Media and Philosophical Mediation between the Worlds of Masters and Slaves

Hegel's dialectic of master and slave was deeply informed, according to Susan Buck-Morss in “Hegel and Haiti,” by the philosopher's reading of news stories about the upheavals in Saint-Domingue during his time in Jena. To make this case, Buck-Morss examined the unusually extensive media coverage of Saint-Domingue in Minerva, a newspaper important to Hegel's world outlook, which published between 1804 and 1805 “a continuing series, totaling more than a hundred pages, including source documents, news summaries, and eyewitness accounts.” With the hindsight provided by Buck-Morss's research, it seems inevitable that Hegel's profoundly influential paradigm would have emerged in dialogue with the representation of the slave revolution in Saint-Domingue. Buck-Morss's compelling analysis of the diffusion and reception of information about Haiti in the German media raises fascinating questions about the intellectual reception of the Haitian Revolution in other countries, especially France. Yet the significance of the reception of news of the Revolution cannot be properly understood without considering the more fundamental question of how news was produced within and exported from Saint-Domingue during the Revolution, and what roles the ex-slaves played in disseminating their political demands and interpretations of events. If, as Buck-Morss argues, “the Haitian Revolution was the crucible, the trial by fire for the ideals of the French Enlightenment,” and “Every European who was a part of the bourgeois reading public knew it,” then the Haitian Revolution begs to be explored as a media phenomenon, not only for its philosophical influence, but for the political significance of the mediatic prise de la parole by former slaves.

Buck-Morss sidestepped the French media's interest in the Haitian Revolution with the observation that “there was censorship in the French press after 1803.” Napoleon Bonaparte's increasingly tight control of the French media in the year leading up to the inauguration of the French Empire did indeed limit representation of Saint-Domingue as it approached independence in 1804, but there was widespread mediatic representation of the Haitian Revolution in France prior to 1803.