TRUE LIBERALISM

The difficulty of defining liberalism is well known (Bell Reference Bell2016, 62–90), and its relation to race and colonialism is deeply contested. Charles Mills argued that, in both theory and practice, liberalism has historically been a racial liberalism: “white entitlement is the norm” of liberal theory’s foundational concepts of personhood, rights, duties, and government; and this occludes the history and present of “non-white to white” property transfer in the political economy of empire (Mills Reference Mills2008, 1381, 1394). James Tully contextualizes the emergence of liberal theory in the immediate aftermath of formal decolonization, reframing deliberative and procedural approaches alike as “neo-colonial” responses to the “demands for recognition and participation” by subaltern actors globally (Tully Reference TullyForthcoming). Similarly, Uday Mehta diagnosed an “internal … urge to empire” (Mehta Reference Mehta1999, 47–8) deriving from liberalism’s theoretical commitments to rational personhood and universalist frameworks of civilizational and historical progress. A range of scholars responded to Mehta, arguing that “liberalism does not lead ineluctably to either imperialism or anti-imperialism” (Pitts Reference Pitts2005, 4; cf. Bell Reference Bell2016, 19–61). Indeed, Mills encouraged political theorists to “deracialize” racial liberalism. If, following Mills, “the struggles of people of color for racial equality over the past few hundred years can most illuminatingly be seen as just such a project” (Reference Mills2008, 1383), then this section of the article can be seen as clarifying Firmin’s own contributions to it.

Haitian liberalism is perhaps an odd place to seek clarity on these issues. The social scientific “silencing” (Trouillot Reference Trouillot1995) of the Haitian Revolution is well known. And while Haiti is far from silent in African diaspora studies, its reduction to the site of revolution or reference point for Pan-Africanism and Black internationalism typically mutes its post-revolutionary period and figures like Firmin (Clitandre Reference Clitandre2020). Haiti is also neglected in studies of the nineteenth century “global liberal constitutional moment.” Noting the importance ascribed by later Haitian liberals to their 1843 Constitution would enable comparison of Firmin with contemporaries seen as central to that moment, like Rahamohan Roy or Dadabhai Naoroji in India (Bayly Reference Bayly2007; Visana Reference Visana2022). By signaling such points of inter-imperial comparison, the article provides a foundation for future comparative studies addressing the “epistemic disavowal” of not only the Haitian Revolution (Bhambra Reference Bhambra2016) but of the global history of anticolonial theory and practice.

My primary aim, however, is to place Firmin’s liberalism in its Haitian context. As Getachew and Mantena (Reference Getachew and Mantena2021) argue, anticolonial political thought counters the tendency to read political theories as “abstract and isolated conclusions” and makes vivid the historical insight that understanding political argument requires understanding the context that “shapes and clarifies the nature and purpose of its theoretical interventions” (361). But even in context, Haitian liberalism proves elusive. Firmin’s protégé Jean Price-Mars complained that the leading figures of the Haitian Liberal Party neither produced a “manifesto” nor pronounced a “doctrine” to specify their version of liberalism; theirs was more an “agenda-driven organization” than a “party” and, at best, inconsistently “liberal” (Price-Mars Reference Price-Mars1948, 15–20; 1978, 61–4, 82). These difficulties can be mitigated by adopting an ideal-typical definition of liberalism (Joseph Reference Joseph, Joseph and Mocombe2021, 104–5). Instead, I adopt a “summative conception” (Bell Reference Bell2016, 69–73), seeing “Haitian liberalism” as a tradition constituted by arguments classified as liberal and recognized as such by other self-proclaimed liberals in nineteenth century Haiti. This approach is consistent with Firmin’s own emphasis on context. It also allows me inductively to generate a set of “foundational principles” (Gerstle Reference Gerstle1994, 1046) that are both specific to Haitian liberalism and of universal significance.

Firmin presented his political awakening as coincident with the birth of Haitian democracy.Footnote ³ He lived from 1850 to 1911, a turbulent period in Haiti’s century-long “struggle for power between two elite groups, designated principally by color”: the “mulatto, city-based, commercial elite” and the “black, rural and military elite” (Nicholls Reference Nicholls1996, 8). At his birth, it was clear that the 1843 Revolution failed to fulfill its promise. It was a movement for economic nationalism and cultural autonomy from France organized by the liberal faction of the mulatto elite. But post-revolutionary infighting exposed their self-professed liberal values as more opportunistic than principled, precipitated the Dominican War of Independence, and revived revolutionary sentiment among Southern Blacks advocating the destruction of mulatto power. His political engagement began when he joined the 1867 revolt that deposed Fabre Geffrard and installed Sylvain Salnave as President. Looking back in exile on the Danish island St. Thomas in Firmin (Reference Firmin1905), Firmin described Salnave’s revolt and subsequent reign as the period in which “Haitian democracy was born” (Firmin Reference Firmin1905, 221).

The Haitian Liberal Party was an attempt to chart the course of that democracy. Its founding document was a letter sent from Boyer Bazelais to Edmond Paul on 19 February 1870. Salnave’s execution the previous month marked the end of a long civil war that, for Firmin, “had all the appearance of a social war … without respite or mercy” (Firmin Reference Firmin1905, 222, 224). Bazelais and Paul were leading figures of the political grouping that formed during his rule and adopted the name Liberal Party. The letter called upon the allies’ “enlightenment and patriotism” to affirm their prior agreement to establish a weekly newspaper (Bazelais in Price-Mars 1978, 74–7). The first volume of Le Civilisateur appeared on 10 March 1870, intervening directly in parliamentary maneuvers during the transition from the post-Salnave provisional government (Paul Reference Paul2015, 141–6).

Paul was the group’s chief ideologist, and even he was ambivalent about the utility of political labels. In a sense, terms like “‘Nationals’ or ‘Liberals’, republicans or imperialists” made little difference; attaching great importance to them signaled vanity or pomposity, not sound political judgment or analytical rigor (Paul Reference Paul2015, 90). But they were useful insofar as they provided the sense of distinctive group identity needed for collective action. Accordingly, he identified substantive differences between the groups and the Presidential candidates around whose election they organized. The difference always came down to two factors. First, the members’ relative “capacity” for rule, understood in Saint-Simonian terms (Nicholls Reference Nicholls1985, 251) as the combination of personal moral character and technocratic expertise needed to modernize Haiti and avoid the endemic corruption of state finances. Second, their respective commitment to either the “traditional despotic routine” of Haiti’s authoritarian rulers, or “the principles of liberty” was embodied in the institutional arrangement established by the 1867 Constitution (Paul Reference Paul1871; Reference Paul1896, 141).Footnote ⁴

Paul was often deeply concerned with policing the boundaries of Haitian liberalism. The ability successfully to claim the Liberal mantle took on renewed practical importance between 1876 and 1879, as the formerly unified group split decisively into two irreconcilable factions. They were divided along personal more than ideological lines, with supporters of Bazelais in the National Assembly aligned against supporters of the new President Pierre Boisrond-Canal. As Paul described, Boisrond-Canal’s supporters loudly proclaimed his “unequivocal submission” to “the cause of liberalism,” that he was “imbued with its principles” (Paul Reference Paul2015, 89). Paul worried about readers seizing on his earlier articles for Le Civilisateur to identify his politics with those of “that disastrous man.” In defense, Paul noted that it was “a funny liberalism” that would allow Boisrond-Canal to align himself with “those who marched to the overthrow of our liberal institutions,” especially his authoritarian successor Salomon, “the prevaricator of liberalism in Haiti” (Paul Reference Paul2015, 94, 104). Boisrond-Canal was thus no liberal because he had aligned with an authoritarian faction in his quest for power and proved utterly incapable of rule once he had secured it.

Firmin’s key contribution to these early debates was an argument that “true liberalism” would eliminate “color prejudice,” the central barrier to political democracy in Haiti. The argument appeared in the inaugural editorial of the periodical he founded on 5 January 1878, at the height of what Price-Mars (1978, 61) later called “one of the fiercest ideological battles in our nation’s history.” While the periodical has unfortunately been lost, sections of the editorial are reproduced by Price-Mars. I supplement this text with reflections on this period in Paul’s work and Firmin’s M. Roosevelt, Président des États-Unis et Haïti (Firmin Reference Firmin1905; hereafter Roosevelt). A comparative history of the United States and Haiti that unfolds as a comparative history of British, Spanish, and French colonialism (Lucien Reference Lucien, Joseph and Mocombe2021), Roosevelt adds Firmin’s analysis of color prejudice to what he had earlier called true liberalism. Together, these sources allow us to reconstruct the contours of Haitian liberalism as committed to the foundational ideas of historical progress, national regeneration, and the rehabilitation of the Black race globally.

The first issue of Le Messager du Nord announced Firmin’s intention to “work for the propagation of liberal ideas,” which were sorely needed in the current situation of mutually reinforcing social misfortune and ideological controversy. The ongoing debate generated a “great confusion of the liberal flag.” To clarify it, Firmin contrasted his “sincere and reasoned liberalism” with the “suspicious,” “veiled,” “passionate,” and “thoughtless” variety of his unnamed opponents. This “true liberalism” looked to the future, embracing the “laborious but worthy path” toward Haiti’s “destiny” of social “advancement and dignity.” False liberals were those with politics rooted in the past, a “retrograde tendency” of political and social restrictions that would, ultimately, overturn the 1843 Republican constitution. Crucially, true liberalism also required “republican vigilance” to “safeguard institutions as well as interests”: citizens needed to see their social status as fair, strive to become “worthy of a free Republic,” and accept their “sometimes onerous” duties as the means of assuring the ascendency of the People “over the direction of the general thing (chose générale).” The ideas of “honesty, progress, and stability,” then, formed the core principles of Firmin’s true liberalism (Firmin in Price-Mars 1978, 91–3).

Firmin’s early editorial argues that these principles should be embodied in policies of public education. “We demand public instruction for all, compulsory even,” he wrote, for “education alone equalizes men.” This argument signals Firmin’s adoption of one of the central planks in his mentor’s platform. Paul started his career by arguing that, “at the point Haiti has reached, the education of the masses is the most urgent need” (Paul Reference Paul2015, 63). For him, only public education could prevent the “beast” of demagoguery familiar from Haiti’s post-revolutionary history: “as the beast succumbs when food is lacking; so dies the charlatan if the people are enlightened” (Paul Reference Paul2015, 63). For Firmin, the republican moral culture undergirding true liberalism required “enlightened citizens” who were aware of their duties, and social as well as legal equals. Public education would spread enlightenment and eliminate the “unconscious training” of prejudice, allowing all Haitians to recognize one another as equals (Firmin in Price-Mars 1978, 93). The preserved sections of the editorial stop here. And while we therefore cannot know if Firmin discussed the place of either “race” or “color” in this analysis, he likely would have followed Paul’s lead in doing so.

Firmin’s later reflections on this period in Roosevelt confirm that he saw color prejudice as central to it. He often liked to quote a passage of Paul’s from 1861, which he saw as anticipating, “by intuition,” events that followed in Haitian history:

Firmin shared Paul’s view of the vast gulf separating the Haitian masses from an elite divided into two castes, mulatto and Black (Nicholls Reference Nicholls1996, 102–8). These were the two “shades of citizens who form the Haitian nation” and the “two poles of Haitian politics” (Firmin Reference Firmin1905, 373, 395). “Color prejudice” or “race egoism” was the false view that individuals deserved differential treatment because of their belonging to either group. With widespread color prejudice in Haiti, the “question of color” became a “dangerous weapon” deployed by both parties as an election strategy and instrument of rule. Firmin saw himself as uniquely positioned to answer it: like Paul, he was a Black member of the predominantly mulatto liberal party; like Bazelais, his opponents had raised the color question against him, spreading rumors that “Firmin is a mulatto as light as a white” during his unsuccessful 1879 election campaign (426).

On Firmin’s analysis, color prejudice was the central barrier to achieving the aims of true liberalism: political stability and social progress in Haiti. Like any other prejudice, it was rooted in ignorance. It was endemic in Haiti because, long after the slave revolts that began the 1804 Revolution, “the great majority of the people remained confined in the pits of ignorance” (428). But it was unlike other prejudices, because the form of ignorance on which it fed was particularly pernicious: the mistaken belief that random epidermal nuances tracked moral distinctions supported the rigid hierarchy of social classes based on skin color, which prevented the development of “national cohesion” and “sociological unification,” the essential task of public power (428). One way of removing the “evil force” of color prejudice was to “exterminate” half of the population, a “radical cure” sporadically suggested by players of the “old game” of Haitian politics (425). But as Firmin emphasized, advocates of this “impossible” solution failed to appreciate the “delicacy” of the problem because they failed to reflect on “the historical chains that explain the existence of the wound” (423)—that is, they failed to take seriously that color prejudice in Haiti was a legacy of slavery and colonization. The other option was to use public education to illuminate “the darkness that reigns in the popular mind of Haiti” (426). Its centrality to the liberal platform thus stemmed from their analysis of color prejudice as rooted in an ignorance that was a contemporary effect of Haiti’s colonial past.

From this perspective, Roosevelt continues the project Firmin announced in 1878. Looking back, he emphasized the Bazelaists’ constitutionalism, their respect for the rule of law and recognition of the need for strong legislative power to temper the executive (393). After Salnave’s execution, the spirit of the 1867 constitution “had become sacred” to them, its institutional arrangements seen as the “palladium of liberalism.” This was especially true of Edmond Paul, for whom the liberal split into “our anarchic factions” had paved the way for Salomon’s 1879 triumph (Paul Reference Paul2015, 147). Firmin agreed that the ultimate result of the ideological infighting was “the debacle of liberalism” and the “liberal party” alike (Firmin Reference Firmin1905, 393, 413). The question he asked in 1905, then, was what lessons could be learned from the debacle. Answering it required contextual knowledge: history had to be told in “its sociological outlines” with demographic, economic, and commercial facts, but the point was to explain how these facts had changed over time (v, 431–5). This contextual understanding of Haiti’s frustrated historical-sociological progress was the only solid ground for good political judgment in the present—even painful histories were “essential to know in order to find one’s way through the inextricable mesh of our political actions” (390).

Firmin reconstructed the history of Haitian democracy as a tragic story of the cynical exploitation of color prejudice by the elite. Its motto for the future, therefore, had to be “honesty, liberty and justice, through the legally established order” (398). On the terms of his earlier editorial, color prejudice was an “unconscious training” that eroded the republican political culture needed to support this liberal constitutional order. “A democracy without freedom is just as absurd as a democracy without equality,” to which true liberalism would “always and sincerely combine fraternity” (429). With color prejudice at the root of the nation’s “fratricidal strife,” true Haitian liberalism had to be oriented to the goals of “progress, the rehabilitation of the black race, and national regeneration” (343, 395). And because achieving these goals meant overcoming colonialism, it also had to be internationalist. The lesson to be learned from Haiti’s various phases of isolation was that “the spirit of international solidarity” was the only “motive” and “guarantee” of “a regime of liberal freedom” (457). Indeed, Roosevelt concludes on Tennyson’s “poetic dream”: In the parliament of men, the Federation of the world (496).

While Firmin’s true liberalism was primarily an intervention in post-colonial Haiti, his emphasis on fraternity signals his critical engagement with republican ideas from the metropole. Alfred Fouillée developed a theory of modern society as a “contractual regime” he described as “liberalism pushed to its highest degree.” It was also “socialism rightly understood,” for, like Firmin, he argued that freedom is best secured through “a social organization where all the parties are in solidarity.” They shared the commonplace distinction between charity and solidarity (Fouillée Reference Fouillée1880, 325ff., 420–1). But Firmin argued that Fouillée’s subsequent account of “liberal education” showed that he misunderstood the relationship between solidarity and freedom. He adduced Fouillée’s claim that “true philosophy” taught “the absorption of the individual life into the life of the whole society, and into that of the Whole” (Fouillée Reference Fouillée1902, 23). This, he replied, was an unacceptable sacrifice of “the freedom of the human person”: “true philosophy, which for us is Western philosophy,” teaches that “man must be attached to man, but not merged.” Only with this understanding could “fraternity” become “morally meritorious” and “human solidarity” attain “the value of an act of commutative justice” (Reference Firmin1910, 248).

Firmin also provides a helpful point of contrast with Fouillée’s metropolitan followers. Léon Bourgeois was a Republican Prime Minister and leader of the French “solidarist” movement whose influential pamphlet Solidarité (Firmin and Sylvain Reference Firmin and Sylvain1895) developed Fouillée’s work in more practical directions. With Fouillée, he saw economic and social inequalities as the accumulated product of joint social production in the division of labor over time. But he replaced Fouillée’s neo-Kantian language of “duty” with a view of citizens as owing a “social debt” to past generations and contemporaries. Specifying the content of the “debt” required imagining what distribution of the benefits and burdens of social interdependence we would agree to if we were free and equal members of a contract prior to our association, which generated a normative standard against which to evaluate redistributive policies (Bourgeois Reference Bourgeois1902, 136–40). In the letter with which this article began, Firmin called Bourgeois’ account of solidarity “beautiful” (Reference Firmin1910, 291). The obvious harmony with Rawls’ difference principle partly explains Bourgeois’ renewed reception among liberal theorists (Sangiovanni Reference Sangiovanni, Owen, Niesen and LadenForthcoming). But it also gestures to his sharing what Mills called the “coloniality of Rawls’ socio-political and normative assumptions” (Mills Reference Mills2015, 23). Bourgeois was also an architect of the League of Nations, and I discuss his “(anti)colonial limits” elsewhere (Holley Reference Holley, Owen, Laden and NiesenForthcoming). What matters here is that Firmin’s true liberalism avoids such limits. His commitment to eliminating race prejudice and the colonial structures that perpetuate it both grounds his deracialized liberalism and gives his account of solidarity a potentially global reach.

RACIAL (IN)EQUALITY

Firmin’s reputation has suffered from the initial “muted reception” of his work. One way of approaching this “mystery of the historical record” (Delices Reference Delices, Joseph and Mocombe2021, 31) is to see EHR as a critical response to Arthur de Gobineau’s Inequality of Human Races (Gobineau Reference Gobineau1853). This approach helped recover Firmin as a “Haitian pioneer of anthropology” (Fluehr-Lobban Reference Fluehr-Lobban2000), and it provides my initial entry point here. However, I emphasize both that Gobineau was not Firmin’s primary target (Rath Reference Rath2021, 49) and that he considered EHR alongside Roosevelt as his “two main works” (Reference Firmin1910, 389). Although the methods and rhetoric of the texts differ, there are abundant intertextual links between them (Firmin Reference Firmin1905, iii, x; Reference Firmin2002, 222, 357) and he engaged in a revealing polemic with compatriots who read the texts together (Reference Firmin1910, 389–422). This authorial context is crucial to the recovery of EHR as a work of political thought. For while they have tended to be underemphasized, we will see that the concerns animating both Roosevelt and Firmin’s interventions in Haitian liberalism are also present in his magnum opus.

When EHR was received by the Paris Anthropological Society in October 1885, it elicited no immediate “response, review, or commentary from the Society’s members” and only two (short) subsequent reviews (Miller Reference Miller2021, 31, 42). Lead by Paul Broca, the Society was divided between proponents of rival views of humanity: the “polygenists” saw different races as different species with independent origins; the “monogenists” saw humanity as a single species, with race as an important but secondary classification. Broca’s suggestion that the term “race” provided a neutral way of discussing different human groups allowed the Society to avoid officially endorsing either the polygenists’ preference for “species” or the monogenists’ preference for “varieties.” Firmin adopted a kind of synthesis of these views. There is a single human species. But he distinguished monogenesis sharply from the “unitarian doctrine,” an ultimately “theological” story of degeneration from a single origin (Firmin Reference Firmin1885, 115). Instead, he argued, the multiple races of the single human species developed independently of and in parallel with one another by means of social (not biological) adaptation to their local environment, with which they entertain a “relation of direct dependence” (Reference Firmin1885, 118). Firmin thereby preserved racial difference while avoiding essentialism by grounding race in history and geography rather than biology (Allen Reference Allen, Joseph and Mocombe2021).

We now know that, despite the claims of his later propagandists, Gobineau was not especially influential in his own context (Bernasconi Reference Bernasconi2008). In a sense, Firmin disagreed: although less essentialist than the early anthropologists, Gobineau was politically important because he had both distilled the unstated premises of their discursive context and exercised demonstrable influence within it. Firmin adduced Gobineau’s claim that “the idea of an innate, original, definite, and permanent inequality between the races is one of the oldest and most widespread opinions in the world” (Firmin Reference Firmin1885, 203; Gobineau Reference Gobineau1853, 58). Firmin’s core argument is a critique of this claim:

To Firmin, Gobineau’s view was a mere “assertion” rooted in self-interest, pride, and the narrow patriotism of “civilized people.” He had simply combined “great erudition” with “weak understanding” and a “proven lack of logic.” He had not “systematically established” any “hierarchy among the human races.” Here, Firmin simply dismissed Gobineau out of hand, for no “student of history” could take such claims seriously (Reference Firmin1885, 203).

Some parts of Gobineau’s work, however, required a direct response. Firmin argued that Gobineau was inconsistent and routinely undermined his own position: his arguments against “race intermixture” and the “unequal beauty” of the races, for instance, were contradicted by a footnote in which he recognized the “beauty” of mulatto women (Firmin Reference Firmin2002, 200; Gobineau Reference Gobineau1853, 255). Most egregiously, Gobineau’s argument that the “Black variety” of the human species is “incapable of civilization” was grounded on an “exaggerated denigration of Haiti”. To Gobineau, Haiti’s violent history definitively proved that the Black race had a natural inclination to “despotically patriarchal social organization” and was therefore incapable of democratic government (Firmin Reference Firmin2002, 220–1; Gobineau Reference Gobineau1853, 83). And in this case, Firmin saw his need to refute Gobineau as following directly from his commitment to the goals of Haitian liberalism: racial rehabilitation and national regeneration.

A crucial yet underappreciated feature of Firmin’s engagement with Gobineau is his comparative method of “juxtaposition” (Hooker Reference Hooker2019, 13–6) to stage a dialogue between French and Haitian authors. In the passage Firmin transcribed, Gobineau argued that their different natural inclinations meant that the different races in Haiti should live in physically separated communities: a mulatto commercial center near the coast would trade with Europeans, supported by a decentralized network of small Black agricultural communities in the interior (Reference Gobineau1853, 83). Firmin worried that Haitian readers had received these ideas “too literally.” He cites The Gerontocracy in Haiti, an anonymous “Haitian book” that argued that only the mulatto race could survive Haiti’s Tropical climate. With “black Haiti as incapable of a long life as white Haiti,” the country should recruit white European peasants to breed with the local Black population and produce offspring of “the most vivacious and best constituted race in America” (Anon 1860, 18–88). Edmond Paul developed his “complete theory of economic autarky” in response to this argument (Nicholls Reference Nicholls1985, 103–8). On Firmin’s reading, Paul was also responding to Gobineau. Without naming him, Paul argued that these segregationist visions “forget” Haiti’s “mission” to create a racially mixed city, “with its arts, sciences, and virtues, where the mind would reign supreme” (Paul in Firmin Reference Firmin2002, 220–1).

Firmin’s dialogical juxtaposition is indicative of his wider approach to questions of intellectual influence and the relationship between theory and practice. He notes that Gobineau’s work was published when anthropology was still a neglected field. Yet anthropologists seemed to find his work so full of “enlightening paradoxes” that they “accepted his conclusions for Gospel truth.” Indeed, Firmin argues that they “give daily proof” of this influence, even, crucially, “without their actually saying so” (Reference Firmin2002, 145). Similarly, despite the “presumably Haitian authors” of Gerontocracy not mentioning Gobineau, Firmin considers it “but an amplification of his ideas.” For they clearly shared the premise of natural racial inequality and, on that basis, “expressed various ideas that can only be detrimental to the nation’s cohesion and solidarity.” Neither does Paul’s critical response to the pamphlet mention Gobineau. Yet Firmin reads it as a “summary refutation” of Gobineau’s ideas precisely because it is part of Paul’s vindicationist political project—his abiding aim to “help the Black people of Haiti prove to the entire world that they are endowed with as many great abilities and talents as any other race” (219–21). In each case, then, whether a given author refers or not to Gobineau is beside the point. What matters to Firmin is their stance on the question of racial equality, especially as that stance is revealed by the political implications of their work.

Firmin saw his critique as being especially urgent in the context of anthropology’s early disciplinary formation. It was “a critical time,” with anthropologists searching for scientific laws to govern their emerging field. His use of anthropological methods and insights showed that its leading figures were advancing “arbitrary conclusions” that obscured the truth, reckless assertions disproved by the evidence. He, therefore, accused anthropologists of being “inspired by the spirit of system” and developing a mere “bias masquerading as science” (Reference Firmin2002, 185). One of the central targets of Firmin’s critique was Armand de Quatrefages. In his L’Éspece Humaine (Quatrefages Reference Quatrefages1877), the French naturalist argued that a “single fact” could disprove the view that “the Negro was in the past, and as such he is, equal to the White man.” For while there was certainly evidence of a “political history,” there was a “complete absence of an intellectual history… among Negroes”—no evident progress of “literary, artistic, and architectural achievements” (Quatrefages Reference Quatrefages1877, 333). To Firmin, this supposed “fact” was not a “scientific answer” but a rather “obvious rhetorical ploy” (Quatrefages in Firmin Reference Firmin2002, 154–5). Quatrefages did cite Gobineau, and Firmin ranked them together with others in “the whole proud and arrogant phalanx” of scholars who “proclaim that the Black man is destined to serve as a steppingstone for the White man in his quest for power.” That their specious arguments won them fame and professional distinction proved that anthropology was being reduced to “the exclusive preserve of some closed coterie… made up of the whole of Europe and part of America” (Reference Firmin2002, 156). That their first collective refutation came from a Black thinker from a former colony, in exile in the imperial metropole, further buttressed the case.

Firmin’s critique of the emerging science of anthropology as resting on the sometimes-unstated assumption of white superiority is convincing and appropriately devastating. But his wider political aims in the text are best seen by emphasizing just how far he extended it. While his response to Gobineau provides a useful way of seeing EHR, it cannot be reduced to a mere “anti-Gobineau” tract. He demonstrated that the theory of racial inequality is empirically false, proving that all races are naturally equal in their potential for sociological progress and civilizational development. That he did so on anthropology’s own terms demonstrated the discipline’s parochial character. But in the final chapters, he announced a shift to asking why this “obsolete and antiscientific” doctrine continues to find widespread acceptance (Reference Firmin2002, 377). To answer this question, Firmin recontextualized the now-disproven doctrine of racial inequality back into the wider metropolitan discourses in which it circulated. Thereby, he leveraged his critique of anthropology to indict the Western human sciences more generally as only presumptively universal.

ANTICOLONIAL SOLIDARITY

EHR’s chapter on “European Solidarity” explores how the doctrine of racial inequality is tethered to practices of European imperialism. As discussed, Firmin characterized color-prejudice in Haiti as a “wound,” the existence of which was explained by the “historical chains” of colonization. Here, too, he argues that the “one particular source” of the continued acceptance of ideas of racial inequality is colonialism: “the pervasive influence of European aspirations and attending policies of invasion and usurpation, which are fueled mainly by the spirit of domination and arrogant faith in the superiority of the Caucasian man” (Reference Firmin2002, 384). Europeans “unite to dominate the rest of the world” because they “unanimously recognize” the superiority of the white race and its “mission of dominating the other races” to promote and “maintain civilization.” In a text published the same year as the Berlin Africa Conference at which European heads of state agreed to coordinate their colonial projects, Firmin asks: “does not the question of race lie at the core of these outbursts of solidarity” (Reference Firmin2002, 387)?

Firmin shared the language of progress and civilization with those he labeled ideologists of racial inequality. He divided the “human community” into “civilized nations and savage or barbarian peoples,” “advanced groups or backward ones.” The distinction relied on an “ideal of the civilized state” according to which each national community could be judged as “endowed with a superior or inferior civilization depending on its level of sociological development.” But there could be “no question of race” in this framework, because race “implies a biological and natural fatality, which has no analogy, no correlation, with the degree of ability observable among the different human communities spread across the globe” (Reference Firmin1885, 661). The problem, then, was not “the concept of civilization” itself but rather the way that “Europeans usurp” that concept (Reference Firmin2002, 387). Europeans debased the “beautiful and scientific idea” of civilization by yoking it to their “colonizing lust” for larger territories. They were thereby “pursuing in the intellectual or moral sphere the same abominable results achieved by the former colonizers” (Reference Firmin2002, 383). Conceptual and territorial usurpation went hand in hand.

Firmin emphasized that the real object of his critique was less personal than systemic. He argued that the exercise of political power in “modern civilization” requires “moral and scientific justification.” Without a “justifying reason” to “legitimize” moral and political conduct, modern individuals suffer from debilitating guilt. The obvious material and cultural superiority of Europe combines with this need for legitimation to generate an “unconscious fascination with European achievements” among “scholars and scientists.” This combination leads them to “unconsciously internalize” the “popular view” of the “organic superiority” of the white race: “declining to submit what has become a doctrine to any systematic critique,” Firmin writes, “they seek merely to justify it” (Reference Firmin2002, 383, 389).

As in his treatment of Gobineau’s reception, asking whether a given author is reflexively racist or explicitly imperialist largely misses the point. For as he repeatedly emphasized, so long as the doctrine of racial inferiority remains a background prejudice in the language of civilization, then white Europeans, too, remain dominated by it. Authorial intent matters less than systemic effect.

The greatest difficulty in unsettling the doctrine’s hold over white Europeans was their obvious material interest in maintaining the colonial practices it justified. Firmin saw colonization as an economic project driven by “the need of major industrialized nations for constantly expanding spheres of activity and markets.” To meet that need, they formulate policies of “invasion and usurpation” in the metropole and engage in practices of “dispossession” and “extermination” in the colonies. The defining aim or “main objective” of colonialism, as revealed by these practices, is “exploiting one’s fellow human beings” (Reference Firmin2002, 384–5). This exploitation extends to nonhuman nature as well: Europeans have “subjected nature to every imaginable experiment”; “the earth” itself is “undergoing a massive transformation,” but for the first time, this transformation is “planned and carried out scientifically” (Reference Firmin2002, 388–9). Firmin does not discuss the division of labor, the production process, or even slavery in this context; and he does not use the language of property or ownership in describing colonized peoples who “possessed since time immemorial… a land sacred to them” (Reference Firmin1885, 568). But in a somewhat less developed parallel with Naoroji’s “drain theory” (Reference Naoroji1901), he emphasizes that colonial exploitation of human and nonhuman nature enables the immense “accumulation of wealth” in European cities. Hence, the “wealth which has an exchange value and is immediately useable,” ostentatiously on display in Paris, is predicated on the extraction of “the natural wealth lying underground” in Africa (Reference Firmin2002, 389).

These economically driven practices of colonization rely on discursive ones to legitimate them. He acknowledges that, “of course, things are not talked about very openly” (Reference Firmin2002, 383). Yet colonial policies are enacted by statesmen who routinely have recourse to “scientific theories” of racial inferiority. While these theories may “appear foreign” to the political sphere, they are essential to its legitimation (384). And as discussed, Firmin characterized European scientists as “colonizers” of the “intellectual or moral sphere”: the greatest scientific geniuses are “all members of the Caucasian race,” in large part because “the white race” also “controls science, the highest source of power” (389, 387). As with color prejudice in Haiti, it is possible for European scientists to “free themselves” if they are “properly educated.” But even if they posed racial inequality as a “scientific question,” they would unavoidably remain “judges in their own case”; and their material interest in perpetuating colonialism means that “everything conspires against any efforts to change their thinking” (384, 385).

As this suggests, it is helpful to see Firmin as engaged in a kind of ideology critique. The picture he sketched of the reciprocal relationship between colonization and the doctrine of racial inequality “reflects a theory so pervasive in Europe that the most philosophical minds on the continent have not quite escaped its influence” (385). Part of his critique of those thinkers was to highlight their ignoring the “legal and political implications of the theories or doctrines they propound” (Reference Firmin2002, 383). This was not a moralizing condemnation. For in revealing the doctrine as false, he presented himself as seeking to liberate white European minds as well. That is, he attempted to demonstrate to his European readers, who speak the language of “eternal justice and truth,” that they are trapped in a “hypocritical situation” of self-contradiction. Revealing the doctrine’s legitimating function demonstrates that a commitment to colonialism is “inconsistent with” and even “negates” the “moral temper of the century.” They therefore “resort to casuistry and the arbitrary interpretation of facts” to justify their actions. With the very ideas invoked to legitimate colonization and the subjugation of other races, then, Europeans render themselves “victims of an illusion” (450). Firmin thus presents racial inequality as what we would call an ideology in the “critical evaluative” sense (Shelby Reference Shelby2003): a false belief that, in legitimating European practices of colonization, brings those who hold it into unwitting contradiction with the values they otherwise purport to hold, and, thereby, into a condition of unfreedom.

Reconstructing Firmin’s picture of European colonialism allows us better to understand his charge that “the question of race” lies at the core of “outbursts of European solidarity.” The immediate context of the charge was the Siege of Khartoum, which began just as Firmin arrived in Paris from Caracas, in February 1884. When news of the death of British General Charles Gordon reached Europe the following year, the Journal des débats published an editorial in which John Lemoinne wrote:

That the article mentions neither “race” nor “solidarity” is unsurprising in the light of Firmin’s critique of colonialism as an economic-discursive system in which such “things are not discussed very openly.” For as he argued, here the “question of race” has been “sweetened by the honey of parliamentarism” and “transformed into a European question, the cause of civilization.” This discursive transformation mirrors an earlier example Firmin provided, in which European colonization of Asia and Africa was dubbed, “in parliamentary language, ‘the Oriental question’” (Reference Firmin2002, 387–8). In this way, the supposedly universal language of civilization is revealed as “Eurocentric” (Sabaratnam Reference Sabaratnam2020) in the sense of being both parochial and, crucially, distorting. For in affording excessive agency to Western historical experience, it leads its speakers to ask the wrong questions about, and as such, to misunderstand the nature of their own social practices.

The language of European solidarity was of course widespread when Firmin arrived in Paris. EHR was published shortly after Kaiser Wilhelm introduced the Berlin Africa Conference by noting that the invited governments recognized the “interest taken by all civilized nations” to “promote the civilization of the natives of Africa” by “introducing into Africa… the same regime … founded upon the equality of rights and the solidarity of the interests of all commercial nations” (State Department 1885). The eventual agreement used the narrowly legal understanding of solidarity when clarifying that the powers “do not assume any guarantee, nor do they enter into any obligation and solidarity” with respect to the trade of spirits in the Congo (Hertslet Reference Hertslet1909). And while Lemoinne did not use the terms, the Journal discussed the need for “the solidarity of Europeans,” referring to material cooperation between European states and white settlers in the ongoing colonization of Africa (Unknown 1884).

Of the authors to whom Firmin directly refers, only the economist Paul Leroy-Beaulieu used the concept of “European solidarity.” He did so in his widely read reference text on Modern Colonization (1874). Leroy-Beaulieu began as an ambivalent supporter of colonialism’s liberal “moral and civilizing influence” against the spirit of “conquest.” But in the second edition (1882), he fervently embraced France’s pursuit of the “rare happiness of implanting their race and their language” abroad by founding “a great African and a lesser Asian empire” (Leroy-Beaulieu Reference Leroy-Beaulieu1882, viii). He was consistent, though, both in his preference for colonization through “investment” rather than emigration, and in his argument that “European solidarity” was a distinguishing feature of modern colonial policy:

The second edition retained this argument while introducing a new analytical category: “colonies of exploitation.” Demographically, these were distinct from “colonies of settlement” because they did not require considerable emigration. Economically, they were distinct from “trading colonies” and “agricultural colonies” because they were organized around exploiting a territory’s “natural monopoly for the production of export commodities.” They thus required large capital investment and “the artificial organization of labor” through “slavery or immigration with indenture.” Colonies of exploitation generated “unprecedented wealth” while leaving the population less developed, prone to social crises, and ill-prepared for independence. His examples were the Tropical plantation colonies, and there is a strong suggestion of Haiti in his account of how the persistence of “class distinctions” stifles the “spirit of democracy” even after the abolition of slavery (577–8).

It seems clear that Firmin had this analysis in mind when writing the European Solidarity chapter. He may even have had it directly to hand: it was published just one year before he arrived in Paris, where it was received by a public that, according to its author, was beginning “to consider that half the globe in its savage or barbarous state, solicited the methodical and preserving action of civilized peoples” (Leroy-Beaulieu Reference Leroy-Beaulieu1882, x). We saw Firmin argue that exploitation is the aim of all colonization. A contextual and comparative approach allows us to see that argument as a rejection of Leroy-Beaulieu’s typology and, thereby, a rejection of the very foundation of the most important ideological justification of modern French colonialism (Murphy Reference Murphy1948, 103–75; Todd Reference Todd2021, 67). He, therefore, ranked Leroy-Beaulieu with Quatrefages and Ernst Renan as contemporary white European scientists who, in “pronouncing their sacramental sentences,” were speaking with a “deadly breath” (Firmin Reference Firmin2002, 383). That claim is followed by a quotation from Herbert Spencer that, for Firmin, laid bare the ideology of racial superiority underpinning the distinction between ancient and modern colonialism. Like the ancient Hebrews, the moderns “dispossess the inferior races every time we need their territories.” Unlike them, however, “we, at least, massacre only those we feel we have to massacre, and we let live those who submit to us.” Spencer’s argument that Europeans had the right to exterminate anyone who resisted their conquest was extreme. But for Firmin, it was simply a consequence of his “succumbing like everyone” else to the doctrine of racial inequality (384). From his perspective, historical contrasts between ancient and modern colonialism, or analytical typologies of colonies, were at best distinctions without a real difference. At worst, they were discursive means of legitimating racial-colonial domination.

The critique of European solidarity Firmin penned in Paris should be seen as integral to the vision of true liberalism he developed in Haiti. Recall that he argued for a liberalism that was committed to progress, national regeneration in Haiti, and the vindication of the Black race globally. Progress should be measured by the degree to which a given society approximates an ideal of civilization. But the universality of civilization is truncated by its role in the legitimating language of colonialism. This is revealed in the varieties of color-prejudice Firmin saw as local articulations of the ideology of racial inequality that circulates globally. His picture of colonialism as a reciprocal system of exploitation and legitimation allowed him to argue both that colonialism is fueled by the doctrine of racial inequality and that policies of colonization necessarily inspire that doctrine. For it also allowed him to argue that colonialism dominates everyone: the lower-ranked Black race is sometimes killed, very often exploited, and always denied the dignity and respect owed to all human beings; while the higher-ranked white race is led systematically to misrecognize the world they inhabit and, by transforming the questions they ask about it, to limit their understanding of the range of possible actions in it. The crucial question, then, is how to start asking the right questions.

Firmin’s answer is that “listening” across contemporary difference (Young Reference Young1997) and historical distance to subaltern actors might move readers from the error of racial superiority to the truth of racial equality. EHR is prefaced with a caution about “the study of the past for present purposes.” History is a dangerous tool precisely because it so often fulfills the ideological function of legitimating colonization. But “historical comparisons” can be useful if they are given a “rational foundation,” which requires that they recognize the unevenness of historical progress and demonstrate that the path from barbarism to civilization is an evolutionary one of “trial and error” (Reference Firmin1885, lvii). Done in this way, “history is there to remind the ignorant and forgetful of the truth” (Reference Firmin2002, 348). The European Solidarity chapter is written from this critical-historical perspective, concluding with two suggestions for how those dominated by the doctrine of racial inequality can be brought “back to reality.” First, white Europeans must be “reminded” of their own history, their “ignorant and vicious ancestors,” and that the center of Enlightenment was once covered in darkness. Second, and crucially, they must be shown that the widespread belief “that Blacks have no social history” is false—it must be proven that “the Black race” has “played a defining role in the destiny of the human species”; or, as he also puts it, it must be demonstrated that “Blacks … have an eventful history” (Reference Firmin2002, 390–1).

This is precisely what Firmin attempts to do. Although he emphasized that he was “not writing history” in EHR (Reference Firmin2002, 371), the European Solidarity chapter falls between those on “The Evolutionary Pace” and “Role of the Black Race in the History of Civilization.” Well-versed in Egyptology, he argued that “the ancient Egyptians… were black Africans.” He saw the idea of a “Black Egypt” as central to the “argument against the idea of racial inequality,” for it proved that “from the time they entered the stage of history, Blacks have shown evidence of admirable progress” (Reference Firmin2002, 237, 368). Citing the history of South America, he argued for the kind of boomerang effect from colony to metropole familiar from W.E.B. Du Bois’ account of the “African roots” of the First World War (du Bois Reference Du Bois1915): as the effects of the Bolivarian revolutions “ricocheted on the century-old institutions of Europe,” so “European politics are propelled by” imperial rivalries in Asia or Africa, where every incident has “repercussions among the European nations” (Reference Firmin2002, 386, 398). The example of Bolivar introduces Firmin’s reference to the Siege of Khartoum, thereby framing the outbursts of solidarity that followed in Europe as reactions to events taking place outside it: “the Mahdi,” he wrote, “cannot imagine the role he plays in the ins and outs of European politics” (386–7).

Rescuing colonized peoples’ historical agency is thus a constitutive feature of rescuing their political agency in the present. In this as in most respects, Firmin celebrated the world-historical significance of the Haitian Revolution: “Haiti’s independence has affected the economic system and moral order of all the European powers that owned colonies” and “had considerable bearing on the internal economy of all the American nations where slavery existed” (Reference Firmin2002, 398). He adduced biographical sketches of individual Haitians to demonstrate that “nature has endowed the Black race with the best of dispositions” (365, 367). Above all, he joined the chorus of nineteenth century anticolonial voices praising Toussaint L’Ouverture as an exemplary figure who “offers tangible proof of the superiority of the Black race” (369). For Firmin, both the structural ramifications of its revolution and the “extraordinary morality” of its participants meant that, in the argument for the equality of races, “the example must start from Haiti” (lviii).