Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - The Slave Revolt That Created A Country

Episode Date: December 29, 2023

Haiti was under French colonial rule in 1791 when the revolution began, resulting in the largest and most successful slave revolt in modern history.It's a compelling story that deserves to be heard, and one with some incredible women at the heart of it.Who were they? How did the island's vodou ceremonies help galvanise the cause? And what is their legacy today?Joining Kate is Marlene Daut, author of Awakening The Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution, to tell us more.This episode was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Don’t miss out on the best offer in history! Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts.Get a subscription for £1 for 3 months with code BETWIXTTHESHEETS1 sign up now for your 14-day free trial https://historyhit/subscription/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Lovely for tricksters, it's me, Kade Lister. I am here, you are here, we're all here. It is time for your fair do's warning. This is an adult podcast book by adults to other adults about adulty things covering a range of adult subjects in an adulty way, and you should be an adult too.

Now that little lot is out the way. I think we can safely continue, because fair do's, we have warned you. On the evening of the 14th of August 1791, on the French colony of Sandamanga, a monumental meeting is taking place. In the woodlands outside Le Cap, as a tropical storm rolls in, some 200 representatives of enslaved Africans from nearby plantations met. They were presided over by prominent slave leader Dutty Boakman and Cecil Fatiman,

a priestess of what would later become known as Vodoo. The ceremony was part religious ritual and part strategic meeting, as the enslaved people planned a revolt against their white enslavers. For context, at its peak, the slave population totaled 500,000, to a white population of 32,000. Dismissed as harmless by the white slavers, the events that took place were a catalyst for revolution. Within days, the whole northern plain of the island was in flames. The French fought back and captured and beheaded Bokeman for his role in the uprising, but it was too late.

What became known as the Haitian Revolution was underway, the largest and most successful slave revolt in modern history. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect confidence of whatever my boss needs by just turning enough and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

Goodness, what beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kay Lister. Before its independence, Haiti was a French colony known as San Dominga. It was a place of tremendous wealth, being the main supplier of the world's sugar, and it was also a place of really vicious cruelty. 50% of the slaves arriving from Africa died there within a year, due to the harsh conditions, brutal treatment and the horrendous diseases.

From this grotesque and unimaginable cruelty, however, grew a resistance. Why was the Haitian Revolution so unique? What central role did women have to play in it? And what was its impact on the rest of the world? Joining me today is Marlene Dot, author of Awakening the Ashes and Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution. I am ready to find out if you are. Oh, and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Marlene Doubt. How are you doing? I'm doing well. Thank you for asking. It's such a

pleasure to be here today. The pleasure is all mine because we are here to talk about a subject that is so fascinating and I confess I don't know much about it. The Haitian revolution. I've done some research and some looking into it knowing I was going to be talking to you and the more I read, the more I was like, oh my God, this is such a wild and amazing, important history. So I'm thrilled that I get to learn more about it with you today. Can I ask you what brought you to this particular history? What made you want to tell this story? Oh, wow, yes.

That's a great question. You know, I grew up in a Haitian American family. My mother's from Port-au-Prince. So I grew up hearing about some of the Haitian revolutionary heroes, but I didn't really know much beyond their names, like Chusain Udhires or Jean-Jacques Desalini, the founder of independent Haiti. And so when I was in college, you know, and starting to read more widely, I had the same reaction that you had. Like, actually, this is, it's not just a founding story of a nation.

This is a nation of people who were formerly enslaved and built this whole society, a free society, while constructing laws the world had never seen before, for example, to permanently eliminate slavery in the slave trade. And that people didn't know, they weren't, people were talking about Great Britain abolishing slavery in 1807 and Haiti had done it in 1807. and Haiti had done it in 1804 that so much was new to me as well. So that inspired me to want to kind of spread the word, I guess, if you will, and dive even more deeply into the parts of the story that really even sometimes, you know, experts don't know about. God, yeah. And for people that are listening, and there will be many people who they don't know this history either,

let's start with a real kind of like page one question, paint a picture of what was happening in Haiti just before the revolution, what was going on, what kicked off? Yeah, I mean, this is so important to understand what happens prior. We're talking about what the Spanish called the island of Espaniola, which is today, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. So Columbus first arrives on this island in 1492 and the Spaniards wage war. They have control over the whole island. In 1697, having really virtually eliminated the indigenous population of the island,

the French take over the western third of the island at the Treaty of Risk. And from that time until the revolution breaks out in 1791, so a little under 100 years, they completely transformed, just as the Spanish had done life on the island, by forcibly transporting 900,000 captive Africans to the tiny part that is the Western third that is today Haiti. This is astonishingly more than the French forcibly transport to any of their other colonies. It is also the coolest slave colony in the world. it has this reputation in its era and the richest, most profitable sugar colony at the same time. So it was called, and people called it afterwards the pearl of the Antilles, which is not a compliment. It's rich because of all this cruelty. But you can imagine that there's only so much people can take.

For example, a captive African directly transported from Africa to the island would only live about two or three years. That was the life expectancy because there was so much whipping and, cutting off of body parts, and executing for perceived crimes, which were things like running away or not working, right? That's the things the colonists were calling crimes. And for a captive African born on the island, so a sort of born into slavery, they wouldn't live above 15 or 16 years.

So that was why that accounts for the large number of forcible transportations continuing from Africa to replenish this population. So just to give you an idea, if you think about the 900,000 transferred there, plus the ones who are born on the island, which we don't have really any correct statistics for. At the time the revolution breaks out in 1791, there's only about 460,000 to 470,000 captive Africans on the island. But they do outnumber the white colonists who are about 25 to 30,000, another 25 to 30,000 free people of color, many of whom were also enslavers because they were the results of marriages between captive African women and white men.

and sometimes they freed those women and the children. And this cruelty is what begins the process that we are going to start calling the Haitian revolution from 1791 to 1803. Why did Haiti have this particular reputation for cruelty? Is there a reason why, I mean, it was all awful. But it's this, like a 50% mortality rate? That's wild. And I should point out that in the era it had this.

So it wasn't like historical. historians went back and looked at the evidence and said, oh, my goodness, this was extraordinary cruelty. There was a white French naturalist who was sent to the colony in the 1770s to do a study of the island. And he produced a report that he published back home when he was in Paris, in which he described the cruelty. We know about those life expectancy rates from his work commissioned by the French king. But after it was in circulation for about a year, the king freaked out, the kingdom freaked out and pulled it from circulation, find him, put him in jail, threatened his life for a report that they commissioned to the question of why was it so cool? I honestly, you know, I teach

this material to students and they can't believe what they're reading because the testimonies sometimes are coming from the colonists themselves. I always say walking into a French archive is like walking into a crime scene because they have cataloged because they're selling plantations. they say so-and-so who has their foot cut off, so-and-so who has this many whips of scars. When enslaved people would run away, it behooved the enslaver, which they called planters, to provide as much information to the newspapers as possible for the fugitive slave notice to describe them, slash marks all over their face, signs of, you know, a saber cut on their stomach. And so they tell on themselves, the question, again, as to why they do it,

It's honestly inexplicable to me. It's human torture and cruelty, but taken to a degree that I sometimes think is beyond what we see in the other, quote unquote, slave societies of the Americas, the plantation societies. At the time, it was recognized. This is particularly horrendous. I think I know the answer to this question, but was there ever any kind of comeuppance or justice for the people that were being hurt like this? or was this just there was zero rights for anyone at all that you could cut the foot off someone that you had enslaved and that there would be no consequences at all? Oh, this is a great question.

So yes, Louis XIV had instituted what became later known as the Code Noir. And this was supposed to regulate these laws, how planters, enslavers and slaves would sort of relate to one another. But most of it was about what the inslavers could do to punish the enslaved, for example, for running away or for refusing to work. And it also regulated, you know, oh, a white man can marry a captive African woman and then he can free her if he converts her to Catholicism, et cetera, right? So you had all of this, yes, it's setting up this very repressive society, but that masquerades as like a law about liberation. But because most of the laws were about what the enslavers could do to be enslaved, which was almost anything, and the enslaved were not allowed to testify on their own behalf. Their testimony was inadmissible, so they couldn't say, well, no, I was trying, excuse me, not to be raped, that's why I hit my master, because those kinds of situations did frequently occur. They couldn't say that, so it looks like here's a person who

hits this other person who the law says that owns them. But later, this is what is really interesting. The French, because of this reputation of cruelty, try to put in some reforms. But the colonists resist these reforms to such an extent that they become watered down. So, for example, if you killed a person you were enslaving, you could be subject to losing all your plantations, deportation to France, and going on trial there and possibly executed. It never happened, according to legal historians, not even once, because the laws, the initial draft, got so watered down by the colonists really saying, we control your destiny back in France because we're making you all of this money, which of course was the money the enslaved Africans were making for them.

And so we're not going to accept these penalties. And when the revolution breaks out in 1791, it's the white colonists who are the ones saying that they might want to try to get independence like the American revolutionaries from Great Britain because they don't want any reforms. And they kind of see the writing on the wall that if the enslaved are rebelling, how is France going to respond? Are they going to respond by giving liberty? And so maybe we should try to get independence before that happens. Wow. So we have got a Tinderbox here really. We have got a situation where there is immense cruelty being meted out. There is no rights for any of these enslaved people who are being treated horrendously. But they outnumber their enslavers two to one more than? More. Yeah. Wow. Is this linked to the French Revolution? So if it kicks off in 1791, that's barely a few years after the French Revolution. You know, that detractors of the Haitian revolution, that's exactly what they said, because, you know, just the way that sometimes the French Revolution is taught as like, oh, liberty, equality, fraternity makes people forget that there were various factions. This was not an accepted rhetoric overthrowing your kingdom and killing the king and then killing the queen. And all of this is an instituting what republicanism now seems sort of like inevitable. Oh, we'll share rights with the people. But in the era, it wasn't. And so people definitely said, oh, all your beautiful ideas of liberty and quality,

look what happened when they came over and were kind of realized in the colony. But interestingly, what actually happens is that after the French passed the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man, the revolutionaries pass this, they say they want to have equal rights and they want to have a say. They don't want any more nobility and people saying they're superior to others. But one of the clauses says that people have the freedom to resist oppression. So that class of free men of color, free people of color, but really it's the men who are in Paris at the time, they say, oh, is that so? Well, we would like equal rights with the white colonists.

Because can you imagine, if you imagine this cruelty of this society, the only reason they're free people of color is because many of them are children of white men. But they deprive their own children. if they don't enslave them outright, which also happened, they deprive them in the equal rights under the new revolutionary laws that said that there should be representation, voting representation across all classes of people. And the white colonists are so afraid that if they allow the free people of color to have equal rights, then it's only a matter of time that the enslaved would want equal rights. But that is sort of a revolution within a revolution, what the free men of color are doing, who are absolutely inspired by the French Revolution. The enslaved for their part,

If they know about it at all, it doesn't mean nearly as much to them because they live in a world in which there's a set of laws for one group of people and not for another group of people. So they wouldn't take necessarily inspiration from liberty and equality from those words because they know that they weren't meant for them. And so it's really the cruelty they experience and their own organizing that leads them down the path of revolution. Because I suppose I remember once an activist friend said something that's always stayed with me. She said that activism is ultimately a quite a privileged position. The people that get to do it are the people that have the time and the freedom.

She was somebody that still works with sex workers, marginalised groups. The people who are out there right now selling sex on the streets, they don't give a shit about the laws and what's going on. They're just trying to make ends meet and just get out there. And I sort of got a sense when you were saying that it was kind of like that, of like the people actually in Haiti who are under this horrendous system, would they have even been aware of liberty, equality, and fraternity and the rights of man and all of this political goings on in France? Right, because, you know, as I mentioned, even if they're overhearing these conversations, they're very aware that none of those ideas are meant for them, which is why the Haitian revolution doesn't end up following any path of the French Revolution at all.

We don't get something like the Declaration of the Rights of Man. We get people in open rebellion initially setting fire to the plantation and to the workhouses, to the means of work. So they stop the means of production. And in fact, again, you know, I mentioned that walking into the crime scene and going into the archives, and one of the remarkable things to me is that in planter narratives from the early days of the revolution in August 1791, they talk so much about how many people enslaved black people they killed in response to the fires. They would mention one or two white people dying, but they would brag and say, I killed two to 300 of them today. I think I killed 400. I can't even count. And when we look at the numbers at the

end of the day, even though the Haitian revolution is often painted as a time when it was justified for black people to kill white people, it's actually the opposite of it. occurs that white people kill black people en masse in response to the revolution, which is only occurring in the first place because of the cruelty of the white French colonists towards the people they were enslaving. So everything sort of gets inverted in the media narratives, which were really strongly about all the plantations are on fire. They would show images and frontispiece of white women and children running away from these very stereotypical images of black men chasing them. And then that became, for hundreds of years, the dominant narrative of the Haitian revolution.

Was there a moment that sparked the revolution? Was there a storming of the Bastille type of a moment? There is, and I love that it's exactly the opposite of what happens in France, because it, again, goes to show that this revolution is really being set on its own terms. So in the middle of the month of August, August 14th, in Mon Rouge, which is a place in the northern part of San Domain, today, Haiti, the mountains, a clandestine gathering of enslaved representatives. So each plantation, they had been meeting already, talking to each other because as I mentioned, they had been organizing. There were maroon communities. Of course, maroons are the ones who are fugitive and run away and live elsewhere. Don't come back and never are forced to work again

unless they're recaptured. And they're meeting and they're trying to decide who's going to lead the rebellion and the revolution and who's going to push it forward. And they have a series of ceremonies that people like today to liken to Vodou ceremonies. But they're really kind of earlier iterations of what comes to be called Vodoo. There's two of them. One, the more Huge Assembly and then the more famous one is the ceremony at Bois-Kaim-Mah, in which a woman named Sassi-Sil-Fatima, an African priestess,

a Vodoo priestess leads the ceremony. and they say, you know, the God of the white man wants us to commit crimes, but our God calls us to commit good works and wants our freedom. So let's go and take it for ourselves. We outnumber them and that we have to want it. And within a week, again, they're setting fire to the plantations to the workhouses. Contrary to popular belief, the white colonists said they want to kill every white person. That really wasn't it.

And in their negotiations with the colonists, they consistently said we want slavery to end. and we want to have equal rights. So then they did start to use some of the language of the free men of color in their debates, but they consistently pushed that forward. And the white colonists responded like when you're talking to someone and what you're asking for, they're responding to something you didn't say. So they're consistently responding as if the enslaved population wants to kill all the colonists. And the enslaved are saying, we don't want to be forced to work.

We don't want to be whipped. We don't want to be sold. We want to have equal rights. And the colonists are saying, we will not. entertain any conversation with brigands who are out to kill white people. Like, that's their consistent response to the leadership of the revolution. This sounds like it was very organized, or at least a lot more organized than I assumed that this would have been. I had had the assumption that this would have been like independent sporadic attacks on various plantations.

But if they were meeting together and they'd representation, it sounds almost like they were unionized and they were negotiating with the plantation holders, that's very organized. Yes, and as the revolution wears on, it travels. And so, like, if you were looking at a map, you could start to see it traveling across the north until eventually becomes general rebellion. But in those earlier days, so before the close of 1791, so throughout kind of the fall months, the colonists are organizing to try to figure out how they're going to stop it. Because they have colonial militias, but they don't have the big French army there yet. They're waiting for France to send their troops to come and help. But in the meantime, they're trying to figure out what to do.

And so when the leadership sends them letters for negotiation, they're the ones who reach out to the white colonial assemblies, the colonial officials. And the enslaved leaders at first say they ask for periods of amnesty for the negotiation to continue, like stop killing us, we won't set any more fires. And the colonists are, no, absolutely not. And the colonists make only one concession to them.

Oh, we'll make sure that you don't have. have to go back to slavery, you leaders, but we're not going to give any freedom to the people which are thousands at this point, if not tens of thousands at this point. And the fascinating things, the leadership responds by saying, even if we wanted to accept this deal, we couldn't make them go back to work if we tried. They know what the power that they have now. And if you want us to help stop this rebellion, you have to give us something more. You know what the more is? It reminds me of, you know, these are not experienced organizers, right? Even though they're organizing, they're not experienced at this. They tried to make some concessions that make me sad today to think

they thought that might be all they could get. They said, we want regular working hours and we don't want whipping anymore. Like, can you at least do that? And the columnist said no. Can you imagine? I'll be back with Marlene after this short break. Arrogance. I'm trying to get my head around it. You are a colonist, an enslaver, who has treated these people appallingly. You're massively outnumbered. If they suddenly charge you, it's all over.

And all they're asking for is for you and not whip them. And you still go, no, I can't get my head around that at all. And then they respond also using, there's no other word for genocidal language. They just say, you don't have to agree to this. will just kill you all and repopulate the colony with new captives from Africa, with new slaves. And this is the line from 1791 all the way up until November 1803, which is when the fighting sort of officially ends about a month and a half before Haitian independence is officially declared. And that's the French line is any time the enslaved and then the formerly enslaved,

because really they freed themselves by this point, try to even establish any lines of communication. The French colonists and then later the French officials respond by just saying they use the word in the era. They don't use genocide. They use the word exterminate. We'll exterminate you all. So when the revolution has got going, what does it look like?

In France, they were guillotining people. In Haiti, what were they doing? What were these acts of rebellion? So the principal thing at first is setting fires to the plant. And I don't want to suggest that none of the enslavers or planters or their families died. They absolutely did. But one of the things the white French columnists do is leave. So you get all these ships. And so to Cuba, Jamaica, the United States in large parts, some back to France. And they're kind of waiting. The one thing they cannot do is go to England, which is at war with

France various times, because then they'll be labeled an emigre and they'll lose all their property. So they have to be very careful about where they flee to. And so in that moment when a lot of the white colonists have fled and French army officers have come to the island. Some other complications happen. Spain and Great Britain go to war with France. France has executed their king. And so by 1793, kind of everything is in turmoil. So it's a revolution that doesn't look like it has necessarily a coherence because there's enslaved rebellion that's constant during this time period, fire in Port-au-Prince. There's going to eventually be a fire in Cap Franca, which is to today, Cathayisian in the north. But there's also the French are fighting in a war with Spain

and Great Britain on the island. So you have a lot of things happening at the same time. And some of the free people of color say, you know what, I'm going to fight with England. And some of the enslaved population, including two Zandlu-Yarchs, say, I'm going to fight with Spain. They're kind of jockeying to see which of these world powers, first of all, will gain control of this part of the island. Spain is still in possession of the eastern two-thirds. That's today the Dominican Republic, but, oh, maybe they'll give us freedom. And so with the Spanish in particular, Tucson, New Yorkshire and some of the other leaders who joined the Spanish side say, well, let's see if we can get the Spanish king to give us freedom. And this causes a remarkable thing to happen.

It is a world historical remarkable thing that in August of 1793, the French commissioners now sent by the Republican government, the Jacobins, the French king is no more. They declare the end of slavery on the island. Wow. It's followed up in September and October by further decrees because the commissioners were only in charge of certain parts of the island. And then the National Convention, which is the French legislative body, in February 1794, declare slavery eliminated across all the French overseas empire. So they've lost Maxinique. Mactinique is in England's hands. So slavery is still going on there. But Guadalupe and other French territories that were not seated to England. And this could have been, if it weren't for Napoleon, this could have been a really huge turning point

in the history of the world. Instead of France becoming the first nation to permanently abolish slavery, France became when Napoleon came to power, the only nation to reinstate slavery after having previously abolished it. Shit. Oh, so close. And yet so far, had they won the revolution at that point on Haiti when they said, right, we've abolished slavery. Because I suppose they would have to have recognized themselves as a sovereign state. When did that happen? So they're not a sovereign state. They remain a French colony.

So they remain a French colony. All Guadalupe, all of these territories that France have, remain French colonies just with no slavery. So what do the French do, though? They try to make a system that kind of looks like slavery. but is not slavery. So you don't sell people. You can't call them slaves anymore. They're cultivators and cultivators, farmers.

This is the language that they're using. They will also say free hands. But they can't really leave the plantations. Whipping is outlawed. They did outlaw whipping. That was a major point of contention. But under some of the black leadership, like to San DuVirteur, who eventually becomes a general,

because he helps, he switches back to the French side, he switches over and helps France defeat Spain. So he's rewarded for this with promotions. Other black generals are rewarded for this. So now we have this very interesting situation where the French army has black generals in it fighting on France's behalf and forced to recognize they're taking these oaths

that they love the French Republic that has given us freedom and equality and all of these things. So did they win at that point? It kind of seems like it, except that only some people won. The people who are working on the plantations, they won some things,

but they didn't win complete and total liberty, but they still want it. And tons of concessions have to constantly be made to them in this kind of late 1790s period to prevent them from stopping work because they're not slaves now. So what are you going to go do? If you engage in violence against them,

that could spark another, you know, rebellion. I think one of the things that really blew my mind about this particular revolution in history is just how front and center women were in it. Like really that driving this revolution forward. And I suspect they have been in almost every revolution. But let's talk about some of the women that were leading this revolution. And you're going to have to forgive me for absolutely butchering the French language in my northern accent. Suzanne Blerier, yes. She sounds like a fairly incredible woman. Yes. So Suzanne Belair, this is actually a perfect segue, also called Sanita Beler,

was the wife of a general named Sean Beler, a black general. So alongside the promotions of many of the formally enslaved people or former free people of color who became generals, some of them had their wives with them. So Sanit Beler is known for fighting in armed combat. And in fact, when the French execute her and her husband, all the reports were that she was so stoic and, you know, she wasn't kind of doing stereotypical things like shrieking or something like that, that women were participating in combat like men, sometimes alongside their husbands. Another woman, Marie Jean La Martineer, her husband was also a black general in the French army, and she fought alongside him, sometimes wearing men's clothing as well and becoming she was known as a lieutenant. It wasn't her official grade.

But these were women whose participation was known in the era. And I always say it's kind of astonishing that more is not written about them. The men kind of take center stage, their husbands, and their wives who participated, or other women who weren't attached to the famous revolutionary men also don't get talked about a lot. What were Suzanne Bel Air and her husband executed for? Was it being in the revolution where they made examples of? Yes. So after Napoleon Bonaparte comes to power, he very quickly starts meditating on ways to bring back slavery.

He's extremely racist and says things like, I can't conceive how we could have given, you know, barbaric people, liberty. And I'd rather go live in England because they wouldn't have done something so absurd or something like that. It's just got crazy ideas. So he sent his brother-in-law, Charles LeClaire, to the island. Charles LeClaire's marriage and Napoleon's sister, Pauline Bonaparte, and they go with a massive expedition that has an exterminatory aim. to get rid of everyone in the colony and just kind of start over again if they have to. He says things Leclair does like

just kill anybody over the age of 12 who's ever worn an epaulette. You know, it's just massively disgusting. And so Charles Bel-Air is actually the nephew of Toussaint-Dircher. And this is a tricky period because the revolutionaries at this point can see that they're outnumbered because we're not in the days of the slave rebellion.

They also, because they are furthering this system, where it's not slavery, but it's not complete and total freedom. And they're black generals, so they're in charge of kind of overseeing it and enforcing it. So they're not super popular with the formerly enslaved population. And so when the French come, they have to decide, do we continue to fight you, which is what they do initially. Marie-Jean-Labertinier is famous for the battle at Cretta Piero for defeating the French there at this battle. But as time wears on, some of the generals start to break down.

And Henri Christoph is one of them. and he joins the French. He becomes later the King of Haiti, the first to last King of Haiti. And the Belaires also, after Toussaint-Muilin, Verture, surrenders to the French. He says, I'm not going to fight you anymore. I'm going to go home to my plantations.

I'm old now. I'm going to be with my wife, Suzanne Leverture, and my children, and I'm going to just retire there. The French do something drastic. Samarly arrest him. They trick him into a meeting, summarily arrest him, deport him to France, where he dies. They separate him from his wife.

They also arrest and deport him. and he dies a horrible death due to French neglect in a prison called the Ful de Ju in April 1803. But in between that time of his arrest and his death, almost a year later, the ones like Charles Bel Air, who had joined with the French, start to see, oh, if they can do this to Tussain and Verture, if they can betray him, what will they do to us? But the immediate cause of their execution, Sainit Beler and Charles Beler, is that they refuse to disarm the cultivators. They are accused of leading kind of a rebellion within a rebellion, that even though he's a French general,

the husband, that they are not doing the government's bidding, that they're not actually loyal to the French Republic. And so they are given this kind of ridiculous trial in which it's already determined that they're going to be executed. This is just for show. And then that's what they do. They have them executed. So this is Napoleon flexing then really, isn't it? That's what's going on here. And some of these women had to witness truly awful things going on, not just what was going on before the revolution, but afterwards, was Marie-Louise Cavadi, who had to witness her son being executed in front of that? Yes, but Marne Luis Guadavid is the wife of Henri Christop, who was one of the early generals who kind of defects. And she had never been enslaved. She was actually born into a free black family.

And they get married, Christoph and Marie-Louis, after the French abolish slavery. in 1794, and then they have four children. But one of her children is executed later in front of her, but that's in independent Haiti after her husband commits suicide. So, only Christoph, in that period of devotion to France, he decides to send his son to France for an education. Toussaint-Livertura had done it, a bunch of the other black generals had done it.

And it was a way of showing the French that they were loyal to them. And after Haitian independence was declared on January 1, 1804, the French government said this school is closed, this school where the black children and other children of color were going. The school's closed and they essentially put her son, Malini Louisa's son, into an orphanage. And they deprive of any financial assistance. His father had sent money for his education.

And the French letters, they're heartbreaking. They say, you know, his father wanted him to get an education, but he's black so he's not suited for an education. And this is kind of a sorrow that follows Marie Louise around. and in independent Haiti after her husband becomes king, she's always doing kind of good works for the people and always looking after the people and making sure that her husband is not treating them too harshly

because she just always felt this sorrow and loss of this cruelty thinking about her nine-year-old son. That's how old he was when she last saw him. And it was just a heartbreaking scenario. So they were the king and queen? Yeah. that's see what I mean

like it just continually blows my tiny tiny brain all apart I really want to talk to you about the practice of voodoo or voodoo is sometimes known because a lot of the mythology around the Haitian revolution is that it was voodoo and that it was

I've got a feeling this might have been white spin after the fact but it was devilish and it was awful but Vodoo did play a part in the Haitian revolution and still today is an important part of Haiti. Can you talk a little bit about what that practice was and what that had to do with the uprising? So Vodu is kind of considered a syncretic religion because it marries West African religious practices and kind of lois, the Haitians call them the spirits, with Roman Catholicism. And sometimes in one-to-one correlations and sometimes

in sort of a more masked way to just kind of mask what they were doing, what the practitioners, of Vodou were doing in the era. But at that Bocah Kaimon Céin de Montu Assembly, in this era, a woman named Ceci Fatima, who I mentioned, is kind of considered this Vodu priestess, and she leads one of these ceremonies. And basically, you can see the real differences with Vodu kind of conceptions of life. And for example, Roman Catholicism, as it was practiced by the French, because when the French execute people who are rebels, they put in this language that says, you know, we're going to to put you on the wheel, which is like they tie you to these boards and whip you and beat you and do horrible things to you and then leave you there to die. And the language that they used was

as long as it pleases God to keep you alive. And so the revolutionaries are saying, our God doesn't want us to suffer. It doesn't please our God to leave someone alive so that they can be tortured and experienced cruelty more. But we do have to, in order to fulfill this gods, the voodoo God's wishes is to strike for our own freedom. We can't be patient. We can't wait for somebody to give it to us. And this conception kind of carries on into later sort of ways of being, I would say, in Haiti. For example, nobody has ever been forcibly converted to Vodou. It is not a religion that relies on. Has any history of forced conversion, any language to that. It is a voluntary acceptance of this religion and that doesn't exclude any other. So today in Haiti, many

many people are vo-do practitioners, as well as they would say, I'm a devout Catholic as well. And so it's really just a different way of being in the world, of accepting differences in one another that starts before the revolutionary era when the future Haitians are bringing spiritual forms from Africa with them that are just going to evaporate in a day, and they're forced to convert to Roman Catholicism and they marry the two together in various ways. This is a huge question. Maybe it's not one that has a neat answer, but what do you think the legacy of the Haitian uprisings have been at the global stage?

I wish that the legacies were more recognized. I think that in 1804 and then the first Haitian constitution is in 1805, slavery is abolished forever, the slave trade is abolished, and yet when we hear about these histories, we often hear about the United States, which doesn't abolish slavery until all. 1865. So it is astonishing to me that people, you know, associated in their minds' emancipation with the United States. Like Great Britain does it before them. France re-abolishes slavery in 1848. And then sometimes I hear about, oh, Great Britain's abolition of a slave trade in 1807 and the United States in 1808. But Haiti is often left out of this story. But really, if you look at the

debates that were happening in Great Britain at that time, like on the floor, William Pitt and other tour and William Wilberforce were pushing forward the spill, they rest. what happened in Haiti. It has a direct bearing and relationship to that abolition of the slave trade that we don't know how fast and quickly or ever if we could have gotten there without Haiti because the Haitian example puts pressure on every nation in the world because Napoleon is considered a formidable enemy. So it was one thing when the revolutionary government said, okay, to quell this rebellion, we're going to have to make this official and we're going to extend it across the empire. But for Napoleon to bring it back while he's at war with half the world

and for the Haitian revolutionaries to then defeat him really shows that organized slave rebellion could succeed anywhere. And then we see that in Jamaica with what's called the Baptist rebellion later in the 1830s. We see that across South America and Central America. We see that when Mexico's forced to abolish slavery, when Simon Bolivar and what becomes known as Grand Colombia that marries five South American states together, that Haitian example changes the world because it's no longer possible to say, as the Americans did when they're sort of crafting the Constitution and the day, we can't do it. What would the Southerners that you can? And it will make some people very upset, but that is the price to pay. Because eventually, as we see with

the civil war as well in the United States, eventually people who are enslaved will rise up, one way or another. And am I right in thinking that Haiti is the only nation founded by a slave rebellion? Yes, yes. That's amazing, isn't it? So my final and last question, although I could actually just keep you here for like a week

and going over this because it's so fascinating. Throughout all of this history and everything that you've looked at is there's so many individual stories of heroism and these characters appearing out of nowhere and rising to quite incredible heights doing incredible things. Do you have a favorite historical figure from the Haitian Revolution? That sounds a little bit reductive, but like, do you have somebody that you feel like particularly drawn to their story and that really means something to you?

You know, I would say an unlikely answer that Haitian market women as a collective body played a role that they haven't gotten enough credit for the role that they played. they would encounter the French troops and they would say to them, which way did the, you know, black rebels, the brigands go, the French would ask them. And they would tell them they went a different way than they completely went. They would steal food from the French soldiers camps and take it over to the revolutionary camps. They furnished in just in general through their practice as kind of protected people in a way because they're market women and not seen as engaged in rebellion, that they could do all of these things that other people wouldn't be,

they would be suspect if they were found out on a path late at night. And I find it remarkable also the way that many of them were healers. One scholars called the medical revolutionaries and would tend to the wounds of the revolutionaries so that they could get back out there and keep going. Because I think so many times when we're looking for women in the revolution, we want them to have picked up a gun and they want them on the battlefield. But so many of the things, that they did were caring for others and also just using their ingenuity to say, to have that ingenuity and that foresight to say, oh, you want me to tell you which way they want. And because the stories that we get about this are so interesting. The French shoulders are like flirting with them

to try to get them to tell them where they're going. And they think it's worked. Like, oh, and then they, I charmed her and she sent me in the direction of the revolutionaries, which is the wrong direction. Oh, that's amazing. Marlene, you have been absolutely amazing. Do you know that I get some notes before each show. And at the top of my notes, it says here, Marlene brackets, who is incredible, end brackets, and you have absolutely been incredible. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? They can go to my website, which is just my name, marlina doubt.com. I've also recently published a book called Awakening the Ashes and Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution. And if people want to learn more about the ideas, the really novel ideas that the Haitian revolutionaries and founders of Haiti pushed forward to create,

which what was really the first state to permanently end slavery and that was founded by formerly enslaved people. Thank you so much for talking to me today. You have been extraordinary. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thank you for listening. And thank you so much. much to Marlene for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like review and follow along, whatever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject, if you have any ideas rattling around in your head, or maybe you just wanted to say hi, then you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. We've got episodes

on everything from historical body parts to a history of swearing all coming your way. This podcast was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte long. Join me again betwixt the sheets, the history of sex scandal and society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.