ABSTRACT
This chapter explores what I have termed the ‘myth of the Haitian republic’: the disconnect between the idea of a liberal democratic republic and its practical instantiation in Haiti but also the stories of the Haitian Revolution and civil war that partisans of the republic told to narrate its inevitability after the unification of the Haitian republic in 1820. After the fall of the northern monarchy and the end of nearly 15 years of civil war, historians, intellectuals and statesmen wrote the foundational national myths of the republic in poems, literary and political journals, travel narratives, geographies and histories. These texts narrated the inevitability of the republic by casting Dessalines’s empire and Christophe’s kingdom as perversions or aberrations of the inexorable march towards civilisation and liberal republicanism. A first section considers the forging of the national republican myth in the work of Beaubrun Ardouin, considered at the time the foremost historian of the post-1820 republic. A second section considers Louis Joseph Janvier’s later revisionist history of Ardouin’s work. By illuminating the early republican mythologising of Haiti’s revolutionary past, Janvier reveals how the post-independence republic failed to live up to the republican ideals of freedom and democracy that it proclaimed, particularly as it concerned Haiti’s majority group: the peasantry.
