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ePaper created 2014-06-21, 10:32:49 | version 1.31.00
Untimely Vision 12 1 character of the French nation-state (by sanctioning decentralized legal plural- ism), and the national character of the republic (by constituting the republic as a multinational federation). Such a partnership would have also undermined the racist norms governing the existing capitalist, imperial, and interstate systems. These factors led Napoléon to prefer to destroy the colony absolutely than to sanction the autonomy of a society of freed slaves led by a black general.54 This historically possible system of shared sovereignty — colonial emancipa- tion without national independence — thus proved politically impossible. Lou- verture’s untimely intervention was out of sync on the one hand with French national and imperial norms and on the other with the separatist wishes of his own militant soldiers and slave rebels, who distrusted his willingness to collabo- rate with white planters and officials. Perhaps knowingly, Louverture’s audacious constitution provoked the epic military confrontation with Napoléon that led to Louverture’s untimely death, to the demise of his political experiment, and to an independent Haiti. When all signs indicated that his dream of a federal partner- ship would not be realized and that Napoléon would try to reinstitute slavery in Saint-Domingue, Louverture was willing to confront France in brutal war to defend general liberty in and local autonomy for Saint-Domingue. Yet until the end, when he was arrested, deported, and imprisoned, he insisted that he was a servant of the French Republic, that Saint-Domingue remained a French colony, and that political autonomy for Saint-Domingue within an imperial framework would best serve both parties. Césaire contends that insofar as it anticipated contemporary forms of dominion and commonwealth, Louverture’s constitution was 150 years ahead of its time.55 This political act exemplified the antinomic circle characteristic of strategic uto- pian projects. It would have helped create an alternative set of arrangements that could be instituted only in a world that had already been transformed in precisely these ways. But we must also remember that Louverture elaborated a fantastic plan for an autonomous Caribbean republic that already actually existed. By 1801 he had in fact fashioned a functioning society in Saint-Domingue composed of formally free people whom he governed (albeit as a revolutionary dictator) with- out the intercession of French officials. This free black state was economically self-sufficient. Its plantation exports allowed it to maintain an interdependent rela- tionship with imperial France even as it concluded independent commercial and diplomatic treaties with neighboring colonies and states.56 Louverture’s regime 54. See Dubois, Avengers of the New World. 55. Césaire, Toussaint Louverture, 279, 283. 56. Schoelcher, Vie de Toussaint Louverture; Dubois, Avengers of the New World.