The Cry of History: Juste Chanlatte

and the Unsettling (Presence) of

Race in Early Haitian Literature
❦

Chris Bongie

I. 1804–1811. Phoenix Rising: Remembering Juste Chanlatte

Otherwise
One of the first texts published in independent Haiti, Juste Chanlatte’s
six-page pamphlet from early 1804 entitled À mes concitoyens begins with
its author looking back on “the great event that has just transpired in
this country”: the recent expulsion of the French from their former
colony of Saint-Domingue, when “our tormentors melted away in the
face of the Indigenous Phalanxes, like an impure vapour vanishing
with the rays of the sun” (1).1 After detailing “the barbarous oppres-
sion of the French whites” and the victorious struggle against those
“who believe they can get away with anything by calling us negroes”
(4; “se croyent tout permis en nous traitant de nègres”), Chanlatte
then looks forward to the unheralded future of this newly united
nation—“a People of brothers” who have drowned “all seeds of discord
and hate” in the blood of their oppressors (5)—and concludes this
exhortatory address to his fellow citizens with a redemptive vision of
“the Island of Hayti” as “similar to the Phoenix, which, after having
had its entrails torn apart by its own children and having been con-

1
A copy of this hitherto lost text, an excerpt from which can be found in nine-
teenth-century historian Thomas Madiou’s Histoire d’Haïti (3.167-68), survives in the
British National Archives (CO 137/113/38-40).

MLN 130 (2015): 807–835 © 2016 by Johns Hopkins University Press

808 Chris Bongie

sumed by the flames, will be reborn from its ashes, and emerge from
its ruins all the more beautiful and glorious” (6).
For the thirty-eight-year-old Chanlatte, Haitian independence
offered the chance of not just national but personal rebirth. The
French-educated Chanlatte had emerged in 1791 as one of the military
and political leaders of the “free-coloreds” (hommes de couleur libres) in
the Western Province of Saint-Domingue. The famous slave revolt that
broke out in the North on 22 August 1791 did not spread immediately
to other parts of Saint-Domingue, and in the rest of the colony it was
“the vexed relationship between free-coloreds and whites [that] took
center stage” at this time (Dubois 119). Intent on asserting the civil
rights granted (some of) them in the National Assembly’s decree of
15 May 1791, the hommes de couleur pursued an intermittently radical
and conservative strategy with regard to the political status quo, on
occasion raising gangs of slaves against whites, and on others signing
agreements with the latter (Chanlatte would be signatory to one such
concordat in October that year). After this initial prominence as both
a military leader and an organic intellectual for the free-coloreds,
however, Chanlatte’s trail becomes increasingly hard to follow for the
remainder of the revolutionary era, and what little is “known” about
this period in his life often points in a problematic direction: he is
rumored, for instance, to have been “in the service” of the (pro-slavery)
British during their 1793–98 invasion of Saint-Domingue, and to have
taken refuge in the United States near the end of Britain’s failed occu-
pation of the colony (Saint-Rémy 4.26). The archival labor required
to sort through the rumors and gather the facts about Chanlatte’s
activities between 1791 and 1804 would be daunting, to say the least.2
All sources, however, seem to agree that Chanlatte returned to Haiti
from the United States at some point in the weeks following upon the
declaration of independence (see, e.g., Ardouin 6.50, 190), beneficiary
of a January 14 decree providing financial rewards to the captain of
any American vessel that returned Haitians, both “native-born blacks
and men of color” [“de noirs et d’hommes de couleur, indigènes”],
to their homeland (for the decree, see Linstant 7-8).
2
There exists, at present, no historical study focused on any aspect of Chanlatte’s
life, and our sense of his biographical trajectory is still in great part shaped by the
few, and mostly hostile, comments scattered throughout the many volumes produced
by mid-nineteenth-century historians of Haiti such as Beaubrun Ardouin and Joseph
Saint-Rémy. The present article does little to redress the archival silence surrounding
him, but aims to establish the importance, indeed urgency, of doing so, by arguing
for the centrality of his role in the formation of the Haitian literary field during the
years immediately following upon independence, especially in relation to his innovative
treatment of racial identity.
 M  L N 809

Upon his return to Haiti, Chanlatte quickly joined forces with Jean-
Jacques Dessalines, “the treasured, intrepid leader decreed for us by
destiny” (À mes concitoyens 5). As one of Dessalines’s principal secre-
taries, he undersigned the leader’s famous “I have avenged America”
speech of 28 April 1804, which justified the massacres of much of the
remaining French population on the island in the months following
upon independence and which, as nineteenth-century Haitian histo-
rian Beaubrun Ardouin points out, incorporates some of the same
language and thoughts as are to be found in the violent harangues
from 1791 in which Chanlatte urged his fellow citoyens de couleur to
rise up against the “monsters from Europe” and “avenge God, nature,
law, humanity, all of which have been desecrated in these regions of
horror” (qtd. 1.314-15).3 Eventually promoted to Secretary of State,
Chanlatte was also the primary architect of the 1805 Constitution,
article 14 of which proclaimed that “Haytians shall henceforward be
known only by the generic appellation of Blacks.” Divorcing the idea
of “black” from its biological assumptions and repurposing it as the
new nation’s “foundational fiction” (Fischer 229), the paradoxically
universalizing imperative of article 14 represents the most dramatic
attempt during the early years of Haitian independence at pushing
the idea of “race” beyond itself, and the primary goal of this article
will be to show how Chanlatte maintains and extends that experimen-
tal approach, both working with and striving to unsettle hegemonic
conceptions of “race,” in a virtually unknown but seminal text from
1810, Le Cri de la nature.
Chanlatte’s phoenix-like emergence in 1804 as Dessalines’s Secre-
tary of State was by no means his last such rebirth. Chanlatte would
became a marked man after the October 1806 coup that was launched
against Dessalines, “that tiger thirsty for the blood of his fellow-kind,”
in the words of the coup leaders (Gérin and Pétion 16). Unlike his
similarly light-skinned colleague Louis-Félix Boisrond-Tonnerre, who
would be imprisoned and executed in Port-au-Prince days after the
assassination of Dessalines, Chanlatte managed to escape to the North
and gain the protection of Dessalines’s second-in-command, Henry

3
Deborah Jenson has recently questioned the degree to which Dessalines’s secretaries
were (as nineteenth-century Haitian historians insisted) solely responsible for the proc-
lamations they signed, arguing that “there is a fluid, sustained, and critical structure
of metaphor in the major Dessalinian texts, regardless of secretarial signature” (90).
Useful as her emphasis on retrieving Dessalines’s authorial voice is, there can be no
question for anyone familiar with Chanlatte’s writings as a whole that his “assistance,”
in Jenson’s words (46), in composing this particular speech was substantial, to say the
least—a point that will be textually confirmed in the second section of this article.
810 Chris Bongie

Christophe. By 1807 Chanlatte had become the loudest defender of

Christophe’s legitimacy and the most acerbic critic of the “Machiavel-
lian club” who had conspired to deny Christophe power, to quote from
the extended satire of Pétion’s government, Réflexions sur le prétendu
Sénat du Port-au-Prince, that he published in May 1807 (1), the first
literary work to be produced in Haiti after the young nation split in
two.4 As editor of the weekly newpaper, the Gazette officielle de l’État
d’Hayti, also launched in May 1807, Chanlatte became the primary
spokesperson for Christophe’s regime in its early years, and would go
on to play a central role in the transformation of the northern State of
Hayti into a monarchy in 1811 (see, e.g., Saint-Rémy 5.276-77): many
of the iconic trappings of the Haytian monarchy, for instance, can be
traced to Chanlatte, including “the primary symbol for Christophe’s
kingdom,” the phoenix (Cheesman 18), which featured on the King’s
coat of arms alongside the motto “Je renais de mes cendres” [“I am
reborn from my ashes”].
In his new guise as the Comte de Roziers (also spelled Rosiers),
Chanlatte would feature prominently at the king’s coronation in early
June. A lengthy account of the coronation by Julien Prévost, the newly
minted Comte de Limonade, reproduces several poetic works of Chan-
latte’s that were performed during the five-day ceremony: a “Chant
inaugural” and a “Cantate,” this last production sung by, among others,
Chanlatte’s wife (159-62, 179-83). Excerpts from both of these works
would feature in Aimé Césaire’s 1963 La Tragédie du Roi Christophe,
where Chanlatte is given a minor role as “official poet” and made to
stand as the very figure of a culturally alienated mimic man. Césaire’s
dismissive representation of Chanlatte is symptomatic of his general
reception over the past two centuries: when he is remembered at all,
it is most often in relation to this derided public persona, that of the
court poet, a writer of florid verse, much of it devoted to fawning
portraits of King Christophe (or, after Christophe’s death in 1820, of
his republican successor, President Boyer).
Too many critics have cast scorn on the poetry Chanlatte produced
between 1811 and his death in 1828 for one to entertain much hope
of salvaging his at best marginal reputation in this regard.5 By con-
trast, arguments for the centrality of his role in the emergence of the

4
A copy of this hitherto lost text, an extended discussion of which can be found in
nineteenth-century historian Beaubrun Ardouin’s Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti (7.102-05),
survives in the British National Archives (CO 137/120/225-41).
5
The inclusion of no less than six poems by Chanlatte in the 2015 anthology Poetry
of Haitian Independence (Kadish and Jenson), however, signals the first stirrings of a
revisionist reading of his poetry that nicely doubles my own efforts here with regard
to his prose.
 M  L N 811

Haitian literary field most certainly can be enhanced by a renewed

awareness of the innovative but neglected writings in prose that he
published in the first years of Christophe’s regime, most notably,
Le Cri de la nature. This work reveals Chanlatte as the first Haitian
writer to provide “indigenous reflections” (Chanlatte, Cri 6) on the
absurdities of racial science and the ambiguities of Enlightenment
thought, and the first to lay the foundations for “the construction of
our historical edifice” (27) by sketching out a counter-history of the
entire Haitian Revolution, from Ogé’s revolt in 1790 to the expulsion
of the French in 1803. With Cri, his most accomplished prose work,
Chanlatte established a veritable blueprint for other Christophean
scribes, notably Baron de Vastey, whose pioneering contributions to
the abolitionist public sphere and status as a representative figure of
“Atlantic Enlightenment” (Stam and Shohat 20) and an inaugurator
of “Caribbean critique” (Nesbitt 173-91) have lately acquired a new
visibility in Haitian Revolutionary Studies.
The formative influence of Chanlatte on Vastey (and on the emer-
gence of early Haitian literature in general) has remained invisible,
however, for the simple reason that the only known copy of the 1810
Cri was buried away in the British National Archives until 2007, when
it, along with a cache of other Haitian books and pamphlets from
the period, was transferred to the Foyle Special Collections Library
at King’s College, London; as yet unavailable in digital form, this text
“par Juste Chanlatte, haytien” (to quote from its title page) remains
virtually unknown. The question of influence is further complicated,
moreover, by the fact that Cri is also a rather well known text under
another name, an edited version of it having been published in 1824
under the title Histoire de la catastrophe de Saint-Domingue by a French
naval officer with abolitionist credentials, Auguste-Jean-Baptiste Bouvet
de Cressé, “a writer as prolific as he was mediocre” (Durozoir 359).
While “J...e Ch......e” is identified as the author of the 1824 Histoire
in several editorial footnotes, Bouvet de Cressé said nothing in his
own preface about its origins, leaving open the possibility that it was
based on an unpublished manuscript, perhaps of recent vintage, and
that its publication in Paris, as one scholar has repeatedly suggested,
might have been the product of a collaborative effort between “two
abolitionist partners” (Kadish, Fathers, Daughters, and Slaves 148),
rather than an unacknowledged act of appropriation on the part of
a Frenchman whose posterity has proved entirely reliant on this act.6
6
Several mid-nineteenth-century writers did make the connection between the al-
ready-scarce Cri and Bouvet’s Histoire (see, notably, Saint-Rémy, 4.32) and in 1979 David
Nicholls, a familiar of the British National Archives, noted in passing that Chanlatte’s
Cri “was substantially republished” by Bouvet de Cressé “under the title Histoire de la
catastrophe de Saint-Domingue” (266, note 27). Kadish’s erroneous suggestion exemplifies
the way in which this information continues not to inform references to the 1824 His-
toire in the work of literary critics and historians alike (see, e.g., Fleischmann, Girard).
812 Chris Bongie

Like Chanlatte himself, who would successfully disengage himself

from Christophe as the monarchy began to crumble in the late sum-
mer of 1820,7 Le Cri de la nature survives in altered form the ideologi-
cal passage from the early years of Christophe’s “black” kingdom to
the consolidation of what historians often refer to, with a sociological
verisimilitude that is inseparable from ideological bias, as the “mulatto
oligarchy” that would dominate Haiti for much of the rest of the
century (Garrigus 20). The prototypical Christophean text, with its
ardent appeals to Haitian autonomy and its experimental approach
to racial identity, takes on a new and altogether less resistant iden-
tity when re-presented to a French public in 1824, one year before
Charles X would impose massive indemnities on the former colony of
Saint-Domingue as the price for its (provisional) recognition as the
independent nation of Haiti. The restoration of Saint-Domingue in
the altered title of Bouvet’s edition perfectly captures this historical
shift, literally denaturing the text, rendering inaudible Chanlatte’s
Haitian “cry” (with its echoes of Enlightenment and revolutionary
discourse) and recasting it in the more assimilable form of a cata-
strophic “history.” In the pages that follow, my aim will be to reverse
this Eurotropic trajectory by providing the first substantive account of
Chanlatte’s original intervention (section II), before concluding with
a brief reflection on the transformation of Chanlatte’s post-colonial
Cri into Bouvet’s neo-colonial Histoire (section III).

II. 1810. Scribal Mimesis:

Le Cri de la nature and Postcolonial Literacy
Of the many differences, large and small, between the 1810 Cri and
the 1824 Histoire none is more glaring than Bouvet’s complete erasure
of the inspiration for the original text. The lengthy subtitle of Le Cri
de la nature gives a good sense of the work’s genesis and priorities:

7
Upon Boyer’s triumphant arrival in the former Cap-Henry, newly renamed Cap-Hay-
tien, two weeks after the suicide of Christophe on 8 October, Chanlatte would deliver,
in the name of the city’s chief officers and magistrates, an effusive welcoming address
to “the worthy successor of the Immortal pétion,” in celebration of “the indestructible
chain that will henceforth reunite the members of the great Haitian family” (Discours
1), and within a week he would also publish a four-page pamphlet denouncing the
monarch of whom he had been the erstwhile scribe, depicting him as a Machiavellian
monster, “the scourge of Hayti, a disgrace to human kind,” “an insuperable obstacle
to the grand work of fusing all Haytian hearts into one and the same whole” (Henry
Christophe 1), and, to boot, a gros cochon who indulged in “nocturnal orgies” and “outdid
all the obscene depravities, all the unholy and indecent horrors of which Sardanapalus
and Nebuchadnezzar were once accused” (2).
 M  L N 813

Hommage haytien, Au très-vénérable abbé H. Grëgoire, auteur d’un Ouvrage

nouveau, intitulé: De la littérature des Nègres. Like every other refer-
ence to the renowned abolitionist abbé Grégoire in the 1810 text, this
subtitle disappears from Bouvet’s edition, concealing the fact that Cri
was written in direct response to De la littérature des Nègres, Grégoire’s
1808 “enquiry concerning the intellectual and moral faculties, and
literature of negroes” (to cite that book’s own subtitle, as rendered
in its 1810 English translation). Bouvet knew and admired Grégoire;
indeed, it was almost certainly the latter who gave him a copy of Cri.8
Grégoire’s absence from the Histoire is no doubt due in part to the fact
that he was a contentious figure in Restoration France and Bouvet did
not want to damn Chanlatte’s narrative through explicit association
with a man whom many contemporary readers, such as the young
Victor Hugo, hated for his republican beliefs and his “regicide” past.9
More importantly, from our perspective, Bouvet’s dramatic erasure
of Grégoire has the calculated effect of reducing what I will be call-
ing the “postcolonial literacy” of Chanlatte’s text to something more
closely resembling basic literacy: no longer explicitly identified as part
of a dialogue of (almost) equals conducted in the transatlantic public
sphere, the Histoire could be more easily marketed as mere source
material for European readers interested in gaining a fuller picture
of the “catastrophe” that befell “the finest, the most beautiful, and
the richest of the Antilles” (Bouvet, Histoire ii).
In order to restore this dialogue, a few more introductory words
about De la littérature des Nègres need to be said. In this book, Grégoire
had bravely taken upon himself, in a very hostile climate, “the task of
proving that the negroes [Nègres] are capable of virtues and talents”
(Enquiry 248 [De la littérature 279]). In its rigorous questioning of

8
In an earlier text from 1824 entitled Précis des victoires et conquêtes des Français dans les
deux mondes, de 1792 à 1823, Bouvet had copied out long passages from “a narrative”
(une relation) about the 1802–03 Napoleonic expedition to Saint-Domingue, noting that
“its author is Juste Chanlatte, eye witness,” and that he was “all the more confident in
consigning it to print because it is, so to speak [pour ainsi dire], unknown in Europe,
and we have obtained it from a venerable prelate whose evangelical conduct does
honor to the holy ministry to which he has devoted his glorious existence” (Précis 203-
04). In the Histoire, using a less transparent form of periphrasis, Bouvet refers to his
unnamed source as “one of the most honorable members of the Chamber of Deputies
of Departments of the Kingdom of France” (153), while maintaining the same strategic
silence regarding the already-published status of the material he was “consigning to
print” and its date of composition.
9
Grégoire was looked upon as a “regicide” for his purported role in sanctioning the
execution of Louis XVI in 1793. For an even-handed assessment of Grégoire’s varying
pronouncements regarding the monarch’s death, see Sepinwall (125-28); and for the
young Hugo’s disapproving view of Grégoire, see Hugo (322).
814 Chris Bongie

the claims of racial science and its extensive historical overview of

examples of black political and cultural accomplishment, Grégoire’s
“abolitionist manifesto” offered “a barely veiled challenge to Napo-
leon’s reinstitution of slavery” (Sepinwall 164), and stands as a vital
reminder “that a radically antiracist position was ‘available’ among
whites at the time of the French and Haitian Revolutions” (Stam and
Shohat 22). While De la littérature des Nègres can, like Grégoire’s entire
corpus, be seen as relevant even today for “its ferocious resistance to
any reification or essentialization of the concept of ‘race’” (Hermon-
Belot xxi), its constitutive insistence on the word Nègre, from the title
onward, to say nothing of a continued reliance on finer racial grada-
tions (for instance, in a chapter title such as “Notices de Nègres et
Mulâtres distingués par leurs talens et leurs ouvrages”), signals the
epistemic complicity between Grégoire’s antiracism and the decidedly
less philanthropic views of his proslavery opponents regarding “the
negro race in its present state” [“la race actuelle des nègres”] (Tussac
18). As we will see, in its ostensibly deferent response to Grégoire, it
is through a strategic evasion of the very word Nègre that Chanlatte’s
own Cri will contest, if not escape, the complicitous assumptions of
this racialized language.
The specific circumstances that led to the writing and publication
of this “Haytian homage” to abbé Grégoire are recounted in Julien
Prévost’s above-mentioned account of the events surrounding Chris-
tophe’s coronation. Early on in his narrative, Prévost notes:
A worthy minister of religion, and philanthropic author, the Abbé Gregoire,
who, since the commencement of his career, has devoted his pen to the
investigation of truth, and the defence of humanity, has, by his affecting
work on the Literature of the Negroes, written with all the eloquence and
simplicity of truth, avenged our rights by openly publishing, in the face of
his countrymen, at once their crimes and the injustice of the pretended
superiority of their species over ours. The President [Christophe] read his
book with all the interest it inspires, and has voted him his thanks conveyed
in a Haytian work called “The Cry of Nature,” which do equal honour to
the virtuous prelate to whom they are addressed, and the head of the gov-
ernment conferring such a mark of respect, at once public and flattering
in its acknowledgment. (Limonade 20, as translated in Saunders 84-85)

Prévost’s description of the Haitian reception of Grégoire’s text gives

us a fascinating insight into the scribal origins of Chanlatte’s text, and
of literary production in general under the unlettered Christophe.
What sort of “reading” of Grégoire was performed in the King’s pres-
ence? What sort of instructions went into the making of this royal
 M  L N 815

acknowledgment? How open or closed were the lines of communica-

tion between the foregrounded sovereign and the occluded scribe?
Where does the latter’s collaboration (or, if you will, propaganda)
end and his originality begin?
I will return to these questions when considering Chanlatte’s hith-
erto unnoted influence on his fellow Christophean scribe Baron de
Vastey, but for now what needs to be remarked upon is that his respect-
ful response to Grégoire is the first in a long line of Christophean
texts that self-consciously addressed themselves to the transatlantic
public sphere in an effort at swaying opinion abroad (and which in
this respect differ significantly from the appeal to a nascent local
public sphere that one finds in Chanlatte’s earliest Christophean
writings, the 1807 Réflexions and his journalistic work for the Gazette,
which were very much addressed to literate Haitian audiences on
both sides of the newly created border separating the rival states of
Christophe and Pétion). In the case of Cri, the principal addressee is
the Frenchman Grégoire, whose republican sensibilities would soon
be deeply alienated by the monarchical turn of Christophe’s Haiti,
and who repeatedly rebuffed the regime’s attempts at opening up a
dialogue with him (see Sepinwall 183-86). But already in 1810 steps
were being taken to lay the groundwork for the wider dissemination
of Christophean texts in the Anglo-American world that would occur
later in the decade through the works, most notably, of Vastey and
the mediation of a network of abolitionists such as Thomas Clarkson
and translators such as Marcus Rainsford (see Bongie 29-42). Chris-
tophe’s chargé d’affaires in London, Jean-Gabriel Peltier, for instance,
gave a hot-off-the-press copy of Cri to Robert Peel, under-secretary to
the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, Lord Liverpool, as
part of his persistent efforts at advancing the interests of the Haitian
State in Britain. After remarking in a letter to Peel that, in order to
gain recognition and protection, “the black chieftain which a series
of revolutions has placed at the head of Haïty may and is willing to
render to this country all possible services,” Peltier appended a note
drawing Peel’s attention to Chanlatte’s book: “I beg to inclose here for
your perusal and Lord Liverpool’s information a book just published
at Haïty by a Black, and printed there, which cannot but give a good
idea of the improvement of civilisation in those quarters.”10 Peltier’s
characterization of Cri in relation to “improvement” and “civilisation”
vividly conveys the manner in which early Haitian literature would be

10
Peltier to Peele [sic], letter of 27 June 1810, British National Archives, WO
1/79/405-07.
816 Chris Bongie

conscripted for, and knowingly (if uneasily, and even paradoxically)

inscribe itself within, a range of developmental discourses capable of
rewriting the country’s independence as, at best, a distinctly adolescent,
if not infantile, state of affairs.
The acquisition of literacy, especially elite literacy of the sort sig-
nalled by Chanlatte’s intertextual engagement with Grégoire, is one
of the most visible signs of “the improvement of civilisation,” and
Chanlatte reinforces his reader’s awareness of it from the very outset
of Cri by also including on the title page a four-line quotation from
Voltaire’s 1736 tragedy Alzire, ou les Américains, as well as a second, six-
line quotation from the play on the following page, at the end of a brief
dedication to Grégoire. Before turning to an analysis of Chanlatte’s
actual text, it is well worth pausing over this paratextual emphasis on
Voltaire’s play, especially given its absence from the 1824 edition. The
use of Alzire is of interest not only because it is one of the most evident
examples of the strategic display of literacy through which Chanlatte
signals his (and by extension his country’s) capacity for development,
but also because it allows us to cast new light on the source for one
of his former sovereign Dessalines’s most memorable lines.
As Christopher Miller reminds us in his enlightening account of
the “circum-Atlantic life” of Voltaire’s play and its relation to the
author’s shifting (and shifty) views on slavery (71-82), in colonial
Saint-Domingue Alzire was “one of the most popular plays of one of
the most popular authors in the very rich and varied theater of the
island” (78). The play offers a stringent critique of the “despotic furor”
of the Spanish colonists in sixteenth-century Peru and their violent
“enslavement” of the native Indians, and for this reason Miller sug-
gests that people of color (who “were allowed to attend [the theatre],
sitting in the rear, at least from 1766”) must surely have processed it
differently than the rest of its colonial audience, and that Alzire, “in
spite of its limitations and in spite of its author’s prevarications,” could
well have contributed “in some small way to the thinking that would
eventually rise up against the ‘despotic terror’ of real slavery” (78-79).
Chanlatte’s provocative use of Alzire at the beginning of Cri provides us
with one exemplary piece of evidence in support of Miller’s suggestion.
Chanlatte’s opening citations from Alzire both focus on the character
of Don Alvares, former governor of the colony, a noble-hearted protec-
tor of the Indians modelled on Las Casas (a great hero of Grégoire’s,
as Chanlatte would have known from reading De la littérature des Nègres).
Don Alvares’s son Gusman, who has just succeeded his father as gover-
nor at the play’s outset, harbors very different views of the Indians, or
 M  L N 817

“savage monsters” as he calls them (1.1.53); nevertheless, he desires,

and succeeds in marrying, the Indian princess Alzire, whose true
love is Zamore, “the virile Indian hero” (in Miller’s words). Believed
dead, Zamore resurfaces with vengeance on his mind for the violent
depredations of the Spanish, but this hatred does not extend to the
noble Don Alvares, whose life he once saved. Chanlatte’s epigraph is
taken from a speech in which Zamore praises the humane governor
and distinguishes him from the rest of his “perverse” compatriots:
Des cieux enfin sur moi la bonté se déclare,
Je trouve un homme juste, en ce climat barbare,
Alvarès est un Dieu qui, parmi ces pervers,
Descend pour adoucir les mœurs de l’univers.11 (cf. 2.3.129-32)

The second citation (3) is taken from another equally glowing portrait
of Alvares in which Zamore compares him to all the other representa-
tives of his “cruel nation”: “Mais autant que ton âme est bienfaisante
et pure, / Autant leur cruauté fait frémir la nature” (2.2.105-06).12
In both instances, Alvares thus stands in for Grégoire, with Chanlatte
assuming the heroic role of Zamore, the indigenous resistance leader.
The fact that Alvares is identified as “un homme juste” creates, more-
over, a supplementary identification in which Juste Chanlatte (whose
name immediately precedes the epigraph from Alzire on the title
page of Cri) is not simply distinguished from but uncannily mirrored
in his transatlantic model Grégoire—a point that is by no means as
speculative as it might seem, given Alvares’s association throughout
the play with “ce grand nom de juste” (5.5.108), and Chanlatte’s
evident awareness of the paronomasiac potential of his given name.13
Both of these paratextual citations from Alzire—as well as the two
subsequent references in the text to this work by “the inimitable
Voltaire” (63), which invoke Zamore’s refutation of the supposed sav-
agery of “the American people” (63; cf. 1.1.105-6 ) and his insistence
on the legitimacy of their resistance to Spanish rule (64; cf. 3.6.249-
50)—feature small divergences from the original play (for instance,

11
“The heavens on me their bounty finally bestowed / A just man I have found in
this barbarous abode, / Alvares is a God, in the midst of perverse men, / Who has
come down to this world, their manners to soften.”
12
“Yet however benevolent and pure your soul may be, / their cruelty makes nature
shudder to the same degree.”
13
To take but one example from elsewhere in his œuvre, in the 1819 Hayti recon-
naissante, Chanlatte affirms, in the archly pious scriptural language that characterizes
this pastiche-tribute to a collection of letters by the British abolitionist James Stephen,
that “the works of the just man [les œuvres du juste], like those of the Most High, will
never perish” (4-5).
818 Chris Bongie

Chanlatte’s “climat barbare” replaces Voltaire’s “séjour barbare,” and

he substitutes “peuple américain” for “peuple infortuné”). Changes
such as this lend themselves to being read as examples of what Joseph
Slaughter has termed “postliteracy (or postcolonial literacy),” a know-
ing manipulation of the signs of literacy on the part of the (presently
or formerly) colonized that emphasizes “the historicity of reading
and writing as social practices that are ‘implicated in power relations
and embedded in specific cultural meanings’” (288). Interesting as
it might be to tease out the significance of these minor changes, it is
more useful here to establish a broader point about Chanlatte’s know-
ingly manipulative relation to Voltaire’s play: namely, that the very
(postliterate) act of transposing Alzire from sixteenth-century Peru to
contemporary Haiti serves to unsettle the play’s ideological assump-
tions, showing up what Miller has identified as the “limitations” of
the text and the “prevarications” of its author (79), “the philosophe
with by far the most vexed relation to the slave trade” (71). As Miller
argues, Alzire is a text that, for all its seemingly critical relationship to
Spanish colonialism and the “enslavement” of indigenous Americans,
nonetheless unfolds “within a context of assumed and unapologetic
imperialism, an attack on ‘slavery’ perhaps but also a defense of the
submission of subject peoples” (73); nowhere, Miller continues, are
these imperial assumptions and the power relations they legitimate
more evident than in the fact that Voltaire carefully “avoid[s] the reality
of the French Atlantic triangle” and “completely elides African slavery
in Alzire” (74). Chanlatte’s rerouting of Alzire from colonial Peru to
post-colonial Haiti addresses this elision, activating the play’s latent
potential to speak to the injustices and inhumanity of African slavery
on both sides of the Atlantic, while establishing bonds of solidarity
and identification between Haitians and the oppressed “Americans”
in Voltaire’s play.
As a vivid example of Haitian postliteracy in the years following upon
independence, Chanlatte’s repurposing of Alzire in Le Cri de la nature
is in and of itself interesting, but it becomes even more so when one
realizes that Chanlatte is here repeating a move that he had made six
years before, when he authored one of the most famous lines in Hai-
tian history, the triumphant words spoken by Dessalines on 28 April
1804: “J’ai vengé l’Amérique.” For this line is based directly on another
speech of Zamore’s, from the scene following the one that supplied
Chanlatte with the epigraph to Cri. In this speech, Zamore informs
Monteze (the father of Alzire, who has converted to Christianity and
is collaborating with the Spaniards) that he has assembled a band of
 M  L N 819

comrades, united in their “common hatred” of the conquerors who

enslaved his people: “Ils sont dans nos forêts, et leur foule héroïque /
Vient périr sous ces murs, ou venger l’Amérique” (2.4.177-78).14 The
prominence given to Alzire in the opening pages of Cri thus serves
as a subtle reminder of the fact that its author, who in Cri is playing
the role of Zamore to Grégoire’s Alvares, once placed the architect
of Haitian independence in that very same role, appropriating the
theatrical words of French Enlightenment in the service of a very real
act of vengeance against colonial tyranny.
Chanlatte’s direct appeals to Grégoire extend to the beginning of
the text proper, where he describes Henry Christophe’s enthusiastic
reaction to De la littérature des Nègres (5; “the heart of President H.
Christophe throbbed at the voice of the just man [à la voix du juste]”),
and declares his own desire to “imitate . . . this saintly Abbé by sowing
some indigenous reflections on the subjects he has discussed” (6). This
scribal mimesis extends, in the opening pages of the first chapter, to
supplying two Grégoire-like section headings, “On our Origin, on the
unity of the primitive Type of the human race” (6) and “On Slavery, on
the supposed moral inferiority of Negroes” (9). As we will see at the
very end of this article, the implicit tension between the first-person
thrust of the initial heading (“notre Origine”) and the objectifying
emphasis on Grégoire’s racial terminology in the second (this being
the only place in the entire book where Chanlatte uses the term Nègre)
is one that will explicitly occupy Bouvet de Cressé in 1824 when he
publishes an edited version of Cri for a very different audience and
at a very different point in history.
As these two section headings suggest, Chanlatte’s first chapter
expands upon Grégoire’s arguments for the common origin of all
members of the “human race” (monogenesis) and his critique of
the racist hierarchies that were used to justify slavery, what Chanlatte
calls the “vain subtleties” and “sophisms” (7), the “diabolical artifices”
(9), through which proponents of slavery have attempted to “reduce
man to a material being and nothing more [matérialiser l’homme] in

14
“There in our forests, a throng of heroes awaits, / To avenge America they have
come, or to die at these gates.” Bernard Camier and Laurent Dubois have also identified
this intertextual connection between Alzire and the 28 April speech in an unpublished
article entitled “Voltaire and Dessalines in the Theater of the Atlantic,” in which they
compellingly argue that “the ideas and texts of Enlightenment writers and theorists
. . . were broadcast in Saint-Domingue through theater more than through any other
medium.” However, their speculation that the citations from Alzire in this speech reflect
Dessalines’s own encounters with Voltaire’s play strike me as doubtful, especially given
the fact that Camier and Dubois make no mention of the speech’s under-signatory,
Chanlatte, whose familiarity with Alzire is, as we have seen, a matter of record.
820 Chris Bongie

order to legitimate and perpetuate their frightful tyranny” (8). As

the first attempt in Haitian literature to pursue the primarily cultural
critique of social and political inequality exemplified by Grégoire’s De
la littérature des Nègres, this opening chapter is of immense historical
interest, establishing a template for the arguments against (but also, as
we will shortly see, in the service of) race that would be developed by
subsequent Christophean scribes, notably Vastey. Chanlatte’s primary
goal here is to publicize and expand upon Grégoire’s refutation of
polygenist claims regarding the “primitive diversity of human races”
(7). In the wake of Grégoire, Chanlatte notes that these pseudo-
scientific claims—eagerly invoked by the colonists in order “to place
their own species in the company of the ourang-outang” (7)—fly in
the face of “countless anatomical experiments and well established
physiological discoveries” (6-7). The difference that color makes is
merely skin-deep, an epidermal nuance (8; “cette nuance, plus ou
moins noire de l’épiderme, qui suffit pour faire nier en nous l’identité
d’espèce”); this nuance must ultimately be accounted for by the fact
that “the common father of all men wished to signal the magnificence
of his works through the diverse shades of animals belonging to the
same race [les diverses teintes des animaux de la même race]” (8). It is this
human sameness that European thinkers such as Montesquieu (10-11)
and Pufendorf (13) may have acknowledged in theory, but that their
evasive treatment of the practical realities of slavery skirted, thereby
facilitating, and at points even replicating, the “bad faith of the colo-
nists and their partisans” (21). Spurred on by Grégoire, Chanlatte’s
attacks on “the charlatanism of the colonists” (18) are nonetheless
notably distinguished from those of the French abolitionist by the
inclusion of first-person invocations of the human sameness that
both men are defending, as when he notes that “just like the rest of
our species, we feel in ourselves this happy capacity for thought, for
arranging ideas, for putting words together and comparing objects
one with another” (11-12).
Such rhetorically powerful deployments of the first-person plural
pronoun, nous, are also evident in Chanlatte’s self-identification with
those who suffered under a “colonial regime that offered us nothing
but torments, terrors, toil, and destitution” (14).15 While not neces-

15
Nowhere is this first-person identification with the experience of slavery more evi-
dent than in the following passage: “Degraded to a condition below that of domestic
animals, half-covered with some miserable rags and tatters, gnawed by hunger, eternally
bent under the whip of a ruthless slave driver, we worked the land, watering it with our
sweat and our blood, so that your arrogant sensuality could savor them drop by drop
along with the delicious liquors they produced” (20).
 M  L N 821

sarily incompatible with Chanlatte’s universalizing emphasis on a

common humanity (l’unité d’espèce), the use of nous in these situations
epitomizes a counter-balancing insistence on (cultural, racial . . . )
diversity that is present, in various forms, throughout the chapter—a
balancing of the universal and the particular that will prove central to
the early Haitian form of critique Chanlatte helps inaugurate in Cri.
The word “race” thus retains a certain validity, serving as a valuable
marker of difference: Chanlatte can ask, in the face of the repeated
calumnies of those who defend slavery, what right these people have
“to stigmatize a human race” (“flétrir une race humaine”; 20, my ital-
ics); and he can refer proudly to “notre race” (24), while at the same
time supplementing this racialized vocabulary with other words, such
as “caste” (24), which double, and thereby unsettle, the “static and
fixed conceptions of human being” that adhere to the idea of “race”
(Monahan 207).
Such appeals to difference over sameness are what undergirds the
incipiently Afrocentric perspective that Chanlatte opens up in this
chapter when he speaks of “the glorious passage of our ancestors” in
India, Egypt, and the Spanish peninsula (7), and when he returns to
the Moorish kingdom of Grenada at the end of the chapter, estab-
lishing ancestral links with “the pleasing virtues of the Abencerrages”
and reminding readers that his caste still today bears many a “noble
scar” in the manner of “one of its famous Othellos” (25). Perhaps the
most striking example of this Afrocentric perspective is his evocation
of the Black Madonna: “we take pride in belonging by virtue of the
color of our skin [nous nous glorifions d’appartenir par l’épiderme], more
particularly than other men, to the mother of our divine Savior, who
said, with a simplicity that equalled the candor of her soul, Nigra sum
sed formosa; I am black, but I am beautiful” (7). When turned to the
past and the ancestral roots of his people (their “souche originelle”; 7),
Chanlatte’s particularizing language thus tends toward an Afrocentric
perspective; when turned toward the future, by contrast, he gestures
toward an alternative, geographically-based rhetoric of difference,
promoting a distinctive “New Worldist” vision that was grounded in
his reading of Voltaire’s Alzire and already central to the 28 April
speech he wrote for Dessalines. Here, distinctions between races and
castes are supplemented or even supplanted by a more inclusive yet
nonetheless particularizing comparison between l’antique Europe and
le nouveau monde, as when, reflecting on slaves who struck down their
masters, he conjures up a vision of “the robust athlete of the new world
looking with disdain on the last contortions of the aping colonist [le
822 Chris Bongie

singe colon]” (14), or augurs that “the moment may be coming when
in order to find some remaining traces of European civilization and
French urbanity, you will have to seek them out in the New World,
below the 19th parallel,” and learn the lesson of what “a fresh vigor
[une énergie vièrge] conjoined with the merit that comes from experi-
ence and instruction” can accomplish (25).
The first chapter concludes with Chanlatte prophesying to his Euro-
pean reader (vous) that “if ever we have our painters, our poets, our
sculptors and our historians, how dishonoring our monuments will
be for you, if your crimes are faithfully recounted” (26). The second
chapter (27-55) sketches out what this (counter-)monumental Haitian
history might look like once the “magical gauze” that has been cast
over “the horrors of the colonial system” is lifted (19): it offers the
first indigenously authored account of the Haitian Revolution from
its beginning to its end, from “the birth of our revolution” (27) to
the “expulsion of the French from our territory” (54). In another
telling instance of postcolonial literacy, Chanlatte begins this chapter
with an epigraph from Virgil’s Aeneid, “Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus
ultor” (4.625). The curse placed on Aeneas by the abandoned Dido,
calling forth an avenger who will arise from her (literally, our) bones,
provides a mythic framework for the historical narrative and estab-
lishes a thematic direction for it that culminates with the description
of the final struggle in 1802–03 when “the cry of vengeance rang out
from all parts” at the atrocities committed by the French and “the
sepulchres of our ancestors opened, their mouldering bones rattled,
and the tombs and all of nature answered: Vengeance!” (53-54) As
David Quint argues in Epic and Empire, Dido’s curse resists “the closure
that the Aeneid projects upon Roman history,” operating as a “rival
prophecy” to those of an unending empire that are sanctioned by
Virgil’s epic: “Dido foretells the other side of the story, the saga of the
conquered who refuse to stay conquered” (111), who rise from the
ashes, phoenix-like, to contest Rome’s imperial destiny. Chanlatte’s
identification of his people with the “defeated Africans . . . who find
consolation in the occasions that future history will offer them for
retaliation and revenge” (111) is thus postliteracy with a vengeance,
troubling enough in its knowing manipulation of canonical literature
that Bouvet de Cressé would simply eliminate the epigraph from his
1824 edition of Cri, as part of a more pervasive containment strategy
directed toward Chanlatte’s various uses of Latin, be it, as in this
instance, through deletion, or through grammatical corrections or
even the ostentatious insertion of Bouvet de Cressé’s own Latin verses
 M  L N 823

on the title page of the Histoire, in the place once occupied by the
epigraph from Alzire.
Without recourse to a single historical date, Chanlatte’s second
chapter takes the reader from beginning to end of the Haitian Revo-
lution—from Ogé’s revolt (29), through “the reign of the virtuous
governor general Toussaint Louverture” (31) and the “civil war” waged
between the forces of Toussaint and “the madman Rigaud” (32-35), to
Napoleon’s decision to restore slavery in the colony (36-38) and the
horrors committed by General Leclerc’s (and later Rochambeau’s)
expeditionary army, culminating in a seemingly eye-witness account
of the use of man-eating dogs imported from Cuba to track and maul
their human quarry (49-53). What is especially striking about this
chapter is its knowing omission of racialized language: while Chanlatte
does have recourse to the phrase “hommes blancs” in narrating the
Haitian Revolution (30, 32, 35, 37, 41, 53), there is a complete absence
of any such reifying terminology when it comes to representing those
struggling against colonial rule, apart from one reference to “a human
creature” being tortured to death “for the sole reason that it pleased
heaven to cover him with a black skin” (50).
Chanlatte’s approach is in evident contrast with that of Boisrond-
Tonnerre’s 1804 Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire d’Hayti, the ur-text of
indigenous Haitian history-telling, which provides a far more detailed
(and altogether less mythic) narrative, focused solely on the years
1802–03, that makes straightforward use of any number of racial
denominations to refer to the colony’s non-white population—such as
“les noirs et les jaunes” (15, 46), or “un noir ou un homme de couleur”
(68)—or even to individuals, such as Pétion, “homme de couleur”
(22), Martial Besse, “mulâtre” (63), or the maroon leader Lamour
Dérance, “noir africain” (79). Here, by contrast, Chanlatte strategi-
cally foregoes such language (at the cost, to be sure, of a great deal
of historical and sociological specificity), as in his account of “la race
humaine” being devoured by dogs (49), where the victims are referred
to simply as “men,” martyrs,” and “sufferers,” or in his description of
the final phase of the Revolution as the “necessary struggle between
oppressors and oppressed” when “all imaginary ideas of superiority
and of color disappeared, and man alone was all that was left [l’homme
seul est resté]” (54). The significance of these deracialized descriptions
of Haitian history can be further gauged by considering how an abo-
litionist like Grégoire processed Chanlatte’s vivid description of the
Cuban blood-hounds for his readers in an 1815 tract where he praised
it as a passage [morceau] “written with the energy of Tacitus”: there,
824 Chris Bongie

Grégoire notes that “the day on which the first experiment of the
animals’ ferocity was made upon a Negro [un Noir] bound to a post,
was a day of festival for the Whites of Cape-town, who were assembled
round the amphitheatre in which they enjoyed this spectacle, worthy
of cannibals” (On the Slave Trade 5 [De la traite 9]). The reference to
cannibalism comes straight from Chanlatte (Cri 52), but the identi-
fication of the man who suffered this torture as un Noir is Grégoire’s
intervention, a reassertion of the essentializing language of race upon
which his abolitionist discourse depends.
With its double focus on human sameness/difference and on indig-
enous counter-history, Chanlatte’s Cri establishes a template for later
writers such as Vastey (and for early Haitian literature in general),
while also diverging in certain respects from what his followers would
produce later in the decade, notably in the brief third (56-64) and
fourth (65-69) chapters focused, respectively, on rationalizing the
1804 massacres of much of the remaining French population in Haiti
and on acknowledging the actions of those in the expeditionary army
who conducted themselves with a certain decency during the bloody
reign of Generals Leclerc and Rochambeau. The formative influence
of this text extends to specific language and imagery: for instance, the
trope of unveiling and the concept of the colonial system, as deployed
in the title of Vastey’s Le Système colonial dévoilé, are both anticipated
by Chanlatte’s emphasis on the need to “lift the veil” that has been
cast over “a system of oppression such as that of slavery” (9), and to
refute the “sophistical” ideas of writers who have tried “to cover over
the horrors of the colonial system with a magical gauze” (19; “étendre
une gaze magique sur les horreurs du système colonial”). While the
familiar voile and the decidedly more unusual gaze magique perform
the same rhetorical labor here, the difference between them nicely
conveys the way in which Chanlatte oscillates, at times wildly, between
a straightforward prose style that Vastey and other Christophean
scribes would cultivate (and that was also characteristic of Boisrond-
Tonnerre’s earlier Mémoires) and a more self-consciously “literary”
approach that sets his work apart from that of his contemporaries,
featuring a more insistent recourse to figural language and distinctive
(at times even precious) imagery. No small part of Vastey’s achieve-
ment as a writer would be to craft a more consistent prose style on
the basis of the model provided by Chanlatte, by building on its more
“literal” elements (the voile, as it were) while purposely avoiding its
more “imaginative” touches (the gaze magique)—a process of scribal
mimesis that is especially evident in Vastey’s Système on the occasions
 M  L N 825

when he lifts material from Chanlatte’s Cri more or less verbatim,

while taking care to edit out any particularly idiosyncratic imagery.16
Nowhere is the self-consciously “literary” dimension of Chanlatte’s
Cri more apparent than in its concluding chapter (70-75), where
Chanlatte builds on the optimistic and conciliatory outlook of the
fourth chapter: there, he envisions a future in which “half the globe
will tire of persecuting the other half” (71) and thereby prepare the
way for an “honorable reconciliation” of the old world and the new,
and, more specifically, of the (still racialized) “hommes blancs” and
the (deracialized) “peuple haytien” (70). Here, Chanlatte once again
evokes the image of the veil, only this time not in relation to a critical
unmasking of the prevarications of colonial discourse but as part of a
more “imaginative” vision of the peaceful reunion of these two worlds:
“Despite the thickness of the veil that still covers over this captivating
future [ce séduisant avenir], the imagination takes pleasure in drawing
back a corner of the curtain,” to look upon the world stage, as it were,
and witness there “the enchanting spectacle of the human species
joined at last in brotherhood [ne formant plus qu’un peuple de frères]”
(70-71). After briefly entertaining the “horrible hypothesis” of what
would happen should any European power pursue “the chimerical
hope of reestablishing its empire here through force of arms” (72),
Chanlatte quickly reverts to the “delicious perspective” of universal
brotherhood, which he reinforces through the archly literary means
of an “allegorical tableau” (73-74). Unfolding in the shining palace of
truth—a sanctuary built on “vast ruins” and revealed by truth’s “faithful
servant, Time”—Chanlatte’s (significantly feminized) allegory revolves
around “a virgin, distraught and disheveled, tearing herself away from
her vile ravishers and baring her stricken breast to a woman of mature
age who is seated on a throne and crowned with several diadems.”
This queen, who “up to now has been nothing more than an unjust
stepmother,” orders her minions to cease harassing “a daughter who
is henceforth to be the object of her most tender solicitudes,” and
then—under the watchful gaze of the “two Divinities,” justice and

16
For instance, Chanlatte’s first-person description of the experience of slavery (cited
in the preceding note) concludes with the statement, “. . . we worked the land, water-
ing it with our sweat and our blood, so that your arrogant sensuality could savor them
drop by drop along with the delicious liquors they produced [afin que votre orgueilleuse
sensualité les savourât goutte à goutte avec les délicieuses liqueurs qui en étaient les résultats]”
(20). When Vastey includes this passage in his Le Système colonial dévoilé (1814), he
considerably simplifies its concluding clause: “. . . we worked the land, watering it with
our sweat and our blood, all to gratify the colonist’s arrogant sensuality and his avarice
[pour satisfaire l’orgueilleuse sensualité du colon et son avarice]” (37).
826 Chris Bongie

reason, who are presiding over this “happy reconciliation”—unfurls a

treaty “in which the words Liberty, Independence, Commerce are inscribed
in indelible characters.” Perhaps not coincidentally, the flowering of
Chanlatte’s literary imagination in the Conclusion coincides with an
unexpectedly deferent affirmation of the cultural and political hier-
archies that his emphasis on Haitian independence has elsewhere
proudly, and even vengefully, contested; the parent-child trope recon-
figures Haiti in an all-too-familiar (and familial) way that doubtless
helped make Chanlatte’s Cri more digestible for French readers in
1824 when they encountered it in the symptomatically edited form
of Bouvet’s Histoire.17
This allegorical turn is doubled at the very end of the conclusion
by an even more self-consciously literary move. The tableau allégorique
is followed not only by a predictable concluding paragraph in which
Chanlatte apostrophizes Grégoire, the “virtuous Abbé, whose coura-
geous pen has so honorably revived the sentiments of love and charity
that ought to unite the children of the same father” (74-75), but by
a supplementary 8-line acrostic poem entitled “Vers pour être mis au
bas du portrait de M. l’abbé Grégoire,” in which the first letter of each
line spells out the name gregoire. This poetic tribute to “a prelate
whom Europe reveres” and who “does justice to the virtues of a new
hemisphere,” could not be at a further remove from the littérature de
combat and “strict prose form” associated with later Christophean writ-
ers such as Vastey (Dash 5), and for which Chanlatte himself provided
the model elsewhere in Cri. This acrostic, of course, disappears from
the Histoire, along with all other references to Grégoire.
The hybrid mix of prose and poetry in Chanlatte’s conclusion,
or the intrusion of myth and allegory into a text largely intent on
critiquing racial science and promoting indigenous counter-history,
is clearly what most distinguishes Cri when read in relation to Vastey
(and other Christophean scribes such as Dupuy and Prézeau). What
follows Chanlatte’s self-consciously literary conclusion, by contrast, is
another, more recognizable instance of early Haitian textual hybrid-
ity. Like Boisrond-Tonnerre’s Mémoires before it, and like a number of

17
In an article on French abolitionist Sophie Doin’s La Famille noire—an 1825 novel
that makes a footnote reference to the Histoire, identifying it as “the admirable work of a
black man [un noir] published by Monsieur B. de Cressé, Paris, 1820 [sic]” (143)—Cora
Monroe has provided a useful reading, based solely on the 1824 version, that fleshes
out the “asymmetrical” dynamics of Chanlatte’s allegory, situating its “authorization
of civic and economic equality from the mother/country” in relation to “the colonial
family romance described by Françoise Vergès as involving the construction of a lone
‘ideal parent associated with whiteness’” (116; see 109-11).
 M  L N 827

Christophean works published later in the decade, the ending of Cri is

followed by a supplementary dossier of historical documents (80-111),
specifically, thirteen letters from the “State Archives” that have been
transcribed, without any “alteration or falsification,” at the behest of
Henry Christophe. As Chanlatte explains in an introductory descrip-
tion of them (76-79), “His Most Serene Monseigneur the President
and Generalissimo of the forces of land and sea of the State of Hayti
has ordered, in support of this document [à l’appui de cet écrit], the
publication of his correspondence with Captain-General Leclerc and
other French officers” (76). The specific content of these documents
need not concern us here (all dating from February-April 1802, they
are meant to elucidate Christophe’s various negotiations with Leclerc
and the French during the “three month war” between Toussaint’s
forces and Napoleon’s expeditionary army, and thereby allow readers,
in Chanlatte’s words, “to compare and judge the respective conduct
of the two parties” [77]). It is the very presence of these documents
from les Archives de l’État—collated and authenticated by Christophe’s
Secretary of State, Rouanez, as we learn at the very end of the dos-
sier, and published “par ordre de S.A.S. Monseigneur le Président”
(111)—that requires comment, since they so emphatically remind us
of the scribal origins of Chanlatte’s “indigenous reflections,” troubling
whatever sense of the text’s literary “autonomy” we might have devel-
oped to this point in our reading of it. The heteronomous nature of
this supplementary documentation blurs the identity of Chanlatte’s
“Haytian homage”: does this archival material “belong” to (and with)
the text proper, or is it no more than an inorganic imposition upon
it?—a question all the more apposite given that in 1814 these very
same pièces justificatives, with one addition, would be recycled at the
end of another Christophean pamphlet (see Christophe, 19-44), with
the correspondence now authenticated by Rouanez’s successor as
Secretary of State, Julien Prévost.
These are the sort of questions about textual integrity that any reader
of Le Cri de la nature has to address, especially if one is interested (as
am I) in salvaging this forgotten work for a contemporary audience.
Exactly what is being salvaged? In 1824, Chanlatte’s French editor,
Bouvet de Cressé, provided one possible response to this question,
not by jettisoning the seemingly tangential material, but by creating
a formal distinction on the title page between these two parts of the
original Cri (which, it is important to recall, is nowhere acknowledged
by name in Bouvet’s edition, nor as having been previously published,
and a date for which is never provided). The full title of the edited
828 Chris Bongie

version of Cri is as follows: Histoire de la catastrophe de Saint-Domingue,

avec La Correspondance des généraux Leclerc (beau-frère de Bonaparte),
Henry-Christophe (depuis roi d’Haïti), Hardy, Vilton, etc., certifiée conforme
aux originaux déposés aux archives, par le lieutenant général Rouanez jeune,
secrétaire d’état. Here, the two parts of the text are treated as distinct
entities, brought together by the editor (the title is immediately fol-
lowed by the phrase “publiées par A. J. B. Bouvet de Cressé”; my italics).
This formal distinction is so sharp, indeed, that a casual reader might
even assume that the coupling of the Histoire and the Correspondance
is an editorial rather than authorial decision, especially given the fact
that Bouvet has omitted the initial paragraph of the original introduc-
tion to the correspondence where Chanlatte established that these
documents were being published on Christophe’s orders à l’appui de
cet écrit.18 At the same time as Bouvet is drawing these lines of division
between the two parts, however, he also blurs them even further, by
treating the archival correspondence and Chanlatte’s introduction
to it as the last of seven consecutively numbered chapters,19 thereby
integrating this material into the earlier portion of the text in a way
that the original did not. Despite the very different effects achieved by
these classificatory acts (separation on the one hand, integration on
the other), they both testify to the same editorial will to power over
the original text, a desire to (re)order unruly materials, that is typical
of even the best intentioned manifestations of abolitionist discourse.
The sort of editorial meddling we have just described, and the
assumption of authority upon which it relies, is nowhere more evi-
dent than at the very end of the correspondence (which is to say,
the very end of both the Haitian original and the French edition),
when Bouvet feels compelled to supplement the Haitian Secretary
of State’s certification of authenticity with one of his own: “I certify
these to be authentic documents; I have them [je les tiens] from
one of the most honorable members of the Chamber of Deputies of
Departments of the Kingdom of France. bouvet de cressé” (Histoire
153). Bouvet’s “possession” of these documents, as we saw (note 8),

18
For instance, in an exemplary misreading of the Histoire from 2005, Doris Kadish
asserts: “Following Chanlatte’s account, Bouvet de Cressé presents correspondence
from general Leclerc, Napoleon’s brother-in-law, who basely betrayed Toussaint, along
with letters to Henry Christophe and others proving the deception that the French
practiced toward Haiti. He thereby bolsters the case that abolitionists were eager to
make against further political or military action against Haiti and in favor of diplomatic
ties and commercial development between the two countries” (124).
19
Bouvet breaks Chanlatte’s first chapter into two chapters, hence the final count of
seven chapters to Chanlatte’s five.
 M  L N 829

amounts to nothing more than his having been given a copy of Le

Cri de la nature by the abbé Grégoire, but over and beyond what this
fact tells us about Bouvet’s propensity for half-truths and self-aggran-
dizement, a more general point can be made here about the ending
of Chanlatte’s Cri and Bouvet’s authoritative reworking of it. If, as we
suggested, the presence of these documents from the State Archives
and the certification of authenticity provided by Rouanez readily pro-
voke a negative reading of (this aspect of) Cri, as signs of its scribal
complicity with Christophe’s political agenda, they can also be read
in a more positive fashion, as heartening signs of a redistribution of
“archival power” (in Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s words), made possible by
the emergence of institutional sites dedicated not (or not simply) to
the mimetic replication of supposedly neutral information but to the
productive unearthing of “new knowledge” that “both acknowledge[s]
and contradict[s] the power embedded in previous understandings”
of the revolution in Saint-Domingue and the achievement of Haitian
independence (Trouillot 56). Bouvet’s concluding words attempt
to recuperate a power that has been dispersed, to regain a hold on
the (power to adjudicate) truth. His editorial enterprise as a whole
is grounded in this recuperative labor, not to destroy but to reassert
control over the other, post-colonial archive that had arisen across the
Atlantic, and that Chanlatte’s text both publicizes and itself represents.
As such, Bouvet’s efforts lend themselves to being read, allegorically,
as anticipating those of the French state in 1825 when it provisionally
granted Haiti independence in return for the indemnification that
effectively reasserted France’s economic control over the lost colony.
In appropriating Chanlatte’s text, Bouvet offers the Haitian writer a
version of what Charles X would impose upon Haiti, on his own terms
and at an overwhelming cost to the supposed beneficiary: what we
might well call “the horrible gift of recognition.”20

III. 1824. Abolitionist Nostalgia: Racial Subjection and Histoire de la

catastrophe de Saint-Domingue
There are any number of ways through which Bouvet translated
Chanlatte’s “new knowledge” into all-too-familiar forms of colonial
20
I am alluding here to Marcus Wood’s scathing critique of “the horrible gift of
freedom,” a fantasy central to abolitionist discourse that “represent[s] liberation or
emancipation as an enforced donation from the empowered possessors of freedom to
the unfree and disempowered slave. From the viewpoint of the giver the slave has no
choice about the terms of this gift, about when, where, or how it is imposed, or about
whether to accept it or not” (2).
830 Chris Bongie

understanding. The process of reterritorialization evident in the new title,

for instance, is one that is carried through to the text, where Bouvet
commits himself time and again to the official fiction of continued
French sovereignty over its lost colony, repeatedly inserting the word
“Saint-Domingue” into a work where it had been carefully avoided.
In Chanlatte’s original foreword (Avertissement), for instance, he had
specified that his use of “the generic terms Frenchmen, Colonists, Europe-
ans” was not meant to include “those among them who left honorable
traces during their time in this country [en ce pays]” (Cri 4); in the
Histoire, by contrast, this becomes “... during their time on the island
of Saint-Domingue” (i). In this same foreword, Chanlatte had also
assured his readers that he would dedicate a chapter to the noble task
of recording “any generous acts that distinguished the reign of white
men on this island [en cette île]” (Cri 4); Bouvet’s nostalgia-drenched
transformation of this statement invokes “any memorable acts that
distinguished the reign of white men in the finest, the most beauti-
ful, and the richest of the Antilles [la première, la plus belle et la plus
riche des Antilles]” (ii). Similar translations of Chanlatte’s post-colonial
deictic reality back into the fixed (and hierarchical) forms of colonial
nomenclature are to be found throughout Bouvet’s Histoire (35, 44,
63, 76, 86, 104), this process of reterritorialization, the restoration of
“Saint-Domingue,” being but one instance among many that exempli-
fies the epistemic violence through which Bouvet rendered a Haitian
text more readily comprehensible for a French audience.21

21
Drawing attention to the epistemic violence at work in Bouvet’s transatlantic
appropriation of Chanlatte does not, of course, require us to disregard or downplay
his credentials as the “right” sort of Frenchman, someone who, in publicizing Chan-
latte’s text, sincerely felt that he was (in the words of his Preface) motivated “solely by
philanthropic views” (vi), of the sort he would have been first exposed to as a young
man associated with the Société des Amis des Noirs who corresponded with Thomas
Clarkson in 1789 (see Davis 400), and that were—as he tells readers of the Histoire in
a heart-felt editorial note—the subject of promises he made some twenty years before
to “the youngest son of Toussaint Louverture, my friend, in an island of the Western
Ocean” (70). Bouvet’s Preface features an undeniably powerful indictment of “the
atrocities committed in Saint-Domingue” under Napoleon’s orders and orchestrated by
a general, Leclerc, who is said to be even more monstrous than Atilla the Hun, a leader
who for all his barbaric ferocity at least fought bravely and in the open field whereas
Leclerc, “when it came to the Blacks, used the most vile means, the most jesuitical guile
and duplicity, to make them fall into the traps he set for them” (iv-v). Registering the
particular “strengths” and “weaknesses” of Bouvet’s (re)occupation of the abolitionist
subject-position with regard to Saint-Domingue/Haiti is vital, no doubt, but it is the
position itself and the authority attached to it that demands interrogation, even while
we maintain an historical sensitivity to the welcomed burgeoning of “an abolitionist
culture in France” in the mid-1820s (Oldfield 220).
 M  L N 831

The task of investigating all the changes that Le Cri de la nature

underwent in its transatlantic journey from the Haiti of 1810/Year 7 of
Independence to the very different realities of Paris in 1824 is beyond
the purview of this already lengthy article. The changes we have men-
tioned thus far (such as the erasure of Grégoire or the elimination of
the epigraphs from Voltaire and Virgil, and the reinsertion of colonial
Saint-Domingue into a proudly Haitian text) are indeed dramatic, but
in fact Chanlatte’s original and Bouvet’s repurposed texts actually have
a great deal, indeed almost everything, in common. Leaving aside
the paratextual materials, which are virtually unrecognizable, what
differences there are between Cri and Histoire more often than not
amount to exactly the sort of minor polishing that one might expect
of any editor, such as amending erratic punctuation, or using the
(more literary) subjunctive in place of an (equally correct) indicative.
While purging the text of such stylistic infelicities, it should be noted,
Bouvet also introduced his own fair share of mistranscriptions and
typesetting errors—as when the French civil commissioner Philippe
Roume becomes “Romue” (Cri 30; Histoire 35), Chanlatte’s “immortel
Willeberforce” becomes the equally erroneous “immortel Wilbelforce”
(68; 89), or an entire page of Christophe’s correspondence disappears
from the concluding archival documentation (cf. 103-04; 141). It no
doubt makes sense to draw a line of demarcation between “minor”
corrections or errors such as these and more evidently “meaningful”
micro-edits but, leaving aside the question of where exactly that line is
to be drawn, I would suggest that for purposes of comparative analysis
it cannot simply be a question of what parts of Chanlatte’s text Bouvet
changes and what parts he retains but, ultimately, of his very power to
respect, or not, the original—a power all the more absolute when one
takes into account the fact that there was no actual communication
between these supposed “abolitionist partners.”
Minor or not, there are a wealth of other differences (and similari-
ties) between the two texts that can help us better understand the
assumption of power through which the French abolitionist circumscribes
the Haitian writer’s indigenous reflections in the service of a Euro-
tropic history. One editorial intervention in particular, however, can
serve as a particularly apt closing example for us because of the way
it attempts to close down the unsettling questions about “race” that
Chanlatte opens up, subjecting the original text to an abolitionist logic
that, no different in this respect from the closural logic of racism itself,
privileges “the determinacy and certainty of being over and against
the indeterminacy and ambiguity of becoming” (Monahan 178).
832 Chris Bongie

As I have noted, Chanlatte’s Cri is remarkable for the almost total

absence of the sort of fixed racial categorizations (Nègres, Noirs, Mulâtres,
and so on) upon which Grégoire’s abolitionist discourse depended,
and in that respect it points, presciently, toward the possibility of an
anti-racist perspective that would not rely, or at least not so heavily,
on the very “thing” that it is critiquing. The first chapter of Bouvet’s
Histoire, by contrast, overturns this experimental perspective through
an editorial process, akin to reterritorialization, that we can term
desubjectification. This process consists in the repeated substitution of
the word Nègres (and other associated words or phrases) for Chan-
latte’s first-person plural nous, as is evident in the transformation of
the initial section heading in the first chapter, “De notre Origine . .
. ” into “De l’origine des Nègres . . . ” and of the opening sentence
of that section, “Quelque soit notre origine . . . ” into “Quelle que
soit l’origine des Nègres” (Cri 6; Histoire 1). Chanlatte’s subsequent
assertion that “the unity of the primitive type of the human species is
stamped on every part of our body [sur l’intégrité de notre physique]” is
transformed into the claim that this unity is stamped “on every part
of the body of these men born in the burning climate of Africa” (“sur
l’intégrité du physique de ces hommes nés sous le brûlant climat de
l’Afrique”) (7; 2). If, for Chanlatte, “our social existence . . . dates
from the beginning of time,” for Bouvet, it is “the social existence . .
. of Blacks [des Noirs]” that dates from the beginning of time and, he
adds for good measure, “touches upon the world’s infancy” (7; 2). A
“more or less black tinge to the skin” is no longer, in a race-obsessed
society, all that is required “for the identity of species to be denied
us” (“pour faire nier en nous l’identité d’espèce”); rather, it is all that
is required to deny that identity to Negroes (“pour faire nier chez les
Nègres l’identité d’espèce”) (8; 3). Bouvet’s racialized discourse, which
settles the question of Negro identity and, as it were, settles upon a
proper home for them (chez les Nègres), is precisely what Chanlatte
had put into question in his critique of the ways in which “political
abstractions” are used to legitimize the idea “that we are obliged to
suffer eternal torture on earth”; for Bouvet, hostile as he might be to
this idea, it is not “us” but “the African race” that is obliged to suffer
the effects of such injurious abstractions (8; 4).
The overwhelming presence of the first-person plural pronoun
throughout Chanlatte’s original text clearly made this disrespectful
editorial strategy next to impossible to follow through on, and Bouvet
rapidly abandons it after one last replacement of en nous with chez les
Nègres (9; 6). However, the vital point, the racialized point, has been
 M  L N 833

more than sufficiently made in these opening pages of Bouvet’s Histoire:

only in the wake of racial objectification is it possible to speak in terms
of nous; before abolitionist sympathy can be granted, “we” must be
thought of as “Negroes” and “Blacks.” The Nègre as “an “object of analy-
sis” takes precedence over the nous as a “condition of subjectivity,” if I
might draw by way of analogy on a key distinction that Lily Cho makes
when arguing that “the diasporic” should be looked upon not as an
object “whose major features and characteristics can be catalogued and
classified” but as “a subjective condition marked by the contingencies
of long histories of displacements and genealogies of dispossession”
(14). Where Bouvet’s abolitionist revision draws objectifying lines of
demarcation around the “Negro,” treating its existence with a certainty
as to what one “is,” Chanlatte’s original vision promotes a subjective,
and always also collective, identity that “one becomes . . . through a
complex process of memory and emergence” (Cho, 21). Rather than
settling for, and settling in, the “home” that sophistical colonists and
sympathetic abolitionists alike have mapped out for those with whom
its author shares a long and complex history of dispossession, Chan-
latte’s Le Cri de la nature engages—as rigorously and provocatively as
any of the better known works of early Haitian literature that would
follow in its wake—with the open possibility of unmooring (black)
identity from its racialized foundations, of remembering it otherwise
and emerging from those ruins of the colonial past, phoenix-like, with
a richly contingent sense of what Haiti and Haitians might become
in a captivating, no longer captive, future.
Queen’s University at Kingston

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