Review of The Haitian Revolution, by Billy Wellman, pub. Enthralling History, 2024

[sheenaghpugh]

A word of explanation first. This is one in a series from a publisher called Enthralling History, whose website declares “We believe that learning history should be an enthralling experience”. This seems to mean, among other things, dispensing with the normal academic apparatus like notes and index (though it does have a list of sources). I’m not sure why history books with this perfectly normal paraphernalia can’t be “enthralling” – if one doesn’t want to read those bits, one can surely ignore them? I assume they think even seeing such evidence of academia may put off the casual browser, which is a pity, since it supposes the casual browser to be somewhat thick.

I’m afraid that to me, the absence of notes and index means it’s Not A Proper History Book, Nevertheless, if the aim of the series is to recruit new readers of history, it’s a laudable aim, and having picked this one up on Kindle while trying to find out more about Toussaint L’Ouverture, I thought it worth reviewing. I’d been reading and reviewing a lot of revolutionary history last year and this was one revolution I hadn’t got around to.

And as a first overview of events, it does its job. It soon becomes clear that this revolution shared the problems endemic to most revolutions, viz: people were clear what they wanted to get rid of but much less clear what they wanted to put in its place, different disaffected groups spent as long quarrelling with each other as they did opposing the establishment, who by contrast were completely focused on retaining their privileges, and the kind of men suited to leading and winning a revolution were not inevitably, or even often, the best men to run the country afterwards.

Yet this revolution did, after a fashion, succeed – independence was gained, though at a ruinous price in reparations, slavery was abolished, though the new leaders found that to keep agriculture going they needed to direct labour in a way that was fiercely resented, and a republic was created, though the difference between a king and a president for life with draconian powers was hard to discern. Presumably those who survived the appalling slaughters along the way thought it all worthwhile.

This could indeed make an enthralling story. It didn’t enthrall me, largely because it was all about events and seemed to miss out the people. But history is as much about people as events, and the heroes and villains of this story (generally the same person at different times) seldom came alive for me, because we simply weren’t given enough of their character and background. To give one example. Toussaint, at the beginning of the war, was a freedman in business (indeed, like many freedmen of colour in the island, he owned slaves himself). Quite late on, when discussing the different attitudes of Toussaint and Dessalines to the French (Toussaint basically wanted to reconcile and stay part of France, Dessalines wanted the French out on the first boat, or dead), the author observes, “It can be assumed that this stemmed from Dessalines’ background, which had been very different from Toussaint’s. Unlike Toussaint, Dessalines had still been a slave when the uprising broke out in 1791. Dessalines had been forged in the rebellion”.

This is such an important point that I marvel it was not made earlier; it explains a lot about why Dessalines was so much less forgiving. We are given a competent summary of events; we simply are not given enough information on the background of these and other leaders to grasp why events happened as they did.

Dessalines, like almost every other leader who came to power after the revolution, had himself made president for life, took dictatorial powers, directed labour and tended to respond to criticism by killing the critic. He also massacred his opponents, though to be fair the French had started that. He is unique among the hapless post-revolution leaders in actually having been assassinated and torn apart by an angry crowd; by the end he was about as popular as Saddam or Assad.

Nowadays, however, although “for the outside world, the person most associated with the revolution is Toussaint Louverture, and for good reason, in Haiti it is Jean-Jacques Dessalines”. This surprises Wellman; it doesn’t surprise me. For one thing, even dictators can get enveloped in a rosy glow of nostalgia when things don’t improve after their death. For another, it was in Dessalines’ time, after Toussaint’s death, that independence was actually declared and the name Haiti adopted. It was also in his time, and on his order, that Haiti’s white population was dispossessed and all but eliminated, which to people who had suffered slavery under them was probably an outcome more to their liking than the forgiving coexistence advocated by Toussaint. It is seldom that oppressed people newly come to power are ready to listen to the likes of Tutu and Mandela on that point.