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Reading The Black Jacobins,Seven Decades Later

By Laurent Dubois

Laurent Duboisteaches French and

history at Duke Uni-versity. The author ofScoring Spirits: The

Empire of FrenchSoccer (forthcomingfrom the Universityof California Press),

he is currently atwork on a history of

the banjo,

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IKE MANY OTHER READERS, I REMEMBER WELL

my first encounter with The BlackJacobins.The title, whispered to me with a near

religious admiration by a teacher, itself alreadytaught a lesson: The story of the French Revolu-tion was also the story of a Caribbean revolution.The Black Jacobins, published more than sevendecades ago, is one of the very few books I haveever read essentially without stopping, stuck tomy chair, thrown into a world, propelled on-ward by a riveting story, angered, exhilarated,confused, even exhausted by the scope of whatC.L.R. James explains and accomplishes in thework. Afterward, something had shifted. Thegeography and chronology of history lookeddifferent to me. After The Black Jacobins, it isnot possible to look at what we think we knowabout the past, about the history of democracyand revolution, the history of Europe and theAmericas, in quite the same way

Cyril Lionel Robert James was born in Trini-dad in 1901, and after completing his studiesat Queen's Royal College in Port of Spain begana career as a sports journalist (writing mainlyabout cricket) and teacher, while also writingfiction and political essays. He moved to Eng-land in 1932, where he continued his work as ajournalist and became increasingly active in anti-colonial and pan-Africanist organizing, workingwith George Padmore. In 1933 he published TheCase for West Indian Self-Government, which calledfor increased political autonomy for the coloniesof the British Caribbean. He also became an im-portant Marxist theorist and Trotskyist activistwithin the British labor movement. His first andonly novel, Minty Alley, was published in 1936,and in the same year his play Toussaint Louverturewas performed in London, with Paul Robesonstarring in the lead role. In 1938 he publishedhis most famous work, The BlackJacobins. He left

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that year for the United States, where he spent nearly twodecades teaching and writing, publishing severalincluding the 1949 American Civilization. Im-prisoned for having overstayed his visa in 1953and incarcerated on Ellis Island while he unsuc-cessfully appealed his deportation, he wrote astudy of the work of Herman Melville calledMariners, Renegades and Castaways. After fiveyears in England, James returned to Trinidad,where he worked as a newspaper editor for atime, collaborating with his former student EricWilliams, then prime minister of the indepen-dent Trinidad, before falling out with Williamsand his party He spent his last years in the Unit-ed States and England, where he died in 1989.

James's first attempt to tell the story of theHaitian Revolution was the play Toussaint Lou-verture. Unsatisfied with the play, however, he

works,

C.L.R. Ja

convinci

demand

that hist

take the

Haitian

Revoluti

seriousl

event of

significa

decidedto write a historical narrative. In doing so, he created alanguage and form for his story that were shaped by itscontent. If The Black.Jacobins has become a classic work,a touchstone of debate, and an inspiration to genera-tions of scholars and activists, it is largely because of itsformi-its combination of hard-nosed narration, politicalanalysis, and philosophical reflection. It is both a narra-tive of history and a work in the philosophy of history.Like James's book on cricket and colonialism, Beyond aBoundary, the work seems inexhaustible, a map of re-Rlections and provocations that you can return to againand again. It keeps surprising me. The text changed, too,with additions and changes made for the 1963 editionthat responded to the decades of transformation that hadfollowed its original composition. This new edition alsohelped make the work much better known to a genera-tion of readers plunged into the processes of decoloniza-tion, revolution, and dictatorship in Africa, Latin Amer-ica, and the Caribbean, for whom this old story heldremarkable prophesies and lessons.

Many works of history find themselves forgotten, fall-ing away as new narratives revise or refute what has comebefore. The Black jacobins never has. Thanks to the workof subsequent historians (many inspired by James), wenow know much more about the Haitian Revolution. Weknow that FranQois-Dominique Toussaint-Louverture,the leader of the Haitian Revolution, was a freeman, not aslave, at the beginning of the revolution. We understandthat the "mulattoes," whom James sometimes describeswith simplified virulence, were an extremely complicatedgroup with multiple political projects and affiliations. Wehave a much richer sense of the deep complexities of the

political philosophy of the enslaved themselves, who inJames's work mostly appear as a relatively undifferentiated

mass of rebels. We have gained an understand-rues ing of the influences of a variety of African cul-ingly tures, philosophies, and histories on the course

ed of events in Saint-Domingue. James's work didwhat any great work of history does: It created

orians descendents, many of them who challenged

and went beyond their ancestor. But it remainsthe best study written on the Haitian Revolu-tion, and indeed one of the best ever written on

on revolution itself. It embodies the story of thaty as an revolution so brilliantly, charging its readers

with a sense of drama and direction in a wayglobal few works of history do. James essentially got

nce. his story right, grasping the core of what therevolution was, and what it implied.

HOUGH HE DIDN'T USE THE TERM TO DESCRIBE WHAT HE

did, James helped lay the foundation in his workfor the field now known as "Atlantic history"

Along with the work of his onetime student Eric Wil-liams, his book transformed the historiography producedabout the Caribbean and Atlantic slavery more broadlyduring the past decades, particularly in the Anglophoneworld. James's work was crucial in part simply becauseit convincingly demanded that historians take seriouslythe Haitian Revolution as an event of global significance,a touchstone in the political history of Europe and theAmericas. It also insisted on seeing the interconnectionsbetween events on both sides of the Atlantic, encouragingsubsequent historians to think beyond national contextsas they studied the circulation of revolutionary ideals.James's work has inspired historians to write a certainkind of Atlantic history, one that decenters Europe, pay-ing close attention to the ways the central pillar of theAtlantic world, the slave trade and slavery, shaped life andideas in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. And it demandsof us that we recall that, within this world, the enslavedwere never simply workers, or victims, but always actorsand thinkers. They remade the world in which they lived.Through the Haitian Revolution, enslaved revolutionariescrafted an idea of rights that was truly universal in scope,refusing to accept, as most revolutionaries in the UnitedStates and France did, that a human being could be aslave. In this sense the revolution, as James shows, was anepochal and global event, one to which we are all linked,whether we know it, or accept it, or not.

"The slave-trade and slavery were the economic basisof the French Revolution," James boldly announces early

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RtVOLTE DES NOIRS A SAINT-DOMINGUE.

The Haitian revolt of 1791. Haiti's enslaved revolutionaries crafted an idea of rights that was truly universal,refusing to accept, as many U.S. and rrench revolutionaries did, that a human being could be a slave.

in his book. He quotes Jean Jaures, one of the few histo-rians of the French Revolution to acknowledge the roleof the colonies in the shaping of 18th-century France,to buttress his point: "Sad irony of human history . . .The fortunes created at Bordeaux, at Nantes, by the slave-trade, gave to the bourgeoisie that pride which neededliberty and contributed to human emancipation."' It isa striking claim, one that intriguingly parallels Eric Wil-liams's claim, in his Capitalism and Slavery (1944), thatslavery and the slave trade laid the foundation for theIndustrial Revolution in England. Interestingly, however,James's claim has not become a touchstone for debate theway Williams's did in Anglophone historiography, wherea generation of historians have argued vociferously aboutit. In fact, the precise ways in which the Atlantic planta-tion economy and the slave trade shaped social life andpolitical thought in France remain curiously under-studied,and the provocation issued by James in this passage stillawaits a full-fledged response.

James also, of course, is curious about the ways influ-ence traveled in another direction, with the ideas of theFrench Revolution shaping the course of the uprising inSaint-Domingue. He crystallizes the question in a power-ful scene in which he portrays Toussaint-Louverture read-ing a particularly stirring passage from a controversial40

work compiled by the AbbeRaynal, the Histoire des DeuxIndes, whose many volumesdescribed and at times harshlycritiqued the history of Eu-ropean empire. Drawing di-rectly from the work of LouisSebastien Mercier, who in hisLAn 2440 imagined a future inwhich slavery has been abol-ished thanks to the leadershipof a hero whose statue deco-rates a plaza in Paris, Raynalevoked the coming of a "BlackSpartacus" and asked, "Whereis he?" It was this passage thatJames imagines Toussaint-Louverture reading. "Over andover again Toussaint read thispassage: 'A courageous chiefonly is wanted. Where is he?'""Men make their own history,"James continues, quoting KarlMarx, "and the black Jacobinsof San Domingo were to make

history which would alter the fate of millions of men andshift the economic currents of three continents." '

Did Toussaint-Louverture truly read Raynal, as Jamesasserts? Scholars have debated the question. In a critiqueof the Enlightenment's racism, for instance, the Frenchpolitical philosopher Louis Sala-Molins seizes on the im-age, dismissing the idea as nothing more than a "fable,"pointing out that for Toussaint- Louverture to be inspiredby Raynal, he would have had to read the passages call-ing for a "black hero" while "systematically skipping" theracist passages of the same text. Such an image, he argues,seeks to transform the "black liberators" into "disciples ofthe Enlightenment." But then the question becomes, Howwas "the black" able to "succeed in the subtle academicexercise that consists in deducing from a discourse that,occasionally, concerns him, what this discourse does notsay or suggest, what it eliminates with complete seren-ity and clarity? How does he manage to extract from theEnlightenment what the Enlightenment never dreamedof?" Having emphasized throughout his work that the En-lightenment worked to either openly justify or willfullyoverlook slavery in the Atlantic, Sala-Molins insists thatit had no role in shaping revolution in the Caribbean:"The black, always a slave and still always standing, trulyinvented his liberty"'

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In Tropicopolitans (1999), meanwhile, Srinivas Aravamu-dan has argued for the need to gain a better understand-ing of the responses and interpretation of individuals whowere the "accidental, unintended, and indirect addresses"of Enlightenment literature. He approaches the ques-tion in one chapter by exploring the assertion (made inThe Black Jacobins, among other texts) that passages inthe Abb6 Raynal's Histoire Philosophique et Politique evok-ing the possibility of a slave revolution helped to inspireToussaint-Louverture. Although, he notes, determiningwhether this particular literary encounter took place isprobably impossible, he argues that the impact of Raynal'stext "can be reconstructed, if somewhat imaginatively, bya literary-critical urge to rush in where historians fear totread." He does so by inventing a reader designated as"Toussaint's daughter-in-law" and imagining her responseto a particular passage from Raynal's text.4

James had his own kind of response to the question ofhow we should think about the impact of Enlightenmentthought on the colonies. For him, Toussaint-Louverturenot only mastered Enlightenment discourse but ulti-mately superseded it. "Pericles on democracy, Paine onthe Rights of Man, the Declaration of Independence, theCommunist Manifesto," James writes in one of my favor-ite passages of the book. "These are some of the politi-cal documents which, whatever the weakness of wisdomof their analysis, have moved men and will always movethem .... But there was another set of writings that, ac-cording to James, had been unjustly excluded from thiscanon: those of Toussaint-Louverture, who wrote in themidst of war, revolution, and international conflict, with-out the benefit of a "liberal education," dictating to sec-retaries "until their devotion and his will had hammeredthem into adequate shape." Nevertheless, he wrote in "thelanguage and accent" of French philosophers and revolu-tionaries, all "masters of the spoken and written word."But he also "excelled them all," for unlike them he didn'thave "to pause, to hesitate, to qualify." "Toussaint coulddefend the freedom of the blacks without reservation,and this gave to his declaration a strength and a single-mindedness rare in the great documents of the time."5

Part of what is so compelling about the story of theHaitian Revolution, and James's rendering of it, is whatDavid Scott has highlighted as its "tragic" dimension.James, like many other historians, dwelled at length onthe ways in which Toussaint-Louverture's revolutionaryleadership ultimately led him into a role as an autocratand a dictator, one at odds with much of the popula-tion whose liberation he had launched and sustainedthrough his rule. As Scott has shown, James, through a

new appendix and a series of edits he made in the 1963version of the text, deepened his exploration of the trag-edy of Toussaint- Louverture, looking at it from a verydifferent place than he did in 1938, when he first wrotethe book.6 For James himself, the story of The Black Ja-cobins shifted over the decades as the world around himchanged. But the brilliance of the book is that, even asour present transforms how we can read it, it continuesto speak to our present.

In the end, Toussaint-Louverture succumbed to Na-poleon Bonaparte, surrendering after weeks of fightingFrench troops sent to take control of the island from him,

There is, James

insisted, no

way to think

about the

history of

the French

Revolution

without

knowing the

history of the

Haitian

Revolution.

and then finding himself shipped offto a dank prison in France, wherehe died of sickness even as warraged in Saint-Domingue, led by hisformer generals. As James beginshis narrative of the war that broughtHaiti its independence in 1804, henotes that what happened in Saint-Domingue after the death of CharlesLeclerc, Napoleon's brother-in-lawand the general in charge of theFrench expedition, "is one of thosepages in history which every school-boy should learn, and most certainlywill learn, some day." He crystallizesfor us what drove and inspired theconflict. The people of Haiti, lessthan a decade away from plantationslavery, "had seen at last that with-

out independence they could not maintain their liberty,and liberty was far more concrete for former slaves thanthe elusive forms of political democracy in France."'

His pages on the war are searing. " 'Why do you burneverything?' asked a French officer to a prisoner. 'We havea right to burn what we cultivate because a man has aright to dispose of his own labor,' was the reply of thisunknown anarchist."' And the story he tells pushes himto make a claim for the present, and the future. Just asit was the "masses" of the enslaved in Saint-Dominguewho drove the revolution there, he wrote in 1938, so willit be for the future. "Others will arise, and others, Fromthe people heaving in action will come the leaders; notthe isolated blacks at Guy's hospitals or the Sorbonne, thedabblers in surrealisme or the lawyers, but the quite re-cruits in a black police force, the sergeant in the Frenchnative army or British police, familiarizing himself withmilitary tactics and strategy, reading a stray pamphlet ofLenin or Trotsky as Toussaint read the Abbe Raynal.''•

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completas, ed, Jorge Quintana, vol, 1 (Caracas, 1964), 411; Mart[, "Manifiestode Montecristi: El Partido Revolucionario Cubano a Cuba," March 25, 1895,in ibid., 243; Marti, "El Delegado en Nueva York," November 1, 1892, in ibid.,342-643.

2. Dwight D. Eisenhower to Harold Macmillan, July 11, 1960, in John P. Glen-non and Ronald D. Landa, eds., Foreign Relations of the United States: Cuba,1958-1960, vol. 6 (Bureau of Public Affairs, Office of the Historian, Depart-

ment of State, Washington, D.C., 1991), 1003.3. Lester D. Mallory to R. Roy Rubottom Jr., April 6, 1960, in ibid., 885.4. Marc Lacey, "In Rare Study, Cubans Put Money Worries First," The New York

Times, June 5, 2008.5. Martf to Federico Henrfquez y Carvajal, March 25, 1895, in Martf, Obras

completas, 248.6. Martf, "Con todos y para el bien de todos," November 26, 1891, in ibid.,

697-706.

The Revolutionary Imagination in Cuba and Venezuela1. Alfredo GonzJlez Guti6rrez, "Economfa y sociedad: los retos del modelo

econ6mico," Temas 11 (1997): 4-29.2. Roberto Zurbano, "jEl Rap cubano!: discursos hambrientos de realidad (siete

notas de viaje sobre el hip-hop cubano en los diez anos del festival de rap deLa Habana)," Boletfn de musica cubana alternativa 1 (2004).

Bull Horns and Dynamite1. Dunia Mokrani, "Pensar la polftica en Bolivia desde Huanuni," Pensamiento

de los confines 19 (2006).2. Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thomson, Revolutionary Horizons: Past and Present

in Bolivian Politics (Verso, 2007).3. See Merilee Grindle and Pilar Gamarra, eds., Proclaiming Revolution: Bolivia

in Comparative Perspective (Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies,Harvard University, and Institute of Latin American Studies, University ofLondon, 2002).

4. Laura Gotkowitz, A Revolution for Our Rights: Indigenous Struggles for Landand Justice in Bolivia, 1880-1952(Duke University Press, 2007).

5. For the post-revolutionary period, see James Dunkerley, Rebellion in the Veins:Political Struggle in Bolivia, 1952-1982 (Verso, 1984).

6. Sergio Almaraz Paz, Requiem para una repdblica (La Paz: Amigos del Libro,1969), 16-17.

7, Ren6 Zavaleta Mercado, Lo nacional-popular en Bolivia (Mexico City: SigloXXI, 1986), 149.

8. Luis G6mez, El Alto de pie: una insurrecci6n aymara en Bolivia (La Paz: TextosRebeldes, 2004).

9. Adolfo Gilly, prologue to Hylton and Thomson, Revolutionary Horizons, xix.10. On the long-term political culture of insurrection in the southern Andes, see

the introduction by Hylton and Thomson to Forrest Hylton, Felix Patzi, SergioSerulnikov, and Sinclair Thomson, Ya es otro tiempo el presente. cuatro mo-mentos de insurgencia indigena (La Paz: Muela del Diablo, 2003).

Et Tu, Daniel?1. MOnica Baltodano, "El 'nuevo sandinismo' es de la izquierda? Democracia

pactada en Nicaragua," Le Monde diplomatique, Southern Cone edition (De-cember 2008): 16-17.

2. Ibid.3. The concept of revoluci6n compartida is developed in Sergio Ramirez, Adios

muchachos: Una memoria de la revolucidn sandinista (Mexico City: Aguilar,1999).

4. Rosa Marina Zelaya, "International Election Observers: Nicaragua Under aMicroscope," Envfo 103 (February 1990), envio.org.ni/articulo/2582.

5. BBC, "1984: Sandinistas Claim Election Victory," available at news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday.

6. Harry E. Vanden and Gary Prevost, Democracy and Socialism in SandinistaNicaragua (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1996), 84-85.

7. Roger Burbach and Orlando Nunez, Fire in the Americas, Forging a Revolution-ary Agenda (Verso, 1987).

8. NuMez develops this argument in his book La Oligarquia en Nicaragua (Mana-

gua: Talleres de Grafitex, 2006). See also Nuflez, "La Agonia politica dela oligarquia," El 19 no. 14, November 27-December 3, 2008, availableat sepres.gob.ni.

9. Human Rights Watch, "Nicaragua: Protect Rights Advocates from Harassmentand Intimidation," October 28, 2008, available at hrw.org.

10. Baltodano, "El 'nuevo sandinismo' es de la izquierda?"11. CBC News, "Latin American Artists Protest Persecution of Nicaraguan Poet,"

September 6, 2008, available at cbc.ca.12. "How to Steal an Election," The Economist, November 13, 2008.

Reading the Black Jacobins, Seven Decades Later1. C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo

Revolution (Vintage, 1963), 47.2. Ibid., 25. For more on Raynal and Toussaint-Louverture in the context of the

Haitian Revolution, see Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World. TheStory of the Haitian Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2004).

3. Louis Sala-Molins, Les mis6res des lumi6res: sous la raison, loutrage (Paris:Robert Laffont, 1992), 158-60. I discuss Sala-Molins and the broader ques-tion of the Enlightenment in the Caribbean in "An Enslaved Enlightenment:Re-Thinking the Intellectual History of the French Atlantic," Social History3l,no. 1 (February 2006)i 1-14.

4. Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804(Duke University Press, 1999), 23, 299.

5. James, The Black Jacobins, 197-98.6. David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment

(Duke University Press, 2004).7. James, The Black Jacobins, 356-57.8. Ibid., 361.9. Ibid., 377.10. Ibid., 155.

MALA: Socially Dangerous1. Frances Robles, "Cuba to Try Anti-Castro Punk Rocker Gorki Aguila," The Mi-

ami Herald, August 30, 2008.2. Ana Menendez, "Change Is Already in the Hands of Youth," The Miami Herald,

March 2, 2008. See also Michelle Chase, "Cuba's Generation Gap," NACLAReport on the Americas, November/December 2008.

3. David Adams, "Cuban Rocker's Case Seen as Test of Free Speech," St Pe-tersburg Times, August 30, 2008; Marc Lacey, "From the Cuban Underground,a Punk Rocker's Protest Reverberates," The New York Times, September 6,2008.

4. Robles, "Cuba to Try Anti-Castro Punk Rocker Gorki Aguila"; Adams, "CubanRocker's Case Seen as Test of Free Speech."

5. Cuba's small opposition groups remain a seductive subject for foreign journal-ists, even for those who make it clear that these groups lack big followings,See, for example, Patrick Symmes, "The Battle of Ideas: Searching for theOpposition in Post-Fidel Cuba," Harper's Magazine, May 2008.

6. Mary Anastasia O'Grady, "The Meaning of Raul's 'Reforms,' " The Wall StreetJournal, August 21, 2008.

7. On the complex relationship between musicians and the state, see SujathaFernandes, Cuba Represent! Cuban Arts, State Power, and the Making of NewRevolutionary Cultures (Duke University Press, 2006) and Robin Moore, Mu-sic and Revolution: Cultural Change in Socialist Cuba (University of CaliforniaPress, 2006).

8. "Cuban Punk Rocker's Bum Rap," September 5, 2008.9. See Diego M Vidal, " 'Creo que nuestras deficiencias noticiosas debieran ser

parte de las mejoras inmediatas': entrevista al cantautor Silvio Rodrfguez,"penultimosdias.com, August 13, 2008.

10. See Debra Evenson, Revolution in the Balance: Law and Society in Contem-porary Cuba (Westview Press, 1994), 156--58. For the reference to the lawas "Orwellian," see David Gonzalez, "A Cuban Rocker Faces Trial for 'SocialDangerousness,' " posted on the New York Times City Room blog, August29, 2008.

11. Jorge Ricardo, "Entrevista: Gorki Luis Aguila: detiene Cuba a punk critico delr6gimen," Reforma (Mexico City), August 27, 2008,

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