Controlling Haitian History

Abstract

This chapter considers the role of the late eighteenth-century creole jurist Moreau de Saint-Méry (1750–1819) as one of the most important architects of the French colonial archives. Moreau’s life project was based on the premise that mastery of legal and historical knowledge was the indispensable precondition of political order. Well before the revolutionary era, Moreau made it his task to impose an intellectual discipline over what he regarded as the more unruly aspects of colonial law and society, considering the disorganized state of the colonial judicial archives to be one of the primary reflections of the disorder affecting colonial society more generally. The fruits of his work were the six-volume Loix et constitutions des colonies françaises, as well as a massive manuscript archive comprising legal and non-legal sources for the study of slavery and creole life in prerevolutionary Saint-Domingue. The argument of this chapter is that Moreau’s legal arsenal was, however, more than a repository of primary sources but must be interpreted as a document in its own right, an attempt to identify the development of Saint-Domingue society with a legal project, which Moreau defined as créolité, in which law must be based on the foundation of local knowledge. Historians’ continuing reliance upon Moreau’s publications and archive suggests the need for greater self-awareness about the uncomfortably close relationship between Moreau’s imperial vision and contemporary scholarship.