“Toussaint L’Ouverture’s Government: Colonial Modernity in Saint-Domingue”

• In Event: Freedom and Race: The Struggles of Citizenship Building in the 19th and 20th Century Caribbean

Abstract

This paper intends to capture the negotiations of power between Toussaint L’Ouverture and the French government during the Haitian Revolution. This investigation is largely based on documents available in the Nemours Collection of Haitian History and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. This research problematizes L’Ouverture’s oscillations between the conceptions of legitimate and illegitimate violence in the agenda of the metropolitan power. This study simultaneously identifies the discursive paradigms of L’Ouverture’s government in Saint-Domingue in order to examine his mandate as a model of colonial modernity that actively reinterprets multiple Western ideas; the analysis of content evidences how L’Ouverture projects himself as a political mentor to the colonial population after the abolition of slavery. The paper lastly exposes how the emission of the Constitution of 1801 of Saint-Domingue, which is implemented by L’Ouverture without the approval of the French government, represents a transgression of the metropolitan power, and its content poses a challenge to the contemporary racial and cultural historicist hierarchies.

Author

• Dannelle Gutarra, Virginia Commonwealth University