 Few concepts, or examples in history, have a total sample size of exactly one. Yet what happened in Haiti in the 1790s was unique and truly revolutionary. The most powerful and important book written about the Haitian Revolution is certainly C. L. R. James' The Black Jacobins, which is staple reading for graduate student historians of all fields. It is an entrancing piece of writing which pulls the reader seamlessly back and forth across the Atlantic. It is a book that does all a book can do to make modern readers almost feel the lash themselves. For more on the Haitian Revolution, I spoke with Cato's own Jason Kuznicki. Welcome to Liberty Chronicles, a project of libertarianism.org. I'm Anthony Komegna. So it's often sort of communicated in the popular wisdom, at least, that the Haitian Revolution was really the only successful slave revolt in history. Up to that point or since. Is that accurate? More or less, yes. There were slave revolts that were successful for a time, but then were eventually crushed. There were many instances of slaves who ran away and founded independent societies, the so-called maroon societies, which existed in Haiti and in various other slave societies. But as far as a slave revolt that successfully changed the nature of the society, that belongs to Haiti. That's not something found elsewhere. So the critical thing here is the revolution element, right? Yes. That word really changes what we're talking about a lot. Yes, absolutely. So what is entailed then in a revolution that's not necessarily entailed in a rebellion? Well, that's a really interesting question to ask right in this particular context of the Haitian Revolution, because at the time contemporaries were acutely aware that revolutions were a new thing, that revolutions in the political order as they understood them were something that had just started happening in history, and that there might have been civil disorder in the past. There certainly was. There were coup d'état. There were assassinations. There were popular uprisings. But the idea of a revolution seemed to be something new to them, and the answer to what made that new and distinctive was an ideological component. These were the first mass actions in history that were not religious, were secular in nature, but that had the goal of somehow transforming their society permanently, and it was hoped for the better. So then let's dwell a bit on the society before the Haitian Revolution. Were the lives of Haitian slaves substantially different from the lives of slaves elsewhere in the British French or Spanish empires? Yes and no. And I say yes and no because it is crucial to avoid the mistake of excusing slavery anywhere. So we can point to slavery being more or less demographically harsh in various places. If you are a slave in the Caribbean, your life prospects are particularly grim. The population in places like Haiti and Jamaica throughout the Caribbean indeed seldom reproduced itself successfully. The typical slave arrived from Africa and died within a few years. And there was not successful reproduction of the slave population, which gives you an idea of how harsh it was. Huge amounts of people just worked to death producing sugar cane. Yes, absolutely. And so on the one hand, slavery in this part of the world was especially harsh because of the climate, because of the work that they did and because of the prevailing conditions. But on the other hand, we should not delude ourselves into thinking that slavery anywhere else was somehow okay. We don't want to make that mistake. If you were a slave even in a place like Maryland where slavery was not demographically that harsh, you're still a slave. It still means in essence that you have an employer who can sell your children or who can sell you and you never see your family again. You don't get paid. You don't get a choice of your employer. You don't get the choice of where you live or what work you do. It is exceptionally opposed to human dignity. I mean, you can't call this a good system. So it's crucial to avoid the appearance of excusing any of it. But that said, it is possible that within this bad system, the slaves in the Caribbean had it probably the worst of the worst. And what about that ideology that you said is necessary to a revolution which really is a product of modernity to some degree or another? Was there a distinct ideology that we can find among the Haitian slaves? I mean, why in Haiti but nowhere else? That question I think points us directly at the French Revolution which is happening simultaneously to the events that CLR James describes. And the revolution is this great generator of different ideological persuasions and a lot of them are still with us today. And while people in the colonies struggled to keep up at times with what was going on in Paris, they certainly were taking notes and they were taking ideological cues from what was going on in the National Assembly or in the convention. And they were using those developments as ways of mobilizing people locally to act. What did the society in Haiti look like on the ground? CLR James kind of describes a constant low level class war between the islands, elite few and the great enslaved mass of people. What did life actually look like for people in Haiti? Well, it's not at all inaccurate to say that there was a class war. There certainly was. And we can see that there were lots of strategies of resistance taking place on the ground and some of them were frankly quite shocking. There were acts of sabotage. There was an enormous amount of poisoning. There were instances of slaves even poisoning their own children so that they would not have to live under slavery, which is if nothing else makes you sit up and take notice of the cruelty of the society, that certainly ought to do it. And the slaves who experienced this society had no doubts whatsoever that it was thoroughly rotten. Even the planters at times have some inkling of it and yet they do not act. And what James says because he's a Marxist after all is that they were motivated by property. And as property holders, they're not going to challenge their society. Now, we don't have to accept his Marxist conclusions to find that he's making important and interesting historical observations all the same. It is a fact that people who are brought up as part of the masterclass in a slave society, seldom question their place in society. Even in the United States during the generation of the founding, we find founding fathers who were very deeply imbued with an ideology of liberty and yet they do not take concrete steps, for example, to free their own slaves or to work for some sort of legislative emancipation. They don't do this. And so it seems to me like where James wants to find class interest and sort of property determining the thoughts of people, I would say it's something closer to socialization. You are rarely going to say that what you're brought up with and what you're brought up in is wrong. It takes a very great deal of intellectual courage and nonconformity to do something like that. Were there any important divisions between white colonists on Haiti or between the colonists and the metropole? Absolutely. Back in France? Absolutely. There were absolutely differences among the white colonists. The planter class was by far the wealthiest. They had interests that were fairly unified, but there were other whites there too. There were the poor whites, the small whites as they're sometimes called who were not slaveholders or who were perhaps very minor slaveholders and therefore were jealous of their racial prerogatives and privileges but had relatively little in the way of the economic interest that the planters had. There were representatives of the royal government there. Representatives of the royal government are keen to protect royal privileges and the trade monopoly which the planters themselves, if they considered their economic interests, were not keen to protect. They did not want the trade monopoly because that meant higher prices for them. They supported free trade and everything except they wanted to keep their slaves and they wanted to make sure that this affront to liberty was preserved. There were definitely divisions among whites. There were divisions among blacks because not all blacks were enslaved. Many of them were free, substantial minority at any rate. There were also people of mixed race. These people, mulattoes as James calls them and as they were legally known at the time, had a fairly precarious legal status. Some of them owned slaves. Some of them were enslaved. Some of them were free. Whenever you have a group like this in a racialized slave system, there is an enormous danger because where do their loyalties lie? Are they going to break in favor of the established order or in favor of liberation if a revolt ever comes? We see this exact dynamic playing out in the history of the revolution. James says that the revolution at home, the French Revolution and the revolution as it carried into the colony really began with the bourgeoisie, these middle class white people in the empire. I want to say is that accurate first of all? Did the bourgeoisie create the French Revolution? What difference do you think this makes for James, a Marxist historian and us, a couple of libertarian historians? Well, I think it's accurate that the bourgeoisie played an enormous part in the French Revolution. The place where modern non-Marxist historians and libertarians alike would differ with Marxists is to ask about their motivations. Whereas the Marxist account of the French Revolution and by extension the Haitian Revolution holds that the bourgeoisie wanted to overthrow the old feudal order so that it could instantiate a fully property holding order with bourgeois legal norms and rights of property fully vindicated. What we find is something a lot more complicated than that. When we look at, for example, the Cayet-de-Doliance, the grievance notebooks that were prepared in advance of the estates general in France, very frequently these Cayet-de-Doliance, which were the grievances that people brought to what eventually became the National Assembly, they are not so clearly asking for a bourgeois social order. They are asking for much more restrained or sometimes much more, we would say, conservative reforms. They don't want to abolish the monarchy. They don't want to abolish the nobility. They don't even say very much about taxation to begin with, except that it's clear that they need some new form of taxation and they're not exactly clear on how to do that. They are not attacking feudal privileges. One thing that has really emerged recently in the last few decades in French historiography of the Revolution was that commonly, although the bourgeoisie had a class interest, each individual member hoped to leave the class of the bourgeoisie and become a nobleman, which was not a crazy aspiration at all because the way that a typical nobleman became a nobleman in the old regime was not because their great-great-great-great grandfather or whatever had fought with Charlemagne. The way that a nobleman typically became a nobleman was by buying an office, which conferred on them a title. Obviously, if the way seems open to become a nobleman, this really cuts down on class solidarity. You don't want to be bourgeois forever. You want to rise in the world and everybody knows it. The salience of class solidarity or class interests is really not supported by the facts on the ground. It seems to me that that would hold whether you're a Marxist looking at this as a class-based event where one stage of history transfers to the next or if you're a libertarian who has a less rigid class analysis that rulers rule over ruled essentially and some exploit others and that's how events turn the conflict between those two. But if you have any sort of rigidity to your class analysis, the bourgeoisie could easily turn either way. They could be the revolutionaries or they could be the counter-revolutionaries. It's not totally clear where their material interests or their mere class interests are being served by one side but not the other. Exactly. That's just at the level of a collective interest. When you look at the level of individual interest, things get very complicated very quickly. My favorite anecdote about class interests in pre-revolutionary France is that there was a certain lawyer from the town of Arras who was very ambitious in wanting to rise in the world and become a very, very powerful and respected figure. So he began putting the particle of nobility before his name. He put the de in front of his name just like noblemen do. He became Maximilian de Robespierre and later when he joined the revolution and became one of its key players, he had to sort of conveniently forget about this aspect of his former life because that sort of playing at being a nobleman could and did cost people their lives during the terror. CLR James spends a lot of time in the book. A lot of the detail that's spent here is the back and forth between the National Assembly convened in Paris and the different colonial delegations, some of which included mulattoes from Haiti. Can you give us a rundown in a sense of these extremely complex interactions going on across the Atlantic Ocean? Well, one of the most important things to remember about these interactions, all of them as a group, is the fact that yes indeed they are taking place across the Atlantic Ocean and it takes weeks to get across the Atlantic Ocean at this period in history. And during the French Revolution, weeks is a really long time. Events can transpire while people are en route and nobody on the island knows about it. Nobody in the ship knows about it. And frequently this means that news arrives and it's already out of date. James opens chapter 5 with a description of a ship that is leaving France and headed for San Domingo and a lot happens along the way. I'm going to just read a bit from it. This is all true. The Girondins did start a war with Austria in part to distract from domestic politics. Absolutely true. The army was half royalist, half revolutionary. Marie Antoinette was sending the war plans to the enemy. Revolutionary France seemed unable to organize itself and the royalists in France were awaiting the entry of the foreigners to rise and massacre the revolution. The Girondins, afraid of the counter-revolution but more afraid of the Paris masses, would not take steps against the royalists and the people of Paris, goaded to exasperation, stormed the Toulonne Palace on August 10th. They imprisoned the royal family, the legislature was dissolved and a new parliament, the National Convention was summoned. The masses administered a rough justice to the royalist plotters in the September massacres and took the defense of France into their own dirty but strong and honest hands. Now, all of this took place while a ship was sailing to San Domingo to confirm the status of the colony. And when they arrived, no one had any idea that the French government had been overthrown, that the monarchy was no more, that the first republic had been proclaimed. So, although there is a great deal of interest in following the latest ideological currents and in aligning oneself with this or that faction back home in order to secure advantage, there's a time lag and it complicates things a lot. So then, can you give us a sense of how this revolutionary ideology in France translated to the slaves in Haiti? Yes, the slaves in Haiti were altogether reasonable in saying that if you mean liberty, equality and fraternity and if you mean that the rights of man are universal to all, then certainly we should be included. But not everyone in France was willing to sign on to that. In fact, a lot of people were either indifferent or actually quite worried about it because it was not clear what the future of the colony would look like after that happened. And James goes into a lot of explanation here that focuses on the fact that a lot of the revolutionaries and people sympathetic to the revolution were property holders and they would be reluctant to abolish any form of property including slaves. I am less than persuaded on these points and I'm less than persuaded for a variety of reasons. It ought to be remembered that these are people who are conducting the French Revolution. They have a lot on their minds and the status of slaves in San Domingo is not going to be at the forefront of their minds. Advancing Austrian armies might actually be more on point for them or the fact that there are people rioting over the price of bread in the streets of Paris. They have a lot going on right now. So that's one reason why. But another reason why is that there was really not very much of an abolitionist movement. There were people with big ideas but it was still very much a nascent movement. It was not something that people had grown up with. It was not something that was a widespread mass movement. It was something that was still relatively new. At times I think James is very unfair to liberal abolitionists. If one were to read this text and know nothing at all of William Wilberforce, one would think from the mentions in the Black Jackabins that Wilberforce was merely an opportunist. He just wanted abolition, it's hinted, to cause the French suffering. This really does not square with a look at his life and the other causes that he devoted himself to. Wilberforce was like a cause junkie. He was involved with the society for the suppression of vice. He was concerned about cruelty to animals. He was an abolitionist. He was involved in electoral reform. He had all sorts of projects going on and they were all dedicated to reform of society. It's hard to say that he just got into this abolition thing because he wanted to stick a fork in the eye of the French. It doesn't really hold up. It was people like Clarkson that were supplying abolitionist material to the French. James does talk a lot about the friends of the Negro, the abolitionist society. You don't buy his idea that everybody conspired to forget the slaves in the assembly. A conspiracy makes it sound like it was a conscious deliberate decision undertaken without too much regret. I'm not so sure that I agree with that. I really don't think I agree with that. I think James really does. He seems to really think this is a conspiracy. People are in the hallways, I guess, talking about how to ignore the slavery issue and push it aside. If you read the writings of somebody like the Ébée Créglaire, he's a sincere reformer. He actually does want to end this institution and he wants to reform slave societies that are in the French colonies to no longer be that way. Can you take us through a bit of the mechanics of the abolitionist and anti-abolitionist debate in the assembly? James says that there is a point, small though it was, where the friends of the Negro controlled the assembly. They had a majority at least, so they could have advanced against slavery there, but really didn't. At least not in any serious way, he says. They didn't. It fell to the convention in the following year to, in fact, abolish slavery. He's absolutely right that this was a failing and this is something that I can't say was the finest hour of French liberalism by any stretch of the imagination. I don't think that it was a conspiracy of property holders to preserve property. I don't buy that explanation. Meanwhile, while different white factions are competing in Paris for control of the government, the Haitian slaves are taking direct action for their liberties. They are. They are. There's a gigantic slave revolt that takes place. There are various non-slave factions. Early on, there is a great deal of concern that the mixed-race people are in particular danger. In the early phases of the French Revolution, there's a question whether the free mulatto of mixed-race people should be enfranchised. The fear there is that this is a slippery slope to abolitionism because if you free them or if you enfranchise them, if you emancipate and enfranchise, well, where do you stop? They're subject to currently subject or were currently subject to racial laws. You lift those laws, they will begin to take political action in what direction? In the direction of their enslaved brethren who they have great ongoing relationships with and they're going to destabilize the whole society. There's a conservative liberal faction that says, yay, enfranchise white people but no further action. They lose. They lose very quickly. Mixed-race people begin to play a very active part in the politics of the island. The different empires all invade at one point or another. The British, the Spanish, the French come back. They do. Here is where I think the economic explanation is at its strongest because everyone knows that this is a very rich prize to add to a colonial empire. This island is enormously wealthy in sugar exports. If you can add that to your imperial collection, you get a lot of revenue. The Spanish do want it, the British want it. They take various steps to try to win over different factions on the island to their side, whether it's planters or slaves or mulattoes or what have you. They're constantly scheming back and forth to try to get the upper hand and therefore claim the whole thing for themselves. It doesn't work. It's pretty well a disaster all around for all of them. It does not work. None of them manage to succeed in any permanent sense. They get temporary victories here and there but nothing permanent. What you end up finding is an increasing sense of nationalism, of an idea of national self-determination. What do you think is responsible for that then? James says that the revolution had created a new race of men that Haitian slaves, ex-slaves, basically refused, absolutely refused to go back into slavery. No matter what flag was putting them there, they simply would not do it again. Well, to be frank, I can't blame them. Sure. But I guess that's another way of saying, was it the fever or the fighting men? Was it the slaves who refused to be slaves or was it the fevers and the conditions of imperial warfare around the globe that weakened each of these powers and prevented them from taking this island? What really made the revolution possible, fever or fighters? I inclined toward the fighters because one of the things that's going on simultaneous to all of this is that Europe is going through constant warfare at home. France is invading Spain. Britain and France are fighting on the seas. They're fighting in various other places in the world. The French are fighting all of the continental powers at the same time. All sorts of fighting is happening. Well, this particular colony would be a great prize to have. There's also a sense in which saving the homeland comes first for all of these powers. And all the factions they've just named, they are all fighting for their survival as a country as well. And so there are choices to be made. So while they are doing that, there is an opportunity there for an independent movement in San Domingo, which becomes independent. A movement led by somebody we haven't mentioned yet to save. True, true, yes. So can you tell us about the general, the great general who made the revolution possible? Oh, well, you've asserted something there that's very interesting because if you are a Marxist, you don't believe that great men make history. You believe that social forces make history. And one of the great paradoxes of this book, this classic work of history, is that it's written by a Marxist. And yet it's about a person who is undeniably a great man of history, if anyone ever is. And it's hard to escape the sense that he really was quite a forceful personality, quite a talented military commander. And without him, it is obvious that things would have been different. Not clear exactly how they would have been different, but it is obvious that he played a key role. He was fiercely committed to France and the revolution. He was. He was fiercely committed to France. He was intent on the French idea of liberty from a relatively early time. Initially, there was sort of a temporary allegiance that he had made with the Spanish commanders. And there was some question about whether it would be loyalty to France with a king or without. But ultimately, he does throw his lot in with the French revolutionary government. And once he does that, he's very, very much committed to these ideals. And then there's the other undeniably great man here, Napoleon. Yes. Who is also terribly important to... James calls him the most important man in the century, I think. Something like that, yeah. In the whole era, certainly that. And he's sort of the paradigm case of the great man of history. When Hegel developed his theory of history, he did it in part by reflecting on Napoleon. And he came up with this idea that there are great men in history, but insofar as they are great, it is because they are embodiments of some idea or some spirit of the age that imbues them with greatness. And for Hegel, that was Napoleon. Napoleon was the embodiment of the revolution as he understood it. Now, I want to say myself that Napoleon was a betrayal of the revolution. He proclaimed himself emperor. He got there through constant warfare. He was by no means a liberal. He was a mercantilist. He enjoyed the idea of rulership. He claimed it for himself, not for the Capetian dynasty, but that's neither here nor there for me. I mean, that's a betrayal of liberty, the very first point of the revolutionary slogan. And to me, that's not the embodiment of the revolution. And certainly not for any of the liberals of the time either. What does C. L. R. James mean when he says that the race system is subsidiary to the class system? Well, this is something that again comes from his Marxism. And a Marxist historian is going to look for explanations of great events in history by trying to tie them to class interests and the workings of class interests. And in the context of slavery in Saint-Domingue, there is a clear mapping of class onto race that if you are a slave, you are black. If you are free, you're either white or possibly you're black, but if you are free black, you're definitely of a lower social class. And there's this tendency for the one to kind of explain the other, which is, I think, not exactly wrong. I mean, you can't really argue with that as a description of the society. But whether it goes on to explain events is another question. Because you do see people of these various race and class identities breaking variously in terms of ideology. And that becomes a lot harder for him to explain. Now, after the revolution, there's a, or I guess during the Haitian Revolution, there's a concerted attempt to keep news of it from spreading past the island, to keep slave rebellions from popping up elsewhere, informed by sailors, for example, from Saint-Domingue going to Charleston or something. So they shut down, they quarantine the island and shut down ships and communications outward to other communities. But yet news does get out, of course, over the next couple of decades. It becomes sort of a classic horror story among American planters of what will happen if you give even the slightest bit on the question of abolition, right? So much so that they said, we can't allow Congress to put in protective tariffs because that's outside the scope of their authority. And if they do one thing outside the scope of their authority, they're coming for our slaves and will all be slaughtered like in San Domingo. It sort of adds color to the fear of the French Revolution, which was also very much present in Federalist circles in the United States and the early Republic. There's this fear that, yes, we've had a revolution, yes, we've become a republic, but you know what, we knew not to take it too far. And the French, they're doing something different from us. And there is this concern that the French Revolution sort of didn't know when to stop. And therefore, we need to avoid that example. It's not entirely clear how that was to be achieved, but one of the things that was clear in trying to avoid the mistakes of the French Revolution was exactly what you said. We can't let the slaves get free. That was the fear among sort of conservatives in that way. Can you say a word about the institutions that dominated Haiti after a successful independent government was established? And what do we libertarians then make of this event today? Yeah, so if you look at Haiti today, it is notoriously the basket case of the Western Hemisphere. It's development, it's environment, it's demographic data, all still very poor. There is a desperately poor country. It has been under dictatorship for a lot longer than it has had free government. It has had a great deal of difficulty developing economically. And it's very corrupt. It's got all sorts of really hard to solve problems. And there is sometimes this want to move from the successful slave revolt to an analysis of subsequent events. And I don't think I quite agree with that. I don't think that I quite agree for a number of reasons. First of all, as we began this discussion by saying, it is the only fully successful slave revolt. So one data point is not very much to go on. Second, the decision to adopt various institutions or not subsequent to the revolt is an independent decision and it has to be evaluated independently. So whether or not let the origin of the country be whatever it was, it is still capable of either having, say, freedom of the press or not. It's capable of having fair elections or not. And the decisions that are made subsequent to the revolution have not always been good. And we can look at those and we should look at those independently. Had to say lived things would have been fine? Well, I can't say that either. I can't say that either. We can't do experiments in history where we run the clock back and try again. But this is one of those cases where certainly it would be very interesting to know how it would have turned out or how things might have gone differently. In any case, we've seen in the 20th century a black nation state does not equal a corrupt tyranny. Doesn't have to be at all. No, certainly not. Certainly not. And plenty of nation states populated by white people are thoroughly corrupt as well. It's always a difficult thing to move from a thoroughly corrupt authoritarian regime of any kind to a liberal society. That transition is always difficult. Sometimes it's done successfully, sometimes it's not. And we, I think, still lack a really convincing theory that explains how people either succeed or fail in that type of transition. Jason Kuznicki is the editor for Cato Books and holds a PhD in French history from the Johns Hopkins University. For more information on Liberty Chronicles, visit libertarianism.org.