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WORK TITLE: Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://pgirard.tripod.com/
CITY: Lake Charles
STATE: LA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.mcneese.edu/f/c/583a9762/Girard_CV_Feb_2013.pdf * https://www.mcneese.edu/history/faculty * http://hutchinscenter.fas.harvard.edu/philippe-girard * http://philippergirard.blogspot.com/p/list-of-publications-cv.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in French overseas territory of Guadaloupe.
EDUCATION:Institut d’Études Politiques (Sciences Po), B.A. (political science), 1994; Ohio University, M.A., 1999, Ph.D. (history), 2002.
ADDRESS
CAREER
McNeese State University, Lake Charles, LA, faculty member, 2002-, head of history department, 2007-, full professor, 2012-.
AWARDS:Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellowship, 2014.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Slavery and Abolition, Journal of Genocide Research, William and Mary Quarterly, Annales, Napoleonica, Caribbean Journal, Journal of Haitian Studies, Journal of the Early Republic, Northwestern Journal of International Affairs, French Historical Studies, Gender and History, International Journal of Naval History, Louisiana History, French Colonial History, French History, Journal of Conflict Studies, Patterns of Prejudice, and Journal of Caribbean History.
Contributor of chapters to books, including Bush wo Saiten Suru (title means “Evaluation of Bush’s Policies”), edited by Yone Sugita, Aki Shobo (Tokyo, Japan), 2004; Colonialism and Genocide, edited by Dirk Moses, Routledge (Oxford, UK), 2006; A Companion to Eighteenth Century Europe, edited by Peter Wilson, Blackwell (Oxford, UK), 2008; Nation Building, State Building, and Economic Develpment: Case Studies and Comparisons, edited by Sally Paine, M.E. Sharpe (New York, NY), 2010; and Oxford Bibliographies in “Atlantic History,” edited by Trevor Burnard, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2013.
SIDELIGHTS
Philippe R. Girard is professor of history and department head at McNeese State University, where he has taught since 2002. A graduate of Institut d’Études Politiques (Sciences Po), Girard earned master’s and doctorate degrees at Ohio University. He has written extensively on the history of Haiti.
Haiti
In Haiti: The Tumultuous History—from Pearl of the Caribbean to Broken Nation (published in an earlier edition as Paradise Lost: Haiti’s Tumultuous Journey from Pearl of the Caribbean to Third World Hot Spot), Girard presents an overview of Haiti’s history from its colonial origins to the twenty-first century. Located on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola and bordered to the east by the Dominican Republic, Haiti was settled by the Spanish in the 1490s but was ceded to France in the early 1600s. Naming the colony Saint-Domingue, the French established highly lucrative sugarcane plantations there, importing slave labor from Africa. Conditions for slaves were notoriously brutal, and many survived for only a few years after arrival. Because of the constant need for new labor, the French continued to import large numbers of new slaves to the colony from Africa. For this reason, blacks in Saint-Domingue developed a culture more closely tied to Africa than was the case on the North American continent. Many were able to maintain some connections to their native languages, beliefs, and customs.
During the beginnings of the French Revolution (1789-1799), when the French people rose up against the corrupt aristocracy and monarchy, slaves and free people of color in Saint-Domingue also declared their right to freedom. Blacks in the colony outnumbered whites by more than ten to one, and whites had long feared an uprising. The revolt, which began in 1791, was indeed extremely bloody. At first demanding only freedom from bondage, the rebels later demanded freedom from France as well. Napoleon sent troops to the colony, but the self-emancipated slaves defeated this army and declared the free Republic of Haiti in 1804. Haiti’s revolution was the first and only successful slave revolt in history and had a profound impact on the subsequent history of slavery and racism throughout the Americas.
As Girard explains, the idealism of the Haitian Revolution did not long survive. Despite their epic victory in overthrowing their colonial overlords and defeating French forces, Haitians faced complex challenges in forming a successful nation and government. Land-reform initiatives failed to ensure prosperity for the former sugar colony, and the country has remained poor, undemocratic, and vulnerable. Indeed, Haiti has consistently been rated the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, with unemployment rates approaching seventy percent in the early twenty-first century.
In acknowledging Haiti’s considerable problems, Girard rejects the argument that the legacy of slavery and racism has held the country back. He points out that every other Caribbean nation has also dealt with slavery, colonialism, and racism. But all have become functional states and are relatively prosperous compared to Haiti. The reasons for Haiti’s failure, according to Girard, are corruption, instability, and entrenched isolation and fear of outsiders. The author discusses U.S. interventions in Haiti, intended to boost education and productivity but also deployed politically. Haitian distrust and resentment of foreign influences, writes Girard, resulted in the sabotage of many U.S.-led infrastructure projects and commercial investments. Girard also discusses the resistance to change among Haiti’s governing elite, who have opposed U.S. calls for education reform, in effect keeping Haiti’s school curricula irrelevant to the masses who need instruction in basic agricultural, manufacturing, and trade skills.
As commentator Arthur Sido noted on his blog, Voice of One Crying out in Suburbia, some readers find Girard’s conclusions controversial. The author writes that rather than increasing aid to Haiti, the United States should do far less for the beleaguered Caribbean country. Only when foreign aid is sharply reduced, in Girard’s view, will Haiti be forced to find ways to overcome its entrenched problems and reach economic independence.
The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon
Girard’s focus in The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian War of Independence, 1801-1804 reveals the “fantastic waste of life and treasure” that characterized the Haitian Revolution. Both sides committed mass atrocities. Toussaint Louverture, arguably the rebels’ most important general, ordered attacks on fellow blacks and mixed-race people who did not fully support the uprising; Napoleon’s white soldiers conducted a mass drowning of black fighters; after victory was declared in 1804, blacks massacred white civilians. In Girard’s view, the savagery was not motivated by racism; rather, he argues that leaders on both sides acted ruthlessly in order to win and were equally unconcerned about the Haitian people. Girard also argues that Napoleon’s opposition to Louverture, whom he ordered captured and imprisoned in France, was based not on the rebel leader’s black skin but on his defiance of France. In the author’s view, the Haitian victory amounted to little more than “a change in the skin color of the ruling elite,” according to Historian contributor Jeremy D. Popkin, who went on to observe that this view “unduly minimizes the significance of Haitian independence.” Writing in Choice; Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, R.I. Rotberg noted the striking originality and importance of the author’s thesis that the Haitian Revolution was, in Rotberg’s words, “as much about greed as about winning freedom for slaves.”
Toussaint Louverture
Girard draws on a huge trove of contemporary sources in the biography Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life. As Paul Berman wrote in the New York Times, the book presents a more multidimensional portrait of its subject than any previous study of the Haitian leader. Born into slavery in Saint-Domingue, Louverture remained in bondage for almost fifty years, becoming a guerrilla fighter and leader relatively late in life. As well as leading the Haitian Revolution, Louverture became a diplomat and head of state. But his autocratic behavior alienated some Haitians, and his military actions could be ruthless, as when he betrayed an antislavery conspiracy in Jamaica in 1799 in order to win British and American support for the uprising in Saint-Domingue.
In Girard’s view, much of Louverture’s motivation in fighting the French was his “craving for social status” and his wish “to benefit financially.” The author writes that Louverture’s father, captured in Africa, had been an aristocrat of the Allada kingdom. Keenly aware of his father’s shame in having been stripped of his freedom and status, Louverture desired to regain the wealth, rank, and respect he considered his due as a nobleman. Acknowledging some merit in this view, Berman felt that Girard fails to credit Louverture’s deep commitment to ideals of Enlightenment thought that had inspired the French Revolution. But Berman went on to praise the biography highly for its honest assessment of Louverture’s sometimes contradictory actions.
The Haitian leader had been a slave owner, as his father likely had been; he abolished the slave trade in Haiti but later reinstituted it, an act he deemed economically necessary until such time as the former sugar colony achieved a stable prosperity. Like other important thinkers of the era, such as Thomas Jefferson, Simón Bolívar, and Napoleon, Louverture held conflicting views regarding human bondage. Though he valued the ideals of emancipation, he also wanted to preserve Haiti’s economic standing through the former colony’s continued connection to France. The final days of the Haitian Revolution occurred while Louverture was exiled in a French prison. In his absence, his deputy Jean-Jacques Dessalines ordered the massacre of the remaining white civilians and declared a total rupture with France. In Girard’s opinion, this violent end to the revolution laid the seeds for Haiti’s future problems.
In his New York Times review, Berman hailed Toussaint Louverture as a “superb” achievement. Writing in the New Yorker, Parker Henry appreciated the fact that the biography reveals its subject to have been a more complex individual than myth suggests. A writer for Publishers Weekly made a similar observation, hailing the book as an “intelligent and graceful work.” Girard is also the translator and editor of the memoir that Louverture wrote while imprisoned in France.
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Girard, Philippe R., The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian War of Independence, 1801-1804, University of Alabama Press (Tuscaloosa, AL), 2011.
Girard, Philippe R., Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life, Basic Books (New York, NY), 2016.
PERIODICALS
Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June, 2012. R.I. Rotberg, review of The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon, p. 1945.
Foreign Affairs, January-February, 2017, Richard Feinberg, review of Toussaint Louverture.
Herald Scotland, January 27, 2017, Brian Morton, review of Toussaint Louverture.
Historian, Jeremy D. Popkin, review of The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon, p. 846.
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2016, review of Toussaint Louverture.
Library Journal, September 15, 2016, Rebekah Kati, review of Toussaint Louverture, p. 94.
New Republic, November 28, 2016, Malcolm Harris, review of Toussaint Louverture.
New Yorker, January 9, 2017, Parker Henry, review of Toussaint Louverture, p. 69.
New York Times, December 8, 2016, Paul Berman, review of Toussaint Louverture.
Publishers Weekly, September 19, 2016, review of Toussaint Louverture, p. 59.
ONLINE
Dr. Philippe R. Girard Home Page, http://pgirard.tripod.com (July 3, 2017).
Haiti: History, Culture, Politics, http://philippergirard.blogspot.com/ (July 3, 2017), author profile.
H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, http://h-net.msu.edu/ (July 3, 2017), Alyssa Sepinwall, review of The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon.
Hutchins Center Website, http://hutchinscenter.fas.harvard.edu/ (July 3, 2017), author profile.
McNeese State University Website, https://www.mcneese.edu/ (July 3, 2017), author faculty profile.
Occidental Dissent, http://www.occidentaldissent.com (February 7, 2014), review of Haiti: The Tumultuous History—from Pearl of the Caribbean to Broken Nation.
Voice of One Crying Out in Suburbia, http://thesidos.blogspot.com/ (July 3, 2017), Arthur Sido, review of Haiti.
5 0 4 M O S SST. • LAKE CHARLES, L A 7 0 6 0 1 P H O N E ( 3 3 7 ) 4 7 5-5198 • E-M A I L G I R A R D @ M C N E E S E .E D UD R . P H I L I P P E R . G I R A R DFE AT UR ED A CC OM PL ISH ME NT SThe Memoir(s) of Toussaint Louverture (advanced book contract with Oxford University Press).The Slaves Who DefeatedNapoléon: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian War of Independence, 1801-1804(University of Alabama Press, November 2011).With Jean-Louis Donnadieu.“Toussaint Before Louverture: New Archival Findings on the Early Life of Toussaint Louverture,” William and Mary Quarterly 70:1(January2013), 41-78.“Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the Atlantic System: A Reappraisal,” William and Mary Quarterly 69:3(July 2012), 549-582.“Black Talleyrand: ToussaintLouverture‟s Secret Diplomacy with England and the United States,” William and Mary Quarterly 66:1 (Jan. 2009), 87-124.2009: Gilder Lehrman Fellow, NYPL Schomburg Centerfor Research in Black Culture.2008: PEAES Fellow, Library Company of Philadelphia.EDU C AT ION1999-2002Ohio UniversityAthens,OHPh.D. in History (Fields: Latin American / Caribbean, European, and U.S. diplomatic history.)1997-1999Ohio UniversityAthens, OHMaster of Arts in History1994-1997Institut d‟Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po)Paris, FranceB.A. in French History and Political ScienceEMP L O YM EN T HI S TO RY2002-presentMcNeese State UniversityLake Charles, LAAssociate Professor of History, Tenured(2008-present)Department Head (2007-present)and Assistant Professor (2002-2007)TE AC HI NG E XPE RIE NC ESurvey coursesWorld History before 1500World History since1500Western Civilization before 1648U.S. History since 1877Upperdivision coursesCaribbean HistoryLatin American History French History since 1789 U.S.-Latin American RelationsHistory of Slavery Modern AfricaGraduate-level coursesTeaching Modern World HistoryHaitian RevolutionL A NG U AG ESFrench: nativeEnglish: fluent, both written and oralSpanish: very good written and oral comprehensionHaitianCreole: very good written comprehension
BooksThe Memoir(s) of Toussaint Louverture (advanced book contract withOxford University Press)Toussaint Louverture and the Dilemma of Emancipation (Westview Press; forthcoming Fall 2013)The Slaves Who Defeated Napoléon: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian War of Independence(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, November2011).[Winner of the 2012 Michael Thomason Book Award]Translated as Ces esclaves qui ont vaincu Napoléon: Toussaint Louverture et la guerre d’indépendance haïtienne (Rennes: Les Perséides, Jan. 2013).Paradise Lost: Haiti’s Tumultuous Journey from Pearl of the Caribbean to Third World Hot Spot(New York: Palgrave, 2005).Re-issuedin paperback as Haiti: The Tumultuous History(New York: Palgrave, Sept.2010).Clinton in Haiti: The 1994 U.S. Invasion of Haiti(New York: Palgrave, 2004).Selected articles[full list available upon request]“The Haitian Revolution, History‟s New Frontier:State of the Scholarship and Archival Sources,” Slavery and Abolition (forthcoming, Sept.2013).With Jean-Louis Donnadieu. “Toussaint Before Louverture: New Archival Findings on the Early Life of Toussaint Louverture,” William and Mary Quarterly 70:1 (January2013), 41-78.“Quelle langue parlait Toussaint Louverture? Le mémoire du Fort de Joux et les origines du kreyòl haïtien,”Annales 68:1 (Jan. 2013)“War Unleashed: The Use of War Dogs during the Haitian War of Independence,” Napoleonica la revue no. 15 2012/3 (Fall 2012), 80-105.Available at http://www.cairn.info/revue-napoleonica-la-revue-2012-3.htmTranslated as "L‟utilisation de chiens de combat pendant la guerre d‟indépendance haïtienne,"Napoleonica la revue no. 15 2012/3 (Fall 2012),54-79.“Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the Atlantic System: A Reappraisal,” William and Mary Quarterly 69:3 (July 2012), 549-582.“The „Dark Star:‟ New Scholarship on the Repercussions of the Haitian Revolution,” Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies vol. 36 no. 72 (2011), 229-247.“Jean-Jacques Dessalines et l‟arrestation de Toussaint Louverture,” Journal of Haitian Studies17:1 (Spring 2011), 123-138.“Trading Races: Joseph and Marie Bunel, A Diplomat and a Merchant in Revolutionary Saint-Domingue and Philadelphia,” Journal of the Early Republic30 (Fall 2010), 351-376.“French Atrocities during the Haitian War of Independence,” Journal of Genocide Research (accepted June 2010).“Napoléon Bonaparte and the Emancipation Issue in Saint-Domingue, 1799-1803,” French Historical Studies 32:4 (Fall2009), 587-618.Translated as “Napoléon voulait-il rétablir l‟esclavage en Haïti?,” Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe 159 (May-Aug. 2011), 3-28.“Birth of a Nation: The Creation of the Haitian Flag and Haiti‟s French Revolutionary Heritage,” Journal of Haitian Studies 15:1-2 (Spring-Fall 2009), 135-150. “Rebelleswith a Cause: Women in the Haitian Revolution,” Gender and History21:1 (Apr. 2009), 60-85.“Black Talleyrand: Toussaint Louverture‟s Secret Diplomacy with England and the United States,” William and Mary Quarterly 66:1 (Jan. 2009), 87-124.“Rêves d‟Empire: French Plans of Expeditions in the Southern United States and the Caribbean, 1789-1809,” Louisiana History 48:4 (Fall 2007), 389-412. [Winner of the President‟s Memorial Award for best article of the year in Louisiana History.]“White Man‟s Burden? The International Community‟s Role in Haiti,” Northwestern Journal of International Affairs 7 (Winter 2007), 36-49.“Empire by Collaboration: The First French Empire‟s Rise and Demise,” French History19:4 (Dec.2005), 482-490.
3“Liberté, Egalité, Esclavage: French Revolutionary Ideals and the Failure of the Leclerc Expedition to Saint-Domingue,” French Colonial History 6 (2005), 55-78.“Peacekeeping, Politics, and the 1994 U.S. Intervention in Haiti,” Journal of Conflict Studies24:1 (Summer 2004), 20-41.“Credibility, Domestic Politics, and Decision-Making: William J. Clinton and Haiti, 1994-2000,” Journal of Caribbean History36:1 (2002), 127-155.Book chapters“Nation Building in Haiti,” in Sally Paine, ed., Nation Building, State Building, and Economic Development: Case Studies and Comparisons(New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2010), 153-166.“Europe and the World,” in Peter Wilson, ed., A Companion to Eighteenth Century Europe (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, forthcoming 2008).“Caribbean Genocide: Racial War in Haiti, 1802-1804” in Dirk Moses, ed., Colonialism and Genocide (Oxford: Routledge, 2006), 42-65.“The Bush Administration before September 11th,” in Yone Sugita, ed., Bush wo Saiten Suru [Evaluation of Bush’s Policies] (Tokyo: Aki Shobo, April 2004), 20-52.Selected paper presentations[full list available upon request]“Toussaint Louverture as a Planter,” French Colonial History Society Conference (New Orleans, LA, 30 May –2 June 2012).“Isaac Sasportas, Toussaint Louverture, and Jamaica‟s Failed Slave Uprising of 1799,”Association of Caribbean Historians (Curaçao, 13-18 May 2012).“The Memoir(s) of Toussaint Louverture,” Consortium on the Revolutionary Era (Baton Rouge, LA, 23-25 February 2012).“Emancipation in One Country: Haitian Leaders‟ Views on Exporting the Haitian Slave Revolt,” Black Resistance Symposium (Tulane University, 13-15 October 2011).“The French Cultural Heritage in Independent Haiti,” The Francophone World and the AngloWorld: Empires of Culture, c. 1700-2000(National University of Ireland, Galway,8-10 June 2011).“Mass Deportations of Caribbean Rebels from Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Saint-Domingue in 1802,” Association of Caribbean Historians (Puerto Rico, 16-20 May 2011).“Toussaint Louverture and the Failure of the French Plansfor a Slave Uprising in Jamaica,” Caribbean section of the American Historical Association (New York, NY, 2-5 January 2009).“The Ugly Duckling: The French Navy and the Saint-Domingue Expedition, 1801-1803,” Sixth International Napoleonic Congress (Ajaccio, Corsica, 7-11 July 2008).“Would France Have Restored Slavery if it HadWon the Haitian Revolution? Saint-Domingue and the Emancipation Issue,” Consortium on the Revolutionary Era (Huntsville, AL, 1 March 2008).“Liberté, Egalité, Esclavage: French Revolutionary Ideals and the Leclerc Expedition to St. Domingue,” French Colonial History Association (Washington, DC, 7-8 May 2004).Other publicationsReviewer of articles on Haitian and Atlantic History for the William and Mary Quarterly, theJournal of Southern History, and the Journal of Haitian Studies.Author of about 20 book reviews on Haitian, French, and French colonial history for the New West Indian Review, theJournal of Haitian Studies, Itinerario, the Journal of Southern History,Latin American Politics and Society,Modern and Contemporary France, theCanadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Patterns of Prejudice, andFrench History.Author of about 50 encyclopedia entries on Haitian and Atlantic history for the Encyclopedia of Race and Racism, theEncyclopedia of U.S.-Latin American Relations, theEncyclopedia of African-American History, theEncyclopedia of Slavery in the Americas, theEncyclopedia of Free Blacks and Free People of Color in the Americas, the Encyclopedia of Caribbean History, theWorld History Encyclopedia, theEncyclopedia of ModernSlavery, theEncyclopedia of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, theEncyclopedia of Africa and the
4Americas, theEncyclopedia of Political, Cultural, and Economic History, theEncyclopedia of World Trade, theEncyclopedia of the Progressive Eraand the Gilded Age, theDictionary of American History, and theEncyclopedia of American History.SEL EC TE D AW A RD S A ND G R A NT S2012: Winner of the Michael Thomason Book Award of the Gulf South Historical Association 2012: Delores and Tom Tuminello and Evelyn Shaddow Murray endowed professorships2009: Gilder Lehrman Fellow, NYPL Schomburg Center2008: PEAES Fellow, Library Company of Philadelphia2008: President‟s Memorial Award for best article of the year in Louisiana History.2001-2002: Baker Peace Fellow, Ohio University.REFE RE NC E SWork colleaguesDr. Ray MilesProfessor of History, McNeese State University (current Dean)Phone: (337) 475-5191 E-mail: rmiles@mcneese.eduDr. Robert ForrestProfessor of History, McNeese State University (former Department Head)Phone: (337) 475-5163 E-mail: rforrest@mcneese.eduDr. Janet AlluredProfessor of History, McNeese State University (current Asst. Department Head)Phone: (337) 475-5304 Cell: (337) 884-0693 E-mail: jallured@mcneese.eduSpecialists in the field of Haitian historyDr. John GarrigusAssociate Professor of History, University of Texas in ArlingtonPhone: (817) 272-2861E-mail: garrigus@uta.eduDr. David GeggusProfessor of History, University of FloridaPhone: (352) 392-6543E-mail: dgeggus@ufl.eduLeading scholars familiar with my scholarshipDr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Professor of History, Harvard UniversityPhone: (617) 496-5468 E-mail: gates@harvard.eduDr. Leon-François HoffmannProfessor of History, Princeton UniversityPhone: (609) 258-4507E-mail: hoffmann@princeton.eduFormer professors (graduate school)Dr. Michael GrowAssociate Professor of History, Ohio University(former dissertation director)Phone: (740) 593-4356 E-mail: grow@ohio.eduDr. Alonzo HambyDistinguished Professor of History, Ohio University(former advisor)E-mail: hambya@ohiou.eduDr. Joan HoffResearch Professor, Montana State University in Bozeman(former advisor)Phone: (406) 994-5203E-mail: joanhoff1@aol.com
List of publications (CV)
EMPLOYMENT HISTORY
2002-present: McNeese State University (Lake Charles, LA)
Professor of History, Tenured (2012-present)
Department Head (2007-present)
EDUCATION
2002: Ph.D. in History (Ohio University)
1999: M.A. in History (Ohio University)
1994: B.A. in Political Science (Institut d’Etudes Politiques, a.k.a. Sciences Po Paris)
BOOKS
The Memoir of General Toussaint Louverture (Oxford University Press; forthcoming 2014).
The Slaves Who Defeated Napoléon: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian War of Independence (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011). Translated as Ces esclaves qui ont vaincu Napoléon: Toussaint Louverture et la guerre d’indépendance haïtienne (Les Perséides, Jan. 2013).
Haiti: The Tumultuous History (New York: Palgrave, Sept. 2010). Revised and expanded paperback edition of Paradise Lost: Haiti’s Tumultuous Journey from Pearl of the Caribbean to Third World Hot Spot (New York: Palgrave, 2005).
Clinton in Haiti: The 1994 U.S. Invasion of Haiti (New York: Palgrave, 2004).
ARTICLES
“Un-Silencing the Past: The Writings ofToussaint Louverture,” Slavery and Abolition 34:4 (2013), 663-672.
“Toussaint Louverture.” Oxford Bibliographies in “Atlantic History.” Ed. Trevor Burnard. New York: Oxford University Press, 1 Oct. 2013.
“The Haitian Revolution, History’s New Frontier: State of the Scholarshipand Archival Sources,” Slavery and Abolition 34:3 (2013), 485-507
"French Atrocities during the Haitian War of Independence,” Journal of Genocide Research 15:2 (June 2013), 133-149.
With Jean-Louis Donnadieu. “Toussaint Before Louverture: New Archival Findings on the Early Life of Toussaint Louverture,” William and Mary Quarterly 70:1 (January 2013), 41-78.
“Quelle langue parlait Toussaint Louverture ? Le mémoire du Fort de Joux et les origines du kreyòl haïtien,” Annales 68:1 (Jan. 2013), 109-132.
“War Unleashed: The Use of War Dogs during theHaitian War of Independence,” Napoleonica no. 15 2012/3 (Fall 2012), 80-105.
“Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the Atlantic System: A Reappraisal,” William and Mary Quarterly (July 2012), 549-582.
“Sasportas, Haiti, Jamaica, and the Failed SlaveUprising of 1799,” Caribbean Journal (31 May 2012).
“Jean-Jacques Dessalines et l’arrestation de Toussaint Louverture,” Journal of Haitian Studies 17 :1 (Spring 2011), 123-138.
“Trading Races: Joseph and Marie Bunel, A Diplomat and a Merchant in Revolutionary Saint-Domingue and Philadelphia,” Journal of the Early Republic 30 (Fall 2010), 351-376.
“Birth of a Nation: The Creation of the Haitian Flag and Haiti’s French Revolutionary Heritage,” Journal of Haitian Studies 15:1-2 (Spring-Fall 2009), 135-150.
“Haiti’s Chance,” Northwestern Journal of International Affairs 10:1 (Fall 2009).
“Napoléon Bonaparte and the Emancipation Issue in Saint-Domingue, 1799-1803,” French Historical Studies 32:4 (Fall 2009), 587-618.
“Rebelles with a Cause: Women in the Haitian Revolution,” Gender and History 21:1 (Apr. 2009), 60-85.
“Black Talleyrand: Toussaint Louverture’s Secret Diplomacy with England and the United States,” William and Mary Quarterly 66:1 (Jan. 2009), 87-124.
“The Ugly Duckling: The French Navy and the Saint-Domingue Expedition, 1801-1803,” International Journal of Naval History 7:3 (Dec. 2008).
“Rêves d’Empire: French Plans of Expeditions in the Southern United States and the Caribbean, 1789-1809,” Louisiana History 48:4 (Fall 2007), 389-412. [Winner of the President’s Memorial Award for best article of the year in Louisiana History.]
“In Our Own Backyard: The Clinton Administration’s Response to Foreign Policy Crises, 1991-1994,” Northwestern Journal of International Affairs 8 (Fall 2006), 39-48.
“White Man’s Burden? The International Community’s Role in Haiti,” Northwestern Journal of International Affairs 7 (Winter 2007), 36-49.
“Empire by Collaboration: The First French Empire’s Rise and Demise,” French History 19:4 (Dec. 2005), 482-490.
“Liberté, Egalité, Esclavage: French Revolutionary Ideals and the Failure of the Leclerc Expedition to Saint-Domingue,” French Colonial History 6 (2005), 55-78.
“Caribbean Genocide: Racial War in Haiti, 1802-1804,” Patterns of Prejudice 39:2 (2005), 144-167.
“Peacekeeping, Politics, and the 1994 U.S. Intervention in Haiti,” Journal of Conflict Studies 24:1 (Summer 2004), 20-41.
“Operation Restore Democracy?,” Journal of Haitian Studies 8:2 (Fall 2002), 70-85.
“Credibility, Domestic Politics, and Decision-Making: William J. Clinton and Haiti, 1994-2000,” Journal of Caribbean History 36:1 (2002), 127-155.
BOOK CHAPTERS
“Nation Building in Haiti,” in Sally Paine, ed., Nation Building, State Building, and Economic Development: Case Studies and Comparisons (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2010), 153-166.
“Europe and the World,” in Peter Wilson, ed., A Companion to Eighteenth Century Europe (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, forthcoming 2008).
“Caribbean Genocide: Racial War in Haiti, 1802-1804” in Dirk Moses, ed., Colonialism and Genocide (Oxford: Routledge, 2006), 42-65.
“The Bush Administration before September 11th,” in Yone Sugita, ed., Bush wo Saiten Suru [Evaluation of Bush’s Policies] (Tokyo: Aki Shobo, April 2004), 20-52.
ACADEMIC CONFERENCES
Toussaint Louverture as a Planter,” French Colonial History Society Conference (New Orleans, LA, 30 May – 2 June 2012).
“Isaac Sasportas, Toussaint Louverture, and Jamaica’s Failed Slave Uprising of 1799,” Association of Caribbean Historians (Curacao, 13-18 May 2012).
“The Memoir(s) of Toussaint Louverture,” Consortium on the Revolutionary Era (Baton Rouge, LA, 23-25 February 2012).
“Emancipation in One Country: Haitian Leaders’ Views on Exporting the Haitian Slave Revolt,” Black Resistance Symposium (Tulane University, 13-15 October 2011).
“The French Cultural Heritage in Independent Haiti,” The Francophone World and the Anglo World: Empires of Culture, c. 1700-2000 (National University of Ireland, Galway, 8-10 June 2011).
“French Refugees from Saint-Domingue in New Orleans,” New Orleans Scottish Rite History and Research Symposium (New Orleans, 1-4 June 2011).
“Mass Deportations of Caribbean Rebels from Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Saint-Domingue in 1802,” Association of Caribbean Historians (Puerto Rico, 16-20 May 2011).
“Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s Role in the Capture of Toussaint Louverture and Other Haitian Revolutionaries,” Consortium on the Revolutionary Era (Tallahassee, FL, 3-5 March 2011).
"The Relevance of Atlantic History to the Study of Louisiana and the First French Colonial Empire," Louisiana Historical Association (Lafayette, LA, 26 March 2010).
“Toussaint Louverture and the Failure of the French Plans for a Slave Uprising in Jamaica,” Caribbean section of the American Historical Association (New York, NY, 2-5 January 2009).
“The Ugly Duckling: The French Navy and the Saint-Domingue Expedition, 1801-1803,” Sixth International Napoleonic Congress (Ajaccio, Corsica, 7-11 July 2008).
“Teaching World History,” Louisiana Historical Association (Lafayette, LA, 15 March 2008).
“Would France Have Restored Slavery if it Had Won the Haitian Revolution? Saint-Domingue and the Emancipation Issue,” Consortium on the Revolutionary Era (Huntsville, AL, 1 March 2008).
“Toussaint Louverture’s Secret Diplomacy with the United States and Great Britain, 1798-1802,” Louisiana Historical Association (Alexandria, LA, 23 March 2007).
“Birth of a Nation: Creating the Principles of Haitian Nationhood from the Ashes of Saint-Domingue, 1803-1804,” Consortium on the Revolutionary Era (Arlington, VA, 2 March 2007).
“Love in the Time of Malaria: Women in the Haitian Revolution,” Louisiana Historical Association (Lafayette, LA, 24 March 2006).
“The 1804 Massacre of Haiti’s White Population,” Southwestern Historical Association (New Orleans, LA, 25 March 2005).
“Rêves d’Empire: French Plans of Expeditions in the Southern U.S. and the Caribbean, 1789-1815,” Louisiana Historical Association (Lafayette, LA, 16 March 2005).
“Liberté, Egalité, Esclavage: French Revolutionary Ideals and the Leclerc Expedition to St. Domingue,” French Colonial History Association (Washington, DC, 7-8 May 2004).
“Haiti’s Contribution to the Early American Republic,” Southwestern Historical Association (Corpus Christi, TX, 19 March 2004).
“Did Haiti Save the U.S.? Leclerc’s Expedition to Haiti and the Louisiana Purchase,” Consortium on Revolutionary Europe (University of Louisiana in Lafayette, 21 February 2003).
“Cultural Encounters and Foreign Policy: The U.S. Intervention in Haiti,” Paul Lucas Conference in History (Indiana University, 6 April 2002).
“Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy: The 1994 U.S. Intervention in Haiti.” MALAS Conference (Cleveland State University, 18-20 October 2001).
“The American Character as a Source of U.S. Foreign Policy,” Cold War Conference (U. of California in Santa Barbara, 21-22 May 1999).
Philippe Girard
Professor of History and Department Head, McNeese State University
Biography
Fall 2014: Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellowship
Toussaint Louverture: A Biography
Dr. Philippe Girard, Professor (Curriculum Vitae)
Fields: Latin American and Caribbean History, World History, History of Slavery
B.A. Sciences Po (1997), M.A. Ohio University (1999), Ph.D. Ohio University (2002)
girard@mcneese.edu
Welcome and bienvenue to Dr. Girard's web page!
I am currently an Associate Professor and Department Head at McNeese State University. My research interest is the history of Haiti, particularly the end of the Haitian Revolution.
What's New?
My publications include two books on the history of Haiti: Paradise Lost: Haiti's Tumultuous Journey from pearl of the Caribbean to Third World Hot Spot (Palgrave 2005) and Clinton in Haiti: The 1994 U.S. Invasion of Haiti (Palgrave 2004). I am currently working on an ambitious monograph on the Leclerc expedition, tentatively entitled The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian War of Independence, 1801-1804.
I also have a recent article on Toussaint Louverture's Diplomacy in the William and Mary Quarterly (Jan. 2009), one on Napoleon Bonaparte's 1802 restoration of slavery in French Historical Studies (forthcoming 2009), and one on women in the Haitian Revolution in Gender and History (April 2009).
Click on the "my resume" tab at the top of this page for a full list of my publications.
The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian War of Independence, 1801-1804
Jeremy D. Popkin
The Historian. 75.4 (Winter 2013): p846.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Phi Alpha Theta, History Honor Society, Inc.
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The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian War of Independence, 1801-1804. By Philippe R. Girard. (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2011. Pp. 444. $45.00.)
This study is a significant contribution to the rapidly growing literature on the Haitian Revolution, but, like Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands" Europe Between Hitler and Stalin [2010], it is also an exercise in the history of atrocity. Whereas other historians of the Haitian struggle, such as Laurent Dubois in his Avengers of the New World [2004], have seen the violence resulting from Napoleon's attempt to restore white rule in France's former colony of Saint-Domingue as necessary to defend the precarious freedom the former slaves had achieved in the 1790s, Phillipe R. Girard calls it "a fantastic waste of life and treasure" (343). The strongest memory readers of his account are likely to retain is its catalogue of horrors, beginning with Toussaint Louverture's repression of rebellious black cultivators on the eve of the French landing, followed by the ghastly epidemic that decimated the French ranks, the mass drownings of black troops carried out by the desperate French, and the massacres of white civilians that followed Jean-Jacques Dessalines's victory in 1804.
Whereas the final two years of the Haitian Revolution are often seen as a race war, pitting whites against the island's black and mixed-race populations, Girard presents them as the consequence of clashes between headstrong leaders, all of them equally indifferent to the sufferings of the majority of the population. As he emphasizes, Toussaint Louverture's authoritarian rule had alienated many blacks, making them initially willing to support the occupation of the island by the young general Victoire Leclerc, Napoleon's brother-in-law, who hoped to make his name and his fortune by restoring French rule. Girard makes a revisionist argument that Napoleon was not necessarily bent on restoring slavery, although he had no principled objection to the institution. It was Louverture's defiance of French authority, not his black skin, that made Napoleon determined to remove him. Girard also argues that better planning and more intelligent decision making on the part of Napoleon and Leclerc might have led to a French victory.
Girard's account is colorfully written, and his extensive archival research modifies some longstanding assumptions about these events. By insisting that the French defeat simply represented a change in the skin color of the ruling elite, however, Girard unduly minimizes the significance of Haitian independence. As Girard acknowledges, Dessalines and his successors may have wanted to preserve the oppressive plantation system, but the mass of the population defied laws meant to regulate their labor and instead turned themselves into more or less independent subsistence farmers. In a world where slavery remained a powerful presence, its abolition in what had been the most valuable of all plantation colonies and the demonstration that former slaves could indeed govern themselves was more important than Girard admits. Unlike the mass killings chronicled in Snyder's history of eastern Europe, the brutality of the Haitian War of Independence was not entirely pointless.
Jeremy D. Popkin
University of Kentucky
Popkin, Jeremy D.
Girard, Philippe R.: The slaves who defeated Napoleon: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian War of Independence, 1801-1804
R.I. Rotberg
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 49.10 (June 2012): p1945.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 American Library Association CHOICE
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2011-19639 CIP
Girard, Philippe R. The slaves who defeated Napoleon: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian War of Independence, 1801-1804. Alabama, 2011. 444p index afp ISBN 9780817317324, $45.00; ISBN 9780817385408 e-book, $36.00
Although dozens of authors have attempted to capture the meaning of and explain how Haiti won its independence from France, this fast-paced narrative is an excellent modern treatment that offers a welcome micro-examination of the day-to-day events that turned Toussaint Louverture from a loyal French governor into a formidable independence leader. But the author's claim to pathbreaking innovation is his argument that the Haitian War of Independence was as much about greed as about winning freedom for slaves. In fact, France abolished slavery in what is now Haiti in the very early years of the struggle in order to retain its grip on wealth from sugar. Saint-Domingue was then the richest colony in the world, and a prize consummately worth fighting for. That in part accounts, Girard (McNeese State Univ.) suggests, for the oft-compromised behavior of nearly all of the key actors in Haiti's independence struggle. Toussaint and Jean-Jacques Dessalines were consummate opportunists, the latter fighting both against and for slaves, the former having been a sometime slave-owner. Fortunately, Girard supports his striking claims by extensive archival research in at least four of the relevant languages. He also looks beyond Saint-Domingue to the wider international components of the war and how it was almost lost, and then won. Summing Up: Essential. **** All levels/libraries.--R. I. Rotberg, Harvard University
Rotberg, R.I.
Briefly Noted
Parker Henry
The New Yorker. 92.44 (Jan. 9, 2017): p69.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
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Briefly Noted
Toussaint Louverture, by Philippe Girard (Basic). After leading a slave revolt in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) in 1791-the only successful such revolt in history-Louverture became an anti-colonial icon. He emerges in this excellent biography as a man more complex than the myth of him would have it. His military and political stratagems coincided with a receptive mood in revolutionary France, which abolished slavery in 1794. In the restive period that followed, Louverture consolidated power, ultimately enforcing a labor code no less repressive than slavery. Girard writes thoughtfully about the various contradictions of Louverture's life, which ended in a prison cell in France. While there, he wrote a memoir addressed to Napoleon, expecting to be acknowledged by him as an equal.
Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life
Publishers Weekly. 263.38 (Sept. 19, 2016): p59.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
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Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life
Philippe Girard. Basic, $29.99 (352p) ISBN 978-0-465-09413-4
Girard, professor of history at McNeese State University, lucidly reveals how Toussaint Louverture led a remarkable life even in comparison with the other leaders of the Age of Revolutions. Born into slavery in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, Louverture grew up speaking the Fon language of Benin and, most likely, practicing his parents' Vodou traditions. Louverture was enslaved until he was almost 50, but in the final decade of his life he became a guerrilla fighter, general, diplomat, planter, and head of state before dying as Napoleon's prisoner in France. As Saint-Domingue became the black republic of Haiti, Louverture presided over a revolution that was significantly more radical--in both ideals and practice--than the American and French uprisings that helped inspire it. Girard's study, based on extensive research in European archives, succeeds in relating Louverture's extraordinary life in its many and often contradictory aspects. It also conveys how he became an inspiration to abolitionists, civil rights activists, and anticolonial rebels worldwide without obscuring "the complexities of the Revolution he had to navigate and the skill he displayed in doing so." Girard's intelligent and graceful work offers a detailed account of Louverture's experiences and achievements, as well as a laudable overview of the revolution he helped create and sustain. Agent: Paul Lucas, Janklow & Nes bit. (Dec.)
Philippe Girard: TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE
Kirkus Reviews. (Sept. 15, 2016):
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Philippe Girard TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE Basic (Adult Nonfiction) 29.99 11, 22 ISBN: 978-0-465-09413-4
A biography of the man who challenged the power of the leading empires of his day and led the only successful slave revolt in human history.Girard’s (History/McNeese State Univ.; Haiti: The Tumultuous History—From Pearl of the Caribbean to Broken Nation, 2010, etc.) detailed research on both sides of the Atlantic underpins this fresh portrayal, in which the author successfully dismisses much mythology about who Toussaint Louverture (1743-1803) was, what he stood for, and what he achieved. Girard’s fine-grained approach enriches a picture that is often drawn in highly polarized shades. Louverture did indeed lead Haiti’s slaves in a revolt for freedom, was involved in their emancipation from France, rose to become general and governor-general of the island, and defeated an army of France’s battle-hardened troops sent against him by Napoleon, but at the cost of his own life. Girard develops these high points in his subject’s life in terms of the historical context. Louverture’s views and aims were not fixed. He was not always an opponent of slavery, nor was he averse to owning slaves himself. He was also an inconsistent opponent of the large plantation owners and the other elements of power in Haiti’s racial hierarchy. Girard argues that what Louverture wanted above all was to be recognized as French and treated with the honor and respect due a Frenchman. He fought to master the necessary skills of speech and writing, and he amassed significant landholdings out of the ruins of continuing warfare. He deftly navigated a course between local representatives of French political factions and the different strands of racial politics on the island. He also mastered the art of maneuvering between the great powers, but successes were often pyrrhic. A groundbreaking biography that underscores the difficulties of leading slaves to freedom and avoiding violent extremes.
Girard, Philippe. Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life
Rebekah Kati
Library Journal. 141.15 (Sept. 15, 2016): p94.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Girard, Philippe. Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life. Basic. Nov. 2016. 352p. illus. maps. notes. bibliog. index. ISBN 9780465094134. $29.99; ebk. ISBN 9780465094141. BIOG
Toussaint Louverture (1743-1803) is best known as the leader of the Haitian Revolution, a slave revolt in the French colony of Saint-Domingue that resulted in the establishment of the Republic of Haiti. Born a slave of African descent, Louverture saw himself as French; this dichotomy would define his life and shape his political policies. Girard (Haiti: The Tumultuous History--From Pearl of the Caribbean to Broken Nation) attempts to reconcile the contradictions of Louverture's life. Sources documenting his subject's early days are scarce, and the author spends the first part of the biography exploring the unusual race relations of Saint-Domingue, which along with discussions of the area's economic, political, and social issues, provide much-needed context to explain Louverture's shifting loyalties and self-reinventions. While Louverture's role in the revolution comprises a large portion of this work, Girard also considers the hero's life after the conflict, when he became governor and rebuilt Saint-Domingue's agrarian economy by instituting a cultivator system. At the height of his power, Louverture was deposed by Napoleon and imprisoned in France, where he later died. The book ends with a brief discussion of Louverture's legacy. VERDICT A compelling look at an extraordinary historical figure. Recommended for anyone interested in revolutionary and/or Caribbean history.--Rebekah Kati, Durham, NC
A Biography Reveals
Surprising Sides to Haiti’s
Slave Liberator
By PAUL BERMAN DEC. 9, 2016
TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE
A Revolutionary Life
By Philippe Girard
Illustrated. 340 pp. Basic Books. $29.99.
Any number of books have been written over the centuries about the leader of
the Haitian slave revolution, but “Toussaint Louverture,” by Philippe Girard, is only
the second in English to draw deeply on the original documents. The book is superb,
though perhaps not in every way. And the greatest of its virtues is to stand
knowledgeably and disputatiously in the shadow of its predecessor, the first of the
extensively researched books in English, which was “The Black Jacobins,” from
1938, by C.L.R. James, the West Indian Marxist. “The Black Jacobins” was more
than superb. It was a masterpiece. But 1938 was long ago.
James wanted to show that oppressed people are capable of taking their destiny
into their own hands, given the right circumstances. On the sugar and coffee
plantations of France’s SaintDomingue colony — which eventually renamed itself
Haiti — the African slaves were oppressed in the extreme. And yet once the French
Revolution had broken out and the gospel of the Rights of Man had radiated to all
corners of the universe, and once the European powers had fallen anew into
interimperialist war, the extremely oppressed saw their opportunity. They found a
6/11/2017 A Biography Reveals Surprising Sides to Haiti’s Slave Liberator The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/books/review/abiographyrevealssurprisingsidestohaitisslaveliberator.html 2/5
leader in L’Ouverture. They found allies among the rebelling working people of
France (in James’s interpretation). And beginning in 1791, they started the only
successful slave revolution in the history of the world.
James saw in this something larger yet — a remote early stage of the
anticolonial revolution in Africa, which, as he predicted, was going to break out in
the years after he wrote his book. And he saw the beginnings of the black revolution
in still other parts of the world. His “Black Jacobins” was in those respects a
revolutionary tract aimed at the future, and not just an inquiry into the past. It was a
literary achievement too — one of the very few works in English (Edmund Wilson’s
contemporaneous “To the Finland Station” is another) to reflect the influence of
Jules Michelet, the most thrilling of the 19thcentury historians of the French
Revolution. Michelet was a master of moral condemnation, and C.L.R. James,
likewise.
But all of this is what Philippe Girard wants to avoid. Girard does not wish to
contribute to a revolutionary program, not in a 1930s version, nor in any of our
versions from today. He is a professor at McNeese State University in Louisiana, and
his intention is merely to reveal the experiences and motivations of L’Ouverture
himself. This has led him to dig into a great many more antique documents from
France and Haiti than were available to James, and quite a few more documents
than came under examination by a more recent biographer, Madison Smartt Bell.
New facts turn up by the spadeful in his book. Old falsities crumble into dust. Now
and then he climbs atop his heap of discoveries and judiciously grants himself
license to conjure out of his own imagination scenes that surely must have taken
place, even if the documentary evidence is lacking.
He tells us that L’Ouverture’s father, Hippolyte, was an aristocrat of the Allada
kingdom of West Africa, who was captured with his family by the hostile Dahomey
Empire circa 1740 and sold into slavery to the Europeans. He imagines the scene of
Hippolyte and the family being stripped of their clothes and branded. L’Ouverture’s
“father, whose tattoos and scarifications were a sign of pride, because they indicated
his rank as an Allada aristocrat, now bore a shameful mark of his servile status on
his burning skin. So did his wife and crying children. They were led onto a shallop,
which battled the frightful surf all the way to a European ship waiting offshore.”
6/11/2017 A Biography Reveals Surprising Sides to Haiti’s Slave Liberator The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/books/review/abiographyrevealssurprisingsidestohaitisslaveliberator.html 3/5
Girard thinks he may have identified the ship in question, the Hermione. And with
brush strokes of this sort, he paints a psychological portrait of L’Ouverture himself.
James railed against various of L’Ouverture’s detractors who attributed to him a
merely personal ambition. But Girard thinks that a desire for what had been taken
from his father — a “craving for social status” — was, in fact, the most constant of
L’Ouverture’s motivations. L’Ouverture wanted to be recognized by the slaveowning
white planters and by the French. He wanted “to benefit financially.” Yet I wonder if,
in making these points, Girard hasn’t underplayed a different and nobler set of
motivations, which James emphasized and documented by quoting lengthy and
ardent passages from L’Ouverture’s correspondence on Enlightenment and French
revolutionary themes, together with passages showing how zealous he was to rebut
slanders against the black race.
On one matter Girard leaves no doubt, which is that L’Ouverture sometimes put
his wellknown talent for deceit to ruthless purposes. There was a moment in 1799
when, seeing an opportunity to curry favor with the British Empire and the hostile
Americans, he treacherously betrayed an antislavery conspiracy in Jamaica — a
coldblooded act if ever there was one, even if it served the narrow interest of the
emancipated slaves in SaintDomingue. Maybe L’Ouverture’s antislavery principles
were more flexible than James could ever have suspected. L’Ouverture was himself a
slave owner at one point (as his father had probably been in the Allada kingdom,
Girard tells us), which is a fact that emerged only in 1977.
It is a little shocking to learn from Girard that at an early point in the revolution,
when the antislavery cause seemed on the verge of collapse, L’Ouverture broached
the idea of betraying his own emancipated followers by leading them back into
bondage, in the hope of getting official protection for himself and one of his
comrades. Ultimately he restored the slave trade in SaintDomingue, after having
abolished it — restored it because the plantations needed laborers, though he
intended to free the newly purchased Africans after they had toiled for a number of
years. Meanwhile he promulgated a labor code that in practice was only marginally
better than slavery, even if it maintained the principle of emancipation.
6/11/2017 A Biography Reveals Surprising Sides to Haiti’s Slave Liberator The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/books/review/abiographyrevealssurprisingsidestohaitisslaveliberator.html 4/5
L’Ouverture was not, in short, an “abolitionist saint.” He was a man of his time.
L’Ouverture’s “equivocation was representative of an age that had to reconcile
Enlightenment principles and the labor requirements of plantations. Like three
other great figures of the Age of Revolutions — Thomas Jefferson, Simón Bolívar and
Napoleon — he had conflicted views on the delicate matter of human bondage.” At
least L’Ouverture brought a greater lucidity to his conflicted views than did Jefferson
or Napoleon. He knew that his goal was double: to preserve SaintDomingue’s
prospects for wealth, and, even so, to uphold the abolitionist idea.
He wanted the emancipated slaves to be able to profit in the future from the
achievements of the advanced French civilization. With that purpose in mind, he
intimated that, under his leadership, revolutionary SaintDomingue was going to
remain formally attached to metropolitan France. He also wanted to ensure that
metropolitan France would never be able to reinstate slavery. And with that
additional purpose in mind, he stipulated that formal attachment should allow for a
considerable autonomy. To benefit from Europe without risking destruction at the
hands of the Europeans — that was his idea.
He built the first Westernstyle modern black army in order to achieve this
attractive and nuanced goal. His army defeated or fended off one adversary after
another — the sometimes genocidalminded white planters, the SaintDomingue
mulattoes, various black insurgents, the Spanish Empire and the British
imperialists. Napoleon dispatched twothirds of the French Navy with a large army
to crush the revolution, and L’Ouverture set the stage for the defeat of that army too.
Only, in the course of doing so, he ended up under arrest. Napoleon sent him to his
death in a French prison, which led the freedmen of SaintDomingue to do what
L’Ouverture had always warned them against, namely, to initiate a general massacre
of the whites and to declare a total rupture with France: tragic misfortunes for the
future of Haiti.
L’Ouverture’s triumphs proved to be in these ways less than total. And yet what
hero in history has ever achieved everything? Napoleon, his archenemy, declined to
grant him even a modicum of respect. Jefferson slighted him. L’Ouverture
nonetheless showed himself to be those men’s superior, philosophically, politically
6/11/2017 A Biography Reveals Surprising Sides to Haiti’s Slave Liberator The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/books/review/abiographyrevealssurprisingsidestohaitisslaveliberator.html 5/5
and militarily — a point made by C.L.R. James that survives mostly intact in Philippe
Girard’s sophisticated and antimythological biography.
Paul Berman is the critic at large for Tablet.
A version of this review appears in print on December 11, 2016, on Page BR30 of the Sunday Book
Review with the headline: The Insurrectionist.
27th January
Review – Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life, by Philippe Girard
Brian Morton
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Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life
Philippe Girard
Basic Books, £25
Review by Brian Morton
AN OLD engraving of Toussaint Louverture hangs over my desk. Fascination, rather than hero-worship. It shows the “Black Napoleon” from the rear, standing on a small rise of ground, wearing an extravagantly plumed uniform, sword drawn and swung away commandingly to the right, his slight frame dynamically balanced forward. This is the leader of the Haitian Revolution, the most successful, if still one of the least understood, slave revolts of modern history. Significant that he is turned away from us, because until now we’ve been beholden either to the myth-makers or the debunkers.
Much of the information in Philippe Girard’s meticulously researched biography – 60 pages of notes – has emerged since the 1970s and right up to the present decade, as a chaotic imperial archive has been slowly penetrated and absorbed. What this means is that for most of the two centuries since Toussaint’s death in 1803 he has been an icon rather than a rounded individual, a man who seems to transcend history rather than one defined by it. Girard doesn’t set out to dismantle. The facts simply speak for themselves. It appears that the freedman Louverture, who would more properly have been known as Breda after his largely absentee French owners, seems never to have been formally liberated, but simply declared his new status. It’s also troubling, though hardly surprising, to learn that the great liberator owned slaves of his own and that he once bought a young Aja woman specifically in order to ransom his surrogate mother when his second family was in danger of being dispersed. This came out in 2013. The previous year, it was discovered that the slave Jean-Jacques, who Toussaint bought for 1500 livres, was none other than the future Jean-Jacques Dessalines, future president of an independent Haiti and a figure of easily equal stature in the eyes of present-day Haitians. As Girard says, it is “as if it had suddenly been revealed that Thomas Jefferson had once been George Washington’s indentured servant”.
The episode is a further reminder not to judge the past by the standards of the present, or to believe that history is simply a chequerboard of moral verities and fixed positions. Racism was as much concerned with the maintenance of class divisions as it was with ethnicity. Saint-Domingue – as pre-independence Haiti was known – was a complex society comprised of French planters and slaves, but also “little whites” and freed slaves, whose relative positions had nothing, or little, to do with colour. Miscegenation complicated the picture even further.
Girard’s chapter headings catch Toussaint in a bewildering sequence of identities: aristocrat (African), revolutionary apprentice, family man, slave driver (shockingly), rebel, politician, diplomat and finally icon. He ended his days, betrayed by the parent country and by another diminutive leader who feared his own charisma was being challenged, in a Napoleonic jail. His death was quiet – probably a heart attack – and unheroic. The real vanquisher of the French forces sent to quell the uprising wasn’t a slave army but yellow fever. Girard rightly warns that to “anoint Louverture as an abolitionist saint is a mistake but so is [to depict] him as an elite individual completely cut off from the realities of slavery”. In the same way, easy divisions of black vs white, slave vs free, French vs Haitian simply don’t work in this narrative. The reality that Girard teases out is far more interesting, and in many respects more impressive, than the myth. Toussaint emerges as a man of extraordinary natural gifts, a shrewd negotiator, a careful temporiser when the moment didn’t yet seem to serve his needs, and one in whom courage and caution were evenly mixed.
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The slave revolt of 1791 had many causes. Worsening economic conditions were the most obvious. Girard presents some astonishing figures. By 1790, Saint-Domingue was exporting 70 million pounds of white sugar (think “cocaine” to get a sense of present-day values and addictiveness), as well as 93 million pounds of brown sugar, 68 million pounds of coffee and six million pounds of cotton. We’re reminded that only a minority of African slaves (Girard quotes 6%) went to the American colonies. An overwhelming majority went either to Brazil or the Caribbean. The huge economic edifice of Saint-Domingue was, though, little more than a bubble drifting among sharp edges, just waiting to be blown. By 1790 the French Revolution had happened, promising freedom, but only to the right type and colour of man, and scarcely at all to women. Though the revolution was warmly enough greeted in Saint-Domingue, not least by Toussaint, the old monarchy, which had been trying to reform its colonies for years, still seemed like a kindlier alternative to the Committee of Public Safety. Even so, the Haitian Revolution can’t be spun as a monarchist plot. It was infinitely more subtle and random than that. Toussaint became its leader by waiting largely behind the scenes. His heroism, again, is of a conspicuously unheroic sort and marked with brutality. Likewise his aims. The younger Toussaint, far from wanting to ruin and lynch his white “employers”, actually wanted to be like them. The older man, far from being a nationalist, in the usual separatist sense, wanted nothing more than to be a figure in a new French empire. Che Guevara had the good sense to die young and leave an easily screenprinted image of himself. With Toussaint, it’s not so easy. That old engraving still hangs there, but it’s as if he has turned a little away from his unseen troops and toward us. If he’s still not quite full-face, that is no fault of Philippe Girard’s but simply a measure of how far we now are from Toussaint’s complex mind-set.
Giving Toussaint Louverture the Great Man Treatment
Why was Haiti's revolutionary overlooked by historians for so long?
BY MALCOLM HARRIS
November 28, 2016
For nearly 80 years no scholar has written an English-language biography of Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture. This fact is even more remarkable when you consider Louverture’s contemporary equals: a group so small it may not extend beyond Napoleon Bonaparte and George Washington. He was born a slave and became a world leader; even in his own time biographers reached back to the Romans, to Spartacus, for a comparison. Louverture is a unique figure in the modern era, and yet he has had some trouble getting due credit.
TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE: A REVOLUTIONARY LIFE by Philippe GirardBasic Books, 352 pp., $29.99
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The New Paranoia
Philippe Girard, a professor of history at Louisiana’s McNeese State University, steps into the gap. His book Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life is the kind of book you might think already exists. It’s a straightforward biography of one of the Age of Enlightenment’s Great Men, a designation that Louverture pursued and one that always seemed to elude him in important ways. Why that was does not confuse us now, and it did not confuse him then: “If I were white I would receive only praise,” Louverture lamented of his place in world politics, “But I actually deserve even more as a black man.” In an era when rebels and usurpers became statesmen and landowners, it was an obvious injustice that he and only he could be excluded.
Unlike America, Saint-Domingue (the French slice of Hispaniola) was not a slave-breeding economy. The colony relied on importation, and the small territory received as many captives as the whole of the United States. The demand transformed slaving practices in the coastal territories of west Africa, and Louverture’s father was a victim. An aristocrat of the Allada kingdom (not quite the son of a king as had been legend, Girard concludes) he was captured and sold for 300 pounds of cowrie shells around 1740. We know him by the name he was given in enslavement and baptism: Hippolyte.
Louverture was born in the city of Cap on the Bréda plantation. The Brédas were absentee landlords, as was common in Saint Domingue, a system that for slaves worked out for the better and worse. Plantation managers acted with independence (though they were held to account for killed or damaged slaves); the Bréda overseer Bayon de Libertat seems to have exercised that freedom mostly for embezzlement. Eager to distinguish himself, young Louverture had shown extraordinary capacity with horses and mules and became de Libertat’s favorite. De Libertat had him drive his coach, then he seems to have freed him under ambiguous circumstances. The slaves were not de Libertat’s to free, and for him to release Toussaint informally would have been another act of embezzlement.
For most of his life there was nothing particularly revolutionary about Toussaint (“Louverture” would come later). Girard points out that he was, on the other hand, exceptionally adept at navigating the slave system. The chance of being manumitted during a slave’s lifetime were under one percent, and in the colorist system these were mostly the mothers of mixed-race children. Men made up less than 11 percent of freed slaves. So Toussaint, Girard writes, “won the lottery.” While there were early slave rebellions on Saint Domingue, Toussaint does not seem to have been involved. His devout Catholicism—so devout, in fact, that Girard suggests at times he stepped over the line and performed mass as a layman—distanced him from insurrections that drew inspiration from Vodou.
Once he managed the huge feat of obtaining his own freedom, Toussaint set about freeing his family. Here is the hard crux of Girard’s account: To free slaves required money, and money on Saint Domingue required slaves. As a free man, Toussaint leased a coffee estate from his son-in-law, including the slaves. True success navigating the slave system meant joining the other side. The revelation that the “Black Spartacus” drove slaves spurred some modern historians to over-correct, speculating that Toussaint was a well-heeled bourgeois by the time of the revolution. But his position was more precarious. The coffee estate failed, and a slave register unearthed in 2013 records his tragic next move: Toussaint resumed his place on the Bréda plantation.
Meanwhile, revolution was in the air, but not the kind that might inspire slaves. By the 1780s abolitionists were gaining influence and they started getting through to French King Louis XVI, who signed an ordinance allowing slaves to appeal to public officials if they were subject to extreme cruelty, which worried the Saint Domingue planters. In revolution, they saw an alternative: “The example set by the victorious American rebels suggested that it was possible to gain political autonomy,” Girard writes, “while maintaining racial inequality.” The American Revolution taught the white and creole colonists that bourgeois liberty could coexist with slavery just fine.
In an era when rebels and usurpers became statesmen and landowners, it was an obvious injustice that Toussaint was excluded.
In 1791 when the Haitian Revolution truly began it was in the name of King Louis. The slaves of Saint Domingue believed (and not without good reason) that the King was their best shot for labor reform, and in the planning stages Toussaint implied that the insurrection against the restless colonists was authorized at the royal level. The end of slavery was not yet on their agenda; Toussaint spread word that the King had promised three-day weekends. When news of the French Revolution reached the colony, Toussaint’s comrade in arms Georges Biassou declared himself Viceroy in the name of the Bourbons and promoted Toussaint to general of the royal army-in-exile. For a short time the rebel army (though, fighting for the deposed King, they hated to be called that) even joined the Spanish colonial forces rather than the French republicans, who by then were courting Toussaint.
It took a familiar character to clarify Toussaint’s historical purpose: the white savior. Not yet 30 years old, Léger-Félicité Sonthonax had two mandates when appointed Commissioner of Saint Domingue by the French Republic: to re-establish French control and figure out how to reconcile slavery with revolutionary ideas of human equality. The abolitionist—and in Girard’s account, genuinely anti-racist—Sonthonax purged the colonial government, assumed virtually dictatorial power, abolished slavery, then sent a delegation back to France to let them know. Although Toussaint decided to rejoin the French side around this time, Girard’s evidence suggests it was not admiration for Sonthonax that convinced him. He “saw the slave rebellion that he had midwifed slip out of his control,” Girard writes, “as Sonthonax became the embodiment of black liberty.” This is when Toussaint introduced himself through a series of open letters as the slave rebel in charge, as well as when he took the name Louverture—“the opening”—to remind everyone who was behind this whole abolition thing.
Sonthonax was recalled to France to answer for his slavery-abolishing impertinence in 1793, and was replaced by Etienne Laveaux. By the time Sonthonax returned three years later, Louverture was commander-in-chief of the Saint Domingue armed forces, he had vanquished the Spanish, outmaneuvered the planter class, and was on his way to kicking out the British too. But with Sonthonax eager to cement his place as the island’s white savior, Louverture was spurred to act. In a series of deft moves he had Laveaux elected to represent the colony in the Parisian Chamber of Deputies, and then, with his soldiers holding key positions, encouraged Sonthonax to head back to France, which he did. Louverture finally controlled the colony.
This is the point in the narrative when Girard’s critical angle gets some teeth. In the war years, Louverture had not only wrested control from the colonial administrators but had also become the whole island’s richest man. He became the wealthiest planter at the very moment when the plantation system’s foundation had crumbled. Without slavery—or something like it—it simply could not function, and Louverture was suddenly invested in its continued functioning. Rather than taking his army and, say, conquering the United States (as one French plan suggested), Louverture defended a forced labor system from both sides: against what was left of the Creole planters and worker revolts. He banned the sale of small parcels of land in order to restrict subsistence farming, then instituted lifetime serfdom. “In France, everyone is free but everyone works,” Louverture said by way of justification. In 1801, he formally restored the slave trade.
As Louverture seemed to know, he was a better bourgeois ruler than his contemporaries. He was Abraham Lincoln and George Washington combined, emancipation and independence in quick succession. He played the middle, between visions of universal freedom and the exigencies of a class system. In Girard’s telling, what he wanted more than anything, was the recognition and respect due to a man of his accomplishments. As a black man and former slave, he never got it. He repeatedly rescued imperiled whites, as if the noblesse would follow from the oblige. When Thomas Jefferson—a slaveholder and bigot—was elected in the US, he sought to isolate Louverture economically and diplomatically. “I wrote several letters to you already,” Louverture wrote Napoleon in 1800, “and I never received a response from you.” Napoleon was able to capture, expatriate, and jail Louverture in France, where he died in 1803. The revolution continued without him, but Haiti’s independence was never Louverture’s priority.
A book like Girard’s might have been near the top of Louverture’s list. For a man born a slave to star in his own biography centuries later, not as a slave, but as a leader and a statesman is an accomplishment without match. He was, as Girard says, “a man of his time,” a phrase that excuses the half-measures of great men. Perhaps the most accurate thing to say is that Toussaint Louverture was merely a Great Man.
Malcolm Harris is a writer and an editor at The New Inquiry. On Twitter, he’s @bigmeaninternet.
Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life
by Philippe Girard
Reviewed by Richard Feinberg
In This Review
Toussaint Louverture was born a slave in 1743, but at the zenith of his power, he ruled all of Hispaniola, the Caribbean island that consists of present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic. In this deeply researched and highly sophisticated biography, Girard walks the reader through the bewildering series of maneuvers through which the wily Louverture rose to power during history’s only major successful slave rebellion. But his legacy is contested: to resurrect the sugar plantations, which he considered the island’s only viable source of wealth, Louverture deployed his professionalized military to impose labor conditions that were almost as bad as slavery. Eventually, Louverture overreached, when he challenged the authority of the early nineteenth century’s most powerful autocrat, France’s Napoleon Bonaparte. Imperial and spiteful, Napoleon sent an overwhelming expeditionary force to capture Louverture, a move that backfired by empowering Louverture’s far more radical and violent deputy, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who formally declared Haitian independence and consolidated his power by ordering the slaughter of the remaining white population. The roots of modern-day Haiti’s maladies—strongman rule, violent racial strife, economic disorgan-ization, and oppressive poverty—can be traced to these apocalyptic events.
REVIEW: Sepinwall on Girard, HE SLAVES WHO DEFEATED NAPOLEON: TOUSSAINT
LOUVERTURE AND THE HAITIAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE, 1801-1804
Date:
Mon, 25 Feb 2013 10:02:11 -0800
From:
Alyssa Sepinwall
To:
H-CARIBBEAN@H-NET.MSU.EDU
H-Caribbean subscribers may be interested in the following review which was
published recently on H-France.
This review may be found on the H-France website at: http://www.h-france.net/vol13reviews/vol13no18sepinwall.pdf
H-France Review Vol. 13 (January 2013), No. 18
Philippe R. Girard, The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon: Toussaint Louverture and
the Haitian War of Independence, 1801-1804. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama
Press, 2011. ix + 444 pp. Maps, tables, figures, notes, bibliographic essay,
glossary, and index. $45.00 U.S. (cl). ISBN 978-0-8173-1732-4; $45.00 U.S.
(eb). ISBN 978-0-8173-8540-8.
Review by Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, California State University, San Marcos.
In his famous 1995 essay, "An Unthinkable History: The Haitian Revolution as a
Non-Event," Michel-Rolph Trouillot considered why the Haitian Revolution had
been neglected for so long by Western historians. He argued that racism was so
prevalent among eighteenth-century Europeans, including the philosophes, that
they could not conceive of slaves as thinking "men" capable of organized
revolt. Finding the Haitian Revolution to be "unthinkable," they therefore
sought to ignore it. Trouillot added that even if modern Western historians do
notshare their predecessors' overt racism, they have often treated the
Revolution in a comparable way. Trouillot identified two tropes in modern
historiography on Haiti by foreigners: "formulas of erasure" and "formulas of
banalization." Where the former omitted the Haitian Revolution from history
books, the second acknowledged the Revolution but dismissed its
significance.[1]
In the seventeen years since Trouillot published this essay, the field of
Haitian revolutionary studies has changed considerably.[2] For one thing, it is
no longer true that Western scholars ignore the Haitian Revolution. The number
of works on the subject by non-Haitians has exploded; it has also become a
staple part of college courses on the French Revolution and on world history,
at least in Anglophone countries. The awarding in 2010 of both major North
American French-historybook prizes (SFHS's David Pinkney Prize and the AHA's J.
Russell Major Prize) to Jeremy Popkin's You Are All Free: The Haitian
Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (which followed LaurentDubois's winning
the Pinkney in 2005 for A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation
in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804) signaled unmistakably that Haiti and the
French Caribbean are now viewed as integral to French history. Foreigners'
attitudes toward Haiti's revolution have changed in other ways. No longer is
there a chasm between sympathetic readings of the event by Haitian scholars and
hostile interpretations by foreigners. Non-Haitians such as Carolyn Fick,
Franklin Knight, David Geggus and Laurent Dubois have increasingly acknowledged
the Revolution's global historical significance. As Dubois wrote in 2004, "[B]y
creating a society in which all people, of all colors, were granted freedom and
citizenship, the Haitian Revolution forever transformed the world. It was... a
crucial moment in the history of democracy, one that laid the foundation for
the continuing struggles for human rights everywhere."[3]
Philippe Girard's new book is in some ways a backlash against the new
scholarship on Haiti. Girard is decidedly less sympathetic toward the Haitian
Revolution's leaders than are many other recent chroniclers of the event. He
believes that heroic analyses of the Revolution's significance have gone too
far; in his analysis, the Revolution's leaders were not motivated by ideology,
but by greed. Arguing that other works on Haiti have been colored by their
authors' "racial, political or national bias," Girard lays out his own subject
position: "As a twenty-first-century scholar, I have little patience for the
racism and labor exploitation that underpinned Bonaparte's colonial project in
Saint-Domingue and can only rejoice at the thought that the former slaves won
the war. As a white native of Guadeloupe, however, I tend to view French
imperialism in a more positive light than iscustomary among my academic
colleagues, especially those of Haitian descent. As a thirtysomething educated
French male, I am also prone to empathize with the young officers who died so
far from the patrie, when other observers might look at them as greedy,
oversexed monsters" (pp. 9-10). Such an emphasis on the positive aspects of
French imperialism may raise eyebrows among specialists in French colonial
history. While recent work onFrance's second empire has acknowledged that
colonialism could benefit some colonial subjects while exploiting others, few
historians have made a similar case for the brutal slave society of
Saint-Domingue. Nevertheless, though some aspects of Girard's book are
contrarian in ways that may not convince others in the field, his book has a
number of valuable features, and is an essential contribution to scholarship on
Haiti's War of Independence.
Girard's goals are laid out clearly in the book's introduction. He aims to
present a "comprehensive, definitive history of the Haitian war of independence
from an internationalperspective" (p. 7), in contrast to studies focused on the
"minutiae of guerrilla warfare" (p. 8). He seeks to use what he calls "the
latest tools of the historian's craft, multiarchival research in particular"
and to focus on the Revolution's understudied final years (p. 7). Girard also
suggests that other studies have treated race simplistically. He says that when
he began his research, "I assumed that...[o]n one side would be black slaves
yearning for freedom and nationhood; on the other would be racist white
Frenchmen eager to preserve slavery and colonial rule" (p. 9). Girard seeks to
minimize race as a factor in the Revolution: he argues that it would be better
"to cast aside all attempts at categorization and study revolutionary
Saint-Domingue as the sum of hundreds of thousands of individual histories" (p.
9).
In addition to these goals, the study has several underlying themes. Scholars
have long held that Napoleon sent an expedition to Saint-Domingue in 1801-1802,
led by General Leclerc, to depose Toussaint Louverture and to reinstate
slavery. Girard seeks to complicate this view by suggesting that the
restoration of slavery was contingent; the decision was made on the ground by
the expedition's leaders rather than being a definitive order from Napoleon.
Furthermore, Girard suggests that Toussaint helped bring his fate upon himself
through impudence and "duplicitous behavior" (p. 43), without which Napoleon
would have allowed Saint-Domingue to remain free and French. Girard highlights
numerous other contingencies in the expedition, and argues that there were
several missed opportunities at which either Bonaparte or Louverture could have
averted war. Moreover, Girard finds, theexpedition suffered from poor planning,
and from Leclerc's incompetent leadership. Finally, he aims to demonstrate that
the Revolution's leaders were at least as motivated by greed as were French
planters and military leaders, and that their decisions lie at the root of
Haiti's poverty.
Girard's narrative is organized in helpful fashion, with nineteen chapters
breaking down the War of Independence season by season. Chapter one ("The Black
Napoléon: Toussaint and the 1801 Constitution") examines the writing of this
document. The author suggests that Louverture's decision to write a
constitution for the colony was an imprudent one which forced Napoleon's hand:
"Bonaparte would surely react with fury...and send a punitive expedition" (p.
28). Chapter two, cleverly titled "The White Toussaint: Bonaparte's Decision to
Invade Saint-Domingue," extends the arguments Girard made in a 2009 FHS
article.[4] Girard denies that Bonaparte launched the expedition to appease
frustrated planters and his wife Josephine. He finds that many planters were
pragmatic and had reconciled themselves to emancipation as a fait accompli.
Girard maintains that Napoleon and his officialswanted to depose Toussaint, not
in order to restore slavery, but only because he was acting too independently.
Girard also suggests that Napoleon saw Louverture as a kindred spirit and that
Bonaparte's and Louverture's plans for Saint-Domingue were similar. If Napoleon
had managed Toussaint's ambitions more skillfully, Girard argues, "the two men
could have sealed an alliance immensely beneficial to them and to their people"
(p. 41).
In chapter three, Girard turns to the planning for the Leclerc expedition. He
highlights Leclerc's inexperience and how his "utter ignorance of colonial
affairs made him overconfident" (p. 61). Girard also emphasizes the many
"logistical, political and epidemiological factors" that Bonaparte overlooked,
from supplies to yellow fever (p. 65). Chapter four looks at additional
contingencies as the expedition crossed the Atlantic. In addition, Girard
asserts that Louverture misled his people about Napoleon's intentions:
"Louverture had refused to publicize Bonaparte's many commitments to
emancipation and planned to appeal to the laboring classes by claiming that the
French had come to restore slavery" (p. 81).
In chapters five and six, Girard explores other contingencies affecting the
expedition once it arrived. Louverture's sons, who had been studying in the
metropole, accompanied the expedition, and Louverture was eager to see them.
However, Leclerc refused to "give peace a chance" by letting the boys
disembark, out of overconfidence that he could capture the island rapidly and
did not need to please Louverture (p. 86). The notion that his sons were being
held hostage aggravated Louverture's suspicion that the expedition was hostile.
Girard speaks of Toussaint's "taste for deception" and how he tricked Leclerc
in battle (p. 88). Bonaparte and Leclerc had anticipated an easy victory, but
Louverture drew their forces into a protracted struggle. Girard describes the
burning of Le Cap as the beginning of a "scorched-earth policy" by which
Haiti's leaders destroyed their wealth rather than allow it to be seized by the
French (p. 92). He also looks at other aspects of Leclerc's problems, including
the foolishly hostile way in which he treated American merchants from whom he
desperately needed supplies. Girard further emphasizes that Napoleon's inept
planning left Leclerc's men ill-equipped to survive sustained fighting.
Leclerc's spring 1802 campaign forms the subject of chapter seven. French
soldiers assumed that they could easily defeat an "incompetent rabble" of
ex-slaves, but they soon found themselves fighting in a challenging environment
(p. 113). Girard notes that Leclerc's army included former slaves who believed
that the French would not restore slavery and wanted to "be on the victor's
side" (p. 122). Toussaint's forces included some white Frenchmen, as well as
black women. Girard is eager not to portray the fighting as a racist war begun
by whites: "the war was a complex tangle in which an individual's ideals and
ambitions were as significant as his racial affiliation" (p. 123). He asserts
that it was the "rebels" (as he terms Toussaint's troops) who began racialist
violence rather than Leclerc's army. The unfortunate soldiers who arrived from
France had a "color-blind outlook," since most had "probably never seen a
person of color until they embarked." They were therefore shocked by
"atrocities against white civilians" (p. 127).
In chapters eight, nine and ten, Girard focuses on the period from May to
August 1802. In chapter eight, he lays out what he calls the "three Gs" that
attracted French officers to Saint-Domingue: "gold, girls, and glory" (p. 142).
As the officers "began a concerted assault on the virtue of the colonists'
wives," disillusionment set in amongst planters (p. 141). Girard notes that
metropolitan officers also dreamed of the profits they could earn if slavery
was restored, and set out to acquire plantations through any possible means.
Leclerc had one of his few victories at this time, tricking Louverture into
captivity and exile. Chapter nine examines the outbreak of yellow fever among
French troops in summer 1802. Girard argues that this epidemic could have been
mitigated with better planning and more supplies. Greedy officers embezzled
money that should have gone to hospitals, in order to decorate their residences
with fancy chandeliers. Chapter ten turns to Leclerc's efforts in summer 1802
to confiscate all weapons on the island, and to the uprising this effort
sparked. Even while insisting that Leclerc still did not intend to restore
slavery, Girard acknowledges that the timing of the disarmament campaign--which
coincided with an effort to get former slaves back to work as "free
cultivators" on sugar plantations--made many fear imminent re-enslavement. The
arrival of news from Guadeloupe of the French army's brutal reimposition of
slavery there only aggravated the situation.
Chapter eleven examines the mounting number of defections in the French army in
fall 1802, by men of mixed race and others. As the French grew more suspicious
of disloyalty, Leclerc and his men "ramp[ed] up violence" and atrocities (p.
211). Girard argues that the more dejected Leclerc became (first by the
campaign's failures and then by the terrifying realization that he was
succumbing to yellow fever), the more "pitiless" he became (p. 219). In the
last weeks of his life, he had "genocidal plans" to massacre nearly all of
Saint-Domingue's blacks, but died before he could bring them to fruition (p.
222). In chapter twelve, about the winter of 1802-1803, Girard turns to
Leclerc's successor, the even more ruthless Donatien-Marie-Joseph de Vimeur de
Rochambeau. Unlike Leclerc, Rochambeau was eager to restore slavery
immediately. Girard details the French army's "notorious" crimes during this
period (p. 241), which nevertheless proved ineffective. Not only did starving
French soldiers end up eating combat dogs for lack of other provisions, but
they began to face a more unified opponent; and Louverture's lieutenant
Jean-Jacques Dessalines began consolidating his control over rival factions.
The events of the winter and spring of 1803, as Dessalines added still more
factions to his command, are analyzed in chapters thirteen and fourteen. Though
Girard saysthat Dessalines fought his rivals "inglorious[ly]" (p. 256), he
"succeeded beyond anyone's expectations" (p. 253). He also notes that
Rochambeau massacred mixed-race officers and sexually assaulted their wives,
and that he likely aimed to exterminate all the people of mixed race in the
colony. Even at this stage of the war, Girard finds contingent factors at work.
He maintains that Dessalines's men would not have declared independence and
could have maintained their allegiance to France if only Napoleon had disavowed
Rochambeau's actions.[5] Girard also looks at Toussaint's captivity and death,
and at Napoleon's dawning realization that Saint-Domingue was lost. "Damn
sugar, damn coffee, damn colonies!" Bonaparte is said to have exclaimed (p.
272).
Chapter fifteen addresses the outbreak of war with Britain and its implications
for Rochambeau's men. The author examines Dessalines's efforts to form
alliances with Britain and the United States. Although Dessalines did not
succeed in either effort, he benefitted from the blockade that Britain imposed
on France, as well as from British merchants' willingness to sell to him
surreptitiously. In the next chapter, Girard discusses "Life in Besieged French
Towns" in the summer of 1803. Amidst shortages, many colonists died of
starvation or fled the island. Therebels completed their "scorched-earth
campaign" to deprive Rochambeau's men of sugar profits; Girard argues that this
continued the "colony's economic death spiral" (pp. 293-294). Girard also
emphasizes the horrifying corruption of Rochambeau's army, which demanded large
sums from white merchants and executed those who did not pay.
The book's final chapters trace the end of French rule in the colony. They
cover Dessalines's capture of the final towns controlled by the French (chapter
seventeen), and the early days of independence (chapter eighteen). In chapter
nineteen, he tracks the migrations of fleeing white planters and soldiers, as
well as Dessalines's efforts to conquer the Spanish side of the island. The
chapter also surveysrelations between France and Haiti until the 1825 indemnity
agreement (in which France finally recognized Haitian independence, but in
exchange for a 150-million-franc indemnity).
In his conclusion, Girard re-emphasizes his main themes and nuances others. He
repeats his assertion that race was less important in the Revolution than
scholars have assumed. He also reiterates his view that modern Haitian poverty
stems from the plantation-burning tactics of Haiti's leaders and because
Dessalines eliminated the white managerial class. "Today," the author laments,
"Haiti, the fabled Pearl of the Antilles, is the poorest country in the Western
Hemisphere and a net importer of sugar" (p. 344). Qualifying somewhat his
formulations earlier in the book, Girard concludes that "[r]estoring slavery
was probably not one of Bonaparte's immediate objectives" (p. 343).
Girard's book is written in a gripping style, with vivid language. Girard has a
gift for lively turns of phrase, and shows with great skill the twists and
turns of the war. His book is also impressively researched, incorporating
archival documents from around the world, written in French, English, Spanish
and Kreyòl. The most valuable aspect of the book is the level of detail it
provides about each phase of the war. This overview is more thorough than any
other book in English; the summary offered here only scratches the surface of
his findings.[6] Girard's discussion of how Napoleon might have been willing to
leave emancipation intact in Saint-Domingue is a useful nuancing of existing
scholarship; his analysis of Leclerc's failings, and of the differences between
Leclerc and Rochambeau, is also extremely helpful. Another of the book's
strengths is its emphasis on contingent factors. Here, Girard adds to Jeremy
Popkin's findings about the central role of contingency in Haiti's
revolution.[7] The bibliographic essay at the end of the volume is also useful.
Despite the study's many valuable features, scholars are likely to take issue
with a number of its arguments. Specialists on Haitian history have voiced
discomfort with Girard's perspective before, most notably in J. Michael Dash's
2008 review of one of Girard's earlier books.[8] In some ways, Girard's
thinking has changed in recent years. For instance, he offers a more nuanced
position on the killings of whites ordered by Dessalines than in his previous
work. In a 2005 article, Girard termed the struggles of Haiti's slaves against
their former slaveowners a "genocide" against whites.[9] Here, he seems to back
away from this claim, and focuses on French atrocities as much as Haitian ones.
He concedes that Dessalines did not seek to kill all whites, and that those he
did massacre "were killed not because they were white, but because they were
French" (p. 324). This evolution brings him closer to scholars such as Geggus
and Dubois who have suggested that if anyone's plans can be classified as
genocidal, it would be those of the French.[10]
Nevertheless, Girard's thinking on other issues, such as the origins of Haitian
poverty, still differs sharply from others in the field. In contrast to
Girard's position that it was Haitian leaders' decisions that caused Haiti's
post-independence hardships, most scholars have emphasized the foreign reaction
to the Haitian Revolution. They point to how other nations strove to isolate
Haiti, not to mention the crippling effect of the 150-million-franc
indemnity.[11] Girard's lament for Saint-Domingue's lost glory as the "pearl of
the Antilles" (which echoes the framework of his earlier book on Haiti) is also
problematic.[12] As Jean-Germain Gros has written, "[T]he 'glorious' past of
Haiti was not in fact so for most Haitians, who were forcibly plucked from
their environment and thrown into the maelstrom of the most brutal form of
slavery, and this abduction is partly responsible for Haiti's terrible
present."[13]
Scholars are also likely to take issue with Girard's treatment of Toussaint
Louverture. Though Girard may have found evidence that Napoleon was not
hell-bent on reimposing slavery, it is unclear why he accuses Toussaint of
lying to his followers when he suggested that Bonaparte wanted to re-enslave
them. Despite Bonaparte's lofty pronouncements about "the sacred principles of
liberty and equality" (p. 46), Napoleon never extended the National
Convention's 1794 decree abolishing slavery to colonies like Mauritius. He was
also perfectly willing to reimpose slavery elsewhere in the Caribbean. Indeed,
as Laurent Dubois has noted, Toussaint "had reason to be concerned" that France
would revoke emancipation.[14] In addition, Girard sometimes seems to echo too
closely the sources he usedwhich were written by whites. For instance, he
refers to Toussaint as "duplicitous" and "disloyal," without considering
whether Toussaint had reason to disregard orders from metropolitan officials,
or to try to mislead them.
More generally, scholars are likely to be skeptical of Girard's argument that
"monetary gain and politics have often trumped race as the underlying issue of
Haitian history" (p. 342). While it is certainly helpful to remind readers that
skin color was not always determinative of alliances, Girard's effort to
deemphasize ideologies of liberation--and to substitute greed as Toussaint's
and Dessalines's main motivator--will likely be viewed as an attempt to deflate
the reputations of these leaders and, by extension, the importance of the
Revolution itself. Other scholars have certainly questioned the centrality of
race in Haitian history, and have had spirited debates about whether it or
class is a more useful lens of analysis.[15] However, to suggest that race was
of such limited importance that it would be better to avoid it and instead
"study revolutionary Saint-Domingue as the sum of hundreds of thousands of
individual histories" (p. 9) will likely be viewed as overstated. Indeed,
Girard's depiction of Toussaint and Dessalines as men driven by greed, not
principles, puts him squarely at odds with those scholars (such as Franklin
Knight, Nick Nesbitt, Laurent Dubois and Susan Buck-Morss) who have argued for
the Revolution's philosophical radicalism.[16]
Ultimately, the book reveals less about "the slaves who defeated Napoleon" than
about the French officers who lost to them. Girard wants to help a popular
audience understand, as he puts it, how a group of "barefoot rebel slaves"
defeated Bonaparte's army (p. 345). But he is more successful at capturing
colonists' thinking than at reading sources against the grain to get at former
slaves' point of view. Some of Girard's descriptions of ex-slaves sound
dismissive (for instance, "Also needed were the specialized skills that eluded
a coachman like Louverture [or] a tile-layerlike Dessalines" [p. 21]). Girard
also makes statements such as "[f]ormer slaves who had once believed their
masters to be endowed with extraordinarypowers had long since learned that
theories of racial superiority were false" (p. 307), but without citing
evidence that enslaved Africans had ever believed slaveowners to be racially
superior. Ultimately, Girard's interests lie more in diplomatic and military
history than in postcolonial theory or history from below.[17]
In addition, Girard sometimes describes existing scholarship in an imprecise
way. There is a disjuncture between the bibliographical essay at the book's
end, where Girard acknowledges the work that other specialists have done (see
for instance p. 433, where he praises the work of others who have complicated
Manichean ideas about race in the Revolution), and the book's introduction,
where he portrays himself as doing this work for the first time. If he has an
academic audience in mind, it also seems strange to inform the reader that
Toussaint Louverture was a slaveowner as if this is a new finding (p. 9);
existing studies have already sought to demythologize Toussaint.[18]
The study thus needs to be read with care. Though the book's extensive research
and level of detail make it essential reading for anyone interested in the
Haitian Revolution's final years, scholars are likely to take issue with many
of its overarchingarguments. Still, Girard has highlighted the paucity of
in-depth work on the Revolution's final phase and his book will be a key point
of departure for anyone turning to the topic in coming decades.
NOTES
[1] Michel-Rolph Trouillot, "An Unthinkable History: The Haitian Revolution as
a Non-Event," in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History
(Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1995), pp. 70-107.
[2] For a fuller analysis of recent historiography on Haiti, see Alyssa
Goldstein Sepinwall, Haitian History: New Perspectives (New York: Routledge,
2012).
[3] Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian
Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004),
p. 7. See also Carolyn E.Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue
Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990);
Franklin Knight, "The Haitian Revolution," American Historical Review
105/1(2000): 103-115; and David P. Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002).
[4] Philippe R. Girard, "Napoléon Bonaparte and the Emancipation Issue in
Saint-Domingue, 1799-1803," French Historical Studies 32/4(Fall 2009): 587-618.
[5] Compare on this point Julia Gaffield, "Haiti and Jamaica in the Remaking of
the EarlyNineteenth-Century Atlantic World," William and Mary Quarterly
69/3(July 2012): 583-614, which suggests that Dessalines's planning for
independence was well advanced by summer 1803. For an extended discussion of
Dessalines's diplomatic and commercial negotiations with Britain and the U.S.,
see JuliaGaffield, "'So Many Schemes in Agitation': The Haitian State and the
Atlantic World" (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 2012).
[6] Important studies in French include Claude B. Auguste and Marcel B.
Auguste, L'expédition Leclerc, 1801-1803 (Port-au-Prince: H. Deschamps, 1985);
Yves Bénot, La démence coloniale sous Napoléon (Paris: La Découverte, 1991);
and Yves Bénot and Marcel Dorigny, eds., Rétablissement de l'esclavage dans les
colonies françaises, 1802: ruptures et continuités de la politique coloniale
française (1800-1830) (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2003).
[7] See Jeremy D. Popkin, You are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the
Abolition of Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
[8] J. Michael Dash, "The (Un)kindness of Strangers: Writing Haiti in the 21st
Century," Caribbean Studies 36/2(2008): 171-178. Dash argued that Girard's
perspective implied that "had the war of independence not occurred
Haiti...would be like Martinique and Guadeloupe today, contentedly dependent on
metropolitan largesse." Dash further contended that Girard's book "takes
writing on Haiti to a new low" (p. 173). See also Charles Forsdick's comments
in "'Burst of Thunder, Stage Pitch Black": The Place of Haiti in US Inter-War
Cultural Production," Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 15/1(2011):
7-18.
[9] Girard, "Caribbean Genocide: Racial War in Haiti, 1802-4," Patterns of
Prejudice 39/2(2005): 138-161.
[10] See Geggus, "The Haitian Revolution in Atlantic Perspective," in Nicholas
P. Canny and Philip D. Morgan, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World,
c.1450-c.1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 544; and Dubois,
Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012), pp.
42-43.
[11] See the overview of scholarship on post-independence Haiti in Michel
Hector and Laënnec Hurbon, eds., Genèse de l'état haïtien (1804-1859) (Paris:
Maison des sciences de l'homme, 2009). See also the survey of scholarship on
this question in Sepinwall, Haitian History, especially pp. 103-114 (and my own
position on pp. 1-7).
[12] Girard, Paradise Lost: Haiti's Tumultuous Journey from Pearl of the
Caribbean to Third World Hot Spot (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
[13] Jean-Germain Gros, State Failure, Underdevelopment, and Foreign
Intervention in Haiti (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. xiv.
[14] Dubois, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History, p. 35; see also Jeremy Popkin's
discussion of Napoleon's interest in "keeping his intentions concealed"
(Popkin, A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution [Malden, Mass.:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2012], p. 118).
[15] For an overview of this debate, see Matthew J. Smith, "From Dessalines to
Duvalier Revisited: A Quarter-Century Retrospective," Journal of Haitian
Studies 13/1(2007): 27-39.
[16] The book's jacket features a blurb by Dubois, but it focuses on the book's
impressive research and detail rather than its interpretive framework. In his
own scholarship, Dubois (and his Duke colleague, Deborah Jenson) have offered
accounts of Dessalines that diverge sharply from Girard's. Where Girard argues
that Dessalines was a "social nonentity," and was "feared and hated" but "not
respected" (p. 248), Dubois has called Dessalines someone who is "justly
venerated" for his role in Haitian independence and who sought "to create a
radically new order." See Deborah Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics,
Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution (Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 2011) on Dessalines's "radically anticolonial ideology" (p. 85 and
passim); Dubois, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History, pp. 48, 43; and Dubois,
"Dessalines Toro d'Haïti," William and Mary Quarterly 69/3 (July 2012):
541-548. See also Madison Smartt Bell's forthcoming study of Dessalines; Susan
Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti and Universal History (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2009); and Nick Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation: the Haitian
Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press, 2008).
[17] For an example of scholars using French sources creatively to understand
slave experience, see Fick, The Making of Haiti.
[18] See Girard's acknowledgement of work reevaluating Toussaint in his
"Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the Atlantic System: A Reappraisal," William and
Mary Quarterly 69/3 (July 2012): 552n2.
Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall
California State University, San Marcos
sepinwal@csusm.edu
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Friday, November 12, 2010
Book Review: Haiti: The Tumultuous History - From Pearl of the Caribbean to Broken Nation
In spite of the proximity of Haiti to the U.S., very few Americans know much about this small island nation beyond the regular tragedies that show up on our news and that they practice voodoo. Philippe Girard’s new book, Haiti: The Tumultuous History - From Pearl of the Caribbean to Broken Nation, is a great introduction to the fascinating, colorful and all too often tragic history of Haiti that spans her history from the early days of European exploration all the way to the 2010 earthquake. I am going to Haiti in January of 2011 and was looking for an introduction to her history and I found a goldmine with Girard’s compact but thorough book.
What I especially liked is that Philippe Girard refuses to get into the blame game with Haiti’s woes. It is true that Haiti was exploited in its early history but so were many other nations and they are not in nearly the same shape as Haiti. According to Girard, Haiti’s woes can be placed squarely on centuries of corrupt leaders who have seized power in this island nation and used their nation as their own personal piggy bank. The end results is a giant welfare state that depends on foreign aid to function. Girard doesn’t sugarcoat the racism of America and the horror of the slave trade but neither does he allow these events to be an excuse for Haiti’s deplorable conditions.
What was most interesting was Girard’s conclusion. He asks the obvious question being asked by his primarily American audience: what should the U.S. do to help Haiti? His answer was surprising but dead on: as little as possible. Haiti needs to come into the world economy on its own. Free food helps feed people but it destroys Haiti’s agricultural sector. What Haiti has in abundance and the world has a need for is a cheap workforce that can do labor intensive light assembly. Are those jobs glamorous? Nope but in a country with something like 70% unemployment, these jobs are not exploitative they are gateways to a better future. Haiti is not going to go from welfare state to booming economy overnight and it is a century behind much of the rest of the world. All Haiti has going for it right now is a large, cheap workforce and natural beauty. To tap the one (the natural beauty) is going to require a stable country which requires stable employment (cheap workforce). Tourists are not ging to visit Haiti and spend their vacation money in a country that is unstable and the only way for Haiti to achieve last stability is to become economically independent.
Not everyone is going to agree with Girard but I think he makes a compelling case for how Haiti got where it is and the only real hope for Haiti in the future. Haiti: The Tumultuous History - From Pearl of the Caribbean to Broken Nation is a great introduction to our neighbor to the south that only seems to be in the news when the latest tragedy strikes. I think that the suggestions Girard makes could lead to Haiti someday being a tourism destination and a thriving economic partner instead of a nation broken by mismanagement.
Posted by Arthur Sido at 10:09 AM
Caribbean Project: Review: Haiti: The Tumultuous History – From Pearl of the Caribbean to Broken Nation
February 7, 2014 Hunter Wallace Books, Caribbean Project, History, Negroes, Race Realism, Race Relations, Racism 3
Philippe Gerard, Haiti: The Tumultuous History - From Pearl of the Caribbean to Broken Nation
Philippe Girard, Haiti: The Tumultuous History – From Pearl of the Caribbean to Broken Nation
Haiti
Philippe Girard’s Haiti: The Tumultuous History – From Pearl of the Caribbean to Broken Nation is easily the best of the most recent popular histories of Haiti in the English language.
Although it is a shorter book, Girard’s concise treatment of Haiti’s history was much more informative than Laurent Dubois’ whitewashing in Haiti: The Aftershocks of History. Every country in the world is the product of the “aftershocks of history,” but that doesn’t explain the differences that exist between nations.
To his credit, Philippe Girard understands why an English-speaking audience would search for a book about the history of Haiti in the first place. It has a lot to do with the old joke that Haiti is the only nation in the Americas that has a last name, “the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.”
Girard, who was born in Guadeloupe in the eastern Caribbean, doesn’t have much patience for the usual explanations. In the 21st century, the Caribbean is the richest region in the developing world. Every other country in the region shares with Haiti the same history of slavery, white supremacy, and colonialism. No other country in the Caribbean, particularly its neighbor, the Dominican Republic, is nearly as poor as Haiti.
In light of all this, Girard has a straightforward answer for his audience: the three main causes of Haiti’s poverty and relative decline are corruption, instability, and xenophobia. Throughout the book, Girard makes a very compelling case for this argument, which shines most brightly in his coverage of the Jean-Bertrand Aristide era (1988-2004). In fact, over half of the book is devoted to Haiti since the rise of Aristide.
In my view, the most valuable part of this book is Girard’s treatment of the demise of the plantation complex after independence:
“Pétion’s 1809 land distribution decrees, extended to the northern part with the reunification of 1820, changed Haiti more than all the revolutions and civil wars of the nineteenth century. From the Spanish colonial days until 1809, agriculture had been dominated by large estates; from that point until today, small-scale farming became the norm (a feeble attempt by Boyer in 1826 to reinstate fermage fell victim to universal opposition). Considering that the vast majority of Haitians, then and today, were peasants, the change was nothing short of revolutionary. Sugar exports ceased altogether for one century, a startling development in a country that was the world’s largest exporter of tropical foodstuffs in the 1780s. Coffee, more suited to small-scale agriculture, lingered on.
Subsistence crops now dominated, but even these eventually proved insufficient. In 1804, Haiti’s population was probably inferior to three hundred thousand, and there was more than enough land to feed anyone. As the years went by, however, the substantial plots of the Pétion era were subdivided between heirs, who then had to feed their family on ever dwindling parcels. In the U.S. environment, individual ownership of farmland led to a sense of personal responsibility and increased production; but the system was only sustainable during the rapid population growth of the nineteenth century because the supply of arable land was virtually inexhaustible. In Haiti’s mountainous terrain, clearing new land only brought under cultivation steep fields who soil was quickly depleted by water erosion. Today, the population stands at eight million, leaving less than half an acre of arable land per person in rural areas. Forests are a distant memory. By dint of such agricultural choices, Haitians had chosen to be happy and poor. The latter proved more enduring than the former.” (Philippe Girard, Haiti: The Tumultuous History – From Pearl of the Caribbean to Broken Nation, pp.67-68)
What is Haiti today?
It is an extremely poor and overpopulated country, the only country in the Caribbean with an economy based on subsistence agriculture, where the land has been redistributed, fragmented, and exhausted beyond recognition since colonial times.
Why didn’t this happen elsewhere in the Caribbean? In places like Barbados or the Leeward Islands, slavery was abolished, but white supremacy and colonialism endured until the mid-twentieth century. In Barbados, the blacks were still working on sugar plantations like their ancestors in the 1960s. Similarly, the blacks were still picking cotton in the American South until the 1950s.
In these smaller islands, the land generally remained consolidated and in the hands of the Whites in large estates, who could command labor by importing Asian indentured servants or through hiring freedmen with wage labor because there was no land redistribution to the ex-slaves along the lines of what had happened in Haiti. In Jamaica, a larger island with lots of uncultivated land like Haiti, there was a very similar plunge into an overpopulated peasantry engaged in subsistence agriculture.
Unlike the Dominican Republic, Haiti never broke away from that model:
“Haitians continued to trade crops for manufactured products, as if the mercantilist exclusif had never been abolished and Colbert still served as finance minister of the French colonial empire. This focus on low-margin foodstuffs, even more than misguided agricultural policies, explains why Haiti today is a nation of peasants eking out meager living off a few acres of bare hillsides.” (Girard, p.68)
The US occupation of Haiti (1915-1934) was another missed opportunity to make a clean break with the past:
“U.S. educational policies were another case in point. U.S. authorities complained that Haitian schools, inspired by the nineteenth century French lycées, were elitist institutions that offered a small minority of Haitians a curriculum heavily biased toward the liberal arts and the classics. Haiti thus produced hundreds of lawyers who spoke Latin and could quote Racine and Corneille but did not know how to repair a steam engine. A broader-based, more technical educational system, Americans rightly concluded, would have been more likely to spark an industrial revolution in Haiti.” (Girard, p.91.)
The Americans had the right answer to most of the problems that were plaguing Haiti: sort out Haiti’s chaotic finances and pay off the national debt (accomplished by 1947), eliminate corruption by removing the parasitic native political class from power, pacify the country to foster commerce, rebuild and invest in Haiti’s infrastructure, diversify agriculture, create a broader based educational system, encourage foreign investment, revive the export based plantation economy, etc.
Some of these policies are reminiscent of what happened to Florida after the War Between the States. The Yankees came to Florida and built their roads and railroads, helped to diversify the agricultural economy (citrus and winter vegetables), established land grant agricultural colleges, and developed new industries like tourism and phosphate mining that greatly invigorated Florida’s “New South” economy. Although Floridians emphatically rejected Yankee racial ideas during Reconstruction, the “New South” mindset eagerly courted Northern capital and economic development.
In Haiti, these policies were an affront to the sensitive feelings of Haitians and provoked a fierce xenophobic nationalist backlash. Led by Charlemagne Péralte, Haitians waged a guerrilla war against the US occupation over the use of slave-like corvée labor to build roads and bridges. Chanting “down with the railroad,” they attacked the building of a US company that was building a railroad in between Port-au-Prince and Cap-Haïtien. The scions of the mulatto elite also resented the US imposed educational system that emphasized agricultural and technical training.
Toward the end of the book, Philippe Girard tours Jacmel on the beautiful southern coast of Haiti, which aside from Haitians has all the natural qualities which should make it a prime destination in the Caribbean for foreign tourists:
“Rather, it seemed clear to me that Jacmel’s inability to tap into the tourist bonanza was the result of profound political and structural problems – not just bad luck, the colonial legacy, or racist bias on the part of some foreign tourists. Jacmel’s gingerbread houses were lovely, but its roads were potholed messes lined with uncollected garbage. The main river bordering the town doubled as a public latrine and laundry-washing spot. The brackish, waste-filled water reached the beach unfiltered. But this was not all: the lovely fine sand was buried under a thick layer of trash, complete with a rusty cargo ship that had somehow ended its life on the town’s waterfront. Broken glass, begging children, and the survivors of the great 1982 swine massacre that lived off the beach’s refuse added a final touch sure to scare away any tourist who had ventured so far.” (Girard, p.219)
The only negative thing that I can say about this book is that Girard chose to include a few of the usual disingenuous fig leaves to ward off accusations of “racism.”
It’s true that some Haitians and sub-Saharan Africans are often successful in the Europe, Canada, and United States: anyone with any brains or talent who has the chance to do so tries his hardest to get out of there and never go back. This often takes the form of foreign students who choose to stay in college to earn multiple degrees precisely in order to avoid having to return to their own countries.
Undoubtedly, there are thousands of Haitians who are held down and and who are unable to realize their full potential solely because of the circumstances of their environment. If Haiti wasn’t so mismanaged by its inept rulers, there’s no reason to believe it couldn’t be at least as prosperous as Barbados. In sub-Saharan Africa, the divergence between diamond rich Sierra Leone and Botswana comes to mind.
In the final analysis, corruption, instability, and xenophobia are the hallmarks of African countries everywhere: to name just a few, Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe, the Democratic Republic of Congo under Mobutu Sese Seko, Uganda under Idi Amin, or Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising.
We shouldn’t exaggerate the importance of “instability” to Haiti’s underdevelopment. Detroit, Michigan has always had a stable black-run government, but xenophobia, corruption, and violence have produced similar results there.