Mixed Race Studies

The many meanings of the Haitian declaration of independence

OUPblog: Oxford University Press’s Academic Insights for the Thinking World
2014-01-03

Philippe R. Girard, Associate Professor of History
McNeese State University, Lake Charles, Louisiana

Two hundred and ten years ago, on 1 January 1804, Haiti formally declared its independence from France at the end of a bitter war against forces sent by Napoléon Bonaparte. This was only the second time, after the United States in 1776, that an American colony had declared independence, so the event called for pomp and circumstance. Haiti’s generals, led by Jean-Jacques Dessalines, gathered in the western city of Gonaïves, where they listened to a public reading of the Declaration by the mixed-race secretary Louis Boisrond-Tonnerre. A handwritten original has yet to be found, but early imprints and manuscript copies have survived.

The declaration is well known to Haitians, who celebrate its passage every year on 1 January, Haiti’s national holiday. They mostly remember it for its fiery defiance. According the Haitian historian Thomas Madiou, its author Boisrond-Tonnerre got the assignment after promising Dessalines that he would use “the skin of a white man” as parchment, its “skull” as inkwell, and its “blood” as ink. “What do we have in common with this people of executioners [the French]?” he asked in the Declaration. “They are not our brothers, and never will be.”

But the Declaration, which historians are just beginning to study in depth, was actually a layered text whose multiple meanings were tailored for six different audiences: the French, Creoles, Anglo-Americans, Latin Americans, mixed-race Haitians, and black Haitians…

Read the entire article here.

Trading Races: Joseph and Marie Bunel, a Diplomat and a Merchant in Revolutionary Saint-Domingue and Philadelphia

Journal of the Early Republic
Volume 30, Number 3, Fall 2010
pages 351-376
E-ISSN: 1553-0620
Print ISSN: 0275-1275

Philippe R. Girard, Associate Professor of History
McNeese State University, Lake Charles, Louisiana

Based on extensive research in French, British, and U.S. archives, the article focuses on Joseph Bunel, a diplomatic and commercial envoy for Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and his wife Marie Bunel (Fanchette Estève), who spent her adult life as a merchant in Cap Français (Cap Haïtien) and Philadelphia. Joseph and Marie Bunel were a white Frenchman and a free black Creole, but their careers were shaped more by their social and monetary ambitions than by their racial background. After spending a few years in prerevolutionary Saint-Domingue (Haiti) as a merchant and a plantation manager, Joseph Bunel played an important administrative role in Louverture’s regime after 1798, first as a diplomatic envoy charged with drafting treaties of commerce and non-aggression with the United States and England during the Quasi-War, then as Louverture’s paymaster. Because of his closeness to the regime, he was deported to France during the Leclerc expedition. After moving to Philadelphia in 1803, he became a noted exporter of war contraband to Dessalines’ Haiti and in 1807 settled permanently in this country as a merchant. Marie Bunel, a prosperous free-colored merchant from Cap Français before the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution, continued her mercantile activities throughout the revolutionary period. Though personally close to notable figures like Louverture and Henri Christophe, her political involvement in the revolutionary struggle was limited. Persecuted along with her husband during the Leclerc expedition, she moved to Philadelphia, where she lived as an independent merchant long after Haiti had declared its independence. It was not until 1810 that for personal reasons she moved back to Haiti, where little evidence is available to retrace the end of the Bunels’ eventful lives.

Read or purchase the article here.