A flexible quill: Abbé de Lahaye’s role in late colonial Saint-Domingue, 1787–1791 – the legend and the life

Abstract

ABSTRACTWriting in 1802 about the outbreak of the 1791 slave revolt in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, planter Félix Carteau identified “the execrable Abbé de Lahaye, curé of Dondon, the most ardent apostle of freedom for the Blacks,” as one of the “known fomenters of their revolt.” This portrait of the Abbé de Lahaye as a committed abolitionist who played a generative role in the Haitian Revolution exemplifies the many passing references to him in colonial-era sources and later historical accounts, as well as works of fiction such as Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (1949). Given the Abbé’s discursive centrality to representations of the Haitian Revolution, surprisingly little scholarly attention has been paid to this notorious figure. Exploring a range of archival documents, this article charts French-born Guillaume Sylvestre de Lahaye’s life from 1787 to 1791, detailing his prominent role in late colonial Saint-Domingue as a man of letters and a politician: first, by examining his contributions to transatlantic botany, notably in his never-published Florindie (1789), focusing on unexpectedly (given his reputation) negative representations of enslaved Africans sprinkled throughout that 600-page manuscript; second, by documenting his (hitherto unchronicled) role as president of the Dondon parish committee in 1789–1790, where he pursued a “revolutionary” policy of equal rights for all white settlers in the colony, while insisting on the need to discipline both the slave and free colored populations. The material unearthed in this article problematizes legendary representations of the Abbé as an “apostle of freedom,” forcing us, as discussed in the coda, to reconsider the humanitarian sentiments he went on to express in the summer of 1793, when, as author of an anonymously published journal entitled Lettres sentimentales sur la Révolution de Saint-Domingue, he helped prepare the way for the 29 August abolition of slavery in Saint-Domingue.