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ePaper created 2014-06-21, 10:32:49 | version 1.31.00
Public Culture 120 Beneath these apparent reversals, Louverture’s goals remained consistent: gen- eral liberty for emancipated slaves, economic independence for the territory, and political autonomy over local affairs. Given the imperial order that postemanci- pation Saint-Domingue would have to confront, he believed that these objectives could best be ensured through a formal partnership with imperial France. He sought to institutionalize all of these precepts in the scandalous July 1801 consti- tution, whose drafting he commissioned and which he sent directly to metropoli- tan France to be publicized and approved.53 Louverture recognized that historical developments had made it possible for Saint-Domingue to be a self-governing and economically independent partner of France. Among them were the transnational interdependence that characterized the French imperial economy, the republican sensibility that circulated through- out the Atlantic as the French Revolution unfolded, and the de facto sovereignty that the slave rebellion had given him the opportunity to seize. Louverture seemed to believe that emancipation could be institutionalized and existing colonialism could be transcended only through a formal affiliation with imperial France. In other words, self-determination for Saint-Domingue would be possible without state sovereignty. His constitution may therefore be read as a modest proposal to formalize an already existing state of affairs that would also have revolu- tionary implications. The political arrangement that Louverture envisioned and enacted would have fundamentally reconfigured the colonial character of Saint- Domingue (by ending French sovereignty over local affairs), the imperial relation between France and the colony (by redefining it as a partnership), the republican Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1963); Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776 – 1848 (London: Verso, 1989); Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991); David Patrick Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); and Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004). 53. Scholars have generally been more concerned with explaining Louverture’s descent into des- potism than with examining the particular political vision expressed in his constitutional act. The latter is usually understood as a de facto declaration of independence, an attempt to buy time until such a declaration could be made, or a missed opportunity to do so properly. For a notable exception, see Claude Moïse, Le projet national de Toussaint Louverture (The National Project of Toussaint Louverture) (Port-au-Prince: Mémoire, 2001). Dubois, Avengers of the New World, also takes seri- ously Louverture’s commitment to renegotiate the colony’s relationship to France. In “Louverture, Dessalines, and the Quest for Sovereignty” (unpublished paper), Dubois argues persuasively that Louverture chose not to declare independence. On Toussaint’s insistence that the people of Saint- Domingue retain French nationality, see Julia Gaffield, “Complexities of Imagining Haiti: A Study of National Constitutions, 1801 – 1807,” Journal of Social History 41 (2007): 81 – 103.