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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
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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).
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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).
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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
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10 YaleFrench Studies
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).
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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.
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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.
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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).
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14 YaleFrench Studies
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.
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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).
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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.
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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).
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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).
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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-
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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.
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22 YaleFrench Studies
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.
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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.
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24 Yale French Studies
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.
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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,
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26 YaleFrenchStudies
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).
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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.
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28 YaleFrench Studies
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
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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.
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30 Yale French Studies
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.
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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).
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32 YaleFrench Studies
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,
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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).
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34 YaleFrenchStudies
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-
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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.
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36 YaleFrenchStudies
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.
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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.
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38 Yale French Studies
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.
Recommended