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1 An announcement for Stella first appeared in the September 10, 1859, edition of the weekly Bibliographie de la France: Journal général de l’imprimerie et de la librairie. Dentu was known for publishing travel writing and histories, such as those by Jules Michelet and Beaubrun Ardouin, as well as the works of socialist politicians and intellectuals including Louis Blanc and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

2 Léon-François Hoffmann, “En marge du premier roman haïtien: Stella, d’Emeric Bergeaud,” in Haïti: Lettres et l’être (Toronto: GREF, 1992): 147–165.

3 While the main events of the novel center on the years 1802–1803, its timeline covers the period from 1788 to 1804; the final chapter provides an even deeper history for the nation, one that begins before 1492.

4 The term “mulatto” does not accurately describe this diverse population, but rather reinforces a racialized system of categorization carried over from the French colonial era. We have chosen instead to use the term gens de couleur, “free people of color,” or people of Euro-African ancestry.

5 The first five volumes of Beaubrun Ardouin’s Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti, 11 vols. (Paris: Dézobry et E. Magdeleine, 1853–1865), are subtitled “Followed by the Life of General J.-M. Borgella,” and include a substantial amount of information about the general, the biography of whom Ardouin claims was the genesis of his seminal work on Haitian history (Études I: 1).

6 For more on the separatist peasants’ region, see Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (New York: Verso, 1988). For one of the many mentions of Bergeaud as Borgella’s secretary, see Ghislaine Rey, Anthologie du roman haïtien de 1859 à 1946 (Sherbrooke, Québec: Editions Naaman, 1982): 18.

7 For more information on laws against Vodou, see Kate Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Ramsey notes that the 1835 Code differs from the 1826 Penal Code, which had outlawed only the selling of macandal rather than “spell-making” (and thereby religious practices increasingly grouped under the term “Vodou”) more generally, in that the 1835 Penal Code “criminalize[d] an entire field of ritual practices” (59–60). Ramsey also notes that the 1835 prohibitions were, compared to similar laws in the colonial Caribbean, relatively mild (59).

8 It was, however, the Americans who established French as the official language of Haiti during their 1915–1934 occupation. French was the sole official language of Haiti from the time of the American occupation until 1987.

9 The phrase “live independent or die” is written in the Declaration of Independence, drafted by Boisrond-Tonnere and announced by Dessalines on January 1, 1804. Significantly, the original motto of the French Republic was “liberté, égalité, fraternité, ou la mort.”

10 Philippe Girard, Haiti: The Tumultuous History—From Pearl of the Caribbean to Broken Nation (New York: Macmillan, 2010): 65–68; Laurent Dubois, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012): 4–7. In the words of Philippe Girard, “Northerners were made happy against their will. Southerners were free and poor” (Haiti: 67).

11 France sent envoys to negotiate with Pétion and Christophe. French agents suggested to Pétion that Haiti be put back under the control of France (Dubois, Aftershocks: 79). Former French colonists argued for some kind of return to French rule as late as 1825, the year of France’s recognition of Haitian independence. See, for example, the anonymous text De Saint-Domingue. Moyen facile d’augmenter l’indemnité due aux colons de Saint-Domingue expropriés (Paris: Imprimerie de Goetschy, 1825).

12 Under Boyer, the Haitian government encouraged African American emigration; in the mid-1820s, the government subsidized the travel of six thousand African Americans to Haiti (Dubois, Aftershocks: 93–94).

13 The writings of the man charged with negotiating the indemnity were republished in 2006. See Gaspard Théodore Mollien, Haïti ou Saint-Domingue (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006) and Mœurs d’Haïti (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006).

14 After the 2010 earthquake, several French intellectuals called for France to reimburse Haiti. See, for example, “Un appel pour que la France rembourse à Haïti la dette de son indépendance,” Le Monde (August 16, 2010).

15 In fact, Haiti was originally ordered to pay 150 million francs in gold, although that figure was reduced to 60 million in 1838, when French recognition became official. Furthermore, as a condition of recognition in 1825, the import and export fees levied on French ships and goods in Haiti were ordered at half of all other nations’ fees. While it is difficult to estimate how much money this would equate to in the twenty-first century, the figures run into the billions of dollars. See Joseph Saint-Rémy, Mémoires du général Toussaint L’Ouverture (Paris: Pagnerre, 1853): 138–139; Jean-François Brière, Haïti et la France: le rêve brisé (Paris: Karthala, 2008); and François Blancpain, Un siècle de relations financières entre Haïti et la France (1825–1922) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001).

16 Dumesle was related to Rivière-Hérard, who eventually succeeded Boyer as president of the Republic. Both Dumesle and Rivière-Hérard ended their lives in exile in Jamaica. See Dubois, Aftershocks: 122–133, as well as Matthew J. Smith, Liberty, Fraternity, Exile: Haiti and Jamaica after Emancipation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

17 From 1844 to 1848, the separate state that had been led by Goman earlier in the century was reestablished by the Piquets. See Michel Hector, “Les deux grandes rebellions paysannes de la première moitié du XIXe siècle haïtien,” in Rétablissement de l’esclavage dans les colonies françaises 1802: Ruptures et continuités de la politique coloniale française, ed. Yves Bénot and Marcel Dorigny (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2003): 179–199, and David Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour, and National Independence in Haiti, revised ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996): passim.

18 Guerrier and Riché were both over eighty years old when they became president. Beaubrun Ardouin served on the powerful Council of Secretaries of State, which was established in 1843 after the presidential term was set at four years, during the Guerrier administration, while his brother Céligny Ardouin served on it under Riché. For more on the complicated “politique de doublure” in Haiti, see Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier.

19 See Justin Bouzon, Etudes historiques sur la présidence de Faustin Soulouque (Port-au-Prince: Bibilothèque haïtienne, 1894).

20 Slavery was officially abolished in the U.S. in 1865, in the Spanish colonies of Puerto Rico and Cuba in 1873 and 1886, and in the Empire of Brazil in 1888.

21 See David Luis-Brown, “Slave Rebellion and the Conundrum of Cosmopolitanism: Plácido and La Escalera in a Neglected Cuban Antislavery Novel by Orihuela,” Atlantic Studies 9, no. 2 (2012): 209–230; Werner Sollors, Neither Black nor White yet Both (Cambridge, UK: Harvard University Press, 1999); Michele Reid-Vazquez, The Year of the Lash: Free People of Color in Cuba and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001).

22 Hénock Trouillot, Beaubrun Ardouin, l’homme politique et l’historien (Port-au-Prince: Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia, Comisión de Historia, 1950): 29–31.

23 However, many of their members were executed before news of abolition reached Paris in the winter of 1793–1794. Jacques-Pierre Brissot laments in his letters from prison, written in late 1793, that “all our efforts” could not break free the “unfortunate” slaves (excerpt from Brissot’s Papiers inédits: Archives Nationales, 446 AP 15).

24 Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet published Réflexions sur l’esclavage des nègres with the Société Typographique in Neufchâtel under the pseudonym M. Schwarz in 1781.

25 In 1790, the colonist Jean-Baptiste Mosneron, heavily invested in the slave trade, warned against allowing these new revolutionary laws to extend beyond French borders in his Discours sur les colonies et la traite des noirs, prononcé le 26 février 1790 par M. Mosneron de l’Aunay, député du Commerce de Nantes près de l’Assemblée Nationale, à la Société des Amis de la Constitution (s.l.n.d.): 9–10.

26 See Laurent Dubois, “An Enslaved Enlightenment: Rethinking the Intellectual History of the French Atlantic,” Social History 31, no. 1 (February 2006): 1–14.

27 The proslavery Club Massiac, whose members included some of Saint-Domingue’s absentee planters, formed an influential political block that tried to halt any laws extending universal rights to people of African descent. Nonetheless, in 1791, the National Assembly officially stated that gens de couleur were entitled to the same rights as all French citizens. However, this was not an easy law to implement in a time of such upheaval and in a colony so far from Paris.

28 See Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998): 29, and Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New Word: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005): 102. There is some mystery surrounding the exact dates of and participants in this ceremony. Both Dayan and Dubois highlight the importance of the symbolic power of the Bois Caïman story.

29 Indications of Bergeaud’s political views, such as his support for Ogé and Chavannes and his dislike of Louverture’s policies have, over the years, contributed to the controversial reception of his novel. Ghislain Gouraige cited political reasons when he wrote, for example, that the novel “merited little interest” in his Historie de la littérature haïtienne de l’indépendance à nos jours (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie Théodire, 1960): 29.

30 Brière, Haïti et la France: 6.

31 The use of the term “indigenous” connected early Haitians to the native Taíno Arawak population of the island, as did the choice of the name “Ayiti.” In our translation, we have kept the French term “Indigène” for this reason.

32 France was rapidly expanding its colonial empire during the second half of the seventeenth century. By 1665, it had also established a colony on the Île Bourbon (La Réunion); others followed on Chandernagore and Pondichéry in 1673–1674, and modern-day Senegal in 1677. France’s colonial expansion increased dramatically in the following two centuries.

33 For more information on French legal code involving slavery, see Sue Peabody, There Are No Slaves in France: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

34 Many colonists admitted that the law was hard to implement, including Jean-Philippe Garran-Coulon in his Rapport sur les troubles de Saint-Domingue (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1798–1799), IV: 26, which was published during the Haitian Revolution.

35 The eighteenth-century colonist Médéric-Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry provides extensive details about the diversity of the population of late Saint-Domingue and describes a complex system of categorization based on color and status. See Saint-Méry, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie Française de l’isle Saint-Domingue (Philadelphia, 1797–1798).

36 See the database of marronage history at the University of Sherbrooke: http://marronnage.info/en/index.html.

37 Dubois, Avengers: 39. The number of enslaved African workers brought to Saint-Domingue reached its peak in 1790, with the arrival of forty-eight thousand people in one year.

38 As we have mentioned, many leading Haitian politicians, including the sons of Toussaint Louverture, received education in France.

39 Léon-François Hoffmann, Littérature d’Haïti (Vanves: EDICEF, 1995): 12. The majority of French ships destined for the Atlantic slave trade left France from the port city of Nantes, although for a few years before the Revolution this ignominious honor went to Bordeaux. See Éric Saugera, Bordeaux, Port Négrier: XVIIe–XIXe siècles (Paris: Karthala, 1995).

40 Dubois, Avengers: 30.

41 See Marlene Daut, Tropics of Haiti: A Literary History of Race and Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015). These examples all counter the idea that the genre of the novel did not develop in Haiti until the late nineteenth century.

42 For more on early Haitian literature, see Hénock Trouillot, Les Origines sociales de la littérature haïtienne (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie N. A. Théodore, 1962): 15. For an excellent reading of the Haitian constitutions as literature, see Maximilien Laroche, “Histoire d’Haïti et Histoire du roman haïtien. La Littérature et l’Histoire comme contrats sociaux,” Cahiers des Anneaux de la Mémoire 7 (2004): 233–251. See also Deborah Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011).

43 Boisrond-Tonnerre’s memoir, which has been criticized for its too partisan (pro-Dessalines) account, was published by Joseph Saint-Rémy in 1851.

44 The first account of the ceremony was written by a Frenchman, Antoine Dalmas, in his Histoire de la Révolution de Saint-Domingue (Paris: chez Mame frères, 1814). The story has become legendary, even as its specifics are hard to verify. It is not known how many details Dumesle acquired from oral histories gathered among residents of northern Haiti and how much he borrowed from Dalmas’s account.

45 Louis-Phillipe Dalembert and Lyonet Trouillot, Haïti, une traverse littéraire (Paris: Éditions Phillipe Rey/Culturesfrance, 2010): 14.

46 Émile Nau, “Littérature,” L’Union: Recueil commercial et littéraire 14 (November 16, 1837): 4.

47 See Ardouin, Études I: 9.

48 Pompée-Valentin Baron de Vastey, Le système colonial dévoilé (Cap-Henry: Chez P. Roux, 1814): 94.

49 Léon-François Hoffmann mentions this connection in his Essays on Haitian Literature (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1984): 111. Many of these abolitionist stories appear in the 1820s, after Britain’s 1807 abolition of the slave trade, the tenuous Congress of Vienna’s 1815 condemnation of the slave trade, and the 1821 formation of the pro-abolition group Société de la Morale chrétienne. The novel’s one-word title, the name of its main character, equally reflects a literary trend of its time, but in Bergeaud’s novel, Stella names more than just one individual: she is the earthly incarnation of divinely inspired Liberty, the “Star of Nations.”

50 In The French Atlantic Triangle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), Christopher Miller identifies France’s approach as a “calculated plan for forgetting” Haiti (246).

51 In Haiti, History, and the Gods, Dayan points to Ardouin as exemplary of an elite Haitian population who wished to “progress away from the dark continent” (16). This criticism of “francophilia” became a common way of reading French influence on Haitian literature, especially after Jean Price-Mars’s theory of “bovarysme,” which was developed during the American occupation of the early twentieth century. While Price-Mars meant to encourage his compatriots to embrace African culture, the concept of bovarysme has often been used to denigrate Haitian artists as derivative or lacking in innovation.

52 Hoffmann, Essays: 121. In current-day Haiti, the Ficus carica is called a “French fig” to distinguish it from a Haitian fig, which is a type of banana.

53 Émile Nau, “Littérature”: 4.

54 According to Hoffmann, Jules Michelet, the great French historian of the day, knew and corresponded with both Madiou and Ardouin (Haïti: lettres et l’être, 1992): 234. In the early twentieth century, some Haitian readers tired of reading Bergeaud’s style of “great men” history and, as with the examples of Frédéric Marcelin, Jacques Roumain, and Jacques-Stéphan Alexis, began to focus their literature on the lives of middle-class, peasant, and working-class Haitians. See Marcelin, Autour de deux romans (Paris: Kugelman, 1903): 27.

55 Pradel Pompilus explains the confusion surrounding the text’s generic uniqueness when he writes: “We are forced to count Stella as a novel because of the author’s considerable use of fiction, but in the end, it is really just a story of our battles for independence livened up by ingenious inventions of imagination” (Manuel illustré d’histoire de la littérature haïtienne, Port-au-Prince: Deschamps, 1961): 201. Our translation.

56 See Duraciné Vaval, Histoire de la littérature haïtienne: ou, “L’âme noire” (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie Aug A. Héraux, 1933): 137. Nau’s periodical L’Union was filled with these types of history-stories.

57 See Jean Casimir, “Prologue: From Saint-Domingue to Haiti: To Live Again or to Live at Last!” in The World of the Haitian Revolution, ed. David Patrick Geggus and Norman Fiering (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009): xvii.

58 Pompée-Valentin, baron de Vastey, for example, insisted on solidarity between Haitians of different hues. He remarked on the fact that he was of an extremely fair complexion and politically sided with Henri Christophe, a man of dark complexion in his Le Système colonial dévoilé (Cap-Henry: Chez P. Roux, 1814).

59 Vastey, An Essay on the Causes of Revolution and Civil Wars of Hayti, Being a Sequel to the Political Remarks Upon Certain French Publications and Journals Concerning Hayti By the Baron de Vastey, trans. W.H. M.B. (Exeter: Printed at the Western Luminary Office, 1823).

60 On this subject, see Marlene L. Daut, “The ‘Alpha and Omega’ of Haitian Literature: Baron de Vastey and the U.S. Audience of Haitian Political Writing,” Comparative Literature 64, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 49-72. Christiane Ndiaye has long lamented what she terms the “impasse of literary criticism in the nineteenth century.” See Christiane Ndiaye, “Quelques impasses du discours de la critique littéraire du XIXe siècle,” in Relire l’histoire littéraire et le littéraire haïtiens (Port-au-Prince: Les Presses Nationales d’Haïti, 2007): 261–275.

61 Jean Price-Mars, in reaction to the American occupation of Haiti, sought to encourage a return to African heritage and a move away from French culture. His work presages that of other negritude authors like Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, and Antoine Dalmas. For more information on the influence of bovarysme on Haitian literature, see J. Michael Dash, “True Dechoukaj: Uprooting Bovarysme in Post-Duvalier Haiti,” in Politics and Power in Haiti, ed. Kate Quinn and Paul Sutton (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013): 27–42.