population in Saint-Domingue. At that same time, the African population was nearly ten times as large.40 In the 1780s, this population imbalance, along with the existence of a strong maroon community—which had played a part in previous insurrections—and the colony’s deplorable working conditions, caused French colonists to fear that Saint-Domingue was a powder keg just waiting for a match.
Stella in Context
While Stella has the honor of being Haiti’s first novel, Haitians were active producers of literature—including long works of fiction—before 1859. Hérard Dumesle’s Voyage dans le nord d’Hayti, ou Révélations des lieux et des monuments historiques (1824), for example, recounts a story of travel that is, at least somewhat, fictionalized. La Mulâtre comme il y a beaucoup de blanches (1803), an epistolary novel written by an anonymous woman from Saint-Domingue, could also merit the title of Haiti’s first novel, although it was published before independence.41 Stella emerged from a rich literary context in which public discussions of politics and history, and the relationship between story and history, were inextricable.42
The unusual mixture of history, politics, and literature that defines the writings of early Haitians also stems from the fact that many authors were both politicians and writers. Félix Boisrond-Tonnerre (1776–1806), for example, who attended school in France and was Dessalines’s personal secretary, both drafted the Declaration and penned his own history of the Revolution, Mémoires pour server à l’histoire d’Haïti.43 Pompée Valentin de Vastey (1781–1820), apologist for and secretary to King Henri Christophe, wrote to audiences in France and Britain decrying the colonial system and demanding that Europeans recognize the humanity of African and African-descended people. Others, including Juste Chanlatte (1766–1828), Jules-Solime Milscent (1778–1842), and Jean-Baptiste Romane (1807–1858), circulated their writings in the era’s literary and news magazines, such as L’Abeille Haytienne, L’Eclaireur haïtien, and L’Union. These periodicals reported political events alongside poems and short stories that also often had political aims. Dumesle, whose 1824 travel narrative recounts a story of the Bwa Kayiman ceremony in French and Kreyòl, was also a politician and leader of the movement to oust Boyer in the 1840s.44
Though influenced by the same tradition of intertwining history and politics, Bergeaud belongs to a slightly later generation of authors known as the “School of 1836.” Other journalists, poets, and historians of the school include Émile and Ignace Nau (1812–1860; 1808–1845), Beaubrun, Céligny, and Coriolan Ardouin (1812–1836), and Beauvais Lespinasse (1811–1863).45 Debates over language and nationalism shaped the writings of the School of 1836, as it had those of their predecessors. Members of the group aimed to follow its motto—“Be ourselves”—and to cast off previous literary and linguistic models in a search for Haitian styles. For example, the movement’s founder, Émile Nau, advised his followers to “naturalize” their adopted language by lending it Caribbean cadences and a “warmth” it never had in France.46 Ardouin argued similarly for the importance of his French’s Caribbean difference.47 Stella’s inclusion of a creole story and proverb attest to a similar approach by Bergeaud.
Much of the search for a Haitian identity in literature, history, as well as politics was marked by the challenges the country faced in its first half century. In 1814, Vastey predicted that the printing press would be a tool for exposing the crimes of colonists and for responding to the false accusations of prejudiced historians of the Haitian Revolution.48 Members of the School of 1836 continued to use the written word as a means to defend Haiti and its independence. To refute calumnies made against their country—usually claims that Haiti’s continuing problems were due to the circumstances of its founding—many early Haitian authors wrote histories. Bergeaud’s Stella follows Dumesle’s Voyage and Thomas Madiou’s (1814–1884) Histoire d’Haïti (1847) in this vein; moreover, Ardouin, the historian who published the novel, certainly contributed to its blurring of the lines between history and fiction.
Stella’s distinctiveness comes from the fact that it is a fictionalized account of the Haitian Revolution that places Haiti’s history in an explicitly positive context. This perspective ran contrary to that of much literature on similar topics produced at the time. Not only is Stella one of the few positive representations of the Haitian Revolution written in the nineteenth century, it is, along with Pierre Faubert’s play, Ogé, ou le préjugé de couleur (1856), one of the first fictionalizations of the Haitian Revolution to be written by a Haitian. Other early fictional accounts of the Revolution—such as Jean-Baptiste Berthier’s Félix et Éléonore, ou les colons malheureux (1801), Réné Périn’s L’Incendie du Cap, ou le règne de Toussaint-Louverture (1802), Leonora Sansay/Mary Hassal’s Secret History; or, the Horrors of St. Domingo (1808), Mlle de Palaiseau’s L’Histoire de Mesdemoiselles de Saint-Janvier, les deux seules blanches conservées à Saint-Domingue (1812), E. V. Laisné de Tours’s L’Insurrection du Cap ou la perfidie d’un noir (1822), Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal (1826), and Fanny Reybaud’s Sydonie (1846)—all present Haiti’s history from the viewpoint of Europeans. Bergeaud was, no doubt, familiar with some, if not all, of this literature. Indeed, the first section of Stella reads much like the sentimentalist antislavery literature that was part of a slowly reemerging French abolitionist movement beginning in the 1820s.49
Stella thus might have seemed somewhat familiar to French readers at the time of its publication in Paris, despite its pro-Haitian message; Bergeaud sought to capitalize on this familiarity in order to reach a population that did not, he admits, often concern itself with an “in-depth study of our annals.” The novel’s publication, during a time when other Haitians were writing and publishing in Paris, however, also encouraged a new French approach to remembering its former colony. Fighting back against a French tendency to denigrate Haiti was a project with admittedly limited impact. The end of slavery in its overseas colonies in 1848 in fact allowed France to return to the troubled subject of Haiti in a way that ignored the reasons for the country’s 1804 loss of its prized colony, contributing to a general amnesia surrounding the Saint-Domingue expedition’s goal to reestablish slavery. Typically, when the French read or wrote about Haiti, their nostalgia for the former colony of Saint-Domingue mixed with anxieties about what Haiti meant for France’s international standing; this combination made Haiti into a literary subject consistent with nineteenth-century themes of melancholy and loss.50 The French often approached the topic with questions about what went wrong or what might have been.
The second abolition of 1848, however, meant that metropolitan French and outre-mer readers alike were able to celebrate a newly authorized diversity permitted by the end of slavery. In the years following, Paris saw a wave of works about Haiti written by Haitians. These include Beaubrun Ardouin’s Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti (1853–1865); Céligny Ardouin’s posthumously published Essais sur l’histoire d’Haïti (1865); Pierre Faubert’s aforementioned Ogé, ou le préjugé de couleur (1856); and Joseph Saint-Rémy’s Vie de Toussaint Louverture (1850), Mémoires du Général Toussaint-L’Ouverture écrits par lui-même (1853), and Pétion et Haïti (1853–1857). In contrast to the literature written by their French counterparts—who often understood colonialism and slavery as separate institutions—the
