ABSTRACT
Haiti’s revolution, from 1791 onward, had a world-historical significance which is perhaps only now beginning properly to be appreciated and explored. Its echoes have sounded across more than two centuries, and not only in the Caribbean or in France. The turning of Saint-Domingue into Haiti, colony into republic, demanded a new history that would be written by people who saw themselves as renewing the work of the French, who had once abolished slavery and declared slaves not only men but citizens. In Port-au-Prince on April 16, 1848, the very black and illiterate President Faustin Soulouque began the massacre of mulattoes he suspected as conspirators. Re-reading events in France through the quizzing glass of Raiti is to clarify the reciprocal dependencies, the uncanny resemblances that no ideology of mastery can remove.
