of power; after independence, access to spoken—and especially written—French marked the wealthy and educated apart from the rest of Haitian society. Thus, literacy in French ensured access to the avenues of political power and influence, and guaranteed that political and cultural power would remain with a small group of Francophone Haitians.8 These regulations and exclusive practices were designed not just to maintain power within one group, or to denigrate the black majority; they were also about presenting a certain image of Haiti to the international community in the face of persistent anti-Haitianism in France and the United States. These anti-Haitian attitudes stemmed from prejudice against a nation whose foundation rested upon the complete opposition to the economically powerful institution of slavery.
When the Republic of Haiti was proclaimed on January 1, 1804, the new country became the second postcolonial nation in the Americas and the first to be built from a successful revolution against slavery. From 1791 to the Revolution’s end in 1804, Haitians saw countless acts of violence, and they suffered years of terror, famine, and hardship. Yet, by 1804, Haiti’s people—most of whom had been slaves under French rule—emerged as citizens. From that moment, they swore to “live independent or die.”9 Yet, as is often the case for new countries, Haiti struggled in its early years. As a result, Haiti was often called upon by members of the international community, especially France, to justify its freedom.
Soon after independence, Haiti’s governor-for-life, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a former slave and hero of the Revolution, declared himself emperor of the first Haitian Empire. Dessalines drew much opposition as a ruler; two years later he was assassinated. In 1810, after his death and a subsequent civil war, Dessalines’s assistants-turned-rivals Henri Christophe (1767–1820) and Alexandre Sabès Pétion (1770–1818) split the country into two. Christophe, a former slave who fought against the British at the 1779 Battle of Savannah, headed the State—later the Kingdom—of Haiti in the North (including Artibonite) from Cap-Haïtien. There, he maintained a system of forced labor which Bergeaud highly criticizes in Stella, one that was instituted by Dessalines and Toussaint Louverture before him; it centered on the cultivation of sugar and coffee for export. In the South and West regions, Pétion, a man of Euro-African descent who had trained at a military school in Paris, led the Republic of Haiti from its capital, Port-au-Prince. Pétion embarked on a program of distributing the land of the former sugar and coffee plantations to the local peasants and soldiers; this created a system of subsistence smallholdings, the products of which Pétion taxed heavily.10 In both territories, the gap between the wealthier, city-dwelling Euro-African elite and the poorer African-descended peasants widened. Opposition groups emerged in both areas, and each country established a strong military presence to maintain a tense peace. Within a few years, an additional two regions proclaimed independence. By the time of Bergeaud’s birth in 1818, Haiti had effectively shattered into four separate countries. Early in the century, the future of the new nation was unclear, and both France and the United States—and to a lesser extent, Great Britain—were ready to capitalize on any real or perceived weaknesses.11 Furthermore, not one of these countries recognized Haiti as officially independent from France.
When Pétion died from yellow fever in 1818, his protégé Boyer became president. During his first few years in office, Boyer worked to reunite the fractured nation and to bring its separate regions under centralized control, both physically and legislatively. When Christophe died in 1820, Boyer rejoined the Kingdom of Haiti to the Republic, extending Pétion’s practice of land redistribution to the North. Just as it had in the South and West, this policy—later enshrined in law in the 1826 Rural Code—ensured that, while able to survive, the peasant classes would have little chance of amassing sustained political power. In 1822, Boyer’s forces invaded the eastern half of Hispaniola (the current-day Dominican Republic), and Haitian forces occupied this part of the island until 1844.
Despite Boyer’s policies of land distribution and centralization, the abolition of slavery during his occupation of Spanish Haiti, and his support for African-American migration, his longest-lasting legacy remains the 1825 agreement he negotiated with France for its official recognition of the independent Republic.12 Until this time, the former colonial power had not only refused to recognize Haiti’s independence, it had also constantly threatened to launch campaigns to take back its “property” (Haiti and Haitians). Although important to guaranteeing Haiti’s continued sovereignty, official recognition came at an enormous price: Boyer agreed that Haiti would pay a large indemnity to compensate the former slaveholders. The new country continued to send payments to France, with interest, for over a century.13 This was a debt that, incurred so early in Haiti’s history, weakened its economy from the start.14 Furthermore, delayed international recognition undermined Haiti’s membership among the world’s nations.15 Despite the indemnity agreement and France’s official recognition, most countries did not formally recognize Haiti until the second half of the nineteenth century; the U.S. did not grant Haiti diplomatic recognition until 1862.
Boyer was deposed in 1843, the result of a struggle both within and without the ruling class. In 1842, an opposition party called the Society for the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which was based near Les Cayes and composed of elite members such as Hérard Dumesle (1784–1858) and his cousin Charles Rivière-Hérard (1789–1850), began to agitate for economic and democratic reforms. This led to what is now known as the Liberal Revolution of 1843, which succeeded in unseating Boyer.16 Rivière-Hérard became the head of a provisional government with a new constitution, and he officially took the presidency in 1844. With Boyer gone and Haiti’s leadership in question, the Dominican Republic took the opportunity to declare its independence. Soon afterward, Louis Jean-Jacques Acaau (d. 1846) led a revolution comprised of black peasant farmers known as the “Piquets” who decried the elite class’s control of the government and called for new land reforms.17 The Piquets continued their campaign until 1848, but an immediate result of their movement was the overthrow of Rivière-Hérard and his replacement, over the next three years, by a succession of black presidents: Philippe Guerrier (1757–1845), Jean-Louis Pierrot (1761–1867), Jean-Baptiste Riché (1780–1847), and Faustin Soulouque (1782–1867). While these men were intended as figureheads to be controlled by the Boyerist establishment, the ruling class soon discovered that they had misjudged Soulouque, who proved to be a strong leader in his own right.18
When Soulouque became president of Haiti in 1847, Bergeaud, Ardouin, and their peers expected him to maintain the status quo. Instead, Soulouque consolidated his power and had several of his political enemies, many of whom were descendants of the gens de couleur, killed.19 Bergeaud, Beaubrun, and his brother Céligny Ardouin (1806–1849) found themselves on the wrong side of politics; yet while Bergeaud and Beaubrun Ardouin were able to flee Haiti, Céligny was not as fortunate. Céligny Ardouin was executed in 1849, the same year that Soulouque declared himself Emperor Faustin I.
The political tumult of Bergeaud’s early adulthood clearly influenced his life and his writing. The turmoil that affected him, furthermore, was not only domestic; it included political developments in the greater Caribbean as well as in France. The same year that he fled Haiti, slavery was abolished in both the Danish and French colonies. This meant that Bergeaud and his compatriots did not have to fear enslavement when traveling in much of the Caribbean, for slavery had already been abolished on the British-held islands in 1833. However, chattel slavery and plantation-based forced
