Nesbitt-The Idea of 1804

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The Idea of 1804

Author(s): Nick NesbittReviewed work(s):Source: 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 1804Penser la pensee revient le plus souvent a se retirerdansun lieu sansdimension oii l'idee seule de la pensee s'obstine. Mais la pens~es'espacereellement au monde. Elle informe l'imaginairedespeuples, ... dans lesquels se realise son risque.

-douardGlissant, 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 twentiethcentury were invented in Haiti: decolonization and neocolonialism.Haiti was the first to demonstrate that the colonized can take hold oftheir 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 merchantclassto create an instable balance of power. This depended upon the skim-ming of surplus profits from tertiary imports and a correspondingsys-tematic underdevelopmentoflocal productiveforces,all at the expenseof the excluded majority,a process that Fanon would first identify inLes damnes de la terreand one that Michel-Rolph Trouillot has bril-liantly analyzed in Haiti: State Against Nation. 1 Both the unfinishedprojectof decolonization and the actuality of neocolonial imperialismimply that attention to the Haitian Revolution and its aftermathis ofmost pressing concern if we are to understandthe origins andclassicforms of these problemsthat continue to confrontourtwenty-first cen-tury.However important these problems may remain, I wish to arguehere 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. TheOriginsandLegacyof Duvalierism (New York:Monthly Review Press, 1990).YFS107, TheHaiti Issue, ed. DeborahJenson,? 2005 by YaleUniversity.

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NICK NESBITT 7cialism and the looming degeneration of liberal democracies into citi-zen surveillance machines. Wehave seen two hundredyears of politi-cal populism that has lead to totalitarianism and genocide, to fascistand 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 tocompensate forpopulardisenfranchisement, as oligarchies of the elitemake their own decisions regardingwar, the environment, and socialjustice in the name of those they are supposed to represent. After thecollapse of socialism and the rise of neo-nationalisms, as we confrontreactionaryWesternpolitical elites that eagerly sacrifice the rights oftheir subjects forthe chimera of impregnablefortress-states, the asser-tion of the universal rightsofautonomous subjects aresuddenly amostpressingand basic concern.Apositive ideaof human rights,understoodas the capacity of individuals and collectivities to exert control overtheir existence anddevelopment has suddenly taken precedence as wecatapultheadlonginto what Ulrich Beckhas called apostnational "sec-ond" modernity.3 This positive notion of human rights today movesbeyond the merely negative safeguardsthat were called human rightsin the Englishand American traditions. It is only after the political andhuman disasters of the last century that we havebegun to move towardthe 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 couldhear:freedom did not mean leaving landowners alone to enjoy theirproperty,human orotherwise. It moved beyondmere national andcivilrights, those of the "citoyen" of 1776 and 1789, to press the universalclaims of the rightsof "Man."4Haiti presentedfreedom to the world asan absolutely true logic, one that must be made, in turn, universal re-2. SeeGeorgLukaics,TheProcessofDemocratization, trans. SusanneBernhardt ndNorman Levine(Albany:SUNY Press,1991).3. UlrichBeck,Pouvoiret contre-pouvoir 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 Studiesality:no humans can be enslaved. Freedomcanonly exist when we cre-ate a global society whose structures and laws allow for the full andunimpeded development of ourpossibilities as living individuals.Thisidea was truly unthinkable in a world groundedand dependenton theenslavement of aportion of the human population.The idea ofthe Hai-tian Revolution was so scandalousthat enormous efforts were madetosilence it, to falsify it, to demonize, in short to reduceHaiti asboth ideaandreality to no more than the "poorestcountry in the WesternHemi-sphere." Haiti was immediately quarantined and pauperized in theforceddysfunction of a postcolonial state undermined andhamstrungby the terrifiedslave-holding powers that then controlled the globe.Inhindsight, however, aswe look back acrosstwo hundredyearsofHaitianindependenceat a succession ofdespoticregimes,political dys-function, systemic economic underdevelopment, and terrifyingsocialinjustice, one might question the utility of a revolution that pavedthe way for these historical (under-)developments. Perhapsall thosetimorous French Enlightenment thinkers, from Condorcet to I'Abb6Gregoireand others were right:a too rapidfreedom grantedto slaves"unprepared" or 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 ashesin the name of a single imperative:universal emancipation. In the faceof this categoricalimperative, nothing else mattered,not property,nothappiness,oranyothergood.Becauseof this total revolution, hundredsof thousands of Haitians avoided the vicious reprisals that fell uponblacks in Guadeloupewhen Napoleon reinstatedslaverytherein 1802.Moreover, this gain is quantifiable: they avoided precisely forty-sixyearsof enslavement (1802-1848). Who else but those concernedcouldjudge what this progresswas worth? The slaves of Saint-Domingue,who knew slavery first-hand,decided for themselves that, faced withits imminent reimposition, nothing else mattered, that they wouldnever 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" or 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. Fora strongcritiqueof the limitations of EnlightenmentUniversalism in light of the prob-lem of slavery,see LouisSala-Molins,Lesmiseres desLumiBres: ousla raison,I'outrage(Paris;Laffont, 1992).


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NICK NESBITT 9and Antonio Negri's Empire, I found myself thinking when I was inHaiti recently that such accounts of the radical constituent subjectiv-ities of the multitude always seem to describe eminently first-worldsites and events.6 Any contemporaryattempt to understand universalemancipation needs to include, perhapseven to begin from, a site likeHaiti, which both invented this process and has demonstratedover thelast two centuries the insufficiency of anyproject that would considerthe "ThirdWorld"--as doesEmpire-through merecursoryreferencesto a few canonical theoretical texts (those of EdwardSaid and GayatriSpivak,for example).While there is no reason one should expect suchauthors 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 aglobal mass-democratic movement in sites such as Seattle, Genova,Porto Alegre, Paris, and New York, these events confront an alreadyconstituted state of (relative) aw andorder.While the Haitian Revolu-tion demonstrates the radical efficacy of constituent power, no lessdoes attention to Haitian history demonstrate its radical nsufficiency.In the first world, it's easy to condemn all representative govern-ments-in their varying degreesof, or lack of, representation of popu-lar sovereignty-as operating an unjust alienation of constituentpower. Inthis view, all rule of law is subjugationto an abstract univer-sal; all mediation, all representationis always alreadyalienation. Theneo-Schmittian trashing of a despised "parliamentarism"and mere"opinion,"of the United Nations and the call forhuman rights, seemsall too easy from sites like Washingtonor Paris(witness Alain Badiou'sEthics).7No constituted power, but only the direct expression of theconstituent will of the multitudes is just for Hardt and Negri. The au-thors never question the degreeto which constituted power might ac-tually both oppress,andparadoxicallyenable the constituent power ofthe multitude to emergein its multiple singularforms. To what degree,for example, might freedom of the press, intellectual inquiry, and aglobalpublic 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 readilyunderstandsNegri'svilification of constituted power,but that doesn't makehis analysis


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10 YaleFrench StudiesWhat can such a one-sidedvision of the rule of law asalwaysalready

(rather han potentially) evil mean for a place like Haiti (orRwanda,orthe 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 instead no more than the direct expressionofviolentdomination (whoever has the machine guns and torture chambers isright)? Contemporary Haiti is the apotheosis of the deformalizationand derationalization of law into a permanent state of emergency andthe arbitraryand unpredictable wielding of raw power.9 Again andagain, 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 rightly celebratehas neverbeen enough to ensurethatthose subjects can realize their full human potential as autonomous,creative subjects, that aftertheir insurgency they will not be taken outof 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 seeminglyunending andtotal state of crisis? Only a critical analysis of the multi-ple, ambiguous, and contradictoryforms of constituted power in thatnation over the past two centuries, ratherthan its absolute vilification,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 absolutelack of popularsovereignty and governmental mediation imaginable.While one must resist any fetishization of the rule of law, which mustalways remain subordinate to the process of democratization, andwhich 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 ParliamentaryDemocracy (Cambridge:MIT Press, 1985) and The Concept of the Political (NewBrunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1976). See William Scheuermann's study ofSchmitt's FrankfurtSchool critics Otto KirchheimerandFranzNeumann fora defenseof rationalizeduniversalistic law as an unfinished projectof modernity, Between theNorm and the Exception:TheFrankfurtSchool and the Rule of Law (Cambridge:MITPress, 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 11process of democratization.10In contrast with its glaring absence incontemporary 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 ofarbitraryforce and subjugation, abolishing slavery immediately andunconditionally, 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, forexample, a universal ban on slavery.This is not to claim that there hasbeen progressin an absolute sense. Such a claim would be hollow andmeaningless in the face of the many historical failures and ideologicalmanipulations of the ideaof human rights.JacquesMourgeon'sbriefyetdense study Les droits de l'homme offersan overview of the historicaldevelopment andinstantiation of human rights, attackingin particularthe idea that therehas been any absolute progress n their implementa-tion since 1789.12If,as he claims (andhe cites no statistics), since 1945the 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 ofgenocide have continued unabated, if all this and more is true, is onethen justified in concluding that "the problem is no longer one ofknowing whether here or there one can find rights emerging from thevoid ..., but if in all cases the powerbroughtto bearby andenlargedbytheir claim does not use theirjustifications to rein them in" (53)? 3Sucha conclusion conflates what I think aretwo separate ssues: the (alwayspartial and contingent) advancement of human rights in any specific

10. FranzNeumann forcefullyarguesthis point in his article "TheConcept of Polit-ical Freedom," n The Democratic and the Authoritarian State:Essaysin Political andLegalTheory(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). Furtherreferencesto this and all other texts cited morethan once will be madeparentheticallyin the text.13. This andallothertranslations romthe Frencharemy own,unlessotherwisenoted.Viewinghumanrightsfromthe standpointof a jurist,Mourgeonclaims that the utility ofhumanrightsexists only when they gainobligatory orcefromtheir inclusion in a consti-tution (Lesdroits del'homme,68).Sucha claimignorespreciselythe decisiveinterventionof the slavesinvolvedin the HaitianRevolution.The slavewith a copyof the Declarationof the RightsofMan n his shirtpocket,like ToussaintLouverturebefore1801,hadno con-stitution to enforcehis claims,yet these claims nonethelessbroughtaboutenormoushis-toricalchange.SeeAlth6 Parham,My Odyssey:Experiencesof a Yo!rngRefugee romTwoRevolutions.By a Creoleof SaintDomingue (LouisianaStateUniversity Press, 1959),34.


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12 Yale French Studiescase andthe critiqueof subsequentnew and different forms of their de-nial that arisewith historical events. It passes over the fact that manyhistorical changeshave occurredpreciselybecause the claims ofhumanrightswere pressedandimperfectly advanced,and the relative(andstillincomplete) decreasein human enslavement since the eighteenth cen-tury offers us perhapsthe least ambiguouscase of this advancement.Given the suffering it engenderedand its historical aftereffects inan (economically andjuridically) mpoverished country, does the Hai-tian Revolution demonstrate historical progress in social justice?14Kant asked the same question aboutthe French Revolution in his 1798text "Contest of the 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 thatnegatedthe local, communitarianpolitics ofrace,ethnicity, and nationto interpellate all those innately endowed with the capacity to under-stand its logic. Kant asks the question "Is the human racecontinuallyimproving?"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 thecase of slavery as an attempt at radicalde-humanization posit human-ity as no more than an immanent possibility to be conquered:amidtheviolence and destruction of enslavement and war, humanity remainsonly 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 theevents 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 withinthe human race"(177).The Haitian revolutionaries who had laboredasslaves, 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 paragraphsappeared n Nick Nesbitt,"TropingToussaint,"Research n AfricanLiteratures35/2 (Spring2004).15. ImmanuelKant,"TheContest of the Faculties" n Kant:Political Writings,rans.H. B.Nisbet (Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity Press, 1970, 1991),176-90.


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NICK NESBITT 13domination 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. Inresponseto this attempt at dehumanization, Haitian slaves, certain in their ownhumanity, conceived of anotherprojectand worked to "produce"thatevent: universal emancipation from slave labor.A seemingly unrelated moment in the history of philosophy dra-matically underscores the momentous implications of the HaitianRevolution as a "production"of universal human autonomy. In themiddle 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: "Whatpathtoward infinity does man possess?" he asks. "Andhow can man par-ticipate in infinity?"16Ratherthan banishing any concrete answer tothese questions asthe mere dreamsof 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 liesat the root of modern experience:

Thereexistsno otherpaththanthe mediationofform.For his is thefunctionofform:ntransformingis existence ntoform, hat s to saybytransformingecessarilyall that is in him of the orderof the livedinto an objective orm,whatever t maybe, in whichhe objectivateshimself,mandoubtlessdoesnot liberatehimselffromthe finitudeofhispointofdeparture,.. but, nemergingrom initude,he causes hisfinitude o overcometself in somethingnew.Thisis whatmakesupanimmanentnfinity. 41)

This vision ofhuman experience as the productionof a simultaneouslyimmanent, yet infinite truth via the process of production is perhapsthe definingcharacteristicof Westernmodernity andits subject,homofaber.The insight of Giambatista Vico that humans can only have ac-cess to truth by exercising their freedom to create, knowingly trans-formingthe worldthroughthe fabricationof objectsfirst conceived viatheir faculty 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: ditions Beauchesne,1972).


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14 YaleFrench Studiesdoes this truth of Modernity,understoodas the construction of an im-manent infinity, receive more striking form than in the experience ofNew Worldslavery that culminates in the 1804 Declaration ofHaitianIndependence.17The novelty of the Haitian Revolution andIndependencestandsindialectical relation to the traditions it critiqued and perfected. Haitiuniquely demonstrates the complex interdependence of human rightsand preexisting symbolic constructs (such as ideas, social forms andcustoms, andpositive law), ratherthan the simple priority of the for-mer overthe latter.18Forthe concept ofhuman rightsis just that,acon-cept; it does not preexist its formulations in the human mind and itsconsequent objectifications. Human autonomy is no hidden reserve; tcannot be saved up and it cannot be separatedfrom its expression. Itonly 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 humanautonomy, they must already have acceded to what their enslaverswould deny them: subjectivity and a consciousness of their universalrights as humans. In other words, they have already become autono-mous participants in a globalhuman discursive community reflectingon human rights, a community that preexisted their birth, subjectsdemonstratingprecisely the processof majorationthat Kantcalled"en-lightenment." They were able actively to construct their right to au-tonomy precisely because they were able to representto themselves thediscrepancybetween a received symbolic object (the Ddclaration desdroits 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 FREEDOMThe Haitian Revolution implemented a radically new conception offreedom that arose in the Enlightenment to receive perhapsits fullest

17. As well as its negation:the ecologicalcatastrophe hat 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 affirmationofprogress,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 15realization on a small Caribbean sland many thousands of kilometersfromParis.This concrete, universal notion of freedommay have arisenfirst in Diderot's Encyclopedie, in articles such as droit naturel, popu-lation, andesclavage. There, the authors of the Encyclopedie attackedslavery by means of an abstract,universal criterion: if all humans arecharacterizedby 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 makethem into animals, a logical impossibility. For the authors of the En-cyclop&die,all humans are inalienably human in their possession offreewill. 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 unqualified forfreedom?), ookthe immeasurablestep ofuniversally disqualifyingslaverythroughtheadvancement of reason as enlightenment.As such, however, this argument against slavery remained highlyvulnerable to the devastating critique 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,logicalargument.It may well be that slavery is a logical impossibility, but theEncyclopedie as a projectof abstract,rational enlightenment can onlyproceedwith the weak hope that aspeople readits critique, slaverywillmagically disappear, hat enlightened reasonwould make realexistingslavery disappearas it speaks the word, the magical incantation, thatwould conjureits disappearance. fslaveryis alogical impossibility, weare still confronted with its real existence after the appearanceof theEncyclopedie.19It is here, amid the contradiction between enlightened reason andreally existing society that Rousseau inserts his radicalinvention of ahistoricized, 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 freedom andhuman be-

19. See MarkHulliung, TheAutocritique of the Enlightenment: Rousseau and thePhilosophes (Cambridge:HarvardUniversity Press, 1998).20. Jean-JacquesRousseau, Le contrat social in Oeuvres politiques (Paris:Bordas1989).


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16 YaleFrenchStudiesing: freedom is not, as Diderot and other Enlightenment philosopheshadargued,a naturalandeternal essence ofwhat it means to behuman,but rather a historical and contingent human possibility.21 Humanfreedom and perfectibility are indeed inalienable, says Rousseau, butonly asuniversally immanent possibilities awaiting their historical de-velopment in a just society (TheAutocritique of Enlightenment, 67-68). Only a revolution would end actual existing slavery in a worldgrown dependent upon the colonial production of wealth via slave la-bor.Humans arequite visibly andeverywhereenchained and unfreeinthe actually existing world, Rousseau observed, and in contrast tothe slavish alienation of modernsociety, anaturalexistence mightwellbe preferable.But Rousseau was no defenderof a return to nature;herepeatedly pointed out its impossibility and futility. Instead, writingin 1762, a generation before the French and Haitian Revolutions,Rousseau observed the antinomy between the unfreedom he saweverywherearoundhim andthe humanfreedomofwhich he couldcon-ceive, andhis radicalintervention was to imagine a social structure,astate andrule of law in which the latent and universalpossibility ofhu-man freedom could become actualized. Le contrat social presents hu-mans as radically historical beings, beings whose existence precedestheir essence, beings who universally possessed the potential to be-come freein a social world that would develop this potentiality. Recallthe famous words of Le contrat social:

Thispassage romthe stateof nature o the civil stateproduces re-markable hange n man,replacingheroleof instinctin his conductby justice. . . . Even though he depriveshimself in this state of severaladvantages rofferedynature,he nowgainssuchgreatnewones,hisfacultiesare exercisedanddeveloped, is ideasextended,his feelingsennobled, ... to such a point that ... he should bless the happy mo-mentthatwrenchedhimforever way[fromnature], ndwhichmadehim,astupidand imitedanimal, ntoanintelligentbeingandaman.(261)

21. Rousseau'scritiqueof Grotius andDiderot is not a critiqueof naturalrightsperse, but ratherthe unmasking of their manipulationof a logical category(the "natural")as mere ideology (the domination of the weak by the strongcalled the "naturalrighttoproperty"or the defense of monarchythe rightto "security").Although Rousseaudoesgroundhis understandingof human naturevia the "natural'qualities of self-preserva-tion andpity, understoodas universalhuman attributes,this human naturecanonly bemore thana logical possibility in the modernworldif it is developedas "politicalright,"as the subtitle to the Contratsocial puts it, since the state of nature s forever ost to us.Cited in TheAutocritique of the Enlightenment,68.


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NICK NESBITT 17To become fully human, that is to say, to become free, is for Rousseaua project,not a pre-establishedessence, in which humans abandonaninferior 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, atent human capacity tobe developed in a just society found its first concrete objectification inthe 1789 Declaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen.

Haitians, however, didnot simply reproducethe 1789 Declarationby transplantingthis foreignbird to tropicalclimes; they demonstratedhuman freedom precisely in their unique transformation of this em-piricalobject.The violent experience of enslavement allowed Haitiansto transform the immanent meaning of the universal declaration of1789, and it was their singularexperience that made the Haitian Rev-olution the greatest political event of the age of enlightenment. Whilethe American and Frenchrevolutionaries, following JohnLocke,spokeendlessly of "slavery,"few understood this critique to include all citi-zens, unequivocally.22 The American revolutionaries in particularwere often more concernedwith enlightenment asapassagefrom"bar-barism" to "civility" andmastery of gentlemanly social behavior thanwith the problem of (positive) freedom.23The American Revolutionwas primarilya revolution for equality (ofnonslaves) (232-33), whereliberty meant merely the negative freedom from unjust taxation andmilitary conscription.If the English, French, and American bourgeois revolutions allserved 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 betweenequality andliberty, in favorof the latter. The Haitian constitutions of1801 and 1804 invented the concept of a postracial society, one inwhich anyone, regardless of skin color or national origin, would becalled "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, 1960 edition).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 conditionsin which it immediately became a glaringand impossible-to-ignorecontradiction thatlead inexorablyto the civil war andAbolition (186).


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18 Yale French Studiespolitan Francefora year,24 he French Revolution had instituted an as-similationist version of nationalism that predicatedsocial unity uponthe erasure (ratherthan tolerance) of communitarian difference andonly bannedslaveryunder duressin 1794. On the otherhand,theAmer-ican Revolution could only base its pluralist conception of social to-tality upon the continuing enslavement of a portion of its population.The Haitian Revolution, informed as it was by the directexperienceof slavery, could not simply take over unchanged the liberal model ofsociety importedfromEnglandand North America:not simplybecauseof the formal emphasis placed upon individual (negative) liberties atthe expense ofuniversal freedom,but because the liberal model furtherpresupposes individuals as free autonomous subjectswho merelyneedto be left alone to go about theirbusiness, aview that Marxwould latercritique as the self-serving ideology of a dominant social class. The for-mer slaves who drove the Haitian Revolution to its culmination in anovel constitution knew from experience that all humans arenot free;they took human autonomy not as an a priori given, but strove to en-act it asasocial, human accomplishment, anongoingconstruction thatwas itself only instantiated in the process of giving form to anemanci-pated society. The simple exigencies ofexperienceled them to the sameconclusions Marxwould theorize a half-century later: human auton-omy can only be conquered by a community as an inter-subjectiveprocess; by herself, an individual can only return to an (inferior) tateof nature (marooning).

COLONIALIST CONTRADICTIONSIf one accepted the notion that African slaves were human, the pro-mulgation of the Declaration in 1791 necessarily engenderedan enor-mous contradiction between the universal norm of freedom and thefact of actually existing slavery in France's colonies. All those bene-fiting from the slave-holding system-including not only whites, butalso mulattoes and even freeblacks--studiously avoided invoking thecause of human rights in their fight for representation. Most often inthe early years of the Revolution, when the National Assembly wasstill trying to maintain slaveryin the face of the first slave andmulattorevolts, the Declaration remained a white elephant never mentionedby anyone in the voluminous debates. To do so would immediately

24. Between Facts and Norms, 509.


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NICK NESBITT 19have drawn the speaker,no matter what his position, into enormouslogical contradictions. 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 partiefrangaise de Saint-Domingue on March28, 1790 attempts to set forththe basis of the colony's right to make its laws independently of theM6tropole (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, fromwhich 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 decree arguesthat to deny this distinction be-tween the M6tropoleand its colony would undermine the very basis ofthe Constitution and its Declaration: "The national Assembly couldnot decree laws concerning the regime internal to Saint-Dominguewithout contradicting principles that it had consecratedin its very firstdecrees, 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 transformthe colonial system immediately graspedsuch contradictions, but re-fused to take the fateful step (universalemancipation)that would movebeyond them, continuing to call only for the extension of civil rights tononslaves. In a letter and decree of December 8, 1791, a group of sol-diers and commissioners in Croix-des-Bouquets(amongthem P6tion)called for the 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 toSaint-Domingue by the National Assembly to attack "the so-calledGeneral Assembly" because it failed to represent the (supposed)ma-jority of the "Frenchpeople of Saint-Domingue": mulattoes and freeblacks (244).While calling for the extension of universal constitutionalrights to include themselves, they refused to see that the partiality oftheir own claim-excluding as it does slaves-invalidates the logical

25. Letter of December 21, 1791: "R6ponsedes Commisaires nationaux civils, auxpersonnesreunies a la Croix-des-Bouquets"n Troisiemesuite des pieces justificativesrelatives aux troubles de Saint-Domingue.No. 166. (Paris: mprimerieNationale).


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20 Yale FrenchStudiesgroundof their argument:"Thelaw obligates only those who havecon-sented to it.... All people should be represented.This is a constitu-tional principle fully recognizedby the National Assembly. People ofcolor andfreeblacks should thus have their own representativesin theColonial Assembly" (244).The RepublicanCommissioners Mirbeck, Roume, and Saint-L6gerrespond point by point to these demands, and their "logical"rebuttalcovers the naked power and domination of authority with the "voiceof reason"(251).While they admit that the Declaration "containstheexposition 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 theuniversality of rights: "Happy s the nation that, like France,finds it-self mature enough to affix the foundation of its constitution to therights of man and citizen." Alas, they sigh, these rights are wonderfulin theory,but a colony is

Separated rom the center of the Empireby the vast Ocean,... popu-latedbywhites, blacks, reedpersons,byslavesandbythe admixtureof whites andblacks; ... by the natureof its population, [it]necessitatesa localconstitution n relation o the stateof existenceof slaves,andthepoliticalstate of thosewhoalready njoycivilrights,andwhode-manda citizen'sactivities. 253)The logic is brutally, cynically simple: because there areslaves inSaint-Domingue, there needs to be a local constitution to addressandmaintain 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 Frenchcolonistsand the government supportingthem, but instead a naturaldestiny inthose lands where Revolution has not (yet) historicized the socialworld. Inany case, those who defendthe slave-holding status quohaveforce on their side, andcan thus freely forgo logical rigor.Only the un-compromising actions of Haiti's slaves could import the universalclaims of the Declaration in the face of such inertia.

THE IDEA OF 1804Twenty years ago, in an essay commemorating the Bicentennial of theFrench Revolution originally entitled "The Idea of 1789," JTirgen a-


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NICK NESBITT 21bermashad to arguefor the continued relevance of an event that, afterintensive investigation over the course of two centuries, seemed in-creasinglyirrelevant as the generationof May '68 settled into the com-fort of 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 consciousnessthroughout 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 Asearch of the Cornell library database on the historiography of theFrenchRevolution 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 theBicentennial of Haitian Independence,Icould findnot a single work onthe 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 found three dusty vol-umes: one from 1960 (C6saire),and the other two reprints from thenineteenth century (Schoelcher,Lacroix).28What are the causes of theRevolution and how did it proceed? Compared with the plethora ofwritten documents that have driven FrenchRevolutionary scholarshipfortwo centuries, much of this periodwill remain forever unknown toscholars.29Writing in 1988, Habermas renews Kant's identification of theworld-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,"n 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 searching t 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 StudiesRevolution: the ideas [of ...] democracyand human rights [that]formthe universalist core of the constitutional state that emergedfrom theAmerican 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 Haitian Rev-olution: does Haiti have anything to teach us about what Foucaultcalled in his 1983 encomium to enlightenment "the concept of the uni-versal that must be kept present and held in mind as that which mustbe thought," orwas it merely a poorimitation of its FrenchandNorthAmerican cousins?30The hegemony of a Euro-Americandominatedhistoriographywould leadus to view the Haitian Revolution as ameretropical echo of its better-known FrenchandAmerican cousins.31In-stead, when confronting the question of emancipation, these earlierevents appeardistinctly parochialandlimited: the Haitian Revolutionis the greatestevent of the ageof Enlightenment because it was the firstto implement, without compromise, not the freedomof a certain classor race, nor the civil rights of "constitutional state," but the programof 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 ofHaitian slaves-fought to institute an emancipatory social structurethat would allow for the free development of all human beings. If the1789 Declaration of Human Rights remained an abstraction that ig-nored the rights of women and slaves, its universal prescriptionwasrightly understood by enslaved Haitians to interpellate them as sub-jects to a politics of emancipation. In Haiti in 1791, the abstractuni-versal concept of emancipation became a more concrete universal, ashundreds of thousands of former slaves invented and instituted theglobal movement of decolonization that had remained a mere idea inpost-1789 Paris. "Philosophy,"as the Abb6Grdgoireput the matter ina letter of June 8, 1791 to the mulattoes and free blacks of Saint-

30. Michel Foucault, "Qu'est-ceque les Lumieres?" n 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 forced aborby Toussaintand,subsequently,Christophe,aswellas the Revolution's failure fully to enfranchise women, whose freedomremainedthemerely negative one not to be enslaved.


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NICK NESBITT 23Domingue, "is broadeningits horizons in the New World. ... One daythe sun will shed its light on no one but free men among you; the raysof the star that spreadslight will fall no more on irons andslaves."33In 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 forward n 1789. "Theliberty that the[French] epublicansoffer 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: "Wearerepublicans and, in consequence, free by natural right. It can onlybe Kingswhose very name expresses what is most vile and low, whodaredto arrogatethe right of reducing to slavery men made like them-selves, whom nature had made free."34 n 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 thansufferthe return of slavery"(Black Jacobins, 195).Toussaint asserts that the reimposition of slavery is not a matter oflocal concern for a small Caribbean community of Africans at theboundaries of the known world. Rather, he enjoins the Directory to"not allow ourbrothers,ourfriends, to be sacrificed to men who wishto reign over the ruins of the human species." While we can no longershare 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 notiondid in fact drive historical progressin the 1790s toward the universalabolition of slavery.The Declaration of the Rights of Manhadbecomea reality for the slaves of Saint-Domingue, and Toussaint affirms un-ambiguously that its universal prescriptionof a right to freedombasedon reason ("principle"), s the groundsof their actions:

33. Abb6 Gregoire, "Lettre aux citoyens de couleur et ntgres libres de Saint-Domingue" (Paris: mprimeriedu patrioteFrangois,place du Th6atreItalien, 1791),10,12.34. Cited in C.L.R.James,The Black Jacobins:Toussaint Louvertureand the SanDomingo Revolution (New York:Vintage, 1989), 155.


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24 Yale French StudiesDo [theforcesofreaction]hink that men who havebeenable o enjoythe blessing of liberty will calmly see it snatched away? ... Ifthey hada thousandives,theywouldsacrifice hemall rather hanbeforcedntoslaveryagain.Butno,the samehandwhichhas brokenourchainswillnot enslaveus anew.Francewill not revokeherprinciples... But f,tore-establishlaveryn SaintDomingue,hiswasdone, henIdeclareoyouit wouldbetoattempt heimpossible:we haveknownhow tofacedangerso obtainour iberty,we shallknowhowtobravedeath omain-tain it. . .. [I]renew, my hand in yours, the oath I have made, to ceaseto live ... before hegodof liberty s profaned ndsulliedbythe liber-ticides,before heycansnatch rommyhands hatsword, hosearms,which France onfidedn me for the defenseof its rightsand those ofhumanity, or the triumphof libertyandequality. Cited n BlackJa-cobins, 195-97)These Enlightenment ideas did not springmiraculously into Tous-saint's mind. Fluentin both Creole andFrench,he actively dictated andrewrote all of his letters with a team of French secretaries until theyforgedthem into the prose of the Enlightenment. Nor was Toussaintthe passive pawn of his French secretaries. DeborahJensonhas shownhow 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 halfof the 1790s ("Spin Doctor?" 5). The contemporary account of oneFrenchwitness (himself a white plantation owner 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 secretariespresenting their workby turns;redo the ineffective sections; transposepartsto place them tobetter effect; making himself worthy, all in all, of the natural geniusforetold by Raynal."36While one of the great figures of the Enlighten-ment, as C.L.R.James points out, unlike any of the great theorists oflibertyofhis 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 25blacks without reservation"(BlackJacobins, 198).Toussaint was notpassively parroting ideas that had been imported from France andforcedupon him. BeforeToussaint, the Rights of Man were, with rare,tentative exceptions, not understoodto extend to Africanslaves. Intheface of this aggressivepartiality,Toussaintused the public sphereof theEnlightenment with tactical genius to redefine the notion of universalright. 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 ownhistorical horizon.Variousculturalmaterialsundoubtedly contributedto the Haitian conceptualization of the universal. That Vodou andother elements of African or Taino cultures surviving in 1791 did soseems 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 devoutChristianfaith may have servedas an initial template: the Christianityof Saint Paul allows for only one principle to define its possible rangeof subjects: that one be a human being. "Slaves,women, people of allprofessions and of all nationalities, all [areto] be admitted, with nei-ther restriction nor privilege."37Yet this ahistorical, transcendentaltruth of the Christian faith was used to justify, as the conversion of"savages,"the brutally exclusionary operationsof colonialism and,in-directly, slaveryitself. Only a radicalfidelity to the lived experience ofslavery, to an experience so brutal and dehumanizing that it simplycould not await divine retributionandthe afterlife, could motivate thetransformationof this transcendental abstraction into the immanentuniversalism of human rights.The primaryfactorin the passagefrom localized, personal,or com-munitarian ameliorative justice to an unqualified immanent and rev-olutionary universalism was most likely the Enlightenment thoughtembodiedin the Declaration of the Rights ofMan.This Enlightenmentuniversalism could be simply defined as any truth claim operatingviacategoriesofreasonindependently 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]," Kanttells us, through"universalcognitions [allgemeine Erkenntnisse]."These "mustbe clearandcertainforthemselves, independentlyof experience. ... For f one removesfromourexperienceseverythingthatbelongsto the senses, therestill remain certainoriginalcon-cepts and the judgmentsgenerated romthem, which must have arisenentirely apriori,


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26 YaleFrenchStudiesthe actorsof the Haitian Revolution hadreadKant,presumably;rather,bringingKant'sformulation to bearupon one of the Enlightenment'skey historical events reveals its historical singularity.The plantationwas structured,throughvarious forms of violence, in the vain attemptto obliterate every intimation of universality from the slaves' mentallife, indeed, to keep them from thinking at all. This it could never ac-complish, of course.Butempiricalexperience ofthe plantationtold theslaves of Saint-Domingue that they were subhuman,devoidof freewilland reason, subject only to the will of an external master. One couldsay that in this world, experience told them absolutely nothing abouta universal right to freedom.In a sense, the Declaration of the Rights of Man appeared rombe-yond any empirical experience offeredby daily life in Saint-Domingue(arrivingsuddenly, on boardvessels from another world). It addresseditself not to the slaves' experience (ina world where slaverywas a legalanddaily fact of life),but to their faculty of reason,a faculty that couldrecognize the universality of its truth independently of all experience.Instead of admitting to the particular "fact of nature" that made uptheir daily experience (the slave-masters' attempt to reduce them tosheer animality), in their revolution they strove to act in accordwithreason, 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 (ofthemechanical, bestial productionof sugar).Instead,they sought to "treathumanity always as an end [as constituted by free individuals], butnever as a means only."Toclaim that the notion of a"universalreason"is a "European"at-egorythat does violence to other forms of human thought in brandingthem "mythical," as does PagetHenry in his critique of Habermas,is

independentlyof experience,because they make one able to say more aboutthe objectsthat appear o the senses thanmereexperiencewould teach . .. andmake assertionsthatcontain trueuniversalityandstrict necessity" (127-28). As Iwill argue n the remainderof this paragraph,his last sentence could stand as an abstractformulationof preciselywhat occursin Haiti,whereemancipationis forcedto occur asa "strictnecessity"whosetruthis independentof all (prior) xperience.WhetherKant s actually correctabouttheexistence of pureapriorijudgments(andI don'tbelieve that he is) is beside the point forthe historical interpretationI amputtingforwardhere.ImmanuelKant,CritiqueofPureReason, trans.PaulGeyerandAlan W.Wood(Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity Press,1997).


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NICK NESBITT 27not false.39Rather,in too quickly judgingthe Enlightenment supposi-tion of reason as a universal attribute of humanity to be mere violentimposition, it remains blind to the singularity of an event such as theHaitian Revolution.40In affirmingtheir own reasonableness, by con-ceiving of themselves as rational subjects of a universal imperative toabolish 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"toapply to Africans, anymore than was the American Declaration of In-dependence.41After the first majordefeat of Napoleon by his equal instrategic and rhetorical genius, by someone far his superiorin ethicalcomportment and insight, that is to say by Toussaint Louverture,theconcept of reason could no longer exclude the AfricanDiasporato thesame 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 Manandacted 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 slavesof Saint-Domingue may alreadyhave "hadtheir own program"callingfor the amelioration of working conditions ratherthan "anabstractlycouched 'freedom"' (Silencing the Past, 103). Furthermore,Fick hasdemonstrated that such autonomous demands, which owed little ornothing to Jacobinism,persisted as an important factor in 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 ofLinn6,Kant,Herder,Jefferson,Hegel,andCuvieronehas addressed he topic of "raceandthe Enlightenment"seems to me not false (these thinkers obviously made racist state-ments andjudgments)but an extremelypartialhalf-truth.It does not even cast Africansas passive victims of Enlightenmentthought (by, say,investigating what the actual con-sequences of these raciststatements might have been); nstead 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) ransformedboththe Revolutionaryworldand theveryconcept of the universal itself.42. Whichis not to sayEuropeansandNorth Americansdidnot trydesperatelyto dosobybranding he Haitians "barbaric"while conveniently ignoringthe depravityof bothslaveryitself and the horrifyingterroristtactics of GeneralRochambeau.


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28 YaleFrench Studiesful drive to independence. Trouillot is undoubtedly right to observethat "the claims of the revolution were too radicalto be formulatedinadvance of its deeds" (Silencing the Past, 88), but between 1791 and1804,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 wasthe 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, ike Condorcet,had defendedthe need to endslav-ery gradually, and commentators such as Louis Sala-Molins haverightly taken them to task forthis restriction.43Similarly,JoanDayandescribes "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 orservile 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 littlewhether Gr6goireand Condorcet thought slavery should be abolishedgraduallyorimmediately. Itwas their ethical idealism that was unam-biguous, andit was heardin Haiti. This process, what SrinivasAravu-mudan has called "Tropicalizingthe Enlightenment," was not one ofmere 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 "toreadthe texts of the Enlightenmentwithout them [the 'negro'slaves], is to ... limit univer-sal philanthropyto the universality of my own neighborhood" 15)andcalls on readersto "readthe texts of the Enlightenment while situating themselves on the side of theblackslaves" (17).The bulk ofhis text is preoccupiedprecisely,however,with the whiteEuropean hinkersof the Enlightenment;althoughSala-Molinsventriloquizesthe blackslaves, he tends to reducethem to the roleof reactivevictims, "thosewho must ... suf-ferin their bodies andsouls" (26).LouisSala-Molins,Lesmiseres des Lumi'res:Souslaraison, I'outrage(Paris:Laffont,1992).While he intentionally remainswithin the samefrancocentricperspectiveas 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 CaliforniaPress, 1995),204.45. In this sense, I think that Aravamudan'sargument, n its focus on whathe calls


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NICK NESBITT 29And yet, little attention has been paid to Haitian participation inthis globaldiscursive sphere.Not only, Ithink, because its traces aresohardfor historians to find, but because attention to the role of ideas inthe Revolution has been perceived as implying an inferior position ofpassive reception, when in fact we thus miss precisely the degree towhich this revolution constitutes one of the primaryevents of modernhistory. Fick's The Haitian Revolution from Below gives a perfect ex-ample of this. As she mounts her compelling case for a Revolution asdrivenby the Haitian masses, and not its nominal leaders, she quotesfrom the diaryof ayoung plantation owner named Parham.ReturningfromFrance 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 deathwithout fear or complaint. We found in one of his pockets pamphletsprinted in France,filled with commonplaces about the Rights of Manand the Sacred Revolution." The planter disdains these pamphlets asmere "commonplaces," while they are not even noticed by Fick. Yetsuch 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 elitesalons andrevolutionary clubs of Paris.46The 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 participation n a transnationaldialogueon universal (andnot merely "tropical")humanrights.Instead,the author'smore limited project s 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 itsEuropeanpurview."SrinivasAravamudan,Tropicopolitans:Colonialism and Agency,1688-1804 (Durham:Duke University Press, 1999).46. Even Carolyn Fick's more recent article "The French Revolution in SaintDomingue:A Triumphof aFailure"(inA Turbulent Time: The French Revolution andthe 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 theidea 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 Studiestion in a global discursive community that pre-existed and informedtheir own subjectivity, yet one that they utterly transformed.48Bynomeans, 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 inSaint-Domingue in Haitian Revolutionary Studies: the "grouping ofslaves] in largeunits ..., the involvement of the ruling class in war orinternal 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 "perplexingproblem" of the influence of ideas on the Revolution because it is sohardfora historian to quantify.If YvesBenot begins his outstanding study LaRevolution frangaiseet la fin des colonies with precisely the question I wish to ask of theHaitian Revolution-"What can an ideology accomplish?" (7)-he isultimately unable to providea substantial answer for Saint-Domingueitself 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 for theentire world, thus for the slaves themselves," while the slaves, in thisview, "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 tomove beyond this initial rhetorical abstraction-"[wouldn't] revolu-tionary ideals have playedany role?"-he nonetheless remainsalmostentirely focused on events in France.Indeed, "it would be difficult toabstractthe debate on ideas pursuedin those years, throughthe press,

48. To claim as I am that the slaves of Saint-Domingue were participants in thistransnationalpublic spheredoes not of course imply that they were equal participantsin an ideal instance of Habermasiancommunicative rationality.For their contributionto the debateto be heard,they hadto resort to violence, but they were nonethelessheardloud 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 "lavision des colons" (LaRevolutionfrangaiseet la fin des colonies, 139);Iwish merelytopoint out that his book is little concerned with the surviving traces of this autonomousthought.


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NICK NESBITT 31brochures, books, which certainly made use of formulations inheritedfrom the Enlightenment, but ceaselessly considered them under a newlight" (9). Beyond a few tantalizing glimpses (138-40), however, Benotnever demonstrates this process of reflection to have taken placeamong the slaves of Saint-Domingue themselves.The former slaves of Haiti were in fact active participants in atransnational, though largely oral, discourse on human rights.

In the oral cultures of the Caribbean, JuliusScott observes,] ocal rulerswere no more able to control the rapid spreadof information than theywere able to control the movements of the ships or the masterless peo-ple with which this information traveled.The books, newspapers,andletters which arrivedwith the ships were not the only avenues for theflow of information and news in Afro-America.While written docu-ments always had a vital place, black cultural traditions that favoredspeech 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 spreadquickly 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 ussave for a few random traces, the "public sphere" of the Enlightenmentmust 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 specificsocial space that appeared in the Enlightenment, one separate bothfrom the family and private life on the one hand, and from organizedpolitics on the other. It is a "public of private people making use of theirreason" (51). In this space, members of society could come together todiscuss 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 "plebianpublic sphere," distinct from the "liberal" sphere he chose to investi-gate (The Public Sphere, xviii), was in Saint-Domingue neither separatenor fully subordinate to the dominant one. Habermas's analytical bent,

50. JuliusS.Scott, The Common Wind:Currentsof Afro-AmericanCommunicationin the Eraof the Haitian Revolution (Ph.D. Dissertation, Duke University, 1986), 115.51. Habermas,TheStructuralTransformationof the Public Sphere:An Inquiryintoa Categoryof BourgeoisSociety, trans.Thomas Burger Cambridge:MITPress, 1991).


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32 YaleFrench Studieswhich hopes to isolate and define acategory(the "bourgeois")n purityfrom all "plebian" contamination, reproduceson the level of scholarlyanalysis, in 1962, the actual socio-historical exclusion of slaves fromthe 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 actually abolishslaveryin 1794.52This "plebiansphere" explicitly andprecisely didnot "remainori-ented toward the intentions of the bourgeoispublic sphere"as Haber-mas claims occurredfor the French"plebeians."Instead,Haitian slavesjoined the discussion on universal freedom without an invitation,while drawingconclusions andinsights that were directly antitheticalto those of all other constituencies in both 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 publicsphere'sexclusion of women and their concerns from public debate),the Haitian slaves demonstrated that

thestruggle verwhatgets ncluded nthepublicagendas itselfastrug-gle for justice and freedom. . . . All struggles against oppressionin themodernworldbeginbyredefiningwhathadpreviously eenconsideredprivate, onpublic, ndnonpoliticalssuesas matters fpublicconcern,as ssuesofjustice,as sites ofpower hatneeddiscursiveegitimation.54Throughthe slaves' forced ncursion into this discussion,anenlargedpublic 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 forward o the pos-sible transformationof my argumentin this direction.53. See Black Jacobins, 116, and Cesaire's Toussaint Louverture:La Revolutionfrangaise et le problme 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, n "Rethinkingthe PublicSphere:A Contribution to the CritiqueofActually ExistingDemocracy," n Habermas and the Public Sphere Cambridge:MIT,


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NICK NESBITT 33Habermas'sdismissal of the "plebian"public sphereechoes the elit-ism of the Hegel whose very conception of the public sphere he cri-tiques. Hegel's 1820 Philosophy of Right offers an unambiguous andstrikingly 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 toMichel-Rolph Trouillot's observation that "the Haitian Revolutionwas unthinkable" until into the twentieth century (Silencing the Past,82).In his ideal image of the State, however, Hegel defendsthe need fora 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 anymorethanthat, mereopinion, "theplace ofparticularandirresponsibleopin-ions, all the more irresponsibleandparticularbecause they are less var-

ied.'"57n contrast to Kant's defense of the public sphereas the guaran-tee of a free society, Hegel criticizes this claim as mere ideology (inanticipation 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 in1992), describes how other, nonbourgeois publics (primarilywomen for Fraser) orcedtheir way into the public sphere, or, conversely, created alternative, nonbourgeoisspheres-what she terms "subalterncounterpublics"-that gave them access to dis-cussion of political questions of common interest: "Virtually rom the beginning,coun-terpublicscontested the exclusionarynorms of the bourgeois public, elaboratingalter-native styles of political behaviorand alternative norms of public speech" (116).Fraserrehearses the argumentthat the function of this new public spherewas in fact ideologi-cally repressive, nsofar 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 onecase in which exactly the oppositeoccurred: he public use of reasonby privateindivid-uals (slaves) ed to theiremancipation.Unlike Fraser, am arguing hat Saint-Dominguewas an active participant n a single, variegatedtransnationalpublic sphere,not a meresegregated"counterpublic."56. I analyze Hegel's defense of the Haitian Revolution in ?57 of the Philosophy ofRight in "TropingToussaint."57. EricWeil, Hegel et l'Ptat: Cinq conferences (Paris:Vrin, [1950] 2002), 69. SeeG.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 YaleFrenchStudiesthe form of the state" (Transformationof the Public Sphere, 120).Sim-ilarly, one might say of Habermas himself that his analytical excisionof 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 corroborationofthe bourgeoispublic sphere.If Habermas merely silences and ignores the "plebian" sphere,Hegel's analysis is infected byhis view that the "rabble" P6bel] n mod-ern society remains subject to the mere "contingencies of public opin-ion, with its ignorance and perverseness, its false information and itserrors of judgment" (Philosophy of Right, ? 317). Public opinion, forHegel, remains forever cut off from participation 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 elsewhereso 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 offreedom actually and explicitly demonstrated their understandingwhen they acted to make the Declaration des droits de l'homme liveup to its own universal claims.When news of the FrenchAssembly's declaration first spread o thecolonies, these putatively inhuman slaves were able immediately toask exactly the rightquestion: Whois the subject of 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 to Saint-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 35tion, andstrict, often arbitrarydiscipline.58Sailorson shore in Port-au-Princeoutnumberedboth the white and free coloredcitizenry.59Thesesailors,often remainingon the islandforweeks andmonths, interactedextensively with the petit blanc and urban slave population of Saint-Domingue as they set up stalls on the wharves to bartergoods they hadbroughtfrom overseas (Description topographique,315).Of course, news also arrived n the form of print. One British trav-eler describes the feverish excitement that greeted the unloading of amailbagin a West Indianport:

Onthepacketmaking heharbourt causeda crowdnot unlikewhatyoumayhaveseenatasailingorrowingmatchupon he Thames.Eachwishingtobefirst,andalleager o learn hereports,hevesselwasbe-set oneveryquarterefore he couldcometoanchor, nd he wholebaybecamean animated ceneof crowded hipsandmovingboats.Manywho couldnotgoto thepacketas sheentered heharbour,epairednshoreto be ready, here,to meet the news.Thepeopleof town, also,throngedhebeach n anxiousmultitudes.All wasbusy expectation.Impatience carcelyallowedthe bagsto reachthe office. (CitedinCommonWind,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 theAssembly thus multiplied the effective distribution of information ex-ponentially.The Baron deWimpffen'sobservations of the colony in 1789, foralltheir paternalistic condescension, document that the idea ofuniversalemancipation circulated among a population of slaves possessing ahighly developed (oral)public sphere of discussion: "One has to hearwith what warmth andwhat volubility, andatthe same time with whatprecision of ideas and accuracy of judgment, this creature, heavy andtaciturn 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. Scottdescribesthe profound evel of identification British sailors sharedwith theAfricanslaves they broughtto the new world (Common Wind, 137-42).59. Moreau de St. Mery,Description topographique,physique, civile, politique, ethistorique de la partiefrangaisedel'isle Saint-Domingue (Paris:Societ6 del'histoire descolonies francaises,1958),1053.60. Cited in BlackJacobins, 18.


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36 YaleFrenchStudiesplantation economy in Saint-Domingue in the years before 1789 ledowners to purchase slaves-often the most rebellious-from neigh-boring Anglophone islands (Common Wind, 80); presumably theseslaves, 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 CapFrangaiscalled Petite Guindebecause of the largenumber of free blacks livingthere, aFreemason's odge "knownby the name ofFriendship"broughttogether citizens of all classes in the Masonic promotion of equality(Description topographique,427).For all the paucity of historical documentation of this oralpublicsphere, we know, as Yves Benot reminds us, that the mulatto citizenDodo-Laplainewas found guilty in 1791 of having "readthe Declara-tion of the Rights of Man" to a groupof slaves (Revolution frangaise139).How many other times did similar acts escape the notice of au-thorities? In fact, the Baronde Wimpffen observed in 1790 that thecolonists constantly discussed the Revolution and the Rights of Manin 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] dvisingthe insurection of blacks and the massacreof Whites, circulatedin theworkshops, were readthere, andin nocturnal assemblies, byBlacksu-pervisors[Nigres commandeurs],by the very people who werethe lead-ers of the greatinsurrection.'"61n 1792, an Inquiry into the Causes ofthe 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'assurer a tran-quillit6, la prosperit6et la fid1lit6 des ces dependancesde l'Empire" Paris:Didot Jeune,1791),31. Becauseof theirdesireto inflamepublicopinionagainstthe abolitionists,suchcomments certainly need to be readcritically, andBenotdismisses such attackson theAmis des noirs as "grotesque" Revolutionfrangaise et la fin des colonies, 138).Ironi-cally, though, it is often the defendersof slaveryandthe plantation orderwho tell us themost about the circulation of such discourse, since abolitionists sought to blame thecolonists' violence andblindness, rather han the ideas of the Revolution, forthe unrestin Saint-Domingue.


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NICK NESBITT 37tent of the Declaration and the Assembly's refusal to extend its bene-fits to the slaves in its colonies.62Weknow that when Sonthonax declaredthe abolition of slavery onAugust 29, 1793,the firstarticle ofhis decreestipulated that "The Dec-laration of the Rights of Man and Citizen will be printed, published,and displayed wherever need be."63Though we will never know howmanyAfro-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 revolutionarytexts even attempted to limit their flow into Saint-Domingue until De-cember of 1789 (Revolution frangaise, 138).The Metropolitanplanter'sClub Massiac had only limited success in preventing free blacks andmulattoes 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 spreadthroughout the island's nervous plantocracyduringthe fallof 1789 (Common Wind, 66-69). Perhaps,then, the October 31, 1789issue 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 ofthe tree, it must by rights fall when it is ripe" (cited in Revolutionfrangaise, 128).JoanDayan describes a public realm of theater that came to existunder Toussaint Louvertureby the late 1790s, a now-official publicsphere "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 thatthe bourgeois public sphere was limited to a literate elite. Haitian

62. "Alldecreesof the Assembly ... uniformly purport, hat 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 theIsland of St. Doming (London:J.Johnson, 1792),2.63. ToussaintLouverture:La Revolution frangaiseet le probleme colonial, 213.


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38 Yale French Studiesslaves forced their way into this discussion from 1789 on and thor-oughly radicalized the terms of the debate.As a radicalextension ofthe processofenlightenment-understoodas the uncoercedpublic use of human reason-the Haitian Revolutionwas both agrandiosesuccess and failure. While I have argued hat it en-acted a globalization andreconceptualization of the concept of univer-salhuman right, its ultimate limitation lay in the historical conditionsof that process. Since Haitian slaves could o

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