The Saint-Domingue Plantation; or, The Insurrection: A Drama in Five Acts (review)

French abolitionism, like the British and American antislavery movements, did not occur in isolation but rather with international connections. Indeed, the subject of antislavery calls not only for a transatlantic perspective, as suggested by the recent title, Women's Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation (Yale 2007), but also for a broader circulation of nineteenth-century antislavery works currently available only in French. Numbering nearly sixty volumes to date, the modern critical editions brought forth in Roger Little's series Autrement Mêmes published by L'Harmattan form a significant body; once translated into English, for example, this rich archive of influential French colonial narratives could reach a wider readership and thus inform transatlantic studies of the colonial legacy. Norman Shapiro's flaw-less English translation of Charles de Résumat's antislavery play, Habitation de Saint-Domingue, ou, L'Insurrection, which is expertly introduced and annotated by Doris Kadish, provides precisely the type of textual link that will allow future scholars to place the complex abolitionist movement in France within an illuminating international nexus of historical, political, and literary thought.

In the nineteenth century, as Shapiro details in his prefatory comments, Rémusat's play was read from time to time, but was never performed. While Rémusat focused more on the ideological intent of his drama, Shapiro has exercised some license as a translator to "make the play more stage worthy in its décor, directions, and such externals," retaining, however, a "period tone in the English dialogue corresponding to that of the French." Doris Kadish, in turn, draws on her knowledge of nineteenth-century French culture and extensive research in the French colonial archives to reconstruct the "complex, transitional world of early-nineteenth-century France" in which Ré-musat emerged as an antislavery activist with a literary talent. Kadish nuances Rémusat's political leaning and participation in abolitionist circles against the backdrop of Restoration France, and the literary significance of his antislavery play with relation to the rise of Romanticism. She then considers the historical value of Rémusat's drama that restages the 1791 slave insurrection in Saint-Domingue from the perspective of a French Creole family whose conflicting perspectives on slavery, viewed in the paradoxical light of the Enlightenment, draw out white plantation owners' complicity with the despotic colonial system.

Issues of gender, class, and race thicken the historically familiar plot in which Rémusat's retrospective narrative engages a cast of stock colonial characters on the eve of the Saint-Domingue massacres. Differences of opinion about the colonial practice of slavery appear to divide male and female members of the Valombre family along the lines of the historic debate on abolition that raised fundamental questions of ethical and moral behavior. Monsieur Valombre epitomizes the unenlightened slave owner who claims that "our slaves are treated superbly," and his wife generally concurs. Yet the lines are also blurred, for their offspring, Léon and Célestine, question with increasing urgency the letter of colonial law and cruel treatment of slaves, respectively. These conflicting colonial ideologies, which metonymically transpose the antislavery movement and its discontents, are further complicated.

Black slaves, both in the household and the sugar cane fields, a free black, and a mulatto all add depth to racial prejudices of the time, which Rémusat teases from his characters with deft turns of phrases. A white envoy from the Continent representing abolitionist views enters the scene to expose the plantation owners' cruelty and the black slaves' suffering, accelerating the movement toward the inevitable outbreak of revolt in 1791. The slave Timur, who evolves as a leader of the blacks to become the voice of reason alternately echoed by his white double Léon, is a dialogical figure that Rémusat incisively casts between the races in the modern image of Toussaint Louverture...