only typical of black leaders who inherently thirst for absolute power.^175 This belief was echoed
in perhaps the most well-known of European racist text of this time, Joseph-Arthur de
Gobineau’s 1853-1855 Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines which specifically cited Haiti’s
difficulty in sustaining a stable political environment as proof of the inferiority of the black race:
The history of Hayti, of democratic Hayti, is merely a long series of massacres
[...] The power that remains unchecked is the true spirit of these people.
According to the natural law already mentioned, the black race, belong[s] [... ] to
a branch of the human family that is incapable of civilization.^176The fact that de Gobineau’s text was met with detailed rebuttals by Haitian essayistsindicates that Haitian intellectuals were indeed aware of European racist perceptions; one of
these Haitian responses will be explored later in this chapter. For now, it is sufficient to state that
the repercussions of such ideology cannot be underestimated, as the positing of Haitians as
uncivilized by Western writers meant continuing to question Haiti’s right to sovereignty
throughout the nineteenth century. Although the Haitian Revolution was over half a century old
by this time, a general sense of a fragile and incomplete independence can be attributed first to
the Western refusal to recognize this independence and then to the non-committal periodic
involvement in Haitian affairs by these same nations. Colonial rule had formally ended, but the
continued practice whereby a state controls the sovereignty of another through political
collaboration or economic and social dependence meant that Haiti remained a target of
imperialism for the entire nineteenth century.^177 Intervention by Great Britain, France, and
Germany, seeking military or economic advantage, was sometimes even invited by Haitian
leaders either to defeat a competing regime within Haiti or to secure protection from one of the
(^175) Spenser St. John, Hayti or the Black Republic (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1889) 95.
(^176) Joséph-Arthur De Gobineau, The Inequality of the Races, trans. Adrian Collins (Torrance, CA: The Noontide
Press, 1983) 49-50.
(^177) This definition of imperialism is cited by Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books,
1993) 9.