Читать книгу A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution - Jeremy D. Popkin - Страница 10

The term “Haitian Revolution” is a relatively recent way of labeling the dramatic events of the years from 1791 to 1804. Historians who use this phrase argue that these events should be put on the same level as the American and French revolutions in discussions of the origins of modern ideas of freedom and equality. The phrase “Haitian Revolution” also suggests, however, that there was a unity to the events from 1791 to 1804 and that their final outcome reflected the accomplishment of a program consciously laid out from the beginning. As we will see, these propositions are not necessarily accurate. The uprising that began in August 1791 affected only one of the colony’s three provinces, for example, and it developed alongside another revolutionary movement, the uprising of Saint-Domingue’s free people of color, that had very different goals. These two revolutionary movements were often in conflict with one another, a conflict that continued even after the declaration of Haitian independence in 1804. Initially, both of them fought against the French colonial government. From 1794 to 1801, however, both movements claimed to be supporting the French, until Napoleon’s intervention in 1802 drove most of the population to turn against them. Waged by a largely illiterate population, the Haitian revolt against slavery never issued a manifesto defining its goals, and its history has to be written almost entirely on the basis of evidence provided by outsiders, most of whom were thoroughly hostile to it. Those events certainly had revolutionary consequences, but trying to force them into a mold derived from American and French models is misleading. Including the Haitian Revolution as one of the modern world’s major revolutions requires us to rethink the very nature of such phenomena, and to recognize, for instance, that a revolution can develop without the leadership of a revolutionary party or movement.

Just as it is misleading to describe the Haitian Revolution as a unified movement with clearly defined and consistent goals, it is difficult to describe its principal leader, Toussaint Louverture, as a revolutionary leader in the mold of Robespierre or Fidel Castro. To this day, it remains unclear whether Louverture actually played any role in starting the slave insurrection in August 1791. When he joined the movement, he did not initially call for the complete abolition of slavery, and he even rejected the first French decree of emancipation in 1793. After he switched from fighting against the French to fighting on their side in 1794, Louverture consistently insisted that he was loyal to the French government, even when his actions appeared to undermine its authority. The laws he imposed on the population of Saint-Domingue during these years, however, were quite conservative and drove many blacks to revolt against him. Toussaint Louverture’s demonstration that a black man could govern a key territory in the Atlantic world had revolutionary implications, but he cannot be seen as a self-conscious, ideologically motivated revolutionary in the mold of Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, or the revolutionary French Jacobins.

It has been customary to see the Haitian declaration of independence of 1804 and the promulgation of the first Haitian constitution of 1805 as marking the end of the Haitian Revolution. Slavery, the fundamental institution of colonial society, had been abolished and, with the defeat of the French army and the massacre of the remaining white colonists, the pre-revolutionary ruling class was completely replaced by a new group of rulers. Nevertheless, the outcome of the Haitian Revolution did not become clear until many years after 1804. By the end of 1806, Haiti had split into two rival states that continued to fight each other until 1820. France did not recognize Haiti’s independence until 1825, and it took several decades before the lasting features of post-revolutionary Haitian society became evident. The final chapter of this book outlines the major developments of Haitian history until the crisis of 1843, which may be seen as the last direct confrontation between the democratic and elitist currents coming out of the revolutionary period.