In Our Time - The Haitian Revolution

Episode Date: October 23, 2014

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Haitian Revolution. In 1791 an uprising began in the French colonial territory of St Domingue. Partly a consequence of the French Revolution and partly a backlash against the brutality of slave owners, it turned into a complex struggle involving not just the residents of the island but French, English and Spanish forces. By 1804 the former slaves had won, establishing the first independent state in Latin America and the first nation to be created as a result of a successful slave rebellion. But the revolution also created one of the world's most impoverished societies, a legacy which Haiti has struggled to escape.ContributorsKate Hodgson, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in French at the University of LiverpoolTim Lockley, Reader in American Studies at the University of WarwickKaren Salt, Fellow in History in the School of Language and Literature at the University of AberdeenProducer: Luke Mulhall.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in the late 18th century, the French colony of Sandamang in the Caribbean, was among the richest countries in the world, supplying Europe and America's insatiable appetite for sugar. But its wealth came at a high price. It was a plantation economy and run one of the most brutal slave regimes in the world. By 1804, the slaves had risen up, thrown out the French and established the first independent nation in Latin America under the name Haiti.

The Haitian Revolution was the only successful slave revolt in history, an inspiration for generations of people living under forced slavery in the new world, and a test case for enlightenment ideas about liberty, equality and the defeat of tyranny. But it was also an extraordinary brutal conflict that saw the Caribbean island drawn into a a global war between Napoleonic France and our enemies, Britain and Spain. With me to discuss the Haitian Revolution are Tim Lockley, reader in American Studies at the University of Warwick, Karen Salt, fellow in English in the School of Languages and Literature

at the University of Aberdeen, and Kate Hodgson, post-doctoral research fellow in French at the University of Liverpool. Tim Lockley, can you give us a sketch of the Caribbean in the late 18th century about the time when we come into play towards the very end of the 18th century? Yes, the Caribbean had for the previous sort of 150 years been developed by European powers into a plantation, so as a plantation economy is based on the island starting in Barbados and then moving into Jamaica and then into Sandamang. Those are the most sort of important islands.

And their plantation economies were organised around the production of sugar. That was an incredibly profitable crop for the European planters who were growing it and shipping it to Europe. People were developing a sweet tooth and you can make a lot of money from sugar. However, sugar was also really labour-intensive and required lots of people to work on it. And Europeans found that labour force initially in white-intentioned servants, but then very quickly replaced by black enslaved labourers imported from West Africa. And over the course of the 17th and 18th century, they imported four, maybe five million Africans,

about 40 to 50% of all those transported across the Atlantic in the slave trade. Those Africans... Went to the Caribbean. Four to five million. just went to the Caribbean. And by far the most dominant islands were Jamaica and Sandamang, which is the western part of Hispaniola. And those two islands on their own,

those two colonies on their own, perhaps absorbed maybe two million of that four million. When they got there, those Africans, they were put to work planting, nurturing, and then harvesting sugar, and then processing it, because sugar was a product that couldn't just be harvested and then shipped, it had to be processed on site.

That in itself was skilled and dangerous work. The labour regimes were incredibly harsh and brutal, people working 12, 15 hour days. They were poorly fed, so they were malnourished. They were poorly housed, so they were suffering from various ailments, suffering to do with exposure. And because of the high death rates, then planters had to continually import slaves in order to keep the populations up. What was the, can you give us some idea of the stratification of society in San Francisco?

D'Amang at that time. We're talking about the 1780s. Yeah, Sanda Mang splits really into three groups. There's a very small white elite who own plantations and run the colony. Within the whites, there are those who own obviously very large plantations. Very small, meaning 5%. Yeah, 5% of the population. Then there's a similar-sized population of free blacks, people who were most likely the product of interracial relationships with whites in the previous

100 years. over the course of the 1750s to 1780s their civil rights are being eroded so their position in society is going down and then about 90% of the population of Sandamang is black and enslaved and most of them are relatively recently imported from Africa and so they're imported as adult slaves and some of them have known freedom in Africa yes most of them have just to develop a little bit what you said in our opening remarks and it was a particularly vicious slave holding that they had

that we're talking about amputations and castration and killings and burning even of the slaves. Absolutely. It was on fear and violence. Yeah, and that's how they control this large mass of enslaved people. They did it by sort of terror tactics. And those terror tactics have to be public and they have to be incredibly brutal in order to cow the other slaves into submission. And so minor infractions are punished harshly.

More severe resistance is punished by execution. But the execution is not just hanging or straightforward, simple and quick. It has to be long, drawn out, torturous, it has to involve burning at the stake, breaking on the wheel, those kind of public executions that would take a long time and send a very clear message of terror

that any kind of resistance to white authority would not be tolerated. Kate Hurd-Mang Cate Hotson, sorry, Sanduson was a colony of France. What was the relationship between the two of France and Sander-Mang? Well, Sand-Domang had only been a colony of France for less than a century at the time of the French Revolution and it became a colony of France officially in 1697.

But it became extremely important to France. To the extent in the 1760s, France chose to keep its Caribbean colonies and get rid of French Canada. It chose the Caribbean over French Canada. So it was very important to France. And the relationship was key there. The relationship was based, economically speaking, was based on a system called the Exclusive, which was a trade monopoly.

The colony could only trade with France, only sell and only buy from France. And they found that obviously very restrictive. in that relationship. But at the same time, it put the Grand Blanc, the great whites, the 5%, in a position of great power

inside the island. Yeah, absolutely, because they have the economic control and the relationship with France. And France is not only economically very powerful, it's also culturally very powerful within the colony. There's a great sense of emulation of France and the Grand Blanc trying to be as French as they possibly can,

trying to send their children to be educated in France, trying to import the latest fashion, the latest news, the latest, everything coming from France. Of course, this relationship is also making the French bourgeois class in Nantes, in Bordeaux. It's making them extremely rich. And this is the merchant class, which then leads the way into the French Revolution, leads the way in terms of... Wasn't the chief city in Sandermang, the richest city in the new world, richer than Philadelphia at that time? It was certainly bigger than Philadelphia, and it was the richest colony in the new world.

It was known as the pearl of the... Sandemang was known as the pearl of the Anceles. Can we go into the French Revolution, sort of, let's say, 1789 and 1972. Now, do these, how do these ideas, do they, and how do they spread from Paris to Saint-Dermain? They do, and they spread through ships arriving in the ports. And they spread in the colony throughout the sections,

which Tim's just described, throughout the sections in the colony, they spread. So in the white population, They see this, that the ideas of the French Revolution is really a chance to try an emmy, like what happened in North America a decade earlier and try to rid themselves of this exclusive system. So the Gromblon, the whites thought great, we can free ourselves like the Americans did and make even more money. Yeah, absolutely. And some of the smaller white people and some of the less rich white people in the colony also saw it as a chance,

you know, also saw the idea of liberty, equality, fraternity as a chance to improve their standing with regard to the, the white people. So you have these two sections within the white population starting to fight each other, starting to becoming conflict with each other. In the mixed race population, who were, had their civil rights eroded during this period, they saw it as a chance to improve their civil rights to become enfranchised. And then...

The 90% of the rest of the population saw it. The 90% of the rest of the population. I mean, that period 1789 to 91 was in terms of legislation all about the debate of should mixed-race people get rights, and if so, what form should these rights take? And that's what's happening in the National Assembly in France. Meanwhile, of course, the slaves are listening,

they are watching, they are hearing this talk of liberty, and they are interpreting it in their own way and with their own cultural framework. So they're starting to understand, they're starting to organise, and they're starting to think about liberty in their own terms, what they want liberty to be. So political rights,

the 5% whites want, want to get away because they can control the island by themselves. They don't have to trade with France. The others who are half, half, half, see it as a chance to get more political rights because they've been remoted. And the 90% see a different thing. They just see straightforward freedom to stop being slaves. Yeah, that's right.

And this is there from the very beginning. Okay, Karen Salt, the revolution began in 1791 with a revolt, which then turned into revolution, but how common was such revolts in the new world around that time? Well, I think it's worth thinking through what do we mean by a revolt, right? The Haitian revolution is fascinating in the sense that it's a long period of time. There are lots of series of engagements that occur.

There's definitely brutality and there's definitely fires, but it's not necessarily where people are marshalling and getting arms and immediately coming out to the street and then fighting for a couple of days and it goes down. It keeps going, right? It keeps going for 12 long years. many other sort of altercations and revolts that happened typically were very small and very immediate. There are lots of indications and instances of very big ones,

but there's a lot of things that people did to actually be disruptive, much more disruptive than necessarily violent, slowing down the work that you might do, shuffling your feet, poisoning yourself. You can engage in all forms of types of resistance that doesn't necessarily have to go to this big, blown-out revolt. And that's been a big debate amongst historians thinking about resistance within the Caribbean

and within the larger North America, which is on the one hand, rumors would circulate that would say, you know, slaves are revolting everywhere and there's just resistance so that the fear needs to happen and people would rally and try to control. But then there was also these other sorts of stories

that would circulate that say, slaves' nature is that they're docile, and they would never revolt. So we would never need to actually do anything because our slaves, this is their natural condition is to be enslaved. And what we've got to do, I think once we start talking

about revolutions, it's sort of change the way that we talk about them and change the way that we talk about resistance so that the Haitian revolution sits amongst a much bigger conversation and story about what sort of resistance means. Before we come to the start of this particular revolution now, okay,

can you listen to some idea of the general, was there a general culture of these 500,000 slaves? Could you say, I'm sure there was. Can you just say, I'm awfully sorry, but briefly, what it was? Right. I think you've got, within a number of plantation economies and plantationist societies, you've got a whole strata of people.

And you've got individuals who might, especially in areas where it's intensive labor. And this is enforced labor, right? You've got people who are doing that sort of work. But you've also got the folks who may be still enslaved, but they're doing other types of jobs. They may be doing processing jobs. They may doing courier jobs. They may be doing jobs in the family home.

They might be caring for children. So you've got a whole, this is the plantation owner's children, you've got a whole range of individuals who are participating and working within the system still enslaved, but may have all sorts of means and ways of being both disruptive and being a part of the system. So yes, a group of people with their own cultures, with their own syncretic sense of religion, with their own ideas about relationships, with their own sort of familiar structures. And as Tim was mentioning before, we've got individuals coming in as adults from wide areas. So lots of languages being spoken, lots of various different ideas. And some of the people who were brought in to San Doming were actually military officers and military soldiers in other places in Africa. So they would actually come in already with ideas about regiments, already with the ideas about forming. And this is pre the revolution now.

This is pre the Haitian revolution. So you've got an interesting mix of people who are coming and being a part of this very, large, very brutal system. Well, let's get down to it. The slave revolt started in Sondamang in August, we told 1791. Do we know how it started? How specifically it started? Yeah, we know that there are fires that start up, and those fires will occur.

Fires? Burning fires, yeah. So the slaves would actually burn the sugar and the sugar cane. And if you can imagine, just think of any sort of culture or areas where there's a lot of grass, right? that there's a lot of grass growing. And if you could put a flame to that, it would just move. Houses get burned.

And all sorts of things can occur. Do you know what sparked it, though? Well, there's a beautiful ceremony called Bois came on. And that ceremony is, people go back and forth of whether or not it actually really happened, which doesn't really matter because it's culturally quite critically important. And this was a gathering in the woods amongst the slaves. And they banned it and came together.

And in this ceremony, talk through the questions and ideas. that Kate was just mentioning about liberty, supposedly then dedicated themselves to potentially freeing themselves from France. And this is what will occur about a couple of days before the fires will actually get going.

And they will continue to circulate. They'll be banked down. More fires will appear. This is in the north, and they would continue to move until one place after another would be up in flames. The word voodoo has been associated with that ceremony,

which you've avoided. It's not an avoidance. It's because I think The problem is that there's folks who have taken aspects of that ceremony and added it to cultural assumptions about zombies and about other sorts of things about people and have read into that ceremony all sorts of other negative attributes. And I think paying attention to it as a ritual and ceremony allows you to understand that it would fit within the syncretic religion or within the sort of cultural dynamics of the people, whatever those were for them, whether or not it might have been. talking to gods, what it might have been, or spirits, whether or not it might have involved the collectivism of bringing people together, of really thinking about a common goal.

That is really what that ceremony is ultimately about. If people would like to want to talk about religion in a realistic way, we can talk about the religion that starts to emerge in Haiti at the time. But I don't want to read into it any sort of negative ideas about devils or devil worshiping or any other types of things that some have done, even in contemporary times, in terms of things in terms of thinking about the religiosity within Haiti.

Good. Good. Tim, Tim Lockley. We now have 12 years of fighting, and it can be quite complicated. So let's start at the beginning. There's this rush like a great flood there, burning the plantations, the owners of planet,

fleeing to the great cities, the great fortified cities. So they're taking great tracts of the land, and there's no real opposition there. Then what? Well, then it can, It's interesting. We have a couple of years where the slaves are certainly making progress. They're making gains. They're defeating whatever kind of forces. The whites are sending against them.

But then it enters into a period of imperial faction fighting, and it's tied into what happens in Europe. Louis XVIth is deposed and then he's executed. I want to come to Europe in a moment. Can we just stay on the island and say what's happening there? Are they one force for a military force? Are there several different chiefs, captains? Oh yes, there's always multiple bands and they are attacking in multiple ways. And that's partly the problem that the whites have is that they don't know where the next attack is going to come. These bands are very mobile. Whenever whites come in force, then they retreat and they go into the mountains or they go into the woods and they can't be found and located.

And so it is, as Karen says, it is guerrilla war. It's hit and leave. And the whites really don't know how to respond, but it's very effective. tactic because they do come in, destroy something, leave. Where do they get their weapons? Some of the weapons are taken from captured French weapons, captured French stores,

but you don't necessarily need large amounts of firearms. A lot of weaponry is merely what you can fashion. So it is, you know, sometimes it's sword, spikes, those kind of things, or it's just clubs. So it doesn't have to be, you know, muskets. That's not necessarily the way these revolutions go. They've got overwhelming force in terms of

of numbers and they just need to give them any kind of weaponry and then torches so they can set fire to things. As Tim was alluding to Kate Hodgson, the other colonising powers got involved. Spain saw it as a chance to switch across the island. They were on the other half of the island. Great Britain sailed in to try to... So what happens there? Can you develop that? Sure. Well, when the French king is killed in 1793, obviously the revolutionary wars begin in Europe. And this becomes a kind of global imperial war and it's happening on various fronts. And one of those fronts is the Americas, as it happened throughout the 18th century. So this is well established in terms of warfare that's ongoing between Britain and France during this period.

And Britain and Spain both declare war on France. They both get involved in Sandomang. but they do it in different ways. The British try and make contact with the white planters to try and create trading links there, to try and tempt them to come, to sort of welcome the British in and bring them in that way. And the Spanish tried to form an alliance with the black revolutionary armies,

which have grown up, led by some of the major legions of the revolution since 1791, so people like Jean-François and people like Toussaint-Lieu-Vauture, who appears during this period as one of the major. figures of the revolution. It's worth saying that at this time is Liberty, Gallaudet, fraternity in France, while in Britain

Wilberforce is still in the 17th-90s pounding through more and more hopelessly, as it seemed, in that decade in 1790, they're trying to abolish the slave trade. So these things are going on as well. Yeah, absolutely. And the British abolitionists are watching

very carefully what is happening in Haiti and in some cases intervening such when Thomas Clarkson was in Paris, he aids one of the Haitian mixed race revolutionaries called Vincent Auget. He actually helped him to get back to San Domang to continue the fight there. So the British abolitionists are watching and getting involved.

Karen Sol. And one thing to add to that the gentleman that Kate just mentioned, Vincent Auget, will go back to San Doming and actually try to lead a revolt amongst the mixed race people and will be killed and executed quite violently because of his actions. So this just sort of reinforces the ways that various different strata within the colony itself are actually trying to use this moment to agitate and try to figure out what this might mean,

this liberty, egality and fraternity for them. It's a good time to begin to talk about the leaders thrown up inside Haiti. At this stage, the most vivid was Tucson Lovatua. Can you say something about him and what he did? Absolutely. He is sort of myth, legend, and the sort of grand champion, if you were, will of, and the sort of Haitian imaginary around the Haitian Revolution. He's a really interesting figure in the sense that, well, we will actually know, when we know now, that he was free

at the time of the Haitian Revolution. He was not enslaved. He owned slaves, had plots of land of his own, had married and had children, and is a really interesting figure in the sense that initially he's not part of the rebel crowd. He will actually join the rebels as the revolution moves on and will rise into power. As Kate was just mentioning, when the Spanish will ultimately come in and when they tempt various different, that sort of 90% to participate,

Toussaint will be one of those crowds that will slide over into the Spanish side and will actually fight for the Spanish for a portion of time. And he will use his sort of military acumen, change his name from his original plantation name, which is Brella, to Louverture. When you say plantation name,

just a second, listen to my thing, you said he was free. Plantation, does that imply I was working voluntary on the plantation? Well, no, because when names are sacred for people and they remain sacred for many, many folks.

And if you would imagine if you grew up as a slave, you might be given a name by your plantation owner. Well, he'd been a slave and was then now free. Exactly. He got free. Yes, he was made free. And then essentially owned slaves had a holding that had some slaves

to attach to it and at least had one slave. And it seems clear that he had a fairly kind master, if we could actually call master's kind, and had an actual relationship with that particular family. But he will use his knowledge and sort of acumen in various different ways to both martial support amongst the various different rebels, because as Tim was mentioning, this is a group that's not necessarily playing together, all the various different slave rebels. They're not one unified group following one person. There's lots of various different bands and lots of different leaders. And Toussaint will manage to rise in that crowd

hold people together, actually push down any sort of opposition to his rule, and simultaneously, once he switches sides from Spain back over to France, will rise up to be the most decorated French official in Haiti or in Saint-Dame. So we have that there, and so leaders are emerging. There are others, but he is the most prominent at that time. Tim Lockley, the French, I'm losing control of this situation. In 1793, they begin to placate the revolution. The revolution is going on now, it's been going for three or four years,

and they abolish slavery to assert it. Can you tell us what effect did this particular French intervention have? It had a massive impact. What did they do? I've bumbled it, so what did they do? Well, there's a French commissioner that comes from Paris to basically try and take charge of the situation in Sandemagne, which is going rapidly downhill. because we've got the Spanish on the one side,

we've got the British on another side, French control has almost disappeared. Well, he arrived, this guy called Sonsanax, and he is himself quite a radical Republican from France, so he believes strongly in revolutionary ideals of things like liberty and equality. He quickly comes to the realization that the only way the French are going to reestablish control in Sandamang is by offering freedom to slaves to fight for the French.

And this is what he does, and that becomes very quickly, morphs into a general declaration of emancipation by him for anyone who fights for France in Sander Mang in 1793. That's later the following year ratified by the French National Assembly, but he does it first in Sander Mang. Why it's so important it's because it persuades people like Loveture to swap sides. He had been fighting with the Spanish.

Why? Because he was fighting against French Republicans who had been enslaving him and his people. Now the French are offering freedom. and he swaps sides, and he starts to fight the French against the Spanish and against the British. And so, Sontanax's declaration of emancipation is absolutely crucial in determining the outcome of what will eventually become the Haitian revolution, because once you've crossed that Rubicon, once you've offered freedom, there's no going back from it, and people will die to defend that right. And things move in an emmishing and complicated way for the next year or two,

with the three, let us call it, European powers. I was going to say great powers. European powers and the several distinct groups, although they're cohering around strong leaders like Toussaint-Lovatur, Desolid and so on, in San de Mang. In 1798, you could say that Leverture is effectively the ruler of the island. Is that right? And how did he get the economy going again? Yeah, by that point, Toussaint-Luverture has fought off the... Tutsuil Lvachot and the head of numerous armies

has fought off the British, he's fought off the Spanish, and he has taken control of the colony. He still has these French governors to contend with. Can you tell me what, can you tell the listeners what fought off means? I mean, these are well-drilled armies who fought battles in Europe and in North American, so and so forth. So what does Fort-off mean? Are we still in guerrilla warfare?

They're using the tactics of guerrilla warfare, yes. And the battle's ongoing, but basically by 1798, they push. And actually by 1800, Toussaint pushes that military dominance, which he has. And, you know, historians are military strategist. I'm not a military strategist, but everyone has recognized Tucson's absolute unquestioning military genius, basically. He is really seen as a military strategic genius. And he not only reconquers the entirety of the original colony for France, but also pushes the frontier to include the whole island.

the Spanish part two by 1800. And what he does in terms of restarting the economy, basically what the situation is, that Tucson and the former slaves, so the black 90% majority of the population, have fundamentally opposing ideas about what they want to do with this freedom. The 80% have this absolutely coherent idea

of what they want to do, and it's since the beginning of the revolution. All they want is time and space, basically, time for themselves and space to cultivate their own land and their own things. Toussaint sees this is impossible and sees the necessity of restarting the plantation system in order to keep providing France with the sugar and coffee

that they're demanding, but also in sort of abolitionist terms and in global terms, this need to prove that free labour could be as effective as slave labour. And so that's what he does. Karen, in 1801, Liverpool passed a new constitution can you give us an idea what that was and what it signified? Yeah, and I think Kate's leading is brilliant because essentially you've got this document, if you'd imagine. The Declaration of Independence and the States, and many are familiar with that.

You know, it's written before altercations actually get going and sort of leads the way. And the Constitution is written after, right? It's written after most of this. The one in San Dement. Yeah, the one in San Dman. After all of the interaction, and you get to see in this constitution. a vision of what a self-governing black French territory would look like. And it's startling in its simplicity and in its grandness to imagine, you know, how laws will be set up, who will be the ruler, how things will be organized.

And most importantly, the fact that slavery can never happen ever in Haiti or in San Doming. It just would not be possible all. It's not called Haiti. No, no, no. So at this point, it's still tied to France. He's quite comfortable to still be tied to France. But the vision that he has of all men, as it says, and it's quite emphatic about the men, are born free,

and they're born, and they will die free and French. It says that in the Constitution. So you've talked about before, Melvin, about enlightenment ideals, and this is the only document at this particular time period that would link notions of sort of politically equality, if you will, with racial equality and make that very clear that enslavement cannot and will not ever happen within this territory. And that it's an emphatic document, I think, because not only is it imagining a political future and the fact that a group of people who many throughout the Atlantic world,

not only do they believe that they should be slaves, but they were folks who actually believed that people of African descent were incapable of political thought. They're actually incapable of actually doing any kind of governing. And this document says emphatically that that's not the case. Not only can he imagine what the world would look like, but he would imagine a world that would be free. And while Kate is right about the enforced labor, without a doubt, because that will be the thing that will

haunt the Caribbean is issues around labor and who will work in what kind of plantation economies, the idea that it is, it is a message, it's a really big message, and it's a message of equality to another ruler that he sends directly to Napoleon to sort of say,

I am not only your brethren, but I'm your equal. Yes, and that's when the poems are written and the praise comes and the man's unconquerable mind enters the vocabulary of the words with sonnet and on we go. What was the, is there a general reaction to this? So that's been very graphically described by Karen. Is there a general reaction to this in Europe?

Does I think, what are we going to do about this? Is it gone too far? Can we do anything about it? There's an immediate reaction in France. Yeah. And the reaction comes from Napoleon, who is not impressed, by somebody sending him, what's he called him this gilded African, sending him this constitution,

which of course he hasn't been run past him before it's promulgated. So there's this constitution that comes. Napoleon suddenly thinks, well, what about this great French territory that we had that we have lost? Can we reclaim it? This idea had been mulling around

the French government for a few years. Napoleon finally acts on it, and he acts on it because there's a short window of peace with Britain when he can actually act on it, when he can send troops and he's got secure supply lines. And he sends 20,000-odd battle-hardened French revolutionary troops to Haiti to take Haiti back from these black rebels to reassert French control. This is in 1801.

This is 1801. 1802, he sends these. That's a piece of Amiens way. Yeah, he sends this fleet and these troops in order to take back Haiti. And it's part of a larger sort of Western design of Napoleon where he's going to reassert French control, restart sugar exports to France and the wealth that that brings. And it's also linked into the reclaiming of Louisiana from Spain, that Louisiana is also going to be a source of food and supplies to support Haiti.

That's the Western design, and it goes very badly wrong very quickly for Napoleon. And it's the end of Napoleon, the great liberator, the great hero of Beethoven, and he goes back to base, and he says, we want slaves, we want sugar. Absolutely. And Napoleon, Beethoven might have anything more to do that. Yeah, and he does it very sneakily because he goes to Haiti. He doesn't announce we're reintroducing slavery. He says, no, no, we're just going to have peace.

And we just want to reassert French control. But then the people in Haiti find out who reintroduces slavery in Guadalupe, another French territory. And that suddenly becomes very apparent that that's what the aim is. So they take on these 20,000 troops he sends across, and of course they will find allies those troops in Sandemang. And Loveture and a clerk, let's stick with Loveture, it makes it a bit easier.

How do they take them on? do they fight them? It's a big force to land on an island. It is a big force, but they are extremely, you know, well, well-supplied, well-trained and they know what they want to do. Karen, how do, what, can you tell us what happened here?

When they're going to have their interaction. I mean, I think the thing that is probably... You've talked about Tucson being a great strategist. What did you do at this stage? I think what's clear at this stage is that there is going to be continuous engagement. And I think you've got some of the

guerrilla warfare ideas, but you've got regiments. You've got people forming. They're actually, they're actually organized in particular places. They're actually having a particular sort of encounters. And you also have this fantastic thing called disease. And it's going to have a huge impact. And it will actually be a strategy. Everyone will know that there is a danger of actually going out and fighting during a particular time of the year because there will be mosquitoes and you will essentially get infected. And if you think of that, that as an actual military strategy, which is says, don't do anything. Just let them go out and they will kill themselves.

It actually works. Yeah. I mean, both Leverture and Desaiens use this as a, like a wait and see. Two or three weeks after the French forces arrive, they know that French force will be considerably weaker because they'll be sick. And he's right. I mean, the French force is absolutely decimated. I think in the two years that the Napoleon tries to retake control of Haiti, he sent something

like 50,000 troops to Haiti. Only 3,000 ever leave. Kate. We shouldn't also underestimate the impact on the soldiers arriving. This is the French Revolutionary Army. They have themselves been fighting for liberty and equality in Europe. They arrive in San Doming and they find a population who are fighting for liberty and equality.

And they're singing the same songs. They're absolutely just shaken to the core, I think, when they encounter these black armies who are using the same ideas and the same revolutionary rhetoric as them. have any hard evidence about what some of them do, do they switch sides? Some of them, there's a Polish regiment that comes across with the French Revolutionary Army. And some of the soldiers do actually, including some of the Polish population, do actually stay in Sandeman and what becomes Haiti at the end of the revolution.

So some do. So just to add to that, Melvin, just to think about people fighting around questions of liberty and equality, we do actually have some of the slave rebels who will fight during the American Revolution. and that is a key issue to sort of put into perspective that lots of these individuals are going in different sorts of places and thinking through these questions of liberty and equality in different ways. What does happen here which is an emphatic change which seems to me, but you'll tell me whether I'm right or wrong.

Come to you first Tim now we can go around. Is that they ambush one way and another. There are two or three different versions of this, but they ambushed to Sandovichu and his sons. They capture him, send him to France, he's put him in prison and he dies in prison so he's out of it quite quick how did he how did they ambush him how did they given that he was so clever how did they get a hold of him well there's this whole thing about whether whether tussons sort of retires and now there's this

french general and there's a general acceptance that he should be in charge he's come with napoleon's sort of authority um all the black generals including desaiens and christoph and lovature they all sort of eventually acknowledge this guy's authority and Leverchur officially sort of retires to his plantation and then he's tricked into coming to a meeting where he's then captured and shipped off to France but there's certainly an element where it might well be there's internal manoeuvring amongst black generals

that basically make Leverture the full guy and they're whispering to the French Leverture's still plotting he's only pretending to lay down his arm he's actually going to come back and fight you and that's the sort of thing that that the French generals then want to play along with this. But if they thought that chopping off the head would reduce the body, it didn't work,

because Desaline is, well, his son-in-law, actually, wasn't he? It was in the wings, and he took charge, and was in fiercer in many ways. Yeah, I mean, there's some suggestion that Desaines was the one who betrayed him to the French, in order to aggrandize himself. But Desaiens had been the slave of Levercher's daughter, and there's always this subordinate superior relationship which Desaiens later talked about as something that he always resented and that Lovature always treated him poorly because of it.

And with Loveture out of the way, Desaiens eventually assumes control of the black armies in Haiti once it becomes apparent that actually the French are here with one aim only and that is to reintroduce and reinstate slavery which they've done in Guadalupe. And he then is the one who then takes the lead in the last phase of the war. So let's move to January 18. 1803, Kate Hodson, when Desilene declares independence. January 1804.

January 1804. Well, 1804, sorry, January 1804. I just can't read. That's what time one of it. Can you say what happened when he declared that? Absolutely. Desaline is one of the, several signatories, generals of the Haitian Revolution, that signed this Declaration of Independence. They renamed the country Haiti, which is taken from an indigenous word, meaning mountainous land, I.E.T. and they create this declaration, basically, this extraordinary, powerful declaration that says,

from now on, we swear eternal hatred to France, we will no longer be part of France. They even invent a new word to describe how heavy the hand of France has been on the colony and how this needs to be shaken off and completely reshaped. So there's this Declaration of Independence, which has survived as a document. In fact, very recently a copy,

the only original surviving copy was found here in London in the British Archives and had been sent by Desalina as a kind of strategy of global publicity of the revolution, sent copies to Jamaica, sent copies to the United States to publicize his Haiti's independence. What effect did this document have on the places to which it was sent which case as you tell us about? Well, just the reality of the declaration itself will have humongous, an immediate effect everywhere.

It will affect various different strategies differently. For the abolitionists, it is both fear because this is their nightmare. This is the thing that they're scared that they can't control. You were mentioning Wilberforce before. Wilberforce is carefully trying to push something through a sort of parliamentarian kind of situation. And here we've got this moment of massive violence and altercation and massive disruption. And they're very concerned that they don't want to be some of them, that they don't want to to be saying what we really need is a war, right?

Who's they? And it would depend. So some of the more radical abolitionists will be fine with this because they really want to change the system. They want to do it immediately. But we're talking about days outside the island. Yes, a days outside the island. And these would be people like those who would have been part of the societies for the Friends of the Black in France. These would be the abolitionist groups in the UK. These would be abolitionist societies that would be in the U.S. But there were others who thought this is the magic moment This is the moment where this, not only the actual declaration itself, but just the existence of Haiti, will actually say to people that you cannot have slave systems.

You can't have a society that imagines that people of a certain group are disenfranchised to a certain extent and actually oppressed to a certain extent as a natural way of being. It just can't occur because this place exists. It shows you that it can be done very, very differently. Yet slavery went on, Tim Lockley, for at least two or three generations of 19. century, even though this had an effect, as you pointed out, Karen, in America, as a vote that went on in America,

went on in Brazil, and so on. So, are we really talking about a shot being fired that was heard around the world, or are we talking about, or are we really talking about something on which other revolution is built? What are we doing? It's very difficult to think of it like that.

It certainly has an impact amongst white societies who are terrified of what's going to happen, and they see rebellions everywhere, plots, etc. and there certainly are some linked to the Haitian Revolution, the Denmark-Vessia conspiracy in Charleston in 1822, is one of them. He'd actually been to Haiti. But there's a resonance of what happens in Haiti amongst black populations,

but it doesn't necessarily then lead on to, for example, emancipation in Jamaica and the British Caribbean in the 1830s or emancipation during the Civil War in the US in the 1860s. You do see an immediate impact on places like Grenada. There's a Fadon's Rebellion in 1795, so there is some consequences. for what happens in the French, English, Caribbean. But it does set an example of what a free black republic would be,

but it doesn't necessarily logically cause those emancipationary events. And finally, Kate, what happens, it seems to me, is that the European powers, and it try to ruin the new Haiti. They blockade it, they won't trade with it, when finally they do trade with it. They force the Haitians to pay incredible. I mean, by the present day, $125 billion compensation and so on. So in one way they're saying,

look, this is what happens if you have this slave revolution. You get poverty-stricken and nobody will have anything to do with you. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, to continue with your metaphor, of a shot ringing out. If a shot does ring out, the rest of the world tries it's best to put a silencer on that shot, that there is a blockade of news, there is a blockade, economic blockade.

And I'm afraid I'll have to do a blockade. I'm really sorry. Thank you, Kate Orson. Thank you, Tim Lockley. Thank you, Karen. So next week we'll be talking about nuclear, Fusion. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now

with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. But I said it was my fault because I can't read. I mean, I covered for these guys. Are you listening? How I covered for you? Yeah, your notes were wrong. It wasn't your notes were wrong. And I read it. And I said, oh, it's doubt me.

It's just deliberate mistake they put in their sketchy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we will have a post-morty at that. the mortum the better. Now, it's very complicated and I think you managed to sift. What would you think? It's more important what you think. How do you think?

There's so much to cover and there's so many actors and trying to get them all in order and they're all doing the right things at the right time. That is complicated for everybody, not only students but for us. And people constantly change sides. It is this soap opera where literally you turn around and next week

there are people who are allies are now enemies, and then three weeks later they're completely... But you would expect you, wouldn't you? I mean, the idea of slaves being a natural part of the human condition and allied to the fact that they were producing such incredible wealth

for France. I mean, such incredible when Rapoleon lost it, he sold the whole of Louisiana to the United States for Fortans because he didn't need it anymore because he hadn't this... He hadn't got to Haiti. And so trying to shift that, You don't do it in an afternoon. I mean, it was an earthquake.

And I think this gets back to your point that you asked about, you know, what's the sort of significance of Haiti, its existence as well as the Haitian revolution, is that it's not going to be necessarily this cosmic change that suddenly every single other empire will go, we can never have slaves now and we need to stop this sort of situation or enforce labor. But I think it changes the nature of the conversation. It means that you can't actually start to imagine

a world in which what you have in existence is in perpetuity, right? And you also can't imagine a world in a sense of slave economies. But it also means that you can't go up to certain groups of people, especially people who will start to go to school,

people of African descent, who will become politicians, who may get the vote in certain areas. You can't explain to them that they will never be a ruler in a particular country. It may have taken until now to get Obama as the President of the United States, but those sorts of moments, they change the dynamic of political

thought and conversation. You can't do it anymore. You can't say that these people are not, these people, by definition of being this color, are incapable of doing all these wonderful things that we do. That is what has changed. Now, it takes a long time to percolate through, but that has definitely changed because there's the example. Yeah, and Louvrecher is, I think the really, the groundbreaker here, because he is this black intellectual, and he writes all these documents, there's something like 1600 documents that are written by him or dictated by him. I wish we said that blasts. That's a lot of documents. And nobody's ever been through every one of them.

Because there's too many of them. What's you're saying in these documents? Well, he's articulating lots of different things. Some of them are mundane, but he's also thinking about rights, about what it means to be French, what it means to be a leader. He's trying to negotiate with the English,

with the Americans. But he's, you know, and clearly an educated and intelligent man, but sort of self-educated. And he imbibes these ideas that are coming out of France. of liberty and inequality, some of which are feeding, of course, from what happened in America

in 20 years previously. But he's this wonderful figure, and he sort of stands alone as being a bit like that. I still... Well, of course I can, I'm being silly about it, but it would be great to know in detail how they got him. Yeah, they're a competing account. Yeah, lots of competing accounts.

Those documents of Toussaintly Vercher, just to add to what Tim was saying, are translated into English, and they are available within an edition edited by academic Nick Nesbitt and the former Haitian president Ahishti Jean-Bertsqin, Al-Hisi there that are available.

But they, I mean... Well, this is a... He's writing, he's not just writing about slavery and freedom, he's writing about all of this ideas that you were talking about, this enlightenment thought, you know, how do we live within a particular sort of society, what sort of...

How should be ordered? How should it be governed? How should we be governed? How should we interact with each other? He's giving this thought, and I'm concerned, consumed with thinking about political ideas and political thought, it's amazing to have that body of knowledge from him, a man born a slave who feels like it's his legitimate right to actually be able to participate in that conversation.

The producer isented. We are now being offered BBC, to a BBC coffee and attention. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programs to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.co.ukuk slash radio 4.