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Hegel and Haiti
Susan Buck-Morss
Critical Inquiry, Vol. 26, No. 4. (Summer, 2000), pp. 821-865.
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Wed Jun 13 11:44:38 2007
Hegel and Haiti
Susan Buck-Morss
By the eighteenth century, slavery had become the root metaphor of
Western political philosophy, connoting everything that was evil about
power re1ations.l Freedom, its conceptual antithesis, was considered by
Enlightenment thinkers as the highest and universal political value. Yet
this political metaphor began to take root at precisely the time that the
economic practice of slavery-the systematic, highly sophisticated capitalist
enslavement of non-Europeans as a labor force in the colonies-was
increasing quantitatively and intensifying qualitatively to the point that
by the mid-eighteenth century it came to underwrite the entire economic
system of the West, paradoxically facilitating the global spread of the very
Enlightenment ideals that were in such fundamental contradiction to it.
This glaring discrepancy between thought and practice marked the
period of the transformation of global capitalism from its mercantile to
its protoindustrial form. One would think that, surely, no rational, "enlightened"
thinker could have failed to notice. But such was not the case.
Thanks to Benedict Anderson, ~tienne Balibar, Martin Bernal, Teresa Brennan,
Zillah Eisenstein, Peter Gilgen, Miriam Hansen, Nancy Hirschmann, Michael Kammen,
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and the Society for Humanities and graduate students of Cornell
University. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
1. "For eighteenth-century thinkers who contemplated the subject, slavery stood as
the central metaphor for all the forces that debased the human spirit" (David Brion Davis,
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 [Ithaca, N.Y., 19751, p. 263; hereafter
abbreviated PSAR).
CrittcalInqu~q26 (Summer 2000)
8 2000 by The University of Chicago. 0093-189610012604-0003$02POO0 All righu reserved
822 Susan Buck-Morss Hegel and Haiti
The exploitation of millions of colonial slave laborers was accepted as part
of the given world by the very thinkers who proclaimed freedom to be
man's natural state and inalienable right. Even when theoretical claims of
freedom were transformed into revolutionary action on the political
stage, it was possible for the slave-driven colonial economy that functioned
behind the scenes to be kept in darkness.
If this paradox did not seem to trouble the logical consciousness of
contemporaries, it is perhaps more surprising that present-day writers,
while fully cognizant of the facts, are still capable of constructing Western
histories as coherent narratives of human freedom. The reasons do not
need to be intentional. When national histories are conceived as selfcontained,
or when the separate aspects of history are treated in disciplinary
isolation, counterevidence is pushed to the margins as irrelevant. The
greater the specialization of knowledge, the more advanced the level of
research, the longer and more venerable the scholarly tradition, the easier
it is to ignore discordant facts. It should be noted that specialization
and isolation are also a danger for those new disciplines such as African
American studies, or new fields such as diaspora studies, that were established
precisely to remedy the situation. Disciplinary boundaries allow
counterevidence to belong to someone else's story. After all, a scholar cannot
be an expert in everything. Reasonable enough. But such arguments
are a way of avoiding the awkward truth that if certain constellations of
facts are able to enter scholarly consciousness deeply enough, they
threaten not only the venerable narratives, but also the entrenched academic
disciplines that (re)produce them. For example, there is no place
in the university in which the particular research constellation "Hegel
and Haiti" would have a home. That is the topic which concerns me here,
and I am going to take a circuitous route to reach it. My apologies, but
this apparent detour is the argument itself.
The paradox between the discourse of freedom and the practice of
slavery marked the ascendancy of a succession of Western nations within
Susan Buck-Morss is professor of political philosophy and social theory
in the department of government, Cornell University, and Visiting
Distinguished Professor in the Public Intellectuals Program, Florida
Atlantic University. She is a curator for the art project tnSITE 2000 in
TijuanaISan Diego. Her books include Dreamworld and Catast~ophe: The
Passzng of Mass Utopza zn East and West (2000) and The Dzalectics of Seeing:
Walter Benjamzn and the Arcades Project (1989). Her email address is
sbm5@cornell.edu
Crttzcnl Inquiry Summer 2000 823
the Early Modern global economy. The earliest example to consider
would be the Dutch. Their "Golden Age," from the mid-sixteenth to the
mid-seventeenth century, was made possible by their dominance of global
mercantile trade, including, as a fundamental component the trade in
slaves. But if we follow its most excellent of modern historians, Simon
Schama, whose thick description of the Golden 4ge of Dutch culture has
become a model in the field of cultural history since its publication in
1987, we will be in for a surprise. Strikingly, the topics of slavery, the slave
trade, and slave labor are never discussed in Schama's The Embnrmssment
of Riches, a six-hundred-plus-page account of how the new Dutch
Republic, in developing its own national culture, learned to be both rich
and good.? One would have no idea that Dutch hegemony in the slave
trade (replacing Spain and Portugal as major players)' contributed substantially
to the enormous "overload" of wealth that he describes as becoming
so socially and morally problematic during the century of Dutch
"centrality" to the "commerce of the world" (ER, p. 228)."et Schama
reports fully the fact that the metaphor of slavery, adapted to the modern
context from the Old Testament story of the Israelites' deliverance
from Egyptian slavery was fundamental to Dutch self-understanding
during their struggle for independence (1570-1609) against the Spanish
"tyranny" that "enslaved" them-and hence for the origins of the
modern Dutch nati0n.j Schama clearly acknowledges the most blatant
contradiction, the fact that the Dutch discriminated at the time against
2. See Simon Schama, 7%e Embarrassment ofRiches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in
the Golden Age (New York. 1987); hereafter abbreviated ER. The question for this newly
enriched nation was "how to create a moral order within a terrestrial paradise" (p. 125).
3. The Spanish asiento granted to individuals the exclusive privilege of providing
Spanish America with African slabes, but the Spanish themselves only loosely controlled the
trade. Slave trading posts on the African coas; flew flags of Portugal, Holland. France, England,
Denmark, and Brandenburg as well. The Dutch merchant marines dominated shipping
among the North Sea countries, carrying the goods of other nations, and they were
participants in the aszento slabe trade as well.
4. My reading revealed only two mentions of real slavery: in a discussion of the Dutch
feasting habits, a distaste for "mengelmoes (mishmash)," which was a "soupy pabulum," "the
pap of slaves and babies" (ER, p. 177), and mention that the Dutch I,l7est India Company
was "forced to spend well over a million guilders a year in defending the footholds at Recife
and Pernambuco [in Brazil against the Portuguese], while only four hundred thousand
guilders in profits had been made off the receipts from slaving and the sugar and dyewood
plantations it supplied" (ER, p. 232).
5 . The "Exodus epic became for the Dutch what it had been for the Biblical Jews: the
legitimation of a great historical rupture, a cut with the past which had made possible the
retrospective invention of a collective identity" (ER, p. 113). King Philip 11 of Spain was
likened to Pharaoh during the Egyptian enslavement: "'The one bos'ed down,Jacob's hou.re [I,<rrtr
elites] wit11 .rlazieryiThe other, the 2Vetherlands oppressed with tyranny"' (ER, p. 103). The Dutch
reference to the Catholic missionary Bartolome de Las Casas's biting condemnation of the
Spanish "misdeeds" of slavery in the colonies is mentioned by Schama, even as the Dutch
practice of slavery is not (ER, p. 84).
824 Susan Buck-Morss Hegel and Haiti
Jews.6 He includes a whole chapter discussing the scapegoating and persecution
of a long list of "outsiders" who, due to the Dutch psychological
obsession for purification, needed to be cleansed from the social body:
homosexuals, Jews, gypsies, idlers, vagabonds, whores-but has nothing
to say about African slaves in this ~ontext.~
Schama is clearly fatigued with the Marxist economic histories that
treat the Dutch only as a mercantile capitalist power.8 His project is,
rather, the tracing of cultural causality. He examines how the anxieties of
affluence due to the "'overflow of goods"' awakened in the modern
Dutch the fear of a different kind of slavery, the "enslavement to luxury"
that threatened "free will," the fear that avarice to consume would "turn
free souls into fawning slaves" (ER, pp. 47, 203). He focuses on the family
as the core of "Dutchness," not world trade, allowing his readers entry
into private, domestic life, home and hearth, full tables and personal affections,
when "to be Dutch was to be local, parochial, traditional and
customary" (ER, p. 62). We might be ready, therefore, to excuse himwere
it not for the fact that slaves were not foreign to Dutch domesticity.
Does Schama's silence reflect the silence of his written sources? I cannot
tell.9 But Dutch visual culture provides clear evidence of a different reality.
A painting by Franz Hals from 1648 depicts at the very center of the
canvas a black youth, presumably a slave, as part of domestic life, visible
in the bosom of a comfortable, affectionate Dutch family within a local,
parochial, Dutch landscape (fig. 1). In Schama's richly illustrated book,
this painting by Hals does not appear (although another Hals painting,
6. "Paradoxically, the church's predilection for describing its own flock as the reborn
Hebrews did not dispose it to favor the real thing" (ER, p. 391).
7. See ER, pp. 365-608. Schama describes connections made by the Dutch between
non-Europeans and excesses of tobacco, sexuality, and other debaucheries that threatened
to contaminate the Dutch domestically: "The stock visual and textual anthologies of native
barbarism in Brazil and Florida, for example, featured Indians smoking through rolled
leaves, while acts of copulation, cannibalism, public urination and other sorts of miscellaneous
beastliness proceeded routinely in the background" (ER, p. 204).
8. Schama is happy simply to record without critical comment the magical fantasy of
Thomas Mun, that under capitalism money begets money, as influencing the Dutch he
is studying:
Capital begot capital with astonishing ease, and so far from denying themselves its
fruits, capitalists reveled in the material comforts it bought. At midcentury there
seemed no limit, certainly no geographical limit, to the range of its fleets and the
resourcefulness of its entrepreneurs. No sooner was one consumer demand glutted
or exhausted than another promising raw material was discovered, the supply monopolized,
demand stimulated, markets exploited at home and abroad. Would the
tide of prosperity ever ebb? [EK, p. 3231
9. Certainly Grotius discussed real slavery. But Grotius (see note 13) is cited by
Schama only in other contexts (just wars, free trade, Dutch destiny, marriage, whales). It is
not unreasonable to have suspicions that the silence is Schama's own. Such selective national
histories have become a trend in European historiography, one that omits much or all of
the colonizing story.
Critical Z n q u i ~ Summer 2000 825
FIG. 1.-Franz Hals, Portrait of a Dutch Family (1648). Museo Thyssen Bornemisza,
Madrid.
of a Dutch husband and wife alone in a landscape, is included). Nor are
there any other images of blacks.1° Of course, given the absence of slaves
from Schama's written account, they would have been out of place in
the illustrations. The consequence of this scholarship is partial blindness
among seas of perspicacity, and it is characteristic of Western academic
scholarship, as we shall see.
Beginning in 1651, Britain challenged the Dutch in a series of naval
wars that led ultimately to British dominance not only of Europe but of
the global economy, including the slave trade." At the time, the Cromwellian
revolution against absolute monarchy and feudal privilege fol-
10. Although see Allison Blakeley, Blacks in the Dutch WwId: The Evolution of Racial Imaggr
in a Modern Society (Bloomington, Ind., 1993), which gives visual evidence of blacks in
Holland in this era.
11. Britain extorted the asinto from Spain at the time of the Treaty of Utrecht (1713).
"Much of the wealth of Bristol and Liverpool in the following decades was to be built upon
the slave trade" (R. R. Palmer. and Joel Colton, A Hitmy of t k Modern Wd, 3d ed. [New
York, 19691, p. 171).
826 Susan Buck-Morss Hegel and Haiti
lowed Dutch precedent by making metaphorical use of the Old Testament
story of the Israelites being freed from slavery. But within political theory
a shedding of ancient scriptures was taking place. The pivotal figure here
is Thomas Hobbes. Although Leviathan (1651) is a hybrid of modern and
biblical imagery, slavery is discussed in clearly secular terms.12 He sees it
as a consequence of the war of all against all in the state of nature, hence
belonging to the natural disposition of man.13 Involved through his patron,
Lord Cavendish, with the affairs of the Virginia Company that governed
a colony in America, Hobbes accepted slavery as "an inevitable part
of the logic of power" (PSAR, p. 263). Even the inhabitants of "'civil and
flourishing nations' " could revert again to this state.14 Hobbes was honest
and unconflicted about slavery-John Locke less so. The opening sentence
of book 1, chapter 1, of his Two Treatises of Government (1 690) states
unequivocally:
Slavery is so vile and miserable an Estate of Man, and so directly
opposite to the generous Temper and Courage of our Nation; that
'tis hardly to be conceived that an Englishman, much less a Gentleman,
should plead for't.
But Locke's outrage against the "Chains for all Mankind" was not a protest
against the enslavement of black Africans on New World plantations,
least of all in colonies that were British.15 Rather, slavery was a metaphor
for legal tyranny, as it was used generally in British parliamentary debates
on constitutional theory. A shareholder in the Royal African Company
involved in American colonial policy in Carolina, Locke "clearly regarded
Negro slavery a justifiable institution" (PSWC, p. 1 18).16 The isolation of
12. If Hobbes's rhetorical examples draw on machinery as a metaphor for the artificially
constructed state, the Old Testament provides the title for Leviathan, as it does for
Hobbes's book on the Long Parliament, Behemoth, the biblical name for a tyrannical sovereign,
already in use in the Dutch national story: "The kings of Spain in whose name these
infamies [against Dutch civilian populations] . . . came to be seen as Behemoth, determined
on destroying the bonds that held communities and even families together" (ER, p. 92).
13. Hobbes considered the "elemental struggle between two enemies" to be "the natural
condition which made slavery necessary as a social institution" (David Brion Davis, The
Problem of Slavery in Western Culture [New York, 19661, p. 120; hereafter abbreviated PSWC).
Here Hobbes followed the earlier theorists, Samuel Pufendorf and Hugo Grotius; the latter's
book War and Peace (1853) included proslavery views and the argument that slavery was
legally acceptable.
14. Peter Hulme, "The Spontaneous Hand of Nature: Savagery, Colonialism, and the
Enlightenment," in The Enlightenment and Its Shadows, ed. Hulme and Ludmilla Jordanova
(London, 1990), p. 24. Hulme is mainly concerned with Hobbes's depiction of "savages"
indigenous to the colonies.
15. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, 1960), $1,
p. 141.
16. Locke was involved in the development of colonial policies through his patron,
the Earl of Shaftesbury, and was a strong defender of the enterprise. He authored the FunCritical
Inquiry Summer 2000 827
the political discourse of social contract from the economy of household
production (the oikos) made this double vision po~sible.~B'r itish liberty
meant the protection of private property, and slaves were private property.
So long as slaves fell under the jurisdiction of the household, their
status was protected by law (figs. 2 and 3).ls
A half-century later, the classical understanding of the economyand
hence slave owning-as a private, household concern was blatantly
contradicted by new global realities. Sugar transformed the West Indian
colonial plantations. Both capital and labor intensive, sugar production
was protoindustrial, causing a precipitous rise in the importation of African
slaves and a brutal intensification of their labor exploitation in order
to meet a new and seemingly insatiable European demand for the addictive
sweetness of sugar.I9 Leading the Caribbean-wide sugar boom was
the French colony of Saint-Domingue that in 1767 produced 63,000 tons
of sugar." Sugar production led to a seemingly infinite demand for slaves
as well, whose number in Saint-Domingue increased tenfold over the
eighteenth century to over five hundred thousand human beings. Within
France, more than 20 percent of the bourgeoisie was dependent upon
damental Constitutions of Carolina, sitting on its Council of Trade and Plantations as secretary
from 1673-75. The Carolina constitutions stated: "'every freeman of Carolina, shall
have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves'" (PSWC, p. 118).
17. "In Locke's view, the origin of slavery, like the origin of liberty and property, was
entirely outside the social contract" (PSWC, p. 119). Locke's philosophical argument tempered
the universality of equality in the state of nature with the necessity of consent before
a social contract could be undertaken, thereby excluding, explicitly, children and idiots
from the contract, and by inference others who were uneducated or uneducable. See Uday S.
Mehta, "Liberal Strategies of Exclusion," Politics and Society 18 (Dec. 1990): 427-53.
18. Davis notes "the unfortunate fact that slaves were defined by law as property, and
property was supposedly the foundation of liberty" (PSAR, p. 267). It was only "after the
Somerset decision of 1772" that "it was no longer possible to take for granted the universal
legality of slave property" (PSAR, p. 470), although William Davy, the lawyer in this case,
argued for an earlier precedent: "In the eleventh year of Elizabeth's reign, Davy exclaimed,
it had been resolved that 'England was too pure an Air for Slaves to breathe in."' Not so, writes
Davis: "In point of fact, Negro slaves were bought and displayed in the courts of Elizabeth
and her Stuart successors; they were publicly advertised for sale through most of the eighteenth
century; and they were bequeathed in wills as late as the 1820s" (PSAR, p. 472).
When, in 1765, William Blackstone made the claim that "'a slave or negro, the moment he
lands in England, falls under the protection of the laws, and with regard to all natural rights
becomes eo instanti a freeman,'" this did not apply to slaves in the colonies. "Even Somerset's
counsel conceded that English courts would have to give effect to a contract for the purchase
of slaves abroad" (PSAR, pp. 473, 474).
19. See Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern Hzitory (New
York, 1985).
20. See Ralph Davis, The Rzie of the Atlantic Economzes (Ithaca, N.Y., 1973), p. 257.
828 Susan Buck-Morss Hegel and Haiti
Slaves were fashionable in late seventeenth-
century England, accompanying
aristocratic ladies like household pets.2'
Portraits by the Dutch-born Anthony van
Dyck and Peter Lely were prototypes of a
new genre of paintings, depicting black
youths offering fruit and other symbols of
wealth from the colonies to their owners.-
FIG. 2.-Peter Lely, Elizabeth Countess
of Qsart (c. 1650). Ham House, Surrey.
slave-connected commercial activity.23 The French Enlightenment thinkers
wrote in the midst of this transformation. While they idealized indigenous
colonial populations with myths of the noble savage (the "Indians"
of the "New World"), the economic lifeblood of slave labor was not their
concern.24A lthough abolitionist movements did exist at this time, and in
France the Amis des Noirs (Friends of the Blacks) decried the excesses of
slavery, a defense of liberty on the grounds of racial equality was rare
indeed.25
21. "The London Advdirm of 1756 carried a notice by Matthew Dyer informing the
public that he made 'silver padlocks for Blacks or Dogs; collars, etc.'. . . English ladies posed
for their portraits either with their pet lamb, their pet lapdog or their pet black" (David
Dabydeen, HogarthS Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth-Centu~yE nglirh Art [1985; Athens,
Ga., 19871, pp. 21-23).
22. For the presence in Britain of slaves in the eighteenth century, see also F. 0. Shyl-
Ion, Black Slaves in Britain (New York, 1974), and Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime
and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1992).
23. Louis Sala-Molins says one-third of the commercial activity in France depended
on the institution of slavery; see Louis Sala-Molins, Le CoL Noir, ou le calvaiw de Canaan
(Paris, 1987), p. 244; hereafter abbreviated CN. More conservative estimates put the figure
at 20 percent.
24. It was Montesquieu who brought slavery into the Enlightenment discussion and
set the tone. While condemning the institution philosophically, he justified "Negro" slavery
on pragmatic, climatic, and blatantly racist grounds ("flat noses," "black from head to foot,"
and lacking in "common sense"). He concluded: "Weak minds exaggerate too much the
injustice done to Africans" by colonial slavery (Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, in Selected
Political Writings, trans. and ed. Melvin Richter [Indianapolis, 19901, p. 204).
25. Most frequently cited as an exception was the work of a priest, the Abbe Raynal,
whose book (written with the collaboration of Diderot) Histoire philosophique et polzhque des
ikzblissemats et du commerce des EurOpe'em dans les dew Indes (1770) predicted a black Spartacus
who would arise in the New World to avenge the rights of nature. The book was widely
FIG. 3.-Anthony van Dyck, Henrietta of Lomaim (1634). Kenwood House.
830 Susan Buck-Morss Hegel and Haiti
"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." So writes Jean-
Jacques Rousseau in the opening lines of On the Social Contract, first published
in 1762.26N o human condition appears more offensive to his heart
or to his reason than slavery. And yet even Rousseau, patron saint of the
French Revolution, represses from consciousness the millions of really existing,
European-owned slaves, as he relentlessly condemns the institution.
Rousseau's egregious omission has been scrupulously exposed by scholarship,
but only recently. The Catalonian-born philosopher Louis Sala-
Molins has written a history (1987) of Enlightenment thought through
the lens of Le Code Noir, the French legal code that applied to black slaves
in the colonies, drawn up in 1685 and signed by Louis XIV and not definitively
eradicated until 1848. Sala-Molins proceeds point by point through
the code, which legalized not only slavery, the treatment of human beings
as moveable property, but the branding, torture, physical mutilation, and
killing of slaves for attempting to defy their inhuman status. He juxtaposes
this code, which applied to all slaves under French jurisdiction, to
the Enlightenment philosophers' texts, documenting their indignation
regarding slavery in theory while "superbly" ignoring slavery in practice.
Sala-Molins is outraged and rightly so. In the Social Contract, Rousseau
argues: "The right of slavery is null, not simply because it is illegitimate,
but because it is absurd and meaningless. These words, slavery and right
[droit,that is, law], are contradictory. They are mutually excl~sive.S"~al~a-
Molins makes us see the consequences of this statement: "The Code Noir,
the most perfect example of this kind of convention in the time of Rousseau,
is not a legal code. The right of which it speaks is not a right, as it
claims to make legal that which cannot be legalized, slavery" (CN, p. 238).
He thus finds it preposterous that Rousseau never in his writings mentions
the Code Noir. "The one existing, flagrant case of what he is declaring
categorically untenable gets none of his attention" (CN, p. 241)." Sala-
Molins scrutinizes the texts for any evidence that might excuse this silence
and finds, unequivocally, that Rousseau knew the facts. The Enlightenread,
and not only in Europe; Toussaint-Louverture himself was inspired by it. See C. L. R.
James, The Black Jacobzns: Toussaznt COuverture and the Sun Domzngo Revolutzon, 2d ed. (1938;
New York, 1963), pp. 24-25. Michel-Rolph Trouillot has cautioned against too sanguine a
reading of this passage, however, which was contextualized as a warning to Europeans,
rather than an appeal to the slaves themselves: "It was not a clear prediction of a
Louverture-type character, as some would want with hindsight. . . . The mist radical stance
is in the unmistakable reference to a single human species" (Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing
the Past: Power and the Production ofH-iistorj [Boston, 19951, p. 85).
26. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, in The Basic Political Writings, trans.
and ed. Donald -4.Cress (Indianapolis, 1988), bk. 1, chap. 1 , p. 141.
27. Ibid., bk. 1, chap. 4, p. 146.
28. Rather, Rousseau's examples are from ancient times, for example, Braidas of
Sparta against the satrap of Persepolis! See Rousseau, Dzscourse on the Orzgzn of Inequalzty, in
The Bastc Polzttral Wrzttngs, p. 72.
Critical Inquiry Summer 2000 831
ment philosopher cited travel literature of the time-Kolben on the Hottentots,
du Tertre on Indians in the Antilles-but avoided those pages of
these same accounts that describe the horrors of European slavery explicitly.
Rousseau referred to human beings everywhere-but omitted Africans;
spoke of Greenland's people transported to Denmark who die of
sadness-but not of the sadness of Africans transported to the Indies that
resulted in suicides, mutinies, and maroonings. He declared all men
equal and saw private property as the source of inequality, but he never
put two and two together to discuss French slavery for economic profit as
central to arguments of both equality and property (see CN, pp. 243-46).
As in the Dutch Republic and Britain, African slaves were present, used
and abused domestically within Fran~e.I'~nd eed, Rousseau could not not
have known "that there are boudoirs in Paris where one amuses oneself
indiscriminately with a monkey and a young black boy (nkgrillon)" (CN,
p. 248).
Sala-Molins pronounces Rousseau's silence in the face of this evidence
"racist" and "revolting" (CN, p. 253).30 Such outrage is unusual
among scholars who, as professionals, are trained to avoid passionate
judgements in their writing. This moral neutrality is built into the disciplinary
methods that, while based on a variety of philosophical premises,
result in the same exclusions. Today's intellectual historian who treats
Rousseau in context will follow good professional form by relativizing the
situation, judging (and excusing) Rousseau's racism by the mores of his
time, in order to avoid thereby the fallacy of anachronism. Or, today's
philosopher, who is trained to analyze theory totally abstracted from historical
context, will attribute a universality to Rousseau's writings that
transcends the author's own intent or personal limitations in order to
avoid thereby the fallacy of reduction ad hominem. In both cases, the embarrassing
facts are quietly allowed to disappear. They are visible, however,
in general histories of the era, where they cannot help but be
mentioned because when Enlightenment theory was put into practice,
the perpetrators of political revolutions stumbled over the economic fact
of slavery in ways that made their own acknowledgement of the contradiction
impossible to avoid.
29. See William B. Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans: White Response to Blacks,
1530-1880 (Bloomington, Ind., 1980). In 1764 the French government prohibited entry of
blacks into the metropolis. In 1777 the law was modified to lift some of the restrictions,
allowing colonial slaves to accompany their masters.
30. The author as well of L'Afrique aux Arniriques: Le Code Noir espagnol (Paris, 1992),
Sala-Molins considers the protests against slavery of the seventeenth-century priest Las Casas,
who called for its immediate abolition, to have been more progressive than the philosophes.
832 Susan Buck-Morss Hegel and Haiti
The colonial revolutionaries of America fighting for their independence
against Britain mobilized Locke's political discourse to their ends.
The metaphor of slavery was central to that struggle but in a new sense:
"Americans genuinely believed that men who were taxed without their
consent were literally slaves, since they had lost the power to resist oppression,
and since defenselessness inevitably led to tyranny" (PSAR, p.
273).31I n evoking the liberties of natural rights theory, the American colonists
as slave owners were led to "a monstrous incon~istency."~A'n d, yet,
although some, like Benjamin Rush, acknowledged their bad faith,33 and
some, like Thomas Jefferson, blamed black slavery on the British;34 a1-
though the slaves themselves petitioned for their liberty,35a nd a few individual
states passed antislavery legi~lationt,h~e~ n ew nation, conceived in
liberty, tolerated the "monstrous inconsistency," writing slavery into the
United States Constitution.
The French encyclopedist, Denis Diderot, spoke admiringly of the
U.S. revolutionaries as having "'burned their chains'" and "'refused slav-
31. Davis is citing Bernard Bailyn in this case. I am following Davis's presentation
closely here.
32. Winthrop D.Jordan, White over Black: Amencan Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968), p. 289. Their enemies, the British Tories, seized upon this: "'How
is it,' asked Samuel Johnson, 'that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of
negroes?'" (PSWC, p. 3).
33. "The plant of liberty is of so tender a Nature, that it cannot thrive long in the
neighborhood of slavery" (Benjamin Rush [1773], quoted in PSAR, p. 283).
34. In a suppressed clause of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson
charged that the British King George I11
"has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating the most sacred rights
of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating
and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere. . . determined to keep
open a market where MEN should be bought and sold. . . . He is now exciting these
very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he deprived
them, by murdering the people upon whom he also intruded them, thus paying
off former crimes committed against the liberttes of one people, with crimes that
he urges them to commit against the lives of another." [PSAR, p. 2731
35. "We have in common with all other men . . . a nature1 right to our freedoms without
Being depriv'd of them by our fellow men as we are a freeborn Pepel and have never
forfeited this Blessing by aney compact or agreement whatever" (quoted in PSAR, p. 276).
36.
If the American Revolution could not solve the problem of slavery, it at least led to a
perceptton of the problem. Nor was the desire for consistency a matter of empty rhetoric.
It appeared in the antislavery resolutions of New England town meetings, in the
Vermont constitution of 1777, in individual wills that manumitted slaves, in Rhode
Island's law of 1774 that prohibited future importation of slaves, and in Pennsylvania's
gradual emancipation act of 1780, adopted, according to a preamble written by
Thomas Paine, "in grateful commemoration of our own happy deliverance" from
British occupation. [PSAR, pp. 285-861
Critical Inquiry Summer 2000 833
ery'" (SI: p. 85).37But if the colonial nature of the United States struggle
for freedom made it somehow possible to sustain the distinction between
the political discourse and social institutions, in the case of the French
Revolution a decade later the various meanings of slavery became hopelessly
entangled when they came up against fundamental contradictions
between revolutionary developments within France and developments
in the French colonies without. It took years of bloodshed before slavery-
really-existing slavery, not merely its metaphorical analogy-was
abolished in the French colonies, and even then the gains were only temporary.
Although abolition of slavery was the only possible logical outcome
of the ideal of universal freedom, it did not come about through
the revolutionary ideas or even the revolutionary actions of the French;
it came about through the actions of the slaves themselves. The epicenter
of this struggle was the colony of Saint-Domingue. In 1791, while even
the most ardent opponents of slavery within France dragged their feet,
the half-million slaves in Saint-Domingue, the richest colony not only of
France but of the entire colonial world, took the struggle for liberty into
their own hands, not through petitions, but through violent, organized
revolt.38 In 1794 the armed blacks of Saint-Domingue forced the French
Republic to acknowledge the fait accompli of the abolition of slavery on
that island (declared by the French colonial commissioners, Sonthonax
and Polverel, acting on their own) and to universalize abolition through-
37. The Encjclopldie edited by Diderot and D'Alembert, included entries concerning
really-existing slavery. Although the article entitled "Nkgres" observed simply that their
labor "is indispensable for the cultivation of sugar, tobacco, indigo, etc.," a series of entries
by Jaucourt was forceful: "Esclavage" declared slavery contrary to nature; "LibertC naturelle"
accused religion of using its pretext against natural right because slaves were
needed for the colonies, plantations, and mines; ''Trait6 des Nkgres" declared slaves traded
to be "illicit merchandise-prohibited by all the laws of humanity and equality," so that
abolition was necessary even if it ruined the colonies: "Let the colonies be destroyed rather
than be the cause of so much evil." But racism was still present in these texts (CN, pp.
254-61), and abolition was advised as a gradual process in order to prepare the slaves for
freedom.
38. This slave conspiracy was led by Boukman, a priest of Vodou, a new syncretic cult
that not only brought together slaves from diverse cultures of Africa, but included Western
cultural symbols as well (see below, n. 114). Boukman addressed the slaves: "'Throw away
the symbol of the god of the whites who has so often caused us to weep, and listen to the
voice of liberty, which speaks in the hearts of us all'" (BJ, p. 87). Although slave rebellions
had occurred in Saint-Domingue with great regularity-1679, 1713, 1720, 1730, 1758,
1777, 1782, and 1787, before the massive revolt in 1791; see Alex Dupuy, Hatti zn the World
Economy: Class, Race, and Underdevelopment since 1700 (Boulder, Colo., 1989), p. 34-within
the context of the radicalization of the French Revolution, Boukman's uprising changed
Europeans' perception of slave revolts-no longer one of a long series ofslave rebellidns,
but an extension of the European Revolution: "News of the summer of 1791 had focused
on the flight to Varennes and capture of the French royal family and on the revolt of the
slaves in Santo Domingo" (Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1789-1820) [New
Haven, Conn., 19831, p. 93).
834 Susan Buck-Morss Hegel and Haiti
out the French colonies.39 From 1794 to 1800, as freemen, these former
slaves engaged in a struggle against invading British forces, who many of
the white and mulatto land-owning colonists of Saint-Domingue hoped
would reestablish slavery.40 The black army under the leadership of
Toussaint-Louverture defeated the British militarily in a struggle that
strengthened the Abolitionist movement within Britain, setting the stage
for the British suspension of the slave trade in 1807.41I n 1801, Toussaint-
Louverture, the former slave and now governor of Saint-Domingue, suspected
that the French Directory might attempt to rescind abolition.42
And yet, still loyal to the Rep~blich,e~ w~r ote a constitution for the colony
that was in advance of any such document in the world-if not in its
premises of democracy, then surely in regard to the racial inclusiveness of
its definition of the citizenry.44I n 1802, Napoleon did move to reestablish
39. Slavery was abolished by Polverel and Sonthonax in August 1793, acting independently
of orders from Paris. The role of both men has been neglected by scholars, another
case ofscholarly blindness that, to useTrouillot's felicitous term (n. 25), "silences the past." See
the recent symposium, Liger-Filiciti Sonthonax: La Premzire Abolition de l'esclavage: La Rivolution
fran~aise et la Rivolutzon de Saint-Domzngue, ed. Marcel Dorigny (Saint-Denis, 1997), which
begins to redress this situation; in particular, see Roland DesnC, "Sonthonax vu par les
dictionnaires," pp. 113-20, which traces the almost total disappearance of Sonthonax's
name from the bibliographical encyclopedias of France in the course of the twentieth century.
40. The British were compelled pragmatically to grant freedom to those slaves of
Saint-Domingue who agreed to fight on their side-as did Sonthonax and Polverel in the
case of those fighting for the ~ r e n i hR epublic. The effect of these policies was to undermine
slavery by contradicting any ontological argument that the slaves were incapable of freedom;
see David Patrick Geggus, "The British Occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793-98"
(Ph.D. diss., York University, England, 1978), p. 363.
41. Geggus notes: "The part played by Haiti in the anti-slavery movement's sudden
resurgence in 1804 seems to have been entirely ignored in the scholarly literature. Yet its
importance was apparently considerable" (Geggus, "Haiti and the Abolitionists: Opinion,
Propaganda, and International Politics in Britain and France, 1804-1838," Abolztion and Its
Afiemath: The Historical Context, 1790-1916, ed. David Richardson [London, 19851, p. 116;
hereafter abbreviated "HA"). Again, here is a case of scholarly blindness that silences the past.
42. In 1796 General Laveaux appointed Toussaint governor, and hailed him as savior
of the Republic and redeemer of the slaves predicted by Raynal; see Robin Blackburn, The
Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848 (London, 1988), p. 233; hereafter abbreviated OCS.
In 1802, the Code Noir was reestablished in Martinique and Guadeloupe (although nothing
was said about Saint-Domingue),
43. Louverture had allied himself earlier with the King of Spain, setting up military
operations and working in the eastern half of the island, which was a Spanish colony; but
once he learned that the French Assembly had abolished slavery, hejoined with Sonthonax
against the British and was loyal to the French Republic until his arrest. (This change of
alliances, which has been a point of controversy, is analyzed by Geggus, "'From His Most
Catholic Majesty to the Godless Rkpublique': The 'Volte-Face' of Toussaint Louverture and
the End of Slavery in Saint Domingue," Revue fran~aise d'histozre d'outre mer 65, no. 241
[1978]: 488-89.)
44. To aid him in drawing up a constitution, Toussaint summoned an assembly of six
men (including the Bordeaux-raised lawyer Julien Raimond, see below):
The Constitution is Toussaint L'Ouverture from the first line to the last, and in it he
enshrined his principles of government. Slavery was forever abolished. Every man,
Critical Inquiry Summer 2000 835
slavery and the Code Noir and had Toussaint arrested and deported to
France, where he died in prison in 1803. When Napoleon sent French
troops under Leclerc to subdue the colony, waging a brutal struggle
against the black population "that amounted to a war of genocide,"45 the
black citizens of Saint-Domingue once again took up arms, demonstrating,
in Leclerc's own words: "'It is not enough to have taken away
Toussaint, there are 2,000 leaders to be taken away'" (BJ, p. 346). On 1
January 1804, the new military leader, slave-born Jean-Jacques Dessalines,
took the final step of declaring independence from France, thus
combining the end of slavery with the end of colonial status. Under the
banner of Liberty or Death (these words were inscribed on the red
and blue flag, from which the white band of the French had been removed
[see BJ, p. 365]),46 he defeated the French troops and destroyed
the white population, establishing in 1805 an independent, constitutional
nation of "black" citizens, an "empire," mirroring Napoleon's own, which
he called by the Arawak name, Haiti4' These events, leading to the complete
freedom of the slaves and the colony, were unprecedented. "Never
before had a slave society successfully overthrown its ruling class" ("HA,"
p. 114).
The self-liberation of the African slaves of Saint-Domingue gained
for them, by force, the recognition of European and American whitesif
only in the form of fear. Among those with egalitarian sympathies, it
gained them respect as well. For almost a decade, before the violent elimination
of whites signalled their deliberate retreat from universalist principles,
the black Jacobins of Saint-Domingue surpassed the metropole in
actively realizing the Enlightenment goal of human liberty, seeming to
give proof that the French Revolution was not simply a European phewhatever
his colour, was admissible to all employments, and there was to exist no
other distinction than that of virtues and talents, and no other superiority than that
which the law gives in the exercise of a public function. He incorporated in the Constitution
an article which preserved their rights to all proprietors absent from the
colony "for whatever reason" except if they were on the list of CmigrCs proscribed in
France. For the rest, Toussaint concentrated all power in his own hands. [BJ, p. 2631
Toussaint's regime anticipated dominion status. France missed this chance to establish a
policy of enlightened imperialism.
45. Geggus, "Slavery, War, and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean," in A Turbulent
Tzme: The French Reuolutzon and the Greater Caribbean, ed. David Barry Gaspar and Geggus
(Bloomington, Ind., 1997), p. 22.
46. Writing under a pseudonym in a Boston newspaper in support of the Saint-
Domingue revolution, Abraham Bishop "remarked that the American revolutionaries who
had taught the world to echo the cry 'Liberty or Death!' did not say 'all white men are free,
but all men are free'" (David Brion Davis, Reuolutions: Reflections on American Equality and
Foreign Liberations [Cambridge, Mass., 19901, p. 50).
47. Dessalines's constitution declared all Haitians black, attempting to legislate away
the categories of mulatto and various gradients of interraciality. Dessalines was assassinated
in 1806; Haiti was then divided into two parts, a north "kingdom," headed by Henri Christophe,
and a south "republic," the president of which was Alexandre PCtion.
836 Susan Buck-Morss Hegel and Haiti
nomenon but world-historical in its impli~ationsI.f~ w~e have become accustomed
to different narratives, ones that place colonial events on the
margins of European history, we have been seriously misled. Events in
Saint-Domingue were central to contemporary attempts to make sense
out of the reality of the French Revolution and its aftermath.49 We need
to be aware of the facts from this perspective.
Let us consider the logical unfolding of the overthrow of slavery in
terms of the evolution in consciousness of Europeans living through it.
The French revolutionaries understood themselves from the start as a
liberation movement that would free people from the "slavery" of feudal
inequities. In 1789 the slogans Live Freely or Die and Rather Death Than
Slavery were common, and the "Marseillaise" denounced "l'esclavage antique"
in this context (see OCS, p. 230). This was a revolution against, not
merely the tyranny of a particular ruler, but of all past traditions that
violated the general principles of human liberty. Reporting on the events
in Paris in summer 1789, the German publicist Johann Wilhelm von
Archenholz (from whom we will hear again) lost his customary journalistic
neutrality and exclaimed that the French "'people'" (I/olk),who '"were
accustomed to kissing their chains . . . had, in a matter of hours, broken
these gigantic chains with one all-conquering stroke of courage, becoming
freer than the Romans and Greeks were, and the Americans and British
are today.' 'j50
But what of the colonies, the source of wealth of such a large part of
the French population? The meaning of freedom was at stake in their
reaction to the events of 1789 and nowhere more so than in the crown
jewel, Saint-Domingue. Would the colonists take after the Americans and
48. Trouillot calls the Haitian Revolution "the most radical political revolution of that
age" (SI: p. 98). Blackburn writes: "Haiti was not the first independent American state but
it was the first to guarantee civic liberty to all its inhabitants" (OCS, p. 260).
49. Was the French Revolution a "'mere reform of abuses,'" as Napoleon claimed the
English considered it, or did it constitute "'a complete social rebirth,'" as he was to say on
his deathbed (Paulson, Representations of Revolution, p. 51)? At the end of his life, Napoleon
regretted his treatment of Toussaint-Louverture.
50. Friedrich Ruof, Johann Wilhelm von Archenholtz: Ein deutscher Schriftsteller zur Zeit der
Franzhischen Revolution und Napoleons (1741-1812) (1915; Vaduz, 1965), p. 29; hereafter abbreviated
JWA. (Ruof's spelling of the name as "Archenholtz" is unusual.) Archenholz continued:
" 'They should be honored by the German people, who thereby honor themselves' "
(JWA, p. 30). In 1792 he again used the metaphor of slavery in describing the French
revolutionary situation, asking whether the people of" 'one of the most populous nations
on earth, that in the past few years had climbed out of the deepest slime of slavery, and . . .
tasted the sweet fruits of freedom to the point of overfullness . . . so soon again would
quietly bow their necks under the yoke, regarding their broken chains as playthings. . . .
Even the combined might of Europe would be wrecked against thls rock'" (JWA, p. 49).
Critical Inquiry Summer 2000 837
revolt, as some of the Creole planters of Saint-Domingue were urging?
Or would they join fraternally to proclaim their "liberty" as French citizens?
And if the latter, then who were to be included as citizens? Property
owners, to be sure.51 But only whites? Mulattoes owned an estimated onethird
of the cultivated land in Saint-Doming~eO.~u~g ht not they to be
included, and not only they, but the free blacks as well? Was property or
was race the litmus test for being a citizen of France? Most pertinent, if
Africans could in principle be included as citizens-if, that is, the implicitly
racist assumptions that underlay the Code Noir were not valid-then
how could the continued legal enslavement of blacks be justified?53A nd if
it could not, how could the colonial system be maintained? The unfolding
of the logic of freedom in the colonies threatened to unravel the total institutional
framework of the slave economy that supported such a substantial
part of the French bourgeoisie, whose political revolution, of course,
this was.j4 And yet only the logic of freedom gave legitimacy to their revolution
in the universal terms in which the French saw themselves.
The Haitian Revolution was the crucible, the trial by fire for the ideals
of the French Enlightenment. And every European who was part of the
bourgeois reading public knew it.55 "The eyes of the world are now on
51. In 1790 a colonial assembly in Saint-Domingue extended the vote to nonpropertied
whites (widening the franchise further than in the metropole), hence reinforcing the
racial nature of political exclusion; see OCS, p. 183.
52. Blackburn writes that they owned 2,000 coffee estates in the west and south, compared
with 780 sugar estates, the great majority of which were owned by whites: "In
St. Domingue free people of colour were almost as numerous as white colonists, indeed
possibly more numerous." The proprietors of color owned about 100,000 slaves: "nowhere
else in the Americas did those of partly African descent figure so importantly in the ranks
of the propertied class"; they often "bore the distinguished name of a French father" (OCS,
pp. 168, 169).
53. The Baron de Wimpffen asked if colonists were not afraid to say liberty or equality
in front of their slaves; see BJ, p. 82. But it was still rare in 1792 for republicans to declare
forcefully, as did Sonthonax, "'One cannot maintain the Blacks in slavery if free men who
are equal to the Whites are also black like the slaves'" (Jacques Thibau, "Saint-Domingue i
1'arrivCe de Sonthonax," Liger-Fe'licite' Sonthonax, p. 44).
54. In the Constituent Assembly (1789-91), consisting of approximately 1,100 deputies,
one in ten had interests in Saint-Domingue; see ibid., p. 41.
55. The Amis des Noirs (founded in 1788) were important in setting the stage for this
discussion. Although not great in numbers, they were influential as writers and pamphleteers
(Condorcet, Brissot, Mirabeau, the Abbe GrCgoire), whose work deplored the conditions
of the colonial slaves. Marcus Rainsford wrote in 1805 that as a result of their
circulated writings, negro slaves "were the prominent subjects of conversation and regret in
half the towns of Europe"; as they, with "unhappy eloquence" depicted "the miseries of
slavery," and "were certainly the cause of bringing into action, on a broad basis, that spirit
of revolt which only sleeps in the enslaved African, or his descendent" (Marcus Rainsford,
An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti [London, 18051, p. 107). The position of the
Amis des Noirs was to endorse only gradual emancipation, until 1791, when they endorsed
rights for free blacks and mulattoe;; by the time i f the actual abolition of slavery (1794)
they had ceased to exist, victims of Robespierre's purges. Abolition had come to be identified
with Robespierre's enemies the Girondins: "The Girondins were accused of having
838 Susan Buck-Morss Hegel and Haiti
St. Domingo."" So begins an article published in 1804 in Minema, thejournal
founded by Archenholz, who had been covering the French Revolution
since its beginnings and reporting on the revolution in Saint-Domingue
since 1792.j7For a full year, from fall 1804 to the end of 1805, Minema published
a continuing series, totalling more than a hundred pages, including
source documents, news summaries, and eyewitness accounts, that informed
its readers not only of the final struggle for independence of this
French colony-under the banner Liberty or Death!js-but of events
over the previous ten years as well. Archenholz was critical of the violence
of this revolution (as he was of the Jacobin Terror in the metropole), but
he came to appreciate Toussaint-Louverture, publishing as part of his
series, in German translation, a chapter from the new manuscript by a
British captain, Marcus Rainsford, who praised Toussaint's character,
leadership, and humanity in superlative^.^^
Archenholz's journal borrowed freely from English and French
sources so that his account reflected news widely reported to the Eurosecretly
fomented the colonial upheavals to the advantage of England and of supporting
abolition in order to ruin France's empire. . . . Robespierre himself was conspicuously absent
during the February 4 session [of the Convention, which voted unanimously to abolish
slavery] and did not sign the decree" (Carolyn E. Fick, "The French Revolution in Saint
Domingue: A Triumph or a Failure?" in A Turbulent Time, p. 68; compare Yves Benot, "Comment
la Convention a-t-elle votC l'abolition de l'esclavage en l'an II?" in Rivolutions aux colonies,
ed. Michel Vovelle [Paris, 19931, pp. 13-25).
56. Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz, introduction to "Zur neuesten Geschichte von
St. Domingo," Minerva 4 (Nov. 1804): 340. This was Archenholz's editorial introduction to
the article (pp. 341-45), which was critical of the revolution's violence and skeptical of the
viability of the "negro-state."
57. See "Historische Nachrichten von den letzten Unruhen in Saint Domingo: Aus
verschiedenen Quellen gezogen," Minerva 1 (Feb. 1792): 296-3 19. The article favored mulatto
rights, the position of ~rissota, nd the Amis des Noirs.
58. This slogan, proclaimed by Dessalines in May 1803, was reported in "Zur neuesten
Geschichte von St. Domingo," Minerva 4 (Dec. 1804): 506.
59. Rainsford's book, published in England in 1805 (and in full German translation
the following year) asserted:
The rise of the Haytian Empire may powerfully affect the condition of the human
race. . . . It will scarcely be credited in another age, that philosophers heard unmoved,
of the ascertainment of a brilliant fact, hitherto unknown, or confined to the
vague knowledge of those whose experience is not admitted within the pale of historical
truth. . . . It is on ancient record, that negroes were capable of repelling their
enemies, with vigour, in their own country; and a writer of modern date [Adanson,
Voyage a lwique, 1749-531 has assured us of the talents and virtues of these people;
but it remained for the close of the eighteenth century to realize the scene, from a
state of abject degeneracy:-to exhibit, a horde of negroes emancipating themselves
from the vilest slavery, and at once filling the relations of society, enacting laws, and
commanding armies, in the colonies of Europe. The same period has witnessed
a great and polished nation [France] . . . returning to the barbarism of the earliest
periods.
Rainsford ranked the Haitian Revolution "among the most remarkable and important transactions
of the day" (Rainsford, An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Haytz, pp. x-xi, 364).
Critical Inquiry Summer 2000 839
pean reading public, and the articles in Minerva were picked up in turn
by "countless newspapers" (a situation of cosmopolitan and open communication,
despite intellectual property restrictions, that has perhaps not
been matched until the early internet) (JWA, p. 62). Although there was
censorship in the French press after 1803,60 newspapers and journals in
Britain (also the United States and P01and)~' highlighted the events of
the final revolutionary struggle in Saint-Domingue-the Edinburgh Review,
among others (see "HA," pp. 1 13-15).62 William Wordsworth wrote
a sonnet entitled "To Toussaint Louverture," published in The Morning
Post in February 1803, in which he deplored the reestablishment of the
Code Noir in the French colonies (figs. 4 and 5).'j3
In the German-language press, Minema's coverage was special. Already
in 1794, two years after its founding, it had established its reputation
as the best of its genre of political journals. It strove to be
nonpartisan, objective, and factual, aiming at "'historical truth'" that
would be " 'instructive . . . [for] our grandchildren' " (JWA, pp. 69-70).'j4
Its goal, according to the journal's (English!) motto, was "to shew the very
age and body of the time its form and pressure.'"j5 By 1798 its circulation
Abolitionism, always an affair of small cliques in France, now effectively ceased to
exist. The attempt to reconquer Saint Domingue had been accompanied by a flood
of literature concerning the colony, but it was largely the work of colonists who, with
varying degrees of vituperation, blamed the black revolution on abolitionist influence.
Then, as the Saint Domingue expedition came entirely to grief, a total ban was
imposed on all works concerning the colonies. ["HA," p. 1171
61. The U.S. press was full of the story of Saint-Domingue. John Adams, while lamenting
the events, believed that they were the logical outcome of what the U.S. rebellion
itself had caused. Others saw the slave revolution as proof that slavery needed to be abolished
in the United States-in other words, both sides-read it as significant for world history;
see David Brion Davis, Revolutions, pp. 49-54. War correspondents also sent reports back
regularly to Polish newspapers, as a Polish regiment was part of the military force under
General Leclerc sent by Napoleon to reestablish slavery in Saint-Domingue. See Jan Pachonski
and Reuel K. Wilson, PolandS Caribbean Tragedy: A Study of Polish Legions in the Haitian
War of Independence, 1802-1803 (New York, 1986).
62. In fact most of the reporting was not very favorable, with the exception of heroization
of Toussaint-Louverture.
63. The sonnet was "probably written in France in August 1802" (Geggus, "British
Opinion and the Emergence of Haiti, 1791-1805," ed. Slavery and British Society, 1776-1846,
ed. James Walvin [Baton Rouge, La., 19821, p. 140). Wordsworth was born the same year
as Hegel (1770); both were in their early thirties at this time. William Blake also incorporated
the Haitian revolution into his poetry.
64. Archenholz declared the "'strictest neutrality'" (strengste LTnparteilichkeit) to be his
"'first duty'" (JWA, p. 40).
65. This appeared on the title page. Note that scholars of Minema need to go back to
the original journal to discover the intense interest of Archenholz in Saint-Domingue and
the Haitian Revolution. The two monographs that have been written on him do not mention
these articles; see JWA, and Ute Rieger, Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz als "Zeitburger":
Eine historisch-analytische Untersuchung zur Aufllarung (Berlin, 1994). But see Karin Schiiller,
Die Deutsche Rezeption haitianischer Geschichte in der ersten Halfte des 19.Jahrhunderts, ein Beitrag
torik(wtt un' b poli
inn in J
bitnPc~
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842 Susan Buck-Morss Hegel and Haiti
was three thousand copies (respectable in our day for an intellectually
serious journal), and that number is estimated to have doubled by 1809.
In the words of Archenholz's biographer, Minerva was "the most important
political journal of the turn of the century" both in terms of quality of
content, written by regular correspondents (who were important public
figures in their own right), and the quality of readers, among whom were
some of the most influential people in Germany (JWA, p. 131).66 King
Friedrich Wilhelm 111 of Prussia "read Minerua constantly" (JWA, p. 130).
Both Goethe and Schiller read Minema (the latter corresponded with
Archenh~lz),~as' well as Klopstock (who contributed to the journal),
Schelling, and Lafayette. And-need I keep it from you any longer?-
another regular reader of Minerua, as we know from his published letters,
was the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.@
"Where did Hegel's idea of the relation between lordship and bondage
originate?" ask the Hegel experts, repeatedly, referring to the famous
zum deutschen Bzld wom Schwarzen (Cologne, 1992), pp. 248-6 1, which includes a summary of
the Mineruu articles on Saint-Domingue as well as a discussion of the accounts of the Haitian
Revolution in other German journals and books, including the very influential German
translation of Rainsford (pp. 103-8). Schiiller's book was brought to my attention by Geggus
after the writing of this paper, and I have added references to it in the notes when appropriate.
66. Two particularly well-known correspondents were Konrad Engelbert Olsner and
Georg Forster; more on them below. For circulation figures, see JWA, pp. 129-30.
67. Schiller wrote to Archenholz in 1794, suggesting that he do a retrospective on the
American Revolution In the journal: "'1st es Ihnen noch nicht die Idee gekommen, ein
kurtzes, gedrangtes tableau von dem amerikanischen Freiheitskriege aufzustellen?' " (JWA,
p. 45). .4lthough no such article appeared in Mznerwa, the series on the Saint-Domingue
events, 1791-1805, was analogous in its conception.
68. Hegel wrote to Schelling from Bern, Christmas Eve, 1794: "Quite by accident I
spoke a few days ago with the author of the letters signed '0.'in kchenholz's Minervu. You
are no doubt acquainted with them. The author, purportedly an Englishman, is in fact
a Silesian named Oeslner . . . still a young man, but one sees that he has toiled much"
(G.M! F. Hegel, letter to Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, 24 Dec. 1794, Hegel: The Letters,
trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler [Bloomington, Ind., 19841, p. 28). Ruof (writing
in 1915) does not mention Hegel as a reader of ~ i n e r w a .The German publication of
Hegel's letters was not available to him; see Hegel, Briefe won und an Hegel, ed. Johannes
Hoffmeister, 5 vols. in 4 (Hamburg, 1969-81). Jacques d'Hont, however, begins his book
with a chapter on the influence of Mineruu on Hegel (and Schelling), which he describes as
"total" (globale) (Jacques d'Hont, Hegel Secret: Recherches szcr les sozcrces cache'es de la pense'e de
Hegel [Paris, 19681, pp. 7-43; hereafter abbreviated HS). Note that d'Hont makes no mention
of the articles on Saint-Domingue that appeared in Mznerva's pages (his point is a different
one; see n. 105). Konrad ~ n ~ e l b e~retl snerm, ore radically republican than Archenholz,
was an (anti-Robespierre) Girondist; his hero was the Abbe Sieyks. See his history of the
French Revolution (based on his eyewitness reports) Lzlzfer oder gereinigte Beitrage zzcr Geschichte
der Franzdsischen Revolution, ed. Jorn Garber (1797; KronbergITaunus, 1997).
Critical Inquiry Summer 2000 843
metaphor of the "struggle to death" between the master and slave, which
for Hegel provided the key to the unfolding of freedom in world history
and which he first elaborated in The Phenomenology of Mind, written in
Jena in 1805-6 (the firs |
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