Race, Gender, and Virtue in Haiti’s Failed Foundational Fiction: La Mulâtre comme il y a peu de blanches (1803)

The independence of Haiti from France in 1804 rested as much on a cultural transformation as on the invincibility of France's former slaves. In 1801, after ten years of brutal conflict, what had been France's most profitable slave colony had become an autonomous, French-speaking New World republic, governed by former bondsmen and their descendants. That year the black general Toussaint Louverture named himself governor for life under a constitution that made few concessions to French oversight. Toussaint Louverture did not create an independent Haiti. As governor, he remained ostentatiously faithful to French religion and culture, urging white investors to return and imposing plantation discipline on former slaves. Nevertheless, in 1802, a massive French expedition removed him to a French prison and tried to reimpose slavery. This attempt to revoke liberty purchased by a decade of revolution provoked a bitter war that eventually led to the unthinkable—a formal proclamation on 1 January 1804 by the leaders of the "native" army, announcing the independence of Haiti, a new American nation, black and indigenous.