Haiti

  The leaders of the movement that overthrew Boyer chose Rivière Hérard as the provisional president and put him in charge of creating a new constitution. Elected representatives from throughout the country gathered in Port-au-Prince and formed a constitutional convention. The debates were attended by large and boisterous crowds, largely drawn from Port-au-Prince’s professional classes and from students of the city’s elite schools, who alternately booed and applauded orators as they took the stand. One of the fiercest discussions, as before, concerned the provision prohibiting whites from owning property in Haiti. The Chamber of Deputies at the time included a number of representatives from the Spanish half of the island; several of them considered themselves white and asked that the stipulation be removed from the constitution. Other representatives, however, rushed to defend the provision. One deputy who regretted the “isolation from the great human confraternity” caused by the exclusion of whites nevertheless defended the law, arguing it was less a manifestation of prejudice than an expression of fears that Haitian independence might be compromised. In the end, the provision was maintained.59

  “Mr. President, we bring you the little monster,” announced the representative who handed the final draft of the 1843 constitution to Rivière Hérard for ratification. It was substantially more liberal than those that had preceded it, and included a constitutional guarantee of the right to political assembly and the right to a trial by jury in criminal cases. There were also changes to the electoral process: senators would no longer be selected from nominees put forth by the president, but chosen by direct elections. Likewise, the president was no longer to be appointed by the Senate. Instead, as in the United States, the population would vote for electors, who were then charged with choosing the new head of state.

  Along with these improvements, however, the new constitution also added suffrage restrictions that had not explicitly existed before. The voting age was rolled back to twenty-one, but now voting would be open only to certain classes of men: those who owned property, those who were renting land under a contract of at least nine years in duration, or those who could prove that they practiced a “profession” or were employed in some kind of “industry.” Those last categories sounded quite broad, but it was not obvious how they would be interpreted. What is more, it was not clear that many rural residents—particularly those who rented plots of land for the short term, worked as informal day laborers, or practiced the system of métayage—would retain the right to political participation.60

  Such concerns were largely overlooked by the urban residents and professionals who were the driving force behind the 1843 uprising. They saw the new constitution as a crucial move forward, one that would guarantee greater political liberty. But the reform movement soon met with resistance from a key group: the military. Even before the constitutional debates were completed, military leaders made it clear that they would have no scruples about opposing the new regime. They did so in part because they resented the way that revolutionaries had taken over positions in the army. The opposition movement, after all, had finally triumphed thanks to the military’s support; yet instead of expressing gratitude, the uprising’s leaders—as one historian laments—had “thrown themselves frenetically on the epaulettes,” naming themselves officers and generals as they rallied their supporters. And once in power, the reformers insisted on retaining the military ranks they had taken on during the revolt. They understood that political power in Haiti was always intimately tied to military power, and they were well aware that every president before Hérard had been a veteran of the war of independence. The established army officers, many of whom had joined the revolt once it was under way, were of course not particularly pleased by the spectacle of young lawyers and journalists taking up positions of command within the Haitian army. One of them complained about the pretensions of these “newcomers who have never warmed themselves around the fire of a bivouac.”61

  In February 1844, there was a new outburst of violence in the long-standing struggle for independence in Spanish Santo Domingo. Rivière Hérard departed with troops to try to repress the revolt, without success: the independence of the Dominican Republic was declared in May 1844. Back in Port-au-Prince, Hérard Dumesle headed the government in his cousin’s absence, but he found critics of the new regime—both military leaders and reformers who felt that the new constitution had not gone far enough—mounting strong attacks against him in the Chamber of Deputies. Long the victim of authoritarian tactics during his years in the opposition, he nevertheless now used the same tactics himself, and dispersed the assembly.62

  The reform movement that ultimately overthrew Boyer was driven by hopes that the spread of popular democracy would bring an end to the militarized, authoritarian style of politics that had dominated Haiti since its independence. But in the end, faced with internal dissent and resistance from the established military leaders, the reformers also fell into the trap of equating military might with political authority. Seeking to preserve their power and institute their new constitution, the leaders of the opposition soon found themselves stuck in the very political model they had hoped to abolish. Both Hérard Dumesle and Rivière Hérard quickly chose to dispense with their commitment to open debate and parliamentary procedure in favor of heavy-handed tactics of rule. They justified this strategic choice by arguing that it was the only way to confront deep-rooted resistance to change, particularly within the military. But they would soon also demonstrate the limits of their own commitment to change, as the 1843 revolution faced its most serious challenge: the political mobilization of small farmers in the countryside who, disappointed with the limits of the reforms, saw an opportunity to push for an even more profound transformation of the Haitian order. As historian Leslie Manigat puts it, Dumesle and his fellow activists had believed that once they passed their constitution, the revolution would be over. In fact, it was just beginning.63

  * * *

  “The bandit Acaau came barefoot,” dressed like a peasant, “in a species of canvas packing-sheet and wearing a little straw hat.” Behind him came the Army of the Sufferers, demanding a change in their condition. They wanted “respect for the Constitution, Rights, Equality, Liberty.” But more than that, they wanted access to more land in order to secure a better existence as farmers. The “bandit,” Louis Jean-Jacques Acaau, saw his mission as divinely ordained: speaking to a crowd convened by the sound of a conch in one public square, he “publicly vowed not to change his clothing until the orders of ‘divine Providence’ were executed.” And what had providence ordered? “The poor people” were “first to chase out the mulattoes, second to divide up the mulatto properties.” At this point, several eyes in the crowd turned and picked out light-skinned peasants who were standing and listening eagerly to Acaau. However, he proclaimed, pointing to them: “Oh—those are blacks!” A man named Joseph, a worker at a nearby rum distillery, stepped out of the crowd and concurred: “Nègue riche qui connaît li et écri, cila mulâte; mulâte pauve qui pas connaît li ni écri, cila nègue”—“The rich black who can read and write is a mulatto; the poor mulatto who can’t read or write is black.” From then on Joseph became one of the standard-bearers of the movement. Respected for his knowledge of both Vodou and Catholic prayer, he led Acaau’s troops on their campaign with a candle in hand.64

  So Maxime Reybaud, former French consul in Haiti, described the movement that erupted in 1844 and briefly threatened to upend the social order in Haiti. Reybaud’s accounts, written under the pen name Gustave d’Alaux for the popular French magazine Revue des Deux Mondes, are deeply racist. Yet it is from this text that the often-cited Kreyòl proverb about the tight links between color and class—spoken by a Vodou-practicing rural insurgent, no less—comes to us. Just as Dumesle ended up channeling the words of the departed Boukman, so a supercilious Frenchman gave us the gift of Acaau’s words. If they have remained so famous, however, it is because they point directly to the complexity and dynamism of politics, class, and color in
Haiti. As Joseph and Acaau insisted, the real problem wasn’t really the color of one’s skin: it was whether you had access to the wealth and education you needed in order to be truly free.

  Acaau’s army, which mobilized thousands of supporters, was dubbed the Piquets after the pickets they carried into battle as rudimentary weapons. As one Methodist missionary in the country wrote, these were “sticks of different sorts of wood; they sharpened the edge, and applied poisonous gum to it, so that any wound which might not be dangerous, would through poison become so. The sticks were from 8 to 10 feet long.” The Piquets were successful fighters, defeating government troops in several engagements and taking over a large swath of the south of Haiti. The political goals of their movement are difficult to document with precision, since they are known to us almost exclusively through the fragmented observations of largely hostile observers such as Reybaud. “Up to now,” Louis-Joseph Janvier noted in his introduction to an 1884 book called Le vieux piquet, “those who have written the history of the piquets were their enemies or their assassins.” Nevertheless, we can glimpse from these writings the broad political agenda that shook Haiti for several months in 1844.65

  Acaau’s movement took root in the south, a region with a long history of rural resistance. It was in the southern mountains, for instance, that the former maroon Goman had created a separate republic in 1807, holding out against Pétion’s regime until 1819. Farmers in the south had, of course, followed political events during the final years of the Boyer regime, concerned about what the new order would mean for them. The majority of the peasants spoke only Kreyòl, while the debates and legislation of the 1843 revolution were in French. That fact itself was a source of political exclusion. But rural residents tried to overcome that barrier by gathering in public places and having someone who could read French explain the articles to them in Kreyòl. The lack of direct access to political documents meant that rumors played a powerful role in spreading news and inciting action. The uncertainty about precisely who would have the right to vote, for instance, led many to worry that they would be excluded from the political process. Many peasants also believed—wrongly—that the new constitution included provisions for the dispossession of small-scale landowners and the reconstruction of large properties. There were even whispers that legislation requiring the municipal government to register all newborns and conduct censuses had a sinister goal: the return of slavery. Such rumors tapped into profound fears of a return of plantation agriculture, and with it the destruction of the way of life that the peasants had painstakingly constructed. More broadly, many rural residents seemed to fear—rightly, as it turned out—that for all its sound and fury, the revolution of 1843 would end up merely replacing one authoritarian regime with another.66

  Maxime Reybaud had a simple name for what the Piquets represented: “black communism.” Just as the European communists demanded “reduced work and increase of salaries,” he opined, so the peasants of Haiti were demanding “reduction of the price of foreign merchandise and augmentation of the value of their crops.” Many owned small plots of land, but they wanted access to larger properties in order to have a more secure existence. And they wanted to be able to profit more fully from their labor instead of seeing their meager earnings disappear into the state treasury and the pockets of foreign merchants. In fact, however, the Piquets’ agenda covered more than just the economic concerns that Reybaud described. Acaau also demanded that the state provide access to national education, and he tried to bring a truly participatory and democratic form of politics to Haiti. The leaders of the 1843 revolution had come from Haiti’s urban, educated classes, and when they threw themselves into insurrection, they had dressed as military officers—like the members of the government they were opposing. Acaau, in contrast, tapped into a very different kind of political symbolism. He brought together crowds of farmers, few of whom had participated directly in the early uprising, speaking to them in Kreyòl and drawing on the symbols of Vodou and popular Catholicism. Though he was wealthier than many of his rural followers and could have afforded different clothes, he made a point of dressing in the traditional garments of the peasantry, “to show in actions the kind of equality and participation they were speaking about in words.”67

  The Piquet uprising began soon after Rivière Hérard’s constitution was promulgated in late December 1843, and Acaau’s followers marched along almost exactly the same route—from the southern province toward Port-au-Prince—as the forces who had overthrown Boyer a few months earlier. The new revolt starkly exposed the limits of Dumesle’s earlier revolution; and for all their earlier idealism, Dumesle and Rivière were not willing to negotiate with Acaau’s movement or address its demands. They responded instead with guns, sending troops to repel the Piquets.68

  The Piquet uprising made it clear that in Haiti a little bit of revolution could be a very dangerous thing for the elite. Emboldened by the moderate reforms that Dumesle and his fellow activists carried out, Acaau pushed for a truly democratic order, one that would give real political power to the entire Haitian population. But such democracy would necessarily mean not just political change but a wholesale social transformation: if all the rural residents—the clear majority of the Haitian people—actually gained access to the presidency and the parliament, they would be able to use state institutions to demand more land and more control over the economy in general. And that would inevitably threaten, and probably destroy, the arrangement that the country’s elite had crafted in the decades since independence, the “stalemate” that kept them in power and the peasants at bay.

  The threat was a serious one, and many in the political class feared that Rivière Hérard and Hérard Dumesle were not up to the task of containing it. Soon, the ranks of the elites opposing the two leaders included not just military officers and members of Boyer’s bureaucracy but also Dumesle’s former supporters, professionals who had served in the Chamber of Deputies or participated in the opposition press but now were worried about dangerous social upheaval. They found a solution they believed would placate the rebels: replacing President Hérard with a man named Philippe Guerrier. An elderly veteran of the wars of independence, Guerrier had been a high-ranking member of Christophe’s regime, where he was dubbed the Duc de l’Avancé. Famed for his military prowess, he sported a crest decorated with a porcupine and the motto “He who rubs against me will get pricked.” By 1844, though, Guerrier no longer posed any political threat. His candidacy was the first case of what would come to be known as the “politique de doublure,” whereby light-skinned elites choose a black president whom they think they can easily manipulate. Guerrier’s selection was meant to mollify the mass of the population without surrendering political control. And, in a way, it worked. Guerrier offered Acaau a high-ranking government position as general and commander of the region of Les Cayes—which he accepted. Other leaders from the Piquet movement were also brought into the fold.69

  Having reestablished control over the state and much of the countryside, the governing elite set to work creating yet another constitution, one that would prevent future threats to order by rescinding the more radical innovations of the 1843 document. The constitution of 1846 gave power largely back to the executive while diminishing the rights of the population. Political assemblies, for instance, were allowed only as long as their goals were not “contrary to public order.” Voting rights remained essentially the same, but the creation of a number of intermediary electoral institutions—as well as restrictions on who could serve as an elector or a representative—introduced new obstacles to popular control over the government. Most significantly, the Senate returned to being a body selected from the president’s nominees rather than chosen through direct elections, with the president in turn appointed directly by the Senate—and named for life. Furthermore, the president was once again given the power to dissolve the parliament under certain conditions. The closed circuit of the Senate and the president left little room for democratic change or ref
orm. The only way for an outsider to take power—one that would be used again and again over the course of the nineteenth century—was to raise an army and march on the capital.70

  This reversal created an atmosphere of defeat among reformers, putting an end to democratic aspirations even among some of the most fervent political activists. They found themselves disappointed by the behavior of their own leaders, who seemed all too ready to take on the habits of those they had opposed. And they were alarmed at the breadth and intensity of the political movement that emerged in the countryside, which seemed to threaten the foundations of the economic order that sustained urban life in Haiti. A generation of intellectuals ultimately reacted to the events of 1843 and 1844 by concluding that the Haitian population simply wasn’t ready for democracy. The prominent light-skinned intellectual Romuald Lepelletier de Saint-Rémy declared emphatically that the “black race” had to return to the “second rank” in the country, leaving power to the educated, light-skinned elites. Honoré Féry, a major participant in the 1843 revolution, confessed in 1855 that the older generation had been right to warn the young agitators that they could not apply “what was happening elsewhere” to the “backward” people of Haiti. The politician and historian Thomas Madiou similarly wrote in 1878 that it had been a mistake to imagine that ideals of democracy could be applied to the “semi-barbaric population” of Haiti. It was impossible, he said, to imagine a people of such “profound ignorance,” barely capable of practicing agriculture effectively, “choosing its President, its Senators, its Deputies, its judges.”71