DOCUMENT: Constitution d'Haïti, 20 mai, 1805, Jean-Jacques Dessalines

Analysis by Aron Pandian, Warwick.

This document, written in 1805, is the constitution written and enacted by the regime of Jean-Jacques Dessalines in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). The Haitian revolution was an inherently unique rebellion. It marked the only time a slave colony was successfully overthrown by its enslaved captives and Haiti became the first Black republic in the world. Article 14 of the 1805 Constitution, detailing that all citizens be defined as Black, can be observed as a new, radical racialisation of Haitian identity, avoided by even Toussaint Louverture. It was fundamental to the processes of citizenship and state formation in Haiti. This source allows insight into French imperial fears of Haitian blackness, as the previous hegemony of whiteness was deconstructed by the new state. The constitution also suggests how Dessalines sought to consolidate the complex frameworks of creole, free Black and enslaved racial categorisation into the identity of the new Haitian citizen, unmarred by the definitions of the Old World order. The Polish contingent of soldiers, originally brought to Haiti to fight on behalf of Napoleon Bonaparte, found common cause with Haitian revolutionaries and campaigned against white hegemony on the island. Those who remained were declared Black and inducted into the new nation under this inclusive definition of citizenship. The negation of literal skin colour that this document represents suggests how, in the context of the first successful slave revolt in the New World, Blackness became symbolically defined by not a visible phenotype, but an opposition to European imperialism and the fight for egalitarianism. Explorations of this radical racialisation can be found in recent histories of Haiti’s independence.[1]

[1] See, for example, Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2004); Phillip Kaisary, ‘"To Break Our Chains and Form a Free People”: Race, Nation, and Haiti’s Imperial Constitution of 1805’, in Whitney Nell Stewart and John Garrison Marks (eds.), Race and Nation in the Age of Emancipations, Athens, (Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2018), Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990).

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