slavery. ‘In order to destroy this System so deeply enrooted by time and prejudice, there were but two methods’, Vastey writes in his 1819 Essai sur les causes de la révolution et des guerres civiles d’Hayti: ‘Either gradually, by the will of the oppressors and with the passage of time, or else despite them, through violent upheavals that would necessarily entail a struggle fraught with crime, blood, and destruction, spread across multiple years, between oppressed and oppressors. This is what occurred: the unyielding nature, the injustices, and the tyranny of the ex-colonists produced this terrible struggle that has continued to our day’ (5–6).

Vastey’s principled critique of violence is in fact even more complex than this sketch implies. Two forms of violence are readily distinguishable in Colonial System: the unjust violence of the colonial plantation and slavery, and the just, necessarily violent struggle to institute a post-slavery state in the midst of a reactionary, slave-holding Atlantic World. In the face of the immediate threat of reinvasion by France, Vastey asserts the absolute justice of Haitian resistance:

I seize hold of my own weapons and thank the heavens for having placed in our hands the instrument of our deliverance and our preservation. O precious force of arms! Without you what would have become of my country, my compatriots, my kinsfolk, my friends? From that moment on, I looked upon those weapons of mine as the greatest of all possessions.

Sons of the mountains, dwellers of the forests, cherish these weapons of yours, these precious tools for preserving your rights. Never abandon them, pass them on to your children along with the love of liberty and independence, and a hatred for tyrants, as the finest legacy you can bequeath them. (p. 87)

As in Walter Benjamin’s influential ‘Critique of Violence’, Vastey clearly distinguishes between the injustice of a political order that monopolizes and wields lawful forms of violence over its subjects, on the one hand, and the rightful violence that seeks to destroy such an unjust regime of constituted law. Vastey’s critique of violence, however, offers a further level of distinction that Benjamin’s text never explores. In ‘Critique of Violence’, Benjamin makes an absolute distinction between two forms of violence, ‘mythic’ and ‘divine’, or, less obscurely, ‘law-making’ and ‘law-breaking’ modes of action. For Benjamin, mythic, law-making violence is always the unjust law of the state, over and against individuals, while law-breaking, divine violence names the revolutionary action of the masses that shatters the laws of kings and masters.

Unlike Benjamin’s relatively simple binary distinction, Vastey’s critique maintains four variables in the process of distinguishing just from unjust violence. States themselves can be unjust or just, while violence in turn can either affirm or negate the just or the unjust state, as the case may be. The single criterion of judgement remains the norm of a slavery-free existence, but as is not the case in Benjamin’s analysis, the Jacobin and Black Jacobin traditions maintain that a just, democratic state can serve to support the goal of popular sovereignty.6 This division allows for a more complex analysis of situations of violence in relation to the question of justice and injustice. Two forms of state can be identified: 1. a state that supports the colonial slave system (like the French ancien régime or Napoleon’s in 1802) is unjust and deserves to be overthrown; 2. in contrast, a state that supports universal emancipation—such as the Jacobins in February 1794, the Thermidorian regime that followed, Haiti itself after 1804, or even, potentially, England—has the absolute right to defend itself against counter-revolution.7 Given this priority of the abolitionist state’s right to existence, Vastey can logically distinguish as well between: 3. the illegitimacy of plantation violence in a system that justifies slavery; versus 4. the (implicit) legitimacy of Christophe’s violence against his subjects (forcing them to build the Citadel Laferrière, say, or to work the plantations to provide export crops). Vastey’s repeated invocations of the law similarly depend upon this distinction between the just and unjust state: under a slaveholding regime of colonial violence, the law is ineffective, a ‘dead letter’ (p. 124). Vastey’s naming of names, his public sphere prosecution of those guilty of these crimes, implies in turn a future state of affairs when the law of the state, and not merely the scribe’s pen, will hold the guilty accountable.

While the 1814 Colonial System focuses its descriptions on the horrors of the slave regime, his 1816 Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères supplements this with descriptions of the violence of the revolution itself. Its concluding section brings that work in its final pages to an apocalyptic finish:

We saw our fellow citizens, our friends, our relatives, men, women, children, old and young, with distinction of neither age nor sex, tortured by these monsters: some expired in the fire’s flames, others attached to the gallows were fodder for birds of prey, still others were given up to the dogs to be devoured while the luckiest perished before the blows of daggers and bayonets. (1816c, 95)

Vastey recounts the evacuation of black soldiers who had fought for the French, along with their wives and children, and who upon boarding the ships they believed would carry them to safety were clamped in irons: ‘each night these barbarians brought a few hundred of them to the bridge, where they were tied, gagged, and thrown into sacks, often with children’, whereupon they were ‘stabbed through the sacks and thrown into the sea’ (96). Vastey describes an auto-da-fé in Cap-Français organized by the French General Michel Marie Claparède, a veteran of Napoleon’s Army of the Rhine who was a member of Leclerc’s expedition:

Claparède orders the pyre to be lighted. The fire catches immediately, and the victims’ feet are set aflame. Already we imagine they are crying out, that they must be writhing in their horrible torments. But no! What Stoic courage! What rare intrepidity! Immobile, not even their feet move, their gaze fixed ahead, they endure their execution and the fire that devours them. Quickly enveloped in flames, their bodies melt, the fat flowing onto the pyre, a thick smoke rising with the smell of grilled flesh… A feeling of hatred and vengeance arises in the heart of the distraught Haytian [dans le cœur de l’haytien consterné]. (98–99)

Vastey’s critique of violence culminates in the final pages of Colonial System in its various calls to defend Haiti, to sustain its defeat of the many forms of colonial violence he has described: ‘From every quarter we hear the cries of our fellow citizens: our tyrants are coming, to arms! We must hasten on… that we might lay down the pen and take up the sword against our tyrants’ (p. 130); ‘Should we be annihilated, down to the very last one of us, this would still be preferable to bowing our heads under the despotic yoke that once oppressed us. Never will we tremble before the forces of our enemies, be they ever so great in number’ (p. 142). Many of Vastey’s writings in defence of Christophe’s abolitionist state remain subject to what I have elsewhere called the contradictions of his scribal predicament, which forced him to silence his support for Haiti as militant antislavery state in the Atlantic World and to support instead the goal of an open and critical (but ultimately unthreatening) public sphere (2013, 173–191). Colonial System, however, pushes this militant stance to the fore in the face of the looming, very immediate threat of French reinvasion, affirming, as would Césaire, Sartre, and Fanon in his wake, the absolute necessity and rightfulness of anticolonial violence to sustain—in the case of Haiti—the continued existence of the postcolonial abolitionist state.8

Discourses on Colonialism

Colonial System prefigures the Black Jacobinism of Aimé Césaire not so much via Césaire’s actual representation of Vastey in La tragédie du roi Christophe as in three dimensions of Césaire’s own political and rhetorical practice. Like all figures of the Black Jacobin tradition, Césaire saw the democratic, egalitarian state positively as a vector for the defence of the sovereignty of all. This is among the principal conclusions to be drawn from his drafting and support of the 1946 law that ‘departmentalized’ a number of France’s overseas colonies, transforming their colonized subjects into citizens of the Fourth Republic.

For Vastey and Césaire alike, the state offered the potential for implementing and sustaining as a historical reality the promise of abolition and decolonization. What Césaire called ‘Departmentalization’ named the struggle to increase the popular sovereignty of the inhabitants of France’s colonies to the maximum degree possible. For Césaire, this implied the transformation of colonial subjects into full citizens of the Fourth Republic, fully subject to its rights and laws. Departmentalization as originally conceived in 1946 was of course not fully implemented by the French state until the 1990s, and this backtracking progressively led Césaire to affirm instead the political ‘autonomy’ of Martinique, and, by the 1970s, even led him to articulate an explicitly Fanonian defence of the necessity of colonial violence in the face of the state’s refusal to decolonize (see Nesbitt, 2013, 103–17). That said, the Departmentalization process has been argued by critics such as Gary Wilder (2009) and myself to constitute a viable and singular form of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s.

In addition to this commitment to the emancipationist state, Vastey and Césaire implemented a similar rhetorical manipulation and revoicing of their sources, a similarity quite striking in Colonial System’s dense network of citations articulating a range of sources including Moreau de Saint-Méry, Grégoire, Wimpffen, Raynal/Diderot’s Histoire des deux Indes, Garran-Coulon, and Mungo Park. Similarly, Césaire would put his vast erudition on display in texts such as the Discours sur le colonialisme (1950/1955) and his 1956 speech ‘Culture and Colonization’, in order to pillory with his powerful invective the many prophets of racial inequality and African barbarity.

Unlike Césaire, however, Vastey, writing from peripheral Haiti, lacking major research libraries, various intellectual communities of debate and discussion, and, above all, time, was forced between 1814 and 1820, in the face of what Bongie shows in his Introduction to be the very real threat of Haiti’s recolonization and resubjection to slavery, to improvise as best he could, with the relatively few sources he had at hand, a substantial and original critique of colonialism and slavery as global systems.9 Marx had the British Museum Reading Room, a European community of socialist thinkers, and, above all, half a century to construct a systemic and scientific critique of capitalism in the three volumes of Capital. Césaire had the library of the French Assembly, the Bibliothèque nationale, and his connections and encounters with colleagues through organizations such as the PCF (Parti communiste français) and Présence Africaine. While Vastey clearly intuits a determining structure beneath the blinding immediacy of colonized experience, he is obliged to rely on a handful of sources (most notably, as Bongie shows in his essay, Grégoire’s De la littérature des Nègres), as well as on his first-hand experience—of slavery and colonial violence, of the Haitian Revolution, and of French neo-colonialism after 1804—and oral interviews with surviving Haitian witnesses of the period, to construct a postcolonial critical apparatus that might ultimately be called an ideological war machine rather than a scientific critique.

Finally, and despite all such limitations that Vastey confronted from 1814 to 1820, the most compelling correspondence between Vastey and Césaire is undoubtedly the degree to which each developed powerful, even incendiary, anticolonial rhetorics of critique and castigation. Readers of this volume should now be familiar with the power and originality of Vastey’s rhetoric. Césaire’s gift for anticolonial invective, in turn, culminated in those extraordinary paragraphs of the Discourse on Colonialism, in which he, like Vastey before him, condemned the universal responsibility of all those in whose name colonial violence and dehumanization are perpetrated:

Therefore, comrade, you will hold as enemies—loftily, lucidly, consistently—not only sadistic governors and greedy bankers, not only prefects who torture and colonists who flog, not only corrupt, checklicking politicians and subservient judges, but likewise and for the same reason, venomous journalists, goitrous academics, wreathed in dollars and stupidity, ethnographers who go in for metaphysics, presumptuous Belgian theologians, chattering intellectuals born stinking out of the thigh of Nietzsche, the paternalists, the embracers, the corrupters, the back-slappers, the lovers of exoticism, the dividers, the agrarian sociologists, the hoodwinkers, the hoaxers, the hot-air artists, the humbugs, and in general, all those who, performing their functions in the sordid division of labor for the defense of Western bourgeois society, try in diverse ways and by infamous diversions to split up the forces of Progress—even if it means denying the very possibility of Progress—all of them tools of capitalism, all of them, openly or secretly, supporters of plundering colonialism, all of them responsible, all hateful, all slave-traders, all henceforth answerable for the violence of revolutionary action [tous redevables désormais de l’agressivité révolutionnaire]. (2000, 54–55; my italics)

Like Césaire here, Vastey argues in Colonial System that there are no ‘good’ colonialists or slave owners; if the system is wrong, all those who support its perpetuation are in the wrong. He powerfully condemns the ‘bad faith’ of apologists who underlined the putative ‘rarity’ of the violent acts he enumerates: ‘[Y]ou will go on to tell me that since time immemorial there have been monsters who have defiled themselves with misdeeds of this sort, and that… I should not conclude from this that all colonists are indiscriminately monsters. Yes, they all are, more or less; they all committed such horrors, participated in them and contributed to them’ (p. 108). Vastey’s logic is perfectly identical to that of Césaire (as well as of Sartre10) a century and a half later.

In similar fashion, Césaire’s tirade continues, unabated, to its monstrous, cataclysmic dénouement:

And sweep out all the obscurers, all the inventors of subterfuges, the charlatans and tricksters, the dealers in gobbledygook [les manieurs de charabia]. And do not seek to know whether personally these gentlemen are in good or bad faith, whether personally they have good or bad intentions. Whether personally—that is, in the private conscience of Peter or Paul— they are or are not colonialists, because the essential thing is that their highly problematical subjective good faith is entirely irrelevant to the objective social implications of the evil work they perform as watchdogs of colonialism. (2000, 55)

Like Vastey’s Colonial System, Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism asserts in these lines the universal responsibility of colonialists and the state that supports them for the violence of colonialism, such that absolutely anyone can (and must) interrogate and ruthlessly critique their own complicity in such a disaster, and, in turn, work for the destruction of colonialism as an objective system.

Colonialism is a Structure

Sartre’s brief article ‘Colonialism is a System’, if only through its title, stands as the most obvious inheritor to the anticolonial critique of Colonial System Unveiled. I have underscored above the fundamental similarity between Vastey’s critique of an unjust ideological system and his entirely humanistic and even proto-Sartrean attribution of the freedom of responsibility, decision, and action to human individuals as named, singular subjects. A close reading of Sartre’s article, however, reveals its surprising distance from the ‘humanism’ for which he would soon be taxed by the Althusserian structuralists. For Sartre’s argument in this article appears eminently structuralist in attributing priority to the pre-existent (Sartre in his jargon would say ‘practico-inert’) determinacy of a social structure that creates and determines the human subjects of colonialism. Sartre writes that the French Republic ‘fabricates “natives”’ and that it ‘creates masses but prevents them from becoming a conscious proletariat by mystifying them with the caricature of their own ideology’ (48). Whatever we may make of this rudimentary sketch of the French colonial system in Algeria, Sartre’s proto-structuralism allows us to distinguish between the critique of an ideological system and the responsible, free human agents that compose it, and the critique of a determining social structure, characterized, as Althusser and his students would soon argue in Lire le Capital (1965), not by the empirical forms of its ideological iterations, but by its mode of production, an understanding of which is attainable only by the articulation, analysis, and critique of that underlying mode of production itself (on the model of Marx’s analysis of capitalism). Sartre’s text thus points beyond the humanism of both Vastey’s Colonial System as well as Sartre’s own assertions of the general responsibility of the French, of all those who participate in and support, whether actively or passively, an unjust system, toward a properly ‘structuralist’ critique of colonialism as the mode of production of colonial violence. While neither Vastey nor Césaire nor Sartre carried through such a critique of the structure of colonial violence, it is the incisive destruction of the ideological system of colonialism, begun by Vastey in 1814, sustained and developed through the twentieth century by figures such as Césaire, Sartre, and Fanon, that remains the lasting accomplishment of this stirring, protean text, Le système colonial dévoilé.

Notes

1 All subsequent page references, unless otherwise stated, refer to the present volume. I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge an omission in the chapter on Vastey in my book Caribbean Critique (2013, 173–91), which cited a number of passages from Chris Bongie’s translation of Colonial System without attribution (see, notably, 178, 186). I extend here my sincere apologies for this oversight.

2 In this assertion of general responsibility for those who participate in a system of violence, Vastey clearly prefigures Sartre’s articles condemning the Algerian war and the use of torture by the French military including the 1956 speech ‘Colonialism is a System’, his 1957 piece ‘You are Wonderful’, and ‘We are All Murderers’ and ‘A Victory’ from the following year (see Sartre, 36–55, 63–88). In the face of what Sartre calls the ‘war crimes’ revealed in publications such as Des rappelés témoignent and Henri Alleg’s La question, the crucial aspect of Sartre’s argument in these texts is not simply to denounce the use of torture or colonial exploitation. Sartre’s ethical project extends much further, to convince his readers of their total responsibility for the torture being done in their name in Algeria (Nesbitt, 2013, 251–52).

3 For a balanced and insightful discussion of the relative, and relatively compromised, commitments to egalitarianism of both Christophe’s monarchy and Alexandre Pétion’s republic during this period, see the second chapter of Laurent Dubois’s Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (2012, 52–88). ‘The two regimes’, Dubois concludes, ‘resembled each other to a surprising extent when it came to their vision of the state itself. While Pétion ruled over a nominal republic that had the trappings of a democratic order and Christophe created a monarchy, both systems revolved around a famous general who anchored his power in a handpicked governing coalition. Both regimes were largely politically exclusive, creating and maintaining a relatively small group of leadership elites while doing little to provide for democratic participation by a larger segment of the population’ (87).

4 Ada Ferrer describes Pétion’s uncompromising defence of Haitian antislavery as a transnational politics of principle in light of his 1816 Constitution, its radicalization of the European free soil tradition, and the political use to which it was put when, as in the case Ferrer describes, Caribbean slaves did in fact escape to Haitian soil. Pétion, Ferrer writes, ‘made free soil not only his legal principle to be invoked and argued in specific cases, as it was in Europe, but in fact a general and inviolable principle written into the supreme law of the land’ (50).

5 On this Caribbean ‘politics of principle’ more generally, see Nesbitt (2013, especially 14–19).

6 I wish to stress that I am calling Christophe’s Haitian state circa 1814 ‘democratic’ only in the baseline sense of a state in which all humans retain their absolute sovereignty from slavery. Upon this foundation of universal popular sovereignty, Christophe’s monarchy—and Vastey as its spokesperson—reaffirms the rightful hierarchal division of society as well as the necessity of forced plantation labour in the name of the survival of the former. Dubois makes the point that, despite the increasingly autocratic nature of Pétion’s republic, it did at least implement in 1816 a ‘significant advance for democratic government’: the creation of a Chamber of Deputies in which ‘the deputies were elected by universal male suffrage’ (2012, 61).

7 Vastey thus follows figures such as Robespierre and Saint-Just, in their defence of the right of the ( Jacobin) state to resist by force counter-revolution, as well as more theoretical, public sphere defences of this same absolute right to resistance on the part of the republican state by thinkers such as Kant and the young Fichte. While Kant has, since the mid-nineteenth century, generally been thought of as a fundamentally conservative political thinker, in the final years of his life following the French Revolution he was in fact widely considered the most formidable theoretical defender of not only the French Revolution but, though it may today seem implausible, its most radical, Jacobin phase. I argue elsewhere that it is Kant’s philosophical defence of the Jacobin French Revolution that, among other resources, made the Haitian Revolution eminently ‘thinkable’ in its own time (2013, 50–59).

8 Though an analysis of the complex relation between Vastey and Fanon lies beyond the scope of this commentary, it is obvious that Fanon’s ‘De la violence’ constitutes the most far-reaching and articulated formulation of this critique of colonial, and defence of anticolonial, violence that Vastey initiates in Colonial System. I analyse Fanon’s critique of violence as a situated logic of absolute necessity in singular, incommensurable situations in chapter 8 of Caribbean Critique, ‘Revolutionary Inhumanism: Fanon’s On Violence’ (192–215).

9 This and the following two paragraphs reprise and extend material first introduced in Caribbean Critique (177, 246–47).

10 In ‘Colonialism is a System’ Sartre writes: ‘It is not true that there are some good colons and others who are wicked. There are colons and that is it’ (38).