Like many other readers, I remember well my first encounter with The Black Jacobins. The title, whispered to me with a near religious admiration by a teacher, itself already taught a lesson: The story of the French Revolution was also the story of a Caribbean revolution. The Black Jacobins, published more than seven decades ago, is one of the very few books I have ever read essentially without stopping, stuck to my chair, thrown into a world, propelled onward by a riveting story, angered, exhilarated, confused, even exhausted by the scope of what C.L.R. James explains and accomplishes in the work. Afterward, something had shifted. The geography and chronology of history looked different to me. After The Black Jacobins, it is not possible to look at what we think we know about the past, about the history of democracy and revolution, the history of Europe and the Americas, in quite the same way.
Cyril Lionel Robert James was born in Trinidad in 1901, and after completing his studies at Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain began a career as a sports journalist (writing mainly about cricket) and teacher, while also writing fiction and political essays. He moved to England in 1932, where he continued his work as a journalist and became increasingly active in anti-colonial and pan-Africanist organizing, working with George Padmore. In 1933 he published The Case for West Indian Self-Government, which called for increased political autonomy for the colonies of the British Caribbean. He also became an important Marxist theorist and Trotskyist activist within the British labor movement. His first and only novel, Minty Alley, was published in 1936, and in the same year his play Toussaint Louverture was performed in London, with Paul Robeson starring in the lead role. In 1938 he published his most famous work, The Black Jacobins. He left that year for the United States, where he spent nearly two decades teaching and writing, publishing several works, including the 1949 American Civilization. Imprisoned for having overstayed his visa in 1953 and incarcerated on Ellis Island while he unsuccessfully appealed his deportation, he wrote a study of the work of Herman Melville called Mariners, Renegades and Castaways. After five years in England, James returned to Trinidad, where he worked as a newspaper editor for a time, collaborating with his former student Eric Williams, then prime minister of the independent Trinidad, before falling out with Williams and his party. He spent his last years in the United States and England, where he died in 1989.
James’s first attempt to tell the story of the Haitian Revolution was the play Toussaint Louverture. Unsatisfied with the play, however, he decided to write a historical narrative. In doing so, he created a language and form for his story that were shaped by its content. If The Black Jacobins has become a classic work, a touchstone of debate, and an inspiration to generations of scholars and activists, it is largely because of its form—its combination of hard-nosed narration, political analysis, and philosophical reflection. It is both a narrative of history and a work in the philosophy of history. Like James’s book on cricket and colonialism, Beyond a Boundary, the work seems inexhaustible, a map of reflections and provocations that you can return to again and again. It keeps surprising me. The text changed, too, with additions and changes made for the 1963 edition that responded to the decades of transformation that had followed its original composition. This new edition also helped make the work much better known to a generation of readers plunged into the processes of decolonization, revolution, and dictatorship in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, for whom this old story held remarkable prophesies and lessons.
Many works of history find themselves forgotten, falling away as new narratives revise or refute what has come before. The Black Jacobins never has. Thanks to the work of subsequent historians (many inspired by James), we now know much more about the Haitian Revolution. We know that François-Dominique Toussaint-Louverture, the leader of the Haitian Revolution, was a freeman, not a slave, at the beginning of the revolution. We understand that the “mulattoes,” whom James sometimes describes with simplified virulence, were an extremely complicated group with multiple political projects and affiliations. We have a much richer sense of the deep complexities of the political philosophy of the enslaved themselves, who in James’s work mostly appear as a relatively undifferentiated mass of rebels. We have gained an understanding of the influences of a variety of African cultures, philosophies, and histories on the course of events in Saint-Domingue. James’s work did what any great work of history does: It created descendents, many of them who challenged and went beyond their ancestor. But it remains the best study written on the Haitian Revolution, and indeed one of the best ever written on revolution itself. It embodies the story of that revolution so brilliantly, charging its readers with a sense of drama and direction in a way few works of history do. James essentially got his story right, grasping the core of what the revolution was, and what it implied.
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Though he didn’t use the term to describe what he did, James helped lay the foundation in his work for the field now known as “Atlantic history.” Along with the work of his onetime student Eric Williams, his book transformed the historiography produced about the Caribbean and Atlantic slavery more broadly during the past decades, particularly in the Anglophone world. James’s work was crucial in part simply because it convincingly demanded that historians take seriously the Haitian Revolution as an event of global significance, a touchstone in the political history of Europe and the Americas. It also insisted on seeing the interconnections between events on both sides of the Atlantic, encouraging subsequent historians to think beyond national contexts as they studied the circulation of revolutionary ideals. James’s work has inspired historians to write a certain kind of Atlantic history, one that decenters Europe, paying close attention to the ways the central pillar of the Atlantic world, the slave trade and slavery, shaped life and ideas in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. And it demands of us that we recall that, within this world, the enslaved were never simply workers, or victims, but always actors and thinkers. They remade the world in which they lived. Through the Haitian Revolution, enslaved revolutionaries crafted an idea of rights that was truly universal in scope, refusing to accept, as most revolutionaries in the United States and France did, that a human being could be a slave. In this sense the revolution, as James shows, was an epochal and global event, one to which we are all linked, whether we know it, or accept it, or not.
“The slave-trade and slavery were the economic basis of the French Revolution,” James boldly announces early in his book. He quotes Jean Jaurès, one of the few historians of the French Revolution to acknowledge the role of the colonies in the shaping of 18th-century France, to buttress his point: “Sad irony of human history . . . The fortunes created at Bordeaux, at Nantes, by the slave-trade, gave to the bourgeoisie that pride which needed liberty and contributed to human emancipation.”1 It is a striking claim, one that intriguingly parallels Eric Williams’s claim, in his Capitalism and Slavery (1944), that slavery and the slave trade laid the foundation for the Industrial Revolution in England. Interestingly, however, James’s claim has not become a touchstone for debate the way Williams’s did in Anglophone historiography, where a generation of historians have argued vociferously about it. In fact, the precise ways in which the Atlantic plantation economy and the slave trade shaped social life and political thought in France remain curiously under-studied, and the provocation issued by James in this passage still awaits a full-fledged response.
James also, of course, is curious about the ways influence traveled in another direction, with the ideas of the French Revolution shaping the course of the uprising in Saint-Domingue. He crystallizes the question in a powerful scene in which he portrays Toussaint-Louverture reading a particularly stirring passage from a controversial work compiled by the Abbé Raynal, the Histoire des Deux Indes, whose many volumes described and at times harshly critiqued the history of European empire. Drawing directly from the work of Louis Sebastien Mercier, who in his L’An 2440 imagined a future in which slavery has been abolished thanks to the leadership of a hero whose statue decorates a plaza in Paris, Raynal evoked the coming of a “Black Spartacus” and asked, “Where is he?” It was this passage that James imagines Toussaint-Louverture reading. “Over and over again Toussaint read this passage: ‘A courageous chief only is wanted. Where is he?’ ” “Men make their own history,” James continues, quoting Karl Marx, “and the black Jacobins of San Domingo were to make history which would alter the fate of millions of men and shift the economic currents of three continents.” 2
Did Toussaint-Louverture truly read Raynal, as James asserts? Scholars have debated the question. In a critique of the Enlightenment’s racism, for instance, the French political philosopher Louis Sala-Molins seizes on the image, dismissing the idea as nothing more than a “fable,” pointing out that for Toussaint-Louverture to be inspired by Raynal, he would have had to read the passages calling for a “black hero” while “systematically skipping” the racist passages of the same text. Such an image, he argues, seeks to transform the “black liberators” into “disciples of the Enlightenment.” But then the question becomes, How was “the black” able to “succeed in the subtle academic exercise that consists in deducing from a discourse that, occasionally, concerns him, what this discourse does not say or suggest, what it eliminates with complete serenity and clarity? How does he manage to extract from the Enlightenment what the Enlightenment never dreamed of?” Having emphasized throughout his work that the Enlightenment worked to either openly justify or willfully overlook slavery in the Atlantic, Sala-Molins insists that it had no role in shaping revolution in the Caribbean: “The black, always a slave and still always standing, truly invented his liberty.”3
In Tropicopolitans (1999), meanwhile, Srinivas Aravamudan has argued for the need to gain a better understanding of the responses and interpretation of individuals who were the “accidental, unintended, and indirect addresses” of Enlightenment literature. He approaches the question in one chapter by exploring the assertion (made in The Black Jacobins, among other texts) that passages in the Abbé Raynal’s Histoire Philosophique et Politique evoking the possibility of a slave revolution helped to inspire Toussaint-Louverture. Although, he notes, determining whether this particular literary encounter took place is probably impossible, he argues that the impact of Raynal’s text “can be reconstructed, if somewhat imaginatively, by a literary-critical urge to rush in where historians fear to tread.” He does so by inventing a reader designated as “Toussaint’s daughter-in-law” and imagining her response to a particular passage from Raynal’s text.4
James had his own kind of response to the question of how we should think about the impact of Enlightenment thought on the colonies. For him, Toussaint-Louverture not only mastered Enlightenment discourse but ultimately superseded it. “Pericles on democracy, Paine on the Rights of Man, the Declaration of Independence, the Communist Manifesto,” James writes in one of my favorite passages of the book. “These are some of the political documents which, whatever the weakness of wisdom of their analysis, have moved men and will always move them. . . . ” But there was another set of writings that, according to James, had been unjustly excluded from this canon: those of Toussaint-Louverture, who wrote in the midst of war, revolution, and international conflict, without the benefit of a “liberal education,” dictating to secretaries “until their devotion and his will had hammered them into adequate shape.” Nevertheless, he wrote in “the language and accent” of French philosophers and revolutionaries, all “masters of the spoken and written word.” But he also “excelled them all,” for unlike them he didn’t have “to pause, to hesitate, to qualify.” “Toussaint could defend the freedom of the blacks without reservation, and this gave to his declaration a strength and a single-mindedness rare in the great documents of the time.”5
Part of what is so compelling about the story of the Haitian Revolution, and James’s rendering of it, is what David Scott has highlighted as its “tragic” dimension. James, like many other historians, dwelled at length on the ways in which Toussaint-Louverture’s revolutionary leadership ultimately led him into a role as an autocrat and a dictator, one at odds with much of the population whose liberation he had launched and sustained through his rule. As Scott has shown, James, through a new appendix and a series of edits he made in the 1963 version of the text, deepened his exploration of the tragedy of Toussaint-Louverture, looking at it from a very different place than he did in 1938, when he first wrote the book.6 For James himself, the story of The Black Jacobins shifted over the decades as the world around him changed. But the brilliance of the book is that, even as our present transforms how we can read it, it continues to speak to our present.
In the end, Toussaint-Louverture succumbed to Napoleon Bonaparte, surrendering after weeks of fighting French troops sent to take control of the island from him, and then finding himself shipped off to a dank prison in France, where he died of sickness even as war raged in Saint-Domingue, led by his former generals. As James begins his narrative of the war that brought Haiti its independence in 1804, he notes that what happened in Saint-Domingue after the death of Charles Leclerc, Napoleon’s brother-in-law and the general in charge of the French expedition, “is one of those pages in history which every schoolboy should learn, and most certainly will learn, some day.” He crystallizes for us what drove and inspired the conflict. The people of Haiti, less than a decade away from plantation slavery, “had seen at last that without independence they could not maintain their liberty, and liberty was far more concrete for former slaves than the elusive forms of political democracy in France.”7
His pages on the war are searing. “ ‘Why do you burn everything?’ asked a French officer to a prisoner. ‘We have a right to burn what we cultivate because a man has a right to dispose of his own labor,’ was the reply of this unknown anarchist.”8 And the story he tells pushes him to make a claim for the present, and the future. Just as it was the “masses” of the enslaved in Saint-Domingue who drove the revolution there, he wrote in 1938, so will it be for the future. “Others will arise, and others. From the people heaving in action will come the leaders; not the isolated blacks at Guy’s hospitals or the Sorbonne, the dabblers in surréalisme or the lawyers, but the quite recruits in a black police force, the sergeant in the French native army or British police, familiarizing himself with military tactics and strategy, reading a stray pamphlet of Lenin or Trotsky as Toussaint read the Abbé Raynal.”9
There is, James insisted through his title and through his book, no way to think about the history of the French Revolution without knowing, and knowing well, the history of the Haitian Revolution. There is no history of France, or of Republican democracy, that is not also a history of empire, of those whose lives were shaped by it, and of those who confronted it. This lesson is the challenge posed by The Black Jacobins. But the challenge is also larger than that, for James’s book is also about trying to grasp how, at rare moments, change becomes possible. “There are periods in human history,” he quips at one point, “when money is not enough” to assure the control of the future.10 If he, and we, return to the Haitian Revolution, it is also because it spurs us to imagine the unimaginable.
Laurent Dubois teaches French and history at Duke University. The author of Scoring Spirits: The Empire of French Soccer (forthcoming from the University of California Press), he is currently at work on a history of the banjo.
1. C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (Vintage, 1963), 47.
2. Ibid., 25. For more on Raynal and Toussaint-Louverture in the context of the Haitian Revolution, see Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2004).
3. Louis Sala-Molins, Les misères des lumières: sous la raison, l’outrage (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1992), 158–60. I discuss Sala-Molins and the broader question of the Enlightenment in the Caribbean in “An Enslaved Enlightenment: Re-Thinking the Intellectual History of the French Atlantic,” Social History 31, no. 1 (February 2006): 1–14.
4. Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Duke University Press, 1999), 23, 299.
5. James, The Black Jacobins, 197–98.
6. David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Duke University Press, 2004).
7. James, The Black Jacobins, 356–57.
8. Ibid., 361.
9. Ibid., 377.
10. Ibid., 155.
