from slavery. At a time when the abolition of 1848 overshadowed memories of slavery’s 1794 abolition and its 1802 reestablishment, this insistence on the necessity of independence often went unheard. Nevertheless, Stella takes a similar approach.
This attempt to appeal to a French audience, along with Bergeaud’s French heritage and erudition, have contributed to modern-day criticism of Stella.51 Bergeaud fits the profile of an elite Haitian “francophile” of the mid-nineteenth century: someone who spoke French, practiced Catholicism, and followed French literary and artistic fashions. In his novel, Bergeaud is clear about his appreciation for France’s language, religion, and culture. More than one critic has noticed that, although he was presumably writing for a Haitian audience, Bergeaud consistently employs European and classical imagery, such as figs, the Alps, and Apollo.52 The few instances of native plants or materials—ironwood or makoute, for example—that do appear in Stella are usually explained for the reader. Yet the very fact that he wrote Stella with an eye toward France helps us to place Bergeaud, as well as his novel and his history, in the context of his social class and political milieu. His literary choices hint at the contemporary life of a particular class of Haitians in the nineteenth century, and they highlight the importance attached to their presentation of national history. It is via his particular expression of “francophilia” that Bergeaud is able to suggest that the ideals of republican equality were truly realized in Haiti, not France, and thereby argue for Haiti’s right to be recognized among the world’s nations.
Nevertheless, Bergeaud does combine Haitian and French literary traditions in his writing, perhaps in response to Émile Nau’s call for new literary forms. In 1837, Nau suggested that young Haitian writers should study all schools of literary thought but “belong to none.”53 Stella responds to this call through its own attempt to blend history and literature, but Bergeaud’s novel is also very clearly written in the style of the historical romance, that is to say, the form made famous by Sir Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, and James Fenimore Cooper. Like the historical texts written by these giants of the nineteenth-century Atlantic literary world, Stella takes the general outline of a historical event and recasts its details through the lives of invented, even abstracted characters, not unlike Edward Waverley, Jean Valjean, or Natty Bumppo. As in the genre popularized by Scott, much of the action in Stella, especially the military accounts, is taken from published historical sources. Indeed, much of the novel’s historical detail comes from Ardouin’s Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti, possibly inserted by the editor himself; but Bergeaud also draws on information from Pamphile de Lacroix’s La Révolution d’Haïti (1819), Antoine Métral’s Histoire de l’Expédition des Français à Saint-Domingue sous le consulat de Napoléon Bonaparte (1825), and Madiou’s Histoire d’Haïti. However, unlike historical work at the time, Stella unites the threads of different historians—particularly Madiou and Ardouin—by portraying the Revolution as both a successful slave uprising and a national independence movement.54 Furthermore, Bergeaud weaves aspects of allegory—both in terms of rhetorical device as well as generic form—together with abstraction and symbolism so that the novel is not explicitly controlled by any one device or formal approach. While Bergeaud builds upon previous models, ultimately Stella takes a form of its own.
Bergeaud’s narrator explains that the presentation of a fictional, rather than a historical, account allows for an exploration of the hidden human motives behind the struggle for freedom:
History is a river of truth that follows its majestic course through the ages. The Novel is a lake of lies, the expanse of which is concealed underwater; calm and pure on the surface, it sometimes hides the secret of the destiny of peoples and societies in its depths . . .
For Bergeaud, history’s sight is “limited to the horizon of natural things,” and thus cannot always know that which is beyond the horizon: “History leaves the field of mystery to the Novel. [. . .] The Novel tells the secret story.” It was Bergeaud’s design to develop interest in the history of Haitian independence through the popularity of the genre of the novel, and it therefore makes sense that he would choose as his model a literary form that overtly combines both fiction and history. For although Bergeaud insists that Stella is more of a novel than a history, the exact genre to which it belongs might be said to exist somewhere in between. In fact, its distinctiveness has led to confusion as to how to classify Stella, which has also led to difficulties in judging its literary value; these problems have contributed, in part, to the novel’s obscurity up to this point.55 In particular, Stella’s deviation from Scott’s genre involves Bergeaud’s connection to epic and oral storytelling traditions, evidenced through the author’s consistent use of “we,” and illustrated in, for example, the family scene in the ajoupa. If one of the aims of the School of 1836 was to distill familiar, oral renditions of history into a new written genre, Stella follows those indications well. In this way, his novel has more in common with Nau’s “contes historiques” or “contes créoles” and Dumesle’s travel writing than with Scott’s romances.56 Bergeaud’s goal of reaching both French and Haitian readers mirrors his novel’s combination of Haitian and European literary traditions.
Reading Stella
At the time of Stella’s publication, the population of Haiti was categorized and hierarchized according to color and class based on divisions inherited from the colonial era. After independence, some categorizations changed shape and the country further split along the lines of region, religion, and language. Haiti’s population differed most considerably from that of Saint-Domingue in that much of the white population had either fled the island or perished during the final days of the Revolution, a moment described in Stella with regret. In the early years of the country, the peasant or cultivateur class also expanded, which resulted in the development of a social distinction based on whether one lived in one of the wealthy cities (gens de la ville) or the rural outskirts (moun an deyò).57 Although skin color continued to be a defining characteristic in nineteenth-century Haiti, some political distinctions that seemed to be based on color—such as the constant conflicts between what have been called the “mulatto” or Boyerist and the “noiriste” or black populist factions—were often the result of intersecting differences in heritage, class, region, religion, and language; assumptions that a given person acted solely on the basis of skin color are frequently inaccurate.58 While the racialist distinctions that shaped the political world in which Bergeaud wrote had their bases in the colonial era, when they were specifically tied to issues of wealth, culture, language, and degrees of freedom, the social divisions of the early national period were not simply based on race or color prejudice. Stella both illustrates and responds to early Haiti’s cultural divides, and locates the origins of the history of difference and disunion in the machinations of the greedy Colonist.
Bergeaud’s insistence on the connection between his main characters, the fraternal founders of Haiti, has much to do with his decision to name them after the mythical twin founders of Rome. As does the figure of the Colonist, the brothers represent, however, multiple historical characters. They embody the actions and spirit of most of the revolutionary leaders: Romulus represents, at times, Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Henri Christophe, while Remus is André Rigaud, Alexandre Pétion, and Charles Boyer. The brothers are the allegorical representations of the division—and eventual reunion—of the two dominant classes of Haitians at the time: the formerly enslaved black population and the Euro-African population. Bergeaud avoids
