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
