while recognizing the possibility of rhetorical strategy, observe that “At times, however,
Toussaint writes as if the very idea of freedom had been created by the French, and as if he and
his insurgent companions were free only by the grace of Paris.”^152 Ardouin’s verses, at least,
clearly elucidate the opposite. The imagined mocking tone of the whites’ intentions seeks to
portray spiteful cruelty and a refusal to extend liberty to others based on race, “pour l’homme qui
porte un front noir.” Beginning this poem by highlighting the primacy of the slaves’ initiatives
and then following it with the hypocrisy of French Revolutionary ideals render Haiti’s
achievement even more revolutionary. By recuperating this war as one which fought for racial
equality, the radical significance of the Haitian Revolution extends its import beyond just
national independence. Stephen Bann states that the “desire for history” is inevitably involved in
a dialectic of loss and recovery, and that various thinkers in the nineteenth century concurred that
every nation needed a certain knowledge of the past.^153
Details in these last two stanzas also contextualize and rationalize any revolutionaryviolence with which Dessalines was associated, indicating that Haitians in the 1830s already
sensed the need to justify the slaves’ revolt and Dessalines’ actions. His appearance after
Toussaint’s departure reverses the power dynamic, and in a twist of poetic justice, it is now the
whites, terrified and powerless, who are hanged at the gallows:
Dessalines apparut superbe, grand, immense!
Lui-même les pendit à l’ignoble potence,
Qu’élevèrent pour nous leurs criminelles mains! (21-23)It is undoubtedly Dessalines’ legendary violence during and after the Revolution (hisorder to massacre some 3000 whites remaining on the island) which have precluded acceptance
of him as a legitimate national hero. In the poem such actions are justified in light of white
(^152) Hartdt and Negri 118.
(^153) Bann 64-65, 67.