On the Haitian Revolution and the Society of Equals

What Does the Haitian Revolution Tell Us about the Society of Equals?

The revolution in Saint-Domingue that brought into being the new state of Haiti occurred around the same time as the French Revolution and the American Declaration of Independence. Yet, it is rarely accorded a similar status of being considered a foundational event of world history. While there have been significant accounts of the Haitian Revolution – most notably, perhaps, CLR James’s The Black Jacobins – few histories of the general ‘Age of Revolutions’ variety have included it as part of their understanding of that age, and fewer social scientists still have sought to understand the emergence of modernity in the context of the Haitian Revolution. This omission has been addressed in recent years, with social science scholars beginning to reference Haiti along with their discussion of the other revolutions. Often, however, this is all they do – reference Haiti.

In Pierre Rosanvallon’s new book, The Society of Equals, Santo Domingo (as the French colony is named by the translator) is mentioned on page 16, alongside the United States and France, as one of the fundamental sites of the new spirit of equality that animated the revolution of modernity. It is then never returned to through the rest of its 384 pages. Instead, the discussion of equality – its historical conditions and contemporary political possibilities – is articulated through a discussion of selective episodes of US and French history (with Britain as a counterpoint in footnotes and increasingly in text as Rosanvallon approaches his conclusion). Rosanvallon believes that equality can be conceptualized through a discussion of US and French history that not only fails to address issues of dispossession, appropriation, enslavement, and colonization as limits to the contemporary ideological understandings of equality, but also fails to consider these as perhaps the very negation of those understandings.

Rosanvallon points to the invention of equality in France and the US in the context of their rejection of ‘aristocratic racism’ – that is, the rejection of the idea that the nobility, in its own terms, constituted a separate ‘race’ on the basis of its distinction – but has little to say on racism of the more common or garden variety and its relationship to understandings and practices of equality. The one mention of Santo Domingo comes in a section titled ‘A Legacy of Christianity?’ but has little to say on the fact that it was the Christian French who enslaved others and thus denied the practice of equality in Santo Domingo, and it was the ‘voodoo’ or ‘pagan’ beliefs and practices of the enslaved population which brought into being the first revolution that instituted political equality.

Slavery is presented as the archetype of inequality, but the limited discussion of the contemporary enslavement of African populations is quickly devolved to metaphors of political slavery vis-à-vis the relationship between the incipient US and Britain, or to discussion of the commonplace analogy at the time between waged labour and slavery. The use of slavery as a metaphor to point to the terrible conditions experienced by white citizens implies that they are aware of the nature of slavery and reject it as a condition they should share with those who have been enslaved, while believing the latter to be outside any consideration of the ‘society of equals’.

At a number of points, Rosanvallon equates equality with sameness or homogeneity of membership within a community which, after all, is the way in which he is able to discuss equality in the round without any reference to the limiting historical instances of enslavement or colonization – those who were enslaved or colonized were not recognized as members of the communities under discussion. This sameness of community is linked to notions of citizenship and has, and comes to have later in the book, disturbing connotations in terms of towards whom we might be obliged to act equitably. The latter part of the book, which I will discuss in a second post, focuses on issues of equality in the present and attempts to do so without any consideration of immigration as necessarily central to such discussions. Beyond this, however, Rosanvallon also manages to put forward the notion that the solidarities of immigrant communities are somehow in breach of the foundational equality of citizenship within the French nation. But more on this later. For now, I want to consider the issues that arise from the earlier discussion.

The histories that we use to interpret and communicate our concepts and categories matter to their overall shape and subsequent efficacy. If the history standardly used is demonstrated to be inadequate as a representation of all that happened of significance, then it is incumbent upon us to consider the broader histories being brought to our attention and to do the work necessary to reconsider our concepts and categories in light of the difference made by these ‘new’ histories. Part of the reason why I put ‘new’ in quote marks is that because if these histories have now entered the academy they were nonetheless circulating elsewhere as lived memories and are only ‘new’ in relation to their increased prominence within the academy.

When I first started reading and teaching about the Haitian Revolution I would regularly refer to it as a ‘silenced’ or ‘forgotten’ revolution. Then I became aware of the numerous instances – from the revolts of enslaved peoples in the southern states of the US, to the independence movements of Latin America, to the cultural renaissance in Harlem in the 1960s, to the Maori movements for justice and equality – where the Haitian Revolution was a live and lived experience for communities in struggle. On learning of these broader resonances of Haiti I realized that the silence referred only to the failure of the academy to take seriously the significance of the revolution there and to learn anew from it.

So what might we learn about equality if we took Haiti seriously?

First, in terms of Haiti itself, we would learn about the ways in which those who had been enslaved, on achieving their freedom and independence, honoured the people who preceded them on the land. In renaming Saint Domingue as Haiti they honoured the name given to the island by the Arawak people who were wiped out by Spanish and French colonization.

Second, we would learn that on achieving freedom and independence, colour was made no bar to political participation. This extraordinary political act occurred as the American Revolution maintained enslavement and segregation of its populations and the French maintained forms of domination and exclusion with their colonies and over their colonized populations. In Haiti, on the other hand, everybody who was black could participate in politics, and black was not an issue of phenotype but of a commitment to the values of equality and freedom and an opposition to colonialism.

Colonization of others was outlawed and a delegation from Haiti travelled to Paris to argue in front of the Constituent Assembly for a clause to abolish slavery to be included in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. The most radical political statement of the French Revolution – that is, the one with the greatest universal potential – came from Haiti.

More broadly, we would learn that as Haitians fought for self-emancipation, they did so from that country otherwise presented as the fount of liberty and equality and brotherhood – France. We would need to think about what taking the Haitian Revolution seriously would mean for any discussion of equality as emerging from the traditions of French thought (as is the case, for example, of much sociological discussion), particularly in their studious refusal to consider the implications of the Haitian Revolution for their own deliberations.

It is this latter point that explains why Rosanvallon, while referencing Santo Domingo, cannot consider it further, because to do so with any seriousness would also cause him to have to reflect on its implications for the whole theoretical edifice of his understanding of equality. It would require a radical reconstruction of the very idea of equality through the engagement with and development of traditions not usually presented as central within the academy.

It is significant that Rosanvallon uses the earlier Spanish name for the island – Santo Domingo (or, in the original French version, Saint Domingue) – rather than that chosen by the self-emancipated citizens, Haiti. Even in its naming, Rosanvallon chooses to efface the momentous achievements of the Haitian Revolution and to defer consideration of how the ideas of equality that emerged in this revolution could contribute to, challenge, and inform contemporary understandings of equality and what it would take to create a society of equals.

Some Groups Are More Equal than Other Groups

The idea of the ‘society of equals’ that is at the heart of Pierre Rosanvallon’s book of the same name is, in his own words, about the forging of ‘a world of like human beings … a society of autonomous individuals, and a community of citizens’. He believes that earlier ideas of social democracy or socialism that emphasize redistribution, and newer ones that stress the importance of equality of opportunity, do not adequately address the problems we face in our contemporary era. What is needed, he argues, is a revised understanding of equality that starts from the position of singularity and distinction rather than a ‘homogenizing’ universality. That is, he seeks to conceptualize equality from an acknowledgement of the many ways in which we, as individuals, are different, rather than by way of what we might share. Indeed, one of the poisons of equality, he suggests, is separatism – group identity in all its varieties – which undercuts the commonality constituted by a democratic equality of individuals and, paradoxically, can also derive from a universalistic imaginary.

In this way, Rosanvallon moves from the idea of the universal to the idea of the individual and only addresses ‘group’ identity implicitly in terms of its contemporary threat, as a form of separatism, to the ‘society of equals’ he wishes to be established. There are a number of issues here that require comment. Perhaps most significantly, he does not address how groups come to understand themselves as such and so naturalizes both the process of group formation and of understandings of membership within groups. Much as white males, for example, might have believed themselves to be neither gendered nor in possession of an ethnicity, but simply embodiments of a universal, so throughout the book Rosanvallon works with a conception of the French nation that sees its population, historically, as constituted solely in terms of its white citizens. He does not mention the many debates over who was to be a citizen and how membership was to be claimed. Group identity is a later disruption into a society of individuals, notwithstanding that such a society was constituted by exclusions of others on the basis of characteristics ascribed to them as members of groups.

With reference to my earlier post, for example, there is no discussion of what implications the demand for inclusion by the delegation from Saint-Domingue had for understandings of being a French citizen. Initially, this delegation had sought simple inclusion and representation within the new revolutionary state. It was only on being denied this that full independence was then sought and equality established on their own terms within the new state of Haiti. The failure to engage with the complex relationship between France and Haiti impoverishes Rosanvallon’s arguments in a number of ways. Ultimately, the failure to transcend racial categories that had white French citizens deny the claim for participation and representation being made by black appellants suggests that the idea of equality, in its dominant French articulation, was, and is, limited by race. This limitation is not just on the basis of effecting an exclusion, but also points to the relations of domination that were under challenge at the time.

The Code Noir, for example, established in the late 17th century to regulate the lives of the enslaved in the French Caribbean, was extended in subsequent years to cover the conditions governing the lives of those within French colonies and those who had migrated from the colonies to the French national state. Within the French state, there were many debates over whether black men could be citizens or whether colour itself was a radical obstacle to civic and political equality. These debates intersected with the events of the Haitian Revolution and for a brief period, in metropolitan France, the established division of colour was overcome with the successful abolition of slavery and the (limited) enfranchisement of free black men. This was overturned within a couple of years, however, with the re-establishment of slavery within the French empire and citizenship re-confirmed as the preserve of white men (with property).

This tumultuous period offers up a moment of history in which arguments for universal (male) equality transcended, however fleetingly, the racial divisions that were otherwise being maintained. It is through consideration of the debates and arguments of this time that we could learn more about what it would take, truly, to create a ‘society of singular equals’. And yet, Rosanvallon neglects to address this aspect of revolutionary French history and its significance for the present.

By not addressing this initial exclusionary moment (or then subsequent ones in the context of Algeria and other colonies claimed by France), Rosanvallon also cannot account for later demands made by those such as the ‘Indigènes de la République’ except to understand them as separatist claims that undercut the society of equals to be established on the democratic equality of all citizens understood as individuals. This, despite the fact that some of the people who claimed citizenship, as individuals, would have been denied it on the basis of ascribed membership to groups by those very citizens who understood themselves as ‘equals’. The repercussions of this in the present are profound.

The implicit presentation of Europe, and European history, as an account of the activities of those understood as European, then, enacts a variety of exclusions. These make the conditions of diversity in the present anomalous in terms of the past that is being put forward and allows the suggestion that what is now needed is for us to treat each other as equals. This does not address the ways in which those identified as ‘other’ were rarely treated as equals in the past and so effaces the question of restitution for past wrongs (that continue to structure present inequalities) as part of the process of how we might create a society of equals.

Rosanvallon concludes his book with a scant two pages addressing a ‘world of inequality’ in which the difference in average income between the richest and poorest countries now stands at 74:1, having been 3:1 in the late 18th century. From this he goes on to suggest – and it’s not quite clear how – that nations are growing closer together while the class divide within nations is becoming wider. The solution to this problem is presented as a needed ‘renationalization’ of democracy. While the strengthening of national democracy would potentially address issues of inequality within nations (though Rosanvallon is not, in fact, an advocate of much greater redistribution within France), it is not clear how this would aid in combatting global inequality as manifested in the income differentials between nations.

Further, in presenting the renationalization of democracy as a solution to inequality, Rosanvallon seems to suggest that national identity is somehow not a ‘poison’ of equality in the way that other group identities are presented as being. This normalizes and, more significantly, homogenizes ‘national’ group identity and is based on an understanding of the emergence of the nation as an endogenous event, unconnected to broader processes of colonization, dispossession, and appropriation. In failing to locate the nation within these broader processes, all ‘others’ are external to the nation as conceived by Rosanvallon. This is what enables him to normalize the group identity of the nation conceived in homogenous terms and pathologize the group identities of multicultural immigrants and diverse others – a notion that aligns rather dangerously with that of most right-wing parties in Europe.

The problem of inequality does not only exist in terms of how we do or do not treat others in the present. It emerges also as a consequence of historical processes that have brought into being structures of inequality. To suggest that the society of equals can be created in the present or future by, effectively, people treating each other equitably – that is, by moving beyond prejudice, by encouraging fraternal (he doesn’t mention sororal) feelings – seems to me to be naïve at best. Equality has to mean more than being nice to one another and has, also, to involve redress for past injustices that continue to have an impact in shaping the present. Without an address of structures of inequality, I would suggest that there is little that is meaningful in any exhortation for equality as a condition of being.