Anténor Firmin and Jean Price-Mars: Revolution, Memory, Humanism

Haiti's radical revolution, which, as Anténor Firmin incisively put it, "affected the economic system and moral order of all European colonial powers at the time,"¹ was immediately treated by Euro-American slave-holding nations either as an "unrest" or, in French traditional historiography, as "les troubles de Saint Domingue." At best, the revolution was long portrayed as a rebellion but always as a non-event.² However, the suppression of the impact of the Haitian Revolution from historical memory was also accompanied by a proliferation of negative reports in the Western press. Disparaging accounts by nineteenth-century European and North American observers, travelers, and diplomats portrayed the black republic as a land of despotism and "savagery" in unfair and patently racist ways; the land's savagery was a product, they claimed incessantly, of black self-rule.³ These accounts both echoed and seemed to corroborate the scientific discourse of nineteenth-century anthropology, with its racializing and classificatory approaches to human societies, its positing that black populations were inherently inferior and required white tutelage. Reproducing this colonial discourse and continuing in the tradition of defamatory travel writing about Haiti was a spate of pseudo-ethnographic narratives written during the American occupation of Haiti (1915–1934). A number of these narratives, replete with "voodoo tales" for a thrill-seeking American readership, were written by US Marines. Toward the end of the occupation, this popular genre was complemented by the first of a damaging tradition of "zombie films." Students of Haitian studies are now well familiar with this web of negativity enveloping Haiti: one can trace a thread from William Buehler Seabrook's The Magic Island (1929) to Wade Davis's The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988), from Spencer St. John's Hayti or the Black Republic (1889) to Graham Greene's The Comedians (1966), by way of Gustave d'Alaux's L'Empereur Solouque et son Empire (1856)and Paul Morand's Tzar Noir [Magie Noire](1928) in the corpus of texts that have sensationalized and misrepresented Haiti's culture and history.⁴

Haitian writers and thinkers, from the onset, did not fail to protest against the colonial representations and negative international opinion about their country. Their vigorous response to set the record straight produced both a pamphlet literature of protest as well as a strong intellectual tradition in defense of national dignity and Haiti's hard-earned independence. This intellectual production, dating back to the early nineteenth century, is situated in the field of social thought. The following is a discussion of the latter as it pertains to the legacy of the Haitian Revolution. This article will analyze the works and thought of two of Haiti's prominent thinkers, Joseph Anténor Firmin (1850–1911) and Jean Price-Mars (1876–1969), to show how—by their motivations and their vision of Haiti—they stayed true to the Haitian tradition of a free people. More specifically, it will be demonstrated how Firmin and Price-Mars, in the nineteenth and twentieth century respectively, achieved this concretely through their historical and anthropological study of their country. Far from displaying blind patriotism or making ideological use of Haiti's revolution, Firmin's and Price-Mars's scholarship of commitment served to promote national self-definition, self-understanding, and a belief that Haiti's postcolonial adversities could be overcome, as had been the problems of slavery and colonialism. The following analysis seeks to reveal, through a reading of Firmin's De l'égalité des races humaines (The Equality of the Human Races) (1885) and Price-Mars's Ainsi parla l'Oncle: essais d'ethnographie (So Spoke the Uncle: Ethnographic Essays) (1928) and several of his articles, how these thinkers viewed the Haitian Revolution and how they considered its legacy in light of Haiti's postcolonial plight.

Firmin and Price-Mars are situated in Haiti's genealogy of antiracist thought, which yielded one of the earliest...