Poetry of Revolution: Romanticism and National Projects

of her people, the result was slaughter of her people and her own death and capture several

months after the murder of her husband. Although the readers must supply the missing details,

this part of the poem hints ever so slightly at the loss of these “naturels.”

German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder, whose late eighteenth-century works

greatly influenced theories of Romantic nationalism in Europe, explored the history of mankind

as a series of life cycles of particular cultures, all of which express a total humanity. As Frank E.

Manuel explains in his introduction to an English translation of Herder’s Reflections on the

Philosophy of the History of Mankind,

...the musical analogy came to Herder’s rescue. There were an infinite number of

variations on the theme of man; each one had a finite existence, but as each came

into being and was fulfilled in time, total humanity grew even richer.”^116

This necessarily implied for Herder the individuality of each “Volk,” or agglomeration of

people, as equally valuable and instrumental in its contribution to world history:

Herder not only gave status to the culture of primitives, winning the appreciation

of explorers like Johann Forster for his capacity to look at these peoples from

within instead of regarding them as mere objects to be converted or civilized, he

also places a new value on the earliest form of expression of all peoples, the

mythic.^117

Clearly, as evidenced in L’Union articles as in Ardouin’s poem, the loss of the Taino and

their culture, which Haitians believed to have included poetry, was to be lamented. Readers of

the 1830s knew that such a tranquil scene ended in genocide:

Qu’est devenue cette poésie? Elle a disparu comme ses auteurs...tous ces chants

étaient traditionnels et inscrits dans la mémoire, car [...] Nous ne savons rien

absolument de leurs bardes et très peu de leurs traditions ; Tout un peuple et toute

une poésie retranchée de la terre!^118

(^116) Frank E. Manuel, introduction, Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, by Johann Gottfried
von Herder, trans. Frank E. Manuel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968) xiv.
(^117) Manuel xiv.
(^118) Le Républicain le 1 mars 1837.