Peasant Resistance in Post-Revolutionary Haiti

Abstract

Peasant Resistance in Post-Revolutionary Haiti Miranda Frances Spieler (bio) Johnhenry Gonzalez, Maroon Nation: A History of Revolutionary Haiti. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. xii + 302 pp. $40.00. Jean Alix René, Haïti après l’esclavage : formation de l’état et culture politique populaire (1804–1846). Port-au-Prince: Communication Plus, 2019. CAD50.00. As this essay goes to press, Haiti, the subject of both books under review, is in turmoil after the slaying of its president, Jovenel Moïse (“I am not a dictator”), by Colombian hitmen.1 At least three people have put themselves forward as successors. The country is under martial law and without a government. Meanwhile, in quite a different spirit, Haiti has been an unusually prominent theme of discussion in France, Haiti’s defrocked overlord, for months. In April 2021, the French media and political class began reckoning with the legacy of Napoleon on the two hundredth anniversary of his death. The link between Bonaparte and Haiti opens from the first consul’s failed attempt to reenslave the Haitian people. In 1802, a French expeditionary force comprised of fifty thousand soldiers reached the island of Hispaniola under the command of Napoleon’s brother-in-law, General Charles-Victor Emmanuel Leclerc. Tasked with reimposing slavery, the invaders triggered an anti-colonial war. By making reenslavement a key to French colonial policy, Napoleon hastened the founding of the independent Haitian state.2 With Haiti paralyzed by gang violence and political infighting, it seems fitting that both books under review should chronicle the survival strategies of Haitian peasants in their struggle against Haitian officialdom since independence. ________ In the era of slavery, the word maroon or marron denoted slaves who fled from his master, temporarily or permanently. In some colonies—Surinam, Jamaica, French Saint Domingue, French Guiana, Mauritius—maroons lived in remote forests or mountains, grouped around charismatic leaders or in small kingdoms. In Maroon Nation, Johnhenry Gonzalez uses a term associated with the era of slavery to describe the identity of nineteenth-century peasants, who [End Page 413] exited bondage and attained national sovereignty and yet remained unfree. For Gonzalez, rural folk after the abolition of slavery and especially after 1804, when Haiti declared independence, created a social, religious, and economic world based on clandestine anti-institutional practices. The ruses of Haiti’s peasantry made it possible for them to resist and evade Haiti’s predatory post-colonial state. In writing of rural life this way, Gonzalez challenges stereotypes of Haitians that are commonplace in the literature of underdevelopment, in which rural Haitians figure as hide-bound traditionalists who refuse all agricultural innovation, to their peril, out of mere stubborness. For Gonzalez, by contrast, Haitian peasant culture is defined by stealthy modernity. Marronnage, originally a term for slave flight, looms large over Haitian history, first as historical experience, later as metaphor and national myth. The mid-20th-century dictator François Duvalier (“Papa Doc”) turned the figure of the marron or runaway slave into the embodiment of the Haitian state, including his own regime, with the inauguration in Port-au-Prince of the now famed monument by Albert Mangonès, Le marron inconnu (1967). Haitian historians of their Revolution, beginning with Jean Fouchard, have traced the origins of the 1791 slave revolt, which lauched the Haitian revolution, to maroon resistance. 3 The supposed importance of maroon groups to the 1791 revolt has been debunked by the historian David Geggus and is unrelated to Gonzalez’s book, which focuses on the period after slavery and independence.4 The use of the word marronnage as a metaphor for the struggle of emancipated peasants against the Haitian state originates with the Haitian historian Gérard Barthélémy, in his classic work L’univers rural haitien: le pays en dehors (1989) [Rural life in Haiti: The country outside]. Gonzalez is indebted to the work of earlier Haitian historians, but takes an original approach to marronnage. Where Barthélémy emphasizes continuity between the folkways of African slaves and peasants in independent Haiti, Gonzalez is interested in marronnage as a form of modernity. The new marronnage was a reaction against authoritarian regimes of the post-emancipation and post...