Beyond the Black Jacobins: Reconsidering 19th-Century Haitian Historians

The nineteenth century Haitian historian Beaubrun Ardouin once wrote that he had undertaken the enormous project of writing Haiti’s history because “[t]he future of a people often depends upon the manner in which their past is presented to them. If they bear a false judgement about the facts of their annals,” he said, “about the principles that have guided their predecessors, their politicians, they will suffer in spite of themselves, the influence of this error, and they will be vulnerable to deviating from the route that they must follow in order to arrive at their prosperity.” While Ardouin penned these words more than 50 years after the declaration of Haitian independence, the sovereign state of Haiti did not have to wait until the middle of the century to proliferate with historical writers who sought to document their country’s history precisely in order to avoid such distortion. In the first two decades of Haitian sovereignty alone, the country saw the publication of several important historical works by Louis-Félix Boisrond-Tonnerre, Juste Chanlatte, and Baron de Vastey. These early historians were followed in the mid-nineteenth century by Emile Nau, Joseph Saint-Rémy, and Thomas Madiou, in addition to Ardouin. Despite the fact that nineteenth-century Haiti teemed with prolific historians, whose works rival that of European writers such as Jules Michelet, the names of these Haitian authors, let alone the titles of their works, are hardly known to non-specialists today. This is unfortunate since nineteenth-century Haitian historians were arguably the first to describe how not only national, but racial points of view could shape and potentially distort a historian’s argument. This paper, thus, invites a reconsideration of the place of 19^th-century Haitian historians not only within the historiography of Haiti, but within the kinds of theoretical debates about writing history that have animated today’s scholars.