To a contemporary audience, Haiti brings to mind Voodoo spells,
Tontons Macoutes, and boat people - nothing worth fighting over.
Two centuries ago, however, Haiti, then known as Saint-Domingue,
was the "Pearl of the Antilles," France's most valuable overseas
colony, the largest exporter of tropical products in the world, and
the United States' second most important trading partner after
England. Haiti was also the place where in 1801-1802 Napoleon
Bonaparte sent the largest colonial venture of his reign: the
Leclerc expedition. His goal was to remove the famous revolutionary
Toussaint Louverture from office and, possibly, restore slavery.
But within two years, the remnants of Bonaparte's once-proud army
were evacuated in defeated, and Haiti declared its independence.
This forgotten yet momentous conflict, in which lives were consumed
by the thousands, is this book's main focus. In this ambitious
monograph, Philippe Girard employs the latest tools of the
historian's craft, multi-archival research in particular, and
applies them to the climactic yet poorly understood last years of
the Haitian Revolution. Haiti lost most of its archives to neglect
and theft, but a substantial number of documents survive in French,
U.S., British, and Spanish collections, both public and private. In
all, The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon relies on contemporary
military, commercial, and administrative sources drawn from
nineteen archives and research libraries on both sides of the
Atlantic. Due to its extensive archival basis, the book corrects
the many factual inaccuracies that have plagued previous accounts.
It also offers a more rounded view of the Haitian Revolution, going
beyond mere military minutia to include the activities of U.S.
merchants; the in-fighting within the French government; the
diplomacy between both the French and revolutionaries with the
United States, England, and Spain; and the lives of the maroons,
women, and children caught up in the revolutionary struggle. This
multidimensional work tells not only of barefoot black soldiers
ambushing Bonaparte's columns, but also of Rochambeau's mixed-race
mistresses, French child drummers, Jewish bankers in Kingston,
weapon smugglers from Quaker Philadelphia, Polish artillerists, and
African-born maroons struggling to preserve their freedom against
both white and black opponents. Equally groundbreaking is the
book's willingness to move beyond tidy ideological and racial
categories to depict an Atlantic society at the crossroads of
African and European influences, where Haitian rebels fought France
while embracing its ideals. In the process, the reader is
introduced to the extraordinary lives of multifaceted characters
such as Wladyslaw Jablonowski, the son of a Polish woman and a
black father who died fighting for France and white supremacy.
General
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