For too long, gentlemen, ... we have been victims of your greed and your avarice. Under the blows of your barbarous whip we have accumulated for you the treasures you enjoy in this colony; the human race has suffered to see with what barbarity you have treated men like yourself ... We are your equals then by natural right, and if nature pleases itself to diversify colours within the human race, it is not a crime to be born black or an advantage to be white. If the abuses of the Colony have gone on for several years, that was before the fortunate revolution that has taken place in the motherland which has opened for us the road which our courage and labour will enable us to ascend, to arrive at the temple of liberty, like those brave Frenchmen who are our models and whom all the universe is contemplating ... by your decrees you recognize that all men are free, but you want to maintain servitude for 480,000 individuals who allow you to enjoy all that you possess ... We present to you our demands as follows: First, general liberty for all men detained in slavery ... Here, gentlemen, is the request of men who are like you, and here is their final resolution: they are resolved to live free or die [1792] ... I have always held humanity in common to all [1794] ... I believe that this is only possible by serving the French Republic; it is under its flag that we are truly free and equal [1796] ... [Let us overcome] the barriers that separate nations, and unite the human species into a single brotherhood ... the oath that we renew [is] to bury ourselves beneath the ruins of a country revived by liberty rather than suffer the return of slavery ... We have known how to confront danger to obtain our liberty, and we will know how to confront death to preserve it. This, Citizens and Directors, is the morality of the people of Saint-Domingue, these are the principles I transmit to you on their behalf [1797] (Aristide, 2008: 6, 7, 8, 10, 19, 28, 33, 34–5, emphasis added).
These extracts provide a flavour not only of Toussaint’s eloquence but of his steadfast commitment to and affirmation of universal freedom and humanity on the basis of natural right, and thus of his expression of a distinct mode of politics. Edward Saïd (1993: 280) has rightly noted that, according to C.L.R. James’s account, Toussaint ‘appropriates the principles of the Revolution not as a Black man but as a human, and he does so with a dense historical awareness of how in finding the language of Diderot, Rousseau, and Robespierre one follows predecessors creatively, using the same words, employing inflections that transformed rhetoric into actuality’.
Nesbitt (2008a: 63) is therefore right to stress, following Césaire, the centrality in Toussaint’s thought of a transformation in ‘consciousness of universal freedom as a categorical imperative’ founded on natural right. It is this singular subjectivity which shows the truth during this sequence of the universality of humanity in the Human Freedom mode. Although many military campaigns were conducted and fought in order to free the slaves, the political discourse was in essence not militaristic. The sites of this subjectivity included maroons and independent bands, secret societies of plantations workers and slave armies.10 The context for the Saint-Domingue revolution was the French Revolution with its Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, but it took the conception of humanity of the French Revolution (often limited, particularly by the right to property) to its logical conclusion. In doing so, the slaves exceeded the limited idea of the human as defined by the Enlightenment, which saw only some privileged members of humanity as fully human (Sala-Molins, 2008). They thus had to think singular political subjectivities beyond the accepted idea of human nature of the time and hence to produce a universal and eternal truth which insisted that all humans, without any exception whatsoever, are capable of reason. Francine Gauthier (1992) shows that the language in which this truth was expressed was that of ‘natural right’, as it was only an adherence to this conception that saw all ‘men’ as given by nature as free subjects.11 It is to this natural right that the slaves of Saint-Domingue gave political expression when they affirmed their humanity and thus established the truth of universal humanity in practice. Yet by 1796 the Human Freedom mode seems to have achieved all it could. It had become – in Lazarus’s formulation – ‘saturated’, a fact that became gradually apparent as a state politics of militarism came to dominate subjectivity, and a distance developed between the leadership, particularly as represented by Toussaint, and the masses of freed slaves. Nesbitt (2008a: 79) notes for example: ‘Toussaint’s actions retained a social and political core only as long as they were guided by a political principle: the universal abolition of slavery and the destruction of the plantation system that enabled it. Toussaint’s limitations arose precisely when he began to abandon that fidelity in the late 1790s.’
MILITARISM, 1797–1804
From 1797 a militarised statist subjectivity became dominant among the ‘Black Jacobin’ leadership and for Toussaint in particular.12 However, it was arguably not the shift in Toussaint’s politics that was the cause of the ending of the mode, but rather the saturation of the Human Freedom mode that made Toussaint’s actions possible. Once slavery was abolished by decree, a fidelity to humanity would have had to take a different form in order for the mode to be sustained. The freed slaves, particularly the African-born bossales (as opposed to the créoles, who were born on the island (see Nesbitt, 2008a)), did indeed have a clear idea of the form in which universal freedom should be thought. Their unique prescription – which was an obvious impossibility for Toussaint to imagine – concerned the breaking up of the large estates into subsistence family units.13 This was not a conception shared by their leadership, with the exception of Moïse, who would consequently pay for his closeness to the masses with his life (Nesbitt, 2008b).
The political sequence 1797–1804 was one characterised by the militarisation of agricultural production, the reorganisation of the estates on the basis of ‘wage slavery’ (to use one of Marx’s very apt expressions), the dictatorship of Toussaint until 1802, when he was kidnapped by the French, and the mass mobilisation of the ex-slaves with the consequent military defeat of the Napoleonic expeditionary force sent to restore slavery. The effects on politics were clear: all politics became systematically militarised until independence was achieved under the command of Dessalines. Toussaint, who eventually acquired full powers on the island, was, along with the civil commissioners of the French Republic, intent on keeping the plantation system intact and invited many Whites to return to manage the sugar estates. The core idea was simply that Saint-Domingue’s economic viability was only possible if based on export production to the metropole, to which Toussaint was totally committed. In the face of worker opposition, a number of work codes were instituted that inaugurated new forced-labour regimes, often under the supervision of Whites whose claim to technical expertise constituted their managerial power. Fick comments:
The workers resisted Toussaint’s rural code just as they had resisted that of Polverel [one of the civil commissioners] ... They were legally, physically, and psychologically no longer slaves, and Toussaint’s system, like that of the civil commissioners before him, deprived them of any means by which to give substance and real meaning to their freedom. Freedom rather was thrown at them as an abstraction, for it was always in the name of general emancipation that Toussaint ... regimented their labour, deprived them of land, and deprived them by the constitution of the right to practice voodoo; in short, imposing upon them Western modes of thought and of organization in an attempt to bring an autonomous,