Abstract
In his Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti (1805), Marcus Rainsford, a British captain in the Third West India Regiment, described Saint-Domingue as ‘France’s most splendid possession’, astonishing the traveller with its ‘private luxury, and its public grandeur’.1 The richest and most productive of the eighteenth-century West Indian islands, Saint-Domingue produced half the world’s coffee and sugar. But while European politicians ‘sighed for her possession … they sighed in vain; she was reserved for the foundation of a republic as extraordinary as it is terrible, whether it ultimately tend only, to the ascertainment of abstract opinions, or unfold a new and august empire to the world’.2 In August 1791, the beginnings of this republic were laid when the island’s plantation slaves rose up against the white planters. By September 1791 rebellious slaves had set alight the erstwhile capital of Le Cap, and for the next dozen years Saint-Domingue became a byword for civil war, racial hatred, and horrific violence. While the initial uprisings of 1791 obliged the revolutionary French Republic to abolish slavery in the colonies in 1794, Napoleon revoked the decree in 1802, sending a large force under his brother-in-law General Leclerc to crush the uprisings and reintroduce slavery. The Francophobe Rainsford captured the horror of this blood-soaked war with some graphic engravings of the viciousness of the French in their dealings with the rebel blacks.
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Notes and references
S. Aravamudan, ‘Trop(Icaliz)ing the Enlightenment’, Diacritics, 23 (1993), pp. 48–68, p. 66.
Quoted in F. M. Holland, Frederick Douglass: The Colored Orator (New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1891; 1969), pp. 393, 395.
F. Daguillard, ‘The True Likeness of Toussaint Louverture’, Americas, 55.4 (2003), pp. 50–2 (p. 51).
C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd revised edn (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. 171.
A. Raynal, A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, vol. 4 (Edinburgh: Printed for W. Gordon et al, 1782), p. 61. Raynal’s A Philosophical and Political History went through numerous editions and has a complicated textual history. It is very likely that Diderot wrote the passage in question; see Peter Jimack’s introduction in P. Jimack, ed., A History of the Two Indies: A Translated Selection of Writings from Raynal’s Histoire Philosophique et Politique des Établissements des Européens Dans les Deux Indes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. xii.
Mercier, L’An 2440, Rêve s’il en Fut Jamais, quoted in Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 57.
See M. Descourtilz, Voyages d’un Naturaliste (Paris, 1809), quoted in Jeremy D. Popkin, Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian Insurrection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 277.
C. Forsdick ‘Situating Haiti: on some early nineteenth-century representations of Toussaint Louverture’, International Journal of Francophone Studies, 10.1/2 (2007), pp. 17–34.
J. Baudrillard, ‘The Violence of the Image and the Violence done to the Image’, in Victoria Grace, Heather Worth, and Laurence Simmons, eds, Baudrillard: West of the Deadline (Palmerston North, New Zealand: Dunmore Press, 2003), pp. 171, 173.
See the Introduction of the excellent new edition of An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti, ed. P. Youngquist and G. Pierrot (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), p. xxiii; M. Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), p. 27.
W. L. Garrison, No Compromise with Slavery: An Address Delivered to the Broadway Tabernacle (New York: 1854), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/24194/24194-h/24194-h.htm, date accessed 22 October 2012.
C. Labio, ‘Reading by the Gold and Black Clock, Or, the Recasting of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 16 (2004), pp. 671–94.
Quoted in H. Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. IV ‘From the American Revolution to World War I’. Part 1: Slaves and Liberators (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 95.
Winckelmann as quoted in S. Ewen and E. Ewen, Typecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006), p. 112.
M. Saint Remy, ed., Mémoires de la Vie de Toussaint L’Ouverture, translated and published in English for the first time in Toussaint L’Ouverture: A Biography and Autobiography by J. R. Beard (Boston: James Redpath, 1863), http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/ toussaint-louverture/memoir/index.htm, date accessed 22 October 2012.
W. Parkinson, ‘This Gilded African’: Toussaint L’Ouverture (London: Quartet Books, 1978), p. 126.
On this subject see G. Pierrot ‘“Our Hero”: Toussaint Louverture in British Representations’, Criticism, 50.4 (2008): 581–607.
W. Wordsworth, ‘To Toussaint L’Ouverture’ in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, eds E. De Selincourt and H. Darbishire, vol 3, 2nd edn, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. 112–13.
See C. Kaplan, ‘Black Heroes/White Writers: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Literary Imagination’ History Workshop Journal, 46 (1998): 32–62; this ref. p. 46.
For the influence of Grand Tour portraiture on the representation of Belley, see M. K. Collins, ‘The Portrait of Citizen Jean-Baptiste Belley, ex-representative of the Colonies by Anne-Louis Girodet Trioson: Hybridity, History Painting, and the Grand Tour’, MA thesis, Brigham Young University, 2006.
Girodet’s letters to the Minister of the Interior make it clear that he conceived of the Belley painting as history painting rather than as portraiture; see H. Weston, ‘Girodet’s Portrait of C. Belley, Ex-Representative of the Colonies: In Remembrance of “Things Sublime”’, eds A. Forty and S. Kuchler, The Art of Forgetting (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1999), p. 82.
Weston, ‘Girodet’s Portrait of C. Belley’, p. 77. For more on the silencing of slavery and the enslaved in France, see L. Sala-Molins, Dark Side of the Light: Slavery and the French Enlightenment, trans. J. Conteh-Morgan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006),
and C. Forsdick, ‘The Panthéon’s Empty Plinth: Commemorating Slavery in Contemporary France’, Atlantic Studies, 9.3 (September 2012), pp. 279–97.
Quoted in D. L. Garraway ‘Introduction’ to D. L. Garraway, ed., Tree of Liberty: Cultural Legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (University of Virginia Press, 2008), p. 7.
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Coleman, D. (2015). The Cultural Afterlives of Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution. In: Ramsey, N., Russell, G. (eds) Tracing War in British Enlightenment and Romantic Culture. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137474315_5
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