The Borders of Citizenship in the Haitian Revolution

Introduction

In this essay, I analyze the conflicting appropriations and transformations of the modern concept of citizenship by the actors of the Haitian Revolution, seen through the intertwining of racial slavery, plantation labor, and the postcolonial state. In the last fifteen years, many scholars have shown the theoretical relevance of the Haitian Revolution by analyzing its importance for the modern intellectual history, as well as for a critical rethinking of the concept of modernity in light of postcolonial and decolonial critiques. ¹ In particular, the most recent debates have stressed the specificity of the revolution by showing that liberation from slavery, racism, and colonialism had its own political autonomy and conceptual originality. ² These contributions have highlighted the risk to misinterpreting black political thought as merely derivative, both the effect and the authentic realization of the alleged universal principles of radical Enlightenment and the French Revolution. On the contrary, by using the European political lexicon and symbols during their struggles, free people of color, Creole blacks, and enslaved Africans articulated different resignification of some modern political concepts, such as freedom, equality, sovereignty, and citizenship.

Nevertheless, the definition of the Haitian Revolution’s political thought still raises open questions that can be summarized in two points. First, the revolution was a complex phenomenon characterized by different currents and two main internal conflicts: between the revolutionary elite and the African-born rural masses, and, within the elite, between the freeborn people of color and the black leaders who ranked the army. As Jean Casimir, Gérard Barthélemy, and Carolyn E. Fick have argued, these conflicts expressed also the clash between the reproduction of plantation system supported by the elite and the “counter-plantation” model of lakou, the family-based and egalitarian community of subsistence agriculture, organized outside the state and characterized by vodou culture and Maroon traditions. ³ Secondly, the illiteracy of the masses and the conflicting relationship between the dominant European culture of the colonizer and the subaltern cultures of enslaved people raise methodological and epistemological questions. ⁴ Scholars have shown how revolutionary ideas widely circulated in the Atlantic, ⁵ but how free and enslaved blacks effectively conceptualized their politics and interacted with European political thought is yet an open field of inquiry. As Anthony Bogues has written by recalling the lwa Legba—the vodou spirit who has the power to open and close the gates between the human and the spiritual world—the Haitian Revolution can be analyzed as a “Legba revolution”: the opening of a space of radical political inventions grounded on the Atlantic creolization of cultures and the concrete struggles for black freedom. ⁶ In this sense, Adom Getachew has shown that the revolution invented its own specific universalism around ideas and practices of “individual and collective autonomy” emerged from two conflicts. On the one hand were the social struggles of black workers to achieve material independence and autonomy, claiming small plots of land for subsistence agriculture and refusing the new forms of dependency and forced labor of the postslavery plantation. On the other hand were the anticolonial struggle for national independence and sovereignty, articulated also through the new Haitian citizenship that reflected the ideal of an international black solidarity envisioning a world of universal freedom from slavery. ⁷

This essay aims to enlarge that debate by looking also at internal contradictions and ambiguities of the revolution and new articulations of power in the post-emancipation period. Indeed, the Haitian Revolution has to be analyzed within the complexities of modern politics; although it produces radical subversions of the oppressive foundations of colonial modernity (i.e., racial slavery and colonial domination), it also reproduces structures of modern power (i.e., the state-form and plantation capitalism). In this sense, the concept of citizenship is particularly productive because of its double meaning of emancipation and subjection. Indeed, as the right to claim rights, citizenship is a fundamental tool of social and political struggles. But it is also the juridical device that structured the governing of labor and, through representation, the modern opposition between the verticality of sovereignty and the horizontality of the equality of individuals. In this sense, as Frederick Cooper has recently argued, citizenship can be understood as “a divisible and flexible bundle of rights and obligations” that was particularly relevant for the unequal incorporation of colonized subjects in the European empires. ⁸ Similarly, as Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson have proposed, the concept of citizenship does not always determine a rigid dichotomy of inclusion/exclusion, but it can be the instrument of “differential inclusions” along lines of race, class, and gender. ⁹

My trajectory on the concept of citizenship follows these two levels—the emancipative struggles and the practices of government—around four key moments of the Haitian Revolution: the struggle of free people of color against the racial boundaries of French citizenship (1789–1792); the strategic uses of revolutionary citizenship by insurgent slaves and black military leaders to secure their freedom (1791–1801); the inclusion of former slaves into post-emancipation citizenship to preserve the plantation system (1794–1801); and the postcolonial Haitian citizenship emerging from the war of independence (1802–1805). During these moments, insurgent subjectivities imposed transformations of the space and contents of citizenship. The first two moments represent different uses of citizenship during emancipative struggles. Citizenship rights were claimed on the basis of property (by free people of color), military service for France and the effort in the fight against slavery (by black leaders and insurgent slaves), and labor (by freed black workers). But these perspectives of inclusion were connected to the fulfillment of racial equality and freedom from slavery; steps backward on these two legal, political, and social consequences of the revolution produced the refusal of French citizenship and the option of separation and independence. The third moment discusses how French administrators and the black revolutionary elite both used citizenship to rearticulate new forms of forced labor, and, more generally, social hierarchies in the plantation. Inclusion into citizenship is therefore analyzed as a way of putting Africans back to work. Finally, I briefly address discontinuities and continuities that characterized the anticolonial shift of the revolution, ruptures with colonial domination, and new forms of postcolonial power. More precisely, how the new Haitian citizenship constitutes both the subversion of colonial society and the reproduction of social inequality between the revolutionary elite and the African majority.

Fighting the “Aristocracy of the Skin”

The racialization of slavery and the legal discrimination of free people of color that characterized Saint-Domingue in the second half of the eighteenth century produced a politicization of race that broke out with the French Revolution around the question of citizenship. Conceived as private property, internal enemies, and an inferior population, enslaved Africans could not evidently be citizens, while free people of color remained excluded from full citizenship rights because of their race. In this sense, the first colonial issue debated at the National Assembly was not slavery but racial inequalities.

In fact, there was not a necessary contradiction between slavery and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Articles 2 and 17 defined the “natural and inalienable right to private property,” which could be limited only for public utility and with indemnities, or for the enjoyment of natural rights for other “members of society,” and therefore not for slaves, considered strangers to the nation’s body and even not fully humans. Indeed, by the eve of the revolution, both polygenist and monogenist taxonomies of humankind that emerged within the Enlightenment had reinforced the positioning of blacks at the bottom of a human hierarchy that considered the white male as the only rational being. ¹⁰

More precisely, from a juridical point of view the black slave had an ambiguous status between inclusion and exclusion. The Code noir promulgated by Louis XIV in 1685 had reproduced the doubling of the slave, who was both res (thing) and persona, inherited by Roman slave law. Nevertheless, rather than granting rights to the slave, the code aimed at taming the domestic sovereignty of the master and disciplining the slave (who had criminal responsibility but no legal capacity). Furthermore, the code was largely unapplied. Especially after the wave of poisoning that struck white colonists between 1757 and 1758, and in the wake of Tacky’s revolt in Jamaica in 1760, the colonial administration ceded even more power to masters in the punishment of slaves. The growing insubordination of enslaved men and women lead then to an increasing of the systematic use of violence that marked the master–slave relationship, such as whipping, rape, and other forms of physical and mental torture. This violence was exercised on the border between life and death in order to achieve both the maximum degree of discipline and the maximum extension of slave’s productive life, as also the literature on plantation management prescribed, such as in Pierre Joseph Laborie’s The Coffee Planter of Saint Domingo (1797). ¹¹

In this context, while the institution of slavery was generally condemned only through gradual abolitionism, such as in Condorcet’s Réflexions sur l’esclavage de nègres (1781), the so-called “aristocracy of the skin” ¹² appeared more in contradiction to the construction of a new order founded on the formal equality of individuals. However, as John D. Garrigus showed, in the second half of the eighteenth century the discourse on citizenship intertwined with a growing obsession of racial purity. Especially in the colonies, the image of the French virtuous citizen was overlapped to whiteness, and many creole families previously considered white were reclassified as “colored.” ¹³ Therefore, even the inclusion of free people of color was not a logical consequence of the French Revolution, or a mere top down act, but the outcome of insurgencies from below.

From 1789 to 1792 free people of color engaged a transatlantic struggle for the achievement of political rights, led by figures such as Julien Raimond and Vincent Ogé. Through this struggle, they expressed a specific concept of citizenship. Indeed, from a conceptual point of view, they advocated not only an extension beyond the metropolitan borders of the “revolution of equality” of 1789—that is, the refoundation of sovereignty on the basis of the individual citizen as subject of natural rights ¹⁴ —but also a critique of the limits of the French citizenship that revealed its hidden Eurocentric and racial assumptions. Considering property and freedom from slavery as the only two criteria to enjoy political rights, their critique eliminated the spatial (metropole/colonies) and racial differentiations of citizenship. In other words, citizenship was not based on the emerging nation-state and its assumptions of internal homogeneity. But it was conceived as a sort of imperial citizenship: the equal inclusion into the space of rights of all free men of the French empire. From this perspective, abolishing discriminations based on color hierarchy means to reestablish the distinction of free/slave as the only legitimate border of citizenship.

It is worth mentioning that this political discourse still operated on the threshold of the revolution. The claim of political rights was based both on the principle of natural equality expressed in the first two articles of the Declaration and on the legal equality of former slaves (affranchis) with other free persons established by the article 59 of the Code noir. In this sense, the Declaration was not used strictly against the old regime but as a legal document that abrogated colonial racial norms and affirmed the formal equality for all free persons. ¹⁵

A wealthy indigo planter of Saint-Domingue, Julien Raimond summarized free colored’s claims for active citizenship in the Observations sur l’origine et le progrès du préjugé des colons blancs contre les hommes de couleur (1791). The pamphlet proposed a demographic and economic interpretation of racial conflicts, based also on a stereotyped vision of white women and colonial sexual relationships. For Raimond, the hate and jealousy of poor white women against the wealthy colored class promoted the racial prejudice that made possible legal and social discriminations. Despite the historical inaccuracies, Raimond’s narration showed that racism was not a natural prejudice but a legal and social construction imposed to obstruct the growing economic power of free people of color—in other words, an attempt to reorganize the racial complexity of the colony into a social hierarchy based on the binary opposition white/nonwhite that, for Raimond, was in direct contradiction to the new concept of citizenship. Indeed, as he stressed in the pamphlet, the white planters demanded to the National Assembly that “a line of demarcation separates the men of color from them . . . , and that they can not enjoy the same benefits as the whites, who are neither more free nor more taxpayers than men of color.” ¹⁶ Moreover, he denounced that the legislative autonomy claimed by white colonists would have produced an illegitimate scission of nation’s sovereignty, leaving the free nonwhite population without representation and confirming whiteness as the mark of an “aristocratic” power. ¹⁷ Against that project, Raimond affirmed the indivisibility of sovereignty and claimed that men of color had to be considered not only members of the third estate, and therefore of the nation, but also “active citizens,” ¹⁸ entitled to political rights according to the distinction between active and passive citizenship proposed by Sieyès, and later formalized by the Constitution of 1791.

It is worthwhile now to recall the theoretical foundations that guided the National Assembly and to which Raimond referred. In What is the Third Estate?, Sieyès had defined the nation as the unitary and homogeneous body of all the citizens belonging to the third estate, so conceived as the “Everything.” ¹⁹ In that discourse, the nation was the historical and collective subject that preceded the political order: the subject of constituent power. Sieyès placed then the superiority of legislative power, as the “ordinary representative” of the nation, and the coincidence of third estate, nation, and state. In this way, he introduced the exclusion of nobility and clergy. Indeed, for Sieyès the nation was also a living organism made by the productive society represented by the third estate, internally unequal because of the division of labor but unified as a homogeneous totality from the point of view of sovereignty. On the contrary, the privileged class was “foreign” to the nation because of its “idleness.” ²⁰ As it is well known, this exteriority was also argued reversing the noble’s discourse against the absolute monarchy that legitimized aristocratic power on the basis of the Franks conquest of Gaul. Urging the nation, with a sarcastic tone, to “send back to the Franconia forest” the nobles that claimed to be a “race of conquerors,” Sieyès introduced then a historical trace that complicated the concepts of nation and citizenship. ²¹

For free people of color, this foundational discourse of the French Revolution had both useful and ambiguous elements. On the one hand, the centrality of labor, property, and tax contribution in the concept of nation overlapped to the third estate made possible the inclusion of all free proprietors of the empire—indeed, Sieyès agreed with the recognition of rights to men of color. ²² On the other hand, the relationship between the nation and its colonies remained unclear. In particular, the historicization of the nation and its equivalence with the territory of the state produced a European qualification that did not entail that all free people of African descent in the colonies belonged to France. And it was precisely upon this ambiguity that the National Assembly attempted to resolve the conflict on the meaning of citizenship in two interrelated ways: the selective inclusion into citizenship of some subjects of the racial hierarchy, and the constitutional separation of kingdom and colonies, conceived as two different political and juridical spaces.

A first compromise was reached with the decrees of the 13th and 15th of May 1791. Two measures approved in Paris after the repression of the armed insurrection of free people of color led by Vincent Ogé in Saint-Domingue on fall 1790. The first decree recognized the constitutionality of slavery, depicting slaves as a “foreign nation,” while the second included into active citizenship free proprietors who had both parents freeborn. ²³ This decision effectively included only the mulatto population and excluded free blacks and former slaves. Although indirectly, the priority of race over property to enjoy citizenship rights was reaffirmed.

These measures found their definitive legal framework in the Constitution of 1791 that defined its geographical boundaries by declaring that “the French colonies and possessions in Asia, Africa and America, although part of the French Empire, are not included in this constitution” (art. 8, title seven). This act established a doubling of sovereignty: while in France the sovereignty of the nation was represented in the legislative body and expressed in the uniformity of the law over the territory; the colonies had to be governed by special laws proposed by the colonial assemblies and ratified in Paris. It is worth mentioning that this conception of sovereignty reflected a long tradition of the European political thought, first exposed by John Locke, who based the qualitative distinction of state and colony on contract and conquest, as two different foundations of political order. This conceptualization of the colonial space as predisposed to forms of despotic power was also diffuse in France by the theories of Montesquieu and Rousseau on the relationship between climate, traditions, and customs of people and the relative forms of government. ²⁴ But besides these intellectual foundations, the constitutional separation can be interpreted as an attempt to contain colonial insurgencies.

In fact, it was again the irruption of a new political subject that suddenly changed the scenario: the slave insurrection that broke out in August 1791 in the Northern plain of Saint-Domingue imposed a new legislative intervention on the question of citizenship. The impossibility to defeat armed African rebels and the destruction of plantations pushed the National Assembly to recognize full citizenship to all free people of color with the decree of April 4, 1792. Citizenship shows here its double function. On the one hand, free people of color won their battle on the extensive interpretation of revolutionary citizenship and indirectly reshaped the constitutional borders of citizenship. On the other hand, citizenship functioned as a device to strengthen social and political order, an attempt to tighten the ranks of the free population against who was still outside the space of rights and threatened the survival of colonial society.

Between Marronage and Citizenship

The attempts to contain slave insurrection were ineffective and the military force of the African rebels forced the Jacobin commissioners Léger-Félicité Sonthonax and Étienne Polverel to emancipate the slaves of Saint-Domingue with different proclamations issued between August and October 1793; a decision sanctioned by the Convention with the decree of February 4, 1794, declared the general abolition of slavery. Slaves were thus included in the nation, formally entitled to “enjoy all the rights of French citizens.” ²⁵

The slave rebels assumed an ambivalent attitude toward citizenship, seeking freedom both inside and outside revolutionary France. In this sense, they defined their belonging or foreignness to France depending on the possibility to achieve freedom from racial slavery, and therefore constantly oscillating between inclusion and separation. In other words, the attitude toward French citizenship is highly instrumental. The inclusion into the space of constitutional rights is just one possible declination of the struggle for social and political autonomy, which was indeed expressed also in the flight from colonial society for the creation of Maroon communities, and in the war for national independence. In this sense, as Neil Roberts recently proposed, the term “marronage” can be used to identify not only the specific historical phenomenon of escaping plantations, but also the peculiar concept of freedom expressed in black political thought and, more broadly, in African American culture: freedom as a constant movement of flight, both real and imagined, from slavery and racial oppression. ²⁶

This oscillation between citizenship integration and the flight from oppressive institutions is particularly evident after the emancipation of 1793–94, but it characterized all the revolution since the slave insurrection of 1791. In particular, there are three main political positions often overlapped. First, following a long tradition of marronage, many rebels aimed at creating autonomous communities based on subsistence agriculture, such as the so-called kingdom of Platons established in the southwestern part of the colony in 1792. ²⁷ In this perspective, freedom is not identified in the integration into citizenship rights and duties. On the contrary, the refusal of French (and later Haitian) institutions is the precondition of freedom, conceived as the autonomy of a community formed and structured outside and against the state. Secondly, by claiming a political and military belonging to France, slave rebels negotiated specific social and political rights: better conditions of work, usually three free days per week and protections against master’s violence; freedom for the black leaders or for the entire group of Maroons; the full recognition of citizenship rights. For instance, black leaders such as Georges Biassou and Jean-François negotiated freedom through a royalist political discourse, legitimizing themselves as defenders of the house of Bourbons, both of Louis XVI and Charles IV of Spain, as well as by using the doctrine of natural rights. Finally, the leaders that joined the Republic after the abolition of slavery (1793–94), such as Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Henri Christophe, and Moïse, pushed the French Revolution toward the defense of abolition and the integration of blacks into citizenship. In this sense, they reshaped the French republicanism in a form of black revolutionary abolitionism.

One of the most relevant sources that show this oscillation between the flight from French society and the claiming of rights are the letters sent by black leaders to the French authorities from 1791 to 1793 in order to negotiate a peace agreement. It is worth remembering that these negotiations forced the colonial power to recognize the Maroons as a legitimate enemy. Indeed, they were usually considered fugitive properties, announced on colonial newspapers next to lost animals and identified by the owner’s name branded on the flesh. Also because of that, these letters expressed a conception of freedom as war of liberation that has to be understood as strongly opposed to a request of emancipation from above. This perspective already emerged in the first letter to Governor Blanchelande, written on September 24, 1791. Refusing to go back to the “tyrants and monsters unworthy of the fruit of our labor,” the insurgents declared that they “will never have any other watchword than Victory or death for freedom.” ²⁸ These words testify a position of total enmity and the intention to express freedom outside of French society by practicing marronage.

During negotiations with French civil commissioners Mirbeck, Roume, and Saint-Léger, who were sent to the colony to reestablish public order, the black leaders Georges Biassou and Jean-François assumed a slightly different position by presenting themselves as mediators between French authorities and the insurgent Africans. Indeed, in the first letter of December 12, 1791, they declared to be dependent to “a multitude of blacks from the Coast [Africa], most of whom can barely say two words of French but who, at the same time, were accustomed to fighting wars in their own country.” ²⁹ But in their role of military leaders, they claimed the confirmation of the general amnesty, legal protection against master’s violence—considered necessary to persuade Africans to go back to work—and the recognition of freedom for them and other leaders by promising their future military loyalty to France. In this sense, they declared to fight for the king, wearing also the cross of the military order of Saint Louis as a symbol of loyalty. ³⁰ This tactic of claiming belonging to France to be entitled to a set of rights was pursued again in a letter to the new Jacobin commissioner Léger-Félicité Sonthonax in June 1793: “you must not ignore that we were fighting for our rights and even for the king . . . and our disposition was ready to change against the Spanish knowing that we are and will be always French.” ³¹ In these negotiations, the perspective of inclusion appears strictly connected to military service, to the possibility to be considered as free soldiers of France. Indeed, the failure of these negotiations led the black leaders to move their troops to the Spanish forces.

We can trace also an instrumental appropriation of the doctrine of natural rights through the letter of July 1792 signed by Jean-François, Biassou, and Belair (a name that probably covered Toussaint Louverture). This letter shows how the demand of rights is articulated inside and against the French revolutionary thought at the same time. First, the letter marked a turning point by demanding no more specific rights and liberties but “general liberty.” Otherwise, the Maroons would have continued to fight until the “total destruction” of the colony. Secondly, the struggle against slavery is legitimized by recalling the first two articles of the Declaration of the Right of Men:

Have you forgotten that you have formally vowed the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which says that men are born free, equal in their rights; that their natural rights include liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression? So then, as you cannot deny what you have sworn, we are within our rights, and you ought to recognize that all men are free, but you want to maintain servitude for 480000 individuals. ³²

By claiming that black people were human beings entitled to natural rights, the authors highlighted the contradiction of the French Revolution that had not yet abolished slavery and racial oppression:

We are black, it is true, but tell us . . . what is the law that says that the black man must belong to and be the property of the white man? . . . if nature pleases itself to diversify colors within the human race, it is not a crime to be born black nor an advantage to be white. ³³

Although we cannot suppose a theoretical objective, but more likely an instrumental use of French political lexicon to argue the struggle against slavery, these words stressed the tension between the right to resistance and the right to property. The appropriation of the Declaration assumes thereby a double meaning since it is both a strategic use of the concept of natural freedom and an attack on the unlimited right to property. From this point of view, article 17 was illegitimate because it recognized the sacredness and inviolability of property without clearly forbidding slavery. In other words, the letter shows that the apparent balancing between natural equality and freedom and the right to property became an unsolvable contradiction in the colonial context, in which the most valuable property were enslaved black bodies.

The political thought of Toussaint Louverture is probably the most important example of this attempt to use French revolutionary lexicon to advocate the abolition of slavery and the integration into citizenship. More precisely, his political discourse aimed to situate the struggle for black liberation within the history and temporality of the French Revolution. Nevertheless, it is still characterized by an oscillation between the possibility to universalize the French Revolution and the critique of the partiality of French universalism. First, renaming himself Louverture, Toussaint Bréda performed a political act: he was the leader of an opening. This can be interpreted as a sign of Haitian political syncretism. On the one hand, the name could refer to the vodou spirit Legba, for his power to open the gates. ³⁴ On the other hand, it could be an appropriation of the political concept of revolution that emerged in France, no more a circular movement, but the creation of a new order ex nihilo. Indeed, as Louverture said in 1797, the condition of the slaves during the insurrection resembled “the chaos that preceded the creation of the world.” ³⁵ The rebellion of free blacks and enslaved Africans was then reinterpreted as the true revolution for freedom, equality, and fraternity:

The first successes obtained in Europe by the partisans of liberty over the agents of despotism were not slow to ignite the sacred fire of patriotism in the souls of all Frenchmen in St. Domingue. . . . they wanted to escape from their arbitrary government, but they did not intend the revolution to destroy either the prejudices that debased the men of color or the slavery of the blacks. . . . Thus, while whites were erecting another form of government upon the rubble of despotism, the men of color and the blacks united themselves in order to claim their political existence. ³⁶

As C. L. R. James first showed in The Black Jacobins, ³⁷ this discourse of black revolutionaries produced an overturning of the spatial hierarchy that characterized French thought and white abolitionism, according to which freedom and equality would be exported and gradually expanded from the center to the peripheries of empires. On the contrary, the political subject that made possible the abolition was the black people.

According to this reasoning, Louverture proposed a political conception of citizenship. Birth, residence, property, and the payment of taxes were not relevant aspects; political loyalty to the republic was sufficient to become a French citizen. Nevertheless, this voluntary obligation was constantly bound to the respect of black freedom. This is evident in the Réfutation (1797) written against the proslavery advocate Viénot de Vaublanc. Attacking the arguments according to which “in Saint-Domingue only the whites are truly French,” ³⁸ Louverture linked citizenship to patriotism. Echoing also the revolutionary reinterpretation of classical republicanism, he represented the blacks as “virtuous” citizens in arms who have chosen to sacrifice themselves by fighting for the glory of the republic: “It was the blacks who, when France threatened with losing the colony, used their arms and their weapons to conserve it.” ³⁹ From this perspective, the African-born men and women also had “the right to be called French citizens.” ⁴⁰ In this sense, Louverture used the Jacobin redefinition of the universalism of 1789 in a nationalist discourse, according to which only the revolutionary people formed the nation. Indeed, if the internal counter-revolutionaries were foreign because of their actions against the nation, the revolutionary blacks should be immediately declared French citizens. Besides this Jacobin logic, Louverture reasoning was also an extension of article 9 of the Constitution of the Year III that gave citizenship rights to the “Frenchmen” who fought for the republic without tax conditions. Indeed, for him all blacks that joined the republic, also after the emancipation, should be included as citizens without being subjected to article 10 of the Constitution that regulated naturalization. ⁴¹

However, while he exalted the patriotism of blacks, Louverture threatened the Directory by recalling the image of Jamaican Maroons:

if the French government is influenced by Vaublanc’s projects, it should remember that in the heart of Jamaica, in the Blue Mountains, there exist a small number of men so jealous of their liberty that they have forced the proud and powerful English to respect their natural rights, which the French Constitution still guarantees us. ⁴²

Agitating the specter of secession, Louverture highlighted that the black people of Saint-Domingue had chosen France as their “adoptive country,” but they remained an autonomous political subject able to defend their freedom against France as well. This doubleness clearly emerged in the Constitution of 1801. Taking advantage of Napoleon’s decision to reintroduce the separation between metropole and the colonies, which was abrogated in the Constitution of the Year III but reestablished by the article 91 of the Constitution of the Year VIII, according to which “special laws” would rule the colonies, Louverture anticipated possible actions against black freedom. He constitutionalized the abolition of slavery and secured the inclusion into citizenship on the basis of a jus soli principle: “there cannot exist slaves on this territory; servitude is therein forever abolished. All men are born, live and die free and French.” ⁴³ But he also concentrated the legislative and executive power in his own person, producing a condition of internal autonomy that probably prepared an eventual secession.

Beyond these political goals, Louverture’s doubleness expressed an attempt to think and practice inclusion not as a process of assimilation that undermined the specificity of black history, but as the fulfillment of equality that valorized the role of blacks in the struggle against slavery. This problem emerged again in his Mémoires, written during his incarceration at Fort-de-Joux where he died on April 7, 1803. While he swore unconditional loyalty to France for the last time, he advanced a critique of the limits of French universalism: “Surely I owe this treatment to my color, but did my color ever prevent me from serving my fatherland with zeal and fidelity? Does the color of my body demean my honor and my courage?” ⁴⁴ The achievement of equality within the boundaries of French citizenship appears to be an unattainable mirage obstructed by the color line.

The Government of “Free Labor” and the Creation of the Virtuous Citizen

The question of citizenship must be analyzed also from the point of view of the practices of government of freed slaves. Indeed, the emancipation of 1793–94 was conceived to impose a new political obligation in order to preserve colonial dominion and the plantation system. The extension of citizen’s rights to former slaves was presented as a bestowal of the republic and connected to citizen’s duties: plantation labor and military loyalty to France. As Philippe Girard recently showed, citizenship was a device to “make freedom work,” to get Africans back to plantations, or enlist some of them in the army. ⁴⁵ The first Sonthonax’s emancipation proclamation of August 29, 1793, clarified that the extension of French citizenship did not mean access to unconditional liberty but the subjection to a new regime of labor: “a new order of things will be born, and the old slavery will disappear. Yet do not think that the liberty that you will enjoy means laziness and inactivity. In France, everyone is free and everyone works.” ⁴⁶ The economic goal of maintaining plantations was then co-implicated in the more general problem of the reconstruction of obedience in a colonial society still structured by the legacy of racial slavery but formally founded on the natural freedom and equality of individuals. On the one hand, the project of Sonthonax and Polverel aimed to synchronize the different temporalities of the emerging French capitalism with the generalization of wage labor. On the other hand, the conservation of the plantation system imposed the organization of specific forms of forced labor, especially in the conditions of war economy. The transformation of slaves into industrious citizens implies the artificial reproduction of dependency. Land concentration, limitations to free mobility, and the disciplining of labor were enforced through rural codes and the rural police to avoid work refusal and land parceling for subsistence agriculture, the basis of the African struggle for material independence from plantation.

Of course, the transformations of emancipation should not be underestimated. First of all, the suppression of whipping is indicative of the effort to eradicate the master’s domination and to establish a new condition in which black bodies were not disposable objects of property anymore. Furthermore, according to rural codes black workers received a salary (generally as sharecrop, while monetary salary was used for domestics and barely predisposed for field hands by Polverel) and could regulate labor disputes in front of the Justice of Peace as any other citizens. Rural codes also introduced protections for pregnant workers, maternity salary, and regulations of child labor. ⁴⁷

Nevertheless, the new organization of labor maintained social hierarchies based on gender, age, and labor skills. In particular, the former slave-driver (commandeur), now renamed conducteur, remained at the head of plantation hierarchy as the pivotal figure of work-gangs and rural police. Exceptionally, Polverel tried to introduce a radical norm of internal democracy prescribing that conducteurs have to be elected by assemblies of plantation workers, and they would wear a red, white, and blue hat (bonnet de police) that symbolized their role as republican police. ⁴⁸ Not surprisingly, the norm on election disappears in subsequent acts. Moreover, all rural codes imposed unequal payments, determined on the third of the crop left to black workers. If skilled workers and conducteurs, who were usually Creole men, received two or three shares, field hands men, generally Africans, received one share, while African women two-thirds of a share and children half of a share. This gendered structure was fundamental to cut salaries since years of war took men away from agriculture and made women the backbone of plantation production.

Another key element in the governing of labor, strongly connected to the asymmetries of citizenship, was the control of mobility. Not only because emancipation dissolved master’s means of identification—certificate of property and body branding—but also because free movement was one of the main ways in which the ex-slaves expressed their freedom, by moving to port cities or to Maroon communities, or just changing plantations. The question of movement and identification is particularly relevant here because it was at the core of the legal definition of French citizenship. According to the law on municipal police of July 19, 1791, and to the decree on the état civil of September 20, 1792, to be a citizen meant to be identifiable in biological (sex), social (property), and geographical (residence) terms. According to this measure, Sonthonax’s proclamation of 1793 ordered to former slaves the inscription in the état civil and criminalized autonomous movement by introducing the felony of vagrancy. ⁴⁹ On the one hand, former slaves were therefore incorporated into the modern “transition from private to state control over movement.” ⁵⁰ On the other hand, the felony of vagrancy can be used to punish different undisciplined conducts, including some depicted as marronage until 1793, such as temporary absenteeism, flight from plantation, handouts, improvised jobs outside plantation regime, and other forms of individual survival. Whoever refused to be worker or soldier became a criminal, suffering incarceration, the temporary suspension of full citizenship rights, and even condemnation to unpaid public works. ⁵¹ Implemented in all rural codes, these measures were confirmed in 1798 by the constitutional law on the organization of the colonies, according to which any individual who could not prove a “known residence” and “occupation” would have be deemed as “vagabond.” ⁵²

The ex-slaves maintained an ambivalent relationship toward this process of incorporation and identification. On the one hand, as Laurent Dubois has shown, they registered themselves in the état civil, knowing the legal, social, and symbolic importance of official documents to prove they were not objects of property but subjects entitled to rights. ⁵³ On the other hand, they reacted to new forms of coercion withdrawing their labor force through rebellion and marronage. Among the many conflicts, it is worth mentioning the uprising led by the black General Moïse in 1798 against the labor politics of the General Gabriel d’Hédouville. In that case, a group of men and women from the parish of Petite-Rivière, controlled by Toussaint Louverture, released a petition that showed how the ex-slaves always acted on the border of citizenship, willing to escape the French society to defend their freedom and to refuse exploitation: “We don’t want to work anymore; we prefer to die, if General Hédouville does not leave the colony; we don’t want to be engaged anymore; we will rather stay in the woods all our life, if he does not leave.” ⁵⁴

But besides the ongoing practice of flight, plantation became a battlefield on the meaning of citizenship rights, especially in terms of wealth redistribution and legal protection against master’s abuses. One of the rare traces of these claims is the testimony of a black rebel of the Andro plantation, transcribed (and maybe modified) by Toussaint Louverture in the report of February 20, 1796, to the French General Étienne Laveaux:

Alas, general, they wish as well to make us slaves; there is no equality here, as it seems there is with you. Look how the whites and coloured men who are with your are good and are united with the blacks. One would think they were brothers from the same mother. That, general, is what we call equality. Here it is not the same. We are looked down upon, they vex us at every turn. They don’t pay us what we are owed for the food we grow. They force us to give away our chickens and pigs for nothing when we go to sell them in the city, and if we complain, they have us arrested by the police, and they throw us in prison without giving us anything to eat, and then make us pay to get out. You see, general, that one is not free if he is treated like this. ⁵⁵

Beyond showing the fundamental gap that persists between the new norms and their effective implementation on plantations, especially on payment and protections against violence, these words highlight how black workers immediately traduced republican rhetoric on citizens’ equality in the claiming of material and social equality, fighting against not only former white masters but also black and colored men of the army who ruled plantations.

Toussaint Louverture, who became the effective governor of the colony between 1798 and 1802, implemented the new system of forced labor within a broader political project of pacification, modernization, and moralization of colonial society enforced through a military dictatorship. The destruction of masters’ authority had opened a space of freedom and disorder that Louverture wanted to govern toward a well-ordered society. For this purpose, Louverture aimed to transform the ex-slave into a virtuous citizen through four pillars: plantation labor, military service, family stability, and catholic education. In other words, he aimed to produce the modern discipline: the prompt obedience to a command perceived as legitimate and rational. In this sense, his politics sheds light on two issues concerning citizenship: the specific conflict between formal and material freedom that opposed the military elite and the peasants, and the modern problem of the production of the citizen as disciplined subject.

Since his enlistment in the French army, Louverture communicated to the black population that emancipation would mean not only liberation from the arbitrary power of the master, but also the ability to self-discipline—to tame vices and bad passions. In other words, for Louverture liberty could be consolidated only through labor and obedience to the law, becoming a “rational liberty.” This idea immediately clashed with the practices of former slaves, who conceived freedom as autonomy and social equality, developing their own conception of social order largely based on vodou cosmology. ⁵⁶

Issued on October 12, 1800, with the aim of guaranteeing “security of liberty,” “prosperity,” “public tranquility,” and “happiness” for all the inhabitants of the colony, the Règlement relatif à la culture offers some relevant indications in this sense. In the preamble, Louverture immediately recalls the problem of labor mobility. Former slaves, he said, “change plantation at their own discretion,” and work in a discontinuous way “because, they say, they are free, and spend their days wandering as vagabonds.” ⁵⁷ Although formally integrated into citizenship, Africans had thus to be submitted both to labor discipline and to a process of education in all spheres of society. Otherwise, they would remain ungovernable subjects, as Louverture said again in the proclamation of 4 Frimaire (November 24, 1801) by lamenting lacks in families’ education:

how negligently fathers and mothers raise their children . . . they arrive at the age of twelve, without moral principles, without a skill, and with a taste for luxury and laziness as their only education. . . . It is certain beyond any doubt that they will be bad citizens, vagabonds, thieves. ⁵⁸

In order to “correct” such “bad citizens,” Louverture improved the control on free mobility reinforcing the felony of vagrancy and introducing specific instruments of control, such as passports (carte de sûreté) and even chains for convicts to forced labor. He then imposed a militarization of plantations overlapping the figures of the cultivator and the soldier, two sides of the same virtuous and disciplined citizen. Seeing the patriarchal family and Catholicism as two fundamental vehicles to educate people to obedience, Louverture, negated the right to divorce (art. 10), imposed on women a moralization of domestic and social mores (art. 9), and declared Catholicism the only legal cult, outlawing vodou (art. 6), in the Constitution of 1801. Finally, assuming the legislative initiative and becoming governor for life, he imposed a military dictatorship that found affinities with the monocratic orientation of the Constitution of the Year VIII. ⁵⁹ Louverture’s thought and government seems thereby to overlap different phases and currents of the French Revolution, presenting elements of Jacobinism and the coup of 18 Brumaire. In particular, the insistence on virtue and the dictatorial shift led back to the Jacobin problem of the virtuous citizen, which had its theoretical roots in the paradox of Rousseau’s political theory defined by the opposition between the total alienation of self-interest in the founding of “general will” and the impossibility of this voluntary obligation for the modern individual that lives in a condition of corrupted socialization. ⁶⁰ As it is well-known, while Rousseau considered the political unity of ancient Sparta, and Rome forever lost and tried to solve this problem through civic religion and the pedagogy exposed in the Emile (1762), the radical group of Montagnards simplified Rousseau’s theory to conceive the revolutionary government of Terror as the regeneration of the corrupted society and the defense of the virtuous people against counter-revolutionary forces. Similarly, Louverture’s discourse seems to be inspired by the idea of the perfect identification of the virtuous citizen in arms in the general will. However, operating within the constitutional transformations of the Directory and the Consulate, his government was not explicitly influenced by the ideal of direct democracy or by the conception of revolutionary government as Terror. His restrictions on representative institutions and the military exercise of executive power deal with the specificity of the colonial world. The legacy of slavery pushed Louverture to consider the majority of black citizens unprepared to act politically through institutions, whether representatives or commissioners, and to recognize in the law his own will. The citizen must be entirely produced through the correction of the alleged antisocial conducts. For Louverture, only the military hierarchy made possible the government of persons previously submitted to the extreme domination of racial slavery. The military dictatorship appears thereby as the exceptional form of government necessary to accelerate the abolitionist revolution as the transformation of slaves into disciplined and virtuous “French citizens.” But this attempt to synchronize colonial and metropolitan spaces sheds light on the general meaning of modern citizenship also in Europe. It shows that the destruction of the social order of the old regime sanctioned and accelerated the long process of producing citizens as disciplined subjects that characterize Western modernity.

Postcolonial Citizenship

In 1802, when Napoleon decided to impose his authority over the colony and reintroduce slavery, the Haitian Revolution shifted toward the war of independence. During the war against the French army, commanded by Leclerc and Rochambeau, the political discourse of the revolutionary leaders soon became anticolonial. The construction of the new Haitian citizenship was thus based on two elements: the French enemy, and the construction of an indigenous and black identity. Already marked by the renaming of the different populations involved in the struggle as Haitians, this shift was explicit in Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s proclamation of April 28, 1804, released to justify the massacre of French colonists: “Never again shall a colonist, or an European, set his foot upon this territory with the title of master or proprietor. This resolution shall henceforward from the fundamental basis of our Constitution.” ⁶¹ In that speech, Dessalines also declared himself the avenger of America—“I have saved my country, I have avenged America”— representing the destruction of masters’ power as the redemption of all colonized people. The foundation of the new political order was thus articulated through a specific anticolonial temporality and spatiality. The Haitian Revolution opens a new horizon of freedom destroying the colonial past, annihilating the interval of time between the foundation of Hispaniola and the end of Saint-Domingue and restoring the precolonial Ayti. At the same time, America was no more a free space for European expansion, now obstructed by black political subjectivity.

Dessalines’s attack to European colonists was indeed constitutionalized in 1805 through an important change that shows the second element of the invention of the people of Haiti: blackness. Article 12 of the Constitution said that “no white, of whatever nation he may be, shall put his foot on this territory with the title of master or proprietor,” while article 14 defines the new citizenship by saying: “All distinction of colour among the children of one and the same family, of which the head of state is the father, necessarily ceasing, Haytians shall hence forward be known only by the generic denomination of blacks (noirs).” ⁶² These articles can be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, the formal equality of citizens before the law, established by article 3, was placed through a subversion of the racial hierarchies that had characterized the colony. On the other hand, this subversion eliminated the social and racial conflicts that still divided the population. Indeed, as Claude Moïse already noted, the alleged universal equality of “black” Haitian citizens was a juridical fiction that hid the concrete inequalities between the elite of free people of color and black generals and the majority of African-born men and women forced to work on the plantations. ⁶³ Defining the “nation” as the unitary body of the “black people” was then a way to neutralize internal conflicts, still structured along the color line, and to concentrate military and political efforts against the white colonizer. Indeed, the anticolonial war was represented also as a racial war. To justify the act of independence, Dessalines claimed an insurmountable difference between the Haitian and the French enemy: “What do we have in common with this nation of executioners? The difference between its cruelty and our patient moderation, its color and ours, the great seas that separate us, our avenging climate, all tell us plainly that they are not our brothers, that they never will be.” ⁶⁴ These discourses are not to be interpreted as the affirmation of a racial essentialism, but as a rhetorical strategy to gather the conflicting factions of Haitian society and to unveil the partiality of French universalism, and especially the concept of fraternité now irremediably delimitated by the color line. In fact, the constitutional text denies any essentialist or biological interpretation of race, and it shows the political reasons of the relationship between citizenship and blackness. According to article 13, neither the white women who were naturalized Haitians and their children, nor the Germans and Poles who had fought for independence, were subjected to article 12. Entitled to citizenship, those groups would be referred to as “black” citizens of Haiti. In this sense, article 13 demonstrates the two main objectives of this section of the Constitution: to subvert European racism by using blackness as a political concept and to identify the proprietary white class as the foundational enemy of the nation. This helped to prevent the formation of a new dependency between Haiti and France and to unify the “black” nation against its enemy.

The necessity to defend the revolution through the elimination of its enemies could be interpreted again as a reproduction of radical Jacobinism and the politics of terror. However, the Haitian nation’s freedom was not defended through the constant suppression of internal counter-revolutionary forces, ⁶⁵ but through the instantaneous act of vengeance and collective violence perpetuated in the Spring of 1804. The conflict with the French masters was expulsed outside the borders of the state and reproduced at international scale in the conflict between the slaveholding empires and the abolitionist empire of Haiti. Nevertheless, as the first independent black state of the Atlantic, emerged from the only successful slave revolt in all of world history, the state of Haiti immediately took a defensive constitutional structure. Despite its imperial connotation, probably adopted also in reply to Napoleon’s designation as emperor in 1804, the Constitution had not an imperialistic vocation: article 36 forbade the emperor any war of conquest and other breach to the international peace. At the same time, the Haitian territory and society were organized as a fortress surrounded by enemies. Articles 15 and 16 organized the territory into six military divisions, commanded by generals of division, and article 9 sanctioned the militarization of citizenship started by Toussaint Louverture by linking the “dignity” of being a male Haitian citizen to the ability of being a “good soldier.” ⁶⁶ The hierarchy of the army was thus the model around which to reorganize social discipline and political order, and the citizen-soldier became the exemplification of postcolonial citizenship.

Conclusion

In this essay, I showed how the political thought and practices of the Haitian Revolution are particularly relevant to rethinking the history of the concept of citizenship, and more generally the history of modern political concepts from a non-Eurocentric and global perspective. Since it abolished the two most extreme forms of domination of Western modernity, the Haitian Revolution is a productive archive to highlight the twofold nature of modern citizenship as an instrument of political and social struggles from below and as a device of the modern practices and technologies of government. More precisely, the revolution radically highlights how citizenship has been one of the decisive concepts both in the fight against slavery and racism and in the integration of colonized subjectivities into the modern political order structured upon capitalism and the state. In this sense, I analyzed how the Haitian Revolution produced different conceptions of citizenship, connected to specific social groups and their relative political and economic interests, by showing that these conceptions are articulated through processes of appropriation and transformation of the European political lexicon and conceptuality. In other words, racial boundaries of French citizenship were continually challenged by black struggles—on the basis of property rights (by free people of color), military service (black leaders and soldiers), and labor (black workers). These struggles made it possible to conceive citizenship as formal racial equality that would otherwise be unimaginable and unattainable within the framework of French citizenship in 1789. The interaction with European political thought and institutions always aimed for the fulfillment of the two main objectives of the revolution—that is, the abolition of slavery and racial-based discrimination. And for this reason, the political and ideological space opened by the French Revolution is refused and abandoned whenever it is not seen as useful for the realization of concrete freedom aspirations.

Nonetheless, I showed that the revolution is also crossed by conflicts on the meaning of citizenship that reveals some of its constitutive apories. In particular, like all revolutions, the Haitian produces new forms of domination. The revolutionary ideal of a society founded on universal racial equality clashes with the plantation system that can survive only by reproducing social inequalities organized through citizenship, as a political legitimization and juridical definition of those inequalities. Indeed, the revolutionary elite tried to bring back to order the insurgency of black workers and soldiers through interpretations of citizenship that bind rights to labor and military discipline. It was also because of these conflicts around the meaning of postcolonial citizenship that the deep scission of Haitian society, described by Michel-Rolph Trouillot as the ongoing conflict between the state and the Haitian nation, emerged. ⁶⁷ Certainly not limited to postcolonial states, this unresolved problem of the relationship between modern citizenship and the legacy of racial slavery still raises urgent questions about the history of capitalist modernity.