The Borders of Citizenship in the Haitian Revolution

• Date: 01 October 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591720975349
• Published date: 01 October 2021
• Author: Lorenzo Ravano
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591720975349

Political Theory

2021, Vol. 49(5) 717 –742

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591720975349

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Article

The Borders of

Citizenship in the

Haitian Revolution

Lorenzo Ravano1

Abstract

This essay surveys the appropriations and transformations of the modern

concept of citizenship by the actors of the Haitian Revolution, analyzed

through the intertwining of race, plantation labor, and the postcolonial state.

The concept of citizenship is interpreted as an instrument of emancipative

struggles as well as of practices of government. The reconstruction

is focused around four moments: the liberal critique by free people of

color of the racial boundaries of French citizenship; the strategic uses of

citizenship by the insurgent slaves to secure their freedom; the inclusion

of former slaves into citizenship to preserve the plantation system within

the republican order; and postcolonial Haitian citizenship. By analyzing the

constitutional shifts and the political thinking of different figures, such as

Julien Raimond, Georges Biassou, Jean-François, Toussaint Louverture,

and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the essay shows the conceptual originality

of Haitian political thought and its relevance for the history of modern

political concepts.

Keywords

citizenship, Haitian Revolution, black abolitionism, political concepts,

Toussaint Louverture

1Université Paris Nanterre, Nanterre, France

Corresponding Author:

Lorenzo Ravano, Université Paris Nanterre, 200 avenue de la République, Nanterre, 92001,

France.

Email: lorenzo.ravano@gmail.com

975349PTXXXX10.1177/0090591720975349Political TheoryRavano

research-article2020

718 Political Theory 49(5)

Introduction

In this essay, I analyze the conflicting appropriations and transformations of

the modern concept of citizenship by the actors of the Haitian Revolution,

seen through the intertwining of racial slavery, plantation labor, and the post-

colonial state. In the last fifteen years, many scholars have shown the theo-

retical relevance of the Haitian Revolution by analyzing its importance for

the modern intellectual history, as well as for a critical rethinking of the con-

cept of modernity in light of postcolonial and decolonial critiques.1 In par-

ticular, the most recent debates have stressed the specificity of the revolution

by showing that liberation from slavery, racism, and colonialism had its own

political autonomy and conceptual originality.2 These contributions have

highlighted the risk to misinterpreting black political thought as merely

derivative, both the effect and the authentic realization of the alleged univer-

sal principles of radical Enlightenment and the French Revolution. On the

contrary, by using the European political lexicon and symbols during their

struggles, free people of color, Creole blacks, and enslaved Africans articu-

lated different resignification of some modern political concepts, such as

freedom, equality, sovereignty, and citizenship.

Nevertheless, the definition of the Haitian Revolution’s political thought

still raises open questions that can be summarized in two points. First, the

revolution was a complex phenomenon characterized by different currents

and two main internal conflicts: between the revolutionary elite and the

African-born rural masses, and, within the elite, between the freeborn peo-

ple of color and the black leaders who ranked the army. As Jean Casimir,

Gérard Barthélemy, and Carolyn E. Fick have argued, these conflicts

expressed also the clash between the reproduction of plantation system sup-

ported by the elite and the “counter-plantation” model of lakou, the family-

based and egalitarian community of subsistence agriculture, organized

outside the state and characterized by vodou culture and Maroon traditions.3

Secondly, the illiteracy of the masses and the conflicting relationship

between the dominant European culture of the colonizer and the subaltern

cultures of enslaved people raise methodological and epistemological ques-

tions.4 Scholars have shown how revolutionary ideas widely circulated in

the Atlantic,5 but how free and enslaved blacks effectively conceptualized

their politics and interacted with European political thought is yet an open

field of inquiry. As Anthony Bogues has written by recalling the lwa Legba—

the vodou spirit who has the power to open and close the gates between the

human and the spiritual world—the Haitian Revolution can be analyzed as a

“Legba revolution”: the opening of a space of radical political inventions

grounded on the Atlantic creolization of cultures and the concrete struggles