Poetry of Revolution: Romanticism and National Projects

A Haitian audience would have been familiar with this episode, one of the most infamous

accounts of colonial brutality in Saint Domingue. Even without a detailed historical context,

however, the excessive cruelty and utterly sadistic torture is readily apparent in Coicou’s verse.

The victims are “nègres” and are described through a series of alliterations, first as “vils,” then as

“vifs,” and finally as “vaillants.” The first descriptor pins their designation by colonial rulers,

the second their more neutral and factual status as alive during this part of the execution, and

then finally their transformation to courageous actors of national history. Moreover, the irony in

some descriptions (the colonizer excelling in cruelty, the victims being vile) mirrors the twisted

logic and again the sheer sadism of the perpetrators. Clearly accentuated however, in the sixth

verse, through repetition and placement at the front of each hemistich, the word “sublime” is the

chief quality of the epic which is to follow.

Curiously, the incident referred to here involved two mulatto leaders, Vincent Ogé and

Jean-Baptiste Chavannes, who actively but unsuccessfully petitioned colonial and metropolitan

leaders to apply the Declaration of the Rights of Man to mulatto property owners in Saint

Domingue in the late 1790s. Ogé returned from a trip to France in October 1790 to launch an

armed revolt for free men of color, and with Chavannes’ help led a mulatto revolt which was

ultimately put down by colonial authorities. Ogé and Chavannes were put on trial and

condemned to death on the wheel in February, 1791. Coicou’s description here of Ogé’s and

Chavannes’ death draws attention to their excruciating suffering inflicted by white leaders in

Saint-Domingue, which C.L.R James also recounted in detail in his book The Black Jacobins:

They condemned them to be led by the executioner to the main door...tied by a

cord round the neck [...]with wax candles in their hands, to confess their

crimes...after which they were to be led to the parade-ground, and have their arms,

legs, and elbows broken on a scaffold, after which they were to be bound on

wheels, their faces turned to the sky, to remain thus, while it pleased God to keep

them alive [...] Even in death the racial division was to be maintained. The