The 1791 slave uprising of Saint-Domingue was the largest and most successful slave revolt in modern history. It transformed one of the wealthiest colonies in the world into a new nation led by the black leaders of the Revolution. Because Saint-Domingue was a French colony, the French Revolution was inextricably linked to the Revolution in Saint-Domingue, however the two Revolutions functioned in largely separate spheres not least because of the ocean that separated them. The struggle for liberation took on a particularly bloody and brutal shape on the island of Saint-Domingue. Along with other French Caribbean colonies (such as Martinique and Guadeloupe) it set the stage for a centuries-long struggle for “hexagonal” France (often called continental or metropolitan France) to justify, reject, incorporate, and attempt to atone for their overseas colonies, and later their territories. Recent scholarship by historians such as Gerald Horne and Westenley Alcenat has highlighted not only France’s culpability, but shown that the United States, fearful of the influence that a successful Haiti might (and did) have on American slaves, was also complicit in sabotaging Haiti’s path as a new nation. Although slavery was abolished by France during the French Revolution, many of the gains were eliminated when Napoleon took over as First Consul (1799-1804), and then Emperor (1804-1814). Even after Haiti achieved independence from France in 1804, it would not be recognized as a country by the major European powers for almost a century, and not by the United States until 1862. It would also be saddled with a crippling debt (a “double debt” that involved loans from the French National Bank) that would be paid to France over the next several decades and would obliterate Haiti’s ability to have a thriving economy or develop a stable government.

Black women in the French-speaking world have been marginalized throughout history and even if they did not lack autonomy within the family unit (which often they did), they certainly suffered as a result of their colonial status. This often created a double oppression. The urgency of nationalistic aims often overshadowed the seemingly secondary struggle for equality between genders. The absence of documentation on their lives does not erase the roles they played as political protagonists in the struggle against colonialism, but it does come at a cost. Not only did it deny them social justice and equality at the time, it left a legacy in scholarship that downplays their significance. It would not be until WWII that France would be forced to officially redefine French citizenship. Deciding who was eligible, and the terms of accepting this citizenship is a debate that continues in the present day. The loaded and complicated questions of individual identity related to one’s race, gender or religion, and on what it means to belong will not be solved without deep reflection on all sides. There is new interest in filling in the missing histories of the enslaved, native and creole populations by historians and by the cultures and nationalities affected by colonial domination. And while many books focus on the male leaders of the Revolution like Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the outcry to see more women of color is slowly shaping current scholarship, and publications are making women of color more visible not only in terms of their experiences, but for their contributions.

For the first French novel written by a woman with a black female protagonist see Claire de Duras’ Ourika. Ourika is an orphan rescued from slavery in Senégal who is brought up into French society as an upper-class woman of privilege during the French Revolution. The novel, written in 1823 caused a huge sensation and was adapted into at least four different plays. It also caused a fashion sensation that prompted French women to dress à l’Ourika. For more information on black women in colonial fantasies in 19th-century France see Vénus Noire, by Robin Mitchell. For resources on the reception of the novel and the effects on the author (whose mother was Creole) see Adaptations: Film, Theater, Music & Novels.

To find more works by or about Women in the Haitian Revolution: Haiti–History–Revolution, 1791-1804

Further information can be found from collections and publications from the Latin American, Caribbean & European Division (LAC&E) in the Library of Congress. A Chronology of Haitian History External is provided by Jean Casimir, scholar and author of The Haitians: A Decolonial History. The Handbook of Latin American Studies (HLAS) includes annotated citations for books, journal articles, book chapters, conference papers, maps and atlases, and e-resources. The PALABRA Archive is another important resource for researchers as it contains audio recordings of poets and writers from Latin America, the Iberian Peninsula, the Caribbean, and from other regions with Luso-Hispanic heritage reading from their works.

For archival material related to Haiti, such as the remarks of Frederick Douglass as commissioner in charge of the Haitian Pavilion at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and a Lecture on Haiti, see finding aids in the Manuscript Reading Room.

For more information on modern-day Haiti please refer to Haiti: Hispanic Reading Room Country Guide and Freedom in the Black Diaspora: A Resource Guide for Ayiti Reimagined. This research guide answers a recent call to action in Haitian studies to engage historical sources in centering Haitian cultural and historical contributions to Black liberation movements in the United States and Latin America.

For an overview of French women in history and the evolution of the French feminist movement, please see the research guide Feminism & French Women in History.

Legendary Women in the Haitian Revolution:

• Suzanne Bélair known as Sanité Bélair was a Haitian revolutionary leader and served in Toussaint Louverture’s army. She and her husband, another lieutenant in Louverture’s army, were eventually found and executed at Napoleon’s command.
• Marie Sainte Dédée Bazile was a important figure in the Revolution and is known for having gathered the remaining parts of Haiti’s first Emperor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines after his brutal assassination.
• Marie-Louise Coidavid was the first and only Queen of an independent Haiti. She and her husband, Henri I of Haiti endured the difficulties of military life and she was forced to witness the assassination of her first born child. After she lost her husband she settled in Italy, in exile.
• Catherine Flon was a seamstress who famously sewed the first Haitian flag at the request of Dessalines, but she is also known for having nursed the sick and wounded after nearby battles.
• Cécile Fatiman was a mambo (a vodou priestess) who is believed to have formed networks on the island of Haiti that would transfer information from plantation to plantation.
• Marie-Claire Heureuse Félicité was an educator who shared her knowledge of French to free blacks. She was married to a French painter who died shortly after, and eventually she became the first Empress of Haiti after her marriage to General Jean-Jacques Dessalines who crowned himself emperor of Haiti on October 8, 1804. Emperor Jacques I was assassinated on October 17th, 1806.
• Marie-Jeanne Lamartiniére was a Haitian soldier known not only for her courage but for her skills in battle and strategy. She was a leading figure in the pivotal Battle of Crête-á-Pierrot in 1802. She fought in a male uniform and was well-respected by her male compatriots.
• Suzanne Simone Baptiste Louverture was the dedicated wife and caretaker of Toussaint Louverture. Reports about her life contradict one another but it is certain that she underwent horrific torture when captured by Napoleon. They demanded information about the whereabouts of her husband which she never divulged. The details surrounding her death are unclear.
• Victoria Montou known as “Toya” was a fighter in Jean-Jacques Dessalines army during the Haitian Revolution. She had served as a warrior for the Empire of Dahomey in Africa before she was shipped as a slave to Haiti. She soon escaped the plantation and some report that she agreed to rescue a newborn baby and train him in battle skills she learned as a warrior in Africa. This young boy allegedly became the future leader, Dessalines.

Print Resources

The following titles link to fuller bibliographic information in the Library of Congress Online Catalog. Links to additional online content are included when available.

• “There Are No Slaves in France” by Sue PeabodyCall Number: DC133.4 .P43 1996ISBN: 0195101987Published/Created: 1996There Are No Slaves in France examines the paradoxical emergence of political antislavery and institutional racism in the century prior to the French Revolution. Sue Peabody shows how the political culture of late Bourbon France created ample opportunities for contestation over the meaning offreedom. Based on various archival sources, this work will be of interest not only to historians of slavery and France, but to scholars interested in the emergence of modern culture in the Atlantic world.
• Action, reaction and interaction: slave women in resistance in the south of Saint Domingue, 1793-1794 by Judith KafkaPublished/Created: 1997Journal: Slavery and Abolition, 18:2, Aug. 1997, p. 48-72 (ISSN 0144-039X)
• Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism by Marlene L. DautCall Number: F1920.V37ISBN: 9781137479693Published/Created: 2017Focusing on the influential life and works of the Haitian political writer and statesman, Baron de Vastey (1781-1820), in this book Marlene L. Daut examines the legacy of Vastey’s extensive writings as a form of what she calls black Atlantic humanism, a discourse devoted to attacking the enlightenment foundations of colonialism. Daut argues that Vastey, the most important secretary of Haiti’s King Henry Christophe, was a pioneer in a tradition of deconstructing colonial racism and colonial slavery that is much more closely associated with twentieth-century writers like W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Aimé Césaire. By expertly forging exciting new historical and theoretical connections among Vastey and these later twentieth-century writers, as well as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century black Atlantic authors, such as Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs, Daut proves that any understanding of the genesis of Afro-diasporic thought must include Haiti’s Baron de Vastey.
• The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture by Grégory PierrotCall Number: PN56.3.B55 P54 2019ISBN: 9780820354910Published/Created: 2019With the Ta-Nehisi Coates-authored Black Panther comic book series (2016); recent films Django Unchained (2012) and The Birth of a Nation (2016), Nate Parker’s cinematic imagining of the Nat Turner rebellion; and screen adaptations of Marvel’s Luke Cage (2016) and Black Panther (2018), violent black redeemers have rarely been so present in mainstream Western culture. Yet the black avenger has always been with us: the trope has fired the news and imaginations of the United States and the larger Atlantic World for three centuries. The black avenger channeled the fresh anxieties about slave uprisings and racial belonging occasioned by the European colonization project in the Americas. Even as he is portrayed as wholly Other, a heathen and a barbarian, his values: honor, loyalty, love, reflect his ties to the West. Yet being racially different, he cannot belong, and his qualities in turn make him an anomaly among black people. The black avenger is thus a liminal figure defining racial borders. Where his body lies, lies the color line. Regularly throughout the modern era and to this day, variations on the trope have contributed to defining race in the Atlantic World and thwarting the constitution of a black polity. Grégory Pierrot’s The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture studies this cultural history, examining a multicultural and cross-historical network of print material including fiction, drama, poetry, news, and historical writing as well as visual culture. It tracks the black avenger trope from its inception in the seventeenth century to the U.S. occupation of Haiti in 1915. Pierrot argues that this Western archetype plays an essential role in helping exclusive, hostile understandings of racial belonging become normalized in the collective consciousness of Atlantic nations. His study follows important articulations of the figure and how it has shifted based on historical and cultural contexts.
• The Black Jacobins by C. L. R. JamesCall Number: F1923 .T85 1963ISBN: 0679724672Published/Created: 1989A classic and impassioned account of the first revolution in the Third World. This powerful, intensely dramatic book is the definitive account of the Haitian Revolution of 1794-1803, a revolution that began in the wake of the Bastille but became the model for the Third World liberation movements from Africa to Cuba. It is the story of the French colony of San Domingo, a place where the brutality of master toward slave was commonplace and ingeniously refined. And it is the story of a barely literate slave named Toussaint L’Ouverture, who led the black people of San Domingo in a successful struggle against successive invasions by overwhelming French, Spanish, and English forces and in the process helped form the first independent nation in the Caribbean.
• Confronting Black Jacobins by Gerald HorneCall Number: E183.8.H2 H67 2015ISBN: 9781583675625Published/Created: 2015The Haitian Revolution, the product of the first successful slave revolt, was truly world-historic in its impact. When Haiti declared independence in 1804, the leading powers–France, Great Britain, and Spain–suffered an ignominious defeat and the New World was remade. The island revolution also had a profound impact on Haiti’s mainland neighbor, the United States. Inspiring the enslaved and partisans of emancipation while striking terror throughout the Southern slaveocracy, it propelled the fledgling nation one step closer to civil war. Gerald Horne’s path breaking new work explores the complex and often fraught relationship between the United States and the island of Hispaniola. Giving particular attention to the responses of African Americans, Horne surveys the reaction in the United States to the revolutionary process in the nation that became Haiti, the splitting of the island in 1844, which led to the formation of the Dominican Republic, and the failed attempt by the United States to annex both in the 1870s. Drawing upon a rich collection of archival and other primary source materials, Horne deftly weaves together a disparate array of voices–world leaders and diplomats, slaveholders, white abolitionists, and the freedom fighters he terms Black Jacobins. Horne at once illuminates the tangled conflicts of the colonial powers, the commercial interests and imperial ambitions of U.S. elites, and the brutality and tenacity of the American slaveholding class, while never losing sight of the freedom struggles of Africans both on the island and on the mainland, which sought the fulfillment of the emancipatory promise of 18th century republicanism.
• Dance on the Volcano by Marie Vieux-Chauvet; Kaiama L. Glover (Translator)Call Number: PQ3949.C493 D213 2016ISBN: 9780914671572Published/Created: 2017Dance on the Volcano tells the story of two sisters growing up during the Haitian Revolution in a culture that swings heavily between decadence and poverty, sensuality and depravity. One sister, because of her singing ability, is able to enter into the white colonial society otherwise generally off limits to people of color. Closely examining a society sagging under the white supremacy of the French colonist rulers, Dance on the Volcano is one of only novels to closely depict the seeds and fruition of the Haitian Revolution, tracking an elaborate hierarchy of skin color and class through the experiences of two young women. It is a story about hatred and fear, love and loss, and the complex tensions between colonizer and colonized, masterfully translated by Kaiama L. Glover.
• Decolonizing and Feminizing Freedom by Denise NobleCall Number: HQ1501 .N64 2016ISBN: 9781137449504Published/Created: 2017This book traces the powerful discourses and embodied practices through which Black Caribbean women have been imagined and produced as subjects of British liberal rule and modern freedom. It argues that in seeking to escape liberalism’s gendered and racialised governmentalities, Black women’s everyday self-making practices construct decolonising and feminising epistemologies of freedom. These, in turn, repeatedly interrogate the colonial logics of liberalism and Britishness. Genealogically structured, the book begins with the narratives of freedom and identity presented by Black British Caribbean women. It then analyses critical moments of crisis in British racial rule at home and abroad in which gender and Caribbean women figure as points of concern. Post-war Caribbean immigration to the UK, decolonisation of the British Caribbean and the post-emancipation reconstruction of the British Caribbean loom large in these considerations. In doing all of this, the author unravels the colonial legacies that continue to underwrite contemporary British multicultural anxieties. This thought-provoking work will appeal to students and scholars of social and cultural history, politics, feminism, race and postcoloniality.
• Des femmes dans l’émancipation des peuples noirs : de Saint-Domingue au Dahomey by Elvire MaurouardCall Number: UB419.B46 J43 2013ISBN: 9782849243077Published/Created: 2013This book is part of the collection, “Memoriae” Table of Contents: Ayiti et des Indiennes — Les guerrières de l’indépendance haïtienne — Les Résistantes haïtiennes — Genèse des Amazones — Les Amazones du Dahomey — Amazones d’exception — La campagne du Dahomey — La guerre du Dahomey — L’occupation de Cotonou et de Porto-Novo — La course vers l’hinterland — La course au clocher — Français, Allemands, Anglais en “mission africaine”. [Women in the Emancipation of Black People: From Saint-Domingue to the Dahomey]
• Des plaies qui saignent : Haïti : 1804-1843 : roman by Jacques SalèsISBN: 9791093576930Published/Created: 2021In his first novel published in 2012, Haiti: Tragic Birth, 1779-1803, Jacques Salès told the insurrection of slaves started almost with bare hands in 1793 which, for the first time in the history of humanity, has led to the defeat of a great colonialist nation and to the proclamation of independence, under the name of Haiti, of the colony of Saint-Domingue until then the pride of France. From historical elements to which he adds a romantic touch, Jacques Salès recounts today the forty years, 1804-1843, which followed the independence of Haiti. Years during which the wounds opened during colonization then the war of independence did not stop bleeding. In particular, it makes us experience the massacre of the Whites who remained on the island after the evacuation of the French expeditionary force; the assassination of Emperor Dessalines; the proclamation of the Republic by Pétion; the tyranny then the tragedy of King Christopher; the help given by Alexandre Pétion to the Liberator Simon Bolivar; the obstacles raised by the United States to the recognition of Haiti as a sovereign state; the interminable negotiations with France for the normalization of relations between the two countries; the conquest of the Spanish part of the island; the beginnings of the first republican institutions; the intrigues, conspiracies, taking of arms, splits, killings, carnage and civil wars which marked this period and which explain that Haiti sank into permanent crisis and poverty. [Haiti: Wounds which Bleed]
• Facing Racial Revolution by Jeremy D. PopkinCall Number: F1923 .F33 2007ISBN: 9780226675824Published/Created: 2008In Facing Racial Revolution, Jeremy D. Popkin unearths documents and presents excerpts from more than a dozen accounts written by white colonists trying to come to grips with a world that had suddenly disintegrated. These dramatic writings give us our most direct portrayal of the actions of the revolutionaries, vividly depicting encounters with the uprising’s leaders–Toussaint Louverture, Boukman, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines–as well as putting faces on many of the anonymous participants in this epochal moment. Popkin’s expert commentary on each selection provides the necessary background about the authors and the incidents they describe, while also addressing the complex question of the witnesses’ reliability and urging the reader to consider the implications of the narrators’ perspectives. The only truly successful slave uprising in the Atlantic world, the Haitian Revolution gave birth to the first independent black republic of the modern era. Inspired by the revolution that had recently roiled their French rulers, black slaves and people of mixed race alike rose up against their oppressors in a bloody insurrection that led to the burning of the colony’s largest city, a bitter struggle against Napoleon’s troops, and in 1804, the founding of a free nation. Numerous firsthand narratives of these events survived, but their invaluable insights into the period have long languished in obscurity–until now. Along with the American and French revolutions, the birth of Haiti helped shape the modern world. The powerful, moving, and sometimes troubling testimonies collected in Facing Racial Revolution significantly expand our understanding of this momentous event.
• Femmes noires au pouvoir en Europe : l’écueil du racisme by Elvire MaurouardCall Number: HQ1236.5.E85 J4 2014ISBN: 9782849243565Published/Created: 2014Elvire Maurouard is a Haitian-born writer on the contributions of black citizens to French culture. [Black Women of Power in Europe: Pitfalls of Racism]
• Haiti’s Paper War by Chelsea StieberCall Number: PQ3948.5.H2 S75 2020ISBN: 9781479802135Published/Created: 2020Turns to the written record to re-examine the building blocks of a nation Picking up where most historians conclude, Chelsea Stieber explores the critical internal challenge to Haiti’s post-independence sovereignty: a civil war between monarchy and republic. What transpired was a war of swords and of pens, waged in newspapers and periodicals, in literature, broadsheets, and fliers. In her analysis of Haitian writing that followed independence, Stieber composes a new literary history of Haiti, that challenges our interpretations of both freedom struggles and the postcolonial. By examining internal dissent during the revolution, Stieber reveals that the very concept of freedom was itself hotly contested in the public sphere, and it was this inherent tension that became the central battleground for the guerre de plume–the paper war–that vied to shape public sentiment and the very idea of Haiti. Stieber’s reading of post-independence Haitian writing reveals key insights into the nature of literature, its relation to freedom and politics, and how fraught and politically loaded the concepts of “literature” and “civilization” really are. The competing ideas of liberté, writing, and civilization at work within postcolonial Haiti have consequences for the way we think about Haiti’s role–as an idea and a discursive interlocutor–in the elaboration of black radicalism and black Atlantic, anticolonial, and decolonial thought. In so doing, Stieber reorders our previously homogeneous view of Haiti, teasing out warring conceptions of the new nation that continued to play out deep into the twentieth century.
• The Haitian Revolution by Eduardo Grüner; Ramsey McGlazer (Translator)Call Number: F1923 .G7813 2020ISBN: 9781509535477Published/Created: 2019It is impossible to understand capitalism without analyzing slavery, an institution that tied together three world regions: Europe, the Americas, and Africa. The exploitation of slave labor led to a form of proto-globalization in which violence was indispensable to the production of wealth.  Against the background of this expanding circulation of capital and slave labor, the first revolution in Latin America took place: the Haitian Revolution, which began in 1791 and culminated with Haiti’s declaration of independence in 1804. Taking the Haitian Revolution as a paradigmatic case, Grüner shows that modernity is not a linear evolution from the center to the periphery but, rather, a co-production developed in the context of highly unequal power relations, where extreme forms of conquest and exploitation were an indispensable part of capital accumulation. He also shows that the Haitian Revolution opened up a path to a different kind of modernity, or “counter-modernity,” a path along which Latin America and the Caribbean have traveled ever since. A key work of critical theory from a Latin American perspective, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of critical and cultural theory and of Latin America, as well as anyone concerned with the global impact of capitalism, colonialism, and race.
• The Haitian Revolution and the Early United States by Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (Editor); Michael Drexler (Editor)Call Number: F1923 .H295 2016ISBN: 9780812248197Published/Created: 2016When Jean-Jacques Dessalines proclaimed Haitian independence on January 1, 1804, Haiti became the second independent republic, after the United States, in the Americas; the Haitian Revolution was the first successful antislavery and anticolonial revolution in the western hemisphere. The histories of Haiti and the early United States were intimately linked in terms of politics, economics, and geography, but unlike Haiti, the United States would remain a slaveholding republic until 1865. While the Haitian Revolution was a beacon for African Americans and abolitionists in the United States, it was a terrifying specter for proslavery forces there, and its effects were profound. In the wake of Haiti’s liberation, the United States saw reconfigurations of its geography, literature, politics, and racial and economic structures. The Haitian Revolution and the Early United States explores the relationship between the dramatic events of the Haitian Revolution and the development of the early United States. The first section, “Histories,” addresses understandings of the Haitian Revolution in the developing public sphere of the early United States, from theories of state sovereignty to events in the street; from the economic interests of U.S. merchants to disputes in the chambers of diplomats; and from the flow of rumor and second-hand news of refugees to the informal communication networks of the enslaved. The second section, “Geographies,” explores the seismic shifts in the ways the physical territories of the two nations and the connections between them were imagined, described, inhabited, and policed as a result of the revolution. The final section, “Textualities,” explores the wide-ranging consequences that reading and writing about slavery, rebellion, emancipation, and Haiti in particular had on literary culture in both the United States and Haiti. With essays from leading and emerging scholars of Haitian and U.S. history, literature, and cultural studies, The Haitian Revolution and the Early United States traces the rich terrain of Haitian-U.S. culture and history in the long nineteenth century. Contributors: Anthony Bogues, Marlene Daut, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Michael Drexler, Laurent Dubois, James Alexander Dun, Duncan Faherty, Carolyn Fick, David Geggus, Kieran Murphy, Colleen O’Brien, Peter P. Reed, Siân Silyn Roberts, Cristobal Silva, Ed White, Ivy Wilson, Gretchen Woertendyke, Edlie Wong.
• Haitian Revolutionary Fictions by Marlene L. Daut (Editor); Grégory Pierrot (Editor); Marion C. Rohrleitner (Editor)Call Number: PN6071.H15 H35 2021ISBN: 9780813945699Published/Created: 2022The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) was the first antislavery and anticolonial uprising led by New World Africans to result in the creation of an independent and slavery-free nation state. The momentousness of this thirteen-year-long war generated thousands of pages of writing. This anthology brings together for the first time a transnational and multilingual selection of literature about the revolution, from the beginnings of the conflicts that resulted in it to the end of the nineteenth century. With over two hundred excerpts from novels, poetry, and plays published between 1787 and 1900, and depicting a wide array of characters including, Anacaona, Makandal, Boukman, Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Henry Christophe, this anthology provides the perfect classroom text for exploring this fascinating revolution, its principal actors, and the literature it inspired, while also providing a vital resource for specialists in the field. This landmark volume includes many celebrated authors–such as Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Heinrich von Kleist, Alphonse de Lamartine, William Wordsworth, Harriet Martineau, and William Edgar Easton–but the editors also present here for the first time many less-well-known fictions by writers from across western Europe and both North and South America, as well as by nineteenth-century Haitian authors, refuting a widely accepted perception that Haitian representations of their revolution primarily emerged in the twentieth century. Each excerpt is introduced by contextualizing commentary designed to spark discussion about the ongoing legacy of slavery and colonialism in the Americas. Ultimately, the publication of this capacious body of literature that spans three continents offers students, scholars, and the curious reader alike a unique glimpse into the tremendous global impact the Haitian Revolution had on the print culture of the Atlantic world. New World Studies.
• Haitian Revolutionary Fictions by Marlene L. Daut (Editor); Grégory Pierrot (Editor); Marion C. Rohrleitner (Editor)Call Number: PN6071.H15 H35 2021ISBN: 9780813945699Published/Created: 2021The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) was the first antislavery and anticolonial uprising led by New World Africans to result in the creation of an independent and slavery-free nation state. The momentousness of this thirteen-year-long war generated thousands of pages of writing. This anthology brings together for the first time a transnational and multilingual selection of literature about the revolution, from the beginnings of the conflicts that resulted in it to the end of the nineteenth century. With over two hundred excerpts from novels, poetry, and plays published between 1787 and 1900, and depicting a wide array of characters including, Anacaona, Makandal, Boukman, Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Henry Christophe, this anthology provides the perfect classroom text for exploring this fascinating revolution, its principal actors, and the literature it inspired, while also providing a vital resource for specialists in the field. This landmark volume includes many celebrated authors-such as Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Heinrich von Kleist, Alphonse de Lamartine, William Wordsworth, Harriet Martineau, and William Edgar Easton-but the editors also present here for the first time many less-well-known fictions by writers from across western Europe and both North and South America, as well as by nineteenth-century Haitian authors, refuting a widely accepted perception that Haitian representations of their revolution primarily emerged in the twentieth century. Each excerpt is introduced by contextualizing commentary designed to spark discussion about the ongoing legacy of slavery and colonialism in the Americas. Ultimately, the publication of this capacious body of literature that spans three continents offers students, scholars, and the curious reader alike a unique glimpse into the tremendous global impact the Haitian Revolution had on the print culture of the Atlantic world.
• Haïti, 1779-1803 : naissance tragique by Jacques SalèsCall Number: PQ2719.A454 H35 2012Published/Created: 2012In this first novel published in 2012, Haiti: Tragic Birth, 1779-1803, Jacques Salès told the insurrection of slaves started almost with bare hands in 1793 which, for the first time in the history of humanity, has led to the defeat of a great colonialist nation and to the proclamation of independence, under the name of Haiti, of the colony of Saint-Domingue until then the pride of France. In his second book, Jacques Salès recounts today the forty years, 1804-1843, which followed the independence of Haiti. Years during which the wounds opened during colonization then the war of independence did not stop bleeding. In particular, it makes us experience the massacre of the Whites who remained on the island after the evacuation of the French expeditionary force; the assassination of Emperor Dessalines; the proclamation of the Republic by Pétion; the tyranny then the tragedy of King Christopher; the help given by Alexandre Pétion to the Liberator Simon Bolivar; the obstacles raised by the United States to the recognition of Haiti as a sovereign state; the interminable negotiations with France for the normalization of relations between the two countries; the conquest of the Spanish part of the island; the beginnings of the first republican institutions; the intrigues, conspiracies, taking of arms, splits, killings, carnage and civil wars which marked this period and which explain that Haiti sank into permanent crisis and poverty. [Haiti: Tragic Birth]
• An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti by Marcus Rainsford; Paul Youngquist (Editor); Grégory Pierrot (Editor)Call Number: F1923 .R15 2013ISBN: 9780822352785Published/Created: 2013As the first complete narrative in English of the Haitian Revolution, Marcus Rainsford’s An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti was highly influential in establishing nineteenth-century world opinion of this momentous event. This new edition is the first to appear since the original publication in 1805. Rainsford, a career officer in the British army, went to Haiti to recruit black soldiers for the British. By publishing his observations of the prowess of black troops, and recounting his meetings with Toussaint Louverture, Rainsford offered eyewitness testimonial that acknowledged the intelligence and effectiveness of the Haitian rebels. Although not an abolitionist, Rainsford nonetheless was supportive of the independent state of Haiti, which he argued posed no threat to British colonial interests in the West Indies, an extremely unusual stance at the time. Rainsford’s account made an immediate impact upon publication; it was widely reviewed, and translated twice in its first year. Paul Youngquist’s and Grégory Pierrot’s critical introduction to this new edition provides contextual and historical details, as well as new biographical information about Rainsford. Of particular interest is a newly discovered miniature painting of Louverture attributed to Rainsford, which is reproduced along with the twelve engravings that accompanied his original account. Available full text online.
• La révolution des esclaves : Haïti, 1763-1803 by Bernard GainotCall Number: F1923 .G15 2017Published/Created: 2017French author Bernard Gainot revisits San Domingue’s struggle for independence from France’s colonial rule and the brutal fighting that resulted in the first successful slave revolt and eventual independence in 1804. A thorough and nuanced account of the factors at play and the long-term ramifications of independence for the country of Haiti. [Revolution of the Slaves: Haiti]
• La révolution et le racisme, conférence à la salle Rameau by Édouard HerriotCall Number: DC158.8 .H45Published/Created: 1939(Conference ,Lyon, le 26 mars 1939) publiée avec l’autorisation de l’auteur. This is an introduction to the conference held in Lyon in 1939 that touches not only on racism, but also mistreatment of those of the Catholic and Jewish faith and in what way the reforms of the Revolution helped and hurt these vulnerable groups. This does not contain the content of the conference. [The Revolution and Racism]
• Making the Black Jacobins by Rachel DouglasCall Number: F1923 .D684 2019ISBN: 9781478004271Published/Created: 2019C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins remains one of the great works of the twentieth century and the cornerstone of Haitian revolutionary studies. In Making The Black Jacobins, Rachel Douglas traces the genesis, transformation, and afterlives of James’s landmark work across the decades from the 1930s on. Examining the 1938 and 1963 editions of The Black Jacobins, the 1967 play of the same name, and James’s 1936 play, Toussaint Louverture–as well as manuscripts, notes, interviews, and other texts–Douglas shows how James continuously rewrote and revised his history of the Haitian Revolution as his politics and engagement with Marxism evolved. She also points to the vital significance theater played in James’s work and how it influenced his views of history. Douglas shows The Black Jacobins to be a palimpsest, its successive layers of rewriting renewing its call to new generations. The original 1938 edition of James’ work, The Black Jacobins is held in the Library of Congress.
• Maroon Nation by Johnhenry GonzalezCall Number: F1921 .G67 2019ISBN: 9780300230086Published/Created: 2019A new history of post‑Revolutionary Haiti, and the society that emerged in the aftermath of the world’s most successful slave revolution   Haiti is widely recognized as the only state born out of a successful slave revolt, but the country’s early history remains scarcely understood. In this deeply researched and original volume, Johnhenry Gonzalez weaves a history of early independent Haiti focused on crop production, land reform, and the unauthorized rural settlements devised by former slaves of the colonial plantation system. Analyzing the country’s turbulent transition from the most profitable and exploitative slave colony of the eighteenth century to a relatively free society of small farmers, Gonzalez narrates the origins of institutions such as informal open-air marketplaces and rural agrarian compounds known as lakou. Drawing on seldom studied primary sources to contribute to a growing body of early Haitian scholarship, he argues that Haiti’s legacy of runaway communities and land conflict was as formative as the Haitian Revolution in developing the country’s characteristic agrarian, mercantile, and religious institutions.
• Martyred Lieutenant Sanité Bélair by Phillip Thomas TuckerCall Number: F1923.B45 T83 2019ISBN: 9780359413034Published/Created: 2019Phillip Thomas Tucker, Ph.D., has presented the first biography about the life of a remarkable Haitian woman who became a revolutionary martyr during the Haitian War for Independence, Sanité Bélair. She sacrificed her life for the twin goals of destroying slavery and creating the first free black republic in world history. As a seasoned lieutenant and diehard freedom fighter of the revolutionary army, young Sanité was executed by a French firing squad in early October 1802. But, most importantly, Sanité’s heroic legacy and memory lived on in the hearts and minds of the Haitian people, helping to inspire the resistance effort to succeed in the end. A bold woman of courage, faith, and character, Sanité Bélair became not only a revolutionary heroine, but also an inspirational founding mother of the Republic of Haiti.
• The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World by Nicholas Canny; Philip MorganCall Number: D210 .O94 2011ISBN: 9780199210879Published/Created: 2011The essays in this volume provide a comprehensive overview of Atlantic history from c.1450 to c.1850, offering a wide-ranging and authoritative account of the movement of people, plants, pathogens, products, and cultural practices–to mention some of the key agents–around and within the Atlantic basin. As a result of these movements, new peoples, economies, societies, polities, and cultures arose in the lands and islands touched by the Atlantic Ocean, while others were destroyed.
• The Price of Slavery by Nick NesbittISBN: 9780813947082Published/Created: 2022The Price of Slavery analyzes Marx’s critique of capitalist slavery and its implications for the Caribbean thought of Toussaint Louverture, Henry Christophe, C. L. R. James, Aimé Césaire, Jacques Stephen Alexis, and Suzanne Césaire. Nick Nesbitt assesses the limitations of the literature on capitalism and slavery since Eric Williams in light of Marx’s key concept of the social forms of labor, wealth, and value. To do so, Nesbitt systematically reconstructs for the first time Marx’s analysis of capitalist slavery across the three volumes of Capital. The book then follows the legacy of Caribbean critique in its reflections on the social forms of labor, servitude, and freedom, as they culminate in the vehement call for the revolutionary transformation of an unjust colonial order into one of universal justice and equality.
• The Priest and the Prophetess by Terry ReyCall Number: F1923 .R486 2017ISBN: 9780190625849Published/Created: 2017By 1791, the French Revolution had spread to Haïti, where slaves and free blacks alike had begun demanding civil rights guaranteed in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man. Enter Romaine-la-Prophétesse, a free black Dominican coffee farmer who dressed in women’s clothes and claimed that the Virgin Mary was his godmother. Inspired by mystical revelations from the Holy Mother, he amassed a large and volatile following of insurgents who would go on to sack countless plantations and conquer the coastal cities of Jacmel and Léogâne. For this brief period, Romaine counted as his political adviser the white French Catholic priest and physician Abbé Ouivière, a renaissance man of cunning politics who would go on to become a pioneering figure in early American science and medicine. Brought together by Catholicism and the turmoil of the revolutionary Atlantic, the priest and the prophetess would come to symbolize the enlightenment ideals of freedom and a more just social order in the eighteenth-century Caribbean. Drawing on extensive archival research, Terry Rey offers a major contribution to our understanding of Catholic mysticism and traditional African religious practices at the time of the Haitian Revolution and reveals the significant ways in which religion and race intersected in the turbulence and triumphs of revolutionary France, Haïti, and early republican America.
• Revolutions in the Atlantic World, New Edition by Wim KloosterCall Number: E18.82 .K55 2018ISBN: 9781479875955Published/Created: 2018A new look at a contentious period in the history of the Atlantic world Within just a half century, the American, French, Haitian, and Spanish American revolutions transformed the Atlantic world. This book is the first to analyze these events through a comparative lens, revealing several central themes in the field of Atlantic history. From the murky position of the European empire between the Old and New Worlds to slavery and diaspora, Wim Klooster offers insights into the forces behind the many conflicts in the Atlantic world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Digging deeply into the structural causes and oppressive environments in which these revolutions occurred, Klooster debunks the popular myth that the “people” rebelled against a small ruling elite, arguing instead that the revolutions were civil wars in which all classes fought on both sides. The book reveals the extent to which mechanisms of popular mobilization were visible in the revolutions. For example, although Blacks and Indians often played an important role in the success of the revolutions, they were never compensated once new regimes rose to power. Nor was democracy a goal or product of these revolutions, which usually spawned authoritarian polities. The new edition covers the latest historiographical trends in the study of the Atlantic world, including new research regarding the role of privateers. Drawing on fresh research – such as primary documents and extant secondary literature – Klooster ultimately concludes that the Enlightenment was the ideological inspiration for the Age of Revolutions, although not its cause.
• Sanité Bélair, drame historique en trois tableaux by Jeanne PérezCall Number: PQ3949.P4 S3Published/Created: 194-?This is a historical drama about Sanité Belair, in a three act play. It was first preformed in the Rex Theater on August 10th, 1942 to high acclaim. Reviews are published in the frontmatter of the monograph preceding the play itself. Of note: Jeanne Perez plays Sanité in the production. [Sanité Bélair: Historical Drama in three parts]
• Sheros of the Haitian Revolution by Bayyinah Bello; Kervin Andre (Illustrator)Call Number: F1923 .B47 2019ISBN: 9780578231631Published/Created: 2019Illustrated biography of ten women who had a major impact on the war of independence in Haiti 1791-1804. Hardcover edition.
• Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804 by Laurent Dubois; John D. GarrigusCall Number: F2151 .D86 2017ISBN: 1319048781Published/Created: 2016This volume details the first slave rebellion to have a successful outcome, leading to the establishment of Haiti as a free black republic and paving the way for the emancipation of slaves in the rest of the French Empire and the world. Incited by the French Revolution, the enslaved inhabitants of the French Caribbean began a series of revolts, and in 1791 plantation workers in Haiti, then known as Saint-Domingue, overwhelmed their planter owners and began to take control of the island. They achieved emancipation in 1794, and after successfully opposing Napoleonic forces eight years later, emerged as part of an independent nation in 1804. A broad selection of documents, all newly translated by the authors, is contextualized by a thorough introduction considering the very latest scholarship. Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus clarify for students the complex political, economic, and racial issues surrounding the revolution and its reverberations worldwide. Useful pedagogical tools include maps, illustrations, a chronology, and a selected bibliography. Get the true story of the slave revolutions that reconstructed the geographies of the American from 1789 to 1804 through the primary sources included in Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804.
• Slavery and the French Revolutionists, 1788-1805 by Anna J. Cooper; Frances R. Keller (Editor, Translator)Call Number: F1923 .C7213 1988ISBN: 0889466378Published/Created: 1988This is a translation of a 1925 doctoral dissertation written for the University of Paris by a 67-year-old black American expatriate woman who had been born a slave. Her study of the French Revolutionists’ view of slavery is a significant contribution to understanding the growth of human rights.
• The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon by Philippe R. GirardCall Number: F1923 .G57 2011ISBN: 9780817317324Published/Created: 2011In this ambitious book, Girard employs the latest tools of the historian’s craft, multi-archival research in particular, and applies them to the climactic yet poorly understood last years of the Haitian Revolution. Haiti lost most of its archives to neglect and theft, but a substantial number of documents survive in French, U.S., British, and Spanish collections, both public and private. In all, this book relies on contemporary military, commercial, and administrative sources drawn from nineteen archives and research libraries on both sides of the Atlantic.
• To Be Free and French by Lorelle SemleyCall Number: F2151 .S56 2017ISBN: 9781107101142Published/Created: 2017The Haitian Revolution may have galvanized subjects of French empire in the Americas and Africa struggling to define freedom and ‘Frenchness’ for themselves, but Lorelle Semley reveals that this event was just one moment in a longer struggle of women and men of color for rights under the French colonial regime. Through political activism ranging from armed struggle to literary expression, these colonial subjects challenged and exploited promises in French Republican rhetoric that should have contradicted the continued use of slavery in the Americas and the introduction of exploitative labor in the colonization of Africa. They defined an alternative French citizenship, which recognized difference, particularly race, as part of a ‘universal’ French identity. Spanning Atlantic port cities in Haiti, Senegal, Martinique, Benin, and France, this book is a major contribution to scholarship on citizenship, race, empire, and gender, and it sheds new light on debates around human rights and immigration in contemporary France.
• Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions by Lisa L. Moore (Editor); Joanna Brooks (Editor); Caroline Wigginton (Editor)Call Number: PR113 .T73 2012ISBN: 9780199743483Published/Created: 2012While not focused on French women, Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions restores a lost chapter in the history of feminism and illuminates the complexity of the rights debates of the eighteenth century. As the English language followed the routes of trade and colonialism to become the lingua franca of much of the Atlantic world, women who experienced dispossession and violence on the one hand, and new freedoms and opportunities on the other, wrote about their experiences. English, Scots and Irish women; colonists and indigenous women; Loyalists and Patriots; religious leaders and scandal-dogged actresses; slaves and free women of color – this anthology puts all these eighteenth-century voices in conversation with one another in an unprecedented archive of primary sources that will become indispensable to students and scholars of the eighteenth century in English, history, and women’s and gender studies.
• Warrior Women by Robert B. EdgertonISBN: 0813337119Published/Created: 2000This book explores the Amazons of Dahomey and the Kingdom of Dahomey both of which played a significant role in developing the tactics and customs of leaders in the Haitian Revolution. Some prominent anthropologists have been joined by an eminent military historian in declaring that military combat – at all times and in all places – has been a male activity. They advance many reasons for this pattern, some more plausible than others. In fact, although warfare is typically conducted by men, in various places and at various times, women have fought bravely and well, and in the West African kingdom of Dahomey during the nineteenth century, they formed the elite corps of a successful army. Many European visitors to Dahomey commented favorably on their military bearing, finding them more impressive in discipline and maneuver than male Dahomean soldiers. When France invaded Dahomey in the early 1890s, their superior weapons won the war but all those French officers and men who wrote about their bloody battles against Dahomey declared not only that these women warriors were superior to male Dahomean soldiers, but that they were the equal of the French. Edgerton describes the history of these ”Amazon,” as they became known, their recruitment, training, and battle experience. Of particular interest to scholars interested in culture and gender today, these women believed that in order for them to carry out their martial roles, they had to transform themselves into men. How this was done, how the Amazons lived and fought, and what their experiences might mean for the understanding of women and warfare both in the past and present day are the subjects of this book.
• Wicked Flesh by Jessica Marie JohnsonCall Number: F379.N59 N44427 2020ISBN: 9780812252385Published/Created: 2020The story of freedom pivots on the choices black women made to retain control over their bodies and selves, their loved ones, and their futures. The story of freedom and all of its ambiguities begins with intimate acts steeped in power. It is shaped by the peculiar oppressions faced by African women and women of African descent. And it pivots on the self-conscious choices black women made to retain control over their bodies and selves, their loved ones, and their futures. Slavery’s rise in the Americas was institutional, carnal, and reproductive. The intimacy of bondage whet the appetites of slaveowners, traders, and colonial officials with fantasies of domination that trickled into every social relationship–husband and wife, sovereign and subject, master and laborer. Intimacy–corporeal, carnal, quotidian–tied slaves to slaveowners, women of African descent and their children to European and African men. In Wicked Flesh, Jessica Marie Johnson explores the nature of these complicated intimate and kinship ties and how they were used by black women to construct freedom in the Atlantic world. Johnson draws on archival documents scattered in institutions across three continents, written in multiple languages and largely from the perspective of colonial officials and slave-owning men, to recreate black women’s experiences from coastal Senegal to French Saint-Domingue to Spanish Cuba to the swampy outposts of the Gulf Coast. Centering New Orleans as the quintessential site for investigating black women’s practices of freedom in the Atlantic world, Wicked Flesh argues that African women and women of African descent endowed free status with meaning through active, aggressive, and sometimes unsuccessful intimate and kinship practices. Their stories, in both their successes and their failures, outline a practice of freedom that laid the groundwork for the emancipation struggles of the nineteenth century and reshaped the New World.