The Black Jacobins, CLR James
This was the first book I’ve read recently where I tried to save passages of interest. To be honest I find the idea of keeping a “commonplace book” pretty bothersome, but I do wonder if manually copying these passages into a hard copy wouldn’t help them to stick further.
In any case, I learned so much about the Haitian Revolution from this book. The Black Jacobins is supposed to be the main entry point for anyone wishing to learn about the slave regime in Haiti and how its inhabitants won their freedom. This conflict was incredibly complicated. In fact, I probably would have been better served by having read a book about the French Revolution before tackling this one, because a lot of what happened in the metropole influenced the course of events in Haiti, and not always in intuitive ways. And it wasn’t just the overseas influence that was hard to grasp. Beyond the enslaved blacks, who acted in ways that were largely understandable, the divisions between the mulattoes, free blacks, and whites (who were themselves divided into plantation owners, petit bourgeoisie, and tradesmen) were free-flowing, even within what I would have thought were clearly demarcated periods of conflict. There were a ton of backstabs, betrayals, shifts of allegiance, and counter-intuitive actions taken by all parties in the conflict.
I came into this book expecting a hagiography of Toussaint L’Ouverture, and James does laud Toussaint for his vision of what Haiti could become. But Toussaint also made a ton of mistakes, especially in the latter half of the revolution. He was too much of an idealist in regard to France and how it might accept or integrate Haiti, which caused him too often to reward or grant mercy to his enemies and punish his erstwhile allies. (James: “His desire to avoid destruction was the very thing that caused it. It is the recurring error of moderates when face to face with a revolutionary struggle.”) James also considers him something of a ditherer. Nevertheless, his cause was righteous, and one wonders what might have happened if he had let the scales fall from his eyes regarding the true character of the French colonial regime.
James draws much attention to how white colonialists, from France to Spain and the United Kingdom, ravaged the enslaved people of San Domingo. The Black Jacobins is a story of rape, torture, and murder, with the ultimate goal being the degradation and unpersoning of every black person on the island. As James says at the end of The Black Jacobins speaking about the contemporary ravages of white governments, “Imperialism vaunts its exploitation of the wealth of Africa for the benefit of civilization. In reality, from the very nature of its system of production for profit it strangles the real wealth of the continent — the creative capacity of the African people.” (This reminded me of the Stephen Jay Gould quote about geniuses who live and die working in cotton fields and sweatshops. It’s the theft of this potential that may be most galling about our capitalist global order.)
The Black Jacobins is ultimately a sad tale, because Haiti was destroyed during and after the revolution, and has never really recovered. I can’t help but think this ravaging was another deliberate act by capitalist nations, one intended to show, essentially, that the house always wins. But the slaves who threw themselves at French artillery, Toussaint dying in a cold and lonely French prison cell, the mulattoes who finally saw the light and helped to expel the French for a final time, would probably have thought their rebellion worth it in the end–because what kind of life is the life of a slave? A slave sees every day their potential wasted for the use of others. It’s hard from my vantage point to really feel that experience subjectively, but intellectually and empathetically I can praise the struggle of the slaves to rise above their circumstances and lay waste to those who put them there.
P.S. Also, I did not realize how much of a racist Napoleon was. Really makes Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure hit different.