The Black Jacobins
Encyclopedia
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938), by Afro-Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James
(4 January 1901–19 May 1989), is a history of the 1791-1804 Haitian Revolution
. The text places the revolution in the context of the French Revolution
, and focuses on the leadership of Toussaint L'Ouverture
, who was born a slave but rose to prominence espousing the French Revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality
. These ideals, which many French
revolutionaries did not maintain consistently with regard to the black humanity of their colonial possessions, were embraced, according to James, with a greater purity by the persecuted blacks of Haiti
; such ideals "meant far more to them than to any Frenchman."
James examines the brutal conditions of slavery as well as the social and political status of the slave-owners, poor or "small" whites, and "free" blacks and mulattoes leading up to the Revolution. The work explores the dynamics of the Caribbean economy
and the European feudal system during the era before the Haitian Revolution, and places each revolution in comparative historical and economic perspective. Toussaint L'Ouverture becomes a central and symbolic character in James' narrative of the Haitian Revolution. His complete embodiment of the revolutionary ideals of the period was, according to James, incomprehensible even to the revolutionary French, who did not seem to grasp the urgency of these ideals in the minds and spirits of a people rising from slavery. L'Ouverture had defiantly asserted that he intended
The French bourgeoisie
could not understand this motivation, according to James, and mistook it for rhetoric or bombast. "Rivers of blood were to flow before they understood," James writes.
James concluded:
's heavy artillery, the rattle of Joseph Stalin
's firing squads and the fierce shrill revolutionary movement striving for clarity and influence." In a later passage, James writes of the slaves in the early days of French revolutionary violence, the "slaves only watched their masters destroy one another, as Africans watched them in 1914-1918
, and will watch them again before long." Of his text, James suggests, "had it been written under different circumstances it would have been a different but not necessarily a better book."
James' reflections on the context of his writings echo his concerns on the context of the events, as traditionally narrated. The text represents, according to some commentators, a challenge to the conventional "geography" of history, which usually identifies the national histories of states as discrete phenomena, and with "Western civilization" in particular being bounded away from its actual constituent elements. In The Black Jacobins, according to Edward Said
, "events in France and in Haiti criss-cross and answer each other like voices in a fugue." "The blacks were taking their part in the destruction of European feudalism", according to James, and, as the workers and peasants of France stiffened in their resistance to local tyranny, they also became passionate abolitionists despite their geographical remove from the French slave enterprise in the Western hemisphere.
The Black Jacobins has been characterized as demonstrating that "the French Revolution was not an insurrectionary experience limited to Europe". Given his origins as a slave in a colonized land, and the unmistakable current of French Revolutionary ideology he imbibed and upheld, Toussaint L'Ouverture becomes, according to one reading of James, not merely the extraordinary leader of an island revolt, but "the apogee of the revolutionary doctrines that underpinned the French Revolution."
, but a problem at every historical moment back to and throughout the revolution. While Toussaint L'Ouverture set out to defend and maintain the dignity of man as he garnered it from French revolutionary literature, and particularly Raynal, according to James, "Feuillants
and Jacobins
in France, whites and Mulattoes in San Domingo, were still looking upon the slave revolt as a huge riot which would be put down in time, once the division between the slave-owners was closed." The narrative of the Haitian Revolution had been, according to James, largely dominated by distant, foreign, or opportunist narrators, who opted for their own preferred emphases. On this plasticity of historical narrative, James opines of the French Revolution, "Had the monarchists been white, the bourgeoisie brown, and the masses of France black, the French Revolution would have gone down in history as a race war."
Toussaint L'Ouverture
is a central figure in James' telling of the Haitian Revolution. Although born a slave, James writes of Toussaint, "both in body and mind he was far beyond the average slave". Toussaint joined the revolution after its onset and was immediately regarded as a leader, organizing the Haitian people into a force capable of breaking the French hold on the colony of San Domingo. He emerged both as a powerful, unifying symbol of the march of enslaved Africans toward liberty, and as an extraordinary politician: "superbly gifted, he incarnated the determination of his people never, never to be slaves again." James emphasizes the writing and thought of Toussaint, and quotes him at length, in order to demonstrate the man as he existed politically, often in contrast, according to James, to what has been written about him. James believes that Toussaint's own words best convey his personality and genius, which was all the more remarkable given its unlikely origins:
In one of Toussaint's letters which James quotes at length, sent by Toussaint to the Directory at a time when French colonists were conspiring to restore the slave system, Toussaint wrote that liberty was being assailed by the colonists under "the veil of patriotism":
In the 1980 foreword, James explains that he was "specially prepared to write The Black Jacobins", having grown up in Trinidad
and having researched the Russian revolution in depth while studying Marxism in England. In this foreword, written forty-two years after the first publication, James discusses his own background, his reasons for chronicling the history, and major people who influenced the work. He stated that he hoped others would elaborate on his research. Aware of some of the attacks on his book, James felt that no one could dispute the accuracy of his history; he "was never worried about what they would find, confident that [his] foundation would remain imperishable".
Of James' text on "the only successful slave revolt in history", he writes, "I made up my mind that I would write a book in which Africans or people of African descent instead of constantly being the object of other peoples' exploitation and ferocity would themselves be taking action on a grand scale and shaping other people to their own needs". He critiques some historians' claims about the events, motivations, and people involved, for their exploitation of African peoples in both history and historiography, for serving European economic and ideological ends. For example, James writes skeptically of British efforts to suppress the slave trade by using William Wilberforce
as a figurehead. James asserts that the actual concern of the British was strategic, and that their "humanitarian interest" in abolition was in actuality a pragmatic interest, in that it undermined rival France by crippling access to slave labor for France's most lucrative colony.
James looks more broadly at the West Indies in his 1963 appendix to the text, "From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro". In the appendix James considers patterns between later developments in the Caribbean and the Haitian revolution. Literary critic Santiago Valles summarizes what James attempts to do in the appendix: "In an appendix to the second edition, James noted intellectual and social movements in Cuba, Haiti and Trinidad during the 1920s and 1930s. First in Cuba, Haiti (1927), then in Brazil, Surinam and Trinidad (1931), other small groups faced the challenge of coming to terms with events which disrupted their understanding and connectedness to the wider world by revealing the relations of force".
Historians still continue to comment on the significance of the work and how it has paved the way for more detailed study of social and political movements in the Caribbean region. In a look at the role slaves themselves have played in Caribbean and American rebellions Adélékè Adéèkó points specifically to The Black Jacobins influence on the perception of slaves in The Slaves Rebellion. In this work, published in 2005, Adéèkó suggests, "The Black Jacobins stirs this high level of inspiration for its symbolic reconfiguration of the slaves’ will to freedom".
Some critics have accused the book of being partisan, in its glorification of the struggle against slavery and colonialism, or in its ideological bent. According to Montague, "The author's sympathies and frame of reference are evident, but he tells his story with more restraint than can generally be found in works on this subject by others less plainly labeled". Adéèkó suggests that "James' work is radical, conceived with a Marxist framework, and favors the search for determinative factors within social dialects". Thomas O. Ott also fixes on James' association with a Marxist framework, suggesting that James' "stumbling attempt to connect the Haitian and French revolutions through some sort of common mass movement is a good example of 'fact trimming' to fit a particular thesis or ideology." Both recent and contemporary reviewers agree that James' view (and critique) of extant historiography make the work extremely valuable in the study of Caribbean history.
C. L. R. James
Cyril Lionel Robert James , who sometimes wrote under the pen-name J.R. Johnson, was an Afro-Trinidadian historian, journalist, socialist theorist and essayist. His works are influential in various theoretical, social, and historiographical contexts...
(4 January 1901–19 May 1989), is a history of the 1791-1804 Haitian Revolution
Haitian Revolution
The Haitian Revolution was a period of conflict in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, which culminated in the elimination of slavery there and the founding of the Haitian republic...
. The text places the revolution in the context of the French Revolution
French Revolution
The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...
, and focuses on the leadership of Toussaint L'Ouverture
Toussaint L'Ouverture
François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture , also Toussaint Bréda, Toussaint-Louverture was the leader of the Haitian Revolution. His military genius and political acumen led to the establishment of the independent black state of Haiti, transforming an entire society of slaves into a free,...
, who was born a slave but rose to prominence espousing the French Revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality
Liberté, égalité, fraternité
Liberté, égalité, fraternité, French for "Liberty, equality, fraternity ", is the national motto of France, and is a typical example of a tripartite motto. Although it finds its origins in the French Revolution, it was then only one motto among others and was not institutionalized until the Third...
. These ideals, which many French
French people
The French are a nation that share a common French culture and speak the French language as a mother tongue. Historically, the French population are descended from peoples of Celtic, Latin and Germanic origin, and are today a mixture of several ethnic groups...
revolutionaries did not maintain consistently with regard to the black humanity of their colonial possessions, were embraced, according to James, with a greater purity by the persecuted blacks of Haiti
Haiti
Haiti , officially the Republic of Haiti , is a Caribbean country. It occupies the western, smaller portion of the island of Hispaniola, in the Greater Antillean archipelago, which it shares with the Dominican Republic. Ayiti was the indigenous Taíno or Amerindian name for the island...
; such ideals "meant far more to them than to any Frenchman."
James examines the brutal conditions of slavery as well as the social and political status of the slave-owners, poor or "small" whites, and "free" blacks and mulattoes leading up to the Revolution. The work explores the dynamics of the Caribbean economy
Economy of the Caribbean
*For more information, see these articles about Economy of the Caribbean.-Natural Resources:By international standards, the nations of the Caribbean are not rich in natural resources. The resources that make significant contributions to domestic economies and regional job sectors include, but are...
and the European feudal system during the era before the Haitian Revolution, and places each revolution in comparative historical and economic perspective. Toussaint L'Ouverture becomes a central and symbolic character in James' narrative of the Haitian Revolution. His complete embodiment of the revolutionary ideals of the period was, according to James, incomprehensible even to the revolutionary French, who did not seem to grasp the urgency of these ideals in the minds and spirits of a people rising from slavery. L'Ouverture had defiantly asserted that he intended
to cease to live before gratitude dies in my heart, before I cease to be faithful to France and to my duty, before the god of liberty is profaned and sullied by the liberticides, before they can snatch from my hands that sword, those arms, which France confided to me for the defence of its rights and those of humanity, for the triumph of liberty and equality.
The French bourgeoisie
Bourgeoisie
In sociology and political science, bourgeoisie describes a range of groups across history. In the Western world, between the late 18th century and the present day, the bourgeoisie is a social class "characterized by their ownership of capital and their related culture." A member of the...
could not understand this motivation, according to James, and mistook it for rhetoric or bombast. "Rivers of blood were to flow before they understood," James writes.
James concluded:
The cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious
than the revenges of poverty and oppression. For the one aims at
perpetuating resented injustice, the other is merely a momentary
passion soon appeased.
Historical and social context
The text was first published in 1938. The impending world war was recognized and alluded to by James in the text; in his Preface he places the writing of the history in the context of "the booming of FrancoFrancisco Franco
Francisco Franco y Bahamonde was a Spanish general, dictator and head of state of Spain from October 1936 , and de facto regent of the nominally restored Kingdom of Spain from 1947 until his death in November, 1975...
's heavy artillery, the rattle of Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
's firing squads and the fierce shrill revolutionary movement striving for clarity and influence." In a later passage, James writes of the slaves in the early days of French revolutionary violence, the "slaves only watched their masters destroy one another, as Africans watched them in 1914-1918
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
, and will watch them again before long." Of his text, James suggests, "had it been written under different circumstances it would have been a different but not necessarily a better book."
The writing of history becomes ever more difficult. The power of God or the weakness of man, Christianity or the divine right of kings to govern wrong, can easily be made responsible for the downfall of states and the birth of new societies. Such elementary conceptions lend themselves willingly to narrative treatment and from TacitusTacitusPublius Cornelius Tacitus was a senator and a historian of the Roman Empire. The surviving portions of his two major works—the Annals and the Histories—examine the reigns of the Roman Emperors Tiberius, Claudius, Nero and those who reigned in the Year of the Four Emperors...
to MacaulayMacaulay-Surname:*Macaulay , an English-language surname with multiple etymological origins .-Given name:* George Macaulay Trevelyan, English historian...
, from Thuycidides to GreenPeter Green (historian)Peter Green is a British classical scholar noted for his works on Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Age of ancient history, generally regarded as spanning the era from the death of Alexander in 323 BC up to either the date of the Battle of Actium or the death of Augustus in 14 AD...
, the traditionally famous historians have been more artist than scientist: they wrote so well because they saw so little. To-day by a natural reaction we tend to a personification of the social forces, great men being merely or nearly instruments in the hands of economic destiny. As so often the truth does not lie in between. Great men make history, but only such history as it is possible for them to make. Their freedom of achievement is limited by the necessities of their environment. To portray the limits of those necessities and the realisation, complete or partial, of all possibilities, that is the true business of the historian.
James' reflections on the context of his writings echo his concerns on the context of the events, as traditionally narrated. The text represents, according to some commentators, a challenge to the conventional "geography" of history, which usually identifies the national histories of states as discrete phenomena, and with "Western civilization" in particular being bounded away from its actual constituent elements. In The Black Jacobins, according to Edward Said
Edward Said
Edward Wadie Saïd was a Palestinian-American literary theorist and advocate for Palestinian rights. He was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a founding figure in postcolonialism...
, "events in France and in Haiti criss-cross and answer each other like voices in a fugue." "The blacks were taking their part in the destruction of European feudalism", according to James, and, as the workers and peasants of France stiffened in their resistance to local tyranny, they also became passionate abolitionists despite their geographical remove from the French slave enterprise in the Western hemisphere.
The Black Jacobins has been characterized as demonstrating that "the French Revolution was not an insurrectionary experience limited to Europe". Given his origins as a slave in a colonized land, and the unmistakable current of French Revolutionary ideology he imbibed and upheld, Toussaint L'Ouverture becomes, according to one reading of James, not merely the extraordinary leader of an island revolt, but "the apogee of the revolutionary doctrines that underpinned the French Revolution."
The text
James sets out to offer a view of the eve that notes European and white perspectives without leaving them unquestioned. For James, the dismissiveness and marginalization that the slaves' revolutionary efforts faced was not only a problem of latter-day historiographyHistoriography
Historiography refers either to the study of the history and methodology of history as a discipline, or to a body of historical work on a specialized topic...
, but a problem at every historical moment back to and throughout the revolution. While Toussaint L'Ouverture set out to defend and maintain the dignity of man as he garnered it from French revolutionary literature, and particularly Raynal, according to James, "Feuillants
Feuillant (political group)
The Feuillants were a political grouping that emerged during the French Revolution. It came into existence from a split within the Jacobins from those opposing the overthrow of the king and proposing a constitutional monarchy. The deputies publicly split with the Jacobins when they published a...
and Jacobins
Jacobin (politics)
A Jacobin , in the context of the French Revolution, was a member of the Jacobin Club, a revolutionary far-left political movement. The Jacobin Club was the most famous political club of the French Revolution. So called from the Dominican convent where they originally met, in the Rue St. Jacques ,...
in France, whites and Mulattoes in San Domingo, were still looking upon the slave revolt as a huge riot which would be put down in time, once the division between the slave-owners was closed." The narrative of the Haitian Revolution had been, according to James, largely dominated by distant, foreign, or opportunist narrators, who opted for their own preferred emphases. On this plasticity of historical narrative, James opines of the French Revolution, "Had the monarchists been white, the bourgeoisie brown, and the masses of France black, the French Revolution would have gone down in history as a race war."
Toussaint L'Ouverture
Toussaint L'Ouverture
François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture , also Toussaint Bréda, Toussaint-Louverture was the leader of the Haitian Revolution. His military genius and political acumen led to the establishment of the independent black state of Haiti, transforming an entire society of slaves into a free,...
is a central figure in James' telling of the Haitian Revolution. Although born a slave, James writes of Toussaint, "both in body and mind he was far beyond the average slave". Toussaint joined the revolution after its onset and was immediately regarded as a leader, organizing the Haitian people into a force capable of breaking the French hold on the colony of San Domingo. He emerged both as a powerful, unifying symbol of the march of enslaved Africans toward liberty, and as an extraordinary politician: "superbly gifted, he incarnated the determination of his people never, never to be slaves again." James emphasizes the writing and thought of Toussaint, and quotes him at length, in order to demonstrate the man as he existed politically, often in contrast, according to James, to what has been written about him. James believes that Toussaint's own words best convey his personality and genius, which was all the more remarkable given its unlikely origins:
PericlesPericlesPericles was a prominent and influential statesman, orator, and general of Athens during the city's Golden Age—specifically, the time between the Persian and Peloponnesian wars...
, Tom Paine, JeffersonJeffersonJefferson often refers to Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States and the principal author of the United States Declaration of Independence.Jefferson may also refer to:-Places:Canada*Jefferson, AlbertaUnited States...
, Marx and Engels, were men of a liberal education, formed in the traditions of ethics, philosophy and history. Toussaint was a slave, not six years out of slavery, bearing alone the unaccustomed burden of war and government, dictating his thoughts in the crude words of a broken dialect, written and rewritten by his secretaries until their devotion and his will had hammered them into adequate shape.
In one of Toussaint's letters which James quotes at length, sent by Toussaint to the Directory at a time when French colonists were conspiring to restore the slave system, Toussaint wrote that liberty was being assailed by the colonists under "the veil of patriotism":
Already perfidious emissaries have stepped in among us to ferment the destructive leaven prepared by the hands of liberticides. But they will not succeed. I swear it by all that liberty holds most sacred. My attachment to France, my knowledge of the blacks, make it my duty not to leave you ignorant either of the crimes which they meditate or the oath that we renew, to bury ourselves under the ruins of a country revived by liberty rather than suffer the return of slavery.
In the 1980 foreword, James explains that he was "specially prepared to write The Black Jacobins", having grown up in Trinidad
Trinidad
Trinidad is the larger and more populous of the two major islands and numerous landforms which make up the island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. It is the southernmost island in the Caribbean and lies just off the northeastern coast of Venezuela. With an area of it is also the fifth largest in...
and having researched the Russian revolution in depth while studying Marxism in England. In this foreword, written forty-two years after the first publication, James discusses his own background, his reasons for chronicling the history, and major people who influenced the work. He stated that he hoped others would elaborate on his research. Aware of some of the attacks on his book, James felt that no one could dispute the accuracy of his history; he "was never worried about what they would find, confident that [his] foundation would remain imperishable".
Of James' text on "the only successful slave revolt in history", he writes, "I made up my mind that I would write a book in which Africans or people of African descent instead of constantly being the object of other peoples' exploitation and ferocity would themselves be taking action on a grand scale and shaping other people to their own needs". He critiques some historians' claims about the events, motivations, and people involved, for their exploitation of African peoples in both history and historiography, for serving European economic and ideological ends. For example, James writes skeptically of British efforts to suppress the slave trade by using William Wilberforce
William Wilberforce
William Wilberforce was a British politician, a philanthropist and a leader of the movement to abolish the slave trade. A native of Kingston upon Hull, Yorkshire, he began his political career in 1780, eventually becoming the independent Member of Parliament for Yorkshire...
as a figurehead. James asserts that the actual concern of the British was strategic, and that their "humanitarian interest" in abolition was in actuality a pragmatic interest, in that it undermined rival France by crippling access to slave labor for France's most lucrative colony.
Critical response
Literary critics have esteemed the work since its first publication in 1938. In a 1940 review, Ludwell Lee Montague asserts that James "finds his way with skill through kaleidoscopic sequences of events in both Haiti and France, achieving clarity where complexities of class, color, and section have reduced others to vague confusion". Another reviewer, W.G. Seabrook, heralds James' work as "a public service for which he merits the attention due a scholar who blazes the way in an all but neglected field". Seabrook proceeds to predict the importance of the work to Caribbean history, and the probable extensive circulation of the book. Decades after the first publication of the work, The Black Jacobins remained a prominent artifact of Caribbean cultural history.James looks more broadly at the West Indies in his 1963 appendix to the text, "From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro". In the appendix James considers patterns between later developments in the Caribbean and the Haitian revolution. Literary critic Santiago Valles summarizes what James attempts to do in the appendix: "In an appendix to the second edition, James noted intellectual and social movements in Cuba, Haiti and Trinidad during the 1920s and 1930s. First in Cuba, Haiti (1927), then in Brazil, Surinam and Trinidad (1931), other small groups faced the challenge of coming to terms with events which disrupted their understanding and connectedness to the wider world by revealing the relations of force".
Historians still continue to comment on the significance of the work and how it has paved the way for more detailed study of social and political movements in the Caribbean region. In a look at the role slaves themselves have played in Caribbean and American rebellions Adélékè Adéèkó points specifically to The Black Jacobins influence on the perception of slaves in The Slaves Rebellion. In this work, published in 2005, Adéèkó suggests, "The Black Jacobins stirs this high level of inspiration for its symbolic reconfiguration of the slaves’ will to freedom".
Some critics have accused the book of being partisan, in its glorification of the struggle against slavery and colonialism, or in its ideological bent. According to Montague, "The author's sympathies and frame of reference are evident, but he tells his story with more restraint than can generally be found in works on this subject by others less plainly labeled". Adéèkó suggests that "James' work is radical, conceived with a Marxist framework, and favors the search for determinative factors within social dialects". Thomas O. Ott also fixes on James' association with a Marxist framework, suggesting that James' "stumbling attempt to connect the Haitian and French revolutions through some sort of common mass movement is a good example of 'fact trimming' to fit a particular thesis or ideology." Both recent and contemporary reviewers agree that James' view (and critique) of extant historiography make the work extremely valuable in the study of Caribbean history.
External links
- Extract from The Black Jacobins
- The Black Jacobins
- CLR James and the Black Jacobins, International Socialism Journal, 126, (2010)