ABSTRACT
It might well seem improbable to offer a postcolonial rereading of Victor Hugo, that reactionary royalist Romantic leader transformed into an icon of the Republic, who was to celebrate, late in life, France's vocation to colonize Africa. Bug-Jargal was the first long prose work of the adolescent Victor Hugo. Bug-Jargal is set in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, which unilaterally declared itself the independent Republic of Haiti in 1804. The action is situated before and immediately following the crucial date of 22 August 1791 which marked the beginnings of revolution in the slave colony. Biassou is part of a complex play of doubles that dominates Bug-Jargal, and which is present in the 1820 version but was much more fully developed in 1826. In the 1826 version, in striking contrast to the earlier version, the divisions between the whites of San Domingo, and their inability to form a united front against the revolt, are a subject for satire.
