Nesbitt_TheIdeaof1804

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The Idea of 1804

Author(s): Nick NesbittSource: Yale French Studies, No. 107, The Haiti Issue: 1804 and Nineteenth-Century FrenchStudies (2005), pp. 6-38Published by: Yale University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4149310 .

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NICK NESBITT

The Idea of 1804

Penser la pensee revient le plus souvent a se retirerdansun lieu sans

dimension oii l'idee seule de la pensee s'obstine. Mais la pens~es'espacereellement au monde. Elle informe l'imaginairedes

peuples, ... dans lesquels se realise son risque.

-•douard

Glissant, Poetique de la relation

It is only today, two hundredyears after its conclusion on January1,

1804, that we are able to hear the radicalmessage of the Haitian Revo-

lution. Two of the processes that came to distinguish the twentieth

century were invented in Haiti: decolonization and neocolonialism.

Haiti was the first to demonstrate that the colonized can take hold of

their own historical destiny and enterthe stageofworldhistoryas auto-nomous actors,andnot merely passive, enslavedsubjects.Lesshappily,

newly independent Haiti also demonstrated to the world the first in-

stance of what would later be called neocolonialism, as ruling elites

(bothmulatto andblack)united with the military and a merchantclass

to create an instable balance of power. This depended upon the skim-

ming of surplus profits from tertiaryimports and a correspondingsys-tematic underdevelopmentoflocal productiveforces,all at theexpenseof the excluded

majority,a

processthat Fanon would first

identifyin

Les damnes de la terreand one that Michel-Rolph Trouillot has bril-

liantly analyzed in Haiti: State Against Nation.1

Both the unfinished

projectof decolonization and the actuality of neocolonial imperialism

imply that attention to the Haitian Revolution and its aftermathis of

most pressing concern if we are to understandthe origins andclassic

forms of these problemsthat continue to confrontourtwenty-firstcen-

tury.However important these problems may remain, I wish to argue

here that the 1791-1804 Revolution contains afurther,more radicaldi-mension that is only now becoming apparent,after the failure of so-

1. SeeMichel-RolphTrouillot,Haiti:StateAgainst Nation. TheOriginsandLegacy

of Duvalierism (New York:Monthly Review Press, 1990).

YFS107, TheHaiti Issue, ed. DeborahJenson,? 2005 by YaleUniversity.

6



NICK NESBITT 7

cialism and the looming degenerationof liberal democracies into citi-

zen surveillance machines. Wehave seen two hundredyears

ofpoliti-cal populism that has lead to totalitarianism and genocide, to fascist

and so-called "socialist" states that sacrificed the process of democra-

tization and the autonomy of human subjects to industrial "produc-

tionism;"2 two hundredyears of nationalist states that merely sacri-

ficed their citizens tout court in genocidal hysteria. At the same time,Westernliberaldemocracies have fostered a culture of consumption to

compensate forpopulardisenfranchisement, as oligarchies of the elite

make their own decisions regardingwar, the environment, and social

justice in the name of those they are supposed to represent. After the

collapse of socialism and the rise of neo-nationalisms, as we confront

reactionaryWesternpolitical elites that eagerly sacrifice the rights of

their subjects forthe chimera of impregnablefortress-states, the asser-

tion of the universal rightsofautonomous subjectsaresuddenly amost

pressingand basic concern.Apositive ideaof human rights,understood

as the capacity of individuals and collectivities to exert control over

their existence anddevelopment has suddenly taken precedence as we

catapultheadlonginto what Ulrich Beckhas called apostnational "sec-ond" modernity.3This positive notion of human rights today moves

beyond the merely negative safeguardsthat were called human rightsin the Englishand American traditions. It is only after the political and

human disasters of the last century that we havebegun to move toward

the idea of a universal right of all human beings to freedom as the pos-itive capacity for self-determination on a global, andnot merely local,scale.

This universal idea was first put forward two hundredyears ago inthe Haitian Revolution. It initiated the world's first radicaldemocracyoftransnationalscope. Haiti told the worldamessage few in 1804 could

hear:freedom did not mean leaving landowners alone to enjoy their

property,human orotherwise. It moved beyondmere national andcivil

rights, those of the "citoyen" of 1776 and 1789, to press the universal

claims of the rightsof "Man."4Haiti presentedfreedom to the world as

an absolutely true logic, one that must be made, in turn, universal re-

2. SeeGeorgLukaics,TheProcessofDemocratization, trans. SusanneBernhardtandNorman Levine(Albany:SUNY Press,1991).

3. UlrichBeck,Pouvoiret contre-pouvoirt l'eredela mondialisation, trans.Aure1ieDuthoo (Paris:Flammarion,2003).

4. FranklinKnight,"The Haitian Revolution and the Ideaof Human Rights" (Pub-lic lecture, CornellUniversity, April 17, 2004).



8 YaleFrench Studies

ality:no humans can be enslaved. Freedomcanonly exist when we cre-

ate aglobal society

whose structures and laws allow for the full and

unimpeded development of ourpossibilities as living individuals.This

idea was truly unthinkable in a world groundedand dependenton the

enslavement of aportion of the human population.The idea ofthe Hai-

tian Revolution was so scandalousthat enormous efforts weremadeto

silence it, to falsify it, to demonize, in short to reduceHaiti asboth idea

andreality to no more than the "poorestcountry in the WesternHemi-

sphere." Haiti was immediately quarantined and pauperized in the

forceddysfunction of a postcolonial state undermined andhamstrung

by the terrifiedslave-holding powers that then controlled the globe.Inhindsight, however, aswe look back acrosstwo hundredyearsof

Haitianindependenceat a succession ofdespoticregimes,political dys-

function, systemic economic underdevelopment, and terrifyingsocial

injustice, one might question the utility of a revolution that pavedthe way for these historical (under-)developments. Perhapsall those

timorous French Enlightenment thinkers, from Condorcet to I'Abb6

Gregoireand others were right:a too rapidfreedom grantedto slaves

"unprepared"for liberty could only lead to chaos.5 It was in Saint-Domingue, not Paris,that violence reachedunimaginedheights ofbru-

tality on both sides, that anentire society was literally reducedto ashes

in the name of a single imperative:universal emancipation. In the face

of this categoricalimperative,nothing else mattered,not property,not

happiness,oranyothergood.Becauseof this total revolution,hundreds

of thousands of Haitians avoided the vicious reprisals that fell uponblacks in Guadeloupewhen Napoleon reinstatedslaverytherein 1802.

Moreover, this gain is quantifiable: theyavoided

precisely forty-sixyearsof enslavement (1802-1848). Who else but those concernedcould

judge what this progresswas worth? The slaves of Saint-Domingue,who knew slavery first-hand,decided for themselves that, faced with

its imminent reimposition, nothing else mattered, that they would

never returnto slavery.

Readingrecent critical studies of globalization like Michael Hardt

5. As in Condorcet's 1781 text Rflexions sur l'esclavage des negres, where thephilosopher-mathematicianargues quite "rationally"for a gradualelimination of slav-

ery over the course of one or two generations.Jean-Antoine-Nicolas,Marquisde Con-

dorcet,Reflexionssurl'esclavage des ndgres(Paris:Mille et une nuits, 2000),38, 44. For

a strongcritiqueof the limitations of EnlightenmentUniversalism in light of the prob-lem of slavery,see LouisSala-Molins,Lesmiseres desLumiBres:Sousla raison,I'outrage

(Paris;Laffont, 1992).



NICK NESBITT 9

and Antonio Negri's Empire, I found myself thinking when I was in

Haitirecently

that such accounts of the radical constituentsubjectiv-ities of the multitude always seem to describe eminently first-world

sites and events.6 Any contemporaryattempt to understand universal

emancipation needs to include, perhapseven to begin from, a site like

Haiti, which both invented this process and has demonstratedover the

last two centuries the insufficiency of anyprojectthat would consider

the "ThirdWorld"--as doesEmpire-through merecursoryreferences

to a few canonical theoretical texts (those of EdwardSaid and Gayatri

Spivak,for example).While there is no reason one should expect such

authors to have anything to sayaboutpostcolonial experience, the uni-versalscope of theirpretensions justifies pointing out the parochialismof their logic.

If we are witnessing today something like the constitution of a

global mass-democratic movement in sites such as Seattle, Genova,Porto Alegre, Paris, and New York, these events confront an alreadyconstituted state of (relative)law andorder.While the Haitian Revolu-

tion demonstrates the radical efficacy of constituent power, no less

does attention to Haitianhistory demonstrateits radicalinsufficiency.In the first world, it's easy to condemn all representative govern-ments-in their varying degreesof, or lack of, representationof popu-lar sovereignty-as operating an unjust alienation of constituent

power. Inthis view, all rule of law is subjugationto an abstract univer-

sal; all mediation, all representationis always alreadyalienation. The

neo-Schmittian trashing of a despised "parliamentarism"and mere

"opinion,"of the United Nations and the call forhuman rights, seems

all too easy fromsites like Washingtonor Paris(witness Alain Badiou'sEthics).7No constituted power, but only the direct expression of the

constituent will of the multitudes is just for Hardt andNegri. The au-

thors never question the degreeto which constituted power might ac-

tually both oppress,andparadoxicallyenable the constituent power of

the multitude to emergein its multiple singularforms. To what degree,for example, might freedom of the press, intellectual inquiry, and a

globalpublic spherehave enabled the critical andanalytical virtuosityandinsights of Empire?8

6. Michael HardtandAntonio Negri, Empire(Cambridge:HarvardUniversity Press,2000).

7. Alain Badiou,L'ethique:Essai surla conscience du mal (Paris:Nous, 2003).8. Given his treatment in the hands of Italian justice since the 1970s, one readily

understandsNegri'svilification of constituted power,but that doesn't makehis analysis




What cansuch a one-sidedvision of the rule of law asalwaysalready

(ratherthan

potentially)evil mean for a

placelike Haiti

(orRwanda,or

the Congo .. .), where the rule of law hardlycan be said to exist at all,where law is not the complex relation of an individual to auniversallyvalid norm,but is insteadno more than the directexpressionofviolent

domination (whoever has the machine guns and torture chambers is

right)? ContemporaryHaiti is the apotheosis of the deformalization

and derationalization of law into a permanent state of emergency and

the arbitraryand unpredictable wielding of raw power.9 Again and

again, the history of Haiti demonstrates the radical insurgency of un-

freesubjects against the forces of violence anddomination, but the factthat Haiti is the greatest historical instantiation of the insurgencyHardtandNegri rightlycelebratehas neverbeen enough to ensurethat

those subjects can realize their full human potential as autonomous,creative subjects, that aftertheir insurgency they will not be taken out

of their beds at night and assassinated or thrown into jail without re-

course to justice. Why must Haitians againandagainassert their radi-

cal insurgency against "constituted power" in the face of a seemingly

unending andtotal state of crisis?Only a critical analysis of the multi-ple, ambiguous, and contradictoryforms of constituted power in that

nation over the past two centuries, ratherthan its absolutevilification,could begin to supply an answer. In the two centuries since its founda-

tion, the history of Haiti has become the development and perfectionof a system of total exploitation by a tiny elite and the most absolute

lack of popularsovereignty and governmental mediation imaginable.While one must resist any fetishization of the rule of law, which must

always remain subordinate to the processof

democratization,and

which must always coexist alongside the possibility of civil disobedi-

ence, the rule of law nonetheless remains a necessary element in the

of it any less partial. See Negri on Negri:In Conversation with Anne Dufourmentelle

(New York:Routledge,2004).9. This processwas theorizedbyCarlSchmittandimplementedbythe NationalSo-

cialists. Schmitt's classic (andanalytically brilliant)attacks on rationallaw,parliamen-

tarism,and "lifeless" universalism occur in works such as The Crisisof Parliamentary

Democracy (Cambridge:MIT Press, 1985) and The Concept of the Political (NewBrunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1976). See William Scheuermann's study of

Schmitt's FrankfurtSchool critics Otto KirchheimerandFranzNeumann fora defense

of rationalizeduniversalistic law as an unfinished projectof modernity, Between the

Norm and the Exception:TheFrankfurtSchool and the Rule of Law (Cambridge:MIT

Press, 1994).Foran overview of Schmitt's thought, see GopalBalakrishnan,TheEnemy:An Intellectual Portraitof Carl Schmitt (New York:Verso, 2000).



NICK NESBITT 11

process of democratization.10In contrast with its glaring absence in

contemporary Haiti,in

1804,in a veritable

Benjaminian "flash...never [to be] seen again," the progressof universal human emancipa-tion became a localized, concrete reality that denied the brutal rule of

arbitraryforce and subjugation, abolishing slavery immediately and

unconditionally, andinventing andlaunching the globalprocess of de-

colonization that continues unfinished today."It is only because the human mind can conceive of the universal,

without ever entirely graspingit, that we have progressedtoward, for

example, a universal ban on slavery.This is not to claim that therehas

been progressin an absolute sense. Such a claim would be hollow and

meaningless in the face of the many historical failures and ideological

manipulations of the ideaof human rights.JacquesMourgeon'sbriefyetdense study Les droits de l'homme offersan overview of the historical

development andinstantiation of human rights,attackingin particularthe idea that therehas been any absolute progressin their implementa-tion since 1789.12If,as he claims (andhe cites no statistics), since 1945

the number of underdevelopedcountries has increasedfrom 77 to 133,

the number of individuals living beneath the poverty line, hunger, in-fant mortality, andilliteracy have all increased (50),if massive cases of

genocide have continued unabated, if all this and more is true, is one

then justified in concluding that "the problem is no longer one of

knowing whether here or there one can find rights emerging from the

void ..., but if in all cases the powerbroughtto bearby andenlargedby

theirclaim does not use theirjustifications to rein them in" (53)?13Such

a conclusion conflates what I think aretwo separateissues: the (always

partial and contingent) advancement of human rightsin

any specific

10. FranzNeumann forcefullyarguesthis point in his article "TheConcept of Polit-

ical Freedom,"in The Democratic and the Authoritarian State:Essaysin Political and

LegalTheory(Glencoe,IL:1957).Seealso Between the Norm and theException,196-97.

11. WalterBenjamin,Illuminations (New York:Schocken Books, 1968),255.

12. JacquesMourgeon,Les droits de l'homme (Paris:PUF,2002). Furtherreferences

to this and all other texts cited morethan once will be madeparentheticallyin the text.

13. This andallothertranslationsfromthe Frencharemy own,unlessotherwisenoted.

Viewinghumanrightsfromthe standpointof a jurist,Mourgeonclaims that the utility of

humanrightsexists only when they gainobligatoryforcefromtheir inclusion in a consti-tution (Lesdroits del'homme,68).Sucha claimignorespreciselythe decisiveintervention

of the slavesinvolvedin the HaitianRevolution.The slavewith a copyof the Declaration

of the RightsofMan in his shirtpocket,like ToussaintLouverturebefore1801,hadno con-

stitution to enforcehis claims,yet these claims nonethelessbroughtaboutenormoushis-

toricalchange.SeeAlth6Parham,My Odyssey:Experiencesof a Yo!rngRefugeefromTwo

Revolutions.By a Creoleof SaintDomingue (LouisianaStateUniversityPress, 1959),34.



12 Yale French Studies

case andthe critiqueof subsequentnew and different forms oftheir de-

nial that arisewith historical events. Itpasses

over the fact thatmanyhistorical changeshave occurredpreciselybecause the claims ofhuman

rightswere pressedandimperfectlyadvanced,and the relative(andstill

incomplete) decreasein human enslavement since the eighteenth cen-

tury offers us perhapsthe least ambiguouscase of this advancement.

Given the suffering it engenderedand its historical aftereffectsin

an (economically andjuridically)impoverished country, does the Hai-

tian Revolution demonstrate historical progress in social justice?14Kant asked the same question aboutthe French Revolution in his 1798

text "Contest ofthe Faculties,"andrespondedthat it was preciselynotthe contingent violence andincompletion of the Terror,all the failingsand shortcomings of such an event that should retain our attention.

Rather,Kantclaimed, the progressbroughtaboutby the French Revo-

lution lies in its construction ofa universal idea offreedom,anidea that

negatedthe local, communitarianpolitics ofrace,ethnicity, and nation

to interpellate all those innately endowed with the capacity to under-

stand its logic. Kant asks the question "Is the human racecontinually

improving?"and in offering a positive answer to this question, Kantpresumes precisely what remains first to be demonstrated:that hu-

manity actually exists as an immanent totality. Instead,Haiti and the

case of slavery as an attempt at radicalde-humanization posit human-

ity as no more than an immanent possibility to be conquered:amidthe

violence and destruction of enslavement and war, humanity remains

only an idea of which we can conceive, and thus producehistorically

(we can become human).15

Kant maintains that one can in fact obtain a "prophetic"vision ofhuman history "if the prophet himself occasions and produces the

events he predicts"(177).He findsjust such anevent in the FrenchRev-

olution: for all its violence andbloodshed, its "miseryand atrocities,"it has aroused a "sympathy"that proves "a moral disposition within

the human race"(177).The Haitian revolutionaries who had laboredas

slaves, making cane grow in the fields and transformingit into sugarandrum, knew all aboutlabor,and"producinganevent [one]predicts."

Farmingis perhaps the prototypical event in the history of humans'

14. An earlierversion of the following five paragraphsappearedin Nick Nesbitt,

"TropingToussaint,"Researchin AfricanLiteratures35/2 (Spring2004).15. ImmanuelKant,"TheContest of the Faculties"in Kant:Political Writings,trans.

H. B.Nisbet (Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity Press, 1970, 1991),176-90.



NICK NESBITT 13

domination ofnature,masteringits unpredictabilitythroughthe imag-

inative power of human reasonto conceive of a nonexistent

project(toavoid starvation by growing food in the coming season) and to imple-

ment thatproject.The violence of the slave-holdingplantation system,

of course, transformedthis bucolic vision into a living hell. Inresponse

to this attempt at dehumanization, Haitian slaves, certainin their own

humanity, conceived of anotherprojectand worked to "produce"that

event: universal emancipation from slave labor.

A seemingly unrelated moment in the history of philosophy dra-

matically underscores the momentous implications of the Haitian

Revolution as a "production"of universal human autonomy. In the

middle of the 1929 debate between Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cas-

sirerin Davos, Switzerland,a student in the audience addressesto Cas-

sireraquestion atonce disarminglydirectandcharmingin its naive ex-

pression of hope that a substantial answer might follow: "Whatpath

towardinfinity does man possess?" he asks. "Andhow can man par-

ticipate in infinity?"16Ratherthan banishing any concrete answer to

these questions asthe meredreamsof ayoung spirit-seer,the neo-Kant-

ian philosopher Cassirergives aremarkablyconcise response that syn-thesizes in a few lines the vision ofwhat it means to be human that lies

at the root of modern experience:

Thereexistsno otherpaththanthe mediationofform.Forthis is the

functionofform:intransforminghis existenceintoform,thatis tosay

bytransformingnecessarilyall that is in him of theorderof the lived

into anobjectiveform,whateverit maybe, in whichhe objectivates

himself,mandoubtlessdoesnot liberatehimselffromthe finitudeof

hispointofdeparture,... but,inemergingfromfinitude,he causesthisfinitudeto overcomeitself in somethingnew.Thisis whatmakesupanimmanentinfinity.(41)

This vision ofhuman experience as the productionof a simultaneously

immanent, yet infinite truth via the process of production is perhaps

the definingcharacteristicof Westernmodernity andits subject,homo

faber.The insight of GiambatistaVico that humans can only have ac-

cess to truth by exercising their freedom to create, knowingly trans-

formingthe worldthroughthe fabricationof objectsfirst conceived viatheirfaculty ofproductiveimagination, is herebroughtinto explicit re-

lation to our capacityto know the infinite anduniversal. Andnowhere

16. Ernst Cassirerand Martin Heidegger,Debat sur le kantisme et la philosophie

(Paris:tditions Beauchesne,1972).




does this truth of Modernity,understoodas the construction of an im-

manentinfinity,

receive morestriking

form than in theexperience

of

New Worldslavery that culminates in the 1804 Declaration ofHaitian

Independence.17The novelty of the Haitian Revolution andIndependencestandsin

dialectical relation to the traditions it critiqued and perfected. Haiti

uniquely demonstrates the complex interdependence of human rightsand preexisting symbolic constructs (such as ideas, social forms and

customs, andpositive law), ratherthan the simple priority of the for-

mer overthe latter.18Forthe concept ofhuman rightsis justthat,acon-

cept; it does not preexist its formulations in the human mind and its

consequent objectifications. Human autonomy is no hidden reserve;it

cannot be saved up and it cannot be separatedfrom its expression. It

only exists in the event of its objectification, as Cassirermaintained.

To become free, a human subject must enter into and transforma pre-

existing social order.On the otherhand,for the participantsin the Hai-

tian Revolution to assert the universal, nonnegotiable status of human

autonomy, they must already have acceded to what their enslavers

would deny them: subjectivity and a consciousness of their universalrights as humans. In other words, they have already become autono-

mous participantsin a globalhuman discursive community reflectingon human rights, a community that preexisted their birth, subjects

demonstratingprecisely the processof majorationthat Kantcalled"en-

lightenment." They were able actively to construct their right to au-

tonomy precisely because they were able torepresentto themselves the

discrepancybetween a received symbolic object (the Ddclaration des

droits de l'homme et du citoyen of 1789)andtheir own continued en-

slavement by the architects of that declaration, and to move to over-

come that discrepancy.

THE HISTORICIZATION OF FREEDOM

The Haitian Revolution implemented a radically new conception of

freedom that arose in the Enlightenment to receive perhapsits fullest

17. As well as its negation:the ecologicalcatastrophethat is the destructionofHaiti'sindigenous forest testifies to the obvious need to critique any production-modelof hu-

man experience; it is this ongoing critique, rather than any univocal affirmationof

progress,that constitutes a dialectic of enlightenment.18. For a discussion of this interdependence,see JiurgenHabermas,Postscriptto Be-

tween Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theoryof Law and Democracy,trans.William Rehg (Cambridge:MIT,1998),456.



NICK NESBITT 15

realization on a small Caribbeanisland many thousands of kilometers

fromParis.Thisconcrete,

universal notion of freedommay

have arisen

first in Diderot's Encyclopedie, in articles such as droit naturel, popu-

lation, andesclavage. There, the authorsof the Encyclopedie attacked

slavery by means of an abstract,universal criterion: if all humans are

characterizedby their ability to reason, andthe essence of this univer-

sal capacityis ourfreewill, le libre arbitre,it is then impossible foranyhumans to alienate this freedom to a master, for to do so would make

them into animals, a logical impossibility. For the authors of the En-

cyclop&die,all humans are inalienably human in their possession of

freewill. The logic of this argument,in its universal abstractionand re-fusal to consider contingent, qualifying, and discriminatory questionsof history, culture, orracewhen considering slavery (i.e., areslaves ac-

tually readyto be free?Arethey racially unqualifiedforfreedom?),took

the immeasurablestep ofuniversally disqualifyingslaverythroughthe

advancement of reason as enlightenment.As such, however, this argument against slavery remained highly

vulnerable to the devastatingcritique Rousseau would level at the En-

cyclopedie's broaderprojectof enlightenment. The Enlightenment cri-tique of slavery relied upon the weak force of a purely abstract,logical

argument.It may well be that slavery is a logical impossibility, but the

Encyclopedie as a projectof abstract,rational enlightenment can only

proceedwith the weak hope that aspeople readits critique, slaverywill

magically disappear,that enlightened reasonwould make realexisting

slavery disappearas it speaks the word, the magical incantation, that

would conjureits disappearance.Ifslaveryis alogical impossibility, we

are still confronted with its real existence after the appearanceof theEncyclopedie.19

It is here, amid the contradiction between enlightened reason and

really existing society that Rousseau inserts his radicalinvention of a

historicized, existential freedom.20We know that slavery is both logi-

cally andmorallywrong,yet it exists in the presentworld, so, as he putsit in another context in the Contrat social, "we will force [ourselves]to be free." With these famously ambiguous and problematic words,Rousseauputs fortharadicallynovel notion of freedomandhuman be-

19. See MarkHulliung, TheAutocritique of the Enlightenment: Rousseau and the

Philosophes (Cambridge:HarvardUniversity Press, 1998).20. Jean-JacquesRousseau, Le contrat social in Oeuvres politiques (Paris:Bordas

1989).



16 YaleFrenchStudies

ing: freedom is not, as Diderot and other Enlightenment philosophes

hadargued,

a naturalandeternal essence ofwhat it means to behuman,

but rather a historical and contingent human possibility.21 Human

freedom and perfectibility are indeed inalienable, says Rousseau, but

only asuniversally immanent possibilities awaitingtheir historicalde-

velopment in a just society (TheAutocritique of Enlightenment, 67-

68). Only a revolution would end actual existing slavery in a world

grown dependent upon the colonial production of wealth via slave la-

bor.Humans arequite visibly andeverywhereenchained and unfreein

the actually existing world, Rousseau observed, and in contrast to

the slavish alienation of modernsociety, anaturalexistence mightwellbe preferable.But Rousseau was no defenderof a return to nature;he

repeatedly pointed out its impossibility and futility. Instead,writing

in 1762, a generation before the French and Haitian Revolutions,

Rousseau observed the antinomy between the unfreedom he saw

everywherearoundhim andthe humanfreedomofwhich he couldcon-

ceive, andhis radicalintervention was to imagine a social structure,a

state andrule of law in which the latent and universalpossibility ofhu-

man freedom could become actualized. Le contrat social presentshu-mans as radically historical beings, beings whose existence precedes

their essence, beings who universally possessed the potential to be-

come freein a social world that would develop this potentiality. Recall

the famous words of Le contrat social:

Thispassagefromthe stateof natureto the civil stateproducesa re-

markablechangein man,replacingtheroleof instinctin his conduct

by justice. . . . Even though he depriveshimself in this state of several

advantagesprofferedbynature,he nowgainssuchgreatnewones,hisfacultiesare exercisedanddeveloped,his ideasextended,his feelings

ennobled, ... to such a point that ... he should bless the happy mo-

mentthatwrenchedhimforeveraway[fromnature],andwhichmade

him,astupidandlimitedanimal,intoanintelligentbeingandaman.

(261)

21. Rousseau'scritiqueof Grotius andDiderot is not a critiqueof naturalrightsper

se, but ratherthe unmaskingof their manipulationof a logical category(the "natural")

as mere ideology (the domination of the weak by the strongcalled the"natural

rightto

property"or the defense of monarchythe rightto "security").Although Rousseaudoes

groundhis understandingof human naturevia the "natural'qualities of self-preserva-tion andpity, understoodas universalhuman attributes,this human naturecanonly be

more thana logical possibility in the modernworldif it is developedas "politicalright,"as the subtitle to the Contratsocial puts it, since the state of natureis foreverlost to us.

Cited in TheAutocritique of the Enlightenment,68.



NICK NESBITT 17

To become fully human, that is to say, to become free, is for Rousseau

aproject,

not apre-establishedessence,

in which humans abandonan

inferior natural existence forafreedomrealizableonly in a freesociety.Rousseau's is an exchange "of natural independence for liberty" (Lecontrat social, 73). Rousseau's conception of a freedom not of the re-

gressive state ofnature,but rathera superior,latent human capacity to

be developed in a just society found its first concrete objectification in

the 1789 Declaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen.

Haitians, however, didnot simply reproducethe 1789 Declaration

by transplantingthis foreignbird to tropicalclimes; they demonstrated

human freedom precisely in their unique transformation of this em-

piricalobject.The violent experience of enslavement allowed Haitians

to transform the immanent meaning of the universal declaration of

1789, and it was their singularexperience that made the Haitian Rev-

olution the greatest political event of the age of enlightenment. While

the American and Frenchrevolutionaries, following JohnLocke,spoke

endlessly of "slavery,"few understoodthis critique to include all citi-

zens, unequivocally.22 The American revolutionaries in particular

were often more concernedwith enlightenment asapassagefrom"bar-barism" to "civility" andmastery of gentlemanly social behavior than

with the problem of (positive) freedom.23The American Revolution

was primarilya revolution for equality (ofnonslaves) (232-33), where

liberty meant merely the negative freedom from unjust taxation and

military conscription.If the English, French, and American bourgeois revolutions all

served to create the structural conditions for the protection of individ-

ual liberties of economic choice, the particularityof the Haitian Revo-lution was to redress the imbalance they had introduced between

equality andliberty, in favorof the latter. The Haitian constitutions of

1801 and 1804 invented the concept of a postracial society, one in

which anyone, regardless of skin color or national origin, would be

called "black."Though Article 4 of the 1793 Revolutionary Constitu-

tion grantedcitizenship to any adult foreignerwho resided in Metro-

22. See JohnLocke, TwoTreatisesof Government (New York:Mentor 1965,reprintof CambridgeUP, 1960edition).23. GordonS. Wood,TheRadicalism of the American Revolution (New York:Vin-

tageBooks, 1991),192-98. Woodpoints out, however, that if the patricianAmerican rev-

olutionaries failed to abolish slavery,their egalitarianismcreatedthe social conditions

in which it immediately became a glaringand impossible-to-ignorecontradiction that

lead inexorablyto the civil war andAbolition (186).





NICK NESBITT 19

have drawn the speaker,no matter what his position, into enormous

logicalcontradictions. This becomes evident in one of the few ex-

changes on Saint-Domingue before 1793 where les droits de l'hommeare in fact evoked. A decree of the Assemblee gendrale de la partie

frangaise de Saint-Domingue on March28, 1790 attempts to set forth

the basis of the colony's right to make its laws independently of the

M6tropole (in essence, to maintain the slave-holding plantation sys-

tem). The colonial Assembly affirmsthis rightbasedon its nonidentitywith France: Saint-Domingue is "too little known by France, from

which it is vastly separated"and is marked by "the difference of cli-

mate, of the kind of population, of social morays and habits" (4).Fur-

thermore, however, the decreearguesthat to deny this distinction be-

tween the M6tropoleand its colony would undermine the very basis of

the Constitution and its Declaration: "The national Assembly could

not decree laws concerning the regime internal to Saint-Dominguewithout contradicting principles that it had consecratedin its very first

decrees, notably in its declaration of the rights of man" (4).The colo-

nial Assembly thus defendsits local hegemony based on auniversal no-

tion of human rights, but in orderprecisely to maintain the exclusionof others (slaves)from those rights.

Those whites, mulattoes, and free blacks who did wish to transform

the colonial system immediately graspedsuch contradictions, but re-

fused to take the fatefulstep (universalemancipation)thatwould move

beyond them, continuing to call only for the extension ofcivil rights to

nonslaves. In a letter and decree of December 8, 1791, a group of sol-

diers and commissioners in Croix-des-Bouquets(amongthem P6tion)

called forthe extension "ofpolitical rights in favorof persons of color,based on the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen"

(250).25In a letter of December 14, the members of this rebel army of

"white andcolored citizens" wrote to the Civil Commissioners sent to

Saint-Domingue by the National Assembly to attack "the so-called

General Assembly" because it failed to represent the (supposed)ma-

jority of the "Frenchpeople of Saint-Domingue": mulattoes and free

blacks (244).While calling for the extension ofuniversal constitutional

rights to include themselves, they refused to see that the partiality of

their own claim-excluding as it does slaves-invalidates the logical

25. Letter of December 21, 1791: "R6ponsedes Commisaires nationaux civils, aux

personnesreunies a la Croix-des-Bouquets"in Troisiemesuite des pieces justificativesrelatives aux troubles de Saint-Domingue.No. 166. (Paris:ImprimerieNationale).



20 Yale FrenchStudies

groundof theirargument:"Thelaw obligatesonly those who havecon-

sented to it.... Allpeople

should berepresented.

This is a constitu-

tional principle fully recognizedby the National Assembly. People of

color andfreeblacks should thus have their own representativesin the

Colonial Assembly" (244).The RepublicanCommissioners Mirbeck, Roume, and Saint-L6ger

respond point by point to these demands, and their "logical"rebuttal

covers the naked power and domination of authority with the "voice

of reason"(251).While they admit that the Declaration "containsthe

exposition of eternal truths, which areno less evident in Constantino-

ple and in Hindoustan than in France, ... nevertheless, one sees slav-

ery with the Turks, . .. Indians are divided by castes, and Israel was di-

vided into tribes." Certainly, Franceis lucky to have recognized the

universality of rights: "Happyis the nation that, like France,finds it-

self mature enough to affix the foundation of its constitution to the

rights of man and citizen." Alas, they sigh, these rights are wonderful

in theory,but a colony is

Separatedfrom the center of the Empireby the vast Ocean,... popu-

latedbywhites, blacks,freedpersons,byslavesandbythe admixtureof whites andblacks; ... by the natureof its population, [it]necessitates

a localconstitutionin relationto the stateof existenceof slaves,and

thepoliticalstate ofthosewhoalreadyenjoycivilrights,andwhode-

manda citizen'sactivities.(253)

The logic is brutally, cynically simple: because there areslaves in

Saint-Domingue, there needs to be a local constitution to addressand

maintain that "state"of things. "Suchis the law. ... Will you say that

the Declaration silences a decreethat contradictsit?"(255).The claimof "universal"rights is only valid for Metropolitan France.Followingthis logic, slaverywould not be ahistorical creationof Frenchcolonists

and the government supportingthem, but instead a naturaldestiny in

those lands where Revolution has not (yet) historicized the social

world. Inany case, those who defendthe slave-holdingstatus quohave

force on their side, andcan thus freely forgo logical rigor.Only the un-

compromising actions of Haiti's slaves could import the universal

claims of the Declaration in the face of such inertia.

THE IDEA OF 1804

Twenty years ago, in an essay commemorating the Bicentennial of the

French Revolution originally entitled "The Idea of 1789," JTirgenHa-



NICK NESBITT 21

bermashad to arguefor the continued relevance of an event that, after

intensiveinvestigation

over the course of twocenturies,

seemed in-

creasinglyirrelevant as the generationof May '68 settled into the com-

fortof Mitterandisme.26Ifmy aim here is similar, it is for the oppositereason:we know comparatively little of the Haitian Revolution, de-

spite the fact that it has never receded from public consciousness

throughout the AfricanDiaspora. It has remained actively "silenced"

and largely "unthinkable" in Western discourse, as Michel-RolphTrouillot has argued,since the moment it beganto unfold in 1791.27 A

search of the Cornell library database on the historiography of the

FrenchRevolution reveals over threehundredandfifty Libraryof Con-

gress subject headings alone, and well over 7,000 individual volumes.

A similar search forHaiti reveals twelve subject headings and a grandtotal of 235 volumes (manyof them duplicates)on the events of 1791-

1804.

In France,this silencing of history is even more striking. Walkingfrom bookstore to bookstore on the rue des Icoles a month before the

Bicentennial of HaitianIndependence,Icould findnot asingle work on

the Haitian Revolution in stock in any of the famous stores that linethat street (Gibert, Compagnie, etc.) until I reached the niche post-colonial bookseller L'Harmattan,where Ifinally foundthree dusty vol-

umes: one from 1960 (C6saire),and the other two reprints from the

nineteenth century (Schoelcher,Lacroix).28Whatare the causes of the

Revolution and how did it proceed? Compared with the plethora of

written documents that have driven FrenchRevolutionary scholarshipfortwo centuries, much of this periodwill remain forever unknown to

scholars.29Writing in 1988, Habermas renews Kant's identification of the

world-historicalimportanceof the FrenchRevolution in the idea it putforward:"There seems to be only one remaining candidate for an affir-

mative answer to the question concerning the relevance of the French

26. "PopularSovereigntyas Procedure,"in Between Facts and Norms, 463-90.27. SeeMichel-RolphTrouillot, Silencingthe Past: Powerand the ProductionofHis-

tory (Boston:Beacon, 1995),Ch. 3.28. Of course, scholarlywork on the Haitian Revolution exists in France;my pointis that to findit, one must undertakethe laboriouswork of searchingit out in the depthsof the BibliothBqueandArchives Nationales.

29. David Geggus'sincrediblyuseful study Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloom-

ington: IndianaUniversity Press, 2002) reveals how many archives still remain unex-

plored,pointing to yearsof future research.




Revolution: the ideas [of ...] democracyand human rights [that]form

the universalist core of the constitutional state that emergedfromthe

American and French Revolutions" (1998:465). Despite, in fact pre-

cisely because of, Habermas'sall-too-common oversight (andHaiti?),

I think it is worth pursuingthe question of the idea of the HaitianRev-

olution: does Haiti have anything to teach us about what Foucault

called in his 1983 encomium to enlightenment "theconcept of the uni-

versal that must be kept present and held in mind as that which must

be thought," orwas it merely a poorimitation of its FrenchandNorth

American cousins?30The hegemony of a Euro-Americandominated

historiographywould leadus to view the Haitian Revolution as amere

tropical echo of its better-known FrenchandAmerican cousins.31In-

stead, when confronting the question of emancipation, these earlier

events appeardistinctly parochialandlimited: the Haitian Revolution

is the greatestevent of the ageof Enlightenment because it was the first

to implement, without compromise, not the freedomof a certainclass

or race, nor the civil rights of "constitutional state," but the program

of universal emancipation that we today call human rights.32

From 1791 to 1804, the-Haitian Revolutionaries-notjust Tous-saint, but, as Carolyn Fick has demonstrated, the whole multitude of

Haitian slaves-fought to institute an emancipatory social structure

that would allow for the free development of all human beings. If the

1789 Declaration of Human Rights remained an abstraction that ig-

nored the rights of women and slaves, its universal prescriptionwas

rightly understood by enslaved Haitians to interpellate them as sub-

jects to a politics of emancipation. In Haiti in 1791, the abstractuni-

versal concept of emancipationbecame a more concrete

universal,as

hundreds of thousands of former slaves invented and instituted the

global movement of decolonization that had remained a mere idea in

post-1789 Paris. "Philosophy,"as the Abb6Grdgoireput the matter in

a letter of June 8, 1791 to the mulattoes and free blacks of Saint-

30. Michel Foucault, "Qu'est-ceque les Lumieres?"In Dits et ecrits II, 1976-1988

(Paris:GallimardQuarto,2001), 1506.

31. The workof the historianYvesBenotis one of the few rebuttalsto this scholarlysilence, asilence all the morestrikingwhen one considersthe numberofstudiesofa sim-

ilarwatershedevent in Frenchcolonial history, the AlgerianWar.

32. As such, it was of coursenot freeof its own contradictions,the most glaringbe-

ing the reimposition of forcedlaborby Toussaintand,subsequently,Christophe,aswell

as the Revolution's failure fully to enfranchise women, whose freedomremainedthe

merely negative one not to be enslaved.



NICK NESBITT 23

Domingue, "is broadeningits horizons in the New World.... One daythe sun will shed its

lighton no one but free men

among you;the

raysof the star that spreadslight will fall no more on irons andslaves."33

In a few short years, the ideology and events of the French Revolu-

tion transformedthe world of the slaves of Saint Domingue, who be-

came throughtheir own exertions both citizens of Franceand subjectsof a global culture of the Enlightenment, as C.L.R.James first recog-nized. Toussaint Louverturewas the articulate voice of this transfor-

mation. Again andagain,Toussaint groundshis and his colleagues' ac-

tions on the universal rightsput forwardin 1789. "Theliberty that the

[French]republicansoffer us you say is false,"he writes at the momenthe abandonshis alliance with the Spanishin 1794. Once the Frenchre-

public had abolished slavery,there couldbeno ambiguitypossible: "We

arerepublicans and, in consequence, free by natural right. It can onlybe Kingswhose very name expresses what is most vile and low, who

daredto arrogatethe right of reducing to slavery men made like them-

selves, whom nature hadmade free."34In 1798, as the Directory aban-

doned the advances of the Revolution and preparedthe way for Na-

poleon, Toussaint wrote to them of "the oath that we renew, to buryourselves under the ruins of a country revived by liberty rather than

sufferthe return of slavery"(Black Jacobins, 195).Toussaint asserts that the reimposition of slavery is not a matter of

local concern for a small Caribbean community of Africans at the

boundaries of the known world. Rather, he enjoins the Directory to

"not allow ourbrothers,ourfriends, to be sacrificed to men who wish

to reign over the ruins of the human species." While we can no longer

share the unqualified certainty of the Enlightenment that a concrete"humanspecies"underwritesanyabsolutenotion ofprogress,this crit-

ical spirit should not blind us to the fact that such a universal notion

did in fact drive historical progressin the 1790s toward the universal

abolition of slavery.The Declaration of the Rights of Manhadbecome

a reality for the slaves of Saint-Domingue, and Toussaint affirms un-

ambiguously that its universal prescriptionof a right to freedombased

on reason ("principle"),is the groundsof their actions:

33. Abb6 Gregoire, "Lettre aux citoyens de couleur et ntgres libres de Saint-

Domingue" (Paris:Imprimeriedu patrioteFrangois,place du Th6atreItalien, 1791),10,12.

34. Cited in C.L.R.James,The Black Jacobins:Toussaint Louvertureand the San

Domingo Revolution (New York:Vintage, 1989), 155.




Do [theforcesofreaction]think that men who havebeenabletoenjoythe blessing of liberty will calmly see it snatched away? ... Ifthey had

a thousandlives,theywouldsacrificethemall ratherthanbeforcedinto

slaveryagain.Butno,the samehandwhichhas brokenourchainswillnot enslaveus anew.Francewill not revokeherprinciples.... Butif,tore-establishslaveryin SaintDomingue,thiswasdone,thenIdeclareto

youit wouldbetoattempttheimpossible:we haveknownhow toface

dangersto obtainourliberty,we shallknowhowtobravedeathtomain-tain it. . .. [I]renew, my hand in yours, the oath I have made, to cease

to live ... beforethegodof libertyis profanedandsulliedbythe liber-

ticides,beforetheycansnatchfrommyhandsthatsword,thosearms,which Franceconfidedin me for the defenseof its rightsand those of

humanity,for the triumphof libertyandequality.(Citedin BlackJa-cobins, 195-97)

These Enlightenment ideas did not springmiraculously into Tous-

saint's mind. Fluentin both Creole andFrench,he actively dictated and

rewrote all of his letters with a team of French secretaries until they

forgedthem into the prose of the Enlightenment. Nor was Toussaint

the passive pawn of his French secretaries. DeborahJensonhas shown

how he actively managed public perception of the events in Saint-

Domingue as a veritable "spin doctor"of the age of Enlightenment.35Toussaint subscribed to French paperssuch as the Moniteur,and in-

terviews with him appearedthere in turn throughout the second half

of the 1790s ("Spin Doctor?" 5). The contemporary account of one

Frenchwitness (himself a white plantationowner hostile to Toussaint)is particularlyrevealingas to how this largelyilliterate former slave ac-

tively transformed himself into one of the most famous public figures

of his time: "I saw him in few words verbally lay out the summary ofhis addresses [to his secretaries],rework the poorly conceived, poorlyexecuted sentences; confrontseveral secretariespresentingtheir work

by turns;redo the ineffective sections; transposepartsto place them to

better effect; making himself worthy, all in all, of the natural geniusforetoldby Raynal."36While one of the great figures of the Enlighten-

ment, as C.L.R.James points out, unlike any of the great theorists of

libertyofhis time (Paine,Jefferson,Raynal,Robespierre,Danton),Tous-

saint had lived the formative years of his life as a slave, and this expe-rience allowed him, alone in the 1790s, "to defend the freedomof the

35. DeborahJenson,"ToussaintLouverture,Spin Doctor?:The Haitian Revolutionin the FrenchMedia"(Unpublishedarticle, 2003).

36. Cited in "SpinDoctor?"8.



NICK NESBITT 25

blacks without reservation"(BlackJacobins, 198).Toussaint was not

passively parroting ideas thathad been

importedfrom France and

forcedupon him. BeforeToussaint, the Rights of Man were, with rare,

tentative exceptions, not understoodto extend to Africanslaves. Inthe

face of this aggressivepartiality,Toussaintused the public sphereof the

Enlightenment with tactical genius to redefinethe notion of universal

right. What then arethe groundsof Toussaint's claim to universality?

Ratherthanholding the Haitian Revolution to some contemporary,

external definition of the universal, we can addressit within its own

historical horizon.Variousculturalmaterialsundoubtedlycontributed

to the Haitian conceptualization of the universal. That Vodou and

other elements of African or Taino cultures surviving in 1791 did so

seems to me most likely, but even to begin to offera sufficient demon-

stration of this lies beyond the scope of this article. In the case of Tous-

saint and other Catholic participants in the Revolution, a devout

Christianfaith may have servedas an initial template: the Christianity

of Saint Paul allows for only one principle to define its possible range

of subjects:that one be a human being. "Slaves,women, people of all

professions and of all nationalities, all [areto] be admitted, with nei-ther restriction nor privilege."37Yet this ahistorical, transcendental

truth of the Christian faith was used to justify, as the conversion of

"savages,"the brutallyexclusionary operationsof colonialism and,in-

directly, slaveryitself. Only a radicalfidelity to the lived experience of

slavery, to an experience so brutal and dehumanizing that it simply

could not await divine retributionandthe afterlife,could motivate the

transformationof this transcendental abstraction into the immanent

universalism of human rights.The primaryfactorin the passagefromlocalized, personal,or com-

munitarian ameliorative justice to an unqualified immanent and rev-

olutionary universalism was most likely the Enlightenment thought

embodiedin the Declaration of the Rights ofMan.This Enlightenment

universalism could be simply defined as any truth claim operatingvia

categoriesofreasonindependently of any experience.38Not that any of

37. Alain Badiou,Saint Paul: Lafondation de l'universalisme (Paris:PUF,1997),14.38. This is stated most clearlyin the first version of Kant'sIntroductionto the Cri-

tique of Pure Reason:We apprehend"trueuniversality [wahreAllgemeinheit]," Kant

tells us, through"universalcognitions [allgemeine Erkenntnisse]."These "mustbe clear

andcertainforthemselves, independentlyof experience. ... Forif one removesfromour

experienceseverythingthatbelongsto the senses, therestill remain certainoriginalcon-

cepts and the judgmentsgeneratedfromthem, which must have arisenentirely apriori,




the actorsof the HaitianRevolution hadreadKant,presumably;rather,

bringingKant'sformulation to bear

uponone of the Enlightenment's

key historical events reveals its historical singularity.The plantation

was structured,throughvarious forms of violence, in the vain attempt

to obliterate every intimation of universality from the slaves' mental

life, indeed, to keep them from thinking at all. This it could never ac-

complish, of course.Butempiricalexperience ofthe plantationtold the

slaves of Saint-Domingue that they were subhuman,devoidof freewill

and reason, subject only to the will of an external master. One could

say that in this world, experience told them absolutely nothing about

a universal right to freedom.

In a sense, the Declaration of the Rights of Man appearedfrombe-

yond any empirical experience offeredby daily life in Saint-Domingue

(arrivingsuddenly, on boardvessels from anotherworld). It addressed

itself not to the slaves' experience (ina world where slaverywas a legal

anddaily fact of life),but to their faculty of reason,a faculty that could

recognize the universality of its truthindependently of all experience.

Instead of admitting to the particular "fact of nature" that made up

their daily experience (the slave-masters' attempt to reduce them tosheer animality), in their revolution they strove to act in accordwith

reason, to, as Kant famously put the matter, "act in such a way that

[they could] wish [their]maxim to become a universal law":that slav-

ery be abolished, universally and without exception. More precisely,

slaveryhadmeant the attempt to reducehumans to mere means (ofthe

mechanical, bestial productionof sugar).Instead,they sought to "treat

humanity always as an end [as constituted by free individuals], but

never as a means only."Toclaim that the notion of a"universalreason"is a "European"cat-

egorythat does violence to other forms of human thought in branding

them "mythical," as does PagetHenry in his critique of Habermas,is

independentlyof experience,because they make one able to say more aboutthe objects

that appearto the senses thanmereexperiencewould teach . .. andmake assertionsthat

contain trueuniversalityandstrict necessity" (127-28). As Iwill arguein the remainder

of this paragraph,this last sentence could stand as an abstractformulationof

preciselywhat occursin Haiti,whereemancipationis forcedto occur asa"strictnecessity"whose

truthis independentof all (prior)experience.WhetherKantis actually correctaboutthe

existence of pureapriorijudgments(andI don'tbelieve that he is) is beside the point for

the historical interpretationI amputtingforwardhere.ImmanuelKant,CritiqueofPure

Reason, trans.PaulGeyerandAlan W.Wood(Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity Press,

1997).



NICK NESBITT 27

not false.39Rather,in too quickly judgingthe Enlightenment supposi-

tion of reason as a universalattribute of

humanityto be mere violent

imposition, it remains blind to the singularity of an event such as the

Haitian Revolution.40In affirmingtheir own reasonableness, by con-

ceiving of themselves as rational subjects of a universal imperative to

abolish slavery, the slaves of Haiti transformed the Europeanunder-

standingof reason;by no means did they passively acquiesce to its def-

initions. The Declaration of the Rights of Man was not "intended"to

apply to Africans, anymore than was the American Declaration of In-

dependence.41After the first majordefeat of Napoleon by his equal in

strategic and rhetorical genius, by someone far his superiorin ethical

comportment and insight, that is to say by Toussaint Louverture,the

concept of reason could no longer exclude the AfricanDiasporato the

same degree.42By this measure, these African slaves, andnot the pro-

colonialist French Assembly, were the reasonable beings who recog-

nized themselves in the universal abstractionof the Rights of Manand

acted to transformthe very concept of "reasonablebeing" accordingly.

The concrete historical existence of universals such as the 1789 Dec-

laration revealedthe partiality and incompletion of the actual FrenchRevolution andstate it underwrote.Until 1791, slave rebellions hadre-

mained merely local, rather than universal, events. In 1791, the slaves

of Saint-Domingue may alreadyhave "hadtheir own program"calling

for the amelioration of working conditions ratherthan "anabstractly

couched 'freedom"' (Silencing the Past, 103). Furthermore,Fick has

demonstrated that such autonomous demands, which owed little or

nothing to Jacobinism,persisted as an important factorin the success-

39. PagetHenry, Caliban's Reason:IntroducingAfro-CaribbeanPhilosophy (NewYork:Routledge,2000).

40. This is even truerfor a book such as EmmanuelEze's Race and the Enlighten-ment (Cambridge:Blackwell, 1997).To think that by presenting the racist writings of

Linn6,Kant,Herder,Jefferson,Hegel,andCuvieronehas addressedthe topic of "raceand

the Enlightenment"seems to me not false (these thinkers obviously made racist state-

ments andjudgments)but an extremelypartialhalf-truth.It does not even cast Africans

as passive victims of Enlightenmentthought (by, say,investigating what the actual con-

sequences of these raciststatements might have been);instead it completely andutterlysilences them, erasingthem from any participationin the Enlightenment whatsoever.

41. In Emancipation(s),ErnestoLaclaudescribesthe process of a historicization ofthe universal (New York:Verso,1996).InHaiti, this processof "wideningthe spheresof

[universalism's]application"(34)transformedboththe Revolutionaryworldand thevery

concept of the universal itself.

42. Whichis not to sayEuropeansandNorth Americansdidnot trydesperatelyto do

sobybrandingthe Haitians "barbaric"while conveniently ignoringthe depravityof both

slaveryitself and the horrifyingterroristtactics of GeneralRochambeau.




ful drive to independence. Trouillot is undoubtedly right to observe

that "the claims of the revolution were too radicalto be formulatedin

advance of its deeds" (Silencing the Past, 88), but between 1791 and

1804,the revolutionariesof Saint-Domingueundertookaconsciousre-

ception and reformulation of the Enlightenment's defense of the uni-

versal right of all humans to freely construct their own destiny.It was

the formerslaves of Saint-Domingue alone who graspedthat this nec-

essarily implied the universal abolition of slavery.

GLOBALIZING THE ENLIGHTENMENT:

THE PUBLIC SPHEREOF DISCOURSE

The Abb6Gr6goire,like Condorcet,had defendedthe need to endslav-

ery gradually, and commentators such as Louis Sala-Molins have

rightly taken them to task forthis restriction.43Similarly,JoanDayan

describes "how the making of enlightenment man led to the demoli-

tion of the unenlightened brute [underthe Code noir],how the think-

ing mind's destructive proclivities dominated a passive nature or

servile body."44 Such a description, for all its justice, neglects the de-

gree to which those bodies were able to refuse "passivity"and"servil-

ity." In the end, one could reply to Sala-Molins, it mattered little

whether Gr6goireand Condorcet thought slavery should be abolished

graduallyorimmediately. Itwas their ethical idealism that was unam-

biguous, andit was heardin Haiti. This process, what SrinivasAravu-

mudan has called "Tropicalizingthe Enlightenment," was not one of

mere passive mimicry, but instead one in which the slaves of Haiti ac-

tively restructuredcontemporarydebateon universal human rights.45

43. In his prefaceto Miseres des Lumikres,Sala-Molinsrightly assertsthat "toread

the texts of the Enlightenmentwithout them [the 'negro'slaves], is to ... limit univer-

sal philanthropyto the universality of my own neighborhood"(15)andcalls on readers

to "readthe texts of the Enlightenment while situating themselves on the side of the

blackslaves"(17).The bulk ofhis text is preoccupiedprecisely,however,with the white

Europeanthinkersof the Enlightenment;althoughSala-Molinsventriloquizesthe black

slaves, he tends to reducethem to the roleof reactivevictims, "thosewho must ... suf-

ferin their bodies andsouls" (26).LouisSala-Molins,Lesmiseres des Lumi'res:Sousla

raison, I'outrage(Paris:Laffont,1992).While he intentionally remainswithin the same

francocentricperspectiveas Sala-Molins,YvesBenotoffersacompellingcritiqueofSala-Molins's failureto examine the historico-economic structureunderlyingthe Enlighten-ment critiqueofslavery (105).Benot,LaRevolutionfrangaiseetla fin des colonies,1789-

1794 (Paris:Editions LaDecouverte, [1987],2004).44. JoanDayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods. (Berkely:University of California

Press, 1995),204.

45. In this sense, I think that Aravamudan'sargument,in its focus on whathe calls



NICK NESBITT 29

And yet, little attention has been paid to Haitian participation in

thisglobal

discursivesphere.

Notonly,

Ithink,

because its traces areso

hardfor historians to find, but because attention to the role of ideas in

the Revolution has been perceived as implying an inferior position of

passive reception, when in fact we thus miss precisely the degree to

which this revolution constitutes one of the primaryevents of modern

history. Fick's The Haitian Revolution from Below gives a perfect ex-

ample of this. As she mounts her compelling case for a Revolution as

drivenby the Haitian masses, and not its nominal leaders, she quotesfrom the diaryof ayoung plantation owner named Parham.Returning

fromFrance to his plantation in 1791,he capturesan anonymous rebelslave. Fick quotes from the diaryat length, yet she passes over in si-

lence what to me is its most astounding aspect. The slave "met death

without fear or complaint. We found in one of his pockets pamphlets

printed in France,filled with commonplaces about the Rights of Man

and the Sacred Revolution." The planter disdains these pamphlets as

mere "commonplaces," while they are not even noticed by Fick. Yet

such randomtraces are the only testimony we have to the role the con-

cept of universal human rights played in the Haitian Revolution, andto the active, originalrole Haitians played in the globalization and re-

alization of an Enlightenment that started an ocean away in the elite

salons andrevolutionary clubs of Paris.46

The determining factor that turned these events into what EugeneGenovese has identified as "the call for a new ... more advanced soci-

ety'"47was, perhaps,the mere "idea" of a universal right to autonomy,an idea developed in Saint-Domingue via the slaves' active participa-

"tropicopolitan... metaliteracy,"does not go farenough in demonstratingthe slaves'

active participationin a transnationaldialogueon universal (andnot merely "tropical")humanrights.Instead,the author'smore limited projectis imaginatively to reconstructthe way the reception of Raynal'sHistoire des deux Indes may have "refut[ed]and ex-

tend[ed]WesternEnlightenment assumptions" as it was read in "a context outside its

Europeanpurview."SrinivasAravamudan,Tropicopolitans:Colonialism and Agency,1688-1804 (Durham:Duke University Press, 1999).

46. Even Carolyn Fick's more recent article "The French Revolution in Saint

Domingue:A Triumphof aFailure"(inA Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and

the GreaterCaribbean,ed. DavidBarryGasparand David PatrickGeggus [Bloomington:IndianaUniversity Press,1997])distinctly discounts the powerof ideas as "relativelybe-

nign [philosophy]"(52).The article nonetheless complexifies our understandingof the

idea of freedomin revolutionary Saint-Domingue, articulating the vast rangeof impli-cations that the single term "freedom"boredependingon one'sposition in that society(54,57).

47. FromRebellion to Revolution, 82.




tion in a global discursive community that pre-existed and informed

their ownsubjectivity, yet

one thatthey utterly

transformed.48By

no

means, however, am I claiming this idea to be the sole or evenprepon-derant cause of the Revolution. Any inquiryinto the causes of the Hai-

tian Revolution must necessarily remain a partial and unfinished in-

vestigation. Geggus lists a few of the many causes of the Revolution in

Saint-Domingue in Haitian Revolutionary Studies: the "grouping[of

slaves] in largeunits ..., the involvement of the ruling class in war or

internal struggles..., economic depression..., urbanization...,

high concentrations of the recently enslaved ..., maroon activity ...

[and]emancipationist rumors" (59-62). My point is ratherthat Geg-

gus, like Fick, thus distinctly underplays the admittedly "perplexing

problem" of the influence of ideas on the Revolution because it is so

hardfora historian to quantify.If YvesBenot begins his outstanding study LaRevolution frangaise

et la fin des colonies with precisely the question I wish to ask of the

Haitian Revolution-"What can an ideology accomplish?" (7)-he is

ultimately unable to providea substantial answer forSaint-Domingue

itself because his inquiry tends to focus on the production of ideas inMetropolitan France,while the revolutionary Haitian slaves are im-

plicitly understood as mere actors.49On the one hand, "The Revolu-

tion in France is the carrierof the ideals of liberty andequality forthe

entire world, thus for the slaves themselves," while the slaves, in this

view, "impose" the 1794 Abolition not through an active reformula-

tion of an ethical doctrine, but through the (implicitly preconscious)"act" of soulhvement (19, 8). While the aim of his book is indeed to

move beyond this initial rhetorical abstraction-"[wouldn't]revolu-

tionaryideals have playedany role?"-he nonetheless remainsalmost

entirely focused on events in France.Indeed, "it would be difficult to

abstractthe debate on ideas pursuedin those years, throughthe press,

48. To claim as I am that the slaves of Saint-Domingue were participants in this

transnationalpublic spheredoes not of course imply that they were equal participantsin an ideal instance of Habermasiancommunicative rationality.For their contribution

to the debateto be heard,they hadto resort to violence, but they were nonethelessheard

loud andclear,by Sonthonax in 1793 and the FrenchAssembly in 1794. On the distor-tion of communicative rationalityin situations of colonial violence, see Caliban'sRea-

son, 179.49. Benotexplicitly rejects any denigrationof the slave'scapacityforreflection as "la

vision des colons" (LaRevolutionfrangaiseet la fin des colonies, 139);Iwish merelyto

point out that his book is little concerned with the surviving traces of this autonomous

thought.



NICK NESBITT 31

brochures, books, which certainly made use of formulations inherited

from theEnlightenment,

butceaselessly

considered them under a new

light" (9). Beyond a few tantalizing glimpses (138-40), however, Benot

never demonstrates this process of reflection to have taken place

among the slaves of Saint-Domingue themselves.

The former slaves of Haiti were in fact active participants in a

transnational, though largely oral, discourse on human rights.

In the oral cultures of the Caribbean,[JuliusScott observes,]local rulers

were no more able to control the rapid spreadof information than theywere able to control the movements of the

shipsor the masterless peo-

ple with which this information traveled.The books, newspapers,and

letters which arrivedwith the ships were not the only avenues for the

flow of information and news in Afro-America.While written docu-

ments always had a vital place, black cultural traditions that favored

speech and white laws that restricted literacy gave a continuing pri-

macy to other channels of communication. ... In cultures where peo-

ple dependedupon directhuman contact for information, news spread

quickly and became partof a sharedpublic discourse.50

Though the oral traces of this culture-unlike those preserved in pub-lications of the Metropolitan revolutionary societies-are lost to us

save for a few random traces, the "public sphere" of the Enlightenment

must nonetheless be understood to have extended far beyond the sa-

lons of literate bourgeois European society where Habermas first iden-

tified it.5' The public sphere, in Habermas's usage, refers to a specific

social space that appeared in the Enlightenment, one separate both

from the family and private life on the one hand, and from organized

politics on the other. It is a "public of private people making use of theirreason" (51). In this space, members of society could come together to

discuss issues of mutual interest without the constraints and limita-

tions of political life, and were thus free to critique actual existing po-

litical power.What Habermas isolated and bracketed as the so-called "plebian

public sphere," distinct from the "liberal" sphere he chose to investi-

gate (The Public Sphere, xviii), was in Saint-Domingue neither separate

norfully

subordinate to the dominant one. Habermas's analytical bent,

50. JuliusS.Scott, The Common Wind:Currentsof Afro-AmericanCommunication

in the Eraof the Haitian Revolution (Ph.D. Dissertation, Duke University, 1986), 115.

51. Habermas,TheStructuralTransformationof the Public Sphere:An Inquiryinto

a Categoryof BourgeoisSociety, trans.Thomas Burger(Cambridge:MITPress, 1991).




which hopes to isolate and define acategory(the "bourgeois")in purityfrom all

"plebian" contamination, reproduceson the level of

scholarlyanalysis, in 1962, the actual socio-historical exclusion of slaves from

the discussion of universal rights in the age of enlightenment. Simplyput, contra Habermas, it is impossible to understand the public dis-

cussion of universal human rights in the period of the FrenchRevolu-tion without analyzing how the enslaved "plebian sphere" forcedmembers of the Metropolitan "bourgeois"republicansphere to reori-ent theirdebate,andsubsequently to actuallyabolishslaveryin 1794.52

This "plebiansphere" explicitly andprecisely didnot "remainori-

ented toward the intentions of the bourgeoispublic sphere"as Haber-mas claims occurredfor the French"plebeians."Instead,Haitian slaves

joined the discussion on universal freedom without an invitation,while drawingconclusions andinsights that were directly antithetical

to those of all other constituencies inboth FranceandSaint-Domingue.They reoriented debate andrefused to allow the question of emancipa-tion to be sidelined by the interests of those who dominated them.53As Seyla Benhabib puts the matter (discussing the bourgeois public

sphere'sexclusion of women and their concerns from public debate),the Haitian slaves demonstrated that

thestruggleoverwhatgetsincludedinthepublicagendais itselfastrug-gle for justice and freedom. . . . All struggles against oppressionin the

modernworldbeginbyredefiningwhathadpreviouslybeenconsidered

private,nonpublic,andnonpoliticalissuesas mattersofpublicconcern,asissuesofjustice,as sites ofpowerthatneeddiscursivelegitimation.54

Throughthe slaves' forcedincursion into this discussion,anenlarged

public spherewas formed that cut acrossall levels of society. Their in-cursion into the bourgeoisdemocraticpublic sphereforced the discus-sion on universal freedom to include other,nonbourgeoispublics.55

52. Ihave undoubtedlymade a similar exclusion in not addressinga possibleVodouorother"African"contribution to a Haitianuniversalism,and Ilook forwardto the pos-sible transformationof my argumentin this direction.

53. See Black Jacobins, 116, and Cesaire's Toussaint Louverture:La Revolution

frangaise et le probl•me colonial (Paris:Presenceafricaine, 1959), 171-90, on the sup-pressionof the question of slaveryin the revolutionaryAssembly.

54. SeylaBenhabib,"Models of PublicSpace:HannahArendt,the LiberalTradition,and JiirgenHabermas,"in Habermas and the Public Sphere(Cambridge:MIT Press,1992),79, 84.

55. Nancy Fraser,in "Rethinkingthe PublicSphere:A Contribution to the CritiqueofActually ExistingDemocracy,"in Habermas and the Public Sphere(Cambridge:MIT,



NICK NESBITT 33

Habermas'sdismissal of the "plebian"public sphereechoes the elit-

ism of theHegel

whosevery conception

of thepublic sphere

he cri-

tiques. Hegel's 1820 Philosophy of Right offers an unambiguous and

strikingly original defense of the Haitian Revolution, understood byhim to demonstrate the universal right of slaves to overthrow the sys-tem that enchains them.56Hegel's text is perhapsthe sole exception to

Michel-Rolph Trouillot's observation that "the Haitian Revolution

was unthinkable" until into the twentieth century (Silencing the Past,

82).In his ideal image of the State, however, Hegel defendsthe need for

a strongbureaucraticclass to orient its decisions, simultaneously den-

igratingthe capacityof the masses, informedby the strong functioningof apublic sphere of discussion, to sustain this function. While he de-

fends and celebrates freedom of the press and public discussion (Phi-

losophy of Right,? 315), public opinion forHegel can neverbe anymore

thanthat,mereopinion, "theplace ofparticularandirresponsibleopin-

ions, all the more irresponsibleandparticularbecause they are less var-

ied.'"57In contrast to Kant's defense of the public sphereas the guaran-tee of a free society, Hegel criticizes this claim as mere ideology (in

anticipation of Marx),anddiscounts its inherent progressivepotentialthat Habermas will seek to recover (though only for the "bourgeois"

public): "The public sphere demoted [by Hegel] to a 'means of educa-

tion' counted no longer as aprinciple of enlightenment andas a spherein which reason realized itself. The public sphere served only to inte-

grate subjective opinions into the objectivity assumed by the spirit in

1992), describes how other, nonbourgeois publics (primarilywomen for Fraser)forced

theirway

into thepublic sphere, or, conversely,

createdalternative, nonbourgeoisspheres-what she terms "subalterncounterpublics"-that gave them access to dis-

cussion of political questions of common interest: "Virtuallyfrom the beginning,coun-

terpublicscontested the exclusionarynorms of the bourgeois public, elaboratingalter-

native styles of political behaviorand alternative norms of public speech" (116).Fraser

rehearses the argumentthat the function of this new public spherewas in fact ideologi-

cally repressive,insofar as "thisnew mode ofpolitical domination, like the olderone, se-

cures the ability of one stratumof society to rule the rest" (117).The case of public dis-

course on universal rights in Saint-Domingue is interesting precisely because it is one

case in which exactly the oppositeoccurred:the public use of reasonby privateindivid-

uals (slaves)led to theiremancipation.Unlike Fraser,I am arguingthat Saint-Domingue

was an active participantin a single, variegatedtransnationalpublic sphere,not a meresegregated"counterpublic."

56. I analyze Hegel's defense of the Haitian Revolution in ?57 of the Philosophy of

Right in "TropingToussaint."

57. EricWeil, Hegel et l'Ptat: Cinq conferences (Paris:Vrin, [1950] 2002), 69. See

G.W.F.Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet, ed. Allen Wood

(Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity Press, 1991).




the form of the state" (Transformationof the Public Sphere, 120).Sim-

ilarly,one

might sayof Habermas himself that his

analyticalexcision

of the plebian sphere,while initially paying lip service to the possibil-

ity that it might have functioned as a realm "ofenlightenment," "de-

motes" it to function, silently, as the mere subjective corroborationof

the bourgeoispublic sphere.If Habermas merely silences and ignores the "plebian" sphere,

Hegel's analysis is infected byhis view that the "rabble"[P6bel]in mod-ern society remains subject to the mere "contingencies of public opin-ion, with its ignorance and perverseness, its false information and its

errors of judgment" (Philosophy of Right, ? 317). Public opinion, for

Hegel, remains forever cut off fromparticipation in universal truth, atruth accessible in this view only for a scientifically trainedbureau-

cratic elite. Ineluctably, "the people [ein Volk]is deceived by itself."This is precisely where the Haitian Revolution he analyzes elsewhere

so insightfully (butas a mere imperfect moment in the march to uni-versal freedom) stands as a radical demonstration that, in Saint-

Domingue, all members of society (insofaras slavery and the planta-

tion determined social life in Saint-Domingue in its totality) wereactually and already (singular,antagonistic)participantsin the under-

standing and realization of a universal truth. Those slaves that en-

lightenment thinkers thought unfit to graspthe universal concept of

freedom actually and explicitly demonstrated their understandingwhen they acted to make the Declaration des droits de l'homme live

up to its own universal claims.

When news of the FrenchAssembly's declaration first spreadto the

colonies, these putatively inhuman slaves were able immediately toask exactly the rightquestion: Whois the subjectof these "universal"human rights?If the answer-"We are!"-was obvious, if not to their

"owners,"to them and to us, they simultaneously perceivedthe con-tradiction between this insight and their own suffering and juridicaland social exclusion. The news of the FrenchRevolution came toSaint-

Domingue in part via the huge influx of French sailors constantlyarriving there, bringing news from Europeas interpreted from thosesailors'predominantly exploited, proletarianstandpoint.In 1789alone,"710 vessels brought 18,460 mariners to the booming Frenchcolony"(Common Wind, 50). This nomadic community constituted a quasi-"enslaved" underclass formed by the violence of subaltern life on-board seagoing vessels, one of violent conscription, utter subordina-



NICK NESBITT 35

tion, andstrict, often arbitrarydiscipline.58Sailorson shore in Port-au-

Princeoutnumberedboth the white and free colored

citizenry.59These

sailors,often remainingon the islandforweeks andmonths, interacted

extensively with the petit blanc and urban slave population of Saint-

Domingue as they set up stalls on the wharves to bartergoods they had

broughtfrom overseas (Description topographique,315).Of course, news also arrivedin the form of print. One British trav-

eler describes the feverish excitement that greeted the unloading of a

mailbagin a West Indianport:

Onthepacketmakingtheharbourit causeda crowdnot unlikewhatyoumayhaveseenatasailingorrowingmatchuponthe Thames.Each

wishingtobefirst,andalleagerto learnthereports,thevesselwasbe-

set oneveryquarterbeforeshe couldcometoanchor,andthe wholebaybecamean animatedsceneof crowdedshipsandmovingboats.Manywho couldnotgoto thepacketas sheenteredtheharbour,repairedon

shoreto be ready,there,to meet the news.Thepeopleof town, also,

throngedthebeachin anxiousmultitudes.All wasbusy expectation.

Impatiencescarcelyallowedthe bagsto reachthe office. (Citedin

CommonWind,129)In addition to such overseas sources of information, newspapers

printed in the FrenchWest Indies sprungup. These forums solely de-

voted to reprinting news of the Revolution and the debates of the

Assembly thus multiplied the effective distribution of information ex-

ponentially.The Baron deWimpffen'sobservations of the colony in 1789, forall

their paternalistic condescension, document that the idea ofuniversal

emancipation circulated among a population of slaves possessing ahighly developed (oral)public sphere of discussion: "One has to hear

with what warmth andwhat volubility, andatthe same time with what

precision of ideas and accuracy of judgment, this creature, heavy and

taciturn all day,now squatting before his fire, tells stories, talks, ges-

ticulates, argues,passes opinion, approvesor condemns both his mas-

ter and everyone who surroundshim."60 The rapid expansion of the

58. Scottdescribestheprofound

level of identification British sailors sharedwith the

Africanslaves they broughtto the new world (Common Wind, 137-42).59. Moreau de St. Mery,Description topographique,physique, civile, politique, et

historique de la partiefrangaisedel'isle Saint-Domingue (Paris:Societ6 del'histoire des

colonies francaises,1958),1053.

60. Cited in BlackJacobins, 18.




plantation economy in Saint-Domingue in the years before 1789 led

owners topurchase

slaves-often the most rebellious-from neigh-

boring Anglophone islands (Common Wind, 80); presumably these

slaves, among them Mackandal, Boukman, and Henri Christophe,

broughtwith them stories of the successful revolution that had over-

thrown English rule to establish the United States of America. JuliusScott describeshow anetwork of itinerant free black and mulatto mer-

chants andprivileged urbanslaves spreadnews of the FrenchRevolu-

tion andits ideals fromthe urbancenters of Saint-Domingueto its plan-tations (Common Wind, 45-46). In the neighborhoodof CapFrangais

called Petite Guindebecause of the largenumber of free blacks living

there,aFreemason'slodge "knownby the name ofFriendship"brought

together citizens of all classes in the Masonic promotion of equality

(Description topographique,427).For all the paucity of historical documentation of this oralpublic

sphere, we know, as Yves Benot reminds us, that the mulatto citizen

Dodo-Laplainewas found guilty in 1791 of having "readthe Declara-

tion of the Rights of Man" to a groupof slaves (Revolution frangaise

139).How many other times did similar acts escape the notice of au-thorities? In fact, the Baronde Wimpffen observed in 1790 that the

colonists constantly discussed the Revolution and the Rights of Man

in the presence of their slaves (Black Jacobins, 82). In a speech of De-

cember 1791 to the Assembly, "Onthe troubles in the colonies," a de-

fender of the planters' interests named Dumorier describes the gener-alized circulation ofantislaverydiscoursein 1790:"[Writings]advisingthe insurection of blacks and the massacreof Whites, circulatedin the

workshops, were readthere, andin nocturnal

assemblies, byBlacksu-

pervisors[Nigres commandeurs],by the very people who werethe lead-

ers of the greatinsurrection.'"61In 1792, an Inquiry into the Causes of

the Insurrection of the Negroes in the Island of St. Domingo directlyattributes the first slave revolt to the contradiction between the con-

61. Dumorier, "Surles troubles des colonies, Et I'unique moyen d'assurerla tran-

quillit6, la prosperit6et la fid1lit6 des ces dependancesde l'Empire"(Paris:Didot Jeune,

1791),31. Becauseof theirdesireto inflamepublicopinionagainstthe abolitionists,suchcomments certainlyneed to be readcritically, andBenotdismisses such attackson the

Amis des noirs as "grotesque"(Revolutionfrangaise et la fin des colonies, 138).Ironi-

cally, though, it is often the defendersof slaveryandthe plantation orderwho tell us the

most about the circulation of such discourse, since abolitionists sought to blame the

colonists' violence andblindness, ratherthan the ideas of the Revolution, forthe unrest

in Saint-Domingue.



NICK NESBITT 37

tent of the Declaration and the Assembly's refusal to extend its bene-

fits to the slaves in its colonies.62

Weknow that when Sonthonax declaredthe abolition of slavery on

August 29, 1793,the firstarticle ofhis decreestipulatedthat "The Dec-

laration of the Rights of Man and Citizen will be printed, published,and displayed wherever need be."63Though we will never know how

manyAfro-Haitiansreadthese postings orhadsomeone else readthem,

enough testimony remains to be certain that the declaration was dis-

cussed, analyzed, critiqued, and internalized by the hundreds of thou-

sands of members of this public sphere. No censure of revolutionary

texts even attempted to limit their flow into Saint-Domingueuntil De-cember of 1789(Revolution frangaise, 138).The Metropolitanplanter'sClub Massiac had only limited success in preventing free blacks and

mulattoes from traveling to Saint-Domingue, and despite futile at-

tempts to secure the ports to the flow of printed and oral information,news of the Revolution fueled wild rumors of the abolition of slaverythat spreadthroughoutthe island's nervous plantocracyduringthe fall

of 1789 (Common Wind,66-69). Perhaps,then, the October 31, 1789

issue of the influential paperLesRevolutions de Parisalso made its waythere, where planters,mulattoes, and blacks alike could read:"Philos-

ophycalls the blacks to liberty every day;fromthe firstwordthat it pro-nounced in their favor,their freedom became necessary. It's a fruit of

the tree, it must by rights fall when it is ripe" (cited in Revolution

frangaise, 128).

JoanDayan describes a public realm of theater that came to exist

under Toussaint Louvertureby the late 1790s, a now-official public

sphere "adapted... to the social and political transformations of thecolony" (Haiti, History and the Gods, 186).To what degreedid this of-

ficially sanctionedpublic spherefurther the discussion ofhuman rightsin the years leading up to the final defeat of the French in 1802-1804?

Such fragmentaryevidence of the existence and functioning of a pub-lic spherethat cut across all classes of society in Saint-Domingue con-

tradicts, at the very height of the Enlightenment, the contention that

the bourgeois public sphere was limited to a literate elite. Haitian

62. "Alldecreesof the Assembly ... uniformly purport,that all regulations [onslav-

ery]should originate with the Planters themselves. Afterhaving declaredthat all man-

kind werebornequal, ... they sanctioneda decreethat gavethe lie to the firstprinciplesof their constitution." Inquiryinto the Causes of the Insurrectionof the Negroesin the

Island of St. Doming (London:J.Johnson, 1792),2.

63. ToussaintLouverture:La Revolution frangaiseet le probleme colonial, 213.




slaves forced their way into this discussion from 1789 on and thor-

oughlyradicalized the terms of the debate.

As a radicalextension ofthe processofenlightenment-understoodas the uncoercedpublic use of human reason-the Haitian Revolution

was both agrandiosesuccess and failure. While I have arguedthat it en-

acted a globalization andreconceptualization of the concept of univer-

salhuman right,its ultimate limitation lay in the historical conditions

of that process. Since Haitian slaves could only participate in this

globaldiscursive sphere byassertingtheirrightsthroughviolence, they

ultimately remained trappedwith the logic of the very will to power

that the public use of intersubjective, communicative reasonin the En-

lightenment hoped to overcome. The paradoxof the Haitian Revolu-

tion is that the slaves of Saint-Domingue could only participatein the

Enlightenment attempt to restrainsocial antagonism by means of hu-

man reasonthroughrecourseto absolute violence. While this paradoxcame to haunt the Revolution before it was even completed, it should

not blind us to the substantive contribution of the Haitian Revolution

to the progressof human enlightenment andemancipation.

The Haitian invention of decolonization and universal emancipa-tion was amomentous rupturein being, one that obliteratedthe slave-

holding logic of eighteenth-century global capital. It was an effect of

a concrete universal articulated in a highly specific historical and ex-

istential situation; it pursued the construction of immanent human

possibilities that remain largely unfulfilled today. The fidelity to the

universal truth of human emancipation unleashed in the events of

1791-1804-a promise that remains to be fulfilled amid the violence

andpolitico-economic dysfunctionthat is

contemporaryHaiti-beganthe difficult construction of anunqualifiedand universal freedom first

concretized not in Philadelphia in 1776, nor Paris in 1789, but in the

new state of Haiti on January1, 1804.

Documents

Nesbitt_TheIdeaof1804