"Le Serment de Vivre Libres et Indépendant": Commemorating Haitian Independence under Jean-Pierre Boyer

Following the death of Henri Christophe, king of northern Haiti, in the fall of 1820, troops from the southern republic marched north and swiftly reunified Haiti under the president Jean-Pierre Boyer. The details of Boyer's military campaigns and the subsequent physical unification of the country are recounted by the famous nineteenth-century Haitian historians Thomas Madiou and Beaubrun Ardouin. Yet, after the battles another variety of unification occurred in annual, official celebrations of Independence Day on January 1st. To commemorate independence, Boyer and his top generals sought to re-enact the original ceremony from 1804 in order to unify the country around a shared identity and past. The highpoint of the celebration was the swearing of the oath to live free and independent from the original 1804 Indepdendence Day speech. Calling on all Haitians to forever renounce France and to fight until their deaths to maintain independence, the oath reminded participants of the struggles of the Revolution and the continued vigiliance needed to maintain the country's new status in the face of possible foreign invasions. However, with French recognition of Haiti in 1825, the fear of international conflict was replaced with the need to rekindle relations with France and other European countries. The agressive, and possibly offensive, wording of the 1804 oath and the official memory of independence had to be ammended to represent Haiti's new internationally recognized sovereignty. This paper will use newspapers and contemporary histories and travelers' accounts to explore the evolution of Independence Day celebrations during these decades of transition under the presidency of Jean-Pierre Boyer. I am interested in how both physical commemoration and reading function as acts of imagining and performing the newly united Haiti and serve to define and redefine national identity and the official memory of independence.