C.L.R. James’ book is a classic and required reading for anyone interested in the San Domingo/Haitian slave rebellion.
There are two big dimensions to the book. One is the historical account, which is detailed and dramatic. James had access to historical documents, correspondence, and contemporary reports to gain insight into motivations, intrigues, and strategies, as well as just to enliven the narrative. It makes for stirring reading, both for the events in their own right and for the lives and fates of those involved.
The rebellion, and maybe a significant part of its uniqueness, owes its character to a complicated play of factions and forces. The rebellion ran from 1791 to 1803. This, of course, was a revolutionary time, with the French and American revolutions, and revolutionary thought in general, in the background. San Domingo’s fate, and the politics and economics of slavery in San Domingo, are at play in its relationship to revolutionary events and ideologies in France.
But the colonial empires of all three European powers in the West Indies — France, England, and Spain — intersect, interfere, complicate, and at times, under Toussaint’s adroit maneuvering, contribute to the rebellious slaves’ cause.
And the empires and their ambitions were not the only complicating factors. San Domingo itself comprised a complicated layer cake of populations — white plantation owners, less wealthy or poor whites, mulattoes, free blacks, and slaves. The combinations of interests, potential strategies, and alliances multiply, grow, and shift throughout the years of the rebellion.
The grotesque contradiction between colonial slavery and the ideology of the French Revolution — liberty, equality, and fraternity — is galling. Slavery was not without its critics in France, but France acted as the mother country, with its economic interests overriding its ideology. San Domingo was a goldmine for France. Sugar and tobacco flowed out of the colony to the rest of the world, but its production was encased in a cruel, dehumanizin plantation slave economy.
This is where James’ Marxist-influenced account finds its strength. Economic interests and the dominant mode of production buried French ideological vision.
The colonial structure, in James’ account, also fixed blinders onto Toussaint’s own strategies and goals. Toussaint never gave up the idea that San Domingo remain (or become, in reality) a part of France. To the end, to his betrayal by Bonaparte and his representative, Leclerc, Toussaint fought for abolition but not independence. San Domingo was to win its place in the French nation, not its independence from it.
This was not blind loyalty to the colonizers on Toussaint’s part. He saw clearly that San Domingo was mired in a position of dependence on France, and on the administrators and the infrastructure France provided. Its sugar and tobacco production was organized by the plantation system. Its trade was dependent on French ships, French officials, French trade relationships.
It is left to Dessalines, once Toussaint has been betrayed, imprisoned, and put to death by the French, to cut the cord. Dessalines turns the cause of abolition to the cause of independence for San Domingo. Dessalines, while not the strategist that Toussaint had been, saw one thing clearly — France, under Bonaparte, would return slavery to San Domingo unless the slaves could win independence. Abolition without independence would not last.
Dessalines oversaw a brutal period of the rebellion. In his eyes, the French, and the whites, had to be rooted out of the country for good. To be free, San Domingo must be independent. The former slaves must be empowered to run their own country and their own lives.
The result, the victory for an independent San Domingo (renamed Haiti), we know was not a fairytale ending. Under Dessalines, deportation and extermination of whites and others, whether enemies of the rebellion or not, was horrific. Hence the title of James’ book, "The Black Jacobins.”
We can’t judge the historical and political outcome — abolition and independence — as wrong, but the moral cost was tremendous. It had been one that Toussaint seemingly was unwilling to pay, as if a moral virtue can be an historical weakness, at lest in James’ narrative.
The other dimension to the book is the context in which James is writing and his own concerns for decolonization, especially in the Africa of 1938. The rebellion has been taken as a blueprint for African independence movements in the twentieth century. James is always telling the story of San Domingo with his eye on African (and West Indian) struggles for independence in his own time, as he discussed more explicitly in the appendix, “From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro.”
It raises the obvious question of the costs for achieving these goals of independence, and the complicity of the colonizers in constructing such a constellation of power that seemingly necessitates those costs.
James is also fully aware of the challenges for a post-rebellion Haiti that will be inherited, in their own forms, in any colonies that achieve independence. Toussaint was right, that in the absence of the colonizers, the country was ill-equipped to survive, much less to flourish. That is the nature of colonial dependence. Freedom doesn’t come cheap.
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Top reviews from other countries
S. K. Pursey
An important story, beautifully told
Reviewed in Germany on February 14, 2024Amazon Customer
Wonderful historical account!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 3, 2021
