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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