rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_65d5838c-940c-56e2-9e07-d95626189ed7">20 At this time, writing to oppose the system of slavery, as Bergeaud did, ran contrary to the existing economic and political systems of these influential nations.
Bergeaud, however, was not unique as an exile. The 1840s and 1850s saw many politicians, reformers, agitators, and revolutionaries exiled in the Caribbean, on mainland America, and in Europe. Paris, in particular, was a popular destination for Caribbean writers of African and Euro-African descent, and pockets of anticolonial and antiracist activism flourished in Haiti’s former colonial capital, led by figures such as Cuban journalist Andrés Avelino de Orihuela (1818–1873), Haitian American writer Victor Séjour (1817–1874), and Martinican politician Cyrille Bissette (1795–1858).21 In 1857, Bergeaud left Saint Thomas for Paris to meet Beaubrun Ardouin, who had been in France negotiating the opening of Haitian embassies.22 Suffering from ill health, Bergeaud soon returned to his island exile, but, before leaving Paris, he consigned his manuscript to Ardouin, who set about editing and arranging it for publication. On February 23, 1858, Bergeaud died on Saint Thomas; he never returned to Haiti after his 1848 departure. Soulouque continued to rule the Empire of Haiti until he was deposed in January 1859. Stella was published in Paris eight months later.
Story and History
Stella begins with the story of two brothers, Romulus and Remus; one is born of an African father, the other is the son of a French colonist. Both enslaved in Saint-Domingue and toiling on the Colonist’s plantation, the brothers are motivated to revolt by the violent death of their mother, Marie the African. Much of Stella follows the two sons, who represent multiple historical figures, through the events of the Haitian Revolution. The novel’s dedication to history means that its storyline recounts, usually in symbolic or allegorical form, nearly all the complex details of Haiti’s founding.
Stella dates the crime of Marie’s death to the year 1789, amid a period of great political upheaval in France. Debate over the question of slavery in particular intensified in France in 1788 with the formation of the first French abolitionist society: the Société des Amis des Noirs. Influenced by British abolitionists such as Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp, and William Wilberforce, the Société sought the amelioration of the conditions of enslaved people.23 Indeed, few antislavery thinkers in the 1780s were arguing for an immediate end to slavery; in 1781, the Marquis de Condorcet, for example, had argued for a process of gradual emancipation.24 For many revolutionaries, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen that was written in 1789 placed the principles of chattel slavery in question.25 Heated arguments over the extent to which the rights to freedom and equality applied to all people were heard throughout France and in the French colonies. Saint-Domingue, a colony fueled by enslaved labor, featured heavily in these debates.26
Stella highlights the connection between France and Saint-Domingue at this time. Initially, many gens de couleur residents of the colony who were not represented in the newly formed National Assembly in Paris protested their exclusion. In 1790, frustrated by the slow expansion of republican rights to free people of color, Vincent Ogé (1755–1791), an influential Saint-Domingue planter, traveled to Paris and, with fellow gens de couleur planter Julien Raimond (1744–1801), argued for their rights in the French National Assembly.27 Upon his return to Saint-Domingue, a frustrated Ogé and an accomplice, Jean-Baptiste Chavannes (1748–1791), led a revolt that was quickly put down by the colonial government. Ogé and Chavannes were brutally executed. Although they were fighting for the rights of the gens de couleur rather than for all of the colony’s people, Bergeaud depicts Ogé and Chavannes as early martyrs to Haiti’s cause of independence.
Though Stella lauds these men’s sacrifice, the sons’ attack on the Colonist’s plantation, where they find the divine incarnation of Liberty, can be understood to coincide with what is often considered the beginning of the Haitian Revolution: August 21, 1791, when enslaved people initiated a full-scale uprising. Though it is believed that the seed of revolution was planted during a religious service known as the Bois Caïman (Bwa Kayiman) ceremony, led by houngan Dutty Boukman (d. 1791) and mambo Cécile Fatiman in August 1791, this event does not feature in Stella.28 Instead, the divine figure of Stella encourages and guides the brothers in their revolt. The sons’ attempt to avenge their mother’s death begins with setting fire to the Colonist’s mansion. During this attack, the brothers come across a young woman whom they initially take to be the Colonist’s daughter. An unknown force prevents them from killing her, and Romulus and Remus find that they have rescued a fellow sufferer. The woman—Stella—had been in Paris during the revolutionary period of 1789, but fled to Saint-Domingue at the beginning of the Terror. Stella originally met the Colonist in Paris, but rejected his advances; when she landed in Saint-Domingue they met again, and emboldened there, he took her to his mansion as his prisoner. Stella pledges to aid the brothers in their mission to free Saint-Domingue and avenge their mother’s death in return for their help in liberating her from the Colonist.
As the Haitian Revolution progressed, fighting between European powers and among the diverse population of late Saint-Domingue contributed to a complex story of multiple power struggles, which Bergeaud attempts to outline in his novel. In 1793, republican France declared war on Britain; on the island, Spain sided with Britain against France. At this time, many former slaves—including Toussaint Louverture (1743–1803), Jean François (d. 1805), Jeannot (d. 1791), and Georges Biassou (1741–1801)—joined the Spanish forces in fighting against republican France, believing that the Crown, not the Republic, had their best interests at heart. In order to convince these fighters otherwise, in August 1793 French civil commissioners Léger-Félicité Sonthonax (1763–1813) and Étienne Polverel (1740–1795) decreed general emancipation in Saint-Domingue. Polverel and Sonthonax, who appear as heroic characters in Stella, had hoped that emancipating the enslaved population would bring them to side with France against invading British forces. On February 4, 1794, the republican National Assembly abolished slavery in France and its colonies, making the previous decree by Polverel and Sonthonax official, and securing republican France’s commitment to universal equality. Nevertheless, intermittent fighting continued between formerly enslaved, gens de couleur, French, British, and Spanish forces on the island. Sonthonax was recalled to France in 1796, a specific historical moment detailed and lamented in Stella.
In 1797, Toussaint Louverture took charge of the French forces in Saint-Domingue. In order to control the population of former slaves and to stimulate the country’s agricultural output, he instituted the dreaded Rural Code in 1800. According to this legislation, the military forced former slaves to work on plantations—not as slaves but as cultivateurs (sharecroppers)—or face severe penalties. Bergeaud harshly criticizes this law in Stella, referring to it as “slavery in all but name.”29 In 1801, Louverture created a constitution for the colony in which he named himself governor-for-life. Bergeaud criticizes this move in his novel as a “direct attack on the sovereignty of France.” Displeased with the growing power of Louverture and the other “black generals” in 1802, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) sent a French military expedition to Saint-Domingue led by his brother-in-law, General Charles Leclerc (1772–1802), to restore a white colonial government to the island. In the meantime, Napoleon had overturned the abolition of slavery and, as Bergeaud laments, succeeded in reestablishing the institution in Guadeloupe. Leclerc was in charge of over forty thousand men; the expedition that bore his name was the largest French military mission sent such a distance
