Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
to an end, Rochambeau frigidly informed his guests that he had invited them to his palace to celebrate
the obsequies of their brothers and husbands. The removal of the cloth then proved the truth of his little
speech, for each coffin contained the corpse of a relation of each of his guests. The same figure was not-
able in battle for his chivalry and courage, and for those large and noble military gestures that one asso-
ciates with the French Régence and the Maréchal de Saxe.
The campaign was a contest that forced Rochambeau to his knees, and finally, after the battle of Ver-
tières, to surrender. This disaster for the armies of the Consulate was abetted by the British, who, as the
Napoleonic Wars were at their height in other theatres, blockaded the ports and traded arms to the rebels.
Haitian independence was declared at Gonaïves on the 1st of January, 1804, and a rough-and-ready con-
stitution proclaimed. It was an amazing, an almost unbelievable achievement. The fierce and heroic Des-
salines was crowned sovereign of Haiti as the Emperor Jacques I, on the 6th October; five months later
than Napoleon's May Day coronation as Emperor of the French. One of the notable early actions of the
new state was an important participation with Simon Bolivar in the struggles for freedom of the Spanish
colonies of South America.
The history of Haiti since then is scattered by a startling catalogue of ephemeral empires and king-
doms, coups d'état , civil wars, conspiracies, Caco insurrections, outbursts of anarchy, murders and re-
volutions; it is characterized also by remarkable and steady progress in building up the machinery of a
state, and in literature and science and the arts. The most recent event of lasting importance, before the
fall of the Lescot government three years ago, was the occupation of the Republic, after the murder of
President Sam in 1915, by U.S. Marines. This period of Haitian history achieved a number of material
advances in the direction of road building, finance, sanitation, military matters and the formation of a
rural gendarmerie. Socially, as I have said before, it has left little mark, except, superficially, the common
heirloom of all occupations: a rise in prices and a cheapening of moral values.
When the French were expelled a century and a half ago, the Haitians really had to begin all over again
(in the post-Montesquieu cliché of the day), as Lycurgus did at Sparta. The phrase can never have been
more aptly applied.
It has been necessary to touch, in this summary fashion, on the history of Haiti because of its total
divergence from the rather stereotyped background of the other Antilles, and because the memory of the
War of Independence, and its results, pervade and stress the whole of Haitian life.
All these events have complicated the social affairs of the Republic. The situation of the Mulattoes, for
instance, is anomalous and involved. The presence of the contending strains of black and white in the
same organism may, under certain circumstances, be an excellent thing. But an adverse ideological cli-
mate turns the two elements into a ferocious antagonism, a lifelong Zoroastrian duel in which Ormuzd
and Ahriman drive each other from the battlefield of the brain to that of the subconscious and back again
for ever.
The large number—in Haiti perhaps larger than the other Antilles—of Mulattoes affranchised before
the Revolution, and the infinite social gradations that existed in the strange limbo between the African
and French worlds, made the question of more or less white blood one of great importance. Moreau de
St. Méry, the French eighteenth-century writer on Ste. Domingue, draws out elaborate tables of descent
of the varying degrees of mixed blood ranging between the two unadulterated extremes, and each degree
had its own name. Advancing, for the sake of simplicity, from black to white, first comes the Sacatra ,
seven-eighths African; then the Griffe and Griffonne , thirteen-sixteenths; the Marabout , five-eighths; and
Search WWH ::




Custom Search