Foreword
Strategists May Sometimes Be Poets
Gary Wilder

Towards the end of this long-neglected work, Aimé Césaire casually remarks that ‘strategists may sometimes be poets’ (216). He is referring to Carl von Clausewitz’s lyrical reflections on the flexible military tactics necessary for a successful people’s war – tacking between an unsettling dispersion of forces and terrifying lightning strikes. Noting that Toussaint Louverture acted in just this fashion, Césaire wondered whether Clausewitz had ‘studied the war in Saint-Domingue without mentioning it’ (216). This offhand formulation offers us a valuable lens for understanding this book and its author.

Early on, Césaire alerts us that Toussaint Louverture is not meant to be a conventional scholarly monograph. He does not offer us a straightforward historical account of the revolution in Saint-Domingue. This is a historical essay on poetic politics and a political essay on historical poetics. Césaire’s insightful interpretation of these events is enough to warrant our attention today. But this book, unfamiliar to most English-language readers, also illuminates important aspects of Césaire’s own thinking about the relation between history, politics and aesthetics. This untimely dialogue between two titanic Black radicals helps us to better understand Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution, Aimé Césaire and decolonisation, and the myriad reverberations between these two eras and figures. It may also help us to relate each to the peculiar challenges and impasses of our postcolonial present.

Staging the Colonial Problem

A great deal of recent discussion about the Haitian Revolution has been inflected by C.L.R. James’s masterpiece The Black Jacobins (1938). James was especially concerned with the self-organising and history-making capacity of enslaved Blacks. He attended to the way these rural cultivators on the imperial periphery leveraged a world-historical opening to abolish slavery and institutionalise Black freedom. James was equally concerned with the question of revolutionary leadership. He thus placed a politically brilliant and tragically flawed Toussaint Louverture at the centre of his account.

In contrast, Césaire focuses on what he calls ‘the colonial problem’, which first ‘took shape’ (noué) and ‘came apart’ (dénoué) in revolutionary Saint-Domingue (3). Like James, Césaire contends that insofar as plantation production by enslaved Blacks was the condition of possibility of European capitalist development, Saint-Domingue may be regarded as a crucial site of the origin of Western civilisation. But he also emphasises how this civilisation was shaped by a foundational ‘colonial problem’. The latter derived from a bourgeois French Revolution that sanctified not only citizenship rights but property rights.

For Césaire, the economic growth that allowed the French bourgeoisie to become a revolutionary class demanding political universality depended on plantation slavery and colonial capitalism. Metropolitan freedom presupposed human bondage in the colonial Caribbean. This imperial situation depended upon and reproduced anti-Black racism. Césaire explains that within France’s Caribbean colonies, class divisions were coded as racial divisions (and vice versa). Social hierarchy was fixed as a racial ontology. Any effort to create a civil society in the colonies, Césaire argues, was invariably, and necessarily, undermined by a military state charged with maintaining this ontological order. It followed that any attempt to institutionalise republican freedom for certain groups within Saint-Domingue, while maintaining the system of plantation slavery, was bound to fail.

Césaire demonstrates how this foundational ‘colonial problem’ expressed an ongoing set of contradictions: political universalism vs. bourgeois social hierarchy, metropolitan republicanism vs. colonial authoritarianism, universal humanism vs. racial subjection, an ideal of human freedom vs. the reality of slave-based production. These contradictions, he suggests, were the source and product of a fundamental conflict between abstract principles and material interests. He argues that the French Revolution revealed and intensified the ‘colonial problem’. Revolutionary republicanism demanded both the maintenance and the abolition of Caribbean colonialism. He points out that these contradictions ‘culminated in Napoleon’s politics of force’ (254). The latter was not an avoidable deviation; it expressed ‘the profound logic of a system’ (210).

Toussaint Louverture thereby challenges any facile story about a republican French revolution simply extending to the plantation colonies. Yet, Césaire insists that the metropolitan revolution was indeed consequential for the slave insurrection that culminated in an independent Haiti. Insofar as it ‘disrupted the power and disarticulated the system that kept classes together in colonial society, releasing its latent energy’, the French Revolution was ‘less an agent of transformation [in the colonies] than the catalyst that … accelerates [a] reaction’ (254). He explains, ‘it would be a terrible mistake to think of the revolution of Saint-Domingue purely and simply as a chapter of the French Revolution. … Let us be clear: there is no “French Revolution” in the French colonies. In each French colony there is a specific revolution, engendered by the French Revolution, connected to it, but each unfolding according to its own laws and with its own objectives’ (4). In Césaire’s dialectical account, the very failure of revolutionary republicanism to resolve the ‘colonial problem’ opened the possibility for the people of Saint-Domingue to attempt to do so.

Césaire also traces a dialectical process through which the major social groups in Saint-Domingue – white colonists, free mulattos and enslaved Blacks – successively seized the historical initiative which culminated in the first modern anti-colonial revolution. Each group carried its version of the struggle as far forward as the historical situation allowed. Each failure created conditions for further development by a different group. Whereas white colonists and mulattos attempted to institutionalise a limited form of political freedom without abolishing slave-based production, self-emancipated Blacks fought directly for ‘universal freedom’ (148–9).

Césaire identifies systemic imperatives and traces dialectical developments. He indicates how this historical situation both propelled and constrained action. But he never claims that the Haitian Revolution expressed a static social logic. Neither does he suggest that history unfolds according to a priori laws. Nor does he portray this revolution as a simple confrontation between coloniser and colonised or white vs. Black. Rather, attending to contingent events and specific conjunctures, he offers a political reading of these intersecting revolutions. He elaborates a dynamic terrain of contestation shaped by a multitude of actors with variegated interests who entered and exited shifting alliances. He analyses proliferating divisions and provisional alignments within and between core social groups within the colony and the metropole. Beyond the distinctions between white, mulatto and Black there are those between colonial planters and metropolitan merchants; colonists and the republican government; grands blancs and petits blancs within the colony; government officials who want to reclaim French sovereignty from Toussaint and those who support his autonomy; French, British and Spanish imperial forces on the island; Toussaint and other Black generals; the revolutionary Black leadership and the toiling Black masses. No group’s interest is ever fixed or self-evident.

Césaire tracks the formation and dissolution of shifting power blocs. This is a drama of provisional judgements, decisive acts, unavoidable setbacks and necessary adjustments. Cross-cutting these strategic calculations were a set of interlocking balancing acts: political principles vs. material interests, military campaigns vs. political projects, parliamentary ideals vs. the actual colonial situation.

This is the perspective from which we should understand Césaire’s interest in Toussaint. He regarded ‘the first great anti-colonialist leader history had ever known’ as a ‘genius’ who had mastered the art of politics (148, 230). No other figure at that time better understood or worked more skilfully and creatively to overcome the colonial problem.

Césaire’s Toussaint

Césaire’s Toussaint paid close attention to the unfolding French Revolution as it affected colonial Saint-Domingue. He quickly learned that ‘demoralising negotiations’ with metropolitan assemblies were ‘not worthwhile’ (149). Like ‘the nègre masses [who] realised they could expect nothing from Paris’, Toussaint understood that Black freedom would have to be seized through military force and secured through political manoeuvre (121). Césaire’s Toussaint became a revolutionary leader when he became convinced that universal freedom in Saint-Domingue...