Troping Toussaint, Reading Revolution

What is the meaning of the Haitian Revolution for those who look back upon it in 2004? Does it reveal progress in social justice and universal human rights, or just the opposite? This essay focuses on the problem of progress and interpretation, looking to two interpretations of the Haitian Revolution that have received little or no analysis in this regard. While Aimé Césaire's Toussaint Louverture has remained virtually unanalyzed in Césaire studies, the first great analysis of the Haitian Revolution, that of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, offers an astonishingly progressive and sympathetic analysis that has yet to be considered in the literature on the revolution.