Victor Hugo and the Melancholy Novel: Reading the Haitian Revolution in Bug-Jargal

In the two decades following the Haitian Declaration of Independence in 1804, a wide array of French writers from across the political spectrum returned, with obsessive frequency, to the subject of Saint-Domingue/Haiti in an attempt to grapple with the effects of ‘traumatic’ loss through discursive revisitings of the forever lost imperial object. Reflecting on the (largely disavowed) centrality of Haiti to an understanding of Romantic-era French cultural production, this article situates Victor Hugo’s 1826 novel about the Haitian Revolution, Bug-Jargal, as the culminating expression of those melancholic narratives lamenting the loss of France’s precious ‘pearl of the Antilles’. It does so, specifically, by discussing the plagiaristic relation of key passages in Hugo’s novel to a hitherto unidentified source, Philippe-Albert de Lattre’s Campagnes des Français à Saint-Domingue (1805). The youthful Hugo’s word-for-word reliance on this earlier account of the Haitian Revolution can, to be sure, simply be written off as yet another piece of evidence for the artistic ‘immaturity’ of Bug-Jargal. A very different argument will be mounted here, however: this mimetic reliance of Hugo’s novel on a text that mourns the loss of Saint-Domingue, denies the legitimacy of Haitian independence, and consolidates the hierarchies of racial science, needs to be read as exemplifying—in its purest, most ‘mature’ form—a collective practice of retelling colonial stories that is characteristic of what Paul Gilroy has dubbed ‘postimperial melancholia’, and that is arguably one of the constitutive features of the literary habitus in Restoration France.