"Nothing in Nature is Mute": Reading Revolutionary Romanticism in L'Haïtiade and Hérard Dumesle's Voyage dans le nord d'Hayti (1824)

In 1983, Jacquelin Dolcé, Gérard Dorval, and Jean Miotel Casthely published an intellectual history of Haiti titled Le Romantisme en Haïti: La Vie intellectuelle, 1804–1915. The work opens with a rather bold statement: "Western thought is so preponderant among young people that it would seem to have expressed everything, anticipated everything."1 They go on to lament that because of this, "eurocentrism has triumphed." The authors immediately signal the irony of these statements by subsequently arguing against both universal history and "[la] Vie Universelle" [universal life] (RH 3). Beginning with the concept of Romanticism itself, the authors suggest that the particularities of Haiti's history since independence, coupled with its unique relationship to both the French language and its French colonial past, led the country's intellectuals to develop a specifically national version of Romanticism that extends well beyond the boundaries of traditional Western European or North American periodizations of the "Romantic movement."2 Dolcé, Dorval, and Casthely aver throughout their book that "Haitian Romanticism" extends from the year of independence from France in 1804, to the beginning of the US occupation of the country in 1915 (RH 5–9).