L'ouverture Quotes

When history is written as it ought to be written, it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity.

The cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression. For the one aims at perpetuating resented injustice, the other is merely a momentary passion soon appeased.

The rich are only defeated when running for their lives.

The patience and forbearance of the poor are among the strongest bulwarks of the rich.

In politics all abstract terms conceal treachery.

An army is a miniature of the society which produces it.

Property-owners are the most energetic flag-waggers and patriots in every country, but only so long as they enjoy their possessions: to safeguard those they desert God, King and Country in a twinkling.

It is Toussaint's supreme merit that while he saw European civilisation as a valuable and necessary thing, and strove to lay its foundations among his people, he never had the illusion that it conferred any moral superiority. He knew French, British, and Spanish imperialists for the insatiable gangsters that they were, that there is no oath too sacred for them to break, no crime, deception, treachery, cruelty, destruction of human life and property which they would not commit against those who could not defend themselves.

Yet when the masses turn (as turn they will one day) and try to end the tyranny of centuries, not only the tyrants but all ‘civilisation’ holds up its hands in horror and clamours for ‘order’ to be restored. If a revolution carries high overhead expenses, most of them it inherits from the greed of reactionaries and the cowardice of the so-called moderates. Long before abolition the mischief had been done in the French colonies and it was not abolition but the refusal to abolish which had done it.

The slave-trade and slavery were the economic basis of the French Revolution. ‘Sad irony of human history,’ comments Jaurès. ‘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.

There are and always will be some who, ashamed of the behaviour of their ancestors, try to prove that slavery was not so bad after all, that its evils and its cruelty were the exaggerations of propagandists and not the habitual lot of the slaves. Men will say (and accept) anything in order to foster national pride or soothe a troubled conscience.

Uninhibited, they wallowed with zest in the filth and mire of their political conceptions and needs, among the very leaders of their society, but nevertheless the very dregs of human civilisation and moral standards. A historian who finds excuses for such conduct by references to the supposed spirit of the times, or by omission, or by silence, shows thereby that his account of events is not to be trusted.

1789 the French bourgeoisie was the most powerful economic force in France, and the slave-trade and the colonies were the basis of its wealth and power.

Where imperialists do not find disorder they create it deliberately...They want an excuse for going in...

The first sign of a thoroughly ill-adjusted or bankrupt form of society is that the ruling classes cannot agree how to save a situation. It is this division which forces the breach, and the ruling classes will continue to fight with each other, just so long as they do not fear the mass seizure of power.

Il est la chandelle du sépulcre. Éclairer l'ouverture inexorable, avertir de l'inévitable, pas de plus tragique ironie.

The slopes to treachery from the dizzy heights of revolutionary leadership are always so steep and slippery that leaders, however well intentioned, can never build their fences too high

Leader of a backward and ignorant mass, he was yet in the forefront of the great historical movement of his time. The blacks were taking their part in the destruction of European feudalism begun by the French Revolution, and liberty and equality, the slogans of the revolution, meant far more to them than to any Frenchman. That was why in the hour of danger Toussaint, uninstructed as he was, could find the language and accent of Diderot, Rousseau, and Raynal, of Mirabeau, Robespierre and Danton. And in one respect he excelled them all. For even these masters of the spoken and written word, owing to the class complications of their society, too often had 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. The French bourgeoisie could not understand it. Rivers of blood were to flow before they understood that elevated as was his tone Toussaint had written neither bombast nor rhetoric but the simple and sober truth.

Constitutions are what they turn out to be.

If a revolution carries high overhead expenses, most of them it inherits from the greed of reactionaries and the cowardice of so called moderates.

[in response to Jean-François, who claimed that, "there is no irrevocable liberty for the former slaves except that which the Spanish monarch would grant them because, as a legitimate king, he alone has the right to legitimate that freedom"] . . . [W]e are free by natural right. It could only be kings . . . who dare claim the right to reduce into servitude men made like them and whom nature has made free.

The slaves destroyed tirelessly. Like the peasants in the Jacquerie or the Luddite wreckers, they were seeking their salvation in the most obvious way, the destruction of what they knew was the cause of their sufferings; and if they destroyed much it was because they had suffered much. [...] Now that they held power they did as they had been taught. In the frenzy of the first encounters they killed all. Yet they spared the priests whom they feared and the surgeons who had been kind to them. They, whose women had undergone countless violations, violated all the women who fell into their hands, often on the bodies of their still bleeding husbands, fathers and brothers. “Vengeance ! Vengeance” was their war-cry, and one of them carried a white child on a pike as a standard. And yet they were surprisingly moderate, then and afterwards, far more humane than their masters had been or would ever be to them. [...] Compared with what their masters had done to them in cold blood, what they did was negligible, and they were spurred on by the ferocity with which the whites in Le Cap treated all slave prisoners who fell into their hands.

Certains penseurs qui ne sont pas tous de droite, soutiennent que, lorsque les inégalités économiques ont pour origine des choix judicieux, le talent naturel, l'effort ou le mérite personnel, elles ne sont pas moralement injustifiées. Ils distinguent les personnes qui sont pauvres parce qu'elles sont victimes de la pure malchance, et celles qui le deviennent en raison de leurs choix de vie défectueux. D'après eux, les secondes devraient, en toute justice, assumer personnellement les conséquences de leurs choix au lieu d'en faire porter le poids sur la «société». Bref, ils glorifient la responsabilité individuelle quand ils s'attaquent aux prétendus «assistés». Cependant, ce sont souvent les mêmes qui, à droite comme à gauche, refusent l'ouverture des frontières et contestent le droit de chacun d'aller s'installer là où les chances d'avoir une vie meilleure sont plus élevées. Ces prises de position restrictives sont en contradiction totale avec les grands principes avancés pour blâmer les «assistés»: glorification de l'esprit d'initiative et du désir de s'en sortir, insistance sur la responsabilité individuelle dans la situation économique.

In overthrowing me, you have cut only the trunk of the tree of liberty. It will spring up again for its roots are numerous and deep!

If a revolution carries high overhead expenses, most of them it inherits from the greed of reactionaries and the cowardice of the so-called moderates. Long before abolition the mischief had been done in the French colonies and it was not abolition but the refusal to abolish which had done it.

Quels sont les premiers pas susceptibles d'engager cette conformation interculturelle d'une humanité une et multiple ? Un premier registre, minimal, est celui du respect mutuel entre des manières d'être et de penser distinctes, entre des cultures et des constellations épistémiques différentes. Cette coexistence respectueuse implique la proportionnalité, c'est-à-dire la reconnaissance par chaque collectif de ses limites, de son propre espace et de celui qui correspond à d'autres collectifs. Telle est la base de toute rencontre et de toute coopération entre les multiples collectifs qui composent la mosaïque planétaire. Encore peut-on souhaiter aller au-delà de la simple acceptation respectueuse de l'autre, pour passer à une reconnaissance de la valeur de l'autre. S'ouvre alors la possibilité d'un dialogue, dans lequel aucun collectif n'aurait de raison de s'engager s'il ne percevait dans le monde de l'autre une chance et une occasion pour transformer son propre monde et l'enrichir, ne serait-ce qu'en le faisant exister en regard d'autres possibles humains et non humains. Un tel dialogue présuppose que l'altérité de l'autre ne demeure pas absolue, totalement impénétrable. La capacité d'écoute, prédisposition à faire place, en soi, à l'altérité de l'autre, s'avère ici éminemment précieuse, sans qu'on puisse garantir qu'elle suffise à déjouer les embûches et les malentendus qui parsèment nécessairement un tel cheminement. Il y faut aussi un effort patient de compréhension - comme saisie de ce qui était jusque-là insaisissable et incorporation de ce qui était étranger - afin d'élaborer des plages de traductibilité entre univers culturels distincts. Mais encore convient-il d'assumer la conscience d'une incomplétude, car c'est dans la reconnaissance de l'inachèvement de soi comme de la perfectibilité du collectif auquel on appartient que l'ouverture à l'altérité peut avoir quelque chance de s'opérer. C'est depuis l'autre en soi, depuis le non-soi de soi, que s'amorce la rencontre avec l'altérité de l'autre. (p. 138-139)

Georges Lefebvre, the great contemporary historian of the French Revolution, who on occasion after occasion exhaustively examines all the available evidence and repeats that we do not know and will never know who were the real leaders of the French Revolution, nameless, obscure men, far removed from the legislators and the public orators.

The March. It’s from Mr. Lawrence’s Toussaint L’Ouverture series. Painted in 1995.

In a revolution, when the ceaseless slow accumulation of centuries bursts into volcanic eruption, the meteoric flares and flights above are a meaningless chaos and lend themselves to infinite caprice and romanticism unless the observer sees them always as projections of the sub-soil from which they came.

Les études littéraires bénéficiaient pour une part importante de l’évolution que nous venons de décrire. Cet élément est particulièrement visible en Tunisie, surtout pour les études d’arabe. Ces étudiants littéraires se destinaient massivement à la carrière d’enseignant (ce qu’attestent plusieurs témoignages ainsi que la brochure de juillet 1953). C’est que l’enseignement de l’arabe avait acquis un prestige très important, aux yeux des Sadikiens tout au moins. Mahmoud Messaadi nous a affirmé être sorti du collège Sadiki avec l’idée de servir l’arabe et la culture arabe. À la suite de Mohammed Attia (premier agrégé d’arabe tunisien en 1934 puis directeur du collège) et de Ali Belhaouane, de nombreux jeunes collégiens des années trente et quarante se sentirent investis d’une mission vis-à-vis de leur langue et de leurs successeurs. C’est ainsi que certains s’engagèrent dans des études d’arabe à l’université française dès les années trente : Mahmoud Messaadi passa sa licence à Paris de 1936 à 1939, et c’est la guerre qui a différé son agrégation (il fut le 4ᵉ agrégé d’arabe tunisien). Ahmed Adessalam lui aussi nous a dit être sorti de Sadiki avec l’ambition des former des jeunes, et certain d’être investi d’une « mission » : rendre l’enseignement de l’arabe aussi attrayant que celui du français. De ce fait, celui-ci a préparé sa licence d’arabe auprès de l’université d’Alger pendant la guerre, a enseigné à Sadiki dès 1944, puis est parti à Paris préparer son agrégation en 1947-1948. C’est aussi en cette période que Mzali, Bakir, Ben Miled et quelques autres ont accompli un parcours identique. Certes, tous les étudiants d’arabe n’étaient pas destinés à préparer l’agrégation (à commencer par les étudiants préparant le diplôme d’arabe de l’IHET qui n’étaient pas titulaires du baccalauréat). Mais ces étudiants sont là pour témoigner d’une sorte de mystique pour l’enseignement qui toucha nombre d’étudiants tunisiens. Les arabisants ne sont pas seuls dans ce mouvement comme en témoigne le succès de la propédeutique littéraire de l’IHET (30 étudiants musulmans en 1951-1952). Il est important de souligner que la profession d’enseignant, qui ne donnait pas un revenu analogue à celui des professions libérales (bien que le salaire soit correct), bénéficiait aussi d’un fort prestige social, et ce d’autant plus que l’enseignement était une denrée rare dans la Tunisie de cette fin de protectorat. Le magistère traditionnel de ulémas avait certainement rejailli en partie sur cette profession sécularisée. Pour conclure sur cette évolution, il est aussi probable que la réforme de la fonction publique tunisienne, et l’ouverture plus grande de l’administration aux Tunisiens, aient favorisé les études menant à la licence, porte d’entrée la plus noble de l’administration. D’autre part, il ne faut pas sous-estimer les pressions de la DGIP en faveur d’études autres que celles des facultés de droit et de médecine. C’est sur un ton très satisfait que l’auteur de la brochure de juillet 1952 conclut ainsi : « Plus de 500 jeunes se destinent à venir, demain, remplir dans la Régence des fonctions de premier plan dans les domaines les plus divers (médecins, avocats, professeurs, pharmaciens, ingénieurs, architectes…) ». (p175-176)

[…] En faisant ainsi prévaloir les droits de la spontanéité sur la réflexion, de l’ignorance sur la science, de l’immédiateté de la pulsion sur la patience de l’art, de l’éphémère adolescence sur l’éternelle sagesse, d’instinct le Têtard faisait triompher la paresse de ceux qui estiment que la tradition tient en elle trop d’exigences, et qu’un héritage, notamment celui de l’excellence, est bien trop lourd à porter. Ces affalés préfèrent laisser libre cours à l’interne chimpanzé qu’ils sont fiers de traîner, en qui ils entendent se complaire et qui réclame tyranniquement une culture pour lui tout seul : celle de la luxure de marché, celle du glauque, de la bigarrure et de l’anomie, celle des veines épithumiques, d’un désir encalibistré et claustral, petite région élevée au rang de galaxie et que ces hédomanes rêvent ventromniloque. La culture du bas-jouir prêt à tout. C’est Têtard qui déclare ainsi l’ouverture du premier génocide fœtal de l’histoire au nom de prétendus droits reconnus à la salope : tout enfant non dévaginé est passible de la peine de mort si un couple de robots drogués ou de Thénardier jouisseurs se voit contrarier le plan de ses projets hédonistes et mercantiles. Microcéphalopolis est une cité cohérente où l’on tue pour finir ses études, pour forniquer plus confortablement, pour partir en vacances, et où l’on dresse simultanément des monuments aux victimes des grands massacres historiques. Car Microcéphalopolis détermine elle-même, au milieu des chialeries, quels sont les génocides propres et quels ne sont pas.

Yet when the masses turn (as turn they will one day) and try to end the tyranny of centuries, not only the tyrants but all ‘civilisation’ holds up its hands in horror and clamours for ‘order’ to be restored. If a revolution carries high overhead expenses, most of them it inherits from the greed of reactionaries and the cowardice of the so-called moderates.

J’ai le temps de distinguer une tête qui passe à travers l’ouverture.

La lutte libérale contre la Restauration et l’ouverture faite aux hommes de lettres dans la période orléaniste avaient favorisé, sinon une politisation de la vie intellectuelle, du moins une sorte d’indifférenciation de la littérature et de la politique, comme en témoigne la floraison des politiciens littérateurs et des littérateurs politiciens, Guizot, Thiers, Michelet, Thierry, Villemain, Cousin, Jouffroy ou Nisard. La révolution de 1848, qui déçoit ou inquiète les libéraux, et surtout le second Empire renvoient la plupart des écrivains dans une sorte de quiétisme politique, inséparable d’un repliement hautain vers l’art pour l’art, défini contre l’« art social ». On se rappelle Baudelaire fulminant contre les socialistes : « Crosse religieusement les omoplates de l’anarchiste21 ! » Ou Leconte de Lisle faisant la leçon à Louis Ménard resté fidèle à ses idéaux politiques : « Vas-tu passer ta vie à rendre un culte à Blanqui qui n’est ni plus ni moins qu’une sorte de hache révolutionnaire, hache utile en son lieu, je le veux bien, mais hache enfin ! Va ! Le jour où tu auras fait une belle œuvre, tu auras plus prouvé ton amour de la justice et du droit qu’en écrivant vingt volumes d’économie22. » Mais l’expression la plus typique de ce désenchantement se trouve chez Flaubert, Taine ou Renan qui, réfugiés dans leur œuvre, gardent le silence sur les événements politiques.

The most dramatic of all slave revolts occurred in the French island colony of Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti). This was France’s major sugar-producing island. Plantation production had increased so rapidly in the late eighteenth century that, by the early 1790s, Saint-Domingue contained some 400,000 slaves. Under the leadership of one of their number, known by the French name of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the slaves of Saint-Domingue rose against and killed their white French masters in 1791.

Le quatrième jour, on annonça l’ouverture de l’hôpital auxiliaire dans une école maternelle.

There have been three major slave revolts in human history. The first, led by the Thracian gladiator Spartacus against the Romans, occurred in 73 BC. The third was in the 1790s when the great black revolutionary Touissant L'Ouverture and his slave army wrested control of Santo Domingo from the French, only to be defeated by Napoleon in 1802. But the second fell halfway between these two, in the middle of the 9th century AD, and is less documented than either. We do know that the insurgents were black; that the Muslim 'Abbasid caliphs of Iraq had brought them from East Africa to work, in the thousands, in the salt marshes of the delta of the Tigris. These black rebels beat back the Arabs for nearly ten years. Like the escaped maroons in Brazil centuries later, they set up their own strongholds in the marshland. They seemed unconquerable and they were not, in fact, crushed by the Muslims until 883. They were known as the Zanj, and they bequeathed their name to the island of Zanzibar in the East Africa - which, by no coincidence, would become and remain the market center for slaves in the Arab world until the last quarter of the 19th century. The revolt of the Zanj eleven hundred years ago should remind us of the utter falsity of the now fashionable line of argument which tries to suggest that the enslavement of African blacks was the invention of European whites. It is true that slavery had been written into the basis of the classical world; Periclean Athens was a slave state, and so was Augustan Rome. Most of their slaves were Caucasian whites, and "In antiquity, bondage had nothing to do with physiognomy or skin color". The word "slave" meant a person of Slavic origin. By the 13th century it spread to other Caucasian peoples subjugated by armies from central Asia: Russians, Georgians, Circassians, Albanians, Armenians, all of whom found ready buyers from Venice to Sicily to Barcelona, and throughout the Muslim world. But the African slave trade as such, the black traffic, was a Muslim invention, developed by Arab traders with the enthusiastic collaboration of black African ones, institutionalized with the most unrelenting brutality centuries before the white man appeared on the African continent, and continuing long after the slave market in North America was finally crushed. Historically, this traffic between the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa begins with the very civilization that Afrocentrists are so anxious to claim as black - ancient Egypt. African slavery was well in force long before that: but by the first millennium BC Pharaoh Rameses II boasts of providing the temples with more than 100,000 slaves, and indeed it is inconceivable that the monumental culture of Egypt could have been raised outside a slave economy. For the next two thousand years the basic economies of sub-Saharan Africa would be tied into the catching, use and sale of slaves. The sculptures of medieval life show slaves bound and gagged for sacrifice, and the first Portuguese explorers of Africa around 1480 found a large slave trade set up from the Congo to Benin. There were large slave plantations in the Mali empire in the 13th-14th centuries and every abuse and cruelty visited on slaves in the antebellum South, including the practice of breeding children for sale like cattle, was practised by the black rulers of those towns which the Afrocentrists now hold up as sanitized examples of high civilization, such as Timbuktu and Songhay.

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Il n'est pas étonnant, chère petite sœur, que M. Bercsényi soit mort. Il est vrai que nous sommes tous mortels, mais lui l'était plus que d'autres. Ils ont procédé à l'ouverture de son cadavre et il n'y avait plus trace de quoi que ce soit à l'intérieur...

Je veux te parler des longues heures de queue qu'on faisait ensemble, en sortant du travail, après t'avoir récupérée à la crèche. Les longues files d'attente debout, avec toi dans les bras, ces queues larges qui ressemblaient plutôt à des manifestations, stagnant devant les magasins alimentaires fermés, en attendant l'ouverture. On se battait pour être parmi les premiers, car il n'y avait jamais assez pour tout le monde, et ceux qui formaient la queue de la queue partaient à coup sûr la queue entre les jambes. Mais ils restaient quand même, croyant, espérant un miracle. Pouvait-on se permettre de laisser passer une chance, aussi petite soit-elle? Tiens, je me rappelle d'une queue particulièrement longue, une queue que j'ai quittée en pleurant. Tu avais deux, trois ans. J'avais les règles et un mal au ventre et aux reins terrible. Il me tardait de rentrer à la maison, me doucher et m'allonger un peu. Mais en descendant du bus, j'ai vu des gens se ruer à travers la place, vers le côté opposé du centre-ville. Ventre ou pas ventre, j'ai suivi la foule en courant, toi dans les bras. Il fallait toujours, toujours, suivre une foule en déplacement au pas de charge, car personne ne courait pour rien, là-bas. C'est seulement ici, en France, que j'ai vu des gens courir pour rien: ils font du footing, pour ne pas être trop gros. Là-bas, on courait pour ne pas être trop maigre. Là-bas, ça se passait comme ça: je ne saurai jamais comment, quelqu'un arrivait à avoir une formation (fondée ou non), et il donnait l'alerte: « ils vont vendre des œufs à tel endroit », ou du fromage, ou des poulets, (ça, les poulets, c'était plus rare et la plupart du temps une chimère). Ou du dentifrice, ou du papier cul. Tout était bon à prendre car on ne pouvait pas savoir quand un autre arrivage viendrait.

Quelque chose n’allait plus. Ma mauvaise humeur était née de la lecture du quotidien La Montagne – où n’écrivait plus Alexandre Vialatte – devant des tasses de café noir qui réparaient mon insomnie dans le bistrot de Pierrefort. « Le numérique est une opportunité pour renforcer l’innovation », disait l’article. Cela commençait mal : personne ne savait ce que signifiaient des trucs pareils. Mais tous les élus de la région applaudissaient. Ils s’étaient réunis en congrès à Murol, ils préparaient la connexion de leur campagne. Ils mettaient en place le dispositif. Le journal annonçait : « Le très haut débit au secours de la ruralité. » Ciel ! pensais-je, les voilà sauvés par cela même qui faisait clore les boutiques. « Ceux qui s’installent ici demandent le haut débit avant l’école », expliquait le maire d’un village dans l’interview, et il se félicitait par contrecoup de l’ouverture prochaine d’un « collège tout numérique ». Le nom de Mermoz serait donné à l’établissement. Personne n’ajoutait que le demi-dieu de l’Aéropostale qui avait réparé son avion pendant quarante-huit heures sur un piton des Andes avec une clef à molette n’aurait pas eu grand-chose à carrer du haut débit.

Diderot and the Encyclopaedists had attacked slavery. “Let the colonies be destroyed rather than be the cause of so much evil,” said the Encyclopaedia in its article on the slave-trade.

saliva of other slaves. One colonist was known in moments of anger to throw himself on his slaves and stick his teeth into their flesh.[*7]

Traders travelled thousands of miles from one side of the continent to another without molestation. The tribal wars from which the European pirates claimed to deliver the people were mere sham-fights; it was a great battle when half-a-dozen men were killed. It was on a peasantry in many respects superior to the serfs in large areas of Europe, that the slave-trade fell. Tribal life was broken up and millions of detribalised Africans were let loose upon each other. The unceasing destruction of crops led to cannibalism; the captive women became concubines and degraded the status of the wife. Tribes had to supply slaves or be sold as slaves themselves.

he knocked him over. The slave picked himself up without any sign of resentment, and resumed. The same hand which had knocked over the slave closed on an enormous fee, and the barber took his exit with the same insolence and elegance as before. This was the type for whom race prejudice was more important than even the possession of slaves, of which they held few. The distinction between a white man and a man of colour was for them fundamental. It was their all. In defence of it they would bring down the whole of their world.

value of the colonies represented 3,000 millions, and on them depended the livelihood of a number of Frenchmen variously estimated at between two and six millions. By 1789 San Domingo was the market of the new world. It received in its ports 1,587 ships, a greater number than Marseilles, and France used for the San Domingo trade alone 750 great vessels employing 24,000 sailors. In 1789 Britain’s export trade would be 27 million pounds, that of France 17 million pounds, of which the trade of San Domingo would account for nearly 11 million pounds. The whole of Britain’s colonial trade in that year amounted to only five million pounds.[

gleefully in to help drive them out of America. San Domingo was now incomparably the finest colony in the world and its possibilities seemed limitless. The British bourgeoisie investigated the new situation in the West Indies, and on the basis of what it saw, prepared a bombshell for its rivals. Without slaves San Domingo was doomed. The British colonies had enough slaves for all the trade they were ever likely to do. With the tears rolling down their cheeks for the poor suffering blacks, those British bourgeois who had no West Indian interests set up a great howl for the abolition of the slave-trade.

France, even a hundred years before the revolution, there was little colour prejudice. Up to 1716 every Negro slave who touched French soil was free, and after an interval of fifty years another decree in 1762 reaffirmed this. In 1739 a slave served as trumpeter in the royal regiment of Carabineers; young Mulattoes were received in the military corps reserved to the young nobility and in the offices of the magistracy; they served as pages at court.[*7] Yet these men had to go back to San Domingo and submit to the discriminations and brutality of the San Domingo whites.

The Mulattoes, unlike the German Jews, were already too numerous, and the revolution would have begun there and then.

in turn despised the man of colour who was only quarter white, and so on through all the shades.

The slave-trade and slavery were the economic basis of the French Revolution. “Sad irony of human history,” comments Jaurès. “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.

its time and it came into the hands of the slave most fitted to make use of it, Toussaint L’Ouverture. “Natural liberty is the right which nature has given to every one to dispose of himself according to his will…. “The slave, an instrument in the hands of wickedness, is below the dog which the Spaniard let loose against the American….

The slave-trade and slavery were woven tight into the economics of the eighteenth century. Three forces, the proprietors of San Domingo, the French bourgeoisie and the British bourgeoisie, throve on this devastation of a continent and on the brutal exploitation of millions. As long as these maintained an equilibrium the infernal traffic would go on, and for that matter would have gone on until the present day.

organised against attempts to exterminate them. The greatest of these chiefs was Mackandal.

aimed at delivering his people by means of poison. For six years he built up his organisation, he and his followers poisoning not only whites but disobedient members of their own band. Then he arranged that on a particular day the water of every house in the capital of the province was to be poisoned, and the general attack made on the whites while they were in the convulsions and anguish of death. He

Negro Code in 1685 authorised marriage between the white and the slave who had children by him, the ceremony freeing herself and her children. The Code gave the free Mulattoes and the free Negroes equal rights with the whites. But as the white population grew larger, white San Domingo discarded the convention, and enslaved or sold their numerous children like any king in the African jungle. All efforts to prevent concubinage failed, and the Mulatto children multiplied, to be freed or to remain slaves at the caprice of their fathers.

accumulated immense capital, and grew more arrogant as their wealth increased. They bid for all properties on sale in the various districts, and raised prices to such fantastic heights that the whites who were not wealthy could not buy, or ruined themselves by attempting to keep pace with them. Thus, in some districts, the finest properties were in the possession of the half-castes, and yet they were everywhere the least ready to submit to statute labour and the public dues. Their plantations were the sanctuary and asylum of the freedmen who had neither work nor profession and of numerous fugitive slaves who had run away from their gangs. Being so rich they imitated the style of the whites and sought to drown all traces of their origin.

him. The only privilege the whites allowed them was the privilege of lending white men money.

Pitt found that some 50 per cent of the slaves imported into the British islands were sold to the French colonies.[*25] It was the British slave-trade, therefore, which was increasing French colonial produce and putting the European market into French hands. Britain was cutting its own throat.

Of the half-a-million slaves in the colony in 1789, more than two-thirds had been born in Africa.

comparatively easy life with a strong attachment to their masters, and have thus enabled Tory historians, regius professors and sentimentalists to represent plantation slavery as a patriarchal relation between master and slave. Permeated with the vices of their masters and mistresses, these upper servants gave themselves airs and despised the slaves in the fields. Dressed in cast-off silks and brocades, they

The bureaucracy, with the source of its power so many thousands of miles away, could not depend only on the two French regiments in the colony. In 1789 the functionaries in San Domingo, where the white population was about 30,000, numbered only 513.

Here then was the first great division, that between great whites and small whites, with the bureaucracy balancing between and encouraging the small whites. Nothing could assuage or solve this conflict. The moment the revolution begins in France these two will spring at each other and fight to a finish. —

the deficiency, thousands of slaves died from starvation and the upward rise of production, though not halted, was diminished. But after the Treaty of Paris in 1763 the colony made a great stride forward. In 1767 it exported 72 million pounds’ weight of raw sugar and 51 million pounds of white, a million pounds of indigo and two million pounds of cotton, and quantities of hides, molasses, cocoa and rum.

produced by the white and the marabou in the proportion of 88 to 40, or by the white and the sacatra, in the proportion of 72 to 56 and so on all through the 128 varieties. But the sang-mělé with 127 white parts and 1 black part was still a man of colour.

soon appeased.

The Mulattoes hated the black slaves because they were slaves and because they were black. But when they actually saw the slaves taking action on such a grand scale, numbers of young Mulattoes from Le Cap and round about rushed to join the hitherto despised blacks and fight against the common enemy.

defeat of Bonaparte’s expedition in 1803 resulted in the establishment of the Negro state of Haiti which has lasted to this day.

To help the slaves and confuse the white planters came news of a Mulatto revolution in the West. Early in August, a body of Mulattoes, weary of being persecuted and lynched by the small whites,

All the 14 parishes of the West Province accepted the terms, and on the 24th of October the great ceremony of reconciliation took place in Port-au-Prince. The leaders of the whites and the leaders of the Mulattoes marched into Port-au-Prince arm in arm, with their troops marching behind, greeted by salvoes of artillery and mutual shouts of “Unity and Fidelity.

They knew that as long as these plantations stood their lot would be to labour on them until they dropped. The only thing was to destroy them. From their masters they had known rape, torture, degradation, and, at the slightest provocation, death. They returned in kind. For two centuries the higher civilisation had shown them that power was used for wreaking your will on those whom you controlled. Now that they held power they did as they had been taught. In the frenzy of the first encounters they killed all, yet they spared the priests whom they feared and the surgeons who had been kind to them. They, whose women had undergone countless violations, violated all the women who fell into their hands, often on the bodies of their still bleeding husbands, fathers and brothers. “Vengeance! Vengeance!” was their war-cry, and one of them carried a white child on a pike as a standard.

Of men who had cowered trembling before the frown of any white ruffian, he had made in ten years an army which could hold its own with the finest soldiers Europe has yet seen.

Vincent did all that a man could do. Even in trying to detach Christophe from Toussaint he was acting, as he thought, in the best interests of France and of San Domingo. To him the restoration of slavery was unthinkable . . . Many an honest subordinate has in this way been the unwilling instrument of the inevitable treachery up above; the trouble is that when faced with the brutal reality he goes in the end with his own side, and by the very confidence which his integrity created does infinitely more harm than the open enemy.

Tout bonheur en ce monde vient de l’ouverture aux autres ; toute souffrance vient de l’enfermement en soi-même.

Property owners are the most energetic flag wavers and patriots in every country, but only so long as they enjoy their possessions; to safeguard those they desert God, King and Country in a twinkling.

It was not Paris alone but all revolutionary France. "Servants, peasants, workers, the laborers by day in the fields" all over France filled with a virulent hatred for "the aristocracy of the skin." There were so many moved by the sufferings of the slaves that they had long ceased to drink coffee, thinking of it as drenched with the blood and sweat of men turned into brutes. Noble and generous working people of France and those millions of honest English Non Conformists who listened to their clergymen and gave strength to the English movement for the abolition of slavery! These are the people whom the Sons of Africa and the lovers of humanity will remember with gratitude and affection, not the peroting Liberals in France, nor the "philanthropy plus 5%" hypocrites in the British houses of Parliament.

On veut toujours que l'imagination soit la faculté de former des images. Or elle est plutôt la faculté de déformer les images fournies par la perception, elle est surtout la faculté de nous libérer des images premières, de changer les images. S'il n'y a pas changement d'images, unions inattendues d'images, il n'y a pas imagination, il n'y a pas d'action imaginante. Si une image présente ne fait pas penser à une image absente, si une image occasionnelle ne détermine pas une prodigalité d'images aberrantes, une explosion d'images, il n'y a pas imagination. Il y a perception, souvenir d'une perception, mémoire familière, habitude des couleurs et des formes. Le vocable fondamental qui correspond à l'imagination, ce n'est pas image, c'est imaginaire. La valeur d'une image se mesure à l'étendue de son auréole imaginaire. Grâce à l'imaginaire, l'imagination est essentiellement ouverte, évasive. Elle est dans le psychisme humain l'expérience même de l'ouverture, l'expérience même de la nouveauté. [...] Le poème est essentiellement une aspiration à des images nouvelles.

He was a man who, while completely shaped by the constraining particularities of his degraded, enslaved circumstances, was nevertheless not reducible to them. His life and