The Priest and the Prophetess: Abbé Ouvière, Romaine Rivière, and the Revolutionary Atlantic World by Terry Rey

Terry Rey's The Priest and the Prophetess spans the 1760s to 1830s recounting an exciting Dumas-like true history of intrigue and suspense, in which the main two protagonists travel the hemispheric Atlantic fleeing misfortune and pursuing wealth, liberty, and survival. The book contributes to multiple fields and is rigorous in its approach to history, ethnography, theology, and religious studies. The story of Abbé Ouvière and Romaine Rivière will be of interest to: Haitian historians, especially those concerned with the Léogâne and Jacmel regions; American historians, and notably historians of transatlantic medicine; theologians of Jesuit and Vodouyizan positionalities as regards the radical Enlightenment; and scholars of liberation theology.

Rey has traveled to Africa, Europe and through the Americas to scour libraries for archives, and he has put his experience as an ethnographer to work in constructing an oral history. This anthrohistorical research is on a par with that of Laurent Dubois, Kate Ramsey, and Gary Wilder; and it is an intellectual history that reads with the ease of Darren Staloff's or James Traub's work on the American Enlightenment. Most excitingly, Rey's careful archival research reveals that the well-known Enlightenment physician, known in the United States as "Dr. Pascalis," was actually Abbé Ouvière—that is, the same individual who had sympathized with the cause of the gens de couleur libres (free blacks) in Saint-Domingue. (Called Haiti today, the French part of the island was Saint-Domingue in the colonial era, while the Spanish side of the island, Santo Domingo, is presently known as the Dominican Republic.)

It is helpful first to describe the events in which the two historical actors' paths portentously cross. The Marseillais Abbé Ouvière sent word of his upcoming visit to Romaine Rivière, the coffee plantation owner and slave insurgent. Rivière was a Spanish-speaking free black from the part of the island colonized and administered by the Spanish crown. The visit took place during Christmas 1791 on Rivière's Trou Coffy coffee plantation, which also served as the main camp for the rebels. Earlier that year, Rivière had earned his name in the historical hall of fame as the only slave ever to have taken over and controlled not just one colonial city, but two—Léôgâne and Jacmel. The ever-powerful gens de couleur libres, who numbered about 30,000, had tasked Abbé Ouvière with talking Rivière into calming the violence of the latter's insurrection. The gens de couleur libres still aspired to achieve rights equal to whites of the French colony, though not necessarily to attain sovereignty. As such, they sought neither to alienate Rivière nor espouse the violence of his rebellion against the white populations of the two cities. Rey's book thus offers the details of a hitherto mostly ignored scholarship about Rivière's rebellion and the ensuing peace accord.

Yet The Priest and the Prophetess goes much further, contextualizing the two historical actors of the peace accord, tracing the life trajectories of each man before and after the 1791–1792 events. Having been excommunicated in Provence, Félix Alexandre Pascalis Ouvière came to Saint-Domingue with the help of his half-brother-in-law, André Rigaud, the general of the gens de couleur libres, during which time he worked for and became good friends with one of Rigaud's generals, Pierre Pinchinat. In Saint-Domingue he was (or posed as) sympathetic to the free blacks' cause; but upon his return to Paris, the abolitionists understood him as a royalist, uncommitted to helping the free blacks achieve their rights. As a royalist who was actively pursued for treason by the Paris-based representatives of the gens de couleur libres, Abbé Ouvière headed for London, went on to Jamaica, and finally settled in Philadelphia and New York, where he became one of the most prominent physicians and medical researchers of the American Enlightenment. In Saint-Domingue and Paris, he was known as Abbé Ouvière; in the U.S., he took on a new identity, that of Doctor Pascalis.

For his part, Romaine Rivière came to the Léogâne region of Saint-Domingue (today's Haiti) from the Spanish side of the island (today's Dominican Republic). Rivière was probably born free-black, and by his mid-twenties, at the time of his migration west, had acquired enough wealth to purchase land, set up a lucrative coffee plantation, and purchase his wife and their three children out of slavery. He became known as Romaine-la-Prophétesse, a feminine name that Rey suggests refers to Rivière's veneration of the Virgin Mary, a practice which the author attributes to various sources: the Catholic presence on Saint-Domingue; Marianism among Kongolese slaves who had already adopted forms of Catholicism before their enslavement; and possibly the conflation of Mary with Anacaona, a Taíno cacica, or chief who at the time of Columbus' arrival to the island partially ruled over the island, and notably was born not far from the region that Rivière had chosen for his coffee plantation. He is also known by various other terms: panyol, which means Spaniard, referring to his origins on the eastern side of the island (206), the "gender-inverted male prophet" (53), and "the hermaphroditic tiger" (52), these latter names relating to his tendency to dress in women's clothing.

With a background in theology and religious studies, Rey pushes his earlier criticisms of academe's penchant to overly romanticize and dehistoricize Vodou and, more generally, African-derived religions, in such a way as to trace how historical proof exists to corroborate that Catholicism and Vodou, in some cases—notably in the Kongo—had already at some level been exposed to each other. Informed especially by Pierre Bourdieu and Max Weber, Rey's work is grounded in a meticulous interdisciplinary process. As such, the book presents a historiography not just of Haiti, but of the early American Enlightenment, both in the United States and writ large. It resonates strongly with Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and Michael J. Drexler's recent edited volume The Haitian Revolution and the Early United States: Histories, Textualities, Geographies (2016). In sum: a tour-de-force of anthrohistoriography.