Poetry of Revolution: Romanticism and National Projects

supplice du noir,” the future, beyond the Haitian Revolution, also belongs to the “nègre” with no

mulatto/black distinctions. In the final part of this very long stanza, their suffering and ultimate

victory takes on a present significance and future warning,

Or, demain, qu’appliquant la loi du talion

Le nègre soit debout, se fasse aussi lion,

N’osez point le maudire et comprenez sa haine

L’ignorance est le lot qu’on lui jette en sa chaîne ;

Le mépris insolent, le sarcasme moqueur,

Sont les germes féconds répandus en son cœur

En bien, il gardera la multiple semence

Et, de tant d’éléments, combinant sa démence,

A vos soins généreux donnant leur juste prix,

Ils auront la vengeance, ils auront le mépris. (87-96)

The verses cited previously which invoke 1804 were addressed to Rochambeau in the

futur antérieur, showing a past perspective on an event which would occur despite

Rochambeau’s iron rule. This part of the poem, however, signals a vague “tomorrow,” with no

clear recipient, and written in the simple future and present tenses, both of which are indicative

modes, used to state facts and not subjective desires. This warning of future vengeance, if

addressed to whites as well as to corrupt Haitian leaders complicit in similar goals, suggests that

historical parallels may surface at the end of the nineteenth century: revolutionary violence and

victory may again be on the horizon for the black people. Earlier in the poem, the poet, in

recounting the Ogé and Chavannes execution did recognize that some whites were the exception

to the rule, perhaps French intellectuals, when he says : “Il y avait pourtant ces homes

austères/Pour qui les noirs courbés n’étaient pas moins des frères:[...]ces cœurs français au juste

épanouis.” (9-12) Save these sympathizers, however, the invective admonition stands and comes

decades before similar ones issued Aimé Césaire’s Discours sur le colonialisme (1950) in Jean-

Paul Sartre’s preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1963). Recourse to racial solidarity,

real, historic, imagined, or prescribed, constituted an attempt to overcome the seeds of dissention