Freedom, Subjection, and Monarchical Sovereignty in (Post)Revolutionary Haiti

This paper examines the context of slavery in late eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue as generative of a particular kind of revolutionary politics and a particular model of postrevolutionary sovereignty that cannot necessarily be assimilated to the paradigm of the French and American Revolutions. Recent scholars have characterized the Haitian Revolution as the most radical movement of the age of Revolution, owing to its far more extensive realization of the natural right to freedom than occurred in the American or French metropolitan revolutions.  Yet few scholars have fully come to terms with the authoritarian turn after the expulsion of the French, particularly in the north of Haiti. This authoritarianism, already present in the earliest articulation of revolutionary emancipationism by figures such as Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and constitutive of the 1801 and 1805 constitutions, culminated in the establishment of a hereditary monarchy and an accompanying neo-feudal social order in the regime of Henry Christophe, between 1811 and 1820. This new regime was a vehicle for re-instituting a repressive labor regime that echoed the law of colonial slavery itself. Whereas scholars typically attribute the appearance of monarchy in postrevolutionary Haiti to circumstancial explanations, postcolonial anxiety, or cultural factors, my inquiry seeks both to historicize the evolution of a monarchical form of postcolonial, post-abolitionist Haitian sovereignty in the context of the Age of Revolutions, and to ask just what about a radical antislavery revolution in Saint-Domingue may have accounted for this trend. This project requires critically interrogating what liberty meant in the context of revolutionary emancipationism, how it was converted into the basis of a political community, what relation popular revolutionary insurgency bears to counter-revolution, and how what we might call the Haitian social contract diverges radically from that of the other two major contemporary revolutions with which the Revolution is often compared.