by Alec Waugh
Wild scenes attended the unloading of each cargo; and the people of the town adopted a curious comic-opera uniform – bare feet or shoeless stockings, braided dress coats, shirts trimmed with fur and ribbons at the collar, felt hats with brims half turned down, decorated with feathers dyed with the colours of the republic. Hugues ceased to read the newspapers and put on weight. He was more interested in commerce than the constitution, and the guillotine worked only one day in five. He regularly sent back to France a generous proportion of his plunder.
In this he showed sound common sense. The committee in Paris had learned of his massacres with concern. Yet his achievements on behalf of the republic were so considerable that in January 1796, it confirmed him in his role as an agent with full powers for eighteen months. Two months later he married a young Creole, and the extent to which he found his office profitable may be gauged from the fact that though he had arrived in the island penniless, he was able to make her a marriage settlement of one hundred thousand livres. He would have been able to make her a larger settlement if he had not been such an insatiable gambler, for not only had he control of the island’s commerce and had benefited from the confiscations of Royalist property, but he was a considerable shareholder in the piratical activities of the corsairs. He should have been an extremely wealthy man, but night after night he sat at the tables, losing with complete indifference the moneys that he had filched from his victims.
His fortunes might have prospered indefinitely had not hubris undermined his power. Incensed at the freedom with which the United States were selling arms and ammunitions to the British, in his opinion a base attempt to drive France and the Revolution out of the Caribbean, he urged the Refectory to declare war on the United States. The Refectory refusing, he increased the tempo of his raids on American shipping to such an extent that in July 1798, the USA declared war on France within American waters. It was called the Brigand’s War.
The outbreak of this war, which does not appear to have been announced in Guadeloupe, turned Paris against Hugues, and a replacement was sent out with instructions to dismantle the guillotine, the only one, it is believed, that ever crossed the Atlantic. Hugues, one of the most bloodthirsty of the Jacobins, was in private life a fond father and a tender spouse, and since his wife was pregnant, he refused to leave the island. He was, however, tricked on board a homebound ship and made a prisoner. From the bows of the ship he hurled imprecations at his successor.
His reluctance to leave the island, apart from his concern about his wife’s condition, is easily understandable. Most of the executives of the terror met a sudden and violent end, and Hugues must have had considerable doubts as to the reception that he would receive in Paris. To his surprise, however, he found himself still in official favour, and he was shortly posted to the governorship of Cayenne.
The news of his appointment caused consternation to the inhabitants of that obscure little colony, but Hugues was as adaptable as the vicar of Bray. Once again he travelled with a printing press, but this time its posters were assurances to the public that there would be no repetition of the sanguinary incidents that had been unfortunately necessary in Guadeloupe, and he installed in the bows of the ship, instead of a guillotine, a company of musicians, equipped with the latest songs from Paris, marches by Gossec, and country-dances for the fife and clarionet. He himself was decked in a quasi-military uniform, braided and embroidered, surmounted by a plumed helmet.
Cayenne, which had escaped the ferocities both of war and the Revolution, had provided a refuge for many exiles from less lucky islands, though it had been nicknamed ‘the dry guillotine’, since so many of these exiles died of fever. Hugues’ régime was paternalistic. He opened roads and irrigated fields. Paris was now at peace with the holy see. Monks and nuns returned and church bells chimed. Then, by the law of the 30th Floreal of the year 10, slavery was reinstated. Hugues shrugged. He was a politician; if the restoration of slavery was a political necessity, there was nothing he could do about it. He proceeded to restore slavery in Cayenne, as vigorously and ruthlessly as he had liquidated it in Guadeloupe.
He summoned the owners of nearby haciendas and the leaders of the militia to a secret meeting, and explained his plans. At dusk, the gates of the town were closed and the farms occupied by troops. At eight o’clock a gun was fired, and several hundred Negroes were herded into a small clearing. Hugues climbed on to a barrel, unrolled the parchment of the law, and by the light of torches sonorously delivered it. The former free citizens were informed that next day their former masters would be calling for them, to conduct them back to their old hutments.
A turbulent period followed. Many of the Negroes escaped in the darkness, hid in the hills, and poisoned the fish streams with mullion seed. There was a succession of grim atrocities. The freed men of colour were refused permission to return to France in fear lest their excessive number might transmit to European blood the same dark tinge that had spread through Spain after the Moorish invasion. In the guerrilla warfare that ensued, what was known as the Egyptian disease struck the island and affected Hugues’ eyesight. But order was eventually established.
The European war followed its course. The Dutch joined forces with Britain against the French and captured Cayenne. Hugues was tried in Paris by court-martial, but was acquitted with honour. Little is known about his final years. He had been a baker, trader, Mason, Anti-Mason, Jacobin, military hero, rebel, prisoner, agent of the directory, agent of the consulate; he was now absolved by the men who had killed the man who made him, and he remained in France. He had links with Fouché. He was in Paris when Napoleon’s régime collapsed. In 1814 an old comrade saw in the Palais Royal the fierce little dictator who once strode up and down his study in Guadeloupe, his hands behind his back, a cigar in his mouth, shouting,’ Spare no Englishman,’ soberly attired and wearing an enormous white cockade. ‘Once,’ his friend said, ‘you executed anyone wearing that.’ Hugues shrugged. ‘What would you? The Bourbons are our legitimate rulers.’
He died in the early 1820s, but the date and place of his death are uncertain. Some say he died in France, but according to the Spanish novelist, Alejo Carpentier, who made extensive researches for his novel, Explosion in a Cathedral, the gossip of Guadeloupe insists that he returned to his property in Guiana, where he died, slowly, painfully, and blind.
The present condition of the West Indian islands has been determined by what did or did not happen to them during this quarter century of war. Certain islands were scarcely affected, Barbados and the northern Leewards – Antigua, St Kitts, Nevis and Montserrat – owing their immunity to the direction of the northeast trade winds. It was difficult to attack against it. But St Lucia, Grenada and Guadeloupe felt the full impact of the Revolution; Martinique was captured twice and was a British island for fifteen years. This was to have a profound effect on her future history. Her landowners were not dispossessed, as those of Guadeloupe were. They could not return to France, so they lived on their estates in affluent isolation, nothing being done to interfere with the maintenance of the French way of life.
One of Britain’s great merits as a colonizing power has been her willingness to allow a defeated people to continue to conduct its affairs in exactly the same manner as it had before. The English have transported for themselves the life of the shires to Malaya, India and the Antilles, with their sport and clubs, their prejudices and their shibboleths, ignoring the customs of their neighbours, leaving well enough alone when that seemed practical and peaceful. In Canada Britain has maintained the French language, the French laws, the Catholic religion. Quebec today is not only bilingual; it is a French rather than a British city. During the Napoleonic Wars Britain captured Mauritius and the Seychelles Islands. The French way of life was maintained so uninterruptedly that not only were the grands blancs of the Seychelles considered more French than the French, but in the summer of 1940 they wondered whether they did not owe allegiance to Pétain’s government in Vichy rather than Churchill’s gove
rnment in London.
In Martinique, during Napoleon’s revolutionary wars, though the Union Jack flew from the turrets of Saint-Pierre and Fort Royal, the big planters and the little whites continued to lead exactly the same life that they had when de Grasse sailed northward to the Dominica Channel. For the slaves the régime was unchanged. The resolutions that were passed and then rescinded in Paris had no effect on them. They continued to plant sugar cane, then cut it, feed it into the mills and scrape the thick scum from the boiling vats; they danced in the evenings and sang songs, cultivated their own gardens on their day of leisure; attended the white man’s services on Sunday but worshipped the dark gods of Africa in their hearts, and dreamed of freedom and revenge, wondering what truth there was in the stories that reached them from Guadeloupe. It was not unnatural that Napoleon, in the pause allowed him in 1801 by the Treaty of Amiens, took Martinique as the model for his new colonial enterprise.
Fifteen years later in St Helena, Napoleon was to describe this enterprise as the biggest mistake of his life, but it had a great deal to commend it. He had recently acquired New Orleans from the Spanish. He was at peace with Europe. He had sixty thousand troops that he would be glad to see out of France. If he were to reassert his authority in Guadeloupe and St Domingue he could form a colonial empire, moving in a circle from Martinique up the Mississippi, that would make France self-supporting and invulnerable. The situations in Guadeloupe and St Domingue were not dissimilar. In each case, contact with France had been largely severed by the difficulties of wartime communication. In each case there had been sanguinary massacres; in each case order of a kind had been restored, with the sugar mills turning and a certain number of white planters enjoying the fruits of their estates; in each case a black general was in command – in St Domingue, Toussaint l’Ouverture; in Guadeloupe, Pelage. It was reasonable for Napoleon to assume that without the distraction of a war in Europe he should be able, with his armies that had conquered Europe, to restore completely the authority of Paris, and had he succeeded he need never have developed his continental plans for Europe; he need never have launched his campaign across the Russian snows. He might have deferred his ambitions for the imperial laurels. Later he would have been faced, he or his successors, with a different set of problems. The United States would not have tolerated a European empire stretching along its western boundary and curtailing its own expansion. Sooner or later there must have been a war between France and the United States. So many things would have happened differently if Napoleon’s colonial enterprise had succeeded. It is one of the big ifs of history, and the enterprise so nearly did succeed.
It had been carefully thought out, with that simplicity which is so often the secret of success. Two expeditions were dispatched side by side across the Atlantic, the one to Guadeloupe, the other to St Domingue. They carried similar instructions. The black leaders were to be cajoled, flattered, confirmed in their ranks; then, when the French army and French rule had been established, the black leaders were to be returned to France, as prisoners if they had been obstinate, to serve in the French army had they been obedient. To Guadeloupe he sent Richepanse, to St Domingue his brother-in-law, Leclerc, ‘a fellow almost damned in a fair wife’.
The expedition to Guadeloupe succeeded admirably. It was far from being easy sailing for Richepanse. There was fighting, there were misunderstandings; a fort with three hundred men in it was blown sky high, but within a few days there was no resistance except for a few groups in the hills; Pelage was on his way back to France to serve in Napoleon’s army and to die in Spain. Slavery was restored, though the word ‘slave’ was not used. Only whites could be French citizens. The word ‘proprietor’ was substituted for the word ‘master’; ‘correctional discipline’ for ‘the whip’. A weekly wage was replaced by food, clothes and medical attention. Proprietors were reinstated. Coloured men and Negroes without a card of freedom had to return to their old properties. Chains and dungeons punished those who attempted to escape. All was, in fact, very much as it had been twenty years before, except that a great many white planters had been killed, with their heirs preferring to remain in Paris. Within a few months the island had been recaptured by the British, and a period of uncontentious prosperity began.
It was all to turn out very differently in St Domingue. Up to a point the plan succeeded well enough. Leclerc had been instructed to treat the black generals as Richepanse had. Toussaint was the equivalent for Pelage, and within a few weeks Toussaint had been tricked on board and sent back to France in chains. Toussaint is one of the great names in history. He was to inspire a sonnet by Wordsworth, a tragedy by Lamartine and a novel by Harriet Martineau. He was the son of an African chief; he had no white blood in his veins; he had been born on an estate in St Domingue. He had been trusted as a slave; he had been promoted early from the cane fields to be his master’s coachman. As far as a slave’s life can be congenial, his had been. He had not been ill-treated; he had had a comfortable house. He had felt loyalty for his master, and when the revolution broke out he had not only helped him to escape but sent after him to the United States a cargo of cotton and sugar. He had been born with a power to rule; he was a natural leader; as a general he outmanoeuvred the Spanish and the British, and as an administrator he restored order in the island. He was not disloyal to France. It was his intention that the island should enjoy something akin to dominion status, acknowledging the suzerainty and commercial monopoly of France. He was not a bloodthirsty revolutionary, and if Napoleon’s schemes had prospered in St Domingue, Toussaint might be no more than a footnote in history. The spotlight has fallen on him because he was captured through treachery, and died in prison without trial, and because the subsequent history of the island is so dramatic, with a drama that is still tangible today. He is famous, in fact, as a forerunner, as the man who prepared the road for Dessalines and Henri Christophe; he is famous because of them rather than of himself, and it was through Leclerc’s tactless handling of Dessalines and Henri Christophe that the campaign miscarried.
When Leclerc arrived, Toussaint l’Ouverture was in Port-au-Prince, and it was here that Leclerc lured him into captivity. But Henri Christophe was at Cap Français, as general of the north. And it was in his handling of Christophe that Leclerc was most at fault. Though the island was technically at peace and work was proceeding on the estates, there were brigands in the hills, and three separate forces were under arms; Leclerc might at one bold blow have taken Cap Français or he might by skilful diplomacy have outwitted the black generals. He delayed assault, however, and sent as an ambassador Lebrun, an ignorant, ill-bred popinjay who later, on a diplomatic visit to Jamaica, was so outrageous in his behaviour as to merit a reprimand from Nugent. It is hard to understand why Leclerc chose him as an aide-de-camp. Possibly Lebrun was handsome; possibly he was Pauline’s choice.
Christophe could have been won over. As it was, distrustful and offended by Lebrun’s tactlessness, he burned Cap Français and fled into the hills. By the time that he and the other generals had surrendered into the acceptance of commissions as French generals, Leclerc had lost half his men.
Even so, for the moment it looked as though the French had won. Toussaint had been shipped to France. Christophe and Dessalines were generals in the French army; according to Napoleon’s plan, they, too, should have been sent back. But fighting once begun is hard to stop; the hills were filled with untamed brigands. Leclerc could not risk the loss of his troops in guerrilla warfare. Bandits had to be set against bandits. Christophe and Dessalines were the only men that he could trust. He had to keep them on. ‘A little while,’ he thought, ‘a little longer. When the last brigand has been captured; then will I send Dessalines back to France.’
But the dice were loaded against Leclerc. Long before the last brigand had been brought in, yellow fever, decimating his men, had broken out along the coast, and before the epidemic was at an end the news had come from Guadeloupe that slavery had been re-established there.
It
was the news from Guadeloupe that decided the St Domingue expedition, by uniting with a common dread not only the black but the mulatto forces. Until then the black forces of St Domingue had consisted of three armies: the mulattoes of the south, the centre under Dessalines, the north under Christophe. There had been no true combination. The generals had fought and acted independently of each other. Christophe had indeed made a separate peace with Leclerc. The news that slavery was re-established in Guadeloupe, with the certainty that it was the plan of the French to restore slavery in St Domingue, united the black forces. Christophe and Dessalines went back into the hills, and with them Pétion, the mulatto general who had been Dessalines’ chief opponent in the early war.
For the next three years Dessalines’ and St Domingue’s become one story.
Today Dessalines is Haiti’s hero. Streets and cigarettes are christened after him. His tomb is in the Champ de l’lndépendence. His statue faces the Chapel of Cap Haitien. In Port-au-Prince it brandishes a sword in face of the green-roofed houses and the dim outline of Gonâve. The visitor in Port-au-Prince will gaze wonderingly at that statue. He will scan the aristocratic, thin-lipped, straight-nosed face below the cockaded hat, and he will ask himself where in those bloodless features the signs of savagery are concealed. He may well ask himself. It was never for ungentle Dessalines that that mask was cut. It was ordered by a Central American president who was cast out of office before the statue could be delivered. His fall coincided with the arrival in Paris of a delegation from Haiti to commission a statue of Dessalines to celebrate the centenary of Haitian independence. As there was a statue going cheap, they took it. That was the way they did things in Haiti then. And, indeed, they might well have found a statue less symbolic of the tiger. As you sit at twilight on the veranda of the El Dorado, the outline of the cockaded hat and the thin curve of the brandished sword is dark and ominous against the scarlet sunset. They are the last things you see as the swift dusk settles on the Champ de Mars.
