Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] The Haitian Revolution

Episode Date: April 16, 2025

ORIGINALLY RELEASED Jun 21, 2020 In this episode, we explore the Haitian Revolution—the only successful slave revolt in history and a landmark event in the global struggle against colonialism and white supremacy. From the brutal plantation economy of Saint-Domingue to the rise of revolutionary leaders like Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, we trace how enslaved Africans overthrew French rule and declared the world’s first Black republic. We also examine how this radical uprising shook the foundations of empire, inspired abolitionist movements, and remains a crucial—yet often erased—chapter in revolutionary history. Alexander Aviña is an associate professor of Latin American history in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. His book, "Specters of Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside" , was awarded the Maria Elena Martínez Book Prize in Mexican History for 2015 by the Conference on Latin American History. ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio HERE Outro Beat Prod. by flip da hood

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On today's episode, we have back on the show, historian Alexander Avina, to talk about the Haitian Revolution. Alex has been on for multiple episodes, including our Chile episode, our Zapatista episode, Mexican Revolution episode. And this is really his focal point in what he studies is Latin American Revolutionary history. And so I thought he would be a perfect guest to bring on to talk about the Haitian revolution at a perfect time because I think the Haitian revolution often gets overlooked in sort of Western histories. We aren't taught it as much as we're taught the American and the French Revolution in school. But it is the really crucial moment for black liberation historically.

And I very much see the ongoing fight for black liberation in this country and around the world as a direct descendant of the Haitian revolution and the Haitian revolutionaries. So I thought it was a perfect guest at a perfect time to have on to talk about this deep and rich history. Again, and I want to say this in the show, there is so much to tackle here. This even among revolutionary historical events, this one is incredibly complicated and protracted. So we're going to give as much information as we can throughout this episode. But both Alex and I wanted to encourage people who want to learn even more. if you want to really learn a step-by-step historical account of the revolution and all the

nuances involved, the podcast revolutions, I think their fourth season, is completely dedicated to talking about the Haitian revolution. And also Alex mentions a PBS documentary as well. So if you are interested in anything you learn here, you can follow up with that documentary. You can follow up with CLR. James's The Black Jackabins. and you can follow up with the Revolutions podcast Season 4, where they cover it in its minutia. It's a fascinating and deeply entrancing history. So without further ado, let's go ahead and get in this episode with my good friend Alex on the Haitian Revolution. Enjoy.

My name is Alex Avina. I'm an associate historian at Arizona State University. my work focuses on revolutionary movements in Mexico in particular. Yeah, and now I teach Latin American revolutions at Arizona State University. Beautiful. Now, you've been on, has it been four or five times now? Do you remember? I think this is the fourth time.

I'm like your official Latin American historian, so I'm cool, man. I like that. Awesome. Yeah, I do too. We have that familiarity. Our listeners have that familiarity with you. and I think that makes for just a little bit more easygoing conversation. And, you know, people like having returned guests and they start to build up a rapport with them.

So happy to have you back. I looked at the Skype chat and it's actually been one year since our last episode and then one year prior to that since our one before that. So basically I have you on once a year since Revlev's been started, which is pretty cool. Yeah, it takes a year of preparation for this, right, on my end. So, yeah, so I need that time to prep. I do ask a lot of you, I admit. No, no, I'm just kidding. But before we get into the questions, I've been asking guests this recently, but with so much going on, pandemic, great depression, and now unprecedented historical uprising around the country.

How are you holding up? How is your family holding up? How is Arizona and your community down there holding up? We're good, man. Thanks. The family's good. We're also going through this really exciting cycle of rebellions in Arizona, which has been a person. pretty amazing to watch and to see play out. It just feels like even in this state, in this region, which at one point it was the home of Joe Arpaio, right? It seems there's like a, it seems like the conservatism can be overwhelming, right? But then we have these moments of hope and resistance. And it's really interesting time to be living through here locally, right, to see so much change developing in real time. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I live in a deep red state here in Nebraska as well. So we're used to having completely right-wing government on the state and

local levels. But at the same time, there's also a huge reservoir of resistance. The protest I've been to here over the last couple weeks have been some of the biggest and most diverse protests I've ever seen in the Omaha area. So it's just amazing that even in the deepest red states, there's still a huge swath of people who are ready to stand up and say, fuck this shit at the drop of a hat. show communal solidarity as well. So I'm glad that you and your family are doing okay. Thanks, man. Yeah, no, it's, I mean, I think to paraphrase off of Malcolm X, we're living in revolutionary times. So it's interesting that we're going to be talking about the Haitian revolution today within a context that's marked by this revolutionary potential. Absolutely. And that's why

I wanted to do this episode. And just to make it clear, we might say this a couple times, either in the intro or throughout the episode. This is a hugely complex revolution. Alex and I were talking before we started recording at just how complicated this is, even for a revolutionary historical event. And so, of course, we're not going to be able to get to every single thing, but we're going to cover a lot. We're going to give a really good, solid introduction to this crucial revolution. And the reason we're doing it in part is because there are implications for what's happening in the U.S. right now. And learning about history is what the single best thing you can do if you want to understand the nuances of the present. So with all of that said, let's go ahead and dive

because this is going to be perhaps a slightly longer episode than normal, given what we have to cover. But first and foremost, for those who may not be familiar at all with the Haitian Revolution, other than just knowing about the name or the event in some vague way, can you give us a sort of bird's eye view of its general place in history and what makes it such a unique historical event overall? Yeah, so this is most like, this is the most important revolution that you most have not learned about, right? And it is, and I think we were discussing this over email when we set this interview up, right? Like one of the ways that I challenged my students when we learn about the Haitian Revolution is I start the class right off by saying that this is the most radical revolution, the most revolutionary revolution that you most likely know very little about.

The Haitian Revolution breaks out in 1791 and it lasts until 1804 when on January 1st, 1804, Jean-Jacques Aline declares. the independence of a colony that used to be called St. Domain, but is transformed into what we now refer to as Haiti. And this takes place within the broader period of history referred to generally as the age of revolution, which is depending on which historian you're reading, is anywhere from the 1760s up until maybe even the revolutions of 1848. And for a long time, most historians tended to ignore the Haitian revolution's paramount place within this broader age of revolutions. There's a couple of exceptions, right? One of the books that I was reading and preparing for this conversation. And I highly recommend as the

classic by CLR. James Black Joccovins, right? And that's one of these early, it was published in 1930s. It started off actually as a play that Paul Robeson actually performed in, which is kind of amazing. Wow. And then it becomes this really famous book. But it's similar to like W.B. DeV. DeVise's Black Reconstruction, right? They're really important historical works that get more or less sideline or ignored by academia. And they're both referring to these revolutionary moments of black radical movements and assertion of rights that, that, you know, will not get picked up until the 60s and 70s by historians who are focusing on this. So essentially, the Haitian revolution, you know, gets overshadowed by the American Revolution, gets overshadowed by the French Revolution that begins in 1789. But it actually is the most radical moment in this broader age of revolution.

and we can talk about some of the broader historical consequences of this, the one successful slave revolution in the history of the Americas. Yeah. And we'll get more into the implications of the European Enlightenment. It's quite clear why the American and French revolutions are given sort of priority of place over the Haitian revolutions, which is just a matter of white supremacy and colonialism, infiltrating academia. But in a lot of ways, this was a far more robust and,

thoroughgoing revolution than either the American or French revolutions, which, you know, had their own problems. The American Revolution specifically was a really reactionary, you know, ruling elite revolution more than it was a real emancipatory liberatory revolution. And in America, we are still living with the consequences of that, you know, half-formed or quarter-formed revolution. And in Haiti, we'll get to where they are today as well. But I just think it's important to sort of of think about the Haitian revolution as happening sort of parallel in that same time period as the American and French Revolution, but being more revolutionary than either of those. And that's an important sort of place to start for people that might not have any conception of what this is.

I totally agree. Let me, if I can interject, but in the early 90s, this Haitian anthropologist, Michelle Rolf Trio wrote a brilliant book called Silencing the Past. And in that book, he has a chapter called Unthinkable Revolution. And in like 20 pages, he does this masterful job of breaking down why the Haitian revolution has been sidelined and why in its moment, but also in our moment as historians, well, in the 1990s, it was an unthinkable revolution. And one of the reasons why I tell my students this is the most radical revolution, is because some of the challenges that it poses to the so-called West are so radical that the people at the time, white people at the time in Europe and the United States,

don't have a conceptual framework to understand what these revolutionaries are doing, right? This is a revolution of blackness, of asserting the humanity of blackness. They are asserting the humanity of people who have been brutalized as African slaves, right? So the idea that in August of 1791, African slaves, both having arrived recently from Africa, having born in Saint-domain, organized clandestinely the world's first successful slave revolution and led to the creation of the world's first modern black state, right? Like 150 years before the wave of decolonizations that happened after World War II. Two, all that stuff was unthinkable for the people at the time.

Even the most extreme less factions within Europe could not conceptualize that these black slaves were envisioning freedom and were using revolutionary warfare to achieve that freedom, right? And that continues to pose challenges us for today, right? Like I was reading some of the reports of from 1791, 1792, of planters, of slave owners in Saint-Domang who are, cannot understand. this revolution that's breaking out in the north part of the island, and they're saying it must be outside agitators. It's, you know, there's reports of these, there's these planters saying,

you know, we discovered a white man in blackface who was killed and he was actually the one leading the revolutionaries. He's the one inciting them to rebellion. And it's crazy, right, reading that and then the past week of reading U.S. mainstream media about the black rebellion and now multi-class, multiracial rebellions that are forming on the streets of the U.S. It's kind of, it's crazy. that same discourse of outside agitator that deny the ability of black rebels and black revolutionaries to one envision freedom and then two envision the way to achieve it like that's a constant right from the 1790s to today as a way to delegitimize these movements but what they're really saying is that they're making a statement about black humanity and the incapacity of black people to do certain things that white people

can right so that that really i think captures and michel rofrio talks about it in that in that chapter and And I think that captures a large part of the radicalism that this revolution, you know, actually enacted in the late 18th, early 19th century. I'm so glad you brought that up. The outside agitators thing being present in this revolution, a bunch of different conspiracy theories about who was really behind it. And it is rooted in this paternalistic, condescending, deeply patronizing approach that black people themselves aren't capable of doing these sorts of uprisings, of having this sort of. human dignity necessary to compel them to fight back. And so therefore, it must be some outside agitators. And in fact, I was listening to some history from the civil rights era in the U.S. during the 1960s. And once again, the outside agitator narrative was deeply pushed. And in the South, I forget which mayor or governor, white supremacist mayor or governor said this, but they

actually played a clip that I heard of them asking, you know, what about these outside agitators? Like, how many people do you think, you know, are actual local black folks? And how many do you think are like communist basically. And then the guy said, you know, I think about 75% of the people in this movement are outside communists coming in. And so 75% was, was the communist. And now today we hear about the anarchist or the Antifa, but it's the same exact, scapegoating is the same exact intrinsic racism that implicitly says that black people in and of themselves, by their accords aren't capable of this, so it must be some other group. And obviously, there's also ties with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jewish people and red-baiting anti-communism,

and it all comes together in this right-wing fever dream of conspiracies that we're still dealing with today. Right. It's a way to avoid engaging with the white supremacist structure that explains the rise of these revolutions, right? I mean, if a particular social formation or society has to acknowledge, is forced to acknowledge the reasons why this revolution emerged in Haiti and the 1790s, it more or less has to acknowledge that something is wrong with the system, right? And that can't happen because the system then delegitimizes itself, right? So hence the outside agitator trope. But it's also, as you mentioned, right, it's also making a statement, like an ontological statement about blackness and black humanity. And the people making these

arguments may or may not be aware of what the implications of the arguments are, that almost almost doesn't matter, because what matters is that they're working to uphold a white supremacist system. And these Haitian revolutionaries in the 1790s, and then on in 1804, when they declared independence, that's what they're challenging to a certain extent. And that's why people, that's why Rolf Trio, you know, refers to this as an unthinkable revolution. One of those, another ways that I pose this challenge to my students is to ask them if they've ever seen a movie or a popular cultural representation of the Haitian revolution. And most of them, you know, there really isn't, right? at least in the United States.

Right. So I tell them to imagine the movie 300, which is like a piece of shit, like total post-9-11 war on terror fantasy, right? But it's by Frank Miller, I think, is like the artist. I'm like, right. So imagine a movie like 300, but where the Spartans are actually Haitian revolutionaries

and for two hours, you're going to see them killing white people. Mm-hmm. How do you think modern U.S. society would react to that, right? That wouldn't sell too well. Right. Like, so even now, that idea of black, A black African slave,

a third fighting for freedom and using violence to achieve that freedom is still too radical of a process, I think, even in this day. Yeah, and the last thing I'll say before we move on, talking about people invested in the system, needing to find a scapegoat so they don't have to look at the core contradictions and problems of the society that they're invested in.

It's obvious what the reactionary and right-wing version is, which is, you know, Antifa or communist or whatever. But there's also the liberal version. And liberals since the very beginning liberal mayors, I think the mayor of Minneapolis immediately came out after the uprisings most recently started, immediately saying that it was outside agitators, even when there was no evidence. And local journalists immediately looked into the arrest records, and it was showed overwhelming, like over 80% of the people were from Minneapolis. But the liberals, you know, they were going, the whole white supremacist route. So, you know, while the reactionaries were saying it's Antifa, and some of the liberals were saying it was white anarchists for the whole IDPOL. thing. A lot of the other ones, especially in the early days, and that Minneapolis mayor himself

was gesturing towards a white supremacist as being the outside agitators. But whether it's liberal or conservative forms of this, it's still conspiratorial thinking rooted in racism. And we just see different manifestations of it, which is important to remember. And then the last thing I wanted to mention on the historical front is there's a lot of thought that Hagel's master slave dialectic, you know, that whole concept, the whole thinking through that process was Hegel being directly sort of kept up on what was happening in Haiti and putting that into his work. So insofar as Hegel is this, you know, huge thinker of history, this huge philosopher of history and went on to, you know, influence Marx who went on to influence

CLR James directly. It's very interesting to see that the whole master and slave dialectic idea was very likely rooted in this, the Haitian revolution, which is just interesting as well. yeah hagel following along reading newspaper accounts of what's going on right yeah no that's that's a really in that social spark like a super nerdy debate that we can we can talk about another uh conversation but uh the the role of hagel and all this yeah that that is a that's a separate episode for sure philosophy nerdy which i love to do um let's go ahead to the next question so to fully understand this revolution uh you do need to have some understanding of of its history and its relationship to European colonialism, et cetera.

So can you talk about that history and give us some context through which we can come to have a better understanding of the conditions that led to the revolution? Yeah. So I think to start at a broad level, right, we're talking about what historians refer to the Atlantic world, right? This world that obviously revolves around the Atlantic Ocean. It connects the Caribbean, South America, North America to Europe and the western coast of Africa. But throughout the 1700s, on the one hand,

you see the mass expansion of slavery and the slave trade in parts, it pushed by the production of certain commodities like sugar, and I'll talk about sugar in a little bit. But one of the things sugar requires is immense amounts of labor. So you can kind of trace the expansion of the transatlantic slave trade and the fortification of slave plantation regimes, particularly in the Caribbean,

parts of the United, current United States, and in South America, in relation to the expansion of the commodity production, mainly sugar. But at the same time, there's a reaction to that, right? So you have great historians like Vincent Brown, who has a great book on Jamaican Slaverbolts that I'm currently reading, or historian Gerald Horn, talk about the 1700s also being a century of massive slave revolts, particularly in the Caribbean, right? Particularly in Jamaica and Antigua, the island of St. Domain, that I'll talk about, or I'll talk about Nasek, also had its slave resistance movements in the 1700s before the revolution. You had slave rebellions in the southern United States, particularly Stono's rebellion in the 1730s, if I recall, right?

So in reaction to industrialized almost slave trade and the expansion of these plantation economies, you do at every moment have massive slave resistance, and you have the emergence of maroon communities, runaway slave communities in Jamaica and Antigua and other. parts of the Caribbean. So that's kind of like the big picture, right? So keep that in mind also, as I earlier discussed, the age of revolutions, because once we get to the late 1700s, you have the American Revolution breaking out in 1776. And it's also essentially characterized by intense imperial rivalry between the French and the British and the Spanish. And that sets the ground for what happens on the western side of the island of Hispaniola, where Saint-Doming now Haiti exists. In terms of the actual colony of Saint Domain, right? So it occupies the west part, the western part of the island, the eastern part of the island, the eastern part is occupied by what is now the Dominican Republic. It was

originally, quote unquote, discovered by Christopher Columbus, right? And it becomes the first outpost of Spanish colonialism in the 1510s. I mean, and they end up wiping out most of the indigenous Taino population. There's a great story of a Taino Cacique or a Taino indigenous leader by the name of Atwe, who, who's from the island of Hispaniola, and as the Spanish conquistadors are wiping out indigenous populations, they're trying to establish a colony on the island, he escapes to the island of Cuba, where he warns the indigenous populations there that the Spanish are coming, and this is what they do.

He ends up leading the resistance effort in Cuba, and once he's captured, he's about to be burned at the stake, and the priests who's there asked him if he wants to be baptized before he's burned at the stake. And what they, Latuei says, ask him, like, why would I want to do this? The priest responds with, well, you get to go to heaven, right? And this indigenous leader responds with, are there a lot of Christians in heaven? And the priest says, of course, that's the only people there.

And he's like, no, I'd rather burn and go to hell. And now in a place like Cuba, Atwe is remembered as like the first rubble of the Americas. And his origin story begins on the island of Hispaniola. By the 1600s, most of the Spanish colonials are on the eastern part of the island and they leave the part that is now Haiti, more or less in the hands of what will become known as French Buccaneers pirates and a lot of livestock, a lot of cattle and pigs, right? So the actual colony of Saint-domain that will fall under the control of the French by the late 1690s really begins as kind of like an erstwhile, like French pirate colony that eventually becomes, formalized as a French colony. And throughout the 1700s, you have the slow expansion of different forms of commodity production, right? They experiment with tobacco. They experiment with indigo pretty early on, particularly in the northern province of St. Domain, where there's a lot of flat land that is

well watered with natural streams and rivers, they figure out that sugar is going to, is a good commodity to start producing. So part of the story of St. Domang from the early 1700s up until the time the revolution breaks out in 1791, is this expansion of sugar production, particularly in the northern province, which becomes like one of the wealthiest colonies in the world, as the same domain becomes the wealthiest colony in the world. But also expanding in the West Province, which is kind of in the middle, if you can envision like the east of the western part of the island, the very middle of it on the West Coast is the West Province, and the very southern one is called the South Province. So you have, with the expansion of sugar production in the

1700s, you have massive amounts of African slaves that are brought into the colony, right? And this is, there's estimates of anywhere from 500 to 800,000 slaves who were brought beginning the early 1700s to the, on the eve of revolution in 1790, they're bringing like 50,000 slaves a year. And these slaves are feeding this machine that is, these plantation machine that's producing sugar, which at that moment becomes the most valuable commodity in the Atlantic economy, right? And this sugar is enriching the French Empire, and this is why Saint-Domang eventually acquires a nickname of the Pearl of the Antilles.

It is the wealthiest colony in the so-called new world. It is the envy of other imperial powers that want it for themselves. We can talk more in terms of specifics about what this slave trade looked like and what life on the plantation was like. But I think it's, you know, what this history of Saint-Doming reveals, and one of the reasons why I think the Haitian revolution is so radical when it breaks out is that it challenges some of the stories that the so-called West tells about itself in terms of how it became the West. And it likes to focus on the rise of democracy, liberal democracy, the rise of a particular

understanding of capitalism. What they don't want to see is what it required. And what it required was slavery, colonialism, a brutal transatlantic African slave trade, brutal plantation economy and regimes that churned through the bodies of people bought and enslaved from Africa. right so it's and to make this all happen you have the ideological assertion by planters and by their supporters that uh when we see the rise of scientific racism in in the late 1800s that justifies this particular order that has african slaves at the bottom doing the type of exploited work um that allows for the production of sugar which allows for the enrichment of individuals and the french empire yeah absolutely well said uh so yeah so you got you i think it would also help for people

to get a good idea, to go look at a map and actually look at the layout of the country and just get an idea of, you know, sort of where it's positioned in the Caribbean and the different parts of the country because, as you said, the north was more like plains-like, therefore it was perfect for sugar and the more mountainous regions, I think, in the south, were good for particularly coffee and, as you said, indigo. But the labor intensity of producing and processing sugar really can't be overstated. You're talking people working 12, you know, slaves being forced to work 12 to 15 hours every single day just in the cane fields, you know, harvesting and processing sugar, which is a brutal process overall and takes many, many workers, which also

led to something interesting that comes to play a huge role in this revolution, which is a disparity in numbers. So you have a situation in which I think I heard 90% of the people on the island right before the revolution are of African descent or, you know, mixed descent, and 10% or less are actual white French colonialists. So you have a huge disparity in number, partly caused by the necessity for so much labor to process all that sugar. And France is obviously profiting enormously off this, as you said, the most lucrative colony in the new world. So this is something that France very much wants to keep going. And as you said as well, also this is how real, you know, European democracy, all the stories it tells about itself.

This is how it actually became a global powerhouse. This is how it accrued so much wealth was through the brutal genocide of indigenous peoples and the enslavement of Africans and the forced slavery of them for hundreds of years to build up the economic power that is still a legacy that's with us today. So definitely look at a map if you haven't already. I mean, it's also like, I can't remember if it was A. Mesa is there or Phonon. I mean, they more or less summarize this process that you just described is like Europe is that place that never stops talking about man, but they also can't stop like enslaving and conquering and working people to death. Exactly.

Right. I mean, and that's that dialectic that's involved in any more accurate historical understanding of what the Enlightenment meant from the from seeing from the perspective of a slave plantation in St. Domain. I mean, I can give basics. It does really help to look at a map, right? So to give some sort of basic information, like there's three provinces in St. Domang, the north province is the wealthiest one. It has the largest number of sugar plantations. Its main city, La Cap, is more oriented toward Europe, right?

That's where most of the ships come in from Europe come into La Cap. South of that is the west province. The main city there is Port-au-Prince. They also have certain areas of sugar plantations. But as you mentioned, Brett, there's also a lot of coffee plantations. there because of the mountains, right? And mountains play a really important role in not only just separating these different regions, but also kind of they play their own role in the way that the Haitian Revolution plays out. I mean, in a certain sense, these mountains are refugees or spaces

of liberty for runaway slaves and then later slave revolutionaries. The South Province in the bottom part of Saint-Doming is a really interesting place because you don't see as many sugar plantations there. And it's actually a center of like contraband and illegal trade, right? The French had set up a monopoly trade system where a mercantilist system where the colony could only trade with France, right? So there was no sort of like America's wide free trade where what the French planters in Saint-Doming were producing. They could then trade with Spanish colonies or British colonies, right? Everything had to go back to France. But the South province was like the center of contraband, of piracy of smuggling. And it was actually more oriented to Caribbean

cities and even to cities on the north coast of South America like Cartagena, right? So it's a, it's a different place. It's probably the poorest place of the colony, and it's going to have a, it's a different type of historical development in the south. So those are kind of like the main cities and what the actual Saint-domain acts looks like. But it would really help if you could see a map of the island, but also just a map of the Caribbean and how it connects with the Atlantic world. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

I wanted to make a point about scientific racism, but I think I'll get into that later when we talk about the enlightenment and its implications. For right now, I kind of want to focus on bringing home the reality of what it was like for a slave before the uprising. So, sort of can you talk about what the daily life was like for African and slaves before the uprising and really talk about the sort of daily brutalities that they had to endure before the revolution? Yeah. Yeah, so I think, and you already mentioned this, but on the eve of revolution, the Saint-domain society was something like 90% enslaved peoples. Probably 50% to 60% of the entire enslaved population had been born in Africa. And they referred to as Balsals. And part of the reason why there's such a huge percentage of slaves direct having been born in Africa is because

this system, you know, it was cheaper essentially for planters to work their slaves to death with an average life expectancy of somewhere from three to seven years, and then going back and replenishing their forces by buying more slaves. So the slave population, which is 90% of the island, it's about 50-50 or 60-40 slave-born versus slaves born in the colony, which are referred to as Creoles. At the top, you have whites. There's something like 30,000 whites at the very top of society. They're divided between the big plantation owners, which are referred to as the big whites, and then the other group that the poor whites were referred to and mockingly by the slaves as Petit Blancs or Little Whites. But what's crucial to keeping the slave plantation economy and system society going is that there's a buffer group in between, right?

And these are the free persons of color. And they're about 28 to 30,000 on the island as well. And I'll talk about them in a little bit. But in terms of what slavery was like in Saint-Doming, it was a system based on ten. terror and violence, right? So if you don't mind, I want to read a little bit from CLR. James's book, Black Jacobins, because he gives a really, his words, I think, convey really well what life was like. Please do, yeah. The stranger in San Domingo was awakened by the cracks of the whip, the stifled cries, and the heavy groans of the Negroes who saw the sunrise, only to curse

it for its renewal of their labors and their pains. Their work began at daybreak. At eight, they stopped for a short breakfast and worked again until midday. They began. again at two o'clock and worked until the evening, sometimes until 10 or 11. A Swiss traveler has left a famous description of a gang of slaves at work. They were about 100 men and women of different ages, all occupied in digging ditches in a cane field. The majority of the naked are covered with rags. The sun shone down with the full force on their heads, sweat rolled from all parts of their bodies, their limbs weighed down by the heat, fatigued with the weight of their picks, and by the resistance of the clayey soul baked hard enough to break their implements, strained themselves to overcome every obstacle. A mournful silence reigned. Exhaustion was stamped on every face, but the hour of rest had not yet come. The piteleous eye of the manager patrolled the gang and several foremen armed with long whips, moved periodically between them, giving stinging blows to all, who, worn out by fatigue, were compelled to take arrest, men or women, young or old. Right?

And that's, there's also other testimonies of how when it comes to sugarcane, right, growing in the fields, you have these fire ants that like to, to set up nests at the stalk of the sugar cane. So these ants would then attack the slaves who were working the sugar cane, right? Sugar cane, these canes also, if you look at the leaves, they're extremely sharp. So there's also testimonies of how these leaves would cut the skin of slaves and then sweat and salt would get in there and just, again, you have ants eating at you, and then you have these cuts being filled with salt to just, while at the same time, you're trying to avoid getting whipped by an overseer or a slave driver.

This was a system overwhelmingly based on violence and coercion and terror. It only worked because there was overwhelming terror and violence. So one of the interesting thing about sugar plantations, though, and someone like CLR James makes this point in Black Jacobins, is that there's a certain modernity being expressed in these plantations, right? Because these sugar plantations can be considered is kind of like the world's first factories. because the vast majority of slaves, mostly, and now we have evidence that it's a lot, mostly women who are doing the field work, it's not just the field where they're tending to the sugar cane, cultivating the sugar cane, but then you also have sugar mills in which you have to process, you know, broken, we have to process the sugar cane into something we refer to as sugar, right? Process brown sugar or processed white sugar. Right. So there's a specialized division of labor that exists within these slave plants.

So the slave population reflects that division of labor. And you do have slave drivers who are black, who are enslaved, and they will occupy an important role in the Haitian Revolution, who are maintaining the surveillance and the punishment. And at the very bottom, you have the field workers, a lot of women doing the actual tending to the crops. But in the middle, you have artisans, carpenters, and skilled, you know, and more skilled laborers who actually have to process the sugar, came into something called sugar. So it's a very diverse internal population within the laborers, the enslaved laborers of a sugar plantation. Another key occupation, if we want to refer to that, within the enslaved population, are domestic workers, right? These are women who work in the homes of slave owners,

and these are women who are suffering sexual violence and rape. And this is also really important part of this system, for this system to work. And in some instances, the offspring of these race and these instances of sexual violence will later become part of the free persons of color population. But it just gives another form of violence that is sustaining this horrific exploitative institution of slavery, which is internally complex and complicated, and it has its own hierarchy that responds to the type of production and labor that's actually. occurring on the sugar plantation. So it's a terrible, and they're churning through bodies, right? Like there's, I think on average, from the early 1700s until 1790, it's an average of 10 to 15,000

slaves being brought every year to St. Germain. By the time you get to the 1770s, 1780s, it goes up to 30,000. And 1790 on the eve of revolution, you have 50,000 that are being brought to the island, right? So it gives you an idea that no one was expecting this revolution, the normal course of things in Saint-domain was to churn through tens of thousands of black bodies to produce sugar. And this was the lifeblood of the most important part of the global economy. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. The horrors cannot be overstated. And again, Franz Fanon, in Wretched of the Earth, helps us understand this rising of a sort of class hierarchy, but race comes first, right? Fanon always talked about the orthodox Marxist position of thinking that class is primary and then racial injustices or racial hierarchies are built on top of that more economic base.

But what France Fanon told us in Wretched of the Earth was that in the colonial context, that's not true. Race comes first and determines the class hierarchy. And so here you do see a division of labor. You see field slaves and house slaves. you see a rise of black sort of, you know, plantation owners or managers, sort of middlemen, if you will. And so you do see this rise of a class hierarchy, but it's fundamentally rooted primarily in race because it's a colonial context. And so that's an interesting thing to law. And then just talking about the brutalities, you know, obviously I don't want to just, you know, focus too much crudely on the terrible abuses.

But it is worth pointing out some of the things that happened before and during. the revolution, the counter-revolutionary forces, you know, there's crucifixions, there was putting black people on the stalks of sugarcane and setting them on fire, which were highly sort of inflammable. There was pouring boiling sugar on the heads of slaves to terrorize them, and then there was one particularly cruel treatment of burying slaves that were getting punished for whatever reason, up to their neck in dirt, and then pouring on their head sugar, and letting the insects slowly, you know, basically chew away at their face while they're still alive.

So the most horrific brutalities and cruelties you can imagine were inflicted on a daily basis on these African slaves for centuries, you know. It really, it's, it's heart-wrenching to think about the scope of this brutality. The slave owners were supposed to abide by this thing called the Cod Noir, or like it was a system of regulation that was passed by the French king, were passed to the French king in the late 1600s. The slaves masters were supposed to provide all sorts of things. But in that code, there's punishments that are allowed for runaway slaves, right?

So the wearing of chains, the wearing of iron collars. But the ones that are, like, reading this, like, that always get me is they were legally allowed to cut off the ears of runaway slaves that had been recaptured. Or they were also allowed to, quote unquote, legally cut the hamstrings of runaway slaves as punishment, right? it's just the horror of it is just that was essential to making this entire system work the one once one of the the the overwhelming form of punishment that like the revolutionaries will try to work against and one of their first demands when the revolution breaks out is the removal of this was the whip i mean that that's the overall the whip and then um burning down or getting rid of these private prisons that were built in plantations called cashos right so those are the the two the more wide widespread forms of violence that were practiced against the slaves at the very bottom of the of that hierarchy of that division of labor yeah it's reading some of these testimonies and descriptions it's just and that's not even describing you know that the middle passage it's not describing the multiple brands that individual people had to suffer right when they're captured in africa and they're sold in africa they get one brand when they're sold to another owner they get another brand they may have a brand that has to do with the the imperial power that that is allowing their sale every time that they're sold to a new owner they may get another brand right i mean that's multiple brands on these on these bodies you know and then not even to say the horde not even to mention the

of the of the middle passage and how many you know hundreds of thousands of people died on that on those slave ships across the atlantic um over hundreds of years right so it's again this knowing this history and the history that goes into what led to the Haitian revolution, completely it forces a reckoning with some of the stories that the West tells about itself. Yeah, absolutely. And one more thing that jumped to mind was during the counter-revolutionary attempts after the revolution had popped off, and there's an attempt by the French colonialists to regain control of the island.

One of the things that one of the more brutal commanders of the French colonial forces did was he put a bunch of slaves or, you know, revolutionaries into the whole of a ship and then pumped sulfur dioxide in. So you see even in these early moments of European colonialism the prerequisites to what really flourished in all of its macabre dimensions in the Holocaust. But in, you know, the 1700s you're seeing French colonial forces literally taking part in the mass gassing. of, you know, black people of slaves, of revolutionaries, of anybody they deemed against them in their interests. So just understanding the brutality that lies at the heart of everything European, I think, is a really important lesson to pull away from this and to see some of the tremors that would give rise later on or come into full dimension later on in some of

the worst aspects of like Nazi fascism and other forms of European brutality. So. Right, which is, you're right, which is what the Martinique and poet Amos is there argues, right, in the discourse on colonialism, which he says fascism begins in the colonies. And Europeans only become anti-fascist when it starts to be applied against them. I mean, that's a powerful way to rethink the emergence of fascism, right? And it really is in a colonial context that it emerges, right? And it's a Martinican poet like Amos is there who makes that argument, more or less around the same time as like someone like, like Hannah Arendt, who makes the same argument, but she would be against the Haitian revolution where Amos Azaire was fully enthusiastic about it.

Right. Yeah, wow, fascinating. So before we get into just how the revolution itself played out, maybe we can talk about some of the key historical figures and leaders of this revolution, what role African, Caribbean culture and religious practices played in the lead up to the revolution and even during the revolution, just anything in that general area that you find in. or worth noting? For sure. The one thing I should mention in terms of what society looked like. So I talked about the whites and I talked about the slave population. And just to

briefly talk about the free persons of color group that's in the middle, as you mentioned, right, some were slave owners, many worked for colonial militia, somewhere in the police, the colonial police. Many were offspring of white masters and enslaved women that managed to escape enslavement. Others, a smaller percentage were beneficiaries of mannubition. Right. In a certain way, it allowed the, at least the appearance that slavery or a slave plantation regime wasn't a totalizing institution, right? The idea that slaves could buy their own freedom or thanks to a generous, so-called generous master, they could gain their freedom, which some did, right? So someone like Toussaint-Breda, who now we know him more as Toussaint-Lilberture, he was a black, formerly enslaved man who gets freedom from his master. Sometimes I think the 1770s, and then we'll obviously play a huge role in the Haitian Revolution. Some of these free persons of color who participate in the colonial militia would actually play a role in the American Revolution, right? There's some of them participated with the French in the siege of Savannah, and there's reports at someone like

Andre Rigaud, who is a prominent free person of color, and will play an important role in the Haitian Revolution was actually at the siege of Savannah helping the Americans out against the British. So these free persons of color are key to running the colony. They're merchants, their police, their militia, their plantation owners, they're artisans, or small business owners. There's a group of women who are also managers of white-owned properties. So that group in the middle is really key. Before I get to some of the other leaders, talking about the small spaces of autonomy that slaves are able to carve out in their everyday existence, that will play a huge role in the Haitian Revolution.

There's two, right? So these slave owners, even though these masters were supposed to provide rations and food for their slaves, did not, right? What they did is they would give a day off for the slaves and encourage them to grow their own food on these small plots of gardens. Essentially these small gardens, right? And these are going to be really important later on in like the night post-colonial history of Haiti, right? Because really what these ex-slave turned cultivators will want to do throughout the 19th and 20th century is they want to own their own land and they want to grow their own products for their own subsistence. The last thing they want to do is go back to a plantation economy based on

large-scale sugar production. So these small gardens are really important. The other one is that you reference is religion, right? And the emergence of voodoo, which most Americans have this crazy understanding of what voodoo is totally inaccurate. And they watch the walking dead or something. They think that's what it is. But what voodoo ends up becoming in the in the St. of the 1700s, it's really like an amalgamation of different religious traditions, right? Certain Christian traditions, a variety of different African traditions, perhaps even Islamic traditions, because most of the slaves were either from West Africa or West Central Africa. And they created something new in Saint-domain. And really the creation of this

shared, syncretic, palimpsest of religious traditions allowed for communication for people who spoke different languages and came from different areas and came from different cultures, right? It became a medium to create community. And it also created, allowed them to create spaces of resistance and autonomy away from surveillance of the masters, and it allowed them to create community. This is going to be really important for the Haitian revolution. It also allowed them to create networks of organization. It allowed, it created leaders, right? So there's certain, not necessarily like voodoo priests, but there's certain individuals who become prominent within festivals, ceremonies that will then become leaders in the Haitian Revolution, but more than anything,

it allowed them to protect and to foster notions of freedom and dignity, away from the surveillance of the master, away from the plantation. And it's really, it inspired hope, it inspired resistance. It created communities of feeling. But in end, what it ended up doing is it unified a diverse group of African-born and Saint-domain-born slaves. And when we talk about when the revolution actually breaks out, according to folklore, it actually begins at one of these ceremonies in August of 1791, right? So it was a small space for common communication, for autonomy, for dignity, and to create community in the most heinous of circumstances, right? And it also, again, gives us this glimpse into the everyday life of slaves in which a system

that claims to be totalizing slavery, even in that kind of system, you have everyday forms of resistance by slaves to create something that will allow them to generate hope, dignity, and resistance. So some of the important figures, the first, I already mentioned Toussaint-Bretta or Toussaint-Lauverture. He will obviously become the main leader of the Haitian Revolution up until the very end when he's captured by the French and then sent to a prison where he dies. Initially, some of the more important leaders were ex-slave or mostly were enslaved peoples, right? And so when this revolution breaks out in late 1791, it's people like Bukmendiddy, Jean-François, George Bissau, and Sam Sussi.

Tucson Lover-Tur does start to participate from the very beginning, but he was a free man. He had been manumitted, so he was not a slave. Another prominent slave who will participate will be Jean-Jacques Desaline. Bochmendidhi is usually referred to as the first leader, and he's really interesting guy because apparently he came from a Senegambian region. of West Africa. So he may have come from a region where Islam was one of the most important religious traditions. So there's some accounts that identify Bookman

as some, at one point, being of an imam or some sort of Islamic leader. But anyway, he's in Jamaica. And as one of these rebellious Jamaican slave rebels that characterize the 1700s, he eventually gets sold to Saint-O-Meng, Saint-Doming is seen as like the worst, possibly the worst destination for a slave. Well, even the most rebellious of slaves will be disciplined.

But Bougainty came with an experience of also a rebellion because he had been in these rebellions in Jamaica throughout the late 1700s. And he's going to be the first main leader of the Haitian revolution. You also have free persons of color will play a key role. So I already mentioned Andre Rigaud, Alexandra Petion will be extremely important. We'll talk about him later. and also Jean-Pierre Boyer will be extremely important.

One of the key dynamics of division, it'll be a shifting dynamic of sometimes alliances and sometimes division that will characterize post-colonial Haiti will be this racial dynamic between free peoples of color, many of whom are mixed ancestry versus the formerly enslaved black revolutionaries. So another thing that I want to mention before we actually get into the historical narrative is that one of the, as I mentioned before, there's a specialized division of labor on the plantation.

Slave drivers and slave coachmen are essentially leaders, quote unquote leaders on these plantations. They will actually be some of the early leaders of the Haitian revolutions. And this will shock their white masters, right? Because they always figured that they could count on their slave driver or their slave coachman to be the most loyal of slaves. But in fact, when the revolution breaks out in August of 1791, they are some of the most important leaders. They're the ones who are allowed to go off the plantation, so they're able to create and forge this clandestine network of resistance and revolution that breaks out into the open on August 22nd, 1791. And you mentioned my French and trying to speak in the accent is absolute dog shit, but bear with me, Toussaint La Overture, that's the big leader that comes out of this.

That is sort of also the iconic image on the front of CLR. James's, the Black Jack. Was that Toussaint that he was basically trying to portray, and like the Jacobin magazine today has Touss sort of silhouette as their logo as well. Is that the same imagery of that person? Yeah, that's that's that's Tucson, right? And he at some point changes his last name from Brada to the overture, which means the opening. Dude, my French pronunciation is shit too. Like I feel so, I usually deal with like Spanish language sources and I'm like super cocky about it because Spanish was my first language. But today, like, today's conference. is humbling me once again because my French is horrible too. So we're the same on that count. Cool. Yeah. I've had listeners call me out for my horrible pronunciation. So I'm sorry I can't do anything about it. I'm doing my best. Yeah. Yeah. So again, there's so many figures and leaders and different factions that take place throughout. So if you can't keep track of all the different names in your head, that's okay. Just try to do your best. We'll put a lot on the table here because this is such a complicated affair. So, you know, don't worry too much if you can't keep every single name

straight in your head. But now that we've sort of gotten a lot of the historical context, the history of colonialism, we can talk about the revolution itself. And again, this is a revolution over a span of 12 to 13 years with plenty of peaks and valleys along the way. So it's not like one singular sort of uprising and event and two sides and then it's over. It's much more complicated than that. So keeping that in mind, let's talk a little bit about the revolution itself. How did it pop off initially? And maybe you can talk about sort of how it played out over several years. Yeah, this is a fun, complicated part where we have like, I don't know how many phases. But the important part, if we start in the 1780s, right, again, as I mentioned earlier, the age of revolution is also

the age of imperial rivalry. So one of the consequences of the French helping out the Americans, settlers colonials get their independence from Great Britain, was they were essentially bankrupted themselves doing so, right? So King Louis the 16th, which has recently lost his hand, at least a statue of him, lost his hand in St. Louis, I think, which is kind of amazing. He calls for an estate general in 1787, right? And he says, look, we're going to, this ancient body of the three estates, we're going to get together and figure out a way to kind of get out of our fiscal crisis

without losing our empire, without, you know, acceding ground to the British. I mean, and this is really the beginning. This will spark the French Revolution, right? It'll take us to 1789. It'll take us to the charging of the best deal, the creation of the National Assembly. And by 1791, the radicalization of the French Revolution, and eventually the execution of King Louis and Marie Antoinette, right, which then will spark off a European war.

So from 1789 to 1791, as the French Revolution is popping off, you have concerned white planters in St. Domain, who while they're scared that this, the end of the absolute monarchy to the shift to the constitutional monarchy might lead to some sort of reforms that they might not like. They also saw this as an opportunity to gain autonomy. So these white planters, what they wanted was to, one, get free trade, right? They wanted to trade with every, they wanted to trade their products with whoever they wanted to, but they They also wanted to have some sort of colonial governance for St. Domain for the colony. They wanted to have some sort of autonomy and power to run the affairs of the colony away from Paris. At the same time, you start to see this, the slow radicalization of the French Revolution. You start the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Free persons of color in St. Domain start to press for full political rights in the end of racial discrimination. Now, technically, they weren't supposed to suffer any of that, right? But after the seven years war between France and Britain in the 1760s, one of the consequences of that is an increase of racial discrimination and the outline or the preventing of free persons of color from occupying certain occupations in domain.

So the main two groups were kind of jockeying for position while the French Revolution is going in France are the white planters and then you have free people of color who want full political rights and racial discrimination. and then the small whites who hate the free persons of color and who don't really have much aligned class interest with the white planters, they also start agitating, right? And they're also going to embrace the Declaration of the Rights of Man that calls for full political equality, right? So those are the main groups who are popping off at the beginning from 1789 to 1791. You have, in the first fighting that occurs in 1790 and 1791 in the colony is really between white planters or the Petit Blancers. against free persons of color who will get granted full political rights and then who will lose full political rights based on the reactions and backlash of whites on the island. And eventually you have white planters and the small whites, the poor whites, come together

against free persons of color in 1791 and preventing them from gaining full political rights. What completely throws that or completely reconfigures the revolutionary situation on the island in the colony is what happened on August 1791 when the slave revolutionaries in the northern province, which has the most sugar plantations, the wealthiest part of St. Domain, start their own slave insurrection. So we think that sometime in August 15th, there had been a meeting between some of the prominent coachmen and slave drivers to set the plans and to set a time to begin with the revolution. Some of these participants were, you know, could not keep to themselves, they're talking about the insurrection a couple of them are captured and they're tortured brutally by

white planers who find out of the plan and um this the revolutionists have to move up uh the date of their insurrection to august 22nd and we think that the night before or or some nights before that the insurrection begins there is at least now to the revolutionary folklore of this era there there was some sort of religious ceremony in a place called boys kaiman where um some of the the main revolutionary leaders, like Bookman, gathered and started and engaged in some sort of voodoo tradition. Now, historians challenge whether this happened, some of this comes from oral history or oral folklore. Anyway, there's a lot of discussion. But there's a really interesting speech that is attributed to Bookman or a prayer in which he said that night, quote,

The Good Lord who created the sun, which gives us light from above, who rouses the sea and makes the thunder war. listen well all of you this god hidden in the cloud watches us he sees all that the white people do the god of the white people demands from them crimes our god asks for good deeds but this god who is so good demands vengeance he will direct our hands he will aid us throw away the image of the god of the whites who thirst for our tears and listen to the voice of liberty which speaks in the hearts of us all and on august 22nd 1791 this small slave revolution group, start to attack plantations. They start to kill plantation owners and their families, and they start burning down the actual structure and material manifestations of their oppression,

which are the sugar plantations and the sugar mills. And that completely changes everything. So some of the first leaders of this of the slave revolution that breaks out in August of 1791, bookman duty, Jean-François, George Vissau, and they're the main leaders who by the end of the year will start to try to negotiate with French authorities, not asking for independence, not asking even for the full emancipation in the end of slavery. Their first demands will be something like the elimination of the whip and three days rest to work on garden plots. So one historian talks about how these slave demands had a strong peasant feel to them. They wanted freedom for some of the slave leaders, but they wanted amnesty for all the slave insurgents. They wanted the

elimination of the week and three days rest to work on garden plots. But these demands will radicalize in the process of revolution. One of the lower-ranking officers in this initial army will be Toussaint-Liverture, right? And eventually he will slowly climb in prominence as the revolution goes on. The next phase, right, that usually – so the emergence of the slave – this unprecedented thing that no one was expecting, the slave insurrection in the north, that will start to spread to other parts of the island, that will force some of the planters, at least some of the French revolutionaries back in Paris, to reconsider their decision about rights, full political rights given to free people of color,

which they do in 1792. And that's what's forcing them to do this, what leads to the political rights for, for free people of color is the slave insurrection in the north. So again, these free persons of color do not have some sort of automatic, you know, affiliation or alliance with slaves. Some of them were slave owners. They weren't saying much about getting rid of slavery or the slave system. What they wanted were full political rights and the end of racial discrimination.

What changes this dynamic too in 1792, 1793 is when, once again, the French Revolution radicalizes, the royals lose their heads, and that initiates a broader European imperial war, like Austria, Great Britain, and Spain will declare war on Republican France that moved from a constitutional monarchy to a republic, and Britain and Spain will actually involve Saint-domain. And when they do so, the Spaniards, in particular, since they're on the island already, on the DR side of it, they promise any slave insurgents freedom and emancipation and formal ranks within the Spanish army if they join them.

And some of the most important slave revolutionaries and their leaders do take up the Spanish on their offer, including someone like Tucson, the Overture, who will become an officer in the Spanish army and who will fight against the Spanish Republicans who are trying to maintain hold on the colony. So that first phase from 1791, when the slave's insurrection begins,

last until 1793. And in the midst of that, the leaders in France are trying to figure out a way to, even as their revolution is radicalizing, they're still trying to figure out a way to maintain a particular colonial system of power in place. And that forces them to first negotiate with three persons of color. And then by 1793, 1794, it's going to force them to negotiate with these slave insurgents who they see is align themselves with the invading British or the invading Spanish. Tucson slowly builds up his army,

becomes one of the most important slave revolutionary leaders. And toward the end of 1793, he has a really famous proclamation that he issues from his camp in which he basically tells the French only immediate unconditional freedom and equality for all would lead me to switch sides once again

and to fight with you against the British and the Spanish. From then on out, a couple months later, After Tucson's proclamation in October of 1793, the French declare emancipation for all of France's colonies, right? And that decision is what convinces leaders like Tucson to abandon the Spanish and to switch back onto the Spanish Republican side. And by early 1794, slavery is abolished throughout the French Empire. This only happens because of these brave slave revolutionaries who first took up arms in August of 1791. So by 1794, you have an alliance, unwieldy alliance between free persons of color and slaves and French Republicans on the island fighting against British invaders and fighting against the Spanish.

And from 1794 up until 1798, 1799, it's Tucson Lover-Tur who will gradually rise to a position of power. to the point where he's, like, the main political force on the island. And this guy, by all accounts, is a genius. Like, he's, he's a tactical genius, strategic genius. The way he organizes his army, the way he handles diplomacy, right? By the end of the 1790s, he personally negotiated the withdrawal of the British. He's negotiating the withdrawal of the Spanish. By 1801, he writes a constitution for Saint-gaming.

Right? This man is, now he has his issues and he has his limits that we can talk about. But he's a pretty, he's one of these individuals that stand out in history, even though someone like CLR. James would say Tucson didn't make the revolution. The revolution made Tucson. So that's also something to keep in mind so we can prevent from devolving to some sort of great man of history version of the Haitian revolution. By 1795, Tucson had managed to defeat. his former Spanish allies and actually not just defeat them, but also kick them off entirely off the island, right? And the Spanish sea, the entire island of Hispaniola, to the French, to Saint-Domagne. The rest of the 1790s is just Touss consolidating his power in the north and in the west. He's fighting against the British.

By 1797, 1798, as the French Revolution is starting to go its conservative direction, direction, Tucson, the revolution in Haiti is going in the opposite direction, right? Throughout the rest of the decade, Tucson is not saying Saint-Domang is going to be an independent nation. He's not saying we want independence from France, but he's very much acting like the leader of an independent, or at the very least, an autonomous new country in the Caribbean. And that's going to bring him into conflict with that one famous military officer in the French army who will rise to fame, right, nearly 1800, late 7,000. 1890s or the 1800s, Napoleon Bonaparte. So that takes us to the expulsion of the British, and then by 17, and I'm totally skipping over like a lot of details, but just so we don't lose our audience, by 1799, again, in Tucson's effort to consolidate his power

in all three provinces of the colony, he essentially declares war on the free persons of color who are in control of the South Province under the leadership of Andre Rigaud. And he sends Jean-Jacques de Saline, his main lieutenant, to essentially reconquer the area and to bring it under his control. It's called the War of the South. The other name that illustrates a little bit more of how this war was fought was called the War of the Knives.

And most of the times this war is cast as a racial war between the black slaves versus the mixed free persons of color. But the issue was much more complicated. You had slaves fighting on the mixed persons of color side and vice versa. What this was really about was who was going to emerge as the unquestioned political authority on the island. And at that point, it was between Tucson and Andre Rigaud and Tucson won. And this is where Jean-Jacques Desaline starts to gain some of his reputation as just completely being like a brutal fighter. There's a really excellent historian of Haiti, Julia Gaffield, who's on Twitter, if you're interested in looking her up, who's currently working on a biography of Jean-Jacques Dessaline.

And for a long time, people portray Jean-Jacques D'Saline as kind of like this illiterate, barbaric, savage, slave-turned revolutionary leader. And he's gotten a bad rap. But he did know how to wage war in a really effective way, and he often did the things that Tucson did not want to do, right? so he wouldn't dirty himself and he wanted to maintain a certain image as a political leader of St. Domain. One of the interesting things to mention throughout the 1790s, particularly toward the end, is that the U.S. is actually helping Tucson Loverchurcher's forces, right, particularly through trade. Now, the U.S. is not giving them free weapons and free supplies. They're selling it to the Haitians.

But under the presidency of John Adams, there is U.S. support for Tucson's forces to the point where the U.S. maybe blockaded some of the ports in the South to prevent Andre Rigaud's forces from getting supplies and that helped Tucson and Jean-Jacques de Salle win the war of the South and bring the entire colony under his control. So Tucson emerges as the young question leader of St. Domain by 1800, 1799, 1800. But the issue with Tucson, and this is going to be one of the main points of conflict for the rest of the revolution and then really for the next hundred years or so of Haitian history is that Tucson felt that the best way to essentially keep this colony economically afloat was to re-institute that sugar or recreate that sugar plantation system but not using slavery

but using really coerced wage labor and that will bring him into conflict with these ex-slave black revolutionaries who had much who had a peasant demand Right? They had no desire to go back to the plantation. What they wanted was their own plot of land. They wanted economic and political autonomy, which they felt they had gained through warfare and through revolution. They had won it for themselves. And that really, that type of class, that type of conflict over what the economy of St. Domain would look like really weakened Tucson's position. So by the time he writes a constitution in 1801, his position, his popularity is suffering because he's essentially appointed. some of his military officers as commanders and drivers on these plantations. He institutes essentially what is a agrarian militarism or a military discipline applied to plantation production that becomes highly unpopular. His own nephew, this general of his, who he adopted as a nephew, Moise, protested against this system and was accused of having sponsored a peasant rebellion in the north in 1801, and Tucson actually had them executed. The guy who had

fought with him since the early 1790s, who had served as his, he adopted as his nephew, who had served as one of his most trusted officers. He executed him. Yeah. So, Toussat is really, he's in a difficult place, right? Because you're like, okay, how do I get the, how do I generate the income and the resources to keep, to defend this colony and to preserve liberty, right? The one thing that he and all the rest of the people, the black people and the free persons of color on the island agreed on, was there were going to be no return of racial discrimination. There was going to be no return of slavery. So how do you prevent that from happening? And from Tucson's perspective, he thought recreating this plantation economic system, but not using slave labor,

but essentially using wage labor, which the distinction is kind of, if you read some of the testimony, it's kind of hard to parse the difference out, really weakens this political position. At the same time, he's doing this. Napoleon rises to power in France. And the fact that Tucson is seemingly crafting an autonomous political route for Saint-domain, the fact that he's writing constitutions for the colony, right? The colony sheds no business writing a constitution from the perspective of the French. Napoleon pretty much decides in late 1801, 1802 that Tucson literature had to be removed. And that brings us to 1802 when Napoleon sends his brother-in-law, General Emmanuel LeClerc.

He sails to St. Domain with 22,000 soldiers. Eventually, it'll swell up to 80,000 soldiers. They get there in May of 1802, and they more or less conquer the island without trying to seem like they're conquering the island. They want to demonstrate overwhelming military force to prevent any sort of rebellion against their presence, and they more or less succeed, right? They co-op most of Tucson's most important military officers and supporters who will side with the invading French army. So the French Army is there. They're not being honest about what they're doing there, but everyone more or less has an idea that they're there to take out Tucson,

and they may be there to re-institute slavery. So it's really interesting. There's a series of letters that LeClerc writes to Napoleon in 1802 and 1803. And the one thing that he says is, like, please do not re-institute slavery anywhere, because if those rumors come back, I'm going to lose the support of some of these revolutionary generals that are supporting me now and not too soon. So by June of 1802, the clerk finally arrests Tucson Lovriture, arrest his wife, arrest his sons,

they're placed on a ship and irons, and they're sent to France. And eventually Tucson will be sent to this mountain prison where he will die in 1803. At the same time, there are slave, ex-slave revolutionary leaders who never crossed over to the French. So you have some of their former allies like Jean-Jacques de Saline, Henry Christoph, who are actually working for the French to put down their former slave ex-slave revolutionary allies. It's a really messy situation. When Tucson boarded his ship, he purportedly said, quote, in overthrowing me, you have cut down in Saint-Domang, only the trunk of the tree of liberty.

It will spring up again by the roots, for they are numerous and they are deep. What changes the dynamic in 1802 and 1803 is when Napoleon indeed does re-institute slavery. And slavery is reinstituted not first in St. Domain, but in some of its other Caribbean holdings. So it's restored in Martinique. And then there's also rumors that it will be restored in the island of Guadalupe. And one of the really interesting things about the Haitian Revolution, a historian named Julius Scott recently published a book about it called The Common When, is that you have a really interesting formal and informal networks of communication

throughout the Caribbean and throughout the Atlantic world that's bringing news and spreading news of the Haitian Revolution everywhere. So actually people who are in Martinique and in Guadalupe will escape to Saint-Doming, and they will start to spread rumors that Napoleon and the French are reinstituting slavery. And that is a key moment in which a lot of these revolutionary generals who had abandoned to side with the French will then defect once again. And by October of 1802, they will start to fight against LeClerc and his French army, which at that point are completely decimated, right?

One of the things that attacks the French is something called yellow fever. And these French troops were amongst the best in the world, right? They're battle-hardened. They were some of Napoleon's best troops that he had used in Europe. Of the 34,000 troops who landed initially, something like 24,000 were dead by the end of 1802. So the – and LeClerc knows this. he himself is extremely sick. And once you have an all-out fight between LeClerc's French army and these revolutionary generals who have defected,

it becomes something that LeClerc refers to as a war of extermination. And the violence just starts to increase exponentially, right? So the French will do something horrible like you cited the anecdote before. And then Jean-Jacques Desaline will respond blow by blow because that's what he did. So it's, you know, you have things like the gassing of prisoners that you mentioned, LeClerc and his French generals were sought to use mass drownings for captured Haitian revolutionaries. They'll just throw them into the harbor. They'll tie a sack of flower around their neck and they throw them into the harbor. But there's also examples of black resistance in the face of this type of counterinsurgency. There's a, there's a, in one letter, LeClerc writes that 50 prisoners had been hung.

But these men die with, quote, an incredible fanaticism. They laugh at death, and it is the same with the women. And this is really important because something that comes out in the clerk's letters is that the women are doing a lot of the frontline fighting. Indeed, they have been doing a lot of the frontline fighting since the revolution emerged in 1791. And throughout the process, the women are always singled out by the French as being the most fanatical, the most brutal, the ones that are demanding the most dramatic instances of vengeance against the French. which is really interesting, right?

And in a lot of histories of revolutionary movements, the women are always written out. But they're there, right? And here they're there, particularly as fighters. By October of 1802, Leclerc knows that his position is untenable. And he writes a letter to Napoleon, in which he writes, quote, here is my opinion on this country. We must destroy all the blacks of the mountains, men and women,

and spare only the children under the 12 years of age. We must destroy half of those in the... the plains and we must not leave a single colored person in the colony who has worn an epaulet. So what essentially he's calling for is killing everybody above a certain age who knew what freedom felt like, who remembered the horrors of slavery, but who also had lived freedom. And that's what the counterinsurgency from 1802 to 1803 by the French would essentially consist of, right, this war of extermination. In this moment, by late 1802, early 1803, the clerk actually dies he's sick in november 1802 um that jean jac desaline emerges as the leader

of this new revolutionary army and they start to call themselves the army of the incas which is really interesting like the incas in south america then they call themselves the sons of the sun and then they just adopted a more generic name which is the indigenous army right and so they they explicitly adopt like an anti-colonial um identity as a revolutionary army against the French and against French colonialism. For the rest of 1803, the replacement of LeClerc is even this guy by the name of General Rochambeau. He's even more brutal. He brings in Cuban dogs that he uses to kill black and free persons of color revolutionaries with. They're actually, you know, they're terrible on the battlefield, if you read the accounts,

but they're used to terrorize the civilian population. Columbus brought in those dogs as well like centuries before but again to give you an idea of these like multiple layers of colonial power in this area by May of 8th so there's the brutal fighting throughout 1803 by May of 1803 there's a new flag

that emerges by the indigenous army in which the white stripe is ripped out and now it's only black and red right and by November of 1803 Rochambe negotiates directly with desalines and he leaves the island and the French leave the island. And Saint-domain is essentially free of French colonial power. So by the end of 1803, they start to work on a Declaration of Independence that's modeled on

the U.S. Declaration of Independence. They produced one on the last day of 1803. De Saline and some of the officers read it and they're like, nah, this is not hardcore enough. One of the officers said, quote, in order to drop our active independence, we need the skin of a white to serve his parchment, his skull as an ink well, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for a pen. Okay, that's awesome. So the prize for this guy speaking up was like, okay, you have to rewrite this all night because on January 1st, 1804, we're going to have to declare it and read it aloud to everybody. And the new declaration is really interesting because one, they announced the change into the name, right?

There's no longer Saint-Domeg in Haiti, which is the name of the island given to it by its original Thaino Inhabitants. But the whole declaration represents the Haitian revolution as a negation of not just French empire and French colonialism, but as a negation of all European empires in the Americas. And there's a really cool line of the declaration I'm going to read, because it gives you an idea of this. Citizens, it is not enough to have expelled the barbarians who have bloodied our land for two centuries. It is not enough to have restrained those ever-evolving factions that one after another mock the specter of liberty that France dangled before you. we must with one last act of national authority forever assume the empire of liberty and the country of our birth we must take any hope of re-enslaving us away from the inhuman government that for so long kept us in the most humiliating torpor in the end we must live independent or die independent or death let these sacred words unite us and be the signal of battle and our reunion it's every time i read that it's just like damn it's so good but um it's you know it like evokes like what chege of lot of will be saying in the 50s and 60s, right?

Patriot or Muerre or death. And Haiti gets renamed. The new flag is red and blue, minus the white stripe. The rest of 1804 becomes really infamous in the history of Haiti in an international perspective. And this is like, you know, some of these white genocide conspiracy people really focus on what happened in Haiti in spring of 1804 when Jacques Desaline fearing that the remaining French white colonists on the island were plotting conspiracies and they were trying to plot the return of French power, he orders most of their killings. A few whites were spared, a segment of Polish

soldiers who had come over with the clerk because they defected over to the side of the revolutionaries, they were spared this in a small colony of Germans who had been in same domain before the revolution. They were also spared. But something like 1 to 2,000 whites were killed by, on the orders of Jean-Jacques de Saline in the spring of 1804. And in his proclamation, to describe this, he said, quote, yes, we have paid these true cannibals back, crime for crime, war for war, outrage for outrage. I have avenged America. Damn.

So to me, this guy who went from being an illiterate slave to the leader of the most consequential revolution in the Americas, casting the whole revolution as this broader historical vengeance against European colonists and conquistadors. To me, like, to me, I don't know, it grabs me. That last line of, I have avenged America is really powerful. But someone like CLR James says that that act and those killings really worked to isolate Haiti on the international scale, but I mean, to be honest, they would have been isolated anyway, right? In the U.S., you now had Thomas Jefferson as president, slave owner, rapist, who was not going to, you know, gave any sort of recognition to this successful slave revolution turned into the first black state in the Americas.

Yeah. All right. So that's like, and in 1805, there's a new constitution that's written and it makes, it abolishes slavery forever. It gets rid of racial discrimination. And it provides for freedom of religion, which is really important. One thing that I forgot to mention is that Tucson really cracked down on voodoo as a Catholic. Desaline will not do that, that this constitution will have freedom of religion and worship. but it will also make Desaline governor or emperor for life.

And really this constitution of 1805 will show that strain that will characterize Haiti for the next decades between democracy and autonomy that people from below are demanding. But then there's also this like militaristic authoritarianism that's waged in the course of revolution that becomes a temptation for some of the revolutionary leaders. Yeah. Damn.

Well, you just amazingly covered 13, 14 years of history in that entire process, I really appreciate you articulating all of those nuances as well as you can. It's a lot of history to cover, and you obviously did it expertly. You talked a little bit about, you know, what happened immediately afterwards. Maybe we can just dive a little bit deeper into that before we move on and reflect on the legacy of the revolution. So like, you know, what happened in the immediate aftermath of the revolution? What did the new society look like compared to the old? And maybe you can even talk about some of the reactions to the revolution after it was completely successful from American and European

leaders and thinkers of the time. Sure. Yeah. So starting with Haiti, right? So Desaline is assassinated in 1806. So a year after the new constitution is promulgated, he's assassinated by some of his former revolutionary generals, particularly Alexander Petion and Henry Christoph. And Desaline will then, he dies, but he will, I think.

achieve something that is, that he's the only, I think he's the only revolutionary leader who achieves this, he becomes an Iwa in the pantheon of voodoo, which is essentially like he becomes like a deity in this pantheon, which I think is really interesting. And following the assassination, Haiti is essentially divided into two countries. You have the Republic of Haiti in the south, and you have the kingdom of Haiti and the north. And they will remain divided until, I think the 1820, early 1820. And some of those divisions, again, reflect the racial divisions between free persons of color and the descendants of slaves and ex-slaves, but also some of those, what I mentioned earlier, right, either going with the autonomy and the demands for direct democracy or economic democracy coming from these ex-slaves turned peasants or going with the agrarian militarism and plantation economy represented by the figure of Tucson. And actually the Kingdom of the North will go that route. They'll institute a grain militarism, plantation economy under Henry Christoph, but the South, under Alexander Petion, will become a republic, and they will encourage small peasant landholders in a peasant subsistence economy. The Republic of the South is really interesting because in the early 1810s, they will host a revolutionary from South America,

who's essentially fleeing for his life after his revolution against the Spanish failed. And this was Simon Bolivar. So Simon Bolivar goes to the Republic of the South. He's sheltered by Alexander Petion. He's given weapons. He's given soldiers on the promise that when he succeeds, he will abolish slavery in Grand Colombia in the north part of South America. Wow.

At the same time, in the kingdom of Haiti in the north, you have a really, fascinating figure by the name of Baron de Vasty, who becomes like this really vociferous anti-colonial critic. Like he has a great piece. He has a great track that just a completely it's kind of described by a historian as like a counter-enlightenment writing, like where he articulates like a more radical understanding of the possibilities of the Enlightenment, if viewed from the perspective of Haiti and the slave revolution. So it's a historian Marlene D-A-U-T who writes a lot about the Baron the Bestie. And it's fascinating. fascinating figure, like this anti-colonial tract that's published in, like, 1814, 1850 is really fascinating.

In a broader global level, right, like the fact that Napoleon failed to recapture St. Domain leads to the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, right? And that enables U.S. settler colonialism. It enables the brutal dispossession of indigenous lands in the southeast and the Midwest. It enables essentially the emergence of King Cotton, right? And so the Napoleon's defeat enables the United States to become what Thomas Jefferson referred to as their Empire of Liberty, right? Which we now, that empire of liberty, we know what it's the white supremacist settler colonial vision. So it's extremely important for the history of the U.S.

19 generals, French generals died in Saint-Doming from 1801 to 1803. Both England and France lost more soldiers in Saint-Domeg than they did at the famous Battle of Waterloo. So, I mean, this is an historically consequential event for the French and the British empires, even though they don't want to admit it, right? This also, Haiti plays a key role in dismantling the international slave trade. So in 1807, the United Kingdom abolishes a slave trade, and they will use the Royal Navy to crack down on the transatlantic African slave trade, right? in part, motivated or pushed by what the Haitian Revolution did, right? Because another thing that happens is that spread, the news of the Haitian Revolution spread throughout plantation economies and societies in the Americas. And it inspired slave revolutions everywhere.

It inspired Gabriel's Rebellion in 1800 in Virginia, Richmond, Virginia. It inspired the largest slaverable in U.S. history, which was the 1811 German Coast Rebellion in Louisiana. these were sugar plantation slaves. They were carrying cane knives, chanting freedom or death. Their slave driver, their leader, was from Saint-Domang. They had copies of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man in their slave quarters. This is a very direct impact, right? You had Denmark Vessi's Rebellion in Charleston, South Carolina.

He actually had spent part of his youth as a slave in St. Domain before his master went to Charleston, South Carolina. his 1822 rebellion in Charleston was inspired partially by the Haitian revolution. You had slave rebellions in Cuba and Jamaica also inspired by the Haitian revolution, which accounts partially for why these European powers tried to isolate Haiti, right, and prevent their example from spreading. But because of ports, because of sailors, because of ships, because of smugglers, the news and the examples of this revolution spread everywhere. and it inspired some to rebellion.

Now, I'll just, the one messed up part, right? I think one messed up, right? Haiti had to essentially pay for its revolution and its freedom. The only way that it was able to gain French recognition occurred in 1825 when a now-united Haiti led by Jean-Pierre Boyer confronted a French fleet that had sailed to Haiti, and they said basically pay for, France and indemnity for having gained your freedom or we're going to bombard your major cities with our fleet. So Boyer agreed to pay France 150 million francs, later modified to 90 million

francs, essentially a tax for having won their freedom for revolution. Now, Haiti was unable to pay the fee. So what they started doing was they started taking out loans from French banks. So there were some years where like 30, 40, 50 percent of the budget, national budget was being used to pay back this this this debt to the french haiti would finish paying the the principal in 1883 france took 10 years to recognize this like it take them 10 years be like all right you paid it off but Haiti kept paying the interest on the loans that they used to pay this indemnity until 1947 god damn so so so when people like look at Haiti and it's like oh it's the poorest country in the western hemisphere and they try to pathologize that this is the kind of history they don't want to pay

attention to. The Haitians were always worried that it was going to be the French who returned to reinstitute slavery or take away their freedom. But the power that actually came and conquered them was the U.S. And the U.S. invaded and occupied Haiti in 1915. They put down a peasant-resistant movement that was recasting itself as a second Haitian revolution. And the Americans dominated the island from 1915 until 1934.

FDR used to joke that he wrote the new people. constitution of Haiti while he was Secretary of the Navy in the late 1910s. There's an instance where the excuse was Haiti couldn't pay back its loans to Wall Street banks that necessitated the marine invasion. So there's an actual instance in which U.S. Marines take literally grab Haitian gold reserves, put it on a ship, and then take it to the National City Bank in New York City, like a straight-up jack move. There's like no way to describe it as anything else. And they alter the constitution that would allow foreigners to own land in Haiti. This had been something that was in the 1805 constitution that prevented foreigners from owning land. You had to be a Haitian citizen, which

meant you were a black citizen. If you were a Haitian citizen, that meant you were black. The Americans alter the constitution that allowed foreigners to own land in Haiti. And that, you can imagine what kind of consequences derived from that, right? And then Haiti, is dominated by the Americans from 1915 and 1934. They will become a dictatorship in the late 1950s, led by Francois Duvalier, Papa Doc. His son will take over in the 70s baby doc until he's overthrown in a popular rebellion in 1995 and 1986.

You know, I think, and I think a good group of historians would agree is that Haiti continues to pay for having the temerity of having launched a successful slave revolution and having become the first modern black state in the early 19th century. In 2003, actually, Jean Bertrand Aristide, who was a former liberation theology priest who was a prominent participant in 1980s popular rebellion,

became president of Haiti. In 2003, he demanded France pay back $21 billion. He said, this is what we paid you guys for the indemnity. We want that back as reparations. And he started to go around the different Caribbean nations, trying to organize them to demand reparations from all the former colonial powers. But Jean Bertrandarcy was overthrown in a coup in 2004.

He's basically woken up in the middle of the night. He's taken out of his residence, placed on an American airplane, and taken to the Central African Republic. And that's me, like not even talking about the 1990s and what Clinton did, and then what the Clinton Foundation has done in Haiti. But this country has had to pay continuously

for having launched the first and only successful slave revolution in the Atlantic world. Damn. Damn. Well, yeah, that's a very important way to frame it. And after colonialism comes neo-colonialism, comes more implicit and perhaps indirect ways of dominating through economic and loans. And, you know, that entire apparatus, which anybody that is understanding of imperialism is fully aware of. And then once again, too, if people that know the history of Vietnam, we see the American colonial, empire pick up where the French colonial empire left off. And so, you know, pushing out the French in both Haiti and Vietnam was only the prelude to having to battle with the American Empire right after it. So these legacies are still very much at play today. They still shape

these countries in a lot of different ways. And the economic extractive apparatus is still fully at play as well, siphoning money from the global south into European and American and pockets and banks. So I want to touch on the Enlightenment and then maybe go on to the last question reflecting on the uprising happening in the U.S. right now. But focusing on the Enlightenment, I think too often the primary influence

for the Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, gets credited to the European Enlightenment, and it makes sense that European academics and historians would over-emphasize the role of the Enlightenment on the Haitian Revolution. But it did play a role, just among many other roles. So I was hoping you could talk a little bit about that and sort of the racism and academia that it might imply.

And then maybe mention what other factors aside from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution went into creating the conditions for the Haitian Revolution. That's a important question. That's a huge question. Look, I think many accounts have it backwards, right? I think the, and even CLR. James, right, that titling his book, The Black Jacobin, he's already casting the role of, someone like Tucson Lovercher in a certain way, right? But if I think it's the opposite, right? I think historians like Laurent Dubois, who has an amazing book called The Avengers of the New World, I highly recommend it. He makes the point that it's, I think, the other way around, right? Like,

it's not the French Revolution or the U.S. revolution that are pushing forward not just a rhetorical, but an actual practice of universal rights, of universal human rights of democracy. It's actually the Haitian revolution who is doing this, and it's forcing the French to do it within that particular dynamic, right? If it hadn't been for the slave revolutionaries, you don't get the abolition of slavery. You don't get the winning of political rights and the interracial discrimination for free persons of color in Saint-Domein, right? It's the slave revolution that's driving this. It's the slave revolution that's radicalizing a broader Atlantic world revolution process that then spreads to different islands and generates rebellions and other slave rebellions.

So I think if anything, I like how Barron de Vastay point puts it, right, and the historian Marlene talks about it. It's that they're proposing a counter enlightenment in which they're actually, from the perspective of a slave, from the perspective of a plantation economy, they're basing their critique of enlightenment from that position, not from some discursive philosophical rumination of what is man and what is the right of man, but they're actually basing it on a slave plantation in the person of an African slave, a black slave. And if we look at it like that, the Haitian revolution is really the most important contributor to the history of democracy and universal human rights. Because they did not, they did not, this revolutionary process

did not content itself with words and rhetoric. They actually put these radical, potentially radical values and ideas into practice, which then made them even more radical, which then made them really dangerous. So the enlightenment, and people who talk about the enlightenment, some asshole like Stephen Pinker, right? Like, they love to talk about the enlightenment. They love to talk about the achievements of the enlightenment and progress. But there's no enlightenment without that counter-enlightment,

without the story of slavery, without the story of racism, without the story of a particular mode of capitalism in the 18th century that fundamentally depends on slavery. And a lot of defenders of capitalism now don't want to admit that. Right. And there's a lot of academic discussions on the role of slavery in U.S. capitalism, right, in Latin America as well. Right. But I think if you if you're looking for the quote unquote true or more radical values of the Enlightenment as actually being practiced, then you have to go to Haiti and you have to go to the Haitian Revolution. It is the, to quote Lauren Thubois, the historian, it is the most radical assertion of the right to have rights in human history.

They were asserting the right to have rights because as slaves, they had no rights. And the fact that they won and they actually put that into practice. And by the 1810, someone like Baron de Vasty was saying that slavery was a crime against humanity. Like, that's radical. That's revolutionary. And I think a lot of at least popular understandings of the Enlightenment and even some academics have failed to grapple with that. And they're more content to leave the Haitian revolution either silenced or off to one side. They're content to say, well, they won because yellow fever took out all the French.

or they use the outside agitator model to explain it away. But this is, if we look at it as a broader global history of democracy and universal human rights, this is the revolution that actually accomplished it. Yeah. Against all odds. Absolutely. Yeah. The way I phrase it is the Haitian revolution was simultaneously not as inspired by the European Enlightenment ideas as many white Europeans often like to think

and a more robust fulfillment of those ideals. than ever achieved by France or America. Like, both of those things are true at the same time. And, like, you know, by overemphasizing the white European philosophy and the legacy of the Enlightenment, what it serves to do is erase the influence on the Haitian revolution of, as you mentioned, many previous slave rebellions of African and Afro-Caribbean cultural and religious practices,

pre-existing forms of communalism, culturally imported from Africa, etc. And I think we both agree that there is this, asymmetry between the ideas preached by Enlightenment thinkers then and now the Stephen Pinkers, the Sam Harris's of the world, the people who think of themselves as the torch-bearers for the Enlightenment, there's an asymmetry between the ideas they preach and the actual real-world

practices of the adherence of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, the European Enlightenment, has always been scarred and undermined directly by the fact that all those high-falutin ideas in practice were built on the backs of genocided peoples, of enslaved peoples, and continue to this day to be built on the back of people in the global south

through the extractive neocolonialist and imperialist plundering of the entire world. And so when we think about the European Enlightenment, we have to automatically and always think about what it actually means in the real world and not just what the thinkers of the Enlightenment like to pretend it is, which is like this holy beautiful blossoming

of philosophy, and thought that guided the democracies into the modern world or whatever. And they always lop off the other side of the entire Enlightenment, which is drenched from head to toe in blood. So I think it's important to push back on those narratives that over-emphasize that because I think it is also, it's that legacy of racism that tries to take away something from black uprisings and from black revolutionaries that we still see today.

Yeah, and these are some of the same people who are mad that statues are being brought. down right now, which I'm all for taking down these statues. But just two things to mention that I kind of thought about why you were speaking. And I totally agree. One is it's also not entirely an Enlightenment project because as one historian talks about John Thornton, he says that when we write about the history of the Haitian Revolution, it's also a political history of Africa, of Western and Central Africa, because so many of the troops, more than half probably, had been born in Africa, particularly in the Congo, in the Kingdom of the Congo, and had been veterans of these type of military, the type of wars that had been generating

enslaved captives in Central and West Africa, right? So they're bringing political traditions and ideas and military experience in ideas, particularly guerrilla warfare, that are radically different, right? And they're applying them in the 12, 13 years of the Haitian Revolution. And there they're mixing with what other Creole slaves had already created on their own. in voodoo within their own internal communities, right? So, yeah, it's totally, it's much more complex. The second point I want to bring up is that the impact of the Haitian revolution

is also really important when you consider, like, the radical black diasporic tradition, right? So people like CLR James, Eric Williams, A. Mesa Zaire, George Padmore, Claudia Jones, Franz Farns, Shirley Graham Dubois, Du Bois, Louis Thompson, Patterson, Marcus Garvey, Charlotte Abbas, Walter Rodney, that you did a great episode on. Cedric Robinson, Angela Davis and Sada Shakur, like these people in reflecting on the Haitian revolution, they all present a really radical challenge to all Eurocentric political traditions and historical narratives. So Fanon has a great quote that I tweeted the other day where he says, Marxist analysis

should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem. And I think that this radical black diaspora tradition from the 19th century and Baron de Vastie to these traditions that begin in the early 20th century with people like Marcus Garvin and Claudia Jones, right? They're all there doing something, intellectually, doing something similar to what the Haitian Revolution does, right?

Which is pushing certain universal values that are being espoused by certain political traditions, pushing those to the very limit, to its consequential logical end, right? And in doing so, they're challenging white supremacy, They're challenging the rise of capitalism. They're challenging the rise of the West. And I think in that, I think the intellectual, the intellectual heirs of the Haitian revolution,

both within Haiti and then in the broader black diasporic tradition, it's so important. And it's something that continues to inspire me today. I read some of these people thanks to historian Robin Kelly, who was like one of my role models, one of my favorite historians. They're there to, they're always there presenting the most radical challenges to, the structures of domination that we currently, historically and are currently are living through. The fact that today we still have to say something like Black Lives Matter speaks to the enduring structures that the Haitian revolutionaries were trying to get rid of all the way back

in the late 18th century, early 19th century. Yeah. Beautifully, beautifully said and an incredibly important point. And that's really a major point of the legacy of the Haitian revolution overall that continues to live on today. And speaking of that, the last question I want to ask you today, bringing all of this into the present moment, you know, America today is in the middle of its own uprising and perhaps even the beginning stages of a revolution. It's too early to tell how this will go, but it's certainly the groundwork for what could be a revolution. And once again,

we see black revolutionaries leading the charge for real change in this country. What can we learn today from the Haitian revolution? And does it offer us any concrete guidance in our own current struggle against white supremacy here in the U.S.? Oh, that's a big question. What can it teach us? I think it's a similar teaching to, you know, what you and I discussed, what, two episodes ago when we talked about Chile, right? And you played that Salvatore I ended his last speech, right?

Where he's talking about history is made by the people. And I think one of the things that the Haitian Revolution, like most revolutionary movements in the Americas, What they teach us is that power comes from below, particularly if it's organized. And this is something that we're seeing today, right? It's really interesting to watch play out in real time how you have black activists and organizations pushing forward these revolutionary messages from below guided by that idea that we are the many, right? We are the many and the people who oppress are the few because fundamentally it's the people from below who make history, the people from below who are pushing history. forward, or at least attempting to produce a more egalitarian, more equitable future.

So I think that's always, that's always an important lesson. Another one that I always think about is that when the slave revolution broke out in August of 1791, those are kind of like the high ties for the planters, right? It's not, the revolution didn't break out because, you know, because there'd been like a gradual breaking down of social conditions. It happened because people organized and they said enough is enough. And I think that's what we're witnessing right now. And it's so inspirational for me to see students of mine who are out there organizing

and out on the streets, you know, using some of the historical knowledge that they've gained and then putting it into practice. I think when we look at the history of the United States and we look at how progress is achieved, you know, to paraphrase Frederick Douglass, it's achieved through struggle. And it's usually through the struggle of black communities. it's usually through the struggle of Native American communities and Latin X communities. To a certain extent, you know, to a certain extent, you know, finding a way to create a multiracial coalition that involves those groups and finding white allies as well, which the Haitian

revolutionaries certainly had when they, when they launched their revolutionary. I think that's a key, right? And I think white supremacy, I think something that's useful to remember. And I think if you look at the history of like the Petit Blanc, for instance, in the in the Haitian Revolution, white supremacy is actually, like, not good for the vast majority of white people. Right. Like, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's benefit from it, sure, but in a very need, but, but, but in a meager way compared to elites. Yeah.

And especially relative to what kind of oppression and exploitation that it enables, right? So the wages of whiteness that Du Bois talks about in Black Reconstruction. Yeah, I mean, I think fundamentally, the fact that things can change radically and quickly during times when the powerful seem the most powerful, I think that's something that I definitely draw from the Haitian Revolution. So it's a trip to see someone like Killer Mike giving certain political positions while wearing a shirt that says kill your masters. I know. And I'm like, come on, man.

That's like, that's straight out of the Haitian revolution. They didn't just wear a shirt. They did it. They did it for what? To achieve their freedom and to achieve that slavery would never return to their island. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, the different factions is something we can learn from.

the fact that the black lives matter and the black led uprising in the U.S. right now can be seen as a direct descendant of the Haitian revolution insofar as it's black people rising up and fighting white supremacy. And then the thing I wanted to emphasize, which you talked about before, which is during the Haitian revolution, the role that women played on the front lines and just how invested they were in a real revolutionary rupture from the status quo. and watching the uprisings in the U.S. today, I'm coming to that exact same conclusion, and I've said it on other episodes,

that if there's a real thoroughgoing roots-destroying revolution in this country, it'll be led by black and indigenous revolutionaries, but I would even add to that, black and indigenous women. And when I look around at this uprising in the U.S. happening right now, clip after clip after clip of black women speaking so powerfully to the moment, speaking so powerfully to the feelings and the motivation behind the uprising and organically rising to take leadership roles in this uprising, I think is not only a sign of the legitimacy of these uprisings, but a sign of who actually is invested in revolution in this

society. You're not going to have a socialist or communist organization led by white settlers really have a revolutionary break from the rotten roots of this society. And the rise of black and indigenous women leaders in this movement, I think speaks volumes to the cutting edge, to what the cutting edge of the revolutionary movement really is. And I think we should really, really reflect on that and realize that the black and indigenous women are really the vanguard of any revolution if it's going to happen in this country. And I think we really have to take that idea seriously. I totally agree. I mean, I think to a certain extent the revolution also begins after the revolution wins. And by that, what I mean is that,

You can't have a complete revolution while maintaining patriarchy in place. And that's a great point, right? And I think the Haitian revolutionary women who were involved weren't articulating it in that same point. But through their action and through their practices, they were also revealing something about that, I think. So the revolution, and this is some – I remember a professor that I met a while ago when the Arab Spring was happening. he's from he's Tunisian and he said ah he had just come back from Tunisia and he said I'm so excited like the revolution has won and I'm like yeah but the revolution actually begins after the revolution win right and he looked at me and he's like I asked him and he said yeah you're

you're completely right um it so there's all sorts of structures that have to be um dismantled um after the revolution wins as well right so it's it's a process and um I completely agree with your point yeah absolutely and and having black and indigenous leadership ensures that those changes are made because, you know, those are the people most invested in a full revolutionary change and not just, you know, reforming around the edges or, you know, can I make a career out of being a radical or whatever? They're the most invested in truly toppling this disgusting white supremacist, settler colonial empire. Thank you so much. I threw so many huge questions at you, as I always do, and as you

always do you expertly handled them and I thank you so much for coming on and talking about this important revolution at this important moment in time. Before I let you go, we've talked about the Black Jacobins by CLR James, which is obviously a recommendation for anybody who wants to learn more about this. But do you have any other recommendations and maybe also let listeners know where they can find you online? Yeah, I would read, as I mentioned before, read Lauren Du Bois, the Avengers of the New World, read Julia Gaffield's work on the Haitian Revolution, be on the lookout for her biography De Saline. I don't think it's come out yet. Michelle Rolf Trillo's book,

Silencing the Past, is also awesome. That's where I, the chapter I referenced on Unthinkable Revolution. That's where I got that from. But yeah, definitely start with CLR. James, the Black Jackoves. That's a good place to start. And the second edition actually has an additional appendix when he links Touss to Sont to Fidel Castro, because he wrote it like in the 1960s. So definitely check those out. There's a really good PBS documentary that you can find on YouTube about Tucson

Lover-Ture. You'll see some of the historians that I referenced. They're in that documentary as well. You can find me on Twitter, Talking Shit, at Alexander underscore Avina. I think the last two weeks has really exponentially increased my participation on that horrid social media platform. but it's also a useful tool. So, yeah, so, and I have a website,

alexandiravina.com, which is super embarrassing to talk about, but it's a professional thing that I guess you have to do these days. Absolutely. Well, yeah, thank you so much. Like I said, this is the fourth time you've come on. I always learned something from you. Deeply, deeply, deeply appreciate you coming on once again to educate me in my audience on this beautiful moment in history

and, you know, love and solidarity. Stay safe out there. My heart is with you and your family. and your community down there in Arizona. Keep up the fight down there. We'll keep it up up here, coast to coast. We're going to continue this uprising in whatever humble ways we can

and hope that we can really topple this horrific system. So thank you so much again for coming home. Thank you, my friend. Salue di Libertat. Thank you for listening. RevLeft Radio is 100% listener funded. If you like what we do here, you can support us at patreon.com forward slash revleft radio or make a one-time donation at buy me a coffee.com forward slash rev left radio.

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